musings that admittedly will not help my good karma deficit.

i'm at my second favorite coffee shop working on the paper i've been working on all day--in between bouts of procrastinashun, of course--and i'm needlessly amused by the people here. like the table of four guys in front of me who are all 1. a little bit dorky and 2. wearing striped polo shirts. one of them is wearing a striped blue and white shirt with a pink collar (why?!). these guys would be totally inconspicuous and i would be totally without someone to talk about if not for their need to dress alike. dorkiness can be hot, but not in this case because polo shirts are pretty much unforgivable. and these guys aren't hot.

and then there's the guy on the couch in the corner who bears such a striking resemblance to a certain ex-boyfriend of mine that i can't stop staring. they could be the same person if said ex got a tattoo, grew out his hair, neglected to wash it, and then decided that it would be really awesome if his hair resembled pebbles' hair as much as possible. minus the bone, i mean. but it's probably not him because ex dude would never, ever scribble furiously in a journal. he was the type that aspired to that degree of coolness but never quite achieved it, mostly because he was anti-anything having to do with writing or even using words in ways that made sense and that kind of precluded the journaling bit.

alas, everyone else here is strangely normal. back to my paper.

four days and two papers to go.

i'm so very tired. my doggie was against me sleeping last night--he felt the need to lick himself for something like four hours straight so all i heard was slurp slurp slurp coming from him and snoring coming from beagle dog. to their credit, i was invading their space by sleeping in the room they normally sleep in, so perhaps it's not entirely fair to be annoyed that they were being their usual loud doggie selves in the room that they've claimed as their own. i feel partially responsible for the incessant licking since it's a nervous habit and i'm no doubt adding to my dogs' stress level these days. i so should not be stressing my dogs out but since slurpy dog has perfected the art of payback, all is right with the world--at least karmically speaking.

i'm thisclose to being finished with this semester (one more week!) though in the meantime i have actual work to do and papers to write and classes to attend and one last presentation to give. i don't understand why i can't just sleep for the next week because that would be so much more productive! currently i'm doing the blog as procrastination thing when i should be writing a paper analyzing organizational frameworks, and, well, i'm so not caring about this right now. this is the second paper i've had to write on this topic in the past two weeks and i've totally hit a limit regarding new ways to talk about organizations and leadership and organizational leadership because sometimes? there's only so much that can be said and i said it in my last paper. i feel bad saying anything negative about this assignment because i'm a big fan of the professor who assigned it, and last week i totally loved him when he referred to a suburb of austin as being in BFE. still--this assignment is borderline torturous. side note: i pretty much love anyone who says BFE so if you people ever get on my bad side just find a way to work egypt into the conversation and we'll be all good again.

tuesday, why are you so far away?

i'm moving out next tuesday.

five days. i can make it.

conversation with my sister, the queen of avoidance.

so, how did you do on your last geography test?

um.

did you pass?

i don't want to talk about geography.

did you even check your grade?

oh look, a sidewalk!

when bizarre things happen in the middle of the night.

it's been a strange night. alvin and i were sitting upstairs having conversation number 342 about why i'm leaving (also, about how i've been acting shitty lately), when the dogs ran outside and started howling. it was eerie. soon after we heard the squeal of tires on asphalt and the sickening thud that a car makes when it runs into, say, another car. i've heard cars smash into things before and this was by far the worst crash noise i've ever heard. i park my car on the street and my first thought was, no! someone hit my car! but what actually happened was way weirder than that.

we ran outside along with a bunch of our neighbors and saw a man staggering around but no obvious signs of damage. i had taken the phone with me to call 911 but someone already had--and it was oddly and completely unclear what had happened. so the fire trucks and ambulance arrived and then staggering dude was on the ground, and then a bit later he was covered up. someone pointed out that dude's car had landed perfectly on top of our neighbor's car that was parked in their (very long) driveway, about 50 feet from where dude was lying and we were standing. this happened at the intersection of our street and a cross street where the streets form a T--apparently dude was driving super fast down the cross street, got to our street and didn't stop in time, and somehow his car flew through the air and hit a building before landing on top of neighbor people's parked car. it was unclear whether he was thrown from the car or got out on his own, and i'm trying to avoid thinking about why the ambulance wasn't in any hurry to take him to the hospital and why he was covered a few minutes later. and then the ambulance still wasn't moving and that's just really not good.

everyone is gone now. the street was washed off by the nice firefighter people and dude's car is still hanging out on top of the car belonging to the neighbors who, unfortunately, aren't home. how weird is it going to be to come home to that? it was surreal. i'm glad no one else was hurt, but i'm not so sure dude walked away from that one.

old house, new house.

this is where i live now:


and this is where i used to live and where i soon will be again:

and drawing arrows on satellite pictures is what i do when i should be working on a presentation that is coming up verrrry soon, or sleeping. yes, i should so be asleep right now.

sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell.

i'm hanging out at a coffee shop this morning with breakfast and coffee and my laptop and myself, and all i have to say is: i still love the aloneness. it's so nice that it's almost as if people were meant to be alone! alright, not all the time, and maybe that's just me--but this is working for me. but the happy coupley people that are everywhere: WHY ARE THEY HAPPY? how did they get that way? will they understand it if i shoot death looks their way? gah.

also:

two more papers to write.

two presentations to give.

two weeks of school left.

one week until i can move out.

many more excrutiatingly painful blog posts between now and then, i'm sure.

still hungry.

at 10:30 last night alvin couldn't stand to be in the same house as me anymore and left to go back to work. this means i must suck more than i suspected if he's driving half an hour in the rain to go BACK TO HIS OFFICE in the middle of the night, but whatever. instead of dwelling on that obvious point, i saw it as an opportunity to continue vegging in front of the tv all alone and to eat a bowl of what has to be my favoritist (and the unhealthiest) organic cereal ever--crunchy peanut butter balls!--and i thought, this is so nice. does it get any better than cereal and tv?

in the long term i hope so, but at that moment it was pretty damn good...until the dysfunctional family on some bad reality show i was watching had a feast of vietnamese food that they'd prepared all by themselves (i want a dysfunctional family to make tasty food for meeee!) and suddenly a couple weeks of not eating much caught up with me and my peanut butter balls seemed less than appetizing and i wanted some real food. so next time i'll do the mindless vegging thing with vietnamese or indian or anything else, really, because that answered my question: yes, it does get better than cereal.

the action movie that wasn't.

i love watching old movies on AMC. i especially love that on the bottom right corner of my tv screen is AMC's website so i don't have to expend the energy to google their site to see what's on. it's kind of awesome, the part where i can use my laptop to look up which movie i'm watching without having to really move very much. i appreciate that the tv people have found new ways to enable laziness.

i'm watching the high and the mighty, and the people in the plane that's about to crash into the water--the plane crash thing is an oddly recurring blog theme of late--they're talking to each other in that breathy way that actors in old movies do, right before the women start sobbing as if they're about to die, like, right now. and my favorite line ever: "howard? howard?! would you be sad if i drowned?" that's the same type of question i would ask! i should have been an actress!

john wayne just bitch-slapped his co-pilot, which was v. cool, but they're being all lame by landing safely in san francisco instead of in the ocean like i was promised. i feel kind of cheated. i wanted to see if the woman who didn't have any lines but cried every time anyone so much as looked her way would stop crying long enough to get in a life boat, and the kid who didn't wake up once during this entire loud and turbulent ordeal--whatever drugs he's on, i need some.

almost failing to meet my own standards of daily mockery.

not much to say this week since i haven't run into anything with my car lately or broken up any more marriages (once per month for both of those is probably enough, at least until i get the hang of it). i've worked out the logistics of moving and my parents aren't totally disappointed in me--they're not disappointed at all, which is such a relief--and at the end of this month i'm going going gone for some unspecified amount of time that is currently looking like probably most likely perhaps forever.

school is still swamp-like and will continue to be for the next two weeks and then, finally, i'll have some breathing room. hopefully i'll have more fun and interesting and--for the love of god--cheery things to say, because when did i become this depressing sounding? stupid problems. sucking all the fun out of EVERYTHING. i don't even have anything to mock today and that's completely unacceptable.

oh, wait! i take that back. here's something to mock: i attend a university that has its very own officially licensed brownie! because nothing says prestigious institution of higher learning quite like a chunk of chocolate (unless it's a cow for a mascot, because that totally has AWESOME UNIVERSITY written all over it).

when writing complete sentences is too difficult.

thank you for smoking: very funny movie. saw it last night. provided an amusing interlude in between the 17 times i cried yesterday.

pms: why i'm crying. it's here again and being extra diligent in making up for last month when i was too busy to notice its presence. now it's like, here i am, biatch! pay attention! (because anthropomorphizing ailments is fun.)

my first ever, brand new nephew: arrived safe and sound last thursday afternoon. i got to see him today for the first time. his name is julian and he's a tiny little bundle of adorableness. normally i don't get gushy over babies, but he's extra sweet.

sleep: one of those things i shouldn't have taken for granted because now i can't. it's making me cranky, as if i wasn't already.

my new and blatant disregard for the english language, and That Other Thing.

my comma usage has gotten out of control. it must be stopped. i'm writing a paper--same paper as last week, actually, since the deadline has been pushed back twice now--and this one sentence i wrote contains seven commas. that's excessive even for me. this is what happens when i have no sense of urgency about my school work on top of an obvious lack of understanding about correct comma usage, which normally isn't a problem so what's up with that? the editor in me is horrified (and perhaps on permanent vacation). this is the terrible, horrible, no good very bad sentence:

"As a result, and as part of the larger political climate, it is becoming clear that heroic leadership, especially in the world of politics, is not working, and needs to be accompanied, if not replaced, by more resourceful means of problem solving. "

that doesn't even make sense. there's a thought in there somewhere but it's been completely lost since the commas hijacked my writing.

*****

so far i've avoided saying anything (on here) about the thing that has taken over my life recently, even though it hasn't gone away and isn't going to any time soon and has the potential to drastically change my life. i've been hesitant to mention it because once you admit something it makes it true. and even if it is true and you've already talked about it ad nauseum with your very understanding friends, once you admit it in blogland that makes it truer and frighteningly permanent. and that's scary.

but. one of the reasons i have this blog is to keep up with shit (a lot of it is trivial shit, but still). and to procrastinate, obviously. i thought about it and for some reason i don't want to look back on this and think, huh, this huge chunk of what was happening in my life is missing from my blog. what happened? in theory i want to be able to constructively complain about my life on here. because what good is public space where i get to say whatever i want if i can't bitch like everyone else? that's what i thought.

with that said, i'm moving out of my lovely, lovely house at the end of this month because alvin and i are having problems. we have many layers of problems that aren't going away and no amount of talking about will fix. the moving out was my idea, and i don't know if this will be temporary or permanent, and life kinda sucks right now. i have found that once you decide to move out it is best to do it as soon as possible and not, say, wait for three weeks after voicing your decision (even though the waiting part is out of necessity, it's adding to the suckage) because the potential to cause each other pain by merely existing in the same space-or, worse yet, talking--is pretty high, if not an outright certainty.

so. i have no idea what's going to happen with us, but i value the opportunity to have some space and time to think. i think i know where i'm moving but it's not definite yet. i'm going to miss my dogs, and i'm going to miss alvin, and did i mention my lovely house? but i think this is for the best.

avoidance, or genius?

having a boy haircut is working for me. it's cute and even though i didn't have time to wash it today, it's still cute! mostly. the nastiness is only slightly visible and then only if you're looking for it, which i totally advise against.

yesterday in a moment of bad judgment that couldn't truly be considered bad judgment because i didn't have time to register what was about to happen, i ran into a pole while leaving the parking garage and knocked my sideview mirror off my car. it's dangling by a thread, or, more specifically, the wires that connect it to the car. i implored the mirror not to fall off and so far it has obeyed, unlike my laptop in all its insolent and annoyingly noncompliant glory. i haven't installed ms office yet, partly because the laptop won't let me and the rest because the bureaucracy i have to deal with to get new cds that maybe work is more than i want to deal with right now.

so: duct tape for the car, and notepad for the laptop. this is how i fix problems.

laptop, if you're listening: get with the program.

my lovely, lovely laptop has quit taking commands from me. it's like 28 days into its life it has just given up, and when i'm all, install ms office, yo, it's like, ha ha! i'm going to make you think i'm installing it, but i'm really not. and i'm keeping your cd! it's holding onto cds for dear life or maybe like it has a vendetta against me, so now it requires much coaxing and lots of overriding the override that overrode my command to eject just to get the stupid thing out. and then maybe it will do what i want it to after it thinks about it for the next half hour, though that maybe part doesn't actually apply to installing software. my laptop doesn't believe in software. it's all, what the hell is this? and then it eats it, much like how cookie monster gobbles cookies.

i need the laptop to understand that i have to install office by tomorrow because my life and my word documents depend on it, and life & word are pretty much inseparable right now. and the part where my mouse pointer plays hide and seek with the browser window, or refuses to work at all? yeah, that's not funny either.

thinking about thinking.

normally i'm totally freaked out by and try to avoid mentioning anything having to do with brains--they're kind of repulsive but, you know, necessary--but, in lieu of doing anything productive, i was thinking about how much energy (in terms of calories) my brain must expend by thinking. because thinking is tiring, right? so that's like a form of exercise, at least regarding caloric consumption? surely lots of thinking means lots of calorie burning? i feel like maybe i should know the answer to this, but i don't. i feel like maybe i should be thinner by the end of this semester based on brain usage alone.

perhaps i could find the answer if i could spend more time googling this, but my brain is so not down with acknowledging its own existence long enough to let me.

oops, i did it again.

today i found a new (to me), fun method of procrastination: i got a pedicure. my sister was like, what? you've never had one?!--then she pointed and laughed, as usual--and made me get one. i have no idea why i didn't do this sooner because the foot massage alone was worth it. my feet are probably the happiest part of me right now. and the prettiest, but only because of what happened before that.

before that i got a (short, with bangs) haircut, and then nearly cried because i'd told scissor-weilding woman that it was ok to cut off so much of my hair--she was almost giddy about the haircutting thing, which should have been my first clue that i should have backed away from the scissors very very slowly and not let her touch my hair. but i didn't, and now it's v. short. so afterward, i made shannon repeatedly tell me that i don't look like a 12-year-old boy. her inital response: no, you look like a 12-year-old girl! thanks. right around the time i started to feel ok about the new haircut alvin came home and the first thing he said to me was: you got a boy haircut!

he later tried to take it back by telling me that what he meant was that it's short like a boy's hair, but i don't look like a boy. really, the clarification? not helpful. comparing me to a boy in any way at all ever? bad idea.

and shannon, whose perfect mane of lovely, long and (fake fake pretty colored) red hair i try not to be overly envious of--she had three separate people compliment her hair after i got mine cut. every time someone was like, you have such beautiful hair! i would almost say thanks before i realized they weren't talking to me. so unfair. the only reason this is acceptable is because she's my sister, and you know what? i'm not as short as she is. my hair will grow out, but she'll never be taller.

anyway, here's the new haircut in a photo whose quality really should be ignored:

two posts in one day!

i'm totally procrastinating.

i have written three pages of my paper--of a possible sevenish--so far. i think they're probably three pages of something like nonsense crap, but since i have to turn in this paper in 20 hours i can't necessarily discriminate (against my own writing?). just need to get it done. also need some chocolate. also, sleep.

yesterday i read something on salon that really resonated with me. it was in response to the question: should i become a flight attendant because it's what i want to do even though i have multiple degrees and could get a better job? this was part of the response:

"Wanting is knowledge. Someone asks us what we want and we say, Oh, I don't know. I don't know what I want. But the truth is we do! We do know what we want! It's just (isn't it?) that what we want isn't the thing we ought to want or want to want or are supposed to want or think we want. It's what we want. It's the potato we want in a store full of ripe oranges. It's the comic book on a shelf full of Shakespeare -- and why are we supposed to not want that? Because wanting is the deepest story of who we are; wanting is who we are more than getting."

exactly.

what i learned in class today.

i spent a lot of time obsessing about and then trying to get over my fear of flying last year when i had to fly to savannah over christmas, and i was successful enough that the thought of flying doesn't cause me to panic much anymore. two nights ago i watched a program on the history channel about aloha airlines' flight 243 without freaking out, and yesterday when this military plane crashed i was like, cool pictures (and bonus points for the lack of casualties). i was a bit dismayed that the cockpit can actually become separated from the fuselage, but apparently that's only the beginning of things i didn't know about the logistics of plane mishaps. and by mishaps i mean terrible, horrible fiery crashes that end in death. i have since been enlightened.

today in class we were discussing southwest airlines and the conversation turned (very, very bad) to plane crashes. the instructor explained how when a plane hits something--say, the ground--all the seats in the plane, starting in the back, crash to the front of the plane and if you don't burn to death then the impact of your seat crashing into all the others is what kills you.

while he was saying this i wondered whether it's safer to sit in the front or back of the plane (to squish or be squished, that is the question) and the girl next to me covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut. and everyone else was like, did you have to say that? thankfully it was a short-lived conversation, but this definitely falls under the category of things that will keep me from flying for the next 15 years, unless i'm drugged and dragged onto a plane against my will.

beagle dog, foiled again.

because my life this past week has been overly complicated (that sounds needlessly dramatic! i like it!), and because i'm procrastinating writing this paper that's due wednesday and is 25 percent of my grade but that i still haven't really started yet, i'm going to not talk about those things and instead tell a story about beagle dog.

for the past three weeks or so, beagle dog's favorite new activity has been to position himself in the front hallway and make very loud sniffing noises that are completely audible upstairs and throughout most of the house. he looks like this:

















after about a week of sniffing i was pretty sure something must have crawled under the house and perhaps died, but then the loud and obnoxious sniffing continued for so long that i assumed the thing under the house must still be there and be alive because if it was dead surely it would smell really bad. like that time the squirrels took over the attic.

then last friday, beagle dog had assumed his daily watch on the floor, nose to the wall, and i was like, why are you doing this again, you weird dog? and that was when i heard the crying.

and then i thought: kitties! there are kitties under the house! beagle dog is smarter than i thought! i want a kitty!

on saturday, alvin put the dogs in the front yard and pulled part of the siding off the back of the house to see if the kittens were ok. there were three of them and they were cute and fuzzy and seemed fine, but the skanky stray cat who staked out our house as the perfect place to have her litter of kittens? she was nowhere to be found and was probably off somewhere being skanky again.*

we tried to lure out the kittens by blinding them with a flashlight, and they were totally going for it and had crawled most of the way out from under the house when beagle dog escaped into the backyard, crawled into the six inches of crawl space under the house, and then got stuck in the wall. unfortunately, he could see the kittens and wanted to eat them? play with them? who knows? since he was stuck between studs he chose to bark at them, and no amount of coaxing could get him out from under the house. the kitties were afraid and the dog was stuck in the wall and that was not how i envisioned saturday going, though the one positive aspect was that beagle dog's bark is much quieter when there's wall and floor acting as a buffer between him and me. also, i might have learned some valuable lesson about leaving things alone, or something, though knowing me i seriously doubt i learned anything.

we were debating where to cut through the wall from the inside of the house in order to free beagle dog and thereby save the kitties when the momma cat showed up and totally saved the day by luring him out. beagle dog saw his chance to chase another cat, one that there was a possibility of catching and playing with, and decided he would dislodge himself from the wall and chase her into the yard. it was very smart of her, and very lucky for us, and if i could have put beagle dog in time out at that point i so would have. we trapped him and lectured him about why he was bad, but i'm pretty sure he still has no idea why what he did was totally unacceptable.

the skanky smart momma cat took her kitties away that night and we reattached the siding to the house so, i hope, nothing can crawl back in. every once in awhile beagle dog stops to smell the wall, though for the most part both of us have given up our dreams of having a kitten to play with.

*i don't actually believe these things; i just say them because i can.