deviance and objectification

evil trolls, gah.

2008-12-09T13:14:00.001-08:00

i just got off the phone with the credit card people again. seriously, they're unhelpful. i'm happy to pay them however much i can each month, i would gladly do it as an effort of good faith--but not only do credit card companies not understand a good-faith effort, they employ trolls to answer the phone. mean trolls who don't understand that i actually do care about paying off this stupid card, i just can't afford the minimum payment right now. so i've quit paying. from my conversations with the troll people, i have gathered that (somehow) it is better to pay nothing than to pay less than the minimum each month. this really makes no sense to me. i'm like, take my money! and they're all, not unless you can come up with x amount!

the first person i talked to was nice--cheery even--and she told me that in the current economy they're very interested in helping out customers by setting up a payment plan before they miss too many consecutive payments. so i was like, sweet! this sounds good. and then she transferred me to troll-man, who apparently didn't get that memo and was not at all interested in helping me with anything. i told him what was up, again, and he said to call back and set up a payment plan later when i have enough money to pay them. when i asked what would happen if i couldn't meet the minimum on the payment plan, he laughed and TOLD ME I WOULD BE IN TROUBLE. can you say that to an adult? is this in a script somewhere? i wonder if the sinister laugh part was also written into the script.

as an aside, my interview monday went very well and i'm hopeful that i'll get the job. i was told they have more interviews scheduled this week but will make a decision and call me by next week. i took it as a good sign that they scheduled my interview on the first day of interviews, and i'm choosing to ignore the part about more interviews. mere technicalities. they loved me, i'm pretty sure.

after today's phone call i really need to get this job because if i don't i'm afraid the mean credit card troll people will send in the mafia, or maybe tonya harding, to break my kneecaps with a crowbar. at least that's what i imagine YOU'LL BE IN TROUBLE translates to.

ode to despair.*

2008-12-06T07:38:00.001-08:00

i wrote a long post about my dying grandmother but decided that several paragraphs about death? was way too depressing (so i'm opting for a couple of not-too-long paragraphs instead because that's clearly better). my original post was amusing in a very tragic sort of way, but still. it was hard to write and was making me sound and feel like a horrible person when i said things like this: SHE NEEDS TO JUST DIE ALREADY. see, that sounds awful now, too, but that doesn't make it any less true. sometimes sick people need to die because the alternative is much too painful. she's old and ill and is only getting worse but she's stubborn as hell. the doctors and my family have suggested this is the only reason she's still alive. in this case that's not a good thing because this crap is just dragging on and getting worse and oh my god i don't want to get old. when i tell my mom this she says, let this be a lesson. take care of yourself now so you don't have to go through this later. word.

my grandma, she refused to go to the doctor for years (she didn't want to know if anything was wrong) and then once she went to the doctor she refused to take her medication (she didn't think she needed meds) and on top of that she smoked for 50 years (and spent the last 10 of those years sneaking around smoking because she told my grandfather she had quit). see? kinda funny but tragic in the end! i mean, it's almost unforgivable to take an ailing old person and be like, you did this to yourself. that's not right. no one says that to her. this was all avoidable though. i love my grandma and she's had a good life--the first 80 years treated her well--but now the situation is reminiscent of this:

just sayin'.

so i have an interview on monday for a job that i have mixed feelings about. i'm confident i can get the job because i have more than adequate experience for it, but it's doing something i don't really like doing. it kind of sounds like i'm alluding to stripping or prostitution or something equally demeaning (but profitable!). but really this job--which is sort of demeaning only because i hate paper and inefficiency and this is a government job so there are excruciating amounts of both--involves lots of paper and moving it around and then spending time, in between dealing with the paper pushing, thinking about my life slipping away. i know this because i've done it before. it drove me to grad school so i wouldn't have to have jobs like this anymore, and grad school ended in divorce and you know what that means? JOBS LIKE THIS TEAR FAMILIES APART.

but the thing is that i can't really be irritated about having an interview for this particular job because i was the one who, um, applied for the job in the first place. i think at the time i was thinking, i'm qualified to do this! and not, i want to do this! a couple of weeks ago i changed the direction my job search was going and actually started applying for jobs i wanted to have. novel, that. something finally clicked and i realized i didn't have to have a job i disliked. well, except now i really do need a job and if i'm offered this one it would be rather stupid to pass it up. it's a permanent job with benefits and i can't argue with that. also, the salary is negotiable so if they offer me the job i'll ask for more money than they're offering. can't hurt.

and this because it sums up the above quite nicely:

*ETA: as in the website, not the feeling. i'm not that histrionic.

obviously.

2008-11-22T07:52:00.000-08:00

susan and i have been trying to make new friends for the past few weeks, an endeavor that has silmultaneously made me feel grateful for the friends i have and completely burned out on trying to befriend anyone else. and all this without ever meeting a single person! that has got to be an accomplishment of sorts (though not what i was striving for), or at the very least extremely funny. here's how it went: we put an ad on craigslist. people responded. downhill from there.

from a sociological perspective it's been a fascinating experiment. again, not my intention, but if that's all i get out of this then that's good enough. my plan was to meet people that we have things in common with and then partake in some common interests, instead of just gathering information about people who i thought maybe we had something in common with, except oh wait, i was wrong, dammit.

we exchanged emails with about half a dozen people who responded to our online ad advertising our need to fill our friend void. i should mention that i've tried this before with no luck, because last time i forgot to go into detail. this time i knew what not to do and assumed i would be more successful by being very specific about what i wanted: non-girly lesbian friends who like to hang out at home, watch movies, discuss politics or pretty much anything else, have bbqs and dinner get-togethers, and go to coffee shops. i mentioned i like to read. i also mentioned beer and football for susan's sake because she groups football watching and beer drinking together and wants friends to watch games with. alcohol didn't figure prominently in that list. there was a lot to choose from. i assumed that anyone who likes any combination of these things would have something in common with us.

so during the exchanging of emails phase of this failed experiment, a couple of things became clear:

1. lesbians, as i mentioned in a previous post, are flaky.

2. lesbians who like the aforementioned activities? are lushses.

i don't know if this is true of lesbians as a whole (maybe? yes? no? only in austin? am i allowed to generalize like this?) but i can say that the people who wrote to us are overwhelmingly flaky and lushy. i can deal with flakiness much better than lushiness because spending weekday nights getting drunk in bars--i thought people got over that once they were out of college. and then i remembered:

3. austin=party town

i forgot. i am so not the partying type. and then i remembered that that's why people live here. got it.

but the people who wrote to me--when i said i was more inclined to stay home and have people over than to hang out in bars--they were like, ugh. bars. i'm so over that scene.

then they invariably would send me a text message that said: going 2 6th st 2nite. wanna meet up?

and their facebook would advertise just how much they needed a drink right this very second, or how they drank too much the night before.

that was when i realized that lesbians, or at least the ones i thought i had things in common with--i probably do, drinking aside--consume alcohol more frequently and publicly than the average person. which leads me to:

4. craigslist, not a good way to make friends.

when life doesn't work out the way you planned.

2008-11-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

so yeah, i've decided that i definitely somehow managed to offend the people that susan and i were supposed to hang out with and that is why they're not talking to me. the other option is that they're beyond flaky, which i guess is possible BUT NOW I'LL NEVER KNOW, will i? nope. and since i won't know i'm having to make up my own stories to make myself feel better. possible explanations include: one or both of them died in a house fire, had to leave town because of a family emergency, or are swamped at work and don't have time to get in touch with me. none of my explanations are all that plausible in terms of good reasons not to talk to me, except for maybe dying in a fire since one of them is a firefighter. however, i know she's alive and not totally disfigured or dead because she's been on facebook every day this week. more likely explanation: people suck.

also, i just ruined my (what was until a few minutes ago) excellent credit when i closed out a credit card account that i could no longer afford to pay the minimum balance on. because being unemployed and broke? not conducive to paying bills. it was an absolute last resort and one that i'm probably going to regret, but i didn't have any other choice short of maybe dedicating myself to a life of crime to make money. mmmm....crime. so much easier than finding a legal job.

i tried but was talked out of going the credit-card cancelling route several months ago when i called my bank and the representative i talked to advised me to keep paying my credit card bill so as not to ruin my credit. not sure if she was being helpful--she sounded sincere, so maybe--or if she just wanted me to continue sending the credit card people money so she'd continue to get a paycheck; either way, i managed to hold out a few more months. until today. this makes me nervous. one of these days i'm going to look back on november 14, 2008 as that day i totally forfeited my ability to buy a house or get a loan or maybe even get a job for at least the next ten years. on the other hand, maybe there are worse things than having bad credit? i sincerely hope so. i feel like a straight-A student who just failed their high school anatomy class. oh wait! i already did that! check.

i guess i didn't fall over dead then, either. everything will (eventually) be okay. i hope.

uggggghhhh.

2008-11-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

i'm feeling incredibly blah right now. last week was looking up with the election and my head feeling less tilt-a-whirl-ish, and then susan and i (i thought) made some new friends who seem cool and funny and nice and down to earth. i'm all about down-to-earth people. they make my day. so, last week: happy. this week i'm crying and i can't even blame it on pms. i hate that. i like to have excuses to cry.

so over the weekend the ear ache that i've had on and off for the past few weeks began to make my head feel like it was going to explode. i wanted to make sure it wasn't an ear infection so i went back to the doctor and was like, what now? she said my eustachian tube isn't draining correctly. two months ago when i had a cold that started all this head crap, stuff hung out in my sinuses then drained to my ear and refused to evacuate. the good news is, no infection. the bad news is, i have to deal with the pain until it subsides.

my head is a bit better today since i spent a lot of time yesterday coaxing my ears to drain. this involved much massaging of my eustachian tube, and wow that really sounds dirty. anyhow, it must have worked because i'm feeling less like my head is on fire today. also, i bruised that half of my head with the repeated massaging. no pain, no gain.

so the head thing is getting better--again. good.

now on to a completely different topic that is making me unhappy: since i overreact to everything because that's just what i do, i'm freaked out that we haven't heard from our new friends in a couple of days. we were in the middle of making plans to hang out this afternoon, then--silence. for a normal person this probably would not be reason to freak out. i mean, two days without hearing from someone? chill the fuck out. not a big deal. but for me, it's cause to recall every single thing i said to them to determine whether i said something offensive or lame. the answer is pretty much no, i didn't, and if my sweet charming self said something to offend them already? it probably wasn't going to work out anyway. also, i'm afraid because this has happened before. this is familiar and not in a good way. austinites (lesbians in particular) are famous for saying they're going to get together with you and then, nada. or, you start to befriend someone and they disappear. i've heard this complaint a lot, from people who are not me. no idea what that's all about but i was so hopeful that this was going somewhere and now i'm thinking it's not. it's making me sad.

this likely wouldn't be causing me so much anxiety if not for the fact that over the past two days, one of my friends moved out of state without telling me (wtf?), and another insinuated that we really aren't very good friends at all (again, wtf?). this has left me feeling, um, horrible. probably not unlike how mccain felt when he realized he was going to lose the election (from what i've read, even after things had started to look very bleak the man sincerely had no clue he was going to lose, and when his staffers finally decided it was time to break the news to him his response was: how did this happen?). yes. that right there.

my parents saw a chupacabra, among other things.

2008-11-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

my parents called me today, and i thought they were calling because it's my step dad's birthday and it was mid-afternoon and i hadn't called him yet to wish him a happy birthday. sometimes they do that when i'm not quick enough to call them but it turns out that's not what they were calling about. they wanted to tell me they saw a chupacabra while driving through southwest texas. my parents are always seeing weird shit when they're alone, which is what i told them on the phone. my mom's response: but your grandmother was with us when we saw it! knowing my grandmother, that really doesn't help my mom's case because my grandma has been known to make up her own version of reality. i love her, but still. not exactly a reliable source.

for anyone not familiar with the legendary chupacabra, check this out. the artist's depiction makes it look like it's a half human, half spiky amphibious power ranger gecko thing. that's not what my parents saw. sadly, they didn't get a picture of it--they were reaching for their camera when it ~~ran~~ sauntered away, and i refrained from asking why they didn't follow it to take a picture if it was merely strolling--but my mom said it was more like a wolf-fox-dog hybrid. that sounds more plausible than other descriptions, so why not? she described it as skinny with long hind legs and a long tail. she said it looked like nothing she had ever seen. she didn't mention any spikes. or fins. good, good.

so this dog hybrid thing frequently makes it on my parents' local news station (definition of local: from a city three hours away), usually once every few months. and it's not so much the dog thing that's on tv as it is the people who spotted it, who describe the same dog hybrid thing that my parents saw and THEN call it a chupacabra (tomato, tomahto). when i was in middle school my town's local newspaper ran a front-page story with a VERY LARGE headline about the chupacabra striking again alongside a picture of a dead sheep. it's pretty embarrassing to admit that my hometown's one local news source touted a legend about a vampire dog that kills sheep as real news. this is why i don't go back there. this is why the town's population growth has remained stagnant for at least the last 20 years.

perhaps it likewise should be embarrassing that my parents now have claimed to have seen a chupacabra--they're actually calling it a chupacabra, which is funny--but i believe them when they say they saw something unidentifiable (and my grandmother can corroborate the story!). also, this doesn't strike me as all that odd since today's sighting is the latest in a list of other things my parents have experienced when no other credible witnesses are around, including (but not limited to) la llorona, which they heard but didn't see along the rio grande; a huge round metallic object with blinky lights silently hovering over them in the desert sky (glad i wasn't around for that since i probably would have fallen over dead); and the ghostly figure that wanders around their bedroom looking creepy, then throws open doors just to get the point across that it's really there.

crystal failure.

2008-11-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

i'm pretty sure the physical therapist i saw on tuesday helped fix me. i'm hesitant to declare being completely 100% better, in part because i'm not there just yet, but the vertigo is gone (yay!) and the other icky balance-related problems are subsiding. i'm very hopeful that i'll be totally well soon.

physical therapist woman was very nice but she did scare the hell out of me by saying i should probably have an MRI to make sure my brain is okay. when i asked her what could be wrong with my brain (i'm very sensitive about brains; could we please not talk about them? mine especially?) she said she didn't want to say anything else because she didn't want to scare me. too late. sufficiently freaked out. she said it was just a precaution and she doesn't think i have a brain tumor. i don't, either. of all the things i think i could have, a brain tumor definitely is not on that list. hypochondria? sure. brain tumor, not so much, if only because the latter negates the former and since i clearly have hypochondria i cannot have a tumor. hello, logic.

after she was done scaring me she ran some rather unpleasant tests to verify that my inner ear is jacked up. these tests wouldn't have been unpleasant if my inner ear were fine but since it's not they made me all kinds of dizzy. also, based on the tests she doesn't think i have a brain tumor (told you so). these are both good things and the best part was that since she could tell that i had vertigo she could fix it, which she did. i was impressed. because the ear nose and throat doctor i saw two weeks ago? he told me what was wrong with me and then didn't do anything about it. this is why i reserve a special place in my heart for most doctors, right next to satan and george w. bush.

just kidding. mostly.

once she had physical therapied my head i had to keep it still for two days. the explanation for what she did to my head is relatively simple: the calcium carbonate particles in my ears, the things that essentially keep you balanced, were knocked out of place and my brain was misinterpreting this as me spinning around in circles any time i made a sudden movement. so she moved me around really quickly to get them back into their proper place, and then i had to stay still to let them settle.

i explained this to susan and that conversation didn't go so well, i think because i used the word crystals instead of particles. she immediately became suspicious.

susan: crystals? are you sure this isn't some kind of new agey crap?

me: um, no, it's real.

susan: but crystals? are you sure these things exist?

me: yes. i promise. they're in your inner ear. you just can't see them. they're tiny.

susan: i don't know if i believe that.

me: are you sure evolution really happened? you can't see it, either.

this conversation happened before we'd had coffee or breakfast and we should know by now that it's a bad idea for us to speak to each other before she's had coffee and i've eaten. also, i made a mental note never to use the word crystals around susan again. now i call them calcium carbonate particles. she seems more accepting of that. what's funny is that she never doubted i was having balance issues but she doubts the scientifically proven cause of the problem.

so i kept my head immobile for two days, during which i spent a lot of time looking very unnatural and perhaps complaining a bit. i had to keep my head propped up at night by sleeping on several pillows and i couldn't turn onto my right side. this does not make for good sleep. when i moved at all i had to move my head and the rest of my body as one entity, a la frankenstein. as of yesterday afternoon i could move my head again like a normal person--and the vertigo was gone. this is a huge improvement. i've had this stupid problem on and off for nearly 20 years, and i'm v. impressed that doctor woman made it go away. this is good. i'm now able to drive/ride in a car without wanting to die, which means now i can work again.

next up: finding a job.

best anniversary ever.

2008-11-05T11:50:00.001-08:00

i don't know what to say, other than i'm so freaking relieved by last night's election results that i don't even know what to do. mostly, i've cried. i started crying right before the west coast was called, then seeing jesse jackson crying made me cry, then i cried through obama's speech, at random points after obama's speech, and then again while watching the view this morning. i was concerned that florida (or ohio) would screw up again, or that the polls were wrong (it's happened before) and people really were voting for mccain in record numbers and not for obama. i was convinced that mccain supporters were purposefully waiting until election day to vote so they could throw off the lead that obama had in the early voting polls. basically, i was expecting a conspiracy. also, i was convinced if i said any of these things out loud that they would happen. superstitious + conspiracy theorist? hmmm. i'm sane, i promise.

the relief is palpable. the black cloud of doom that's been hanging over my head for the past, oh, eight years has cleared and i feel like i can finally be proud to be a part of this country again. that's no exaggeration. i had already looked into moving to canada (note: it helps to have a lot of money) because there was no way i was going to be able to handle another republican administration. i was afraid, for myself and the country and the rest of the world. no longer.

so this morning while watching the view i teared up again during the election (re)coverage, but that was cut short because elizabeth hasselbeck started talking and i suddenly wanted to bang my head against the wall. i need to say something about elizabeth. the woman is really good at two things: looking pretty, and parroting everything the mccain campaign said. in the weeks leading up to the election she wouldn't quit talking about obama's (tenuous) ties to bill ayers, so much so that it appeared to be her only reason for disliking him. if she had ever said that she just didn't support him because he's a democrat, that would have been fine. i would have much more respect for her. she never said that, or at least i never heard it if she did. she repeated the republican party's talking points about bill ayers, ad nauseam, and it got old. i realize that to an extent that's how politics works, but toward the end there she was starting to sound kinda--how do i say this?--incapable of thinking on her own.

this morning she apparently had a change of heart and now? now she completely supports obama. why? because he's the president and as an american she fully supports the president, no matter who that is. i have a problem with this because 1. she's either incredibly fickle or 2. she really does blindly support the president just because, which means she embodies what has been wrong with our country for most of the past eight years. i'm not okay with the herd mentality. i'm all for people supporting obama but i would like for that support to be based on merit and not on the belief that he's our next president and you support the president no matter what. she could have said that she wished maccain had won but she would give obama a chance to see what she thought of him. that she was so quick to switch sides seems disingenuous at best. elizabeth, i do not trust your kind.

in other, other news: i am sad that prop 8 passed in california. opponents of prop 8 are now suing (they're wasting no time! good!) to block the changes from taking effect. i feel about gay marriage the way many women i know feel about abortion: they want it to be legal but aren't sure they would have one themselves. i'm not sure i ever want to get married again, but i do want for other gay couples to be able to marry if that's what they want. of course, the gay marriage issue is really one of equal rights, and yes, i am all for equal rights. one of these days susan and i are going to run into some kind of problem because we aren't afforded the same rights as heterosexual couples. i know it will eventually happen and i don't look forward to it. so, i feel for gay couples in california--and everywhere, really, but i imagine it sucks extra to have your rights stripped away. i'm hoping that their ban on gay marriage will (again) be overturned.

rants aside, i'm very happy with the way the election turned out. i think obama will be an awesome president, and i'm hopeful that our country will soon stop looking like the total asses that ~~we have~~ bush has made us out to be.

blog resurrection part 2.5: hope, or something like it.

2008-11-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

i decided it's time to resurrect my blog, if only to keep myself sane. i need an outlet other than lying awake in the middle of the night worrying about life. at the very least if i'm awake in the middle of the night i need to compose blog entries about what's keeping me from sleeping. much more productive that way.

susan* and i celebrate our two-year anniversary tomorrow. i'm very very hopeful that we'll also celebrate obama being elected president. really, if other dude wins i don't know what i'm going to do. it's been much too freaking long (and inspiring) of a campaign for it to end so horribly. i voted, i frequently ask my friends to reassure me that obama is going to win (they won't; it seems everyone is being extremely cautious about this), and i spend a lot of time generally begging the gods not to let him lose. also, i watch msnbc and have developed a huge crush on rachel maddow because she's hot and smart and hot. all this means that i have done my part in the political process so the political process had better not let me down.

i wish i could have been more politically active (like, at all) but i'm currently broke, unemployed, and have been sick with random illnesses for the better part of this year. my random illnesses have not been life threatening--i'm truly thankful for that--but they have been debilitating. most recently: labyrinthitis. and benign positional vertigo. also, motion sickness as a result of the first two. i have an appointment with a physical therapist tomorrow to figure out what all is going on and to try to make it go away. i hope she can help. i'm kind of at the end of my rope here. basically, i would like for the suckage to end now please.

the upside to this is that my diet has much improved. i started getting desperate a couple of weeks ago because doctors, they're not so helpful. they were like, i think you're fine but have some more antibiotics just in case! no thanks. so i did a bunch of research, started eating better, exercising more, taking vitamins, and i quit eating processed sugar. that last one has made a huge difference and i'm feeling much better. every few days i'll have a sugar craving and eat, say, some reeses peanut butter cups. then i'll feel like crap and realize it wasn't worth it. unfortunately that realization has yet to precede the decision to binge on sugar. the learning not to eat sugar thing, it's a slow process but i'm getting there.

the downside is the broke and unemployed bit. also, the debt. i spend a lot of time freaking out about all of this because sometimes it's just too much. some people (i think they're called optimists) seem to have this weird belief (optimism?) that when things are bad they can only get better, but a friend of mine takes a completely different approach when he tells me this: things can always get worse. it's true, that. and it makes me laugh.

so i tend to beat myself up about how i got where i am. i can point to a series of decisions i've made that were, it turns out, bad decisions--i just didn't know it at the time. i spend a lot of time thinking about the many times i should have done things differently. not what i should have done differently, just that i should have pursued a different course of action. this is, of course, a completely useless exercise. today i read something that took some of the pressure off and hopefully will change the way i think enough so that i'll be nicer to myself from now on:

"Although I take full responsibilities for my mistakes and failings, I also recognize and understand that my actions and behaviors are connected to other people’s actions and behaviors - nothing happens in a vacuum."

all i have to say is: reading that made me feel better. i still need to get my shit together, but that was a much-needed reminder that not all of the crap i'm going through is a direct result of my own stupidity. some of it, yes. but not all.

*she's still completely awesome

sarah needs a new blog.

2007-04-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

i think that will be coming soon.

2007: the quitting continues.

2007-02-23T18:30:00.000-08:00

i'm clearly having serious problems updating my blog on a regular basis. i think it has something to do with all the changes that i made last year and wanting to start over, yet i still have the same blog. also, i talked a lot about my dogs and since i no longer have them i don't have any good dog stories to tell. how sad is that?! you'd think prison would generate some good stories, but no. nothing exciting ever happens in jail--i mean, not in the parts they allowed me in--except for that one time they lost track of all those sharp objects (scissors and such) and had a three-day lockdown until they were found. i never heard if/where they found the lost sharp things, but the three-day lockdown was insane. it was like being in high school again.

speaking of prison, i am no longer there. and i'm not in school anymore. graduate school was getting expensive and it turned out this program wasn't good enough. i wasn't getting out of it what i needed to in order to justify the expense and time commitments. had i been getting paid to get hit on by prisoners instead of being hit on for free (see, i meant it when i said i wasn't getting much out of it) this maybe would have turned out differently. maybe. it was over winter break that i realized i didn't really want to go back. i didn't heed the first warning sign, which was that i was completely envious of a friend of mine who quit school a couple of weeks before i did. but then i started panicking about having to go to class again and i thought, hmmm, maybe i need some time off, and then i made soccersusan's mom reassure me that i wasn't a complete failure for quitting. she was very convincing. i withdrew from school the next day. no regrets so far.

so, for now i'm working at a coffee shop and, for whatever reason, i really like it. this makes little sense because i don't get paid much and it's hard work and the last time i had a job like this? i swore i'd never do it again. but the past year has made very little sense anyway, so i'm going to assume this is just more of that. what i really want to do is to save some money and open my own coffee shop in the next couple of years, and i think part of the reason i like my job now is because the coffee shop thing is kinda what i want to do. of course, i also thought i wanted to be a social worker and that didn't turn out quite as planned.

i think i have some kind of adult-onset career ADD. actually, it's probably just regular ADD. case in point: this is off topic, but i love soccersusan. she makes me happy.

2006 recap.

2006-12-27T16:57:00.000-08:00

borrowed from amy, here is the first sentence of each month's first post from 2006. this seems representative of the bizarreness that has been my life this year:

january
houston: wasn't so bad.

february
kate-berry asked nicely that i update my blog with a new post and a title that doesn't include any references to body part inspired rope art.

march
this morning on the today show--or good morning america, i'm not sure--there was much anticipation about the academy awards.

april
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.

may
i like that dooce likes shoes as much as the rest of us.

june
give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

july
i've tried several times this past week to call alvin and see how he's doing, but he hasn't answered his phone.

august
i'm still around; i just haven't had much to say lately.

september
it's been almost a month.

october
i've had issues with friends* in the past--or, rather, they've had issues with me--where i fell out of touch with them for a while and then got back in touch and we had to catch up on however many weeks/months/years it had been since we last talked...which is difficult, obviously, because it's much easier to keep someone updated on how your life is going on a daily basis than on a monthly or yearly one.

*i'm not referring to you.

november
i've had this annoying problem with receiving text messages on my cell phone for the past six months--someone sends me a text and sometimes i get it, sometimes i don't.

december
tuesday is the last day of class.

things i learned about myself via my blog: my first post of the month tends to be on the third of each month, and i write excessively long sentences. also, it's been an interesting year.

shopping, yay!

2006-12-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

so, thanks to all the rallying, soccersusan now has a blog. now you people just need to convince her to update it like you did with me back in the day. notice how telling me i need a new post isn't working so much anymore? sorry about that. now that i have free time, posts should be more forthcoming. i'm hoping that if i stick to my end of the posting bargain, runnersusan will create a new masthead for me.

i'm all done with school for the semester and am so happy that i don't have to be back in class or jail for a month. wheee! i need some time off. i have books to read and people to see and, most importantly, shopping to do. soccersusan and i are going christmas shopping tomorrow. we're also going to look at the christmas light spectacle on 37th street and then we're perhaps going to the blue genie art bazaar, though she doesn't know it yet.

okay, now she does.

it's going to be awesome.

problem solved. all of them.

2006-12-09T13:33:00.000-08:00

classes are over (yay!) and i'm supposed to be writing the remaining eight pages of my final final 16-page paper for this semester, so i thought it was time for an update instead. i totally half-assed my presentation i gave last week, but that's okay because the instructor wasn't paying attention anyway. i know because i watched her grade papers during my presentation. it was awesome. also, much lower stress than if she had actually cared. no matter, it's over now and i can sleep soon.

nothing much else going on. prison hasn't changed much. i'm überexcited about the semester being over because i'm freaking burnt out and need a break. yep, that's about all there is to say about school and work.

ex-husband news: he had to get a lawyer to work out the legal part of the house stuff, because the part in our divorce decree that said he gets the house? that's not actually enough for him to get the house. i don't really understand what all has to happen in order for the title and mortgage people to take my name off of the title and our loans--all i know is that i have to sign papers soon, and then i should be house-free. that will be good. that's our last lingering tie and it needs to go away soon.

i informed hot new girl that i have a blog in which i call her hot new girl, and she informed me that i need a new name for her. so, i was thinking about just "hot girl" but that doesn't sound quite right, and i suggested "hot old girl" but she didn't like that so much because it makes her sound old and there's no way she's old since she's 12 days older than i am, and i know i'm not old. i suppose i could just call her by her name: susan. not to be confused with runnersusan.

i think i'll call her soccersusan.

so. all is well with soccersusan. we're annoyingly happy. it's disgusting. i love it. also, #3 on this list? i'm so there. bet you didn't want to hear that. sorry.*

*not really, though there are some things i shouldn't say on here. that ususally doesn't stop me.

so tired.

2006-12-04T21:09:00.000-08:00

tuesday is the last day of class. one more presentation, one more sixteen page paper to write by next monday (wheee!), several prisoners to play with in the next week, and then i'm done until january. this is good, because complete exhaustion and total overwhelmedness hit a few hours ago while i was working on my presentation and oh my god i'm tired. i can't remember being this tired since i don't know when.

hot new girl is still hot and is now on my list of favorite people. anyone who gets up before dawn to make coffee for me *and* cooks me dinner two nights in a row is totally on that list. she's also putting music on my ipod so i'll use it, which is the sweetest thing ever. it's really good to have someone in my life who counteracts my slothiness. and has tattoos. and is hot hot hot.

i need to post more after the semester is over. it makes me sad that my blog is so neglected.

awesome hotness, and texting.

2006-11-21T12:31:00.000-08:00

i'm v. happy to report that my text messages are now working. cingular fixed the problem on my end and apparently hot new girl's phone was partially at fault, so when she got a new phone the not being able to text problem was replaced with the all i do is text all day problem. i hit my monthly limit of 400 messages within a week and just upgraded my texting plan to 2000 messages. clearly, i have a problem. the bright side is that i have become an expert at texting while driving. that is my crowning achievement this year.

speaking of hot new girl, since i can't stop talking about her: she plays soccer. she's a goalie. i'm going to watch her play tonight and i'm looking forward to it because it's going to be hot. and no, i can't talk about her without using the word hot repeatedly. and the word awesome. because she totally is.

raising the bar and withholding my messages.

2006-11-10T22:14:00.000-08:00

i've had this annoying problem with receiving text messages on my cell phone for the past six months--someone sends me a text and sometimes i get it, sometimes i don't. the cell phone people have been decidedly unhelpful about fixing the problem whenever i've called to talk to them about it; most recently they told me that they could see all the texts i should have received but hadn't, and i was like, well, could you at least read them to me? not receiving texts wasn't a big deal until the past week or so when i started seeing this girl who wants to be able to text me. and since i like her i want to receive her texts. this should be simple, but no.

i talked to tech support for a couple of hours on wednesday, then i took my phone in to the store on thursday and they claimed it was fixed (not so much), so i went back into the store again today. it's been fun playing the "can cingular help me this time?" game, and yet i still can't receive hot new girl's texts. did i mention she's hot? she is. is it too much to ask that hot new girl be able to text me? i think not. cingular clearly is not as invested in my love life as it should be.

i would have to consider today's encounter with cingular to be the most fun so far. and by the word fun i mean that not only could cingular not fix the texting problem, but while the cingular employee was on hold with tech support he asked me out to thanksgiving dinner. at denny's. like this:

cingular dude: so, how's the husband? and kids? everything okay?

me: haha. yeah...

(i don't normally think such things because usually this doesn't happen, but i knew then that dude was going to ask me out and that it was going to be weird.)

cd: what are you doing for thanksgiving?

me: staying in town and hanging out with friends.

cd: me, too! i'm going to denny's.

me: sounds like a plan.

(and not one that i want to be part of...)

cd: do you want to come with me?

me: no.

cd: yeah, i guess it's kind of creepy being asked out by an old guy who works at cingular.

(word, but dude was maybe 30. not old.)

me: ummm...

cd: anyhow, i was just kidding about that. i have a wife. here's a picture of us.

(dude takes out his phone and shows me a picture that i'm pretty sure he uses for awkward times like this. dude isn't wearing a wedding ring, but if he's really married why is he asking me out?)

me: she's pretty.

cd: you can't even really see her in this picture.

me: it's still a good picture.

that was when--THANK GOD--the tech support people came back on the line. i'm afraid to think of where that conversation would have gone if he hadn't been interrupted.

i still can't receive texts. gah.

ouch.

2006-10-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

so, the divorce...

went well. i mean, the showing up to court part went well enough. the judge was super nice, which i really appreciated. she made me read a statement swearing that i don't have any kids and was requesting a divorce because things were not working out, then she signed the papers and i was done. i was pretty close to ecstatic (and relieved) for the first half of the day. then alvin called just to make sure that everything was taken care of. that was when i started crying, the first time. it's been so much more difficult than i anticipated. i thought i'd be kinda mopey for a couple of days and then bounce back, but it's more like every time i'm alone i break down crying and can't stop. it usually starts when i'm in the car, i guess because i'm alone. crying and driving are a little bit hazardous. i need my therapist.

i know that i'll be okay at some point in the future--right now, not really. i don't regret it, but i completely underestimated how stressful and upsetting it would be to have everything finalized. of course, how could i have known? i was fine up until now. ugh.

update!

2006-10-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

i've had issues with friends* in the past--or, rather, they've had issues with me--where i fell out of touch with them for a while and then got back in touch and we had to catch up on however many weeks/months/years it had been since we last talked...which is difficult, obviously, because it's much easier to keep someone updated on how your life is going on a daily basis than on a monthly or yearly one. so. i'm having the same problem with my blog, where there's so much going on that i don't even know where to start, except my blog's not bitching at me to stay in touch more frequently or don't bother. that would be rude.

so yeah, rundown of the past month and a half in bullet format because it's easier:

prison is going well. my clients occasionally frustrate me, but overall they're incredibly resilient and impressive in terms of the crap they're overcoming in order to get on with their lives. i appreciate that they keep trying even in the most difficult circumstances, long after i probably would have given up. it's kind of amazing.
classes are going less well. one class is much more uninteresting than it could be, and the other is taught by someone who is completely ineffective as a teacher and, among other things, keeps trying to get me to talk by commenting on my quietness and then demanding that i say something. that tactic? so not working.
i'm getting divorced, officially and finally, next wednesday morning. we go to the courthouse, sign papers, and then we're done. afterwards there will be cake--unless your name is alvin, and then you don't get any.
i was dating this girl for a while and it totally ended up not working out because she didn't know what the hell she wanted, which was made extra difficult because she was also immature about how she handled things. anyhow, that's over, but it's for the best, in part because it was so short lived that i didn't have time to whine incessantly about it on here. i feel like i handled my end of it very well, which i'm proud of.
i had this god awful stomach virus last week that i'm pretty sure people are tired of hearing about and that i would totally shut up about if not for the fact that, at the time, i thought i was going to die. three of my roommmates also had it, and tonight david was telling me about a story he heard on NPR about a highly infectious intestinal bacteria that's spreading among younger people and pretty much fits the description of what we all had last week. it used to only be found in people who were already sick and in the hospital, but apparently now it's spreading more like the plague. one woman who had it had to have part of her intestines removed. i thought mine were going to be removed, too, but that was because i was convinced i was going to throw them up. it was that bad. i'm better now.
random aside: while having dinner tonight at a chinese restaurant, i overheard the couple in the booth behind me ask for ranch dressing with their eggrolls. you know, ranch does make everything better, but still. the server person was completely appalled, and i was amused, and the guy who wanted ranch with his eggrolls, he was very disappointed. which makes me wonder: has he successfully ordered eggrolls and ranch dressing before?

*i'm not referring to you.

i know.

2006-09-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

it's been almost a month. i thought it was only a couple weeks since i last posted, but no. i'll write something soon, i promise. things have been busy lately. lots to say.

happy blog birthday to me.

2006-08-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

today is my one year blog anniversary. i'm not sure why i'm keeping track of this, except that other people do, too.

(speaking of anniversaries--sort of--next tuesday it will be four months since i moved out of my house.)

it's hard to believe it's been a year. it's gone by pretty quickly.

i celebrated today by eating a wild cherry sno cone. and then going to target. and maybe with a piece of chocolate cheese cake. there was much celebration on blog birthday day, though only coincidentally. i celebrated like it was any other day of the week! which means i really need to cut that out.

i found the snake, and yes, it scared the hell out of me.

2006-08-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

i was looking for something in my closet tonight--a pair of scissors--which involved removing a stack of clothes off of luggage stacked on top of a closed box that contained a bunch of random shit, including a bag full of more random shit. i thought the scissors were in the bag.

turns out they weren't, but the snake was. i was digging through this bag, pulling things out of it, when i saw something black and white move at the bottom. my brain interpreted the wrongness of the situation before i actually figured out what the hell i was looking at, and then i dropped everything and nearly threw up. this is the effect snakes have on me, particularly when i'm not expecting to find said snake in my room in a random bag under piles of crap. which is, in retrospect, exactly where i should have expected the snake to be.

anyhow, i made shannon come retrieve loomis. he smells bad, and i'm sure he's hungry as hell--it's been four weeks since he last ate--and this totally explains a couple things, such as:

1. why my closet has smelled weird lately. i thought it was my dirty laundry, and i'm trying not to think about why i thought my unwashed clothing smelled like a dying reptile, but whatever, and
2. why the cats keep hanging out in my closet. i thought they liked it because it's obstacle course-like, but i guess it was more that it's like an obstacle course containing their favorite snake that kept them coming back for more.

shannon swore there was no way the snake could have gotten into my room (liar), but i think that since my closet is adjacent to her room, loomis probably escaped her room though a hole in the wall, somewhere, and found himself in my closet. and then slithered away to die. poor snake. he's being fed now. much as i'm not thrilled about the fact that he's back, instead of, say, halfway to mexico by now, i hope he's okay. i'm glad he didn't die. in my closet.

so wrong.

2006-08-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

okay, so this uncf ad? it really bothers me, every single time i see it:

i have brain issues anyway (they're nice, i just don't like to talk about them), so i'm seriously bothered that there are books WHERE HER BRAIN IS SUPPOSED TO BE. it's like her head was unnecessarily opened up and the contents were replaced. i'm not cool with that.

good dog, bad movie.

2006-08-16T22:26:00.000-07:00

chuck is the best dog ever! i want.

58 days left.

wasn't that the title of a horror movie? oh, no, that was 28 days later. close enough, though i'm not completely overcome with the desire to kill anyone. yet.

60 days and counting.

2006-08-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

i filed a petition for divorce monday morning, and i was surprised at how easy the process is. once i finally found my way into the courthouse--because all but one of the entrances are barricaded shut, including the front door, and i walked around the entire building looking for that one entrance--all i had to do was hand the dude my petition and a check and i was done. it took about five minutes, which was long enough for it to occur to me that that's got to be a really depressing job, being the person who accepts and processes divorce petitions all day long.

almost as depressing as the office in the courthouse in new orleans where we got our marriage license--this one tiny room served as both the marriage license office and the death certificate office. how very appropriate. i'm still amused by that.

so, october 16 is the first day that i can possibly have the divorce fairy waive her magic wand over our heads and declare us completely free. i thought it was a week sooner than that, but no. turns out i can't count. and wishful thinking, etc.

i'm throwing a party when this is all over.

the snake is still loose.

2006-08-10T11:19:00.000-07:00

and i feel bad about it curling up in some dark, remote corner of the house and starving to death, because that's pretty much what is happening. unless it learned to open doors and has managed to escape into the wilderness that is our backyard.

i was hoping this wouldn't happen, but.

2006-08-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

every so often i check the aquarium in shannon's room to make sure her snake is all snuggly in his cage (in being the imperative term) and tonight when i checked i was having trouble finding him. so i told shannon this and she was all, sure he's there! he's in his coconut!

the snake has half of a coconut shell he likes to curl up and sleep in. so far every time i've been like, dude, where's your snake? i don't see him! she's been right about him being in his coconut.

but not tonight. he wasn't in his coconut. and he wasn't in his water bowl. nor was he buried under the fluffy stuff that lines the bottom of his home. the snake had escaped.

four hours later, the snake is still missing. we've turned over and looked under every piece of furniture and clothing in the downstairs part of the house, and we can't find loomis. we think he's probably still in shannon's room because it's unlikely he could have made it past the cats, into other parts of the house, without them clawing him to death. like they tried to do the last time he escaped. he's non-venomous and doesn't have any way to protect himself. it doesn't help that the cats think he's a toy.

so, loomis has some basic snake needs: food (today was his feeding day but he got out before mealtime), water, to be kept warm, and not to die a kitty-induced death. and i have some basic human needs, like not waking up in the middle of the night to find a snake slithering across my body, and then promptly dying of a heart attack.

i <3 being alone. and tile, of course.

2006-08-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

i still love having weekends to myself. i sleep in, watch movies, hang out at coffee shops, get together with friends, go shopping, and best of all no one complains about what i'm doing or how i'm doing it. this level of weekend contentedness reminds me of how i felt when i moved back to austin from NC: i would wake up every day and just be grateful to be back here. it's like that.

for awhile i envied alvin and his situation (er, girlfriend), but not so much anymore. alvin was telling me yesterday that he feels smothered because they hang out together all the time, and sometimes he wants to be alone but she's not okay with it. i tried to give him some advice because i feel bad for him--i mean, if i were in that situation i would feel claustrophobic right about now--but i also laughed a tiny bit. i reminded him that he can make his own choices and shouldn't let someone else choose how he spends all his free time. because it's true. that's something i'm learning, that i have control over my life. i hope he realizes that, too. relationships are all about trade offs, but it sounds like it's not necessarily worth the sacrifices he's making. alas, not my decision to make. wheee!

in other news that is potentially uninteresting if you're not as big a fan of tile as i am, i'm about to start a huge project that may be completely infeasible: a ceramic tiled headboard for my bed. i don't know whether to tile/mosaic an already existing wood headboard (which would require buying one), or if i should mount tiles on a surface like plywood and attach that to the wall. tile is heavy, so attaching something to the wall would require lots of supports and would be semi-permanent since i probably wouldn't want to take it down for awhile because it might leave lots of holes in the wall. and this isn't exactly my wall. i only rent it. i think david's pushing for the existing headboard approach so i don't completely ruin his wall. but i already have my pretty tile--now i need to decide what to do with it.

i've also got a book that i want to read before classes start that i hope will give me some idea about what i'm doing when i'm thrown into my field placement this fall. i'm not sure that reading this book will help but i'm pretending it will just to make myself feel better.

movin' on up.

2006-08-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

i'm still around; i just haven't had much to say lately. every once in a while things get shitty and then i get whiny and i'm really trying not to be whiny so i opt for silence instead. same old story.

i found out yesterday where my internship will be this fall: the nearest prison. i've never been to a prison! i'm all excited that i get to hang out with prisoners and mentor them. we'll see how this goes. it should be an awesome opportunity, and it's exactly what i wanted to do. i just need to get the silence of the lambs visions out of my head. a friend suggested i think shawshank redemption instead. yes. that. it's going to be completely intimidating and probably fucking scary until i get the hang of whatever i'll be doing. no idea about the specifics, but yeah, looking forward to it.

that's all for now. divorce stuff is soon to be in the works (hopefully by next week, and i'm v. happy about that). let the games begin.

yay, apathy. eh.

2006-07-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

class. over soon. in 12 hours. lots of happy hour'ing going on afterwards in celebration. so tired.

alvin and i finally for the last time for real broke things off tonight. i haven't talked much about that on here lately because the process of deciding to get divorced has looked like this: separate, decide to get divorced, try to work it out, decide it won't work, decide it might, get back together, break up (repeat). it's a rather prolonged, annoying process and i'm pretty sure my friends are all like, what are you doing?! why is it taking so long? so i just try not to talk about it. the only thing that makes me feel better about this is that my therapist said it's completely normal, it's just been a more external process for me than for some people. some people apparently go through this back and forth thing in their head and then make a decision, so no one hears about all the back and forthness. freaks. i'm all about external, obviously. i broadcast the minute details of my life on the internet and it doesn't get much more external than that.

anyhow, alvin's happy about getting back together with his girlfriend, whom he had broken up with to see if we could work things out (nope, can't). i'm all kinds of tired and wanting this to be over. he was so happy when we made this decision he nearly choked on his dinner. then he text messaged his girlfriend. it would have been nice if he could have waited until, i don't know, i was out of sight, but no. yay for them. they can have each other. i'm actually at the point where i don't care. as much caring as i've been doing the past few months, there's something to be said for that.

reject.

2006-07-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

three years and five months ago on a rainy thursday morning when i was living in this same house, i walked through the kitchen and ran into a chair with my foot--my left foot--and broke my little toe. it turned black and purple and hurt like hell, and it hasn't been the same since. the bone is all fucked up and it hurts when it rains. and months later my toe nail fell off, completely unprovoked. that was when i knew that was the reject toe, and if it weren't necessary to keep it in order to walk and to maintain toe symmetry it would so be out of here.

tonight while mocking my sister, because she was mocking me (she started it), i walked through the kitchen and did it again: i hit a chair in the exact same location with the same toe. lots of screaming commenced and shannon was kind enough to get some ice for my foot in between bouts of laughter. this is totally karma because my mom used to break her toes all the time and i used to laugh (i was young; i thought it was bizarre that she broke her toes with such frequency BUT NOW I UNDERSTAND). i'm not sure that my toe is broken but it definitely isn't feeling good. really, it's hard to tell what's up with it since it's still messed up from the last run in it had with a chair. it hasn't turned purple yet so i guess that's a good sign.

if life were a musical.

2006-07-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

it's saturday night and i'm home alone watching rent, the movie. the musical movie. i'm antisocial and he movie's kind of lame but i'm liking the aloneness, especially since it means that no one is complaining that i'm making them watch a bad movie.

i kind of want to sing all of my conversations now. i want to be like the characters in this movie and sing about how cold it is since my heat was turned off and how i can't afford to pay rent and how my T cell count is low. is it horrible that i'm amused that the HIV/AIDS support group is singing about their problems? is that supposed to be funny? this is why i love musicals. they're completely ridiculous.

speaking of ridiculous, shannon's boyfriend was hanging out in her room while she was at work today, and at some point while i was otherwise preoccupied with nintendo i heard fuck! fuck! fuck! but since it takes more than that to get my attention when the legend of zelda is involved, i ignored it. pete later told me that loomis--shannon's snake--had escaped and was busy fighting off the kitties. he put loomis back in the aquarium and i've been completely paranoid ever since. i keep checking on him to make sure he's still in there, though if he got out again i don't know what i would do (leave the house?). shannon's not all that helpful, either, because when i was like, dude, your snake escaped, she was all, no it didn't. what snake? loomis isn't venomous, but he is about three feet long and waking up with a snake in my bed is going to make the stove-peeing cat look good.

ETA: okay, i suppose if rent people are going to insist on dying, i'll quit laughing.

everyone should be like me.

2006-07-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

this week has been crazy busy, with presentations and papers and more papers and classes and sitting in coffee shops all day writing papers and racking up huge tabs. i asked the professor that is making us attend classes the day after classes are over what's up with us having to be in class on a non-class day, and she didn't like that question so much. so. there will be class next wednesday, and i will be there.

i'm trying to convert shannon to the dark side--social work, i mean. she needs a major, i like to recruit people to my school, it's a win-win situation. everyone should be a social worker. i think she's halfway convinced. it's either that or she's going to get a psychology or english degree, and i tried to explain to her that getting a liberal arts degree is about as useful as not having gone to college at all, which i'm sadly familiar with. i cried the day i got my diploma, and not because i was happy. my diploma says i have a bachelor's degree in liberal arts. it's like UT wants to rub it in just how useless my degree is. they couldn't even bother to mention that i have an anthropology degree, not even in fine print at the bottom of my diploma.

word on the sunscreen.

2006-07-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

this makes me sad. i hope dooce is okay.

no lo comprendo.

2006-07-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

the only thing more amazing than the number of group projects i am required to be part of for school (one per class, at least), is the number of interventions that need to take place because of the group projects. i never expected so much conflict. it's so bad that i think we should be required to take a class on it. maybe something like, how to deal with that one person in your group who won't do any work when everyone else in the group is totally non-confrontational (and working their asses off to pick up the slack) in a way that won't ruin your entire semester and/or your project and/or your reputation. yes, that.

school is technically over july 25th, but for some reason that i'm not comprehending, one of my professors is making us attend our two-and-a-half hour class and turn in papers on july 26th. this would be THE DAY AFTER THE SEMESTER IS TECHNICALLY OVER. i think we need to point this out to her, because, dude, no.

happy 26th birthday to me!

2006-07-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

one year closer to 30, which i sekritly look forward to.

ghosts, perhaps.

2006-07-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

my parents came into town and took me out for a pre-birthday dinner celebration sunday evening. there were presents, in the form of many gift cards, and for some reason i ended up with three birthday cards from them. one from each parent and one from (i probably shouldn't admit this) their cat. they were trying to cheer me up. it worked. except the cat, when he wrote in the date of my birthday on the card, he got it wrong. he was off by four days. for some reason the cat wrote july 7, which happens to be my parents' anniversary. which, incidentally, i totally forgot about. maybe he was trying to tell me something? my mom corrected the date on my card and apologized. for the cat's mistake.

i'm not sure i should precede what i'm about to say with what i just said, because i don't think i'm lending any legitimacy to my next story, or to anything my parents say ever. anyhow.

during dinner we had a discussion about the status of the ghost in my parents' house. i always forget about it, which is probably a good thing considering it's one of those things i don't need to remember when i visit. growing up, my sister and i were scared of the master bedroom. we didn't go in there much and when we did we always ran through it because it was creepy (i still avoid it). it never occurred to me that rooms aren't supposed to make you feel like that; i just accepted it. the room only got creepier after shannon and i saw an outline of a person walking through the bathroom on several occasions. as a child i remember thinking, kids see things! i'm just imagining this! years later when we told our parents about it, they were all, yeah, we see it too. and i was like, what do you mean YOU SEE IT TOO? really, that's not an acceptable answer. normal parents aren't supposed to corroborate ghost stories, they're supposed to tell you you have an active imagination and that your house isn't haunted. at the very least they could have lied to me.

so far the only paranormal activity i'm aware of has been the bathroom ghost sightings (why the bathroom? why?) and doors opening and closing on their own. my stepbrother just visited my parents for a week and was so freaked out by the door to the guest bedroom opening by itself that he refused to sleep in there and slept on the living room couch instead. he's 39. and otherwise well adjusted.

the ghost thing isn't surprising considering our house, our entire neighborhood really, was built on an old indian reservation. i tried to research it to find out which tribe was living there and has taken up residence in our house, but there were quite a few so i'm not sure who to attribute the ghostiness to. this sounds like something out of a bad movie. a bad made-for-tv movie based on a stephen king book, like maybe pet cemetery, only with people instead of cats, and less death.

keywords that lead to my blog, part III

2006-07-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

stalking objectification
objectification and oppression of women in marriage
katie llama trent reznor
beagle bark dysfunctional
do female rabbits thump
incessant sniffing and licking in 13 in beagles
macramae how to
deviance and therapy
how can i stop my cat from peeing on my belongings
how to get a beagle to stop barking during the night
should i become a flight attendant
perpetually sarah

for the inquiring minds that want to know: the cookie was v. good.

library.

2006-07-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

i'm at the library, ostensibly writing the introduction to this super long group project paper (one of two) that is due in a couple weeks. i'm having trouble writing. the introduction. why can't i just blog for a grade instead?

i have this cookie i want to eat, but it's so freaking quiet in here that i'm hesitant to even try to open the wrapper because it's loud and it sounds like i'm opening a cookie. the library people finally decided that it's permissible for students to bring in drinks with them as long as the drinks have lids, but cookies are not okay. it's bad enough that i have to type in here. it's all echoy. and my stomach is making all kinds of loud and unacceptable gurgling noises.

also, i'm completely distracted by the sign next to me: DO NOT LEAVE LAPTOPS AND VALUABLES UNATTENDED AND AVAILABLE FOR THEFT!

i think it's the "available for theft" part that keeps drawing me in. i never thought of my belongings as being available to be taken--shouldn't it be clear that they're unavailable for the taking because they belong to me? i thought so. the girl a couple seats away took the top portion of her laptop with her (the monitor/keyboard) so the sad, empty laptop shell is sitting on her desk with some other stuff that is totally available but not worth thieving.

this is not unlike the parking permits that UT issues, the ones that hang from your review mirror and have printed on the back: REMOVE VALUABLES FROM CAR AND LOCK DOORS TO PREVENT THEFT.

it seems strange to me that we put the burden on people who have belongings not to let them be stolen. i understand why it's necessary, but locking your doors doesn't prevent theft. it merely deters it. that wording always bothered me.

okay, i need to quit procrastinating and find a way to covertly open and eat my cookie.

i'm so not down with this.

2006-07-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

i realize it's probably unfair of me to complain that alvin has a girlfriend, but the part of me that is complainy is all kinds of wtf? about it. i called him tonight because the past couple days have been kind of unhappy, and i thought that since he's the main cause of my recent unhappiness then he can help fix it or at least maybe say something, anything, to make me feel better. he wasn't helpful, really, and i didn't necessarily expect him to be but i thought i'd try because everything else i'm doing? it's not making me feel any better. the new girl was at the house taking care of him because he's not feeling well. (i've been replaced with a newer model. i'm expendable. i know, i'm the one who left. but still. people wait longer to replace their dead pets with new ones than he waited to replace me. just sayin'.)

the one thing that made my evening okay was that in the middle of being extra upset, david came home with lots of tasty food from central market. he asked what was up and i said i was plotting my death--i'm not, far from it, i just enjoy making bad jokes at inopportune moments--and he said that what i needed was chips and hummus. so he kept me occupied with food until i quit crying, not unlike how you would treat a cranky two year old. regardless, it was sweet.

so. relationships are stupid. mine, especially. i hate what this is doing to me, particularly since i thought i was okay. i really want to hate alvin and i can't because alvin's totally unhateable. i want him to be happy, just not at my expense.

i'll get over it. later.

2006-07-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

so last week i met with my therapist and i was all, life is good! i have nothing to complain about! and she was like, you seem to be making progress, but you know you're not going to be this happy all the time, right? and i was all, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

yeah. so then the weekend happened, and i hate everything again. everything everything everything. just saying. that i hate everything.

when amicable divorces go bad.

2006-07-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

i've tried several times this past week to call alvin and see how he's doing, but he hasn't answered his phone. until today. i can only assume he was feeling extra spiteful this morning when he finally decided to answer the phone and tell me that i'll never guess what he's been up to, and oh by the way she's hanging out in bed next to him, and that's why he has been incommunicado this past week.

i'm happy that he's happy. however. the manner in which he decided to relay that piece of information was unforgivably vindictive.

i don't know whether he realizes it or not, but he just declared war.

frustrated.

2006-06-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

i found out today that loki the outdoor cat has to come back indoors because he has a plethora of health problems caused by being outside (insects, things attacking his eye, depression, etc.). last night he stayed indoors and this morning there was a puddle on the stove. and the counter; he hit both! shannon's picking him up from the vet now. she has to work all weekend and isn't going to be around much until tuesday night. i don't know how we and the cat are all going to survive under the same roof for the three weeks he has to be inside though i suspect this will not end well. she's going broke because of the cat and should she have any leftover funds after today's visit, the vet suggested kitty antidepressants. i think the vet has it backwards: screw the cat drugs, the people in this house should be on antidepressants so we can forget all the day-to-day cat-related problems we have to deal with. why does the cat get to have all the fun? really.

also, i can't get any work done because i am burned out and in serious need of some fun, but i'm caught in this stupid cycle of feeling guilty and anxious if i'm not doing school work, then not being able to really get any work done when i do try because i need a freaking break. it sucks.

also also, my lovely new reef flip flops are missing. they were in the living room last weekend, and now they're gone. i'm thinking someone took them because really, i've looked everywhere for them over the past week and this house isn't that big. shoes shouldn't just disappear, especially ones that belong to moi.

ETA: found my flip flops in the pile of shoes in my closet. why the hell did i put them there? i never do that.

airbrushing, wow.

2006-06-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

recently:

and more recently:

skool.

2006-06-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

so i am now moved out/moved in and sitting among piles of boxes that need to be unpacked. i should have some time for that in august. until then all my time is devoted to skool, otherwise known as My New Life. i can't remember the last time i did anything that was fun! actually, yes i can. june 7. seems like so long ago.

the class that i was just lukewarm about a couple weeks ago, i'm now completely hostile about since it continues to be an unorganized, unstructured mess that i'm not learning anything from, except how to be really pissed off for five hours a week. several of us from class are going to talk to the instructor on wednesday, the dude who so far isn't listening to our concerns, to see if we can get him to hear what we're saying when we very clearly state that every last one of us is completely overwhelmed and about to revolt unless he makes some changes, and soon.

i still love my other class. i'm quite grateful for that. if i didn't, this summer would be a soul-sucking disaster of a semester and i would spend even more time than i already do complaining about it.

dear bad austin drivers:

2006-06-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

unless you have a death wish, which at least a few of you appear to, or have never had the pleasure of driving a uhaul (i guess that's possible), it is completely stupid of you to think it's okay to cut off someone who is driving a uhaul in the rain just because you need to make a turn at the next street and waited too late to change lanes. uhauls are pieces of crap with v. bad breaks and you're lucky we didn't all die. you people almost made the $14 i spent on insurance worthwhile. glad you didn't. just sayin'.

i talk about britney too much as it is, but this is totally worthwhile.

2006-06-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

today i learned that lexis nexis has a feature i've so far overlooked that allows you to search transcripts of interviews from reputable news sources, so tonight after class i searched for the transcript of the britney spears interview with matt lauer that aired this week, the interview accompanied by this picture. how could i resist checking out an interview with someone who used to look (relatively) attractive and now looks like that? because she was allowed to do her own hair and makeup and dress herself before appearing on television with no help from anyone at all including the help of a mirror? exactly.

lexis nexis wasn't as helpful as i had hoped in producing the text of the entire interview, but that was fine because after reading sections of it my interest was piqued enough that i really just wanted to watch it. i found it online in a three part series and so far have watched part one, otherwise known as the part where britney invents new words and shows off her cleavage, all while chewing gum. it's awesome. i'll save part two, where matt makes her angry and she cries so much her fake eyelashes fall off all while chewing gum, for the next time i'm, say, feeling bad about myself.

(matt, incidentally, looks strangely like trent these days. i think it's the mutual near-baldness.)

one of my roommates gave me way too much crap, in the form of many sideways looks that implied i must be crazy, during my hour-long britney interview transcript search and subsequent interview watching spree. i wanted to defend myself by saying i'd had a hard day, that mondays and wednesdays are the days that i spend all day in class talking about things that matter and come home exhausted so, really, i'm entitled to watch mindless, trashy tv if that's what makes me feel better. then i thought better of it because there's no way i'm justifying myself to someone who plays xbox almost as much as he plays his three girlfriends and is showing no signs of slowing down, or remorse.

my wife is an adolescent and other randomness.

2006-06-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

the allergens (or cats, whatever) have taken over my room. munchie sneaks in here every chance he gets to sit on my lap--or on my laptop--and last night i found loki, who shannon let into the house and then neglected to watch to make sure he wasn't being his usual self, curled up asleep on my bed. he didn't pee on it (or the stove, or my piles of clothes, or any of the roommates) and he looked so happy that i let him sleep for awhile. by the time i kicked him out my sinsues were revolting, but i consider that my good deed for the day (see, i'm not completely heartless). and the munchie litter box problem either has been resolved since shannon changed his food last week, or my allergies are so bad that i can't smell anything. perhaps he's being a good cat and has quit peeing altogether. that would be ideal.

yesterday during class #2, also known as the most frustrating class in the world because the instructor is not providing any sort of instruction at all, instructor dude started talking about his wife. he said: "my wife is an adolescent..." and then he trailed off. he eventually finished the sentence with the word "counselor," thank god, but meanwhile he was quiet for so long that the entire class started laughing until many of us were crying, and he didn't get what was so funny. these professor types are seriously not understanding our particular brand of humor, and we frequently have to explain jokes to them. for some reason this makes us laugh more. we (and i speak for the class here) are mature like that. but at least we have a sense of humor.

i'm v. proud of myself: i have spent the past five days doing nothing but homework and reading and paper writing and working on projects, and this means that i'm not falling behind. school has become my life. go me.

not that i actually own anything really besides many pairs of shoes, but i get to move my stuff from my old house to my new house this weekend. i'm so looking forward to finally feeling like i have a place that is mine, like i'm not living in between houses and lives.

finally someone understands.

2006-06-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

last week i attended a lecture on business practices and social work, and, long story short, i was barely successful at not laughing at this bullet point on page 11 under "management mistakes that lead to business failure":

Insufficient/ineffective HRMS*

that's what i'm talking about.

*so i guess here it stands for human resource managment systems, not hot raunchy monkey sex. though really? insufficient amounts of either one will totally lead to failure.

noise.

2006-06-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

favorite coffee shop no. 1:

it's fun to listen to anti-establishment people talk about the evilness that is time w@rner.

also amusing to watch people come here to update their myspace accounts and then leave.

but having the "are you sure we can't work this out?" conversation with alvin? not so much fun. he sent me an email this morning, asking if we could try again, that completely caught me off guard. i thought we had made that decision, but he wanted to ensure we made the decision when we weren't angry with each other. i appreciate that...but i can't do it, even when i'm not angry and have had a good night's sleep.

have wasted three hours not reading so far. should get back to that.

ETA: for those of you concerned with the rabbit antics of two nights ago--there was no further torture last night (if only because david went to bed early and i didn't have rabbit access). besides, rabbits need some excitement every so often.

hasta mañana.

2006-06-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

this evening david and i had the bright idea to introduce one of shannon's cats (munchie, the lone indoor cat) to our friend ian's rabbit (fred, the misnamed female rabbit) that has taken up residence in david's closet while ian is out of town. this closet is the size of your average new york apartment, so lest it sound like the rabbit is trapped in some small, dark space, really it's not. david's closet is nicer than my bedroom.

we've made an effort to keep the cat and the rabbit away from each other so far, just because we didn't want to have to explain that oops, munchie clawed fred to death and ate her, so sorry. tonight's introduction didn't go very well--munchie was freaked out and while i was holding him mere inches away from his prey i could feel his little kitty heart start to pound. the rabbit was not amused; first it hid and then it started thumping. i don't have any rabbit experience aside from with my friend crystal's rabbits when i was in second grade, and the only thing i took away from that experience though i don't remember why: rabbits are mean, i should stay away from them.

but apparently rabbits thump when everything is not okay in their little rabbit world. like thumper in bambi. i don't remember why thumper thumped his foot, but fred did this a couple of times while the cat was staring at her (or stalking, perhaps) and it was hilarious. fred was obviously unhappy. she was like, THUMP...wtf...THUMP...is that thing? and what is wrong with you people?!

we took munchie out of the room after the thumping started, with the expectation that we'll reunite them tomorrow and maybe they'll like each other then. now he's running around the house, doing the thing he does where he makes loud screamy cat noises and acts like he's possessed, ricocheting off furniture and whoever happens to be in his path. i think he's angry we denied him a rabbit.

getting divorced.

2006-06-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

that's it.

roller derby, i think.

2006-06-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

so i'm at favorite coffee shop #2 writing a(nother) paper--still on the topic of oppression--and the v. loud group of women across the room from me is discussing what types of outfits they should all wear: hot pants? mini skirts (leather of vinyl)? tank tops with the bottom part cut off? fishnets? corsets? spandex? and should they call themselves the domestic divas? and wear aprons?

they're trying to figure out how to make their outfits more s&m without offending their children (gotta have priorities), and how to coordinate their clothing with their helmets. i can only hope they're a roller derby team. the weirdness, it's following me today.

is this considered success?

2006-06-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

i'm sitting at favorite coffee shop #1 writing a paper about the oppression of women, and there is a woman sitting at a table near me talking about a friend of hers whose pre-nup included a clause stating that she would get X amount of money if, during the first year of her marriage, she didn't gain any weight.

she got the money.

oh.my.god.

i've decided to come out of hiding, briefly.

2006-06-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

*school is kicking my ass this summer. i love love love one of my classes and am lukewarm about the other so far, but even so this semester is starting off so much better than last. talking in class has become easier now that i'm in class with primarily my own cohort. this semester is tons more engaging and there's plenty of eye candy, which i know is not why i'm in skool (or is it...?) but it's still a nice perk.

*the cat situation has been only partially resolved. bad cat is permanently exiled to the outdoors, and cute and cuddly cat whose pee smells like death is still inside, which is still problematic. i think he's eventually going outside since shannon sort of promised, even though that kind of means close to nothing. in the meantime we'll all have died from asphyxiation.

*i realized today i have become that roommate, the one i always disliked beacuse they eat everyone else's food. i don't have any good reason to do this since i buy my own food (mostly), it's just that the food that is not mine looks so much tastier. like the strawberries my sister bought. oh my god. these strawberries are gigantic, and pretty, and most of all they were calling to me. they were, i think, the best strawberries i've ever eaten. also, her avocados. i think she's becoming annoyed that food keeps disappearing, but i can't let this food go to waste. i can't not eat avocados. she needs not to buy such good food if she doesn't want it to disappear. obviously.

*i continue to feel like i'm living in this strange, bad dream-like state, where my life is not my own. i mean, it is my own, but it's more like a blurry, watered down rendition of the life i used to have. i feel like i'm living two lives: the one i'm currently in that involves school and friends, which strangely overlaps with my old life that i step into when i see alvin. it's a life i don't have anymore, one that i'm trying to figure out if i want back and whether or not i can resume. it's bizarre and complicated and, most of all, confusing, very much like a bad dream that i desperately want to wake up from.

perpetually blocked.

2006-06-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

hope i'll eventually have something to say.

for those times when i can't think of anything original to say.

2006-06-03T22:13:00.000-07:00

Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Sarcasm helps keep you from telling people what you really think of them.
If you think things can't get worse it's probably only because you lack sufficient imagination.
You can't be late until you show up.
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.

transcendence.

2006-05-31T23:40:00.000-07:00

i'm really going to regret being in the habit of staying awake until 3 a.m. and sleeping until noon when my 8 a.m. classes start next week.

meanwhile, i'm waiting for the bad feelings to go away. i sekritly hope they'll sneak out the window one night while i'm asleep, but no. there seems to be a fine line between dealing with everything and staying busy so i don't have to think unpleasant thoughts, and i don't know how to achieve a balance between what seems to be avoidance and wallowing in self pity. i should probably do whatever seems okay, but right now nothing seems okay, and that? that just sounds like i'm being whiny again. i wish i could fast forward a few years, wake up one day when i'm 30 and magically have all this shit figured out. i have goals i'd like to meet by then, the perhaps most important one having to do with avoiding becoming emotionally invested in relationships that aren't viable. i am so done with that.

retail therapy, and then some.

2006-05-23T20:31:00.000-07:00

i have been on a spending spree of late that i would feel bad about if i didn't actually need everything i've purchased. the weather got hot--so very hot--and i realized i lack the appropriate clothing for dealing with the god awful heat, and nothing fits anymore anyway which could only mean it's obviously time to buy new clothes. yesterday i bought pants that very cleverly convert to capris. today: shirts, shoes, therapy, a cookie, and a trip to victoria's secret, where i learned that my bras don't fit right lately because apparently the weight i've lost was subtracted straight from my boobs. an entire cup size is gone! that's like a handful! that's unacceptable! the one thing that has remained a constant in the past decade is my bra size and now that that's gone i don't know what to believe anymore. oh, the betrayal.

in other news, one of my roommates is on a mission to get me to drink, among other things. he just poured me a glass of wine even though i'm all i'm not going to drink it and he's like, drink it you need to chill out. point taken, but still. it's sitting next to me and under normal circumstances i would worry that the wine would go to waste, but i'm sure lush boy won't let that happen. he's resourceful like that. although: my ability to withstand peer pressure is seriously waning and if anyone can talk me into drinking or smoking anything, it likely will be the lush roommate.

don't waste the pretty.

2006-05-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

i'm back in town and i have my room back (yay!). dude that i'm subletting from left today for italy and has offered to sleep on the couch when he returns in mid-june (before he moves out for good) in an effort not to kick me out of his/my room again. that's sweet of him and he's actually kind of hot, really, and i think the hotness and the sweetness are all a result of the italianness. so is the pasta and sausage eating. did i mention the hotness? and the motorcycle? and the pretty hair? anyhow, the point is that this works out v. well for me because now i don't have to worry about being displaced again; i only have to worry about feeling guilty that he's sleeping on the couch and i'm sleeping in his bed.

i recently realized that i begin way too many sentences with, "the fucking cat..." followed by whatever horrible act the cat just committed. today: he peed on the stove again, so i tossed him out in the backyard--it was rather satisfying--where he stayed the rest of the day and, contrary to shannon's prediction, managed to survive. he's rather screamy about being outside, but whatever. cat needs to learn to deal.

also, i'm almost positive that the being ignored bit that i've complained about so much lately is totally going to be a prolonged thing and is also a quiet--though effective, i admit--way of telling me to just go away i don't ever want to talk to you again. i mean, i assume that's what the not talking to me is all about but it's hard to tell considering the blatant lack of communication on the part of the uncommunicative party. it's rather awesome, really--and by awesome i mean it inspires awe and not that it's a good thing. in addition to awe, this particular tactic is inspiring all sorts of other emotions, none of which could be considered very positive, but awe is up there on the list. i definitely deserve better treatment than this. even being told to fuck off would be preferable, since at least then i would know where i stand.

in keeping with the addiction theme.

2006-05-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

i miss austin. i even miss austin drivers. i especially miss austin drivers, because they know all about how the big numbers on the speed limit sign correspond to the little numbers on the speedometer and what that means in practical terms when they're behind the wheel of a car.

i'll be home saturday, so all good.

at one point today i was hanging out with my parents and trying not to cry, so they tried to cheer me up by handing me a wad of cash and also replacing the tires on my car and then taking me out for a drink (they're kind of being really cool right now). i know, i know, i don't drink, but my parents apparently don't believe me every time i tell them that, so i had to explain yet again that no, really, i don't drink at all, and they were like, not ever? and i was all, no, not ever. and they were like, huh. as if we hadn't had this conversation a dozen times before. since i'm incredibly grateful that they bought me new tires i'm not reeely complaining, i'm only making an observation about the lack of attention they've paid to this same conversation we've had many times in the past and undoubtedly will continue to have in the future.

last week when i told someone i go to school with that i don't drink or smoke, her response was, so what do you DO? and i was like, fuck me i'm tired of answering this question and surely i'm not that freaking weird just beacause i don't DRINK so quit giving me that LOOK like i'm a freak. i feel like i need to have it tattooed on my forehead or something, perhaps followed by a list of activities i do engage in that don't involve alcohol just to prove that i'm still an interesting, fully functioning, and mostly sane human being in spite of the not drinking bit (even though, honestly, i'd like to drink kind of a lot). still, that line of questioning is becoming tedious.

next time someone asks what it is that i do i'm going to say: heroin. because alcohol? that is so last year.

couch surfing

2006-05-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

at my parents' house until saturday and i can have my room back. it's been two years since i've been here and it's strange to be back. the first thing i noticed: people here drive way too slowly. also: there is no coffee. like, anywhere. it hurts.

i'm all impressed with my parents being super nice to me and feeding me, so much that i'm probably not going to quit talking about it for a long time. i could get used to this. i just found the oatmeal cookies and hot chocolate so life is happy now; this after my mom made enchiladas for dinner and is making french toast for breakfast and i'll likely leave here several pounds heavier than when i arrived.

tomorrow after my french toast feast i get to sort through the mountains of stuff in the room that used to be mine but is now used for storage. stuff needs to be thrown out and garage sale'd so that my parents can eventually sell the house and move to a place that has coffee shops and where people don't habitually drive 10 miles under the speed limit.

i got more game than parker brothers, biatch.

2006-05-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

so said one of my roommates tonight while he was kicking some goblin ass in his newest video game conquest. i was amused.

i miss playing video games and now have access to the xbox so conveniently located in the living room, but i'm afraid that being one with the xbox might derail me from school this summer. then again, maybe not. maybe i won't play for 10 hours a day. really, there's only one way to find out: i need a game. if anyone has any suggestions, i'm listening.

but before the gaming addiction begins: i'm being kicked out of my room for the next few days--dude whose room i'm sort of subletting is returning until sunday and then leaves again for a couple of weeks--and i'm either staying in my sister's room during that time or visiting my parents. my parents are a four-hour drive away. my sister, her room is a four-second walk away. when i think of it in those terms it sounds much easier to stay here than to drive across the state. but i promised to visit, and my mom promised to cook for me. not having to procure my own food sounds super nice. my mom promised me french toast. i should be all over that. but the laziness!

i'm pretty sure i want the official vacations from sarah to officially be over now, or at least for an end to be in sight. it is an interesting test to see how long people can go without talking to or emailing me and generally pretending i don't exist, but really i'm not sure i want to know how long this can go on. i have a feeling it could be indefinite. that makes me sad.

new addiction.

2006-05-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

since the incontinent cat isn't going anywhere (away, i mean) any time soon, i bought a new litter box today and some arm & hammer kitty litter. because the second biggest kitty problem is that when he humors us by using the litter box, it's totally noticeable in a way that gives me a headache and makes me want to leave the house out of fear that, if i don't, i will seriously kill brain cells and harm any future, unborn children that i'll never have. sometimes i do leave and it completely offends my sister--the one with the pretty hair and no sense of smell. so. new kitty litter seems to be working well so far. good thing because my patience is wearing thin and i'm tired of pointing out that in some places people choose to eat cats instead of dealing with them. just sayin'. shannon is definitely showing some signs of being a cat lady in the future. she seems okay with that.

kate will be happy to hear that i have added a new addiction to my repertoire (yes, i have an addiction repertoire)--itunes! the evilest of all of apple's numerous, evil inventions. i give them my credit card number, they give me music, and everyone's happy until a month from now when i fully realize i've spent several hundred dollars on music. what makes up for the fact that i'm willingly draining my bank account is that i've discovered and rediscovered all kinds of good music that i'm focusing on putting on my ipod. tell me this counts as focusing, yes?

i have something to say to the writers of grey's anatomy, should they be reading this: it was completely unacceptable that YOU KILLED OFF DENNY even though tonight was the season finale and someone had to die (hello, callie?). denny was sweet and his new heart was FINE and then you killed him and it was clear when izzie wouldn't let go of his cold, dead body that she isn't going to recover from his death, like, ever. i was cheering for them even though he had just asked her to marry him and it was all kinds of romantic in a way that i kind of despised. but still. this during the same episode where you decided that meredith and mcdreamy's dog had to be put to sleep? the dog and denny were at least lovable. callie, not so much. she would have sufficed for the requisite cast member death, people, and since george doesn't love her anyway it's not like he would have cared. next time: don't kill the nice guy. and you'd better make it up to izzie. and me.

self pity & wallowing, etc.

2006-05-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

the only time that it doesn't suck to be awake lately is between midnight and two or three in the morning, which is the only time of day i'm too tired to care that my life sucks. the downside is that i'm not sleeping enough. again. but at least i have a couple hours to look forward to in the middle of the night before i pass out from the sheer exhaustion of staying awake.

loki the demon cat peed on the stove this evening. shannon was supposed to take him to live at her boyfriend's apartment, but she's reneging on that promise since (she claims) his apartment is too nice for her cat to indiscriminately pee everywhere. i hope the cat doesn't run away because that? that would be so sad, especially if he never returned.

in the past three days, two separate people have decided that they don't want to see me for some unspecified amount of time because apparently i am the cause of much anguish. one i could handle, but two? ugh. my brain is pretty much refusing to process this information and has decided to go on strike, and honestly if i could just take a couple weeks off from me i'd so be on a sarah vacation with everyone else who can't deal with me. i really would.

good news: i fulfilled my civic obligation today by voting in the local election, and everything i was in favor of passed and everything i was against, well, was shot down. as it should be since i'm so obviously right about everything.

cheapening the blog experience one whiny post at a time.

2006-05-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

pmsing again.

it's causing my gums to hurt, which is unfortunate since i went to the dentist this morning and they were all about inflicting pain yet again. the sonic cleaner thing they use works really well until they get to my wisdom teeth and the high-pitched frequency of the super sonicness becomes unbearably loud. dental hygienist woman was all, yeah, that's loud because i'm right near your ear canal. and i was like, so why don't you stop then since i keep wincing? and she was all, because i'm holding the sonic cleaner thing and you're not! and then the torture resumed. alas, my teeth are sparkly clean now.

i think my love affair with HGTV is over. because they're all about showing happy couples fixing up their houses, and i'm all about hating couples right now. even their commercials feature these sugary sweet happy people in home improvement stores and there's something about the fact that they're always, always wearing wedding rings that makes me want to scream. where are the home improvement project people who aren't married? like who are maybe just living together? sans stupid wedding rings? and are single people not allowed on HGTV? what gives?

/pms-inspired irrationality

una lista, sorta.

2006-05-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

*loki has stopped relieving himself in front of my room and instead enjoys peeing all over shannon's clothes in her room. shannon is running out of ways to rationalize keeping the cat, much to everyone else's delight.

*27 days until summer classes start. normally i would be happy with this but oh my god that sounds like a long time when i'm otherwise needing to distract myself from, i don't know, myself.

*i'm thinking about getting a job, but given my limited definition of an acceptable job (based upon many years of bad, bad jobs), my only option right now appears to be whoring myself out. profitable and tempting though it may be, i'm not ready for that just yet.

*and the advantage of having 27 days of freedom and no job is that i can finish reading the four books i've been reading since forever: half asleep in frog pajamas, running with scissors, bait and switch, and the da vinci code (which i'm not impressed with so far even though everyone says it's excellent). i realized a few years ago that life is too short to read books i don't like, but can so many people be wrong about the da vinci code being a good book?

the kitty that lives up to his name.

2006-05-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

my sister's cat, the male cat that completely despises male human beings perhaps because he had never seen a dude before my sister adopted him--we have evidence of that, at least--has decided that the entire house is his litter box. this means any square inch of surface that isn't actually the litter box is fair game, and all the better if those square inches are located in the hallway directly outside my room. it appears he is not happy about my presence. i thought that not being a guy means i wouldn't be targeted, but no. i think kitty is also unhappy that i won't let him in my room, so he leaves gifts outside my door and totally hopes i'll slip in them and perhaps die so he can sneak past my lifeless body and into my room to pee in my closet some more.

this cat is a vengeful evildoer. perhaps this is payback for shannon naming him loki.

david, our landlord, left a rather lengthy letter for shannon earlier this week outlining the unacceptableness of loki's behavior (this after the cat peed on the kitchen counter) and the consequences of future injustices, starting with her having to pay a fine and ending with loki being exiled. i was on my sister's side for a day or so since i didn't think he was that bad and the letter was a bit harsh. turns out loki was just getting warmed up and we hadn't yet seen what he's truly capable of.

yesterday kitty did unspeakable things on the hallway carpet--not once, but twice--and i was all helpful and sisterly and pointed out the vile products of his kitty transgressions to shannon before anyone noticed. then kitty upped the ante. this morning i was greeted with four separate and completely disgusting, um, incidences in the hallway. right in front of the litter box! the cat is obviously angry. i woke shannon so she could clean it up because, really, i draw the line at having to clean up someone else's cat's shit, even if the someone else is my sister. and she was all, omg! and i was like, yeah, the cat needs to go somewhere far, far away. i think she's beginning to understand that cat deviance is not a good thing and subjecting her roommates to cat torture is pretty unacceptable. the vet hasn't found anything physically wrong with him, which seems to indicate he's just psychotic and must be destroyed* before he finds a way to get into my room.

*i mostly mean his kitty will, not him literally.

sweet.

2006-05-04T21:20:00.000-07:00

i am finally finally finished with classes and projects and papers this semester, which means that today i had time to do the one thing i've been talking about for weeks: veg in front of the tv. oh wait, wrong thing. i meant: move out of my house. i packed up my dirty laundry (because i don't have clean clothes anymore; lately there have been only varying degrees of dirtiness) along with some books and my beloved laptop and maybe my toothbrush--i got the essentials--and left. it was one of the hardest things i've ever had to do. i assumed that as relieved as i am to leave, it would come pretty easily. and that throwing some belongings into a bag and putting them in my car wouldn't be so difficult. no, no. totally wrong about that. but i did it.

as hard as it was to leave my house--so many hours spent making it my own!--it is nice to be out, by myself and in a place that, interestingly, always has and still feels like home. it's freaking peaceful here. i can't get over that.

the room i've moved into is in a house owned by a friend of mine who rents out rooms to mostly college students. like my sister, for one. and alvin's cousin. usually the people living here aren't so related. now we're taking over the house, not unlike roaches.

i had forgotten how interesting this place can be. by interesting i mean in the past five hours we've had three near-crises. first with shannon's cat, the serial pee-er on-er of everyone else's things, then a wounded bird that's being given CPR or something in the next room after it fell out of a tree during a storm, and with my sister's boyfriend, who is stranded somewhere after being caught in a flash flood in said storm. bad storm. worse kitty.

so, aside from that it's peaceful. the cool part is i can lock myself in my room when it gets too hectic and i don't have to talk to anyone.

when my*space comes in handy.

2006-05-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

mellowdrone: because i can't resist a hot-sounding guy who uses the word behooves in his lyrics. yum.

gogol bordello: like being at the circus, and as an added bonus they're a big proponent of my favorite color. i love love love.

moving out tomorrow.

2006-05-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

i like that dooce likes shoes as much as the rest of us. and cute shoes that i'm totally digging, at that.

i'm locked in* the basement** of the social work school working on a paper and am not leaving until i'm done. i'm trying to ignore that a. i'm hungry and b. i'll eventually have to pee and c. there are vending machines 10 feet away but i don't have any money and a bathroom right past that but i don't want to leave my laptop all alone because it will get lonely. and perhaps some nice person will recognize this loneliness, pick it up and take it home with them, and i'll never see it again. that probably won't happen but it could.

i'm also trying to ignore that the semester is over at the end of this week, which is a mixed blessing because i'm almost done with all this stressful school work, but at the point that i have no classes to focus on i have a suspicion that everything that has sucked lately is going to suck that much more. there will be several weeks of vibrant technicolor suckage before summer classes start.

the upside: i'll have time to sleep. lots.

*ok, so perhaps i'm not technically locked in.
**there are windows with pretty views, so it's not quite as bleak as i make it sound.

musings that admittedly will not help my good karma deficit.

2006-04-28T18:43:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-04-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

i'm moving out next tuesday.

five days. i can make it.

conversation with my sister, the queen of avoidance.

2006-04-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-04-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

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.

fun with iphoto.

2006-03-30T21:32:00.000-08:00

thou shalt not blog while hungry.

2006-03-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

i've been sitting in a coffee shop for the past three hours working on writing paper #1 of, like, 83 that are due in the next four weeks, and i'm getting kind of hungry (ok, really, i'm starving). i had breakfast here, i'm about to have lunch here, and i'm hoping like hell i won't be here long enough to also eat dinner. so while i'm sitting here starving this cute, thin woman in coordinated clothing came in for lunch and i'm watching her eat a (v. small) salad and drink a latte, and i can't help but wonder how people get away with only eating salad for a meal. i mean, how does crunchy water constitute nutrition? how does your stomach not retaliate by eating itself after it realizes that you tricked it by feeding it rabbit food? mine totally doesn't fall for that.

i get hungry about 15 minutes after eating (only) salad. of course, i get hungry every fifteen minutes anyway so maybe it's just me, but i can't help but think that salad woman is probably able to coordinate her outfits--a skill i'm seriously lacking--precisely because of the salad eating. i think i would magically dress better if i ate more salads, only i know that thought is completely illogical and must be a symptom of the ravenous hunger.

oh, wait. salad woman is now eating chocolate cookies. heh.

for the love of my pretty new mac.

2006-03-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

i've been so overjoyed with my new mac(book pro) and all its nifty features that i haven't had time to blog. also, i'm drowning in school. not really, but almost. i will be. soon.

unlike susan, my mac love does not manifest itself in monitor licking, though i totally understand how it could get to that point. if i find myself licking any part of my laptop i'll be sure to take pictures.

and once the drowning stops i'll have more to say. like, what made me think going back to school would be a good idea? actually, i'm already saying that but by the end of the semester i'll really mean it.

the heather and jon coffee shop get together that probably took a couple years off my life due to nervousness alone

2006-03-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

even though it was worth it just to bask in the dooceness.

so i saw them, but just to get this out of the way: i didn't meet them because last week when i said i felt like i was going to throw up if i was in the same room with dooce? that feeling only got worse the closer i got--and i mean that in terms of city blocks, not in terms of feet or inches once i was in the coffee shop, though that was pretty bad too. so there was a line to get coffee, and there was a line to meet heather and jon (and george! george was there! george looked at me!). i stood in the heather and jon line for a bit before realizing that i didn't have my camera, anything to write on, and i was still on the verge of throwing up. despite amy's very practical take.your.camera. advice, i forgot. i always forget.

upon realizing just how unprepared i was to have a conversation with anyone about anything, i switched to the coffee ordering line instead. i figured, at the very least, it would buy me some time during which i could stand two feet away from heather and act like i wasn't staring (i wasn't, not then) and maybe she would look at me, which obviously would be the next best thing to actually talking to her. though really, i'm not sure my stomach could have handled that. as it was i was scoping out exits in case i needed to make a run for it.

i did get to sit and watch heather and jon talk to people while my drink was being made. the two things i noticed about them were 1. they're really attractive and 2. they're super nice. they were having seriously long and involved conversations with people about i don't know what, when most people in their situation would not have been that personable. also, heather's southern accent isn't nearly as bad as she claims it is. and she was wearing really cool shoes. did i mention the prettiness? i hung out long enough to be blinded by it and to get my drink, and then i quit staring and left.

so, to you people who are disappointed that i didn't get any pictures: me, too! and that i didn't talk to either of them: i know! but i'm happy i saw them. that was good enough.

this could work.

2006-03-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

last week i wrote a paper about poverty for my social policy class. really, poverty--and its good friend, welfare--is the only subject i'm allowed to read or think or talk or write about anymore. in response to all the poverty talk, someone in one of my classes pointed out that we get it and the faculty are preaching to the choir. he had a point. it's too bad that all this education is wasted on people who understand these issues. if my instructors really want to be useful, they should go teach a class in washington. but that wasn't my point.

yesterday i got my paper back (with a much higher grade than i expected, yay me). in part of my paper i talked about how social programs obviously need more funding, but i don't see any good solution to that because the money has to come from somewhere and no one is willing to reallocate funds for any greater social good. obviously. because if we truly cared about fixing social problems we would have done it by now.

i thought i was being pessimistic, but my professor totally one-upped me. in the margin of my paper he wrote this suggestion for raising money: "tax on sales of crack and meth?"

priorities, or not.

2006-03-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

i feel bad that i haven't had much to say lately (here or in real life, assuming this real life that i hear of actually exists). i've been busy with classes, and when not with classes then with sleeping, and then eating. those are my priorities these days. actually, eating is ahead of sleeping. peeing is somewhere in the middle. oh, and sometimes tv watching. also, hanging out with other students and talking about how and why grad school makes us want to cry. it's enlightening. sometimes we all cry together.

this is why i'm such an awesome student--i have priorities that involve peeing--and why my blog has become so uninteresting. you'd think that if i'm neglecting everyone (i totally am), i could at least make up for it with a good story. but no. if my bladder were more accomodating and less insistent about the peeing thing, i'd probably have more time to communicate with people. just a thought.

meanwhile, beagle dog reeks of beagle-ness. i really wish he could take care of that problem himself because the thing where he rubs his dog ass on my couch is so uncool.

ETA: dooce will be here on monday for SXSW, and she's planned an informal meeting at a coffee shop to meet people! with jon! she is so going to be mobbed! the thought of seeing her makes me want to throw up, in a good way, but still. once i get over the wanting to throw up part, i'm so there.

i only say the E word when i need a really good laugh.

2006-03-04T18:35:00.000-08:00

today alvin and i were driving around running errands, and for about the fifth time we got stuck in a parking lot full of many, many slow people who couldn't figure out that the secret to making their cars move was to press the gas pedal. alvin normally has way more patience than i do but today it was too much even for him. he then proceeded to mock the slow people's inability to just fucking move already in a high-pitched nasally voice that made me laugh. this means that alvin was being extra fun and, naturally, was about to pay for it.

once we got out of parking lot traffic and into street traffic he cranked up the radio in what was meant to be a show of defiance but was more like payback from the karma gods. i was surprised he turned up the volume at all since green day was on and they're so overplayed lately that he refuses to listen to any of their music. unfortunately for him the song was brain stew, and the next lyrics to come blaring out of the speakers were: my eyes feel like they're gonna bleed.

most people who know alvin know that he has a serious problem with any mention of the word eye, and even any reference made to eyes will immediately cause his to turn red and water profusely. it took me a second to realize what was about to happen and when i looked over at him tears were streaming down his face. at least he saw the humor in the situation, so when i laughed so hard that i cried he sort of understood. sort of. of course, my watering eyes just made his cry more.

this was the second time this week that his totally unsympathetic sympathetic eye response has caught him off guard. on thursday night we went to a social gathering with a bunch of people i go to school with, and after a few margaritas the conversation turned to how to make liquid shoot out your nose, followed by someone confessing that they blow air out their eyes when they laugh too hard. i was really amused by that, but alvin's eyes? not so much.

oscar porn & eye candy.

2006-03-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

this morning on the today show--or good morning america, i'm not sure--there was much anticipation about the academy awards. so much, in fact, that they devoted a good deal of live coverage to preparations at the kodak theatre, including showing the place settings (8,000 pieces of china were made for the event), demonstrating how the lighting works, and talking to wolfgang puck about the nasty yellow liquid stuff he was making that was maybe soup or custard or, more likely, liquid gold being prepared for the amusement of the beautiful, rich people dining on new china under the special lighting.

i watched for about 10 minutes until the coffee started working and i realized i was being subjected to oscar porn and then i thought, if we could reallocate the money being spent on entertaining hollywood people to, say, fund public education or feed hungry people or even just pay off my student loans, it would be much better spent.

but. despite the fact that i want to boycott the oscars on a matter of principle, i'll probably watch anyway because jon stewart is hosting and the man makes me drool. ellen did a mock award segment with him on her show this morning and the two of them were hilarious together. they have great chemistry, and at one point they abanonded what is probably my very favorite social norm--the idea of personal space--and sat kind of on top of each other with their faces about one inch apart. it was weird because, personally, if i were that close to jon i would consider it an opportunity to forget that i'm married*. i wonder if ellen considered forgetting she's gay? i say that only because this is jon stewart we're talking about, and later on she definitely gave him this oh my god i love you look after he said something funny. i think it's probably just the look you give jon stewart when you're in his presence, but still. there should be more ellen & jon comedy and i wanna sit in his lap.

*the forgetting i'm married thing only applies to jon stewart, and maybe to ellen because the woman can dance.

being hot and frustrated isn't nearly as much fun as being hot and bothered.

2006-02-28T18:15:00.000-08:00

a few minutes ago i was working on writing email #15 or so today to the people i'm working on a group project with. we're trying to set up a meeting time and it's just not working. i really like my group but we're not making any progress in the deciding on a topic for our project that's due in eight weeks department. currently i'm a wee bit frustrated about the lack of progress being made concerning setting up a meeting. also, the emailing is taking up precious time i should spend writing a paper but would rather spend eating chocolate or sleeping. no matter, i don't have time for any of those things right now.

alvin was sitting next to me on the couch while i was typing this email and it was becoming obvious that i was annoyed because i was threatening to give up and was perhaps banging on the keyboard a bit more than necessary. he eventually asked if i was frustrated and when i asked if it was that obvious he said: yeah, i can feel the heat radiating off your skin.

oh.

i'm still frustrated and radiating heat, but i've been relegated to the other end of the couch so that i can wallow in my hot frustration alone.

cr@ck is wh@ck.

2006-02-23T19:04:00.000-08:00

tonight i was zoned out watching "i love the 80s strikes back" on vh1 and i wondered how my life (and tv) had been reduced to such lameness. this wasn't even a best of the 80s show or a where are they now? kind of program. it was all about the crap the 80s produced--and crack is the only worst example i can remember, which is sad considering it was only 30 minutes ago and i know they showed music videos horrendous enough to rival the awfulness of crack cocaine. i think forgetting that particular decade is probably for the best, which makes me wonder why vh1 keeps insisting on reliving it and i keep insisting on watching.

i was resigned to having a completely lame evening until they started dissing inspector gadget and then i was all, oh no you didn't. it was only then that the cheesy neon graphics started to annoy me. i wish i could say that i turned off the tv and did something more interesting, something that actually required some thought, but no. but that was a defining moment if only because it made me realize that i was too freaking tired to change the channel.

that's the whole point of this post, really. to complain about the exhaustion--what better reason to update my blog than to complain? exactly!--and the pms that has caused me to eat so many pounds of chocolate this week that i've already lost count. i thought about it, and if i go to bed now i'll invariably wake up at 11 and not be able to get back to sleep until way after midnight. that's mostly how i got to be this tired in the first place. well, that and alvin tossing and turning and stealing the blankets and waking me up in the middle of the night to answer a question i asked two days ago. it makes for unpeaceful sleep.