Not Tonight


This is definitely a great idea, she congratulated herself. What could be more practical than getting totally hammered by oneself the evening before boarding an extremely long flight to the other side of the world? Why, nothing at all!

It’s too unbearable to leave any food or drink in the house that her sister in law might find and eat, so in the course of the past three days she has devoured all the cookies, frozen pizzas, and snacky foods in the house, out of spite. The bowl of fruit and the six remaining carrots, she knows, are safe and will be moldy when she comes back. The bag of rice and the frozen peas sleep soundly in their bags knowing they are out of danger for the next three weeks.

It has been a patience-trying evening, she thinks, filling her wine glass for the third time with cheap shiraz that will guarantee a ridiculous clown-version of Red Wine Mouth for the long-haul flight tomorrow. Oh, how embarrassing that will be for her, to be seated for more than 12 hours next to an interesting person born in the same decade as she is, and to be hyper-aware of this person’s eyes traveling always down from hers to assess the damage done the night before.

She will feel compelled to offer something in the way of explanation, or apology, when she notices this happening more than once. “I’m a vampire?” she will say awkwardly, feeling slighted and totally misunderstood. That will end the conversation with alacrity.

All of the mothers have called tonight. All of them have called and gotten weepy on the phone with her, lamenting the distance, the insurmountable distance of this journey. She rolls her eyes as they weep and wail, wondering how a person who only calls once every three weeks, on Sundays when she is not too engrossed in Lifetime movies, can claim this type of ownership over her. This mother has been behaving in such a stupid way since her birthday a few days ago.

This time, the Tale of Her Birth was expanded to include graphic details about how much suffering the Mother had to endure before the doctor (who had left to attend a holiday party in the midst of this) granted her a c-section. Odd that these details had not been introduced in the preceding 25 renditions of the story, but whatever. It surprises no one to learn that this family’s history is not…exactly…what it was previously thought to be.

This is the side of the family that routinely finds itself contacted by long-lost cousins given up for adoption in the 1970s. This is the side of the family that is so world-renowned for its absurdity that people in her graduate program, people who are considered by the rest of the department to be incredibly good-looking (but who just seem arrogant and obvious to her, personally) are prone to confronting her in the small room behind the mailboxes, to say, “did I ever tell you that my parents know your uncle?”

Further conversation on this matter makes it clear that yes, he is aware that her uncle is dead; yes, he is aware that her uncle had a secret second family that he hid until on his deathbed; and yes, he is aware that her uncle was bullied into giving up a child while in high school, just like all of her mother’s relations. She sighs inwardly and smiles at him, shaking her head with feigned amusement at her totally fucked-up genetic blueprint. How in the samhell does this chucklehead know these things about her? She has never spoken to him before.

This genetic cesspool will be the literal death of her, she laughs bitterly into her wineglass. Stupid, stupid, stupid. What right did these idiots have to produce so many doomed children? Fuck.

This evening witnessed a great deal of Being Talked At by her husband’s family members. Hence the bottle of wine. Exhausting, she thinks. It’s fucking exhausting to listen to that unparsable stream of yammering. Have a good time in NZ, sweetie. Oh and while I have you did you get the check from grandma? Because she always thinks you won’t get the check. [yes, the check endorsed to an imaginary name? Thanks much] The kids at school. Retards. How awful, the parents of these retards, wanting their children to sing songs instead of learning to read “help wanted” signs. Now THAT is a life skill they will need in the future. She groans inwardly and spaces out her disinterested “uh-huhs” to mask the fact that she’s taping the catsitting schedule onto the fridge, she’s rolling her eyes to her friend in the living room, she’s eyeing the bottle of wine on the counter and daydreaming about cracking it open by herself with the tivo in the background while she plows through the last remaining academic obstacles to her departure.

What We Need Is A Persuasion, What You Give Is A Retaliation

The silence is abruptly shattered by a question so complete in its thoughtlessness that she knows the Finer Things Club meetings are over before they have even begun: What do you think are the similarities and differences between classic fiction and modern fiction?

Modern fiction, she reflects, in this case means books about stupid shit. She looks at her toenail polish. Pretends to cough. Waits until Bea has opened her mouth to respond and then opens and closes her own mouth, obviously, as though she had been about to say something but then had paused to avoid interrupting.

Really? she thinks to herself, while her friends begin a heated discussion of a paper Kay wrote on Bea’s book in high school English class. About symbolism. Of course.

She vomits quietly in her own mouth and chases it with a swig of cold tea, the last bite of guacamole, and half a scone.

White dresses worn by the characters in Bea’s book represent virginity and purity. Duh. That book sounds promising. Not the symbolism, but the story itself. None of them can pronounce the title but it sounds promising. Kay’s book sounds like it would make her stab people. Two friends and their lives. Their comical foibles. Their life trajectories, their multiple husbands, their children and their siblings and their involvement in meaningful careers and also drug addictions and emotional affairs. Really? Sigh.

She picks up this book and sees the Redbook endorsement on the back cover. Drops it like it bit her. Stirs her tea and half-listens to the ongoing soliloquy about how cultured and knowledgeable Kay intends to become, about everything. This is not what it was supposed to be like, this club. This may have been a total waste of guacamole, she thinks.

*****

She is going to be the best wing-person ever, she’s decided. This kills several noble birds with one ignoble stone: She gets to flirt with boys while her husband is on another continent, but it’s to negotiate potential suitors for someone else to go home with. It’s flirting with a higher purpose.

A means to several peoples’ ends.

She mentally high-fives herself after making that joke in her head. She’s not sure these friends would get it, or laugh if they did get it, so she keeps it to herself. What a waste of her best talents, to keep these stupid jokes to herself. She briefly feels lonely and then shoves it out of mind again.

There’s practically nowhere to get a drink at 11pm in this town, so the new wine bar that serves until 11:30 is kind of a big deal. Sitting at a table with her back to the wall, she scans the bar for dark-haired men who are not thinner than she is. There are only two reasonable approximations. Both look like they might be chowderheaded clowns. But one must start somewhere, mustn’t one?

Don’t look now, she starts.

Her friends both whirl around to look, right now, all over the place. Thanks to this unspoken invitation for All Males to Please Look Over Here, indiscriminate eyeballing ensues. Their cover is blown. Ah well. She will be the best wing-person ever, eventually.

This Is My Way Of Saying Goodbye

Oy, this blog is boring! I don't know how you people stand it. I think I am going to change it up a bit. The format, I mean.

I went to Idaho (sadly, there is no photographic evidence of this) and spent a few days with a bunch of people who intellectually bested me and could drink me under the table(s). Idaho is fantastic. It's very pretty and Jenny and Mike are there, which makes it possibly the second best place in the universe.

I had a blast with them, and their excellent writer friends. Oh, and artists who use their real first name but make it into an exclamation for the sake of artsyness. You know, like changing "Teresita" to "Teresita!" and calling that a stage name or pseudonym or whatever art people say. I got bitten by a cannibal hamster (he'd eaten his sister hamster?!), learned speed Scrabble, ate living raw sweet potato pie, successfully (with Jenny) cooked a holiday meal (!), met everyone I've heard of who lives there and influences Jenny and Mike's lives, made up some words, met several more people who are as obsessed with Twin Peaks as Mike is, became embroiled in a debate about "rich people" and certain classic psychology experiments, handily won said debate, drank, drank, drank, then was accused by one of these Writer folk who clearly has a raging boner for my sister, and by extension probably anyone with our last name, of wishing I were married to him rather than my husband. Ahh yes, practically a lifetime worth of fun in a few short days.

I finished reading Wuthering Heights, which I now recommend to everyone reading this. Fuck, that is a good book. I have two more on deck that I probably won't start until this weekend (my friends and I are starting a chapter of the Finer Things Club wherein we sit and drink tea out of precious teacups and read quietly to ourselves. B and I are really into this, and into the idea of reading classics and learning French-- I think we're going to Paris when we graduate--and then there's Krist hen, who keeps trying to force us both to read novels about lonely 30 somethings looking for Mr. Right and finding themselves instead through a series of whimsy-laden happenings).

So the new format I'm going to try is in honor of being around such fantastic writers and intelligences when I was in Idaho. It's intense, you guys. It made me feel very much like my discipline has successfully groomed all the creativity and joie de vivre out of me. So I'm glad I've started reading for pleasure fun the sake of my own interestingness again. I'll get it back. I used to be interesting, I'm pretty sure.

I'm going to stop writing you these insipid little blogs, and instead try to write you insipid little short stories. This is going to be painful for you guys to read, so as they say on flights landing in Seattle when a snowstorm is coming in, "Belts. NOW. SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW."

Why Should I Be Sad?

Fuck. It is really challenging to be as stupid as I have been, and to be this stupid for an extended period of time, say for a whole weekend, or perhaps two entire weeks, or however long it had been since you shot your damned self in the foot without noticing you had done.

There are exactly two applications that I need to be able to use right now that do not involve office. These are a stats program and a video editing program. Neither of these will open on my stupid, stupid computer. It hurts to think about how stupid I am, telling this story. Why won't these programs open? Well, that is what I spent two whole weeks ignoring/not really dealing with/working around in computer labs.

These things don't work with Leopard. And I installed Leopard right before JD left. Apparently, I had not opened either of these apps since then, which I find totally hard to believe, but whatever.

So some heavy-duty internet research and, like, eleven panic attacks later (this is how I spent my weekend and all day Friday), I deduce that my stats thing won't work, and the next two versions of it won't either (there's no point in running out to buy another version). And there's a brand new version that just came out that MIGHT work, but the grad pack isn't available for mac until dec/jan and the full version is many hundreds of $. Not an option. Also not an option: not having the stats program on my laptop. Fuck. I'm traveling a lot in the next couple months; I cannot be in NZ for a month without a stats program. FUCK!

Also bad is this whole video editing dilemma. I have to make movies to show kids for the Big D. I need to have these clips ready to go NOW, but JD has done this for me in the past and I wasn't sure which programs he used to edit them other than stupid, stupid iMovie. So I bought iLife '08 yesterday and that fixed my other problems with iPhoto and iDvd refusing to open, but since I have an old powerbook it won't let me install iMovie at all (and I knew this before I bought it, the guy at the store was helpful). I also bought an external HD.

And this is the week that JD is in Australia for some random other conference, and I hadn't talked to him since Monday last week (until this morning), so that was adding to my Total Meltdown. I just needed to know which programs he'd used, and what video exporting settings, and blah and blah.

So this morning he helps a bit and then I go trolling for more internet help. And I think I found the answers, and it all I'm sure is basic mac stuff to mac people, but this is Very Advanced for me and I am kind of feeling like a badass:

JD's old laptop, that we almost gave to his sister but thank fucking god we did not, does not have leopard on it. I use the external HD to put my defunct stats program and EVERY conceivable dataset onto his old laptop. It works, barely, but passably, on his old computer.

I get all fancy pantsy with the external HD and partition it into chunks so that I can clone JD's old laptop in its entirety onto the external drive. I can also clone my laptop in entirety. I also have a ton of room leftover for time machine to do backups in a third volume.

This way, assuming this all works, I can use the external drive to boot up ANY mac I encounter with my OR JD's (old) hard drive. See where I'm going? Once I'm done cloning these sheep I can reboot my own laptop AS JD's old laptop, with the stats program on it. Fuck, that is brilliant.

I am going to punch someone if it doesn't work. I have a meeting tomorrow morning that I MUST have resolved all of this before attending. I doubt I will be sleeping this evening. This whole fucking weekend has been trouble-shooting and pulling my hair out when I am not computer-savvy enough to help my self.

FUCK.

Wonder If He Knows He's On My Radar

This might be the best story you'll ever read on this blog.

I went to the gyno-chiatrist the other day. This, irritatingly, was a follow up visit to having gone a couple months ago, because Dr. Ladyparts thought I was either (a) ovulating stupid out of one side of my bits only or (b) about to die a terrible, gruesome early death from god-knows-what, but probably metastasized cancer (turns out I'm fine- yay wacky ovaries).

So I'm sitting in the cold, clinical room, on the examining table. I've draped my paper "skirt" about my lower half in the most fashionable way I can manage and I am swinging my feet and feeling sorry for myself. I look around the walls, trying not to make eye contact with the cervical torture implements laid out on a little metal tray near my feet.

I notice a painting hanging on the wall in front of me, and I am surprised by it. The rest of the room is totally devoid of personality, and I realize that the painting is there for women who have draped their paper "skirts" about their lower halves as best they can and are waiting, feeling sorry for themselves, to look at. It's right at eye level with the examining table.

The painting is of a little man in a boat.

I Won't Count The Scars Again

Living alone is taking some...adjustment. For example, I am learning how to cook, or at least how to heat food to a reasonable temperature before eating it. Although it's so much easier to just eat raw carrots and pistachios than worry about "putting things in a pan" and "combining ingredients" or "pressing tofu"

Anyway.

I'm not so great in the kitchen. Except in the sense that I can provide you all with descriptions of my ridiculousness. This morning I was attempting oatmeal. In my underpants, right? Because that's how we single living-alone gals roll. and I went to shake the rice milk container, and, like a bad porn, as I shake it the milk sprays out all over me and my face and the cats and the counter. Excellent.

I had two different kinds of leftover pizza in my fridge this weekend. Yes, awesome. Now, however, I have to subsist on whatever's in the pantry until I can get to the actual bank, because my debit card stopped working and they have yet to send me a replacement card. That is a real inconvenience of a bitch, you guys. It's weird to think how often you use a debit card (if you're me) and because the ATM won't even read it, I'm totally broke until the real physical bank opens. That's lame.

I also spent about three hours today confused as to whether it was daylight savings or I had lost my fucking mind. Tivo and computer reset the clocks, but my cell phone hadn't. The checkout guy at trader joe's finally settled it for me: I'm fucking retarded.

Literally everyone I know here is out of town this weekend, which is making me feel crazy and isolated. But I think I'm ok in general. JD started work today (holla!) and he's updating his Kiwi blog with pictures and stuff. Go check it out. He's awesome. Auckland looks rad and I can't wait to go visit, especially now that he didn't die on the flight over (I was tracking his plane and I had a bad moment when I refreshed the tracker and it just said, "cancelled" when he was about halfway there. Cancelled? Really? Cancelled in the middle of the pacific ocean? WTF). Oh and apparently 12 hours isn't that bad when the airline is all nice and good at these kind of flights. So now I'm just excited.

The webcam thing is awesome. Oh what else. I'm enjoying how gawdawful the new Britney album is. My cats don't like classical music. Jyushin is clearly depressed because he only loves JD, and he is heartbroken by this. Mingus is my baby (actually, Mingus is intently watching the Broncos game right now, that's precious) so he could give two shits that JDs not here. Just kidding babes.

My coffeemaker has developed a sense of self, volition, and a moral imperative such that it now decides when I have had enough coffee and refuses to brew more. This is cute for about ten seconds as I marvel to myself how intelligent machines are becoming, but then it sends me into a caffeine-withdrawal-fueled rage and I shake the daylights out of that bitch. Sometimes this tactic works, sometimes it does not. I think I need a new coffeemaker, but again, no debit card = no trips to target.

Ok this is boring even for me so you guys must be dying. I'll try to be interesting next time.

Break Me Off A Piece of That Applesauce

This week kind of sucked. Next week's not looking so hot either. Today's JD's last day at his job. That alone is pretty terrifying. I'm not really sure how I'm going to feel over the next week (he leaves Thursday), but I bet it's going to be: bad.

The fire(s) are really close but we're not being evacuated or anything. Air quality sucks balls and there's ash on everything. It kind of looks like what I think living on Mars would look like. For a week, though. It's very hard to breathe if you're outside for more than a few minutes. I had to give a 3 hour lecture in my class tuesday night on 5 hours' notice the other day. ouch. Then I had to present my dissertayshun shit the next morning in my lab. And I had been up all night cramping thanks to my wondrous femininity. Then I had to come home and drink two bottles of laxative and spend the night in the bathroom. Then I had to go to the dr yesterday to have a really invasive test wherein they roofie you and run a tube all the way up your colon. Sometimes I think my life is like a fairy tale.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to grade papers and continue gnashing my teeth with anxiety.

Marmalade Fires

Dear Raedy,

Please click HERE.

Love,
Teresita

You're All I Need

Ok. My dealing-with-new-zealand webcam arrived this past week. So JD and I practiced talking to each other by sitting in the living room skypeing each other and making stupid faces into the cameras. Awesome, right? Well Jenny and I just realized that we can also webcam talk, because her fancier computer has a built-in camera (like JD's). OH MY GOSH SO MUCH FUN.

Who else has a mac with a built-in isight, or a webcam more generally? You have got to get a Skype account (free!) and start having super fun video chats with me. It is so awesome.

Also, the new Radiohead is fucking great. I haven't liked one of their albums this much since Ok Computer. So this is a big deal for me. Also a big deal that I only paid three pounds fifty for it! Yes! That makes it so much more valuable.

Thanks for the skirt feedback. I always hiked it up too, but felt the same vague shame that Jenny described. Thanks a lot, mom. I'm always worried that I'll be in a stall and some other women will walk past and see through the cracks in the door that I've gathered it into a ladylike fistful while I piss all over the toilet seat, and they'll openly mock me. Shut up, I've violated plenty of women-schemas in the past, and been openly mocked each time. It's a valid fear. But knowing that at least some others hike theirs up is good news.

Maybe You Would've Been Something I'd Be Good At

Dear Ladies,

I have a serious question. When you wear a skirt, and you have to pee, do you hike the skirt up or unfasten it like pants and yank it down?

Should I have learned this in my childhood? Because I didn't. Thank,

Teresita.

I Re-Invite You All To Enjoy This Aperient Catharsis Anonymously

Welp, I talked to Raedy last night and she basically reinvigorated my love of the Remorseless Blog II: The Secret of The Ooze (see Temperance link ------>) by reminding me of a funny post. So I went back and read all the archives today and was snorting coffee out my tear ducts after a couple of minutes of laughing until my lungs shut off.

I hereby make an impassioned plea for a more routine use of this excellent venue for hilarious contributions. May I remind you that, for a time, haiku was the format du jour on the RBII:TSOTO? There have also been short and longer essays, creative nonfiction pieces, song lyric suggestions, selections from softcore porn writing, etc. In short, there's something for everyone and all forms of writing are welcomed.

If you've never used it before, you simply must give it a go. Just log in to blogger as "remorselessblog@gmail.com" and use the password "remorseless."

Happy Bitching!

I thought about this today. I think I'm going to take a slightly different tack than earlier. I already know the right answers to both the 'hypothetical' questions I asked of you guys, and the answers are sad but not surprising.

I'm a big girl, I got this.

Thanks anyway, Raedy, for the input. And my bad, to the rest of you. I don't want this to be that kind of outlet for me.

These Eyes Are Berries

Now That It's Raining More Than Ever

Hullo, lovies!

I mentioned JD is very popular. Right? Well, after a month of debating and considering various exciting opportunities, etcetera, a decision has been reached:

JD is going to New Zealand for six months as a consultant. He'll be there November through April and they're putting him up in a furnished apartment and paying him a shitload of money. They're flying me out in December (as his friend put it: "they're paying for a conjugal? That's pretty pimp.") and I'll probably go out another time in March over my spring break. He'll probably go to another conference in Australia in February, and he and I have talked about visiting parts of Fiji, or the Cook Islands, or Easter Island (though that one's a little far-fetched, it's fucking far away from everything).

Decision came down to: 1) Catapult career into high gear in one fell swoop or 2) continue plodding along doing essentially "more of the same" until wife graduates in a few years, then begin trying to move up a peg or two career-wise.

This seems like the most excellent choice, objectively. However, this means all kinds of unpleasant bullshit for us personally. I have to learn how to cook. He has to buy power converters so he can take his PSP. You know, super-huge consequences.

It is fucking incredible that he's been given this opportunity, and fuck if I'm going to let temporary discomfort stop him from doing it. Plus, HELLO, free vacation to New Zealand. Also, I have to advance soon and this lets me be totally up my own ass about that since I don't have to pander to loved ones. har.

So we've got a couple months to arrange these ducks into a pleasing, orderly row. Visitors more welcome than ever now, both here and to NZ. Hope you guys love being emotionally supportive, because I will probably be a huge whiny baby about everything all the time.

Yaaarp. Fuck, it's awesome.

Once, Once I Knew How To Look For You

1. Fuck. Fuck if there is not a shitload of crap happening.

2. I'm constantly reading career-related shit now. Things that sound vaguely like concessions about choosing "alternative" careers from what I'm being groomed to do. To me, these things don't sound like concessions at all. I continually waffle on this topic-- what shall I do with myself?-- yet when we break it down into component pieces, I am not cut out for traditional career choices. I like JD. I like free time. I don't think the intrinsic joy of doing independent research offsets the costs of being so far up my own career's ass for such an extended amount of time still to come. And really, judging from the faculty I know who have recently been tenured, it doesn't let up once you cross that bridge. It's a fat fucking fiction that it's only this heavy for another 8 years (which sounds pretty gruesome anyway). I'm leaning. I'm leaning very decisively this time because I took a look around and it's been 4 years and it's time to get the fuck out of here. It will still take forever and there's a ton of work to do, but my fear and trembling about the next chunk of life has been replaced with steely resolve. Ish.

3. Some of this decisiveness is being prompted by JD's career trajectory. Which has recently become just that, a trajectory. It's shocking to both of us how quickly this happened, but in hindsight I am not totally surprised that he's become a rising star in his field, I think everyone who's ever met him has a strong reaction to him. Right now things are in this somewhat awful state of flux-- he has several offers on the table that we are discussing, the most heart-stopping being the idea that he's already at a point in his career at which he could viably choose to freelance himself out as a temporary consultant/contractor, traveling around the globe for chunks of time. This is totally enthralling, tinged both with selfish little whines like, "but then i would have to learn how to cook" and selfish little secret thoughts like, "oh god I could be so productive if he would go live on another continent for a few months."

Adding to the ambiguity of a career cobbled together with consulting opportunities is the abject terror I feel now that I am in my 5th year and even teaching funding isn't always guaranteed. At any moment (before each quarter, anyway), I can be informed that there isn't work for me. But when you work the uni pays your tuition/fees for you. Which are exhorbitant for people who aren't receiving a paycheck. And you have to pay your tuition/fees and be enrolled full time in order to live on campus. See how this snowballs? So I am contractually forbidden to find outside employment, yet I am no longer guaranteed anything from the school. And I am following a totally average time-to-degree course like everyone else in my program, and I am thus fighting bile about how screwed we will/would be if they yanked my funding and in-campus housing.

There are creative solutions, of course. I have friends, I can sleep on couches, especially if my husbie is traipsing around in the south pacific. But I don't want to deal with all this added uncertainty and shittiness now. Grad school bureaucracy is total bullshit. And some days I feel spiteful enough to think, secretly, "Oh yeah? No teaching funding? No on-campus apartment? Well, suck on this, bitches: ABD! That's right! I fucking said it."

What kind of manky fucking system trains people up this well and refuses to make it reasonable to finish a thesis? Honestly.

Anyway. I'm getting fed up, and that irritation is incredibly motivating, and I suppose that's what is important. I'm getting to a good, zen place from which I can crank out a proposal and finish the shit I'm working on, and assume that I'm not destined for a top-tier anything, and be totally content with my 85% effort comfort zone. Even my excellent advice-er has lately expressed intense misgivings about the "crapshoot" that is the trad'l job market. I love her for that. I love the profs who candidly say, "I got a job with 3 publications. you can't do that anymore. you guys are totally fucked." and no, I don't even have three publications. And I'm not holding my breath to have three before I leave here, either.

BOO HISS.

Something's Going to Steal Your Carbon

My meeting went really well. Like, now I am questioning my own sanity because of it well. Did I hallucinate all the shitty, unprofessional rage that I had detected in the last few weeks of gritted-teeth emails and second-hand accounts of how much shit was being talked about me?

Hmmm. No.

Ok, on one hand I am hugely relieved that things are back on track and the project has been salvaged and, apparently, no relationships have been destroyed and some little nuggets of praise and/or understanding were thrown my way ("oh, this IS complicated!" and "I had NO idea this was so complex, no wonder it has been progressing this way") that are kind of making it all better.

On the other hand I am frustrated at the extremely huge expenditure of energy this has demanded, from venting/bitching/kvetching about it to literally everyone I have ever met to the mountains of mental and material preparation I accumulated this weekend, to the psykologikul and biological stress response enactment. All for naught...or at least, all for naught much. haaaaaa.

In other news, JD and I ruined some poor woman's day yesterday at the deli counter of a grocery:

Deli guy (to me, because i am clearly next in line): Hi, what can I get you?
Me: Hi! We just need 2lbs. of this vegan chicken salad, plea--
Lady: EXCUSE ME. I was next. EXCUSE ME? I was waiting!
*a lady has magically appeared, behind us, while I began ordering*
JD: Fine, then. Go ahead.
Lady: Well it's just that I was next. I was waiting and it's MY turn and I
Me: FINE GO AHEAD, WE DIDN'T SEE YOU IT IS FINE JUST GO AHEAD.
Lady: I was waiting over on the other side of the deli counter and I asked them to get someone to help me, so it's MY TUR--
JD: YOU WIN. YOU WIN, WE GET IT, YOU WERE HERE FIRST AND IT IS YOUR TURN
Deli guy (to Lady, after shooting us apologetic look and rolling his eyes): Ok, sure, what can I get you, then?
Lady: Hmmmmmm. Hmmmm. I think I want a sample. Yes.
Me (agog): ---
JD (mouth hanging open in utter disbelief): ----!
Lady: What tofu do you have today?
*there are, literally, twenty dishes with tofu available at this deli*
Deli guy: Uhh, well, this (pointing) and this and this are made with tofu, and this, and this....lots of things, anything that says tofu on the sign will have it in there.
Me (not even bothering to hide my bitchface now, hissing): Is she serious?!?
JD (also hissing): She wants a SAMPLE?!
Lady: ooh, ooh. I want a sample of this BBQ tofu, please. Yes, I want a sample of that.
Deli guy: Here you go. *turns back to us and opens his mouth*
Lady: HMMMMMMMMM.
Me (opening and closing mouth): Harrumph
Lady: Can I also have a sample... (looks at me as though she's just realized I'm there) OH, you can go ahead, I don't even know what I want yet.
Me (dumbfounded): Oh, thanks a lot! If you're sure that's ok? OK, it is? Ok great.
Deli guy (to me again): So what can I get you?
Me: Just 2 lbs. of this
deli guy (smiling): oh yeah, right.
Me: thanks a lot! (to JD): WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

I felt bad until Jd convinced me that if ever there's a time to put on a bitchface, it's when some crazy lady interrupts my extremely quick, half-syllable away from being completed order so that she can hee haw around asking for samples and not having any earthly idea of what she wants to order, only that she wants to be first. He also told me that after I turned my attention back to the deli guy, she smacked herself full in the forehead like a cartoon and said, "oh, I can't buy groceries today! What is wrong with me!" Which confirms my suspicions that she is a nutter. As did the deli guy's reactions to all of this. Oh and we then continued shopping and she was nowhere to be found in the store. I believe I reacted so bitchily that I scared a woman out of a grocery store.

I felt like my knee-jerking reaction might have been a touch oversensitive. A smidgen off-kilter. A tad overdone. I'll blame it on the stress of waiting for this meeting. but I'll still feel bad, because words can never fully describe the withering eyeball daggers I hurl at people when I get this way.

We Treat Mishaps Like Sinking Ships

1. I'm listening to Kid A for the first time in about three or four years. The other night JD and I heard Disarm (my favorite SP song ever) playing at a restaurant and came home and dug up Melancholie & the Infinite Sadness.

2. I've been getting into trouble with one project I'm working on. Like, major, bizarro-world trouble that only makes sense in the context of some other dimension where it is a reasonable thing to treat someone (me) like a baby who is too stupid to do the simplest possible thing involved in a project, and where it is also reasonable to send shitty emails to an entire work group lambasting my idiocy instead of asking me if indeed I have done some retarded thing that I stand accused of having done. Also, in this other dimesion, it's cool for several colleagues to talk shit about you in your absence in front of many other students, regardless of your not actually having fucked anything up the way they are assuming you have fucked it up. And, in this dimension there is no need to talk directly to me, instead communication should pass only through a well-meaning but Not Exactly Helpful person who has been working in a research capacity for, oh, exactly five weeks of his entire life now. It's also great to be in this magical dimension, because even if you are an established member of the fakultee you no longer feel the need to acknowledge or respond to anything that I say, my pleas for reason or a chance to defend myself, or attempts at appeasement. Oh! What fun to be unreasonable! What fun to toy with hapless little students and totally fuck their sense of competency.

All I can say, though, is at least this person/group is not my advice-er, and at least the worst that can happen from this disastrous series of miscommunications is that I get kicked off a project, not that I get kicked out of school or asked to leave, etc. It still makes my stomach flop over when I think about it-- I have no idea how this happened and I am acutely aware that before the dust settles, I will have to endure at least one terrible meeting in which several people will scream at me and I am already trying to imagine how I will want to react to that: so far, I am unsure whether I will scream back (probably justified, as the more I think about what has gone wrong the more I am totally confused as to what their problem is) or sob like a bitch.

Awesomely, this project concerns emoshun and how one goes about managing it. My life has recently become very "meta" all the time- I know the things one should do in order to be happy, healthy, etc. I know which means of managing emoshun lead to which unseemly outcomes. yada. Anyway, this has been stressing me out for a couple weeks as I sit here, breath baited, waiting for the other shoe to drop, cringing every time I check my email. I suppose I am lucky to have gotten this far without having any Real issues with people I work with, but this is just sad and a waste. And who knows? Maybe it will still work out. But that would require my being allowed to explain myself first-hand, which does not seem likely. I feel very frustrated and like I am getting totally. fucking. screwed here.

3. I am also finding it necessary to read books about how one should motivate oneself to write, or write a big D, or go about navigating the shark-infested waters of akademic life (even just as a student) and none of it is cheery stuff. However, one particular book is proving useful in urging me out of writer's block (or motivational block, whatever) and I am trying to establish some better work habits than I have ever seriously considered doing before. I get the feeling a lot of things people have been trying to tell me for years, that I have dismissed roundly as not being effective for me, are things that I either need to learn or I will fail at this stupid big D process. For example, people always say that you should "write everyday for two hours and don't let yourself be interrupted by anything no matter what and it has to be your sacred time to write"

which I immediately snortled at. Only two hours? But so much writing has to get done, when will that be accomplished? Turns out that attempting to write all day sometimes results in impressive amounts of it, but I can only write all day once every so often. And the rest of the time I am being useless and unproductive, worrying about how I'm not writing. So I'll try this 2 hour thing. I did it yesterday and felt better about life. I'm not counting this blogging shit toward my 2 hours, but I'm going to go start it after I post this big steamer of a life update.

4. My hubsie is in AZ at a conference, networking and making himself totally obviously invaluable to a whole corporation. I have talked to him once since he's been there (he is too busy socializing! and enjoying it! I wish I could do that) and he'd had something like a trillion job offers from various exotic locales and people more or less offering to put me in touch with people they know who might study what I study but at private corporations. people telling him how cheap houses are in pittsburgh. Etc. Good for him. When I fail spectacularly at this, we can get by on what he makes. It'll make his grandmother happy, at least.

5. So along with this new writing routine I'm trying to develop, I am finding that, when left to my own devices, I would go to the gym most afternoons, write in the morning before I do anything else, and never turn the tv on. This is considerably different from married life routine. Sometimes I wish we had two cars so I could go to the gym in the afternoon, when I either want to eat a chocolate bar or take a nap, but I can't get there if JD drives to work. Man, what a dilemma.

6. Also, everything I've been reading about the "process" of the big D has emphasized how selfish on emust be during this important time, eschewing friends and family and husbands and pets and children, to focus on this all-consuming task. Hmmmm. I am sick of thinking and hearing about the "process" and how hard it is. This whole stupid thing could not be more nebulous and fraught with unclarity, and it is my suspicion that it is kind of the point of the whole dumb thing to make you feel like shit. Perhaps this is all a test. It's definitely a big flaming hoop of stupid they want us to jump through.

Argh. Raedy? Jen? Is this your experience(s)? I am starting to hate everything. I don't want to be a bitter heartless person on the other side of this. Cog in the machine and whatnot.

There's Nothing Worth Running For

I'm going to explode.

Is it too late to want back on the party cabin bandwagon? I'm desperate for something to look forward to and to get out of here, and what I really really want is to curl up in a ball on Stacey's futon in her room in high school and know that everyone is coming over to hang out and later we will get up to some No Good.

Failing that, however, I would really like to hang out with normal people who I like and miss all the time. If you're all going to be in one place for a few days I think I need that more than anything.

EDIT: Here is an illustration of what I am nostalgic for

Stop Now Before It's Too Late

Dear Entire past week,

Fuck you. I hate you so bad.

xoxoxo

You Can Normalize! Don't It Make You Feel Alive?

We bought JD a new macbook the other day. Waaah. I know I am supposed to be loving and mature and shit, but I am violently jealous. It can perform magic and stuff that mine can't do.

Speaking of, we attended the midnight showing of the new HP5 movie earlier this week. Sweet god, I love this series. Sweet god, I want to squinch Hermione's cheeks all the time. My new theory, about book 7, is that Dumbledore himself was one of Voldemort's horcruxes. That's why Snape had to kill him. Oooooh, right? yeah I'm a genius.

Last Saturday we went to see the Decemberists with the LA philharmonic. I can now officially die any time and be totally content with the amount of living I have done. That was the best thing ever. They played the Tain, which is a 20-minute, four-part opus something akin to "freebird" that some rapscallion always cheers for at decemberists concerts, much to the delight/chagrin of the hardcore fanbase who chuckle dismissively at this idea. They, however, played it at this show, marking the first time I had heard it performed live, and they played it with a full orchestral backing. Sweet christ almighty. best. thing. ever. Also playing this show were Band of Horses and Andrew Bird. Both fucking spectacular. I made little videos of much of the decemberists' performance but haven't posted them on youtube yet or anything. if anyone's interested i might.

jenny and mike left boston this morning! Oh, adventure. I hope they have some good comp cds in the car to tide them over. Else that will be a loooooooong drive.

My officemate, who is ridiculously hard-working, the golden child of the whole department and especially our advisor, and my very patient, hand-holding grad student mentor and informal advisor for the past few years has a great job at a real university being a real professor and she is slowly moving her shit out of the office. Yesterday I moved some of my shit from a bookcase across the room to the more conveniently located, now-empty one over here, and I almost had a panic attack. I don't want to be the oldest student and I don't want to help the littler ones and I don't want everyone looking at me to see how to teach/do research/successfully land a job/be professional in any context/work hard. Ugh. I don't want to pioneer this shit for the next couple years. I want someone sitting right next to me who won't fall over laughing when I ask a really, really stupid question about something I ought to know already.

Compounding my existential waffling is a bunch of work I am finding it impossible to focus on. I am giving a guest lekshur for said officemate in the class of hers i am taing this session in a week, yet i can't write the stupid lekshur. ok, but this class is 3 hours long. i am pretty sure i need to at some point, put SOMETHING on a slide and think about what words should accompany it. Jesus. If only I could decide on a stupid career path I would be so motivated, right? Blugh.

Last night, though, JD and I were both working dilligently at 2am on talks we have to give soon, on our yuppie-pants apple laptops. That was really amusing to me. What kind of people are we to both be prepping powerpoint presentations for our careers? It just seems so fucking adult and weird. At least one of us is motivated and will end up being successful. I am talking about him, you guys. Duh.

Ok, fine. I am going to get some shit done before a meeting later with a person who is ten years older than me, a former engineer who decided he wanted his soul back and has converted to research, who is much more focused and driven than i am but i am in charge of him and that makes me feel icky. great.

What the fuckery is this? Stupid fucking feelings of inadequacy. Go away! Why is this career so fucking rife with ambiguity?! SO ANNOYING.

For Those Of You Who Still Think We're From England...We're Not. No.

Here's some photos Ashleigh took. There's more on her snapfish account (obviously, they didn't jsut come out here, take three photos of us, and leave) but I don't know if I am allowed to link to her photos. I guess she needs to update her blog to share those things with you guys.





JD and I went cd shopping at this excellent used cd store the other night. Ohhhh sweet god. We each bought like ten cds and they are fucking rad. I am thinking, a real genuine awesome comp cd is finally about to come of this. It has been SO long since I bought a cd, instead of stealing music. Now I am grown and my skool seems to be cracking down on stealing, so I will buy used music. It's way better, you guys. I put all my new music on my iPod and the gym has never been so much fun. I'm really into LCD Soundsystem right now (that's the new background song), also got the new arcade fire FINALLY, the new Andrew Bird, a mewithoutyou cd, jose gonzalez, the rosebuds, new modest mouse, blonde redhead, pelican, tomahawk, a talking heads best-of collection (USED!), a tortoise + bonnie prince billy cd, a rare black heart procession UK import I have never seen before, herbert, the battles. Ahhhhhhhhhh. It is going to be a great day for a compthology sometime soon. I like to think that if I provide you all with nothing else, I can supply you with music artfully arranged in a pleasing song order. Jenny tells me that she usually ends up liking only one or two songs on every cd I make, but she REALLY likes those, so it's cool. Hmmmm. I understand comp cd burnout, you guys. So even if I just sent you one, hit me up. This might have to be a three-parter again. Oh, summer. What do you do to me? I fucking forgot how great life is when you have excellent music following you around everywhere, too. No one can be glum when faced with this! Ahhhhhh.







So for the 4th we went goodwilling. I spent $80 and got like sixteen items of ridiculously awesome clothing. I found a twee little tote bag with a reared-up unicorn quilted onto the front of it, but decided not to buy it because, honestly, it doesn't scream, "professional." Maybe it will still be there when you come visit and we can get it next time. Goodwill is awesome. Also, to be patriotic we went to see Sicko. Ugh. I am going to reserve final judgment until the next election, but if things go south I am applying to jobs in other countries for SURE. And I am going to start encouraging my mother to move to scotland. Because if she didn't have to worry about her health insurance premiums, I think her life would be a hell of a lot easier. Mine too. Yours too. yak. Then we did laundry. That's right. Life is so glamorous and exotic at all times.

I'm Coming Up Only To Hold You Under

No Time For Proper Detail, We Are In Need Of A Listing Device:

Ashleigh and Jim were here for a week. That was fabulous.

Ash and Jim and me and JD and our friends here went out to dinner on our anniversary (the 21st) and it was fantastic. The waitress was incredible and, after discerning that we were celebrating our anniv., she brought two free bottles of champagne for the table and wouldn't stop exclaiming over how cool it was that we got married in a castle in scotland. Oh, I love the restaurant that we went to, it's Cuban and they have the best...everything. Ah, god, that was awesome. It was super nice to have friends around and go celebrate with people we love etc etc

Then my armpits had been hurting (??) mysteriously for a couple days, and I woke up with a migraine that lasted the next three days. I thought I was going to die.

Went to Hollywood, toured the Kodak Theater (we went on the actual stage where they do the oskirs), went to Grumann's Chinese Theater, watched live performance of America's Next Pop Tartlet-Skank in progress America's Next Pop Star, spent three man-free hours of bliss in Sephora with Ashleigh, went to Ripley's B'lieve it or Not museum, saw walk of fame, got harrassed for "donations" by low-rent looking Chewbacca knockoff after "character" forced way into group photo.

Drove to Pasadena, where my suggestion for an eating place turned out to be the worst idea in human history. My food had a living grub or maggot of some kind luxuriating on the spinach leaf placed atop the pasta and when I sent it back a series of escalating, progressively sassier misunderstandings with our english-as-a-second-language waitress led to our eventually leaving without eating and I don't really want to talk about it because my blood pressure is rising even now. I had to keep sending her back to her "manager" to see if they could comp all the food. Am I crazy for thinking that should have been the initial appeasement? I thought that was more or less standard practice. Instead she encouraged us to save room for lots of dessert because that would be on the house. I dug deep, you guys, and got totally fucking shitty with her. Ugh. We drove back to the oc and swung by In 'N Out burger (yes, we can eat it, they have a "veggie burger" that is just tomato and lettuce and grilled onions on a bun with ketchup and mustard and it is fucking heaven) and the only positive thing to come from that is that we didn't blow a ton of cash on an overpriced italian meal. Jeeze.

We discovered a new, super-great beach that we had never gone to before which will now be the only beach I care to hang out at (Ash and Jim spent most of a whole day there when JD and I both had to work one day)

Went to watch a taping of the late late show with craig ferguson (he's scottish). Interesting. When you show up, they basically rank-order you into categories based on your physical attractiveness (I am not kidding) and how nicely you're dressed. Duder looked us up and down and stuck us in group 1 even though we were very close to arriving late. A quick look around the waiting area revealed the method to their classification: young, reasonably attractive people who were not dressed like idiots in group 1. middle- and older-aged people, really conservative or boring-looking young people, and people who were dressed trashily in group 2. Group 3 was entirely composed of freak teenagers who were clearly (I thought) trying to dress/look as weird as possible so that if they were on tv it would be hilarious to them. Oh and I noticed that a good number of minorities were seated in group 3. This classification highly disturbed me. Until we ended up in the most amazing possible seats, in the second row on the side of the studio without any of the stupid camera equipment blocking our view of anything. Then I said a little thank-you to the baby jesus for making us reasonably attractive because it was pretty cool to be 10 feet from celebs. janeane garofolo was there. SHE IS TINY! also wolfgang puck was there to film the july 4th cooking segment, and he seems really really sweet and cute. he's also tiny. he made a flag cake that they fed us after the taping was over. It was all filmed out of order and we were basically forbidden to do anything but cheer and yell enthusiastically. The warm-up guy, a fat sad drunk man who relentlessly hit on the Sassy Southern Girl seated right in front of us, said that at no point were we allowed to do what in the comedy world is called a "step-back," where you go "oh no he didn't!" or some such. Fatty McWarmUp then joked, "this isn't Conan, you guys" to which the whole crowd reacted with a loud stepback.

anyway. it was cool, if surreal and disenchanting a little bit. Craig ferguson is fucking hilarious in person, though. Jim won a mug. JD won a Big & Rich cd. Oh yes. I think we left that in ashleigh and jim's rental car *cough*

After the taping we went to another restaurant I suggested, this one all macrobiotic so mostly vegan but with some things having fish in them, and that was actually good, thank god. I would have stroked out if anything had gone wrong with that place. Macrobiotic cake is a little disappointing, but otherwise it was fabulous.

Then we dicked around in Santa Monica, a niceish hipster shopping area. sort of. I can't describe things very well. Oh earlier that day we had gone to Venice Beach, which is where there's a boardwalk and muscle beach and people rollerblade with their dogs and sell fake watches and stuff. Yarp.

So there's only a week and some change before the 5th HP movie. I am going to pee my pants every day until the midnight showing of that movie

Also, JD and I just discovered that the Decemberists are playing the Hollywood Bowl next weekend with the LA Philharmonic in their first-ever full orchestra concert! AND AND AND Band of Horses and Andrew Bird are both playing too!!!!!! I am so excited already I can barely think straight. We got tickets yesterday, and they are really rad seats (they better be, they cost an arm and a leg) and you are allowed to bring picnic things like wine and candles and shit with you. We are sitting in a little 4-seat box with a great view. If two of you guys wanna come out we'll share our picnic and wine with you. Heeee. God, a fantastic concert with my current three favorite bands, and we get to bring wine. God BLESS IT.

When Ash & Jim were here I had this fanatical idea that we needed new pillows for our bed because JD and I constantly wake up with sore necks. We ended up going to linens 'n things and buying a new comforter and sheets and now every time I see the bed I get so happy I cry a little bit. Maybe I'll photograph that for you guys. So since then I have been on a big nesting kick. We spent an entire afternoon looking for a particular size cushion to replace the one on the bench we have in the living room that's a thousand years old. I went on a crazy three-target spree to find the perfect toilet contour rug. etc. It's strange how different this place looks with those little changes- the shower curtain we got to replace the extremely ugly one we had previously alone really classes up the place. I am kind of a princess.

Melissa, you are welcome to come visit any time at all! and you don't need to bring emergency water because we are going to donate allllllllll those cans of disaster preparedness food to either a food bank or a shelter of some kind, so it would probably be gone by the time you got here. But anytime is good. Unless I'm, like, not here or something. So maybe call first, but then anytime is fine :)

We'll Never Know Unless We Go So Let Me Show You

JD's mom and gparents came into town friday and saturday this past weekend. How lovely to catch up with family, yet how intolerably awful to have to bite one's tongue as much as I had to. It is half missing, you guys. I chewed the end off and kept having to discreetly spit bits of it into my hankie like a proper lady. Then the resulting inability to form english speech with no front palate led to vigorous nodding. Occasionally I would find some way to relate my existence to the topic of "discussion" and would interject if possible. It was usually not possible.

They only like to eat at buffets. Everything that is sold in malls or stores that are not garage sales or swap meets is "cheap junk" that they "wouldn't be caught dead in, not if someone paid" them. Which I found to be an extraordinarily strong statement! Not caught dead in it even if someone paid you? What do you care? you're dead! but the sentiment, I guess, is the key message. It's all cheap junk that's no good and people who buy it are stupid.

Young people today. They have no sense. Buying coach purses just to say they have a coach purse, when it's just cheap junk (jessica, having bought a knock off coach purse at a swap meet earlier that day, shifts uncomfortably when this is barked at her) instead of working hard and earning things like their parents. Buying $200 jeans (here I shift my butt away from her even though my jeans did not cost near $200 and i seriously doubt, in hind sight, that she would have recognized the pocket stitching and identified them as overpriced cheap junk) and credit cards. And young people and debt and family. FAMILY. Kids today and the schools. Target, since it is a french company, is evil because they don't support "our boys." (I just looked this up- target is NOT owned by a french company. Probably we are all thinking the same thing- someone took the Fronch pronunciation of "tar-zhay" a little too seriously without a second thought). I was actually warned not to bring up target because of this french anti-americanism. jessica did not receive such a warning, and since target is her favorite place on earth, mentioned it and got chewed out for essentially being unpatriotic. i did not attempt a counterargument built around wal-mart's labor practices. {Even better, I just found this: the obvious explanation, since I receive dozens of these bullshit forwards from this side of the fam every month.}

Also, college was hard mostly because the shitty professors couldn't teach their way out of a box and it didn't matter how hard you worked, they already decided your grade. and while we're on the subject, elizabeth, it's fine that you want to get the doctorate and of course you worked your butt off for it, but when it comes time to have a family you'll do the right thing, the responsible thing, and not be selfish and say you want to work too. because i don't care, a family can live on the husband's income if they're willing to live at that level, and anything else is pure selfishness. anything else is just wanting to get a bunch of stuff, and that's selfish and raising kids is more important. so it's great that you're getting that phd and you probably want to use it at some point, but the time for working is once your kids are raised and in college, then maybe you can work part time or something because you went to school all this time and worked so hard.

MAYBE I CAN WORK PART TIME WITH MY DOCTORATE ONCE MY KIDS ARE IN COLLEGE, YOU GUYS.

Kids need two parents. End of story. Two shitty parents are way better than one devoted parent who is competent. I should thank my lucky stars that I don't have a "huge horse butt" like those hispanic girls. Welfare is destroying this country because we give a free ride to all the people who don't want to work hard or get a job. People have choices, they can choose to live the average american life or they can choose to be lazy and live on the street. They can choose to have a modest, good-sized house or they can have a too-big house and drown in debt. they can dress to make themselves look like fat pigs or they can wear shirts with sleeves. they can do things wrong or they can do things just like we did. everyone has that choice. that's why so many marriages break up, because people want too much stuff and they both have to work if they want it and that makes you not know the other person.

I'm not going to retype the bits about Jewish people, or rich black people. Or, other than the "horse butt" comment, the stuff about Latinos.

Needless to say, I was totally flabbergasted by all of it. I don't even know that I fully believe that they feel strongly about these things, most of it is loving to talk so much that it all avalanches out once the pandora's box opens. It is hard for me to even imagine people living in this world, this present-day universe, who hold these opinions and hold them tightly. I could not be more fundamentally opposed to nearly everything she said.

But what I find really alarming is the whole, "good for you that you want a phd, but if you're not a total shit wife who sucks at everything you'll stay home and raise your kids while scraping by on whatever jd gets paid."

No, I didn't mention the piles of research on child care/day care/nannies, on single-parent households, on how our economy is so bad that this generation does not have the OPTION of supporting three people on a single income, etc. There is no point in mentioning these things. It is like talking to a stone wall, but more frustrating.


On a much lighter, weirder note, JD's family brought us a "present" from his aunt who lives in salt lake. What had been initially described to JD on the phone as "a 72- hour disaster kit" turned out to be two months' worth of bulk, canned/dry goods that weigh approximately 80lbs and all require water to use. For example, Janet picked out the "vegetarian" option that the church was offering, taking extra care to ensure that the shortening included (two fat, gallon-size cans of the stuff) was made from vegetable products. Other included items are 20lbs. canned red wheat, which you apparently have to grind before using (?), lots and lots of dried macaroni, white rice, white flour, dried beans, and my personal favorite, two HUGE cans of powdered milk.

Now. Jd's mom's/gma's approaches to the powdered milk were priceless.

Me: wow, that's great, but we won't eat powdered milk
Janet: oh i know, honey, but this way you have it, just in case.
Me: uhh huh, yeah.
Janet: you know, so if there's a disaster you can feed it to the kitties if they don't have any food.
Me: riiiight, right. the cats would probably like that.

Let's, for now, ignore the basic premise that a disaster could occur that trapped me, JD, and two intact cats in our own apartment for up to two months with access to electricity and running water so that we could cook this food. Let's ignore the glaring issue that what is really important when you live in a fancily decorated desert is water, and if there's a disaster all we would worry about is water. Let's ignore, gentle readers, for the time being, what particular type of disaster might result in our being so desperate that either of us would consider touching or ingesting shortening, and instead let's focus again on the powdered milk:

Me: Right so I could feed it to the cats.
Gma: Well I know you don't eat that stuff, honey, but you'd be glad to have it in a disaster.
Me: No.
JD: No.
Gma (ignoring us): Yeah, you'd be glad to have it if you were hungry!

ahh, so that's it. I'm vegan because I just haven't gotten hungry enough to eat meat/dairy lately.

Later (it kept coming up, seriously)

Gma: Well if you need that milk you'll have it
Me: right
Gma: because, think about it, you have two months of food, and maybe you could share it with your neighbors
Me: yeah, good point
Gma: and maybe someone has a baby, and maybe you can use the powdered milk to save their baby when they don't have any food for the baby.
Me (stunned): ...
Gma: so i bet you'll be glad to have it either way, because you can share it with your neighbors and their baby
Me: right. right, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. *snicker* i mean COUGH COUGH COUGH.


Also the cans are all marked, "SLC welfare" which I find utterly hilarious given their stance on welfare in general. I'm not sure why they thought we were either starving to death or would be involved in some sort of disaster that merely jammed our front door for a couple months, but I would eat most of our furniture and all of my clothing and toiletries before I started in on the shortening or the powdered milk.

All Your Diction, Dripping With Disdain

I have been One Hot Mess lately.

Stupid end-of-quarter. I hate it. I finished grading papers already, though, which is excellent. Not the papers. Those were not excellent. Several of my pet students wrote appallingly terrible papers. This makes me feel personally responsible. However, I have enough ego stored elsewhere to pull me through this temporary teaching setback.

I attended a retirement party last week for one of my most beloved colleagues, three hours late thanks to this ridiculous tee ay meeting that was intended to establish "rely-a-bill-uh-tee" in our grading but instead involved two overgrown teenage asshats shouting at each other over one of the sample papers. Dialogue that I found unnecessary included, "You don't understand underground rap. I totally get it, and this kid didn't go to underground shows, he just read a book about it." ... "But at least he has a main argument! I mean, he doesn't ever actually say it or make it clear but OBVIOUSLY he means..."

You know what? It may be bitchy of me, but if you take a class from me, I will not be generously hamfisting-about trying to discern your topic sentence. Hopefully that word choice conveys to you guys the image of me sitting, weeping with boredom, at one end of a conference table whilst a retarded neanderthal at the other end bangs his fist on the table for emphasis when trying to make a point that no one cares to argue about. Yes, you win, this kid deserves a medal for constructing one legible paragraph. Yes, we should give him a hug for being so smart. Yes, you are the best teacher on the planet. Yes, I remember you from my first year when you kept telling me my hair was pretty and your wife wished her hair would look like mine. Yes, I was creeped out forEVER thanks to that. Yes, I noticed that you are no longer wearing a wedding ring. Yes, yes, yes. SNOOOOOOOOOOOOZE.

Oh and then I ran, yes, ran, home to change clothes and then ran back to campus where this party was happening. I caught the last 45 minutes of it, sweated through some gratuitous group photos, returned home pissed as hell about missing the fun part (I showed up just as people were politely greeting the guest of honor and then leaving and there was nothing left to entertain me but schmooooozing), and then realized that I had my skirt on backwards.

Oh yes. One Fine Hot Mess, I am. That explains why I got honked and whistled at when I was running over to the party. Even people driving by me could tell that I was a hot mess. For fuck's sake. I have no idea whether I put it on wrong or it worked its way around me while I was running over to the party. Excellent.

In other, more interesting news. I got a new flat iron. And LAYDEES, I have a product recommendation for ya'll. You may think that the flat iron you bought at target is super great and flattens your hair. Well, I went all Girlzilla and ordered one of the super expensive "professional" ones with all that magic "ceramic" and "tourmaline" crap online after reading about ten thousand customer raves and looking at their before and after pictures and hearing all about how fucking insanely great these uber-expensive ones are. I actually bought a new (cheap) iron recently but then my stylist decided I ought to have bangs, so now the one I had is too wide for the bits of hair in the front that ALWAYS need to be heat styled so I had to get a smaller one anyway.

Well. I used it this morning and my hair looks unbelievably great. Seriously, almost incomprehensibly fantastic. Again I wish I had my stupid camera battery. My hair looks like melted silk. I have crazy shiny hair, most of the time, but this is just sick. I look like a hair model. I can't stop touching it. You wouldn't be able to either, if you were here.

So I think that is fairly awesome but no one else probably will care. If you want the actual link leave me a comment.

Also, Ashleigh and Jim are coming to visit in, like, A WEEK. Oh MY GOD I am so excited. Shit, I have so much work to do before then! Yikes. That's cool, that's cool.

Oh and I have been trying to decide what to do with my career lately too. That has actually been going pretty well but is causing some expected anxiety attacks.

And I want to come to Chicago this summer and I want you all to also be there. But I'll have to leave that to Stacey to orchestrate because she is more popular and well-liked than me. So all of you start daydreaming about that road trip. For serious. You know you want to see this hair of mine, if nothing else.

Gonna Teach You Tricks That'll Blow Your Mongrel Mind

Happy would-be birthday to my dad! He'd be 59 today. Poop on cancer. Have you guys noticed all the attention genetic testing has been getting in the media lately? Maybe that's just because I keep debating whether I should get those tests done. On one hand, yay, maybe I'm no more at risk for it than you guys. On the other, waaaaaay more realistic hand, there's an 80% lifetime chance of at least one (?) cancer and something like six thousand percent chance of a second cancer after that first one.

I don't know what can be done other than to control all the things that aren't genetic that are under my jurisdiction. Veggies are way better off than omnivores. Exercise is good for you. I eat so much fiber you guys would blush if I told you about my bathroom habits. Haha. I have an optimistic and positive outlook on life in general and I am surrounded by people who support me rather than tear me down or otherwise detract from my mental, emotional, and physical well being. I eat antioxidants like candy. etc.

But I will probably still get cancer and die from it. All cancers are terrible, yes. This particular one is ruthless. Everyone dies.

So the scary thing with the genetic testing is more about my hypothetical future kids than knowing for myself. Because then I start doing that math. Yuck.

Oh whatever. I'm so Debbie Downer. At least there are ways to screen for colon cancer and there are lots of options when you catch it early. Speaking of, I'm going to sweat out some negativity in the gym and then come home and stuff my face with acai. I'll pour some berry juice out for the hoardes of family members who didn't move to the west coast to become dirty, crunchy-granola hippies with visible purple auras later today. Hope you're all doing well.

Keep It Upstairs

1. My camera battery charger is in Boston. So I sincerely apologize (really, I got my bangs all dolled up the other day to photograph-u and scoured this apartment for my other battery for, like, an hour before I remembered forgetting it at Jenny's house), but there won't be any pictures of my hair anytime soon. It's pretty okay. It's not full-on bangs or anything. But I'm learning the value of bobby pins and things (working out or sweating in general is really annoying with bangs) and my flat iron hasn't left the bathroom vanity for a week. Urgh.

2. Congratulations Celeste! Mrs. Shane! Newly-married Ladyface! That's awesome.

3. Also congrats to Auntie Melissa, again. Those babies are preshie.

4. And congrats to Stacey on the new apartment and blog template! very chic. Happy Birthday to Chris Daniels and happy early birthday to Toni. HOORAY!

5. JD and I went camping in the middle of the damned desert with Kris-tin and Airhick Monday night. Holy balls it is hot and arid in a desert. I know, right? But we were all a little shocked by it. We saw a sidewinder rattlesnake. Kristin found it, which makes sense because she is kind of prissy and also deathly afraid of snakes. It was in our campsite. Yeah, everything has to live underground during the day so there are all these animal holes all over that could fit a desert rat, or a snake, or a huge rabbit, or whatever. It's hard to tell if different animals have different holes or if they're all just piled up under there, all day until it gets insanely cold at night and they all come out and prey on one another.

The place we went is called Joshua Tree Nat'l Park and the whole landscape looks like a living Dr. Seuss book. It was beautiful.

6. This quarter is two weeks from being fuuuucking done.

7. I have an EXCELLENT comp cd for ya'll. HIT ME UP. It's really good and catchy.

8. I am radiating goodness into the universe all the time, when I can stand to. Am trying to carve some awfulness from my life too but it's slow going and painful. My life is too fantastic otherwise to waste so much energy and time on something doomed. Blah. I am thinking happy thoughts about all of you and I am sending good vibrations you ways. Love you guys.

Charge Me Your Day Rate, I'll Turn You Out In Kind

Ladies:

If you go to the haircutter's, and you sigh, "I am bored with my face, I don't know what kind of haircut I want," BEWARE.

You will be given bangs.

I haven't had bangs since I was like ten, and I feel weird.

And Bloodlust Tanks and Crave Gets Slaked

1. Yes, I saw the OpEd in the NYT about how veganism kills babies. However, veganism didn't kill that baby, stupid fucking parents did. I'm too pissed about this characterization of veganism of a totally left-wing, radical, granola-chomping cult of ignorant hippies to do the whole rational counterpointing thing, but luckily there is a whole community of people who are better writers and better tempered to say something meaningful. Babies aren't "made of fish oil," for christ's sake. I know more about babies and JD knows far more about nutrition than Pissy Pants McHates Veggies anyway. When we decide to have babies, rest assured that they will be completely well-fed and their cognitive development will be provided for. Without fish oil or raw milk or any number of diabetes- and cancer-promoting ingredients. Jeeze.



2. We went to/participated in a lovely weddding last weekend. That was nice. I like talking to brides who are all, "uh, did you feel cold feet and think about running away right before you got married?" to me, because that makes me feel less crazy. Also I like talking to the ones who are all, "I can't even imagine having to do this in front of a bunch of people," because that is also how I felt. No offense to any of you. But having my mom's friends or random cousins or people I just don't give a shit about seemed really unnecessary. Whatever.



3. Keith came to visit for a couple of days last week. That was fun too. I don't have any illustrations of that. So here's more from that wedding.

If I Could Only Coax You Overboard

So last Friday JD and I went to see a jazz pianist with our dear dear friends Kris-tin and Air Hick. hhahah. Air Hick, I'm totally using that more often.

Anyway. I digress. Two sentences in and I digress.

So we went to the jazz show. It was rad. The guy performing, this dude, was fucking talented. There were peanuts on each little four-person table and it was over in the new building's smaller theater and the atmosphere was delightful. Since JD got free tickets Air Hick wanted to buy drinks but the bar was cash only so he literally ran around the area until he found an atm. Then returned with, magically, everyone's favorite drinks. We have a standing Monday night dinner fete with them, you see, where they come over or we go there and we all eat something vegan and drink the shit out lots of bottles of stuff and forget all our worldly troubles. So he and JD have been plowing through our ever-expanding whisky collection and the Men have both developed a taste for the good shit. and that's what Air Hick brought for himself and JD, and brought his wifey white wine (here is my Kris-tin impression: "I only drink white wine. But NOT FUCKING Chardonnay. I'm leaving if anyone orders a fucking Chardonnay") and me red wine. Yay! Red wine is my favorite color!

Ahem. So afterward, we decided to go to a bar. A nice normal bar (those are very hard to find in socal) with doughy people, or pale people, or reasonably attractive people instead of barbie dolls and coyotes. Yes, somehow the Men knew about a nice Irish bar. So we Ladies were concerned that we were terribly overdressed, because that was completely fucking true. I was wearing a dress, for fuck's sake. And shoes that were destroying my damned feet. She was wearing a skirt with beads or sequins on it or something. We both looked way too awesome for a normal bar. But we resigned ourselves to going and enjoying it because we both love bars and we figured since we had dates it didn't look as much like we were desperately trolling for dick.

So there's a really shit band. I enjoy shit bands at bars quite a lot. It's fun. Yay. There's a jukebox that I put money into right as we're leaving. I always fucking do that, I don't know how it happens. At some point the Men go to close out the bar tabs (god, you know what? there are some things that are SO FUCKING GREAT about being married that don't even occur to me until I go to boston and both Raedy and Jenny give me shit about being a puss and not wanting to go up to the bar. Jenny even made me go up to the bar tender, pretend I was her, and close out her tab once while I was there. Booo). Air Hick came back and while the three of us were sitting there, this random dude came up and totally hit on me.

I actually got to use this technique I have been daydreaming about for months-- because it was loud (air full of shit band music) I could barely hear him (something about dancing with him, though, and I think how awesome my boobs looked) so I drunkenly and dramatically gestured to my ring finger whilst making an exaggerated apologetic face and shurugging my shoulders, drunkenly.

Maybe a little bit of overkill. I also vaguely remember patting his hip to console him because after I said no he kept talking and I couldn't hear him. Something about helping him make his ex-girlfriend jealous, we think. Not sure. But then JD came back and hahaha, what a funny occurrence because he is totally secure in our marriage and shit.

Now, for the story part of the story.

Kris-tin has NOT LET THIS GO since it happened, she has brought it up repeatedly and always in the context of Why he hit on me and not her. It is SO obviously killing her. She has suggested the following theories:

*She is unapproachable looking because of her dark hair.
* She is unapproachable because her husband was sitting right next to her.
*She was not hit on because she had her back to this guy so he couldn't see her, he could only see me
*She is hideously ugly and repulsive to all men
*She is some kind of freak, goddammit, and no one ever thinks she's pretty
*She is going to kill herself if anyone ever hits on me again

hahahahah

To Know Me All Wrong

Office hour. Friday. Friday afternoon. No chance anyone is coming to pick my brain about resirch, syince, or life more broadly. Hence, blogging. Plus we just had a lively diskussion sekshun in which I allowed them to pretend to be working on a class project so they are thoroughly tired of me today.

My officemate noticed my Incredible Grey Hair today. "Wow," she said, chewing thoughtfully on some trail mix. "You've got grey hair!"

"Yah," I replied wittily, "I have since I was in high school. But usually I color it. But then my sister was all on my case to leave it alone. Also now I'm broke. Oh and I'm hoping it looks cool eventually."

"I never noticed that!"

"Yarrp."

Oh hey that reminds me. Go see Hot Fuzz the movie if it's playing near you and/or you like comedy. Heeee-larious. I haven't even seen Shaun of the Dead but it is the same people and it's pretty awesome. Almost Super-Troopers awesome. It's an action movie homage/parody but it's funny and loving. According to the reviews I read about it, it's very deferential to the genre as opposed to... oh, just, here.

Life is so fantastic and also busy. My social life has been off the chain lately, which is great, but I am not so excellent at balancing responsibility and fun. So usually I'm like, "ahh, fun. yes, I could use some fun" and then nothing gets done. I am trying for the billionth time in the last few years to remedy that. My newest technique has involved emailing people to schedule meetings well in advance of actually completing the work for the meeting, leaving me panicked and rushed for time, pulling all-nighters and freaking out. But getting shit done, you guys.

My husbie has started mispronouncing words to irritate me and then repeating them ad nauseum, laughing until he is literally crying. It must be such a fun life to have a wee little pea brain that takes delight in conversations like the following:

Me: Gawd I want some chocolate!
Him: Do you want some wewwie wewwie good chocolate?
Me: Uggh don't use that baby voice. Do we have any chocolate?
Him: Hmmm. I don't know but I want some chok-lit too. I wish we had chok-it chip cookies.
Me: ARRGE! shut up with that voice
Him: Chok-it chip! I want chok-it chip cookies. Chok-it CHIP!!
Me: --
Him: CHOK IT CHIPS!! CHOK IT!!! HAHAHAHAHA CHOK IT!!

So for the last week whenever he wants me to punch my fist through the wall he gets in my face and starts going, "mmm chok-it chip cookies!" and then dissolving into giggle hysterics. He is SUCH a little girl. But I have to admit it's fucking funny to watch him autistiklly mispronounce "chocolate" so many times that tears stream from his eyes and he's hyperventilating.

Have you seen those weird "yoga" classes where the point is to force yourself to laugh for an hour? Supposedly it becomes contagious and real as you do it. I tried this the other day, forcing myself to laugh at nothing, and it was highly amusing. The cats, my only witnesses, did not find it amusing. They assumed I had lost my damn mind and hid under the bed while I almost choked to death on my own spit.

I spent some time this morning finding a suitable photograph of Lavril VaVigne (figure it out, lazy) for my advicer to use in a talk next week at a major international conferense. The world is ending.

I was having some mood problems earlier this month, not menstrual in nature, but more of a global feeling of smothering dread that was suspiciously feeling like it might be clinically meaningful. I feel better now (I feel pretty awesome now, actually), but for awhile I could literally not concentrate on anything and was sleeping a lot and hating my work. Then I voiced these concerns to my advicer and she translated them into words I could make sense of. "Oh," she said, lightbulb popping into existence above her head as I lamented my own Extreme Laziness, "you're scared shitless. That's normal."

Ahhh, I love having an advicer who curses at me and also one who Does Not Pull Punches, especially when a curse word is the most exact/precise/appropriately narrow word for the anomaly. I about cried in her office I was so relieved to hear that I am behaving in a normal manner, as normal as dysfunction is for grad skool participants in general, and since then I have been able to think and focus and shit and I am much better, thanks.

What else? Oh jeeze you guys I am not that interesting. I went shopping a few weeks ago against my better fiscal judgment and that also cheered me out of my pseudo depression funk. I got some shoes and a really prosh dress.

How about that earth-like planet, huh?

It Cares Not For Your Pyramid Schemes

Yo.

I got this wild hair up my ass to organize my entire hard drive the other day. Great, right? Except I think I deleted my iPhoto library. Yeah, last time I did this spring-cleaning-of-my-computer thing I deleted my whole iTunes library accidentally. I am freaking awesome.

My friend B wanted to go to a poetry reading tonight. Can you picture me at a poetry reading? Neither can I. I couldn't keep a straight face for more than three seconds. I'm, like, not nearly mature enough for Arts Appreciation these days. Unless by Arts Appreciation you mean artfully dodging all of my responsibilities. Or drinking margaritas. If that's what you mean, I guess then I am actually really good at it. But probably you mean something different. Better stick to the baser arts with this one.

So, so. Comme ci comme ca. School is hard as usual. JD started his class last night and I made him wear a little beanie with a propeller and take a shiny apple for the teacher. Ok, that's not true. I made him scrub his sweet round face until it shone with the light of a thousand suns though. All the better to convey unwavering interest in the subject matter of a class, in my opinion. I, on the other hand, am trying so hard to just Sack Up and Do It, but today I have to teach commas to a bunch of graduating seniors and I would rather visit the gynechiatrist.

Aside from school, I have been cramming my social calendar to the brim with fun, so that's been great. Totally having lots of fun. Ahhh. It makes me miss you guys a lot too, but what can I do. I can throw myself into my work, that's what I can do.

OH BOOOOOOY ARE WE ENTHUSIASTIC!!!!

Your Frame Went Limp In My Arms

I love my husband. He always cooks, which is great but when I try to help he usually gets all shitty and orders me out of the kitchen and out of his way. I realize that cooking is like a nice decompression thing for him, but it's not fair that I can't help! I'm not so totally inept; I've fed myself before. However, lately my whining has worn him down (or he just super-missed me while I was in Boston) and he has been assigning me benign little kitchen jobs while he's cooking, to be kind. The first day I was tasked with washing the potatos. I did this masterfully. What I really wanted, of course, was to cut them too, because to me that's the only fun part of cooking. But he had been snatching each clean potato up as I set it by the sink and had them all cut up by the time I turned around to demand that I now be allowed to cut them. Damn.

So the next day he let me cut up an onion, which he thought was hilarious because I immediately started crying and shrieking and waving the giant knife around in despair. Oh and a tomato. But the tomato came with special instructions and he had to sharpen the knife right before I could cut it. Then last night he actually let me stir ingredients in a hot pan. Oh yesssss.

Also, I love it when my husband laughs until he cries like a little girl. Last night I achieved this by telling him about my sister's particular aversion to having the word "mew" said in this very anoying voice that I have perfected (so has Mike), and her other particular aversion to being called "jennay" like in forest gump. So my impressions of both these things are excellent, and I did one and then the other until he was inexplicably sobbing and gasping for air. Hahahah. Then he told me he hasn't ever seen forest gump.

Oh and he blockbustered (not the same ring as "netflixed") that awful movie the holiday for me to watch without my asking. then he sat through it last night. And he's taking classes and he's so excited and I'm so proud of him. Also if I can't find a damned job after this I think he will be successful enough that it doesn't really matter. Thank fuck. I'm so fucking glad he's a grown up and has a career and likes it and does everything right all the time. Ok that last thing isn't totally true but close enough. Wow, I'm really getting soft in my old age.

Oh and I had my first sekshun meeting yesterday and it went really well. I may have griped about how I didn't want to do this tee ay class? well now I think I may end up enjoying it a lot despite myself. excellent.

Ok now I really have to quit stalling and mooning about over my husbie and crank out some really excellent writing.

CIAO BITCHES