i just figured out

what i want to do with the rest of my life




.

just in case anyone cares

i took most of today off. the plan is to stay in and listen to house music and make this:



(the coat, not the girl, although the pants are tempting)

out of this:



so if you find yourself in lovely downtown wichita today, give me a call. my schedule appears to be pretty devoid of everything for the next few whiles.

random wednesday thoughts

Backpfeifengesicht: a face that cries out for a fist in it. (German)

the songs i am currently trying to steal off teh interwebs:

"always love" nada surf
"golddigger" kanye west
"trippin" robbie williams
"head" tin star
"over my head" goat

(oh, and brooke, you asked once about my celebrity crush? yours is viggo, we all know. i think i'd like everyone to go on a photo hunt for half-naked robbie williams.)

no one ever said i had good taste.

i was talking to a friend the other night and we had a discourse on the nature of true love. i don't actually believe that there is one special person for each of us, only that we have a set of criteria that someone must fall within and then perhaps we can like them enough to love them. my proof? if there is only that one other soul for us, then how in the hell is it that they always happen to be geographically convenient? statistics kills the inner romantic again.

i can't wait for Serenity to open. Sci Fi channel has been playing all the existing episodes in the meantime. problem is, one of the big plot episodes i think was called "Heart of Gold" and there was something about that one makes it such that i just can't watch it again. nick and probably JJ would remember this one. big showdown, some kind of whorehouse thing? and the bad ol man who runs the town has one of the girls on his side, and infers at some point that all women are fit for is orally servicing the men. then in front of the entire town, makes her do just this. and something about that scene, even just thinking about it, makes my skin crawl.

drama at work. i might get to attend a union meeting for the first time, and interestingly, i'm there on the side of a teamster. i happened to find myself in a package car the other day, hidden behind some giant thing where i couldn't be seen, and overheard something i wish i hadn't.

i have two current crushes i'm nursing. they're both crushes because i just will not cross this line: one is a twenty year old boy, the other a married man. sigh.

no ever said i had good taste.

If you aint no punk holla We Want Prenup
WE WANT PRENUP!, Yeaah
It's something that you need to have
Cause when she leave yo ass she gone leave with half

(maniacal giggling)

nephology: love song of the weatherman (FFF9)

red sky in morning, sailors take warning:

storms ahead

you stand too close to me

the heat rises from you and flows over me, giving me shivers in this unabashed show of adiabatic cooling, and the clouds form around my head and obscure my judgment.

oh cumulonimbus! harbinger of sure storms, heavy rains and the rending of wind and electricity. fat and heavy with anticipation of things to come, things that fall from the sky and wash over us all. things that want to fall, as you make me want.

sweet noctilucent formations...rarest of creatures in my atmosphere, shining in the night when i am so blessed, and finding their way to my southern latitudes. the albedo of you, of us.

too high to be reached with balloons, more easily studied from above. i want to sound you out and find what you are made of. are you light and ice, or dust and steam? cirrus or nimbus, altostratus: take me higher despite the chances of ice.

the storms are rising
coalesce with me

Bring it on, bitches!

a "dance off"? does this stuff really happen? the answer, apparently is yes. and here i was thinking it was only a plot point in horrible, horrible movies.

while it still involves violence, and spotlights all that's wrong with people, at least it doesn't have anything to do with hurricanes, abortions, BTK, or my credit rating. also, when they interviewed the cops on television, you could see that they were masking giggles as hard as they could.

i had to put up a new post, or risk losing my entire male readership.

winks.

AA

the day i met the other woman

beautiful dowtntown lawrence, winter 2001.

i'd been doing psychological battle with my then-boyfriend M for reasons aplenty: i had convinced myself he was seeing someone else. perhaps not seeing, so much as screwing. whatever. betrayal is what it is, regardless of the form it takes.

we'd been together for quite some time, and some aspects of his behavior had changed. case in point: he was a drunk. but he was very good at it. he'd go to kansas city every thursday loaded, to bowl with his old friends and drink more, then drive home drunker still, and always made it. never had any issues.

one night, he tells me he's going to J's house (the three of us knew each other because we had all worked together at one point in time) to help her change her tire. or a lightbulb. or something equally ludicrous. whatever, i think, but think twice when he doesn't come home. a day or so later, i ask him, where the hell did you go that night? and he tells me that he'd gotten entirely too drunk to drive back from her place (was within two miles of where he lived). suspicious, and one more thing to add to a list of many, and finally, i tell him what's on my mind. this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, or in my case, my silence.

i ask him if he's seeing J? he tells me in no uncertain terms that he is not, and how dare i accuse him of anything. which was interesting, seeing as how if i came home an hour later than expected, i was subjected to either the third degree, or a three day silent treatment. we argue, i cry. we both pout and take it out on each other and our friends. things get worse.

not long after this, it all falls apart. no worries, it's really for the best, i tell myself. inside i hurt hurt hurt. i can't entirely avoid him, we have many shared friends. like any good youthful breakup, it isn't as cleanly ended as anyone would like. we still talk. we miss each other. we still sleep together even when we're not talking to each other. i found it hard to sleep alone after so long, and yet, sleeping with him, even just beside him, was so bittersweet. it was hard to give it up, that is, could i save this? was it worth trying?

and through all of this, i still run into J here and there, and i was, frankly, a bitch to her. not catty, not angry. just very short, very cold. she was the embodiment of opposition, someone who would/could come in and take my man. she was a touchstone for my self-loathing, and a reminder of all that i wasn't. and yet, i still believed that they (M and J) hadn't been seeing each other.

my brother worked with J's roommate (a man unable to change lightbulbs, so it seems). he had a party, and bro and i were invited. while i felt ackward, i decided for some reason to go. J is of course, there, and since we're both smokers, we found ourselves time and again on the back porch together. liquor flows, and i get my nerve up, and decide to make good. i tell her, listen J: M and i had been going downhill for some time, and i thought you two were seeing each other behind my back, and if i've been rude to you i truly am sorry. i wanted to be a bigger woman than that, didn't want to make myself part of the women-fighting-over-shitty-men enterprise.

which stops our otherwise warm conversation short. she says, seeing him behind your back? and i say yes, he and i dated up until (insert here) and i finally kicked him to the curb..and she breaks down. crying. is drunk, and as such, throws herself into *my* arms to tell me that she HAD been seeing him, had been for such and such time, and now she believes he's cheating on her.

let me repeat the point here: he had been cheating on me, he had convinced me that i was foolish and hateful to think he would cheat on me, and suddenly, like a light comes on i realize i had been right in the first place.

many things went through my head at that point. they had been seeing each other while he and i had been seeing each other, and J and i had a little honest discussion, just between us girls, to figure how long he'd been playing the two of us off one another. figured it at something like six months. clever boy. i didn't have any suspicions til closer to one month before the end, and while she knew that he and i had been dating, she was under the impression it had been over a lot longer than it had.

and then there was this third girl, as well. hmm. J and i didn't see any need to discuss her, let her have him, and she and i decided to call him on his little game. which we did, literally. it was ugly, and it proved nothing and it made nothing right. but just once, we girls fought him instead of each other, and that made me proud, in way. nonetheless, i think the poor idiot J went on seeing him. myself, i actually felt self-righteous for a while, then like an idiot, as he'd convinced me to convince myself that he was flawless, and i was the paranoid jealous one.

interestingly, it was both a victory and a defeat. i won, because just then i had broken off with him, entirely. i wanted nothing more from or of him. i was finally hep to his game. a defeat in that i realized just how stupid and traitorous to myself i could be. how i let some shitheel make me doubt myself.

while this story isn't intended to be one of those "i hate men" diatribes, i think it rather clearly illustrates (at least to me) just how much our emotions can override our sensibilities. i wanted so badly to love and to be loved that i was willing to sacrifice myself to an extent to achieve it.

i've flatly refused to get that close to anyone since, because i am aware of just how malleable i am in a skilled player's hands.

i do get lonely, i do want sometimes what other people (seem to) have. i will not, however, give myself up again like i did that time. i'm not going to desert me for "us".

it was hard to be alone, at first. then hard became "different". then different became okay. and in a nutshell, i suppose, that's what healing is. you sometimes get hurt, and it makes you different. not indifferent. in my case, smarter. more able to take care of myself. braver.

i won and lost. i lost M. i gained myself. i was right, and i was very wrong. J did take my man, it seems, and i still haven't thought of an appropriate way to thank her.

sweet mother of mercy!

it finally happened. i met the future mr. anonymous. his name is craig and he only knows my name because when i was talking to him i was at work and my supervisor was screaming for me to come do something..alas. i could not tarry.

he walks into my line of sight and i wonder, have i met him before? he looks so familiar. then it dawns on me, this is what fate feels like! i go from a casual do-i-know-you look to rather plainly checking the poor man out, and holy crap, he busts me. and i have no slick comeback, no ploy to act like i was looking at something behind him, no clever wink. nothing!...i can't do anything but smile in that way that (hopefully) says, sorry, but couldn't help it - you see an ass like that maybe twice in a lifetime. and he smiles back, perhaps taken aback?

and blushes!

i am rife with smit. (giggles)

i wanted to show you something beautiful

and all i have is lousy, right now. apologies folks.

i separated a couple of bones in my pelvis and oh my god, wow. all i can say is that if someone ever offers to separate bones in your pelvis for you, skip it. for the love of all that's holy, skip it.

so i hurt. so they give me more meds to take and now my brain is a pharmacological stew that i have had to opt out of. i took my pain meds, the muscle relaxants (needed so that i can stretch the tendons and muscles out so my phys therapist can manhandle them all back into the proper place), the allergy meds, the sleep inducers, the diet pills, pamprin, aspirin, and the mother-fathering effexor and guess what? i spent sunday night vomiting my guts out in front of the most attractive doc i've ever met (sorry doctor mike). given all that, i stopped taking *everything* until i'm back in control of my psyche.

i called a good, old, trusted friend and cried to him sunday night, then felt it necessary to call him back today and apologize for that. why do i feel this over-arching need to apologize all the time? because i feel like i'm a fuckup about 85% of my waking hours.

i tell him the problem is, lately, i feel all alone with this mess in my head, and even here on this blog, i feel it necessary to censor some of the crap i want to spew, just to get it out of my system. i'm not used to being lonely, but it's better when i am than when i no longer want any kind of company. i'm feeling like a weird, old, damaged person, and god help me (i fully expect an Uber-kick in the butt for this) but folks, i feel like a damaged woman. like just the kind of person who grows old with their cats and their memories. i'm certain that the birthday didn't help, and certainly spurred part of this.

i called back to apologize to him because not only do i value him as a friend and a person, but because i don't want to wierd him out the way i have some people. you get brave about your disorders, your faults, and eventually you know someone well enough that you share it with them when the time is appropriate. then they never call you back, or return your emails. or whatever. i've no one person in mind when i type this, but sort of a colloid of faces and names that i can't seem to just flush, and wonder what i did, or why this turned them so off to me. i'm afraid that when people find out about me, that they'll stop trusting me, or still worse, write off every feeling i share with them ("because she doesn't know if she means it...").

i count on my fam, because they are my family and if i can't trust them to trust me, then who do i have? in my mind, i have them, roomie A, a handful of friends from way back, and apparently whoever reads this. i trust you to not think i'm a car wreck. i trust you to read this because you're interested in what i have to say, or find something insightful or (god help you) you just like my powerful and hypnotic use of the written language. whatever it is, thanks i guess, for being the objective other, and for allowing me to shake loose some of the things that stick in my head.

anyway, more later.

by the numbers

so technically it's my 29th birthday. i prefer to think of it as the 5th anniversary of my 24th, which somehow both makes me feel younger, and like i have the willpower to keep doing something for five years (even if it is only aging).

in honor of the Miracle in September, i give you these fascinating 29 facts about me and my life, as it appears right now:

29. i'm bipolar, which lead me to blogging in the first place
28. i'm no longer ashamed of that
27. there's something like 18 pounds of assorted meats in various stages of preparedness right now in my kitchen, awaiting tomorrow's festivities
26. i have the best brother in the universe, hands down
25. i make the best chocolate chip cookies of anyone i've ever known
24. i can airbrush pretty well
23. i am also one hell of a picture framer
22. i can recite "Jabberwocky" from memory...still
21. i won a math conference my first time out, presenting a paper on complex systems control theory
20. i am a trivia idiot. trivial pursuit, NTN, you name it, i play it.
19. i played jazz bass and tenor sax for eight years, gave it up for engineering, and eventually gave that up as well. guess which i'm thinking of taking back up?
18. my cat is named after michael faraday, because when i got her i was knee-deep in an electromagnetics class
17. my family has traveled as a family to england, france, scotland, canada, mexico as well as yellowstone national park
16. i was in marching band all through high school and i loved it. i miss it. i still make "L"s with my hands to determine left from right, occasionally.
15. my favorite band of all time is Steely Dan
14. however, my favorite albums of all time are Blood Sugar Sex Magic (RHCP), Abbey Road (Beatles), In Violet Light (the Hip), Angel Dust (Faith No More) and Don't Tell a Soul (the Replacements)
13. i'm fairly certain i've been in love, really, twice in this lifetime. statistics say women get three, on the average.
12. if i could only have one beverage besides water for the rest of my life, it would be milk. if i got three, it would be hard to choose between coffee and gin gimlets
11. best movie of all time? Raising Arizona
10. i've never been to jail, although i was incarcerated one night in a psych hospital, where i taught the other patient/inmates to play gin, then we watched a KU basketball game. all in all, not my favorite night, but it beats some dates i've been on.
9. i starred in a film spoof of the X Files as the Scully character
8. i've been to Graceland, as well as the only ornamental metal museum in the United States
7. i've also been to the bottom of the deepest hand-dug well in the U.S. upon returning to the top, i was given a wooden nickel, which i still have
6. my twenty-first birthday was spent at the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival, where we drank and sang all night, then slept in the woods, and when i woke, the symphony was playing as the sun came up, and it was like it had been scripted just for me.
5. i have a friend who has a snake named "Deep Throat"
4. i speak just enough German to really get myself into trouble
3. i have a freckle on the bottom of my right foot
2. my favorite outfit is a long sleeved t-shirt, overalls, and Birks
1. i think i'm actually looking forward to, and am hopeful about, the next ten years

cheers! happy weekend everyone, and Merry Ginnymas!

if a blog could laugh..

this would make it giggle like a scoolgirl.

i got nothing. today was better. this weekend brings birthday party and friends from work, school and even (potentially) those miscreants from larryville, including an ex of mine that i'm probably still in love with. sigh. i love autumn. i'm thinking of having a birthday cake made that reads in spanish. don't know why, seemed funny earlier when i was tripping on decongestants.

i have noticed that i write more eloquently when my mind is a little pained, so if i seem flip tonight, it only means that i feel bettah. which calls for a tasteless joke:

q: what does george bush think about roe v. wade?

a: he doesn't care how people get out of new orleans.

cheers!
AA

this is the kind of day i've had

yeeeaah, i'm back. and i have a few things i want to vent about, and then we'll all have cookies and punch, okay? and in reference to the kind of day i've had, i'm eating frosting out of the container and waiting for my mom to call me back.

both of my managers have yelled at me this week. this is a first. i can't recall the last time i screwed up so badly that people actually yelled at me (who aren't related to me). i've hurt my effing back so badly that i have to go to physical therapy several times a week, i ask for help in moving packages at UPS, and i get yelled at. interesting. perhaps it's time to job hunt. maybe i'm just bitter because my back hurts so much that it's raised my blood pressure more than noticeably. i've had walked out today, but then the bastards would get out of paying for the therapy.

second, and more interesting than listening to me whine, is this discourse between my roommate and his brothers over something the brother's wife sent out via email. i think JJ's touched on the forwarded-email plague in the past. it's bad enough that we suffer the idiots to live. it's double plus ungood that they now have email and are more efficient in spreading their inanities.

okay, so sister-in-law sends out a forwarded message about all these biblical things that purportedly happened in Iraq. the message ends with this particular bit of poop:

And also... This is something to think about! Since America is typically represented by an eagle. Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages...
The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible)

Koran (9:11) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; and there was peace.

(Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?! God Bless you allAmen !

little miss erudtition sends this to all of the people in her address book, including my slightly more well-read roommate. he replies, mostly out of vitriol, to *all* of them thusly:

Actually the Koran quote is a well known chain mail urban legend, the verse actually reads:

"But if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, they are your brethren in faith; and We make the communications clear for a people who know."

which started a family shitstorm, including threats of physical violence.

huh. he was told by one brother that he (the brother) was "ashamed of his family", and roomie A wrote another email to the sister-in-law apologizing to her. he was angry at the chain mail for forwardin stupid shit. we've all been angered, methinks, by this kind of crap, and usually it's easier just to delete it. once in a while, tho, i get so angry about it that i do reply, and i *always* reply to whatever ass sent it to me and all of their friends. i don't know their friends, and don't feel the need to impress them with how much i like the craphounds who start this sort of thing. isn't it bad enough that i can't get away from junk mail? must my own family and friends send it to me?

so anyway, brother says, you'll probably never get another email from her (sis-in-law) again. well, shucks. a forwarded chain mail is not a replacement for communication within the family. forwarding chain mails does not grant you luck, it does not support the troops, if anything, it detracts from my bandwidth and frankly, that makes me want to kick ignant ass. so roomie can't make fun of her. i can. moreover, he's right. why does his pointing out the (amazingly blatant and superpatriot christian crapola) mistake in the chain make her look any sillier than sending it out in the first place?

(balling fists, smoking another cigarette)

i don't know this woman, and while i'm certain she intended no insult, i just can't fathom an entire family turning itseld inside out over this. just like ID, the right wingnuts want to spread their nasty little propaganda feces all over the world without any verifiable proof for said propaganda. whatever.

christians, right-wing zealots, bush-supporters (ack): learn to police your own. i'm a liberal, and i know what i'm talking about here. we have as many loony tunes as anyone in our camp, but we learn to stop listening to them. i don't forward their crap on to other people. you want respect from the literate-if-unwashed masses? check your facts, stop acting like TV is all the reality you need and fer chrissakes, try and listen to the other side once in a while. debunk them (us) for our logical fallacies, not our percieved hatred of the troops or love of commies or whatever.

with that, i'm all out of steam, i think.

two last random things, and thanks for reading this far if you happen to have that much time on your hands: i'm having a birthday party this saturday, and if you can find it, you're invited. second, if anyone can find me the t shirt above ("save ginny" is a fan club for the band Harry and the Potters) i will give them my brother as a personal slave, as a token of my thanks.

happy birthday, brooke..

different names for the same thing

i am an idiot, and a tired idiot at that. and almost thirty, as idiots go. are idiot years the same as dog years and such? do they vary? are say, ten years of idiocy roughly equivalent to five normal years, or do idiot years progress faster?

i'm fighting my dual-employment, and school, and sleeping. trying to get to the gym. not being a bitch as i'm not getting enough sleep. my job at the UPS pays the bills, buys my food and fuel, and the second job pays for school. by and large, that's the entire budget. i can't go any farther than i have with UPS until i finish my degree, which i didn't do for a variety of reasons that you can either figure out by reading old passages on this blog, or make up for yourself. i'm not making any excuses for it.

so i'm figuring about one more year like this, and then it's all smooth sailing, right? somehow i doubt it's that simple.

i didn't grow up as i should have done, in my twenties. i made a lot of mistakes. i made a lot of enemies, and hated myself more times than i can count. i've been embarrased by myself, and i am tempted to look back at how "brilliant" i seemlingly was when i was younger. not to quote faith no more, but would anyone tell me if i was getting stupider?

this is my problem with perception, crystallized. when i'm down, i lose a little of the perception that makes it easy to get through the things that would otherwise incapacitate me. i recently had a little hyper cycle, where i was a little too "up" for my own good, and while it feels good, and while i get a lot done, this is the cost of that. now i'm down, and it hurts.

there's too much going on in the world right now for me to focus too closely on it. i take the pain that isn't mine and let it grow and grow, as pain will fill up what would otherwise be a void. i get angry, and cry of frustration. fucking hell.

so i'm going to take a little time off from blogging and try to force myself to behave as i need to to get out of this. the voice of experience tells me that getting all the places i need to be and things i need to get done accomplished are going to feel a lot more difficult than usual, and having fewer things to will perhaps help.

it all feels like a chore, and a bastardly one at that. i'm trying, but it's not always easy. this isn't meant to be one of those cry-for-help type things. my blog is a record for me to consult of my moods, and what-was-i-thinkings, and this is just another entry into it. this is payment for what i've had in the last month, and again i'm balanced. not yet overdrawn at the karma bank, as my friend tom would say.

but i'm tired, and not in the good way. so i'm just fucking weak, or i'm human, and where the line between the two is, i can't say.

new post time..

which is to say, thank you all for reading my FFF. it came out better than i could have hoped, and wow. so thanks again. but i think i've attention-whored enough on it (but if you haven't read it, go do it! now! there will be a quiz..) and as such, it's time for a new post.

and i can't say anything that hasn't already been said about Katrina. i'm afraid of what's going to happen to the south now that the people who were poor enough that they couldn't leave the area with a storm on the way..where are they supposed to go now? no house, no insurance, no job, no belongings. i read a stat that said a million are now homeless. where are they going to go once they're no longer allowed to stay in one of the sports stadiums they now inhabit? what's the impact on my insurance given that i'll end up absorbing some of the cost of rebuilding? what can one girl in kansas do?

i am a hopeful person, and i must be. it's not some blind optimism, but i find i must be hopeful because it makes it possible to deal with the things that are completely out of my hands. i can feel that there is or will be someone smart enough, compassionate enough, to save us all from ourselves (and frankly, this administration).

someone is trying to extort one of my employees.

my electric bill is obscene.

the front page of today's paper says most of the inhabitants of america are in favor of teaching creationism in the classroom. i don't want my tax dollars going to teach crap to children as opposed to something we have some evidence for. i mean, if it's fairy tales we like, then why not just use one of the disney films that litter our culture like so many diapers left on the side of the road? that way, we don't have to waste any more time or money on curriculum development.

who are these people in favor of this? i know one, and he's a mouthbreathing fuckstick. as are Phil Kline and Rick Santorum.

i'm grumpy tonight. i'll get better. i'm still posessed of hope, for some inexplicable reason.

sigh.

AA

afterthought:

i did meet someone interesting today, a buddhist nun. she was young (today was her 26th birthday), smiling and calm. i watched her give a talk tonight on the importance of realizing how fortunate, and free, really, we are. her name was damo, and she shared her birthday cake with me, a total stranger. hooray for good people.