economists supply it on demand

Stop rooting for the underdog.  Sometimes he's 'under' for a reason.

I got a ridiculous amount of things done this weekend, and while I like feeling productive, the feeling is relatively limited since everything accomplished was related to personal health, beauty, or hygiene in some way.  Hair cut and coloured (you can't tell but I spent 2 and a half hours having it foiled.  Foiling is the delicate process whereby your stylist sandwiches pieces of your hair in between the popular food storage product to hightlight it and you sit for two and a half hours under a 60's Star Trek era dryer), pedicure (foisting your ugly feet onto delicate Asian women while sitting in a massage chair called, I kid you not, 'The Hummer'), eyebrow wax (tolerable, acceptable pain).  When you let all these things pile up you've got to get them done in one day otherwise you loose the momentum and get so distracted by one or the other.

I followed this up (the next day) with some serious shoe shopping and the acquisition of some expensive eyeliner/shadow/lipgloss.  Now I can finally be hip.

I learned a lot about shoes in the time I spent at the store.  Apparently, the new style is no longer the pointed toe that was adequate for looking like you were going to stab a foe in the shin or shank a bitch, now it is the new abbreviated toe that looks like you have recently been amputated (40's style!) combined with the always uncomfortable stick thin heel.  You've got to break the shoe in just as much as you've got to break YOURSELF in to the shoe--you know, cell memory, contortion, all that.

 That style is what I am sporting today because, well, no pain no gain, and I've been wearing the samn damn pair of black heels for nearly a year and they're falling apart.  I figured a new pair of shoes would help improve my poise and grace but I'm pretty sure they're just causing me to lurch around. 

I finally took them off while everyone is at lunch and no one is around.  I hate people who dont' wear shoes in public places.  It's so weird and gross, pedicure aside. 

Alright, lunchie munchies.  Time for my desert island fave.

Hear me out, because I know you have had one of these moments and can't deny it.

Spent the evening on a 'date' with good good friend, saw Skeleton Key (go see it so I can talk about the ending with you!  I was shocked!  Surprised!  Etc!), ate good pizza, watched Adult Swim.

On the way home in my mother's zippy little car, busting through the windy/hilly roads in the dark at way too fast, scanning the stations hit 'Sweet Home Alabama.'  The instinct:  crank it up, open the windows, blast the heat, sing and dance along.

And I did.

God it feels good being this awesome.  Sometimes all you need is a little Skynard to put the life back into you.

Now that I've got your attention...

My employer is matching Red Cross donations two to one for the next
thirty days.  If you'd like to add money to my donation to help
take advantage of the match, contact me and we'll work something
out.  Thanks!

So I was going to upload some new photos to go along with this but the system is down.  This probably has something to do with New Orleans or a storm or global warming or something but either way it is inconvenient to me and that's what's really important.

I had my first three hour 7:20-10:00 class.  This shit is EXHAUSTING.  Especially when I know I'm going to have to get up early tomorrow for work.  Especially when it's Macroeconomics.  The teacher looks like Thomas Dolby except without the awesome hair--has that nerdy thing about him where you know he became a professor to push frat boys around (and if not exclusively for that reason, considers it the #1 fringe benefit).  He also has that weird mountain climbing nerd attire to him with the hiking boots and the clothes that are so large you know exactly what they look like naked.  Don't ask me how it works, but it does.  Maybe I'm just too busy picturing people naked. 

Worked my way through the first section of my Arabic workbook and I'm feeling pretty confident.  Practicing those letters makes me feel like someone is crushing my larynx, but I feel like I'm reading and writing pretty well so far.  This semester is all about writing/reading/recognizing sounds, we're not really going to be learning any real words.  Except for ba'ab.  That means door.  I know that much.  Or wait, is it a'ab?  Shit, I guess I don't know.

If there's anything I can say about school: being able to come back after a class to an apartment worth of things that are mine, privacy, space, etc, is great.  Really really worth it.  That little white box, no matter what you did, was so demoralizing and I didn't even realize it.  Which reminds me, I have to pay rent tomorrow.  Eek. 

Final Thought Before I Go to Bed:  Green Day, take off some damn makeup.  Seriously. 

I have been going to school consecutively for 14 years, or the better part of my life.  And I have to say, I'm damn tired of it.  Today, classes begain again and I will have my face rocked by syllabii and assignments and commuting and parking and professors and students and all that other associated bullshit.  I will be a junior in college for those who are not up to speed.  It sucks.  I'm tired of it.  I also haven't come to terms with the fact that school really does start tomorrow.  It is all so surreal.

This weekend has gone without accomplishing anything major, and has generally be going pretty slow.  Tonight I finally got around to pimping out the gerbil cage and adding a bunch of tubes and new levels.  Unfortunately, the new tubes didn't match exactly onto the old tubes, so copious amounts of duct tape was utilitzed and nothing is quite as steady as I'd hoped.  They haven't gotten around to adventuring the new areas, but they are awesome and I am proud.  I hope their curiousity will get the best of them because it's damn bogus having this beastly new tube set up there without any love in it.  Cleaning it is also going to be a pain in the ass.

I also wanted to clean and straighten up in here which I never got around to.  Maybe tomorrow night.  Paging all people who know about makeup:  wtf do you have to use to get that dark smoky eye that all the girls are sporting nowadays?  I keep trying to do the dual-black-eye look but I can't find a product that looks right.  Someone fill me in!

So that's it.  This is a super boring entry, but I have been super boring lately.

But what do I know. I had long conversations about Islam and Christianity with cabbies in DC, and they always ended with happy faces and salaam and go in peace. I’ve no doubt millions and millions of Muslims are content to let the Christians go about their errant path, content that in the end a just God will say okay, you crazy lug, you’re in. Just as millions of Christians are willing to say Koran, Shmoran, you’re just and upright and believe in the One Big Guy, meet you at the Old Country Buffet in the sky. Bacon bits on my side, hummus on yours, whatever. But when you have your Clash of Civilizations, people retreat. MOOOON GODDDD! Oh yeah? Cough up the dhimmi tax, kaffir!

The point is not to get to that point. We are seriously need in live-and-let-live juice applied globally by aerosol spray, the sort of thing that makes people swallow big chunky doctrinal differences and concentrate simply on the idea of a God who is out of the smiting business for the time being. Take that as your daily verse: smite not. And the first one who says “but” gets sent howling down to hell? Smite not. Tomorrow, smite we might. After a day of not smiting we might actually refocus and agree who is smite-worthy, who truly profanes God’s gifts. But today? Smite-free.

I love the idea of "live-and-let-live juice"!  Additionally, the idea of an interstellar aerosol can makes me giggle.   Stolen from lileks.com

When I was little, my dad used to take me to school (instead of taking the bus which I unhappily rode in the afternoons), and often we would go to breakfast.  In our old old house closer to the city, pre-third grade we used to frequent Kip's (ironic!), an oldschool diner which probably began my diner obsession.  Subsequent diner love continued into middle school in the new old house when we went to Minella's and often Starbucks as well.  I look back on these days fondly, often wondering how they were even possible for me to get up early enough to make them work.  He still drove me to school for the first two years of high school before they gave me a car, but by that time I was too old to get up properly for morning breakfasts and needed to be arriving by at least 7:25am, a time that I believe was devised specifically to torture. 

Sidebar:  Can you imagine anything in the real world starting at 7:30 other than POTENTIALLY a commute?  I can't.  People around here don't start trickling in until 9 at best. 

Anyway, that initially paragraph was somewant of a tangeant to what I was getting at, which was it wasn't until I was high school and the too cool fucking hip place to be was a coffee bar that I initiated my love for lattes (with three packets of Equal or Splenda if available).  Foamy, thick, and rich, they made me quiver (literally) and kept me up all night after curfew.  I've gradually had to scale back my coffee and cigarette consumption since then with increasingly less money to spend on little treats like Starbucks mornings (can't get up early enough still, either). 

Today, however, I indulged.  I should have sooner, really, it's so worth it and I'm an idiot for perpetually forgetting there is a Starbucks right up the street.  Grande latte, two packets of splenda, and a butter croissant have kept me exceptionally jittery, on edge, not hungry, and running to the bathroom.  I inherited from my mother an extreme sensitivity to caffine wherein I often feel the effects of it hours and hours after having actually drank the damn thing (example: drank latte at 10, now feeling crazy antsy at 2:30).  People don't believe me, but it's true.

Anyway, I figure I need to take lunch sometime but I'm having trouble figuring if it's even worth it or even what I want or where to go.  Again with the ants in the pants.

Dear Colleague:

Who represents and fight for the rights of business to innovate and consumers to enjoy technology?  

Who works to bring some 140,000 people together to learn, share and engage – all in the name of technology advancement and commerce? 

Who works for an industry that creates products that can protect, unite, entertain, inform, connect and teach?  

You do. And for that, I thank you. 

Please join me and the entire executive team Friday, November 18, 2005, at the [someplace fancy], as we celebrate you – and our joint success over the past year. Cocktails will begin at 6:30 p.m., with dinner and dancing to follow.  

Save the date!  Please extend this invitation to your spouse, significant other or an adult guest Look for your formal invitation to the Gratitude Gala later next month. 

With utmost gratitude,

[CEO Name]

Now I gots to find me a hunky gigalo to take to this shindig.  Excellent.

Somehow I managed to get all the way to work this morning without realized I had actually left AN HOUR EARLIER THAN NECESSARY and then therefore arrived an hour earlier than scheduled.  I just now realized that I skipped a step in my wake up process.  The alarm goes off at 7:45, I reset for 8:45, and then snooze until 9:15.  I missed the important re-set, which means I ended up here way earlier than necessary without even thinking about it.  I looked at the clock a bajillion times in the car, but generally I'm only concerned with the minutes so I probably didn't even look at the hour or didn't believe what I saw.

God damn.  I'm tired.

The intro credits for 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' (FX Thursdays) with various action shots of the city makes me really tear up for the home I was so eager and casual about leaving.  Even the fictional characters in their fictional homes seem to be surrounded by the right kind of foliage framed by the right kind of curtains.  Everything just seems so right.  BRYN MAWR PENNSYLVANIA REPRESENT.

But the show is really fucking funny.  So is Starved, but you really have to be able to relate to that kind of humour.

So as the title of this entry implies, I have been keeping up with my flossing.  It has only been a three day resolution, but generally, it has been working out all right.  I've done it every day, even when I was late.

The problem wish flossing is, however, if there's any effect on gum disease/teeth in general, I'll never know about it.  They're not going to get any whiter.  The only way I'll know is if I don't get gum disease, and since I don't know what the odds are of me NOT getting gum disease without flossing, it's really somewhat of a crock.

Either way, it's been a busy few days.  I'm hoping for rain; this hot weather is killing me.  I was looking forward to the weekend, and then I realized there are only two more weekends before classes start and now I'm scared to look forward to it.  Dammit!

I am damn tired.  I don't really know why.  I keep getting more sleep; snoozing my alarm for longer and longer each day.  I'm just exhausted.  It's the heat or maybe the humidity or both, compounded by the job I decided to keep because it scares me to look for something else, honestly, something else without a Subway next door and an uninterrupted supply of meatball subs.

Today my biggest battle was fought with the white bra under the white shirt which refused to stay hidden.  Instead of allying, the whites rebelled and made me look nearly nude and generally obscene.  I told Mark that the whites should blend together and make an effort to camaflouge themself, and then he pointed out the obvious that my skin was brown which I had all but forgotten about and that this couldn't be dealt with on a cotton by cotton basis.

I watched a loooong marathon of my favourite show Dog the Bounty Hunter last night.  It was awesome.  I love when he looks into the camera and gives the little soliloquies about the job and about life and spirituality, "He'll get off the ice.  All he needs is a little time, some prayer, and some support."  And we're supposed to listen politely while he has that damn haircut; the long bleached blonde hair carefully jelled over the HUGE baldspot.  I don't take orders from men with bad haircuts, I just don't.

Today I had another set of department meetings about our customer service people.  Today's meeting was somewhat exciting because there was actual feedback provided, proving my theory that librarians are snotty bitches no matter where you go, except for Laura Bush who is all class. 

I guess it's time for me to go home.  Tomorrow when I get paid I can shop for groceries.  Until then it's dry cereal and expired peanut butter.

So today I started flossing.  I've never entirely believed in flossing--it seems like one of those urban legend type deals where someone thought it was a good idea and circulated all this sort of made up propaganda about it and now everyone is too afraid to say what they really think, that flossing is a damn waste of time (much like recycling).  However, I've started doing it anyway in the hopes that other parts of my life will start to come together.  The only people who floss (or that I've ever known to floss) have always been type A people with things in line and assignments started actually the night before they're do.  They have it all together.  I'm not saying this is necessarily BECAUSE of the floss, but I'm just saying, I haven't proved that it's totally unrelated.

I watched Maury after I woke up this morning because sometimes that's just the thing to do after snoozing your alarm for literally an hour.  I just watched enough to see that the gross guy with the gold fronts was NOT the baby's father.  It got me up and ready for the day, and subsequently, flossing.

I've recently discovered that my development opens onto a main road, which means, quite literally, that I live across the street from a Starbucks (and a Quiznos, if you're so inclined, I am not).  The only problem with Starbucks is that there is no drivethrus.  I realize this is to keep the classiness of the Starbucks, but really, there have been many many times I would've stopped but for the fact that I'm perpetually running late.  I actually could probably go for a latte right now...hrm.

Anyway that's all that's been going on, basically nothing.  My laptop is hot and the jubilation that went along with being online at home instead of just exclusively at work is kinda fading fast.  Oh well.  Ho hum.

Schedule for last night:  10:30, fall asleep downstairs watching Red Dwarf on the dogs bed.
1:30  Wake up because the dog was snoring
5:30  Wake up in normal bed, with outrageous acid reflux
5:35  Wake up my mom to ask her where the tums are, she gets them for me, and then I spend another 25 minutes online (sitting upright) reading the syptoms, treatment, and diagnosis processes for GERD (reflux) to her
6:00  Go to bed, but stay up reading a dog eared, yellow Dave Berry book that was bought like ten years ago in this little general store up by our summer home.  Laugh at the columns I've ready easily a thousand times by now, cower in bed because I'm cold but still in pain
8:30  Wake up from reflux, drink water, go back to bed
11:00  Wake up again after having this incredibly bizarre dream.  Mostly it involved my mother having 17 more children (I already had two black older sisters) of varying ages.  My sister's boyfriend left them all her in the car moment's after delivery and then them dying in a fire.  To try to get rid of the bodies, someone came in with a huge Jumanji-esque venus flytrap that kept growing larger and larger.  To stop the flytrap from eating people I kept having to hack off pieces of it (while I kept growing and trying to bite me) and put it in my dad's cuisinart.  It was awful.  Then finally Jesus came from the sea and said something about the situation but I don't remember what.  I woke up sweating.  Gross.

Today begins my new job search.  Much like my new apartment search, I am looking to get out of a bad situation with tumultuous relationships.  Ever since I've been here I have never felt particularly challenged.  I don't hesitate say that I am a motivated, competant problem solver who doesn't need a ton of hand holding.  I have succeeded at every other place of employment I've ever been.  The work I was given here has been substandard grunt work while interns in all other departments labor on long term, legitament projects. 

At twelve o'clock today I was asked to go around and inventory the computers of ALL STAFF (around 150) to determine the amount of ram contained in each to determine what kind of upgrade was needed.  The project desperately needs to be completed so that the appropriate budget needs to be made; so desperate that instead of sending an e-mail out to staff asking them to report back with thier information in a simple process, this was given to me at noon on a Friday; Friday at a company where a large number of employees leave at one o'clock and my success depends on whether or not they are here at all. 

I am so pissed I can barely see straight.  This has really become the last straw.  The commute is retarded, most of the people here can't get their act together, and I'm tired of being given projects that someone could write a simple script to do.  While my term ends in December and most of me really wants to finish it up, I need a new opportunity.  This is sucking my soul.  I feel I've invested enough time into this venture to really know that I need to find something better.  Where and how, however, I have no idea.

Sorry about yesterday's rant and I hope I didn't offend anyway.  It was pretty harsh.  I've been trying to keep it pretty light on the buzz side of things, but I sorta failed.

"Hey look at me go
From hero to zero
Oh, take it from a geek like me"

I keep writing this entry about religion in my head and never putting it down, content to be distracted by something else, be it TV or gerbils or sleep.  I just keep going over the bulleted points, getting the stories straight, flashing back to days in church as a child and Christmas pageants and that one moment when I was 12 that I remember losing all my faith. 

When I think about it, however, I don't really want to go into any of it.  I don't want to put it down; it doesn't seem right, but I think it's seeping out anyway.  It was stirred up after an argument I had with two friends about "intelligent design" versus evolution.  It had never occurred to me before, even knowing of their wacky demoninational status, would blow off something so scientifically relevant, that I believe so thoroughly to be true.  I read about creationists, but never truly believed in them, like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.  People out in Kansas, nobody here, nobody I knew, no one would say "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys" and "It's all just irrational" with a straight face at my dinner table.

It had also never occurred to me that they would dismiss me with such an easy, haughty fervor because I hadn't been thoroughly indoctrinated as children as they had (not their words of course, but my interpretation of the "well it's all what you're raised with" sentiment).  Nothing I could say was relevant because I didn't believe in their God, the all knowing being that cares about whether you eat pork on Friday or they drink caffine and whose plans and purposes somehow include famines that ravage families and terrorists that behead innocent men and women. 

For the first time in a long time I got that "I can't believe I'm sitting with you" feeling in the pit of my stomach, a combination of shame and pity and confusion that I hadn't felt since my before conservative conversion when I used to hear people talk about the worthlessness of gun control.  I didn't like the feeling.  I didn't like knowing that I was so devoid of spirituality, whether it be real or organizationally imposed.  I've always tried to be respectful of the beliefs of others but this time it just made me mad.  It made me want to scream "Stop!  Stop!  You're being fooled!  It's all a joke!  Don't you see!  Don't you get it!  There's nothing for us after this!  Just stop!" 

But I didn't.  I ate some dessert and went to my car and drove home.  And since then I feel like I'm being haunted by all these thoughts and feelings about if I could ever neatly reclaim any of those Jesus-y thoughts I was raised with. 

I've always half-heartedly believed there was a hell, just no avoiding my admission.

"It takes a night to make it dawn
And it takes a day to you yawn, brother
It takes some old to make you young
It takes some cold to know the sun
It takes the one to have the other

It takes no time to fall in love
But it takes you years to know what love is
It takes some fears to make you trust
It takes those tears to make it rust
It takes some dust to make it polished"

Dear Jason Mraz,
Despite pining away for nearly three years, you still haven't married me.  WTF, mate?  Seriously, let's get on that.
Thanks,
K

...and here I am.  Indoors.  Ablah.  However, my boss is not here today which means I might be able to sneak out a big early to get my traffic on a little sooner than normal.  Who knows. 

I have gotten into a nice little rut in terms of getting up going to work coming home.  It is very plain and boring.  Alarm goes off at 7:45, reset alarm for 8:45.  Sleep.  Snooze when appropriate.  Get up.  Shower if necessary.  Dress.  Make breakfast.  Check on gerbils.  Go to work.

Arrive at work.  Play KingdomofLoathing.  Deal with any assorted personal crises that come up.  Often pretend to be working when people walk by.  Read e-mails.  Go to lunch.  Get a headache.  Want to go home.

Get home.  Make dinner.  Watch Seinfeld.  Fall asleep really damn early.  Shower rinse repeat.

Sometimes I'll go OUT for dinner.  That is the major exception.  I am a very boring little person and while the rut I've gotten myself into is a real pain it is not so bad.  I've even started putting my underwear in the hamper: talk about grownup.  Either way, this job has robbed me of my soul and I've been giving some very serious consideration to going back to my old summercamp and becoming a camp counselor next year.  I know!  Ms. Creep A Tron abandoning the corporate rat race for mosquito bites and chattering girls and cute boys and other summer camp politics.  I know.  I'm excited.  I'm nervous.

My camp of choice is in upstate Pennsylvania, right smack in the middle of nowhere.  I went there for six years, the latest being the summer before my junior year in high school, and, you know, the previous six years; usually for about four weeks at a time (sessions are two weeks per). Don't be fooled, this is not any stupid sleepaway hellhole.  This is a rich kid camp often frequented by children of celebrities (no kidding!) with horseback riding, computers, and a real circus.  It was the important location of some of my most memorable firsts:

The finding of my first real boyfriend, my first real bestfriend(s), where I learned how to play D&D, where I learned how to play Quake 3, my first real play (production), the first place I socially felt happy and really wanted and belonged.  My first time on a skateboard, my first time writing tired poetry, the list goes on and on.  And I MISS it.

Major problem:  you can't ever go home again.  You certainly can't ever go home again as a boss instead of an employee.  I remember a fair share of counselors who were masking misery for whatever reason.  Eight weeks away from home is nothing; eight weeks away from privacy is another.  And they've made a lot of changes since I was first there to attrack more mainstream kids; maybe there won't be the kind of quirky makeup I loved.  Plus, me, a camp counselor?  How weird is that?

I dunno.  I'm half heartedly trying to make someone else do it with me but I can't think of anyone who would end up doing it that would be sufficiently appropriate or fun.  Either way, I've still got my headache, and the day is not close enough yet to being over.