I almost used an exclamation mark in this sucker

Sometimes I am a bit overwhelmed by my general resistance to change. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go plowing through what laugh-tracked sitcoms might call my “issues;” I just wanted to revel in my dogged love of re-reading crappy books.

I just finished reading Under the Volcano by M. Lowry, which was a challenge, since I usually tend to zone out during swirly, multi-consciousness passages that lack quotation marks. I have been disappointed several times by my inability to stomach stream-of-consciousness modernist writing. Generally I start to waiver and then rebuke myself with a stern slap of pretentiousness. Surely the book isn’t boring, pointless, or a crack dream. It’s obviously art, and I’m obviously a moron.

To return to my point, if I can indeed claim to have one, I read Under the Volcano for two reasons. One is that amazon told me that I might like it. The second is that it is referenced rather frequently in another book, Second Hand that I somewhat regularly re-read. I like Second Hand; it’s obvious and pop-y and the main chap wears tweed pants and suffers from “emotional hang-overs” after embarrassing events, which is certainly something I can relate to.

I liked Under the Volcano slightly less. I like things to be conclusive, and although it ended with plenty of carnage, I didn’t get the feeling of any real catharsis. I like things neatly concluded (tragically or not), which is perhaps why I spent yesterday afternoon holed up in my apartment watching It’s a Wonderful Life and eating spaghetti from a Tupperware. Now that is a firmly concluded story.

Speaking of things referenced, one of my favorite bits of Under the Volcano was when the brother laments being served tea as a sailor because he had read Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. I read The Sea Wolf recently (during my London phase, closely documented on THIS VERY BLOG) and it was a real naturalist ringer. Full of stabbings and hard-tack and people who try to burn the boat down after they’ve been presumed in a coma because they are plumb crazy atheist sailors with hands like shanks of meat.

How Strange

In the past 48 hours I have received two free [yes, free] Squirts, heard the words "addled," "persnickety" and "babe-o-rama" used in complete sentences, and encountered two women named Wilma.

Those are very strange occurrences.

The only time skim milk is acceptable

Excuse me for sounding obnoxious and hyper-patriotic on a Wednesday afternoon, but sometimes a Coke is just awesome. I’m having one now and I’m pleased as punch.

I don’t have too much to relate (my brain is the mucky state at the crossroads of bored and caffeine) so I will just share a few random thoughts to avoid being called a blog-bandoner.

1) It’s a “free jeans” day at my workplace. It is very unnerving to see coworkers who would never usually soil themselves with denim donning it painfully for a show of solidarity. People get insulted if you don’t wear jeans on “free jeans” day. Strangely they are often more upset at this than they are if you violate the everyday no-jeans policy.

2) I am forcing certain persons of my very close acquaintance to experience select volumes of prairie literature. I’m pleased to find (yet again) that my brain has not evolved to a point where reading descriptions of skimming milk is not the most pleasant thing comprehendible. Please, list yet again the process of dressing in wool for sub-zero weather. This is how I get my kicks.

3) It has been quite cold and I was very excited that the weather had finally decided to act like winter. However, the sun came out very determinedly this afternoon and rendered me incapable of fully appreciating a semi-truck with a Christmas wreath attached to the front. I simply cannot enjoy thinking about that truck driver making the long trek home in snowy weather to arrive in the nick (I’m really resisting a bad joke here) of time on Christmas Eve when I’m busy sweating inside of my car.

While I am yapping on about the weather, I’d like to petition for it to rain already, so that I can use my totally bitchin’ umbrella.

Humbuggery

Again I will dabble delightedly in clichés.

Boy do I hate Christmas music on the radio while I am driving around. Which is not to say that I hate Christmas music all together; I don’t mind it in the least when I’m trying to listen to it. But I like to groove in my car, and oftentimes the Christmas jams are too sanctimonious for grooving.

All of this whining does have a point, albeit a stupid one. Last night I was driving home and I turned on the radio, only to hear I Want to Wish You a Merry Christmas done by some sappy oldie-goldie beboppers. For years my go-to Christmas song has been Little Drummer Boy (so sue me; I like repetition). But I found myself awfully uplifted by this Merry Christmas song.

I’m awash in confusion; I don’t even know what Christmas means to me anymore. Probably it means something about egg-nog, but I’ve never had any of that.

More than traffic

I definitely hate sitting in traffic, but I have lately realized that what I hate slightly more is driving in a quickly-moving middle lane next to a lane of stopped traffic.

For some reason this really creeps me out; I tend to cringe on the right side while hurtling past these stopped cars at impressive, yet legal, speeds.

My fear is that someone in that line of cars is going to decide suddenly that that exit is not nearly so remarkable as to warrant the wait, and thus liberated and joyous, turn violently into the quickly-moving lane. [That's where I am driving, hoping to be left alone.]

Blinkers people, love your blinkers.

I don't taunt insects.

When I was a teenager I suffered a spider bite perilously near to my eye (at least in my own narrow and admittedly melodramatic opinion). The only thing really funny about this story, beyond the obvious slapstick resulting from arranging your bangs to cover your eyes, was my mother’s reaction to my plight. And even that is not particularly funny.

When I interrupted my mother’s phone conversation with my panicked and slightly exaggerated assertions that a spider had bitten my eye (“ My eye, Mother, my god-forsaken eye!”) she responded with typical motherly indifference. A few days later, when she noticed my impressive shiner and inquired, she claimed that she’d thought I was joking about the spider because I apparently said weird things like that “all the time.”

Though insulted, I could not deny it: proclaiming my personal atrocities was/is a large put of my (substantial) daily conversational quota.

I was reminded of this humiliating escapade this morning. My mother was emailing me (as is her persistent habit) loads of pictures from the family Thanksgiving festivities. She included among the other unflattering gems a subsection very appropriately entitled “close-ups.”

I have tried to reason with my mother on this account many times. I’ve assured her that no one likes close-up pictures of themselves bopping from PC to PC on the family mailing list. People especially do not appreciate this when the pictures are unflattering or make them look like a goober or feature them wearing earplugs and eating huge pieces of pie. In short, people do not appreciate the Internet publicity if they are me.

After I shuddered my way through the photo selections this morning, I began yet another cap-locked email to my mother expressing my distaste of close-ups. The familiarity of the situation started me thinking about how I have most of my conversations with my mother in metaphorical cap-locks, not because I’m angry but because of my semi-constant state of overreaction.

It would appear that I am the kid who is always yelling “spider bite.”

Fistful of advil in my bubble space

I think that it’s about time to change my image to something more intimidating and awe inspiring. [The last time that I considered changing my image it was because I wanted to be more mysterious. To be clear, my idea of mysterious is to grow my hair out long and wear it in a single braid down my back, but enough about that.] My motivation is this: my spinelessness has become so apparent that even oral surgeons (the yellow-bellied gum-cutters of the surgical set) feel comfortable patronizing me.

Today I went to visit my oral surgeon because a whopping 3.5 weeks later, my gaping wisdom teeth wounds were still throbbing like nobody’s business. Three previous visits had resulted in smiles from dental assistant and plenty of nasty tasting cotton swabs, but no actual relief. I had received several lectures on not taking any crap this time, so I tried to look at stern as it is possible for one to look while wearing a paper bib.

The oral surgeon seemed unperturbed by my glare. In fact, I think he was too busy shouting “You again!” and acting surprised to see me to notice my face…or the mouth bleeding evoked by the prodding assistant with her thin metal stick.

He gazed at me in a kindly manner and asked if I was feeling any better.

“Last night I took a fistful of Advil,” I responded. He didn’t seem impressed. I guess a guy with gobs of Novocain looks down his nose at giant bottles of Safeway Select Advil. He looked inside my mouth. He flushed around with water. He sat back, looking startled.

“You’re wearing Sarah Palin glasses!” he exclaimed joyously. By the time I summoned up enough spit to protest, he was stuffing my mouth with “special” gauze and telling me to come back next week.

Being intimidating would have plenty of fringe benefits that have nothing to do with oral surgery. Maybe I would have fewer people wandering around the side of my desk at work to see what I’m typing while I’m helping them. I know that they probably just want to make sure that I’m spelling their name correctly, but I find this very disconcerting. And not just because I usually have Twitter up. Oftentimes these people have pockets full of tissues and bodies full of excitable germs.

Would it be too nineties of me to say that I want to intimidate sickly customers out of my “bubble space”? Yes, I think so.

This is not a vomit story

I think that it is real pleasant when people call television shows “programs.” This is an excellent tactic for worming your way into my affections during casual conversation.

Also, I am prematurely and rapturously excited about Thanksgiving. I was raised to be very gluttonous around the holidays and Thanksgiving is prime pie chow-time. I spend most of the day stuffing my face with deviled eggs and avoiding awkward conversations that start with “How’s school going?” I guess now that I’m graduated, they will all be “Have a job yet?” questions. I will mumble about bad economic conditions and repel questioners with my paprika breath.

Last Thanksgiving I had the mad stomach flu. I never really get stomach-type illness, but this was wretched. I couldn’t eat more than one mouthful of mashed potatoes and was sick for the next three days. At the time I was house-sitting for a good pal of mine (HI TORI!) and it was only her charming cable television that saved me. That and the plain oatmeal and telephone sympathy (during gross vomit-description conversations) furnished by my main fellow.

I wish I had thought at the time to call the junk I was TIVO-ing “programs.” I would have been consoled.

Spoons for special occasions

A really marvelous thing just happened to me.

I was sitting at my desk a few moments ago when a very elegant lady approached me with a plastic bag. I was instantly impressed with her hat, which was a little black number with some mesh extending from the front to cover her face. Intrigued, I glanced around my mega-double computer screen. She wore a back skirt-suit and glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.

“This,” I thought to myself, “Is a woman with driving gloves and more than one set of spoons.” I asked her what I could help her with in an extra polite way. I imagined that this lady was a widow with a tragic past, so I didn’t mind coddling her.

Here’s the real kicker: it turns out that the plastic bag was full of slightly-used Time magazines that this charming lady wanted to leave in our waiting room. For months I have been reading the same Country Home catalog, so I was drooling over the opportunity to pretend that I didn’t know how the presidential election was going to turn out.

Also my pal brought me a delicious tea from a certain soul-less commercial coffee house that I dare not frequent myself for loss of street cred.

Sometimes people are awesome.

I make no secret of being a pansy

I just finished reading “White Noise” by DeLillo and although I feel sort of barbaric typing it out, I wish someone would have actually died. It’s not that I’m bloodthirsty. Quite the opposite actually. Usually I am squeamish as hell. I can often be found quailing.

Speaking of this (and I’ll return to my clumsy attack on someone else’s art in just a moment) I have been thinking lately of scenes in movies in which someone gets their head bludgeoned and spattered.

You know the sort I’m talking about. It starts with a fight or tense discussion. They grapple, the bludgeoner grasps for something heavy, we get a shot of the soon-to-be-bludgeonee on the floor (eye’s all squinty and hands held up in defense), followed by a shot of the bludgeoner lifting the blunt object over their head, moving into a quick down-swing. And then, you hear a wet crunching noise and you know some bloke just got bludgeoned. Probably there will be some blood on the walls or face of the violent-freako with the blunt object. Call me lily-livered, but I hate this sort of thing.

I invariably close my eyes for this sort of scene. And I suspect that if I were ever to be in a ballistic manifestation of my general grouchiness, I would refrain from punching someone in the face out of an abject fear that it would elicit this exact crunching noise.

But back to “White Noise.” The main fellow in this book (as well as many other characters) was obsessed with the idea of his own death. And although it seems more optimistic to think that we should all privately grapple with the idea of death and learn to deal with it, I rather wanted him to die. He just seemed so tormented that I thought it might be more pleasant for him to be freed from the anticipation.

I’m not trying to be morbid or particularly sadistic. I liked the guy; he wore black plastic glasses and so do I.

Are there really 18 wheels under there?

If I were particularly lonely I would call up one of those "How am I Driving?" 800 numbers and describe in detail why a particular trucker's performance and road etiquette was offensive to me.

I wonder how these conversations go.

Yes, I'm still here. Illegal lane violations up the whazoo. No, I can't see the license plate. Yes, a big truck, a gray one. Going left on the freeway. Tasmanian devil mudflaps and a surly expression.

Loud engine. Like, rudely loud.

This blog is free, so it probably has anthrax

As I skipped every instrumental track on the CD playing in my car this morning, I decided that I am into very obvious aesthetics. I like songs with words, paintings with glaringly apparent subjects and I feel just dreadful about certain modernist novels. Not all modernist novels, obviously, but the particularly sassy Irish ones.

I may be dense (and I just ate three buckets full of hummus for lunch, so I probably am) but I like to believe that it’s a matter of taste. I can’t be blamed if I buy into the pleasant simplicity of the narrative arch.

And speaking of narrative arches [standard seamless segue to follow]. Last night I was reading this article in the free Sacramento Bee my non-fiancé and I scored (it was just sitting on top of the newspaper box, asking to be taken or poisoned with anthrax) last Sunday. It was a regular column, a dual opinion thing written by a father and son, addressing some previous column in which they argued over whether the father should pay for the son’s gas. Apparently there had been a reader uproar over this, and the familial duo was rebutting accusations that the son was spoiled.

I could not resist rolling my eyes as I read the son’s defense. Yes, he knew that he had “entitlement issues” like all teens, but he solemnly believed that this didn’t show an improper upbringing. On the contrary, he believed that he would grow up to be an upstanding citizen and good provider for a future family. In his opinion, he was an okay guy.

“Stupid teenagers,” I thought. “I don’t care how many houses you built on a summer abroad program in Guam. I bet your father wrote this in an effort to pad your college application packet, so that you can get into a flashy university and in four years become a sloppy semi-employed person like me.”

And that’s when I realized. I’m a jerk. What’s more, I’m a jerk with possible entitlement issues and a free Sac Bee in her bathroom.

I went as a pseudo-intellectual for Halloween

Today I had the top of a muffin for breakfast and I must admit that it was very tasty. It reminded me very much of the time of my life when everyone I knew was a barista and I ate millions of muffin-tops off day-old pastries. Blueberry muffins with the crumbly junk on top were always my favorite.

The second reason that I found the muffin very satisfying is that it came from a bakery and I have very ambitious feelings about bakeries. To be clear, it’s not that I like coffee shops overmuch. Nope, I’ve never been one to patronize coffee shops, even though I love to loiter with what I might call a delightful decaf-coffee-bev. Probably I’m just afraid that someone will call me a pseudo-intellectual when I hang out in coffee shops looking pensive, and since I am a pseudo-intellectual I don’t want anyone to blow my cover.

Anyway, I like bakeries because when I imagine myself I like to think that I am the sort of person who frequents bakeries. I try to believe that this is just because I am naturally nostalgic and I like small business and quaint things and I definitely love bread. But it’s possible that I’m just lying to myself.

Maybe this is a product of Hollywood. Imagine for me (look how bossy I am, regardless of national holidays like Veteran’s Day) the beginning of some unlikely love story movie.

The likeable and endearingly loopy character surely stops at a bakery during the opening sequence and the bakeristas will know his or her (her or John Cussack) by name. Peppy music will fade, he/she will jovially get the “regular” donut and coffee bev combo and pleasantries will be exchanged.

Now, you might think that this is used to create juxtaposition with the other, more uptight character (who will probably be trash-talking a cabby while drinking a raw egg for breakfast) so that we know exactly how unlikely the love affair will be.

Really, though, I think Hollywood is trying to tell us that people who go to bakeries are plenty more charming than people who drink raw egg protein drinks while looking at their Rolex. And I’ve never known them to lie before.

Botony Monotony

Having been admonished, I suppose I should update. As you can see, I’m awfully good at following directions, and that especially pertains to direction in cap-locks.

At my work-place today they served free BBQ sandwiches, and since I love things covered in sauce (BBQ sauce, free sauce) I stuffed my face, commenting between bites how entirely strange it is to serve BBQ in the workplace. We are often being reminded to present a clean and somewhat approachable face to the public and to this end BBQ grub seemed entirely illogical. But I wouldn’t look a gift-BBQ sandwich in the mouth. [I didn’t even bother to find out what kind of meat it was, so I wouldn’t know what sort of animal to find this proverbial mouth on, anyway.]

Fittingly, this tremendous meal backfired overwhelmingly, because I’ve catapulted downward into a post-lunch slump. I feel ever so much like a nap and I’ve adopted a distinct desk-slouch. I’m highlighting so slowly that the freaky and prolonged highlighter squeak is really maddening.

Such is my dreary fate on a Friday afternoon. But there is an exciting anecdote to follow.

A certain manager in my workplace gave us reception types some fake flowers in a silly vase for our desk. Now, these flowers were a really outrageous color and showed up somewhat dramatically against the boring flagstone decor of my desk. With eerie regularity, patients have taken to approaching the desk, often even stopping cold in the hallway to stare beforehand, and fingering these fake flowers. Really, there were several gawkers everyday. After a few moments they would invariably comment on the color and ask if they were real.

I’ll admit it; at first I didn’t know if they were fake or real (I, after all, had not spent the last few moments petting them) and I would express this as politely as possible. But over a few months their unwavering brightness assured me of their immortality and I grew annoyed with the interruptions.

For the last few weeks I have struggled against a desire to ignore people asking about the plant. I wanted very much to instruct the curious parties to poke their fingers into the soil and feel the lifeless Styrofoam heart of the plant and to see for themselves that it was no agricultural marvel. Nothing more remarkable than a little corporate schmoozing.

But I’m too much of a pansy for such direct confrontation, so I took the flowers and disposed of them. It was very satisfying. And this blog is hopefully sufficiently satisfying to requesters.

I'm pro procrastination

I thought of a really great idea for my return to the blog arena last night when I was falling asleep. I quite clearly recall reminding myself to remember the idea, and repeating it to myself to be sure. Quite obviously, since I am biding my time here typing away, I definitely forgot about it.

Shamefully, I didn’t forget about my blog. I wish that I could say that I had forgotten about it and had since been happily cured of my internet amnesia, but really I’ve just been madly avoiding writing. I’ve considered it many times. I have been reminded oh-so-gently by my admiral boy-companion. There have been many days that I’ve been at work, staring in wonder at the automatic spring-operated Post-it dispenser and considering bloggish thoughts.

But instead of laboriously opening up a Word document, I have elected to do a mess of other things. Like getting my wisdom teeth removed and surrendering my face to the dread swell disease for a week. Or failing at job interviews and sobbing into my pleated skirt. Also procuring matrimonial engagements.

I would consider going on here, and whining about the obnoxious sweats-wearing cell-phone obsessed families in the waiting room (why is this a common theme in all waiting rooms?) or about how I want to read some fluffy news stories that aren’t at all about Obama, but I just can’t find any, but I think I’m going to stop here.

I would very much rather read this Fitzgerald story I am in the middle of, and continue my homage to the alter of procrastination.

Thinking frugally

It seems that I will soon be making a large and car-shaped purchase. As a result of this I have renewed my interest in being a paranoid and frugal penny-pinching-type shopper.

Currently I'm asking myself: Are alternatively shaped pastas the critical missing link in my food budget?

Car stoppin' and name droppin'

Today my car abandoned me in the parking lot of a Borders Books. It was around 10 am and because my car is a particular breed of malicious, it often alerts the thwarted driver to its internal distresses by self-activating the blaring alarm. This alarm can only be de-activated by re-connecting the battery twice and playing “You are My Sunshine” on the horn (or by some shit equally cryptic) that I can never successfully perform.

As the moms-in-crocs shot me dirty looks I wondered why my car has a problem with my dress shoes. The recent streak of rebelliousness seems to correspond eerily well with any occasion that I don my shiny black “wouldn’t you love to employ a doofus like me?” shoes. This morning I was spiffed up for a career fair. Recently my car has stranded me following a job interview.

Maybe it just knows that as soon as I procure something vaguely resembling a legitimate employment I will trade it in for something in a more soothing color and petroleum bracket.

So I have been reading the latest book of mini-essays by a certain popular American author that I would feel a little too cliché namedropping. He mentions frequently that he “doesn’t drive” and relies on friends, public transit, walking and the occasionally chartered car for transport.

What a wise fellow.

Something icky for your Tuesday.

I am annoyed with my lunchmeat for not pretending to be a more wholesome staple.

Sandwiches being a very important part of my theory on eating, I usually spend some small part of the day selecting the choicest ham in the Tupperware for my lunch. This morning I was trying to get a few slices for my sandwich and was very frustrated with the way that it was all squashed together and crumbly, like one big handful of puesdo-meat.

This imagery pretty much grossed me out and put a swine-shaped damper on my appetite. Should I be eating something that doesn’t have enough nutritional integrity to hold its shape? Quickly paranoia set in. What about my mayonnaise, when did it expire? *

So here’s my plea to you, makers and packagers of cheap meat: try a little harder to conceal the gunky, miscellaneous pig-part origins of your product, because you are disturbing my feeding patterns.

*My mayonnaise expires in April 2009. Furthermore, I suspect that this might be the first time in my life that I have typed the word mayonnaise.

I'm easily tricked before noon.

In the early morning I was tricked into getting excited by a false railroading tramp. In my defense, I am never entirely at my best in the mornings, mostly because I never allow enough time to properly wake myself up before I shuffle out of the house. Being anti-breakfast, I used to allow only 15 minutes from my bed to the drivers seat of my damned and unreliable vehicle.

I shudder to acknowledge that my efficiency has decreased chronologically until I now need 30 whole minutes. However, since my beautification routine has gone unaltered I’m pretty sure that I spend that extra 15 minutes either pressing snooze or making sandwiches. My old roommates used to remark that I had a certain “sleep face” for the first hour following getting out of bed that involved swollen eyes and an expression of general distaste. In hindsight, this may have just been a nice way of saying that my head looks weird before I put my glasses on, but I'm digressing.

So anyway, this morning I was sitting at a stoplight on my way to work when a young fellow dashed between the gleaming white mass of my car and the truck in front of me, making his way into the train-yard on the right side of the street. I observed his departing form against the backdrop of the boxcars: flannel shirt, knapsack, and dirty sneaks.

Now I’ll admit that I’m predisposed to thinking about hitching rides in boxcars. Not for myself, obviously, since I’m not into being rattled about and smokin’ tabaccy. But I did recently venture with my quite obliging boyfriend to Jack London’s cabin, and I read The Road (his tract on all things hobo-ing and devious) in preparation.

So I’m watching this kid walk off and I’m thinking to myself, “This guy is certainly about to hop on the underside of this train and see America in some fit of anti-capitalist idealism, getting jailed for vagrancy and joining populist armies all Jack-London-style.”

When I passed him it turned out that he was carrying a gourmet iced coffee beverage with a mighty dollop of whip cream, so I might determined that I was probably mistaken. I’m always disappointed when a possible tramp turns out to be a pointedly disheveled youth.

In other news, today I made a massive commitment to my traitorous car and bought one of those little tape-player-converter things. I know, I know, I’m about 10 years late in electronic trends. But until recently I abstained almost entirely from driving, so I was never particularly concerned with entertaining myself in route. But now I can play my little not-Ipod MP3 thinger to my hearts content.

ALSO. I’m reading Sarah Vowell’s newest book, and I am ashamed to say while it’s good, it’s not nearly sappy enough. I was utterly entranced by her complete obsession with Lincoln in Assassination Vacation, as showcased in her lengthy speculations about how it would feel to cradle the weight of holding Lincoln’s bleeding head as he died.

This newest one is mainly facts with a generous sprinkling of very good zingers. Explanations blaming the uninteresting puritans as the crippling factor in this comparision will be firmly ignored.

Are oversized blazers okay again? And other questions.

I was wondering if perhaps it wasn’t a little too Seinfeld to blog about my trip to the dentist. But a little soul searching assured me that Seinfeld is now too removed from the gooey-grey membrane of social consciousness to do me any harm at all. After all, that Seinfeld chick got herself a new show and no longer does that big-in-front hair thing or those over sized blazers (both of which I found mysterious and intriguing). Furthermore, it’s either discussing the dentist or self-analyzing why I totally choked during the interview I had today, mainly as a result of its location in some big art-y loft with splatter paint and a mandatory legion of artsy folks loitering beautifully around.

So, I went to the dentist yesterday about a toothache. Previously I had never had anything resembling a toothache, and mostly associated the term with people crying and tying strips of cotton nonsensically around their heads. But apparently it’s just pain located in the tooth/gum region. After spending some time in the waiting room (no clocks in there, just plenty of comfy canvas chairs) I was escorted into an examination room.

Shortly my doctor/dentist/fellow bustled in and after lowering his substantial mass onto a stool briskly informed me that he was quite sorry, but I would have to postpone my deployment to the Middle East to allow time for a root-canal.

Endeavoring to be debonair I mumbling “Excuse me?” and waited while he leveled a patronizing look in my direction.

“There is no way around it, I’ve just been looking at your X-Rays,” he informed me, having apparently mistaken my awkward confusion for anger. Oh yeah. No dentist, you will not keep me out of the blistering heat and warfare.

At this point I was flabbergasted. Please excuse me while I air some very trite military stereotypes, but I was amazing that he had mistaken me for an enlisted lady. I was sitting cross-legged on the examination chair, in all of my sloppy glory (the dental assistant had advised me to take out my “hair clippies” for the X-Ray) reading a magazine article on internet dating after forty (“A match made in cyber heaven?”).

Eventually I managed to convince the doctor that I had no military affiliation (“So your husband is being shipped out?”) and that I was not 27 or named Sarah. Thus mollified, he wandered off in search of her, and I was to my own devices for another hour.

Continuing on this theme, I had some comments to make about wisdom teeth. I want to talk about them because a set of impacted wisdom teeth is the source of my discomfort, and because I was lectured on all manner of wisdom tooth protocol by my dental assistant in the waning hours of my visit. She told me that most people have them out around 16 (a time when I was of course busy mystifying the local orthodontist with my chronic bad choice of bracket colors) and that I should have had them out long ago.

This is probably true, but the thing that I took some issue with was the association of anything with the word wisdom in it with a 16 year old. I know that I was certainly not wise at 16 and that there didn’t seem to be anyone particularly sage amongst my peers. I would summarize my mentality as a 16 year old by mentioning that I owned a hat with a propeller on top of it and suspected that the cruise control on my blazer was a “booster.”

For that matter, I can’t profess much wisdom now that they’ve decided to make a surprise appearance and I’m quite aged beyond the average.

Final comment on wisdom teeth: one of the few facts that I retained from a disastrous Human Evolution Biology class that I took is that the occurrence of wisdom teeth is slowly evolving out of humans now that we have more subdued eating habits. Consequently, as time passes fewer and fewer people will probably have them.

In conclusion: I take my wisdom teeth as a personal Neanderthal insult to my intelligence and I will treat them as such, by taking the antibiotics prescribed to me to stop their kooky inflammatory fun.

Friday is chip day.

On Monday I was all set to write a blog about some silly lady-oriented thing when I was interrupted by a most distracting statement spoken by a co-worker.

Then on Wednesday I plotted to write out the story of the distracting statement, and came up with a much better opening line than the above one, but I got too busy with work to finish it. And because I am a bashful and paranoid person, I deleted it without saving it, and so that really killer opening line is completely lost to posterity.

Yesterday I was too busy googling various combinations of the words “money” “chevy?” “check engine light” and “whirling noise” to be bothered with wasting keystrokes on a blog entry.

So today is Friday, and it is overcast. And since the pretentious builders of my current work station decided that overblown windows are more earthy and art-y than glaring artificial lighting (however will I photosynthesize?) it’s pretty dark and dreary in here. As a result I am yearning madly for either a nap or a soda. (Inconsequently I am forbidden from having either at my desk, but one is more harshly policed than the other, so I suspect that the afternoon will pass with me pounding my keyboard with the dread sugar fingers.)

Speaking of things both dread and dreary, I got a job rejection e-mail this very day and since I find that I can be excessively chatty when both chipper and enraged but am quite tight-lipped when glum, I will settle with giving the cliffnotes (does anyone remember when people were using that website called Pink Monkey to cheat at school) of the aforementioned events.

“I have some pictures of fairies that I’d like to show you.”

That was the alarming statement made to me by a co-worker on Monday afternoon. To my discredit, my first reaction was neither wariness nor disbelief but instead a distracted, knowing nod. Only last week this same co-worker seized my hand and while I squirmed nervously (sugar fingers, remember?) informed me that I had a shoddy life line and that my “money line” was all scrambled (like I needed telling).

You see, people are always picking me out as an interested listener to their sci-fi uber dork tales. [GIANT, GLEAMING NOTE: I love uber dorks and their tales.] I’m not at all an unwilling listener. It’s just disconcerting to me that people always know that they can relate their stories about fan-fic editing and learning to speak elvish.

How can they tell? I don’t wear my Sailor Jupiter t-shirt in public and I sold all of those Buffy novels on E-bay years ago. Maybe it’s a glandular thing.

I just discovered that the highly commercialized short story anthology that I’m reading has a story by Arthur Miller, so I’m going to go attend to that.

Dogs can climb chain-link fences.

I was very distracted last week by my search for employment and various betrayals (artistically rendered by my car with special malice) that I did not write. Not that I feel guilty about it or that I am a blog whiner, but I just thought that I would mention it. In an off-hand way, you understand.

Even though I was too preoccupied to actually perform my blogging duties, I won’t have you going around thinking that my brain was barren, completely free of the pointless sort of commentary that I find suitable for the Internet. On the contrary, I opened my Word program several times last week with the great intent of writing something driveling. But I found that after I had set my window to the correct rambling settings (10 point font, 75% zoom and Print Layout view) I was utterly unmotivated to continue.

So back by popular un-demand, is a list of the things that I neglected to blog about recently.

A) I spend a hearty chunk of my day cruising down the freeway, listening to various yelping DJ’s hawk their stations and while I’ve got no problem with pre-paid self-aggrandizement, I really hate when radio stations run little sampler-platters of the sort of music that they play. In my experience it nearly always leads to a severe disappointment.

For example, an ad might go something like this: “This is blad-blah-blah FM, playing the best music ever, in the best regional subsection of the best state ever!” and be followed by a loud animal call and a series of 5 second spurts of a few songs.

If you are an easily appeased individual like myself, you probably nod along with these partial songs in distracted appreciation. However, I inevitably find that the entire song that eventually follows this compilation is totally crap. And so now I greet these ads with wariness, hoping that each semi-decent fragment will continue to its full length, instead of stopping short to make room for a more obnoxious song. But it never happens that way.

B) I am in a literary funk. And not the fun kind of funk, either. I just can’t seem to finish anything that I start and just meander around starting new things for the sheer joy of getting bored and giving up. On my bedside table there is a variety of ambitious (Daniel Deronda, assorted stories by Maugham, To The Lighthouse) and lesser ambitious re-read (Franny and Zooey, The Fountainhead) undertakings.

Here I would like to make some kind of play on words that incorporated “literature” and “littering,” but nothing really leaps to mind.

C) Twitter. Could it provide me with the happiness I once realized during the AIM away message hey-day of my college career?

Dropping-eaves

Best thing I overheard all day (and I spend my days eavesdropping so this should be good):



"Ohhhhhh man. I need me some Sega Genesis."

-Provoked by a discussion on the possibilty of money exploding forth from a person on impact.

Does double-sided wrapping paper qualify as environmental?

Being full of humbuggery, I guess I will continue my previous (and oh so premature) railing against holiday specialty items. Don’t freak out, I promise that I won’t talk about the early appearance of Santa statues in the Walmart during September or rattle on about the quantification of the holiday season and the real meaning of Christmas.

Oh no, secularize away, holiday season. I‘ll be at home polishing my “Happy X-Mas” Hanson CD and watching the neighbors put up those massively hideous inflatable snowmen on their balmy arid-plant landscaped front yards. But despite the fact that I was raised in a home where every holiday is stripped down to its most base gift-giving manifestation, I can’t help but quail when confronted with grade-school kids selling wrapping paper out of catalogs.

A co-worker placed a catalog suggestively on my desk today while pitching the yearning desire of an offspring to be a classroom best seller. She knew, she claimed, that I was a bit young for buying expensive wrapping paper and probably hard up for cash. Helpfully, she suggested the multi-purpose gift bags.

Since my day has been very slow, I have had no choice but to browse the catalog and ponder. (It’s a widespread weakness for magazines and catalogs…I love the Skymall.) After all, I couldn’t take the chance that sandwiched between the Elegant Rhinestone Picture Frames and multi-level candle holders there was something that I might need.

Like a tote-bag that has clear pockets on the outside were I can arrange my photos for display.

To conclude, (and one must conclude so as to commence furious working) one question haunts me: will I ever evolve into such a domestic and well-adjusted adult that I will be comfortable buying something costing 10 dollars and labeled “Item: 0226. ‘Ready, Set, Snow!’ Snowman Roll”?

Comments.

Holiday-oriented scrub tops for medical personnel...what an industry.

Also, did you realize that Jack London did time in the penitentiary for vagrancy? He also thinks that hobo-ing is the best way to advance one's writing chops. So maybe I'll take to the rails soon, since I am reading The Road and learning all of the appropriate hobo terminology.

Apparently "to kip" means to sleep.

Real quick realization

Some days I am somewhat intelligent and certain Americanisms just make sense. For instance, I generally roll my eyes whenever I hear someone compare something really nifty to sliced bread, but today I abruptly realized that yes, sliced bread is totally bitchin'.

The genius is right in the name: sliced.

Pita bread? Impossible to cut, and ergo, leakage of pita juices onto a person's favorite zippy. English muffin? Forget about cutting that with enough precision to ensure even toasting.

And since sandwiches are the most exulted of all bread-related meals and require two sections of similarly sized bread to accomplish sucessfully, I'd have to say that sliced bread is in fact, the best thing.

Excessive dia-blog.

Sometimes I feel a very keen compulsion to be spectacularly lazy and let my brain turn to mush and leak out of my ears. To be clear, I don’t mean regular laziness (a reluctance to lift things above my head, ect) to which I am a devoted subscriber, but a more ambiguous mental laziness.

I suspect that without the rigors of the school work that I was accustom to and lacking a proper employment, I’ll become a slack-jawed person who can’t piece together the phonetics of personalized license plates. I’ll spend my days mulling over the riddles on the back of the Fruity Pebbles box and being confused by military time. I have a strangely acute desire to never be outsmarted by my breakfast, so I have taken it upon myself to hamper the liquidation of my brains whenever possibly convenient.

Since I don’t have a TV and I hate sodoku like early New England hated the Quakers, I’ve been forced to find other methods of exercise for my brain-case. Usually I just read. However, since I am often reading, it doesn’t feel particularly productive.

So I try to read things that seem difficult (read: boring). And since I am by nature a boring person who is drawn to boring books (I avoid things that remotely imply adventure in favor of excessive dialog, usually regarding people who don’t have sufficient dowries), this quest requires a severe level of boring.

To bring this back around to a vague sort of point, I’ve been reading Daniel Deronda for the last few days, and it’s been kicking my ass. I’m moving through it as a snail’s pace and growing impatient with things that I would usually think just dandy (love between first cousins, getting your shoulder re-set by a blacksmith after a hunting accident where your horse breaks all of its knees). I am assailed by the tediousness of the wording. Jesus-in-a-juicebox, I’m on page 112, and where is this Daniel Deronda already?

Mind you, this certainly isn’t the first time that I have been defeated; my previous conquers include Ulysses and several huge books with a rearing horse and an evil knight in black armor on the cover. But I was surprised to find myself so daunted by good old George Eliot, since I am moderately fond of The Mill on the Floss (or at least I was until I rented the crap mini-series in misguided flurry of BBC fervor).

And yet, whenever I have time to read I find myself accidentally misplacing Daniel Deronda and searching out something I’ve read 200 times before. Hence the laziness and inevitable leaky brain.

Counting minutes; Counting pointlessly

Bad audio things come in pairs.

Today I heard:

1) Two people independently describe the rock-path at my workplace as “the yellow brick road” of Dorothy fame.

2) Two Alanis Morissette songs during one 30 minute drive.

Smoothies aren't worth it.

The desire for a smoothie today got me into a very unpleasant situation.

I know what you are thinking: smoothies are like a healthier milkshake and therefore above reproach. And I agree, there is nothing unpleasant about a smoothie. However, faulty planning can mar even the most perfect of fruit beverages. You see, I decided to go and get smoothies for myself and a few of my work-time compatriots during my break at 3 p.m* and 3 p.m.** is the worst possible time to go anywhere in a small town.

[*,** Note to build suspense and over-all word count: I have recently had occasion to brush up on the AP standards. As a result I know all sorts of things, like that one should write “Calif.” instead of C.A, and that my use of ** is rampantly inappropriate. Also, when you have occasion to say “goddamn” in a newspaper it is disrespectful to slap a capital “G” on there. Now I can “who vs whom” with the best of them.]

3 p.m. is the worst time to go anywhere in a small town for one simple reason: it roughly coincides with the moment that high schools roll back their pearly gates and free their frenzied denizens. And it would so happen that the smoothie joint of my choice (I’ll give you a hint, it involves two J's, and is the Starbucks for pseudo-hippies) was located at an unfortunate proximity to the high school. And the parking lot of the shopping center where the double “J” is housed provided many of these teenyboppers with parking.

As I halted before the crosswalk choked with teens, cursing the Jansport-ing masses, I tried to distract myself by reflecting whimsically on how freaky-weird the high-school thing is. Where else can you see people walking around eating straight from a bag of Doritos? People who aren’t homeless, I mean.

Far be it for me to say anything that might be construed as nice about the youth, but these kids looked damn elated to be released from school. I guess that daily joy is a mass-mentality thing that people forget about due to the sporadic nature of college socializing and classes, but I vaguely remember what it was like.

When I was in high school and before I had my driver’s license, I used hang out around the bus stop after school everyday with some kids who I assumed were socially adventurous, but in fact were just lax in hygiene. I really envied these kids (who walked home from school after my bus retrieved me) because I thought that walking seemed like the ultimate social event; the antithesis of a stifling bus ride home reading ahead in my English books. After I got my license I would troop everyday to the corner where most of “I read The Onion during computer lab, aren’t I clever” set parked their cars so that I might drive the four grueling blocks to work.

Sitting in my boiling hot car today in Jamba Juice gridlock, I tried to summon sympathy by recalling my love for my first car. It was a Chevy Blazer in a faded black, called “Tux-y” by my friend Amanda for reasons too geeky to relate. I was so proud if my car, with the hairbrush on the shelf below the dash, and a backseat full of strategically showy sci-fi novels (bad early- 80s stuff with faded yellow covers). I was particularly proud of the CD player (as I would later be strangely proud of the desk-top background on my computer) and I played unlabeled Beatles CDs and weird burned SKA (always an all-caps word for me) mixes that I kept in one of those CD folders on the sunshade.

When the masses vacated and I finally got to a parking spot this afternoon, I clambered out of my car and attempted to cross the street. Some lady in a grande “sand-colored” SUV braked to let me pass and added a haughty eye-roll to her hurry-up wave. Although mildly embarrassed, I understood completely.

With my short stature and my shitty car, she undoubtedly took me for one of the enemy. I am however a completely different breed of youthful blight: the under-worked post-collegiate secretary desiring a smoothie.

Lista? Listo.

Things that I am currently giving a chance:
1)Books by Charlotte Bronte other than Jane Eyre.
2)Bobby pins, in the service of harnessing my multitude of small-bangs.
3)The frequent rate that people are pick-pocketed in Disneyland, despite commercials and mottos implying general felicity.
4)Kettle-Korn.
5)Curtailing my internet reading habits: the news keeps getting more depressing.

Bonus footage---

Today I received an email from my sister containing only the following text:

“this week is weak ahahaha...i crack myself up”

Listless list

List of things that I’m currently refusing to give a chance:
1) Books by that guy who wrote The Notebook.
2) Rats as pets.
3) Buying the 2 liter of milk, even though we are using two one-liters a week.
4) Free live streaming of Olympics footage online, because although it is instantaneous it is silent: no commentary or human-interest bios.
5) Crucifixion art.

Machines: both laundry and vending.

Today I wasted the best handwriting of my life on the word “laundry.”

Usually my handwriting is terrible, with r-looking n’s and overly upright f’s and b’s. But today when I casually decided to make a list on the back of a window envelope with the company logo emblazoned on it, I spontaneously achieved flawlessly casual cursive.

And I am pissed (understandably, I warrant). If I had this one beautiful handwriting sample deep within the bowels of my fingers, why would I waste it on the word ‘laundry’? In my glee I tried to immediately continue my list with hopes to achieve the same penned majesty, but every other item came out in my typically spacey writing. I’m certain it’s gone forever.

Speaking of things that anger me unreasonably, I’m going to dabble in a little economic theory for a moment. I’ve always been one for chaffing my nose on the proverbial grindstone, and so I go to work everyday and make some small packet of monies. And with this money I buy goods and gas and lament like everyone else that prices are rising and especially that the job market is shitty, given my particular circumstance of job-searching.

“Yes,” I think to myself as I cruise along in my lumbering vehicle, listening to every moronic radio commercial blaring the word CRISIS into my ear. “Gas is hideously expensive.”

I absorb this daily and reaching back into the recesses of my brain I remind myself of what inflation means, and what a widget is, and how that the invisible hand is not just another creepy Kevin Bacon movie.

And yet, when I went yesterday to the vending machine at my work place to buy a Milky Way, I was enraged to find that it cost 90 cents. Vending machine inflation is the worst of all. I don’t want to hear any more pansies whining about gas prices; we should just thank our lucky stars that our cars don’t run on delightful caramel.

I would like to say that paying ninety cents for a Milky Way is the worst vending machine experience that I’ve ever had, but unfortunately I have a long history of ugly vending machine encounters. I’m thinking specifically of an instance in during last spring quarter when I was refused my Skittles by a vending machine in a crowded section of Wellman hall. [Characteristic comment on spell checking: Skittles is a word? Really?] I decided to forgo the generally futile and noisy attack on said vending machine, and consoled myself by muttering profanities and slinking away into a nearby lecture hall.

A few minutes later I was seated in the lecture and reading the newspaper (I miss you, free news-print and terrible comics), when a girl silently approached me with a package of Skittles held in front of her. In confusion, I reached out my hand to receive them, wondering frantically if I should have any idea who this chick was. And here is the most mysterious bit of all: after handing me the Skittles, she didn’t offer any explanation or even giggle nervously as I would have, but walked straight back out the door. Just like a guardian angel of artificial fruit flavoring.

That, my friends, is a truly freakish vending machine experience.
As a final point: I’ve been working my way through A Passage to India, (motivated by my love for A Room with a View) and feel a great suspense. It has morphed into one of those court-dramas that hinges on racism, and I always find those sorts of plots most distressing. A similar weakness hinders my reading of slave narratives and led to my refusal of all war tales and holocaust memoirs for cheeky comedies of manners.

I considered buying denim online today.

I feel very ashamed for not having written in awhile. (There it is! I’ve said the thing that I pledged never to say. Farewell to whatever small fragmented amount of self respect remains to a person after they forfeit the larger portion to become a blog-person).

Awhile ago I commented that I was striving for consistency in writing, so that I might never have to make that awkward apology (blogology?) for not writing. My first motivation for this is so that I might separate myself from the throng of other internet-creepers who are making vague excuses into the abyss about finals, patchy internet or losing their space-bar finger to cheese-graters, followed by feverish promises to do better next time.

My other motivation was a wholly less offensive one. I had been hoping that I would be so inflamed with the joy of blogging that I would not lapse into breaks and that the very act of blog-having would transform me from my previous lazy identity into a more motivated person.

Quite apparently, that was not the case.

A more secret motivation was that I was hoping that writing more regularly here would motivate me to do other forms of writing more enthusiastically, or rather, with a more clinical regularity. To this end I am an absolute failure at prioritizing. If you’ll allow me to wax a bit melodramatic (the beauty is that you can’t stop me, I’m going to wax that shit on and off like the Karate Kid on crack), I’ll amble on a bit about my largely imagined problems.

As it stands now, my waking life is divided into five main segments of activity: A) working B) various social ventures C) reading D) eating and E) writing. [To say nothing of looking for a job, one that will enable me to afford the means of B through E in a more permanent fashion, as that is much too dreary an issue].

Two of these things (eating and working) are inescapable to some degree and therefore might be regarded as hostile, but both are mitigated by an ability to combine with other more pleasant factors. Para example, at work I sometimes socialize or read and I daily consume food between the hours of 11 30 and noon in the break room. Similarly, eating is very often combined with socializing and when it is not, I elect to read while eating. (I have perfected a great strategy for not getting Cheetos dust on the pages of a borrowed book. It involves agility and an affinity for white socks. Trade secret).

Because of its inherent solidarity as an activity, writing comes in at the bottom of the pile. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, it’s that I have an amazing ability to make excuses against doing it. I’m doing it right now.

But on the upside, I can post this blog and pretend like I was productive today.

Musings a la Monte Carlo

Things I was considering today while driving to work…

1) I should think that the very worst job would be to work in an airport restaurant. Just consider it. Everyday you would get up and put on your uniform and special no-grease shoes and head off to work. Your commute would consist of a daily battle against airport style traffic with no rewarding little peanut pack (or vacation, whatever) to sustain your goodwill. All of this followed by a whole day of dealing with grumpy travelers and skeezy business fellows, clipping your shins with their rolling suitcases and drinking whatever a “highball” is. [Note: Probably I will have this job soon, since I have proved to be hideously unemployable in the post-collegiate sense.]

2) I forgot my cell phone but remembered Brideshead Revisited, because I am a lady of impeccable priorities.

3) I really hate it when people in the work place refer to a certain f-starting explicative as the “f-bomb.” I’m relatively certain they aren’t aware of how silly this appears in the middle of an otherwise civilized situation. Since we’re all adult-sized people, I should like to see people either manning-up and just saying it, or thinking of an alternative phrase meaning “well, this situation has gone to all sorts of hell” that you aren’t too chicken to utter. I personally love to curse; it’s a shortcut when explaining your feelings.

4) Today I saw a personalized license plate holder that said “Janis Joplin: I Miss You.”

Rags to rich-ish

I went this weekend, being much overcome by issues pertaining to the search of employment and, having three days off of work with which to tarry as I pleased, with my boyfriend to the illustrious casinos in proximity to Lake Tahoe.

Our way was beset with many delays; our straining climb to the glorious summit that doth overlook the more minutiae mountains and less ambitious peaks was plagued by a determined stretch of road labor and we found ourselves often halted, having to content our eager feasting eyes upon the glossy rear bumpers of many a SUV. Finally, without a little labor, we reached the summit and descended with the grace of gravity so often gifted to weary travelers, our tumulus emotions soothed by the lilting tones of the Beach Boys.

Upon arriving in our destination we embarked immediately (though a trifle delayed by a whimsical pause on the sandy beach, standing fully dressed betwixt persons in various states of disrobe) upon a tour of the various residences in order to find the one most suiting to travelers of our station and means. One residence in particular, which I shall not stoop to grace with a mention by name, though most shall know it by reputation and sheer size of facilities, was dismissed on the grounds of a prevailing odor so offensive to our sensibilities and yet so common to facilities employed in the business of gambling in states beyond our own.

Following a prodigious debate we elected to patronize a residence of middling size but exemplary cleanliness and agreeably situated in relation to the casinos. The room possessed a television and charmed me with the delicately folded towels prominently displayed; however, my boyfriend heartily lamented the softness of the bed as detrimental to the alignment of the spine and various other maladies of the back. He was appeased only by the presence of a spa, which we concluded, when used in conjuncture with overly forgiving bedding, would do a suitable job in counteracting, or at the very least minimizing, pain procured by sleeping.

At the casino we were an admirable success. Having indulged overmuch at the buffet, not surprisingly considering my own indisputable fondness for pizza and potatoes, we entered the casino with our funds depleted shamefully to the effect of 3 dollars between us. Despite our humble store of cash we triumphed both in games of skill and by placing ourselves strategically to result in the receipt of beverages free of charge, and saw ourselves richer by 35 dollars when the Beatles tribute band of much renown heralded the end of the evening by conceding to be photographed with the humble likes of myself.

For sooth, in my experience I have found vacationing to be the cure for all ills incurred in daily existence of the mundane kind.

Lawn art, it's always ugly.

I know it must be tiring for me to always be puttering on about such-and-such book that I read to console myself for such-and-such mini-tragedy, but as your (you, they, them, Internet, ect) feelings mean squat to me, I'm going to do it yet again.

[Side note regarding my spell checker: when I neglected to capitalize Internet and lazily left clicked upon the red-lined word to view my correctly spelled options I was shocked to see the first one was “INTERNET.” We get it; the Internet is hellsa important and brought us life-altering amounts of free information, bloggity blogs and Neopets. I don't think there is any reason for a full CAPS option, however.]

So, to venture forth with my tirade. Yesterday was crappy as crappy days go and as I love to wallow I had set my sights on being self-indulgent when I got home from work. As I drove I toyed with the idea of spooning ice cream from the tub, passing it perilously over the DVD player to my mouth without removing my eyes from the television where a loop of MASH eps would be playing, but as I drew more disgruntled with traffic I knew that nothing less than James Herriot would do.

There! Now you know my deepest and darkest Scottish secret. [My deepest darkest Middle Eastern secret? I cried while reading The Kite Runner on a plane.] For those of you who either live in a box, or aren't interest in British word-smut, Mr. Herriot is a fellow who practiced veterinary medicine in Britain in the thirties and uses the word “boot” to describe his trunk in his many quasi-fictional memoirs. He was in the war. What war you ask? The Great War. Actually I'm kidding; it was WWII.

I just can't help but feel up-lifted by the haphazardness of veterinary practice before penicillin. These fellows are always dashing out at night and washing up in a bucket to birth a cow (which is then laid in a nice box-stall in a bed of Yorkshire clover while the JH goes on a rant about how a new birth is always magical.) And practically every other story is about a lonely old salt who wears a cloth cap and has no companionship beyond his querulous sheep dog. I eat that stuff up.

I first discovered these books when I was a sloppy little youth who wanted to be a vet when I grew up. This may comes as a shock for those who know me now as a easily panicked and nervous sort (and particularly shocking I'm sure to those who have to suffer through my squeamish shrieks during any suggestion of blood on the television) but I was sure that I was destined for a life of helping animals overcome colic. I even indulged in this Sterling North-esque fantasy where I had cured a friendly otter and built a small river in the back of my vet-house in which it swam playfully.

Since then I have thankfully recovered my sanity and want a nice indoor job that rarely (if ever) requires me to consider the complications to twin lambs in the birth-canal. Despite this, when my bike tire blew this morning I was certainly glad that I hadn't quite finished the story where JH is assigned to measuring ponies in the horse show and people try to swindle him with their rural trickeries.

Misplaced work ethic

This little sucker is both economic and inspirational around the workplace. I'm pretty much an artist, which would make me almost well-rounded.

Ps, I've been corrected. Apparently there is a drive-thru at the Dixon Subway, a real break through in deli accesability.

Optimism shmoptism.

I’m pretty awful at a lot of things, but using the drive-thru might take the cake. I can never seem to get close enough to the window to make the change and food transactions work smoothly. I once even had to open my door to receive the 1.35 that the disdainful burrito girl who was hanging out the window was attempting to hand to me. I get a minus ten at life skills that yield poor nutritional choices. It all leads me to wonder why there is never a drive-thru option when I want a deli sandwich.

Can't I combine my love for a nice ham sammy with my pointed avoidence of other humans?

Today I have been a massive complainer; it's very invigorating.

Have you ever noticed that I never post over the weekend?

Hyperbolisms

Worst thing I saw today:

A woman using the pants part of her overalls as pants, but disregarding the shirt-part and leaving it to trail behind.

Best thing that I heard today:

“I was forced to watch CNN; apparently the economy is bad. I will not be buying a jeep.”

Best thing ever:

Reading detailed descriptions of domestic tasks on the prairie. Reading about prairie cooking makes me hungry, even though I would probably never eat a slab of salt-pork from a barrel after some matronly lady grilled it up on a skittle greased up with a hunk of lard.

I would never go near the Amazon river.

Earlier today I was aimlessly surfing around in the interweb. Quickly I hit all of my compulsive checks: various comics, several email addresses, facebook, facebook, facebook, job trafficking sites, blogs of acquaintances, myspace, and finally the blogs of people I don’t really know. Finding myself with time still to kill, I settled before the soul-sucking abyss that is Amazon.

Generally, I am no huge fan of Amazon, a surprising occurrence considering my tendency to sink my spending money into books. I don’t know exactly what it is that I don’t like, maybe it just freaks me out that they have a “grocery” section (see previous post for additional rebellions against modern convenience).

However, I’m not too proud to browse the “Your Recommendation” section of Amazon when I am scraping the scummy bottom of my internet entertainment barrel. I was introduced to this phenomenon last December when my Older-Younger sister became obsessed with the function while creating a wish list. She called me up in a great tizzy and informed me that she wasn’t sure how, but Amazon had guessed very astutely that she would want to buy the Mighty Ducks trilogy on DVD. She then proceeded to fill her wish list with items that Amazon had troubled itself to identify quite correctly for her.

I’ve never been too amazed by the items recommended to me, but that certainly doesn’t stop me from looking. It’s rather like calling up Miss Cleo from someone else’s land-line; it’s free and it’s somewhat flattering to hear other people guess at your personality.

[Short delay, is it totally dating myself to reference Miss Cleo? Is that retro? Are her commercials only playing on Nick-at-Night between eps of Full House?]

Unfortunately, I didn’t want any of the books, DVDs, shoes, hardware or linens recommended to me today. Not that I would have purchased them, but it would be nice to know that my previous purchases [read: books] would have suggested something more flattering to the Amazon mastermind than a Nimbus 2000 lamp and three floral table clothes.

Aaaaaand, speaking of linens [stop here if you’ve already heard my spiel about linens; I’ve been dragging it all over the wider Sacramento area for a week] I’ve been having some thoughts. I was recently reading Moll Flanders by DeFoe, which is a novel that focuses in the early part a great deal on capturing rich husbands by pretending to have a totally bitchin dowry. At one point, after having cajoled her husband into accepting her diminished wealth, Moll rewards him for his loyalty by revealing an additional dowry of…linens.

Back in the early modern period having towels was like having a Hummer. As an individual with about 40 towels and at least two pairs of blue sheets, this has always been a very perplexing concept. It sort of makes me want to hoard my linens against the impending downward spiral of the economy. In like, wooden chests with sprigs of some fragrant plant and ladles stuck in between them.

Given the cheapness of my linens/ladles and complete distrust of fragrant plant, this would be completely unnecessary, but I suppose I’m just feeling dramatic today.

Can you make money on a Denny's franchise?

Today I managed to get peanut-butter on my shirt hours before I considered eating my sandwich. I suspect that it might have happened during the sandwich creation process, during which I was admittedly half awake and recklessly flinging sticky knives around, but all that I know for sure is that it’s ten-thirty on a Monday and I’ve got Jiffy crumbles on my shirt. Probably this augurs an exciting and stimulating day ahead. Or perhaps not.

While I’m in this vein of discourse, I might as well continue with more of the mundane. Being a determinedly disheveled sort, I’ve never thought too hard about the catalog-type sale of cosmetics. However, this morning an old bitty handed me an Avon catalog as I shuffled through the door to work and I can’t abide rebuking the elderly so I shoved it into my bag amongst the rest of my belongings. [Pop quiz: What are the other contents of my bulging bag? Answer: The Great Short Works of Willa Cather, the aforementioned peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, sparkling new Bluetooth ear piece,* a pack of Big Red gum, a stick of deodorant, keys, phone, woefully empty wallet, two rogue dimes, a teeny thinger of sunscreen, and one chilled can of Ruby Red Squirt.]

Up until today my thoughts regarding person-to-person cosmetics selling were confined to the stereotypes about Mary Kay that I gleaned from reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Café about 47 times when I was 16. I suppose it’s not too shocking, considering that the novel was instructive in forming a whole passel of my youthful stances, such as my generous opinions about the homeless, my liberal views about same-sex marriage and my distrust of people name Dirty Bird burying fish-heads in the garden.

In short, F.G.T.a.t.W-S.C taught me that if you sell Mary-Kay, you can get a great career and a pink Cadillac that symbolizes your newfound joy in life/acceptance of your own personal appearance/womanhood/blah blah depression in the depression. With this cheerful image in mind I opened my Avon catalog expecting to gape at pricey cold creams and magical lip-glosses. Imagine my surprise at finding strange items intermixed with the cosmetics, like underwater digital cameras, BBQ lamps, braided Comfort Flip-Flops, and beach-towels emblazoned with the motto of every MLB team.

Strangely, I went directly from having zero expectations to being disappointed. I hate diversifying for my convenience. I’m of the mind that I’d like to buy meat from a butcher, and bread from a baker and sneakers from a very mod cobbler. How I covet inconvenience.

In other news, my boyfriend and I threw an inside-BBQ (turkey-burgers via stove top served on Wall-E plates) for the Fourth of July over the weekend, and it was a quite successful, though occasionally mildly disturbing, event. Regardless, in the spirit of the great American Revolution, I give you a picture of the pills just consumed by my esteemed co-worker.

A very patriotic apothocary at work.

*I don't wear my Bluetooth headset! I'm not a dork! I just don't want to be pulled over and have an officer realize that none of the lights on my dashboard work. Too awkward.

Is this the auto-mall?

Despite the fact that I hear about Marysville at the end of every city-list on every radio commercial, and despite the fact that I saw a freeway sign directing traffic toward Marysville today, I continue to disbelieve that it exists.

I've never seen it, and I've never had to account for the blank space in my geographical conception that surely must house Marysville.

Dumb name for a sub-city anyways.

Too many knick-knacks.

Further reflections on moving:

There must be some kind of physiological reason that certain disturbed citizens like myself hoard junk long after familiarity has eroded away the novelty. Do I need you, oversized dice? Do I, a tone-deaf and lazy individual, require 4 different harmonicas? Today I tried to find space for silly hats, tool belts, statues of Korean people and a bronze goblet that I won years ago in a crossbow-shooting contest at a Renaissance Faire.

Maybe the thing proclaimed my status in some overwrought script and phrases like “Crossbow Winner” or “Robin Hood in Training” or something I would consider keeping it. Unfortunately, I know that these goblets are just given out to youngsters willy-nilly and without honor, their cost already covered by the hideously inflated prices of the Ye Olde Juice of Jamba served on site.

Can people even drink from bronze? If I wouldn’t want to win a medal of it in gymnastics, then I don’t want to risk my health on it. Plus, that sucker is probably heavy, which is a huge determent where moving is concerned.

I guess the going excuse for keeping these sort of things (things= Gargoyle book ends, llama toy with real llama fur, framed internet comics, Jesus candle from the supermarket) is that they might make excellent conversation pieces.

I’m still waiting for someone to walk into my home and ask me point blank exactly (yet…. conversationally) what my intentions are in keeping a megaphone from my high-school beside an American Girls Christmas ornament, a collection of unclaimed rocks, keys and bouncy balls found on the ground, stacked atop a pile of readers from every course I took at college. Perhaps the ensuing conversation would bring enlightenment.

In other news, I’m reading two short story books cyclically, with no confusion yet. We shall see how this develops.

The "OF" Complex

Moving makes me feel awfully weird. And I am fairly certain that it is not just a shock reaction to the strain of lifting things (being the sort who writes primarily in cursive to avoid excessive lifting of the hand) but is instead the product of a more intangible funkiness.

[Aside: Man, I just can’t believe that “funkiness” is a real word. As I was typing it I was steeling myself to ignore the red line of Word, so ironically wiggly for representing the rigidity of spelling within the oppressive Word-world. And yet, no red line. I guess there is no other way to say “funkiness.” I could have said “a more intangible thing with elements of funk included.” I'm getting quite out of control, I know. Maybe I miss school.]

But back to moving. It’s entirely probably that I always get a little unhinged about moving because I yearn for the epic imagery of cheese-ball novels. In my youth I saturated my brain with books from the vast field of novels featuring sprightly young women as heroines in a more moral provincial past. Think covers of a “grass in motion” motif.

You know the sort of books I am talking about. The female version of your epic boy-and-dog tale, which often boiled down to girl-and-horse because no child in their right mind wants to read a book about a kitten. I was never happier than if these whippersnappers occasioned upon a horse that was untamable to all hard-hearted men-folk and easily won over by the offer of an apple or the playing of a fiddle, or maybe just automatically because the horse cleverly realized that he and this chick were similarly misunderstood by society, horses being great sociologists. The horse theme in this kind of literature is optional, but that stuff is gold. I could watch The Notebook about 30 times and never cry as hard as I would reading My Friend Flicka.

To return to my point (if I did indeed have one), these books warped my impressionable young mind and thus I suffer to this day from an “OF” complex. Oftentimes these books include the the name of the whimsical farm or region where the saucy young heroine lives in the title of the novel. Looking back, I guess it's possibly because these books frequently pushed a theme of ownership and home-making and the space that's being claimed is as important as anything else. And because it is important, it becomes important that you are “Of” there, to use the hokey phrasing. Hence the “OF"complex.

The prime Canadian example is the epic Anne of Green Gables series, featuring 8 whole books using the “Anne of whatever” title structure. But there is also American stuff like Rebecca of Sunnybook Farm. Or the Little House series, which doesn't state the OF so blatantly, but instead completely eradicates the main character Laura from the title and makes the House the constant [Farmer Boy excluded, ewww] and connects it with a series of “on” and “in”s. In short, the literature of my childhood taught me two things: tame a horse with some sugar cookies and a fiddle; and your home is a defining characteristic, or in some of the Wilder [ha..ha..] cases, more important than you altogether.

So moving makes me feel weird, because it deserves due consideration and weight. I spent many formative years (and long weekends in college) reading about people drawing their identity from their home and only conceding to leave their home in when sheer desperation left no other option or when dragged along by the cruel bitch of Manifest Destiny. Maybe I'm being too American today, but I can't help but want some sort of great gurgling reliance on my home. And although I adore my apartment to pieces, I wouldn't risk any sort of prairie fire to keep it, and I don't feel too bad leaving it.

Mostly I am nervous about my job interview tomorrow and rambling on insensibly.

Salmonella outbreak rocks my socks.

My mexican food experience is always so much better when I don’t have to ask for pico de gallo to be left off of my burrito. Thank you, pesky innards-dweller who thrives on red fruits and raw chicken.

Series of mildly related thoughts.

While plodding away at work this morning I succumbed to a fit of procrastination and took the opportunity to examine my water bottle from all sides. I always give my water bottle labels a thorough peeling, so it's not often that I get to gaze on the exciting line-drawings of mountains and streams name-plates. I was thus occupied when I realized something disturbing: water is a total show-off.

To preface, I love tap water. People are always gabbing on and on about how the water in Davis is distasteful (too liberal?) and whenever I’m not too busy guzzling water straight from the hose I take the time to disagree with this. It tastes perfectly acceptable to me.

My boyfriend and I are in the formative stages of a plan that requires drinking several dozen bottles full of sparkling lemonade, with the intent of filling them with marvelous tap water and stockpiling them in the fridge, thereby enabling us to constantly be lumbering about swigging from a chilled bottle held by the neck. [To be clear, that last sentence is both the longest in my blog thus far and a blatant digression.] Obviously, I am no anti-water freak with an ugly rock lawn.

And yet, the unbridled liquid ego of bottled water rankles me. There is no need for a Nutrition Facts panel when the answer for every value is 0 percent (based on a 2000-calorie daily diet). If you need to include it, you might as well mention things like 0 % water snake particulate matter, or 0 % crawdads disease, both of which concern me more than the fact that water lacks carbs. So you have no sodium, no calories and no sugar. Stop showing off. You also have no color. And I think that Sierra Mist, semi-transparent N-64 game systems and albinos can attest that having no color is bad news.

So, while reflecting on water I was reminded of the Willa Cather documentary that I watched last night (because I’m that kind of crazy party kid). In addition to revealing Willa Cather’s suspect sex life and history of the risky hair decisions, the documentary featured several melodramatic voice-over excerpts from her novels against a visual of casually wind-swept prairie.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I like about documentaries, the low-budget reenactment feeling. I’m quite fond of long dramatic shots featuring someone’s hand writing with a feather quill while a lilting voice reads the Gettysburg address or the personal correspondence of some hella religious corn farmer. I’m also keen on panning shots of cannons and flags with the noise of bullets whizzing and swords clanging. I even like a repetitive circling of a gallows accompanied by a noisy courtroom soundtrack, complete with audience shuffling and pounding gavel.

Anyway, in this Willa Cather documentary featured one such reenactment. A man and his packhorse were picture from the knee-down roaming listlessly in the desert in search of water. The narrator was reading from the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and explained that the priest was following his pack animal, hoping that the mule might sense water. There's some nonsense about a cactus casting the shadow of a cross, and maybe some metaphor about needing God almost (but not quite) as much as you need water. Eventually the super-star mule leads the priest to water.

It occurs to me that a water company might do much better to detail this story on the side of the bottle instead of including a Nutrition Facts panel.

PS, I'm reading The Way of All Flesh by S. Butler, which is very slow going, but offers important insights about the valuing your offspring. Por exemplo:

“His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and it did not spill things on the tablecloth at mealtimes or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did not quarrel amongst themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages become extravagant upon reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he would have to pay.”

Something afoot in the Great Clips.

This morning I got the best Great Clips hair cut of my life. Well, the cut itself isn't that great, sort of a botched job of taking two inches off all the way around [Is there ever a time when you feel more ignorant about the metric system than when getting a haircut? Is an inch one hundred centimeters or ten?]. Really, I rarely bother to brush my hair, and I'm not too picky about symmetry and weird things like body, when considered in hair seems like a contradiction in terms. I have been rocking the same middle-part hairstyle in a variation of lengths for the past, let's say, 7 years and I'm widely immune to the screw ups of hair cutteries that start with Great or Super. But this morning was entirely different.

I entered the Great Clips with mixed emotions. On one hand I was feeling gleeful and self congratulatory, since I had managed while biking through the shopping center to get close enough to the Office Max to cause all 4 of their automatic doors to open as I cruised past. On the other hand (the hand that isn't so easily swayed by the good omens reliant on biking prowess and the fact that no one patronizes Office Max) my last trip to Great Clips yielded a particularly awkward experience.

During my last haircut, I was asked by my very chatty and petite [read: midget-y] hairstylist to stand up for the majority of my haircut, so that she could get an even cut. Though I was inclined to point out that my slouching posture was hardly more conducive to cutting majesty than the chair, which I was mildly certain had been designed for the cutting of hair, I tend to be very shy with protests [read: a sucker]. So I stood, and tried not to feel like Zordon from the Power Rangers movie after he gets attacked and it is revealed that when Zordon is not encased within his grandiose smoking pillar he looks like an old man with a wrinkly garbage bag on.

Alas, it gets weirder. After a few moments of tip-toeing and chit chatting around, the stylist then requested that I remove my lumpy sweater, to prevent its scruffy and uneven exterior from interfering with the precision of the cut. Again I should have protested, explaining that since I am likely to be always somewhat disheveled, that it would behoove her to just cut my hair in its normal habitat. But, because I am an utter pansy, I soon found myself feeling like quite the woman of scandal, as I presume that only a woman of scandal would choose to take her haircut standing up wearing an undershirt and a very uncomfortable expression. Hence my overall reluctance.

Today however, my hairstylist was marvelously indifferent to me. She yanked the comb through my hair without the slightest remorse and without asking whether it hurt. Instead of reminding me several times to "keep your head down, please," she simply nudged my head back into place whenever I got twitchy. And, best of all, she never asked me my major.

This is the sort of customer service that I desire. A vast, unfeeling indifference that expedites the process by removing the presumption that I want to leave feel like I've left behind both hair off my head and some emotional weight off of my shoulders. Having lived in a very small town, I always endured the chatting of haircut-ladies about my sisters and community sports and grades with a bleary eyed (I never get to wear my glasses during a haircut) good humor because I thought that chatting during a haircut was a mandatory event, like tipping or the no-charge-blow-drying that you have to brush down once you get in the car.

But today I was quite liberated from my provincial notions by stylist at station number 3, who never bothered to pretend that she cared about me, my finals, my ambiguous future, my political agenda or the shitty windy weather, in the least. And since I didn't care too much about my haircut, we got along marvelously.

[See how non-nostalgic and irrelevant I'm being? I've heard that I'm getting out of control with the weeping over old term papers and wearing my old dormitory T-shirt underneath all of my clothes. I didn't even mention that I'm getting this haircut because I fear people will try and take my picture at graduation].