Better than fruit salad

When I check my work email, the “Bullitens” pop up first. There were several since I hadn’t been in since last Wednesday. This was my favorite:

We are looking for the bound volume December 1941 morgue book. If you know where it is, please put it on Rachel Davis’ desk as it is missing from the morgue room.

Thanks.

Morgue room. The mind reels.

META CORNER

Back when I first started doing internet journals and experimenting with HTML, I was a Constant Checker. I would reload a page to make sure all of my tables still were in the same spot I needed them to be. I would look them up in Netscape, to make sure it still looked okay. I would look up pages at school, where the computers had a different resolution. I would re-read the content several times at different parts of the day to make sure I was making at least a little sense. As time went on and I became more familiar with the medium I have sort of slacked off in this area, deciding that if I’m doing all this for pleasure, there’s no reason to be all anal about everything. WordPress has a very different set-up than some of the other hosts I’ve written on, and right at the beginning there were freaky things that’d happen with the text that made me get back into the habit of checking my own site and screwing up my stats reports. Usually it’s something picky like where a chunk of text breaks, or the wrong use of “then” which is embarrassing but something I wouldn’t really lose sleep over, (and something you probably don’t even NOTICE do you,) but sometimes bigger things go wrong and I have to go back and fix it. So if you clicked any of the two links in the previous entry about the “one” “person” who lives here (my point being: ME, since neither Anthony nor the late Walter live here technically. Those pages were linked to explain that. Hi. Still with me? It‘s hard I know. Here, let me get a piece of paper.) and were confused to be brought to two entries that really have nothing to do with living in a place, or singularity, or anything, I apologize. Apparently the number of the entry page changes when you post a new entry. It’s fixed now, so you can go back and read a sort of mushy/humorous entry and a sort of heart wrenchingly deflated entry if you’d like.

TONAL SHIFT

I am back from my slacker weekend, and not quite sure I’m ready for it. I did an alarming amount of stuff around here last night, but it was all Suzy Homemaker type stuff and very little in the area of school work. It’s nice to be back here — I like putting up Christmas decorations here at the new place and just being at the new place in general — but it’s not so nice to be in crunch time as the semester comes to a close. I’m a little scared of how this semester will wrap up because I have not been schooling as diligently as one should like. I feel like I say that at the end of every semester, but it’s really true this semester (again), and I am (again) hoping that I pass all of my classes, or at least do well enough to scrape by.

REOCCURING CHARACTERS IN MY LIFE

1. The slightly overweight southern-belle who talks a LOT but has a heart of gold.

2. A female friend that has a feature I am slightly envious of, whose family has a Rottweiler that is the sweetest thing on the planet.

3. The young, spindly crazy guy with brown hair and an unconventional, addictive smile who can (and will often, willingly,) walk like a gorilla.

4. A shockingly obvious pathological lair who is so sweet that you can’t help but hang out with them anyway, even though you never believe a word they say.

5. “Goblin boy.”

6. A short-for-his-build guy with curious hair and passions for very specific things like taking photographs of planets from a telescope or designing the surround sound equipment in his apartment, who you would think was very unpopular in high school but is in fact one of those charismatic nerds, who loves cooking with a burning devotion.

THE GOOSE IS NOT GETTING FAT, SO TAKE NOTE

Besides Amazon, I spend a lot of time and money here and here, and have wish lists at both places.

Tea thermos! Anthony and I are planning on getting a Go board set from the same website, but this is something I happened upon later, and something he probably wouldn’t go halvesies on that.

Have I mentioned the tiny mechanical turtles? They are worthy of repeating. Tiny mechanical turtles!

And you know. A whole bunch of this cheese, and several packages of the Berry medley, and a hearty red wine and we’ve got a stellar picnic scenario. Let’s go.

I had every intention of doing some productive things over my four-day weekend, but instead I’ve mostly sat around with my mouth hanging open, enjoying what a change of PACE this is. It just feels so nice to just sit. And do nothing. And not have to be at two different places that require my full, undivided, active attention.

Part of the sloth may be due to the fiscal frenzy of the parental units this entire break. My own personal household has barely enough income for the one person living there, and while I never go hungry there are things like tuna-from-the-can for every meal towards the end of the month. It is quite the culture shock, then, to experience your original home which is invariably far better off than you are, particularly if they are fronting most of your tuition. I have talked with fellow freshly-out-of-the-nest friends who go home and face similar treatment. Suddenly the Mom who would have you picking up buckets of sticks for spare change when you were in high school is scuttling around making grocery runs, or offering to buy you that movie you have your eye on, or offers to take you to Target just to “see if there’s anything we need.”

It goes beyond the straight up monetary possessions however. She freezes bags of soup. She writes recipes for other soups and some of the Christmas candy. You find a few of your favorite childhood Christmas CD’s freshly copied and waiting on the bed upstairs. You mention how you’ve always liked that little glass bottle she keeps sage in and later you notice it, rinsed and dried, sitting next to your cell phone and hat by the door. You get a pole to hang birdfeeders on, and she donates a few of her extra birdfeeders, plus seed. You came here with your brain and some dirty laundry, and you’re leaving with a whole car full of stuff. She notices your necklace is a little tarnished and offers to clean it, since she has silver polish.

It’s like stepping into the House of Healing in a video game. All of your health and HP gets restored, and all you can do in return is be lavishly thankful.

This is not just a Mom thing either. Dad and I made the mutually beneficial trip to the coffee store to stock up on our respective stashes, but then on Friday he took the car for some vehicular HP+ as well.

THINGS THAT WERE DONE TO MY CAR THIS WEEKEND

1. Replaced the belt
2. Fixed the oil-gauge malfunction
3. Oil change
4. Headlight maintenance — specifically, they were sanded with fine gauge sandpaper and then polished so that I could see with them again. This has been one of those problems that we considered going to the dealer for, to replace the covers, (since they really were quite bad, think opaque tan) but when we learned that it would be roughly $500 a light, we began searching for alternatives. This sand-and-polish kit does not solve the condensation problem, but it still helped immensely as I can now see the light bulbs. And I’m no longer questioning whether or not I actually have my headlights turned on while driving at night.
5. Wash and wax, plus an interior once-over that had not been done in years.
6. Rearview mirror re-attached

Aside from weeping at their feet, I don’t really know how to repay them.

AND WE OPEN WITH A TINY THOUGHT

This probably indicates how un-“hip” I am, but I am still always dismayed when people with the cutest icons — like a smiling hamburger — without fail say the snottiest things in internet forums.

THINGS ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND, EACH IN THREE WORDS

1. Skin tight jeans.

2. Livejournal clothing blogs.

3. Roughhousing in Dillard’s.

4. Text-ing whilst driving.

5. Nobody writes notes.
5a. (they type them.)
5b. (on their ibooks.)
5c. (ALL of them.)

6. Slanted-bangs hairstyle.

7. Large disposable income.

THE CONTENTS OF THE ONE-SENTENCE NOTEPAD FILES ON MY DESKTOP

1. there is nothing that is not beautiful

2. TUESDAY: Breakfest: 1.5 cups of coffee, 2 plain eggo waffles; Lunch: a can of salmon, several ritz crackers, a glass of milk.

3. Kreucht & Fleucht by Dominik Eulberg

4. is a foodstuff made from the gluten of wheat.

5. If you have several left feet and a pencil, you can ride a picnic to the moon

A ROUGH LOG OF CELL PHONE USAGE FOR YESTERDAY

1. A friend of mine from high school had called 3 times last week when my phone was dead. She’d left several sad-sounding messages. Called her back, had a long, breathless “here’s what’s been going on in my life for the last two years” update-focused chat, and then her call battery died.

2. Another friend from high school had called while I was at work, left a message to the tune of “now it‘s break week, let me know what you‘re up for.” I got his answering machine (excuse me: voice-mail-box,) and said I was a go for hanging out but I wouldn’t be in town nearly as long as everyone else. Have not heard back.

3. Megan had not called but I left her two messages, the first in song and the second while sitting on the toilet, both mentioning what great thing it is that we are seasoned phone-friends. That is always more apparent after getting off the phone with people (or recordings) that you haven’t had about eight years of phone-chat practice with.

4. Anthony’s brother, about six times.

He was going to pick up Anthony from work last, to go back to their home planet town for Thanksgiving. I had been the one to initially give directions. Mistakenly, I gave them the fun way, citing it at the easy way, (which is sort of true but not as easy as the conventional way which is up the main drag but through dozens of stoplights and cops which can be tricky and frustrating late at night). I called about 15 minutes after they were supposed to show up to see how it was going.

“Hey remember, when you get to E street, you take E street west. You’ll see the sign for E street east first, but that’s not the one you want. Go a little further, and turn left. On E street west. Okay?”

“Sounds good.”

A few minutes later I got a call:

“You said E street east, right?”

Sigh.

I buy a toasted cheese bagel about every other day from the coffee cart in the library. Nothing seems to stifle the mid-morning hunger crisis quite like it. Yesterday I was miraculously at the grocery store in the middle of the day, when the bakery was fully functional and all the shelves in the plastic pastry pantry were filled. Foolishly, I felt I could replicate my morning snack-time experience by purchasing a few asiago bagels and having them at home. They sort of smelled odd when I plucked them out*, but I thought nothing of it, mistakenly thinking it was some combination of the jalapeno and onion varieties near it. And Oh, what a mistake it was. This morning I took one out and the stench actually induced a little gagging. I began to toast it anyway, since I’m not very good at making decisions in the pre-dawn dimness of the kitchen without the help of caffeine and foodstuffs. Of course the heating up of the pocked surface accentuated the smell, which I could then define as distinctly urine based, and both the toasted atrocity and its untoasted brother made it straight to the dumpster, as I couldn’t bear the thought of these things sitting around in the garbage can stinking up the kitchen.

Nothing seemed to be innately wrong with the bagels. They had just been baked the day I purchased them according to the boastful labels and signs. So I don’t know then in King Soopers somehow bakes their asiago cheese mixed with a variety of limburger, or if the baker takes a frequent wiz in the dough, or what the deal is. It kind of freaks me out a little, since I get asiago baked products at a variety of places and scarf them down; I enjoy them as though they were chocolate-coated espresso beans laced with cocaine (okay, maybe not THAT much). So now I am worried that my asiago experience will taint all other asiago experiences, and that I will somehow either catch or project the smell onto the perfectly innocent and urine-free bagels, rolls or bread-slices, and I will be ruined.

The best part, though, was that the next morning as I was leaving I noticed one of the Dumpster Squirrels struggling to climb to the rim of the dumpster. In his mouth was an ENTIRE bagel-half that had been thrown out. He never paused to take a nibble or anything, but rather inched his way up the telephone pole, and then along the wire into the tree. (Quite the feat — the bagel was bigger than he was and probably equaled his weight.) I haven’t found a squirrel corpse, so I can only assume it wasn’t poisonous.

*I almost never use those little films of paper to retrieve baked goods, but rather look until I’m absolutely sure and then just go for it.

THINGS I DO DOZENS OF TIMES A DAY

1. Pop my thumbs, which really just takes bending them normally when it’s time.

2. Drink something, whether it’s water, a caffeinated substance or juice.

3. Wonder about some obscure human feature, like the way eyebrows and the nose on a face can look like a long-horned steer. Then spend a subsequent hour or so trying NOT to notice so that I can interact with people normally again.

4. Think of something funny, find something weird, or overhear something worth note, and jot it down in my notebook.

5. Bounce up and down in my task chair at work.

6. Repeat some happy sound or word to myself, often in increments of three. (Today’s is boot, boot, boot.)

7. Check my email.

8. Feel like my eyeballs are too dry, and worry that they are going to crack.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE, TIRE JACK OF VIRTURE

This is a small pathetic week because I only have three days of work and school, and then it is that Turkey holiday. You know, the one with the turkey? And the horn of vegetables? And the giant balloons? I know a lot of people who kind of get exasperated about this fake holiday, but I kind of like it. It used to mean traveling to Grandma’s house, which has always been a wealth of strangeness, and now it just means I get to go home for a few days and hang out with my dog. Mom and I will eat food, watch the parade, watch a little football, sit out on the porch even though it will be way too cold to logically do so, and so forth. I don’t get to leave until 5pm on Wednesday, owing to work, and there was a while there where I was going to have to spin on my heel and drive BACK at about 5am to make it into work on Friday, but because my boss is awesome I get then entire four days to laze around in Crazy Town until my head explodes. (Which usually won’t take much more than a day and a half.)

It is even more pathetic because many of my classes are letting out early or doing easy lame things, if they’re having class at all. The university does not let us take more than Turkey day itself and Friday off officially, since our winter break is so long, but many professors would just as soon go home like the rest of us. Today there has been lots of “Hey, I won’t be taking attendance on Wednesday. So you know. It’s up to you.” or “I will be holding office hours during class. So you know. Come by if you want, I guess.”

Here is a poem from a book I had to read for Eng 340:

John Edgar Dawdle married a little chicken
And went to live in a hatbox
Which stood near the castlewall; but
At 5 ‘o clock the king came and
Wanted to give them a thousand buttered Rolls-Royces,
Eighty barrels of turpentine-mellowed trout, a flute
Which he claimed had belonged to W. R. Mozart,
And half a glass of rounded ale.
So, not wishing to appear rude or ungrateful,
They restrung his tennis racket, subscribed to
All his magazines, and each wrote PEACE
On his behind; for he’d hurried over
Without bothering to dress. Oh, he was fine!
And they all stayed there…except him,
And Dawdle, and the pretty little chicken.

Yes.

It’s been an interesting semester.

ON WHY I WENT IMMEADIATLY, UNBLINKING, TO THE REMAINDER OF THE WINE UPON CROSSING THE THRESHOLD THIS EVENING

I was hit in the chest tonight by an announcement. The traditional, or at least socially acceptable, reaction would have been congratulations and happiness. What I feel can best be described as fear for the people involved, anger, sadness, disappointment? disbelief, worry and a hint of selfish self-righteousness. These reactions are based not on personal experience but rather watching several people close to me go through some horrible things, things that have broken minds and shattered lives. Things that possibly could have been avoided with a little more thought and a little less blind-leap-of-faith kind of gusto.

Not to be dissing on the gusto. I’m a big fan of gusto, just maybe not in the area of Major Life Decisions.

Do you ever grow out of this? At what time do you stop sucking in your breath through your teeth when someone announces Things? Big things like engagements, pregnancies, moving to a new place together, or joining the Army or the Peace Corps? I remember when a girl shaving her head in your 7th period chemistry class could stir similar gumbos of emotion, except for me in that case such a reaction would be clouded by the unbearable yearning or jealousy. Damnit. I could shave my head. Right?

The amazing thing was that, bad choice or not, her best friend was there, to grab her hand and say “absolutely” and push it even further into public awareness. It was almost equally as striking. I don’t know how to grasp the hand of something I disapprove of and warmly call more attention to it. To ask for rousing praise.

That isn’t what happened, but I bring this up because someday — I worry — I’ll need to do this. I need to make sure I’ll know how.

COULDN’T SHE GET — DROWNED?

Before something went and BROKE my MIND, Anthony and I drove down to Louisville to watch a showing of Sunrise with live accompaniment. Simply dazzling. The venue was a bitch to find, (mapquest led us to several non-existent roads and one that ended up being a dead end — I hereby boycott mapquest and invite you all to purchase a proper map and do the same,) but was also delightfully small with shiny wooden floors and interesting interior architecture. We were warmly introduced to the film by the man who composed music specifically for the movie. It was a very tight piece of music — several distinct themes and refrains — and so seamless you would have to occasionally look back down at the waggling bow of the violin player to remember that the music you were hearing was LIVE and not pre-recorded. The movie itself was charming, very melodramatic, and was also weirdly reminiscent of most of Woody Allen’s films, which makes me wonder if he’d seen it when he was lonely in film school. I am as yet too lazy to find out.

The venue was humble, as I think I have mentioned. We sat on folding chairs and were asked to help stack them when the movie was over, which reminded me of girl scout events or yore and made me smile. We were served Oreos, Chips-a-hoy, and cans of fruit juice during intermission. All of the walls hosted art done by 3rd-11th graders in the area, which we spent a good portion of intermission ogling at.

Today I unpacked one of the last boxes left over from the move. This one was mostly filled with smaller boxes of tiny great things like old buttons I’ve hard forever, matchboxes, beads, tokens, and so forth. For no particular reason I took the small elephant made of carved wood, fashioned a harness for him of string, and hung him from a hook on the ceiling. He’s up above my head as I type this. He’s keeping me safe.

On NPR the speaker is listing off jazz clubs and who will be featured in the next few weeks, but I can’t tell if this is all local or places all over the country. It’s hard to tell, even harder since I wouldn’t know anything local so I don’t think that would tip me off.

Portland.

West coast.

What I wouldn’t give to be in Portland, with all of this Jazz at my fingertips.

But I do like it here. In this place. So I guess it’s not too bad.
One and a half years.
Three semesters.
Then perhaps nothing will stop me.
Until then here’s to you, High Plains. I tip my wine glass to your cold indifference.

Exuent SAL PARADISE