A night to remember...sort of
Two years ago today, I was in my house, minding my own business, when my friend called me up and invited me to his New Year's party. I'd already been invited once, but I was feeling sick and didn't really want to be around people, so I'd turned him down. The second time he asked me, though, I was getting kind of bored, so I said, "Hey, why not."
I went to the party and enjoyed myself, and got amazingly drunk in the first half hour of 2002. Later, a casual friend of mine ended up groping me in full view of everybody else, which I have only the haziest memory of. I find it funny, only because he was even drunker than I was and because nothing really happened, but he still apologizes profusely over the whole thing. Anyway, this year I'm going to a party with much the same crowd, and my only goals are to 1) avoid the mistletoe that will be all around the loft 2) avoid getting completely drunk and 3) be sober enough to laugh my ass off at everyone else.
Happy New Year, all.
Be safe.
If anyone's in Manhattan and has nothing to do, come to the loft over the Fat Black Pussy Cat bar, located at 130 W. 3 St. There's a $50 cover (yeah, I know), but it's worth it. Ask for Nicole (and don't mention this blog)!
See it again for the first time
I just watched Love Actually again - for the second time. This time I saw it with my girls, instead of with a guy. Really liked it this time, too, although I realized 1) that Karl had an accent (I didn't really care about that before) and 2) that he wasn't nearly as attractive from the neck up once he took off his glasses.
I also figured out that such a sweet movie is completely wrong for me when I feel this disconnected from the whole love game. Let me find a cute and smart guy who interests me, and then maybe I can feel mushy inside without immediately starting to feel like crud.
Good for me!
Today, I was supposed to go into work at 10 am, instead of at 3, my usual time. I'm training for a different position, or maybe the supervisor just wants me to know it - that's not exactly clear. Anyway, I've been begging for an earlier shift for months, and this was my chance to show that I deserve it. So what do I do? Get to the bus stop in time to see the tail lights of my bus.
That will impress the boss, huh?
Wow
I would, of course, prefer to go the rest of my life without hearing Kelly Clarkson open her mouth for any reason, but if this isn't possible, then I would at least ask that she not speak, and instead just continue to bleat her way through her Schmaltz 101 songs. I just heard her describe Jack Nicholson as possessing the "most sexiest eyebrows," and I'm still trying to recover.
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas, y'all.
Heard it through the grapevine
A girl from my alma mater was expelled because of something she wrote on her blog. Her remarks involved a professor, a dead rodent, and the professor's anal region. They were ill-advised, but nothing that should have made anyone fear for the professor's safety; off-the-cuff, we've all said things that we later realize were not wise. Anyway, I feel bad for her; I know that there were a few professors I wanted to hurt during my tenure at school, and I'm sure I said so more than once. I guess I was just lucky that I didn't say it to the wrong person. I'm glad I graduated when I did; that place is turning into a police state.
Merry Christmas all.
My gift to you: a little advice. If you are going to badmouth your professors/coworkers/superiors/spouses/neighbors/etc. be sure to do it in a private blog.
Sales
I just got offered a position in sales. Sales, me?
I don't know. Plus, what about grad school?
Why couldn't they have called me last month?
Premature?
I just saw a commercial advertising pastries for Easter. It's not even Christmas yet. Stop the insanity, people.
People are crazy
Right now, I need a vacation from several people in my life, but they're just inescapable. Then I got this email today, asking if I wanted to be an au pair in Switzerland and if so, could I start in about a week. I actually thought about it for several minutes.
Calgon, take me away.
Got it
So I found an awesome
set of shot glasses for Christmas, and that's what my friend is getting. I was also going to give him a cool
Donna Karan tie, but a guy at my job thought it looked silly, and since I'm not an expert on ties, I decided to trust his judgment.
2 Shopping Days Left
Okay, technically there are 5 shopping days left until Christmas, but not for me. I work all day tomorrow and Sunday, so I'll miss two days right there. I also work on Monday and Tuesday, but there's no way that I'm going to leave this until Christmas eve, so I'm left with only two days to find the bestest Christmas present ever. So, what do you get the nerdy, admittedly anal retentive guy who has every accessory for his iPod?
I'm poor here, people, so my limit's somewhere under $100. Help!
GRE
Seventeen hours and counting...
Then my suffering was not in vain
When I was in college, my mother and I would email back and forth. I could wake up and expect to have a nice "Morning, Sunshine" message in my inbox, and she could expect a "Sup?" in return. During my junior year, I sent her this email about how disappointed I had been by my first-years. At my college, we had
this tradition called "Ring Week," which was when first-year students would decorate the doorway of a junior in the week before the junior received her class ring. It's not supposed to be about money or materialism, and creativity is encouraged, but it's definitely a time to go all out and buy the junior cool presents. In return, the junior buys things for her first-years, even though she has no idea who they are. Ring Week was in November, but I'd been buying things for my first-years since the summer before, and I was so excited during the first night of Ring Week that it took me forever to go to sleep.
I woke up the next morning to a couple of ballons, and a few pieces of Hersey's candy, while all of my friends had streamers, confetti, toys, and hand-painted crafts. I felt like I'd been screwed out of stuff, and I wrote my mom an email, pouring out my wounded little heart. My mom told me to calm down (which I did), that she loves me (which she does), and that my first-years would do better the rest of the week (which they didn't). I felt better after receiving her email, and that was that.
Behold, last night, while chilling in my parents' room, my mom was rifling through her papers and found a printed copy of my email to her. I'd forgotten all about that whole Ring Week disaster, but while she was reading the email, she started telling me how funny she had found the whole thing. She rushed to say that she felt bad for me, but that she had found the email amazingly funny. I acted hurt, because I didn't want to seem like I encourage my mother to mock my pain, but really, the email was pretty damn funny.
It LOOKED like this!!!!!! And? I CANNOT BELIEVE that I was sooooooooooooooo upset that I forgot the rules of
proper formatting.
I don't blame my mom for laughing, just for telling me.
I like to think my pain is sacred.
What not to say
I am now writing my personal statement for grad school. It would be ill-advised, but I am so tempted to include the following sentence: I need to be accepted to your graduate school because I realized that I think too much to stay in my current field forever, and it's either more education or slow but certain brain-death.
It's not the most concise phrase ever, but it sure gets to the point.
Run that by me again, please
I was in my parents' room, just hanging out with them and generally having a good time. Yesterday's freeze had thawed quite a bit, which meant that my mom was actually talking to me. I looked over at her and saw her scratching her back, which made my back itch. I can't ever watch another person scratch their back without feeling a corresponding itch in my own back; in a previous life, I was cat. So I asked my mom to scratch my back too, but she made me wait, more out of pure meanness than anything else. She finally started to scratch my back, but when she saw that it was making me feel better, she almost stopped, putting her fingers so lightly on my back that they might as well not have been there at all. At first I was confused as to why I couldn't feel anything anymore, but then I figured it out and told my mom that she was the worst. She just started to laugh at me.
So I looked at her and said, "Just wait until you need a hearing aid. I'm going to make sure that dad always has fresh batteries, and then the two of us are going to have conversations and be laughing at you and you won't know what we're saying.*" I made eye contact with my dad, and we were cracking up, and my mother, who'd obviously missed the end of my promise, looked at both of us and said, "Say what?" And that was it, folks. My dad and I didn't stop laughing for the next two minutes, and my mom looked at us with genuine puzzlement and repeated, "But what did she say?" pretty regularly every time we'd nearly settled down, which just made us laugh even more.
*This might sound weird, but it makes sense in the context of my family; my brother and I, even as small, evil children, used to threaten our parents with hearing aids powered by dollar-store batteries and/or placement in large, badly run nursing homes in their dotage, unless they catered to our increasingly ridiculous demands. To my recollection, they never caved, but we all continue to laugh at this little family joke.
I could not make this up
We - myself and a couple of other women from work - were discussing the Rock, and how handsome we thought he was (or not, in the case of one obviously blind woman). The discussion rolled around to his ethnicity, and how he was of Somoan descent. The woman who sits across from me said, "Oh, Somoa. That's a Pacific island, right?" We all agreed that it was, and the conversation continued. Then the same woman said, "It's a shame about what's happening to the Somalians. There's been so much intermarriage that only 10% of the Somalian population is full-blooded."
I didn't know how to respond to that, and neither did the other woman involved in the conversation, so we left it at there. You heard it here first, folks: only 10% of the Somoan population is made up of full-blooded Somalians.
Poor again
I just made my first student loan payment. Only 119 or so more to go...
Adulthood.
Yay.
Finally.
The 30 Hour Date has concluded. I've just gotten back home, after having left yesterday evening for a night out. Highlights: seeing the Trans-Siberian orchestra (and leaving early), misunderstanding the 2 for 1 martini special at Pasta La Vista, looking good enough to eat. Not so great parts: the last 10 or so hours, possibly ruining my amazing new shoes, being in a house without digital cable, not eating anything in over a day, missing spaghetti night at my house, mom giving me the silent treatment.
Was it worth it? Still too soon to tell.
Classic LiliaNic
I just saw a cartoon where a character used the phrase "old school" to describe a Christmas gift. I don't know quite what to make of this, but I think I'm disturbed.
I'm a moron
In a continuing quest to prove that I don't possess a single graceful bone in my body, I did the dumbest thing ever today at work. I got to work a little early, so I went downstairs and bought myself a Snapple. I took it to my desk and opened it, but didn't get to drink it, because my phone started ringing off the hook and things didn't calm down for about 35 minutes. I figured that by that time all the good stuff in my Snapple had sunk back to the bottom, so I picked it up and shook it. Except I'd never closed it the first time.
So I had Snapple all over my face, my hair, the desk, phone, keyboard, monitor. I laughed, sputtered, and looked around, but amazingly, nobody saw what happened. I would have known if somebody had, because there's on way that any of the people I work with would have let such an event pass without notice. I know that if I'd seen somebody else do that, I'd still be laughing. Anyway, nobody noticed, and there was no evidence because, luckily for me, I'd worn a sweater that was several shades of dark blue, and so busy that no stain could be detected. I also wore my pants that are made out of some fabulous material that completely rejects moisture, so that my legs didn't get wet and you couldn't see a stain. And to think that I'd started out in cream pants. Jeez, that would have sucked.
I cleaned all of the Snapple that I could find, but I spent the last several minutes of my shift cleaning off the sticky spots that I'd obviously missed before.
Ugh
My guy friends talk about sex a lot, which isn't a problem in and of itself. I'm used to hanging with them when they have these discussions, and don't mind contributing if I have something to say. Today, though, one of my friends really upset me in his advice to another guy we know. Guy 1, the one who did not upset me, was telling Guy 2 about how all of the girls he ends up dating cheat on him or leave him for other guys. It's not that I don't feel bad for Guy 1, because that sucks, but it's not like he shouldn't expect this. He keeps dating women on the basis of their attractiveness and sexual experience, and not necessarily much else. After he starts dating them, he expects them to change so that they're still the "sexual freaks" that he likes, but also interesting in a monogamous, committed relationship. Guy 2 said that what Guy 1 needed was a nice virgin, preferrably a religious one, so that he could have all the sex he wanted with a more wholesome partner.
That really pissed me off. These guys degrade women who have had a lot of sexual partners, but that's who they seek out. They like having women who are "freaks," but want them to be "good girls" at the same time. I'm sick of the sexual double standards. These guys aren't virgins. I'm not saying that they sleep around all the time, but they do have sex lives and have had multiple partners (maybe at once, I choose not to know). I just hate that, for these guys, there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Either you're good, or you like to have kinky sex. They can't allow for the possibility that there are good girls who like kink, or that you can have had multiple sexual partners without being a slut. They also cannot fathom that there are women who enjoy sex and don't necessarily want relationships, and that there isn't anything wrong with such women.
I've heard them say more than once that a girlfriend's lack of sexual experience has caused problems, so what do they want? I called Guy 2 an ass, not because Guy 1 isn't, but because I know Guy 2 better and I think that Guy 1's just beyond help anyway. I'm sure that wasn't the best way to handle the situation, but I hate the way they discuss women.
Young Republicans, Unite!
Okay, not really.
But there is a
Family Ties marathon this weekend on TVLand.
Now what?
So it snowed more last night, to the point where I cannot go to work today. I'm not terribly broken up about this, as I'm guessing that today will be more of the same as last night, and I don't necessarily fancy a 12-hour shift of people whining and yelling at me. Still, if I could have gotten to work, I would have gone. Now, though, I don't know what to do with myself. I kept waking up all night, but am not tired, so sleep doesn't work. I watched the episode of
Joan of Arcadia that I'd taped last night, and now I'm updating here.
But what to do? I guess I could try to sleep again, but I'd be discouraged if that didn't work. I could maybe study some more for the GRE, but I think it's a bit early in the day to try to use that much of my brain. Plus, I just don't want to. I could read a book, but none of the ones I have are that interesting, not even the one that got all the great reader reviews on Amazon.
I can't even bug my parents, because they're not having any trouble sleeping. What's a girl to do?
The hell?
So I just got a phone call from a man who claimed to need a car immediately, because he had gone into the street to look for a cab and fell and broke his leg. The hell? If he really broke his leg, he should have called an ambulance, not a car service, which is what I told him. He told me that an ambulance could not take him to Brazil, but I refuse to believe that any person would rather go somewhere on business than to have a broken leg set.
Jeez. What's up with these people? Either this guy is lying, or a moron, or actually, even if he is lying, he's still a moron.
Let it snow
When I was a kid, my parents and I went to visit my grandmothers in South Carolina at least once every summer. I liked South Carolina for many reasons, not the least of which were cool swimming pools and endless dinners at restaurants. Another cool thing about the south was Wal-Mart, which was just about everywhere. We didn't have those in New Jersey, and I was convinced that the southern Wal-Mart was less trashy than its northern counterpart K-Mart (now I know that K-Mart is in the south, too, but I still think that Wal-Mart isn't as trashy).
Anyway, the summer that I was 12, we were shopping in Wal-Mart for t-shirts for my dad when I saw a novelty shirt that I absolutely had to have. It said "LET IT SNOW (some other day), LET IT SNOW (some other place), LET IT SNOW (in your face)." I loved that shirt more than life itself, even though it was pretty stupid. First of all, it never snows in that part of South Carolina (well, it doesn't snow in most of South Carolina, but definitely not there), so why would they even have a shirt like that there? Second of all, it was the middle of a sweltering summer, so unless I was going for the reverse psychology factor, there wasn't much reason to wish for snow to go away.
Right. Back to the present, today the NY metro area received its first "snowstorm" of the season. As of now, we've only gotten 4 or so inches, which isn't a lot at all, but is enough to mess up various ways of commuting. There are hardly any cabs, the airports are closing, flights are delayed or canceled, and people are very unhappy. The car service that I work for wasn't capable of fulfilling orders, because a large percentage of the drivers we use refused to drive today. They are not used to driving in snow, and don't have any interest in learning to do so.
I've spent the better part of today (but not the
better part) finding new and different ways to inform people that 1) having a reservation is no guarantee that a car will show up on time and that 2) just because the delays were 45 minutes when you made your reservation does not mean that you'll be getting a car 45 minutes later. It sucks, but it's true. As the day progressed, and the roads got worse, more and more drivers stopped working, to such an extent that we now have delays of 4 hours.
I feel bad, not only because I have nothing but bad news for these people who just want to go home, but also because I have heard a seemingly never-ending string of hard luck stories about people who just want to go home to their families, or who are 9 months and three weeks pregnant, or who have 2 year old who they've been away from for days, or who have very important client meetings to get to (which I care about the least). I think it has stopped snowing, but the delays remain, and I wish that I didn't have to be the one to tell everyone "Sorry pal, try again in 4 or so hours."
Reading is fundamental
I was riding through this town today, and I noticed that they had two signs honoring two of their soldiers. These signs saluted these men as heroes, and praised them for their "braveness and courage." I know that, technically speaking, the word
braveness isn't incorrect, but it just looked really wrong. Is that word making a comeback, or was that just some wonky usage?
Give me a break
If I want to be sad, I think I have the right to be sad. I'm not sitting around other people, bringing them down with my mood. I'm in my room, minding my own business. I don't listen to loud sappy music, and if you're not glued to the other side of my closed door, you won't even know I'm awake. So don't try to cheer me up, because that will only make me sadder right now. I'm going to be in this little funk for a day or two, and then I will be better. I'm not really impeding your life, so leave me alone, okay.
See, living at home does turn you back into a teenager.
Um, wrong
Just because you send a racist forward, doesn't mean that you support it, right?
Does that sentence look as dumb to you as it does to me? A friend forwarded me an email which listed some tragic/terroristic incidents done by Muslims, and which ended by telling people to boycott the Eid (Muslim holiday) stamps that are currently being sold at US Post Offices. I wrote her back telling her that it's not Islam that is to blame for the actions for some people who call themselves Muslims. I know that I personally would love to be able to forbid Dubya from acting like a right moron in the name of Jesus and G-d, especially when he is so out of touch with basic Christian principals, much less basic human decency. The point is, there are crazy/stupid/messed-up people of every (or no) religious persuasion, and the blame for their actions should not be cast onto the entire body of people who follow that religion.
My friend wrote back to say that she doesn't believe that sending that email should have been taken as an endorsement of the ideas enclosed. Right. What else was I supposed to conclude? I am so frustrated, mostly because she doesn't see anything wrong with telling people to avoid something connected with a specific religion, and then going on to say that she doesn't discriminate against the people of that religion.
I have no tolerance for the way that the post-9/11 atmosphere has allowed people with anti-Muslim prejudices to call their beliefs patriotism, and to question anyone who doesn't indiscriminately blame an entire religion for the actions of its fringe members.
So Smooth
I totally wiped out on Saturday night. I was walking around my house, which has hard wood floors, minding my own business, which isn't actually true, I became suddenly and forcefully acquainted with the floor. I didn't move for a while, mostly because I wasn't sure that I could, and I heard my mom say to my dad, "I didn't hear her move. Go check on her." So my dad did, and helped me up, and I rather wish I hadn't. I wasn't embarrassed, because it was just my parents, but boy, did I hurt.
That, though, can't even compare to how I'm feeling now. My whole left side just hurts. It hurts to breathe, it hurts to think. Naturally, it hurts to type. But if you can't share your utter lack of coordination with your buddies, who can you tell?
