06-29-04

Oh, we may never land.

Actually, yesterday wasn't John Vanderslice. Sunday was John Vanderslice, which is odd because both my roommate and I thought that it was yesterday. But the trip to Detroit was not wasted, as I made up a joke: Why did the pig go into the bathroom? To put on some oinkment!* There are admittedly some problems with the joke, as the pig wouldn't necessarily have to go into a bathroom to put on his oinkment, and a better premise might be that the pig has a rash, or something. But perhaps I am overthinking my pig joke.

But that is the past. To the future! Or, at least, the present!

Recently, I've discovered that pretty much everywhere in town is walkable, assuming you don't mind a 45 minute walk to Kmart or an hour and 15 minute trek to the mall. I guess this is also assuming that you have time to do this and don't mind arriving at your destination in a sort of sweaty state. I don't, do and don't, respectively, so today I slathered on sunscreen and headed for Kmart (and it wasn't that I needed or wanted anything. I just thought, "hey! I bet I could walk to Kmart!" and went. I'm not really sure what being willing to walk to Kmart on a whim says about my life). I walked many blocks without meeting anyone else on the sidewalk, and then when I did meet a few people, I kind of wanted to have long and detailed conversations with them, and I wondered if maybe that was what people on the Oregon trail used to feel like when they met people on their long and lonely trips west. I decided probably not.





*The joke was inspired by this joke, which my roommate found on a Laffy Taffy wrapper: Why did the pig go into the kitchen? He wanted to do some bacon!


np: John Vanderslice-Lunar Landscapes

7:37 p.m.

06-28-04

No one but myself to blame.

Today I saw a toad smashed on the sidewalk, and now I am going to go see John Vanderslice! (and also Pedro the Lion, who I really haven't been paying much attention to for the last two or three years, but I do really like It's Hard to Find a Friend. but he probably won't play any songs from that at all).

ps: the purple was driving me crazy. tell me if the new template looks bad. there seems to be a slight problem with the guestbook in ie, but it looks fine in firefox (which is what i use), so i'm not going to worry about it right now.


np: Spiritualized-On Fire

8:38 p.m.

06-26-04

There's no way I'll go feeding the bears.

Today I went to Trader Joe's and gazed longingly at the peanut butter filled pretzels, which is something I like to do from time to time. You can get them in a big tub for five dollars, or in a littler bag for four dollars, but the tub is a better bargain per ounce. Plus, the tub has palm trees on it. So why anyone would by the little bag is beyond me.

In any case, I once again decided that I didn't want to pay five dollars for a big tub of peanut butter filled pretzels. I would like very much for someone to present a tub of peanut butter filled pretzels to me as a gift, but I can't see myself ever paying for one, unless it is someday on sale. I briefly considered buying a bag of regular pretzels and a jar of peanut butter, but the whole point of peanut butter filled pretzels is that the peanut butter is inside the pretzel, so I figured that pretzels dipped in peanut butter could be nothing but a disappointment.

I decided a while back to start buying all of my junk food at Trader Joe's. Their junk food seems less junky, even if it is something like a bag of ketchup flavored potato sticks (SO GOOD! I will no longer have to journey to Canada to buy quality ketchup flavored snack foods.). Plus, they always seem to have free samples of a beverage. One time it was chai, and that day will forever be bright and shining in my memory. I don't buy chai anymore, because there was a month last winter when I was buying it every single day. I'd always act like it was a reward for something: "I finished my paper. That deserves a chai!" "I did all of my reading. Time for chai!" and sometimes I pretended like it was for my well-being: "I can't possibly walk all the way home from the library without something hot to drink. Chai!" And it got to be pretty expensive, and it couldn't possibly have been very healthy, so I decided the best thing to do was just to stop. Anyway, today's sample was iced tea, which I don't like very much, but I dutifully drank a glass anyway. Because it was free.

After Trader Joe's, I went to Meijer (because going to two grocery stores in one day is better than going to only one), where I discovered that the pumpernickel and onion pretzels that I've been keeping an eye on (this entry makes me sound like a pretzel freak. i'm not, really) were on sale! They were marked down from $2.50 to 99 cents, so it was a really good sale, too*. And they are really all I hoped they would be, and I wish that I would have bought two or three or twenty bags of them.

Today apparently all I did was think about food.





*I was looking at some flavored popcorn salt and it was only thirty cents off the regular price. I thought, "Oh yes, because I can do soooo much with thirty cents, can't I, mr. parmesan and garlic popcorn salt. Thirty cents will pay for that villa in the south of France, won't it." And then I wondered if thinking sarcastic thoughts towards spices means that perhaps I've been spending too much time alone.


np: Super Furry Animals-Citizen's Band

8:30 p.m.

06-24-04

Even though the weekend doesn't really make much difference.

I had a meeting at work at 5:30, but they are always kind of boring and overly long and repetitive and repetitive, so when it started getting cloudy at around 4, I decided that if it was raining when I had to leave, I wasn't going to go. So, I looked out of the window at 5:10 and it was raining! well, it was sort of misty out, anyway. actually, not even misty, really, but all of the outdoors had a general feeling of dampness.

Also, my space bar is broken. It was broken worse an hour ago, but I fixed it (sort of). However, it is still very broken, despite its current usability.


np: the Lucksmiths-Smokers in Love

9:13 p.m.

06-23-04

And you won't break my heart, you'll only make a dent.

There are new (unmastered) Saturday Looks Good to Me tracks here, including the song that has been my favorite every time I've seen them recently (and by that I mean every time I've seen them since last September), which I have only just now learned is called "When the Party Ends."

I like it because it has a lot of words. I'm pretty sure it has more words live, including this entry's title and something about dancing all summer to 50 Cent (which was yelled out by Mr. Ted Leo when Mr. Fred Thomas asked the audience to suggest lyrics rhyming with 'ent').

I miss live music.


np: Saturday Looks Good to Me-When the Party Ends

7:09 p.m.

06-22-04

Diet grape faygo is so hot right now.

Last night I went to the diag liquor store after work to buy a beverage (not liquor) for Zoolander (zoolander!) night at Top of the Park. Because I only had an hour between when work ended and when the movie started so I didn't go home. I had spent most of the night at work thinking about how great it would be if the diag store had 24 ounce bottles of diet key lime pie faygo, and they did! They had it! But then I looked one beverage slot to the right in the Faygo row and saw diet creme soda! !!!!! Finding diet creme soda is like . . . actually, I can't think of anything that quite compares to finding diet creme soda when you aren't even looking for it.

Oh wait. I CAN think of something! And that is looking one more slot to the right (I don't know, it's like I have blinders on when I'm looking into refrigerator cases in party stores and can only see one thing at a time) and finding (oh man, i am shaking with excitement) diet grape soda.

No, no, listen: I haven't seen diet grape soda of any kind since I was about ten years old, let alone deelicious (and deliciously cheap) Faygo diet grape soda. There's that diet rite white grape kind, but that's not the same. But I've always really liked grape soda. I would occasionally buy the regular kind and be disgusted by the sugariness, but in spite of that, I always remembered why I liked it and never stopped (although, I was always just theoretically liking grape soda, since I couldn't actually find any that I enjoyed drinking).

I realize that all of this excitement is just setting me up for inevitable despair when the diag store stops carrying diet grape and I can't find it anywhere else. But for now I will just lay down my 89 cents day and pretend that the end will ever come.

ps: diet grape soda + watching zoolander outside in the rain=joy. only one thing could've made the night any better. but never mind.


np: SFA-Slow Life

10:07 p.m.

06-21-04

I didn't think I would ever actually write anything about those topics I listed yesterday, but I guess that stranger things have happened.

Turtles: I saw one!

Cousins: I think that the only thing more irresponsible than accidentally getting pregnant is automatically thinking, "Oh! I have to marry the person that I got pregnant with!" Um, hello? This is 2004 (two thousand and four). Your Mennonite relatives might not like it when your girlfriend has a baby, but they will also not like it when your hasty marriage breaks up in six months. Also, (another cousin) living with your boyfriend is another one of those things that your Mennonite relatives will not like, but do you know how you can make it even worse? Moving all of your stuff out while your parents are gone and moving in with a boyfriend that they had never even heard of until they went to your place of employment after you ran away and your boss told them about some boy that seemed to hang around a lot. The family is going to hell in a handbasket! I mean, I realize that there were probably a lot of things leading up to this that I don't know about, but there have obviously been some bad decisions here. [Also, I feel smug because the worst thing in our family used to be that some of us had televisions and my parents (and aunt/uncle) let me (their daughter) wear pants and get my hair cut. At my next family reunion I am wearing a Britney-length mini-skirt* and no one can say a word about it!]

Linguists: can't remember.

Cows: I read in the yard two days in a row, and I noticed that although the cows move around in the field a lot, they seem to be in the same places at the same time each day. They always end up right behind my parents' house at about six in the evening. At around noon, they are usually way in the back of the field, and at four they head to the edge of the woods.

Also, I like cows because they find me so unendingly fascinating:

Just look at them staring at me! They love me! Actually, they were just waiting for me to take one step closer to the fence so that they could run away like the scared little cows that they are. Someday I will befriend those cows**! Just you wait.





*um, not really. my skirts will remain knee-length until the day that i die.
**but then soon after that, i will eat either one of them or one of their loved ones. friendship from me means very little, apparently.


np: work

6:19 p.m.

06-21-04

You know young girls like happy endings.

I fell asleep in the yard today while reading The Fellowship of the Ring, which is one of those books that I've never actually read before, but everyone assumes that I have, and as a result, I've taken place in long conversations about it. I think, actually, that the only Tolkien I've read at all is "Leaf By Niggle," which I read for a fantasy class (I meant to register for the sci-fi class, but I had my semesters mixed up) (and according to that syllabus (which I'm pretty sure is the same as when I took the class), I was also supposed to read some other things from The Tolkien Reader, but the writing assignments being what they were, actually doing all of the reading was just sort of silly)). Anyway, I've been meaning to read it for a while, but I wanted to wait until I could get the movie from the library without having to wait through a three hundred person request list. Or, really, any request list at all.

Yesterday, I did not fall asleep while lying in the yard reading The Westing Game. The weather was absolutely perfect this weekend. Sunny, no humidity, and never much warmer than 70 degrees. My dad said that this is why people live in Michigan, and I said, "Why? So they can have weather like this two days a year?"

When I wasn't reading in the yard, I spent the weekend looking for pictures of Scotchie, the world's most benevolent cat, because I wanted a copy of one to hang in my room so I could gaze at it and think about what a nice cat I used to have. Oddly, I could never seem to find a photograph that was in focus and in which he was not digging up flowerbeds or eating. It was like the time Santa's Little Helper ran away and the Simpsons were looking for pictures of him to put on posters, but the only pictures they could find were of Homer strangling him or of SLH punching Homer. Conversely, we have many pictures of Stewart the cat, who was much spazzier and moodier and bitier (but we liked him anyway). And all of the pictures that we have of Stewart feature him sitting around calmly, looking cute or noble. Which isn't really fair, because if anyone finds our family photo albums after we are all dead and gone, they'll think that Scotchie was the bad cat and Stewart was everyone's favorite, which is exactly wrong.

[Hah, I just wrote a big boring paragraph about two cats that are now dead and before that there were two about books and the weather.]

This morning while we were at breakfast, my dad asked me if money was keeping me from going to/applying to grad school. I looked out of the window and thought. It never occurred to me that maybe it actually WAS the money that was stopping me from getting around and going. I mean, I worry about money a lot (a very lot), but I worry about it in a very abstract way that doesn't include numbers. I'm careful in that I hardly use my credit card and rarely buy things that aren't on sale. I don't eat in restaurants that often and the only really frivolous purchases I make are music-related (and I've even cut way back on those; I still don't have the new Beta Band album that came out over a month ago (and it breaks my superficial little heart), and a glance at the shows list (hah hah, obsessive) reveals that by this time last year I had gone to 14, whereas this year I'm at a mere 4).

Anyway, though, even taking all of that into consideration, I think that my not going to grad school this year (which was my goal), has less to do with money and more to do with:

There isn't a conclusion here, which is exactly why I will get a zero on the GRE.





i had other things i wanted to write about and this is already long and boring enough, but i don't want to forget, so here are cryptic notes that probably won't make any sense when/if i look at them again: turtles, cousins, linguists and where do those cows think that they're going, anyway?


np: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci-Young Girls and Happy Endings

2:26 a.m.

06-16-04

The only thing worse than bad memories.

-I just almost killed myself trying to open the windows on the first floor of the house. We hardly ever use the first floor for anything besides cooking, unless we have dinner guests or are just feeling uppity and want to eat our cereal in the dining room. However, over the past couple of nights, I've realized that it's really hot down there. It's not hot outside, so that bothered me and tonight I decided to open the windows. And they were all stuck. I pulled and pulled on them, and eventually, after much sweat and many splinters, they all opened. The one above the sink, though, proved to be especially difficult to open, since I had to stand on a chair, and then sit on the cupboard, and then seriously consider the problems that might occur if I briefly stood in the sink*.

-The other day I bought some yogurt that I thought was called "Strawberry Orange Surprise." The whole time I was eating it, I was thinking, "Oh my, this yogurt is surprising!" and giggling sort of creepily at myself. Then when I threw the container away, I saw that it was actually called "Strawberry Orange Sunrise." It made me sad.

-Last week I bought a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream. But there aren't actually chocolate chips (I wanted so much to italicize the word 'chips' there, but I think I've already gone over the acceptable amount of italicizations for one entry), there are little squares of chocolate. And the chocolate isn't even semisweet chocolate chip chocolate. It's actually more like fudge (kind of). So, even though this is probably better than classic mint chocolate chip ice cream, the only reason I bought mint chocolate chip was because I was feeling nostalgic** (and it was on sale), so this also makes me sad.

-I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again this afternoon. I thought I had something to say about this, but the 10 minutes I just sat here staring blankly seems to prove otherwise.

-The end.





*This actually doesn't make the window-opening task sound like as much of an ordeal as it was. Please just believe that it was harder than it sounds.
**because I never ever get mint chocolate chip because it seems so drab and unimpressive compared to everything else. Prior to this week, I probably haven't actually eaten mint chocolate chip ice cream for at least 10 years.


np: the Dismemberment Plan-Spider in the Snow

10:11 p.m.

06-15-04

And you know she misses you when she's gone.

So after that whole thing yesterday, we ended up not going to the movie last night. It was something to do with laziness and rain and all of the chairs being wet and did we really want to walk all the way there without actually knowing if it was still actually going on? No we did not. Instead, I had the roommate describe scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean to me ("There was some fighting, and then Johnny Depp said something clever."), and then we watched the MTV movie awards, which one of us taped the other day because we heard something about Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn discussing a sequel to The Return of the King with Peter Jackson and Will Ferrell interviewing Jesus.

Anyway, though, tonight we really did go see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I remembered the reasons that I don't like top of the park: people talking constantly, little kids everywhere, the most uncomfortable chairs since those molded plastic ones they used to have in the basement of my grandma's church, and I'm always stricken with sno-cone lust, which inevitably leads to me purchasing a sno-cone and then being disappointed by it.

But it was a nice night. The sky was clear and not raining, and I saw my first firefly of the year.


np: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci-Where Does Yer Go Now?

1:29 a.m.

06-13-04

Movies on a parking structure. What could be better?

Now I am at work, but later tonight is the first night of Top of the Park (assuming that neither the current tornado watch nor weather.com's prediction of scattered strong storms for the night interferes)! Actually, I guess it is the third night of Top of the Park, but it is the first night that has a movie, and as far as Top of the Park goes, movies are all that I care about. I have stated (repeatedly, since late April) that I am going to every single one, even if it's something that I don't want to see (like Pirates of the Caribbean tonight), because there is very little that you can do for free in this town (or in any town, probably). One thing you can do, though, is see movies outside on top of a parking structure five nights a week for almost a whole month! Hurray for being easily excited*!

I actually experienced a conflict of interest the other day when I figured out that John Vanderslice is playing his first ever Michigan show (as John Vanderslice. I'm not sure about MK Ultra)(and yes, I did go through all of the his tour archives and check on the legitimacy of this statement) on the same night that TOTP is showing Kindergarten Cop, which is (pathetically enough) one of the movies that I was really looking forward to (what can I say? I love the ol' Ah-nold comedies. The one where he's pregnant is the best.). It's an obvious choice, though.

*If you had told me while I was at university orientation five years ago, sitting at TOTP watching Austin Powers with two weird boys who were they only people in my orientation group that would actually talk to me (and who I had to stay with, because I didn't know how to get back to the dorm on my own), that I would someday be incoherently excited about totp, I'm not sure what I would have done. I certainly wouldn't have believed you and I might also have thrown something at you.


np: someone just called to ask me what a bidet is.

4:35 p.m.

06-12-04

One and two thousand, better turn around.

Movies* are more expensive now than ever before, and yet when you go see them, you have to sit through six or seven commercials. Regular commercials that you could be watching on tv at home for free! Tonight they advertised some tv show premiere that was going to be commercial-free. So we were sitting there in a movie theater that we paid to get into watching a commercial for a tv show that wasn't going to have any commercials. It was all very surreal.





*We saw Saved!, which I didn't want to see and can't recommend at all. It had a few funny parts, but it also had a shrill, preachy ending, just as I suspected it would. I really do love when movies assume that the audience isn't smart enough to understand the moral they've been beating them over the head with for and hour and a half, so they say, straight out, what they want you to take away from it. A hint: if you are making a movie and you think that the audience might miss the point entirely, you've done something wrong.


np: John Vanderslice-June July

2:56 a.m.

06-11-04

Sing me something sweet until I fall asleep.

I've decided that I'm glad I'm not any taller, because every time I see someone (an adult) shorter than me (which isn't that often), I feel huge and hulking and awkward.

I still wish my fingers were longer, though.


np: Saturday Looks Good to Me-Underwater Heartbeat

7:06 p.m.

06-09-04

It's life microscopic sized.

Tonight I handled every single dvd in the library (that wasn't checked out or taken care of before I got there, which isn't that many). There are new shelves for them* and each dvd had to be flipped over inside its security case, because the former bottoms of the security cases are now going to be the tops. I'm not sure why, exactly, because I checked, and the dvds sit just as well on the former bottoms of the security cases as they do on the new bottoms. (And I honestly don't think that this paragraph will make any sense to anyone who hasn't actually seen the dvds in their security cases.)

Moving on, sort of, what is the deal with the Dewey decimal system? I shelved all of the non-fiction dvds tonight, and there is a brief portion of the 600 section that includes both maternity exercise routines and documentaries about the space program. And that just seems weird to me. (Also, this site seems to be trying just a little too hard to interest kids in learning about the Dewey decimal system. I especially like the page about Dewey's life (wow! that is truly amazing!).

Earlier, I was out of the house (what are the chances?) and a tornado warning was announced. I decided that I should go home, but when I went outside, the patio tables from a nearby restaurant were flying around, so instead I sought shelter in a book store and discovered the best magazine ever (published by Fancy Publications, even).





*The dvds used to be in waist-high bins, and now they have taller shelves, which is nice because it makes it look like there are more of them. Tonight people kept commenting on how we had so many dvds in, when before they would glance at the bins and say, "Is that all you have?" Also, I thought that the larger shelves would mean that fewer people would ask me where the dvds are, but that proved to be untrue.


np: Brendan Benson-Life in the D

10:43 p.m.

06-08-04

I'd really like to see you every day, but I'm afraid of what my friends might say.

-It's hot. Last night I was trying to figure out how I could sleep without letting my hair touch me, but as it turns out, the stuff is actually attached to my head. And I kind of wonder how I'm going to survive the rest of the summer if I feel this bad already.

-Yesterday at work, some woman asked me for my opinions on various classic works of literature, then saw that I was reading Anne of the Island and said, "Oh, you're reading that? My daughter said those books are really slow," and then just sort of walked away without listening to my edited-for-the-library views on Tolstoy. Ah, well.

-Also yesterday, my clothes asked that age-old question: does pink go with green? Answer: yes, but only if you don't mind looking like a watermelon.

-I bought some sunscreen the other day, because the only sunscreen that I have is over four years old. Did you know that they now make sunscreen that goes up to SPF 70? I remember the days when I had to buy sunscreen for babies because they didn't make a high enough SPF for me in the adult kind. Anyway, SPF 70 seems a little extravagant even to me, and I settled for SPF 45 (I would have preferred 50, but they didn't have that in a kind that was also oil-free. My face produces enough oil by itself during the summer (3 brand new pimples today!), thankyouverymuch). Dear Dutch ancestors, thank you for the pigmentless skin. I greatly appreciate it. much love, kim.

-Today at work a little boy told us that he couldn't remember his last name. Not little little, but probably around twelve or thirteen. He claimed to have a really bad memory, but I think he was just lying. Although, why he would lie about that is a complete mystery to me.

-I made the best pasta for dinner. The very best. The other day I was reading a recipe magazine at work (because, when I'm working at the periodicals desk and get hungry, I always read recipe magazines, which admittedly, doesn't make a lot of sense because it just serves to make me hungrier and sad because most of the recipes in magazines are composed mostly of ingredients that I can't afford). But recently I came across a recipe with a headline like "Tired of drowning your pasta in sauce?" And I thought, "Yes sir, I am!" And it was made of normal things that I already had (like tomatoes and cheese and basil). And it was so very good. But a little troubling, because it was really simple, but I know I would never have thought of it on my own.

-The reason the pasta was so good is that I do this thing where I live on one kind of food for an extended period of time (hello basically nothing but turkey sandwiches and honey nut cheerios for six days), and then something new and of the 'real' food variety tastes absolutely amazing.

-The other day Lefty listed her favorite song intros, and I've thought and thought about it and decided that my favorite is Pas/Cal's "I'd Bet My Life That You'd Bet Your Life." And I have gone to the trouble of mp3ifying the first 25 seconds of the song, so please someone listen to it.

-I'm reading Dracula (because, what better to read while sitting in the shade by the river than a novel that takes place in a dark, gloomy castle!), and a reading problem that I have is that I get stuck on lines that have very little to do with the overall story but that I find so overwhelmingly hilarious (whether or not they're actually funny) that they sort of become the entire novel to me. So far in Dracula it's " Just fancy! He is only nine and twenty, and he has an immense lunatic asylum all under his own care." Partly it is because I find the word fancy pretty funny all by itself (i think it's just the way it sounds), and I'm always referring to things as 'fancy' or 'fancypants' or 'fancypantsy,' much to the annoyance of the few people that I actually speak to. It's more than just fancy, though, but I can't tell you what it is about these two sentences that made me read them 20 consecutive times, and why, even after I managed to initally tear myself away from them, I kept turning the pages back and reading them again.


np: Brendan Benson-Metarie

10:01 p.m.

06-06-04

I never never want to go home.

In spite of online notes to myself, I forgot to buy Decemberists tickets on Tuesday, and on every day since then. As of this morning, though, there were still tickets left, but the only ticketmaster outlet within walking distance closes at noon on Saturdays and I wouldn't have made it. And for some reason (that is a mystery to me now), I didn't want to buy will-call tickets online or over the phone, and instead chose to cross my fingers and hope for the best. So we got there and it was sold out, but lots of other people that were waiting in line also didn't have tickets, and that made me feel better. I prefer to be part of a communal misfortune rather than singled out for my own personal bad news.

The night was not a total loss, however, because during the drive home from Detroit (on Michigan Avenue, since it is more scenic (strip clubs every fifty feet!) than the highway):

-I almost ran a red light because my roommate said, "Hey, there's a naked woman!" and I was too busy scanning the sidewalks for nudity to worry about driving. Conclusion: it was a statue.

-We had the old Owen vs. Luke debate that seems to take place each time I see a Wilson brother in a movie (the roommate and I saw Starsky and Hutch on Wednesday). Conclusion: there's really no wrong answer.

-We stopped at a video store and saw a guy stuffing dvds into his pants. We went out to the car and giggled and wondered if we also should have attempted burglary in this way. Conclusion: no, because we were both wearing skirts, and the dvds would have just fallen all the way through.

-We saw some skinny boys, and my roommate wanted to give them food except she didn't have any. I wasn't that worried about them, because one had a bottle of chocolate milk and the other had some juice. Then we wondered if maybe they were homeless and if we should date them, because Jane recently had an article about six types of guys that girls generally overlook, and one of those groups was the homeless. Jane must've made some pretty convincing points, because it has been a popular conversation topic for the past two days. Conclusion: I will not date anyone who weighs less than 1/3 of my weight. Also, I should stop reading Jane, because it is probably making me stupider.

-My roommate accused the cd we were listening to (and my music collection generally) as being chiefly made up of sad bastard music. Conclusion: she's probably right.


np: the Smiths-There is a Light That Never Goes Out

4:18 a.m.

06-02-04

At sunrise the monkeys will fly.

When I got home from work, my head hurt and I decided to take a nap, except the neighbors (who have been constantly working on their house since March) were doing something with a circular saw (presumably cutting) right outside of my window. So I put in some ear plugs (which I have numerous packages of, because I always forget to take them with me to rock shows and have to stop on the way and buy more), and was wondering: when the noise of the rest of the world is blocked out, should there still be noise inside your head? Because the inside of my head sounds like a refrigerator. Or fluorescent lights.


np: Sparklehorse-Eyepennies

7:48 p.m.

06-02-04

I've worked here for two years, but I still find it surprising when people know my name.

Yesterday my mom only worked a half day, so I met her in town for lunch. I was more than a little surprised when, as we were driving down the street, she pointed behind a building and said, "That's the garbage that grandma and I had to dig through last week!"

Also, I keep getting weird emails in my work account. They have my name on them (they aren't just things that are sent to the whole library or my whole department), but I have no idea what they mean or why I am getting them. I think that people must have me confused with someone else.


np: work

12:40 p.m.

06-02-04

Late night adventures in counting.

I usually don't have any trouble initially falling asleep, but if I wake up during the night it takes at least two hours for me to go back to sleep. It's because I like to spend late night/early morning hours worrying about extremely trivial things. So this morning when I woke up at 3:30 (after being asleep for an hour) and I could feel those first little pangs of worry (about how I forgot all of my work-related cards* at my parents' house and how, as a result, the world would surely end), so I took evasive action.

I counted.

I didn't count sheep, because that seems dumb. I just counted, because numbers are boring** and that is what I did when I couldn't sleep when I was little. I counted by twos to five hundred. I counted by ones to fourteen hundred. I didn't fall asleep, but I also didn't worry. I mean, I did sort of worry, but I was mostly focused on counting.

Now I am at work, after three, refreshing, nonconsecutive hours of sleep. Earlier I denewed some books, and while I have no problems with the denewing process, I do have a problem with the word 'denew,' and will henceforth refer (in my head) to the task as 'oldifying.'





*time card, key card for staff door, library card for checking out books and photo id badge (I recently got a new one and it has proven, beyond any doubt, that I have an abnormally large forehead).
**except for that joke about seven eating nine. Cannibalistic numbers aren't boring.


np: work

11:20 a.m.

06-01-04

And will she remember me fifty years later?

I've been noticing an alarming trend of people telling me that things I do/say are annoying/whiney, and then I feel bad and I've been making a good solid effort at not doing/saying those things anymore. That's not the alarming trend (that's only real life whining/annoyingness, by the way. diaryland w & a will continue as per usual). The same people that tell me these things often do exactly the same thing that they've told me to stop doing, and if I say something like, "Hey, isn't that what you told me not to do?" they'll answer with, "Sort of. But it's different with me because of [reason a] and [reason b]." That isn't the alarming trend either, though. The alarming trend is that I not only accept their response, I actually feel guilty for trying to call them out on their behavior in the first place.

Hello, my name is easily trodden upon.

Also:

1. I am at my parents' house, and my mom finds my black eye to be a constant source of amusement. "It's SHREK-COLORED! You should color the other one green too. Bwa hah hah! And you don't even know what happened! Hah hah hah!" I expected a little more sympathy from my mother.

2. My aunt is working at a mission near the Haiti/Dominican Republic border, and no one has heard anything from her since before the floods and mudslides. She is most likely fine, but the lack of communication is still kind of troubling.

3. I decided to reread that Anne of Green Gables series, or at least Anne of Green Gables through Anne of Windy Poplars. I used to have the whole set, but now I'm missing two. And it's not really that big of a deal (I can just get them from the library), except that my parents got me all of them for Christmas one year, and now two are gone. I remember loaning Rilla of Ingleside to someone in, like, 1994 and figuring that I'd never see it again. But Anne of Windy Poplars, where are you? Please come home!

4. One of my dad's cousins found out she has cancer. Six more months, they're saying. She isn't a good friend of the family or anything, but it's still just. Whoa. She was my counselor at winter camp one year, and once my friend Liz and I were reading Song of Solomon (it was church camp) after lights out, and giggling incessantly about verses like "Your breasts are like two gazelles" (we were thirteen, give us a break), and she said, "Alright, if you two can't be quiet then you have to leave." And we thought she was just trying to scare us, so we quieted down. Then she said, "Did you hear me? GET OUT!" So we scrambled to the floor and noisily put on hats and boots and coats and went and wandered around in the mud and cold for four or five hours in the middle of the night. And now she's dying. It's odd to feel so intensely bad about someone when your one and only memory of them involves them throwing you out into the winter night.

5. Am I the only person who salts watermelon? I am? Really?

6. note to self: Buy Decemberists tickets tomorrow! I know that you don't like to buy tickets ahead of time because you think that it is ridiculous to have to pay 15 extra dollars just for someone to print the tickets out for you, but I also know that if that show sells out and you don't get to go, you will cry. So just pay the extra money and then you won't have to worry and there will be a bright spot at the end of your week.

7. Oh crap. It's June. I was sure that we had one more day of May.


np: Neutral Milk Hotel-Oh Comely

1:45 a.m.

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