05-28-05
I've made a huge mistake.
Yesterday I was trying on a skirt and some women in the fitting room were talking loudly about the clothes they were trying on, and after a long preamble by one about how she wanted a totally honest opinion about this outfit, because it was one that she really liked but she needed a second opinion to be sure, she stepped out of her fitting room and the other woman said, "Oh, that is you Mary-Jo. Y - O - U."
It was right about then that I decided that that particular skirt was not the one that was going to save me from my summer of skirtlessness, I left my fitting room and if that outfit really was h - e - r, then Mary-Jo needs a new sense of personal style. Even I could tell that it was a bad color on her (and not particularly age-appropriate), and I need someone to hold my hand through pretty much the entire purchasing, coordinating and dressing process.
Two days ago, I accidentally registered for library school classes. I hadn't thought that what I was doing was actually going to register me, because registration was such a big deal when I was an undergrad. The school would send you an email telling you a registration time, and then you would go around and find people with the same amount of credit hours as you and people would be like, "You get to register at 10:02 on April 2nd? I don't register until 3:07 on April 6! Ack, I am never going to get into the chem lab that I need to take." And then when you sat down to register, the computer would tell you that it wasn't time for you to register yet, and you would think, "It is TOO time for me to register! And that guy sitting over there is probably getting the last open spot in introduction to 20th century literature right now," and then the computer would explode and you would sit there and fume and think about how everything was better back when you registered by telephone. (Except I usually didn't have a lot of trouble getting the classes that I wanted because I was a linguistics major. Plus I took the ling classes that even linguistics majors didn't want to take, like the ones called introduction to old English that met at 8:30 in the morning.)
Anyway, I expected what I was doing to only save the classes that I wanted to take for easy registration at a later time, because everything I read claimed that I needed a special number off of a school id card to register, but after I filled in some numbers and pressed the ok button, a screen read, "Congratulations, you have registered for. . ." whatever the classes were that I registered for (library school classes have fun names like, "organization of knowledge," "records management," and "producing technology based instructional materials"). And I thought, "Um, OK, I guess I really am going to library school," because I'd kind of expected to give up on the whole mess some time this summer. And I guess I could still do that, but now it requires more work, since I have to actually do something to unregister and before all I had to do was continue not doing anything until it was September and too late.
A while after I accidentally registered, I realized that the only day that I have classes is Tuesday (until 8:30 pm), which also happens to be the one night of the week that I like to watch tv. I will miss you, Veronica Mars. Do you remember how excited I was when I learned that you were coming back next season? Now it doesn't even matter. And Gilmore Girls, I was finally going to be all caught up on the previous seasons and able to watch this one at the same time as everyone else. Wrong! The roommate said that this is exactly the reason that people choose not to go to grad school. She is probably right. Everyone would have a master's degree if it wasn't for tv.
05-24-05
A free spoon, but not a free Spoon album. But Gimme Fiction was worth the I spent on it, so that's ok.
Today my landlord came and fixed our leaky bathtub faucet while I stood around looking awkward because I felt like I should be doing something other than measuring and photographing skirts* in the middle of the afternoon**. He had to move our refrigerator in order to shut the water off, and he found a spoon underneath it. So now, not only does our faucet no longer leak, we have another spoon! It is like a special reward for not wasting water.
Also, obsessions of the week:
- Wonderfalls on DVD ("But maybe she's just a lazy whore. That happens, right? They can't all have hearts of gold and good work ethics.")
- Andrew Bird (I downloaded "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left" a long time ago, but only listened to it for the first time yesterday. But I've listened to it 24 times since yesterday, so that kind of makes up for months of neglect.)
- Diet Grape Faygo (me: It tastes like Jolly Ranchers! roommate: uh-huh? me: Grape ones! roommate: Yeah, I figured.)
- Old-time radio detective shows (I especially like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. They are suave and use a lot of puns ("I may be upset, but you're the one that's gonna spill!"). Also, Philip Marlowe has a weird fixation with Lifesavers (I smell early, clumsy product placement!).)
Thumbs-down of the week:
- To the person who checked out Buffy, the Vampire Slayer season 4 disc 3 from the library and never returned it: I'm pretty sure I have the ability to find out who you are and where you live, so watch your back.
- The landlord weeded the shrubbery in front of the building and pulled out the incredibly huge dandelion that I kept meaning to take a picture of.
- Crippling feelings of self-doubt and dread regarding grad school and refusing to talk about it to anyone except while being sarcastic ("And every day I wake up and think, 'Am I a librarian yet?'") and/or fatalistic ("Sooner or later you just have to accept what you're good at and do it, even if it's not what you'd really like to be good at.")
*Skirts that will be sold on eBay, although honestly, I'll probably only sell one and then decide that it was too much trouble for too little reward and dump the rest of them off at Goodwill. I'm also selling an old Death Cab for Cutie shirt that I hardly ever wore, and since they're way more popular now (although I haven't understood the appeal of any of their albums since We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes) than when I bought it, I'm hoping that some hipster with misplaced priorities is going to pay my way through librarian school.
**When he left I told him that I'm starting grad school in the fall, with the hope that that would explain why I was sitting around at home in the afternoon. My afternoons of leisure are numbered.
05-18-05
I guess birthdays are still about fun things. It's just that now I think that pans are fun.
If you had told me as recently as five years ago that there would come a day when I would be really, truly ecstatic to receive pans as a birthday gift (beautiful shiny pans with lids that fit on them!), I would've said something about how birthdays are for fun things, and I might've added some sort of personal insult ("Birthdays are for fun things, stupid!") (I was not a master of the clever insult at age 19.).
But hey, it happened! At first I thought it was a sign that I was becoming a grown up, but then I received these two birthday cards:
(A click to enlarge these images would not be a click clicked in vain.)
and was pretty thrilled with both of them. So I think that grown-uphood might still be off somewhere in the distance.
05-12-05
NWT! Cute! Great for summer!
I'm getting really tired of people outbidding me on eBay skirts. They all probably have lots of clothes, while I'm going to have to spend most of the summer with a towel wrapped around my waist. Which means that I would probably need to buy some new towels, and if I could afford new towels I could also probably afford new skirts and I wouldn't need to wear towels. So the moral of the story is that people should just let me win an auction once in a while.
(Please do not imply that this is partially my fault because I am unwilling to pay more than 10 dollars for someone's old skirt, because right now I am only willing to blame other people for my problems.)
I have more grievances to air against the eBay people (seriously folks, don't ever let your bare feet or stubbly knees get into a skirt picture), and also the people (who are perhaps not affiliated with eBay, but maybe) who think that they own the sidewalk because they have dogs or babies (or dogs and babies) (or dogs and babies and cell phones!), but I think I'm starting to sound a little grouchy. So instead I'll just say that something good is bound to happen soon, I hope.
05-09-05
We also talked about how we both enjoy eating cucumbers.
I went to a wedding (a sham wedding! they were already married! i would've been angry, but there was a soft-serve ice cream machine at the reception, so all was forgiven.) over the weekend and at the reception I met the kids that my mom babysits for. They were very interested in me (I'm not sure what my mom has been telling them), but I'm never sure what to talk about to little kids because it always seems unlikely that we share any interests. This leads to conversations like this:
"Is your name Kimberly?"
"Um, yeah."
"Do you know my name?"
"It's David."
"Yeah. Do you know how old I am?"
"Uh, six?"
"Yeah!"
"Oh, wow, that was just a guess."
(Then he guessed my age and then I guessed what grade he was in. Then I guessed his brother's age and his brother guessed my age and then I guessed his sister's age and he guessed my mom's age and oh my, it was even more boring in person.)
Eventually I got used to him and offered him advice on eating grape tomatoes ("Just put the whole thing in your mouth. Biting them in half just makes a mess." That's really the only wisdom I have to offer to the younger generation.) and critiqued his treatment of his younger sister (me: "I'm glad my brother was never that mean to me." him: "Oh, if you were our sister. What a time we'd have.")
Eventually I got to go home. I think that there was originally more to that story, but I can't remember. I can never remember anything that I want to write here anymore.
05-04-05
Pink means stop.
Today I was waiting to cross the street and a man who was also waiting there looked at me and said (presumably in reference to the pink sweater I was wearing), "I like that color. It's bright." Which seemed sort of nice.
The light changed and we started to cross the street. He said, "Yeah, you won't get hit by a car while you're wearing that!" Which seemed sort of weird.
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