Victory in da house!!!!!! My department had a baby shower at work today and one person arranged a party game: a quiz involving the identification of celebrity baby names. HEL-LO! Everyone was grumbling, “Aw, Jen shouldn’t be allowed to play!” because they knew right off the bat that I was going to slaughter them. And I did! It took me like five seconds to do the quiz and I got 19 out of 20 questions right. Boo yeah!!! That $65,000 Jesuit education is paying off, y’all!
It was jokingly said that the winner gets to pick the baby’s name. Plus, some quizzes were on pink paper and some were on blue paper, so it was decided that the winner’s colored sheet would determine the baby’s sex. My sheet was pink, so we were like, “You’re having a girl!” Then I said to the mother-to-be, “I hope you like the name Freyja, because that’s what I’m naming your kid!”
song heard most recently before posting:
Disconnected—Veruca Salt
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
15 years
Antoinette is planning her son’s first birthday party; she told me that in lieu of gifts, she wants guests to bring items for a time capsule that she’ll give to Luca on his 16th birthday. It’s a brilliant idea and I’m not surprised by it, because that girl tends to be disgustingly creative!
Her focus is on items that will be useful to Luca when he’s 16. Well, aside from condoms (which were suggested by another one of her friends), I don’t know what he’ll define as useful in 15 years’ time because I’m not sure how his personality will evolve. Will he be an athlete? An artist? A budding journalist? A wannabe architect? Will he have a passion for old cars? For dinosaurs? For playing the violin?
Because I don’t know what items will be useful to him, I think I’ll focus instead on “this is what life was like in 2007” items. Copies of Time and Entertainment Weekly, a newspaper, a compilation CD of today’s most popular songs, a New York Times bestseller. Things that serve as a snapshot of modern life. And I’ll write him a letter describing what the world is like at this moment in time. I can’t say what it’s like for someone who’s 16, because I’m not 16 and I don’t even know any 16 year olds. I suppose I can hazard a guess, though, based on technology and trends. What I do know is blazingly obvious: life for today’s 16 year old is wildly different than it was for me when I was 16 in 1990. I may as well try to compare a teenager’s life in 1957 to a teenager’s life in 2007.
In some ways modern teens have it better than my peers did, because cyberspace and mobile communications have made the world much smaller, and this can be a great comfort to kids who feel restricted by the confines of their immediate surroundings. I was a raging Anglophile at age 16 and would’ve given anything to obtain easy access to British newspapers, magazines, products, and TV shows. That access didn’t exist back then, but nowadays it does in the form of the internet. In other ways I think my classmates and I were better off than today’s teens. At the very least, we didn’t have to worry about cyber-bullying, text bullying, and getting embarrassing videos of us posted on YouTube by vicious classmates. There was a kind of purity nestled in the note-passing we did in school, in the old-fashioned letters we had to write in order to keep in touch with penpals or friends who lived far away. Sure, we could’ve phoned them, but with no free nighttime minutes, not everyone had the money to make a ton of calls to someone in a different state or country. Patience was taught to us in the form of waiting until the family phone was free before we could make a call (no cell phones, after all), and having to try again and again to reach someone when his or her line was busy (nobody I knew had call waiting at that time).
So I try to imagine the impossible and think ahead to Luca as a 16-year-old boy in 2022. God, we’ll be speaking a whole other language by then, just like the language we speak now is different from that which was spoken 15 years ago. I mean, think about it. Suppose a guy walked up to you in 1992 and started talking about digital camera megapixels, satellite radio, WiFi, SUVs, blogging, GPS, emailing friends on Blackberries and Treos, IMing people in chat rooms, surfing the Web on a laptop, Netflixing a DVD to search for Easter eggs, Mapquesting directions, eBaying, Googling himself, texting on his Razr, TiVoing American Idol on his plasma HDTV, friending people on MySpace, playing with a Wii, shooting a video of Brangelina on his cameraphone and uploading it to YouTube, playing MP3s on his iPod Nano, looking for a BFF to LOL with on match.com…would you even realize that he’s speaking English? Would you believe him if he told you that the human genome has been mapped, a rover has photographed the surface of Mars, a cancer vaccine (Gardasil, for HPV) is now available, space tourists exist, and we’re all the verge of figuring out how to manufacture stem cells? Although we’re all still eating and shitting and walking around like we did in 1992, I think 2007 would sound like a foreign country to your average 1992 resident.
I can’t imagine what we’ll be saying and doing in 15 years. I can’t imagine what advances will be made in science, what technology will be enhanced and perfected by then, or made obsolete. I’d like to think that 15 years from now, society will have made some progress in the right direction. I’d like to think we’ll have slowed down or halted global warming, eradicated our need for oil, figured out how to dissolve terrorism at its root (or, at the very least, know how to protect ourselves from it without sacrificing civil liberties in the process). I’d like to think healthcare will be universal and poverty will be alleviated; gay people will have the right to marry; we’ll finally have a cure for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, etc. I’d like to think we’ll know how to respect each other and create a better world. Wishful thinking, huh?
We could take a turn in the wrong direction: dystopian novels and movies come to mind. V for Vendetta. Children of Men. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1984. Sometimes it feels like we’re headed there, that the next 15 years will bring us under the heel of a totalitarian regime or crush us with a worldwide superplague or some other disaster plucked from our most paranoid fears. Other times I have hope that we’ll manage to get our shit together and figure out what we most need to learn: the idea that the planet isn’t disposable, that underneath skin and faith and genitals and sexual desire we’re all the same. We’re all the same. We’re all a bunch of vulnerable, lost creatures living on the membrane of a lonely rock bobbing in space, and we’re all we’ve got. We’re the only ones who can look out for, and protect, each other. We’re our only line of defense. Tearing each other and the planet apart won’t solve any problems.
For now, though, I’ll tell Luca about where the world currently stands—not where I hope it goes. It’s a messy, silly, absurd, complicated, divine world. Humanity is the same as ever: we stretch toward evolution and advancement and sometimes we make it, while other times we fall into the same old ruts, digging the same old destructive graves. There’s still racism, sexism, and war. Pedophiles, criminals, and suicide bombers still shadow the streets. There’s still pollution and poverty. Tensions still run high between certain countries. People are more fixated on Paris Hilton’s release from jail than they are on the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. More people vote for American Idol contestants than they do for politicians. A shocking amount of people have no access to education or healthcare or even clean water. Obesity is skyrocketing and yet people are dying every day from starvation, either because they can’t afford food or because Hollywood has set this ridiculous standard wherein being a size zero means being beautiful.
But, you know, there’s still plenty of loveliness out there amidst all the terror and atrocities and apathy. There’s still art, music, beauty. People still create. They still help one another, give to charities, volunteer their time and services. This 2007 world of ours still holds compassion. Sometimes wallets get returned unopened. Sometimes someone will offer his or her seat on a crowded train to a pregnant woman, or will offer to mow an elderly neighbor’s lawn, or will step forward to help a person who’s being attacked. Sometimes friendships last and nations align and families are functional. Sometimes it seems like we’re going to be okay in the end. And as long as we have that we at least have something.
song heard most recently before posting:
Farewell—Yo-Yo Ma
Her focus is on items that will be useful to Luca when he’s 16. Well, aside from condoms (which were suggested by another one of her friends), I don’t know what he’ll define as useful in 15 years’ time because I’m not sure how his personality will evolve. Will he be an athlete? An artist? A budding journalist? A wannabe architect? Will he have a passion for old cars? For dinosaurs? For playing the violin?
Because I don’t know what items will be useful to him, I think I’ll focus instead on “this is what life was like in 2007” items. Copies of Time and Entertainment Weekly, a newspaper, a compilation CD of today’s most popular songs, a New York Times bestseller. Things that serve as a snapshot of modern life. And I’ll write him a letter describing what the world is like at this moment in time. I can’t say what it’s like for someone who’s 16, because I’m not 16 and I don’t even know any 16 year olds. I suppose I can hazard a guess, though, based on technology and trends. What I do know is blazingly obvious: life for today’s 16 year old is wildly different than it was for me when I was 16 in 1990. I may as well try to compare a teenager’s life in 1957 to a teenager’s life in 2007.
In some ways modern teens have it better than my peers did, because cyberspace and mobile communications have made the world much smaller, and this can be a great comfort to kids who feel restricted by the confines of their immediate surroundings. I was a raging Anglophile at age 16 and would’ve given anything to obtain easy access to British newspapers, magazines, products, and TV shows. That access didn’t exist back then, but nowadays it does in the form of the internet. In other ways I think my classmates and I were better off than today’s teens. At the very least, we didn’t have to worry about cyber-bullying, text bullying, and getting embarrassing videos of us posted on YouTube by vicious classmates. There was a kind of purity nestled in the note-passing we did in school, in the old-fashioned letters we had to write in order to keep in touch with penpals or friends who lived far away. Sure, we could’ve phoned them, but with no free nighttime minutes, not everyone had the money to make a ton of calls to someone in a different state or country. Patience was taught to us in the form of waiting until the family phone was free before we could make a call (no cell phones, after all), and having to try again and again to reach someone when his or her line was busy (nobody I knew had call waiting at that time).
So I try to imagine the impossible and think ahead to Luca as a 16-year-old boy in 2022. God, we’ll be speaking a whole other language by then, just like the language we speak now is different from that which was spoken 15 years ago. I mean, think about it. Suppose a guy walked up to you in 1992 and started talking about digital camera megapixels, satellite radio, WiFi, SUVs, blogging, GPS, emailing friends on Blackberries and Treos, IMing people in chat rooms, surfing the Web on a laptop, Netflixing a DVD to search for Easter eggs, Mapquesting directions, eBaying, Googling himself, texting on his Razr, TiVoing American Idol on his plasma HDTV, friending people on MySpace, playing with a Wii, shooting a video of Brangelina on his cameraphone and uploading it to YouTube, playing MP3s on his iPod Nano, looking for a BFF to LOL with on match.com…would you even realize that he’s speaking English? Would you believe him if he told you that the human genome has been mapped, a rover has photographed the surface of Mars, a cancer vaccine (Gardasil, for HPV) is now available, space tourists exist, and we’re all the verge of figuring out how to manufacture stem cells? Although we’re all still eating and shitting and walking around like we did in 1992, I think 2007 would sound like a foreign country to your average 1992 resident.
I can’t imagine what we’ll be saying and doing in 15 years. I can’t imagine what advances will be made in science, what technology will be enhanced and perfected by then, or made obsolete. I’d like to think that 15 years from now, society will have made some progress in the right direction. I’d like to think we’ll have slowed down or halted global warming, eradicated our need for oil, figured out how to dissolve terrorism at its root (or, at the very least, know how to protect ourselves from it without sacrificing civil liberties in the process). I’d like to think healthcare will be universal and poverty will be alleviated; gay people will have the right to marry; we’ll finally have a cure for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, etc. I’d like to think we’ll know how to respect each other and create a better world. Wishful thinking, huh?
We could take a turn in the wrong direction: dystopian novels and movies come to mind. V for Vendetta. Children of Men. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1984. Sometimes it feels like we’re headed there, that the next 15 years will bring us under the heel of a totalitarian regime or crush us with a worldwide superplague or some other disaster plucked from our most paranoid fears. Other times I have hope that we’ll manage to get our shit together and figure out what we most need to learn: the idea that the planet isn’t disposable, that underneath skin and faith and genitals and sexual desire we’re all the same. We’re all the same. We’re all a bunch of vulnerable, lost creatures living on the membrane of a lonely rock bobbing in space, and we’re all we’ve got. We’re the only ones who can look out for, and protect, each other. We’re our only line of defense. Tearing each other and the planet apart won’t solve any problems.
For now, though, I’ll tell Luca about where the world currently stands—not where I hope it goes. It’s a messy, silly, absurd, complicated, divine world. Humanity is the same as ever: we stretch toward evolution and advancement and sometimes we make it, while other times we fall into the same old ruts, digging the same old destructive graves. There’s still racism, sexism, and war. Pedophiles, criminals, and suicide bombers still shadow the streets. There’s still pollution and poverty. Tensions still run high between certain countries. People are more fixated on Paris Hilton’s release from jail than they are on the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. More people vote for American Idol contestants than they do for politicians. A shocking amount of people have no access to education or healthcare or even clean water. Obesity is skyrocketing and yet people are dying every day from starvation, either because they can’t afford food or because Hollywood has set this ridiculous standard wherein being a size zero means being beautiful.
But, you know, there’s still plenty of loveliness out there amidst all the terror and atrocities and apathy. There’s still art, music, beauty. People still create. They still help one another, give to charities, volunteer their time and services. This 2007 world of ours still holds compassion. Sometimes wallets get returned unopened. Sometimes someone will offer his or her seat on a crowded train to a pregnant woman, or will offer to mow an elderly neighbor’s lawn, or will step forward to help a person who’s being attacked. Sometimes friendships last and nations align and families are functional. Sometimes it seems like we’re going to be okay in the end. And as long as we have that we at least have something.
song heard most recently before posting:
Farewell—Yo-Yo Ma
Thursday, June 21, 2007
two more questionnaires
Courtesy of Mr. Seabold.
70 Confessions
1. The phone rings. Who do you want it to be?
-- I don’t care, as long as it’s not a telemarketer, a wrong phone number, or this one person (or maybe it’s a telemarketer; I don’t know) who has been calling me 2-3 times a day lately and hasn’t been leaving a message.
2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
-- Yeah, either to the store or the cart corral. It’s rude not to do so.
3. If you had to kiss the last person you kissed, would you?
-- Dude, I couldn’t even tell you the last person I kissed. Oh…wait…it was probably my niece Olivia, so sure!
4. Do you take compliments well?
-- Not really. Compliments about my clothing, shoes, photos, website: yes, absolutely. Compliments about me physically: not so much.
5. Do you play Sudoku?
-- Hell no. I hate numbers.
6. If abandoned alone in the wilderness would you survive?
-- Probably not!
7. Do you like your home as it is?
-- Not in my current hellhole apartment situation.
8. Do you enjoy driving?
-- I used to love driving until I moved to Gridlock Central. Now the only thing I like about it is having an excuse to blast my CDs/iPod and sing loudly.
9. What is your favorite roller coaster?
-- They’re all great in my eyes. I haven’t ridden one in nine years, but I still love them.
10. City, suburbs, or country?
-- Suburbs. Part of me really hates the bloated, bland sprawl of them, but they do offer a nice mix of city and country advantages: shops, restaurants, grass, silence.
11. Do you have a favorite restaurant?
-- Not particularly. The Dixie in Lebanon was always my favorite, but now it’s gone. I’ve eaten in many fabulous places over the years, and it’s impossible for me to choose one restaurant over another.
12. Who was your first celebrity crush?
-- Shaun Cassidy.
13. When someone tells a story, do you feel the need to top it?
-- Nope. But if I had a similar experience I might share it.
14. Do you clean your home on a regular schedule?
-- Pthhhhh. Not anymore—not my current place. I’m just too apathetic to care. Once I buy a place, I’ll be back to caring and cleaning fairly regularly.
15. Are you a pack rat?
-- Hoarder, hoarder, hoarder. I’m a sentimental hoarder, though—I keep letters, cards, mementos, etc. I still have every note passed to me by friends in high school. And I can’t let go of any of my books. Although I have trouble getting rid of clothes and CDs, I occasionally manage to do so. Other than that, I’m not so bad. It’s not like I hold on to stacks of newspapers and gum wrappers or anything.
16. Do you own, rent, or live with family?
-- Rent, with the intention of buying before 2007 is through.
17. What’s your next car going to be?
-- Whatever I can afford.
18. If your house was on fire, what would be the first thing you would do?
-- Make sure my cats are safe.
19. Who was the last person you shared beds with?
-- Besides my cats? My coworker Susan, when we shared a budget hotel room in NYC in early June.
20. Who do you text the most?
-- Nobody—it irks me for some reason. As do cell phones. I’ve got an ancient, bricklike ghetto TracFone for emergencies and that’s it.
21. Favorite children’s book?
-- I don’t remember much about my favorite books from childhood, other than this one personalized Sesame Street book I got when I was quite young. I read a lot and loved many of the books I read, but I’m drawing a blank as to which were my favorites. When it came to pre-teen books, though, faves include the first two Little House books; The Girl Who Owned a City; Run, Run As Fast As You Can; Mirror of Danger; Emily; A Gift of Magic; After the Bomb; books from the Twilight series; Chain Letter; and more that I’m not remembering right now!
22. What color are your eyes?
-- Blue.
23. How tall are you?
-- 5’8”
24. Are you happy with your waist size?
-- My waist is fine—it’s my stomach, thighs, and ass that are the problem!
25. If you could do it over again, start from scratch, would you?
-- I wouldn’t mind going back and reliving a week here, a day there. But reliving my entire life again from scratch sounds horrific to me.
26. Any secret admirers?
-- I highly doubt it! Except for maybe a lunatic or two.
27. Any secret crushes?
-- Maybe a mild one.
28. When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?
-- Years ago. That restaurant sucks. And they’re owned by the same people who own Red Lobster, which imports an inordinate amount of seafood out of Canada, and we shouldn’t support the Canadian seafood industry because… Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? They kill baby seals.
29. Favorite ex?
-- That’s kind of a weird question, innit?
30. Where was the furthest place you traveled?
-- St. Petersburg, Russia.
31. Do you use light mayonnaise?
-- Such a thing shouldn’t even exist. If you’re that weight- or health-conscious, you shouldn’t be eating mayo at all.
32. Do you like mustard?
-- I’m not crazy about yellow mustard, but other mustards are fine in moderation.
33. Do you prefer to sleep or eat?
-- That’s a tough one. I feel like I love both of them equally, but I suppose I love sleeping a tiny bit more.
34. Do you look like your mom or dad?
-- I look like some old pictures of my mom but I don’t resemble how they look now. However, I inherited blue eyes from both of them; I inherited my dad’s height, dark hair, curved toes, and freckles; and I inherited my mom’s big bones. (sigh)
35. How long does it take you in the shower?
-- If I’m not washing my hair or shaving I’m usually in and out in like five minutes. If I’m washing my hair and shaving it takes longer, ’cuz I gots a lot of hair, yo.
36. Can you do splits?
-- Not even close! I don’t even think I could do them when I was a kid.
37. What movie do you want to see right now?
-- 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, The Lives of Others, This is England, Wristcutters: A Love Story (When the hell is it ever going to get released?)
38. Do you keep a tea kettle on your range?
-- Yup!
39. What did you do for New Year’s Eve?
-- Watched TV, drank a glass of Vana Tallinn, worked on a big art project.
40. Do you think The Grudge was crappy?
-- I didn’t see the remake, but I can tell you that the original Japanese version made very little sense. I was disappointed with it.
41. Do you scrapbook?
-- I make travel scrapbooks after I visit other countries, but they’re not elaborate. It’s not like I’m using all the fancy paper and 3D stickers you see at Michael’s. I really just arrange ticket stubs, postcards, receipts, food wrappers, and other travel ephemera in a big blank book.
42. Do you own a camera phone?
-- See my answer to #20. I do use my digital camera quite a lot, though.
43. Was your mom a cheerleader?
-- No, thank god.
44. Was your dad a football player?
-- Again: no, thank god. He was a shiftless ruffian, bless his heart.
45. What’s the last letter of your middle name?
-- E. What a strange question.
46. What are you thinking right now?
-- That I really need to get around to applying for a mortgage pre-approval.
47. How many hours of sleep do you get a night?
-- Around seven on weekdays; up to 12 on weekends.
48. Do you like Care Bears?
-- I did in 5th/6th grade. I owned a Cheer Bear. If I liked Care Bears now, at age 33, there’d be a problem.
49. What do you buy at the movies?
-- Popcorn, if anything. I’m usually too cheap to buy concession food because it’s so overpriced.
50. Do you know how to play poker?
-- No. And I have no desire to learn—I’m lousy at card games!
51. Do you wear your seatbelt?
-- Always—it’s just a habit. But I do leave my belt off when I’m zipping from my office to the UPS box down the street.
52. What do you wear to sleep?
-- Either a t-shirt or a big old nightgown. Nothing when it’s warm.
53. Anything big ever happen in your town?
-- Well, these are the DC ’burbs—there’s always a shooting or a hit and run taking place somewhere.
54. Is your hair straight or curly?
-- Curly in some parts, wavy in some parts, straight in some parts. A rat’s nest, basically.
55. Is your tongue pierced?
-- I have no desire to pierce it.
56. Do you like liver and onions?
-- Ew! My dad loves them, so I sometimes had to eat them as a kid. It was foul. I think meat itself is nasty; you can imagine how I feel about eating organs.
57. Do you like sarcasm?
-- Yes, but not when people are sarcastic all the time. It gets abrasive and old when it’s constant.
58. Do you like funny or serious people better?
-- I like a perfect mixture of both.
59. Ever been to LA?
-- No. I wouldn’t mind going someday, but it’s not at the top of my list.
60. Who is on your mind right now?
-- Olivia, because it’s her birthday.
61. Any plans for tonight?
-- Working, as usual. Packing for my upcoming weekend at home. Wrapping Olivia’s birthday present.
62. What’s your favorite song at the moment?
-- I’d say that it’s a multi-tie between “Swans,” “Kreuzberg,” and “Who Would You Have Me Love.”
63. Do you hate chocolate?
-- I hate dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is superb.
64. What do you and your parents fight about the most?
-- We usually don’t fight about anything.
65. Are you a gullible person?
-- It’s weird…I have my moments of being naïve and gullible, but I’m also super-suspicious of everyone, so I’m surprised I ever fall for anything.
66. Do you need a boyfriend/girlfriend to be happy?
-- Fish without a bicycle, baby!
67. If you could have any job what would it be?
-- Writing/editing for a sleazy/lowbrow British magazine/tabloid.
68. Are you easy to get along with?
-- More so now that I’m medicated.
69. What is your favorite time of day?
-- Evening, although it’s usually spent working.
70. Are you a generally happy person?
-- Happy-ish, let’s say.
Love survey
[1] Two names you go by:
Jen, Jennifer
[2] Two things you are wearing right now:
Vintage 1940s dress and strappy silver sandals.
[3] Do you still have feelings for your ex?
Ditto Shawn’s answer: “I have no feelings, my heart is a blackened shell.”
[4] Have you ever been given roses?
Yes, but I’m a sucker for wildflowers.
[5] What is your all time favorite love movie?
Probably Love Story. Yeah, it may be corny, but I still think it’s fundamentally sweet and wonderful. And it always makes me cry. I don’t believe that love means never having to say you’re sorry, though! If that ass screws up, he better apologize!
[6] How many times have you honestly been in love?
With a guy? Just once. But with pets and countries and ideals and songs and poems and activities and art: more times than I can count.
[7] Do you believe that everyone has a soul-mate?
I’d like to think that everyone potentially has more than one soul mate.
[8] Have you ever had your heart broken?
A few times.
[9] Your thoughts on online relationships?
Relationships that start online are fine—I know lots of people who’ve had great success with it. But a relationship that only exists online isn’t going to work. Well, a friendship would be fine, but an actual love match? You need to be in the same room with the person for that to work!
[10] Have you ever seen a friend as more than a friend?
Unfortunately. Effing unrequited love!
[11] Do you believe the statement, “Once a cheater always a cheater?”
Not necessarily, but I’d really have trouble trusting someone after he cheated on me.
[12] How many kids do you want to have?
The jury’s still out on that one—if I want them at all.
[13] What is your favorite color(s)?
Plum.
[14] Do you believe you truly only love once?
Some people (like my grandparents) do, but other people find true love more than once.
[15] Imagine you’re 79 & your spouse just died, would you re-marry?
Hell no. Why bother at that age? Just enjoy being alone and finally having the freedom to do what you want to do and go where you want to go during the last years of your life.
[16] At what age did you start noticing the opposite/same sex?
I had crushes when I was a kid—both celeb crushes (starting around age four) and crushes on classmates (starting in first grade). Does that count?
[17] What song do you want to hear at your wedding?
Well, I’ve got a full line-up for Annida to sing, and I like the idea of having a wedding march that’s an orchestral or Celtic version of “our” song, whatever that may be.
[18] Do you like anyone?
I ain’t saying!
[19] Do you love anyone?
Just friends, family, and pets!
song heard most recently before posting:
Digital Ghost—Tori Amos
70 Confessions
1. The phone rings. Who do you want it to be?
-- I don’t care, as long as it’s not a telemarketer, a wrong phone number, or this one person (or maybe it’s a telemarketer; I don’t know) who has been calling me 2-3 times a day lately and hasn’t been leaving a message.
2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
-- Yeah, either to the store or the cart corral. It’s rude not to do so.
3. If you had to kiss the last person you kissed, would you?
-- Dude, I couldn’t even tell you the last person I kissed. Oh…wait…it was probably my niece Olivia, so sure!
4. Do you take compliments well?
-- Not really. Compliments about my clothing, shoes, photos, website: yes, absolutely. Compliments about me physically: not so much.
5. Do you play Sudoku?
-- Hell no. I hate numbers.
6. If abandoned alone in the wilderness would you survive?
-- Probably not!
7. Do you like your home as it is?
-- Not in my current hellhole apartment situation.
8. Do you enjoy driving?
-- I used to love driving until I moved to Gridlock Central. Now the only thing I like about it is having an excuse to blast my CDs/iPod and sing loudly.
9. What is your favorite roller coaster?
-- They’re all great in my eyes. I haven’t ridden one in nine years, but I still love them.
10. City, suburbs, or country?
-- Suburbs. Part of me really hates the bloated, bland sprawl of them, but they do offer a nice mix of city and country advantages: shops, restaurants, grass, silence.
11. Do you have a favorite restaurant?
-- Not particularly. The Dixie in Lebanon was always my favorite, but now it’s gone. I’ve eaten in many fabulous places over the years, and it’s impossible for me to choose one restaurant over another.
12. Who was your first celebrity crush?
-- Shaun Cassidy.
13. When someone tells a story, do you feel the need to top it?
-- Nope. But if I had a similar experience I might share it.
14. Do you clean your home on a regular schedule?
-- Pthhhhh. Not anymore—not my current place. I’m just too apathetic to care. Once I buy a place, I’ll be back to caring and cleaning fairly regularly.
15. Are you a pack rat?
-- Hoarder, hoarder, hoarder. I’m a sentimental hoarder, though—I keep letters, cards, mementos, etc. I still have every note passed to me by friends in high school. And I can’t let go of any of my books. Although I have trouble getting rid of clothes and CDs, I occasionally manage to do so. Other than that, I’m not so bad. It’s not like I hold on to stacks of newspapers and gum wrappers or anything.
16. Do you own, rent, or live with family?
-- Rent, with the intention of buying before 2007 is through.
17. What’s your next car going to be?
-- Whatever I can afford.
18. If your house was on fire, what would be the first thing you would do?
-- Make sure my cats are safe.
19. Who was the last person you shared beds with?
-- Besides my cats? My coworker Susan, when we shared a budget hotel room in NYC in early June.
20. Who do you text the most?
-- Nobody—it irks me for some reason. As do cell phones. I’ve got an ancient, bricklike ghetto TracFone for emergencies and that’s it.
21. Favorite children’s book?
-- I don’t remember much about my favorite books from childhood, other than this one personalized Sesame Street book I got when I was quite young. I read a lot and loved many of the books I read, but I’m drawing a blank as to which were my favorites. When it came to pre-teen books, though, faves include the first two Little House books; The Girl Who Owned a City; Run, Run As Fast As You Can; Mirror of Danger; Emily; A Gift of Magic; After the Bomb; books from the Twilight series; Chain Letter; and more that I’m not remembering right now!
22. What color are your eyes?
-- Blue.
23. How tall are you?
-- 5’8”
24. Are you happy with your waist size?
-- My waist is fine—it’s my stomach, thighs, and ass that are the problem!
25. If you could do it over again, start from scratch, would you?
-- I wouldn’t mind going back and reliving a week here, a day there. But reliving my entire life again from scratch sounds horrific to me.
26. Any secret admirers?
-- I highly doubt it! Except for maybe a lunatic or two.
27. Any secret crushes?
-- Maybe a mild one.
28. When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?
-- Years ago. That restaurant sucks. And they’re owned by the same people who own Red Lobster, which imports an inordinate amount of seafood out of Canada, and we shouldn’t support the Canadian seafood industry because… Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? They kill baby seals.
29. Favorite ex?
-- That’s kind of a weird question, innit?
30. Where was the furthest place you traveled?
-- St. Petersburg, Russia.
31. Do you use light mayonnaise?
-- Such a thing shouldn’t even exist. If you’re that weight- or health-conscious, you shouldn’t be eating mayo at all.
32. Do you like mustard?
-- I’m not crazy about yellow mustard, but other mustards are fine in moderation.
33. Do you prefer to sleep or eat?
-- That’s a tough one. I feel like I love both of them equally, but I suppose I love sleeping a tiny bit more.
34. Do you look like your mom or dad?
-- I look like some old pictures of my mom but I don’t resemble how they look now. However, I inherited blue eyes from both of them; I inherited my dad’s height, dark hair, curved toes, and freckles; and I inherited my mom’s big bones. (sigh)
35. How long does it take you in the shower?
-- If I’m not washing my hair or shaving I’m usually in and out in like five minutes. If I’m washing my hair and shaving it takes longer, ’cuz I gots a lot of hair, yo.
36. Can you do splits?
-- Not even close! I don’t even think I could do them when I was a kid.
37. What movie do you want to see right now?
-- 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, The Lives of Others, This is England, Wristcutters: A Love Story (When the hell is it ever going to get released?)
38. Do you keep a tea kettle on your range?
-- Yup!
39. What did you do for New Year’s Eve?
-- Watched TV, drank a glass of Vana Tallinn, worked on a big art project.
40. Do you think The Grudge was crappy?
-- I didn’t see the remake, but I can tell you that the original Japanese version made very little sense. I was disappointed with it.
41. Do you scrapbook?
-- I make travel scrapbooks after I visit other countries, but they’re not elaborate. It’s not like I’m using all the fancy paper and 3D stickers you see at Michael’s. I really just arrange ticket stubs, postcards, receipts, food wrappers, and other travel ephemera in a big blank book.
42. Do you own a camera phone?
-- See my answer to #20. I do use my digital camera quite a lot, though.
43. Was your mom a cheerleader?
-- No, thank god.
44. Was your dad a football player?
-- Again: no, thank god. He was a shiftless ruffian, bless his heart.
45. What’s the last letter of your middle name?
-- E. What a strange question.
46. What are you thinking right now?
-- That I really need to get around to applying for a mortgage pre-approval.
47. How many hours of sleep do you get a night?
-- Around seven on weekdays; up to 12 on weekends.
48. Do you like Care Bears?
-- I did in 5th/6th grade. I owned a Cheer Bear. If I liked Care Bears now, at age 33, there’d be a problem.
49. What do you buy at the movies?
-- Popcorn, if anything. I’m usually too cheap to buy concession food because it’s so overpriced.
50. Do you know how to play poker?
-- No. And I have no desire to learn—I’m lousy at card games!
51. Do you wear your seatbelt?
-- Always—it’s just a habit. But I do leave my belt off when I’m zipping from my office to the UPS box down the street.
52. What do you wear to sleep?
-- Either a t-shirt or a big old nightgown. Nothing when it’s warm.
53. Anything big ever happen in your town?
-- Well, these are the DC ’burbs—there’s always a shooting or a hit and run taking place somewhere.
54. Is your hair straight or curly?
-- Curly in some parts, wavy in some parts, straight in some parts. A rat’s nest, basically.
55. Is your tongue pierced?
-- I have no desire to pierce it.
56. Do you like liver and onions?
-- Ew! My dad loves them, so I sometimes had to eat them as a kid. It was foul. I think meat itself is nasty; you can imagine how I feel about eating organs.
57. Do you like sarcasm?
-- Yes, but not when people are sarcastic all the time. It gets abrasive and old when it’s constant.
58. Do you like funny or serious people better?
-- I like a perfect mixture of both.
59. Ever been to LA?
-- No. I wouldn’t mind going someday, but it’s not at the top of my list.
60. Who is on your mind right now?
-- Olivia, because it’s her birthday.
61. Any plans for tonight?
-- Working, as usual. Packing for my upcoming weekend at home. Wrapping Olivia’s birthday present.
62. What’s your favorite song at the moment?
-- I’d say that it’s a multi-tie between “Swans,” “Kreuzberg,” and “Who Would You Have Me Love.”
63. Do you hate chocolate?
-- I hate dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is superb.
64. What do you and your parents fight about the most?
-- We usually don’t fight about anything.
65. Are you a gullible person?
-- It’s weird…I have my moments of being naïve and gullible, but I’m also super-suspicious of everyone, so I’m surprised I ever fall for anything.
66. Do you need a boyfriend/girlfriend to be happy?
-- Fish without a bicycle, baby!
67. If you could have any job what would it be?
-- Writing/editing for a sleazy/lowbrow British magazine/tabloid.
68. Are you easy to get along with?
-- More so now that I’m medicated.
69. What is your favorite time of day?
-- Evening, although it’s usually spent working.
70. Are you a generally happy person?
-- Happy-ish, let’s say.
Love survey
[1] Two names you go by:
Jen, Jennifer
[2] Two things you are wearing right now:
Vintage 1940s dress and strappy silver sandals.
[3] Do you still have feelings for your ex?
Ditto Shawn’s answer: “I have no feelings, my heart is a blackened shell.”
[4] Have you ever been given roses?
Yes, but I’m a sucker for wildflowers.
[5] What is your all time favorite love movie?
Probably Love Story. Yeah, it may be corny, but I still think it’s fundamentally sweet and wonderful. And it always makes me cry. I don’t believe that love means never having to say you’re sorry, though! If that ass screws up, he better apologize!
[6] How many times have you honestly been in love?
With a guy? Just once. But with pets and countries and ideals and songs and poems and activities and art: more times than I can count.
[7] Do you believe that everyone has a soul-mate?
I’d like to think that everyone potentially has more than one soul mate.
[8] Have you ever had your heart broken?
A few times.
[9] Your thoughts on online relationships?
Relationships that start online are fine—I know lots of people who’ve had great success with it. But a relationship that only exists online isn’t going to work. Well, a friendship would be fine, but an actual love match? You need to be in the same room with the person for that to work!
[10] Have you ever seen a friend as more than a friend?
Unfortunately. Effing unrequited love!
[11] Do you believe the statement, “Once a cheater always a cheater?”
Not necessarily, but I’d really have trouble trusting someone after he cheated on me.
[12] How many kids do you want to have?
The jury’s still out on that one—if I want them at all.
[13] What is your favorite color(s)?
Plum.
[14] Do you believe you truly only love once?
Some people (like my grandparents) do, but other people find true love more than once.
[15] Imagine you’re 79 & your spouse just died, would you re-marry?
Hell no. Why bother at that age? Just enjoy being alone and finally having the freedom to do what you want to do and go where you want to go during the last years of your life.
[16] At what age did you start noticing the opposite/same sex?
I had crushes when I was a kid—both celeb crushes (starting around age four) and crushes on classmates (starting in first grade). Does that count?
[17] What song do you want to hear at your wedding?
Well, I’ve got a full line-up for Annida to sing, and I like the idea of having a wedding march that’s an orchestral or Celtic version of “our” song, whatever that may be.
[18] Do you like anyone?
I ain’t saying!
[19] Do you love anyone?
Just friends, family, and pets!
song heard most recently before posting:
Digital Ghost—Tori Amos
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The Shuffler - vol. 1
The Onion’s AV Club has this regular feature called The Shuffler, wherein a celebrity of some degree sets his/her iPod to shuffle and describes the first five songs to play. No cheating (ie, no skipping ahead to a less embarrassing track) is allowed.
So, I decided to do my own version of The Shuffler. Throughout my two commutes yesterday and my morning commute today I kept my iPod on shuffle and jotted down the songs it regurgitated. Here are the results:
Angel of Harlem – U2
Rattle and Hum came out in 1988, and although I really didn’t start listening to it until 1990 or so, Angel of Harlem was a big radio and MTV hit and I loved it.
Running to Stand Still – U2
Two U2 songs in a row! Fancy that! This is my favorite song from the Joshua Tree album. My angst-ridden teen heart was all over the lyrics “You’ve got to cry without weeping, talk without speaking, scream without raising your voice.”
Someone Else’s Life – Joshua Radin
Haven’t we all, at one point or another, even if only for a split-second, wondered if we were living someone else’s life?
What Doesn’t Belong to Me – Sinead O’Connor
This is such a great break-up song. “I miss you, but I’m glad you’re gone / I want you but I’m not alone / I’m haunted by you / But I’ll get you gone if it takes me all my life long / Take back the pain you gave me / Take back what doesn’t belong to me / Take back the shame you gave me /…/ Take back the rage you gave me / Take back the hatred you gave me for me / Take back the anger that nearly killed me / Take back what doesn’t belong to me.”
Marys of the Sea – Tori Amos
I’ve been a massive Tori Amos fan since 1992, but this album, sadly, doesn’t do much for me. Still, I felt obliged to put it on my iPod, because, dude, it’s Tori! And really, this song isn’t a bad song—it’s just not as spectacular and some of her other songs.
When Doves Cry – Prince
Lord, when was this, 1982? ’83? I think I was around nine years old when this came out. I loved it even though I didn’t have a clue what it was about. Even today, when I see Plath sprawled on his back, legs in the air, I sometimes sing “Animals strike curious poses!” to him.
Mad World – Gary Jules
You know, the original Tears for Fears version of this song kind of sucks. It’s very jaunty and carnival-sounding, and considering the bleakness of the lyrics, this juxtaposition is disconcerting and downright inappropriate. Gary Jules’s version is gorgeously, gloriously wrenching. If this had been around before I was medicated, it probably would’ve been the straw that broke the suicidal camel’s back.
Sky Blue – Peter Gabriel
So Missy once told me that every time she hears this song, it reminds her of all the people trying to escape from the World Trade Center on 9/11. And ever since then, I’ve had that image burned in my head every time I hear this song. Thanks, Miss. By the way, the extended reworking of this song that appeared in Rabbit-Proof Fence is just as brilliant as the original Sky Blue.
Den Bla Slatten/Ormsla – Den Fule
Nordic folk kicks ass, and this is one of the songs that really makes me feel like grooving (albeit spastically, as I am wont to do).
Lonelilly – Damien Rice
Damien Rice rocks my world. What else can I say? He sets my cold, dead heart aflame.
Bad – U2
Another U2 song! I love U2, but apparently not as much as my iPod does! There was a period—’round about 2001, I think—when I was obsessed with this song and another U2 song, The Unforgettable Fire, and I listened to them on a continuous loop when driving back and forth to my weekend petsitting job in Alexandria. So that’s what they bring to mind.
I Want Candy – Bow Wow Wow
So dirty, but I had no clue what it meant when I was a kid. When it came to sex, I was about as naïve as you could get (and this carried on well into my teens).
Dirty Diana – Michael Jackson
I got my first stereo, a portable boom box, for Christmas 1987 when I was 13 years old. I got a handful of cassettes with it, including Michael Jackson’s album Bad. I loved that album—especially Dirty Diana. That bitch does sound dirty!
Spice Up Your Life – Spice Girls
Okay, listen, in my defense, when I’ve just had a long day at work, and I’m stuck in Beltway gridlock, and stretching ahead of me is an evening or weekend of grueling freelancing and being forced to listen to my neighbors bellow and pray and stomp, sometimes it’s nice to hear a fun, frothy, silly song that puts a smile on my face and rhythm in my weary ass. So yes, I’ve got three Spice Girls tracks on my iPod. Bite me.
Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad
I have this in my ’90s folder. I think it was out when I was in 10th or 11th grade. Not one of my favorite songs, but it still makes my tired old foot tap a bit.
Goodnight and Thank You – Evita
Heh. I had a thing for a few musicals in high school, especially around 9th grade, and this was one of them. It’s weird to hear it out of context like this, without the rest of the musical framing it. When it ended my brain automatically jumped ahead to The Art of the Possible, but instead I heard:
Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone – Glass Tiger
A prom/graduation anthem of the late ’80s! This came out in 1986, so I always think of big hair, shaker knit sweaters, and big ugly brooches when I hear it. Maybe I’ll request that Annida sing an operatic version of this at my funeral someday. (*smiles and waves at poor beleagured Annida*)
Have I Told You Lately – Van Morrison
Awww, such a nice love song. Conventional and hardly groundbreaking…but still lovely. I have a few of his songs on my iPod.
Waiting for That Day – George Michael
I was obsessed with the Listen without Prejudice album in 11th grade. This song features the line “Well, everybody’s talking about this new decade / like you say the magic number and then say goodbye to the stupid mistakes you made.” He was talking about the dawn of the 1990s, which seems like a lifetime ago. It’s so depressing to realize kids born at that time—at the turn of the decade—are now almost old enough to vote. And some of them have kids of their own. Jesus Christ.
Don’t Drink the Water – Dave Matthews Band
I really can’t stand the Dave Matthews Band. They earned my undying loathing for churning out two of the most awful songs of the mid-’90s: songs that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns and won’t even mention by name. Adding insult to injury, those songs got played several times on a day on the radio station I was forced to listen to during my two summers as a temp at a warehouse during college. So if I even hear, like, three notes of those songs I automatically think of being on my feet for eight hours, wearing a hairnet, and boxing up bars of chocolate with the dregs of Lebanon. Needless to say, no one was more shocked than I was when Don’t Drink the Water was released and I actually liked it. I think I like it because it’s so dark—the singing is a kind of feral growl, and then Dave Matthews repeatedly sings “Don’t drink the water—there’s blood in the water!” Blood in the water? Awesome!
Strangers in the Night – Frank Sinatra
A crooner classic. Part of me always wondered if I, too, would someday be enchanted by a stranger in the night. In reality, I’m more likely to be attacked and murdered by a stranger in the night.
song heard most recently before posting:
Con te partiro—Paul Potts
So, I decided to do my own version of The Shuffler. Throughout my two commutes yesterday and my morning commute today I kept my iPod on shuffle and jotted down the songs it regurgitated. Here are the results:
Angel of Harlem – U2
Rattle and Hum came out in 1988, and although I really didn’t start listening to it until 1990 or so, Angel of Harlem was a big radio and MTV hit and I loved it.
Running to Stand Still – U2
Two U2 songs in a row! Fancy that! This is my favorite song from the Joshua Tree album. My angst-ridden teen heart was all over the lyrics “You’ve got to cry without weeping, talk without speaking, scream without raising your voice.”
Someone Else’s Life – Joshua Radin
Haven’t we all, at one point or another, even if only for a split-second, wondered if we were living someone else’s life?
What Doesn’t Belong to Me – Sinead O’Connor
This is such a great break-up song. “I miss you, but I’m glad you’re gone / I want you but I’m not alone / I’m haunted by you / But I’ll get you gone if it takes me all my life long / Take back the pain you gave me / Take back what doesn’t belong to me / Take back the shame you gave me /…/ Take back the rage you gave me / Take back the hatred you gave me for me / Take back the anger that nearly killed me / Take back what doesn’t belong to me.”
Marys of the Sea – Tori Amos
I’ve been a massive Tori Amos fan since 1992, but this album, sadly, doesn’t do much for me. Still, I felt obliged to put it on my iPod, because, dude, it’s Tori! And really, this song isn’t a bad song—it’s just not as spectacular and some of her other songs.
When Doves Cry – Prince
Lord, when was this, 1982? ’83? I think I was around nine years old when this came out. I loved it even though I didn’t have a clue what it was about. Even today, when I see Plath sprawled on his back, legs in the air, I sometimes sing “Animals strike curious poses!” to him.
Mad World – Gary Jules
You know, the original Tears for Fears version of this song kind of sucks. It’s very jaunty and carnival-sounding, and considering the bleakness of the lyrics, this juxtaposition is disconcerting and downright inappropriate. Gary Jules’s version is gorgeously, gloriously wrenching. If this had been around before I was medicated, it probably would’ve been the straw that broke the suicidal camel’s back.
Sky Blue – Peter Gabriel
So Missy once told me that every time she hears this song, it reminds her of all the people trying to escape from the World Trade Center on 9/11. And ever since then, I’ve had that image burned in my head every time I hear this song. Thanks, Miss. By the way, the extended reworking of this song that appeared in Rabbit-Proof Fence is just as brilliant as the original Sky Blue.
Den Bla Slatten/Ormsla – Den Fule
Nordic folk kicks ass, and this is one of the songs that really makes me feel like grooving (albeit spastically, as I am wont to do).
Lonelilly – Damien Rice
Damien Rice rocks my world. What else can I say? He sets my cold, dead heart aflame.
Bad – U2
Another U2 song! I love U2, but apparently not as much as my iPod does! There was a period—’round about 2001, I think—when I was obsessed with this song and another U2 song, The Unforgettable Fire, and I listened to them on a continuous loop when driving back and forth to my weekend petsitting job in Alexandria. So that’s what they bring to mind.
I Want Candy – Bow Wow Wow
So dirty, but I had no clue what it meant when I was a kid. When it came to sex, I was about as naïve as you could get (and this carried on well into my teens).
Dirty Diana – Michael Jackson
I got my first stereo, a portable boom box, for Christmas 1987 when I was 13 years old. I got a handful of cassettes with it, including Michael Jackson’s album Bad. I loved that album—especially Dirty Diana. That bitch does sound dirty!
Spice Up Your Life – Spice Girls
Okay, listen, in my defense, when I’ve just had a long day at work, and I’m stuck in Beltway gridlock, and stretching ahead of me is an evening or weekend of grueling freelancing and being forced to listen to my neighbors bellow and pray and stomp, sometimes it’s nice to hear a fun, frothy, silly song that puts a smile on my face and rhythm in my weary ass. So yes, I’ve got three Spice Girls tracks on my iPod. Bite me.
Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad
I have this in my ’90s folder. I think it was out when I was in 10th or 11th grade. Not one of my favorite songs, but it still makes my tired old foot tap a bit.
Goodnight and Thank You – Evita
Heh. I had a thing for a few musicals in high school, especially around 9th grade, and this was one of them. It’s weird to hear it out of context like this, without the rest of the musical framing it. When it ended my brain automatically jumped ahead to The Art of the Possible, but instead I heard:
Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone – Glass Tiger
A prom/graduation anthem of the late ’80s! This came out in 1986, so I always think of big hair, shaker knit sweaters, and big ugly brooches when I hear it. Maybe I’ll request that Annida sing an operatic version of this at my funeral someday. (*smiles and waves at poor beleagured Annida*)
Have I Told You Lately – Van Morrison
Awww, such a nice love song. Conventional and hardly groundbreaking…but still lovely. I have a few of his songs on my iPod.
Waiting for That Day – George Michael
I was obsessed with the Listen without Prejudice album in 11th grade. This song features the line “Well, everybody’s talking about this new decade / like you say the magic number and then say goodbye to the stupid mistakes you made.” He was talking about the dawn of the 1990s, which seems like a lifetime ago. It’s so depressing to realize kids born at that time—at the turn of the decade—are now almost old enough to vote. And some of them have kids of their own. Jesus Christ.
Don’t Drink the Water – Dave Matthews Band
I really can’t stand the Dave Matthews Band. They earned my undying loathing for churning out two of the most awful songs of the mid-’90s: songs that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns and won’t even mention by name. Adding insult to injury, those songs got played several times on a day on the radio station I was forced to listen to during my two summers as a temp at a warehouse during college. So if I even hear, like, three notes of those songs I automatically think of being on my feet for eight hours, wearing a hairnet, and boxing up bars of chocolate with the dregs of Lebanon. Needless to say, no one was more shocked than I was when Don’t Drink the Water was released and I actually liked it. I think I like it because it’s so dark—the singing is a kind of feral growl, and then Dave Matthews repeatedly sings “Don’t drink the water—there’s blood in the water!” Blood in the water? Awesome!
Strangers in the Night – Frank Sinatra
A crooner classic. Part of me always wondered if I, too, would someday be enchanted by a stranger in the night. In reality, I’m more likely to be attacked and murdered by a stranger in the night.
song heard most recently before posting:
Con te partiro—Paul Potts
Monday, June 18, 2007
how the other half lives
This weekend I got to briefly experience what it must be like to be rich. Angela was in DC all week for business, and because there was a recurring issue with her room, the hotel upgraded her to a presidential suite, free of charge, for her final two nights. As she was planning to stay at my apartment on Friday night anyway, we decided to turn things around and have me stay with her in the mega-suite instead.
Good lord. Never have I seen anything like it. For one thing, she even had her own doorbell. Such a simple little thing, and yet it left my plebian self agog. The first thing I said to her when she opened the door was, “Ohmigod, you have your own doorbell!” I sure done felt fancy. Here’s the rest of the suite:
Good lord. Never have I seen anything like it. For one thing, she even had her own doorbell. Such a simple little thing, and yet it left my plebian self agog. The first thing I said to her when she opened the door was, “Ohmigod, you have your own doorbell!” I sure done felt fancy. Here’s the rest of the suite:
the foyer:
the living room:
another view of the living room:
the TV room:
the kitchen:
the dining room:
the bedroom:
the bathroom, with its shower stall that was bigger than my whole bathroom at home:
Angela and me in the back gardens:
As posh as the suite was, the rich aren’t given any swag in it. The snacks in the living room weren’t free—they cost a lot of money ($6 for a bottle of water!). And the movie-on-demand feature cost a whopping $9.99 per film. Breakfast would’ve cost a fortune for very little food. I shudder to think of what the minibar cost.
Anyway, on Friday evening we hopped on the Metro and went to Friendship Heights to browse through the stores and pick up a bottle of wine in World Market. Then we returned to Woodley Park and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant. After that we headed back to the hotel, showered, and hunkered down with the wine and a movie-on-demand (The Queen), since her office gave her permission to buy up to two movies.
On Saturday, after we checked out, I drove us down to Arlington so we could eat brunch at the Silver Diner and poke around the shops in Clarendon (the Mac store was our first destination). We didn’t have a lot of time before I had to drop her off at the airport.
The rest of Saturday and all of Sunday were spent working on freelancing, naturally. zzzzzzzzz
song heard most recently before posting:
Con te partiro—Paul Potts
Monday, June 11, 2007
a birthday in New York
(Note: If you’re having trouble reading this entry in Firefox, and wonky things keep inexplicably happening, like a gigantic gray box appears over part of the text, open this page in Safari or IE instead and it should be fine.)
Okay. New York. I really should have written about this sooner, but within hours of returning home I started getting sick with a cold, and even though it’s just a cold—and not even a particularly bad one at that—it knocked me on my ass. Maybe because I’m not used to being sick? My immune system is normally freakishly effective. I called in sick on Friday and it took all my energy to plow through the pile of freelancing I had to do over the weekend. Working while sick sucked, but at least I was able to lounge on the sofa while doing it. And after finishing each day’s workload, I sprawled on the sofa and watched Netflix and Lost DVDs, coughing and sniffing pitifully the whole way through, and occasionally moaning about how wiped out I felt. I wasn’t sleeping overly well, probably because of being stuffy and coughing, and I’m sure that didn’t help with my overall sense of exhaustion.
New York was great, though. (Pictures can be seen here.) We were only there for two days, but we did manage to accomplish everything we set out to do (with the exception of taking a ghost walk, since, oddly enough, none were being offered while we were there). This was actually my first time staying over in New Yawk; in the past I’d always stayed in New Joisey. Actually...now that I think about it...there was one night when I stayed in New York itself. It was my freshman year of college, when three friends and I spontaneously decided, at like 11pm, to drive to New York. We got there in the middle of the night and then we were like, “Now what do we do?” So we slept in the car. On a cold November night in the middle of a dodgy neighborhood in Manhattan. Yeah, makes no sense.
Anyway. On Sunday, June 3rd, my pal Susan and I took an 8am bus from Bethesda to New York, and it was a nice bus! Reclining seats, TV screens, a bathroom. I don’t know what I was expecting for $25, but it sure wasn’t that. Two hours into the trip we stopped at a huge rest stop in Delaware, and as soon as we hit the road again the driver started playing a DVD (The Pursuit of Happyness, which was so depressing it kind of made me want to shoot myself). We pulled into New York on schedule and arrived at Penn Station around 12:30pm.
We grabbed a cab to our hotel, the Larchmont, in Greenwich Village. It’s a budget hotel—very hostel-y and European (the toilet cubicles even have “WC” written on their doors)—but pretty decent. It was a great neighborhood, and because we required three separate keys to get from the front door into our room, we felt safe. The room was small, the bed wasn’t overly comfortable, there was a dead fly in our room, and I saw one or two bugs in the shower; however, we had air-conditioning (very important, because although it wasn’t overly hot when we were there, it was humid), they gave us robes and slippers, we had a TV and sink, and a cleaning lady replaced our towels and made our bed for us, so I have no complaints. It was affordable, after all!
After we got settled into our room, we walked off in search of Blossom, an organic gourmet vegan restaurant. It was much smaller than I expected, but still great (even though we were sitting next to two rich chicks who were casually blathering on about their exotic travels. (Yes, I was jealous.) After lunch we walked around Chelsea, the West Village, and Greenwich Village, popping into shops (including secondhand shops and a pet store run by a bunch of gay guys, where I bought cool souvenirs for the cats). We stopped for ice cream and did some people-watching while we ate it. By this point, Tropical Storm Barry had appeared and it was raining off and on.
We went back to our room, relaxed, and watched TV. Well, first we had trouble even getting to our room. We couldn’t figure out how to open the door to our hallway! We tried all three keys and nothing worked. Finally someone came along and we asked her for help. After watching her, Susan figured out that when turning the key in the lock, you need to pull the door toward you in order for it to open. It reminded me of my front door in Lebanon, where you’d have to push yourself into the door in order to lock and unlock it.
It seemed too pathetic to call it a night already, since we were in freaking New York (even if it was a sedate Sunday night), so we flipped through the guidebook someone left in our room and looked for something to do. We chose Bowlmor Lanes, a rock n’ bowl place in the vicinity of our hotel. I think I’ve only been bowling once in my life—as a kid when we visited family in Massachusetts.
It was a miserable walk to the lanes, since it was pouring, and once we got there, we were kind of confused by the whole set-up process. Eventually we figured things out and settled down to share a divine order of spinach-artichoke dip. The place wasn’t really hopping, thankfully, and the swank nightclub upstairs was closed, which was a relief, because I looked like a frizzy-haloed piece of hell and wasn’t exactly in the mood to mingle with hip, beautiful New Yorkers. The bowling itself was fun. Well, no surprises here—I sucked at it. I’m sure it didn’t help that I’m cross-dominant (although closing my left eye didn’t improve my game at all, so maybe cross-dominance really can’t be blamed for my lack of bowling skillz). The best part of the evening, aside from the yummy dip, was seeing all the bowling pins signed by celebrities who had bowled at Bowlmor in the past.
A bowling pin signed by Michael Stipe!
When we woke up on my birthday, it was still pouring. We first headed to the basement for breakfast. Obviously their definition of “breakfast” was different from mine (they only offered danishes, juice, and coffee). It was as bare-bones as you could get—even more bare-bones than the sparse layout offered to me by the Salvation Army hostel in Reykjavik. After “eating” (and yes, I use that term very loosely), we headed to MoMA via the subway.
We thought we’d have to hang out in a nearby café or store since we were so early, but to our surprise, the lobby of the museum was open and there was already a huge line of people waiting to buy tickets. In fact, the line was so long, it stretched out the door and just kept going. Since it was pouring, we opted to hang out in the gift shop instead of standing in the rain. Once the ticket counter opened, we joined the mind-bogglingly huge line out in the downpour. The line was so long, it was like waiting to ride a roller coaster in the middle of summer! It did move fairly quickly, though, I must admit.
The museum was fabulous. As I’m coming from an environment where most museums are free, I hated having to pay such a high entry fee, but what can you do? I was delighted to learn that photos were allowed in the museum (except in one special exhibit); however, flash wasn’t allowed, so my pictures aren’t as clear as they could be.
The only Chagall work on display: “I and the Village.”
I was having some...umm...how shall I say this delicately? Let’s just say that I was having some gastrointestinal “issues” and was forced to spend some time in a bathroom. When I finally stumbled out of there Susan said, “You’re never going to guess who I just saw. Locke’s dad!” “WHAAAAAT!” I screeched. Turns out she saw the guy who plays Locke’s dad on Lost while I was stuck in the bathroom. I was so pissed. You can’t imagine how pissed I was that I missed an opportunity to meet—or at least furtively photograph—Locke’s dad because I was stuck on the fucking toilet!!!! I wish I could’ve said to him, “Will you pose for a picture with me? Please? I’ll let you steal my kidney if you do. I’ll let you push me out of an eighth-story window if you just pose for a photo with me and tell me how the hell the Others got you onto that island!”
Disappointment: I was looking forward to seeing Chagall’s painting “The Birthday,” partially because I really like it and partially because I thought it’d be cool to pose next to “The Birthday” on my birthday. Sadly, though, it was nowhere to be found. While the museum was careful to post a notice in several places alerting visitors to the fact that Dali’s most famous piece was currently on loan to the Tate Modern (rather ironic, considering I was just there in October, before the painting arrived), there was no word of what happened to “The Birthday” or Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.”
After exploring every floor, we browsed through the gift shop again and also hit the MoMA design store across the street, as well as the gift shop for the American Folk Art Museum (the museum itself was closed), before heading back to our hotel.
We freshened up and changed, then walked over to Tea & Sympathy. The restaurant was much smaller than I expected, but still utterly divine. The pasty I got was even better than the pasties I ate in London last year! I also got sides of beans and mash and drank a fizzy Ribena.
Food of the gods.
Susan had them bring out a candle in an amazing slice of warm ginger cake, and that gave me a chance to make a birthday wish. I was so completely stuffed from dinner, though, that eating even half the cake slice made me feel faintly ill!
Me, stuffed to the brim after my birthday dinner.
It was a nice night, the rain had finally stopped, and the humidity was subsiding, so we decided to walk to the KGB Bar—the last stop on my birthday tour. The bar was pretty empty, minus some folks who seemed to be friends of the bartender’s. Some hipsters showed up later, too. There was no poetry reading after all—they’d been suspended for the summer. The bar was rather quiet and almost had a gothy feel, and I really liked it. I saw some great Soviet memorabilia on the walls and loved spotting a Lenin bust next to a bunch of liquor bottles on the bar.
Lenin and liquor.
I got a Russian beer but was only able to drink less than half of it because I was so freaking stuffed from dinner.
So: that was how I turned 33.
On Tuesday morning, after “breakfast,” we turned in our keys, paid our bill, and headed to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim via the subway. It was a bit tiresome, since we had all our bags with us, but once we bought our museum tickets (which had a reduced price because the building is being renovated), we were able to dump our bags in the coat check room. Pictures were only allowed in the lobby, unfortunately. It’s a grand lobby and I took many photos, but I wish I could’ve taken photos of the artwork as well—especially since the museum had several Chagall pieces!
In the lobby, looking up.
In the lobby, looking down.
Me behind a prism curtain in the Guggenheim lobby.
Because chunks of the museum were closed, it only took us about two hours to see everything. We stopped for a leisurely lunch in the museum café, hit the gift shop, snapped more photos in the lobby, and decided to go for a walk outside before retrieving our bags. We walked down Fifth Avenue, plopped on a park bench in the shade, and didn’t move again. It was so lovely and comfortable in the shade, and we were so tired. Well, after a few minutes curiosity got the best of me and I decided to find an entrance to Central Park, which was literally to our backs (behind a wall). Then I poked around a small portion of the park, snapped some pictures around the lake, and returned to the bench to laze away some more time.
By the time we arrived at Penn Station, we were really hot and tired and just wanted to collapse on a bench in the air-conditioned station. Except there were no benches—none that were free, anyway. So we each purchased something to drink at a little café place and sat in there forever, nursing our drinks and trying to cool off. We had gotten there very early and it was nice to have the luxury of crashing in the a/c before stumbling off to the bus.
The ride home was good. The DVD shown was…some Robin Williams movie. I can’t even remember the name. Man of the Year, maybe? We got back to Bethesda around 9pm, and, through a stroke of luck (or misunderstanding) got away with only paying $8 for parking instead $24. We were like, “Hell yeah, we’ll take it!”
Thus ends my only vacation of this year. *sniffs* It wasn’t much of a vacation, really; I mean, it was just two days away. But it felt good to get the break, and now all my money and vacation time can be be directed toward buying a house/condo and fixing it up. After that I can focus on saving for my next big vacation, which will probably involve some configuration of Prague, Budapest, Kiev, and Krakow.
song heard most recently before posting:
Please Can I Go Now—GMT and Hinda Hicks
Okay. New York. I really should have written about this sooner, but within hours of returning home I started getting sick with a cold, and even though it’s just a cold—and not even a particularly bad one at that—it knocked me on my ass. Maybe because I’m not used to being sick? My immune system is normally freakishly effective. I called in sick on Friday and it took all my energy to plow through the pile of freelancing I had to do over the weekend. Working while sick sucked, but at least I was able to lounge on the sofa while doing it. And after finishing each day’s workload, I sprawled on the sofa and watched Netflix and Lost DVDs, coughing and sniffing pitifully the whole way through, and occasionally moaning about how wiped out I felt. I wasn’t sleeping overly well, probably because of being stuffy and coughing, and I’m sure that didn’t help with my overall sense of exhaustion.
New York was great, though. (Pictures can be seen here.) We were only there for two days, but we did manage to accomplish everything we set out to do (with the exception of taking a ghost walk, since, oddly enough, none were being offered while we were there). This was actually my first time staying over in New Yawk; in the past I’d always stayed in New Joisey. Actually...now that I think about it...there was one night when I stayed in New York itself. It was my freshman year of college, when three friends and I spontaneously decided, at like 11pm, to drive to New York. We got there in the middle of the night and then we were like, “Now what do we do?” So we slept in the car. On a cold November night in the middle of a dodgy neighborhood in Manhattan. Yeah, makes no sense.
Anyway. On Sunday, June 3rd, my pal Susan and I took an 8am bus from Bethesda to New York, and it was a nice bus! Reclining seats, TV screens, a bathroom. I don’t know what I was expecting for $25, but it sure wasn’t that. Two hours into the trip we stopped at a huge rest stop in Delaware, and as soon as we hit the road again the driver started playing a DVD (The Pursuit of Happyness, which was so depressing it kind of made me want to shoot myself). We pulled into New York on schedule and arrived at Penn Station around 12:30pm.
We grabbed a cab to our hotel, the Larchmont, in Greenwich Village. It’s a budget hotel—very hostel-y and European (the toilet cubicles even have “WC” written on their doors)—but pretty decent. It was a great neighborhood, and because we required three separate keys to get from the front door into our room, we felt safe. The room was small, the bed wasn’t overly comfortable, there was a dead fly in our room, and I saw one or two bugs in the shower; however, we had air-conditioning (very important, because although it wasn’t overly hot when we were there, it was humid), they gave us robes and slippers, we had a TV and sink, and a cleaning lady replaced our towels and made our bed for us, so I have no complaints. It was affordable, after all!
After we got settled into our room, we walked off in search of Blossom, an organic gourmet vegan restaurant. It was much smaller than I expected, but still great (even though we were sitting next to two rich chicks who were casually blathering on about their exotic travels. (Yes, I was jealous.) After lunch we walked around Chelsea, the West Village, and Greenwich Village, popping into shops (including secondhand shops and a pet store run by a bunch of gay guys, where I bought cool souvenirs for the cats). We stopped for ice cream and did some people-watching while we ate it. By this point, Tropical Storm Barry had appeared and it was raining off and on.
We went back to our room, relaxed, and watched TV. Well, first we had trouble even getting to our room. We couldn’t figure out how to open the door to our hallway! We tried all three keys and nothing worked. Finally someone came along and we asked her for help. After watching her, Susan figured out that when turning the key in the lock, you need to pull the door toward you in order for it to open. It reminded me of my front door in Lebanon, where you’d have to push yourself into the door in order to lock and unlock it.
It seemed too pathetic to call it a night already, since we were in freaking New York (even if it was a sedate Sunday night), so we flipped through the guidebook someone left in our room and looked for something to do. We chose Bowlmor Lanes, a rock n’ bowl place in the vicinity of our hotel. I think I’ve only been bowling once in my life—as a kid when we visited family in Massachusetts.
It was a miserable walk to the lanes, since it was pouring, and once we got there, we were kind of confused by the whole set-up process. Eventually we figured things out and settled down to share a divine order of spinach-artichoke dip. The place wasn’t really hopping, thankfully, and the swank nightclub upstairs was closed, which was a relief, because I looked like a frizzy-haloed piece of hell and wasn’t exactly in the mood to mingle with hip, beautiful New Yorkers. The bowling itself was fun. Well, no surprises here—I sucked at it. I’m sure it didn’t help that I’m cross-dominant (although closing my left eye didn’t improve my game at all, so maybe cross-dominance really can’t be blamed for my lack of bowling skillz). The best part of the evening, aside from the yummy dip, was seeing all the bowling pins signed by celebrities who had bowled at Bowlmor in the past.
A bowling pin signed by Michael Stipe!When we woke up on my birthday, it was still pouring. We first headed to the basement for breakfast. Obviously their definition of “breakfast” was different from mine (they only offered danishes, juice, and coffee). It was as bare-bones as you could get—even more bare-bones than the sparse layout offered to me by the Salvation Army hostel in Reykjavik. After “eating” (and yes, I use that term very loosely), we headed to MoMA via the subway.
We thought we’d have to hang out in a nearby café or store since we were so early, but to our surprise, the lobby of the museum was open and there was already a huge line of people waiting to buy tickets. In fact, the line was so long, it stretched out the door and just kept going. Since it was pouring, we opted to hang out in the gift shop instead of standing in the rain. Once the ticket counter opened, we joined the mind-bogglingly huge line out in the downpour. The line was so long, it was like waiting to ride a roller coaster in the middle of summer! It did move fairly quickly, though, I must admit.
The museum was fabulous. As I’m coming from an environment where most museums are free, I hated having to pay such a high entry fee, but what can you do? I was delighted to learn that photos were allowed in the museum (except in one special exhibit); however, flash wasn’t allowed, so my pictures aren’t as clear as they could be.
The only Chagall work on display: “I and the Village.”I was having some...umm...how shall I say this delicately? Let’s just say that I was having some gastrointestinal “issues” and was forced to spend some time in a bathroom. When I finally stumbled out of there Susan said, “You’re never going to guess who I just saw. Locke’s dad!” “WHAAAAAT!” I screeched. Turns out she saw the guy who plays Locke’s dad on Lost while I was stuck in the bathroom. I was so pissed. You can’t imagine how pissed I was that I missed an opportunity to meet—or at least furtively photograph—Locke’s dad because I was stuck on the fucking toilet!!!! I wish I could’ve said to him, “Will you pose for a picture with me? Please? I’ll let you steal my kidney if you do. I’ll let you push me out of an eighth-story window if you just pose for a photo with me and tell me how the hell the Others got you onto that island!”
Disappointment: I was looking forward to seeing Chagall’s painting “The Birthday,” partially because I really like it and partially because I thought it’d be cool to pose next to “The Birthday” on my birthday. Sadly, though, it was nowhere to be found. While the museum was careful to post a notice in several places alerting visitors to the fact that Dali’s most famous piece was currently on loan to the Tate Modern (rather ironic, considering I was just there in October, before the painting arrived), there was no word of what happened to “The Birthday” or Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.”
After exploring every floor, we browsed through the gift shop again and also hit the MoMA design store across the street, as well as the gift shop for the American Folk Art Museum (the museum itself was closed), before heading back to our hotel.
We freshened up and changed, then walked over to Tea & Sympathy. The restaurant was much smaller than I expected, but still utterly divine. The pasty I got was even better than the pasties I ate in London last year! I also got sides of beans and mash and drank a fizzy Ribena.
Food of the gods. Susan had them bring out a candle in an amazing slice of warm ginger cake, and that gave me a chance to make a birthday wish. I was so completely stuffed from dinner, though, that eating even half the cake slice made me feel faintly ill!
Me, stuffed to the brim after my birthday dinner.It was a nice night, the rain had finally stopped, and the humidity was subsiding, so we decided to walk to the KGB Bar—the last stop on my birthday tour. The bar was pretty empty, minus some folks who seemed to be friends of the bartender’s. Some hipsters showed up later, too. There was no poetry reading after all—they’d been suspended for the summer. The bar was rather quiet and almost had a gothy feel, and I really liked it. I saw some great Soviet memorabilia on the walls and loved spotting a Lenin bust next to a bunch of liquor bottles on the bar.
Lenin and liquor.I got a Russian beer but was only able to drink less than half of it because I was so freaking stuffed from dinner.
So: that was how I turned 33.
On Tuesday morning, after “breakfast,” we turned in our keys, paid our bill, and headed to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim via the subway. It was a bit tiresome, since we had all our bags with us, but once we bought our museum tickets (which had a reduced price because the building is being renovated), we were able to dump our bags in the coat check room. Pictures were only allowed in the lobby, unfortunately. It’s a grand lobby and I took many photos, but I wish I could’ve taken photos of the artwork as well—especially since the museum had several Chagall pieces!
In the lobby, looking up.
In the lobby, looking down.
Me behind a prism curtain in the Guggenheim lobby.By the time we arrived at Penn Station, we were really hot and tired and just wanted to collapse on a bench in the air-conditioned station. Except there were no benches—none that were free, anyway. So we each purchased something to drink at a little café place and sat in there forever, nursing our drinks and trying to cool off. We had gotten there very early and it was nice to have the luxury of crashing in the a/c before stumbling off to the bus.
The ride home was good. The DVD shown was…some Robin Williams movie. I can’t even remember the name. Man of the Year, maybe? We got back to Bethesda around 9pm, and, through a stroke of luck (or misunderstanding) got away with only paying $8 for parking instead $24. We were like, “Hell yeah, we’ll take it!”
Thus ends my only vacation of this year. *sniffs* It wasn’t much of a vacation, really; I mean, it was just two days away. But it felt good to get the break, and now all my money and vacation time can be be directed toward buying a house/condo and fixing it up. After that I can focus on saving for my next big vacation, which will probably involve some configuration of Prague, Budapest, Kiev, and Krakow.
song heard most recently before posting:
Please Can I Go Now—GMT and Hinda Hicks
Friday, June 01, 2007
reason number 213 why I hate my apartment
I’ve been in a bit of a foul mood lately, just because it’s freaking hot outside, my freelancing workload has been ungodly, I’ve been dealing with a particularly rough set of author changes in said workload, and my upstairs neighbors have been torturing me by babysitting their grandchild since last Saturday. Normally they only have him on Monday night and all day Tuesday, and that’s bad enough, because this kid exists solely to race laps around their house (on, I may add, hardwood floors) and screech. Also, he has developed a propensity for furiously stomping. On hardwood floors. With me beneath them. So, you can imagine what it’s been like to have him around 24 hours a day for almost a week. Being totally passive-aggressive and nonconfrontational, I’ve taken to angrily whacking at my ceiling with a sneaker every time the noise gets too extreme.
So anyway, last night I was working and dealing with a particularly meddlesome, frustrating set of author changes that made me want to go above and beyond the level of pulling out my hair out and instead pull out my teeth. All of a sudden I heard a loud, rat-tat-tat dripping noise. “What the hell?” I asked Plath, who was snoozing on a pile of manuscripts at my feet. I thought perhaps my kitchen faucet had inexplicably begun dripping. I put down my lap desk and pen and headed to the kitchen.
Aaaaaaaaand I found water pouring out of the top of my kitchen doorway. What. The. Fuck. Actually, I shouldn’t be surprised by this at all, because two years ago water spontaneously began pouring out of the ceiling light fixture in my kitchen. So there you go. This is the kind of apartment I’m dealing with.
I stood there slack-jawed for a while, then ripped myself out of my stupor and grabbed a bucket to catch the water. After a while I figured out that the water wasn’t coming from my doorway after all, but from one of the air ducts in the laundry room, which borders my kitchen. The water was leaking out of the duct, running along its length, and then heading toward my doorway. I discovered that it wasn’t even water I was seeing, but some kind of brownish fluid that left a sticky residue wherever it landed. Huh? My floor was sticky, the bucket was sticky, the duct leaking the fluid was sticky. It was pretty disgusting, actually, and I had to spray everything with bleach in order to get rid of all the stickiness. After the dripping stopped I wrapped up the troublesome area with duct tape. (Just call me Bob Vila! But it is duct tape, after all, and this was a leaky duct, so...) I vowed to call my landlord today if the problem returns. Calling him is a last resort, because he’s pretty useless and doesn’t fix half the things he’s supposed to fix, which only succeeds in leaving me seething with fury—not something I really need right now.
In less teeth-gritting news, I got this one from Shawn a while back, and I thought I’d fill it out while groaning and digesting the enormous meal I just ate at a vegetarian Indian buffet with some coworkers:
The Summer Survey
Favorite cookout food? — My options are kind of limited, what with me being a vegetarian and all. So I’ll say veggie burgers and corn on the cob.
Favorite summer drink? — Nothing that’s any different from any other time of the year.
What do you look forward to when summer comes? — Thunderstorms (but not losing my power because of them!). Strappy sandals.
Do you join any sports? — Ha!!!!!!!! Unless you count bitching about the heat as a sport.
Do you wear a one-piece or two-piece bathing suit? — Dude, I want one of those head-to-toe swimsuits that were recently invented for Muslim women, just because nobody needs to see my ass/stomach/thighs on display. Until then, I settle for swim trunks with a regular swimsuit top. But if I were swimming in a place where no one else was around, I’d be naked all the way.
Would you rather it be winter? — Kind of, yeah, because I HATE THE HEAT.
How many times do you hit the beach? — Rarely, just because I’m so busy. I love the beach, though, so last summer I made a point of taking off work for a day and going to the beach to spend hours swimming in the ocean until I was dizzy and gagging. Literally.
How many BBQs do you have? — None.
What time do you go to bed in the summer? — Same time as always: 11pm on weekdays, whenever I feel like it on weekends.
Do you go camping? — I love nature, but camping honestly doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve never even done it…aside from that time some friends and I camped out at Knoebel’s Grove overnight during college.
Flip-flops or shoes? — Sandals as much as possible.
Beach or pool? — Either one, as long as I don’t have to be near a lot of people—especially screaming kids. I love being in the water.
Bug-bite or sun burn? — What, do I prefer one or the other? Uh…neither? Who likes being bitten by bugs or sunburned??
Better swimsuit piercing: nipples or belly? — Neither one appeals to me, but I guess belly is a little better, even though it’s so clichéd.
In a relationship or single? — Single, baby!
Hang with friends or family? — Either one suits me just fine.
Hit the clubs or BBQs? — BBQs, I guess, because clubbing bores me.
Layout or fake bake? — I like being pale, actually! But if I wanted color, I’d get a fake tan. Real tans cause premature aging, yo!
Did you go to Disney World or Cedar Point? — I’ve never been to either one!
What vacations did you go on? — A long weekend in Athens, GA, visiting Annida. Then, in the autumn (yeah, I know, that doesn’t count as summer), I went to London for a few days.
Who did you hang with everyday? — My cats.
What was the worst memory of last summer? — I guess just dealing with the stress of working 900 hours a week and living with very noisy people above me.
How did you celebrate the Fourth of July? — Uhhh… *scratches head*…I don’t know…just hung out at home, I guess? I honestly don’t remember.
What was one thing you did every week last summer? — Worked!
Favorite summer 2006 clothing item? — There’s this floral wrap dress that I loved wearing, because it’s so comfortable and cute and doesn’t wrinkle.
Favorite song of last summer? — Probably “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” by Stars, because I was kind of obsessed with it for a while.
Where will you be going on vacation? — Nowhere, aside from going to NYC for two days over my birthday, and trying to visit Angela in NC and/or David in Chicago. My big summer event (knock on wood!) will be buying a home. And I’ll start saving for my next Euro trip, too.
How will you celebrate the Fourth of July? — Doing nothing. That’s a rare luxury in my current life.
The best place to be this summer? — In an air-conditioned building.
song heard most recently before posting:
Secret Spell—Tori Amos
So anyway, last night I was working and dealing with a particularly meddlesome, frustrating set of author changes that made me want to go above and beyond the level of pulling out my hair out and instead pull out my teeth. All of a sudden I heard a loud, rat-tat-tat dripping noise. “What the hell?” I asked Plath, who was snoozing on a pile of manuscripts at my feet. I thought perhaps my kitchen faucet had inexplicably begun dripping. I put down my lap desk and pen and headed to the kitchen.
Aaaaaaaaand I found water pouring out of the top of my kitchen doorway. What. The. Fuck. Actually, I shouldn’t be surprised by this at all, because two years ago water spontaneously began pouring out of the ceiling light fixture in my kitchen. So there you go. This is the kind of apartment I’m dealing with.
I stood there slack-jawed for a while, then ripped myself out of my stupor and grabbed a bucket to catch the water. After a while I figured out that the water wasn’t coming from my doorway after all, but from one of the air ducts in the laundry room, which borders my kitchen. The water was leaking out of the duct, running along its length, and then heading toward my doorway. I discovered that it wasn’t even water I was seeing, but some kind of brownish fluid that left a sticky residue wherever it landed. Huh? My floor was sticky, the bucket was sticky, the duct leaking the fluid was sticky. It was pretty disgusting, actually, and I had to spray everything with bleach in order to get rid of all the stickiness. After the dripping stopped I wrapped up the troublesome area with duct tape. (Just call me Bob Vila! But it is duct tape, after all, and this was a leaky duct, so...) I vowed to call my landlord today if the problem returns. Calling him is a last resort, because he’s pretty useless and doesn’t fix half the things he’s supposed to fix, which only succeeds in leaving me seething with fury—not something I really need right now.
In less teeth-gritting news, I got this one from Shawn a while back, and I thought I’d fill it out while groaning and digesting the enormous meal I just ate at a vegetarian Indian buffet with some coworkers:
The Summer Survey
Summer — General
Favorite cookout food? — My options are kind of limited, what with me being a vegetarian and all. So I’ll say veggie burgers and corn on the cob.
Favorite summer drink? — Nothing that’s any different from any other time of the year.
What do you look forward to when summer comes? — Thunderstorms (but not losing my power because of them!). Strappy sandals.
Do you join any sports? — Ha!!!!!!!! Unless you count bitching about the heat as a sport.
Do you wear a one-piece or two-piece bathing suit? — Dude, I want one of those head-to-toe swimsuits that were recently invented for Muslim women, just because nobody needs to see my ass/stomach/thighs on display. Until then, I settle for swim trunks with a regular swimsuit top. But if I were swimming in a place where no one else was around, I’d be naked all the way.
Would you rather it be winter? — Kind of, yeah, because I HATE THE HEAT.
How many times do you hit the beach? — Rarely, just because I’m so busy. I love the beach, though, so last summer I made a point of taking off work for a day and going to the beach to spend hours swimming in the ocean until I was dizzy and gagging. Literally.
How many BBQs do you have? — None.
What time do you go to bed in the summer? — Same time as always: 11pm on weekdays, whenever I feel like it on weekends.
Do you go camping? — I love nature, but camping honestly doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve never even done it…aside from that time some friends and I camped out at Knoebel’s Grove overnight during college.
Summer — This or That
Flip-flops or shoes? — Sandals as much as possible.
Beach or pool? — Either one, as long as I don’t have to be near a lot of people—especially screaming kids. I love being in the water.
Bug-bite or sun burn? — What, do I prefer one or the other? Uh…neither? Who likes being bitten by bugs or sunburned??
Better swimsuit piercing: nipples or belly? — Neither one appeals to me, but I guess belly is a little better, even though it’s so clichéd.
In a relationship or single? — Single, baby!
Hang with friends or family? — Either one suits me just fine.
Hit the clubs or BBQs? — BBQs, I guess, because clubbing bores me.
Layout or fake bake? — I like being pale, actually! But if I wanted color, I’d get a fake tan. Real tans cause premature aging, yo!
Last Summer — 2006
Did you go to Disney World or Cedar Point? — I’ve never been to either one!
What vacations did you go on? — A long weekend in Athens, GA, visiting Annida. Then, in the autumn (yeah, I know, that doesn’t count as summer), I went to London for a few days.
Who did you hang with everyday? — My cats.
What was the worst memory of last summer? — I guess just dealing with the stress of working 900 hours a week and living with very noisy people above me.
How did you celebrate the Fourth of July? — Uhhh… *scratches head*…I don’t know…just hung out at home, I guess? I honestly don’t remember.
What was one thing you did every week last summer? — Worked!
Favorite summer 2006 clothing item? — There’s this floral wrap dress that I loved wearing, because it’s so comfortable and cute and doesn’t wrinkle.
Favorite song of last summer? — Probably “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” by Stars, because I was kind of obsessed with it for a while.
This Summer — 2007
Where will you be going on vacation? — Nowhere, aside from going to NYC for two days over my birthday, and trying to visit Angela in NC and/or David in Chicago. My big summer event (knock on wood!) will be buying a home. And I’ll start saving for my next Euro trip, too.
How will you celebrate the Fourth of July? — Doing nothing. That’s a rare luxury in my current life.
The best place to be this summer? — In an air-conditioned building.
song heard most recently before posting:
Secret Spell—Tori Amos
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