Who wants to go to town with a guy who drives a rowboat?

I am getting a sore throat. I am blaming the girl I don't like at work, who came back from her last trip coughing. More likely, it is caused by the fact that I sleep with the air conditioner on and pointing at my face all night. It is probably a bad idea, but I prefer it to the sweaty knees of my natural environment.

I turned in my last paper and finished my sociology final tonight. Huzzah for being done with another semester. I have made an August resolution that I must go to the gym while I am out of school. Ever since the representative from Merrill Lynch hosted the meeting and told us not to pay for things we don't use, like gym memberships, I have felt like my future wealth all hangs in the balance of whether or not I go to the gym. If I knew more about math and calculus, I would figure out what my $22 a month, compounded with interest, would be when I turned 70. But I've never been very good with math. I didn't have Winnie Cooper telling me to go for it.

I have a very vivid memory of failing a subtraction test in 2nd grade. I didn't carry any of the numbers, so I believe I got every answer wrong. It was the first time in my life that I completely failed to understand something. I always point to that, and ditching algebra II, to explain my completely disinterest in math. It would be nice to blame my teachers and society for encouraging the belief that math is harder for girls, but I know myself pretty well. In my youth, if I didn't instantly succeed at something, I didn't bother trying again. Math may have been the first casualty of that personality trait. To be followed by crocheting, playing the piano, speaking french, and learning bass clef.

To my credit, I used to know the decimal conversion for inches in a yard (all 36 values). I never thought I would work a job where it would be important to know that 4 inches is .167 yards, but then, I started working at Hancock Fabrics.

Walking towards the light

I am one semi-finished paper and a sociology exam away from being done with this semester. I just finished my final proposal for my business class. Aside from giving it a final proofread before submission, I am done with my business writing class.

Hallelujah. That must mean that the User Conference is around the corner. I'm not so bothered this year, since we don't have roommates. That makes the four days at Beaver Run way more tolerable.

I hardly know how I will spend my three weeks between semesters. Reading for leisure, no deadlines, most likely it will make me lazier than ever.

I will leave you with a quote from Mark Morford that amused me to no end, today.

"I mean, he's by far the worst president the United States has ever known and he's done more to set this nation back and embarrass us and create more terrorism and repress science and women and love and hope for all mankind everywhere. But oh my God, he's still no Dick Cheney. That guy makes baby unicorns bleed."

I learned how to dance from a vincent van gogh

I was going to post a video of Beyonce falling down the stairs, but her label is pulling them off youtube at a brisk pace. If you find her to be as repulsive as I, or you just like to laugh at other people's misfortune, you might want to look it up.

Mostly, I am glad it is time to go home, and I busy contriving a way to get out of going to the gym. Boo to the gym.

moratorium

Well, I did it. I made it through all 754 pages in one day. In fact, I decided to finish the Half Blodd Prince on Sunday, before I started the Deathly Hallows and I still got it done. Granted, I was up until 3 AM, and I feel like crap today, but I don't have to worry about anyone raining on my parade. It was weird how paranoid I felt all day Saturday. You would have thought the death-eaters were after me. I was afraid to watch any tv channel with commercials or news tickers. I went online once to get a source for a NYT article and saw a link to a Harry Potter article that looked spoiler-rific. I thought about playing some online games, but they have chat windows and I was worried that someone might post something into the chat. At that point, I nearly pulled my cable modem out of the wall and locked myself in the bathroom.

In short, I was cracking up. It's a good thing that it is over. I feel relieved. Now, I think I can go back and read all of the books and maybe pick up on a little more. Sunday felt like a marathon.

Villi was ahead of me for most of the book and would come stomping in, usually red-eyed, demanding to know where I was in the book and indulging in little conversations, although she didn't fully trust herself not to give something away. She and I read the last 4 chapters together. I finished a little ahead of her and tried to guess what she was reading when she would snicker. It was good times.

So, how long till I can post my opinions about the book?

Good-bye to you

If I play my cards just so and get all of my homework and chores done before Saturday, I think I will be geared up for the perfect Sunday. My plan is to read Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows from cover to cover, stopping only to refresh my spritzer.

I was going to try to make it until the end of the semester, August 6th, and then read the whole series straight through. The fact that the book isn’t even officially released and there are already spoilers up everywhere, however, makes me think that I can’t stay in a media vacuum long enough to read the book and not know how it ends. Instead, I will try to read it in a single setting this Sunday. We will see how it goes.

The household watched Saw III last night, and guess what? It sucked. The genre, I believe, is called torture porn and although I am gorehound from way back, I like it untied to plot, or even worse, some hack's idea of a morality play. As we discussed last night, we think it is pretty rich that Jigsaw would target someone for being vengeful, when his whole life is taking revenge on people that don’t appreciate life. Jigsaw, of course, thinks he is righteous, the sure sign of a zealot, and therefore, cannot see the parallels between what he considers murder and what the rest of the world considers murder. The whole franchise is focused on a character that is painfully pious, high-handed, and insufferably self-righteous. Boo to that.

Time has stopped moving forward at work. I won’t make it out alive.

Jeremy's Iron

Wow, there is a circle of life, and it does move us all.

1. I am researching topics for my argumentation and logic class. I choose the bookstore model, since I want to be a librarian someday and intend to use my undergraduate degree as a way of preparing for graduate studies.

2. I find an article about Gilbert, Arizona abandoning the dewey decimal system.

3. I visit Leslie's blog, where she happens to be writing about bookstores and cataloging. I post a link to the article to see how she feels about this whole dropping dewey thing.

4. Leslie writes a great piece about the need for cataloging in a library, mentioning the article I sent her.

5. The New York Times writes about the Gilbert, Arizona library and its decision to get rid of cataloging altogether. They mention Leslie's blog. But the attraction is hardly universal. On Web sites where librarians frequently post, the abandonment of Dewey has not been welcome. One blogger titled her entry “Heresy!

6. Leslie sends out an email alerting everyone to the good news.

7. I read the article and toast to Leslie's success.

8. I find a logical fallacy to use for my second paper for my argumentation and logic class in the NYT article.

And, lo, the world makes sense again.

entitlement

Today, at lunch, we were talking about Sprint's decision to get rid of its 1000 most nuisance customers. Some of my co-workers were appalled at the decision, but I, for one, applaud it. I believe in consumer rights, but I know what customers got dropped. They were the pain-in-the-ass, ask-for-the-moon, never-satisfied, whiny-petulant-bratty customers that I have worked with at every job. They are the people that are so wrapped up in themselves, they never consider their impact on other people. And not just the service people but the other customers, too.

These people have cut in front of me in line (ooh that lady at beauty brands still aggravates me), they haggle about prices when they are obviously lying, show up to restaurants 2 minutes before closing, and demand that the library refund every single overdue fine they accrue.

These people are responsible for bad customer service. These are the people that make the people answering the phones jaded, cynical, overwrought, mistrusting, and angry. They ruin it for the rest of us. The fact of the matter is that if you yell loud enough and long enough, you will usually get your way. People just want you to shut up at a certain point. It is a cheap victory, but these are cheap people we are talking about.

I relayed two anecdotes about this whole issue. One was about a woman who turned in 30 books more than 90 days overdue and then claimed that she should be given leniency because she had been at a funeral. Really? For 90 days. What, did you have to build the pyre yourself? Was there some sort of fast or ritual involved? I'm sure she gets away with things because she invokes the names of things that are considered taboo to challenge. If you say you are at a funeral, even for an incomprehensible 90 days, the person on the other end is supposed to take the high road, apologize for your loss, and then do whatever you want. Ridiculous.

The other anecdote came when I was working on a chat support line for an ISP. A man chatted in about his broken phone service, which I could not help him with. I told him, based on the time of night, that he needed to call from another phone to receive assistance. He bitched and moaned and carried on, but the fact remained that I couldn't help him. He finally asked what would happen if he need emergency services. I told him that in the case of emergency, I would send emergency services to his house. He, of course, wanted to know why I couldn't fix his phone if I could send emergency services to his house. The argument went on for a while, and I was about to end the chat, when he posted in the chat that he was having a heart attack.

I had his address, and I knew that if he did have a heart attack and had posted that in chat, that me and my company would be negligent and responsible, so I told my supervisor that he had claimed to have a heart attack. While my supervisor was contacting the authorities, I tried to confirm with the customer (who didn't realize I had verified his home address from the account he had signed in with) if he was okay. He didn't type anything in for a while.

Pretty soon, my supervisor, who was on the phone with his county's dispatch, confirmed that an ambulance was on the way. I relayed this into my chat and the dude flipped out. He wanted to know why I had sent an ambulance. Why couldn't I detect his sarcasm? When I told him that sarcasm is dependent on tone and we were chatting, he got even angrier. While fighting with this jerkoff, I told my supervisor that he was kidding. When my supervisor relayed that to the dispatcher, she simply said, "we'll just change that ambulance to a police car." My guy left the chat soon after. I would have given anything to have been there when the police showed up at his house.

At the very least, I hope this exercise in tough love helped him understand that sometimes, no one can move the mountain for you. I applaud Sprint for taking a small step in the battle against consumer entitlement.

How loose is your goose? Our goose is totally loose

I am making my way back through my Nancy Drew Case Files collection. It is the perfect reading distraction for the summer semester. Each book takes about 90 minutes to read and is so predictable and silly, I know I don't run the risk of becoming completely engrossed and missing a whole bunch of assignments.

Right now, I am reading case file #8--Two Points to Murder. This book is about basketball. I know this because there is an illustration on the cover of a dummy hanged from a basketball hoop, and because the book is called Two Points to Murder.

The last time I read this book, I was at the age where it seemed like a great idea to stamp all my books with both my kitty and my rainbow stamp and then tattoo it with my inelegant, 5th grade signature. It is a safe assumption that I knew far less about the game of basketball than I do now. I was Keene (if you'll pardon the pun) to see how well the ghostwriter of this book had gotten it. It started well, as the book specifically thanks two males for their technical assistance. Unless the book turns out to be about nuclear submarines, I was to assume their expertise was in general basketball knowledge. I was wrong.

1. "If they win their last three games, they'll grab their division title and go to the NCAA playoffs!" I don't know much about Emerson college, but it must play in a pretty serious conference if a team has to win a division title before it can win its conference title. The only other divisions in college basketball are Divisions 1,2,and 3. If you win that division, you are the national champion, regardless of the outcome of this NCAA playoff as they call it.

2. NCAA Playoff? Wha? Everyone and their mom knows it is referred to as the NCAA tournament or the dance. It isn't a playoff. Stupid dummies.

3. What exactly does the title mean? Two points to murder. It doesn't make any sense. For most of my life, I thought the title was Two Points FOR Murder, implying that killing someone earns you two points. Even that, though, doesn't make sense. I think killing someone is just as hard as draining one from the top of the key or even half-court. If the meaning of the title is to award points, I think killing someone should earn three points. It seems like a better trade-off.

Pointless. And now, off to the Harry Potter movie.

I won a hand, a glorious hand

The yard sale was a moderate success. Considering how exhausting the whole process was, I don't think I will ever do that again. I'm more of a bag up all my stuff and take it to goodwill kind of person. Haggling with people who don't want to pay $5 for anything isn't the kind of reenforcement I need on the weekend. I already think people are stupid and gross. Having a yard sale helps to solidify that opinion.

After the yard sale Saturday, I had to take a cool bath and a nap to fend off heat stroke. I also read 6 Nancy Drew case files in bed this weekend. It was fantastic. That was pretty much it.

why would anyone give me a pin cushion?

What do you do when you come to the startling conclusion that you were a decidedly unlikeable person until you were 19?

It's so refreshing

Ever since the news of my high school reunion, I have been in an odd state of sadness and nostalgia. The nostalgia I understand. I was pretty fucking awesome in high school. The sadness I can't entirely account for. I know that news of a certain person heightened it, and I have found myself rehearsing speeches and kiss offs that will never happen, and I am startled at the amount of hostility still there. Up until today, the sorting for the yard sale hadn't really hit on any of those nerves. Tonight, though, while going through my high school bucket, I was bowled over by a sense of regret and frustration that I wasn't somewhere different today. I have a problem with regret. It has been that greek heel for me for quite sometime. I'm not really surprised by it anymore.

I found the clown that Josh gave to me at my 13th birthday party. Is it sad that I still remember what the card said? I was going to sell the clown for $0.10, but then I accidentally broke the head off of it instead.

How appropriate, when I started, I was just listening to my Ipod library. At the first sign of high school angst, I turned it to Sarah McLachlan. She has been my maudlin music savior for gosh, like 14 years? Her music is like an injection of morphine and penicillin. The morphine numbs me immediately and then the penicillin starts to cure what ails me. I don't know why it works; it might be voodoo. I dug this little gem up off my old page archive about my sadness and Sarah McLachlan.

"If I cry me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?"

Sarah lends herself so perfectly to all the emotions that steamrolled me in high school. When no one understood me, Sarah had the answer. When I was in super extra love with the cellist in high school, paralyzed with devotion and lust and fear and joy and misery and fear and most of all fear when I saw him, and couldn't just say it, Sarah wrote it. When all my half-formed thoughts tried to take shape, they found their most comfortable home as Sarah lyrics. I branded everything with lyrics from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. Yearbooks signed with

I don't like your tragic sighs
as if your god has passed you by.
Well, hey fool,
that's your deception.
Your angels speak with jilted tongues.
The serpent's tale has come undone.

KIT

Notebooks filled with transcribed lyrics, failed french translations, etc. Turns out, I'm not the only one. Pick a lyric from Surfacing or Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and throw it into google. It's like winning the angst lottery.


Well, it's almost time for the kids to get home, and I have dragon slippers to mend.

Let's hurl a bricky-mart!

A few (many) months ago, I posted about the strange pride I take in the city of Denver and its inclusion as a major city. So, of course, you know I would be ecstatic that Denver was one of only 12 cities to get a Kwik-E-Mart 7-11 store. That is the top story tonight.

In other news, we are preparing for the G8 of yard sales this weekend. It will be the yard sale to end all yard sales. This sale is a purge of items from 6 of the fiercest consumers I know (myself included) and has taken over our whole front room and dining room. Pictures below.





Villi and I are trying to be strict about what we keep and only keep the good stuff. This means that when I came across my volleyball shoes and my prom shoes, I could only take a picture of them to remember and throw them in the donation pile. You don't care, but I do, so here is that picture.



Anyhow, it's 4.15 PM and the office is empty and I think it is time I make my departure and get home to do some more sorting and reminiscing.