It's like eating an old person

Dried apples, that is.

I'm still not well. In fact, I think I keep catching my cold over and over again. I don't think I am disinfecting and sanitizing my living space fast enough to prevent the spread of germs. The last possible solution is to fire bomb the place and start over. Since I'm not ready for that, I will just keep coughing on.

I blame the Kansas Jayhawks for much of my illness. They are wearing me out. The wrenching highs and lows of following this team is stressing me out and placing undue wear on my body, starting with my immune system. The good news is that my boys advance to the final weekend. I have given myself about a 95% chance of survival.



LOVE THEM!!!!

Go Hawks

Be the dummy in your snapshots

Been sick for nigh on 10 days now. Started as this wretched fever, flu, strep throat thing and now it has morphed into this hacking, coughing, phlegming, nasty head cold with laryngitis. I can't seem to get well. It sucks. I know it was prolonged by the fact that from Sunday to Thursday of last week I couldn't sleep. I would wake up every 45 minutes through the night. It was miserable and not conducive to healing. I thought last weekend, that involved 18 hours of college basketball, was my path to the final four of wellness. It was not.

I have been meaning to write my open apology to Jack White and give you a run down on my schooling. But these, and other fascinating topics, will have to wait until I am feeling better, or until I have exhausted my supply of Nancy Drew Case files to read. Spring break is awesome.

Sarah Rose knows you have an unusual talent

Imagine you are at the grocery store or the drive through lanes at the bank/ATM or at some adorable boutique waiting to buy matching Ming vases. In all cases, there is more than one cashier available and a line behind each cashier. My special talent is always choosing the line that will take the absolute longest. Even after a cursory scan of number of items, an assumption of personality of both cashier and customers, and a search for receipts or returns, I still always pick the wrong line. Even when I pick a line intuitively and then change it because I am always wrong, I still end up in the wrong line. I end up behind the person who wants to return something with no receipt, or the person who contests the price of every item in the cart, or the lonely person who engages the cashier in conversation for 15 minutes, or the person who tries to pay with a personal check and doesn’t write any of the information in while they are waiting. It isn’t as cool as flying or x-ray vision, but many of the superheroes have to reconcile the fact that there super powers aren’t what they thought they would be.

When you have a power like that, you get used to waiting in line. It isn’t breadline Russia, and I am not a patient person by nature, but waiting your turn is something that everyone has to learn to do. That said, lady in the minivan this morning, WHAT MAKES YOU SO FUCKING SPECIAL!!! I saw you driving in the bike lane on the one lane street, trying to bypass the rest of us who had to wait. That is why I straddled the line and wouldn’t let you over. And you people on Hampden, you see the line forming all the way back at Jefferson, yet you roar ahead and cut over at the last minute. Where does this sense of entitlement come from? You are driving a 2004 Jetta, so I can’t imagine that your upbringing justifies your arrogance. What makes some people think the rules don’t apply to them? Why is there no justice? Do we really have to legislate common courtesy and decency?

Villi and I were talking about this one, still seething from the series of injustices we witnessed, and decided we should make a huge sign that says, “people who cut in line go straight to hell.” We were going to stand on the sidewalk at Hampden and shake the sign menacingly at people who cut over. I don’t know that we care that much about it now, but I just feel that these people get away with it because no one challenges them. Meanwhile, I’m three cars back, white-knuckled with fury. And when I finally snap and kill someone with a tire iron, they will call it a “senseless tragedy.” Even in death, this cheater wouldn’t be held accountable.

Wow, that got pretty dark, but it felt good to get a little of that stress off my chest.

Leslie sent me this cartoon this morning. It made me smile. I like a good rickrolling joke.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

I fucked up at work today. I don't often do this, like once every 1.5 years, but it has already settled as a weight on my chest and a needle in the back of my mind. I'm trying to shake it off, but I always take this stuff very personally. I wish I really believed that we learn from our mistakes when really I just hate exposing myself at all.

Fuck.

Oui, c’est ça vous.

I have always marvelled (notice the defiant British spelling) at the idea that it took until Einstein for someone to formalize the theory that time is relative. One of the first conclusions you come to as a student, after summer or spring break, is how much faster that time goes than a week at school. I figure the slaves building the pyramids would have come to that conclusion. Although, maybe they didn’t have what I would consider leisure time to compare it to. They probably didn’t crack open a couple of Miller Lite’s at the end of the day and reflect on a good day hauling stones. All I know is that five minutes on the elliptical machine last night and five minutes snoozing this morning were not the same measure of time. Not even close.

No spiritual epiphanies this week. I am a task robot this week. I make a list and start checking it off: homework, housework, laundry, Christmas light removal. I am trying to get into a good place for spring break. I need to walk the dogs more and enjoy the sunlight. I hope you all can do the same.

He doesn't care about winning the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix?

In the second week of my film class, my teacher told us that Krzysztof Kieslowski tried, with his films, to drive home the idea that shared memories, not just information about a person, form true intimacy. Just because Google knows my secrets doesn’t mean we are intimate. Since that lecture, the idea has really stuck with me. Reading Durkheim this week helped reinforce it. Durkheim believed that we create culture through shared interactions, and the more we share with a group, the closer we will feel to the people in it. It seems to me, however, that we are moving away from the interactions. We are accepting these connections on just the information and not the act of discovering it with someone. It starts with the celebrity worship in this country, the sheer glut of information we can find out about someone without knowing them. It trickles down to blogs just like mine. I don’t reveal much here, but there is information about me available, if someone should choose to learn it. This knowledge we acquire can be so dangerous because we are often guilty of overestimating our understanding of people. For example-

1. You may read my sister’s site. You might learn that she likes college basketball and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You could discover the shocking truth about her candy corn addiction and her unflinching loyalty to Brenda Walsh. You could learn a good deal about her life: names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. But, you would never know why she, reading that last sentence, smirked.
2. You might know my friend John. You might know that he likes art, only passed consumer math, and works in the telecom field. You may even know, through casual conversation that he likes Robert DeNiro and Lisa Loeb but hates Vin Diesel and Edward Furlong. But, you have never been treated to a 30-minute comedic diatribe about Edward Furlong while taking him to the airport.
3. You might know that I work for a software company as a manager. You may be aware that I have an all male staff. You may even know how much I dislike customers who wonder why the software can’t anticipate or think. But, you don’t know that every time we get a call like this, we joke about software that thinks and make the joke that, “Skynet is self-aware.”

So what? So, Thursday I had this zygote, inkling of a migraine. I shook it off and thought I was past it, but this morning I woke up with a full-grown migraine. I hate having to go anywhere with a migraine. When I have a migraine, my perfume makes me sick, so I don’t wear it. Then I spend the day in public with a headache and the nagging, self-consciousness that I smell terrible. It sucks. I would rather have stayed home, but I had papers to turn in, and I figured I could get through the Terminator trilogy pretty easily. So, I used a small amount of perfume and took four Advil gel caps and two Advil migraines. I took those on an empty stomach, like a dummy, so I stopped at Starbucks to get some breakfast, a bottle of water, and a coffee. By the time I got to school, the headache was much worse, so I took three more Advil migraines and rode the accompanying buzz through the first Terminator and into lunch. Instead of lunch, however, I had four more Advil migraines and a bottle of water. I blame this mild overdose for much of my behavior after lunch. We started watching T2: Judgment Day, and between the memories of Edward Furlong and Skynet jokes, I spent much of the movie giggling uncontrollably.

At the end of the movie, eager to go home and detox in peace, I heard the know-it-all film buff below me mention Edward Furlong and that he was dead. That bulldozed me. Dead? Really? My immediate reaction was one of confusion and disbelief. My second reaction was revulsion at myself; I had just spent the last two hours giggling at the expense of a dead guy. My third reaction, hearing her discuss his death from an apparent overdose, was that this girl had mistaken Edward Furlong for Brad Renfro. As I drove over to meet my father for dinner, I thought of little else. The anticipated guilt over his death conflicted with my conviction that there was just no way that Edward Furlong was dead. I read enough celebrity gossip and IMDB; this wasn’t something that would get by me. And even if it got by me, it couldn’t have gotten by Villi and John. No way, right? I drove in a haze of ibuprofen and self-doubt. Before I even said hello to my dad, I went straight to the office computer and pulled up IMDB. I was relieved, almost frighteningly so, to find that Edward Furlong was alive and well. He is married to Rachael Bella, with whom he has one child, and he just completed the film Kingshighway. And there in my parents’ office, reading his IMDB mini-biography, feeling a tremendous relief that he wasn’t dead and a little surprise that he is a vegetarian, I realized how easily I sometimes mistake information for intimacy.

I barely have the strength to close the curtain

I have that itch under my skin right now. I always do reckless things when I get this itch. I cut my own hair, dye my hair, contemplate full sleeve tattoos, or spend disgusting amounts of money on things I don’t need. This itch manifests itself as a tightness in my chest. It seems to happen when my life is rigid and unyielding and unfun; I get inspired to do stupid crazy things to wake myself up. If I don’t shake off the doldrums, I will get stuck. I don’t want to be stuck.

My long-term plan for doldrums shaking includes more time for creative writing. Villi and I are thinking about collaborating on a book or a screenplay. I had a crazy idea of supplementing my income by writing e-book romance novels. I’ve been practicing my lurid prose and coming up with euphemisms for…stuff. We’ll see.

My short-term soul stimulus package will be a trip to the coach store. I have a coupon AND a gift certificate. I feel like pastels. It feels weird and a little bit wrong. Anyone up for a luxury goods run?

hell's own half-acre

I was going to watch the KU senior speeches at work, today. But even before I could open the links, I started crying, so I realized that work was not the appropriate place to watch the videos. Perhaps Villi and I will watch them tonight, alone in our house with the sound up and tissues at the ready.

In addition to the boys of KU, who gave me a birthday gift by winning games on the two days sandwiching my birthday, I also have to thank everyone else who made my transition to 29 a little less frightening and repulsive. Sunday was lots of fun, the dinner was fantastic. Thanks to everyone, both my family and my extended family, for being there. Thanks for the giftcards (to buy my school books), my car payment, my new books (or at least new to me), and mostly for being there and being lovely.

Special thanks to Villi for all the kitchen cleaning, laundry doing, dinner buying, and general awesomeness for the weekend. Even though I am back at work, I am looking forward to a big slice of that cake when I get home.

Busy week ahead, final week of film class and stuff. Will write more later.