My plan for surviving Wednesday

Eat cup o' noodles until the gaping void in my soul is filled.

UPDATE: Made it through the day with just two.

Apparently the 30 freakout starts tonight

It's all red wine and chick flicks/lit from here on out.

Blogging from an ipod touch sucks

That is all

Everything old

I got too drunk at happy hour to go to school. This is my senior semester in my second attempt at college, and this is the first time I have been too busy drinking to go to class.

The earlier, drunker me was going to write about how finally meeting this college right of passage made me feel nostalgic for something I hadn't experienced. I knew there was a big german word for that precise sentiment. I knew I had either read it at Leslie's site or in a Douglas Coupland novel. It was Leslie's site; the word is Blinderflecknostalgie.

Thank goodness for the blogs.

The earlier, drunker me was also going to tell a long, convoluted story about my hideous college roommate and how, on her last night in Colorado, we convinced her that my friend Rich was illiterate. The thought of her helping him read through the bar menu at the pool hall still makes my sides ache with laughter.

Mostly sober now.

Even in the future nothing works

I’ve been flirting with expanding my virtual presence. I can hardly get motivated to maintain my real friendships, so I wonder how successful I would be at maintaining virtual ones. Given my past experience, the one where I don’t respond to friend requests or emails (not maliciously), I don’t know if social networking is for me. Goodreads, librarything, and linkedin are the only ones I look at regularly. Considering that I update linkedin for my job, the only other sites I maintain are book sites. Does that mean I like books more than people? Probably.

What is the real benefit of social networking?

A run down of the last week

Dealt with the layoffs in my own way. Drank vodka, ate chocolate, read trashy books, and ignored the little pit in my stomach that refused to leave me alone.

That Friday, as I was leaving Target and feeling unbalanced, I spotted the Great Clips across the parking lot. I decided to get a haircut. I wanted to remove any temptation to do it myself. I have a weird affliction. When I get it in my head that I need a haircut, I have to have one or else I do it myself. I was wise enough to recognize that I was in no position to cut my hair, so I had a weird guy who smelled like fritos and cigarettes do it instead.

Read the entire twilight series this week. Felt lame about it. They are just not good books, but I got caught up in one of the character and felt compelled to keep going. It was like reading Harry Potter and the only character I cared about was Neville Longbottom. Sort of misses the point?

Now I have to get into academic reading mode and psyche myself up for books like Athena Unbound and Women in Engineering.

Work was okay. I feel better about things now. Thanks for the kind words, all.

Pink slips

I just tempted the fates with the statement, “don’t I at least deserve this.” I should have been grateful that the axe didn’t fall on me today, and to ask, so soon, a favor of fortune was unwise.

I’m on my fifth vodka, trying to wash the distaste of today out of my mouth. It was unpleasant and made my hands shake. Worst of all it made me vulnerable; I hate that. I was betrayed by my red eyes and quivering voice. I prayed that I would make into my car before I wept. I did. I’ve been asking a lot in prayer today.

I have to hope that next week isn’t so bad. There will be a lot of ghosts in the office, and I am susceptible to haunting.

For God and Country...and three points

There is a moral to this. There is no such thing in this world as love. Until the day we go to Heaven, there is only childish infatuation and jealousy, duty, despair. A sickly moral, admittedly, but better than endless burning.

I wanted him to make me feel pretty. Isn't that sad? - The Sunlight Dialogues

Given the near collapse of my circle of friends over the last year, I have, again, begun to question the practicality of monogamy. If the friends I chose at twenty don't hold up when I'm thirty, I really wonder how I can pick one person who works out forever. And forever isn't even really forever. It's like 75 years max, a tiny little blip on the scale of cosmic time, but we call it forever when someone makes it to that 75th anniversary, because hell, it may as well be.

Perhaps it is me (most likely it is me). I hemorrhage friends, always have. I outgrow them, or they outgrow me, or they stop being worth the effort. The trick, it would seem, to successful monogamy is to find someone who is always worth the effort. Maybe committment, ideally, isn't what you pledge to someone, but rather what they inspire in you.

I got a beard on my hand

I’m not sleeping well. I go to bed between 11 and Midnight. I’m sleepy when I turn out the lights, reading until my eyes get heavy. Without fail, and with no regard the number of OTC sleeping pills I’ve taken, I pop awake between 3:30 and 4 AM and sleep fitfully until 7 AM. I can hardly get up in the morning to go to work. Usually when I am exercising, which I am right now, I don’t have sleep problems, so I am quick to blame this on one of the three new medications my endocrinologist prescribed for my newly diagnosed hypothalamus hypogonadism (previously I had been diagnosed with PCOS). I admit that the 10 year old in me totally snickered at the inclusion of the term “gonad” in my diagnosis. Thank you, Beavis and Butthead. One of my meds, Byetta, I inject into my thigh (the nurse at the office called it my meat, which I found off-putting). Byetta is interesting in that you know it is working if you feel horribly nauseated. One of the benefits of this medicine is that it helps you lose weight. It feels like chemical bulimia, no wonder it helps me lose weight. I’ve spent the first three hours of the last fifteen days feeling like crap, but it’s getting incrementally better.

New York is just around the corner, and I spend my free time picking out restaurants to try. By my count, we will have to eat 19 times in 3 days to hit all of the restaurants I want to visit. I, predictably, have created a spreadsheet to keep track of the optimal times to go to each of the restaurants and to remind myself about making reservations. I’m only truly happy when I can obsess over something. I had to transfer my mania from the Hauppauge HD PVR to the trip because the PVR was driving me crazy.

So let's crush that fly

My prom sucked: Not just my experience at the prom, but, really, the whole thing. The junior class throws the prom for the senior class ahead of them. If you have an eager, motivated bunch, you end up with a nice prom, like the one in any number of teen movies. If you have a bunch of gen y slacks, you get “One Night in Paris,” replete with shitty cardboard reproduction of the Eiffel Tower and bad pastries, hosted at the Colorado Art Institute because the juniors waited too long to book and all of the hotel ballrooms were taken.

The guy I had secretly hoped to go with was going with another girl, one who had been a friend and then, in the way of high school girls, abruptly stopped. The two groups of single people I tried to glom onto managed to shake me, so I ended up going alone in my mom’s 1991 Toyota Camry. I stayed about two hours: long enough to make the rounds, find someone in my exact same dress (a trashy, awful girl who brought her 35 year old husband as her date), receive no compliments on my homemade handbag and wrap, and be asked to dance zero times.

I had always equated prom with magic (common theme in my early life and this from a non-Catholic). There was this expectation, from all of those stupid 80s movies, that prom somehow fixed everything that had gone wrong in high school. Couples that were meant to be somehow found each other on prom night. Bad people were punished. The punishment could be innocuous, like public embarrassment and a food fight (a la Valley Girl), or death (a la Carrie). I wandered around my prom waiting for this whirling of the cosmos to happen, but it didn’t. I was home by 10:30 PM.

This year I turn 30, and I thought it might be fun to host a prom for my birthday. I was going to sell tickets (for a great dinner, of course) and hire a DJ and make everyone wear prom dresses and spike the punch and all of those goofy things associated with prom, but the more I thought about it, though, the more I feared I was still looking for this prom miracle. I would go through all of this trouble and expense of throwing this prom, and in the end, I would be out in the parking lot waiting for Andrew McCarthy (except not, cause no...maybe Jake Ryan instead). I would just be disappointed again.

So instead, I am going to NYC with my sister for 3 days. I plan to eat at great restaurants and see a show and not throw a prom. This solution helps me meet one of my new year’s resolutions as well. I have a problem saying no. Instead of saying no, I’ll do things for people and then resent the shit out of them. This way, I get a trip instead of the logistical headache of party planning. Yay for New York.

In other news, I love Vanity Fair. I'm about half way through, and I'm beginning to see why people didn't like the movie.