Friday, September 29, 2006

It's Friday!

The World is Flat


About three years ago, I worked at a day camp corralling kindergardners. Now, through the wonders of Facebook, I have discovered that one of my former co-workers from that job is living in the same city as I am right now--nearly eight hundred miles away from that job and home.

Also, today is!!!!!

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

More on Aging Gracefully

I don't begrudge Janet Jackson a good body or even a hot body. I don't really begrudge her the benefits of that either. I would, however, like to begrudge the heck out of dressing like this when you're in your forties and upward, and I'm not talking about the styling of this outfit, which looks absolutely ridiculous anyway. I just don't think that we all need to see this much of her body. Ever.

I just feel like there is a certain dignity that needs to come with the forties or even the thirties that involves putting on more clothes than this.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Life Is a Cabaret

Truth time: I LOVE Liza Minelli. I know it's sad, but once I saw her in Cabaret, I realized why she felt she could drift through life on that and her lineage alone.

Today brings good news for me (and Ms. Minelli.) A judge threw out the $10 million civil assault case brought by her former husband David Gest. Mr. Gest said he had had headaches from alleged beatings allegedly by Ms. Minelli in alleged alcoholic rages. Ms. Minelli, in turn, alleged herpes.

Apparently, Minelli brought evidence that Gest's headache's were caused by the herpes virus that causes shingles, and Gest failed to rebut that evidence.

Although I feel like alleging herpes should perhaps be one of the last lines of defense in a messy divorce, I also feel that it should always be that one card in the back of your pocket that you could always throw down and say, "BAM! Herpes! I win!"
Now that's a fine-lookin' dog.

Housebreaking Update




M likes her apartment to be immaculate. You see, her mother was always very neat, but M also gets sick very easily. She absolutely eradicates any source of germs that may be in the area. M has also within the last year or so bought her first furniture which includes a gorgeous khaki-colored, suede, overstuffed chair and sleeper sofa.

In last night's adventures in housebreaking, the nice doggy peed on both of them. Not just a little pee either. The chair had a puddle, and later the sofa sported one long slash of pee running the length of it and pooling down the back of it and onto the back cushions.

This dog may not be with M much longer.

By Popular Request

I realize this isn't the chocolate dog, but it's the best YouTube would do for me.

Monday, September 25, 2006

I Realize Videos Aren't Real Posts, But....

Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark

This is what it is like with my cat in M's apartment right now.

Another Post about Another Defective Animal

Ladies and Gentlemen: Meet “No, No, Bad Dog.” I know, she’s cute, right? My friend M just got this dog a few weeks ago. I had a day off today, so I’ve been watching this little darling. Now, I’ve never had a dog of my own to housebreak before, so I had no idea that this could actually be quite challenging. You see, we take the nice doggy out because she is sniffing around in a dire sort of way, and then the nice doggy gets distracted outside and can’t go. Consequently, after forty-five minutes of watching the little furball alternate between sniffing and chasing gnats, we go in. The first thing that happens when we come back in is that the nice doggy obliges us by going to the bathroom on the carpet. It’s this whole cycle thing. Just fabulous.

Today has been no different. The best way to do it is to grab a beer before you go outside, so that you have something to do while you natter, "Go potty," at, well, yourself.

I count today as my greatest victory so far. She was sniffing and sniffing, so I took her out. This trip out was going just as the others had. I sat. She sniffed. I drank. She played. Then, the biggest distraction of all came by: a person. Having just one person come by usually destroys the whole trip. M and I typically go in directly afterward. This nice lady was the UPS lady. She patted the nice doggy on the head, and the little dear relieved herself copiously on UPS lady's shoes in her excitement. We both praised the dog, and I thanked the lady for her assistance.

Hey, I'll take what I can get.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Ten Chances to Lose Your Eye





So, I have now moved in and am installed in my friend M's apartment. M and I have been friends since elementary school, and she is über cool. Her mother is also here, and she is very sweet. Also with us are the animals--M's cat and new puppy and my one year old kitty.


Now, my kitty has always been high maintenance. She is not really even good at being a cat. She is highstrung, anxious, and somewhat unfriendly at times. She's not so much a fan of being held and cuddled and touched. She is also not used to other animals.

Of course, I blame myself for this aversion to other fuzzy things. Last spring break I went out to visit Fiancé's extended family with him and his father and I left the kitty with his mother. Fiancé's mother has two older cats who are dignified and aloof but also two dogs who are jumpy, noisy, and forcefully involved. The evening I dropped her off I got the call that she had been nicknamed Tea Kettle because she would do nothing but hiss at anyone. It took her days to recover.

These new animals have been no different for her. The older cat is somewhat interested, but in a friendly way, and the little puppy is playful and wants to get up into the kitty's face. And I have forgotten to mention that the kitty is not declawed.

As a consequence, to avoid the damage that would be inflicted by the swiping that accompanies the hissing, I went to PetCo to purchase the humane plastic claw caps. The ordeal was an ordeal even at this point since I had to take her into the store to figure out which size to get her. She dug her claws into my back and growled at everyone and tried to run away while small children kept coming up to her trying to touch her and talking about the pretty kitty, ignoring their mothers' warnings not to touch the mean kitty. I was lucky to get out without a lawsuit.

The fun continued when I had to clip the claws. Yowling, growling, swiping, biting, struggling, hissing...the fun just wouldn't stop. At the end of a half hour I decided to cut my losses and just did the front claws.

The very last thing was the caps themselves. The glue tube was roughly the size of a pencil nub...maybe 2.5 inches long and no bigger around than a No. 2 pencil. I had to wrap the beast into a giant, extra thick fleece blanket with only the paw in question sticking out. Forty-five minutes of screaming, growling cat and finally I now have a cat that can't kill the other animals in the apartment.

She can't use the scratching pad, but she forgets that and tries anyway. She's been trying to lick the things off for days.

It's official: She hates me.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

97 Luftballoons

Almost 100 visitors! Wow.

All this without my having posted in days really. I'm excited.

I think this further proves that to be a real success, you must be lazy, lazy, lazy.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Désolée....

So sorry for the slim post pickins! My internet is still not quite working in the new place. As soon as it is up and working, I will be back to work at it.

As a side note, if you are staying in a hotel in a town on the state line of State A and State B, make sure you know which state you are staying in because there may be another location of the same hotel chain right across the interstate. It was all very confusing.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Procrastination, Part Deux

Incidentally, we're now creeping up on three in the morning, and I still have not packed. Just one more reason why I am not a bona fide adult yet.

We Must Guard Our Honey Pots

Just one more reason to be a bear.

La universidad

UrsaMinor and I have gotten a couple of comments referring to our university. None of you will see these, even though they are fine comments and we are grateful for them. It's even okay if you've worked out who we are. However, we are not publishing that information because there have been people at our school who have gotten into trouble with their blogs. We do not anticipate becoming in any way controversial, but we figure it is just better overall to stay away from naming names of any kind--names of people, places, schools, any of it.

So, thank you for your comments and keep them coming, and we are very sorry that we can't publish everything. Keep reading and commenting though!

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Hmm...


How do we feel about this?

I've actually seen this billboard in person, so, no, it's not photoshopped.

Aging with Grace

Not too long ago, I was in the big city visiting my freshman roommate, Y. She turns twenty-four the month before I do, so we spent a lot of time teasing each other about the rather advanced state of our years. During my stay we visited Urban Outfitters. As we walked through the store, Y would point out things that she thought were cute and that she would like to buy when she started her job after graduation. I walked along saying, "Hmm," and pursing my lips a lot. After a while she looked at me and asked me if she had bad taste and if the things she liked weren't cute. I thought about it for a bit, because I myself had been trying to pinpoint the problem as well. Then it came to me: We were too old for a lot of their clothes and about to be too old for the rest of them. After I had that little epiphany, I felt a little embarrassed even standing in the store. I shared my feelings on the matter with Y, and we made a pact that such attire would be retired promptly on our twenty-fifth birthdays (but glitter eyeliner could stay maybe til twenty-six...)

Just now I was watching Million Dollar Listings, on Bravo. I don't know if you have seen this, but the woman pictured above is one of the main characters on the new reality show. I recommend that you Google around a bit and find some clearer pictures of her to fully appreciate what I am about to tell you. After selling a house, this woman Dia and her husband Ray went shopping at Urban Outfitters. She started trying on shoes and clothes. Some of these clothes were even glittery. And she bought things. Ray paid for them. She will wear them in public.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

What It Do

This is what bears do all day. This is why I want to be one. I rest my case.

Procrastination


If any of you are wondering why I have time to post so often, and I know you are, I am taking one term off from school. My school is on the quarter system, and I attended four quarters straight of law school. Considering that the first three of those comprised my first year, that's quite a load. Anyway, I'm taking a quarter off and moving to a completely different part of the country for a month and a half to just hang out and work. I'll be moving in with my best friend from high school.

All this to say that what I should be doing is packing because I leave Friday. However, I am procrastinating. I do this rather well, you see, as I am well-practiced. I do this every time I go into finals week. I have a very specific strategy, and that is this: I watch The Newlyweds DVDs back-to-back-to-back. To-back-to-back. To-back. You get the idea. They just sit and run while I sit and watch instead of doing what I'm supposed to be doing which is in this case packing.

It's rather sad, you know. As utterly irrational as it is, I had a hard time not taking their split personally. I might have cried while no one was looking, but no one can prove it. The worst part though, is that the final season of the show is part of my procrastinathon, and that is the one where you can see things falling apart.

Every once in a while, I'll check in and write a post so that I can convince myself that I'm being productive. At some point though, the last season finishes, and I know how it ends, so I just have to accept the demise and freakin' pack. Sigh.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Number Twelve Looks Just Like You


How close do we think we are to this nowadays?


I think we're a long way off, but it is interesting to think about.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

I Know What This Sounds Like

“This month, Ford will roll out his second fix-it plan this year, which analysts expect to cute deeper and move faster than his earlier effort to shed 30,000 workers and 14 factories. He’s also busy selling off pieces of Ford (he announced a possible deal last week to unload Aston Martin). And he’s working the phones, calling Nissan-Renault’s superstar CEO, Carlos Ghosn, this summer to express interest in joining forces—that is, if Ghosn’s alliance talks with GM don’t work out.”

Naughton, Keith. "'We Understand We're in Trouble': Q&A: CEO Bill Ford Jr. on how he's dealing with the carmaker's current struggles." Newsweek. 11 Sept. 2006: pp. 30-32.

----------------------------

Not too long ago I went on a three-week long road trip with my fiancé and my future mother-in-law. Somewhere along the trip, Fiancé bought a copy of monopoly. I was game for it the first time we played. That first time ended in his beating both of us soundly. He kept wanting to play at various points in the trip, and he kept beating us too. Every time we started to lose though, his mother and I would start selling off hotels, then houses, then mortgaging properties, and finally combining forces before selling properties to him or just flat out losing.

I think that’s every losing game of Monopoly ever played.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Eureka!

I’ve found it! The sangréal of my all-too-recently forgotten childhood!

The miracle of which I speak is, of course, a packet of Runts candy that has no limes or oranges in it. Not only are there none of the horrid citrus candies (alright, orange isn’t so bad, but the lime’s just terrible,) but a majority of the little pink heart-shaped ones. Mmmmm! They’re the best ones by far. I just pulled it out of a bag of assorted Wonka candy that UrsaMinor brought over to my apartment and conveniently left there.

Runts and I go back a long way. I remember that as a child my grandmother would try to use them with my brother and me to convince us that the real fruits were more palatable. We even had tiny, Runt-sized baskets that you could do a tiny confectionary fruit arrangement with. Looking back, I’m not sure why she thought this would work. She was probably just at her wit’s end.

I think the best candy memory I have though, is of my very first baseball game. I was born in the Houston area, but we had moved several states away close to my fourth birthday. The summer I was ten, we started to go back to visit for a week each summer. We were still close to two families in the town I’d been born in, and they each had two kids apiece—a boy and a girl—all of whom were older than my little brother and me. One summer when I was still fairly young, we all went to an Astros game together at the Astrodome. The group was of all the adults, my brother and I, and one of the other girls, who was in at least middle school. I thought it was so way cool that we’d be hanging out together at the game. I’d brought my sweet new backpack which was yellow, fuchsia, teal, and bubble gum pink. The older girl had the best idea that I’ve ever heard to this day: FILL IT WITH CANDY. I don’t know whether it was because her family just had a lot of candy to get rid of, that you could get away with more if you had guest friends to blame it on, or if it was because her dad was a dentist, but that backpack was absolutely stuffed full of candy. I mean, we had trouble zipping it up kind of full. I think we even had overflow that we put into my pink, personalized child-sized duffel bag with the bunny head on the front, complete with big floppy ears. It was easily more candy than I’d ever seen even from a Trick-or-Treat haul.

We took our candy to the game, and we got in with it too. There were Runts, of course, and Gobstoppers—none of the candies you don’t want to have like leftover Christmas candies or the butterscotch or cinnamon affairs. It was all pure sugar Wonka candy. The candy, however, turned out not to be the best part of the evening. I am not even sure that we ate that much of it. I assume that we didn’t because I didn’t collapse into a diabetic coma at any point in the evening. The game was the best by far. We played the Mets and we lost, but I screamed myself hoarse and discovered that those terribly boring games my dad watched on TV were really quite a lot of fun if you were actually there.

To this day, I still can't watch a baseball game on TV, but I still cheer for the Astros whether the season is good or bad and eat my tiny fruit-shaped candies. Now, my sugar high and I are going to go find a tiny basket for the perfect bag of runts. Next: The perfect bag of Starbursts!

Monday, September 11, 2006

HTML For Complete Idiots and Me Too


We have acquired a shiny new counter. I fully expect UrsaMinor to be beside herself that it is pink. Because pink was the new black, but now it's the new green, I think. At least that's what I heard.

Stop Then Go


I started out today to write a post about financial aid and how much I hate it, because that is what I have been doing today. That post is, perhaps, for another day.

I knew in sort of a peripheral way that today was September 11th, but I had not stopped to think about it much. Guiltily, I must admit that I didn’t stop and let it hit me until I was watching Bowling for Columbine on Bravo this afternoon. I’d been alternately running around and yelling at the financial aid office and sitting around feeling sorry for my sinuses. I was doing the latter when the documentary came on.

Now, I’m not going to come down on one side or the other with Michael Moore and the quality of his work, but I will say that what he does effectively is to get your attention and remind you to ask questions and to think about the things you hear and not take them for granted. At least, that is what he accomplishes with me, and that is where he got me today.

I, like everyone else, remember where I was and what I was doing when it happened.

It was probably my second or third week as a freshman at the university. I was living on my own for the first time (albeit in a dorm full of other young people) and was at school over seven hundred miles from home. Our campus is and was a “suitcase campus” where many of the students, and most of the freshman especially, went home on the weekends to visit their families and friends which added to my homesickness. I had my first boyfriend, and he was yet another thousand miles away.

I’d just gotten up for my 9:30 class. I routinely woke up to the clock radio, and that morning they were saying that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. Somehow, I thought they were joking—joking poorly, but joking nonetheless. I think it was that this momentous news was given in the disc jockeys’ well-trained, singsong on air cadences that made me think so. It nagged at me, and I checked the news on CNN.com. I was thinking that if this were a joke, I was going to be writing an angry letter. How tasteless of them.

Then, I saw the picture right there on CNN’s homepage. Two tall buildings like perfect mirror images of each other except for the fiery explosion in the side of one and the thick clouds of black smoke billowing out of the other. If you clicked past the headline to look at the story itself, you saw more pictures of people in their business suits running panicked through the street sobbing and covered in a thick layer of grey dust from the tops of their well-coifed heads down to their leather briefcases and Ferragamo shoes. The images were terrifying.

It’s funny that I never thought of not going to class. It’s funny not just of the gravity of what was going on but also because I’m a chronic class-skipper. Usually, I work myself up to skipping class, skillfully talking myself out of it with my inner silken tongue. I guess I was too shocked to say much to myself that day. I walked to class, surrounded by my peers doing the exact same thing. It was the same thing that we did every day. I think that many people did not quite know yet, because everything seemed so normal. The day wasn’t even quieter yet, since the mornings always started out quiet with bleary eyes, yawns, and personalized plastic mugs of Starbucks coffee. We were our own little picture of New York then, I suppose—a private university full of well-groomed young people with lots of promise walking to work just like we did every other day of the week.

Every class was held that day and the days after that. The feeling was that if classes were cancelled the terrorists had won. Between classes people crowded into the common areas to watch the news and to see what had happened next. I just remember that no one sat to watch; everyone stood.

The whole day passed that way until that night when classes were over and several hours had passed without another incident, after the stillness of shock gave way to the busy activity of fear. I called my family to make sure that none had been flying and that my cousin who lived in New York City was alright. I called the then-boyfriend to check in with him and desperately talk him out of joining the armed forces. Fortunately for him, there was a week to lapse between 9/11 and his eighteenth birthday, and his mother had intervened and talked him out of signing up. I spent a lot of time calling home and calling those of my friends in other towns and talking things over. However, my friends at the university and I did not discuss it much at all. I think that would have made the possibility that such a thing could have happened in our town less remote than we would have liked it.

The figure of speech, “The world stood still,” never seemed to be a very visual one to me until I saw all of those people stopped dead still staring at the news and at each other not knowing what to say. I think that is what we all did that day. Stand still in shock. And I think that is what we should do today: stand still in reverence for what has happened and the age of certainty that has passed. Then, when we have stopped, go on again with day-to-day life and have our own small victory against fear, those who feel it, and those who wield it like a weapon.

Now, I’ve stopped, and I can move on.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Playing Grown-Up Isn't As Fun As It Should Be.


I remember when I was in high school all I wanted to do was to graduate and move the heck out of my house. Not that I realized it, but I really didn't have it so bad there. I hated living at home because I hated having that extra level of approval to deal with before I did something. I hated going to school because I had to ride the bus and the students around me weren't exactly the most enlightened group of people I could hope to meet in my lifetime. They weren't bad, they just upset mighty easily, that's all. The bus itself was an extra thirty minutes I could spend sleeping while someone else got me where I was supposed to be going. I thought that surely in college it would be better--that I would have no one to answer to but myself and that my academic life would be absolutely bursting with brilliant, interesting people and compelling classes that actually had something to do with whichever magical major I chose.

Uh, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

First, I was wrong about the whole parent-thing. My dad called me three times a day, easily, for all four years. He could never quite decide if I was an equal to confide in or lean on or someone who had quite possibly lost every scrap of responsibility and maturity he had believed me to have in my younger years. Some of this was earned, like those times NSF slips showed up at the house, but the phone calls to me when I was at the library to demand if I were drunk were certainly not. In fact, I didn't touch a drop of alcohol until I was twenty-one, a little tidbit of information that I am fairly certain he will never believe.

Of course, now I am twenty-three, almost twenty-four, and living mostly on student loans though some still on his dime. I actually had the dean of my graduate/professional school offer to call him when she heard that he still called every day. This very day, in fact, he called and yelled at me for ten minutes about something that did not directly affect him and could not be fixed with screaming. It was just that he needed to scream. We never screamed in high school. Ever.

Then, there were my fellow students. I still keep up with a good number of my robust high school class of thirty-three students, and they are some of the most insightful, kind, and steady people that I know. I have met perhaps five such people in college and graduate/professional school combined. I never met such un-self-reliant people. I can probably count on one hand the number of peers I have met at my university that I have known to have moved out of a dorm or an apartment without their parents' help. Of course, at my university, this help really consists of a girl and her mother sitting on boxes in the air-conditioned room while the fathers, brothers, and boyfriends move all the stuff out to the S.U.V., or, in the case of a male student, his mother packing all of his stuff for him (including bringing the boxes up from whatever hometown,) and then everyone helps move out. I have had people sleep through private tutoring sessions for evaluations as important as the G.R.E., and then want to know what the big deal was and why I could not do it three hours later--on a Friday night.

Oh, and the classes, let us not forget those. Pertinent? I don't think so. I had to take more junk classes in order to get a B.A., than I thought would be possible to do a major with. For instance, along with my major, I had to have four phys. ed. type classes, some chapel, some Bible classes, three lab sciences, two histories, four English literatutre/writing classes, three social sciences, two arts, and goodness only knows what else, all in the name of making me a well-rounded human being. Some of this stuff, I actually liked before it became a required class, but in the hands of an old man tired of dealing with students, or a middle aged woman who wanted nothing to do with people who didn't drool at the thought of Willa Cather's latest post mortem development, it became sledge crowding out the information I needed for my chosen field. In the end, it almost felt like throwing a major in there was something of an afterthought.

The point of all that griping is to say this: I still don't consider myself what I like to call a bona fide adult, but from what I've experienced of it so far as a pseudo-adult, I've got nothing much to get all excited about. I could get excited at the prospect of getting a full-time job with an actual degree someday because it would mean my father and I would no longer have tension over how I lived on his dime, but I don't think the little prize of freedom will be at the bottom of that particular cereal box. Nor do I think that grown-up life will ever bring me more people worth being close to than I know what to do with or as much intellectual stimulation as I want. Because the older I get, the more I feel like I'm moving into my home for the first time, rather than out of it.

I think that the best that I could possibly hope to get out of all of it is a little decoder ring at the bottom of the box that'll help me figure out the puzzles on the back.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Dos Osos

It took every fiber of my being not to be so trite as to name this post "And Then There Were Two." But that's the idea. A long-time friend, one-time roommate, short-time blogger has agreed to write with me, and her name is Ursa Minor. Because she is short on person, long on bear.

Une genèse fraîche.

Blogging is not exactly a new experience for me. I used to have another blog on another site which I took down after a good friend of mine got in some serious trouble with our university for using its name. Panic ensued, and I took my site down. After much thought, I have decided to reenter the blogosphere (and that's a sentence we can all love, right?)

Amusez-vous bien!