ring ring

Somewhere, deep in Amazonia, on the humid, mosquito-swarmed banks of a muddy, broad river, where strange birds call out and sharp-toothed fish lurk beneath the surface of the water, there is a dude who makes his living by tapping a stand of rubber trees, collecting the resin, and smoking it into a ball that he can sell to traveling rubber merchants. That fellow lives in a small tent with a plank floor, cooks his meals along with his rubber ball over an open fire, and works fourteen hours every day.
That guy, unlike me, has a cell phone.

I've always thought a cell phone, for me, is a big waste. I work all day at a desk where I have a phone, and then I go home to my house where I have a phone. In between, I'm on the train, and there's no signal anyway. I am not a fan of the whole "we'll call you when we pick a restaurant!" thing where cell phones render humans incapable of making a plan and sticking to it. And I don't see a need to be constantly reachable. Plus I'm bad about losing things, and breaking things, and forgetting things. Most importantly, I am a cheap bastard. So no phone for me.

Last night I was out with my buds, and they managed to hit me right where it hurts cell-phone-wise. They said that it would be nice for my friends if I had one. Those sneaky bastards have to know that the way to manipulate me is to tell me I'm doing it for my dear friends.

So maybe I'll get a cell phone. dammit. But a cheap one.

high school nightmares

I do love my parents, but they do some stuff I can't bear. One of which involves being friends with the parents of kids I hated in high school. They're always talking about "the Smiths* were over for dinner last night, and they said Jonathan is living in LA," or some such nonsense. Thing is, Jonathan was a grade-A asshole when he was ages 6 through 18, so I don't want to hear it. Hearing it puts me back in a frame of mind I don't want to go. This is my problem, I realize. But it makes me do stupid stuff. I just spent twenty minutes sitting here thinking of what to wear on Friday when we go up there for the weekend, because The Smiths and the Jameses will both be over for dinner that night, and somehow, in my addled mind, I have to dress up, and wear makeup, and look nice, so that they will not all go home and email Jonathan and Sally about how that Shirky, you rememeber, from school? The ugly one, with the glasses, and the little head? She looks a fright!! She must be eating twelve cupcakes a day, poor thing.

Ahem. No fair pointing out I'm insecure. I know that already. I just can't make it stop.

My parents are even going on a vacation this summer with the Jameses, to a tropical locale (SO not like them, I have no idea what's gotten into them) where they will no doubt sit around and discuss boring grownup stuff, but I will worry that the Jameses will think poorly of my parents because I am not successful. And that would be terrible because it is not my parents' fault I don't really like working for a living/haven't found my calling/am a lazy ass bastard. And oh, just thinking of these people makes me think of their horrible children, who probably aren't even that bad, but one time, Jonathan Smith told me I was stupid and annoying when I asked what the fuck was going on during some weird ass japanese movie he made everyone watch, and another time I heard him making a twenty-dollar bet with some other douchebag over who could seduce a freshman first, and that is just nasty, and he is nasty, and I hated him, so there.

So yay! Three-day weekend! Rock out!

*not their real names. None of these names are real.

to persistent voicemailer

1. Sudeepta does not in fact work here
2. Voicemail is not capable of responding to questions. It is a robot.

scraping the bottom of the blogging barrel

--attention: the following is boring--
It's another rainy day here. Unfuckingbelievable. I have been sitting around trying to come up with projects and plans to distract myself for the next 18 months (give or take.) I got nothin'. Except eating. Look for me in your local bakery, licking cupcakes clean of all the bomb frostings.


Work is so slow lately, it's nearly approaching the boredom level of the Old Job. The Job That Broke My Brain! I really hope it doesn't go that far. For one, I hate looking for new jobs and two, I begin to sense that the problem may not be the jobs, but me, as a person who cannot occupy herself for more than five minutes without employing cupcakes.

Ideally I would find a hobby that could be engaged in from my desk at work without anyone noticing (breeding fancy chickens is probably out, and hog-calling is a definite no) that costs nothing and makes me smarter, not dumber. Perhaps I should run a side business of some sort from my cube. Is there a market for home-based cupcake testers?

ooh! blogging about work!

The woman in the cube across the aisle is being Angela. You know, the religious nut on the The Office. She's on the phone with someone, complaining a lot about the Da Vinci Code. She and I probably don't agree on much. But we can agree that that book is lametastic.

I hear lots of phone conversations because we have just cubes. One woman seems to be running a financial consultancy out of her cube. She is always giving advice on investments and IRAs and so on. I wonder how good her advice is, though, since she still works here and is not living it up Trump-style.

This is why I always find an empty conference room, even just to make a dentist appointment. Super secret ninja style personal calls!

Seriously, she is still going on about the Da Vinci code.

a new fad that's sweeping the nation -- wasting food!

We went to New York this weekend. Rather than bring a traditional hostess gift such as flowers, we brought hijinks!

After a nice brunch, we went over to a nearby park to be a bad influence on the local children.

We stopped on the way to purchase 2 liters of diet pepsi and a pack of mentos. Both of which I consider inedible, which is good, because wasting food is not easy for me.

Here, you see the pepsi, awaiting its fate:
And the mentos:

And Lauren:



Aaaaaand, the mischief:


Kids: definitely try this at home.

damp

Seattle,

Some of your things are still at my place. I put them in a box for you so if you could just come and pick them up that would be good. There's drizzle, mist, clouds, and some dave matthews CDs. Anyway, if you could come get them pretty soon, that would be great, I don't have a lot of room.

--Boston

cat in doghouse

At about four AM every day, the elderly feline resident of our home begins her "Wake UP, you guys" routine. She howls in the hallway, she saunters back and forth across our heads, and worst of all she climbs up on our dressers and begins pushing little objects off one by one.
I keep a squirt bottle of water by the bed to discourage her. I know she remembers what the bottle does because I only have to hold it up and she runs off. But thirty seconds later she is back, making sure that the force of gravity is still acting upon all the items on our dresser. She's robbing me of hours of sleep! I was so tired, I tried to turn off the alarm clock by squirting it with the water bottle.
This morning she raised the stakes by throwing down a glass of water that was up there. It was just pulverized. We'll be finding glass crumbs for months, I'm sure. Good morning! Step on glass! feed me, bitches! Or the next one falls on your head!

gone

Twenty-two painstakingly assembled copies of our profile are now in the mail.
they had better arrive safe and sound, after all those trips to staples and oh my god the pages are upside down moments.

I feel like we'll never be finished though: there is often one more form to complete, one more thing to sign, one more document to get witnessed (every agency has their own requirements, their own forms, and so on).

It has taken a sick long time to get this far, what with the homestudy social worker dragging her feet and then up and quitting (so she got laid off. It's not her fault! still! It was an inconvenience!) I'm not too worried about time--going into this we knew it would take a while and we were in no rush. The longer it takes, the more dough we have saved, the more chances we've had to pick up and go to NYC on a whim, and all that stuff. I'm trying to really savor all that instead of letting my brain swirl itself into an anxiety smoothie.

brain smoothie is a nasty drink, by the way. Very salty.

douchebag rundown!

Today's list of worthless tools who tick me off!


David Blaine
James Frey
Samuel Beckett
Steven Pinker
Mary Cheney

Congratulations, you all suck!

edited to add:
how could I have forgotten Mel Gibson? The King of All Jackasses.

owie

I have been attending a series of lectures at BU Med School. I like science; I like to hear about research; I thought it would be fun. They had important doctors lecture on their area of research. Some were better than others. You know--some actually talk, and others read right off the powerpoint. The stuff they presented was a little boring--I was ready to hear about some amazing new discoveries, and they were all like "Smoking leads to heart disease." But it was OK.
There were two things that I hated though: one, the building the lectures were in has a constant smell of week-old garbage. Two, there were several other attendees who delighted in asking the most obnoxious followup questions.
Now, some of the mainly-elderly audience was asking kind of strange questions, but clearly they needed to know the answers, and I can't have a problem with that.
But then there was Pre-Med Asshole. Every time he raised his hand, I rudely rolled my eyes. He would invariably ask a "question" that was really just a list of vocabulary words he'd recently memorized, with no real point. The speaker would listen politely, blink, and try to form a question out of those words that he or she could answer, and end with "Does...that answer your question?" Pre-Med Asshole was a fucking showoff, but not even really smart. The worst kind!
Then there was My People Are Superior in Every Way Guy. Oh god. This guy did not ask questions. He would raise his hand and say "I have an observation," and I would shrink down in my seat because I was actually embarassed for him. For example, when the topic was Depression, he offered that His People do not suffer from depression, due to their "fighting spirits." The speaker respectfully repeated the main topic of her presentation: depression is caused by chemistry in the brain and central nervous system. She guessed that cultural coping mechanisms could mask or exacerbate depression. But MPASEWG wasn't having it. "We had a man in my country named Gandhi," he continued, "who had this fighting spirit! I have a fighting spirit!" The speaker allowed as how Gandhi and MPASEWG might have the somewhat-protective allele of a particular gene that has been recently discovered. But MPASEWG insisted on the more scientific conclusion of "fighting spirit". I wanted to ask his spirit to step outside to settle it mano a spirito.

Last night the topic was BOOBS! Or breast cancer, specifically. And oh my god, am I the only person on earth who still doesn't understand how mammograms are possible?? The boobie...in the machine...and squashing....holy crap, that has got to hurt. Also I still can't look at my own chestal area and imagine how mine would get in the machine. They're ATTACHED, for pete's sake. And there is not much there! They don't stick out very far! And I just imagine this horrible pinching machine scrabbling at my chest trying to squash something that isn't there. And it misses like 30 percent of tumors? Why is it still used? That's insane!