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[02 Jul 2009|08:31pm] |
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'kay so, for the first time in like three years, i am sick enough that i decided to see a doctor. this, of course, happens to fall within the like only WEEK in those three years that i don't have insurance, as i apparently let it expire. i'm sure it's just a random sickness but i have become one of those people i hate, researching swine flu symptoms and all that. which it's not, but the body aches are kind of awful, and holy fucking excruciating sore throat. like honestly, my timing is motherfucking impeccable.
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[14 Mar 2009|04:31pm] |
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what are some good office desk type plants?
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[26 Jan 2009|01:29am] |
lately i have been wanting to watch movies. this is unusual for me, you realize -- the set-up of my room reflects this; i can watch my television -- no cable, no channels even, so only movies -- either from my really not so comfortable computer chair, or from my bed which is much too far to do so.
i've considered how maybe i can rearrange my room to make it a bit better, but it spirals into exhausting so quick -- even assuming my room were clean, i'd at the least have to move one lamp, a bursting bookcase, dresser, the air conditioner semi-stowed under the television, some plants, probably put my computer in a case after a year and a half -- adjust, adjust, adjust.
but it's been appealing, i guess, some other way to lose myself. some normal way, maybe, except not really; watch movie after movie after movie, oh, so romantic. i can sort of feel myself fading: you know those 3 o'clock in the mornings, when you're lying rigid in your bed, staring at the ceiling, you're crushed by love and fear and hate; i think there's something universal about those 3 o'clocks -- and so those 3 o'clocks creep in, like toxic sucking little leeches, until they're 3 and 12 and 9 and 6, and all your library books can't beat it away, and even your video games; maybe the epiphany will come from this medium, of course, of course.
so now my dreams are contracting, for this day, this week, from japan, from paris, from upstate new york, to just a small little den, no computer, no links, just a little cave, warm and womb-like, where i can live a life that is not my life.
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[08 Nov 2008|03:51pm] |
and on a completely unrelated note --
you know what, i'm not ashamed of my prepubescent crush on axl rose. fuck you all.
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[07 Nov 2008|06:07pm] |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmX3qXDVjjs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPsV6ZhL15c
ehheh.
yes. i am vastly relieved that the election is over, and over so incredibly (trying not to let the gay marriage ban(s) sour it, even though it already has). i still can't wrap my head around it entirely, every time i see president-elect obama. barack hussein obama. it's beautiful in so many ways.
and i think most people would acknowledge that mccain's concession was a thing of beauty and class.
however, i don't think i can ever forgive letting sarah palin within a thousand miles of the white house. between that and the reelection of george w., i don't know which is more of a shuddering abomination of politics.
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[05 Nov 2008|01:11am] |
oh my god.
i am not, tonight, ashamed to be an american.
i have also never before known what it felt like to cry over my country.
i'm speechless.
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[04 Nov 2008|11:16am] |
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dear god, america, please don't fuck this up.
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[06 Oct 2008|10:07pm] |
everyone looks at me strangely when i say that i'd rather lose my hearing than my sense of smell (probably much like i look at those who would rather lose their eyesight than their hearing). it's funny, i guess, how little connection i have to sound. i don't learn auditorially. i never have. i never had that ability some people have to replay what was just said. i'm tone-deaf. i'm even vaguely uncomfortable with spoken conversation, with the sound of my own voice.
and i don't listen to music, which is the weirdest part. i like music -- i even love some of it -- but i don't listen to it. i haven't bought a cd or downloaded a song in many, many years. sometimes when i'm talking with someone about music, i'll feel the need to listen to it, but never when i'm just here. sometimes i'll open winamp -- because i don't care enough, obviously, to use itunes -- and hit shuffle, and every song that comes on i fast-forward until i just close the thing in frustration. it throws me off-balance in my head.
i guess for a brief period in college, i did, when the skin of my life was fairly rich and shiny even as the skeleton was beginning to crumble. even then, though, it was semi forced enthusiasm. when i was a kid, like in middle school when everyone began getting interested in things beyond jumprope and action figures, i remeeber faking it, plastering my notebooks with the names of whatever bands were on MTV that i knew other people liked. i knew the cool bands, i'd heard them, and i liked them; i was just entirely disinterested.
with smells, it's not like i'm constantly in the throes of olfactory orgasms, and really more smells than not are unpleasant in the day to day. but that idea of smell being the most evocative sense is so true for me; it's the absolute only thing in the world that can knock me out of my own head, even if for a fraction of a second. they can bring back memories of a garden in switzerland, a toy from early childhood, lovers long since half-forgotten. even songs that are strongly associated with certain people or places or time, it's so much more of a conscious, obvious reminder, it doesn't have anywhere near the same pull. whenever a finger of sea air reaches me deeper in the city, it's such a shock of mixed emotions, it feels like a physical impact.
for whatever reason, the only sound that really has that effect, that ability to almost draw me out of my body, is the sound of a train going by somewhere in the distance. that, and perhaps the dance of the sugarplum fairy.
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[04 Oct 2008|11:55am] |
looking up how to make french toast -- yes i realize it's sort of sad to have to look that up, but hey -- and i come upon this gem of a quote:
"I do not remember where I got this recipe, but my husband says it tastes just as good as what he had at Denny's."
(from a user with "Earnhardt" in their username.)
bet they're from daytona.
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[28 Sep 2008|11:57pm] |
books! i came home with like twelve.
1,000 Places to See Before You Die
100 Places Every Woman Should Go (a bit cheesy in places, but mostly neat)
Japan in a Nutshell (ehhh... some intereting stuff; mostly kinda not)
Travelers' Tales: Japan (A- so far)
Expat: Women's True Tales of Life Abroad
(do we see a pattern here...)
Colette: Cheri and The Last of Cheri (i love colette, but i think i like the translator who did my copy of the claudine novels better)
Julian Barnes: The Porcupine
Rana Dasgupta: Tokyo Cancelled
The Best American Short Stories, 2008
100% Pure Florida Fiction, an anthology
and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game, because her children's books are among the best i've read.
plx give me more things to read when i am done with these. gracias.
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[23 Sep 2008|09:10pm] |
so i had a huge palm-to-forehead fucking duh moment a couple weeks ago. i was in borders or barnes & noble or whatever, probably borders, and i'm like, man, i really want new stuff to read, but these are so expensive (and yes, that's a brief illumination into how fucking poor i am) -- gosh, i wish there were somewhere i could go get books for free!
...yeah.
not only that, but hey, that building near me, the one that i'm always like, gee, i wonder what that is, with a pretty little park area and the funny cat benches? the one i walk by almost every single day?
...
anyway, i went in there to poke around, even though i had no cambridge library card and didn't have any of the identifying bill-type things on me to get one. it was pretty ghetto, as pretty much all of the smaller-branch libraries that i have ever seen anywhere are, but i stumbled onto a book about how to build fountains, and it totally triggered a short-lived but fervent desire to, you know, build a fountain, out of whatever stuff i have lying around, which probably would inevitably include alcohol containers of some sort, although really, i'd kind of rather it not, as i am not, in fact, a college freshman. and actually i'd still like to do this, but my enthusiasm has been slightly stunted by (a) where the fuck do you find a pump, really, 'cause hardware stores no dice and you get some surprisingly blank stares when you ask, and (b) again, well, that $15 for a pump is pretty pricey.
so, that's on hold.
but, so a few days later i dug up an internet bill or whatever and went to the main branch, which was much more respectable (and yet farther from public transportation, but hey). and i wandered around and loaded up my arms with a pile of books, some fiction, some history, some on japanese gardening (shrug), and seriously, after having not utilized a library for a good few years, i had this vague feeling like i was getting away with something. like, i can just kinda pick up whatever books i like until i can't carry anymore, show them to the nice old lady at the front desk, and just, like, walk out on good faith? really?
it sounds silly, but seriously, it seems like it's one of the few surviving institutions where they don't need social security number, passport, background check, metal detectors, bar codes, holograms, and microchips before they let you in, and, you know, that book on How to Cook Lebanese isn't going to land you on a no-lend list.
it's comforting, i guess, in a way; it's like at least there's one thing from your childhood that hasn't got fucked all to hell in the last 20 years.
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[10 Sep 2008|08:38pm] |
i remember being a kid and reassuring myself that the only reason that some of the other kids had atrocious grammar and spelling and sense of language was because they were kids, you know, they were just still wrestling the rules into submission; it was something that would fall into place by the time they were out of high school, because of course most adults have a reasonable understanding of their native language. of course.
i don't remember when the muted but ever-growing horror began, when i realized that that assumption was patently untrue, but sometimes i think that that was a deeper source of disillusionment than anything else in my life.
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[31 Jul 2008|12:05pm] |
i am seized by indecision: this is nothing new. however in this case, i just can't decide whether to take a course in japanese in the fall, or in hindi. i had planned on hindi, and obviously it would be very useful, and i'm sure it would be much easier, particularly since i already half-know the devanagari script. but... i really want to go to japan, to hokkaido. but the language terrifies me, and i have my doubts of being able to learn it to a useful degree. and i'd love to go to india too, of course, and somewhat more than i'd just love to go pretty much anymore, but not as specifically as hokkaido. not that i really know why i'm so drawn to northern japan as of late. all of the factors are identical -- time, price, et cetera -- i am absolutely torn.
there's a fairly real possibility that i may actually be busy this fall, which would be very, very strange.
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[26 Jul 2008|04:43am] |
you know what is really bothersome:
i spend a lot of time thinking of the last five, ten, fifteen years, wishing they had never happened, really, wishing all of this were just this fucking horrible dream, and no, my life isn't over yet before it's begun.
and yet i know it's pretty likely, in another five years, if i'm still alive, i'm going to look back on this time and wish i still had the opportunities i have now, and am systematically declining.
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[11 Jul 2008|11:49am] |
things to do this weekend:
* research the possibility of an a/c. i'm still reluctant, very reluctant, but honestly, do i really want to be miserably uncomfortable for the next two months? and it looks like they're like $50 on craigslist, and i don't exactly need a super nice one.
* check out possible gyms. primarily it needs to be convenient, but i'd LOVE to find a pool. i think i'm going to look into the YMCA both in central square and in somerville, and the bally's in central too, as i think all of those have a pool. there is also a bally's like RIGHT next door to my work -- sans pool :( -- which i might as well look into also, but i know if i get a new job (hey, i can dream) i'd probably never go there.
* look into a bike, too, again. still don't really know how to go about doing this. i can't/won't spend very much money on one -- i don't have very much money -- but i don't want a complete piece of shit that's uncomfortable to ride. which is why i'm leery of craigslist, because i'd feel so weird going to people's houses, testing out their bike, and being like, "ah, nah, thanks anyway." even though i know with a bike, that's probably kind of what you've got to do.
* try to figure out other shit to do with my room?
* tell myself all evening i'm going to take a notebook and leave my house and wander around and even if i don't write anything let/make myself be inside my head, and then proceed to continue slowly drinking myself asleep until i crawl into bed shortly before dawn. i think i've got that one covered.
* also contemplate how i should take the commuter rail somewhere and spend a day outsid of the city, look around online for like 20 minutes, and then give up.
* bookstore maybe
* breathe.
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[03 Jul 2008|01:19am] |
LOOOOLOLOLOL cigarette tax
not really, because i kind of despite people who quit smoking or any other bad habit and then get all righteous about it, and i kind of want to hit them in the face generally. but i am, obviously, rather glad about the timing, as it's been a solid two weeks now, and this price hike goes over much more easily as an incentive to continue not smoking than it would as an impetus to quit.
however, i'm just about out of ideas on how to keep myself semi-productively occupied. i have cleaned my room (and kept it clean!); cleaned my apartment (somewhat negated by having more or less coated my kitchen floor in vegetable oil during a remarkably delicious but not very well orchestrated experiment with homemade empanadas); hung up a tapestry on my boring walls; bought a bookcase (!) so i can finally keep at least a fraction of my books in my bedroom; put my old tv in my room, which doesn't get any channels of course but i can chain-watch lotr again; and got three plants: a pothos, an ivy, and a little tiny bamboo.
oh and got an... ottoman. two, in fact.
it's quite nice, because my bedroom really is a much more pleasant place to be now (after 10 months of living her, of course). but yeah, i'm a bit at a loss as to what else i can do. there's still far too much emptiness on my walls, but you can't really like, go shop for art or decoration. or barring that, you know, some little way to continue the futile clawing scrabbling struggle to keep myself out of my head.
this might be the year that i finally break down and get an a/c.
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[09 Jun 2008|11:03pm] |
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no, seriously, enough of this heat. i showered twice today. unprecedented. ish. tomorrow work is questionable, which normally i'd have very mixed feelings about it, but this time they are most unmixedly hoping there is work, because it's air conditioned there. today i went in at 10, and there was none, and i'm like, maybe i'll just... wait around. in the cool. and then there was work. but there was exactly zero when i left tonight, so i fear tomorrow i'm going to have to leave my house regardless, and find some way to occupy myself during the worst of the day, because sitting at home rotting miserably and marinating in the thick of the air -- yeah. it's 11pm, and i think i'm going to go to bed, because i'm bored, hot, generally irritated, and sober.
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