Thursday, August 31, 2006

ghost like swayze part deux

i just walked into the living room, where, by some crazy twist of fate, my brothers and my dad were watching "point break", a movie that features none other than mr. swayze. move over, mc - it's swayze time.

also, the corners of my mouth are cracked and dry and that isn't very nice. there's something to be said, though, for driving around in 115* weather in a car that doesn't have any air conditioning and not being greasy at all, and i totally did that today. that is such a feat, i can't even explain. therefore, i'm getting off accutane's case. it can crack my mouth corners as much as it wants.

ghost like swayze

i've been seeing a lot of patrick swayze recently. i mean, the real patrick swayze. last year, in the dorms, there was a girl who looked exactly like patrick swayze from "ghost", thus earning herself the glorious "p-s-f-g" moniker. i haven't seen her since the end of school. i have been catching patrick swayze himself on tv almost every day, because (i'm guessing) summer is the time to play "ghost" and "dirty dancing" on heavy rotation. and i've come to the conclusion that he's a really strange male romantic lead. he's way fem. way. i'm not by any means calling him homosexual, mostly because a) i don't care either way and b) it wouldn't make "ghost" any less awesome, so again, i don't care. i am, however, mildly to moderately interested in how he became the go-to hot guy in the eighties. he's not really that good-looking, and, as i said, he strikes me as totally fem - as if he spent far more time in the hair and makeup trailer than demi moore and jennifer grey combined. (who, by the way, is jennifer beals? does she exist? because i always think jennifer beals was in "dirty dancing." is beals the "flashdance" girl?). swayze's hair is always perfectly coiffed and he's forever brooding and he always, always, always finds a way to wear next-to-nothing or a spandex dance costume. i do love p.s., i truly do, but i just don't get it. how can a man so muscle-y and sharp-jawed seem, to me, like more of a meg ryan than a brad pitt?

i have lots of time think about such really powerful things when i'm withering away at work.

wholesale breast milk and supply

"sometimes, i wonder if they've started selling something else," b said as i stood in her office making copies. "something like breast milk." we were talking about the company that shares the warehouse with us, and more specifically, said company's receptionist, who, according to b, is "always showing her breasts." her little tank tops and pigtails make b very upset.

"how old is she anyway? it's not right," b laughed as she realized how hilarious she'd just been.

this almost makes up for my not being invited to the first official meeting of the private club of associated surplus warehousers.

cafe de ass

i'm at work, drinking disgusting coffee that has taught me a very valuable life lesson: powdered coffee creamer tastes like ass. my current task, lest you judge me for posting a blog on company time, is to answer the phones while everyone else important enough to warrant access to a meeting is in a meeting. the phones aren't ringing. i can't talk to b, the front-office secretary whose nickname is actually "b", because she's in the meeting. i can't talk to joey, the salesman, because he's out in the warehouse doing something outside his job description (or so he says). i can't talk to sam because he's back in school and not working with me anymore. so all that's left to do is drink my cafe de ass and write.

shiza and i leave for new york next week. t-minus five days. it's going to be amazing. i've been there briefly once on the way to maine, but we didn't walk around too much or actually see little local things. we were giant tourists and saw only the statue of liberty and ellis island. i guess when you only have seven hours in nyc you have to prioritize. i'm looking forward to exploring, and shopping, and hanging out, and pretending to be a fashionista. we're going to providence to visit zoe at school, and i can't wait to see her in her college element. plus, she's the only one of us going to an ivy league school, so i want to check it out.

today, after work, i'm supposed to go even farther into the valley and have dinner at my great-aunts' house. they are both divorced and hilarious and they live together in the craziest house i've ever been inside. it's beautiful and wallpapered and ivy'd and houses hundreds of little dolls and placards and potpourri dishes filled with dried flowers. it's like insta-cozy. it's where we have every thanksgiving, so even when i go in the middle of the summer, i imagine a fire in the fireplace and tons of family and the all-important coveted cranberry sauce. the house is also designed in a really unique way, so it's almost like a playhouse. and it goes without saying, i hope, that i love hanging out with my aunts, one of whom once called ann coulter a "vile bitch."* i adore them.

i hope they're not firing someone in the big office meeting. my uncle, my boss, has closed the door to his office and put on the ominous red light, meaning, i suppose, that a super secret private meeting is in progress and no one should disturb them. i can just barely hear voices, and i'm curious about what's going on in there. it also makes me feel left out, which is ridiculous because i'm well aware that i have no effect on office politics at all. everyone is in there, though, and it's a little like being a witness to a party i'm not invited to. unless, of course, they are firing someone, and then it's not really a party i'd want to be invited to.




*by the way, i just looked up how to correctly put "vile bitch" in quotation marks, because i've always been a little bit confused as to how a quotation inserted at the end of a sentence works, and apparently, the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. that makes no sense. all right, maybe it makes a little bit of sense, but that means i've been doing it wrong forever. how upsetting and sad.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

10 things i hate about driving

after my dentist appointment, i had lunch with my grandpa and his fellow dentist, and that turned into the most terribly awkward, i-wish-i-were-invisible hour of my life. more on that later. when that insane lunch finally ended, i drove down to LA to drop off the apartment rent check to andy. on the way there, i drove alongside a man who was wearing a straw hat, a tommy bahama flowered shirt, and was smoking a cigar. classy. on the way home, i created a mental list of all the things i hate about driving, aptly titled, "10 things i hate about driving". some of things i hate about driving are: being cut off, inexplicable traffic, merging, getting dirty looks from people after they screw up, bumper stickers promoting the re-election of a certain recent president, and, finally, idiots. i think that idiots make me the most upset, which might also be why i despise those bumper stickers so much.

basically, i had a severely unpleasant driving experience this afternoon.

being at the apartment (between freeway journeys) was nice. it's going to be grand to finally live there, and not have to drive back and forth from home to visit for a few hours. i was pissed off to discover that one of our subletters, someone we found online and who, as an adult, has less consideration for his fellow man than my nine-month-old cousin, has totally destroyed the toaster oven i brought down last month. he has baked lots and lots of greasy meats in the tray and now it's foul and it offends my delicate vegetarian sensibilities.

i had a bunch more written (namely, about my lunch with the dentists), but my laptop crashed and i lost it all. therefore, i'll just sum it up by saying that i spent a good portion of my noontime listening to a grown man talk about his terrible divorce, his child custody battle, and his trouble dating due to his kids (but, he assured me, he would never call them "baggage", which is, in fact, precisely what he called them originally). i just felt way out of place and for once in my life, i absolutely did not want to know everything about everyone.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

go ahead, let your hair down

i've listened to "put your records on" by corinne bailey rae about two hundred times since this morning. it's happy and upbeat and that's exactly how i feel right now. i'm a little fever-y and achy, but i just drank a fat glass of airborne, so my blood vitamin c level is at a contagion-fighting premium.

i left my house today, which is a vast improvement over yesterday. my mom needed me to pick her up from work at the high school, and i got to see the classroom she works in and meet the teacher she works with. she has a little desk in the back of the room where she filed the lesson plan she created for the first-year teacher she'll be assisting this year. i still think that she should go back to school and get her teaching credentials so that she doesn't have to be a lackey anymore. i'm sure she'd only have to take a few more classes considering she's a lawyer already, and i figure that graduating law school and passing the bar should help qualify you to teach government in the public school system. she likes what she does, though, and comes home every week with pictures of students with their signatures scribbled on the back.

no one recognizes me with my glasses on, which is nice. i feel like i'm incognito. at the high school, i saw a few teachers i had for a couple years when i was there, and they had no idea who i was.

clay got his "star" testing scores back today in the mail. he scored 100% on nine of the fourteen areas, above 90% on four others, and got an 83% in "earth science 5". he just about had a panic attack about that 83%. he was also really disappointed that he's only reading at a tenth grade level, according to the standardized test. apparently, last year, he'd registered at the 11.5 grade level. he's in sixth grade. i don't know what we can do for him. he has such incredibly high expectations for himself. i don't think i started really caring about my grades until eighth grade, and even then, it was only with a vague understanding that i'd be applying to college someday. clay treated fifth grade history tests as if they were the mcats. it makes me so frustrated and sad to see him react to his less-than-perfect results the way he does. we got back from picking him up from my grandparents' house almost an hour ago, and he's been holed up in his room since then, no doubt putting the breathing techniques and calming routines his therapist taught him into practice. he hasn't seen this "behavior modifier" since he was in third grade because the kids at school tormented him about his having to leave class to see a psychologist. he's not crazy, he told them, he's just nervous and stressed out. it breaks my heart to think that my little brother would be so panicked about elementary school.

tomorrow, i have to go to the dentist. my grandpa (my dentist) refuses to allow me to slip by without going promptly when i need to. my dad's coming with me because he chipped a tooth the other day at his office. i'm surprised that he's not just going to grin and bear it, because my dad hates doctors, even those he's related to, and only went to get the pre-cancerous moles on his head looked at after my mom nagged him for five years. he let a tooth get so twisted that eventually it impeded his eating, and required a hotel room, a nail file, and a kindly grandfather dentist to shave it down during our summer vacation. that's so hillbilly of us.

i guess it kinda makes sense. my great-great-grandma was from texas.

Monday, August 28, 2006

jog-a-thon

so i did go running for a while tonight. running in my neighborhood is dangerous for me sometimes because this place is pretty much a giant buffet of people i either don't talk to anymore or never talked to in the first place. that makes me sound like a huge beasty bitch, which isn't true most of the time, i swear, but yes, i'll admit, i try to avoid most of the people in my neighborhood. god, that sounds awful. however, i have to run by houses inhabited by ex-boyfriends, ex-friends, people i went to high school with, enemies, and conservatives who really hate my liberal family. basically, i'm glad i'm running quickly by these houses.

as i rounded the corner to huff and puff back to my front door, sam's stupid friends cat-called to me from inside the cars they had parked in front of our house. that's great. the only attention i get is totally fake idiocy from my brother's seventeen-year-old friends. yipee.

all that aside, running was fun. i used to a true runner, with a jersey and a team and a set of hurdles to get over every track meet. and that is what i want to be again. a hardcore runner who enjoys being out of breath and sweaty and revels in the nausea that can only come from running way past one's boundary.

i guess i'm trying to remake myself into what i've always wanted to be, or rather, what i probably would be if i hadn't stopped having confidence in myself. i stopped running when i worried that the sweat would aggravate my acne. and now that i'm hopefully getting rid of that, i want to start loving to run again.

so it's not new years. i'm making fall resolutions.

today tastes like chapstick and cake

last night, i had a dream about every person i care about. waking up, i realized that i must have subconsciously just run down an imaginary list or something, because everyone had a role. some of those people aren't in my life anymore, and i miss them. dreams are amazing to me because for a few hours in the middle of the night, you can really truly feel like you are surrounded by people you can't see during the day. that's kinda comforting.

today was a wasted day in that i didn't scale any mountains or fight any crimes or solve any problems. i didn't do ANYTHING really. i was trapped at home without a car, and i was trapped in my room in an effort to avoid the cleaning woman my mom hired to clean the house while she went to work. i don't think there is anything more humiliating and awkward than hanging around my house while someone else cleans it. it's terrible. my mom doesn't like it either, but i think she's tricked herself into thinking that this woman relies on the income we provide, which probably isn't true. whatever. let's suffice to say that i spent almost the entire day in my pajamas, alternately watching tv and reading books.

i say "books" because even though i have a virtual library of novels in my room, i absolutely could not choose one i had any desire to read today. i'm restless. i didn't want to just stay here all day, but the prospect of making myself look any less than hideous is far too much to ask. i did eventually get dressed, but only when i had to help my mom load the car with the rented tables we didn't use at the anniversary party.

at one point today, i checked my email, and found out from andy that i have to pay next month's rent for the apartment by this friday. i can't believe it's already the end of august. my brothers go back to school on wednesday, and then i'll really be bored out of my mind. sam shared in my laziness for about an hour, and we caught the tail end of "true lies" on tv.

i don't think this refusal to do anything is a sign of failing mental health. true, the accutane pamphlet warns that "lack of interest in once-loved activities" (like leaving my house) is a sign of impending depression, but i'm not self-important enough to think that just because i sat around and ate pita bread all day, i have a serious illness. still, i'm a little nervous about the physical effects the medication is having already. i can't wear my contacts because my eyes are too dry. also, today, i noticed for the first time that my face is peeling, and my lips are always dry. always. i'm also getting headaches daily (another side effect), but i don't want to tell my doctor (like he told me to) because the last thing i need is to have the rug pulled out from under me again. getting this drug has been a three-year odyssey, so i figure i can handle five months of scaly lizard skin and mild migraines and glasses. oh, i'm gonna be gorgeous.

i'm going for a run tonight because i must do something with myself before i go to sleep.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

old rush

"you've gotta be careful around those guys from italy and france," my grandpa told me as we wandered the looping hallways in the rehab clinic where my great-grandma is recovering. "and the argentinians," he added. we were talking about my going to idaho to work next summer in the little ski town where my great-aunt lives. apparently, the area is popular with all kinds of young people from all over the world. "but, you know," he said, "you'll be competing with all those girls from europe, from sweden, from denmark." thank you, grandpa, for having such faith in me. personally, i'm not interested in competing with swiss beauty queens for italian princes - i just want a crack at the $400 a day paychecks i've heard whisperings about. ever since i decided to become (as) financially independent (as i can) from my parents, any source of income is very intriguing to me. and of course the italian princes are a nice bonus.

my mom has started getting deep and insightful words of wisdom from the "charmed" re-runs she watches on tv. last night, when all the family was gathered in our living room celebrating my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary, the conversation fell to my great-grandmother, who recently broke her pelvis and is recuperating at a clinic in the valley. we were talking about mortality and getting older and how horrible it must be to find yourself mentally capable (as my great-grandmother is) and yet still be unable to stop your body from getting terribly old. my great-grandma is required to spend the next few weeks in the clinic, rooming with two other elderly women who are much, much more ill than she is. "how terrible is that?" someone asked. "it's awful to try to recover around so many people who are dying."

to which my mother responded: "you know, on 'charmed' they said that only death gives meaning to life."

and that is true, i guess, but what i'll really remember from that conversation is my aunt's reaction to what my mom said. "charmed?!? you mean that show about the idiot twit sisters who are witches?" she was incredulous.

my mom smiled and said, "oh, so you've seen it?"

apparently, sensitivity does not run in the family.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

accutizzle

i'm currently waiting for the wonder drug to start working. today i started taking two pills a day, as per the doctor's instructions that i ease my body into the medication by taking a half dose for the first week. i'm actually excited to feel my skin dry and tighten. i wonder how excited i'll be about it when it starts to crack and peel and be foul. in this case, though, the ends will definitely justify the means.

at first, i thought i shouldn't broadcast this into the universe on the internet, because it's personal and almost humiliating. but, then, i realized that every person i've ever met in my entire life already knows that i have shitty skin, it's pretty obvious, so why not talk about the crazy schemes i've used (and am currently using) to try to end the issue once and for all? maybe it could theraputic or something, to detail how i feel about it.

i just hope that i don't lose my hair or have joint pain or fall into some psychosis. i'm cool with the dry skin, but i think i'll draw the line at psychoses.

blogs, shmogs

sam and i are watching "puppet master" for the first time since we were ten. it's a little strange to think that we have ten-year-old history with movies like "PUPPET MASTER", considering we must have been little children when we first saw them, but i guess i can just chalk it up to my parents not having a CLUE how to raise kids when they had us. that's actually not entirely true, because my parents are great, but really, i mean, sometimes, you have to stop being such a hippie and forbid your children from viewing terrible movies about living puppets who stalk people with tiny, lethal weapons. part of the reason i'm not really watching the movie (and am instead starting this blog deal) is because i'm still carrying around a small fear of the evil puppets in that movie and don't really want to devote full attention to it. and yes, i am twenty years old.

i'm also way hyped up from the "chinese flower" tea i drank an hour and a half ago with shiza at starbucks. way back when we were disgusting, we would go and sit at denny's with plates of seasoned curly fries to pass time at night in our little town where everything closes at 9 pm. now that we are older, wiser, mature college students, we go for "coffee" and drink a lot of tea and steamed milk. tonight, i was convinced to try the above-mentioned "CF" tea, and now i'm caffeined out of my mind. i usually don't feel the effects of teas and coffees and chocolates, and i used to think that i'd desensitized myself. apparently not. hence the blog. it's keeping my crazy shaky fingers busy.

awesome.