Emotional Maths

I dreamt last night about operating a movie theater in New Orleans that was constantly infested with insects, lizards, and rodents.
+1 anxiety
I woke up late and had to email work to tell them I'd be about an hour late.
+2 anxiety
I opened my breakfast yogurt and a blob of it splattered on to my shirt.
+1 irritation
I realized later in the morning that I was unsuccessful in preventing yogurt from causing a stain.
+2 irritation
Lunchtime approaches. My lunch plans consist of obnoxious but already over procrastinated errands.
+3 anxiety per minute
Co-worker's phone rings again, while she is away from her desk.
+3 irritation for each dropped "g" in "Don't Stop Believin'" 
Ten minutes closer to lunch, I get an email from HR about a day I was out sick this week.
+5 anxiety
Someone I need to talk to is not answering my messages.
+8 anxiety

~I decide to blow off the errands yet again in order to spend my lunch break picking up my refill for Xanax, and getting a donut or something.~

Just as it's my turn at the pharmacy window, a very old man shuffles to the window, either oblivious to or not giving a crap about the concept of a line. Old man has several questions, not just about the pills but about how this thing called "insurance" works, does not have a Value Card but would like to get one, and pays with a check.
+5 irritation, multiplied by the old man's age, which I estimate to be about 172.
Get back to my apartment, where the hallways are being painted. "Don't worry, we're almost done." = "We are now painting right around your door."
+8 irritation
For some reason, part of the painting process includes running a JACK HAMMER right outside my door for about 100 hours.
+13 RAGE!
I take a Xanax, watch some Top Chef, and eat a donut.
+21 mellow
+13 overall goodwill for mankind

Final Thoughts

You know what I like? I like trees. Even in the winter, without leaves. It reminds you that the sky is there for us to breath. I also really like gum. And pencils. Especially pencils. There's a subtle beauty to the gradual exposure of the pencil's core. From the slick school bus yellow skin (what a great color to pick for pencils), to the earthy wood that smells like ideas, to the soft lead we use to bleed our souls onto paper. Dixon Ticonderoga 1388 - 1 EX-SOFT. Let's all take a moment to appreciate a pencil.

A Poem

The Empty Box 

I ate all of my chocolates but
I didn't throw away the box. So,
I thought I still had some.
I planned on eating one today.
I opened the box
     and they were gone
     and I was like: oh yeah.

Just a peon's thought

I re-watched Anne of the Thousand Days last weekend. Watched it the first time in history class so that means it might as well be a documentary. (By that criteria, also documentaries: Dead Poet's Society, Spartacus, Shakespeare in Love, Glory, Forrest Gump, and Roots.)

There's a scene where Henry is doubting his decision to execute Anne and is reminded that, because he is the king, all impulses, thoughts, and desires he has come from God. Can you imagine actually living your life like that? To think you are the embodiment of God's desires, and have a moral duty to act on them?

I would be SO fat.

I wish God would stop wanting me to wear pantyhose.

Like a vacuum

I really suck at goals. Well, at follow-through in general. But one of my favorite things is making goals. And then organizing them. Dividing them into sub-goals and grouping them into super-goals. Prioritizing, listing, color-coding, charting out on poster board and buying lots of gold star stickers.

They will ALL BE MINE.

But that's about as far as I go. I burn out, usually at about draft 3 of the amazing poster board calendar chart. So how do you do it? Move from the thrilling high of organizing change to actually changing? I need different strategies. I have some ideas I plan on trying out, and I'll let you know how they go. I'm sorely tempted to document those ideas in full entertaining detail, but I'm restraining myself. (As best I can, anyway. Clearly, I'm still blogging about it, however vaguely.) (Hee. Clearly and vaguely in the same sentence, describing the same verb. I'M SUCH A PARADOX.) Anyway. Let's see what doing first can accomplish.

See I can follow through

A short silly post! As promised, no more five month hiatuses followed by a depressing "update" post that illustrates the current lameness of my life.

Check out these hilarious (and disgusting) Weight Watcher cards from the 1970s. I think the secret weight loss strategy was to publish pictures of THE MOST disgusting food, hopefully making the dieters lose their appetite for the rest of the day.

Here's my favorite:

The food itself is nowhere near the worst of the bunch (though, what THE HELL is that water crap in the center?), but the creepiness is turned up to 11 with the gathering of the ceramic cats and toad. WHY are they staring at the food? I picture the cook finishing the platter, turning away, then turning back to see ALL of her ceramic friends staring intently at whatever the hell it is she just cooked.

Fair warning. All future food pictures I post on this blog will be surrounded my large collection of souvenir owls, all of them staring creepily at the food I am about to eat.

Five months exactly

Hi blog. I haven't forgotten about you, I promise. I'm just super boring. I bought a new car, which isn't that boring, I guess. Though the car itself is pretty close to the definition of boring: gray, Nissan Versa. Brand new BECAUSE I'M A SUCKER. Just kidding, it was a good deal, I swear. It would have been dumb of me NOT to get the new car. The dealer said so. I drove to California and back in it, and it was great. No cruise control, but I did get well over 100 during some rural stretches of I-15. It was raining, and I was going too fast for the rain to stick to my windshield. That's the only way to drive.

I'm having trouble coming up with things to include in a five month update. Seriously, I must have done SOMETHING in the last five months. I've lived in my new apartment for almost a year and STILL have not unpacked. Though listing things I haven't done really shouldn't count as an "update." 

I bought new shoes. (Talk about bottom of the "personal update" barrel.) This is actually kind of a big deal for me. It's really hard for me to spend money on quality items. I'm much more comfortable buying a bunch of crap shoes from payless than I am buying a really nice pair of shoes that will last me forever. But I did it. Here they are:

They are Dr. Martens Felice 8-Eye Boot. I'll allow you a few moments of envy.

Bought a car and bought shoes. This is my five month update. LAME. SO LAME. I will try to update more often, to at least spread the lame out slowly. This much more potent lame is probably a bit much for you to take. OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS QUOTE: "Well if loving your kids is lame, then I guess I'm just a big lame."

Oh hey, it's been a while

And woah the blogger post interface changed. What's up with this posting format. You can't see it, obviously, but trust me. It's way different. It's like I'm just typing to myself in a google doc, pretending I have friends. Friends with no hands that I only communicate with over chat.  I MIGHT ACCIDENTALLY TYPE OUT ALL MY SECRETS. Or, like, a work document that explains how to set up the computers for the alpha test in the lab. Here's how you do it: you turn them on and make sure they have chairs. Oh and headphones. That work. ONE PAYCHECK PLEASE.

This new dashboard says my blog has had over 8800 page views. That's a lot of disappointed people. I'm hoping most of those were spambots.

SO anyway, the reason I made a new post after three months of silence. I saw this on youtube. For 5 minutes and 35 seconds I thought I'd traveled back in time, watching Jill play this game. See, I never played the game because I suck at video games. I'm the girl in Halo running around in a circle with her crappy gun pointed up in the air saying, "Which one is me?" And then Jake shoots me. (Yes. I'm the Pierce of video games.) It's always bothered me. I grew up in the 90s, video games were really important to me. The only way I could enjoy them was to pretend to be above them. "I don't play video games. I read books." Except Mario Kart. NO ONE is above Mario Kart. I finally sat down one weekend and dedicated myself to beating Tetris. I just wanted to master ONE game. I did it. Got to level 100, and then the levels just roll over back to 1. I really wish I could put this on a resume.

But I loved just watching this game. It was one of the first we ever played, on the old original NES. I really love how Ariel kicks stuff with her fin. And flops around on land like a seal. (Don't watch the whole thing. It's really not worth it.)

Newsroom pilot

Just watched the pilot episode of The Newsroom (which is available on youtube.com, but don't get too attached unless you have HBO). I watched it after reading various critiques of the episode scattered across the internet. Aaron Sorkin and the internet love to hate each other, so it makes for some really good sleazy navel-gazing reading. The exact kind of reading Aaron Sorkin so fiercely hates. Though, if he wants us to not read the sleaze, he really needs to stop trying to make the gossipy articles so irresistible by demanding a newspaper reporter "pick up a newspaper once in a while." (After condescendingly calling her "internet girl" and teaching her how to high-five because he's "sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five." Seriously.)

The show is about a news team that is trying to bring integrity back to the news, like the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Kronkite. Which makes me roll my eyes the same way I do when people decry modern life and long for the "good old days" of stay-at-home moms and nuclear families. (And segregated schools and the public shunning of divorced women.) The eye-rolling was abetted a bit by the reviews I spent my lunch hour reading, which for the most part felt that the show "chokes on its own sanctimony." I found out the pilot is available online, so I could watch it for myself tonight. Or I could watch The Bachelorette. It was tough call. (Just kidding, I'll watch them both. This is the week Emily finds out Arie had a relationship with a production assistant! Drama!)

So I watched it, and I liked it. I'm sad I don't have HBO. (I did not head my own warning.) Like Sports Night, The West Wing, and the first episode of Studio 60, Sorkin is really great at showcasing smart people who do Important Jobs for Important Reasons. What's most satisfying is they are successful at it, at least in these fictional universes where clumsiness is enough of a flaw to make a character "realistic." (SHUT UP BELLA SWAN YOU ARE NOT JUST LIKE ME.)  And of course, intelligent viewers (the kind of viewers that read the newspaper and not gawker.com because no EVER reads both) are supposed to ask themselves is, how can I make my world like that world? This is really the heart of this (and any Sorkin) show. It's fictional, yes, but a fiction to which we are meant to aspire. In case anyone was unsure of The Lesson, the pilot episode is helpfully titled, "We just decided to." We just do it! Awesome! No sneaky disappearing magic train platforms required. Even Muggles can make this fictional world real! Except. It felt like the show used phrases like "great men" and "men were Men" an awful lot. It kept saying we had it right once (Back Then) and we somehow made it all worse. (Hmm. What are some things have have changed in the past 50 years that might be at fault? One moment while I refer to my Mad Men dvds and play "spot the differences.")

This show made me wonder this thing I've been wondering lately. What if things really were better back then? I mean, of course they weren't. Of course!  All the bad -isms lived there. And we have a tendency to romanticize the good parts of history. And I'm sure every generation feels like theirs is where everything is falling apart. And lots of other reasons that assure me of course things weren't better.  But, why do we keep looking back and saying we used to be great? Why do our scriptures and Declarations seem to say things were better and now they're worse? To create powerful people who can change the world (for good, usually!), does one group need to give up their power? We're supposed to be aspiring to Godhood, yet a requirement for that is a marriage with one Presider and one (or many) not-presider(s).

Back to earth. As usual, I like to take my theological extrapolation a bit too far. This is a tv show, after all. It'll be interesting to watch how The Newsroom tries to reclaim the greatness of Back Then while still embracing what's good about Right Now, and hopefully even better about The Future. Unfortunately, I know already that Aaron Sorkin shows have serious issues with women, and if the interview I linked to above is any indication, this one will too. (Maybe it's a good thing I don't have HBO.) And it's not Aaron Sorkin's job to navigate society back to greatness (though I have a feeling he'd beg to differ). And it's certainly not his job to reconcile Mormon theology with all of that. It's my job, and your job. So I liked the show, for reminding me of that.

Overheard on Public Transportation

As I am now without a car, I think this has the potential to become a regular series.

I Really Hope They Are Talking About Picking a Band Name

She-Hooligan: We're going to be firetruck cannibals.

He-Hooligan: You're what?

She-Hooligan: We're going to be firetrucks that eat other firetrucks.

He-Hooligan: I'd love to see you guys just walk into a fire station...

She-Hooligan: ...and start, like, gnawing on the tires. Haha.

He-Hooligan: Haha. Well if anyone could do that, it'd be you guys.

Anarchists New Making Friends

Angry Man: You see that cop?

Jaded Teen: Yeah?

Angry Man: He's there to give you a $500 ticket for jaywalking.

Jaded Teen: Woah.

Angry Man: They can't think of normal ways to do things, so they just make them up.

Jaded Teen: I hate cops.

Crazy Bearded Man: Me too! I keep getting hit by cars when crossing a crosswalks.

Jaded Teen: Man.

Crazy Bearded Man: It's happened three times. The cops told me that half of them were my fault. The light was white. How was that my fault?

Alas

People don't use the word "alas" often enough. I see the obnoxious *sigh* everywhere. (At least online. No one, that I know of, says "asterisk sigh asterisk" and if I did know of such a person I would not be happy with that. I suppose people have been known to say "sigh" rather than just sighing, but I'm ok with that. I don't know why. Probably because I've done it before. Or perhaps because it's always said with a sighing tone, almost making the word onomatopoeic. I'm always on board with onomatopoeia.)

Reasons to use alas instead of *sigh*

• It makes you sound fancier in a top-hat old-timey way. (Indeed!)
• There is zero risk of coming off as passive-aggressive.
• It lets you use words to convey your emotions rather than clumsy gestures jammed into stupid asterisks. You do not want to appear to be bumbling around like an agitated monkey trying to communicate its desire for a banana. Asterisk actions should be used sparingly, and for humor purposes only. *farts*
• I will like you more.

But alas, no love for alas. Puppet Dumbledore agrees with me. (I also like how Harry and Ron onomatopoeticize"bother." [I also like that I've been able to use variations of the word onomatopoeia like a bazillion times in this post.]) Alas, watch the video below.