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Sunday, 12 July 2009

  • currently

    it is a few minutes past eleven in the morning on sunday. i have finished my internet perusing and a breakfast which consisted of a bowl of easy-mac with bacon bits. they claim they are real bacon bits, but i doubt it.

    the weather outside is beautiful. the sun is bright, the sky is blue, there is no rain. yesterday it seemed as though there might be rain to come, because it was very windy and cloudy in the evening. if it did rain, it was after i fell asleep.

    i have many things i need to accomplish today. i have to do laundry. i have to go food shopping, because i am out of easy-mac. i should probably do some cleaning. i want to go to the mall and buy some new skirts. i should get some writing done. i should get some other stuff done.

    i will likely not accomplish all that i ought to accomplish today, mostly because it is almost ten minutes past eleven and i have not gotten dressed yet. all i have accomplished is eating a container of easy-mac with bacon bits and checking my email. and typing up this entry, which i have not yet finished.

    yesterday morning i drove to fort lee for my japanese class, which went quite well. i am enjoying learning again. on my way back to the car, i paused to peruse a little cutesy shop. i bought two mechanical pencils with cow patterns on them. i think i am going to give one to Lisa. i also bought a pair of scissors and a folding fan.

    it is a lazy sunday afternoon.

    the trip to the bahamas will not happen this year. i am hoping for California instead.

Thursday, 02 July 2009

  • the internet, the weather, and Josh the Puppy

    the internet was only functioning sporadically over the last two weeks or so (which, along with laziness, explains my lack of entries). yesterday, i left work early so the cable guy could come and look at the modem, since we theorized that the problem was that i needed a new modem. he hooked up the wire to this doohickey and the doohickey said that the signal was way too strong. which i didn't think would be a problem, but apparently if the signal is too powerful the modem can't take it and just spazzes.

    I have come to the conclusion that the weather is getting stranger by the day. This morning it was mostly cloudy. this afternoon it rained. on the way home, it was sunny, but raining. early this morning i was awakened at around 3 am by the sound of rain. my bed is right next to the window. i heard the sound of the rain and thought, "Oh, it's raining."

    After a moment, i thought, "The window is open."

    After another moment, I thought, "I should close the window. at least most of the way, since it's wide open."

    After another moment, i sat up, shut the window so it was only open about an inch, squinted at the alarm clock, and then fell back to sleep.

    Since while sleeping, i have little concept of time, these "moments" could have been several minutes long.



    This is Josh. At the time of this picture being taken (which was about two weeks ago), he weighed an estimated eight pounds or so. He's two months old (he was born April 15, so he's Tax Day Puppy). In case you weren't aware, he is a Pembrook Welsh Corgi, which means he doesn't have a tail. Full grown, he'll probably be between 20 and 30 pounds.

    Corgis grow to be, i suppose, about two feet tall. They were originally bred to herd cattle. The dog nips at the feet of the cow, and if the cow kicks out, it misses the dog because the dog is too short, and too nimble to get hit. Josh comes from a family of sheep-herders, and he was born at the house of a woman who teaches other dogs (and their owners) to herd sheep. It's actually a pretty interesting thing to watch a dog herd sheep, and learn how to herd. The day we went to meet Josh and his siblings, we got to watch a few of my uncle's dogs herd sheep and it was pretty cool to watch. There was also a rookie dog who had never seen sheep before, and seeing how he knew how to do some things just by instinct was also pretty cool.

     

Monday, 22 June 2009

  • Currently
    Songs for You, Truths for Me
    By James Morrison
    nothing ever hurt like you
    see related

    go go carefully

    ten minute blog before my wash finishes washing and i go to dry it.

    got nothing done this weekend because i spent half of saturday sleeping and the other half at mom's. got nothing done sunday because i drove with her down to Shamong, NJ (yes that's a real place, nine trillion miles from anything) to get a puppy. I'll post a photo later when I've got time. His name (mum keeps saying her because we were originally planning to get a girl, and our last dog was a girl) is Josh, and he's eight pounds. He's a corgi, and he's adorable.

    so now i have almost no clean clothes, since i haven't done laundry in i don't know how long. i had to drive to Fort Lee today, because I'm thinking of taking Japanese classes there, and I wanted to know how to get there, so i stopped there on the way home. I almost freakin' died on the way there, because of all the traffic. (If you don't know, Ft. Lee is where the George Washington Bridge is, which is like, crazy busy at 5 pm or so). It's a cute town that reminds me a lot of the City, probably because there are many tall buildings and many signs for restaurants in Korean and Japanese. It took me a little bit of time to find the place, which was identified only by a little lettering on a door in a building. I was kind of expecting something more elaborate. Ah well.

    anyway, i got some paperwork and left my name with the assistant, who said she would give my name and number to the director, who would call me tomorrow and give me some info about classes. i mostly went to see how long it would take me to get there in the evening. nancy said "make sure you use your gps or you'll get lost, because there are a lot of one-way streets." so i did and thank god i did because otherwise i might have gotten lost.

    coming home i had to get on 80, which involved staying to the right, then staying to the left, then staying to the right. i almost hit a sports car that whizzed past me and i guess i cut off an suv, because the driver honked his/her face off at me. it's not my fault the signs are so bloody confusing!

    so i got home a little while ago and i haven't even started to think about eating yet. i grabbed a bunch of laundry and went to the laundry room and saw that someone in apartment 116 had put a note on two of the washers. one said that it wasn't rinsing and the other said that they had put in money and nothing had happened, please refund the money to the apartment. another two of the six washers were unplugged/not working. so i put one load in one of the free ones, and the other working one had someone's clothes still in it. i didn't want to touch their clothes, so i put my clothes in the washer that supposedly doesn't rinse, since i've never had a problem with it. worse comes to worse i'll ring it out by hand or wash it again. shrug.

    i guess that's what i get for waiting until the last possible second to do laundry. anyway. time to go see if it washed at all.

    (title borrowed from the song "Airstream Driver," by Gomez.)

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

  • blood!!

    for some random and annoying reason, my internet decided to stop working (or only work occasionally) for several days in a row. this annoyed me greatly because i pay a trillion dollars for it and so i think it should thus be required to function correctly on a regular basis. Grr.

    there was a blood drive at work today. i wasn't planning on donating, but nancy was going and she didn't want to go alone and i thought it was a nice thing to do so i went along. i filled out the paperwork and they checked my blood pressure (which wasn't at all high, go me) and then poked my finger to test the hemoglobin or something like that, and then prepared to take my pulse.

    that was as far as i got, because apparently they couldn't get a good reading on my pulse. i think it might be because i had caffeine that morning, but they said it was crazy weird and erratic and because of that they couldn't take any blood from me. oh well. i hung around with nancy anyway, since she didn't want to go alone.

    so now i should probably go see a doctor, since i haven't been to one in about ten years....

Friday, 12 June 2009

  • Currently
    A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future
    By Charles Van Doren
    see related

    self doubts, belonging, and more rabbits

    i feel proud of myself. i went to yoga class last night and i walked twice today. not once, but twice. the first was with nancy during lunch, and the second was this evening. in fact, i just got back a few minutes ago.

    while i was walking, i was thinking, as i always do. i was letting my mind wander where it wanted to wander, which was, as always, far from the physical plane. i let things happen in my head, and these motivate what i write. the more free time i let my mind wander, the more developed the story becomes, and eventually (sometimes) it will get down on to paper the computer screen.

    i prefer to spend my days in a universe of my own making, in a distant place separated from the real world. in that place, i do not have to worry about boring things like work and politics and whether or not people like me. it's like watching a movie, or dreaming, but better. the real world keeps pulling me back to it, and it becomes harder to retreat. by friday, today, i find myself overwhelmed with self-doubts.

    we never truly know what others think of us. we never know if, when they say they love us, they really do. when they make an effort to chat or to call or to listen or to talk, are they in their minds thinking negative thoughts? even if they say they are not, are they lying?

    i had an argument with my mother quite some time ago, when i was an adolescent. i don't think i was a teenager yet, but maybe i was. she was criticizing the fact that i didn't put much effort into my appearance. i put on clothes that were wrinkled and i didn't brush my hair (so it was/is a giant frizzy mess). she told me, essentially, that it was a sign of maturity to worry about what others thought of us. i replied that i thought it was a sign of immaturity, because doesn't what we look like/who we are matter most to ourselves, and secondly to others?

    the real answer is somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, i think. we have to put forth enough effort so that we are happy with ourselves without caring too much what others think, because we can't please everyone. when i was a kid, i didn't care what i looked like, so i didn't care what others thought. now, i care what i look like, but i don't spend much time on my appearance because i feel my time is better spent getting another 30 minutes of sleep than putting on make up that no one will notice and will inevitably smear off by noon anyway.

    in any case, the real reason that i try not to care what others think is that when i do i become terrified of what people are thinking. i begin to worry about the innate hypocrisy of humans, to constantly fear that even people who are making an effort to be friendly or to include me in social activities are inside thinking terrible thoughts about me. these thoughts can paralyze if one is not careful.

    as i was walking, i passed a group of families. in between the buildings is a wide grassy area where i often see rabbits and robins. on warm spring evenings such as tonight, a few families bring their children outside. the kids play in the grass, ride bikes or tricycles on the paths, and the parents stand nearby and chat or play with the kids. i walked through such a group today, and one of the fathers was kicking a ball to a boy on the opposite side of the grass. as i passed, he smiled in greeting, and i smiled back, and went on my way. they all seemed so happy.

    for a while i felt like i wanted to belong to that, like i wanted to be in that family atmosphere. but i am always doubting. do my friends what me there? does my family? do i really belong? and i wonder if maybe they are being nice because they feel they should. because they don't want to hurt me, so they lie and don't tell the truth. which is a form of caring. and if they cared, they wouldn't hate me. and if they hated me, they wouldn't care enough to lie. but maybe they would.

    in any case, i continue on this cyclical train of thought for a while, and i wonder, as i have before, if my loneliness during my high school years was self imposed. did i exclude myself (as some people claim i did) or was i excluded? i was afraid of inserting myself into the conversations and activities of others, yet i feared that invitations were insincere.

    there are no answers to these questions. i can't go back and change the past. i can't observe my actions and conclude the fault of the consequences. i cannot (thankfully, perhaps) see into the minds of others. so i continue on, because what else is there to do but continue on, and take baby steps in the direction of the social universe and try very hard to ignore the doubts in my head.

    because, really, what else is there to do?

    this entry ended up being far more philosophical and depressing than originally intended. so i shall close by reporting that i spotted a small brown rabbit yet again today, and that i also saw one while walking with nancy at lunch. and we also saw a chipmunk running up the side of the tree.

    also, i now have three plants. i hope i do not kill them.





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