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It should be noted that C seems to be enjoying these entries as much as I am enjoying writing them. I think people secretly like to be written about, even when they feel self-conscious and weird about it. This entry was C's idea (sort of).
Shopping with my roommate is generally an exercise in futility. Let me give you an example.
A few weeks ago, I came home late from work one day. I didn't get home until around 8:30, but we needed to buy some groceries. There was nothing nothing nothing to eat; the cupboards were bare. Since Central Market closes at 9, we went to Whole Foods, instead. And that was fine. We wandered through the aisles since neither of us has spent enough time at Whole Foods to become comfortable with the layout of the store, and we got most of the stuff we needed, with Claudia resolving to pick up a few more things at the Wheatsville Co-Op the next day.
And then we got to the bread section. We needed bread that night. It was very important. And, of course, we don't buy normal squishy Butter Krust bread because C won't eat that kind, and anyway, it's not vegan. So we went to the bakery and found the baguettes. C took a look at the price and visibly blanched.
"$1.99? That's pretty expensive," she said with chagrin. "Baguettes are only $1 at Randall's."
In retrospect? I should've just said, "Fine, I'll buy the baguette." But I didn't. I looked at her unbelievingly and said, "We're at a grocery store, but you want to stop by Randall's on the way home?"
That's when she got that look on her face that clearly indicated that she believed I was a value non-believer, so I sighed a defeated sigh, we bought the groceries we'd picked out (including a couple of frozen items), and we headed home, stopping at Randall's on the way.
Randall's, for those of you not familiar with Austin-area grocery stores, is one of those hotbeds of bad deals that offers a shopping-tracker card that puts its prices back within the ballpark of a normal grocery store. There's one in our neighborhood, but if I can help it, I avoid shopping there. The produce is bad, the prices are bad, and the store smells like old people. The old-people smell can be tracked to the gnome that works there. He's about 120 years old, small and shriveled and hunched over, and I'm equal parts saddened that he (apparently) can't retire yet and horrified by his long, tobacco-stained, mummified fingernails. I'm scared of The Gnome, truth be told, and I'd almost rather go to HEB (about three miles out of my way). Almost.
So we went to Randall's. I repeated the list twice. "We're getting a baguette and paper towels, and that's it, right?" Yes, she assured me, that was it.
So we went in, our sorbet melting slowly in the trunk, and rushed to the bread section. Baguette: check. Then we hurried to the paper goods section. Paper towels overpriced, but we won't have to take out a mortgage since C has her Randall's card with her. Check. And then, on the way to the checkout counter, C sees the batteries and remembers that the smoke detector needs a 9-volt. Alright, fine -- it's not on the list, but smoke detectors are important, so we compare prices and pick a battery. It's $6 normally, but with the Randall's card, it's around $2.49. Good enough, and we hurry to the checkout.
Sure enough, The Gnome was working that night. There were only about three checkout lanes open, so we picked the shortest one. The woman in front of us in line had apparently earned a free turkey by paying too much for canned peas all year long, so we waited patiently in line as the cashier went to the freezer section to locate the turkey and lug it to the checkout lane. That was our fatal error. In the next lane, The Gnome spotted us, raised his wrinkly little fingers, and summoned us to his lane. We shot each other horrified glances, but we couldn't find a way around it, so we moved to his lane.
We had three items. Three. But I stood there at the other end of the checkout lane and watched as he took at least five minutes to scan them and operate the payment machine. My attention was drifting when I noticed C going over her receipt and then pointing out an error. "These batteries were only supposed to be $2.49," she explained to The Gnome.
His yellowed fingers reached out to take the receipt from her, and he pulled it toward himself, squinting through his glasses to read the small print. "Well, you didn't have a Randall's card," he answered. This from the ancient gnome who chided me for not having a Randall's card when I moved into the neighborhood.
"But I swiped my Randall's card," C answered, trying not to look visibly horrified.
"Sometimes, they don't take," he answered. "You should've checked before you signed the receipt."
The customer? Not always right on The Gnome's shift.
"Well, if you bring back your receipt and your Randall's card and take them to the service desk in the morning, they'll refund you the difference," he concluded, and C took her receipt from his gnarled talons and stalked out of the store. She was pissed!
We hadn't even gotten to the car yet before she started bitching. Luckily for me, it's a short drive home. "And I spent $6.00 on batteries," she complained, "and the old man breathed on my baguette! Now I can't eat it."
I stared at her, stunned. "...I'm so glad we saved that dollar," I concluded.
Next time? Next time, I'll know better.
The way it works, if you really want to know, is this: I am a person of big plans and bigger inertia. I am excellent at dreaming up ambitious ideas, and often, I know exactly how they should be completed, but I'm not so good at following through with them. I tend to get overwhelmed and procrastinate, because there is always something I'd rather be doing. Always.
Those who I've worked for, or who have worked with me, are probably aware that there are two ways of dealing with me. 1) Provide deadlines (even ambitious deadlines) and a great deal of structure. I thrive with structure, for some reason, though I don't always like it. It keeps me focused to know exactly what I need to be doing and when, and I am easily distracted. 2) Leave me to my own devices. Be forewarned that you'll get mixed results with this technique.
While this does (ahem, occasionally) apply to my work environment, the fact that I'm accountable to somebody keeps me more focused than I might otherwise be. My own personal projects? That's quite another story. Let's take stock, shall we?
I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year, but as of today, the 4th of November, I have written precisely 0 words. The prospect of 50,000 words by the end of November was just too daunting. I couldn't do it. That's alright, I have other (more important) things I want to do this month, anyway.
Like redesigning this site. I love Movable Type, but I hate that my page is basically the MT template, with just a few slight alterations. I want to declutter and organize, and basically feng shui the hell out of the place. I want to make this site more personal, in both style and content. If there's anything I learned at JournalCon, it's that I want this to be a site that people (other than my dad and my friends) can become engaged in. At the same time, I want to aggregate my web presences together somehow. Oh, and I'd like to use the TypePad subscription I've been paying for since August. And while we're at it, I'd like it to be both seamless to the user (that would be you) and aesthetically pleasing to the creator (that would be me). I don't ask for much, do I?
I'm not completely sure what's prompting this desire to upend everything, to purge things from my life and try to rebuild them based on what I know now but didn't know then. Some things have been changing around me, while others have remained the same. I got promoted, for one. The responsibility promotion, as my dad called it in an e-mail this morning, happened a few months ago, right in the middle of preparations for JournalCon, which gave me effectively about three lives there for a while to try to live in 24-hour days. It's nice, in any case, to have the monetary (and titular) promotion to go along with the responsibility.
The whole thing makes me feel like a grown-up all of a sudden, and so much grown-up-edness, not to mention my birthday in about three weeks, is more than I know how to handle sometimes.
I had an epiphany about a month ago while I was lathering my hair in the shower on a lazy Sunday morning. Somehow, I got started thinking about travel, and how I'd like to do that more often, and about all the things tying me down to Austin and the place I live. This part, in and of itself, wasn't particularly revolutionary. I've had these thoughts before. In fact, two weeks prior to my epiphany, I saw my dad in Kerrville, and he not only asked me when we were going to South America together, but he provided some practical ideas of how I might support myself if I were to go traveling for a more extended period of time.
The ideas themselves weren't new, though it was helpful that they'd been slow-cooking in the little pressure cooker of my brain for a couple of weeks at that point. The revolutionary part was that I set myself a little mental deadline for making a radical change in my life, to rid myself of the things that bind me to one place, and to travel until I'm tired of traveling. The date? My thirtieth birthday. It'll happen in 2006, for those keeping score.
I've been slowly trotting out my little plan to select audiences to test their audiences, like some test-market viewing of a limited-release film, and the reactions have been mixed. I've heard several people say, "Wow, cool! Can I come along?" and "I can totally see you doing that," but then, I've heard some people say, "You don't know what it's going to be like," as well. And it's true, I don't. I don't know if I have the temperament for a nomadic lifestyle, but I'm not sure whether I could know without trying.
I've been a bit nervous about publishing this little missive of mine out here where the whole world can see. It makes it all feel a tiny bit more concrete to show it to an audience that can make me feel accountable. Because it is absolutely a cop-out for me to plan a date three years in advance. Any number of things could happen between now and then that could cause me to change my mind, and I'm fine with that possibility. What's remarkable about this idea is that it changes substantially my own concept of who I am and who I might become, and that's more exciting than anything else I've done lately.
This Friday will mark the third anniversary of the day I began publishing on the web on a regular basis. Google has been kind enough to archive my first, most primitive web layouts, ones that I put together for a project in an English class I took during my senior year of college, in Fall of 1998, which precede this date. I find these cringeworthy now, and I try not to look at them. They were meant to be personal but creative, and reading them back now, they sound trite and overstated to me, though, for the record, my English professor loved them. Nonetheless, I have the impulse lately to consolidate my writing into one place, and so I'll probably bring them here someday soon.
As an aside: I state all this not as a way to vouch for my credibility, but rather because CY has challenged me to write my rebuttal in a narrative fashion, because what I really need in my life is more challenge. I told her that because I was trying to be ironic, but she decided to make sure that I actually get the extra challenge I so desperately need in my life. But I digress.
When I first started writing online, the medium served as cheap therapy for me. I was in the midst of a very long period of depression, and it served as catharsis and a way for me to express myself at a time when I didn't really come into contact with many people. For several months, I never even knew that there was a journalling community, and it was a couple of years before I realized how far-flung it extended. I'd been writing for six months or so before I ever heard of a "blog," and even then, I didn't completely understand what the word meant, or what a blog was. (Phil would be happy to corroborate that I live under a rock when it comes to certain new web technologies.)
Within the context of the online writing community in which I was figuratively raised, a blog was something completely different from what we were doing. Within the context of the journalling community that I come from, the image of a blog evolved into a form of online publishing that focused on the external, reporting things that happen in the world around you, rather than on the more introspective kind of writing that made up journalling.
Obviously, weblogs were invented long before the spring of 2001 when I first heard of them. Lloyd began writing in his weblog in May of 2000, using the term "blog" at a time when I didn't even know online journaling existed.
The way I see it, the two genres evolved parallel to one another, and those who adopted each genre over time have had a very wide berth to develop a style of writing appropriate to themselves. To me, the difference between a weblog and a journal is often semantic and nothing more. There isn't a barbed wire fence that runs along the border between the two genres. For the record, I consider much of the content that I post upon this page to be weblog material, but I'd probably classify this as a journal entry. I don't know how my page fits into the diaspora, but that's the least of my worries.
My writing has evolved a great deal since I began publishing on the web. The voice of that writing sounded nothing like what I generally publish now. What I wrote then was intensely personal, and the audience was different. This website is meant to be more public, but that means that I self-censor quite a bit -- after all, family members, friends, and co-workers all read it. Still, my writing voice continues to develop every time I write something meaningful here in these pixels I call my own. Likewise, my photographic skills have evolved over time as I've developed an audience and challenged myself to advance. The improvement comes from practice, and from the fact that I know that at least 150 people every day come here to delve into my life, and I'd like to think it has nothing to do with whether I call this medium a weblog or a journal.
All this is to say that I feel like a troublemaker for getting Lloyd all riled up over what I see as a semantic difference in the first place. (In my defense, the conversations in question actually happened ages and ages ago.) Whatever elitism journal writers might participate in has absolutely nothing to do with the writing done in within the IU extended community. Based on the definition that I understand, those would be defined as journals anyway. Perhaps this page would be defined as a journal, as well. I called it a weblog when I first built it, but its function has changed over time. Ultimately, your genre is whatever genre you most identify with, and the definitions (and opinions, for that matter) of whatever establishment might be pertinent lose meaning anyway.
It should be noted that one of my weaknesses in narrative writing, which got sort of sidetracked about halfway through this entry, is that I'm awful at conclusions. Therefore, this is the very non-narrative conclusion. The End.
Pen iso 1-7, 307212 10 wkk old kitten, pfa, tested + for flk - will you
guys take? tortie pt. getting uri
One cryptic line of text with incredibly tragic implications. Click through for a full explanation and my own little soapbox -- but only if it won't make you cry.
I never cease to be amazed at the beauty engendered by a simple sunset.
As summer approaches, the days are getting longer, and I was struck once again by the beauty of the central Texas countryside late Friday evening. The sun was beginning to dip low in the sky, but it cast a warm glow on the grasses that stretched endlessly toward the horizon. With little rain in the last couple of months, the vibrant verdure of the vegetation has become tinged with gold, which seemed to glow in the evening light. I couldn't take a picture of the sunset as it reflected on the ponds, but I can tell you that the water shone brilliantly at dusk, like liquid fire.
There is a raw beauty to this land I've grown up in. I like the simplicity of the geometric divisions of fields. I like the juxtaposition of rugged barbed wire with the delicate petals of wildflowers. I like the partial spectrum of colors that ranges from golden brown in the sun-touched fields to deep green along the creeks that cut through them.
It makes it hard to imagine living anywhere else.
This is the part where I start pimping JournalCon. It's going to be here in Austin this October, and I'm on the host committee. I designed the web site, so go admire it. :)
A few weeks ago, I had this entry half-written in my head about walking. I went a couple of weeks without driving my car to work (to my very convenient parking garage which is attached to my office building -- unheard-of at my university of employment), opting instead to take the bus or, on nicer days, walk. Most days, I'd ride the bus in the morning and walk home in the afternoon, so I wouldn't be all sweaty and I'd get to work on time. Turns out, I really enjoy the walk.
Yeah, I was shocked, too.
Well, then I bought a new car. New cars are addictive. I think they lace the upholstery with new car smell and crack or something -- it's -so- good, and when that new car smell dissipates, the dealers want you to trade in your car and get a newer one.
So I've got my new car, with the new car crack going on, and it gets 450+ miles to a tank of gas. I don't have to worry about it breaking down like the old one, and I can rationalize my gas usage by saying that I'm helping to clean the air with my super-ultra-low-emissions-vehicle. I know that sounds redundant, but it's the official designation -- I didn't make it up.
The point is, I can rationalize. I can always rationalize. So I've been driving my car to work most days, and I haven't gotten around to writing this entry yet, until now.
C and I walked to Eeyore's Birthday Party on Saturday. I wore my new sandals, which are really comfortable, but not quite comfortable enough for six miles of walking. I got blisters right at the ball of my foot where the straps rubbed funny. By Sunday, they felt better again, and today, I had the urge to walk to school. C didn't need a ride to school, so I decided to hoof it.
It's a nice walk, and cool mornings make it even nicer. I live in a great neighborhood, but there are even greater ones between home and work. Once I get to the other side of the medical centers and cross the major street, there's this beautiful, idyllic neighborhood with quaint little houses and beautiful yards. The only things missing are driveways. I like driveways and car ports, but I'd be willing to consider giving them up to live in a house on this street with huge, overhanging trees.
There's a Taco Shack on the way to work, too. I have a weakness for potato-egg-cheese breakfast tacos. I grabbed a taco on the way to work this morning -- ate it there and read the paper for a few minutes before continuing on my way. I wound up being 40 minutes late, but the walk was good.
This afternoon, I made the return trip. It was much hotter at 5pm, just foreshadowing of the summer to come. I saw a message stenciled on the sidewalk at a street corner:
"we are our experience,
our experience is what it is of;
we are that."
I have no idea what it meant, but it sounded profound, so I took a picture. On days when no one listens to anyone, I have to content myself with the little things.
The following was written by David Nunez as part of the first-ever Austin Blogger blogswap project. :)
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I want to tell you about ice cream.
I realize it's been a while, but sometimes -life- takes precedent. I promise to do better as I free up some time.
So about the ice cream.
I was -going- to write my personal manifesto (because, you know, every girl needs a manifesto. And, of course, what good is a manifesto unless people hear it). However, -right- as I was pressing the button to submit my entry, the server blew up and retched out these little black puffs of smoke.
And then, as I was pondering whether I should learn Electrical Engineering to fix the stir-fried CPU, my phone rang. I jumped -with- a start (did I just say "...with a start?" Who talks like that?) and yelped. (Yes, I know "yelping" is also passe')
In response to my Tourrette's-like outburst, my kittens turned into these little buzzsaws and flurried their way across the room into the safety of their wollen, kitten pockets I found at this -bizarre- Kats-R-Us place when I was working as a Hippopotumus wrangler in Belgium. (I'd like to go back one of these days and do more work with the baby hippos. It's life affirming to see them hatch out of their purple eggs and scurry into the sea. Or maybe I could learn to be an ice sculptor. I'm not too old to live out a girlhood fantasy, am I?)
Anyway, I was hoping the phone call was Claudia. She always has the right advice and always seems to be available -for- my gripe-a-thons.
Instead I was welcomed with a mixed blessing. It was David, the quiet, slightly creepy, self-effacing guy I met at the Journalers Happy Hour and the blogger meetup.
He was asking me all these questions about whether or not he should get his eyebrows pierced. Naturally, I told him to do whatever he wanted, but if it were ME... well, you know. It started to dawn on me that this was awfully weird for a stranger to be asking me to decide for him about piercings. I started to plan my escape as Hux sauntered back over and spun around into his you-scratch-my-belly-now pose to show his support.
And then the conversation took a decidedly important and energizing turn.
I would be a happy girl indeed if I could snap my fingers and take care of all the world's problems. I'll do the next best thing: take care of the most important problems, one at a time. David invited me to a rally this afternoon to ban mellorine.
I was -so- glad to finally find someone who dispises Mellorine as I do.
Because, really. Do we need that -stuff- swirled into our ice cream? "I'll take chocolate syrup, walnuts, and a THICK, CRUSTY INFUSION of mellorine, please."
Did you know that people that eat more than one gallon of mellorine-laden ice cream per day have a 3% higher chance of having heart disease?
David asked for me to pull together some troops for the demonstration. I called CY, JI, FA, WX, UY, HV, EU, LBs, XX, DV, 4H, and ?#, but unfortunately they all seemed to suddenly remember other plans. No matter.
At first it was just me and David on the Congress bridge singing our "Mellorine is not the way" ditties we made up on the spot.
And then this truck full of cool, hippie looking people pulled up with signs. At first we were all excited about this unexpected cavalry, but then one of them shouted, "Do you have any idea what's happening on the other side of the world? You need to get your priorities straight! People are dying!"
As if people aren't dying from ice cream delivered mellorine overdose, for Pete's sake! I've come to expect that sort of behavior from people that don't understand.
It's ok. That's why I'm here; it's my job to spread the word and fight the good fight.
I suppose there are actually some people that can be perfectly satisfied eating their "ice cream" with all that mellorine dripping on their chins. I'm hoping the Ice Cream Corporations will stop their charade and own up to their responsibility. I'm hoping really hard.
Ahem. Bluebell. You know... bah...
And so forth.
machine!
The world seems to be getting tenser with each passing day, like a giant spring wound tighter and tighter and tighter. I have this mounting dread that it's going to pop someday soon.
An acquaintance, pro-war before last week, has suddenly realized that the Iraqis don't trust us to liberate them. And why should they? We've carpet-bombed their nation, killed their civilians, and shut off the water supply to at least one major city. This, of course, is following the 12-year economic sanctions we've levied against them.
CY jokingly dared me to write a poll question for the system I develop at work, along the lines of, "If a Muslim army were to invade the United States with the intent to overthrow George W. Bush, what would you do?" Needless to say, the poll question for next week has something to do with academic advising, and nothing at all to do with Muslim armies invading the U.S. It's a bad economy, after all, and I need to keep my job.
Yeah.
In a gesture that more than made up for her trying to get me fired with a controversial poll question, CY pointed me to a New York Times op-ed article by Paul Krugman, called Delusions of Power that actually clarified (indirectly) how Americans and other members of the "coalition" have convinced themselves that this war would be largely unopposed, wildly successful, and mercifully brief.
