So on my birthday, my best friend went to Germany for the summer and I've spent a majority of the time since then
1) working.
2) moping.
3) trying to turn Ladyboner into "a thing."
And creative pursuits, like my blog, have fallen by the wayside because I am crafting especially witty emails and letters to said best friend. Also, since the invention of twitter, it has become easy to whip out a bon mot as I think it and not have to save it for a blog post. Twitter is the new blog. QUICK SOMEONE TWITTER THAT. I already did.
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I went with LBCS to Iowa today to pick up her new family member, Phoenix the Dog. He's a rescue-dog, an Aussie, and he's a sweetheart. His "foster" family lived outside of CRapids and couldn't meet us half-way, so we made a day of it, making it back to the Cities successfully, even though we were sure for a moment that the city of Faribault was trying to suck is into its terrifying center, where a Minotaur would be waiting to devour us.
Phoenix was found in IL back in May, wandering about with a sheltie who was his fellow hobo friend. He's a young guy and seems to have some training and no fear of people. He also really, really likes being around people. I suspect he was abandoned by a thoughtless owner who couldn't handle a dog past the puppy stage, and probably wandered about for a few weeks before he was found. It's a guess, but I think it is an accurate one. It makes me so mad I could spit. I found a stray dog once -- an english bull dog who wandered into my yard when I lived in IL. She was friendly and sweet but someone had decided to let her go and who knows what would have become of her if I hadn't found her, given her water and taco meat, and let her stay in my air-conditioned house until I could get her to someone who could help her out? If we can't treat our dogs with decency, what does that say about us?
A few weeks ago, a friend commented that I would be a good trainer for seeing-eye dogs. I would think that I could be a foster-mom for dog rescue organizations. It seems like a really worthwhile thing to do, and I would get to hang out with dogs as much as I would with people. Oh man, part of a golden retriever rescue? I love their sweet, dopey little faces. Yes, sign me up. As soon as I, you know, have a yard for them to play in.
So lately the trending topics on twitter have been pretty sexist. I'm trying to counter with "#ladyboner." If you don't know, a lady boner is the name I give for things that make me excitedly happy. One day Pineapple said, in reference to something awesome, "Oh my God, is this what a boner feels like?" I started calling them Lady Boners. Also, no word makes me laugh harder than "boner." If men can accuse each other of having vaginas, why can't I say boner?
If you're a lady and something makes you happy and you have twitter, for goodness sake type in #ladyboner and go for it!
The final cause of an egg is to be a chicken.
The egg's sole aim is to be a chicken.
Without the concept of a chicken, how can we know the final cause of the egg?
Without the concept of a chicken, the egg is a useless thing, a mystery.
Therefore, a concept of a chicken is needed to understand the final cause of the egg.
The chicken came before the egg.
College-aged me (when I re-read this I said, "Damn, man, my MOM listens to Coldplay now."):
I have to write a one-to-two pager on what we would learn about love if Ovid's Apollo and Daphne were our only example of it. My paper is about halfway finished and it is getting rather cynical. But then I guess it's easy to play the cynic in love when you are surrounded by happily in-love people while you yourself are unattached.
"What's that? Oh, you're all talking to your boyfriends? That's great. No, I'll just be in my room listening to Coldplay. Yeah."
BONUS! Here is the "cynical" paper. Guess who reads a lot of Milan Kundera? That's right, College-me:
Love’s childlike body gives him the appearance of innocence personified, but this is a dangerous assumption to make about the one responsible for the most adult stirrings in mortals and gods. Dare to approach Love flippantly, or worse, mockingly, and learn that Love, after all, is not patient, kind, or free of envy. Especially is Love is prone to anger when mocked, and what Love lacks in benevolence he makes up for in power. Anyone else’s weapons might kill, if aimed correctly, but Love’s arrows are always sure, and always have the desired effect.
Love encourages its victim to engage in a hopeless pursuit, without rest, without thought. Because of Love, one loses grasp of rational thought and thinks instead in the language of hyperbole, or worse, metaphor. In the eyes of the afflicted lover, the beloved is flawless and this perfection is only enhanced in flight. The disorder of the beloved is juxtaposed with the lover’s wish to reign her in, and this destructive line of thought blinds the afflicted to anything the beloved might be lacking, including the rather important detail of reciprocated interest. Even so, as the lover longs to hold and control the beloved, it is the hopeless pursuit that beckons him further.
This mad, Love-led chase does more than put its victim outside of rationality. Love is essential for the survival of the lover, detrimental to the continued existence of the beloved, turning one into a predator, the other into prey. The beloved must also pay for refusing Love by an even more drastic dehumanization – losing love altogether. Her coolness towards her lover turns into a veneer impenetrable not only from the outside, but also from within. Her heart is trapped; she doesn’t have to accept the unwanted advances of her lover, but she’ll never have that chance again.
Strangely enough, the scorned lover is further blinded by Love, and accepts the loss of his beloved as a gain due to the imagined consent of the beloved. Under Love’s spell even a sneeze seems significant; a slight nod of the head, as subtle as a light breeze in a treetop, may as well be a profession of love. If anything, the lover carries his lost beloved forever, through the memory of that shared, insane chase. In this way he makes the beloved his completely, no one else had that chase, and no one else ever will. The lover can forever exalt in the beauty of his beloved, and perhaps the better for him that that perfect chase will remain unmarred.
I'm now co-blogging with my new roommie, Recycled Art Guru, and a few others at Terrible Poetry for Terrible People
http://terriblepoetryterriblepeople.blogspot.com/
I'm also back from the internet-blackout (read: moving days) and should have more time to write these days, although next week I'm taking PTO to go up to the cabin for the first time this summer. This will be delightful. Also, I will play with a dog a lot.
Predictions over, now go read our bad poetry!
So I worked fifty hours this past week (at least, it actually might be closer to sixty), plus I'm packing for the apartment move, and let's not forget the wild, unpredictable moodswings caused by stress. I'm getting angry at things that are solvable. On the bizarre plus side, I got a raise and a promotion at Bratopia. The raise I expected, the promotion I did not see coming. It would be weird to explain, but I basically get commission pay for fullfilling certain extra duties with said promotion. That's rad. So goes my brief update.
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My actual reason for cracking open the ol' blog is to ponder something about music tastes. Even though I don't like it as much, I still occasionally read Pajiba. They have a newer music column now, and the most recent article s on good bands that "need to stop." While I'm largely ambivalent about the list (i like some of the bands listed, namely the Pixies) I'm interested in the comments. It always intrigues me how protective we are of our music tastes. People get virulent and angry if someone disagrees with them, slags a band they like, so on, so on. I used to care a lot more than i do now, but I'm still a little miffed if someone makes fun of music I like. Even though I don't listen to them much anymore, I'm still protective of DMB -- in a "No one picks on my little brother" kind of way. And the opposite still happens, too -- when someone likes a band you like, you want to make them your friend FOREVER. On Twitter, when Merlin Mann from You Look Nice Today (hotdogsladies) got all excited about A.C. Newman's new solo album, I got super happy. It's like validation.
I've only met one person in my life who claimed not to like music. It seems like everyone else I know has their identity tied up in the music they like. Oh tiny audience, what music is tied up in your identity? Why are your bands important to you? This is a judge-free zone -- talk about why you love what you love. I know one brother of mine who would probably say "Dire Straits" because "So Far Away" is the only song his son falls asleep to (is that not rad? I think that's rad. I hope Peanut skips over the nonsense kid-song phase and just listens to Prof. Hermano's music, which when all is said and done is pretty decent). Why is your music YOUR music?
Sometimes I'll go weeks without injuring myself (although when I pointed this out to LBCS she said, "Will you?" in a doubtful tone, and I had to concede the point) and then I'll injure myself a bunch in a short span of time. Behold, in the past four days I've had a bowl of dip fall on my head, scratched my arm on broken glass, and biffed in the parking lot at work, creating scrapes up and down my legs that look worse than they actually are. A friend of mine also sustains as many injuries as I do, but she does Roller Derby. I just exist.
Sometimes, I'll go months without strange things happening, and then in the span of twenty minutes, a myriad of strange events will happen. Witness, last Wednesday on campus I saw a shirtless guy chasing a squirrel, a random middle-aged asian guy take my picture for no reason, and another young man skateboarding towards Hewitt Ave, singing what I supposed to be opera. I end up going to class with a perplexed expression, wondering if these were all signs from a god I may or may not believe in.
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And sometimes, I'll go weeks without blogging, because I have a fairly small audience and a fairly regular life -- by regular, I mean I have tasks and habits that detract from my public show of self reflection. I have fallow periods with my private journal, too. Sometimes it is my lifeline, and sometimes I can go weeks without needing it. For a time, I think it is because I'm getting older and maybe "outgrowing" these things, but I'm not, because I've been doing this -- writing to myself, that is to say -- since I was eight. That's almost twenty years of talking to myself. I didn't save the earliest efforts, partly -- actually, entirely -- because I feared my brothers would read them. And they did, once that i knew of. To my cousins, who were the COOLEST people in the world and it sucked to have my inmost thoughts betrayed to them.
This brings me to my point.
A while ago, Lyz did a series on that which made her cringe from her old journals, inspired by the book Cringe (which is delightful). I've been thinking about copying her, especially since the comparison between Young Lyz and Young KT is entirely hilarious. Young Lyz was very religious in her writings, Young KT was writing through her last days as a Catholic in a blaze of profanity and incoherence. Young KT drew pictures -- that were intended to be LIGHT-HEARTED, mind you, of Young KT destroying her enemies in myriad ways. This was all pre-Columbine, I must point out, and I know that while I was a lonely soul through my junior high and high school years, I was still fairly well-adjusted and had no real designs for chaos. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy imagined chaos.
Also, I had the penmanship of a mildly psychotic adolescent boy (to which I can picture LBCS and Pineapple raising their eyebrows in unison and saying, "Had?")
So here is episode one of that which makes me cringe -- 14-year-old me making her "I AM" statement to no one in particular when she should be paying attention in English class.
"Still 5/20/97 (just thought you'd like to know)"
Well. Hafta be a useful part of society. Back in a second.
Alright, I was a useful part of society, now I can be normal. I had to do math problems and learn something.
I wonder if anyone who gets a hold of this notbook in the future will wonder what I was like and if I really accomplished anything in school. Why yes, I did. Hello, person reading this. I'm here to tell you I did accomplish good grades my freshman year. I'm just rather apathetic and prefer to write in my notbook or write to my friends. That part of life always seems more interesting. But yes, I do get As and Bs. Every once in a while, I get a C. Those teachers usually retire after they give me a C. Mainly cauz they're all old. No wonder they gave me Cs. THey gave me Cs cauz they're old and blind and suffering from old timer's disease.
(Shut up, justin. Yer stupidity personified. There, I said it) [Note from '09 - I probably didn't.]
I'm not an over achiever or an under achiever, I'm just another being wandering aimlessly through my life, a person on this continual journey, wondering where the hell will this end up. For the moment, I'm ona happy strech of life where things seem okay. But it's kinda spoiled by my enemies and people who don't like me. Why don't they? I dunno but that's their loss. I don't like not liking people from the first meeting,s o I try being nice and if they don't wantto be my friend fine whatever just don't bug me, I won't bug you if you don't bug me. So. Person reading this, that is me. I'm Bored.
I'm kinda getting sick of all this Romeo and Juliet hype. It's starting to get on my nerves."
I have been remiss in being a blogger lately, for whatever reason, and while I've been not-blogging, a shitload has happened:
- I signed a lease on a new apartment with Recycledartguru (woo!). It's cheaper, a little smaller, but we don't have to pay for heat! Or water! Or garbage! And it's a mile from Bratopia, with a walking/biking trail leading me straight to the door of my work.
- Pineapple decided to defer her PhD program and is moving in with her folks for a year. My response was, "That's awes...ful. Awesful. Awfsome?" Anyway. We get to hang out.
- LBCS bought a house! Then her loan fell through. Then HER PhD program restructured and took away her funding. So she's just waiting for the next piece of shit to hit the proverbial fan.
Just to name a few...
Homeworking (and watching Gilmore Girls) with K-Jo:
K-Jo: This show always makes me want to dress better and eat dessert. We should get cake.
Both: *laughter*
*pause*
Tigi: I'm not saying no.
It's like the bucket list, only it involves what you can live your life without doing.
Like,
- Listen to jazz
- not say inappropriate things
- quit drinking chocolate milk
- not laugh at my own jokes
- anything with the words "cardio" "boot" and "camp"
- pretend i don't watch tv
- wear bug-eye sunglasses
- get manicures
- wear heels often
- Read Ayn Rand
... and so on.
