before i start ranting and raving, you will notice (if you are paying attention) that i have now put the goddamn cam up again. i don’t know what possessed me to do it other than the usb can i had was pissing me off and i had to have a cam again so up went the old greyscale parallel port one. so you get noire lisa — and yes i really am that pale. you will also see the lisa-patented barrette in action. and yes, i do have a nose, but what do you expect from greyscale?
this will also be a very sad and depressing mea culpa type of piece. if you want to be depressed like me, go look at my list of mp3s that i have currently playing. You’ll be tragic in no time.
this entry will be loaded with irony up the ass. and i think if you only the reason why it’s ironic, you’ll get it. but if you don’t get it, then i can’t explain it to you.
hahaha. that’s just fucked up. but it’s true.
so i awoke this morning with a strange sense of depression. it was weird to me, at least, because when i awoke i was lying on my stomach and i could feel the depression embrace me like a bird flying overhead. in a sense it’s partly hard to describe, but i just felt it slowly come over me and i got up and called myself silly for being a dumbass. this wasn’t depression like “oh god i just want to go and die, my life is so tragic *backofhand to forehead*”, this was just like, i was sad. just very very sad.
so I’ll begin at the begin.
point a: I’m taken.
point b: I’m taken.
someone once said to me you “you are so very taken!”, and i guess being in serial monogamous relationships for the past 10 years can do that to a person. i used to bitch/moan that i never had a bf in my early 20s and now i can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a boyfriend within the last five years.
one of the aspects of having someone being your bitch is that, well, free sex. and the love and cuddling and all the other shit that comes with relationships, including the arguments and the make-up sex and shit.
so yah, then you can like be single and stuff. and being single can be cool cos you can date whom you want and do what you want and you do not have to answer to anyone but yourself and don’t have to worry about hurting someones feelings. but then there is that empty feeling of being alone and not having someone around when you need someone to talk to, and then you get older and suddenly your 30 and the only thing you’ve accomplished in your life is this black book and list of fuck buddies.
okay maybe that is a bit drastic, but you get my point.
[crank! my dream complete!]
i have musing lately how no one seems interested in me. i know i know, i have pauly and i shouldn’t worry about it, but the thing is, as a human, I WANT TO BE ADORED! i want to be worshipped from the ground level on up — but the thing is, I’m taken and i should be very happy that i have someone who adores me, but deep down i know it’s not enough.
i bitch to my friends that it’s always about how I’m treated as pauls other half and as one of the guys, I’m not treated like a person or even better yet, a female. to be honest, that hurts more than anything. i feel sometimes asexual and with no feelings because the only person who seems to appreciate me for being attractive to their eyes is my own bf.
Don’t start picking apart at my logic, cos it will gets you none :]
moving right along, i have guys i flirt with but there is always that very very safe assurance that nothing is every going to happen anywhere along the way. like my friends rob and moe. we flirt all the time and it basically means nothing because we’ve gone from that line of friends to brother and sister. sleeping with them would be like sleeping with your sibling, and i am not from Alabama, so lisa isn’t going there.
Saturday night Ivette and i got all dressed up to drive to Baltimore to see my friend mandyplay with his band at some rinky dinky bar in Fells Point (like 25 people would have been overcrowded for this joint — that’s how small it was). It was a hard won fight with paul to go out that night, mainly because of his age and his lack of driving skills, we haven’t done much of anything since we’ve been to VA — and I’m really hoping that will all change when he turns 21.
So Ivette and i dressed up in bar clothes, not knowing what kind of bar this was, and well, we were overdressed, however, since it was fun to dress up for something other than a special occasion, i didn’t care. Now, mandy pandy is a long standing friend of mine that i met via TLC (go figure — he’s a fan of my site and I’m a fan of his music — much ego stroking here) and we started talking on AOL IM back in the day and he was fun to flirt with, and we had swapped pictures of each other and spoke on the phone and the whole nine yards. I like Mandy because not only was he witty and got my bad jokes, he had the same music tastes as I do (everything Brit baby!). Since Mandy was also from Miami, I wanted him and Paul to meet because I wanted Mandy to fall into the Moe/Rob categories where I could flirt with them and have nothing be taken seriously. I wanted to do things with Mandy without Paul getting into that obessive/jealous category. I just wanted some freaking FRIENDS goddamnit, that were mine and not pauls and mine and not work related. And yah, it felt good to have someone think of me as being attractive.
Silly me to think that.
Being taken and all.
Ivette and I were hanging out at the bar, drinking and watching them warm up before playing and Mandy (as promised) played a few bars of “I wanna be adored” as promised, and I was happy sitting there drinking my sierra Nevada (i had four and was pretty tipsy). Mandy was busy with band stuff so Ivette and I talked about men and other shit, and then the Skydivers played.
Overall, for all the technical problems they had, the set wasn’t half bad — it was pretty good in fact. Mandy and co launched into a full rendition of “I want to be adored” by the stone roses (unrehearsed) and I was so happy I almost started crying (having missed the roses in concert and thusly anything live, even a cover, makes for one happy lisa). After playing the song, Mandy pointed to me and said something like “This one is for you baby!” Shortly after, they finished their hour plus long set, we all headed back into the, what would be called the “green room” and talked.
Something changed — whether it was me or the tension or atmosphere or the fact I kept drinking and chainsmoking, i don’t know what changed. My heart was aching because I had left my cellphone in my car and I knew paul was calling every 15 minutes but on the other hand i wanted to be adored and that is what I came to Baltimore to do.
I went from teasing Mandy to ignoring him and having more fun talking to his bandmates Rand and Mike. It was like I wanted to be adored by Mandy and on the other hand I had a boyfriend and I wasn’t willing to take things any farther than flirting because I valued my relationship too much. But Mandy was pretty much ignoring me and talking to Ivette and whether it was something i blew out of proportion or not, but on the way home I said to Ivette “he was hitting on you, wasn’t he?” and she said “Yes.” I slunked down in my seat and just stared out at the landscape of 95 on the way home to my fiance.
i started beating myself up inside for even thinking those thoughts. For the most part, Paul and I are really happy and I know Paul satiates everything I need, but my own thirst and trouble with being committal drives wedges in us which starts fights, which ends with me curled up in the bed just reading to make the thoughts go away. There are weeks/months that I want the whole happy nine yards with Paul and then i get in moods and I want to fuck shit up.
So i was in a mood to fuck shit up.
Ivette and I waited around like two groupies for them to finish loading mandy’s car. There were talks of grabbing food but by now it was going on 2am and home was over an hour away. If we left at that point, we would be home at 3:30am at the earliest and if we went for food, even later. Paul would be furious and I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to push the line at this point.
[hello frantic frauds of verse.]
Mike dropped us off at my car, in which it was required of Ivette to undo her boot to grab the car key. I jumped in the passenger side, since I had much to drink and drove to meet Mandy back in front of the bar.
When we pulled up in front of Mandy’s car, paul and i were arguing on the phone. He pissed me off so bad i started slamming my StarTec against the dashboard and Mandy just watched wide-eyed. He asked if we were going to go to breakfast with him, and I said no, his royal highness is demanding that I come home now. He said “fine. I’d like to take you two out to dinner some time. ” I said “Who, me and Ivette?” and he said “Yah.” I said “Um, why?” Mandy replied “for no reason, i just want to.” Mandy looked at me and said to call him anytime i needed him and told Ivette to call him too. With that, Ivette pulled a u-ie and we went home.
The car ride, which we were quiet and I was coming down from my drink induced buzz, was interesting. I felt stupid for thinking that getting adored was dumb by someone not your own boyfriend. I was no longer a high schooler looking for the man of her life, I was a 28 year old female preparing to get married to her fiance. I should be fucking happy and given any other person in this situation, they would be fucking happy too.
But I’m not and I don’t know why I suddenly felt sad today.
I of course, being me and all things that are me, woke up this morning with that sadness that just crawled over my skin. I got out of bed and fed Wednesday and thought about it some more. Ivette and I talked about it pretty intensely last night on the way home and she assured me I wasn’t being dumb for being angry and sad at the same time. It is a pretty human concept to want to be loved and adored by others around us. We all want to feel like we are the bomb shit yo.
Thoughts started drifting into my head about this pseudo rejection that had occurred (in my eyes). I hate being rejected by anything, especially men. It does not matter if I want them or not, if they reject me, it hurts my fragile psyche and then starts all the self-doubts that come sliding in (I’m too fat, I’m too aggressive, I’m too this I’m too that).
I hate this shit. It’s so 1986. GAH!
[which you feel is which you are, what you are is beautiful]
I won’t lie and say that a part of me hasn’t entertained the idea of starting something with Mandy if I were single. It has. That’s only human and for me it’s perfectly normal to do the whole “meetsomeoneandlivearelationshipwiththemin30seconds”. But, something always stopped me from even really going to that point. Maybe Paul’s threats of cutting my tits off has something to do with it. I’m not sure.
I know a lot of what I am/have been feeling goes back to that whole shit with Mike Norton back in 1999. When I *assumed* something and Mike rejected me on the play ground in Memphis. That time period takes us back to when Paul got his shit together and finally got the balls to admit he was in love with me, but that is neither here nor there.
I’ve attempted to bring this up with various therapists over the years and the words “responsibility”, “living in a dream world”, “act your age” seem to ring a few bells at this point and time. So they dope me up on 300mg of Effexor and tell me to live a happy and prosperous life.
I’m angry and I can’t explain why I’m angry. I’m sad and I’m pretty sure why I know I’m sad. I feel boxed in and can blame that on a 100 and one different things. Pauls bitching about freethinkers and I wish I had an answer because I know this is only going to keep going on and on.
Paul and I talked tonight and I postponed the wedding till 5/2002. He assured me that we can have the wedding whenever we want and he knows that he doesn’t want to mess with the little girl dreams. I wish I had answers, but only the thoughts of Danny telling me how non-committal I am and how I should just be happy. I’m being overrun by exboyfriends who keep seeing the same pattern and I of course, think I am fine.
not verbatim, but you’ll get the drift – “Why is it that every time something happens, you’ve got to throw up on your goddamn website?” – Jeff Z, another guy I had met via IRC and “assumed” that something was going to happen — got rejected when I was visiting him in Pennsylvania, Christmas 1997.
I’ve got a crack in my heart,
x0x0x0x
lisa
Month: January 2001
bow down, for i am enabled
note: this is going to get rather technical, so i’m going to use an analogy that i’ve used in teaching in the past about how the internet basically works. To explain how traffic (ie: internet traffic) flows from your computer to the internet, it works like this: You live in San Francisco. You know there is are many routes to get to San Jose. Do you Take 101? Do you take 80? Do you drive the backroads? The point is you have many choices, but which one do you take? Do you take the shortest path? The fastest path? Each packet on the internet makes these kind of decisions based on routing protocols (what they can and cannot do).
Now, lets throw up another scenario. You are looking at renting/purchasing a home. You want to make sure your path to work is less stressful and trouble free. You consult the home owners association, the builders and find out that taking a path down main st is guaranteed to be yours exclusively alone to use. Your family and yourself can drive virtually undisturbed to work without having to deal with overzealous commuters.
But wait!
one day you wake up, drive to work and realize that your comfortable drive has turned to hell. You contact the builders and the HOA and find out that the selling agreement in your property was “limited” due to “increase” in others wanting to experience their own comfort drive. Since the guarantee was verbal and not in the contract, you are basically screwed.
This is, in a nutshell, what paul and i found out about remington apartments this morning.
You see, we are bandwidth whores. After working at UUnet for nearly 2 years and having broadband at home, going back to anything less than cable internet is purely bullshit. Thankfully RoadRunner has upgraded their systems and I can experience damn near t1 speeds at home with fairly little congestion on the network. Now that it is time for paul and i to move, we started looking at apartments and fell in love with remington. Not only were they close to work (five minutes!), they had amenities up the wazoo and kept telling us that they had “t1 speeds wired into every apartment”.
We should have known it was too good to be true.
What tipped us off this was a ruse was when none of us (paul, myself, scott who now lives there, greg and nadia) could get a set date on the install of the circuits to provide said bandwidth. We had started stalking the apartments since last august. By October we were convinced we were going to be living in one of their “luxury” apartments. When Scott moved in, we started pestering him about the t1 speeds. “in a few weeks” he said (as he was told via bbrez, the firm handling the dss and internet connectivity), by january 19th we were told. By February 1st was another verdict. DEFINITELY by the time you move in (march 1st) we were told yet again when we went to go look at the apartments. “If not by the time you move in, they will be in big trouble!” we were told by the apartment manager. So paul and I felt confident that we would have the requisite speeds. So we dropped our deposit off on this past saturday and were excited about the prospect of our new home.
But something wasn’t right within me personally about the whole bandwidth issue. We were not getting a straight answer from anyone in the company (techs, sales, marketing, etc) about what is exactly going on, so i took matters into my own hands.
The latest we had heard from Greg was that there was a t1 being dropped into each apartment building. Each building houses 32 apartments. Lets say 2 people per apartment (since most are 2+ bedrooms) and you are looking at 64 people on that connection. You say that half those apartments have internet-ready computers. And half of those are users. You are looking at 16 people who will be sharing that t1 (being conservative here).
[side bar: a t1 has 24 dso channels. Each dso is capable of 64K (56K + 8bit overhead). You can theoretically get 24 people on a single t1 at 56K modem speeds — which is what ISPs use. Now to make money, ISP’s oversell their connectivity, with the ratio being 5 to 1, which means that for every t1 there is up to 120 people trying to get on it to get the interweb from that t1 ALONE. 5 to 1 is a conservative standard, i’ve seen it as high as 10 to 1 (with the rule that not everyone will be using the interweb at the same time, therefore they are reselling that bandwidth) with the average being 7 to 1.]
So, if bbrez was dropping a single t1 into each building, 16 people would be (conservatively) attempting to use that. Using the above the sidebar as a rule of thumb, we would not be getting split between us nothing more than dialup speed!
So I called and got the number for the VP of marketing. He gave me the song and dance and I told him “Look, I work for UUNet, do you now who we are? We are the largest tier 1 provider in the world. I do my living turning up t1s, t3s, and OCs. What you are telling me is not computing here as “high speed bandwidth”, it’s a little more than dialup according to your own conversions!” Then he started on the marketing and sales bs. I told him to shove it (i literally did). I was not a fluff head without any technological background, I did this for a *living*. He referred me to the VP of Technical Operations, with whom they called me back and did a conference call on this subject. They kept telling me my idea of “high speed internet” was unrealistic (um, okay) and I kept asking them “Can you guarantee me 384 up/down connection all the time”. No response. This went on for nearly 30 minutes, when they said they would “get back to me” and we hung up.
I got a standing ovation in the cube farm when I stood up to stretch from my co-workers and people asking me to dispute their bills.
And the kicker?
They are not dropping a t1 into each building, they are dropping the t1 into the WHOLE COMPLEX! 13 buildings x 32 apartments =384 units. On a single t1. FUCK THAT! “Well upgrade as needed” i was told. And when are they planning on dropping the local loop? They just got the order into verizon and they have a 45 day FOC date. Oh fucking please. Which means the service won’t even be available on our move on date!
To be a bitch, I called the vp of marketing and said “Can you please let me know whom your peering with and what your plans for aggregate bandwidth is and why you did not plan on dropping a tiered t3 at 3 or 6mbs and therefore could increase bandwidth when demanded instead of installing additional t’s. Call me at work tomorrow at 703.xxx.xxxx. Thanks!”
Doesn’t matter. I compiled a list of seven possible replacements that paul and i did a star system and i will be calling those places tomorrow. I already know that one place has available rentals for our time frame. as a preclude to this all, this wouldn’t be an issue if there were other options in that area, but there isn’t! RoadRunner (our current interweb cable provider) only covers fairfax county, and the new complex is in loudon county. There is aldelphia cable, but that is uni-directional (t1 downloads/modem uploads) which would be okay, but pauls work requires something a tad bit faster than dialup! The area we live in is so convoluted because we have three cable providers (cox (roadrunner), aldelphia and comcast(@home)) and in some areas whom you get is dependent on where you live. you could live five blocks from john doe and have a different cable provider. DSL is not an option since most of the newer apartments are having fibre dropped to the curbs, which rules out true dsl unless someone got off their duff and did PPPoE, like bellsouth.
I’ve already told bbrez and remington that I will be filing with the BBB for false advertising. But my bitching gave me a sense of betterness because this chickie does not take bullshit from anyone, especially when it comes to bandwidth.
x0x0x0x
lisa lisa
shining sky
i want to know about my obsession with England.
I want someone to tell me why English accents make me swoon, their music is always so much more appealing and except for them being anal retentive about sex, why their lifestyles seem so much better than living in America.
i don’t remember my obsession begriming but all i knew is that most of the music i started digging in the late 80’s came from the UK: Charlatans UK, Morrissey, The Smiths, The Cure, New Order, Stone Roses, Mission UK, The Pogues, SoHo, The Verve, Simple Minds, Neds Atomic Dustbin, Jesus and Mary Chain, Republica, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Church, Sisters of Mercy, Ruby, et al.
Everything I can find on britpop/dreampop which was fucking alternative before alternative was referring to sexual choice. When wearing black didn’t mean you were Goth but just, deep and pretentious. Where having black hair wasn’t a statement against the man but when it actually looked good on someone.
the closer i get to turning 30, the more reflective I’ve started becoming on my music and life going on. the other night, one of the girls i know off of IRC was having a drunken party at her apartment and was using her cam as the expression of said “art work”. i got angry at all the idiots on IRC who were drooling over her own stupidity. Then I got really angry at myself for realizing it wasn’t too long ago that i had flashed everyone via my webcam. like two years ago. okay it was last year.
paul and i got into an argument about aging and how it affects the both of us. and I’ve got to say, i need to stop thinking about the past. it hurts more than it helps. i keep reflecting back to things that were never were into things i want to be. and i need to stop obsessing over death. i keep thinking every time i speak to my mother that she only has 20-25 years left to live.
to stop being depressed, go check out skydivers world domination.
i (heart) mandy.
x0x0x0x
summer sky
resolution #7
it dawned on me on the way to work this morning (after reiterating it to paul, of course), that the other resolution i was missing was that i was not going to dye my hair anymore. no, the world has not fallen on it’s knees and no, hell didn’t freeze over. After 15 years of dying my hair (i started young), I’m extremely curious to see what my hair would look like au natural. but of course I’m going to enhance it. heh. i want some caramel highlights to cover up any gray that suddenly appears, but overall, i wonder what my natural hair color is.
the last time i dyed my hair was in November when Ivette was in town and we went on a hair dying spree between the both of us. I’ve got roots nearing two inches long and boy, does it look white trashy. because i have such thick hair, it is becoming to look like a hair helmet and I’m praying i have the strength to not go get it cut or to run out and buy a box of feria.
I’m still hoping for the strength.
stand tall girl
i am tired as fuck, paul has been on a conference call all night with work and Wednesday is driving me crazy. i pounded out a few back entries this evening so if you think you’re getting another one from me, kiss my fat white ass.
some amusing things to note, some asshole decided that it would be cute to put a link to geek-haus.org from stileproject.com. That’s fine by me and paul. We redirected traffic back to stileproject.com and to catholic.org.
the wedding plans are becoming a pain in my ass and I’m getting pissed at how expensive everything is. Since paul got me my visor for Xmas, I’ve been using that like a mofo adding dates and to do items and collecting crap left and right to get the wedding planned. Pauls parents will be up next weekend with an antique ring that we are going to have shaped for me (3 carat total weight in diamonds and in a platinum setting), plus we’ve been looking at places to get married and for the low low price of 8k we could rent our own private island in Key West.
Gah.
I can’t make my mind worth a damn, and to make matters worse our lease is up on our apartment in March and so we’ve been looking for some place new and everything is either asking wayyyyyyyyyyyy too much money (a lovely luxurious apartment for the low low price of 2500) or they won’t take big dogs (for paul’s sister whose moving up here next week) and or something is wrong with them. And you would THINK us living in the new SillyValley that we could get broadband — but no. We can’t. The central offices in the newer places are virtual and cannot do DSL, and if we move out of RoadRunner neighborhood, we can’t get cable. If someone thinks I’m going back to dialup, they are smoking some serious crack.
i finally got T-shirts for sale. I know I know, I promised those on the list shirts for free, and I swear I will get to them at some point. Dunno when, but i will. I’m also featured on a T-shirt from Open Knightly. I’m a CoderBuff girl! Right down to the barrette on the side of my hair.
Kinky.
new years resolutions
new years resolutions are broken promises. we all know this. i can’t think of anyone off hand who had actually gone through and made resolutions and did what they said they were going to do. all the smokers start back smoking on 1/3 and the dieters last a bit longer. So my question is, are these resolutions something we can truly count on or can we really work on them?
i thought about this little ditty this last week as i was eating, puffing and flipping through bridal magazines. i was looking for something i liked and in the meantime my own compulsive habit of buying clothes that do not fit me was going out of control. Paul bought me a Visor Deluxe in blue and said “Plan our life with this!” and which I’ve started doing. I love this thing! But I digress.
I started flipping through bridal magazines, victoria secret magazines and i swore to myself “I am not wearing a size 18 wedding dress!” no way no how, damn skippy! Since we are planning for the wedding to be in key west, i kept telling paul “I’m going to be prancing around wearing a scarlet red thong bikini!”.
- resolution 1: go on a diet.
- resolution 2: paul goes on a diet. shopping for paul has become a bitch as well, you know being 6’6 and built like a line breaker makes it hard for paul to shop for clothes as well.
- resolution 3: get my health in order. Then there is the whole anxiety crap. I’m chugging down vitamins and meds left and right. His family thinks it’s funny that i keep quipping that i deal with paul “because of all the crack I’m on” when the truth is, it’s more for me than for him.
- resolution 4: quit smoking.
- resolution 5: get things ready for school to start in January 2002. then there is school. i swore to myself i would die if i didn’t get my undergrad degree by the time i am 30. I will be 29 this year. No freaking way can i get it all done in a space of less than two years (especially with expenses up the yazhoo coming up). but there is hope! my fathers trust will pay for schooling and appropriate bills as long as i do a business plan to show where the money is going.
- resolution 6: start writing more and start looking at branches i can use to sell my work. my writing has taken a nose-dive in the last few months and i keep using the excuse “I’m busy.” for not writing. and i know it’s more that I’m afraid of what I’m going to say than what i will say on paper. i miss what I’m doing and so…
there are tons and tons of other things that keep bubbling up to the top that i feel i must include in this little list of what i want to do this year. plan a wedding, plan our move. plan for school. get both paul and myself to the doctors for complete checkups. dentist appointments and eye doctor appointments. get Wednesday fixed, plan vacations. see my mom and pauls family.
there is not enough time in the world for me to do this all in. but i hope to get it done and make my mark on the world as we know it.
x0x0x0x
lisa
year in review: 2000
January: paul and i started off the new year by me not remembering what had happened the night before. The alcohol consumed by myself was enough to force a blackout. something mumbled about blowjobs, bathrooms, and me being the life of the party all night.
February: paul and i head to NYC for LWE:NYC to meet with friends from #userfriendly and for his work purposes. We drove. Never ever will I drive anywhere farther than a few hours again. When I got to the hotel, I cried like a little girl because the NYC drivers *are* as bad as they say they are. i partied with geeks, saw times square, and paul and i got lost on the way into DC on the way home. We ended driving up the wrong side of 495 and had to cut through DC in the middle of the night.
march: my lovely brother came and stay with us for a week for spring break. oh joy!
April: my father passed away on April 24, 2000.
may: spent a week in Toronto for the funeral. paul turned 20. love and birth in one month. my fathers 73rd birthday would have been this month.
June: my 28th birthday.
July: Brian (pauls brother) comes and stays with us for nearly 2 months. I love his little brother 🙂 Wednesday is born.
august: i meet pauls parents and his Spanish grandmother. Brian goes back to Miami. school starts and i miss another semester.
September: We add Wednesday into our household. At 8 weeks and 3lbs she is adorable.
October: paul and i celebrate our one year anniversary by going to Morton’s steak house.
November: paul’s sister Ivette comes and stays with us for thanksgiving weekend and paul cooks up a storm. i nearly kill him in his over Martha Stewart process of making everything perfect. We roast a 26lb turkey for friends and family and there is no leftovers.
December: i plan a weekend trip to Michigan to see my mother, and paul and I fly to Miami for 9 days of fun in the sun. While we are gone, Wednesday gets bit by his aunt’s German shepard and paul and i freak out over our “child”. nadia and greg get married and we formally announce our engagement to the sullivan family.