d-day

i had completely forgotten today was d-day at work.
you see, for quite some time, there has been numerous rumours running rampert all over the company as well as [Not sure where the rest of this entry went to…]

about

this isn’t going to be some sort of deep psychological debate with myself. you can form your own opinions about me via reading what i write. but that is just the tip. the basics are as follows:

  • I’m 6′ tall in stocking feet.
  • I’ve driven cross country (san fran to dc) solo.
  • I’ve been engaged multiple times (but not all at once)
  • my fiance is eight years younger than me
  • my brother is 7’2
  • i was born in canada and raised in Michigan
  • i was arts/entertainment editor on the college paper
  • I’m obsessed about harry potter and anita blake books
  • the first thing i do when i get up is: feed the dogs, make coffee, pee, smoke a
  • cigarette and check my stocks in that exact order.
  • i make more snide comments than i do straight answers
  • I’m obsessive /compulsive
  • I’m a drew carey fanatic.
  • i admit to owning albums by “Aqua” “Color Me Badd” and “Britney Spears”
  • i have a purse/shoe fetish
  • i only write with pentels rsvp pens in fine point blue
  • i also tape (via tivo) beverly hills 90210 every time it’s on
  • I’m a zelda fanatic
  • my favorite comedian is eddie izzard
  • if i would, i would marry christian slater in a heartbeat.
  • same thing for brendan fraser
  • ahh hell, imhotep from ‘the mummy’ would so be my bitch.
  • i cannot live without my cellphone or my visor.
  • or cigarettes, cawfee (from barnies) and nachos

that prep school bitch

i had decided this weekend to start going through all of my stuff to sort and pack before we began the actual packing. like a lot of people, I’m a pack rat, but what i keep tends to be more paper than actual junk.
sorting out through some of stuff that was crammed into a four shelf bookcase, i came across pictures, memorabilia and other paraphernalia of days gone by. Pictures of high school friends, tickets to concerts long since seen and other stuff that I had kept for a reason that escapes me even now.
later on Saturday evening, a friend from back when I used to hang out on the mailing list fte (back in the mid-90s when my obsession for sarah mclachlan was going strong), IM’d me out of the blue. I had by chance logged into my aol account (hey, it’s free, fuck off 🙂 and he had IM’d me wondering if that was still me.
it was indeed me and we got to talking and i asked about how people were doing and what not. We had a loosely knit group of friends who had formed a sub-list off the main list as most of the people we talked with hung out in the bay area and it was easier to plan to see shows like lilith without all the chatter of the static of the main group clogging it up.
over time, i saw that while sarah mclachlan still rangs up there as one of my all fav singers, it was time to move on with myself. i unsubbed myself from fte in the spring of 99 before lilith had started and removed myself from sf-fumblers as the traffic was so slow and sometimes there would be weeks without email. I knew that if anyone really wanted to talk to me, they could always email/IM me if they choose and that was that.
talking to greg brought up a lot of painful insecurities that i had long forgotten in my daily life. you see, there were a few females on the mailing list that i alternated between hating and liking within a moments notice. the two particular females had seemingly grown up with everything being golden to them. One had gone to Vassar and the other had gone to private college in CT. They were the kind of girls who in their early 20s had already traveled fairly extensively outside of the US, knew which types of wines to order with their dinner, could afford or had knowledge of the better things in life. both had wanted to marry someone early and have babies and live the full life of a soccer mom.
yes, those kind of girls.
the kind of women my friend Jennifer at work and i mock when we head out to dulles town center for lunch, the kind bored and restless with their expensive degrees shuffling along with their 2.5 kids, the kate spade diaper bags and their stupid SUVs parked in the parking lot, wasting away the day while their husband is off having a fling with his secretary.
can you sense the bitterness here?
one of the girls was honestly sweet — but we never really became close as friends as other than a few musicians we had nothing in common. the other girl, however, has long since been a manipulator in the big scheme of things and it was widely discussed about how she manipulated people for her own things.
i can’t really fault those two for the things they have done/said/will do, but it was amazing to me the resentment that came out talking to greg when i asked how everyone was doing. it always seems that the privileged, or those i think as being privileged, are having a high time in life while i still feel like the poor student working her way through college.

Passion for Food

My food passions tend to be for things I can’t have, like faygo. I love faygo with a passion i would literally would sell my soul to get some shipped to me.
A friend and I are swapping girl scout cookies (me to her) for TimTams, which are Australian cookies. You can’t buy them in the states and goddamn they are yummylicious. 🙂 And I have them in my hot little hands! Thanks sweetie, you are the best.
Now only if i can figure out how to get someone to send me roundtable bread sticks before they get yucky!

white trash party

if i had a buck for every time i started mucking around with the design of TLC, I’d be a rich woman today.
I also realized that I could probably name several weeks worth of chronicles with afghan Whigs song titles and not repeat myself once.
They (Whigs) broke up earlier this year — Dulli is apparently going to be working full time on The Twilight Singers — pffft. Now we will bow our heads in silence for 60 seconds in memoriam of the Whigs’ breakup.
*crickets chirping*
moving right along, it’s been a quiet Sunday (you know, no fighting or anything) — and paul and i watched a few crappy movies on teevee while i dicked around looking stuff to do. we adopted another pug, this one is called Lili, and is Wednesday’s sister. They are paternal twins but from far away look identical. I call them the girls, and paul keeps saying when i move out, lili is going with me.
so thus begins our story.
a few weeks back, upon seeing my shrink, she and i started talking about sex, when i started opening up more about how i was feeling sexually — which is nothing. she suggested that i see her in a few weeks instead of a month and start talking about these issues at hand so that grow past them and carry one. i agreed.
last week, i took a spin in my new car up to see her, and things started pouring out. things i knew that i hadn’t discussed with anyone, let alone paul, in a very long time. i sniffed few times, i used urn charm containing my fathers ashes as a touchstone as i talked. fear. abandonment. lack of commitment. these were some of the issues concerning my and things that needed to be addressed. paul and i had tentively brought the wedding up to 5/01 instead of 9/01 and my shrink (correctly) was detecting that the closer to the wedding we got, the more put i closed up inside. which is true, I’m not going to lie about that — it’s like there should be a club for my ex boyfriends (such as in the show drew carey when all of kate’s boyfriends held a support group for her at the warsaw) to comment on my past behavior and how i have hurt/affected them in the past.
but i digress.
and i digressed a lot when i spoke to my shrink that day as well. i found myself jumping from one issue to another and yet in my mind it all made sense. here i had thought i was getting along marvelously well but inside I’ve been screaming for something (anything?) to get out.
i know a lot of it has to do with how paul and i interact with each other. a friend of mine had notated that in our office, our computers were facing away from each other — which he said seemed odd. i had obsessed about that one for sometime and brought that up to paul, when paul mentioned that it had been my idea to place our computers away from each other as i had wanted my space. which, of course, i had neglected to mention when i had spoken to said friend.
if i could spell out paul’s and i’s relationship, it would be under a lot of misunderstanding (on my part), misinterpretation and sometimes lack of an overall picture. paul wants to move forward and i want to stay here (where here is, is sometimes hard to distinguish). i used to think, when things got bad, that it was because of the boyfriend, and not something within me that had to change. but with paul, it’s different, how different i don’t know, it just is. i know that sometimes things seem to be more perfect when I’m with him and when I’m away from him i miss him like crazy. but in everyday situations, it always seems to be when i get antsy and it takes extreme events to make me realize that i love him.
which is bullshit, i should be thankful I’m with him everyday and not stirring up trouble to see his reaction.
but in all honesty, the only fault that i found with him is that sometimes his own lack of confidence in himself in the regards of us. it’s like, why torture me with the whole argument of “when you leave…” scenarios when you are just creating another wide open door for me to step through?
we wage this war on ourselves sometimes, and I’ve started working on being more calm within myself and not jumping the point when it came down to who was right or wrong in silly stupid arguments. but you know, as they say, pimpin’ ain’t easy.
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lisa
ps: I’ve sent emails on starting a reading club on yahoo, and the response was pretty fucking overwhelming (honestly, I’m surprised that many people still WANT to read – considering the advent of the interweb and such). If you want to join us, you can find us on yahoo as the lisa chronicles book club. I’m on yahoo as modgirllisa, so shoot me an email, sign up, just have fun.
pps: what i had also forgot to mention, was a funny (to me) incident at the shrinks office. she had said to me “do you write?” when in speaking with in means about other methods of therapy, and i just gave her this level stare and she responded with something like “you don’t like to write?” and i said something like “it’s not that, i have been writing a journal on the internet since 1995 or so”. i think, in all my times with her, I’ve never spoken about things that made me happy, including writing. so with her permission, she’s on the TLC mailing list and with my permission, she can browse my archives. i love therapy 🙂

hannibal

if there are but two movies i have been eagerly awaiting the release of this year, it’s been harry potter (yes yes, I’m a huge fan of harry potter and got a lot of nifty cool stuff for Xmas that was harry potter based) and Hannibal.
Harry Potter i could easily explain because of my obsession with the books, but even though I saw “silence of the lambs” and i liked it (not loved it), i became obsessed with seeing the movie. maybe because i have a slight obsession with serial killers, or maybe it looked gruesome, i have no idea other than i had to see this goddamn movie.
since Friday night is logans night round these parts, there was talk about going to go see it after dinner last night, but because I’m old and cranky, paul and i decided to go see it after hitting the chiropractor Saturday morning.
now, i have NOT read the series of books by Thomas Harris yet (red dragon, silence of the lambs or Hannibal); which is unlike me since i generally read the books movies are based on. So in going into the movie, i went with eyes wide open and with a clear mind.
now gore or horror movies don’t freak me out — but suspense thrillers do. i was totally expecting something as involved as SOTL, but boy was I wrong.
the good points: the cinematography was beautiful. the shots of Florence and NoVa were beautiful and the scenery was breathtaking. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter was satirical with his tag lines of “Okay dokey”. But other than that, the movie was not that great.
It wasn’t awful either — so don’t take it the wrong way. The problem is that the movie seemed to be billed as suspenseful and horrifying when it really wasn’t. The ending, which everyone kept saying was horrific and gruesome, wasn’t and it was very obvious they were using CGI for the scenes. Julianne Moore, whom I love, was fine as Clarice Starling, but it was obvious she was nothing more than an accessory in the movie and yet was billed as staring. The movie in no way explores the relationship between Hannibal and Clarice, which it should have, but more focuses on Hannibal and his returning to the “scene” of his crimes.
Over all, on a rating scale, I’d give it a 3 out of 5 stars. I would recommend seeing it for the pure factor of Hopkins and his satirical speeches and the humor he plays out onto himself, but the gore/suspense and the thrill just wasn’t there.
I have heard the book is slightly different from the movie, and that they are planning on remaking “ManHunter” (based on the first book, Red Dragon) with Hopkins and several of the comments on the book itself have been summed up as “a manuscript produced in paperback form”.
When I finish reading the series (which I’ve ordered from Amazon), I’ll let you know what my final verdict is.
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lisa

$17K dollar tax mistake

i love tax time.
i don’t know if it is because i know i generally always get money back or if it is the simple fact of number crunching (finding out interest rates or new tax laws), but i always love it when it’s time to do taxes.
every year i start a new folder for my files for that years taxes and start waiting for the W2s to come trickling in. For me, the year 2000 was easy as I only had one employer, UUNet. For Paul, since he swapped out three separate jobs (fucking Plexmedia claimed he work for two weeks in the first week of January) and because he hit above 80k a year (thanks to signing bonuses and moving expenses expenditures), there was the probability that we could owe taxes at the end of the year.
so we were expecting to pay out some money.
when all was said and done and i had gone through the whole itemized deduction list, paul ended up “owing” 14K to the IRS.
i cried. i blamed Plexmedia and andover.net for fucking up his deductions. i panicked thinking that we would be so poor, it would be unreal for us to get back on our feet again. i called paul into the office and showed him what i came up with using TurboTax. Paul started hyperventilating while I started crying.
14 fucking thousand dollars.
I dumped that return and started doing it over again in TurboTax. I kept watching my fingers as I typed (something i never do) to make sure there were no mistakes. As I typed, I watched the upper right hand corner in TurboTax, waiting for that surprise of owing 14K to the IRS.
Turns out Paul gets back a 3k refund.
ahem.
Well, later on I thought it was funny.
Paul, however, did not.
god bless the interweb and the ability to file and receive refunds within two weeks.
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lisa

apology

mandy wanted to me tell the population at large that he was in no way/shape or form hitting on ivette. he was in a bad mood that night due to problems with the show (he thought — though i thought they were great).
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lisa