Category: The Lisa Chronicles

in which: lisa gets confused

I’ve been sitting here moving like a sloth today. In fact, if i moved any slower, I’d probably be dead. I’m paying homage to the slugs i saw last night when I was outside at midnight varnishing a chest to hold my linens in. i got these flash brilliant points of light when i was varnishing that i could turn this hobby of one into a project in case i left my job. which is on my mind, a lot, losing my job. it ranks up there with leaving, moving, and being sexy. some would say my train
of thought seems to range down the pretty shallow range. I’d say it’s pretty human.
i just watch a pretty dreadful movie, Kate and Leopold. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t recommend it and the only cute thing was Natasha Lyonne playing Meg Ryan’s admin assist and she gushing over bodice rippers. I love Natasha in just about everything she’s done, except But I’m a Cheerleader!, because that was simply crap. Art house films for the most part seem to be filled with subversive need to push the boundaries because they can not because it actually means something. Modern art does not speak to me, however I like Kandinsky. Go figure that one out.
I have this thing about smells, always have. This weekend I went walking around the mall and was opening up bottles of cologne to sniff to see if i could find a new scene for myself. Foolish counter girls at the stores. Why is it that they assume that if you look like a bum you can’t buy anything? I could buy/sell their damn counter several times over. I did it a few weeks back before my birthday party when i bought out Clinique counter and the woman was amazed (and hooked me upon some free crap as well, which is a good thing considering how much i spent).
i wondered around and sniffed.
CK



—-

it was your smell

that’s all i could remember

laying

down on the sofa, on the

bed

closing my eyes and thinking

of

you

—–

	


	





	

		
		
the winner is…
	


	
	
	

		
not me.

too much inspiration and not enough creativity. i miss them all and apparently that’s a bad thing. apparently it’s wrong. it’s always wrong.

i’m waiting for the dam to burst and i don’t have any towels to stop the leaks. and i’m glad I don’t, because once the dam bursts open then perhaps we can all save ourselves instead of lying to each other on a daily basis. I’m back to looking at people through green-colored glasses, wishing life was really like that over on that side and knowing that they are mere shallow humans walking around in their lean cuisine and abtastic bodies.

i’ve not had a cigarette in 60+ days and my mouth feels like shit. Nothing can make the taste go away, so what do I do? I eat and I consume mass quanties of water and it stilld oesn’t go away.

———

i’ve written before about my dream of the mystery lover who whom i’d never see but yet he was always with me. the mystery lover whom i knew was a brunette but yet i never saw his face. I have all these qualifications in my head of what they are like, this person. These qualifications that I’ve been fine tuning since i was a wee tot, and today i said to myself “Fuck. it.”

i miss him/them. it never was. i miss their smell.

———

it was your smell

that’s all i could remember

laying

down on the sofa, on the

bed

closing my eyes and thinking

of

you

	


	





	

		
		
the freshmen
	


	
	
	

		
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about life and what not.  More so than usual, as it were. Basically thinking where I’m going to go once I leave Paul and what direction my life will be heading at that time. i have been sitting on the fence watching both sides and I’m not quite sure which way to lean, if any.

several themes have been swimming in my head, such as friendship and how to be good.  both have been ping ponging against my head like there is no tomorrow. i need to deconstruct.

m. and i got into a disagreement if you will, this week and our relationship is now considerably strained. it seems that no matter what i say, it comes out all wrong to him. at least that is what i think.

coupled with my own lovely sense of paranoia, i am probably making it into a much major deal than i thought or think it is.   the bottom line is, we are not speaking to each other right now and it hurts.  i have thought back and recognized times when there were weeks/months when we didn’t speak to each other.  the difference being that you sometimes don’t know what you have until it’s almost gone and then it wasn’t almost gone and now i feel like it is, I realized that he was a better friend than I gave credit for. He’s not an angel by any chance and I’ll mention that in a second but still, he’s one of my closest friends and I’d hate to lose him over something that could be worked out. i think.

the second incident this week was when b. said something she shouldn’t have in public. she, in short, inferred i was sleeping or wanting to sleep or want to start an affair with a mutual friend. now, she will tell you that she is not inferring anything, other than she thinks it’s “odd” that i want to spend time with said friend. What she failed to do was put together how it was circumstantial evidence. such as, said friend and i hung out together a few weeks back because b. and her bf went to dinner without us and we both had made plans with them. Mutual friend and i got together a few days later as he had left some stuff at our house. I also invited mutual friend to dinner a few times as well as to go back up to Baltimore with me to  see more of the Inner Harbor. I’m such a little heathen!

I plainly, really, do not like people who sit there and run their mouths and think it’s okay, especially when it’s inferring shit that isn’t happening just because they think it’s “odd”. It down right angers me. Paul is a very temperamental guy and gets blown out of shape if the wind blows wrong, so saying crap like this in front of him isn’t doing anyone any good.

In short, please don’t spread my bidness around if you don’t know all the facts. I tried to communicate to her how I didn’t appreciate what she was saying. She said she didn’t start it, i did by mentioning i asked him to lunch. See, personally, I don’t make the correlation between how asking someone to lunch = hot sex. But apparently it does somewhere somehow. At any rate, she then started jumping down my throat about something that didn’t have anything to do with me. When I mentioned to her that this has nothing to do with me, she got huffed and said how i should care if i care about j (her boyfriend). This woman is all over the damn place. The amazing thing is that everyone but her and her bf see how her words were wrong. Whatever.  I told her bottom line is we will agree to disagree and she invited me to tell her what she did was wrong — but at this point I don’t think it matters.

Since bad things come in threes, the final thing was at work. Apparently my next up level manager is either having issues with me or something else is going on, i have zero clue. The reason I am saying this is because she called me into her office with my immediate supervisor (which I found out later that she was not supposed to) and started comparing me to co-workers who no longer work there, which was an insult to me. I got miffed because not only did she remove my team lead status, but my new backup is not up to par technically. She said that she did it for my backup to have a bar to reach to, i blanched. I don’t buy this BS any longer. She also said my lateness is a problem — which I mentioned that there were several co-workers who repeatedly were late every day as well as those who took 2hr lunches as well as those who leave work 1/2 hour+ early. I said hey, if I’m in the wrong, fine. But i want to make sure that you are being fair across the board here. She said she’ll look into it. Right. I’m sure she will. I am not quite sure what I’m going to do about that little instance but I’ve gone and gotten counseling from non-involved persons. I guess my quandary is, why kill myself to protect myself for a job that i feel burned out by?

friends classification:

COWARDLY LION-TYPE: M. falls into this type. You know these kinds, very easy to spot. They are there through thick and thin as long as it doesn’t concern them.  But when the chips really fall or you try and have some sort of substantial conversation with them, it falls fucking apart. They curl up and hide. I’ve noticed that when I push M., M. doesn’t push back. I know his issues but he seems to timid to really take charge and be there, really, as a friend.  example: He offered his place to stay in case shit got bad with Paul and then reneged it. Said his sister thought  it was a bad idea. Too coincidental for me, thanks.  I could be reading too much into this, but hey, that’s my charm.

ME-ME’S: B. and a few other of my friends fall into this type. It is never about you, it’s about them. If you fall and break your ankle, they broke same ankle but worse. It’s competition with them. And it’s about attention gathering, and people buy into this lock stock and two broken barrels. The times I’ve watched people get suckered in to this and I just want to shake them for being silly.

Fakies: Maybe I should just walk the fence.

	


	





	

		
		
with a girl like you
	


	
	
	

		
one of my coworkers, whom i’ve nicknamed HIM, recently has started speaking to me again. The reason why this is remarkable because our relationship is damn fucking weird. Shortly after he broke up with his girlfriend of several years, he started hanging out in my cube. Then we started hanging out for lunch, going to have sushi. we would email each other every day and went back and forth for awhile, even while he was dating gf #2. Then gf #2 and he broke up and he kept bugging me to go clubbing with him (like that would go over well with paul! hah!) and then gf #3 came into the picture. My birthday party was a few weeks ago, and I invited him to show. He said he was and RSVP’d that he and the gf were going to show up. They never did.

It bothered me that he didn’t show up. I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much but I think because I thought we’re being friends or starting to be friends. I feel so awkward socially sometimes and I can only attribute that to the fact that I don’t go out with Paul at all, and our social circle is short.

	


	





	

		
		
when we were kids
	


	
	
	

		
he left me when we were kids.

i was 19 and he was 21 at the time when the affair had started. mere children. shortly after i had turned 20, the man who i had thought was the one i was going to marry me, was planning on marrying someone else.

for a decade he has haunted me.

i moved as far away as possible and yet i still see him nearly everywhere i go. one day i was having lunch with a friend and I had thought I had seen him and his wife walking by us, leaving the restaurant. i was three thousand miles from home and i think this is him.

it wasn’t, obviously, he.

it wasn’t me he had wanted, it was her. it wasn’t him at the restaurant, it was someone else. but seeing or thinking i saw him was enough, if even for that briefest of seconds.

when he and i lived in the same city, i used to see him occasionally around town. driving down the street, going into clubs, seeing him in stores. he was always alone and she was never around.

when he had broken up with me, i was devastated. with him, i was everything i thought i could be. i was loved and loving. old and young. pure and a whore. he made possible everything in my heart that had know even known existed or was too scared to show. my own sensual and sexual identities were pushed forward and ripped apart when he was around.

i thought he was the one. i thought we were going to get married.

this to me was love.

it was christmas 1992. I was wearing some paisley/floral type dress i had purchased for the informal christmas party that was being held at his brothers place. i remember watching his brother and his wife and thinking ‘this is what i want. i want to marry him and bear him children and we can have this fantastic life together’. i truly believed that. i envied his brother and adored his sister- in-law. his nephews were not that much younger than we were at the time. I remember us leaving and holding the jewelry box they had given me for christmas that year. his mother had given me a ring that belonged to her mother several months prior to all of this. i think they thought that i was the one, and i wasn’t. i do not know what happened to the jewelry box. the ring i kept and have lost it along the years.

	


	





	

		
		
harder, better, faster, stronger
	


	
	
	

		
on-line right now talking to some stranger in seattle, my brother in michigan and my high-school sweetheart who happens to now reside in Portland, OR. As I had stated in my livejournal, the past is falling out of the woodwork. First Josh and now Aaron.

I’ve been pacing myself outside myself recently to see what I was really like, you know, to everyone else. I used to think that I was unphotogenic but due to the recent rash of pictures that have surfaced, that little line will have to go back. So I look at these pictures and what I see and what I think I am and how

people perceive me are obviously three different things. I didn’t like the young woman in the images I saw. I didn’t like the poses or the facial expressions. I thought i was seeing a fat ugly whore. really. I’m not saying that to be negative but I am saying that to be true – at least to me. Now friends, friends say different things. They always have, but I don’t feel like I am a hot piece of ass. Now Alisha, she’s a hot piece of ass. She just oozes sensual and sex. Me on the other hand do not and I wish I did. And then the there is the opinion of me by me when I see myself in mirrors and what not. Depending on the view, I do think of myself as a hot piece of ass.

	


	





	

		
		
Infatuated with a lunatic and cornered by the muse
	


	
	
	

		

I’ll warn you, if cornered, I’ll scratch my way out of the pen

Wired, an animal

The claustrophobia begins

You think I’m scared of girls

Well maybe

But I’m not afraid of you

You want to scare me then you’ll cling to me no matter what I do

Tell you a secret

They shared a needle once or twice

I loved her, she loved me

We slept together a couple of times

You think I’m proud of this

Well maybe

But the shame you never lose

Infatuated with a lunatic and cornered by the muse

And it goes down every night

This must be what jail is really like

And I will scratch my way out of this pen, again

Lonely?

Maybe

Or maybe not

It all depends

Your ideal, your image

Your definition of a friend

If what you’re shoveling is company

Then I’d rather be alone

Resentment always goes much further than it was supposed to go

what jail is like by afghan whigs


I don’t know what has been my deal lately with Afghan Whigs, especially Greg Dulli. This is the second night in a row that I’ve been sitting here listening to various mp3s that I have spanning nearly their whole career. I felt like, to be honest, my whole life of emotion listening to their music. I felt pain, sorrow, pity, fear, love.

What was worse (or cute if you are into that sort of thing) is that on the way into work today, I was bopping along to them in the car cranked up and car dancing. I’m a wonderful car dancer BY FAR. Which brings me to this past saturday night: so there is this live band playing at my party, which is total coincidence. I won’t mention the details but in short those in my party were COMPLAINING about the loud music. Hell even paul acts like an old man when it comes to listening to music. The car stereo can’t be above x or else he pitches a fit. Home stereo is the same thing. Right now I’ve got head phones on so I can enjoy the sultry tones of that which is Greg Dulli.

It’s not really a choice of music but when I listen to tunes I want to feel like I’m either at a show, being sung to, being fucked while at the show or feel like i’m being possessed. I want to feel ALIVE when i listen to music, not this pamby ass shit that they pass for music these days. pfft on that.

let me in, i’m cold. all dressed up and no where to go.

Today was the grandiose day that I had to go to Anger Management training, and to be truthful, i thought (and expected) it to be a joke. The joke it turns out, was on me.

I hate these interpersonal training classes they give at work. For the most part, they are always taught by undereducated fuckwits who keep it boring and snoozefest. So yes, I was pleasantly suprised when we actually had someone teach the class who held a doctrate and worked in the field of mental health and has been teaching this for years! Woah. Impressive. Makes me wonder what WCOM does sometimes with its few brain cells.

	


	





	

		
		
when we two parted
	


	
	
	

		
it starts out with an obsession.

it always does.

it starts out with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. I was in desperate and determined need to get their new cd. Which turns out is not really new, it’s two years old but you know the music biz, what is new last year is not necessarily fresh at the time. So i hunt and hunt for the damn thing and can’t find it. I don’t want to buy it online because i want instant gratification of having it in my hot little hands asap.

i end up finding it at barnes and noble of all places, hidden at the back of the ‘b’ bin. i grab it greedily, somehow expecting that someone else wants it (well considering everywhere else it was gone …). I walked around and then took it up to the semi-cute cashier who kept raving about the greatness of said cd. I nodded in agreement and toyed with buying some remix cd of Verve singles and passed on it. I got into the car and put the cd in and shivered in delight. turns out i knew BRMC from several other songs other than the one i had originally bought them for.

I keep playing the cd over and over. I take it into work where I speak to cute-guy-at-work (who, btw, dissed me on my birthday for a concert, but i digress) and get him to listen to the said cd. He then starts raving about it and then I kick myself in the proverbial ass because BRMC has been to DC TWICE.

	


	





	

		
		
thirty
	


	
	
	

		
I’ve been watching the clock all day. Waiting for midnight, which will be in about 20 minutes, because I will be saying goodbye to my 20s forever. I have become, pathetically morbid about this particular birthday. Something, about the age, is grating on me and I cannot tell or say for sure what it is. I keep hearing from women in their 30s+ that the 30s were the perfect time of their life. Still young and youthful but not stupid and cocksure. The ages of 30-35 seemed to be the golden age for a woman because she knows what she wants and how to get it.

Personally I have not figured out why my obsession with my age is so frantic, but it is. I’ve been swapping between moping and careening about this day. Some say I should just grow the fuck up and deal with it and personally, like I always say, I wish I could agree with them and do said growing the fuck up but you’ll find (as I find) that what we are being told to do is not as easy as it seems. I’m still waiting for the answers and the tellings that people keep saying and yet these same said people will open and fornicate with their mouths but yet the fornication is dry and cheap.

Sometimes I love my euphemisms. I thought I had alliterated (no such word) but thanks to m-w.com, I found out I was wrong.

10 minutes.

midnight means nothing. If you want to get pedantic about it, i was actually born in the afternoon — 4 something on June 12, 1972. It was rainy, muggy and humid. My father left my mother on the corner by the hospital when she was in labor and she didn’t see him until three days later. I often wonder if my mother feels guilt or love or something about my father, even though they had been divorced for over 25 years at his death. I cannot be the only adult in history who feels like a bus ran them over since their father has died. The other thing that kills me is that my birthday always falls around Fathers Day and for the last three years I have been furious at all the e-mail I have received via direct marketing for said holiday. I want to call up Amazon.com, Cdnow.com, bestbuy.com and the rest of the lot and strangle them for being so insensitive. I wish you could opt-out of certain marketing advertising because of whatever.

In five minutes I will die, I want you to know that.

When you hit 30, you think you’ll have x amount of stuff done with your life. You’ll have finished college. Gotten a job with a firm you wanted to work for. Get married and spawn brats. Have the dogs and the whole nine yards. At 25 I bemoaned the loss of my youth and laughingly, I can recall feeling the same way then as I do know. Sitting in a BART station with Christian and yet feeling like my life had gone to complete and utter shit. That no one, no one would ever fucking love me the way I want(ed) to be loved. I remember thinking that Christian did not love me and I was right, while the location and names have changed, it’s still the same damn fucking story.

In three minutes I will implode.

Five years is a long time. A very long time. I have moved cross- country twice, been in a few relationships. I basically lived.

BOOM. I blew up.

Five years ago, if you would have asked me where I was going to be when I was 30, i certainly would not have said in the ‘burbs of Washington DC, on a flaming red/pink duvet anxiously watching three clocks for the stroke of midnight.

I’ve been accused of being whiny about this birthday — and I think I have every right to be whiny. The thing is, is that I’m tired of people who harangue me about turning 30 (or basically feel that it’s their due to tell me that my ovaries are getting crusty) and are not supplying any real answers.

the bottom line is this:

I do not feel that I particularly smart or gifted or special. I am not fishing for compliments, I am just being honest with myself. But there is something in me, in my core that doesn’t seem to agree with normal day to day life. At work I want to rip my hair out because I am so bored and the job seems to be tedious. The thought of what I do on a daily basis makes me cringe when I realise how menial it sounds. Everything from washing clothes to taking a shower seems to be beneath me. I cannot comprehend day to day life for another fourty years, I will kill myself if it is like this. I feel bored, in a rut and itching to get into mischief. The sheer fact that to share this with another person and to make this the basis of a relationship? Seems laughable and pitiful, at best. Something is wrong and I’m aware but at the same token a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying ‘waht if you are right and they were all wrong’.

I keep telling people that I am waiting for something. I do not know what I am waiting for but I am waiting for something and it will be soon. When that happens, you will all see what I finally mean.

Happy 30th Birthday to me.

Wednesday June 12 2002 — 00:30 -04:00

x0x0x

ps: it was suggested that on saturday for my party the theme be a ‘death party’. i thought that was a terrific idea until I was later told that it was too morbid or perverse. They have no sense of humour

	


	





	

		
		
i  care because?
	


	
	
	

		
Today I got called into the managers office at work, and I knew why I was being called and it was not really that big of surprise to me. I was called in because of my “attitude” and apparently to sum it up telling sales reps to go fuck themselves is a bad idea. Very bad apparently but you know I’m very well aware of what i said and when is said it.

Work-wise, I’m at the end of my rope. I’m angry to start with because I got bumped from being a team lead. Now this doesn’t sound so much like a big deal but, it was because it was important to me. I’ve got this sinking feeling that raises are going to be long in coming because of the new power structure. Off track, anyways, so that’s part of it. Secondly, I’m noticing some coworkers that I am in contact with who apparently feel it’s necessary to speak down and to dummy down everything. It’s not that I don’t like being told what to do, I just resent it, when it feels like i’m being talked down to.

It has also came very apparent that I do not speak english. Really. I speak Lisa- ease. Things that should be very clear because of specific circumstances I have were basically laid out in the open, it has been apparent that it is not. I also dislike being second guessed and knowing I’m right in the first place.

The problem is, literally, if I am having acute paranoia about these things or if they really are true. My thinking as of late has been not that everyone is out to get me, or that it was really negative but more so that x follows y follows z, even though majority of the time it’s all just me being nuts or complete coincidence. But i string the events together anyways to see what happens.

I’ve also been having weird little quirks that are kind of getting to me, like I have to hold the arm rail when I walk down the stairs or I will fall. It’s not because I’m a klutz, it is because I truly feel i’m going to fall and break my freaking neck. And when I was smoking, jesus was that a bitch since i had to walk down a few flights of stairs.