Category: The Lisa Chronicles

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.
x0x0x0x0x
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.
x0x0x0x
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.
x0x0x0x
lisa

sadness you crave

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