By definition, I’m an extremist. I can’t eat one cupcake, I have to eat the whole batch. I can’t watch just one episode of $Television_Show, I must watch the entire series. I can’t do things in halves or partials, I must have the whole entire wondrous, beautiful thing. Thus, anytime I need to quit or par down on something, it’s hard for me to get into the mindset that majority of the population already does this on a daily basis and that it’s totally okay to have $X in small amounts or not at all.
Temptation and gluttony be thy middle name. And usually, I’m totally okay with that until it starts running my life — like Twitter.
Let me spin it this way: When TheEx and I broke up for a second time in August ’08, I swore that I was not going to read his blog anymore. This sounds silly, yes, but after nearly two years of being together and the joining of our digital and physical lives, I did not want to know what he was doing or how he was doing in grad school. I went from checking his blog several times a day, during the entirety of our relationship, to not checking his blog at all. NO MATTER HOW TEMPTING IT WAS TO GO THERE! I especially did not want to find out about his love life. I’m egotistical enough to state that once you go Lisa, you never go back and I know myself well enough to know that my little heart could not bear to find out that in “3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years” he’d be dating someone else. Also finding that information would lead me to want to track the newGF down and talk sense in her before he started smacking her around (literally).
But I’m horribly digressing.
The point being is that I had to rationalize my way through of not going to his blog: What was I going to learn? How was this information going to help me? Did I or do I need know what or how he is doing? How is this going to help me in the healing process? I deleted cached information so that there would be no auto-complete when I went to the browser bar, I cleared out the cache so that it would not show up in my history. I did not want any easy way for me to stumble upon his blog, even innocuously. Melodramatic? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
Like reading TheEx’s blog, like smoking (25 days smoke-free! woot!), like most anything that has a shred of addictiveness to it – Twitter has become one of those indispensable things in my life that one wouldn’t think would make such an impression or be declared a necessity but because it has, I have to nip it in the bud before it takes over my life — which it has started to do.
I discovered Twitter in the August of 2007 via somewhere, created my account and tweeted my first tweet about procrastinating on a now-abandoned thesis. I lost interest in the technology — I knew no one really other than a handful of people on Twitter and since at the time the interaction with those people was sporadic, I too was sporadic with my tweeting. My tweeting picked up in December/January of ’08 and from June onwards, I became a tweeting fiend. I’m not sure what changed — perhaps finding out I could tweet from my cellphone via SMS was probably a huge factor, tweeting non-sequitor stuff I was thinking about while grocery shopping or what have you seemed like the bestest thing since sliced bread. Or that my own readership was growing as well as those who were following me.
Discovering that not only people but robots, news services, and whole corporate entities were on or getting on Twitter also helped further along the obsession. But what really hooked me was the immediacy of Twitter — there is no thought process or need for editing (other than “Can this fit in under 140 characters or less?”). Getting out a thought, no matter how minute or ridiculous or profound fanned the flames. According to TweetStats, I averaged 20 tweets per day for January 2009. My overall average is 10 tweets per day, which via another statistical tool (of which I can not find now, obvs.), was higher than the average tweeter who does something like 5-7 tweets per day.
Some popular tweeters get along on much less. But it isn’t about the time of writing the tweets that becomes a problem, really, it’s the auxiliary work that becomes the issue. I use auxiliary as a term for things such as reading my public tweet line (which can take time especially when reading pages upon pages after period of non-reading. Like reading what was going on in the Twitterverse while I was in bed.), finding new tweeters, researching said tweeters (yeah, like you don’t Google everyone you digitally meet), reading those tweeters back log and making decisions on whether to follow them or not.
In short, tweeting is not just about the immediacy of getting out your special snowflake thought but it is also about researching and developing relationships with those in your network, which of course takes a lot of time. So much so that everything else I am working on (such as working in a library, homework, studying, personal projects) went to the way side and I hadn’t realized to the extent of how bad this addiction of mine was getting until it dawned on me that the first thing I do when I’m at work everyday is log into Twitter — before I do anything else. My own writing for my various blogs, journals and personal use also took a huge nose dive – libschooled. alone hasn’t been properly updated in ages.
Couple this with I was beginning to write professional emails in Twit-speak, the problem had to be curtailed and soon. Several Twitterpeeps were discussing what they were giving up for Lent and while I no longer practice Catholicism, I do like a challenge. Could I go 40 days without participating in the Twitterverse? No tweets, no adding friends, no reading the public tweet lines? If I could give up smoking, which was on the one crutch that I have been trying for years to give up, surely Twitter could be no worse. So, I resolved for the next 40 days (starting today, Ash Wednesday, of course) of no personal tweeting and no reading of public time lines. Twhirl has not been removed from my computers but it has been removed from my desktop. I’m even debating on removing the Twitter SMS number from my phone.
In my little world, Twitter will not exist, at least for 40 days. But of course there are exceptions, such as libschooled. has third party software that tweets when it is updated, so that is okay. And I also believe some other software stuff I have installed on various forms also tweets when that is updated, so that is also the exception. As long as I am not personally involved in the tweeting, then I have not broken this vow of Twitter-chasity.
What I’m going to be interested in is how much the Twitterverse will have changed in 40 days — how many people have stopped following me, how many people will begin to follow me. What new, cool and useful toys will make its appearance while I’m gone and how social networking within my own Twitter group will also change and also social networking as a whole in the Twitterverse. You can get in touch with via the usual routes and I’m always on gTalk.
See you in 40 days. More or less. 😉
Tag: TheExHusband
A recap, an update, and the like.
Right now there is a battle of noises happening between Wednesday and the radiators. Wednesday wins, hands down. For an 18lb Pug, she snores like no ones bidness. A lot has happened in the last month, way too much to document in one post, so I’ll give the run down (in no particular order):
- Moved from Grand Rapids to Royal Oak on 1/11/09 and am currently enraptured with my new surroundings.
- Started my new job as a reference librarian at Wayne on 1/5/09. Yes, notice the disparity in dates. For the first week, I commuted from E. Lansing to Detroit. (As I’m still in school, I am not technically a librarian, but a GSA. Technically, I’m not a GSA but a library intern. Manager refers to interns AND GSAs as “GSAs” to keep it simpler for her, and well, I’m doing reference librarian work. It’s all semantics.)
- Am attempting to transfer from $corporate_bookstore in G-Rap to one that is (obvs) local to me. Downside to this development is that one of the stores in my new area closed and currently they are placing the displaced employees in local stores first before transfers. I’m not getting a paycheck BUT my bennies will hold out until the beginning of March as a last case scenario. Broke but if anything happens, I’m covered.
- I got a 4.0 last semester, which is awesome (obvs). This semester the classes are more challenging and I need to get my groove on to keep up with the work. I’m taking a digital imaging archiving class, library management and cataloging. Currently, my plan of work is still to obtain the IS and Archival certification along with my MLIS but who knows how that will end up.
- I’ve got a new man in my life – Justin. It’s almost like out of one of those torrid RomComs: We met, fell in love and immediately shacked up together over a decade ago and were together for a year or so while we were both living in California. We split, I moved out of state to D.C. and haven’t spoken to him in nearly a decade. He got in touch with me shortly after TheEx and I broke up last March and we became friends again. He stood by me and worked with me while going through all the residual shit from the break-up. Ideas were tossed about seeing each other again, as friends, and the idea of getting involved with anyone romantically seemed highly stupid (of me) and made me queasy. But we talked, and talked some more, and continued to talk almost every night for over eight months. Decided somewhere along the way we should reconnect physically as friends and talked about the probability of romance — but there were no guarantees that anything physical was going to happen, rather, just the excitement of seeing each other was enough. But the romance DID happen, organically, and it’s better than before. MUCH better. It’s downright awesome. Everything I liked about him is still there and everything that irritated me changed for the better and he feels the same way about me. The biggest difference is the passion is much higher and hotter and we talk – about everything, even if it means that what we are saying is not going to bode well for the other person. While a decade younger than TheEx, he handles things much more maturely and Justin gets me — he’s always gotten me. The awesome part is that this has all the sparks of something “new” while we have memories of the old. He’s a wonderful man, I’m so glad he came back into my life. He means the world to me, I’d be completely lost without him.
- shesgotplans.net has garnered enough hits on the library school front to encourage me to continue to write more about my experiences, trials and tribulations of going to school and working in an academic library (and possibly holding down another part-time job). This upcoming weekend, I’m doing the final push to get everything unpacked and sorted before the semester gets into full swing so that I can concentrate more on doing updates here. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to write about here and I don’t because I didn’t make the time for it but I want to change that (for the better obvs). There is a lot going on in librarianship that is not being addressed or overlooked and that just makes the profession even farther behind in viability and interest to potential students. I feel I have a lot I can contribute to this discussion so of course I will be opening up my mouth and talking about it.
It’s late and I have a zillion things to do tomorrow before my cataloging class. Yay Dewey and LOC! Go team!
PFT Book Club: An introduction and a Review (#3): Vile Bodies
[Maintenance: Still tweaking the blog and still a bit rough, hopefully the tweaking will be done in a day or two.]
Many moons ago, when Justin and I were dating, we got on this kick to read the entirety of the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels, of which we completed a scant few. Somewhere in my packing is the original list that I printed out nearly a decade ago. And over the years and many hours of classtime later, I am no closer to finishing the list now then I was then. So when Justin and I got back into contact a few months ago, we struck up our original deal to do a bookclub, but this time, the rules were going to be different. We decided to call ourselves the “Pretentious Fuck Twit Book Club” or PFT Book Club for short.
Each month1, one of us would make a selection from our bookshelves, the other would have to buy/loan a copy out and we’d read and discuss the works. The point of this bookclub was several fold:
- Â To expand our reading tastes into things we may not normally read
- To plow through our bookshelves and read the books that we’ve been meaning to read for ages
- To find the most pretentious work available as our selections2
The first selection, for the months of June/July was Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. This I selected because of it’s relationship to Jane Austen (supposedly) and its relevancy to British literature (debauchery at its finest!). Justin finished the book, I only got 200 pages in and was subsequently bored to tears, so we called this one good.
Justin’s selection, which we finished in under a few weeks (which was to be August’s selection) was God Knows by Joseph Heller. This one I adored — funny, satirical, sexy, and clearly Heller was a huge influence on Christopher Moore for his book, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Reading God Knows has piqued my interest in reading more Heller, primarily Catch-22, which I’ve never read.
Now, I have a B.A. in English, a M.A. in Humanities, I work in a bookstore and I’m going to be starting my M.L.I.S. degree in a few weeks — so one could reasonably say that I’m well read. One could say that and one, for the most part, could be awfully wrong. Despite my training and my interests, for an English major, there is scads of classic and contemporary authors that I have not read: Hesse, Dostoevsky, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Wodehouse to name but a few, and for the next selection of PFT Book Club, Evelyn Waugh.
Waugh is one of those authors whom I keep coming to again and again as someone I should be reading and just never got around to actually doing so. I choose Vile Bodies because it is one of his lesser known but vaguely famous works, there is an awesome movie adaptation of the novel by Stephen Fry and the premise sounded right up my alley.
Vile Bodies, written in 1930, is Waugh’s tribute and satire of the London smart set near the end of the Roaring ’20s, of a generation that was glimpsed so briefly and yet was so influential on so many other works that were penned during the period and after. The story revolves around Adam Fenwick-Symes (a penniless writer) and Nina Blount (daughter of an eccentric aristocrat) as they become engaged and un-engaged depending on the status of Adam’s fortune, which literally changes by the minute.
Rousing out the cast are the friends and acquaintances of Adam and Nina, whose own lives change and upheaval are all taken with sighs of disinterest and complete boredom. But the twist in the book is the facade of their lives and the breaking down on their door by sheer reality — they have become spinning tops of a generation that could (and would not) last only to have the reality of the real world come crashing in upon them. As the characters begin to die off, literally almost one by one, and as others go on to other perhaps more grown-up lifestyles, Adam and Nina find themselves almost stranded, alone, in a world that they were once ruled as king and queen.
When their own world starts to impolde, so the the outside world when another world war calls Adam up to action. The story starts and ends in medias res, and it is for that reason alone that the novel feels incomplete. You get a sense of the period and the culture of the time, of the reality verses the inner workings of the world that beholdens Nina and Adam but I didn’t feel like the story was actually resolved.
However, in lieu of that, Waugh was a master as creating secondary (and tertiary) characters that were fleshed out and held their own in terms of personality and lifestyles, and could have stood alone outside of Nina and Adam, on their own terms. You want to believe that there is more to their lives than just parties, drinking, gossip and debauchery and even when there isn’t – you don’t seemingly care, just as they don’t seemingly care. You’re intrigued by the type of world they inhibit, you want what they want but you seemed aghast to realise that what they want seems so very shallow, but because of who they are and what they do (nothing), that seemingly justifies their very existance. But it’s more about money and standing, peer relations and marriages, it’s a way of life.
The public then was just as fascinated then with the hobnobbings of the upper crust as we are today of the goings and comings of royalty and celebs. Waugh was not the first to lampoon the social set he grew up and mingled with, nor will he be the last. But if you’re looking for something that became the defacto standard of that lampooning that would influence generations after him, he is your man.
Would also recommend the following if your interest in Waugh is piqued: Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin and Snobs by Julian Fellows.
1. We said “month,” but after Tom Jones, we’ve been plowing through our selection every week or so, so we’re are incredibly ahead of schedule.
2. Most of my stuff is still packed and at the rate we’ve been going, we’re pulling future selections from stuff that neither of us own and want to tackle.
Material World: Well, whores will have their trinkets
The poster to your left arrived on my doorstep today, a gift from Justin who saw it online and knew that I “had to have it.” What makes this poster even more special is that the online print run was severely limited due to the production of the poster was specifically for an event (now passed) and as an autograph tool. My copy is currently still pristinely rolled up in its tube and I’m barely containing myself from fondling it.
Later, when I called Justin to thank him for this unexpected gift, we got to talking about my upcoming move to east side of the state and his plans to move to Chicago sometime in the next few years; “When the market bottoms out,” he says. One thing we discussed was the framing and placement of the poster, primarily noting that he did not bother to get one for himself and secondly, that he’s not a print kind of guy. Which brought the discussion over nesting and when one does and doesn’t nest. Our answers seemed to be in unison that in our current locations, our walls are devoid of anything personal. I, personally, have a stack of prints sitting in storage and now two other prints (the Spaced poster and a James Bond poster I bought while I was in the U.K.) that are still in their tubes, waiting to be aired in all their glory. And come to think of it, I have a lot of prints that I’ve gathered in my travels that still have not seen the light of day.
Continue reading “Material World: Well, whores will have their trinkets”
Meijering at night.
Growing up, my mother installed a strange power relationship with food into our heads. I’ve never quite figured out where her ideas came from but essentially her idea was that less food in the house the better. Let me explain further: She would sometimes “forget” to go grocery shopping and or she would buy a few packages of hamburger, American cheese slices, saltines, and popcorn. For a family of four with eating habits for a family of six.
We’re large people and a bit on the tall side (I hover near 6′, Mumsy at 5’10” and brother at 7′. My now-ex step-father is about 6’1″.) While my mother is now borderline morbidly obese, my brother and I are just plain chubbeh. We could stand to lose a few pounds, but, we’re both fairly active (then and now) and are not sit at home stuffing our faces type people. We do, however, have large appetites.
It wasn’t that we were poor, Mumsy made a really good living as a home health care nurse (let’s just say, she neared six figures by the late ’90s in Michigan) and she certainly could afford to feed us, but, without fail, every week she would go grocery shopping and bring home the exact same items:
Continue reading “Meijering at night.”
not justin
to “not justin”:
i don’t know who you are — but you are giving me the willies. please stop attempting contact with me and please stop sending emails telling me i’ve dumped my dream guy. the past is over and done with and i’m very much in love with paul.
thank you and have a nice day.
fsck me
my plates came in.
i’m so surprised that the state of virginia allowed me to have the plate “FSCK ME”. There were bets going around due to the fact that a friend of ours who wanted “FSCK” was denied due to it’s implications (supposedly). I am now a “Linux Pronstar”. bow down before me for i give good head.
make it stop
i don’t know what it has been lately, but i’ve been feeling like two separate people are living inside of my body. the other day i got so angry on the way home from work that if someone was in the car with me (which they weren’t), i would have killed them. i don’t know why i was angry or why i would have killed them but the rage in my head is driving me insane. now i’m not talking about just straight off pms, this is much much worse. i have had to start taking walking breaks at work because when i get an email from a customer that sounds scratching (even if it really wasn’t), i have to walk away from the situation to see if i am feeling any better.
chances are, i am and i do. but that doesn’t stop making it less scary. i’m not quite sure what i’m going to do now — i’m thinking it’s the new birth control pills but it may not be. but they found me to be healthy.
supposedly.
back to square one.
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lisa
pr0n
i finally uploaded the pr0n and pictures pages (no, not the bill cosby kind). DO BE WARNED that these are in THUMBNAILS and there is quite a number of images. if your on a slow connection, this can take some time. I’m on cable — but hey, you slowpokes are just being warned. and please. do not email me bitching about morals, bullshit, and how its degradating to women. the pictures are either funny, disgusting, perverted or just down right “um — okay” type of deals. this is my website, i will put on here what i please. just don’t bother with me with how you feel about pron. i mean, jesus christ, if i can write a chronicle about rimming justin, I’m sure you people can handle pictures. and hey. no one is forcing you to go there. I’m just letting you know.
the above was just necessary because i really don’t want my email box filled with letters about how I’m going to hell, and pr0n is degrading to women and yadda yadda yadda. move along now. there is nothing to see here.
spam
i used to claim that back in the day that i /never/ got spam because i never posted to usenet. hahahaha. okay well anyways, i now do get spam (spam in my aol account doesn’t count btw) and the funny thing is that it’s generally sent to an address that theoretically doesn’t exist (it exists in so much as it’s now an alias pointing to a physical email box) and for the most part i just delete it.
I’ve also gotten complaints from people who have forwarded to me spam that was “generated” from my simunye.com address. which is funny — but hey. hehe.
but I’ve been getting spammed from two persons who have been directed at me. one is from cyberplebe.com. yes, i know, go ahead and laugh at that lame ass moronic page. the issue is that for the last year or so, they’ve been spamming me about their lame book — and got my address from the geek white pages (a little project started in 1995 that i had signed up on in 1996). and the guy claims:
“Sorry about the email. You will not be sent any future mailings, that email was mis-sent. please take your name off the Geek Pages list to stop any email in the future. For your information SPAM is not illegal in any state nor the US on any federal or state statutes. SPAM of course is discouraged. Your were sent this email because your name was on a submitted list.”
Obviously, the idiot didn’t read the last two emails I sent him in regards to federal law:
U.S. law, including Title 47
Sec.227(b)(1)(C) of the U.S. Code, as follows:
US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C):
“It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine”
A “telephone facsimile machine” is defined in Sec.227(a)(2)(B) as:
“equipment which has the capacity to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper.” Under this definition, an e-mail account, modem, computer and printer together constitute a fax machine.
The rights of action are as follows. Under Sec.227(b)(3)(B):
“A person or entity may, if otherwise permitted by the laws or rules of court of a State, bring in an appropriate court of that State —
(A) an action based on a violation of this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection to enjoin such violation,
(B) an action to recover for actual monetary loss from such a violation, or to receive $500 in damages for each such violation, whichever is greater, or
(C) both such actions. If the court finds that the defendant willfully or knowingly violated this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection, the court may, in its discretion, increase the amount of the award to an amount equal to not more than 3 times the amount available under subparagraph (B) of this paragraph.”
Now, I’ve been more than polite to this guy and I’ve quote said paragraphs to him above several times. I mean, what is it going to take for people to get the hint that YOU WILL NOT MAKE MILLIONS HAWKING YOUR WARES ON THE NET! jesus. especially some drippy little page done in FrontPage hawking a book called “cyber plebe”? ugh no. Anyways, he hasn’t emailed me back, I suspect he will not. His wife has previously written to my response and told me to fuck off (which he said she apologized for — which she had not). Lets grow up people, shall we?
The next group soulforce.org is an actual legit community. and i can admire what they are trying to do, but for the last TWO years they have been sending me updates on their community. problem is, I’m not interested, i don’t really care and i want to know how they got my email address. The first time i got mail from them, they promised to take me off. The second time i got mail from them, i got an apology from the founders and a gift certificate from amazon.com for my inconvenience. and then it stopped.
well it was raining spam again this evening folks as i got email from BOTH parties at the same time. I’ve also emailed the founders of soulforce again — directly and bitched. but in a nicer way. i never spent the amazon.com certificate (didn’t think it was a big deal) and was told it was an intern error when they were importing addresses (and we know how interns are — just ask Bill Clinton).
I believe in freedom of speech but spam has gone WAY AND ABOVE the call of duty here. it’s distressing because i can’t think of anyone who really reads it (let alone who actually RESPONDS to it), it causes problems with servers (amount of mail vs sever load), people get angry, blood pressure rises, i mean, what of any GOOD that comes out of it?
me personally, i take extra careful steps when I’m registering something on the internet. i always read the fine print (some legit companies will ask if you mind being put on a mailing list — always read the fine print on this) and make sure I’m not receiving extra mail. for instance, i was getting mailing info from companies like Barnes and Noble, Iomega, C|Net, et al. I read the fine print at the bottom and unsubscribe my ass from their mailing lists (if i had inadvertently gotten on). Some mail I do read, like Wired Daily News, my horoscope, and my weekly update from cdnow.com. But for the most part, I’ve realized that I do not have the time and energy to sort through that crap. some companies will put you on a mailing list when purchase something from their website (again, read the fine print, unsubscribe). i never realized just how much junk mail i was on until i was swapping accounts over from simunye.com to geek-haus.org/simunye.org mailing addresses. everyday I’ve been getting something new from something i had purchased/registered for and hell, i was even a founding community member of nerve.com website. (which i had forgotten about until they sent me an anniversary email — hehe).
i just don’t like the fact people can try and hawk their wares to me thinking it’s okay. I’m a resourceful goddess, if i need something, i know where to look for it. i don’t need to be told how.
i guess that is what irritates me the most is that most people will run something because it is under the guise of “free speech” — but you see, free speech (in my opinion) is only worthwhile AS LONG AS IT DOESN’T HURT SOMEONE ELSE. I’m sure someone is going to put the smackdown on me about this in particular, but there are limits to everything — including my patience.
paul and i had a conversation a few weeks ago about internet e-commerce. from his perspective, only 10% of businesses succeed on the Internet today. When someone starts a business, they have a 50% chance of either closing in two years or continuing to run. On the Internet, with so many choices being available — and so many people working from home these days, this has sky rocketed to 90/10 fail/pass percentage — and with the advent of IPOs? It can’t stay like this forever — the market won’t allow it. it’s going to crash and burn sometime.
I saw a wonderful article in modemag.com about how there is just TOO much information — and i totally agree with it. With the advent of portals, my.company.coms, free web hosting, specialized sites/search engines, newsletters, everyone is rushing to be on the information superhighway — and wanting to be a geek in the same time. ITS MADNESS I TELL YOU! i keep two my.company.com ‘s websites running at work with my profiles with my weather, horoscopes, movies and teevee guides and other fun things. i can remember a day when i spent EIGHT freaking hours on yahoo taking advantage of their services — and the suck-me-part is the “FREE” word. hell, even one of my usual rants is about the popularity of online journaling, now made more famous by websites such as diaryland.com with everyone and their brother jumping on the bandwagon.
god, one of the dreams I’ve had for a long time was a complete Internet cleanup. Go through and remove 404 errors, weblogs (lame ass link pages), and dead websites. kind of do a spring cleaning on the whole thing. and especially start requesting that a computer iq be generated when purchasing either a computer or an online account. yah, that’s the ticket.
in short, spam is evil. don’t do it.
addendum to the abortion story
got a lot of responses to the chronicle from 12.12.99 on my experience with being a friend to someone having an abortion. got in several stories of some personal experiences as well as guesses as to who i was speaking about (i will neither confirm nor deny those).
all in all, honestly i didn’t feel like i had written well enough to convey what was going on. the person who i was speaking about thought i had written well on the topic — but my main story running through my head while i was hanging out at the clinic didn’t come out as passionate as i had hoped. which sucks, but there is good days and bad days when writing.
Anywho, i do thank everyone for telling me how they have felt. paul and i were discussing the old “what if i told you i was pregnant” theory — and he said he would quietly freak out and not speak to me for a few days before we talked about our options (which is funny considering that paul was just telling me this morning how we are going to be buying a house within the next year — I’m like dude, just drag that big freckled hard arse of yours up here so that we can start our life!)
I think the thing that freaked me out the most was the fact that laying next to my friend the night before the actual procedure having her tell me how the babies were kicking. to me, that was just too close to home. as i find myself getting older, i keep thinking about little lisa’s (and little paulys i would assume) and i keep thinking about how great it would to be a mom just to clean up the fuckups in my own life. but i don’t have plans for quite some time to do this until I’m older and more able to handle it — as for the fact of being in a stable relationship (married or not).
I’m all for being protected and being safe. again, to me it is a show of utter lack of respect when not doing these precautions — especially in this day and age. you can’t just assume that because the vaginal area/penis area looks clean — it is. get tested regularly (once a year), buy condoms and live a long and healthy life!
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rhubarb
man, i need to stop writing these things late at night. I’m getting mahself all confused.
On Sunday, my friend Keth came by packed with her Final Fantasy game, an extra controller to pick me up to head to Andrew’s and Godmomas new place in San Jose. The meeting was a bittersweet one. We met to congratulate Andrew and Gunilla on their new apartment and to say goodbye to me.
I find it hard, in some strange and broken way, to come to the realisation that this week will be the final week I will be in the SF Bay Area. I sat talking with Caroline (Cathleen’s sister) the other night about my 2.5 years here, and in many ways, I can’t quite come to grips with knowing that what I’ve put myself through. I know, personally, that looking back through my discussions with her, that my own life seems so damn ridiculous. How you may ask I know, personally, that if someone related to me about what I’ve been through and what I’ve seen right back to me, I would have said “man, that chyk is on fucking drugs. she’s not trustworthy, independent nor is she even really COOL.” However, ones own assessment of themselves seems to be way harsher than reality. We had a fairly healthy debate about women in technology (ironically, it was four women and two men at the shin-dig) and my basic stance is this: while i believe in the fight for equality for all sexes, women need to stop bitching about what is “owed” and start proving that they are worthy of their own due. I cannot take feminism seriously as long as those who claim to fight for “women” end up reading Cosmo, Vogue and other mags when they are done at the end of the day. ’nuff said.
On that note, i actually got packed this evening — man — three boxes worth of crap and i haven’t hit books, CDs and clothing. I can’t believe how much toys, knickknacks and overall crap i’ve accumulated since i’ve been here.
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you know how it is. you start looking at one friends webpage, which means you go to another and yet another. fortunately, i knew two of the people and knew of the third.
two of the pages i quickly skimmed were of course journals. not to the extent of which i have written, but, journals nevertheless (how cool is it to say that i have entries going back to 1996?). Since I knew of the persons, at one time, fairly intimately, it seemed strange to read their entry and feel — nothing.
Not strange perhaps, but more of an “gosh, they got what they wanted — why can’t i?” kind of feeling. not one of jealousy per se, but one of “why is it always THEM that gets the goods and not me?” kind of deal.
Last night on the phone, Paul babbled for some time about music and how it affects us. The strange ironic part of the conversation was that earlier in the evening, Justin and I were on our way back from running errands and I was grooving to NiN’s new cd (which, ironies of ironies CDNow finally shipped two weeks AFTER and I had already went and purchased the cd since I had never received it). I loved watching the back windshield pound to the beat of the bass of “Even Deeper” and Justin looked at me and said “I just don’t get it.” I replied “Don’t get what?” and he said “Music. This does NOTHING for me”. Justin knew, since the beginning of our relationship nearly 2.5 years ago, that music was a huge HUGE mainstay in my life. I used it for many reasons. And there are songs — some of which I’ve stolen from people I’ve met and some i’ve conjured on my own, that makes sense to me. I need the music in my life in order to survive.
but that is not the point and neither is this really.
lately i’ve been feeling detached. i toyed today with ideas of things and nothing. and i’ve been spending like mad (3 lipsticks, 2 pairs of shoes, boots, 4 pairs of pants, 3 shirts, 4 pairs of tights, the checkbook is hurting!). Most people spend their cash on hardware — i look to outfit my wardrobe. I heart being a girl.
I am not copesetic on everything right now. in fact, i’m choosing NOT to think because it’s so much easier than thinking. It hasn’t dawned on me that i’m leaving in 2.5 days.
love
How do you have a girl fall in love with you?
You buy her boots.
friday
Friday, September 17 had to go down in history as being one of the worse days in mankind. Well, at least in my personal history line.
I woke up early Friday morning to take Justin to work when I noticed something odd about my car. It didn’t look “right.” I found a note attached to what used to be my drivers side mirror. It was from Cathleen. It seems that during the night she was pulling into our driveway, tried to miss one of the cats and ran into my car instead.
All of Pleasant St. heard me screaming “FUCK!” at 5am. What a way to start the day.
This is the story she’s sticking to, but, I’ve conceded that to an extent it can’t be true. See, not only is the drivers side mirror fucked up (and hanging by a few wires) but there is also a 6 foot long scratch going from tire well to tire well. ugh.
I played show and tell all day at work with dragging people out to look at this mess. I wouldn’t have been so pissed if it were not for the fact she a. left me a note and b. i had spent nearly a grand within the last month getting my car out of impound and getting it ready for the trip in a few weeks. I forgot to mention this didn’t i? My car got impounded for being parked in a “commuter” zone on 3rd street in san francisco. I had a nice little anxiety attack at the corner of 2nd and Stillman, Justin slapped me and I was back to normal again.
The other fucked up part is that while both my roommate and I go through the same insurance company, they are notoriously slow with getting their act together. Last October I had rolled into a car while waiting at the toll booth to get onto the Bay Bridge. No biggie really, my foot slipped off the break when i had leaned down to grab my cd-holder. But the woman whom I had hit claimed that she got a neck injury! Ugh, I wasn’t going any faster than less than 1 mile per hour. You heard that right. 1 mile per hour. And she’s claiming neck injury?
Lisha twitches.
Anyway, that started off this past glorious friday. Got into work and found that we had a power outage at 6am with no UPS back up. Though power was restored fairly shortly, NIS+ had taken a dump which meant that people couldn’t get logged into the network and route. And if they were logged in, they couldn’t route. I was logged in at 6am and had gotten dumped (I was in fact, writing this column). I went to log back in and got these lovely funky errors. I tried dialing into several other providers and couldn’t route for the life of me. I figured something had gotten fucked up along the way so I did some maintenance and found that my disk had errors. No biggie. Went to reinstall Windows (which overwrote LILO) and then it started crashing back to hell and forth. I couldn’t even just BOOT into windows without getting a ton of errors.
bah.
So Friday.
Car got sideswipped.
Windows partition died (I’m now exclusively in linux or mac)
network goes down.
I’m sure I can think of a few things or ten that also went wrong. I kept claiming I was going to go home and buy a fifth of vodka (750 MIL for you non-us folks) and drink it down and fix my machine. I did neither. I haven’t even ATTEMPTED to get into windows to fix it. I should, my firewall is so airtight that I can’t even freaking do DCCs on IRC. I can’t ftp (ftpd is broked — jesus) and mah stupid fucking quickcam sucks ass in linux. *growls* However, GNOME is quite pretty. I like it much better than KDE or windowmaker. I should say, Enlightenment with Gnome on top. Whatever. It’s pretty. If you want to see my KDE desktop?
obsess
The strange man lurking on all my desktops is Paul.
You wanna see something really sick? Go here.
I had conceded in my head that I was ready to talk about this. I’m not yet. Don’t ask. I’ll tell you in a few weeks.
moving right along
I’m so fucking bored at work, it’s not even funny.
A little over a month or so ago, someone had asked me to send out an email for them to the staff mailing list. I had done these requests before. This time, the letter was not (supposedly) appropriate. Both me and the letter-writer got “in trouble”. The thing is, that they couldn’t fire me and since I’m leaving anyways, they haven’t done jack. All I do everyday (and all day) is fuck around. I try to get involved with projects but they don’t give me responsibilities because they know I’m leaving. Many people wanted to see me fired — but if they fired me they would have had to fire the letter-writer which they were not going to do.
They also gave my counterpart Matt a raise so that now I AM the lowest paid person in the company (at least in our SF office) — and I am also one of the most senior people there.
Fucked eh?
To be honest, I care and I don’t care. I haven’t give a shit about my job in a few months seeing how fucked over Matt and I were getting. We were promised raises back in April and July only to never see them follow through (well, now at least for me). I spend all day doing documentation because they want what’s in my brain but yet I didn’t “qualify” for a raise.
BAH.
I’m so stressed out these days, it’s not even funny. As my leave date approaches it seems more and more shit is being thrown in my face. Carolyn, Cathleens sister moves in (making five people living in our 2 bdr house instead of the original 2). Justin is moping around because I’m leaving, we have nine cats that Cathleen promised to take to the SPCA months ago and never did (I’m so leaving that up to her). Our house looks white trashy enough to make me gag, I’m sick of my job. I hate the area (is there any real reason why it takes me 1.5 hours to drive a 20 minute drive?) and the list goes on and on. The only bright thing is that I’m leaving, but with the added expense (car stuff + misc crap that keeps popping up), I’m finding myself frightened enough to start just freaking out.
I have no idea.
You know, I told Shelly on the phone last night that I was afraid of things working out. I have NEVER been happy — at least I know not for the last four years or more. I can’t remember when I was just freaking content with my life. Many people have said that my cross country odyssey makes them slightly jealous. you know, me doing a thelma and louise bit (minus louise, minus brad pitt, minus going off a cliff) as I will be alone for four days in my car. alone. with a carton of ciggies and 260 cd’s and a trunk full of computer equipment.
And I can’t get through peoples heads how frightened I am of packing up and just MOVING my shit cross country. I do so well with impromptu things but since this is planned and this has been dragging on for months now, the closer i get to my leave date, the more I find myself falling apart.
I’ve never ever told the story of how I came to California or why I came. I think maybe less than a 1/2 dozen people know the truth, and even then it’s hard for me to swallow. The last four years of my life have been this period i like to call the dark period because so much has happened to me in such a short amount of time it’s ridiculous. I find that, when I go to tell the story, my mouth drys up and I block out events. I knew what I was doing to get me here and I manipulated my way across the west. I can’t forgive myself for doing that but I also am having a hard time forgiving the person that I was involved with.
To many of you, my life starts when you read this and for majority of the world I’ve always lived in Oakland and I’ve always worked at slip.net. To be honest, it’s always felt like i have. Like there is no time and space before this. But there is. I’m NOT a california girl and I’m not happy here.
Justin has said he is afraid that I’m running away (again) to something that doesn’t exist. That my move to Virginia will just make things worse. I know he’s being selfish. If he could, he’d live with me forever, work at PBI and watch the Hitler, I mean History, channel is his off times. But I’m such a shell of a person I used to be — that it disgusts me. I can’t deal with it much longer.
I’ve got everything lined up in a row. Prospective boyfriend obsessing over me. New job at a kick ass company (making phat bank), new place. My own place. New things to do. Education. Everything. It’s like, God finally knocked some sense into his head and said “Yanno, Lisa has been having a rough life as of late, I think I will finally put things in perspective for her and give her what she wants” and the thing is, I’m so fucking intent on destroying it because I can’t handle being happy. But see, I can’t believe in a god or a god when I can barely have faith in myself.
I know, this much is true. There has never been a righter time in my life to move on then now. I know, that despite my grumblings, this is the best thing for me. I know that the trip will be fabulous and that I will fall in love on the way and that everything will work out for the best.
Because to be honest, I really have nothing left to lose.
Except myself.
Or maybe I’ll find myself out there in the wilds of Texas and join my mom in a convent.
I’m just kidding.
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moi
she’s quaking
be afraid.
be very very afraid.
For the last couple of months, Matt and the guys from work have been trying incessantly to get me to play Quake or any of the other RPGs lan-type games. I’ve been resisting with “I don’t play games” but when Matt got me the 16MB AGP vid card, handed it to me, I knew I was lost.
This past Friday, we installed Quake2. All day long I started futzing with it because the whole concept of killing people without going to jail is kind of appealing. I futzed and futzed and futzed and finally got it working. When it did work and I entered the arena, Matt killed me in under 3 seconds. Not fun. I logged off and tried playing solo — but the game kept stalling and I was getting frustrated. I reinstalled a different version of Quake 2 (namely, the upgrade) and that worked. But I wanted to kill people dammit. I then downloaded Quake3, and installed it. But since Quake3 is tourney style, again I was dead pretty quickly.
I retold this whole story to Justin over the weekend (whom he thought it was amusing) and last night he came home with a legitimate copy of Quake which we both immediately installed on our boxes. For over an hour last night Justin and I hunted each other and I got mah ass handed to me 9 to -6. However, it is fun. I’m downloading the patch for quake 2 now :D.
violet eyes
Justin’s new schedule has me getting up between 4:30a-4:45a to take him to BART so that he can get to work. for the first time in a few weeks, instead of staying up, i immediately crawled back into bed when i got home. i didn’t wake up till nearly 11am. Woopsie. Since I’m leaving in three weeks anyway, they have been pretty lenient with me at work. Woopie. So I spent most of yesterday doing household items and talking online while my clothes got tided.
someone in the channel mentioned about buying colored contacts and i said how when i was younger i had gotten both green and violet flavor eyes. i had to dig up a few pictures to prove my point:
Lisa at 17
Lisa again at 17
Now, don’t yell or email me about how fucked up the hair is — I had no idea what the hell was going through my head at the time. However, I was at Shelly’s apartment in Wyoming, MI sitting in “my” chair (we all have that right? we go to a friends house and sit in the same chair. i also was obsessed with using this glass for drinkage that was actually a fancy measuring cup. Shelly didn’t understand my obsession with this thing.).
So, I post the pictures to the channel and to be honest, I got really disgusted with how people reacted to them. Why? because the first thing everyone noticed was the weight difference. In those pictures, I was 50lbs thinner. Big difference. Okay, fine, I can deal with that. The main thing was that people kept going “oh you were so cute/hot/beautiful” almost as if “what the fuck happened to you?!?”. Well, I’m 10 years older than I am in those pictures. I don’t think they are the best representation of me at that age but it really irked me that people were so fucking shallow.
The biggest pet peeve i’ve always had for a long time was people not accepting me for me but accepting me for what i looked like. It was like, jesus christ people, grow up. I’m still the same person 50lbs or not, purple eyes or not.
I was ranting and raving to Paul about this because it was bugging the fuck out of me. he was like “lisa, you were cute and innocent then, but to be honest, you ARE HOT now weight gain or not.”
The thing is, I’ve always known i would grow into my looks. I have such strong features that I knew that I would get better with age. Like a lot of people didn’t believe I was 17 in those pics and a lot of people don’t believe I am 27 now. Then it was always that I looked older and now it’s that i look younger. I can thank my mother (for once) for having her beautiful genetics.
I have always ALWAYS known that I was or never would be conventionally beautiful and that doesn’t bother me. I’ve not let it bother me for years because it helps weed out the imbeciles and numbskulls who hit on me. Same reason why I got pierced in the various fashions that I have — because i know and have always known that I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. Which is just fine by me. I don’t want the whole world to love me — just one person. That’s fine enough for me.
But what REALLY irks me is that people who are so, just, ugh, normal, pass judgement on me as they sit on their 300lb fat asses eating king dongs and HO-HOs trying to tell me I look like shit. I always look good. I can afford to be egotistical because I am god and what I say goes. I’ve never had a problem getting a man or winning over friends. The problem I have is that the men that generally like me are fucking nimrods and bore the living fuck out of me.
But enough about me. let’s get on to something interesting!
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moi