Time Flies Like A Banana

I'm having one of those days where I'm feeling like I've been missing out on crap for months. I just thought of going directly to Hilly's blog instead of relying on my feeder, and realized I had missed almost a month of posts waiting for stupid Google Reader to pick them up. I'm not sure what the problem is there, and quite frankly, I don't feel any need to figure out what the problem is, because I just fixed it.

And I realized yesterday that I hadn't logged into OK Cupid in six months. I'm not a hundred percent sure what my username is there, or my password, but luckily they sent me a link to click on. There were a few emails in my box that I just never responded to. Yikes. I think that's what I think of when someone blows me off in the wonderful world of online dating, shit like that happens. One gets busy.

I'm flying to Los Angeles in a week, and I'm trying to get some shit organized before then. I think part of the problem with me this month is that I've been totally fucking broke and I've been struggling just to have enough money to buy groceries. I mean, yeah, I have credit cards, but I'm sick of climbing into that hole and digging it deeper every time I do. So I haven't been doing things I should do, like taking Teddy to the vet. And being broke is stressful. Thankfully I don't have children, can't imagine being like this and having kid expenses too. I am thinking that things will be okay soon because I got a small raise, and I have extra hours paycheck coming through, and also some overtime scheduled in August. It seems like with the gas prices high, everything is ridiculously expensive, even when you shop at places like Trader Joe's.

And the whole traveling to see family is stressful, and I got a passive-aggressive email from mom today, and I can almost feel some part of me shriveling to adolescence, to try to play the same game that I always played. I think that I developed coping strategies then, and I want to do a better job of coping now than I did then, because I wasn't very happy when I was a teenager. Sometimes though, coming home has a way of pushing you back to whom you once were.

Book Meme

I got this meme from over at Dagny's blog. I was trying to count how many on the list I've actually read, and it was over half, but math is not my strong suit like reading is.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (I'm doing asterisks like Dagny did.)
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling **
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell **
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott **
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller **
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier **
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger **
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll **
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis **
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez **
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving **
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert **
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon **
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov **
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt **
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - I have gotten almost halfway through this one a few times.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath **
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker **
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams **
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole **
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl **
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Plat Du Jour

I never post pictures of food that I make, well, mostly because my idea of cooking is heating up take-out, but I was totally in the mood for steak last night. I got sirloin from Trader Joe's. I was actually planning on getting filet mignon but the sirloin looked better. I marinaded it with some shallots, garlic, and throwing in a few different sauces. I didn't have any worschestire which is really perfect for this, but I did use some soy sauce, A1 steak sauce, a little bit of hot sauce, and some balsamic vinegar. The side dish is Rice-A-Roni, beef flavor, which I had been craving for a while and finally got some at Safeway. The steak ended up being a bit more spicy than the rice, so it wasn't a great combo, but it did the job. I should have gone for a vegetable, instead of that bit on the side which is cooked shallots.

I don't want to post a commercial video here, but I just saw this commercial for Heineken that shows a bunch of people passing along bottles of the beer, and it actually reminded me more of a commercial for veneral disease, going from one person to another.

I'm in a punchy mood lately ... hopefully it's just hormones. But I find that my tolerance for things is pretty minimal today, and I pretty much feel like cracking someone over the head with a day old baguette. My final call of the day came the great question of, "How do I put numbers in capital letters?" Seriously.

The Turning Point

Maybe it's hormonal, but last night I was thinking about a large turning point in my life. When I was in my senior year of high school, I decided to go to UC Santa Cruz and move 300+ miles away from home. I could have easily attended UCLA and lived in the bosom of my family, but instead I picked one of the farthest away colleges in California. I know most of my reasoning was in fact to get away from everyone I had known and had an opportunity to do something different with my life, but sometimes I wonder if I made the best choice.

Ruminating about a choice I made half my life ago, I was thinking last night about how my life would have been if I stayed in Los Angeles. I already attended classes at UCLA, so I knew my way around the campus. I had already taken a couple of upper division Russian Literature classes, which would have paved my way to make that my major. I had a good relationship with the professor who taught those classes, that is, he knew my name, knew me as a hard-worker and a motivated student. I assume if I had a professor like that who believed in me in college, I would have gone to grad school. Also, the money that it cost me to live in Santa Cruz would have been saved, perhaps going into my hands for an easier life after college.

I'm thinking this sort of ruefully, for a lot of reasons. The main one is obviously I can't make a different choice than I made when I was seventeen. And really, almost all of the friends I have, I wouldn't ever have met. I don't know if I'd be into blogging even. I like to think that I would have been a more motivated student at UCLA because I would have had less of a problem with adjustment and therefore spending less time partying and more time studying, but that's total conjecture on my part. If I stayed in LA, I might have stayed closer friends with some people in high school, even though I was growing out of them by my senior year of high school. I would have stayed further in the bosom of my family, for the good and the bad. And while I can say, oh if I had gotten that depressed living at home, someone would have noticed, I know that's really bullshit, because I went through periods of time so depressed and emotionally out-of-control in high school and no one noticed. And at some level, some of the root emotional causes of my anguish were things that went on with my family, the negative messages I got from people who loved me since I was a baby.

This woman that I always considered my nemesis in high school is on Facebook now, and of course, I added her as a friend. I'm not even sure why I thought of her as being my nemesis, other than she dated the guy I really liked in tenth grade. And then he dumped her horribly sometime into that, at the point where she had trusted him and believed in him. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic to her? I remember one party I went to where she drove the old Jaguar her parents had given her, and had some problem with the gears sticking, and phoned her dad and he came right out to fix it. My parents never did crap like that. Maybe if I called and said that I was being stabbed or something, they'd come out and fix it, but they made me rely on myself when I was younger and try to fix things on my own. I remember my dad hanging up on me many times when I was crying, giving me the message that he didn't want to deal with my emotional outburst. Anyway, it was another reason to envy her.

When I think about it all rationally, I realize that it's very easy to look at other people's lives and think that their lives are much better than mine, but there are so many things I like about myself and being me that I'm going to stop doing that. From years of being in group therapy, I realize that not only does everyone have problems, but a lot of people's problems are way more fucked up than mine could ever be. People who seem to "have it all" from the outside have their own share of problems too. And often you pay a price for things, because you can't really have it all. There's something everyone has given up, some choice we made wrong, that puts us where we are now. My thought in this is that I have to accept where I am at this moment and move forward from here.

Bleh

It's just been one of those weeks where I feel like I don't have enough time for everything and my environment seems uncooperative. Lately, I'm irritated with my living situation. I used to live in a big professional apartment complex, and if you had a problem, stuff got done right away, professionally. Now, it's a small place with a landlord who seems barely on top of things. I like her personally, but there have been a lot of snafus lately (is that the plural of snafu, or is snafu plural). The window people came back this week, and I'm not really sure why they had to be in my place for two days, since one of the days they didn't seem to do anything but use my toilet. Things are looking mostly better now, although they did take out one of the larger windows and put in a smaller one and put some paper or something on the outside, making it look a bit war torn. And my landlady says she's going to paint the trim, when she gets around to it. Then tonight I got home and there was a pile of water by the toilet, so I called her, and she told me to call her handyman, who said he'd be out in an hour over an hour ago. My eyelids feel like they are drooping, like I can barely stay awake. I hope whatever is wrong with the toilet is minor and fixable and the dude shows up soon before I do in fact pass out sitting here in front of the computer.

Relative Insanity

My mom's best friend was out of town for a few days, and when she got back home, she called her mom to tell her about her trip, and also about how her cat Puma missed her while she was gone. My mom's friend was talking about how Puma couldn't stop purring, and her mother said, and I quote, "cats purr a lot right before they die."

I'm trying to decide if I'm going to LA for my bitch grandmother's 90th birthday. I've tried to write several blog entries about her and I haven't gotten around to the right one yet, but I'm going to some day. She's living proof of the saying, "the more you complain, the longer God lets you live." She has said things to me like, "Oh you've lost a lot of weight and your skin looks great, what's wrong with you?" When my brother was going to get married, she said to him, "why would someone want to marry you?" The list goes on.

What's the meanest thing a relative has ever said to you?

Gift Horse in the Mouth

When I was a kid, my mom sold a friend of hers a used car. The used car started crapping out almost immediately after she handed him the keys. I remember her saying, it's not a good idea to sell someone a used car if you value your friendship. This stays in mind because I kind of tried to fix the temp at work up with an ex of mine. Let's call the ex SwissBoy (SB) for simplicity's sake, and well, because he's Swiss. I did mention my breakup with him once here.

I was looking at SwissBoy's photo on Facebook because he put a new one up and he looked pretty good. For some reason, the temp was over at my desk when I saw the pic and was all, oh he's really cute. And I told her, you think so? He's my ex. Well, I'll tell him you said that. And he signed on IM later that day, so I started talking with him and told him that a coworker thought he was cute. He immediately was ready for me to introduce him. Yes, he's not the classiest person ever. We could chalk it up to his lack of English skills, but he has been in the US for 10+ years. I will generally say that he's clueless and insensitive about other people's feelings. Once I told the temp that SB was interested, she was both saying that she didn't want to date anyone and also asking me lots of questions about him. Many of the questions I couldn't answer because I hadn't spent any time with him in years. And I'm a different person than I was when I dated him, so maybe he's different too?

I started asking him some questions about what he is like now, has he dated other people, etc. and he logged off in the middle of that. I think SB just didn't want to answer my questions, maybe because he hasn't dated anyone and is ashamed. Because I know four years after we broke up, he hit me up for sex and then said that he hadn't slept with anyone since me. (In case you are wondering, I turned him down. Hell no would I be messing with that again.) Then after he logged off, the temp suggested I should send a link to him with her pic on the web, so I did, and I heard nothing from him further.

Well, SB gleaned the temp's email address from her website, and started emailing her. Then she started forwarding his email, freaked out that somehow I told him that she was available because she doesn't really want to date anyone, wants to start her own business, yadda yadda. So this whole thing made her very uncomfortable and she started putting me in the middle. I was pretty irritated at her for spazzing, but I did realize that it's kinda nutty that SB sent out an email with his phone number, saying he was going to call her number from the website. But as I said, he's not got the greatest social skills ever.

After the temp wrote him back saying that she wasn't interested, he wrote this back to her:

Coming from Fluffycat, this is not awkward.

At one point I suspected she invented you :-)
Am I wrong in finding that stupidly offensive? It's just further proof that he doesn't get me at all, probably never did, and certainly doesn't now. And at this point, I wouldn't introduce him to anyone, except for maybe a mobster who would break his legs.

No Fluffy

more cat pictures

Chinese Food & Fries

Just a note on the post below, volunteers managed to save the kitty from a death sentence. We found someone to adopt her and the cat is hopefully settling into her new home tonight. It's been pretty touch and go, back and forth, and I am happy that this had a happy ending.

I learned in London last year that Chinese food goes well with fries, and I waited until Friday night to try to replicate it. I got takeout from Panda Express at the mall and added Hot Dog on a Stick fries. It really wasn't as good as it was in London, maybe because the fries weren't really the right kind for this endeavor, but it was still tasty. I think next time I'll try to find some steak cut fries, maybe from a frozen bag? The Panda Express was good. I hadn't had it for years, though I used to live on the stuff at various times in my life, including lunches with DMA in high school.

Gift of the Bacchae

There are a lot of reasons why I wouldn't want to live in the 19th century, not the least of these was the lack of proper hygiene and insufficient running water. But I do think sometimes that I'm over-educated for my job, my life, my contemporaries, often in ways that do me no real good. Other than make it so I draw amusing parallels and jokes. Like today, when at the Humane Society, I compared this group of three black girl kittens to the Bacchae. There was a string toy tied to their cage, a ball with a bell in it, and another string in toy in their cage, and they were attacking all these items like crazy, with a wild gleam in their eyes. I am kitten, hear me destroy. For all my time with cats and all the time I spend around people who think they are like little humans, I realize they are something else entirely. Thankfully I am much larger than them and can close their cage and let them do their crazy-ass playing when I step away.

People always ask me, is it hard to volunteer and work among cats? Do you want to take them all home? (Answer is sometimes, but I like the Kiki-Teddy dentente I have going now and another cat would ruin that.) I think really the best thing is seeing a cat I love go to a new family that will appreciate them. And the worst thing. Today.

This cat that I have spent some time with, not a lot I admit, is going to be put down tonight, because she has been deemed "unadoptable." I am not without sympathy for this decision, because while she has been nice to me, I've seen her claw and scratch at people trying to put her back in her kennel. In fact, late this afternoon, someone was looking at her and hoping to adopt her, and she clawed the crap out of the woman and the volunteer who was putting her back in the cage. The management had moved this cat around, trying to find a less stressful place to put her at the shelter, but nothing had worked out, and her behavior got worse.

And while I understand all that, my heart breaks. Because I know this cat would do just fine in someone's house. Being at the shelter is a hell of a lot more stressful than being in a real home, even if it's a small tiny apartment. This cat had no room to run away if she were feeling frightened or agitated, nowhere to hide when she wanted to get away. Not every cat can handle the shelter environment, and she did put up with it for a long time before starting to lash out.

It hurts me. I know if my own Teddy were in a similar situation, he would probably not have lasted long in there. I know that there are plenty of cats that act scared, depressed, agitated, and angry at the shelter, and then go home to be someone's wonderful pet that they love with their whole heart. I wish this could have happened for this cat.

I don't have an answer to this, don't know how to close off this entry. Sometimes life just sucks and shitty stuff happens. After years of being depressed, depression isolated me from feeling things strongly. If you are down all the time, one more thing doesn't bother you, in fact, it feels like that's just the way things are. I felt like the universe was a crappy place when I was depressed. I don't feel that way anymore, but I don't think the world is going to do be looking out for all of us either. We have to do the best we can with the strength and the knowledge we have with us now. Sometimes it sucks in the face of life when you've done your best and you realize that you can't do everything, can't fix everything, can't save this one life. But I tried.

Hot Hot Heat

The last piece of my ergonomic puzzle arrived yesterday when my new keyboard tray arrived. And the guy setting it up was somewhat hunky. I go through periods of time where I never see men that I find the slightest bit attractive, then this guy came in and wow. But when I got a closer look, I was less impressed. I think because he looked a bit rougher-edged and harder than my first glance. He was totally buff with tats all over his arms. The tats were the classy kind of Asian script or something and not just naked pictures of girls or motorcycles. I realize that I have those kind of judgments of tattoos in my mind, that there are certain types of people who get tattoos and other kinds, and I like the first kind and not really the second.

Anyway, I mentioned that I thought he was attractive to our temp, and she was like, what about all those tattoos, it looks like he's been in prison. Now really, I know a little about prison tattoos from watching TV and reading books, and these didn't look like prison tattoos. Though can you tell if someone has been to prison by looking at them? Probably not. I was just thinking that the guy was hot, not that I wanted to go steady with him or anything.

I wonder if at 35, I'm too old to hook up with some guy that I saw at work, putting in my keyboard tray.

Clowning Around

Therapy was fun last night, but this one woman did tell me that I'm like the clown of the group. Shudder. I said, "at least I'm not the kind of clown who hides under your bed and waits until you are asleep and then kills you."

Hrm, I started typing this and then I keep getting interrupted by weird crap at work, including someone who just called and I swear the person was drunk, and of indeterminate gender. That was more of a Friday kind of call.

I have to try to take a photo of my new hair color.

It's been so hot in San Jose that it's hard to sleep. It's supposed to continue being this hot until Friday. It's sad, but I look forward to coming into work because it's so freaking cold.

I finally figured out how to move items in my list in Google Reader. Simply by dragging and dropping. I have been looking for an alphabetizing option for a month, and today by accident realized I can just organize things by myself.

It's Margarita Time

It's been super hot here today. I'm chilling, literally, with the a/c going and fans going on top of that to blow the cool air around. And I'm groggy as hell from having a long ass Monday at work. I think having a few days to rest makes going back to work that much harder. I left work totally in the mood for a margarita. I did buy some margarita mix stuff at Trader Joe's, and I'm going to whip it up with some vodka, since I don't have tequila or triple sec, and really didn't feel like buying. It should work, right? I have some lemon flavored vodka in the freezer that I've had for years, and some limes I can slice. And ice cubes. And salt. It should be close enough.

Update: Tastes kind of like lemon juice got strained through a bag of salt & vinegar chips. And my limes had gone bad. Oh well, at least it's cold.

Copper, Again

I have been vacillating dyeing my hair auburn and copper, and I went back to copper today. I think auburn looks more "real" but less interesting. Also, copper is the color my hair was when I was a child. And it stands out in a crowd. I also think I've picked auburn because it's an easier color to find in stores. The only place I've found the color I like is my local drugstore, which is more expensive than Target.

I'm gearing up motivation to start dating again, and setup a new email alias in anticipation. I won't have the stupid snafu of last year with the guy finding my blog and then putting dumb comments trying to be stealthy or whatever the fuck he was trying to do. Obviously, I don't blog in my real name or allow photos of me here, so I don't want the real world and my blog world crossing too much. Ideally, I'd like to meet a guy I can share my blog with, but that is going to happen at a later date, not right away when we first meet. Anyway, I started thinking about what sites I'm going to join or what I'm going to do, and have had no concrete ideas yet. If anyone has any ideas, leave a comment or email me.

Yesterday I spent hours trying to help people find "the right kitten." It's kind of funny to me because all kittens have pretty similar personalities. It's only when they get older when you see big distinctions in their personalities. There is a range of personalities, but it's harder to tell what they are like. And really, all kittens are totally freaking cute. And sweet. And playful. It is kind of funny when someone says "oh these kittens seem more playful than those." And it's really just that the other kittens that seem less playful were running around madly in their cage for half an hour and have just crashed out. I think it's timing more than anything else.

Happy Fourth of July

I'm going to a BBQ over at Heather's later today, where they will be serving pork. Yay for pork. I never got to eat much of it when I was a kid, but since then I've had some wonderful experiences chowing down with "the other white meat." Heather and her hubby do a Carolina-style BBQ, with a vinegary sauce instead of a tomato based BBQ sauce. Took me a bit to get used to it last time, but then I found it very tasty.

I've spent some time cleaning my place and vacuuming this morning, and getting rid of massive amounts of recycling. I could always clean and throw at more but this a good start. I also talked to my next door neighbors about the windows being put in. I think theirs was worse than mine because the workers broke a window in their bedroom and didn't clean it up all the way. So there was broken glass everywhere. Oh and they also have a window that was bigger than the last one with the blinds no longer being long enough, only theirs is in there bedroom. My neighbor said her husband yelled at our landlord, which made me feel better. I wouldn't yell at her, but I might want to, and having someone else do it is a good substitution.

It's really nice to have a three-day weekend, and the weather here is perfect, sunny but not too hot. Hope you all are having a good weekend too.

Photos of the Chaos

Well, the work is probably still continuing. They came back this morning to do more stuff, and left with at least putting screens in all of the windows and putting the furniture back in place. However, some issues still continue.

Originally, these blinds in fact covered this window. I'm glad it's just in my spare room.

In case you were interested in what the inside of my walls look like.

Teddy is a little dubious about the new patio.

Perhaps because the window people left a big pile of crap out there.

My landlord said there is going to be some sort of frame going on there. I sure hope so since it looks so ramshackle now.