Hometown: The Roch, MI (aka. The Crotch, aka. Crotchscratcher, aka. Crotchmolester, aka. Rochester)
Currently Living: Clawson, MI
Height: 5'8
Weight: Ha ha, yeah right
Favorite Color: Blue (preferably navy)
Profession: Researcher
Favorite Nickname: Trick, Sloan
Favorite Drinks:Vodka Tonic, Guinness, Diet Dr. Pepper, Dirty Martinis, red wine
Favorite TV Show: Friends, Sex & The City, Project Runway, The Amazing Race, Iron Chef America
Least Favorite TV Show: A Baby Story, I Love Lucy, Martha Stewart, Everybody Loves Raymond, every hour long drama
Favorite Books: The History of Love, Beloved, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Fight Club, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The of Being, SurUnbearable Lightness vivor, Empire Falls, The Corrections, The Bell Jar
Favorite Movies: Little Miss Sunshine, Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Wordplay, American Beauty, Life is Beautiful, Amelie, Breakfast Club, Singin In The Rain, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sleeping Beauty, Dancer in the Dark, Duets, The Virgin Suicides, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Austin Powers I, II & III, My Best Friends Wedding, Moulin Rouge, Tommy Boy, Billy Madison, The Shining, Gone With The Wind, Bridget Jones' Diary, Chicago, Love Actually
Guilty Pleasure Movies: Xanadu, Dirty Dancing, Overboard, Groundhog Day, Steel Magnolias, 10 Things I Hate About You, Bond movies, Footloose, Clue, Murder By Death, High Spirits, A Cinderella Story
What I Do Too Much: Check email, crossword puzzles, complain about my job to friends and family,
Obsessions: sushi, Indian food, ranch dressing, toenail polish, song lyrics, hands, awards shows, symmetry, avocados, maps, dreams, This American Life, the display in my car that tracks my MPG
Pet Peeves: loud eaters, slurping, gulping, arrogance, snoring, bad grammar, repetition, late mergers, ripping cardboard, the word "chunky", intolerance, couples in a restaurant sitting on the same side of a booth, pop-up ads, privacy manager, men that drive without shirts on, being foolish, unfairly jumping to conclusions, being made fun of, cat-calling, people who type too hard
Greatest Fear: crossing bridges
Relaxing Activites: late night drives to sing by myself, headstands, hot baths,
Wish I Was: Ansel Adams, Jenifer Aniston, in love, living alone
Prized Possessions: ring from my grandparents, flower pot of my Grandma's, electric blanket (temporarily broken), tongue scraper, my bed
Craziest Thing Ever Done: getting a tattoo, strip Jenga
Things I Eventually Want To Do: skydive, buy a guitar, learn how to play the aforementioned guitar, take flying lessons, travel to France, write a novel, learn how to play the harp, tap dancing lessons, run a marathon
Thursday, July 27, 2006 That girl was a one time teenage drama queen....Yesterday, it became glaringly apparent that I need to stop watching crap entertainment news programs in the evening. Immediately. Or my brain is going to start melting into a pile of goo, as the asinine behavior of celebrities becomes more and more pathetic. Or more like it, the pathetic reporting of the behavior of celebrities has become more asinine.
Let me draw your attention to the straw that broke the camel's back. A story that has been presented every day this week on Entertainment Tonight. It seems that everyone's favorite plus-sized-and-lovin-it comedienne, Mo'nique, had some life-altering, soul-destroying, eternally-devastating humiliation at the hands of the folks at United Airlines. With the dramatic presentation of this story, you'd have thought that the pilot got on the overhead speaker, and after announcing their flight time and cruising altitude, slandered Ms. 'Nique with a bevy of the most attrocious slurs imaginiable.
The real story? One of Ms. 'Nique's "team" (yes, this is how she in fact refers to them. Her "team" consisting of makeup designer and hair stylist. Right there, most of my potential pity vanishes, but I'll get back to that in a minute) put her blow dryer in one of the overhead bins in first class, where Ms 'Nique was sitting, instead of in coach where her beloved "team" member was sitting. The flight attendants called them out on it, they got hostile, and all were kicked off the flight.
Now, let's break down why this story is disturbing on so many levels:
1. I don't know if I've ever heard anything more pathetic than getting upset because your blow dryer was being put in a different overhead bin. 2. I don't know if I've ever heard anything more pathetic than THIS MUCH time being devoted to something as friggin stupid as a blow dryer. It's seriously been on the show every day this week. They keeping talking about how they "broke the story". 3. How diva are you that your "team" has to sit in coach while you sit in first class? 4. Honestly, if you hear this woman talk about it, you'd think that the flight attendants sacrificed her first born. She sounds like her best friend died. She's talking about how grateful she is to all the support she's received. She's talking about how people should band together to boycott United. She's talking about the lawyer she hired. GET A LIFE PEOPLE! IT'S A FRIGGIN BLOW DRYER!! What kind of planet do you live on that this is the most significant thing that you have to deal with? That you are that pathetic and desperate for any kind of publicity that you will chalk up something so stupid into being this horrible victim.
So that's why instead of boycotting United or Mo'Nique (as I'm tempted to do) I'm boycotting all entertainment news. I will never again by a US Weekly or People magazine at the grocery store - even if I'm in a particularly long line and the cover story is something tempting like "Is Suri Deformed?" I will no longer change channels in the evening to inevitably end up on Ryan and Guliana on E!. I'm done. I will passively hear the gossip on the radio as my alarm goes off or on glance over it on MSN when I log out of my hotmail. But I'm done with sad pathetic celebrities who think their lives are so tragic and important.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 Poppa was a copper, momma was a hippie....Ahhh, the hippies have come a long way. Particularly, the hippies of Ann Arbor.
Sunday evening treated the boy and I to an interesting evening of music, and a slightly creepy hippie commune. A friend of his, Tim, was playing with Curtis Eller, toted as the "Angriest Banjo Player in New York." The boy and I didn't really know where we were going, and me, having only seen musical performances at theatres or bars, figured something of the like. Well, turns out that the locale, however it ended up being, was the common room of this co-op thing on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. But the strangest thing about it, was that they looked like $300,000 condos. So much for the sharing-all-things-equally ethos of the hippies. Unless they share all things only if you're in a certain tax bracket.
So we sat in the common room (which was really a common building with game rooms and child play areas), with lemonade served, children in diapers and overalls running around, girls tap dancing as part of the percussion section (I acutally thought that was pretty damn cool), with a cricket (noticeably not in tune, but really damn loud for a cricket) making his presence known inside the room, and enjoyed some good ol' banjo music. He was actually very very good and incredibly amusing to boot. The boy's friend's band (got that? Enough possessives there for ya?) played beforehand and was very good as well. So needless to say, it was an interesting evening. Kind of surreal and odd, but who doesn't love a little odd now and then?
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For whatever reason, at my gym yesterday, they were playing soft rock adult alternative hits from the 80's. And picture, if you will, a very out-going African American woman belting out the tunes like it was nobody's business. Like she knew the key changes for Mike and the Mechanics and all the musical nuances of Simple Minds. You'd think that she at one point sang back up for Hall and Oates, because I've never seen anyone sing "Kiss on My List" with such vigor (although there was a moment up north over the 4th of July where I believe there was some pretty animated singing of "Maneater").
Speaking of, I just heard an interview on the radio last week with the one guy from Hall and Oates (the one who doesn't sing? Hall? Oates? Hell if I know). What's up with them haunting me lately?
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I'm less crabby about my school stuff this week. But boy, has my motivation flown right out the window. I'm back to a few nights this week too. Time to see how the work-night-work-next-day routine works. This might be short lived.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006 Better stop now before I start crying....And just so I don't have to complain to anyone else on the phone about the same damn thing over and over (as the three of you I've already hit will be glad to hear), I'll just say it once: I won't be done with my degree program by the end of the summer. I'm not wanting to go into details about why this is (and this time there are multiple reasons) but needless to say, I'm a little short of devastated and mid-meltdown. I wasn't that upset about it when I talked to the salient individuals about it in the past few days, but the more I've had time to sit on it, the more upset I am.
I'm so tired of all of this. I hate being reduced to a whiney complaining heap that has not progressed anywhere in so long it may as well be 4 years ago. Absolutely nothing is different. I think I'm actually regressing. Maybe someone can figure out how to take my other degree away. At least then I had a lot less debt and had some amount of shiney optimism in the world and people around me. But I think I just might be the most bitter, cynical, crabby person around. How do you put up with me? I don't even like being around me. I wish I had the option not to be. Because I would kick me to the curb mighty quick.
You know what's the saddest thing about it? A small part of me is beginning not to care. I have the beginnings of an apathy and indifference that kind of frighten me. There's a sense of "Fine, fuck it," that I don't recall every having before. I've always been motivated to get whatever needed to be done, done. But now, whatever. No amount I've been doing has managed to surpass anything, so I may as well just sit and be blase and become half-assed like everyone else around me. It works for them right? Fuck, why don't I just stay exactly where I am forever. Then I'll never have to be motivated to do anything ever. And at this point, that's just fine. Whatever. Bring on the passivity.
5:49 PM
Friday, July 07, 2006 Is it any wonder that I'm tired....I've been crabby to be home and back at work this week after having the most fantastic weekend. At the end of the year, Suz and I usually go through and say what our favorite days of the year were. Well, this past weekend will be at the top for sure. We all went up north to the same place that we all used to go as kids that none of us have been to for years. So we were able to relive our childhood by doing all the things that are ingrained in our memories: getting ice cream at Ray's, going for a walk on the dock, playing putt-putt, making spaghetti and salad just like our grandma used to (although I don't think she used Ragu, but we argue on the side of simplicity for this one), having dinner at Joe's Pizzeria, riding the giant slide (with a couple rug burns as casualties for Suz and the boy), playing dominoes, spending a day at the beach we always used to go to, making smores, lighting sparklers, burying the kids in the sand, getting Slush Puppies, and watching the sun set.
Needless to say, we are grown ups now (supposedly. I might question a couple of us), so there was a bit of an adult spin on things -- maybe a little more profanity (mostly on my part) and maybe a lot more beer, wine and whisky. And maybe a few more dirty jokes. But they're just so easy to make when you're playing putt-putt (c'mon, playing the back 9? Just too easy). But it was a nice combination to be able to see our own memories through the eyes of the kids. Kind of a unique perspective.
The strangest thing about the weekend, and in some ways the best, was the way that time stands still. Even though I have these memories about all these experiences from 20 years ago, almost everything up north is exactly the same as it was. They have the same damn slush machine for pete's sake! And when Suzy and I pulled up to the putt-putt course the first day we were there to see if it still existed, I think we were both in shock that it was EXACTLY THE SAME, in all it's orange, beige and green glory. There's something comforting to know that in some places life doesn't just evolve and blow away into something all together different. That there is at least a little bit of static stability somewhere in the world. In spite of its occassional creepiness.
So yes, I think the entire fam had a priceless time this weekend. I know I did. I still think I'm a bit grouchy wishing that I was skipping rocks and eating BBQ potato chips on the beach. And I have a feeling I'm not alone. Thanks to all who came and made it priceless!
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Ahhh...my cat and mouse game has come to an end. For the past 4 years that I've worked here, I've never had to pay for parking. But they've finally caught up with all of us research folks who had the red badge (for volunteers and students) and who didn't have to pay for parking and swapped them for the yellow badge. I've been avoiding our administrator like the plague so she wouldn't take my red one, but she hunted me down this morning. Dammit. Although I feel pretty confident that the guy at the information desk who avows his love for me every day will continue to hook a girl up with a validated parking ticket.
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The dorkiest thing to come out of my mouth in a very long time: when returning the set of dominoes that I bought (yes I know. Let me point out that no, I'm not a 70 year old man) saying to the customer service lady at Target, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize these were double fifteen dominoes. I was looking for double nines." She kind of looked at me like I could quite possibly by the dorkiest person alive. She may have even been chuckling under her breath.
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It's Tour de France time again! And even though Lance isn't in it and most of the top contenders got the boot for alleged blood doping, it's still pretty damn exciting. It's almost more exciting knowing that it's anyone's game.
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Well, I'm back to early mornings at work, hence the reason I've been here since 5am. But I have approximately 56 days until I start my new job. Have a good weekend.
9:00 AM
