This is probably not a very original thought, but because my brain is still on the fritz I figured I’d share it with you anyway. I was getting dressed the other morning and I thought, why is underwear called “a pair” of underwear? It makes perfect sense that things like socks and earrings are paired because there’s two of them. And glasses have two lenses, so they can fairly be called pairs. Pants are a little trickier, but with two legs I guess I can see why they’d be paired. But a shirt has two arms, and you don’t call it a pair of shirt. And a bikini has two leg holes, two boob cups, and even two parts to it, but it’s not called a pair of bikini. Nor is a bra, with its dual cups, ever called a pair of bra.
A friend of mine suggested that the underwear is a pair because it has two leg holes. But gloves have five finger holes and still end up as a pair. And even a single glove is just a glove, not a quintuplet of glove.
I don’t know... do you think pregnancy is ruining my brain?
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Two questions
If anyone can correctly give me the answers to the two missing questions, I will send you a picture of my boobs.
First week back
I just finished my first week back at school and my brain is poo. While I was on vacation I complained that I was so bored my brain was rotting off its stem, but now I have the opposite problem. As usual, my professors feel they have something to prove by starting off the semester gangbusters, and my two-credit journal commitment suddenly requires that I spend ten hours per day for the past three days editing student articles that, quite frankly, make very little sense to me. I seem to have forgotten anything related to the Thai language, and spent NINE HOURS this weekend re-learning how to draw complicated little symbols, of which it takes approximately twenty five to make a single word like “cat.” (And if you slip up and put one of the symbols in the wrong place, you’re actually saying “dirty rotten whore whose worthless existence nauseates me.”)
On top of that, my bar application is due soon and is completely f-ed up. Over the past month and a half I’ve called every state I ever held a driver’s license in (four), ordered transcripts from every college I ever attended (five), tried to track down addresses for every apartment I’ve lived in for the past ten years, including those in foreign countries (fifteen and counting), and begged six friends to fill out and notarize a complicated form saying I’ve never done drugs, never had dirty sex on the desk with my boss, and never stole large amounts of money from my grandma. (And reader, I can guarantee I haven’t done all three of those things. And if you understand that last statement, you understand me.)
What’s holding me up now is that they need detailed information about every single job I’ve held in the past ten years, whether paid or unpaid. They want to know the name and address of the company I worked for, the name of my supervisor, the exact dates I was employed, the reason I left the job, and the precise name of my position. I’m thinking “Kandy Grrl”* is gonna look really weird on that form, and I’m beginning to wonder how people with interesting lives ever become eligible to practice law. Oh, right. Question asked and answered.
* Readers, I love you, I really do. When I get a comment on a post, it makes my day. But seriously, don’t irritate me with irritating comments or e-mails about Kandy Grrl. Really, anything you can say has already been said.
On top of that, my bar application is due soon and is completely f-ed up. Over the past month and a half I’ve called every state I ever held a driver’s license in (four), ordered transcripts from every college I ever attended (five), tried to track down addresses for every apartment I’ve lived in for the past ten years, including those in foreign countries (fifteen and counting), and begged six friends to fill out and notarize a complicated form saying I’ve never done drugs, never had dirty sex on the desk with my boss, and never stole large amounts of money from my grandma. (And reader, I can guarantee I haven’t done all three of those things. And if you understand that last statement, you understand me.)
What’s holding me up now is that they need detailed information about every single job I’ve held in the past ten years, whether paid or unpaid. They want to know the name and address of the company I worked for, the name of my supervisor, the exact dates I was employed, the reason I left the job, and the precise name of my position. I’m thinking “Kandy Grrl”* is gonna look really weird on that form, and I’m beginning to wonder how people with interesting lives ever become eligible to practice law. Oh, right. Question asked and answered.
* Readers, I love you, I really do. When I get a comment on a post, it makes my day. But seriously, don’t irritate me with irritating comments or e-mails about Kandy Grrl. Really, anything you can say has already been said.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Pica
When I first started writing this blog I was aware that people I used to date and/or would some day like to date were reading, and I was somewhat conscious of how I presented myself. I was careful not to talk about hemorrhoids or cellulite, and I kept my more bizarre pregnancy symptoms to myself. However, after writing about my nursing bra, my melonbelly and the breathe-right strip I wear to bed every night, I think I’ve pretty much ruined any chances of ever getting lucky with any of my readers, so I may as well let it all hang out. Think of me what you will.
I seem to be developing a weird, but hopefully harmless, form of pica. I don’t actually want to eat soil, but I crave the smell of it and the feel of it in my hands. I have fantasies about rolling around in the mud and feeling its squishy grittiness between my toes, and the idea of working with pottery clay is enough to make me feel faint with desire. (I know, I should probably just check myself into the nearest hippie-dippie pottery class and get it out of my system, but you know, with all my spare time...)
Also, I don’t want to eat white-out, but I used some the other day to fix an address on an envelope and it smelled AMAZING. Last night I was watching Extreme Home Makeover and they were pouring cement and I got this insane longing to run my hands through the wet cement and rub it all over my body. I’ve had my blood levels checked and everything is fine, and I seriously have no desire to eat this stuff, but wouldn’t rubber cement smell really good right now?
When I first found myself pregnant and single I imagined that I would blow up like a balloon and nobody would want me and I'd have to go nine months without sex and it would be a terrible hardship. But now that I'm older, wiser, and pregnanter, I know better. I don't want sex, I want cement.
I seem to be developing a weird, but hopefully harmless, form of pica. I don’t actually want to eat soil, but I crave the smell of it and the feel of it in my hands. I have fantasies about rolling around in the mud and feeling its squishy grittiness between my toes, and the idea of working with pottery clay is enough to make me feel faint with desire. (I know, I should probably just check myself into the nearest hippie-dippie pottery class and get it out of my system, but you know, with all my spare time...)
Also, I don’t want to eat white-out, but I used some the other day to fix an address on an envelope and it smelled AMAZING. Last night I was watching Extreme Home Makeover and they were pouring cement and I got this insane longing to run my hands through the wet cement and rub it all over my body. I’ve had my blood levels checked and everything is fine, and I seriously have no desire to eat this stuff, but wouldn’t rubber cement smell really good right now?
When I first found myself pregnant and single I imagined that I would blow up like a balloon and nobody would want me and I'd have to go nine months without sex and it would be a terrible hardship. But now that I'm older, wiser, and pregnanter, I know better. I don't want sex, I want cement.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Not a good start
It's 8:30 in the morning and I've just managed to roll out of bed (and I really mean it when I say "roll"). Out of pure masochism I checked the weather: current temperature: negative 13, feels like negative 29. Can someone remind me again why I didn't go to law school in Miami?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Argentina, what is wrong with you?
For those of you who don’t blog, this might sound a little creepy. But if you have a website, there’s this thing you can do where you can see what geographic areas your readers are in. So if you live in, say, Podunk, Idaho, and you click on my blog, I can see that someone in Idaho is reading my blog. (It’s not actually that enlightening, except for some reason I seem to have an inordinate number of readers from Massachusetts. I have no explanation for that.)
The other creepy/nifty thing you can do is see if people found your website through an internet search. So if someone in California types “law school duck thailand” into google and then clicks on my blog from there, I can see how they found me. Again, I’m not sure how useful this is, but it’s kind of interesting.
So even though I’ve already managed to insult Sweden, Brazil, and people who watch The Amazing Race, I now have to ask, Argentina, what is wrong with you? Whenever someone in Argentina clicks on my blog, it’s the result of a really messed up google search. While I find it somewhat baffling that people in a Spanish-speaking country type their internet searches in English, I find it especially baffling that these same people are interested in “sex with a duck,” “dirty naked bowels,” “put balloon full of mustard up ass,” and the ever-popular “lactation porn.” Lactation porn? Why, Argentina, why?
On the other hand, I do feel somewhat vindicated that there are a lot of people out there looking for a solution to “volvo car door frozen shut” “volvo locks frozen” and “volvo bad winter performance,” and just plain, “volvo sucks.” Ha. Take that, Volvo.
The other creepy/nifty thing you can do is see if people found your website through an internet search. So if someone in California types “law school duck thailand” into google and then clicks on my blog from there, I can see how they found me. Again, I’m not sure how useful this is, but it’s kind of interesting.
So even though I’ve already managed to insult Sweden, Brazil, and people who watch The Amazing Race, I now have to ask, Argentina, what is wrong with you? Whenever someone in Argentina clicks on my blog, it’s the result of a really messed up google search. While I find it somewhat baffling that people in a Spanish-speaking country type their internet searches in English, I find it especially baffling that these same people are interested in “sex with a duck,” “dirty naked bowels,” “put balloon full of mustard up ass,” and the ever-popular “lactation porn.” Lactation porn? Why, Argentina, why?
On the other hand, I do feel somewhat vindicated that there are a lot of people out there looking for a solution to “volvo car door frozen shut” “volvo locks frozen” and “volvo bad winter performance,” and just plain, “volvo sucks.” Ha. Take that, Volvo.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Nightlife (or, Pregnancy Blows Goats)
Here’s how my nights used to go:
Carefully blow dry and curl my well-cut and highlighted hair. Spend an hour getting my makeup just right. Decide whether the Pradas or the Guccis look better with the tiny scrap of fabric I’ll be wearing that would get you arrested on most U.S. streets. Get a cab. Eat dinner at Nobu with gorgeous, rich, highly sexed guy who acts like he’s lucky to get a date with me. Bypass line outside nightclub, get escorted directly to VIP section. Order $26 martinis that taste better than dinner. Dance on tables. Go skinny dipping at midnight in rooftop pool with skyline view of midtown Manhattan. Wake up the next morning and order brunch that costs more than my car.
And for those of you who now think I’m a pretentious asshole, here’s how my nights currently go:
9:00pm: Attach a sticky, irritating Breathe-Right strip to my nose so I can hopefully breathe through the pregnancy-induced apnea that makes me wake up gasping for air in the middle of the night. Put the greasy hair that I’m too tired to wash into a ponytail so it doesn’t make my neck break out.
9:30pm: Arrange seven oddly-shaped pillows in a complicated configuration that might guarantee more than an hour’s sleep tonight, if I’m lucky.
10:00pm to midnight: Toss and turn. Except “toss and turn” implies moving in some sort of meaningful way. This is more like writhe and heave while struggling for breath. No matter which side I lie on, my arms fall asleep, my back cramps, and my sharp hip bones, completely unpadded and forced to bear 25 extra pounds of weight, dig into the mattress so hard they develop ulcers.
1:00am: Wake up to The Thirst That Will Not Be Slaked. Which will shortly be followed by The Urge To Pee That Will Not Be Denied.
1:45am: Wake up to go to the bathroom for the millionth time and notice that the sheets are strangely sticky. Turn on the light, see blood on the sheets and Freak. The Fuck. Out. Run around looking for the doctor’s phone number and my hospital bag while praying the baby isn’t coming this early and ignoring the searing pain in my hips for as long as possible. Finally look down and realize that I’ve actually put so much pressure on the skin over my sharp hip bones that they’ve developed ulcers and are bleeding. This is just ridiculous, but I’m too tired to contemplate it. Bandage up the damage, change the sheets, go back to bed.
3:00am: Wake from a Kafka-esque nightmare whereby I’ve turned into a giant insect and my fellow law students are throwing apples at my back. Attribute the nightmare to the white-hot pain grinding through my lower back, which my doctor has explained is simply my bones moving to accommodate the baby. But I shouldn’t worry, the doctor says, because this blinding, staggering pain doesn’t touch the baby at all. I may be a bad mother, I may be a bad person, but at 3:00 in the morning with my bones literally being ground apart, I could give a flying fuck how the baby feels. I. Am. In. Pain.
4:30am: Wake up torn in half by a contraction that feels like wild dogs sinking their teeth into my lower belly. Turn on the light and, for the eighth night in a row, reach for a little chart entitled, “Braxton Hicks Labor Versus Real Labor: How To Tell The Difference.” Determine that all is well. Consider throwing myself off a bridge. Go back to sleep.
5:30am: Lose the fight against the daily nausea that’s already been building for several hours. Get up for good.
6:00am: Force myself to eat some soggy toast, for the baby’s sake. Think about the smug already-mothers who seem to get so much enjoyment out of shaking their fingers at me and tittering, “Just you wait till the baby’s born! You’ll never get any sleep!” Bite me.
Carefully blow dry and curl my well-cut and highlighted hair. Spend an hour getting my makeup just right. Decide whether the Pradas or the Guccis look better with the tiny scrap of fabric I’ll be wearing that would get you arrested on most U.S. streets. Get a cab. Eat dinner at Nobu with gorgeous, rich, highly sexed guy who acts like he’s lucky to get a date with me. Bypass line outside nightclub, get escorted directly to VIP section. Order $26 martinis that taste better than dinner. Dance on tables. Go skinny dipping at midnight in rooftop pool with skyline view of midtown Manhattan. Wake up the next morning and order brunch that costs more than my car.
And for those of you who now think I’m a pretentious asshole, here’s how my nights currently go:
9:00pm: Attach a sticky, irritating Breathe-Right strip to my nose so I can hopefully breathe through the pregnancy-induced apnea that makes me wake up gasping for air in the middle of the night. Put the greasy hair that I’m too tired to wash into a ponytail so it doesn’t make my neck break out.
9:30pm: Arrange seven oddly-shaped pillows in a complicated configuration that might guarantee more than an hour’s sleep tonight, if I’m lucky.
10:00pm to midnight: Toss and turn. Except “toss and turn” implies moving in some sort of meaningful way. This is more like writhe and heave while struggling for breath. No matter which side I lie on, my arms fall asleep, my back cramps, and my sharp hip bones, completely unpadded and forced to bear 25 extra pounds of weight, dig into the mattress so hard they develop ulcers.
1:00am: Wake up to The Thirst That Will Not Be Slaked. Which will shortly be followed by The Urge To Pee That Will Not Be Denied.
1:45am: Wake up to go to the bathroom for the millionth time and notice that the sheets are strangely sticky. Turn on the light, see blood on the sheets and Freak. The Fuck. Out. Run around looking for the doctor’s phone number and my hospital bag while praying the baby isn’t coming this early and ignoring the searing pain in my hips for as long as possible. Finally look down and realize that I’ve actually put so much pressure on the skin over my sharp hip bones that they’ve developed ulcers and are bleeding. This is just ridiculous, but I’m too tired to contemplate it. Bandage up the damage, change the sheets, go back to bed.
3:00am: Wake from a Kafka-esque nightmare whereby I’ve turned into a giant insect and my fellow law students are throwing apples at my back. Attribute the nightmare to the white-hot pain grinding through my lower back, which my doctor has explained is simply my bones moving to accommodate the baby. But I shouldn’t worry, the doctor says, because this blinding, staggering pain doesn’t touch the baby at all. I may be a bad mother, I may be a bad person, but at 3:00 in the morning with my bones literally being ground apart, I could give a flying fuck how the baby feels. I. Am. In. Pain.
4:30am: Wake up torn in half by a contraction that feels like wild dogs sinking their teeth into my lower belly. Turn on the light and, for the eighth night in a row, reach for a little chart entitled, “Braxton Hicks Labor Versus Real Labor: How To Tell The Difference.” Determine that all is well. Consider throwing myself off a bridge. Go back to sleep.
5:30am: Lose the fight against the daily nausea that’s already been building for several hours. Get up for good.
6:00am: Force myself to eat some soggy toast, for the baby’s sake. Think about the smug already-mothers who seem to get so much enjoyment out of shaking their fingers at me and tittering, “Just you wait till the baby’s born! You’ll never get any sleep!” Bite me.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Robe unbutton
Although I often wonder what my Thai language skills will get me (besides $48k toward my tuition) I was reminded of its usefulness when I unearthed this e-mail from my first trip to Bangkok. It was 2001 and I was staying on Khao San Road, a place which has changed so drastically in the past seven years I didn’t even recognize it when I saw it again last year. Gone are the marijuana-leaf pharmacy signs and Thai guys in fake dreadlocks, replaced by over-priced, family-friendly hotels and tourist bars masquerading as "sophisticated nightlife." It’s kind of sad, but I’m betting you can at least buy Robitussin if you need it.
Whining to my friend Dan about the dearth of e-mails in my inbox, he suggested a group e-mail might generate some responses. I’m hoping he’s right and my friends will be forced out of sheer guilt to reply and then I’ll have lots and lots of messages waiting for me. Ha, ha, ha...total world domination.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m completely high from a mysterious cold pill I bought from the pharmacy and took about an hour ago. Some might say that this is not the best of times to send large amounts of e-mail to an unspecified number of addresses, but I beg to differ. Why, some of the most profound things I’ve ever said have been on telephone calls in the middle of the night to ex-boyfriends, sobbing and as inebriated as half a martini will get me.
Right now I’m holed up in a room in Bangkok with one of those miserable drippy colds that make you feel unloved and unlovable for at least a week. After sniffling all night and coughing until the person in the room next to me pounded on the wall to shut up, I swung by the pharmacy to pick up some cold tabs.
A trip to a Bangkok pharmacy is a sketchy venture at best. Everything from Vicodan to Viagra is available over the counter, and if you need a pharmacy in a heavily-touristed area, you just look for the big red and green signs with Jamaican flags and marijuana leaves on the outside. Not very auspicious if you’re just looking for Robitussin.
The other problem is that the labels are written in Thai, a language that looks like bird droppings strained through a sieve then thrown at a ceiling fan. The generic drug name is written under the Thai, but unless you have a Ph.D. in pharmacology this is about as helpful as Chinese Mandarin. Gringos like me are forced to beg help from the “pharmacist,” a guy in a white lab coat with dreadlocks and a red-and-green knitted rasta hat who emerges out of a back room in a blue haze of pot smoke.
The best idea is to phrase your question as simply as possible. “I have a cold. What can you give me?”
But even this sometimes backfires: “You don’t seem so bold to me, missy. I give you lifty. What you want? Red lifty? Blue lifty?” What might he mean by lifty? I don’t want to know.
My agonizing conversation this evening went something like this:
“No, no lifty please. I have a COLD and I can’t sleep.”
“Oh baby, I think you very sweet. Oh...sleep. You no sleep? Here, this good, this very guuuuud.” Hands me what even I can decipher is Vicodan.
“No, I don’t want Vicodan. Do you have Sudafed?”
“Oh lady, yes I have Sudafed for you. Do I have Sudafed for you!”
“No, what is this? Percocet! Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Mon, I go school many year for this. And I never hear of Robe-unbutton. You want Viagra? It make robe unbutton.”
“Oh you are so funny. Do you have Robitussin or not?”
In the end I emerged with something that had a picture of a nose on the front. Either it’s cold medicine or I was actually supposed to put it up my nose. I took my chances and swallowed one. An hour later my sniffles have stopped, although the pink bunnies I keep seeing in my peripheral vision may or may not be the real thing.
I’d like to take full advantage of this state of mind and write terribly pithy things for which I will win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, but I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. This could be due to either the dubious drugs I just took or the fact that internet cafes here all have telephones where people go to make overseas calls. None of the phones have booths or walls around them and it’s hard to work while listening to Brits and Aussies yell their private lives out over staticky telephone lines. How do you express your deepest thoughts while someone is sitting next to you screaming about their latest yeast infection and how difficult it is to find a good pharmacy in Bangkok? You tell it, sister.
Whining to my friend Dan about the dearth of e-mails in my inbox, he suggested a group e-mail might generate some responses. I’m hoping he’s right and my friends will be forced out of sheer guilt to reply and then I’ll have lots and lots of messages waiting for me. Ha, ha, ha...total world domination.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m completely high from a mysterious cold pill I bought from the pharmacy and took about an hour ago. Some might say that this is not the best of times to send large amounts of e-mail to an unspecified number of addresses, but I beg to differ. Why, some of the most profound things I’ve ever said have been on telephone calls in the middle of the night to ex-boyfriends, sobbing and as inebriated as half a martini will get me.
Right now I’m holed up in a room in Bangkok with one of those miserable drippy colds that make you feel unloved and unlovable for at least a week. After sniffling all night and coughing until the person in the room next to me pounded on the wall to shut up, I swung by the pharmacy to pick up some cold tabs.
A trip to a Bangkok pharmacy is a sketchy venture at best. Everything from Vicodan to Viagra is available over the counter, and if you need a pharmacy in a heavily-touristed area, you just look for the big red and green signs with Jamaican flags and marijuana leaves on the outside. Not very auspicious if you’re just looking for Robitussin.
The other problem is that the labels are written in Thai, a language that looks like bird droppings strained through a sieve then thrown at a ceiling fan. The generic drug name is written under the Thai, but unless you have a Ph.D. in pharmacology this is about as helpful as Chinese Mandarin. Gringos like me are forced to beg help from the “pharmacist,” a guy in a white lab coat with dreadlocks and a red-and-green knitted rasta hat who emerges out of a back room in a blue haze of pot smoke.
The best idea is to phrase your question as simply as possible. “I have a cold. What can you give me?”
But even this sometimes backfires: “You don’t seem so bold to me, missy. I give you lifty. What you want? Red lifty? Blue lifty?” What might he mean by lifty? I don’t want to know.
My agonizing conversation this evening went something like this:
“No, no lifty please. I have a COLD and I can’t sleep.”
“Oh baby, I think you very sweet. Oh...sleep. You no sleep? Here, this good, this very guuuuud.” Hands me what even I can decipher is Vicodan.
“No, I don’t want Vicodan. Do you have Sudafed?”
“Oh lady, yes I have Sudafed for you. Do I have Sudafed for you!”
“No, what is this? Percocet! Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Mon, I go school many year for this. And I never hear of Robe-unbutton. You want Viagra? It make robe unbutton.”
“Oh you are so funny. Do you have Robitussin or not?”
In the end I emerged with something that had a picture of a nose on the front. Either it’s cold medicine or I was actually supposed to put it up my nose. I took my chances and swallowed one. An hour later my sniffles have stopped, although the pink bunnies I keep seeing in my peripheral vision may or may not be the real thing.
I’d like to take full advantage of this state of mind and write terribly pithy things for which I will win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, but I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. This could be due to either the dubious drugs I just took or the fact that internet cafes here all have telephones where people go to make overseas calls. None of the phones have booths or walls around them and it’s hard to work while listening to Brits and Aussies yell their private lives out over staticky telephone lines. How do you express your deepest thoughts while someone is sitting next to you screaming about their latest yeast infection and how difficult it is to find a good pharmacy in Bangkok? You tell it, sister.
Monday, January 7, 2008
What I'm watching
I have a month between classes and I’m getting to the point in my pregnancy where traveling is really uncomfortable, so I’m forced to hang around Wisconsin. With a surplus of time on my hands, I found this thing in my living room called a “TeeVee.” Pushing buttons on it provides much entertainment in the way of stories acted out by moving characters. Here’s what I like (with caveats, of course):
- CSI. But only the Vegas one. And I hate the violence. And it kind of bugs me how they’re always prowling around in dark places with flashlights. One minute they’re talking to a suspect in a fully lit office, next thing they ask the suspect to step out of the room while they switch off the lights and look for evidence with flashlights. Why turn off the lights to look for teeny pieces of evidence?
- Without a Trace. It’s a great show, but they keep switching the days and times around so I can never find it. I’m pretty sure it’s personal.
- Women’s Murder Club. (Are you seeing a theme here?) This is a great show, and I love the actresses and actors on it, plus I think it’s pretty well-written. But I’m not getting too attached. How can a show with such an unbelievably stupid title survive?
- The Amazing Race. I hate this show with a vitriolic passion that I could write an entire blog post about. It’s horrible and it stresses me out. But for some reason it always runs late on Sunday nights and I have to watch it while waiting for Cold Case to come on.
- Cold Case. I really like it, but it seems like there’s something wrong with the female star, Kathryn Morris. She’s so pale, she looks kind of sick.
- The Biggest Loser. Fat people are mean.
- America’s Next Top Model. Skinny people are mean.
- Jeopardy. Faithfully. Every. Single. Day. But I think Alex Trebek is secretly anti-woman and subtly roots for the male contestants.
- Antiques Roadshow. My favorite. I dream of being on it one day and am constantly assessing the value of things I find in my parents’ house, much to my mother’s irritation.
- Criminal Minds. I think this show is kind of silly, but I’ve somehow gotten sucked into it. I can’t resist a good mystery.
- Family Guy. I used to live in Rhode Island. It’s one of the best places I’ve ever lived, and this show reminds me of it. I’m pretty sure my baby is going to turn out exactly like Stewie.
Did I mention...
...that at the age of 34 I have never purchased a TV in my entire life, nor have I ever bought cable? This might explain a few things about my tastes in television. Here's a picture of the one and only TV in my house, which a friend donated to me years ago. I’m thinking about taking it on Antiques Roadshow.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Blogging, and cheap tricks
The problem with blogging is that you have to keep up with it. As I'm discovering, if you don't post from time to time, people lose interest in your blog and you basically end up talking to yourself.
This shouldn't be a problem for me since I love writing and am endlessly irritated by the world. Right? Well, maybe not. Now that I have over a month off from law school with nothing to do but fill out my tedious bar application, my brain feels like it's rotting off its stem. Worse, the weather outside is so foggy it's dangerous to drive (we had a 30-car pileup on the highway nearest my house this afternoon), so I've been housebound for two days. Nothing dulls my brain like lack of adventure.
However, I do have a cheap trick up my sleeve that may buy me some time with my faithful readers (all three of you). In 2002, before I went to college, got my degree, came to law school, got pregnant and became a genuine grown-up person, I took a solo, fourteen-month, round-the-world rock climbing trip. Being alone for so long, I was starved for contact from my friends and sent home regular reports of my time on the road. Given that exactly zero of my old friends ever reads my blog (thanks guys), I feel that maybe I can get away with posting one of these old e-mails from time to time, purely as a stopgap measure while my brain regenerates.
I feel like I'm giving a furiously hungry baby a pacifier while I search frantically for his bottle. I promise I'll keep it to a minimum, and if you hate it, feel free to leave a comment saying so.
This shouldn't be a problem for me since I love writing and am endlessly irritated by the world. Right? Well, maybe not. Now that I have over a month off from law school with nothing to do but fill out my tedious bar application, my brain feels like it's rotting off its stem. Worse, the weather outside is so foggy it's dangerous to drive (we had a 30-car pileup on the highway nearest my house this afternoon), so I've been housebound for two days. Nothing dulls my brain like lack of adventure.
However, I do have a cheap trick up my sleeve that may buy me some time with my faithful readers (all three of you). In 2002, before I went to college, got my degree, came to law school, got pregnant and became a genuine grown-up person, I took a solo, fourteen-month, round-the-world rock climbing trip. Being alone for so long, I was starved for contact from my friends and sent home regular reports of my time on the road. Given that exactly zero of my old friends ever reads my blog (thanks guys), I feel that maybe I can get away with posting one of these old e-mails from time to time, purely as a stopgap measure while my brain regenerates.
I feel like I'm giving a furiously hungry baby a pacifier while I search frantically for his bottle. I promise I'll keep it to a minimum, and if you hate it, feel free to leave a comment saying so.
A secretary goes to Africa
As promised, here's an e-mail I sent home from Morocco, my first stop on the road, where I spent two of the most miserable months of my life. For those of you who don't know, I was a secretary for ten years before coming to law school, which explains the title.
Greetings and thanks to everyone who sent e-mail! I had 24 messages when I got to the internet cafe and I nearly cried when I read them all. I’m camped out on the roof of a hotel called Les Roches a million miles from civilization in a country where mule is food and all I can think about is brie and shopping. Sometimes I’m so homesick a message from a friend is all it takes to send me over the edge.
Speaking of the edge, tragedy struck today at the Hotel Les Roches while I was out scaling the rocks. As usual, the wind was blowing like a tornado and apparently my tent got caught in a bizarre cross-draft between the rocks and blown clear off the roof of the hotel. According to eyewitness accounts, it hovered for a minute in the air, then came crashing down on guests eating lunch on the terrace below. Much screaming and breaking of china and running for cover ensued, then the wind again caught my portable home like a big balloon and blew it right into the garbage. Imagine my dismay when I came home for lunch and found my precious tent in a stinky dumpster.
Fortunately, the tent itself suffered no damage. However, the contents inside didn’t fare so well. I had a full box of Tide laundry detergent (which sticks to everything like glue due to the crazy static electricity out here), half of which ended up in my sleeping bag, the other half in various unexpected places like my underwear and travel toothbrush. Not to mention the fact that the dumpster was full of ants and the hoteliers were so annoyed I fear my $1.50 per night rent will soon be going up.
It may not be my fault about the misfortunate terrace-diners, but if they ever find out who clogged their shower drains I’m definitely getting kicked out of here. The other night, fed up with split-ends and peeling skin, I got some avocado to put in my hair with the hopes of conditioning it (I still can’t believe they don’t sell hair conditioner and skin cream in the middle of the Sahara desert).
What seemed like a good idea at the time quickly turned into a mess of nightmare proportions: avocado in my eyes and my tent zipper, all over the Thermarest I need to spend the next 13 months on, mashed into my sneakers and smeared across a page in my journal.
When a big green glop fell onto my climbing rope, I decided it was time to cut my losses and dash to the shower. Before I started this genius endeavor I had checked to make sure we had hot water (the plumbing is very erratic here), but I soon discovered the error of my ways in having not checked to see if we had cold water, as well. So picture a green girl, covered from head to toe in avocado, hopping around a tiny, steaming shower stall trying not to get burned, and jumping naked from shower to shower as each drain gets clogged up with avocado. Rite Aid seems very far away and I can only dream of the days when I looked down my nose at Prell.
The whole thing may have been a waste of time anyway, because two days later I met five Spaniards climbing in the Gorge (Juan, Juan, Juan, Jorge and Victor) and they invited me to go see the dunes in a town near the Algerian border. Even though it’s a four-hour drive, I wanted to go because the dunes there are supposed to be some of the best in the world.
Juan drove, Juan was in the passenger seat, and Juan, Jorge and Victor sat in the backseat, while I spent most of the drive curled in a fetal position in the very back seat with the same spasming pains I’ve been experiencing in my stomach for 16 days now. I managed to fall asleep, but woke up three hours into the drive when the car got stuck in a sand dune. It was blazing hot and we were in the middle of a sandstorm, with the wind rocking the car and blowing the sand so high it completely covered the sun.
Everyone but the driver wrapped scarves around our faces and got out to push the car out of the dune. The heat was unbearable and our sweat turned to mud as it ran off our faces and I just kept thinking about an SUV ad as I put my shoulder against the jeep and tried to keep my breakfast down.
We finally got the car going again, but we were afraid of breaking an axle so we had to go slow and got stuck in the dunes again and again. Every time it happened we had to jump out of the car and push while the sand scraped under our eyelids and the hot wind singed the hairs on our arms. Tumbleweeds rolled across the road and made sounds like a Cuisinart when we ran over them and lightening flashed all around us, even though it didn’t rain.
After we pushed the car free about a hundred times we came to a dark, disreputable-looking old hotel without electricity near the Algerian border. Since other travelers were waiting out the storm there, too, there were no rooms and we had to sleep on flea-ridden sofas in the cafe. As I fell asleep scratching at bites and cleaning sand out from between my teeth I though, “Gee, it’s a good thing I have soft skin and shiny hair.”
It’s times like these I feel like getting on a plane and coming home and eating pizza till it comes out my eyes while soaking in a hot bath for three days. But when I left the gorge today and saw all the e-mail messages from my friends I felt like I could keep going. Now I’m on my way back to the Gorge to pick granules of Tide out of my sleeping bag and scrub the avocado off my Thermarest.
Greetings and thanks to everyone who sent e-mail! I had 24 messages when I got to the internet cafe and I nearly cried when I read them all. I’m camped out on the roof of a hotel called Les Roches a million miles from civilization in a country where mule is food and all I can think about is brie and shopping. Sometimes I’m so homesick a message from a friend is all it takes to send me over the edge.
Speaking of the edge, tragedy struck today at the Hotel Les Roches while I was out scaling the rocks. As usual, the wind was blowing like a tornado and apparently my tent got caught in a bizarre cross-draft between the rocks and blown clear off the roof of the hotel. According to eyewitness accounts, it hovered for a minute in the air, then came crashing down on guests eating lunch on the terrace below. Much screaming and breaking of china and running for cover ensued, then the wind again caught my portable home like a big balloon and blew it right into the garbage. Imagine my dismay when I came home for lunch and found my precious tent in a stinky dumpster.
Fortunately, the tent itself suffered no damage. However, the contents inside didn’t fare so well. I had a full box of Tide laundry detergent (which sticks to everything like glue due to the crazy static electricity out here), half of which ended up in my sleeping bag, the other half in various unexpected places like my underwear and travel toothbrush. Not to mention the fact that the dumpster was full of ants and the hoteliers were so annoyed I fear my $1.50 per night rent will soon be going up.
It may not be my fault about the misfortunate terrace-diners, but if they ever find out who clogged their shower drains I’m definitely getting kicked out of here. The other night, fed up with split-ends and peeling skin, I got some avocado to put in my hair with the hopes of conditioning it (I still can’t believe they don’t sell hair conditioner and skin cream in the middle of the Sahara desert).
What seemed like a good idea at the time quickly turned into a mess of nightmare proportions: avocado in my eyes and my tent zipper, all over the Thermarest I need to spend the next 13 months on, mashed into my sneakers and smeared across a page in my journal.
When a big green glop fell onto my climbing rope, I decided it was time to cut my losses and dash to the shower. Before I started this genius endeavor I had checked to make sure we had hot water (the plumbing is very erratic here), but I soon discovered the error of my ways in having not checked to see if we had cold water, as well. So picture a green girl, covered from head to toe in avocado, hopping around a tiny, steaming shower stall trying not to get burned, and jumping naked from shower to shower as each drain gets clogged up with avocado. Rite Aid seems very far away and I can only dream of the days when I looked down my nose at Prell.
The whole thing may have been a waste of time anyway, because two days later I met five Spaniards climbing in the Gorge (Juan, Juan, Juan, Jorge and Victor) and they invited me to go see the dunes in a town near the Algerian border. Even though it’s a four-hour drive, I wanted to go because the dunes there are supposed to be some of the best in the world.
Juan drove, Juan was in the passenger seat, and Juan, Jorge and Victor sat in the backseat, while I spent most of the drive curled in a fetal position in the very back seat with the same spasming pains I’ve been experiencing in my stomach for 16 days now. I managed to fall asleep, but woke up three hours into the drive when the car got stuck in a sand dune. It was blazing hot and we were in the middle of a sandstorm, with the wind rocking the car and blowing the sand so high it completely covered the sun.
Everyone but the driver wrapped scarves around our faces and got out to push the car out of the dune. The heat was unbearable and our sweat turned to mud as it ran off our faces and I just kept thinking about an SUV ad as I put my shoulder against the jeep and tried to keep my breakfast down.
We finally got the car going again, but we were afraid of breaking an axle so we had to go slow and got stuck in the dunes again and again. Every time it happened we had to jump out of the car and push while the sand scraped under our eyelids and the hot wind singed the hairs on our arms. Tumbleweeds rolled across the road and made sounds like a Cuisinart when we ran over them and lightening flashed all around us, even though it didn’t rain.
After we pushed the car free about a hundred times we came to a dark, disreputable-looking old hotel without electricity near the Algerian border. Since other travelers were waiting out the storm there, too, there were no rooms and we had to sleep on flea-ridden sofas in the cafe. As I fell asleep scratching at bites and cleaning sand out from between my teeth I though, “Gee, it’s a good thing I have soft skin and shiny hair.”
It’s times like these I feel like getting on a plane and coming home and eating pizza till it comes out my eyes while soaking in a hot bath for three days. But when I left the gorge today and saw all the e-mail messages from my friends I felt like I could keep going. Now I’m on my way back to the Gorge to pick granules of Tide out of my sleeping bag and scrub the avocado off my Thermarest.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Volvo
I hope I don’t have a lot of Swedish readers out there because I just have to get this off my chest: I hate the Swedes. My animosity toward these peaceful, herring-eating people can be traced, strangely enough, to a Toyota Prius, which I believe is probably the best car ever made.
In 2005, through a nefariously shady business transaction which I won’t describe for fear of incurring the wrath of the Board of Bar Examiners, I acquired a brand new Toyota Prius with exactly zero miles on the odometer. Because I’m both a closet environmentalist and secretly enthralled with technical things I can’t understand, owning a Prius was my dream. I drove it lovingly and proudly, learned all its quirky features, and even got the GPS to speak to me in French. While I don’t actually speak French, I found it very romantic to drive around town completely lost with a Frenchy-french lady-voice commanding me to “tournez a gauche ici!” Too cool.
Sadly, I drive very little in law school and the car mostly sat in my driveway. And then, last year, my mother got a new job that required her to drive a lot, and also got diagnosed with breast cancer. In another sickening display of that nicey-nice shit that lurks somewhere deep inside me and sometimes rears its ugly head, I gave my beloved Prius to my mom in exchange for her ancient, teal green Volvo.
This car enrages me on so many levels. First, it’s not just a little bit teal, it’s aggressively, violently, nightmare-inducing teal. Sometimes small children cry when I pass by, and every day I ask myself, who would make a car in such an offensive color? And why? For the sole purpose of embarrassing me? Then, the automatic window controls are located between the passenger and driver’s seat, so you can’t actually open a window while driving without taking your eyes off the road and craning your neck to peer under the cup holders to find the right button. That, of course, is because the cup holders are located, in typical Volvo fashion, DIRECTLY ABOVE the window controls. The slightest quiver of your hand while rolling down the window results in third-degree double-latte burns, and the smallest drip from aforementioned double-latte results in permanently sticky window controls.
The car nicely displays the outside temperature - but only in Celsius. The clock nicely displays the time - but only military time. If you open the hood, the radio disables and requires a code to turn back on. But the code is not published anywhere. It’s a secret. And you practically have to take the goddamn car to Sweden to get the secret code put in.
The windshield wipers work perfectly, except for a six-inch square spot directly in the driver’s line of vision. And don’t suggest that I change the wiper blades, the wiper arm, the electronic mechanism that runs the wipers or the entire flipping windshield, because I already tried that. At great expense.
While each of these things cause me daily rage, what really pisses me off about the Volvo is its performance in cold weather. Isn’t Sweden kind of a cold place? Then tell me why the rear window defroster automatically turns off every ten minutes, necessitating that I jump in the car to turn it back on six times in the sixty minutes it takes me to scrape ice off the car. And tell me why the locks constantly freeze on the Volvo, when people parked directly next to me never have this problem no matter how cold it gets. And why my windows have been completely frozen shut for over a month, preventing me from taking a ticket at a parking garage or ordering coffee at a drive through. And why my doors froze shut on the day of my Thai final, requiring me to crawl into the backseat through a tiny hole in the trunk that was clearly not designed for seven-month pregnant women. And why my electronic radio antenna is frozen in the down position (as if I could listen to the radio without the secret code anyway).
Yesterday was the final straw in my war against the Swedes. Let me set the scene for you. The weather channel said it was “six degrees, feels like minus three.” Uncharacteristically, I had let my gas tank run very close to empty. But when I went to fill it up, the mechanism that locks the little gas tank door had frozen shut. No amount of lock de-icer, hot water, or effort from the unbelievably nice guys who work at the Shell station could open the door. After standing in the cold for over an hour trying to figure it out, we came to the conclusion that I had no option but to break the door open. They got a screwdriver and did it for me, I filled up the tank, and went merrily on my way, wondering what the Volvo has in store for me next.
I’m picturing the Swedes laughing their asses off at me and asking myself, why, Sweden, why?
In 2005, through a nefariously shady business transaction which I won’t describe for fear of incurring the wrath of the Board of Bar Examiners, I acquired a brand new Toyota Prius with exactly zero miles on the odometer. Because I’m both a closet environmentalist and secretly enthralled with technical things I can’t understand, owning a Prius was my dream. I drove it lovingly and proudly, learned all its quirky features, and even got the GPS to speak to me in French. While I don’t actually speak French, I found it very romantic to drive around town completely lost with a Frenchy-french lady-voice commanding me to “tournez a gauche ici!” Too cool.
Sadly, I drive very little in law school and the car mostly sat in my driveway. And then, last year, my mother got a new job that required her to drive a lot, and also got diagnosed with breast cancer. In another sickening display of that nicey-nice shit that lurks somewhere deep inside me and sometimes rears its ugly head, I gave my beloved Prius to my mom in exchange for her ancient, teal green Volvo.
This car enrages me on so many levels. First, it’s not just a little bit teal, it’s aggressively, violently, nightmare-inducing teal. Sometimes small children cry when I pass by, and every day I ask myself, who would make a car in such an offensive color? And why? For the sole purpose of embarrassing me? Then, the automatic window controls are located between the passenger and driver’s seat, so you can’t actually open a window while driving without taking your eyes off the road and craning your neck to peer under the cup holders to find the right button. That, of course, is because the cup holders are located, in typical Volvo fashion, DIRECTLY ABOVE the window controls. The slightest quiver of your hand while rolling down the window results in third-degree double-latte burns, and the smallest drip from aforementioned double-latte results in permanently sticky window controls.
The car nicely displays the outside temperature - but only in Celsius. The clock nicely displays the time - but only military time. If you open the hood, the radio disables and requires a code to turn back on. But the code is not published anywhere. It’s a secret. And you practically have to take the goddamn car to Sweden to get the secret code put in.
The windshield wipers work perfectly, except for a six-inch square spot directly in the driver’s line of vision. And don’t suggest that I change the wiper blades, the wiper arm, the electronic mechanism that runs the wipers or the entire flipping windshield, because I already tried that. At great expense.
While each of these things cause me daily rage, what really pisses me off about the Volvo is its performance in cold weather. Isn’t Sweden kind of a cold place? Then tell me why the rear window defroster automatically turns off every ten minutes, necessitating that I jump in the car to turn it back on six times in the sixty minutes it takes me to scrape ice off the car. And tell me why the locks constantly freeze on the Volvo, when people parked directly next to me never have this problem no matter how cold it gets. And why my windows have been completely frozen shut for over a month, preventing me from taking a ticket at a parking garage or ordering coffee at a drive through. And why my doors froze shut on the day of my Thai final, requiring me to crawl into the backseat through a tiny hole in the trunk that was clearly not designed for seven-month pregnant women. And why my electronic radio antenna is frozen in the down position (as if I could listen to the radio without the secret code anyway).
Yesterday was the final straw in my war against the Swedes. Let me set the scene for you. The weather channel said it was “six degrees, feels like minus three.” Uncharacteristically, I had let my gas tank run very close to empty. But when I went to fill it up, the mechanism that locks the little gas tank door had frozen shut. No amount of lock de-icer, hot water, or effort from the unbelievably nice guys who work at the Shell station could open the door. After standing in the cold for over an hour trying to figure it out, we came to the conclusion that I had no option but to break the door open. They got a screwdriver and did it for me, I filled up the tank, and went merrily on my way, wondering what the Volvo has in store for me next.
I’m picturing the Swedes laughing their asses off at me and asking myself, why, Sweden, why?
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Socks
I went to my parents’ house on the west coast for the holidays (no wireless internet, no cell phone service), which is why it’s been a while since I posted. I hate to admit this, but I’m actually somewhat anti-Christmas, for a number of reasons. First of all, my real birthday (which I arbitrarily changed a few years ago) falls within a few days of Christmas, and I’m sick of hearing the stupid “merry birthday and happy Christmas” joke as people hand me EXACTLY ONE PRESENT for both occasions. This for a girl who revels in presents and who carefully shops for birthday and Christmas gifts throughout the year. Second, people are forever giving me heavily scented body lotion or shower gel, to which I’m hideously allergic. Third, I move all the time and have developed a dread of heavy or bulky objects. Once you move a heavy item thirteen times in thirteen years, you start to loathe that item. Finally, every year I get more and more turned off by listening to two months of commercials yelling at me to “BUY! BUY! BUY!” Ugh.
This year I did a little research and discovered that homeless people are perpetually in need of socks and toiletries. So I told my whole family that I wanted nothing but socks stuffed with travel-sized toiletries for Christmas. My mother, because she is superwoman, called up her and my dad’s closest friends and invited them to a sock-party. About fifteen people showed up, all bearing packages of socks and bags of toiletries. By the end of the night, we had stuffed over a hundred pairs of socks with toiletries for the homeless. The next day we took three huge boxes of them to a homeless shelter and it was probably the best I’ve felt all year.
I was reluctant to publish this information for fear that people who don’t know me would think I was a do-gooder. Or worse yet, an all-around good person. I’m not. I can’t be monogamous, I step on people’s heels on the subway if they take my seat, and I would probably sleep with you for a ticket to the Caribbean, depending on how ugly you are. But I figured I would put this information out there for all those people who dread the gifts they acquire at Christmas or their birthday. Next year, I highly recommend asking for socks and toiletries. You’ll be glad you did.
By the way, Chanel No. 5? Not allergic. Diamonds? Also not allergic. Cashmere... ditto.
This year I did a little research and discovered that homeless people are perpetually in need of socks and toiletries. So I told my whole family that I wanted nothing but socks stuffed with travel-sized toiletries for Christmas. My mother, because she is superwoman, called up her and my dad’s closest friends and invited them to a sock-party. About fifteen people showed up, all bearing packages of socks and bags of toiletries. By the end of the night, we had stuffed over a hundred pairs of socks with toiletries for the homeless. The next day we took three huge boxes of them to a homeless shelter and it was probably the best I’ve felt all year.
I was reluctant to publish this information for fear that people who don’t know me would think I was a do-gooder. Or worse yet, an all-around good person. I’m not. I can’t be monogamous, I step on people’s heels on the subway if they take my seat, and I would probably sleep with you for a ticket to the Caribbean, depending on how ugly you are. But I figured I would put this information out there for all those people who dread the gifts they acquire at Christmas or their birthday. Next year, I highly recommend asking for socks and toiletries. You’ll be glad you did.
By the way, Chanel No. 5? Not allergic. Diamonds? Also not allergic. Cashmere... ditto.
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