In the interest of actually posting something

I'll post this following not so exciting blog.

Don't you really want to read it now? It's like giving someone a present and prefacing them opening it with the statement: "If you don't like it you can always take it back."

Anyway. I've been extremely tired recently. Last night when we had our fantastic and fabulous sleepover extravaganza 2008, there was a mention of narcolepsy. Now I am of course convinced that I am narcoleptic. Is that a word? I think so. Anyway, much like my fear of catching the diseases that I see on medical shows, or being murdered the way that people are murdered on shows like Bones, I am now definitely positive that I have narcolepsy from that one conversation.

Is that normal? Probably not. I mean, I don't know if most people watch a TV show where a person dies from a cerebral hemorrhaging a year after they receive a light blow to the head, and said viewer becomes fearful that they have hit their head at some point hard enough to possibly cause slow bleeding in the brain that they will eventually drop dead from at the tender age of 27. Or is it? I wonder if there's a term for that - the conviction that bad things might happen to you at every turn? Probably. I should go look on WebMD. Or maybe I shouldn't watch these shows. But I love them.

...and let's not even touch on the strange obsession I have with fonts. That would just make me sound like a super freak. As if what I wrote above doesn't already...

scrabulous

Or something called something similar to that.

So I'm moving shortly. I'm nervous. I think I'll get over it. I hope.

Anyway. I was in the middle of accessing my scrabulous game on facebook.com tonight. However, for some reason it's telling me that I have NO active games, when in fact I do have at least one active game, and I know this for a FACT!

Damn you scrabulous you dirty, dirty beyattttch!! because what I really need is to waste my last week here on internet scrabble. Obviously.

Subway smells

That title is cleeeeeeverly misleading!! I'm so tricky. You could look at it and think to yourself -- ooooh yes. The subway in pretty much every major metropolitan city does smell Liz, you observant girl you. And you'd be right, and I'd be right, because they DO smell!!

However. I speak of Subway the sandwich making store. Hence, my trickery. And while I'm on the subject - why and how did that food store earn it's more unillustrious name?? Honestly, why would you want to name your store after the subway system anyway?

Anyway, Subway's really do smell - I've always been a bit creeped out from it. I used to walk past one on my way to work every morning, and there was always this odor... I think it's the bread. The icky, flat, flappy bread that they use for their sandwiches. And this morning I had the pleasure of smelling that smell in my very own apartment. That's right. This morning I discovered why the Subway smell had always been so vaguely familiar to me.

It's because it smells like cat poop. That's right. Jared's favorite restaurant smells like cat poop. And there you have it.

What are four hundred rabbits hopping backwards? A receding hare line.

And what are four hundred rabbits doing in tiny little jars at the bottom of my stairs? Being eaten by my cat.

That's right. My baby bob cat (and nina toot as well) has been given doctor's orders because of his asthma (he's coughing as I type this) to eat Rabbit. Not rabbit mixed with anything else - just straight up rabbit.

Now I know, I know: cats are obviously canivores. They're not supposed to eat bread and grain and veggies and chocolate (although try telling Nina that when she has a half a roll sticking out of her mouth). But honestly - rabbit??? I didnt even eat rabbit when I ate meat, and now it's my duty to scoop out this rabbit into dishes for my cats to chow down. It makes me uncomfortable.

And yes, I just wrote a blog about my cats. So?

Bookkkkkkkkzzz

I stole this from Janet, who stold it from Suz. Books are fun!

What you do is take the following list of books (the top 106 marked most often as 'unread' by LibraryThing’s users) bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you started but couldn’t finish, strike through the ones you really sort of hated, put an asterisk next to the ones you’ve read more than once, and mark in green the ones on your own personal To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (so long ago I do not remember a single thing about it. Must read it again.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (STRIKETHROUGH!!!)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair (STRIKETHROUGH!!!)
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (BOO ON CHARLES DICKENS.)
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (Am going to read actually shortly, swear.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man
Love In the Time of Cholera (personal favorite)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons (is this by the same guys who wrote The DaVinci Code? Why is it on this list???)
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (boo)
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (apparently I really need to read this)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces (in the process of reading currently - finally)
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : A True Account of A Multiple Murder and Its Consequence
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Note to Self:

Googling your name, when you have a name as common as mine, is probably not a good idea unless your desired outcome was akin to the scene in Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy that I oft reference where Arthur Dent looks into the mirror and sees how small he is in comparison to the rest of the universe (a quote that I swear I'll eventually find again).

Boo on all the other Liz Lawson's! Boo on them! Or maybe we should all join a club, and sit around and eat soft pretzels and salt and quesadillas and listen to music. Because obviously every other Liz Lawson on the planet is exactly like me.

I'm the original model.

Or maybe I'll change my name to ... Zil Noswal. I bet it's few and far between who would share that name with me.

Update: Apparently while there may not be anyone named Zil Noswal, or at least anyone that can be found by a google search, there is a site that has those two words in it. Click on it if you want to barf. I know it's so enticing when someone says "do this and it'll make you REALLY sick!" And yes, I just said barf.

Hmmm...

I saw Australian Pink Floyd last night. Seriously. They actually call themselves Australian Pink Floyd. They didn't even attempt to come up with a clever name for themselves, like Dark Star Orchestra (a Grateful Dead tribute band) or The Soft Parade (The Doors cover band).

Even stranger is the fact that Pink Floyd itself recently reunited (in 2005, but that's recently enough for me, seriously, what's two year in comparison to the 1034343783 bazillion years that the earth has been in existence? *note: I may have exaggerated that number, since we all know that really the earth has been in existence only approx. 5,000 years, at which time God created it, as well as Adam and Eve).

Okay got off topic, what's new.

So. Tribute bands. Are they weird? I mean, aren't people who play Carnegie Hall in essence "tribute" pianists to the composer who wrote the particular piece of music? Or is that somehow different because there aren't any words, or because a composer differs from a band of people who make music together, or because the composers are typically dead, whereas the members of Pink Floyd are most definitely not (except Syd Barrett, but since he left the band back in the '60's I'm not sure that he should count, although he did name the band and basically came up with its psychedelic sound, so maybe I'm wrong on this).

Then again, Jerry Garcia is dead (some would claim differently of course, but those are the same people who have friends inside their own heads...) and I still find it sort of odd that there are a wide range of tribute bands to the Dead, many of which make bank.

Beyond the irony of the name and the irony of tribute/cover bands in and of themselves, an even greater irony existed in the hall last night. There they were - a tribute band playing to an audience who (for the most part) used to listen to their music back in the day, but who now work corporate jobs, and who were singing along to lines like "We don't need no education," but (to clearly stereotype) who likely headed home to their mc-mansions and sent their kids off to prep school in the morning, so they can get into the "best" colleges, and have offspring who do the same exact things, over and over and over....

The best part was the SUV that was apparently being raffled off in the lobby area.

Days of yore

Before flying to Vegas tonight, I decided for no particular reason to attempt to set up my Mac "Entourage" system. I need the contact part of it, which was obviously straightforward and which I figured out how to use in less than a second, but for some reason I decided to try and figure out how to have my email sent from my Gmail to my Entourage. (I sort-of understand why it's called Entourage, and I get that it's cute because there's a vaguely misogynistic and homo-erotic HBO show that shares the name, but it kind of annoys me, especially now that I've written the word Entourage about 12 times in two minutes.

Therefore, I will stop writing it and refer to this new system as something else. How bout E. I'm creative, yes I know.

Anyway, the point of this little diatribe is that since I have no idea what I'm doing, the E is currently downloading ALL of my email from my Gmail inbox into its system. I have 4,648 emails in my Gmail inbox. This is not the best use of my time, especially since I'm one of those people who finds it fascinating to read emails that I sent about a year ago (or more). I'm also one of those people who looks at the photo albums of old high school friends and acquaintances on facebook (don't worry Janet you are not alone, although you already knew this).

So I've been reading tons of old emails. For no particular reason other than I wish I was already on my plane, and I like wasting time that I shouldn't be wasting. It's some what depressing, pretty hilarious, and more than a little bit gratifying, since as I'm looking back on emails from a specific person who I don't speak to anymore and who shall remain nameless, I see how much that relationship was draining me and how much better off I am without them. And, it's a little sad, because I see one friendship that has ended that had gone on for years, but in the end just wasn't worth my time and energy, and I realize that I still miss her.

I also see how much lonelier I used to be. How much I've grown. It's kind of awesome.

(Updated, in case anyone care, which they probably don't, but I do, so I'm writing this: I just realized that my email is also sending all my SENT messages to the E. There are 4012 sent messages in my Gmail account. This is insanity.)

Poli-ticks and other frustrations

I'm back. Yeah, not every day, but I'm trying. I really am. However, after my bizarre post the other day about meteorology, I decided to encourage myself to post when I had something interesting to say, rather than force myself to write every day and come up with inane garbage.

That being said, today I have something to say. Prompted in part by my drive back to DC today from my parents house which got me thinking about things, which of course resulted me in getting annoyed at the world at large (or more specifically at the political system that we have going on this country).

Election '08. Yeah. We know it's happening because, well, because the lovely 24-hour media began to blather about it back in March. Really. Is it necessary to begin to obsess about the election a year and a half before it will actually occur? Apparently so.

At first, initially, I was somewhat excited about this go around. I mean, anything would be better than the last two elections - with Gore/Bush and freaking John Kerry/Bushie as the "choices" (great "democratic" system we're kept up here, but I'll complain about that more later, don't you worry). Where could we go but up from '00 and '04, one might think?

And one did. I did. I thought, well golly gee it couldn't get annnnny worse! There's no way that this go-round we'd be subjected to even crappier choices!

Oh. But there is.

Because right now it looks like the American voters will be in the unenviable position of choosing between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani in Election '08. That's right. We get the choice of the government controlling everything, or Giuliani womanizing and 9-elevening his way into office. Yes, we understand that you were the mayor of NYC during 9-11. Seriously. We do.

But we also understand...well...stuff like this: Charles Hill to serve as Chief Foreign Policy Advisor; Norman Podhoretz joins as a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor. And lovely video:



Which is entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran"

We also understand that health care is a BIG BIG problem in the United States right now. Seriously. It is. And I think that both sides get this, but as usual, have no idea how to approach the problem in a reasonable way.

For instance: "Currently, the big companies that don't offer health insurance to their employees tend to be retailers and banks. Herzlinger points out that if they are required to pay an additional $5,000 for health insurance for a clerk earning $22,000, the companies will immediately start substituting capital for labor. In other words, economically vulnerable clerks would be fired and replaced by automated systems or by offshore workers. Instead of just lacking health insurance they would now be out of a job." Harvard business school professor Regina Herzlinger

So basically, instead of having a job and having the opportunity to get a promotion and then get health insurance, as the current situation goes, (which granted is far less than ideal), instead (COOL!) the clerk will just simply lose their job. But, under HillaryCare, at least they'd still have health insurance, right??

Riiiiight: "Under Clinton's plan if you're uninsured you're going to go to one store, the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program," says Herzlinger. The problem, as Herzlinger sees it, is that this one store offers products designed by federal bureaucrats. She likens FEHBP insurance policies to going to buy a car and finding that only two-door subcompacts by various manufacturers are available. The cars offer different colors and hubcaps, but they are all two-door subcompacts. In other words, there is little consumer choice. The situation is even worse for the Medicare option."

My problem, in simple terms is this: the Government thinks You're Stupid. That's right.

The Government. Thinks. You're. Stupid.

The Republicans want to take away all your social choice - your right to choose, your right to smoke drugs, your right to marry who you want to marry, in essence, your right to social freedom and liberty.

And guess what?

The Democrats think your dumb too!! They want to give gay people "civil unions" because god knows that that's just EQUAL to marriage (no, actually it's not). They want to regulate what you can do (employment), and where you can do it. They want to control where you get your health care, and your economic freedom. And guess what? Normally, it's the Democrats in office that are for things like eminent domain! Yup, those Dems that allegedly stick up for the "little people"?? Well, if that person's land and home is in the way of a subcontractor's dream building, or happens to be on a piece of land that the government wants to develop then, sorry dude! You and your family history is g-o-n-e gone.

It's awesome. I love our two party system of "choice." And I love our media that boils everything down to catchphrases and simplistic, biased thinking, instead of providing the entire story up front. And I particularly love this bizarre thing that seems to have happened over the past 5 years, this idea that has seeped into our culture, and made it "cool" to think one way, straight lined.

I'd love it if we could actually get back to the roots of the counter-culture, that doesn't love the government and embrace it as a BFF AEAE, but instead yells at it, combats it and says things like "Think for yourself. Question Authority." And the most obvious: "Damn the Man. Fight the Power."

Dogs On Acid - Only in a Parallel Universe

When I was younger, I really wanted to be a meteorologist (which interestingly enough, according to the blogger spellcheck, I can't even spell). Not one of those weather women you see on TV that have Vaseline coated on their teeth - a real weather person, who tracks things like hurricanes. I thought it would be really cool to move to Antarctica, spend my days wearing a jacket that looks like this:
and maybe own a pack of dogs like the ones in Jack London's The Call of the Wild.

Then I discovered that I was bad at science (possibly caused by an undiagnosed case of ADD), and that dream fell flat on its face. However, this might not have been too much of a tragedy, since I dislike camping, and I can only imagine that living in the tundra is much like camping, only with more clothes, less marshmallows, and more scary snow animals that might eat you in the night.

(Okay seriously, why did this image come up when I typed "scary snow animal" into Google image search? Google, this is the first time that you have failed me. How could you?!?)

I went to see the Dalai Lama speak yesterday

This man is amazing. Not only is he a fan of modern technological advances, interested in psychotherapy, and an advocate of non-violence - he's also hilarious. Really - those photos of the Dalai Lama that you may have seen on the internet - where he's making faces, having fun - they actually weren't photoshopped! (I always thought they were.)

Dalai Lama for president! OF THE WORLD!

To me, every day means...umm...

Yeah. So my grand idea of writing "every day" on this didn't quite come to fruition. Regardless of that false start, I'll try again. Here and now.

My last day of my last job was Friday. This job I had for a grand total of 3 months and 2 weeks. Almost a record for me. (Sadly, it actually is in fact almost a record for me.) I'm getting fairly desperate at this point to figure out what I want to do with my life, because not only am I convinced that other people have begun to look at me and think "well there's Liz. That sad and lonely 27 year old girl who will never make much of her life," but I have begun to think of myself like that as well. (And most likely my thoughts are the cause of my belief that other people think the same way. Projection is a serious problem for most people, and I'm absolutely the President of the Projection Club. Even though I want to kill projection a lot of the time.)

Now I have time again. I'm not so good with time again, but I'm desperate to be at least better at it this time around. I feel like I should rent an office space so I feel like I'm actually going to work in the mornings, since that might cause my brain to believe that I'm a real, productive person, instead of melting into my couch as it tends to do.

in essence: I am scared. I am scared of free time, I am scared of myself not trying, I am scared that I'll end up at my high school reunion in a year (if I actually end up at the reunion in the first place, which is most definitely debatable), and have to say to people, "Well, I've lived in six different cities since graduation, and had many more jobs than that, but as for me...? Oh, well here's my boyfriend and he works for Dallas Austin."

Yeah that'd be awesome.

I have a year. One year. (It's good to set time limits (right?), and maybe I can scare myself into actually not being scared of life. Which, in essence, is a lot like people who beat their animals in the hopes that the punishment will make them behave. Super positive and realllllly healthy philosophy behind this thinking. Agh. At least I recognize it thought...right?? Ummm...)

Sometimes I think it would be easier to live in a state of complete and utter lack of control, where the State did everything for me.

Seriouuuuuuuusly. I'm not joking (okay yes I am, sort of), but honestly, as a person whose decision making skills are down there with ... ummm ... a really low level animal's like an ameba or something that doesn't really have a brain, sometimes I DO honestly think that life would be much easier if other people made all my decisions for me.

I've often said that my skill as a decision maker are somewhere on the George Costanza level, and have one several occasions contemplated trying his idea of doing everything backward, completely in antithesis of my natural instincts. Because, honestly, maybe then my life would make a little bit more sense, and people wouldn't look at me and my actions and say "Liz. YOU ARE INSANE." (And I wouldn't have to agree with them even if they did still say that.)

If the State (or another person: my puppet master) would just tell me what to do, then I wouldn't have to make all the small stupid decisions that fill up daily life. Or the big ones, like where to attend college (I transferred), where to live after college (um...5 places and counting so far), and what to do with my life professionally (that would be a serious relief, esp. if I lived in a society in which all the hard work was done FOR me and I just got to be the faux boss of everyone, the head of my own little puppet state, where I was fed and cared for, and basically really really stupid ... oh wait! I just described a non-pedophilic version of Michael Jackson)!

Okay neat, I have a role model now. That makes me feel much better about...well...nothing in particular, but I can pretend. Right?

Karma is a bitch...or something

Now that I've grown (fairly) accustom to getting up before 11 a.m. every morning (although I miss it miss it MISS IT), I've decided that I no longer should just go home after work and hole up in my apartment every evening. I'm not one for routine, and that's putting it mildly....so getting out of both work and the apartment for a while every day seems like the other thing that [might] save my sanity (although of course it's debatable about whether I ever actually, um, had my sanity to begin with. But I digress, as usual.).

Anyway so last night was my first attempt at Being A Good Person (okay not my first attempt at that ever, but the first in DC so far), and Getting Out of the House. I had scheduled a meeting with this woman to talk about opportunities tutoring refugess through her organization after work, and the address of her organization was the same as my work, so I figured oh great, I'll just walk there! (I hate driving in DC - I've done it a grand total of once so far, and ended up driving around Dupont Circle about 52 times. It was like something out of National Lampoon's European Vacation or something. I mean, honestly, who thought it would be a good idea to build a freaking city with a bunch of wagon wheels in it? How are you supposed to have ANY idea what road to turn off of from the circles? I have no idea. I strongly believe that the people who planned Philly were much less evil than those who planned DC. Strongly believe it.)

Right. So. I realize during the day that the weather is looking vaguely threatening outside the building, although the rain had managed to hold off all day. Of course, I dont have an umbrella (ella ella), so I email the girl in the middle of the afternoon and tell her that I might not make it in, on account of rain. By the time I leave work, it's not raining, and being me, I guilt trip myself into going, even though honestly all I really want to do at that point is get back to the city before the rain begins.

I make it there and the clouds are still closed. That is not to say that it didn't take me nearly 40 minutes to walk there, since my assumption that two buildings that happen to be on the same road as each other are therefore close to each other was obviously blatently WRONG (you know what they say about assumptions. Yeah). So there I am, deep into the ghetto of Arlington (honestly, it exists!! I swear). I finally find the building, meet with the girl, realize that it's a Catholic organization, am told that they strongly encourage people to refrain from trying to convert the refugees (they have an entire pamphlet dedicated to "Evangilism and Refugees" no joke) and hear her call some other person a Sister (uhh). I'm a little creeped out, but still interested because she's not the person that I'm going to be tutoring (thank her G-O-double D).
I walk out of the building, and it's POURING RAIN. Now, I may have forgotton to mention this above, but I am wearing a White Dress. Yes. White. Entirely white. White as a...white bunny rabbit. White as a baby's butt. White as a cloud in a non-stormy sky. White.

And I don't have an umbrella.

Ever heard of wet t-shirt contests?

Yeah.

In the gheeeeetto.

In the twilight.

So I decide, why not hold this nice blue folder over my head that I was given during my meeting? Bright ideas are always coming to me like that. Uh huh.
5 minutes later, it's dripping its runny ink down my (once) white dress. And, no, it didn't look like some cool tie-dye because 1. it didn't and 2. "cool" tie-dye is an oxymoron anyway.

There are no cabs in sight.

I walk back 2 miles, and finally get to the metro, but not before I am creeped up on by several people walking by, am nearly run over in the median of a really busy road that apparently doesn't believe in cab service, am distracted and walk all the way back to the office which is a good 5 blocks PAST the metro, and get into a fight with a jerk who had the audacity to honk at me when I was crossing the street in front of him (dude you're in a caaaaaaaaaaar, I'm walking in the pouring rain, who do you think gets the right of way in that scenario? Yeah. ME.)

I'm alive, but wondering why Karma seems to be an evil old hag so much of the time...

The adventures of Metrogirl and other stories.

Sometimes when I'm walking around, or sitting, or standing, or...I guess being awake...my brain will start to wander. (Yes, being awake would be most accurate, since my brain wanders pretty much continuously...)

Anyway, my brain wanders. Yeah. As if that wasn't obvious just from that first mini-paragraph. So I'll be sitting on the metro, or walking down the street, or walking back to the apartment, and I like to play a little game with my wandering brain called "What if I did something right now totally against the expectations of society, and what would the repercussions of that action be." I like this game, because it keeps me entertained, and keeps other people entertained to, because they are able to go home at night and say to their loved ones "Hey blankityblank, I saw a totally crazy person today, who was laughing to herself walking down the street! She looked like she belonged in a mental institute. Isn't that neat?!" (I like to provide entertainment for strangers. I feel it's giving back to society, like a constant form of community service.)

The only problem with this game is, recently I've been really contemplating doing the things that I imagine. Not that I actually would (um, I swear), but they're becoming more and more tempting as the weeks pass. For example: yesterday I was walking home from the Metro and I passed by this truck emptying its contents onto the street. I thought, I wonder what the worker guys would do if I just walked up, nonchalantly grabbed a box, and wandered away. I mean, REALLY nonchalantly, like I was supposed to be there or something. And when they grabbed me, which they would in like .5 seconds, I would look at them like they were the crazy ones and start yelling for the cops. OR...what if on the way to work one day, I just decided not to get off the Metro. Ever. I just refused, and rode it all night and all day, and when it stopped for the night, I would just stay on it. I'd live there. Of course, I'd have to bring a bunch of food with me, or bribe passengers to bring some food down, but I'd totally be famous. I'd be known as Metrogirl, and people would think that I had superpowers, except that they wouldn't be able to get close, because my greatest superpower would be my smell.

Or what if I jumped onto the back truck of a car that was stopped at a stop light, right as it turns green, and the person didn't notice, and I just rode away on it, while holding on for dear life.
Life would be so much more interesting if people did totally unpredictable things. Of course, we'd all be living in a loony bin, but it would be entertaining at least.

Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler

Have you ever noticed how office supplies look vaguely threatening? Seriously, I just spent 5 minutes with the staple remover thingiemagigger, and it started reminding me of a mean alien insect or something. What if one night all the office supplies somehow came to life and started traipsing through the office corridors, and the next day when the first employee arrived, they surrounded him/her like sharks and started to nibble? And then the next person came in and the same thing happened. How long do you think it would take for office supplies to take over the world? Not long my friend, not long at all.

Of course, that's not to say that I think that they would ALL be evil, that's just silly. I think that rubber bands would probably be kind of daft, not smart enough to plan ahead, just to follow, and post-it notes would probably take on the personality that they were given when written on. The ones that have crazy notes on them or stuff like "I'm sorry, I can't, don't hate me" (haha except that wasn't in an office of course) would become super evil masterminds, and the others would be totally nice and mild-mannered, until of course they were caught unaware by the pens and written on and scribbled on and THEN...then (much like Gremlins) they would be evvvvvillllll!!!!!!!!

Except the one named Gizmo.

ennui.

Apparently there is a band named Ennui that hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsyltucky. Does this strike anyone but me as odd? Why in god's name would you want to call your band (in essence) boredom. I understand that they were probably going more for "ooooh we're sooooo cool and above society etc etc etc whine whine whiiiiny whine whine" (and no that doesn't sound like me at all, ehhem), but a) that is lame of them and b) ... never mind I'm bored of them already.

Anyway, the point is, that I think that I'm suffering from ennui. Do you think that it can be treated medically? I can pop some pills and POOF puff the magic draaagon will appear and start singing me some Peter Paul and Mary songs? (Well technically speaking, I suppose that this would actually happen if I self-medicated with the right combination of stuff. Hmmm. That's something to keep in mind.)

Seriously though, I can totally understand sometimes why people become drunks and drug addicts and why Lindsey Lohan can't stay sober for more than .3 milleseconds before having to do that next lil' line of ...

Yeah.

It's because they don't look up enough. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. My sister's boyfriend's BFF AEAE apparently sees me walking to from the Metro to work about once a wekk, and I'm allegedly standing on corners listening to my iPod and sort of looking around at the sky (and I guess appearing like a well-dressed homeless crazy person, but that's neither here nor there). While that may or may not be true (it is), it's true that I do believe that looking up now and again is reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally important for sanity's sake.

It's amazing all the things we miss (esp. if you live in a city with tall buildings) while we walk around to work to home to bars to restaurants to sporting activites to shows to etc....our heads down our eyes not really looking at much. Last night I got the idea in my head that I'd like to move to New Mexico. Or Arizona. Or Colorado. Where the sky is enormous and at any moment in time, if you keep on going in your car fast enough and long enough, it looks like you might just be able drive right into the clouds.

Politics, religion and other things you shouldn't discuss at the dinner table

I'm not a religious person; I would term myself spiritual, but certainly not a God/Jesus-lover, although I do love the church signs in the South that make bold, declaratory statements about the evolution of man, and vague, somewhat sinister threats of what God's gonna do to you if he's disturbed from heaven ("DON'T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE!!" being one of my faves) - because as we all know it's SO much easier to be Good if we're being constantly threatened by a omnipresent source of power who we're afraid is going to beat us up at any moment. Sometimes I wonder if this bizarre image of God might cause some battered-woman syndrome in some people...I mean honestly.

That being said, I do believe in something. My way of thinking is that there HAS to be something holding it all together (albeit with pretty thin string).

Sometime I get the feeling that I'm the only one (perhaps because of my egomaniacle way of thinking) that gets totally confused and astounded by the way the world works. Or doesn't work, at times. I mean, honestly, how WEIRD is it that, for example, people waiting for the Metro can stand there, at the edge of the train track, waiting for the train, and NOT be afraid that some random stranger might come up behind them and give them a little nudge, a little shove, and BOOM they sail over the side and into a million little pieces, if you want to quote James Frey, which nobody really does now-a-days, thanks to Oprah and her insanity. Seriously. So trusting! We all stand there in our own little worlds, and I do have to wonder (in amazement) about our civility. At times it drives me mad - the civilized drones that work hard and play easy, our Ikea loving materialistic comforts that have turned us from animals into, what? Yes, I'm verging on some Fight Club territory here, and Chuck Palahniuk annoys the crap out of me normally, so I don't particularly want to continue with this line of thought, but honestly. IT'S WEIRD!!

(Disclaimer: I'm not by any means saying that I would actually want people to start going around shoving each other in front of trains, or driving into oncoming traffic for fun, because anarchy in theory is sort of cool, but in actual practice is pretty damn scary, but merely stating how freaking insane it is that it is considered normal that it doesn't happen.)

With so much drama in da L-B-C, it's kinda hard bein' Snoop D-O-double G

Woot woot! My brain is tiiiiired.

That's all, for now.