bloggrrilla

tri report

2007-07-31T18:41:00.001-04:00

The triathlon is done! It was easier and harder than expected (easier in the swim, harder in the bike and run), I was faster than I thought (in the run), and I actually felt better physically after the tri than I did after either of my two (last years) running races.

Also, I came out close to the top quarter of all racers, combining all times and my transition times. I mean, I'll take that! This wasn't near as bad as I thought I would be.

Of course my slowest time was in the swim event. Nonetheless, the wetsuit helped enormously. I didn't get super tired, although I did find myself swimming the long way round, because I kept forgetting to sight. It was darkish and foggy too. I was looking at minnows and fronds for a while, then i realized that all the flailing human bodies were headed a different way. Ah me. At any rate, it was over soon enough and I rose out of the water like the swamp thang, peeled off my neoprene carapace and donned biker chic.

At first I was elated to get out of the water and onto my bike, where I really do feel most at home. I started to fly...WHEEEEEE!!! I started to feel like I was just going to kick ASS. WHEEEEEE! ...
and then WHEEEEE gradually turned to "f**k. F**K. HOLY F**KING SH*T!" There were hills. LOTS of hills. Hills throughout the WHOLE course. And these were steepish hills. LONG hills. Short stocky fat hills that came one after another in an annoying steplike fashion. Hills with smaller hills on their peaks like massive pimples on a nose. I could not believe it. Later, I looked at the website, which actually described the course as "challenging". Why, thank you. I was not expecting challenging for this baby tri. Nonetheless. I persevered. However, I forgot that I was to hold back some mojo for the run. Also, my race number flew off my bike at one point, and I, like a stupid dummy, went back to get it. As I picked it up, someone whipped past me saying "oh you don't need that..." haha. But I am so damned anal that i held onto it for the rest of the ride. My pace was average of 16mph overall. This is no tour de france-type pace, but, hey, for me, on hills, it was ok.

Then, I had a surprisingly good pace on the running portion (8:18 min mile, which is also no elite pace, but is a good pace for me). This was amazing, because i was trying to run slow, just so that i wouldn't have to give up and walk, because, as already stated, I had sorta blown my wad on the bicycle portion. Running after biking did not feel good, despite the fact that in the gym, it often does. But then, in the gym, my bike training is usually pretty half assed, and the treadmill soft and forgiving... Here, my legs felt like they were slamming the pavement hard with every step. I tried to consciously make my footfall softer, but it wasn't easy... Additionally, at the beginning, someone handed me a packet of sports beans which i clutched the entire time, wanting to eat them, but not really knowing how to do it in a non-spastic manner. Thus, i did both the bike and run holding on to unnecessary objects. I suppose that is good training for wartime or something. I dunno.

I did my transitions in a leisurely and calm fashion. Since I used to perform in some rather prop-heavy shows, I am good at setting up my props and keeping that part of things together. I did not feel like rushing, especially since I was more interested in my separate times for each event than my overall time. Nonetheless, in looking at my stats, it would behoove me to shave a bit off those times...I mean, I could have had a light luncheon in the time it took to get from swimming to biking...

I've decided i am a fan of the triathlon. It has something for everyone. Enough physical punishment for the masochist, enough gear for the gear head, enough planning and lists and setting up for the obsessive compulsive, enough exercise for the fitness minded, enough of a "pack" for the social, and enough autonomy for us loners (after they call your swim wave, you are really on your own for the rest of the race, you basically make up your own schedule...)

I spose I'll have to get that swim time up, tho. If my swim percentile had matched my bike and run percentiles, I'd have done a lot better stat wise. Ah well. Maybe I'll just buy a better wetsuit...

Honey in da house

2007-07-06T20:13:00.000-04:00

Well, the hon-ster had her surgery, and has recovered nicely. We had some awful bout with pain meds, which resulted in probably way more stress for yours truly, the inept yet glumly determined caretaker, than for the resilient 4 pound entity known (reluctantly) as Honey. But now, things are happier, and this morning 12 pound Pink was appropriately chased up and down the hall, after attempting to steal food from the feisty surgery patient.

Her prognosis still isn't great, but we're exploring some homeopathic remedies, cause we're not sure chemo is the best option for her at this point. We'll see.

For now, she's having a good time. Which is, of course, as it should be.

eats, poos and stays

2007-07-06T20:07:00.000-04:00

I may be overdoing it a bit. In my continuing quest to convince myself of my health and invincibility, I am working full time, training for a triathlon (and actually training as though I were a healthy person), and , in a move worthy of florence catingale, have taken over the care and feeding of yet another cat, but this one has....good god dare I say it...breast cancer.

Yep. a rescuer that i work with found poor little Honey (i didn't name her, guys, lay off), in really bad shape in a courtyard. Although she is an adult cat, she weighed about 4 lbs, had thyroid counts off the charts, and a large, ulcerated mass on her chest. That was 3 weeks ago. Now, she lives in my former home office room, where she occupies a now soft t-shirt covered desk newly devoid of computers, eats like a princess, takes thyroid meds, and runs around chasing my other cats who treat her like an interesting yet frustrating oddity (does she like us or doesn't she? will she play or won't she? is she serious when she hisses or isn't she?)

And, tomorrow she goes for her mastectomy. Yes, cats get them too.

The rescuer and I are told we are crazy for doing this, b/c her prognosis is not great no matter what we do. But, my god. the little cat is so full of life. Even at her lowest point she'd get up on you and demand petting. She apparently was catching mice even as her counts were skyrocketing, and her tumor was growing. So, she wants a chance. And, she'll get it.

Well, I have to confess, the only reason I went to law school was to be a good provider for cats. So, she gets her chance.

Like I have mine.

tell me something I don't know

2007-05-11T20:28:00.001-04:00

Your Personality is Very Rare (INTP)

Your personality type is goofy, imaginative, relaxed, and brilliant.

Only about 4% of all people have your personality, including 2% of all women and 6% of all men

You are Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.

How Rare Is Your Personality?

my goodness

2007-03-11T21:12:00.000-04:00

i have fallen into the realm of the unblogged. i am not immortalizing my every twitch and fart these days. the blogosphere weeps...

the names of cats. saturday cat blog

2007-02-03T17:22:00.000-05:00

Abigail = abby, abner, abnerilla, fanxnorilla, rilla, riller, riller van rillerstein, rillette, rilly, marilla maroo, roo, mrooo, abster, abnoid, ner, abnoria, abnorium.

Pink = pinkster, potato head, mr. potato, pinky-winky, pink the wink, pink van winkelstein, winkster, baxter, opus pinkoid, opus pinkorium, magnum opoid, opoid, batata, batista,

Lou = loooooooooooo, looper, loupoid, lupus, louf. (she hasn't been en famille long enuff to have alot of nicknames. and she won't hold still long enuff)

barbaro

2007-01-30T20:31:00.000-05:00

I was sad to find out that Barbaro was euthanized yesterday. I've been pulling for him all along. He and I had surgery on the same day last May y'know. It's just sad. I guess I really really wanted a happy ending.

But, keep in mind, folks, there are lots of other animals, horses, cats, dogs, cows, pigs, mice, birds, iguanas, etc, that don't get anywhere near the care and attention Barbaro got, and die sad little deaths all the time, on the side of the road, in a factory farm, in the vet's office, in backyards, in vacant lots, in forests, in fields. I'm mourning them too, today. Sometimes it's the way of nature, but, a lot of it, a fairly prodigious amount of it, is human-caused suffering. We need to open our eyes to it...even when it's not Barbaro that dies...

2007-01-23T21:08:00.000-05:00

I know I know. I majorly did NOT rise to the challenge of posting every day. I mean, it's really all I can do to keep up with my life. So, let's all move on shall we?

On the job front, I am DETERMINED to catch up, because I am tired of sneaking in (late) taking and hour and a half in the middle of each day to go to the gym, and leaving (earlyish) and feeling guilty about it. I mean I won't stop doing those things of course, but i do not wish to feel guilty any more. Ergo, I guess I'll just catch up. Appropos of that, I have designated this week "Type A" week, in which I impersonate someone effective who gives a shit about her job. To that end, I worked on Sunday, stayed late last night, stayed late-ish tonight, and only checked my email 85 times today. I did still go to the gym of course. As I've said before, I'm addicted. I love my gym. until i get my bike, the gym it is. I project that i will catch up in the next couple weeks and then I can go back to slack.

On the physical front (what front? I have no more real front), I feel pretty good. In 2 weeks I get my expanders out and the implants (saline) in. that will be a welcome change, as I've had these damned hockey pucks sitting on my chest way too long. And it's not like, because they are hockey pucks, they are impervious to pain. OH no. I am reminded every time I bathe that i am still made of flesh and blood, sadly enough. I also try not to look at myself naked more than once per week, which is easily enough accomplished, I just make sure to fog up the mirror inthe bathroom when I shower, and that's the only mirror in the house. No wonder I sometimes show up to work wearing two different socks and with my fly undone.

Cancer has definitely killed one of the seven deadlies... that one being vanity. But i make up for it in gluttony and sloth...I won't talk about lust, lest i get another joyous comment from my evangelical constituents....

cuppycake

2007-01-10T20:29:00.000-05:00

the Ex tortures me today with the cuppycake video and song, which, if I had swallowed poison, and needed a good emetic, I would certainly appreciate, but, since I would like to keep my dinner flowing in the proper direction (that is, from top to bottom so to speak), I do not appreciate in the least.

People should have to sign a contract when they purchase video equipment, or even cellphones with any digital recording capability that they will not, EVER, videotape their child singing ANY song for the camera, even if that song is the overture from carmina burana, or one of the more decadent stylings from the weimar cabarets. Get it through your head, people, your idea of "cute" or "talented" is my idea of vomit inducing. so don't do it. I don't care if it made cuppycake a star.

not my fault

2007-01-07T21:00:00.000-05:00

tried to post and blogger ate it...
hahahahahah not my fault...

o bother

2007-01-06T17:50:00.000-05:00

Yes I know, I know, i already blew it (forgot to post last night). Well, really, lest ye wish to cast the first stone, how long did your new years resolution last?

At any rate, we saw Borat last night. It was pretty damned funny, but, i have to say, I laughed harder at Jackass 2, which made me almost wet my pants. In fact I want to BE johnny knoxville.

Guess my movie choices show what kind of brow I am/have (low, lower, lowest?). My brow ridges must be threatening my nostrils by now. I don't really know what high brow humor would be, or if we have it any more. I mean, Oscar Wilde? Isn't that more gay than high brow? Maybe gay humor is the only highbrow humor there is? Except that I am about 98% sure that the jackass guys swing each and every way there is to swing...

Actually, all this testosterone based humor (I also watched Richard Pryor, live on sunset strip last week, which remains one of my faves. the cheetah bit alone is worth the stained bedsheets), has raised a question in that foggy area north of my overactive mandibles. Women can be funny, we know this. But, the serious low brow, wet your pants, stain your drawers, effluvia inducing humor of jackass remains out of our reach. Why? I think it's because females aren't generic enough. Jackass is funny because of what they do to their bodies, and, thus, the body that is done to, has to be generic enough to evoke humor rather than horror or vulnerability or lust. Really. if you think of women doing what johnny knoxville does, it just isn't funny. Because if she's pretty, you get distracted by that, and if she's not, you don't give a fuck. It's the way the world is. And, women probably wouldn't do it anyway, because the returns for us are not what they are for men, i.e., we can't make you laugh and make each other laugh and make millions of bucks doing it.

there are women who will mutter something essentialist about biology and women's superior intelligence, etc. very well. But, I for one think there is something completely euphoria-inducing about what the jackass guys do, and I'm not kidding either. If you take all your demons and make them physical, and then survive them, it must make you high as a kite. Keep in mind where I'm coming from with this. I am someone who has fallen down mountains, been shot, jumped hurdles while drinking tequila (with disastrous effect), been beaten up, and, more damaging than all of the above, had a semi-successful dance career. Thus, I must have some need to put myself through hell in pursuit of something (or in avoiding something) In my old age my body has become a source of fear for me, rather than a source of mastery. Is it any wonder I'm attracted to the bold and audacious misuse of said body by the jackasses? While women can DO wild stuff, we can't make you laugh doing it, we can only terrify, horrify or disgust you (not in a funny way, either). And THAT is kinda sucky. Because you need the whole thing. if it's just about doing it, that's not enough. The laughter has to be there too.

This is not making sense, because it's a blog, and therefore is a place for me to put half-baked ideas out there for all 4.5 of you to read. So i'm not fully fleshing this out, pun indeed intended.

At any rate, no, you won't be seeing me blindfolded in a bull ring anytime soon. at least i don't think so...

time

2007-01-04T20:13:00.000-05:00

I have nothing to say, and usually, I manage to stretch saying nothing out for at least several paragraphs, but today i really do not feel like blogging nothing. Nor do i feel like blogging anything. My job is really stressing me out, and, unfortunately, stress is not what I need right now. I just need time. TIME.

tempus, stop fugging.

fried

2007-01-03T19:44:00.000-05:00

Great sweet mother of bugger mad, slime-infested crapulent sons of beehives I cannot believe i made this god-forsaken resolution. I do not have anything to tell you and I am far too busy to give wilingly of my precious "down" time, all 29 minutes 33 seconds of it. Sigh. Ok Ok. I have no one to blame but everyone. I mean, peer pressure made me make this resolution. I should not be bound by it. I was not responsible at the time. I was coerced, I was intoxicated, I was fraudulently induced, and futhermore I lack capacity....(except i seem to have an endless capacity for greasy vending machine snacks and anxiety, see below...)

Well, today I had one of my "hours of spaz". Sometimes my mind literally short circuits and I cannot make sense of anything I see. Usually this happens when I'm stressed or nervous and I have to admit I woke up even more anxious than I usually am, and believe me my general capacity for anxiety is even larger than my above legendary capacity for fried, bagged snack foods, preferably with some form of red flavoring on them. Thus, I spent the morning fruitlessly reading the same paragraph of a case over and over and thinking "what does this mean?" "what does this have to do with anything?" and even "what language is this?" and even "byaoenorid;fa;iupr /s///*U()_)???

Then, i got it together and managed to get some work done. I gotta get another job.

resolute-shun

2007-01-01T15:28:00.000-05:00

I resolve not to make any resolutions this year. As a general rule, my resolutions are pretty good, I mean I never resolve the usual things involving health, altruism, or self-improvement, so I'm never caught up in the usual, "quit smoking" "lose 10 pounds" boring crap. My resolutions, like most, however, sometimes seem to reflect some fantasy about what either I or my life should be...like "go to mongolia this year" or "have plastic surgery done in order to look like cate blanchet." My best resolutions were those I wrote in (sorta) jest, which consisted of resolutions to "harrass, irritate and otherwise make life miserable for those I love and cherish each and every day of the year" and "point out to well meaning strangers how dismal and hellish their lives really are". I managed to keep those....bwhahahahahah.

At any rate, in complete bipolar reversal of the first statement on this post, here's one for this year that I think I'll really try to keep. the beauty of it is, it's short term enough so that Ms. ADD may be able to do it, and fast enough (now) so that ms. alzheimers won't forget about it.

I resolve to write in one or the other of my blogs EVERY DAY FOR ONE (1) MONTH, that month being the month of January, 2007, i.e. starting today.

So there u have it, my very first step towards keeping my resolution. 30 more days to go. If I fail, feel free to dis the hell out of me. I love it. (See recent comment on "the year in fears" over at cancer-grrl...)

the year in fears

2006-12-31T18:46:00.000-05:00

Well, here's my second annual year end recap. all the news you can use and plenty you can't in wildly truncated form. I started bloggrilla last year at just about this time, and the 2005 recap was, in hindsight (i almost wrote "hindi-sight"), almost heartbreakingly touchingly sweet and naive, full of hope for the brand spanking new year that was 2006, a year that, we now know, will go down in the annals (yes yes, anals...) of abigail history as the year voted most likely to be expunged from the memory as a very very dark time.

However, expunge we do not, not yet anyway. before we expunge, we must memorialize. So here it is folks, I bring you, that annus horribilus, that dark year, that era of bad feeling, that era when the dark lord lifted his hand over dead sea and withered land -- 2006!!!

January: I enter the ranks of the gainfully employed for the first time in three blissful years of scholly-stipend-supported schooling. The BF and I go see Morris Day and the Time at BAM, and shake our stiff white butts.

February: I become acquainted with life as a bona fide, 9-5 (or, lets get real, 9 - whenever) proto-attorney (proto because I'm not sworn in until ....)

March: I am sworn in as a lawyah. Other than that, absolutely nothing happens.

April: I hit my first double digit run (10 miles) on the rainiest day of the year. As fate would have it, I catch a flu which sends me to a doctor, who discovers a lump, which sends me to have a mammogram, which sends me to a surgeon, who takes a biopsy, which shows cancer, which sends me to surgery, which involves a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction....shit, wait, back up this is only April. April is the cruellest month. In April, the doctor discovers a lump and sends me for a mammogram. On the last day of april, the EX and I walk the entire length of manhattan, and I convince myself, for one brief day, that I couldn't possibly have cancer.

May: On May 1 I am diagnosed with cancer. On May 19, I undergo a double mastectomy. After Memorial day, I go back to work, and no one is the wiser.

June: In June, I start chemo. And I buy a wig. Cancer grrl is born.

July: I lose my hair. I lose my eyebrows.

August: I lose my mind. I lose my patience. I lose any self delusion that I like my job or law in general as a career.

September: The Ex and I run the komen race. It is jolly good fun! Chemo ends, and not a moment too soon.

October: The BF and I go to Austin where we run the LiveStrong Challenge, which kicks my chemo-ized butt. I realize what a toll the whole thing has taken on my body, when a simple 5K run almost cripples me for a month.

November: Back to work. It just gets better and better (oh yeaaaahhh). My hair starts to grow back COMPLETELY GREY. I get spanked at work for a job crappily done. I dis and avoid thanksgiving dinner. There have to be SOME perks to survivorship.

December: I go to 2 holiday parties at work where I make nice, try not to embarrass myself, and try to keep my by now overused and severely stretched-out wig from shifting back off my forehead like some 1930s newsboy cap. I get a nice fat cold for xmas and skip another holiday dinner. I begin the foster-ship of yet another feral feline (pix to come...). The BF and I go to see Pina Bausch at BAM. It's nice, but I fall asleep.

Oh baby. From the bottom of my toxic heart, my teflon lungs, my three brain cells, I fervently fervently fervently pray to the deities for a much less interesting, much more peaceful, much less medicated, much less, um, well, terrifying year for myself, for mcuster, for carolyn, for marjory, and for all the other cancer bloggers I've compared notes with over the months. Let's all move on now, shall we?

god without man

2006-12-24T10:17:00.000-05:00

in my dream i'm running along a gravel road. there's bright sunshine, and yellow flowers on my left side. on my right side is a forest that's close to the road. the road is like a bright tunnel, heading straight forward into the blue. i'm going fast. Out of the yellow flowers on my left side comes one big animal, or two animals chasing each other. i think it's a lion, or cougar, or two of them but i can't tell. There's a flash of grey tan fur. It dashes ahead of me down the side of the road: soft, mad, low dash. it never goes on the road, it stays by the yellow flowers. It never morphs either into one animal or two, it remains indistinct, chaotic. I don't have time to think about what it is, i keep going forward.

Farewell Sea Turtle

2006-10-01T22:33:00.000-04:00

"...So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight;
Either was the other's mine..."*

yesterday, the Ex found this huge, beautiful sea turtle, maybe a loggerhead, who had crawled up on a beach in Staten Island and died. It is not a great cause for sadness, because, given his size, the turtle must have lived a long and turtle-full life, and it was probably time for him to die. Anyway tears aren't worth much in the ocean, because it's made of the same stuff. But this turtle was an awesome creature, and remains so, even decomposing. May he find his phoenix (or she, hers).

(excerpted from "The Phoenix and the Turtle" by Shakespeare, which is really about a turtle dove.

Come on Komen

2006-09-10T15:39:00.000-04:00

Ooh i didn't mean the title as it sounds. That is, i didn't mean it in any kind of porno way. I assure you...

at any rate, my komen race is run, and the report is over at cancer grrl for those of you brave enuff to read CG...

Last chance to be worthy

2006-09-06T20:39:00.000-04:00

That nagging "not so good" feeling puzzling you as you park your SUV, pack your 3 items of groceries in 3 plastic bags, eat your factory-farmed cruelty-heavy chicken from KFC? White liberal guilt got you down? Survivor guilt? Catholic, Jewish, secular humanist or lapsed Buddhist guilt? Wake up feeling irrelevant? A cog in the machine? A tool for the man?

ARE YOU JUST NOT WORTHY?

I CAN HELP!

yes folks, this is your last chance to do something real. Redeem yourself brothers and sisters, so that at the final gasp, when god or the guy at the crossroads or whoever does the last weighing, you'll have that one extra chip that knocks the scales towards heavenly redemption and glory.....

THIS IS your last chance to donate to my Komen Race for the Cure. And you KNOW whut cure I be talkin bout.

So, brethren and sestren, here's what I need you to do.
Go here, and click on "make a gift".

THEN: (and here is the important part)
GIVE MONEY, bucks, the long green, the elusive sponduliks, the filthy lucre.

Then:
sit back, relax, and enjoy that guilt free feeling....

(repeat as necessary...)

Cross posted at Cancer grrl

great caesar's ghost

2006-08-24T12:22:00.000-04:00

It has really been over a month since I posted on poor ole bloggrilla! That's cause all the action is happening over at cancer grrl, at least in terms of posting.

Actually, my life is pretty boring, and pretty much devoted to going to work, trying to run as much as I can, and trying to ignore chemotherapy as much as i can. Outside of the stigmata of perennially perforated veins in my arm, I am pretty good at putting this whole thing out of my mind.

I did manage to see Snakes on a Plane last week, with the Ex. Since I lack the required snake phobia, roughly 85% of the chills were wasted on me. However, I have a slight airplane phobia, so I was able to reap some fear gratification from the whole endeavor. NOT, mind you that I need any more fear in my life, but, we all like a little gratuitous fear from someone else's pain.

The movie had a lot of the requisite junior high school gross out moments: snakes bit a nipple, a penis, an eye, and a tongue. People's faces turned black from venom. Good, solid lunch hour discussion fodder for cafeteria.

And, muthafuckin Sam Jackson did not swear as much as this muthafucka would have wanted. goddamn it.

All in all, it was kinda fun. Not scary, and not real funny either, but, i think worth seeing. I mean, these days I will take my entertainment as low brow as I can get it, thank you very much.

I also watched The Spy Who Shagged Me, last week at chemo with Gar. I thoroughly enjoyed all the anal jokes, in fact I nearly wet myself. Since I was in the chemo drip place, I'm sure that would not have caused the nurses to blink an eye...

Today's aspergian exercise, or: the hairy ocean heresy

2006-07-15T15:13:00.000-04:00

My recent head depilation, and subsequent medieval monastic look, led me naturally to try to create a pun filled blog for the cancer grrl site, using two words that have frequently vexed me because despite the fact that they are similarly spelled and sounded, they completely lack any relationship one to the other. NOW I realize that there are three of these perilous P-words. Without further adieu (heh..sorry, I KNOW it's ado), I bring you the three perilous Ps.

1. Pelage: fur, hairy covering of a mammal. As in: "Maria possessed a diminutive pollard, whose pelage was lactescent as crystallized precipitation. (thas mary hadda little lamb, yall) OR, if you moderns prefer, Maria possessed a diminutive clone

2. Pelagian: The theological doctrine propounded by Pelagius, a British monk, and condemned as heresy by the Roman Catholic Church in A.D. 416. It denied original sin and affirmed the ability of humans to be righteous by the exercise of free will.
Of course, If I were witty and british and medieval and all that, I could make a good pun out of fur and monks and heresies...ah...but I ain't even gonna go there... Of course, it's also funny that "hairy" sounds a lot like "heresy"...
*By the way that's not Pelagius above. That is St. Augustine, one of his opponents. Couldn't find a pic of Pelagius. I would think he'd look a lot happier than St. Augustine.

3. Pelagic: Of, relating to, or living in open oceans or seas rather than waters adjacent to land or inland waters.
This is my favorite of the 3Ps.

So pelage is from the Old French word for hair, and pelagic is from the Greek word for ocean. Pelagian is obviously from the man's name (Pelagius). Maybe Pelagius was hairy. He was an old Brit, so he did live near the ocean, although that ain't enough to be pelagic of course. He was also supposed to have been influenced by Greek thought.

At any rate, I just think these three words are interesting. I remember getting confused when someone was talking about "pelagic" meaning near the ocean, and I thought they were talking about "pelagian" as in the heresy.

So I can't really make anything cute up about this, because my head's just not there right now, having lost my pelage. I leave it up to those of you pelagian enough to exercise your free will. for me, I would rather go to pelagic regions for some R&R.

Monster Name

2006-07-04T16:27:00.000-04:00

Your Monster Profile

Merciless Beheader

You Feast On: Starbucks

You Lurk Around In: Roller Rinks

You Especially Like to Torment: Your Evil Twin

What's Your Monster Name?

And here I thought it was bloggrrilla....

up from the ashes

2006-07-01T18:52:00.000-04:00

Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne; one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.

The tempest

wigging out

2006-06-25T09:52:00.000-04:00

part of the "fun" of chemo (ha!) is trying on wigs. I loved this one, but didn't buy it of course. I mean, I have very short, curly hair. Me looking this good would cause major rifts in the time space continuum.

What do cats DO?

2006-06-20T19:47:00.000-04:00

Today I went to a CLE (continuing legal eddication) course. (In case you don't know, lawyers have to put in a certain amount of CLE hours per year, even after law skool. BUT they don't make us take any more exams, and they don't make us answer stupid law school questions like: If John builds a garage two inches over Mary's property line, and then sells his property to Joe, who builds an airplane in the garage which later crashes in the bermuda triangle, which crash becomes the subject of a top grossing hollywood film whose stars inexplicably all suffer bankruptcy within ten years, causing a lack of funding to certain charities which support the preservation of certain amazonian flowers which are used to create a medicine which regulates Mary's heart, and Mary then dies of a heart attack, who gets her Royal Cotton Tea Set?) Oh gads but i do digress.

At any rate, today was a very worthwhile CLE, because one of the sections was on Animal Law. The prof was David Wolfson, a corporate lawyer who also happens to be an animal lawyer and animal rights person. He was great.

My interest in animals far predates my interest in law, and my interest in animal law predates the whole law school song and dance, so I was gratified that stodgy old new york is suddenly taking notice of this very important and cutting edge area of law, and offering CLEs on it.

Wolfson was great. At one point he was explaining the valuation of animals in tort law. Since animals are considered property, if someone kills your animal, they owe you property damage. (animal lovers reading this, this is the state of the law as it stands. FLAWED??? Uh yeah...) In New York, this property damage is limited to market value or "intrinsic value". Market value is obviously an absurd way of valuing animals for people like me, whose animals have always been strays or ferals with ZERO mkt value. And, no one seems to know what "intrinsic" value is, but in the courts it seems to have something to do with the animal's function, for instance a seeing eye dog or guard dog would have a higher intrinsic value than a lap dog.

As Wolfson was explaining valuation, he started talking about his cats. he said that he loved his cats, and got a lot of pleasure from them, but, in terms of intrinsic value, he couldn't quite figure out what, exactly, cats *did*. He kept asking, "what do cats DO?" It was quite amusing. What indeed?

Well I have an answer. Read it HERE

Needless to say, I'm oversimplifying the legal aspects of Wolfson's talk on valuation. And, Wolfson didn't limit his talk to the plight of companion animals, he does a lot of work for farm animals too, who are arguably the most abused (think veal calfs, hen battery cages, gestation pens. One tidbit (no pun intended...) of information is that the US and Canada have virtually NO laws regulating the treatment of farm animals, and let the farmers themselves determine what "usual practices are", while many European countries have adopted laws prohibiting certain farming practices. I know, I know. More US bashing, more Euro promoting. What evah, they are ahead of us in a lot of ways, folks. I mean, Abba proved that long ago...(oops, that's scandinavia. oh well.)

At any rate, Wolfson doesn't think animals should be property.
Especially not cats...

There's a face off in the corner

2006-06-12T20:27:00.000-04:00

I have proclaimed this week the "International Week of Denial" partially in honor of the edmonton oilers winning the third game in the Stanley Cup playoffs on Saturday night (DENIED the hurricanes), and partially because i am damned tired of thinking how my breasts betrayed me.

What cracks me up is that the announcers keep saying "the oilers play PHYSICAL hockey". Ok. um, yeah? I mean, is there metaphysical hockey? Astral hockey? ectoplasmic hockey? If so does anyone watch it? Or do you need a medium?

So I am in a good mood. I have been watching hockey and blasting the Ramones and the Pogues. These are things that make me feel good. Am I secretly a teen boy stuck in 1977? Hmmm. I don't have a shag or a mullet, or a mohawk (any more). I don't have acne. And I don't lust after teen girls (as a matter of fact, I avoid them like the plague). Ok, guess not. But I do wish that, vampire like, I could suck up some of their energy. Hockey, Ramones, and the Pogues seem to give me that kind of energy...

Well, I must leave you with my favorite hockey leper joke. You probably remember it from third grade, but, here goes.

How can you tell a leper hockey game?
There's a face off in the corner...

Now, WHO SAID cancer lowers IQs? And i haven't even STARTED chemo yet...

Philematology

2006-06-10T09:21:00.000-04:00

The science of kissing. Because really, who'd have thought?

I mean, where does one study this science? And from whom? And...does it cause cancer? heh. The wiki article is full of splendid phrases, such as: kissing is "the touching of the lips to some other thing"..."In order to avoid clashing noses"...and "Kissing is a complex behaviour that requires significant coordination," and information. for example did you know that "the Romans distinguished three types of kiss: osculum, a friendship kiss on the cheek; basium, a kiss of affection on the lips; and suavium, a lovers' deep kiss?"

at any rate, this was brought to you by the fact that I went to the dentist today for the first time in TWENTY-FIVE years or so (ok ok don't get all grossed out on me, I assure you no one noticed my lapses). My teeth are FINE! Good even. No Problemas! Good news is rare these days, and most welcome.

Moveez

2006-06-05T20:34:00.000-04:00

I just ordered Throne of Blood from Amazon. I'd been vacillating about ordering it, because it is pricey, but it is one of my favorite movies. It's Akira Kurosawa's version of Macbeth. It has a great creepy witch scene, and the lady mac character is even worse than the hand washing shakespearean character.

I don't have a big DVD library or anything, really the only other one I've ordered is the Ruling Class, which is like Monty Python meets Edgar Allen Poe, via the Producers. Oh hell I don't know what it's like but it's good. Peter O'Toole plays an aristocrat who thinks he's god. At first, he's the god of love, full of love (and lust) for all his creatures. This pisses off his aristocratic relatives royally (or nobly?), so they enlist all kinds of shrinks to cure him of his delusions.

He gets cured...not of the delusion that he is god, but of the delusion that god has anything to do with love. He becomes the destroyer, a god of death, a/k/a Jack the Ripper and starts killing people. But, his manners and sartorial sense are impeccable, so he is totally acceptable to the aristocratic relatives and neighbors. He runs for parliament and of course wins big. At anyrate you should see it, it's quite strange. And peter o'toole is a madman.

introducing the cancer grrrl

2006-06-04T10:11:00.000-04:00

i started a new blog which will keep track of the cancer treatments, the technical stuff and my responses etc. Bloggrrilla will remain the venue for musings about star trek, polar bears, and ridiculous pictures of my cats. Occasionally, i'm sure the 2 will overlap, because I am one me, but for the most part the 2 blogs have different raisons d'etre.

New blog = Cancer Grrrl. I haven't tweaked the template to my liking yet, so bear with me.

See you either here or there.

crossroads

2006-06-03T14:18:00.000-04:00

Photo courtesy of bluessource.com

"In the folk magic of many cultures, the crossroads is a location "between the worlds" and, as such, a site where supernatural spirits can be contacted and paranormal events can take place.
This is particularly pronounced in conjure, rootwork, and hoodoo, a form of African American magical spirituality. In conjure practice, it is said that in order to acquire facility at various manual and body skills, such as playing a musical instrument, throwing dice, or dancing, one may attend upon a crossroads a certain number of times, either at midnight or just before dawn,and one will meet a 'black man," whom some call the Devil, who will bestow upon one the desired skills." wikipedia

Well, i'm at a crossroads of sorts with this blog. I wonder if i will get supernatural skills if I blog at midnight...
At any rate, here's my dilemma: I can make this a straight up cancer blog, detailing the treatments and my mental and physical status vis a vis this disease (oooh i'm a poet). Or I can keep doing the irrelevant, frivolous, shallow posting that you know and love.
Actually there's another choice. I can keep bloggrilla as bloggrilla, and start another blog with the cancer blow by blow. I'm inclined to take that option.

The only reason I feel compelled to blog about the cancer at all is that I myself find people's cancer blogs really helpful and encouraging. To get deep on ya for a moment or two (don't worry, it won't hurt) facing a potentially fatal disease has a way of distancing one a bit from one's healthy friends. This isn't horrible, but it happens. So, one searches the web for people going thru what one is going thru. I've been really gratified to find both Marjory and Miriam, and I follow their blogs like i used to read runners magazines. (ok i still read runners mags. But now i find the envy almost too much to bear...). It helps! You realize you can still be geeky and stupid and lazy and don't have to walk around looking like Camille and coughing gently into a scented hanky. (not that miriam or marjory are geeky or stupid or lazy. but they didn't change because of the cancer into tragic heroines overnight.)

I don't really wanna be a tragic heroine either. So, i think i'll keep bloggrilla, and create a different blog for the cancer follies.

So it wasn't a crossroads after all. It was more of a three way, like this:

bak 2 wk

2006-05-31T18:42:00.000-04:00

moving right along. yesterday I went back to work. It was oddly comforting to be wrapped up in my protective little cubicle, like a little borg drone, jacked back into the law "firm" (pun intended) teat. work floods in, work trickles out.... (ok maybe i'm not so fast...). Aside from the fact that my boss kept smiling at me, (and he NEVER used to smile at me) nothing has changed. Because I was in a different office a month before surgery, people assumed i just got back from that office.

my underground cancer status is safe. Unless they happen to check out the joan crawford-stiff-backed walk i've got going...

fun & games

2006-05-29T11:47:00.000-04:00

thought I'd pass on some of the things which have been occupying my mind of late.

First, a really cool site which lets you build and animate little robots made of nothing but lines and joints. See sodaplay.com (courtesy of The Ex, who sent me this site).

Then, yesterday i visited van cortlandt park, and saw the riverside riding stable. Lots of great horses, riding lessons, horse boarding, right here in da bronx! Of course van cortlandt park is also great for running. I like the whole riverdale area too. nice.

Osamu Tezuka, who created both astro boy and kimba the white lion, childhood obsessions of mine.

Tomorrow i go back to work, so my delightful slacker pastimes will probably have to cease. sigh.

Dead Malls and the Homeless Problem

2006-05-26T10:13:00.000-04:00

I just had a brilliant idea. Why not use all the dead malls as housing for the homeless? You could put bunkbeds in the Strawberrys and Limiteds, use the abandoned Wendy's and Brown's Chicken as kitchens, and use the sears appliance sections as laundromats.

This would accomplish several things.
First, the homeless could be protected from the elements and kept comfy whilst sleeping in a different place each night, which, you know they love to do.

SEcond, you could keep track of them (perhaps using the abandoned Wizs and Radio Shacks as control centers). This would of course be for their own protection from asshole kids who like to take baseball bats and tire irons to them (and not for any nefarious, big brother like purpose....of course).

Third, you could organize the less helpless homeless denizens to protect the mall property itself from vandalism.

Fourth, you could have a built in labor force to take care of small repairs in the mall, and maybe even to do some gardening and flower arrangement.

Fifth, you could develop a small army of recovered, healthy homeless, eager to protect their land.

Sixth, you could have play wars between various malls, say the Dixie Square Mall versus Randhurst, in which your little army develops its skills.

Eighth, you could then unite all the homeless malls, and TAKE OVER THE WORLD....BWAHAHAHAHEHEHAheh heh uh uh, um. choke. cough. I, er, meant um SAVE the world..., yeah that's it...

ok ok i didn't mean any of it. It was a drug and fear induced dream.

So, did i ever tell you my idea for terraforming strip malls....and developing new species of plants that thrive on linoleum and french fry grease?

I'd walk all night just to buy you a new pair of shoes

2006-05-23T12:03:00.000-04:00

or maybe i'd run.

I just walked about 2 miles. First real walk apres surgery, and it felt good. I walked along a short section of trail in back of our apartment which is really pretty, mucho flora and fauna. Sometimes I stopped, shut my eyes and moved my arms like I was running, trying to visualize my running form. Hey, whatever gets ya through.

today, the worries about the future surface. Too soon, i tell them, i'm not recovered from surgery yet! Don't i get a grace period? Seems I don't. This constant worry is probably why i HAVE cancer in the first freakin place. All that black shit has to go somewhere.

nonetheless, here's to running, even if you are running scared. May I run again soon, and long.

we like tha sun*

2006-05-22T10:38:00.000-04:00

Sleeping after this surgery is not easy. I have to be propped up 45 degrees like an enbalmed corpse at an open casket funeral (hands gently folded, expression serene). perhaps, given my condition, that was not the best analogy to use, but, well, it does evoke the position.

However, I did manage to sleep quite well last night, using my unusually gifted kinesthetic sense to contort myself into positions that were only mildly uncomfortable, whilst maintaining the requisite angle. Ah I knew my dance career would be good for something besides knee aches down the road. And I woke up feeling only slightly kinked, and required no percoset to get out of bed.

Pink and Abby helped, by flailing about on the bed in paroxysms of sun worship, waving their legs like upended bugs, attacking each other, squirming to be petted, and otherwise comporting themselves in such an embarrassing and ridiculous manner as to make it impossible to lay about fretting about dying.

The sun's out, i guess that's what all the fuss is about. I think sometimes I have seasonal affective disorder, in that, after a few cloudy days I tend to be even more morose than usual. When the sun comes out, I, like the cats, get irrationally happy for an instant or two.

*rathergood's megahit, paraphrased

notes from underground

2006-05-21T09:03:00.000-04:00

not exactly underground.

more like i'm on the second floor, with a nice view of a gravel roof and some cars parked in a lot. There are lots of nurses with various tubes and clear plastic bags, the contents of which they like to put into you. There are moving beds and expanding socks which massage your legs, and little, cheery measuring cups in the toilet for seeing exactly what comes out. (i guess they like to keep track of the in/out ratios).

Bloggrilla is out of surgery, walking and talking. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, the whole thing was so novel to me that it was actually kinda fun. But NOW i'm ready to gtfo (get the fk out).

I am percosetted and ambianned beyond all recognition, not to mention virtually boobless (however, I do have some very prepubescent looking buds. Which is not unpleasant). My skin is greasy, my hair is very 1980s electroshock looking, I walk like joan crawford with a rod up her butt, and I do not give a crap. Now for someone who is as self conscious as I am, this is highly unusual.

Oh, and upon waking from anasthesia, the most pressing question on my lips was: "do polar bears have tails?"

the mind is indeed a strange thing.

Update and sad note:
another thoroughbred faces surgery:
poor pretty guy. Hope he makes it thru surgery and has a long, happy career impregnating mares.

blade running

2006-05-18T21:07:00.000-04:00

tomorrow is slice and dice day. I go "under the knife."

I have a confession to make. I was raised by a rabid christian scientist and so have not really even had my share of normal doctor experiences. Never took aspirin growing up, never even had novocaine at the dentist.

Ok ok, things have changed since then, after all, I rebelled early and hard against anything vaguely christian science.

But still, my experience of doctors is limited. And tomorrow i have major surgery.

Yeah, i think that qualifies as scary.

I'm a jeepster for your love

2006-05-16T21:05:00.000-04:00

today i felt so good all day that i can't even believe that i have the big C. In fact, this may be a relatively cancer-free post.

I was downloading some music yesterday and came across T.Rex's "get it on, bang a gong." Now I was a wee thing when I first heard that song (which tells u that I'm old), and, to quote another old rocker (lou reed) "my life was changed by rock and roll."

Well, perhaps my life wasn't changed, but I loved the song immediately. Unfortunately, it must not have been top 40 or perhaps it was plunging from high rotation or something, because i didn't hear it again until years later. I mean, perhaps decades. And the trouble was, I couldn't understand the words the first time i heard it, so there was no way i could find out what it was. (It was also hard to find things out in those days. I am continuously amazed by the fact that I didn't have a computer until I was in my 20s and no net until...well you can guess when).

So. flash forward. the next time I heard that song was at a loft party in williamsburg (when it was still cheap). I met a man at that party who later became a boyfriend, although not a very good one. At any rate, a friend and I were the manhattanites in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and attempting to charm the art school dropouts, when someone played that song and I lost all vestige of sophistication. I grabbed my friend, forgot about boys and went to dance to the song. That moment of elation got me saddled with a bad two year relationship and my life shifted again.

fast forward again to now. Now some slicked up version of that song is on a TV commercial featuring some women walking around in flouncy dresses and slow motion, probably trying to charm some B-school dropouts.

At any rate, i downloaded it.

So, why is this blog titled "i'm a jeepster for your love?" I dunno. I don't think I intended to write about bang a gong. But, it's another good one from TRex, so there you have it.

cancer-free posting (lest you forgot)

doom and gloom

2006-05-15T20:50:00.000-04:00

I have been told I should be blogging about the current situation in my life, but I've been loathe to do it, because 1. it's mind bogglingly awful (for me anyway) 2. my tendency with health issues is to go underground like a wild animal to nurse my wounds; 3. I've kept this blog deliberately light, because, hey, it's more fun for me to blog about random happenings and cool science news than it is to reveal the cracks and dark underbelly of my real life; 4. I have trust issues and hate to reveal weakness; 5. It scares me to talk about it.

Having said all that, here's the windup....
and here's the pitch: I have cancer. Just diagnosed. Won't tell you where yet, perhaps I could do a guessing game to keep things fun. Guess where the cancer is? Peekaboo! I didn't see you! you snuck up on me you little devil you. Now we'll see who's boss...

At any rate, I've kinda kept it secret because people get weird around cancer. Suddenly they look at you as if you have those little x's in your eyes like in the cartoons. Or they act as if merely by getting cancer you dropped 100 IQ points. However, there are perks. The sympathy card is EASILY played. As is the "opt out" card. I can now, without fear of seeming antisocial, opt out of ANY social event I want to. Also, of course i have a built in excuse for being a. cranky, b. tired, c. completely incompetent.

And, even tho I'm having surgery on friday, I'm still running and/or doing yoga every fcking day, and plan to all thru chemo and whatever other treatment it takes to get this thing outta me.

so it's not all horror and gloom. Mostly I try not to let myself go into the inevitable bad place. Mostly, I'm ok. mostly.

It's a good day when the waves aren't dark,
but instead, play at your feet,
like hungry kittens chasing your ankles.
Until something gathers on the left,
and leans in -- old, yellow, cracked.
Rusted hinges and broken engine
laying there, wind whining through.
And you wake up with a taste in your mouth
like waking from the dead.

icy tales, random museums

2006-05-06T17:34:00.000-04:00

Incredible journey:
Pink and Abby brave the elements in this compelling tale of two kittens who cross an icy, post apocalyptic landscape in search of the human who once gave them tuna.

the happy ending has them snoozing, and dreaming of past struggles and triumphs on the ice, a la Island MacKenzie

Humans were not built for too many choices. Marketing is a very very recent phenomena. our ancestors couldn't possibly imagine having a choice in what they ate or wore or did. Choice disturbs our limbic brain. It causes anxiety and cancers. Nothing was ever accomplished by anyone who had a choice. go ahead. prove me wrong.

But, choice is here to stay. so we need to evolve new brain circuits to handle it. Perhaps we can recruit some other organs such as the liver, or heart, to process choices. Perhaps new senses are in order. New implants. Borg technology, or AI interfaces. I, for one, am fully, FULLY prepared to embrace the new transhuman paradigms. Sign me up. Right away, please, there's not much time.

down for the count

2006-04-29T09:32:00.000-04:00

this blog may go on a bit of a hiatus for a while. There's lots to talk about, all of it bad, so I'll spare my 4.5 readers the boredom and agony. I'll post when I get inspired or when there's news too cool to lose.

in the meantime, here's to finding a secret joy, even if it takes you to the limits of known space...*

*"betty on titan, or: what really happened to the mars rover" courtesy of phlonx.com

wild red tulips

2006-04-23T11:54:00.000-04:00

I don't know anything about gardening, but I thought you had to plant tulips. I mean, they are bulbs, right? Big, like onions. Not little seeds that get airborne and spread. I could be wrong. Like I say, I don't know.

Nonetheless, our story today depends on tulips being bulbs. It begins on bloggrrilla's morning commute, which entails about a mile walk to the train station over some heartbreakingly lovely roads. I'm not even being sarcastic, it's beautiful up here. I also walk past the world's largest set of dumpsters, which aren't so lovely. I scan them daily for glue traps, which i promptly destroy. I cannot stand glue traps. Abominations. If you set them, I will destroy them. Even roach motels. But I digress. Across from the dumpsters is a narrow strip of weedy grass, which rises to about head level, because as you walk past the dumpsters you walk into the valley of the shadow of death. Sorry I cannot keep the stream o consciousness outta here today. NO discipline. Back to the story. The weedy strip borders one of the pretty roads.

I take my camera with me some mornings, because I like the change of seasons and sometimes get the urge to chronicle it visually. So one morning, as i walked past the dumpsters on my left, to my right, I caught a glimpse of red. Bright, bloody red. Naturally I turned. There, in the weedy strip, were 2 perfect, full, red, tulips. As perfect as if waving gently in the overcultivated gardens of the versailles.
As brave as two orphans in a storm. As happy as...well whatever, you get the picture. Unexpected at any rate, and certainly not weeds.
So I took pix of them, and went on.

And came home that night, saw them there, and felt as though I had a secret joy.

Went to work the next day.

And came home.

And lo and behold, some moron had mowed the weedy strip, and mowed the tulips to the ground. Chopped red petals lay there, nothing else.

Pretty stupid. I mean, one doesn't mow tulips, does one?

It's hard to have a secret joy these days. Someone always fucks it up.

king to pawns

2006-04-21T19:06:00.000-04:00

King Gyanendra has made a concession. He will allow the royal dog one extra milk bone per week. He hopes this will stop the protests, and restore order.

Ok ok, you got me. thas a joke, son. Here's the real story, hot off the BBC (those brit hotties, who keep the best track of their ex-empire. wait, was nepal part of their empire? the bbc is notoriously silent on this....)
At any rate, Gyanendra says he will now allow an election for prime minister. some say this is a major step, some say it just ain't enuff. In my eyes, there's not much he can do at this point to stop the inevitable...the inevitable being the end of the monarchy. I have to say I don't hate Gyanendra, after all, he supports the WWF (not world wrestling foundation. SMACKDOWN!). But isn't he a bit anachronistic? I mean, look at the crown...

I don't know how this will all turn out. Anything I would want to say that isn't a joke would be hopelessly stupid, bland and platitudinous, so I'll spare you. pass the milk bones.

nice weather to be under

2006-04-15T10:47:00.000-04:00

I've been sick this week. I stayed home from work on weds, dragged myself to work the other days of the week and only ran once, yesterday, when the junkie twitch just got too much for me. (i'm paying for it today, with a renewed sore throat and that oh so unpleasant feeling of a distinct lack of lung space).

I have no really thrilling news to report, except that, by sheer accident, scientists have discovered a that a certain type of mouse, called a "Murphy Roth's Large" has incredible regenerative abilities. These capabilities were discovered when they marked one of these guys by punching a hole in his ear. S.O.P. right? Well, when they checked again, lo and behold, as if jesus himself had laid on hands, the ears were made whole. (see comparison with different type of mouse, at left)

I think this calls for great celebration. Perhaps even a new cult. Perhaps some sci-fi writer (like my current fave, Ted Chiang) could invent a new religion, based on the Murphy Roth's Large. Or, if we wanted to go less techno, and more nature-primitivo, we could just worship it.

IN ANY EVENT, I am gratified to learn that my "theme song" is "Born to Be Wild." I'd really have thought something more along the lines of "The Funeral March of the Marionettes." but hey, these quizzes do not lie.

Your Theme Song is Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf

"I like smoke and lightning

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under"

A total independent spirit, you can't be held down or fenced in.

You crave the feeling of wind on your face... and total freedom.

What's Your Theme Song?

Triangulation (3 = FCB)

2006-04-14T20:47:00.000-04:00

cattus cattus triangulattus
oxnum fanxnorium triaxium
plesticillia latvore istphax tri tri mutvex.

Nepal

2006-04-08T13:13:00.000-04:00

The ex and I lived in Nepal (well, I guess I really mean we "visited" Nepal) for a few months in late 1997, early 1998. We stayed in Pullahari, which is just up in the foothills from Kathmandu, and a 40 minutes walk from Boudhanath, which has the famous stupa with the eyes. I didn't much care for Kathmandu, but Boudha and the hills were another story. Oddly, the area seemed like home to me. I always planned to go back.

Thus when the Maoists started rumbling, i reacted a bit like a typical colonial. I mean, a lot of what I liked about Nepal was the fact that for about $3 a day you really could live quite well. Plus, there was the fact that everyone seemed so un-selfconscious there. And that the night is actually dark. Of course I knew that Nepalis have one of the lowest per capita incomes of any country in the world, and their royal family is one of the 8 richest families in the world. I knew that Nepalis tend to die at 40. I saw lepers (yeah, I handed one a coin or two). But, hell. Why let any miserable reality cloud my pretty vision of sub-himalayan paradise? To be sure, I did experience some misery of my own. I mean, no central heating, very little protein to eat, and I did catch pneumonia, rather spectacularly wasting away to the point where people were waiting for me to die. But, let's face it, I chose my misery. it was romantic. it was religious. It was adventurous.

So I, of course, thought of Nepal as my private ace in the hole, my private get away, a place where I could truly experience life (whatever that ridiculous statement means). Now the Maoists have ruined all that. Sheesh. any way you slice this conflict, I lose. If the maoists actually manage to do some good for the people, then, bye-bye friendly, impoverished, unselfconscious Nepalis, hello equals. Hello adequate hospitalization and jobs. Who wants that? If the maoists turn out to be assholes, then Amurkans like me won't be welcome there anyway, and hello cashmere curtain (pun on kashmir intended. sometimes i am just so clever). If King Gyanendra wins, he's going to have to make some changes anyway, which means that Nepalis may be better off, but I have to pay more to go there. again. who wants that??

So, I guess I have to look further for some private heaven realm. Maybe somewhere in outerspace exists an unspoiled, beautiful planet with charming, happy natives whose religious beliefs lend themselves to oh so friendly exploitation by disenfranchised, heart-heavy humanity.

*disclaimer: Mostly, i'm pretty sarcastic and glib about things. However, to be serious for a second, I am not in favor of the Maoists. Their violent revolution is violence, unadorned. 13,000 people have died in this revolution. Also, calling yourself a maoist at this point in history is kinda like calling yourself a nazi. lotsa cachet there. However, I can understand how Nepalis, of all people, would be attracted to the supposed equalization of power that "maoist" communism is supposed to represent. And, there's some indication Gyanendra is not a bad guy, for an ivory tower royal. Anyway, take what I say with a grain of salt. And, read about it for real, if you're interested.

A day at the office (or, another unnecessary series of cat pix)

2006-04-08T12:55:00.000-04:00

Abby checks the printer while Pink readies the scanner.

Pink checks the wall for bugs (many legged or electronic, he does not discriminate).

the Time Being

2006-04-02T11:03:00.000-04:00

I've been reading an old book of the best Sci-Fi stories of the year (from 2000 i believe). I just finished one by Ted Chiang, called "The Story of Your Life" which was really good, and got me wondering about our perception of time passing. The story concerns a linguist who is called upon to learn and translate the language of the first aliens landing on earth. The aliens' written language is completely different from their spoken language, and, is written in such a way as to be read in a temporally non-linear fashion. in other words, you don't read the language from left to right or right to left as most human written languages are read, rather the language contains no preferred order.

Of course the spoken language cannot be that way, and, thus, is less interesting to our linguist. The linguist finds herself so possessed by the aliens' written language, that she becomes "unstuck in time" (to borrow from slaughterhouse 5), and starts seeing her own life as moments appearing randomly. thus she experiences her daughters' death and birth, her marriage, etc., "out of order," so to speak.

In Slaughterhouse 5, a much less thoughtful work, but one which i read when I was 10 and was pretty enthralled with, the main character "Billy Pilgrim" gets unstuck in time, and views the moments of his life randomly but, if i remember correctly, he sees the moments more than once. I think this is different than the Ted Chiang story.

In "real" life, we experience a moment, and it is gone forever...like "tears in rain." So if we were to experience moments out of order, we'd still probably only visit them once, correct? Perhaps then we wouldn't build memories, because we wouldn't be alerted that we had to pay attention to this particular moment by the moments that came before. Does this make sense? I mean, you say goodbye to your dying cat, or dying parent, and it means something because of the moments that came before, which tied you to this entity. AND because of the moments which come after, where you know you won't see them ever again. But, if the moment of their dying came randomly, would you pay attention to it? I mean I guess you would, because that moment would probably have all the other moments somehow attached. I don't know.

My ex-husband used to refer to an entity called "the Time Being." So every time you did something "for the time being", it was for this entity. Like, I think I'll stay in this apartment "for the time being"... I tended to think of this entity as a sort of large pacman, eating up moments in a linear progression. But, even pacman can change direction. And what would he (or ms pacman) do if the moments came from every which direction? The time being would become more like the cartoon tasmanian devil...a mini tornado of an entity.

At any rate, the freakin clocks go forward today, which means I have to get up at an even more ungodly hour tomorrow. It would be comforting if I could somehow just skip the moment of the alarm clock...

and behold

2006-04-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

it was very very good.

and now, for 13 things that don't make sense. Because law is a human institution. And I'd rather be stargazing...

I swear.

2006-03-29T18:34:00.000-05:00

I was sworn in today. I'm now a licenced lawyah. and i feeeeeel the powaaaah.

The ceremony was short & sweet. Take an oath, sign your name, and go eat. Do i feel different? Yeah. I actually do. I know, I know, lawyers in NY are a dime a dozen. And I'm a bit of a loner, so having a community has never really been a strong draw for me.

Nonetheless, for what its worth, now I'm a recognizable commodity, a brand name if you will. There will never again be the need to answer "what do you do?" with more than one word. And that is worth something.

The non-ironic post

2006-03-26T13:34:00.000-05:00

the news this morning was so painful to read that I my mind started to go into one of its obssessive modes. I won't explain, suffice it to say that it's not pleasant, and seems to take the form of some exaggerated sense of responsibility, I get maddened when I can't fix things. ridiculous, i know.

Makes me also wonder why a person in one longitudinal setting has to worry about getting hacked to death with a machete, or blown up or tortured to death, and another person in different setting has to worry about their SAT scores or doing their taxes or their morning's commute. it can't be the will of god, unless god plays dice, and karma seems too pat, I mean if there is karma, then every person has some bad and some good. No one deserves what they got in Rwanda, or are getting in Darfur or Baghdad unless we all do, which i think is the essence of why i'm obsessed with my inability to fix things. I know i'm making sweeping generalizations here, this is not a reasoned, logical argument i'm making. bear with me.

but i can't fix things, and i do no good to anyone when i'm in my obsessive state. so perhaps i should just not read the news today, and go back to my taxes.

there's comfort in taxes after all.

mush on slop

2006-03-25T16:23:00.000-05:00

on thursday, after my lunch-hour-power-gym-treadmill time, as i dripped treadmill sweat (sorta like real sweat, but nastier) and headed for the shower, the "moms-and-kids" play group broke up and the breeders and the brooded over tumbled into the locker room.

Now, I generally scowl mightily when this happens, just because crumb snatchers are oddly attracted to me, especially when i'm red-faced and struggling with an uncooperative sports bra; and i want to keep them and especially their mothers far far far at bay. But, this time I had to crack a smile, because one of the cuter larva had started to sing a little ditty, over and over in that repetitive way that drives mothers crazy (and that I never outgrew...). I present below, the sweet child's most charming ditty:

would you like some
mush* on slop?
a dop a dop a doppity dop?
(tempo change, speed up)
mush on slop, a dop a dop dop
mush on slop, a dop a dop dop
mush on slop, a dop a dop dop

repeat

coda
mom of course had had it by this point and started the shushing and the usual distracting chirps: "jasmine (or brittany, or crestview or appaloosa or whatever the name was) look over here, jasmine, have you got your (panties, swimcap, juicebox, telescope, gasmask), jasmine don't get your feet wet, jasmine other people have to get by, jasmine ..... on and on. But the winsome and tiny entity would not desist, bless her little heart.

So, yours truly, being soft of mind and hard of heart, now has the mush on slop song firmly engraved in her somewhat limited brain. And now i pass it on to you. It's the least I can do.

*note: "mush" is pronounced the way kids pronounce it: to rhyme with "swoosh." NOT to rhyme with "flush."

pcb (phriday cat blog)

2006-03-24T20:12:00.002-05:00

sigh. if i must, i must...

abby distractedly faces mecca:

pink poses like pegasus.

Rocky Top

2006-03-19T12:31:00.000-05:00

"once I had a girl on Rocky Top
half bear the other half cat
wilder than me but sweet as sody pop
I still dream about that"

I'm listening to High Lonesome, one of my favorite tapes. Every march it seems I get the urge to hear it again, must be some sort of roots thang (dad's side = scotch-irish from arkansas; moms side = shotgun shacks & drifters). This thang must have skipped a generation though, my parents had pretensions to middle-class modernity. (except where the twin demons of alcohol abuse and religion abuse raised their seductive heads...one curly and crosseyed, one stick straight and thin lipped)

anyway. I once choreographed a dance to "jerusalem ridge." In retrospect, although I had very little talent as a choreographer, it was a good dance. I'd like to unearth it and see if my current non-dancer body could handle it. It'd be fun. And maybe I could reclaim the "half bear the other half cat" side of me...
grrrmmmmrrorrooooow...

sports, money, and ocd

2006-03-18T12:41:00.000-05:00

i've said it before. I don't much like spectator sports, but I do enjoy a wager. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before I joined the office pool and bought a bracket on sportsline.com for the NCAA championship.

Despite my last minute persusal of the standings, I managed to make some rather silly choices. I'm at about 60/40 win/lose at this point, a solid B- in betting GPA. Now I've said i like to bet, but I generally bet when I have a pretty good chance of winning. Or, I bet on incredibly dumb things, like the number of times a real estate broker says "charming" when describing an apartment the size of an outhouse, or how many people will cross at the crosswalk versus in the middle of the street.

In fact, i make mini-wagers with myself all the time. Will I see that man with no cheekbones who's reading a mystery about egypt on the #4 today? Will I manage to get out of the house in time to get across highway 9 before the morning stream of traffic starts? will I manage to avoid my boss on the elevator ride? Of course, betting with yourself is not really a lot of fun, it's more like my very own little brand of OCD. Considering I also have a symmetry OCD (can't stand to have or see one sock on, one off, can't stand to step on crack with one foot, and not the other), the wager compulsion is at least a tad more entertaining, and, let's face it, you don't go broke.

But, I do like real betting, with money, and other people too. Which is why it is good that watching most sports doesn't do much for me. The NCAA is a tad different, because watching college basketball is pretty palatable. For one thing, it goes pretty fast, unlike football. For another thing, there's always a lot of scoring. We likes fast boys and scoring. Other things i really like are boxing and horseracing. I haven't quite figured out why, perhaps I'm really an old italian man at heart, and this is the 1930s. Chi sa?

Friday Cat Blog (St. pat's edition)

2006-03-17T19:52:00.000-05:00

Well, I could have done this (see below): oh, i guess i DID do it...

At any rate, it is interesting to note that St. Patrick is also the patron saint of Nigeria. So I don't understand why the average St. Patty's day parade does not reflect that.

of moons, life, and death

2006-03-10T06:40:00.000-05:00

One of saturn's moons has geysers, which indicates that there is a possibility it can sustain "life".

NYtimes says that "life requires at least 3 ingredients "water, heat and carbon based molecules." I'd probably add a few more (sex, drugs and rock & roll? blood, sweat and tears? cinnamon, curry, and cumin? goretex, neoprene and nike? pick your poison...), but i guess that's a start. Anyway as any good sci-fi writer will tell you, the NY times is talking about "life as we know it," i.e. carbon based life. It's always interesting though to speculate about life based on something else, like silicon, or electromagnetic force. Larry Niven wrote a story which had a being shaped like a sail that lived off of solar energy. Niven comes up with some very cool entities, i must say.

Speaking of entities, and moons, this morning I woke up sad. On a brilliantly sunny day just like this one 2 years ago, March 13, 2004, my favorite cat, "moon launch," died in my arms. He had lung cancer and couldn't breathe. I carried him out from the vet's office, his heavy weight in my arms, blinded by sun and tears.

Odd of course to carry on so for a cat. But i did.

Anyway, one should remember moon fondly, and with a touch of exasperation. He and I were together for 13 years, he came to me as a completly wild stringy gray kitten on superbowl sunday, 1991. Over the years he flung himself out of 2 windows, raised kittens, fell in love, trashed innumerable apartments, ate about a megaton of plastic bags, made friends with enormous dogs, demanded constant infusions of tuna water, and vocalized loudly whenever he felt he had something to say, which was often. He was huge, irrascible, annoying, determined, crazy, he loved me...and i loved him.

"all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die" -- Blade Runner

Om mane padme hum, moonie.

(top picture courtesy of www.phlonx.com)

put me in my place. NOW.

2006-03-06T18:46:00.000-05:00

Today I received an interesting email from someone I barely know (I exchanged 3 or 4 emails with her, some time ago, and then we (i thought, although she says it was me) just stopped corresponding). She told me I was:

arrogant,
narcissistic,
elitist, and
full of "hubris,"
and that this would be my downfall.

Hmmm. wow. This from someone who barely knows me. Think how many more adjectives she could have used had she really known me. oooh, i'm not sure I even wanna go there. How do I live with myself, one wonders?

Actually, this was good news. I guess I'm glad I come off as arrogant, because I usually feel that I come off as pathetic. I guess, given a choice between just those two, I'd rather be the one than the other. Trouble is, I thought that I was nicer on email than in person, especially to those I don't really know.

I guess the fact that I have the audacity to blog when I really don't have much to say proves my arrogance. Ah well. It's all fodder for my johari window, which I keep asking all my 3.5, oops, er, 4.5 readers to fill in. HEY. Perhaps if some of you had filled it in as asked, and put "arrogant" in, I could have been forewarned of this disturbing development. But NO. I was forced to be ignorant. Thanks a lot guys. I hold you all, every one of you, personally responsible for my downfall. There. It's not MY fault after all. sheeeeeeesh.

oscar > nascar > nasdaq

2006-03-05T19:11:00.000-05:00

Since I did a super bowl blog, and since my interest in the SB is probably roughly equal to my interest in the oscars, fairness and lack of anything better to do with my sunday night, combined with the fact that I have a new reader (HI ED!) urges me to write an oscar post. However, since i am singularly unqualified to opine on art, entertainment, talent or pulchritude, I have chosen do do something uniquely bloggrrilla. Here then, with no word from any sponsor, I bring you My Oscar Blog:

I may perhaps be a tad asperger syndrome, but I have some trouble keeping the above named entities/events apart in my brain. thus my first quiz. The Os/nas/car/daq quiz:

1. guess the event/entity which spawned the following quotes:

a) they are hot, they are edgy..

b) weak rubber and tires...

c) updo, downdo...

d) the power supercouple...

e) silly season...

f) in the event of a crash... (ooh that's a toughie folks. especially THIS year...)

g) first of several shoes to drop... (SEVERAL shoes. wow.)

h) this is a fantastic dress you're wearing...(ah ok, just checking to see if you're awake...it's...NASCAR! oooh yeah.)

2. What do Oscar and NASCAR have in common?
(besides that they rhyme and are thus connected in Bloggrrilla's phoneme obsessed brain)
A: click here..

ok ok this is not one of my more inspired blogs. But, well, i was compelled. I've done my duty now. Go eat your freakin popcorn or pizza or whatever people eat while watching the oscars. Oh sorry, champagne and caviar blinis.

(answers: a) OSCAR; b) NASDAQ; c) OSCAR; d) OSCAR; e) NASCAR; f) NASCAR; g) NASDAQ; h) OSCAR. oh come ON. whaddija think?)

The Ferals of Ferry Land

2006-03-04T16:00:00.000-05:00

Here we have some Staten Island denizens. Note the big hair.

Friday cat blogging

2006-03-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

Pink and Abby on the (guitar) case.

Pink and Abby run the numbers again.

REPENT NOW

2006-02-25T18:20:00.000-05:00

today i gave money to christians. Please, please, please do not hold it against me. Please, please do not erase me forever from the annals of the secular scientific saved. Please do not revoke my born again buddha card. Please do not preclude me from pagan parties. Please do not exclude me from evolution. Please do not think I've gone mad. Please, when I stand at the last gasp, in front of the great golden globe awards, please, please, please do not send me to the same hell that will contain jerry falwell, anita bryant, cardinal o'connor and pat robertson. Please. i repent.

It was the carrot cake that did it. Christian people can bake carrot cake. They do it well. I'm sure the kitchen they bake it in is as bright and cheery as a norman rockwell painting, with little black and white children looking on in awe, their cheeks flushed with anticipation, as mommie-like matrons in aprons hand out bits of dough, and pans to lick. I know, I know. It's all illusion, I know. I know it's a trick. I know they would bake me if they knew me. I know. But...doggone...the flesh is weak and the tastebud strong...

I bought carrot cake from some christians today.
AND
(oh dog! the sin...)
I also bought apple crisp.

mea culpa, mea culpa mea maxima culpa....

vey is mir

2006-02-24T20:17:00.000-05:00

and I'm not even jewish...

However, it's been a hellish week. And I'm buried deep in things I have to do but haven't gotten to yet. At work fer shure AND at home. Work is kicking my ass this week. I forgot how much easier school is than working. Working is hard. Working takes a long time. that's why it's called "work." otherwise, I guess they'd call it "play" or "sleep" or "sex." of course, to some, "sex" IS "work" and to some, arbeiter macht frei. (i hope for all the thousands of my germanic readers that is spelled correctly... ). However, for yours truly, the sensitive, tender, flower-like, and incredibly youthful bloggrrilla, work is work. And, really, I'd rather just sit around and eat.

The high point of the week happened 1/2 hour ago, when I received some new runner togs that I'd ordered online. nice, new, supple, colorful runner clothes. mmmm. I'm easy to please. At least for minutes at a time.

and on that note, here's some news you can use: Apparently, (and i've always thought this) happiness is genetic. I mean, you get dealt a certain "set point" of happiness and "trying to be happier is like trying to be taller." read all bout it here. Given my family history, I'd say that momentary thrills over new running clothes are pretty much the mount everest of my genetic capacity for happiness....! too bad really. I mean, isn't it sorta unamerican to be unhappy? oh well. perhaps vey really is mir.

and now on a completely different note, I ask all my 3.5 readers, and YOU know who you are (yes ok i lied about my thousands of germanic readers. ich bin ein berliner and so on.), to map my personality! I mean fill in my "johari window". here's your chance to describe your favorite blogger by means of select and tasty adjectives submitted to you as a by product of years of painstaking, rigorous, psychological study. Don't miss this chance.... go on, and knock yourself out. I thank you in advance. You totally rock.

kick me

2006-02-22T20:58:00.000-05:00

yes, i am walking around these days with a big, cosmic kick me sign plastered to my back. or perhaps my forehead. so go ahead. line up!!!

the cheese shop

2006-02-20T16:18:00.000-05:00

say no more. here's what we've all been waiting for.

morpheus' dark and starry altar

2006-02-19T16:43:00.000-05:00

I am a fan of sleep. If allowed, I sleep 9 hours per night. (but can't ever get them) I also (and have stated this before) think it's ridiculous to require people to start working at 9am, and i completely mistrust people who have no trouble popping out of bed at 6 or (god forbid) 5am. When I used to post to a runners message board, I realized that many runners are the type of people who actually pride themselves on getting up at hours that are beyond wee (3am, 4am) to get in a run before the 9-5 job kicks in. Now I love to run, but I could no more do that than I could go to torino this minute and knock off a flawless half-pipe 180 snowboarding trick. Nor do I EVER plan to run at 3am, unless I stay up to do it and unless (ok lets face it) someone comes up with some very nice medical enhancement that enables me to do so.

Here's where the link comes in. There are 2 interesting articles here about sleep. One about sleep deprivation drugs (which allow you to go without sleep without feeling it. and what do you do with those extra hours? why you WORK of course! ooo i can hardly wait.), and one about sleep in pre-industrial times (apparently they had 2 periods of sleep. they'd knock off at about 9pm (bedbugs allowing), then get up after midnight for a beer and a chat.).

anyway. If you, like I, love to worship at morpheus' dark altar, read and weep. Sleep as we imagine it was, never was, and sleep as we'd love it to be, will not be or will not be for much longer. There. sleep on THAT.

Reading List

2006-02-18T19:40:00.000-05:00

For years I read only nonfiction (ok, and a lot of sci-fi). Post barzam (last july), I had had it with reading law, and with reality in general. So I started reading whatever struck my fancy. I also sorta wanted to go backwards, and do the 19th century novel thing, (but I also tossed in some sci-fi, because it's what i love) Here's what I've read since the zam.

Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
(those 3 are books 2,3,4 of the Ender series by Orson Scott Card)
Martin Chuzzelwit by Charles Dickens
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Nanon by George Sand
Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
The Aeneid by Virgil
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Break, Blow, Burn, poetry by various, poetry crit by Camille Paglia
Moby Dick (in progress) by Herman Melville
Time out of Joint (in progress) by Philip K. Dick

When I get ambitious, I may review some of them. But then again, I'm no book reviewer, and usually just say things like, "it's good, you should read it." I have to say I was surprised at how easy to read both the Dickens book and the George Eliot books were, I guess I only hate modern fiction. (heheh).

You may notice that the sci fi I've been on recently is more of the philosophical kind than the "hard" sci fi kind. As a die hard Larry Niven fan, I have read my share of hard sci fi too, and I'll always love it when it's done well (as Niven does). And as far as cyberpunk goes, I burned out on it. I mean after Count Zero and Neuromancer, Gibson kinda lost it, and I'm out of the loop with respect to what other cyberpunkians like Bruce Sterling are doing. I mean, I'll always have a soft spot for cyberpunk, just like I have a soft spot for the Clash and the Sex Pistols, because that was my era.

On another note entirely, I recently (ok ok, it was during law school), read an interesting compilation called Alien Sex. It was sci fi erotica. Except it was way more sci fi than erotic. Some of the stories weren't great, but some were amazing, especially if you like dark. (Again, not erotic amazing...lest we get your hopes up so to speak). My point is, it wasn't a good idea gone wrong.

insect petting zoo

2006-02-17T21:03:00.000-05:00

Those who know me know that I am a modest fan of the insect. By "modest fan" i mean that I do not love insects the way I love cats, horses or even iguanas, but I do not abhore them either. I have a mild, somewhat bemused interest in the furious struggles of the ant, am amused by the homer simpsonesque nature of the fly, and think praying mantises are pretty cool looking. I also like bees. (However, big brown papernest wasps terrify me, and, as with all things that terrify one, seem inordinately attracted to me. I am reminded of the poet Archilochus, but, that's for another day.) (his grave is supposed to be surrounded constantly by hornets)

Anyway, given my feelings about the insect, it would seem that the Smithsonian Insect Zoo is tailor made for such as I. Apparently you can even pet them.
But, the picture on the site also has a
tarantula which, as any 8 yr old can tell you, is no insect.

It is an arachnid. Smithsonian oughta fix that.

and now for something completely different.
CAUTION: PG-13 (parental guidance suggested. Some nudity, some touching...some hardware...)

heh. fooldya. Friday feline follies as if you thought I'd forgotten. This time, pink and abby embrace on the bf's laptop.

since it is friday, i am exhausted. Cannot even tell you how tired. and before I forget, I have to say that next week is the bar exam. If I had not passed the sucker in July, I'd be doing it next week. I am inordinately glad that I am not, and I want to take this opportunity to wish ALL bar takers, be they first time, second or tenth, good luck next week. If you've never taken the bar, you have NO idea of the stress level involved. Not sure why, or how, but it is a NASTY experience. It's not even that hard, i mean objectively. But the psychological pressure is incredible. probably only equalled by the pressure undergone by doctors and paratroopers. thus, bar takers, i wish you ALL luck. merde, etc!

happy vd

2006-02-14T21:43:00.000-05:00

This really has nothing to do with VD (or does it?). Nonetheless, I know that I have often stated that I hate broadway musicals. And I do. however, I LOVE quizzes that purport to tell you who you are, because really, I haven't a clue. So, here's the latest indulgence.

I am "Rent". And you thought I was "Cats" didn't you?

the quiz:
What Musical Are You?

Rent
You're Rent! The best musical in the world! You're wild, crazy, and a little unorthodox. You live life to the fullest because there is no day but today.

Quizzes by myYearbook.com -- the World's Biggest Yearbook!

angels in amurka

2006-02-12T19:47:00.000-05:00

GW. Tha's global warming, folks, er, or is it George W?

2006-02-12T09:49:00.000-05:00

more news you can use.

Seems the plight of polar bears as they slowly lose their icy homes due to GW (global warming), has forced GW (Bush) to take notice. If he actually moves on this, i will be very surprised, and may even be forced to believe in a deity... perhaps the great polar bear goddess...
Read about it HERE. And keep in mind the source...(the independant. A UK paper that spells "program," as "programme." I'm not sayin, i'm just sayin...)

Now speaking of deities, bush, and GW, THIS is really really interesting. It seems that the polar bears are actually being helped by a deity after all, the old mean one, jehovah. Apparently some Evangelicals have decided to back an initiative to fight global warming, and have signed a statement. Bush is thus pressured by his own base (well, not the billionaires yet). This is major, folks. First of all, to back such an initiative, you have to think there is something called global warming, and then you have to decide it is scary enough to be a threat. This is major on at least two levels:
1) One such evangelical admitted that there may be "blind spots" in the evangelical community (NO, REALLY???), and that GW was one of them (GW means global warming...uh, remember?(

2) I thought only the devil, gays, liberals, women who want good jobs, doctors who perform abortions, people who drive hybrids, janet jacksons left (or was it right?) breast, and the latex industry were threats to evangelicals. I'm glad GW (george...oh oops I mean GLOBAL WARMING) has joined the list.

Again, keep in mind the source for this one. That pinko-commie rag, the NY times. Sheeesh.

These articles verge on being good news. I am heartened and hope that soon we'll all join in the fight against GW... even GW himself...

miscellania

2006-02-12T08:45:00.000-05:00

It is snowing like the bejeezus. And I have nothing really scintillating to say. Has this stopped me before, you ask? No it has not. Therefore, we forge on ahead to bring my 2.5 readers news they can use.

Yesterday I got my hair straightened again. I go here. Straightening my hair involves a long, and arduous process called "thermal reconditioning," which means they put on a chemical, then spend about 3 hours flattening 1/4 inch sections of your hair with an iron, tug tug, hisss hiss all over your head. I played go and minesweeper on my zaurus until they started pulling my head back at which time I forced myself to make some conversation. Fortunately, this was an abortive attempt because the guy who was working on my hair the most didn't speak english, and I don't speak much spanish.

At that point, a kid, a 10 yr old girl, asked the owner of the salon (it's a small, kinda family place) where the tallest building in teh world was. I (ms.nerdy know it all) piped up "In Singapore". Now i have to check my facts. Turns out that as usual, ms nerdy know it all is dead wrong.) here's the scoop. Also, according to this site, it depends on who measures.
However, note that, in none of these sites, is the word "Singapore" mentioned. Ah well.

At any rate, the kid & i began a conversation about, of all things, the Taj Mahal and birthdays.

She wanted to go to the Taj Mahal and I heartily concurred. She also wanted to visit the empire state building and disney world. Now I've been to the empire state building, in fact, i worked at a temp job there for quite some time (pre 911), so I have perhaps less appreciation for the deco skyscraper than I should. And let's not even get started that now the ESB reminds me too much of the WTC, which makes it all a bit sad. Human striving for the sky and all that. Money and Hubris, burnt up in one disgustingly low-tech, almost pedestrian act. Note that I didn't say "pathetic" at all, I said "sad." and that's just what I mean.

Anyway, disney world is less controversial. I have NO desire to go there, but when I was 10, I LOVED Six Flags over Texas. So i can understand the sentiment.

Apres the ironing of the hair, comes the neutralizing of the hair. One sits with goo running over ones head for about 20 minutes. since hair is in face, there is no zaurus action possible.

Then, the blow job (heheh, sorry, of COURSE I meant blow dry. Just checking the site monitor...) the blow dry, and the credit card pulled out and pinched til it cries out in pain, the tipping, and the leaving with pink and pearly products packaged in a glossy bag o' beauty.

I like the salon, which means that I can tolerate it. (See "Shopping with Bloggrilla") below. It's small, run by a very relaxed (no pun intended, heh), Puerto Rican guy and his 19 yr old daughter. Seems like the stylists are mostly hispanic, the manicure/masseur types mostly slavic, and there's a chick from Staten Island complete with SI accent to keep it local. This is not to say that the place is inexpensive OOOOOH no. And they do a booming biz. The reason? The guy is REALLY GOOD at what he does. I'm a case in point. Someday, when less camera shy, I'll post before and after pix. You would not know today that I ever in my life had one curly strand. No, I am now a blond asian. Minus the epicanthic folds...

I think it is time for breakfast. The snow keeps falling. Since you can't sweat or get your hair wet for 2 days after straightening, I cannot run today. Which is, in some sense a blessing, because although I have run in blizzards, and liked it, that was in Chicago where it's flat and wide and you don't run the risk of running into things or getting run over. So i will not be trotting about like the maniac I am today.

moon

2006-02-11T11:43:00.000-05:00

soon there will come a time when I have to tell the story of moon. However, I'll probably wait until the anniversary of his death (March 13) to do it. And then I'll post pics of him.

Meanwhile here's a picture entitled "moon and squid in the shadows" from The Ex's website. It reminds me of a verse from a Rilke poem called "on hearing of a death"

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you dissapeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.

belated friday cat blog

2006-02-11T08:32:00.000-05:00

The orange cat is squid, who lived with me and my ex-husband. After a protracted custody battle, squid now resides with my ex. The black cat is Jill, a reformed former feral, the very same feline who gave birth behind my ex's toilet. She is the mother of abby, one of my kittens.

it is truly a may/december romance, but who amongst us can cast doubts upon true love?

bowl of souper

2006-02-05T19:26:00.000-05:00

this year, we are picking teams by the color wheel. the BF wanted higher frequencies, so he got Seattle, because they wear dark blue. I got the Steelers, which is fine. However, I have to say, as if it's not obvious, I don't like watching football. I don't even really like playing it. It's not like hockey, or basketball, which are exciting to watch. Football is like, um, well, like sex on anti-depressants, if you know what I mean. (it takes forever to get there...)

and speaking of sex. How about the word, "pudenda?" (nice segue there, 'rrilla) Now if there was ever a less sexy word for the female anatomy, I haven't heard it. I mean, it sounds a bit like "credenza". "Canya get your feet off the pudenda?" "I thought I told you to use a coaster on the pudenda." "This lovely couch, and matching pudenda..."

well, ok. now back to superbowl 40. brought to you by "brown and bubbly..." oh god. Stop me before i get started on THAT...

saturday mass

2006-02-04T11:16:00.000-05:00

saturday is mass day in bloggrrilla land. This means the kittens get weighed.
here are the stats:

abby: the sleek and enormous kitten weighs in at 9.5 pounds. And can jump straight up in the air 6 feet.

pink: small and wiry, but does a mean backflip. Weighs in at 7.5 pounds. He's a little finicky about food, preferring to play with his chicken nuggets rather than eat them.
(by the way, those are real chicken, not McNuggets...I prefer to play with McNuggets rather then eat them too. oh god. say McNuggets to yourself a few times....bweheheheh).

I just ran 8 miles and am feeling mighty proud of myself.

i'm a believer

2006-02-03T20:13:00.000-05:00

FSM:
well, at last, something even I can believe in. And there are even pictures. I especially like the Sistine Chapel, though i remembered it a bit differently; and the global temperature/pirate graph is very informative. This is at least as good as what L. Ron Hubbard came up with. Perhaps we can get some movie stars to convert.

FCB:
And another thing that I fervently believe in is the friday worship at the cat blog. Or the worshipful friday cat blog. Here, without further ado, I present:

Abby (the glorious)

and:

pink.
(i know it's a repeat, but one can't get enough of the handsome young thing.)

rewriting the wheel

2006-02-01T21:44:00.000-05:00

today, in a sudden revelation at work, i confidently said to myself: "why, I don't need to rewrite the wheel here."

Then I started to snicker uncontrollably, all alone in my little cubicle. And then, words started to get funny on me, you know how that happens. Suddenly simple, normal, everyday words like "flower," "pudding," or "slumber," begin to become incredibly amusing. I normally like when that happens, but I'm still too new at this job to feel quite comfortable laughing uproariously at what appears to be nothing.

Additionally, this is a job for social phobes. There is virtually NO interaction with other humans. We work in a warren of cubicles like specialized insects. Now I happen to like that, but it makes the rare social contact really hard, whereas if you are forced from minute one to interact, it gets easier to do.

anyway. Ugly day today, the hair is a total rats nest now. I must bite the bullet and either cut it off or straighten it again.

But i shall not bite the bull. or rewrite the wheel.

monday

2006-01-30T20:49:00.000-05:00

and that's what i'm talking about.

What time is it?

2006-01-29T10:56:00.000-05:00

Last night the BF and I went to see Morris Day and the Time at BAM. If you are too young to remember "Purple Rain," then you likely don't remember Morris Day and the time (o wee o weee o). They were part of the same minneapolis music scene that produced (or perhaps I should say "spawned," meaning that in the nicest possible way...) Prince. In fact, I guess Prince actually put the band together, but I don't really know the genesis of Time (heheh). Prince happens to be an idol of mine. In fact, I look like him. That is, I would if I were male and black. Or even if he were just clean shaven. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Morris Day.

The concert was AMAZING, if you like your concerts interactive. If you like to sit back in your seat and "appreciate," then this ain't for you, they MAKE you get up and dance. In fact, they made a lot of women get up on the stageand dance. I was not one of them (I actually hunkered down in my seat due to an attack of bad-hair related shyness). The band sports a retro old movie gangster look, Morris Day fronts in velvet pimpwear, and Jerome Benton...what can anyone say about Jerome Benton? He's the court jester, the trickster god, the ...whatever. He roams through the audience insulting people and flirting, flings himself into athletic contortions, grabs his crotch with alarming frequency, and has an ongoing, onstage battle with a basket of drumsticks, which are dropkicked, tossed, caught, juggled, broken, thrown, used as props, and used as weapons against the drummer (Jelly Bean)'s wall o' sound beats.

I liked also that the music was somewhere between funkadelic and prince, with some led zepplin tossed in there for good measure. The opening song sounded seriously heavy metal.

In all, it was pretty awesome. 3 hours went by and I thought it was about 45 minutes.
And, yes, they played "jungle love." O wee O wee O. If only the Lexingon Ave subway would change its tune. sigh.

miracle on the lex ave line

2006-01-27T20:25:00.000-05:00

well there's this thing i've noticed for a long time now, on the lex ave line, actually happens on the 4 & 5 mostly. No, the virgin mary's face doesn't appear magically out of graffiti (especially since there isn't any more graffiti, graffiti is now as scarce as virgin marys as a matter of fact.). No, the doors don't chime "repent". No, jesus doesn't appear, walking on the third rail. in fact, there's nothing religious about it at all, unless your'e a musical theatre freak. and if you are a MTF, i don't wanna know. I hate musical theater.
Nonetheless, it is, in its way, a small, pleasant, secretive, old new york sort of miracle.
It is this: when the 4 and 5 pull out of a station (any station) the squealing gears or wheels play the first three notes of "There's a place for us" from West Side Story. They do. Yes they do. "THEEEEEERE's AAAA Plaaaace......" and then the gears catch and all you get is that whir of accelleration.

It's not like i haven't got anything better to do with my time. It's really not... just thought you all should know.

the agony of my seat

2006-01-23T20:53:00.000-05:00

ow ow ow ow, my butt hurts! I hate sitting all day. Gads. how do people do this? And I can't believe i'm sitting in front of the computer at home now. Ridiculous. I have to go get horizontal.

this could get ugly

2006-01-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

kissin' cousins...

new camera test pix (belated friday cat blog)

2006-01-22T15:18:00.000-05:00

new images of the wee ones.

odd, how each seems to choose a flattering background color...

the triumph of the morning-nazis

2006-01-21T11:39:00.000-05:00

my first week of work over, this is my first saturday as a wage slave. Ain't it sweeeet? why i remember when saturday was just another day of mindless pleasure.

Howz the job? Well, glad you asked. The JOB itself I cannot particularly write about. Top secret and all that. heheh. No I won't be outed soon by the bush administration. At least I hope not. Suffice it to say that i am gainfully, legally employed. I have found a use for my law diploma, other than covering the cracks in the tenement walls.

This is the FIRST time I've had a real job where you are supposed to be there from 9-5. Here are several things I have learned about 9-5.

1. Running after work is harder than running during the day.
2. One gains weight working 9-5, and one isn't sure how, because one eats less b/c one is not near the refrigerator all day.
3. The gym is more crowded at 6 pm than it is at 11am.
4. Blogging is harder working 9-5.
5. Kittens feel deprived, and pee on things when everyone is gone all day.
6. Everything is crowded, all the time, wherever you go, because everyone else works 9-5.
7. The main thing is, getting up this early every morning is very hard. 9-5 is really the TRIUMPH OF THE MORNING-NAZIS.

I was so depressed this week b/c running really doesn't feel good to me after work. I hope this changes! I mean i like running about noon, or even as early as 10 am. as long as I've been up a couple of hours. But sitting on my (fat) ass all day and then trying to run on a treadmill surrounded by every other (fat) assed 9-5er is singularly uninspiring. my body does not like it.

The times had an article a while back about the tyranny of the morning people. Apt, i think. We are never far from our puritan heritage in this country anyway. (That goes for our obsession with porn too!)

sigh. Here's my ideal day:

wake up 9am.
flop around reading emails & stretching for a while.
run about 10am.
eat about noon.
flop around for a while, stretching and reading emails.
go out for errands.
at about 3, get down to some kind of work.
work until about 8 or 9pm.
eat, watch tv.
maybe do a little more work
read.
zonk out at about 12 or 1.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

eve of destruction

2006-01-16T20:01:00.000-05:00

oh ok, perhaps i'm being a tad overdramatic, but I START WORK tomorrow....

Yeah, I'm excited, but i'm also bemoaning the loss of my days of getting up late, running when I feel like it and flopping around the apt. all day with my kittens. After all, it ain't like i'm 22 and this is my first job.

nonetheless, i suppose i should feel good about finally putting my legal education to good use. hope to hell I can do the job. Hope to hell I LIKE the job.

prosperity preachin'

2006-01-14T17:31:00.000-05:00

I've been hearing about Creflo Dollar and his wife Tammy for ages. So it's kinda surprising that the Times just ran an article on him and the "prosperity gospel" phenomena (linked to above). Prosperity gospel is loosely described as "God wants you to be rich." So if you make money, you must be doing right. Well, aside from the obvious problems with that (uh, hello? totally does not query the means of making money), my all too human habit of inferring the opposite from any statement makes me think that this doctrine is saying that if you are poor, you ain't right with god. Now, that seems odd, since jesus said "blessed are the poor" or something like that. But maybe he was just playing to the masses (no pun intended) at the time.

Seriously though, i understand that this "gospel" comes as a natural extrapolation of the notion that god will provide. Jesus also said "I come that not only that you have life, but that you have it more abundantly" or something like that (i can't really quote the bible right. Although I grew up having it crammed down my throat, it's been years since i memorized any of it, and i don't have one at present), and that could be interpreted to mean that you have money more abundantly (but "life" isn't really money, is it?). But the whole thing is suspect because it is way too simplistic, i.e. doesn't take into account the disparities in society that create lack of wealth, etc. I remember when I was a dancer, occassionally I'd try to read a self help book with a loud, sweaty, exitable title something like "you can get what you want!!!" or "10 secrets to absolute success!!" (I'd hide them though. Usually under a comic book). They were all the same, some good notions aimed at changing your mind and empowering you, but in the end given to all too simplistic, all too unexamined, all too obviously illogical platitudes "proved" with ridiculous examples. I couldn't get into the self-help thing.

Religion and self help always have had an uneasy relationship as far as i'm concerned, i mean religion does "help", i'm sure, but if you REALLY think about it, what's good from a universal POV (which is supposedly what religion has) is not necessarily good for YOU as an individual. OR, conversely, you may not even recognize what's really good for you. The flat screen TV and hummer may be BAD for you, and maybe even in ways that are pretty direct.

Anyway, I'm ranting. Guess it's a slow day in bloggrrilla land.

shopping with bloggrrilla

2006-01-11T18:02:00.000-05:00

I am a strange woman. Shopping for clothes, talking on the phone, and beauty parlors fill me with dread and the need to avoid them at all costs. (and, no offense to the breederishly inclined, but i don't want a baby either...) I mean, all these activities take up too much time and the end result is never as good as you wanted it to be. Hence, I am generally prone to avoiding infants, wearing well-worn clothes from 1992, sporting bad hair, and returning calls only when missing them threatens economic or reputational ruin.

Although hair was always a problem, clothes haven't always been. When I was a dancer, I mostly lived in jeans and workout clothes, and the annual pilgrimage to the gap to buy jeans took all of about 10 minutes: Enter store, find guys section, pour self into the smallest straightleg 501s you can, pay, and leave. that was before "relaxed" entered the vocabulary of jeans for people under 78 yrs old and 300 lbs, before manufacturers started deciding that every woman has a 22 inch waist and 85 inch hips, before the dizzying array of "boot-cut," "low-rise", martin/jimmy/ellwood /harrison/ford/chrysler/honda "fits," before "pre-ripped" jeans, and before jeans cost at minimum 50 bucks and max out over 5 benjies. Now, men's jeans are too baggy, women's jeans have those HIPS, and i cannot afford to go to diesel or baby blue or prada or whoever else wants me to pay 3 digits for a ripped up piece of denim. gads.

So today i was almost irrationally elated when I ventured into the gap to buy some bras (yes, bras at the gap, sigh, I have NO style), and found a dark pair of jeans that had not been pre-washed, ripped, ground-in-dirted or stressed in any way, which FIT me the way jeans should, i.e. none of that overly curvy shit, STRAIGHT in the hips which is how I'm built, AND which cost less than 50 bucks.

And by the way, how about that Alito?

Yes, I've been listening to the hearings. I don't have anything smart to say that hasn't been said about Alito, he's a very smart man, and his hyper-conservative views should come as no surprise to anyone, given his judicial history and opinions. What is surprising is that anyone in congress actually expects him to give a straight answer about roe v. wade. However, I will say that there are things that frighten me about Alito, such as his much-inquired into CAP membership (ok so he was a member, but why was he proud of it at 30?) AND the fact that he actually said he admired Bork. The latter admission would be enough for me to keep him as far away from the Supreme Ct as possible...perhaps assigning him a district judgeship in Guam...

There. the sacred and profane in one blog. You decide which is which...

the will to blog

2006-01-09T14:20:00.000-05:00

odd how looming employment has taken away some of the will to blog. Since this is my last vacation week, soon my life will be filled with new people, and more importantly my life will be FILLED, in the sense that I'll have literally no time. I'm anticipating that filled-ness by suddenly wanting to do nothing more this week than sit in front of the TV and eat chips.

pink update

2006-01-07T00:16:00.000-05:00

Well, the ex-husband, who discovered and maintains the feral colony that pink and abby hail from has posted a rebuttal to my assertion that pink lost his eye due to an eye-infection. Since he was there, i guess he knows best. I maintain that he never told me the eye story, he says he did. i mean i knew about the fall, but not the eye-poking in the garbage pile. Poor little pink! I thought his eye problem was due to the same kind of infection that attacked the left eye of the original rescued kitten, betty, but then subsided, causing her eye to gain a strange, sparkly aspect when viewed from certain angles. (The ex rescued betty and her sibs Annie and William when they were about a day old, and he and i totally hand raised them. They are now hale and hearty 7 yr old cats ...)

fast forward to now. at any rate, the Pink one is doing fine. His eye looks a little frightening, all sutures and shaved skin, but he's chowing down and running around like a maniac, tormenting his sis/cousin. Yay pink!

pinkeye-- friday cat blogging

2006-01-06T12:36:00.000-05:00

our male kitten
just got home from being fixed. poor tyke. In a perfect world, male cats would get to keep their balls, but female cats don't buy into the Nancy Reagan formula. Apparently, because female cats don't ovulate until the male cat withdraws, different kittens in the same litter can have more than one daddy. Gives new meaning to the phrase "who's your daddy?"...

Pink (our male kitten), also lost his eye due to an infection in his babyhood, so the vet had to operate to take out the useless eye material, clean up the eye, and sew it shut. We were worried he'd be kinda freaked, but he came home from the vet hungry and raring to go. He's already jumped on every cabinet, gotten into the sink, run back and forth investigating the apartment, and sparred with his cousin, abby (seen here airborne chasing her favorite toy, a feathered stick), so i guess he's feeling ok.

gainfully employed

2006-01-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

hmmmm, employed at last! I start week after next. Wow, between blogging, running and kittens, who has time for work?

oh, word to da wise. do not EVER eat bean patties for breakfast prior to an important interview...unless you enjoy that clenched feeling...

style and content

2006-01-03T21:41:00.000-05:00

in the very early days of my marriage, my husband (now ex) and i would sometimes amuse ourselves by doing "free writes." we'd take 10 minutes and a beginning phrase and write whatever fell out of our mind and onto the page. Some of these free writes wound up as stories, some were really funny, some not. One of mine became a sci-fi story i called "the rat game."

in the desperate and confused days after i quit dancing and before i became the worlds oldest law student, i flopped around a lot trying to figure out my next move. I found myself in a writers' workshop, and, not understanding the need to reinvent any fictional wheels, i trotted out "the rat game" as my work in progress. I thought it was good sci-fi: rats had taken over the world; spoke a colorful, fast-paced, highly william gibson influenced argot, and amused themselves by knocking people out, putting extremely poisonous scorpions ready to strike on their bellies, and waking them up. The idea was that if a human could come to fast enough to whip up and knock the scorpion off before it struck, they'd win something. Ok, ok. tame by today's standards i know, but i was going for a burroughs-esque weirdness, and the plot mattered very little to me. i was only interested in my descriptions of speed and sweat and the smells of rat lairs.

well, predictably, the writers workshop ripped "the rat game" to shreds, along with another story i called "the passion of betty" about a woman with stigmata. the basic message was that i had a lot of style, and zero content. I never went back. Funny, after years of choreographers yelling at me, dance teachers ripping my ego to shreds, and reviewers damning me with faint praise, I couldn't even take one bit of constructive criticism on my precious stories. apparently, i had an ego problem after all.

rare and brutal -- news you can use

2006-01-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

Today the Science Times has an article on cuteness, and why humans respond to visual cuteness cues. A friend who is herself "cute" in that mini-cooper way, used to tell me that cute can get away with a lot more than beauty where men are concerned. Another friend disagreed..."beauty rules" he said. The Times states: "Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness." The article goes on to talk about the human response to the cute, why it feels cheap, why some cultures (Japan) seem to crave the cute more than others. Then predictably it de-constructs some fuzzy animals' cuteness, (a baby penguin's wobbly walk, a panda's 2 toned face) into their survivalesque components.

The article is cute itself. But what i really liked about it was the phrase "beauty is rare and brutal." you don't find a phrase that nice in most news articles. I mean, Bush's latest idiocy or connivance (depending on your view of his iq) inspires nothing so poetic, and rightly so. Of course "cuteness" is not serious news. But hey, maybe it should be.

i'll drink to rare and brutal any day.

cold hard light of day

2006-01-02T10:55:00.000-05:00

This is the week of The Big Job Interview. The interview for the job I want, that is. Also, let's face it, the ONLY job interview I've had in recent weeks (ok months. jeez.) Let's all keep fingies crossed that B gets her job and re-enters the world of viable humans who have reasons to live.

Speaking of reasons to live, and lest I wallow in more and greater melancholia, here are some of the big highlights of 2005. Lowlights (and lives) are excluded.

Jan. 2005: I join the YMCA even though I am not young, a man, christian, or an associate. No one seemed to care.

March 2005: I move from inwood to ossining, and in with the boyfriend. BF and I go to see LAURIE ANDERSON at BAM.

May 2005: I graduate law skool highly honorably. The boyfriend drags me to graduation. On the way we stop off at a B&B in Clearfield Pennsylvania, where I run on a great trail made from an old railroad (Clearfield to Grampion, PA).

July 2005: I sit for the NY bar. (ok not a highlight. But, like a massive zit before an important interview, it took over my mind.)

Aug. 2005: Ex-husband and I do a trap neuter return (TNR) on a feral cat colony in Staten Island. We trap 6 cats, have them spayed and neutered, take care of them, then release them back into the vacant lot behind ex's home. One that is too pregnant to trap gives birth to 4 kittens behind my ex-husband's toilet. I get my hair straightened.

Sept. 2005: The bf and I go to Paris and Bordeaux to visit friends. On our return, we are rewarded with KITTENS (links to follow). Two of them, from my fave SI feral colony. We again find ourselves buying massive amounts of cat litter and feathered rubber toys (for THEM. get your mind out of the gutter.).

Oct. 2005: I am informed that I have been elected into the Order of the Coif. Too late, I've already spent a fortune straightening my hair and am not about to don one of those curly white wigs.

Nov. 2005: I am informed that I passed the NY barzam. I try to tie one on to celebrate but am promptly floored for the better part of 10 days by some kind of bird flu. (i don't know if it was bird flu. Just said that because it was in the national zitgeist.) More TNR with a huge (30 cats) colony in Staten Island.

Dec. 2005: The bf and I go to see PATTI SMITH at BAM. I reluctantly enter my 7th month of unemployment. The ex-husb finds a girlfriend. (I wasn't aware he'd lost one.)

As I said, i've omitted the maudlin, sad, painful and depressional aspects of 2005 in the interests of not feeling any worse. The NY Times recently published an article saying that introspection was bad for you. In the interests of a better 2006, I hope to stop some of my quantum naval gazing, and go with my gut. (wait, isn't that contradictory?)

bloggrrilla 101, or the chronicles of ugly

2006-01-01T12:11:00.000-05:00

New year, new bloggrrilla. or so i hope... Let's see, what's going on? Well, I'm still unemployed for one. This is NOT good. And, I seem to buck the odds, as usual. I graduated in the top 5% of my law skool class (despite my insistence on misspelling "school"). I went to LS on a full scholarship, so I have very few student loans to pay off. Most other folks in this position are employed with big firms or in some cool public interest job. Me? I was just turned down for a paralegal position...

What gives?

Ok. I'm a tad (well perhaps more than a tad) socially inept, read phobic. This characteristic does not lend itself to ease of interview style. In fact, it doesn't lend itself to lawyering at all. It will take a lot of work on myself for me to be a decent lawyer, school is easy for me.

Second, I am constantly in my mind apologizing for being the age I am, and for graduating from a 2nd tier school (TOP second tier, mind you! heheh), even tho my decision to go to the school hinged a lot on the full scholarship, and I actually got in to a couple top 15 schools. Not a great decision in the long run, but as I said, I'm not terribly well educated, wasn't up on the ratings game and didn't know no better. Oh let's be honest, I wanted the scholarship, and the school wooed me like a basketball star. It's also a good school, with a very good regional rep, and had I wanted to live in the midwest, I'd be gainfully employed and sitting pretty.

I need to remember what Eleanor Roosevelt said: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," or something like that. Well I hand my inferiority around like a business card before I open my mouth. "hi there, look down on me please." I do this so automatically in job situations that it is frightening, and of course when I try to cover that feeling, I come off as arrogant and abrupt.

Lastly, I didn't manage to get excited about law, although I have to say that is changing. I recently figured out what I want to do with my degree, or a broad area anyway, and that's good. I don't want to work for big firms and help rich companies, I actually want to work in housing or employment law, helping poor and working people keep their homes and not get screwed on the job. I came by this interest recently, by volunteering in housing court. I like what the pro se attorneys there do, I like it a lot. I want to do some good in the world. REVERSAL! The folk wisdom about law school is that people go in idealistic and come out wanting to work for the biggest firm possible and make a ton of money. I didn't exactly go in to make money (although that possibility wasn't a deterrant), but I came out feeling bored and bleak about big firm law, and yes, dare I say it, more idealistic than when I went in. But then again, I seem to do everything backwards, so there it is.

aeneid

2005-12-31T16:09:00.000-05:00

apparently in addition to having difficulty with aeneas' moral imperatives, i have trouble with the spelling of his name. humble appy-pologies.

honorable new years

2005-12-31T15:37:00.000-05:00

I don't have a lot of good formal education, well, I didn't until I went to law school, which is like a rather drawn out, painful version of trade school and thus doesn't count. However, I read a lot, and I read a lot of stuff that educated people read, discuss, write on and sweat over in the hallowed halls of high hierophancy (I just used hierophancy for the alliteration, sorry. It's not really appropos. I meant "high learnin'" lest there be confusion...).

I'm now reading Virgil's Aeneid, and, apart from it being a jolly good read (filled with battles, tears, love, passion, compassion and the wicked doings of nasty people AND nasty gods/giants/monsters/mountains/trees, whatever, they all seem to get a hand in against poor Aeneas and co.), some questions occur. To be right with the gods seems only to require constant sacrificing of handsome young bulls, yet Aenaes is a compassionate, ethical, and courageous person (except, perhaps in the eyes of the handsome young bulls). It would seem then, that (ok this is probably quite elementary for those of you who've studied classics) ethics has nothing to do with devotion to a deity. Now, being of the non-theistic persuasion myself, this comes as no surprise, but I wonder if I'm reading the Aeneid correctly. To the Romans then, was there a notion of divine reward for being courageous and ethical, or was acting in an ethical way on earth reward enough?

And, for another example of honor and dishonor, read Archilochus 6th (8th?) century BC greek poet. He wrote poetry joking about his running away from a battle and leaving his prized shield behind for the enemy to take. In the days of "return with your shield, or on it" I assume he was pretty radical. Western culture's first anti-hero... By the way, this paragraph has nothing to do with the first. It was just in my mind.

The mind is a terrible thing.