Last night as I was
Posted by: Liz
Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, my doorbell rang. It was pretty late for doorbells to be ringing, so of courseit caused a light panic to arise in my chest. But my roommate leaned out her window and couldn't see anyone by the door. We stood there for a minute, deciding it had just been some kids playing around or something when the doorbell rang again! Now my roommate had just looked out and saw there was no one there, but J went down gamely and peaked out the door. No one there again. That gives me the shivers. Ghosty doorbell ringers. In any case, this inspired something in my subconcious to give me dreams about scary people rattling my doorknobs and trying to break in. I knew I was asleep and thought that I was really hearing these scary noises, but couldn't wake up to react to them. So I kept trying to break through my dream haze and yell to J to check it out. I really thought I was getting through the dream and talking loudly. When I finally did awake for real, it was just like regular waking up and I realized I hadn't been shouting or thrashing about at all, but merely sleeping. It always feels slightly disconcerting to wake up in a panic to find your body has been resting calmly through your turmoil. --------This could have come from
Posted by: Liz
This could have come from my 9th grade journalDo you think it's possible to lose the ability to think original thoughts? Or maybe I just once thought I had original thoughts and the older I get, the less orignial they all seem. All that angsty poetry sure seemed of-the-moment when I was spending my teen years composing it, but I'm sure it was just some horrible recycling mixture of stuff I'd heard and read and stuff I thought a girl my age might write about. The less I write, the less inspired I feel to write, and the more I probably need to write. I have a horrible backlog of shit I have to workthrough in my head to reach any of the good stuff now. But I guess I worry it's not back there at all. Maybe I crushed it to death with all the backlog. Great, I'm just walking around with a big clump of cold-mashed potato thoughts.
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Across the pond, fanny is
Posted by: Liz
Across the pond, fanny is slang for the other side of a woman's lower regionsThe fannypack may be on its way back into mainstream fashion culture. I saw two very hip young women walking around with these trendy, hip slung bags that were unmistakable cousins to those ugly florescent tourist belts. But these weren't ugly at all...they were kind of...cute? Having...mixed...feelings...must...fight...urges...to...like...new, hip...fanny packs...
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Well, obviously My baby cousin
Posted by: Liz
Well, obviouslyMy baby cousin is at the stage where she talks with real words, but in that baby accent that is very hard to understand. She was chattering away at me while I was talking to her 4-year-old older sister and I was giving her the obligatory, "Uh huh! Oh yeah!" that I do when I don't understand a child and I've already asked them to repeat themselves. Usually this placates them, but she was being very insistent with a phrase that I couldn't wrap my head around. Finally, I asked the older one what she was saying and she looked up at me like she couldn't believe this deaf person had been standing next to her the whole night, and promptly interpreted: "She said, '"Teeth" and "cheek" are not homonyms.'" Silly me, why didn't I hear that...
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Ye-Haw and Jesus On Saturday
Posted by: Liz
Ye-Haw and JesusOn Saturday I had my Big Brother Big Sister field trip to ride horses. Or at least that’s how it was billed to me: riding horses. The reality was more of a general stroll around a stable in Queens by a black cowboy named Vern. The place was run by the Federation of Black Cowboys, an organization I never dreamed existed, and boasted an impressive 40 horses. They even had this guy who worked a whip and did some tricks showcasing his tremendous whipping skills, which boiled down to making a loud crack with the whip and making a REALLY loud crack with the whip. Everything was going along just fine until another cowboy, inspired by the whipping, launched into an unprovoked sermon on child rearing. “The Lord said, ‘Don’t spare the rod to save the child’ and I raised my children with the guidance of God. I got my children so all’s they had to do was look at me and they knew to behave. The Lord tells us right out how to raise our children, and then here comes some psychologist only twenty years ago, telling us all of a sudden this is child abuse. Boy, I tell you, what world did this guy ever create? None, that’s what.” It went sort of alarmingly down hill from there as he digressed into some tirade about Bill Gates having billions of dollars but ending up in the earth all the same like the rest of us. The kids were all quiet, not knowing exactly what to make to the impromptu sermon. I think they preferred the whip tricks. I rode a horse named Smokey up and down the road and tried unsuccessfully to get my little sister onto a horse. She was terrified and refused to get near the animals. She almost got on at one point, but the horse decided that would be an appropriate time to give a little kick backwards and that scared her right out of her timid willingness. She at Cheetos and watched the others.
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We just had an office
Posted by: Liz
We just had an office bake-off. My work enironment is almost entirely female, and out of the four males here, only two are straight, so this makes for a, sometimes overwhelmingly, feminine presence at the office. Which leads to things like departmental bake-offs. Or bi-monthly cake and soda birthday celebrations. And since a majority of the staff "watches" their weight in one way (weigh, ha!) or another, these events are greeted by all with a steadily mounting excitement, various reminder e-mails, hurried introduction or birthday song, and a final intense eating frenzy that's over in a fraction of a time it took to compose the first e-mail announcing the event. Everyone stands around looking a little dazed and suffering slightly from some post-binge depression. There's some re-motivation surrounding the clean-up, as everyone decides what happens to the leftovers and its determined whether anyone will in fact be given anything more to eat in the near future. Then the listless shuffle back to computers to kill the remaining 20 minutes before 5:00. I decline to exclude myself from above events.Sigh.
--------I've found out how to
Posted by: Liz
I've found out how to include comments, which qualifies as one of my first big steps in blog world. Little pats on the back for me. This is equal parts crazy intimidating and super fun. Yeah! --------Here is my week in
Posted by: Liz
Here is my week in review: Monday: I went to this Literacy Advocacy benefit/reading thing that my work gave me passes to. It celebrates a reading program that Liz Smith put together and they have famous authors come read and give a fancy-pants dinner. A co-worker and I went last year and didn't realize it was black-tie until we showed up to the Lincoln center in our jean skirts and tank tops and had to schmooze with ladies in long gloves and tunxedoed gents sipping champage. Very awkward. So this year, I made a concious effort to look nice--though one step short of the ball gown (the dinner that takes place after the readings is really the black-tie part, and the part for which we're not ticket holders). But at the last second, my co-worker friend backed out on me for a yoga class and I ended up calling J and the last second to accompany me. J for some reason did not go to work dressed for a black-tie affair, so my attempt at blending in with the crowd was sort of dashed. This was more troubling for him, since he actually owns a tuxedo and is itching for the chance to make it worth the $100 he spent. Ah well.So we went and right away ran into Darin Strauss, an author friend of J and the McSweeney's crowd. He was in a tuxedo, which made J long a little more for his, but Darin tried to make him feel better by saying he'd rather be underdressed than overdressed. But I think that just made J feel more underdressed. I went to say hi to a co-worker and she leaned over to whisper, "You do realize that Martha Stewart is standing right behind you." I hadn't! But I turned and there she was in all her linen glory! I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a closet Martha Stewart freak...sometimes I think my whole life would be so much better if I could bake perfectly round layer cakes with decorative flower centers and fold all my fitted sheets into perfect little squares. She promptly disappeared into the crowd and I made J come with me as I tried to chase her down just to stare at her a little more. I'm not very suave with this celebrity-watching stuff. But sad day, we never saw her again. (Darin, on the other hand, sat right behind her during the readings. I would have had the urge to put things in her hair. Maybe just a little string or something. I don't know why I have these urges.)
The readings were good. J and I were both a little disappointed that Michael Chabon was a no-show (wife is preggers and he has the whole Spiderman script deal going on), but Billy Collins, out poet laureate, read and was great. Also E. Lynn Harris, and Susan Orlean. On the way out I saw Michael Pitt! Who is Michael Pitt? Well, to be honest, I just now googled "Dawson's Creek" and "Murder by Numbers" to figure out his name but he's the guy who played Jen's football boyfriend in the former and Richard's creepy friend in the latter. I saw him once at a screening for "Murder by Numbers" and my friend Jennie says she keeps seeing him on her way to work. I guess he is our best friend now. I'll invite him over for Memorial Day. It rained a little and we (J and I, not Michael) went home to eat brownies.
Tuesday: Supposed to go to gym. Went instead to Tortilla Flats with roommate Kelly and drank a pitcher of delicious margaritas. Then we watch American Idols and made more brownies, as J and I had finished the ones off from last night. I put pecans in them.
Wednesday: Jennie got screening passes from some MediaBistro mingler for "The Shape of Things." But we went to dinner first and by the time we got there, the line was snaking out the door and the only seats left were in the second row (because they tape off a huge section of prime seats in the middle of the theater. Why? I don't know. People who won tickets on radio shows?). We reluctantly settled in, but on my way out of the bathroom I noticed that X-Men was playing at the same time in a nearby theater. Jennie thought about it for about 2 seconds--30 seconds later we were sitting confortably in the middle of a huge theater we had almost to ourselves preparing to watch a movie we were excited about. woo hoo! And the movie was great. I now want to read all the comic books. J gave me a little bit of a hard time about "stealing" the movie, but I have no moral qualms about it. I file it as fine under my "peas in a pot" theory, which I'll elaborate on later as I've typed quite a bit already.
Also, no new job. Haven't heard anything. Sadness.
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Okay, I think I'm hip
Posted by: Liz
Okay, I think I'm hip to trying out this whole thing, but I feel it's going to take awhile to get used to this medium, though I really think there's something to be said for walking this line between public/private.
This morning on the subway I was thinking about what would happen if the train took off with a door still open. But then I thought that they probably build them so the train can't leave a station if one of the doors is ajar (maybe the door latching causes a continuity in a circuit that signals the train it can go? I don't know). And suddenly I felt very benevolent toward the subway cars, all sealed and protective, whisking me away to work in a tight little capsule.
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I went up to the
Posted by: Liz
I went up to the upper east side to get birthday treats for my mom in Denver: belly lox from Zabar's, black and white cookies from Hot & Crusty (which is, I'm sorry, a gross name for a bakery). I ate one of the cookies and now we're having an impormptu birthday party at work and serving red velvet cake. I will now have to eat that too, and all the pastries are already making me sleepy. ----------------
Posted by: Liz
--------Lessee how tech savvy I
Posted by: Liz
Lessee how tech savvy I can be.... --------