Blue-laced shoes etc

It was cold and windy last week. Then it reached 93 degrees, record-breaking temperatures for this time of year, and the whole city turned to mush. Just two days later and we're back to 40-some degrees and windy as fuck, and we don't really know what to do with ourselves.

I'm drinking wine now. M. is playing records. I worked from home today, finishing up a little past midnight. It's been a strange week of sickness or allergies, thoughts of ph-duhs, wearing shorts outside the house for the first time in perhaps ever. Our roommate of over a year is moving out, and we can't find anyone decent to replace her. Yet Craigslist has been overrun by douchebags. Longhaired self-styled gypsies; people who can conceive of no world outside Burning Man; robotic CS types with appallingly firm handshakes. Screw this. I don't think I can do the roommate thing for very much longer.

Secretly, we've been going to open houses. M.'s mom is looking to buy a house here, and we would live in it as tenants. Once, years ago, at the zenith of the housing bubble, we looked through some listings and laughed at the rundown pieces of shit priced at a million dollars. Not so anymore. Now, for half that, you can buy something pretty sweet. Something high up on a nearby hill, protected from roommates and noise, complete with deck and small yard. And--as the boring, snotty academic types we have indeed become--we're seriously looking into it. Let us snatch our schmancy espresso machine, our 1950s crystal, our dutch modern table, and rescue them from your unclean plebian hands!

Recession Liveblog!

Actual lunchtime conversation with a gray-haired co-worker whose name I still don't know:

Him: Good afternoon. Will this explode if I microwave it?
Me: No idea.
Him: It's made of metal.
Me: In that case, maybe you shouldn't microwave it.
[pause]
Him: Did you know that if you microwave pantyh0se, it catches fire? I read that somewhere.
Me: No, I didn't know that.
Him: So if your pantyh0se are wet for some reason, you shouldn't dry them off in the microwave.
Me: Thanks. I'll keep that in mind.


Wine country biking trip I didn't pay for


The afternoon after the final party


The first cold day of the season

I haven't been blogging much--I see I skipped the entire month of February--but oh, how busy I've been! The tragedy (yes, tragedy) of it is that I've been occupied with such truly bloggable material at work. But I've been too busy working, and I can't blog about work as long as I'm still here, anyway. And given the situation (Stable job + nasty recession + 3-strikes-I'm-out on the masters application process), I expect to remain here for a good long while.


Yes, I did fail for the third consecutive year to get into a grad program. Every year that goes by is another mark in favor of selling out. The older I get, the more I would be willing to trade for the ability to afford a certain standard of living. The less I want to be sharing my living space with people I met on Craigslist, perfectly lovely people they may be. The more I long for middle-class comforts like the ability to go on vacation, maybe once a year, on my own dime without bankrupting myself.

But how to sell out? Is anyone even buying these days? This schmancy degree has got to be worth something, hasn't it?

...
...

Or not. Well, I'm employed!


Christmas in Midwest (didn't pay for this either)

The View from My Recession

We found a new flatmate. He's our thirteenth in three years. Or maybe the fourteenth or fifteenth; I can't keep track anymore. He seems to have two girlfriends. They spend alternating nights at our place, and my first thought was that I must be truly awful at recognizing faces. An ex-addict, current law student, barkeep, and apparently manslut, he does seem interesting, maybe a little too interesting, which is why he wasn't our first choice to begin with. But then, our first choices do keep on disappearing on us--

It's that time of year again; time to apply to yet another masters program that I may as well have picked out of a hat; time to beg profs who don't remember me for letters of recommendation; time to make up a coherent narrative in which I travel smoothly from point A through point B all the way to point C when the true story is much more Lynch than Hollywood; time to ask my boss for money; time for all this merriment, and ah, could it be a more wondrous economic clime?

At least I have a job. A full-time job, with so many people underemployed. I really should not be complaining. My own personal recession could be a lot worse.

I'm late to work all the time now, almost every day. But today I biked to the train at sunrise with brain and body in full revolt, and it was kind of nice. Arriving at the station I felt warm and awake in my windbreaker while everyone else yawned and shivered in their coats. Maybe that's what success feels like.

Screw narrative. This isn't narrative. I don't remember narrative. I don't read novels or stories anymore, I just click through blogs, follow links across the Internet, skim the Economist, apply to three radically different programs in three consecutive years; maybe the lack of narrative is narrative enough. I'm just confusing myself with words now and I think I need another tea. I'll be back again sometime.

Frying Pan --> Fire?

Everything's in flux. Will report back when it all settles down, most likely to a whole new equilibrium.

Meeting Notes

I suppose I am lucky that I have to attend only one meeting a week. As you can imagine though, I take each meeting very seriously. I always make sure to take detailed notes.







On the topic of work, it was evidently not enough that my boyfriend and I shared an apartment, a daily commute, a checking account, and a boss. So now, M. is moving into an office directly across the hall from me! It is a coincidence, but one that fits nicely with the general process of nauseating attached-at-the-hip-dom. Tune in for next episode, in which M. and I buy a tandem bike and matching outfits. Jeezy.

Adventures with Mace

The dog has been spared, for now: her health had deteriorated rapidly, but then it improved just as rapidly. Here's to her living to see her 18th birthday.

A few weeks ago, M. threw two parties back-to-back. It was an exhausting weekend. The second party was an underground affair--twice as exhausting, a zillion times as risky, and, it turned out, maybe half as successful as the legal one. The main act canceled at the last second, claiming that it was all M.'s fault for something-or-other. For an hour and a half I "worked" behind the bar selling drink tickets. Having never worked in any sort of retail, I was absolutely useless at making change, and the veteran bartenders happily let go of me once it started getting busy.

The night ended abruptly at perhaps five-thirty. First the smoke machine set off the fire alarm. Then there was a brawl. A nice nerdy hipster kid from Minneapolis was socked in the face, and someone, we don't know who, sprayed his assailant with Mace. Being a warehouse with no ventilation, the place was soon rendered a box of wheezy fiery pain; the partygoers fled, leaving us there with lungs full of spice and boxes and boxes of booze to bring home to our garage. Heed this advice: underground dance parties are NOT worth the bother, and this one lost money, too.

As long as I'm talking about staying up 'til dawn, here are a few of the heat-wave circa-solstice sunrise pictures mentioned in this post:

Dog

I stumbled upon this link at Andrew Sullivan's website yesterday and it sounds a little too familiar:

There are two general signs that a blog is heading toward extinction. The first is a declining frequency of posting, and the second is a proportional rise in the number of posts about the blog itself. These two don’t always go hand-in-hand; sometimes it’s just one or the other, sometimes you don’t get either warning sign. But when either of the two is spotted it’s reasonable to begin wondering how long that curious internet publication will continue to be updated...

It always seems to be that journals — and blogs — begun with the urgent intensity of someone confident that the simple act of putting their thoughts on paper will clarify or improve them, you soon find that a personal conversation is hard. And whether it’s because you find yourself a poor conversationalist, a slow writer, or an incoherent blabberer the realization generally comes that the results are a little less than magical. The realization dawns that what you’re writing is not really in need of urgent preservation.

So you walk away. You give up. You’ve expelled whatever it was that caused you to create a blog or buy a journal. You’re done with the superfluous recording of everything.

Well, I've been aware for some time that my writing is in no urgent need of preservation. I am not the kind of person to let things die, though. First I let them fade toward a mediocre end so that by the time they're really gone, no one really notices. Not with a bang but a whimper, and so on.

On that note, they're putting down my childhood dog soon. She's nearly eighteen years old now, so she's been with my family for the vast majority of my conscious life. Nearly all of it, in fact--or all, if a third grader is not considered conscious. But I remember the day I brought her home as a puppy. It was January of 1991 and she sat in my lap as we drove her from my grandma's friend's house in the back of the red Nissan pickup truck. My little brother, in Kindergarten at the time, wanted to name her Sally. But she was mine--I'd been heartsick for a dog for years by then--so I named her after a magical cat in a book I'd read recently. Little did I know that I was also naming her after a well-known brand of cat food. Well, we got home and introduced the puppy to my dad, who was lying on the floor reading a newspaper. She promptly peed on his socks. Nevertheless, she was always a great dog.

Here she is in happier times.



And here, a few years ago.


The weather has alternated between furnace and windswept tundra. My life has alternated between dull and frustrating. One night it is too hot to sleep inside, our apartment a greenhouse sweltering even with all the fans turned on. M. is out with the Englishman, phone-less and late enough to worry me all the way to crazytown; I sit out on the roof as the sun comes up, read a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, sip a beer and feel sorry for myself. Granted, I do take some decent pictures. (Not pictured.) Maybe it's the sun's rays that knock some sense into me. By the time M. gets back, I'm not terribly angry, mostly tired. And the next night it's freezing inside. We flick on on the electric yuppie fireplace. I am working on my math homework, making pasta, watching The Wire. I used to watch no television at all, but ever since my bizarre discovery that I can actually get more work done while watching something, I just haven't stopped. Right now it's Arrested Development at work and The Wire at home. But there's also been Dexter, Weeds, Firefly, Heroes, and anything else available online on Netflix or Hulu. I'm worried that I'm becoming too passive a consumer of entertainment.

I'm worried that I'm overcompensating for my lack of posting by writing a novel. A bad novel. Postmodern with a swirl o' vomit. Gbye then.

Old Maui Photos, Part 4

Old Maui Photos, Part 3

Old Maui Photos, Part 2

Old Maui Photos, Part 1

25

I've been miserable at posting. But I'm a quarter-century old tomorrow, and I've never failed to wish myself a happy birthday on my blog. So hello, let me re-introduce myself.

This is Penitent speaking. I'm just about 25 years old. I'm a shit blogger. What's worse, I've become only shittier with time, but I probably don't have to tell you that.

For my birthday I would like:

(1) A year's supply of provigil
(2) Another vacation with M. (Death Valley in April was sublime and I don't know when I'll be able to do something like that again.)
(3) To get into grad school, ha-ha.
(4) A new job
(5) Someone to pay off my credit-card debt accumulated over almost a year of M. being in graduate school and the both of us being addicted to food and drink
(6) Less partying like I'm 19 on weeknights, waking up late, sitting through the day in hangover-induced idiocy, because the whole routine has worn out its welcome. (Or will the provigil fix this, too?)

It's ninety-fucking-thousand degrees outside. Tomorrow my age will be a perfect square. I ate lunch at 4:30pm today while watching Netflix on my work computer, after having arrived here at 12:30-- I am a horrendous employee and a worse blogger and an even worse-er writer.

Hap-pee birth-day tooo meeeee....

I was going to link to last year's birthday post but I must have deleted it.

Instead, a San Francisco sunrise.


And Werner Herzog.

Primary Scourge

I am blowing it with this particular resolution:

- Blog at least once a week.

Actually, now that I look back at it, I'm blowing the whole shebang except for these two:

- Don't get in any serious bike accidents.
- Change party affiliation so I can vote in Democratic primary.

Speaking of the primary, it's probably bad for my health. A few nights ago M. and I stayed up until 2:30am sipping cheap red wine and watching that mudfight of a debate on youtube, woke up late the next morning with a horrible hangover, showed up ostentatiously late to work and have been manically checking and re-checking TPM ever since.

Neither of us care much for Mme. Nixon and are hoping (against reason, perhaps) for an Obama win. I figured I'd do my part by voting, but M. wants to sign us up to make phone calls this weekend. I don't know, wouldn't you be annoyed if some 24-year-old called you up in the middle of dinner/lunch/feeding the dog and tried to get you to support any political cause whatsoever? Consider my extreme phone phobia as well, and I'm audaciously hoping that M. forgets about the whole thing.

Politics, pfft.

On the other hand, Hawaii wasn't so bad.

Round Two

I'm applying to grad school again. Last year I was rejected because I applied to a program I wasn't qualified for. So I asked myself, "Why not do it again, just for fun?"

To which I protested, "No, no, it was too easy last time. This time you need to apply to something for which you are so supremely underqualified that it's laughable--a math program, say."

"I'm skeptical," I said. "I know less math than most high-school seniors."

"Exactly. You will work hard all year to fulfill the requirements, fail to do so, then get rejected again. That'll prepare you for 2009, when you can apply to and get rejected from a Ph.D. program in, say, applied thermodynamics."

"Oh, what the hell."

Which just about summarizes my life right now, with the exception of a multitude of parties. But the parties seem too boring to write about today--even more boring than grad school. So here are some more pictures from Milwaukee and Chicago.


Milwaukee: (gl)asses, because I'm secretly 12 years old

Milwaukee: bored self-portrait while M. rummaged joyfully through someone's record collection

Milwaukee: yum!

Chicago: we're in there somewhere


Chicago: the great rib massacre of '07