Had a Bad Day Again

Today was, quite possibly, the worst day of my thus far very short professional life. I've been extremely stressed out of late, and we just got our new supervisor who is already significantly less friendly than our last one. But then I made the mistake of returning two phone calls made to our main department line, and I got reamed out because they've been having so much trouble having their issues resolved (which made me really, really sad because even though the company isn't helping them out as much as they want, I made a point of putting in a lot of my day and a lot of research on how to resolve their issues, and they yelled at me anyway because I was on the phone). So, I snapped a tiny bit and spent 20 minutes in the bathroom crying. I've been getting tension headaches a lot lately (which is significant for me because I rarely get headaches), and my tummy is more often upset than not when I'm at work or thinking about it. I'm still a little futzed up and misty-eyed right now. Sigh.



But things are very good for Sarah today, and I get to see Neil Gaiman tomorrow at Temple, and there's a plastic-bag lovin' kitty sitting on my knitting bag-of-the-day right now, so things in the grand scheme are pretty okay. It could all be worse, right?

I signed up for the Knitting Olympics today. My project for the 16 days is a pair of cabled socks. They'll be worsted weight, but they'll be cabled, and they'll be a challenge because I'm a bloody slow knitter lately. And last night, I officially signed up for Sockapaloooza because it would be nice to receive a hand-knit from someone...since I'm so dismally obstructed in making my own (seriously, my 'year of selfish knitting' has turned into a pair of socks for Sarah--who counts as selfish knitting for me, a hat for a friend, a pair of glittens for a friend, a teddy bear for a co-worker, a couple of birthday gifties, a baby sweater, and goodness knows what else after April's over with...). Anywho, speaking of the knitting, I should be getting back to it. There's some hat-knitting that I would love to complete before tomorrow evening.

Not Quite the Middle Way

Whenever I let too much time elapse between posts, I sort of think that my next post is going to be profound in some way. Mostly because I start and restart entries over and over in my head all the time. Which is probably a sign that I'm not a very serious blogger anymore. Obviously, if you're reading this, you already knew that.

Nothing much going on, though. I've done some knitting this weekend. Perhaps it's just me, but I notice that there are some parts of projects that I just don't want to deal with immediately. With socks, it's picking up stitches for the gusset. Come to think of it, most of the things I don't like dealing with involve picking up stitches. Which is pretty ironic because I go out of my way to have to pick up stitches in projects because that means that I can knit more of it in the round, thus having fewer ends to weave in. And weaving in the ends is probably the thing I hate the most about knitting. At least I've gotten to a point where I do it well enough.

This weekend has been a bit too low-key for me, though. Not in the sense that I've not done much, because I've knitted a bit and read a bit and cooked a bit and gone to the gym a bit and wandered about outside a bit. It's been low-key in the sense that in the background, something sad is kind of lurking around, keeping itself quiet, but not being entirely subtle in hiding its presence. Do you get what I mean? I think I started off the weekend feeling mostly good, and it seems like it's ending with me questioning my motives and my choices in life.

I don't understand why I can't seem to wrap myself around the concept that if you wanted to be doing something, you'd be doing it instead of mewling about how you don't have enough time to do it. I have time--it just doesn't feel like it because I waste so much of it doing I don't even know what. It all boils down to the Yoda-ism, 'Do or do not, there is no try.' Why on earth do I do everything so half-assedly? I always go back to believing that if I can plan my life right, if I can just make a good enough to-do list and keep on track with it, I'll get done with everything I wanted to do. I'll write letters to my friends, I'll knit lots of great things, I'll be very romantic and wonderful for Sarah, I'll be a more attentive kitty mommy, I'll read all kinds of books. But the lists never work. And I haven't even bothered writing one for a while, but I know I want to go back to it.

Anyway, I guess this evening, this was all sparked by this thought that I keep having that there's supposed to be this moment when everything clicks into place, and I get myself all together. And I always imagine that moment in some sort of Buddhist context, which is really weird. Not sure what else to say, though.

First Meme 'Round These Parts

Four Jobs You’ve Had In Your Life

1. Caterer's under-the-table help (at the tender age of 13-ish).
2. Writer (yeah, I got paid for it for two whole summers, so I think it counts)
3. Graphics Editor (for my college newspaper, where I was also the Online Editor)
4. Corporate Lackey (which is what currently vies for my soul)

Four Movies You Could Watch Over And Over

1. Big
2. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
3. Donnie Darko
4. Freaky Friday

Four Places You’ve Lived

1. Muskegon, Michigan
2. Albion, Michigan
3. Cork, Ireland
4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Four TV Shows You Love To Watch

1. Family Guy
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation (I know it's only on DVD, but it's still one of the ones I could watch endlessly)
3. Good Eats
4. The Apprentice

Four Places You’ve Been On Vacation

1. Galway, Ireland (my flatmate, Erin, and I went in, I think, May '03)
2. Kinsale, Ireland (my flatmates and I took a day trip there in January of '03, and I loved it so much that Sarah and I went back for a weekend when she came to visit me in March of '03)
3. Traverse City, Michigan (Holly and I went and spent a few nights there all by ourselves over Spring Break of our sophomore year of high school)
4. Painesville, Ohio (I have family there, so it was the destination as a tween/teen)

Four Blogs You Visit Daily

1. misanthropic tendencies
2. pesky'apostrophe
3. yarn harlot
4. See Eunny Knit

Four Of Your Favourite Foods

1. Really good fries (more like chips, actually--the ones that are sort of rustic and thick and crispy and a little salty and eversoyummy).
2. Fresh, soft-and-crusty bread.
3. Watermelon.
4. Banoffee pie from the Quay Co-op in Cork, Ireland (their version is the only one I've ever liked--the toffee is more custardy than the toffee everywhere else, and it's got a layer of banana slices rather than a sad little piece of banana on the top of each slice).

Four Places You’d Rather Be

1. Cork.
2. A warmer, bug-free apartment.
3. A coffee shop with friends.
4. Anywhere that satisfied any of the above requirements is really good enough for me.

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without

1. The Beauty of the Rain - Dar Williams
2. The White Album - The Beatles
3. Fashion Nugget - Cake
4. American Idiot - Green Day

Four Vehicles You’ve Owned

1. N/A
2.
3.
4.

Four People To Be Tagged

1. Caitlin
2. Tracy
3. Jimmy
4. Rebecca

Brain Splatter

Ahoy mateys.

I'm all torn about wanting to post and wanting to read and wanting to knit and having to do other things and having to work and never getting the balance quite right for all the things I want and need to get done so that I won't be exhausted or feel disappointed. Sigh. But I got all kinds of furious this evening, so I thought that was worth setting a match to in the hopes it might burn itself into a blog post.

When I got home I noticed that the deadbolt had been locked. We usually only lock the handle lock because the bolt sticks sometimes. Maintenance always locks both locks, so I knew they'd been in the apartment. We had no reason to call for anything to be fixed, so I looked around for a maintenance slip, and seeing none, figured that maybe there had been another mysterious leak into the apartment below us. Then I wandered into the kitchen to make dinner and stepped on something sticky and hard on the floor--they put down a roach trap. We don't have a bug problem--we've never seen a bug in here--but worse than that, they know we have a cat, and it was just sitting there in the middle of the floor waiting to be batted around and licked or nudged by a curious little nose. What the fuck do they think they're doing putting a toxic substance on our floor without our permission or even our knowledge? That's absolutely not cool. So I dislodged it from my foot and buried it in the garbage before stalking the apartment for more random poison treats that they might have decided to bestow upon us.

Other than that, though, it's been a pretty good day. Work was work, but I was very productive, and that always feels good. This evening has been chock full of the two things I promised myself I'd do more of in the coming year--knitting and reading. Sadly, I'm not adept enough at the former to be able to do it with doing the latter. I'm making pretty good progress on a sock I'm knitting for Sarah:


I'm using this really soft, fabulous sock yarn I found at Sophie's after they got back from Stitches East. It's a wool/nylon blend, so it's machine washable, and it's really pretty, I think. The sock will be a tabi, which is the Japanese word for the split toed socks they wear with sandals. It will eventually be a pair. Yea! It's the smallest gauge I've worked with before--8 stitches per inch, and size 3 needles. Not super small yet, but smaller than I usually use, so I'm pleased with my meagre progress.

The reading I did was the climactic finishing of Annie Proulx's Close Range, which is a collection of short stories set in Wyoming that includes 'Brokeback Mountain.' I'm absolutely amazed at how well Ang Lee stuck to the story in making the movie. It's a great story. The book made me a little grateful that I was reading it in the (supposedly) cold part of the year because so much of the atmosphere she created was windy and harsh and frigid. She wrote well-rounded characters with good stories to tell, and her penchant for detail was impressive. I never felt like the details of the landscape or the characters' homes or cars were forced, and like I said, the cold was a major part of the stories--so much so, sometimes, that when the sun came out and the weather warmed up, I actually found my inner self relishing the sunshine and the heat. I really enjoyed her writing, and I think that I will read her again in the future. Not right away, but I feel like her work will float back into my realm of readership.

The next book on my list, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America is sort of representative of a lot of things for me. It's a testament to my renewed interest in reading and learning, and it's a really solid indicator of just how much I feel like myself again, which I'll get into later, but most of all, it's a return to a way of thinking I kind of feared I'd lost. For as long as I can remember, I had this amazing sense of responsibility to the world, and shortly after I started to get the sense that I was coming into my own in terms of how I thought about the world, that feeling went away. I stopped thinking, or at least I felt like it. But since I've started on the Wellbutrin, not only have I gotten my sense of self back, but that thinking is back too. I actually give a damn. That's so awesome!

Like I said though, I feel like myself again. I have goals and aspirations, andI feel like there's something more out there. More here. I'm looking forward to exploring more of Philly and thinking about the future, and that gives me a lot of hope. I want to take care of myself again. I've been thinking about that a lot, too, and I'm seriously considering going vegan. At least in the dietary sense (which means that I'll be a total vegetarian, and not a vegan because I have no solid opposition to leather or, um, wool...). In a personal sense, I really long to eat really good food. Good for me food. And I don't want my life to revolve around food. And as much as I enjoy ice cream and cheese on this irrational, carnal level, I don't need them, and I don't want to continue tricking myself into believing that I do. I just hate that I feel like my life revolves around this kind of crap. I don't need it. Contrary to everything I've been led to believe.

And on that level of responsibility to the world around me, I don't want to support the dairy/egg industry anymore. It's not responsible to waste the planet for some milk and a couple of eggs. I know the animals are treated incredibly poorly, and though I want to say I care an awful lot about that, I just can't. I care more about the future of the planet and the legacy I'm leaving behind. I'd rather leave behind something better.

Make all the jokes you want, Jimmy.

So I'm saying goodbye to the things I crave from the animal world this week, and we'll see where next week takes me. Now I need to make some lunch for tomorrow. Cheers.

Holiday Recap v.1

Gosh there's a lot of shit to say when you don't say anything for weeks. I'm glad that in my absence things to talk about have come up, because for a while, I wasn't even feeling that. Meh.

So it's the last joyful day for a while. I have a day off next week and one the week after, so I can't complain too too much, but I am so weary of my working, and I feel like if I don't step it up a bit, people might start to realize how little I actually care. I'm so sick of being fake. Last week, our director--the highest up that we ever encounter in our lowly jobs...there are at least two levels above her before el presidente--stopped by to say hello and happy holidays, and I couldn't even muster some faux encouragement for her. And that's bad, you know? It's important to make them feel like you're at least willing to play along, and I've clearly reached a point beyond that. But it's a new year, and that means that I have enough time off now to be able to look for a new jobby. Yea!

The holiday season has been largely good to me, in spite of my usual job-related ennui. My nigh ulcer-inducing levels of stress at the prospect of entertaining the not-in-laws was all for naught. We had a good time, I think, as far as forced family funtime goes. I would even go so far as to say that dinner out with them on the night they arrived was really nice. And I encountered an absolute truth while perusing the awesome Ben Franklin exhibit at the Constitution Center. They had these kiosks stationed at a few spots throughout where you could match up a value that Franklin held dear and his thoughts on it (e.g., 'A penny saved is a penny earned.'). The one that struck me was (and I'm paraphrasing) 'Houseguests and fish stink in three days.' Since our visit was about three days, it was great.

And I spent much of it cooking like a fiend. For lunch on x-mas eve, I made pasties, which could have gone very badly (like making cheesesteaks for a native Philadelphian if you've never had a real cheesesteak, but you've been told that yours is good). Then for dinner, I made a potato corn chowder, a salad (I also made dressing for it, but damn, that shit was bad!), and Sarah made a pecan pie for dessert. Xmas morning, I had hoped to borrow someone's waffle iron, but alas, my coworker couldn't find hers, so I figured I'd use my waffle recipe to make pancakes. Only, I've never modified a waffle recipe like that before, so it took me about six pancakes to get the right consistency and temperature so it would cook through without burning the outside. I took my cue from Rachel Ray on breakfast and made gingerbread pancakes and chicken sausage (which made an awful lot of smoke...and in hindsight, I should have known it would because half of the comments made about the recipe included warnings about the smoke), and a lovely fruit salad.

My pièce de resistence, though, was dinner. I made another salad with red pears, pecans, and a shallot vinaigrette, haricots verts, a potato salad with a savoury vinaigrette, and beef burgundy. I had also planned an apple tarte tatin, but everything else took all day to make (literally), and we were going to see a movie after dinner, so I didn't have time to finish it. Sigh. Sadly, of the two xmas day meals, I had only the fruit salad for breakfast and the salad with a piece of crusty bread for dinner as I didn't have time to eat more. So unfortunately, I can't tell you how anything was.

I've seen a few movies this holiday season, and all of them have been good so far (we're going to see another--probably Munich--this afternoon). We saw Syriana with the not-in-laws, and our group was pretty much the consensus of all the reviews I've read--half the viewers think it's really good and thought-provoking, and the other half get bogged down in the Traffic-esque cinematography. I walked out of it thinking to myself that it was an important film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. My reaction to its various stories mirrored my reaction to current events because at first I was hopeful, and then, I became disillusioned. Ultimately, I found myself feeling most keenly for all the people I'm not supposed to respect or care about in reality. As an afterthought, I suppose it leaves one feeling kind of hope- and helpless.

We finally went to see Chronicals of Narnia, and I was pleasantly surprised. Tomnus (I don't know if that's how you spell it) was played by an Irish actor who was in Rory O'Shea was Here, and I was all giddy for that. And of course, though I liked most of the heroes/heroines well enough, I was ultimately most enamoured of the White Witch. Tilda Swinton is just a fabulous villain, and somehow, she's hotter when she's evil than when she's good. Incidentally, I found this vid of an SNL rap about the movie (sort of), and it's worth a watch and a giggle.

The most recent film we saw was Brokeback Mountain. I don't say this lightly at all, but it is one of the best films I've seen in years. For some reason, movies don't stir me the way they used to--make me feel and think and react profoundly. This one did all of those things. It's been almost a week since I've seen it, and when I think about it, something inside me just reverberates with the depth of feeling that came while watching it. It was heartbreaking in the realest, truest sense of the word, and I bought the book of short stories by Annie Proulx from which the story came in the hopes that I might find some of that profundity in her writing. I just can't get that feeling out of my self. It was amazing.

I had the chance to meet Caitlin while she's been in town. I'm totally copying her, but even though we're web-friends, I think we'd totally be friends if she lived here (or vice versa). It was really refreshing to just spend time with a friend. It always is, and even though we'd never met before, we 'know' each other in a sense because we read about the others' lives and the things going on and being done. I have the advantage, of course, because she writes about her life with a lot more candor and emotional colouring than I tend to bring to my blog these days. I'm already looking forward to her next visit to Philly.

There are two other holiday recaps to come as I have pics and stories about my xmas knitting, and I've read a couple of books since xmas (as I didn't do anything aside from knit for about a month before the holiday). I would write them here, but I'm feeling a wee bit distracted, and this is already becoming overly verbose. I suppose I also have some thoughts on the new year to yammer out, but that's also going to wait.