Writing Returns, Writing Privileges, & Rational Signs

After attending American Atheists’ convention in Seattle last weekend, I have approximately 43.83 new topics to blog about. So, I’m officially back. While life hasn’t really calmed down since my post about overflowing cups and the like, I miss writing. I’ll be around mainly on weekends, as I seem to have acquired a day job in addition to my soon-to-be-sold business… but I shall be around, writing and blog-browsing, once again.

For those who haven’t noticed, I oh-so-benevolently granted my significant other posting privileges on the blog a few months back. Really, seeing as he granted me living-in-his-apartment-privileges about a year ago, blog-sharing seems only fair, eh? Posts signed by dday76 are by Jason. Posts signed by aviaa are by Amanda. Certainly, we could be logical and just use our actual names to sign posts, but where is the fun in that?

On a terribly exciting note, after a world-wind look at condos around Boston, we decided on one after discovering a Darwin fish on a car parked at the building next to ours. As Jason postulated, “a non-existent force of the rational universe was sending two atheists a purely physical sign that this was the place.” We’re heeding the sign and should be closing at the end of April and moving sometime in June.

Anyway… more soon! It’ll be great to catch up with everyone again!

More than Half Full

My cup runneth over. I’m in the middle of running my business, selling my business, designing an e-learning space for a local nonprofit, purchasing a condo in Boston, and searching for a job in Boston. I’m having a good time; however, time itself seems to be in rather short supply at the moment. To clarify and correct my first sentence: my cup runneth over onto my counter and is making a bit of a sticky mess.

So, while I miss blogging and know I should keep with writing and all that good stuff, I’m going to continue to be mainly absent for the next month or so until things start to slow down a bit.

I hope everyone else’s cups are treating them well!

Random Randomness

Mr. KA over at biblioblography tagged me for this meme quite a while ago. I’ve been playing hooky (again), but I’ve finally forced myself to sit down at the computer and write.

• I become ridiculously excited by grocery shopping, cooking, and just looking through recipes. I learned to cook largely because I spent eight years as a vegan (I’m still vegetarian) and found it terribly difficult find good vegan food.


• I once backed into an SUV because it wasn’t a goat. I used to have pet goats who would just run around my house nibbling on my lawn, part of which was an alfalfa field. Before backing out of my garage, I would always glance into my rear-view mirror to be sure there wasn’t a goat in my driveway. One morning, I glanced back, saw no goats, put my car into reverse, and listened to the trunk of my car crumple against the SUV that I had seen but that my brain had entirely ignored because it wasn’t, indeed, a goat. The SUV was fine. So were the goats. My little Honda hybrid spent two weeks in the shop.


• My favorite local club is a leather bar, complete with a whipping wall. What can I say- the people there just act so much more “normal” than those at more traditional clubs and bars.


• Rick Finch, one of the founders of K.C. and the Sunshine Band, is sleeping in my bed. Okay, to be more accurate, he is sleeping in a bed that I bought and have not sold or given away, but that is located in a house that I no longer occupy. I do not sleep in the bed with Rick Finch; however, it sounds much more risqué when worded in the first fashion.


• I’m moving to Boston in June! I once spent a summer in Boston and absolutely loved it. It’ll be lovely to be back. Now, I just have to find a job…

As for tagging new people to complete the meme…. It seems most everyone I know has already been tagged (that’s what I get for waiting so long). So, my excuse is that I took virtual antibiotics and always virtually coughed into my virtual elbow and thus successfully avoided passing along the meme. Anyone who wants to catch the meme is welcome to have a lick of the lollypop that I carefully contaminated while I was sick, just in case.

Back Again (kind of)

Well, I’ve been back, gone again, back again, and am about to be gone again. There is great pressure in adding a blog entry after so much absence… it feels like whatever I write must be brilliant, witty, and relevant in order to make up for the fact that I haven’t written for so long.

Earlier this week, I decided to avoid the entire pressure of a good blog entry by writing about something entirely mundane, such as getting my tires changed on Wednesday. However, my tires were not indeed changed on Wednesday due to a mix-up, so even my mundane writing prompt failed me. I also considered writing about how I pondered, on the way home from the non-tire change, the blog entry that I could write if my still-damaged-right-back tire exploded on the freeway. A near death experience would certainly be worthy of writing about. Do all people who write do this, wander around with the running dialogue of “well, if that happened, think how brilliantly I could express it in (blah, blah, blah) work of literary significance I am creating!” I certainly do, especially when I feel a writing project looming over my head.

Ah, I’m considering erasing all of this and starting over again, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll just not start again, so I’m going to be stubborn and leave it all exactly as it is.

My life in summary since I disappeared a few weeks ago:

I’ve been traveling frequently, though not out of the country as I had wished. Nonetheless, hiking, whale watching, rock climbing and visits to both a belly-dancing bar and a lesbian club were potentially almost as cool as Italy. Okay, probably not. But I’m pretending and it’s good for moral. I’m off to Las Vegas for the weekend, back for a week, off to teach a Camp Quest for a week, back for a week, visiting LA for a week… after which, I’m planning on sitting at home and absorbing life for a while, or at least doing some of the homework and work-work that will pile up while I’m gone.

The brother situation proved too much and I moved. I have alternating pangs of guilt and frustration at how that entire situation played out, but I’m quite happy where I am now not the least because I currently have lots of truly exciting food in my refrigerator. There is nothing like stores nearby carrying such amusements as cheap chevre and vegetable pot stickers to help make up for the fact that I officially live in the city rather than in my log house.

I’ve started my second to last class before I’ll be entirely done with my master’s degree. I found one subleasor for my building, who will pay me about a third of what I need someone to pay me, so I’ll only be partially financially devastated by the end of the summer. I’m not packed in the slightest and my plane for Vegas leaves in a few hours. I need to go back.

Now that I’ve broken the curse of the “returning blog entry” the next should be something of more general interest and relevance. Probably.

Hell

Yes, I've been there and yes, it was frozen over (quite logically so, as it was December in Michigan). I even quickly ran a lighter under my finger and have thus officially burned in hell. Oh, the lengths I will go to for a corny joke.

- Party in Hell (Michigan)

***

Hell might not be living in Michigan. It might be living with your 18 year old brother. I’m theorizing that this living arrangement may end up being more difficult than being married, largely because one can’t threaten to withhold sex from one’s brother.

So, it’s not really hell yet. Perhaps just a case of heck is looming. My brother moved in last weekend and the first five days of our cohabitation went swimmingly. However, this may have been due to the fact that almost immediately after dropping off his kitten, Peaches, on Sunday he went to go visit friends until Friday morning. Friday night was fairly uneventful and even included a shared spaghetti dinner and a feeling, on my part at least, of potential communal happiness. I left on Saturday to visit my boyfriend’s parents and didn’t get back until Sunday afternoon.

I returned to potential conflicts. My house reeked of pot and there were cans of beer stacked in the vegetable drawer of my refrigerator. My sink was filled with my dishes, which he and his friends had used. They had also been using my computer. I suppose this isn’t a huge deal, but in my panic about my newfound lack of privacy, it seemed like quite the problem. I was pretty upset about it all, but wanted to wait until I was calmer to decide what to address before he and I had a “conversation”. His friends (including a 17 year old, which adds a new dimension to the beer-drinking part) came back yesterday evening, so I fled to stay in Columbus overnight. I’m back tonight and things are still somewhat messy, but there are no teenage boys (including my brother, who seems to have disappeared) and my house even smells relatively normal again.

Eck. Maybe it’s just purgatory. Does someone want to donate enough money to the Catholic church to buy my way out?

Self-Commiseration

Generally, I consider myself a fairly optimistic person… I've found my life, while not perfect, contains far more in the way of sunshine and flowers than rain and toads. Actually, I like both rain and toads, so scratch that comparison and instead just note that my life is generally lovely. Generally. The last seven days have been quite disappointing and I am thus giving my week an overall satisfaction rating of 2, on a scale of 1 to 10. My justification for such a rating:

I’ve had no leads for a subtenant for my office building: -28

I had to sit through a Chamber of Commerce meeting, which turned out to not be a nifty networking opportunity (as I had hoped) and instead just an expensive meal with few vegetarian options: -8

It rained on me on the way back from the meeting: -1

My student still hasn’t shown up for his tutoring session: -3

I’m going to charge him for the session anyway: +2

I’m having staff problems at work: -18

I was turned down for a terribly nifty job: -20

Overall, my financial situation for this summer looks dismal: -42

I found out on Friday that my ex-husband married the person he had an affair with and they are expecting a child in September. As much as this theoretically has no impact on my life whatsoever, I still found myself clutching the edge of the toilet: -60

The person who was my best friend for a significant portion of my life helped to plan their wedding: -60

The wedding was on April 1st, making for an excellent built-in April Fools Day joke. I do love built-in jokes: +58

I sent away my laptop for two weeks to be fixed, and they forgot to fix my battery and instead just wiped my hard-drive: -22

I had backed-up all my files in advance: +12

I talked them into just sending me a new battery rather than requiring me to send my laptop away for an additional two weeks: +4

I continue to have a lovely source of snuggles, sex, and companionship while doing math problems on table coverings in Italian restaurants: +100

Said source of such goodness is being sent away by a mystical being generally known as Williams Sonoma for the entire summer: -70

Based on all the above negatives, god apparently hates me: -1,000,000,000

I don’t believe in god, so the fact that he/she/it hates me has no relevance to my emotional sanity: +1,000,000,000

To end with additional positive notes, in the past week I have not been hit by a car (+53), struck by lightening (+53), or maimed by a wild boar (+52).

I conclude: my week shall receive a fully justified, highly scientific satisfaction rating of 2. With this compilation, I shall officially reset my “week meter” and begin accumulating points for a new score.

I’m off to a writing workshop in Rowe, MA and won’t be around to post/respond to emails/etc. until Monday. I hope everyone has a lovely weekend, preferably with high satisfaction ratings all around!

Positive Social Conditioning?

I had my SAT students write an essay today assessing whether or not technology has made our lives better. One said yes, it had, and cited the following as a reason: in The Scarlet Letter, had Hester Prynne possessed a telephone, she could have called her husband to determine whether or not he was coming back and therefore avoided the entire affair with Dimmesdale escapade. I’m sure he did so because I told him that it was better to stretch a little bit if needed to include a literary reference. Reminder to self: must go over the definition of “a little bit” at the next class.

This was better than when another student several classes ago cited the treatment of this same Hester Prynne as positive social conditioning, mainly because today's student was joking whereas the first student was not.

Merging at Full Speed

I’ve been told I need to learn to continue moving forward while merging. The speaker meant it literarily; I was driving in New York City for the first time. Whenever I realized I needed to be in another lane, I’d first slow practically to a halt and only then glance around to see if there were any gaps in traffic for me to slide into. I’m sure all the local drivers had great fun rolling their eyes and grimacing at my Ohio license plates.*

I also need to develop better figurative driving skills. When facing large decisions, I tend to throw all my energy into the need to change, and relatively little into continuing on with the daily process of living. I try to make decisions happen so quickly that I forget to consider whether they are practical before shifting into “change mode.”

The person who subleases part of my office gave me thirty days notice last Monday. This throws me into a bit of a financial tizzy. My options: find someone else to sub-lease the space, find some other way to earn that additional amount of money, or buy myself out of my lease and find a full-time job. Any of the options could work, though one and three are likely the most practical.

I’m not sure which direction to merge. My immediate impulse is to pick a lane and try to find a way in. I like making decisions and then following through with them. I like feeling in control of my life. However, if I pick a lane without first looking for openings, then my only option is to stop and wait until something opens up. This is often what I do, but potentially not the best choice in this situation.

Instead, I’m working to create options. I’ve sent out my resume to companies in Austin, London, and Boston. I’m continuing to market summer programs, though I’m not certain I’ll be around to run them. I’ve started advertising for a new sub-leaser. Something will open up.

In the meantime, I’m going keep moving forward and trust that if I find an appealing gap in traffic, I’ll be able to merge at full speed.



* I’ve gotten better. I’d also like to take this moment to point out that in my hometown about 43.57% of the population stops at the end of exit ramps. I’m sure I give them much the same looks of disbelief as I was receiving in NYC.