This man is my new boyfriend. Most likely that means he is married or gay. He knew where to buy the best dildo’s in SF. So…
Louise posted his wonderful article about Harry Potter critics on Satan’s Bookclub, from which that wonderful title came. Such genius that both of us almost gave up writing entirely. Because we felt we’d never reach that pinnacle. Almost.
I can’t sleep because I’m having vicious allergy attacks. I think the whole neighborhood mowed their lawns this weekend. Green grass is my very best allergy. I’ve worked very hard in my life to make it at least 7 x’s as bad as all the other allergies in my head. My head is full of cement, stuff is dripping out of my nose and down my throat and I’ve given up breathing. Which is making me very light headed and dizzy. But it’s worse when I lay down. Of course.
So I was standing there in the kitchen, breathing through my mouth, staring up at the halogen lights that I don’t really like. And I lowered my sights to the butcher block beside the fridge that held the diet coke my stepdad left behind when he headed back up north today. When I spied some cookbooks. Which I had not noticed in the six months I’ve been back in the house. One of them was called “Help, my Apartment has a Kitchen.” That sounded my speed. So I was browsing through it and, low and behold, the most craved food I never ever ever get to eat… Beef Stroganoff. It said it was an easy recipe. Maybe I’ll try it. It requires me handling food, however. And then preparing it. And I never feel like eating food, if I have to prepare it.
Then I saw a Pictorial Cookbook from Nova Scotia. And that made me laugh. Fucking Nova Scotia! You see, about six months after the divorce was final, my stepdad asked me to stop by the house and water his garden for him, while he went camping. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going to to go up to Canada… drive around… camp a little. At this point, he still had not admitted he was seeing someone. So he takes off, when he gets back, he gives me a cd that he bought for me. In Nova Scotia. He did not drive up to Canada and do a little camping. He went to FUCKING NOVA SCOTIA!! Look, here’s Seattle and ….. here is Nova Scotia. You’ve got Seattle, Venezuela, Beirut, Africa, Cincinnati, Hanging Gardens of Babylon… Nova Scotia.* In my family, it is tradition to tell someone when you are leaving the general area, especially if you are getting on a plane, so if it crashes, we know to drive to wherever and look for your body. You certainly do not go to the OTHER SIDE OF THE FUCKING CONTINENT, leaving the Country, without maybe a little note. It was apparent that my mom used to take care of such things. Anyway, when I relayed the story to her, I was still rather stunned, so every time it came out “He flew to fucking NOVA SCOTIA!! Nova fucking Scotia!!”
So, it’s become a bit of a personal joke that whenever someone does something so stunningly different from what they told you they were going to do, because they didn’t want to tell you something. Like the fact that they are seeing the woman that maybe they were sort of seeing before the separation and she happens to be from Nova Scotia so you are both going there. I like to call that “Going to Fucking Nova Scotia.” I have absolutely nothing against Nova Scotia. It looks absolutely gorgeous! In fact, I’d like to go there some day. I’m going down on record to say that I would like to visit fucking Nova Scotia. As well as Montreal. And Nunavut! I’d like to go to Nunavut to visit Elle. Just not in the winter, as I don’t think I have the proper coat for the climate.
*I love you Eddie Izzard!
I just got back from picking up a 44ozer – Dr. Pepper. Edgar 16 – Sullen Weekend Edgar, was eating a soft serve ice cream cone from Dairy Queen, explaining to me how she never got off work in time to get one, I guess someone had brought her this one. Or maybe she picked it up on the way to work. Anyway, it reminded me of a story I was telling my coworkers earlier this week. Which I shall share with you now.
When I was in high school, my second job ever was at McDonald’s. I lasted from about the beginning of the school year, until just around Christmas. Shockingly, I did not get along with all my managers. Even as a innocent 16 year old, I seemed to expect to be treated with a modicum of respect. Scheduling someone’s shift to end at 9, but the making them ask permission to leave is bad enough. But when you then send them on 45 minutes of stupid tasks before letting them go, is just down right rude. I don’t have to ask permission to start my shift, I think, under normal circumstances, it should end fairly close to what’s written on the schedule. But I didn’t hold the power, did I? That was just one of my problems with my career at McDonalds. The polyester uniform itched. I smelled like french fries constantly, they never let me work drive thru, which honestly, was my best position. Probably because I wanted to work it. I had to work the birthday parties. oy.
Anyway one afternoon I was working with my arch enemy of mangers, an tough young woman who really should have just gone ahead and joined the military, she was a perfect fit. She did not find me delightful at all. It was really quiet and I was the only one behind the counter. A woman came up with two kids and ordered two soft serve ice cream cones. I made the first one, and up came the manager.
“that’s too big!” she hissed. I’ve not had many people actually hiss at me, but she did.
“what?” I asked, innocently, blue birds and woodland creatures gathering around me, to bask in my joie de la vie.
“THAT is not a regulation sized ice cream cone! Make a new one!”
I glanced over at the mother, who was only a few feet away with an apologetic look, and set the ice cream cone down. I made two other ice cream cones, of regulation size and shape, under my managers watchful eye and handed them to the mother. Who seemed sympathetic to the fact that it was not me, but rather that nazi manager.
At my McDonald’s when food needed to be thrown away, you would yell back to “the grill” and say “WASTE ONE WHATEVER!!” they would return the yell and mark it down on a sheet. One cheeseburger wasted. Seeing as tho there was nobody in the lobby, I walked the offensive ice cream cone over to the sheet, and standing next to a giant trash cone turned to look at my manager.
“WASTE ONE ICE CREAM CONE!!!” I yelled. and then brought the cone to my mouth and inhaled as much ice cream as I could in one mighty brain freezing suck. There was ice cream all over my face, I took one bite of the styrofoam cone and then tossed it the trash, marked it down on the sheet, and walked passed my manager, still looking her in the eye, as I took my place behind the counter, wiping my face with napkins.
It is, to this day, one of my proudest moments.
I though, hey – Jodi… you don’t have any regular features on your blog. Nothing that people can count on. How about you make one up. And so I did. Welcome to the first 50 Word Fiction Friday. In which I write a 50 word fiction. Pretty simple. Now… let me think….
Good Listener
He glanced up from the bottle on the table, the label torn all along the edges, “Thanks for listening to me…you’re different from the women I usally meet in this place.”
Under the table, her fingers flexed as her claws extneded. “Let me guess, I’m not like the other girls.”
My house is mere minutes from Microsoft’s main campus, in Redmond. I was about thisclose to driving down there and chucking rocks at it’s front door until someone came out and told me why IE for windows sucks so very very hard. Louise and I were trying to fix a problem with our three column layout on Satan’s Bookclub and Win IE. Frankly, my first inclination was to just say “fuck off IE!” I probably did a few times. I don’t have a pc to test with at home, so fixing the problem meant me trying anything I could think of and then pinging Louise on AIM and saying “look at it now!! look at it now!!” So I was going to drive down to the main campus and ask them what made them so special that they could just blow off any and all CSS compatibility? We have received sooo many comments and emails today! I don’t know where people are finding Satan’s Bookclub, but they are already stopping by. So we wanted it to work for everyoe. We fixed it. Louise had some old CSS that worked and I compared it to the new stuff and BAMF! three columns all in a row. Even in microsuck IE.
Everyone who uses IE… switch to Firefox now. I have two words for you, two words that will forever change the way you deal with the internet. Those words are “tabbed browsing.” Trust me.
Because I just had a bunch of New Yorkers ambush me from their speaker phone, question my intelligence, my experiences, my honesty and worst of all MY PRODUCT!!! Usually, happy stuff like that only happens on Mondays. Dr. Stevil said it was painful to hear, so he put his headphones on. And he was only hearing my side of it.
meh.
I want to listen to some tunes to help reduce rage levels, but I haven’t had time to unpack, so everything is still in boxes which are stacked around me. I can’t find my headphones. Guess I’ll have to blog instead. Remember when I posted the song from Shivaree? I told you that I would post the song that hooked me, made me a fan. Since, if everything goes according to plan, I will be seeing them live tomorrow, at Neumo’s, I thought I’d play that song for you today. It’s called “Goodnight Moon” and for a wanna be gal detective, lover of mysteries and puzzles, is the perfect song. It’s a noir novel put to music.
Now I am going to see if I can dig out my headphones. I think I’ll keep everything else packed. It’s like working in a fort built of boxes. And cube walls. Except Kermie… I’m going to unpack my Kermit.
EDITED TO ADD: Dag nabbit! That’s not what my audioblog posts are supposed to look like. They are supposed to have cute little purple buttons. WHY ARE YOU PLOTTING AGAINST ME, WORLD??
Hey… it’s time. Enough is enough. Go kick it around and make sure it’s sound for me, ok?
Well, there is a tie. Both Arifa and Romy got four out of five. For Romy, I have already begun working on her prize. I’ll have to negotiate with Fee, to find out what she wants.
In no particular order:
Creativity
Freedom
Pleasure
Friendship
Personal Development.
Some of the others mentioned were in the running for a while. Like Inner Harmony and Wisdom and Economic Security. Some others fed into my key value. Like Helpfulness, I like being helpful, it gives me pleasure, but the real value is pleasure. So that’s not a bad guess. And god bless Jack for thinking that I could possibly be orderly. If that was a key value, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my performance. And, I’m not surprised that competitiveness came up. I’ve always enjoyed being competitive on some things. I think I got the grades I did, in High School, because I was competitive with my friends. But in the end, enjoying it, and really valuing it are different things, I guess.
So. There you go. How fun was that? Well, even if it wasn’t, I got to go into class this morning and tell everyone that I was running a poll of blog readers, to find out what they thought my key values were. I don’t think anyone had done that before. All in all, I think this proves that all I really want to do is have some fun.
should you chose to accept it, is to get Satan’s bookclub up on Friday morning. [or late thursday night] so everyone can click the little links and make little fake comments in the fake entries and check everything out. make sure it’s working all right. i will finish a book review over the weekend. maybe louise will too. [she’s been sick sick sick. for weeks. it’s the consumption, probably. for a scottish girl, she’s very fragile. a frail hothouse flower, as we like to say.] And then it will be for real live, and ready for pimpin’, on monday.
that is the plan and i am sticking to it. i found an acceptable cheat/ work around for CSS’s shortcomings. so, the rest is just detail work. it shall be my number one priority until it’s done. except for napping. and work… i’m trés busy at work. there are a couple of other things that might come up… but it’s right up there. with a bunch of really important priorities. definitely before flossing my teeth and eating my vegetables.
I am in class all day today and tomorrow. Learning to deal with my growth, professionally and personally. Learning to MANAGE it. Right now, we are doing various exercises to identify our top five values. Before the class, I was to have one person pick what she thought was most important and least important. I chose Evildeb. My manager also got a chance to talk about me. I haven’t seen what she wrote yet. We are encourage to find out “how others see us.” So I am giving you, my little internet friends, the chance to pick what you think my top five values are. The one who comes closest to matching the final five gets a prize. I don’t know what. What do you want? Music? I could make you a cd. Or I could draw you a picture with crayons. If someone in your life needs yelling at, I could do that. However, I won’t accept responsibility for the consequences. I could write a limerick, celebrating your brilliance and insight. I don’t know, you tell me.
ACHIEVEMENT (attaining goals, sense of accomplishment)
ADVANCEMENT (progress, promotion)
ADVENTURE (new and challenging experiences, risk)
AFFECTION (love, caring, fondness)
COMPETITIVENESS (striving to win, being the best)
COOPERATION (collaboration, teamwork)
CREATIVITY (being imaginative, inventive, original)
ECONOMIC SECURITY (steady, adequate income)
FAME (renown, distinction)
FAMILY HAPPINESS (close relationships with family members)
FREEDOM (independence, autonomy, liberty)
FRIENDSHIP (close relationships with others, rapport)
HEALTH (physical and mental well-being)
HELPFULNESS (assisting others, improving society)
INNER HARMONY (being at peace with yourself and others, tranquility)
INTEGRITY (honesty, sincerity, standing up for beliefs)
INVOLVEMENT (participating with and including others, belonging)
LOYALTY (commitment, dedication, dependability)
ORDER (organized, structured, systematic)
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT (learning, strengthening, realizing)
PLEASURE (fun, enjoyment, good times)
POWER (influence, importance, authority)
RECOGNITION (respect from others, acknowledgment, status)
RESPONSIBILITY (accountability, reliability)
SELF-RESPECT (belief in your own abilities, self-esteem)
SPIRITUALITY (faith, strong spiritual and/or religious beliefs)
WEALTH (abundance, getting rich)
WISDOM (discovering knowledge, insight, enlightenment)
