I just bought a cell phone and I thought it was appropriate to warn you all that this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

... the shame ...

"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."

One week down of year 3 ... I think I have this college thing down, but I have a feeling just when I start to really enjoy it, I'll be graduating.

Writing for the Media:
It started with Morris Day and the Time singing "Jungle Love" as we filed into class. Good? Bad? I think good, but I have a natural fear of optimism, so I'll think good and say bad. It may work out okay, but I can't shake the fear that I'm going to screw it up somehow. My controversial paper is pretty weak, but it sounds like everyone else is having the same problem, so maybe it'll work out. My biggest fear for this class: I think I'm going to have to get a cell phone so I can set up interviews during school break hours. Why why why ...

Sociology:
Professor looks like the Amish grandfather in "Witness" but is a delightful little powder keg of liberal bias. Once we started in on the lectures it got really interesting and will most likely continue to be so. Bad: I was knocked down in the section for admitting that the last movie I saw was Harry Potter ("Oh, you're one of those people" -- whatever that means). The students who had seen "Transformers" didn't get that reaction. But I did get props for having a red star on my carrier bag (thanks DWS).

Astronomy:
I don't know ... I get the analemma thing, but it kind of irritated me that when I asked what happened between the "gas cloud" and "stars emerged" I was put off with "That will be addressed in Astronomy 123." What th... I want to know now. Just because it won't be on the test doesn't mean it's unnecessary knowledge ... unless it's complicated. Then it's probably for the best that I don't know.

And if it involves math ... forget it.

Day 2 -- must have been the full moon

I could tolerate my fellow students a little more today, although I don't like having to stare at their "Greek Week" shirts all day long. What if I rushed a sorority ... hmm ... Still, I didn't hate anyone ... actively.

Moment of the day: in Sociology the professor's lecture was interrupted by a blonde girl two seats down who leaned over to ask me a question. I leaned in closer to hear her and then looked at her.

It was 12 o'clock in the afternoon and she had more Botox and make up than Joan Rivers. Not only that, but she had -- and I'm not making this up -- fake eyelashes. She was no more than 19 or 20, but she looked like a (I hate to say this) 40 year-old drag queen.

All I could think of was:
She's dead. Wrapped in plastic.

Hate is not a prison

First class, 9:00 am, student #1: "Do you have a spare pen I can borrow?" It's the first class on the first day and he's already lost his pen. And I don't know why he borrowed it because he didn't write anything down.

Mein Gott, and the inanity that I hear every day on every cell phone on every patch of space around campus ... I think I heard the word "like" about 423 times, but I think there were some that I missed when I was trying to drown it out with the pink pod. "Like, I'm sure, she, like, totally bought it at, like, Target." <--- actual quote, by the way. It's like, being, like, back in, like, the 7th grade. Other top moments: "One of my first assignments is to ask my students to write a short essay describing their high school classes." fah what? WE'RE NOT ALL KIDS!!!!! "Like, this is, like my notebook from last year. These doodles are from that English class, remember? That's where I drew your face. Yeah, like, we learned so much in that class, huh." Not only that, but I've nearly been hit 4 times while riding my bike. Twice from a-holes turning right and not looking, 1 who ran a stop sign, and 1 who stopped at the stop sign and then decided to go as I was crossing the intersection -- she was looking right at me and maybe trying to figure out if she could get out there ahead, but not sure, but thinking I'd stop because she's a car and could do more damage, regardless of the fact that she had a stop sign and I didn't. Three were on cell phones. All were under the age of 30.

I don't want to be a cranky old woman. I don't. I want to be a normal old woman, but I find that concepts of normality are apparently exclusive and specialized, and every second of every day I'm reminded that I don't fit into this society.

Cah, it really is like being in 7th grade again!

Here's today's customer question of the day:

Me: Great! We appreciate the opportunity to assist you! How can I help you today?
Visitor: I need to know if I can clean my hard wood floors??
Me: I'm sorry, I wouldn't have that information. We're an office supply company
Visitor: how about the inter of my 1957 ford???

I love working Sundays ....

Human Tetris 3

This is possibly the best show on television.

Things to do before school starts

- buy a new pen
- sleep
- watch another episode of On Demand "Fantasy Island" (done)
- buy another red sweater (done)
- sleep
- make some brownies
- finish reading one of the three books I just started - or leave them all half-finished through the term like always.
- sleep
- eat breakfast
- finally put the new checkbook register in my wallet so I can stop trying to balance my account on sticky notes and tissue paper

Adventure Friday:
Some mutt chased Cat chased up a tree today. That's instinct. You can't teach that. She came down again before cousin/roommate returned with the ladder. But no cat of mine is going to be a chicken. I'm going to teach her how to stand up for herself and fight back and ... and ... nah. I guess the tree thing is cool. Very little street cred, but it works.

oh. my. god.

click here

That is HORRIFYING. Oh Oscar ........

(the commentary is hilarious, but, yes, I agree with wuh, it is a pretty raunchy website, so viewer beware)

WHAT?!?

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (September 20, 2007) " Oscar De La Hoya is fighting mad over some questionable photos of the boxer that have surfaced online.

The photos, which depict the boxer in a full-body fishnet suit and black high heels in some suggestive poses, were posted by the photo agency X17 Online on Wednesday.

And now the website is down
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

How did I miss out on this? Oscar, why hast thou forsaken me?

cah, I'm always the last to know.

What are the cosmic moral implications of training your cat to behave like a dog? She comes when she's called, she greets me at the door, she does tricks, but she still pees in a box and sleeps all day, so I don't see it as really changing Nature ... just sort of changing it. Have I earned a place in Heaven or Hell?

Last interview at work today -- interviewing people can be a weird gig. I'm asking the hard questions (why are you leaving your present job? Do you mind working all day without a break?) and doing all the background explanation about what we do and what the position entails, but I feel like I should be giving them more. "Look, this job will steal your soul. Are you prepared for that?" But I don't want to be like my old boss Bob and ask things like "Are you a Capitalist?" and crap of that nature. The best information he got from a candidate was "Do you know who her favorite author is?" (me: "No, Bob, we only talked about the job") "Dickennnnsssssson...?" (me: "Is that Dickens or Dickenson?" He didn't know, but told me to hire her based on that and the fact that her father had worked for Boeing.)

Fah ... this is the last one for this job, and it's someone with my name, so if she's hired we'll have to screen the phone calls with "Do you want Karen H or Caryn S?" but maybe I'll just give it to her straight: People yell at you, are intensely unreasonable and will treat you like a stupid robot who lives in Pakistan. Do you think you'll be okay with that for X salary? Honest, we have a coffee maker, Vanity Fair Magazine in the roomy restroom and you get Christmas Day off. What do you say?

Then, at the end of it, I'm comin' home to "Evil Eye" (and some Star Trek thing....).

I'm a believer AMEN

I fought against this whole Netflix thing. It just smacks of lazy, and I like going into the video store and spending an hour wandering around not remembering what I came in there for because there are 14 other movies distracting me. But, whatever, all our friends are doing it and we want to be like the cool people, so we signed up.

I looked for "Odd Man Out" -- saved, not in -- "Drunken Angel" -- saved, not in -- and why does it tease you with a picture of the cover and then say that "saved" means it doesn't exist yet when I fecking KNOW that "Odd Man Out" is on a g-damned Criterion disc! "Wuthering Heights" -- save -- screw it, we can at least pick off some Star Trek ... which leads to a fight over what he have and what we don't have. Cah! Do they even have any decent Richard Widmark??

So I add Star Trek ... and then "Rollercoaster" and "Murder on the Orient Express" ... and then, hey, what's this? They have the 6th season of Men Behaving Badly, which has the one where Gary and Deborah get married, which is hilarious, and the episode about Gary's couch ... and they have those I Love Lucy episodes where she's in Hollywood and "Random Harvest" and "Capricorn One" and "Westworld" and "Slaughterhouse Five" and --

HOLY SWEET JESUS IN THE MANGER!

Neflix has episodes of Taggart!

No WAY! Flicks n' Pics didn't even have Taggart! No one carries these discs.

So now I have 75 dvd's in the queue. And I know they treat you nice, like a new boyfriend, for the first couple of months, and then the honeymoon ends, and you start to not get the stuff in the queue like you used to, because they don't want you to take too much advantage of their goodness, so I moved the Taggart's up to the top so we can get those first.

I love Netflix.

once more onto the bus, dear friends, once more

Summer's ending. I can tell because the air is dryer and school kids are already hauling their crap back into town.

We have traffic. That only happens when the kids come back to town.

And I've already printed out my syllabus for Writing for the Media -- it's 44 pages.

44

I pictured this class being the fun Journalism class, the one where you actually get to pop out a bit of writing and sell the story with that Lois Lane kind of gusto. Based on the syllabus, it's like Info Hell without the annotating. Which, I guess, is okay. The worst part of Info Hell was the annotating and the easiest was writing the paper, so ... eh.

My books for this term total $250.00.
used.

blows, dude.

It's all starting over again in less than 2 weeks. No more time off ... no more laying on the couch and watching "Fantasy Island" through On Demand ... fehhh school.

Patriot Day

This just posted on the work chat line:
My company annually purchases your Monthly reminders and I would like to qualify why you do not show Patriot Day on today September 11th? the back page says (deleted manufacturer's name -- not my company, by the way) Printed in the USA

Possible responses:
- Because it's not a fecking holiday
- Because it conflicted with Oreo Cookie Day
- Because we're communist bastards. Problem with that?

Other events of the week: bad cold (can I have a week where stuff doesn't fall apart demmit?), hot in library (melted my Vicks Vapo-Rub), and ... erm ... oh yeah! WENT TO IKEA!

That's the bestest place in the world.

Oh, so I drank one
It became four
And when I fell on the floor
I drank more

It was Paganini

I'm going to miss that Pavarotti fella. I still listen to him in "Tosca" (bad story/great songs) all the time (but not on the pod because ... I guess there's no reason why not. Time to put "e lucevan le stelle" on the Sony).

Cah ... first Beverly Sills and now Luciano. It's a bad year for opera.

L'ora è fuggita, e muoio disperato

What good is street cred if you don't risk it once in awhile

So my new pod (new school year/new pod) arrived Friday, and it's more like a stick than a pod, but it's still a Sony because I had to transfer my ATRAC downloads from the current pod to another Sony or else lose everything ... which, based on an email sent by Sony the day after I purchased the pink stick, is what will happen anyway when Sony sells out to Windows Media next March.

Whatever.

Until then I'm a crazy down-loadin' fool.

This little gem holds 1 gb of music, which is 3x the old pod -- and cheaper than the old pod ... go figure.

So I've loaded the old pod's music, plus some CD's, plus some fine samples of AM Gold: The Troggs, Johnny Mathis, Del Shannon, Irma Thomas, Neil Diamond, Andrew Gold ("Oh what a lonely boy..."), Sweet, The Crystals, The Ronettes, Elvis doing "Kentucky Rain", The Partridge Family, 2 count-em TWO songs from the Xanadu soundtrack, The 5th Dimension, Lobo ("Baby. I'd love you to want me.") -- and then some of the best pop ever put on vinyl/digital download: Ultravox, Roxy Music, Duran Duran, Visage (which might as well be Ultravox), Big Country, Colourbox doing up "Just Give 'em Whiskey" which has samples from The Prisoner ... dude ... feckin' Blur, The Jam ...

Still. Not. Full.

Mark Ronson featuring Daniel Merriweather, Richard Hawley, Stereolab, Gnarls Barkley, Outkast, Peter Bjorn and John, Sebadoh.

Still not full.

I have no idea what I'll do when I have to convert all this junk to Windows Media, but more than that, I can't get my head around what the kids do with 30 gb on the Apple pods.

That's just obscene.

Current tune as I type this: "The End". Dude, the cousin/roommate was right, this is totally the part where they kill the water buffalo in Apocalypse Now ... far out, man ...

What level Wiki?

Being 40 and single has many drawbacks: anniversary presents for other people, dinner parties and weddings with no date, listening to discourses on why autonomy is bad (no, really, that happened the other night. It was one of those "what the f...?" moments) ...

But when one of your exes has their own Wikipedia page, where is that in the level of low? I mean, it's not that the breakup was bad (in fact, I just stopped using his bathrobe, which was gifted to me during the end-days -- it's one of those nice terry robes that they seem to only make for men. And, not to digress, but how is that felt-cotton-fluffy stuff they make women's robes out of supposed to be good for getting out of the shower?? I hate robes that stick to you. Took me all this time to find a suitable terry replacement in a women's robe) or that there are leftover feelings because we weren't really couple of the year and all, but it's like he's done better after the breakup or because of it. Yeah, it's been 13 (14?) years, but where the hell's my Wiki page?

Not like I've done anything to ... you know ... merit one, but still ... I'm just sayin'.