I had fun with googly eyes last night after J had already gone to bed (he's home today with a sore throat, poor lamb). I'd bought the eyes a while back, because they're good fuel for a silly mood, or want to cheer someone up. I put a pair on a mango sitting in our fruit bowl, a pair on a picture of my best friend’s dog that we have up right now, and a few more here and there in somewhat more secretive but frequently-visited locations (like inside J’s lunch bag).
J was still pretty out of it when I left, so I'm looking forward to coming home and seeing how many of them he found--and if he came up with his own creative locations for them.
A friend of mine that was a fellow Ithaca chemistry major is coming here for grad school in the fall! I’m really looking forward to having some new faces around, since most of the friends I’ve made here are going to be gone by the end of the summer. He (the friend) was around this weekend, looking for apartments. I had a good time showing him around a bit—I’ve always enjoyed the role of Unofficial Tour Guide. I got creeped out at dinner, because there was this old woman sitting at a nearby table staring at me. Just watching. At first I thought there was some really interesting picture behind me, but it was just a blank white wall. I have no idea what that was about.
Some people are strange and rude.
The rest of the weekend I spent knitting. I figured out a nice baby blanket pattern and wanted to try it out. It took awhile to get things lined up correctly but it looks pretty good. The pattern I adapted it from, though, called for the knitter to use two pieces of yarn wrapped around each other. What a pain in the rear—I keep losing one or the other, so I have to keep looking down at my work every second. Not only that, but the project calls for needles that are really a lot smaller than you need for a double yarn thickness, so the blanket is pretty stiff. It would probably be okay as the top-layer crib blanket, but for something to just keep a newborn covered, it’s a bit much. I’ll probably use the same pattern again—there’s nothing wrong with the overall look, but will never bother with two threads again. Phooey. I’m just trying to finish it, so I can move on to something more enjoyable.
Also, I finally finished off Jeremy’s sweater—there were some dangly threads I've needed to work in, but it's been too warm to sit with a completed wool fisherman's sweater in my lap for 2 hours doing my least favorite yarn-related job. He seems quite happy with the finished product—good. He doesn’t have enough sweaters. I hope he wears it.
It’s the first thing I’ve made that I’m completely pleased with. I made a point of not skimping on any of the steps I usually skimp on. It helped that it wasn’t for me, because for myself, I usually say “oh, I don’t mind wearing it if the seams are a little sloppy,” and just slap everything together as quickly as possible. For the first time, I made something that I feel is preferable to store-bought. There’s still some unevenness here and there, but the pattern that he requested would’ve been difficult to find, and it fits him very nicely.
Oh, man--Strom Thurmond and sodomy, all in one day! I can come up with a hundred and one tasteless jokes, but, you know, they're tasteless, and I feel like behaving myself today, the day I'll be handing out my Euphemistic Thesis to my advisory committee. I'm hoping some of my inherent goodness will rub off on them.
Wish me luck.
Oh, thank goodness. Because the only friends of mine that will allow me to live vicariously through them do things (or want to do things) that are of the illegal-in-Texas-until-today variety.
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O yarn, how I love thee! Thy joyful colors, thy fluffy texture, thy whispered descriptions of what you want to be! I twist you into happy, center-pulling balls, I untangle your twisties and snip out your knots, then I stick you in my new Tuppermaid bucket to take a nap while I plan your transformation.
Sleep little yarns, and have lovely dreams of warmth.
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My mom sent me a bunch of yarn from home a while back--some stuff of my own that I never got around to doing something with, some stuff of my grandma's that she was sick of looking at and pawned off on the Current Family Knitter. More than a week ago, some boxes she'd sent at the same time got here, but no yarn.
We feared the worst.
I pictured yarn gleefully jumping out the back of a mail truck--bouncing down the road, tails flapping in the wind, escaping a life of drudgery as a hat or sweater.
I pictured my yarn deciding to go to Vegas. What would yarn do in Vegas? It didn't know, but it would find something more glamorous than baby blankets.
But instead, the package slip finally arrived on Monday, and yesterday I dragged the hugeass tub home, and there was all the yarn. Turns out, Yarn didn't want to go to Vegas, it wanted to stay cozy with its little 4-ply friends. It just got a little bit lost along the way.
Thank goodness, because that would have been a lot of yarn gone to waste. A big plastic tub FULL! I really try to keep my yarn stash to whatever I'm working on, plus less than a grocery bag, so it'll be awhile before I buy anything new. It's time to sort through my new lovelies and get to work.
The yarn from gramma is good yarn for making baby stuff--I'll be using it to make things suitable to donate. I already made a pile of booties, but now I need to pair them blankets or sweaters. About half the yarn I got yesterday is destined for those projects.
The rest of it I either bought myself or got as a graduation, birthday, or Christmas present. There's enough for two or three sweaters, plus some odds and ends that will make nice gifts.
I relish my bounty, and sing praises to the Happy Yarn Spirits for its safe passage.
What I want for my birthday
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A lot of people have been finding me by looking for a "monkey child" lately (my baby picture is on the third row right now).
I have no idea why this suddenly a super-popular search term--10 in the last two days! Merciful heavens.
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I was born on a Sunday. This means I am "bonny and bright and good and gay."
Ok, so since the song was written, "gay" turned into something else entirely. That's okay, 3 out of 4 isn't too far off. Anyway, it doesn't upset me exactly, the song is just a bit mistaken. It's okay, everyone makes that particular mistake with me, I don't mind. I'm still bonny and bright and good. That's enough, right?
But now bright is being taken away from me? Where did that come from? Before you know it, someone's going to decide that "bonny" should mean "lactose-intolerant", and "good" means "elderly", so then I can be an old atheist homosexual that can't eat cheese because I was born on a Sunday.
Choose another day to pick on, Wednesday children. I know it's you behind all this, with your "full of woe", come on and admit it.
So, I'm a big fat liar to myself, and read the whole Harry Potter book already. Blame Jeremy, he kept putting it in front of me and opening it. My little crack dealer.
My Harry Potter predictions came out... interestingly. I won't say anything one way or the other because I was going to beat J over the head if he told me ANYTHING before I finished, so I won't ruin it for anyone else.
Also, I'd looked at a few other prediction pages, and had pulled out 2 or 3 things I thought were especially intriguing, although I didn't write about them here, so I don't feel bad saying that all of THOSE things happened, which I was pretty proud of myself for.
The book was enjoyable--if you liked the other ones, you'll like it. It is a very different book from the others, style-wise (it seems to live more in people's heads than the others, and doesn't bother with as much exposition of things that happened in the other books, but the world is just as complicated and rich and lovely.
See ma? No spoilers!
Something to keep your busy little fingers out of trouble--something more evil than Snood, or Solitaire, or Tetris, or that game with the little bouncy balls my mom plays.
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Euphemistic Thesis has been moved back a bit. Still writing, but now I'm a bit more sane. An extra 5 days will do that.
That sanity might go away, however, if my advisor reads my paper and thinks it's horrible and I have to start from scratch. I hope not.
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(warning: Harry Potter geekdom ahead. You may as well avoid it if you haven't read the books, because I'm a freak and will be getting all detailed and stuff. Oh, and don't read the predictions if you haven't read the books but want to, I give a lot away.)
J and I have been talking about Harry Potter a bit lately--for one, it doesn't involve cells and surface chemistry, so it gives me a mental break. Second, if you're not into the books or haven't been watching tv, the next installment is coming out this Saturday. So excitement is running high. Jeremy bought an advance copy that should be arriving by FedEx on Saturday, and is fully planning on staying up for 48 hours straight, or however long it takes to finish the new book.
For me, I'm going to put off reading it until my thesis defense is over--that's my little carrot. It will also be well timed, because I'm going to a conference on July 5th, so I'll have something to amuse me on the plane. J doesn't seem to get the concept of non-instant gratification in this case, but the way I see it, it's a book. It's not gonna go bad.
My only fear is Jeremy jumping up and down at 3 in the morning on Saturday yelling "I can't believe that Harry kills Hermione! Oh my god!" So I made him promise--no spoilers.
There's a difference between spoilers and predictions, though, so it's Prediction Time. I figure, I may as well be willing to hang my shame out to the world when I'm proven utterly and pathetically wrong, on the off chance that I'll get it right, and then I'll have proof of my genius.
Prediction #1: Jeremy says that Dumbledore will die in this book. J.K. Rowling has admitted that she did kill someone off this time around, and that it's a somewhat main character and it made her sad to kill them off, but I really think that Dumbledore can't die until the very end--there's been foreshadowing up the wazoo up to this point, but he's too important.
So who will it be? I've changed my mind since last night, but the more I think about it the more right it sounds.
My money's on Professor McGonagall.
A: She's a main character, but not TOO main. B: This'll be something that really messes up Hogwart's--getting a new house head and all that. I think it'll set up the whole outside world good vs. evil division within the school, and would just be a really interesting thing to watch, interpersonal-relationship wise. C: She's already in on the Order of the Phoenix--it got started up with her in the room right at the end of Book 4, so I assume she'll be kicking butts and taking names. D: It can't be Dumbledore, it just can't! *sniff*. Another possibility is Snape, since he's going all double-agent, but I think he's too smart to get killed off. And I was originally thinking of Mrs. Weasley, because of almost all the same reasons as McGonagall, but now I'm thinking she's not quite a main ENOUGH character, and is only tangentially related to the school itself.
Prediction #2: Sirius is going to be revealed in a way that royally screws him over.
He's been hiding for too long, now he's going to be taking on all the evil guys, no one knows he's innocent except for like 10 people, and he's running around the English countryside eating rats with a huge magical animal. Give me a break. He probably won't be in Azkaban by the end of the book because of some little twist in the end involving Pettigrew finally being revealed (see prediction #3), but he'll get caught and he'll get roughed up.
Prediction #3: Pettigrew accidentally orchestrates his own downfall because he can't kill Harry.
I've been listening to Book 3 while typing up my bibliography (more time-consuming than you'd think), and Harry is the reason that Pettigrew doesn't get killed, and Lupin says something like "He's bound to you now, because you saved his life." There's going to be some kind of deal where he tries to kill Harry but his wand does something wonky, or he chickens out, or something. And Harry can turn the tables, and he'll end up in Azkaban. Good--he's annoying anyway.
Prediction #4: The girlfriend is Cho.
Claire disagrees with me, so I felt the need to say it. But, DUH. Only it'll take awhile because her boyfriend died at the end of the last one.
Prediction #5: This one will be a few years, but Dumbledore'll die at the end of Book 7.
The whole way through so far, Harry has some big thing he needs to overcome, or someone he needs to vanquish. Dumbledore always helps him through. It's possible that Dumbledore won't be there to help him at the end of this book, but the way things are structured, the obstacles become a little more difficult every year: First year, a wimpy teacher posessed by Voledmort, Second year, young ghostie Voldemort, third year, the dementors (and trying to get Sirius free and all that silliness), fourth year, Voldemort that's just regained his power but hasn't gotten any new followers yet. Every time Dumbledore has some critical part to play. Harry'll have to be ready for this big battle by the end of book 7, but without Dumbledore to hold his hand through books 5 and 6, I don't see how he can manage to get all the way through to the end.
There are some other, more minor things I think will happen, but they're pretty well predicted in the other books because there's a lot of Big Obvious Foreshadowing, and when books 3 and 4 on tape are your background, cleaning-the-house noise, you get all the little details stuck in your head.
One detail I'd like to see that I haven't heard anything about yet: Wizard graduations. It just sounds fun.
The paperwriting mentioned below is going slowly, but going. Continue with the good jujus--they're working. Go frolic in my links section if you're bored. I'll be back in full swing by July 1st--before that, if things go unusually well.
Writing my Euphemistic Thesis is swinging into high gear this week, so other areas of writing will be minimal. Like here. And email.
So, be gentle.
Send good jujus.
And interesting journal articles on fibronectin.
Random question: How common are pregnancy dreams? And if you've had one, does it totally mess with you? I don't have them often--I'd say, less than a dozen times in my whole life. But when I do, they're so intense and wierd that I can probably list every time it's happened. I'm always a little off-kilter for the rest of that day when I have a pregnancy dream.
The dream itself is usually focused around me trying to do the best I can in a situation I've made very clear many times that I don't want to be in--I buy all the baby crap, change the house all around (or move), change my job, decide all of those little baby details that need to be decided before I pop--disposable diapers or cloth? Circumcision? Breastfeeding? Is the house big enough? How much time off am I going to take? etc., etc.
All this stuff gets figured out, I finally make my peace with motherhood, maybe even feel pretty good about it.
Then I wake up, and put my hands on my belly, and realize I just spent the whole night dream-planning, and for about a minute and a half I'm upset because I really feel like I just spent months planning for a little critter that isn't actually coming.
For the rest of the day I'll be looking down at my stomach with an eyebrow raised, thinking, "are you SURE there's no one home?"
I know I'll be back to my normal, birth-despising self tomorrow, but the world's just a little bit crooked right now.
My friends' list of romantic involvements is sounding more and more like a Jerry Springer show. If you know the same people I do, email for juicy details.
Update on the monkeypox thing I talked about yesterday: Jeremy says that I failed to mention the irony of a disease named after monkeys being spread by prairie dogs. Duly noted. I don't feel like making a joke about it though.
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Entertaining search hit of the day: "Gay Cancun Horror Stories".
Honey, I wish.
I just realized that I haven't mentioned the funny ways that people find me before. Kind of odd, really, since I tell real-life friends about them all the time, and follow them the way some people follow sports. So here's the rundown.
Angelfire has this thingie where I can see some information about every person that's found their way to my site, including their IP address (which I have no use for) and the URL of whatever site they clicked on to get to me. So, if someone found me by searching under "wierd engineering grad student", I'd see that. It's interesting to see what people are looking for--although I don't think a single person has found what they're looking for here yet.
Far and away the most common search hit? Any spelling variation on "tchotchke", because I once talked about not knowing how to spell it, and listed a few possible variants. Several a day.
Second place? Once or twice a week I get someone looking for Mazzicato's, an Italian bakery in Hartford that's really, really tasty. In fact, I might have misspelled that one too. Now that I think about it, the majority of hits I get are misspelled. I should really check myself more often. Other misspellings include the word "poety" (although in my defense I think I was describing something that was poet-like) and "crochless", which makes me laugh.
I get an occasional dirty one, but not too bad, since I don't really talk about dirty stuff. I get a lot of people looking for folks in boxer shorts. And crochless things. That's about it.
All time favorite? "dogs in fluffy pimp coats".
One recent hit made me kind of sad: "POEMS THAT HAS TO DO WITH A GIRL LIKING A BOY BU THE BOY HAS A GIRL GRIEND AND THE BOY IS FOOLING AORUND WITH BOTH OF US". I want to pull this girl aside, give her a hug, and send her far, far away, where she can learn to write her own, properly spelled poetry, get away from that naughty boy, and have a happy rest of her life.
It's strange, just a few words from a total stranger, sent into an impartial machine, get indirectly sent to another impartial machine, which lists these words exactly the same way as it tells me the time of day someone visits, and I'm still touched. This person that I've only ever seen one all-caps runon sentence from, I want to be her friendly big sister and tell her about the world.
Who says computers have made us more impersonal?
Oh! I guess I shouldn't have played with all of those prairie dogs. Whoops.
No, although I've had a temperature and been achy and/or cough-y and/or sneezy the last few days, I don't think it's monkeypox. Although it is a LOT of fun to say that name. Monkeypox. Monkeypoxmonkeypox.
You can tell that the news people are trying not to giggle during all of this Serious Talk. First off, it's called monkeypox, which just isn't as dignified sounding as some of the more recent panics. West Nile Virus? I picture bongo drums and a weak sweaty person on a raft. Anthrax? An angry heavy metal band putting powder in envelopes. SARS? A scary, industrial-sounding acronym can make anything sound bad. But monkeypox? It sounds like chicken pox, only funnier. I picture small children scratching beneath their arms and making chimpanzee noises for a week, maybe picking nits out of their parent's hair and hanging from the shower curtains over their oatmeal bath. The dangerous tone just isn't there.
Secondly, the stories are accompanied by stock footage of prairie dogs, which I'd never seen before coming here, except in photos. Midwestern people already know this, but for my mostly coastal family, you need to know this: prairie dogs are really, really funny. They're adorable, they dig in an entertaining waddling manner with their butts in the air, and they poke their heads up at random like a live game of Whack-a-Mole. Small children walk up to their pen and start giggling immediately. It's hard to associate them with deadly disease, especially a funny-sounding one.
So imagine the poor news anchors. On the one hand, people could DIE. On the other hand, comic gold! So they end up with a strange kind of smirk on their face, trying to prevent the funny from taking over.
I'm recovering from a yucky, cold-like thing. I'm feeling a lot better now, though--my lungs still feel a little raw, but my brain isn't so slushy and I'm not achy anymore. Sleeping for 15 hours is a good thing.
Also, I can't say what I would've thought of it if I was healthy (although J liked it and felt fine), but Finding Nemo was a lot of fun. Of course, when I have a cold I'm operating at about the level of an 8 year old, so it was right at my level.
Especially good was the portrayal of seagulls: hungry, incredibly stupid, but effective in packs. Anyone who's spent time on Star Island knows just how spot-on the image was.
"Mine?"
Some nearby neighbor decided last night that 4:09am is the PERFECT time to crank up the volume on their amp as they practiced terrible out of tune covers of Top 40's songs from the mid-90's. From now on I'll always associate "Lightning Crashes" with a desire to bruise and maim.
After this, my sleep was light and grumpy. So when Jeremy woke up from a dream about not being able to find me in NYC a few hours later, and rolled over to give me a kiss of gratitude for not being chased after by Eminem in the real world, the response was less gentle than normal.
"Why are you so mean? Go away!" I vaguely remember saying, before rolling over and putting my pillow over my head.
I think I'd been dreaming about the MST3K robots pestering me to give them candy I wanted for myself.
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I've been knitting like a fiend lately, to the point that I think I'm going to run out of ideas for people I know fairly soon. Also, my grandma recently gave me a hefty garbage bag full of yarn she wanted to get rid of--mostly the baby blanket type of yarn, so there's not much I can do with it except make things for babies. So I decided to look around for a charity knitting organization--I know there are a bunch of them that give booties, hats and blankets to newborns in various troublesome situations (preemie, drug-addicted, or needy).
Ideally, I'd like to donate to an organization that isn't either A: primarily religious or B: only for one hospital somewhere I've never been to. About 95% of the ones I've found so far have fallen into one of these categories. Not that the religous-based places I found at first were doing anything that wasn't good hearted and honorable, I'd just rather think of my gift as one with no heavenly strings attached.
But then I found these people, that just give me all sorts of willies. They're saying their message in a nice enough way, but I'm picturing someone walking up to a frightened 19 year old woman in front of Planned Parenthood and handing her tiny booties. BOOTIES. It's an improvement over pictures of aborted fetuses, but still a terrible thing to do to someone that suddenly needs to make a major life decision.
I did find one place that seemed to meet my requirements halfway. The angel theme is a bit much, but they ARE trying to convince me to spend time making tiny socks, after all, and there aren't religous quotes coming from every page. I just want an excuse to knit, you know.
Phew. A bunch of my exam related politicky problems have worked themselves out, after talking to my advisor. Much relief abounds.
On the other hand, this whole process reminds me that there's a reason I don't want to become a professor at a big research university like here--too much drama. So-and-so owes the group a favor, Whoozi-face-it and that other guy always disagree in meetings, so don't have them both on your committee, and Whats-er-name doesn't do research in our field anymore, but knows a lot about it, so she might be helpful.
It's not that good science isn't getting done--there are a lot of wonderful papers getting published in a lot of top-notch scientific journals--it's just that I have no particular desire to get bogged down in all the little back-scratching maneuvers that seem to go hand in hand with DOING all that wonderful science.
I just don't have that ambition that's needed to start kicking and scratching. I'm not willing to work anywhere in the world because of the prestige in a particular name. And I'm not willing to shoot down everyone else's ideas to sound smart.
The way I see it, the purpose of all these years of professional education is to allow me to select the job that makes me happiest, and, even in the worst-case scenario, to feel some financial security in the idea that I'll always be able to find something that pays me in exchange for using my brain. Like everyone else in my class, by the time I get my Ph.D., I'll have put years and years of hard work into getting this piece of paper. My mom and I will have paid thousands and thousands of dollars to get me into rooms with blackboards and seats and professors. I'll have spent 5 or 6 years half a country away from my family. And I'll have sworn to the heavens that I'm going to quit this crazy program and start a yarn store dozens and dozens of times.
What's the point of getting that far just to be unhappy?
I recently promised a blurry picture of one of my sisters that didn't quite come through the first time (disk problem). Here it is. If you can't tell, she was facing the camera while jumping up and down, dancing to country music. The digital camera has some kind of automatic light timer thing, so, since I had the flash off, it took it a few seconds to get enough light through before it saved the picture. No foo-foo Photoshopping (except to make the picture a little smaller so it would fit here).
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Oh, boy, I'm up the creek today.
So, for the past week I've been working on my upcoming Euphemistic Thesis Defense. I have to write up something very similar to a Master's Thesis, although the data can be pretty preliminary, and give a talk very similar to the first part of a Thesis Defense, and then, like a thesis defense, I get asked questions about my work for an hour, and at the end I get a Master's degree, but it's NOT A MASTER'S DEFENSE! It's something else ENTIRELY.
Heaven forbid we call something by its name.
Anyway, as part of my non-thesis, I need a non-advisory committee--essentially, the people that ask me questions and give me the OK (or not, if I show up drunk or insult them). When I looked over the requirements, I saw that they had to be members of the Euphemistic Materials Science Group, Which Is Not Called By This Name In Any Other Context. There were two pools of people that could have been described in this way--and there's quite a bit of overlap between these pools.
Stupid me, without checking, assumed that they meant Pool #1. Pool #1 is the pool that contains my advisor, my vet school co-advisor, and every other professor that I regularly talk shop with. I like these folks, they like me. I pictured my defense as being difficult but friendly--all of these professors are incredibly smart people, famous in their scientific sub-group, an expert on a particular aspect of my research and/or intimately familiar with the science that our group does.
Unfortunately, with the exception of my advisor, none of these people are in Pool #2, and it turns out that Pool #2 is the one I have to select professors from.
Doh!
Also unfortunately, again with the exception of my advisor, almost no one in Pool #2 does anything even REMOTELY related to biology, and since a partial title of my talk is "Cell-Surface Interactions", having some familiarity with biology is really important.
In other words, I'm up the creek.
The one good thing is that I only need 3 or more people from Pool #2, and can have up to 6 people on my committee. So at least I can have up to 4 people that I like there (since my advisor's in both the 1st and 2nd group).
I'm not sure where I'm going to find all these other people, though.
I got a really creepy phone call yesterday morning. It's one of those things that has a 99.9% chance of being totally innocuous, but bothered me nonetheless.
Jeremy was out, dropping off a DVD we'd watched the night before. The conversation went something like this:
*ring ring*
Me: "Hello?"
Sounds Like A Regular Youngish White Guy: "Hi there!"
Me: "Um... yes?"
SLARYWG: "You know who this is, right?"
Me: "Actually, I don't, I'm sorry, who is this?"
SLARYWG: "I can't believe you don't recognize my voice!"
Me (approaching annoyance): "Well, who is this?"
SLARYWG: "You mean you really can't tell? I don't believe it."
Me: "............."
SLARYWG: "............"
Me: "Ok, I guess you're not going to tell me. Bye!" *click*
Now, I have a very short list of males who would assume I know their voices. My Dad, Jeremy, my friend Dan, my grampa, maybe my advisors, maybe a friend or two from Ithaca or from my current research group. None of them are the game-playing type, and I'd definitely recognize their voices unless they were on cell phones or something (which this didn't sound like).
My guess is that it was a wrong number, since we get a lot of those because our number has a lot of repeats in it (think something like 123-1232). Also, the person didn't call back, which I think a normal person would have done. He didn't say anything creepy or dirty, wasn't trying to sell something, kept a pretty jovial tone throughout. There wasn't any particular aspect to his demeanor that SHOULD have bothered me.
But I still jumped a mile 10 minutes later when J called to say he was hanging out at the park across the street.
The thing is, my family's had problems with someone stalking us before. Someone who called the police department and DHFS on us saying that we were being held captive and beaten by a family member that was a Nazi (all untrue, of course). Someone that wrote many page letters that included details that convinced me this person was sitting across the street from my school, watching me. Someone that called every person in the phone book with our last name (our name is unusual enough that they were all actual family members) asking why my dad didn't call her, until every person with our last name got an unlisted number. Someone who called my dad's workplace asking for him several times per week, hoping some new worker would foolishly page her through. Someone who got sent to a mental institution for awhile because of what she did.
This shit freaks me out. This experience is the reason I keep semi-anonymous on this site (I say semi-, because I have pictures of myself on the site, and because I wouldn't bother with pseudonyms for everyone I know unless someone specifically requested it, and because if someone was really nuts they could probably put together enough details). For a long time, I couldn't be as happy as my friends were if my name got mentioned in the local newspaper (where my dad works), or on TV, because this person could be watching, and find out enough about me to find me, and start harassing me and my mom directly, too.
I don't wish ill on the dead, but the day I read this person's obituary I suddenly felt a whole lot safer in this world. I can write a letter to the editor with my name and town on it. I didn't fear that this person would somehow find out about my wedding and show up screaming, something I surely would've worried about had she still been alive.
I can list my phone number.
And now, someone I don't know calls me and acts all familiar but won't tell me his name? Yeah, this manages to hit almost all of my panic buttons in one swoop.
The good news? The "Finding a huge half eaten beetle in my oatmeal" panic button is still untouched. That's something, at least.
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Well, I've been married for a year and a day now. J and I had a nice anniversary day together (except for the phone call described above)--mostly just lounging around weekend-y type stuff, but also got dressed up and had dinner at a place we hadn't gone to before--food was fair, but service was hoveringly excessive, because we were the only people in there for most of our meal. J's present was the sweater I'm knitting for him. It's still incomplete, but it'll be ready in a few weeks. J got me a book about Trading Spaces, going with the theme of: "I should get her something she likes that I hate, so the gift isn't really a gift for myself." The book's cute. Too bad there isn't much I can do with the apartment--it would be really depressing to have to repaint everything white in a few years if I did some wild stuff to the walls.
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Now I REALLY need some book recommendations--I'm halfway through my recent library stack. I spent a large part of the weekend reading Tales of Protection, which from what I'd read I thought was going to involve a couple of interconnected stories that revolve around a particular character, to show how chance and accident can radically affect a person's life. I like that kind of stuff.
Too bad it wasn't that at all. There were 3 main stories, which could have each been their own books. Only a half-paragraph that had nothing to do with the main story was thrown in to link the 3. I patiently made my way through the whole thing, expecting there to be a point at which the jigsaw pieces click-click-clicked into place--anyone who's read a few of John Irving's books knows what I'm talking about. But it didn't happen. Connecting the books seemed to be an afterthought--hmm, let's have the girl see the ghost of this other guy, that won't be born for another 50 years, and call that FATE. whhoooo--whOOOoo! (ghost noise).
I would have found each section moderately enjoyable on its own--the writing itself is very clean and delicate--I just got annoyed reading through the whole thing expecting a denouement that never came.
Read it if you're looking for something to amuse you for a few days, but go through the 4 main sections out of order so you don't get into the mindset that I did.