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| Happy Birthday Superstar! |
It's raining again in the bay. The rain is so miserable here, unlike the rain in Pittsburgh. I think it's a matter of expectations. If you don't come to expect blue skies, then you will never be disappointed when it rains.
An old coworker of mine, before she became a technical writer, worked as a paralegal for an unscrupulous law firm somewhere in the bay. One afternoon, during the daily episode of writer's block, she peeled an orange outside my office door at IBM while describing to me the most horrific lawyer she ever had the misfortune of meeting. She and her officemates, through a long series of events, became aware that this lawyer had accidentally run someone over on the highway in the middle of the night and proceeded to leave the scene without telling anyone. The pedestrian died, and the lawyer continued about his daily business as if nothing had happened. My coworker later decided, in a fiction writing class she took, to write a story about a man who killed another man with no remorse. Her teacher had handed the story back to her and told her to rewrite it, on account of the fact that "no one could be that evil."
Many years ago I made the poor decision to watch a really bad movie (out of choice, to my horror!) called Dragonheart, in which the supporting actor, as it were, was a villain of unbelievable proportions. The movie was really not "bad" in that you wanted to jab your eyes with a pointed object after ten minutes of it (that's more like the South Park movie), in fact, it had the general makings of a decent movie -- a fairly interesting if somewhat predictable plot, acting that's better than daytime soaps, and a few flashy special effects. While it limped along with some torturous script writing, I didn't want to run out of the theater at any point (that's Star Wars episode II). What really irked me about this movie was the "bad guy." The bad guy was an evil prince saved by a generous dragon who gives him half of his heart. Well it turns out princey is a real ass to pretty much everyone, and you spend the whole movie waiting for him to die, or at the very least, to do what your creative writing professor always insisted in college -- to show his other side. Well, this guy had no other side. He was evil till the end, dying only when the dragon finally admitted he made a huge mistake and committed suicide in order to remedy it (haven't we all had days like that).
This movie annoyed me on two diverging levels. Firstly, this character was what we, as snooty writers, call "flat." Just like my coworker's writing teacher who told her "no one is that evil," I stubbornly believed that this bloodthirsty villain should still have a soft spot. He never repents, not even as he breathes his last breath. On the other hand, in my version of reality, such people do exist, even if I don't want to watch them in movies. I think that generally, many people want to believe the best, that even hardened criminals have an inner pinkness, that even the seemingly unremorseful can be rehabilitated. No one wants to think, this person really doesn't care, this person is only out for himself, I can never believe what this person says. If we thought this about everyone, we'd never function as a society, or at best, we'd all be living in New York City. Yet, do we subconsciously do this when we lock our doors, remove our stereo faceplates, ask to see receipts before reimbursing someone?
Where has this element of trust gone? Can someone be evil down to the last? I asked myself this very same question last night as I drove down 280 in the darkness, listening to Vitali's Chaconne on the radio. I went out last night with an old "friend" who I thought, in some magical, mystical moment was actually feeling sorry about his impending departure from the state and from me. To my surprise I thought I saw a flat character growing round before my eyes, a man with a hint of emotion where there was none before. His persistence, or insistence, as it were, that I stay at his house waned and waxed, and I became aware of that doubt I have so often felt in the past year, that uncertainty that someone was not telling me the whole truth. By the time I was skirting my way out the front door, he had become completely plastic to me, and I drove away feeling like Indiana Jones escaping an elaborate Aztec trap. I was more relieved than elated, more sad than triumphant. I had wanted to exit glamorously and confidently, but the uncomfortable doubt he had instilled in me left me shaking my head down the highway. Could it be that everyone is only out for themselves? The truth is difficult, no doubt, but I wonder why it is so often withheld from me, unless it is simply to further someone else's personal interests. I sincerely hope that is untrue.
An old coworker of mine, before she became a technical writer, worked as a paralegal for an unscrupulous law firm somewhere in the bay. One afternoon, during the daily episode of writer's block, she peeled an orange outside my office door at IBM while describing to me the most horrific lawyer she ever had the misfortune of meeting. She and her officemates, through a long series of events, became aware that this lawyer had accidentally run someone over on the highway in the middle of the night and proceeded to leave the scene without telling anyone. The pedestrian died, and the lawyer continued about his daily business as if nothing had happened. My coworker later decided, in a fiction writing class she took, to write a story about a man who killed another man with no remorse. Her teacher had handed the story back to her and told her to rewrite it, on account of the fact that "no one could be that evil."
Many years ago I made the poor decision to watch a really bad movie (out of choice, to my horror!) called Dragonheart, in which the supporting actor, as it were, was a villain of unbelievable proportions. The movie was really not "bad" in that you wanted to jab your eyes with a pointed object after ten minutes of it (that's more like the South Park movie), in fact, it had the general makings of a decent movie -- a fairly interesting if somewhat predictable plot, acting that's better than daytime soaps, and a few flashy special effects. While it limped along with some torturous script writing, I didn't want to run out of the theater at any point (that's Star Wars episode II). What really irked me about this movie was the "bad guy." The bad guy was an evil prince saved by a generous dragon who gives him half of his heart. Well it turns out princey is a real ass to pretty much everyone, and you spend the whole movie waiting for him to die, or at the very least, to do what your creative writing professor always insisted in college -- to show his other side. Well, this guy had no other side. He was evil till the end, dying only when the dragon finally admitted he made a huge mistake and committed suicide in order to remedy it (haven't we all had days like that).
This movie annoyed me on two diverging levels. Firstly, this character was what we, as snooty writers, call "flat." Just like my coworker's writing teacher who told her "no one is that evil," I stubbornly believed that this bloodthirsty villain should still have a soft spot. He never repents, not even as he breathes his last breath. On the other hand, in my version of reality, such people do exist, even if I don't want to watch them in movies. I think that generally, many people want to believe the best, that even hardened criminals have an inner pinkness, that even the seemingly unremorseful can be rehabilitated. No one wants to think, this person really doesn't care, this person is only out for himself, I can never believe what this person says. If we thought this about everyone, we'd never function as a society, or at best, we'd all be living in New York City. Yet, do we subconsciously do this when we lock our doors, remove our stereo faceplates, ask to see receipts before reimbursing someone?
Where has this element of trust gone? Can someone be evil down to the last? I asked myself this very same question last night as I drove down 280 in the darkness, listening to Vitali's Chaconne on the radio. I went out last night with an old "friend" who I thought, in some magical, mystical moment was actually feeling sorry about his impending departure from the state and from me. To my surprise I thought I saw a flat character growing round before my eyes, a man with a hint of emotion where there was none before. His persistence, or insistence, as it were, that I stay at his house waned and waxed, and I became aware of that doubt I have so often felt in the past year, that uncertainty that someone was not telling me the whole truth. By the time I was skirting my way out the front door, he had become completely plastic to me, and I drove away feeling like Indiana Jones escaping an elaborate Aztec trap. I was more relieved than elated, more sad than triumphant. I had wanted to exit glamorously and confidently, but the uncomfortable doubt he had instilled in me left me shaking my head down the highway. Could it be that everyone is only out for themselves? The truth is difficult, no doubt, but I wonder why it is so often withheld from me, unless it is simply to further someone else's personal interests. I sincerely hope that is untrue.
So aside from Larry Ellison apparently commenting on my blog, I rear ended one of his other employees this morning on the way to work. Whether she's going to sue me for everything I have (which isn't much, so she'll be sorely disappointed) or not is questionable, but I might have to go get an evening shift at McDonald's to pay all these bills off soon.
| I'm so excited I figured out how to FTP from work that I had to find something to upload. So here's a really bad video of me not being able to skate or play hockey. Enjoy. |
So I've been told that my inability to skate backwards with any effectiveness is all in my head. I think you can convince yourself of all kinds of untruths if you really try. Crazy people throughout history have convinced themselves that they're refugees from another planet, Jesus, the master race, or even more simply, that everyone else is crazy except for them. I've had people persuade themselves with conviction that they did not and could not love me, so hey, if you're allowed to convince yourself of that, then don't take my backwards skating fixation away from me. It's all I have.
I recently noted that Bizzy asked for a hockey update. To satisfy her and to appeal to the many people who for some strange reason are living vicariously through me (you know who you are), my hockey story tonight is a 30-second unrequited romance that should leave you sighing for more, or at the very least, rolling your eyes in embarrassed sympathy.
I've been going to a hockey skills workshop on Sunday nights at Ice Oasis in Redwood City. Skating with the girls twice a week is getting a bit depressing since I can't keep up with a one of them (are all these people from Canada or is this some kinda sick joke?), so I make myself feel better by going to skills and skating circles around large, unstable men. Sure, they all shoot better than me, but first they have to catch me. I'd been wearing my Snoopy jersey to practice so often that the instructors had started referring to me by that name, so I decided to mix them up a bit and wear my Piranhas jersey that I don't know what to do with anyway. Last Sunday I was on the ice for a mere five seconds when I could see someone gliding next to me out of the corner of my eye. It was one of the instructors, who, for the purpose of this blog, we'll call "Crush," because his distinctive SoCal attitude reminds me of that sea turtle in Finding Nemo.
"Is that your real name or is that a nickname?" he said. I turned to him. "Huh? OH, that's my last name," I answered, bumbling. "Dude, that is SO COOL. Did you know that means CUTE in French?" I tried not to roll my eyes, but unfortunately, it's become an involuntary reflex. "Yes," I said, "I get that pickup line all the time." Five crossovers later and I had managed to escape him.
Tonight, on a whim, I decided to wear the jersey again, since I thought by this point everyone had already seen it. I was about two laps around the rink tonight before I heard "Is that your real name or a nickname?" You already used that line, I almost blurted out. I looked and it was a different instructor. "Oh, uh, it's my real name," I said. "It's Italian, right?" he continued. Surprised that someone actually got it right, I answered yes, smiling. "Did you know in French it means CUTE?" he said, beaming.
It's well known that hockey provokes people to aggression, but for me, it doesn't always occur in the usual and customary manner. Some people get slashed, checked, punched, run over, but me, I get picked up on. The refs should give penalties for such poor game, but then, people don't even get busted for bad driving these days. I have little hope it will be decreed a penalty in the near future.
And then there are the people not suffering from poor game, just an altogether lack of a clue. Namely, me. There's an instructor at skills who looks curiously like Paul from the Southpointe Iceoplex in Canonsburg, PA. Paul was a hockey clinic instructor at Southpointe when Bizzy and I skated there during my second and last sultry Pennsylvania summer. Quite a looker (and yes, we saw him with his shirt off in the office), but unfortunately too short and absolutely zero sense of humor, even when Bizzy accidentally hit him in the face with her stick. Now, Bizzy gets minus two-hundred points for hitting the pretty boy in the face, but that's a tale for another blog entry. So this instructor, who we'll call Paul, is blessedly taller than the real Paul, and appears to have a more substantial sense of humor. He's been at Polars practice on several Sunday mornings, insisting the women be in ready stance all the time in case he "accidentally" ran into them.
I got a good look at him tonight at skills, and had decided quite suddenly that I was going to ask him out. My problem is that I decided this too early on, when my group had just rotated into his corner of the rink. It's well known that I have no coordination in front of current or potential love interests. It's just too much to ask to stickhandle a puck around a cone and lust over someone at the same time. Don't believe me? You try it sometime.
"You're just going to stickhandle back and forth like this," Paul said, pushing a puck around in front of himself. We copied. "Now look two feet in front of your puck...now look five feet in front...now look at the boards....now look at me." My puck was gone. I'm not sure how long it had been gone but I was still stickhandling as if it was there. I got another one. "Jessica look at me." Ah yes, looking! "Richard look at me." I looked down and my puck was gone again. "We're going to stickhandle around these cones now," Paul said, pushing some strange orange discs into a straight line (they weren't cones at all). The drill was impossible. Paul's puck went in a straight line back and forth between the cones. Mine went diagonally from my stick between the cones and then back again, eventually knocking the last cone out of position. I started to turn the corner sharply to the right with the puck on my backhand. "Look at me!" Paul said as I skated by. I glanced up and my puck went sailing off past the blue line into one of the other group's corners. "I can't," I said, exasperated, then stood up straight in defiance and skated back to the goal line, puckless.
Paul was talking to us at the goal line, although I have no idea what he said. Would you like to go to dinner sometime? How about drinks? Do you have a girlfriend?...No, I thought, scratching that last question from my mind. Sure I wondered, but you couldn't just straight up ask that. Do you have a real job or do you just work here? Will you be at Polars practice next week? Is that your red Mustang in the parking lot? What's your shoe size? "Now you're going to stickhandle between the cones like this," Paul said, demonstrating. I envisioned myself skating up to him after practice was over. So, I was wondering... I replayed it in my head until I had it down.
We did a couple more cone drills (for me, poorly) before an instructor blew the whistle to rotate the groups. "Thanks, you guys did great," Paul said. He took his left glove off to scratch his head. Ring? Ring!! I slammed my stick down on the ice like a person who's just missed a really good goal, and skated away, beaten. And to think I could have actually been practicing that whole time, instead of dwelling on my approach. My only consolation is that after the incident, I played fairly well during the scrimmage. Without the pressure of the scrutinizing eye of a potential date, all my oppressed coordination came back in one big uprising of thwarted wrath. I slashed one person, ran into another, and at the end stormed back to the locker room to rip off all my tape in spurned fury.
Anticlimactic, I know. Disappointed by this story? Send your generous donations to the Find Jess a Man foundation. Your contributions will help to improve my blog entries and hopefully ensure that they have a point in the future. Thanks for your support.
I recently noted that Bizzy asked for a hockey update. To satisfy her and to appeal to the many people who for some strange reason are living vicariously through me (you know who you are), my hockey story tonight is a 30-second unrequited romance that should leave you sighing for more, or at the very least, rolling your eyes in embarrassed sympathy.
I've been going to a hockey skills workshop on Sunday nights at Ice Oasis in Redwood City. Skating with the girls twice a week is getting a bit depressing since I can't keep up with a one of them (are all these people from Canada or is this some kinda sick joke?), so I make myself feel better by going to skills and skating circles around large, unstable men. Sure, they all shoot better than me, but first they have to catch me. I'd been wearing my Snoopy jersey to practice so often that the instructors had started referring to me by that name, so I decided to mix them up a bit and wear my Piranhas jersey that I don't know what to do with anyway. Last Sunday I was on the ice for a mere five seconds when I could see someone gliding next to me out of the corner of my eye. It was one of the instructors, who, for the purpose of this blog, we'll call "Crush," because his distinctive SoCal attitude reminds me of that sea turtle in Finding Nemo.
"Is that your real name or is that a nickname?" he said. I turned to him. "Huh? OH, that's my last name," I answered, bumbling. "Dude, that is SO COOL. Did you know that means CUTE in French?" I tried not to roll my eyes, but unfortunately, it's become an involuntary reflex. "Yes," I said, "I get that pickup line all the time." Five crossovers later and I had managed to escape him.
Tonight, on a whim, I decided to wear the jersey again, since I thought by this point everyone had already seen it. I was about two laps around the rink tonight before I heard "Is that your real name or a nickname?" You already used that line, I almost blurted out. I looked and it was a different instructor. "Oh, uh, it's my real name," I said. "It's Italian, right?" he continued. Surprised that someone actually got it right, I answered yes, smiling. "Did you know in French it means CUTE?" he said, beaming.
It's well known that hockey provokes people to aggression, but for me, it doesn't always occur in the usual and customary manner. Some people get slashed, checked, punched, run over, but me, I get picked up on. The refs should give penalties for such poor game, but then, people don't even get busted for bad driving these days. I have little hope it will be decreed a penalty in the near future.
And then there are the people not suffering from poor game, just an altogether lack of a clue. Namely, me. There's an instructor at skills who looks curiously like Paul from the Southpointe Iceoplex in Canonsburg, PA. Paul was a hockey clinic instructor at Southpointe when Bizzy and I skated there during my second and last sultry Pennsylvania summer. Quite a looker (and yes, we saw him with his shirt off in the office), but unfortunately too short and absolutely zero sense of humor, even when Bizzy accidentally hit him in the face with her stick. Now, Bizzy gets minus two-hundred points for hitting the pretty boy in the face, but that's a tale for another blog entry. So this instructor, who we'll call Paul, is blessedly taller than the real Paul, and appears to have a more substantial sense of humor. He's been at Polars practice on several Sunday mornings, insisting the women be in ready stance all the time in case he "accidentally" ran into them.
I got a good look at him tonight at skills, and had decided quite suddenly that I was going to ask him out. My problem is that I decided this too early on, when my group had just rotated into his corner of the rink. It's well known that I have no coordination in front of current or potential love interests. It's just too much to ask to stickhandle a puck around a cone and lust over someone at the same time. Don't believe me? You try it sometime.
"You're just going to stickhandle back and forth like this," Paul said, pushing a puck around in front of himself. We copied. "Now look two feet in front of your puck...now look five feet in front...now look at the boards....now look at me." My puck was gone. I'm not sure how long it had been gone but I was still stickhandling as if it was there. I got another one. "Jessica look at me." Ah yes, looking! "Richard look at me." I looked down and my puck was gone again. "We're going to stickhandle around these cones now," Paul said, pushing some strange orange discs into a straight line (they weren't cones at all). The drill was impossible. Paul's puck went in a straight line back and forth between the cones. Mine went diagonally from my stick between the cones and then back again, eventually knocking the last cone out of position. I started to turn the corner sharply to the right with the puck on my backhand. "Look at me!" Paul said as I skated by. I glanced up and my puck went sailing off past the blue line into one of the other group's corners. "I can't," I said, exasperated, then stood up straight in defiance and skated back to the goal line, puckless.
Paul was talking to us at the goal line, although I have no idea what he said. Would you like to go to dinner sometime? How about drinks? Do you have a girlfriend?...No, I thought, scratching that last question from my mind. Sure I wondered, but you couldn't just straight up ask that. Do you have a real job or do you just work here? Will you be at Polars practice next week? Is that your red Mustang in the parking lot? What's your shoe size? "Now you're going to stickhandle between the cones like this," Paul said, demonstrating. I envisioned myself skating up to him after practice was over. So, I was wondering... I replayed it in my head until I had it down.
We did a couple more cone drills (for me, poorly) before an instructor blew the whistle to rotate the groups. "Thanks, you guys did great," Paul said. He took his left glove off to scratch his head. Ring? Ring!! I slammed my stick down on the ice like a person who's just missed a really good goal, and skated away, beaten. And to think I could have actually been practicing that whole time, instead of dwelling on my approach. My only consolation is that after the incident, I played fairly well during the scrimmage. Without the pressure of the scrutinizing eye of a potential date, all my oppressed coordination came back in one big uprising of thwarted wrath. I slashed one person, ran into another, and at the end stormed back to the locker room to rip off all my tape in spurned fury.
Anticlimactic, I know. Disappointed by this story? Send your generous donations to the Find Jess a Man foundation. Your contributions will help to improve my blog entries and hopefully ensure that they have a point in the future. Thanks for your support.
Happy Birthday Saturyne! May your day be filled with dragons and magic and horses and swordfights (ending brilliantly in the swift beheading of your worthless boss). Spend it like Cally would -- drinking spiked punch, dueling with the boys, playing with fire, galloping across the countryside, and most importantly, doing it all with Jerrica. It would take a tri-moon crystal conjunction to tear them apart.
I am, apparently, a homeowner.
...a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi
People, I'm not dead. I was in training for work all week with no internet access. So Friday I even paid $6 to log in from a Starbucks with my laptop just to remedy the rumors about my possible demise. I spent the week staring at Powerpoint illustrations of database cylinders and nebulous clouds representing the Internet. I'm not sure what I learned about Oracle 9i database administration, but I did manage to finish reading Life of Pi, some Japanese comic books, and my LSAT book. I recommend Life of Pi for a look at spirituality reinvented, the comic books for some graphic samurai gore, and the LSAT book if you like to spend hours figuring out which bus Doug is riding in and whether or not Jocelyn or Grace could also be in that bus with him. Why Grace and Helena always insist on riding together, we'll never know.
I read a fact/fiction article at the LSAC site today that insisted on ramming home the fact that law school will be the hardest thing I will ever do in my entire life. Strangely, my eyes glazed over at this and I could feel a bit of drool seeping from the corner of my mouth. I guess I am still not over my CMU trauma. I feel like a shell-shocked war veteran, watching small animals being ruthlessly killed with an unflinching eye. Perhaps then, the best time to go back to school is when the pain of it is still fresh. I still dream of taking a long vacation on a tropical island and riding horses on the beach and eating coconuts (but don't eat coconuts while riding because you could choke) before starting something so difficult again, but if I do that I fear I'll never do anything difficult again.
Of course, this begs the question, why subject myself to this? Nothing says I have to do anything really difficult, ever again. I could kick back in a tiny condo in Northern California, work at my 10-4 job, and continue dreaming of tropical islands. I guess, in some masochistic way, I am not happy with that. The general public appears split, opinionwise, on this topic.
My friends are on and off in their support, which is understandable. Good friends don't just blindly support you; they make inferences from your own enthusiasm and opinions and situation and base their suggestions on that. Obviously, if you are very excited about something, friends will look at it with a critical eye, but they will more than likely support you if they see that it makes you happy and will promote your interests and future. It's when you are wishy-washy about a decision but looking for blind support that your real friends will balk. That's when they'll withhold their encouragement until they can see that you have made a convincing decision. My problem, however, is simply that -- I want help, one way or another, in solidifying this decision. Maybe friends are worried about giving the wrong advice. But really, advice thought out and given is never wrong when the exercise itself helps a person to know that they are not alone on the journey.
And then of course, in my confusion, there is the hate mail I received the other day from an online dating service. You minority hater, egotistical bitch, wanna-be, uncultured loser, and so forth, ad nauseum. How I made this person so angry, I'll never know, since I've never met him or spoken to him in my life, but it's my first and last stint at online dating, and I think at this point that law school is looking much easier than dating. Thank goodness I didn't pay $19.99/month to be verbally abused. I mean seriously, I can listen to that for free anytime I like.
I read a fact/fiction article at the LSAC site today that insisted on ramming home the fact that law school will be the hardest thing I will ever do in my entire life. Strangely, my eyes glazed over at this and I could feel a bit of drool seeping from the corner of my mouth. I guess I am still not over my CMU trauma. I feel like a shell-shocked war veteran, watching small animals being ruthlessly killed with an unflinching eye. Perhaps then, the best time to go back to school is when the pain of it is still fresh. I still dream of taking a long vacation on a tropical island and riding horses on the beach and eating coconuts (but don't eat coconuts while riding because you could choke) before starting something so difficult again, but if I do that I fear I'll never do anything difficult again.
Of course, this begs the question, why subject myself to this? Nothing says I have to do anything really difficult, ever again. I could kick back in a tiny condo in Northern California, work at my 10-4 job, and continue dreaming of tropical islands. I guess, in some masochistic way, I am not happy with that. The general public appears split, opinionwise, on this topic.
My friends are on and off in their support, which is understandable. Good friends don't just blindly support you; they make inferences from your own enthusiasm and opinions and situation and base their suggestions on that. Obviously, if you are very excited about something, friends will look at it with a critical eye, but they will more than likely support you if they see that it makes you happy and will promote your interests and future. It's when you are wishy-washy about a decision but looking for blind support that your real friends will balk. That's when they'll withhold their encouragement until they can see that you have made a convincing decision. My problem, however, is simply that -- I want help, one way or another, in solidifying this decision. Maybe friends are worried about giving the wrong advice. But really, advice thought out and given is never wrong when the exercise itself helps a person to know that they are not alone on the journey.
And then of course, in my confusion, there is the hate mail I received the other day from an online dating service. You minority hater, egotistical bitch, wanna-be, uncultured loser, and so forth, ad nauseum. How I made this person so angry, I'll never know, since I've never met him or spoken to him in my life, but it's my first and last stint at online dating, and I think at this point that law school is looking much easier than dating. Thank goodness I didn't pay $19.99/month to be verbally abused. I mean seriously, I can listen to that for free anytime I like.
Well folks, I finally went out and did it. I accepted reality (it's hard not to when you're out of school) and the fact that there's an excellent chance I'll be single forever. As such, I've realized I need to go get a real career, one that will support all my expensive habits (yes, horses are more expensive than crack) as well as my male harem of kept men who, aside from giving me good loving in exchange for the BMW M5s, Harleys, 60" plasma TVs, yachts, and golf club memberships I will offer them to buy their favor, will also fix my car, lift heavy objects, and squish spiders at my request. As we all know, men who fit the bill don't come cheap.
I went out and bought an LSAT book. And I've even begun reading it. With all the seriousness that comprises my crazed, obsessive-compulsive mind, once I spend $35 on something I insist on getting my money's worth. Whether this $35 leads to a $32,000 a year tuition or not and whether that is worth it is a logic that escapes my inexplicably absurd sensibilities.
The sad matter is, I have no intention of following my job to Bangalore once they decide to ship it there. I also can't afford to live in California anymore (never could). As my home loan gets ever closer to approval, I've been more and more depressed (not disillusioned, mind you; I know what's out here) at my prospects of finding a place to live that will fit both my tack box and my hockey bag. If you think that's sad, check out this house for sale in San Bruno. At 590 square feet that's $618.65 a square foot. Also note the private driveway and sparkly white rock garden! I'd have to say $365,000 is a steal. And who wouldn't want to live in charming San Bruno, California, where the sun never shines through your barred windows into the closet which you call home? When a "tub" is considered an added luxury, you know it's time to move out of the state.
I haven't actually decided whether I'm applying this year or next year yet. It depends on a number of feelings and circumstances, of course, one of them being my level of perceived desperation. Another item to consider is the appreciation of any real estate I end up purchasing, or whether or not I think I'll be able to rent out said real estate once no one lives in the SF bay because they've all moved to India. A third item is my lack of a good essay topic, some spiritual revelation or volunteer work. I couldn't even donate my old clothes to the battered women's shelter the other day, because they only take monetary donations now. I ended up giving all the stuff away to Goodwill. After briefly browsing the UNICEF web site, I decided I didn't have the resources to go give vaccinations in Iran, nor is that a particularly sound idea in the current state of affairs.
"I hate this place," I sobbed to my mother in her kitchen as she washed the dishes in yellow gloves. "I know," she acknowledged, oddly. "Do you want to move back to the east coast?" she asked. "I would," I snapped, "if I could find a job out there. I only came back here because they made me." "They" being some nameless, intangible force that cruelly offered me a single, lonely job, four miles from the house in which I spent twelve years of my life, and within fifty miles of everything that wore me so thin after returning from U.C. Davis.
"Why don't you go to vet school?" B said. "Law is so boring. And engineers and lawyers don't mix, so I could never talk to you again," she added smartly. "The day a rich man pays all my bills and I can just go to school and do my prereqs," I answered, "then I will go to vet school. Right now, logic dictates I do what I'm already qualified for." "And who says you're not logical?" she said.
"I could have stayed with her and been her kept man," J-man remarked about his ex, over dinner. "She was rich?" I asked. "She was a manager at Microsoft; she made $250,000 a year." "I have no interest in being anyone's kept person," I said. "Me neither," he concluded, as we simultaneously poked the dessert with our forks.
What I do have interest in, however, is support. More so than someone else's dollars and cents, I need someone who believes in me, in my attempts, in my very unclear path through life. I'm not saying, "Please don't provide constructive criticism about my choices," but I need more than disapproving frowns and furrowed eyebrows without thoughtful alternatives. Anyone can disagree, but not everyone can provide a better suggestion. I need that better half of me to provide a second opinion, that half that has a vested interest in me as well, who is directly affected when I succeed or fail. I'm missing that, and the search for such a person feels like the quest to find something very dear to me that I have lost, like a sentimental piece of jewelry lost somewhere during the day's excursions. The hopelessness of it claws at my heart.
In a hockey digression, one on ones stress me out. I am nervous going both forwards and backwards. When I'm skating towards the goal a single defender might as well be a brick wall. When a forward is coming at me I feel like I'm playing tennis with a stringless racket. To my shock this morning, however, I managed to poke check a puck away from a small girl in gray who later caught on to me and eluded me by changing directions as fast as she could. I guess it's getting pretty obvious that I can't crossover backwards. Coach is now teaching us to check people up against the boards to steal the puck. Is this legal? I don't care but I'm starting to like it.
I went out and bought an LSAT book. And I've even begun reading it. With all the seriousness that comprises my crazed, obsessive-compulsive mind, once I spend $35 on something I insist on getting my money's worth. Whether this $35 leads to a $32,000 a year tuition or not and whether that is worth it is a logic that escapes my inexplicably absurd sensibilities.
The sad matter is, I have no intention of following my job to Bangalore once they decide to ship it there. I also can't afford to live in California anymore (never could). As my home loan gets ever closer to approval, I've been more and more depressed (not disillusioned, mind you; I know what's out here) at my prospects of finding a place to live that will fit both my tack box and my hockey bag. If you think that's sad, check out this house for sale in San Bruno. At 590 square feet that's $618.65 a square foot. Also note the private driveway and sparkly white rock garden! I'd have to say $365,000 is a steal. And who wouldn't want to live in charming San Bruno, California, where the sun never shines through your barred windows into the closet which you call home? When a "tub" is considered an added luxury, you know it's time to move out of the state.
I haven't actually decided whether I'm applying this year or next year yet. It depends on a number of feelings and circumstances, of course, one of them being my level of perceived desperation. Another item to consider is the appreciation of any real estate I end up purchasing, or whether or not I think I'll be able to rent out said real estate once no one lives in the SF bay because they've all moved to India. A third item is my lack of a good essay topic, some spiritual revelation or volunteer work. I couldn't even donate my old clothes to the battered women's shelter the other day, because they only take monetary donations now. I ended up giving all the stuff away to Goodwill. After briefly browsing the UNICEF web site, I decided I didn't have the resources to go give vaccinations in Iran, nor is that a particularly sound idea in the current state of affairs.
"I hate this place," I sobbed to my mother in her kitchen as she washed the dishes in yellow gloves. "I know," she acknowledged, oddly. "Do you want to move back to the east coast?" she asked. "I would," I snapped, "if I could find a job out there. I only came back here because they made me." "They" being some nameless, intangible force that cruelly offered me a single, lonely job, four miles from the house in which I spent twelve years of my life, and within fifty miles of everything that wore me so thin after returning from U.C. Davis.
"Why don't you go to vet school?" B said. "Law is so boring. And engineers and lawyers don't mix, so I could never talk to you again," she added smartly. "The day a rich man pays all my bills and I can just go to school and do my prereqs," I answered, "then I will go to vet school. Right now, logic dictates I do what I'm already qualified for." "And who says you're not logical?" she said.
"I could have stayed with her and been her kept man," J-man remarked about his ex, over dinner. "She was rich?" I asked. "She was a manager at Microsoft; she made $250,000 a year." "I have no interest in being anyone's kept person," I said. "Me neither," he concluded, as we simultaneously poked the dessert with our forks.
What I do have interest in, however, is support. More so than someone else's dollars and cents, I need someone who believes in me, in my attempts, in my very unclear path through life. I'm not saying, "Please don't provide constructive criticism about my choices," but I need more than disapproving frowns and furrowed eyebrows without thoughtful alternatives. Anyone can disagree, but not everyone can provide a better suggestion. I need that better half of me to provide a second opinion, that half that has a vested interest in me as well, who is directly affected when I succeed or fail. I'm missing that, and the search for such a person feels like the quest to find something very dear to me that I have lost, like a sentimental piece of jewelry lost somewhere during the day's excursions. The hopelessness of it claws at my heart.
In a hockey digression, one on ones stress me out. I am nervous going both forwards and backwards. When I'm skating towards the goal a single defender might as well be a brick wall. When a forward is coming at me I feel like I'm playing tennis with a stringless racket. To my shock this morning, however, I managed to poke check a puck away from a small girl in gray who later caught on to me and eluded me by changing directions as fast as she could. I guess it's getting pretty obvious that I can't crossover backwards. Coach is now teaching us to check people up against the boards to steal the puck. Is this legal? I don't care but I'm starting to like it.
"Closure?" I told a disbelieving friend before I left for Pittsburgh. This isn't true either. The truth is that I don't know if I ever had an ulterior motive to returning there; in my lonely head I was going there to share the holidays with someone so unmanageable he makes "party of two" feel like a mosh pit at a rock concert.
What is closure, anyway? Whenever you watch TV, there is inevitably someone talking about how they found "closure" to some aspect of their lives, whether it be the solving of a mystery, the begetting of a criminal, or justice served. In love and things differently serious, could closure be the discovery of a cruel triangle, the marriage of your lover to another, a new baby, 8000 miles between, or simply, feelings unreturned? What tells us when to move on? Do we ever move on? Maybe closure, then, is just a figment of our imaginations, an invented theory to give a meaning to something so seemingly pointless.
Sometimes people make you feel as if it's against the law to love them if they don't love you back. I'm sorry if I ever made anyone feel that way, because it was certainly not my intent. Please, love away, I say. It's not until you shun someone who loves you that you realize how little there actually is to go around. It's like dumping out water in the desert because you're not thirsty at that moment. I think too, that sometimes people have water, but they won't share it with others, even though the singular selfishness of it hurts them. Maybe they are afraid it will run out, or that the people they share it with will keep asking for more.
I had a friend tell me that he had never been in love. That no one had ever made him cry, that he had made no one cry. I sometimes cannot decide whether to feel bad for him or to view him in a blessed light. On the one hand, he is missing out on half of the happiness of life, perhaps more. On the other hand, he has managed to avoid the debilitating pain of loss, of love unrequited, of affection gone awry. Unsurprisingly, he was usually the least sympathetic to my cause, although on occasion he had serendipitously empathetic observations about my plight.
But empathy isn't love, and that's life half missing.
What is closure, anyway? Whenever you watch TV, there is inevitably someone talking about how they found "closure" to some aspect of their lives, whether it be the solving of a mystery, the begetting of a criminal, or justice served. In love and things differently serious, could closure be the discovery of a cruel triangle, the marriage of your lover to another, a new baby, 8000 miles between, or simply, feelings unreturned? What tells us when to move on? Do we ever move on? Maybe closure, then, is just a figment of our imaginations, an invented theory to give a meaning to something so seemingly pointless.
Sometimes people make you feel as if it's against the law to love them if they don't love you back. I'm sorry if I ever made anyone feel that way, because it was certainly not my intent. Please, love away, I say. It's not until you shun someone who loves you that you realize how little there actually is to go around. It's like dumping out water in the desert because you're not thirsty at that moment. I think too, that sometimes people have water, but they won't share it with others, even though the singular selfishness of it hurts them. Maybe they are afraid it will run out, or that the people they share it with will keep asking for more.
I had a friend tell me that he had never been in love. That no one had ever made him cry, that he had made no one cry. I sometimes cannot decide whether to feel bad for him or to view him in a blessed light. On the one hand, he is missing out on half of the happiness of life, perhaps more. On the other hand, he has managed to avoid the debilitating pain of loss, of love unrequited, of affection gone awry. Unsurprisingly, he was usually the least sympathetic to my cause, although on occasion he had serendipitously empathetic observations about my plight.
But empathy isn't love, and that's life half missing.
 | Super Happy New Year! |
