What are my creative juices?

Are they pressed? Are they squeezed? Do they contain pulp? Are they from concentrate? Are they old-fashioned? Are they 100% juice? Will they expire? Should I shake them before opening? Should I refrigerate them after opening? How much milk would I have to drink to receive the same amount of calcium? How much fat is in each serving? What constitutes a serving? Will this explode in my freezer?

From what fruit are they derived? Is it sweet? Is it nectar? Will I choke when it blooms like a flower in my throat? Can I put it in my hummingbird feeder? Will it attract bees?

Is it tart? How tart? So tart they made a movie out of it? No, not the book, the movie! Is it refreshing, like lemonade? Or sour, like lemon juice? Does it go with fish? White wine? Will it bring tears to my eyes...or yours?

Is it beautiful? In the spring, will there be blossoms? Does it need pruning? Will it grow wild? Unchecked, will it overcome itself, an ungainly giant without mind or soul, and end as its own demise?

Or is this the juice of the meat of the flesh of a beast? Must it be domesticated? Herded and bred? Do we slaughter it live for consumption? Do we roast it over the spit, with wild, pagan rituals? Do we beautify it in the back of the restaurant and teach ourselves to forget its rough ancestry? Can it be tamed?

I paid $125 to the pound, and all I got was this lousy dog.
Kind of like one of those T-Shirts, but really not funny.
Let me explain: My gorgeous dog decided to go for a walk, and some "helpful" person rang up the pound and got them to pick her up (even though she's as far from an unowned dog as you could get). Meanwhile, back at the *ranch*, we're frantic! Dog? Where's the dog? Argh! Ring the vets, ring the radio stations, ring the pound... "Ah, yes, we can confirm that a small white dog has been picked up in your area". OK, right. My dog or not? Better check. So, rush to the pound, and the council guy has to drive out there (only another $20 because they only open from 8;30 to 9:30 in the morning, and this was the afternoon). Yup, it's our dog. Riiiiight, what to do. "That will be $125" the helpful person says. Excuse me? Did I hear that right? 1 2 5?!? "Well, if you had left the dog there overnight, it would have been $85" he continues. Hold on, I leave her overnight, you feed her, and it costs LESS?
Well, there was nothing to do, but pick the dog up. They'd fed her, so she'll probably try to go back there. She knew she was in trouble from the moment she saw me, and consequently moped all day.
I gave $125 to the pound, and all I got was this lousy dog.

Random thought for the day: Join the army! Travel the world! Meet interesting people, and kill them! (Shamelessly stolen from ThePinkFirePrincess who still has not graced us with her presence).

And a reasonably cool over-heard conversation between two of my friends: "Oh yay, my two favourite subjects! Maths and history!" Dripping sarcasm.
"Well, history is one of my favourites, no sarcasm..."
"Yeah, well, my statement had enough sarcasm for the both of us!"

I come bearing gifts of an alien race
Really, I do.
"Can I have one?" (Somebody asks)
"No" (You reply)
"Why not?" (Person is coy)
"Because I'm bearing them, not giving them!" (Smartarse!)

As you can see, it's been one of those days. I said "NO" to drugs, but they just wouldn't listen! Hehehe. Studying madly for my exams that are five days away. Doing internal assessments, juggling books, guys and parents around, then kicking the eggshells that I continually walk upon.

Bought a new, red, off the shoulder (one shoulder, that is) little top. I like it. My parents reckon it makes me look a little bit sluttish (they think "all the get-ups" my generation wear do though). All the more fun! I'm sick of being dictated to. I know that they don't want me to ever grow up, but I have to some day.

I was talking with a friend the other day, and we came to a decision about this new years (but I won't spoil it yet!) and what to do when we've finished school in a couple of years. Easy choice! ROAD TRIP! We're going to get a bunch of people, a van, and just cruise around the islands! Legend! It's going to be so much fun, I can't wait to try it... but in the meantime, study. It's getting really tedious.

Had to get in our subject options for next year, and after a lot of debate, I've gone for English, Maths, French, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. I still don't know if Physics was a good choice, because I love History, and I'm pretty good at Economics... argh. These things are so hard. You could make a hurried choice and slightly stuff up your future.

My school's annual Lip Sync was on a while ago... it was honestly the most disturbing thing I have ever seen. The teachers always do one, and this year, four male teachers did "Hard Day's Night" by The Beatles, which was fine, but then all of the female teachers dressed in really short 70s dresses came screaming around the stage, crawling (literally) up the stairs onto the stage (this is not a good look in short skirts), and doing high kicks (also not a good look). Never again! Gotta admire their guts though.

Oh well, Pos' Teen Angst Notebook signing off for the day, and just remember - if you don't succeed the first time, then skydiving is not for you!

Must update site... Must study... /me wanders around aimlessly humming a little tune while busily procrastinating...

Mope. Mope. Mope. Actually, just very tired, feeling a little overwhelmed by work at the moment, lots of little piddly things to do and absolutely no motivation to do it. Leaving in a few hours, time to get cracking and couldn't care less.

A new romance/hot sex/sexy friend/all of the above is looming on my horizon. She's bi, married, has a girlfriend with a non-exclusive contract, and huge tracts of land.. Luscious. Very interesting personality, very intelligent, really cute, nice legs. Can't wait to see her - um - nekkid.

Going camping at Assateague Island today with a couple of sons, couple of friends. Should be pretty good times. I am so tired!

Anyway, I'm definitely going to art school this fall, one evening a week, I think. A second evening at Schuler's is only $250 more but I don't know if I can swing the money or the time.

I really do want to do it, just - well, just afraid. Afraid of success, not of failure. Afraid of the commitment to my art. Afraid of the pain in my heart from finding out I was wrong, all these years, that I coulda been a contender, Charlie. That I have what it takes to be an artist. Failure to have it would only confirm what I suspect. Which would be so easy to deal with. Not good enough. Not talented enough. Not driven (I know that one, if I was driven, quitting art school wouldn't have happened.) enough. Not creative enough. So - this one's for me, just for me, no one else has to comment, I don't care. I suspect that had I not been MPD, not undergone so much damn trauma, I would have finished art school, because - I would have been a different person altogether.

Going back to college apparently means being forced to be poor again.

My last job, working for the State of Vermont, paid me $13.71/hr for 40 hours a week. That sounds like a lot, until you do the math; that turns into about $28,000 a year, without benefits. In reality, that's a lot less than it seems; the same job working at a real company would have netted at least $35k.

Well, now I'm in school, so my options are limited. I can't reasonably work more than 20 hours a week, and even that's pushing things a little. But if my wage were unchanged, 20 hours a week would be fine; I can survive just fine at just over the poverty level.

But here's the thing. I can't find anything. The state keeps trying to re-hire me, but that's for full-time work, in a town that's about an hour away. The only options I've come up with are workstudy at the computer lab, which is work that I hate and was done with the last two times I did it. What's more, it would start me off at $7.80/hr. That's far less money for far more work, at least if I take the job at all seriously.

The cited reason that I can't make more in the lab is "seniority". Nevermind that I'm 24 now. Nevermind that I've got real-world experience. Nevermind that I've got references far superior to anything that these other "consultants" have, much less what they will have two years after they graduate. Seniority my ass. I've got better qualifications, and this is a freakin' college campus. Nobody has more than 3 years of seniority in the lab.

Sometimes I sit down and I forget how huge a geek I am.

I guess that spending most of the past few years engaging in graphic/web design instead of programming led me to see myself as more of an "Electronic Artist" than a programming nerd (which I spent a good amount of my early childhood being, with the help of my father, who had learned BASIC as part of his Electrical Engineering degree sometime before Compsci was offered at his college). And then, yesterday, I picked up PHP Essentials, the book that had been sitting on my shelf for almost a year, untouched since I bought it on an improptu trip to Border's..

So here I am again, with my keyboard and monitor turned 90 degrees on my desk, so that I have room to put down the book in front of the keyboard. Copying examples out of the book, trying this and that, spending more time debugging than it took to write the damn thing...

And the sort of rush that I guess only some people can understand, when you can finally say: "I know how to write a script to handle a feedback form!"...

And the same sort of rush when you realize how excited you got over a really simple thing to do.

This is the second installment (see August 16, 2001 for the first) in a continuing series of day logs on the influence of downloadable music on my music-buying habits. If that seems like a frivolous line of investigation, well, you're probably right. But music is a serious part of my frivolous life--has been for thirty years--and it's obvious that the methods I used to learn of good music, back then, are not those that I use now. Back then, it was all about radio, music magazines, random shows, friends...things that aren't in my life much anymore. Radio, I (barely) wake up to--used to keep it on all night at work, but reception at my current job is pathetic. Years of reading the music press have taught me how poorly it covers its beat, and how little it can be trusted. Thanks to the graveyard shift, live music and friends have all but disappeared from my orbit.

So how am I finding new music? Not through the standard route for many of you--MTV and the like; I recently became a television owner for the first time in 14 years and cable seems like something I shouldn't be trusted with. Although I'm not a Napster user, the Internet does appear to be one of my few remaining resources for music information. The question is: Will it make me go out and buy music that I like, the way that defenders of pirated music say it will?

In this episode, there are, again, two CDs to talk about. I downloaded a live recording of Yo La Tengo's "From A Motel 6" and enjoyed it enough--all raucous and grating, with a hint of vaguely pop-y jangling--to want more. I went hunting on the Web and immediately found a huge collection of more live tracks, all cover versions, and grabbed a few of the songs that I already knew. So far, so good. Finally, I got a chance to stop at the Virgin Megastore on my way to work and bought their 1993 release, Painful. What the fuck?! It's a sure-fire sleep-inducer, other than the studio version (which isn't as good) of "Motel 6" and maybe a couple of other tracks. I mean, I already have some Dream Syndicate and Sonic Youth stuff--you know?--and both of them give the styles on this disc a better work-out! So that was disappointing.

Well, since this is a comparison shopping feature, I had to get something that I had heard of by some means other than the Web--so I picked up Jim Campilongo And The Ten Gallon Cats' self-titled disc from 1996. This was one of the things I had been struggling to wake up to on the clock radio a couple of years ago, but you can't blame them for that--I sleep heavy. These guys feature guitar, bass, pedal steel and drums (no singer) arrangements with a lot of imagination, and good taste, too. Equal parts jazz and country swing, for Danny Gatton fans and anyone who:

• Thinks Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalk" is the bee's knees.
• Likes to puff a little 'herbal helper', put on the headphones, and try to figure out Les Paul guitar parts.
• Wishes that Bob Wills And The Texas Playboys had recorded more instrumentals.
• Ever made a compilation tape with Steely Dan's version of "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" as a centerpiece.

There you have it--the Internet struck out, this time; radio is ahead 2 to 1. Then again, a web page did sell me something, and would I have remembered to buy the other disc if I wasn't doing this evaluation? To be continued...

---

Another thing this kind of w-u is good for is discovering all the stuff you were sure had to be already noded, and isn't.

I found out it is very easy to eat well at a Japanese restaurant. I mean healthfully, not in copious amounts, to clarify. Since I'm on a pretty strict diet right now (I would like to lose 2 or 3 more pounds this week and see if I can get under 110 pounds), I thought going to a restaurant would totally blow it. But wrong I was. I had vegetables with soy sauce, some rice, green tea, soup, and a salad with ginger dressing. My ex-boyfriend, a cook (and also the benefactor of my meal), helped me figure out what the calories might be in some of the stuff on there, and this is how it broke down:

The appetizers:
Salad dressing on salad: ~60 calories
~1 cup of salad: ~10 calories
~1 cup onion soup: ~20 calories

The veggies:
~¾ cup broccoli: ~30 calories
~1 cup mushrooms: ~20 calories
~¼ cup carrots: ~45 calories
~4 tablespoons soy sauce: ~40 calories

And the rice:
~1 cup cooked white rice: ~225 calories

My dinner was around 426 calories. Which was nice 'cause I'd left a lot more than that for my dinner and was able to nibble a little bit on cake that night. :)

As for today's menu:

Breakfast:
½ grapefruit (my ex-boyfriend ate the other half): 20 calories
1 cup Tastee-O's (not Cheerios!): 110 calories
½ cup skim milk: 45 calories

Lunch:
I was GONNA have ½ cup cottage cheese but mine went bad. :(
2 strips Morningstar Farms fake bacon: 60 calories
2 slices of pickle: 20 calories
1 English muffin: 120 calories
¼ cup Ragu spaghetti sauce to dip it in: 45 calories

Snack:
1½ cup salad: 15 calories
Dressing:
2 tablespoons lite Miracle Whip: 70 calories
1 tablespoon Heinz Ketchup: 40 calories
10 baby carrots: 17.5 calories

Dinner:
½ cup egg substitute: 60 calories
2/3 cup corn: 80 calories
1 apple: 80 calories
8 fluid ounces of fruit punch: 120 calories

That gives me a today total of 908.5 calories, leaving 91.3 to play with. I believe I'll be snacking on cake or Wheat Thins. Damn I love those things!

I am stumbling through the day after an unintentional bender last night. I went out for the proverbial "couple of beers" and ended up closing the bar and staggering home a bunch of hours later that I'd intended to. I always hate myself on days like these. The thick and grimy haze of my detoxing brain refuses to recede and the lighting in this computer lab is fucking with me like nothing else.

The moral of this story is not to drink whiskey. Or maybe it's "don't drink whiskey when you have to get up in the morning." I don't like any of those. Maybe the real lesson learned here is that there is no such thing as a free shot especially when they are approaching the double digit mark. Yes, I am nearly thirty years old. Go figure.

I was planning on leaving town for this weekend but an old friend is going to be in from the bay area. Hopefully we'll be able to do some catching up at the skate park because bars are not on my "to do list" for this weekend. Skating some bowls and hurting myself the good old fashioned impact with concrete at high speed way seems a whole lot healthier. It's going to be a little strange because the friend who is visiting is actually an ex-roommate and one time fellow band member. Our friendship turned into a big pile of caca once we lived under the same roof. I'm a little weird about living around people who fall asleep in front of the television every night especially when they complain about having nothing to do in Denver. Anyhow, after a couple years of not really talking to each other, we started emailing back and forth. It's weird to make the full circle from being close friends with someone, getting fed up with them, and then becoming friends again. Maybe we'll piss each other off this weekend and the holistic cycle can morph into a vicious circle. I think girlfriends work as an odd buffer for weird situations, though. Hopefully having both significant others around will make things easier.

I don't believe it. This is my first daylog and it's full of complains. Am I really that kind of people ?

Ill or not ill, that's the question

Just had a day off. Such a day you better forget. A day which had no reason to exist. A disaster.

It ended just like it started : with a headache. Like thousands of hammers just knocking all day long on my cute, little head. Some moments they beat harder for a few seconds, some moments they seem to disappear... but... forget it, they didn't.

And top of the bill (not "the" bill of course) I read my email at this end of this stupid day. Big mistake. Normally, B. is on vacation wright now. Yes... he didn't even returned and it started already... it 's really unbelievable. Some people.... (by saying this I nod my head, which hurts... aaahhh)

To be short : he complained about me, just for the about thirtiest time :(

I got to work late, around 8:30. It doesn't matter, because no one really cares.

My job is stupid. I am currently fixing someone else's bad code and a poorly designed project that is in reality the demo version of the product, which will be later ported to Java. That's right, I am being paid to fix/redesign a fake application, so it looks good enough to get it by the client and the usability people. Then it gets re-written by the Java team.

At 1:00pm we all went to the company picnic. Joy. There was much standing around and talking about work.

8:00pm found me in Baltimore, at Czeano's house, where I met a couple of his cool friends, and introduced them all to the Martini of Death. We also got to see the scans of Eat Poop You Cat from the recent gathering that produced them.

I didn't get home until almost two in the morning, about five hours before I needed to get up and head to work again...

So last night was my last "party night" downtown.. not that it was much of a party.. but I got my drink on..

I was sitting not two days ago
Feeling lonely cause I'm just feeling low
And I asked Henry my bartending friend
"Why is it that there are those kind of men?"

And Henry said
"You're lucky to even know me You're lucky to be alive
You're lucky to be drinking here for free
Cause I'm a sucker for your lucky pretty eyes"
Liz Phair, "Polyester Bride"

I am either a fool, or just pathetically trusting.. or maybe both.. He is either a flake, or a quite dishonestly stringing me along.. I know a lot of this is in my head.. I want to figure out the mystery.. and I know it will reveal itself eventually.. for better or worse.. I want to know now.. So I have to laugh at my own prison of yuckiness I have created.

So the weird thing with me being social butterfly girl lately is.. I don't really get a lot of these people.. between the more than blatant sexual proposals.. fake banter.. and posing.. I don't get it.. Do they really feel as if people are buying it?? Maybe they are.. maybe I am the one who is looking too deeply at a mirage.. everyone knows is a mirage..

The other day I realized something.. one thing I pride myself on valuing substance.. I think all of my friends.. and a great deal of my casual acquaintances are of substance.. There was a time.. high school mostly.. when I was very shallow.. not when it came to judging other people.. but when it came to myself.. I was so concerned and scared about the "image" I put across.. that I couldn't even see other people.. nevermind anything of who I really was.. It didn't matter who I was.. just what other people saw.. during this time I was a downtown girlie.. I knew everyone.. social hugs.. blah blah.. til it made me sick.. I think I am a bit weirded out now.. being in the same arena.. just a bar instead of a coffeehouse.. I mean.. I am all about substance.. but is it being looked at as that.. and even worse.. is it a waste of time to be real in a room full of fake??

Not that everyone is fake.. it's a pre-conceived notion I must admit.. I admit I have that generalization.. but I never apply those to any individual.. I guess it's a pointless notion to have then..

I miss a lot of my friends.. I will see some out in SF soon.. but I miss people I don't know when I will see next.. sucks.. sigh

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life
I've been afraid of changes cause I built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
I'm getting older too

Fleetwood Mac, "Landslide"

I turn 23 in 11 days.. scary.. I really never thought I'd live to see the day.. from age 7 til about 19 I really thought I would die before then.. I know why.. apprehension and fear of the future.. of being an adult.. of making choices and having to live with them.. or so I assume.