(Note 2 Self)Do not be fooled by grandma's size, especially when drinking is involved unless i desire to experience hangover from hell.

--

Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

the house of my dad's girlfriend burned down one night ago.


(click for more pictures)

Dear Automobiles,

If you wish to be my speeding buddy, please remain at least 10 mph over the speed limit, if not 20+ over.

You will lose all speeding buddy card if you end up doing any of the following:

choose tailgate me at 20+ the speed limit when the roads are icy

consider 5+ the posted speed limit to be livin' on the edge

speed whilst actually an undercover cop


-- the girl who spent too goddamn much time in an automobile today.

i have a drinking problem...

one that goes beyond my inability to navigate liquid into its desired location ¹

a handful of years ago, i picked up a nasty habit after finding myself completely bored in an office setting. it was a trick taught to by my fellow bored co-worker, quite in the same manner that in the 1970's fellow sorority sisters taught each other the wonderful ways of eating everything you desire and staying thin with just a little bit of puking within 20 minutes of food consumption. of course, this work trick was all about an innocuous way to kill time at work, and not short fingernails and ponytails.

without entirely exposing the secret, i'll let you in on an important tidbit. it involves frequent trips to the water cooler, plastic liquid receptacles, and the wonderful side effect of frequent field trips out of the cubicle for water recycling.

this trick, which might be already known to some of the worst of us, helped me kill time in an otherwise boring job and only caused a bit of trouble once but that is a story printed elsewhere and involved a territory battle and a job change.

after i finished working and took the journey that moved me half across this country for the search of higher education, i thought i was going to be able to quench the habit, i mean kick the water habit², i mean stop being extremely hydrated.

this is when we cue the twilight zone music with a visual of a nalgene bottle floating in as if it was an ufo.

someone thought it was a wise idea to give me the gift of a nalgene. little did they realize that within the unbreakable polycarbonate walls was one of the most usefully evil presents i've ever received.

i can't kill the drinking problem because i bring the nalgene with quivering contents every where i go. it has escalated to the point that i fear the moment when as i am embarrassedly replenishing my nalgene's water supply at the office water cooler where someone will tap me on my shoulder and then carry me off to get intervention.

"No more water for you!" they'll cry as they slap my twitching arm as it reaches for the bottle. "Drink some soda pop instead!" as they'll pour burning bubbly³ liquid down my throat, whilst i crave the taste of fermented nalgene water.

i slightly wonder how long i'll be locked up in a deprogramming center, and i wonder if i'll be strong and end up causing a following that surrounds the falun dafa practicioners.


this message has been brought to you by my desire to kill time in between trips to the water cooler at work, a nun in full nun garb on the subway this morning, and the letter p. thank you, and have a good morning





--
¹ i have reasons to believe that this has been previously mentioned somewhere. if not, you ought to know that i have this graceful ability to be attacked by stationary surfaces (walls, doorways, and corners) and frequently it seems that my beverage would prefer to be worn instead of digested.

² no, no, no. i'm not going to go around kicking nuns, despite the fact that i love the imagery of finding an elderly nun for the purpose of kicking her habit. this might be a side tangent that seriously only amuses me, and will continue to amuse me every time i see a nun on the subway.

i also love the idea of kicking water at a nun's habit. but this really must be a product of a semi-demented and partially sleep deprived brain. violence against nuns is bad, despite the humor potential.

³ little known fact which is actually widely known by those who know me in real life, i can't stand bubbly beverages. they all seem to taste like cleaning products, and this comes from a person who has accidentally tasted a wide variety of cleaning agents.

mental burnout - a banana story

originally, i opened this blogger window to make a silly post essentially stating that i've somewhat survived finals hell and that i owe you all some good stories. then i would launch into some story to fill up my blogging debt¹.

instead i am going to tell you a banana story, which first requires a definition.

banana story²: [bah-nan-ah stuh-re] (noun) is a convoluted personal tale due to strange twists and turns that hijack the story. the original banana story somewhere along the way involved a banana, thus the moniker.

i haven't talked to my grandmother (my mother's mom) in over 4 years. the last time i saw my grandmother involved some family function where i caused a little bit of trouble by leaving for a little bit to drive around to see cincinnati's skyline³ with my dad. i don't even know if i talked to my grandmother for more than a few sentences at this family function... and actually i don't know if i've ever talked to my grandmother for more than a few sentences at all of my lifetime's total of grandma-seeing occasions/ family functions.

this is mainly due to the fact that my mom is the youngest of a painfully large family. she has 10 older siblings and a niece who is only a few years younger. by the time my mother had gotten around to giving birth to me, my grandmother had moved well the point of being exhausted by grandchildren. in other words, i barely know who she is.

not knowing one's grandparent seems excusable because most people's grandparents aren't living, but my grandmother is still breathing and uping my own scary life-expectancy rate⁴. and i'm intensely curious as to who the hell is this person whose genetic sequence makes up ¹/₄ of mine to the point that her younger pictures look eerily like me.

i only know disconnected pieces, like the fact that she had a formal living room, with a strict policy of no kids allowed, that was decorated with various tea cups. does this mean that she likes tea and tea parties? i have no idea. i think she used to dance, because i vaguely recall her trying to teach me the charleston in her kitchen. i have a perhaps made-up belief that she's russian in heritage, as my memories of her were triggered by things i've seen in a russian teahouse. i also have the floating around idea that she has a radical streak that somehow ended up bending to my ultraconservative grandfather.

i know none of her stories. i don't even know simple things like her maiden name or even where she was born. it makes me feel like a horrible granddaughter.

this has been one of the floating things on my mental back burner. if i took all the time i've spent thinking about who my grandma might be, and actually talked to her... there might be a book written by now. but i haven't, and this is where the excuses begin.

after my parents separated i never saw my mom's mom or any of my mom's family again. my mom divorced me. and then due to a public blog i kept in my freakishly unique first name, i vented about the actions of my mom in the never ending divorce. i ended up becoming the focus of a lot of unwanted hate mail at a painful time from my mom's side of the family.

that hate mail is what has triggered this blog to try to hide under the radar, without associating itself with my real name. it has been suggested that i should come up with an online persona name, but seriously i love my name to the point that i couldn't blog without it... well, it is just my name in reverse. which was a slightly unwise thing considering i have already been found, and i'm still easily googled⁵. gah.

despite being on the back burner, there was a recent reminder after my great-grandmother's death this year (dad's side of the family) that my grandmother's time is short... i'm just terrified that she's going to rip me a new one, if i ever try to contact her.

time flows in ways to make this story that has become an actual story instead of a banana story as i previously promised. after a little bit of weirdness i finally decided that i should seek out my grandmother during this xmas break, and talk to her.

of course to talk to her requires her phone number, which i don't know. and i can't ask my mom for her mom's number because i haven't been on speaking terms with my mom in years. i previously tried to milk the phone number out of my only sibling that lives with my mom, only to find time flowing by quickly and a frustrating lack of respond from my brother.

i ended up obtaining the phone number of my grandmother by pestering my dad which ended up letting him in on the fact that i wanted to contact my grandmother. he finally emailed me a number that he remembers as being grandma's number, but we can't be completely sure because she did move (after i last talked to her) and she might've gotten married.

the phone number has been rotting in my mailbox for several weeks. i haven't wanted to call anyone during my bout of finals hell, especially someone i haven't talked to in over 4 years, as i'm a rather bitchy sleep-deprived person. i also didn't want to call her until after i had a plan of sorts, which of course i decided should involve my younger sister because everyone loves my younger sister and my sis could be a buffer zone if end up doing my plan.

waiting for my little sister to reply took so long that i had to call her up and remind her about the grandma possibility and that i desired a response.

i wonder if i've somehow gone beyond the hellish point in this story where no one is actually reading this and i myself fell asleep 4 footnotes ago. somehow i've fouled the banana story as i haven't even given a proper example of a banana story.. should i continue to the point where the banana twist comes in? i think i will. i hope you do too.

okay, so i'm the horrible grandchild who doesn't really know her grandmother who gets hits by several obstacles in communicating with her grandmother, and then procrastinates for the fear of the unknown and potential holy hell outcome. i tell myself that i will call my grandmother the day finals are over. i reconfirmed this fact, that i was going to call my grandmother today, as i rode mass transit home after my last presentation⁶ of the semester.

the thought that crossed my mind as i turned my computer on as soon as i got home, was that i was going to call my grandmother tonight. i had decided upon the beautiful hour of calling at 7, because calling during mealtime seems rude if it is the first time you've talked to your grandmother in over 4 years. of course, in killing time i did silly things like check the site stats for this page and i noticed that there is a part of google that requires a login that for some reason is linking to me.

i tried to register an account, and was told i already had a google account. and thus i tried my usual login name and several of my passwords. but i couldn't login. i ended up clicking the forgotten password link, and several seconds after i realized that this meant my sleep deprived brain just accidentally reset my gmail.com email password and i will now have to wait 4 days until i will be able to provide an answer to my security question. thanks security protection.

none of this would really matter except for one thing...

the email that contains the phone number of my grandmother i haven't talked to in over 4 years, is safely locked away in my gmail email account. my dad isn't in a place where i can call him to retrieve the phone number and time ticks away as i feverishly try to convince google to un-reset my password, and to give me another chance. it hasn't worked yet, and i can't help feeling like i've been whacked in the head with a banana.



-- footnotes--

¹ somehow it is saddening that the only currency i deal in is debt. i'm in sleep debt to the point that i could sleep all winter break and still require more sleep. i don't even want to talk about my hellish student loan debt. and now i'm talking about blogging debt, as if the blogosphere feels sad and lonely when there is one less individual constantly spewing silly posts.

² fuck, fuck, fuck. someone sniped the domain name before i did. i wonder if searching in register.com for that domain name (which was only a few days away from being relinquished) caused someone else to snipe it. fuckers. and it is a bloody portal page that mentions it is for sale. bastards.

³ for those new to the home game, my extremely large extended family lives in the cincinnati area but i (and my immediate family) haven't since 1997. thus every time i visit, the timing is very short and i'm a gawking no-longer-a-native.

⁴ i never thought i was going to live after the age of 18. this might not be something i should admit to in print, but it is true. somehow it is strange to still be living in the shadow of that belief.

⁵ someone has recently discovered the most creepy google related thing ever... if you go into google suggestions (you'll find it via google labs), it knows my last name if you supply my first. goddamn. i need to start erasing instances of my first and last name online so it doesn't haunt me when i start job hunting.

⁶ it when so amazingly terrible that i must mention it. everything that could possibly go wrong, and even the things that weren't thought to ever possibly go wrong, did. there is quite a string of stories here, but due to some level of decency, i'm not going to air the stories out in the google-able public.

the xmas spirit

the bleeding lights and the blaring holiday music at the 42nd st bus terminal has gotten to me, as i've acquired a christmas tree. the legion of christmas cheer spreaders prepare to rejoice, as they feel as if they have melted the heart of another xmas hater and have another convert.

-

usually one acquires a christmas tree by either handing over money to someone in the possession of trees, or they take an ax into their own hands and take a whack at something¹. neither of these are the way i acquired my tree.

the story starts on a dark and stormy night, which wasn't actually night but rather that space between night and painfully early morning. i was a sleep deprived zombie whose sanity was holding on a thread of silly sightings such as an elderly guy with a penny in his penny loafers² and posters for a group for closeted republicans.

i notice as i'm exiting the subway station that the splashing of rain has caused all of the streets to be void of signs of life. streets that are usually busting with pedestrians and taxis at all hours of the day. seeing the empty street streets terrifies me to the point that i quicken my pace ³ and wish i had a personal deterance weapon... scanning my surrounding for lurking bad guys as i turn a street corner i notice a sad little thing in the gutter next to a pile of garbage.

in a moment of early morning logic, i decide to take the dirty dripping thing with me on my journey home. snickering the entire way, despite the poke of the needles and the dripping of dirt on my shoes. snickering because i have lofty plans for this little fellow.

as soon as i got home, i potted the charlie brown-eque tree in a spare pot⁴ promising him a future with fresh soil, a huge pot, and extremely tacky decorations. and this is how i expect to maintain a semblance of sanity over the next few days of final project hell, by snickering of the tacky possibilities. i might even be able to tolerate the thought of the xmas.



---
¹ it must be said that i'm terribly amused that my alma mater has decided to deal with the problem of people hacking off bits of campus trees by treating the trees with an awful smell. oh i wish i could find the link of the article for you.
² what is the reasoning behind tucking pennies into penny loafers?
³ i fear empty streets because there is the lack of eyeballs to keep would-be serial killers in place.
⁴ although i haven't achieved crazy-cat woman status yet, i might be a crazy plant woman. to the point that i get excited that i play in my houseplant dirt on weekends, and might have my apartment taken over by all of my plant propagation projects.

negative work

definition: when effort ends up canceling out previous accomplishments.
this is the result of when the sleep variable's value approaches zero and the lateness of the hour increases.
example usage: i can't stay up any longer, because all i am doing is negative work.

attention

*monty python voice* i'm not dead yet. /voice

currently i am loosely held together by ducttape, coffee, painkillers, vitamins, and eyeball photosynthesis. it is plausible that i will completely unravel at any moment, but i'm currently hoping that won't happen until after i complete my final projects.

times like these remind me why i hate school. i love the learning process, i just hate the stressful twist that accompanies the end of a term which leaves nerves raw and eyeballs crusty. in 2 weeks most of this will be over, and in 5 months i might never have to deal with school again. now that's a scary thought, almost frightening enough to send me scurrying back for another masters degree or a phd. am i masochistic enough?