yard sale hell

Begin rant.
I had a yard sale today because I needed to unload some of my shit for the move...I hate yard sales. More specifically I fucking hate people at yard sales. What exactly is this compulsion to barter an already ridiculously cheap price, does that extra fifty cents REALLY make the difference between a shitty deal and a good deal? I just want to scream, "Just pay the three fucking dollars or go buy it for full price," not that they would ever venture beyond the Walmart and dollar stores. If they need that money so badly, don't fucking spend it. Better yet, maybe if they stopped smoking a carton a day, a fairly accurate estimate judging by the reek of stale tobacco, they would be able to afford the fifty cent price tags.
What's more, what's the fucking point of stealing from a yard sale? Do they think it's somehow okay to steal from a person rather than stealing from a store? Do people think they aren't going to burn in the fiery pits of whatever hell they believe in because they stole the fake pearls that cost a few bucks from me instead of some department store? Do they honestly think that they are some big fucking deal, that they really got one over because they took what basically amounts to my garbage? I hope they enjoy their ill-gotten gains because I know that cosmic retribution is a motherfucker. As they fondle their costume jewelry and rub one out to their newly "acquired" copy of Legally Blonde 2, the cancer cells are slowly starting to multiply in that reeking pile of malaria-induced, black-tar diarrhea they call a body. Fucking assholes. This is just another fucking drop in the bucket of the misery known as moving. I'm almost considering arson-for-hire just to simplify things.
End rant.
PS-Yeah, I realize that generalizations are wrong but I needed to vent dammit.

if ever i needed proof...

that I am certifiably a nerd/dork/geek all rolled into one, I have found numerous pieces of evidence while ransacking my house in preparation for the dreaded yard sale. Not only did I find the pins for my annual stint on the Steilacoom High School Math Team, but I also found photographic evidence of my utter and total lack of cool. I found the picture of me and the rest of the JV Badminton squad of the League Champion Redlands High School Badminton Team AND I found the scrapbook I made commerorating our awesome season. I dare anybody to try and out high school-geek me now.

bittersweet symphony

I just finished the very last test of the very last class of my undergraduate college career. I'm not sure how to feel. While part of me is glad that I stuck with it and accomplished my goal of finishing my degree before I hit the big trigenerean years, the other part of me wonders what the hell I'm supposed to do now. You see, I did it all in reverse: left home, had a multitude of jobs, did the family thing, and then went to college. So all the things that newly metriculating students look forward to, leaving home, starting a career and family...been there, done that, have the psychotropic medications to prove it. It feels good to set a goal and follow through though. YAY for me!!! Now I can have time for the important things like watching my 21 Jumpstreet and Family Guy dvds while eating Karamel Sutra ben & jerry's ice cream in my pajamas.

i eat my feelings

A lot of drug addicts turn to food while they're recovering, that's why all the stars get all chunky (which in Hollywood speak means a size 8) after kicking the junk. I however probably need to turn to drugs to help me escape my food addictions. I have eaten at Panera Bread the last five days in a row. I was hoping to make it six in a row, which I think might be just a tad obsessive compulsive, but dammit their half-sandwich/bowl of soup combination has been perfect for the craptastic weather we've been having here lately. I swear, the day after I decide that I am finally going to turn on my air conditioning, the temperature drops to 50 degrees. What the hell is wrong with this place? Pick a season already. Anyhoo, regarding the whole Panera Bread thing, luckily Katie pulled an intervention and we're having Indian tomorrow...garlic naan here I come.

scary

Last night we attempted to go out to dinner and because we're sort of poor and didn't want to go too far from home, we opted to dine at the Olive Garden. So we get there and the weather is turning to crap. We check in and there's a twenty minute wait. While waiting there seems to be some sort of commotion going on outside, people are just going out to the awning in hordes. We look outside and the clouds are SCARY, they're hanging really low in the sky and have that deep dark gray color. Then people start getting paranoid and point out funnel clouds here and there, and honestly I started to get into the whole groupthink paranoia because I started to see funnel clouds and hear sirens going off in my own head. Some crazy woman runs up and screams, "Everybody go inside, there's a tornado, I just heard it on the radio." And we don't because she's a crazy, over-dramatic, control freak and that was readily apparent. But things just keep looking worse and worse and we decide that there is no way we are dying at an Olive Garden, no way we are dying with the people at the Olive Garden. If my ghost has to haunt the place I died until the end of all time as we know it, it sure as shit isn't going to be at the Olive Garden...because looking at breadsticks for the rest of my after-life would make me a very angry ghost. So we went through a drive-thru, came home and watched Spanglish...and there wasn't a tornado the whole night.

googlers

I love seeing the stuff people google and somehow end up here.
Here are some of my faves:
o Wouldn't you know...I am in the top 10, sometimes the top 5, list of sites for "Low Hanging Balls." And I've noticed most of these searches come from the UK. I don't know what's going on with this obsession with dangly sacks, but it has definitely got my attention.
o Today there was "Napoleon tigon totally smell like poo." Pretty specific search.
o "British euphamisms for a man's penis." Interesting...considering the obsession with balls, I would say there are probably a lot.
o "Noassatall syndrome." Honey, you've come to the right place, not only am I the founder but I'm a customer too.
o "Naked dark magician girl and other funny stuff." Are naked dark magician girls funny? Who knew? Are they funnier than clothed dark magician girls?
o "Unrealistic expecations of people." Well you obviously have them if you expected to find the answers in all of this shitty rambling.

bulking up

Now that I'm close to moving I feel like I need to eat the food I have in the house instead of going out to buy new groceries. This is definitely not a good thing. Whatever possessed me to buy that 20 pack of Rice-a-Roni at Sam's Club along with the bulk canned tuna is beyond me now. By the time I leave here I'll be so full of preservatives that I'll never rot after I die. They'll find my mummified corpse hundreds of years from now and probably think that my body is representative of all humans for this time.

stream of consciousness

Isn't it odd how you bounce around from thought to thought and wind up someplace that really had nothing to do with the first thought?I sat down to study for my constitutional law class and started reading a chapter on the 2nd Amendment (which actually I should have read a month ago but hey...procrastination is a skill I've mastered, though frankly it took a long time ba-dum-bum). So I started thinking about gun ownership, which made me start thinking about the DC snipers. That made me think about the media and how for the longest time all you heard about was Malvo and Mohammed and their lives before they went bat-shit crazy. So then I started thinking, "Wow, wouldn't it be weird to have known them before that and have thought they were pretty cool guys who just did some weird shit?" Which made me think about something I saw on television once. It was a show about crime in the military. Some quick background, when I joined the army years and years ago they had just started integrating basic training (females & males together), so for a while there were video cameras following us around. So I'm watching this show and I swear I see people I know from boot camp and then I swear I see myself marching past the camera, which of course makes me continue watching the show. Then they start talking about Ft. Carson, Colorado, where I was stationed for less than a year. They start talking about street gangs in the military and show some surveillance camera footage of a military guy buying guns for the gang he's in. So I'm thinking, "HOLY FUCK, that looks just like ______." Then they say his name and lo-and-behold it is _______. They show his apartment and I had actually been there, but apparently I missed the closet full of weapons, the potato silencer, the backpacks full of weed and crack, and drawers of money the feds confiscated. WHOA! So now I'm looking on the internet for the name of that show so that I can buy a copy of it and see if I really was on the show, which means that I'm very much NOT studying. And that's the story of how I went from reading about the meaning of the preamble in 2nd Amendment to looking to see if I've actually been on A&E before.

unremarkable part deux

A couple of days has passed since my encounter with the guy I work with, the one that left me slightly humiliated as D. didn't recognize me, even though we've worked together for about a year. So on Monday I saw him on my way to break and I screamed in my high-pitched, whiny- girl voice "So do you recognize me now?!?" He laughed, and I guess as an act of contrition he sat with us during breakfast. He complimented me profusely, "You looked so nice...Your makeup was gorgeous, it looked airbrushed...I didn't know your hair looked like that...You just looked so different." And today he told another gal we work with the same thing, "D. said he saw you Saturday, he said you were SO pretty." So, I guess that means I look ten kinds of ugly at work since they went on about how pretty I looked that night. Not being one to NOT point out a backhanded compliment, I said, "So I guess that must mean I'm really ugly at work." Wow, who knew I looked so hideous during daylight hours. I suppose this makes me the antithesis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I go from nasty during the day to normal when the sun sets.

dropping the kids off

Every day there is some family here to look at the house. And within ten minutes of them showing up for their appointment I feel the urge to...well you know. But I don't want to drop the kids off and then have somebody coming through the house. I can just picture it, a nice young couple holding hands and giggling at the prospect of having their first real home. They look at the fireplace and think of all the romantic evenings they can have, lying in front of the roaring fire naked, sipping only the finest wine that Fetzer offers. They're touring the basement and small bedroom thinking "Golly Susan, wouldn't a family room be nice? We could make this bedroom the guest room and then maybe it can become a nursery later?" Then they open the bathroom door and whammo, eau de fully digested processed cafeteria food. I wouldn't want to associate this money-trap with the number two, I hope my landlady appreciates the sacrifices I'm making for her.

unremarkable

So this weekend I went out with G.H. Dickington, the artist formerly known as Bobby. We get there and decide to go to the drag show and low and behold I see somebody I work with at the table in front of us. So being the gracious queen o' manners that I am, I went over to say hello. It went a little something like this:
Me: HEEEYYYYYY! How are you?
Him: Hi, ummmmm okay.
Me: Did you watch the other show?
Him: Uhh. Do I know you?
Me: Ummm, yeah we work together?!?
Him: Where?Me: Ummm, at __________ in the lab.
Him: We do?
Me: Ummmm yeah (at this point my self-esteem has been torn to teeny shreds that float to the ground with the shards of my dignity as I whip off my glasses and push my bangs away from my face to become my own version of Diane Prince)
Him: OOOHHHHHHHHH!!!! Wow, I didn't recognize you. It's the make-up and hair and glasses. You look so different.
Me: RIIIIGGGHHHTTTTT!
So we do the whole small talk, make nice song and dance and then off I go to my table. Then later that night I see somebody I know through a friend. We're in the bathroom, and since I can never make the same mistake just ONCE:
Me: Hi, how's it going?
Him: Good, how are you?
Me: Good.
Him: Where do I know you from again?
Me: I'm a friend of ______'s. We sort of hung out last weekend.
Him: Oh that's right. I'm sorry, I meet so many people and you look different tonight.
Me: RIIIIGGGGHHHHTTTT!

So I've figured it out, when I turn to my life of crime to pay for my bad habits...I'm going to rob gay-bars because apparently they won't be able to identify me and I won't even need a disguise. It'll be perfect!!!

hush hush

Can I tell you a secret? Promise not to tell ANYBODY? Okay...I'm warning you though, it might completely change the way you see me. Ready?









I just bought a Kelly Clarkson song off of iTunes.
Don't hate me, I just couldn't help myself. The song grew on my like a bad case of herpes, one day I was fine and then BAM full-blown bad pop-song mania. I think this might be a cry for help.

setting up shop

While perusing other blogs, I noticed a mild disagreement in the comment section about what constituted a person "living" somewhere. I guess somebody said they had "lived" somewhere for six months and another person said that six months didn't count as "living" somewhere, merely visiting. Well my personal opinion in this matter is that if you have received mail and paid at least three different bills (i.e. rent, phone, electricity) then you have actually lived there. So with that in mind, here are all of the places I've lived:

Pusan, Korea
Seoul, Korea
Amsterdam (Everybody always gets excited when they hear this, but seriously...I was like three, one of the few things I remember about that place is that an ice-cream man would come by and sell the most awesome waffles EVER!)
Ansbach, Germany
San Bernadino, CA
Redlands, CA
Ft. Leonard Wood, MO
San Antonio, TX
Puyallup, WA
Steilacoom/Lakewood/Tacoma, WA
Colorado Springs, CO
Washington DC/Arlington, VA
Newport News, VA
Mililani/Honolulu, HI
Radcliff/Louisville, KY

the answer is always no

Maybe the idea of springtime romance is making all the users of yahoo messenger a little hormonal and crazy because I have been getting more im-ing than usual and more visitors to this site from my yahoo profile. So just in case you are here from yahoo, let me clue you in to a few things:

o Don't pretend like "my English...not so good" and then the VERY next question be able to say, "Are you sexy? Do you have any pictures of you naked?" Seriously, the answer to that...NO!
o Don't ask me to be my friend and then say "I would like American wife, I want come to America for making money." Again, to all marriage proposals, no matter the location of the asker...the answer equals NO!
o Don't ask me to send pictures of me if you don't have pictures of you. Especially when you say something like "I don't want random strangers on the internet knowing what I look like." Ummm, okay shallow asshole hypocrite...gonna go with NO! here.
o Don't assume that because I'm bored enough to chat with you on yahoo that I'm even vaguely interested in meeting you in person. Don't ask me to call you or hang out with you or get drunk with you. Not only is that a NO!, but it's a HELL NO!
o Don't under any circumstances have your first line be "You're hot!" or anything along those lines. Seriously, the reason why I have that weirdish picture and not some cleavage baring glamour shot is because I don't have low self-esteem, ergo I don't give two shits or a fuck about whether you find me attractive.

tick tock tick tock

Wow, barely a month to go before I leave this place. It's starting to make me a little nostalgic for the things that I'll be leaving. Some of the things I'll miss.

o Bobby, aka GaBS Calhoun. The f to my h, the person who keeps me entertained with his gladiator conquests, my sometimes alter-ego who makes me want to be a more outgoing person.
o Katie McW. The person who stuns with me her breadth of knowledge of the weirdest things...like the meanings behind cemetery sculptures, ornamental grasses, and bagworms, my fellow Zhongwen learning friend and road-trip companion, the gal who makes me want to be more easy-going.
o School. What's better than going to school for a few short hours a week and then justifying only working part-time by claiming to be busy with school? Plus associating with young people makes me look younger than I actually am...Score!
o Low cost of living. It'll be a sad sad day when I actually realize how little my housing dollar is going to get me in the Seattle/Tacoma area. Probably a studio with a leaky ceiling, faulty electrical wiring that reeks of cat urine and has a crack-house next door.
o Work. It'll be even sadder when I have to work a job that isn't as accommodating and doesn't pay me too much for the lab-monkey, button pushing work I do now.
o Digital cable and HBO/Showtime. Who knows how long I'll have to do without? But I refuse to go without at least a DSL line. I'll pimp myself on the streets before I ever have to hear that click-click-click then whir of the relic known as dial-up.

Things I won't miss:
o My stupid landlady who doesn't take care of shit and is being overly aggressive about selling her money trap house and not taking into account the fact that I still FUCKING LIVE HERE!!!
o Humidity...and bad hair.
o School. I can't pontificate about feminist scholarship any more.
o The fact that nobody around here uses a turn signal. Seriously, what's so hard about it? You don't even have to take your hand off of the steering wheel.
o Ohio valley crud. It'll be nice to have a sense of smell again.

movie reviewie

I saw Sin City this weekend. After reading Katie's glowing review of the movie I had really high expectations. Maybe they were too high because honestly, I couldn't really get into this flick. Granted, it is the rare movie that can do a comic or book justice on the big screen. But if you want my opinion (which you must because here you are reading a page devoted to my mental vomit) this was an amazingly stylized cliche wrapped in the vision of bad actresses with big boobs. I have to say though that I loved the look of the movie, the black and white with the occasional vivid splash of color, the portrayal of seedy urban decay, Clive Owen...but the rest of it just didn't do it for me. And for the love of god, this movie was LONG, REALLY LONG. It was like Return of the King...every time a vignette ended you thought, "Oh, this has to be it, I really have to pee." BUT IT NEVER WAS. There was always another story, and frankly I think I did irreparable damage to my bladder. If anybody else saw it, what did you think?

that's what friends are for

There is nothing worse than a person who tells you they are going to do something and then flakes without at least the courtesy of calling you and LYING about why they're blowing you off. Well maybe somebody who blows their nose while you're eating is worse...but it's definitely a close call.

birds and the bees

Ahhhh, spring. When the hazy blue skies and warm weather are mere indicators of the balmy sweaty summer months ahead, when hair like mine goes from just slightly frizzy to just slightly less attractive than Roseanne Roseanna Danna When the suburban automatons go out to their lush velvet yards and plant their hopeful spring gardens, hoping that by Memorial Day they'll have the best rhododendrons and roses on the block. When people start walking their dogs again and the amount of poo you have to dodge in the park increases trifold. When condom sales become inversely proportional to the amount of clothes people are wearing. I wish it were autumn.

touchy feely

What is it about drunk people that makes them think that touching is ok? I can barely stand people I know touching me, but then you throw in the drunk, spittle machine, sweaty stranger factor and ugh...geeerrooossss.

zestfully clean

I have a couple of extra minutes to post this morning because I CAN'T take a shower since I have one of those holter monitor heart thingies on. Let me tell you, wiping at your armpits with a towel is nowhere near scubbing at them in a burning hot shower. I feel gross. And sometime during the night one of the LEDs unplugged themselves so I'll have to start all over again. Bummer.

living on a prayer

If I win at least four numbers on my lottery ticket, I will IMMEDIATELY buy tickets for this.

imagine the world's most beautiful flower

Some things I just cannot understand. At work towards the end of the shift, we were standing around shootin' the shit as we were unusually slow. Somehow we ended up talking about autopsies and then the conversation turned to "What's the grossest thing you've ever seen?" I always lose this game because I can't even look at pictures of the Pope laid out, much less actually be near some lifeless body. So we're talking and then somehow we end up talking about doctor's visits and somewhere along the line I say "Yeah, I have a pap smear tomorrow." Judging by the uncomfortable silence and the uneasy shifting of eyes, you would have thought I had just admitted allegiance to al Qaida, the Nazis, and the Huns. So we can talk about the two week dead lady with maggots eating out her eyes or the burnt carcasses of a couple that had been caught cheating by the husband or the big fat loogie hanging out of a trache hole...but GOD FORBID I mention the routine exam on my cooter. For god's sake fifty-one percent of the planet have one, and about fifty-one percent of the planet want to have an intimate relationship with somebody else's. So what's with all the unease?

sports page

Granted I'm not much of a sports fan but I have to give it up to our basketball team. They competed against huge schools with much bigger programs and recruiting potential, were often considered the underdog and STILL managed to make it to the Final Four. U of L has had a really good year for sports and while it would have been sweet to graduate the same year the Cards won it all, you gotta admit this team was awesome.

official papers

Maybe I've seen While You Were Sleeping too many times, but today I went out and applied for a passport. I'm not really sure why, I have no out-of-country travel plans in the near future but I figure if I ever meet a old-monied Dutchman who wants to take me jetsetting throughout Europe on his dime, I might as well be prepared right? Anyway, part of the application process involves submitting your old passport, which I got when I was thirteen. Looking at the thirteen year old version of LisaM. and the twenty-nine year old version, I realized that I look exactly the same, and I do mean EXACTLY THE SAME. Even the postal worker was amazed. It's almost freakish, I am either extremely youthful looking now or I was really old looking when I was thirteen. Personally I'm going with the former as the narcissist in me refuses to believe that I'm aging, in fact in my mind whenever I picture myself I look just like I did when I was twenty. A little denial is good for the old self-esteem.

reality check

Last night I was running late and didn't get to class on time. On Tuesday the professor (the one I constantly complain about) had said something about maybe cancelling class because he had a colonoscopy on Wednesday. Honestly, I had really hoped he would cancel the class...the weather was perfect and it just seemed wrong to be cooped up in a windowless cell with a bunch of overly fake-baked sorority girls. So as I walk up to the building I see a girl that sits in front of me. "Hey, awesome...is class cancelled?" Then she looks at me with tears welling up in her eyes, "Dr. X came in, he's not teaching the class anymore, he just found out he has stage 4 cancer and only has a 1 in 20 chance of living a year, he started to tell us and then his face started getting really red and he started crying and walked out and didn't come back." Then tears started falling out of her eyes which were already captivating my attention because she had glitter eyeshadow on and the sun was really making the glitter twinkle, like a disco ball. Wow, talk about putting shit in perspective. I take back all the mean things I said and even thought about him and all of the things I had planned on writing on the student evaluations. I just can't imagine waking up in the morning thinking that your life was going as it should and then coming home that evening having been told that you are on death's doorstep.

lemon zinger

When a recipe calls for a 10x10 in. square pan, it REALLY isn't a good idea to use a 9 in. round cake pan in its place. This, at least according to the box, is SUPPOSED to be lemon bars. What it actually looks like is yellow lava.