Sadness

Sometimes I get so, so angry at my friends when I know that they're together, enjoying each other's company, while I feel like I'm rotting away in Michigan/Georgia. I remind myself that, to some extent, this is self-imposed exile, that I chose to come here over spending more time with them. It's also a selfish feeling to want other people to be as miserable as you. It's also a temporary feeling, one that will go away once I see them again.

But I am deeply unhappy. I feel very lonely in my head, and the loneliness won't decrease when I head back to Georgia. I could choose to stay home, to abandon the venture, but I really don't want to quit. It's that familiar feeling of being caught between a rock and a hard place, of wanting my cake and wanting to eat it, too. In moments like this, I feel destructive, like I just want to hurt someone (including myself). I want to punish someone for making me feel this way, even if that someone is me.

I will only say this several times. There were birds. In the kitchen. Probably trying to eat the flies that are also in the kitchen.

Let me just say that my relative standard of cleanliness has gone down even as my respect for the human immune system has gone up. This is a natural result of such experiences as finding birds. In the kitchen. As well as mice (although not at the same time, a la Cinderella). Also, slugs in the bath, dogs in the trash, and pseudoscorpions in the outhouse. Perhaps to be expected, this experience is making me think about maybe how unnecessarily concerned I am about health and hygiene. My whole approach to the topic during this adventure has been "If it won't kill a Georgian, it won't kill me." Is that bad?

I digress. I'm thinking that I might change the name of my blog. Can you guess what it would be?

Birds. In the kitchen.

Note: That high pitched noise you hear in the vid? That's me, squeaking "Birds! In the kitchen!"

Hrm. This is mostly an experiment to see how well my internet connection (spastic at the best of times) handles blogging. These are some of chemi megobrebi from the 8th and 10th forms. It looks like we stole the lighting and our smiles from a box of Girl Scout cookies, which is appropriate since we were at a nature preserve.

La Recherche Du Les Temps Perdu

I sit under a bank of clocks at my desk. They are labeled with cities all over the world, with a lone clock stuck off to the side with an attorney's name on it. Sitting here, I am accutely aware of lost time. Sometimes the tick-tock of the clock reminds me of an iv, only this one working in reverse as I feel life draining away.

However, I think that Proust would be proud of me. When I'm not at work, I work diligently to regain lost time, to value the time that's [almost] my own. Perhaps my one fault in this regard is that I become slightly manic about doing as much as I can outside of work. Perhaps a fault of the whole undertaking is failing to satisfy the question "when is our time ever our own?"

One wonders, and hopes.

My first day...

And now, a story. An entirely fictional, bearing-no-resemblance-to-reality-whatsoever story.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who sat in a closet that was approximately 5'x8' and smelled of musty socks because it was where the deli, bakery, and meat department people kept their aprons and there was a sink that hadn't been cleaned since Noah was being weaned. The boy sat at a computer and learned how to be the happiest damned cashier you ever did see. He learned about "world class service," and "shrinkage," and that words like "honey" and "babe" are naughty, dirty things upon which the Great Iron Fist of the Zero Tolerance Sexual Harassment Policy would come down should they even be whispered to oneself behind the boxes of frozen peas in the produce freezer.
When the boy emerged into the blindingly nuclear fluorescent brilliance that was the shopping floor, he was changed. He had become, as promised by the cashier training software in many more words but with essentially the same meaning, the happiest damned cashier ever.
The end.

Special thanks to poliscijournalistleslie.

Totally stinkin' awesome

So, I was much more excited than I should have been to find that Baltimore has a women's roller derby team! I think my cousin (Krissy) and I will try and go to THE CHAMPIONSHIP in October. Stinkin' awesome!

Roller derby, anyone?

To each his or her due

Here's a link to info. on the poet whose lines appear at the bottom of the page.