Monthly archives: October 2010

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, specifically the part where this Beck song plays:

Bad headaches.

A particularly bad day at work.

Regrets.

Seeing or hearing someone close to me cry makes me cry just from proximity or empathy or something.

The beginning of Up, and a related topic, Russ dying before we get to do that one thing in life we want to do.

The thought of my parents dying.

The thought of my cats dying.

Occasionally I’ll think about how I don’t have my life as planned out or achieved as it should be, and I freak out a bit.

Hot tea with sugar, or hot cider.

Taking a bath.

Watching MST3K.

When I take a nap and Valla always comes with. The cats in general really.

Taking a drive out to the farmland west of here.

Knitting sometimes. Depends on how complicated it is, or if I’m screwing it up.

A certain ultra hippie couple I know, and their need to tell you about how amazingly natural they are being every day of their life. Salads shouldn’t be blended into a smoothie, assholes.

Someone I work with who hates her job, constantly complains, and never does anything right. Also the knowledge that she probably will never be fired.

People who don’t know how to deal with cats. Russ had a friend (/acquaintance) who would come over and meow horribly at the cats, scaring them. Or he would pick them up and hold them really tight even though it was obvious they didn’t like it. Man I didn’t like that guy.

Expensive food at restaurants that isn’t very good. Decor and fancy service isn’t helping if your food is shit.

A certain friend (who is less of a friend now) telling me how I’m living my life wrong. If you are the expert, why are you seriously fucked up yourself?

My car. Just fixed the AC in August, and a hole in the exhaust last summer. Just blew another hole in the exhaust, it sounds awful.

Jerk face employees in stores. I have been known to abandon my shopping if they are being especially irritating.

The high price of nearly everything. I sometimes think I am an old lady deep down.

Painfully ignorant people who like being that way.

Being late. Also, people who are habitually late and don’t give a fuck.

Horribly snooty rich people.

Bad parents. Your baby is wailing because it needs your attention, maybe you should stop shopping.

Finding more gray hair every day.

Not being able to digest dairy. Doesn’t my body know how much I love cheese?

People who think my hobby/job/college major is a waste of time. To be fair, when I get my LTA and my bachelors in Japanese language, they will be just as useless as your theater/philosophy/history degree.

ETA- FUCKING AUTOTUNE

4th of July, 2000. Julie and I get some snacks and soda at the store, burn a whole bunch of cds of trance music, and park her car at the top of the parking garage at Oakbrook mall. We’re high enough up that we can see 4 different town’s fireworks, and we’re pretty much having our own party aside from two or three other cars.

We laid out on the hood of her car and watched the fireworks while blasting our own music out of a huge boom box (the kind that took 6 D batteries). It was probably the best fourth of July, since I hate big crowds and the normal patriotic music that goes along with a fireworks display. It was also fun because it was kind of secret, most good fireworks watching spots become crowded quickly, but I don’t think many people knew about it. Also I’m not entirely sure we were supposed to be up there. Good times.

Oops, it looks like I’m a few days behind on these posts. This month has been really busy, my 8 week accelerated class ended (I got an A, yay), and I had a fairly difficult midterm in my other class (I got an A on that also, yay). I love October in general, because I can start to wear sweaters, and have all the windows open during the middle of the day. It’s been quite cold in the mornings here, in the high 30s earlier today, but I kind of like it, I curled up on the couch under the quilt with some hand knit socks and a cat and watched Roman Holiday. Fall is really the best season, I just wish I had more time to enjoy it.

Staying with my high school boyfriend as long as I did.

Being mad at a guy for a difficult situation, even though it was never his fault.

Fighting with my mom about who knows what, the day my dad had his lung surgery.

Not saving my money to study abroad in Japan.

Not saving my money period.

Breaking James’ heart. We dated when I went to college in Kansas. He introduced me to his parents about 2 weeks in and I was really freaked out. He had long hair that I hated, and I told him that he’d look cuter with it short. He picked me up from the airport after I had visited my parents for Thanksgiving, and he had cut his hair. It did look better, but I still knew that he was far more into me than I was into him. I broke it off a week or two later, and he never really spoke to me again. My friend who lived across the hall told me I was a huge bitch for making him cut his hair and then breaking up with him. I felt far worse than that. I still think about it from time to time, and get a sinking feeling in my stomach.

As a kid its tough having a summer birthday, since most people were out of town or whatnot. I didn’t have a big party with all my friends all that often, and now I prefer it that way. I’m not a big fan of forced holidays in general. I love Christmas and Halloween, but most others are “lets get together and pretend you care what your Uncle has to say for hours on end.”

Generally we celebrate birthdays in my family by going out to dinner, no gifts, very simple. I love it. I think we started doing this when I was in high school, and its a good plan. In Russell’s family his grandma loves getting together for just about anything, you have to open presents and pass cards around, and you have to eat whatever cake or pie was brought for you. She also gets really upset if you cant make it to an event, but normally plans things 2 days in advance. This doesn’t really work since I go to class nights, and work nights and weekends. I like my family’s laid back version better.

My favorite birthday was probably when I turned 23 and moved out of my parents house. We rented a place near the college, and they started leases August 1st, which happens to be my birthday, so we moved in that day. I was really excited to be living on my own (sort of), and it felt like one big present to me. I loved moving in and decorating our first place, even if it was kind of a shit hole.

The thing Russ and I cared about the most about at our wedding was the music (besides the actual getting married part.) I spent more than a year picking the music for our ceremony, and every single song for the dancing at the end of the night.

For the ceremony, it was important to me, as a non traditional bride, to not have any of the regular wedding songs. My dad is a musician, and asked his friend Roy, the piano player from his jazz band to play for us. It was wonderful to have an actual musician playing for the ceremony and cocktails, since we originally thought we couldn’t afford one.

We asked him to learn this song for the processional. Its called Memory of Light and Waves, from the Final Fantasy X-2 soundtrack. I had it in mind pretty much right away. Its a beautiful song, and its from one of my favorite video games, so it felt like a secret nerdy thing that just Russ and I knew about.

Our ceremony was outside, and took about 15 minutes maybe? We wanted to keep it short, and since we didn’t really have a religious ceremony, that wasn’t hard. For the recessional we picked Mr. Blue Sky by ELO. Its a favorite song of both of ours (and it was in the greatest episode of Dr. Who ever.), and it was a really fun song to have at the end of the ceremony. Most of our guests said they loved that part.

His name was Jeff. Or I think he spelled it Geoff. Whatever. I was in 8th grade I think? Or maybe Freshman year. He was one year younger than me.

We ran in the same group of friends, and we had become more close after his mom died, talking on the phone and whatnot. I think I asked him out over the phone, and we planned a date to the mall, where my mom drove us.

I remember getting ready on Saturday, my mom bought me a new powder blue shirt to wear, I did my hair, and painted my nails (also pale blue). The date was supposed to be that night, but Saturday came and went with no call saying he was ready to go.

I remember anxiously passing the time by playing Donkey Kong Country 3 on the SNES, sitting in my nice new top, ready to go. I had beat the game before, but I was trying to get all the secret levels to kill time, and that game is impossibly difficult if you want to beat every level to get all the DK coins.

Most of Sunday passed without a call, and I finally decided to call him back, which my mom said I should never do. Girls should never call boys ever. I never did listen to that advice. Heh. I asked him what happened about yesterday, and he said he went out to dinner with his dad and brother, and forgot, and that he was sorry. We rescheduled for the next day, Monday, since it was a 3 day weekend.

I don’t really remember much about the date itself, we went to the mall, an outdoor mall in January. It was freezing, and there was snow everywhere, I’m not sure how that got planned.

All I really remember is being extremely nervous. This wasn’t the first time I had hung out with a guy, but I think it was the first time labeled as a date. We were walking in some deep snow along a sidewalk near the parking lot when he said “I guess we should probably kiss now.” I didn’t say anything, but I probably smiled or something. I leaned in for the open mouth kiss I was nervous about, but totally prepared for, and he just gave me a peck. What the hell.

It wasn’t fun, and I didn’t feel anything emotional or otherwise. In retrospect, I’m not sure I liked him all that much, at least not as much as guys I had a crush on, and I think I mistook friendship with a guy as something else. We never went out after that, we stopped talking on the phone as much, and actually stopped talking at all.

It seemed like a lot of work getting ready and waiting for the call for something stupid. I think I sat around waiting for a call for a guy maybe one other time, but I’m glad that I learned my lesson early.

I used to have recurring nightmares a few years back. Thankfully it stopped, but I can’t seem to remember what they were about, other than being terrifying. Frequently I am trying to run away from something, and I am always running impossibly slow, like through sand.

Generally my dreams go into two categories, nightmares, and weird sex dreams. By weird I mean the person, not the act, my brain seems to make odd choices of who I’d sleep with in a dream as opposed to awake.

I had one the other night where Ewan McGregor was hitting on me at this house party in rural Wisconsin. When he found out I worked in a library, he started talking about how he wanted to donate money to Illinois libraries (we are struggling pretty bad), and he lost all interest in chatting me up. He kept going on about charity bullshit, and I ended up sleeping with some other guy at the party. He looked like one of the guys from that BBC show Skins, the skinny one with glasses, not any of the hot ones. Even my dreams are self conscious. “You cant have sex with a hot guy, even in a dream! Here, you can have the weird one who never showers.”