well, this day has started off nicely.
jen moved in last night - with an EXTREMELY tolerable amount of stuff (thanks, jen... :) and it was nice to get up and chat with her while she made coffee. my seamus called from manchester and told me that he was having lovely weather*, his pup is doing well too. he told me not to let jen steal any of my food (apparently he had bad roomie experiences in the past) but to video our catfights over it, if she does... hm. jen DOES have a webcam... we could start a little cottage industry... :D JUST KIDDING!**
it's a gorgeous day here, too, the prettiest we've had in weeks. in my not-so-humble opinion, good omens abound for the new arrangement. i think we will send the next week or so arranging and moving stuff so that jen fits in and feels at home, and then hopefully we can introduce gump the wonder weasel into the household. remember, please, if you talk to luna that gump is a CAT, ok? NOT a funny cute smelly little interactive chew toy. this is VERY important.
wish us luck!

*jams, your accent and good spirits are enough to cheer me, even if the weather were shite.
**mostly.

you know, i spend all this emotional energy longing for vin and/or viggo (i mean, hey, if you're gonna dream, dream big), but i realized today that it's scott adams that i should be aiming to run off with. what a guy. his new book, "The Way of the Weasel"* proves to me that he and i have more in common than vin and viggo put together (ooh, i did not need that mental image in my head before i head off to work! *sigh* :) on page 11 he says: "The average person can only understand a sentence that has up to three acronyms. At four acronyms, the brain starts flailing like a spastic reindeer in an ice rink."
this man and i were obviously meant to be together. :)
he also is a perpetrator of samspeak. he righteously accuses people of "weaselness" and he says that if you find the creative balance between ignorance and confusion, you might create "weasenable doubt" in your opponent. hur hur hur... he also manages to squooze THREE footnotes (of nigh-pratchett funniness) into the first four pages of this book**.
oh, i'm sure he's married, but hey, as he stated in "Dilbert Future", it's guys like him who will earn the harems in years to come...
he's a cartoonist, a bonafide geek, a great believer in the theology of physics, and he's very cute (LOVE the new haircut, scott!).
sure, we'd have to have extra sunscreen on the beach, and he's not likely to carry my purse for me, but that's ok. i could carry HIS laptop... if vin-like guys came over to kick sand in his face (as IF), i'd just beat their @$$e$. no problemo. :)
oh well. dream big, everybody. and read his books. whether you care for dilbert or not (read ONE strip of "cathy", you'll come crawling back to cubicle-land, i PROMISE!) these books sooth the work and world-frustrated mind. he's funny, he's blunt, and he's RIGHT.
(plus, dogbert is reallyreally cute.)
illegitemi non carborundum, y'all!


*not to mention: 'The Dilbert Principle - Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century'
**one of them just says "after i racked my brain, i chalked my nose."

now let me tell ya, brothas and sistahs, this right here is the reason that this section is called "the RANT":

some of you may already know about my previous adventures with my garbagemen, the worst of which was losing my sweatpants as i ran up the hill one morning... :( i have been flirted with, i have had them meddle in my affairs (literally. one of them was on the volunteer fire dept. with "Red")... but this morning took the cake.
i laid out of work for the morning because i was feeling poorly. i was up all night, ill. luckily, the garbage was already out there - as it has been for WEEKS because they haven't been able to get up my infamous (notorious?) hill due to the !@#$ weather. because so much trash had collected, i needed a better container for it. my neighborhood is loosely run by a gang of thug dogs, so no trash is safe.
due to a chemical expolosion inside of luna's old doghouse (don't ask), i'd had the perpetrator procure me a plastic 50 gallon drum to use as luna's dog house. she refused to enter it (i can't say i blame her) and so it has been out by the dog-run for a couple of years. just recently i discovered that i might be able to make armor out of it, and so i was excited that i had one around. those things are pretty hard to come by. still, i thought that in the meanwhile it would make a PERFECT garbage can. tall, VERY sturdy, holds a lot, dogs can't knock it over. perfect. i only wish i'd thought of it sooner.
so this morning, just after the garbage truck left i went out to pick up the cans and make a quick run to the store for gatorade. i got out to the road, and my !@#$ barrel was gone. i jumped in the truck, peeled out of the driveway and hauled ass down the hill to catch the garbage truck.
any other day, i'd have to dawdle along behind it, late for work, with them waving and grinning at me, but of course today, it was nowhere in sight. gone, *poof*, like kaiser sozhe. grr.
so, i headed into town, and decided to stop at the town hall and express my feelings about the loss of my nice barrel. actually i wanted to express my feelings about the stupidity of this particular bunch of sanitation engineers. i asked the nice lady at the desk
if she could contact the truck - she did. she said "it's already crushed up." i asked her if i had to paint "THIS IS A GARBAGE CAN" on the side of the thing? it was ten times sturdier and three times bigger than any commercial can... sheesh. she rolled her eyes (not at me) and asked how much it was worth. i didn't really want to explain to her that i'd had to threaten someone ELSE for it when they blew up my doghouse, so i just told her that it had been VERY hard to come by. she was so nice.
i went to the store, came back home, and there was a big fat shiny new Rubbermaid Roughneck(tm) in the driveway.
hmph.
still. i can't make armor out of that, now can i?
so, anybody care to come blow up my garbage can?

“Hungry Joe was too firmly embedded in calamities of his own to care how Doc Daneeka felt. There were the noises, for instance. Small ones enraged him and he hollered himself horse at Aarfy for the wet, sucking sounds he made puffing on his pipe, or at Orr for tinkering, at McWatt for the explosive snap he gave each card he turned over when he dealt at blackjack or poker, at Dobbs for letting his teeth chatter as he went blundering clumsily about bumping into things. Hungry Joe was a throbbing ragged mass of motile irritability. The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.”
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller –

i ran across this passage and it really rang a bell. when things start getting furry, this is my first sign.
i am generally intolerant of a lot of certain kinds of noise. i hate white noise, electric hum. my seamus calls me a luddite because i don't have a lot of the usual modern appliances. it has taken me years to get used to the sound of my fridge. people eating noisily and chewing gum can set me into a silent rage on even the best of days. there are three people (one diner, two gum-chewers) that i run into fairly frequently. after a "session" with them my body literally aches from being clenched so hard while i am with them.
when things start to go all... wonky... furry.... sound starts to grate on me in a bad way. i hate any rhythmic clicking, nervous habit noises. argh.
how can people stand me at all?! i guess the same way that i stand them. i need to re-read catch-22 and find out what happened to hungry joe...
hm.

speaking of emotional nudity...
yesterday i ran into a boy - THE boy - who makes my heart flutter and sing and whirr like... a fairytale faberge clockwork nightingale.
(OF COURSE i was dressed like a southpark baglady, and i - yes, me - can NEVER think of anything even REMOTELY intelligent or interesting to say. he probably thinks i'm autistic. ) it literally throws the all of me right off track for days when i see him. if i have time to mentally prepare myself, then it's ... well, it's better. i am still preoccupied with thoughts of his face and his work (i honestly think of his work instead of, y'know, naughtiness, when i think of him) for days, but i am more in control. when i just happen upon him, it is kind of devastating (in a mainly good way). he's that kind of amazing and fantastic that usually only happens on a galactic scale. i could only use astronomical terms to try to describe him - but i won't.
there will never be a chance for me to tell him any of this, not in this lifetime. and believe it or not, that's ok. i know that if i were able to tell him, then (whatever our individual feelings about this confession) we would suddenly be reduced to two hormonal lumps of divinely electrified meat. this way, it's perfect. i can think of him and his work, feel what i feel, and be reminded that, despite all the odds, my heart can feel this way. the fact that he doesn't know that he gives me this gift does not decrease the generosity or my gratitude.
i don't wish him single, i don't wish him mine, i only wish i didn't appear to be an indigent babbling idiot everytime he saw me.
*sigh*
telle est la vie, telle est amour, tel est art. :)

i seem to know a large number of people who REALLY enjoy being naked. I know a positively shocking (to me) number of people who say they would prefer to be naked ALL the time, and i even know a few who actually LIVE that way (in camps and communes).
i don't enjoy being naked, not physically. not at all. i didn't even really wear shorts until i was 21, and even now, my dress is very conservative. my bathing suit looks like a dress, and after seeing pics of that from last summer, i think i will return to cut-offs and a tank top next year. nudity does shock me, and i am embarassed to admit that, because i know it's no big deal, it's just me, it's just a personal thing.
what's funny to me though, is that my "emotional" nudity seems to shock others the way their "nekkidness" does me. i have had several friends now comment on a couple of my posts here. none of them are censorial. in fact they seem to be complimenting me on my bravery... hm.
over the years i've been called "TOO sensitive" - too which i ALWAYS reply "no, YOU are just not sensitive ENOUGH.", i have been told that i "take things too seriously", that i "wear my heart on my sleeve", "that i give people too much of myself", or that i am, myself, just "too much". i even had a poetry teacher once, at USM tell me that maybe i shouldn't write about such "personal" things, after his own insensitive (read: STUPID) comment caused another student to verbally set him straight and half of the class burst into sympathetic tears.
i don't do this because i want to shock people. i don't do it because i want sympathy*. i do it maybe for the same reasons that some of you don't want to wear clothes. i feel bound. i feel that if i don't do this, i will strangle, or explode. i don't force anyone to hear or read my nudity. i am not an emotional 'flasher'. i offer myself - as much of myself as i can - and it is up to the individual to look, or look away.
my nudist friends are constantly trying to convince me that i'd be much happier with no clothes on. the fact is, i wouldn't. i am always the girl who is trying to borrow someone's moms suit so i can swim while everyone else is skinny-dipping. but i wish that i COULD be naked, be comfortable with the all of me. it would certainly make SOME aspects of my life easier...
but i'm not. so maybe this is my way. and maybe I can help to convince some folks who wish they could go soul-skinny-dipping that it's ok, that they don't have anything we haven't seen before... :D
find a safe place, invite safe people, take it off. take it ALL off - and jump on in. :)

*empathy, however, is a whole 'nother story...