Sic Itur Ad Astra

Subject:	There's a lot of stuff I could be posting about
Time:	7:24 pm.
Mood:	cranky.

But I've been tired as hell the past few days and it feels like I'm coming down with the Death Virus for the third time this month, though I hope in a form that doesn't lay me out flat for five days. I still have no cushion of sick leave. I worked on my day off last Friday to make up a sick day, which of course contributed to the tiredness. I may have to give in and start borrowing from future sick leave (you're allowed to borrow up to 30 days' worth per year), but that feels like a cycle I'll never break out of, so I'm resisting.

May take some vacation around Labor Day to maximize time off while minimizing leave days used. Supposedly my family's going to the UK next year, and since I haven't been out of the country since I was, what, twelve? I'm raring to go. Gotta save up those leave days.

Zippy's old foster home requested him back because they love him so much, so now I have a fluffy cutie named Charlotte. Pictures to follow when the room isn't spinning.

Who gave my contact information to the college? Because whoever it is I want to punch them.* I'm going to get so many goddamn contribution requests now, and they aren't getting a cent of my money until I'm rich and disconnected from the world enough that giving to the fantastically-endowed elite school that destroyed my health and my self-confidence starts looking better than, say, sponsoring a hundred children in developing nations, or making sure everyone has a basic goddamn necessity like water to drink..

*Although it's possible I did this to myself by accident. College Alumni Fund letters are like herpes - once you start getting them, there isn't a drug or major address change in the world that will make them go away permanently. If I was sent to Mars on some great mission I have no doubt that they'd start harassing me via email.

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Subject:	AAAAAARGH
Time:	11:01 pm.
Mood:	exanimate.

Why, yes, I am horribly ill again, how did you notice?

I'm completely out of sick leave and, while I'm allowed some advance leave, I'd like to save it as much as possible, given that I still have ~~five~~ four and a half months to go this year. Nonetheless, I am taking tomorrow off - in the middle of a highly time-sensitive project that I was nominally in charge of.

Went to Andrew's party last night and fell asleep after about half an hour; because he rocks, Alex drove me there and back so I didn't have to try to make it on my own.

I am so very pissed right now.

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Subject:	Life, the database, and everything.
Time:	2:24 pm.
Mood:	busy.

So I missed the NASA exhibits at the Folklife Festival, I missed karate on Saturday, and I missed a day of work, that's how sick I was last weekend. Now I am mostly better, except for the fact that my four-day weekend was not relaxing in the slightest and I am tired and grumpy.

This might have something to do with the amount of vituperation currently directed at my Nemesis of the Month, the chemical database that I have to use for all sorts of purposes. It is made of ridiculous fail. It is very hard to use, and you have to go through complicated sequences of clicks to do very simple things. God help you if you click out of order - now your footnotes weren't auto-generated and you have to input them manually! Ha-ha! Now you have to do it 75 times in a row! (I am not exaggerating.) I wrote an angry email to the people who are in charge of this sort of thing. I don't expect them to push out an update on the strength of my righteous fury, but I do expect to attend every single planning meeting for the database's replacement, which is nearly in alpha, and voice my concerns loudly and at great length.

Yesterday's karate was awesome, as usual, and tonight I am going over to Alex & George's to ~~watch Reno 911~~ use Alex's blender to make mango soup, which should keep long enough to bring to

appending_doom's First Job Wake on Saturday night. All around and in between is relaxing and much sleeping, and perhaps the bonus!creative endeavor that I promised everyone last week. After this weekend I expect to feel strong enough to begin attending group karate classes, which will only compound the awesome to even greater levels.

EDIT: Note to self: also buy rum. The soup is apparently even better with rum. Possibly everything is better with rum, though I shall need to confirm this with multiple studies.

EDIT EDIT: Also, my ceiling is leaking again! Sweet! Why, yes, I would like a goddamn refund on my so-called "luxury" apartment!

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Subject:	Quote of the Day, courtesy of my LJ post dated 1/27/2005:
Time:	8:42 pm.
Mood:	silly.

"So I discovered today that bananas squeak when you rub them together. Also that they do not produce fire."

more graph humor and song chart memes

It is Monday! After a week of severe annoyance, my window/ceiling may have finally stopped spewing water! All hail the masonry expert and his caulk gun of awesome!

I would have gone to see WALL-E even if it were awful, because, well, robots, but luckily it is composed entirely of win. You should go see it.

I have a three-day week this week, because Friday was going to be my day off but they let you move it if Friday is already a holiday.

Planned events include:
- Watching Ryan Stiles cameo on Reno 911 Thursday night
- Possibly going to see the NASA exhibits on the Mall, part of the Folklife Festival
- OMG ZIPPY IS SO CUTE HE'S SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR THERE WILL BE PICTURES
- Sleeping. Lots of sleeping.
- Extra bonus! karate lesson Saturday
- Playing with kittens at Petco
- Possible bonus! creative endeavor

I found out Trader Joe's has cereal bars for a cheaper unit price than anywhere else I've checked, and iirc they're not made chiefly of corn syrup. (My favorite work snack is a cereal bar in the afternoon.) I am obviously doomed.

INTARNETS:
Truck full of fire extinguishers catches fire

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Subject:	The Martial Arts, Part I
Time:	10:43 pm.
Mood:	tired.

more graph humor and song chart memes

So the karate place didn't tell me about the $300 "start-up package" fee until it showed up on my credit card, which makes me kind of nervous. But it has to hurt in order to make sure I'm really going to stay with it. (Until they stick me with any more bullshit fees and I drop them like a hot potato.) Methinks this chain is really meant for wealthy yuppies and their offspring, but they're the only place that teaches kenpo around here. I've looked.

I had a minor anxiety attack two nights ago when, at 11:30 PM, I had still not finished sewing the patch on my gi. This studio has more rules than my old one - you get a t-shirt, a gi, and a patch with their logo when you join; the patch goes on the gi, over your heart, which goes over the shirt for every lesson. The patch is iron-on, but nothing iron-on will take the abuse of martial arts for long, so they recommend you have a dry-cleaner or tailor sew it on nice and tight. Because I am regularly too tired for errands and also very cheap, I decided to do it myself, but preparing the proper weight of thread and actually punching holes in the iron-on backing was a huge hassle and kept me up far past my bedtime.

I don't know exactly what I thought was going to happen if the sewing looked subpar. It's not like they were going to rip it off and make me wash the restroom with my toothbrush. But I somehow had it in my head that it was very important that it look right, and so I washed the gi and prepared the thread and bemoaned my lack of a thimble.

Yesterday I arrived at work late and had a long, hectic day due to the upcoming deadlines. (Got everything done, though, and I'm somewhat ahead for the rest of the quarter, which is to say until Monday.) I left a little late after helping a coworker do some stuff and rushed home to throw on my shirt and gi and pants and drive the whole two miles to the dojo.

Bow in. Kneel to put on the belt. Meditate. Try not to think about the fact that your feet are screaming. Good. Now let's do some blocks. Punches. There it is. This is what you remember. This is the strength that kept you going, that defined you in ways so subtle and far-reaching that you never noticed when the classes stopped being a weekly chore and started creeping into your personality, your dreams.

Maybe there is a place past which pain has no meaning, but becomes simply an acceptance, a numbness like a shell. Surely I can turn my most crippling weakness into my greatest strength, if I can only find the energy.

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Subject:	She was gonna be an actress / And I was gonna learn to fly.
Time:	12:26 pm.
Mood:	groggy.

I woke up half an hour early this morning because that dripping noise did not sound like it was coming from the bathroom or outside; my window was leaking prodigiously. I put a towel on the carpet, but the water was kind of streaming down the outside wall of the building and spreading over the blinds and dripping all over the air conditioner, so I hope maintenance can figure out how to seal it up before it causes any damage.

Oh! Alex and George came over to help me install my headboard last night, and we went to see Get Smart at the giant swanky theater down the road. I have no idea if it was true to the original series, but I loved the crap out of it. (OMG the nerdy tech guys were so cute! Also I want their job!) The whole thing held together pretty well, though I didn't understand a couple of the transitions, and it was actually laugh-a-minute funny. Your mileage may vary, but this movie hit my sweet spot so hard I might get it on DVD.

( Work )

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Subject:	Curiosity necessitates an informal survey
Time:	5:43 pm.
Mood:	relaxed.

When I go to sleep, my senses shut down before my consciousness finishes turning off, and as far as I can tell my brain panics and starts manufacturing its own entertainment. This is occasionally in the form of wild images of the most random sort (and once or twice in the form of putrid odors), but usually it's a montage of insane noises. Crashes, bangs, screams, voices of people I know urgently calling my name, tortured electronic feedback screeches that jerk me awake and make my actual ears twinge in sympathy. I know they're auditory hallucinations, but they sound real, and only the really loud or frightening ones wake me back up long enough to write to memory.

This has been going on for years, but it only occurred to me last night to actually try to remember what I hear and write about it on the internet, because apparently when my brain is in the equivalent of the "Windows is Shutting Down" screen, I am an idiot. Dur.

So I'm curious - do other people get this? Do you see strange pictures as you're drifting off? Do you hear sounds, smell or taste strange things, feel odd skin sensations? Is there a name for this when specifically related to sleep, or is it just lumped in with dreaming and/or hallucination?

(Now that I think about it, this could be related to the fact that I wake up with a different song stuck in my head every day. Maybe my ears are quick to shut off and slow to boot?)

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Subject:	Favorite quote from my LJ post dated 10/31/2004:
Time:	4:07 pm.
Mood:	busy.

"Terrifying things, steel things, metal things, things with cylindrical bodies and multitudinous jointed limbs. Things without flesh and blood. Things that were made of metal and plastic and transistors and relays, and wires. Metal things. Metal things that could think. Thinking metal things. Terrifying in their strangeness, in their peculiar metal efficiency. Things the like of which had never been seen on the earth before. Things that were sliding back panels...Robots! Robots were marching..."
("Curiosities", F&SF, Oct/Nov 2004)

I'm still intermittently going over and annotating old LJ entries. It started as a quick skim-through to make sure I wasn't saying anything offensive to prospective employers, but I think I've only had to edit one or two entries for content, and iirc those were to remove mean comments about specific professors. All I'm really finding is a late high school/college student baring 90% of her real life to the world, ups and downs and cussing and rants and all, which is pretty much what I was going for.

( Life update of banality )

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Subject:	I can has free furniture?!?!?!
Time:	1:08 pm.
Mood:	working.

Saturday was a very, very slow adoption fair. Almost no apps on anyone, though Zippy got some interest for being a freakin' beautiful cat. Still need to pimp him at work. Lack of working printer complicates this only slightly.

Sunday I slept until almost noon but woke somewhat revitalized. The first thing I discovered while watering my plants was ( OMGWTF HUNDREDS OF BABY SPIDERS AAAAGH )

Cue massive apartment-cleaning! I moved some furniture around, took 99% of everything out of boxes and put it away, and carried my month-old stack of newspapers down to recycling. Where I found a beautiful ginormous dresser with a big "FREE" sign taped to it.

I probably looked like one of those cartoon characters trying to move something obviously too heavy for her, but eventually I inched it into the freight elevator, then inched it into my apartment, then inched it into the spot where the old beat-up dresser lived until now. I'll hang onto the old one until Saturday so it has all weekend to be snatched up.

Then, though my feet were pow'rful sore, Alex came and picked me up so we could go sneak Chipotle-to-go into Kung Fu Panda and make room for imminent George by moving some of my leftover crap out of the spare room. George gets a free Uncomfortable!Futon (TM) and Spinny!Chair (TM) because, well, because nobody wants to move them. Watched some Season3 Venture Brothers (the deconstruction, it will brainfuck you) and then schlepped some bookstacks and a pickanick basket (Hey, Booboo!) back to my place. Place is mildly cluttered until books go on shelf and old!dresser goes away.

Kung Fu Panda was awesome, by the way. Jack Black is still one of my many heroes. It made me miss martial arts so strongly that I looked up Kenpo dojos in my area. If I spell it "Kempo" instead (transliteration from the Japanese can sometimes be an inexact process) I get a hit right in Alexandria, which would be fantastic...I have to get back in some semblance of shape before I try anything, though, and I'm not looking forward to fighting my pain response every step of the way.

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Subject:	Blupdate
Time:	1:53 pm.
Mood:	busy.

Okay, so when I joined a local CSA a couple weeks ago I was envisioning a big cardboard box of veggies to take home every week, something actually worth the $23.30/wk I was shelling out for the experience. Instead the first "box" I got was a small Rubbermaid tub with about $8 worth of produce. Delicious produce, sure, but all the "supporting local agriculture" and "99% organic" in the world can't change the realities of a skimpy grocery budget, so last week I called the farm, canceled my membership, and got a refund (less the first delivery). I know production picks up later in the summer, but all I was ever going to get was stuff that fit into that little container, so I decided to get my produce from the grocery store like everyone else.

That said, I got home from Alumni Weekend yesterday, crashed for two hours, and then made roasted kale with my farm-fresh 99%-organic kale and cheapo olive oil, and it is CRACK, I tell you, CRACK. I only used about half the kale, so I might make it again tonight. The rest of dinner was mostly chili-from-a-can (NEEED grocery shopping), but you can't say I didn't try to be healthy. Then there was more crashing and I was half an hour late to work today.

Sleep deficit is still painfully apparent, but I foresee no more crazy weekends for a long while, so maybe I'll finally have some time to recover. It was great to see people and hang out, even if I did have to be bitchy and drag

arctangent and

appending_doom back to DC before hanging out was complete. I feel like I cut it too close anyway, but those beds were so awful, I couldn't have gotten up any earlier...Blergh. Anyway, I survived and probably won't die of exhaustion before Friday, which is the important bit.

In not entirely surprising news, McCain = kind of a toolbox. He would have earned an awful lot of Eliza Respect Points had he stuck with her, and I'm not just speaking as a woman suddenly disabled in the flower of her youth. The real question is, why the hell did I learn this from a British news outlet instead of our own supposedly "liberal" media? *grumble*

( Edit with more bloviating )

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Subject:	Blag blog blog
Time:	6:23 pm.
Mood:	sore.

Blogging from a dorm room in Dana, the SWIL cookout just outside my door, which I guess means that I'm at Alumni Weekend. Darn.

There has been fun. There has also been a rock-hard mattress that made me miss all this morning's activities due to extreme tired. Fueled by massive quantities of junk food and corn syrup, I have talked to some professors, hung out with some SWILumni, and attempted to nap on a chair in the Math Lounge. Later perhaps there will be more of same, in the stifling sweltering blanket of humidity that Philly calls air this time of year.

I'm glad I came, in any case. It may take a few more visits over the course of many years to let me make my peace with this place, but I do feel a little better each time.

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Time:	3:33 pm.
Mood:	blah.

Argh blargh I've spent this whole day in deep fibrofog and gotten nothing done and I'm frustrated as hell.

Visiting Swarthmore over the weekend was somewhat fun, somewhat stressful. As soon as I got back on campus I started getting that clenching feeling in my chest, the muffled thudding of restrained panic that THERE IS SOMETHING I AM SUPPOSED TO BE DOING RIGHT NOW WHY AM I PROCRASTINATING INSTEAD OF DOING IT. I lived with this feeling pretty much constantly for four years, and I'm not sure I can even look at the campus anymore without it all flooding back.

This was only made worse by the way I repeatedly failed to do things like get up on time or find any of the professors I wanted to talk to or bring the thing I was going to give Greg Frost had I managed to meet up with him or effectively organize a post-graduation lunch outing or eat a single healthy meal in the 36 hours I was there. Every time I was confronted with something that required effort, my energy failed me and I took the path of least resistance. By the time we got back to Alexandria I was a bundle of nerves and self-loathing which proceeded to crash directly onto the bed and sleep for something like twelve hours. Now I'm a foggy blob at work who has gotten almost no actual work done today.

All of this does not make me especially optimistic about Alumni Weekend, which I was ambivalent about attending in the first place and for which I have still not signed up. I will likely still attend, but I will also likely leave as early as humanly possible on Sunday in order to put some actual breathing space between me and another solid week of work. I don't have the stamina to do this anymore.

That said, Arthur walked, weather was great, people were talked to briefly, hooray. I'm sure I'll recover enough to remember more good points before Friday.

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Subject:	What's the matter, Colonel Sandurz...CHICKEN?
Time:	10:35 am.
Mood:	distressed.

Okay, so first of all, I don't know if Swarthmore gets G4 on their cable package, but if they do, then we have to somehow figure out how to watch the beginning of Spaceballs: The Animated Series on Saturday night. This is Very Important.

Second, ( I am having the most ridiculously shitty month health-wise. )

In any case, I feel absolutely worn out, used up, ruined. I was so productive yesterday that I don't actually have a lot to do today, so I guess I'll finish what I can and maybe go home early and nap.

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Subject:	ARRRRGH
Time:	9:37 pm.
Mood:	frustrated.

This stupid allergic reaction's ruining the rest of my weekend! It kept me inside and utterly sedated for all of what was apparently a beautiful day. I don't think my doctor's office is open tomorrow, but I guess if I wake up and I'm still covered in Hives of Death I'll give them a call. If not I have to go buy more Benadryl and some kind of cream. I'm not going to the ER if I can help it, because unless I'm visibly suffocating or something I'll be sitting around for five hours while grill-burn victims and heart attack patients and home-improvement catastrophes zip by.

Starting to wish I had cable. This is a new low.

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Subject:	Past the halfway point in my four-day weekend.
Time:	2:52 pm.
Mood:	tired.

Stuff that has happened:

Folks + little brother came. Put them up in the complex's Hospitality Suite, which is like a big, nice hotel room that doesn't cost as much as a hotel. Folks took me around and bought me things, including two fantastic seafood dinners and a ticket for Indiana Jones at the theater in Old Town Alexandria. (The theater now requires you to buy a concession item with your ticket, which I guess must be the least legally ambiguous way for them to stay open, because I can't imagine anyone just trying it for a lark. On the plus side, the concession stand serves alcohol and sandwiches and stuff so if you don't mind paying out the ass you can theoretically eat your whole dinner while watching the movie. We opted to dine at Hank's Oyster Bar a couple blocks away.)

Got bed. (Saleslady at Mattress Discounters was nice and not too pushy and plays Magic. Salesman at Mattress Warehouse went from obsequious to near-abusive when we said we were going to shop around some more. Mattress Discounters got our business, unsurprisingly.) Bed is delivered as of this morning but still naked due to new sheets being in wash. Had them set it up on bed risers but now I'm worried it might be too unstable to work long term. Might take it down when I have more than just me around. ("Be careful of cat," said one of the delivery guys. "It fall, it will make him flat, heh heh.")

Started having some kind of itchy allergic reaction almost right after family left this morning. Groggy as hell due to Benadryl. Hives not going away. If I have to spend Memorial Day in the emergency room, or take work leave to see the doctor, I'm going to be really pissed. All I ingested this morning was Frosted Mini-Wheats; only other current culprit is the new sheets I bundled into the wash. Maybe I'm allergic to a preservative or something? It's all quite bizarre.

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Subject:	Guess what I got to do when I got home?
Time:	7:57 pm.
Mood:	cranky.

If you guessed scrub cat urine off the wall, then YOU WIN A MILLION DOLLARS DINGDINGDING! 8D

In other news, Zippy chewed one of my plants and then threw up green liquid all over the carpet last night. He's really breaking the place in. The experience does seem to have made him nervous about chewing on any more, though, which can only be good.

My parents and little brother are coming to visit tomorrow. I hope to have the place at least presentable by then. Meanwhile, the car needs an oil change, and I need to hit a Target or other big-box store pronto so that I can, oh, sweep the giant sand dune of cat litter out of the bathroom. Maybe I'll do some exploring this evening.

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