Resuming and resume-ing

It has been a stressful two weeks, but it has also been a fruitful time. I feel like I have figured out a few key ingredients that are missing from my life and a few ingredients that have no business being in my life, and now I just need the patience and fortitude to make the recipe work. Sorry to my readers if this blog goes a while without being updated - I am going through some minor life upheaval and restructuring. I'll see if I can bust out some funny stories by the end of this much-deserved 3 day weekend.

vacation-ing

Sorry that it has been a while since I last rapped at ya. I've been preparing for my big vacation, which means I'm taking 4 whole days off of work. I'm now on day 2 of my vacation. I'm visiting some family, resting, relaxing, and recuperating. I will also be heading to a friend's wedding on Saturday. I'm not sure what to expect from this wedding, but I am friends with both the bride and the groom, so I'm very happy to see them getting hitched. I will update you as the weekend progresses, but for now, I did not want to leave you hanging.

500 Days of Summer

Similar to a lot of my previous boyfriends, I had known about 500 Days of Summer for a while and didn't pay much attention to it until I got really, really bored. It was initially on the bill for the Atlanta Film Fest back in the Spring, but the film description didn't really catch my eye. I saw several major summer blockbusters before this movie even crossed my mind.

Literally, today I thought "I haven't seen a move in a while. Wow, this has really good user reviews." I will check it out.

Damn, it was a great movie. It was a movie that was in love with love, and I can't stand in the way of something that sincere. I loved the quirky touches, the awkward moments, and the karaoke. It was interesting to see things from the guy's perspective as well, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a really decent job of portraying all the emotional stages that his character experiences.

It has its cutesy moments, like the unbelievable tough-talking 11 year old sister and the goofy friends, but sometimes I'm willing to let some cheap gimmicks further along the plot if it helps with the pacing of the film.

But then again, I also really liked My Life in Ruins, so it may be fair to say I'm in that wierd girly place where I'm just into romcoms at the mom(ent). For those who have an aversion to girl-trap movies - go see 500 days, don't go see Ruins. Trust me, I know what I'm rappin' about here.

Hot Tubbin'!

In spite of this fantastic piece of art by Ashkon, I'm not a huge fan of hot tubbin'. I can do it for short periods of time, usually after skiing or swimming, but ultimately, you're sitting in a small pool of re-used, over-heated water. The water always smells a little suspect too. . . kind of like feet. That always drives me over the edge. Well, Ashkon seems to enjoy it, even if he does have to hop the fence at a Motel 6 to get things hopping after escaping from a totally boring sausage party.

Ashkon- Hot Tubbin'

zzzzzzzzz aid

Due to a lot of recent job stress, I have not been sleeping very well. I will lie awake in bed for hours, without being able to fall asleep. I will wake up with a start in the middle of the night. It really sucks. My sister recommended that I try melatonin pills. I also understand that I will need to address the underlying stress issues (which is why I am saving up my go-to-hell money), but in the short term, I need to get some sleep.

One night during grad school, I took a few Tylenol PM to try to get to sleep, and then every time I started to fall asleep, one of my legs would jerk and wake me back up. This ultimately left me even more exhausted and frustrated. Similarly, when I returned from Europe with a case of the German measles and a nasty cough that kept me up for 24 hours straight, I did what any normal person would do. I downed some Nyquil in order to knock my ass out so I could get some much needed rest. I then proceeded to wake myself up by coughing every 15 minutes and had wierd fever dreams in between.

I think what I'm saying is that my body is too strong for the sleep aid. Let's hope that the melatonin will work, or I will have to get serious and get a prescription for non-habit forming Ambien.

Traffic Court, yo.

So, I had my first personal experience in traffic court this week.

A few weeks ago, I was pulled over and told that my tags had expired, which was a surprise to me. The officer said, "You know, I'm supposed to impound your car...but I'm not going to." So, let me digress a little here and say that it's the little touches that make normal law-abiding folks hate cops. I understand that police officers have very stressful jobs. They deal with the scum of the earth on a daily basis. However, police officers need to differentiate between treating potential scum like scum and treating everybody like scum. If you pull somebody over for driving with their running lights on instead of their full headlights in the middle of a well-lit city, and the offender is genuinely surprised, not drunk, and has no prior offenses - perhaps it is best not to threaten to make them go to driving school.

Also, don't threaten to impound somebody's car when you have no friggin' intention of doing so. Did that make you feel better? Will that threat make it more likely that I will get my tags? Probably not more likely than the fact that you already issued me tickets that require me to go to traffic court. I think that the possibility of a large fine and or other penalty is motivation enough to register my car and pay my personal property taxes on my car. But nooooooo, you had to take it an extra step, just so I could thank you for being a dick. "Thank you, officer. I appreciate that," I replied.

"I hope you fall off your bike and get some road-rash on your fat-parts" I thought inside my head.

I'm not saying all cops are bad. It's just the bad ones that give the rest a bad rep.

So, traffic court was pretty straightforward. I went in and registered early. At the beginning of the session, the bailiff explained that the court would be trying cases not in alphabetical order (which really sucks for trinny, as her real name resides at the end of the alphabet, curses!) but in the order in which we registered. Joy, I thought - I registered 2nd, so I'll be out of here in a jif!

Then they began looking at cases alphabetically. Then they stopped to have the newly released jailbirds come in to get officially released on probation. One of the things that jails provide people with upon rejoining the cruel world is a roll of toilet paper - I saw several former inmates holding these in large plastic zip-loc bags. Then they stopped to try any cases where the defendant was being represented by a lawyer. Then the juvenile cases. Then more jail releases.

I wasn't all bad. I felt a lot better about my situation after watching some of the youth offenders go through their whole rigamarole. It's really difficult to sign up for anger management courses, submit a clean drug test, and prove that you are enrolled in school, according to a lot of these kids. It's also difficult to come to court, where you are being judged, in clean, conservative clothing. Tight jeans, baggy jeans, cut-off jeans, garish shirts. They were all there. It wasn't a surprise, really. During the opening spiel, the bailiff informed the court that we needed to spit out any gum before addressing the judge, and I thought "oh, this should be good." Any time you have to inform a group of adults to spit out their gum at a public court hearing - you know you have special people involved.

In the end I pleaded no contest, paid my expired tag fine, and moved on with my life. Now I'm always going to make time to register my car and renew my tags on time.

my big mouth

I have a problem where I tell people exactly what I think of them. People I don't even know, or have just met are as easily susceptible as close loved ones or long term friends.

My mother has a favorite story that she tells about me. When I was very little, our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Stewart, would yell at my two older sisters and all of the neighborhood children whenever they would run through her yard. At one point, she had probably yelled at me as well, but I was too young to remember.

One day, when I was three, I was tooling around with my mother and grandmother in our backyard. (My grandparents were also our next-door neighbors, so Mrs. Stewart knew both my mother and grandmother.) I was happily picking raspberries when Mrs. Stewart walked into our yard to talk to them. I flipped my three-year-old lid and started screaming "get out of our yard! get out of our yard! GET OUT OF OUR YARD!"

To get your comeuppance hurts. To get it thrown at you by the complete honesty of a three year old has to sting something fierce.

My mother apologized and took me inside the house to "discipline me", which involved her laughing until she cried. This is probably where it all started. That was the crucial moment when I got the positive reinforcement from a parental figure that shaped who I am today.

I am a bigmouth who can't lie and will tell you exactly what I think of you, and some part of me, no matter how misguided, thinks that this sort of behavior will be rewarded. In a psychological/Transactional Analysis sense I am looking for "strokes" - be they positive or negative. I'm realizing this isn't the most handy tool to carry with me on my interpersonal toolbelt. It's sort of like spraying mace in somebody's face as they try to shake your hand.

Occasionally I will find my brethren, and we will become fast friends, like my friend Mike. One time, during the last "Targeted advertising" (re: junk mail) class of the quarter, an ex-boyfriend made a desparate last-ditch effort to get more class participation points by asking "What exactly is targeted advertising." to which Mike replied from clear across the room, "Haven't you been in class at all this quarter?" in an angry tone of voice that suggested he could have easily followed it up with "you f'ing moron." We were friends before this, but at this moment I knew we would be friends for life. However, it can cut both ways. For example, one time when I spit my gum out into a trash-can with an emphatic "Phoo!" instead of discretely wrapping it in something and quietly dropping it in, Mike laughed and said "Classy". Like all true addicts, we just don't know when to quit.

So the last two times this has been an issue were in public places

Situation 1: In the Dulles airport, a TSA representative informs us that we will have to move to another area to get into the transportation screening line. One guy can't get there fast enough, and starts walking past us really quickly, and then knocks over some luggage from people who are walking in the opposite direction. Then he steers his rolling luggage dangerously close to a baby stroller. He gets comments from several folks who he nearly runs over with his Samsonite, "Hey!" "Watch it!" "That was rude!"

As usual, I can't help myself.

"Hey fella, we're all going to the same spot, do you need to take up the entire walkway?"

"Why don't you mind your own business?"

Then I got testy.

"Well, Jesus, just how wide are you, sir?"

"F*ck you."

Situation 2

I am standing behind a couple at a rest-stop McDonalds on the PA turnpike. The poor teenager who has to fulfill orders near the holiday gives the man his coffee. "Goddamn!" the man says. "You didn't need to put that much sugar in my coffee! Get me a new one. My God!"

I swear I wasn't going to butt-in, but then the guy turns around to me and says "Gosh, what are you gonna do?" as if to say "I had no choice. Too much sugar in my coffee and I'm a real b*tch! This McDonald's clerk totally deserved it!" I would have perhaps stayed out of it, but the fact that this lowlife was looking for backup or the feeling that he was justified in accosting a stranger with profanity was too much.

"Do you think swearing at the clerk was appropriate?" I asked.

"What do you care?"

"I think you could have had the same result without having to swear at that young man. Have a good day sir."

"You don't hope I have a good day. You want me to burn in hell."

And he said it in such a creepy way. It was compounded by his sleazy John Waters style mustach, his wierd pedophile shirt (striped button up, yellowed with age, short sleeves, mock turtleneck underneath), and his beleaguered wife - who looked like life had handed her a crap sandwich. I wanted to point all of these things out to him, as if to say "Listen, glass house man. Stop treating people like crap - you need all the good karma you can get."

So I settled for "No, but I think you should treat people with more respect." and then walked away. I was trying to keep it classy in a bad situation.

I swear I'm gonna get shivved someday.