Please Send the Smart Energy My Way

December 20th, 2006

This afternoon is my tough final. My last final of grad school, actually. Yesterday’s was a piece of cake. I studied 20 minutes. Today’s? Not so much. I might sit down at my desk in the classroom and throw up on it. I’m sort of nervous. So please send positive vibes in the Long Beach direction. Address them to “The girl with the Dickinson-fist-sized bruises across both eyes.”

I went to the doctor yesterday and am on the mend, I hope. I look forward to being in touch with you people again after a few days. I mean actually being in touch, like answering e-mails and stuff. I miss my people. Dead poets are nice, but they are quiet.

Things I Do When I Am Sick

December 17th, 2006

1] weep.
2] take my medicine.
3] be cranky with stevel.
4] make stevel hold me while i weep.
5] change the sheets, because clean sheets can make you well.
6] drink lots of water.
7] become frustrated when i can’t be understood when talking due to my congestion, and then weep about it.
8] miss out on cool stuff with my friends.
9] get none of my grading done because i am in too much pain to think about things.
10] try to make the cats hold me while i weep.
11] weep because the cats don’t want to hold me.
12] shiver a lot.
13] sleep. wake up an hour later because the mucus has congealed on one side of my head and lungs. get up and move around to break up the mucus. sleep more. repeat.
14] go online and look up all the deadly diseases this might be.
15] go to the doctor (usually, but maybe not this time, because he always says the same thing: “you don’t have a fever. this is a virus. all you can do is take otc medicine and wait it out.” shah. SEE NUMBER 14, DOC! I COULD HAVE SEVERE MENINGITIS!).
16] weep in the car outside the doctor’s office, because not only will the doctor not cure me, he is not legally allowed to hold me.
17] play the handheld solitaire game to the point where i am such a practiced pro i win every single game.
18] watch “cold case files.” weep because murderers are so mean.
19] constantly brush my teeth to try and get the taste of biohazardous toxin breath out of my mouth, to no avail.
20] sigh and feel sorry for myself.
21] blog my pathetic story on the internet.
22] weep because the internet will not hold me and furthermore tells me i could have meningitis. MEAN internet!
23] stare at my christmas cards in an effort to will them to fill themselves out.
24] order the wrong starbucks by mistake. amazingly, manage to keep it together without weeping.
25] fill our home with snotty tittues.

Dickinson, You Are Defeated

December 16th, 2006

Emily Dickinson tried to kill me this week. I now require Vicks Vapo-Rub in order to breathe and a mallet in order to beat any thoughts out of my gelatinous brain, but at last, after two complete rewrites, I turned in my paper. It is titled:

“I’ll tell it You —”: Emily Dickinson and the Ontological Nature of Virtual Experience

It includes sentences like this one:

It makes sense that her poetry experiments with themes of identity performativity and external world skepticism; she had few sensory experiences with the ideas, people, and objects about which she wrote, and her representation to her readers and friends eventually became almost exclusively a disembodied, written one.

and these:

The philosophical comment of Dickinson’s oeuvre on such experience, the consensus among critics seems to be, is one of the manifold possibilities of identity and self, especially of gendered self or self as constructed through language. The poetic and epistolary works of Dickinson offer similar commentary on virtual experience.

and this one:

If we view immortality in her works in light of this connection to questions of virtual experience—as connected to Dickinson’s own experience of her friends through letters—it is apparent she uses the term not only to explore possibilities of an afterlife, but as a means to discussing disembodied experience and the spatial and temporal questions of ontology that problematize it.

Oh no she DIDn’t just say that! (Yes, I did.)

Overheard and Over-shopped

December 12th, 2006

Overheard one professorly looking man say this snippet to another in passing:

“… global warming in Europe and places like that …”

Yes, all of those places like Europe.

I may have been cranky. I was fresh from Toys ‘R’ Us, where the brilliant decision-makers in Corporate have decided the fire-code-defying crowds of the holiday season require even more of a challenge in the form of giant, stacked displays of extra toys that make it so only one cart can fit through any aisle at a time. What results is a situation in which you enter the store with your cart and hook yourself onto the train of shoppers weaving in and out of the aisles single-file and at a pace determined by whomever needs to pause and peruse the Barbie accessories for ten minutes. It’s not her fault that no one can get by her—there isn’t even room for her to LET anyone by. And what’s she supposed to do, reach out her arm and grab a random toy as she slides by behind the man testing the tires on the Spider-Man bike? I don’t blame her. But I do blame the parents who drag their tots in there, like that’s a fun experience for them. Hey, three-year-old kid, I have an idea: Let’s spend 45 minutes in a store full of things you want but can’t have, and the whole time, I’ll just get more and more testy with you. Then there’s the staff. I pity them, but why was my line, which was comprised of not one but TWO cashier stations, moving more slowly than any other SINGLE-cashier line?? It’s called, “I need to bag this set of fake plastic Subway food in s-l-o-o-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n.”

Nothing like a good rant about the nation’s most fucked up toy store to get you into the holiday spirit, huh?

Celebrating the Fuck Out of Christmas

December 11th, 2006

Stevel and I went to the Aimee Mann Christmas show at the Avalon last night. It turned out to be a variety show of comedy, traditional Christmas tunes, and original music from Aimee and Grant Lee Phillips. Aimee promised to “fuck Christmas up for you,” and the show delivered. Great fun.

Today I went to the UCLA library to dig into my big term paper on Emily Dickinson. I made significant progress and am still working away at it. On campus I saw a sign that said this:

HELEN OF TROY
Model wanted
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
[phone no.]

The capitalized parts were huge, the middle line, small, so that it really appeared the experience mentioned referred to experience being Helen of Troy. Good thing it was not necessary. So few of us have been whisked to Troy by a prince who learned about our beauty from Aphrodite herself.

I also got a call from my sister, who told me this story: Her little family was walking around the mall today, and when Dani, 4, got tired, Brian (my bro-in-law) put her up on his shoulders. After some time in this seat, Dani was put down, only to collapse on the floor, shouting, “My socks are wrong! They’re all tingly!”

If you ever wonder how an alien would describe human concepts—like, say, your foot falling asleep—ask Dani.

Miis [Pronounced Meese, like Cheese]

December 10th, 2006

On the Wii, you can make caricatures of yourself, and those caricatures are the ones who play the games. Here are Stevel and me.

Treasures and The Veggie Van

December 9th, 2006

During my travels this morning, I acquired a discarded champagne flute (nice) and a dime. Picking them up off of the ground, I was reminded of the “Treasure Hunts” my grandmother used to take us on when we were little. We would set out with empty plastic grocery bags in the subdivision she and my grandfather lived in, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Our eyes to the ground, we’d walk slowly, on the lookout for such gems as bottle caps and nicely shaped rocks. If only my grandmother had patented her Treasure Hunting concept, we might all be wealthy today, having sold it for millions to the Adopt A Highway Maintenance Corporation.

I also thought of my niece, Erica, CEO of the Adopt a Parking Lot/Department Store Floor Corporation.

Following my treasure acquisition, I proceeded to the dentist’s office. Dr. Wong is a nice man who found gentle ways to let me know I scored about a D- in dental health this time. Not that I didn’t know, as throughout the cleaning he upgraded to heavier- and heavier-duty pick-tools, stopping just short of digging out the jackhammer. Ouch. Good thing I treated myself to a candy bar for breakfast, because now all I can eat is Velveeta Mac n’ Cheese (IF Mia lets me have any of it), because it coats as it nourishes. I tried to have an all-out dessert fest after dinner last night, but Stevel wasn’t supportive, despite my explaining that the night before going to the dentist is like a bachelorette party. I settled for hot chocolate.

On my way back from the dentist’s office, I encountered The Veggie Van, the driver of which was either buying office supplies or planting TNT to blow up Staples in an act of enviro-terrorism. Either way, I got my toner.

And now I really AM going to go start those two term papers. Adios. For real.

You’re Welcome?

December 8th, 2006

I mailed some early Christmas gifts to my nieces, which they went ahead and opened (as instructed). Yesterday I spoke to Dani on the phone, and she said this:

“Thanks for the presents, Krissy. When are you gonna send other ones?”

Spoiled hellion.

Now I am off to work on The Term Papers. Adios.

The Downsides of Having a Favorite Shirt

December 4th, 2006

1] I have to wear a towel for 30 more minutes while the dryer finishes. Because I had to wash it. Because I wore it from early Saturday, slept in it Saturday night, and didn’t take it off until yesterday evening.

2] It was the only one in its size on the clearance rack, so I can’t get backups or refills (Upside: It was only $6.99).

BUT I LOVE THIS SHIRT!

Happy Stevel

December 4th, 2006

Last night we celebrated the upcoming (Tuesday) 32nd birthday of Stevel with a dinner at Akbar (naturally) and dessert at No. 6 with playing of the Wii. I posted some photos of the fun here; thanks to Jeremy for the photography.

This Just Marched Out of the Drain in Front of Me

December 2nd, 2006

Drain visitor

He lives on the balcony now.

I Am Turning Into One of the Cats

December 1st, 2006

It is 10:00 a.m. I JUST woke up. I slept something like 11 hours. And I am exhausted. AND I am out of M&Ms.

ANTSY

December 1st, 2006

I’m glad the semester is nearing its end, because I can’t stand sitting in traffic anymore, and if I continue to have to travel at speeds of under two miles an hour for 30-minute stretches for much longer, I’m going to get out of my car somewhere around Lawndale and start screaming at the sky.