'Tis the season for high cholesterol, eating cake for breakfast (not that I did that today or anything...oh wait, I still have some whipped cream on my lip. busted.), and outlandish onslaughts of annoying holiday deliveries from the USPS. This year it seems that corporate America has infiltrated my life even more than usual by "sharing with me" via email holiday sales/last-minute Christmas gift ideas/last day for free shipping/ORDER TODAY FOR CHRISTMAS DELIVERY/40% off - OUR BEST OFFER EVERRRRRRRR!!!/the super easy click me-click on 'show images'-click the link to open the coupon-download the coupon-open the coupon in Adobe Reader-wait for Adobe Reader to say it's a corrupt file-reopen in Preview-print-cut out-take to the store-give the checkout lady your name, email address, date of birth, last four digits of your social security number, and your mother's maiden name- AND RECEIVE 10% OFF YOUR HIGHEST PRICED ITEM (Item must be an original price of $250 or more. This offer does not apply to sale or clearance items, nor can it be used with any other offer. Limit one coupon per household per visit. Walking out of the store and then walking right back in to buy another is not allowed. Honestly, if you attempt to use this coupon, your name will be added to our 'Do not Sell' list posted next to each cash register, so good luck coming back in the future. When you open this email, your name, likeness, contact information, and the future of your small children will all be sold to corporate hacks who will continue to infiltrate your lives with GREAT OFFERS LIKE THIS ONE!!!!!!!). Gee, thanks for that.

But the only thing worse than the cards and the "sales" ads are the Christmas letters. You know what I'm talking about - the impersonal letters printed out on somebody's home InkJet outlining the major events of their family members' lives for that year. These letters are typically printed on cheap scrapbooking paper purchased at your local Kinko's with smiling snowmen or a series of reindeer prancing around the margins. Actually, while I do really love hearing what my friends and family are up to, I secretly believe that these letters are systematically designed to make you feel like shi*. This is why I went for the typical Christmas card this year - no letter, no personal message, just a smart-ass holiday-themed joke with the politically correct statement on the inside referring to the "Holidays" for all of my Jewish and Muslim friends (of which only one Jewish one got a card this year, and no Muslims, but I figured it best to play it safe). For anyone who didn't get one, here it is:


My favorite holiday letters are the ones that are sent out by young twenty-somethings that feature a happy-go-lucky photo of the couple posed in front of the Christmas tree. How quaint. You know, the ones that make everyone say, "I give it two months. Tops." Here's a tip: assuming that position is lethal unless you've either got a ring on your finger or a bun in the oven. Or the ones that are conspicuously screened for any less-than-par imagery. "Stephen and I have been loving every minute of our new empty nest, and we're looking forward to turning young Johnny's old bedroom into a sitting room or office. We haven't quite decided yet, but, you know Stephen - when he gets an idea in his mind, it'll be done in two weeks! Watch out!" But wait a second... why did little Johnny leave the house? Oh yeah! That's because he was kicked out when his folks found him pawning grandad's pocketwatch for crack money. Isn't he in juvie now? Huh.

Ruth sent me an email-based Christmas letter the other day, and, if you're reading this Ruth, I appreciate your honesty. She listed out her major achievements of the year, but she also played it real. She ran for an elected office. She didn't get it, but she enjoyed the process. (You easily could have slid in some curse words towards the second primary voting population in the tiny type here.) I appreciate that. So, in keeping with the honest and real take, I give you my quick-and-dirty Christmas letter:


To my Dearest and not-so-dear-but-I'm-required-to-write-this-to-you-anyway Friends,

The year of 2008 was a roller coaster of emotions, successes and failures for me. I rang in the new year playing Peanut on the living room floor with my mom. Soon after, I was asked to move in with someone post-graduation, to which I eventually teetered towards no. I spent the next few months dating a random list of not--so-quality guys, which landed me in continued counseling and sex therapy sessions (and, yes, the sex therapist's office at Iowa State has a two-way mirror inside it - talk about awkward). I somehow ended up in the only architecture studio that not only did not include an overseas trip, but in fact made it a point that you had to gather all of your information from your desk. After designing an orphanage for a crack-infested town in Nicaragua, I discovered that the head librarian of the Design Reading Room was from there and was in for a big surprise when she attended my final presentation. Whee! In May, I said goodbye to my rockstar roommate and graduated with Honors and triple degrees from Iowa State and became the first student in the school's history to do, well, a number of things. After much deliberation, I decided to turn down the offer to return to my old firm in Minneapolis (which turned out to be a good thing, b/c they're hurting bad right now), and instead moved to Austin, Texas, to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts of Design and to work at a family firm that does mostly work for the University of Texas. At work, I became a "professional shopper" (but yet they refuse to write that on my business cards). I spend most of my days researching products, colors, and prices to make things pretty. Over the summer, I threw a Five Year High School Reunion (go Falcons!) back home, had some reconstructive surgery on the chestules, and donned a bridesmaid dress in my friend Kari's wedding. School has, so far, turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I'm loving every minute of it. I've thrown my declared thesis topic - architectural graphics - out the window and have since turned to challenging that time tested, gay medium of cross-stitch. My final project was a huge success with the critics, and as soon as I get it photographed, I'm sending it off to the United Colors of Benetton's magazine "Colors" and hopefully parading it around some local museums. This fall, I also declared two minors - History and Business (both of which will be complete in May), and worked with a group of lawyers/engineers/MBA candidates to develop a business plan for a line of diabetic footwear that prevents ulceration (on which we landed an unprecedented perfect score!!). (See photo below to toss your cookies.) I traveled out to DC to visit my friend Stephen, and jumped out of a perfectly good airplane when my folks visited this fall. In my mind, my relationships have been improving steadily, however I have also been alerted that they're sometimes just that - only existing in my mind. I got to go to LA and home for Christmas, which reminded me yet again that living in a place where you don't know anyone kinda blows...big time. I'm now in a new and vastly-improved apartment and am working diligently on putting together a life here as a southern belle.

All in all, 2008 was a 'meh' year. It's probably safe to say that it was my worst, at least January-May. So there's only room for improvement from here! Best of luck to all in the New Year, and stay away from Sally Hansen's Lavender Spa Home Waxing Kit (yet another lesson learned in '08)!!

xxoo,
Lisa


I wonder if Kinko's has a holiday paper that would coordinate with foot puss...

I was home mosaic-ing some broken tile on Christmas Eve, and I started thinking about Christmas wishes. At the time, the best I could come up with was, "stop cutting my fingers on this f*&$ing glass!" (Can you tell who it is?)


I figured I needed a reality check, so I sent out texts of "If you had to pick one Christmas wish, what would it be?" to a random list of people. It was really interesting to hear their answers:

"To be healthy" (my friend who has Crohn's disease)
"To ease all of my cousin's pain and suffering"
"Who is this?"
"That everyone in the world could learn to accept one another and get along"
"That my family would all be happy and healthy." "That's retarded and unoriginal." "I'm a mom. It's what I do."
"To make a smooth transition to my new city. I'm worried that I'll get there and find out that there's no place for me."
"200 million dollars" "Yeah, money is nice, but you know there are a lot of things you can do for free that don't cost a thing ;)" "Yeah no"

The great thing about Christmas wishes is that, whatever your wish, you get to put it into action by outlining your plans in your New Years resolutions. So far, I've heard, "To sell the bar", "That you would be happy", "To start taking care of all of the medical things that I've been putting off", "I want to drink more and think less", and "To lose about twenty pounds." Here's my list so far:

-Embrace my cynicism
-Take more chances ("Do something that scares you everyday")
-Make my new home a place of comfort and tranquility where others always feel welcome and hopefully inspired
-Continue to push myself in the handicrafts and find new ways to introduce them to the market
-Travel to at least four new countries
-Slowly but surely work on building my confidence back up
-Be better about writing letters to my grandparents
-Make more. Buy less.
-Be content.
-Figure out what the hell "girlfriend material" really means. (No, nobody said this to me, it's just a phrase that I've never been able to pin down.)
-To be the best me that I possibly can

In light of some news I received on Friday, I'd like to add another one to the list too. One of my very best friends recently found out that she has contracted HPV, the human papillomavirus. Now, if you're been reading this blog the whole way through, you've probably heard me mention it a time or two. You see, I was one of five gals on a research team at Iowa State that studied people's awareness of HPV and its causes, methods of preventative treatment, consequences, etc. Some people would really shock you. In our trial surveys, I actually had a professor in her fifties answer that she thought hugging was one way someone could lose their virginity. Yikes. Most people, if they've even heard of it, know only what information has been portrayed on the Gradasil commercials, and that, my friends, is wrong or misleading about 80% of the time. I made it my own personal mission to educate my friends and family on HPV factoids, and annoyed the hell out of them in the process. But somehow, and I don't know how, I must've missed my very, very good friend. She might have already had it before I learned, and even if I had said something, she might not have sought treatment in time, but, regardless, I feel an immense amount of guilt for what she has to deal with now. No 24 year old should have to have doctors digging around in her vijayjay looking for lumps and bumps that could lead to a whole lot more than genital warts. Not cool at all. So my addition to my list is: Find something that you are passionate about and GET THE WORD OUT. It doesn't matter how annoying you are, never stop if you think it's something that people should know.

If I had to pick one thing that I'd want the public to know at this very moment, it's this: calling me/texting me/emailing me out of the blue without even knowing if I'm dating anyone and asking for sex is really not going to work. I'm serious. This has happened twice in the last week. I honestly don't know how I got a reputation that that was ok, but I've never done it in the past, and it's HIGHLY unlikely it's ever going to work in the future. Besides, asking for sex without even a date or a drink isn't cool, cheap asses. So don't. Please. The end.

Even though it's not New Year's yet, I've already started my work on my resolutions. I figure that "girlfriend material" likely has something to do with cooking and cleaning and all that other wife-ly crap, and I'm guessing that providing a comforting home also requires there to be food for your guests, so I took a stab at cooking. I cook occasionally, but generally not when it's just moi. They say that everyone should have a 'signature dish' - something that you make really well. Mine is toast. And Coconut Orange Angel Food Cake. (Let me know if you want the recipe - it's amaaaaazing...) But I've noticed that when I cook a meal, I generally plan, plan, plan and then when it comes time to put it together, I get all flustered, screw things up, and get really cranky because the longer it takes me to get it right, the hungrier I get... It's a downward spiral.

Santa brought me a cookbook for Christmas this year, and I set out to make Sandra Lee's "Lemon Chicken" - chicken strips fried in lemon-flavored breading and drizzled with a light lemon glaze. Mmm, tasty!


This poor little guy's brothers and sisters all got doused with a layer of disgusting-ness. I figured it was an acquired taste, but, after downing six pieces,  I never did acquire it. Instead, I ended up laying on the couch the rest of the night wondering if it was worth it to run to the bathroom or if I should just throw up right there. The chicken was just way too acidic with all of that lemon juice on it. But, silly me, I thought, "Ketchup! Everything's better with ketchup!" Um...yeah. Ketchup's acidic too. Bad combo. As I lay there on the couch writhing in pain watching "Intervention" (and thinking 'You whiners don't have shi*! Try eating some of this chicken and then tell me how bad meth withdrawal hurts!"), I came to the realization that more lemon juice or ketchup would only make the chicken more acidic. But...what if I had used kosher lemon juice instead? Would that still be too acidic? Or would it just be Hasidic?


I am happy to report that I had the gumption to try cooking again tonight, fish tacos this time (with guacamole, cabbage, red onion, sour cream, whipping cream and taco seasoning no less), and it was absolutely edible and almost tasty. Like I said, there's nowhere to go but up, right?

Well, I suppose that's enough corny jokes and pessimistic sarcasm to last you for a day or two. I'm headed off to San Antonio tomorrow after work to ring in the new year with that crazy Puerto Freakin' Rican and her folks. Then it's back to work for a day and then we're headed up north for Steven and Rebecca's nuptials in Wichita! Karen's not going to be able to make it, so we both snagged her spot in the hotel room. Unfortunately, I drool, so I've been relegated to floor duty. Oh well. If I drink enough champagne at the wedding, I won't even care where I sleep. It's gonna be a good weekend, and a great start to the new year. :) Chins up, ladies and gents! Let's get this year a-goin'!!

On the radio this morning, the deejays asked one of their young interns, "Bri, can you name the seven natural wonders of the world?" After a long and thoughtful pause, she answered, "Umm, Hawaii?" Close. Very close... Or not.

My geography was rattled last weekend as well. In case you didn't know, somewhere between the Los Angeles International Airport and "Walkin' in Memphis with my feet 10 feet off the floor", lies Purgatory. Hell. The Netherworld of domestic flight travel. Let me explain.

I had gone to LA that weekend to chill with my brother and sister-in-law - a little Christmas trade-up if you will. They're trying desperately to save up enough money to buy a house, so instead of them flying home for Christmas, we decided to split the fare of flying me out to LA in leiu of exchanging presents. I guess we decided it was more important to be together around the holidays than to express our love via presents...or some mushy crap like that.

Anyway, on Monday night, my last night in LA, Heather and I stayed up until the wee hours - me frantically trying to discern how the battle between Kennedy and Khrushchev over the Berlin Wall was more a fight for public approval by the West Berliners than it was a territory or arms race, and her just being her genuinely kind self and trying to help me piece it all together. [Fun Kennedy factoids located at the end of this entry.] I ended up getting 1, count 'em - 1, hour of sleep that night, figuring I'd just sleep on the plane the next day.

Ooh, if only...

The flight path was supposed to be LA --> Memphis --> Austin. Two long flights. Two long naps.

On the first flight, however, I drew the short straw. The lady sitting behind me was traveling with her entire chihauhau family, for whom she had purchased their very own seat, mind you. Every time somebody got up to go to the bathroom or walked past her seat on a pleasure stroll, they just HAD to chat it up with her and those "adorable little doggies!" Rats. They're rats. Get it right.  And every time she would explain to them, in her revolting Southern accent akin to what you'd hear from "The Golden Girls" Blanche Deboreaux when she's reminiscing about her days on daddy's plantation, that they're not just little doggies. Oh no. "They're a whole little family! This is mommy, and this is daddy, and this is the little baby right here. You can see how he's got his mama's sweet eyes? He's got his nose from his daddy though. Yes you do! Yes you doooo!!!"

Gag.

I thought I had gotten lucky when I discovered that I got a window seat. Rock on. The lineup in our row was me, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, and a preppy-looking girl about my age in the aisle. The girl says, "Just so you know, on my last flight, I spent all six hours talking to my seat mates. I have a feeling we're all going to be great friends by the time this flight is over!"

Don't count on it.

Not surprisingly, the other lady promptly started scouring for an open seat and was gone in a flash, off to some non-Chatty Kathy or diamond-collar-studded-rat-dog-haven. I lunged from my seat and grabbed for her ankles as she slipped away. "Noooooooooooooo!!! You were my buffer zone!!!!!!!!!"

It was now every girl for herself. I figured that if I didn't speak or make eye contact, maybe I could pass as a deaf or a mute, or... better yet, you guessed it, a DEAF MUTE! Would it help if I wore my notebook around my neck? Helen Keller still has my chalkboard. If it weren't for this damn Texas hat and boots I'm wearing, I might've been able to pass for a foreigner. Scandinavian maybe? Nah, without the hat, nobody'd believe a European could have bedhead this bad. And so I fretted. And slept. And awoke repeatedly to high-pitched yips in my ear. Repeat pattern. Want to die.

Please remember that, unless you cage up your animals and stick 'em in with the cargo, you have to buy them a seat on the plane. Granted those piddly thimbles for butts don't weigh anything compared to, well, my much larger thimble of a butt, but in the eyes of the airlines, a seat is a seat. And that seat is surrounded by other seats full of human-sized butts. Butts that don't want to hear about, or hear directly, your retarded dogs when they're going on little to no sleep.

Once we got close to Memphis, the pilot got on the intercom and announced that we were being directed to go closer to a storm around the airport than he would've liked and to brace ourselves for the ride. As long as it kept those dogs and their pea-brained owner silent, I really could care less. I'd sleep through a train wreck at that point. (Why there would be a train plowing into us at 30,000 feet is beyond me, but you know where I'm going with this.) But again, no. The storm turned out to be a hail storm, and our plane was pelted with these golfball-sized pellets of ice that made it sound like we were under attack. I thought we were flying into Memphis, not Normandy!

My flight to Austin was canceled on account of the storm. On the upside, this meant that I got to munch on some Tennessee BBQ for dinner. On the downside, it meant that I would be stuck at another airport for an additional two hours, only to be then directed to Atlanta, and then, with any luck, to Austin. The flight to Atlanta was uber-short, and I don't even like the prefix 'uber'. But that's how short it was. I got to sleep, about forty-five minutes, bringing the total up to about 2 hours in the past 48 or so.

On the flight to Austin, I sleepwalked back to my seat at the rear of the plane. I was probably in about the fifth-to-last row or so. Ahh, silence, I thought. I'll be lulled to sleep by the noise of the engine and it'll be sweet dreams for me until we get home. Ohh...but then. A lady walked down the aisle, carrying her infant baby girl, followed in tow by three other youngins, all under eight years old. Well ain't that just fabulous? The last thing I needed at that point was a bunch of kids crying through my precious sleep time.

As it turned out, the kids didn't make a peep. The group of 15 15-year olds traveling to some YMCA swim team competition, however, were up snapping pictures and watching movies on their laptops and throwing food and hootin' and hollerin' the whole ride. When we exited the plane, the lady with four kids and I exchanged a knowing glance. The bags under our eyes said it all.

In Austin, they lost my luggage. I then went to the Walgreens by my new place to buy some incidentals (hairbrush, makeup, toothpaste, etc.) so that I could go to work the next day and look at least half-way as a member of the living. It was raining outside, and when I went up to the counter at Walgreens to pay for my purchases, the girl said, "So how're you liking our snowstorm?" "Oh, I just flew in. I must've missed it." Then she got really confused and said, "Um...It's going on right now."

Believe it or not, by morning, there was snow on the ground. Real snow. About 1/16" of it. And that's when I realized that the inevitable had finally happened. Hell had frozen over.




Kennedy Factoids:
1. Kennedy suffered from serious back problems. When planning the parade procession through West Berlin on his 1963 trip, it was assumed that he would stand in the center of the three men in the back of the convertible. Unfortunately, Kennedy's back wouldn't allow him to stand up unbraced for that long, and instead he was relegated to a side seat where he could hold onto the car door for support.

2. Kennedy was fascinated by death, having been traumatized by the deaths of several family members while he was still a young boy. He would frequently ask party-goers and public officials how they would like to die. If they said that they would like to be shot so that they wouldn't suffer, he would generally ask them if they'd prefer to be shot by someone they knew or by an assassin. One of his favorite movies was a foreign film about a prime minister that receives notice that he is to be killed by an assassin by midnight that night. So he bunkers down in his headquarters and surrounds the building with armed guards. Once the clock strikes midnight, they all breathe a huge sigh of relief that nothing had happened. The guards retreat into the building and they all celebrate their success. Just then, the phone rings. The prime minister picks up the receiver...and is electrocuted.

3. Before he married Jackie O., Kennedy took a trip to meet Queen Elizabeth while his dad was stationed in London. After meeting her, he wrote a letter to his brother saying, "I met the Queen and Princess Anne today. I plan on returning to the palace tomorrow and wearing my smart new tweed pants. They fit tightly around my crotch and make me appear very becoming. I hope that they have the same effect on Anne. Will keep you posted."

4. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech given in Berlin was a totally last-minute add-in. His planning staff had been organizing the event for the previous three months, but Kennedy decided to scribble some notes into the margins of his index cards before going onstage. Once there, he spoke in front of the largest audience of his career, in the first major television presentation given in real time and in full color. For the first time ever, Berliners had the option of either going out to see the President's speech in person or watching it on their television sets at home at the same time it was going on. Ironically, many were vocally frustrated that they had to choose one or the other. Many translators poked fun at the President, saying that he mispronounced "Berliner" and it more closely resembled the German word for "jelly doughnut", meaning that he had really proclaimed "I am a jelly doughnut!" rather than "I am a Berliner!". Further analysis has proven this translation to be incorrect. While the Presidents' German can still fairly be described as crappy at best, at least he knew the difference between a human and a breakfast pastry.

There comes a time in everyone's life when you realize you've been putting up with a crappy situation for far too long, and it's up to you to decide if you want to stick it out anymore or if you want to do something to change it. Some of these such situations end in divorces, some end when you send your brats off to boarding school (aka boot camp), but, for me, my situation revamp has led to:


Read it again. Everrrrrrrr. Á laThe Sandlot. Speaking of which, here's a classic clip from that classic movie, and every little boy or lonely middle-aged man's dream.


So, any ideas what the BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT ever is? If you're my 14-year old cousin, it'd be a life-size poster of a scantily-clad Eva Longoria (I say poster because if he was to actually meet her in the flesh, he'd explode / spontaneously combust / be reduced to an atom-bomb-like conglomeration of 'excited' atoms. Chernobyl would seem like a sparkler in comparison to this one.)
  
Nope. This present is even better than that. Give up? I moved out. Yep. My perfect December 1st marked my glorious move into a new apartment allllllll to myself. :D :D :D :D

Ever since I've moved away from home, I've lived by myself more often than not. Of the traditional random-placement roommates, I've had one stellar one (Meggo), and one that continues to creep me out to this day just via the memories. She was my roommate when I moved to Iowa State my freshman year, selected only based on the proximity of our apellidos in the alphabet. From the letters we exchanged that summer, she seemed pretty cool. Once we got there, however, I soon found out that this girl was the biggest slob in the world with creepy habits to boot. When she did her laundry, she would hang her thongs from my bedposts to dry. If you were to open my fridge (note that was MY fridge), you'd find her collection of tube socks (this one came with the explanation that cool socks helped her feet not to sweat. Make sense...I guess...but come on...). And of course we can't forget about the deep bass, gravely smoker's voice waking you up every morning with a "Good morning, Lisa," that made me wake up in a panic and wonder what 50 year-old leather-clad biker dude I had brought back to my bunk the night before. It was either that or one of Marge's sisters, from The Simpsons, but I don't swing that way.

I could've put up with the roommate situation, of course. It wasn't a life-or-death catastrophe, but what was the point of grinning and bearing it when I could start flirting with the betrothed CA and get a new super single to open up by the end of the week? You have options, my friends! Use them!

It was the same deal with this most recent roommate arrangement. Sure, I could've stayed there and started hoarding razor blades in my growing rage and desire to slit my wrists, but it was doable. But WHY? I  put up with a lot of crap on a daily basis, more than my fair share if you ask me, but this was one situation that I could change. I discovered that it's not until you're to the point where you're spending your holidays doing homework and taking catnaps in your car in the parking lot of Boston Market (which does a killing on Thanksgiving meal deals, by the way) or pricing out local hotel rates just so that you don't have to go home for another second, that you really understand the value of relaxing enough to be able to, oh I dunno, sit on your own couch? (If you have a roommate, even if the couch is yours, this is most likely going to be located in 'shared territory' and therefore off-limits if you don't want to even see your roommate, let alone let her catch you off guard as you're in a relaxed state.) Or to leave the house in the morning and be 99.9999% certain that the place will look the same when you get home at the end of the day. No messes. Nothing broken. No unexpected visitors. But the best part by FAR is...






It's really pretty amazing how fast you can move when you want something done badly enough. In a nutshell, here's how my moving itinerary panned out:

Day 1: Feel like prisoner in your own home, even though you own the prison and all the goodies the guards are partaking in. Send ridiculously long and whiny emails to friends. Be told that I'm not alone and that "just be thankful you don't get your roommate's pubes on your soap like I do." True dat. 1 point for person X.

Day 1 to Day 2: Lock yourself in your room for around 20 hours to avoid others in house.

Day 2: Decide enough is enough and meet with apartment locator and your own apartment complex to discuss options.

Day 3 to Day 4: Shop online for apartments.

Day 5: Tell roommate moving out and witness the realization of the shallowness in its finest form.

Day 6 to Day 7: Focus on work and school and schedule appointments to visit apartments.

Day 7: Pack up kitchen supplies after roommate and guest make huge meal using all of your supplies.

Day 8: Meet with realtors and tour apartments. Pack remainder of items. Paint over kitchen, living room, entry, dining, and bathroom.

Day 9: Meet with two more apartment locators and put down payment on backup apartment.

Day 10: Sign release forms at current apartment, purchase new apartment, move carload of boxes to new place.

Day 11: Switch off all utilities at current apartment, have movers come to carry furniture away, move rest of smaller items in car, unload everything at new place, and sigh a huge contented sigh of bliss.

[Note also that the above events took place in between working 30 hours a week at my firm, school classes, finals week, and the erratic schedules of businesses being closed for Thanksgiving.]

So there you have it. A week and a half and not only do I have a new address, but I have freedom. Not to mention wood floors and built-ins. :) Without further ado,... I would love to show you my new place. But I can't. I made a movie of the new apartment, but unfortunately iMovie's on crack and doesn't want to import the sound. This is probably a lucky thing because I made it after my Diabetic Footwear Solutions team presented our kick-ass business plan for our new product Soccasins to a group of venture capitalists, and, well, we basically ruled. And then we went down to the bar in the basement of the AT&T Conference Center, and we celebrated. And I discovered that if you haven't had an alcoholic beverage in about two months that a single glass of wine can pack some serious punch. As we were leaving the bar, I told my teammate Seth that I almost felt like I should drink a glass of water before we left. He was like, "Are you serious? I feel like I need to order a beer for the road!" Long story short, we've decided that our next business venture will be to create some sort of sippy cup/to-go cup for alcoholic beverages. I have a feeling we're onto something... Maybe not something legal, but something nevertheless.

If I can only show you one picture, however, here's my favorite: the kitchen (This is from the demo apartment. Mine's still full of boxes of dishes to put away.)

 

On Tuesday, I returned from my much-anticipated visit to Washington, D.C. to visit my friend Stephen. I’d wanted to go back there to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum ever since I took Kris Van Der Lugt’s fabulous Holocaust course last fall at Iowa State. And now that I knew somebody living there, it gave me every reason to finally make the trek.

Visiting the Holocaust Museum was just one of many things that I’ve got on my list of things to accomplish before I die. A couple of weeks ago, I ticked another one off the list. I finally, FINALLY went to see Martin Sexton in concert. If you’re not familiar with his music, Martin Sexton does this sort of folksy, Americana type music with a really funky beat and awesome lyrics. And goodness knows I do love the lyrics. This is exactly why I intend of having Jason Mraz’s linguistically genius children.

Now we all know how awkward I am, and me going to that concert was nothing new in that department. Since my newly acclaimed hermit status means that I hardly go out anymore, going to a bar on a Sunday night felt pretty strange. And I can guarantee you with 99.9% certainty that I was the only gal there that night that had packed a book on the Haitian Occupation (love how that rhymes!) in her clutch handbag. But once the music started, I forgot all about my book or even how much my feet hurt, and I got completely lost in the music.

First up was an opener, an unknown guy with the most perfect teeth you have ever seen. His music was very similar to Martin Sexton’s style, but all I kept thinking about was how much I would give to be that microphone. Sigh…


Then the real act arrived. And I realized that, for all of the years that I had been listening to his music, I don’t think I had ever seen a photo of him. In fact, I had always pictured him as a tall, slender black man playing his guitar on the back porch of some Arkansas plantation. Boy was I in for a surprise when Jack Black’s stunt double showed up wearing a guitar!

(Yeah, I still have no idea how to rotate an image on here. Anybody know?)

I had gotten there early enough to secure a spot in the VERY FRONT ROW. Literally, if I had wanted to, I could’ve reached out and hugged him by the ankles. Granted, that would be extremely creepy, but I still thought about it. But then I imagined him falling into his amp and getting wrapped up in the cords and there would be sparks flying everywhere and one of them might fly up and catch the shirt of the lady next to me’s on fire and, if that burned up, well nobody wanted to see what she was like underneath…. So I decided against it.

A wise person once told me that good music isn’t about what it sounds like, but what it makes you feel. Deeeeeep. So I tried it out. Here’re the thoughts I thunked during Martin Sexton’s performance (in no particular order):

Why is there a random grape on the stage? Do they even sell grapes here? Do they even sell food at all? It could be an olive from somebody’s martini… No, no, that’s definitely a green grape. Bizarre. --- K, Martin’s starting to get a little sweaty now. Wouldn’t you want to double up on the Speedstick if you knew you were going to be on stage? --- What’s up with this lady standing next to me? Not only did she make a pass at the stage manager before Martin started and while her husband was at the bar getting her a drink, but now she’s making googly eyes at Martin and singing EVERY single word to his songs. How is that possible? Most of these words I’m sure he’s making up on the spot! Wait. Maybe she’s not even singing. It kinda looks more like a cross between having a heart attack or an orgasm. I feel sorry for her husband. --- Hmm, what’s next on the playlist? Oh man. Please don’t play that song. I love all of his music, but I’m not prepared to hear that one tonight. I know, I used to have that song as the only song on a CD, and I’d listen to it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, but I took that one out of my car for a reason. Please don’t play it. --- He always wondered why some of the trees would lose all of their leaves in the winter but others were able to hang on. He was just standing by the window, watching the snow come down. I asked him what he was doing, and he silently took me by the hand and led me outside. The last leaf had finally fallen. He had hung on through the end. Then everything was still…

You asked. I answered. Now don’t ask questions, k? Cool.

So seeing Martin Sexton was one thing on my to-do list. Another was going to the museum in D.C. In retrospect, the museum visit was just a mere mention on the list of the many, many cool things that I got to do and experience while I was in the land of our forefathers though, so let me just hit the highlights.

I flew in on Saturday and we headed to Stephen’s house to drop my things off:


Aight, so that’s actually a photo of the Smithsonian museum headquarters, but it’s very similar. ☺ Saturday night, we headed out to Chinatown (where, as I was informed, there aren’t actually any Chinese - just a handful of signs with Mandarin writing on them underneath the English names of the establishments). We went to this fabulous restaurant for dinner and then meandered our way through the National Mall. The Mall looks especially dramatic in the nighttime. There was some sort of grade school peace demonstration going on where different school groups had decorated tents that were set up on the Mall. But not very well – many of them had collapsed in the wind, and it looked more like a war zone than a peace demonstration. Kinda makes the point hit home even harder…


The next day, we rolled out of the house at the crack of 11 and hit the museum. I was giddy with anticipation – Stephen was pissed that he had forgotten to leave his pocket knife at home and it was confiscated by the security peeps at the entrance. I guess they were afraid he was going to slice and dice some informative display plaques or something? Still not sure on that one.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum, it’s divided into a handful of different stages. You begin with the pre-war descriptions of how things came to be. It’s difficult to understand in retrospect of why the Germans would go along with the whacked-out ideas of Aryan superiority and the need for increased “Living Space” if you don’t learn that it all happened in baby steps. The Holocaust didn’t happen overnight; it was a strategically designed long-term experiment that was nestled in centuries of anti-Semitic feelings and the German desperation at that time to have a fresh beginning after their embarrassing loss in the previous war. From there you go through the concentration camp phase and eventually into the aftermath of the war.


(Seriously, why is LiveJournal so gay??)

The museum is largely text-based, with only a handful of relics, most of which are on loan from other museums or are cast reproductions of the originals. The stage that takes you through the concentration camp phase houses the most interactive variety of installations. You can walk through a rail car that would have been crammed with hundreds of bodies on the devastating journeys between camps. Some of those bodies would have been dead and rotting, and others would be alive, but barely – wishing upon wishing for food or water, reaching their hands out the side of the car to gather snow or icicles  - anything for a taste of sustenance.

The museum is set up very wisely in that each of the television screens that show the more graphic footage are lowered behind four-foot walls so that small children can’t happen upon them unsupervised. However, while I was entranced in one of these that was showing still shots of the medical experiments (extreme air pressure, extraction of certain organs, the reaction of the human body to consumption of large quantities of salt water, etc.), I noticed a small boy of no more than 7 years standing next to me, also watching the screen. He was on his tip-toes and grasping the wall to hold himself up high enough to see over the top. I was just ready to tell him that he probably shouldn’t be watching this without a parent when I realized that his dad was standing just on the other side of him! Not a care in the world, as he let his son watch naked women and mutilated organs and brains displayed on cutting boards with the doctor flashing the camera a proud smile of accomplishment. What kind of a message is that sending? Stephen and I talked about this later, and we decided that there’s a certain age at which, younger than that, the kids aren’t going to have a clue what they’re looking at, but at and above that age, they need to be eased into that sort of imagery. It needs to come with in-depth, child-level explanations and take-home messages. This kid, in my opinion, was far too young to be seeing what he was seeing, and he was old enough to know exactly what he was looking at.

Unfortunately, the museum cannot control for all age-appropriate disseminations of information, however. Stephen and I watched a short movie at the museum that was introducing Adolf Hitler and explaining how he won over even the wisest of the German population into following his devilish schemes. The movie said that he was a charismatic leader who used his powerful capabilities of public relations to exchange ideas of pure evil to his public. At that, the lady sitting next to me leaned over to her young boy and said, “Just like Obama.”

We had eaten breakfast that morning, but by the time we had made it through the museum (it took us about five hours), we were depressed and dejected and tired and starving. In fact, we felt exactly (okay, so maybe we had an miniscule inclination of) how those prisoners must have felt. Also, since the museum is set up so that you start at the top of the building and wind your way down to the bottom, it feels like it’s getting progressively colder and colder (and more hopeless) as you go. Once you grab your coat and step outside into the cold November air, you kind of just want to cry.

Personally, I don’t see what the big deal was. The so-called prisoners got to take an extended vacation from their jobs to the countryside where they were provided with the essentials of life and given glamorous jobs like being tailors and cooks and shoemakers and professional landscapers. Those jobs sound like fun! Alright, I give. It was just plain depressing. Educational and enlightening, but depressing.  My aunt works with, for lack of a better term, “juvenile delinquents”, and one of them visited this museum on a recent trip to D.C. She said that the kids rarely get psyched up about anything, but this kid was raving up and down about the museum. Now that’s a sign of a successful educational venture.

The next day, Stephen had to go into work, so I was left to my own devices. First mission – master the bus system and the subway system. Success! I took the mass transit down to the Foggy Bottom stop to visit the historic Georgetown area. But when I came out of the subway station, I had no friggin’ clue where I was. It sure didn’t look like the Georgetown images I had seen online. Online there were photos of these quaint little brick rowhouses and a waterway lined with shops and restaurants. Here, I saw the university and lots of tall office buildings. And so, I meandered. And found some of the cutest houses ever, all decked out in their east-cost glory. But the best part was the leaves – leaves, everywhere! Sigh… I miss living in a place where the concept of “fall” actually exists.


I eventually found the area I was looking for and happened into a jewelry store. Hey, I figured I needed a souvenir of my visit. That idea was thrown out the window when I looked at the first price tag I came across - $5000…and that was for a pinkie ring. The lady asked if she could help me find something, but I said, “No, thanks. I’m just looking.” (And I promise I won’t touch a thing, lady. I swear. Do you need to see my driver’s license before I look around? Or should I just show myself out?)
There was a set of shelves there that caught my eye because all of the pieces on it were in the shape of diamond crowns – crown pins, brooches, crowns on necklaces, and chokers, and even, set atop a mannequin head, a full-sized diamond crowd. Down the shelf from the crown: a framed photo of the Miss America pageant wearing that exact same crown. Turns out that this store supplies all the contestants with their bling.

Looking around, there were also photos of Mrs. Bush wearing the crystal choker that was displayed next to the photo, photos of Mrs. Reagan, secretaries of state, vice presidential wives, and, my favorite, a framed photo at the door of what looked like Bill Clinton flashing a gang sign. He was actually showing off his diamond-studded cufflinks. ☺

For lunch that day, I took up a table at Nathan’s, a small pub in Georgetown where they had waitresses with thick, unplaceable accents and CNN blasting on the flatscreens over the bar. The news was reporting that Obama and his wife were to visit the White House that day to see Mr. and Mrs. Bush, and, I figured, most likely to arrange their new decorating scheme for when they move in January 20th. So, I did what any dedicated designer would do. I finished my meal and high-tailed it down Pennsylvania Avenue to go offer my insight. After all, the news showed that Mrs. Bush was wearing an orange dress and Obama’s wife an red one. They totally clashed. It was clear that they had no insights on color coordination. I was a little worried about my level of perceived professionalism – after all, I didn’t even have my paint cards or fabric swatches with me – but I knew this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And hopefully one with a handsome monetary reward…or at least a tax break.


When I got to the White House, it became clear that I wasn’t going to be going inside anytime soon. At least not until those pesky gargoyle-looking Secret Service men on the roof with their sniper rifles came down. The place was hopping with camera crews and tourists, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the president and president-elect as they came out of the house. Have you ever been in a situation where you’re surrounded by police and you have to bite your tongue from screaming, “BOMB!!!!” at the top of your lungs? I just wanted to see what they would do. Sure, they look all domineering and in-control now, but how would they react in a crisis? I decided that if they figured out it was me that had called out the false alarm, all I’d need to do is say that they had misunderstood me. I hadn’t said “Bomb!” I had said, “O-BOMB-A!” Silly Secret Service men.

I gotta tell ya though, the Obamas are in for a disappointment when they move into the White House. Little did I know, but the White House is the crappiest house on the block. Total crapshoot real estate. Sure, it occupies half of the block, but the other house there, the Eisenhower Administration Building, is wayyyyy nicer. The White House may have a yard, but the Eisenhower is probably 8 times as big, and has a much nicer color palette than white, white, and white. C’mon, Prez, let’s jazz it up a little, eh? You think that the Obamas will paint some of the outside of the White House brown? After all, it’s a little racist to call it the “White” House…

That night Stephen and I reunited and went to a church where he tutors kids once a week. Say it with me now, “Awwwwww…” Kinda makes me want to pinch his cheeks. ☺ Anyway, I got teamed up with Mercedes, an 11th grader, and I got owned on World History and Biology. Our outing to the church was completely unplanned, but, all-in-all, it was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip.

If I had to name what the absolute best part was, though, I think it would have to be more vague than just one singular event. Yes, I got to go to a museum that I’d been wanting to see for a long time. Yes, I got to visit the behind-the-scenes workshops at Goddard where they build the kick-ass vessels that go up into space. Yes, I got to see…well, everything. But the best part, BY FAR, was getting to see someone in their element. I’ve known Stephen for several years through school and clubs at Iowa State, but to really walk in the shoes of another, even if only for a few days, I feel like I know so much more about his world now. And, in my opinion, he is exactly where he needs to be to succeed. I wonder sometimes whether Texas really can offer me what I need to go where I want to go, and often my answer is “no.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place, but I don’t know if my future really lies in a state where they sit around and eat deep-fried pig’s ears. God I hope not. But, for Stephen, I can see him truly thriving in D.C., for as long as he chooses to stay there.


It’s kind of like when you’re in eighth grade, and you have to go on Job Shadow Day. Anybody remember that? At my school, they actually called it Take Your Daugher to Work Day, but then they got in trouble for promoting sexism, so they changed it. Before you went, you had to take a test that would select your ideal future profession based on your interests and skills. At the time that I took the test, I was still trying to choose between being an animator for Disney, being a teacher, illustrating children’s books, or running for President. None of those were my result. Nope, the test told me my ideal career would be to “install fence posts” for a living. All of my friends got jobs like “doctor”, “lawyer”… I got fence posts.

Of course that’s not the future I ended up choosing for myself, but, who knows, maybe I’ll hang onto it as a backup career. All I know is that I got to see someone first hand who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life, and moreover, he was doing it. Now that's commendable.

The more I think about this trip, the happier I am that I went. I got to see some amazing things, and I hope that I don’t forget them anytime soon. Thank you, Stephen, for a wonderful, wonderful weekend. Hopefully one day I can return the favor.


P.S. I also found out that I'm one inch taller than Martha Washington - SCORE!

You know, what they say about 'if you don't use it, you lose it' is really true. My Spanish, despite having spoken it/studied it for the past 13 years, is really going down the pooper. But, thanks to my handy dandy www.spanishdict.com, I know that the actual title I was going for for this entry was "Actualizaciones" - or "Updates". Good to know...

So, after my last gut-wrenching entry, I feel it necessary to give you an update on how the whole gumball-in-the-boob turned out, as well as to follow up on a couple of other happenings that were mentioned in here in earlier entries. First off, let me just get this off my chest (ahh...so punny) - the breast cancer scare turned out to be nothing more than that. Just a scare. WHEEEEE!!!!!!!! I never did have to get an ultrasound, just got a phone call from my surgeon on Monday saying that it wouldn't be necessary b/c she maintains that it's more than likely just scar tissue. Granted, there is still the chance that she doesn't know a cancerous lump from a doughnut hole, but for this case, I'm going to claim that ignorance is bliss and just accept her explanation with a really, really big smile. Like this: :-D. Furthermore, I found out that if you massage the scar tissue every day, then it will break down (maybe not completely, but at least some), and mine is now more akin to a spherical quarter than to the boulder I originally felt. Gotta love any health regimen that requires you to intimately touch yourself, eh? Or I guess you could use it as an excuse to have somebody else touch you. (Any takers?) Either way, I'll take this over leg lifts or cough syrup any day.

Secondly, and this one's mostly for my mom since I think she's about the only person interested, the sewing project is cruising along...if you consider the average speed of a tortoise with arthritis 'cruising'. Yesterday, for example, I woke up at 5 am and worked on it until bedtime. On the upside, it's giving me an opportunity to watch a lot of really great movies while my butt slowly welds itself to the bed. This weekend, I watched Cool Hand Luke (meh), The DaVinci Code, and American History X. These are all selections from my "Must-See Movie List". So far, I've got the following on the list - can  you think of any I should add?

The Shining
The Graduate
The Last Emperor
Citizen Kane
Passion of the Christ (to those of you who have seen it, am I going to understand ANY of this movie??)
Everything is Illuminated
Stranger than Fiction
City of God
12 Angry Men
Dr. Strangelove
Wall-E (yes, Ryan, I got it on there)
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Reservoir Dogs
No Country for Old Men
Fargo
The Last King of Scotland
Donnie Darko
Monster
Judgment at Nuremburg
Snatch
Trainspotting
Letters from Iwo Jima
Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels
Rosemary's Baby
Mystic River
Nightmare Before Christmas

Also, has anyone seen any of those movies and know that they suck? At 5 dollars a pop, thanks to Blockbuster's upped prices, I rather not waste my time on the crappy ones. But, anyhoo, after working my tail off on this thing for about three weeks, here's what I've got so far. $2 if you can tell me what it's supposed to be (WITHOUT looking back at the base photo that was posted earlier).


In other news, remember the "Get ready for Apple Dipping!!" card that I sent the family friend with cancer? Wasn't quite sure how that one was going to go over, but I finally got a wonderful Thank-You card back. It was clear that the inside was written by his wife, but he wrote on the back of the envelope "GREAT CARD! It made me laugh." And that made my day. :)

I have a stellar addition to add to our collection "Photos of People who are Stupider than I Are". This summer, I designed a total renovation of the first floor of the Perry Castañeda Library, the central library for the University of Texas. One of the stipulations of the project was that we had to accommodate two incoming sculptures that would be housed in the lobby of this floor, but nobody had seen them until they were installed. When they came in, we received an elated email from the deans of the Library saying that the artwork was on loan from MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), and would consequently serve as a major highlight to their space and to help them gain funding support from art lovers. Well, as it turns out, the two pieces that were installed in that space were only two in a large collection of pieces that were installed on campus. There ended up being five inside the library in all, two went to the LBJ Presidential Library, and a smattering of others ended up at various strategic points around campus.

Now as I understand it, these are just part of a traveling exhibit, on an extended loan from the Museum to the University. So they were not created with site-specific intentions, as they will ultimately move around to several different locations. HOWEVER, that being said, it is always necessary to take into consideration the location where these pieces will be installed, even if it is only temporary. When it came to the piece "Landmines", the committee that approves the public arts on campus had the brain-zinger that it should take a place of prime importance in front of the campus's signature tower. Kind of like Iowa State's campanile (which is only about a tenth the size of the tower - guess everything  really IS bigger in Texas), UT is centered around a tall belltower, and its image takes a forefront in much of the advertising for the university. So, with that in mind, here's a photo of the "Landmines" installed in front of the revered tower:



Its name has now been changed from "Landmines" an example of public art to "Pubic Art". Here's to taking the campus's pride and joy and turning it into a huge phallus. This has now become my new favorite spot on campus. Ahh...a little to the left...yeah, that's the spot... (By the way, those balls are made out of ionized steel - I dare you to try to bust those balls. Personally, I wouldn't touch 'em. They're all covered in little bumps. Must be some sort of an STD or something. Yikes.) So maybe it would be my good deed for the day to go out there and rub some ointment on "Pubic Art" sometime. See if we can't get those bumps to go away. Gotta be painful - they're starting to rust already!

Speaking of good deeds, there's something I wanted to share with y'all. Maybe you can help me out. I got this excellent letter from my mom a while back, and I think it's so great that it's worth sharing with anyone and everyone. Grab some tissues, 'cuz here we go:

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This is to all of my children: Matt, Scott, Lisa, Tara, and Heather

Dear Kids,

I would like to make a request. At this point in my life I feel that I have been blessed. I have food on the table, clothes on my back, a roof over my head, and love from those I care about. You are all always so generous at Christmas. This year I would like to do something a little different. If you are willing to play my game, here it is. Do not buy me a gift this year. Instead, I would like each of you to spend this time before Christmas doing random acts of kindness. I know you have all heard of this before and know that it does not need to include money or lots of time. All I ask is that you write down what it is you do and give it to me at Christmas time. I will not give them to anyone else to see, unless of course that is something that you wish to do. It is for my eyes and heart.

If you are still unsure of what I mean, some ideas may include: baking someone cookies or dinner if they are stressed, perhaps it is only a kind word or an ear when they need to talk, maybe you would pay the next guy in line's toll at the toll bridge, maybe give someone gloves or a hat when it is cold, help an elderly person carry their groceries, the ideas are endless. If you want, there are lots of websites with ideas galore. The idea is to do something to make someone's life happier, if only for a moment.

What you give to me can be as plain or fancy as you want. That part does not matter. I don't care if I get scribbles on a napkin. The idea is that you did it.

I hope that you chose to play. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Love, Mom and Mom-in-law

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After getting this letter in the mail, I too sent out a letter to all of my family members. It simply said, 

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Dear Family,

Wasn't that a lovely letter we got from Mom? Just so that there's no confusion, I wanted to clarify that I am not nearly as warm-hearted as she and will still be expecting oodles and oodles of expensive gifts. If you have any questions, I would also be happy to supply a list of ideas.

Love, Me

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Nah, not really. But I thought about it. My mom's pretty cool though, huh? So here's what I'm thinking. I've been "playing her game" for awhile now, but there's absolutely no reason why this needs to just be something within our family. Let her "game" be an inspiration for all of us to get our butts moving and to think about ways to help other people. If you follow through with anything and you want to be a part of the "game", feel free to send your list of completed random acts of kindness on to me, and I'll be happy to pass them onto my mom. She'd be tickled pink to know that you helped. Well, more like a blotchy red than pink, actually, 'cuz I can guarantee you that she'll be balling her eyes out. :) 

Happy pre-Holidays, everyone!

On October 22, someone (let me know if you want to be identified - I wasn't sure) wrote this entry in their live journal:

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This is a discussion question I wrote today for class...maybe some of you will ponder this:

Are more and more women made to feel like ticking time bombs? Anyone who pays any attention to the media knows that breast cancer awareness has seen a huge rise in media coverage. The idea of performing radical surgeries like mastectomies to prevent breast cancer or passing it on to future generations is gaining media attention as well. This idea attracts women who don’t have or may never get breast cancer. Breast cancer treatments are getting better…and more profitable. Are radical procedures like mastectomies just another way to broaden the market for those who make huge profits from breast cancer treatment? Is it another way to make women more dependent on medicine? Are the awareness and the advent of preventative surgeries truly genuine?

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I read it the other day and tried to post a reply. Maybe the system was down or just the system inside my blonde head, but I couldn't get it to work. I asked them why their journal was being so lame; they responded that it was probably because my comment was too lame; and then I told them that they'd be too lame to understand it anyways. So I refused to post it out of protest. Now I think I know why I wasn't able to post that day. It's been a long day. Let me tell you about it...

Having read this entry on Monday, my experience in volunteering at the Race for the Cure of Austin on Sunday was fresh in my mind. So that's what I was going to write about. This was the first year that I've ever not run in the race. I've done it several times in Moline, once in a small town outside of Denver, and then last year I had to do the Bix since the Minneapolis race was held before I moved there. Okay, so I guess that makes twice that I haven't run it.

The first time I did it was with my mom and my grandma, and we walked it. Bless her heart, but my grandma was so slow that even the ladies carrying the quilt that was supposed to mark the end of the race asked if they could pass us. By the time we got to the end, they were already picking up the traffic cones. No matter. We did it, and we had a blast.

The next couple of times that I did it were with Rae, and we ran in memory of her grandmother. We covered our "In memory of..." signs in happy stories about her. (Once I started volunteering at Gilda's Club, my signs became lists of single names - no stories - that would fill one or two of these papers.) Rae and I always ran the 5k, and the first year, I beat her. The second year, I made it to the finish slightly ahead and waited for her at the gates so that we could run through together. But no. As she came barreling through the last leg, she saw me and just kept on going full force. Her finish time of like .5 seconds ahead of me is something she'll never let me forget. Doesn't matter what actually happened, I suppose, she's got the paper proof on her side. Damn her anyway.

The next year, we got separated at some point during the race, and I found myself trotting along with a stray dog running along with me. Aww..., I thought. How cute is that? He was trucking right along too, a little weiner dog with those corks-for-legs just pounding the pavement. Then, he started to pull ahead. I tried to catch up with him, but he was too fast for me, and I had consumed too many twinkies prior to the race. I just got beat by a dog, I thought. Oh, but it was much worse. As he pulled ahead, I finally saw the other side of his body for the first time. And I realized that he was missing his right hind leg. Yeah, not only did I get beaten by a dog...I got beaten by a three-legged dog.

So maybe it was out of fear of a possible repeat humiliation, but this year, I decided to volunteer at the event instead. You don't have to pay an entrance fee, you get a free shirt,...it all sounded like a great idea until I learned that my shift would start at 5-freaking-30 in the morning. Seriously, why are volunteer events always held at ungodly hours? Don't they know I'm far more charitable after 10? (FYI - it's 6pm if you're hoping for money.)

Do you ever find yourself wondering what the South Austin shores of the Colorado River look like at 5:30 am? Why, yes, yes you do? Great! Allow me to illustrate:


Exciting, huh?

My official command at the race was "Finish Line Crowd Control." I guess they took one look at me and immediately noticed my bouncer-like physique and thought that I would be a great addition to a team in charge of holding back big burly men covered in sweat. Actually, it sound kinda sexy when you put it that way...but it wasn't. I did, however, have the grimacing look that helped scare people away. It comes naturally before 8am. I was in a pretty 'ugh' mood at having to get up at the buttcrack of dawn to pretend to push back crowds (when, ironically, all the statuesque, muscular volunteers were given the job of refilling the water troughs). Ooh, lemme help you with that big heavy water bottle there, Chuck. Don't want to pull a muscle... Gee, thanks for the hand, Larry. Couldn't have done it without ya, pal.

Things were dead until 7:45 or so (the race started at 8:30). Then the crowds started pouring in. I think they said there were something like 25,000 people in the race, plus all of the spectators and families that came to cheer their loved ones on. As I stood there guarding my vital fence and blocking any and all spectators from crossing the sacred ground of the finish line, I people watched. And I found myself looking at the families. The little girls with their mothers, still wearing bandanas to cover their bald heads. I saw the girls running with three or four signs on their backs, all names with the same last name. Relatives, each and every one of them. If you were one of these girls, how many people do you have to see die before you wonder when it's going to be your turn? Not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but when you least expect it, you too could find that lump that would change the rest of your life.

The blog entry that started all of this talk was in reference to a research project that the author is working on about the new test that's available to screen young women who are at a family risk for developing breast and/or cervical cancer. The test searches for a mutation of the BRCA gene that can give a fairly firm prediction of whether you will have trouble down the road. Based on the findings of this test, many women are choosing a preemptive approach by either having their breasts or ovaries removed before the cancer develops. The tricky part is that there's no guarantee, just because this test says that you're likely to develop a cancer, that you actually will. So some women are removing body parts when they don't have to, and others are faced with the decision of what to do with this god-like knowledge they've been given.

How would you live differently if you could see the future? Would these girls in the race with their entire family trees wilting to cancer undergo the test? If they tested positive, what would they do? Hold onto their organs until they finish having children? What if that comes too late? Should they even have children if they're prone to passing the gene along? What about those who have already had children? What are the consequences for their kids? Is it too early to have them tested? What if we find out that every female in our family is likely to develop the disease? The list of questions is endless...and heartbreaking. And I have no idea where one even begins in answering them.

On Tuesday night, I found myself wandering mindlessly through my apartment with my thoughts far, far away. I started to fantasize about being with someone (no names). We were making out outside of his door, kissing passionately, and then fumbled to open the door and squeeze inside, with our lips never separating. He shut the door, and pushed me up against it... It was hot, it was erotic, and it was steamy. And before I knew it, I was getting the ol' goosebumps. I tried to shake it off, but I couldn't. I reached my hand up and felt my chest, lightly at first, and then harder. And then...

WHAT THE FUCK.

On my right breast, I felt something hard. Now I know I got implants during my surgery this summer, but those are filled with saline. This felt more like the last time I attempted to make meatloaf and ended up with some sort of rubber the quality of a shoe sole. Minus the shoe tread, it was dead on. So this is what it feels like, I thought. I started shaking, and I felt around to find out how big it was. By my best guess, it was about 2 or 3 inches in diameter. It felt enormous. I didn't know what to do. It was too late to call anyone, so I put it out of my mind. I couldn't deal with that right then.

The next day, I did what any level-headed, clear-thinking adult would do: I bawled on my way to school, and then I called my mommy. I knew I would be able to call the surgeon's office right after my 8:30 standing meeting with my advisor, but I really wasn't so sure I wanted to hear what they would say. I made it through the meeting and pretended to care about thread color and composition, but I couldn't even figure out how to plug in my computer. I was retarded...and scared.

My mom told me that I had to call them, if nothing else just to give me some peace of mind. So I finally did. Do you have any idea how hard it is to have a private conversation about finding a lump in your breast on a college campus? I slinked around to an abandoned side of the Art building outside, and dialed the number. She was in with a patient. I left a message… And waited…

She called me back pretty quickly actually and, after asking a few questions, she said she was 90% sure that it was probably just scar tissue. But since I already had an appointment booked with the school gyno to give me the last of the HPV shots that Friday (BIG supporter of HPV prevention – inquire inside for details), she said to have them feel it just to make sure.

Whew. Relief. So I got through to Friday, and reported to the gyno office for my shot. “Miss, we don’t have any appointments booked for you today. What did you say you were here for?” “Huh? I’m supposed to get my third Gardasil shot today.” “Oh, you must be confused. You get that in the allergy department. Second floor.” “But… I thought I would be seeing a gynecologist today. I had another question for her.” “Well, you’ll just have to make another appointment then.” I may have been reassured when I talked to the surgeon, but that was only temporary, it was a Get out of Jail Free card until I heard it come from the lips of a real live doctor who had actually touched it. My reassurance was scheduled only to last until 11:00 that Friday afternoon – I wasn’t prepared to wait another two weeks until my next appointment could be scheduled!

Regretfully, and fretfully, I trudged down the escalator to get my shot. It was all over in about five minutes. I could’ve left then, but, at the same time, I couldn’t. I needed answers. I needed peace of mind. So I went back upstairs…and begged…and pleaded…and promised the delivery of three-fudge brownies. They let me in to see a nurse. VICTORY!

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not licensed to do breast exams. You can only do those with a nurse practitioner or a doctor. And all of them are busy right now. Would you like to make an appointment?” My god. The poor woman did not understand where I was coming from. She was sitting just two feet away, and all I wanted her to do was to lift that little arm up and slap her palm onto my breast and squeeze. Although I was tempted to grab her arm and do it myself, I thought better of it and cried instead. She got the hint. I needed to talk to somebody, and I wasn’t going to be making an appointment. She pulled some strings, and sent me back out to the waiting room while the doctor finished up with her other patient.

And so I sat. In my little upholstered chair – I wondered if they were from Rockford? Steelcase maybe? – and let my eyes wander around the room. Nothing really penetrated my brain. I saw the clock, but I couldn’t tell the time. I saw the tacky fall decorations. And I saw the covers of the magazines in the rack on the wall. But I couldn’t focus enough to even read the headlines. Another girl in the room was talking on her cell phone, and I marveled at her ability to be so calm when my organs were doing a Mexican hat dance behind my ribs.

Word must’ve spread inside the office, because the receptionist area just on the other side of the glass was slowly filling with nurses and assistants gathering around to send me forlorn, knowing glances. It felt as if they already knew my fate, but for some reason they weren’t authorized to tell me. But how could they? I thought. Nobody’s even touched it yet. Don’t give up on me yet!

Half an hour later, I was admitted into the room and told to put a gown on. The doctor would be in shortly. “Shortly” extended into another forty-five minute wait. No joke – I was counting the clicks of the clock at this point. I started to relax a little. In a little while, I’d have my answer and there wasn’t much I could do about it at that point. I read all of the articles on the bulletin board and learned that a woman only has about one 24-hour period each month that she is likely to conceive. I admired the tattered Longhorn socks stretched over the stirrups on the examining table and wondered if the bookstore that sold them ever imagined they’d end up in such a setting. Oh, if those socks could talk… When I spotted the box of free condoms each wrapped up in their individual Longhorn packaging, I decided that this was a classy joint. After all, ISU just passed ‘em out in their original wrapping. Not that I ever took them or anything…mom.

Finally, FINALLY the doctor came in. First words out of her mouth, “so what’re you so worried about”? Don’t toy with me now, lady, ‘cuz you’re gonna be eating those words if this turns out to be what I fear it might. She felt me up good and proper and said, “Yep. There it is.” That’s it? There it is?? There’s what? A cancerous lump? A gumball that I consumed whole and somehow lodged itself in my chest cavity? What?!?

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. My god, if it weren’t for fear of further tearing those adorable Longhorn stirrup socks, I would’ve lunged for her and demanded that she take that sigh back – or, at the very least, explain it. “Well, there’s definitely a lump.” No shit, Sherlock. “But I wouldn’t be worried that it’s cancerous. You’re too young for that. Old folks like me, we have to be worried about that. But it’s extremely rare in someone your age.” I thought back to all of the girls I had seen that weekend and the gals I had known from Gilda’s Club. Don’t tell me that cancer practices age discrimination. Part of me wishes that it did. But we all know that’s a load of shishkabobs. Cancer can strike no matter how old you are.

“My guess is that it’s either scar tissue, like you said, or a benign tumor. Either way, it wouldn’t be hazardous or a time-sensitive issue. Of course there’s always a chance that it could be cancer, but I really can’t tell that just through feeling it.” Was this lady for real? Did I truly just wait an hour and a half just to hear her say that she couldn’t give me any answers? “My recommendation would be to have you go back to the surgeon and let them feel it. They have a better idea of where they cut and where it would be reasonable to see scar tissue conglomerate. But in order for them to help you, I think that you should have an ultrasound before you go. That way, you can go over the results with them and see if it truly is cancerous or not.”

I was still shaking. She told me to stop. Sorry, but when you tell me that there’s a chance, even if it’s minute, that I may have something deadly growing just inches away from my heart, I’m bound to get a little freaked. Call me a pansy if you will, but I never said I was fearless. Just be glad the bed I was sitting on was still dry, lady. “Don’t be worried. You can be pissed that this has happened to you, but don’t be worried.”

So her plan of attack sounds logical, right? Until you realize that this would mean that I would STILL HAVE TO WAIT FOR SOME GODDAMN ANSWERS. She put a call into my surgeon to have them formally request the ultrasound, the surgeon said that she would look into it and call back on Monday, and I quietly thanked her and left. As I walked back through the reception area, the lowered eyes and sympathetic weak smiles of the other nurses followed me every step. I felt like I was leaving a vet’s office where I had just had my dog put to sleep. Only this time, it was me up on the cutting block.

So that’s where things are at right now. I’m liking the scar tissue theory, but I really won’t know for sure until I have the ultrasound next week. For now, I’m getting ready to go visit my friend Stephen in Washington, D.C. for the weekend, and I am seriously looking forward to a glorious break from this boob nonsense. I’m exhausted, and I need to be thinking about happy, uplifting things (no pun intended). Like the mounds of corpses we’ll be seeing at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example. Even seeing footage of small children ripped from their parents’ arms as they marched on to the gas chambers would be a welcome change from the thoughts that are running through my head right now.

Just as long as the displays at the museum don’t show any boobs, I’ll be okay through Monday. And, Stephen, if you cop a feel, don’t expect me to be alarmed. This ticking time bomb will just be not-so-patiently waiting for you to give her a diagnosis.

My first semester of graduate school ends on December 5th. Thus the countdown clock tells me I have but 32 days, 790 hours. Yikes.
Time's a-wastin', and I'm still not 100% sure what I'm doing for my final project. But I hear this journaling crap is supposed to be a good way to work out ideas, right? Meh, let's give it a shot...

One of the first assignments that we had for my design courses was to prepare a short, 10-minute presentation of work that we had done recently to introduce our classmates to the questions that we've been struggling with and where we were at in terms of skill-level. Well, I fessed up and showed this photo, among many others, with the disclaimer that I normally don't tell anyone about this secret hobby until I know them really, really well.

Once the dress was complete, the next phase was to throw a mini photoshoot and take some shots of my model (aka my classmate who graciously volunteered to the gig) wearing it. We ended up taking the majority of the shots inside the fabulous new AT&T Conference Center on the UT campus. Never in my life have I seen such beautiful hand-laid carpet, and it's EVERYWHERE!

After the dress project, I tooled around with some material studies in crocheting for awhile. Ever crocheted a coffee filter? I have. That and a piece of caution tape, ethernet cable, bubble wrap, sand, a belt, a measuring tape, toilet paper... the list goes on an on. I think I ended up crocheting around 50 items. Anyhoo, after that I returned to the medium that started this whole crazy quest into handicrafts - cross-stitch. I'll spare you the complicated details, but my next intention was to develop a technology that could reproduce photographic images into cross-stitch patterns while maintaining the same level of color definition and vibrancy as in the original.

This phase was inspired by my dream man, name unknown, but the guy who works at the Volant Embroidery Art Studio (the only one of its kind), In San Antonio. I've actually said probably less than 50 words to the guy, but any 20-something, latino, attractive, and seemingly heterosexual man who knows more about thread dyes than I do has got to be a one-in-a-million catch. At Volant, they recreate a wide variety of art pieces using this big honking machine that can create patterns that duplicate your original color within 7 shades. He explained to me that embroidery thread is made in every 15 shades on the color spectrum - that's the minimum difference required to be visible by the human eye. So to achieve a medium shade, they will sometimes combine one of the 15-shade colors on either side of the desired color to create the blending that matches the original color. Make sense? Didn't think so... That's why I'm sparing you the even more complicated stuff. It's just a bunch of graphs with numbers and RGB and CMYK and RYB values - nothing pretty. (The reason this photo's taken from outside is because when I returned to the museum on my most recent visit to San Antonio they were closed. And I was sad.) :(


So I got cranking on developing a pattern for an image that I found through Flickr, that of a brightly colored duck standing in the water. The test was to see if I could stitch something that would be able to differentiate between the original duck and the reflected duck so that it wouldn't seem like he was merely doubled on the page. Four hundred thread colors, 8 pixelated image variations, and countless attempts to code his colors, and all I was left with was a headache - and a big one at that. Did you realize that when you purchase 400 different colors of thread that you have to hand-code and hand-select each individual one at the craft store? Did you realize that you then have to take them up to the cash register where the clerk has to ring each one up individually? How about how you then have to go home and catalog each one and put them onto individual cards with their name and DMC registration number (as they correspond to the RGB color charts that others have hacked by purchasing DMC cards and doing a color match using a painter's tool)? Yeah, neither did I. My receipt is literally about 20 feet long. My advisor about had a heart attack when I plopped that one on his desk. Thinking about just framing it as is, saying it's "art", and calling it a day.


But enough about the duck (yes, it's making my head hurt just thinking about it again). Besides, what in the world was I going to do with a giant embroidered duck? Hang it in my house? I'd have to redo my decorating scheme just to incorporate this ginormous feathered friend. Besides...it's a duck! So my advisor wisely advised (he's an advisor, that's what he does) that I select a different image. At first, I said, "Ugh." thinking that this meant I had to start over from square one.

Instead, I did as a good student is supposed to, and I started my ardent search to re-select an image. I began by looking for an image that somehow represented color theory. Nada. I looked for something revolving around pixelization. Nope. I looked for something that showed dillution in color intensity. Not a thing. Well, I found stuff, but it didn't "grab" me. I like my projects to goose me and really get my engines revving.

And that's exactly what happened. Remember at the beginning of this elongated rant how I told you that I was embarrassed to do cross-stitch because everyone thinks that it's just a bunch of hulla-baloo about samplers and Native American eagle feathers and wolves howling at the moon? (I never understood that connection either. Aren't Native Americans supposed to be making pottery and dream catchers and weaving blankets? I have yet to see an Indian lady cross-stitching something out of a package she bought at Michael's Arts & Crafts.) Really, what's the difference between cross-stitch and any other medium that's used to reproduce an image - like painting or drawing? Nothing really. So why are we confined to these hokey images? The way I see it, there's absolutely no reason we should be.

Therefore, I present to you my selected image:


It's gruesome. It's horrific. And there's absolutely no reason why it can't be recreated in cross-stitch. Next, I purchased a Mac-based program called Stitches that can upload your photo and allows you to specify the number of colors to be used, the number of stitches per inch, etc., and then it spits out a pattern for you. This original photo has 277 colors in it, some just single specks. When I turned the color number down to 125, here's the pattern that was produced (note that this is less than half the size it would've been if we had stayed at true size):



Yeah, take a close look at that. That's the size of an extra-wide conference table. Remember that William Morris piece I showed you above that was only 2'x3.5'? That one took me two years to finish. So you better believe that the thought of me having to finish this one in the next five weeks is enough to start sweating bullets. (I gotta step up from this Dove deodorant crap...) Enter the wide world of cropping. Next mission was to find a way to crop this image in a way that still maintained the message intended for the photograph's audience. It needed to convey that there was a woman in anguish, desperately asking for handouts to support her two small children. This was the final choice:


Alright, I admit. I just didn't want to cross-stitch a young boy's penis. Just something about that that doesn't sit right, you know?

So this image is going to be stitched (and already has been started) onto burlap to reflect the textural quality of the clothing worn by the photograph subjects, as well as the harshness of their situation. While all you cool kids were out trick-or-treating or bobbing for apples in your sexy cop outfits, I was covered in these burlap threads, conjuring up the itchiness factor of the one summer I spent reorganizing boxes of insulation in my parents' warehouse. It's pleasant , lemme tell ya.

But I'm still freaking that I won't be able to get it all sewn. My next thought is to complete the arm/hand that I've already started and then figure out a way to transfer the rest of the image onto the burlap. I'd love to see it all displayed in a series of cropped images. The first might show a photograph of the cross-stitched arm sticking out with no context. I imagine it looking like a religious image of some sort. Next, we can show the rest of this image, the hand with the little boy. Now the viewer will realize what the woman is asking for money for. And, lastly, I'd like to reveal the entire image, displaying the horror in her face as well as the second unclothed child.

I hope that the color gradation that I have chosen does an adequate job of representing the photo-quality look I'm going for. I hope that the audience is challenged in their thinking of what cross-stitch is and how it can be used to communicate an image. And I also feel like this horrific photograph is something that needs to be seen. This sight is common in so much of the world, and yet so few of us ever actually see it if we're too hesitant to leave the country or to even pick up a copy of National Geographic. The photographer who took this shot probably congratulated himself on capturing an emotional moment on film. And that's exactly what the medium of photography is excellent for - capturing single moments. For this picture, I'm going to make it in a medium that shows it's worth taking the time to consider it for the long term. This lady and her sons will never know about our discussion here or whatever art piece is created from their terror, but we will know their story. And I can only hope that it stays ingrained in our minds for a long time to come.

[This is where I'm at right now. If you've got any feedback or ideas, please lemme know. I'm all ears!]

[D, this entry's for you. :) ]

Last weekend, a truly amazing thing happened to me. Are you ready for this? I made friends!! Well, in all actuality, I finally met friends that I had heard about (and, scarily enough, had heard plenty about me) over the last five years. I had planned on making a trip to San Antonio to visit some friends and former Honors peeps in town for the annual National Collegiate Honors Council Conference. What I didn't expect was my friend Nalena's news that her parents, who live in San Antonio, wanted to invite us all over for dinner. Let me set the scene here. I've been collecting dirt on Nalena (err, I've been friends with Nalena) ever since we first lived together in Freeman Hall, in exile while Barton was being renovated. She moved to the states a year after her parents did, all from Puerto Rico. Which is why I do, and always will, refer to her as "my favorite Puerto-freakin'-Rican." But despite the dozens of Spanglish phone calls I had eavesdropped on between Nalena and her mom, I had never met her folks. One of the other girls making the trip with me has a class with Nalena this semester, but she was a stranger to the other two. But to the big-hearted and open-doored Santiagos, that didn't make a lick of difference.

We slurped up some piña coladas, we chowed on plantain cups (tostones) filled with jumbo shrimp in stew sauce, we looked through baby pictures of Nalena, we even watched some home videos of the family on their vacations through geographical hotspots in Venezuela. I learned how the State Department works. I learned about Nalena's mamá's dream to open up her own restaurant (a venture I would whole-heartedly support). We drank mojitos. And we chit-chatted the night away. The next day, after the girls had flown home in the wee hours of the morning, a little hung-over and extremely sleepy, I went back to the Santiagos', and they took me on an outing to see a local lifestyle center that had just opened up. Then we had leftovers and more delightful chit-chat. I finally, and regretfully, went home the next day around 4pm.


Why am I reciting the details of our weekend together? Because it just felt so damn good to be around a family again. To be in a house. To hear their history and to expand my social circle with such wonderful people. We could've talked about boogers for all I cared (and we actually did at one point), and I would've still been a happy camper.

The adoption papers are in the mail. Sorry, Nalena, but you've been replaced. :)

So all of this has got me thinking about starting over, in the social realm. The beauty of being a lifetime student (alright, 5 years, but it still felt like I was ready to apply for my AARP card upon graduation) at Iowa State was that I got to watch so many of my fellow classmates trudge through the adjustment of college-kegger-and-ultimate-frisbee-club-life to  oh-my-god-I'm-a-yuppy-at-this-huge-corporation-and-all-of-my-coworkers-are-asking-me-to-babysit-their-kids. The complaint I heard more than anything else from these whiny babies was that they were never in contact with other people their own age. Generally, my conscientious advice to these titty babies (it's my mom's term) was to "suck it up / grow some balls and stop feeling sorry for yourself." (Hey, I'll tell you right now that if you're looking for a shoulder to cry on, these bony shoulders are gonna poke you in the eye, and you'll be lucky if I give you a used napkin to snot on.)

Anyway, at the risk of admitting I was wrong (NEVER!), I've found myself standing in those very same shoes, and I'm looking back at some of the "suck it up" advice I dolled out. Now the vast majority of the people I heard making these claims hadn't even moved out of the zip code, so they really didn't have anything to complain about, but when you're moving to a city/state/country where you could count the number of people you know on a foot with webbed toes, you truly do have to start over. This can be both a great opportunity to reinvent yourself - "Did I tell you that I used to be a bikini model? Yeah, this lackluster appearance is simply the result of that fire incident a few years ago. What incident? Oh you know, when I ran into that orphanage and managed to valiantly balance 20 small children in my arms (with three sitting on my head) and somehow, somehow, they all survived. You should've seen it - it was a miracle in the making. I'm just glad I was in the right place at the right time." Sigh... It can also be pretty tricky though. I mean, one day, you can be a former bikini model and another a former geneticist right on the brink of a cancer cure when you got called into active duty for your Red Cross service, and, before you know it, the well of alter-egos has run dry.

A good friend from college graduated recently and moved back home to BF Small Town, Nowhere. She took it as a bad sign that everyone between high school graduation age and those ready to move back by the parents so that they could help babysit their kids had skipped town. She felt lonely and severely lacking in peer companionship. I gave her some ideas - tap into the hubbub of the nearby college town scene, take classes at a community college, ask around her work to see if she could tag along to social functions where pre-stretch-marked folks would be in attendance, etc. And from what I've heard, she's starting to establish herself pretty dang well. Two points!

The truth is that it doesn't matter if you move to a town of population -8 or if you now reside in a bustling metropolis of only those young enough to still be carded when the order a white russian (the drink, not a racist remark about our friends in the Soviet Union). It really comes down to your level of effort and just sheer dumb luck. For example, take the tale of me and my all-time childhood best friend Rae. As I tell the story (ask her and you'll get a different version), we met when we were four when my mom had the bright idea to dump me and one of my brothers off at a Sunday School one day. I got put next to Rae during craft time and decided that I just plain didn't want to decorate my milk carton like a church like we were supposed to. Instead, I decided to make mine into a Showbiz Pizza (predecessor to the Chuck E. Cheese), and Rae and I met when she helped me write "Pizza" in the neon lights in the windows. When my mom came back at the end of the day, the lady asked her not to bring us back.

[Sidenote: This basic pattern would be repeated several years later when I went to a Sunday School session at a Quaker church with Rachel. They asked me why we celebrated Easter. I of course had no clue, so I guessed that it was Jesus's birthday. They asked me not to come back... And then Casey Jones stole my Keebler cookies. Since then, I've also been unofficially banned from a Presbyterian church in Ames (not that I really wanted to be there in the first place), a Jehova's Witness meeting hall in Colorado (by sheer association), and a Catholic church (also in Ames). I complained that the confirmation gowns reminded me of the costumes from "Bride of Chucky." My life goal is to hit the rest of the big ones: Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim, Episcopalian, etc. Let me know if you've got one up for grabs.]

It's been the same way with most of my really good friends. I met Meggo while I was wearing a towel and her bed was covered in beer cases. I met Cass when she stole my beloved red chair on picture day in Kindergarten. When I first met Darin, I was surprised that she was a girl (hey, you would too if you had only heard the name). Those are just a few examples. The rest are just as random. So my question is, is this the only way friendships, true friendships, can be founded? Like Rae's and mine - through sheer dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right desire to recreate a pizza joint? Is it a prerequisite to have a little fairy dust or special sauce to make a friendship work? Can planned methods, like ice-breakers or speed dating, work? What about online services?

One night last year, Meggo and I decided we desperately needed to escape the oppressiveness of the Concentration Camp Barton and interact with people. She was dating and so was I, but she astutely (and rightfully so) had realized that my boyfriend was acting like a turd and that I should expand my social circle to include people who, well, weren't him. So we donned our cutesy duds and headed to the nightlife of Des Moines. We made it as far as Ankeny when we realized we had no plan for where we were headed. So we ended up eating dinner at Chili's right there next to the interstate, and, by the time we had polished off our plates, realized we still hadn't formulated a plan for the rest of the evening. She was too young to go to a bar or dance club, there weren't any movies playing that we wanted to see, the mall was already closed for the night, and she refused to help me flamingo my teacher's house who had given me a crappy grade on a paper that day. So, lacking for a better idea, we headed back home. As she changed her clothes, she convinced me to sign up for eHarmony and match.com, just to see what it was like. So I did and promptly found out that you have to pay like $60 to see anything. ("Review your matches for free" my ass.) So that didn't pan out, but the automatic emails I get sent on "10 Things That are Never Appropriate to Ask on a First Date" never cease to entertain. Meggo eventually went upstairs to hang out with friends, and I vacuumed...in my dress, thinking that maybe I should shell out the $60 and take a photo of me vacuuming in my heels as my profile picture.


But a few weeks ago, I was reintroduced to the concept of planned friendships. The JB and Sandy show, a radio station that I listen to religiously, was hosting their annual BFF Party. Inspired by their wives who said they had "outgrown" their friends (as in one moved/got married/became a crack addict/etc.). The party was to be an opportunity for girls to meet up at this rooftop lounge (very swanky) and meet new friends. ¡Perfecto!

One girl called into the show and won a ticket to the BFF Party. Then she says, "Can I bring a friend with me?"
JB: "Woah. A friend? That's contrary to the whole point of the party..."
Girl: "Well, it's not really a 'friend'..."
Sandy: "Oh... Mother-in-law?"
Girl: "Yeah."
Sandy: "And she's bugging the shit out of you, isn't she?"
Girl: "Yeah."
JB: "Bring her along."

I too secured my entrada to the fiesta. That morning, I tried to pretty myself up to appeal to my new friends' keenness to high style. Unfortunately, I got tied up working on a video editing project at school. So instead of tipping back a hot toddy in my stilettos with my new Austin-based BFF, I spent the night with a bunch of red-eyed film editors in a computer lab with a projection screen showing "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Chainsaws...budding friendships...meh, that's a fair trade-off.

It's not like I don't have friends. According to the all-knowing Facebook, I've got 609 of 'em. And I've certainly got people I can call and pester as I please, but I'm finding that, at heart, I pretty much prefer to be a loner. Or, better said, I prefer to be a selective people person. My mom (aka my preschool teacher) says that I would commonly go off into a corner to get some peace and quiet to do my own thing. Other, pure innocent kids would come over and sit next to me. That'd be fine. But if they'd start asking me questions about what I was doing, they'd be hard-pressed to get an answer. And if they dared to "borrow" one of my crayons, ooh, buddy... Watch out, kid. Try it again, and I'll bite your f-ing finger off.

I can meet people when I want to and need to, but you've got to realize that there are risks to interacting with people you don't know, and you don't know if they can be trusted. I met a guy the other day, actually, and he even gave me his business card and told me to give him a call. Sweet, right? HA. All you jealous suitors out there, don't get too worked up. Read on...

That day, I went out to lunch with my coworkers. While there, I received the following forwarded email (delivered around 12:30):

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Fwd: Fw: FW: frightening/Read these words]

Share with your sisters, daughters, nieces, mothers, and female friends. This Incident has been confirmed. In Katy , TX, a man came over and offered his services as a painter to a female putting gas in her car and left his card. She said no, but accepted his card out of kindness and got in the car. The man then got into a car driven by another gentleman. As the lady left the service station, she saw the men following her out of the station at the same time. Almost immediately, she started to feel dizzy and could not catch her breath. She tried to open the window and realized that the odor was on her hand; the same hand which accepted the card from the gentleman at the gas station. She then noticed the men were immediately behind her and she felt she needed to do something at that moment. She drove into the first driveway and began to honk her horn repeatedly to ask for help. The men drove away but the lady still felt pretty bad for several minutes after she could finally catch her breath. Apparently, there was a substance on the card that could have seriously injured her. This drug is called 'BURUNDANGA' and it is used by people who wish to incapacitate a victim in order to steal from or take advantage of them. This drug is four times more dangerous than the date rape drug and is transferable on simple cards. So take heed and make sure you don't accept cards at any given time alone or from someone on the streets. This applies to those making house calls and slipping you a card when they offer their services.

PLEASE SEND THIS E-MAIL ALERT TO EVERY FEMALE YOU KNOW

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Now, who knows if this is actually true, right? As far as I know, it's only for entertainment value, just like those emails that Tara sends me outlining her ambitions to go from upper middle-class to white trash, trading in her Lexus for a riding lawnmower suped up with a cupholder and umbrella (for inclimate weather). But check out what happened next...

We returned from lunch around 1:30, and as I had class at 2, I gathered up my things and took off for school. Realizing I was practically driving on fumes, I pulled into a gas station at 10th and Lamar (the one across from the Tavern). The station's a tight little bugger, so when I was filling up my tank and a big work truck pulled in the drive and looked like he was going to try to squeeze past my car, I gave him the stink eye. Instead, he parked in front of my car and got out. "Can you still get out?" he asked. "Yeah, I'm fine. I just thought you were going to try to pass my car, and I don't think there's enough room for both of us." "Oh, no, no. Have a nice day then." "Yeah, you too." The guy started walking towards the station. Then he stopped, turned around, and looked at me. "Oh yeah," he said. "I've got a business card in my truck." Ok..., I thought. He retrieved and handed me his card and said that he does interior and exterior house painting. I told him I'm an architect, so maybe I'll give him a call sometime. "That'd be great," he said with a wink. Then he went inside.


Now I ask you - HOW FREAKY IS THAT? Not an hour after receiving that email, I too found myself at a gas station in Texas where I randomly was approached by a guy who claimed to be a painter who, without request, gave me his business card. And another thing, which I didn't realize until after the incident, the guy's clothes were SPOTLESS. Now I've known quite a few painters in my day, and I have never ever seen one without at least a little paint splatter on their gear. Maybe if it was his first day of work or something, but come on. How likely is that? I took the card and drove to school with the windows down, just in case. He didn't follow me. So I suppose it had to have just been a coincidence, but, seriously, what're the chances???

One of the first things I did when I moved here was to make my house visitor-ready. I've got the 800 thread-count sheet set, the $25 guest towels, and the cupboards are stocked with wine glasses. The 'Voice' from "Field of Dreams" told me that if I built it, they would come. Fat load of good that advice turned out to be. So what's the problem? Well, for example, the last person I begged to come visit me is afraid of heights, so for him it's a 19-hour car trip or nothing. It'd be lovely, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Give him some sleeping pills and some scotch and stick him on an airplane unconscious, perhaps. But I think that might be against the law. I dunno. I'll check and get back to you.

I even tried reinventing myself a little. My former coworker Chris noted that I'm blonde. He's very observant.  But this got me thinking - maybe all of my potential friends see the blonde and think I'm a total airhead. And maybe they're right, but that's beside the point. This is about first impressions. So, much to Ryan's chagrin, I went brunette. Which, despite its $100+ pricetag at the Aveda salon has pretty much bleached out already. I just can't escape my blondeness. It's here to stay.


So that's half of it - it's just tricky to make sense of the logistical nightmare. And the other half is that maybe all this fuss is really all for naught. Maybe you can't plan who your next friend will be any better than you can predetermine the doctor's prognosis of that mysterious rash you've developed. All I know is that one of my classmates is from China, and she had a friend over to her house the other day that speaks Korean. So if a Chinese girl who doesn't speak much English managed to befriend a Korean girl who also doesn't speak much English, then there's got to be hope for a slightly entertaining girl who at least speaks the national language...right? If all else fails, I think I'll give that painter a call and ask him if he's got any extra tainted business cards lying around. Friends have got to be much more manageable when they're unconscious...

Le Corbusier's Furniture Designer Denied Exhibition
   
THE PARISIAN PRESS
PARIS, L. W., October 10 - (AP) ~ The proposed exhibition for Le Corbusier's former furniture designer has been revoked.

Charlotte Perriand was employed by the great Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition was planned to show images of her steel and glass furniture to the Parisian public, many of whom purchased the items for their homes and workplaces in recent decades.

The issue arose last Saturday, museum director Chehalis says, when the exhibit was discussed with a group of frequent museum patrons. "They did not recognize her name nor her work until I explained she was employed by Le Corbusier," Chehalis explained. "There are far too many talented artists out there who the public would rally behind having an exhibition to spend our wall space on an unknown female past her prime."

The exhibition has been remarketed as a showing of "Le Corbusier's Furniture Designer", and so far has proven to be a much greater success.

Warning: This entry contains more four-letter words than the average human brain can modestly absorb. This entry is not suited for small children. But, then again, most of them aren't. If you are afraid of heights and begin to feel squeamish at any time, just take a deep breath, look around, and realize that you're still sitting at your desk...and that you're a moron. Enjoy.


"Why would you want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" my mom asked.

"To make use of a perfectly good parachute."

But as it turns out, not all airplanes are "perfectly good". Case in point, the one at the entrance to Skydive San Marcos, where my dad and I took the plunge last weekend:

I spent a good deal of this past week frantically devouring (or attempting to at least) and reviewing Melvyn P. Leffler's For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. If you're not familiar with the 500 page monstrosity (in other words, you actually have a life), it covers the secret and private conversations between the economic power men of the era. Acclaimed international historian Leffler does a superb job of painting portraits of all of the major players involved in the Cold War discussions - from Khrushchev to Kennedy and back again. For your Marxist-Leninist pleasure, I give you a random smattering of Stalin factoids, gracias a both Leffler and John Lewis Gaddis's "Presidential Address: The Tragedy of Cold War History":

Stalin, we are told, once kept a parrot in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The Soviet leader had the habit of pacing up and down in his rooms for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding about God knows what, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot, having observed this many times, tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. Stalin immediately responded by reaching into the cage and crushing the parrot's head with his pipe, instantly killing it.

Stalin once was on vacation in the Crimea, and was kept awake during the night by a barking dog. "Shoot it," he told his guards. "But Josef Vissarionovich," they reported the next morning, "the dog is a seeing-eye dog, and it belongs to a blind peasant." "Shoot the dog," Stalin commanded, "and send the peasant to the Gulag."

Stalin once had a wife - actually his second wife - who had an independent mind, and who was becoming concerned about the repressiveness of his policies. After she argued with him about this one night, either he shot and killed her, or she shot and killed herself. (My money's going on option uno.)

On 1 March 1953, at his dacha outside of Moscow, Stalin did not appear at his customary midday time. His servants and bodyguards grew worried as the hours passed and not a sound was heard. They did not dare enter his quarters without being summoned. At 6:30pm a light went on in Stalin's room and they breathed a sigh of relief, but then nothing more was heard. The hours ticked away. Anxiety rose. At 11:00pm, after a nervous discussion, one of the guards gathered the day's mail and walked to a small dining area where Stalin often slept on a tiny cot. He found the aged dictator lying on the carpet in pajama pants and a white undershirt. His pants were wet with urine. He was barely conscious. When he saw the guard, Stalin weakly raised his hand but could not speak. "His eyes expressed horror and fear and were full of pleading." His servants lifted him onto a sofa. They were terrified. Too frightened to telephone for medical care because Stalin had recently charged his doctors with plotting to kill the Kremlin's top leaders, they tried to contact Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, and Georgi Malenkov, Stalin's principal lieutenant. It was nighttime, and Beria could not be found. He was carousing somewhere in Moscow with his latest mistress. Malenkov would not do anything without Beria. So more time elapsed. Nobody would call the doctors unless Beria approved. Finally, Beria, plainly drunk, emerged, and he and Malenkov drove to the dacha together. Malenkov removed his new shoes so they would not squeak as the two men approached their now unconscious boss. Seeing him asleep and snoring on the sofa, Beria pretended that nothing was wrong. "What do you mean...starting a panic?" he shouted at a guard. As Stalin lay dying, still without medical care, Beria and Malenkov drove back to the Kremlin early in the morning of 2 March and met with Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow boss of the Communist Party, and Nikolai Bulganin, deputy chair of the Council of Ministers and former civilian head of the armed forced. We do not know what they said to one another, but they probably began to discuss the division of power in the absence of Stalin. Stalin remained without medical care until 9am the following morning.

And here's a gem I found online: After his death in 1924, Stalin wanted to immortalize Lenin in part to endear himself to the masses. Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Voroblov were entrusted with the task of preserving V. I. Lenin for all time. Starting with glycerin and acetate, the team marinated Lenin for several days. Over the course of a number of years, they developed a succeessful embalming technique - partly out of fear that they would be shipped off to Siberia if they failed to keep Lenin looking alive in his Kremlin Wall mausoleum.

Stalin was so taken by their success, he ordered that he too be embalmed just like Lenin. So artful were the Soviet embalmers that other communist heads got the embalming craze under their skin (or actually in their veins to be more precise). North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, North Korean's Kim II Sung, and Angola's Agostino Neto all employed the Soviet technique and still can be viewed and admired for their contributions to the world.  However, the embalming technique and recipe is still held as secretly as is the recipe for Coke.

So if those instances don't prove that Stalin's a menace and creepy to the core, I don't know what would. Oh wait, maybe the fact that his commands determined the deaths of millions of people? And the grave starvation and poverty of millions of others? Well there's that too I suppose... But if these vignettes weren't enough of a kicker, Leffler's real impact came in how convincing he was at explaining that Stalin was, despite what you may have heard, not all bad. Leffler tells us that it was indeed Stalin who initiated many of the peace treaty talks, tried to make everyone "just get along". In fact, he was a proponent of peace and tranquility! Whaa?!? As I read this book, I actually bought into it, found myself robotically nodding along with the text. What was wrong with me?? Here I was, thinking about Stalin as a good, warm-hearted gentleman? My god.

Leffler, no doubt, is a superb writer. But he makes me angry, because he challenged my better judgment. He turned my previous understanding of Stalin as a Hitler-esque demon on end and shook it, just for good measure. This isn't the only incident of such craziness that I've witnessed this past week either. My coworker was telling me about a friend of hers who is an author that writes fictional novels based on true stories of dysfunctional families. Through my personal acquaintances as well as my counseling experience in psychology, I've met some real dandies, and I eagerly shared their stories with her to help her gain some material for her next piece. I was feeling pretty good, pretty knowledgeable. But then I heard on the radio one that takes the cake. By far. A teenager in Colorado (I believe) hired a hit man to kill his mother. He was well aware that his mom had a large inheritance to leave him, and he was eager to collect the bulging bank account. And what was he planning on spending the money on you ask? He wanted to buy his girlfriend a boob job.

Find your seats, boys and girls. Find your seats! Class is now in session. I'd like you all to take out a single sheet of paper and a pencil and follow along.

Number your paper 1-3, please. Bobby, I'm serious. Please stop throwing your yo-yo at Patricia, and pay attention. Everyone ready? Good.

1. Please write down the last total stranger that you encountered that deserved a serious smack-down. A good ol' wallop to the side of the noggin. Maybe it was that pesky Bluetooth-talkin' Range Rover driver that snagged the last parking spot in the lot and who mysteriously appeared to be deaf, as they didn't respond to your incessant horn honking. Or maybe it was that gal at the bar the other night. You know, the one who's hip gyrations against Mr. Wearing-a-Wedding-Ring (and she wasn't) caused her to spill her drink down the front of your trousers. Then you had to spend the rest of the night going, "Hi, I'm Sam. Me and my soggy pants are pleased to meet you."

My #1 came last weekend. Remember how I said I was going bra shopping? Well, first I hit up the much-anticipated boutique Underwear. Gorgeous, but too fancy for everyday wear. Next I searched a whole slough of stores in San Marcos, but still I came up virtually empty-handed. Finally, I relented and joined the ranks of the common underwear-wearing public and went to Victoria's Secret. VS is set up with their fancy frills up front, push-ups and garter belts in the middle, and the basics in the back. Since I've been waiting for months to make this purchase, I wanted to treat myself to something pretty. There were several cute ones in the front of the store, but, upon an intense search, I couldn't find my size. In ANY of them. I snagged a saleslady and asked her what the deal was. "Do they have the rest in the back or in a drawer somewhere?" "No, these are our fashion bras." "So?" "So they only come in fashionable sizes, ma'am." Well thank God she threw in the "ma'am"; otherwise I'd be insulted... I responded with a look something akin to this:


My future purchases will go to Soma. I really don't know why it is, but I have a knack for attracting the absolute worst salespeople. I draw them to me like flypaper. If I walk into a store, I'm sure to get the guy who's been standing in the back wiping his boogers on the sweater rack. If there's a saleslady whose PMS is reaching a lifetime high, she makes a direct beeline in my general direction. Thanks so much.

2. Next, write down one piece of technology that you deem completely worthless. You know, the type where the inventor should be drug into an alley somewhere and receive what's comin' to him. As an example, I give you The Self-Adhesive Chest Wig:

Enter exhibit A, another entry in the Photos of People who are Stupider Than I Are:Oh, yes, my friends. What you see here is a package that I attempted to mail using the Automated Postage Center at my local USPS. The machine weighs your package and then spits out the amount of postage required to send it. So everything's supposed to be hunky-dory, until the package was returned to me saying that it didn't have sufficient postage on it. It was off by about $5.

Here's what I was trying to send:The other day I was having a disagreement of sorts with someone long-distance. I was sitting there with tears streaming down my cheeks. When I told him this, he responded by saying, "You are a tremendously good person, Lisa, you know that? I always picture you smiling when I think of you.  Just thought I'd let you know." Argument over. I melted. He won. And then he asked for fifty bucks. (Not really.)

Now, you and I both know this is a load of crap. But it's one that I'm going to gladly take and stick in my pocket and pull it out whenever I need a boost. Even if this is the first or second entry you've ever read, you know that I'm a cynic to the core, a regular Debbie Downer, a Pessimistic Patty. I was talking to my brother the other day, and we were hypothesizing what it would be like if I gave up my architecture gig and took a job at Taco Bell. I thought this was a great idea. He thought it was because I'd be able to walk in there and show them how to improve their system, give 'em a major boost. "No," I said. "That idea hadn't even entered my mind. I'd work there because I could go home at the end of the day knowing that I wasn't going home to my three out-of-wedlock children all conceived through different fathers like my coworkers." "I can't believe you just said that." It's true.

But in light of this compliment, I think it's time to turn over a new stone. Nothing but positivity for the rest of this entry. I'm takin' a big ol' ray of sunshine and shoving it up my as* until I spit out nothing but happiness.

I left Iowa State with a whole lotta wounds that needed to be healed. And some of them are still healing and will be for quite some time. One of these was my complete confusion over how I deserved to be treated. We're not talking being fanned with palm fronds and hand-fed peeled grapes here, we're talking basic human decency. And now, I'm demanding it. Case in point, I went back to that Victoria's Secret and talked to the manager. She was appalled at what Miss Tongue-in-Cheek sassy gal had said, and gave me $40 in return for my trouble. Thank you, VS lady.

Next up, I've got a long list of things on my To-Do list (note that those were "things", not "guys" like the lists we made in high school, girls) that I've been putting off for far too long. So, next weekend, at 10am on October the 4th, I'm going skydiving. Here's a preview:

Meggo, this entry's for you.

We all know what last Thursday, September 11th commemorated. It doesn't need repeating. My advice: remember, but do not dwell. Be resilient. But despite what your pocket calendars say, Friday, September 12th also marked a momentous occasion. Yes, it was the day that JFK married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in 1953 and, even more importantly, the "Taxi" pilot episode debuted on TV on that day in 1978. But besides that, it was, I am extremely proud to say, my last visit to the doctor. Say it with me now... "YIPPEEE!!!!!!!"

That said, I am so friggin' ecstatic to be winding up with this ordeal that it's time to come clean to those of you who either haven't been in the loop about what's going on or, more likely, have been coming to your own conclusions. Let's set the record straight once and for all so that no one again has to summon up the courage to ask me questions like, "So...am I going to recognize you when you're all done with this?" or "Um...is everything like...you know...in the right...no, what I mean to say is...does it look...how you want it?" In answer to the first question, unless you only recognize me by my naked breasts or you have gone blind in the last few months, yes. As for the second, it's not quite there, but soon. Very soon.

On June 22nd, I had a mastopexy (breast lift) operation with augmentation. Basically they cut off a triangular chunk of skin about the size of the palm of your hand and then inserted a small saline implant to make up for the volume that was exhausted. The nipple was moved about four inches north. Then they cinched everything up with a purse-like stitch. Let me make three things very clear: [1] This was not done out of vanity. [2] I did not have a "boob job". In fact, I'm the same size I was before (36D), just perkier. [3] Plastic or reconstructive surgery, no matter what you've seen on Dr.90210 or Nip Tuck, is no walk in the park. It's been quite the adventure, and I've learned a lot of really cool things along the way. And, now, I get to pass them on to you. I had my reservations about talking about this in the public sphere, but, I figure, if Jamie Lee Curtis, a well-respected actress in Hollywood who was born with the internal reproductive organs of a man and the external organs of a female is brave enough to pose on a magazine cover in her sports bra and boy shorts in her mid-forties, then who am I to act modest about talking about my boobies? Besides, if any of you or someone you know are considering having a surgery, then by all means, I'm here for 'em.

So why did I have it? Well, I'm a pretty crappy swimmer so I thought it'd be a good idea to sew in some flotation devices into my chest. Sure beats the embarrassment of wearing water wings to the public pool. I tried to stick to one of those "noodles", but every time I see someone floating on one, it just comes across as a phallic flotation device and I can't take the 65-year-old woman using it seriously anymore.

No, in all reality, it was because I went from this:
to this:

When I plan out what to write in these entries, I usually try to find a reoccurring theme from what I've done/saw the previous week. That method didn't exactly pan out this time, because, well, I just don't really know what to do with the one thing I saw repeatedly. How does one write an entry about seeing two homeless, alcoholic Mexican men, on two separate occasions, throbbing in pain and rolling around on the ground on the side of the road, both going through withdrawal symptoms and possible heatstroke in the 100+ noonday sun? In all fairness, the events weren't completely identical - one of the guys had his pants pulled down, revealing his white BVDs as he was wetting himself all over the front of 'em. Are you supposed to call the cops when you see this kind of thing? I thought about it, but then all I did was circle the block and take another look. I am a horrible person.

The juicy shorts guy was spotted while in East Austin last weekend, while I was there doing some site analysis for a school project. Each first year grad design student has been teamed up with a second year to do a project of their choosing that combines their strengths and interests. My partner is really into promoting alternative ways of living - things like community gardens and bicycling. And you've gotta hand it to her - when it comes to walking the walk, this girl's got it down. She spent the summer living in a leper colony in Spain and learning their traditional glass fusing techniques. Yeah. Top that one, Mr.I-was-a-summer-camp-counselor-for-the-fifth-summer-in-a-row-and-expanded-my-
collection-of-self-made-sit-upons. Booya. Anyway, we've decided to enter this competition put on by some Austin community art group that tries to promote, you guess it, art. They're looking for unique sculptural bike racks to place along the new Lance Armstrong bike path. No biggie - it's a one-week project, so you just kind of scribble some ideas down, chew 'em up, and spit something out to hang on the wall for the critique.

But here's my dilemma. Bicycling is a great sport, a great form of exercise. However, is it really feasible as an "alternative form of transportation"?? The scoop is...I do not ride a bike. I do not own a bike. I haven't owned a bike since I was 10. In fact, I don't think I've even gotten on a bike (besides for a spinning class) in about ten years. So I don't really know what it would be like to solely rely on your bicycle to haul your patootie around town, but I'd imagine it'd be a royal pain in the as* (literally). Bicycles make sense for children and people on college campuses. However, the kids who had bikes on the college campuses were also the ones who were always begging me for rides somewhere on the weekends. It only works in select environments.

Austin is a booming bicycle mecca. There are bicycle lanes on just about every street, including side streets, and they are always full to the brim with those little peddling maniacs. And therefore, I come this close to hitting a bicyclist just about every day. Is it really a good idea to throw those non-helmet-wearing bicyclists in with the chug-a-lugging cars and trucks? Just ride on the freaking sidewalk, people! Seriously, though, for those of you who are avid bicyclists, how does this work? How do you get groceries - balance a twelve-pack of pop/beer on your handlebars? Forget it! And, ladies, how in the world do you cope with bicycle helmet-head for the rest of the day? Heck, I start sweating just walking from my apartment to my car, let alone huffing and puffing up a hill. I certainly don't need any discouragement in my fight for basic personal hygiene.

I grew up in the country, in my parents' house that sits atop a huge hill. You know what's special about hills? You very rarely will ever find one huge hill all on its lonesome. So not only do you have one huge hill, you usually have dozens. Thus was the case. Also, for most of my life there, our steep driveway was covered in gravel. If we did go for a bikeride, we either had to pack up our bikes in a truck and go to a biketrail or walk them down to the bottom of the hill, ride around, and then lug them back up when we were done. I decided to leave that one to the die-hards. Folks like Kelly were not only brave enough to ride up the hill, but he did so balancing frozen pizzas on his handlebars. (That memory still makes me smile.) My oldest brother, as another example, was a part of some little-boy bicycle gang. They'd ride all over the metropolis that is Blue Grass, Iowa. He then rode BMX-style bikes for many, many years, and our driveway was always home to several plywood ramps and jumps, usually splattered with the blood of multiple attempts to get something "just right".

But then he wised up and found the wide world of motorized vehicles. He switched to dirt bikes and then wakeboarding and then motocross riding. It was always just a hobby, but it was totally his thing. Our woods were plowed out to form dirt mounds, jumps, and routes weaving through the trees. He would pick me up from the schoolbus at the bottom of the hill on his dirtbike. Scared the crap out of me, but it sure beat hiking up that freaking hill.

Now that I think of it, my family is home to several motorheads. Cars, trucks, planes, boats, helicopters - you name it, it's on somebody's fantasy Christmas list. Between the lot of them (and including both personal and work vehicles), we've got about 15 or so vehicles, two hot rods that my dad fixes up in his spare time, a motorcycle, a dirtbike, a boat, and umpteen tractors/backhoes/trailers/other construction equipment. Many married men find themselves ogling beautiful women. My dad ogles the "For Sale" section of Street Rodder magazine, hoping upon hoping that he's made another issue: http://www.streetrodderweb.com/features/0805sr_mark_willmans_37_chevy_sedan/index.html

So I'm not trying to blast the world of bicycles. I think that they're a great mode of recreation and exercise, but not necessarily the most feasible option for reliable transportation unless you live in a unique utopia where the ground is relatively flat, everything you ever need is within 10 blocks, nothing weighs more than five pounds, and no precipitation ever falls from the sky. Show me that town, and I too will wedge a padded triangle up my arse and be walking like I just got off a horse.

Chalk it up to just another thing I don't understand. If anyone's reading this that may be in charge of designing my tombstone, this is what I want it to say: "If I've learned anything at all, I've learned that I have a lot to learn."

And here's another. Why is it that people automatically expect people to come in twos? The lady at the Long Center for the Performing Arts, where I went to see "A Bronx Tale" last night, gave me two programs. I was the only person standing within 10 feet of her. Who else did she think was coming in with me? I handed her one back and said I only needed one. She goes, "Are you sure you guys don't want one for each of you?" At this point, I got excited. I stopped, turned around in each direction and made double sure that there wasn't some hunky, single guy lurking on my shoulder. Nope. Damn. "It's only me. I don't need two programs", I said, handing it back.

I bought a voucher for a cruise to the Bahamas yesterday, and was refused service when I tried to buy a ticket for just one person. "So I'll go ahead and ring you up for two passes to the cruise?" "No, it'll probably just be me going." "Why on Earth would you go on a cruise by yourself?" "Who do you expect me to go with?" "Do you have a sister?" "Nooo..." "Do you have a brother?" "Yes, two, but they're both married. Therefore, that would bring our total up to three. Again an odd number which evidently doesn't exist in the world of Majestic Cruise Lines in the Atlantic. Maybe I should just give Carnival a call. Maybe they've heard of those crazy things that come between 0, 2, 4, and 6." "No, don't do that. But don't go by yourself. That'd be miserable." "Welcome to my life." "I'm sure you could make a friend and invite them. Anybody'd love to go on a cruise to the Bahamas!" "I'm sure that they would. But I'm not about to invite some random person that I've just met to bunk up with me on a ship where I can't escape if they turn out to be an axe-murderer without the risk of delving into shark-filled waters." "Point taken. So ticket for one then?" "Put me down for a room for two and port charges for one, and we'll see what happens." "Very good." Man, I've given serious consideration before to tying on the ol' ball and chain just so that I don't get relegated to couch-duty when all the family comes home for the holidays, but this is ridiculous.

Whether it be to gain a better half or just to stop looking like a "Creature From the Deep", I've decided I need to update my look. I'm growing my hair out until it's long enough to donate again. My mom's hooked me up with Ah-nold's old trainer, back in his body-building days, so that's taking off next week. She's been seeing him, ahem - going to him (she's married - that came out wrong), since early spring and has already lost the equivalent of a hefty-sized third grader. So that's a good sign. I've got some skincare specialist lady coming to the house on Monday to figure out how to sandblast my skin to smoothness. Wait. That sounds way too hoity-toity. In all actuality, I won the consultation by dropping my card in one of those fishbowls at a spa. I've gotten really good at those (because of course it takes talent) lately. I've already won five free lunches and now this skincare lady. Hmm... hopefully the business card I handed to the random waiter at Macaroni Grill will also make me get lucky. Wait. That came out wrong too....Oh well, I'm leaving it.

Lastly, I cleaned out my closet of about 40% of its contents and took them to a resale shop downtown to make some moolah. Of the three bags of clothes I brought in, they only accepted three items. And thank God for that. Everyone in the joint was either homeless or homeless-chic, sporting the Austin trend of keeping hippie-dom alive and well. Basically it's just an excuse to not shower for 72 hours or shave your armpits. Yikes. I took the rest to Goodwill and called it a day.

I pay a lot of attention to people's appearances in general, but I've gotten an extra comic dosage lately. I'm taking two electives this semester - a history class (which requires us to read no less than 26 entire books - in 14 weeks! auggghhh!!!) and a business class. Both are grad courses, so the folks in them are die-hard "Americanists", "Latin-Americanists", "Ancient Atlanticists", and even "Dell Computers Bitch-Boys". And each of these groups have their own unique looks. Art students as a whole are pretty funny looking. We sport clothes from decades that are punishing us, we tattoo ourselves on our lunchbreaks, we cut our punked-out hair in the kitchen sink and then take a picture of the hair in the sink and turn it over to a museum and call it "art." The history students meet for class in a tiny room in the basement, without any windows, and they look like they indeed have never seen the sun. Most of them, in fact, look like they haven't looked up from a book in the last twenty years. The business students meet for class in the posh new AT&T Conference Center, in a multi-level conference room that has little bowls of candy and glasses of ice water in front of each delegate's seat. They come to class in their business wear, ties included, and put their name placards in the holders in front of them and take out their touch-screen-high-def-flippy-monitor-computer-laptop-thing-a-ma-jiggers. I, on the other hand, sat there with my Target notebook and my flipflops, hoping nobody would see the sauce I dripped on my blouse while chowing down a Schlotzsky's sandwich in my car before class started.

The moral of this story is that I simply don't fit in. With any crowd. When I drive down the street in my gas-guzzling Volvo, I feel like I am personally responsible for the depletion of our ozone layer. When I go out in public on my own, I feel like I am some heathen who has been released from her cage. When I walk through the halls of the Art building, I feel like I should be borrowing some more items from Michael Jackson's closet. When I go to a history class, I feel illiterate. When I go to a business class, I feel like hurrying home to embroider a polo with some big-shot company name like Amazon or Ebay or Hooters. Hey, I gotta make friends somehow... So in order to make myself feel better about, well, myself, I've started a collection. I call it "Photos of People who are Stupider than I Are."

First up we have the guy who stocks and labels the shelves at Garden Ridge:

I am officially a graduate school biatch now, and I've got the keyring to prove it. I've got keys to access the woodshop, the design studio, the computer lab, the lithography studio, the wood typeset collection, the sandblasting room, the wire foam cutter, exterior doors, as well as a magical magnetic key that opens most other doors in the Art building (please don't look it up - it's prolly the nastiest looking structure on campus). All of that sums up to about 5 extra pounds of metal in my pocket and me with saggy pants.

On the evening of my first day of school, I was scheduled to have a night class in room 3.106 of the Business School. I chose this class, among other things, because I've done a lot of design work at the Business School this summer and, quite frankly, they've got their shi* together. I like that in a school (reference previous entry). Anyway, so I drive up to the school and am elated to find all sorts of empty parking spots. Like Iowa State, many reserved spots become un-reserved at 5:30/5:45ish. Fabulous. So I pull into my spot and gather up my things. But as I go to get out of the car, I notice a small sign underneath the reserved parking sign that says something to the effect of "5:45pm-7:00am Reserved for Permit AR2 Parking Only. Violators will be towed." You've got to be kidding me. Unable to find another spot, I drive off campus and park on a side street that has 15-minute parking. I took my chances that the parking police would be moving a bit slow and not notice that I was actually parking there for three hours, and I hauled rear-end to go find room 3.106. Ahh, but room 3.106 was nowhere to be found. Eventually I found a map on the wall that had room 3.106 listed...as the janitor's closet. Hmm... Think about it. Think about it. Aaaand it still doesn't make any sense. So I walked to where the janitor's closet was shown on the map, and, to my surprise, the area is now a men's restroom. This scenario just gets better and better! Unfortunately, the room number on the bathroom was not 3.106. 3.106 turned out to be across the hallway from the bathroom, buuuutttt it had a sign on the door that we're not meeting until next week. Yeah. That about sums up how school has gone thus far.

Thanks to everyone who pitched in to cheer me up after my Eeyore of an entry last week. I thought I'd share with you some of the things that have put a smile on my face. :) (Yep, like that.) I <3 words, and this week has been abundant with play-on words, puns, and dialects alike. All of this amounts to me, along with the keyring full o' keys, having a lot more sunshine in my pocket.

Play on words. (sung) "What would you do if I sang out of tuna?"

Dr. Seuss-isms. (Thanks, mom.) "I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!" "You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room."

Dialects. (This one actually came before the pity party but still makes me laugh. Note that the following was not an expression of racism, just practicing our ghetto-speak, ahem ebonics.) Landan: "Oh yes fool I'll pop a cap in any african americans who are rude to me." Me: "Let's jazz it up a little. 'You know it, foo. I pop a cap in any nigga's, a.k.a. black bean soup's, ass who don't show me the 'spect I gots comin'. Damn!' " (...long awkward pause...) Landan: "You're scaring me :-/" Mission accomplished. :)

Southern speak. My coworkers and I went to a Thai restaurant for lunch one day, and I made the grave mistake of ordering a "pop." It just slipped out! Well, not only were my Texan coworkers failing at hiding their smirks, even the waiter started giggling like a little schoolgirl. At first I was offended, but then I remembered we were in a thai restaurant and thought, "Hey, how dare you make fun of my accent? English isn't even your native language!!" So, to sum up my frustration on 'carbonated beverages', try this on for size: "A coke is a pop and can be a Coke. A pop is your dad, but he could also drink Coke. A coke can be Pepsi, Dr.Pepper, Sprite, etc., but a Diet is not necessarilly a coke. Well, it is a coke, but not necessarilly a Coke. It's necessary to specify that a diet is a Diet Coke coke. I'm so confused..."

In other news, and most of you already played a first-hand role in this event, but I got engaged last week. Whee! Exciting!!! Well, hold your horses because that's not the whole story. Remember that wedding I went to with Ryan? Well, before we went Ryan had mentioned something to our friend Andy about it, to which Andy replied something to the effect of (and note that I was't there, so I'm guesstimating here) "Well have fun with her for now, but I've already called dibs on marrying her." Well Ryan told me about this and was under the impression that this was an inside joke between Andy and I. If it is, and I wouldn't be surprised, I don't remember it. But, I've been giving Andy crap for it ever since. Things like "I didn't know we were engaged - you never even proposed!" or rules like "Don't put the ring in my food b/c then I'll accidently swallow it and we'll have to wait a full 24 hours to make it official." Finally, I decided to make an honest man out of him and made it official. A.K.A. I put it on Facebook that I was "Engaged to Andy ------." Ah, but if you are familiar with Facebook, then you know that the significant other has to approve the statement before it actually shows up. So I put it on Sunday night and dangled the bait, just waiting for him to bite. I figured we'd have a good chuckle about it, leave it up for like five minutes, and then take it off. He hadn't by the time I went to bed, so I left it up and didn't think much of it. All this time, my status is just listed as "Lisa is Engaged".

The next morning I awoke to find a handful of p-o'ed messages on my wall, mostly from the gals I grew up with - those that have entirely way too much blackmail material on me to ever be brave enough to mess with 'em. And...they...were...PISSED. Why did they have to find out via Facebook? Who was it? How did it happen? When did it happen? Why didn't I call? WTF??? That was the general synopsis. I didn't get a chance to respond to their comments as I was on my way to work, so I left them to simmer. Once I got to work and logged onto gmail, Kassie (one of the earlier posters) pounced, demanding the scoop. I explained the situation, we laughed, and then went on our merry way. Afterwards I told my mom the synopsis of Kassie's reaction. Again we laughed and went on our merry way. This sort of thing happened all day long. The most random people were sending me messages - an ex-boyfriend, friends from high school, foreign exchange students I've only talked to a handful of times ever, someone I worked with at a summer job when I was about 15, etc. And of course we can't forget about my poor aunt. She was beside herself. She sent me about three messages on Facebook that day, and I couldn't answer any of them b/c I was at work. So that night she told my uncle the good news, who then called my dad to congratulate him and find out the story. My dad, of course, was completely in the dark. Whaa---? Luckily my mom was standing next to him when my uncle called and was like, "Oh my god." She explained it to them and I think they nipped it in the bud before my aunt sent out the alerts to the rest of the family.

Then my cousin called. She was absolutely livid. I again explained the situation and got her to calm down a little bit. She was funny. She ended the conversation by saying, "Well, when it happens for real, I'm not going to have to find out via Facebook, am I?" I said, "Of course not. When it happens for real, you're going to find out because I'm going to call you and ask you to be a bridesmaid. You know that." "(getting excited) Really?!?" "Yep." "Okay then. Have a great day!" I couldn't help but smile. Everyone just wanted to share in my 'good news'. My brother called, and I decided to nip it in the bud. I answered the phone, "No, I'm not really engaged. Calm down." He was just like, "Huh?" The poor guy had called for some other reason and had absolutely no clue what I was talking about. I called Andy and filled him in on the day's drama (he having just seen the notification around six the evening after it was posted), and then went to delete the status. But before I could, my phone rang again...and again...and just kept on ringing. My ex-boyfriend's younger sister (who, I admit, I had some fun stringing her along for awhile - sorry!), a friend from college, etc. Everyone wanted to know what was going on, who the guy was, and why I hadn't told them earlier. Finally, that evening I FINALLY got to take it off. Then I had to go back and explain to all of my well-wishers that I wasn't really engaged. In a nutshell, my attempt at playing a practical joke on Andy had come back to bite me in the as*.

So now I'm dealing with a bitter broken-off engagement and the disappointment that I've lost the love of my life. My therapist has been a huge help. I've been working on other explanations I can use to explain why I am now un-engaged. One suggestion was that my fiance died, another that I ate him, and yet another that I caught him cheating on me with a goat. Any of them hold merit.

The upside of this whole ordeal is that it reunited me with a lot of people that I hadn't heard from in a while, or a LONG while as the case may be. It was kind of surprising to see who actually sent forth their warm regards, and it kind of shows you who your real friends are. Eh, to an extent, anyway. On "How Do I Look?" last night, they had a quotable moment. The fashion victim said, "Your true friends are those who are there to challenge you the most because they know what's possible for you and they want to see it happen." I'd alter that to say, "Your true friends are those who get royally pissed off when you go through major life changes and they don't know about 'em."

I've decided to only surround myself with people who make me smile. I told Meggo that she just barely made the cut. :)

With that, I'll leave you with yet another Dr.Seuss-ism to keep the positive momentum. It's one of my favorites:

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."


P.S. Travel update: Had to pass up the invite to D.C. with Stephen b/c I can't go to the beach yet, but I'm planning on booking a weekend trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico soon so that I can be more like Nalena, my favorite Puerto Freakin'-Rican. :) More to come...

P.P.S. I went to buy a "Get Well Soon" card for that family friend I mentioned before, the one with quickly-progressing cancer. I couldn't find anything appropriate that I liked, so I went for a Rash-Hashanah card that said, "Get ready for the apple-dipping!" I have no idea what this means, but I figured it might make him smile. If anyone can explain this apple-dipping business to me, I'd be most grateful. :)

I've been in a particularly foul mood lately, and I think it has at least 90% to do with the fact that school starts up on Wednesday. Starting grad school, and before classes have even begun, has only pointed out to me more and more how much I hate the college atmosphere. Well, the undergrad atmosphere at least. There's just something about being an undergrad that brings out the 13-year-old moron in each of us. For example, I was on a job site at UT the other day, and the site was alive and well with the din of tractors and jack-hammers. The norm. But then, out of nowhere, my eardrums started ringing with a cacophony of noise that rose far above that of the construction workers. What was it you ask? The high-pitched screams of the sorority girls' initiation going on across the street. I could practically feel my brain cells depleting...

Oh, but here's my favorite. The freshies started moving in last weekend, and the other day, while standing in line at the glorious Taco Cabaña fast food restaurant on my lunch break, I came face-to-face with my first, real-life, UT freshie. Two of them, actually. There was a guy and a girl, the girl obviously out of the guy's league, but both trying to see if there was a potential 'love connection' between them. I half thought about turning around and saying, "You know, I can tell you right now that this isn't going anywhere. Save yourselves the effort and just order your own nachos." But I didn't. Instead, I eavesdropped. The two were talking about a party, ahem, "kegger", they went to the night before and were boasting about which of their friends got the drunkest. They were obviously new to this conversation concept, as they kept switching topics nervously from "So...does your fraternity have a carpool system?" to "Yeah, so that weather sure was hot yesterday, huh?" It was painful just listening. But then the hopeless male romantic threw in the ultimate curveball. In response to the girl's question, "Have you checked out the gym yet?", he responded, "Yeah, it's pretty nice... Do you want to take a shower with me?" Dead silence. I couldn't hold back any more. I pivoted around on one foot, and just stared at the guy. Was he for real? That's like going into a gas station to pay for a doughnut and, upon telling the cashier she can keep the pennies, asking her if she wants to have your babies. Who does this?? But the worst part was that the guy didn't seem to understand the extreme bizarreness of his question. And the girl, she just shrugged and said, "Maybe. Have you seen the new Ben Stiller movie?" Come again??

One reason that I'm scared about going back to school is that I fear the MFA Design program at UT is going to be a repeat of the conditions I found at ISU's Architecture program. I had every hope that, with a new school, different program, different people, that the atmosphere would be different, but so far I'm not convinced. You see, Iowa State, and I just realized I can finally say this because I'm no longer a student there, had (or, has, really) some serious internal problems in their Architecture department. Despite being one of the top-ranking undergrad arch programs in the country, I can only name perhaps 3-4 professors who actually gave a shi* about their students. The rest either didn't care or made it their sole purpose in life to destroy the maleable lives sitting in front of them. For the first two or three years of my time there, I had to wake up each morning and pre-determine how many bathroom breaks I was going to allow myself that day so that I could still get my work done. I missed out on major holidays with my family because we would either be on class trips or working on an oh-so-important deadline. And I even missed the funerals of several friends and family members back home. These are memories that you can never get back, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna say that the trade-off was worth it.

Each of us succumbed to the pressure at one point or another. This was generally done by going weeks without sleeping, setting up cots underneath our desks so that we wouldn't have to go home to sleep, getting sick because (surprise!) one can't have a balanced diet by surviving on only the mac-and-cheese microwave dinners that they sold in the vending machines. Heck, I'm surprised nobody got scurvy... In an extreme example, one of my good architecture friends eventually said that "enough was enough". She locked herself in her apartment for weeks, refusing to speak to anyone, and even refusing to go to the grocery store when she eventually ran out of food. The last we heard from her, she had packed up her stuff at home (not even bothering to clean out her studio space), and had moved back to the west coast to live with her mom. We were all well-aware of what was going on. But did the professors or administration try to contact her? Not a chance.

Perhaps the most oft-recurring problem that I had as a student with the professors in the ISU Architecture program was the complete void of professionalism in their relationships with students. It is my belief that a teacher should be there to encourage a student to keep improving their skills in his or her specific area, to find that area of expertise, and to let it shine - to get them excited about their future profession. But it seems that the architecture faculty were much more interested in the personal lives of their students, and I don't mean career-related. Professors would comment on the sex lives of their students, even reporting that so-and-so was sleeping with so-and-so, when in fact they were just friends. This even happened to me once, long before I had ever had my first kiss. A student was in trouble with the law and the faculty asked us to report whether we knew his whereabouts on a particular night. After the meeting, I went up to one of the professors in private and said that he had visited our hotel room in Chicago that night with several other friends. He stepped out in the hallway to make a phone call, and then they all left. That was the last that I had seen him. And you know what she said? "Riiiight. He left that night. Sure. Come on, Lisa. We all know he was in your bed that night." #1, NO. (I have never even, to this day, had a real conversation with this guy.) #2, How would he have fit when I was already sharing a bed with Andrea? and #3, How dare she imply that with absolutely no foresight?

All Iowa State courses require that you fill out an evaluation form at the end of each semester to give the department feedback on the professors. I guess the professors got sick of hearing the negative commentary, so they decided to give US an evaluation form. Mine, in a nutshell, read that I should choose a new profession because I had absolutely no future in architecture. I was the most rude, inconsiderate person she had ever met, and that I should be ashamed that I wasted the faculty's time by being in their classes. Hmm... now there's some great encouragement. I had to be careful what I wrote because this woman had seen me naked at a local gym several months earlier, and she was not above pulling out personal attacks like her opinions on what she had seen. A conversation ensued, and she eventually turned it over to my advisor. But, lucky for me, my advisor was one of those 3-4 kick-ass profs I mentioned earlier. I alerted him that she had sent him this email and that it was completely untrue. And he responded, "I checked my email the other day. I always have so much that I scan the senders first before deciding what to read. I read the important ones, like yours, first. Once I heard what happened, I went ahead and trashed her email. Never even read it." Finally. A professor that believes his students.

Every few years, the architecture schools across the country are subjected to being checked in on by the American Institute of Architects, to determine whether their programs are still up to snuff and worthy of being labeled "accredited." We're generally told to play nice that week and to shovel out the fancy-pants work so that the faculty can hang it proudly in the hallway and take credit for our accomplishments. Aha! Well, this time, I managed to pull out ahead. I was invited, based on my academic success, to a private luncheon with the advisory committee and a select handful of other students - no faculty allowed. At the luncheon, we were invited to voice our concerns about the program, with the promise that the high-and-mighty advisory committee would look into each and every one of them. So I said my piece, and, finally, for the first time in probably four years, sat down with a sigh and felt...fulfilled. I had finally been given the chance to speak. That feeling of accomplishment was short-lived however, when I learned that not only was nothing vocalized at that luncheon actually looked into, but the reports were even stricken from the official record of the event. The whole thing was a ploy to make them appear concerned but to never have to actually do anything.

I know what you're thinking. If I was so concerned about how things were going, why didn't I ever say anything to anyone else? Ahh, I tried. But you see, Iowa State Architecture is far more advanced than that. They have a policy in place that a student cannot place a complaint with the dean's or departments' office anonymously. And if I had left my name on that statement, that pretty much would have guaranteed the end of my time at Iowa State, and transferring into other undergrad architecture programs halfway through is pretty much unheard of. I looked into it, trust me.

Sigh... But life just moves in one giant circle, and they've gotten a chance to eat their words. I heard from a friend of a friend who's starting the undergrad Design program - emphasis in Architecture - that, at her orientation, the faculty boasted of a student who recently graduated with three degrees. They were trying to prove the point that anything was possible, the sky's the limit. HA. Considering I'm the first person in Iowa State's history to receive two other degrees besides a B.Arch in five years, as well as a couple other things, I can be pretty certain they were talking about me. So glad they could capitalize on the one thing that they discouraged me from doing every single day for the past five years.

So yeah. I'm bitter, and mortified that this experience could turn out the same way. I'm not looking for a life-altering experience. I'm not looking to make the best friends of my life. I just want to go in there, go to class, do my homework, get the grades, and get the hell out. I'm sorry if that's not the rah-rah attitude that they're looking for in their grad students, but that's what makes the most sense for my life right now. I keep trying to remind myself of what an honor it is to be a part of the MFA Design program - they had around 55 students apply, and they only accepted 5. I'm one of only two students they admitted from the United States. But I'm still not pumped. So, as nice as it was to include that little social calendar booklet in our new-student packet, they can take it and stick it where the sun don't shine. Let me go to class with these folks and get to know them first. If we like each other and choose to befriend each other and want to hang out, splendid. If not, just let it go. BUT STOP PUSHING!

There were a handful of wonderful people at Iowa State, from all areas of campus, that made my time there worthwhile. People like Liz Beck, Mikesch Muecke, Kris Vander Lugt, Gene Takle, James Bolluyt, Kristin Pesola, and the entire current Honors gang, just to name a few. It just really bothers me when people try to bring you down before they even know you. Just like at Iowa State, my current advisor is already "concerned" that I'm taking on too much. I told him, "If you see me passed out in the hallway, kick me. If I don't move, THEN you can be concerned." Don't doubt me before you give me a chance to prove myself. Maybe I'll fail, but maybe I'll succeed beyond your wildest dreams. All that I ask is that you give me a chance first.

This brings us to the second reason for my foul mood as of late - good people getting dumped on. Last week, I got to hear the tragic story of how someone very special to me grew up with a childhood full of mental and emotional abuse. My heart broke as I heard him tell his story, and could hear in his voice that this was something that has just become a standard for him - it was "his story", but not yet "history." And today, my family back home spent the day rallying together some 1500-odd people at a benefit to raise money for a family friend who's been overtaken by cancer. Now, both of these people are spectacular people - ones that we would all be lucky to be even a smidge alike. So why them? They never did anything to anyone except put a smile on their faces. What did they do to deserve such disservice? I know, I know... Sometimes life just ain't fair. Shit happens. Or, as Gilda Radner used to say, "It's always something." But sometimes it doesn't seem like "Shit Happens." It's more like something's got the runs, and there's shit all over the place.

I know I rant and rave about a lot of insignificant crap on this blog, and I've certainly gone through my share of hard times, but I feel like I deserve what's happened to these people - not them. They didn't do anything wrong. Why did life choose to dump on them? It makes me feel like any difficulty that I'm having - either with school or making sure that the Sauers' $7,000 bathtub's going to fit in their renovated guest bathroom - is really pretty silly in comparison. And yet it still bothers me. And the thought of going back to school and reliving it all over again - putting my personal life on hold, relinquishing my privacy to the "good of the team", and jumping through all of their silly disorganized hoops - is so insignificant I don't even know the word to describe it (and that's saying something). And still it bothers me. And it bothers me to know that there are probably a handful of people out there who have somehow stumbled upon this blog and will somehow feel better about themselves after reading it. They will take pleasure in my pain. They will take pleasure in the pain of my loved ones. Those people, and you know who you are, aren't worth shit. I don't have the energy or the desire to deal with people like that.

If you're reading this with a smile on your face, rot in hell.

Weddings have an uncanny ability to bring out a person's true personality. You give Grandma Elsie a couple of Jell-o shots, and a few minutes later she's giving you tips on what to do on your wedding night to propel the grand entrance of her first grandbaby. The tensions between Aunt Faith and her ex-husband's new tottie are magnified when they start fighting over who should get to stand in for the family portrait. Lucky for you, you'll always have that Kodak moment of them glaring at each other to sit upon your mantle.

I spent the weekend in the Chicago 'burbs, fulfilling my duty as a bridesmaid in my friend Kari's wedding to her fiancé Wade. Now I've been to plenty of weddings, and I fully intend on giving Katherine Heigl a run for her money if they ever decide to make a sequel to 27 Dresses, but this was the first time I'd ever been to a wedding where I didn't know anyone besides the bride. I had met the maid-of-honor once on a visit to Madison, Wisconsin, three years ago, I saw the mother-of-the-bride for about .5 seconds at graduation, and I'd seen the groom maybe two or three times throughout the course of college. That's it. So, in a nutshell, I knew no one. Lucky for me, Ryan agreed to make the trek up from the QC, taking his first glorious day off from work in 17 consecutive days, to keep me company. So besides the bride, who obviously had a few things on her mind, and Ryan, I was left with plenty of opportunities to see the family dynamics with an outsider's perspective. And, at the same time, I gave a lot of thought to what I would really look like to an outsider.

I flew in bright and early Friday morning, and spent that day getting filled in on family drama. This person doesn't like this person, these two got divorced, this person has dealt with this illness, this tragedy happened a few years ago, never ask this person about this situation, etc., etc. I'm certainly not going to air their dirty laundry on this blog, because, I don't care how happy-go-lucky your family appears from the outside, every family should come with a user handbook. Heck, even I've got a cousin that sports hockey-playing Tasmanian Devil tattoos and who once managed to roll an armored truck on a bridge. But I love him just the same, because I know that I've done just as stupid things in my day. I like to think of my extended family as a real tight-knit bunch that, albeit with our certain quirks, is a group that would be able to sustain the pressures of a wedding without fail. But I'm sure, when that day comes, things will surface that I haven't even considered. Ergo, Ryan and I have come up with a solution: At the wedding, instead of having a dance floor, there will be a boxing ring with those blow-up Sumo suits. Let the two sides duke it out. I don't care what your beef is with somebody, there's nothing that can't be solved with a good belly-bump.

Even before I got to the wedding, the bride had prepared my tasks for me. When I asked what I could do long-distance to help her prepare, she said, "Your job is to keep that f-ing ----- away from me on my wedding day." I was thinking more along the lines of putting together centerpieces or something, but whatever. We originally decided that I would bring a billy club with me to the festivities, but then we decided that billy clubs are only effective from a short distance, so we opted for a taser. Colleen looked up the rules about carrying weapons on planes, and it turns out that I could have brought a shotgun (without bullets) carry-on, and even a saber sword in my packed luggage, but we didn't see any information about a taser. I was left to duke it out in mano-a-mano combat.

So I wondered, to these people, with their endless stories of familial warnings, did I appear as the sane one? HA. That's all I have to say about that...

The day was arranged with a strict schedule, and all of the details bound together in a huge three-ring binder Kari referred to as "The Bible". As we were pulling into the parking lot to check into our hotel rooms, my beloved Blackberry delivered an email to me about an ex-boyfriend. That was my first hint that, despite the elaborate planning, things were not going to go according to plan that weekend. Hearing about your ex on your way to check into a hotel room is kind of like standing at the garden altar when the neighbor's dog comes up and takes a whiz on your white dress. You love the dog any other day of the year, but at that exact moment, he's not what you want to be thinking about.

The ceremony itself went off without a hitch, and I took my place at the altar as the girl on the end in her first big-girl bra, with her still-swollen chestules wrapped in gauze, and trying desperately not to fall out of her dress or let her heels sink into the mud. Kari made her way down the aisle, and we all performed our dutiful bawling. (Even her brother cried - that was a sight I had not anticipated.) That portion of the ceremony, accompanied with a really cool later portion where the bride and groom presented each of their parents and grandparents with roses, really were enough to make anyone tear up. So there I was, with my mascara running and stiff as a board so that my bra straps wouldn't shift, watching my college friend tie the knot. For this portion of the night, I actually got a third-party feedback as to my appearance to others. Some guy that went through the receiving line greeted me as "the crier" of the ceremony. Sweet. So I'm a sap.

It has just occurred to me that, albeit how random my weekend was, perhaps Ryan should be the one making this entry. I'm sure his trip was even more random than mine. Thank god for the open bar, because, while I was locked in to taking wedding party photos and such, he was left to entertain himself by watching baseball and plotting ways to bust into the quinceañera party at the other end of the country club. (And how could you not be tempted? They had a mariachi band!)

We avoided most of the reception by going for a walk on the golf course, and then headed out a little early. Besides, I figured Kari and Wade needed to spend this time with their families. While the beginning of the night had started with me thanking Ryan profusely for being such a sport - he even helped spread fish rocks on the reception tables, the end of the night featured me apologizing for things not exactly turning out how I had anticipated. But, get this, the guy looked completely unphased, and actually said, "Don't be sorry for anything. I had fun." Seriously, Ryan, if you're reading this, where did you come from??

This morning I got up bright and early for yet another flight and tramped through the airport like a zombie. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe I should have kept out my Mardi Gras mask from the reception and worn it on the plane to cover up the bags under my eyes. Too late now. Anyway, I fell asleep on the plane sitting next to a ten-year old boy and awoke to find that I had slouched over in his direction and was semi-spooning with him. Awkward... The poor kid had eyes the size of grapefruit. I fell asleep again, only to awaken to the stewardess announcing that, if we happen to run into Robert DeNiro today that we should wish him a happy 50th birthday. Evidently Robert DeNiro lives in Austin. (??)

So that's what I learned from this crazy weekend. In the company of others who are unaware of the situations you come from, I appear as a sane, level-headed person. From the viewpoint of an audience member at a wedding, I'm a total sap. According to 10-year-old boys on airplanes, and most likely their fathers, I am either a child molester or a goddess, depending on who you ask. And according to Robert DeNiro, if I were to meet him, I'd probably appear as some creepy stalker fan that just so happens to know that he was born on August 17th. All I know is that I found myself thanking my lucky stars that I found someone to share the weekend with that is also able to find enjoyment in the random quirks of my life.

Congratulations, Wade and Kari! xxoo

P.S. To clear up a disagreement from last night, the "x" from xxoo refers to "hugs", and the "o" refers to "kisses". So if you're trying to write "hugs and kisses", you should write it as above (as I did) as "xxoo". If you write it the typical way, as "xoxo", you're literally writing "hug, kiss, hug, kiss". And if you try to write "kisses and hugs", you would write it as "oxox", but then it just looks like you're writing "ox-ox" (like the bison). And that's just strange. Booya.

Disclaimer: Someone made a crack about an entry I had made on this blogger-ma-thingy the other day, and when I replied to their comment, they got really quiet. Finally then said, "Wait. That stuff really happened?" Yes, my friends, I know it's hard to believe, but my life really is this ridiculous/mundane/choose your adjective based on the experience you're referencing. Like the wise and learned Dr. Seuss once wrote, "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!" I find humor in the blahness of everyday life. If you're in for a chuckle at my expense, then keep tuning in.

Disclaimer Numero Dos: For this entry,  since I've written a few now and have gotten feedback, I have a better idea of who's actually reading this thing. It generally tends to be those people who have boring desk jobs and need a method of snooze-prevention, but that's beside the point. Anyway, for my semi-literate public, this one's for you. Lots of pretty pictures, not so many words. :)


The Olympic games are alive and well. Michael Phelps has been giving Mr. T a run for his money in who can wear the most gold around his neck at one time, and the Chinese gymnasts have seemingly delayed puberty by a good four years. (And they have the "documents" to prove it...) Many of you probably tuned in to see the opening ceremonies a few days ago that featured thousands of drummers, acrobats, guys running around in the air in day-glo suits, the works. The ceremonies took place in a little place that goes by the nickname of "The Nest". Here it is illuminated by one of the Chinese's favorite substances - gunpowder. Err...fireworks rather. Either way.

I've just returned to my apartment from a quick rendezvous at our local Target store, and this visit has solidified a theory that I have been hatching for quite some time. My theory: for some god-forsaken,  unexplained reason, things that should be incredibly simple are always incredibly difficult for me. Allow me to illustrate this with, oh, just a few of the thousands of possible examples...

Let's start with the aforementioned trip to Target. My mission, as I chose to accept it, was to purchase a pair of "black strappy sandals" as requested by the bride of an upcoming wedding I'm in, as well as a face mask. Not the hockey goalie style, but rather the type you leave on your face for 10 minutes and then wash off to find the beautiful clear skin broadcasted on all major skincare commercials. Well, that's the intention anyway. So, first, let's talk shoes. I have a pair of pointed-toe black shoes with an ankle strap that I thought would suffice (although slightly breaking the rules) just fine, however, my roommate and our friend put the ix-nay on them at first glance since they weren't "strappy" enough. So I went first to Ross - no go. Then to the Shoe Pavilion, where I found - what luck! - a going out of business sale! But could I find anything there? Of course not. So by this point, this mission now stretching over a several-day period, I was getting pretty ticked, especially since I didn't want to buy another pair of new shoes in the first place. So I looked up Target's collection online, found 4 or 5 suitable pairs, donned my safari hat, and set off. But, alas, upon entering the shoe aisle, they were nowhere to be found. I did purchase another pair, but I'm still pissy over the whole deal. The second mission at Target, as you will remember, was to purchase some mask. After roaming the aisles for a good ten minutes, busting out the search dogs, I was still unable to find any, whereas there should have been at least five different brands available. So I ask my faithful Target representative, and, low-and-behold, it turns out the face mask is the one product that they've decided to discontinue at that Target branch. Lucky me.

Second example: Women Partners in Health. I'm not afraid to list their name here, because I've strongly considered turning them into the Better Business Bureau, which would make their disservice public anyway. WPH is a gynecologists' office in Austin. I found them out of the phone book shortly after I arrived here because I needed a couple of shots - the second HPV vaccine (I used to be a part of a research group on HPV awareness, so if you ever want to know more, I'd be happy to talk your ear off) and a birth control shot to the butt. It's a lovely thing. So, upon my first visit, after spending two weeks getting my records sent from Iowa State to WPH, getting them to accept my new address even though it didn't match my forms, six phone calls, and a returned letter, I had my appointment set. I go to the appointment, and they ask for my insurance. "Isn't the insurance included with the information sent by Iowa State?" "No... We're going to have to see your card." Well, my card was with my parents, who were on vacation, and most likely fast asleep at this hour, in Florida. So I call them (luckily they were awake), get the information, and am finally allowed into the room.  I certainly never thought I'd ever be this excited to finally get the go-ahead to get a shot. So they give me the first one, and then ask me for the second one. "Ex-squeeze me? Since when is the patient supposed to bring her own shot?" So they give me a prescription for it, and give me directions to the nearest pharmacy: go out of the driveway, turn left, and then take your first right. You can't miss it, they say. Unfortunately, what they say is wrong, because it didn't exist. I finally found another pharmacy, which meant that I had to call and get the insurance information for the SECOND time (this time the pharmacist insisting on calling both my parents and the university), and got my shot. By this time, I had been gone from work for several hours, and I needed to get back and show my shining face before they gave me the boot.

I returned at my lunch hour with the second shot. She poked me in the butt, and then says, "We also offer free urine-based pregnancy tests. Would you like one of those today?" "No thanks. That's not really necessary." "Really, it doesn't cost a thing if you want one." "Nah. Not today. I think I'm good." "Are you sure you're not pregnant?" "Yeah. Trust me, I'm not pregnant." "Are you positive?" Alright. At this point, I admit it. I lost it. My response: "Listen. I -------- (portion of conversation deleted because it's none of your business). I had to have a pregnancy test before I started the HPV vaccine in -----. That test came back negative. So unless I've been artificially inseminated in my sleep since then, we can both be pretty dam* sure there's no way I'm pregnant." She responded with a stern look that lasted .5 seconds too long. Finally, she let out a deep sigh, and said, "Follow me, miss." Then the *#&% led me back to the bathroom and made me take a pregnancy test! At first I was appalled, but once I reached the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I realized that I had neglected to remember that I had the word "SLUT" tattooed on my forehead.

Finally, the doctor released me from her grasp of angst. I stormed out of the lobby, and had just reached the door, when the lady behind the desk says, "Don't leave yet, sweetie!" (Two notes here: 1. This woman was about 2 years my junior and she's calling me "sweetie". 2. By this point, I had been in their office for a total of about 4 hours, of which only around 10 minutes were devoted to the distribution of the two shots that I had requested.) Turns out that my "insurance wasn't no good". (This was a classy establishment, lemme tell ya.) I said, "Yes, it is. I just used it this morning to buy that shot, so I know it's good." We went back and forth for several minutes, her calling somebody in another department who was probably just sitting on the other side of the cubicle, me begging to go back to work, until she finally realized she had just been mis-typing the number. By this point, she had charged me an additional $17 in wages. Yes, by this point, I was doing the math.

Oh, but we still aren't done with good ol' WPH. The University of Texas, just like almost every other public institution, requires its students to have certain vaccinations before entering. So they sent me a form that asks me to fill out the dates of when I last received these vaccines. No biggie. I filled out my portion, but...you guess it...the rest of the information lay in that little file folder of my medical information, still stashed away with our friends at WPH.

I drove up there on work time, yet again, and approached the front desk with my form. I asked them to pull my record and fill in those three tiny, itty-bitty, super-simplistic, dates and offer up a John Hancock at the end. Heck, I would've sufficed for a rubber stamp signature. She asked who my doctor was, and she was out for the day. I asked if there was another doctor available. Not at that time. "Well is there anyone else that can fill this out? A secretary? A nurse? Someone?" "No, it has to be a doctor." "Well, can I leave this here for her to fill out then?" "Oh. Well I don't know if we can accept any paperwork from you without the doctor's permission. And you might have to fill out a form to release that information." "That's fine. I'll sign whatever you need." "Well, I don't know what form it would be, but there might be one." "Well, do you want me to authorize my permission on a post-it note or something?" "No, no, that won't be necessary. We'll leave it for the doctor." "Should I leave the envelope as well, so that she can just stick it in the mail?" "Oh, we can't mail anything for you. You'll have to come back and pick it up." "Should I come back tomorrow then?" "Well, you could. But it could take up to a week to fill out." "A week? It should take about five minutes!" "Ma'am, our doctors are very busy people." "I completely understand that. So how about you just hand me my folder and I'll fill it out myself and save us all the trouble?" "I can't release your paperwork for free." "Well how much does it cost then?" "$15." "And how much does it cost to have you release that folder to another doctor if I found someone else?" "I don't know. I'd have to ask." "So if I pay you $15, then you'll turn around and fish that folder out of the file cabinet and hand it to me?" "No, ma'am. It takes about a week to process that." "It takes a week to pull a folder out of a drawer?" "We have a lot of patients who request their records." "Alright. Here's the deal. The last time I was in here, the service was HORRIBLE. So there's no way in hell I'm ever returning here as a patient again. I'm just trying to figure out if it would be better for me to take my files now or later. Now you tell me what I should do." "You're going to have to take up your complaints with the doctor." "Well, my doctor isn't here, even though you're supposed to be open until five, so that's not really an option. So here's what I'll do. I'm going to leave this form here, and you have her call me within a week when it's filled out."

Grrrrrr....

But, low and behold, the doctor decided to be on the ball for once, and called me the very next day - to tell me that she didn't have enough information to fill out the form. You have your meningicoccal (sp?) vaccine, but I can't find any evidence for the others. Well, I knew I had them, because they're standard, and I would have had them all to get into Iowa State, if not high school and earlier. So she tells me I should go have a blood test done to see if I've had the vaccines. "Well I just had blood drawn a few weeks ago. Can't they just take the tests from that?" "No. They would have thrown the blood away after they were done with it." "Well, I know I have those shots, if not for school then for my travels, so what do I have to do to prove that to you?" "You're going to have to retrieve those records and bring them to us." "But they're back in Iowa still." "That's your problem. You're going to have to get the blood test and re-vaccinate if you have any missing, or you need to find those records." So I hung up with her and gave UT's immunization office a call and told 'em the story. "Well that's silly," the woman says, "you don't need any of the additional vaccinations. The meningicoccal one is the only one that's required. The others are just suggested. It says so right on the top of the form." Isn't it nice to know that your doctor reads the instructions?

Last night I took my roommate's dog for a walk through the woods behind our apartment complex. We took a new trail this time, and came upon a group of three twenty-something-aged guys hanging around a bench on the path. Yes! The opportunity of a lifetime! Never before have I had the chance to be the quintessential "cute girl in the park with the dog", but, finally, it was going to happen! I started walking a little taller, pulled Murph into the perfect "heel" position (he was still totally oblivious, sniffing remnants of other dogs' poo along the path), and then, when we got within about 10 feet of them, presentation time, Murph froze in his tracks. I've never seen him behave like this before, but there he was, stiff as a board, head down, ears perked, and generally looking scared for his life. He wouldn't budge. I tried pulling on his leash, giving the usual, "Come on, boy!", but nothing. Finally, as I busted out the Strong-Man competition moves, I managed to yank him past the men, but he never took his eyes off them for a second. It really got me thinking. Here was this group of decent guys, behaving perfectly friendly and not impeding his path, and yet he was able to pick up on something that I was completely oblivious to. On our return trip, we ran into these guys again, still sitting on the same bench, and the exact same behavior was  repeated. Stiff body, head down, ears perked, ready to wet himself. Only this time, I figured it out. The guys were smoking. They hadn't been on our first passing, but maybe Murph had smelled the smoke on their clothes. Regardless, he was able to pick up on something that I was not, and it served as a way to protect himself. And for the first time, I found myself jealous of something that drinks out of a toilet.

In other guy news, I have met the perfect man. Well, when I say "met", I really mean "oggled from afar because I was too afraid to talk to him". I was shopping at the grocery store, strolling past the fine cheese aisle, when I saw him. Probably 27 or 28 years old, devilishly handsome, and pushing a small shopping cart. But his physical appearance, while good enough to give any heterosexual woman under the age of 50 material for happy dreams for weeks to come, was not the clincher. Inside his shopping cart, he had the following contents: 1 California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizza and 3 bottles of red wine (brand and type not noted - I was a little too distracted by wiping the drool from my mouth). Now this is the perfect man. First, he realizes that fine dining is not always required. I don't need a man who can cook a five-course dinner. But what put him to the top of the list was that not only did he know of his cooking impairment and make up for it with a frozen pizza, but he did so with a good-caliber pizza. Then, to top it off from there, he sweetened the deal with not one, but 3 bottles of wine. Ahh... As I swooned in front of the mozzarella wheels, he casually pushed his cart in the opposite direction. I finally realized that this was my chance. Now or never. He hadn't noticed me, so I had to divert his line of sight. I turned my cart in front of his to go down the next aisle - let's say I politely cut him off - and got a good look as I went past. Well, if he did notice me, there was absolutely no reaction, and, if he did, any hope of attraction was immediately squashed as soon as I came to, wiped the stars out of my eyes, and realized that I had turned down the feminine products and baby care aisle. Neither of which make good hey-I-think-you're-hot conversation starters.

If only I had Murph with me, he could have bitten my ankle or pulled me in another direction, using his stealthy intuition. Or maybe he could have broken the ice by walking up and sniffing the guy's crotch or something. I dunno. He does it to us plenty enough... But, random story aside, my point is that simple things always seem to be mondo complicated for me, and I wish I could have some of the intuition of that dog. In the meantime, however, I'm just going to let Murph start doing my shopping and scheduling any future gynecological appointments.


P.S. Alright, I psyched you out with the 'guy' story. As if I'm really going to divulge my love life on this thing. I've thought long and hard about what kind of a blog I want this to be, and I'm not ready to get that personal with it yet. Maybe someday. But for now, if you want to know the grit, you're just going to have to ask...and bribe. And, no, Colleen, I am not ready to go for the Amy's Ice Cream employee who wears a pith helmet just so that we can get a discount - although it is tempting...

P.P.S. In response to an earlier conversation topic, the trip to Myanmar has been postponed. There is a travel advisory out until September that limits only government officials and those on other necessary business to travel there - no tourists. It's possible that this ban could be lifted by December, but, under the begging and pleading of my mother, I've decided to put it off for a year. In return, my parents and I are planning a short rendezvous here in Austin, followed by a week-long courtship with Central America. Many thanks to all of you who provided information about Myanmar's instability.