save me!

I really should be getting out to meet my friends now, but I'm on a Migraine research roll and keep finding new tidbits of information!

Whether or not you know someone who's easily affected by the omnipresent flickering of fluorescent bulbs, this website and newsbrief should be mandatory reading for all people--certainly for all Migraineurs.

I signed the petition electronically but wished I had a pen I could bare down on with all my strength and fervor.

don't go warmin' my leg...

I bought a pair of cozy leg warmers over a year ago while on vaycayshun and have yet to actually wear them. Part of my being still remains stock-still against the Huntley Hills Elementary cafetorium wall during the seventh grade dance, fearful that making a move toward the center of the room will bring attention to what is surely the wrong pastel, flowered dress.

Most of me doesn't care what others think of what I'm wearing. (See? I'm soooo self-actualized.)

After having slept off a Migraine most of the daylight hours, I am not feeling too festive. I miss my GHP friends right now and wish we were having one of our characteristic lock-ins. Heartbreakingly, these events are now a thing of the past. Wah. Going out this evening will be festive, I'm sure--seeing The Diamond Center last night was awesome enough, so tonight will be even more fun, especially since the Tom Petty cover band, Heavy Petty, will follow. But bar-hopping and going to see some bands play and friend-DJs spin sort of feels like any other night. If only Chris (see photo, courtesy of C. Tinsley) would get all souped up in his cheap-ass Santa outfit again.


Happy last day of 2007.

Happy Birthday, Mary!

It's Mary Tyler Moore's birthday today. She was born on December 29, 1936, so that makes her 71.

This is my 221st blog entry. My birthday is 2/21--it's a SIGN!!!

Voudriez-vous une cigarette?

In what I see as an incredibly wonderful twist of fate for the health of millions, the French government has decided to outlaw smoking in bars and cafes beginning January 2nd! (They are going to allow smokers to party and puff away on New Year's Eve, kind souls.) Next time I go I don't have to retreat early to the hotel due to smoke-induced Migraines. Sweet heaven!

No need to get into a whose-right-is-it-to-say-where-and-when-we-can-and-cannot-smoke debate here, folks. The fact of the matter is the issue has been decided and we will no longer smell like cigarette butts upon leaving French bars at 4 AM, nor will we have secondhand smoke hangovers the next morning. Freedom, sweet freedom. Ah, bon.

The Average Debaters

Lord, I'm so happy I'm not the only one out there who's not fawning over The Great Debaters.

sickypoo strikes again

Last night I couldn't fall asleep. I had the strangest ball of pain in my stomach. Unfamiliar, unsettled pain. It wasn't the lurching pain of an upset stomach or the hard rocky feeling of a gassy stomach (ew--did I just say "gassy stomach"?).

Around 6 AM, after having napped about twenty minutes between 2:40 and 3:00 AM, I got up suddenly and was sick sick sickeroo. Food poisoning? I'd only had Chick-fil-A and a few handfuls of snack food at Dallas's earlier in the day. Did I overnog it? I had a mug full of pumpkin eggnog that was marked "sell by Dec. 24." Does that mean it was bad by the evening of Dec. 26th?

In any case, I was sick and then lay down in bed in more pain, whining and moping and not falling asleep for another hour or so. Today was shot, and by the time I did get up I was weaky mckinserson and couldn't do much of anything without getting winded. Taking a five minute shower just about knocked me out!

I'm grateful to have this time off work. Nothing much is going on right now. Obviously it would have been nice to help Jim with dinner despite my tendency to grunt about helping (truly--I'm not very good!), and dropping all my stuff off at the post office would've made me feel as if I'd accomplished something. But no such luck, eh?

My dearest Denise did send me a link to a "fun" website, though. For all of you with whom I've bitched about misplaced or completely unnecessary quotation marks, this site's for you!
http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Hope everyone's in good health! Remember that Mary Tyler Moore's birthday is this Saturday night, 12/29!!!

Happy Xmas.

This is the first year I have spent Christmas without my parents, and it'll be the second Christmas morning I'll wake up without my sister. No, nothing sinister or heartbreaking happened to her--she just spent Christmas with her former girlfriend's family one year and came home a few days after to have an after-Christmas get-together with us.

My parents didn't feel like traveling away from their adopted Florida homeland. I didn't feel like going to their Florida home for the third time in three months only to turn around three days later. Julie didn't want to book air travel from Milwaukee when the Midwest has been erupting in snowstorms every few weeks. (She thought correctly on that one--Milwaukee is all snowy and wintry mixy right now, and many people's travel plans have screeched to a halt.)

I'm here in Athens with my beau and my friends. It's chilly, and it's quiet. Mary Beth just called and offered to bring me a delicious plate of food from her family's Christmas dinner. Sounds wonderful, as I've had just a teensy bit of food since my lunch earlier today. I'm going to take my new camera and the handy-dandy portable Scrabble game down to Flicker to visit the bartender boyf til he gets off work at midnight. Maybe we'll see Santa flying through the skies!!

It's certainly a nontraditional Christmas for me. Stranger than the year Julie and I were on a cruise with our parents? P'raps. That was 9 years ago. Or 10!! I'm old.
Guess it's time to bust all out on my own, right, y'all?

this short video of a small child will restore your faith in humanity

Have you ever felt so tired you just nodded off in the midst of what you were doing? I can recall dinners, classes, and of course books during which I caught myself as my head and/or body started heading swiftly toward the closest hard, horizontal surface.

A few months ago the little boy I babysit (one whom I've known since he was a couple months old--now he's 17 mos. or so!) was being a Crabby Appleton, as my beloved Grandma Mary might say. During his lunch he barely ate a thing, so hunger wasn't at the root of his bad mood. Halfway into his meager portion of vegetables the problem surfaced: his eyelids grew heavy, he comically half-fell toward the highchair table again and again, only to catch himself at the last second. (I had my pand poised at the ready, of course--I wouldn't let that teensy little head get all smooshed in vegetables, let alone bruised!) But sweet lord--that was hilarious. I think it was my laughter that kept waking him up. The transition from wakefulness to sleep took about 2 minutes--amazing. I wish I could fall asleep that fast.

I cleaned him up and put him in his crib, where he went out like a light. Later I described this adorable and very funny phenomenon to Jim, but words could not begin to describe the event.

To my happy surprise, someone has captured the same event with a different child on video! And I know the people involved, so it's not like I've been cyberstalking a small baby! My friend Eliza and her husband Eric have a little girl named Rio; since Rio was born they've been recording short videos and posting them on youtube.com so that friends and family far away could see what she's up to.

Take a look--it's only about 1.5 minutes at the most and you can watch it on mute. So cute and funny. And the blog subject doesn't lie, unless you really are the grinchiest of them all.


Love,
me

Flight of the Conchords--watch it!

Today's Paste email announced that Flight of the Conchords (do I italicize that? I guess not since we're talking specifically of the performing duo here and not their TV show) are going to release a full-length album!

My mom had Jim and me watch Flight of the Conchords over Thanksgiving. This was after it came highly recommended from a few friends, including the ever-zealous "F'n Jimmy," who promised Nancy and me that we would love it, especially since she and I tend to sing about what's going on at any given time. Well, I saw a couple episodes of my mom's season 1 DVD and I can verify this: the show is amazing. Hilarious. Original. So funny. Watch it.

I just went to youtube.com and found a clip of them performing "Business Time" on stage in front of a live audience. It's still very funny, but I really do prefer seeing the duo perform within the auspices of their television show. They definitely have the means to up the ante there and make things more ridiculous, silly, and clever. All the same, it's worth a watch if you've never seen any of Flight of the Conchords and want a dose of their humor.

Next stop: Vision Video, Amazon.com, or wherever you go to acquire DVDs! Get to it!
xo-
Janet

I do not exist.

I am standing in a home not recognized by UPS, FedEx, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, or Dominoes.

You see, this evening marked the third or fourth time I've found out from a worldwide, highly reputable delivery service (this description does not include the pizza places mentioned above) that my "delivery address does not exist." It's lots of fun to pay for expedited shipping only to discover that you can't be shipped to due to your own nonexistence.

Granted, my house address is a little misleading. The house itself is in a little community of homes off one street, and the house address bears the name of another teensy street that forms that back border of the small neighborhood. But let's go over a few key points here:
1. The teensy street EXISTS.
2. The teensy street has a NAME.
3. The teensy street has a LEGIBLE ROAD SIGN.
4. It is the year 2007 (soon to be 2008!) and I do reckon there's better technology out there than paper maps and compasses. (No, I'm not besmirching the glory of the compass. But an in-cab cheapo GPS system seems fairly routine these days, and what stops 'em from calling the main office or--dare I say it?--the phone number on the shipping label, my number, for more descriptive directions?)

Now I have to wait a whole extry day for this and this.
And that makes me feel like this:

Ho, ho, ho!

I'm trying to force someone I know and love to get into the Christmas spirit. First I told him that I'd be home in Athens for the holidays, a warm body for him to cuddle by his side [in this 70 degree winter chill], a loving girlfriend to keep close as the holiday doldrums attempt to hit each and every one of us swiftly below the belt.

This news was not taken as excitedly as I'd wished. Hmmff.

Next plan? Get a Christmas tree! Decorate it while Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole make us filled with dreams of sugarplum fairies!

It just so happened that I bought the tree by myself. (See earlier post.) GrinchyBoyf (TM) did seem a bit disappointed when I told him I'd done so ("I thought we were going to do that together!") but expressed zero interest in decorating it with me. You see, the lad just doesn't celebrate Christmas in that cheesy way I do. I get overly excited and overwhelmed with countdowns and lights and icicles (Chris would have me call them by their collective name, "tinsel") and the sheer anticipation. Jim doesn't go for this. Not one ounce of it.

Today I ended up half-forcing him to "want" to help me put the lights on the tree. By the time he said he would and that he "wanted" to help, I rejected his offers. Hours later, we were both in our element: he relaxed before a show by watching the classic Christmas heartwarmer, Letters from Iwo Jima, whilst I decorated the tree in jean shorts in mid-December. Guess we came to a compromise after all.

let the tipping begin! (or "karma chameleon")

A few weeks ago I caught myself making a grave mathematical error about five beats after the person I was selling two CDs to caught me making a grave mathematical error. Ignoring the error would have saved him $20 and lost the band I was working for that same amount. Luckily we both realized my mistake. (Trying to balance too many things at once--a conversation, selling CDs for two bands in the selfsame minute, and such.)

I was really hard on myself for this mistake. Truly, I beat myself up for these things much more harshly than I think most people do. Time, learning, reading, and a little degree in gifted education (in which I learned a lot about perfectionism and how it manifests) has solidified what I didn't want to believe: I am a perfectionist, and this is not entirely healthy. Though I'm pretty secure with myself and have a shiny self-esteem (ahem--some scholars/psychologists might say that I am not too much of an inwardly-focused perfectionist), I really take it hard when I make a mistake in front of someone else. Falling on my butt, flubbing my words, etc.--that's usually fine, because I can laugh at myself first. But making a mistake that may make the other person perceive me as dumb? Oh, boy. That is really difficult to take.

That man at the rock show, the one I sold the CDs to for almost-free? Wow. He probably thought nothing of our interaction, probably thought what I would have if I were in his shoes: "that girl done got confused, guess I'd better tell her what's what." But that's not what I imagined, and not what I still imagine he was thinking. Oh, no siree. You see, he was thinking about how this little young thing in a dress was hired to sell CDs but can't even multiply by tens and do simple subtraction. He was wondering how much money I'd lost the band thus far. He was trying so very hard not to roll his eyes, thinking I might have looked a little cute but was probably not all that smart.

Let's face it, kids. Very few people in this world are as harsh as the way I imagine(d) that man to be in that moment. In fact, he handled the situation gracefully and I probably did as well. I am well aware that I need to get over making mistakes in front of people. People don't need to know that I'm smart. It's just...

Oh, shut up.


Anyhow. Today I went to the soon-to-be-closing nursery on the East Side of town, Charmar. The drought is making it so this quaint and usually successful family-run business is closing its doors in 17 days. (I originally heard about the store after they made the decision to close while listening to a local NPR story. I think that's right, but perhaps it was the UGA channel or 100.7. Whatev.) It's really a shame. I'd never been in before this afternoon, when I dipped in between tutoring appointments in the hopes of scoring one of their pretty Christmas trees. (30% off, and the only Christmas trees I've seen in town, truth be told. There were only five left when I was there. I think I'm a late bloomer.) When I handed the woman at the cash register a twenty and a ten to pay for the tree, which was $28.45, she gave me a ten and change in return. I rewound time in my head to be sure and then said, "Oh, um. I think I gave you thirty, not forty." "No, you gave me forty." "I'm pretty sure I didn't. It's hard to tell by my wallet since all the cash is jumbled together, but my ten is gone." She looked in the drawer, and sho' nuff, there was a ten dollar bill in the space where the twenties go. She reddened a bit and smiled gratefully. "Oh, THANK YOU!" "No problem," I replied, handing the cash back to her. She must have said thanks four more times, blushing all the while. I threw her a bone, mentioning I'd done a similar thing recently. That cured any awkwardness I'd sensed (maybe I was projecting it all the while?) and we chatted for a moment.

While I was there, three ladies bought plants for their houses and talked to the cashier/owner as they did so. "I just can't believe it," one woman in her sixties said, referring to the imminent closing of the store. "It just makes me start to tear up!"

"Well, don't start, 'cause then we start. We have eighteen days left now. Let's make them good."

A nice young feller carried my tree out to the car and lay plastic in the trunk so the needles wouldn't get everywhere. Feeling suddenly rich since I'd momentarily had a ten dollar bill and given it up so valiantly (ho ho ho), I whipped out a fiver and said, "Is it strange to tip? Is that done?" "It's not strange," he said, and I handed him some money and thought about holiday tipping and my blog and how much of a dork I am.

The end.

Go get yourselves a little plant or something.