Things That Will Be the Death of Me

• Netflix
• Sending out resumes
• Cleaning my room-- and my apartment
  
• Staying awake during NDS working hours
• Keeping up with my Bloglines list
• A possible membership of the Internet Writing Workshop (anyone want to join me?)
• The parakeet and her impossible demands
• Staying out of PSP business now that I am no longer an active member
• The red tape of graduating

K.

The shoes ate my soul

Nearly every day, I come home from selling shoes to usually polite, but always oblivious people, look at my computer, and go to bed. All of the fatigue from my feet travels to my fingers and I simply can't be assed to blog or even to check my e-mail. Essentially, the shoe trade has destroyed any sort of online presence I may have had.

I really do have some great stories from my nearly one month at NDS, like customers that go from zero to crazy half a second after you tell them that a particular coupon doesn't work for a clearance shoe or the people who make me stay after the store closes because they need shoes just that badly. And good stories too, don't get me wrong. But I'm tired and I don't feel like writing them.

So, essentially, all this post can claim to be is an apology and a bad explanation for my absence. Sorry.

Some news:

• I'm thinking of joining an on-line writer's group so that I can get the sort of constructive criticism that can hone my crap into reasonably good work. Can anyone recommend a group or does anyone want to join with me? Just let me know.

• Went to Scranton today and found out that The Office's spin-off will be about the politics of the town-- and my uncle's cousin owns the deli that some scenes might be filmed in (the cousin has script approval-- he doesn't want to offend anybody). In real life, many of the local Republican committee meetings happen at the back table of the deli, so the show won't be far off. And, wouldn't you know, I just ate at that table today. So, when you tune in and see a deli called Catalano, you just remember that I enjoyed a turkey hoagie with pepper and olive oil there. I have pictures to prove it.

That's it really.

K.

I want to throw up

I just realized that I have been sending out many of cover letters to companies with incorrect information on them. How heartbreaking. :(

But, to cheer me up, I find that reading The Pajiba Ten: 2008's Most Bangalicious Celebrities pretty much does the trick. The RDJ one makes me blush because it's so very true (and also proves that I need to get out more.)

K.

Injustice

My friend stood a foot away from Will Arnett and Amy Poehler last night and I... I sold people shoes.

Excuse me while I cry myself to sleep.

K.

Quit waiting for Godot

Some genius upload one of my all-time favorite movies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead! Existentialism at it's finest.

Edit: And, as luck would have it, I found my favorite scene on YouTube. It makes all of my English major naughty bits feel tingly.



Play at home with your friends.

K.

PS. Gary Oldman and Tim Roth never looked so good!

A quick note

So I'm sitting here, watching the fourth season of Weeds, and I can't get over Albert Brooks. Every time he opens his mouth, I hear the f-bomb coming out of a tiny animated clownfish. A tiny animated clownfish who is just looking for his son. Sigh.

I feel like a teenager again

You know, I'm 22 years old and should be over some of the emo bullshit that I sometimes get into-- including writing posts about said bullshit. But sometimes living at home with three other adults while looking for a career that's supposed to launch you into real life gets so stressful that I snap at small things.

I should be down in the basement with my parents, eating a family meal and watching The Heartbreak Kid (not my choice), but instead I'm sitting on the porch, eating cereal and watching Weeds. Not exactly a heartwarming alternative. I had a minor tiff with my father that got blown out of proportion and the tension got a little much for me. It's better that I don't mess up a meal for the two of them with my pride and bad mood.

What really got me wasn't the argument with my dad-- it was my mom's immediate reaction to it. I wasn't looking for her sympathy, just sitting on the couch with a scowl, and she just bursts out that she doesn't know what's going and on and she isn't getting involved. It just struck me as so attention-seeking; she made an announcement of not participating in the argument when she could have kept to that concept better if she had just not said anything at all.

I've been noticing this more and more with my mom, and I hate thinking about it. I know that she's proud of her business (and she should be-- she built it from the ground up), but hearing about how she sold a scarf that day once every hour makes me want to just cry. It's selfish of me to think that, but that's just how I'm feeling.

Maybe it's the fact that she's doing so well while I'm working in retail and not getting single response to the resumes I send out (not including the India job, which hasn't gotten back in contact with me, by the way). Or perhaps that attention-seeking is really there and I'm getting angry at myself for perceiving a fault in a parent that has often been my greatest supporter.

I'm also wondering whether I should tell her how I feel. It could end up with hurt feelings all around, so that wouldn't be good. On the upside, it would keep me from going postal on her after hearing about her business one too many times. I just don't want to break her spirit. She's paid her dues and deserves to be happy in what she does.

I'll talk to her. The worst that could happen is that I make her cry, then I cry, then I go sleep in the car. I hope that doesn't happen.

Let's all pray that I can stay away from dumb posts like this in the future.

K.

Ed. Talked to Dad instead. Feel a little better.

Fuwa!

 

I adore these little guys, but some think that the Beijing Olympic Fuwa might stand for something more sinister. 

Whatever, they're still cute.

K.

Eye <3 U

It's strange when the highlight of my day is visiting my eye doctor-- something I only get around to once a year. I guess you would understand if you knew my doctor. My mother calls him an aging hippie, but I think he looks more like a benign Mel Gibson, more likely forget what he's doing during an eye exam than call some lady "Sugartits." He also never wears socks. Ever.


For most of my life, he called me "Kaitlyn," which is decidedly not my name. It didn't matter that my preferred moniker was on my chart; I was Kaitlyn for a good 18 years. Then, out of nowhere, my name became "Kathryn," which is technically correct, but a name I never go by publicly. I still don't know what changed his mind.


But what really sets him apart is how good he makes you feel about your eyes.


"Wow, beautiful. Your eye pressure is absolutely perfect."


"That's a nice thick rim of tissue around your ocular nerve."


"Your anterior chamber is deep and calm." (I've never figure this one out, but I picture a velvet blue with a humpback whale singing mournfully behind my pupils. Please, let that be what's actually back there.)


What do you say to these things? "Why, thank you! I've been working very hard to build up such thick tissue. It's wonderful when one's work is noticed."


I come out of that office with a smile every time.


K.

Scattered Thoughts: Produced by frustration

I had another post earlier, but the formatting nearly killed me. So, for lack of any more brain cells to put together something coherent, another Scattered Thoughts.

• I had my second day of training at National Department Store (NDS), which focused primarily on an unintentionally hilarious workplace harassment video focused on "sweater puppies" and drunk Irish jokes. Then I learned about how you have to "give the customer the pickle." Retail is weird.

• While taking the bathroom trashcan out to the curb tonight, the wind caught a pantyliner wrapper and blew it down the street. I had to chase it, which didn't help my self-esteem.

• I found my parakeet asleep on her side the other day. Thought she was dead for a second, then she sat up and looked at me like I was doing something unnatural.

• Another weird thing-- I saw a chipmunk eating a worm. What the hell is up with that?!

• No news on the career front. I've been told that I just have to keep going, which is obviously true. After all, I don't want to be stuck at my parents' house forever. But throw me a bone, people! I'll work for peanuts!

K.

UGLY!

Sorry, my blog is currently under construction! I'll be posting as usual (haphazardly), but everything will just look weird for a while.

Thanks!

K.

Whining

Maybe it's because I'm trying not to think about my first day of work tomorrow, but I've been concentrating lately on figuring out whether to change my blog template. The trouble with already having an established name for a blog and a set visual image for it is that nothing you see in the world of free Blogger templates is quite right.

Trying to stick with the title's theme, I've been looking for interesting writing-related backgrounds, but all I came up with are scrolls and medieval journal-like things. They just all strike me as so literal.

When I think of "Writing in Wax," I picture a stylus pressing deep into a wax tablet-- easily to scribble, easy to erase.  I think this tablet softly lit by candlelight as someone labors away in the dark to get their thoughts down before sleep takes over. And none of these templates are quite up to my standards. 

This wouldn't be so irritating if I had Photoshop Elements on this computer, but I don't. Frankly, I don't even know if my old copy of the software will work on Vista. But if it did, I could just remake the banner I have right now-- just take out the references to college and such. 

This post needs to end now. I'm not writing anything productive and I'm just doing it to stave off the sleepless night I know if ahead of me. Sorry to all of you who just wasted your time.

K. 

No longer fits

My banner for this blog no longer fits me anymore. Sure, I can get a couple more weeks out of the college thing-- until I get my August diploma, that is. And while I'm thinking about it, should I just change the entire layout of this site? And do I really want to go through all of the hassle?

Too much to think about for now.

K.

Red, white, and the blues

I surprised myself the other day by asking my dad if we could have a "real" 4th of July this year.

I'm not sure what I meant by that.

What I'm confused about is that the comment came out sounding like an impatient American child with immigrant parents. Could we save the hummus/chopsticks/beans and rice for another day? Can't we act like an American family just this once?

I suppose that I have been a stranger to July 4ths in a conventional sense. Up until last year, I spent most Independence Days at Jew Camp-- a dreamy bastion of foreignness in the middle of Confederate Flag-waving Maryland. Not that Jew Camp didn't celebrate the holiday. Far from it. That particular days was swarming with campers wearing redwhiteandblue, patriotic sing-alongs after a barbeque lunch (kosher, of course), and the invariable Americana kids show in the evenings. But beneath of all this star spangled fervor ran a faint sense of desperation, the sweaty scent of someone trying too hard. The lengths we went to celebrate the 4th the "correct" way made the celebration awkward in itself.*

After I left Jew Camp, I spent the next 4th in summer school in an effort to graduate college on time (you see how that worked out). Aside from a mountain of American-themed cupcakes in the dining hall, it was like the national holiday didn't exist.

All of this brings me up to this year and that squeezing feeling in my chest that I wasn't doing this "American" thing right. No fireworks, no party, and no thought of a barbeque until I practically begged my father to grill some hot dogs for me. Circumstances didn't help, either. My parents are self-employed, so even though it was a Friday, there was no sense of a long weekend. The sky remained stubbornly overcast and weather steamy, punctuated by occasional rain. My father insisted I make Israeli salad for our barbeque, which ruined the American theme I had been going for, and then promptly forgot to grill the hot dogs I had asked for.

It's stupid and ridiculous for me to complain about this. There are people in this country who legitimately have a right to feel left out of America and carry the air of "foreigner" around with them, no matter how hard they try to assimilate. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, unaccented me-- I can do pretty much anything in this country without being hassled or questioned. I have no right to feel like the 4th passed me by without me feeling that surge of warmth and belonging. Do I?

K.

*There was this one time (before I spent 4ths there as a camper) that things got a little weird. The director at the time, a gentile, was a Confederate Civil War re-enactor along with her husband. For some reason, they decided that July 4th would be a great time to have a "Confederate Day." A lot of weird things happened at Jew Camp, but that was one that only happened once.

China on July 4th. So patriotic.

My China scrapblog. I figure it might be easier to view the pictures this way for now.



K.

Things I Like: Arrested Development

One of the things that I think is missing from TV today (aside from shows like "30 Rock" and "Lost") is the ability to create complicated story lines that are both cohesive enough to last through an entire season (or little reminders here and there) and entertaining at the same time. I think that this type of clever, forward-thinking writing is the saving grace of a medium that is more and more giving over to reality shows, stupid sitcoms, and cop/doctor dramas. However, television lost a shining light in its redemption when it callously canceled "Arrested Development."

No, I'm not one of those people who blames an idiotic public for the cancellation of "AD"-- I helped kill it in my own tiny way by not watching the show when it was on. And I can't really blame FOX either. After all, why waste valuable air time on something that only a select crowd seems to appreciate? Still, even with all this apparent magnanimity, I'm still kind of bitter.

For those of you who haven't seen "AD"-- and I know you're there, don't be shy-- you can find all three seasons on Hulu.com. Watch them. Seriously.

For those of you who have seen it, you know what I'm talking about.

Let me outline several reasons why I love this show.

1) My hetero-crush on Jason Bateman; my lesbian-crush on Portia de Rossi; my voice-crush on Will Arnett.

2) This video:

3) The "Happy Days" references. And why not? Ron Howard narrates and both Henry Winkler and Scott Baio have bit parts. You haven't seen anything until you see the Fonz making awkward references to his perverse sexual preferences.

4) Bob Loblaw Law Blog. Analrapist. Banana Grabber. Loose seal. "I've made a huge mistake." "Final Countdown." "Come on!" Mrs. Featherbottom.

5) And this video:

Oh, there are more, but you'll have to see for yourself (if you haven't already).

And that, my friends, was a Thing I Like.

K.

PS. An "AD" movie? Say what?!?

Losing it

I've been having the strangest sense of time just slipping by.

For example, I know that it's Wednesday evening. Not only that, but I know it's July 2, which is pretty incredible for a person who never remembers dates. But there have been periods during the day when I can't remember which month it is or what day it is or even how my life fits into the current season. The whole thing is scary and disorienting.

I realize that this comes from not having a routine that marks out the days in a week, like school or work, and that as soon as I start my part-time job things will get better. But it worries me that I feel the slightest bit insane during these periods. Not shooting up a Wal-Mart insane, just drooling on the street corner insane.

Anyone else have this issue?

K.