clarification

What I meant about the comments wasn’t that I’m not going to reply to any comments, just not every one of them as I have been doing. I said it wrong. My bad.

he even had a normal parking lot

Two interviews this morning. The first one was with a sole practitioner in Owings Mills, an area north of Baltimore and not far from where BF works. I REALLY liked the guy and the situation (a clean office! Specialized legal software!) and I am hoping I land that one. A lot. The second interview was with a placement agency, which I mentioned yesterday, and although I don’t know a damn thing about the job (interview to come, presumably), the pay will probably be right.

At the second one, I took a typing test, and the person who picked up the results told me not only that it was the fastest result she had ever seen, but that it was an entire 20 WPM higher than the fastest result she had ever seen. She was in awe. I told her I instant-messaged a whole lot when I was younger. Yay me! (97 WPM, in case you’re curious.)

Heading back to Annapolis I was plumb tuckered out and just wanted to go home. Interviewing is hard – lots of muscle tension. But instead, of course, I came to work, and everything on my desk just seemed so unreasonable. Another one of those woops-the-deadline’s-next-week things from EP. Two tasks from MD that I wasn’t trained for, one of which I can’t believe the firm is pursuing in its current state. A request from OG that I have no idea what to do with (clear the floor of my office by next week). And a whirlwind crisis around one of our clients, who, bless her kind heart, is so brainless that I’m surprised she knows how to dress herself in the morning. This last has put DT in a foul mood, and she and I are the only ones here right now. Don’t know what to do with that either.

What I’d love to do is take my computer out to the parking lot, smash it with a sledgehammer, and go home, never to return, trailing papers out the window of my car and screaming “So long, suckers!” I feel it’s not wise to do that until after I get another job. But like I said, it’s tempting. After seeing a completely normal solo-practitioner’s office, this office just seems so many thousands of times worse – I kept remembering all the little things about it that are just unacceptable as I drove back to the building.

I still feel all this conflict in my chest about interviewing and paralegaling and so on, but I still can’t find the energy to write about it. I’ll tease you again today, sorry. I did talk to MFA about the whole “You’re fired!” “No you’re not!” thing, and he had a furrowed “that ain’t right” look on his face that I’ve rarely seen. He said he’d talk to MD about it.

Last night BF and I watched Shoot ‘Em Up. It was violent, silly, quick, and interesting, and had two people I’ve personally fantasized about in a combination sex scene/shootout. Highly recommended if you can stand the gore. Also, it’s official that the entire movie criticism complex does not make sense, as this movie got 68% and Wanted (which was just awful) got 74%. WTF?

password for post below

I wanted to protect clients’ identity in the post below, so I passworded it. There’s really nothing else sensitive about it, it’s just a rant. The password is my real first name, shortened to my nickname. If you don’t know this word please leave a comment below and I’ll send it to you.

why did they name a cookie “chalet”?

So I think the previous post sort of came out the wrong way. I didn’t mean to sound like such a snob. I was trying to explain by the end that my sense of superiority had morphed into realizing that counterculture is just different from mainstream culture and that’s okay and we can all hold hands and bunnies can hop around the happy-faced daisies, but I don’t think I did a very good job. Oh well. I’ve been evincing my bitchy gossipy side a lot in the last week. Probably the visit from my dad made me feel like I’m 14 again.

I had the l33test dream evar last night – I dreamed myself into an episode of Star Trek involving a weird planet with a culture that morphed into US culture and then back again after stealing Riker’s ability to speak English and behave like an Earthling. Me and Wesley and Data were the away team on the planet, and Wesley and I were doing that awkward teenage starting-to-be-PDA thing that you do when you’re 15 and attracted to someone, and I was standing outside the dream as my 27-year-old self saying “Aw, God, no, I already had to do this awkward teenage PDA thing, please don’t make me do it again.” Naturally, Wesley saved the day. There was a short in-joke between us about an arcade version of The Force Unleashed that made a cameo. I believe this dream had the most nerdiness per capita it’s possible to have in a dream not involving comic books.

Last night BF and I made breakfast for dinner – whole wheat pancakes and scrambled tofu with green curry paste, smoked Gouda and avocado. I haven’t had breakfast for dinner since I lived with my mom, and it was really good and a nice little shake-up. I also made cheese popovers with the smoked Gouda. Yum.

This weekend I realized I couldn’t remember at all which Girl Scout cookies were which, so I decided to buy one box of each kind (aside from Samoas, believe me, I am FULLY AWARE of what Samoas taste like, having consumed more boxes of them in my lifetime than the entire state of Minnesota) from the criminally adorable Scouts peddling at my local Giant. And I did. So now I have 7 boxes of them stacked up in my kitchen, gradually getting eaten. My verdict? I still mostly just like Samoas. I was born without the female gene that makes us red-eyed crazy for Thin Mints, and I prefer caramel to peanut butter fillings (luckily BF is exactly the opposite, so a box of chocolates always gets eaten evenly in our house), so the shortbread is really the only other kind I would want to buy on a regular basis. And their shortbread isn’t remotely as good as that shortbread you buy in the red tartan box, the kind that melts in your mouth. Ohhhh slobber.

Yoga yesterday afternoon was a bit tougher than usual – Noelle seemed fired up. She also seemed out of breath throughout class, which is no real surprise considering she’s just over a month away from giving birth.  She asked me to stay after to take a couple of pictures of me in yoga poses – she wanted to send pictures of the studio to her friends back home, and she thought that me in poses would make a better set of pictures. I obliged with pride. I also got up the nerve to ask her if she and her husband wanted to come to dinner with me and BF sometime, which I’ve been wanting to do for weeks. She said sure. Now I have to worry about whether it’s going to be awkward or fun.

Work is still slow. I think it’ll continue to be for a couple of weeks, because another big case (huge, actually) is about to settle. I may be able to write a little today. I think I’ll also put together another post on a single yoga pose. Maybe.

aroo? via CNN.com

Just…what’s going on here?

Story here. It looks like this guy is using chopsticks to add a small disco ball to the food he’s holding, but that makes no sense. I have been known to misinterpret simple images before now, but I really can’t figure this one out. Is he holding up a round pane of glass in front of a light source just behind the styrofoam container? Is it…a really round leaf of lettuce? Any thoughts, folks?

I miss Ian already, and it’s only been 800 words

I went to Jennifer’s 6:00 class last night. She was tougher on us than she usually is, and I think my legs are going to be sore later today. Her classes always make me feel completely blissed out afterward, and physically long and limber and hard-worked, and this one was no exception. She’s a very skilled teacher.

We did cow-face pose. I am tired of linking to pictures, so I’ll describe: you sit and cross one leg over the other, lining up your knees vertically. Your legs should look and feel like noodles lying over each other. In the full pose, you add arms – one arm goes under and behind your back, as you’re trying to scratch the middle of it, and the other arm goes up and over behind your head, and the fingers of each hand hook each other. (Most people use a strap for this.) While I find the arms difficult on one side, I’ve always thought the rest of the pose is kind of meh. It’s peaceful, but not challenging for me. Last night she said that the eventual progression of the pose should lead to your legs being one straight line, calves perpendicular to the thighs, knees lying on top of each other. I tried this, and did it fine; I’ve always thought that the challenge of the pose is getting your heels close to your bum and keeping your knees lined up, when in fact it’s apparently the opposite. I guess this is one of those poses that my anatomy is highly suited for.

I am still [trying to find time to keep] reading Anna Karenina, but I found a hardback copy of a book I’ve been wanting to read for some time at Borders in the discount bin, and yesterday in between work and yoga I read some of it. It’s Self-Made Man, a memoir by a woman who dressed as and pretended to be a man for 18 months. The first chapter describes in detail her experiences on a bowling team – in enough detail that this chapter is about 20% of the book – and there was a lot of interesting insight in there already. I have the feeling that a lot of what I’ll read in this book are things that I’ve always suspected about men but have not been able to put into words, or confirm, and thus far this is exactly what I’ve read. Men are more authentic than women. Men are inclusive and unsuspicious first, and only become exclusive and suspicious if you give them a reason to. Men do their best to be honest with their wives, even wives they’re devoted to, but the facts of their sex drive are not for women. Etc.

(Please don’t flame me about the above paragraph. Generalities are by their nature not specifically true about every man in the world.)

I wrote the second death in the novel at work yesterday (still slow here for me), and I think this death is part of the reason I’ve been putting off writing. This guy is hugely fun to write, and the whole book will be a little grayer with his absence. But I determined the order of deaths right from the start of the project, so there was nothing for it. I also got a lovely rejection letter this morning from an agency – it actually contained the sentence “Don’t give up!” It wasn’t personal to me, which oddly made me even happier – that they were telling all the writers they reject not to give up. I have been getting incrementally more frustrated over the last several months, starting to feel a bit like the way I felt at the height of my constant-submissions period in 2007, almost crazed at the lack of footholds I was finding, but this letter was a silver-lined cloud.

Next week there are no classes at the community college for spring break, and while for most of us in the evening sections of class that just means one less thing we have to do during the week, it’ll still be nice not to have to sit through CivPro. With any luck I’ll get some writing done and actually watch Diner, which has been (via Netflix) sitting on top of the TV for over a week now.

Those appear to be my plans for the weekend, as well: homework and Diner and writing, oh my. I have to do a midterm for CivPro, and I should get started on a big project for Legal Writing that’s due on the 31st, but that’s about all. I hope I will get around to writing a post about how uneasy I feel whenever I’m not being constructive, and how I really need to find a way out of that feeling.

*beep*

Everything at the moment seems insignificant or just the ordinary irritations of life – job, leg, lack of motivation, etc. – so today’s another nineteenth story post. Peace to all.

password

Please leave a comment on this post if you’d like the password for the post below.

I had it up to here, now it’s down to there

Work yesterday was not so terrible. MD is…somewhere else, and there wasn’t really that much work waiting for me, so I had time to sit and look around my office and readjust to the fact that this is my life, and there’s nothing for it right now.

I had to go to Target yesterday to pick up a prescription (after a hassle that is not even worth talking about to get the fucking thing filled), and I went on a small spree. Beck and U2 have both released new records recently, so I bought those, and BF and I have been quoting Mary Poppins to each other and asking why we don’t own it for months and months now, so I bought it, and they had the widescreen version of Spider-Man for $5 and I’ve owned only the fullscreen version for years due to a long story so I bought that, too. (These are the things that I buy, if I buy things. Not home furnishings or clothes or knickknacks, but music and movies.)

One of the things my mom and I talked about in Georgia was me getting an MFA. She essentially convinced me that it was a terrible idea, that it would not benefit me but would in fact do me harm, and that even my unusual reasons for wanting to get one would not be fulfilled by the degree. She didn’t do this with her usual “you won’t make any money” logic, which I’ve learned my way around, but by telling me that an MFA is basically a bigger, more expensive, more labor-intensive version of the fiction class I took at Prince George’s Community College (not much fun, and I didn’t get anything out of it). She explained that there was a great deal of sniping and backbiting and who’s-sleeping-with-who that goes on in MFA programs, that it can be a popularity contest and not a talent contest, and that getting into and staying in a program doesn’t mean at all that you’re a good writer. Nor are you guaranteed – or even likely – to be a better writer by the time you get out. She told me that I probably wouldn’t be able to focus on the novel I want to write any better in an MFA program than I would with a full-time job, and that my writing muscles would get used for dumb class exercises, anyway, instead of the novel. After I confirmed that I didn’t want to teach with the degree and that I didn’t care about any level of snootiness associated with it, she said that really there was no good reason for me to pursue it, unless I went somewhere with a serious writing community already in place, like in Iowa. (Iowa? Really?) So there’s another degree that I would needlessly waste time and money on eliminated. The only one left is in film, which is the one I want most anyhow, and what I should have been spending my energy thinking about in the first place.

I thought that if she managed to change my mind about an MFA I would feel sad and a little angry at her, but honestly I just feel relieved. The ways she explained that an MFA would not benefit me would have meant a couple of years of feeling stifled, out of place, and starved for time and money. Her advice on the MLS was a totally different matter, full of considerations that didn’t apply to me, so I made that decision on my own. The MFA, though, I consider a close call thanks to her.

On the plane ride back on Wednesday I skimmed through what I’ve written on the horror novel, and I was pleased. I still really can’t tell if I write good dialogue or not, particularly in this piece and in the SF novella I wrote. I felt like I got my characters into conversations that weren’t quite what would be expected in regular fiction. I don’t know if that means it’s good or bad dialogue. I haven’t written on it in over a week, because I’m at a stopping point where I don’t exactly know where to go from here and I haven’t made time for it. I’ve realized I need to shove another 10,000 words into what I’ve written so far, and I need to do some much, much better characterization, but those problems are dwarfed by what next?. If I don’t inflate this thing to 80,000 words or more, I’m going to give up novel-writing entirely until I have more to say, or until novellas become all the rage in publishing. I am fed up with myself in this area.

Can I just talk about my hair for a minute? Last summer I chopped off all my hair, to above my ears, and it was the first short haircut I’d had since seventh grade. Since then I’ve had it at various lengths: down to my waist, just below my shoulders, etc. I wanted long long long hair for the entirety of my childhood but my parents wouldn’t let me grow it, so when I was in high school I did grow it out and that was pretty much my default hairstyle for years, until I chopped it for Locks of Love and then grew it out again and then chopped it again. Last summer I wanted something different, and I was tired of fiddling with it for yoga classes, so I went ahead and did a dramatic cut. I liked the convenience of it, but I realized that getting it trimmed as often as I would have to in order to maintain it was just as much of a pain as fiddling with it when it was long. I didn’t really like the way I looked; people said it was cute, but I felt unfeminine and potato-faced. Since then I’ve been growing it out. I’m just short of having an actual bob now, but it’s all at different lengths and it curls out stupidly and sticks out messily and the bangs are IN MY FACE ALL THE DAMN TIME and it looks like a dumb 80’s pageboy cut and basically I hate it. (I hadn’t forgotten that growing out bangs is a horrible experience if you have thick slippery hair like mine, but I went ahead anyway because I thought I wanted bangs for a while again. I was wrong.) When I go for trims the stylists do the best they can, but only time will really fix the problem. My hair looks really stupid right now, and there’s nothing I can do about it until it’s grown out. It makes me sad.

That’s all for now. Coming up this weekend: I talk about religion. Film at 11.

from idyll to Orwell

I’m back from the spa trip with my mom. I had a really lovely time, but on this particular evening I feel kind of crappy. Probably because the thought of going back to work tomorrow has dogged me since I woke up this morning amidst the splendid Georgia mountains. I will probably write a long post, or a bunch of posts, about my trip, but I don’t know at all what’s waiting for me at work so I don’t know whether I’ll have not enough time or too much time.

I read Watchmen on the plane and then during the trip, and finished it last night. Frankly, now I’m even more confused about the critics who reviewed the film badly. I had an inkling that the ones who did were the ones who read the book beforehand, and assumed that reading the book would give me some clue as to what was so superior about it, and/or what made it so “unfilmable”. I think it’s actually quite a cinematic book, with all of the links it forms visually and with clever connecting language, and if you had enough time to tell the story (say, two hours and 45 minutes) you could easily make it work. I didn’t miss the stuff that was cut out or changed, and while some of Moore’s incredible linkages were sacrificed, in general I felt the film was a fine adaptation. My assessment about the hollow center of the film actually makes more sense now; with a book you can have several stories of equal import braided together in a sort of long rope, but film is a bit more three-dimensional and you need to have one story that forms the spine of the thing. If not, it’ll feel off. Which is what happened here.

I missed writing, and I missed reading. I hope you’re all well.