externalizing the inner monologue

work: Braiiiiinnns! Nom, nom, nom!
me: Ungh. [splat]

It's a good thing I really love my job, else I might have crumpled up and died already.
Come on, end of June. Come on! No Whammies!

Yes, it's all Coke. Got it?

What do you call:

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.

a creek, pronounced as like the sound a door makes

2. What the thing you push around the grocery store is called.

a buggy

3. A metal container to carry a meal in.

a lunchbox

4. The thing that you cook bacon and eggs in.

a skillet, or a frying pan if it's cast iron

5. The piece of furniture that seats three people.

the couch, or the very friendly loveseat

6. The device on the outside of the house that carries rain off the roof.

the gutters

7. The covered area outside a house where people sit in the evening.

the porch

8. Carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverage.

a coke. what kind of coke? a dr. pepper. but all referred to as a coke.

9. A flat, round breakfast food served with syrup.

pancakes

10. A long sandwich designed to be a whole meal in itself.

hoagie or sub. or po' boy.

11. The piece of clothing worn by men at the beach.

trunks [preferably never speedos]

12. Shoes worn for sports.

sneakers

13. Putting a room in order.

cleaning

14. A flying insect that glows in the dark.

lightning bug

15. The little insect that curls up into a ball.

roly-poly

16. The children's playground equipment where one kid sits on one side and goes up while the other sits on the other side and goes down.

seesaw

17. How do you eat your pizza?

with my hands, pointy bit first

18. What's it called when private citizens put up signs and sell their used stuff?

yard sale

19. What's the evening meal?

dinner, or supper depending on how old of a person I am talking to

20. The thing under a house where the furnace and perhaps a rec room are?

the creepy-ass basement

21. What do you call the thing that you can get water out of to drink in public places?

water fountain

22: If something is diagonally located, where is it in relation to you?

catty-cornered

23. What do you call the place where the water comes out of the sink?

faucet. a hosepipe gets hooked to a spigot.

Sometimes, I swear my ipod is both sentient and sympathetic to my need for certain things. Today, it was like it understood the weather--forebodingly grey as a thunderstorm rolled in, and then the splatters of the first raindrops, followed by the steady staccato of rainfall.

It played: 

Paranoid Android- Radiohead   

9 Crimes-Damien Rice   

Don't Confess -Tegan & Sara  

Breakable-Fisher

What I (Re)Built Last Night -The Casket Lottery   

Waltz -Fiona Apple

White Kite Fauna- K's Choice  

You Picked Me- A Fine Frenzy  

Teach Me Sweetheart-The Fiery Furnaces   

Morningstar-AFI 

I couldn't have made a more perfect playlist myself.

Well, on the plus side, the EARTHQUAKE seemed to fix my bathroom door, which had been sticking on the frame.

Last week--tuesday, I think--I had a burger for lunch. More specifically, I had a Fat Mo burger with cheese, hold the tomato, because I screwed up when I ordered it and got the Fat Mo instead of the Little Mo. [Fat Mo's is a local burger chain that makes really awesome burgers and spicy fries.]

But I took the enormous burger back to work and ate it all anyway, and it was stupid to do so because it was a burger the size of my face. Afterward my stomach was insanely upset and I had heartburn something fierce, which had been plaguing me as of late anyway. I was essentially in agony for the next five hours after my burger extravaganza, and was a miserable excuse for a girl until the poisons left the building.

So I decided, as an experiment, to lay off meat for a few days and see if it made me feel any better. I've had to pay attention to what I've eaten because it's such a habit to order whatever I'm in the mood for. But I've avoided all meat so far except for some fish I had the other night--which doesn't count as meat if you're catholic or even lapsed catholic. And... wow. No heartburn at all since I quit eating meat. No upset stomach. It's amazing.

The only part that sucks is... well, I like meat. Sometimes I want nothing more than a big juicy burger or a rare steak. I like bacon with breakfast. I also hate being someone that is 'picky' or has 'dietary restrictions'--I love food, and that includes burgers, bratwursts, fried chicken, grilled salmon, rare filets, and good god do I love barbecue. And I'm not up in arms about eating animals, because I grew up on a farm and raised many a pig and calf that later ended up on the table. [I do try to buy meat {and eggs, and milk} that was treated humanely though, because factory-style farming is fucking evil.]

But if the meat is going to make me a pathetic, heartburny excuse for a girl during the duration of digestion, well, maybe I will be a vegetarian after all. I figure after this week of no meat experimentation, next week I'll try adding chicken and see if it's just beef making me miserable.

In the meantime, got any good vegetarian recipes you want to share?

Last week? Sucked. I mean, there were highlights, sure, like the beautiful flowers Zeb sent me [first flowers a guy has ever given me, and at 29-almost-30 that's sad], and...well... I'm sure there were other highlights. Oh, there was the massive caffeine high that was thursday morning, when I had a triple latte after not having coffee for two weeks. But you really have to stop the think that, geez, if I'm counting a caffeine high amongst the high points of last week, all told, it was a crappy week. Not your average run of the mill crappy-stinky-poopy, but truly shitty-fucky-sucky, if you'll pardon my french.

And there's the eternal chicken-or-egg question of: Was it a crappy week because it did nothing but rain incessantly and with fervor? Or was it an already crappy week topped off with the crap cherry of constant rain. Look, I like a good rainstorm, but after--no kidding--five whole days of near-incessant downpour, your spirits fall flat alongside your hair and chase the mascara down your cheeks. Not even The Cure can encompass that kind of gloom, and I listened to Wish a lot last week.

Plus, I got my first true joy of homeownership [please note sarcasm]. I went down to the basement to get some paint supplies and--low and behold, Lake Stephanie had snuck in during the night and now washed over everything sitting on the ground. 6"--at least--of standing water in the basement. I didn't even know what to do, so I just shut the door, went upstairs, and opened a beer. Over the last two days the water has finally drained... well, back from wherever it seeped in from, leaving only a couple of puddles and the questionability about my lawnmower's survival rate.

But alas--it's a new week. The Boy is coming home Wednesday, the Lake has receded, at least for now anyway, and after today's 10 hour day at work I feel like maybe I will actually accomplish everything on my to do list for the workweek after all.

Plus, that bitch Mother Nature realized she fucking owed us one, and today was utterly gorgeous, and the cherry blossoms blew from the trees like beautiful pink snow.

So, it's been a longstanding foregone conclusion that I will read almost anything. Fiction, biography, poetry, trashy vampire horror/ romances, whatever. But right now I think I'm even topping my usual wide-subject-area:

Paula Deen: It Ain't All About the Cookin'

Paula Deen

I'm reading It ain't All About the Cooking by Paula Deen. Yes, that Paula Deen, the white haired lady on Food Network that starts every recipe with two sticks of butter. The same Paula Deen that was in the movie Elizabethtown. The same one that makes me salivate watching her show remembering all the things my granny used to cook that inevitably involved lard, fatback, or both.

It's actually pretty interesting. For example, she seems so put together and full of that particular form of grace that is the quintessential "southern charm", yet for twenty years she suffered from agoraphobia and rarely left the house. And she mostly raised her brother, who was only 16 when both of their parents died.

I'm not sure why I think it's so interesting, except maybe that, when it comes down to it, I'm interested in anybody and everybody. I think when it comes down to it, it's the same impetus that makes me love blogs so much.

What is the chemical difference between fluorine and fluoride? I need to ask my Chem-major roommate.

What was the name of the other girl character in Special Topics in Calamity Physics? Blue, Jade, Hannah, and L____... Damn, it was such a good book. I need to read something that good again.

Do I read too much Fiction? Does it make me shallow?

It's so amazing that the tilt of the Earth on its axis accounts for our seasons. and even more amazing that as a planet we are hurtling through space, around the Sun, and even in all that we are still as tiny and infinitesimal as I am in comparison to the size of the Earth. It's so mind-boggling.

Why can't I sleep? Go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep. I can't sleep! Gah! I need to sleep!

Should I just get up and do something? Fuck. I know I'm going to fall asleep around 7, right when I need to be getting up. I didn't even have any coffee today. What the fuck?

I wonder if the East Nashville Calypso Cafe is open yet?

Ooh, jerk chicken would be good right now.
Dammit, now I'm hungry.
Grrrrrrrr.

All I want to do is read my book. But there's work, and hanging out with the boyfriend, and cleaning the house, and did I mention work, which eats such a huge chunk of my day that I could be devouring the book I am reading but instead I am enslaved here at the salt mines [even though I love my job and don't really mean that but when all you want to do is something you cannot be doing it eats at you like a cancer] and I just want to go curl up, hell, I don't care where, anywhere, anywhere at all, and pull out my book and finish it, slide through the last 100 pages so I can GET THE DAMN THING OFF MY MIND.

Body Surfing: A Novel

"Gonna get a new tattoo, black and stretching around my arm..."

That song [by Everclear, in case the 90s didn't explode all over you the way they did all over me] came on my iPod on shuffle today, and it really brought back a flood of memories and desires. It reminds me of summer; of driving around riding shotgun in Melissa's car, windows down and singing along at the top of my lungs. It reminded me of seeing Everclear, all four times, including once at 328 Performance Hall, the best music venue Nashville ever had, I swear. It reminded me of kissing a boy who did not belong to me under skies filled with stars, the taste of peach schnapps on my tongue.

It also stirred up--suddenly and acutely--the desire I've had simmering for a year about getting a new tattoo, though probably not black and stretching around my arm. There are so many different tats I want, and I don't even know where to start. I was black victorian-style wrought iron off center down my back. I want the words to my favorite poem. I want an old fashioned heart shaped lock. I want an art nouveau illustration, somewhere. I want more words in latin etched into my body, indelible and everlasting.

I want the burning sensation of the ink being pressed into my flesh, the odd way it tickles from time to time, the furrowed brow of concentration of the artist, that strange intimacy.