In which I looooooooooooooooooooooove gadgets, omgwtfbbq!!
While I was in Portland my bro-there, Jay-rob, and I exchanged iPods. He gave me his 5th gen iPod Video, and I gave him my older iPod Photo (plus Firewire cable, charger, and FM transmitter) because I didn’t need it any more after he gave me his. (Because I guess he’s in love with his PSP and basically quit using his iPod. Plus he’s way fuckin’ cool.)
Additionally Jay-rob forced me to watch Serenity. (Let me tell you: it totally rocked out with its cock out. The fact that I only got five hours of sleep because I stayed up late watching it is totally irrelevant: THAT’S how much it rocked. Dude.)
(I know, I know, how can I call myself a card-carrying sci-fi geek when I haven’t watched Firefly? Well, it’s like this: NO FUCKING CABLE TV FOR YEARS, MMM’KAY?)
Anyway! (Focus, would you?) The result of all these things is that today, I used the $10 in my PayPal account (thanks, Amy! *smooch!*) and bought five episodes of Firefly from iTunes and synched them to my video iPod.
And then I laid in my bed and watched one of them. And then I sat on the porch with a cocktail and watched another.
AND I’VE STILL GOT THREE LEFT.
This is a totally true story.
In which I now consider myself to be a resident of the Left Coast, visiting Iowa for a week.
I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack! Back online and back in Iowa, that is.
The captain of my flight out of Portland said that we could listen in to the air traffic control chatter on channel 9 if we wanted to, so I pulled out my iPod headphones and did just that. For the entire flight. And now I think it would be fun to push tin for a living. I could totally do it, too. It’s geek, but with planes instead of packets! (Not to mention you would not have believed how sexy that German Lufthansa pilot’s voice was! OMG. For real. WTF Lufthansa was doing in Denver I’ll never know, but whatever.) So I’ve decided I need to learn the phonetic alphabet. Alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, h, India, j, kilo, lima, motel, November, o, p, Quebec, r, sierra, tango, u, v, whiskey, x-ray, y, Zulu. I’m half-way there.
I’m taking a couple of gigs worth of stuff off of the iPod my brother gave me before I wipe it and put my stuff on it. Tedious. But worth it, for delicious tunes.
In fact, I’ll be spending all day playing with my new laptop (it’s old, but new to me and it works, and it’s MINE) and organizing my few belongings into coherence.
It takes a lot of software to make a laptop comfortable. And a lot of cleaning to make things that have been stored at The Ex’s house reasonably clean.
In which I’ve made it!
I took a commuter flight from CID (Cedar Rapids, IA) to ORD (Chicago O’hare). Then I took a big ass jet from ORD to PDX (Portland, OR) where my kick-ass baby brother picked me up and promptly took me to a dive bar so I could decompress over a few drinks.
Now I’m at his place and we’re dorking out hardcore (his desktop is gorgeous) on hardware. The image is of our two iPods plugged into his tower. (No, iTunes doesn’t know what to do when you connect two iPods simultaneously. We don’t suggest you try it if you’re not a card-carrying FUCKING GEEK.)
Jay-rob’s giving me his iPod and I’m giving him mine. Right now he’s loading an assload of Todd Rundgren onto my new iPod BECAUSE HE’S SUPERIOR IN ALL WAYS.
Bro-there’s are excellent. You should get one, if you don’t already have one.
Tomorrow, we’re driving up the Gorge to Walla Walla to see the fam-damily for gramma’s 85th birthday celebration. Whee!
In which I must be part bear or something.
It’s warming up to birthday time! I can tell because I’ve been getting gifts already. (I love gifts.) Someone emailed me an entire Ben Folds album, and someone else bought me lunch via Paypal. (Fear of Pop, Vol. I rocks, by the way. I’d already had a few tracks off of it, but listening to the whole thing in context is even more kick ass. I sure do love that Ben Folds.)
In contrast, the weather is cooling down. Rapidly. Much too rapidly. I don’t like it.
I usually adore autumn, but the days seem to have shortened much more suddenly than usual and it’s cold enough at night to see one’s breath. My physiology is reacting by wanting to sleep for 12 – 14 hour stretches. Since it got cold three days ago, I’ve hit snooze on my alarm for an entire hour each morning. I just can’t wake up and when I finally do my brain literally, physically hurts.
I’ve always been this way. I’ve been socialized to believe that I don’t try hard enough, that I can’t wake up because I’m lazy, but I can tell you it ain’t about my attitude. My body must depend on some combination of temperature and ambient light to process my sleep patterns, and when those things change so suddenly I get stuck in deep sleep and can’t get out.
Or something. (I don’t know! What the hell am I, a sleep expert?) All I know is that the temperature dropped 50 degrees from one day to the next, and I woke the day after having slept 13 hours and feeling headachy, confused, and stupid.
Yay for coffee!
Tonight I gotta pack my suitcase and tidy my room and get some of the boxes out of the back of the jeep. Tomorrow is my last day at work; I’ll be leaving around three or so. I have a 6:30 flight out of CID and tomorrow night I’ll be in Portland hangin’ with my baby bro!!! HELL TO THE YEAH, BITCHES!
Update: Packing for travel this time of year is a pain. I’ve checked the weather for PDX and Walla Walla, and it says it’ll be, like, 85-ish during the days and 57-ish at night. So I need strappy summer things and also jackets and socks. Gah.
My mom suggested that I use my luggage allotment to take some shit out to grandma’s, saving space in the jeep. She’s a genius! If time allows I may just select a box at random, tape the shit out of it at work, and take it as my second piece of luggage. I’d meant to go through my boxes of shit and consolidate it (most of them are half garbage anyway, I think) next week, so I don’t really have anything that I know contains only stuff I want at this particular juncture.
Moving. Such a pain in the ass!
In case you’re curious what the hell I’m doing during the next few weeks.
Sept 13 – 18: Fly to Portland Oregon, drive to Walla Walla Washington with my brother, celebrate grandma’s birthday with the family. Back to PDX, return to Iowa.
Sept 19 – 22: Tune up the jeep, organize and pack my belongings. Hock books at local used bookstore. Get dog’s records from the vet, etc.
Sept 22: Enjoy a lovely Going Away Party!!! at the little bar.
Sept 23: Recuperate.
Sept 24: Depart Iowa. Whee!
Sept 25: Arrive mom’s house in Wyoming. Hang out for a week or so. (Note to self: get the hell out of there before winter snows your ass in.)
Sept 29: My birthday! Whee!
Oct 1-ish: Get back on I-80 heading west.
Oct 3-ish: Arrive in my new home, Walla Walla!
In which my time is limited.
It occurred to me this morning that I only have so many opportunities left to have Indian take-out for lunch.
I don’t remember there being any Indian restaurants in Walla Walla (there’s Thai and sushi, though!), and I don’t have high hopes that my grandma will be up for eating a lot of home-made Indian food. (She does have mucho freezer space and a microwave, though, so I may be able to make myself some homemade curry TV dinners.)
I love India Cafe’s dhal mahkani. Yum.
As long as there are yarn stores and places to buy spices, I’ll be just fine. God knows the weather’ll be better!
In which there are several visual aides!
With the help of NLW I collected a bunch of stuff from the farm yesterday, but I never did see my beloved Polaroid camera. I looked all over the place several times but it wasn’t there. Bread said he couldn’t remember seeing it anywhere.
Last night in bed I thought about it really hard, and remembered seeing it on the white shelves in my old office a year ago. Those shelves were packed by Bread himself the last time I went out there to get stuff. Therefore, the camera could be… in that box right there!
I jumped out of bed and opened a box. The camera wasn’t there, but it was in the box below! (Now all I have to do is find my Kodak Brownie and I’ll be good.)
The reason I love the Polaroid so much is that it takes pictures like these:
[color] [black & white]
The thing is simply amazing, and that’s all there is to it. If only I didn’t have to hoard the flashbulbs.
I threw away half of the stuff in those two boxes, but in the process I found a couple of old short stories. (The ‘Fixer’ one I wrote the last time I lived in Walla Walla – eleven years ago, as a matter of fact.)
Here they are, for your amusement, two short stories I’d totally forgotten about, found in my stuff, and scanned into PDFs:
[A Real Fixer-Upper] [Landed Aristocracy]
See, I used to be a cool person who took awesome photos with vintage cameras and wrote short stories for fun! And now I’ve proved it.
In other news, Iowa is pretending to be Oregon today. The sky is overcast and has been steely and unchanging all day. It hasn’t rained, but it looks as if it should. From horizon to horizon, the color is the same uniform pearly gray.
In which it’s probably true that McDonald’s isn’t so good for you. On more than one level.
There’s a story about a monk who suddenly and inexplicably becomes obsessed with the news. It turns out that the servant who prepares his food does so while reading the paper, and the subtle vibes in the food have affected the monk.
Similarly, today I had breakfast from McDonald’s and ever since I’ve been thinking about things I want, things I would buy if only I could.
I tend to avoid magazines and malls and catalogs because they cause me to want stuff I can’t have anyway and which is generally overpriced and no more functional than the things I already do have. Seeing the things I use, after looking at the nicer things available generally, makes me feel like a style-less bumpkin and so I make some effort to avoid the whole thing by shielding myself from advertising.
I’ve had New Agers tell me I don’t have tons of nice stuff because I have issues with abundance, that I need to realign myself and clear out feelings of guilt in order to experience proper flow. But that’s all crap, and I know it. If stuff was truly important to my path, I’d have figured out how to get it by now, hey what? That I haven’t – that I’ve given up all of my stuff repeatedly – informs me that this life I’m living is not particularly about the stuff. If I want beauty I can go outside and watch a sunset: I don’t have to own beautiful furniture and appliances in order to recognize myself as a lover of beauty, an appreciator of functional art, a Libra.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of nice stuff out there I’ll never own. And I’m okay with that. After all, it’s just stuff. Other than the occasional playful foray into the world of shopping, I tend to ignore the whole thing altogether.
Usually. But not today! Here’s a list of crap I want:
- This kick-ass knitting needle set
- a Flickr upgrade, since my older pictures keep sliding off and that makes me sad
- a new pair of mocs
- Back To The Bars – I wanna hear this album so bad I could puke (I used to have it but Bread lost it)
- a dedicated ebook reading device
- the yarn and pattern to make this sweater in the long-sleeved version
- any of this stuff
- this t-shirt
- and this couch because omgwtfbbq is it not gorgeous?!?
- …and some chocolate. Or coffee. Or both!
When I rejoin the ‘real’ world in the near future, I will probably have a fairly rocky readjustment period. In Iowa, one can get by without nice things for looooong periods of time. One can simply not think of nice things, if one is judicious, and be quite happy with what one has.
But in the ‘real’ world I’ll need normal clothes, at the very least. I have the feeling I’m going to be longing for things I can’t afford much more than usual for the next year or so, or until I can reconcile myself with the new local laws of nature. I’ll probably bitch at first, and then it’ll all go down hill from there. You should probably stop reading me now.
Well, after you buy me a birthday present, that is.
In which I tell you a story about my sordid past.
Tonight I’m going to a birthday party at TiRi’s with this cute kid I met the other day. He’s nineteen. I watched him try to seduce a drunken redneck who thought he was a girl, and the look on the kid’s face when he realized the object of his affection didn’t understand he had one too was priceless. I fell instantly in love with him.
It’ll be fun to go out with him tonight. There will probably be lots of giggling. Befriending a nineteen-year-old is a little sketch, maybe, but I liked him and I’m a total fag hag not an ageist… even though I do think I’m old enough that I had an abortion the year he was born.
Which reminds me of my Weird Psychic Abortion story, which I’ve meant to write about for years and so I might as well now.
The first time I got pregnant (in junior college, by a dumb trumpeter I’d mistaken for deep) I had no emotional or spiritual experience with regards to the future personhood of the zygote at all. I’d simply been incredibly miserable.
My physiology does not get along with pregnancy hormones, not one bit, and every time I’ve ever been pregnant has totally, utterly, unabashedly sucked. I get morning sickness from hell, my mental facilities fail spectacularly, I sob endlessly, I puke randomly, and I bloat. All within ten days of implantation.
I remember pulling off of a busy road one day dressed in my Dickens’ Carolers costume, opening my car door, and puking my guts up into a parking lot. In broad daylight. While hurrying to a gig. “I’ll never forget this moment,” I thought at the time, punching my voluminous crinoline underskirts back under the steering wheel, “because I’m wearing this fucking dress.”
The abortion I underwent to terminate my first pregnancy was unusually awful due to the fact that they used oral rather than intravenous Valium, and I’d eaten a meal – the last cheeseburger I was ever to eat, actually – before presenting for the procedure. I wasn’t even half as drugged as I should have been when they wheeled me into the room. Let me tell you, you want your Valium by IV whenever possible. Trust me on this one.
When I was about twenty-three or so, I missed two periods. Having been pregnant before I knew exactly what it felt like and I had all the symptoms, not to mention I knew I’d been unbelievably half-assed with birth control. But unlike the first time, I felt someone. Someone was there. Already. A boy child.
He’d be dark haired, I knew, with a high forehead and hazel eyes even though neither I nor the father looked anything like that. He had chosen me, for some reason, and arrived awfully early in the process. After getting over my initial terror of pregnancy and motherhood, I liked him. I loved him. I talked to him for a couple of weeks. My boobs hurt, but I didn’t mind so much. The queasiness was bad, but manageable. He was always around, an intangible yet somehow very real presence.
Yet I had The Fear. Was I ready to give my life up to another? Who would I become, if I had that child? I’d never go back to school, probably, never travel. I knew myself to be selfish and somewhat reckless, and doubted my self-discipline. (In those days, I had heavy judgments about how people should raise children, and I didn’t think I passed my own specs. Nobody did, but it took me years to realize that my standards were artificially high and that total idiots raise children to adulthood every day.) I was honest enough with myself to know that I didn’t want to exchange my lifestyle for motherhood. I was also pretty sick with the prospect of having another clinical abortion, but that was my own damn fault.
I didn’t want a baby, in fact didn’t want kids at all, but I wanted him. I didn’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t want to have to be dealing with it! What kind of idiot was I, getting pregnant again?
And I could feel him there, hanging out with me, sweet and mine. I agonized over it.
But one night I decided, and the next evening I walked to a nearby park and sat on a swing. I thought, Hey, baby. You need to go. I can’t have you now, but you can come back later. I can’t care for you properly. You have to go. And I felt such sadness, but also a certain amount of pragmatism in myself. I thought, There’s more than one door, baby. If you have to come in now, pick another woman. Or if you wait, maybe I can be your mother later. But not now. Please, not now, can’t you see?
And it was sunset, and cars drove by, and I sat on the swing. By and by I couldn’t feel him any more. I walked slowly home. When I got there I started bleeding.
It’s not often that one remembers something that didn’t happen with such clarity. I’ve come to regard that place in time as one of the larger branches of my personal choice-tree: if I’d had him, my whole life would have been different. I would be a totally different person. I would never have come to Iowa, met the people I love, done the things I’ve done. I would have chosen a path on which I was a woman with children: totally different than this path, the one I’m living now.
What had never occurred to me before the other night was that I might one day meet him, because he wanted in so badly and since I never birthed him someone must have. What a cool feeling that would be, to meet him and know that I was almost his mother.
Anyway. That’s the story of my psychic abortion. (The easiest transition from pregnant to non-pregnant I ever went through! I recommend it as the preferred method.)
In other news, I’m glad it’s Friday ’cause I wanna rock!
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4 random books from my Library!
