HOLY FUCK! I finally hacked into my old LJ

And found my old life list, dated November 21, 2006:

This is an incomplete list of dreams. Goals. From realistic to downright unlikely possibilities. But who knows? I’ll check back in a couple of years and see which ones I get to do.

( ) A clean catch on a trapeze,
( ) Make babies,
( ) Drive a truck across NLEx (with my babies!)
( ) See a ghost–a real ghost, none of that cold spot shit,
( ) Join Greenpeace so I can…
( ) …live on a boat and sail to the ends of the earth…
( ) Meet Aleksandar Hemon and make him touch my cheek so I can…
(XX) Faint (hey, I’ve never fainted. Gotta try that), FUCKING DYSMENNORHEA! Ended up fainting TWICE in the past 4 years.
( ) Bungee jump off of the Sagrada Familia cathedral,
( ) March with the penguins,
( ) March with the Morgan Freeman (hey, he black),
( ) Get drunk with my kids,
( ) Get drunk with my husband,
( ) Trek across what’s left of the Amazon,
( ) Meet a pygmy,
( ) Eat a pygmy…
( ) …Then ride a roller coaster 4 times straight (ever regurgitated a pygmy? Me neither.)
( ) Sit in Nigella’s kitchen so she can talk my ear off while she cooks,
( ) Appear on The Daily Show (that Greenpeace or pygmy eating business could get me somewhere…),
( ) Contribute to Granta,
( ) Contribute to The Paris Review,
( ) M.A. Anthropology,
( ) Board a plane bound for Palau, then it crashes in the middle of the ocean and I’ll find myself on a deserted island with someone whom I have serious, unresolved issues with,
( ) M.S. Ergonomics,
( ) Go underground long enough to be pronounced dead, so I can have one of those really ridiculous “AYZJUSTKEEDING!” moments
( ) Write for a tabloid,
( ) Die old and happy from something really unspectacular

Didn’t get a lot done, but I haven’t completely missed the boat on writing for a tabloid.

and “March with the Morgan Freeman”? What the fuck was that?

How to Give the Wrong Impression

Usually I know it’s a date when there’s Camera Obscura playing in my head. I came to realize this through another blog entry about dating because I live on the internet and get all my knowledge from fairly unreliable sources with no scientific basis whatsoever, but the Camera Obscura score comes as a reliable indicator. Close seconds are Beach House and Neko Case’s “That Teenage Feeling”, but even that gets too intense.

“But nothing comforts me the same/ as my brave friend who says, ‘I don’t care if forever never comes/ ’cause I’m holding out for that teenage feeling”

Usually I know it’s a date if there’s physical contact involved. Not face raping, not weird out of context shakes: the right kind of contact. But “right” is such an arbitrary term. I know what’s not “right”: the good night high five. I know it’s not a date when the night is capped with a good night high five. I give good night high fives because I rarely know what to do with my hands. Heck, I rarely know what to do with myself. I rarely know what to do with myself, that’s why I rarely know it’s a date.

My favorite date, as told by Hemingway:

“What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What do you do?”
“I don’t care at all. If you’d like to fish I should write a letter or maybe two and then we could swim before lunch.”
“To be hungry?”
“Don’t say it. I’m getting hungry already and we haven’t finished breakfast.”
“We can think about lunch.”
“And then after lunch?”
“We’ll take a nap like good children.”
“That’s an absolutely new idea,” she said. “Why have we never thought of that?”
“I have these flashes of intuition,” he said. “I’m the inventive type.”

This doesn’t really count because it’s a discussion between a married couple (from The Garden of Eden), not between two almost strangers awkwardly negotiating dinner or coffee.

LET’S GET IN THE HABIT OF TELLING PEOPLE WHAT WE DID TODAY IN MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS!

Bullet points (I wish I was): A tribute to my dead LJ

• I woke up and chose tea over coffee, which was one giant leap for my poor caffeine logged veins, until I realized that tea is caffeinated–BUT–it also helps with digestion. I’m a little expulsive in the mouth area but this is in direct proportion to how anal retentive I am on so many levels.

• I drove my mom and brother to church, then walked over to Power Books and bought:
  

  Which made me very happy, with useful bits of non-preachy advice about what to do once I realize I’m going to die one day and should treat life as more than a slew of activity to distract me from sex (with people–do I really have to note that I mean sex with people?).

  If Maira Kalman were in a catfight with Roz Chast, who would win?

• Had lunch with my dad who gave me a fedora that came free with his Cuervo. I now have a fedora that says “Cuervo” so people can stereotype me as a hipster AND a date rapist. I love my dad.

• I watched The Squid and the Whale and was not turned on by Jesse Eisenberg. This is a first.

• I got sevral texts telling me to go out and look at the moon, so I went out. Unfortunately this fabled moon of the twitter and SMS-verse refuses to show itself in New Manila, so I just got unreasonably angry and was in the street in my girl boxers going (in my head) “WHAT FUCKING MOON BEAUTY TIARA OF HOLY VENUS AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGHHH!!!” and had to calm my nerves with coffee…which is what my nerves like very, very much. So much for choosing tea earlier today.

• I texted my friend Peter asking what was the word for it when you’re listening/singing along to one song in your head while another is playing in the real world, his answer: “Infidelity”

• I met up for coffee with my friend Wincy to show him my new book, talk about money and other –that man’s shoes are pretty! Flowers!– and test the boundaries of serious A.D.D.

• I usually cap the week off by talking to my sister. So yes, I talked to my sister.

I’m beginning tomorrow by visiting my lola and learning to write an open deed of sale and selling a car that’s been in our family for 18 years. This is also the first new car I ever sat in, the car with which I learned to drive, and the car of my first (and hopefully ONLY) car accident.

My Laptop is a Fucking Asshole

And if I had the money, I’d probably make the jump from PC to Mac, unfortunately, a) I don’t. And b) I thrive on organized chaos. Need a strapless bra? There’s one right there on top of that stack of magazines. I believe that there’s a place for everything and everything should be in its place, but I like being the only one who really gets where things go. The thing Macs do where they sweep up your workspace the minute you minimize something–that causes panic. Of course, I’ve never really had the chance to get used to it because for the past two years, I’ve been working on an HP/Compaq something model.

First, the people at HP are lovely. They have a vending machine! With lemonade! If you’re like me and you’re the type to get excited about vending machines and lemonade, it doesn’t take much to float your boat in the technology department. Which is similar to how I deal with people; I’m happy if you say please and thank you. HP made me extra happy by re-opening after closing hours to accommodate my n00b-ness.

Funny thing about this laptop is I’ve never done much with it. I’ve never used its webcam, I’ve never edited a single video on it, I can’t even open Photoshop SEVEN and when I hook it up to my wacom, the system goes haywire. So when the nice HP man asked what OS I was using, and I answered Vista, he kind of giggled and had to explain that “a Celeron can’t handle Vista”

“I wanted XP but the nice people at the store said Vista is all that my hardware can take.”

“That’s right, but your hardware’s too slow for Vista, and it causes the system to crash sooner than it should.”

*Blink. blink. blink*

“Then…why…ah fuck it.” Is it time to get Windows 7 installed? I can’t say Windows 7 without imagining Justin Long smirking at me. Also, I can’t say “Justin Long” without smirking, because the words Justin and Long just do not belong together. What is wrong with the world?

A lot is wrong with the world. First, the Senatorial slate has people like Bong Revilla on it. BONG FUCKING REVILLA, you guys! Anyway, back to my computer…

It blue-screened a while ago! For the first time! And it came with user-friendly instructions on what to do in the event of blue-screendom, but that shit’s scary! And I’m a girl! With ovaries! So when stuff like this happens, apparently I’m supposed to back up slowly and curl up in a corner with Blankets or something girly. I don’t know, eat ice cream or something, eat your feelings.

But I didn’t. Instead I just wrote this note.