life

Vague enough to be boring

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 08:36 on 3 November 2005

One of the great things about keeping a journal is that it provides a nice history of things important to me at a given time. I can look back through the various entries and be entertained, horrified, amused, or puzzled. All perfectly valid responses given the varied posts I make about the events in my life.

The theory goes if I keep this up, I'll have a nice chronology of my life, and will be able to laugh about most of this when I'm a crotchety old lady, sitting on the porch with my Crazy Cousin Kelly, cackling about something or other.

Assuming I'm sane enough to be able to read it.

Well, and that she's still game for that plan. Given she has a kid now, Gadi might think I'm just too crazy for her mom to hang out with. Or she might in 80 years.

The biggest problem with this plan, however, is that I don't write when I'm down. When things get rough, or I get overwhelmed, the first thing that gets chucked off the list is this, the writing, the purging of the thoughts, ideas, fears, feats, accomplishments, or events that humour me. Note the gap just last month, mid-October. I was writing a little bit, but wasn't finishing anything, and several people actually commented to me about it.

So, now, here I am in a similar place. Some of the issues I'm struggling with I'm surely not supposed to talk about, and sometimes I think I'm not supposed to have in the first place. But that reckons back to expectations, of which I have a huge long thought/post about.

Not talking about these issues is hard, because some of them deal directly with people, friends I'd desperately would like to talk to about the situation, but can't seem to do it. Not being able to solve a problem staring me in the face is incredibly frustrating. Not solving is isn't my style. Eh, people aren't my forte either, and those two are going hand-in-hand at the moment.

Ah, well. Vague enough to bore even myself, and accomplish little.

Bad mood wake up call

Blog Instead of being asleep at 21:31 on 13 October 2005, kitt created this:

I hit a tree tonight.

I find it interesting, and not at all surprising, that bad "accidents" happen when I'm angry or in a foul mood. The mood has to be particularly foul to fall into the categories of "interesting bad accident" correlation, but many negative emotions certainly fit.

For example, when I lost 85% of my hearing.

I had come downstairs one morning and wandered into the kitchen, when I noticed my roommate had left all the kitchen cabinet door open again. He was always leaving the cabinet doors open, and it drove me nuts.

Now, in retrospect, why kitchen cabinet doors being open would be annoying is beyond me. Maybe at the time it annoyed me like toliet seats being left up (though, for the record, I prefer toliet seats being left up to toliet seats being urinated on), I don't know. But it annoyed me.

And so, in a fit of anger, I slammed each and every cabinet door.

Wham!

Wham! Wham!

A week later, I was in the doctor's office for a hearing test. I had lost 85% of my hearing in my left ear, and 20% in my right ear.

I used to have really good hearing, being able to hear -/+ seven kHz over normal hearing range. Now, when it's quiet, I hear ringing. In that fit of anger, I managed to induce tinitus in my left ear. The first year of the ringing was very difficult.

"You'll get used to it."

"It's not so bad, at least you can hear."

"Don't worry, it'll go away sometimes."

Didn't quite work out that way. Now, when it's very quiet, say on a mountain hike, and someone comments, "Wow, listen to how quiet it is," I can only wish I could hear the silence.

Because the hum is always with me.

But, back to the tree.

The hitting of the tree was one way to snap me out of the semi-bad mood. Especially with police officer looking over at me when the crunch happened.

That I hit the tree at all was a surprise to me (well, d'uh, I wouldn't have hit it in the first place if I had seen it), because I make it a point to never drive when I'm in a foul mood. I'm responsible for two thousand pounds of machinery that can cause serious injury to people around me, to property around me, and to me. One of the last things I want to do is cause damage because I wasn't in control of that vehicle. Just as using the phone while driving is bad, driving in a bad mood is bad. And I don't like to do it.

So, now, I've gone and hit a tree. The only thing I've damaged is my own property, and that's good. The tree was fine, if a bit scratched. It's a good wake up call. Expensive, but good.

A wake up call to lower the level as to what is an acceptable "bad mood," and don't drive if I'm in that mood.

Wake. Up. Call.

Update: Oh, yeah. The human body heals well when you let it. My hearing has recovered to the range of normal hearing. I wear earplugs when I head out to loud places now (say, like dancing on Saturday nights), and carry around a pair in my backpack pretty much everywhere I go. I still have the ringing when it's quiet, but I can hear fairly well now. Well, except if you speak in a fast English accent. Then I have trouble comprehending what the heck you just said.

I win! I win!

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 22:23 on 12 October 2005

I have won the ever prestigious 2005 SBW Award! I will be forever honored for this award!

From Megan's site, I received the news:

2005 SBW Awards
I just wanted to pass the title of Smallest Bladder in the World back to the lovely and talented Kitt. My bladder really hasn't been that bad lately, and she's right, her bladder is dinky. So here you go, Kitt. You are now the reigning SBW queen.

I am so honored! I'm so excited! I've never won such an amazing award before! Oh, thank you, Megan, for passing the torch (walnut?) to me!

Leave my presets alone

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 08:51 on 12 October 2005

If I hand you my car keys in, say, a car swap for the weekend, or, to let you borrow my car for some reason, don't change the radio stations. Really, it's for only a weekend.

But, if you absolutely must reset the radio stations because my selection of NPR, modern crap and 70's-80's-and-90's crap don't meet your expectations, don't return the car without the stations reset back to my settings.

And for goodness sake, don't leave it set on some All-Religion-All-the-Time station. Or leave three of the five buttons set on Spanish stations when 1. I know you don't speak Spanish, and 2. none of them are my one favorite local Spanish station.

Not that any of my car-swapping friends would actually do such a thing.

Doyle.

Last book I read?

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 20:10 on 7 October 2005

Oh, it's a sad, sad day when a friend asks you what the last book you've read is, and not only does it take you four minutes to remember what book it was, but the book was actually crap.

In all fairness, it wasn't complete crap, just mostly crap.

The book in question is Carpe Demon. I read it on the way to Chico nearly two months ago. Two! I haven't even finished the latest Harry Potter for goodness sake. Sigh.

Kris purchased the book for me a few days before our drive to Chico. We had been at Borders, nominally for Kris to purchase the soundtrack to Wicked. In as much as I love bookstores (having worked at bookstores for over five years in high school and college), I wasn't quite ready to leave when Kris was ready.

Well, Kris was completely ready to leave, so even though I was resisting, he was insisting. After a few moments, Kris turned to me and said, "I'm getting in line. You can put whatever books you want into my hands until I get to the register, but I'm leaving now."

Um...

Okay!

I immediately plunked the stack of books in my hands into Kris' arms, and followed him out of the stacks. Along the way, I started picking up books and adding them to Kris' pile. A couple of them were ones I had been thinking of purchasing, but wasn't quite ready to get (realizing I had a 2' stack of books at home not yet read), but some of them were completely spontaneous.

Like the Carpe Demon book, whose sub-title of the book is "The Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom."

The back cover makes it sound interesting:

Lots of women put heir careers aside once the kids come along. Kate Connor, for instance, hasn't hunted a demon in ages...
That must be why she missed the one wanderin through the pet food aisle of the San Diablo Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, he managed to catch her attention an hour later -- when he crashed into the Connor house, intent on killing her.
Now Kate has to clean up the mess in her kitchen, dispose of a dead demon, and pull together a dinner party that will get her husband elected to County Attorney -- all without arousing her family's suspicion. Worse yet, it seems the dead demon didn't come alone.
It's time for Kate Connor to go back to work.

I read the first three pages in the store, to see if I could stand the writer's voice. It seemed okay, so sure, why not?

Well, by the end of the first chapter, I realized why not.

The style of writing was annoying. She was unable to make any statements of actions without explaining them to death. And the descriptions weren't entertaining either. Quite often the author tried too hard to create the scene and character voices, managing to just annoy me instead. An example:

"Mo-om." She managed to make the word two syllables. "You don't have to be gross."

Writing the word as two syllables puts both of them into my head as I read them, I don't need the description afterward.

The plot was predictable. The character development was unsatisfying and shallow. The lead character, Kate, pretty much had to be an idiot to behave the way she does in the book. And her husband? A complete moron.

The parts that should be exciting, the fight scene descriptions, for example, were lame and boring.

The book is 360 pages long, and satisfyingly thick. Until you open it and realize the paper is thick, the lines widely spaced, the font large and there are less than 300 words per page.

The part I think I found the worst was on page 279:

"Demons are the bad guys," Ediie said. "And believe you me, I've known some bad ones in my time, that's for sure."
I opened my mouth to get a word in, but Eddie rambled on.
"Vial things. And the stench? Hoo-boy..." he made a strong motion as if to dispel the odor.

Vial.

Sounds a lot like "vile," eh?

Yeah.

That was the one I remembered, but there were a number of misspellings in the book that were really annoying. Those, and a series of grammar errors just grated on my nerves.

Bleh.

The book sucked. Time to get this copy out of the house.

Memories are funny things

Blog Instead of being asleep at 19:42 on 6 October 2005, kitt created this:

They're gone before you realize it. That very well may be the best thing about them in some cases, but it's also the worst thing about them, too.

Pretty much most of my childhood I struggled to forget. I'm sure most people (though definitely not all) are in the same boat of hating the awkwardness of growing up.

I became darn effective at forgetting memories, and being aware of the ones I wanted to remember. I remember sitting on the Olive Walk with Ari Pine, just talking on cool Southern California evening some time during my junior year at college, and thinking, "I want to remember this. This is a good moment." I have no idea what we talked about, nor who else was there, but I do remember that it was good, and that I wanted to remember.

I find myself more and more wishing that in the destruction of my bad memories, I hadn't lost the good ones, too.

But, I guess memories are like that, too. You don't get to choose.