February 2012
14 posts
The Husband and I walked past a building today, and the enormous sign on the wall announced that inside there were “Jade 8” condos.
Um…clearly this is just Jdate branching out in a weird, semi-secret way, right?
super sad true stories
allcapsornocaps:
Yesterday, I told myself I was going to go to the gym, so of course instead I went to the IFC to watch the Oscar-nominated short docs, which is the the discomfort equivalent of maybe 17 consecutive hours on the treadmill? 117? Somewhere between 17 and 117 hours on the treadmill. We start off with pictures of Iraqi civillians blown to pieces by US helicopters! So many high-res...
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One of my co-workers just gave me a cupcake for my birthday, which is obviously the best, and also maybe the most exciting work-related birthday-thing that has happened to me?
But, more importantly, the note reads:
Happy (belated) birthday, old hag! With any luck we’ll all be dead soon!
Is there any clearer indication that I’m working in exactly the right place?
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I think I have an ear infection.
To add insult to injury (or, to illness?), I googled the symptoms, and realized that I was doing many of the things people with ear infections often do…tugging on them, rubbing them to try to relieve the pressure, etc…but! The people who do these things? Children. And babies.
I am apparently handling this the way people who have yet to acquire...
Twenty-seven
I turn 27 today, and, despite being very much on the record as loving birthdays and feeling they are Very Important, most of this year’s birthday-related thoughts are along the lines of trying to figure out what’s special/interesting about being 27.*
Yes, 27 is a cube, which is nice, but the math section of my brain is so atrophied at this point that it barely means anything to...
I was on the train just now with a girl I wassurewas my freshman roommate. Like, it took maybe twenty or thirty seconds of pretty blatant staring before I decided that no, she was just another pretty blonde with aMean Girls-esque vibe.
I felt pretty relieved, because I wasn’t ready for that particular impromptu reunion, but later, I couldn’t decide what was more unnerving:
the...
Terrible, Ironic Update!
Now *my* tumblr is blocked for “personals and dating” content!
Damn, you, Dickens!
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Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday is next Tuesday, so I’m hunting around, trying to find something to do with my students to “celebrate”…
PBS has a link to Dickens’ journal, which could conceivably be interesting, but I may never know, because my school has blocked the website.
The reason?
“Content Analysis Category:’Personals and...
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So, I'm "writing" a YA novel about a 16 year old...
The scare quotes aren’t meant to be self-deprecating so much as they’re meant to be accurate…I’m averaging maybe 8 pages a month, which means it should be finished by approximately…never. But! I think I figured out what my problem was: not my hazy-at-best sense of the plot, or my crippling lack of imagination, but my lack of the right musical accompaniment! Anyway:...
January 2012
15 posts
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I have no internet!
I mean, I do, at work. And on my phone. But my internet connection (which, um, our landlords give us for free, so we can’t really complain) at home is dead.
It’s the worst!
Beyond the obvious fact that this is terribly disconcerting (what happened on Tumblr yesterday?!!), and generally annoying, it also makes me seem like a liar.
One of my coworkers asked me yesterday if I got the...
Overheard boy on train: so, yeah, you just get drunk, like really drunk, and end up on the other side of the country. Like, you wake up and don't even know where you are.
Me, to The Husband: ugh, I hate boys.
Overheard boy on train: ...yeah, you kill monsters and stuff...
Me, to The Husband: I love boys!
[Update: he's now explaining how to make coffee using a French press...]
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I wish I didn’t have such a Pavlovian response to people crying on TV!
Google has some interesting ideas about my...
Its ads preferences ideas about me are pretty accurate/banal…I’m a 25-34 year old female interested in “movie research,” “recipes,” “health and fitness,” “shopping,” and…New Jersey.
Sigh.
However! It’s pretty sure The Husband is 65+
How did he ever get a hot young thing like me?
…it must be our mutual love of...
I have some work event tonight that my coworkers have taken to calling the “mystery party.”* No one’s entirely sure what it’s for, or what’s going to happen. All we are fairly sure of is that it’s not so much optional as it is “optional,” so, we’ll all attend.
This isn’t the end of the world, of course. I mean, there’ll be food...
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Well, that's embarrassing.
I recently remembered that I have a google analytics account. (Is that even the right term? can one even have such an account? Whatever. The point is, I have the google thing that tells me how many people are looking at my tumblr)
I rarely look at my google analytics account (or whatever), because there’s no point: “1.2 people have looked at your blog for less than 5 seconds in the...
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I wrote a thing...? →
weirdly, it’s about being naked
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The Not-So-Retiring Barney Frank
coldplums:
Andrew Goldman: You’ve long argued for the decriminalization of marijuana. Do you smoke weed? Barney Frank: No. AG: Why not? BF: Why do you ask a question, then act surprised when I give an answer? Do you think I lie to people? AG: I thought you might explain why you support decriminalizing it but don’t smoke it. BF: Do you think I’ve ever had an abortion?
auto reblog—Barney...
True Love!
Me: I want to draw something.
The Husband: What's with your creative flourishing? I hate it!
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I went to the gym last week with one of my friends from work (she’s trying to stick to a New Year’s Resolution, and I’m a child who can’t do anything even vaguely good for me (or, let’s be honest, anything that isn’t watching tv) unless I have someone holding my hand and/or guilt-tripping me every step of the way).
I didn’t die, which was very nice, and I...
Ugh, nonplussed indeed.
There are a handful of words whose definitions refuse to stay in my brain. Bemused is one. Nonplussed is another.
For the million and twelfth time, I looked up nonplussed today, and, oh, that’s right, it means surprised and confused…
but wait, what the fuck?
“In standard use, nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’: : the hostility of the new neighbor’s refusal left Mrs....
December 2011
7 posts
uh oh.
None of my students knew that Dickens created Scrooge, which, I mean, fine, whatever. As the husband pointed out, he is a well-known duck…
But!
They also all thought (think? It’s unclear how much they actually listen to me) that Sherlock Holmes was a real dude.
A very eventful night!
The husband and I went out to dinner last night for very poorly defined reasons (“uhh…it looks like the food in our fridge won’t rot for another couple of days?”)…
While we were there, we saw a girl I used to work with, the cross country coach of a school my school runs against, and a guy who bore a passing resemblance to Einstein. Quite a successful expedition!
It...
I get emails from MoveOn.org, because I pretend to be a good person who cares about the world.
Sometimes those emails are from a lady named Lenore Palladino, who, coincidentally, used to live in my apartment.
Because I only pretend to be a good person who cares about the world, I usually just delete the emails before reading them, but…something tells me I should look into this one a...
“Phineas and I were talking about superheroes, and I was explaining that they are...”
– A text from my sister re: the four-year-old nephew
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November 2011
12 posts
When did Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp become the same person?
My pretty initiative took a hit today… I woke up 20 minutes late (when I say 20 minutes, I should explain that that isn’t including the 10-15 minutes of oversleeping I automatically work into my morning routine…), so I was already flustered…then I realized that the lid of my left eye was attractively swollen, and slightly red (who knows why!), so my 13-year-old girl...
“My grandmother did not suffer dullards lightly.”
– Some lady in the last episode of Prohibition.
That’s literally all I want people to say about me once I’m dead.
Speaking of teaching kids about OWS...
[a teacher I work with took a bunch of our students (99% of whom are definitely the 1%) on a tour of Zucotti park to get a better sense of what's going on down there, and I saw a handful of them after they came back]
Student 1: Miss! You should have come! It was really interesting!
Me: Oh, that's great!
Student 2: Yeah!! We saw some people smoking WEED!
Me: ...
“Nothing nice is for us.”
– The Husband, discussing the Family Finances, mostly apropos of nothing
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well, it *does* have a liberal bias, and my job...
The other day, I tried to check tumblr while at work (not, to be fair, while I was actually teaching), only to find out that the site had been blocked. (the reason? Pornography.)
For some reason, I can access it again, which is lovely.
What is less lovely is that several images are now blocked.
Almost all of those images are on the Sesame Street tumblr…
What are they teaching our...
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“Manners and a code of civility can’t help you negotiate everything.”
– well, my life is over. farewell cruel and tacky world. (via coldplums)
Dammit.
October 2011
11 posts
The first thing I noticed when I came in to interview at my school last year was that all of the teachers looked fancy—the men were wearing ties, the women wearing heels…a far cry from the mom jeans and Cosby sweaters I had seen on most of the teachers at the schools where I was student teaching.
So, A) this was super intimidating, and B) I decided that it was time to step up my...
