Prosaic Paradise

I was all ready to replace the sac and do some other repairs on this Estie J-Series my dad found while at the AAA Antique mall while he was visiting. Sadly – or really happily – I don’t have to get it in writing condition, because it already is in terrific condition!

OK, so the feed is missing two tines. And the clip is bent. And the jewel is broken. These are mostly cosmetic. The lever and J-bar are not rusted, and I gently heated up the barrel and section to separate them to see if I had a genuine vintage sac inside and – lo! It appears that someone already replaced the sac.

I guess I don’t get to be the valiant pen hero I had hoped. Or learn how to replace a sac just yet.

So, Dad, what color ink do you prefer? I’ll send you a bottle with the pen, which, by the way, would have worked just fine if you took it home and fired it up without my non-help!

I don’t know if this is necessarily the launching of a new pen repair hobby, since there’s a lot to repairing pens, and I have a long list of hobbies queued up for my nonexistent spare time. But I couldn’t pass up the pen for the price, even with the flaws.

(This post brought to you by the fact that I have clearly been studying pens more than Chemistry, and by way of proving that it doesn’t take long to learn all the pen lingo you need to know. And by my ridiculous self-manicure you see there. And by Exaclair & J. Herbin Orange Indien, which is the orange you see in some of the photos – I’ll be posting more extensively about that when I have a little time!)

Tags: Stationery

I got a letter from the Office of Admissions and Advising at Howard Community College! I think the thin letter/thick letter thing kind of doesn’t count when you are applying to Nursing shool at community college, but I can’t tell you for sure, because I only got a thin letter.

It goes something like this:

• We reviewed your application! But it doesn’t mean anything until the end of this semester.
• You must have a 2.0 GPA! (I have a 4.0 GPA for nursing pre-reqs) But we won’t confirm that until the end of this semester.
• You may still qualify! But if you do, you will be on the wait list.
• Yay, the wait list! Actually it’s the backup wait list of people like you who may be within spitting distance of the county line, but are sadly not over it.
• But you will be on the list! But note that it’s a lottery system that is totally random.

This letter has lots and lots of fine print. The thing that’s really irksome is this bit (emphasis mine):

In the event that a Fall 2009 seat does not become available [ed. note: foregone conclusion for out of county folks], if you qualify for the program, you will be offered the opportunity of remaining on the official Waiting List for the next available clinical semester for your program.

Wait, what does that even mean? Does that mean if I qualify I have to be on the wait list again? Or that I am waiting to be accepted until the next available semester? Verbally, the allied health adviser told me it guaranteed me a spot the next year (meaning fall 2010), not another spot on the wait list. In reality it is all academic, because this is the traditional program anyways, not the accelerated program,which is my first choice. And let me just mention my dissatisfaction with a lottery system, though I’m sure they have a good reason.

Have I mentioned that one of my chem lab partners is hoping to go to Johns Hopkins? And that she can do this because the Navy is paying for it? And it’s making me jealous? She is also on the wait list. They could tell her 2 days prior to the first day of the program that she is in. She and I both wonder: how do people come up with $65,000 or whatever within 2 days?

Tags: nursing, School

Hero (short for Hieronymus) came to us 5 years ago as a 6 year old shelter kitty. He’d been in a foster home for two years (how could anyone foster this cat and not want to keep him?) and prior to that, adopted and rejected. What rough streets he traveled in his youth we will never know. He had the broken fang and we had him checked out and all was well.

Fast forward to Tuesday, wherein I hop out of a meeting to take the vet’s call.

“So, a normal cat has 32 teeth.”

“Okay…”

“Hero had 24 teeth out of those.”

“Wow. Oh, okay. I guess he didn’t have a full set when we got him…”

“Out of those 24, we had to remove 14.”

At this point in the conversation, bad things run through my head. But ultimately, our vet is a good guy and wouldn’t do us wrong. He took pictures of the rotten teeth with his digital camera to show us what was up. Hero being Hero has comforted me far more than the other way around in the aftermath of this. He just won’t be stopped from his relentlessly positive outlook. Well, he was stopped briefly when we had to take him back to get a bandage to hold the narcotic patch on his back. But I wasn’t there for that. Apparently our cat is also a Popple and can retract all limbs and his head when he’s pissed.

Anyways, he’s home and despite having ten teeth left, simply cannot wait to get a crack at his old hard food. His face still looks funny and I’m not sure if that’s permanent or if it’s still swollen. Today he gets to take off his purple bandage. I almost wish Jack would wait so I could see how happy he will be. He’s been trying valiantly to lick it off all week.

Tags: cat

(Sorry for skipping last week… nobody’s perfect!)

I had one of those Aha! moments this week. The following became evident to me through various channels in a concrete way:

Taking care of yourself is a way of showing that you have respect, or regard, for yourself.

Duh, right? Well, for me it’s a tough one to get. And I think this is clear in how I eat, how I treat my body. Constantly feeding myself crap (which when I am Crap Mode I will defend with every ounce of my brainpower) is a way of saying “I think I suck and I don’t care about myself.” Sounds like self-help claptrap but if getting my head around it helps me not have sugar crashes that wipe out the last two hours of my work day or helps me alleviate acid reflux, then I’ll take it. Not to mention, when my dad posts something like this, who am I to belittle his accomplishment? Who am I to treat that person like shit?

What does this have to do with Purge Thursday apart from a horrifying and false implication that I will become bulimic? Well, if you’ve looked in our fridge lately, you’ll understand. It was, prior to tonight, a horrifying graveyard of wack-ass old crap in there. Total bachelor fridge, since apparently Jack and I both identify as bachelors, or at least adopt their alleged eating habits.

So in preparation for trying to do myself a favor, here is a brief list of junk I cleaned out of the refridgerator to make room for better things:

• 2 jars of “fancy” mustard
• 4 year old thai peanut sauce that had solidified into brick
• cocktail sauce: “Best Before 0806”
• Acai Juice, date unknown
• 1/3 of a cake from you don’t want to know how long ago
• Random homemade hot sauce, date unknown
• Annie’s dressing, 2007, cracked lid, frightening green color
• Smuckers Caramel topping
• Can of cranberry junk, date unknown
• Raspberry Curd
• Brummel & Brown pretend butter, past date

And maybe a few other things it would be embarassing to mention. This weekend, since we can see the shelves, maybe we’ll be productive and like, clean them.

Tags: Purge Thursday

1987 was a really good year in music. …Nothing Like the Sun, In My Tribe, Document, Meet Danny Wilson, Pop Goes the World, Permanent Vacation, Bucky Fellini, Tango in the Night, Whenever You Need Somebody, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby… OK at the end of that list things start to fall apart. In 1987 had a weird thing for Dan Aykroyd. I suppose I never really stopped having a weird thing for Dan Aykroyd, but that is neither here nor there. I would simply like to thank my friend Danny for reminding me of this gem. I remembered all the words. Now to get my hands on the soundtrack, which I did in fact own at the time.

Tags: Music, nostalgia, video

This is just a heads up to anyone out there who was inspired by my story about Girls Rock Camp last August. The volunteer application for this year is up, and there is a great need for organizers and help. There will also be a camper application up soon – so if you know girls 8-18 that would like to go to rock camp, let their parents know about it.

I have been thinking about other things, school and being busy since. But I was donating our old TV to the school that hosts camp and I got to talk to the co-orgs a little, and wow – talk about people that charge your batteries. I’m all excited all over again.

Tags: Music, Rock Camp, volunteering

What are the most skipped songs in your music collection? Would it surprise you to know that the highest skip count listed in my collection is 4?

This is yet another symptom of my weird emotional issues, for sure. I would rather restart a playlist than give a song a skip count simply because I’m not “in the mood”. To me, an added skip count is an actual mark against a song, an indicator that it might not deserve its rating.

This drives Jack nuts! I make him listen to songs all the way through that he’d rather not hear right now. Or, if it’s a song that essentially had a really high play count long before such a thing existed (something I’ve been listening to since I was 12), I will actually skip to the end and let the count increment. He insists that I am lying. But to who? What is the sound of one person lying to their software? After a while I told him that if he wanted to skip something, he had to tell me before the halfway mark, because if we listened halfway, the song deserved a play count, not a skip count.

Yes, I have issues. I also think I might crack up if my metadata were ever lost. Hrm… seems like a good time to work on my non-attachment! My top most skipped tracks behind the link… Continue Reading »

Tags: Music

This Friday was a rare treat – I got to take my parents to a concert. As you probably know, I dearly love music and go to a fair amount of shows nowadays. But I don’t think I’ve gone to see live music with my own parents since the days of Dramtreeo shows at that long-defunct pub at Waterside in downtown Norfolk. So when dad noticed that Tom Rush was coming to Maryland, we arranged a special visit.

In case you don’t know who Tom Rush is, you can check out the very abbreviated wikipedia page or his home page or I can just tell you that he’s a folk music legend, a contemporary of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and possessed of a unique voice which my father feels is highly reminiscent of a cello. My father (who bought his first Tom Rush album as a reel to reel in ’67) said this to Tom Rush as he got his CD signed, and Mr. Rush said that was one he hadn’t heard before. (As far as I know, that’s the only time my father has gotten anything autographed!)

The show was fantastic. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect since my only exposure to his work was the songs I bought based on the fact that my dad liked them so much. I was not expecting to be cracking up the whole time. He says in the liner notes (of his album of funny songs and bits) that he’s not a comedian, but that has to be part of his resume because I laughed my ass off. He did this one, but the one I loved the most by far was “Old Blevins”.

Dad attests that his voice hasn’t changed much over the past forty years, something I can’t prove or disprove, but from recordings it seems pretty accurate! One of his most famous classics, “No Regrets” had me in tears.

The best part was seeing my dad so happy.

Tags: Music, show

Like almost everyone else I know, I lined up this weekend and saw the Big Geek Movie Of The Year. I didn’t have the investment that my cohorts did, although I did read it the first time back when it hadn’t been out too long. I was just 13 and totally didn’t get it. So I read it again last year in anticipation of, or in self-defense for, this movie coming out.

So I am someone who liked the comic but can’t say I have the dedicated reverence that many have. Also – still probably didn’t get some of it.

A note about going to see movies like this: You might feel a budding and wonderful kinship with your fellow geeks as you wait in anticipation. You might feel that for that afternoon, together you are all one in a tribe of earnest subculture citizenry. And if you are me, this feeling will explode into white-hot stabby rage when the people in front of you, self-professed browncoats, begin filk-singing about Serenity. But this isn’t about my ever-growing Whedon backlash. The rest awaits after the click! Continue Reading »

Tags: movies

Recently Genie pointed me to a post on finslippy that reminded me of an apocryphal story I often tell from my youth. I shall immortalize it here, and perhaps my mom will comment and tell her side of the story or tell me I’m full of shit.

As a kid I was the kind of shy that is interpreted as cute right up until it’s rude. My parents could hardly take me places and I didn’t want to interact with anyone who wasn’t them (right up until I was a tween, commencing the “I want to interact with anyone BUT my parents” stage). As a really small child, when other adults were around I would hide physically behind my parents, furniture, whatever I could.

It went that way with other kids my age, too. My mother was determined to put me in every activity she could get me into, I guess on the notion that it would turn me into an overachieving genius. I refused as much as possible unless an already established friend was going with me. Dance class? Convince Amy’s parents to let her go with me. Summer camp? Only if Mona is going. I was not interested in meeting new people on my own. I still recall sitting on the floor of a gym being arranged in summer arts camp “homerooms” wishing the earth would crack open and swallow me into its safe, non-populated bosom.

So I will never forget one terrifying afternoon when my mother espied a lone child on a bicycle riding liesurely up and down our street. For me, that was my cue to go inside. For my mother, it was a chance to get me to “come out of my shell”. After lots of whingeing and tussling and attempted emotional blackmail from both parties, my mother finally somehow got me out the front door, where she stood in the doorway and told me that she was locking this door and I couldn’t re-enter the house until I’d talked to the girl.

The Horror.

I have no idea what I said to her (I recall I thought of her as somewhat a victim of my mother’s cruel plan, or at least collateral damage) or what she said to me or how awkward it was. I primarily remember looking down the street and thinking “there is no way I’m just going to talk to this person and they are going to talk back”. She actually ended up as one of my neighborhood pals (Amy R.? A different Amy? There were several Amys…) for years after.

Whatever my mother’s motives, in retrospect, forcing me to socialize was probably the right thing to do. If I had terrible self-esteem, or was just an introvert, or simply was really sensitive – whatever it was – I needed to be pushed, I think, to abandon my concept of what was going to happen and give things a try.

Nowadays I might have a hard time walking into a situation cold (who doesn’t) but I don’t have the concept cemented in my head that it can’t possibly work. I know it could go either way and that the only way I’ll find out is if I talk to people. Otherwise how would I manage to go to ProgDay year after year all alone? You notice I still do try to recruit someone to go with me…

I often wonder about the people who can’t relate to this experience. Who are those people? Did they recieve some sequence of DNA I didn’t? How were they not imbued with the idea that social interactions are sure to go horribly wrong?

Tags: History