If you do not have feelings for your spouse like those expressed in Major Sullivan Ballou’s letter of 1861, then in my opinion, you should not be married to that person.
add
September 30, 2006 at 4:42 pm (memories)
Sebethis has been talking about ADD this week. She wants to get tested and get it all sorted out. It’s funny she’s going through this, because the day she told me about it, the South Park episode about Ritalin was on, where the adults are taking their kids’ Ritalin and they all are getting excited about seeing Phil Collins.
But I digressify. I am quite convinced I have adult ADD and that I was probably ADHD when I was a kid. Somehow I make it work out so I don’t worry about it too often. But even as I blog this, I am simultaneously watching a movie, listening to the Beatles, practicing music, and sorting through crap. I do one thing for fifteen minutes and then have to go back to something else. Ah, multitasking and the nothing it accomplishes! So Sebethis probably has a good point. I will have to stay tuned to her adventure and see where it leads for her.
Incidentally, I just found my red spiral notebook from when I was like, four. I thought it was so grownup to have my OWN OFFICE SUPPLY. It’s hilarious. The first page, it says:
Meg is nice
Yes, Meg is nice
I love Meg
She is nice and good
But she does not play very much All she does is read
Meg is my cousin, for those of you who don’t know this. She is ten months older than I and we grew up next door to each other. One day, I apparently got mad at her and annotated it:
Meg is NOT nice.
Yes Meg is NOT nice
I love Meg
She is NOT nice and NOT good
But she does not play very much All she does is read YES SHE READS ALOT
frozen frames of demographics
September 30, 2006 at 4:23 pm (Smith, memories)
I am making some sort of concerted effort to actually go through the boxes of crap and papers I’ve been lugging around for quite literally the past six years. Or longer.
I came across panoramic pictures of my junior high class of 1990, my high school class of 1993, and the Smith College class of 1997 at its orientation in August 1993. Holy crap. First off, the ninth-grade picture has a bunch of folks in it who are dead now. About seven or eight people in my class in Boulder (at both high schools, Boulder and Fairview) died from 1992-1993. All in completely unrelated incidents. That makes the high school picture interesting, too, although most of them had died by the time that picture was taken. My friend Allie died the week the high school picture was taken, but she was going to an alternative high school at the time. She was saying to our mutual friends how weird it was that everyone was dying, and then her school van got into an accident the following week and she died. Everyone else was fine.
It’s very upsetting to me that my college orientation picture was taken thirteen years ago. It makes me feel old. And I realize that the aging process happens to everyone and shocks and amazes everyone, too. I just don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much. At least most of the people I knew then can say now that they’re married or have kids or an amazing career. Grr. I can’t believe what dorks we looked like, too. Smith was a little more demographically diverse, but my high school picture is pretty darn white. There were a lot of us, too. Boulder was big on the clean-cut look, even though it turns out most of the popular kids were complete whores and drugheads in spite of how they presented themselves. But there wasn’t any makeup or big hair.
It’s so funny how at every point in our lives, we generally think we have it all figured out. I remember being in sixth grade and thinking I was seriously the shit. We were, oh, so grown up. In college I thought I knew absolutely everything. Now I feel like I am so much more grown up than I was even five years ago and I laugh at folks in their twenties figuring everything out and becoming fully fleshed out adults. But I’m sure I still don’t have it figured out. Heck, I can’t even figure out how to date at the ripe age of 31. Anyway.
I need to figure out how to get pics off my camera so that I can blog about the anti-gun rally in Harrisburg that Karin and I wound up having to go to last Tuesday — and for which we were glorified stewardesses for twelve hours….
mofos in libraries.
September 27, 2006 at 3:19 pm (Uncategorized)
something cool to share with y’all
September 24, 2006 at 4:22 am (Uncategorized)
These pieces of sheet music look the same. At first, I thought one was just a bad print. But look closer and you’ll see they’re done by two completely different lithographers. This is circa 1858:
nfl
September 24, 2006 at 4:14 am (noise)
I knew there was a reason I hate going to sporting events.
library workers and lobbies
September 23, 2006 at 5:21 pm (bureaucratic bullshit, noise, politics, why I hate noise, work)
At this moment, I have started watching the final DVD of the hearings with the city council last year, when the director of the Free Library chose to get rid of librarians in 20 of the 49 branches and run the libraries on an “express” system: i.e., have the branches affected only be open from 1-5 PM and staffed by library assistants, who only have to have a high school diploma.
This is supposed to be the moment of blazing glory of our recent steward, Allen, who fought hard for everyone’s jobs. I am excited to see how it goes.
Some background: Eliot, the director, decided to improve the central library and even build a new building for it but wanted to cut librarians to make more money for the project. Side note: there will be no extra room for *books* in the new library, and the stacks will be cut off the back. You do the math. I can’t say anything else until I pass probation, at which point I will be lambasting the library administration in oh, so many ways.
I have also painted my toenails, as I promised my toes would look OK should we be allowed to wear sandals to church tomorrow, to be worn under our very hot and polyester robes (read: no ac in the sanctuary). We are singing Thomas Tallis’s (c.1505-1585) setting of “If Ye Love Me, Keep My Commandments” and an interesting Britten piece called “Hymn of Columba,” which is rather funky. We’re singing Harris’s “Faire is the Heaven” and Messiaen’s “O Sacrum Convivium” later on this fall, which makes me very, very happy. Those are two of my favorite things ever. Although I suppose the Harris is a tad cheesy. Every time I think of St. Columba, I think of the weird medieval monastic history course I took in college. I tried hard to concentrate, but I’m afraid I spaced much of that out. Although maybe I’m also remembering Clovis, who didn’t like his wife, so he “smote” her. Hmm.
Today I was rather angry at work, because a bunch of guys were setting things up in the lobby, which was pretty damn loud. And they couldn’t help that, but it wasn’t good that they were all having conversations for which they felt they needed to SCREAM at the tops of their lungs. We’re not allowed to close the doors to the music library at all, and patrons started asking if there was some way I could get the people who WORK at the library to shut the fuck up. So I went out and asked the guard if he could help me by getting the guys to at least stop yelling their heads off all the time. And then I asked one of the guys to please not shout, and he looked at me like, “Die, you fucking white bitch.” After I went back into the music library, he pretty much said what he looked like he was thinking to all his buddies and then they started throwing things around and crashing things just to make more noise.
It was unbelievably infuriating to be derided by asking people to please not shout in a library. I can ask patrons to do that, but heaven forbid I ask library workers to please be quiet, because they’re represented by a different union that will shove all it has down my throat if I do anything about it. Or try to cause a problem. How on earth am I supposed to enforce quiet rules in the library when the library workers are worse than the worst patrons? And then it becomes a race issue, inevitably. Every single one of those building guys setting things up in the lobby were black. I’m a white, tightass, female librarian. And it shouldn’t be a race issue, but because of all these other things, it’s impossible for people to expect peace and quiet even in a LIBRARY anymore, for heaven’s sake.
Anyway. I have to work again tomorrow, of course, for church. There are going to be some rough weekends in October, when I have to work Saturdays and Sundays back to back, with church in the AM on Sundays and sometimes also work in the library on Sunday afternoons. Me no have no free time anymore. But I’ll at least be able to pay my fucking bills. :/
Yesterday was a good day off, though. I went to the dentist which isn’t pleasant but he is SO COMPETENT. I’m going to have to invest in another nightguard for my TMJ. I had a nightguard that my mother paid, like, $400 for when I was in college or something, that I lost in New York. It always fell out when I slept so it probably got stuck in my sheets when I had them laundered or something. In any case, when I’d gotten that nightguard (it’s like a plastic splint that is molded to your teeth and keeps your jaw aligned and keeps you from grinding your teeth in your sleep), I insisted that if it was that expensive it had to be see-through ice blue. So they made it blue. This dentist will also try to make it blue. 
Then I decided to go buy clothes. I bought two pairs of pants and four shirts at the Gap outlet downtown for only $80! (No clothing tax here, but we surely make it up in income taxes.) Then I up and decided to get a haircut at a salon recommended to me by my fabulous new Russian choir buddy and randomly stopped by Ludwig’s Garten for a wonderful German lunch. I love German food. I’m such a carnivore.
I followed it up with a fun evening in Manyunk with Amy for dinner and then Jim’s gig at Grape Street, where we met up with the famous Allen, my boss and his wife, and David from art.
deeply alone, as ever
September 20, 2006 at 1:28 pm (dating doldrums, relationships)
Part of why I decided to start down the track of a Ph.D. in public policy was owing to a conversation with my mother. She pointed out that I’ve been obsessing my entire life over never being in a relationship and I need to face up to certain realities. I.e.: I have never been in a significant relationship, quite contrary to my attempts at meeting people and dating and so on, and I should just accept that I may, and probably will, be alone my whole life. Which royally sucks, given the fact that I’m a pretty passionate, loving person. And that maybe someday I might want to have a kid. I’m turning 32 in two months and time is ticking away….
Of course, if I were ever so lucky as to be in a relationship, I might very well be questioning the need to ever have kids. People have kids for dumb reasons a lot of the time, and let’s face it, I could pretty much kiss my life goodbye.
But anyway. I’ve been annoying my friends again, in my continuous wondering about what the hell is wrong with me, do I have really bad halitosis, etc., etc., etc. And it’s true. I do need to accept the fact that I am not really the kind of girl men are very interested in unless they’re unavailable to love me the way I should be loved. Many people in relationships do not live authentically at all. To be in a relationship is to compromise, after all. However, I do know a few couples here and there who I believe are able to be in their relationships with each other and also live authentically. And I am incapable of doing anything BUT live authentically. Obviously, if I really wanted to be in a relationship that much, I would have settled long ago for someone I wasn’t really all that into.
Sometimes I don’t know if people realize how difficult it is to be someone like me in this society. People look at me and think I’ve got some good things going and they don’t realize how agonizing it is to be single forever and ever, amen. It’s like I never started my period or something.
groan.
Anyway, I think I need to find some way to accept my alone-ness and one way to do that is to get my mind off the loneliness. I am working three jobs now so that helps. And maybe I need to plan a trip to get out of this country for awhile. Dust off some ambitions I DO have control over — after all, I have absolutely no control over meeting anyone or meeting anyone who is single and available and right for me. I should also revisit other people like me in the Quirkyalone world — just to remember that I’m not the only one who experiences serious singlehood at all times of life.
And I do feel uplifted by the fact that one of my best friends, who is a pastor, told me that she thinks the most important thing people can do IS live authentically, and that I’m one of the only people she knows who truly does it.
cars and the people who drive them
September 20, 2006 at 4:43 am (inadequately endowed, noise, politics, vehicles, why I hate noise)
I’ve been most pleased at how many people have been blogging about their decisions to ride bikes more, take public transit more, etc., owing to having seen Al Gore’s recent movie. Of course, that wasn’t a major decision for me to make: I’ve owned a car for three years out of the past thirteen, all of which were years when I was living at home in Colorado and pretty much had to have one. One of the reasons I choose to live in a city is because I don’t have to have a car here. I even managed to get by without one in Urbana.
So I am pretty hard on obnoxious drivers who are driving during rush hour, particularly around the four-way stop behind the library. Yesterday, it was MY TURN, and a woman who was trying to turn in front of me started making this huge display of sighing and huffing and puffing because she had to wait for me. So, of course, I started exaggeratedly waving my arms around in mocked despair and sighing and huffing and puffing back at her with a sad face, like, “Isn’t it TERRIBLE?” Come ON. If you choose to drive in a city you’re going to have to sit around and wait quite a bit, especially when it isn’t your turn and the pedestrians have the right of way.
A couple of weeks ago, it was quite literally pouring rain, and I was walking into the back entrance of the library, which is on a one-way alley. To my surprise, about ten of us in the alley had to dash to the edges for our safety, because a guy in a souped-up Neon needed to illegally back down the alley, the WRONG way and very fast, so that he could get a rock-star parking place right next to the door.
Sometimes I just feel like people automatically become jerks (or bigger jerks) the minute they’re behind the wheel. It’s no secret how I feel about illegally modified tailpipes and car stereos and what I think about the anatomical endowments of men who do soup up their cars or motorcycles. I think this is a much, much noisier city than Chicago or New York. Chicago is similar to Chicago in that it is full of people who continue to own and operate vehicles in spite of the good public transportation. But they’re a lot stricter with their noise ordinances and they actually enforce them. In Chicago, you can be fined $500 and your car IMPOUNDED on the FIRST offense if your stereo can be heard from a greater distance than 75 feet. That is so not the case here. In fact, looking through the Philly Blog, it appears that a lawsuit is holding up the enforcement of noise ordinance laws here. And in New York, of course, it’s downright stupid to own and pay for a car and try to drive it around unless you live in BFE Queens or Brooklyn.
Anyway, I have otherwise been pretty good about behaving myself, unlike in Chicago or Urbana. I haven’t flipped anyone off. I haven’t told anyone he has a small penis. But I am sincerely hoping to get together an anti-car alarm group. New York is well on its way to finding a way to ban audible car alarms. I was kept awake all night on Saturday by an alarm that was valiantly defending its host vehicle against every bus that drove down the street. This particular alarm went through a cycle of every sound (circa 1990s-style car alarms) and would last for about fifteen or twenty minutes. Until something else drove down the street and set it off again. I was pretty pissed, because now that I get paid to sing in a church, I had to get up pretty damn early. Grr.
Someday, my friends. Someday you, too, and everyone else will get as angry as I am about noise and then maybe they can’t ignore the laws that exist!
Anyway. I don’t mean to rail on cars in general. I do think they’re necessary sometimes. But I also believe that people get too reliant on their cars and use them even when not necessary, thus adding to congestion, noise, and roadrage against pedestrians. My 2c.
I don’t know, guys…
September 18, 2006 at 6:31 pm (TV, flix, me)
Seventeen years after I first started getting told on a regular basis that we resembled each other, people don’t see it anymore. Do you?:
What’s particularly funny about this movie poster is that it’s just like a commercial on YouTube from that era that Mary Kay sent me.
