Avoidance.

It’s ‘round about this time in the week wherein I absolutely cannot take my job anymore.

Here are some common work avoidance strategies I take:

1) I drag my feet on the way into work. This was a bit more thrilling today, as I forgot my breakfast at home, so called a woman I work with and told her I would be “a little late.” Too bad “a little late” was only 8:36, instead of the usual 8:30. Stupid apartment and it’s nearness to my job.

2) I spend about an hour in the morning “catching up on the news.” Chicago Tribune is first. God forbid some poor downtrodden individual on the South Side got stabbed or caught in a drive-by overnight, and I missed it.

Then I read CNN, then the BBC. I like to start local and end global, you see. After I've gotten a good inkling of how screwed up the world is, I usually end by looking at People's daily celebrity photos, just to really bring my brain back to the rotting cesspool that I am comfortable with it being most of the time.

3) I check my daily blog reads. Bev will usually have her daily musing already up for me to check out. Except for that one time last week when she was late - because she was visiting with her mom and cousins - and I had to sit on my hands so as not to be one of many of her loyal readers who emailed her, to make sure she wasn’t trapped under something heavy. See, that’s what happens when you blog every single day for seven years: you take a break, and the online community thinks you’re dead.

4) Lately, I’ve also been writing in my journal. Not this journal, but the actual journal, filled with waywayway more phobias and laments than I could let the Internet in on, including but not limited to:
- wanting to be more creative in my everday life
- as part of that, wanting to take classes to learn how to sew
- thinking that I’m a bad mother to my dog and cat some days
and,
- getting all “woe is me” about that Cadbury Crème Egg I ate last night.

Believe me, you would probably just need to lay your head down on the ground wondering how I make it through the day if I let you read any of THOSE entries.

Usually I throw a little watercolor or two (or hundreds) on to the pages of my journal, for visual stimulation. And, also, because I can’t seem to write on a page unless it’s decorated in some way, even if that just means being crinkly from the watercoloring that’s on the page behind it. The thought of a blank piece of paper fills me with terror, and I could probably (and probably have) read into that as being another reason I should pay for weekly therapy, but whatever, for now I'll just decorate the pages.



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After I have done one (or all) of these things at work, THEN I can begin to do something work-related. About five minutles later, I am bored enough to rinse and repeat the above list.

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Because it’s SO fitting that I follow that rant on my attitude towards what I do to pay the bills, I feel I must mention that yesterday was Secretary’s Day, or "Administrative Professionals Day," or any of these names that you would like to call it.

So, for the fourth year in a row, I spent the day being praised for doing a job that I don’t particularly care for and feel that I am too smart for, thus making me only marginally good at it, because I really hate it so much.

However, it pays the bills. Boy howdy, does it pay the bills.

Anyways, it was nice of my higher-ups to do something for me, but what really what I'm getting at is that it's just so embarrassing to get cards, gifts, accolades and a breakfast celebration to honor a profession I don't want to be in. I want to say something, you know, like: Please. Rub it in more that I had a foolhardy major in college that got me nowhere, and went down this professional road because I needed health insurance.

Sheesh.

The tulips were lovely, though. Even the two-headed mutant one.



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Finally, because I feel the need to spew it’s cuteness all over the Internet, delight if you will in this little polar bear’s butt.



Sorry I couldn't get him facing the right way - he was too busy playing with a piece of hay to pay any attention to the 600 people watching him.

This was taken last Sunday, probably the most beautiful day in all of 2007 (and Earth Day, to boot), when my family and I went to the Brookfield Zoo. There was also this baby, too:



Although, her cuteness was cut in half by the zoo feeling the need to show a video of her live birth, back in January. A live birth involving a very leggy little thing, splooging out of her mom’s rear, covered in afterbirth. And then Mom licks her clean. Just like that. I’m pretty glad that good old soap and water has replaced that last part of birth for us humans.

Maaaan....

I just got back from a performance by the the Joffrey Ballet - I am a season ticket holder - and I was all pumped to take some no-flash photos of Light Rain, because it rules, but photography of any kind was prohibited, because it's a "serious danger to the dancers."

I say: you owe me at least one photograph for my $275 a year, little "ballerinos".

:)

It could be worse.

Remember how in the last entry I was saying how I didn't want to bog the Internets down with my "woe is me" bullshit? Well, now I'm really trying to be happy and grateful for everything that I have, after watching the events unfold yesterday at Virginia Tech.

Seriously, what the fuck. What could have pissed that kid off so much? I think what bothers me, too, is that the survivor that spoke about how she played dead had been in a German class. I sat in that same German class for three of my four years of college. Tons of people would walk past our classroom, much like that shooter. Hell, watching people walk by the door was the only sweet respite I had once the professors started teaching us the dreaded genitive case, and I ceased to understand a thing.

Even for it's huge size, the U of I has a pretty open campus. Damn, I remember cutting through some of the school buildings on the Quad to get home from the bars on the weekends. That was sort of the beauty of college. You were in this bubble - you thought at least - where you could stretch your wings away from your family, yet still have an eye kept on you. I don't agree with anything else the man says, ever, but W. wasn't too far off when he said that colleges are sacred places of growing and learning, and that sacredness was violated yesterday.

It just shatters me to think that my nephew and his peers' college experience, should they choose to have it, might not be as freeing and eye-opening as mine was. I guess we can't ever really expect things to be the way they were. Still. It just scares me to think that maybe, sometime - and I hope to God not - it might not just be faceless, nameless strangers that get caught in the crosshairs.

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Enough of this, though. I can't dwell on such things. Live the now, don't worry about the future and things you can't change, if you catch my drift. Life's great right now. Everyone I know and love is happy and healthy. And, as you'll see below, my nephew's already facing life head-on. With no pants on. And he doesn't give a shit what you think.



He's going to be fine.

April Blahs bring May Hurrahs.

Hello Internet. It’s been awhile. This freak re-occurrence of winter in Chicago has made me irritable, so I haven’t really felt like doing much of anything, and I don’t want to bog the old Internets with my winter doldrums and tales of woe.

This is what it looked like outside my apartment the day that my Man turned 26, this past Wednesday:

Gross. Poor Steve. What crappy birthday weather. And on a Wednesday, too? Insult to injury.

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Also, I seem to be overemotional lately, another thing I don’t want to subject anyone to. Example: just last night, the Wizard of Oz episode of Scrubs had me in tears. The tears continued on, through a commercial about how anyone can help when they become organ donors. At one point, someone says, “A Cubs fan can even help a White Sox fan.” I don’t know why that hit me, but holy floodgates, Batman.

Although, if I HAD the choice, I don’t think I’d want some stupid Cubs fan’s stupid kidney. Yeah. I said it.

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Anyways, here are a few things:

1. I want to subscribe to this. Seriously. A t-shirt in the mail every six weeks? Awesome. They’re made with American Apparel shirts, too. Even though I think Dov Charney's sort of a soft-porn fetish weirdo, the Woman's M shirt fits me like a frickin' glove. Anyways, the descriptions inside the T-Post shirts are pretty great, too...I think something might have been lost in the translation from Swedish to English with some of them. Even more charming.

2. Have you seen Grindhouse yet? If not, gosh, what are you waiting for? Go see it, and then go get the soundtrack, especially to “Death Proof.” “Hold Tight” by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich has been in my head for days, and that’s a good thing. Especially when I think of the awesomely violent part in "Death Proof" where the song is playing....

3. My addiction to Flickr continues to worsen. I swear, I check my Contacts' photos before I even check my email. My favorite Flickr contacts lately have been this mother/daughter trio from Rhode Island: melisdramatic, iggy sodashell, and eyeballjellomold. I can't explain it, but the love and family together-ness sort of oozes out of their photographs. They're great.

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That's about all I've got, Internet. I'm watching two retrievers and two German Sheperds at a home in the suburbs this weekend. See, I have this side gig where people pay me way too much to house/dog sit for them. Really, what I do is eat their food, watch their cable, and sleep on mattresses that aren't pieces of shit like mine. Oh, and I get to do my laundry. Free laundry? Pretty sweet. I must say, though, that this time I'm afraid I miss my little family and my ugly little apartment a little too much to really enjoy myself.



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Over and out, y'all.