Not that I'd been feeling that well this past week to start with, but good grief did I get a new reason to be nauseated today.
See, early in the afternoon (or at least early for me), I went downstairs to make some spaghetti for lunch. As the pasta was cooking, I noticed Skooter out in the backyard. This isn't an infrequent occurence, since Skooter loves the outside and we like to encourage her to "roll in the dirt, piss in the sand" like we used to do with Rowan. (Spyder has always been a strictly indoors cat.)
I went out on the back porch to ask Skooter if she wanted in so she could eat, when all of a sudden I noticed Skooter had a companion laying next to her in the form of a baby rabbit. A DEAD baby rabbit. Given the way Skooter was acting, it was pretty clear that she had killed the rabbit, even though it was nearly as big as she is, and that she was presenting it to we humans as a trophy.
I was able to get my father to remove the rabbit corpse before Mom saw it, since I knew she'd freak even more than I would. Don't get me wrong, I have a very healthy understanding of the way nature works and all of that, but especially to see a baby rabbit dead like that, and to have Skooter fling the corpse up in the air using nothing but her teeth, was not the sort of thing I needed to see just before eating lunch.
Top two stories on Yahoo! Sports right now:
1. Tigers clinching a playoff spot
2. Bengals beating the Steelers
:)
I have long resisted the urge to go out and buy a shredder for all those credit card applications and such that I get through the mail, simply because I didn't think it was worth the expense. Normally what I like to do is save up a bunch of those things, then while I'm listening to music or a television show ("listening" because it isn't necessarily important to be watching the screen at the time), then gather the junk mail up, cut out all the parts that have any identifying information on them, then shred them finely by hand. Not only does this save the expense of a shredder, but because it's so slow and deliberate it makes me carefully recognize what every document that passes through my hands is, which greatly reduces the chances of ever accidentally cutting up something that might be of actual importance.
That being said, since I started graduate school, I've kind of been letting my pile of junk mail go. For two years. *headdesk* Tonight I finally decided to start working on getting all of it cut up, but just looking at the credit card offers that come my way these days I'm astounded by how often in a given envelope full of letters your identifying information -- either your name, address, or a special code put in thirty different places that is obviously unique to the offer sent to you -- appears. Given the rise of identity theft in the Internet Age you'd think that credit card companies would start getting better about this, but if anything they seem to be getting worse. If the rate at which I cut up junk mail earlier tonight is any indication, I may have no choice but to get a shredder just so I don't spend a lifetime hunting down all that junk in the junk mail I already have.
After again skipping out on going to the arcade to play DDR -- blame it on a combination of my silly nervousness about playing on arcade machines and just getting caught up in Ralph Ellison -- I wound up coming back here to catch the first televised pre-season Red Wings game. Can someone please tell me why the NHL still insists on three-a-side shootouts instead of five-a-side?
Anyway, for all that sports hadn't seemed to get me up there for a while, and for all that I worried that I wouldn't be able to get into the Wings now with Stevie Y. and Shanny gone, I sure enjoyed myself just now, even with the Wings losing to the Avs. Thinking about it some, I think a bad experience I went through last fall -- something above all the other crap I mentioned here previously, and which will have to remain unmentioned for the immediate future -- just kind of soured me a bit and made things less enjoyable for me for a while there. Only now do I think I'm getting over it (to an extent), and I hope this means being able to derive some fun out of things like sports again.
Gee, for a while there I thought I was making good progress on this blog, but now I've kind of gotten caught up in all the reading I have to do for my MA exam. I'm not exactly sure how much, if any, I could talk about the books I've been reading without making the rest of you wonder just what the heck I'm talking about.
To make matters worse, I found out today that the test is two weeks earlier than I thought it would be, so now I have less than four weeks left to get ready. I think I can manage it, although now I'm really going to have to hit those books harder than I have been. I think I'll do okay, but at the same time I tend to get nervous enough about tests as it is (even when I don't need to do well on them to keep my grades up), and this one particularly is likely to be the hardest (academic) test I will take in the whole of my life. I don't think I've ever been that good at literature stuff as it is (at least not at the same level that the other MA students here at UT seem to be), and for this test I need to be not just good but superb. Yeesh.
I caught the end of the Bengals-Browns game on Sunday, and while I'm glad to see the Bengals doing well, I can't say that any sport in general is interesting me. Perhaps I'm just depressed due to the Tigers' freefall these past six weeks. Still, the Red Wings' preseason starts tonight, and I really don't have any interest in catching the games, although that may be more due to the fact that I can't eat Little Caesars now. (I've done so well on my diet these past seven-plus weeks -- I haven't had a single drop of soda -- and I really don't want to mess that up.)
I swear, I don't know if it's seasonal irritants or the relatively cool weather, but something has made my sinuses go positively berzerk these past few days. I just hope this isn't a lead-up to me getting sick, because I really can't afford to let that happen here.
Normally when I need to translate some Japanese that's beyond my current grasp of the language, I have some Internet resources I can go to in order to try to figure things out. However, now I find myself in need of a good translation guide, one that will hopefully handle both vocabulary and kanji translation. I don't suppose any of you have any suggestions, do you?
The past couple of days we've had cloudy skies and high temperatures around 70 or so. This is really my kind of weather, especially in terms of going to Wildwood or another park and just getting in a good long walk, but I hesitate to do that now just because I've finally gotten back on a real DDR kick for the first time since the start of the year, and I'm making real improvements there and I want to keep up with arrow-stomping until something (injury, sickness, the last-minute crush for my exams) stops me.
Actually, what I'd really like to do right now is go play some touch football. I don't know why, but I do. I guess part of me would like to see whether or not all the dance games I've played for the past two and a half years have increased my speed and endurance in other sports, because I certainly feel in the best cardiovascular shape of my life right now (although that's not really saying much). Alas, I don't really have anyone to play with here, and all things being equal I'm not in a position to be going out and making friends at this point. Le sigh. Le weep.
Oh, and the latest thing to test my commitment to non-violence: whomever from Audrey Hepburn's estate thought it would be okay to loan out that footage from Funny Face so the Gap could use it in that stupid commercial. You just don't do that to Audrey. On top of that, mixing Audrey with AC/DC is just ... ugh. Look, I like AC/DC enough, but I feel the same way about Audrey Hepburn and AC/DC that Denis Leary feels about Samuel Adams mixing cranberries and ale. ("One is for getting drunk, the other is for bladder control!!!")
We lost Ann Richards. For a while there I really thought she would be the first woman president, back when I thought any Democrat was better than any Republican and the whole political equation was just that simple. Now it looks like we may get Hillary under the same circumstances. Colour me nauseated.
I can't really say that I tuned in to that much television coverage of the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I honestly can't say I even thought about the attacks that much. I guess that even after all this time, even though there has been at least some change in the American political climate, it's like some people still insist on framing the debate in such a way that if you don't support the current administration and all its programmes, you're dishonouring the memories of all the innocent people who died that day.
It also doesn't help that, as an academic myself now, conservative media have tried to portray Ward Churchill as typical of left-wing academia's response to the attacks. I can't say that I completely disagree with Mr. Churchill on some of the things he says, but he can go fuck himself for claiming that the people who died in the attacks deserved to die. Fuck that noise.
Yet another example of how much I suck ...
A few days ago we ran out of bananas here at the house, and I've been making a point of eating bananas a lot since the potassium in them will help my muscles when it comes to my newly-resurgent dance game habit. My sister and brother-in-law said they were going to the store anyway, so they'd pick them up while they were out. I then went onto my diet Website and figured out what I was going to eat for the rest of the day, figuring that I'd be able to have a banana later.
Fast forward a couple of hours, as the store trip had been made, and I went downstairs to go work out in the garage. On my way out there I went through the kitchen, and at this point everyone was in the next room eating dinner. While I was in the kitchen my eyes were drawn to the fruit basket on the counter, which now had a bunch of those baby 2" long bananas in them. Upon looking at them, everyone at the dinner table started laughing. Mark had thought this would be a funny practical joke, and later he replaced those bananas with real full-size bananas he'd bought at the store and kept in his bedroom up until that point.
I probably should have just laughed along at the joke, no matter how lame it was. Instead, though, I went out to the garage seething with indignation. All I could think about was how I'd made such careful plans for my dinner, and now those plans were seemingly all ruined for the sake of a stupid joke. Looking back, this whole episode just seems to underscore how maladjusted I am, and how I tend to take things -- especially myself -- too seriously.
Yesterday I got to see my counselor at school for the first time in four months, and we just barely scraped the surface of all the shit that went down in that time. Especially given that I may not necessarily be hired by UT to teach spring semester, I'm going to try to meet with her as often as I can over the next few months, to try to figure out just what to do.
Unfortunately, my counselor basically confirmed to me that I didn't handle the worst situation of the summer the way I should have. I'm going to have to deal with it here soon, and in the process I may once again throw away what tiny hopes of possible friendships I may have. Have I mentioned lately how I fucking HATE always doing the right thing?
If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go vomit now.
Is anyone else starting to get the subliminal message spams that have been going around? Just before the actual body of the e-mail shows up, for about half a second the word "BUY!" flashes all over the preview screen, and it's done in such an obvious way that I doubt it could be effective against anyone. I'm just surprised that the spam filters on my e-mail server, which aren't perfect but still catch about 95% of my unwanted e-mail, aren't deleting these yet.
These past few nights I've had the worst time of it trying to get to sleep. I don't know whether my sleep problems are being caused by a physical problem (tightness in my legs after my workouts) or mental problems (all the usual stuff there, plus worries about entering the job market soon), but it's getting to be a huge bother. Things became much worse today because we had an early-morning brownout for some unknown reason (certainly not because people are using their air conditioners), and see, when my stereo suddenly regains power after losing it, it makes the same clicking sound that it makes when it powers up on mornings when I have school, since I use the alarm feature on my stereo as my alarm clock. Hence, after the brownout, I mistakenly woke up after having gotten precious little sleep. I actually napped most of the afternoon away just now, and even after that and a tall glass of iced tea I'm still not feeling all that well.
This wouldn't be so much of a bother if it weren't for the fact that when I'm feeling as tired as this, I don't even attempt to do any studying for either my Japanese class or my MA exam because it just doesn't feel like I'll retain anything I attempt to read or learn. This will likely end up being the third day in a row here where I haven't done any learning activities, and while this is hardly a deathblow in terms of crushing my hopes of graduating this semester, it's not exactly making things easier in that regard, either.
The weather these past few days has definitely been what I would call "unseasonably cool." We barely got to 70 today when we should be getting up at least to 80, and over the next week we'll even have cooler days than that. The folks are actually burning a fire in the fireplace right now, which of course makes me a bit ill-at-ease considering I've never liked fireplaces to start with, and hearing wood crack and sizzle like that still reminds me of the house fire.
I've been hoping to keep up with my Japanese blog here, but it's awfully hard for me to find topics to talk about on it. Here on this blog I can talk about pretty much whatever I want to because no matter how complex the topic I think of, I can almost always find the right words and the way to put them together to express what I'm feeling. My Japanese is still so limited, though, that I can't think of much else to write about besides very basic facts about me, my city, and my life. I couldn't even write about the weather like I did in that last paragraph in Japanese. Ugh.