Quo Vado?

There’s a new country song out called “Don’t Ask Me How I Know” by Bobby Pinson and I was wondering what I could include in the kelli version of such a song.

Don’t get mad at your mom for saying ‘I told you so.’
Don’t hook up because you feel lonely.
Listen to your gut when it says jump.
Don’t stay because it’s safe.
Remember the moments you were slow to catch on.
Work to find silence and stillness peaceful.

What advise would you give with a ‘don’t ask me how I know’ tacked on to the end?

Is there enough space between my brain and my skull to give myself a concussion while trying hack up a lung?

I cannot stop watching The West Wing. The oddest thing about it is that I watch more regularly now than I did in seasons three and four which were much better written. I just want to see what evil thing they do now, or how they manage to screw up my favorite characters. I just realize that I get a rush from watching this train wreck. Now, I press play and watch the trains crash together again.

I’m going to keep adding to this until I decide to stop. If you want to put in your nickel, leave a comment.

Dancing slowly through the night toward the whispers at the far end of the cavernous room, I tripped over my untied shoes.

As I flew through the musty air, my arms rushed out in front of my head hoping to avoid blood loss. The stinging shock of crashing to the floor radiated up my arms to my brain as I took a moment to collect myself in the rooms stillness.

After pausing for moment, I gently roll over onto my back, taking stock of the latest set of aches and pains. Footsteps traveling into the room startle me from my inventory: two legs, pain on the left hip, two knees, breasts, two arms, banged up elbow…

I didn’t realize it had been so long since I’d written here. As I like to tell the random phone callers that ‘I’m not dead yet.’ It’s been a rough couple of days, last Thursday and Friday closed up the last round hellish deadlines, Saturday I sat in line waiting for a drivers licence address change and had someone else wax my brows, Sunday I survived two-and-a-half hours with many two and three year olds and took a very nice nap, and today I had a lovely experience with Atlanta traffic court.

So, this post is just a long way of saying I’m not dead yet.

Ten Things I Dislike About My Rental:

1. My left leg is getting lazy, and I’m forgetting how to shift.
2. The eleven speed bumps on the way to work are more difficult to manage.
3. I cannot find it when parked in a large parking lot.
4. My boss is driving a more interesting rental.
5. The windshield wiper inserts need to be changed.
6. There is no CD player so I’m stuck with only the radio
7. The cup holders are un-reachable.
8. I routinely scrape the front end on drainage dips while leaving parking lots.
9. I keep forgetting to lock the doors.
10. It’s not my little Civic.

The Schiavo case and other’s opinions have been floating around the net. I don’t know enough about the players or the case to have any legal/logical opinion. All, I know is that I’d hate to be Terry Schiavo.

My father watched his father died slowly, spent the last fifteen years of his life ailing and passed on to his eldest a firm belief that just breathing isn’t life. There’s a part of me that doesn’t understand what Schiavo’s parents are trying to save, that wonders if holding on so tightly to the present won’t somehow discolor the past, and that questions their continuing pursuit of ‘life’.

So, if something drastic should happen to me and my family finds me in a similar state, I hope they don’t leave me there.

During my last two years at Case I found myself with two different, but slightly overlapping, groups of friends. The first group formed during the first few weeks of class and the second formed as the class settled into chosen majors. Of the second group, you often found Jane and I wondering the halls Bingham and trudging back and forth to class together. Jane’s nickname came toward the end of our time together, as she so aptly played Jane to my Daria [1].

Given that she was in-town for a corporate educational thing, we ventured out for dinner last night. When we were in college Jane encouraged the completion of off-the wall tasks and viewing of movies I wouldn’t typically see, she’s why I saw Amelie, Romeo+Juliet and the four-plus hour version of Hamlet on film. Keeping with tradition, we ventured to Pannang yesterday evening for dinner. A Malaysian restaurant, Pannang offers a wide variety of meals, most with descriptions that I don’t understand. Given that the prices aren’t exorbitant and we were eating on her per-diem we had a #4, #42, #44 and #46. Don’t ask me what I ate but the shear variety of noodle types boggled my mind. Dinner might have even included tofu; don’t ask me though, I didn’t look that closely. The conversation over dinner meandered from how our respective jobs were going, our long-term plans, the 75 year-old half-a-house Jane’s closing on next week, and where the people we knew then are now. While the evening turned out well, it felt more like two old acquaintances than two old friends. Sad.

[1] Despite my refusal to wear a skirt that scary and my ignorance of literature, as a college student Daria’s attitudes and mine meshed quite a bit.

A couple of months ago I wrote about some special undergarments I’d purchased, and while I’ve warn the garment only three times I’ve developed a hyper-awareness of my attributes. While my shelf isn’t monstrous, thank God, it does provide an excellent portable catchall surface and, in my opinion, delicately rides the line between too much and too little. So, why am I mentioning it here? Until wearing the ‘special garment’ I hadn’t so actively thought about my breasts, where they fit into the world of breasts or what they did for me except drive me nuts. Now, I can’t go a day without contemplating their appearance. Am I becoming shallow?

Spooning homemade granola from a plastic bag to my mouth involves more dexterity than I originally imagined. First comes the hassle of wrangling the cereal onto the spoon from a completely non-rigid container. Then, I hold my breath while transporting the spoon from inside the bag to outside the bag without scrapping any captured goodness off the spoon. This morning’s problem however has been turning, raising and steering the spoon into my mouth. You’d think with such a SA attitude I’d have a bigger mouth.

If you missed the reference over on the Google blog, lils’ account from a run-in with an unexpected visitor cracked me up.

After reading a post by Scrivenerabout giving up his watch and a post by Sarcasmo about alarm clock (with links to some scary alarm-clocks), I’ve wanted to talk about time keeping devices. Like Scrivener, I’ve given up my watch. I own four or five of them; but I only wear them when I travel. Before I entered the ‘real’ world, I obsessed about time. I often dedicated as much time to finding my watch in the morning as I did my glasses, I exchanged my watch annually as I often beat up the face by striking it into walls and refrigerators, and I almost came to blows with one of my aunts on the way to my father’s memorial service because she made me leave home without one. In preparation for graduation from college mom told me I had to come up with something that she could give as a gift that I’d cherish in twenty-plus years, I chose a new watch. The path toward timepiece independence took about six months. My first engineering job out of school involved being a warm body during the design of the I-15 Corridor reconstruction in SLC. As a warm body, all I had to do was show up for work and stay until I couldn’t think any more and with no where to be, no one to see and my watch getting in my way, it became something that took up space next to my monitor. After six months of shilly-shallying, I gave it up all together. Having to rejoin the watch-wearing world is one of the great disadvantages of my plans. As for alarm clocks, I completely agree with Sarcasmo that alarm clocks are evil.

Partial to Read Piles