work it out

I am thinking about starting a series of writing exercises to ramp up for this November’s NaNoWriMo. I think I need to learn more about the building blocks of writing. For instance, I could go a couple of weeks of learning to write individual paragraphs with a purpose and a dramatic arc. Then I could build up to writing scenes. One of the big things I learned about my writing is that I have a good sense of what I want to happen in a given scene, but I can never seem to close one off with any finesse. I’ll have to be pretty disciplined about it, but I think that I can set a reasonable schedule to do it. I might try writing on pen and paper, but we’ll see how long I last that way.

The BBC is allowing free downloads of Beethoven’s symphonies as performed by the BBC Philharmonic. As I am pretty ignorant when it comes to classical music, I figure I can learn to appreciate and identify these works by listening to them on my iPod everyday.

My pet peeve while driving is drivers who do not signal for turns or lane changes. More than anything else, this action drives me to what I know to be an unreasonable amount of anger, but it amuses me to cuss a little and give them the “why don’t you signal, you buffoon?” gesture, which looks like closed-fist-open-palm-closed-fist-open-palm with my palm facing outward, which I know no one understands. That gesture, and my “let me merge like I’m supposed you, you moron” gesture, which looks like my left hand held out like I’m going to shake someone’s hand with my right hand held similiarly but at ~30 degree angle to that where I’m ramming my right hand into the middle of my left hand, which I also know no one else understands, are my favorite to use on the road. The other person gets confused, and this makes me giggle.

My favorite song to sing while driving has to be, bar none, Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There For You”, because I know all the words and it requires some screaming. Runner ups include any Motown and Dance Hall Crashers, although it kinda sucks because I don’t know enough words, so I end up doing that weird mumbling thing that everyone does when they don’t know the words.

the lies we tell

I have a very good body image. I’ve always consciously striven to be a person who can look objectively at her own body and not be filled with self-loathing or over-inflated ego. I think I look fine. I could use some toning here and there, and maybe dress up more often, but overall, I don’t look bad. I know what my good physical traits are and I know what my not-so-good physical traits are.

I’ve been socially conditioned to lie though. Somewhere along the line, I must have learned that people identify more easily with others when you show a vulnerability. So while I feel in general good about myself, if a girlfriend is feeling bad about her body, I’ll not only point out what great features she has and that she’s seeing herself in a warped light (which is almost always the case), I’ll also point out something similarly “bad” about myself, even though I don’t feel bad about it.

In a similar vein, when in the course of ordinary conversation, it is appropriate for me to comment that I have big thighs and legs for someone of my general size (I assure you that I don’t just bring it up for no reason — heh) in a conversation that is not about feeling bad about body image, even when I’m very careful to convey that it is not something I view as negative at all, the other person (generally a woman) is very very quick to say something like, “No, your legs aren’t big! They look fine!”

I can’t tell if they are just trying to make me feel “better”, or if they really believe it. I can’t really think it’s the latter. Heh. I think in general, people expect others to either have a bad body image or be an arrogant asshead, so it is confusing to deal with someone that has a fairly realistic assessment of themselves (or so I think I do). I mean, I have big legs and forearms like I’m 5′ 4-1/2″ and Asian. It’s just who I am. I kinda prefer big legs to skinny legs anyway. Heh.

Anyway, it seems like in the quickness to assure me that my legs are not big, the person actually ends up adding to the general public opinion that big legs are bad and to be avoided. So they are trying to be nice, but given that I have big legs, if I started to listen to carefully, I could start to get self-conscious about them. Hahahaha.

Wow. That was a pointless post. Hahah.

relationships

In a person’s life, there are many relationships. Seppo and I got to talking late last night about our relationships with our parents and friends and with each other, and how each of these affects the other ones.

Generally, I think there are two or more phases to the beginning of a relationship. There is the phase where you are getting to know each other, having a great time, taking it easy, and generally trying to figure out if you are gonna end up caring about them in a bigger sense. Then there can be the phase after you’ve decided that you do care enough about them to work at the relationship. This is the beginning of a sense of commitment. Then you may or may not move into a long-term commitment.

I think that what I notice about myself in the past and in my friends is the desire to slip into a feeling of commitment before the two people involved even know if they like each other enough to really genuinely work at it. People want the best of all worlds: the rush of the courtship, the security of commitment, the comfort of familiarity, and the excitement of mystery, and we want it all at the beginning. But that’s simply not reasonable.

I think it’s important to take the time to enjoy the first phase for what it is (a getting-to-know-you phase — even if you are friends who are starting to date, it is important to realize that there may be different expectations in what you want from a friend and what you want from someone you are dating). I think it’s easy to jump ahead and wonder if you can make things work in the long term with the person, and keep yourself from enjoying the process of getting to know a person. This part shouldn’t be work. If it’s work at this point when you are just getting to know them, then I feel like it may not be worth trying.

The important thing to realize is that someone that you are great with in phase one is not necessarily someone you want to work at a relationship with, and it may not be someone you want to evolve into a long term relationship with. You have to decide that there is enough mutual caring with someone that you are both willing to work hard at making the relationship work. No relationship will be without work.

I think that when I was younger, I assumed that if I liked/cared about/loved someone, it automatically meant that it was a committed, life-long relationship, and that I couldn’t just enjoy it, evaluate it, and learn from it. You can love a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean a relationship will work with most of them.

I think I’ll leave this half-finished and get back to this topic later. It’s been on my mind a lot lately.

habits to acquire

• No more parking self in front of computer at home and no non-critical & specific use after 9pm.
• No more than 2 hrs of tv per day, and no more than 10 hours total per week.
• Do at least one household chore every day (no matter how small).
• Get to bed by 11pm.
• Mull over each potential purchase item for an additional week before committing to purchase.
• Get back into habit of importing banking/credit card data to Quicken in order to analyze where I am spending money.
• Buy birthday presents for people a month or more in advance if finances allow it.

c’est une idée terrible

Seppo thinks it would be funny to rename our house:

La Maison Terrible

I sure hope you have the font I selected (Edwardian Script ITC, with a Monotype Corsiva backup).

day off

I took the day off today, just to recover from yesterday’s marathon puking. I ate a bunch of porridge, browsed a bunch of websites, and, uh, I… tried on my wedding dress, wondering if this meant I was on the slippery slope to bridezilla-dom. I think not yet. Hopefully, this will not come to pass. I only got sick once today, but I think it was because I kept trying not to get sick and kept thinking about getting sick at work, and the fact that rice porridge looks semi-digested, despite being delicious. Oh! Seppo’s mom came by yesterday upon hearing that I was sick to bring over green tea and ume to help with the upset stomach. It was so sweet that it almost made me cry. But maybe because I was weakened by the illness and not because I’m a big baby that cries at the drop of a hat. No wait, that sounds about right. But it was really sweet of her. I wonder if I should write her a thank you note.

I watched the TiVoed premier episode of Hell’s Kitchen, a reality tv show based around getting bossed around by Gordon Ramsay and surviving to the end in order to get to run your own restaurant. And you know, it wasn’t half bad. I wish they would focus more on the craft of cooking, but the peek into the kitchen of a restaurant — as staged as it must be for the show — is pretty cool. The website seems to give out the recipe for a different signature dish every week. Awesome.

My friend is in town! I got a call from another friend in Philly telling me that I should call her, as she is stuck at the airport without a ride. Hahaha. She eventually met up with her ride, but I gave her hell for not telling me when she was gonna be in town.

I have yet to take a picture for the latest flickr challenge, which topic is “speed”. I don’t have any good ideas for it. It occurs to me that trying to get a pic of a druggie shooting up (or whatever it is you do with speed) would be somewhat difficult to obtain.

a total and utter…

Barforama. I don’t mean to compete with Seppo, but I am feeling like crap this morning.

My stomach feels queasy, and my head feels like it’s spinning and like I’m going barf any second now… which wouldn’t be a surprise, since I just got back from barfing up my breakfast in the bathroom. Earlier in the day, I was washing my hands in the bathroom when I spontaneously barfed into the sink just a little. Took me by surprise. Another 15 minutes, and I’m barfing into a toilet at work, hoping against hope that no one walks in and thinks I have some sort of freaky eating disorder.

My mouth feels dry and watery at the same time, with that weird wet sweet feeling you get in your mouth when you are close to puking. Ack. I think that I might not have puked up everything, and will need to hit the can again. Damn.

The worst part is that I don’t feel good enough to drive myself home. I’ll have to stick it out and hope that I feel better at the end of the day.

past perfect

During the beginning of the room shuffle (which we are still in process of) I found a box of old mix tapes and pictures from high school. I look at the pics and am kind of surprised to think that many are from 10 or more years ago. It doesn’t seem plausible, but there it is. I think back to who I was in those pics and my first reaction is to believe that I am exactly the same person, but that is, of course, entirely wrong.

I also found a journal I had kept during the summer of 1998, right after taking Seppo to the airport (when he moved out to LA for a summer job) to just before I moved out here. It stunned me how raw my entries were, so devoid of the cleansed-for-the-public eye process that I subconsciously go through for my blog. I could feel so vividly who I was and understand how I felt back then.

I don’t think reading my current entries years from now will give me the same sense of who I was. Perhaps I should keep a hand-written journal in addition to this.

wedding dress

dress_front_black
Originally uploaded by eingy.

I bought my wedding dress today! I went to see it at 10:20am and had it purchaed by 11:40. It was the first dress I had tried on, so I felt weird about buying it right away, but Seppo and I really liked it a lot, it was in a price range that I thought was reasonable, and the craftsmanship is excellent. I also got a petticoat, which is a weird word to see written down, as well as it is to hear and say. It is apparently a Maggie Sottero gown in diamond white silk. Ok then. 😀

I tried to figure out which style on the website it most closely resembled, but I wasn’t sure. It is similar to the Sabrina, but not quite the same in the bodice. It also has no tulle. So maybe it’s all totally different. Heh. I think it might be the Mallorie. As I’ve said before, these names for non-people things weird me out.

The woman in the pic is obviously not me. I blocked out the face for anonymity. 😀

lows and highs

Looking forward to my sister moving to the US. She apparently received the package I sent her that included a form I-864, three of my most recent pay stubs (as proof of salary and current employment), and copies of 1040s for the last three years. I need to fax her my citizenship certificate, so I will be taking that in to work tomorrow. Woops, I mean today.

You know, the poverty line is grossly low. You know how I know it’s low (this is quite poetic to my ears)? I know it’s low because in order to be a sponsor for my brother-in-law (side note: my sister and her kids are US citizens, but she can’t sponsor him because she does not have an employment history in the US for the last three years), I have to make 125% of the poverty line for the number of people I support. By “people I support”, I mean 1) myself, 2) people I claim on my taxes as my dependents (my mom and little bro), and 3) the total number of people I am sponsoring. This bring the total to four people.

I was like, man, four people. I knew I must be over 125% of the poverty line for four people, but I wasn’t sure by how much. When I looked up the numbers, it turned out that I can sponsor something like 13-14 MORE people with my income.

THAT is how I know the poverty line is too low.

—

The guys came today to start working on re-drywalling the two unfinished bedrooms. Yay! It will cost us some money that we could really use to save for the wedding, but I honestly believe that this is the better/more right use of our money right now. Any improvements to the house will pay off in the future, I know. It still does sting a bit in the short run, but I’m happy that our home will become even more homey.

—

My sister also told me that my dad went to stay with his mom in the country. This is really good news, as it means that they must have come to some sort of reconciliation. It means some pragmatic things as well: we don’t have to worry about him not having a home or having food to eat. His mom is pretty well off — not rich, but pretty well off, and he’ll be living in the home that has been in our family for generations, living near farm land that our family owns. He’ll be in good country air, so his asthma should be better. He’ll be able to eat good foods, so maybe he will put back on some weight.