obfuscated girl

void after

to start: a link. i kind of wanted to see troy until i started hearing a lot about the sucktacular suckiness. thanks to this via occupation: girl, i don't have to.
lengthy excerpt:
Somewhere Else Inside the Palace of Troy

BRISEIS: Paris!

ACHILLES: Briseis!

BRISEIS: Paris!

ACHILLES: Briseis!

AGAMEMNON [grabs Briseis]: Oh, now we're gonna have some fun. I'm taking you home to work on your knees, Temple Babe, if you know what I mean and I think you do--

BRISEIS: *stabs Agamemnon in the neck*

AGAMEMNON: *dying* But... what about... Orestes and... Electra... they gotta kill my... *dies*

ACHILLES: Briseis!

BRISEIS: Achilles!

PARIS: *shoots Achilles in the heel*

BRISEIS: NOOOOOO!

PARIS: *gets his Legolas on, shoots Achilles 15 more times*

BRISEIS: PARIS, NOOOOOOOOOO!

PARIS: OH MY GOD, I FINALLY DO SOMETHING GOOD AND PEOPLE STILL YELL AT ME!

ACHILLES: Briseis, it's okay. Go with Paris. In the middle of war, you gave me peace. Or sex. Or something. It was real, yo.

BRISEIS: No!

ACHILLES: Briseis...go...

BRISEIS: No!

ACHILLES: Briseis...go...

BRISEIS: No!

ACHILLES: WOMAN, GET OUT OF HERE AND LET ME DIE.

PARIS: *drags Briseis off*

ACHILLES: *dies*

GREEK SOLDIERS: *woe*

hee hee hee hee hee hee.
and now for something completely different.

i thought that i was going to be starting work today but she wants me to come in at 8:00 tomorrow morning. and thus i am sadly thrust into the World Of Other People Who Are Awake At That Goddamn Hour. i feel a bit strange about the whole thing and i can't explain why.
there is a feeling that's been following me all day which i have only just now identified as loneliness. it is currently gnawing at my solar plexus and making me feel slightly nauseous. i want to call someone, mainly i want to call the boy, and express this to someone/him but i'm also afraid of being percieved as Needy. it's like my subconscious is reminding me of all the bad things about being unemployed so that i won't mind getting up early tomorrow so very much.
i have done very little today. i finished rereading look at me (whoa buddy, what's with the sudden and repeated literary namedropping?), called a friend from madison, dragged my sorry ass out to get a muffin and some coffee (sole means of sustenance thus far today--even my appetite is sleeping), got the call telling me not to come in today, and that's all. sloth has been seeping in, like sap in my veins, for the past five months now, and i can't really seem to shake it. and it feels even more expressed today. today is one of those quintessential spring days and i feel like i can't even enjoy it.
i have no idea what i'm going to do with the rest of my day but i know i need to get off the computer.
if i do post anything in the next 72 hours it will be abbreviated. i am going to two rock shows and then home in the wee small hours of sunday morning, and as i have expressed here intermittently i am still afraid of what my parents would do if they found out about my well-documented drug use, rampant sex with strangers, taking candy from small children, etc. so happy memorial day, everyone. hoo and ray.

soundtrack. jeff buckley, grace

end.

my love don't cost a thing...unless we divorce

heh. that line is from a spin article that i cut out and pasted on my computer at home, back when i was in the phase where every flat surface had to have something on it, and preferably something cooler than you'd ever heard of. now, since i have been broken by life (bites knuckle) i don't so much do that anymore. (also, more practically speaking, there's only so much space you can cover with crap in a studio.) i don't know why that line came to mind, as i'm on the laptop.
from the should-have-seen-that-coming department: turns out the job is 25 hours a week. and i have no choice but to take it, since the library clerk thing isn't a sure thing like i thought. my resume is just being submitted. oh. i am not terribly upset about it, though, thanks to my new prozac iv. kidding. i have trained myself to live on nothing and can meet my bills in sort of a timely fashion, i can do it a little longer. and there's a possibility for more hours. we'll see what happens.
and besides, i have much more important things to rant about:
sondre lerche.
i just bought two way monologue last night and i have concluded from listening to it that this boy has no right to exist. this is pretty much just another example of my ridiculousness but i have always been consoled by the fact that a lot of Beautiful People are, in fact, not so much with the smart. then here comes this beauuuuutiful (finnish? swedish? danish? i was too busy panting over cursing his photo gallery to read his bio) boy who is 21 and on his third album (!!!) which is stunning. stunning, i say. lyrically and musically. it's not fair. my perfectly ordered world of stereotypes which were meant to console me is supposed to remain intact. that was the one thing i was supposed to have that the Beautiful People Didn't (please no angry comments, my tongue is firmly in cheek here), goddamnit. well, i don't actually possess gifted songwriter abilities, but you know. sondre lerche, i love totally hate you.
so um go get the album, because it's really, really good.
and if you further wish to pattern your life after mine (because that's why you read this, right? to be just like me? because you think i'm cool? say it. SAY IT!) here is the first Book I'd Recommend On National Television Before Killing Myself If I Suddenly Woke Up In Oprah's Body (part one of a very special series [snort]): an almost perfect moment. it sort of has the same feel that the virgin suicides has without the gruesome bits. i am very pleased with it so far.
and the nerdiness continues, because now i wanna go finish it.

soundtrack. pedro the lion, achilles' heel
end.

under construction

this is a formal apology to all the people who have made comments recently, because when i redid the layout (about goddamn time, i say) i lost all the customizations. i am also going to rebuild the links sometime in the near future, so if i linked to you and you are not there anymore and are sad i'm sorry about that too. side note: i actually know some crap about html now and am fairly confident that i CAN rebuild the links section. amazing.
this weekend was spent uttering "i have a job!" at least sixty-five times, drinking bad champagne, failing to find a sendik's, avoiding tornadoes and making fun of crappy internet weather maps, and finally watching the fourth-season finale of the sopranos. i am now considering installing cable for a month so i can watch the fifth season. for reals. and/or ingratiating myself to Boy's friends who have cable further than i already have (which is not very much, i suspect they secretly think i am Insane and Moody. which are both accurate descriptions, i admit). my crush on james gandolfini is not waning in the LEAST, even though (and the entire rest of the world knew this like two years ago) he is turning into kind of a dick.
today i have an appointment to fill out work (did i mention that i have a job?)-related paperwork and make sure that i'm going to get insurance and ask other prevalent questions and everything, and then my sister is coming up from madison to see mean girls with me. apparently she cannot find anyone in the entire city of madison who wants to see it. i am very apprehensive about seeing this because tina fey is on my list of Greatest People Ever, and if my perception of her was shattered, i don't know what i would do.
so that is all for now.
i have a job.
yay.
soundtrack: mclusky, the difference between me and you is that i'm not on fire

(end.)

did i mention that i have a job? because i have a job.

. *the above image, besides being one of my most favoritest pictures ever, is directed squarely at The Man. thank you.*
actually, not only do i have a job, i suddenly also have an offer from temp agency #1, being, of all things, a library clerk. and so i am considering two (2) job offers (!!!!!!!!!!) and have to get back to one of them on monday. the fact that this library clerkness pays more money than the other job to start and the fact that it is a shorter bus commute and the fact that i could do devilish things with my idea of a library clerk's wardrobe (insert porn soundtrack here)...
eep. sorry, did i write that?
but on the other hand it is filing and sorting and, well, being in a library. while my mother very much wants me to go back to school for library science my overall assessment of that idea is wtf. odds are my existence would not actually mirror parker posey's, even if i got a degree.. so i am now tormented by the classic Thing That People Are Tormented By: do i choose the job with a bit more soul (i am embarrassed to say that i don't know the name of the company i will potentially be working for, but i do know that it's something really, really silly) or do i go with the corporation which will allow me to not only pay my bills but have Bling? or do i have an inflated concept of what twelve dollars an hour can buy you? (me?)
ack. i don't know. i am leaning towards taking the small job, just because it's not so very anonymous and faceless and...temp. but Bling would be nice. as would working downtown (insert mary tyler moore theme here). what should i do? voice of reason, do you ever read this page?
in other news, we have had rain upon rain upon rain here this week, which has led to 50 degrees and fog at the end of may, as well as the second largest (1.5 billion gallons!) sewage-dumping episode ever this makes me very, very sad. and angry, because there's no way i'm going to get near lake michigan this summer. fuckers.

now it is off to do as much reading of library books (i'm such a rockstar) as i have decided that, whatever the outcome, i am going to treat this week like vacation. and this is what nerds do on vacation (when their Boys are off in the suburbs helping renovate houses, that is): we read. copiously.

soundtrack. m. doughty, skittish
end.

!!!!!!

ladies and gentlemen:

I GOT THE JOB.

it starts next thursday. i will be a personal assistant to a lady that does...well that has yet to be exactly determined, but it starts at a dollar more than i made previously. and it involves booking and working with (probably terrible) bands. i'm the shit, i'm the shit. and while it is not What I Want To Be Doing With My Life, i didn't expect to find that anyway.

do you realize what this means? this means that i will be exactly half as whiny in this forum. or if i am whiny it will be about a whole new extraordinry range of things. this means i can FINALLY PAY MY ELECTRIC BILL. awesome.

that is all i have time to say, as i am on a laptop which i don't own and the battery is about to die.

but to repeat:

I HAVE A JOB.

I HAVE A JOB.

I HAVE A JOB.

that is all.

i want to ride my bicycle, i want to ride it where i like

.

there are certain issues which i am not going to address here, i.e. the last entry. while i don't wish to alienate anyone who reads this, it seems to me that there's nothing wrong with a former geekiest girl in the entire world semianonymously celebrating a random stranger's reaction to her body. i think that we as a human race exist on a certain subconscious level to look as pretty as possible to other people. ahem. i am trite. you should know this about me by now, readers. i am silly and ineffectual and secretly convinced i am fat and secretly convinced that i am shallow for thinking that i am secretly fat and socially retarded and too concerned about what random people who post comments to this site at 1 in the morning think of me and in general far too susceptible to criticism. ask the boy. for reals.
anyway.
we (amy, her dog and myself) finished my second anime series ever tonight. this series defies description and it taught me two japanese words due to the amount of times the characters repeated them. unfortunately as it is two hours later and i have been exhausted all day i have forgotten them.
i had recurring dreams about the interview that i had today last night and kept waking up. i was terrified that i was going to fuck it up because i was so tired, but i was told, and i quote, by the interviewer, "i like your vibe. i get a good vibe from you." i'm like "i...try?" (didn't actually say that.) but i am more optimistic about this one than i have been about any of the others, mostly because the job would involve working with local musicians, or at least working for a company that works with them. and who better than me to do that? i mean, really. so stay tuned, kids, there may actually be more to come.
question for the public: is reality tv any better if it's on pbs?

soundtrack: gang of four, "not great men"
(end.)

on catcalls, ryan seacrest and the ever-elusive quality of happiness

i am grinning ear-to-ear right now. warning: what i am about to say will possibly set feminism fifty years back.
i was walking down the street this morning and this darling mopheaded college-looking boy in a who pulled up alongside at a stop sign. it took me a few minutes to actually process what happened next, but it did indeed happen:
boy (to self, in awed-sounding voice) "wow." (to me) "hi."
me: (huge grin, continues walking)
previously to this experience the only other time my physical self was commented on by a stranger was at one in the morning last summer when someone leaned out of a car to yell "nice tits" thereby angering the ex-who-is-now-someone's-babydaddy. while i have since come to agree with him, at the time it led to a heated discussion about objectification. (with me feeling secretly thrilled.) but this one was EVEN BETTER because--hey--i elicited a "wow."! little me! me of the formerly chubby and the bad perm! you like me! you really like me! it's very tricky to admit that i actually like the attention, but in this case the boost that it provided to my fragile self-esteem overrides any possible offendedness i might have felt. besides, who could be offended by "wow."?
my ego might not recover from this, people.
i spent the rest of the walk to the library, where i am writing this from, with that swelling, orchestral feeling in my stomach, and this is only partially due to the fact that i am obviously the hottest thing ever. it is also due to the fact that i have two (2) (ah, ha ha ha) interviews between now and monday. and couple that with the way that the air feels and the way the trees look and i have decidedly decided (?) once and for all, at least for the next half hour or so, that everything is going to be okay.
p.s. you may have noticed that i have changed the exit parenthetical declaration. that is because i only recently became aware of ryan seacrest and his "seacrest, out." ryan seacrest, as you may be aware, is a douchebag. i do not wish to create the impression that i am endorsing or imitating him.

soundtrack: temper temper, "sexy little cuts"
(end.)

the detour

i don't know what it's like in your city, but here the official arrival of summer is marked by the expressions guys, a bunch of WGWDs (white guys with dreadlocks) who patrol the city streets trying to get you to buy their shitty magazine filled with shitty poetry. this is the type of magazine that does not reject any submissions ever and so it is filled with poetry like "baby, your hair/reminds me of the ocean/and i hope our love/lasts forever." i have been battling one of them in particular for about three years now. for some goddamn reason he remembers me, and rather than tell him the first time i was solicited that i wasn't interested, i was polite and said "not today, i don't have any money." which led to months and months of him on campus/brady street/downtown getting this huge grin on his hippie be-dreadlocked face every time he saw me and yelling about how he saved a copy for me. instead of feeling special this inevitably led to me cursing all hippies and writers everywhere.
i saw him yesterday.
i was walking home from The Gym and saw him staked out on the exact spot of sidewalk that i needed to pass through so i could use the atm machine, in front of a walgreens. so it took me twenty minutes to get home, as i tried to walk around the block and discovered that every route i had to get back to the atm was blocked by fences. and it was just an atm. i was not going to get all mission: impossible over one machine.
finally, feeling sheepish, i got back to the spot i had started from and merely crossed the street.
and it made me think:
all this over one little hippie?
what am i afraid of, exactly?

(end)

expect the best, accept the worst

tired again. kept waking up from very strange dreams (my entire family went to see an r.kelly biopic, my brother teased me about how r. kelly was my favorite singer, i got really mad and went home but then had to go back to the movie theatre to go to the bathroom, where my sister said dream-muffled sympathetic things, cut to my mom yelling at me for going home because i didn't have any money to be on my own [???], cut to me and my dad arguing about whether r. kelly was a pedophile and my dad blaming it on the damed liberal media).
my dreams this week have led me to believe that i am on the verge of certifiably insane. i also keep having a recurring dream wherein i tattoo my entire back. i would really like to know what that means (veiled plea for any dream experts who read this to comment). other than that, the status is...quo.
i need to start writing again. i miss it.
also i now realize that i fucked up the dylan thomas quote cited below. i am apparently a failed english major/poetry snot, too.
roughly three weeks left of unemployment. for real this time. temp agency #2 was applied at yesterday, and i have phone numbers and addresses of #'s 3, 4, 5 & 6. i have hope, even though this basically means that the milwaukee center for independence has failed me, as their goal was to place me in long term employment. i am a bit upset about that--it means that someone is getting paid for not doing their job properly, even though there are too many variables to be able to blame them completely. but it's the american way, finding scapegoats.
of course, my younger self already went through a phase where i romanticized temping, so this won't be so bad. playing dress up and getting people coffee? sure. completely worthwhile, lifelong use of my degree.
(sigh)
the rest of the week was spent being horrified by the situation with the iraqi prisoners, commuting between 'stallis and my apartment as i am Too Fragile To Be Alone, exhausting both locations' supplies of coffee, correcting the commas in my sister's paper on hegemonic masculinity and superheros, which was very good, and thinking more about going back to school.
also, doing a lot of things that have turned into Stories Which Are Not For You.
(there is a difference between embracing my sexuality as a post-feminism feminist and turning this into penthouse forum. or this, for that matter. you could argue, "why bother mentioning it, then?" it is because the part of me that when i was fourteen was convinced that i was going to die unloved and fat and ugly and half-eaten by alsatian wolves is so shocked that i have a sex life that i have to point that out to anyone who will listen. neener neener neener.
...
i think the fact that i have mentioned coffee twice in two paragraphs means that my subconscious is desperately trying to tell me something. on that note,
happy weekend, y'all.

soundtrack: jawbreaker, dear you
(end.)

don't give me your heartbeat cause i've had enough

you know, i really don't have anything to say. matthew's cat has been follwing me from room to room and mewing at me pitifully the whole 45 minutes that i've been awake, and i would be really pretentious if i mused about how it meant that something Needs Me, so i won't. also i have no idea how it happened but this wee blog has somehow accumulated over 1,000 hits, which probably means that i come up in some weird pornography google search. my mother is out of the hospital. it is spring. which means that the whole waiting/finding things to do with my day while waiting for work has become less of an annoyance. go go gadget springtime!
there is nothing terribly exciting in the works for this week. oh, i now own the book i referenced about a month ago and am terribly mortified uh, pleased and smug about my own eclecticism. saturday night matthew went to a lan party and i rented an incredibly embarrasing movie and watched it and LIKED IT, even though it totally fucked up the book. sometimes you just need to give yourself over to fairy tales, even if they have been disneyfied.

(edit: i discovered while researching a link to the film that disney is, in fact, producing a sequel that AGAIN has nothing to do with the books, and will not be featuring the schwartzman-brother-who-is-not-jason-but-was-incredibly-endearing, and i am officially getting a bit annoyed. off pointless soapbox.)
whilst renting this one of matthew's friends called and matthew disclosed what i was renting, whereupon i beat him. with fists of fury. oh yes. whereupon he retorted "if you're too ashamed to rent these things, should you be renting them at all?"
that is a good point.
new project: embracing all that is girly about me.
step one: wear more pink.
oh, jesus...

soundtrack: whiskeytown, "ticket time"

(end.)