ladiesbug my ass

photo credit here

the flippin weirdest thing happened yesterday. i was on my way to class, around 1 p.m., just walking on a typical autumn day, leaves falling, overzealous kellogg kids running my ass over on the sidewalk, busy networking or whatever the fuck they do, when something on my exposed collarbone pinches, and i look down at the same time as i reach to see what it is, and a fucking LADYBUG has just bitten the shit out of me, and then flits off into the sunlight.

what the FUCK? since when are ladybugs mean? i didn't run through a meadow of ladybugs and disturb its habitat or anything. if anything, it should've bitten those obnoxious kellogg students, not some innocent-though-stupid medill student who's going to make shit for a living after shouldering massive amounts of debt.

i mean, really. that ladybug was pissed. i have a welt, now. and more importantly, i'm puzzled. should i expect ladybugs to be menacing from now on? they are the one species i won't smash if it's caught in my habitat or on my person, but damn, if they're going to go around biting folks i might have to re-think that.

in defense of dating a dud

not a dude, a dud. a dud can be a dude or a dame.

it dawned on me while in the shower about 23 minutes ago that dating a complete booooo, thumbs-down, everybody-hated-him-except-my-mother guy really made me appreciate a couple of things.

first, and more obvious, is that it made me appreciate T all the more when he came along.

second, it made me embrace the full, unadulterated me because i gave so little of a shit about this guy that i basically said and did whatever i wanted. his only manipulation leverage was that he could make himself such a complete pain in the ass that i would do what he wanted (on rare occasions) just to avoid the burden of dealing with his tantrums.

i'm going to argue here that being completely selfish and self-involved in a relationship, while shitty for the other person, kind of helped me be me all the way. finally.

i've had trouble with this in the past. the one time my mom had me evaluated by a shrink, he essentially said that i grew up too fast and strove hard to be something i wasn't, which was actually very accurate. i think my mom just felt guilty from the point forward for indulging me when i said i wanted to go to school at 4 years old, thus making me a year younger than the others. i'm not really sure what to think about that nugget.

BD (before dud), i was never fully relaxed enough to express all of my opinions, let my tendencies bust out into the open. i'm a tomboy, i curse enough to make people uncomfortable, i'm logical to a point of emotionlessness, i have a horrible temper, i mistrust every single person on the planet except for like, 3 people of varying connection to me, the list goes on. in the past i've tried to be more stylish than i naturally care to be (stylishness takes effort, which i frequently don't have the energy for), i've tried to be high-maintenance (also takes way too much effort), i've tried to be girly and pleasant. ha. my pleasantness is derived from the fact that i'm deadpan and lazy and sleepy, not because i'm actually pleasant. it's a by-product if it happens.

PD (post dud), i was able to see how much i changed myself to make myself more likeable. that's some wack shit. sadly, it took me about 29 years to figure out how to be me.

part of my 30s loftiness comes from the fact that i have accepted my faults and am more-or-less comfortable in my skin. hats off to people who have had a steeper and faster learning curve. it's not an easy one.

so i was standing in line one day...

photo credit


wow, feels funny and great to be using blogger again. i'm beginning to HATE my other web publishing service. hate hate hate. anyhoo.

i had a funny experience yesterday. funny as in laugh-out-loud, funny ha ha. i was standing in line at the kaiser pharmacy, which happened to be my second successive day to be both at kaiser and in line at this particular pharmacy, and was minding my own business, hum dee dum, checking out the assortment of supplements and tummy aides and whatnot. la la la. so i get up to the front of the line and wait for the next available cashier, and happen to get the same guy that rang me up the previous day. i notice these things, but not everyone does, so i make it a practice, dexter-like, to not let my somewhat creepy observational skills out of the jar, lest someone take it offensively, or worse, flatteringly. so the cashier looks at me and says, "oh, you're stuck with me again today."

"oh, haha, yeah, i guess. i like to hang out at kaiser every day." (me, beginning to suspect that this guy didn't notice me because of his hyper observational skills.)

"yeah, i thought that was you in line, but i wasn't sure. i was going to tell you to just come up to me and not wait."

"oh, that's nice, but i don't mind waiting." (me, now certain that this guy rifling through my bag of prescriptions thinks i'm cute.)

and THEN, my new friend pulls out the three-month supply of birth control in my bag and whispers confidentially, "hey, do you need this right away?"

"um, huh? uh, i guess not." (what the fuck in hell? i am too confused to get indignant.)

"well," (still whispering), "i can save you $10 if you fill it through the mail instead of taking it home today."

"oh, cool. yeah let's do that." (kind of relieved - he's just trying to hook a girl up - and kind of knowing on another level that most people would find this invasive and i'm not those people but probably should be.)

"alright i gotta cancel this order and re-enter it..." blah blah the rest fades from memory. but you catch my drift. i thought it hilarious (trevor didn't seem to agree) that some dude was totally commandeering my prescriptions and getting all intimate with my shit. i mean, i guess he IS the cashier at the pharmacy, but it's not like he works the door at a club i want to get in to. you should - for the benefit of people not like me - maintain this facade of pharmaceutical professionalism even if you're handling someone's wart cream or whatever the hell, pretend like you don't know what it's for even though you do, pretend that you don't see it or don't care. i was just happy to have saved $10 and have a friend with questionable lines of professional conduct at the pharmacy, but that's just me. and we all know about me.

[side note: i know better than to jump in line in oakland. you would get called out by everyone from the seven year old in a cast to old grandma ethel waiting for her precor refill. you either have to have an invisible cloak or just had a huge pair of cojones and a thick hide to get away with it, and i have neither.]

snappy shoe gear

i think my last post title was happy new year, but i couldn't think of anything else, so there's a little rhyme for you. i did, actually, go a bit berserk on sunday due to some unnamed unhappiness and went out and bought new running shoes:



for all of that running that i've been doing lately (smirk). seriously, tho, i think my knee cartilage has healed up nicely (thanks, 2-a-day-glucosamine horsepills!) so i'm ready to alternate the old-people low-impact activity of walking with some interspersed running.

these shoes, let me tell you, nike has been a busy busy little company. i haven't worn nike for probably a decade, but the technology and innovation they spend their little dimes on is pretty impressive. there is this little chip you can buy that goes into the sole of your shoe (any nike shoe with a + sign has this built in, or i've read online how you can DIY a non-nike or non-+ pair to do the same) which links to a little ipod plugin add-on. basically, the chip in your shoe interacts with the plugin device and your ipod stores all this info on your workout - distance, calories burned, etc. you can create workout programs, supposedly, or listen to yourself run, whatever that means. anyway, the salesgirl at nordstrom showed it to me, and i was mightily impressed. still cheap and unemployed (so it stayed on the display), but impressed nonetheless.

here's a photo of the kit if you're curious:






i was having some buyer's remorse for purchasing new full-price anything in this crazy time of serious markdowns, but that is why i shop at nordstrom. they're nice and they take shit back if i change my mind or dislike the item after i've used it. trevor is encouraging me to keep them, plus the clothes i bought on super markdown. i think he's so relieved that my unnamed unhappinesses can be soothed at the local mall that he thinks a bit of shopping is a small price to pay for girlfriend happiness. also, since my birthday is coming down the pipes, i can always tap into that "you just bought me new running shoes" option. right?

aside from the little shoe chip, i was shopping for the most stable shoe i could find. i've been getting weird connective tissue weakness on either side of my ankles a day or so after running, so i guess if these super-stable shoes don't help, i can take them back. isn't it funny the way our bodies break down once we hit 30? ok, i might be speaking for myself, but i hate to see what kind of shape my joints and tendons are in when i'm 70. i think the glucosamine horsepills are here to stay, sadly.

hilarious

some of the best copy i've read in a while. oh yeah, and they sell products. all 2 of them:


http://www.helpineedhelp.com/bored/

for lack of thai oil...

at saadiq's suggestion about thai oil for my purple, lumpy, swollen legs, i remembered these little bottles that came free with my economy-sized white flower oil that i love so much: hoe hin strain relief!

it doesn't smell 'horrid,' as i guess thai oil should, i hope that isn't indicative of its weaker healing powers. when chinese medicine is concerned, if it doesn't stink to high heaven, it's somewhat suspect in its effectiveness. it's making my leg tingle and feel warm, which i guess is better than nothing. it smells cinnamon-y.

i can also douse myself as i see fit since i'm not at the office and vulnerable to 'you smell like an old person' comments.

get out of town.

no way: http://www.fldsdress.com/

you may recall me going off about this in a previous post. gives the term, 'throwback,' a whole new meaning.

thanks sarah!

ain't trying to hate

"Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members left the courthouse on Thursday after a ruling in their favor in San Angelo, Tex." (unabashedly ripped from the ny times, both image and copy.)

...but i mean, damn. if any sect told my ass that i would have to sport THOSE outfits and that HAIR, i would immediately tell them to get lost. pound sand. stop freebasing. get real.

sometimes i wonder if general guidelines for life can't be at least somewhat based on the rules of fashion? like, when crazy people dressed like this tell you that you are going to be the 4th wife of some old fat fart and your 12-year old daughter is going to be married off to some beer belly crazyman, you take one look at the getups they're sporting and the warning signals go off.

right?

half man half amazing

i dreamt (dreamed? my spell check gave me the thumbs down) that my sister and i had a well-swaddled baby in our trunk, and it was a really hot day. my sister wouldn't let me take her out of her many layers of clothes and blankets, but i unwrapped the baby and was showing my sister how sweaty she was. we were in a parking lot somewhere, and the baby was a newborn little girl.

it was the weirdest thing.

9:12 am and i'm leaving in an hour to pick up my parents at the airport. i hope my mom survived the flight ok.

update:

it smells and tastes like a sweet potato hyped up on sugar. i think i may use the smaller sugar rocks for tomorrow's brew.

the cure

at dinner over at my ayi's house over the holiday weekend, she prescribed this for my asthma:





one pear (she prefers organic) cut up into pieces, one lump of rock sugar, and a piece of some herb that looks like an albino bamboo stalk. located at 11:00 in the photo. i'm boiling it right now, and i have to make it every night and drink one cup.

eat your heart out, glaxo smith kline! advair 500/5o ain't got shit on bamboo and pears!

i'm not making fun, tho. chinese herb medicine does work some crazy wonders. my uncle swears by this tonic that my pah pah makes from baby mice marinated in liquor. i am not joking.

gimme salami

i didn't know chinese people made prosciutto. especially on street signs at busy intersections.

post-post

a couple of pics from the wedding. trevor and i are always too stupid to take pics together for some reason, unless we're in a taxi and stuck in traffic. for the record, chinese weddings are rarely this western. i've never seen an actual western-style ceremony at a chinese wedding before (and i didn't see this one, either, because we showed up 10 minutes late and it was OVAH).

considering i've only been here 1.5 years, i've been to a record 4 weddings. that's a lot for me, who holds the record as girl-with-the-most-single-friends for some reason. and i'll go to a wedding, believe me. i like to eat and ogle.









trevor and our friend jason (in the seersucker and bowtie. don't hate, he's southern) with the newlyweds

frosh

i've been reading celebrity blogs way too damn much. my brain is mush.

its friday night and i couldn't be any happier with my grandma blanket bunched around me on the sofa. fuck that party girl shit. i'm too damn tired.

went to yoga at 7:45 tonight and had a mildly bizarre experience. i say mildly bizarre because after 1.5 years here, it takes some serious weirdness to be rated really bizarre. the teacher was some lanky white dude who spoke his shitty chinese fearlessly, and proved that really large flexible people are just odd. it looks strange, too much going on, too much muscle and flesh and skin all warping matrix-like in front of your face. also, instead of your standard-issue triple ommmmm chant, this motherfucker made us chant the vowels of the alphabet. i'm not kidding. i kept expecting someone to jump out from behind a door and tell us we're on that british show, 'just for laughs' (and damn do i roll when i watch it on the plane).

he was like, 'everyone say ah.'

'ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...'

(i felt like i was at the doctor getting a physical.)

'everyone say eee.'

'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...'

'now oh.'

'ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...'

i'm glad he actually stopped after u. i was halfway expecting some 'and sometimes y' bullshit. after he later made some crack about how his job was so easy, he just says stuff and we do it, i knew he was just jacking around, using us for his own petty satisfaction (he also informed us that this was his last class because he got canned). i knew it!

weirdos abound.

what's been going on... not much. work has been getting busy - i spent most of the day running around like some fool trying to hustle sales for a company i don't own.

speaking of weirdos:



this broad had the nerve to sit in front of me on the bus yesterday. excuse moi? this is just furthering my disbelief about the chinese nationals and their love-hate-disregard for their hair. (i will at some point rant about how an entire nation can be cool with running around in public all damn day long with some of the worst bedhead you've ever seen in your life. it's compounded by the fact that chinese folk really do not find hair-washing a priority. oily hair is somewhat 'glued' into place by sebaceous secretions, making for a fine sculpting medium for extreme bedhead. hair hygiene seems to be a curse or crime to be avoided, something that is detrimental to your life, health, and the health of your long and otherwise robust line of descendants. i don't know any other culture in this world that has traditions and folklore supporting hair-washing abstinence.)

i'm effin' geeked about finally having a camera on my phone. i haven't even turned off the loud, faux-shutter click because china is one of those places where you can both run around with a hairstyle like the above and not garner a single stare, and very obviously take multiple pictures of a complete stranger without anyone giving a phuck.

dreams

i dreamt last night that one of my eyes fell out and so i carried it around in a tea cup, looking for a doctor.

the night before i dreamt i saw an ex and his hair was overgrown and shaggy and his eyelids had fallen and were droopy.

what's with the presence of eyes in dreams?

dan shui lu