Judgment

No real reason not to talk about what's happening anymore. I lost my jobs. All of them. The ones I was currently doing and the ones I was hired to do in the future. I made a judgment error in using the names of my places of employment and the name of the victim of a tragedy on my blog. People who didn't know me read what I wrote on my blog out of context. The things I wrote were interpreted as inflammatory. I never meant them to be hurtful or inflammatory. But I should have been more careful, more thoughtful. I'm so careful around the kids and parents, but not in my blog. It's an unfortunate way to learn an unfortunate lesson. All my good intentions and good works and bending over backwards and everything I've done for and with the kids couldn't save me from the consequences of a poor judgment effecting the PR of my (now former) employers. So to those who wanted me gone got their wish. I hope the kids and the community are better off, because they didn't need any more hurt or heartache. Unfortunately, neither did I.

Thank you to my friends and family who have been supportive through all of this. I love you guys.

Does this mean I'm "supposed" to be a writer not a teacher?

Thought of the night

There is no one “right” way to be. At least I think…though by thinking there isn’t necessarily a “right” means that there is necessarily the possibility of a “right.”


I need to find a good, free blog hosting site that allows password-protected access to content without the readers all having to be members of said site. Any suggestions?

bad bad bad

Big fat hairy bad thing. Call me if you want to know more, but this blog has caused me enough trouble.

Insurance, Dreams, and Movies

I can finally check off one of the items from the list of Things Keeping Me Awake At Night: I got a packet in the mail today confirming that I will be health insured the moment my COBRA expires. This is mostly important so that my migraines don't become a "preexisting condition" and not covered, because that would be bad. I had a nasty migraine today, but I felt it coming so I seem to have started medicating myself early enough that it's already almost gone. I spent the day asleep and was dreaming about tornados and pirates and OutKast and some weird thing where people had polluted the world so badly that everything was under an ocean of sludge. We all had to live in these boats that were like if the creators of the Starship Enterprise designed a cruise ship and people were mutating into these weird lizard-like creatures that lived off the sludge. The mutation happened if you fell into the sludge but it could also be passed around like a cold. Migraine-induced dreams are weird. Maybe that's why I've never felt the need to do drugs. Psycho dreams: my anti-drug. Hmm.

I watched A Streetcar Named Desire tonight. Marlon Brando was hot. He should've been the one freaking out about aging. Blanche DuBois and Norma Desmond would be appropriate roommates at the nuthouse. Now there's an idea for a truly dreadful spin-off. I'm not sure what I want next from my Netflix queue, it being 120 movies long and all.

I'm trying to resist the urge to turn on the air conditioner, but it's a sauna in here.

I can hear someone crying somewhere outside or upstairs or something. It's odd.

The current and very loud soundtrack in my head (not a great performance/recording of it, but still a great piece):

So glad it's a long weekend...

I'm not doing anything in particular this weekend and that's exactly what I need. Whoever thought up Memorial Day should be commended. It would have been nice to have my Second City class tomorrow, but oh well. Maybe I'll clean my apartment, but it's supposed to be beautiful out. Too bad my dog isn't nice to people.

Dirty

I finally pulled out my Eureka! Quick-Up Hand-Vac I got for my birthday and holy shit, it's amazing. The quantity of dog hair I got up from just my bed and the area immediately around it was disgusting. I also tried to vacuum my laptop, but the dog hair is kind of stuck under the keys, so I ended up basically taking my keyboard apart and picking out the hair and crud with a tweezers. (What? I don't have a rollerball mouse anymore, and my manic/OCD tendencies need something to keep occupied...) The resulting furball was at least the size of my fist. I also gave Freud a bath, which he hated, but he's much softer and less stanky now.My sister is hanging out with me tomorrow and I have to clean my apartment before she gets here and beats my head in for being such a pig. She doesn't appreciate my slovenly way of living, and it's a good excuse to get this place neat enough to not be embarrassed when the cleaning service gets here.

new things

I got my espadrilles. Steve Madden. $39.92 on clearance. Yes, that's my foot. I couldn't find a picture on the web, so I used my cell phone camera.

My improv class yesterday was awesome. There are about 13 people in the class, ages probably range from 19 to 40 with the bulk in the 20-somethings category. More men than women, and lots of friendly open people. One highlight of the first class came while playing a version "Kitty wants your corner" in which the middle person had to call out a non-observable trait and everyone with that trait had to stand up and switch seats while the middle person tried to take one. Andrew was in the middle and called out "if you have kinky underwear." My mind immediately went to the articles I still own from Safer Sex Nights past and my red corset and I stood up to switch seats. No one else got up. Strange mixture of pride and embarrassment as I'm sure my face turned beet red.

Friday night I went by myself to see Augusten Burroughs on his book tour at Borders. Don't really feel like talking about it anymore, though, or even the drunk kid who was passed out on my apartment's front lawn when I came home, except to say that after I called 3-1-1 (the non-emergency version of 9-1-1 in Chicago) a cop car, firetruck, and ambulance all came (I said he was breathing, but I guess it must have been a slow night) and it reaffirmed my "thing" for firemen.

The Espadrille Search

Spent almost an hour by myself in DSW this evening looking for espadrilles. They had many, many cute ones at reasonable but not fantastic prices and I couldn't decide so I left empty-handed. Hopefully my sister will go back with me tomorrow and be my second opinion, but in the meantime, these are my espadrille thoughts:
One pair (by Born) was extremely comfortable and cute in shape, but a pale lime green. Do I really want/need lime green shoes? Will I be able to wear them with any of the things I want to be pairing with my espadrilles?
Two different styles by Steve Madden were very tempting. One (in both silver and gold) was super-sparkly with fun ribbon ankle lacing things. I'm a sucker for the things that lace up your legs. The others are very similar but with shmancy beading instead of sequins and in a bone color. This pic I found (right) is similar but I'm not sure if it's actually the same shoe or not. Damn my non-visual memory.
I don't remember the brand of this one other pair I liked, but they were closed-toed and black with white stitching and black ribbon lace-up ankle things. Perhaps the most practical, though maybe not because I can think of skirts I own that wouldn't go well with the black. Really I need a white or neutral, but they tend to look creepy against my pasty-ass legs. Perhaps I need to start painting my legs a darker color with that tan-in-a-can lotion shit, because obviously, beauty and golden skin are of the utmost importance. Obviously.

Does anyone else find it extremely amusing when I'm being girly and superficial? Because I'm definitely laughing at myself with all my shopping and makeup and shit. It's still shit, but I'm pretending to be a grown-up here and grown-ups are supposed to look like they know what they're doing and that somehow includes makeup and fashion and crap like that.

Needs

Need more time in the day. Need nap. Need booze. Need to clean apartment so I can have service come clean apartment. Oy.

Blah

At my parents' house. Can't sleep. My brother is asleep on the couch with March of the Penguins playing in the background. Baby penguins are incredibly cute, especially when they're fat and recently fed. I want cereal, but my stupid family doesn't have any non-diet crap cereal. And for some reason, whenever I'm at this house, I have a ringing in my ears. You'd think it was external since it mainly only happens at my parents', but it's loudest when I plug my ears, meaning it's inside my head. Maybe the building is tuned to some frequency that vibrates my skull. How fucked up would that be?

So bored. I should have brought a book. Maybe I'll raid my parents books. Blah.

Mania: A Confession

I just wrote this, and I can't decide if it's really dumb bullshit or really important:

Sometimes, when I too strongly feel all the hurt and love in the world at once, I become super-saturated with emotion. It blisters and swells, tumefied and bloated, until I am paralyzed with every ounce of universal pleasure and pain, frozen, blinded by the strange volume of it all, wanting to push out and peel away my skin and take everything in at once until I can’t think or make sense and I’m stuck in my head and in my body surging and writhing with pressure and finally it comes bursting out in such an orgasm of emotion and brightness and adoration that I can’t believe no tangible, dense chunk of matter isn’t born somewhere, like a new star or the first bits of life from some primordial ooze. But being trapped as I am, some little blonde girl, the best I can bring forth are a few strange sentences that won’t mean anything by morning. If I believed in the human model of God, this would be His feeling that led to the creation of the world. How frustrating, this mortality and loneliness and ever-unfulfilled need for what I do not know.

In short

[Insert joke about me being short and this being the short version of my weekend HERE]

Having to be fake for big fake family shit is exhausting. It can be fun and I enjoy a number of my relatives, but the Shiny Happy People Show is both pointless and draining and I can't help but put on my own Shiny Happy shell because I want them to think I am Shiny and Happy in the pre-prescribed way that Shiny Happiness is supposed to manifest itself. A small handful of us exchanges meaningful glances and steal moments of meaningful conversation, but I do worry I'm like my mom, with even the "meaningful" glances being highly deliberate and self-conscious and their own form of plastic fake bullshit. Just so much bullshit.

And somewhere in this bullshit, I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I'm a grownup and my birthday isn't likely to be all balloons and parties anymore. Birthdays have always been important to me, but maybe it's time I accept that Jill's 24th Birthday isn't going to be the #1 priority on my friends' lists. Thank you very very much to my friends who did call and/or send general birthday wishes and love, as these things really do get my serotonin pumping, but maybe it's time to lower my birthday expectations so I won't be so disappointed and lonely when the world doesn't stop in my honor.

Tonight I went over to my other cousin Josh and his wife Vicky's apartment and watched TV and drank Mike's Hard Cranberry and ordered in Chinese. They got me a cake that we didn't eat because I brought over the leftover cake from yesterday. It was perfect. The contrast to Shiny Happy Weekend was incredible, and it was perfect.

Happy birthday to meeeeeeee!

birthdays

My grandfather is now officially 90 years old. Happy birthday, Grandpa.

Just a few more hours of me being 23. I guess I'm paying for last year's unbelievably fun Nantucket birthday weekend extravaganza with this year's potential suck-fest. Whatever. My cousins are very entertaining and there's a full moon and maybe my uterus will stop being so cranky by tomorrow and the cake should be good and perhaps I'll go buy myself espadrilles in the early afternoon.

Is it completely lame if I fall alseep before midnight? I've stayed up until midnight on my birthday for as long as I can remember, but dammit, I'm exhausted. Long day at work today and I did it without the aid of coffee.

A big of good news: I seem to have finally gotten the whole eyebrow thing under control. Revlon Brow Fantasy pencil and gel duo in "dark blonde" is a good color and consistency for me. Brings out my eyes without them looking fake or "done." Huzzah.

Malcontent

I spent most of today alternating between frustrated and annoyed. I wished harm upon a good number of people, mostly strangers, and then started wondering what would happen if anything came of my venomous thoughts. What if some poor shmoe, who has other things on his mind than letting me into his lane, will now get run over by a truck and paralyzed from the neck down, costing him his job, health insurance, and happiness?
My ill-wishing continued, but I added my own narcissism to the day's annoyances.

I signed up for the acting improv class. I've been having lots of dreams lately where I'm making up plays as I go along; perhaps my subconscious isn't that subtle. Besides, now's probably not the time to start a new writing genre. I'm still trying to actually do something in the magazine non-fiction world. I'll take the writing class when I need a new muse or something. For now, I'm going to play Freeze.

Is there a single word that means actively wishing ill on another person? I feel like there is. Maybe starting with the prefix "mal-" but I couldn't find it in my dictionary or using thesaurus.com. Hmm.

Search:  Dictionary.com Thesaurus.com Reference.com the Web

for

major life decision

Which Second City class do I want to take? The writing one or the improv one? The improv one sounds like more fun, with games and running around and interacting with people, but I'm a writer not an actor and maybe sketch writing will turn out to be "my thing." I've always been decent at dialogue, and I actually have professional humor writing experience. But writing is so solitary, even in a class, and part of why I want to do this thing is to meet people, and one of the other teachers at work took the improv one and loved it. I'm way too torn and running out of time to make my decision.

What do you think?

speaking of...

My boogers hurt. So do my eyebrows. Someone needs to make me mazzoh ball soup. Stupid boogery child continued to booger all over everyone as much as possible all day. I'm trying to fight the germs. I do not need more of them wiped on me. Also, there should be some sort of free online thing where you can answer multiple-choice questions and get a diagnosis for children with social/emotional issues. Let's give this puppy a name so we can deal with it appropriatly.

Speaking of puppies, when mine farts, he turns and looks at his butt like "what was that?" He's very strange.

Speaking of strange, I saw a movie tonight with my cousin and cousin-in-law that was strange. Brick. I liked it, but 1) if a movie is about high schoolers the actors should be at least believably in their teens and 2) no matter how stylized you make your revenge murder myster, it is still a revenge murder myster and I am still very good at figuring it out way before you're supposed to and 3) Joseph Gordon-Levitt is hot.

From the "seemed like a good idea at the time" department

One of my eyebrows is currently a bit dusty rose.
Ever since the woman at Sephora darkened my eyebrows and showed me a whole new world of eye makeup drama, I have been trying to figure out how to make my brows darker in the most natural, least stupid-looking way possible. I'd been using my fancy slanty make-up brush and a combination of two eyeshadows: one was too dark, the other too orangey, but mixed they were juuuuust riiiiight. Still, the eyeshadow itself would clump a bit and was clearly not meant to be a brow powder. So I bought brow powder, but it looked drawn-on and weird. My mom suggested I get this new eyebrow mascara stuff she'd heard about and got it for me at Walgreens. This definitely darkened my brows in a natural-looking way, but I discovered a new problem: once darkened, my eyebrows are all bushy! Jilly-Jilly-No-Brow (ok, no one has ever called me that) needed to tweeze! So I tried tweezing, but I had no idea what I was doing or how to shape, since my blondeness never learned tweezing skills in junior high like the rest of the vain girly world. I'd seen HairOff (not to be confused with Face/Off) eyebrow stencils at Walgreens and looked up online how and if they could be used as tweezing guides. Sounded simple enough, so I bought eyebrow stencils that even came with a FREE! eyebrow pencil. That takes us to tonight. Splendid.
I follow the instructions on how to place the eyebrow stencils very carefully.

1. FIND THE INNER POINT: To find the beginning point, lay your eyebrow pencil
alongside your nose, pointing straight up. Mark the point on your brow a finger's
width above the bridge of your nose. Do the same for the other brow.

Easy enough.

2. FIND THE OUTER POINT: Place your pencil diagonally from the tip of your nose to the outer edge of your eye. Mark the point where the pencil hits your brow bone. Do the same for the other brow.

This required more guesswork, as there are an infinite number of possible slopes for the diagonal of my pencil, but I just used my existing brow and the vaguely helpful illustration as a guide for where to end the thing.

3. PLACE STENCILS OVER YOUR BROWS: Peel one stencil off the backing...Line up the inner edge of the cutout with the inner point you marked in Step 1. Line the outer point of the cutout with the outer point you marked in Step 2.

Problem: my eyebrows, from end to end, are smaller than the stencil. Do I go by my Step 1 dots? My Step 2 dots? Average it out? Squish the stencil a bit so it has to fit?
I ended up basically using my Step 1 dot and the natural arch of my brows as my guide, then shifted them slightly so they were more symmetrical. It looked pretty good, and I planned to err on the conservative side of my plucking, anyway. I drew my right brow on with the pencil and removed the stencil. It looked ok, so I started on the left one. My FREE! eyebrow pencil broke at the tip and I didn't feel like looking for the sharpener, but I figured I had a cheap lip liner pencil right there that would do the job as a tweezing guide. So I had one brown and one reddish eyebrow all stenciled out, but the right one somehow looked flatter, so I repositioned the stencil and redrew it in lip liner. I looked funny as hell with my rosy red eyebrows, but the shape seemed good, so I started plucking. Plucking fucking hurts, particularly when you're going after chunks, but I got all the little blonde strays and washed my face to see how I'd done. The eyebrows stayed red. Lots of scrubbing and soap and eye makeup later, the right one is still pinker than just the rubbing would have caused. Having removed hair that's normally almost invisible, I looked otherwise the same. I put in the eyebrow mascara stuff, which we got in the lightest shade. They look like boring little eyebrows. The dramatic arch of the stencil doesn't really show up, and (once darkened) I found a few strays.

Another round of scrubbing tomorrow should remove the remaining lip liner (or maybe my eyes need to eat something...food tends to wipe lip liner off very quickly) and maybe I'll play more with brow powder or perhaps a heavier coating of eyebrow mascara.

So was the whole thing worth it? I don't know...was it worth reading my entire account of the experience?

Music and mucus

I appear to be getting another cold. This is bullshit. Bring on the zinc and OJ (though no OJ for 30 minutes after the zinc, since it supposedly stops it from working). Stupid germy children and their stupid germs.

Chili Peppers are on SNL right now. I still like their music a lot, but being in their mid 40s, they look a little silly dancing around topless and headbanging and such. Red Hot Silly Peppers.

I gave in and paid the $10 for Napster for at least this month. There was more I wanted to download and listen to and such and I kind of like it.

A bit of my wiggle music, a la Napster:
Hey There Delilah
Mad World (Album Version)
The Luckiest
Lightning Crashes
Colorblind
Wild World
Vincent
I'm Kissing You
Kiss From A Rose (Album Version)
Polly

Triumphant return

My internet is back up! Just as I'd resigned myself to having to pay for some form of net access in my apartment, voila! Internet! I wasn't even going on my computer to check for a connection (I have a version of Text Twist that I can play offline, thank god) and there it was! I'm very happy to have it back. I spent my day off today cleaning. CLEANING, I tell you! But now, I can go back to wasting all my time like a good lazy person.

As for today's cleaning, I did eight, count them, eight loads of laundry. This included all my towels and a particularly hairy blanket, but still, eight. And they were full loads. I have too much crap. I should really go through my stuff and give away all the shirts that are falling apart and the pants that don't actually fit, but the trouble is (as shown by the eight loads of laundry) I still wear them with some regularity. I'm a little surprised What Not to Wear hasn't kicked me in the face yet.

My mom's therapy appointment is next week! It's a shame I don't have a video of Elizabeth doing her happy dance, because this would be the perfect place for it.

Why oh why does it take so long to bake a $0.25 frozen Banquet chicken pot pie?

Monday and Tuesday at work I spent two minutes clicking on my AdSense ads (it seems to have figured out what I'm doing from my home IP address and will often not add any money for my clicking). It was the little bar that lets you choose what types of ads to look at, then gives you an entire page of ads to click on. With the keywords "mesothelioma," "real estate," and "maid services" (I actually was checking out maid services, so why not get paid for it?), AdSense paid me $6.28 on Monday and $14.44 on Tuesday. Holy crap. That's better pay than phone sex! I'm almost to $50, which is the half-way point to actually seeing money. For the minimal hassle, I say it's definitely been worth it, and they don't actually pay me to say this shit.

So, if you love me and/or don't mind, click an ad or two, or if possible as to see ads for real estate, mesothelioma, or anything else you can think of and click click click! When/if I eventually get a check from this shit, I'll totally buy you a drink or something.

Begging readers to do things just reminded me: there are six entries in my guestbook! From four different people who aren't me! And they're actually interesting! I feel loved. Carnally, in Joel's (AKA "Yoel" the Silly UberJew)'s case.

My internet at home is down again...it looks like my preferred pirated connection may no longer exist and the other signals are weak at best...this better not mean I actually have to start paying for internet service. Maybe I'll just hang out at the internet cafe a few blocks from me.

Praised be the diety of your choice, my mother got a referral for a therapist! She's plugging her own damn bucket! Yay bucket plug! Yay psychological health! Maybe now my brother can actually get better, too! I'm not holding my breath, but faint optimism can't hurt too bad.

Maybe she's playing basketball...

All I know is the "thunk-thunk-thunk"coming from upstairs is very annoying.