lazy sunday

I'm committed to laziness today. It's all grey and humid outside, not the kind of weather that would be conducive to my original plan of riding my bike to the grocery store... I have 35,955 miles on my car and it's only under warranty until 36,000, but the jerkwads at Ira can't look at it until Wednesday. So not only is my car a bastion of all that is evil in the world, it can't even take me to Stop & Shop to buy some frickin organic pears.

So since I can't drive, and in preparation for the long car-less days ahead (during which the aforementioned jerkwads stare blankly at my car and try to think of things they can fix that aren't covered by the warranty,) I practiced my mass transit skillz today. It took me four and a half hours to get from Canton to Lowell, but I only spent $1.25.

After a much needed water + Tylenol + large iced coffee + supreme omelet (oh GOD yes) breakfast to assuage my hangover, Amanda dropped me off at the commuter rail in Canton. I had to get the T from Back Bay to North Station, and was literally a minute late for the commuter rail to Lowell. So I walked around the area for an hour, watched some people, listened to some tunes, and tried not to consider myself too much of a martyr for not driving myself last night, despite the fact that if I had, I would have been home by 2am last night and wouldn't have had to waste the whole day today. But is a day spent supporting public transportation really a wasted day? I'm telling myself it's not. So when I arrived at the Gallagher, which is conveniently located NOT DOWNTOWN, I watched as the one bus I needed pulled away, not to return for an hour. The public transportation sitation in Lowell is absolutely ridiculous - think of all the people who have to completely RELY on that crap to get around! I weighed my options: walk home or walk to my car and drive home. Having planned to accomplish tons of work today, I broke down and called Kate for a ride to my car, defeating the whole purpose of trying not to be car-dependent...

When we got to my car, I showed Kate the battery acid all over my car's inner workings (or whatever all that stuff under the hood is called.) She was duly apalled, and even suggested that I green clean it off with one of the many gallons of distilled vinegar I keep in my backseat. But I'm not a chemist, so I just drove home and hoped for the best :)

So when I got home I was all, "I just need to ride my bike everywhere I need to go, starting with the store." But then I sat down on my bed and all my aspirations melted away into a pool of extreme laziness. I know I'll have to go to the store at some point, because I don't have any milk for my iced coffee, and that's a problem. I think if I had an iced coffee holder on my bike I'd be a lot more psyched to take it places; maybe I'll invent one in my spare time. But for now I'm just superglued to the couch, plotting and planning how to make people do what I want without coming off like some crazy zealot. On a less insidious level, I'm also plotting something delicious for dinner. Macaroni and cheese? A healthy salad? No, macaroni and cheese. Don't fret, cheese, you'll always be my true love.

Speaking of being a zealot, may I remind you all to go see the Al Gore movie? NOW? I saw it for the second time last night, and although I missed the first hour, I'm even more convinced that WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE if we don't do something soon. Can somebody lend me $35,000? I need a hybrid. I'll share it if you make the car payments - I'll even throw in gas money!

i heart summer

I was sitting out on the porch today watching a little league game and I finally realized that in the past week, all of a sudden, I've been able to do all the fun stuff I missed out on during school (i.e. relaxing, lazing about, being a sloth, puttering, sitting around, etc.) I went to the state forest and took pictures of caterpillars, played my poor neglected guitar, cooked delicious food, took a nap in the middle of the day, went on a road trip, knitted, and completely ignored my desk, which is obscured by an ever-growing pile of papers that I will never look at again. It would be fun to have a symbolic bonfire with them like we used to do in college, but I feel too guilty about that kind of thing now, so I'll probably just recycle them... Either way I don't have to read them, and that is why summer is f-ing super.

it's all over

Thank GOD. School has officially stopped torturing me for the year. I know I've said it a million times, but WHAT posessed me to go back to school? I sucked at school before, I suck at school now. I will continue to suck at school until I finally convince myself that perhaps school is not my life's calling. So far, however, waitressing is the only thing I've found that I don't suck at, and I refuse to accept that waitressing is my life's calling. I have way too much in green cleaning at this point to end it all before I change the world (i.e. before I convince at least 12 million people to drop their Windex.)

So I've been told that Bullet Points "really get the point across." This is convenient because I don't have the energy to get creative and write "paragraphs" right now. I haven't blogged much since the last disaster (thesis proposal rejection,) so here's what has happened since I last blogged, in Bullet Points:

-I rewrite my proposal and never hear whether it's OK or not
-I worry, but I have bigger fish to fry
-My love for baking soda gets increasingly obsessive
-Some jerkwad in my group decides to plagiarize her section of my final project
-I have an ethical dilemma
-I have a nervous breakdown
-My professors take pity on me, one gives me an extension
-Mother Nature takes pity on me and sends a flood
-I feel bad for all the people who lost their cars and houses in the flood, but I'm secretly psyched because school is closed on the day my finals are due
-I still somehow manage to get all behind and don't sleep for a week
-I am cracked out to the extreme
-I pull a few more all-nighters, try my best to deal with the jerkwad's section
-I give up on the project
-I take that bitch to Staples, bind it, and get it out of my life
-I have another nervous breakdown, pull another all-nighter, and pour every fiber of my being into writing about green cleaning
-I email that bitch to the professor and drive to Boston for Alexis' graduation
-I miss the graduation itself but am just in time for a delicious Bloody Mary
-I proceed to the RESD party and drink some more, make pleasant conversation with the plagiarist, who I admit is actually a nice person
-There are balloon animals
-I go to Kelly's baby shower, give her some pesticide-free organic cotton baby clothes
-Amanda and I drive to Braintree to get a thing so we can play our Ipods in the car
-The Ipod thing attacks us viciously
-We make our way towards the sweet sunny South
-There is a rainstorm
-There is traffic
-There is a hailstorm
-There is a plague of locusts and I see the seven horsemen of the Apocalypse riding beside us on 95
-We stop at an unsavory location in New Jersey which is both a bar AND a package store, buy some wine, anticipating that we will REALLY need a drink when we get to DC
-We get to DC, drive past our hotel, and proceed to get lost in DC for an hour while trying to call the hotel
-No one picks up the phone at the hotel
-We finally get there at 4:30 in the morning, the little birdies are tweeting
-The desk clerk is "auditing the system" so we can't check in
-We do not even think about opening the wine... We sleep
-We go to some Smithsonians, see some cool insects and the Hope Diamond
-I have my picture taken with the Swedish Chef, my favorite Muppet
-We eat a ridiculous amount of food
-We smoke cigarettes at the bar
-We eat more food
-We suffer food comas and can't seem to motivate ourselves to go back out
-We watch some show about this crazy person who wants a room in her house to look like Hilary Duff's sewing room
-Hilary Duff is a stupid human being
-I get to my green cleaning seminar an hour early
-I eat some danish, scope out the scene at the Holiday Inn
-There are no hot building service contractors in the house
-A guy from Norwood tells an extremely tall tale about the flood, I keep my mouth shut
-I "network" with the guy from Norwood, who makes cleaning products that come in a self-contained biobased film
-I forgive him for being a liar because he's so green
-The seminar would be better if I could keep my eyes open
-We get back on the road, I pray
-We get lost in the ghettoes of Maryland for a while
-We play Twenty Questions, coming up with some killers, including: Army, Lighter Fluid, Jack o' Lantern, Johnny Appleseed, and Picture Frame
-We play Trivia towards the end of New Jersey, but years of pot-smoking seem to have destroyed my memory
-We play Categories through Connecticut and Rhode Island
-I get home and sleep like I've never slept before
-I go to work for about an hour, come home, and sleep some more
-I wake up to an email from the jerkwad plagiarist saying she got an A on the project

So that's my story. It's been a crazy few weeks, and I wish I could express more eloquently how ridiculously happy I am that it's all over. Suffice it to say this is going to be the goddamned best summer of my entire life. Even if I wake up tomorrow and I have no feet, I will be happy. If you'll excuse me, I have to whip up a baking soda paste for the dishes.

a piss-poor day on the farm

This blog entry is really only of interest to true Anne Devotees. It's not going to be creative, it's not going to be funny, so if you're just being Anne-curious, look elsewhere because you're about to be bored out of your skull. Unless, of course, you have a passion for epic tales of woe that have nothing to do with love or human relationships, but rather focus on qualitative research methods. If that does describe you, you're weird.

Thesis proposal
Torn to little tiny shreds
One more albatross


For those of you who haven't already heard the three-hour psychotic tirade behind that haiku: today I was supposed to defend my reserach design proposal for my thesis... It didn't go quite as well as I had anticipated. I seriously thought my design was bulletproof and impervious to criticism, yet like I insinuated, it was torn apart. My professor found holes in my research question big enough to walk through. And of course the rest of the design, having been based on that central question, was totally invalidated. Phrases like "totally not feasible," "you're not an epidemiologist," "this is not a RESD thesis," and "you just can't really do this" were tossed around the room like so many spiny wiffle balls. It was not a good scene. I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or throw up or just scream "BUT WE DISCUSSED THIS!!! BUT I'VE BEEN WORKING WITH THE SAME RESEARCH QUESTION ALL SEMESTER AND ONLY NOW YOU'RE TELLING ME EXACTLY HOW BAD IT IS?"

Jesus Christ on a bike. I just couldn't help feeling like it was somehow personal. I feel like I got punched in the stomach repeatedly for an hour... I just f-ing HATE actually putting effort into things and having them suck. It just goes to show that my traditional formula of not putting any effort into schoolwork is actually the most effective.

I also f-ing hate the fact that I drank 3 cups of coffee at like midnight because I got a new coffeemaker and I just haaaad to try it out. This combination of seething anger, the resulting adrenaline, and being physically wired is just not helping me get to sleep. I have more pointless phone interviews to conduct tomorrow. Perhaps I should tell my interviewee, "Hey, its really nice of you to agree to talk to me, but unfortunately my research design is so lame that it's really useless for me to ask you any questions. Yeah, my whole thesis topic has ebola. Apparently. Thanks for your time!"

Why did I come to grad school? What in the good green earth was I thinking? I sucked at school before; I had no logical reason to believe that three years of waitressing would have given me that unstoppable impetus to learn that I had been lacking when I was in college...

I heard this amazingly beautiful John Lennon song today that I had never heard before, "Working Class Hero." According to John, "a working class hero is something to be." Please indulge my crisis of self/purpose in life and consider how this leads me to two possibilities:
1. I should go to New England Tractor Trailer School, get a real job, and get over myself.
-OR-
2. I am doing this for all the wrong reasons. I read a study or something that argues that people who go into social work, non-profits, social justice work, etc., do so out of a subconscious need to be taken care of themselves. That is, anyone who does something nice for someone else (but NOT as a means to an end - rather because they think they are just being nice and "caretaker-y") is actually hoping that someone will take care of them in return. I don't really know what to do with that theory, I just thought it was interesting to consider that maybe I don't actually want to help people - in which case I REALLY ought to just go to NETTS...

By way of ending
I know I'm totally nuts
It's something to be

a haiku for roo-roo

After all this time I just realized that was a haiku! Well here's one right back at you, outlining in a simple zen-like form why I haven't blogged lately:

Data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead

Paper-writing hell
Power Point Purgatory
Alliteration

I got a little carried away on that last one. Those were the days, though, writing haikus about thrust and fuselage in engineering class. Oh Joe Palladino, you made drag coeffiecients sound so HOT...

Back to my research design. This is officially Dark Night of My Soul Number One of the semester.

nohari window

Yeah, umm, I'm going to need you to go ahead to come in on Saturday... And do my NOHARI WINDOW! Why, you ask? Take a peek at this timeline:

The other day: I looked at Amanda's profile and saw her Johari Window. Verrry Interesting, I mused. People tell you what's good about you. Warm fuzzy feelings. I like it, but I'm a self-destructive glutton for punishment. How can I mold this experience to my warped existence? It came to me... THE NOHARI WINDOW - the evil twin, in which people tell you why you suck!

Later that day: I sign up for my own Nohari Window, but I do something wrong when putting the link into my profile, so one has to cut and paste the link to access it. No problem, I think, people will probably be eager to enumerate my faults anyways. I wait with baited breath to see the venom be spewed forth from my so-called friends.

The next day: YESSS, someone has done my Nohari window. ONE PERSON. One "A. Non." Very clever, but I can see right through this like I can see through my arm when I wrap it with Saran Wrap. I know there is only one person likely to meet all of the following criteria:
-read my MySpace profile
-recognize the coolness of the Nohari Window
-be bored enough at work to do my Nohari Window
-come up with the clever nickname A. Non
-think I am, of all things, LETHARGIC!!!!

In conclusion, AMANDA, now I know what you really think. I guess I was asking for it. Too bad you had to be the first. All others who follow in your footsteps will be protected by "safety in numbers." I admire your fortitude and courage, and I regret if you find it unjustified when I accidentally attach toilet paper to both of your shoes at Kelly's wedding. You'd better sleep with one eye open, my friend. If not for that unfortunate incident in December of 1999 when I took advantage of your passed-outness to do unspeakable things with a certain western Massachusetts motorcar heir in your extra-long twin, an incident for which you kindly forgave me after a short period of Spanish class silence, I would be more inclined toward revenge. But I love you and your crazy, crazy ass, and I know you could have been meaner in the Nohari Window, which I must admit I requested that people do (nice use of the subjunctive, self.)

To everyone else: the seal is broken, the cherry popped, the trail blazed. Take this unique opportunity to insult me with complete anonymity and impunity. Do it now, my minions, before I do it to you (unless I'm feeling too lethargic to type, that is.)

te recuerdo amanda

Well, well, I guess someone did read my blog. Someone who's a pretty big deal. I thus dedicate this blog entry to you, Amanda. I just did your Johari window, you crazy hippie, and then I went on to do my own NOhari window, the evil twin of the two. Apparently. So even though the link isn't so much a link, it's there and I encourage all of you to cut and paste it. The small effort on your part will be repaid thousandfold when you get to anonymously tell me what sucks about Anne. Not that anything does, I'm just saying.

So how's life, you say? Pretty lame, but thanks for asking. On the heels of Worst Valentine's Day Ever things can't get much worse. So there. In other news, I skipped yoga tonight to eat a four-course dinner and drink a bottle of red wine. Well worth the guilt.

I can't find a dress for Kelly's wedding, and I have this nagging feeling that if I stopped skipping yoga to eat four-course meals, it might be easier for me to fit into a dress. But whatever, I'm deep into feeling-sorry-for-myself mode and Amanda is the only source of logical advice in the universe right now. Not that she's the one forcing me to eat fried tomatoes, I'm just saying.

Hey, is it just me, does every single one of my friends have an evil boyfriend? I feel like such a statistic. Speaking of statistics, school is a such a rock-bottom failure right now that I yearn for the days of December when I spent my Saturday nights poring over confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. I am a sad, sad case. I think it's time to put this lame day to bed. I have work to look forward to tomorrow: there's nothing like getting to work at 9 and staring at the pencil cup which once really captivated my fancy. Maybe after I look at the pencil cup, I'll turn on my computer. Then I might water my plant, or eat a banana, followed by a little "professional development:" Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I just can't get enough of that Chameleon Game - doesn't he ever get sick of eating letters? By the way, I'd like to point out that I type 40 wpm with my index fingers and 15 wpm with all of my fingers. Well look out world, because by the time Miss Mavis is done with me, I'm putting all of you Katherine Gibbs School grads out of a job! Yay grad school!

poco de todo y todo de nada

Holas, loyal readership. You will soon seek me out like the squirrels seek to come into my room through the closed windows. It is just like a Windex commercial up in this mother.

I went to see my musically proficient friends Tripping Lily last night and mentally beat myself up for bing such a piss-poor guitar player. It was a great time though, and it was wonderful to see my long-lost Cape Cod homies at Molly's, where after months of living in Lowell, the bouncer still stated that he didn't need to see my ID because I'm there "all the time." I guess that Cape-Cod-for-life quality shows on my face.

I have literally eighteen hours of reading to do in the next 3 hours, hence my procrastination in the form of blog-writing. Now I feel guilty, bye.

flava of love

Um, so I am writing a blog now. I never saw this coming. I wonder if anyone will ever read it... If you do you must tell me. Fan mail may be sent to me care of Kathleen Keefe of the Lowell Keefes. Well, where shall I begin, MySpace minions? How was my day, you ask? It was a pleasure and a delight, thank you.

I began my day by drinking a large iced coffee and proceeded to waste over two hours watching Flava Flav's reality show. This turned out to be not a waste of time, but rather an alarming insight into the ethnography of a really fucked-up household. A grad student in the social sciences, in my opinion, must never take a break from learning about the human condition. I went for a walk in the state park and cleared my head. Flava had given me a lot to think about and I really needed some time alone, away from the troubles of the material world. There was an amazing mist over the swamps and all the baby pine trees are starting to grow.

On the way home I was listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "Only Living Boy in New York" and had one of those "I fucking love LOWELL" moments. I was stopped at a traffc light forEVER and I had a perfect view of a construction worker returning to the site from across the street with a brown paper bag. He walked over to the guardrail along the river,hopped over, sat on the guardrail, and looked around about 15 times to make sure no one could see him. This seemed a little silly to me as he was clearly the only construction worker there, but there were cars everywhere. Who was he looking for? He was in the middle of the city traffic... Anyhow he opened his brown bag and took what seemed like a full 45-second swig. I couldn't even drink water like that, but apparently this guy's first 5 hours at work (it was 2pm) were pretty stressful. Then he lit a cigarette, took another sip, and looked contentedly out at the river. The traffic finally moved, so I drove away, having shared this weird secret moment with some guy I'll never meet. I felt all conflicted, because on one hand I felt bad for him being an alcoholic, but at the same time he seemed so free and peaceful. I couldn't stop smilig, it literally made me happy to be alive and to be in Lowell. There's nothing like a third-tier city to get the voyeuristic juices flowing.