Meme from January's Real Simple Mag

1. What did you want to be when you were little?

• Age 3: baseball player at Wrigley, grocery store clerk, and wife of Han Solo
• Age 6: restaurant owner
• Age 7: bank executive
  
• Age 8: vet
  
• Age 9: nurse
• Age 12: actress
• Age 13: interior designer
• Age 14: otolaryngologist
• Age 15: computer programmer (BASIC rocked!)
  
• Age 16: either one of the corps in a dance company or a coroner (it was a strange year)
• Age 17: psychiatrist

2. What is the one thing you'll never understand? Texas
3. What surprises you most about your adult life? that I still have times when I feel much like an adolescent
4. What's your idea of a perfect meal? Oh, I'm kind of high maintenance on this one. I like the 5 star restaurant type of service, quality, and ambiance. It would be a 7 course meal, each course bringing me close to ecstasy with every bite. Yeah, that and fantastic wine!
5. What's the craziest fashion trend you've ever worn? Sadly, I've never gone after the trends, except for Grunge, which I still wish would come back. I guess the craziest would be um having the winged hairstyle look back in the 80s. That was bad.
6. What amount of money would make you feel you were set for life? I probably would never feel set for life. I'd always live like I was middle class and would feel like I could fall back into subsidized housing, cheap beer and spaghetti Os at any minute (though I was actually very happy during that time period of my life).
7. If you could change careers now without any consequences or financial loss, what would you switch to? a sound editor. I think that would be ultimately the coolest job in the world. I'd be a singer in a band at night, though, or a back up do wop girl.
8. Bath or shower? I've always been a shower girl, but there was a period of time when I lived in this apartment with a fantastic, deep, clawfoot tub. I really got into baths at that point, candles, aromatherapy, and everything. Now I shower--long, scalding hot showers at midnight with different shower gels I made myself at Bath Junkie--and it is the highlight of my long day!
9. Movie you most recently watched? At the theater: The Departed At home: All the King's Men, though I'm not sure it counts because I fell asleep during it. I can't watch movies at home anymore. Too tired. Plus, the southern accents in that movie were horrendous. HORRENDOUS!
10. The big decision I'm currently wrestling with is...? ugh. I don't want to think about it.

Itchy and Scratchy

Sadly, not the sadist cat and mouse team but the real kind of itchy--I went for a long hike yesterday and picked up some chiggers or something. Yikes. Ended it with a Whole Foods and Jamba Juice run (Yes, this body has become a temple again). But damnit, I itch!

Watched most of the Oscars. I have to say that the commercials during the Oscars completely bitchslap the Superbowl's. The JC Penny's ad with the movie clips done real life style was awesome. And, though I'm not sure why exactly, the mastercard ad with the elephant and monkey caring for their ill caretaker was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I think I must be exhausted. Much thanks to G and V for the invite, but by the time I got home from hiking and grocery shopping, I just wanted to crash on my couch.

Let's see, what else? Um, Saturday I went to a Chinese New Year party (or the new PC term Lunar New Year). It was about 200 people big with fantastic food (note to vegetarians: she's a great caterer). I spent most of the time drinking too much wine and putting pig puppets together with the kids. Where else would I be?

MUST STOP ITCHING!

Only in Texas

Today I attended my first Go Texan Day Shabbat. No, your eyes don't deceive you. There were hats and fiddles and bandannas sitting right alongside the challah and kiddush cup. This was "Tot Shabbat, " for the kids at the Temple (my friend's child attends school here). The tots danced around to strange country songs about men washing their faces with a frying pan.

It was strange to hear The Eyes of Texas and Deep in the Heart of Texas intermixed with Shalom Aleichem and Baruch Kel Elyon. It was almost alarming.

Why are Texans so weird?

You've got mail

So previously I've gotten strange things in my mailbox at work: a comic book about soil, a My First Haggadah coloring book, 7 staplers, a golden calf cookie cutter, mardi gras beads, a shell pasted on a card that says, "A pearl is a healed wound. Praise the Lord" on it but the pearl has been ripped off, a bag of rocks, and more.

The CP, who has laughed at and with me over this montage of stuff, trying to help me decipher the clues to hopefully unleash a secret message (in the hopes that the person is just a brilliant prankster and not a psychopath). He even now has Mooby, the golden calf cookie cutter, hanging from the cross in his office.

He won the toss, though, yesterday when he received mail of his own--a letter with taped words on it, ransom note style. The envelope is addressed to "Doggy Lovers Unite" with some Houston address taped underneath and has our work address taped to the return address corner of the envelope. There is no postage, so aptly, it was returned to us in the mail. CP opened the envelope to reveal clippings (photocopied from a newspaper): an ad for Joe the plumber, an ad in Spanish for telephone service, an ad for a new laptop, and an ad that says, "Pork the one you love" with a man and a woman caressing over a bbq grill.

He hands this to me saying, "I win," and I carry it, without thinking, into a meeting that I am trying to wrap up. I almost peed my pants. WTF?

Who knew?

So this weekend I went to a Latin competition (that's the Classical language) as an adult leader, and I learned a few good things about our favorite bar, Catbirds. I was talking to Colin, the man with the great upper body and no brains that every one of the female adults was salivating over, and apparently, he has passed out on the floor of Catbirds (or outside of Catbirds) once or twice in his life (it must be a trend). He claims it as a "jazz bar."

Now from my experience a jazz bar usually contains...um...JAZZ MUSIC and even more importantly, jazz musicians. To Catbirds' credit, they were playing cds of Ella Fitzgerald the last time I was there, but the bartender/dj didn't even know who she was. Plus, Ella was sadly followed by Keith Urban or some other boy band type cum country singer out there.

This argument fell on deaf ears yesterday, however, as Colin moved on from the jazz bar aspect to Catbirds' history. Apparently, if you look around and upish in the place (not something I ever think of doing in Catbirds) there are little curious windows all around. On some of these windows are etched little sperm, swimming their hearts out to the "live jazz," no doubt. I don't recall seeing these windows, but that doesn't matter to Colin who continues to discuss them. Apparently before Catbirds was the jazz mecca of the world, it was a head shop, and before that, it was some porno/peepshow/bookstore thingy, the windows being the viewing vehicle into peepshow paradise.

Ok, what I can't understand, and what I couldn't get accurately described to me by Colin, was exactly how people viewed a peepshow through the windows. Do they stand on ladders? Do they toss coins through the window after some big person on a ladder stands in front of it to block the view? How does this work? And where would they put the kleenex? There's always a table and a trash can for kleenex (don't ask me how I know this). Do they just have incredible balance? These questions and more have, strangely enough, haunted me for a few hours, and I can't figure it out. I'm tempted to go back to Catbirds to get a better visual on the situation, but a third visit might suck me into its frightening world.

And the question I couldn't answer but wish I could: Colin asked, "Well, if you hate it so much, why do you go?" Ok, answer #1--um, I only went three times. Answer #2--it was the lychee fruit at Mo Mongs (and that's the thing, really, I could blame the bartender at Mo Mong's for giving me martinis that were too strong, but Glinda always drinks wine, so that blows that theory). Answer #3--The first time we went was to meet up with a friend from HCC. The 2nd time was because we were so blitzed the first time that we didn't have an accurate picture of the place (damn that Lithuanian wine), and the 3rd time, I just can't justify. Maybe it was Darth pulling us into the dark side.

I don't know, but at least I'm not maintaining contact with the people who reside there. G, on the other hand...

numerblogogy

Since Philly, I've been pretty busy. And since I'm so excited that I finally broke the 600 barrier on my countdown to leaving Pewston, here's the week in numbers:

• 5 is the number of hours it took to fly back from Philly
• 250 is the approximate number of people who danced at the square dance event at my workplace. Who knew there were so many freaks out there?
• 15 is the number of people at work who asked me how much rest I got at the conference? Rest? There's no rest for people who are going the distance!
• $29 is the amount I paid for some $210 Cole Haan shoes on sale, and $39 is the sale price for a $199 amazingly sexy top I bought for the Chinese New Year
• 5 is the number of new underwear I bought from Victoria Secret--yes, I know that I boycotted them 12 years ago in college because the salesbitch took one look at me and with a sneer said, "Um, I doubt we have your size here. We don't sell training bras." Yeah, well, now since last year was the year of my boobs, I've had 365 days to come to terms with mine, and I say, BITE ME, SALESBITCH, or I'll sick Don Eduardo on your ass! Of course, I still didn't buy a bra there, but then again, I try not to wear them much anyway.
  
• 10 is the number of consecutive minutes I listened in last week's staff meeting, which is a record for me.
• 3 is the number of ridiculous, mindless busywork projects I have to do before tomorrow's staff meeting.
• 2 is the number of martinis (or glasses of wine) it takes to make Glinda and me forget our boycott on Catbirds.
• 5 is the number of people who thought G and I were a couple.
• 6 is the collective number of text messages she and I sent to her brother, Cody. He's scared of me now, thanks to her.
• 19 is the number of Star Wars references made at Catbirds that night between Nerfherder and Darth
• 11 is the number of new friends Glinda made at Catbirds(and let me tell you--once she pulls out her first ciggy, she's on a mission to add as many phone numbers to her cell address book as possible. Among the new friends are Juicy, who sadly was hit by a car that night but is recovering; a guy who looks like a muppet but I didn't catch his name; Julian child and Buckwheat, his friend; a cartoonist librarian whom G counseled for awhile; Blondie, a girl who told me that her fake boobs are smaller than my real ones (I find that odd); two guys from Pasadena who got into a fight with another guy who forgot more English as he drank vodka straight; a woman I dub Mary Katherine Gallagher bc I thought that at any moment she might sniff her armpits in ecstasy; and some punky, gothy, roller derbyish chick who kept hanging on G all night toward the end.
  
• 21 is the age of Julian, from Scotland, who apparently got G's number and called her at 4am to get my number. creepy kid kept pulling my chair closer to his, every time I got up to get a drink, as if I wouldn't notice that it was practically on his crotch. Where are the normal guys, and more importantly, where are the normal 30 something guys?
• [ok, that much gets us through Catbirds] 40 is the number of kids smiling after they helped serve Valentine's dinner to people on Friday night. That was a blast.
• 2 is the number of funerals I've attended this week
• 6 is the hours of food poisoning endured this week.
• 1 is the number of hours I stayed awake during Hollywoodland on my first "date" with Edgy since the split. He fell asleep, too, though, so I guess the feeling was mutual. That bodes well, doesn't it? Granted, I was just coming off of the aforementioned food poisoning bender.
  
• 21 is the number of miles I've run/walked this week to destress.
• 4 is the number of apartments I've looked at before breaking down and calling Crazy Jackie.
• 3, the number of days left before I convince G to go out to dinner with me again ;-)

Computer Woes

My computer is dying, and it's time for a replacement, but this is the reason I haven't been posting. It takes way too much time to simply log onto the internet, and I don't have time to post remotely from anywhere else.

I went tha distance

Yeah, I made it back from Philly. Highlights below:

• Caught cab from airport. Cabbie has Reggae blaring, which provided a great soundtrack for the drive into town.
  
• Hotel is phenomenal--heart of downtown; view from the window is of that art deco building which is Philadelphia, the masonic temple where Washington was deflowered (or at least I assume he was), and city hall where I could see William Penn's face in distinct detail.
• Lunch (and some of the best fries EVER) at Marathon Grill
• Historic wandering--liberty bell, Independence Hall (great tour guide), Elfreth's Alley, Penn's Landing, Quaker meeting house, etc.
• Getting flashed at the Betsy Ross House--what kind of wacko pulls his little William Penn out at the Betsy Ross House?
• insidious accents--My coworker and I were talking like "we was from Philly" by day 3
• People from PA--you gotta love 'em. They are straightforward, no nonsense, hardworking, NORMAL people. No fake hair. No fake lips. No fake boobs. Hats worn because it's cold not to look cute. I need to move.
  
• Fitness center with individual flat screen tvs on each piece of equipment
• cheesesteaks!
• New veggies--I ate beets and parsnips. Parsnips suck.
• Amish food!
• Awesome food at Morimoto's and a chocolate martini with wasabi. Once you go wasabi and chocolate, you'll never be able to go back. I'm ruined.
  
• Posing by Rocky's statue and running in freaking freeeeeezing weather up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (along with many other folks, including an elderly man who gets his own highlight below)
• Elderly man runs up the steps and stops at the top for what seemed like hours with hands raised in fists. As he walks inside, we all clap, and he says, "Yeah, I work out tree times a week at the East Street Y. I don do da treadmill or nuttin', just da eliptical but it works, ya know? Look at me? I go da distance." [shake of fists in triumph]
• Dunkin Donuts--mmmm dunkin donuts

Prax was able to meet me for dinner, and it was nice to catch up and get a pickle magnet for Glinda and me.

Oh, the conference? More on that later. It gets its own post.