Tag Archives: things i hate

come here/go away to wrap up 2007

{31 December 2007}

so there were a lot of half-finished posts that fell by the wayside, and treading water backwards is not worth the effort. so we’ll summarized the busy past couple of weeks with an installment of come here/go away and then move on to thoughts of 2008.

come here: dr. atomic. H and i caught this at the lyric the week before christmas. i have almost no experience with opera, so the whole process was impressive – the grandiose opera house, the scale on which everything is done. however, sitting still for a three hour anything is not really my specialty, and i found myself getting antsy during the first act (okay, i get it: it’s the night before you test the first a-bomb and you don’t know if you’ve invented something that will ignited the atmosphere and kill us all. an intriguing question but not really three hours’ worth of plot, and i’ve seen the same material treated much better by the excellent Carson Kreitzer). that is, until i reminded myself that plot isn’t the point of opera. the audience is meant to sit back, listen to the music, look at the big pretty stage pictures and just be. as a sometimes-play-goer, full-time-play-maker, i’m used to being very actively engaged in a production. it took me a while to realize that i needed to actually disengage a bit in order to fully appreciate the experience, but once i did, it was lovely. still, it’s sad that my total lack of musical talent/education means that there were probably many levels on which i failed to fully appreciate the work. it did look pretty, tho.

go away: aimee mann holiday spectacular. it pains me to have to give aimee mann a “go away” because i totally dig her, and her band sounded really great live. a “holiday spectacular” however, is not a concert. there was too much standup riffing with guests who are probably people i’d know if i had cable or ever watched tv but who really weren’t that funny, and guest spots for off-beat musician friends who were quirky but totally NOT AIMEE MANN. also: aimee mann fans are OLD. and suburban. when did aimee mann stop being hip? maybe i was just feeling curmudgeonly that night. still, the ticket was free, courtesy of my roommate who works at the concert house, so i should really shut up and stop complaining now.

come here: sweeney todd. i’m pretty emphatically not into musical theatre and so i didn’t know sweeny todd particularly well. the sondheim purists i saw the movie with objected to some of the changes (songs deleted/rearranged, mr. todd’s part transposed from a baritone to a tenor for the tender vocal cords of johnny depp), but i totally dug it. the production design was so excellent, tim burton just keeps getting better.

come here: christmas with the family. it snowed and snowed and snowed, and provided for skiing and snowshoeing in the meadow, and there was a cute baby (my brother’s wife’s sister’s baby, which we decided still makes him my nephew, for simplicity’s sake). i cooked christmas dinner (turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, salad, and chocolate chip oatmeal cookies – everything from scratch) without any major disasters (with the help of a rotating cadre of sous chefs, it must be noted, some of them more helpful than others).

go away: food poisoning i got from the denver airport. for two days, i wasn’t sure what my own name was. on the upside, by the time i recovered, i’d lost those pesky holiday pounds and started the whole eating-well-in-the-new-year with a fast. food poisoning and breakups are the most effective weight-loss tools i know.

come here: visits with old friends. had the nicest visit with A’s parents when i was in boise last week, the odd circumstances of our relationship notwithstanding. i hadn’t heard news of any of his siblings in more than a year, so catching up with the doings of the family was nice, and they are such gracious, lovely people that we navigated around the obvious social land mines without trouble. why do i bother to keep up with my former in-laws? i’m honestly not sure. i don’t do it out of a desire to maintain any sort of connection between me and my ex. if anything, it’s because in the past year i’ve learned to appreciate the myriad of forms that interpersonal relationships can inhabit, the blurred distinction between family and friends. there’s no substitute for having good people in my life, and cutting people off out of a sense of injured pride brings a hollow sort of satisfaction.

when i got back home a number of college friends passed through the windy city, including the lovely wabes and entourage, also p & j, and db. (ha! nicknames and initials for everyone!). catching up was good.

come here: good jobs & engagements & baby news. lots of friends with news this holiday season. it’s all happening to the right people and i couldn’t be happier for all of them.

go away: cold cold cold! as i write this, the windchill is -6. this is the cold when homeless people freeze and poor people can’t heat drafty apartments. it’s no good. also, where do the wild bunny rabbits of chicago go when it gets this cold? wikipedia informed us that rabbits don’t really hibernate but they sort of hibernate, but it didn’t really answer the question, where do they go in the winter?

come here: chicago smoking ban! hooray! as of jan 1, the smoking ban finally goes into effect for bars. i intend to invest more time holding up a barstool at my local now that i can do it without stinking like an ashtray. i should be more sympathetic to the smokers shivering in their boots out in front of the bar, trying to hold a cigarette in mitten-clad fingers, but i’m really not. now’s the time to quit! then you have more money for the other vices! our own cold turkey wonder woman inspires many.

come here: the ginger people’s ginger chews. my tongue is on fire and i’ve eaten about half the bag while writing this. mmm, ginger candy.

come here/go away: november installment

{02 November 2007}

come here, puns on fondue. daily candy was pimping the fondude today. i’m willing to forgive daily candy all its “math-is-hard Barbie” take on today’s modern gal, just for today, just for this. (fondue? i say, fon-don’t!)*

go away, co-worker who left a hammer on top of a ladder. i came back to what i had been doing on stage, moved the ladder, and subsequently took a hammer to the forehead. a minor goose egg over my left eyebrow is all i really have to show for it, so no serious harm done, but it did hurt. first rule is, don’t leave tools on ladders. second rule is, look for tools on top of ladders before you move them.

come here, halloween, oh favorite-holiday-of-mine. our party was low-key, being a wednesday night and all, but we made an effort toward costumes, and carved pumpkins, and watched scary movies, and lit the apartment with orange and black candles. and little kids still trick-or-treat on my street, though accompanied by packs of watchful parents. remember the days of tramping around the neighborhood armed with a pillowcase? you had to look out for the bully hiding behind the monster mask who’d snatch your candy and run if he had the chance, and mom always admonished you for eating the candy before she’d checked it for razorblades or other such horrors, but we were utterly free on halloween night. monsters and fairy princesses and superheros and tinfoil robots ruled the night. it seems like childhood has grown so safe.

go away, shoulder injury. my second class back to aikido after the marathon, and i tore my shoulder up. i’m waiting for it to heal…and waiting….and it’s just not. sore muscles, i can take. but injuries that aren’t better two weeks after they occur just make me feel, well, old.

come here, handy Select A Candidate Quiz. according to this tool, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Chris Dobb are in a dead heat for my vote. i am least compatible with McCain.

come here, sunday brunch with pela. over the summer and fall, we have refined the sunday tradition: i wake earlish to go on a long run, then we meet for a late morning meal at one of the 43 good brunch places in our hood (no driving/public transit is key; somewhere we can both walk/bike to). eating good food after a long run is one of life’s great pleasures; with friends, even better. i inhale my breakfast and have been known to eye the leftovers on pela’s plate. we gossip about the men in my life, and her life, and about work and so forth. today we were at fireside, which ingratiated itself with me immediately by bringing coffee and a plate of chocolate muffins to the table before we’d even read our menus. never mind the standard restaurant breadbasket…a free plate of chocolate muffins? yes please.

go away, shin splints. the plan for late fall/winter was to back down to maintenance running – 5 miles three days a week or so, plus ultimate on the weekends (until it gets too cold to handle the frisbee), just to keep some general cardio endurance while i focus mainly on aikido, and then start a training plan for the Race to Robie Creek in the new year. but the shin splints (for which i think ultimate is the culprit) are not getting better any faster than the shoulder injury. as far as i know, there’s no way to tough out shin splints: they want rest. non-running rest. there may have to be an actual vacation from running…like, where i get to know the machines at the gym again. ugg. i think i need to learn how to swim. i mean, if i fall out of a boat, i won’t drown, but i need to learn how to *really* swim. for exercise, not just splashing about. are there classes for people like me?

*it is unclear to whom this pun should originally be attributed to. no one wants to take credit for it. but it still makes me giggle when p says it.

{30 August 2007}

this post was supposed to be about what a crappy day i had today – i left my coffee on the table and remembered too late to go back, then my ipod died, i got a flat tire on the way to work, had to spend $9 to park downtown for a 5-minute dentist appointment. on the way north i hit horrific traffic and was late for my staff meeting at bmg, the parking meter was broken and ate all my quarters, there was no parking on my street when i got home. my new invisaline appliance made my teeth hurt.* i could go on.

then things were put in perspective for me when a friend of mine learned that her father passed away earlier today. it wasn’t sudden or unexpected, but i don’t think that prepares anyone, really, for losing a parent. i’m fortunate not to really know what it must feel like, i can only try to imagine.

bad days happen. but family is the thing that gets you thru those bad days, and i’m taking this moment to be grateful for mine, in all its changing forms.

*altho my 16-year old braces-clad self can’t believe this, i’m actually voluntarily submitting to have my lower teeth straightened (which, in the post-braces years, have drifted a bit crooked again). at least braces have gotten a lot better since the 80’s. no hideous metal brackets or anything, now it’s just a clear plastic mold i wear over my teeth.

catch up installment of come here, go away

{03 August 2007}

1. come here, vacation in idaho
the schedule was thus: wake up with the sun, 7 or whenever. go for a run on forest trails or logging roads. see some deer or other wildlife. come back, shower, breakfast. spend the morning reading or doing chores around the cabin, or sitting on the back porch with my ibook and wireless internet. forest, meet internet. internet, meet forest. maybe nap. late lunch, then bike into town. swim in the lake, then go to the grocery store and plan the evening’s meal. cook dinner with family and friends. spend the evening throwing a frisbee on the golf course, walking the dog in the meadow, watching movies, playing speed scrabble with my brother and sister-in-law.

2. go away, coming back from idaho
my boss is off getting married so that means that i get to be the boss for a while. it turns out his work suits me. what doesn’t suit me is doing his job and mine. where’d my summer go?

3. come here, veronica mars
season one has hijacked all of the time i would have otherwise spent reading books/sleeping in the past couple of weeks. curse lau for loaning me the complete first season! i finished it last night, but it turns out she sent me home with season two, also, so i’m not out of the woods yet. the fact that i know the series was abruptly canceled at the end of season three, however, makes me sad even as i invest in the first season. WB dramas, i love you.

4. come here, pandora
how did i not know about www.pandora.com until now? i’d vaguely heard of it before, but never really bothered to try it out till this week. i heart it.

5. come here, ultimate frisbee
i have a new love. take that, track workout! i’ve begun counting ultimate frisbee as speedwork for marathon training. we play saturday mornings, which means that i have to do my long run alone on sundays, but i don’t care.

6. go away, stinky hot weather.
i get home from running at 7am and i literally can’t stop sweating for the first 15 minutes or so. my body has become a sieve.

7. come here, 400 mile merit badge!
last week i ran my 400th mile since marathon training started. this is peak mileage month; if all goes well and i stay healthy/uninjured, i should hit 500 by the 25th or so.

8. go away, repetitive stress injuries
tendonitis and soft tissue strains and stress fractures are circling one another warily, growling low in their throats. on the upside, i got to see an x-ray of my foot (and no stress fracture after all!). there’s something fascinating about seeing a picture of one’s own bones. like, that isn’t just a black and white picture of foot bones on the screen, a theoretical image of what feet look like, those are mine. that’s me.

9. come here, awesome car-free weekend:
date with a cute boy on friday (i beat him at darts! turns out drinking beer actually IMPROVES my aim). ultimate frisbee on saturday followed by a double at ye olde corporate theatre gig. pick up organic veggie farm share with the first sweet corn of the season. sunday morning an easy 10-miler, followed by brunch at Over Easy with an old college friend. afternoon margaritas and chips and salsa with A and J, then 500 clowns‘ 365 project. finished the evening watching poi fire dancing at foster street beach – take out sushi and smuggled-in PBRs and crazy hippy drum circle, while the full moon rose over the still black lake. kept the car parked and rode my bike all over all weekend, and as a karmic reward, enjoyed excellent public transit timing every time i looked for a bus/train.

10. come here, popularity dialer
.

on my answering machine today

{27 January 2007}

bill collectors have reached a new low, it seems. i got home today to a message on my machine that went, “hello my full name. this is generic woman’s name from generic corporate-sounding firm. could you please pass a message to your neighbor, first and last name. tell him to please call me back at 877-555-5555 about an important matter…”

jeez. can they do that? can they actually harass someone’s neighbor to try and shame them into paying their bills? now, i’m all for paying one’s bills and not spending more than one earns and good fiscal responsibility like that, but i also know first hand that one can get screwed through no fault of one’s own (poorly-managed health insurance plans, for example, cough cough) and have bill collectors calling at all hours while you’re waiting for some pea-brained administrator to straighten out their mistake. so i’m not passing judgement on my neighbor (and besides, i have no idea who this person is anyway). and yeah, technically the message said nothing about it being a bill collector, but really, there’s only one reason why pleasant-sounding women call from anonymous-sounded firms and leave 877 callback numbers. talk about invasion of privacy. if she calls again i might take up this fight just out of spite.

learning to love the mustard

{23 January 2007}

in the past year, i’ve been surprised several times to discover that i suddenly like something that i have always, always disliked. things that come to mind are:

mustard
the color orange
hard-boiled eggs
turtleneck sweaters

i have always been a mustard hater. i think turtleneck sweaters make people look like their heads are about to be swallowed by a wooly snake which has already consumed the their arms, chest and neck. the color orange was downright gross, and don’t even get me started on hard-boiled eggs and the way that they smell, not to mention that nasty green-ish black rim that forms along the border between the yolk and the white if you overcook them.

it’s interesting to realize that while we are defined by our tastes, we are also, then, confined by those tastes. if i’m not a mustard hater, then who am i? my sandwich identity has gone all topsy-turvey.

the post in which i finally stop writing about myself for a wee moment

{15 January 2007}

q. so what’s really bugging you today?

a. oh, so glad you asked. at the moment, it’s that dunkin’ dougnuts commercial* where all the zombie-looking people sing about how confusing it is to order espresso (digging, in particular, at starbuck’s admittedly inconsistent tall-grande-venti sizing system). the chorus goes, “is it french or is it italian? perhaps fratalian.” followed by a voiceover: “lattes from dunkin doughnuts. you order them in english, not fratalian.” is it possible that they actually missed the irony in that latte is not, in fact, an english word? i hate this kind of rah-rah-average-joe-ness that smacks of cultural xenophobia. we appropriate yummy foreign foods, but god forbid that we have to wrap our mouths around a unfamiliar word in order to do it. everywhere else in the world, educated people learn to speak two, three or more languages. what gives americans the perogative to bask in our own cultural ignorance? it’d be one thing if we were some little isolationist nation. but the US goes lumbering around the world imposing our own notions of right and wrong on other cultures right and left.

you know who else has been up to this same sort of cultural newspeak? Iran. we snickered last summer at the news blurb that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had required that more than 2000 foreign-appropriation words be replaced with modified farsi words. pizzas, for example, are now known as “elastic loaves” (washington post article

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