the wrong side of the bed

i half wrote a really long post on affection earlier, but didn't get a chance to finish it. i have a lot to say on the subject. i am just too sleepy to do it right now. and i need to get plenty of sleep to keep down on the panic attacks (none today!). i'm sorry i don't have more to say.

i do, however, want to give mad props to michelle for her help with my laundry project. she is, in fact, finishing it for me! i need to buy her a pony or something.

the first person i ever dated i met just before i turned 20* (i'm a late bloomer, ya caught me!). he won me over with a sly trick known as "the mix tape." it is still one of my favorite tapes, and i like a lot of the bands i do because of him and it. the song that "sealed the deal" (as the kids say) was "Affection" by Jonathan Richman.

I just found the track listing... let me reproduce it here:

Emily: John Cale
Lovers from the Moon: Magnetic Fields
Little Atoms: Elvis Costello
Soul Soldier: Throwing Muses
A Complete History of Sexual Jealosy (Parts 17-24): Momus
Tempter: Stereolab
Don't Ask Why: My Bloody Valentine
Itchy Chin: Heavenly
Love Ruins Everything: Lloyd Cole
Blood Bank Man: Ed's Redeeming Qualities
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud: Julian Cope
Drivin' on 9: Breeders
Paradiso: Chameleons
Dying to Hear from You: Miles Dethmuffen
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? Bob Dylan
Geek the Girl: Lisa Germano
Way Down Now: World Party
Outta Me, Onto You: Ani DiFranco
Bonnie and Clyde: Mick Harvey & Anita Lane
Hardly Wait: PJ Harvey
Affection: Jonathan Richman
Digging My Feet in the Ground: Smack Dab
The Petticoat Waltz: Stephanie Sayers
See Emily Play: David Bowie

and, um, he ended it with a poem he wrote for me. yikes! but, really, like i said before, it was all about "Affection".


* he was 28. the same age i am now.

i spent the afternoon studying with a friend. towards the end, things just devolved into me telling stories from my childhood. when i told her that kids called me a fat cow (or similar epithet) every day (seriously) in elementary school, she didn't want to believe me. when i told her that in high school i hid behind a mane of long brown hair and only wore dark, solid colors so as not to attract attention, she didn't want to believe me. not kidding. she said she always assumed that i was really cool in high school. what? i play role-playing games and collect comic books as an adult! how could i possibly have been cool as a kid? i had to pull out the big guns to convince her. it wasn't pretty. but, she finally believes that i have always been a tremendous loser. um, great!

jeremy's cautionary tale has done little to caution me.* so some woman got fired somewhere because of her blog? that will NEVER happen to me! i'm invincible! mwah hah hah ha! okay, i exaggerate. it is not as if i grabbed the flashing star in mario bros. and can now run through mushroom people without dying (um, what? i spent my youth in stupid ways), but i do sometimes wonder how come i have never been reprimanded by the department for being so odd. i mean, i once made all of the students get in a circle around one kid who came in late and sing "the farmer in the dell". he was obviously the cheese, you know. i curse up a storm in front of my students and laugh loudly enough in my office to make dissertators several rooms down slam their doors. when will this kind of behavior come back to haunt me? my friend from high school, dorotha adams, was fired from a hostessing job because people complained that she was too odd. dorotha adams was tall, pretty, personable, born-again, and republican in a place where those things matter very much. if she could get fired for being weird, how am i still employed?

* i reccently told someone that i was thinking of starting an anonymous blog in which everyday i would just add the name of a person that i hate. i am pretty hate-filled, so it didn't seem like it would be a hardship to come up with names. i didn't need advice from jeremy to decide not to do this. i usually think that my emotional maturity level is somewhere around 13, but maybe i am all of 20 years old!

i just spoke to my parents on the phone. my mom was funny and engaging (if somewhat morbid) as is her style, and my dad was my dad. he can be funny sometimes, but mostly he is somewhat gruff and asshole-ish. tonight, he cracked me up twice. this is how our conversation went:

"what were you talking with your mother about? she sounded excited."
"i was telling her about my plan to wash a bunch of laundry and then donate a bunch of my clothes somewhere."
"well, i guess it is better than moving it come august."
"yeah, and i have a ridiculous amount of clothing."
"hm. plus you'll do anything to avoid studying for the prelim, if i know you."
"yeah, dad, ya got me."
"hm. we've been talking for nine minutes. are you trying to use up all mom's minutes? it's free for you, right?"
"well, since we both have the same wireless company, i got a special deal so that it won't count against my minutes. but it's after nine. don't you have free minutes anyway?"
"hm. so, i guess it isn't costing us. i'm gonna go. do you still need to talk to your mother?"
"yeah, dad. thanks."

my dad, ladies and gentleman. a charming, lovable man.

* this is a line from the best song ever about someone loving her dad. it is by meredith louise miller. i would link it, but i can't find one. the album is pretty obscure.

someone i don't know actually emailed me suggesting i turn on comments. i'm gonna give it a try, at least for a little while. but, if i get scared, off they go! don't even try to argue with me.

changing my blog today. sick of how it looks.

i just had a panic attack so bad that i got lost three blocks from my home. how did that even happen? i somehow ended up headed in the opposite direction of my house. it doesn't even make sense how i got there. a good block and a half of my trip are complete mysteries to me. i'm going to get into an accident one of these days.

i didn't feel this attack coming at all. no anxiety at all before it happened. blah.

fifth grade* was rough. i think of all my years in school, it may have been the hardest, though i didn't do well in kindergarten or any of the years from 4th to 9th. there was a small, happy time when i had two pretty down-to-earth friends in 1st and 2nd grade, but then problems in the oil biz sent people packing away from houston and i lost my friends to oklahoma and alaska. fourth grade was particularly rough on me, and i was shell-shocked in fifth grade. i could barely look a person in the eye for fear that any attention i drew to myself might result in cruelty.

fifth grade saw the end of the cabbage patch craze. it was also a time of giant bangs. my mother, sister, and i were not terribly gifted with curling irons, so my bangs were rather limp (i might not have been using enough Aqua Net, either). my mom had a brilliant time saving idea. she had the front of my hair permed, but not the back, so that it would (hopefully) look like i had spent hours curling my hair every morning. instead, i looked much like the cabbage patch dolls that we fifth graders were trying to rid ourselves of in an effort to be more grown up. the hair, coupled with my chubbiness and dimples, earned me an obvious nickname.

most of the popular girls were quite mean, but one or two were actually sort of sweet. karen silverberg was nice to me, when i actually bothered to interact with her. later in high school, i would tease her that in fifth grade i would muse that her parents must have owned stock in glitter because all of her assignments (if you recall, fith grade was all about dioramas and posters) looked like vegas showgirls. karen was glittery, sweet, nice, and popular. i scowled a lot and looked like last year's plaything. through some bizarre twist of fate, karen and i had matching purses (i never had anything that the cool kids had). the boys in my class used to tease the girls by grabbing their purses and threatening to look through them. they never did this to me because, thankfully, i was off their radar by this time (had they still noticed me, it would have been to throw sand in my eyes i'm sure). one day, john grabbed my bag thinking it was karen's. "karen, i have your purse." he said, "karen, i'm gonna look in it!" when she said that she had her purse and i told him it was mine, he dropped it, expressionless, and walked away. i was completely a non-entity. i think i cried.

this morning, i was walking with carey and lisa. we were talking about a friend of ours who is out of the country right now. some of my friends had been teasing her before she left about all of the hot, accented boys she was going to get to make out with, "oh, don't get me wrong," she said, "i fully intend to make out with a lot of cute boys!" while present, i was not one of the people encouraging this behavior. these friends of mine are so much girly-er than i am. when carey mentioned that our friend does indeed have a date coming up with one of these exotic beauties, i said, "i don't understand you guys. i just don't understand how you do it! but, then again, i don't even know how to flirt..."
"no, it's like those boys in elementary school who used to pull your pigtails..."
"but, boys didn't do that to me! they just told me i was a fat cow! that was not some cryptic sign of affection, it was just plain mean."
"you misunderstand me, dorotha. you are the boy. that's how you flirt. pulling pigtails."
"i guess you are right. it's not a great strategy, let me tell you."
"but it is! you don't want a sweet boy anyway."
"no, i guess i don't."

* why are there only titles like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade? when will someone write The Prelim Ate my Gym Shorts or The Fourth Year of Grad School Sucked Out my Will to Live?

the only person i have spoken to today is My 1950's Dad. i needed caffeine desperately, saw him in his office, and begged some change from him for the vending machine. end of story. i have had 3 email exchanges with living people and two or three with an automated response program. i feel like, all things considered, i'm doing pretty well. sometimes i get quite depressed when i don't interact with people. for a while last fall i would even get depressed during lulls in conversation. talking to people helps me shift focus away from myself. reba thinks i need a pet, but i tend to think that harboring a secret obsession with someone would also serve as a needed distraction from my own head. who should it be?

* these aren't my sentiments, but rather those of Morla, the giant tortoise from The Neverending Story. so don't go saying that i'm all angsty or something.

ah... no panic attacks yesterday, despite some serious moments of crazy (that involved spending $56 at Borders). but, check this horoscope:

Gemini
By Athena Starwoman
Vogue June 2004


It's time to kick back, relax, and not take yourself, others, or the world at large too seriously. Excess anxiety could make you the astrological equivalent of a panic merchant throughout June, and with Venus out of phase and pushing your negative-thinking buttons, you're suffering foul fallout that could deny you happiness. To ward off Venus's downbeat buzz, do everything in your power to alleviate stress and have fun.

this is probably the most accurate horoscope i have ever read! perhaps i should also consider what Lloyd Schumner Sr. of The Onion has to say as well:

You're about to go through a very sad time of the soul, but now that Ray Charles is dead, that's pretty much true for everybody.

you know, i get very little in the way of reader response to my blog. part of the problem is that i talk to the people who read my blog all the time, and blogging is almost an extenuation of those conversations, so there is no need to write me to say, "dorotha, i read your blog and blah, blah, blah.." so, imagine my delight at receiving the following email from an out-of-state reader!

i'm going to have to agree with you about that magic eraser... phwhoo! i found out about it from MathMan and MathMan found out about it from her mom who found out about it from her sister, etc.. how bout that packaging? it's so non-descript. you can't figure out where the magic is coming from. there's no ingredients listed, or anything. i guess they are just assuming word will travel about the magic and the product will speak for itself. well, they're right. i want to meet the genius magician behind it. "explain to us how you made the magic." and they will smile and say "not a chance, crazy!" and we'll laugh with each other and go ice-skating (or walk in park, the fantasy varies).

the funny thing is that it is true. i've seen maybe one commercial for the magic eraser. in it, it appears to be a regular sponge. at every store where i have looked, the magic eraser is nearly impossible to find (a tip: look up high). the packaging reveals nothing about how the product works. instead it tells you at what point to discard the eraser. mr. clean is not letting the cat out of the bag about this one, i guess.

i found out about the magic eraser from my sister. i called her one day while she happened to be cleaning the floor on hands and knees. she has a giant house with a lot of linoleum. it actually took her days to finish the job, but i'm sure it was worth it.

i just can't stop posting about marriage! it's like i can't get enough! bring me marriage! i demand it!!!!!

whew. okay, that's over. now, i can post a reasonable and well thought out post. you know, because i'm always so measured and even...

anyway, here's the thing: everyone is getting married. seriously. i guess it is all the rage or something. or, perhaps i have just reached a certain age where all my friends are going to begin to pair off with some sort of frightening determination. as i get older, it seems harder and harder to defend my anti-marriage position. in fact, there are reasons i would get married*, but none of them are for love alone.

my ex was not opposed to marriage when i met him. i don't remember the context of the conversation, but i remember that we discussed, in the abstract, the idea of matrimony fairly early on in the relationship. probably in the context of some argument about feminism or something. when i first met my ex, he was much further "to the right" than i am. interestingly, he has now moved such that we are almost exactly at the same point on the continuum. he says that it is because he was raised by very conservative parents and had a lot more thinking to do during college than i did, and i suppose it is true. in any case, it is nice that his beliefs have changed. we used to argue about things more than we do now (great! he thinks like me after the break up!), and, like me, he is now befuddled by people's determination to get married.

in the most shocking marriage announcement of late, one of my ex's friends from art school is getting hitched. this person is weirder than crispin glover! he lived in his studio** during art school and never quite seemed like he was talking to me when he supposedly was. my ex and i both would have guessed that this guy didn't even know what marriage meant. imagine saying some big word to a person who doesn't know it and having them just look at you with a vacant smile. that's what i would have expected from this guy when faced with the idea of marriage. maybe his partner asked him and he just said yes because he was actually thinking about flat planes of color. who knows what he was thinking? but, what are other people thinking?

* i would get married for health insurance, child custody, citizenship, and a couple of other financial reasons. but i would feel icky about it.

** when my ex started grad school for painting, the administration made a really big stink about not living in your studio. each grad student got a small cube with a locking door in which they could do their work. i can see how it might be tempting as a way to save money, but there was no kitchen or shower, and i would really want these things. the social science building would be a much better place to live. in my office, we have a microwave, a mini-fridge, an electric kettle, a couch, two chairs, and a table. somewhere on the second floor of the building is a shower. what is the difference between sociologists and painters that i was never warned (and warned and warned) not to live in my office? our building is a lot more tempting. on top of everything, there are less toxic paint fumes.

michelle is moving soon. liz and i went over to her house tonight to help her get it ready for an open house this weekend. i think that the highlight for me was introducing michelle and liz to the wonderful world of the mr. clean magic eraser. if you haven't used one of these, you absolutely need to. i'm not all about random product placement in my blog, but i will make an exception for this. the magic eraser is the perfect way to obsessively clean a linoleum floor or other slightly porous surface. not only will your floors be cleaner than you ever thought possible (without using dental tools), but the results are amazing enough to keep three grown women captivated for 20 minutes of cleaning the floor on hands and knees. before we started magic erasing, i would have said that the highlight was barely making it into Target before a funnel cloud threw sheds from the nearby Menard's into the street. the cleaning power of the magic eraser is more awesome than mighty tornadic activity.

i guess the low point of the evening had to be when, knowing a panic attack was building all evening, i finally had one while painting michelle's basement. in retrospect, it is sort of funny that i decided the best solution to this problem was to lay down on the floor in the basement. did i even manage to put the paint brush away? what did i say to liz when she looked over and found me sprawled on the floor? i should have pretended the fumes got to me.

can someone just tell me how many panic attacks i can expect in a given day? i'm so tired of this.

so, i have a new theme for the summer. a friend of mine and i are going to "think pink!" instead of being negative nellies. anyway, part of my pink thinking has led me to change my nail polish twice in three days. now skin is peeling off my fingers. i'm not sure if it is related, but it seems likely, doesn't it? i guess if grad school falls through, i can always be a lockpick.

all i do is complain. really. once i was walking home from school with ang and i had nothing to say, which is quite rare, and i realized it was because i was in a good mood and had nothing to bitch about. so, i complained about that. yeah. stoopid.

a was just talking to a friend of mine on the phone. she's not exactly satisfied with sociology right now. we talked about it for a spell, and she kept apologizing for wasting my time. it was sort of endearing. i mean, i complain about some facet sociology about 50% of the time i spend talking.

i guess i'd like to try an experiment where i am a bit less negative. do you think i can do it?

last week, at my parents' urgings, i finally got a cell phone. partly for safety reasons and partly for convenience. my mother worries about me up here in the cold north. if i have a cell phone i guess it means that i can call 911 that much more easily from the side of the road. some of her fears are valid. when i lived in austin, i had an endless supply of family members that i could call in an emergency. if my car broke down, i always called my sister first, no matter what. but, i have no family here. instead of that built in safety network i have friends and a cell phone. practically the same thing.

i didn't just get a cell phone in case my car breaks down or i am being followed home from school by an axe murderer. i also got it because last semester, no one could ever reach me. i was always at school or union meetings. it got to the point where my friends stopped calling me. cassidy told me that my nephew simon wouldn't call me anymore because i wouldn't be there (dagger in the heart. thanks, sis!). so now i have a cell phone so that all of my hordes of admirers can reach me. only, it just serves to make my life lonlier. i get few emails, few calls on my land line, and almost no calls at all on my cell.

i think i am going to hang a banner out my bedroom window that says "please be my friend!"

okay, maybe. but, actually we do. i'm frustrated and beaten down. i lack motivation. i don't want to be here but i don't know what else to do.

ugh. i just saw "super size me" and i am reeling. i know that if i were not a vegetarian, nothing would stop me from eating the shittiest food i could lay my hands on. i pretty much think the pinnacle of all cuisine is mac-n-cheese. and, if i recall correctly, i LOVE mcdonald's filet-o-fish sandwiches. when i was in 5th grade i was probably the most overweight that i have ever been and my favorite meal was two fish filet sandwiches, large fries, and a chocolate shake from mcdonald's. if i started eating fish again, lord knows i'd end up with only fried fish in my gut. gah!

anyway, i can't really give up fast food after seeing the movie, but only because i don't eat much of it. there just aren't a whole lot of vegetarian fast food options. but, i really ought to make an effort to cook my own food, don't you think? so, in addition to switching to brown rice and whole wheat pasta, i'm gonna try to eat at home more. and i'm going to wean myself off the caffeine. i think this will help with my anxiety problems, too.

life is so hard.

on my way home from the dental hygenist just now, i passed a white mini-van that had an odd coupling of window decals. calvin was micheviously peeing on a rainbow. is this the van of a gay man who is into golden showers? a straight guy who likes rainbow showers? someone who vehemently wants to declare to the world "piss on fags"? what does it mean? email me, please, if you know.

i was talking to my sister yesterday about a paper i wrote with a friend of mine and she mentioned that my brother might be having a rough time finding a job in new orleans (where he just moved). monkey boy isn't certified to teach in louisiana, so he was just going to try for jobs at private schools. anyway, she thought, i guess, since i NEVER found a job when i moved out to new haven with my ex, that i might have some kind of advice or sympathy to offer the boy. it has only been a week, but it can be a hard adjustment to make when you move somewhere for someone else.

when i called monkey boy, he told me that not only did he have an interview after one stupid week in town, but they offered him a job on the spot! i told monkey boy that he obviously lives a charmed life. he didn't like it when i said that.

on the way to meet my students for drinks the other day, i ran into bill*, a student from a previous semester. he was a sweet kid, slightly above average smarts, and very quiet in class. his section was pretty silly. one or two of the students definitely needed a lot of attention as often as they could get it. during one section, which took place during coming out week, bill said something, and later thought he had revealed that he is gay. it was sweet because no one, myself included, noticed his slip. he came up to me at the end of class, shaking like a leaf, and asked me if i thought the other students had noticed him saying anything funny. i had no idea what he meant, and had to drag it out of him. i told him that, especially given what the students in class had said about coming out week, that even if they had picked up on it, they probably wouldn't care. i also should have told him that the other students in class were too busy thinking about what witty thing they could say next to notice a shy, gay kid who said "we" instead of "they" when talking about gay high school kids. i felt especially terrible for bill because I had fully intended to tell my students that i am bisexual, but i had chickened out. when I told bill, i was shaking like a leaf. you’d think that at 28, something like that wouldn’t make me nervous, but i was worried that a student might react poorly and (horror of horrors) give me a bad course evaluation or be a disruptive ass in future classes. i was going to come out to my students in the first place because the whole idea of coming out week is so that people can have lots of support and i thought that it might be nice for some random 18 year old gay kid to know that he/she (ze?) wasn’t alone… i felt especially terrible for being such a wimp since this poor kid was obviously so torn up about it, so i made a point to tell the class the next week that what i had planned to do and how I had chickened out. of course, they couldn’t have cared less, but i hope it made that one student (maybe others?) feel better.

after that week of class, i always found myself smiling reassuringly at bill and asking him how he was doing. then i started worrying that i was some how outing him just by talking to him. in my own experiences in school, the gayer a teacher was, the more likely i was to be the teacher’s pet in that class.** well, with the exception of fourth grade. despite the fact that his name was really, really, really gay, i never guessed it. my mom actually told me about it later. but, the first teacher that all of us kids recognized as a lesbian, my 7th grade life sciences teacher ms. klein, had me doing all of those goofy tasks that the good kids do. the worst, and most damning in the eyes of my classmates, involved me actually touching ms. klein. i mean, it is one thing to be favored by your lesbian teacher, but it is another to touch her! it was the day that ms. klein brought in the knee joint of a cow that she bought from a butcher. blood was dripping down her sleeves and she called me up to the front of the room to pull them up for her. i couldn’t get the wide sleeves on her lab coat to roll up properly, so she asked me to stand there the whole time holding them up. i swear it was only later that same afternoon that some kid accused me of being a lesbian (it was either that or the fact that my friend amy and i were talking about Doctor Who). my 9th grade biology teacher was also a big ol' dyke and also constantly singled me out. ms. taylor not only always called on me in but also, during an in class assignment where we were supposed to pretend to breed with a classmate and predict our kids phenotype on a couple of traits she paired me with a girl! and made a big stink about it! great. in my high school, where some boys actually killed a gay man by beating him to death with sticks, this was so not a great thing for her to do.

of course, i fared a lot better than my friend jason. my favorite english teacher, mr. johnson, singled him out for attention, but went we beyond my lesbian teachers did. mr. johnson actually slept with my 15 year old friend. i didn’t know about it until i was in college, so for a long time i considered mr. johnson to be the best teacher i had ever had. he was always really nice to me, too, but i lucked out by being a girl.***

* all names, except for my own, are changed to protect identities...

** i should say here that i wasn't just the favorite of the gay teachers. any teacher with obvious mental health issues was sure to single me out. for example, i had a teacher who had to leave school for a while because he was missusing alcohol and anti-depressants. when i ran into him in a park with my friends, he gave me a big hug.

*** i really hate that mr. johnson did this because it seems to feed into a lot of stereotypes. i feel pretty certain that my straight art teachers also slept with students. they were both pretty creepy. mr. prescott was always drawing either barbarian women or my friend dorotha adams in his sketchbook. ick.

you will all be glad to know that i had my heart checked this morning to make sure that the heart murmur that i had as a child would no longer be causing a problem for me. the nurse practitioner said she could only barely hear it, and only if i was lying down. so, i should be okay for the dentist tomorrow and okay for the rest of my active lifestyle!

is it because i need to do laundry? no. today i am wearing a ridiculous outfit for no better reason than i felt a little silly this morning. i am wearing my boba fett t-shirt, a lavendar training bra* with floral print, superman underwear that look like boy's briefs, pants that i cut off at shin level, socks with green monkey heads, my chuck's, and pigtails. why? don't i get enough attention? i might as well start riding a unicycle to school or juggling flaming batons in public parks!

last night i asked angela and rebekah what i could do to make myself more lovable. rebekah suggested that i work on my jimmy durante impersonation. i have one, but it is sort of unintentional. it is actually an imitation of a "crispy critters" commercial from 1987 which features a cartoon character singing in the style of jimmy durante.

* not actually a training bra, but it might as well be. it is sort of a stretchy tube with some straps.

i told my mom that i have a blog and now she is looking for it. i'd really rather she didn't read my posts. i mean, i didn't go to the trouble of changing the names of my loved ones just so that i may remain employable in the future! no, i actually don't want mom reading this. so, if that is the case, why did i tell my mom an odd word combination that, if googled, would probably lead her directly to me?

i have deleted the post, but this blog still shows up when i google it. picture me smacking myself in the head, if you would be so kind. thanks.

my student dorotha has a crush on a boy that was in a class with her. last night while we were all hanging out, he walked past us twice. he was nothing special, just a quirky, skinny boy in baggy clothes. my other student, anne, said that she understood dorotha's attraction to this kid because her own boyfriend was 6'5", but weighed about 180. anyway, i remarked that the kid was plain because he didn't have glasses. dorotha said, "i know. he'd be 20% cuter with glasses."

i think that is a pretty good estimation of the cute-ness added by spectacles.

in preparation for my planned longer post on teachers, i was thinking about elementary school while showering moments ago. what i was remembering was mostly not about teachers, but rather about some of my classmates. i think that this story deserves it's own post.

when i was in kindergarten, there were two boys named jeremy in my class. one, jeremy sawden, was my best friend. the other, jeremy gray, tormented me regularly. jeremy sawden was my best friend mostly because our mothers were friends. he only went to my elementary school for a short time, and i don't remember much about him. he was very quiet and plain. the most notable thing about him was that he was always absent from school because of pink eye. he came from a family with five or six children and they never really managed to get rid of pink eye. it just rotated from child to child. the other kids didn't like jeremy sawden much because he was sickly and silent. there just wasn't much to him except for the possiblity of infection.

jeremy gray, on the other hand, was memorable. i remember him quite well because he used to call me "fat cow" all of the time. he also made fun of my for being shy and well behaved, but mostly he called me fat and moo-ed at me. once, mrs. tucker, my kindergarten teacher, was reading to us. we were all sitting on the floor in a circle around her. at the end of the book, she asked that we return to our desks, and so i did. jeremy gray, being an ill-mannered twit, never immediately did anything that a teacher asked. i was walking back to my desk while he was still sitting on the floor, cross legged, with his hands behind him. as i passed, he called me a cow. his hand was extended into the path that i would take back to my desk. i decided, in that moment, to step on his hand and grind it into the ground with all of my 5-year-old weight. of course he yowled in pain. mrs. tucker took us aside to find out what had happened. jeremy said i stepped on his hand. i said that i hadn't noticed and that i hadn't even felt his hand beneath my foot. because i was such a good kid, she believed me. i ended up feeling quite guilty about having gotten away with it for some years afterwards. i don't feel bad about it anymore.

* the title of this post, like the title of many of my posts, is a song lyric. normally i just steal and do not credit. because jeremy freese has posted about stephen merritt reccently, i believe that i will credit this song. it is called "jeremy" and it is by the Magnetic Fields.

update** 11:35pm: i suppose that i should give credit to jeremy for having a blog to begin with because i wouldn't have started one if not for his. i wouldn't want to have the arkanow chant thing-y happening here. also, thanks for pointing out my spelling mistake. i actually went back and fixed the spelling of stephin merritt from my earlier post, but maybe it didn't "take" or something. i make a tremendous number of spelling mistakes, etc. in my posts. if anyone ever spots any, please feel free to let me know. thanks.

** yes, i stole the update thing from jeremy, too.

update II, a little less than an hour later: jeremy suspects that my link is broken as the above text is all part of the link. i actually intended this. i know it isn't exactly done to have so much text as part of a link, but i wanted to emphasize just how much i owe jeremy!

everything went well with my students. i have more to say than that, but i want to write a longer post about students and teachers stemming all the way back to my seventh grade life sciences teacher. but, i need time to develop it. just wait.

so, i guess it was about time for another panic attack. i mean, i didn't have one yesterday, so i was pretty much due. we wouldn't want me thinking that i was mentally healthy, now would we? anyway, what was i doing when i had the attack? watching boian be placed in a house by an online sorting hat. he got ravenclaw, which he wanted. i always end up in gryffindor or ravenclaw despite my overwhelming malevolence.

so, what do you do when you see your respondents in public? i almost always want to talk to them. i sincerely like all of the guys i interviewed (with the exception of the crazy, unemployed, ice-fisherman who kept asking me out for drinks). i remember that the day i interviewed the guy who was at the show last night it was the first day that i wore my pink skull and crossbone vans. i was pretty excited about them and he was, too. anyway, i didn't say anything to him last night, but i think he looked at me a few times, probably trying to place why i looked familiar.

on another note, in my mind related, but perhaps not to you, tonight is the night that i am going for drinks with my students. i'm meeting them at the terrace at 8pm. i can't decide how much like myself to act. i really am a little off-putting when i am full force dorotha. despite what they think, i was reserved when i taught. i just don't know if i will be able to contain myself. i've never had students want to hang out with me before. okay, three students in the past have expressed that they wanted to eat lunch with me, but they never followed through. anyway, i'm nervous about tonight.

to my companion at the concert tonight: no, i'm not going to tell you which guy was one of my respondents for my master's thesis! you probably would have "accidently" spilled a drink on him or something.

some people!

p.s. to everyone else: it was one of my favorite respondents. the one who liked the same music that i do.

here's a thought: don't, don't, DON'T drive to get your meds while you are going through withdrawal* from said meds. it is stupid. remember that your only friend with a car does not live in mazomanie, but that you actually have a good friend a block away who can help you out.

okay, i made it home. i took some effexor. i slept for two hours. i still feel a bit shakey, but well enough that i was able to fix some of the more egregious errors in my earlier posts. i also ate some chocolate. i'm following remus lupin's advice here that eating chocolate helps after experiences with dementors.

* i think i am more sensitive to medication than anyone i know. taking antihistamines knocks me unconscious, for example.

jeremy and ang are both perfect girlfriends (and also, apparently, freakish anime wood nymphs), but am i? i mean, i consider myself pretty high maintenance because of all of my ridiculous neuroses (although, i did reccently tell a large group of people that i would be willing to have sex with each and every one of them if they only talked to me about my neuroses for a coupla three hours before hand. maybe i'm high maintenance, but i'm willing to be slutty about it!). here are my results:


-Perfect- You're the perfect girlfriend. Which
means you're rare or that you cheated :P You're
the kind of chick that can hang out with your
boyfriend's friends and be silly. You don't
care about presents or about going to fancy
placed. Hell, just hang out. You're just happy
being around your boyfriend.
What Kind of Girlfriend Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

yeah. the game is fixed. either that or being a "perfect girlfriend" just means that you don't want to go to the mall.

last night, katy mentioned a project that i was temporarily involved in. i too attempted to girlify myself. i belive it was the summer of 2001. i have obviously given up, whereas katy now definitely appears to be a girl (way to fool 'em, flynny). i've never exactly been a tomboy, but neither have i been particularly girlish. in fact, most would probably describe me as asexual. um, thanks. that's totally what i am trying to go for.

well, i need to pick up a refill on my meds (one of my meds). i decided, as a sort of game for myself, to see what would happen if i skipped a couple of days. you know, see what it will be like if i ever (please don't make me) go off my meds. in this particular case, after two days of no effexor, i woke up feeling totally drunk. not in a particularly good way, more in a lack of coordination way. standing up is a bit hard. my head is spinning. i keep walking in to things. anyway, in a few minutes, i'm going to be getting in my car and driving over to the GHC pharmacy to pick up my flimsy grip on an anxiety free life. is this a good idea? i'll let you know if i make it home...

p.s. note to my shrink: why am i still having panic attacks almost daily? i'm ready for my soma vacation, thanks.

my good friend monrovia is getting married the day after my birthday next year. i spoke to her on the phone just a few minutes ago. as has become my custom ever since i found out about her intended nuptials, i promptly burst into tears after ending communication with her. i can't even read emails without freaking out my officemates!

anyway, we discussed friendships we had with people in our past. i only maintain one friendship with someone i knew in high school. my friend kim and i were very similar in our goals and such when we were young. now things are very different. i was telling monrovia that one thing that makes me current friendship with kim so awkward (at times) is that we seemed to start off on the same trajectory, but we have come to such different outcomes. i feel like i have stuck to my guns better than kim, but then again, our lives took some very different turns. mostly hers. maybe i have just been in a period of relative stasis since i was five.

when we were 17, kim and i planned on living together when we were older. we were going to adopt kids. we wanted to make our own organic tofu. i guess i am not doing those things, even without kim.

at least i'm still a vegetarian. i guess.

i think the fact that i didn't fall asleep until 3:30am makes the fact that i was stood up for a 9:30 coffee meeting that much more irritating. my face hurts so much that it is difficult to focus my ire.

well, as you all know, i have an amazing capacity for evil. friends and loved ones quake with fear before me. why friends and loved ones? why not my mortal foes (and i do have those)? because i am one of those delightful people that hits where it hurts and i'm more likely to know where to hit the ones i love. never show me your weaknesses. if i so much as think the balance of power might be tilting in your favor, you better believe i will make a suprise attack. hey, it's kill or be killed, people. i wasn't always like this...

... okay, yes i was. i'm a pretty bad person deep down. sunshine-y veneer, but evil to the quick. it's okay. i'm used to it by now. and my family loves me. plus, i don't turn my evil on them as much anymore. i don't mean this as an excuse. i'm not trying to say "i'm a bitch, get used to it!" or something like that. i just mean, i agonize over it, but can't seem to totally get rid of it. i've got my rage under control pretty well of late, and, while i did envy the homeless man i encountered on my walk to school this morning who was muttering something about "motherfucking assholes", i haven't yelled at any random people yet this summer.

so, anyway, to the person whose feelings i just hurt, i'm really sorry. you just reminded me of my position in the world and i didn't much like it.

back when i lived in austin, my friend sarah worked in the art department for a film adaptation of an anne tyler novel, A Slipping Down Life. the film is finally coming out! i don't think it is supposed to be very good, but it stars lili taylor and i am totally in love with her, so i will have to see it. besides, it isn't every day that a friend works on a major film production.

years ago, my friend molly described my then boyfriend as a "hobbit loving, chuck taylor wearing, they might be giants fan." oh, how right she was! i think i was trying to make a case for how he was "special" or something. i didn't count many (any?) boys among my friends at the time and my ex really introduced me to the possibility that all guys may not be assholes (case in point: he introduced me to henry). anyway, my ex and i agreed that TMBG's "they'll need a crane" is one of the saddest songs ever - at least about breaking up.


for my birthday, my friend carole, who happens to be one of the best people on earth, gave me a DVD of TMBG videos. it has reminded me that i am in love with john linnell. how could i have forgotten? while the crane has certainly been involved in the demolition of my relationship with my ex, i have to say that it has not come near the house i have built with john.

well, ang wins the prize for being the most hilarious at dinner. katy gets to blog about one funny thing she said and i get the other (according to the plan we came up with on the drive home).

i was telling ang and katy about a singles ad that i read that started with a list of places (i guess where the person was "based out of"). anyway, she thought it sounded like a lame attempt to lure people into stupid jobs, like " want to travel the country? drive a big rig!" ang's pitch was "paris, london, tokyo, rome. get paid to stuff envelopes from your home!" well, if it is that glamorous, sign me up!

i'm unpacking all of the stuff i got from texas. i wanted to share with my readers something that Monkey Boy and The Small Grey Thing included in the program for their wedding. since i just dug it out of my bag, why not share it now? MB&TSGT had this to say:

"In honor of our wedding, we have made a donation to the Human Rights Campaign. We hope that someday very soon, all couples, whether they are same-sex or opposite-sex, will have the opportunity to marry. We are proud of our friends and family who have made lifelong commitments to same-sex partners. They are living without the legal protections that we will receive today. We do not believe that marriage should be an elitist club. There are at least 1,049 protections, benefits and responsibilities extended to married couples under federal law, according to a 1997 study by the General Accounting Office. Mariage provides legal protection and public recognition of the love that two people feel for one another. We hope that as you witness our marriage, you will think about the contentious debate our country is currently having about same-sex marriage. Marriage is a celebration of love and family and should be avialable to all families."

i love my little brother so much. he is pretty much the best kid brother a girl could ask for. i'm so glad he and TSGT included this in their program. Monkey Boy, cassidy, and i had an email debate about marriage last semester. i came out against marriage (of course), but was curious why my brother and sister both think it is so great. i think it really does come down to an issue of rights. Cassidy and MB have a different perspective on this than i do, probably because i might not get the same legal protections that they do (should i EVER find a partner and despite what catching the bouquet might predict). even though i wouldn't get married to a man until the right is extended to same-sex couples (and probably not even then - i don't know, my thinking on this is complex), i appreciate greatly that my brother and TSGT put this statement in their program.

it's summer, which means i am pretty much broke. no income at all to speak of. i have to live off what i have managed to squirrell away.

one of the first tasks i have now that i am back in madison is to head over to the grocery store. i think i am going to purchase only dried grains and legumes in bulk. cheaper that way, you know. anyone want to come over for some really good lentil soup?

so, here are two good things about this evening:

1. my friend sara called me to let me know that an old friend (does four years count as an old friend if you move as much as i do?) was visiting from out of town. i knew jamie would be here, but wasn't sure i would catch her since i was just getting back from texas and she was just passing through on her way to minnesota. anyway, i met them at a bar and we had one drink before we were all too beat (okay, mostly i was too beat). even though i only saw her for an hour and a half, it was nice. jamie is sweet and funny and, perhaps most importantly, laughs at all of my jokes.

2. at the bar, i made a bunch of silly drawings in jamie's notepad. all my friends gave me mad props for my doodles. that was sweet of them, especially considering that all of the arms that i gave people were either straight up and down or bent at 90 degree angles.

one bad thing about tonight:

1. i am sick. sore throat and congestion. i took some "wal-tussin" before i went to the bar. it cleared me up a bit. i decided that i was well enough for a beer. word to the wise: beer and cough syrup are not a great combo. my stomach is in a knot and i feel a little bit silly. i don't mind the silly part, but the stomach thing would certainly have been worth avoiding.

when i was in 4th grade, i had two best friends, christina and clare. we considered ourselves equally "best" friends - a three-way relationship rather than the normal two girl arrangement. in 4th grade i was sick a lot. i had bronchitis three times. once i was out of school for a week. when i came back, clare and christina wouldn't speak to me. they claimed they were mad at me for not being at school the last week. finally, they relented, but from then on i was asked to walk behind them while they walked together with arms linked. being the spineless twit that i was, i went ahead with their demands because i thought that (1) i wasn't worth very much and that it was kind of them to befriend me and (2) perhaps with time, i could win back their affections (provided i didn't get sick again). anyway, in fifth grade, christina moved to mexico city, and clare was stuck with just me. she was tremendously cruel any chance she could get. christina came back in 6th grade. by that time, clare had a whole new, more popular group of friends (that strangely accompanied her move to a nicer neighborhood). both of them denied ever having been my friend. i didn't really make friends again until 10th grade.

i tell you all of this not just because i can't get over my childhood despite its relative lack of trauma, but also because i am scared. i've been reading my friends' blogs while i have been in texas. they have all been hanging out together. what if they make me walk behind them? i don't have much choice here. people's lives go on with or without me. i may spend my evenings crying and waiting for phone calls, but tomorrow, i think i will call my friends and let them know that i am available to go to the yarn store even though i don't knit. anyone looking for a lapdog?

yes, i screwed up my last post. i know, i know. i forgot to have anything correspond to the asterik after cassidy's name. rather than just go back in fix it, i thought i would make a whole new entry. i have an odd habit of pointing out my mistakes. if i mispeak, i tend to say the word again. if something comes out in a goofy voice, i continue to use the goofy voice. if i err in blogging, i blog some more.

this is what should have been at the end of my last entry:

* cassidy is upset with me for using "cassidy" as her name. she doesn't read my blog, but i told her that i had given her family fake names to protect their identities. she is fine with "simon" for her son and "aaron" for her spouse, but thinks it is mean of me to use the name she would have named a child if she had had one in high school. cassidy says that it is a good thing she didn't have a baby while in her teen years in part because of the horrible name she would have given him/her. she also says i could have chosen the name "sage" for her because that is the other name she would have assigned a child when she was younger. i didn't know this, so it can't be helped. my sister would also like me to tell my readers that if i had a baby while in high school, i would have named her/him zilpha. yes, i know. it is terrible. i actually tried to get people to call me zilpha when i was in 9th grade because i was so dissatisfied with the name dorotha. i've gotten used to it, so dorotha i shall remain.

needless to say, and much to everyone's amusement, i caught the bouquet. i tried to avoid it, but the small grey thing threw it straight at me like a bullet train through the chest. ha, ha, ha! otherwise, the wedding was a blast. i mean, really fun. simon played in the bouncy castle until he was dripping with sweat. no one made an ass of themselves. henry was the best best man the world has ever seen. my dad's head didn't explode. good work all around!

anyway, now i am really tired and a little grumpy. i'm about to go eat one last austin meal with cassidy*, aaron, and simon. then i need to ditch some wedding presents at my brother's house and load up my car with junk. liz and i are leaving texas tomorrow at 8am. so, i probably won't be blogging again for a while. maybe later tonight. depends on my mood.

i'm off to a ranch for monkey boy's wedding. will be unbloggable for a few days. i know it's gonna hurt.

laters,
dorotha

i had all of these things that i wanted to report back on after my evening with my friends suloni and joe, but i was awfully tired when i got home. i may just make another boring list of things that happened to me yesterday. it should probably get more interesting as the list progresses. maybe.

1. monkey boy called me around ten to request my assistance in helping to remove their old washer and dryer from their home. he and the small grey thing are moving pretty much* right after their wedding. the sold the washer and gave the dryer to habitat for humanity. anyway, it was pretty hot yesterday and i was also really hungry. i got kind of woozy feeling and really weak. after the washer and dryer event, we went to Waterloo Records (which has lots of texas music) cuz MB and TSGT had a gift certificate and i needed a birthday present for aaron. i was pretty much starving by this time, but we still shopped for a while. in the car on the way to lunch, i felt like i might pass out. eventually, we got to Veggie Heaven (a delicious all vegetarian restuarant that serves a dish called Protein 2000 that i eat every time i go home). i could barely eat anything and had less than half of my bubble tea. i told MB and TSGT that i should probably rest for a bit when we got back to their place, but really what happened was i got to their house, went to their bedroom, and then decided i had actually better go to the bathroom and violently expell the contents of my stomach. lesson: it is hot in texas. do not get overheated and then eat. even if you are starving and the food is extra good. you will just lose it later.

2. i finally hung out with joe and suloni last night after much laying on of guilt by joe! we got pizza, ice cream, and a movie. the movie we watched was "Fog of War". i'm still not recovered. it is pretty bleak. i highly recommend watching it. it isn't a regular movie about the inhumanity of war. it is all about the inhumanity of strategizing about war. god, it was terrible to watch. robert mcnamara was... creepy and intelligent. creepy because he is smart and still did the things he did. i mean, i guess on some level i always think that the people in charge of our country at any given time are a bunch of boobs. but, here is this man who is intelligent doing things in a calculated way and still killing the hell out of a whole bunch of people. ugh.

3. after the movie they showed me their collection of old prints from nature books. it was fantastic. they have a lot of pages from books from the 1600 and 1700's that are phenomenal. some of them are disturbing images of animals that people thought existed but didn't really. you know, drawings of reports of strange beasts that the artist only heard about second hand. joe suggested that it was sort of like playing a game of visual telephone.

4. joe mandated a task for me as a sociologist that i think is too much for me to shoulder alone. he thinks sociology should make a greater effort to inform the public. don't we wish! i can barely teach my students. so, sociologists reading this, the onus is on you. i entrust you. take that!

* ang and i shared a student (no, not like that!) who would always say "pretty much, blah, blah, blah..." now the phrase "pretty much" peppers my speech. last night i actually had a dream in which the "pretty much" kid played a small role. i was hanging out in some kind of waiting room with loopy and "pretty much" roller bladed up for a chat. that was it. boring dream.

i keep bailing on my friend joemess. my family is very, um, last minute about things. the approach i take to this is to just do what they ask and not even worry if it means that i bail on my joemess. i know this sucks for joemess and my other pals, but it makes my life easier because my family is, well, my family and they know all of the right buttons to push and strings to pull to make me do things. anyway, the point of this post is only to say this: i promise to hang out with joemess tonight. girl scout honor!

got that joemess. i promise not to back out. there are virtual witnesses.