aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

(that's the noise a headless chicken makes.)

i'm off to minicon! see ya!

i am being a headless chicken today. fyi.

Anybody want spare change?

jon carroll writes, in an article about change:

"Change is bad. You know that, I know that, cats know that. The reason we have so many soothing aphorisms about change is to make us calm in the face of the inevitable.

Humans say, "This is all part of some larger unknowable plan." Cats dash madly around the house and urinate in inappropriate places. I ask you candidly:

Which is the better solution? Which produces greater serenity?"

i'll tell you; the solution that seems more appropriate to me and the solution that i usually follow through with are not the same.

there's a rant in me somewhere about the difference between having things happen and having things happen to you, and the importance of being an active participant in your own life.

if things just happen to you; there you were, just innocently minding your own business as you so often are, and poof! all these bad things happened to you, well, i don't have a lot of sympathy. it's a lot easier for people to walk all over you if you're lying on the floor to start with.

if things happen, however, and yup, you did this thing that probably played into it, and now you can do this other thing to work on making things better, good for you. let me know what i can do to help.

a friend of mine posted something in her journal a bit ago about how difficult it is to recognize one's own bad actions and deeds; how it's easy to recognize when someone treated you poorly, but not so easy to think about how you treated them.

i've treated some people not very well. i am a tin-plated bitch when i am depressed and scared. that's a reason, not an excuse. knowing why it happened doesn't make it okay, doesn't absolve me of the responsibility of trying to make sure that i don't do that again.

but i know what happened. and i know my part in it. and i think i can manage things a little better in the future than i did in the past.

(i have never, in my life, had a party where i had to specify that attendees needed to remain dressed. not one. i hope to continue this trend in the future.)

choices, choices, choices.

this weekend, i could either go to minicon, where most of my friends who are fannish and also, simultaneously, do not have a tractor up their butt about the state of minneapolis fandom will be, or else i could go to a party that i have been invited to where the invitations specify that people must wear clothes and must avoid each other strenuously instead of getting into fights.

oh, the dilemma.

i think i'm going to minicon.

(in re: tractors. you can either decide i'm not talking about you, or you can email me and ask. your call.)

went out for dim sum on sunday morning, for a birthday celebration for lauren. it was lauren, chris, maya, kate, nathan, ryan, and me.

we went to a fabulous place that had very few people and very many yummy things, and i'm not telling anyone where it is, because then it will get crowded and i don't want that.

oh my goodness it was fabulous. more dim sum is in my future, i can tell.

see, when you think no one is reading your blog, you can spout off about anything.

sadly, once you know that everyone from your family to your friends in other states to the current significant others of your exes are reading it, it becomes an inappropriate place to put frustrated love (okay, well, not love but certainly hormones) letters to people who you can't send that sort of thing to in.

(that sentence, correctly diagrammed, will get you a cookie next time you see me in person.)

the best part about lent is having clam chowder for lunch once a week.

mo said today: "And links! I love being linked to more than anything-- it's like a present in my referral logs."

happy birthday, mo.

i need new pants. that is all.

so, surgery update: it went fine. she's still in the hospital, as planned, and she's totally hopped up on morphine. this makes her slightly talkative, alternating with quick naps. she's pretty cheerful, though.

i went in to work today to change around the login scripts. how very exciting. if this doesn't work out properly, no one will be able to log in in the morning. and i mean no one. wheee! more details later tomorrow, when hopefully, i'm still employed.

my mom is having surgery on tuesday. she's having her stomach stapled.

please don't email me telling me how brave she is and how she's taking control of her life and how you envy her.

don't email me telling me what a health risk being fat is, either. (she is, you know. fat, that is. so am i.) i know more on the subject than you do, and while i could just cite you studies until you got bored and went away, i'm a little stressed on the subject of her having surgery and i'd more likely just use you for a bit of stress relief, and we don't want that, do we? so messy...

i'd feel better about this if my dad hadn't spent the last two months of 2000 in a coma after surgery.

i don't trust surgery right now. and i don't see any reason why i should.

i value thoughtfulness very highly in people. perhaps thoughtfulness isn't the right word-- i value it when people think about things. even to the point of overanalyzing them. even to the point of having to develop strategies to make the hamsters in their head stop running around on their little wheels and just for god's sake, shut up already.

a friend of mine in college used to say that if there were a drug that could make you stop thinking, that could stop the chatter in her head, she'd be an instant addict.

that's taking it a touch far, i think.

but i know how to stop worrying something to pieces, and most of my friends do, too. it's survival knowledge, really. there's only so much thinking about something that you can do before you end up rocking back and forth, muttering under your breath.

even knowing that this isn't exactly optimal survival behavior, i still will take it over the alternatives.

i won a prize of a big jar of candy at kate's wedding shower the other week.

today, i finally managed to bring it to work. everyone here is cursing my name now. my evil plot is working.

it was sigrid's birthday yesterday. happy birthday, sigrid! wooo!

i am writing this from my newly installed mandrake linux box. oh, the excitement.

i can't figure out how to telnet over to visi to read news to save my life, however. arrrgh. the rest of everything seems to be working, though.

i went out to a new place for lunch today. it is called "ROCK STAR!" except with a star in place of the a.

i expect to see a new restaurant there shortly.

the food was all right; i had turnip leek puree soup with charred (i kid you not) what i think was spinach on top. it was actually way better than it sounds. i like pureed soups. i also had a portobello something something something something salad.

first tip that someone was not thinking about this clearly: your food should have short, simple names, so that people can figure out how to order it. special nifty portobello red wine vinagrette whatsit whoosie salad is not a good name. (i said "the portobello salad", and i did in fact get the thing i wanted. but don't make your customers have to work that hard.

second tip that someone was not thinking about this clearly: i got soup and half a salad. i got two plates, each larger than my head. the tables, however, were the special tiny "pack them in like sardines" size. i sat at a table for two, and there would have been real trouble if there had been two of us and we'd both ordered that. we would have had to begin annexing extra tables.

other than that, there was just some of the normal new restaurant things; no one had thought clearly about demarking the smoking from the non-smoking areas, and the mix on the diet coke was off. ah, well.

if they're still there in a few months, i'll probably go back.

jon carroll, mr. hypothetical question himself, asks us:

"Fear of a powerful enemy can really bring a country together. Fear of a common enemy can often be used to justify repressive measures. Can we think of a place in the world where this has happened recently?"

as he argues that maybe we ought to hold off a minute or two before we invade iraq.

i am going to reinstall my home computer. i expect that this will take forever and not work very well, so don't be surprised if my email response in the evenings is a bit slow.

(send me email during the day, when i can read it at work, to cheer me up, though! do it! you know you want to! :)

hmmm. now i am fiddling to see if i can get the links on the archive pages to work right. they've always been broken, you see.

tonight is caucus night. sigrid is going, so tonight i am staying home. i am not going to the caucuses, but i figure this is a fine chance to go spend oodles of money at uncle edgars.

i'm at work. it feels like friday. i am ready for a weekend. sadly, i don't get one for a while yet.

nathan is at home sick today; i hope he feels better soon. (get well, you! get well! :)

brunching shuttlecocks has these new donation buttons. you've seen regular donation boxes on websites all over; well, these are special new oral sex donation buttons.

so now, i wonder. is it possible to do negative donations? that is, to push the button and communicate that you want all the oral sex you've ever given that person back? "hello; just wanted to let you know i've decided that that was a really bad idea and i'd like to retroactively have not done it. thanks!"

this also brings up the question of sending back some of the oral sex that one has been given, be it because it came through an untrustworthy vendor, shoddy quality control, or for various other reasons.

oooooh, the possibilities.

and now the walls have mud and tape on quite a bit of them! yay!

i do not have joint compound between my toes. i am very pleased about that, as i had heard that it was a near certainty.

it really works best, i think, to put gloves on, grab a handful of goop, smear it on the wall with your hands, and then smooth it down with the knife. it's sort of playing in the mud, only more irritating.

the bathroom is still being in pieces. but it has walls again. the walls are totally unfinished, but they exist. wheeee!