i just came home, drove into the garage, and then watched in the rear-view mirror to make sure the garagedoor a) did close, and b) didn't bounce. this is now unnecessary as i am living in a house in which the garage door actually closes and stays closed.

(the one at the ex's house started bouncing obnoxiously right after i left him. i kept thinking that i should offer to call the repair place for him, and then i thought about he stared at that sticker every morning while angrily pressing the doorbell that ought to, but usually didn't, make the garage door open, as well. then i would go open the garage door with the opener in my car.)

i am home from wiscon. i am also, not coincidentally, exhausted.

it was a totally fabulous time.

i would mark this up so that it would show in the wiscon conglomeration of posts except i am not saying anything more interesting than "back home! not dead! more later!"

aaronv and i went out for yummy vietnamese food last night.

at a restaurant that i couldn't remember the name of exactly, couldn't tell you anything about beforehand except that it was purpose-built to be this restaurant and that they serve vietnamese food, that afterwards i could tell you that it's beautiful, huge, and they have a koi pond up front and that the food is wonderful.

lisa says that i need to work on what the good things about being divorced are. not just the new life alone bits, but what bits are better without the ex.

let me tell you that the part where i don't have to listen to pseudo-foodie monologues which i am not allowed to contribute to is one of those parts.

Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement:

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.
I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.
I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.
I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

"George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption", the common dreams news center reports. this is the text of his statement, correcting, he says kindly, the errors in the information about him and gathered by the united states government.

I Know What Butch Is, (c) S. Bear Bergman, 2005

I know what butch is. I know, and I’m going to tell you, so listen up and take notes. First of all, butch is a noun. And an adjective. And a verb.

Butches only ever wear jeans, and boots, except if they’re wearing suits, and they keep their hair clipped down to a flattop you could putt off of. Except if they have to for work. Or if they want to for sex. Or if they want to for some other reason. But otherwise it’s denim and leather and butch wax, kid, and don’t you forget it. Unless you’re vegan.

i am almost swooning too hard to type coherently here. i like butches, and i like discussion about gender, and did i mention the swooning?

i close on my new house tomorrow. then on tuesday, the moving! so, i will likely be incommunicado from some point real soon until either i go insane and run down the street to the laundromat with the free wi-fi or else qwest gets their act together and gets me dsl real soon now at the new house. we'll see. but if you need to get a hold of me this week, the best way to do it would be to call me on my cell phone. you can still send me email, but as i mentioned, me picking it up might depend on a laundromat. we'll see.

there's good knee news and bad knee news.

in the good knee news category, no surgery this summer. not even a bit.

in the bad knee news category, he doesn't want to do a synovectomy on me because my knee is too screwed up for it to have a good chance of helping. in addition, he thinks that i probably have osteoarthritis as well as the rheumatoid, which i already knew i had. last but not least, he says that he'd probably be willing to replace the knee any time i want.

i don't want yet. i go down stairs funny, when i go up stairs and am flaring, i go up them funny, i have a handicapped tag and use it, and i don't do a lot of walking. but i'm pretty much used to it. so, not yet.

Starving Artist You are 14% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 71% Arrogant.

You are the Starving Artist! You are more intuitive than logical, and are primarily guided by your heart and emotions. You are also very introverted and gentle. Of course, this does not mean that you do not have an ego. In fact, you are surprisingly arrogant for someone so emotional and gentle. This is why you are best described as a starving artist. You are very introspective and quite sure of yourself, as any accomplished artist is, yet your views are impractical, emotional, and overly gentle. You probably find math, logic, and similar intellectual pursuits offensive to your artistic sensibilities, and you prefer the open-endedness of artistry because then you know you can never truly have a wrong answer. So really you have no reason to be arrogant, you big doofus, because the skills you value (emotion, spirit, art, etc.) in yourself are valuable only on a subjective level, meaning your arrogance is purely masturbatory. In short, your personality is defective because you are arrogant, introverted, introspective, gentle, and thoroughly irrational...posessing most of the traits needed to be a starving--and useless--artist. So get out there, write a few short stories that are allegories for the spirit, and starve! To put it less negatively: 1. You are more INTUITIVE than rational. 2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted. 3. You are more GENTLE than brutal. 4. You are more ARROGANT than humble. Compatibility: Your exact opposite is the Capitalist Pig. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Haughty Intellectual, the Televangelist, and the Emo Kid. * * If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits. The other personality types: The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 7% on Rationality You scored higher than 16% on Extroversion You scored higher than 31% on Brutality You scored higher than 81% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on Ok Cupid

pameladean: Ten thousand cheers for HCMC:

Today I went, as I do twice a month, downtown to the Hennepin County Medical Center Out-Patient Pharmacy to pick up a subset of my antihypertensive medication. I rushed right past a new sign decorated with information brochures, and then stopped dead as my brain registered the words 'Emergency Contraception.' With a feeling of trepidation, I backed up and read the sign more thoroughly. 'Emergency Contraception. Available at HCMC, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ask your doctor or come to the pharmacy. No prescription required.' Then there were a few paragraphs defining emergency contraception and discussing how it worked.

Bless their hearts. And take that, you antediluvian anti-scientific misogynistic theocratic authoritarian creeps. Put that in your over-controlling hypocritical lying pipe and smoke it until you choke.

hurray for hcmc, and hurray for pamela for letting us know. i don't go to hcmc for any of my medical care, so i would not have known. but now i do, and now you do.

(and knowing is half the... oh, never mind. ;)

i have dogs. on what planet do i want a slipcover made of suede, velvet, corduroy, or chenille? oy!

better things:

cute girl in swim therapy.

my mom and my sister say they'll come along to surgery with me.

lt is going to come take me out to ice cream.

got lasagna for deeener.

and now lt is here to take me out for ice cream! woo! ice cream!

y'know, fuck it. i was writing this up to put it on lj, and why not post it here, too.

the post is titled if only i had a little tiny baseball bat.

...for little tiny beatdowns, of course.

apparently it's occurring to my subconscious that this whole divorce and moving thing is going on. i mean, not that i forgot, but i'd been more easy with it for a while. and now i am so angry.

the last few days i've let the dogs out in the yard to play, and the next door neighbors have been in their yard, and they run into the house to get treats for the dogs, and they love the dogs. and i'm moving away and taking the dogs with me in a week and a half. and they don't know. i am not going to tell them in person; i am thinking that i will take a picture of the dogs in their new yard and send a letter along with the picture.

and last night, i went and picked out shingles for the new house, and they're an okay color and they'll work fine with the color the house is painted, and it will all be good, but what the FUCK was i doing there making major house decisions alone, instead of with n?

and n's birthday is this weekend. and in the past i'd have made a big deal out of it; taken him out for dinner that night, been looking for good presents for a few months now, maybe have a new outfit to wear. but instead, i'm going to my parents' house for the weekend, and not having breakfast with him on saturday morning, because while i think i'd be able to deal with us being tense and weird at each other over breakfast, the part where he drives away and goes to his new girlfriend's house (did i mention that at the moment i hate her? she's not good for him, she's not nice to people in general, and i really only tolerated her moderately well before.) and stays there all the rest of saturday, all saturday night, and most of the day sunday (at least that's what i'm assuming he's been doing when he's gone all that time) would be too hard, and i'm going to go be somewhere else instead.

and i'm going to have knee surgery (a synovectomy, not very serious) this summer, and i am so angry and scared about it. the reason why my knee is this damaged at this point in my life is because i went off my arthritis drugs for over a year total. it was a deal i was glad to make at the time; you have to be off the drugs for four months before you can try to conceive, and we were going to try to have a kid. but the deal i was making was that i'd go off the drugs, the arthritis would do whatever it wanted to do during that time, and at the end of it, i'd have a baby. we'd been trying, for some value of trying that involved n being angry and resentful and throwing as many obstacles into the works as he could while telling me no, no, it was all fine, since before the littlest llama was born. it's not goddamn fair. if i have to have the surgery, i want to have already had a baby, to have to worry about how my partner will handle chasing a toddler on their own while i'm recuperating and on crutches.

and the last two times i've had surgical procedures, n has been there. i called him my security n. like a security blanket, only better. the last time i wasn't sure he'd be there. that he'd make the effort to get the time off of work and to come with me. but he did, and both of these times he was sweet and kind and distracted me and held my hand when i was scared and now i have to go do it without him and it's not goddamn fair and i am so scared about it and so angry with him because he won't be there.

and i am so angry angry angry.

comments from people referenced in this post who are not cme, mlf, or the littlest llama that i don't like will be deleted. go bitch about me in your own damn blog.

sorry i haven't been posting much recently. and there won't be much through monday, either. all the posts floating around in my head right now are of the form "...and i'm so angry about that."

the next door neighbors love the dogs and feed them treats, and i'm so angry about that.

i picked shingles for the new roof on the house i'm buying, and i'm so angry about that.

i am going to have knee surgery sometime this summer, and i'm so angry about that.

hopefully a few days at my parents' house this weekend will clear out my brain some and i'll be able to do something useful like entertainingly natter on about the new bras i just got from decent exposures.

Malcolm Heath's Journal - Mmmm, meatloaf

meatloaf recipe!

dear betsy: make this at the new house.

i am writing this down here in hopes that it will seem as profound to me after i have had some sleep.

the thing that i want to learn how to do is that i want to learn how to expect to be treated in ways that i perceive as loving and caring by my nearest and dearest. i'm tired of expecting that i will have to ask for it.

it's good to know what you want.

it's good to be able to ask for it.

but i want to expect to not have to ask for it all the time.

woo!

i have a closing date, i have a closing time, i have movers, i have made arrangements to have my cleaning ladies (who i love) move with me, and things are looking very pleasing.