I had to switch back to the old theme (probably only temporarily) because turns out, I’m a terrible computer hacker. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to put “previous post” and “next post” buttons on that new, stupid theme. Why would a blog theme not come with that feature installed?! Stupid theme.
But! Things I’ve learned by attempting to be a computer hacker:
Using google and youtube, you can learn nearly everything ever from everywhere. (Except how to get your Previous/Next Post plug-in to work.)
OK, that’s just one thing. But it was a big thing. I did way more than I thought I could. And if I knew WHERE THE HELL to paste the code that the trouble-shooting sites tell me to paste, I think I could be total web ninja.
I’ve spent the last couple days downloading and previewing themes and installing plug-ins. I researched and learned how to embed video content. I also manually entered my UA code to update Google Analytics. WHAT??? I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.
Yes, I’m an accidental computer hacker now.
Sort of.
My profile picture is not showing up, even though I tried some of the troubleshooting techniques mentioned on various internet technology geek sites.
Come on, my geek people. Help a lady out.
(And in case you’re confused, the comments button is that speech bubble high and to the right. Go ahead, tell me what you think.)
In January, I replaced all the belts and hoses and whatnot in my Subaru (to the tune of $1,200), and now it won’t pass inspection. Why? The check-engine light is on. Amongst others, the catalytic converter code pops up on the computer, but whoa, that’s a thousand bucks. My mechanic says the spark plugs blah blah misfiring and the spark plug wires blah, and that could be what’s setting off the alarm, so “Cross your fingers that, when that’s fixed, the cat con code will disappear as well.”
I trudge around Chapel Hill for six and a half hours while they replace that stuff.
$816.
He says, “OK, it needs about seventy miles to reset. If the light doesn’t come on in seventy miles, you’re good to go. Come back and we’ll reinspect it.”
So I drive seventy miles. No light. Whew!
Eight miles later, stupid fucking light comes on.
I’m trying to keep this in perspective. Dug told me, when we first met, that his brother had cystic fibrosis and had been in the hospital for months waiting for a lung transplant. He had actually had one already a couple years ago, which seemed to be doing well, for about a year. Can you imagine? Thinking, “Hey, I’ve got working lungs!” for a year. Jesus, what a disappointment when they go on the fritz.
So this is just a car. It’s just a car. It’s just money.
Never should’ve sold my Civic.
(Maybe the problem is that I don't have flames. See, Margo's has flames. Mine, no flames.)
It’s amazing how much cleaning I can get done when I’m having last-minute company. In half an hour, I tidied the desk, wiped down the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom, took out the recycling, and swept and skated on Clorox wipes. Even changed the sheets! Rowr.
Just kidding.
Not about the sheets. About the getting some.
There’s a billboard on 85 that says, Every 28 minutes, an NC teen gets pregnant. Every time I drive by it, I think, “Man, those teens are getting so much more action than I am.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we had in the comments the other day. You know, about my being judgmental. I’m still a little surprised by Opiner’s reaction. Why did that post in particular offend him so mightily? I felt like that one was kind of a throwaway, actually. I wasn’t thinking horrible thoughts about CaryMale37. I just find unnecessary quotation marks funny. Clearly, I’m not the only one.
Listen, I make joke! (That has to be said with an Eastern European accent.)
I mean, yes, I’m judgmental. But seriously, once I get to know you, I nearly always adore you. I’m going to say 99.64% of the people I get to know? I am almost pathologically admiring of them. I’m arguing a case for their awesomeness inside my head at all times, and they just keep providing me with evidence. (The other 0.36% of the people I meet I think are total douches.)
So, should I judge people I don’t know? Probably not.
Do I do it? Yep.
Is it funny? I think so. Often.
…But I’m coachable. I’ll work on it.
I knew this guy, only peripherally really, when I lived in New York. He was probably in his mid-forties, businessman. At one point, he said to me, “I’ve started looking at all criticism as coaching. Even personal attacks, I just take as something to consider and work on to be more effective with people.”
My Catholic friend Cat frequently listens to a Buddhist podcast. When I told her about remembering what the businessman had said, she mentioned that her podcast monk often says something like: Let everyone be your Buddha. Every person that you meet appears before you to teach you something.
So, from now on, I’ll try to remember to reflect on my judgments of prospective dates.
I’ll probably still make fun of them on the blog, though.
I hate clothes shopping. I mean it—I loathe it. I despise it. Just thinking about it makes me put a hand to my forehead and stagger to my fainting couch. And it’s for one reason, and one reason only. Not really. It’s for every reason, but for one huge, major reason.
Pants.
Shirts, I can buy. I don’t love doing it, but it’s one of those chores that just makes life a little easier in the long run. Thinking about all the no-shirt-no-service establishments to which I’m given entrée makes buying shirts tolerable.
Shoes, fine. I have a hierarchy when it comes to shoes: comfort > cost > cuteness. I’ll pay a lot of money for a comfortable pair of shoes. Whether my feet look cute in them is the least important part of the formula. I dig clogs, and I dig flip-flops. You will never find me out on a Friday night in FMPs. Maybe if I lost half my body weight, but would you want to walk around with 170 pounds of pressure funneled into your smooshed-up toes? I thought not. Whatever, shoe shopping is not the problem.
Dresses are all right. I mean, how often do I have to buy a dress? And I can actually look cute in a dress…I just tried to find photographic evidence, but the only full-body shot I could come up with was this:
What am I doing, you ask? I was trying to do this adorable pose my friend Cat does, in which she indeed looks like a cat. I look less like a cat, and more like a dainty, flirtacious hippo.
You’ll have to take my word for it, I can look really cute in a dress. (Sidenote: that flowery, flowy dress up there, I bought that in, like, ’99. No shit. Wore it to my friend Dan’s wedding in October of last year. Probably gonna wear it to your wedding when you invite me.)
Of course, with dresses there’s the chub-rub issue. Chubby girls require
these
or
this
to avoid shredding the insides of their thighs when they walk. But again, how often do I wear a dress? I’m gonna go with twice a year. An average of two people I know get married every year.
Which brings me to pants. First of all, finding pants that fit my ghetto ass requires a tenacity usually found only in the honey badger. Second, remember the chub-rub? Well, that continues with pants, but fortunately, or un-, there’s fabric in between the frictional bodies. Fortunately, because there’s no angry rash. Unfortunately, because I will abrade the living shit out of the inner-thigh part of a pair of jeans. Seriously, if you were stranded on a desert island, you wouldn’t need matches or even two sticks to rub together. All you’d need is me, a pair of size-14 corduroys, and an up-tempo song on your iPod. I would start walking and blaze that motherfucker up.
Now about two years ago, I found a pair of jeans at Marshall’s—Donna Karan jeans (she’s a designer!)—and they fit, and even the social worker at my old school (female, straight, sort of uptight) said, “Wow, Amy, those jeans make your bottom look so cute!” I loved those jeans from the moment I bought them.
Well
shit.
Yep, that’s my fingers sticking through the gaping hole in my DKNYs. But I wasn’t done with those pantaloons yet. Who knew when the next time was that I’d find such a prize. I decided to patch that hole. What could it take? A little fabric, some thread, a little elbow grease.
A number of people have told me they enjoy my blog. One guy said I’m his favorite blogger (buffs nails on shirt). A couple friends have mentioned they get mad when there are no new posts. This is all flattering, to say the least.
I love writing this blog. I look forward to the time, after work is finished and the dogs are fed and exercised, when I can sit down at my computer and put words into cyberspace.
And, I realized today that when I’m writing is the only time that I don’t think about food at all. So I’d like to do it as much as possible.
But, I have to admit, sometimes I have nothing to say. No—often I have nothing to say.
Part of me worries that I have a finite number of stories knocking around in my brain. Like I’m a vessel, and once I pour out the stories, all done.
And to a certain extent, that’s true. I have a terrible memory. Terrible. I think it’s because I started eating compulsively when I was in second grade, and if there’s one thing addiction does to a person, it robs her of the ability to be in the present moment. I was so fixated on the food that could satiate my demons that I just didn’t encode what was happening around me. So stories from the era when I was frequently and heavily binge-eating? (That would be 7 to 34ish.) Few and far between.
I try to remind myself that new things happen to me all the time, and I can write about those things. And that content on this blog is generated, not unloaded, and I can generate content any time, out of anything.
A lot of the time though, I got nothin. I futz around the house, I peruse only-sort-of friends’ Disney vacation photos on Facebook, I call people and answer emails. And I fret because I have no words.
However.
I’ve found a damn-near foolproof method of sparking an idea. I’ve used it a bunch of times, and it’s always rendered some catalyst for me. Here’s hoping I don’t jinx it. Ready?
Sometimes I have to do nothing for four minutes, but it has never taken more than that. In two to four minutes, something bubbles to the surface, and I start banging away on this keyboard.
So if you’re feeling uninspired, or overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, try it. And let me know what you think. (And if you have other means of inspiration, do tell.)
The crowd, as usual, dug it. The judges did not. Again.
People kept coming up to me at intermission and saying, “You was robbed.” Not sure why I went over like a lead zeppelin with the judges yet again. One idea I had: going second is the shit position in the line-up. I went second when I told the Turducken story too. And I don’t know, I think the judges rate the first story pretty high, if it’s good, which Thursday’s was. But the second storyteller, they’re thinking, “Damn. We’ve got six more people after this. Better set the bar low.”
One of my friends offered another theory: the judges seemed to dig the “and here she is in the audience with me thirty years and two wonderful kids later” ending.
And that’s a lovely ending. But that was not the ending to my romantic story. The ending to my story was grossness and discomfort. So that’s the ending I told.
Whatever. Jeff Polish, the director of the Monti, said late in the evening that he was going to choose a story to go on All Things Considered (local version, of course) on Friday. And guess whose story he chose.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
Suck it, judges.
(WUNC edited the hell out of it, taking out all my profanity* and chopping the ending completely off, but who cares! Seventy thousand people heard me tell a story.)
(*I also forgot to tell you that when I had that little stepmotherhood daydream, my mom emailed me to say, “If you’re thinking about becoming a stepparent, you better clean up your mouth!” Ha! I fucking love my mom.)
