Ultimately, a life of crime leads to a life in exile.

She has been seen collaborating with other suspects

The Perp Returns to the Scene

Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!

No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave mouse.

Lady strikes again.

Pestilence

Hello. I have a confession to make. I... am a slob. Yes, it is true. I am not neat. I am not tidy. I leave things in piles, I do not alphabetize, color code, reverse chronologize or plain chronologize. I know OF these practices, but fail to see how they relate to me and my life, and find them sort of quaint in others.

Let's call sloppiness the left, and neatness the right. I have a few friends who veer very far to the right. These friends admit that their neatness is related to an obsessive-compulsiveness that may or may not be a disorder. They can be made to feel physical discomfort if an element of their physical world is moved out of place; a disordered space leads to a disordered mind which leads to a disordered body.

I myself veer to the far left. I, in turn, admit that my slovenliness is related to a mild form of depression/anxiety which may or may not be a disorder. The difference is that I don't feel physical discomfort in a neat space. Rather, I can be made to feel physical discomfort if I either I am urged by someone else to neaten and organize, or if my sloppiness has gotten to such a state that I am ashamed to have someone else witness it.

As I've grown older I've learned to compartmentalize my sloppiness. When living with roommates, I make sure that I keep common areas clean, and have the door to my room always shut so no one has to be offended by the clothes on the floor, piles of paper on the desk, books everywhere, etc. My car is another compartmentalized space, and discarded paper bags, CD's and coffee cups tend to build up in the front and back seats.

I've long tried to believe that I can maintain a live and let live philosophy as regards the lefties and the righties. I can be messy as long as it doesn't impinge on others, and they can be neat as long as they don't make me join them in trying to impose order on chaos. Unfortunately, I've decided I can't really continue. My family is convinced that my messiness is harming my physical health (they think eczema is caused by dust) and I've realized that I can't really function in polite society as a messy person. I have to take my car in to get work done, so that can't be messy, and I live at home now, so I can't really be messy there either.

It's not a huge deal - I can be neat. I don't mind the repetitive task of cleaning, and all it takes is a few minutes out of a day or an hour or so out of a week.

Still tho', something rankles. The righties don't have to change. They are free to express their mild mental illness in peace, because society accepts it, man. But how am I supposed to express malaise and existential angst now, huh? The only form of aggression I like to indulge in is passive aggression, and now I'm willingly giving that up. I expect I shall now become actively aggressive, and society won't like that either. Society is such a whiny little bitch. (See? It's happening already. I rest my case.)

The bout

The first reason for my NJ visit was to see the last Nightmares bout of the season, against the Hell Razors. These are my girls, even though we're not all close, we're a team, a collective, and a lovelier funnier more insane group of ladies I've yet to encounter. I'm not an o.g. Nightmare, but I'd say I came in during the second wave, and I skated last year and this year, so I'm still old enough that I can agree when my o.g. teammates say, 'ya know, it's not like before, with the old Nightmares...' 

And it's not - there are new Nightmares. Still though, we've built our mythology up, and the mythology goes like this: the Nightmares are better than other teams because we skate as a team and we stick together. Somehow, everyone agrees that this has nothing at all to do with practice. The Nightmares don't practice as a team. Before every bout, Von Fury reminds us: 'you know, the Nightmares don't practice, and we always skate better, cuz we don't fuckin' need to practice'. Or words to that effect. And it's easy to think that's bullshit, and it's VERY easy to get pissed off by this attitude, if you happen not to be a Nightmare, but oddly there is something to it. I know this to be true because for this bout, a couple of subs from Jersey City skated with the Nightmares, and one of them said to the team manager, 'I love skating with you guys, now I understand why you're so adamant to stay together as a team!' So, there it is. Luck, magic, regional personality... we got something.

This made it kind of a hard bout to just be watching, for me. I haven't skated derby in five months now, and I still wanted to be out there with them, cuz damn it feels good to be a ganster. But what's done is done, what's herniated cannot be unherniated, and it was awesome to be there to see everyone. 

The bout was fraught. Apparently in the last couple of months there's been huge animosity growing between the Nightmares and the Hell Razors. I don't know what went on, but you could definitely feel the tension. The bout started and ten minutes in, the Nightmares were leading by 20 points. The Hell Razors called a time-out, which seemed to last forever. It turns out they wanted call the game because the EMT's didn't show up. So we all waited 15 minutes for EMT's, which kind of threw the night off kilter. On the one hand, yeah, you want EMT's there; on the other, don't leave your audience hanging not knowing what's going on. 

Play resumed and everyone was skating really, really hard. And really, really dirty. There were so many minors and so many jammerless jams because of fouls, it was nuts. The Hell Razors won by 15 points (I think), so there was no joy in Mudville for the Nightmares, but there didn't seem to be any joy from anyone, really. No joy from JC that their rivals had finally gone down, and no particular joy from the H.R. 

Overall, it was fun to watch my girls skating, those on my team and those not. It was hard to watch, too; it was the kind of thing you watch intently so as not to miss anything, and the points were kept low, so it was edge of your seat stuff. 

The cheering and yelling... I told myself I wouldn't, on account of my sore throat, but I couldn't help it. I never can. I yelled and screamed. My throat suffered.

Excuses, excuses.

I had so planned to write an extensive, witty, fun to read post about my weekend in NJ/NY, because it really was amazing, but then, errg, stuff happened. Plus, I am lazy. Double plus, I posted pictures, and that seemed so easy and summary.

Stuff that happened that prevented writing: I came down with a pretty bad cold pretty much the day before I left to drive up. Note to the curious: staying up until 3am drinking and yelling are not that therapeutic, and may in fact worsen any cold you have. Further note: if you drink enough, you will stop caring about your sore throat. Oh, it'll still be there, but you won't care.

Also, I started a longish-term temp assignment on Monday. I could not very well call in sick to my first day, as I feel that would have looked bad, so I could not stay home and do the hard-core sleeping that I felt was necessary to kill the coughing, hacking, dry throat and ear pain. 

I've spent the last week working  and sleeping, with breaks for snacks and dinner. You would think that going to sleep at 7pm woud make it easy to wake up at 6am the next day, but in fact this has not been the case at all. Maybe it's the Nyquil. Finally, today, I'm feeling like a normal human again. A normal human who has more snot than usual, but a normal human all the same.

...and then some other stuff happened...

...although frankly after my fourth vodka martini, it was all kind of a blur.

We saw some boobies. And some fire jugglin'.

Who's gittin' married?

This guy!!! This fuckin' guy!!!

And the bachelor partay...

The Babybel

Aka, squishyface. Errrrg! I won't wake up! I WON'T! So just enjoy catching up over your delicious Raymond's brunch special in peace, cuz I'm just gonna sit here all squishyface! NYERH!

Eeeee! Coming to get youuuuuu!

...and then there was this bear.

Happy Funtymes Weekend

I went up norf this weekend, firstly for the Northern Nightmares/Hub City Hell Razors bout, to see the Babybell, and then for Mr. Getting Married Soon Guy's bachelor party in the citay. And I documented my reality in pictures.

I stayed with my old roomie in the House of Antiquity. He's got some new old antiques, including this lovely slot machine! How  awesome is that? Rather, I think.

To The Starter Wife: I Am Miffed

Thanks to the magic of teh interwebs, I now watch a lot of TV from my computer via Hulu. I watched season 1 of USA's The Starter Wife this weekend. It's about the wife of a Hollywood studio exec who gets dumped and blah blah blah drama-cakes. It stars Debra Messing, and I like seeing her in anything except Will and Grace, where she was a little annoying, but anytime she gets to act like a normal person and isn't constantly yelping and mugging, I think she's fun to watch.



The upside of hulu tv watching is you can watch an entire season quickly. The downside is you can see the creators making sudden changes. It seems like they started making one show and then quickly retooled it all midstream. Around episode three, for example, Debra Messing starts to have vivid dream sequences based on well-known movie scenes. Eh, whatevs, it didn't bother me that much, although it wasn't exactly original or funny. (The show is on USA. Do they really have enough viewers to care enough to change the series? It's not like Lifetime does that...)



So, I got into it, I got into the characters a bit, and I like a couple of the actors a bunch. Specifically, Stephen Moyer, who plays the hot homeless beach bum that Debra Messing falls in love with. He's now the head hot vampire on True Blood, and he's a way better sexy vampire than sexy homeless guy, but you know, I'll watch him in whatever, I don't care.



I also really liked Peter Jacobson as the smarmy studio exec who dumps Debra Messing. I wish I had the skillz to hyperlink his name to his imdb page, cuz you probably don't know him by name, but you'd recognize him. Oh, and he's on House, I forgot about that. Anyways, he takes a role that could be very one-note and makes him, you know, many notes. As he's dumping Debra you look at him and you see that he really thinks this is the right choice for him, and you really think he believes his ex-wife will be ok with it, because she should only want what's best for him. He's awesome, basically.

Some not so great kid actor plays Debra Messing's daughter, and yeah, she's not so great, but never the less it was TOTALLY JARRING to move on to season 2 and see that they had replaced her with some other kid who a) looked nothing like the first kid, b) was way older than the first kid, and therefore not in keeping with the time frames set by the show, and c) was definitely NOT a better actor than the first kid. What the effing eff?

Even worse though, they replaced Peter Jacobson! What? Come on now! Ok, so maybe it was his choice to leave so he could be on a Fox show instead of a USA show, but still. It sucks. The two casting changes coupled with the heavy-handed stylistic changes make it impossible for me to watch now. My bar for tv watching is set pretty low, so, I think that's saying something.

Hmph. Pout.

Office Pictures

Yesterday I worked at a Native Alskan-Owned tech company. There were lil' stuffed seals on my desk. And that's really all there is to say about that.

If you have an idea for a story...

...and you tell someone about it before you're done writing it, does it die?

My mom and my sister and I were at a Border's yesterday, because my sister wanted to buy the latest Buffy comic. While we were hanging around waiting for her to be done buying it, we saw a woman sitting at a table with her new book. No one was lining up to buy her book, or get it signed, so she was doggedly/hopefully handing out bookmarks promoting the book, and she gave one to my mom and one to me.

The book was some sort of historical fiction fantasy about a mystical Egyptian bracelet falling into wrong hands. My mom made some comment about never wanting to read such a book, and I said, if she can write a book, why haven't I written a book already? And she said, well you've got the computer and lots of time on your hands, and I was like, this is true. Unemployment - an opportunity to write a damn book already.

So then I woke up this morning quite early with an idea for a young adult novel, and I wrote a page or so of it. Later today I told my mom I'd started writing my book, and she asked what it was about, and I told her, and then I was like, should I have not done that?

Something in me says one should keep one's good ideas to one's self until it's done, or at least until it's a draft. But then again, I crave attention for everything I write. This is one reason I don't keep a diary. It would never be secret enough. I'd want to have people read it, every entry as soon as it as written.

To compare writing to cooking, that's like making someone taste raw eggs on their way to becoming an omelette. On the other hand, I rarely write anything unless I know people are waiting to read it. So what's to do?

I'm going to keep writing this one. No seriously, I promise. If only because other people are not only totally writing books, they're totally getting them published and junk. Even if they're not that great. I want to do that.

Urgh, Shut UP! Or, Temping Continued.

So there was a week where the Large Nationally Known Temping Company didn't call me with any jobs. As much as I like not working, I actually do prefer to work, so I stepped up my cover-letter-writin', resume-submittin' game. I've been mostly focusing on Craigslist, cuz it's the cheapest and the best, imho, but I am registered with Careerbuilder, so I applied to a few on that. 

(Uploading a new resume on C.B. had the unfortunate side effect of re-alerting them to my presence. Despite me changing my address on the site, I now get daily email alerts and solications from employers in New Jersey. It's a hell of a commute.)

It seems that 85% of the jobs posted on C.B. are posted by temp companies. I applied to one job without really paying attention to who posted it, and the next day Small Indie Temp Company called me up. They asked how many tests I'd taken at Large Nationally Known Temping Company. I told them I'd taken a Word test and an Excel test, and the rep somewhat snottily said, 'Oh, I guess our competitors don't test as extensively as we do.' I said, 'No, but at least they have name recognition.' Despite my returned snottiness they invited me in to take their barrage of tests and interview with them.

I was actually a bit nervous about it all - they test Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Access, typing speed, spelling and arithmetic. I actually pulled up my Powerpoint for Mac before the interview and messed around a bit, and worried a tad over it. They also told me to plan to be there for three or four hours, and cautioned me not to use Google Maps to get to the office, because people who use Google Maps to get there get lost. I looked it up on Google Maps, and well, I think stupid people who use it get lost... I didn't have any problems tho'. 

When I got there they handed me the math'n'spelling test. It was not at all intimidating. The spelling test consisted of checking off words that were misspelled, and that was easy because I just looked for spellings I've seen on Craigslist. Redeculous, curoisity, excsept. The math was addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division. I haven't done long division since 8th grade but it wasn't too painful.

Then I got sent to the computer room to do the barrage of MS tests. Again, not that hard. You get 20 minutes for each test, and I finished each one in five or six minutes. Either you know the stuff or you don't. The Word test threw me because it was in Word 2007, and apparently they've done away with the menu options at the top toolbar in favor of pictures only. Whatevs. 

And then we got to the interviews... oh man. They made me take a Meyers-Briggs test. GROSS. I am not a fan. "On the weekend, do you prefer to: a) make a schedule of things to do, or b) do whatever seems fun at the time?" Um, depends on the weekend. "When solving a tricky problem, do you a) rely on your intuition to tell you what's right, or b) apply a logical, reasoned approach?" Um, depends on the problem. I finished it as fast as possible and tried to seem out-going, logical and spontaneous. I was laissez-faire because THE TEST IS MEANINGLESS. 

They treated it as gospel, tho'. The first chick who came in to interview me started explaining to me that I'm an ENTJ, and did that seem familiar to me. I was like, 'uhhhh, sure. Whatevz. Get to the part where you ask me where I'll be in five years.' So she did, and then she proceeded to talk about herself a lot. 

The second guy came in and was more bearable; he just checked my paper work and asked me what, if any, jobs I wouldn't do. No cold-calling please! Oh, and he did tell me how I did on the MS tests... and it turns out I only got 55% on the Word one, but it DOESN'T MATTER, because they know most people don't have the latest update; they just test it to see 'who's keeping up.' Lames. But anyway, he lulled me into a state of relaxation with his easy questions and not talking about himself. I was then ill-prepared for the last interviewer... the owner of the company.

Owner guy majorly pissed me off. Over the next HOUR, he proceeded to tell approximately fifty bad jokes, told me to try coming to my next interview sober, spoke to me in a bad russsian accent after reading that my emergency contact's name is Leonid, told me random stories about how he went to Falls Church High back when it was in Fall Church City and oh wow it's so tough to be old, told me I was a 'high E' on the Meyers-Briggs and that would really influence my placement, and told me I was a beautiful young woman. EW. I felt like pulling out the sexual harassment policy they made me sign and throwing it in front of him. I kept hoping for the interview to be over already but it just went on and on. He told me I was one of the smartest candidates to come in that year. I didn't say, "Wow, your bar is set pretty low then, seeing as all I did was spell at a fifth grade level and do some arithmetic." He just kept going on and on and on and on. I wanted to scream "Will you just please SHUT UP" but instead I had to be all, "Heh heh... yes. You, sir, are a card. Oh my. How amusing." Finally he was like, do you have any more questions? And I said no, and he said, "I wish I had another hour with you." Gross!

They better get me some work, cuz EW. 

Luckily afterwards I got to have a delightful lunch with Atomicate. And she bought me Tim Tams! The happiest cookie on earth! We also checked out the H'ween store. She thinks we should just get mascot heads, but I told her I'd rather be Sexy Darth Vader. (Plastic Darth Vader mask and a short skirt. Hell to the yeah!) It's a good thing I had funtymes with her after that grossness interview that is still grossing me out.