I've had so many things I've wanted to write about here, but in my head they keep forming as full stories--and when I come here I usually only have time to write a little, so I just haven't written anything. Sunday I wrote two big paragraphs but never posted them, and now they're just lost somewhere in disappeared-data-land. Oh well.
I've been wanting to write about my job at the growers'/landscapers, and also about what happened when the front tire on my bike caught a flat a couple weeks ago. To make two long stories short, 1) there are a lot of interesting characters at that job, and 2) I tried to use fix-a-flat on my bike tire (very bad idea), and then wandered into an auto parts store, where I bought a tire patch set. It was getting dark outside, so they let me bring my bike inside the store to try patching the flat there. One of their off-duty employees had come in with his two kids, saw me struggling with it, asked if I needed help (I admitted I did), and then just jumped in and started fixing it. Then P (my husband) got there (I'd called him to tell him what was going on), and the guy continued fixing my tire and we were all chatting. And it was really nice, somehow--just one of those times where you feel like there are still decent people to be found, at large, floating around fixing flat bike tires.
Today I had an orientation for my summer teaching job (teaching art 2x/week at a summer camp for middle school students) today, which was cool, and on the way back I decided to stop for coffee and to check my email at a coffee place that has free WiFi access (not Starbucks! yay!!). I ended up working on some stuff for an interview I have tomorrow (to teach at an elementary school for the upcoming school year) and a proposal for a project I want to do for next year (if I don't teach full time). I've been so unusually productive that it's like I'm afraid to leave--to go home and get distracted by the dogs and the mess and P and TV and piddling around the house.
Anyway, I slept a good 7 hours last night, but I'm just exhausted all of a sudden. And hey Toad, if you're reading this--what's up with the "sweet jesus" comment on my last entry? :) I know it's manual labor, which is fine, but that's still no reason to mistreat employees. And you CAN talk while you're weeding--it just makes it go a lot faster! (I say this good-naturedly.)
In related news, now when I close my eyes for any length of time, I see weeds. I weeded for like five hours yesterday. These weeds with hundreds of tiny leaves, and this weed called spurge. The weeding gets boring, but Tuesday I was weeding some seedling (?) thrinax radiata that were soooo matted and suffocated by weeds that it felt like I was freeing them and letting them breathe. So that was kind of satisfying.
Also, when I'm fertilizing (another sort of repetitive, tedious job, although it goes a lot quicker than weeding) I entertain myself by saying, "Eat, little planties, eat!" in a high voice and "Die, weeds, die!" in a deep voice. I do this quietly enough so that my boss or co-workers don't hear, which would be extremely embarassing.
Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness
This seems kind of skeevy to me...I'm all in favor of raising awareness of and destigmatizing mental illness and mental health issues, but the involvement of pharmaceutical companies and the fact that the initiative reportedly "promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs" scares me. Newer drugs (in my experience) don't seem to be as well-tested and can sometimes later be found to carry risks not known about at the beginning of their use.
I've been remiss in updating. I have a lot of stuff to write about, mostly little minutae of small but interesting things that have gone on during the week, but I've just been really exhausted in the evenings. Next week I'll only be at ye olde Nazi wholesale growers two days out of the week, so hopefully things will settle down and I won't be so darn wore out at night.
It's been really good for me though, I think--the woman I'm working for is a bit crazy, they treat all of us like incompetent peons, they pay a pitiful wage by any standards--but I've actually gotten my chronically late butt somewhere ON TIME at 8AM just about every day this week. I have a nice tan, and I'm working hard physically...which does great things for mental health (although worrying about being yelled at for chatting with one of your co-workers while you're weeding does not).
...is the name of the plant (or ornamental grass, if you're picky) that I potted all afternoon today. Actually, the technical term is to "split," not to pot. My new job is a part-time (two days a week) as a plant nursery/landscaping grunt for a woman who is a wholesale grower and sometime landscaper of tropical and subtropical plants including begonias, heliconias, plants and trees in the ginger family, ornamental grasses, and some vegetables and herbs. I am dying to get my hands on some boniato (sort of like the Cuban version of the sweet potato) and one of their big ol' potted rosemary plants. I asked the sub-honcho, a guy named Tony who is sort of second in command there, if there were employee discounts for plants, and he just laughed. (I finally found out that we can buy them at wholesale prices, which is pretty cool, I guess.)
Anyway, I will write more about the new trabajo (job) later tonight, hopefully. I got a crazy sunburn today, and standing up and working with plants all day has made me sore in muscles I didn't even know I had (like the sides of my hips, for example?).
Today was a weird day of many different things--ended up doing a lot of stuff, really mundane stuff, but a lot anyway. I'll write more about it during the next couple of days.
I start a new job tomorrow--I'll write more about that then, too.
In the meantime, I have to get some sleep, as I have to wake up early for the new job.
I chronically go to bed late. I hate this. I really need to go to bed around 11 or 11:30 in order to get up at the time I want to get up (6:30-7:30), but I always end up sabotaging myself.
Didn't mean for this post to come off so gloomy--really, things are OK. Actually, better than OK. More later.
As I mentioned earlier in the blog, I started this for part of an assignment (to start a personal blog) for my Multimedia Narratives class at the New School. I definitely want to continue keeping it, but I've had a lot of conflicting feelings about this, mostly because classmates and friends might be reading it. The other blogs I've kept have been mostly private, or at least private between me and whatever strangers online might have been reading them--I didn't direct friends or acquaintances to those blogs as I have with this one.
Anyway, one of my classmates wrote really eloquently about this on her blog, so much so that I want to quote it here:
Hey all. I admit I am finding this blogging exercise excruciating. What to reveal, what not to reveal. What these decisions say about me. Who's reading? How can this information be used against me? How can I use it against myself? Why do people do this? It is like keeping a journal for exhibitionists, except without necessarily, getting a reaction from the audience...
...And yet, there's the drive to communicate, in whatever way I can. I think it is a human need to express oneself. Writing is easiest for me. I can communicate effectively in person but I find it comes at a cost to the personal, there is a veneer that comes into being that shelters the things I really think and feel.
I couldn't help but notice this little chat snippet in the tBLURT! box to the right (doesn't show up here, but you can see it if you go to the main tBLOG site): "RoXyRoXmiiSoX says: Hey yall...how do u gets da music in ya TBlog? " Oh dear. I know this could be perceived as petty, but I'm thinking of moving from tBLOG to Typepad.
Paco and I participated in the surplus fest of capitalist gulag that is Costco this afternoon.
Actually, I am so not too snotty for Costco. They sell huge quantities of stuff for cheap, you can save a lot of money, and if you go on a busy Saturday afternoon, you can sample a lot of free food.
Tonight I went to see NE 2nd Avenue with a friend I hadn't really hung out with much before. It was nice. And the performance was really good, too. It reminded me a lot of another great play/performance piece about Miami that I saw a few years ago, Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami. Both performances sketch portraits of the various cultures and ethnicities that make up Miami, and explore the connections between them--including historical and cultural links as well as racism and preconceptions between ethnic groups.
Aside from that, I'm in a really bad, grumpy mood right now and I'm not sure why. I think part of it is that I really want to watch TV, but ever since our cable service mysteriously appeared (we didn't order it) and then disappeared, we haven't been able to configure the antennas on our TVs in a satisfactory way. We can't get decent reception on practically any channels, and to get any reception at ALL it depends on the exact precise positioning of the antenna in relation to your location in the room. If you move or someone walks into another spot in the room, it just buzzes and pops back into static.
It's really annoying.
Was going to write more, but I don't feel like it. So there.
I was asked to volunteer and did, and then got to see this for free.
I got to talk to a couple of other really nice people who do community arts work, and now my head is buzzing with ideas. (Not dance-related though.)
Now I'm watching The Ice Storm, fresh from Netflix. Christina Ricci looks so cute and little, and normal in this movie. I think she's had a nose job or something since then.
Katta is watching the movie with me, curled up next to her Scooby-Doo toy, which is almost as big as her.
Mood has improved a bit...it got worse before it got better.
Chandra, I don't know if you're reading this, but I tried to call you (finally) a couple of hours ago--but the answering machine came on and I didn't leave a message. I'll try you again later.
A final linky-link for today:
Some funny, but practical thoughts on blogging and health concerns on another tBLOGger's blog--especially good for those of us who spend way too much time on the computer. The main blog is at npera2.tblog.com and has a ton of links about education, blogging, and technology.
I am so frustrated right now. Have you ever had one of those days when every single thing you try to accomplish is impeded by some stupid thing like clutter getting in the way or the fax machine not working or a slow computer or someone not picking up after themselves or just plain distraction? I am ready to kill EVERYTHING.
I recently joined an online book club that just started out of an online community I'm a member of. We're reading Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives, by Anna Fels. The author is a psychiatrist, and the book explores the development of ambition and achievement in women from psychological, cultural, historical, and sociological perspectives, especially in light of women's changing roles and what seems to be a wider--but often conflicting--variety of options open to women.
I'm excited about the book so far, and I'm also really excited about being in a book club. My first contact (that I know of) with anyone who participated in a book club was a former boss at one of my first jobs shortly after moving to Miami--I was working at a here-unnamed regional association of grantmakers. She once hosted her lunchtime book club meeting in the conference room of our office building, complete with a spiffy catered lunch. I was intrigued by this group of lunching ladies gathering to discuss books at noon--"We're reading the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," admitted my boss, somewhat sheepishly, "but we usually read things that are more along the lines of real literature." Ohhhhh, I see. Once the ladies had left, I was encouraged to run along and scavenge some leftovers. This was a particularly threadbare time in my life, so I was thrilled to score several helpings of monster-size boiled shrimp.
Oh, who am I kidding--"was a threadbare time in my life"--hell, if someone told me to run along and snag some shrimp right now, I'd be stuffing them in my pockets.
But I guess that maybe what I'm saying is that I associate book clubs with shrimp--and that I like the idea of, as an adult, belonging to a club (or at least one that doesn't involve golf, expensive fees, and racism). As a chubby second-grader, I was obsessed with the girly clubs that dotted my childhood pop culture landscape--The Babysitters Club, The Barbie Club (it had a secret handshake, consisting of aligning the back of your hand with the back of the other person's hand and lightly locking thumbs--which I later realized was only to accomodate the fact that Barbies can't move their hands). I was constantly inventing my own clubs and trying to round up members, but usually got no more than one or two: The Friendship Club, the Pink Ladies Club.
I guess I'll have to think more about this later to try to figure out why I like the idea of clubs now--or at least just book clubs, anyway. Honestly, I'd rather just think about shrimp.
But seriously, I'll definitely be writing more about the Fels book as I make headway with the reading. I'm excited about that.
Finally, can I tell you what the best thing about Mozilla is? It's the fact that you can undo and redo edits and deletes when typing in forms and text boxes in the browser. I can't tell you how many times--when using some other browser--I've just finished typing some long, heartfelt discussion board post or blog entry, only to send it off into information oblivion due to some hapless strike of the delete button. And then I'd be screwed. But with Mozilla, that doesn't happen anymore! (Envision me smiling brightly, with a big twinkly glimmer coming from one tooth, followed by a sprightly DING! sound)
Called "webnevesht?" And it's not just official government stuff, either. Check it out, it's pretty spiffy-looking.
I found it courtesy of blogosfera.org, a collaboratively authored spanish-language blog (why didn't I think to look at those before? there's great stuff in spanish out there, if you can read it) about blogs and blogging.
Paco does something that incites fury between our two dogs.
I hate to bring in the semi-lameness of posting dog pictures so soon into the life of this blog, but there have been three doggy squabbles since Paco got home and I think he causes them somehow. He claims he's not doing anything specific to bring this on. It's actually terrifying to me because they start barking and growling furiously at each other and I'm afraid one of them is going to get hurt eventually.
Paco was dressing up Minha in a babushka-like piece of fabric like this:
And then for some reason it looks like Katta gets jealous, or takes offense, or something. This photo isn't from today, and in the picture they're just playing or wrestling as opposed to actually fighting, but when they do rassle for real it looks kind of like this:
No rasterization needed--I'd just sized it wrong. I increased the height of the header image. Voila.
I rode my bike around and did some errands today--this helped a lot with my anxiety. Although I'm still grinding my teeth right now, ugh.
More later! (Don't you love when you find web/blog/journal sites, last updated, in like, 1999, with those very words? "More later!" "Will update again very soon!" And that last-ever update to the page, those little phrases so full of optimism, just hang there all forlorn, or else taunting...)
Oops! I forgot to do something fontly to the header I just made. I'm sort of learning to use Fireworks for working with graphics, and the fuzzy text from the header could be cuz I forgot to rasterize or whatever the Fireworks equivalent of that is.
I'll fix it later--I gotta go to sleep now!
edited to add: Why is it showing I posted that at I said I needed to go to sleep at 10:13 AM? (or thereabouts) I guess I need to adjust the time settings on ye olde blogge here.
(that meant: "this old blog here" in fake Old English. hee.)
Making my slightly less anonymous blogging debut...
I decided to go with good ol' tBLOG for my latest incursion into the blog world. The added bonus for this blog is that it's part of an assignment for my Multimedia Narratives course, towards my M.A. in Media Studies at the New School.
I'm sort of excited about this. I'd been thinking about starting a new personal blog anyway, wanting to make a new start after the quasi-medical drama of the last one.
I want this to also be sort of health-oriented, but also to be about plain old regular life, family, things I love and want to do, music, film, TV, and my freakish penchant for ratpacking information off the internet. And a way to stay in touch with my friends, and stuff.
"Fairytale in the Supermarket" is a reference to the Raincoats song of the same title.
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