I had an interesting conversation with the good doctor on Friday night regarding my high levels of cynicism and pessimism. He was asking me about my reasons for not wanting to be a wife and mother… and I mentioned that knowing my own selfishness and being aware of my sense of responsibility, I would completely resent HAVING to be responsible for a being that was totally dependent upon me for everything and for which I would be totally responsible. That’s a special sort of hell for me.

We talked about gender roles and responsibilities, cultural influences on those (old school European versus what I’ve come to believe living in this day and age), and other fun stuff. Then came this question, “But wouldn’t you want to have a child so that some part of you could go on? So that there would be someone to inherit your intelligence and personality?”

I replied that a) there is no guarantee of my positive traits being passed on, b) I have no desire to propagate myself, c) I’m fine with not “living on” because I’m quite all right with the ephemeral nature of life and the impermanence of things and d) if I want permanence, I can write a book.

He nodded, jotted some notes, and then said, “You’re really cynical.” This has been discussed before, but I think the depth of it was a surprise. And the fact that I am this cynical while still having a sense of humor and retaining a sense of humanity. We talked about how those two aspects of my personality can co-exist… because they are, strictly speaking, in conflict with one another and should not harmonize. I came to a little bitty realization - one that I’ve been aware of externally, but didn’t apply to myself.

I’ve always been drawn to things that contain or convey a sense of conflict or contradiction, and usually in subtly humorous style. Happy-sounding songs that, if you listen to the lyrics, are about serial killers or obsession or suicide. Movies that seem to be light and happy or even for children and are, on viewing and understanding, quite dark. Books and stories - classic fairy tales, novels, whatever - that present some very dark or disturbing themes in the guise of happy frou-frou or vice versa… that use a dark or disturbing storyline to talk about something very light, or mock the darkness in that way. Artwork that uses a childish or naive style to depict death or destruction (I instantly think of Mark Ryden’s paintings).

I don’t think it’s all that dissonant, really - being a nice and human person doesn’t mean I can’t also be a complete cynic. My cynicism is reserved for my personal beliefs, feelings and life; everyone else gets the ‘judgment free’ treatment. If your wishes, hopes, dreams and beliefs are different from mine, that’s all they are: different. Not bad or inferior or stupid. If you get what you’re hoping for, I am genuinely happy for you. I can appreciate that we’re not all cut from the same weird-ass cloth.

Anyway, it’s another sleepless night. I can’t get comfortable, I can’t find the right room temp or pillow softness or book or TV show or music or silence to help me sleep. So I’m writing until my brain isn’t whirring constantly anymore.

I watched a really cool version of the “Faust” story today; Jan Svankmajer’s “Faust”. I think I’ll need to watch it a few more times and perhaps read up a bit on the Faust legend to see if any of the film elements are taken from minutiae in the legend. I know I have a copy of the Marlowe version of “Faust” the drama in an anthology from my college days… but it’s a bit late at night to start shuffling through bookshelves looking for it.

I shall content myself with flipping through the channels until I get tired enough to konk out.

I don’t know why, but I have a special place in my heart (and stomach, apparently) for the homestyle Indian cheese known as paneer. While I’m up for pretty much anything in an Indian restaurant (save the vindaloo - my nose starts running after mild food, so I’d be a mess if I tried anything legitimately spicy) I keep going back to paneer dishes because they’re so darned tasty. I met my friend for dinner tonight and we had Indian food; she’s eating vegan for the weeks prior to her wedding to insure the dress fits comfortably and, not surprisingly, the nearby chain restaurants didn’t have anything she could eat without sacrificing more than half of the ingredients. It’s all just as well; I prefer ethnic food to chain restaurants any day.

I was supposed to have a doctor’s appointment today, but my early train home was delayed since some fool (and yes, feel free to adopt the Mr. T voice right there) drove through the railroad crossing barrier a few stations ahead of where my train was stopped and we had to wait until the police arrived to direct traffic. The car that drove through the barrier broke it off; it was lying in the street, looking like a big smashed-up candy cane. I know this because when we finally got moving (after standing in one place for 20 minutes) we were traveling at a very slow speed and I was able to observe the police officer standing at the train tracks with his hand up. Because, I suppose, people are stupid enough that if the cop stood there with a train on the tracks behind him, they’d try to drive through anyway. The “halt” hand might’ve been a form of idiot insurance.

Thus, I did make it to the doctor’s office and my cell phone battery was dead, so I couldn’t call to say I was running late until I was already REALLY late and I just rescheduled. I have another different doctor’s visit tomorrow night, so that’s just peachy.

SO - some discoveries for this fine spring day (24 degrees in the morning, 60 when I got home, and raining)…

• For my money, the best author blog out there at the moment is Neil Gaiman’s Journal. He = hilarious. My little brain crush on Mr. Gaiman has increased to a massive brain crush with this short line from his entry today:

“Why am I still up and writing this? Why aren’t I in bed. Anybody sensible would be in bed. It’s almost two in the morning.”

So glad I ordered my ticket for the PEN Event at Town Hall. I’ll get to hear Salman Rushdie, Steve Martin, Don DeLillo, Nadine Gordimer and Neil Gaiman, all in the same night. Wowie. All appeal to very different delights of mine, but all are wonderful. I think, however, the two most exciting individuals to see will be Rushdie and Gaiman.

[singing]I’m a little nerd girl, short and stout…

• The MOST AWESOME BROWNIE PAN in the WORLD!!!

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame is also gaining points on the Researchgirl Brain Crush chart (which I might have to create now). While this link was submitted by another Boing-er (hmmm - wonder if they call themselves anything), Cory chose to post up info about a “labyrinthine” brownie pan. Take a look.

It’s not cheap at $34, but it’s such a wonderful idea in the “I can’t believe no one thought of this sooner” vein. There was even a review from “Cooking for Engineers” which informs us, “For the edge lovers, the brownies from the Baker’s Edge were perfect - chewy edges surrounding a moist chocolate brownie. ”

• CuteOverload NEVER disappoints. It’s like having the perfect thing for lunch every day when you didn’t know what you were in the mood for to begin with. Like this, for example? I think I didn’t stop smiling for about 10 minutes at work.

I know there’s more, but I just realized that it’s 11:30 (since I’ve been intermittently browsing and writing and browsing… oops).

Just ordered a ticket from ticketmaster for this event. I’ll go alone; I don’t care. I’m that girl.

April 25 | Town Hall
Readings: Writing Home
When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: The Town Hall: 123 West 43rd St.
What time: 8 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

With Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya, Saadi Youssef

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members
Purchase tickets from The Town Hall, (212) 840-2824 or Ticketmaster, (212) 307-4100

Oh, yeah. It’s the Wednesday before my friend’s wedding, but it’s not like I’m going clubbing and will be toasted afterwards or anything. I’ll even drive into Hoboken so I don’t have to worry about catching a train afterwards.

…and while my family may consider me to be useless, by and large, I come in handy sometimes. Tonight, my success was as negotiator (or arm-twister, depending on how you stand on the matter), protector of younger sisters and quick cook/Hausfrau.

Of course, my family being my family, all packing was left until the very very last minute. As in, 45 minutes after they were supposed to leave for the airport. I was talking with my friend at lunch today and I mentioned that they were planning on leaving for the airport at 7:30, which translates into 8:30 “Family Standard Time”. They left at 8:20, so I wasn’t far off.

On my way home (6:30), I got a call from my sister asking me if I would prepare some sort of dinner for them so they could eat before leaving for the airport. They were on their way back from the store (an hour before their planned departure) so I said fine and whipped up one of my old stand-by quick-but-delicious meals: Thai-style peanut chicken (recipe is on the site, actually). I defrosted chicken breast, chopped it up, sauteed it, let it cook-through for a bit, added peanut butter, salsa, lime juice, cilantro and some water… then let it simmer. Meanwhile, I had some instant Spanish rice going (because there wasn’t much I could with real rice in the time I had) and I served up the lot in a total of 20 minutes. And that’s a damn tasty meal for that amount of time. If I’d been able to find some frozen vegetables downstairs, I could’ve made some broccoli or sugar snap peas or something. Oh, well. I cooked and then had to fight to get them all to leave their suitcases for five minutes to eat. They fought me, but I told them that five minutes at this point would not make a difference and that they’d feel a lot better if they ate. As often happens, I was right.

Meanwhile, there was a huge “to-do” since my father asked my sister at the last minute (if nothing else, they are consistent) to bring something in her carry-on for him. This something was a new $1000 digital camera for a relative. In its original packaging. Which measured about 10″ high and wide and a foot and a half long, thereby taking up ALL the room in her carry-on and weighing about 15 pounds. My sister was freaking out since she couldn’t bring anything else in that bag as a result and my father would not hear of her NOT doing it (did I mention that it was a favor he was asking her to do?). She took it out of her bag and said she was NOT bringing it because she needed her carry-on for her stuff. My father promptly started going through her carry-on and throwing out items he felt were unnecessary for her to carry… her book, sketchpad, colored pencils, etc.

At this point, I stepped in and told him to stop rifling through her bag since that was her stuff and she was doing him a favor in agreeing to bring it, and to suggest that we unpacked the camera and packed up the smaller constituent boxes inside the main box (since all small electronics are victims of egregious over-packaging - except for the newer generations of iPods. That packaging is great).

Of course, this was unacceptable because he wanted the camera to be presented nicely. Now, if I was getting an expensive digital camera from a relative, I wouldn’t care whether they left it in the original box or put it in a paper lunch sack - it’s a friggin’ NICE camera. But he’s got stubbornness and pride and a need to play alpha dog (that coveted trifecta) so it’s out of the question to present an expensive gift in any fashion that would seem to cheapen it.

He flipped out and then got huffy and informed us that if they didn’t want to bring it, then fine. In the end, they were able to reorganize some things and place the ridiculously huge camera box in my brother’s carry on, my sister took some of his carry on items, and all was moderately well.

Now they’re off doing their thing for about a week and I’ll be here, stuck doing Hausfrau stuff… or not. I am planning on spending as little time at home as possible, even if that means I have to spend every night at the bookstore, reading. I don’t want to be subjected to constant needling and whining about housework that needs to be done (and which an adult male is completely capable of doing), getting bugged to make dinner, do dishes that aren’t mine, do laundry that’s not mine, etc. It’s one of the reasons I don’t see myself cut out for married or family life.

I can’t believe it’s already/only Wednesday. The week has been both never ending and speeding by. I feel like the two days left in this week are far too little time, but that the past three days have been interminable. I don’t think it’s work stress but a culmination and combination of everything going on.

Sigh. And shaking the head… and over it. I think I shall give myself a nice manicure tonight.

I am so tired, but still have so much stuff to do… freelance work, work work, and then some bill paying and balancing of the checkbook (that last one is all in spreadsheet format so I won’t have to worry about messing up simple math).

I’ve spent the last hour resizing photos in Photoshop to make them more web-friendly as well as creating thumbnail versions of the resized images. So two times the work, really. But it’s necessary for this freelance job. Just tiring.

Now I’m going to do what I used to do when I couldn’t stare at the screen any longer while writing papers back in my college days; I will print out my work-work so I can write on it while laying in bed. I can type it up at the office tomorrow, but my eyes just won’t hold out any longer in front of this screen.

Ugh ugh ugh. Today is just a crazy day and a long day (not a crazy long day which would imply that the length of the day was crazy and would fail to capture the dual craziness and length). It started off with no parking at the train station and the conductor holding the train for me while I frantically drove backwards through the lot double-checking to make sure I hadn’t overlooked any spots; I hadn’t. There was just no parking, so I ended up spending time, money and fuel on driving in to work. It’s fine when it’s planned, but this sucked since I could’ve slept in an extra half hour if I’d known.

Enough whining. Work to do.

Today, the cleaning muse came for a visit. I don’t know how else to describe it; just as a muse might come and inspire me to write or paint or create, I was inspired to organize and clean today.

Part of it might be psychological; I’ve felt more and more organized in terms of finances and other stuff lately, so it’s almost a natural progression to bring some of this outwards. Another part of it is necessity; I have mapped out a physical fitness routine and I need some space back in my room to do it. I have storage boxes for putting away winter clothing and stuff taking up many feet of footprint space on my floor. Once those are gone (or at least stacked up neatly to take up less floor space) I’ll have room for my yoga mat and even enough space to jump rope for a few minutes each day.

My cleaning progress isn’t immediately apparent, but that’s because there was lots of organization going on as a precursor to the massive cleaning effort that I will embark upon tomorrow and this week. I found room for the four two-foot tall stacks of books I had on my desk and bedside table. It meant clearing shelves of other stuff (decorative teapots, wine bottles, tins of tea) and moving them or storing them elsewhere. But now all the books have homes.

It’s dangerous territory, though. I might have to review my library and take some books that I wasn’t entirely jazzed about and give them away. There’s a bookshelf in the cafeteria at work where people can put books that they want to get rid of but don’t want to throw away. It’s a great place to give away books you don’t have the heart to throw away — just because you didn’t love them doesn’t mean they’re horrible. I can also release them into the wild per BookCrossing (I’d have to order some of the bookplates first) but I’d have to do that with books that I liked but wasn’t 100% enthused about. I wouldn’t want to fob off the real dawgs on other book lovers and make them hate me. If I felt lukewarm about something, chances are there’s someone else who’d love it (I don’t really operate on extremes).

So… uh… yeah.

I need to buy some stuff - like work shoes and shoes to wear to the wedding and shapewear to wear under the dress I’m wearing to the wedding and some more appropriate spring attire. I’m heading to some stores tomorrow night with my mum since she needs to do some pre-travel shopping.

The majority of my family is leaving for Poland later this week which means I’ll be spending the better part of two weeks home alone with my dad, avoiding the house so that I’m not drafted for what will end up being servitude. The scenario will be something like this (dialogue translated from the original Polish):

Me: (Returns home after long day at work and train ride home, shuffling through mail on the kitchen counter, wondering what to have for dinner.)
Father: (Hears noise in kitchen and walks in. Sees that it’s me.) Hello.
Me: Hi.
Father: So… did you just get home?
Me: Yup.
Father: That was a long day. Are you getting paid overtime?
Me: (With slight exasperation since we’ve had this conversation 8 millions times and he knows I’m salaried) Nope, I’m salaried but my boss is really good about giving me comp time off.
Father: Well, that’s good. (silence for a few seconds) So what are you going to have for dinner?
Me: I dunno. Probably cereal.
Father: That’s not a real dinner. (silence for a few beats) Why don’t you make some pork chops or chicken cutlets or something? I could go for something like that. I’ve only had a can of soup for dinner myself.

So, instead of figuring out how to prepare food for himself now that he’s totally retired and has upwards of 8 hours of free time every day, he will wait until I get home at 7 or 8 pm and try to get me to make him a dinner then.

Let’s just wait and see how that goes for him, huh?

In case you’re not hep with the jive, this little video is talking about paradigm shifts - and our past, present and future in the new “globalized” world.

I’m glad that I have the friends I have. Today, I spent the day with my friend and then we had dinner with her boyfriend. I drove to dinner since she drove around all day and when we got back to their house, the random song shuffle on my iPod brought up one of the songs I’m sometimes tempted to remove from my iPod: “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. My friends both looked startled and asked, “Is this a boy band song?”

I replied, “Yes. But listen! It’s fun to pantomime.”

And I proceeded to do my crazy pantomime/partial sing-along to the song. They got into the act, too, and were singing the chorus with me.

Why was this so important to me? They let me be a weirdo freak and even enjoyed this display of utter silliness with me. I didn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed or foolish for doing it… or for knowing all the words… and harmonies… and having gestures and moves for pretty much every word and phrase.

Yeah. Friends who not only let you be your wacky self but revel in your being your wacky self are the best. Yay, friends!

Also nice today was that we spent the day shopping. We spent the hours between 1:30 and 5:30 walking around the mall, then from 5:30 to 8:00 walking around some other stores. The mall portion was our luxury bit. We both found shades of Chanel nail polish that we really liked, so we each got a bottle (I got Black Satin, which is finally back as the season is now over, and she got a shimmery shade called Wonderland). Then we both got some chocolatey treats from the Godiva store.

Then we went to Marshall’s where I used the rest of the gift certificate I got for Christmas on some 2 pound medicine balls (for completing my at-home occupational therapy exercises), a windproof London Fog umbrella (with the little flaps that let the wind pass through the umbrella rather than blowing it inside-out) and a really cute kimono style wrap shirt. I’ll have to wear a camisole underneath since it ends up being a little low on the chest, but that’s OK. I’m willing to do that.

I don’t think I mentioned that I have now been successfully discharged from occupational therapy and have been given the OK by the doctor. I have some home exercises to continue doing, but things are settled for now. I go back in three months for a new X-ray. That’s it, though. I am excited because I can start getting some exercise into my daily routine because I won’t be working crazy hours and getting home at crazy hours from therapy or from work after staying late to make up for therapy. I’ll have to work on modifying my Pilates and yoga routines to find exercises I can do without putting any weight on my wrist (because that’s one thing I cannot do - just yet, anyway) and still get a full workout. The treadmill is one thing, but the weights and Pilates and other stuff are really what I think did the trick the last time I lost lots of weight. And I would like to lose a lot of weight by November.

Why?

There’s a very important formal event for work happening in November and it would be nice to feel confident in an evening dress. I don’t need to be a size 2 - but I would like to fit into some of the size 8 evening/cocktail dresses I already own and never had the opportunity to wear. Yeah, I bought some without having an event in mind - but I have been lucky to buy classic styles that would work just as well now as they did when I bought them 3 or 4 years ago.

This is a night for watching “Mary Poppins.” I’m going to get on that.

An Italian friend shared this with Polish me on St. Patrick’s Day. According to the man at the diner this morning, everyone is Irish today.
Erin go bragh. Yeah.

There’s crazy snow and ice coming down outside. I see seven inches or so outside of my window and I heard the most pessimistic/realistic traffic report ever tonight: “It’s a nightmare out there.” Right on, chum. Telling it like it is.

So I’m tired since it took an hour and 45 minutes to make the 20 minute drive home from work (they closed the offices early, so that was on my side…) and I am being lazy and inserting code from an online quiz.

Your Birthdate: April 4

You have an extraordinary character - moral, responsible, and disciplined. Your sincerely and honesty shine through in almost every situation. Driven and focused, you rarely let your emotions get the better of you. You’re level headed and rational. People count on your to look at things objectively.Your strength: Your unwavering loyalty and ethics Your weakness: Your rock solid stubbornness Your power color: Navy blue Your power symbol: Shield Your power month: April

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?