I am writing words now, so technically, yes, it does seem to be true, but the true test will come momentarily when I return to the thing I actually need to be writing.

The thing that I need to be writing has the potential to be sort of a big deal (to me) and I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it’s taking up all of my time.

Oh, also? I applied for a professor job at a community college today. That I am willing to talk about, but I find myself with very little to say. I filled out an application, wrote a page about why I’d be good at the job, a page about my teaching philosophy, and then submitted the whole shebang along with my resume and transcript. It was very exciting – but it’s possible that I’m letting Community cloud my judgement. Anyway, even if Jeff Winger doesn’t show up, I think it’s a job I would both enjoy and perform well.

That is if psychic detective is completely off the table.

P.S. Our toilet is bound and determined to run, and it’s going to drive me fucking insane. In my townhouse the toilet ran but a) you could fix it by jiggling the handle and b) I always blamed it on the ghost that lived there with me, so it never really affected my life. This? This is either my fault, Crockett’s fault, or no one’s fault, and when one is faced with a running toilet, one does not simply blame no one. And the handle jiggle is completely useless. It’s very irritating.

Not daydreams of walking through Parisian streets – actual dreams in which I’m part of some group that has a trip planned.

In these dreams, I never even make it on the plane, much less all the way to Europe.

In last night’s version, I packed a bag but forgot pants, and then followed a GPS thing to the airport and ended up in Colorado Springs – more than 100 miles from DIA.

Sometimes I arrive at the airport and can’t find a place to park. Sometimes the airport is a maze.

Sometimes, I have an out of body experience where I watch everyone else milling around the gate, getting on the plane (which is always luxurious), and generally not caring where I am.

I can’t imagine what these dreams might mean.

Maybe I should just go to Paris.

By pee sensor, I mean the little strip inside your bladder that they designed to emulate the little strip inside a gas tank. You know, the one that tells you when you’re full up or running on empty. (You know – ‘them’. The designers of body parts.)

What? Is that little strip not a real thing?

Ok, I see where you’re coming from. Bladders are not gas tanks. They’ve been around longer, for one thing. If anything, gas tanks were based on bladders rather than vice versa.

But still, there’s clearly something going on in there that tells you when you need to pee, right? It might just be a pressure thing, I guess. When you start to fill up, your bladder skin starts to stretch and then a ‘hey we’re stretching cause of pee’ message to your brain, and then you start to plan your next bathroom trip. I guess.

My college did not offer any courses in biology.

Not that that’s clear from what you read above.

Anyway, you know how when you’re going downhill (or uphill, depending on the design of your car), it looks like you have less gas than you have? My route to school is very very hilly, and when I’m running low, my gas light will flicker off and on the whole way there.

My bladder is clearly on an uphill slant.

I don’t have to pee, don’t have to pee, don’t have to pee…. HAVE TO PEE RIGHT NOW DEAR LORD IN PEE-PEE HEAVEN.

It’s terrible.

I wonder where they sell new pee sensors. Probably not in the automotive section of Target.

This scooter, to be exact.

I wanted one too…

so I took some pictures to see how I looked.

Awesome, is the answer.

When my mom was doing the actual purchasing, the woman behind the counter mentioned that she knows someone who has the same names as my mom (Catherine Rose).

My mom told her that when we were growing up, I had a friend who had a little sister whose name was also Catherine Rose. She turned to me and said, ‘you remember, Brian blah-didee-blah’s little sister?’

When I was about five, Brian blah-didee-blah lived in our neighborhood. I remember exactly three things about him.

1. He was in Boy Scouts.
2. He had a wooden fence in front of his house.
3. This one time I kissed him and then his family moved away and I thought it was my fault.

Let’s revisit that last one. I kissed him (on the cheek, I think, but still – a kiss), and then they moved. Like the next week. I didn’t even see him again, that I remember.

I’m sure that his parents had been planning the move. I might have even heard about it, at some point, and forgotten. Five year old brains are not known for their fact retention, you know?

It’s just that the timing made me think that it was linked. I kissed him and then they left.

It wasn’t until the day at the scooter store that I remembered this whole thing. I apparently just decided it was my fault and moved on. Until last week, I never revisited the event as an adult, to relieve my five year old self of culpability. There was just a little part of my brain that thought that I forced an entire family out of their hometown.

So, Brian, even though I know now that it’s unlikely that my slutty five year old ways drove you away, I want to apologize for the fact that I apparently thought that they did for 25 years and failed to feel guilty about it.

I hope that new town worked out for ya.

I have a meeting and a … well, a nothing really – a class in which I’ve already taken the final is meeting this afternoon, and part of our grade is participation, so I do have another class but really just as a warm body. After that, though, I get to leave campus.

I am not taking any classes over the summer. I would, but none of the courses I need are offered and since I’m most likely  not going to do thesis work, thesis credits aren’t going to do me any good. Assuming I do decide to come back to school in the fall (which it’s looking like I will, because I started this grad school thing and damned if I ain’t going to finish it), I won’t have homework again until the last week of August (classes start on 8/23).

That’s 15 weeks from now.

15 weeks.

I’ll be working, of course, but for the same woman I work for now and mostly from home. I’ll be teaching some middle schoolers and presenting at a few conferences, but it won’t be anything like 8-5. I have fifteen weeks stretching out in front of me in which I am almost entirely in control of my own schedule. If I wanted to leave town for weeks on end, I could probably do so. I can’t remember the last time I had this much free time. Probably the summer before my junior year as an undergrad – the summer between my junior and senior years I was either in Turkey or working full time at the Department of Commerce all summer.

I want to be elated.

I think tomorrow I’ll be elated.

Today I’m just worn out.

I didn’t give grad school enough credit for difficulty. I mean, I knew that it would be hard, but I think that at soem point between graduating in 2002 and walking into class last August, I forgot what actual mental commitment was like. I thought that some of my work environments were challenging, but I’ve since realized that I was being intellectually lazy the entire time I was professionally employed. That’s not to say I wasn’t doing a good job – I just wasn’t learning anything. Certainly not learning in the skull stretching headache inducing way that comes from 16 weeks of constant lectures and homework.

I made it, I did. I can do another year.

Probably.

Ask me in 15 weeks.

So. Obviously, an example is forthcoming. I’m working on this presentation. My guidelines for the presentation consisted of a single sentence – ‘show things that high school students can do to prepare themselves for computer science in college, other than taking CS in high school’.

Fine. I took that sentence and ran with it.

What I came up with wasn’t directionally identical to what the person who asked me for it originally had in mind. Hold on while I read that sentence again…. ok, I’m going to call it good and move on. Confusing, sure, but sometimes I’m confusing okay JEESH.

So sure, what I came up with wasn’t quite what she wanted. Fine.

She told me that slowly, over ten or fifteen sentences, with little compliments strewn in between, and a concerned look on her face.

You’re not telling me I have incurable cancer of the toe, lady, you’re telling me that my understanding of your short instruction is different from how you intended it. You are telling me that now, during the last two weeks of the semester, I have to start something over again, which sucks, but it’s not TOE CANCER.

I don’t actually know if toe cancer is a thing, by the way. You can get cancer anywhere, right?

I wouldn’t have minded if she’d been like hey, this isn’t what I was going for – sorry for the confusion but let’s get this fixed. Instead she acted like I was unbalanced.

Which I’m not.

Obviously. Because rants like this always come from completely balanced people.

It’s just, if something is wrong, being babied while I’m told about it makes it worse. I’m a rip-off-the-bandaid, tell-me-I-smell-right-when-you-notice-it-and-then-make-a-joke-about-it kind of girl.

What makes you irrational angry?

Not, like, as a career (although do we talk a lot about that). More like what you do, during the day. Like right now, I’m sitting on a couch, watching Family guy, sipping wine, and writing this post (yes, I probably published this Tuesday morning – rest assured that I didn’t write it Tuesday morning).

My friend, as I understand it, is of the opinion that certain things are sort of a waste of her time. Television, for example.

I don’t really understand how that whole attitude came about. I’m not calling her out, specifically. This is a widely held opinion and one that I frequently fall prey to. Reading is better than the radio, which is better than tv. Writing is better than reading. Meditating is, perhaps, better than writing. Working is better than meditating. Volunteering is better than working.

In some cases, this totally works. If you’re supposed to be working and someone is paying you for the outcome, you maybe shouldn’t be watching tv.

In other cases, though, I’m a little confused. Why, exactly, is reading better than watching tv? Really?

I was trying to relate this to sexual predilections the other night when talking to Crockett, and I wasn’t quite successful in my comparison. I was trying to say that we (we being cool people) have reached the conclusion that whatever weird sex people like is fine, as long as they’re doing it with other people who also like it and want to be there. The same cool people should be ok with whatever you do in your spare time, as long as you want to be doing it and aren’t hurting yourself in any major way (skipping work repeatedly to watch tv probably counts as hurting yourself).

As I said, doesn’t quite hold up.

Anyway, why is watching tv a worse way to spend your than reading? Or listening to the radio a worse way to spend your time than meditating? Where does that idea come from?

It’s not that I’ve been busy. I have been, but I used to write every day while I had a whole buncha shit to do. It’s not that I’ve been lazy. I’ve been doing stuff, left, right, and sideways. It’s that I haven’t had anything to say. I’ve been all conflicted, and blahblahblah, and just insert Charlie Brown’s mom here for awhile, ok?

For about a year now, I’ve been writing for a collaborative blog called The Road More Travelled. The bloggers are me and the mindblowingly  fabulous woman who has been my best friend for 17 or so years.

Last week, I told her I had to cut back on The Road posts.

I expected anger, or something, but she was all ‘dude, of course – whatevs’. Ok, not really. She doesn’t say ‘whatevs’. She’s classier than me.

The thing is, I feel like I have to be all smart on The Road. We’re making a point. We’re experiencing and we’re writing about it. We’re blogging about our quarter-life crises.(Yes, I am going to live to be 120 – you want to fuck with that?) We’re saying REAL THINGS.

I feel obligated to be smart.

I also have a food blog, called Mangled Baby Duck. (You know you wish you owned mangledbabyduck.com). It’s a cross between a recipe blog and a diary. It’s a pain in the ass, to be clear. I take pictures. I upload them and edit them and then write about what’s in them. The lemon asparagus risotto recipe I just posted took me almost as long to write down as it took me to make (which was a long fucking time, thankyouverymuch).

I feel obligated to make, eat, and do interesting things.

Here, though?

I don’t feel obligated to do jack all.

I feel obligated to be myself. To yap at whoever happens to land here, from the wide world of the internets, if that whoever feels like reading. Basically, to yap. I feel obligated to curse if I feel like it, but not to curse if I don’t feel like it. I feel obligated to show my cranky pants when they’re what I’m wearing, and to show my enthusiastic pants when they’re what I’m wearing.

I like it here. For some reason, that has made me feel bad lately. I feel bad because I don’t feel bad about being not-always-interesting, or not-always-smart.

Yeah.

It’s, what, a blogger thing? A girl thing? An Emma thing? A person-under-5’2″ thing? Who knows.

Anyway.

I’m back.

Feeling bad is for chumps.

Ok, so – right before my 25th birthday, I got an IUD. Despite the excellent safety record of birth control pills, I felt sort of icky when I realized I was closing in on ten years of what is essentially hormone therapy.

This is the story of me getting my IUD.

I was working as a pastry chef at the time and didn’t have health insurance. Being the responsible woman that I was, though, I was still going in for a yearly gynecological exam. When I told the Planned Parenthood (thank you, Planned Parenthood, for being there for me when I was uninsured) doctor that I wanted to get off of hormones, she laid my options out for me. There were more localized hormone solutions (like the patch, which I had an allergic reaction to), shots, barrier methods (which I never tried but come on, could a diaphragm sound more like a pain in the ass?), and the IUD.

She told me that IUDs weren’t usually for women who hadn’t had children, but she didn’t tell me why and she said I’d be fine.

You know why it’s better for women who have had kids?

Because things get… ahem … stretched out when you have kids. Cervical type things. And those things get stretched out with the help of natural physiological responses. It’s not pleasant then, so I’ve heard, but you get a baby afterwards.

If those things aren’t stretched out, an IUD has to fit through a much smaller space before ending up where it belongs.

It hurt so much. SO much. When they inserted it I held the hand of the nurse and I yelled cuss words at the ceiling. When she looked like she was going to laugh, I seriously considered punching her.

Once it was in, though, I mostly loved it. I recommend it all the time.

I’ve had it for five years (it’s supposed to be good for up to ten), and it’s starting to hurt. I’m assuming that isn’t good.

I’m getting it taken out on Friday and going back to the pill.

I’m now accepting suggestions for curse words to yell at the ceiling, and any compelling ways to avoid punching any nurses.

Oh, and sympathy. I’m accepting pre-emptive sympathy.

Thing One.

We need to bring ‘as if’ back. I expect you all to help me with this.

Thing Two.

I can’t find a picture of Thing 2 on his own (her own?).

That’s not thing two. Thing two is  that some days I wake up mad. There’s no rhyme or reason, and I spend the drive home on those days bitching to anyone who will listen. However, no one but my brother really knows exactly what to say.

I ended today by bitching to my brother.

It was awesome.

Thing Three (which may be mildly related to thing two)

I have a mild communication problem.

It goes thusly: I have something to say that involves the sayee being wrong. To be clear, the sayee is wrong. I’m a polite non-confrontational type person, though, so I either swallow what I have to say or try and frame my saying in a non-insulting way. For example, let’s say that you and I were trying to schedule something. Let’s say that I told you several times that said thing would take 30 minutes, and you said ‘ok, that sounds great, I’ll put it on the schedule for this big meeting that I’m in charge of’. Let’s then say that when you sent out the agenda for said meeting, you gave me fifteen minutes. And when I asked, you said that you were pretty sure I said fifteen minutes. Here’s what I do. I review all the emails we’ve exchanged – the emails in which I’ve specifically said half an hour at least three different times – and? I cave. I email you back and say ‘oh, maybe I said that before I knew how long it was going to be’.

Obviously, the above is a true story. It’s not the only story like this, though. Somehow I send out missives that I find clear as a bell, and in return I get weirdness. I asked my grant supervisor (via email) today for some help on a personel issue, and she promptly forwarded my email to the person I was having a problem with, along with a note requesting that we “talk” to each other.

Was I not clear?

This happens to me so frequently that I have to suspect that in fact, I was not.

Either that or I’m surrounded by morons.

Definitely one of those two things.