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irrational

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

There is very little in the world that makes me angry faster than someone trying to pull a punch when they’re telling me something they think I won’t like.

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?

Tags: oh Emma you do smell by the way
Posted in girl geek, school, tellin secrets | 3 Comments »

DOIN’ stuff

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

A friend of mine and I have been having these very serious discussions regarding what people do.

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?

Tags: I have tv to watch so make your responses timely
Posted in advice (requested or otherwise), my happiness project, tellin secrets | No Comments »

us

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

If this blog were a baby, some court would have deemed me absentee sometime in the last couple of weeks.

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.

Tags: how bad do you want a pair of enthusiastic pants right now, plus everyone knows the cool kids are the ones who don't give a flying fuck
Posted in advice (requested or otherwise), girl geek, it's all about me, my happiness project, tellin secrets | No Comments »

anticipating the ow

Monday, February 28th, 2011

WARNING
If you do not want to hear about my birth control stop reading.
I’m not kidding.
I’ll put a picture in here so you don’t accidentally read while you’re clicking away.
If you read it anyway, I will not listen to any ‘ew’ related comments.

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.

Tags: what are the chances that they'll give me an epidural?
Posted in I'm a cranky brat, it's all about me, really? REALLY?, tellin secrets | 3 Comments »

as if

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

I have three very important things to tell you.

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.

Tags: thing one and thing two, thing red and thing blue
Posted in I'm a cranky brat, it's all about me, school, tellin secrets | 2 Comments »

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