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in your love

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Roughly 10% of the time, I’m the biggest fucking crybaby you’ll ever meet.

Don’t believe me?

A not-guaranteed-all-inclusive list of things that have made me cry since Sunday morning – each thing mentioned caused an independent bout:

Some C++ code that wouldn’t work
A woman who got hurt in a Stephen King book (Full Dark, No Stars)
An article about they way dogs love people
Forgetting to feed my dogs
Some Java code that wouldn’t work
Crockett helping me with some homework
Having to leave the house without my lunch
Trying to schedule Thanksgiving
A teacher scheduling a meeting to review an application I’m writing for a fellowship

Yeah.

If you’re a man, right now you’re shaking your head and thinking ‘aww, that poor Crockett’. (Yes, I think that dudes say ‘aww’. If they don’t, they should. It’s the perfect combination of empathy and pity.) Fortunately, I’m hilarious 90% of the time, so it all evens out. Plus, I’m adorable, which makes up for a multitude of sins.

Not that crying is a sin.

I don’t know why it happens. Right now I think it’s a combination of hormones and the rapidly approaching due date of the aforementioned application, but hell, it could have something to do with the position of Jupiter. We’re mysterious, us crying women. What I do know is that I freaking HATE IT. I am not the girl who cries, y’all. I’m the bitchy girl with the big sunglasses who sits at the back of the bus and chews gum despite the fact that the busdriver went to all the trouble of making a sign that says ‘please no gum on the bus’.

I’m NOT the crying girl.

(Except, apparently, when I am.)

Tags: boo freaking hoo
Posted in dating is fun!, I think I'm funny, I'm a cranky brat, it's all about me, nablopomo, tellin secrets | 8 Comments »

10 minutes of living dangerously

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

I bought my car, brand spanking new, in 2005. It looks like this.

With a few more dings.

Ok, fine, a lot more dings. What? I’ve had it for five years and three months. That’s a long time to not run into ANYTHING. Right?

I bought a new car, way back then, because I can’t really be trusted to take good care of things without a lot of reminders. When you get a new one, I figured, the dealership helps you remember to do things like change your oil, and if they were helping, I’d totally get it done.

In retrospect, that’s not true. I mean, the reminders are sort of true, but the me actually taking care of my car just because of the occasional email?

Not true.

I think the only way I will ever have a vehicle that gets all of its maintenance in a timely manner is if someone drives to my house and forcibly takes it from me to perform said maintenance. Is there a service that does that?

Anyway, today I went to Jiffy Lube. My ‘maintenance needed’ light came on some time in July, so I figured it was about time. I only have 35,000 miles on the car, so don’t get all huffy – it’s not like I’m putting on a thousand miles a week here, y’all. 35k in five years. (Dear everyone who isn’t my father: the huffy comment was not directed at you – I know you won’t get huffy!)

I drove in, made my selections, turned down a new air filter for the cabin (it’s THE OUTSIDE – why am I filtering outdoor air out of my car? This makes no sense to me. Outdoor air is awesome.), and sat down to wait.

Ten minutes later, a tech came in laughing and asked me how I got the huge yellow streak and dent on the top edge of the roof. Apparently they each tried to come up with a way it could have happened, and I was to settle it for them.

I explained. He chortled and returned to work.

I think that before I told him that it was a parking garage incident, they thought I was some sort of rule breaking badass – that perhaps I’d driven through a pedestrian underpass in pursuit of a shoplifter, or gone off a jump in a skate park in my car and hit a lightpost.

I wish I’d told one of those stories instead. For 10 minutes there, I WAS a badass.

Not a girl who misjudges her turn radius in parking garages.

Oh well.

Tags: in my defense it's a very pretty yellow color
Posted in girl geek, it's all about me, other people are sometimes funny too, really? REALLY?, tellin secrets | 4 Comments »

holidays

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

It’s getting to be that time.

Halloween is in less than a week, then Thanksgiving is three and a half weeks later. My christmas tree comes one day after that.

I positively adore this time of year, but I don’t think it’s because I have a special connection to any of these holidays, exactly.

It’s because I enjoy a celebration.

Really, I will celebrate anything. Ask Crockett. Last night while making dinner, I suggested that we call our sandwiches ‘yay I quit my internship today’ sandwiches.

I’m not sure what this is, on my part. Is it an inability to embrace the even pleasantness of every day life? Or rather, is it an enthusiasm for even the silliest things?

I prefer to think it’s the latter, but it may be the former. One of the issues that I had with being a working stiff was the complete and total lack of things to look forward to. Two weeks a year of vacation and a raise once every twelve months? Are you kidding me? If you set your enthusiasm clock with those, it would wind down by January 15th. I started celebrating silly things just to have something.

Now that I’m in school again, I have milestones galore. Every week I will have finished a major project, for example, or taken a scary test. I have fewer than two months until Christmas break, and then the whole cycle starts again. I haven’t gotten out of the habit of little celebrations, though. I get a pumpkin latte after an exam, or to rent a movie after finishing a crappy project. I carve a pumpkin to celebrate a slightly increased understanding of dynamic programming.

My question is, if you celebrate little things, does that detract from the big things? I do feel that in order to make them stand out, I need to make holidays and birthdays into gigantic deals, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

What do you celebrate?

Welcome to the dollhouse

Tags: celebrations, halloween
Posted in it's all about me, school, tellin secrets | 3 Comments »

new thing: story thursday

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Everyone has stories, right? You know, those stories that all of your friends have heard 10,000 times?

I’m opening Thursdays for story submission. If something awesome or hilarious happened to you and you’ve run out of people to tell, you can tell us. We promise to be totally amused (right, guys?).

If you’d like to contribute, email me at emmanationblog at gmail.com.

I was going to kick off today with my Turkish brothel story, but that’s kind of a long one. (I sincerely hope you’re now saying to yourself ‘Turkish brothel story?? I MUST tune in on every future Thursday so that I don’t miss what is sure to be a scintillating tale full of intrigue and Russian prostitutes!’)

Instead, I will leave you with this.

Once, I worked at a wedding cake bakery in a snotty part of Denver. My boss was a Polish man named Janus who was (and probably still is) insane. I rarely understood the words coming out of his mouth, but I thought he was awesome.

While working there, I used vodka to help decorate cakes – I mixed it with powdered food coloring and sprayed or painted it onto the frosting, and then the vodka evaporated, leaving behind the color.

One day, I came in and didn’t see Janus. He’d been there when I left, working on a sugar sculpture for the top of a cake, and the decoration was there. The door was unlocked. The bottle of vodka was on the counter. Empty. Working with sugar does NOT require vodka, but it does require a serious level of care. Sugar melts at about 185 degrees, but when it’s boiling it can be above 300. If you get it on you when it’s hot, it sticks and keeps burning you. Not only is vodka not required for sugar work, it should probably be avoided.

Janus?

Was sleeping in the walk in refrigerator. He drank over a pint of vodka, worked with boiling sugar, and then spent the night in the fridge.

He was like the best boss ever.

Tags: fridges aren't as comfy as you might think, vodka, wedding cake
Posted in other people are sometimes funny too, tellin secrets | 2 Comments »

where I invade other people’s privacy

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

I wasn’t kidding about it being privacy week, in case you were wondering.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my office mate at work. I used a clever pseudonym (Rochester, the city she’s from – I know, my creativity knows no bounds). Not a lot of people that I work with here read my blog (that I know of). I was vague when referring to her problems.

But?

I still put her ass out on the internet without her permission.

I write about Crockett all the time. He knew I was a blogger when we started dating, and I do occasionally give him a heads up when something really personal (fights or whatever) is going to show up, but in general he’s on the internet whether he likes it or not.

A few weeks ago when I wrote about how not everyone wants to sleep with everyone, I used a specific example of someone I recently met. He recognized himself and emailed me (to assure me that he in fact did not want to get into my pants, precisely as I suspected).

The theme here is this: if you know me, none of these people are in fact anonymous. While my adorable nicknames prevent someone from googling them and ending up here, they do not in fact prevent Chewbacca (who sits upstairs) from coming down here to see who my office mate is. They do not prevent the people who know Crockett from knowing the inside of his head.

Am I violating their privacy in any major way? Should I stop? If I can’t write about the people I meet, what can I write about?

Tags: spilling the beans
Posted in advice (requested or otherwise), it's all about me, tellin secrets, the people I love | 2 Comments »

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