Pet Peeves

I'm sort of a grouch today so I thought I'd do a much overdue post centered around those things I find most annoying. Some of these may have been mentioned in a previous post about CTA manners, but I feel they're worth repeating since people have yet to alter their ways.

People who stand on escalators. Unless you are handicapped in some way, don't stand on the escalator. The escalator was invented to aid in stair stepping, not to completely take the work out of scaling heights. You have legs so use them. If you insist on perpetuating your utter laziness, at least stand to the right. Not everyone is okay being trapped behind you because you chose to stand in the middle of the escalator. Let those who aren't completely consumed with sloth pass you.

People who don't stand up to let you out on the CTA. I live pretty far North on the Brown line, so in the morning, I generally get a window seat. By Belmont I have someone sitting next to me. When it's time for my exit, they don't stand up to let me out. No. They swivel their legs and act like that's good enough. Well you know what? It's NOT! Stand up for five seconds. I don't want to press against you to leave. On top of that, when my purse smacks you in the head due to lack of room, don't glare at me, it's your own damn fault. In fact, I would say thanks to your own lethargy, you deserved it.

Wintry Mix. You're not snow, your not rain, you're wintry mix. You are a nasty slushy raining down from the heavens leaving me not only wet but freezing wet because you can't make up your mind what you want to be. I don't know how to dress for you. Should I bring an umbrella? Will that look silly when you turn back to snow? Are my snow boots waterproof enough? You are the worst weather condition aside from maybe a tornado. It's you who make me half serious when I joke about moving back to Florida.

So there's a nice little group of pet peeves. I have more, but I'm putting myself in a grumpier mood than before by airing my grievances.

A Month

It's almost been a month since my last post. Life has a tendency to intrude. The weather has changed. It is now bitterly cold every day, the sky is generally gray, and we are expecting more snow this afternoon.In short, it's miserable. Thoughts of moving back South float merrily around my head. Unfortunately, love, friendship, theatre, and my political beliefs keep me bound to the North.

This morning was fun. Fay boobie-trapped my purse with fur. She must have at some point decided it was a great place to sleep and shed. By the time I got on the train this morning, the purse fur had transferred to my coat leaving me looking like a crazy cat lady.

Sergio is in Florida already. I had a pretty nice and quiet weekend, if not cold and sort of lonely. It's been a while since I could just curl up in my apartment and pretend to be a hermit. I cleaned, I watched 16 and Pregnant, I slept, I cuddled with Fay. I went to bed at 9:30 last night and actually woke up on time! Yes, I've just described the life of an old lady, but I think one weekend of acting like the elderly is excusable.

I go to Florida on Thursday. I wish it would just hurry up and get here. I'm taking Fay with me so I'm sure this flight is going to be even more fun than usual. And I'm going to have to take a taxi, what joy.

I'm getting a mild headache thinking about all this, so I'll go ahead and stop.

I am Thankful

I thought after months of complaining Thanksgiving is the perfect excuse to examine and give thanks to those things which make me happy and, at times, give me satisfaction. I know I can be a bit of a negative Nancy, but I really have a pretty neat life.

Let's start on the macro level, my time. I happen to live in one the most tolerant and accepting times since the dawning of man (at least as I can tell). Let's focus for a moment on the United States since it's what I have the most familiarity with. Since the Civil Rights movement we've advanced leaps and bounds in the treatment of those who are "different" than our superficial idea of normal. We are far from perfect. Our treatment of the poor and weak regardless of color is shameful, but at least intolerance is no longer politically correct. I'm proud and hopeful to say in my lifetime gay men and women will finally be treated with the respect every human being deserves. Despite backwards thinking bigots, we will keep fighting for equality on every level. I am thankful for our determination to win this war.

I am thankful that I'm a woman in a world where I'm not trod on like a sexual doormat. I grew up knowing I could do anything that a man could do, that gender was not going to be a roadblock. I am thankful for the strong women before me who stood up to oppression and paved the way for me.

Now for the more personal thanks. I have a wonderful boyfriend to spend my time with. He's warm and sweet and smart and handsome. He makes me dinner. He puts up with my abrupt hi's and low's. He's pretty much everything a gal could need or want. I have two magnificent parents who take care of me even though I live hundreds of miles away and don't call nearly as much as I should. I have a cat who is happy to curl up on my chest, full of purrs, and nap. I have a job that I like with health insurance. I have money in savings. I have a roof over my head and food on the table. I have a comfortable bed and a large television.

I'm pretty damn lucky. I tend to forget that and as corny as this post may be, it's nice to remind myself that I am far from lost. I'm in a good place with good people. I am moving forward. I wish everyone could have it this good.

Book

I'm trying to write a book and I've hit the wall at only 34 pages. Everything sounds like a cliche. The story's stupid. I want to take it outside and burn it, only it's in digital form and I don't want to waste the paper to print it out.

Ugh! Frustration! Why can't I just be a writer, poof, with a grand and beautiful way of expressing myself? Why I'm I trapped in my own lethargic mind? Why? Why? Why?

It feels so good to wallow in self pity sometimes. Not right now though. I don't want pity, I want to write. I want to get published. I want a lot of people to read my work and pay me a good deal of money so I can buy that loft I want and spend all day writing on my rooftop deck (in the summer) and all night rehearsing for that next great play I'm in.

Is that too much to ask? This is America! All our wishes and dreams come true here, right? That's what Disney taught me. Don't dream it, be it. Wait, no, that was Rocky Horror. Same sentiment.

I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do. It's literally the same drivel page after page after page.

Look, I'm not attempting the next Great American Novel here, but if I can't write something at least as good as those stupid, poorly composed, Sookie Stackhouse novels that True Blood is based on, I may actually just keel over and die.

A Little Fun

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A Late Night/Early Morning

I'm conscious and I'm at work. That's pretty much the limit of cognisant abilities today. As you may be aware, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 came out in cinema's everywhere this past midnight. Being the crazy die hard fan that I am, bucking violently at the idea of growing out of this phase, I was in attendance. And now here I am, at work, trying to maintain some form of awareness on two hours of sleep.

I've never been like some of my comrade's who, in college at least, seemed to live, nay, thrive on minimal sleep. A healthy dose of Z's have always been a priority on my agenda. I never pulled an all-nighter to finish a paper. I can count the number of times on one hand that I stayed out until the sun came up, and they were generally not sanctioned by myself.

More than that, I am strictly diurnal. As much as being a night owl has always appealed to me, what with my penchant for the paranormal and my infatuation with star gazing, I've just never been able to sustain it. My body craves sleep. My body relishes in it.

Getting home at 3:30 and waking up at 5:45 was a feat. I'm proud to have accomplished it. I whipped my blanket off of myself like a champ, bravely facing the icy air and chilly wood floor. I dragged on my jeans (thank god for casual Friday, brushed out my hair, and even managed to make my face look somewhat fresh. I am thoroughly and utterly pooped, but I console myself with the knowledge that in a few short hours I'll be tucked safely in my bed, blankets piled high, my head filled with magical dreams.

For now I'll pat myself on the back for a movie well watched and my brain's willingness not to ignore my alarm. I will smile bravely at the guests who zoom in and out of my office and have no idea of the girl screaming for sleep behind my slightly red eyes.

I will also attempt to stop being so melodramatic and go drink a cup of coffee.

The Other Extreme

I'm finding it hard to write in the absence of politics. I must say, I've had a lot less heart ache and grief since I went on my vacation far from the New York Times and Huffington Post. My worry lines are decreasing, I'm not so utterly depressed when I get off work. It's like I'm a recovering addict.

There's not much to say. I'm in rehearsals Monday through Thursday's after work and it's rather taxing. I'm surprised I haven't caved into the allure of caffeine. Going to the gym is a pipe dream. My point is, my life is far from eventful at the present time. Go to work. Go to rehearsal. Sleep. Repeat five days, sleep for two. Aw the pleasures of the bohemian life. Well not really bohemian with the who full time office job thing, but, you know what I mean.

Do you know what the excitement of my week has been thus far? I get to fly my cat home with me over the Christmas break. That's the highlight. Boom.

It may seem that I am hating on my rehearsal process, which is not the case. I love this show. It's coming together quite nicely. I know some music. I know some lines. It'll be good. I'm simply tired, grumpy and cold. And I'm really struggling to write this today. So it's bad and it's scattered and I just don't care.