Macaroni

So, Connecticut, though it's pretty, is a state that annoys me to no end. The roads suck, the drivers suck worse, and my body seems to think that it can't survive without at least 90% humidity.
Everything is expensive (and the state makes me feel a little claustrophobic (yeah, the whole state)) and the roads are screwy. Not as bad as New York, but still gratuitously obnoxious. It's like the civic engineers tried to make it as complicated as possible to get from point A to point B and a half (because, let's face it, you're never actually going to get to point B, you'll just circle it desperately for half an hour before giving up and walking half a mile.)
Also, it should not take 45 minutes to travel 16 miles. This is very wrong, Connecticut...ians...?
My sister bought a shamefully large house (but I am pleased that the house across the street is much cuter, and I bring this to my sisters' attention quite frequently.)
The dogs are even more neurotic and, in Alfie's case, senile, than the last time I visited. Alfie spontaneously runs laps up and down the stairs. He walked through the paint can lid (that Dessa left...on the floor? For some reason?) and left tiny green pawprints all over the painting tarp yesterday. He also kicked over his food dish today because he felt walking through it was more expedient than walking around it (I mean, he's right, but he still made a mess.)
Sleeping on an air mattress sucks. My back hurts all the time now. My mother snores intermittently and I have to flip around to make her stop (probably by waking her up but it is my little vengeance.) I know I've been waking up a lot because I remember three or four dreams a night now as opposed to the one or two I usually remember.
Diedre dragged me to the state fair in one of them (I apparently had something better to do?) and I lost my pen in a ninja-bull's manure (the manure was unfortunately not graced with any ninja aspects.) The bull was hiding under a pile of hay, though.
I think I was supposed to buy something there too, but I'm not sure anymore cause I think that was actually the night before last.

Dessa and Nathan eat poorly. We bought too much at the grocery store in abject fear of the emptiness/junk food repository of the kitchen.

Did I mention there's no snow and I am disappointed? This probably means that Nature is saving it all up for a shitstorm of snow the day I try to fly out of here just to jack everything up.



._.

This is Halloween

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. I'm not sure if it's because I get to dress up as weird things without anyone thinking I'm crazy (a definite factor,) the free candy, the weather, the parties, or that Halloween is probably the holiday with the least emotional baggage.
Unfortunately, talking about Halloween reminds me that Chris dumped me on Halloween for some reason that I'm still (and probably will forever be) unclear on (preposition, no!) This may take away Halloween's privilege of being emotional-baggage-less.
(Is it bad that I spend so much effort trying not to cry about things like that (like...during the breakup even?) Sometimes I think I'm a tomboy even emotionally...)
Yeah.


Anyway. Halloween.
(I'm really itchy and fervently hoping that I didn't get bedbugs from Scott's house. The pattern doesn't seem like bedbugs, maybe I'll be lucky for once.)
HALLOWEEN IS FUN.
I like seeing people dress up and play (non-injuring) tricks on others. Just what's up with all the skanky versions of everything now? There's even a skanky BigBird and Cookie Monster. There's something seriously wrong with both those designers and the people who wear the costumes.
This is why I tend to just make my own, because I don't want to wear a skirt that MIGHT cover my butt.

For the ladies, it's that or be a witch/vampire for the jillionth time in a row.

Unemployment always sucks, but moreso if you knew your job was disappearing and you've been looking since June and haven't gotten anything yet except the one person who was definitely going to hire you but you couldn't because they needed someone the next day and you still had school two hours away.
So anyway, lately I've just been like "Blaaaaagh I can't do anything right and nothing's going my way and certainly nothing's turning up Gemini and I'm still stuck living with my parents which is okay but makes me feel like a total loser and now I don't even have a job and I'm still living with my parents which makes me like a superultra loser and I'm not even sure at this point that a redo would help but I can pretend like it would and I've been soooooo tiiiiiiired lately and I'm not sure if there's something wrong with me or I'm just that depressed/stressed/apathetic ahglhwkgjhdfhj."

Also I hate going to fill out applications because I've been getting a lot of no and that's hard to face that many times.
I have now been sick for longer/more times since I graduated than I have in the last two years and that just isn't right.

Parents are ridiculous as usual. Remodeling the kitchen is both more personally fulfilling and more frustrating than studying. At least I can see my progress, but the parents argue so much about what should go in the kitchen, whether or not to buy appliances even though the old appliances still work just fine, and today, buying a fridge that's too big because nobody bothered to measure the damned thing. Also, the things I can do have been put on hold because of my sister's moving (so we have to clear out her storage space and drive her shit up to CT, which means she and her husband owe us a hell of a huge favor *again*) so instead of being able to just finish a project I'm slammed with HOW MUCH STUFF I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET.

Anyway, the tl;dr of it all is that I'm frustrated, emotional, and running out of time.

10/25 I wanted to leave previous post up longer, but I also don't. My post-box is all confused cause technically most of this post was written before the previous (obviously the previous trumps this one, though) and today I feel like updating, though now I'm second-guessing it again so I guess I'll wait.

55% of my views are from Internet Explorer. I can't accurately state how disgusting that is. Get a better browser, people!


10/27
My old job wants me back but I don't know if I want to bother with them. I may or may not need the money, but it's not what I need in job experience, and frankly, I'm tired of the random shit they pull. (Also killing things.)

In Memoriam

There are times when I feel like I should blog about something, and there are times when I want to talk to myself (and I sometimes blog to do that) but think that I shouldn't blog about it yet.
In fact, it's probably definitely too early to blog about this, but my typing is much faster and more legible than my writing (and much less prone to tear stains and edits.)
My friends' youngest brother suddenly passed away October 16th (yesterday at the time of this writing.)
I feel completely inadequate in the consolation of the surviving members of the family, especially the other sons who are trying so hard to be strong. Of course, you never think that something like this could happen to you, or someone you know, especially when they're so young. Sure, he was sick, but not that sick, right?
I put so much hope and prayer into David growing out of his seizures, or at least that they'd be able to control them by medication, that I never even considered that he might not survive (that doesn't happen to good people, right?)

I wish that David could have had a long and happy life, but I have accepted that there is nothing that I can do or could have done to change that.
I take my peace from that I made the right choice, that I got to have fun with him before he died, and that he was not in pain, and certainly is not now.

God grant us the courage to continue on without him, celebrate his life, and honor his memory, and grant us the serenity to accept what we cannot change.




Post-edit 10/25: I'm also grateful that I was allowed to help bury him. Unfortunately (maybe not that unfortunate,) it was closed casket so I kinda still feel like when I go over to the house he's just in his room or at school or something. I wonder how long it will take to ...not think that anymore.




I hope I didn't make Scott cry.

Octobanana

I don't know why, but I never want to spell mañana correctly. To me, it just seems like it should be manyana, because I can't get over how much it looks like "banana," and I want to separate those two as much as possible, as "banana" and "tomorrow" are in no way related, unless you're going to give me a bunch of bananas tomorrow (or possibly you'll shoot me with a banana tomorrow, in which case I question your sanity.) "El Niño" does not pose this problem for me, for some deucedly opaque reason. Perhaps, I have always seen "El Niño" in conjunction with hearing it, so I never suffered through how to spell foreign words (it's easy in French, just say something in Latin and add a bunch of letters at the end that don't actually make a sound!)

In totally unrelated news, the Indonesian Mimic Octopus has reminded me why I love eight-limbed invertebrates so much. They're pretty and hideously intelligent, can color change, spray ink, and mimic other creatures, they can squish themselves into tiny spaces and steal all your crabs, and some of them are ridiculously venomous to boot.

Probably due to watching too much British television, I want to start calling the trunk of my car the boot instead, so that I can then tell people that I've got loot in the boot. (See also: deucedly, queue up, bugger off, bollocks)

2012, Are You Worried?

The Mayans. Aren't they crazy, with their crazy creepy calendar? I remember one point, after I first learned about that calendar, that I actually worried about it. I mean, the Mayans were incredibly clever. How could they be wrong about the end of the world? Then I started thinking, what if they just got tired of carving centuries of dates into a big rock? It's not as if they needed the information that far ahead anyway. But, you know, there are always the people who believe it, and the predictions of Nostradamus, totally and completely. After all, it's not as if we've been looking for the meanings to these prophecies (and fitting events to them as necessary) for several decades, if not for several centuries.

In my mind, it "works" in the way that horoscopes and astrology work; everything is just specific enough to gain your trust, but vague enough that it's easy to find something that fits. People are so focused on finding patterns and attributing symbolism to random objects/events/whatever, that they end up with a lot of false positives. It really is like astrology; here we've attributed meaning to random clumps of stars and then divine how they influence our mundane lives in an effort to predict the future. It's not as though every culture sees the same clump of stars in the same way, so how could we possibly ascribe meaning and import to them?

Really, what worries me about 2012 is just people. Maybe it will be the end of the world, but the real question is: will it be because it was always going to happen, or will it have been a self-fulfilled prophecy? Is it some sort of divine will, or just people with itchy trigger fingers?

(P.S. Do you really trust the prophecies of a civilization which did not forsee their own demise?)

Monsters

Some days, I feel more like a monster than other days. Some days at work, I have to euthanize animals, usually for space, which is probably the stupidest reason to kill something. Sometimes, it doesn't actually bother me. Those are the times I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty. Today, I finally had to euthanize a cat that's been at work a while that I particularly liked (that I, as the hand of Death, have skipped over for almost three months now,) as well as four kittens that I've watched grow up for the past two months. Today is not one of the days it doesn't bother me. I'm so frustrated with this job,and that I'm shoving animals in cages together to try to keep from euthanizing anything, and that when we go to mobile adoptions, everyone comes to pet the cute puppies, ignore the older dogs, and make excuses for why they can't take anything home (and, on occasion, why I'm a horrible and vicious person for having to euthanize anything at all.) They tell me how they breed their animals so that their children can witness the "miracle of life," then bring the unwanted offspring here so I can handle the inevibility of death, even if I as much as tell them that I'll euthanize the animals. Not to mention the people who surrender their 10 year old dogs and cats to us because they just don't feel like taking care of them anymore, and who don't bat an eye when I tell them that, due to space issues, or health, or temperament, I'll have to murder their faithful companion. Or those that bring strays from outside our jurisdiction even when we're so, so full, and then have the gall to tell me that it's my job to help the animals and, again, I'm a horrible person for not killing other animals to take theirs. Some of these say, "I'll just dump them on the street in Pearland so that you have to take them in!" and storm out in righteous fury. How churlish of me.

It's because of days like today that I dread coming to work for my two days a week (and we haven't even officially opened yet.) Those two days have the potential to be truly loathsome.