How To Tell I Am Secretly Mad At You

When I don't like someone, or am angry at someone, but don't want to express it, for whatever reason, I sometimes retreat into uber-niceness and politeness. I don't do this with my friends (I don't really get mad at my friends), but I do it with strangers and aquaintances. It sometimes confuses people enough that they forget that we were ever fighting in the first place.

I pull back my ears when I am very irritated/angry and can't express it. (I can move my ears on their own. It's a skill I developed as a very bored child.) No one ever notices. It's like I'm very secretly giving people the finger. Except with my ears.

When I am drunk, I tend to move into subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the level of drunkeness) mockery of annoying people, in the very polite voice and cheerful. If the person is not very bright, I can sometimes get away with this for very long periods of time.

Sometimes I don't even notice how irritated I am until I discover that I am positively chirping through a phone call, my voice so high it practically sounds as though I'm helium, ending with a, "Great! Thanks!" so perky I can't believe it's coming out of my mouth. I am an wind-up doll, an anime character, a secretary with a poster of kitten on a branch with the caption, "Hang in there, it's only Monday!" I am pissed.

Who Loves Ya? Ice Cream!

I really love this sign, because it implies that someone at Ben & Jerry's has decided to market directly to the eating disorder crowd.

Remember, kids, food is love! And you're ugly!

You Don't Go Down On A Woman, You Lose Her Like A Set of Keys

From Sex Advice from Liz Phair.

"Dear Liz:
I'm a twenty-five-year-old woman, and my boyfriend of more than a year is a spoiled baby when it comes to oral sex. I pleasure him orally every day, but he refuses to return the favor. Every single time I ask him to do it, he simply says ‘someday' and …
Sorry, I have to cut you off. This is a deal-breaker. Run run run. I will not help you; I will not treat you. You must break up with him. This relationship cannot be saved."

Clearly, Liz Phair is a genius. (As if Exile in Guyville wasn't already proof of that.)

I Woke Up At 4:20 AM

I had to be at work at 5 am today. Would someone please just shoot me in the fucking head?

My office smells like pills, and I don't like it. Seriously, it smells exactly like aspirin in here.

It Was All On The Cover of Newsweek

Death Abounds

I found out today that Neal's old roommate just died.

I didn't get along with Adam. I was avoiding talking to him on AIM, actually, because we started chatting with each other after Neal died. He sent me an email, which was actually very nice, although it had a couple of typically abrasive moments. He mentioned a couple of mutual aquantainces that he thought should have died instead, and said, "i think he figured you still were in love and that boosted his ego."

He told me how Neal died, which I didn't know, and I was grateful for knowing.

He told me that he wore Neal's clothes all the time, which I found creepy. He was supposed to send me some things of Neal's I wanted. He offered to include a piece of pumice that I had decided was a "floor rock" once, when Neal and I were on mushrooms. It was a story I had forgotten and he remembered, even though I was there and he wasn't. I didn't want the pumice, because the last thing on this earth that I need is another useless item that I can't throw away for emotional reasons, but I said I'd take it because he seemed to want me to.

He was arrogant and lacked any sense of tact. He had horrible taste in music. We went on a couple of miserable road trips together. We tolerated each other in the way that you tolerate the people that are loved by the people you love.

Before I hated him, before I really knew him, we talked on the phone for three hours one night. He was Neal's best friend. In the last email I have from Neal, he talks about how much Adam means to him.

When I got Adam's email, his sweet, sincere, horribly tactless but geniunely considerate and well-meant email, which came several months after Neal's death, when I finished reading it, I sat on my couch and sobbed. I thought, "Why couldn't you have died instead of him?" and it was horrible, and mean, and I knew it, and it made me cry even more.

Now I have another email telling me about another unspecified death, assumed to be an accident. (What kind of accident? It doesn't say.)

I am left feeling, mainly, like an asshole. Because I was avoiding him. Because I made jokes about him to my friends. Because my nickname for him, to differentiate him from another Adam, my best friend, was "Evil Adam." Because he was annoying and overly critical, but he was a decent person, and he was Neal's best friend. And now he is gone, and I remain, petty and mean as ever.

The Cat Saga

This is Sophie Natasha Wigglesworth, the latest addition to the Porkmenstrual family (i.e. the PinkHairedCat).

Before Friday, Sophie lived with Amy. Unfortunately, Sophie's hobbies include torturing children, which was not going over so well. Fortunately, Phil and I also hate children, and have had people under the age of 18 in our apartment exactly never times.

It's at this point that I am sure all of you observant readers are going, "But didn't you guys just get a cat named Shadow?" The answer is, yes, kind of, but he was defective. We ended up giving Shadow back at the end of our five day cat evaluation period, as during that time he had become brave enough to come out of hiding, scratch us, and go back to hiding.

Sophie, on the other hand, immediately jumped out of her cat carrier and started checking out our apartment, with absolutely no hiding. She sits on our laps and lets us pet her and plays with us and is totally interactive! Also, adorable!

She's the first pet either Phil or I have had since living with our respective parents, and it's proving to be really fun, although occasionally confusing. We're like, "She made a noise! Is that a good noise, or a bad noise? What does she want?" (When I told this to the PurpleHairedBoy, he was like, "Now you know how I feel," because I also have the tendency to just make random little noises.) Sometimes she just meows at us, and we're like, "You have food! Do you want to play? Do you want to be petted? What do you want? USE YOUR WORDS, Sophie!" Except she can't use her words, because she is a cat and does not speak English.

Gay Weddings Are Adorable

It's possible that these pictures of gay weddings (links via Mac) made me cry like a big ol' girl.

But people, look at this. It's gay men getting married with babies in snugglies. That picture basically just speaks directly to my uterus.

Look how cute!!!!

Geography Is For Losers

The PurpleHairedBoy and I are currently having a debate over geography. It started when I said that I thought I could probably find about 25 of the states on a blank map of the United States. He says that he could locate all 50, and that I should be ashamed because you learn where the states are in fifth grade. (However, when I asked if he remembered how to do prime factorization, which you learn in junior high, he didn't even know what it was.)

I maintain that knowing exactly where Conneticut is just really isn't all that important. I can tell you which of the four general regions of the country (East, South, West, and Fly-Over) any given state is. I can read a map, so if I really need to know where Idaho is, I can look it up. If I need to get somewhere, I get on a plane or a train and end up at my destination. I could even plan a road trip, if given a map. So why do I need know the location of Alabama by heart? It's just not useful information.

So how many states can you guys find on a blank map?

Wanna Touch My Muff?

I made a muff. Actually, I made two tubes (because I like knitting tubes), and then put quilt batting in between them and sewed them together. The outside is this amazing furry eyelash yarn (elle Lussuria), and the inside is an acrylic/wool mix. The elle Lussuria had a stripe of black running through the yarn part, but not the eyelash part, and it gives the finished project a kind of depth of color I really like.

I want to sew an elastic loop onto one end, so I can kind of let it dangle from my wrist when I'm doing something with my hands, but I can't find my elastic right now. (I know I have elastic, because I bought some to sew into my leg warmers, and then didn't.)

The muff is the ultimate Pretty Pretty Princess accessory. I feel like I belong in a Victorian woodcut when I wear it. And of course, the pun possibilities are really endless.

Arm Warmers

The Cold Hands Knitting Project Triumverate happened because I lost my gloves, and my hands were very cold. I could have just made myself mittens, but I think I was fixated on knitting hand warming things because my hands were so cold all the time.

These arm warmers I made using some crazy acrylic yarn that my mom gave me a long time ago. It's a very nice acrylic, very shiny and soft.

I really enjoy making arm warmers, because you're just knitting a tube, and I like knitting tubes. I really like using double pointed needles. I realized the other day I have dpns in more sizes than I have circulars and straights combined. More knit small tubes, I say! Arm warmers are also usually knit in a rib pattern to keep them up (these are knit two, purl two rib), and I enjoy knitting in a rib. I made a couple of sets of arm warmers for people for Christmas, but this was the first set I made for me. They took a little longer than I expected, because I knit them on size seven needles, but they were super easy and fun. The trickiest part was putting in the button hole for my thumb to go through.

Mittens!

Hey kids, it's knitting pictures time! These mittens are the first of the Cold Hands Knitting Project Triumverate. I made them using the four-needle mitten pattern from Hip to Knit, and Rowan Kid Classic.

The mittens make me very happy, and sometimes I like to do a little mitten dance and sing a little mitten song while I wear them. I also like to pretend that they are hand puppets and make them talk.

I Never Would Have Imagined

I went to Borders after work today, because I like to validate my existance by buying elitist culture* at large chain stores. On my walk from the bus stop to the bookstore, snow started falling, lightly, but in huge fluffy amazing flakes. I had an urge to call someone and say, "It's snowing, and it's beautiful."

And I stood in the middle of the city, with the cabs driving past and the lights shining down on the historic buildings, and I was filled with a sense of wonder at little West Coast suburban me, actually living in this East Coast city.

*What I bought: Three Francesca Lia Block books, the first Lemony Snicket book (buying young adult fiction makes me feel like I'm getting away with something), Lost in Translation and Ghost World. (I enjoy my bittersweet humor mixed with melancholy, thanks.)

Doppelganger

Yesterday I was walking up the stairs to my office, and a woman who was walking down the stairs towards me said, "Nice coat." So I was all, "Oh, thanks," and then I realized that she was wearing the exact same coat.

Then I kind of did a double take, and I realized she was also wearing the black and pink Hello Kitty bag that Jill gave me for Christmas.

It was weird.

Made even weirder by the fact I bought my coat in a thrift shop.

Things You Should Not Stick Up Your Twat

I ordered The Keeper online today. I am oddly excited about it, and hope it arrives before my next period. (You'd think I would know whether it would or not, but my body - not so much with the "cycles." I used to think I was just super flaky about it, but then I actually charted them and it turns out that they're all over the place. So I guess my uterus is the flaky one.)

The Keeper is part of my new semi-hypochondriac fear of getting what I like to refer to as Cooter Cancer. I know you can't actually get cancer of the vagina, and I'm not actually sure what getting cancer in your down-south entails, but I do know that I'd like to avoid it, and that tampons are pretty much Cooter Cancer Central. Plus when I saw my old roommates, they all mocked me for still using tampons. (Ah, hippie school, I love you so!)

Other things that are apparently insanely bad for your vag are condoms with nonoxynol-9. At first I just assumed that they also caused Cooter Cancer, but it turns out what they actually do is increase your risk of AIDS. My health-non-profit-worker roommate describes them as "pouring bleach into your vagina." (This is where I cross my legs and whimper.)

So that's your list of things you shouldn't stick for in your vagina for today. As for things you should stick in your vagina, well, I think that would be best discussed in person, perhaps over a bottle of wine.

True Dat

The more fucked-up a phase was, the more fondly he remembered it.

Question

I don't think I've ever had a female cab driver. I can't think of any reason why women wouldn't be cab drivers, it seems like they would be just as good at it as men, and it's not like it requires strength or anything. Is institutionalized sexism running rampant in the cab driving industry? Does anyone know why all cab drivers are male?

A Room of One's Own

I've returned from Antioch, and I have to say I was struck by two things. First, they sure are making college students young these days. Second, dorm rooms sure are shitty.

My dorm rooms at school were nicer than the one I stayed in at Antioch, cause they were filled with girls, and thus had decorations on the walls and excessive cuteness pretty much everywhere. (There was also one that had about five pounds of glitter in the carpet due to various art projects.) But they also had two to four people living in all of them, which seemed perfectly aceptable at the time, but now I think would cause me to go insane.

I think the best part about being a grown-up is having your own room in your own apartment. I like having a roommate, (especially my lovely roommate) and don't think I would like living completely alone, but man, do I like having my own room.

I Make It Through The Airport

I have somewhat miraculously gotten to Antioch, the official small liberal arts school of Far Away Boyfriends everywhere. It is really only miraculous in that buying plane tickets on my own with money I earned myself at my actual job is pretty much the most grown-up thing I've ever done, and between that and the Valentine's Day curse, I was pretty convinced that there was no way I'd be able to get here without some sort of incident.

There was a bit of minor panic on my part in the cab in the way to the airport, as I realized I'd forgotten to factor in traffic in my getting to the airport time. But I handled it by being nervous and thinking, "Can we get to the airport with some alacrity, please? Alacrity!" I chose to keep this thought to myself, however, because what kind of asshole says alacrity to a cab driver?

I must say, I liked the airport a lot better before going through security required taking half my clothes off. Between the steel-toed boots and the studded belt, I am pretty much made entirely of metal. This was also possibly the first time no one has searched my bags at the airport. I didn't even talk to a person at check-in. I was doing e-ticket with only carry-on bags, which meant I went up to a machine, put in my credit card, and it printed me a ticket I could take to the gate. They x-rayed my stuff at security, but didn't search it, which I found shocking, as normally my bags get searched about fifty times. I was like, "Are you sure? I got some good shit in there! There are cookie cutters AND knitting needles!"

In other news, my friend John has started an independent news site called The Raw Story. Checka checka.

Special Valentine's Day Phone Sex Haiku

Happy Valentines.
A ten inch strap-on dildo
For you, sissy bitch.

I Am Healed!

So I went to the doctor today about my broken arm, and he was like, poke poke poke, "Okay, be careful for the next three weeks and call if you have any problems, but otherwise you're good to go."

Best. Broken Bone. Ever.

Mmmmm, Carrie Brownstein.

I had a dream last night that I had sex with Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, from Sleater-Kinney. Except in my dream, they were both in The Spells. (In real life, The Spells are Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony.)

Now, The Spells are a very good band, but they only released one EP, and it's about fifteen minutes long. And I'm like, "Brain, I love you very much, but when I start dreaming about lesbian sex with obscure indie rock bands, it's just a little too close to self parody."

Advertising Goes Crazy

The above picture is from an email I got telling me to get the latest version of Crystal Reports. "Spend[ing] hours on tedious presentation layer design" is pretty much what I do every time I get involved with Crystal Reports, as it is the most badly designed, unintuitive, annoying pain in the ass piece of software I've ever worked with, and I write code for MS Access 97. So this is pretty much either a keen sense of irony, or a bald-faced lie.

From a sticker that was on top of some Eggless, Vegan Seaweed soup I bought for lunch: "You have no idea how good & what kind of benefits this soup will bring you." I now have an idea how good this soup is, and how good is "not very." I don't know about the benefits, because I threw the soup away after about five spoonfuls. I think the word that described it best was "brackish," which is not a good word for food.

Witnessed at the counter of the deli across the street from my job: A product named "Aunt Flo's Country Fudge." The more I contemplate it, the more disturbing it gets. Especially when I pronounce "country" heavy on the first syllable.

A Conversation Where I Try To Remember The Word "Jarlsberg"

PinkHairedGirl: It's this kind of cheese, it starts with a J, I want to say "Jagermeister" but I know that's wrong.
PurpleHairedBoy: I want Jagermeister cheese.

I Am Cursed

I have two traditional Valentine's Day activities. One is that I break up with someone, and the other is that I do heart-shaped Jello shots. (Unrelated? I think not!)

I think of the break up thing as a curse. Kind of like Angel on Buffy, except instead of turning evil when I experience one true moment of happiness, I get dumped before Valentine's Day. And I'm always evil. I was hoping that maybe the curse wouldn't apply this year, since the previous three people to dump me in the week before Valentine's Day have been girls. Unfortunately, the Not Far Away Boyfriend and I were busy proving that sometimes when two people like each other very much, there should still be some sort of law against them dating.

I've made the Far Away Boyfriend promise that he won't dump me before Valentine's Day. (To which he replied, "But what about on Valentine's Day? Can I dump you on Valentine's Day?" because he is kind and sensitive to his girlfriend's neurosises.) I'm visiting him Thursday through Sunday (Awwww! Aren't I the cutest?), and he has promised to do heart-shaped Jello shots with me.

Even When The Sun Is Shining, I Can Still Feel The Lightening

My apartment uses some kind of heat that involves water moving through my walls. Which means that it frequently sounds remarkably like it's raining outside, when it's actually doing nothing of the sort.

Weird Thoughts I Had While On Vicodin And Never Got Around To Posting

1. What's it like being in an egg? I think that it would be like when you're in bed on a Saturday morning and you pull the covers over your head, and the sunlight filters through and everything is warm and cozy. I told this to Ro and he pointed out that you would also be surrounded by special goo designed to give you nutrients and keep you happy and comfy. All of this, plus my love for small enclosed places, makes me really want an egg of my own to live in.

2. Is the human being the same temperature throughout? Are our brains just as hot as our hearts? Are our internal organs hotter than our skin?

Here, Kitty, Kitty

Well, Phil and I have acquired a cat. His name is Shadow, and he's currently hiding somewhere in our apartment. We don't know where, exactly, because it turns out that Shadow is very good at hiding. If he ever comes out of his undisclosed location, I will probably post pictures in good Crazy Cat Lady fashion.

Build Yer Own Cynthia

Since I'm working a night shift today, I decided to run around and do errands. The errands I needed to do mainly involved aquiring things, as I am a capitalist like that.

My new posessions:

• Yarn. I actually ordered this at Elann and just had to pick it up at the post office. I ordered enough super wash wool (in Spring Green) to make a cardigan, and then I couldn't resist a skein of this Angora in turquoise. I was kind of worried about buying yarn online, but it's beautiful and the colors are really true to the color swatches on the webpage.
  
• The new Mountain Goats cd.
  
• Lube.
  
• Hair dye. I'm trying a new kind - Special Effects, in a color called Devilish. We'll see how it goes.
  
• A Bettie Page button. I really just bought this so I could charge the hair dye on my credit card, but it is now proudly adorning my shoulder bag.
  

So I was considering my purchases, and I was like, "Damn. Those are some very Cyn-ish purchases. In fact, I think that's pretty much a little build-yer-own-Cyn kit, right there." Really, if you just threw in an AS Byatt book or two, you'd be good to go. So in case you want to create me in a lab or something, those are your ingrediants. (That whole "sugar, spice, everything nice" bit is a big lie.)

Worky McWork Work

1. At my job, we frequently have to call 800 numbers to find out where they go to. Fairly often, this involves us listening to the recordings at the beginning of phone sex lines. Today, Jill and I started writing haiku based on these recordings. Here is mine.

Hot teenage girls wait,
practicing on each other.
They want a real man.

2. Today at work, I got to spend a lot of time taking our T1 and 56k lines up and down to figure out why a program I wrote breaks when our T1 line goes down. I took way too much obscene glee in the fact that I got to basically break everything repeatidly. Click the button - T1 line is down! Click the button - T1 line is up! Click the button - T1 line is down again! I AM THE GOD OF THE T1 LINE. ALL MUST BOW BEFORE ME!

I had so much fun breaking everything that I didn't even mind that I had to stay 45 minutes later than I was supposed to. Clearly, the answer to having me be a contented worker bee Cynthia is just to let me break shit all the time. My boss should just get a pile of cheap crockery and an empty office, and let me go to town every time I get cranky.

Baldness

It is only through an insane amount of will power that I refrain from poking people's bald spots on the bus. When ever I sit behind someone with a bald spot, I spend the whole ride staring at, listening to its siren call. "Come on, poke at me," they say. "I will feel smooth and warm. What's this guy going to do? If he turns around, just pretend you didn't do anything. It's not like he's going to be all, 'Did you just poke my bald spot?'"

It's even worse when they're women with bald spots.

In an unrelated except that it also involves baldness story, my sophmore year of college I once sat at a baroque music concert behind a bald man whose skull looked as though a baby Pterodactyl was going to hatch from it any point. Granted, I was rather stoned at the time, but he had an ovular head with skull bones poking out in a way that suggested nothing so much as "dinosaur egg." The sad thing is that people rarely see the backs of their heads, so he probably doesn't even know it. If I had about a dinosaur ready to hatch from my head at any point in time, I would definitely want to know.

My Horoscope

From Nerve:

"Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)
It's feast or famine, isn’t it, Aquarius? Lucky for you, this month the new moon will be in Pisces. It's a double-bodied sign, so two extra naked people might end up in your bed. Scared? Don’t be. You’ve had enough dry spells in the past — double your pleasure while you can. You'll be dreamy all month, artistic on the 3rd, making bank on the 5th, and, if you're in a relationship, quite possibly single on the 6th. This is good news. You’ll have almost an entire month, Valentine's Day included, to expect the unexpected."

The Most Frustrating Part of Living in an Apartment Building

Is when you open the door of your building to delicious food smells, and they get fainter and fainter as you move towards your actual apartment.

Knitting Pictures!

This is Skully. I actually got it done about a week ago, but I've been too busy to take pictures until now. Anyway, note the fact that it's totally a sweater! I made a sweater!

Skully on me.

The Goddamned Scarf. The Goddamned Scarf is an insanely long scarf knitted in garter stitch, with some acrylic Lion's Brand fake mohair stuff, with cheap metal needles. The Goddamned Scarf seemed like a good idea at the time. The Goddamned Scarf was knitted while drunk, on the bus, in a six hour French socialist movie, in the dark, and for far, far too long.

Here Are Some Pictures For You

This is the awesome lego pirate lady that Naomi gave me for my birthday.

This is Wendy, wearing a furry hat I knit for her.

This is me with some super bed head.

This is some lace I knit, lying flat.

This is the same lace, as a wristband.

More knitting pictures when I take them. I have finished the Skully sweater, and it's super awesome, and I also finished The Goddamned Scarf. I also did an ass-ton of Christmas knitting, and am currently working on some mittens.