The Gold Standard

So let’s talk about my feet. I have been wearing my hiking boots so i can break them in before my camping trip but there seems to be no breaking in necessary, these are th most comfortable boots ever made. It’s about 95 degrees here. It’s hot. You would think that in this heat my feet would get all gross and ooogly in the sweat. You would think this wouldn’t you? Well, you thought wrong!You really did. The magic of Gore-Tex! Holy crap! My sock are completely dry. Not just mostly dry, not damp, but completely dry. All of the sweat my feet generate gets instantly wicked away. I don’t know where it goes, I suspect it gets sent to the place where your missing socks are living. When you get your socks back they will reek of my feet. Good for you.
I want to go on a trip. I was on the phone with David….
me: do you want to go to new york with me? david: do you want to go to bali with me? me: YES!
I hope we go. The rest of my summer is tight with crazy busy stuff going on but I have vacation time, money and a passport. David, let’s go to Bali (or Argentina, I want to go there). or New York!
I want to go to New York because my coworker Jen Z left for NYC today and before she left I told her places to go. The funny thing is I would pull up a Google map of wherever I was talking about and be all like “okay 33 carmine st is between bleeker and varick and 7th, after you have lunch go in this direction for record shops, then in this spot is where all the cheese shops and spice shops are….okay, go to the macy’s at herald square. go to the southwest corner and face south, you’ll be looking into koreatown, you’ll see a silver awning, go there for the best korean food ever!”. She thought I was crazy. I am. But also I have a good memory for stuff like that! Now I want to go there and eat the best korean food ever and go purse shopping on canal street and ride the subway!
Tonight I am going to drink beer. Lots of beer.

the matter

yeah, okay so I’m trying to not expend so much energy on being angry at humanity. Craziness exists at every level from the genocidal maniac running a country all the way down to the sociopathic freak that won’t leave you alone. To get angry is not productive.
So what is the evolutionary reasoning behind getting eyelashes in your eyes? I understand why we need them in the first place, that function is clear, but why are we also set up to get them in our eyes? Seriously, if I was living on the savannah i’m pretty sure that getting an eyelash in my eye would be the shittiest of defenses against a pissed off hyena attack. It’s not like you are suddenly camoflauged when that pokey little hair monster starts drilling into your iris, and it causes the exact OPPOSITE of enhanced vision. When you lay there on the ground, fetal, grabbing at your eye, tears mingling with the dust to cake your head with mud a lion is not going to take pity on you, grab you by the scruff of the next and drag you back to her den. Mostly she will just eat you.
Evolution made a major fuck up on my face (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, I know).
Come to my party! My housewarming party! Invites to go out soon! Jessi and I are working on designing them. Custom invites to go out to you people so you can stop acting like you won’t get a custom engraved invite!
Today I wore my hiking boots to work to break them in. I was all worried that my feet would hurt and I would hate my life but these are the most comfortable boots I’ve ever worn. I love them so much. This is one less thing to worry about on the trip!
Surdyks is having their wine sale so I’ll be able to pick up wine for cheap, maybe even 2 mixed cases. Nice.
Okay, so here is my cranky radio issue…
During the day I listen to KQED on iTunes. KQED is the northern california NPR station and they have excellent issue based discussions all day long. They are experiencing some sort of technical difficulty and they won�t come through. The LA NPR station is playing music you’ve never heard of and would rather not hear and the NYC station is interviewing eclectic jazz musicians and playing their music. I don�t want to listen to inarticulate jazz musicians ramble on about their music then have to listen to each song. I don�t want to have to hear �I wrote this song in 1957 after blues great Teddy �no one you have ever heard of ever� Muddyson stepped on a rusty beer bottle cap and got tetanus and died because he was too blues musician-y to get insurance.�
This is irritating me
Lots of times, when I am reading the writings of stupid people I picture them as Beaker talking and going all “meeh meeh meeh meeh” in a voice slightly more whiney than Beaker’s.
The doogles need new collars. I’m trying to find a balance between the really cool ones ($40) and the really ugly ones (cheap). Every time I look at them and pick out the ones I like they end up being too expensive for a dog collar. My dogs deserve good collars, but not GOOD collars, ya know.
David’s doing the triathlon on Saturday, good wishes to him (and his dad and sisters and brother in law who are also all participating in the race).
hotcha my chili-bots, I’ll be the ruination of this hemisphere yet.

Who are you

Who are you people who can orchestrate genocide? Who are you? What is in your head and your hearts and your hands that you are blind to the humanity in every pair of eyes that looks at you? EVERY PAIR OF EYES, not just the eyes of your countrymen or your family or your friends. There is humanity in every pair of eyes that looks at you.
Who are you that you would do this? This is not a crime of passion, this is not one person losing it. This is meticulous and planned and executed all with precision. Who are you people who pulled the triggers? Who are you people who complacently pulled the trigger time and time again? Did you ever question what was happening? Did you ever say “I do not like muslims but I see their humanity in their eyes”?
What kind of person orchestrates a genocide? I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand. I don’t even want to understand genocide or where it comes from. I don’t want to believe that one group of humans would do this to another.
I don’t want to lose my faith in humanity. Ever. I rarely lock my front door. Quite often I leave my purse unsecured. These things are foolish and people point them out to me but I have no worries. If someone wants to steal from me then I hope that what they take helps them. I see no group of bad people, only individual circumstances. I have faith in humanity.
But it is slipping.
Who are you people on this earth with the rest of us that would take life so viciously based on the most specious of reasoning? Who the fuck are you and what is wrong with you?
I have lost faith, however, in the United Nations. Just one year, ONE YEAR after the Rwandan tragedy the U.N. did the same thing in Srebrenica.
Today Kofi Annan called this a great shame. No, Kofi, the great shame is Darfur. The great shame is that as you stand there and apologize to the widows and the mothers and the daughters and the sister, as you speak these words they are hollow ringing with the echo of your inaction in Darfur.
I’m a foolish girl, in my heart I believe that these acts are individual acts, that they are the acts of a visual minority. I believe that if you sampled the hearts and heads and hands of the majority of people on this earth you would not find this atrocity. I’m foolish, i’ll always believe that people if not inherently good are at least inherently neutral.
And every time I cry on the way to work as I listen to these reports and every time I give money because I am helpless and unskilled in any better way to help, I wonder if I am wrong.

merry merry

I got a micrometer today. I don’t know what to measure with it yet. I can measure paper and a post it note is 4.95 micrometers thick. My hair is exactly 2 microns thick.
I had a dream that I went to dog obedience summer camp in cambodia during the vietnam war. The war was coming to an end, the camp couselors knew we would have to leave early, so they decided to give us a special trip to phnom penh. When I got to the city with my group (we flew, it sucked, i hate flying low over the jungle when there’s a war on) we decided to meet at the german restaurant in the middle of town. I had a wad of american dollars I wanted exchanged into baht (i’ve since discovered that the unit of currency in cambodia is the riel, i knew the baht was thai, but in my dream i could only work with what I knew). Of course, the first place I went to exchange my money was the flashy new Target store on the outskirts of phnom penh. The lady behind the counter had to consult her binders to see who would back the american dollar. I tried to explain that america itself would back it’s own money, but it was all very bureaucratic, she had to look it up. When I got my money I wandered into the bathroom and was surprised to see families having picnics in the bathroom. I chose a stall and the door was not full size and you could see me sitting there. As I finished up my business (it stayed in my dream, I didn’t pee the bed) I realized that the bathroom opened completely into the Target cafeteria and that was why people were picnicking in the bathroom AND the people in the cafeteria could see me.
Dammit.
I hope someone in the dream target cafeteria was eating a pretzel and got grossed out.
It’s official, my housewarming is 8/27. Who’s coming? There will be food and happiness and joy!
Okay, thanks for the emails and comments. The world will not end if I don’t do my dishes, the planet will not spin out of control or anything like that! Once I calmed myself, reminded myself that this is mine and I am beholden to no one, I actually managed to be productive. I did the dishes, all of the laundry, arranged my room, did all my filing and made a well balanced, tasty and nutritious dinner for David and I to eat at the freshly cleared table.
Nice
Where’s a good place to get cheap wine in minneapolis? or, barring that, who wants to go to chicago for an overnight?

Trash talkin

Well, I’m the kind of slut that wears a black bra under a pink tank top. Fatty boombalatty…cha cha cha!
There are days that I have to remind myself that this is mine, all of this mine and if it doesn’t get cleaned or straightened in a timely manner it doesn’t matter. It’s not a reflection of anything other than the fact that I prioritize differently than the anally-retentive or the boring. I slept late again today, tired and worn out, I got out of bed furious with myself for sleeping in and for wasting a morning not cleaning or doing something productive. In the shower I stopped myself, I reminded myself that it didn’t really matter in the great scheme of things if there were bunny mugs and dinosaur magnets and hippo clocks and hello kitty lunch boxes on the coffee table and it didn’t matter if the entirety of my filing was strewn on the dining room table. Sure, the dishes had to be done because I ran out of plates, but that would get done and My bedroom needed to be cleared a bit, but that will also get done.
I made our coffee and I chilled and I read a little then I did the dishes and rearranged things in my room while David did the yard work (sweet guy, that david, doing my yard work for me.), So now maybe I do some filing so I can clear the table so we can eat our dinner in there like civilized people.
Maddie is eating the doorknob in the living room when I am not here. She seems to have some massive separation anxiety when I’m not around and I’m not entirely sure what to do about that.
Do I want a new tv stand? I’m not sure. I have more dvd’s than my little dvd bins can hold now and I don’t like storing them on the sides of the bins. I’ll look into it. Maybe a cabinet type thing where I can close it and you can’t see the dvd player, the vcr or the dvd’s would be good.
Be good, chochachos, and keep your nose in your own business like a good norwegian should.