arbofo

The past two weeks at work have been insane. My boss has been in and out of the office, my coworker’s on vacation in California, there were massive phone and network outages in the office last week, there’s a brand new employee in the office for everyone to train, ASL classes have started, 4 of my friends have/had birthdays, my mom wanted me to collect 400 US state quarters- so I can bring them with me to Japan (where she’ll give them to her students)- and somehow I’ve managed to do 3 loads of laundry, finish Atonement, and watch several movies and sytycd, probably all while lying comatose on my bed with the fan set on “Lo” and Emma pawing at my head.

The upcoming weeks are bound to be more of the same, especially as I get geared up to visit Japan. Ay yi yi!

So. My plans for this weekend? Absolutely non-existent. I’ll get outside to run some errands around town and I’m sure I’ll clean up the apartment a bit (it is my week to take the trash out). I also have emails to write, miles to run, and computer updates to install. And hopefully it’ll occur to me to practice my ASL. But other than that, I mostly just plan to thumb through the latest FLAT SEXY ABS! article from Women’s Health. This will be followed by lots of sitting around on my butt.

Amen for butts.

It’s your birthday
We gon party like its yo birthday
We gon sip bacardi like its your birthday

-50 Cent “In Da Club”

…yeah, I wish.

I’ve got a final exam on John Singer Sargent that I have to prepare for, so no parties for me. I did take the day off so I could bum around and run errands, though. It was nice! I shopped for basil and flowers at a nearby garden center, alongside elderly ladies who held up pots of rosemary at me and beamed. I traveled to the public library to pick up some dvds. Then I stuffed myself with pizza and cheesecake for dinner, and promptly slipped into a food coma.

I haven’t managed to do any studying yet, but the books are right in front of me, so you know… osmosis?

Sifting through my neglected rss feeds, I came across Jezebel’s birthday salute to Janet Jackson (she’s 42). It was good that I saw this, because I sort of forgot that other people were born on this day, too. But wait a minute. Why does it seem like my day is kind of a bummer, as far as famous birthdays go? Let’s take a look at the highlights for May 16th:

• Tori Spelling
• Tucker Carlson
• Liberace

Oy.

Okay, okay, there are some cool people on this list. Like Debra Winger and David Boreanaz (yup, I’m a fan of the Joss Whedon oeuvre). I shouldn’t be complaining.

It’s my birthday
Ain’t gon study like it’s ma birthday
I gon sip diet coke like it’s my birthday

See this card? Inside it says “See, there are things more frightening than having another birthday.” So true. This image is WAY scarier than the prospect of getting older.

This is the sort of thing I always want to give my friends and family on their birthdays, but then I worry that the card will make someone cry into their birthday cake, and so the card gets put back on the shelf.

So I’m one year older as of Friday, and my mom sent this card to commemorate it. I immediately took it to work and showed it to all my coworkers, and you know this man’s hairy buttocks totally brightened their day. There’s no denying it. My mom is a woman of taste.

It’s hard work having a mom who’s as awesome as she is! She’s funny, well-traveled, and wishes I wouldn’t dress like a yuppie. She’s Lorelai to my Rory.

But sometimes, cool moms come with perks.

This summer, I’m following her to Japan, where she’s teaching for part of the summer. I’m so excited, I wish I could fall asleep and wake up in July.

But I won’t, because who sleeps through birthday cake?

My laptop’s on the fritz and it’ll be a little while before it’s fixed/replaced.  Since blogging at work is not exactly kosher, it’s doubtful that there will be anything new up here for awhile.  This also means that I’ll be kind of slow to moderate any comments you might leave- bear with me!

Thanks for visiting!

Be honest: The above comic, from xkcd.com, that’s you, right?  If “yes,” you are so not alone.  Everyday at work, I receive at least one email that makes my blood start to boil.  The kind of email that demonstrates an appalling level of ignorance about my job description, or even the laws of gravity.  The kind of email where I’d rather hurl my fist through the monitor and chew on a power cord than devote precious minutes on the civilized response that this person can’t possibly deserve.

It’s like that with blogging, too, right?  You voice an opinion and inevitably someone takes you to task, even if it was just an idea you wanted to casually toss out as food for thought.  As someone who takes conflict personally and also hates confrontation, I tend to self-censor a good deal.  This only causes seething and bitterness, which loses friends, and ultimately, you become that angry old lady with 12 cats living in that house all the kids are afraid of.  So yeah, not a habit I endorse.

Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about nonviolence and conflict resolution.  Honestly, go read The Power of Nonviolence - it’s one of the best books I’ve read in ages.  It reminded me of a favorite professor I had in college- he was awesome in every sense of the word.  Nice to everyone, showed cartoons during class, and deeply involved with his work in peace psychology and mediation.  I finally decided that I wanted to read some of his work, so today, I borrowed one of his books from the library.  And because I recently battled with my roommates over dishes, I’ve also started reading Getting to Yes, a book that this professor once recommended to me.

The first thing I’ve read in the book he co-edited is about making the distinction between “conflict” and “violence.”  Conflict is just two parties with two different positions.  Getting to Yes points out that sometimes a negotiated compromise is better than the two original positions.  Critiques and/or questions aren’t always attacks, and shouldn’t be treated as such.  In contrast, violence is destructive:

It is the violence that we read and hear about daily.  It is parents fighting, one spouse battering the other or their children; it is children beating up other children in school or gangs attacking customers at a gay bar; it is ethnic cleansing, it is terrorism, it is war. [via]

Violence occurs when one party believes that their interests and well-being are more important than another’s.  To consider how this plays out on the web, I guess you really only have to look at the comic from xkcd.  But I guess it all comes down to how you express your ideas, and abstaining from personal insults while you’re at it.

Gah.  I’m ready for bed.

UGH.

I must upset a delicate temporal balance every time I leave my house early to get to work early because every time I do a [bleep] train breaks down and I end up arriving to work at the same time I would have arrived if I had left my house at the time I normally do and now that I’m at work I don’t want to be here because, clearly, the universe doesn’t want me here and to make moods worse I’m staring at blog posts reminding me of depressing nonsense such as Saudi Arabia’s [bleep] reenactment of the Salem Witch Trial.

UGH.

I need a chai.

TGIF.

My roommate and I got started talking some nonsense about this guy, Harry Whittier Frees, who dressed cats up in bizarre get-ups in, uh… the name of art:

C: http://www.brassgoggles.co.uk/brassgoggles/?p=473
me: vat is dis?
C: See those kittens? In the airship?
me: cute?
C: My grandma sent me three of this guy’s books. One with puppies, one with kitties and one with bunnies.
me: holy crap
http://members.shaw.ca/pelorian/index2.html#anchor121222
C: Yeah. the first three that person talks about
me: Emma does not know how good she has it
C: Perhaps we can show her the pictures and use those as an incentive not to scratch the couch
me: snort
hahahahaha

Holy crap.

This is unbelievably dumb, but it took an episode of Medium (”Do You Hear What I Hear?“) for me to find out the name of my sudden hearing loss/tinnitus deal.

I’ve seen my share of doctors and audiologists over the years about this. You would think that the least they could do, besides shrugging their shoulders with a stupefied “I dunno,” is give me a name for what happened to my hearing. You know… something for me to Google? (Wait, did Google even exist 9 years ago?)

Anyway, it’s called “Sudden Deafness” or SSHL or just SHL.

Yeah, it’s a little anti-climatic, and way obvious. But at least now I have something I can show my employer about what’s going on with me, and what it means when I say that I’m “deafer than usual.”

At the moment, I can’t hear anything out of my ‘good’ ear. Whatever residual hearing I have has been supplanted by a varying stream of high-pitched tinnitus. Based on past experience, this could last for about a month. I don’t mind being deaf, but it’s hard not to let such an abrupt change get to me.

But when I saw today’s PostSecret, I felt a little better:

Ain’t that the truth.  It’s nice being reminded that I’m not the only one who wishes that.

As for the tinnitus? This guy’s post made my day.

I’ve got Leo Tolstoy’s “…families are all alike” quote stuck in my head, even though it doesn’t quite apply to the blog entry I’m about to write.

But families are all alike in that they tend to serve certain dishes over and over again. Maybe it’s an old recipe that has been passed down through the generations, or maybe it’s a particular kind of tv dinner- weary parents have to serve their kids something every night, so they turn to the reliable dishes that they could make blind folded, one arm tied behind their back.

Via my mom (and her mother), I’ve inherited a recipe for broccoli rice casserole, which proudly asserts cheez whiz as its principal ingredient. With my mom, I’ll also forever associate french toast, blueberry muffins, and her one-time favorite pizza, which was topped with sun-dried tomatoes and asiago cheese.

Bisquick pancakes, omelets, mac&cheese, and hamburgers- these were my dad’s most frequent dishes. But his dinner that stirs the most nostalgia within me is his pan-fried haddock, served with small potatoes and peas, topped off with a chunky egg sauce.

A couple weeks ago, I took a stab at replicating it, and failed miserably- so I emailed him for the particulars. Here is my edit what he sent me:

Chunky Egg Sauce (”White Roux”)

• 1-2 tablespoons butter
• 1 heaping tablespoon flour
• 2/3 to 1 cup flour
• Ground Pepper
• 1 boiled egg

Melt butter in a small sauce pan and stir in the flour till no lumps. Cook 2 mins on medium-low heat. Do not burn. Stirring with a spring whisk (or similar), add milk slowly. Keep stirring until you get a sauce consistency. Add a bit more milk to thin it. Add pepper to taste.   Chop up the hard boiled egg and stir into the sauce. Add milk if necessary.

Pan-Fried Haddock

• Fresh Haddock fillets (usually 1/2 a fillet = 1 serving)
• 1 egg
• 1 Tablespoon/dash of milk
• Bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, cornmeal, or flour
• Butter or Oil (to grease the pan)

Slice fillets into appropriate serving sizes. In a small bowl, blend egg and milk. On a plate, place a layer of bread crumbs (or whatever you’re using). Dip fillets into egg-milk blend, then coat with crumbs. Then place in a greased skillet, and cook until lightly browned on both sides.