Just drop the friggin' ball already

Ever so slowly, I am returning to the land of the living. When I say "ever so slowly," I really mean it. I started to fall asleep today during the bobcat talk at work (duh, of course -- where else would there be a bobcat talk?). Doesn't sound like that big a deal? Well, I was the one inside the bobcat cage...giving the presentation. Mid-way through my intro, my eyelids started getting very heavy; I had to prop myself up in there in order to avoid a face-plant into Bob's food dish (yeah, our bobcat's name is Bob. Clever, no?).

I spent the two weeks leading up to Christmas in holiday hell, running our Christmas fundraising event every night. This event renewed my desire to get the hell out of here -- out of Fort Myers, out of the Nature Center, out of my craphole of an apartment. I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. Aren't the holidays grand?

I applied for a job in Missoula, Montana, yesterday; this weekend, I'm applying to a job or two in North Carolina. Cross your fingers -- with any luck, one of these facilities will call me up and say, "Hey, we'd love to have you! You can start after your Costa Rica trip and we'll even pay the penalty from your apartment complex for breaking your lease! Heck, we'll even cover your moving expenses because we want you that bad!"

Ah, a girl can dream.

I have zero plans for New Year's Eve tomorrow night, which is a fitting way to end this year. It has been a rough one for many, many reasons, and it only makes sense that 2005 would end with a whimper rather than some rollicking good-time. For the first time, I've been looking forward to New Year's Eve not for the parties, but for the chance at a new beginning. I like the idea that I can wake up Sunday morning, and say that 2006 is going to be different, that it's going to be better. Sure, I can say that any given morning, but it's more fun to say it on a holiday.

Still, though, 2006 doesn't even sound like a real year. I realized over Christmas that my brother will graduate from high school in 2010 -- how bizarre does that sound? Shouldn't there be flying cars by now?

I hope you all had some lovely holidays and that you have a happy new year. I'll think of you as Foxy freaks out and crawls underneath me during the neighborhood fireworks.

I love me some Scottish faun

I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia this afternoon with my friend KW. KW is the friend who tricked me into going to her creepy church. I should have suspected something was amiss this afternoon when we followed a red minivan to the theater and she said, "I'm pretty sure that's Pastor D's van. He'll know where we are supposed to go."

And why would he know where we were supposed to go? Because he's the one who gave KW her movie tickets and he's also the one who rented the theater for his congregation to see CON together! Of course!

Before the movie began, the associate pastor said a few words to the group of 200 churchgoers gathered in the icy theater (why are theaters so cold? I had a very strong urge to pee throughout the movie just so I could warm up). He explained how the story was a parable, blahdy blah, and how he believed that this movie was an instant Christmas classic -- "Right up there with It's a Wonderful Life. I think Narnia may even eclipse that fine film." Then he asked us to sing "Joy to the World."

Have you ever sung Christmas carols in a dark, crowded theater with a couple hundred strangers? It's an odd experience to say the least.

After the movie started, I couldn't stop thinking about how vastly improved It's a Wonderful Life would be with some Narnial elements. Frank Capra's movie is really just missing some trolls, centaurs, and epic battle sequences. How great would it be George Bailey led the people and woodland creatures of Bedford Falls in a bloody rebellion against Mr. Potter? Or if Clarence said, "George, every time a cyclops' eye is gouged out, an angel gets his wings"? Add those parts and the movies would be virtually indistinguishable.

Did anyone catch Saturday Night Live last night? There was a hilarious music video with Chris Parnell and one of the new guys, rapping a Beastie Boys-esque tale all over NYC about "The Chronic (...-les of Narnia)." I just couldn't get the refrain out of my head during the movie ("The Chronic/What?/...-cles of Narnia"). I guess you had to see the skit.

Aside from my daydreaming and not being able to see the screen over the head of the dude in front of me (to be fair, the movie screen wasn't that much bigger than my laptop screen...this was a tiny, tiny theater), the movie was quite enjoyable, but I have a weakness for little kids with British accents. And buff non-threatening fauns in knit scarves. So, maybe I'm not the most impartial judge. Nonetheless, the movie is one of those that should be seen on a big(ger) screen -- awesome cinematography and scary-good cgi effects. I also liked how the White Witch didn't look like the "typical" witch; not only did she have killer dreads, but she kind of reminded me of the blue princess in the CandyLand game, except, of course, with less cherubic features.

I am a bit surprised, though, that the movie is only rated PG. Although you never see any blood, there is quite a bit of violence; the battle scene was Braveheart-like in its brutality. Should little kids be watching that sort of thing? I don't know. I do know that the children of the screen-blocking head in front of me were climbing all over said head during the scary parts of the film.

When KW and I left the theater at the end of the movie, she asked if I picked up on the biblical references in the story. It's kind of hard not to notice the parallels (especially when you're in a special church-only screening and people stand up and applaud during Maslan's return), but I would rather enjoy the movie as a fantasy, of some kids playing around in a wardrobe, running through some myterious forest whilst wearing oversized fur coats, and meeting up with a pair of lovable talking beavers (which, by the way, I'm totally in love with; can someone get me a couple of friendly talking beavers for Christmas?). I read the book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child, and I loved it then, completely unaware of its Christian themes. And that's how I shall enjoy it now -- it's just a fairy tale to me, not some tool for evangelism.

Reason #472 not to turn on the tv on a Saturday

NBC Sports presents "Earth, Wind & Fire: Tribute on Ice with Brian Boitano."

Bestiality and prostitution: a family tradition since 1880

Somehow, a trunk in my mother's bedroom has become a repository of all sorts of priceless family heirlooms and memories. In this large wooden trunk is my great-great aunt's costume jewelry along with a lock of her hair (blonde, like so many others on my mom's side of the family; that gene missed me and went straight to my sister); pictures of my great-great one-armed grandfather in the ferrotype style (he looked alarmingly like Robin Williams, except less hairy); old watches and other trinkets; and journals aplenty, including my grandfather's journals from his teenage years, which he kept entirely in Spanish for reasons unknown to us, and my grandmother's great-grandmother's journals from the 1880s, written entirely in her native language, Swedish.

I think her name was Christine -- that's the default name I go to for my mom's side of the family: it's my mom's middle name, it's my grandmother's middle name, and it would be my middle name and my sister's, too, if either of us had a middle name (our hyphenated surname precluded that; our parents are cruel, but not so cruel as to give us four names). Anyway, I'm not sure that Christine ever came to the U.S., though her journals did, probably with her daughter Charlotte, my great-great-grandmother.

Now, my mom, grandmother, and I embrace our Swedish heritage. For example, the three of us own more Swedish horses than you can shake a fistful of skorpers at (skorpers, a staple of Swedish bakeries, are pieces of flattened stale bread rolled around in sugar. Hey, at least it's not haggis). But I'll be damned if any of us can read/write/speak a word of the Swedish language outside of "Valkömmen," which we only know because it is woven into the doormat my grandmother has had since the beginning of time.

With each passing year, though, our desire to learn some Swedish has grown because, as each year goes by, the pages in my great-great-great-grandmother's journals fade a little more. Her journal, now well over 100 years old, falls apart each time you touch it. We don't know much about Christine and her life in Sweden -- her journal is all that's left of her and it doesn't seem like it's going to be around much longer.

I think the dynamic duo of my mom and grandmother toyed with the idea of taking a class in Swedish, but they were not optimistic that they would be able to learn enough to fully grasp the contents of the journal. Me, I'm far too lazy to learn a Germanic language; if there's anything that I learned from my degree in linguistics (other than the ins and outs of x-bar theory, which, let me tell you, I use all the time), it's that Germanic languages are, for lack of a better word, hard. It seemed that we were destined never to know what was so important in that journal that caused my family to hold onto it for so many generations.

One day, though, the gods smiled down upon us as they brought Torborg into our lives. Well, his name isn't actually Torborg -- I've told my mom his name a million times, but "Torborg" is the name she insists on calling him. I kind of like that name for him; it sounds like "cyborg," an entity with which he shares key similarities. I say that out of love.

Our planetarium director met Torborg online three years ago, right around when I started working at the nature center. For awhile, he was just her "pen pal" from Sweden, but then he came to visit her here for a few weeks. That visit went well, and pretty soon, it seemed like Torborg was one of the staff because he was here, visiting all the time. Naturally, we forced him to work for us like we do with all people who linger for too long near the nature center.

Anyway, the celestial goddess and Torborg got married this spring; she did it on her lunch break from work, which I find hilarious and very much in keeping with her personality. Now that he was a permanent member of the nature center family, I found it perfectly acceptable to exploit his skills, so I approached him about translating the journal. He was on the fence about it because he wasn't so confident about his proficiency with English, so I backed off.

A few weeks ago, though, celestial goddess (<--dude, she calls herself that) asked me if my mom could do their taxes this year. My mom, a former accountant, gets some kind of thrill from tax code and had done the taxes of the entire naturalist staff last year. Since the celestial goddess's taxes would be a bit more complicated than my unmarried, poor, non-asset-owning staff, she was willing to pay my mom.

My mom agreed to do her taxes on one condition: in lieu of cash, she wanted a few pages of the journal translated in time for Christmas. Finally, we could give my grandmother a little insight into her great-grandmother.

My mom sent me some scanned journal pages in my birthday card this week so that Torborg could get to work on the translation. Celestial goddess stopped in my office the other morning to give me an update.

"It seems that the journal was written by a man," she said with an apologetic look on her face.

"What? Why do you think that?"

"Well," she began gingerly,"the writer said something about his father saying to him when he was young, 'Welcome, to the world, my boy.'"

"That doesn't make any sense. We know the journal belonged to Christine."

"There's something else, too. He was in the army. He joined the army after breaking up with a woman. She was an organ grinder. When her instrument broke, she couldn't afford to fix it, so she decided to be a whore. That's when the writer decided to join the army."

All of this just seemed too weird to be true. The celestial goddess went on about the writer's description of being desperately poor, growing up in a family of 12 (after the 11th child was born, the writer's mother said to the father, "Well, we might as well make it an even 12"); Torborg said he could just feel the despair coming off the page. The thing was, though, that Christine didn't have 11 siblings.

I asked the celestial goddess if it might all be a story.

She paused. "You know, I never thought about that. I guess you could be right; your grandmother might have been writing a novel."

The next day, she came back into my office and said that Torborg, after some consideration and more reading, agreed that the journal was part of a well-thought-out story. She also mentioned a part of the story she had omitted when she thought that the "main character" was a family member of mine.

"There's a part where the man is looking for work, and so he goes to a goat farm. The goat herder wasn't confident in the man's ability to handle a herd of goats, so he -- the writer, who I thought was related to you -- started, uh, touching the goat, to show the herder how much he liked goats. The goat herder was really creeped out by this and refused him a job."

Yeah, I really don't think the main character is kin.

She then added, "You know, it's kind of sad. Your grandmother clearly was very skilled at story-telling and she never got to realize her talent."

Well, if that doesn't light a fire under my ass to get my act together on this writing thing, nothing will. I've wanted to publish a book for as long as I can remember. I certainly don't want a nearly-finished work of mine languishing in a trunk for 120 years.

Of course, my predecessors won't have journal pages of mine, as I do most of my writing on a computer. I mean, I suppose someone could toss my laptop nto my mom's trunk when I'm dead, but I highly doubt my computer will be functioning in the year 2180 (hell, I highly doubt it will be functioning in 2008). So, that means I've got to do something now, or soon. It's the least I can do to honor the memory to honor someone who had the courage to write a story about whore-lovin', goat-touchin' Swede.

Birthdays 1998-2005: A Review (Scroll to the bottom for 10 things I want to do before I'm 30)

Today I am only 10 years away from being able to run for president. Today I exit the highly desirable 18-24 age bracket and enter a less coveted demographic. Today I am, at long last, able to rent a car without penalty of exorbitant underage fees.

Today I am 25. A whole friggin quarter of a century. Whoop-de-doo. My best friend from high school teased, "HA! You're half of 50!" I told my grandmother about this and she said, "Well, I guess that makes me half of 150. Hey -- that sounds pretty young!"

According to the Death Clock, I'm going to kick it on my brother's 68th birthday, on February 16, 2060. Special thanks to TEd for this cheery link [oh, and TEd, thanks for the link to my rapture post; I just made my round o' blogs today and saw it. From what I know of butterflies, most are commies and, therefore, oppose state-sponsored religion. Or so I've heard]. So, I'm going to die when I'm 79. Only 54 years to go!

Ugh, but that means 54 more birthdays...I'm not so good at birthdays any more. I used to love my birthday. I used to like it more than Christmas because it was all about me, wonderful, glorious me. Then people starting combining my birthday and Christmas -- "Here's your birthday-slash-Christmas present" -- and even though it's not about the presents, blah, blah, blah, it still sucks. If your birthday were in June, you wouldn't expect anyone to give you a birthday/Christmas present because that is lame. If you have December-born friends, and you slash up their birthday, cut it out and stop screwing them out of a present; it's not fair.

Aside from losing my birthday presents to Christ, my last few birthdays have kind of sucked all on their own. Maybe I'm putting too much pressure on myself to have a good time; maybe I hang out with losers, I don't know. What follows is a review of the birthdays of my quasi-adult life, rated for your convenience on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being a total crapfest; 1 being a mud-wrestling-midgets-good time).

18th Birthday I started the morning of my 18th birthday in therapy. I was ordered to go by my school because one meddling English teacher thought that I might be suicidal since I didn't turn in a few assignments on Tess of the d'Urbervilles (this was around the time that I came to grips with the fact that I don't like fiction. Period). I was kinda depressed/stressed around this time because I was (needlessly) worried about getting into college, but I was not suicidal. I just wanted to get the fuck out of high school as quickly as possible. The doctor gave me Prozac, anyway, because that's what a lot of these doctors do -- they just throw around drugs. Prozac wasn't bad, though it did totally squash my appetite, so I lost a few pounds, making me feel a little better.

I left the doctor's office for the airport, as I had a debate tournament at the University of Michigan that weekend. Oh, I was such a debate geek -- not only was I captain of the team for two years, but I spent every summer of high school at debate camp at the University of Michigan. God, I'm cool.

My debate partner (the one who reminded me that 50 divided by two is 25) and I did pretty well, considering the caliber of the teams we were up against. I remember cutting up articles for arguments on the flight from Atlanta to Detroit -- something we would never be allowed to do now, of course. Ah, those were the days.

Score: 6.5/10. No one wants antidepressant prescriptions forced on them on their birthday.

19th Birthday I had sex. For the first time. With a frat boy. In the study lounge in my dorm. Need I say more?

Score: 7/10. Not that I expected candlelight and rose petals for my first time, but I could have done better than a good ol' boy from Virginia passing out on top of me while laying on tacky 1970s furniture. I think I was just looking for an end to Virginity Quest '99.

20th Birthday Oh, this one is a gem. I had an evening geology lab on my birthday. Most nights (that I remembered to go to it), I faced the 40-minute walk home in the dark by myself. On my birthday, my boyfriend was kind enough to offer to pick me up from lab and drive me to the dinner we'd planned with my friends. Since it was December in Montana, and therefore, very cold and snowy, I thought this was the least he could do.

So, I waited outside the science building for the boyfriend. Then I waited some more. Then, after that, I kept waiting. Eventually, I called his house (I knew no one with a cell phone at this time).

Me: "Hey, is everything okay?"

Him: "Yeah. I'm just playing a video game. What are you up to?"

Me: "I'm at the science building...waiting for you."

Him: "Why are you waiting for me?"

Me: "Because you said you'd pick me up..."

Him: "Why would I pick you up?"

Me: "Because it's my birthday?"

Him: "Your birthday's next week."

Me: "Nooo...I'm pretty sure it's today."

After he decided to believe me, he finally came to pick me up and we drove to meet my friends at Sushi Hana.

It was the foggiest night I had ever seen -- one of those where you can't see across the street, let alone the car in front of you. So, the drive was a little scary. It got much scarier when my boyfriend's car died as we turned onto a major road. One moment, the motor is humming along; the next moment, the car is silent as we coasted into the shoulder. We rolled into a parking lot and used all of our spare change to call the restaurant repeatedly, trying to get a hold of my friends (again, a few cell phones would have been handy here; oh, how quickly technology changes).

We finally did, and my friend Emily came to pick us up. I got into the backseat of the car where I met a guy who I had seen before -- shooting up heroin with is dorm room door open. I didn't even know Emily knew they guy -- and she didn't really. I still have no idea why she brought him along.

We arrived at the sushi place and met our other friends. As soon as we got there, though, Heroin Harry started complaining loudly. "Gawwwd, this place smells like fish." He wasn't even trying to be funny. "Gawwwd, are you going to eat that junk? That's disgusting."

I ignored him for the most part and was thrilled when he got up to leave. But then he came back. With a sandwich from Arby's. "Gawwwd, this is so much better than that shit you're eating." He was charming. The best was when he ate my green tea ice cream when I was in the bathroom. No one at the table could stop him. I think they were afraid.

Score: 9/10. Spending the evening with a dessert-stealing drug addict? Fearing for my life as we cruise down the road in a powerless vehicle? Being forgotten by a loved one? What more could a girl ask for!

21st Birthday I started my day with a trip to the plasma bank and a pap smear, so what could go wrong? A few of my friends who were present for the 20th birthday debacle decided that they were going to plan a cool, crackhead-free birthday for me. "We're going to take you out for a good time! We'll take care of everything -- we'll make reservations, invite everyone, we'll do it all!"

I found out later that that meant I would be picking everyone up and driving to the restaurant where I would pay for my own dinner, but only after listening to them ridicule me as I got dressed to go out. You see, I had just mysteriously lost 12 pounds, so none of my clothes fit and I had scary Nicole Richie arms. I wasn't trying to lose weight, as I was in a good place to begin with; somehow, though, some of me disappeared. Twelve pounds is a huge deal when you're only 5'1". It wasn't pretty...and my very good friends let me know.

After dinner, I wanted to go out because it was, after all, my 21st birthday. But everyone bailed because they had to study (hey you college professors out there: why do you people assign so much work in the two weeks BEFORE finals?) or because they weren't yet 21. So, after I drove everyone home, I called up a "secondary" friend -- you know, someone I was friendly with, but who I had never really hung out with before.

We went to a few bars and had a good time. I was dancing in a crowd at one place, when my new buddy approached me, with a freshman guy, who looked vaguely familiar, trailing behind her. "BPW, I got you something," she said as she literally handed the freshman over to me. Uh, okay...

I danced with the guy, and la-di-da, later at my place we were naked on my futon when I realized how I knew the freshman.

Me: "Oh shit! I know you -- you're on my caseload! I'm your advisor!"

Him: "Oh yeah! Hey, thanks for telling me not to take Professor Justman's class -- I really dodged a bullet on that one."

Me: "You have to change your major. Tomorrow. I'll do it for you."

After some academic discussion, he confided that I was the oldest girl he had ever slept with.

Score: 7/10. Because the pap smear was the highlight of the day. Oh, and I set my hair on fire drinking a Flaming Blue Lamborghini.

22nd Birthday This one would get a better score were it not so bittersweet. I had dinner and a few beers with my real friends -- the ones I'm still in contact with. I won a cool pint glass at pint night at my favorite bar, and I was home by 10:30. No mysterious junkies, no making fun of my body, no pap smears, no one-night stands. It was a good night.

That day, though, I had just gotten the job at the Nature Center and was supposed to start in a few weeks. So, that night was the last time I got to hang out with all of my friends before having to move across country.

Score: 2/10. It was sad saying goodbye to everyone. :(

23rd Birthday I was not invited to my own birthday party at work. It was the first night of our big holiday hoo-ha, and I was out on the trail fixing the Christmas lights because none of them worked. I went back into the office to refill my staple gun, where the surly secretary said, "Where were you? We've all been sitting in the breakroom waiting for you?" She then said that "we may have left you a piece of cake."

Score: 7/10. I didn't have any friends at this time. It was a sad, sad night.

24th Birthday The Ex Boyfriend and I went camping at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. This trip was kind of a bummer ... I'm just not sure that either one of us wanted to be in Key Largo that weekend. For example, we forgot pretty much every important item because we weren't really in the mood to plan the trip. The highlight was when we came back from dinner and found a raccoon sitting in our tent eating a bag of tortilla chips.

Score: 5/10. Things started getting weird between us during the trip. We broke up not too long after.

Holy crap, are you still reading this?

My big plans for my 25th? Well, I'm going to work (whee!) and I may go down to the beach bar later. Nothing out of the ordinary -- and hopefully it will stay that way.


10 things I want to do before I'm 30:
1. Use the word akimbo in a game of Scrabble.
2. Get something other than my work-related articles published
3. Figure out what I want to be when I grow up
4. Find wuv, twoo wuv
5. Wash my dishes
6. Change the template on this blog (I'm trying, Jenna!)
7. Pay off a credit card (god, I am funny)
8. Buy a car cooler than my minivan
9. Visit family in god-forsaken Ohio
10. Finish all the knitting projects I've started this year

How's this for pillow talk?

Traveling Man was in town Thursday night. When I got to his hotel room, he left to go buy some wine for us (mmm, gas station chablis...) and handed me the remote control for the tv. I made myself comfortable and turned on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Traveling Man returned and asked what I was watching.

"Conan O'Brien."

"You like Conan O'Brien?"

"No. I love Conan O'Brien."

"Me too. I like his hair. You know, if we were together in a club in Fort Lauderdale, and Conan O'Brien walked in, I would understand if you left me for him."

"Well, everyone deserves one freebie."

"Oh my god, we could be brother and sister."