One Abnormal Girl

I am apparently totally helpless when it comes to food.

Anybody have advice about snack-type meals that involve easy cheap things like produce?  I’m thinking . . . Apple slices with peanut butter or yogurt, etc. The closest grocery store to me sells mostly basic non-dairy things, and I’ve come to realize that the fastest way to blow your grocery budget is to buy anything that comes pre-packaged.  But I have so few staples to my simple-eating diet that it’s easy to get bored of it and buy something I will regret.

Need ideas!

I got a set of tinier screwdrivers and managed to get the screws out only to discover that there is probably one other screw holding it together, which I can’t get to because they put a cap over it and it’s not a cap I can destroy. I hooked the speakers back up and fiddled with the knob again to get them to turn on, but again, I couldn’t get the volume up high enough to be of any use without making them shut off again.

So I tried the remote again, and still no dice, but before I gave up on it completely, I pulled the battery out of the tiny remote and just blew hard into the electronics inside, à la Nintendo cartridge.  I put the battery disc back in and tried it again and voilà, it is working.  Once again I can just ignore the stupid knob.

It’s not so much that I wouldn’t want a nicer set of speakers, but other than the knob that controls these, they work fine, and I like them a lot.  It would kill me to have to toss them just because Logitech is determined not to let me fix them myself.  It’s probably just a stupid loose wire.  Aaaaargh I hate capitalism.

I like systems.  They make things easy.  But food (grocery shopping, cooking, augh) typically defies systems, partially because the human appetite demands variety.  Ideally I’d like to have a master inventory list of items that I always have in stock, and I’d like to have a fairly predictable rotation of things I can cook with those items that will use them all up before they spoil.  Therefore, I avoid recipes calling for items that I couldn’t use in other recipes, or wouldn’t want to eat often.  This usually means I just avoid recipes and put some cereal in a bowl and garnish it with some milk and call it dinner.

In an effort to make grocery shopping bearable, I’ve made a Google spreadsheet to keep track of things, because any task that requires filtering and sorting in a spreadsheet is pretty cool.  One tab is the master inventory sorted by where the item is kept in the kitchen so I can easily run down the list and visualize if I still have any of that item left or not.  (The drawback to this is that it’s highly dependent on memory if I’m not standing in the kitchen at the time, which I’d rather not trust.  But, it might be most efficient.)  There’s a column to record whether or not I need that item, the section it’s located in at the store, and which store I buy it at.

Then I have a tab for each store which only lists items that a) I need to buy and b) I buy at that store.  So it’s an automatic shopping list, and it’s sorted by where it is in that store (so I grab all the cheeses at once, all the pastas, etc.).  And I can just bookmark the spreadsheet on my phone so I can access it at the store.

That said, today is grocery shopping day, and this is how I’m procrastinating. Maybe I’ll go to Target instead first.

I'm gonna look cool

So I finally ordered a pair of these.  Close-quartered apartment living + writing/reading/thinking = frustration.  I also got a nice white noise app for my phone, which has also been helping, but my little earbuds are just not enough to drown out the children environment.  (Seriously, this is not a playground.)

I just hope they ship fast.  I’d been using an iPod stereo as my computer speakers, and about a year ago the knob responsible for the power and volume stopped working.  Luckily it came with a small remote that still worked, but yesterday I dropped it in my cereal, and of course it’s not working anymore.  I fiddled with the knob enough to get it to turn on again, but the volume is too low, and my efforts to take it apart and look at it were foiled by my screwdriver shaft being too thick to get to the screws.  Even once I get it open, though, I’m sure I can’t fix it.  It’s a shame, because the sound is excellent for such a compact device, and it would really, really pain me to trash it when technically it still works fine.  In fact, I’d probably just store it just like my old Canon camera, taking it with me from apartment to apartment.  Thanks, companies of the world, for making piece of shit equipment that only lasts a year before taking up space in a landfill.  Do you know how many millions of people there are, trashing up the planet?  Stop making things that break.

In other news, we should all cross-dress more.

So earlier today I was talking to cryogenia and I was reminded of the comparison between the way we commonly refer to the two halves of the US: “back east” and “out west.”  Even if you’ve never lived in the east, you are likely to refer to it as “back east,” likewise even if you are from the west you might refer to it like it were still pioneer’s land.  Our collective American history is built into those short phrases: our common origin on the eastern coast and the gradual spread to the far-flung coast in the west.

And so I got to thinking that a person in the early west would have a very different social context than a person in the early east, and what better way to focus on this than to daydream about a romance between two such disparate boys colliding.

So now I have a bunch of library books to read.

• Bad Land: An American Romance
• The Human Tradition in the American West
• The American Mind; an interpretation of American thought and character since the 1880s
• Historic Cambridge in four seasons
• The End of American Innocence; a study of the first years of our own time, 1912-1917
• Winning the Wild West: the epic saga of the American frontier, 1800-1899

and last but not least,

• The Crimson Letter: Harvard, homosexuality, and the shaping of American culture

We’ll see if anything comes of it, but somebody’s got to want to read about a cowboy and a Harvard student, right?

I’ve always been relatively antisocial, but it just dawned on me why I immediately think poorly of any man who ever tries to talk to me (specifically, in locations that don’t imply anything about who I am, like the bus).

It’s because striking up a conversation with me implies they’re only doing so based on my appearance, because that’s all the info they have about me. They might want to know more about me, but it’s all with biological intent. Beyond the physical they wouldn’t give a shit.

Good to know.

Maybe I’m not as antisocial as I thought.

In my never-ending quest to feel more important, I started a formspring.me.  It’s like this totally unnecessary thing where ppl can ask you a question, anonymously or not, and then you answer it, and we all move one step closer to total omniscience.  It’s like an “ask me anything” meme with structure.

OK, cool.  Ask me something.

And if you have a formspring, lemme know.

Almost as much as I do.

Didn’t get up until a bit past 1pm today, which isn’t usual for me lately, thanks to my INCESSANT JOB.  GOD.  I guess it isn’t so bad being productive during the weekends by being up at a decent hour, though.  But I had a good excuse today.  Julien came home from the vet this morning–which I was awake for, and he’s a sore but cuddly kitty, and snoozing together is mucho quality time.  He had a mass removed from behind his knee, same stupid thing as what he had removed three years ago, which is not good.  They’re optimistic that they got all of it out, but it’s aggressive and fast-growing and it could come right back from the tiniest remnant of itself.  But without radiation (or amputation), this is what we have to work with.

Despite my late hour of rising I still did things today.  I picked up some soft food for him (he also got his teeth cleaned) and as long as I was up there I picked up some cake batter ice cream from Cold Stone.  This is my favorite flavor.  It used to be so good that the FDA made them stop selling it.  Now it’s back, presumably less heart-disease-inducing.  One can hope.

Still getting settled into the new place.  It smells a little less weird, and I have a platform for the bed, and both my dressers, AND my old computer desk, so I have everything I need to function.  There are, of course, things I still need to outfit the place like an adult (a kitchen table, coffee table, shelving, a kitchen cart, etc. etc. etc.) but it’ll get there.  And I haven’t painted yet, but I will.  I’ll have to change it back before I go, so the sooner I do it, the longer I can enjoy it before I return it to this blah blah eggshell gloss.  Blegh.

It’s also going to take me a few months to get through this laundry.  I can only carry so much to the laundromat at once, people.  I need a go-cart.

I AM ALSO MISSING CRYOGENIA‘S BIRTHDAY UP NORTH ILU AND I MISS YOU AND I’M SORRY I COULDN’T BE THERE D:

During my four-year stint at a Catholic high school, after 9 previous years of Catholic schooling, I finally developed enough of a personality that I was able to make and keep friends.  And, given that my personality was yet (and remains) unrefined, those friends were rather encouraging of my bizarre ideas and creative ploys for attention.

Like most teenagers, I was trying to find myself, and like a percentage of those, I battled with the added confusion of religious doctrine not making any damn sense.  So, dabbling in a newfound appetite for creating Webpages, I founded a quaint Geocities Webpage called Kristianity.  For the sake of religious parody, I presented myself as the center of this so-called religion, made my own commandments, and tried to find my personal limits of blasphemy.

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This weekend, barring some unforeseen obstacles, I will be moving to a one bedroom apartment of my own! Will have pictures once I am settled.

Unfortunately I would not be willing to handle two internet bills for a month (if they could even grant me a second borrowed modem), so I will not have internet for a while.

Here are some things I would like to focus on during my month of isolation:

. Scanning more doujin
. Preparing things to sell on eBay
. Reading some book
. Reading some manga I never got around to
. Decorating
. Finishing some knitting that will just have to be a wide scarf because I don’t wear the shawls I already have
. Finally sewing doll bedding
. Finishing some writing
. Laundry, budget permitting

And I probably wont get around to any of it.