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Weekend project complete May 10, 2008 ~ 10:31 pm

Posted by Julie in : About a Julz , 2comments

rook

The helix (outer cartilage) piercing is old. The rook (cartilage piercing right over my earhole, closest to my face) was done at about 7 PM tonight. Yes, it hurts. But not as much as the helix did. Amazing, how getting it done by a trained professional hurts less than going to Piercing Pagoda at the mall and getting it done with a gun.

Re-enry is hard May 6, 2008 ~ 9:02 pm

Posted by Julie in : photo safari, Craftiness Is Next To Godliness, The Girls , comments closed

Work is chaos, my boss has a kidney stone and probably won’t be in for another day or so, and the new commencement ticket distribution program on the computer is causing all sorts of headaches. Let’s just say it was very hard to come back from a wonderful four-day weekend with Jordana and Samang. So I’ll share a look back with you guys to get us all through the next few days:

Monday in the Park with Samang

National Aquarium

Maryland in May

Sky Drama Handspun

Samang's first MDSW

baby robins

Shooting for the lowest common denominator April 25, 2008 ~ 10:20 pm

Posted by Julie in : Random Insanity , comments closed

Because I don’t think I’ve shared this with you guys yet:

Pull My Finger

That’s my uncle Norm, pulling FDR’s finger at the Roosevelt Memorial in DC. And lest you think that it’s only my family who would find this kind of redneck behavior entertaining, FDR’s finger is shiny because so many other people had the same idea that they’ve worn the patina from the bronze with their collective finger-pulling. So there.

Also? Apparently our greatest president looked a lot like Elton John. I’m just going to start singing “Rocket Man” now, okay?

Rocket Man

And finally, while I’ve never considered Eleanor Roosevelt a looker, I never thought she looked like Barbara Bush and Mamie Eisenhower’s lovechild. Until I saw a statue of her at the Memorial:

Eleanor Roosevelt

Please note that these sculptures have been made PC. In the picture of Eleanor that this was based on, she was wearing a fur stole. And the only reason that FDR’s finger was extended for Norm to pull? Because in the picture that one was based on, FDR had a cigarette holder between his fingers. No cigarette holder in the sculpture. And for that matter? FDR would have been pissed that there is a sculpture of him in his wheelchair - her went to great lengths to avoid being seen in it.

Pull my finger, Rocket Man. Posterity will now remember you as that guy in the wheelchair who didn’t smoke but had some really nifty glasses.

I just tithed to Barack. April 23, 2008 ~ 2:46 pm

Posted by Julie in : Politically Incorrect , comments closed

$25 isn’t going to break me, even if I am a little po’ this week. And he needs some cash to keep fighting the good fight in the upcoming primaries. But mostly I did it because I’m disappointed that Pennsylvania fell for the Clinton “Farakhan” trick. Dude, everybody’s gotta back somebody. I don’t think Barack was all “Come on, Farakhan! Come support me!” do you?

Give the man some cash to piss off the Clinton supporters. :)

short attention span theatre April 22, 2008 ~ 9:10 pm

Posted by Julie in : Shorty , comments closed

I think this is the longest break I’ve taken from blogging in…well, ever. There are plenty of excuses, but I don’t feel like making an excuse post, because that would be boring. I don’t have any good excuses like “I got into a total bitchfight with Daisy from Rock of Love and she knocked me unconscious with her plastic surgically enhanced face.” That would be cool though, huh? Except I could totally take her down, so maybe my excuse would be “I was put in jail on aggravated assault charges.” That makes me sound like less of a wuss, at least.

And that last paragraph, which I wrote and re-wrote several times? Perhaps that’s my best excuse: if I would have blogged in the past weeks? It would have been worse than that. I think in terms of Twitter-sized bites or Facebook status messages these days because I have the attention span of a flea. Do fleas even have attention spans? (And that just proved the point about the attention span nicely, didn’t it?)

The End.

Teaching an old dog new tricks. April 8, 2008 ~ 2:11 pm

Posted by Julie in : About a Julz, Drama Queen , comments closed

I have always thought of myself as a writer, and generally if you think of yourself as a writer, you think of yourself as a pretty decent one. We only define ourselves as something if we’re good at it, after all. Now just because I think I’m a decent writer doesn’t mean I’m a decent writer all the time (blog posts written while I’m multi-tasking are proof of this). It also doesn’t mean that I have a great process to produce decent writing.

Frankly, I’m discovering that my writing process - which I relied on throughout at least eighteen of my twenty years of schooling - pretty much sucks. For starters, I can produce writing under pressure, so for many years I deluded myself into thinking that I needed that pressure to write something. Um, no. I was an idiot with procrastination problems. Also, my writing goes something like this: write something. Is it perfect? Did it say what I wanted it to say in just the right way? No. Delete it, start again. After I get that sentence done, move on. Today I finally realized that system is not very efficient. At all. It’s much better to get something down on paper, leave myself a note that says “This isn’t quite right, find another way to say it,” and move on to the next sentence. Get all of it out of my head and on to paper, then make revisions.

Did I mention that I’m thirty and that I can recall numerous occasions where teachers and professors told me this exact thing and I never implemented it? So I’m an inefficient procrastinator who is also a stubborn idiot. Wonderful.

Today on my lunch break, I was working on a grant. I told the artistic director of the theater that I’m writing said grant for that I will have a rough draft for her on Monday, and for once in my life I wanted to give myself plenty of time to write it and get some feedback from Jordana. (Look, in the past I would have started it Sunday night. This is progress.) And since I realized the “Get each sentence perfect” method sucked, I was getting stuff out of my head and leaving notes for myself throughout the Word document. And I remembered something else. Writing? It’s hard work. And I think the creative muscles I use for it have atrophied since I last tried to write anything that wasn’t a blog entry.

Today, writing is very similar to pulling teeth. I hope it will get easier again.

Deep thought gone awry. April 4, 2008 ~ 10:25 am

Posted by Julie in : About a Julz, Deep Thoughts, Da Cats , comments closed

The monkey survived. It even survived the 1 AM blitz where Freddie ran from one end of the apartment to the other, and almost knocked over the monkey’s rocking chair in an attempt to get to the top of it so he could see what the hell that other cat in the mirror was doing in his house (think of the rocking chair as a see-saw and you will understand). After the third time he jumped on the back of the armchair, causing it to tip back and then drop with a loud thump, Freddie almost did not survive the night, but everything ended up fine.

On a totally unrelated note, I’ve found myself thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr. today, since it’s the 40th anniversary of his assassination and his picture is everywhere today. The man was only 39 when he died, but he managed to pack so much into that short period of time. I’m 30, and I haven’t done even 1/20th of what he did by the time he was my age. I truly believe that people who are going to die young have some sort of knowledge of that, not consciously, but somewhere in their makeup that makes them push harder and strive to achieve a lot in the time they have. Look at the people we have lost through assassination: JFK, RFK, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King (and all the others I’m not listing). They achieved remarkable things in their limited time here. Freddie Mercury, dead at 46, look at everything he did.

I have no such drive, and sometimes this depresses me. Other times, I crack open a beer, look on the bright side and think “Hey, this must mean I’m going to live forever.”

Monkey on my back. April 3, 2008 ~ 10:03 am

Posted by Julie in : Random Insanity, Da Cats , comments closed

Some days, I really have nothing to write. I mean, I could write: “I was at work all day and it was busy. And then I came home and had wine and cheese and crackers for dinner.” Or “I’m in a power of positive communication seminar. I have something I’d like to communicate.” Or “Trapped at the Foundation Center in grant writing courses.” But those are boring posts (although they make pretty good Twitter entries, just ask anyone who has followed me this week on Twitter). You don’t want the breakdown of my day like that. You come here for the stupid stories and the pithy commentary, although we haven’t had pithy commentary here for a while, so you must be starved for that. So on days where my life can be summed up by a Twitter comment, that is what I do, I write tweets instead. So I can blog about the important stuff. Like the vendetta Freddie has against every stuffed animal I have brought home from Dave & Busters.

Lori and I go to D&Bs at least once a month. It is our happy place. Cut price mixed drinks and arcade games are just the way to unwind after a long week at work. Or in the middle of the week. Or whenever. And when we go, we play for the tickets so that we can take prizes home. Because just like when you were a little kid, the prize is the sign that you had a really good time.

I have come home with many things from D&Bs. A small stuffed bear, a medium sized stuffed polar bear, a Wii game (I could tell you how I got that many tickets, but then I would have to kill you), some golf balls and tees for Rick…but last night we won big. We played a giant claw game and ended up with three foot tall stuffed monkeys. Mine is blue, Lori’s is pink. And frankly, there was no good way to get this sucker home. He is drapey, so I just hung him over my backpack and tied his arms around my neck. And then I walked through Times Square, got on the subway, and rode home. I think I should do that more often, really, walk around with a giant monkey on my back, because I like the looks I get from other people. I like actually being the “wow, that would only happen in New York” person, instead of thinking that about someone else.

When I got the monkey home, however, Freddie didn’t like him. Freddie also didn’t like the polar bear that I brought home the last time I was at D&Bs. Last weekend, when Samang was over, I sat the polar bear and a teddy bear beside each other so she could play with them. And Freddie would go over to the polar bear and deliberately hit it on the nose with his claws so that the bear would fall over on its face. Maybe it was looking at him funny, I don’t know. He did this five times, each time ignoring the other bear. Only the polar bear pissed him off.

Perhaps the monkey and the polar bear smell the same, because this morning Freddie started attacking the monkey. The monkey was sitting in a rocking chair, minding its own business, and suddenly I see a little cat head come up and start biting it. This happened five times, even though I tried to get him over his monkey hatred by putting him on the monkey and petting him until he purred. I tremble to think of what is going to be left of the monkey when I get home, because I just realized I forgot to move it before I came to work. There might just be a pile of blue fluff on the carpet.

Beware the wrath of Freddie. And rambling posts about blue monkeys.

Huh? March 28, 2008 ~ 10:43 am

Posted by Julie in : Random Insanity, Shorty , comments closed

This morning on the radio, I heard that on a list of emasculated husbands, the top three were Keith Urban, Rudy Giuliani, and Elton John (not necessarily in that order, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention until I heard Elton John).

Elton John is an emasculated husband. Let us ponder that.

And now let us move on with our Fridays.

Breathe March 26, 2008 ~ 3:44 pm

Posted by Julie in : Academic Office Monkey , comments closed

Boss still has the flu, I just got off the phone with her and she sounds terrible - it’s settled in her throat. She is going to try to make it in for our staff member’s memorial service tomorrow, and reminded me that it was only a month and a half ago that there was a memorial service for said staff member’s husband at the same funeral home (I was in Florida when that happened).

To that end, I have taken care of the staff member’s college obituary. I have cleaned out her desk. I have had someone contact her family so that they knew to contact HR about benefits. I have arranged that the two offices where staff member worked over the years will be closed tomorrow at 2 for the service, and informed the offices who will catch our overflow of the closings. I have almost coordinated transport for those in our offices who are going to the service. I have done everything that I had to do, all of the things that no one else was stepping up to do. And I am exhausted by it.

So tonight I am going to have some me time. A friend offered me a free ticket to see the musical Juno (in no way related to the movie of the same name) at City Center Encores tonight, and I am meeting her for dinner before that. I need some down time, and I am taking it. A deep breath before tomorrow is in order, and I am taking it.

Carpe diem, peeps. Life is just too damned short.