It's eleven days into November already, so it's way too late to do that blog every day for November thing. Uh maybe I can aim for three posts this month?

The class I'm teaching is ten hours a week: Monday through Friday, 7 to 9 a.m. For the first month, this schedule fucked me in every way.* During my year of unemployment, I congratulated myself for managing to be out of bed (mostly) at 8:30. For the year and a half before that, I had a 15-minute commute and didn't see the point of getting to "the newsroom" much before 10. And my job before that one -- teaching after-school English in Suwon -- required me to be at work no later than 3:30 pm. So basically, it's been at least ten years since I had to regularly wake up at 5:20 am, and the fear, dread, anxiety and anger that floods my brain when the alarm goes off these days does feel strangely like my junior year of high school. Oh my god! I have to get up, spackle makeup over my acne, curl my hair and finish my AP American History homework!

And then there's how I feel after class: I'm done at 9, but I'm useless for the rest of the day. I get home, stare at the computer for a couple hours, eat something, stare some more, and suddenly Ryan's home, asking what I did with myself all day. Then I'm like, "nothing" and "I have to go to bed now."

But in the interest of not being completely whiny, things have been getting better. My body has adjusted to the hours. I no longer feel despair and self-loathing when the alarm goes off. I've been doing some Pomodoro Technique-type things and it's helping me get through my To-Do lists. It goes without saying that the people in my class -- adults who want to learn English badly enough that they show up, every day, at 7 in the morning -- are motivated to an almost horrifying degree.

Finally, this year, I've found a reason to appreciate Daylight Savings Time. When I started this job, the sky was completely dark in the mornings and I hated everybody and everything. Now, I walk to the car and the world is light and purpley. I get in and turn up 16th street and NPR tells me the sun is almost ready to rise. If I'm at Walter Reed before Garrison Keillor starts in on the Writer's Almanac, I know that I'll be at school on time.

* Phrase stolen from here. Thank you, anonymous Pakistani official, for your colorful swears.

One essay that's been kicking around in my head for a while is Meghan Daum's My Misspent Youth. I remember how I found it -- through a January blog post on Slate, which was talking about money and women and creative-professional-type careers and whatnot. And I remembered this essay the other day because of something else on Slate, specifically this paragraph, where the author is talking about the financial reality of being a stay-at-home freelance writer with a working husband, two children and a babysitter:

But eventually I got used to the sitter, and, in the years since, I've been working on a novel, as well as on the occasional magazine article or radio story. Some of the work gets calmly completed during the baby-sitter hours and some more frantically on the margins: taking a reporting phone call at music class; doing an edit while breast-feeding. In general, I'm happy with the work I've done since having children, but I often get really mopey about not having done more. Or about not having earned more: With the exception of the year I received a movie windfall (a modest one—"that's TV money," sneered the agent), my work has not even covered the cost of child care. Which is humiliating, and imprudent.

The humiliating imprudence of working, and yet not coming close to supporting yourself; the way we form ideas in adolescence of the lives we want to lead, and the way we let those ideas dictate financially and emotionally unsustainable decisions: Obviously I've been thinking about this stuff in the last year, a year when I got laid off from my shitty, inconsequential reporting job, then came to the brink of going to photojournalism school, then worked for a couple of wedding photographers who, after a month, told me I was an incompetent, lazy person who couldn't shoot her way out of a paper bag. Throughout all of this — and during the year and a half previous, when I was actually working at my shitty inconsequential reporting job, and during the freelancing I did in Korea and Richmond, and during college when I earned my journalism degree and put in the required unpaid time in newsrooms — I was filled with this anxiety. I wasn't happy with the work I was doing, and thinking about future work (Moving up professionally? Networking? Freelancing? Starting my own photography business? Sinking $35,000 into tuition that'll take forever to earn back? Getting another reporting job that would probably be more stressful but just as inconsequential? Moving into PR?) didn't help. Why did thoughts of my future fill me with dread? Why didn't I want to do any of this? Why didn't I enjoy doing any of it? Was it because I wasn't trying hard enough? Was it because I was a bad, slothful person and I needed to try harder and keep plugging along? Obviously!

I guess it's just been disorienting, slowly letting go of the "I will be a creative professional" mindset, letting it float away from me and then turning around and looking at the way I was, wondering why I've spent years twisting myself into knots for nothing, like a doodoo brain. Whatever. Basically, if you haven't read that Daum essay you should click on over. I like how she talks about seeing a prewar Manhattan apartment as a teenager, and how the resulting, all-consuming desire for New York hardwood floors basically ruined the next ten years of her life. I feel the same way about myself, and about whenever it was that I decided it would be a good idea to write for a living, for other people, as a job.

So FYI, I got an ESL teaching certificate this summer and I've been working with adults in Maryland and Ryan and I are moderately far along in our application to this here thing. I'm not making much money right now and the hours are kind of a bitch but more than anything else, I feel relieved.

In other news, I went insane the other day and bought a very large tub of kimchi. It is slowly taking over the apartment.

Time for a Seasonal Update!

Remember when I used to write on this thing multiple times a week? That sure was a while ago. To the tens of you (or perhaps that should not be plural) who are still checking my precious internet diary for updates every now and again, all I can do is apologize and urge you to discover Google Reader and rss feeds, already. Free your minds. Your terrible, warped minds that crave slot-machine-esque intermittent reward. Don't let B.F. Skinner get the best of you; take charge of your web browsing! Tear yourselves away from randomized reinforcement! You zombies, you slaves, you drooling smelly behaviorist sheep!

And now I would like to talk about natural deodorant. What is the deal with it? That's what I want to know.

See, I started using some Tom's of Maine this summer, partly for embarrassing granola reasons -- you know, because of antiperspirant's ingredients, and the maybe-cancer, and whatever. I'm way too lazy to actually read any studies; the most I'm willing to do is visit one .gov website, and the National Cancer Institute hedges its bets:

More research is needed to specifically examine whether the use of deodorants or antiperspirants can cause the buildup of parabens and aluminum-based compounds in breast tissue. Additional research is also necessary to determine whether these chemicals can either alter the DNA in some cells or cause other breast cell changes that may lead to the development of breast cancer.

But just reading that paragraph grosses me out. "Aluminum-based compounds in breast tissue." Fucking...that is disgusting.

Oh but is it? Is it so disgusting? Is it really? How about all the other disgusting things I put on and in and around myself without a second thought? I'm mostly off processed foods, I avoid corn syrup, my water bottle doesn't leak plastic and now my deodorant contains no metal: this is all very well and good. Good for me, and hooray. But meanwhile, I'm still cleaning my apartment with chemicals and I'm still drinking milk, and those things contain la la la LALALALA I CANT HEAR YOU

So anyway, yes, I am a little concerned about regular deodorant and whether or not it causes cancer, for whatever that's worth (nothing). But let's stop pretending that was the real reason I switched. Obviously, I'm using the hippie stuff now because aluminum is what makes the armpits on your white shirts yellow, and nothing is more important to me than squeezing as much life as possible out of a $7 Target T-shirt.

And I will say right now that it works, miraculously. I might be the last person on the planet to finally discover this work-around, but just in case I'm not, there you are. Use an aluminum-free deodorant and your shirts will stop turning yellow, just like magic. The world will open up to you. Possibilities you never dreamed of will appear: For instance, how will you spend that extra $7 that you were going to use to buy a new white T-shirt? My god! You could buy a burrito, or a differently colored shirt.

The problem is, see, that I smell like death. Death. I have to scrub the stink from my armpits at the end of every day. Every morning, I shower and apply my useless "deodorant" and put on a clean shirt. And every day by midmorning I reek like a seventh-grade boy who just swam through a silo of chopped onions. It seems to be worse now than it was in the summer, somehow. Maybe it's because I'm wearing more synthetic fabrics now that it's cold -- today, for instance, I put on a Goodwill shirt that, as per usual, has a cute pattern but is made of gross polyester. By the end of class my stench was so powerful that I was afraid to get too close to any of my students, and I was having paranoid delusions. Why are they smiling at me? I wondered. Are they laughing at me? Are they laughing at me because I STINK? They are, I bet they are, oh my god why is everybody so mean to me it's not my fault that I smell so goddamned bad right now.

Obviously, if you have a good deodorant recommendation I would appreciate it.

We had a couple of six packs of Brooklyn Summer Ale in the fridge last week:

It's actually kind of gross and I don't recommend it.  Their brown ale is so delicious; what went wrong here?  I don't know, but this stuff tastes like ass, no two ways about it.

So the beer was disappointing, but as we were drinking it we kept making comments about the packaging and how pleasing it was to the eye.  How could this beer be so disgusting, we wondered, when the label was so beautiful?  We gazed and gazed upon the beautiful labels, and drank of the nasty beer.  The design reminded us of something, didn't it?  Yes it did.  What was it?  We wondered and wondered.  We couldn't think of it.  Still, the labels were lovely.  

Then I realized what it was: the bottles reminded us of our own goddamned apartment.

How embarrassing.

Well hello, and whatever.

This year my attention span crawled under a porch somewhere and died a quiet, lonely death. If you're my friend on GoodReads you may think that I joined that site in October, then typed in the three books I was reading, and then never logged into the website again; this is true, but what is also true is that I haven't actually read any other books since then. In my "Essays of E.B. White" I'm cracking along at the pace of one essay per month; Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" has been sitting by the side of the bed, unopened, half-done, since November. I mean it's a good book and all but I ain't too into readin' non-fiction for pleasure and anyway, I mostly just liked how it was slightly thrilling and naughty-feeling reading a bright-orange atheist book in public, on the bus, when I was commuting to my job which I lost ten months ago.

Probably you've heard me blather about how I think Americans don't talk enough about our money -- how we get it, how much of it we have, how much we're spending and how much we're saving. As a for instance: I was sitting on the john the other day reading a back issue of Real Simple as I do, and I saw this little article about "The Recession's Silver Lining" that said Americans' savings rates are up from zero percent last year to four percent this year.

"Ha!" I scoffed at the shower curtain. "Four percent! Gimme a break." But I mean, that's just the point: I don't know. Maybe most people really don't or can't save much more than zero. Four percent may seem like a sad little number to me, a number for the destitute, the debt-ridden or the delusional, but I don't have any idea of how it seems to my peers. I know I'm coming from many places of privilege, one of the biggest being my membership in a shared household: Often I think about how crazy and out of control my financial situation would be if I had nobody to answer to but myself, and O, it makes me shudder. What indulgences I would bestow upon myself! Thrice-daily lattes! Weekly Target binges! Probably I would discover Etsy!

Anyway. I bring this up because I mentioned my long-term joblessness, and that made me want to bring up my unemployment benefits. I find myself talking about them a lot, despite the fact that it always feels inappropriate in some way. And I partly blame our American money-squeamishness for the inappropriateness, i.e., it's not my fault that me blathering on about my $359 of weekly pre-tax government cheese makes people uncomfortable, goddamnit. People should just sit there and take it when I talk about being a welfare queen. It's perfectly acceptable conversation fodder and we should move beyond blah blah blah puritan blah reticent blah western blah blah.

But also it feels uncomfortable because it's so fraudulent, because nobody is less deserving of free money than me, and I guess I talk about it as a way of apologizing to everyone. I'm sorry about my unearned income, everyone. But not sorry enough! Obviously.

Hey, for 2009 this is lucky post number 13, all riiiiight

Some Other Things:

1. So I started taking some classes last month (if you follow that link, you will see how I have also morphed into a first grade teacher from 1993) and here is what I think about things:

a) Public space!  Vast, open areas filled with rooms and desks and free (in a manner of speaking) wireless!  You can sit and "do" your homework all day long, and you don't even have to buy anything (sort of).  I forgot how much I love going to college libraries in the summertime: quietly pretending to be industrious, coveting specific cubbyholes for no good reason, scouting out the cleanest, least-used bathrooms for midafternoon emergencies.  I even love going to get coffee at "The Dav" and dealing with the kind-of-snotty 20-year-olds that run the place.  Oh ladies.  I was you, once, except fatter.  I mean I was fatter than you when I was in college.  But also, I am fatter than you right now.    

b) Speaking of svelte hip-looking undergrads, one surprising thing has been the number of extremely well-dressed, um, alternative types that I see walking around here.  I was really confused for a while, seeing college students with their expensive-looking skinnypants and very precise haircuts.  We didn't really have those people at my school.  We had the people that worked at the radio station, and the twelve or so of us were thrifters and tried to dress ourselves according to whatever subculturey rubric we had in our heads, but really we all looked terrible with our terrible clothes and our terrible hair and there was just no getting around this.

Now, however,  it is clear to me that these Williamsburgy-looking AU people probably just have substantial clothing allowances.  Oh, right!  We had those people at UR, too.  They also dressed like assholes.  But like assholes with yachts.

2.  We watched the DC pride parade this weekend and this lady makes me want to weep and weep and weep:

Oh my god, her tevas and her fannypack and her little smile and her gay child who she loves.  

I put a link to my Flickr account up there on the sidebar, just in case you want to download this picture and print it out postersized and hang it above your bed.

Several Things

1. Ryan and I drove to North Carolina last weekend. Here is a collection of things he said during a twenty-minute period on Friday night:

(inside a Sheetz in Woodstock, Virginia)
"Don't look now. Kid Rock is right behind you"

(in the parking lot, singing in the car)
"Oh, fat fat people, fatty people at the Sheetz...oops my door is open"

"We must never return to this place"

"Hey. This is the best Sheetz sandwich I've had in a while!"

"I think I need to vom. I need a vom break. I need to take a break from this sandwich to vom"

"Uggggh why didn't we get chips? Or fries? Fryz. Or fry...fried...fried pretzels"

"I have turkey juice on myself"

"You want some gum? It'll take that stank off yo' breaf"

2. Here is my new haircut, in case you were waahhhhndering:

Yeah, it's the same old graduated bob that everybody and their mother has nowadays. Whatevs.

I am reminded by these photos that I have a formidable nose.

Once, I was at one of Ryan's fr-t-rn-ty parties (I have been asked to tone down my apparently near-constant references to the fact that he belonged to a fr-t-rn-ty in college and is a big fat disgusting fr-t b-y who loves the sweet tunes of D-ve M-tth-ws and who makes me play b--r p-ng every night before he puts r--f--s in my M-ilw--k--'s B-st) and this kid who I kind of knew -- we maybe had a couple classes together, I can't be too sure, I had about four and a half friends in college and it's just hard to keep everybody straight sometimes -- came up to me and started talking about how I changed my hair more often than anybody else he knew, and it was just very interesting, seeing what I did with it. Because that night it was brown, he said! But a couple weeks before it was bleached blond, and longer, he continued! And before that it was blue, and my bangs were different, he gasped! Turns out I am making this guy sound kind of creepy, in the retelling.

Anyway, changing your hair is fun! Is what I meant to say. I think people should do it more often. And I don't miss the long hair. It took way too long to grow out and I suspect it made me look mangy. The end.

3. Certain persons have recently informed me of their distaste (ha!) for food blogging, and so it is with sadness that I present to you: HOMEMADE SALSA.

Just kidding, I'm not sad. Or actually, I am sad. Sad that it took me so long to make my own salsa. God, what is wrong with me? Do you have any idea how fucking easy and delicious it is, making and then eating your own goddamned salsa? DO YOU? Do you.

Tomatoes, lemon juice, onion, cilantro, hot pepper-garlic-paste-stuff. Immersion blender. Done. So good. So cheap. So easy.

See! See how your loved ones will finally love you back. Go make some salsa, if you weren't doing it already, and I suspect you were because you people are not morons and I will never stop beating myself up for taking so long to figure this out. HOMEMADE SALSA, AY CARAMBA.

There was perhaps a bit too much spouse-reference in this blog post, so as a peace offering I give you stfumarrieds.tumblr.com. If you haven't visited it already, you're in for a treat!

Okay I have many homeworks good night

Oh hello. Guess what I'm doing! Guess! Did you guess? I'll tell you. l'm sitting at a Cosi in Dupont, blogging on my iPhone like the world's biggest, most gaping asshole. It's wonderful! I don't know why I haven't done this before.

It took me two minutes to type that last sentence, so whatever I take it all back.

Also, this bears a close resemblance to tweeting. "Tweeting." I dunno how comfortable I am with that. I know I've been talking about myself online for basically ever and so clearly I have no right to be skeeved out by twitterers, but I can't help the way I feel. How do you do italics on this stupid bitch of a phone? I can't help the way I feel. I can't control my feelings. I can't help thinking the Internet exists just so we can all talk about me.

Speaking of which: In two hours I will either cut off a little bit of my hair, or basically all of my hair. Do you have an opinion? Because I don't knooooooow what to dooooo

Now I'm walking and blogging YEEHawwwW

Dave said he's going to try to lose weight without exercising.  I am going to try to lose weight, as well!  I'm typing this one-handed because there's a beer in my other hand and I am very busy drinking it, but that is neither here nor there.

My plan to lose weight does not involve going to the gym more often.  Right now, it mostly involves not buying any more half-and-half, and just swallowing my pride (literally)(just kidding, I'm just kidding.  Jesus) and drinking my coffee with skim, like a real girl.  I have also been trotting along on the treadmill at an exhilarating rate of 6.5 miles an hour, instead of the customary 6.0.  

Finally, every day I am going to force myself to look at a picture of myself:

What's up, saddlebags?  Oh hey!  Not much.  Just hanging out in the kitchen.  Just squeezing myself into some pants.  Just listening to the crackling sound my thighs make as they expand.

So yeah, as you can perhaps guess from that photo, I recently found myself at Wardrobe Remix again.  First, I just slowly compiled a mental list of things I need, NEED to put on my body immediately, like:

• Khaki trench coat for da spring
  
• Wide-legged jeans tailored to be worn with flats
  
• Denim pencil skirt
  
• More necklaces
  
• A blazer that actually fits me, I mean my god, I have about sixteen blazers and suit jackets in my closet and every last one is too small.  What is wrong with me?  Why do I continue to impulsively purchase jackets for some mythical Katie that is a boobless size 4?  That person does not exist, and I must stop buying clothes for her
  

Oh god, it's been so long since I've made any money.  

Well, I made some last month.  And the government supports me in my leisure.  But let's not talk about that.

So I coveted some clothes, and then I internet stalked some people, hardcore.  Mostly just this one girl.  Hmm.  How can I tell you about this person without the internet finding out about it?

There we go.  A screen grab.  Ha-ha!  Catch me if you can, Google!  

Cute outfit, right?  I like it.  I've attempted to wear very similar things, and it's interesting to see how much better they would've looked on me if I were more like her, and less like a squat old turd.

But anyway, I noticed her a couple times in the Remix stream.  I noticed that she wore cute vintage things, and also that she tended to pose in front of barns, or in the woods, or by train tracks, or -- in one particularly inspired photoshoot -- against abandoned storefronts.  And as I noticed these things, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly my heart filled with dread.  Who was this person, I asked myself, and why the fuck did she seem to be living my dream life?  

So I clicked around a little bit, and if you search Flickr for that photo's title up there you may discover what I discovered: She's 23, married, living in bumfuckiest Bumfuck, Indiana, and her job appears to be thrifting (in what I assume is a goddamned midwestern goldmine) and then selling her shit on Ebay.  Or Etsy.  Or whatever.

She LIVES in the middle of NOWHERE and has a BARN and gets to THRIFT SHOP in the COUNTRY WHENEVER SHE WANTS.  Fucking fucckkkkkkk fck fuck uckfuckfuckfuck

Am I insane?  Am I insane?  Am.  I.  Insane?  I don't know.  I mean, I like the urban, walkable, public-transportationable, dense and vibrant and diverse kind of city livin' just fine.  I really do.   I try to be grateful for it every day.

But still.  Wow.

Also, let me know if you decide to stalk her, too.  I would love to talk with somebody about things, many things, such as her son, or the way she tags all her photos with "half japanese," or her 40's hairdo tutorials on YouTube, or what her town looks like in Google Street View.  Okay, thanks.

And then I also did some mild stalking of this person:

There is nothing about this outfit that interests me, but based on the picture I figured she lived in DC.  So I clicked through to her profile, and whaddya know!  There was a link to her blogspot.  I will do a screen grab of the banner for you:

Yeah.  

But here is my problem.  This girl, on her personal fashion blog, which I am weird for reading in the first place,  wrote a St. Patrick's Day entry.  In this entry she rounded up a bunch of green stuff she liked and posted pictures of the stuff -- a green fedora, green heels, a pair of American Apparel lime green leggings that were horrifying in the usual way, et cetera, et cetera.  And then, at the bottom of the list, was this:

Um um um um um.  Listen.  I took no art classes in college, okay?  No art history, no art, nothing of the kind.  I went to a Small Liberal Arts University but it was filled with Normals and Greeks and nobody was intellectual and nobody sat around discussing art or literature or philosophy or religion or history or economics or any of those things I thought college students discussed, you know, just spontaneously in the dorms.  Didn't happen.  My art history training began and ended with my ninth-grade World Civilizations class.  Okay?  Okay.

Now:

"Mario + MAN RAY"?  Baaaah hahaha ha ha haha ha.  HA.  Nice try...dumbass.  

None of those ten commenters mentioned it, incidentally.  

O, I was briefly overwhelmed with the impulse to leave a troll-like comment.  Anonymously.  I'm not even sure what I wanted to write.  Hey Chica!  I just found your blog and I'm really enjoying it!  You're so pretty and thin and your outfits are great and I love your hair and I love the shots of the inside of your boring condo!  It must be great to have a husband around with a nice camera to take pics of you, and your laser-cut boots, and your guys' winery trips and boating excursions! LOL UR SO WHITE!  Check out my fashion blog at www.ITSMAGRITTEYOURETARD.wordpress.com!

I'm short and fat and awful and she is totally going to find her way here.  Good night!

  

I'm going to stop talking about job and life and educational plans on this thing, because every time I do, things either go to crap or I change my mind.  Okay?  Cool. 

I'm at Sticky Fingers, and the dude sitting across from me is staring out the window at nothing, into middle distance.  Every time I look over he's making a different face.  

Also, I have a problem.  When I came in I sat by myself at a set of tables, like this:

Then these two bitches showed up:

Which is fine.  I am not complaining.  I mean, they started yakking about their jobs and one of them has a scratchy, annoying voice, but I'm the one who forgot her headphones and I am willing to live with my mistake.

But then dis third bitch walked in:

And now they're having a meeting.  A jolly meeting.  "This is the funniest meeting I've ever been to!" is what B2 just exclaimed.  

Meanwhile, this was -- and continues to be -- the table situation directly to my left: 

But I can't move!  I can't, can I?  No, I can't.  I would look very weird and conspicuous, gathering my things and getting up.  And then they would feel obligated to say something.  They would say, "Ooooh, sorry!  Ha ha!  We're probably being too loud, right?  We should've sat over there!  Gosh!"

And then I would have to swallow my righteous anger, and I would open my mouth and some lame social lubricant would come dribbling out.  And I will be damned!  If these gainfully employed assholes are going to make me smile and say no it's fine ha ha ha!

Well, this has been a pretty good use of my time.    

Insomnia has been a problem for me these last few months, which makes me feel very not myself. All my life I've been a champion sleeper. I was always the first to conk out at sleepover parties. My best friend in third grade interrogated me about it: Can I ask you a question? How do you fall asleep so fast? What do you do? What are you thinking about? (The only secret I remember offering was, "Do you close your eyes when you lie down? I think it helps to close your eyes.") Ryan has mentioned several times how obnoxious it is, sharing a bed with somebody who is out like a light about a minute after her head hits the pillow. I thought this was just petty jealousy until this weird, unprecedented bout of insomnia hit me. I've been lying in bed night after night, listening to his steady breathing sometimes for hours on end, and now I am grateful that he's refrained from smothering me all this time. Shit is super, like super super, annoying.

Anyway, it's midnight and I should be in bed but I'm not going to get to sleep anyway so what the hell.

Hi! That job I told you about is maybe on the rocks. Once again, I ain't going to go into details (especially since Google is still seeing my full name on this blog, even though I removed it months ago and jesus, can those geniuses stop eating their Google cafeteria gourmet meals and doing their Google campus dry cleaning and exercising on their Google-built rock climbing walls and just take a moment to fucking fix my personal problem, please?), but yeah. Things are maybe not working out. And at the moment I received notice -- in no uncertain terms -- that things may not be working out, I also received notice that I'd been accepted to that graduate program I'd been considering. Considering until I got this job. This job, which is now maybe going down in flames. I am sitting here hitting refresh on my Gmail, waiting for my bosses to tell me whether things are going down in flames because -- I'm paraphrasing here, slightly -- because I am an unacceptable person. Meanwhile, Syracuse has deemed me worthy of paying lots of money for a degree. A degree that is not the most practical degree in the world.

I love my life I love my life I love my life I have a lot of things to be grateful for I love my life I I love my life I love it

Today, at about two p.m., after much thought and many self-affirming mantras, I managed to make it to the gym. Then I came home. I showered. I made a shopping list (this is not the most exciting recipe in the world and I've made a million other totally similar soups, but I gotta say: something about it is magical. Double it, add corn and spinach, puree some of the garbanzos and eyeball the broth. You shan't be disappointed). I went to Giant. Some yuppie almost yelled at me for accidentally cutting in line at checkout, and that almost derailed me. But I persevered! I bought my things and transported them back to the apartment. Ryan came home and found me in the kitchen.

"You're making dinner," he said.

"YEAH," I said.

"Yeah?" he said.

"YEAH," I said. "NOTHING'S GONNA BRING ME DOWN GODDAMNIT."

It's been a weird and hard month. If you are overdue for an email from me, I'm really sorry. I think I'm going to have it together enough to write people tomorrow.

Hey, check out this shit I made:

Rice noodlez, salad, chickenz.  There's a dressing on there, too, made of olive oil, canola oil, garlic, sriracha sauce, lime juice, cilantro, cumin and honey.  Duh Damn: it is good.  Approximately three pounds of each ingredient are sitting in the fridge, separately Tupperwared, waiting for my grubby little hands to throw them together and eat them in front of the teevee.  My heart pounds in anticipation of lunch tomorrow.  O!  Be Still!   

Ugh, well.  I was going to sit here and write out a To-Do list, but now it's late and I am lazy and so you are spared.  That new job is kind of kicking my ass and it also comes with a driving commute that is almost two hours long, round trip.   And so I seem incapable of getting anything done, ever.  

Here is something much better for you to read.  The author has an article in this week's New Yorker that blew my mind in terms of how it was a) awesome, and b) seemingly impossible to fact check, and so I've been looking through all her other stuff.  You should do that, too.  

Okay goodnight.

I've been sitting on this goddamned couch since Friday. I have also been sleeping on it, due to the coughing and death rattling that issue forth from my person every time I attempt to lie down. Every night, Ryan retires to the bedroom while I wrap myself in a throw and don my kerchief and prop myself up against a couch-arm, telling myself that this time, THIS FUCKING TIME, I will sleep through the night and not wake myself up at two-hour intervals with tubercular barkings.

A Snuggli would've been kinda nice this weekend.

Oh excuse me: I meant a Snuggie.

Anyway. Lessons learned from the last few days include:
1. NyQuil: It did not slow my roll nearly as much as I wanted it to. I am going to try sneaking a double dose tonight. This will have to be concealed from Ryan, who became stern when he found out I'd taken two Sudafeds this morning, and that I had not even bothered to read the instructions that clearly only called for one pill at a time. Like woooooah it's a miracle my kidneys're still working and shit.

2. It's a nice idea to make chocolate-covered strawberries. It's a stupid idea to put them in the freezer overnight.

3. I'm about halfway through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It's obviously a very good book, but the only female character (apart from a neurotic Jewish mother, of course) seems to be one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and it's driving me insane.

And from that Wikipedia entry, I see Natalie Portman was once slated to play said character in the movie version. Of course she was.

4. In the process of googling that stuff, I came across the Bechdel Rule for the first time. I like it. I like it a lot. Are you too lazy to click on that link? If so, the rule comes from a comic strip

in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

Splendid! Incidentally, I'm 429 pages into The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and it has not yet passed this test. Michael Chabon is a wiener. But I guess I'll finish his novel.

5. Baltimore Craigslist really busted my balls today. Did you know that, for around a thousand dollars' rent, you could have yourself an entire rowhouse in Baltimore? Like this or this or this?

Well now I do.

So. It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Personal Web Log, and I see we’ve reached the point where Dave is starting to leave disapproving comments. Well! Fine! I’m here with my MacBook at the local vegan coffee shop in the middle of the day, and if there’s anything you can do in this situation other than write about yourself on the internet, I don’t know what that thing is.

Life News:
1. I seem to be getting sick. There’s some kind of phlegmy weight in my bosom, and I have a little Bangkok Belly/Montezuma’s Revenge situation going on. My face is hot and dry and puffy-feeling. I haven’t showered today. A high greasy sheen radiates from my hair. Meanwhile, directly across from me, there sits a clean cut, slender, attractive boy-man in crisp office wear. Let’s see if I can sneeze on his external hard drive before he leaves.

2. I made a boneheaded mistake a few weeks ago with this blog, and now if you Google my name, the second page of results has a link here. I’ve fixed it and search engines should eventually stop seeing my name all over this thing, but yeah. I fucked up. It was kind of stupid. Especially since I’ve been applying to jobs and schools and everything.

Anyway, my accidental outing happened because I started a new photobloggy thing at [firstnamelastname]photo.blogspot.com. Have a gander! Or don’t!

3. I did jury duty for the first time last week. It was a fun-filled few days of other firsts, too: First time in a courtroom, first time I’ve almost had a coughing fit in the middle of a trial, first time I’ve sent a dude to prison while his wife and two small boys sat thirty feet away and watched. Boy! Civic duty! God Bless America!

Just kidding, what a humongous fucking bummer that shit was. Good Christ. It just bummed me right the fuck out. Just harshed my mellow like one hundred percent. The guy messed up some other dude’s face in a drunken brawl, and then I messed up his family, but good. Great. I eagerly await my hard-earned $136 check from the D.C. Government.

4. I need a bagel. Now I have a bagel.

5. This vegan cream cheese. It is not half bad.

6. I got a full-time job takin’ photos, and I start on Monday. I shall make you inquire within for more info, but for realz it sure does beat the hell out of anything else I've been doing for the last two years. Hooray!

And this brings us up to date. Now, I'm going to either go buy myself something pretty, or lie down and moan for a while.

The last thing I swallowed was a mouthful of wine, with a couple ibuprofen in there somewhere.

Because I threw out my back today. Yes, thank you! I'm fine. Thank you for asking. I'm pretty sure I'll be fine. I don't know how I did it, but I know that going to the gym really fucking did not help. Taking a hot shower did not help. Putting clothes on and walking to Giant did not help. I whimpered and yelped and cried a little, trudging back home and then trying to maneuver my grocery bags through the door. That's a pretty picture, right? A grown woman, deep into unemployment, directionless, setting her cans of beans on the kitchen counter and mewling to nobody.

Ryan came home and witnessed my plight and said, "Maybe you should take off from work tomorrow." We both had a nice laugh about that one. Ha ha ha! Laughing is actually a bad idea right now, so. Let's keep it to a minimum.

So I'm applying to schools; I don't know if I've announced this on the internet before, but now I have, so whatever, you're in the loop. Except today I decided I would just apply to one. Originally I was going to do three. But School A was probably going to be the hardest to get into, and it had the earliest application deadline, so I let that one go. And today I realized that even if I got into School B I would probably not want to go. Maybe I'm just being lazy; I'm so close to being finished with my application to School C, and I just don't FEEL like doing a campus visit to School B next week, you know? I've visited School C, I like School C, the program wouldn't take the rest of my life to finish and people there actually respond to my emails -- and as goddamn well they should if I'm considering paying them all that money for what is, essentially, an M.S. in Frivolity, Needless Marital Strife and Possibly Crippling Debt.

Yesterday I went to a Starbucks to meet with some government interviewer dude about another dude's security clearance. After he asked me all those hilarious questions about whether or not the person in question seemed crazy, drunk, or capable of betraying his country, we finished our coffee and had a nice little chat. He asked me what I was doing, now that I was out of a job; I said I was applying to grad schools.

"But first I have to get in," I said.

"Oh, getting in's the easy part," he said.

"Yeah seriously, then I have to figure out how to pay for it," I said.

"Paying for it's the easy part, too," he said.

"What's, ah...so?"

"Getting a job is the hard part," he said.

And then I laffed and laffed and laffed, because he'd studied Criminal Justice and was living in D.C. Ha ha ha. Ha. I don't want to hear it, Rational Person Who Studies Practical Things That Can Be Used In Industries That Are Not Collapsing.

Oh, god. I've just been coming across a lot of stuff lately.

If we could bring ourselves to believe, to really feel, the possibility that we are invincible and can accomplish whatever we want in this world, it wouldn't seem out of our reach at all to correct such absurdities. What I am begging you to do here is not to put faith in the impossible, but have the courage to face that terrible possibility that our lives really are in our own hands, and to act accordingly: to not settle for every misery fate and humanity have heaped upon us, but to push back, to see which ones can be shaken off. Nothing could be more tragic, and more ridiculous, than to live out a whole life in reach of heaven without ever stretching out your arms.

That's from the foreword to some kind of horrible-looking anarchist-collective-manifesto-thing, which is a little embarrassing to admit to reading, but, there we are.

Then there are the previews for Revolutionary Road, which give me hives just thinking about them. Oh, a story about people who think they're going to lead interesting, fulfilling lives and then don't. Sounds like exactly what I need in my life right now!



And how much does that sound like Antony Hegarty, in that song, there? I guess it's Nina Simone, but still. Antony. Mmm! We're going to see him at 6th and I next month, and my god it is going to rule.




Oo, some pretty choice androgyny in this one, too:



Well, I had other crap to show you but now I must hobble off to bed.

Hello! Guess what! I made some stuff for dinner tonight. I think you're going to like this.



We begin as all dishes should begin: with a pound of melted margarine.

Already I am cheating, here; I'm supposed to be making clarified butter, but a) that sounded like a pain in the ass, b) I decided to make this at about 5 p.m. and didn't have a whole lot of time to mess around before The Breadwinner walked in the door, loosening tie and grabbing ass and yelling for supper, and c) I came across other, vegan-er recipes that used margarine instead of butter, so apparently this is not without precedent for people who don't consume animal products. Just pretend that I did it this way because I have principles.

In the margarine, there is onion, garlic, a cinnamon stick, three whole cloves and a couple pinches of nutmeg. There is also supposed to be ginger and cardamom in there, but Giant was out of ginger and I have called a personal moratorium on spice-buying.



While the spices were soaking in their warm bath of chemical fat, I put some cherry tomatoes, red onion and diced jalapeno in a bowl. Then I squeezed half a lemon on it. Then I put it in the fridge.



After about 25 minutes, I figured the margarine was done and poured the liquid into thisyer tupperware container, to save for later. I hear it's good spread on toast. We'll see.



But then, after I picked out the cinnamon and cloves, I was left with this hot mess. It looked kind of delicious, so I didn't rinse the pot out. Soon this stuff would join it:





(that little frosty container has tomato paste in it)

But first, in went 2 tablespoons of paprika and 2 tablespoons of this stuff:


That stuff being berbere, which I got at the Black Lion up the street.

The freshly diced garlic and onions went in next, for two minutes; then the green beans, carrots and potatoes for ten. Meanwhile, elsewhere, on a distant burner, I started a couple cups of lentils:



(that looks like the most tasteless pot of food, ever. And I've been meaning to ask -- does anybody really bother to pick over and rinse their lentils before they cook them? I'm sure I'll change my tune once I come across some gravel in my soup, but for now, I mean really, who gives a shit)

Then I put the can of tomatoes, about a quarter cup tomato paste and two cups of chicken stock into the vegetable pot; I brought it to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, and put in the spinach and peas.



Oh god I can't describe how delicious this smelled.

So, okay. I let that stuff simmer a while. Eventually the lentils were done, and so I took them out of the pot and pureed them, to make sure they looked as shitlike as possible:


Aw yeah.

But then I put the puree back in the pot with some of that spicy butter, some more garlic and onion, a little turmeric and a cup of broth, and it started to look edible. A squeeze of lemon helped, too.

Um so anyway, I also bought injera at Black Lion, and so it came to pass that



I MADE ETHIOPIAN FOOD AND I AM THE SHIT.

In other news, we saw us some Dave:


And some sheep:


All these pictures are brought to you by my Christmas present to myself, which I'm trying to learn how to use when I'm not having panic attacks about theft and breakage.

Hello, you. Are you having a nice winter holiday season, so far? Good! I'm glad to hear it.

Ryan and I did a little dog-sitting for my parents this week. It was a busy few days:

I've forgotten how to sit down and write about myself. Oops! This is probably because I don't have much to say, and because I'm not doing anything worth talking about, and because nothing is really going on inside my head besides unemployment- and life-related mental hand wringings that nobody wants to hear about. I don't want to whine on my blog. Do I look like a faggy?



But anyway. I decided to start a project where I try to use the dusty, forgotten kitchen appliances that all those nice wedding guests bought for us three and a half years ago. It's funny how I didn't know what cookery to register for when I was 22 years old and fresh out of the dining hall. Hilarious, even!

So, first: the crockpot. We have made one other meal in this sucker. I don't remember much about that meal, besides the fact that it involved chicken that got overcooked, and there was some kind of sweet-and-sour glaze that got all dried out and molasses-like, in a bad way. And fuck that, right? I ain't got no time for that kinda shit. I don't have a job (which is pretty much my fault) and the economy is disintegrating (this is not my fault) and so we cannot afford to waste any food.

Oh, speaking of which, that is one of the best things about being on the dole and sitting around in my apartment all day: scavenging. You know? At lunchtime, I no longer have a salad and some cut-up vegetables, all hermetically sealed and paperbagged in my purse. When we go grocery shopping on Sundays I don't have to spend money on red peppers or baby spinach or any of the other dumbass things I used to take to work. Instead, at lunchtime I am like one of those sucker fishes you buy for your aquarium: I just vacuum up all the algae in the fridge.

Unfortunately, this usually involves eating a lot of carbs and cheese, and I've been spending a lot of time in sweatpants, so. I am not sure how my ass is faring in this global economic downturn.

Whatevs. Here you see me cooking three turkey sausage links, two onions and six-ish cloves of garlic:


And here you see those things in the pot, with a bag of lentils, a can of diced tomatoes, some chopped carrots, two tablespoons of tomato paste and eight cups of broth:



And then I hit "Low" and set it for seven hours, and left it on the counter all day.


And now, basically, I will be making this every week until I die. It is magic. I'm so glad there are five pounds of it in the fridge.

My Christmas present is probably going to arrive tomorrow. I bought it online, last week, for myself. As soon as I placed the order my e-mail account and cell phone started blowing up with fraud alarms.

BANK OF AMERICA
Oh my fucking god! Katie! Somebody is trying to steal stuff with your card!

ME
No, that was me.

BOA
Oh no you di-int.

ME
Yes I did.

BOA
But that's kinda...a lot of fucking money.

ME
Yeah

BOA
Are you sure about this?

ME
Yyy...yes.

BOA
C'mon, aren't you out of a job?

ME
I'm, I mean...But I've been thinking about it for a while.

BOA
.

ME
It's on sale?

BOA
You will die alone and penniless.

ME
Yes well goodbye!

[commutes to the kitchen, hyperventilates through a sandwich]

Several things:
1. We just watched Paranoid Park, and that is the last time I take a chance on a Gus Van Sant movie. I remember watching Elephant four years ago (during, now that I think about it, another period of unemployment and weirdness)(I bet I can even find the entry where I bitched about it! And...here it is) and just loathing everything about it. This one was slightly better; if Van Sant continues to improve at this rate, I think I would be interested in seeing his, say, 168th movie. Otherwise: Whatevs. Whatevs to your slo-mo and your terrible, fresh-faced actors, Gus Van Sant.

He picked some nice Elliott Smith songs, though.

2. Speaking of movies that have been letting me down lately: Slumdog Millionaire. I did not enjoy that half as much as I thought I would. For one thing, the scene at the end is weak shit. I am not an expert on these matters, but I was under the impression that a "Bollywood dance number" is less like a lame, repetitive, visually uninteresting line dance filmed from three camera angles, and is instead more like THIS:







3. For those still interested in my Chronicles of Succotash, here is Meal #467:



The dread leftovers, plus beans 'n' onions 'n' garlic 'n' yogurt 'n' salsa, on top of a baked sweet potato. There's still about a pound of the succotash sitting in the fridge, but I've decided to toss it tomorrow. I did my best to finish it; now it's time to set it free, down the dispose-all.