This seems very much like my recent experience.

Nearly all my life, I have felt I didn't belong anywhere. Now, there's one and only one place in which I do.

I feel a little like I'm holding a naked candle flame, cradling it against the wind.



I think that tonight I'm going to make an apple pie, from the recipe that chish_and_fips was kind enough to let me copy from her some time ago. I can only hope it will turn out as well as hers.

Oh, and I hardly slept last night. I just hope I can get through the rest of the day.

After the brake fiasco a couple of weeks ago, and the accompanying discovery, by my father, that all the vacuum lines in my car were crumbling and the serpentine belt badly cracked, I determined it was high time to have replaced all those rubbery items that tend to naturally disintegrate after years of exposure to high temperatures and little moisture.

Camelback Volkswagen, just for the replacement of the serpentine belt, wanted $600. To which, I basically said, "Fuck that." This morning, I took my car to a little shop in Glendale, where they have currently quoted me under $300 to replace both the belt and the vacuum lines. So far, so good.

But the real highlight of my morning was when I left the shop and walked about three-quarters of a mile to the nearest Enterprise, to obtain transportation for the interim. I have to say that the distance looked much shorter on the map than it turned out to be in actuality. Twenty-five minutes later, my belongings removed from my car and in tow, the girl behind the counter, of ample proportions and little friendliness or helpfulness, refused to loan me a car on the basis that I did not have a credit card, or two utility bills and a pay stub to accompany my debit card.

Now, first of all, I don't carry a credit card anymore. I have one, through my bank, which is linked to my checking account as overdraft protection, but since I endured a struggle of several years to get myself free of credit card debt, I have no intention of giving myself the opportunity get myself back into it, so I don't carry it around in my purse. Secondly, the Enterprise I normally frequent, near my workplace, has had absolutely no problem renting me a car with only my debit card, in the six plus years I have been doing business with them. I explained this to her, but she was adamant with the company policy line, and how she doesn't want to get anyone in trouble, etc., but it's simply not allowed. I explained to her that I'm stranded. My apartment is on the other side of town, and there's no way for me to get the information she is demanding. "Sorry. Company policy."

So, I gathered up my belongings, established myself on a concrete picnic table outside, and called the office to explain my predicament. About 35 minutes later, our secretary showed up, having driven across town to retrieve me. She then took me down to my usual Enterprise, where they rented me a car, sans utility bills, with only my debit card, once again. Every once in a while, it's nice to know that some people aren't afraid to take your money.

I think it's ridiculous that a person should be expected to carry a credit card. What a fucked up world we live in.

A couple of years ago, I had this dream.

At the time, I never imagined that we were already there.

Scary.



I don't know which is more disturbing--my dream, or how close it came to reality. I don't recall having heard anything about this before--certainly not two years ago.

Yessssssssss! The only thing that could make this idea better is if the small room was also filled with those plastic colored balls from Chuck E. Cheese.

courtesy of Toothpaste for Dinner

How about a little Married to the Sea for Sunday morning?



Too true. Too too true.

Odd dreams last night that I'm struggling to remember.

I remember being at some kind of large festival or food-tasting in a warehouse-sized space, without the extra-tall ceilings. For all the food around me, most of it seemed to have been claimed by others, or perhaps I wasn't allowed to eat it. For whatever reason, I was hesitant to consume anything.

And then I came upon a table of what could only have been clams--except they were more active than any clams I've ever heard of. They were packed on ice, and lolling about and dancing as much as the limitations of their shells would allow them. They swayed back and forth, large viscous mouths wide open in happy smiles. I befriended one, petting it, and it rubbed up against my hand like a cat, then rolled over for me to pet its . . . belly? They seemed so happy and so much like housepets that I thought it a crime to eat them, so, although hungry, I passed them by.

I met up with someone I know, who had gone off on their own for a while. Somebody, a friend of his or mine, handed me a hand-held digital console displaying a puzzle game. I couldn't read the instructions before they faded off the screen, and then failed each round. I felt very stupid, and knew that my friend would think so, since I believe he had accomplished each round quite rapidly.

Outdoors was a carnival with booths and unusual rides. I started to try a trivia game ride. There was a series of seats that faced outward, conveyed on a vertical loop, like a ferris wheel, with the seats mounted on the sides of the wheel. Upon reaching the top a trivia question was read to each person in line, and whoever answered correctly would win a prize. I got near the top and became frightened--despite my actual distance from the ground not being very great--and decided to jump off. This ruined the game for everyone else, since they had to come down early because of my irregular behavior.

Last I remember, I was crawling into the back of a large Humvee-like vehicle.

In the last twenty-four hours I have taken:

3 Walgreens generic 12-hour decongestant tablets
2 Claritin 24-hour anti-allergy tablets
2 multivitamins
1 Benydryl antihistamine
2 packets of Emergen-C
2 birth-control pills

And I may end up taking a few ibuprofen if my left shoulder gets any stiffer.

I survive on pills and caffeine.



On another note: Is it just me, or does LiveJournal seem to be a lot less responsive these days? For me, pages seem to lag in load time--particularly the log-in window and when I attempt to edit an entry.

Question: Is it still a comic if it's all dialogue and no drawn characters?

Whatever. It's still funny.

I went home from work early last night, and instead of going to meditation as I had planned, laid down for the remainder of the evening, falling asleep by 10:30--which hardly ever happens for me. Though I now feel less stuffy in the head than yesterday afternoon, I still feel generally tired--and more importantly, unmotivated. I just don't feel like doing anything--not work, or housework, or even any of the leisurely things I do for fun.

These moods hit me every once in a while, and I've never been able to exactly determine the cause. At first, they seemed to me to be the fallout of depression, but it's been some time since I could call myself depressed. I thought I could chalk it up to impending illness, but now question whether I'm even getting sick at all. Have I been doing too much? Or not enough? Do I simply need to push myself to do more whether I feel like it or not? I can't tell.

In any case, it's not very good to find myself so unmotivated at the office. I'm accomplishing only a fraction of what I normally would on a good day, and we really can't afford to have me so unproductive, but somehow this does nothing for my morale.

I think I'm getting sick, which may have something to do with why I've been feeling a little mopey. I'm tired, and a bit sinusey. Hopefully it's not the pig sickness.

I was reading "The Tragedy of the Commons," by Garrett Hardin and came upon the following, which to me, though pulled out of context, seems to sum up the situation with the current health care debate (which appears to have devolved now into a debacle, particularly, now that the public option has been thoroughly routed on the basis of the shrilly-voiced fear by the right-wing nutjobs of the country becoming socialist--heaven forbid, and keep your hands off my Medicare . . . never mind the irony, etc).

It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out, worshipers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (1) that the status quo is perfect; or (2) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.

But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.

I'm afraid I have nothing to add to this insightful statement, except a despairing acknowledgment that it is highly unlikely that the people of our country and the institutions of our government will be able to act so sensibly now, or any time in the near future.

It turned out the vacuum line to the brake booster had completely rotted out. It was hanging loose in the car. Another line was also weak, and likely all the other various vacuum lines all need to be replaced, now that the car is over six years old and has been residing in a hot climate.

So, it was all just coincidence. This doesn't bode well for the future with this car, having more than one problem in a single week.

This has been a week for car trouble. First, the last couple of weeks the thermostat light was on in my car. Stupidly, I didn't bother looking into it, because it didn't come on consistently, and the gauge didn't register any higher temperatures than normal. Turns out my car was somehow leaking coolant. The mechanic at the dealership (I seem to get a new mechanic every time I take my car into them, because the last mechanic I worked with is never there the next time) tried to give me this big snow job about how it's probably the water pump, and since there's about six hours worth of labor in that I should also consider replacing my timing and serpentine belts, because those are likely to go soon, and can we please have $1300 for all this? To which, I basically said no. I expressed my concern that we were just going to go in and replace the water pump without having any certainty as to whether this was the actual problem. I'm not willing to spend that much on basis of someone's inferences. So, they topped off the coolant and drove it around about 20 miles or so trying to make it overheat. It never did. I had told them it wouldn't, because I had been driving it around for two weeks like that. So, they wasted some of my fuel tooling about town needlessly. They couldn't come to any conclusions about it, so I decided to just take the car back from them and keep an eye on the situation. I purchased some coolant at the parts shop, because evidently VW's are ISV (incredibly special vehicles) that have their own special coolant that can't be purchased at an Auto Zone or Checker or Pep Boys.

It seemed like all was well, but now I've just had a bit of a scare driving home from work. My brakes don't seem to be working right. Between this morning and this evening, the brake pedal has become extremely stiff, and has almost no ability to brake my car at all. I had to force the pedal down with all my strength and leave about four times the normal distance for braking. A little searching around on the internet turned up the information that possibly the vacuum in the braking system has somehow been compromised.

Needless to say, it stretches my credulity a little that it's mere coincidence something like this happens the day after I get my car back from a mechanic who wanted to charge me a lot of money for a problem he wasn't even certain existed.

And why isn't there a light on my dash to indicate that the braking system isn't working right? The thing beeps insistently at me and a yellow light turns on whenever the windshield wiper fluid is empty, for fuck's sake. Why wouldn't a light about the braking system be considered equally important? It would have been nice to know that my brakes weren't going to work before I left the office and tried to drive home.

Whilst browsing the Friends of Friends page here, I saw an entry that linked to this site where a guy posts all the doodles he does on The Weekender, which, I gather, is a Brit mag. I found many of them to be spit-take hilarious.

I took a night off from shirt-sewing last night to drink beer and watch The Daily Show with the kittyfaces. I simply couldn't take another night of coming home from the office to work in my own personal sweatshop. The collar really was child's play, compared to the sleeves. I've gotten into the habit of doing a running commentary while reading the pattern instructions. Usually I read one or two lines and then burst out into a snort and a comment like, "Yeah, that's gonna happen. I'll be ripping that one out, like, at least twenty times before I get it right."

It's funny though how the things I think will be the most difficult sometimes aren't, and the things I think will be a snap turn out to be agonizing. Like, the other night. I sewed on a thin elastic strip, just laid on the top of the fabric and held in place with my hand while sewing with a zig zag stitch meant to go to either side of the elastic strip, without going through it (because you're supposed to be able to pull the elastic strip to gather the bottom of the sleeve). I was certain that I was going to be pulling my hair out over that one, especially since there was no way to pin or baste down the elastic first, since it was so skinny, and just trying to successfully sew a straight seam can practically bring me to tears. But, it went as slick as the proverbial whistle the very first time.

Of course, I made the mistake of mixing up the point in the process at which I was supposed to sew on said elastic (damn instructions . . .), which made finishing the bottom of the sleeve a real bitch. I probably should have taken out the elastic and resewed it back on after finishing the bottom edge of the sleeve, but I didn't trust myself to get it so perfect the second time. I still haven't tried the elastic trick on the other sleeve. I'm half-convinced that the first time was just beginner's luck. But, at least this time I've finished the bottom edge of the sleeve first.

My last cooking class was last night. The chef demonstrated the hand-tempering of chocolate, which, it soon became evident, is a beastly difficult process to accomplish successfully. Tempering chocolate is what makes it, once melted, stay in a hard form until you bite into it. If you don't temper chocolate before making candies with it, they will only stay hard if you keep them refrigerated.

To temper chocolate, you have to first melt the chocolate in a double boiler over simmering water until it's about 110 to 120 degrees. Then, you have to cool about two-thirds of the chocolate by spreading it out on a cool countertop and working it around until it gets down to between 75 and 80 degrees, just before it seizes and becomes solid again. (There are other methods of doing this, but he stated this as his preferred method, since he has always gotten the best results this way.) Then, you return the cooled chocolate to the rest of the warmer, melted chocolate, getting the heat of the total mixture back up to between 84 and 89 degrees, and keeping it that way until you need it.

His handy thermometer had mysteriously disappeared, so the chef had to demonstrate all of this to us based entirely on appearance. The room was kind of warm for the process, and he had some trouble making the chocolate temper. Still, I wanted to try my hand at it, so after we did some other things in the back kitchen, I expressed my interest to him, and he got everything together for me. Nobody else wanted to give it a shot, so it turned out that I tried to temper chocolate with the rest of the class watching me stumble through the process. It was crazy. One second, the chocolate was still in a thick liquid form on the counter. I picked it up with the tools, and dropped it back into the bowl of melted chocolate, and by the time I scraped the rest off the tools, it had already seized into a hard lump. I knew this wasn't necessarily a failure, that it was just going to be more difficult than if it had still remained slightly liquid, so I kept stirring it back into the mixture, warming it slightly over the still warm double boiler. Finally, it melted all together, and it looked very much so like I was going to be successful. In the end, though, I think I may have slightly over-heated it when I re-melted it, because the chocolate wouldn't solidify when formed into shapes.

Still, the chef seemed pretty impressed by my willingness to try. He assembled a dessert in the back kitchen and gave it to me for being a good sport :-). We all feasted on cookies topped with raspberries and lemon curd, accompanied by glasses of champagne--of course.

I think at some later date, when I have some money saved up again, I'd like to try the 12-week pastry course.

I made a mock infrared version of this one too. I don't think it's that great--I was just kind of playing. It's below the cut.


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