The New England Society for Tea Fetishism

I'm back on Long Island and back at work, although I didn't end up at work until around 2pm. The trip was fine. My mom even rode the subway to Copley with me to help me carry my big-ass suitcase and generally mill around and not leave for a while. She's so sweet. She left me at the bus stop and the next thing I know she's walking back toward me saying "I might as well have a cigarette before I get back on the T." She also mentioned things like "At least it's daylight," and "This is a pretty busy place, lots of people," as if I hadn't sat at that bus stop alone to wait for the jitney three times before.

No snacks or newspapers on the bus. Funny that. No problem really, because I made sure I had a belly full of pizza before I left the house and I read 200 pages of Hearts in Atlantis while listening to Bjork and Radiohead. The only bad part was the ferry. The ocean was calm as can be but the boat was packed and there must have been fifteen or twenty little devil spawn running about, knocking into things, dropping food, and generally making my life very hard.

But here I am, already with an invitation to a late dinner at Shawn's house for tonight and possibly hanging out at Jeff's house later, depending how long dinner goes. I'm practically a socialite.

Oh, I know I should be wrtiting for my thesis, but I'm a sucker for those "getting to know you" type quizzes and I also love pilfering from Amy's blog.

Three Names You Go By
1. Sarah
2. Saza (only in print)
3. The Amazing Julio (ummm. . . can you tell I made that up?)

Three Things You Like About Yourself:
1. my ability to make people laugh
2. my vast (if random) knowledge of trivia
3. my ass

Three Things You Dislike About Yourself:
1. the way I get irrationally defensive when being told what to do or told that I am wrong
2. my inability to express myself verbally
3. my ass (ass appreciation depends upon the day of the week, what I'm wearing, and whether I'm retaining water)

Three Parts of Your Heritage:
1. scottish
2. french-canadian
3. german

Three Things That Scare You:
1. zombies!!!
2. video footage of sinking ships and video footage of ships and airplanes on the bottom of the ocean
3. undercooked eggs

Three of Your Everyday Essentials:
1. oatmeal
2. comfy pants
3. my rings

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. worn out jeans with a hole in the butt
2. plover necklace
3. bracelet made out of two spoon ends

Three of Your Favorite Bands/Artists (at the moment):
1. bjork
2. radiohead
3. nico

Three of Your Favorite Songs at Present:
1. whipping post--the allman brothers band
2. everyone--van morrison
3. when the levee breaks--led zeppelin

Three New Things You Want to Try in the Next 12 Months:
1. learning to play the guitar
2. getting my own apartment
3. taking the license test

Three Things You Want in a Relationship (love is a given):
1. honesty
2. lots of laughter
3. cuddling

Two Truths and a Lie:
1. i once killed a frog by falling on it
2. i once french-kissed a midshipman
3. i once owned a cd of Abba's greatest hits

Three Physical Things About the Opposite Sex (or same) That Appeal to You:
1. height (I like 'em at least a few inches taller than me)
2. dark hair
3. big hands

Three Things You Just Can't Do Without :
1. a body pillow or Jenny--I need something to wrap my arms around when I sleep
2. chocolate in all its varied incarnations
3. gum

Three of Your Favorite Hobbies:
1. reading fiction from the genre ghettos (horror, sf, etc.)
2. printmaking
3. writing

Three Things You Want to do Really Badly Right Now:
1. go outside and jump in a gigantic pile of snow
2. get a real job---god do i miss having a paycheck
3. buy a dog

Three Careers You've Considered:
1. columnist
2. nursing
3. paleontologist

Three Places You Want to Go on Vacation:
1. prince edward island
2. alaska
3. las vegas

Three Kids Names:
1. rory
2. eliza
3. keiran

Three Things You Want to Do Before You Die:
1. get married (or at least meet a really cool guy who isn't a pothead or an alcohic and move in with him)
2. travel across europe
3. get published in the new yorker

While it is always a sad occasion to leave the Maison du Thompson, it was quite lovely to sleep through a whole night without being woken up by a kitty who seems to be fascinated by my nose hairs. What else could she be looking at so intently, less than three inches from my face? It was so good to be the property of an Amy for a week. We ate Italian food and Thai food and a whole lotta meals featuring the humble (but quite nutritious) bean. Black beans, garbanzo beans, kidney beans--we had them all. I also started a new story for the first time in months and I'm really excited to flesh it out. Two trips to the Grasshopper Shop have confirmed me as a future dinnerware addict. I'm lucky I don't have much money to throw around or else I'd probably own about five sets of dishes, ten tea pots, and all manner of adorable kitchen gadgets. I mean, I don't know what the hell I'd do with an egg cup, but I'll probably buy several once I have the disposable income.

Has anyone heard John Mayer's new song, "Daughters?" I'd heard bits and pieces here and there and was slightly disturbed so I looked up the lyrics on Google earlier today. Can you say "condescending?" I mean, it has an okay premise, something about a girl who is messed up because her dad was an asshole, but then it degenerates into gender stereotypes and drivel about how every boy needs to be warmed by a good woman's heart. Well meaning, but ultimately offensive. It's times like these I realize that I'm more of a feminist than I think.

Hello all.

See you in a week.

I just made some crappy stir fry. Actually, it tastes pretty good, it's just that I'm using a new brand of noodle and they got that slimy starch coating that noodles sometimes get.

I went out with Tracy and Jeff and three people from the company where Jeff has his internship. They were all very nice and quite fun. We went to a bar in the lower level a restaurant in Portsmouth called Bananas. It's a decent place with a bunch of pool tables and an electronic jukebox. We had some drinks, ate quite a lot of food (well, I did), played a little pool, and had a conversation that made me glad the place was pretty much deserted.

It was me, Tracy and Jeff, and the three people from Jeff's work, Jeff, Mike and Melissa. What you have to understand is that Jeff and Mike are both older and married, so 1.) they seem to think that they know everything there is to know about women, and 2.) they are very comfortable talking about sex and whatnot. Somehow we got into this big conversation about how all women are bisexual. All women. Even lesbians, apparently, because according to Freud, as Married Jeff said, all women have a need for the dick. But as for so-called straight women being bisexual, the guys argument boiled down to the fact that women are attractive and men aren't, so therefore a women would want another woman. Because men are icky.

And I sat there thinking, of course you think men are icky--you're heterosexual and typically homophobic American males. Straight girls don't think men are icky because straight girls are attracted to them. I mean, are these guys so trained by society to not consider other men sexually attractive that they can't even think of themselves as sexually attractive? Or is it that straight men think about sex with women so much that they think straight women must think about having sex with women all the time, too? Is it both? I don't know.

We (we being Melissa, Tracy, and me) tried to explain things to these guys but they wouldn't listen to us. Tracy's Jeff was pretty quiet throughout this whole conversation, by the way. They just couldn't believe that we didn't find two women making out incredibly attractive, or that we could get absolutely anything out of watching two guys together. I tried explaining to them about how they'd been trained by television and movies and society in general to see women as (sex) objects and men as active, which is probably why they find a man being passive and receiving sexual "action" from another man so disturbing, but that didn't work either. I mean, I can look at another woman and acknowledge that she's attractive, but as far as physical attraction goes, there's nothing there for me. I'm attracted to men. How hard is that to understand?

My mother still has yet to call the cabinet guy and schedule when he's going to come and do the kitchen over, but she did buy a new stove and a new trash compactor the other day at Tri-City Sales. I love appliance stores, especially ones with display kitchens. I love warm woods with stainless steel. While she was signing stuff in the back, Brian and I explored the refridgerator sections. We found one with a crazy, sci-fi looking, double door, temperature controlled thingy inside that you put warm soda bottles in to cool them down fast. I like the fridges with the freezers on the bottom.

I have decided to put House of Leaves (you like that, Tracy?) down until I am back at school. And not living in a house. Nothing particularly scary has happened yet--I'm only on page 37--but for some reason I'm finding it to be intensely disturbing. I guess that there's just something fundamentally wrong about a house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside and it pushes certain psychological buttons. Dorms are substantially less creepy than houses. Well, at least my dorm is very non-creepy. The same cannot be said for Shriner pre-renovation.

Or for Tracy either, it seems. I watched her play her newly purchased copy of Resident Evil 4 for about two-and-a-half hours last night. The first fifteen minutes of the game are just a set-up for you to become comletely overwhelmed by crazy zombie villagers when suddenly a church bell rings. All the villagers drop their various sharp farming implements and . . . go to church. Must be some kind of zombie cult. At first we weren't sure if the villagers were zombies or just crazy European villagers (the story seems to take place in a remote village in Spain because everyone has a bad Spanish accent and the police at the beginning had jackets with "Policia" on the back. Those guys were impaled and burned), but since it takes up to five bullets to the head to kill these people, I'm guessing that they're at least partly undead. They scream stuff at you that sounds like "Bastard!" and "Asshole!" and "Luis Vuitton!"

At one point Tracy entered a new village. I made a small "ooh" noise to indicate that I saw a trip-wire ahead. Also, in the background, there were the faint sounds of zombie-moaning, which I thought would have prepared her for the zombie that jumped out at her a moment later. Apparently she thought it was me making those sounds (because I always make the low, sensual noises of zombie love-making when I'm sitting on the couch), so when the dude with the pitchfork appeared on screen she screamed bloody murder.

And much fun was had by all.

I went to the dentist today and had no cavities (thank goodness), but the hygenist did criticize my flossing. Apparently I don't scrape the sides of my teeth enough. I don't care, I'm just happy I don't have to go under the drill again.

Tracy made good on her threat to call and ask me to go sledding. Jeff came and while he grumbled about hating snow on the way to Gallows Hill, he had a good time, too. You know what? Rocks and tree trunks and giant slush puddles make sledding really exciting. And cute doggies who want to maul you death with their adorableness. Actually, the dog came during a sledding break. She was so excited to be out in the snow (and around three people who were throwing snow) that she completely ignored her owner and instead jumped all over us for about five minutes.

Tracy bruised her bumper and I think I crakced my tail, but we had fun and that's all that counts, right?

I just finished the last Dark Tower book abour an hour ago, the last of seven. Le sigh. Happy endings for some, sad for others, and second chances all around. Right before the last few pages there's a warning that basically says that all real endings suck and if you want a happy ending stop where you are and read no further. I seriously thought about putting the book down and walking away because I knew that after all this time and all this build-up, no ending would be good enough, but I only thought about it for about ten seconds. In a way, the ending is quite maddening, but it's also entirely appropriate and most of all, I think it's earned. It's the kind of ending that will turn some readers into raving lunatics (if they weren't already) and I don't envy Stephen King the hate mail that must be coming his way.

I went to Barnes and Noble with Ms. Tracy and bought two books with the remaining money on my gift cards. They are "The Devil in the White City," which is a fictionalized history involving the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, an architect, and a serial killer, and "House of Leaves," which has a structure that is indescribably weird. It's about a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. I'll leave it at that. It looks like the kind of book that nightmares are made of.

Speaking of nightmares, what with all the Resident Evil and Shaun of the Dead viewing, I had a zombie dream two nights ago. Since it's already faded from memory I'm guessing that it wasn't all that bad, and possibly means that my zombie-phobia is lessening somewhat. Although, thinking about the walking (and hungry) dead is giving me the heebie-jeebies so maybe I'm not so much with the conquering of the mortal terror just yet.

Edited to add: Holy crap! Demagogue died.

Well, there's not much to tell, but it's been a few days, so I suppose I owe it to my loyal readers to blog. All three of you. Also, the blog with all the menstruation comments needs to be pushed down a bit.

I saw Shaun of the Dead yesterday evening, and while I had visions of pale-eyed zombies dancing in my head all night (visions that I tried to replace with floppy, hoppy, bunnies and Viggo Mortensnen), I have to say that it was worth the zombie trauma that I sustained, which will inevitably lead to some kind of awful zombie nightmare approximately three months from now. It was hilarious and really quite touching and I kind of got a crush on the red-headed guy who plays Shaun. I think his name is Simon. He wrote the movie with another guy who directed it and they have a show in Great Britain called Spaced, which might be worth taking a gander at if it's on dvd.

After a little quibbling, the Ground Round accepted my passport as legal ID and I was allowed to sit at the bar with my dad and have a drink on Sunday afternoon. The bartender was quite nice and actually apologized when the manager came out and asked me for more forms of identification. "I had no idea that was going to happen," she said. Everybody likes my Mass ID except for the Ground Round on Highland Avenue, which sucks because they make this Mandarin Martini that's to die for.

That's all that's happening in the great state of Massachusetts. It was ridiculously warm today and on Thursday we're supposed to get around six inches of snow, so at least the weather isn't boring. I have a feeling that Tracy will want to go sledding up on Gallows Hill. I don't know if my tailbone can take it. Speaking of Tracy, I have to give her a call in a minute. We're going to make some mischief tonight. Or sit around and watch TV. It's a toss up, really.