|
I scanned in this picture while I was at my mom's house. It's one of the few pictures I have of me as a kid. My hair is almost the same color right now...artificially, of course.
08*29*05 I'm very happy to say that Chad and I made up yesterday. We celebrated with Chinese food and a Mr. Show viewing last night. My trip to NJ wasn't too horrid; the trip back was. Next time my mom visits, she's bringing me a whole slew of kitchen appliances and cookware she doesn't need anymore. Not that I really ever cook, but maybe someday it'll get some use. I had to call an old woman on Friday to ask if she'd donate her recently deceased son's corneas. Before I even got to the part about donation, she started crying hysterically. I had no idea what to do. I just kept telling her I was sorry for her loss. I'm almost done with my training. I've done at least six pairs of corneal excisions by now and two single enucleations (whole eye removal). Once I start processing donors on my own, I'll start making more money--and I could really use it. I want to find a studio apartment in the Park Slope vicinity by the end of the year. I've estimated that with a broker's fee, first month's rent and a deposit, I'll need at least $3000 to move. Mere pocket change! I just watched a few horror movies I got from Netflix. I think maybe I'm losing my taste for gory movies. Seeing it in real life on a regular basis will probably do that to a person. When the hell will it start getting cooler out!? I thought we were through with this humidity for the rest of the year, and I could put my air conditioner to rest until next year. But alas, that is not the case. Thankfully it's at least ten degrees cooler in France right now. I don't know how evident it is, but I am getting completely consumed with thoughts of my trip. Only a week and three more days! 08*28*05 My mom is having an open house today. I guess most people would be sad about losing the house they grew up in, but I hate this town and don't feel much of an attachment to the house. I felt a little nostalgic when I was looking around for stuff I might want before my mom sells it. But I'll get over it. I had the worst week. Everything that could have gone wrong did. Chad and I had a fight Friday night, so he never ended up coming over. And we still haven't resolved anything. At least I was still able to salvage Saturday with Alex. We got lunch in Park Slope and then had some beers at an outdoor bar. I got to New Jersey kind of late and slept over Katrina's. I haven't slept over a friend's house in a long time; and I haven't seen Katrina since May. But we'll see enough of each other when we go away to France in less than two weeks. I can't believe how close it is. I only have to go to work two days next week with the holiday and the trip. I'm so excited. Anyway, I feel that things usually go really shitty just before they get really good. So even if things aren't too great this week, I know at the very least my trip will be fun. 08*25*05 I think I can count on one hand the amount of times Chad has been to my apartment. Tomorrow night may possibly mark the poignant moment of having to start using a digit on the other hand to tally up his visits. I'm seeing Ted Leo FOR FREE after work tomorrow. Whenever that ends, I'm meeting up with Chad and his friends to celebrate another friend's birthday. And then I'm taking Chad home with me and having my way him. Haha, just kidding...but not really. I had a bad day yesterday. A co-worker is slowly but surely driving me insane. The rest of the week was ok. I'm getting more and more engrossed with planning my trip. It only took me three months. I want to look into renting a scooter when we're in Lyon. This could be disastrous or fun, or disastrously fun. Only one way to find out. I realized today I haven't taken many pictures lately. I'm charging up the ol' digital camera as I type this so I can bring it with me tomorrow. So expect pictures soon. Saturday I'm meeting up with some school friends and wandering around Brooklyn with them. Later that night I'm taking a dreaded trip to New Jersey. The trip will have a two-fold purpose, though: my mom has been complaining endlessly about never seeing me, and I need to procure my suitcase from her house for my trip. On the positive side, the train ride there and back will leave me with plenty of time to read up further on France. Je n'ai pas de maladies. 08*22*05 I can't believe this summer is nearing an end. Well, I guess it doesn't technically end for another month, but my mind set has always been that it ended when school started. But I don't have to go to school now! Mwahahaha! I'm also surprised at how quickly my trip is creeping up; only 17 more days and I'm outta here. This summer has been so much calmer compared to last year's...in a good way. Back when Chad and I were dating in the beginning of the year, I had hoped we'd at least be together through the summer. Then of course we broke up and that idea slowly dissipated. When I graduated in June, I never expected to land a job cutting out eyes or to get back together with Chad. I'm really happy things worked out the way they did. Chad helped me plan most of my trip out yesterday. I needed some guidance. We basically decided Katrina and I will stay 3 nights in Paris, then take the Eurorail to Aix en Provence for a night, then to Lyon for a night, then to Dijon for a night, then back to Paris for 3 more nights. I booked a hotel for every night except our night in Lyon. I actually called the hotels in Dijon and Aix en Provence to make reservations on my lunch break today. I spent a half hour prior to my call planning out how I'd book the room in French. But as soon as I heard French on the other line, I panicked and only managed to say, "Bonjour. Je suis Américaine et je ne parle pas bien français. Parlez-vous anglais?" And down the crapper went four years of French. The flatulence jokes were running rampant in the office today. So much so that a coworker spit his water out all over his desk. Good times. 08*21*05 It's almost 4 in the morning, but I wanted to write the following story down before I forget. Last week I was doing a donor for work. I'm still training, so my co-worker was there. When I unzipped the donor's body bag, I got a whiff of something smelly. The body had been dead for about 12 hours, so it's not uncommon for him to begin smelling by that point. I commented to my co-worker about how the guy smelled and she replied, "No, that was me--I farted." If there was ever a time to blame it on someone else, that'd have been it. 08*20*05 Chad introduced me to the band Of Montreal, whom I love. I've been listening to this song repeatedly, and now I'm in the mood to dance. Actually, I've been in the mood to dance since last night. My problem is that I don't want to dance in some stuffy club with pretentious hipsters. I have a vision of the ideal dance scenario in my head instead; it involves a rooftop party with a decent-sized crowd of good people with even better music. And, of course, an endless supply of free booze. Anyone know if this exists? Lemme know. I'm in a weird mood. I can't quite put my finger on why. Well, I could list a bunch of reasons why, but I don't feel like getting into it. I just wish I felt more stable about a few things going on in my life. I feel like I need to be doing things right now, but I don't feel like doing them. I don't know if it's sheer laziness or complete lack of motivation or what. I also feel like I haven't had a really great time in a while. Maybe this trip to France is just what I need. 08*16*05 I guess I should have known it was going to be a shitty day when I found a cockroach amongst the paperwork I was going through at work this morning. It was huge. I can deal with cutting out eyes from dead bodies, and looking at pretty much any gruesome sight. I can even deal with spiders and snakes and mice and rats and most anything else that people are irrationally afraid of...but I can't stand cockroaches. They completely skeeve me out. So I started freaking out like a little girl, and ran to my boss's office and begged her to kill it. To my surprise, she told me I was being ridiculous. I mean, I guess I was. But I think if cockroaches are the only thing that grosses me out, I've got it relatively good compared to some people. So not only was I frightened by a bug, but I was made to feel bad for my innate reaction towards the vermin. Later on in the day I was having an e-mail feud with the company who booked my bed and breakfast in Paris. They told me a few weeks ago that I couldn't have the place I already put a deposit down on. I was pretty upset with them, but picked another place regardless. They told me today I can't get the other place I wanted either. So now I have to hunt down another place to stay and I hardly have any advance notice, which means I won't have as many choices and I have to pay more. Plus I haven't really been planning the details of my trip at all, and Chad made me realize some holes I have in my tentative France agenda. The thing is, I just don't feel like planning anything right now. I want someone else to do it. I got the plane tickets and I'm working on the hotel; I can't be expected to do everything! So yeah, it's been one of those days. Last night was better. Chad showed me around Columbia (he works there). Then I ate Ethiopian food for the first time. We finished the night off with a screening of Citizen Kane on the Upper West Side. Good times. Unfortunately, I was very tired because I had had a nightmare the previous night about my "best friend", a talking pumpkin, dying. I woke up in tears and couldn't fall back asleep. I think maybe it was indicative of my diet's lack of pumpkin pie. 08*13*05 The Girl From Ipanema is the kind of song that never leaves your head. But it's great, so I don't care. 08*11*05 I just took a wonderful two and a half hour nap. When I awoke, I spoke to Rory on the phone for about 20 minutes. Rory and I haven't spoken in over a year because of a big fight we had at the end of June last year. He's living in LA now, trying to land acting jobs. I may see him before I go away to France next month when he flies over here for his sister's wedding. It's kind of surreal feeling to be talking to him after all this time. I'm happy about it though, I've missed him. I cut both corneas out of a guy's head yesterday. That's the first time I've been allowed to do both on my own. It went pretty smoothly. I did it at the Brooklyn Medical Examiner's. When I arrived, there was a morbidly obese corpse on one table and another corpse laying face down with his back sliced all the way open on another table. I am completely apathetic to such sights. I just enjoy relating it to people who are more sensitive to these matters. As far as the obese corpse is concerned, the eye-bank gets referrals from hospitals after people who are suitable for donation have died; almost half the time it's for someone who had heart-related complications due to obesity. And they're not that old either. That and the cancer referrals are pretty rampant. The statistics do not lie. In the description section of a referral I got other day, the man who passed away had collapsed in front of paramedics. Before he did so though, he had yelled something which, from the handwriting, looked to be "Fleep me." I looked at it several times and started giggling. Finally I showed a co-worker and he, having a similar mentality as me, started yelling "Fleep me!" It was pretty hysterical. What was even funnier was when we realized it said "Help" instead of "Fleep." Stupid handwriting. I got this dress in the mail today. It looks better on that girl in the picture, but I joined the NY Sports Club a few weeks ago, so hopefully that won't be too much of a problem in time. That club is so nice. The one I go to on Wall Street actually used to be a bank--the same bank Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze go to in Ghost. Not that I'm a huge Ghost fan, but I totally recognized it after an employee told me that. As invigorating as my nap was, I can already tell I'm probably never going to fall asleep tonight. It doesn't have much to do with all the sleep I got, and more to do with the whimpering dog I hear in the building next to me. 08*06*05 It was brought to my attention that some people are under the impression that the title of my page, That's the Story of My Life, is named after a Social Distortion song of the same title. But I don't even listen to Social Distortion let alone know that song. I got the name from the phrase that Morrissey croons repeatedly at the end of The Smiths' Half a Person. The title Well I Wonder is also a Smiths song. For some reason I thought that was obvious, but (gasp!) not everyone likes The Smiths. There's only one part of my training at work that I've been dreading, and that's calling families after their loved ones have died and basically asking them if we can take their recently departed's eyes. My boss has been making me call him from another phone in the office to practice my approach for a while, but yesterday he told me I had to finally call a family. I was so nervous, but I sucked it up and got it over with. The first woman I called was nice enough, but declined to donate. Then she called back five minutes later while I was on lunch break to say she changed her mind. I have five different sheets of paper with things to say to the families and I was running all over the place to get everything organized again. Anyway, it went well. My boss was so proud of me he gave me a high-five. I called one more woman before I left and she also consented to donation. My boss said it's because my voice sounds so pure. If that's true, then my voice definitely does not fit my character. I am going out tonight. I don't know with whom or what I'll do, but I do know I am not staying in tonight. Last night I hung out with Chad. We lazed around on his bed listening to David Cross doing stand-up on an MP3, and then argued about movies because we're geeks. Being an ex-film major, Chad has a talent for critiquing and interpreting movies. It's frustrating for me because I can't argue a point about a movie as well, so I gave up and just boiled all my arguments down to, "It sucked--end of story." Well, I decided a few months ago I want to take more film classes as soon as I'm done saving up for another place. I also want to take a class on how to reupholster furniture. Maybe then I can fix the damage my cats have done to my couch. I received another crazy Friendster message from a guy in Indonesia the other day. Enjoy: I plan to move to Indonesia in December. We're obviously soulmates. 08*03*05 I received a message on Friendster a few weeks ago that's just begging to be posted. Some random guy from California wrote me telling me all about himself and then ended the message with a poem that came to him while looking at my picture: if i say yes, is that will you be the best... Chad and his friend agreed that "one day humanity will have the technology to create a worse poem, but until then, this one gets the prize."
|
