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I have strep throat for the fifth time this year. I definitely need to have my tonsils out at some point. I can't wait! As usual, I can't really write about anything else worthwhile going on in my life because of who may read it. Oh well. 12*25*05 I had a very eventful Christmas. At six this morning I got called into work to cut corneas out of a 24 year-old. So I had to drive all the way from my mom's in New Jersey, back to New York City, take care of business, and drive all the way back to my mom's again. I can usually handle the death of my donors, but when they're that young it does get to me a bit. So that put a damper on my Christmas morning. By the time I got back to my mom's, my brother and his boyfriend (now fiancé) were already there, and my mom's boyfriend (whom she recently moved in with) and her had had a fight and he had taken off. I was a little irritated they couldn't hold off on fighting for one of the few times I'm here, but I tried not to let it show. This proved rather difficult being that my brother was being more abrasive than normal, and jumping down my throat every chance he got. Dinner progressed somewhat normally if you don't count the awful prayer my brother attempted to say before we ate. Afterwards, he talked and talked and talked, and I couldn't get a word in edgewise. He cut me off in mid-sentence at least ten times. Finally I had enough, and told him I was in the middle of a sentence, and to let me finish it. I continued what I was saying when I was interrupted yet again by my brother having a violent outburst of "You're a fucking bitch," getting up, grabbing his things and telling his boyfriend they were leaving because he hates me. He kept calling me a bitch and saying that my grandmother and one of our aunts like him better. For a few minutes I was kind of in shock and things were going in slow motion, but I finally snapped out of it and got up and told him everything I've always wanted to tell him: basically that he's caused our family nothing but trouble and left a huge responsibility on me to be successful to make up for his endless fuck-ups...etc. He started quivering with anger and tried to lunge at me, but my mom and his boyfriend were holding him back. Let me tell you, it takes a real man to try and beat up his little sister. But I didn't back away, I accepted his challenge to dual with a "Let's go!" But, alas, no punches were thrown. However, he did take a cheap shot at me as he was leaving; he swung his book bag around my mother and whacked me in the side with it. He then briskly walked towards the front door in retreat. So I ran up behind him and pushed him as hard as I could. His head slammed into the door frame, bounced off and then he fell flat on his back. It all happened so fast, but it looked like it hurt. So I ran and locked myself in my mom's room to prevent him from seeking any further retaliation. Anyway, my mom and I were just a tad stunned after all that, and decided to forget about this Christmas and just watch movies for the rest of the night. I wonder if my mom's opinion about me has changed now that she's heard me curse as much as I did today. After all, cursing in front of her has only become a recent occurrence for me. The night wasn't a total bust though--I did get to see Katrina for the first time since our trip to France. We talked for a while about the usual (feces and flatulence). Plus the image of my brother's head bouncing off the door has been keeping me giggling all night. 12*23*05 Melissa bought me The Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection on DVD for Christmas. I couldn't believe it. She said it was to make up for all the years she never got me a present when she had a crappy-paying job. It's the best present ever! I took the day off and got my teeth cleaned at my new dentist. When it was all over and I was ready to pay, they told me my health insurance covered the cleaning. I love health insurance! This is a whole new world to me. Unfortunately I have cavities and will probably end up spending $500 to get that taken care of. Stupid teeth. Who needs 'em!? I'm leaving for NJ tomorrow morning. Tonight, however, I am going to Black & White for the first time in a while for a long overdue drink with some friends. Happy holidays! 12*21*05 This article about the strike coverage is pretty hilarious. 12*21*05 I was looking through pictures of commuters walking to work today on The New York Times' website when I thought I saw my bike. But its rider turned out to be a rather hefty black man. My coworker had a good laugh at my expense, and we continued pretending to look busy. I then went to the website's main page, and lo and behold there was my picture (see below)! I printed it out and e-mailed everyone I knew to glory in my fifteen minutes of fame with me. It was only on the main page for about an hour, but it's still in their photo gallery. Anyway, it was pretty neat. I rode my bike to and from work yesterday and today. My knees are pretty sore and I'm completely exhausted. But it is, if nothing else, quite an experience. There's no doubt that I think this whole strike sucks. No one should have to be outside for any long period of time in this weather. I bundled up like crazy, but I go through constant extremes: first I'm completely freezing, then I work up a sweat and feel hot, then I cool down and become even colder than before because my clothes are damp from sweating. I'll ride my bike again tomorrow, but I'm not going to work on Friday. I requested a personal day in the beginning of the month for Friday to get my teeth cleaned anyway. If the strike is still on then, I just plan to take it easy and maybe soak my legs in hot water. I suppose the worst part about getting to and from work is weaving in and out of pedestrians on sidewalks. Every time I try to ride on the street, a car pulls up flush with the curb, forcing me either into heavy traffic, or back onto the sidewalk. A few cops have told me to get off the sidewalk, but I promptly disobey them once they're a block away. You'd think they'd make an exception given the circumstances! On my way home today, a man was legally crossing the street by Prospect Park with his dog when a car came speeding out of the Grand Army Plaza circle and almost hit his dog. I screamed along with a few others, but his dog was ok. I saved a dog yesterday morning from running into traffic. He must have gotten away from his owner somehow, and I heard her screaming, so I got off my bike and grabbed him by the collar until she could cross the street to retrieve him. After those cats from my last entry finally stopped screaming, I went back to bed and came close to sleep until two dogs began doing their rendition of "The Dueling Banjos"...but with barking. I finally went and slept in the living room. One of those damned dogs started barking again when I was going to bed last night, so I spent yet another night sleeping in my living room. Hmm, there have been quite a few incidents in my life the past few days involving K9s. What could it all mean!?
12*20*05 It's fucking 3:30 in the morning but I can't sleep because there are two cats screaming outside. And wow, it sounds like they're now trying to kill each other. Anyway, I thought I mine as well check the MTA strike status; I can't believe they're actually going through with it. That sucks. Looks like I'll be riding my bike to work today. I hate to say it, but I wish one of these cats would kill the other so I could go back to sleep. 12*18*05 I was on-call today from midnight until noon. I got a call around 10 AM to come in, and ended up running three hours over my shift. But I made $300, so all is good. I realize not everyone knows much about cornea/eye donation, and I get a barrage of similar questions from people. So I thought maybe I'd shed some light on the matter. First of all, just because you are a registered donor with the Department of Motor Vehicles does not mean your organs and/or tissue will be taken when you die. The decision rests solely on your next of kin (next of kin being your spouse, your children if they're 18+, your parents, your siblings, your legal guardian...in that order). It has happened quite a few times where a registered donor passes away and their next of kin says no to donation, thereby negating the deceased's wishes. So, if you really want to donate, make your wishes known to your family. As far as requirements we have for eye donation, we don't accept donors over 75 years-old (unless it's for research), or donors under one year-old. Donors who have AIDs or hepatitis B and/or C, or a long list of other diseases, are not acceptable for donation, but we do take many donors who've had cancer. As long as the deceased had nothing specifically wrong with their corneas, people who wore glasses or had glaucoma, etc. are still viable candidates for eye donation. And people who don't have transplantable corneas can still donate for research. And finally we must try to get the donation within twelve hours of death. I'm actually leaving out a long list of other rule-outs (contraindications), but you get the general idea. The eye-bank only deals with, you guessed it, eye donation! There are other tissue and organ teams that deal with all the other parts of the body one can donate. Sometimes we have to race the other organ/tissue teams to the donor so we can do our procedure first. Our procedure definitely takes less time (~one hour), so having to wait hours for another team to finish is neither fun nor fair. We have a company car that all the technicians use to drive to hospitals for donations. Our area of coverage is New York City, Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley; so sometimes a donation can take the whole work day depending on where it is. Another neat little fact about the eye-bank I work at is that it was the world's first transplant organization. There are now over 100 eye-banks nation-wide. Www.restoresight.org/general/faqs.htm covers a lot of what I just rambled on about and more if you care to see. 12*16*05 Yay, more pictures from the Goldfrapp show! 12*14*05 I saw Brokeback Mountain tonight with Melissa. It was great. I almost started sobbing towards the end, but had to try violently hard to suppress it. Every little thing the main characters did that could be taken the slightest bit sexually before the actual homosexual love began, made everyone giggle like children in grade school sex ed. Now I'm not the type of girl that gets off on gay porn, and not that this film was pornographic at all, but when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were sexually entangled with one another, it got me just a little worked up. But, as most reviews have said, it's not all about gay sex. The movie is more about love than anything. And it was extremely moving and beautifully filmed. And that's my two cents. 12*13*05 I had a dream last night that a co-worker started to address my boss as "grandma", but only got as far as "grand" before she realized what she was saying. Then we all had a good laugh to the point where I woke myself up laughing in real life. In my half-awake/half-asleep state, I still thought the whole thing was hilarious and told myself to remember to tell everyone at work today so they could share in the humor. But I forgot, and it didn't seem that funny anymore when I remembered this afternoon. At the moment, the thing that is funnier to me is that my mom pronounced eskimos "ex-mose" tonight. She asked me if she had ever told me some boring nutrition story about the ex-mose. I wanted to say yes so she wouldn't tell me, but I was actually intrigued as to what this mysterious ex-mose was. At first I thought maybe it was some sort of pill similar to green algae, but she kept mentioning whale blubber and cold weather. When it hit me that she meant eskimos, I almost peed myself laughing. She never did get to finish her story. 12*12*05 I only looked at a few places over the past week, but something felt utterly wrong with the whole thing, and I finally realized today it wasn't the apartments. I do not want to live with a roommate. There were two reasons I wanted to move out of my lovely apartment: 1-I wanted to live in a more exciting neighborhood (ideally Park Slope), and 2-I wanted to live alone. I was willing to sacrifice number 2 to get number 1. But I've decided to still try for both, or at least as close as I can reasonably come. If that fails miserably, my mom said she'd front me the money for half of a deposit for a two-bedroom apartment. I would promptly pay her back after I moved in and found a roommate. I like this plan much better than my other one. I'm sure my current roommate could attest to my dislike of living with people. She's probably as close to perfect as roommates come: she doesn't bother me, she never complains, she pays almost always on time, she's quiet. There's really nothing monumentally wrong with her, and yet I just can't bring myself to be happy with our living situation. And contradictory as it may or may not be, I really would like to one day live with a significant other. I think I'd be more willing to compromise my living arrangements for someone I love. But being financially forced to live with someone I don't even know just plain sucks.
12*11*05 I've been apartment hunting all weekend...and yet I've only seen one place. My online roommate and I finally met and viewed a place in Park Slope together. We almost gave the broker a down payment, but I didn't have a good feeling about it. I didn't like that it was on such a busy road or the layout of the apartment. The kitchen was twice the size of the living room which had no windows, the biggest bedroom was twice the size of the medium-sized bedroom (if not more), and the smallest bedroom could only fit a bed in it. I think my new roommate wasn't very happy with me for not wanting it. Oh well. I'm also still toying with the idea of getting a studio; the idea of sharing decorating rights with other people makes me cringe. Even though I don't think I can find a studio I can afford where I want to live, that hasn't stopped me from looking. A girl can dream. This weekend was pretty uneventful otherwise. I wrote out some Christmas cards for relatives and friends, had brunch with Brook this afternoon, and saw The Chronicles of Narnia tonight. I wasn't nuts about the movie. It was a tad too lighthearted for me. I wanted all the children to die in the end...just kidding! But seriously, it was a bit too sappy. Ugh I can't believe stupid Christmas is next week! I'm doing an on-call shift Christmas morning. I get paid $300 even if they don't call me in, so I'm happy about that. I haven't done all my Christmas shopping or even set up my fiber optics mini-Christmas tree. I'm in denial. Meh, I guess I'll set up the tree now. 12*07*05 I've been hesitating to write about this for months, but I guess I'm at a point where I don't care anymore. I'm just dumbfounded by the fact that two of my ex-boyfriends in particular still check my site (I have my ways of knowing). One does it not so frequently, but all the same it's an utter mystery to me why he bothers. I could give two craps about his site. The other checks it almost every day. This one is particularly peculiar to me seeing as how he treated me like utter shit and made it more than abundantly clear he had no interest in being with me back when we broke up. So why the sudden interest in my life now? I know this site is out there for everyone to read, but I guess I feel that if people have wronged me in such a way as these two have, they really don't deserve to know what's going on in my life. If they had wanted to continue being a part of my life in some way, they should have made the slightest effort to be civil human beings to me while we were together. And that's all I have to say about that. 12*06*05 I saw Goldfrapp last night at Nokia Theater. She was friggen awesome. As Rory would say, she's one sassy bitch. She also had two fabulous dancers for about half of her songs. They had a different outfit every time they came out (see other people's pictures below), and they shook it like strippers. Even the venue was great. I was told it used to be a Loews theater. I'm almost positive I saw The Others there with an old roommate about 6 months after it was released. Anyway, it wasn't too big like Roseland, but bigger than Irving Plaza, and it supposedly has the greatest sound system in all of New York. I highly recommend it. I met a nice British boy while waiting for Goldfrapp to come out. It turned out he was visiting by himself for only about four days to celebrate his 21st birthday. He took me up on my suggestion to go to a bar in the East Village after the show. Unfortunately the bar was pretty dead, but we still had a good time and got many free drinks. We walked back to the subway as the snow was falling. It looked really beautiful. It was even more beautiful that I thought ahead and took today off of work to sleep late. After lazing around for most of the day, I finally went to my school to pick up my diploma. Cheap bastards couldn't mail it to me. Anyway, I'm a college grad for real now! I also went to the Apple store to see if they had any good deals on the older iPod models since I asked my mom for one for Christmas. Turns out they did; I got a 20 gig color photo iPod for $180. It was mostly cheaper because it was refinished, meaning someone had returned it within 15 days after they bought it. But it works fine, and there isn't really a scratch on it. However, it is weird that I shopped for my own Christmas present and my mom wants me to bring it home with me on Christmas so she can wrap it, give it back to me, and then I can take back home with me again. But hey, I have a new iPod either way, so I'm not complaining.
12*04*05 So I've started getting a little more serious about this apartment search. I posted a listing on Craigslist today to find two more roommates. I just won't have enough money on my own for a broker's fee and a deposit for a three-bedroom apartment. Initially I wanted to live alone, but, just as I expected, that's somewhat of a financial impossibility in Park Slope. Then all the two-bedroom apartments I'd been looking at that I can afford aren't in the true Park Slope area. But I did find a lot more three-bedroom apartments that were. I've already gotten at least eight responses to my ad, and I already chose one roommate from those eight. So hopefully this will all come together soon. Bahaha, Milo just whacked his head into the wall. What a cute idiot. I was supposed to go Christmas shopping with my friends yesterday, but we decided to get a drink first and never ended up leaving the bar until I had to go to the concert. Ted Leo was awesome as usual. And I met that guy from online there; he seemed nice enough and attractive. I told him to give me a call today so that we could meet up. But I was deeply engrossed in a movie when he called and feeling pretty shitty on top of that, so we didn't meet up. I dunno, I think I feel ready to date, but I just don't care one way or the other. I guess when I meet a guy I like, and who's willing to put up with this flitty dating approach of mine, he's a keeper. 12*03*05 I will shortly be meeting up with some old friends from school to do some Christmas shopping. Actually, I'm mostly going to be window shopping. Saving up for a new place has left me with very limited funds. I can't believe it's friggen December. My life is going by in warp speed. Tonight I'm seeing Ted Leo with Amanda. A guy I've been talking with online will also be attending, so it should be interesting, if nothing else, to finally meet. I think I'm going to meet up with another guy I've been communicating with online next week. It took me a while, but I think maybe I'm finally ready to do this crap again. Maybe.
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