Sunday, September 29, 2002

I FOUND GELATO IN LOS ANGELES!!!!!!!!!! yummy, creamy, delicious gelato. goodbye diet, hello extra 20 pounds!

it's called Al Gelato, but i will lobby for a name-change to "Karen's Second Home." i tried the banana and coconut. but i also tasted the blackberry, pistachio, and honeydew. all were amazing. and to make things even better, they serve great pasta and pizza, and whenever you order food you get big slices of crusty bread with a dish of olives and a jar of pickled peppers.

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

i heard a radio interview with laura bush recently, and the interviewer asked her what the president has been reading lately. she said that he just finished reading The Emperor of Ocean Park (by Stephen Carter)....but so have i! i don't know what to think now...i mean, i feel like now we share some kind of literary comraderie, and i can no longer hate him as much because he, too, enjoyed the book.

some time in the past few weeks, geroge w. bush and i were reading the same book at the exact same time. *shudder*

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Two passages, out of order, from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

“In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of on of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful of their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”

“Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ca y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from underneath his feet and for an instant he was suspended in air and he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.
“Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo’s horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried her best to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death’s final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite all the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: ‘Only God knows how much I loved you.’”
i forgot Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess at work today, and am now suffering from acute separation anxiety.

Monday, September 23, 2002

Life really sucks ass right about now.

i just ate 1/2 scoop of ice cream, and i feel so guilty. i hate this cholesterol-free, taste-free diet thing. it puts me in a bad mood.

which reminds me: i am so fucking tired of this prospective employer stringing me along!! FIVE interviews and TWO job offers later, they have yet to give me a definitive answer as to whether i can quit my current job to work for them. goddammit, i am at a standstill because their offer is too good to take lightly, and all they can do is make vague promises (that THEY initiate, mind you) and tell me to keep in touch or that they're just on the edge of a decision. I'm even in salary negotiations with them for chrissakes, yet i've received no concrete offer letter and no go-ahead to resign my current job. I'm losing hope...and self-esteem. A year after graduating from college, I'm still puttering around in a dead-end boring job, having learned little to nothing that I couldn't have taught myself, about to be knee-deep in law school application fee debt when i have no idea how the hell i'm going to be able to afford law school in the first place, living paycheck-to-paycheck with no clear vision of my future career plans, no longer on speaking terms with my evil stepmother, and generally stressed the hell out for fear that i am, in reality, merely a mediocre peon unwilling to admit my inferiority.

okay, i'm done whining.

Sunday, September 22, 2002

my doctor told me last week to severely limit my intake of cholesterol, so the whole week i ate nothing but vegetables and ungreasy food. then, the weekend came, and i am now chock-full of artery clogging cholesterol. among other things, i ate: fried lobster, fried crab, rotisserie chicken with garlic butter, gelato...the list goes on. the point of that previous rambling being...i found good homemade gelato that isn't in Italy! although it is in san diego, which is defintely too far to go on spontaneous gelato-runs.

this week, i cured myself of a long-time addiction, and i am never turning back: i abandoned my hotmail account. instead, i now have yahoo, where i have 4mb storage space and am not deluged with spam offering me a larger penis. my new address is: meow61212@yahoo.com. actually, i will still be checking my hotmail periodically, so i haven't quit cold-turkey yet. one day at a time.

i am overcome with the fear that, now in his older and wiser days, my cat has decided that he does not love me anymore. he loves my father, but not me. then again, my dad feeds him sirloin steak, and i only feed him chef's blend (sprinkled on top of his wet cat food, cut into cubes, and microwaved for 10 seconds). i do everything i can to try to win him over, but i just really don't think he's gotten over my painting his paws green last june. i have the sneaking suspicion that he's only using me for food.

Monday, September 16, 2002

i'm SO over my closet. it's hopeless. it's actually impeccably organized, but now my room is filled with everything that used to be in my closet...and my room is a total mess! i'd rather have a messy closet and clean room than a messy room and clean closet.

my new strange obsession has become...chess. ever since i finished reading The Emperor of Ocean Park, I've been really wanting to learn to play chess well. i am now reading Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.

closet cleaning....chess strategy books....um, can i get any more nerdy?

Thursday, September 12, 2002

I was listening to NPR on my way to work this morning, and came across live coverage of Bush's speech to the UN General Assembly.

Here is the Text of Bush's speech to United Nations. keep in mind while reading the text of the speech that Bush pronounces "nuclear" like this: "Noo-cue-lar"....puts a whole new pinon things. hasn't anyone told him that he's butchering the one word he keeps using to make his powerful, moving points?

Laughable pronunciation aside, I agree with the analysts that this is a well-written speech (amont other things, it is certainly vague enough while still managing to warn of US unilateral military action). Hooray for Bush's speech writers!

He still doesn't have a point though. Here's why.

Tuesday, September 03, 2002

ugh. i am very sick. i crawled out of bed to make myself chicken soup, and then while i was eating it, i was convinced of the unequivocal hatred that god must harbor towards me, because a cricket jumped into my soup and drowned itself. now i do not have the energy to make more soup (and even if i did, i wouldn't be able to taste it anyway) so i will lay in bed some more and read about people more miserable than i (El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera ).

Monday, September 02, 2002

Weekend recap:

Thursday...went to Felix's and shared 2 bottles of wine. Then, headed down to Er and Francis', where I drank 3 more bottles of San Miguel and then commenced taking swigs out of the bottle of Jack and Southern Comfort with the guys. I drank like a man, dammit! The next thing i remember I'm throwing up all of my salmon on the side of the freeway. Here are a few highlights (some i do not remember):
*Group primal scream
*Er pouring beer into Mike's ear
*Jon wanting to jump through the living room window very very much
*Er throwing office chair at Mike
*People throwing one another into the bathtub full of ice
*Joe prostrate on the cement with his head in a bush
*Loud drunken rendition of "drop, baby drop, baby drop, drop all your love on me"

I wake up in the morning, still drunk (I find out later that just about everyone else woke up drunk too....worst of all was Mike, who woke up drunk still in the hallway of the empty apartment) and drag myself to work. Somehow i make it through, and then head to church retreat! Hypocritical, you say? I fully agree. Spent the weekend soaking in mineral hot springs, eating resort food, staring at the beautiful lake and black swans....and i must admit, not praying very much at all. I have some issues to work through, but I do not know if I will find the answers at church retreat.

After a weekend of heartfelt talks, admonitions, and altar-calls set to the weepy picking of a guitar, i have only been able to recoil at what now appears to me as emotional manipulation...preying on the insecurities and wounds of a few kids who are hurting so much inside. the altar call dangles in front of you the shiny carrot of forgiveness for your sins, healing for your pain, communion with your peers...but at the price, in my humble opinion, of your self-reliance.

i am not saying that we as humans can ever be self-reliant....but we must learn before we submit to a higher power the abitlity to discern the things caused by our own actions from those directed by divine intervention. too often it seems that whenever i'm wrong, it's because i'm an imperfect sinner and i deserve all the bad things that happen, yet whenever anything good happens to me, i should thank god for his blessing. i want my successes, as well as my failures, to be my own.

even so, i realize that just because i want something to be a certain way doesn't mean that it is.