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I have just finished this week's sunday times crossword puzzle, lovingly mailed to me by my in-laws. I don't know if any of my friends are as dorky and addicted to crosswords as I am, but I don't charge $1.20 a minute like 1-900-289-CLUE, if anyone is stuck for an answer. I couldn't do the extra puzzle at the bottom, but I never ever can. I feel triumphant anyway. Don't I officially qualify for some sort of special elite status, that I've done this 3 out of the past 4 weeks? BTW, if anyone else does these, tell me about it, because when I get stuck for a few squares and can't get them at all it's frustrating beyond belief.
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Life has felt really non-stop in a way that is really unusual for me. I'm used to having way too much free time, and being able to do things in a way that reflects that. It's interesting to discover that I'm not great at time-management and lots of little things are falling through the cracks. I've started developing little rituals for getting things done, like eating. I keep a quart of cooked brown rice in the fridge and mix it in a bowl with beans from a can and salsa and microwave it and that feels like dinner but takes no imagination or time. At least work isn't one of the things I've been dropping. Lots of people have been wanting to be my clients, and part of me wonders "where were you a month ago?" I had an amazing stroke of luck/karma today that I surely did not deserve, when the new secretary at my office must've been unsure of her job responsibilities and washed and folded my sheets that were supposed to be dirty and problematic given the number of clients I had scheduled today. I had a little pocket of free time that I had allotted for the purpose of panicking, and it was nice to not have to.
Went to a friend's party on Saturday night and was told by a friend of his that my seder (admittedly the one I did last year, not this year, but the Haggadah was virtually unchanged so I still count it) was the most hard-core observant one she had ever been to, including a few orthodox ones. I was pleased, and this made the party fun for me.
Did you ever have to pee so hard that when you finally finish you have the hiccups? Be warned: it is possible!
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And I am always embarrassed by how technically illiterate I actually AM, and I do my stupid girlie try-to-look-smart thing and don't ask questions about what I don't understand and get a general gist, so that I can not say stupid things at parties, but it gets in my way and takes too much energy. Tonight as huz-bin and I were heading home from swimming, he informed me that he was planning on working through the evening after dinner, and I decided that I should do some work too, and decided to actually suck up my pride and go to a bookstore and feel really ignorant and buy an HTML book and learn how to play with my website so I can feel like an adult, or at least a child who can successfully operate her own toys without someone else winding them up. I think my massage website is very pretty, but mostly useless, and among other things, I want to knock my prices back $5. Little things, and wanting to try out improvements and see how they work. So I got Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML in 21 Days, because it was the only book that A) I had heard good things about that B) didn't make me feel stupid and that C) is wordy and conversational and explaining of new concepts-y in a way that means that I can read it AND comprehend it. I read through the first chapter, in which I learned what URL stands for, but pretty much knew everything else, which made me feel not-stupid.

PS- The thing that makes me feel most stupid is people telling me that I'm intelligent and should be able to pick up HTML easy, that I should find stuff online and not bother buying a book, and that it should take me a weekend or less to do so.
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you livejournal people like quizzes, here's one, but only fill it out if you live in Somerville, because it's the Somerville Commission for Women 2005 Women's Needs Survey. It takes 3 minutes and basically, it's a straw poll for what your civic priorities are.

http://www.somerville.k12.ma.us/education/components/contact/default.php?sectiondetailid=4512
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I haven't posted anything in a while, been enjoying Comcast's DNS problems and reading everyone else's stuff. But today I went *SWIMMING*, at the Alumni Pool at MIT, where I now have a card that will let me enter. They have towels there, and the one major downer is that the girls/women in the locker room are hella skittish about nudity, to the point of holding their towels tightly clutched 'round their bodies while they put on their underpants with one hand. It makes me miss Healthworks, where I learned to love my body and got to properly dry myself after showering. When other people are that self-conscious/discreet/whatever, it makes me feel like *I* should act that way too, to not offend their delicate sensibilities, especially where I may run into a client there or something. I'll get over it soon. Then I'll be "that naked chick with the hairy legs who is drying herself in the middle of the locker room". Hee hee. That will be fun for me when I muster up the chutzpah for it.
My bathing suit is tighter than I remember. Then I remember that I bought it my senior year of high school (yes folks, I go swimming just that often) and it makes sense. But once I started swimming, with my new goggles on that Jake say make me look like a blueberry imac, I don't notice, because holy crap I remember how to swim! It's great, and when my face is underwater, between the bubbles I blow out of my nose I can see the SCUBA people on the other side of the pool, and they're these people just sitting at the bottom of the pool, which is a little surreal, but it keeps me entertained. It's fairly standard Massage Therapist dogma that swimming is a type of exercise that (unless you're doing it competitively and ripping up your shoulder doing butterfly or something) is unlikely to hurt you. But now I can say it like I mean it. So much fun and only now are my hands/wrists/forearms starting to hurt as I'm typing. I felt warm and tired and physical and then I came home and ate pasta with shredded cheddar cheese and toasted chopped walnuts and pepper.
So now I have a regular Thursday night swim date. I need more though. Any other MIT people want to go sometime with me?
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I have never been more suprised by a quiz's assessment of me before.




You're Mississippi!

Torn and conflicted, sometimes people feel you have a split personality.
People have a hard time knowing whether you're coming or going, black or white, racist
or egalitarian. While you say you're a combination of everything, many look at you and
think you're just trying to be divisive, even offensive. It seems like your image problem
would be easy to correct, but you have almost no money for other changes or improvements.
When people are trying to slow themselves down, they say your name.



Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyra

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I'm sick, and I'm in mourning because my favorite video store closed (City Video for the locals). I drove there tonight on my way home, looking forward to a Sex in the City DVD to entertain my sick brain and City Video had vanished! No more cute guy to have conversations with, no more different sections for each nationality rather than a "foreign film" section! No more 20-year-old video collection with gems like the Doonesbury TV special to discover, blow the dust off of and rent! No more rentals at $3.75 apiece with double rentals on Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays! My frequent borrower card was two stamps from full! They can't do this to me!
I don't know what they're going to put in the empty hull, but it had better not be either A)Starbucks, B)the McDonalds, relocated, C)another boutique shop with merchandise I can't afford or D)anything else I'm not gonna benefit from.
I just hope that I'm overreacting and they will come back, a phoenix reborn! Until then it's time to suck it up and go to Hollywood Express, which has better selection of new releases anyway.
I think that other people must not get as attached to their favorite businesses as I do. I assign them this place in my pantheon and then I feel betrayed by capitalism, which snatches away everything good. A moment of silence for other businesses I have loved that cannot be here with us today...

Dolly's, Pennington Video, New New York Deli (rte 1 in NJ), Celia's Fresh Market & Deli, Denise's Ice Cream, Wordsworth Bookstore, Sage's Market, the Harvard Square Army-Navy Store, Lucy Parsons Center on this side of the river, am I forgetting anything else?
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I'm really curious to know what my friends think of this t-shirt/styling of a political message:

http://www.clamormagazine.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=IHADANABORTION&Category_Code=GR&Store_Code=BTM

I would not wear one, because I have never had an abortion, but if I ever had an abortion, I think I would want one of these. Currently, I'm much more of an "Ask me about EC" or "Ask me about my Keeper" sort of girl though. I've read two different articles about this shirt at this point (Bitch and Bust showed up in my mailbox on the same damn day)
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It all started with my recent obsession with watching Sex in the City on DVD (if you haven't watched more than 4 episodes you are NOT allowed to think less of me for this. I'm tired of girl-culture getting no respect!). Lately I have renewed an interest in clothing unheard of since high school, when I played with Bright Red Lipstick and color combinations not usually found in the 90s. I have too much clothing and I don't wear most of it. I am building a lean, mean, wardrobe machine (perhaps not lean because then it wouldn't fit me) and getting rid of all the crap I never wear, and all the stuff my mom buys me because she assumes our taste is similar, due to a series of ill-fated childhood attempts to win maternal validation by agreeing with her taste in my clothing. The ill-fatedness stems from the fact that, like today, I would refuse to actually WEAR the stuff once we got it home. Wah wah wah. My relationship with my mother was ruined by leggings or something. But yeah. I've been getting more honest with myself about what I like to wear and what is interesting conceptually, but is either ill-fitting, overly daring, or not part of my current lifestyle (I have this great business suit that doesn't come out much...). So I have pledged to get rid of 2/3 of my current wardrobe, because I realized that I only wear about 1/4 of it, but some of it is fun, and that things that I need but hate the version I have will get replaced so that I will have
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Does anyone I know have/have access to a shredder I could use for an evening or afternoon sometime? A working fireplace would also work and come to think of it be easier and cosier. I have an entire box of checks that I need to pitch because they sent me check numbers I had already used, and while I'm at it, I have a bunch of stupid deposit slips and such. Bribery is possible.
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Last night I had the distinct pleasure of getting a chance to say "Sorry. I don't have my Harvard Law School ID with me." It's technically not a lie. Went to see Liberal Establishment Boy, one of my favorite people from high school performing in the Harvard Law School Parody, complete with drunken lawyers and law students around me hooting at the cast. Highlights were a) L.E.B.'s acting ability, which was surprising in it's subtlety and accuracy, the dance number to "Justice Stevens please don't die" (to the tune of "Hit me baby one more time") complete with the little mini-kilt and poufy pigtail holder things ala the video. Afterwards, I got to crash the cast party and see law students at play. The music was really uninteresting (how many times in my life do I have to listen to "Jump Around"?) but they loved it. The most interesting thing at the cast party was the women (as Abi shows her biases to the world) when they turned their eyes away from other people and I can see them, tired and regrouping before they put their faces back on. There are aspects of myself that I don't like and try to avoid or downplay that were really naked in these people. I've always thought that if I had a different set of ethics, I'd be an evil ad exec, but now I think I could also have been a half-decent evil lawyer.
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Oh! Also today got an email from the boy in Vermont, which is weird and warmed my heart a bit. I thought it was spam, except spammers don't usually use subject lines taken from TMBG Dial-A-Song lyrics. This entry will make very little sense to almost everyone except the people it makes sense to. Hi Dana!
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My last post I mentioned that I had an initial appointment with a potential doula client and that I was excited. The post I was too down to write yesterday should have been about how I was sure I'd fucked it all up and was worthless and my training didn't prepare me for this and stuff. Today my post is about how she called back and wants to work with me! yahoo! I am so validated. Also, today I ate a roasted poblano chicken burrito from Picante grill, enough to satisfy any girl's dreams. I love how I can still TASTE it, hours and hours after eating it, but not in the burp way, in a good way. It's only REALLY good when the peppers and the sour cream end up in the same place. It makes it hot and cool at the same time.
But back to my brilliant career. One place that I feel stuck in is that I'm unsure what to talk about during prenatal meetings. I want someone who is not totally ignorant about birth to pretend to be a pregnant lady and I can practice and you can learn everything you wanted to know about birth and we can practice squatting or something.
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I have my first interview with my first potential doula client tomorrow. I have no idea what I will do or say, but I have faith that I will pull something out of my ass in time anyway. Also, I will be reading all my texts in an effort to cram some confidence down my craw.
In other news, I bought myself a T pass today for the first time since the 90s. I never get them because the T is not really very convenient for me, because where I live and where I work and where I tend to go are none of them terribly T convenient. But there's a sense that I could go anywhere with a T pass (well anywhere 617 anyway) and it wouldn't cost me anything extra and I could get out of my rut a little bit. Right now, any time I go anywhere on the T, I get a looming picture in my head of what else I could do with $2.50 and I often decide to not go anywhere. This way I'll have to go lots of places to justify my purchase. I expect to make many deli-runs (possibly combined with a vibrator run) to brookline and to go back to exploring a little outside my usual left bank turf. There can be such a thing as being too provincial.
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I got my first doula client! I mean the first person who read my listing and called me up and decided that the fact that I have no birth experience is actually ok. Wahoo! I called her up ready to do the whole "let me refer you to someone experienced with VBAC/ with more experience/etc" spiel and found myself instead sort of sputtering that yes I was available and we should set up an initial meeting and all that. I'm a bit excited and totally scared, but I have this problem with transitions and changes that while they are totally fascinating and I crave them, they also make me at least temporarily freeze, but I have learned that this happens to me no matter how prepared I am to do something and so the fact that I am scared is not actually good information about how prepared I am or how well I will do something. Anyway, this makes me happy. Several other things are making me really happy right now, some of them are obvious, like I just got back from a long weekend at Acadia and taught Jake how to cross-country ski and he likes it now and I'm still in a post-exercise high, some of them silly things like my new hands-free headset for my phone, some of them are symbolic, like the way that I negotiated returning a business-thing that I wasn't happy with on the phone without either being an asshole or losing, and some of them are small but vital, like getting really good sleep last night.
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I've been in a weird, good mood all day and I blame my Alexander technique teacher. Feeling weirdly self-assured and calm.
Holy crap! Today was beautiful out! I saw brynndragon's post this morning and was all inspired and got on my bike and pedalled around town doing errands, getting tickets for Vagina Monologues on Thursday night, and making plans to go to Maine with Jake this weekend. I bought a new bike seat! It doesn't make my butt wet when I sit down on it, but it is too hard and unforgiving. I don't care how much gel they put in it, it doesn't feel as cushy as the cheapass seat that came with my bike. A bike seat is a very important and personal choice to make. I'll be stuck with whatever I chose. I should be nice to my delicate bits. But I just bought them tickets to that play they really want to go to. They're just insatiable consumerist sluts is the real problem. "We want blue silk underpants! yeah! and chocklit! and Vagina Monologues tickets and a bike seat with a built-in vibe! that's the ticket!"
This is what happens when I am relaxed and in touch with my own desires. Y'all better watch out now.
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I've seen a bunch of different people with this meme and I've been having a hard time answering for others, because I'm uh, not sure how honest to be. But I think it's fun anyway.

"If you woke up and I was in bed with you, what would be your first thought?"

And now I'll go to bed, thinking about waking up next to y'all.
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Using jake's computer, I am finally working on a project that I have wanted to do for a while, namely making mixed playlists of the music I really enjoy massaging to. Favorite song to massage to ever: La Femme D'Argent by Air from the album Moon Safari. If only it was about 55 minutes long it would be perfect in every way. So I'm trying to come up with more things that will go with it. Going through Jake's collection on his laptop, it looks like there are about three CDs I can make, but I need to do a lot of sorting. I'm very picky about music to work to; probably more so than most of my clients. I've had experiences listening to music while getting massages that mde me feel upset or exposed or broken, and I felt silly speaking up for changing it, because I couldn't always explain what was wrong or why Tracy Chapman was making me cry, and I felt like I needed a better reason to cry than a song. But I think that I've been overly picky about music that I play for clients so that it doesn't have any CONTENT, and that maybe if I played stuff that *I* like to get massaged to then other people would like it too. We'll see. I have this optimistic little theory that if I start being more myself at work it won't be terrible, and will even be good and make me, and thus everyone else more comfortable and happy and stuff and my life will be filled with fulfillingness. I seem to be mixing an Air/Morcheeba/Moby CD for myself with a little bit of Tracy Chapman thrown in. The theme is that it is all songs that make me unwind in a very particular way.
Had a lot of fun at Dana's house tonight. I'm proud of my kickin' cake. It was cool getting to hang out with people I barely know, and also with Dana, who I sometimes feel like I barely know anymore. I forget how much I like her sometimes, which is pretty stupid.
I'm still making my way through the books that Estheruth lent me, and realizing that I need to spend more time in her presence (I've been realizing this for years at this point) because she has the best taste in books of anyone I know and is more in the habit of owning books than me. If she is reading this, props on the Wendell Berry book, which I am enjoying mightily at the moment. If I was ever going to lend out Hothead to anyone, it would be her. But Hothead doesn't get lent out, because I never know when I will need her, like the other night.
Driving home tonight, the power was out on Medford Street and my section of Broadway, including a fairly complex intersection. When I got home, I was confused that the wireless internet wasn't working. Admittedly, I was tired, but I don't think of the internet as something that uses electricity, which I think is an interesting perception gap. Internet is like air or light pollution in some part of my brain. It's like how I didn't perceive sales tax in France because I wasn't aware of the price without it. But not very much like that.
abilouise: (suave)
Last night had a really interesting conversation during which I FLIPPED OUT and listed off all of the things that I hate about the cultural relics of femininity that make me feel ill, angry, ooshy or just generally uncomfy (when applied to me. other people are free to do what they want). certain shades of pink, socks with lace around the ankles, pointy shoes, curls in my hair, eyelet lace, the words "vagina" and "pussy", deodorants marketed at teenage girls, the bras they sell at K-mart and Target, etc., baby powder, wigs, pantyhose, baby dolls, that whole damn aisle of the drugstore (you know, the woman one that I never have to go to again -- ask me why), most purses, most makeup, non-cotton underwear, capri pants, skirts with flapping open side-seams, strapless bras, corsets, any frill on any garment, ever, maternity clothes (no I've never worn any), slips, hairdos, giant and obnoxious wallets that are built to hold a checkbook and change and stuff, baby shower culture, bridal headpieces (only one person has ever seen me in one and there is no photographic evidence), moisturizer, cold cream, women's garden gloves, my grandmother's sweaters and aprons, the way that most of the men I know pronounce the word "nipple" (no I can't explain it)
After this conversation, I had to go read The Complete Hothead Paisan cover to cover before I could fall asleep. She's my girl. And no, I don't want to perform violent acts on men.
There is also the list of things I am now comfortable with but wasn't for a long time, but that is less interesting.
I want to throw a party and invite all the women I know and everyone gets an award for making it through another year of being female. If anyone wants to help me organize such a thing, let me know because I'm currently just treating it as an idea.
abilouise: (stretch)
Tonight, husband Jake and I wanted to go and buy ourselves drinks at a fancy bar, but we also wanted to stay home and enjoy the fact that all of our housemates were out and we had the place to ourselves, so we mixed drinks and created actual "ambiance" in our living room and referred to it as "Fancy McYuppie's Bar and Grill" and sat on the couch and wondered where our waiter had gone off to. It was the best of both worlds (where one world involves paying $10 per drink and getting seen by the beautiful people of Somerville and the other one does not). There's a lot of chicken in our fridge and I did some Structural Integration work (aka Rolfing) on one of our kitchen drawers.

Oh! Does anyone local want to help me put a photo on my website in exchange for homecooked dinner sometime? Warning: only take me up on this if you like my cooking.
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