jasmine soup - ingredients subject to change

Thursday, October 27, 2005

whiner

....its 11am on a weekday. i'm sitting on the couch in my pink bathrobe, considering whether or not i should go eat another handful of rice crispie treat goo. must. shower. can't. do. it. thinking about grading makes me twitchy. thinking about homework makes me tired. Can I go back to bed?

can you tell its that time of the semester? the time that makes you want to quit it all and ask, "can you buy marshmellos with food stamps?"

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Consumer Whore

Jared always accuses me/us of consumer whoredom because of our weekly trips to the strip mall land. It is hard to believe that a household of two people need to visit costco every weekend. What can I say, except we like hot dogs and we are able to drink 2 gallons of milk in a week.

The real whoredom roots from my Target glee. Purses, sunglasses, track pants, curtains, laundry baskets, and clearance, clearance, clearance. I always seem to want to shop in depth in the moments when jared's hunger/boredom/low shopping tolerance kicks in, so when we get in the door, i buy him a pretzal with nacho cheese. That usually does the trick.

This week, I went to Target alone knowing no amount of pretzals would satisfy jared for the duration of the aimless shopping I intended to do. I was let down in the clothing department and housewares isn't as exciting lately because:
a) i'm lazy and haven't finished my other home decorating projects
b) we are running out of things to decorate. we only have 3 windows after all.
c) nothing new was on clearance

The really good things this week we out of the price range:

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I then proceeded to go to Old Navy and be very very very bad. a hundred dollars worth of bad. It takes work to be 3-digit bad at Old Navy. And by work I mean a total lack of self-restraint.



....among other things
This is all rooting from being totally dissatisfied with my wardrobe. I'm planning on a total blitz attack on the closet when I can get up the strength. I'm going to make it difficult to look bad/boring by getting rid of all my clothes that are bad/boring. I know this seems obvious, but I thought it was brilliant when I thought of it on the toilet today.

The lesson to be learned here is that reading Vogue in a rural community is a bad idea. It makes one feel frustrated and stylistically impotent.

P.S. I can beat the dork factor of anyone else's saturday night plans today.....bowling with the computer science department. oh yeah.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

what a wastrel am i...

I'm really worried that I'm going to get out of this school and get a degree and still not know anything! I feel so stupid sometimes. Its making the grad school application process more intimidating. Knowing that if any of these schools are snowed by my transcript and accept me, they're going to be disappointed once I get there.

I've started filling out the online applications. I stop once I reach unanswerable questions. I almost wish I had never gone to Berkeley just because of the transcript confusion. They demand that you include every school you've ever attended but their form options are very limited. I'm always trying to squeeze in explanations like:

Degree Acquired: Junior Year Abr

Because their fields are remarkably short for the amount of information they want. I didn't even have enough space to write Biostatistics in a field for major.

OMG this is the most boring post ever. This is the most boring part of my life and I'm subjecting the rest of you to it.

Mostly I'm doing all of this in avoidence of actual work. I wish I were the kind of person who could read and appreciate text books. They are so dry it KILLS me. I re-read the same paragraph over and over and over. Thats what I really should be doing right now. Except I don't carry around my textbooks. So instead of reading them, I just get to spend that time feeling guilty for not reading them and subsequently stupid. (I know, I know, the solution is obvious)

I got 5 books in the mail yesterday. I've gotten really into travel memoirs lately. The one i'm reading now is about a family who went around the world one summer because of the parent's worry that corporate advertising world of america was turning their kids brains to mush. There is a lot of writing about dealing with the teenage daughter. Even though she's a teenager almost 10 years later than I was and in NYC, its remarkable how similar our thoughts and behavior were. Dressing up goth and dancing to Robert smith....she was sneaking into clubs, I was going to lambda (gay) dances at the holiday inn. They need to come up a with a cure for being a teenager.....its an awful time for everybody involved. Hormone shots or something.

Its officially fall here....It seems like it happened overnight. I had to pick all my squash and zucchinis. My yellow squash didn't get very big but the zucchini is ridiculous. Each one probably weighs about 2lbs. I'm trying to think of ways to hide the zucchini in food so jared will eat it. It has to be chopped up so small that he can't pick it out. I'm thinking zucchini bread.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Bundle of Joy

Jared and I brought home a new bundle of joy this weekend. She's a little over 5lbs and so cute!

She also comes with a 6 month return policy, Intel Centrino, 60G of hardrive space, and 512mbRAM. Unfortunately, she came with a bunch of crap installed and I've already customized too many things to want to reinstall.


Please ignore the catywhompus slipcover....It is willful and difficult.

Jared and I are both sick and doing our best to take care of each other. We're living on oatmeal and tea and our house looks like a disaster. I have snot that is a lovely shade of deep celery coming out of every hole in my face. We demolished my birthday cupcakes....note the excessive cupcake papers.

Examples of said disaster:




Jared had a scary physics test this morning and he managed to quell his anxiety this weekend with a "success through failure" mantra. it was actually very effective. now that he's a graduate student, he still procrastinates work, studying, etc.... but he gets right to work worrying about the things he has to do. This is really fun for me. Needless to say, I'm a big fan of the mantra.

I don't have much to do today which is marvelous. Just one very informal class on programming in R. I should be cleaning up the house and figuring out if I have homework but instead I'm blogging and screwing around with all the digital cameras in the house. Ooooh, I could write thank you cards which is not taxing and can be done while lying on the couch. It does not, however, involve my new baby and is therefore dropped from my options. Maybe I should do some scary grad school stuff like print forms for recommendations....Ugh, or maybe I should just read the new york times online.

My best idea yet would be to put on some clothes as it is 1:oopm and I am still in my pjs. I don't like any of my clothes right now. I need something crisp, yet comfortable, yet snappy, yet sophisticated. I'm fairly certain I don't own this thing.