Life

Waffling on Test Questions

Posted on January 17, 2014 by caseykins

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A friend of mine is trying to get certified as a counselor for the Meyers Briggs test, so I took an online thing today so I could go to a group session tomorrow.  It was very interesting, and I found that I fell in between the two options on the screen so often that it was SO HARD to pick one.  I wrote down the questions that I had trouble answering, and I thought I’d post them for fun:

Do you find keeping a schedule liberating or confining? – Here’s the thing, I don’t like keeping a schedule.  I definitely don’t like that I have to regulate my entire life by a book and a pen, and deadlines, or even charts and check boxes.  I hate that.  But has keeping a schedule been confining?  I really can’t say that it has.  It’s enabled me to keep track of things and meet deadlines.  It’s given me the ability to be productive when I otherwise wouldn’t be.  It’s really more a little of both.  I hate it, but I get a LOT of good from it.  Not the least of which is my novel that I’m very proud of.  I finally put confining but it didn’t feel like the truth, exactly.

When making a decision, is it more important to you to weight the facts or consider people’s opinions and feelings? – Facts are really important to me.  They are.  I think that every decision should be made based on facts and not on We Wish or We Hope.  But, facts have different weights depending on your feelings.  That should be taken into account.  For example, what if I’m looking to move to a new city?  I can look at ratings of best cities, but maybe “best” is based on number of bike paths.  If I hate to bike, that fact isn’t going to matter to me.  That shouldn’t be weighted equally with how much live theater a place has.  I care about that much more.  It’s both.  We need both to make a valid decision.  I waffled, and then finally picked opinions and feelings…

Do you rather prefer to do things at the last minute, or find doing things at the last minute hard on the nerves? – I LOVE chaos.  I love struggling, feeling that adrenaline rush and knowing that you’ve been the one to solve that last minute problem with aplomb.  It fills me with glee.  This is the reason I loved running the Electrical Parade costuming crew so much.  Disaster was imminent every night, and I often got to be the hero.  Still, if given the chance I’ll plan ahead.  I also like that satisfied feeling, that I’m competent and in control, to know that my tasks are finished and I can just enjoy (or be ready for the coming chaos).  90% of the time, I plan ahead and am ready for anything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love a little last minute action.  I honestly don’t remember what I picked for this one, it was such a toss-up.

 

Among your friends, are you one of the last to hear what’s going on, or full of news about everybody? – This is a weird one for me.  I have a hard time keeping in touch with people.  Unless I interact with them on a daily basis, I’m always out of the loop.  I’m a terrible correspondent and I don’t answer my phone (ever).  This means that I’m usually behind the times on what’s happening in people’s lives.  But… acquaintances have this weird habit of telling me insanely personal details about themselves.  I like it because I get to be in the know, but I often find it strange how I end up being the confessor.  I straddle both divides.  I think I put down “last to hear,” because I usually am the last among my nearest and dearest.

Are you at your best when dealing with the unexpected, or when following a carefully worked out plan? – Oh man.  I’m better when I’m following a carefully worked out plan, and I enjoy working out careful plans.  That is the truth.  But I’m better than anyone I know at dealing with the unexpected.  Very little phases me.  The world could be burning down, and I’m like “thanks for the info, we’ll deal with it when we get there.”  Does talent for something give enough weight to claim it as best?  I was true to myself and put plan, but I still don’t know if it was the right choice.

So that’s it for the test.  On another note, there is a large group of people yelling outside my office as if they’re at a sporting event or something.  The ways of college students are mysterious (says the girl who graduated 6 months ago).

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Miscellany

Posted on January 15, 2014 by caseykins

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This is mostly going to be a post of miscellany.  I have done nothing at all that’s exciting in at least a week, so I’m having a hard time coming up with ways to paint my life as exciting.   After all, isn’t that the point of a blog?  I’ve been following Neil Gaiman’s blog and I’m happy he’s back at it again.  I feel a small twinge of disappointment, though, every time I go to the site and there is not a new one.  So in that spirit, I’m just posting something anyway.

Brian and I had a lovely date night last night.  We ate salmon and eggplant Parmesan at Café Lucca on antique chairs.  Then we went to the movie theater in the building Brian works and watched a screening of The Great Gatsby (the Baz Lurman version).  I did not hate it, and I expected to loathe every minute of it.

The night started off with a lecture on green screening, then moved to the film itself.  It was hokey, over the top, and not historically accurate.  I abhorred the book and found myself wanting to slap sense into every one of the characters, even Nick.  I didn’t have the same impulse in the movie.  I had fun following the little seeded clues to the end, the realization of the green light and the importance of the fancy, custom car that seem like nothing but are ultimately plot points.  I liked the echoing of the candles when Gatsby and Daisy dance, the white flowers when they meet, and how both of them were present at his funeral.  I liked looking for green screen.  I enjoyed myself even though I didn’t enjoy the film, despite its beauty.

Applications are coming up sooner than I like to pretend they are.  That is what I’ve spent most of my week doing.  For better or worse, it will all be submitted fifteen days from now.  I’d better do re-writes on that sadistic statement of intent right away.  If nothing else, at least I won’t have to worry about pulling intents out of my bum and trying to make them sound pretty.  That has been the worst of grad school, by far.

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Weekends

Posted on January 9, 2014 by caseykins

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Brian is leaving me.

For the weekend to attend Anime Con in Los Angeles.  He’s running the D&D games, and a few of them he wrote himself.  He’s excited about it.  I will be lonely in my empty bed.  I will be forced to commute an hour and a half to Orange alone.

“I’m going to have to figure out what to do with you gone this weekend,” I said.

“Who is Yugon?” said Brian, very indignant.

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” he admitted.

But we both laughed anyway.

I have snuck a note into his shaving kit for him to find later.  It makes terrible puns about knocking ‘em dead and killing things in D&D, and it’s very loving.

I suppose what I’m really planning on doing is all the rewriting I’ve been avoiding for my grad school application.  I’m having one of those weeks where I am certain that I have no right at all to call myself a writer – just look at the drivel I’ve written –they will never accept me to grad school in a millennium.  I will be Denied.  There is no question.  It makes it hard to pitch in and slog through rewrites, even though I know it’s all in my mind.  I will go back to believing that I’m brilliant soon, I promise.  It’s just this week of weird weather and head colds that is getting me down.

But this weekend will be full of writing and mass quantities of Jasmine tea (overly sweet with sugar).  And then on Sunday, I will have a husband again.

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Happy New Year

Posted on January 2, 2014 by caseykins

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I had meant to write a blog post filled with optimism.  “It’s a new year with no mistakes in it yet,” I wrote for the first sentence.  I was asking for it, loud and clear.  So far, this year has been riddled with mistakes.

We celebrated the new year at a friend’s house, playing Cards Against Humanity while we ignored Ferris Beuler’s Day Off playing in the background, lounging and laughing.  “Happy New Year!” we all yelled as we watched the ball drop in Times Square on the television.  I leaned in toward Brian for the traditional kiss.  I took a step closer.  I squished his bare toes with my sharp pointy flats.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied.

At that point, the new year was 50% mistake.

Brian and I thought we would like an adventure on our last day off, so we bundled ourselves in the car and went to LACMA.  I specifically checked the website for holiday hours.  It said they would be closed on the 31st, but it didn’t say anything about New Year’s Day.  In my quest for holiday hours, I missed the gigantic banner at the top that said “closed Wednesdays.”  I found it in all its bright, pixilated glory when we returned home.  The empty parking structure should have tipped me off, but it wasn’t until the security guard at the entrance stopped us that I realized.

“Is the Tar Pits open?” I asked.  Plan B

“Maybe, I don’t know,” he said.  “You can check.”

So we checked.  It wasn’t.

The LA Farmer’s Market (oldest farmer’s market in the US, they proudly proclaim) is a few blocks away.  We walked there, and they were open.  We had blueberry pie at a diner that was the best I’ve ever had – buttery crust and berries that burst as I chewed amid the sweet, dark filling.  I bought a teapot and some loose-leaf Imperial Earl Gray at one of the shops.  Not the regular kind, the Imperial kind.  And then we walked back to the car, drove home, and fell into bed.

This morning I packed a lunch in a large Trader Joe’s bag, brown paper with convenient handles.  It was a tasty one.  Fusilli pasta in basil with fresh cherry tomatoes, popcorn, and a Honey Crisp apple.  Dried cocoanut strips as a snack.  I got to work and realized that it’s still on the floor of my living room.  Evidently, I’ll be buying lunch today.  I have little hope that cats won’t eat all the popcorn before I can get home tonight.  Sigh.

In short, this year has been nothing but mistakes so far.  I suppose that’s what I get for writing that fate-tempting sentence.  There is something so tantalizing about the promise of the new year, though.  The unflinching optimism that this year, surely, will be better than the one that just passed.  Maybe it will even be the best one yet.  The evidence might be for the contrary and still I persist in thinking I can make better the reality; when the reality is, who knows?

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Thoughts on a trip to the Huntington

Posted on December 31, 2013 by caseykins

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I grew up going to the Huntington Library often.  My mother was a stay-at-home-mom, and she had it all figured out.  On days when we were insufferable and cranky, she would bundle my sister and I in the car, take us someplace beautiful and open,  and let us run ourselves ragged.  She could then enjoy our mellow exhaustion for the rest of the evening.  I developed a collection of wax animals from the LA Zoo and perfected my peacock call at the LA Arboretum.  I learned at the Huntingtonin a flurry of tickling grass blades and green stains that if you roll yourself down a long enough hill, you start to go crooked.

When I was older, we would go on the weekends and stop at the exhibit hall where Audubon birds gazed from the walls and illuminated manuscripts peaked from glass cases.  I mostly found it boring.  I wanted to get to the Japanese garden with the gong and the delectable arched bridge.

“Look, it’s the Gutenberg Bible,” my mother would say.

“Uh huh,” I replied.

“It was the first book ever printed on a printing press.”

“Yup.”

It didn’t look like anything special to me.  I was an avid reader and had seen hundreds of thousands of printed pages.  The letters on the Gutenberg Bible looked just the same as those.  I didn’t understand what the big deal was, other than the fact that it was old.

I took a medieval history class at Chapman two years ago.  I don’t know what it was about that class, but so much of it made me see the world differently.  The water was unsafe to drink back then, and disease was rampant.  The known world was being run by drunk twenty year olds.  Picture the guys of Jackass empowered to run a nation.  Doesn’t the medieval world make so much more sense now?  It also gives me hope for the future.  I mean, humanity survived that and went on to flourish.  Our political system may be gridlocked, but at least drunk and reckless with a side of murder isn’t an admirable trait in a world leader anymore.

And then there was the Gutenberg Bible.  Suddenly, I got it.  I understood why it was amazing and I fully appreciated its beauty.  It was made using a modified fruit press in a time when people thought disease was spread by gaze.  The ink was a combination of soot, wax, and squid ink.  It has lasted hundreds of years. The thing that left me so unimpressed before is what makes me so fascinated today.  The edges of the letters are crisp.  The letters are black.  It looks like it could have been printed yesterday.  It was printed in a time so far removed from me that I cannot fathom it.  It blows my mind.  I could stare at the two pages behind the vast Plexiglas case for hours in the Huntington’s gallery, marveling at each contour of the letters, perfect and crisp, wondering whose hands have touched it in the hundreds of years since it was bound.

The printing press changed the world.  I think of this every time I stare at those perfect pages.  Instead of one copy of things that took years to create, suddenly there were hundreds that could be disseminated across the world.  Catholic heresies spread faster than the church could stamp them out and Protestantism was born.  Scientists in different parts of the world could now compare their volumes of Aristotle’s works and see that the reason the math did not add up was not a scribe’s error, but an error in the theory itself.  Advancements in science and technology followed like wildfire on dry grass.  The catalyst for all of it stands there in its case, its perfect lettering still black.

“Look, it’s the Gutenberg Bible,” I say to my husband.

“Uh huh,” he says.

“It’s just so perfect.”

“Yup.”

So I tear myself away and we move out to the gardens, which are almost as impressive.

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Tesseract Pearls

Posted on December 16, 2013 by caseykins

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I have been a very sick kid the last week and a half now.  It started with me just feeling a little under the weather, and then I had a work event full of insanity lasting two nights long.  I barely ate and spent the night running around in the cold in a cocktail dress.  Then, I spent the next four days in bed.  I am clearly not in my twenties any longer.  That is what I told Brian as I groaned in agony on the pile of laundry next to the bed because I didn’t have enough strength to get in again after going to the bathroom.

I have a thing about doctors.  I refuse to go unless I’m certain that I’m outright dying and about to leave Brian with a sad legacy of horrific sink dishes and student loan debt.  I explain this so that when I say I went to the doctor, you know how bad I was feeling.  I needn’t have bothered.  They basically called me a drama queen and sent me home with a medication called “Tessalon Pearls” to help with the coughing.

“You work, so I’ll have to prescribe you something that doesn’t make you drowsy,” said the doctor.

“Thank you,” I said.

I picked up the bottle from the pharmacist and it said “Warning: may cause drowsiness.  Do not drive or operate heavy machinery until you know how this medication will affect you.” Oh the irony.  Luckily, it doesn’t make me drowsy.  The doctor knew what he was doing after all.

I took the bottle home.  They look like really tiny oil capsules.

“They prescribed me something called ‘Tessalon Pearls,’” I told Brian.

“So basically you’re telling me that your lungs are non-stick now?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No, see I was being funny,” Brian explained.  “Your line is: ‘it’s Tessalon, not Teflon.’”

“But yours is so much better,” I said.  “Let’s pretend my lungs are non-stick.  Either that or we can call them ‘Tessaract Pearls.’”

“What is a Tesseract?”

“It’s from A Wrinkle In Time.  In fact, a Tesseract is a wrinkle in time, a jump.  This means that I was just proscribed time travel pills.  Let’s go with that.  MUCH better than non-stick.”

“Uh… sure,” said Brian.

So basically, this post is to say that if you need me, I’ll be fighting dinosaurs on a spaceship far in the future.  You know, until the pills run out.

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Giving Thanks

Posted on November 18, 2013 by caseykins

There is a disturbing lack of Thanksgiving songs.  There is an even bigger dearth of arrangements of Thanksgiving songs for the Ukulele.  So far, my mother and I have been able to brainstorm two.  “We Gather Together,” complete with overt Christian message, and “Over The River and Through the Woods.” 

Brian claims that one is a Christmas song, and it doesn’t count.  I say there is pie in the song, and therefore it’s a Thanksgiving one.  My mother has decided not to pick a side.  “It can be both, really.   It’s just about traveling to grandma’s, but we always sang it at Thanksgiving.” No one buys my (obviously brilliant) pie argument. 

I’ve been adapting guitar chords for both.  Part of me thinks that I should just move to Christmas songs.  Another part of me thinks that I should claim “Jingle Bells” as a Thanksgiving song and move on.  If Brian can justify claiming the other as a Christmas song, I can claim this one for Thanksgiving, right? I mean, it’s about a sleigh ride… Okay, maybe not.  All internet searches bring up dubious songs from musicals or pop groups that Do Not really count.  They are not Traditional.  But nice try, internet.

This year I’m certain I’ll try to do too many things as usual.  It will be pies for days.  Trader Joe’s has pie pumpkins, my dad told me at Breakfast last weekend.  They’re smaller and sweeter than the jack-o-lantern kind.  I’ll go to church on Thursday and listen to the congregation give thanks.  I’ll wear the leaf pins that were my grandmother’s.  I’ll make affectionate fun of the people who gave terrible thanks in church with the rest of the family who was there.  I’ll visit too many houses and attempt to play the Ukulele at all of them, whether people like it or not.  I’ll look across the table at my handsome husband, especially dapper in his collared shirt, and at the family around me, and I’ll realize that I have a lot to be thankful for myself. 

This post makes me wish it wasn’t almost two weeks away.  Sigh.

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Shut Down

Posted on October 1, 2013 by caseykins

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In a move full of irony, Google is celebrating the anniversary of Yosemite and the park is not open due to government shut down.  I’m not really sure how I feel about this, but I have a presentment that my feelings aren’t good.

“Did you hear that the government is officially shut down?” I said to Brian this morning.

“No.  I mean, really?!  The Tea Party is full of awesome,” he said with sarcasm.  “I can’t believe it.”

“Oh, I can believe it,” I said.  “I might be outraged, but I’m really not surprised.”

“But we’ve been so close to the brink before and it’s always ended fine,” said Brian.

“I think that’s why I’m not surprised,” I said. “How long have they been threatening this?”

I thought about how we’re trying to get a home loan, and how that process can’t happen without the government.  I thought about the millions of students who may also have trouble with their loans.  Of the millions of government workers who aren’t getting paid.  California has announced that only a few weeks of funding remain before people here will start to starve.  Without federal checks, they can’t pay for food stamps nor can they pay for school breakfast programs.  The Pentagon is running with a skeleton crew.  The people at the FDA have gone home.  Is it only a matter of time before we also have to deal with terrorism and botulism?

These are the thoughts that ran through my head this morning.  I sped down the white freeway, the sun cresting on my left, and felt like civilization had ended.  We were just waiting for it to collapse.

I usually consider myself a very middle of the road girl when it comes to politics.  I don’t feel like the Tea Party is for hating.  For mocking, maybe, but not for outright vitriol.  Still, I will never understand why they have decided, in an unwillingness to drop a fight they’ve already lost, to gamble with the death, destruction, and future of the country they claim to care for.

Today I have lost faith in the American system.

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With Bonus Miscellany

Posted on September 27, 2013 by caseykins

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Things I learned this week:

I’m not the one losing sleep at nights, but there is something about the small red tongue and dainty fingernails of an infant (wearing a gigantic bow) that makes it seem like sleeplessness would be worth it.  Especially when she is in the crook of your elbow and opens her big blue eyes to look at you.

The ukulele is infectious.  Both my aunt and a friend of mine bought one and are learning to play it. Evidently, the infection only spreads to other females.  We’re trying to convert my mother.

You know those employees you were told you really shouldn’t trust?  Yeah, you really shouldn’t trust them.

It is not editing five chapters a week that is hard.  It is making yourself sit down to write anything at all that is the real struggle.

Bonus miscellany – How can you tell you work at Disney? My boss just sent me an e-mail in which one of the lines was: “Damn chipmunks!  Always causing trouble.”

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Fire

Posted on September 24, 2013 by caseykins

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There was a fire on the way home last night.  We could see the fluffy, spiral plume of smoke for miles as we drove home on the freeway.  It was a sickly yellow, sort of cream and brown as well.  It rose off the hillside of dead grass and into the blue sky.  I watched it as we sped along, trying to see red flame beneath the yellow, but I couldn’t.  I watched, noting that the plume up top was large; immovable, but that smoke rolled off the hills beneath, curling to join the rest.   The sunset made the cloud a deathly red.

KPCC, our local public radio station, is calling it the Azusa fire.  Evacuations from last night have been lifted and the fire burned a few hundred acres.  This is all the technical information I have about it.  Azusa is close to us.  I used to go to school at Citrus College in Azusa and my friend Emily works there still.  It’s not the proximity of the fire, that I care about.  I have been closer to fires.  It is fire in general.

I can’t see a plume of smoke coming from a low hill without thinking about Vesuvius, and wondering if the people of Pompeii also watched a curling cloud of ash rise from the hills as unconcernedly as I always do.  I even watch with a sense of wonder.  I thought this during the Claremont fire, over ten years ago now, as well, about the vacationers in Rome on their last days on earth.  Gray ash rained down from the heavens for two days and the world smelled like camp.  The light was eerie, like a foggy day only the fog had no substance; no dewed weight.  It was dry, made of filaments, and warm.  My clothes were smeared with white and black bits clung to my hair.  My lungs felt heavy.  the night was especially black.

I was bussing tables at the local dinner theater during the Claremont fire, and still living in my mother’s house.  During the first act of the show, our break, some of the staff climbed to the top of the hotel next door.  Just past the high school we could see the glow in the darkness.  The flames crawled nearer.  We watched them spread toward civilization, flickering and gaining hold on the burning grasses faster than an incoming tide.  One of the waiters got a phone call from his mom.  He had been evacuated, and he couldn’t go home that night.  Even I had packed a box and put it in my back seat, not wanting to tempt fate.

It’s strange how a plume in the sky turns into something real as it creeps toward us.  Instead of being something to watch with fascination it becomes something to run from as it crawls across the dead hills.  Is this fascination why few in Pompeii got out? Is the distance why I tend not to pay attention to reports of fires during California’s long fire season?  I don’t know.  But I know that natural disaster has always plagued humanity, and that it always will.

The plume had dissipated this morning, but the sun rose through a milky gray haze that settled evenly over the horizon.  The evacuation order was lifted.  This fire is done.

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