Oh, man. I have had a mild internet crush on a certain self-described "nerdy libertarian lawyer" for about the past year now, and I have just today discovered that HE RUNS A D&D GAME AT HIS HOUSE. That, people who don't know me in person, is as close to a fetish as I think I have. It actually makes me feel sort of giddy, like I have suddenly become a teenager again and am unable to make eye contact--with anyone--when that boy is in the room. (Or in the next room. Or even at school that day. In fact, I seem to remember spending the entire three years of high school a sweaty-palmed, stammering mess. So I was never Captain Cool when it came to the boys, big deal.)
Anyway, consider this post my best blogger-geek attempt at a wink and a smile from across the bar.
Showing posts with label gut-spilling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gut-spilling. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Monday, August 20, 2007
Panic! at the Grocery Store
So yesterday I was pushing my cart through the grocery store, and just about worked myself into a panic attack. Seriously, if there was anyone else at my house who could have finished shopping for me, I would have just come home and gone to bed.
Let me tell you how it went:
I got a barbecue grill for my birthday (thanks, hon!), so I had planned on some inaugural steaks for dinner last night. Only I've never really bought steaks, except cubed steaks for chicken-frying, because they're expensive and not worth doing if you don't have a grill to cook them on. So I was staring at hunks of raw meat in the butcher block section, looking for something with a sign on the package that said "Great for the Grill! Impossible to Screw Up!" Finally, I asked an employee which ones were good on the grill. She made a few suggestions--a tri-tip roast, porterhouses, T-bones, New York Strips, etc., but what I really wanted was an answer. Something like, "Here, take these eye of round steaks. Marinate them in Worcestershire sauce and garlic pepper for two hours, then cook over medium heat for 5 minutes on each side."
Let me say that, when I am shopping and don't know what to get, the indecision is agonizing. The more I allow it to go on, the more powerless and insignificant I feel. Then I start fretting about what everything costs, and what percentage of my take-home pay that is, and then I start to feel guilty about every expenditure I've made for the last three months. So you can see where this is headed.
Desperate to make a decision, any decision, I glanced quickly at the price tags on the cuts she had shown me, and hastily (and, I hoped, authoritatively) put a smallish tri-tip roast into my cart. Almost immediately after I had done that, I changed my mind again, but I was determined not to let the grocery store lady know how crazy simple steak-buying was making me. I pushed the cart down a few more aisles, fretting the whole time about the prices of each item I picked up, knowing full well that five dollars here and four dollars there has a way of adding up very quickly, and there were all those groceries in my cart from before the steaks, before I had started obsessing over prices, that maybe I should try to put back.
Finally, I went to the meat counter, where there were only two kinds of steak to choose from, and ordered two giant ribeyes. No kidding, these were an inch and a half thick and weighed in at more than a pound each. They still cost as much as the tri-tip (which I couldn't go put back because, out of the corner of my eye, I could still see the lady who'd helped me restocking the meats), but they were steak, not roast, and I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that ribeyes were pretty good for grilling. I started to worry some about how I was going to cook such thick steaks, and how I would probably mess up twelve dollars' worth of steak.
Then I started worrying about school, if I was going to be any good at it, or if people would like me, or if I was ever planning on going up and unpacking all of my stuff, and if I could get a bigger screen for my projector, and who I was going to ask for help with things like that since my new school doesn't have mentors like my old school did. And once that got going, well, forget it. I got the last few things I needed, and finally the meat section was empty so I slipped the tri-tip back onto the shelf. I got a doughnut for myself, which I later ate furtively in the car in the parking lot, because when I start to go crazy like this, I sometimes turn into a junk food junkie, which adds fuel to the fire of these neurotic mini-meltdowns.
My sanity was somewhat restored when I checked out and the bill only came to $112. Actually, I was mildly amazed, but still so far gone worrying about all sorts of other things. I still needed the doughnut in my car.
So anyway, I knew that the waves of panic and terror would go away as soon as I told somebody about them (thanks, therapy!), and as soon as I got home I told Tyson, and we laughed, and it was no big deal. So don't you guys worry or anything. It's funny now (and probably was at the time, I suppose!). I just thought that, given my recent absence from the blogosphere, I would give you enough honesty that maybe you would be happy with just random links and comics and things again.
Let me tell you how it went:
I got a barbecue grill for my birthday (thanks, hon!), so I had planned on some inaugural steaks for dinner last night. Only I've never really bought steaks, except cubed steaks for chicken-frying, because they're expensive and not worth doing if you don't have a grill to cook them on. So I was staring at hunks of raw meat in the butcher block section, looking for something with a sign on the package that said "Great for the Grill! Impossible to Screw Up!" Finally, I asked an employee which ones were good on the grill. She made a few suggestions--a tri-tip roast, porterhouses, T-bones, New York Strips, etc., but what I really wanted was an answer. Something like, "Here, take these eye of round steaks. Marinate them in Worcestershire sauce and garlic pepper for two hours, then cook over medium heat for 5 minutes on each side."
Let me say that, when I am shopping and don't know what to get, the indecision is agonizing. The more I allow it to go on, the more powerless and insignificant I feel. Then I start fretting about what everything costs, and what percentage of my take-home pay that is, and then I start to feel guilty about every expenditure I've made for the last three months. So you can see where this is headed.
Desperate to make a decision, any decision, I glanced quickly at the price tags on the cuts she had shown me, and hastily (and, I hoped, authoritatively) put a smallish tri-tip roast into my cart. Almost immediately after I had done that, I changed my mind again, but I was determined not to let the grocery store lady know how crazy simple steak-buying was making me. I pushed the cart down a few more aisles, fretting the whole time about the prices of each item I picked up, knowing full well that five dollars here and four dollars there has a way of adding up very quickly, and there were all those groceries in my cart from before the steaks, before I had started obsessing over prices, that maybe I should try to put back.
Finally, I went to the meat counter, where there were only two kinds of steak to choose from, and ordered two giant ribeyes. No kidding, these were an inch and a half thick and weighed in at more than a pound each. They still cost as much as the tri-tip (which I couldn't go put back because, out of the corner of my eye, I could still see the lady who'd helped me restocking the meats), but they were steak, not roast, and I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that ribeyes were pretty good for grilling. I started to worry some about how I was going to cook such thick steaks, and how I would probably mess up twelve dollars' worth of steak.
Then I started worrying about school, if I was going to be any good at it, or if people would like me, or if I was ever planning on going up and unpacking all of my stuff, and if I could get a bigger screen for my projector, and who I was going to ask for help with things like that since my new school doesn't have mentors like my old school did. And once that got going, well, forget it. I got the last few things I needed, and finally the meat section was empty so I slipped the tri-tip back onto the shelf. I got a doughnut for myself, which I later ate furtively in the car in the parking lot, because when I start to go crazy like this, I sometimes turn into a junk food junkie, which adds fuel to the fire of these neurotic mini-meltdowns.
My sanity was somewhat restored when I checked out and the bill only came to $112. Actually, I was mildly amazed, but still so far gone worrying about all sorts of other things. I still needed the doughnut in my car.
So anyway, I knew that the waves of panic and terror would go away as soon as I told somebody about them (thanks, therapy!), and as soon as I got home I told Tyson, and we laughed, and it was no big deal. So don't you guys worry or anything. It's funny now (and probably was at the time, I suppose!). I just thought that, given my recent absence from the blogosphere, I would give you enough honesty that maybe you would be happy with just random links and comics and things again.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
What I'm afraid of
Some of you (ahem, Tyson) have asked me why I don't do more on my blog, or why I don't do "that writing thing" very much. These people (Tyson) give the same couple of reasons every time they mention this: sometimes I say clever things, I know and use lots of words, I like writing, etc, etc. But when it comes to what somebody once called the "ass in the chair" principle, whereby a writer parks his or her ass in a chair and actually produces written material, well, that's where the whole paradigm sort of breaks down for me.
Why?
There was a time when writing seemed very important to me. For three semesters in a row I enrolled in creative writing workshops in college (two semesters were with Penn-Faulkner Award-winning professors, one helpful, one pompous). I faithfully kept a journal for about six years, not just the standard, unimaginative, sparse "dear diary, today was a regular day" kind of stuff, but lengthy diatribes, descriptions, conversations, poems, and so on.
You know what I think it is? My first semester in college, I fell in love with a man 10 years my senior and had an immediate, intense need to feel like an adult, like a fully developed real person, not a person-in-progress. Curling up on my bedroom floor with my spiral notebook, a handful of cigarettes, and Bob Dylan on the stereo just seemed so--adolescent. Coming up with theories about how the material world exists only as a manifestation of our thoughts, feelings, and memories about objects now just seemed dumb. Then I took a philosophy class where basically what I learned was that no matter how great your idea sounds on paper, and no matter how many years you devoted your career to refining it, somebody somewhere (or a roomful of somebodys) can tear it to shreds with barely a flex of their mental muscles, and if your logic has a hole in it anywhere, then, by default, it must be wrong.
I do want to make clear at this point that T in no way made me feel like this; he did not belittle, was not condescending in any way (except maybe once about Bob Dylan. And those of you who know Tyson will say that he is fairy adept at poking holes in theories, whether he does it maliciously or not.). My internal critic, always by far the loudest voice in my head, just kicked it into high gear.
The other thing I'm afraid of goes back to way before this: I am sometimes embarrassed to call attention to myself in the brains department. Maybe it is partly left over from college, too, but I hate that guy who raises his hand every five minutes and delivers well-reasoned answers at length. (Maybe that's why I prefer the short-n-pithy approach, you know, so it's like, not a big deal or anything. Very non-threatening.) To this day, I don't like playing Scattergories with most people because I hate feeling like the giant, overeducated nerd who has to explain answers because people don't know what they are.
What that means for me now is that, as a writer, I find myself all but crippled by insecurity. My poetry is, at best, sophomoric, my ideas are pedestrian, and there is nothing I can say that the next person couldn't say better. I figure, if it's not "good," then there's no point in my doing it. I hate bad poetry; that's why I don't write it. I get bored almost instantly reading most small-time comics, so I all but refuse to finish my own comics. I hate reading the same old trite "this is what I did today" schtick online, so I wait and wait and wait to update my blog. Then I just sit around in smug self-satisfaction until somebody else posits what I was kind of thinking, so all I have to do is agree with them and pretend I "just didn't have time" to come up with something like that. (I also think that ties into my penchant for self-sabotage, but that's something I'll take up later. Maybe.)
Secretly, I know that for me, "hate" and "am jealous of" are sometimes interchangeable, as in, "Man, I hate all these skinny rich people you always hear about that get to jet-set all around the world kayaking and rock-climbing all day long. These people will be the downfall of Western Civilization, I tell you what."
Anyway, I hope this clears up some things for you, and for me.
Why?
There was a time when writing seemed very important to me. For three semesters in a row I enrolled in creative writing workshops in college (two semesters were with Penn-Faulkner Award-winning professors, one helpful, one pompous). I faithfully kept a journal for about six years, not just the standard, unimaginative, sparse "dear diary, today was a regular day" kind of stuff, but lengthy diatribes, descriptions, conversations, poems, and so on.
You know what I think it is? My first semester in college, I fell in love with a man 10 years my senior and had an immediate, intense need to feel like an adult, like a fully developed real person, not a person-in-progress. Curling up on my bedroom floor with my spiral notebook, a handful of cigarettes, and Bob Dylan on the stereo just seemed so--adolescent. Coming up with theories about how the material world exists only as a manifestation of our thoughts, feelings, and memories about objects now just seemed dumb. Then I took a philosophy class where basically what I learned was that no matter how great your idea sounds on paper, and no matter how many years you devoted your career to refining it, somebody somewhere (or a roomful of somebodys) can tear it to shreds with barely a flex of their mental muscles, and if your logic has a hole in it anywhere, then, by default, it must be wrong.
I do want to make clear at this point that T in no way made me feel like this; he did not belittle, was not condescending in any way (except maybe once about Bob Dylan. And those of you who know Tyson will say that he is fairy adept at poking holes in theories, whether he does it maliciously or not.). My internal critic, always by far the loudest voice in my head, just kicked it into high gear.
The other thing I'm afraid of goes back to way before this: I am sometimes embarrassed to call attention to myself in the brains department. Maybe it is partly left over from college, too, but I hate that guy who raises his hand every five minutes and delivers well-reasoned answers at length. (Maybe that's why I prefer the short-n-pithy approach, you know, so it's like, not a big deal or anything. Very non-threatening.) To this day, I don't like playing Scattergories with most people because I hate feeling like the giant, overeducated nerd who has to explain answers because people don't know what they are.
What that means for me now is that, as a writer, I find myself all but crippled by insecurity. My poetry is, at best, sophomoric, my ideas are pedestrian, and there is nothing I can say that the next person couldn't say better. I figure, if it's not "good," then there's no point in my doing it. I hate bad poetry; that's why I don't write it. I get bored almost instantly reading most small-time comics, so I all but refuse to finish my own comics. I hate reading the same old trite "this is what I did today" schtick online, so I wait and wait and wait to update my blog. Then I just sit around in smug self-satisfaction until somebody else posits what I was kind of thinking, so all I have to do is agree with them and pretend I "just didn't have time" to come up with something like that. (I also think that ties into my penchant for self-sabotage, but that's something I'll take up later. Maybe.)
Secretly, I know that for me, "hate" and "am jealous of" are sometimes interchangeable, as in, "Man, I hate all these skinny rich people you always hear about that get to jet-set all around the world kayaking and rock-climbing all day long. These people will be the downfall of Western Civilization, I tell you what."
Anyway, I hope this clears up some things for you, and for me.
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