Archive for the ‘The Nonsense’ Category

So this weekend we moved.

Or I guess we’re still moving since we still have at least one car load of crap left at our old place. A car load of crap I simply cannot motivate myself to get, especially since in our own personal method, none of it is boxed up and it will all have to be collected, boxed and then put in the car. Sometimes our procrastination tendencies seriously bite us in the ass. I’ll worry about that later though.

Friday we packed in earnest for the first time, despite my fool proof “pack one room a day” plan. It was more like, pack one item a day and then get distracted by anything other than packing. So Friday was packing hell.

Saturday morning we got up at the crack of dawn, loaded each of our cars and drove out to the new place (30 miles from the old one) and got the keys and information. Can I just say that them not doing the walk through with us, but instead having us do it and turn it in in 3 days is like the dumbest thing any apartment complex has ever done? Yea, all 30 of those scuff marks in the stair well were definitely there before we moved in. And no, they don’t perfectly match the color of the paint/wood/metal of the furniture upstairs. Of course not.

My dad and step-grandpa came and helped us move, and truly we couldn’t have done it without them. They loaded two trailers full of our stuff and they worked harder than two men should ever work on a Saturday in 90+ degree heat. After all was said and done the only collateral damage was 1 wine glass, which I think is pretty impressive. Especially since we have at least 7 other wine glasses that we never use anyways.

Oh and maybe my dad’s back. Since my husband thought it would be funny to label his extremely heavy book boxes like this, not understanding that sarcasm doesn’t always translate when written in Sharpie on a box on moving day.

The only really dumb decision we made (besides choosing to move into a two story townhome) was inviting my mother-in-law. My father-in-law was immensely helpful, as were my brother-in-law and nephew. But my MIL spent about 100% of her time making comments about the things we were doing wrong, prompting even my father to ask if we had killed her by the end of the night (the answer was no). The woman has impeccable taste and can be super helpful when decorating a new place, but she struggles a bit with the biting her tongue about imperfect things thing.

We brought the cats late Saturday night after all the major things were moved in and all the family left. I’m not sure how to sum up the experience. It was by far the longest 30 mile car ride of all time. Shmo started the meowing, then he and Karma had a repeated chorus back and forth for what felt like several years in the back seat. Each meow getting progressively louder than the first, to the point that it resembled the talking Carl fight.

And then we brought them inside and Karma took the very cautious explorer route, which was to be expected, she has moved before, she can handle it. She eventually found her way to a sink and was fine.

Shmo on the other hand has never really lived anywhere besides our old apartment and he freaked the hell out. He burrowed under the couch, which is barely tall enough for him to smoosh his head under. Then we finally convinced him to go up the stairs (okay, fine, I picked him up, him silently hissing the whole time, and brought him upstairs) and he immediately burrowed under the bed. The burrowing was his coping mechanism, it was almost cute until he decided to burrow under the covers of the bed at 3 in the morning and in between my husband’s pillows at 5.

Okay fine, the burrowing in the pillows was still cute.

Shmo also spent the whole first night hissing at Karma, I’m pretty sure he blamed her, which I was kind of okay with. Better her than me. He seems better now, he’s nearly returned to his role as king of the house. Or at least king of the mess of boxes for now.

We are all adjusting and exhausted and still not even close to unpacked, which is unfortunate. But we are getting there. It only took us two days to realize that the kitchen didn’t have a microwave, so you know, we’re totally on top of things. I’m hoping to have pictures of the place by this weekend to share with you next week, but don’t hold me to that. There’s no telling what method I’ll find for procrastination between now and then.

I hate moving. Let me just get that out of the way right now. I hate it. I hate packing, I hate cleaning, I hate schlepping, I hate it all. I hate it even more when I don’t have time off to do it.

Prior to last night, we had not packed a single thing and we’re moving bright and early Saturday morning, which I still fail to see as a problem, unlike my very stressed out husband. I mean unlike the last several moves, we’re only going about 30 miles down the road not across several states, but even still, we didn’t even have boxes until Sunday night. And I think we only have 10 boxes total. I mean, I know my apartment is small, but it’s not that small.

At my suggestion, we decided to tackle a room a day to try and make the packing more manageable. So last night we did the bathroom, which doesn’t seem like it can hold much crap, I mean, we’re talking two double cabinets under the sink, 3 drawers and the medicine cabinet. We packed 6 big paper bags of stuff and threw away 4 full paper bags of other stuff. It took an hour, I think I may have sweated during the process. Woe. Woe is me.

Tonight we’re tackling the living room, because pretty much there’s nothing to pack in it. We need to clean off the coffee tables which will take time, but otherwise everything is being moved as is. You see, basically I’m using strategy to procrastinate because the remaining two rooms (kitchen and bedroom) are going to be a nightmare. And why deal with the nightmares when you can put them off until tomorrow?

I mean really.

As I type, my husband is on the phone with a new cable provider trying to negotiate all kinds of things that make no sense to me. There are so many letters. HD. DVR. HDDVR. HDMI. HBO. All we want is CABLE. I just want to be able to watch Food Network and Bravo, this should not be this complicated. We would happily stick with our current cable provider, but the new (older) apartment doesn’t have the proper cable wiring. Again, with the woe.

I think the biggest non-packing hurdle is going to be finding the remaining piece of furniture. We were able to get a futon from my dad and step-mom to be used more as a seat than a bed in our office/spare bedroom. We bought an entertainment stand from Target at a mild discount thanks to some gift cards. All that remains to be found is a chair for the living room. You guys, furniture is effing expensive. I just want a chair. I don’t want it to be modern and weirdly shaped, I don’t want it to recline and hold cold beers (I mean, sure, not that I’d really object to either of those), but I’d just like it to hold my butt in place while I watch tv.

That is if we ever get the tv figured out.

And all our stuff packed.

And then moved into the new apartment.

These are big ifs. I think I better spend some more time procrastinating considering them.

For the past two months, my phone has been slowly dying. In order to turn it off you had to squeeze the top really tightly and press the button just right. And even then it only turned off about 40% of the time. There were pieces cracking off and if I didn’t keep a cover on it, it looked dangerously like the screen was going to separate. It probably would’ve lasted a lot longer if I didn’t drop it 800 times.

We got our iPhones in June of 2008 and I knew our contracts were up soon, so I had a good case to persuade my husband to go phone looking.

So we went to AT&T to see when our contracts were up and I was super excited when they said “tomorrow.” Score, the new phones were a total possibility. We talked about our plan and discovered that we had the fewest number of minutes we could, so there was no way to save money and frankly, we weren’t all that thrilled with the service. The new iPhones were the same price we knew they’d be, the service would be the same. Basically, we could stick with AT&T and just pay for the phones and nothing else would change.

So we decided to try Verizon. The first thing they asked when we walked in was where we worked. And guess what? My husband’s hospital qualifies him for a discount. It’s about time being married to a doctor got me something. And oh guess what else? They pay you to trade in your old iPhones. Oh and their new iPhones are cheaper. And their network is 20 times better.

Yea, it was a really tough decision for us.

I am now the proud owner of a white iPhone 4. It has taken me about 3 days to get it organized and learn the new tricks, but now that it’s set up, I am in love. I admit it, I am an Apple product junkie.

And best of all, it has two cameras. All the better to take a bajillion pictures of my cats with.

One of us is not so fond of the auto-flash…

Last week on twitter, I briefly engaged with a person I have followed for a long time. She was discussing Chiari stuff and she stated something as a fact, and well, it wasn’t. I very (VERY) politely replied and gave her the information that I had just learned at the conference I wrote about last month. She replied somewhat curtly and that was the end of it.

That was the end until I looked at my phone the next day and discovered that she had not just unfollowed me, which would’ve probably been an overreaction, but she actually blocked me.

I didn’t run and cry or anything, honestly, it didn’t really make a huge difference in my life, but it just struck me as very odd. Maybe I shouldn’t have replied to her original tweet at all, I did it entirely for the purpose of giving her relatively new information about her own condition. I wasn’t trying to be preachy or know-it-all-y and I think I phrased my tweet as such. I was honestly just trying to be helpful and if she’d told me she was offended, I would’ve happily apologized. But she didn’t.

I think this is part of a bigger trend. We don’t seem to know how to disagree anymore.

I disagree with people often. I disagree over politics, over religion and even this morning over whether or not the latest X-Men movie was good (spoiler alert: it was). I will not stand here and pretend that I have never lost my cool, have never said things wrong or rudely, because that’s just not true. But I think by and large, I do a fair job of disagreeing without blowing things out of proportion or making them a gigantic issue. And when I do screw up, I make a point of righting those wrongs.

In these disagreements I commonly see people make assumptions about strangers. I had someone tell me last week that because I was pro-choice I was a “typical liberal” and that I wanted to “kill the innocent and save the guilty.” This person didn’t take a moment to understand my position or listen to anything I had to say, she saw the word pro-choice and decided exactly who I was. This is not a good way to argue. It immediately puts the other person on the defense and that almost never ends well.

The next worse one is the personal jabs. These are usually tucked in at the end and they are meant to poke the other person. Sometimes it’s tongue in cheek, othertimes it’s just plain douchey. The worst are when you add a post script to try to embarrass someone for their typos.

But the biggest problem is when you make things personal. I love a good debate on abortion or the death penalty or even whether or not you should put two spaces after a period (you should, I’m sorry, I cannot let this one go), but my position is not a dig at you. My position or statement is not meant to be offensive, it’s not even an argument about you, it’s about an issue. So when you start taking my position as a personal affront, we can not debate any longer. Once you make it about you, there’s no agreeing to disagree and honestly, that’s where 99% of these debates need to end.

I know that this isn’t a universal truth, but a lot of the time, it’s not personal. A lot of the time, the other person isn’t attacking you, they’re just stating something they believe to be true, right or wrong. Most of the time the disagreement has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with the other person. It’s a difference of opinions.

And those are okay. They aren’t worth being hurt over and for goodness sakes, you don’t need to block me someone on twitter for them.

I’ve been half-heartedly following current events for the past few weeks and one has caught my attention like none of the others. Because apparently we have a congressman with the last name of Weiner. And because he did not get mocked enough for that last name as a kid, he decided to post a picture of his (not naked) wiener on twitter.

To be perfectly honest, I could hardly care less about the scandal. He removed the picture already and well, he’s not the first sleezy guy in politics. If he really enjoys taking pictures of himself in his underwear, does it in his spare time and doesn’t send the pics to children, well, I say live and let live. To each his own, awkward hobby.

But I have to say that I have been enjoying the hell out of the news coverage because I have the sense of humor of a 13 year old boy. So I present the 10 best headlines and quotes of Weinergate 2011.

10. Weiner’s Wiener is actually Weiner’s Wiener

9. “Weiner issued a statement saying he would ‘welcome and fully cooperate’ with the probe.”

8. Weiner’s Wiener Problem Hard To Forget, Harder To Let Go‎

7. Dem leaders struggle on Weiner’s future

6. Pelosi calls for investigation of Weiner

5. Weiner A No-Show At Parade

4. Barbara Walters: If Palin ‘Can Ride Around on Her Bus,’ Weiner Can Stay in Congress (it’s the quotes, the euphemism slays me)

3. Weiner’s Twitter ‘Friend’ Speaks Out: ‘He Was So Full of Himself’

2. Weiner comes clean on photos

1. Bill O’Reilly Goes Nuts on Weiner‎

I am incredibly blessed to have a huge community on the computer. I can log on any time of day and connect with other people. Not everyone understands how important those friendships are and many people roll their eyes because they think you can’t really get to know anyone over the computer. But the thing is that the computer plays a big role in my life because I’m at a very weird stage of friendships.

We moved back to California almost exactly 2 years ago and since then, I just haven’t grown roots. I don’t have a big group of friends, or really a group of them at all. I have some friends at school who I like a lot, but who when we’re not at school, I generally don’t see or hear from. I don’t begrudge them that, in fact, I totally understand it. When we’re not at school we’re usually on vacation or clinicals, and we’re busy, myself included.

But the other part is that no one lives anywhere near us right now. I mean, there are people, but no one we know, that we have a connection to. My school friends, a few pre-existing friends from college and some friends I’ve met since moving out here, all live at least 30 miles west of us or more. My husband’s friends, who I only know a few of, live 30 miles to the east of us. They are nice, but I wouldn’t consider them my friends.

I feel…lonely.

I mean, I love my husband, he is my best friend. He is who I want to see every day for the rest of my life. But right now he feels like my only friend. He’s the only one I see movies with, he’s the only one I go out to dinner with. I miss having friends, having people to hang out with, to tell stories to. My husband doesn’t understand why I spend so much time on the computer and part of it is because right now, it feels like all my friends are here. My only friends.

I’m not one of those people who needs 300 friends and thrives on being surrounded by people constantly. But I am someone who is used to having good friends, who is used to being able to have someone to call or text and chat about things, sometimes big or small. As much as I enjoyed my birthday this year, it was the first time I thought that if I had tried to have a real birthday party, there wouldn’t have been anyone there.

I am suddenly an island in this huge city.

Obviously this isn’t a life or death situation, I can survive with my husband, with the computer and with phone calls to friends who are farther away, but it just feels hard sometimes. My husband is on the night shift for the next 2 weeks and I will have no one to talk to. I’ll have no one to share my days with, no people to eat with, to spend time with. And while the cats will be super stoked to have me around, I just long for the days where friends were easy to come by, where I felt like I had a community in my real life.

I’m grateful for the people in my life, I just wish more of them were closer in proximity. Twitter, skype and emails are all fine and well, but I’d kill to have a beer with someone tonight.

And I hear that it’s a bad sign when you start drinking with your cats. I’m pretty sure they’ll judge me too.

I have been feeling fragile lately. Not depressed, not anxious. Just fragile. It takes a minimally harsh thing to make me feel really bad. And because timing in my life is always awesome there has been a big influx of harsh comments here and at the other places I write. Normally, it bothers me, it feels crappy, but I move on and it isn’t a huge deal.

Last night and today, more of that has rolled in and I have just been a mess. I cried for a pretty solid amount of time for things people said. They were harsh for sure, they were crappy to read about myself, but they were not horrible things. They were not comments that I felt a need to delete, they were just harsh.

And I cried. Just like I cried after an argument with my husband last night (which before he calls me and makes a joke about how the argument wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t already like this let me just say, it was unrelated to everything else here honey. See also: neener neener neener). Just as I cried over an email that was frustrating to me this morning. I have been in a panic all day because I’m afraid that it’s me not being able to handle life without the headache meds that also happened to be anti-depressants.

But it’s not depression. It’s hormones.

This is one thing I did not account for when I was taken off the birth control that I’ve been on for 5 years. I knew that my body was different while on it and there would be adjustments now, but I guess I didn’t realize the difference in hormone fluctuations. This is like high school levels of hormone strife and I am woefully underprepared for this. I’m alternately weepy and angry, neither of which I like being.

I pride myself in being strong and in control of myself and I am anything but either of those right now.

I may be a little more quiet on the internet than normal while I try to manage myself, my posts may read a little more solemn the next few days, just bear with me. I’m doing the best I can, and I’m doing it without the help of normal sleep hours, with the added stress of a clinical and without a proper stockpile of chocolate. Basically a recipe for a hormone coated disaster.

I really wish I could wear a sign that they put on boxes of glasses for the next few weeks.

FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE.

I love Glee. Judge me if you must, but it’s my favorite tv show. It allows me to suspend my disbelief, zone out, listen to music that I otherwise probably would never listen to and reminisce about high school. Some weeks I cry, some weeks I laugh, but I enjoy the hell out of it. I’m even going to the Glee concert this weekend because my husband bought me tickets for my birthday and I’m really pretty excited about it.

Now, all that said, I see a startling trend among my fellow Glee watchers. People seem to be really almost creepily emotionally attached to the show. Attached to the point that they start dissecting each episode, song and character and doing other things that are a little troubling. I can stay silent no longer.

The following are 10 signs that you might be taking Glee a little too seriously. And for the record, all of them are real things that I have seen or read in the past few weeks, none are made up.

10. You update your facebook status more than once during an episode to criticize the plot, characters, dancing and/or musical selection.

9. You write entire 500 word blog posts devoted to how stupid Glee has become. By the way, we all know you’re totally still watching it anyway.

8. You use the phrase “jump the shark” about a television show centered around high school kids in a Glee club. I love the show to death, but the premise should’ve clued you in about the shark jumping from the first moment.

7. You start giving musical advice to the kids on the show. You know they’re not actually competing in a national competition, right?

6. You randomly start conversations about the last episode of Glee and why it was the worst episode ever. And even though your wife tells you you’re taking Glee too seriously and disagrees with your assessment of the episode, you continue to restart the same conversation several times over the course of the week. MUCH to your wife’s dismay, I might add.

5. You openly discuss how concerned you are that they have changed the ages of several characters and express concern that they won’t have them graduate when they should be.

4. You start getting upset that they haven’t had the football coach on the show in several episodes. And even when someone points out that football season ended months ago, you ask why she isn’t there teaching a P.E. class. (Answer: because she’s not a real football coach.)

3. You wax on poetically about how good the first season was and how disappointed you are with the second season, as if it was your child who had done something unthinkable.

2. You blame Glee for the downfall of teenage morality and for the increased support of gay marriage initiatives while scolding Kurt for not believing in God.

1. You refuse to go to your basement during a serious tornado watch because you didn’t want to miss the season finale of Glee.

Tomorrow I turn 28.

Each year I’m pretty sure I say that whatever age I’m turning sounds old to me and this year is no exception. Twenty eight. It just sounds…mature. Like adulthood is not screwing around anymore. I guess after 10 full years of adulthood, it probably shouldn’t be anymore.

27 was actually a pretty good year, especially compared to 26, which, let’s be honest, was just a huge bitch. And 28 has a lot of potential.

Like each birthday I am hopeful for what this next year will bring, but this year more than ever, I am reflectively grateful for what this last year has given me. I have had more than a reasonable number of challenges and I won’t lie and pretend like I wouldn’t love to have fewer bad days and more easy ones, but I also know I can manage even if easier days don’t come. I can clear this hurdles and live a good life, even with pain.

In this past year I have developed new friendships and strengthened old ones. And as important, I’ve seen ones that are not meant to last and I’ve let them go. I’ve been supported by people in my real life and here, through the internet. I settled into a routine at school and though I did not get the coveted straight A semester, I came really, really close. I have rediscovered my passion for patient care, I’ve seen first hand the way that I can help people, children, in my future.

My life feels manageable for the first time in a long while. It doesn’t feel easy and I know it might not ever, but it feels manageable. I can see a future, one with children, with a career, with family, with cats. I sincerely hope that 28 is the true beginning of my adult life, the beginning of the road to motherhood, to being a professional and to many other roles that I’ve waited a long time to fulfill. I feel like my life has been paused for a long time and now we’re finally getting to press the play button again.

I have high hopes for 28, but more than that, I have peace as I say goodbye to 27, grateful for how it has changed me and for how it has prepared me for what comes next, even if I don’t yet know what exactly might be next.

But I can’t wait to find out.

So, as another super fun part of our vacation, Slappy and I set out today, after my dentist appointment (more on that another time, like after I get the stupid filling on my freaking birthday), to find a new apartment. We had a list of places, all at least 20 miles east of our current place and we were ready to find a new home.

The place we currently live in is a very nice complex and it’s in a very nice neighborhood. I’m not going to tell you exactly what we pay in rent, but suffice it to say that it would make you gasp once you knew that it was only 1 bedroom/1 bathroom. We also live with like 200 college students who find it most appropriate to yell at each other between the hours of 1 and 4 am. We found out last year that our apartment complex was actually becoming a dorm for the college right near us and even worse, we didn’t hear it from our apartment complex, but rather from a friend whose brother was moving in for his freshman year of college.

The bottom line is that we pay too much for the space and to live in a dorm and we knew we could pay less and get more if we moved east. So east we went.

The first few apartments were underwhelming. It’s hard going from a brand new apartment complex to a 30 year old one. But there are very few new places in the areas we’re looking into, so this was to be expected. We determined early that washers and dryers were a deal breaker. We don’t iron much, and the dryer acts as a makeshift dewrinkler. And I’m sure as hell not walking to the community laundry area at 6 in the morning and paying 75 cents to dewrinkle my pants. I’m too old to do laundry in public, see also lazy. Another absolute deal breaker was the second bathroom, my marriage hinges upon it. Ditto with the dishwasher. I realize this makes me spoiled, but it’s not like I wasn’t planning on paying for it.

Several hours and tours later we found an apartment we liked, it’s a 2 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom townhome. The appliances are a little outdated, but otherwise, it’s nice and pretty much exactly what we were looking for. It’s within a few miles of my husband’s work, we know some others who live there and they are mostly pleased, as much as anyone is ever pleased with living in an apartment complex. It even has a racquetball court on site, which is pretty great for us. It totally raises our chances of exercising to fairish. And it’s actually 200 more square feet and $200 less a month.

It’s a deal right? Well, mostly. Except for the damn pet rent.

It is completely understandable that most apartment complexes charge an extra deposit for pets. Some pets cause extra damage and an extra 500 bucks secures that the damage can be paid for and repaired. I’m totally on board with this. But pet rent is a completely different beast. It is an extra charge added each month to your rent, PER PET.

Um, what?

To me, extra rent for pets only makes sense if they also charge extra rent for kids, for roommates and for men, because they are all often astoundingly messy. And yet, all the apartments had a pet rent policy, none of them have a kid rent one. Kids puke, pee and draw all over walls. They destroy things all the damn time. My cats literally never puke, seriously almost never pee outside of the designated locations (that has happened twice in 6 years) and have yet to draw on a wall. And yet, I’m being asked to pay an extra fee each month for them to live with me. A fee that is non-refundable if my cats do not do any damage to the place.

So now we are not only shelling out an extra $500 for the pet deposit, but also an extra $40 a month for pet rent. It kind of take away from the greatness of the place. And yea, we could’ve lied and said we only had one cat or had none at all, but we didn’t and for that, we’ll pay an extra $980 this year. People with kids have no extra cost, no extra deposit or rent, but because my very small pets aren’t people (and before you yell at me, I absolutely know that kids and cats are different, I’m just talking about potential messes), they’re increasing our monthly rent.

While I am very excited that we’ve found a new place to live, and am totally stoked to see my really dumb (but extremely sweet) cat try to tackle stairs, I am bitter at how much more money we’re having to pay than our neighbors, simply for two cats whose damage is easily covered by the extra deposit. To me this screams as a money making scheme, but it’s one that is widespread, and at least where we want to live, totally inescapable. And since there’s nothing to do about it, I’m just gonna sit here and be bitter. Join me, won’t you?