Compound W

I have had a planter's wart for over a year. But it has stayed the same size, so Dad says my immune system probably just keeps it in check. But I got stressed out last week, and it started to get bigger and it started to hurt. So I got Compound W, and there a few funny things about it.

1- I had planter's warts when I was younger (um, I'm thinking around age twelve...Dad?). And Dad spent A Very Long Time taking them off with this Compound W stuff. First, you soak your feet for 5 minutes. Then you get an emery board and take away as much dead skin as you can. And then you paint on more of the stuff.

2-You have to do this every night.

3-It smells bad.

Opening the bottle and smelling the wierd nasty smell totally brought me straight back to being that age, and to having my Dad set aside what should have been 5 minutes every night (but was probably more like half an hour, because I was a Champion Dawdler) to basically give me a pedicure! He would read me stories (Lord of the Rings) while my feet soaked. And it turns out I have such fond memories of this! When I remembered it I thought he did this with me for about 2 weeks. But actually, it was more like 2 months!

He also told me to think evil things about the wart.

This is the part of the memory I like best. I made up an anti-wart alphabet (like Gashlycrumb Tinies), and thought about it every night (example: A is an alligator eating the wart, B is a beefeater from the school cafeteria making the wart puke, C is a car driving back and forth over the wart....) He said that if my brain knew the wart was not supposed to be there, it would start to attack it, and the wart would go away.

I love that my Dad tells me stuff like this. For as solid as he makes the world, he leaves so much mystery in it too.

Two Shoes

PS-the wart is not really contagious. So if you want to wear my gold sequined flip flops, you still can.

WWKMD

So Vigilante and I aren't sure what this noise means. It comes from upstairs, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at Seven in the Morning on a Saturday. It is directly over the bed. It is the distinct, sharp, metalic-y sound of something rolling, sometimes bouncing a few times, and then stopping, alternating between all three in random sequence and duration.

But what's hard about it is, I don't really feel like going upstairs and asking:

"Excuse me, but is your cat playing with a marble in the bathtub?"

But that is the only logical thing that makes sense to me. But I've never had an indoor cat. Does anyone know if this is a typical game that indside cats like to play? Is this similar to dogs drinking out of toilets (or ponies...a different, long story that samazing told me once).

I just don't want to sound stupid when I go up there; and that question looks kind of like a Crazy Question if...well, if it is. For what it's worth, I do know that their bathtub is right above my bed.

what would karl marx do?
what would you do?
two shoes

Pleh

The last time I pulled an all nighter, it was definately with the aid of -ahem- substance.

This one was different. The 'substance' was school: and on the one hand, it's nice to hear the birds in the morning, and staying up until sunrise always feels like more of an accomplishment than sleeping through those hours between 4:30 and 5 when it's slowly getting light.

on the other hand, there are those wierd disoriented hours between 6 and, say 2, when sleeping to catch up is strange and hot and filled with scary bizarre dreams.

It would be one thing if now that I've stayed up all night to finish, I could say that I was done. But, oh, I so can not. Not for weeks. It feels like we (my classmates and I, and that includes Vigilante, for those of you not In The Know) are going through this "thing" this epic stretch of...well, what IS it even, really. Sholarship? Really? Is this Scholarship?

Here are my current pet peeves:
1) Only being able to say to people that I'm busy with school, which sounds so lame, and doesn't cover how it really feels.

2) Missing friends outside of school

3) People who look at me and say "ooh, leaving everything to the last minute, eh?" To which I want to reply by scratching them, or pinching Very Hard.

4) People who say: Well, it's just like real life.
Like fun it is.
Does real life look like this to anyone (sorry, Dad, I know you already heard this rant)?
5 totally different projects, on 5 different topics that are totally unrelated, with 5 different groups of people with whom you have to maintain 5 different sets of relationships, for virtually 5 diferent clients/professors (at least) all with different sets of expectations. Let's also point out that in none of these groups is there anyone that looks like a boss, a project manager, a tech guru or organizational hierarchy that might help making Decisions... and that in none of these projects is there anything that RESEMBLES a protocal for methodology, report content or formatting, communicating with each other, writing style, or disciplining errant teammates who fuck up and make your life infinately harder. If you have managed to work out these protocals for some of the groups, they are all different from each other. With deadlines all at the same time.

If real life ever looks like that to you, I'd like to know about it, now. But I feel like I've lived some "real life." It didn't look like that. I looked back in my journal just to check. And it didn't. So that's not real life. It's school. And this is the part of school that Sucks.

pleh. now it sounds like I'm whining. Not. I'm just venting. There's a difference.

5) Liking the subject matter of all my projects A LOT! But not being able to feel like I'm really delving into any of them.

6) Liking (most) of my team mates a whole ton, but feeling like I'm exposing my sharper edges to people that I have come to love and respect and will be working with possibly for years.


On the other hand, sometimes it gets really really funny. The other night, working on stuff with my team mates (for the Together Not Evil project), I laughed harder than I had in a long time, until my belly hurt. It gets stupid and funny in that late night computer lab yoohoo string cheeses starbursts this mouse isn't working squeek kind of way.

So, if you want to risk coming near me, keep calling me and pestering me. I need surfacing for air breaks. And this does end. I think like somewhere around June 5 it will be Totally Done (for the summer). And I will be knocking down your doors, people, pestering you to get out of the house with me, walk with me, go to toys in babeland with me, see movies with me and bake pies with me. So get ready. I'm gonna be a big old pest this summer.

Love you, learning something (i think)

Two Shoes

For Mother's Day

Dear Mom,

I remember sitting on your lap at dinner, falling alseep against you, and listening to your laughter resonate within your chest. How it sounded different with my ear pressed up against your skin. Perhaps listening that way, I could hear how your own laughter sounded to you, rich and warm.

And your skin always smelled like warm sun. It still does.

I hope you know that I brag about you to my friends, to anyone who asks. I hear that you brag about me quite a bit. I guess it's just another way we're images of each other.

And my skin is turning all freckle-y, like yours. And living in Seattle, I feel like I must be walking in your steps some of the time. Ghost steps from three decades earlier.

I love how much fun we can still have together, even if you don't like any (read: fall asleep watching) of the movies I show you these days. I love that conversations on the phone with you always last just about 74 minutes.

You should come over more often. Just to hang out. And you should call more often. Just to chat.

I'd love it.

I know you are having a wonderful time. Scope out the Southern Cross for me. Tango your heart out. I can't wait to hear all of your details when you get home. I especially like the detials.

Love,
Two Shoes

I'll shellac YOU!

People have asked me if I get too much of my Vigilante boyfriend (we have nearly all our classes together, and he's over, like all the time). I don't think so, though. For one, we actually make an effort not to hang out together too much at school, prompting a number of classmates to continue to ask me how things are going with him. Which is good because it means that they don't know that things are going great. Which is definitive proof that we're not being gross at school.

But we do study together a lot. Which is kind of fun. It means that besides getting stuff done (or not), there's almost always an accomplice for more tea or an impromptu walk. Which is what we were doing last week when we saw this kind of tree he likes (I guess it's all over Toronto).

And I said it was a Sambuka Tree.

I mean, I knew it wasn't a Sambuka Tree, but that's just the word that came to my head because I knew the actual tree name was something close to Sambuka.

But then we were stuck with Sambuka, and niether of us could get it out long enough to remember the real name. We guessed that it had an S...and an A

He said Shabbat Tree. Then I said Salal. We pondered that for a bit. WAS there an l in it?

I think that brought him to Shellac.

I said S'uh-lap (like Slap only drawn out into 2 syllables).

And by then we were almost home when we found the word.

Sumac.

---Two Shoes

FAQ: What is the benefit to an ISO EMS?

If you're a fan of symbols, check out these two pages. I'd like to try to make up some cracked out mechanical engineering rebus puzzel out of these babies.

I also just enjoyed looking at them and wondering WHAT some of them could mean. I mean, I recognize a few, like the one's I've seen on the dashboard of most cars and on copying machines.

The longer I looked at these two pages, the more I saw, though. It was like that one night back in January when Tufte took me out to Sofrito Rico and plyed me with Hot Buttered Rum, and then walked me to the bus stop. We stood in front of that tea shop thingy that has this huge wall of silver and copper cookie cutters. And I got more and more excited as I started spotting cooler and cooler shapes, until I decided that my favorite was the mokey wrench cookie cutter.

I think some of these ISO 7000 symbols would make awesome cookie cutters. For example: A Highbeams Peanut Putter Cookie. Or a Snickerdoodle with the Collate symbol on top.

---Two Shoes

P.S. This is absolutely totally related to my homework. Just look up ISO 14040 and you'll understand it. Well, maybe not. But that's my homework anyway.

P.S. I also read nearly all the archived posts for this beauty. Which is not so much homework. Well, not really. But I miss her.

Good Friday

The end of a Not Very Fun Week was bound to be better. And it has been. And wholesome too! (well, mostly).

Magnificent made me salad on Thursday and we sat in her Garden and we know all the latest Gossip together and, well, now we know some other things too. The best part was probably just the fluxuations of topics and colors over a pure uninterrupted 4 and a half hours of MagnificentTime.

And then last night I got to give Indelible Medusa a squeeze. And we tried out the latest pedicure place. Which was so funny and brilliant. I never knew I would be so attached to a massage chair! Can I just say that this idea was a stroke of fricken genius on Medusa's part. Now my toes are HOT pink, AND they have a rhindstone on the big toes. So cute!!! The only thing missing was a certain engineer that we both missed, a lot.

And also yesterday was officially 6 months for me and Vigilante. Good thing he was around because I nearly forgot. God, I'm just like my mom, huh. Crazy. Well, good thing I said as much in my previous post.

Back to letting homework suck the life from my brain.

Nah, just kidding. I Love School. Really.

two shoes

This is for Indelible Medusa.

the one word quiz.

1. Yourself: two shoes
2. Your Lover: Vigilante
3. Your Hair: scrappy
4. Your Mother: me
5. Your Father: listens
6. Your Favorite Item: puter
7. Your Dream Last Night: what?
8. Your Favorite Drink: squirrel
9. Your Dream Home: red
10. The Room You Are In: red
11. Your Pet: flytrap
12. Who You Are Now: student
13. Who You Want to be in Ten Years: planner-ish
15. What You Don't Wanna Be: shrill
16. Your Best Friend: which?
17. One of Your Wish List Items: sneakers
18. Your Gender: girly
19. The Last Thing You Did: type
20. What You Are Wearing: skirtLao
21. Your Favorite Weather: spring
22. Your Favorite Book: yours
23. The Last Thing You Ate: chicken
24. Your Life: happy
25. Your Mood: full
26. Your favorite store: art
27. Your favorite sport: belly
28. Favorite place: home
29. Who do you miss right now: dtg
30: Who did you get this survey from: indelible

T is for TERRIFIC!!

My landlady, Terrific, is the coolest. She had this fence built around my apartment last week, AND she planted this incredibly sweet little garden in front of my windows. Now I can leave the blinds up all the time.

A couple of months ago, we saw the creepy icky shadow of someone looking in with their nose (and who knows what else) pressed up against the window. This little punk ass had been looking in on us for months it turns out (piecing together a few other things), getting up close enough to stare through the blinds. Well, Terrific gave my boyfriend the nickname Vigilante when she heard about how he chased this kid through an alley and lost him. We didn't call the cops that night, but we sure will if it should happen again.

But it won't.

Because now The Fence is up; I leave the blinds open all the time because he just wouldn't be able to get close anymore without one of us seeing him. And on principle, I don't think fences are the greatest thing in many urban environments the way the segment everything. But you know what, every time I look at those clean cedar planks, I think HAHA FUCKER! to the punk that has been deprived of his peep show.

So, to the little piss ant: It's not ok to look into other people's windows from 6 inches away. It's not ok to come back and keep doing it. Go do something else, like your homework. And if you still have voyeuristic proclivities, might I recommend this website. It's about as far as I would legitimately go.

There. I've been wanting to do that for months. He got a chance to watch me that was beyond my control, and now I've had the chance to write about him that is beyond his.

I'm at peace with it now.

Two Shoes