The biological clock: up until a few months ago, I would have told you it was a crock. Then *sigh* mine kicked in like an electrical socket to the tongue.

This is scary. Although I love kids, I'm a damn selfish person. Children were viewed as parasites. Cute, adorable, fun to visit or babysit, even super silly...but still parasites. And now, thanks to a damn biological urge that has totally fritzed with my brain and hormones, I want one of those parasites, dammit! I have added 'babies', 'family', and 'children' to my StumbleUpon topics. I just read a book on HOMESCHOOLING, for god's sake.

Argh. And so...now that I've accepted this whole urge, have started planning for an October conception ('cause babies conceived in the fall/winter are smarter due to fewer chemicals in mommy, dontcha know), have even broached (and gotten approval for) the whole stay-at-home mum thing....


OUR TIMELINE HAS BEEN FUCKED.

See, it all depended on the money thing. Namely, the second half of Mr. Munin's inheritance from his mom. It was going to pay off the house...and let me tell you, dropping the mortgage payment off our monthly bills was the only thing that made losing my income look reasonable.

But Mr. Munin's mom called last night...hysterical after having been seriously ass-raped by the IRS for the first half of the inheritance payoff earlier this year. Yikes. She is so anally bixarre about money, she didn't talk to her financial consultant...or a lawyer...or ANYONE before embarking upon this money transfer, because SHE'S A LITTLE CRAZY.

Not that I'm mad or anything. Oh no, especially since she's now decided that it'll be 'a few years' before we get the rest of the moola. Although, OF COURSE, she's gonna keep bitching about her lack of emminently-emerging grandchildren all the while.

ARGH.

So apparently, my boss thinks I have skills that I don't. (Wait, that sounds dirty. It's not!)

 

He wants me to design a website. For our research collection. And as an example of what (apparently) it is believed I can accomplish, he sent me here: http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/admin/index.html

 

Eeep!

 

Ok, granted, I am a PowerPoint guru. I can blog. I can get the kiddos on those crazy games when their browsers freeze. Heck, I can even navigate Zwinky and NoveList simutaneously...but THIS?? I'm supposed to design something that looks like the NYPL's site with NO website building experience?!

 

Urk. To top it all off, there are some areas of our collection that I'm definitely...less familiar with. That doesn't help much, when I'm supposed to be promoting said resources logically and professionally.

 

Sigh. But hey, I guess I shouldn't complain too hard--this just means that my boss has A LOT of confidence in my (albeit mad) skills, eh? Um, yay?

Sometimes, being a vegetarian is bad for the belly.

*Urp*

I am a manager at work. First time experience for me, and while I'm good at my job, I really suck at one part of it...being somebody else's boss. I always second guess myself, and it's almost IMPOSSIBLE for me to chastise someone without some serious internal pep talking. So anyways, today my shirking of conflict led me to (not) do something I'm pretty ashamed of:

One of my employees treated a child, a ten (ish) year old autistic child, like he was a piece of shit. She was mean, outrageously so, and really had no reason to be so...she just didn't want to give the child a free movie ticket (provided by someone other than herself, and she just grabbed a shitload of them so there weren't enough for the kids...but the ghetto-ass shittiness of my employees is another story entirely). She yelled, she bitched, she degraded the child in under three words. And I...*sigh* I stood there and let her.

Sucks.

So there's the rub...because I let her treat a child unfairly and I said nothing, am I a bad person? Is my lack of managerial balls (so to speak) backsliding me into this sucky place where I let people do the wrong thing in front of me, and I just let it slide?

I feel like a bad person.

Well, it's been a very long and bumpy road since I've written here, and although I've occasionally read over my old entries in the last two years...this is the first time I've actually been interested in renewing my blog ramblings. The reasons for my long absence are complicated and excessively boring for people who are not-me, but the basic synopsis of the last two years of my life goes something like this:  

1. lose interest in S just as he gets super clingy and reveals his (squee!) virginity
2. feed him a baldfaced lie unashamedly to get rid of him
3. fend off his advances once he finds me on match.com
4. go on one long summer of crazy speed dating the likes of which the world has never known (coffee? twenty minutes after my previous date has ended? not a problem!)--meet a variety of men who ranged from boring (bookkeeper), to crazy (lived with a stripper and was a religious luchadore in his spare time) to deceitful (cancelled our second date THREE TIMES, using the same lame ass excuse each time) to, at the very last minute as my membership was expiring...amazing (helloooo future Mr. Munin)
5. move in to a donut-shaped house with a raving lunatic crazy French bitch
6. move out four weeks later, into a slum lord's wet dream (complete with neighborly crack dealers, prostitutes, the pleasant glow of the 7-11, and hourly ambulance/firetruck/semitruck/ghettomobile serenades)
7. start at a new school the NEXT DAY (after a lovely morning of brushing my teeth with orange juice, since the water hadn't been turned on yet, followed by a rousing school breakfast culminating in an awkward group conga-line as the Principal serenaded us with 'I will Survive')
8. find out a bit belatedly that I'd been chosen to teach a small, intensive group of highly needy...underachieving...overly adolescent fifth graders for whom the term "high stakes testing" took on a whole new meaning
   
9. spend all my spare time with future Mr. Munin (hereby 'FMM'), including late nights, early mornings, and every damn weekend moment we could find
10. lay down the law with Jadenn, who was calling me at this point only to lay guilt trips on me
    
11. teach the hell out of my little group of misfits, manage to raise their reading levels by a minimum of 2 grade levels each...only to be berated as a failure when they failed their standardized test
12. lose Crow through one of the slum apartment's faulty windows
13. break down repeatedly in the ensuing week, before having him return (and be picked up by my neighbors) at midnight on St. Patrick's Day....a changed cat
14. decide, quite suddenly while on spring break with FMM at Disney World, that I was moving out of the slum trap and moving in to FMM's newly finished house
15. give Crow up following months of heartbreak and confinement
16. find a new kitten at school, mewling impertently for food and struggling with a collar much to large for her
17. christen her Calamity Jayne, as a sign of her fortitude, three weeks before being forced to have her 'put to sleep' (what an apt euphemism that) because of a birth defect
18. have FMM reflect to me, one night shortly after an agonizingly awkward visit from Bonnie and Dad, that he guessed we were ready for the next step now that he had met my parents. To which I replied "Uh...aren't you going to ask me, or anything?". To which he replied "Well, I know you'll say yes, so..."
19. go to animal control and pick out a new kitten. Named Eleanor (as in Roosevelt). A kitten with multiple venereal diseases, a distinctly cow-shaped profile, and the habit of climbing across the bottom of our bed. On her back. At 3 a.m., while making loud, querulous  hippopotami-in-heat noises.
    
20. spend three painful months in school with a new principal, too many kids, too few books, and a professional environment of censure and blame, and call it quits
21. underhandedly (bua hah hah) be released from my contract and become a librarian (to which my parents all say, 'Well, it's about time')
22. get married in a pavilion on the Ogeechee river, with bubbles and sparkly Dorothy shoes and wild pigs and a 10-ft alligator. Oh, and cake. Lots and lots of cake...

Okay, that's about it. See? Busy two years, even in the abbreviated format. Oh, and for those of you who caught it...yes, we are a frickin' match.com success story. Sigh. I can just see our commercial now..."Well, before we met we had long chats about cats and oral sex and stupid people. And then, on our first date, the waiter spilled sour cream all over me. And after dinner, I took FMM back to apartment and ravished him. Several times. Hee hee!"

Think that'd sell ?

I lost my voice today, thanks to Savannah's mutated cash crop of pollen. Squak! was about all I could manage by last period today...lovely fun.

Today was a day of goods and bads:
Good:

1.  My lesson plans went over well, despite being written in between parent conferences on Friday (can we say half-assed?)
2.  My chocolate coffee uber-rich brownies are within 5 minutes of being done baking.
   
3.  I took a very refreshing 30 min cat nap today.
   
4. S came over last night (okay, semi-cheat on the date) and we ate, watched Serenity, and cuddled. Me likey.
   

Bad:

1.  I've never had allergies before. Savannah has reduced my nasal passages to one constant snot factory, and my throat feels as if it's coated with a fine lining of sawdust.
   
2. Jadenn freaked out today when I brought up the subject of S. Uh...HE'S the one who chose to put LA and 'his career' (snort) before our relationship, not me. Plus, he's the one who kept spouting that "We'll always be friends first" stuff!
   
3. I have a crapload of poems left to grade.
   
4. My hips totally don't fit in these jeans.
   

Hmm. I think the good wins out, if only due to the evening entertainments. I like him. We shall see. In the mean time, it's just fantabulous to have someone flirting with me again *grin*.

S and I went out on Monday for coffee et al at Books a Million. We closed the place down, then stood talking in the parking lot for a long time, despite the cold...and them going so far as to turn out the parking lot lights on us. Finally, I was so damn cold, I said we had to go somewhere else...so we ended up coming back to my place and talking 'til after 2 am. Thank god I had cleaned that weekend/day...with the hopes that that exact thing would happen. ('Banana Pancakes', Jack Johnson) Then, I called him yesterday and we talked for 3 solid hours...and truthfully, the only reason we hung up was because it was 11, and we were both still damn tired from the night before. What did we talk about? Uh...his art, my art, tattoos, high school, college, standardized testing, shaving, gaydars, dingos, our families, a distaste for organized religion, tofu, his grandmother, Crow and Selene, movies, ex's, the paintings hanging in my apartment... And that's the short list. I like him! Our conversations seem to have ending point, and he's a very entertaining conversationalist (lots of voices). Our senses of humor compliment each other quite well, he's smart in multiple functionalities, he's SANE and RESPONSIBLE, and I think he's pretty damn cute. That was the one I was really worried about (I know, bad Jasmine), but he's actually very much my type: tall, solid, and broad shouldered. Drool. So...we shall see. Per my tendencies, however, I'm already way ahead of myself with my attatchment to him (Jadenn anyone?). I don't think that his is something that I can change, but it is something I need to keep a tight rein on...although, to give myself credit, I've never done this with the 'wrong' guy. Not since I was in high school, at least. I saw his profile well before we met in the real world, but I was immediately drawn to it. At the very least, I guess I know my tastes very well. ('Lucille', Billy Currington) I like this feeling, this light-headed happiness. It's amazing how much more alive I can feel, even with a serious lack of my normal sleeping hours.

I had a dream last night that I ended up in a *cough* slightly compromising position with the man who (according to dream me) was my soul mate, but then we got separated and I ended the dream searching for him. I wish I could remember more of it, because I remember waking up momentarily and fuzzily thinking 'Wow, that was a really great dream'. So in honor of that fuzzy memory, some of my favorite dreams:

1. I walk into a supermarket and turn into a giant whale, slowly drifting over the aisles and people push their carts filled with creamed corn and hush puppies below me. There is no sound, just a sense of weightless calm.
   
2. I slip through the cracks of my world into a world of books. There are dusty mazes of esoteric knowledge, shelves on every topic imaginable, long wooden tables and lighted stony nooks with comfy reading chairs. I cannot leave this world; there is a thick, pea-soup fog surrounding my world. Green and malevolent, it absorbs all who dare it. I lose myself and my ride when I try to make it to the other side.
   
3. I am on a cruise ship full of warren-like cubby holes of living quarters, trailing up and down ladders, chasing shapes that aren't there. A warning horn sounds: the sky had grown gray and menacing, heavy clouds overhead. A wave appears silently on the horizon, growing faster than seems possible. Larger than the horizon, it blocks out the sky and I feel the ship being tugged towards the wave. There's no way to escape the coming wave; I stand at the railing and watch it grow.
   
4. I run down the street at dusk, the street lamps providing pools of white in the growing gloom. As I reach the bottow of the shallow hill, I hold out my arms and coast up and into the sky. The night grows as a shift and soar above my house, rising further and further away from the street and my life.

10 things I couldn't easily part with: (picture me as one of the howling children in the supermarket who refuses to breathe without a toy)

1. caffeine (namely coffee, diet cherry coke, and chocolate)
   
2. flip flops
   
3. pineapple
   
4. peach scented candles
   
5. vacations (the main reason why I am still slogging through teaching)
   
6. Joss Whedon (not so much him as his brainchildren...BTVS, Serenity/Firefly, Fray)
   
7. my 'pocket rocket'
   
8. cheap paints in a billion colors at Wally Mart
   
9. sunny days
   
10. the ocean
    

Notice that these are all superficial things...no air, love, or sleep in sight. I hate it when people put things that everyone needs on these lists. NOONE can live without air, numbnuts. Be a little more creative, huh? It seems like the whole point of lists like these is to expose the writer's inner materialistic 'demon'. Well, I fully embrace mine. Invite to dinner sometimes, even. I though about putting my iPod, but I think I could give that up. Not that I want to, or ever will...but I wouldn't go into withdrawl like I would if someone got rid of all my caffeine. Or Joss, for that matter...I'd go into mourning for months. Speaking of which: I've been playing the 'guess that quote' game with S, and he has never seen Firefly. Which means that I am now in the position to indoctrinate him into the cult (in my case it's the cult of Jayne, muah hah hah). I really am completely, utterly, and hopelessly obsessed with that show. It's even gone so far that it's on a 2:1 watching ratio with Buffy, which is unheard of for me. On a less positive note...he's into heavy death metal *shudder*. I consider my musical tastes to be pretty enlightened, but I CANNOT listen to that crap. Now, if you like it, don't get all pissy...I'm just saying that to my ears, it's crap. Others would probably say the same about what is currently playing on my iBook: ('To Be With You', Mr. Big) Feel free to laugh.

10 Things I could easily live without:

1. banannas
   
2. narrow shoes (my feet are quite literally as wide as most shoe boxes)
   
3. bikinis
   
4. pubic hair
   
5. a credit report
   
6. bras
   
7. Britney Spears
   
8. before and after pics (ie fat vs desireable)
   
9. menstruation, and the accompanying cramps
   
10. red ants
    

guess what the list'll be next time? Well, today has been a total lack of activity...with the exception of the last half hour, in which I cleaned the kitchen. It's funny that when the urge to clean strikes, 90% of the time I start with the kitchen...then quickly lose momentum. I guess my internal thinking is that it's more important to eat in a clean place than poop in one *grin*. ('Little Bit Lonely', Billy Currington) I did send out a few emails today, though. All to my new potentials (I sound like BTVS, urk) S and D. Both of which seem very nice and compatible, albeit in slightly different ways: S is an art and tattoo guy, very cerebral and 'smart' funny; D is a cop, VERY attractive, and also verbose over email. Hmmm. Watch me come up with new ways to ruin new chances...but in the mean time, it's very nice to have some NSA male attention. I get all kinds of happy when I have new communication, and they're both good at compliments (MY kind)...S called my tattoo choices 'cerebral', and D is very interested in my career and asks lots of questions. It's amazing how much better such little stuff can make my day be; it's also amazing how it has helped me cope with J being gone. The realization that if he doesn't choose to be with me, it's his loss is one that has brought me quite a bit of peace over the situation lately. Now, if only I could also bring peace to all my...uh...more 'earthly' needs, if you know what I mean *smirk*. ('She Thinks my Tractor's Sexy', Kenny Chesney)

I bailed on the bar. I totally suck ass. Plus, now I'm stuck trying to come up with a suitably beleivable "yeah-I-wanted-to-be-there-but..." excuse. Which, fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I am very good at. I'm thinking...I left my cell at school. I'm thinking...I was in a fender bender on the way home. I'm thinking...I totally deserve to be dropped, alone and friendless, into a dry well in Botswana right about now. Argh!!

This is bizarre: I live on a tiny island substrate of Savannah. Tiny. However, I just looked for the local library, and found that there are two within walking distance of my house. Does that make sense to you? Personally, I think that the answer to my library conundrum lies in the history of Williams College. Namely, group A gets pissed at group B, steals half the books in the library, and starts a new college. In this case it was the evil, the reviled, the always-second-place Amherst (hee), but in the case of my tiny substrate...I think it was that second library. I'm going to go check them out today. Will all the Fantasy be in Library A? All the Mysteries and New Releases in B? Will my reconaissance of both libraries on the same day be seen as some sort of affront to their hastily drawn line in the sand? Maybe they'll ask me never to return. Maybe I'll receive pamphlets eschewing the greatness of Library A in the eyes of God, and the wicked sins committed by Library B. There might be a dog to sniff out past library residue. I'll be escorted off the premises and told firmly that 'my kind' isn't welcome there... ...and I thought I had nothing big planned to do today! Oh, and the story about Williams' biblio-based revolution? All true. (Insert an anti-Amherst statement here, hee) Truth is so much stranger than fiction...