Thanks for the suggestions; they were, um, interesting. :)

I went with ivyology. But like I said, livejournal's still my home.

I like ivyology though. I might rename the lj eventually. Maybe.

Three things:

1. April is my second favorite month, after October. This April is off to a nice start. I am knocking wood.

2. Oh, man, Fiona Apple. Amazing. and I'm not even crazy about that genre of music.

3. OH. Okay then. EDIT: AHHH BUT WAIT, there's more. (Ryan's HAIR! It almost makes up for Brendon's.)

You know that meme where you post lines from 20 movies and then people identify them? ( That is what this is. )

In other news, I am going to stop trying to be happy because it doesn't work.  I am instead going to accept happiness when it comes and wait out the other times.  Today I left work early and went for a very long walk and I am happy enough. 

Libby was extra cuddly yesterday and today.  I think she can tell when I need it.  ( Here is a poor quality photograph of her precious little face: )

IT IS THE WEEKEND and ever since I dumped all my work-negativity into actual words explaining what sucks about my job, I've been feeling better about it. Also, I finished up all the really annoying stuff I had going on and the next couple of weeks MIGHT be kinder to me. And we get to wear jeans all next week. That will be nice. And I did get to leave early today. \o/

SO Friday the 13th (second in a row! that is just mean) hasn't been terrible except for the part where I dropped my cell phone and managed to kill it. Thank goodness it wasn't my Sidekick. THAT would have been cause for tears.

I want more icons. I can make icons myself, and I'm not terrible at it, but I'm not great either, and it takes forever and at least half the time they just don't turn out well enough to keep. And I don't know why I want them when I just use my default icon most of the time anyway. But I do. I need some RPattz icons, because he had fallen off my radar for a bit there but oh my goodness is he ever back on it, and some KStew because she never fell off it, and some JoBros. I actually am deeply conflicted about JoBros fandom, in that I LOVE them in all ways except for as actual musicians. Or I am not even opposed to the music so much as Nick's voice, which I really hate. It could get better, but at the moment he still sounds his age in a really unfortunate way. (TO MY EARS! Music being a subjective experience and all.)

Speaking of music, I am hearing very good things about the new Decemberists album. I need to check that out. I need more new music in general. Tell me what you are listening to and liking!

I am really tired! I need a nap. But I also need to watch The Office! Which to do first? Oh, decisions.

So I checked my bank account to make sure my paycheck had been deposited, and oh yay hey there tax refund! Awesome! Except why are you higher than the amount I claimed on my tax return?

So I went and checked things out on the IRS website, and when I entered my info it said this, in part: "We found mistakes on your tax return which caused us to change the amount of your refund."

The IRS reviewed my tax return, decided they owed me MORE money than I said they owed me, and PAID IT. It's $600 more, so I'm pretty sure it's the 2008 economic stimulus money, which I didn't claim because I didn't file a 2007 tax return because I was a student and unemployed in 2007. When I was using the H&R Block efiling thing it kept trying to get me to claim that money and I was all NO NO NO because I still thought I wasn't eligible? IDK. (Okay, actually, now that I'm looking into it, it actually makes some sense; I couldn't claim it when it was an advance but I can claim it now as a credit. Got it.) BUT the key thing here is the the government is actually forcing money I didn't ask for into my bank account. This does not fit with my understanding of how things work.

Anyway 3 day weekend! I'm going to hang out in Baltimore with H on Sunday! \o/ Did you know there's a place in Baltimore that gives away free books? No, really. (Their website FAQ basically says "no, really" over and over, it's pretty funny.)

Lately I have only wanted to listen to the music I was listening to in high school. Oh mid-to-late 90s I miss you, you were my coming of age era and I will never have anything like that again. Mostly though it has just made me sad that Tori Amos hasn't put out an album I liked more than a few songs on since Choirgirl. On the other hand, does it matter when she made 4 albums I'm still listening to over a decade later? That's some staying power, there.

Happy birthday, jennesaisquoi! Today you are

OLD

much love,
your dear sweet sister :)

That poetry meme, only not, because there's a lot more than just one favorite here. It's not a comprehensive list either, just the ones I thought of off the top of my head and could find easily via Google.

Anne Sexton - The Truth the Dead Know
Anne Sexton - Courage
Anne Sexton - Rowing and The Rowing Endeth
Anne Sexton - The Starry Night
W.H. Auden - As I Walked Out One Evening
W.H. Auden - September 1, 1939
John Donne - The Canonization
Robert Browning - Two in the Campagna
Tennyson - The Lotos-Eaters
William Butler Yeats - The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats - When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming
T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land (annotated version, because that's how I like to read it)
Philip Larkin - Talking in Bed
e.e. cummings - i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)
e.e. cummings - i thank you God for most this amazing day
Wallace Stevens - Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Louise Gluck - Trillium
William Dickey - A Kindness
E. Powys Mathers (transl.) - Black Marigolds
William Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

This last probably wouldn't qualify as a favorite, but it's meaningful to me. In tenth grade Honors English, we were all assigned a different poem to analyze and then present our analysis to the class; I'd never really understood poetry before, and I remember agonizing over this poem, and I remember the moment when it finally started to click. I might like poetry a lot less if not for this poem, is what I'm saying. (We also read a LOT of Shakespeare in high school, and Shakespeare's another really good way to learn to read poetry, I think.)

And also, I couldn't find this anywhere, but it's a nice poem that for some reason struck a chord in me during a really difficult time in my life:
Philip Levine - ( The Way Down )

The network is down, and there is nothing I can work on while we wait for it to be restored. I can't even access templates. I have a feeling I should think this a good thing but I'm mostly just bored.

Everyone keeps raving about Merlin but I remain skeptical, as I've never found Arthurian legend interesting at all except for in very limited Monty Python-related circumstances. It's entirely possible that I would enjoy it anyway, but I never watched FNL either because football bores me even though everyone said you didn't have to like football to watch it. I don't know. Television's appeal has been waning for me lately anyway, though I say that while still being fully committed to watching nine shows (tbf, with staggered seasons, it's never nine shows at the same time). I guess it's more accurate to say that I'm less invested in most of those shows than I used to be, with Who-verse the only exception.

I've been thinking about stories and my standards as a consumer of them, and about guilty pleasures and how I think the whole concept is silly and elitist, and the construction of identity around the things one likes and how that was something I definitely did when I was younger and is still something I do, but in a different way. I think apologizing for enjoying something, or excusing it, or disclaiming it, is pretty dumb. Still it's something I have to resist doing, because - well, I don't know. Because no matter how dumb I tell myself it is, I can't get past the part where what you like = who you are.

At the job I was at a few months ago we were talking about movies we liked and I said that these days I don't see anything without a happy ending, and this was not the prevailing opinion. It's 98% true for me, though, and I'm the same way about books and stories. I don't indiscriminately enjoy every single story with a happy ending, but happy endings - or at least not explicitly UNhappy endings - are usually a prerequisite.

Of course if you love miserable endings where the world ends and everyone dies and someone microwaves a kitten, well, I might worry a little about being alone in a room with you, but otherwise, hey, follow your zen. (Of course, years and years and years ago, when I was in Roswell fandom, I wrote a really terrible story about just that - minus the kitten - which just goes to show, people change, tastes change, nothing is fixed.) Getting worked up about the things other people enjoy seems like a really big waste of energy.

Liking Twilight ironically is TOTALLY okay though. But so is liking it with all the sincerity in the world.

Not at all ironically, I like Ian Crawford. But then if that's not an example of an opinion that is 100% correct I don't know WHAT is.

OK I hate cross-posting to twitter but I'm too excited. I made food and it was tasty! This never happens! It was only TJ's brown rice medley, TJ's red curry sauce, spinach, and Quorn (N you were right, Quorn is amazing!) but I have ruined far simpler dishes than that. I can't believe I spent so many years hating rice. I still don't like the white rices much, but brown and wild rices are delicious. (So were the daikon radish seeds! Which I'd never heard of, but they are awesome.)

Tomorrow I attempt not-chicken noodle soup. \o/

I know I have a few vegetarian people on my flist - if you could point me to your favorite vegetarian recipe blogs/sites, that would be awesome. (Bonus points if they have a low-budget focus.)

A poll about grammar! The questions are not biased in the least. And I will probably be the only one to bother filling it out, as I'm the only one with ridiculously strong feelings on the subject. See how that doesn't stop me.

[Poll #1327281]

Hey! So for the record I don't think lj's going anywhere anytime soon. But in the spirit of you never know, and backups always being a good idea regardless of sky-is-falling circumstances, for Mac users:

LJ Migrate
-This looks scary, as it involves python and the terminal, but the directions are excellent and the actual implementation is painless, I promise. I know nothing about Terminal and I've never had problems. And it backs up comments (and userpics!). And you can use it to move all your content over to insanejournal or journalfen or wherever if you should so choose.

Xjournal
-Less scary, but not as useful, and it doesn't back up comments. After you download and have logged into your account, go to Window, select History, and then Refresh to sync. I think the download option just downloads a big xml file, which - I have no idea what you would do with that, actually.

Windows users:

Backing up your LJ: a guide for Windows users
-Explains how to use ljarchive, which is awesome and downloads comments and all that good functional stuff, and also lj-sec, which you can use to transfer your lj contents over to another journal. Lj-sec is actually what I use to back up to my insanejournal and it works really well.

Yes, I have both a Mac and a PC. MACS ARE BETTER. I feel really comfortable expressing this obviously correct opinion.

EDIT: via tree, if you want to back up your lj on wordpress, here's a community that tells you how! lj2wordpress


Uggghhhhh I am so exhausted and it's only Tuesday. :( It's wintry mix-ing out, and I am sad. I know it's the grass is greener effect but I am almost convinced that I liked it better when my winters were five to ten degrees colder on the average day but at least there wasn't always slush falling from the sky. When I first moved here and saw the first forecast for a wintry mix I was all ha ha, that's hilariously lame. And then I experienced one, and then I experienced four winters full of them, and now I am on my fifth and it's miserable, okay. It's cold in the worst way, and it sucks to drive in (sucks WAY WORSE than driving in snow, WHEN WILL PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT ON THE SCALE OF SCARY ICE>SNOW, ALWAYS) and there are still three more months of it to get through and :( is all I can say to that.

BUT tomorrow I'm not going in to work until nine! And I'm still going to leave at four-thirty, or rather ACTUALLY leave at four-thirty instead of an hour later like I have the last two days, and then I'm going to go to my mom's and work out and get hugs and I will >:( at the sky until it caves to my will and gives me sunshine, and it's gonna be awesome. AWESOME.

I need to shower and get groceries but I am laaaaaaazy! This isn't news, just the state of things.

Today's epiphany is that I really like tattoos on other people. Like them a lot. Not an epiphany maybe so much as stating the obvs., but there you go.

Also I miss going to shows. And I miss when the weather was nice and I could walk around my neighborhood for an hour every day. I realized last night that it's going to turn into January this week and I really, really, really hate January. I am also not especially fond of February or March. How about we skip those months this year and just have it be April now? :\ (With Panic back on tour, and The Cab and The Hush Sound for good measure. Oh oh oh and hey, Neko's going to be touring this spring! Presumably. That usually goes along with new albums. oh yay. *___*)

Resolutions, I am working on them. Having succeeded at last year's I feel a lot of pressure. So far I have:

1. Stop eating meat.
2. Join a gym.

The first is giving me semantics-related issues. Like, when I was seventeen and stopped eating meat for four years I had no problem calling myself vegetarian. But back then I never paid attention to labels and no doubt ate a lot of animal derivatives, and the thing is even now that I know better I am not going to stop eating cheese (ever) nor am I going to bother seeking out rennet-free cheese, and I'm also not going to not eat the red curry at Spice and Rice in San Diego if I ever go there again (which surely has fish sauce in it).

I don't personally care about semantics, and I'm going to be happy enough with myself just for finally officially cutting out obvious meat. But the hardcore vegetarians, man, it's not an argument I want to have. So I am just not going to bother with the vegetarian label and instead call myself a lazy non-hardcore non-meat-eater. Actually that is kind of unwieldy, so I'll have to come up with something else. But you get the idea.

And eh, gyms. They're really pricey around here, even the Y is $65/month with a $99 joining fee. I'm having a hard time justifying spending that kind of money when I know I'll stop using the gym as soon as it's nice out again. I might be better off just going to my mom's after work a few times a week and using her treadmill. IDK, IDK. I'll say my resolution is to visit all the gyms in my area and see if any of them are really worth it.

I haven't been eating as much fruit as I should lately, so I'll add that! 3. Eat more fruit. And I can get started on this when I go to the grocery store, and it's not even 2009 yet, score! I hope the bananas look ripe. I said once that if I could have one wish in the entire world it would be to have a magically replenishing supply of all of my favorite fruits in a state of perfect ripeness, and this is especially true of bananas. Those fleeting few hours when they're yellow and speckled but not bruised, oh man. Hearts.

In keeping with the contemporary spirit of Boxing Day, a short meme about things, AKA 10 things that make my life easier/sparklier/a little more worth living.

1. My ipod.
2. Carmex. I have tried many many lip balms but none have come close to the simple perfection of the stuff in the little yellow red-capped tube.
3. Bumble & Bumble's Brilliantine. My hair is fine and kind of lank, and every other product I have ever tried just weighs it down. This stuff doesn't, just adds texture and some shine. It's magical.
4. My iMac. I hate it a little too for making Windows seem so clumsy in comparison, and also for making me feel like I've drunk the koolaid.
5. Very long socks. I am always cold, and very long socks make me less cold. Sock Dreams is the online long sock-selling marketplace of my heart.
6. Talc-free eye makeup. There were many years when I thought I couldn't ever wear eye makeup because it made my eyes red and watery, and then I figured out that I'm just extremely sensitive to talc. The only con is that it's a little tough to find, and generally pricier - mineral makeup is the new craze but lots of mineral makeup still has talc in it. Physician's Formula was making great, inexpensive talc-free eyeshadows that I could get at the drugstore for awhile, and then they stopped. I was sad. :(
7. Mrs. Meyers Clean Day cleaning products. Lavender-scented! This stuff almost makes cleaning fun.
8. My Sidekick. Maybe there are shinier products on the market, but I don't like touchscreens anyway, and the novelty of the flipscreen has yet to wear off. And of course it ups my scene cred in the long winter months when it's too cold to wear my stonewashed American Apparel deep v's. >.>
9. Diet soda. My sole vice, and it's not even a cool one. D: On the other hand, if it's the worst thing I put in my body, I'm not doing too terribly.
10. THE INTERNET.

oh hey! square envelopes apparently require extra postage! I DID NOT KNOW THIS. DDDDDDDDDD: SORRY EVERYONE I SENT CARDS TO IF THEY ARRIVE STAMPED POSTAGE DUE OH GOD POST OFFICE PLEASE JUST RETURN THEM TO ME BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE THE TACKIEST THING EVER.

DDDDDD:

The thing I don't enjoy about the weather here is that it slushes all winter. It's not snow and it's not rain and it's worse than both of them to drive in, and there's no warm fuzzy associations like you get with snow or even the soothing I-must-stay-inside-and-drink-tea-and-listen-to-Bach feelings you get (well, I get) with rain.

Anyway we're supposed to get a lot of that in the next few days. I'm tired just thinking about it. :(

It's snowing!! Snow is white and fluffy and nice!

And I have laryngitis. It's pretty hilarious.

I start my new job tomorrow, and I am coming down with a cold. (again! wtf.)

I love my nephews, but why must they be plague-carriers? D:

( snow! )

( the libster! )

And it's already been posted everywhere, but I don't care! ( panic at the disco, swimsuit model edition )

And oh yeah I got the job I was interviewing for. \o/ :DDDDDDD

Man I am going to be so bummed when the puppies go away, whenever that may be. D:

I AM REALLY HAPPY THAT JON STEWART WAS THE ONE TO TELL ME THAT BARACK OBAMA IS GOING TO BE OUR NEXT PRESIDENT.

OMG AMERICA. IT'S A REALLY GOOD DAY.

/MOST EPIC OF UNDERSTATEMENTS