Pictures from the past month (incl. Thanksgiving) added to Flickr tonight.

And the link to Tom's pictures.

ahhh, I finally figured out the "archiving" feature of gmail tonight (you'd think I'd never used email before - who HASN'T figured out archiving by now?). So I feel pleasantly relaxed and satisfied for having spent the last 50 minutes organizing a small part of my digital life. aaahhhh (that's a pleasant sigh). Though I'm still stuck using IE (uggghhhh I hate internet explorer! stupid stupid IE give me my Mozilla back! I hate stupid newsmonster that has somehow crippled, paralyzed friendly Firefox) so I can't have too deep a pleasant sigh.

Jen, I keep meaning to email you for troubleshooting help but I read Slate, get frustrated with IE and then give up, not wanting to mess with using IE any longer. Thank you for offering your know-how to release me from my IE imprisonment!

Since I don't feel like spending the time to change the template to add this to the Recent Tommisms sidebar, I'm going to note here Ccup's funny (ok, I almost spit my milk out my nose this morning) comment from breakfast during our conversation about a certain philanthropic organization that the company supports; as a rule the philanthropist won't put their raised money towards health organizations that perform abortions and so C passionately exclaimed as to why she wasn't going to the feel-good info session later in the day, "I think [philanthropic org] should be aborted!"

I'm pro-choice too, but I don't think I could have ever expressed my beliefs quite as eloquently as C :) hehe

Maybe you just had to be there.

Pushing up the last few inches on the inclined shoulder press I really heard the lyrics to Carve Your Heart (Dashboard Confessional) for the first time. For the first time, when I've listened to the song at least 50 times. It's as if Chris Carraba (sp?) snuck into my carved out heart to find the lyrics (bold cliff notes idea thanks to Biffy):

Carve your heart out yourself
Hoplessness is your cell
Since you've drawn out these lines
Are you protected from trying times

Man it takes a silly girl to lie about the dreams she has
Lord it takes a lonely one to wish that she had never dreamt at all

Oh look now
There you go with hope again
Oh you're so sure
I'll be leaving in the end

Dig your ditch deep enough
To keep you clear of the sun
You've been burned more than once
You don't think much of trust

Man it takes a silly girl to lie about the dreams she has
Lord it takes a lonely one to wish she had never dreamt at all

Oh Look now, there you go with hope again
But I'll be sure your secrects safe with me
Oh you're so sure
I'll be leaving in the end
Treatin me like I'm already gone

but I'm not
I will stay
where you are
always

I will stay
I will stay
I will stay
I will stay
I will stay
I will stay (oh look now, there you go)
I will stay (oh look now, there you go)
I will stay
I will stay (oh look now, there you go)

Tonight's been very thought-y, especially since conversation with Jody is so hard to do without including lots of thought-y thoughts. I was reminded yet again of how easy it is to forget how rapidly other people's lives move on simultaneously to your own, completely unaffected by you. You are irrelevant, kind of. At the same time, talking to someone with a vantage point mired in history serves to magnify how you've changed on a microscopic level that feels macroscopic to the person holding the magnifying glass. You're more adult, you're wiser, you've had all these thoughts that I've not heard or seen expressed, all these thoughts that influence your daily outlook; I'm more adult, I'm more confident, I've had all these thoughts that I've languished in contemplating without you there as my sounding board. You say you know yourself now more than ever before and I agree for myself. But at the same time it makes me sad to know that for every bit more that I know myself, it means I know you that much less.

And yet hearing your voice soothes my wandering soul and grounds me in the reality inherent in reaching out to a dear friend. Hearing your voice also makes me thirsty to climb out of my well and let D and H and JO and K's voices wash over my parched ears more often. I miss you guys. In that kind of way that makes me day dream about the last time we were together, the last conversation we had in person and what the first thing is we'll talk about when we see each other next (D - a joke about improved performance. H - a joke about improved performance. hehe) I especially am missing my IA right now.

How is it that parents serve as a mirror for the worst exaggerations of the impatient, selfish, unforgiving facets of your personality? They're the only two people in the world who I can love the most while pushing them as much as possible to test them, to be a jerk just because I can. Thanksgiving was satisfactory, but the magic of the holiday has been robbed from my idealistic imagination. Cooking the full spread's really not that hard. And the stresses a manufactured holiday create because societal morays dictate that the day go a certain way, that you feel and act a certain way, are just unnecessary. I'm on the verge of deciding that I'd much rather spend time with my parents on any random day than one with human-assigned, arbitrary importance.

Going east on West Esplanade, just within reach of the 17th St. canal's high concrete wall, I looked south onto Lake Ave. to see a healthy-looking, fluffy black dog meandering down the street. He was wandering in the truest sense of the word (can dogs be struck with wanderlust?) with a sense that he was taught to always have direction -- to be a dog for goodness sake (and dogs don't ask for directions) -- and yet he was desperately searching for his warm, food-filled home. He looked well-kempt, with a sleek, full coat and a gait marked by puppy training classes. Should I stop and get out of my car? It's not like my neighborhood is bad; I could safely check the dog for tags in the middle of the darkened street. An image of my mom's concerned face flitted across my mind's eye - she volunteers once a week at the humane society and has a soft spot for these sorts of things - what would she say if she knew I drove by a lost dog without doing something? What horrors are the dog's forlorn owners imagining right now? What would I have thought, how many tears would I have cried, if I had ever lost my yellow lab Sandi? How grateful would I have been to the kind, thoughful girl who had taken the chance to greet my perennially cheerful pup and call the telephone number on her collar's tag?

But instead, I'm standing at my living room's counter top, typing this. Wondering. Regretting. Pondering my own anthropomorhpism of the dog's situation: if I won't even stop my car to help this creature bred by humans for mankind's selfish enjoyment, what does that say for humanity's propensity to help each other? Ignoring my tendency to sweeping generalization, what does that say about my own compassion, my own willingness to reach out to someone else when I see them wandering, lost, on life's figurative road? In my guilt, I'm still not moving any closer to the door.

(I'm sorry!)

I've grown to appreciate the insane cyclic tendencies of my emotional throttling. Occasionally I worry that I'm too quick to attribute a swing in my emotions to "nature;" instead of brushing off my own relevancy, I should question why. Because otherwise my own frustration with my self builds up (why do I feel this way still? Shouldn't that cycle be over by now? Shouldn't I be happy again and not weighed down with this deep sad feeling?). I hate not knowing how to fix what's wrong because I can't pinpoint what that "wrong" is.

I'm excited to see my parents tomorrow, but mildly nervous at the same time. For the first time ever, they're coming to MY house. No pretending anymore. I'm no longer my parent's little girl, even though to them I probably always will be. But it doesn't feel fair anymore to be able to blame my development disfunctionalities on them because I'm an adult, expected to have grown out of any difficulties they inflicted on me by now.

I'm nervous that Thanksgiving isn't going to be what I always expect when I go home. I'm horribly sad inside (but trying to ignore it) that my family is so very small. By virtue of the people who will be here I will be reminded of who's NOT and how they're ALONE (grandma in FL too frail to fly here) or DEAD (everyone else) and how for my tiny gene pool the holidays don't really mean huge gatherings, they mean a typical nuclear family dinner with a slightly larger table spread. We've even taken the tradition out of the holiday by moving it to LA, so now there's nothing grounding me in my Thanksgiving except for the stupid matching turkey candle holders we put on the table every year.

Stupid turkey candle holders.

In the vicious cycle that is emotion, I move from sorrow about what is vs what is not to feeling guilty for being sad when I'm so lucky with what I do have.

I was reminded of a great conversation with Jonny this past summer, sitting outside his rented cabin on Conch Key (approx. 60 miles north of Key West, FL) post hockey games and splashing in the pool and just being mesmerized by the black sky and pinprick stars and word play; Jonny said that no one is truly unique, and yet that's what we're all stretching for. We're all trying to define ourselves in opposition to everything else that's out there, when in reality we're all basically the same (are there ever any new thoughts created anymore? or has ever unique idea already been explored?). We try so hard to be different when we derive the most comfort and share the deepest senses of humanity when we can identify something SIMILAR with someone else. I suppose I derive some comfort from knowing that the people around me are provoked into sadness by many of the same things common to our situations (broken city, limited social structure, etc. etc.) but I still manage to feel very much alone in my solitude and questioning and puzzling over how to change my situation when I don't fully know how I want it to change.

Know how you can lull your mind into numbing emptyness? That's what I've felt like for the past 2 weeks. And I reassure myself, it's part of the cycle. Don't worry, it'll change soon. I'm in the phase of avoiding conversations I already know, scrounching down into my little hole in the world, attempting for an obscurity I don't really want but am attracted to because it's just easier that way.

Eh, I'm doubly frustrated by not being able to express myself in words here what I feel like my mind is thinking; so while this post kind of almost makes sense to me, I can tell it's convoluted and rambling. Eh. Maybe it'll work better next time. And then again, this all just starts to feel so redundant and needlessly self indulgent.

I've stumbled across some pretty cool websites tonight, worth sharing:

Pandora
"Pandora has hired 30 musicians who have spent years analyzing 400 attributes of songs, like melody, rhythm and vocals. They’ve analyzed over 10,000 artists and 300,000 songs to date. Users pick a band or song to get started, and create a “channel” based on that type of music and which you can stream over their site in high quality audio. Over time, by telling Pandora whether or not you like a given song, the channel will evolve. You can share these channels with other Pandora users." -- from TechCrunch

What's especially neat about Pandora, and what makes it better than Yahoo's similarly free launchcast radio web-based application is that it plays artists that match your taste but that you likely haven't heard before; whereas Yahoo sticks with mainstream picks (or repeatedly plays the exact songs you've starred instead of searching to play songs similar to what you've indicated you like).

Equally cool (and what Pandora's technology works with) is the Music Genome Project

PaidContent.org
"Paidcontent.org is a news site covering the business of digital media and content."
I like sites like this that quickly update me on the "cool" new movements in internet content and capability. The site has effective links to find more information when you want it (a feature Slate and Wikipedia employ extensively; I really, really like this feature and its ability to lead you down a winding internet path otherwise unlikely to be created -- it allows me to feed my occassional ADD tendencies and follow the littlest things that capture my intrigue).

Side note: Twiki (a cousin of Wikipedia, I think, or the same development company) has been implemented with many success stories by big companies to facilitate communications and knowledge retention on big projects. I first heard of it through a random discussion board on my company's intranet (we don't use it, but there are whispers of future use). I think the underlying technology, and the day-to-day capabilities it provides to streamline information management are really cool.

A9.com
This is Amazon's new-ish (I have no idea when it came out, really) search engine to rival Google. As much as I like the ability to search different forums, the results become very cluttered and distracting. If the display format were changed a bit, I could see slowly switching away from being a die-hard Google-er.

The Great Google Wipeout
Fittingly, a story in Slate first started my stumbling link-to-link-to-link discovery tonight. It took me a paragraph or two to "get it" (I won't ruin the reading experience for you by giving a synopsis).

I don't understand Google Base -- what's the point? What makes it different and better (a trademark of Google technology, typically)? Upon first perusal, it seems like a less developed and more difficult to use amalgamation of ebay, google, and froogle.

Share cool sites you particularly enjoy (or that just made you go, "wow. who thought of that?!") and let's nerd it up all together.

It's still wierd, unnerving, unsettling, to drive home from a night uptown and be able to see remnants of the city's skyline in my rearview mirror while being surrounding by the pitch black, unelectrified, mangled-ness that is my next-door neighbor of Lakeview. There's this dichotomy of despairing destruction paralled by people trying to have fun and fulfill that human side of the nebulous process we've taken to calling "rebuilding." (check out Tom's pictures from driving around Lakeview 2 weeks ago)

Friday night Tommers, C-cup, and myself (pictures coming soon...get a preview in my just-created album on facebook) attempted to play Eduardo 32-ounce Hands at Tom's amazingly '70s apartment before going to some bars in Uptown with other friends. Most Walgreens in Florida have an attached liquor store, yet in my new wonderful city that has drive-thru daquiri places the Walgreens are liquor-less; so what should have been Edward 40 Hands was modified to fit what the only store (a gas station) on Power-David-Hickory-Dickory-Dock (in all seriousness, the road is named all of those words in a 3 mile span) had -- 32 ounce bottles. After I dropped one, though, I had to substitute 2 regular 16 ounce bottles.

I have no regrets about the college experience I enjoyed, but I'm wondering how different it would have been if I had lived like I do now, partying hard every week. And compared to most of my friends, what's "partying hard" to me is run-of-the-mill to them. I'm a novice, under the tutelage of some of the greats in having fun. I've learned more liquid games in the past 2 months than I did in 22 years.

We broke the city's 2 am curfew Friday, staying out until we were kicked out of the bar at 5 am. Our penalty was getting ripped off by the taxi, since he had to drive past the blockade to get back into the city after dropping us off and he was afraid of the marines. (It was crazy to see on our way out -- a real Army humvee armored car checking the IDs of incoming traffic) I made my first official non-work friend in a 23-year-old Marine who had just finished 7 months in Iraq after being in Afghanistan for a while. At some points in the conversation, I just didn't know what to say: how do you comfort a person who can't legally rent a car yet fights tears in a bar talking about his friends getting shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile? How do you assure him that you care, that there's a difference between being "liberal" and a "democrat" and "against war" and supporting his efforts and his desire to join the military to get an education and discipline? How do you have a discussion about patriotism versus pride in your country's legal ideals in the middle of a dirty, all-American bar? I wanted to hug Z and squeeze out every horrible memory and image of bleeding patriots singed into his mind, but I didn't. I didn't want to belittle the emotions he was sharing by trying to take them away.

Saturday C-cup and I joined some older co-workers (do married people ever hang out together, by the way? I never see people with their significant others and it seems strange to me) to watch college football. The rest of Fat Harry's was happy because LSU beat Ole Miss into the ground and then they became huge Georgia Tech fans when it became a real possibility that my beloved Yellow Jackets were going to win out over Miami, causing UM to drop their 3rd ranking in the BCS to allow LSU to move up. It was awesome to have people conratulate me for my victory -- that never happens for a Tech grad! Usually it's consolation from friends, not excited "wooooooo!!!!!"s What a great victory. Though we missed a few balls that should have been interceptions and were typically sloppy at some points, we still looked like a real football team for most of the game! :) GO TECH!!

I signed up tonight to participate in my first ever road race, something I've thought about doing for a while but haven't for a variety of reasons, timing, distance, in-shape-ness; I'm super excited and think it'll be especially cool because my parents will be here for the holiday so they'll cheer me on at the finish :)

Don't worry, Sarah, I promise I'm not going to interview at NASA next and move to Houston, now that I've started playing soccer and running in races hehe :) (oh, and we lost our second game this week, but I still had fun!)

Tom pointed out Friday that I hadn't posted in "nearly two weeks...fine, maybe 8 days" and gave me the following suggestions for topics that I feel like I should still address:

"how you fell in love on the platform
the story we're writing
your love of fried seafood
Calorie counting
how standardized tests are racial biased
only 20 more days of Robert
How candy bars have come back to the cafeteria
your giant piece of cake
thanksgiving with the flies"

First, going offshore last week was AMAZING (even better than the first time). I fell in love, as Tom noted, with the drilling rig and the smell of mud and being on a huge metal beast and the salty air and the funny operators and feeling necessary to something working and exploring and learning and! I can't decide which I want to do more, go offshore for my rotation or go abroad for a rotation. I let my mentor know how much I want to go off, but (for good reasons, I understand) I won't be able to until next year after my next training course in the Netherlands. *sigh*

I just got annoyed with myself for writing in here about a list -- yes, I want to record the memorable things that happen so I can look back and remember little things I'll probably forget made me laugh or smile, but I'm not thinking here enough, and that's what I enjoy most about this medium, this being able to postulate about life and potentially make someone else think something differently or with a new consideration, just like I what I read other blogs for. So enough listing.

I just killed a bug. With my bare hands.

(when I go to jail for an newly developed anger problem incited by all small things that buzz around my face, will you bail me out?)

Ok, seriously. Seriously. Bug Master, I'm going to need to you to get your troops to stop STOP doing this whole fly-around-and-die thing. Really. Because I've now cleaned my fridge twice in one month (more than we cleaned it in a year in room 207) and I'm really tired of scraping your brethren's guts into a trash can. Forget about the disinfecting process - I've already given up, deciding that if I've lived this long through you landing on my dinner and buzzing around my face, then my sealed food will be fine. The fridge does not need another dousing of lysol and bleach.

Speaking of, I'd really like to be able to buy fresh produce again. Soon. (please?) The only fruits and vegetables I can buy right now are of the prepackaged variety, in containers that will seal again once they're opened. Because you have this nasty habit of infesting anything of some interest to my stomach even when it's in a plastic bag (don't even get me started on leaving things to ripen on the countertop). So if it's disruption of my normal life you wanted, fine, YOU WIN. I concede defeat. NOW JUST GO AWAY. thanks.

ugh

So I joined a soccer team. Yep, me, Jen - the Jen whose buddy put up a post-it note next to his desk to tally the number of times I trip walking past his desk to get to mine. The Jen who face plants even when playing the sports she's GOOD at, like tennis. The very Jen who would rather duck from the ball, run AWAY from the ball, than chase after it (Jen's brain: who thought it was a good idea in the first place to run around kicking projectiles off the safe, safe ground into the air?? WHO??).

So this Jen played her first game today after prepping by buying cleats, shin guards, and soccer socks at Target and securing additional medical coverage on her health insurance policy. And Jen actually played for almost the whole game (minus about 5 minutes at the beginning of the second half; I love co-ed team rules when only 4 girls show up and there have to be at least 3 on the field) as the left-side defender. I was fierce. I was brutally unforgiving. I managed to get a "good job, Jen" from the goalie at one point, after stealing the ball away from the other team's offender. Yeaa-yerr! I had been all prepared to just pick flowers on the edges of the field, too!

The Hungry Hippos play their next game next Sunday, and I'm already pumped. I'm thinking about buying a real soccer ball to learn how to kick and control the ball during the week, but then I remembered that there's no green space in my area because I'm paying for it to be a dump site....stupid Katrina!

"It could be that all these developments are constitutional [i.e., exempting the CIA from laws against torture]. Maybe you can't enforce the U.S. Constitution in Poland. But the Constitution is not supposed to be just an obstacle course for officials who are trying to get around it. It ought to inspire policy even when it doesn't impose policy. Ditto the Geneva Conventions. Why would you even want to be clever about reasons it might not apply here or there? Nor is the Constitution supposed to be divvied up like patronage, with the First Amendment for liberals, the Second Amendment for conservatives, and so on.

Laws, including constitutions, are supposed to have sharp edges. Even without the help of clever lawyers, they define what is permissible in the process of defining what is impermissible, and they send a strong message that if it's not impermissible, it's OK. By contrast, a bone-deep desire to be left alone, a tolerance for eccentricity, a quick resentment of bullies—these are qualities that Britain has more than America, I think. And they may be more important."
--"A Tale of Two Constitutions; Britain, land of freedom" in Slate this week

Also: "I Want My Oil Yesterday; Why it takes so long to drill in Alaska"

You know you've had a great night in New Orleans when you barely have time to rush to F&M's in Uptown from the French Quarter before the city's curfew hour hits and you still manage to bite into some tasty tasty cheese fries stolen from a friend's basket (who you haven't seen in 3 months, stupid Katrina) since the kitchen refused your order citing the proximity of the curfew.

You know you've had a great night in the French Quarter when you incite the awesome lady piano player at the piano bar in Pat O's to play "Old McDonald" (...had a farm, e i e i oooo) AND get the whole bar to sing along while you're doing the hand motions for "a cluck cluck here" and "a cluck cluck there" because she didn't know the music for 50 Cent's "In Da Club" or "Sippin' on Gin and Juice" by Snoop Doggy Dog. You also know it's great when you get the waiters (who are my dad's age) to dance to "Hava Nagila" in a big circle.

You know it's a stranger night than normal in the French Quarter when there are as many miliary police officers and national guardsmen as there are party revelers and when you look around you there are a disproportionately larger than usual number of skeezy construction workers. In fact, they're ALL skeezy construction workers who don't understand, "No, we're lesbians, we don't want to dance with you" (which was C's motto for the night as I hugged her away from men with dry wall still under their nails and in their hair). The men we tried to inappropriately dance with, the national guardsmen -- hey, who can resist a man in uniform?! -- walked quickly away from us as we laughed hysterically.

I love the "small town" feeling of the New Orleans late-night scene (it was like this before the hurricane, too), how you always manage to meet up randomly with friends. And when you're having a good time, there's nothing like the joy of "Heeeeeaaaayyyyyy!!! I know you!!!" even when you've only met them a few times before. I like having "our" spots in the city (though that list was rather large, it has dwindled to the 3 places that are open now).

In other news, I got my hair cut yesterday and LOVE having short hair again. It just bounces on my shoulders and has some layers with long bang-ish things in the front.

Thanks Jen for continually educating me about cool technology :) A link to my site feed is now in the "notes" section of my sidebar. I'm about to google "site feed" because I still don't know what it actually does..... hehe

This has become one of my favorite times of the day: I've watched some TV at the gym (if I time it right, Good Eats followed by quality like Sex in the City or The O.C.), I'm scrubbed clean, and I've (hopefully) gotten everything done I wanted to for the day; all that's left is to ponder until I drift off to sleep.

At the end of the day I called my platform to schedule a trip offshore to walk out some new piping I'm working on, and now I'm going next week! Even on the phone I was already excited, my heart all a pitter-pat, ready to be terrified by a helicopter before spending 30 hours in the middle of the Gulf. I'm finally figuring out how my workload cycles, with what's becoming normal lulls and crests in quantity and challenge. I'm amazed by the responsibilty I've been given, and even more amazed by the ability I'm finding myself to have in solving real engineering problems. I know I've talked about this general sentiment before, but I have to share my surprise, again, about how applicable school has been so far. Oh, did I already mention how excited I am to go offshore next week?

Driving home from the gym my mind was caught up in making a list of errands to accomplish during my Friday off tomorrow. When I found myself focused on the long list of grocery items to purchase per Mrs. S's Thanksgiving Menu Shopping List, I was struck by the extravagence of it all, this whole Holiday Idea. Because, genuinely, what's the common theme of all American holidays, aside from the commercialism and family? Extreme hyperbole! We don't just have meals, we have HUGE FEASTS. Seriously, it's going to be my mom, dad, and myself at my house for Turkey Day and yet I'm cooking a turkey, Honey Baked Ham, green bean casserole, yams (with pineapple and marshmellow of course), pumpkin pie, pecan pie, brownies, and relish plate - and I might be forgetting some dishes here. FOR THREE PEOPLE! I'm not even going to go into Christmas extremism, but you get the idea - why do we require our holidays to qualify as such by virtue of their exorbitant nature?

I love, love, love the holidays, but when I was driving home and thinking about the sheer massive quantity of food I'm going to buy ingredients for tomorrow, all I could notice around me was the disparate damage shwooshing by outside my car windows. The smell of rotting was pushed out, there were no obvious signs of all the families with no possessions who've left the area, and in my little cacoon of greed and consumption I was oblivious, ignorant to the crying needs of the homeless, ravaged, and ignored.

So what to do? Put some of the money I would've bought food for my feast with towards relief efforts? Or donate food to a shelter? Or what? Just feel guilty? This is our trite "time for thanks," sure, but I don't want just the calendar's page to be my impetus to kind actions, they feel more fake or shallow that way. Ugh I'm such a broken record -- whether it's women raped in Sudan or hurrican relief or environmental conservation, I always get stuck on how much matters. How do my actions matter? So why bother? But if I try to do good, helpful things 'just because' are they then selfish because I'm doing them to feel good about myself and my actions to help the world? Does it matter if they're selfish so long as the actions help someone in some small way? I want to be altruistic, but I so easily lose sight of what altruism is.

I love comments, btw, friends. Thanks for your thoughts, that helped spark my own mind. :)

Lastly for tonight, a huge hug for D (can you feel it? right now?). You're not giving up on love - when you follow your heart you can never be giving up on love. I'm reminded of one of my absolute favorite quotes, from The Alchemist, something like, Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.

Boo, email is a dangerous thing when done tired.

This morning I went back to the Square to retrieve "items critical to business success" to bring back to the farm land; it was also my first trip downtown since coming back. The morning felt like the rough draft of a movie script, with a dense fog cloaking both sides of the interstate from view. I was tunneled into the Superdome area and the CBD, which looked surprisingly normal (aside from Poydras being squished into one lane each way for a stretch were signs reading "Falling glass!" shouted warnings from in front of a beat up office tower). Structurally, the city is fine. Windows everywhere could use some work. Being back made me realize again how much I fell in love with my office and downtown in general in those first few weeks. I missed my upside-down pictures and my ergonomic foot rest (I brought it back to RTC). I miss having my buddy next door instead of across a cubicle and not being able to hear Tom's phone when I call him from across the other side of the fake wall we currently have. It will make work a little easier to have my huge binders of process flow diagrams instead of piecing through them in online pdf files.

After getting our stuff out of the office, T, Buddy, and I drove through Lakeview (the area on the side where the canal broke that got horrrrrible flooding). With the fog still hanging heavily and the huge 30 foot wall of soaked, moldy household discards on the median, I expected to see men in biohazard suits and not just typical looking utility workers in orange safety vests. Most sobering of all was the almost cartoonish solemnity of the neon spray painted orange X's by every door. The top quarter of the X had a date and the right and bottom quarters had numbers for people trapped inside. In some places the Xs were almost at the roof, right above the dingy brownish/murky yellow line that striped the entire neighborhood - the flood's waterline. Those high Xs were made by men in boats. Boats.

One particular area that my mom and I ate at when she helped me move in a mere 9 (?) weeks ago was right on the Lake, with 4 restuarants, a park, and a large area with 15 sand volleyball courts. From the parking lot you wouldn't even guess there had been large structures at the site, because they were completely gone. No stray plywood haphazardly strewn about -- everything. Everything. Was. Gone. Completely, utterly, absotutely gone. There were also still national guardsmen in several areas we poked around, which is still disconcerting. Every house in the Lakeview area had 8 feet or so of water and every house will need to be completely gutted and rebuilt. Every one. When in the world is my city ever going to be normal again?

What physically, chemically makes words so seductive in my mind? How can a few well-chosen adjectives make me feel more inspired than any picture?

Last brief thought for the night, inspired by (sigh) The Real World: are people disposable? Can you use one for a little while, get bored of his or her features and no bad feelings move on? Is anyone actually capable of connecting with another person, physically or mentally, for a brief period of time and then completely forgetting them or easily brushing them off? Watching the show it seems like the answer is yes, with no problems - how, I wonder. I can't figure out how to put here the vague premonitions of thoughts my sleep brain is meagerly bubbling up, so I'll try again tomorrow (earlier.).

My friends here in New Orleans call me "Pathy" (full nickname: Pathy McFishActress, but the last name is a whole different blog entry-worthy story) because of my tendency to stay on the path and not stray from the straight and narrow when driving an electric golf cart. They chased geese and stole other players' balls, and I clung to that concrete path like it was my job (technically, as a caddy, it was). Sure I veered off a few times here and there to gleefully bounce over gnarled, exposed tree roots, but the extreme is what earns a nickname, right?

So it was no surprise when Friday afternoon we went to a Go-karting place in Baton Rouge and I exhibited more Pathy-worthy tendencies. Is it my fault I care about safety?

While waiting for our rag-tag pit crew to start our engines I asked, "do we get helmets or safety goggles?" (I wouldn't have asked for the safety goggles except for the large sign affixed above our starting point that clearly demanded, "YOU MUST WEAR HELMETS AND SAFETY GOGGLES") My esteemed mechanic's response? "Nope. Don't need 'em."

It's ok, I tried to tell myself, the hardcore go-karting place in the Netherlands only had us wear safety jackets, gloves, and helmets (with eye protection) because it was two stories with sharper turns and faster cars. We're outside in beautiful weather with palm trees lining the course and a friendly Comfort Inn parking lot on the other side of the course's fence. No problem! I'll admit it, my Pathy-nervous-wimpy side was screaming inside DON'T DO IT!

But I survived, and in the end I wished for some eye protection just because the engines sputtered so much and the tires spit up every particle on the road, so I drove blind for most of the way to prevent my eyes from being gouged with dirt and tar specks. It was a good time and incredible to see my 6'3" buddy crammed into the tiny plastic shell of the car.

Talk about HSE concerns - I think I might be harboring the next insect-carried disease pandemic in my house (Malaria had to start somewhere). My previous struggles against pesky flying bugs was to no avail, and I'm being overrun again. With their constant presence (and now in every room of the house, not just the kitchen), I vascillate between trying to accept them as the household pet I never knew I always wanted and hating every single hairy leg sprouting off their abdomens, wanting to scream in frustration, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE. And it's not for lack of trying - I spent hours today scrubbing any potential sources of buggish home; my kitchen is disinfected, as are my two bathrooms. My fridge is yet again a mortuary, though, and I feel like singing a dirge everytime I open the door to see the body count of the fallen rise.

The problem is escalating, too, with the identity of my enemy evolving. No longer am I just waging war against small fruit fly-gnat-small black specks, I'm now forced into battle with larger, scarier looking bugs who look professional. They know what they're doing in my house and how to best avoid being squashed. Where the black specks whizzed around aimlessly and were just kind of annoying because they had no rhyme or reason to their air dances, my new foes have a purpose and direction that drives them to dive bomb whatever I'm eating. Or preparing to eat. I had to fish one such bugger out of my peaches tonight after dinner. I'm starting to worry for my own health (and judgment capabilities) when I went along happily eating my contaminated peaches. Or when I find it normal to eat with one hand while continuously swatting the air with my other.

If my house is as clean as it can get and I'm still losing to these insects' geometric reproduction cycles, how can I expect them to DIE until my neighborhood is cleaned up? Because I'm sure the festering, rotting piles of poo all around my condo building aren't helping the situation.

I found this rather serendipitously, on an old lab mate's lj,

comment with your name and I'll
1. respond with something random about you.
2. tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. pick a liquor i'd take a shot of with you.
4. say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. ask you something that I've always wondered or liked about you.
8. If I do this for you, you should post this on your journal (eh, I don't really care about this one. do whatever you want.)

Look, I've done one meme and now I can't stop. I just learned this new usage of "meme," by the way, which I haven't heard since I read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins back in freshman english. Did my usage sound authentic? hehe

I AM A WOMAN!! (hear me roar?)

Granted, you might have known that already. But today I graduated into REAL womanhood - I wore these new Steve Madden shoes, bought in Atlanta this past weekend, to work today with my normally-too long jeans, so that the hem of the jean just brushed the floor and the rounded toe of the shoe peaked out. Me, in moderately-heeled shoes. At my real life job. I'm so hip. Don't worry, I'm still the same person inside and will be back to my Birks and sneakers tomorrow.

Fluids always has been my favorite subset of ME (that's "potions" to the younger Shaw), and only partially because I wanted to adopt my professor as my third grandfather (oh Dr. S, you were so cool). Today I got to calculate head loss and flow rates galore, finding pipe length equivalents and Cv and oh my! It was neat to being doing something that was such a clear, direct application of something I learned in school (and to find that with a little prompting and thought, I even remembered the theory behind it, and not just the calculations to solve). As helpful as school was in doing the job I am now, the most valuable skill I seem to apply most often to get work done is my ability to use the internet. You can fix any oil problem with the help Google. Seriously -- at a group meeting this week, someone asked a question of the rest of the team if anyone had encountered that particular problem before or was familar with common solutions, and when no one spoke up, the group lead said "Google it." Yes. I love billion dollar company's solutions to problems their engineers don't know right away.

In other news, I HATE THE JEFFERSON PARISH WATER DEPARTMENT. 'Hate' is a very strong word. I realize this, and intend for the word to carry its full weight. HATE. Ugh, now I feel bad and overjudgemental because the woman I spoke to on the phone was really nice, so I'll go with mildly disdain. I MILDLY DISDAIN THE JEFFERSON PARISH WATER DEPARTMENT.

Local government billing departments (parish = county for you non-Louisianans) are understandably LOST after this whole hurricane mess. I understand. But you charged me $3.73 for the voluntary recycling program I signed up for, AND HAVEN'T EVEN MANAGED TO PICK UP MY REGULAR HOUSEHOLD TRASH. IT'S IN A HUGE PILE, ALONG WITH THE DRYWALL, BEER BOTTLES, AND ROTTING POO OF MY 5 OTHER CONDO NEIGHBORS. The parish website says that recycling services have been stopped until further notice, which is FINE -- there's too much dead body-mutilated house-rotting stench trash in this city to worry about rinsing my half gallon milk jug -- but don't nickel and dime me for it! Then again, the recycling debacle is nothing compared to my compulsory payment for Lafreniere park ($2.26), which I didn't even know EXISTED, not to mention that it's currently being used as a TRASH DUMP. I'M PAYING FOR A GREEN-SPACES TRASH DUMP -- that I'm not even using because YOU AREN'T PICKING UP MY TRASH.

It's the moral here, not the measly $6. I wanted answers and to have my frustrations heard (even if Betty Sue on the other end of my nicely-said tirade just told me, "I'm sorry ma'am, you're going to have to call these other two numbers to find out. We're just the collection agency"). So I waited 58 minutes on the phone, said my piece for 3, and haven't gotten around to calling the other two numbers she gave me. And my trash is slowly growing legs of mold that I'm hoping will walk the whole pile to stupid Lafreniere park.

I'm off to the gym to run while watching this season's premiere of the OC. I can't wait to be an average TV-watching American who has a weekly routine of watching one particular show. I've tried to play this game before, though, and I suck at remembering every week. And I thought I was so good at routine, too. Ugh.

Oh! One more thing - did you know that carrots were originally dark, dark, dark and the Dutch genetically got the random African orange strain to dominate as an homage to their royal family? Check it out: about ten lines down (I love Alton Brown :))

Why is it that the majority of my male friends are better at relating and talking about their feelings than I am? They can specify what hurts them and what makes them scared in the five minutes it takes me to figure out how to wrap my verbal skills around whatever it is floating around in my head, neverminding the uncomfort and immaturity I feel when trying to then convey it to someone else. Intellectually, I'm 22. Physically, I'll give myself 19 (22 with my hair down and a smidge of mascara). Emotionally, I'm a barren twelve-year-old.

Knowing how to identify what I'm feeling, and why, is a fine skill that I don't quite have down; it takes a professional who knows the right questions to ask to get it out of me. Back in the spring, when my emotional energies were so clearly focused on not freaking out about possibly having multiple sclerosis amid trips to the neurologist, it was easy - I was dealing with something specific, I had support, and I trusted that support and their genuinity (is that a word?) -- Dr. Shippey had to care. It was her job. I had a reason to need support. I had a reason to lean on someone else.

But now, when there's nothing clearly wrong and I have every reason to be lost in happiness and security, it's difficult to trust why someone would care what was going on in my life. So I stay gaurded, fearful that I don't really understand how I feel so why bother trying to explain my unknown to someone else? Especially when I have no clue where to even start or what words to use to get me there. I know, friends are friends because they care, blah, blah, you have to share with others for a fully balanced friendship, blah, blah, I know people care about me and don't care how confused I am it's just the process of sharing that counts. I don't want to be a burden when other people have more pressing, real things to be worried about.

But I honestly don't know what to share - that I'm absolutely terrified of meeting someone who I really, really like because I won't know how to give to them what they give to me? Or that I'm absolutely terrified about hurting someone again the way I already have? I'm absolutely terrified that I don't know how to understand my own heart when it comes to this stuff - I've buried it so far down to prevent myself from being sad that I've lost it and don't know how to trust or feel it again. I'm scared of being rejected. I'm afraid of not being rejected and messing things up. I'm worried that my own mistrust for myself will prevent me from trusting the people around me. So I'm closed off, because for right now it's just easier that way.

Tonight Jody said that he thinks love is logical, in that you decide to love someone else or to let them love you. But I want to know how you actually do the act of deciding to love someone else? How do you know you're falling in love with somone, that it's worth trusting more and more and giving more and more? Because it happened accidentally last time and I never knew it was happening until it was too late. Sometimes it just seems easier to think about being selfishly alone forever. I've never been one to take the easy, less challenging way out, but there's just something about this genre that I can't handle or understand. I'm such a confident, strong willed and strong minded person when it comes to school or work or personal ability or other Life stuff, so this dichotomy is all the more distressing to me. Ugh.

I wish Love could be in a computer language that I could code, I could dissect and piece back together in a more sensical way. I write some simple math, like

love(time)=boy+girl
boy=constant
girl=constant

relationship=boy(y) + girl(x),
where x, y=effort

Or something. Anyway, to something I do understand. Which is that I'm nervous about my first physical since my G.B. diagnosis (here or here) in April - I know that nothing's wrong and it doesn't matter or affect my life anymore, but it's still scary to go back to the doc when the last time I was poked repeatedly with a intramuscular needle thing that measured my nerve responses to electric shocks. Hopefully I'll be able to extend my record 2 blood withdrawals without fainting.

Oh! If anyone has been tempted to come visit me in New Orleans (it'd be fun!), Airtran has a sale right now until Nov 10. Pretty cheap flights from Fl and Atl.... hint hint :) (and to Cali, so Jonny I'll be calling you soon :))

Goodnight, World!