Izzard!

My fellow Eddie Izzard fan, Kim, led me to this silliness:


Which Izzard Are You?

Kid Izzard: You still find a way to look at life in an innocent way, even though those around you marvel at your naive opinions. But the world wasn't made just for the grown-ups around you, so dodge your subway fare and get the most out of life!

Given the last post, I think this is most appropriate...

Two

Almost done...

I bid farewell to the first of my film buddies today...remember the name Jeremy Latcham, because he's gonna go out and kick ass and take names. He's a good guy who works his ass of, and mark my words, he'll rule Hollywood someday.

I was joking with him that by the time this happens, he'll be talking to an aged Reese Witherspoon and offering everyone cocaine, but I think he really could do it. He's got his shit together, quite a bit more than anyone I know.

It's very weird saying goodbye to someone you're not sure you'll ever see again. I hate Los Angeles, and I'm going to do everything in my power to avoid moving there, so I don't think my chances of running into him professionally again are too high.

Someday I may see him on Entertainment Tonight, talking about how his studio has just had its first billion-dollar opening weekend (don't laugh, it'll happen sooner than you think). But it's sad to think this is the last time he's gonna be around when a bunch of us film nerds go and get plastered.

At least until the Reunion. Then whoever's not in AA will go out and get plastered, and everyone else can have an AA meeting.

I stopped into the Best Western bar, where my friend Eric works, on the way home, since I looked in the window and it was completely empty except for him. I ended up talking to him about graduating for about half an hour while I lit every match in the pack sitting in front of me.

The Sheryl Crow reference didn't even hit me until after I left.

And now that I may be leaving soon, I don't know when the next time I'll see him is. You never know the last time you're going to see someone will actually be the last. If you think it's the last, you'll inevitably run into each other as whoever is leaving is heading for the airport.

I'm a hell of a lot more scared of graduating than I'd like to admit. Maybe that's why my job search feels so half-assed, although the job market hasn't particularly been too hot. Everyone talks to me about being excited, and I should be.

I'm relieved, that's for fucking sure. I can't take another day of school without killing something.

But excited? It's tough to be excited when you have no idea what you're doing with your life. I give people advice to go with the flow, and I do it, and look what happens to me: I have no idea where the fuck this flow is taking me.

Something will come up, that is inevitable. Maybe it'll be some dumb receptionist job, maybe it'll be third shift answering middle-of-the-night customer service calls for some random company, or maybe I'll actually get to be an engineer.

But right now, all I want is something to hold on to, and that's the only thing I don't have.

Which is why I'm doing the only thing I really know how to do: I'm picking up my guitar and ripping off strings until I feel like I know what I'm doing again. I may not actually have a clue, but I want my fucking confidence back.

And when I have that, then I'll be excited.

Deadarm

Oh wait, an actual story!

I got my flu shot today, since I had to go pick up a prescription at Searle and there were about 4,000 signs saying GET YOUR FUCKING FLU SHOT, and I thought, "Huh, maybe I should get my flu shot..."

I got one freshman year, right as I was getting over some really disgusting bronchitis, and got mild flu from it. So sophomore year, I decided not to, and of course, got a really nasty, don't-feel-like-getting-out-of-bed-for-four-days flu.

I hate getting shots, partially because of the needle, but mainly because I'm unusually susceptible to deadarm.

Deadarm is that weird feeling you get in your arm when you get a shot, when it suddenly becomes very noodly and you can't really control it quite as well as you'd like. Though most people only get it from a couple of shots, I get it from everything.

The worst was the Hepititis B vaccine...you have to get three shots for that one, and every time, I couldn't feel my arm for 2 days. Tetanus is what I recall being second worst, with the same two-day period, just not repeated thrice within a year.

Today was fun, because I went to stop by a bake sale that some of my friends in Rainbow Alliance were running to try and raise money to send a group to the Alphabet Soup Conference, and I had to try and hold cookies and a brownie in my left hand without dropping them. That was entertaining.

Well, it was entertaining to me, at least. To them it probably just looked like I was holding cookies and a brownie. However, they didn't see me go to scratch my eyebrow outside as I was walking back to my bike and almost poke myself in the eye.

Now that would have been funny.

Dove sono io?

I added a little location thingy to the blue bar, since my location is about to become rather impermanent over the course of Winter Break, so I figured I should at least do y'all the courtesy of letting you know where the fuck I've run off to.

And now to bed, before my hands freeze off.

Three

I had my last class in college...ever!...today.

Fittingly, I fell asleep.

I need to be done with school because I just have absolutely no motivation anymore, and it's seeped over into other parts of my life, which is what's really starting to bother me.

I don't have the motivation to get up and go out (granted, that may have something to do with the fact that it's fourteen goddamn degrees), I don't have the motivation to get things done that need to be done, and I don't have the motivation to care.

It's gotten somewhat annoying lately, but now, I guess, is the time for me to have the weight of school lifted from my shoulders. We'll see if it does any good...

Someone is clearly going to hell for this...

Martin Luther bobblehead dolls (courtesy Obscure Store).

For Linz

Lindsay asks if people joking about the heat when it's unbelievably cold is a DC thing.

My reply as a D.C. native: No Linz, it's not a D.C. thing, it's a clinically insane people thing. However, since D.C. has way more than its fair share of clinically insane people it seems like a D.C. thing.

The dirty litte secret of our nation's capital is that most people don't stay in the area more than 5 or 6 years, if that. Some because they can't stomach it, a whole hell of a lot because their politically dependent jobs have evaporated with the next election.

So anything that initially seems like a D.C. thing can almost always be blamed on something else, because the vast majority of people in D.C. are not D.C. people, they're just interlopers pretending to be such.

Ok, rant off. For now...

Four

Still exhausted and nothing much new to report, but I did want to confirm the onward march of time. Hurrah!

Five

I won't subject you to much more tonight, since the damn thing didn't post yesterday, plus I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I want to go to bed.

However, I thoroghly enjoyed this article, which I found through Obscure Store, where vast amounts of time can be wasted by all.

Five more days (after today) til I'm done...forever....

More Family Fun

Fun vignettes not included in the mega-long Hannugivmas post below:

singing

My mom singing the first four bars (without words) of "Yellow Submarine" over and over and over until I just about killed her. I can't tell if she's aware that she does this or not, but she only sings the first four bars of the song, and repeats. Never the chorus, or any other part.

Drives me apeshit.

glastonbury

Getting lost going to Glastonbury. My grandma purported to know where she was going, but unfortunately, she's getting to the age where that's not always a reliable indicator of whether someone actually knows where they're going, particularly if they're as stubborn as my grandmother.

Problem #2 is that my mom has no sense of direction whatsoever. To say her sense of direction is like that of a doorknob would, alas, be an insult to doorknobs everywhere. So we ended up stopping to ask for directions, which was a smart move, because we would have ended up in Rhode Island at the rate we were going.

We ended up eating lunch around 4pm (when we left the house around 2) and not getting back to the house until literally 2 minutes before our ride was supposed to get there to take us to the airport. And he had already been there for 5 minutes by the time we showed.

eek

The other fun thing from that trip was my mom spacing and just following the car ahead of her instead of actually watching the turn light (which the guy in front of her shouldn't have turned through anyway) and almost getting us hit by two cars, one for me, one for grandma.

I brought this up with her later, as it scared the shit out of me, and she had the nerve to say "All's well that ends well."

Right, and what would she be saying if these people hadn't been able to stop for whatever reason and my grandma and I ended up in the damn hospital? She wasn't on the side of the car with these people coming straight at her. I do wonder about her sometimes...

earring

My aunt Louise putting my mom up to giving JJ (Louise's 67 year old, very square husband) an earring and certificate for free ear piercing. The look on JJ's face was absolutely priceless.

This came when Louise visited her old college roommate Sheila (who is actually the former Deputy Director of Counterintelligence at the FBI) and seeing Sheila's husband Walter's fresh ear piercing.

However, Walter's not quite JJ's age, and doesn't have 13 (soon to be 14) young grandkids who like pulling on everything they can get their hands on. Louise got a good laugh out of it, and managed to convince JJ that my mom is even more nuts than he already assumed her to be.


That's everything I can think of right now. I'm sure my cousin Mark will read this and refresh my memory with more ridiculousness at some point, but I think that should hold the rest of you for now.

One Week!

I am officially done forever with college in one week! My last final is Monday night from 7-9.

...Still hasn't hit me yet.

Hee

I had to throw this in, it was too good to resist:

I went to check my email one last time before turning off the sweet sweet internet, and I see 2 new messages. One is just something random, the other is what catches my eye. It looks something like this:

From: Laura (The Ex)
Subject: sex part II

It turned out to be a message to the whole Rainbow Alliance listserv telling people about a sex toy workshop (the second in a series), but it certainly gave me a bit of a start when I first read it.

Of course, I realized immediately I knew this was not what it appeared to be, since a) we no longer particularly speak and b) I'm not that desperate (yet), and from what I've heard, she shouldn't be. Ah, the joy of still living in the same little bubble as your ex...

But it was quite amusing, at least after getting over the minor heart attack it initially induced.

Hannugivmas

WARNING: Excruciating detail within.

That would be a combination of Hannukah, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I was also considering Chrigivukkah and Thankstmukkah, but I figured the above was the proper word.

So, my trip to Connecticut to visit my mom and all her relatives. Where I still am, by the way, but I'll get to that in a bit.

After getting dropped off at Midway by Mark, who agreed to do so because I offered to lend him my car in exchange, I ended up in the most ridiculous line at security. I mean it was Thanksgiving day, and it took me half an hour. Pure insanity.

I managed to pass out even before the plane took off, which made my flight nice and stress-free. This was not to be a harbinger of the weekend.

My mom picked me up from the airport, and we went back to my grandmother's house and had a nice(!) Thanksgiving dinner. My grandma has apparently started taking both prozac and some new arthritis medication, both of which have done significant good in the effort to make her more agreeable.

I tried to watch the Redskins-Cowboys game, but the triptophan (or however the fuck you spell it, the turkey drug) defeated those efforts, and I only got to watch the 'Skins fold like a cheap card table during the fourth quarter.

Friday we didn't leave the house because (gasp!) it snowed. My grandmother hates driving even when it's sunny, and my mom will not go if there is a bloody flake on the road, and neither of them trusted me to drive grandma's car in the snow, so we stayed home, watched TV, and read.

The main problem I have staying at my grandmother's house is sleeping. She has a fold-out couch in her den, but the mattress is so old and decrepit that the bar of the couch that's supposed to hold the mattress up in the middle simply pokes me in the back.

I tried solving this problem by simply sleeping on the couch part, but the problem with this solution is that the couch is about a foot shorter, lengthwise, than I am, thus making it quite difficult for me to sleep without turning my back into a knot.

I managed to find half a solution last night by just dumping the couch cushions onto the floor and sleeping on them, but it was still far from an ideal sleeping arrangement. I tried to put on a happy face to my grandma, since she's got enough to deal with, but my mom asked if I was comfortable, and I had to say no.

I've been granted a reprieve this evening onto the futon in my aunt Louise's basement (and also the computer in her basement, so I'm typing this up before I go back to Ev,IL and actually have shit to do, like, you know, study for finals).

I've read three books in four days, which will be working its way up to four if I have insomnia tonight anywhere near as bad as I have the last couple of nights.

The Christmas/Hannukah portion of everything taking place at this point is about 98% my fault, since because of custody issues with my mom and my dad, I get Thanksgiving with one and Christmas with the other, so I celebrate Christmas/Hannukah whenever I come to Connecticut, whether it's the appropriate time of year or not.

The rest of my relatives wait for their gifts from each other, since they all live in Connecticut and can deal, but mom and I get our gifts now.

The process is really the thing that drives me the most insane. Everyone gets all their gifts passed out to them, and then we go around opening them from oldest to youngest. But we don't just open them. No no, that would be far too simple for this family.

Each person opens their present, holds it up for all to see, and everyone goes, "Ooooh!" Normal so far, right? Then the gift is passed around so each member of the party can individually inspect it, and it must be returned to its rightful owner before the proceedings can...proceed.

This is why it took almost three hours to go through about three dozen presents for the entire group combined.

I'm certainly not complaining about getting gifts, I just think there might possibly be a way to do it in a somewhat more efficient fashion.

Anyway, I came out pretty well, getting a couple books I wanted and some nice sweaters and such. Everyone always gets at least one head-scratcher every year, and mine this year was a gift from my cousin Mark's parents, who gave me a Florida State beach towel.

I go to Northwestern. I have never once professed to liking Florida State. There's a possibility that maybe they confused the Florida State Seminole logo with the 'Skins logo, but otherwise, I can't think of any other plausible explanation, especially because it said FLORIDA STATE in great big letters on the towel, which you'd think would be a dead giveway.

The other fun family trivia bit was my mom's gift to me of Christopher Buckley's No Way To Treat A First Lady, which I had caught her reading earlier (I had specifically asked for it). This lead to a story I hadn't heard before that really reveals exactly how insane my family really is.

Apparently, there is a longstanding tradition on my mom's side of the family of reading books before giving them as gifts.

This tradition was so ingrained, in fact, that when my uncle Harry was dying back in 1996, and my uncle Kevin gave him the (at the time) new Tom Clancy novel, Harry automatically asked him, "So, how is it?"

When Kevin replied that he hadn't yet read it, Harry (who had been in and out of the hospital for four years at this point) reportedly made a joke to the effect of, "Boy, I'm really screwed this time, aren't I?"

What can I say? I guess we Leonards have a morbid sense of humor, although Harry, bless his soul, really did outdo us all with that one.

So after that family joyousness, we returned to my grandmother's for a delicious, nutritious meal of Franks and Beans, and for me to try out my couch-cushions-on-the-floor sleeping arrangement.

Jamie (my freshman year roommate and future roomate of Jon, for those just tuning in) had called me to say she was also going to be in West Hartford, since her grandparents live here, too. She's been in New York City all quarter, so we decided to go out to breakfast this morning.

She said she was going to come by at 9:30, so I made the brilliant move of setting my alarm not only for an hour late (since I hadn't changed the time zone on my Palm Pilot, and shut up, it's a useful device) but for the next day. I had to bolt downstairs in my pajamas to let her in so she wouldn't freeze while I threw some clothes on.

We went to Friendly's, which is a nice little restaurant chain up here in New England, and got pancakes and such. We were pointed into Friendly's by a rather crazy and/or drunk man, who I was surprised to see at 9:30am in West Hartford, which is normally populated by people whose average age hovers somewhere around 79.

It was nice to be able to catch up, and it sounds like she's been having fun in New York City, despite some slightly batty roommates. It was fun going through and catching her up on the gossip ("WHO has a [insert appropriate gender here]friend?!") and such. It'll be nice to have her back.

After a nice little nap, I went out and saw Far From Heaven with my mom and my aunt, and realized exactly how big a film nerd I've become, especially because I was able to explain a lot about Douglas Sirk to two people old enough to have seen his movies in first-run theaters.

And finally, I came back to my aunt's house and watched my first full episode of The Sopranos. Yes I know, I'm a horrible film major for not rushing out and watching the DVD's when they came out. I just never got around to it.

I had to have my aunt explain who most of the people were, but it was fairly entertaining. Now that I'm poised to be an unemployed lazy ass for a while, I think I'll have to watch some of those to pass the time.

So that's been my trip so far. I'm due to leave tomorrow, but I've been told that major snow is expected in Chicago tomorrow. Predicitons range from 3-7 inches on the high side to 1-3 on the low side, so hopefully I will not be sleeping in the Hartford airport tomorrow (sweet Jeebus, no!).

I consider this a good trip, though, despite wanting to snap from having a smile plastered on my face all week.

My mom only asked me once if I was seeing anybody, only one of my relatives asked how my job search was going (mostly because I think mom warned the rest of them), and nobody besides mom pressed me on whether I was seeing anyone. My mom even complimented me on how much better I was being this trip than I was when I was there for Christmas last year.

I did have to point out that last year a) I was in the process of having my heart broken, so I wasn't really up for plastering on the smile and b) my grandmother was in significantly more pain then, so it made it harder for either of us to put up with the other's crap.

As much as I bitch, I can safely say it certainly could have been worse.

And that's as much as I ever hope for with a trip to Connecticut.