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Friday Fun! (Inception and General Busyness)
Just a quick check-in today my lovely readers. It’s a busy Friday!
I had a lovely week in spite of the rain at the beginning. I actually found the cooler weather to be a nice relief, both to me and to my electric bill! I went to see Inception this week, and while my friend and I would have had fun watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt in pretty much anything, the movie itself is truly great! I loved following the plot during it, then thinking out all the possibilities after. (I might possibly have lost some sleep doing just that). I also really enjoyed the soundtrack. I believe it’s by the same composer who did The Dark Knight. In any case, it’s just as powerful.
I finished my final project for my summer session online class, although I still have a bit of forum discussion left to do before it’s officially over at the end of this week. Naturally, my fall online class starts earlier than Simmons–this week to be exact, so I’m getting a bit of an overlap. I have a scheduling strategy though, so thus far I’m not too stressed about it. This semester is my final semester of my MLIS program, and I’m going to be so incredibly happy to be done. I’m not looking forward to my face-to-face class at all. It’s cataloging, which I’ve put off for last for a reason. (I really hate the technical services aspect of librarianship), but it needs to be done, so I’m planning on grinning and bearing it, haha.
Two of my friends are also moving this week, so I’ve been helping them when I can. Last night they crashed at my place as they had a one night apartment gap. This weekend I’ll be cooking a special dinner to help ease the stress for them and also helping clean their previous apartment in preparation for the security deposit check by the landlord. It’s busy, but it’s always nice hanging out with them, even if it is working on something or just them sleeping on my couch. (I have a couch that’s very disproportionately large for my apartment. It’s amazing).
How about you guys? Has the busyness of fall started to catch up with you or are you still in summer relaxation mode? What are your stress management strategies?
Friday Fun (The Hill)
I’ve mentioned previously that in spite of an intense desire to be athletic, I am not, nor have I ever been. I’m not talking about fit or in shape; I’m talking about that ability to just run up a hill or jump into a basketball game and not get hurt or…well, you get the picture. Even at my most fit, when I routinely biked at least 15 miles a day and had rock-hard abs, I still got hit in the face with the ball playing backyard volleyball. Heck, even when I would go running I certainly didn’t look good doing it. When it comes to fitness, I am not gracefully athletic. I am awkward.
Anyway, as part of my bid to get back in shape and relieve my anxiety and do good things for the planet, I’ve been biking to work. Well, not all the way to work. I can’t make it that far yet. It takes two city buses to get to my job, so I’ve been biking to the bus connection, which luckily is just about half-way to work. I live partway down one side of a very large hill. In the mornings, I have a nice, gradual slope up for a couple of blocks followed by around five blocks of downhill easy awesomeness. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
In the evenings, I hit the hill at the end of my ride. It’s like a giant middle finger taunting me about how much easier this all would have been if I’d just taken that second bus today. I’ll be riding along, feeling pretty fit and great, passing all the cars stuck in stand-still traffic and happy in the knowledge that I’ve cut my commute time nearly in half. Then the landmarks start popping up to remind me that the evil hill is nearly upon me. Now this hill is not just a hill. The top of it also happens to consist of a bridge, and bridges in Boston for some unearthly reason are narrower than the roads, which means cars that used to be arms-length away are suddenly at your elbow. And this isn’t a pretty bridge over a river or a gully or anything. No, no, it’s over the lovely commuter traffic on the Pike (translation: interstate, highway, Autobahn with a speed limit).
So, I’m at the end of my ride, tired, hungry, sweaty, and there’s the hill. I dutifully switch down a gear, but something’s fucked up in my bike’s gears and it won’t catch when I go down from 6 to 5. I have to go 6 to 5 to 4 then back up to 5 for it to catch. This makes me wobble for a moment in a way that makes the cars near me worry that I’m about to tip over into them. (This is a fair concern as I did tip over into a car once when I was in highschool, but that’s another story). Anyway, so after the wobbling, I try to regain my speed, generally to no avail. And there I am, moving at a pace that eventually becomes so slow that pedestrians are passing me and giving me that “Why don’t you just get off and walk the bike?” look. No matter how many gears I’ve moved up since starting this project (5, thank-you-very-much). No matter how much faster I get. No matter what, this hill is always just as difficult, and I always reach a near stand-still at the top of it.
It just refuses to get any easier. It refuses to stop making me look like an out-of-shape loser. In a way, this hill reminds me a lot of my anxiety. I want to just breeze through the day perfectly happy and not conjuring up new things to worry about and not get stuck in a loop of obsessive thoughts. I want to get up that hill looking powerful and athletic. But no matter what I do, no matter how I start the day, no matter how many times I tell myself this is going to be an awesome day and I’m going to do the right things and I’m going to treat the people I care about with the peaceful trust and respect they deserve, I still wind up sitting at home or in my cubicle at work with a racing heart and panicky thoughts powerhousing through my head.
My anxiety is just like that hill. It makes me look like an idiot and makes me feel real shitty about myself, but nothing I do seems to make me able to conquer it. And yet, I get up each day and say “today is going to be the day I beat that goddammed hill.” And that’s what I say every day about my anxiety too. Someday I am going to power through the ride and realize at the end of it that that hill felt non-existent, and someday I’ll be at the end of the day and realize that my anxiety is non-existent too.
Friday Fun! (Exercise and Zombies)
Hello my lovely readers! I hope you all had lovely weeks and are enjoying your Augusts. Remember that scientific studies have proven that you’re more likely to have a bad Friday the 13th if you believe in the curse, so just don’t believe it. ;-)
I’ve had a busy, but fun week. As a way to try to strategize against my anxiety until my doctor’s appointment next month (where I’m hoping to finally get some anti-anxiety meds), I’ve been seriously increasing the amount of physical activity in my week. If I’m exhausted then maybe I’ll be too tired to be anxious, eh? Well, it worked in uni anyway. So I started doing the 30 Day Shred
One of my pepper plants is blooming! But the blooms tend to wither up after one day and die. I have no idea if this means I’ll be getting peppers or not. Are the blooms supposed to whither? Anyone know?
So I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the increasing zombie trend. (If you haven’t heard much about it yet, trust me, you will be). Where is this obsession with a global pandemic coming from? I think maybe, on some level, everyone knows that the way we’re going right now isn’t sustainable. We have too many people using too many resources. A key element of a lot of the zombie lit is that it wipes out the population to a sustainable level, and the survivors are forced to return to the ways of our ancestors–growing their own food, going to sleep when it’s dark out, being physically active, etc… So people clearly know that two of the main issus are overpopulation and over-use of resources, and yet most people do little to nothing about it. What used to be a key element of our survival as a species–the instinct to reproduce as much as possible–is now our downfall. Whereas we used to lose a lot of people in childhood (seriously, as a history major I can tell you, kids were so disposable, some families named all the boys the same name because statistically only one would survive. It was that bad), now you pretty much have a really good shot at living a long, healthy life as long as you live in a western nation. And of course there’s that problem on top of the overpopulation problem. We currently have plenty of resources, but they’re unevenly distributed. I’m not saying there’s something wrong with there being some variance in the levels of comfort, but it’s so incredibly wrong that we have some people with multiple million dollar homes and an entourage they pay for and clothes that cost thousands of dollars while other people are living on the street or in dirt huts or are starving to death. And the thing is, I think everyone knows that the world is fucked up, but we’re tired and we’re beaten down, so we just figure the world is coming to an end, may as well have fun imagining it. My friends and I started talking about whether banding together to fix things was possible or if it’s just too late. One of my friends thinks it’s just too late. I’m inclined to agree with her. I think there’s just too many people who would rather live in happy ignorance than face the facts they know and make drastic changes to fix it. Of course, that’d be a lot easier if so much of the population weren’t debt slaves…., but that’s another rant for another post.
Anyway, so that’s what’s been going on here this week! Lots of physical activity and lots of philosophical discussions, lol. Oh also, I bet you’ve figured out by now that there’ll be a review of a zombie book next week. Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know which one. ;-)
What do you guys think about zombie lit? Where’s the popularity coming from?
Happy weekends!
Friday Fun! (Being in Your 20s)
Hello my lovely readers! Sorry for the relatively small number of posts this week, but I do hope you enjoyed them! Things will be back up to snuff next week. I’ll have at least two book reviews plus my very first product review for you all in spite of the fact that I have a rather large homework assignment due next week. Yay!
Last weekend was pleasantly relaxing. I went shopping with one of my friends, primarily for shoes, as I tend to wear through mine like nobody’s business. I blame the large amount of walking that’s necessary when you live in city. I also saw Dinner for Schmucks (definitely worth the ticket price) and had Thai food. Yum, Thai food!
Last night I was hanging out with two of my friends and we got to talking about our experience with being in our 20s so far. We all started our 20s highly idealistic and determined to change the world (samples: hippie tendencies, tv is evil mentality, save the planet, etc…) only to now have fizzled a bit on that. We got out of university and encountered the real world and the real world kind of beat down on our aspirations. Now we don’t want to save the world; we just want to be happy. I’m wondering if the next phase of our 20s will be some sort of moderation between the two: helping the world but striving for personal happiness and improvement simultaneously. That sounds like a happy medium to me, but I guess we’ll see. Anyone currently in their 20s or someone older who wants to reminisce on the experience? I think it’d be interesting to hear.
I hope you all have lovely weekends! Anyone have any special plans?
Friday Fun! (Scott Pilgrim, How I Met Your Mother)
Hello my lovely readers! I hope you all had great weeks and got some time in for reading. To my fellow Scott Pilgrim fans, I hope you got your hands on the final installment already. If not, best get to it before the movie comes out next month, eh? I don’t know if you’re aware, but the movie adaptation of the graphic novels was started before O’Malley had decided how the story was going to end, so the script writers kind of wrote their own ending. O’Malley says he’s happy with the film ending, but I’m curious to see if I will be as well. I was surprisingly happy with the ending of the graphic novel series. Generally I can find something to gripe about at the end of series, but not this time. I’m not sure if the movie can live up to it, but oh the third trailer has me really hopeful.
I was sick the beginning of the week with some sort of stomach thing, so I wound up watching a lot of tv. I started watching How I Met Your Mother and in that sick haze, wound up getting almost all the way through the first four seasons. It’s not a bad show. A few of the episodes are hilarious, such as Slap-Bet. The rest are at least entertaining. I have to admit, though, if I knew the main characters in real life, I would absolutely hate them. That doesn’t make it a bad show, but I doubt that’s the writers’ intention, since they based two of them on themselves. Obviously the womanizing Barney is a character we’re supposed to love to hate, but I don’t think that’s the case with the rest of them. Honestly, they’re all basically those people who just pick on anyone who isn’t exactly like them and apparently have no actual goals in life or morals. It seems like kind of an empty existence for characters who are in their late 20s to early 30s, but oh well. It’s good entertainment, but Friends is still better.
You can tell I spent a substantial portion of the week in bed, as I’m mostly yakking to you about tv shows and movies. Hm….oh! One of my pepper plants appears to finally have buds! I may have blossoms soon! I’m rather stoked.
Are any of you guys Scott Pilgrim fans? How do you feel about the upcoming movie? Any other thoughts on How I Met Your Mother? I hope you all have lovely weekends!
Friday Fun! (Gardening, Kindle App, Swiffer)
Hello my lovely readers! Thanks to my friend Nina, my tomato plant now actually has a cage instead of being held up by a contraption made up of random bits of my blinds, yarn, and my refrigerator. It is surviving…barely. It’s this tall gangly thing. On the other hand, my peppers keep getting bushier but not blossoming. Get on that, peppers! The basil is behaving quite well. I highly recommend it to anyone who forgets to water plants until they get wrinkly and then desperately drowns them with so much water that the dirt floats. That might just be me. In any case, the basil is thriving in spite of my abuse.
Oh in bookish news, I got the Kindle app for my iTouch, partly because it’s free, but also because I was wondering if I’d actually successfully finish an eBook if it wasn’t a classic. So far all the ones I’ve tried have been classics because that’s what’s free. Anyway, I heard that you can get some romance novels for free from Amazon via the Kindle app, and lo and behold you can! So expect a review of reading on the Kindle app, and possibly the book, if I actually finish it. I have yet to successfully finish an eBook, and I only plan on reading this when I’m standing up on the bus with one free hand or in line for something. So we shall see what we see.
Also, pet owners, for the love of sanity get a Swiffer
Happy weekends all!
Friday Fun! (Camping and Biking)
Hello my lovely readers! Thank you for being patient with my hiatus last week, and I hope you enjoyed the posts this week.
Last weekend I went camping in Vermont with my friends Nina and E. I love so many things about camping–the fires, the food, the technology free time to talk, sleeping outside, the justification for using a hatchet. We rocked out in the car on the way up, and they also got a chance to meet my family. My brother taught them how to shoot rifles and pistols, and my dad made us dinner one night. They continued on to Canada, and I took a bus back to Boston after visiting a bit more. Unfortunately, the bus was around an hour late, so I wound up arriving at work exhausted the next day.
Yesterday it was finally cool enough to start biking again. My legs only lost a little bit of their strength, so that’s good. My bike fell off its chain for the first time yesterday, and of course I had no idea how simple that is to fix. I spent a few minutes grappling with the chain and getting covered with grease before discovering this lever you can push on to raise and loosen the chain and set it back on. At least I knew enough to put it on the second circle since it was on the second gear. So then I got to arrive on my bus connection covered with grease and got weird looks from the bus driver. It was awesome. I took a risk biking this morning. It’s cool now but is supposed to get up into the low 90s by this evening. We shall see.
Happy weekends, all! How were your weekends? Any good weekend plans?
Friday Fun! (On Thursday!)
Hello my lovely readers! You are getting this week’s Friday Fun a day early because tomorrow’s my birthday, and I took the day off work and will be staying far away from the computer all day! I’m turning 24! I have to say, ever since I turned 20, I just feel like I’m improving with age. Like wine. Only with a lot more work than it takes for wine to get better with age, because let’s face it, they just stick that shit in a cellar somewhere and abandon it, whereas I work damn hard to get better. Anywho.
By some awesomeness two of my best gal pals also have tomorrow off, so I’ll be spending the day with them, getting bubble tea, going to a farmer’s market, and probably hitting up a bookstore too. Of course one of my favorite veg restaurants will also be visited. Because of the fact that my birthday falls on a holiday weekend I tend to get my presents early or late or get informed of what I will be getting. My dad contributed money so I could get my a/c unit, and my brother informed me he’ll be giving me homemade goat cheese he made himself from his own goats. It’s a whole bunch of awesomeness. Also, tonight I’ll be going out to dinner with my third best gal pal (there are three of them), so the celebration is nicely spread out.
I know, you guys do not care this much about my birthday, but I get four days off for it and am EXCITED!! Plus, I freaking love the 4th of July. I mean, one of my majors in uni was US History. Plus! The fireworks! The drinking! The bbq’s! The music! Did I mention the fireworks? The fireworks!!
Ok, that was a ridiculously excited post, but I think that’s warranted if only for the fact that I have a four day weekend. Four. Days. Wheeeeee!
Happy weekends, everyone! What will you be reading? What will you be doing for the 4th? *waves*
Friday Fun! (A/C, Ribbon Cutting, Garden)
Hello my lovely readers! I hope you all are enjoying the long, hot days of summer. I am so grateful that we put in my a/c unit last weekend. It’s been up in the 90s and humid all week, and I would have been pretty miserable sitting in my attic apartment without it, particularly after biking home from work! Besides biking and cooking, I haven’t been doing too terribly much in the hours off of work. Just hanging out and vegging out. Everyone needs a week like that once in a while though, eh?
It’s been an eventful week at work. The intranet that I’ve been working so hard on (along with others from each department in the hospital) was officially launched. Yay! Hopefully this will make everything easier, particularly once our patrons get used to using it. Additionally, ever since I started working here, construction has been going on converting the floor the library is on into an education and research center. My hospital is focusing more in on academics and such. I’m excited about the change, as it means the library is now conveniently located to the Chief Academic Officer, Chief Education Officer, Residency Training, and more. Anyway, this week was the official unveiling and ribbon cutting of the new floor, and people have started moving into their offices already. It’s nice to be on a floor bustling with education instead of construction.
In container gardening news, my pepper plants are growing like weeds (har-har). One tomato plant is still struggling, and the other is going at a fairly normal rate. I did take BookishBella’s advice and fertilize them all. I believe struggling tomato plant grew a tiny bit afterwards, but the pepper plants just shot right up overnight. I’m thinking my kitchen might just be more conducive to peppers than tomatoes. I also planted onions, which seem to be doing alright. Unfortunately, my kitty seems to have an affinity for them, which is super odd as she’s never given any of the other plants a second look. We have to keep stopping her from trying to eat the onion shoots. I’m thinking a few have already been lost to the cause when I wasn’t looking. I do think it’s pretty odd she chose onions of all things to want to nom on.
I’m excited for the weekend, as always. I hope you all have wonderfully relaxing ones!
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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