I made it to the gym tonight and promptly managed to get the car key stuck in the door of the car. I couldn't lock or unlock the car and I couldn't get the key to budge. Not wanting to break the key off in the lock, I only did a bit of wrangling with it before calling Dave to come rescue me. Of course I had the only key to the other car on my key ring (I usually leave it with Dave), so he had to borrow Kelly First's car to come with another key so that we could leave the stuck key in the door and use the other key in the ignition and don't you hate it when something so small goes wrong and it screws up a whole bunch of crap? Anyway, it meant that my total gym workout consisted of about fifteen minutes on the elliptical trainer before Dave arrived. I could have waited to call Dave, but the gym is plastered with notices about recent car break-ins and I didn't want to leave the car sitting unlocked while I worked out.
My fingers hurt today. I think it's from all the sewing I've been doing. I've been making Christmas ornaments, but they're all Day of the Dead themed. So I guess I don't really know if they're Christmas ornaments or not. They may not be. Sometimes I wish I could get The Brain to be a little less amused by things like skeletons at Christmas.
And, oh, yeah:
Today I finally finished unpacking my suitcases from Japan. Yes, I did arrive home two years ago. So what? Time flies, ne? I actually came home with two suitcases, one normal-sized, one a giantess. I unpacked the smaller one right away because it was filled with everyday stuff and it was the perfect size for the few shorter trips I've taken since coming home. But the other suitcase, the giantess, I haven't needed since I got home so I just left it packed. Over time, I sorted through it and took out some stuff, but there was still a lot of stuff in it that I haven't needed. I haven't, for example, needed my business suits, so I just left them there. (I did take out one suit about a year ago to wear to my grandfather's funeral, but the rest stayed put.)
Today I took out all out my business suits and put them in one of those way-too-big, like, six-gallon Ziplock bags that are all the rage among people who have too much shit. Why didn't I just put those suits into the bag of clothes marked for donation? Well, some of those suits were pricey and they've held up, so I'm loathe to get rid of them. What? It's possible that, in the future, I might have a job that requires a business suit. Maybe not in the near future. Maybe in a future in a parallel universe. I know, I know. I don't know who I'm kidding, I mean, keeping those business suits. But now it's almost like I now have some weird paper-doll-ish version of me in a large Ziplock bag. That's really why I kept them.
One of the other things in the suitcase was a bag of relatively sexy underwear, the kind of stuff not actually intended to be worn under clothes--or not for long anyway. I haven't needed that stuff either since I've been back, but here was my dilemma: Should it go into the pile of clothes marked for donation or should I just throw it away? I reached a decision by reasoning thusly: Used underwear for sale at a thrift shop? Ew.
So I tossed the bag.
What? Don't tell me you'd ever consider buying used underwear at a thrift store. On the other hand, I probably could've made a lot of money putting my used underwear up for sale on eBay. (You know, writing that made me realize that there probably really are only two kinds of people in this world.)
And some of that underwear saw the insides of some pretty posh hotels in Tokyo, too, dammit. Ah, well. The tattered remnants of my misspent youth probably don't deserve much more attention than one might give used, thrift-store underwear.
The final suitcase treasure was six pairs of shoes, some of them real foot manglers. One pair went straight into the donation bin. (That was the pair of black boots that I begged David to bring me to Tokyo after I saw the way women dressed for winter there in their knee-length skirts with knee-high boots. I couldn't find my size in Tokyo for love or (too much) money, so I asked Dave to bring me a pair. The boots were so uncomfortable that I never wore them in Tokyo and the only time I did wear them after I got back to the US, they made me cry out in pain after about forty minutes even though I was mostly sitting while wearing them. They were gorgeous boots, though. I hope some other broad with size 10 1/2 feet gets more mileage out of them than I did.) The other pairs were still serviceable and it never hurts to have a couple of pairs of nondescript, somewhat dressy black heels.
And then--ta-da !--the suitcase was empty. Now it's being used, matroyshka doll-like, to store other suitcases.
And what else happened today?
Oh, yes. There was the library thing.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am pretty much not welcome in libraries. (I should be outright banned from utilizing any and all library services. Ever. But librarians tend to be a forgiving tribe.) I will admit that I bring this upon myself through a combination of overly enthusiastic book love, a lacadaisical approach to due dates, and scofflaw library habits. That's what led me to keep about fifteen books from the university's science and engineering library after I graduated. I don't know why I kept them; it's not like I've read those books in the half-decade I've had them. In fact, those books have been like an albatross around my neck. For the last couple of years, they've been sitting in the closet getting dusty. The cat puked on them at one point. The only paperback in the bunch got mangled. And still I hung on to them. Argh. So stupid. (I originally checked them out because I was working on a thesis about the role of science--astronomy in particular--in John Milton's Paradise Lost. It was an interesting idea, yes, but even though I never completed the thesis, I kept the books.)
Well, today after unpacking that suitcase and reorganizing the closet somewhat to accommodate the unpacked suitcase, I decided to do something about the books. I called the library and spoke to some woman who was, like, uh, yeah, I guess bring them in and we'll just, like, consider them a donation. She wasn't all that willing to say that I should maybe be reimbursed for whatever the university was trying to charge me for them (yes, even though I'm in the wrong, which I admit whole-heartedly) so I pushed a bit and she ended up handing me off to some other guy who was actually helpful about the whole thing.
Just to long-story-short this: I'm going to take the books in on Friday (after wiping the long-dried cat puke off of them) and chat with that guy and figure out how to take the two-thousand-plus dollar charge for them (late fees for the books being overdue plus the charges for the books plus the late fees on the charges) off my account. So that was me being a responsible library patron. For once.
Mark the goddamn calendar, yo.
And then the other thing I did today was proofread an essay via email for my niece.
My niece had to write a persuasive essay and she decided to write about abortion. We had talked about sitting down together over some coffee to work on the essay but a couple of days ago she got sick so she decided to write the essay at home and email it to me to look over. Before she emailed it to me, she called me and we had a conversation about her unease about my potential feelings about the essay. Maybe I should explain that. My niece is very sensitive about feelings and she thinks everyone else is, too. (Me? I tend to be relatively insensitive about feelings to the point where if someone gets upset at me, I rarely wonder if it had anything to do with it or what responsibility I have to that person to un-hurt their feelings. I don't mean that I go around trying to upset people. If I make some idiot mistake, I will apologize. But in general, I feel that being an adult means taking responsibility for one's feelings. So other people's feelings? Are their problem. That sounds pretty shitty, I know, but there it is. I'm not trying to hide anything from you.)
My niece, coming from the point of view that people's feelings are important things, had decided to write about abortion and she, knowing that I am strongly pro-choice and have personal experience with abortion, wanted to make sure that she wasn't going to hurt my feelings by writing an essay suggesting that abortion should be illegal. She told me that though she wanted to write a good persuasive essay and that meant being very staunchly anti-abortion, that she is more moderate in her stance than such an essay would suggest. I told her that it was important that she learn how to write a good essay and my feeling about it weren't important. She also asked if it was okay that the essay contain ideas that she doesn't necessarily believe in. I didn't tell her that most of the essays she writes are probably going to contain ideas that she doesn't necessarily believe in--she'll realize that as she goes along--I just told her that it was okay if she wrote about ideas that she doesn't personally believe.
Here is a part of that essay that deals with adoption as an alternative to abortion (and my corrections and suggestions in the brackets):
There are other options other than abortion. Giving the baby up for adoption is one of them. [Does the following part about losing your figure have to do with adoption? If not, it should be part of another paragraph or taken out of the essay.] Some women are worried about losing their figure if they go through with having the baby. Again, they should have thought about that before they became pregnant. The baby did not ask to be alive, so why should it be killed because of its mother’s stupidity? There are many families that are hoping to be blessed with a child because they can’t have their own. The mother and the father, if he is involved, can even chose [choose] the family that they want their baby to end up with. [Try not to end sentences with prepositions like “with”. Try: "The mother and father, if he is involved, can even choose the family with whom they place their baby." If that is too formal for you, try: "The mother and father, if he is involved, can even place their baby with a family they choose."]In the end, we got through it, and I hope the teacher is thrilled to read another eighteen-year-old's anti-abortion persuasion essay. (They were a dime a dozen in my early English classes.)
What else happened today?
Laundry. Dishes. Internet.
It was a day.
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