…or so they say. I am just impressed at how stingy Quark is being, they have a good corner of the market, it is just a pity they forgot who is keeping them in business. But that is ok, here is my idea…the Quarks are really secret agents from the alcohol industry see. they invent this software and run this huge PR campaign telling everyone its industry standard until eventually it is. And then when everyone is using it…everyone starts to drink just to releave the pain. Heres to a brav-ious PR campaign Quark…Bravo.

On the job front, started yesterday. I hate starting new jobs, it is always so nerve wracking to me to learn new things in business because if you muck it up its a big muck up. I’ve already dealt with some 100 books in the last two days. I came home yesterday and went right to sleep…straight through 6:30 to 6:30…minus Muhanna calling somewhere in between. Haven’t heard from him in a while, can’t remeber what he said. Oh well.

Life is boring, can’t wait till i can afford to do stuff again.

getting over the guys, its not them that i feel bad about but the potential “us.” this is really pathetic but oh well… my heartache doesn’t stem from dropping the losers, but from the possiblity of never having someone there, the possiblity of living and dying a lonely bitter shrew. This can be summed up exactly in my conversation with Frank and Holly from this weekend…

“Frank, i am having a mid-life crisis.”

“aren’t you a bit young for that?”

“well, maybe”

“a young life crisis then?”

“meh whatever, all i know is this…i have a place, a nine-to-five, that’s it, thats what i was working on for all those years, now what? whats left? whats next?”

he looks at me….

“i’ll tell you whats next… friggin getting married and babies for christ sake. NO. That will not be me. I am freaking out. Bitter.”

After that we passed five weddings on the way to ohiopyle AND had a wedding themed game of Scrabble at the camp site that night with a twelve year old who insisted on throwing himself off the bench for shits and giggles.

I will not turn into one of those things that walk around with the shoes and the hair and the eyes and the boobs and shake their asses and lure guys into their evil lares in desperate attempts to trick them into marrying them.

And how will i not allow this society, hell bent on brainwashing the masses into pairs like some warpped rendition of Noah’s ark, to sway my mindset? By keeping myself busy of course…Volunteering, working out, traveling and staying as far away from beauty magazines as possible.

Oh, and my mom, aunt and grandmother…yes ladies and gentlemen, they don’t joke when you see people’s parents pestering them in the movies, and ITS NOT FUNNY. And then my mother and father are both pestering me to “date well”…or nobody below a BMW owning, suit wearing, christian professional socialite. They dangle the losers i use to date infront of me and say “see? your taste is better than this now, its matured…” They are right, its matured, but not just beyond losers- beyond men in general. I don’t care how good you look in a suit, you are an asshole, and i am tired of assholes. And i am tired of dating, and I AM TIRED OF NOT BEING ABLE TO AFFORD A FRIGGIN MARTINI! I am going to the bar tonight.

Sitting at the library…scanning a box of historical photographs for the Library and the Historical Society. It is extremely peaceful and i love not having to deal with people right now. Besides, it is one way of learning about your community, just you know, how it was fifty years ago…not really today. Don’t care, it is getting my mind off of other matters.

For starters…the second degree burns on my knees…which my skirt is sticking too. ouch.

And then there is the usual boy things…me getting burnt, me getting tired, me getting over it. Me taking a vow of celibacy (masterbation doesn’t count as sex right?) I realized the sad but true fact yesterday, my most faithful lover, with me since the era of John has been my virator. I begin to feel guilty about shoving it back in the bottom of my closet…thinking it may just require a place of prominence thus being the man of the household. Thinking of tacking it to the wall. Might be alittle odd to those who enter my house but i am not giving it enough respect, where else does it belong?

READS: Sarah, the first book of the canaan trilogy…love this author, artsy, poety AND establishing international peace talks. This book is just as fabulous.

Suffering at the keyboard in the middle of mt. lebanon library, second degree burns on my legs, sun burn everywhere else…even places i know weren’t exposed :). But it was well worth it.

Went white water rafting on the Yough yesterday, level 3, 7.5 miles :) I missed the outdoors and it was wonderful to escape the city. Made me miss new england.

Taking arron’s advice and getting rid of the losers in my life. So those positions are available and i am taking applications…hehe. J/k.

Thinking of going to the Animal Friends benefit ball on the 17th of July if I can find a dress by then. We will see.

Florida over labor day. yay! i miss beth.

“Thank you for calling La Strada, how can i help you?” ~ me

“um, i know this is a strange comment, but your ad…it reminds me of syphilis (spelling?)”

“Excuse me?”

“The ad of the lady licking the plate, everytime i look at it i think abotu syphillis and it makes me sick, i don’t even want to come into your restaurant because i am afraid i will catch it.”

“syphilis?”

“yes”

“well mam’ i am sorry you feel that way but i can assure you that the only way you will catch syphilis from our restaurant is if you sleep with one of the waiters. Thank you good day.”

I swear to god….today.

finally in my new place, love it.

Oh yeah, remember that job i found a while ago and claimed it to be “my job”? well it really is, i went to the interview yesterday, they called me four hours later saying “we don’t want to interview anyone else, we want you.” salary, benefits, four-OH-one K, yay! I start on the 29th, my dream job- designing books, and better yet, overseeing the designs of books.

Think i found a new church, but more on that on sunday.

La Strada had a grill fire today. Smoke, flames and firemen everywhere. It was bad, we closed for lunch. Some idiot comes in in the middle of it all, firetrucks outside, flashing fire alarms going off inside, sirens and asks me…”i am here to check on my application for employment i put in a few days ago.” I look around then back at him with the biggest are you a moron look i could muster.

Reading: The Last Temptation of Christ

Bravo to the author, i couldn’t imagine putting something like this together. very creative.

began moving into my new place, i love it. It is wonderful. I finish moving everything in tomorrow morning and walla, free at last.

Talked to nina today, she is doing well, in texas right now. Trying to convince her to look beyond her asperations of growing weed for a living into brighter things…grapes. Told her she should look intro viticulture. yay wine!

Tried Bella Sera’s Pinot Grigio today, very wonderful appley-taste, very wrong with my ceasar salad though. Meck.

Interview on monday, :).

Tried to be friends with brett, didn’t work out so wonderfully though. As he was moving his hand up my leg i came to the decision he was neurotic and that i didn’t want him to call me anymore, and so i told him. C’est la vive, but i refuse to be treated like that anymore…i am not about the whole sex thing, don’t treat me like i am cheap.

Saw pug guy at ikea today, gave him a hug made a minute and a half of small talk then went on my merry way.

Fighting temptation to call steve, but i need his help with some project or another and can’t decide if it is worth talking to him again.

interesting how the pages have closed on the last chapter of my life. I can’t wait to see what is next.

Mya’s birthday was yesterday! yay! She is so sweet.

Danielle came in with a huge hangover the other day. She said she had about 15 drinks including 8 martinis the night before. I asked how that was possible, she told me her ex boyfriend came into her work with a huge rock… attached to his new girlfriends finger. I asked her “only 15?” Guys are scummy, for some reason i can only really stomach the 40-something pigs who hit on me at work, a casual civility is as far as i can take guys right now, everyone else for some reason remain completely intolerable, minus ewan mcgregor and GM Joe, but i work with one and have no idea where and when to meet the other.

Read The Notebook the other day, i cried about 8 times…on the bus since it was my bus reading material for a day or two. It was great…i am not sure i can say the same about the movie coming out, but the book was wonderful. I am cynical love like that exists and frankly don’t really care, its not for me and i would rather not overanalyze.

until next time…

i got off the phone with a friend who i miss dearly. I haven’t talked to them in a long time and the last thing i remember is laying in there bed and the way my lips felt against theirs and the frustration i felt watching them get treated like dirt earlier in the day by another.

The conversation was awkward, wanting to tell them how i felt, how wonderful they were, how i wished i could be closer to them physically, emotionally, which ever way i could and wanting to tell them how they, where as no other has ever held a role in my fantasies, let alone a reacurrring one. I wanted to bring up the letter, packed somewhere in my boxes, to see if they still felt the same, still felt the same as when we rolled in the snow, still confused.

I couldn’t, and i didn’t and instead i heard them talk of the people in their lives both new and old, of current infactuations and i was not one of them, and i couldn’t tell them they were one of mine. And it ended in an odd sort of way, filled with awkward pauses and finally the kind of good bye that makes a person wonder if they would ever talk to the other again.

Remember you are always beautiful.

yay! i have an interview on monday for my new job (behold the power of optimism). And i really really need this job…full time, professional desk-and-collared shirt type job. Plus its creative AND management based AND its working with books. its the job i dream about when i walk dreamily through B&N.

Move into my new place this weekend. yay!

and for my idiot-retard news: going on a picnic tomorrow with brett. Damn idiot retard damn.

sitting at the hilton with my mother i finally realized how far apart her and i were. I, sitting there over my tea with cream making small talk with the maitre d’ about russian artwork and her sitting there with her elbows on the table droning on about the usual things in her little world (and of course things like money which realy have no place in a four star restaurant such as the Promenade) it struck me…she lied about alot of the things that supposably happened in her youth. My arguement is this, if the supposed events took place, like the men she dated, the places she has been and the people she once knew then why the tension when we walk into four star restaurants, why the crude comments, why the socially unacceptable behavior? I’ve caught myself blushing into my tea on more than one occasion at lunch when the unacceptable came out of her mouth.

My frustration with her hit the roof today in the car when a realization occured to me. I had asked her if i could borrow the car to get my haircut and she in her usual way through a hissy fit. She says…25,000…i say i’m insured she says her usual and i turn the radio up knowing what she wanted but refusing to give her the glory of a response. At that exact moment i realize Andy’s girlfriend is even allowed to drive the cars when i have never been allowed to. Andy’s girlfriend even lives with them for god’s sake when i was booted to the curb when i was 17.

I sat in the kitchen with her this morning listening to her try to convince andy’s girlfriend that he is dieing of cancer (medically unproven). I loose myself in the paper i am carrying as we walk down pittsburgh’s streets sloooowly as her shoes hurt her feet too bad for her to continue at a normal pace. I look at her shoes…3 inch platform sandals to walk around downtown in… She has a migraine she whines and five minutes later she is giggling over some joke she cracked as if her head were fine. She whines about her paper for school…a five page response to some reading or another…one a week, not comprehending that students at juniata and other schools write two of these a day while juggling two jobs and some volunteer thing or another, and perhaps…those of us who haven’t learned better… a relationship (or two :) ). As of next week my relationship with my mother will resort to meeting her once a month for lunch at some place or another, I can’t do this anymore.

She lends me three dollars for the bus, my brother calls her co-dependent over his cellphone from the drivers seat of his 30000 dollar nissan. She yells at me to finish his american history midterm for his cyber school as he is out riding his four wheeler and drinking beer. She bitches when the towels his girlfriend tried to wash are pulled out of the closet still damp and thrown back into the dryer.

Everyone has a mental illness, most people an addiction, everything relates to drugs. She points to a teapot at a vendor’s booth at the arts festival and asks if it could be used as a bong. I drop my head and walk to the next booth. My friend from work’s friend got caught under a MAC truck on his motorcycle as the truck burnt above him, she cuts the picture of him being pulled from under it out of the newspaper and hangs it on the fridge. She’s sick and dying, andy’s sick and dying, her cat is sick and dying. I refuse to be anything other than immortal and since she can’t make me sick anymore she does her best to make me miserable. I’m a fuck up, when i come to visit her i am not good enough to sleep on her sofa, i have to sleep on the floor. I inconvience her by staying a week or two.

But i digress, back to lunch. She is trying to come up with a story to tell her class for a presentation she must give. She wants to tell them about the mother’s day i planned a surprise picnic, had her blindfolded and driven out to the park. I suggest a running theme so she can combine more than one story… maybe tea and different events that happen around tea, maybe mothers day as a theme. She could share about the time i won her a weekend trip with four star accomidations and five star cuisine from an essay i wrote about her, or the picnic, or the time nina and i painted her laundry room in the house she had just bought the year before with dragon flys and whimsically thngs…as i said these things my heart sank. I always thought i was horrible to her, always thought that might have been the reason she treats me the way she does. I realized i wasn’t, she is alwasy the victim. I still can’t figure it out.

My father i talk to four or five times a year, him and i have a better relationship than we use to and than my mother and i have. He treats me as a business associate, filing me in on the daily processes of his job as assistant brew master at anheuser-busch. He bought darcy a 300$ dog a year ago, they have a pool, a 300m and a nice house in an affluent part of houston. I had two jobs and still couldn’t make ends meet when i went to school. He was mad at me for not finishing at juniata, but yet he couldn’t (wouldn’t?) help me when i asked.

This is my family, a jumbled mess of crap that made me who i am today. A mess of crap from which i have learned what not to be, how not to hurt, how not to behavior and in some strange way, after many, many failed attempts, how to love…myself and others by following a model set on the opposite of the compassion they have showed me.

I have learned more from my step-mom when all is said and done on the kind of person i want to become, the kind of life i want to lead, the way i want to treat others. She has showed me more compassion in the end than either of my parents combined have and for that i am eternally grateful to have someone in my life i can say that about. She truly is a wonderful role model for me.