falling for the first time

2009-10-09T16:24:00.002-10:00

I'm going back to therapy tomorrow. My last session was three years ago. After my dad died, I thought it would be good for me. And it was, for a little while. It's always good for me for a little while. It has been three years. I'm petrified.

I haven't told anyone yet. That's why I'm just writing it here instead.

book sale

2009-06-28T18:48:00.003-10:00

It's SO hard for me to motivate myself to work during the week of the Friends of the Library Book Sale! Argh. I have a box full of books sitting in The Boyfriend's room at the foot of the bed (something I think he doesn't appreciate because he hates clutter, but there's nowhere else to put them currently) that I'm dying to start thumbing through.

I love the book sale! I love dollar books that I may or may not even end up reading, but, hell, they were a dollar. I love rummaging through aisles books in the hot, stale air of the the McKinley cafeteria. Okay, not love the last one. But I deal with it because I love books. The Boyfriend constantly preaches about his Kindle and it's convenience, but I don't think I'll ever love something as much as a paperback to tote around in my bag or stacks of books on my nightstand to pick through before bed.

This year's book sale seemed to yield slim pickings initially. I'm quite certain that it was much, much smaller than previous years. The sci-fi/fantasy section was practically non-existent. There were also a large amount of hardcover books and seemingly small amoung of paperbacks in comparison. I'm not a big fan of hardcovers because they're harder for me to maneuver when I'm trying to read in bed. Mostly I don't prefer them because I often drop them on myself when lying down and reading, and those things are, by nature, hard. I typically only purchase a hardcover book when it's something I've been dying to read--in recent memory, only the Harry Potter series has motivated me enough to do so. I got two long days of browsing in though and was rewarded with 18 books, but I didn't feel they were as easy to come by as previous years. I've picked up 20 or more books on a single jaunt before, and the variety of those were much more varied.

It did strike me as odd that most of my choices ended up being books by Asian American authors. I typically shy away from them, especially women authors. I chalk that up to a combination of two things. First I experienced utter disappointment when I was in an "Amy Tan" phase a handful of years ago and ended up thinking "I just read this exact same book" each time I finished one of her works. The other was that around this same time, I was still in school and, as an English major, I was reading a number of Asian American authors, which further convinced me that the books meshed together too much in my mind without memorable twists in the plots. They were good books, but too much at once.

I'm enjoying this latest haul though.

(I also realize that this is the first reference to "The Boyfriend" in almost a year. To clarify, this is a new beau that I've been seeing officially for about four months, unofficially for almost six. People who know me IRL or follow on Twitter should have no confusion, but just thought I would add a note to clarify)

I actually wrote this last week, but I'm not sure why I didn't finish one last sentence and post it. Oh, well. Happy Fourth of July!

family

2009-06-21T15:52:00.002-10:00

I thought I was getting through today alright, but in the last hour or so I've realized that I am incredibly sad. And I know that it's expected and understandable so I figured that I would just go with it for a little bit. It's not one of those out of control, lock myself in my room and cry kind of deals--and I'm trying to deal with my emotions better.

I just miss him. And I realize that I really miss being a family. Because ever since late 2005 when my dad started getting sick, my immediate family life and my extended family life just went to hell. It really bothers me not to have it.

Me and my sister bought an orchid from The Engineer's family for one of my uncles as a Father's Day gift. I drove out to the nursery to pick it up and wasn't really sure if it would be awkward since I haven't seen any of his family members since we broke up last September. I was just going to sneak in, pay for the plant and leave, but his parents came out to greet me when I got there. And they were genuinely happy to see me, and I was happy to talk and catch up with them. I used to love spending holidays and birthdays and weekends with that family. It was the kind of home life I never really had growing up, and is completely out of my reach.

I don't know where I'm going with this anymore.

birthdays

2009-06-11T22:06:00.003-10:00

Tuesday was my dad's birthday. We're in the middle of that weird stretch that always kind of gets to me. His birthday, Father's Day, my birthday. Not always in this order, but usually within a week or two of each other.

I didn't bring it up on the day of. I didn't freak out. I didn't let it consume me. I don't think I'll let the next two events do so either. It made me sad. It made me miss him so much more. But I dealt with it. I cried in the shower Monday night, but that was the worst of it.

And part of me was proud to have been able to handle something that in past years has been a blur of alcohol and bad decisions and blinding pain. But other parts of me chanted something I wrote early on, "Moving forward feels like leaving you behind."

Testing email blogging

2009-06-10T12:38:00.001-10:00

So I know that the blogging by text message was a huge fiasco but I have high hopes for the email version for mobile blogging.

My new job gives me an hour lunch but having no one to eat with really drags that out. It's not that I mind eating alone as much as I eat way too fast and have nothing to do. I'm here for 9 hours a day and they include an hour lunch so I may as well sit around like I've been doing.

Just remembered that I set this up so if it posts successfully, then expect many more lunchtime posts.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

not unemployed. for real,

2009-06-02T18:08:00.002-10:00

SO, I got the job :)

Started today. Have a lot to learn. I think it's going to be a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Get to do writing on top of the general office work too.

Had to quit The Restaurant without notice last night though. No time because they wanted me to start right away and the hours clash. Would have liked to help train a replacement, but whatever. New manager is gonna run it into the ground service-wise anyway.

doh!

2009-06-01T11:51:00.003-10:00

I had my first job interview of 2009 job hunting this morning.

Potential Job #1 was something that I initially just emailed my resume to because the unemployment office requires me to apply to three places a week to receive benefits. I had thought it was a position that I wouldn't terribly mind doing, but didn't really want to take because it wasn't something I really wanted to do. I am determined that my next job with be permanent, something that I can have a career in, and something I enjoy (pretty much anywhere I can write). Of course, out of the jobs that I applied to in the past couple of week, the one I wasn't crazy about was the company who called me to interview.

I was hesitant about it last night because I do not want to just take the first job offered to me, that is how I got into the mess with The Other Place and I was miserable. However, if they offered me a job and I didn't accept, I could get my unemployment benefits cut. Plus this appeared to be a customer service desk and phone job, which isn't the ideal place I wanted to start. So since I was working on a big freelance project anyway, I decided that I would do my best but not do my usual interview prep of researching the company and doing practice interview questions in writing.

Not a good idea. Potential Job #1 was not advertised in the way it was discussed in the interview. They selected me because of my background in writing and would probably let me do a good deal of it since they're in the process of expanding. I didn't know that the section of the company hiring is actually a newly independent division of the big company I knew about initally. It actually sounds pretty interesting, although very intense, and the perks are great. Eh. I've already come to terms that I may not be offered the position, but the interviewer seemed to like me well enough, which is about the best I could have done without proper preparation.

Lesson learned.

And the job hunt continues.

only half as smart as i was this morning

2009-05-21T16:04:00.002-10:00

Just got home from pulling two wisdom teeth (right side) so I'm messing around on the computer until the Novocaine wears off.

Some thoughts about the process:

1. That huge needle they use to inject you with Novocaine is just as scary when you're 24 as when you're 10.
2. I have big ass teeth. Not just big teeth. Big ass teeth.
3. And a small ass jaw. Not just a small jaw. A small ass jaw, which made it exceedingly difficult for my dentist to get in there with all her scary dentist gadgets and yank those suckers out. She estimated an hour, but I was in the chair getting multiple Novocaine injections for an hour and forty-five minutes.
4. It's still cool to keep your teeth. I did. And posted pictures on Facebook. And Twitter.
5. I always did enjoy poking my numb face and moving my numb tongue around in my mouth;
6. The go-to food of request for me is still Campbell's chicken and stars soup. It's chicken noodle soup with tiny star-shaped noodles that are easy to swallow whole.
7. I am still traumatized from childhood teeth pulling during my pre-braces years. It was freaking scary, but I'm glad that my dentist didn't have to crack any of my teeth during extraction. That sound just freaks me the fuck out.
8. At one point, I didn't close my lips over the spit sucker thingy propery and got blood and drool all over the place. That is why they make you wear those plastic-lined bibs.

I anticipated a quick recovery even if we had planned on pulling all four wisdoms today (no guts, no glory!), but I wonder if it'll be more painful since she was in there for two hours rummaging around to get the teeth loose? We held off on the other extractions since the right side was taking so long and my bottom left molar isn't fully out yet so my dentist didn't want to have to do any slicing and dicing to get at it.

UH graduation

2009-05-18T08:53:00.002-10:00

Went to UH graduation on Saturday to watch my sister participate in commencement exercise. It was long, crowded, and hot as heck--the standard to expect. Ran into a bunch of people graduating and visiting graduates, which was nice. I think I finally found the perfect leis to make for graduation: chip leis. I went to Costco and picked up a couple of boxes of those mini-bags, then attached ribbon to the corners and strung them together. The cost came out to less than $4 per lei and, after I got the hang of ribbon tying, each lei took only about 15-20 minutes to make. This was way cheaper than buying flower leis (where I spend over $6/lei because I can't stand to give tacky-looking leis), and way faster than the last time I attempted to make leis (ribbon leis took forever, and the li hing mui strawberry belt leis were a big mess on top of being an arduous process). Chip leis were also something different, although I don't think I'm the first to think of the idea or anything. All in all, a really good deal if you need to get more than a couple of leis made. I used six bags of chips, and that made for some pretty big leis; I'm sure five would suffice.

Of course, I made my sister's lei with more expensive sun chip rather than the cheap stuff I used for most of the other leis. Upon showing it to her in the morning and explaining how she got the better quality stuff, she told me, "I like Doritos." Bleh. In fact, she pretty much prefers all the chips that came in the cheaper box of stuff I picked up. I told her she could have the remainder of it for a graduation present of sorts.

Got a little sunburnt from walking around on the field looking for graduates because I'm so pastey white (I like being pastey white, for the record). Nose got burnt, have a nice square-shaped tan line on my chest from my shirt, and I just noticed that my calves feel a little tingley when I scratch them. Boo, sun!

just do it

2009-05-14T16:37:00.003-10:00

I've been telling myself to write something--anything, really--to get back in the habit of blogging. Today I was unexpectedly called off from The Restaurant so I thought the newly-found time would be put to good use by writing something.

Reasons why I think I haven't been in the mood to blog:
1. Twitter feels so much like mini-blogging and I tweet multiple times a day about most of the things I would normally blog about.
2. Freelance writing has take up a lot of my time lately and while blogging is usually one of the many ways I procrastinate, my fingers just haven't been into replacing writing with more writing.
3. I haven't been home as much or had ample free downtime since I started seeing someone new.

But here's to making a renewed effort to write! I'm (sort of) unemployed again--although I feel about twice as busy as when I was still at the Capitol--and really want to get back into blogging.

I am a little freaked out about the current job market right now, but I'm hopeful and optimistic. In the mean time, I'm doing all sorts of freelance work to put on my resume and make some side cash.

This is a lame post. Eh.

everything in moderation

2009-04-27T21:16:00.002-10:00

Less than two weeks until the end of the 2009 Legislative Session. Boo!

I consider myself a moderate liberal, and have for a number of years now. I like to pick and choose about the rationale behind the issues, although there are certain issues that I absolutely would never be able to compromise an inch about. You really can't be too extreme on either side though. If you're an extreme conservative, (to me) you come off as an ignorant bigot most of the time. And if you're an extreme liberal, then you come off as downright insane. The extreme liberals were a lot of the reason I shied away from the other students in the English program at UH. Crazy hippies. Hah.

work

2009-04-25T10:47:00.002-10:00

Just a quick post because nothing makes me want to write a blog more than putting off massive amounts of text I need to produce for some legitimate cause.

The legislative session is over in about two (!!!!) weeks and I'll be (sort of) unemployed again. I really want to quit The Restaurant. I know I say that all the time. And sometimes I even do (and then go back) or bring in letters of resignation (and get talked out of handing them in). I'm starting to feel like my relationship with The Restaurant is starting to mirror the way that I used to deal with boyfriends: I only stay because it's comfortable and I'm scared of what else is out there, but I'm so bitter and frustrated with the whole ordeal so I'm just dragging out the inevitable. I think it's really up in the air right now. If I can get enough unemployment benefits, I may just quit The Restaurant to focus on finding a permanent job (that won't be with a company that doesn't know what it's doing and make me miserable and crazy). Any extra income I earn from them will just be taken out of whatever I qualify for anyway. The only thing that I kind of want to stick around for is the possibility of getting insurance from them. I'm covered by the state until the end of May, but not having insurance makes me really nervous. I know The Restaurant actually has a pretty good plan, but that would mean upping my hours a lot. I would also feel a bit guilty leaving them right before the summer rush, but after the huge falling out I had with our new GM (yeah, that would be 4 sets of managers we've had in the last year), I don't really care.

Eh. Decisions, decisions.

2009-04-19T15:16:00.001-10:00

Spent yesterday in my room.

Today I realised that visiting him makes me feel worse instead of better.

I know that there is something very wrong with that.

three

2009-04-18T13:59:00.002-10:00

Today, three years ago, my dad passed away.

I thought I wanted to write about it. I did write about it. But it all sounded like everything I've said about it before. Because he's gone and nothing can change that, nothing can alleviate the utter permanency of the situation. I should have come to terms with that by now. I should know that there is nothing more for me to say about it, nothing anyone can say or do for me, and nothing that could ever make me stop wishing that things were different.

I miss him so much that I still can't deal with it on a day-to-day basis except to drink my coffee black and my martinis with Tanquray like he did.

This is all I have to say about it this year.

2009-04-17T09:57:00.011-10:00

at I can go back to all the people who laughed at twitter when I insisted it was going to be huge and say "I told you so."

C. Mentioned to me today via

2009-04-17T09:57:00.009-10:00

DM on twitter that a lot of people we knew had recently jumped on the twitter bandwagon. That's what sparked this.

FYI.

2009-04-17T09:57:00.007-10:00

o colleges and you needed your school email to join. Likewise now that twitter is all over the place, it's not as fun. Of course, I do very much enjoy th

2009-04-17T09:57:00.005-10:00

, the new mainstreamness of it all is a real turn-off. I like myspace befor everyone I knew it was on it. I like facebook much more when it was limited t

2009-04-17T09:57:00.003-10:00

short posts via my BlackBerry)

I've been pretty Twitter-crazy as of late but, as with most of the other social networking sites I've loved and abandoned

2009-04-17T09:57:00.001-10:00

Just signed up for this mobile blogging thing that blogger puts out in an attempt to get back into the habit of writing (even if that means pathetically

I am not dead.

2009-03-24T11:20:00.001-10:00

Well, my Twitter followers know that anyway.

I have been crazy busy with the Captiol thing, The Restaurant thing, and the freelance thing though. Also my laptop finally died as a result of me not getting the virus that my mom somehow installed on my computer in time. I guess it's both our faults, but, seriously, I don't know if I've ever gotten a virus--ever--before so I feel like it's more her fault.

I have to tinker around with it a bit more, and ask for some input from tech-y friends, to make sure it's really unusable, but it doesn't look good. So I probably won't' blog much until I can get myself a replacement.

Thank goodness for internet on the BlackBerry.

So just a short note to let everyone know that I'm working on getting back into blogging. Wish me luck!

busy busy busy

2009-01-31T10:12:00.002-10:00

this is my fri-sat-sun schedule.
9-430 friday at capitol
530-730 (when i left since it was slow) at restaurant
830-1045 finishing copy work
1145-? out drinking at champions and bar 7
woke up late
need to clean car and get fishing permit at sports authority because
have catfishing permit to go to nuuanu reservoir from 12-4
dinner 630 with C. and K.
karaoke at 11.
sunday will squeeze in copy work for a diff person
visit aunty who was admitted to hospital earlier in th week
(crap KNOW there's something else too)
go to capitol and check on wtf came in over the weekend for the 20 bills we're hearing 8am monday morning
work restaurant sunday night.

that was for anyone who wanted to keep track of me.
<3 busy

coffee

2009-01-26T23:45:00.002-10:00

I like coffee dates because you're forced to really talk to someone. I can talk to anyone after I've had a few martinis and have the time of my life. But if I can't talk to you for a few hours over a cup of coffee, then that's a deal breaker.

Another deal breaker:
Thinking that it's okay to share a toothbrush, ever.

because it happened again tonight

2009-01-21T23:13:00.004-10:00

Dear CPK,

I have a bone to pick with you. I enjoy the food at your establishment, and have been a committed and loyal patron for years now. I have overlooked the fact that your mixed drinks continuously suck (the bartenders always say they are bound to some BS corporate recipe), a big no-no for which I have banished other eateries from my mind without a second thought. I have come to terms with the reality that times are tough and your delicious Original Chopped Salad began as a heaping pile of deliciousness with cheese, salami, and turkey galore, but has dwindled into lettuce with sprinklings of the aforementioned items. I even held my tongue when a server made condescending, judgmental facial expressions and comments when we requested beer with our late lunch at 3PM once (if it wasn't okay, then ya just shouldn't be serving beer at all yet). However, I cannot deal with the fact that whenever I eat at a CPK, regardless of the location or time, I never get a cute server.

Now, I know that they exist. I freaking see them floating around the other sections of the restaurant. And I never get one. Ever.

One particular establishment, with one particularly elusive server, irks me more than the others. This, as most of my dining companions know, is the Ala Moana location. For over a year now, I have sipped many an iced tea and ogled a particular server discreetly through my peripheral vision, and not so discreetly from across the room. Every time I put my name in for one of those buzzers, I think, "Maybe today will be the day that I will actually be able to get close enough to him to read his name tag." Honestly, the sheer probability that I should get him at least once is in my favor. There have been times of plenty when I've frequented this place numerous times a week. Yet it never happens. Even when all the tables surrounding mine--tables that have been seated both before and after me--are his tables, I am somehow not in his section. Ridiculous!

I really do not understand this anomaly of sheer cruelty. Perhaps it is the fault of the hostess. I, not proudly, have diverted my share of pretty girls away from attractive servers in my own place of work. But, even with that variable in mind, by now I don't see how I can never be in his section.

Yes, I could request to be seated there. However, I feel as if the money I have invested in CPK through countless lunches and dinners has been enough to buy me back my dignity and my pride. So it would be very much appreciated if, upon the next time I venture out to assuage my craving for artichoke and spinach dip, that the server at least be sent to my table so that I can stare at him properly for 10 minutes or so. With a free dessert. Then we can call it even.

XOXO,
J.

opening day

2009-01-21T07:59:00.002-10:00

Excited for Opening Day!
Will blog later. My internet was being all weird and not connecting me for a while.
Yay!