Anonymous Amy

Getting the mail isn’t an evil process. It shouldn’t be scary or horrific or frightening. Sure, the mailbox holds a small part of the unknown but it isn’t going to chase you with an axe.

I have a slight case of exaggeration. here is the back-story.
Call it what you will; luck, karma, fate, destiny, God, chance, life, good, evil, tea leaves…..
It hates me.
“Unfortunate” follows me as if I’m eating a pile of crunchy Jinx and dropping a fat crumb trail. I don’t walk around tempting the gods by stating obvious facts so that they can be jinxed and then thrown at my wallowing self. But yes, yes, I did in fact get excited about a random expectation.
-My stimulus package.- That money owed to me by the governments… (sorry. i’ve fallen prey to the “everything is plural” phenomenon) I even made a public comment on my Twenty Something Blogger site regarding my surprise that this so called money exists and that maybe I’ll be a believer since others were receiving this fabled money. how stimulating.
**PIANO COMES CRASHING OUT OF BLUE SKY ONTO HEAD**
I am notoriously known for getting the shit end of the stick. I try not to make a habit of picking up shitty sticks but again, it’s like I have a posse of them trying to hang with me.
I should be grateful that the United States Postal Service even considers me alive. I had to fight for this right. They killed me off when I moved and my mail service discontinued. All my Netflix movies were leaving their Netflix queue but being mysteriously returned by someone who was NOT ME! The post office said i was deceased. They took the liberty of putting a yellow sticker onto the bottom of envelopes coming to me that simply said “deceased”.
I was now:
“Stick it in my ass” Jones
151 wehateyourlife Court
Die, MI 66666
DECEASED

After I convinced them that I didn’t die, I just moved up the street, not into a cemetery but a condo…they finally stopped breaking the news of my untimely death via a yellow sticker on the front of my mail envelopes.
No one seemed alarmed when they found out, in this manner, that I died. Most people nodded and went about eating their Cheerios. Thanks Friends. Their expectations of my finality was laid to rest. excuse the pun. yay.

this is just one little story in the unique collage of karmic repercussions I’ve managed to survive. Anything from getting a brand new car without working brakes to being chased up a flight of stairs by an astonishingly quick midget to having my car stuck in the driveway of a fraternity house across the street from the office i worked in….(no worries aye….Jeff, the husky, red-bearded and incredibly hostile Facilities guy drove it out “no problem”. In the meantime my car is doused in cheeseburger remnants and slime from Nick and I, who grappled, with soggy, greased fingers at car parts to hide in as we slid down a hill of ice where we thought we’d plunge to our death. But THANKS Jeff for just driving it on out like it was a horse heading to his barn.)
Here for a while the waters have been calm. I’ve been chugging along at a miserable pace but nothing disturbingly inconvenient has surfaced. (i’m going to fucking pay for writing that out. the universe isn’t one to let me get away with these types of naive statements. Seriously, just ask my butt.)(I like to kid about anal rape. I know it isnt actually a laughing
matter but it’s so graphically descriptive of my feelings…)
Like I said, exaggeration is probably key to these little disaster recipes.
So, my boyfriend, lets call him Life Loves Me, gets in the car with a funny envelope. The envelope has my name on it in the return address side. Weird. The envelope only has a return address side…the rest appears to have been chomped off by ….a shark, maybe? Yes, that must be what happened. Ooooor, the mail box does have an axe and it chopped off half of my envelope. But, why? The partial envelope is contained inside a bigger envelope with a clear, plastic window to display my slaughtered piece of mail. Honestly, my measly murdered mail should have been delivered inside a Band-Aid box or via a cast…or at least they could have delivered the culprit shark.
But no, it was just me, Life Loves Me and this illegible cut of something that was just about to make sense.
Life Loves Me: that is your return address and my handwriting…*pause*…What did I mail for you? Oh shit, your taxes. I mailed your taxes for you.
upon opening the strong, secure, well-put-together envelope from my friendly, neighborhood USPS I was horrified to find that the small triangular shaped envelope was indeed housing the triangular left-overs of my taxes. so i guess they’re late.

“When a person really desires something, all the Universe conspires to help that person realize his dream.” -The Alchemist
This is one of those comfy quotes, laced with support dependent on your actions. If you can figure out your desires the Universe is gravitationally going to help it land into your lap.
I desire a high income job that allows me to sleep almost narcoleptically… and lets me use my awake time to name ice cream flavors for Ben & Jerry’s. This is probably more of a “want” than a “need”. Although, on any given February morning in Michigan, not getting out of bed is a strong need.
So maybe the actual need is to not live in Michigan.
We’ve got to break down our wants to figure out the true desires.
I, for example, don’t want to kill myself. so in order to not do that it seems as though changing my location could prolong my life. perhaps this could lead to happiness. It’s like the poster that hung in Mulder’s office in the X-Files; I Want To Believe.
Happiness. It’s gotta be out there right? Maybe it is alien. I want to believe.
Am I being optimistic? Fuck, i feel that i am.
my apologies. this is so embarrassing.

to start figuring out what you want you have to narrow down the desires. If you’re like me you may not even have that many desires but you have tablets carved in stone of all the bullshit you definitely don’t want. That’s kind of good; you know the part of yourself that won’t settle. If you have 1,000 things you want you have to work on figuring out the most important for now. The problem with people who want it all is that they can’t focus and they end up with scraps and inaccurate details. Concentrate. pick a thing and do it well. if you want to be a gourmet cook but you also really want to be an opera singer and you can’t decide which is really the one you are going to excel at; guess what? you can sing and cook at the same time!
Maybe that is what the quote about the universe conspiring to help you realize your dreams is all about. Once you actually try, your attention is in one place instead of watching Hell’s Kitchen and American Idol, you’re in your element, standing at attention–your reward is…..it works out.

This post was going to be about the difference between dreams and fantasy. Then I took a look at these so-called dreams of mine and realized the post should really be about how to figure out what you want. I believe this is called soul searching.
Probably it is something that takes a lifetime.
I may fall into the “eternal” search category.
Searching keeps me from having to make a commitment.
Who needs to actually be good at anything if they are testing the waters? When i pick up a guitar and suck at playing because I haven’t practiced…ever…it’s okay because it isn’t my calling. When I decide to get back to that novel I work on whenever the day job tortures me, I forcefully amend myself to become that best-selling novelist who haunts me…but the feeling passes and i go back to …life as usual. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have the kind of boyfriend that recipricates dinner.

If/when i make dinner on any and every given night there is never any manifestation that i will receive a dinner on my behalf. That would be nice but it is not required. It does seem like common courtesy though, doesn’t it?
I do not give to get.
moving on….

tonight didn’t really feel like a cooking night…or a cleaning night. so..
i dug into my old recipes and pulled out an old time favorite. cheap wine and popcorn ala. at $3.49 a bottle and, well, a nearly illegal supply of Orville from Costco that probably equates to about .7 cents per bag (our box-o-popcorn actually expired in August 07′ but we’ve nearly gone through the entire box now. I will probably blog my incredible success the day i get through that…it’s been years in the making)

Good popcorn
Good wine
Good God
Lets dine

footnote: oh, and the wine was purchased from KMART. ya folks, i’m the real deal

Sunday was chilly. After a week of warm sunshine in Michigan we quickly forget that this place is 2 figurative steps away from Antarctica and we start wearing sandals and t-shirts the second there is no more snow on the ground. The sun was bright yesterday but it wasn’t creating any heat. Clouds cast shadows on my newly planted pansies; they shivered all day in the icy breeze skittering through. Poor pansies.
I left for work at 6:05pm. I was in a slump because Sunday night is usually spent lolling on my love seat recliner eating popcorn and reading trash novels. Once I got out and started working I was all right; it was only going to be a couple hours so I sucked it up and gave myself an internal beat-down for being so whine-y.
At 9PM, on my way out this guy shows up in our building asking about the bus system. He’d been waiting at a bus stop for 45 minutes and no bus went by. hmmm. the buses are supposedly running; we check the website. Yup, buses run till 12:15am. hmmm. he said he knew they were definitely running that day because that was how he came to be standing in the spot he was in. but now, at 9pm, he was stranded. we looked up different bus lines for him but they unfortunately didn’t have sunday service. shit. “okay, well, we can call you a taxi, how bout that?” “nah”, he says, “I’ll just walk, it’s colder than it looks outside.” we all agreed that it was and he went right and i went left. guilt was pressuring me to give him a ride but my brain was on a powerpoint presentation of slides showing what happens to girls who give strange men a ride home. it’s so stupid to be getting in a car and not giving the poor man a ride to his apartment. 20/20 has me paranoid and all i can think about is my inhumanity and how i am such a selfish person for not having some decency and courtesy. no way though, no way can i put this guy in my front seat and drive into the night. decency and courtesy is nice and so is not being strangled. so i pushed the radio dial on along with the heat– 93.9 had The Barenaked Ladies in their studio doing a live show. Within 60 seconds their song, Pinch Me, was welling in my ears and the lyrics go “I could walk but I’ll just drive / It’s colder than it looks outside”
The lyrics sharpened my senses–immediately I analyzed the entire evening for evidence. any evidence pointing to anything. unearthly coincidences are signs. that is just the way it goes in my world. it seemed so blatant that his last sentence was the lyric to a song i would go to my car and listen to. but, i haven’t figured out if it means anything. maybe a coincidence really is just a coincidence this time. the blaring obviousness of it makes me feel that the universe is trying to tell me something…and i am not interpreting it.

pot wafted through the plaza today. the university has been overstuffed with parents this weekend. they are busy taking their kids out to special dinners and standing in the type of lines that should lead to roller coasters but really only lead to cheap folding chairs you have to sit in; where there isn’t even a view of the stage. but the smell of pot billowing in the breeze reminded me of spring and dave matthews concerts. after my day of being the office dildo and learning i’d have to work this weekend, i left in feelings preoccupied with boredom and anxiety. the mixture is a strange hyperactive culmination that makes me strangely despondent and thirsty for beer. anyway, the pot reminded me of something jenny said last weekend. she showed up at my condo on friday night, an hour early, we were excited for our weekend of amy & jenny to begin. after 20 years of being best friends we still manage to get excited to see one another. we walked to the liquor store and picked out the items we’d pee out later. then sat in my living room, content in our moment of alcoholic reflection–in mid-moment Jenny stated “this would be way better if it were E” and then she gave her beer bottle the don’t-even-bother look a girl would give a no chance guy at a bar. HAHA
Sorry i didn’t have any raver drugs, Jenny. better luck next time…

 

spring means pedicure.

when Heidi visited in February we did the pedicure thing together; because I heard that is what girls do when they bond, so I tried it. Heidi is way ticklish and I really thought her Korean girl was going to get flung into the nail polish display. Unfortunately that did not happen and instead I got to see Heidi’s facial expression collage. A triptych non-verbal artwork entitled “excruciating”. While I was receiving a light pumice scrub accompanied by a minty tingle that made my legs feel the way my mouth does after some Crest Winterfresh, Heidi appeared to be getting a hot anal scrub. Her face went from red and squeezed to purple and open-mouthed. At one point she looked over at me, her body scrunched helplessly in the vibrating massage chair and left leg held hostage by Sado Scrubber and mouthed “oh my god *pant, pant*”, was she getting a pedicure or going into active labor? I think i saw her pray.
My pedicure, only 1 foot away from violent duress , was Baja Sunset–I had an entire 40 minute fantasy about being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to name nail polish colors. I could dominate that field.

 

There was quite a crowd. Men in suits and men in gym shorts. People smacking gum and blatantly ignoring the ‘no cell phone’ rule. Ignorance never felt so apparent.
But then he was on stage, barefoot and smiling. He spoke about compassion and affection, he spoke about self-discipline.
The ignorance surrounding me was not for me to judge; if I wanted to be happy in my moment with the Dalai Lama I would need to choose to be happy.
One of the first things he said was “I am happy.” You fully trust and believe him. He said he wasn’t a healer and he doesn’t believe in them, itching at the back of his head he chuckled about his skin disease and remarked how he wouldn’t have it if he were able to heal himself.
The Dalai Lama has never taken a bath! This is his contribution. When he leaves a room he turns the light off.
As he spoke this I thought to myself, how elementary and basic. Everyone knows that they are supposed to do those things; turn the water off when brushing your teeth, close the refrigerator door… where is the profound wisdom?
It was there. I, in my infinite quandary of problems, had overcomplicated matters.
This man wasn’t going to sit lotus style and meditate the earth to pristine majesty. His answer was that he conserves water by not using it for bathing in a tub and when he isn’t using a room he simply switches off the light. Simple and true. This is what he can do, personally, and that is good. He is happy with this. Pollution is everywhere, natural resources are depleted, violence is surging, the gap between rich and poor is as broad as ever–our problems are overwhelming. We don’t know where to start to stop the madness. Choose one thing and do it well. I was making it too complicated because it is so complicated and in the mess of chaos one becomes indifferent. I was making myself as big as the problems themselves, taking myself too seriously. All you need to do is choose what you can do and then–do it.
Crisler Arena was steaming hot. There had to have been about 10,000 people all warming up to their own enlightening experiences. The Dalai Lama continued to converse with us, as if we were house guests coming over for a bit of lunch and tea. He entertained himself and laughed heartily after accidentally calling himself a Christian. “Obviously, I’m Buddhist,” he smiled out at the crowd and finished his thoughts about ecology and sustainability. “If this is interesting to you learn about it and experiment. If it isn’t you can go forget about it.” He gave a mighty laugh at this, waved his hands in a shoo motion and then bowed.
It was an experience I’ll remember forever.

After working at UPS long enough to have a fan base George said, “it’s time to retire”. Jenny, his daughter said, “it’s time to saran wrap my dads car”.
Unbeknown to George; he whiled away his last day innocently delivering packages without a thought that his teal grand am was in jeopardy.
3,000 feet of saran wrap was being unloaded by a manic daughter, her anti-retirement boss and “Shaky”, a woman with Parkinson’s Disease who likes to get wild.
As you can see, wild is no lie.

CONGRATULATIONS GEORGE

Slept til 8AM. It isn’t that my alarm didn’t wake me–I chose to turn it off 9 times and lie in bed. Waking up this morning was not happening, maybe I had a concussion yesterday. That will be my excuse. had concussion, was late.
That one is new. I have a friend who has a database of all the movies and music he owns. He has thousands of dvd’s and cd’s. He is generous and you can log into this database and search through his stuff and he’ll lend it to you like he’s a library. That is what I should start doing with excuses. I need to keep a database of what I say and the date it was used. Email tracking is forcing me to have to work–and if I’m going to get up to rifle through my work e-mail the least I could do is go to my fucking job. so, a db would be nice. it’d give me a chance to practice my project management skills. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple arguing about whether or not she, at one time, shared her underwear with her friend. This all originated from a poster they read that says “Passwords are like underwear. Don’t share them with friends.”

It was a lame argument but it has kept me entertained.

Sunday was an interesting day. For one, there was sunshine and for two, Main St. was closed and we got to stand in the middle of the intersection. But only after all the gigantic and grotesque puppets from Festifool danced by.

A lady across the street was walloped in the head by one of the bungeeing jugs attached to this extremely female puppet. Read the rest of this entry »