I just found the most luxurious site. Ohhhh. It makes me hungry. It's about lunchtime anyway. I'm going to go find something to satisfy me. I wish it were the food in these photos though. They make me want to go home and start cooking immediately.

Enjoy the pictures and I hope they inspire you too, or at least just make your mouth water uncontrollably.

One way to kick start that fish, Deim

I have found one good thing about the job so far. SO FAR. I'm trying not to complain or be pessimistic. And this thing is pretty optimistic. Sort of. Coming home from a long, mind numbing day of work really puts me in the mood to live life to the fullest. I want to do everything, see everyone, eat everything and do anything that might be construed as fun or relaxing. Maybe this can be the way I can fulfill the quote I like, "the future unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult present." Mmmmm. I want gallons of ice cream, glasses of wine, cigarettes and dancing. I'm so happy to be home that you could convince me of doing any outrageous act. Ahh, to be young and home from work.

Two Days for the Price of One Post

Another day of skulking around the maze of cubicles hoping someone doesn't ask me what I'm supposed to be doing. I played a super fun game on addictinggames.com for a while. And then, trouble. Apparently they can't find my security clearance from my old job to reestablish it. Embarassing questions got asked, questioning my competency and reliability and job status.

Well, not really, but it felt that way. I felt like even more of a fraud; like I had lied my way into this boring place just to steal state secrets. So I had to fill out bunches of paper work accounting for my past 7 years.

Resumed 8/29/07
It is in these moments, when I am filling out resumes or school applications that I am made aware of just how sporatic and unregimented my life is. I tend to think of myself as organized and liking schedules, knowing where the plan leads to. But when I look back and see 3 different colleges, 15 jobs, 2 cities and countless missing phone numbers, addresses or supervisors' names trailing after me that I realize just how impulsive this life of mine is. I always make decisions impulsively. I tend to want to gather the data but then end up just throwing it into a corner and running at the situation with my head down. I think it yields interesting results and stories but might look a little too colorful for this cubicle. It's a bit outside their color scheme. I'm afraid I'll be a bit too outside this color scheme too. Yesterday when I left here I felt physically ill. I think I'm just not used to this sort of schedule, but it's also my fears creeping out and affecting me. I need to remember more often that I have done quite a lot, and know quite a lot more than people give me credit for. I went to Kenya by myself, I visited London all alone. I got an internship working in Robert DeNiro's production company, and moved to New York all alone. I can do anything I want (and I don't just mean that in a girl power sort of way. I'm pretty self suficient.) Just because these people don't know what I'm capable of doesn't mean I have to feel intimidated by beige walls and button down shirts.

In response to Smith Mag's six word memoirs I came up with this minute autobiography: Exuberant families breed stories from messes. That, in turn, led to this poem (which is still a work in progress):


Exhuberance oozes out of them

like oil; rich, smelling of sun, necessary.

From this force of relatives and friends

Messes are beget on the kitchen counters,

in the living room, and bathroom sinks.

They trickle onto the sidewalks

where neighbors gather gossip,

leak out through phone lines,

and on voices carried past the pines.

Slowly, after tears and roars- of laughter fade,

the messes emerge from chrysalis as stories.

And the stories creep back in to fill up the house.

Breeding among the late night dishes in the sink

and bottles left on the back porch,

events catalogued like colorful beads,

from conversations continued long into the night;

they take up their place alongside the silent spiders

and remain; the friendly ghosts of the family.

New Kid on the Block

I started my first day of work this morning. I had an hour long orientation and then a quick tour around the office maze, and now I'm sitting here in an abandoned cubicle feeling like a little kid on her first day at a new school. The girl that I'll be working with for the next couple of weeks showed me around and then dropped me off at this cubicle and left. I read through the packet of new employee information I'm supposed to understand and fill out and now I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I feel a little like someone pulled a Freaky Friday on me and my dad and I've stepped into his world of business casual and gray fabric cubicles. I slink around the makeshift halls hoping no one looks up from their computer and recognizes me as a fraud, or will ask me a question and expect a smart, professional response. I don't know what I'm doing here. Literally or metaphorically. I don't know what my job will consist of and I don't know why I suddenly have an office job. It sort of scares me. Maybe it's the thought that this means I'm one step closer to really growing up. I know I'm supposed to have a real job and yet all I'm doing is sitting in this office, hidden away from everyone and wondering why I wanted to enter the real world of employment anyway.

It's sort of everything I imagined a real job to be-lonely, boring and confusing but not what I actually thought I'd have. Thank god I don't plan to be here forever. It would be soul crushing. Or at least, I think it would be, based on my first day. Maybe after a few weeks I won't feel like the new kid no one wants to play with at recess. But will I ever feel comfortable here? I hope for that, just to make things easier, and at the same time remaining in a cubicle, not doing anything that FEELS worthwhile for the rest of my life is one of my biggest fears. I've never thought I was cut out for the corporate world and I don't really see that changing. I've always wanted a job that I loved, that I felt meant something. A job like this might actually mean something to someone, but it doesn't to me. I've never wanted a job where I work 9-5 and come home and wash off the 'dust from the walls of institutions,/Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,/Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,/Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,/Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.'
(Theodore Roethke, Dolor)
That poem has always summed up what I think of the corporate world, and I know there are great jobs out there and great people who do them in office cubicles but I really don't think they're for me. Office Space, despite its hilarity, also terrified me because I didn't want that to be my reality, and now I find myself counting down the minutes of the clock and hoping not to be seen by anyone in authority because I'm afraid they'll ask what I did all day and I'll have to tell them. "I read sweet juniper all day. "

Say Wha?

I got a job. I got a job. I got a job. Sorry. I'm just a little surprised. I never really thought it would actually happen. I'm not super thrilled about the job but I know I can do it and I think I can do it for at least a year. I'm going to be proofreading things that military men write. Yay. It will pay well. That's the saving grace. I'm going to be commuting down near the Pentagon every single day. Every day. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I have a desk job and have to be there five days a week. At least now that I'll be sitting down all day I can buy some sweet heels and wear them without losing the feeling in my toes. And maybe even a car.

I've also been gearing up for the school year again. I'm trying to take a grad class at GMU this semester. Lots of good reasons, like working on my GPA, getting a good recommendation, getting some experience in a grad class and keeping my brain awake. But, in order to take the class I have had to run around like crazy trying to get all the documents in time so I can register and pay for classes by August 27th. Yup. Monday. (I think.) Wish me luck.

Surprise!

There's a sound in my house that I haven't heard in quite a while. It's a strange, bombastic, deep throated sound. It makes me happy in a way I've never felt before. Joining it are other melodious noises but this one sticks out more for its loudness and all encompassing hilarity. It's the sound of my brother laughing.

Last night my mom, Julia, Wendy, Joong Woo and I went to dinner with Ariel, Graham and Graham's family. We met at an Outback in Centreville. Sitting, waiting at the table, wondering who is joining us at a table for 15 we speculate on the announcement Ariel says she has for us. Is it an engagement announcement? Are she and Graham getting married? Julia threatens to walk out if that happens. Is she pregnant again? We can't believe either of these could be possible and we will be very sad if they are, because she and Graham aren't done with school yet. Ariel and Graham's brothers and mother walk in and Ariel looks beautiful in her dress, and the baby is adorable. Julia's afraid that because she looks so pretty she is getting engaged and she's preparing to be angry.
After they're seated Graham and Graham's second oldest brother walk in and behind them comes someone that looks kinda familiar, looks like a cousin or something, looks like he belongs with this group of people.
I hear my mom screaming and she runs around the table.
Julia and I are dumbstruck, Wendy starts yelling too.
I can't figure out what is going on.
Why is this person here?
Why shouldn't he be here.
It's my brother.
My brother who was in Iraq, and is supposed to be on R&R in Germany.
What is he doing here?
He was in Iraq and now he's here.
How?
Those are the confused thoughts running through my head.
Then it occurs to me that he is actually here now.
I get up and try to fit my arms around him and my mom and Wendy.
We're crying and laughing and stunned at his presence.
It's like when we saw him after boot camp all over again.
My mom is crying and Julia is crying and he's here.

He told everyone he was going to Germany for two weeks and we all accepted it without another thought, but he emailed Ariel and Graham to tell them it was all a lie and he was actually coming home and they planned the whole surprise. He arrived yesterday and will be here until August 19th. That's so long, he's here for so long, it will be the longest we've seen him for about two years, and the first time we've seen him since January.

I feel so shocked and as though it's not real, even though I hear him in the other room talking to Wendy. I almost don't want to spend too much time actually with him because I don't want to wake up, or miss him too much when he is gone. My heart hurts.