The Dangerous Existence of Madame Lee

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. (In the immortal words of Ass Dan, "you know I'm going to live forever!" All joking aside, I am not as confident of my immortality.)

( What have I been doing? Here's a lot of words to say that it hasn't been very much. )

I don't know if this post heralds a golden age of my glorious return, or if it means I'll be back in another six months. I suppose there's only one way to find out. In my absence, I haven't really read anyone's back posts extensively, though I have gathered from skimming that some of you are Going Through It, and I'm sorry to hear that.

There is no Stirring Conclusion here. I'm feeling tired and it's time to hit the hay for an exciting day of Cleaning! tomorrow. Not locking this because nothing matters anyway :D

To whom it may concern: I am wearing a pair of jeans I dug out of my closet this morning. I hadn't worn them in years because I couldn't fit into them. I kind of like this because it means I might possibly not have to buy new pants :D

( Life in general )

And that's all, folks!

So tired. Will have to work this weekend. Had the second of my cavities filled this morning and it feels weird because I'm not used to it. (I'm not used to fillings period--I never had any before this year.) Fell off the wagon yesterday, hard, and am now getting back on, which is going to be very interesting because they're giving us pizza for lunch tomorrow. I'm planning to bring my own lunch and resist the siren song if at all possible. Also I stocked up on more trail mix, which is hilarious and pathetic at once.

But! MONEY, because avarice is the besetting sin of all my race. :D

( A tedious body miscellany )

That's all, folks.

So I'm back now. Actually, I was back yesterday when AT&T came out to fix the Internets while I was at work, but didn't feel like LJing then due to the throes of irrational paranoia et al and would likely have bitten someone's head off. (Irrational paranoia isn't ended, but has been greatly reduced; I am unlikely to bite anyone's head off unless they piss me off. Then all bets are off.)

Things that have happened (exciting and not):
+ I am attempting to fix my life. Again.
+ At some point between the last time I weighed myself (sometime in the spring) and last Sunday, I apparently dropped ten pounds. Experts speculate that I may have done nothing whatsoever to deserve this, but hey, I'm not complaining.
+ I have started to clean my room on the grounds that since I'm likely stuck in this shitpit for a while, my room might as well look like someplace where a teenaged girl with ADHD a grown-ass woman lives. I haven't been at it very long but it is already a vast improvement.
+ In the process thereof, I found that Callice apparently let herself into my bedroom on a regular basis and peed on a huge amount of things. I knew that she occasionally got in there, and that because I often didn't know she was there, I occasionally shut her in there and she occasionally peed on things as a result. Apparently, she was in there and peeing on things a lot more often than I thought. I now have huge piles of laundry that may or may not be completely ruined. My cat keeps on giving. (On the off chance you're just tuning in to the long-running, if not terribly popular, Wang Xi-feng Show, as I know a couple of you are: Callice was my last cat. She died in September.)
+ I found my Russian dictionary (the good one, not the Langenshit one) and was pleased, as I had been wondering what the Russian word for "seahorse" was. It's morskoi konyok, which unfortunately does not lend itself well to adorable nicknames for the adorable duokinneas, who will have to remain a plain old regular Angloglot seahorse.
+ I failed to find my elementary Russian textbooks, which I assume are somewhere in the bowels of my room. I know I did not sell them, because foreign language books are unsaleable at IU. AWESOME JOB l33.
+ Our tomatoes are turning red and yellow. (Yeah, we grow yellow tomatoes.)
+ I fucked up my federal income taxes, apparently. I received a refund check last week, and (true to form) a couple of days later a letter followed which informed me that I was too entitled to a refund because I miscalculated my tax burden. No complaints.
+ forgottensanity! I received your package the day before yesterday! You will be pleased to know that I have not yet opened the present. (O HAI WUT IZ TIHS THING CALLD RESTRAINT.)
+ On the off chance you wanted to talk to me on AIM, which means this next is mostly for galhea, work schedules and pavement-pounding unfortunately mean I am not going to be on too often in the next few days. I'll try but no promises, k?
+ So glad to be back.

O hai thar Delilah. I'm back.

I don't know that I'm doing 100% better. The job situation still hasn't improved (though I've gotten two raises, one cost-of-living and one performance-based), and, consequently, neither has the financial situation (though I'm not doing as badly as I could be, given the circumstances). I'm still in therapy (big surprise, I obviously have some issues to work through). Mom still hasn't got a job, and that weighs on us. (She was up for a job, made it to the second-interview round, and was in the hiring company's top three candidates…and they picked someone else. Well, I wish them joy of their vastly inferior employee.)

On the other hand: I've lost some weight (part one in a bazillion-part series), am generally eating better most of the time (I really fell off the wagon this week, though), and am exercising more regularly. I'm less socially isolated than I had been. (I am so bad at meeting people in real life. SO BAD. Trufax.) I'm still getting interviews, so obviously I'm doing something right. And damn it, I miss my friends.

Events of the past two months behind the jump, if anybody cares. ( Shit no one cares about! )

In conclusion: back now. Hi.

1.) I think LJ is on the fritz again, because it says my last update was 7 days ago. Actually, it was 11. Or thereabouts.

2.) My appearances will likely be sporadic for some time to come because I have a lot of things to do in preparation for the upcoming move, which God willing will be at the beginning of March or so. However, there will be posts in which I attempt to fob off crap that I don't want or can't take with me onto other people.

3.) H is back from Kobe. HURRAH. He has still not succeeded in his attempt to quit smoking, but the year is young and he has managed to cut back, so also HURRAH. All the same, I expect I'll have to pick up an ashtray when he's here in the fall.
OH HOLY CRAP H IS GOING TO BE HERE.
3a.) I wish I were still smoking, because it was a lot easier to keep my weight under control back then. Of course, it could have had to do with the fact that I was in college and walking all over campus (even when I had a car and an apartment), and it could also have had to do with the fact that I pretty much lived on coffee. On the other hand, at least my weight is remaining stable, but that doesn't mean I want to be this number for the rest of my life.

4.) Most of my entertainment for the past couple of weeks has revolved around movies; we went to see Atonement on Saturday (I liked it, and it played with perception in some interesting ways, but it was rather a downer). Also, jurhael, if you haven't seen Notes on a Scandal yet, you should really try to get ahold of it; one of the themes has to do with a kind of narcissism.

5.) Also I finished The Warlord by Malcolm Bosse (a relic of my father's). I was pleasantly surprised, as I had expected it to be stupendous crap, but it was actually quite good.

6.) Went up to Bloomington last week to look at an apartment. I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to get a 1-bedroom, because it's easier for me to think in terms of what I can afford/what I'm likely to get rather than in terms of what I want. (I suppose someday I will be able to afford a 2-bedroom. Alas.) In terms of location and what the landlord pays, it's perfectly okay; in terms of space, I could make it work, but it would be a stretch, and I'd have to leave my upstairs table at home. I might apply for it anyway, after I've looked at some other places, though I need to clarify their pet policy first (leasing agent said the cat would be okay; application says no pets).

(I already looked at apartments where I used to live. There's a lovely 2-bedroom available, but I have severe misgivings about throwing money down on it when I don't know that I can afford it. Unlike the last time I did this, I have a car and credit cards now.)

Was indescribably sad to leave.
6a.) Maybe because I've already told H about all this, and because to me it's old news, I just feel kind of brusque and short about rehashing it here. But I figure at least 2.5 of you might like to know how it's all turning out.

7.) Happy birthday, imperfectkatoru! Also a happy belated birthday to queen_lily_rose.

1.) Okay, so never mind the fact that I've actually exercised every day this week until now, and never mind the fact that it's raining and no one could reasonably expect me to go out in the rain and walk a mile. That nagging little voice in the back of my head is saying, "Hey, lardass! Get yourself out to the high school track and WALK!"

2.) This is possibly because I've been bribing myself with watchables; at the moment I'm working my way through Trigun and yes I AM old enough and have been in anime fandom long enough to remember when it was the hot new fandom, but I'm really liking it. This is nice, actually, since I didn't think myself capable of taking more than peripheral, benign interest in anything that didn't have samurai, and I haven't been really into any anime in years. Either that, or I'm becoming a fantard in my old age.

3.) I got a letter from a check verification service today informing me that my checking account information (along with 2 million other people's) has been compromised, basically because one of their employees was misappropriating it and selling it to marketing companies. They have no reason to suspect fraud--they think it was just being used to annoy the piss out of me with direct marketing crap, which should be a crime in and of itself--but all the same my weekend has now been complicated by having to talk to my bank and the credit reporting agencies. The word "FUCK" comes to mind.

4.) I desperately want to mock someone SO HARD for being a pretentious, navel-gazing little twat who feels herself at all qualified to dispense sage advice, but can't because she knows one of my friends and I don't want to bring her sparklyspeshul wrath down on my head. Not, actually, that this would bother me; for one thing, my vocabulary is bigger and I suspect that I am more vicious and have less remorse, so obviously you should put your money on me. However, I can only do so much for the lulz before I get bored, and I'm not sure if the strong likelihood of lulz to be had merits the wanksplosion that might follow.

Also, I would have to 'fess up to reading her journal, which I do because it is a hilarious trainwreck. And if I did this, she might make it friends-only and thus cut some of my lulz off at the source. So I'm not altogether sure that I want to part with these particular lulz at the moment.

Which is probably my way of saying "'tain't nohow worth it".

5.) I ordered apricot tea on a whim, and it came in the mail today. HOORAY. Also, it smells delicious even dry, and very, very strong. Mmm, tea. ♥

6.) Teh m0mmy strongly insinuated that we might turn the A/C on tomorrow if it continues like today. :D Also that there might be PIE. Delicious sweet PIE. Mmm, pie. ♥

7.) I have temporarily called a moratorium on buying new books until I'm done with the pile I got last week in Salem. No, I can't stay out of that bookstore. It has, like, a magnet or something that sucks me in, and oddly, no matter what I want, I always find it.