stupid chirpy bastard

A cricket has decided to take up residence in my apartment.

A stupid, chirpy, little bastard of a cricket.

It won’t shut up. And it’s driving me crazy! I can’t even get away from it, because my apartment is a small studio… there is nowhere to hide!!!

I want it to die a painful, chirpy death… well, not really… I really just want it to hop happily away and live somewhere else. But at this moment, it is pissing me off… it is the sixth day in a row that it has woken me up at 5:00am, and I’m sick of seeing that time on my clock.

Stupid, chirpy bastard. Grr.

self-control

Sometimes I wonder if I would be an alcoholic if I didn’t have more self-control.

Alcoholism runs in my family. My grandfather (on my father’s side) was an alcoholic until about three years ago, when his doctor basically told him to stop drinking so heavily or be prepared to die within the next year. Somehow, after a lifetime of drinking twelve or more beers a day, this got through to him, and now he drinks twelve or more NAs* a day. He was a grumpy and crabby drunk, although never angry or violent. He knew nothing about me, or his other grandchildren, as he could never be bothered to ask. My grandmother handled all presents and cards, and the caring about the grandkids.

I spent my childhood feeling as though I had only one grandfather — my mother’s dad — with whom I was very close. I never spoke to my father’s father, and he never spoke to me. The first time we ever spent time together was a few months into his sobriety. We were at our family’s annual 4th of July party, and he asked to play badminton with my sister and I. For most people, this would be a totally normal request. For my sister and I, it was completely baffling. For our entire lives, he never wanted to do anything at family gatherings outside of drinking in the garage and complaining about the meal.

But this time, he actually wanted to spend time with us. He asked us questions about school and our friends and boyfriends. We played badminton for a while, and for the first time since my mother’s father passed away — when I was 11… about twelve years ago now — I felt as though I had a grandfather. That made, and continues to make, me happy… but also sad. To know that we could have had twenty more years of this kind of grandfather-granddaughter relationship, had alcoholism not been present in his life — in our lives, really — is incredibly sad.

My father spent his high school and college days deep in the bottle. He’s never told me what made him come out of it, but I’ve heard plenty of stories — and warnings — about his adventures while inebriated. He doesn’t like to tell me stories about himself in high school or college, because they almost always start with, “My buddies and I had gone to the packie** and…”

For the most part, I have the self-control and self-awareness to know my limits when it comes to alcohol. I am definitely the drinker in the family, between my sister and I. My sister tends to stay away from alcohol almost completely, while I am what can definitely be termed as a social drinker. When I’m out with friends, I like to have a beer or two, or a cocktail or two. Sometimes that number is higher, although a lot less frequently now that I am out of college.

But every once in a while, when I’m in a particularly deep funk, I do find myself reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniels that always has a home in one of my cabinets… I do find myself reaching for that third, fourth or fifth beer… I do find myself remembering those moments in college when a few extra drinks took the edge off the anger or pain.

And when I’m thinking clearly again and the funk has lifted, I find myself wondering. If I didn’t have my grandfather as proof of how alcoholism affects and hurts so many people besides yourself, would I know my limits? Or care about them? If I didn’t have my father’s embarrassment at the fact that he doesn’t have any non-alcohol-related stories to tell his kids, would I have that self-control?

Is alcoholism a disease that is lurking under the surface of my consciousness, waiting to beat out my self-control and take over? I’d like to think that isn’t true, but then the funk sets in, and the knowledge of how to take the edge off that pain drifts to the surface, and then there’s a little less whiskey in the bottle. Knowing that my self-control can’t always win out, scares me.

For now, my self-control wins out most of the time. And I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that the day never comes that it doesn’t.

*Non-alcoholics. Mostly O’Douls.

**In Massachusetts, alcohol is sold at package stores, packies for short.

lovin’ me some genius

I don’t know if you have the latest version of iTunes, but if you do, have you discovered the wonders of the Genius!?!?!? I’m obsessed! It’s the only way I listen to iTunes now

It’s like Pandora, but with all songs I like and know!

Basically, you pick a song, hit a button, and it creates a playlist of up to 100 songs that are similar to the song you selected! If you don’t like the songs it picks initially, you can refresh it and it creates a new playlist of up to 100 similar songs! You can save the playlist if you want, or just let it disappear into oblivion when you create a new one. It’s pretty awesome for someone like me, since I have almost 10,000 songs in my iTunes. Having so many songs makes me not want to create playlists, simply because it would take forever unless the playlist was just music by one certain artist. This solves my (lazy) problem!

It rocks the shit, and you should try it.

yesterday was a good day

• I paid under $3.00/gallon for gas for the first time in recent memory. It was $2.94… barely under $3, but under nonetheless!
• I went to a LWL Round Table discussion on Branding and the Small Business, and it was insanely informative and fun. I took tons of notes.
• I was crazy productive at work, and it made me feel great.
• I got paaaaaaid. Which is very very good, because rent is due soon, as well as a few other bills. Plus, I really need to hit up the market because I’m basically out of food. Although I’ve been very not-hungry lately, which is a strange thing. Usually I can practically eat my weight at any meal, but lately… itty bitty meals.
• I talked to my amazingly awesome friend, KG. She lives all the way on the other side of the country (like allllll my friends), and we do not talk often enough. But we talked yesterday, and it was glorious.
• I found out my friend, Licious is officially engaged! I knew she was getting engaged, but it wasn’t ring-on-her-hand official yet. But now it is! She’s in Brussels (eating mussels) with her Spanish-Irish fiancee-lover-man. She’ll be moving there once they get married, which totally bums me out because I miss her enough just being across the country from her… but once she’s married, we’ll be across an ocean!
• And lastly, I voted early, and got this rockin’ sticker:

raaaandom

I was watching The Price is Right this morning, while basking in the bliss that is having Fridays off, and realized that one of the contestants was a girl I went to high school with! I’m talking good friend, hung out pretty often… I could probably dig up some ridiculous pictures of us from sleepovers and school dances — yep, just clicked through my harddrive quickly and found one of us at our high school’s Senior Halloween Party.*

However, she’s one of the 238 — out of 241 — people I graduated high school with that I no longer speak to. I pretty much made a clean break from my hometown once I hit college. Which was aided by the fact that my parents moved from Massachusetts (where I grew up) to North Carolina (where they live now) after my freshman year.

Anyway, she won a barbeque grill, a pool cleaner and a thousand dollars. Congrats to her!

*Why do I still have pictures from 2002 on my almost-full laptop (poor Larry Jr is so full he may actually spontaneously combust**)? No freaking idea!

**Yes, my computer has a name. It’s Larry Jr. My first computer was Larry. My external harddrive is named Frank and my iPod Shuffle is Jimmy. Strangely, I have not named any of my cameras.

when you see a shooting star…

… all your problems seem so far

I genuinely believe that nothing can cure a crappy mood like hysterically cheesy and undeniably catchy 90s pop music.

My medicine of choice is NSync’s debut album, complete with the version they released in Europe with five bonus songs. I actually love admitting that I adore NSync. I’ve seen them in concert several times, and would be one of the first people in line — okay, in the iTunes store — if they reunited and came out with a new album. I have all of their albums, including some random ones: the aforementioned European debut album, some sampler album from Herbal Essences that also has some funny Britney Spears songs on it, and the DisneyMania album on which they sing ‘When You Wish Upon A Star.’

I’m listening to NSync nonstop, because lately, I’ve been wallowing a bit, and I’m freaking sick of it. I’m incredibly ready for the next part of my life — whatever the hell it ends up being — but I’m kind of stuck where I am. I’m staying in Arizona for five and a half more months, and then I’m moving in with my parents for a few months, while I wait to find out what the next part of my life will be: grad school or a new job.

It annoys me to no end that I have basically no forward movement at the moment. And what annoys me even more, is that I’ve become sloth-like. To the point that I’m not even working on what little forward movement things I really do need to be working on.

So I’m listening to my musical lovers… those studmuffins of the late-90s. Who I seriously thought I would meet and marry someday. Ah, to be a teenybopper again.

But seriously, how can you not get happier with lyrics like this:

here we go / one more time / everybody’s feeling fine / here we go now
yes yes yes here we go / nsync has got the flow
put your head to the beat / we’ve got everything you need / here we go now
yes yes yes here we go / nsync has got the flow

Seriously.

(the post title is also part of an nsync song… pluto will be a planet again — and not sad and dejected out in space — if you know which one!*)

*I really hope you know I can’t promise this… but that would be the most kickin’ prize ever. Our generation gets the best “When I Was Your Age” finisher ever…. When I was your age… Pluto was a planet. F-yeah, dude.

unless you care about our world, don’t vote

we want the funk

My favorite back-to-school commercial still lives! Makes me laugh everytime I see it:

I especially love the third kid. Gotta love little kids jamming to We Want The Funk!