Shiver Shiver

If heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied,
And illuminate the "no's" on their vacancy signs,
If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark.

new death cab

OK, Now that I've Stopped Hyperventilating

I think Phil is totally going to divorce me because I am a MOTHERFUCKING MANIAC when it comes to school. Today we were supposed to get our papers back for my Peoples and Cultures of Africa class. It turns out that like 7 of us had our midterms graded by this phantom "guest TA" who hasn't been to all the lectures and OBVIOUSLY cannot grade efficiently or get our goddamn papers back to us on the right day. She just sent over a list of our grades in her absence. A list of grades that showed mine as being an 85%.

This is so not happening.

I'm going to sound like a stuck up bitch here, but I've earned my bragging rights for school and if you can't tell everyone about your 4.0 GPA, then what is it for, really?!? I swear I haven't seen a B on a non-math-related paper in like 4 years. I took one look at the B and walked right out of the room. I walked about 50 paces and turned on my heel while holding back tears. I went to our lovely, witty, fair-grading regular TA who was actually PRESENT and asked whom I needed to talk to about my grade from the phantom TA. She said; "You're Tawny, right?" and I said "Yes, the Tawny you gave a 97% to on the first exam. The Tawny who gets A's, always. The Tawny who only sees 8's on her paper if they follow a 9 and precede a percent sign. Yes, that's me." And in her infinite goodness she said "Don't worry, she doesn't know how to grade. I remember you from your last paper and you're going to need to breath right now, OK? We'll fix this, just come to my office next week and we'll change that grade because I know it's bogus. OK, take a deep breath, and have a good weekend."

You'd think that this would be enough to calm someone down. A normal someone, yes. An anal retentive school nerd with a 4.0 GPA to defend, no. I held back my tears all the way home on the bus and down the street until I came into the door and saw Phil playing THIS GAME.*** I went over to the bed and started to sob and just recently got my ass under control.

I'm such a dork right now.

***When this game ruins our marriage (if my temper tantrums over B's don't do us in first) I want you all to remember that as he was signing up online I repeatedly said; "NO GOOD CAN COME OF THIS! TURN BACK NOW!" and he didn't heed my warnings. So, don't blame me when it happens.

Memories

Elliot: So, I've been doing Pilates. I got a DVD.

Tawny: Cool, what are some of the moves--er--positions?

E: Well, there's this one (Elliot sits on her bum with her upper-body and legs lifted while she pumps her arms, which are parallel to the ground, up and down).

T: Um, cool, any others?

E: Well, we do--

T: --Wait. We? Who are you doing Pilates with?

E: Um, the other people on the DVD. hehe.

How Dare They!?!

How dare the video store people tell us that disc 5 in the LOST series is CHECKED OUT? We're done with 4, cannot just SKIP to 6, and NEED TO KNOW what happens next. I don't care who has it, you need to call them and ask that they bring it back. Now.

If He Only Knew

Blogging is my own special form of procrastination. Every time I sit down to write a paper on Maasai gender relations or the Zapatista rebellion I think, "hmmm, the internet needs to hear about my weight issues and it cannot wait until after Villa and Zapata. This is more important." So, you can be sure that if there is a post here there is also a paper deadline looming over my head and a husband being mislead by the sound of typing effectively conveying to him that I am a good student.

The Julie Post

Hi Julie!

OK, so things about Julie I find endearing and sometimes, somewhat unbelievable:

Julie is the kind of woman you sometimes just need to hate for a few minutes. Let me explain. When you randomly stop by her IMMACULATELY CLEAN house you want to think that this is how your house would look if someone just stopped by. But really, if you weren't expecting a guest and someone just (unthinkably) CAME BY you would pop your head out the door and try to end the conversation on the front porch because GOD FORBID they see your underwear strewn across the living room and your fast food bag sitting greasily on the coffee table. Julie, on the other hand, gracefully opens the door and in a 1950's-sitcom-way invites you in to smell the fresh flowers she's picked from her garden and PLEASE have a taste of the homemade organic apricot tart.

Let's all take a moment to hate Julie. In a loving way.

Julie is also the kind of woman who will, in response to any comment about almost anything remotely cool in her house, say "Oh that, I made it." The beautiful hammock? "I made it." The skirt you have on? "I made it." The adorable journal on the mosaic table? "I made it. And the table."

Let's all take another moment.

Julie is also very strangely selective about the information she volunteers in conversations. I don't know the name of her High School. I don't know her favorite food or movie. I don't know her weight (but I think that if I did I would be REALLY afraid to fall on her for fear that someone twice her weight would effectively crush her). I don't know her middle name. But I do know what kind of ear wax she has. I know she doesn't wear deodorant. I know about and once witnessed the panty-liners protecting the armpits of her sweaters. I know that, like myself, her menstrual periods are painful and accompanied by the feeling of needing to poop without actually needing to poop. Do you notice a theme here? Yep, you guessed it, BODILY FUNCTIONS. Get this girl started and you'll be trading scab stories for hours.

When Julie has a kid, NO THEY AREN'T PREGNANT, SIT BACK DOWN, she will probably be such a good Mom that all other mothers will have to steer clear of her for fear of having to hate Julie for her impeccable mothering skills. I myself have decide to stick around Julie in hopes that some of her together-ness will rub off on me like powdered sugar from her homemade doughnuts. Plus, she's nice and, well, I like her.

I Know I'm Still Young...

...But sometimes Santa Cruz takes me waaay back.

Back to the days when my hair would get pooped on if I didn't hold onto it as I sat down on the toilet. Not that I ever pooped on it, I just always assumed that it was so hippy-liciously long that it would fall into the toilet if I didn't consciously keep it from doing so.

Back to the days when my closet contained more tags that said "Gunnie Sax" than should be allowed.

Back to the days when I would wear more than one ring on each hand and think "Wow man, this totally compliments my John Lennon glasses and my Birkinstocks."

Back to the days when I thought it was possible for a guy to simultaneously live in his psychedelic-ly-painted van and be sexy. You know, at the same time.

Overheard in Class

"I have a hope for my generation that gender roles will be reversed and men will GET TO stay at home and cook and women will HAVE TO go out and see what it's like to work and run the world."

Um, riiiiiiight. 'Cause women who cook and clean and raise children and enable their partners to simultaneously have children and work a full time job aren't WORKING, they just do that for the fun of it. When someone who's NOT your mother or wife washes your clothes or cooks your dinner or babysits your kids you pay them. When it's your wife, while you're not paying her you tell her she should be grateful she isn't subject to personal autonomy and cultural and economic power. Don't you just LOVE having your labor illegitimized by frat boys!

Things that Make Me Go "Arghhh"

When people act like science is supposed to make claims about God and supposedly Supernatural phenomena.
There's an "intelligent design" conference on campus, yes that's the UCSC campus, and "creation scientists" (an oxy-moron if you ask me) are coming to gather to say things like "The world is so complex and so beyond our own understanding that there MUST be an intelligent creator." Here's part of the problem: why is it that we expect science to be one thing for us sometimes and another thing entirely at other times? For example, would you trust a medical researcher who said "Well, this disease is really hard to comprehend, we can't really know what's behind it, we have a lot to learn, so it MUST be a supernatural phenomena." You'd laugh and say "Very funny, so when will y'all be developing medicines to combat this thing?" We EXPECT medical science to use the scientific method and stay within the world of the knowable, the concrete. Why does this suddenly go out the window when we talk about further understanding the origins of the universe? Sure, I see why some people have a HUGE spiritual investment in making "just so" stories about the beginnings of time, but THAT'S NOT SCIENCE, SO DON"T CALL IT SCIENCE....I'll be the first person to say that science is not above reproach, I mean, Karen Barad, is on my top-ten Science Studies reading list. I don't think that we should blindly follow science as though it were a religion, which is hard to do seeing as science is self-correcting, but I don't think science should become obsolete when a person's faith is in jeopardy. If you insist on dragging science into lala land to make yourself feel better about Genesis, I'm cool staying where I am: in a natural world wherein knowlege about that world is held to standards of, you know, ACCURACY and PROCESS. (imagine!)