February 13, 2001
Okay, where are the spy cameras? I know GE has them set up all over my house to make comedies. My dishwasher (circa 1922) doesn't get the dishes clean. In fact, some dishes can enter the dishwasher resembling clean, and exit looking like refuges from a feast. But my main complaint is the stove. Oh, we can't let people choose their own heat settings--they might actually creat edible food! So instead they give me four choices of heat. At heat setting three, the water doesn't quite boil. At heat setting four, it boils over constantly. So I can't leave the stove for a second when I'm trying to cook pasta. I don't like to sit around the kitchen watching pots boil. A watched pot never boils, unless Beth is watching it, in which case she gets bored and wanders away and it boils over, as the old maxim says. Maybe it's a way to keep me from eating semi-healthy. And my Microwave (non-GE, but nonetheless) likes to not cook things at the rate packaging says. Maybe I should eat out every night.
February 14, 2001
I used to be Bitter Single Person on Valentine's Day. This morning I was feeling antagonistic. And then I read something about Valentine's Day that I didn't know. I found that people didn't always send sappy, romantic cards on Valentine's Day. At the time of the American Civil War, there were cards also not in the best of tastes that some men would send to former loves or people they wanted to get back at for some reason or another (http://www.stvalentines.net/americanvalentines.htm). Ann Landers or Dear Abby (whichever) had in her column that people used to send insulting cards. I don't mean to sound like a malicious person, but why are we all celebrating a Catholic Saint day anyway? Especially since it really comes from an old Greek Goddess originally. Bunch of pagans, we are! But next year, if I'm single, I think I'll have a good time sending dumb cards to people and know that I'm keeping the Valentine's tradition!
February 15, 2001
By your reaction to that headline, it tells how much you know me. The people are saying, "You are so stupid to panic over that" don't know me at all. The people that are saying, "It will be okay, Beth" know my personality (to panic over anything) but they don't know me. The people who laughed and said, "mm-hmm, Beth" with grins know me. I hate telephones. They've always scared me. As far as I know I was never attacked by phones when I was a child. I think I've always been easily startled, and phones ringing in quiet houses always startle me. Why did I then get a cell phone? Because it's not the best idea to go driving on long road trips by yourself without some way of communicating should you get in trouble. I got a cell phone for my convenience--so when I needed to talk on a phone, I'd have one. I didn't buy it so everyone could get ahold of me when they wanted to talk to me. I'm a private person. I don't want to be found at any given time. :) Sure, I give other people my phone number if there's some reason they should need to call me, but for the most part, I don't use my cell phone. So, if my battery's going low, I'll turn it off. I'm not worried about it not being fully charged (although I would like to keep it that way in case I ever needed it and couldn't charge it!).
February 16, 2001
This morning I went to work like any other young adult who isn't idependently wealthy. Being a young adult is also a fairly good indication that I use a computer for my job. Being a normal day, the first thing I tried to do was log onto the computer. It asked me to change my password, and grudgingly said I could wait a maximum of ten days. I choose to wait. Apparently that was not the answer the computer was looking for. Why? Suddenly it pretended I was a new person. It got rid of my pretty background and gave me the WindowsNT green, and popped up a helpful "Welcome to WindowsNT." Or maybe it said Office2000. I, frankly, didn't pay attention. I never do. It started doing some installation set-up stuff, so I canceled it. What's the answer to all computer problems? Shut down and restart. And this time I decided "Okay! I'll change the password!" By then the computer was too upset, and it did the same thing. It took the Computer Geeks of the company two hours to get my computer doing the right things so I could work. As an addendum, now my Mac monitor seems to have died. Or perhaps the computer. There's really no way of knowing right now.
February 19, 2001
I really am trying to organize myself. Tonight I think it hit the bottom, ironically, while I was trying to clean. See, when I decide to clean, I figure there's no use putting new wine in old bottles, so I clean everything. I go through all my storage boxes and, well, everything with a total purge. I guess I wouldn't call it a total purge, since I'm a pack-rat, but I get rid of anything and everything that I know without a doubt I do not need. Thus, in the beginnings of my cleanings tonight, I had over four storage boxes of stuff completely empty on my living room floor. Believe it or not, what it looks like now is a cleaner version than earlier! (Another reason to be glad I don't have a web-cam!) I didn't get rid of a whole lot, but I did get it packed better. I don't know that I suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, but let's just say that tonight a bunch of those boxes came from my bedroom closet, a bunch of the boxes came from the hall closet, some boxes were already on the floor in the living room, and my bathroom soap dish got fixed and part of the bathroom counter got cleaned. There was no logic to it. I just happend to walk into the bathroom and realize that it needed cleaning...etc., etc. I guess I can just be thankful I didn't follow through on my threat to write letters to all the people I owe!
February 20, 2001
What's this deal? Last night I started going through my boxes of stuff. Tonight I'm doing dishes and made cinamon rolls (from Pilsbury, but nonetheless). What's with this sudden fit of cleanliness? Am I growing up? Considering that my favorite part of the cinammon (I can't spell that!) rolls is still the frosting, and I still can't get to bed before midnight, I'm thinking that just might not be it. Maybe it's my perfectionist qualities getting the best of me. At any rate, I hope I actually finish all the cleaning I want to do before I get bored with cleaning again!
February 28, 2001
Yesterday someone committed suicide by jupming out a window of the 51st floor of the IDS. I was a block away when this happened, although I knew nothing of it until this morning when I was reading the newspaper. Funny. I was a block away worrying about my own little problems, when so short a distance away, someone felt his life wasn't worth living anymore. It's been said that committing suicide is very selfish--you don't let anyone into your life to help you. You decide to cause others pain, rather than face your own. I think I'm starting to understand. Someone I trust a lot failed me recently. I hate it when I fail others. I hate it when others fail me. I have very little trust in people. I want to believe that all people are good, but I'm realistic to know that they aren't all good, and so people have to prove they're worth trusting. Thus, tonight when someone I trusted failed me, it hurt a lot. And that's when I realized what brings people to committ suicide. It's that they've been hurt too many times. Even if the immediate situation is solved, they know they'll be hurt again. They can't take the pain of hurt anymore. Suicide is selfish. Being annoyed with others hurting you is no reason to hurt others--because if all felt that way, the wave of suicide wout never end. There are other answers. But I think I understand why, even if I don't understand how and I know it does no good.
March 13, 2001
One of my mom's favorite smells is something she calls "New Dolly" smell. It's the rubber/plastic smell, but it's the way all dolls smelt when she was little. It's a happy association for her. Last night I baked cookies. I bought a mixer six months ago, but never got around to making cookies. I don't know why. Too busy, I guess. Thus, last night was the first time I got to use my mixer. I got to smell the "new mixer" smell. I don't have a clue what it smelled like, but upon first using it, there was a distinct smell that made me happy, because the mixer made me happy. Happiness by association, I call it. Things that are just normal and everyday events that make someone happy because it calls to mind a special time in their life or something they enjoy. I like those minutes. In the middle of a long, stressful, dull day, you can suddenly be called in your mind to somewhere far away in place and time, and it brightens your day. Your stress goes down. The day is no longer an "everyday" day.
March 22, 2001
Most people here are probably not aware of my quirks (not eccentricities, because I can't spell it or pronounce it, and I'm not rich, either). If there's any easy way to do things, I'll do it. A piece of code can be written in one, concise line? That's great! There's a program that will do something I want to my pictures? That's fabulous! And then we get to the real technology. There are seven million programs that will write a web page for you, but do I use them? Nyah, I know the basics of html; I don't want to waste time learning a new program, even if it does have nifty features like spell check. Thus, each one of these pages is written with painstaking detail in html. That said, after how many pages I've created (If I had to guess, I'd say around 50), when did I learn to make tables in html? Last week. Yep. I've been programming web pages since 1996, and I finally made myself go look up how to make a table. Took me five years to learn a basic concept. I've never claimed to be bright. I've never needed to use tables before, but one day I realized the best way to do something involved a table, so I finally opened up Html for Nose-Picking, Drooling Morons and looked up "tables." Now that I know how to use them, I can see the doors open and so many uses for them, that I fear my pages will be one big table. You'll have to bring your own chair. (And yes, I was embarassed when I looked it up to find out how amazingly simply beautiful the html for tables is.)
March 23, 2001
It's been five years since I spent the year in England studying and traveling around as much as I could. The other night I started scanning in pictures from the four scrapbooks. As I went through, it was a trip down memory lane. I would look at these pictures and think, stunned, "I was there! I did that!" I have a poor memory at best. These pictures were reminding me of the many incredible things I had done in my life. I tend to take them for granted. I oftentimes feel like a fairly dull person; I can never remember any of these stories when the conversation has really dried up. Part of it is my desire not to be dull (you can quit reading when you want) and I try to keep my stories concise, and part of it is also my discomfort at being the center of attention. Perhaps my poor memory is just a survival skill of a shy person. That aside, the fact does remain that it was very cool to look through my photo albums and realize..."I did that. I was there."
March 29, 2001
This spring, the Dayton's (soon to be Marshall Fields, which upsets me greatly as a Minnesotan)-Bachman's Spring Flower Show was based on Monet's Garden--specifically the book Linnea in Monet's Garden. Dayton's Downtown has an eighth floor display area. For Christmas this year, they told the story of Harry Potter--the first book--in a bunch of little mechanical scenes. Or not so little in most cases. Anyway, this year's flower show was based on Monet's Garden. I wish I had known about Monet's Garden when I was in France, but I was just an ignorant kid. I actually wasn't even aware of Monet's work when I was there. It's one of those things in life that I now kick myself for not doing. The Dayton's display was beautiful. Whomever put it together created a whole spring garden inside a huge warehouse-sized room. Walking through the garden felt like walking through a park in spring. It just made me incredibly happy to breath the scents of the flowers and enjoy their beauty. One of the moments when all the stresses of life disappear and suddenly your just immersed into another world; a world where so much of what we worry about from day to day doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the pure joy of being alive. (And trite and sappy and cliche-y and cheesy as this all may sound...that's the way life is sometimes. And a good thing, too.)
June 6, 2001
As you're sitting, reading this, if suddenly you were to wake up and find out nearly everything you've been doing has been a dream, would you be relieved or disappointed? I know, I know, you want to know how far back does reality go back to? Say you were to wake up a different person--as you wake up, you're not quite aware of who you really are, but remember this entire life and know it's a dream. (I only added in that last bit to keep all of you quiet who are asking "well, does the real me live a better life?") Something to speculate about. The thought just randomly occurred to me after reading entirely too many stories of people asking, when something wonderful happens to them, "Is this just a dream?" Well, if you think wonderful things are a dream, why can't you find out reality is just a dream? I've had some mundane dreams in my life (fortunately, I can't remember what they were about; I just remember having them) to go along with exciting, fun, funny, scary, and incredibly thought--provoking. I think my dreams have run the gamut, which pretty much reflects my life. In short, I'd be half disappointed, half amused, half frustrated and half wishing I could go back to sleep (but then again, when isn't that my wish? *grin*).
E-mail Beth!. I cannot be reached via lava lamp.