I'm leaving in about an hour to go meet up with Paul for some lunch and some Uncle Fun shopping and some used CD shopping. I fully intend to pick up some more Superchunk today. That's the plan, and I'm sticking to it.

Depending on the health of El Matty, I may do something with him later today. And depending on how long Steve slaves away at the corporate grind (working on Saturday! what a travesty!) I may do something with him later today. So it seems that it will be a pretty full, busy day. It will keep me away from the computer, and that's always a good thing. Well, for me it is. Maybe not for you, if you like reading this.

I think that everything is slowly but surely starting to look up for me. I've been kind of down and cranky for a while, but I think I've forgotten what I learned after the job debacle: everything happens for a reason. I just have to figure out the reason and it's all going to be for the best.

Laura recommends seeing Weezer in Columbia, MO. I discussed it with Matty last night and he was kind of iffy. I'm all for it now, so if he wants to go with me, it's on.

I should get dressed and get ready to face the day now. I think I am going to wear the fuzzy (actually, fluffy might be a more appropriate adjective) purple headband today. I think it's that kind of day.

Bob's posts today brought a tear to my eye. I know the struggle so well, the struggle of the creative person stuck in the cogs of the Machine. I used to be that person, the one who got reprimanded for "using the Internet too much." The Man spent *months* trying to stifle my creativity and keep me down. Trying to turn me into one of Them, a workaholic whose job was more important than anything else. I refused to assimilate, and they fired me. Of course, I was miserable anyway, and now I am happy making minimum wage at a part-time job that allows me the freedom to exercise my creativity. Well, uh, I can update my weblog when I don't have any appointments.

Thinking, thinking, thinking...go see Weezer in Columbia, MO? Or not? I love Weezer, oh yes I do. But do I love them enough to drive six and a half hours to see them? (That's five hours to St. Louis and an estimated hour and a half from St. Louis to Columbia. I could be wrong, though.) Is their live show good enough to warrant such extreme measures? Let me know.

--writers whose talents I envy

--fierce rockin' girls

--cute boys

--people I should have linked ages ago

--corrected links

--an indieblogger

--the webzine crazy enough to allow me to write CD reviews

Enjoy! I'm gonna go get some lunch now.

I was online, talking to a friend (who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend). He had found his way over to the kiss list, and he realized that I kissed someone else while we were still semi-involved. Now, I had no idea that he took our relationship seriously at this point when I kissed this other person, he had gone on about how he couldn't handle the distance and how he wanted to see other people, so I assumed that we weren't really an "item" in that sort of exclusive way. Sure, I still cared about him a lot, and I wasn't on some quest to find a new boy, but I figured that drunkenly (and I was very drunk on this occasion) kissing a friend was not a big deal. Knowing that he would make a big deal of it if I told him, I did not tell him. It was nothing, it wasn't like it was going to lead to a torrid and passionate affair, and flaunting it in his face would have been unnecessarily cruel and lame. I honestly believe that sometimes it is best to just keep your mouth shut about such things. If I had considered him a "boyfriend," I wouldn't have done it in the first place. Once you give up the boyfriend title, you give up the right to be continually up in my business, and he had given it up months before this even happened. But I felt that there was no reason to hurt him in that way.

So Friend gets on AIM, and he's all "you didn't care about my feelings," and blah blah blah, and he starts talking deception and cruelty and "you need to apologize" and "I thought we had a future together at that point" and all that. Well, guess what? I had no idea that he had strong feelings for me at that point. How was I supposed to know that he was contemplating some sort of future between us? A) He never told me--all I heard from him was how he wanted to see other people; and B) his actions didn't show that he was contemplating some sort of future between us. I get really tired of these sort of things, boys assuming that I am some sort of a mind-reader and that I can divine their true intentions by sitting around and thinking really hard about it. If you don't tell me and you don't show me, I don't get it. I am not Miss Cleo, people. I do not have the power of the tarot and a fake Jamaican accent.

Just prior to my conversation with Friend, I had a conversation with Paul about relationships. He agrees with me--that actions speak much louder than words. All the pretty platitudes in the world don't matter if you aren't going to back them up with actions. Paul and I are headed out to lunch tomorrow at my New Favorite Place to Eat, the Flat Top Grill, and then we're going to hit Uncle Fun and Reckless. He doesn't live that far from me, but we've somehow managed to never get together and hang out except for once at a journal gathering in 1999. It should be a good time.

I talk about boys too much, but I only do it because the men of Yahtzeen like it when I talk about boys. If I go to Minneapolis for a couple of days at the end of March, are you guys gonna drive out from Fargo and visit me?

But what made me want to scream and break things, really, is that there was no apple juice in the refrigerator last night at midnight when I wanted some apple juice. There were bottles of apple juice in the cabinets, but none of it was cold. I wanted apple juice so bad that I *dreamed* about it last night. Of course, I also dreamed that Brian was visiting me at work and that he had a pet ferret and that he was telling me some absurd story about how ferrets kill their prey in the wild by shooting poison darts out of their foreheads.

Speaking of tests over at TheSpark.com, remember that personality test that was all the rage back in September? If you haven't taken it, go take it, and make sure you put in my email address (nanette@spoonbender.org) as one of the people you know. Then you can see how compatible we are! Of course, that's a very non-scientific method of going about it, but still...it's good for a laugh or two.

As a matter of fact, there was one occasion where Robin photocopied a tarot card with a really gruesome devil, wrote a word balloon that said "OBEY ME" coming out of its mouth, and hung several of the copies on bulletin boards across campus. Most of them were gone by the next day, but one of them stayed up for several weeks. We had a class together in that room, and every time I would see it I would laugh uncontrollably. We had some good times back then, oh yes we did...

an example of how judgemental i am, from one of my friends

are you not at work?

bah!

bearer of sad news

balloon porn...

beautiful boy

bills, bills, bills

closer to the heart

contest, yo

crescent fresh

david markson

donde esta el brian?

emergency vets?

favor with the flavor

fortune cookie fortunes

glad you liked the cake

good morning, captain

good morning, sparkle boy

guess what i found?

hair!

hello to my comics-reading, final fantasy 9-playing boy...

i liked you better when you whacked off compulsively instead of fucking everything that moves

i totally want one.

i tried calling again...

karaoke, yo

lego porn!

mess

mini corn dogs rule

nick cave @ park west, chicago

part b

pit pat!

proof that this country is going downhill

quickie

ramming speed

relatives and the whole marriage thing

run ronnie run!

scenesterism?

shenis!

so now you know

spontaneous disconnection from aim

take this test!

templatey template

that tape from waybackwhen...

the great panic of 2001

this joke isn't funny any more

transcripto maximo

uhhhhh...

vanilla ice bubblegum cassettes

well, poop

Why I'm Not Speaking To You

...and that's a whole bunch of them. There are several with subject lines like "yo" and "good morning." But those aren't all that fun anyway.

Low-level. Somebody says "I don't want to see you any more," and you feel kind of relieved because you didn't really give a crap about them anyway. As a matter of fact, you would have dumped them yourself, but you didn't want to deal with a potential stalker and/or all the nasty and somewhat-true things they would say about you in retaliation. This is also the level of any relationship that has reached its natural end.

Mid-level. Neither of you wants to end the relationship, but you feel compelled to because of some reason that is beyond your control. It hurts, but it hurts less than it could because you know you could still hook up with them at some point. In other words, you're sort-of being rejected, but not totally and wholly. It will really start hurting when they start seeing someone else, because then you pretty much know that it's over. (Of course, this is not always true. I did get back together with someone following a mid-level romantic setback, and we were happy for a couple of years, and then we ended up tearing each others' hearts out and stomping on them repeatedly just for fun. And I even *lived* with someone in the interim. Of course, he was a smelly hippie motherfucker, and I think it really must have been the pheromones because he wasn't attractive in the least and he had the personality of a slug, but desperation does weird things to people.)

High-level. You get dumped, and you sort-of knew it was coming, but not really. Maybe you were in the midst of trying to make things better, trying to rekindle that old flame. Say you've been fighting a lot, or you know they've been sleeping with someone else behind your back, or you sense that they never really loved you anyway. This one usually involves yelling, and sometimes angry "I hate you/I want you" ex-sex, which may very well be the best sex of your life. You won't ever be friends after this. Don't bother.

Code RED. You get dumped and you didn't see it coming. They either hide the reason they dumped you or they flaunt it in your face. You're torn between never wanting to talk to them again and wanting to talk to them just so you can say awful, nasty things that will make them cry. This will hurt for months after the fact, and every time you think of the person who did this to you, you'll either imagine them on their knees grovelling for your forgiveness or dead in a pool of blood in the middle of a busy street. This is the sort of romantic setback that makes normal, happy people bitter and cynical.

FYI, I did indeed watch the ending of this movie late last night. I was flipping through the channels and I just couldn't help it.

SPOILER ALERT: The plucky breakdancing kids manage to raise the $200,000 they need to keep Miracles open thanks to a $50,000 donation from the parents of the rich girl who didn't want their baby hanging around with those rough, tough breakdancer types in their crazy neon clothes. Oh, and there was some breakdancing at the end. And Ice-T--yes, the REAL Ice-T--is in this movie.

I talked to Brian on the phone last night. He was telling me stories about Michael Jackson videos. I do not know why. Anyhow, he kept talking about the video for "Man in the Mirror," which I have not seen since forever, and last night, guess what came on VH1? I changed the channel right away, though.

I'm meeting with a financial planner today to talk to him about what I should do with my recent windfall. I'm going to roll it over into some sort of retirement account. Mainly this is because I don't want to pay taxes on it, but I also feel that it's the responsible thing to do with it. I'm 26 years old, and I'm probably not going to be working at a job that will pay into a retirement account for a couple more years due to my school plans. I need to start saving for retirement, because it's not like I'm going to have anyone around to help support me in my old age. (There's your bitter comment of the day, for those of you who keep track.) So the money will be put away somewhere where I can't touch it until I'm totally old (bitter comment #2: and probably living alone in a big house with a hundred cats named Fluffy and a chinchilla named Horace).

I hope you are all aware that I'm just being a smart-ass. Having just experienced what I will call a "mid-level romantic setback," I'm feeling a little bit bitter and snipey. Give me a couple of weeks, I'll be fine. Back to normal and all that stuff.

I had a few appointments--nothing too major. I went to class. It was all right. I was expecting to be more annoyed by it.

At least it wasn't an awful day or a wonderful day, because I would have had to change the rating on my review of this month.

I still have an hour and a half left here. Bleh. I'll probably spend half an hour or so on AIM, then I'll spend the last hour reading.

Oh, and I found out what my supervisor wanted to talk to me about. She asked me to compile some statistics on the proficiency exam for her. No big deal, and nothing major. Maybe this will help me get over my automatic negative response when a supervisor says that they need to talk to me. Heh.

Well, January 2001 got off to a better start than January 2000 did. At midnight on January 1, 2001, I was kissing my then-boyfriend. At midnight on January 1, 2000, someone else was kissing my then-boyfriend.

2000 was a lousy, rotten, hellish year. I spent most of it being completely miserable or absolutely delusional. All I wanted was for 2001 to be better. Just a little bit better. It doesn't have to be perfect. Mediocre and eventless will do. The absence of catastrophe would be damn nice.

I spent the first hours of 2001 taking care of a very drunk boy. It gave me the opportunity to indulge my motherly tendencies, and it also left me with some amusing anecdotes. I also wrote some very self-indulgent crap in my little writing notebook. I will not share this with you. Sorry.

The beginning of the month saw the end of my trip to Louisville, which was the last vacation I will have for the forseeable future. The combination of new job + lack of money leaves me in a situation where I can't afford to travel. Which is sad. Anyhow, leaving Louisville was marked with all the drama of a Nanette goodbye: I cried, carried on, and acted very, very sad. Then I got on the plane and got on with my life.

While in Louisville, I got a fortune cookie with the fortune "All your hard work will pay off." It still hasn't. I'm still waiting.

I started my new job on January 8. It is much better than my old job. First of all, my new boss isn't a workaholic who buzzes around like a mosquito on amphetamines. I am not miserable for 40 hours a week, so that's a bonus. I can't say that I'm miserable at all during the 20 hours per week that I work. I like it here. My co-workers are all nice, my boss is cool, the commute doesn't get on my nerves...well, except when I'm spinning my car out into a snowdrift.

Despite my new-found job happiness, I spent the bulk of the month feeling kind of down and disappointed. I try my damnedest to be optimistic, but there's always this part of me that won't let it happen. I have a theory about my life, and it's kind of stupid, but it always seems to fit my situation. (Self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone?) There are three areas of my life: friends, work, and boy-thing. One of them is always going to be fucked up somehow. It's never my friends. My friends are always cool. So it's always got to be a problem either with work or with a boy. Remember back in the day right after I got fired, back when I was totally unemployed and had no source of income and didn't want to get out of bed half the time? I was constantly blabbering about how awesome my love life was back then. Well, now I have a good job that I like. You do the math.

It's that big grey murk that hung over me for half the month that caused me to lower this month's rating. It would have been a solid 8.6 if it hadn't been for my moping and sadness. These ratings with their decimals, they are very scientific. I had to have Ray help me with the formulas. Even with his master's degree in math, he was still stumped.

What served to snap me out of it somewhat (albeit temporarily)? A trip to dear, dirty Decatur featuring a lot of gin and some karaoke. Oh, and an ex-boyfriend who finally admitted that I WAS RIGHT. There is nothing more pleasing than hearing those words. Well, there are things that are more pleasing, but having someone admit that I WAS RIGHT is definitely in the top twenty. Not even the best efforts of some crazy-ass bitch with a weird vendetta against me could ruin my good time. As a matter of fact, her antics were the source of many a good laugh.

But then it was back to real life in all of its glorious disappointment. I did make a new friend at the end of the month. And I had a few crushes, but not crushes of the serious type. Just crushes of the "you are so cute and funny and witty and clever" type. And I somehow got over my phone-phobia and called Kevin of Kev-Blog. We talked about the joys of working at Borders, getting fired, and grad school (or, in his case, law school) recommendation letters.

Things are looking up, I guess. Hopefully I won't get hit by a truck before the day is over. I'd totally have to rewrite this review if that happened. And I'd have to re-work that equation to get a new rating, and I'm not about to go through with that. Well, I'd go through with it if I could *increase* the rating, like if something really good happened. I don't know. Whatever. I'm glad January is over because January sucks anyway.

I had an absolutely rotten night of sleep. Part of it is because I slept until 11:30 in the morning yesterday, thus totally throwing off my sleep schedule. Part of it is because I've had a lot of crap on my mind that seems to hit me really hard just as I go to sleep. Part of it is because it was absolutely impossible to get comfortable. Oh well. I'm sure I'll sleep well tonight. It will give me something to look forward to.

I don't write poetry any more, by the way. Sometimes I kind of miss it. I actually tried to write a poem the other night, but it came out a big mess. I'm just going to stick with prose from now on, I think.

Other accomplishments today: I annotated the "people I've met" section of the links list (just hover your pointer over it and a little word balloon will pop up!), I finished the Sylvia Plath biography and Tender Buttons, and watched Jeopardy. Oh, and I folded my laundry and put it away. I started uploading the new personal information section of the website, but it's full of "coming soon" graphics. I guess I can let you see it, though.

It was my supervisor, calling to tell me that the school is closed today because of the fire. I tried my best to sound coherent, and I think I did a decent job. I thanked her for calling me, and that was that.

My class for tonight had already been cancelled, so the only reason I would be headed down there today would be to work at the library. I was kind of looking forward to that, so it's a shame that the school is closed. One good thing, though, will be that most of today's appointments will probably be shifted to tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have a full day of appointments tomorrow. Well, not *full*, but busier than normal. I like my job, I like the work that I do, so it's always kind of a letdown when I only have two or three appointments for the entire day.

I somehow got it in my head that I should be productive today. And I've done pretty well thus far. I faxed my alma mater and arranged to have my transcripts sent out to the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science and to two scholarship programs (ALA and Illinois State Library). I filled out the forms to have my GSU transcripts sent to the two scholarship programs. I thought about who I should ask for recommendations for the two scholarship programs. (People have got to be sick of me asking for references by now, so I'm going to use three people I haven't asked yet.) And soon, I'm going to finish that Sylvia Plath biography I've been reading and I'm going to finish Tender Buttons and I'm going to start reading the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Oh, and I printed out my response for class tomorrow.

Other things to do today: find more journallers/webloggers and ask them to fill out my survey, do some reading for the GSU thesis, update the indieblogs site, work on the new personal information section of this site, talk to people online, watch Jeopardy, listen to some more of my new CDs, vacuum the living room and hallway, go to the post office and buy stamps...the list is endless.

Speaking of CDs, I'm listening to Domestica by Cursive. I bought it a couple of months ago, listened to it once or twice, and never really got into it. A couple of people whose tastes I respect are very fond of this CD, so I decided to give it another chance. I think I like it better now.

I was sitting at work lamenting the fact that two of my three appointments didn't bother to show up when the lights started flickering. It didn't seem too strange, the weather has been really crappy and I thought maybe there was some sort of an ice storm that messed up the power lines. The lights went completely off for a second, then they came back on, so I went back to reading the biography of Sylvia Plath that I've been reading for school.

A minute later, the lights went off and didn't come back on.

The emergency lights in the Writing Center weren't working, so it was completely pitch black in there. Fortunately, the emergency lights in the back of the Student Development area were working, so I made my way back there and sat down. There was a lot of commotion and noise all over the building.

Wonder of wonders, my 6:30 appointment actually showed up. Of course, she showed up so she could cancel and reschedule for tomorrow, but at least she showed up. After about ten minutes of sitting around in the semi-dark wondering why the lights were out and if they were coming back on, my supervisor sent me home for the night. So I got off work an hour early.

I still don't know exactly what was going on, though I heard that it was an electrical fire. There were a bunch of fire trucks around, so that may very well be the case.

Just before I left, my supervisor asked me when I was working again. I told her Wednesday, and she said that I should remind her that she needs to talk to me. I panicked. I'm so conditioned from my former job that whenever a supervisor says "I need to talk to you about something" I automatically assume that it's going to be something negative. I suppose I should get over that, shouldn't I? I don't think she's got anything negative to say to me, really. Unless it's maybe that I shouldn't hide out in that one office so much.

Now I'm here at work. My 3:30 appointment didn't show up, and I probably won't be able to do anything with the 4:00 appointment besides show her a website or two to look at, so it's going to be another easy day. I brought some books with me, I'll do some studying.

So I watched Survivor last night. I didn't watch the last Survivor at all, except for one night when Ray and I were in Boston. And you know what? I decided that I'm sick of being left out of pop cultural events like Survivor. The problem with me and television is that I always forget when shows come on. I'll be sitting around and I'll see something on TV, and I'll think "that was cool, I should watch that again next week" and then I'll forget. But my brother watches Survivor, and so does just about every other human being in America, so it will be hard to forget to watch.

It was okay. It didn't blow my mind or anything, I didn't think it was the most amazing show ever, but it was okay.

I went CD shopping today. I had a gift certificate AND a 15% off coupon, so I bought a whole pile of CDs and it only cost me $39. Not bad.

I actually managed to get out of the house on two separate occasions this weekend. Last night, I headed out to the Pick Me Up Cafe with my new friend Steven, who I met through this weblog. Just like I meet all my friends these days. We sat around for a couple of hours and drank coffee, then we went to his apartment and watched the Henry Rollins spoken word special on Comedy Central and the beginning of SLC Punk. It was pretty cool. I have been wanting to expand my social horizons for a while, so this is a good thing.

Today was the Flat Top Grill for lunch, and then Reckless and the Gallery Bookstore. Enjoyable. And I didn't have any more automobile catastrophes! Hooray for that!

Oh, you probably want to know what CDs I bought. Here goes:

The For Carnation - The For Carnation

Jawbox - Jawbox

Superchunk - No Pocky for Kitty

Elliott - If They Do

Burning Airlines/Braid single

Bluetip - Join Us

The Sky Corvair - Unsafe at Any Speed

I also bought a copy of the newest issue of Beer Frame, which is one of my favorite zines in the whole world.

The only one I have listened to thus far is The For Carnation, and it's fucking great. Charlie was right when he told me that it's sexier than Slint. Hot damn.