So, I’ve done these on and off for a really long time. When I used to religiously use AIM (I don’t anymore. Instead, I sign into Google Chat and have it sign me into AIM along with it. But there are only four or five people I speak to on AIM these days. Oh well), I would post in my profile a list of books I was reading that month. Then I’d strikethrough the ones I was finished.

It worked pretty well, and was pretty motivating. Sometimes, it even drew comments from my friends. I never used to to show off (well, to some people maybe), and this time it’s definitely not to show off. But I think it’s important for me to keep some kind of record of what I’ve read, because it will keep me accountable to actually reading throughout the year. It’s so easy to fall into a slump where the only thing I read are the trashy magazines that come to my house once a month, and the endless dribble that comes through Google Reader and CNN.com. And reading books makes me feel more connected to writers and writing.

There you have it. Now I’m introducing my list for October 2008. Starting small.

1. Summer of Light – W. Dale Cramer
2. Duma Key - Stephen King
3. Bel Canto – Ann Pratchett
4. Next – Michael Crichton

One of my goals this year was to obtain a library card so that I’d stop wasting money at large bookstores and filling my house with crap I may not even like. Mostly, the crap is usually comprised of books that looked pretty or sounded interesting, which I read once and don’t intend to read again. Now that I’m a member of the Dekalb County library, I can get stuff out!

Although, I must say that the Decatur Library, for all its convenience, is pathetically small compared to my old branch in Ellicott City. Maybe I’m spoiled. Oh well. I suppose this will give me the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and read some things I may not have looked twice at before (yes, I am very comfortable with reading nothing but my favorites for the rest of my life. And yes, I know I should branch out. So that’s what I’m attempting to do. Next month!).

Also… Summer of Light was fine. It didn’t move me much, but was a pleasant summer reading book. Even though it’s not summer. I found Cramer’s style to be a little simplistic.  Overall, the story was nice and sweet, the characters all right, but not especially memorable. Also, what distracted and pissed me off was that in my library copy, some asshole had gone through and marked all the places were there was a potential grammar mistake. Oh god. Get over it. Stop marking up a library book. Bendy or folded pages I can handle… but don’t deface property that’s not yours. And stop being petty. You’re ruining the story!!

I digress. It’s also interesting to note that Cramer lives in GA (which I didn’t know when I got it), and it takes place partially in downtown, but also around and about GA. Yay!

Next on the list is Duma Key. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Lately, I’ve been obsessive about CNN and my debt.  I suppose perusing financial  and frugal living blogs has a lot to do with that. I suppose it isn’t a bad thing.

While I’ve been managing my money better than ever, slowly working to become debt free (especially from my credit card, although I’m thankful to have just one), and cutting back on my random and frivolous expenses, I’m still not perfect. And I’m far from being completely disciplined on everything. I really need to be.

It’s just terribly difficult to stop wanting things, or to stop perceiving things that I want as things I need. For me it is always easier to control my spending during the last two weeks of a pay period, when money is getting tight. But I should always be in control like that, and I still feel like I’m not.

Already this week my frivolous expenses are these:
- coffee at several places
- lunch at Subway
- buying 2 DVDs (well, I will buy them today since my mind is already made up)
- 2 magazines, a bottle of water, and some gum at the airport

Do I need these things? Coffee, certainly not. In fact I have still not accepted my addiction to caffeine, but maybe that is not such a bad indulgence (better than habitually smoking, or drinking, I guess). Lunch… I should pack and bring from home (which I do, most days, but I just get so freaking tired of sandwiches. It’s my own fault, not being creative and such). The DVDs I can certainly live without, and at the airport… I would have been terribly bored in the terminal, but I should have sucked it up, waited patiently by playing a game on my phone, and then simply getting up and schlepping to the water fountain.

It will take time still, and more disciplining myself. That doesn’t mean I’ll give up all my hobbies and sit alone, in the dark, in my room with nothing but candles and my books. But some of the unnecessaries I think I can learn to do without. I’ve already saved tons of money by feeding my appetite for new movies with the Blockbuster plan that delivers three to my mailbox, and now I’ve discovered the joys and mostly lower prices (and fresher food!) at the Farmer’s Market.  Anyway, I’m 100% sure I can do it, and get my debt paid down soon. What a relief it will be!

On a different note, the weekend!

Friday, I flew into DCA. It’s bumpy coming down, but I like the swooping you get in your stomach when you descend quickly. Then we land and it rains and I wait for an hour to get home. Mostly, the day is fine.

Saturday we drive over to Oxford and meet at Rusticana Pizza, all six of us, and we meet up with a friend from out of town whom we haven’t seen in… a long time. For me, it’s been since March. For everyone else, at least a year (and one person hasn’t seen him in two years). We eat and laugh and then go bowling. It is a nice day; the sun finally comes out as we’re leaving, although we stand around awkwardly, nobody wanting to be the first to go. In all likelihood, it will be another year or two before we all see each other in one place again.

Sunday I go home after breakfast out and a visit to the old store. My managers are there, and we talk but the distance is very apparent. There is little left to talk about. Then I sit in the airport for a few hours, try my best to comfort a random stranger, and then recede into myself on the ride home. I get a lot of reading done about the economy, the election, and everything in general.  It is a good day.

This week… is shaping up to be all right. But now I have to actually get some stuff done at work, or risk kicking myself on Friday when I don’t have any free time!

This weekend was all right. It wasn’t anything really special, but not all weekends have to be.

Friday was another awful day at work, but I went to the gym and swam off some of my frustration. Swam about 800 meters, and while the first 400 were not as easy as they should have been on my arms, I can still breathe through the exercise okay. And my Swimp3 lasted until the last 100 meters anyway.

Saturday, I got up early and went to the DMV in an attempt to change my license, yet again this year, to reflect my new address. I swear, it will be the 4th address I’ve had since moving to Atlanta. And now it’s no longer free, so when I went up to the counter, the agent shook her head and told me that since their main databases were down, I’d have to wait indefinitely until they came back up.

I downloaded Spore for my phone and played for a while, until about 9:10. Having waited almost two hours, I asked for my license back and went home. Grabbed the cousin and flew off to the gym, where I was late to class (again). It was only a mediocre workout, anyway. Stopped by H&M to get some things, and then we went to the Farmer’s Market in Decatur and had a great time going through the fresh fish section, the meat counter, and the rows upon rows of fresh (and rare) fruit and vegetables.

After that, we watched a movie and then headed over to Acworth to have dinner with the family. I suppose there isn’t much exciting news in the family that I’d feel comfortable sharing, except that the wine cooler in my aunt’s new kitchen broke, the dog scratched me several times, the kids were quieter than usual, and we sat outside in the driveway for a long time until we were joined by neighbors from across the street.  The experience–the long, rambling conversation interrupted by a long argument over politics and a tired two-year-old who needed to poop every three minutes–just sort of reinforced in my mind that people don’t change drastically over the course of their lives. The couple that joined us, for example, seems to me like just an older  version of some of my friends. And they have a kid. And that’s about the only difference between us. Is this sad? Does this make me less excited to ‘grow up’ and become a full adult, whatever that means?

Kinda.

And I guess this means that I will still be sitting out late at night on the front lawn, cracking lewd jokes about my kid in mixed company, and will still have the same immature sense of humor when I’m 30. And probably even 40. I just may have a house across the street to stumble back to on a Saturday night, instead of an apartment where I live by myself. Huh.

We drove home and half-heartedly searched for gas, but apparently there’s a slight gas crisis. This would have been nice to know before we’d gotten up there and had more than a quarter tank left. Driving around at eleven o’clock at night in northern Georgia where everything closes early (and where there’s been no gas for days) is not fun.

Barely made it back to the house, and the shortage of pumps still working made me decide not to go anywhere on Sunday, except to take the cousin to the East Lake Marta station so he could get to work. What if I’d gone to the gym and run out of gas in midtown where there’s nothing because I was in stop-and-go traffic all day? What if I ran out of gas Monday or Tuesday?

Well, this morning there’s still nothing in East Atlanta. I’ve heard rumors that if you drive a few miles up to Scott Blvd and 78 there’s still a working station, but really. This is ridiculous. But I suppose that’s what Atlanta gets for only relying on the Texas refineries for all of their gasoline (and for not letting the pumps gouge customers accordingly to keep those especially high-strung people from topping out their tank every day during a supposed “crisis.” Way to not leave any for the rest of us!).

Oh well. Things will probably return to normal in a few days, I hope. If not, looks like I’ll be walking to work for a little while.

I had such an awful day today. Sometimes at my job I want to scream at everybody, upset all the desks, and run down the hall and out to enjoy the day in the real world. We’re such a small company that people almost feel free to communicate however they’d like, which is ironic, considering right now we’re developing some modules on effective communication.

And the coworker who reamed me today about how my module sucked, was totally useless, and could not possibly be used, is the worst at communicating! Half the time I tune out what he says, because the majority of his points he never gets to; the rest are lost in the infinite tangents he rambles on about when you ask him a simple question.

Ugh.

So, tonight I self-medicated with my favorite game, cleaning my fish tank–it makes me happy to see them happy, swimming about and chasing each other, much improved from their depressed wallowing the last week or so–and watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith with a glass of wine.

At least tomorrow is Friday.

I think I am becoming far too comfortable and complacent at work.

It’s not for lack of anything to do. This job is definitely self-paced (although mindful of deadlines), intellectual, and creative. I’m sitting on three programs right now that I’m supposed to learn, and soon. Sure, I have issues with motivation, but who doesn’t?  But I don’t have people breathing down my neck constantly to make sure I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, as long as I produce results. Which I do. But anyway, that’s not the issue.

The issue started for me at tea time, when, everyday, my boss asks if we want tea. Most days I say yes, I would like some tea. Then I hand over my black cup and she makes the tea. About ten minutes later (or longer, if she distracts herself with a phone call or something), the water boils, and my other coworker and I are drawn to the back room by the buzzer going off, which indicates that the tea has steeped for two minutes exactly.

It’s then that we stand around and talk. A lot of times we’ll talk about work-related things, but sometimes we’ll talk about personal things, too.

At first I didn’t have a problem with it. Questions from my boss were innocent, like what did you do this weekend? Or what are your plans this evening?

I would think to myself, wow. She’s a genuinely nice person, asking after my life to maintain some interest in what her employees do!

After a while I began to think that her interest was too personal, or that she was somehow vicariously living my life… Take for example, this past weekend when I had my boyfriend down. I mentioned it to her happily about three weeks ago, and then forgot. After all, I am at work, and I while I didn’t forget that in a few weeks my boyfriend was visiting, I did forget it in terms of my work life. He wasn’t visiting me at work, anyway, but at home. Anyway, the day before I’d mentioned he was flying in, she came and stood in the door of my office and said, so, when does your boyfriend get in tomorrow?

I was taken aback a) by her incredible memory of a date which has nothing to do with her, and b) that she asked about my boyfriend, when my personal life has very little to do with my work life.

So this sparked a lot of my thoughts about… am I sharing too much with my coworkers? Is my personal life blending into my work life and vice versa? Where is that line? Or am I obliterating it by assuming that the people here are like family?

My first job was very much like a family, and it was acceptable to bring some personal problems into work. Oh Hallmark. Considering that the industry revolves around personal circumstances–how else would we get to sell so many get well, sympathy, birthday, and other standard occasion cards?–I don’t believe there is any way to really maintain a solid work/personal life line without coming off like an atomaton. And people in that line of work really do connect better to you if you seem to have genuine human emotion and experiences.

And I can’t count the number of days I came in (or left) pissed off, uspet, depressed, or ecstatic about something and had the support of most of the staff on duty that shift. It felt good. They were my friends. We didn’t really need to hang out together (sometimes, we did), but we knew generally what happened in one another’s lives and supported one another (yes, with cakes and sometimes cards. My Hallmark mom, Melissa, even made for me a beautiful blanket, which still keeps me warm in the winter…).

That experience was invaluable to me.

But other job experiences haven’t necessarily encouraged that kind of environment, even if the staff has been as small as the Hallmark staff was. And nor should they, I’m starting to believe.

I can’t know for sure. I’ve never worked for a company with more than 40 people and a set, corporate structure. And I know that part of having a great work experience is trusting those you work with, getting to know them to some extent. Returning to my original question, how close is too close?

Sure, there’s no hard and fast rule about work friendships. But what about in my company, where I see the same… five people every day? Is it all right to be friends? And what happens when one person decides not to include her personal life in the everyday water cooler (or in this case, tea…cup???) conversation?

I lie when I say that these thoughts started when my boss asked about my boyfriend this time around. They’ve been lingering for a while, in general. Sometimes I waffle between thinking wow, she’s just a really nice person to geez, she’s really almost too interested in what I do… But am I being paranoid?

So I decided to experiment a little. Instead of saying to her on Monday morning, “I went to the park, the gym, saw three movies, hung around with my roommates, and then decided that I would swing by the art festival…” when she asked what I did, I instead shrugged and gave a very neutral response. “It was very quiet. I didn’t really do much. Just some reading.” Then I would smile and shrug, perhaps ask if she had a good weekend (I’m very terrible at reciprocal communication, but that’s another issue) and then act as though I really needed to get to work…

But her curiousness has remained the same. I find though that when I don’t go into specifics, she tends to suggest more interesting things for me to do arond Decatur, where she is very well connected in the community and arts venues, and then keeps asking.

The thought that maybe she was prying to see how much work I was doing, or to gauge how invested I was in this job also occurred to me too. Do people do that?

An experience I had yesterday in the By Hand art store I visited while browsing for a present for her (from all of us, not just me), changed the way I feel a little bit. A sales associate approached me, and after a few minutes of describing what I was looking for and for whom, it turned out everyone there knew my boss. “She’s just the nicest person I’ve ever met,” both of them said at one point or another.

I agreed, and we all tried to think of something she would like, but time ran out and I left, back to the office.

So maybe I’m just letting my cold, northerner’s paranoia get the best of me. I know I haven’t gotten the full picture yet.

But I can’t help but think that still, maybe I am letting my personal life blend too much into my working life. In some respects…this isn’t a bad thing. I hope I am not taking advantage of my boss’ niceness however. Like this entry. It is 1:13 PM and the others are either at lunch or having a meeting, and I’m doing this. Oops.

Well for now, we’ll see how it goes. I can try to change my suspicions that my boss is a cunning spy who wants to either live my life or slowly drain away my personal life, and instead really embrace the potential that she is just plainly a very nice woman with a lot of southern charm.

Friday night we go to Wild Wing Cafe off of Roswell Road and are caught in what was I suppose the end of a car accident on I-75. Stopped for only about fifteen minutes, we waited with the rest of the annoyed drivers while six or seven police cars whizzed by, followed by two ambulances and one fire truck.  After dinner, which is good, as usual, we go home and start PU-239, an interesting movie about plutonium.

That night I can’t sleep from having to readjust to sharing a bed again for a few days, so Saturday I wake up exhausted. Even trying to rest until noon doesn’t do much good, so we make breakfast for my cousin and actually use the table like normal people to eat on. We pop off to the Atlanta zoo, which is much better than the DC zoo (sadly), and have a decent time hurrying to each exhibit before they closed early for an event. We see all the major exhibits: elephants, tigers and lions (with their cubs!), giraffes, naked mole rats, reptiles, and the pandas. Then, after an arduous trip into the Target off of Moreland, we head home to watch several movies in a row. We cook dinner and turn in early.

Sunday… is another movie day, although we do run some errands early in the morning, while the sun is still warm but the day breezy. That, and we end up seeing Burn After Reading, which I did not like very much. Dinner is pizza with beer while watching CJ7 and a few after that.

Monday I work, but I break up the day by driving home for lunch. Boy makes pasta salad, and we talk with the roommates. They leave for an excursion to the Cingular store while I go back to work. In the evening, we go out to dinner (Ru San’s in Buckhead). Before settling on that place, I search for another sushi restaurant that I’ve been to before but can’t find it. Rather than becoming more and more lost in Buckhead, we just park and walk, and the experience is worth it.

We find a car wash on an empty stretch of Piedmont Road, and then head downtown to the little theater on E. Ponce. We kill 45 minutes until our movie starts and then head back inside, the only couple until about thirty seconds after the movie begins.

When we arrive home it is very late, but we talk with the roommates and make cookies. I stay out so infrequently on work nights that it feels more rebellious than it actually is, although I feel I have made the most out of the day.

I’m glad I went to the gym last night.

At first I wasn’t going to go, but even being a few minutes late was much better than not going at all. Not only did it feel good to actually lift with the class again, but I got to momentarily connect with Marion, or at least show her that I didn’t totally ditch her class. Mostly I’m just never able to get out of the office on Thursdays anymore, so my new, accepted routine has become Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.

Anyway, I had snuck out early from work, had a great time in class, and left the gym feeling awesome. Then the cousin and I puttered around Kroger for about an hour while I agonized over some weird ingredients for this recipe I’m trying to make for the Boy sometime this weekend. Not sure if it’ll turn out good at all, but we’ll see!

I had a bad dream last night.

Okay, I’ll rephrase. I had an unsettling dream last night, and when my alarm jarred me out of it, I felt vaguely annoyed. I hate it when my brain spends a lot of time in dream-sleep just meandering around, giving me mundane dreams of my normal routine, or languishing in the past. It makes for uninteresting, disturbing, or downright disappointing dreams. Oh well.

(I read somewhere that only total bores entertain other people with their dreams, so I’ll refrain from droning on about it here. maybe in the “dreaming” section I’ll post it later on!)

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my social life, and while I’m not completely disgusted with it, I am a bit dissatisfied. It has been nonexistent lately, but a lot of that is my fault.

Read the rest of this entry »»

Looking forward to a few things at the end of this week.

I can’t wait, because this week has been slowly getting more annoying, especially in terms of work. It’s all these little projects that are causing me stress, and the way in which they’re being handled at work. Things that were supposed to have been done by September 1 have not been finished, and now everybody is taking the fall.

But I went to class today and worked out fully for the first time all week. Having been sick with that weird cold last weekend, I’ve felt gross and lazy, but it was a fun night tonight. Julie was in rare form and we were all able to let loose a little bit.

Nothing else to say yet! I suppose that’s a good thing.

I’m tired of being sick.

Things I’ve done today:

- slept
- watched “In the Valley of Elah”
- made some bisque and ate it with a croissant
- watched episode 1  of season 7 of The Shield
- watched “The Chronicles of Riddick”
- watched a few chapters of “Wizard People, Dear Reader” on YouTube
- read some of Abundance

I’d much rather be outside going for a jog, working out, or driving around, rather than being stuck inside here feeling tired, sick, and gross. Boooo.