Happy Days Are Here Again.

Well, the child is back. My mother finally brought her home a couple of days ago and, as predicted, she's already driving me crazy. This time because she's developed some very bad habits over the last three weeks and seems to think she can just do whatever the heck she wants. I figure she'll be finished with time-out by the end of the weekend. It's good we keep her in the bathroom for time-out, so we don't have to worry about any messy accidents during her confinement. I'm glad to have her back home, though. Three weeks is an awfully long time.

Just another day.

The Cure is playing on the streaming radio station I like to listen to. Cool beans. Looks like it's going to be good weather this weekend, which bodes extremely well for my barbeque. Maybe the child is coming home tonight, maybe not. Hopefully, she'll be home tonight. But you never quite know with my mother. Apparently they were all in Ocean City for the past couple of days. Wish I could've been there. I wish I could interview someone. If you know someone interesting, let me know about them. It would seem I've exhausted my supply of interesting people. I've sent out a couple of stories in the past week. We'll see how this round goes. I'm sleepy and my neck hurts. If I ever get really rich, I'm going to hire a personal chiropractor to crack my neck for me whenever I desire it.

Ho hum.

I really don't want to be here right now. I'd rather be home so I can clean the place up for the barbeque this weekend. Instead, I'm forced to sit here and look at a computer screen doing nothing useful. I used to wonder when I still worked for the government how people could stand to be so unessential. The little known secret outside the government is that once you've worked there for three years, it's basically impossible to get rid of you no matter how useless you are. You can only get fired if you fuck up royally--meaning you fuck up in a way that can't be hidden from people on the outside.

When I worked at NIH, the only person I knew of being fired was this completely gross grant analyst who made passes at female PI's when he went on site visits. Needless to say, you can't cover up numerous complaints from highly educated women accussing a government hack of sexual harrassment. Now, if he'd limited his perverted attempts to inhouse women, nothing would have happened to him. So really, he was fired more for being too stupid to follow the unwritten rules of government employment rather than for legitimately deserving to be canned.

The federal government really is an interesting world. The only people who make it a lifetime endeavor are those who don't want to do anything for a living. Anyone who really wants too accomplish something good and decent leaves in frustration because no one's interested in that. They like sitting there getting their paycheck for nothing. The populace should rise against the system and revolt and demand real outcomes for their tax dollars. Of course, for that to happen, the populace has to have some clue as to what the hell actually goes on. So, needless to say, nothing will ever change. Why does the average citizen care so little about what goes on? People complain about the way modern politicians are all spin and nothing else. Do people really think they'd spend so much time selling the superficial if it didn't work? The blame rest squarely on your shoulders, Joe Schmoe. Why don't you take the effort to vote? Why don't you take a little bit of time to read a newspaper and find out what really goes on in the world? Why don't you try to look at the bigger picture? Americans are so lazy. and I'm tired of watching talking heads who avoid real questions. What's wrong with answering a question honestly? Is anyone stupid enough to think every answer out of a politician's mouth is going to be something they actually want to hear or will agree with? Can that be said of anybody on the planet? No. People need to not take stupid shit so seriously.

Whine, whine, whine.

So, I really have nothing to talk about but I am going out of my mind with boredom. I figure rambling on the ole blog should fill a little time. I saw this program the other night on Discovery channel about face transplants. There are three surgical teams around the world currently working on performing a face transplant. The hope is that this sort of surgery would make it possible for people who have been severely injured and deformed by, say, fire to live relatively normal lives again. The doctors want to transplant the face of a dead donor onto the receipient's face. It was really fascinating. It was particularly interesting because the night before watching this program, I happened to watch this movie on HBO called Something the Lord Made about the first heart surgery.

The show and movie parallel each other because they both deal with radical new surgeries of their time. It's interesting to watch how ignorant it seemed for doctors to be so afraid to operate on the heart back then because heart surgery is so common place now. You wonder why were they so afraid. But watching the show on face transplants, you see that that's how many people are greeting the idea of this type of surgery. There's a lot of fear. Like heart surgery today, I'm sure face transplants won't phase a soul in fifty years.

I am now heading into my third week without the child. I miss her. Although, I'm sure when she's back and we're caught up in the normal routine of life, I'll wonder why I spent so much time wishing away my freedom. We always want what we don't have, stupid humans that we are. We've got the big barbeque this weekend. Should be fun. Hopefully the good weather they are predicting will hold true.

It's the same for all of us.

I just finished reading a piece from my thesis director, Valerie Sayers. It's a "confessional" in Image. She talks about her experience being diagnosed with cancer. I was just finishing up the program in 1999 when she got the news. It was interesting reading her account because we outsiders have a completely different memory of it, as it should be. My friend Elizabeth and I were terribly upset by it at the time because she's such a neat lady. But reading her article makes me feel sad because it makes me realize how much of ourselves we hold back from the rest of the world. How many times in life we hurt like hell on the inside and never let it show. Maybe it's a woman thing, I don't know. Why do we do that? Why do we feel like we don't have the right to let everyone know exactly how we feel? Why do we have to put on sunny faces to make everyone else feel comfortable when we're screaming on the inside? Why can't people deal with the screaming? Sorrow and pain are just as much a part of life as happiness and joy. People are allowed to feel those things, too. Why do we have to be ashamed of it? Anyway, it makes me a little bit ashamed to think about the important people in my life right now who are dealing with really hard issues because I think I should do more to let them know that their struggles aren't invisible.

Home Alone

Well, I'm home alone for the first time in ten years. How lovely it is to be me right now. My husband and daughter are off visiting my parents for a week. I couldn't go because I don't have enough vacation. But being alone and not having to do anything for anyone is a really nice break all by itself. Nights are creepy, though. It's too quiet at night, but everything else is OK. I'm hoping to clean a lot of junk out of the house while they're gone. My daughter doesn't play with about half the stuff she has, but god forbid you try to get rid of any of it while she's around:
"Moooom, I still like that."

"You never play with it."

"But I still like it. I'm going to play with it right now."

Anywho, when the cat's away, the mouse will throw all the shit out.

I've just linked to my friend Lynn's blog. I encouraged her to start a blog to vent some of her frustration over not finding a job. Any of you peeps out there reading this, go take a look and see if you can hook her up. She deserves to have a job that will let her realize her full potential.

Escape from Azkaban

We went to watch "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" Friday night and it was alright. This is the first of the HP movies I've watched where I'd read the book beforehand and knew the story. It definitely gives watching the movie a new perspective. I was a little surprised by the things they didn't include in the movie from the book. Little things, really, but still somewhat significant in my mind in terms of understanding the characters and where they're coming from. My daughter really enjoyed it. This is the first of the HP movies we've let her watch in the theatre. We waited until the first two came out on DVD before letting her watch them. But like me, she knew the story ahead of time on this one and she felt that she wouldn't be too freaked out to watch it on the big screen. All in all, she was OK. She was only freaked out at the very first appearance of the dementors in the movie, but at least she knew what they were and what was going to happen, so it wasn't too much of a freak out. She was fine with the rest of the movie.