Ghosts and Quotes and The Art of Procrastination

Over at Jodi's site she's wondering if people believe in ghosts. I said that I do. I haven't seen a ghost myself, but I believe in the possibility.

I really enjoy hearing other people's ghost stories. Could they all be making them up? All be completely delusional? It's possible. Maybe. But I doubt it.

I was thinking about it, and I'm pretty sure my belief in ghosts came about after hearing a particular ghost story. I'm not sure how old I was, elementary/junior high-ish I think. I just remember that I was at my best friend's house, and it was either on or right before Halloween. My BBBF's father regaled us all with a story from his youth, of a time long ago when he was working in a... hmmm... I want to say a morgue... but that's not quite right. A mortuary perhaps... Anywhoo... He was really convincing and I totally bought everything he said. I looked up to him, trusted him, so why would he lie? :)

Looking back on it now, I realize he could have been shining us all on. Making up a story to entertain the little kiddies. Either way, I don't want to know the truth. I kind of like believing in the eeriness of that story. It was magical in away. But even if I did learn that it had all been made up I'd still believe in ghosts. I couldn't help it, it's just engrained in me to believe in the possibilities of it all.

Thinking of this as I was (and procrastinating at work very efficiently thank you very much), I was reminded of perhaps my favorite Shakespeare quote:

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Oh how I love that quote.

I wanted to find the exact wording, so I did a search and found my new favorite website, a wiki quote page!

*drool*

Quote of the Day from that site:

"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?"
- George Eliot

I really enjoyed the books I had to read for my George Eliot class two quarters ago. I wish I had more time to read more of her stuff. Maybe I should take a Victorian literature class so I'll be forced to read them. Hmmm... or maybe not. :)

Here's a quote from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:

"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

I loved this book when I read it. It was years ago and I can still remember the rush I got from reading it, the need to finish it without putting it down. I haven't read it since though. I'm kind of curious now to see if I'd enjoy it as much.

Here's a quote from one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day:

"People like blood sausage, too. People are morons."

Classic! Oh, and another…

"Ned, I would love to stand here and talk with you... but I'm not going to."

I remember the first time I watched this movie. I was home sick, my best friend had come over, and the two of us watched it with my mom. I cracked up like crazy person and my mom and the BBBF were all like, 'what's so funny'. Good times. :)

Here's a quote from the BESTEST CARTOON EVAH!!! Animaniacs:

Ms. Flamiel: Yakko, do you know how to conjugate?
Yakko: Who, me? I never even kissed a girl.

And...

"Citizens of Anvilania, I stand before you, because if I was behind you, you couldn't see me."

heh heh heh.

My brother and I would rush home from school and watch this show together. We'd recite "Good Idea/Bad Idea" sketches to one another all the time, and if someone missed an episode we'd be sure to tell them what the day's Wheel Of Morality's lesson was. And when this cartoon didn't win an emmy, and that stupid Rugrats show did, boy did we shout up a storm together about the injustice of it all. :)

Okay, one last quote. To further our work-day procrastinating, Jack and I have been in a little sci-fi tv show discussion. "Did you ever watch..." "Do you remember that episode where..." "Those bastards canceled that show early didn't they?"

One of my favorite Sci-fi Shows That Was Canceled Way Too Early was Special Unit 2. I tried looking for a SU2 page on the wikiquotes site, but they don't have one. Sigh. Guess its not my favorite new site after all. So anyways, I got this quote from imdb:

"Remember, guns don't kill people, gargoyles do."

Gawd, I loved that show.

Another Chapter In The Ongoing Saga of Me vs. Stairzilla

Yes folks its that time again for another round of...

Name!

That!

Burning Sensation!

[insert fabulously cheesy game show musical fanfare here]

The palms of both of my hands are stinging something fierce. Is it from...

a) humiliation

b) concrete burn

c) all of the above

If you guessed d) Lisa The Almighty Klutz tripped herself while climbing up stairs at school today! then you are correct. Your prize is in the mail.

Lisa: 0
Stairs: 542

Sigh.

So I'm at school today, and class was canceled, which was good considering that I'd seriously thought about skipping anyway, but bad because we're going to be really behind which means extra homework on a night I'll be busy instead of having the nice four day weekend to do it in.

But anyways, I'm walking back to my car, in between the old gym and the new gym they're building, and my mind is wandering. Can't remember what I was so busy thinking about, but I was completely distracted. Then I started to climb the stairs.

Which are really crap-astically built by the way. It requires very abnormal steps to climb them. Each step is about half the height of a normal stair. And they're far apart, so its either shuffle and take little baby steps or stretch more than normalcy requires and take two at a time. Either way feels weird.

No weirder than I must have looked flying through the air though, nearly doing a face plant on the concrete. Smackers! Luckily my hands were there to brace my fall. And my ego has an air bag which managed to deploy, so not too much damage there. Just a little bruising.

I swear, just a couple of days ago, while walking across my college campus, I was thinking about the time I tripped while walking across my high school campus, in front of the entire student body as we all headed out to the parking lot after school. And I thought to myself, just a couple of days ago, about how totally embarrassing it would be to do it here, at the college campus, where we're all supposed to be grown up and shit. Not awkward and clumsy and retarded and such.

As I tripped, that high school memory flashed through my mind. Thoughts that also flashed through my mind were: "ah crap" and "not again" and "noooooooooooooo!" and "good lord how many of my classmates are behind me". It's fascinating how you can have several thoughts whizzing through your brain simultaneously in a measly little second of time.

I tried to counteract my falling motion but my school bag threw me off (it's the bags fault! haHA!) and I skidded along the concrete. I then jumped up, walked a few steps to prove that yes, I could indeed walk like a normal person, then I "subtlety" turned around to see who all had witnessed my latest humiliation. Luckily only one person. Maybe. They had just exited the building and were going the other way. So maybe they exited after I'd jumped up like nothing had happened. Maybe. And no classmates had walked around the building behind me, thankfully, because most of them are super cool writer people and I'm quite goober-ish and come to think of it now, that might in fact be what had distracted me so, because I was thinking about their coolness as I left them all grouped together, being cool and hanging out together while they decided how to spend their free hour and a half.

Anyways, as the sigh of relief washed over me once I realized I wouldn't have nightmares of the faces of people trying to pretend they didn't see me fall, I realized my hands stung. Ouchies. The damn stairs even drew blood!

The bastards!

And then, to top it off, I get back to my car that I'd left in the hour parking slot (because it was hot and I figured I'd splurge on paying for a closer spot) and saw a frelling parking ticket on my windshield! Turns out I'd punched in slot number 9 when paying for my parking ticket instead of number 6, so even though I paid for two hours and was only there for a half hour, I've been fined 25 bucks.

I felt like such a moron when I figured out what was wrong, especially because I'd double checked to make sure it was a 9 and not a 6. I looked at the cars to the right of mine, and the spots said 8 and 7, and I must have been temporarily dyslexic because I thought to myself "7 and 8 so 9 is mine."

Grrrrrrr.

I'm so ready for this day to be over.

People/Things That Need To Be Slapped

People that like to listen to Christmas music before Thanksgiving...

*slap*

The radio station that started playing nothing but frelling Christmas music last week...

*slap*

Idiot drivers...

*slap*

People that can dish out crap but can't quite take it...

*slap*

People that make plans only to get sidetracked...

*slap*

Mother "Ha Ha Let's Make You Sweat In November!" Nature...

*slap*

Psychics guest staring on radio stations giving happy cheesy generic advice...

*slap*

Mondays...

*slap*

My ass...

*slap*

(heh heh heh)

Disclaimer: This list is in no way complete. You may be on this list. You may not be. Be weary. Don't be a dumbass. And let it get cold already! Sheesh.

An Open Letter To This Morning's Jerkwad Driver

Dear Impatient Asshole With The Big Ass Truck,

It seems that you were in a bit of a hurry this morning! Boy, isn't that just the pits?!

Please except my sincerest apologies for moving into your lane several car lengths in front of your speedy little ass. When I merged onto the freeway I was in the next exit's off ramp lane and, silly me, I really didn't want to get off at the next exit!

Weird, huh?

And oh, can you ever forgive me for not speeding up to match your speed? I totally would have, really, if it hadn't been for the fucking line of cars right in front of me!

Silly drivers, driving slow in the slow lane! Pffffffffffft!

Seriously, did you think the cars in front of you were going to magically pick up speed? That would have been awesome!

You know, I bet those other four lanes of the freeway must have been really smelly, because they were completely open. That must be why you continued speeding along in your lane until you were so close I couldn't even see your headlights anymore.

That's an amazing feat by the way, considering your over-compensating truck was really high above the ground. So thanks for being so thoughtful! I really do hate it when headlights blind me from behind.

I hope the rest of you drive was just as peachy as mine. I'm figuring you had a long ways to go since you didn't get off at the next exit with the rest of us slow-lane drivers.

Anywhoooo, thanks for starting my day off right ya big prick!

Sincerely,
Loony
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

My Photonic Personality Absolutely Radiates

Mr. Desk Neighbor sits across from me, facing me, at a desk that's pushed up against mine. Kind of like the desks you see in tv-show police departments - you know, where partners vs. crime work together and have their desks pushed up against each other, the better to communicate with I guess - only with our desks, there's a mini cubicle wall set up in between. More push-pin surface room for hanging miscellaneous Dilbert cartoons I guess, so I don't mind it.

Mr. Desk Neighbor, on the other hand, minds that the mini-wall only extends from the wall to halfway across the length of our desks. To remedy this, when we first moved back here a couple of months ago, in an act of comic inspiration (desperation?) he taped/glued/wedged/erected a piece of cardboard to fill the remaining space. He calls it his "photon-shield".

Hey, whatever floats his boat I say. Makes it more challenging to lob over wads of paper/trash/empty coffee cups.

Some days he's quite jovial. Other days he's down right cranky. And when his hormonal cycle sways into mine it's a mess of fireworks in here. Fun times!

Now me? I'm as peachy as a tabby cat today. Mr. Desk Neighbor, on the other hand, is getting biotch slapped around a bit.

Poor Mr. Desk Neighbor.

I might not be helping much as I sing badly along with the radio, but hey, everyone has to play to their strengths, no?

A few minutes ago, Mr. Desk Neighbor walks up to his desk, reaches into his secret stash of random crap in the overhead storage cabinet, and grabs a bottle of advil.

He turns to me and holds the bottle up like he's practicing for a commercial ad.

"These are to make you go away," he says.

"Notice how the bottle is mostly empty?" he says, giving the bottle a little shake.

Then he cries in mock anguish, "You're still here!"

Is it wrong that that made my day?

Well, it did, until a few minutes later when Mr. Desk Neighbor calls up our lab department. When they answer (both are on speakerphone, mind you) he screams "Where's my crack?!" Ah, that never gets old, no matter how many million time he says it.

[Insert eye roll here]

There's more discussion, most of which I tune out. Then someone on the other end asks if Mr. Desk Neighbor wants to talk to Richard.

To which Mr. Desk Neighbor replies, "No, I don't like Dick!"

I nearly snorted donut sprinkles out my nose.

Damn those squirrels are happy little suckers.

I'm sitting at my desk, wanting to write something, and I got nothing. Nothing interesting happening in the World of Lisa. Lots of mundane stuff, but nothing interesting per say. I mean, I find it interesting, but then I'm easily amused.

It's both a blessing and a curse, really, depending on whether you want to use your super power for good or eeeeeevil.

This here, this typing words and making sentences that just sort of ramble on and on? Spectacularly amusing! Don't need no fancy toys to keep me entertained, no sir-e-bob! Give me a wooden spoon and pots and pans and I'll rock this joint, boy-eeeeee!

And no, I really did get a decent amount of sleep last night. Thanks for asking.

Since I don't have anything recent to write about, I'm gonna post what I'd started to write a couple weeks ago about a very adventurous day, with a bit of revision, plus its now complete with an ending!

And the squirrels rejoiced across the lands.

It's a bit lengthy and quite possibly unreadable, but I want to preserve it for posterity, because I just don't have the photographic evidence to suffice, for that one day in the future when life is super sucking, so I can look back and say, hey, if only my days were only that bad.

~ ~ ~

A couple Thursday's ago I experienced a rather suck-tacular day. At least it started out that way. The day definitely tried to redeem itself.

Woke up way too early, found out I had a flat tire a block from the apartment, called in car-sick to work, and ended up missing an important meeting I really needed to get out of the way. Actually, we still haven't had that meeting, and I'm going to get grief from one of my supervisors soon. Oy.

And when I tried to get back into the gated apartment complex my clicker didn't work. It's worked marvelously for years and decided to die on me the one morning I'm already freaking out. I felt the world was conspiring against me at that point. I woke the poor HB up and asked me to come open the gate for me. Poor guy. His alarm wasn't scheduled to wake him up until 7. :)

But anyways, since I was going into work at 6, and the tire repair shops don't open until after 8, I got to watch the night before's tivo-ed Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls. Bonus round!

Thankfully, my tire was fixed with little charge (Woot!) in time for me to still go to school (double Woot!).

On a quick side note, guess where I found the perfect husband for me... well, in name only. At the tire store! Guess what his name tag said... guess guess guess! Mr. Looney! Swear to gawd. If we married I'd be Lisa Looney!!! That would be awesome.

Anywhoo, the fun didn't stop at the tire store with Mr. Looney (*tee hee*). I hopped in my car and rushed to school. I decided to pay for hour parking instead of parking way out in BFE with my expensive parking permit. It was going to cost $4 for two hours, but I figured I'd earned myself a treat. So I park and pull out the wallet and... no money. Only a wrinkled dollar bill and a few coins. I checked the change tray in the car... score! Quarters!

So I grab all the change and run to the ticket spitter-outer thingy. But as I'm standing in line, waiting my turn, I count the change again for the millionth time, just to be sure, and the change I counted in the car that came out to 4 bucks was no longer counting up to 4 bucks. Son of a ...

I asked the people around me if they had a nickel. That's all I needed. One friggin nickel! I felt like the biggest dolt, but I asked anyway. Most people ignored me like my head was one big pimple. One girl said she had the change in her car and would get it for me after she got her ticket. I moved to the back of the line and when she was done she gave me a whole quarter, god bless her.

So its my turn, again, and I put my money in the machine. And you know what? I was still several cents short!!!!!

Apparently my math skills are seriously lacking when I'm anxious and in a hurry. I did really well in math in school. Honest! But that day, I was math impaired to the nth degree.

I ended up paying for hour parking, ran to class, got all the important stuff I needed, and made it back an hour and a half later before any one gave me a ticket. Ahhhhhh.

After that, I was soooooo ready to miss the rest of the work day, and figured I might as well get my headlights fixed. For a couple weeks prior, whenever I used my turn signal my headlights would turn off. Driving down the busy freeway late at night when poof goes the headlights? That's some scary shit right there, let me tell you! I'd been putting off getting it fixed because I didn't want to take a day off of work, so I'd been driving around with no turn signals. (Yeah, I was one of those people.) So luckily my tire flatted out and I had the chance to fix my headlights.

Blog Post Word Count: 937
NaNoWriMo Word Count To Date: 0

(Think I might have to steal this post and turn it into a story so I can use the word count. Hmmm....)

Jackfoolery

Last Friday, during the Weekly Meeting of Awesome Lameness and Repetitive Bullshit (tm), my dear friend Coworker Jack informed me that I hadn't posted in awhile.

He was right, as he so often is. ( =P )

And let me tell you something, the poor man was distraught. Oh, the pain I saw in his eyes! He was clearly in agony over his loonyville withdrawls. Poor fella. So after the meeting, after being infused with an overpowering sense of purpose and dedication in surging forward in our ever pressing march towards business excellence, I rushed back to my computer. To blog. Because oh yeah, I felt so business-ing-ly excellent.

I opened up my little word document and started to write about my day. Only I had nothing. Because my day so far had been rather boring. I was going to make something up, something fantastical with talking squirrels with French accents and flowers that spit out skittle flavored gumdrops, but I had nothing. The creative brain was tapped. And the new Brain Keg (tm) was still on backorder.

Sigh.

Which was a problem over the weekend since the second draft of my story for workshop was due on Tuesday, and unlike some of my classmates, it was looking like I was going to have to rewrite almost the entire damn story. Draft One sucked the big one. A classmate actually wrote that into his story; that a character, to "protect the names of the innocent", was to be henceforth referred to as Deep Throat because... well for some reason which I can't quite remember now, plus the other reason, (a parenthetical afterthought reason) which was that she "sucked the big one". And yes, I think he might have gotten a better score than me.

Sigh.

I had a problem writing the first draft of my short story because I had NO FRIGGIN CLUE what to write about. This led me to turning in a story that had absolutely no point to it. Which kind of sucks for my classmates that had to read it. Actually, it seemed to be a class-wide theme: stories with no plot/theme/point. So for the revision, I needed to give my characters purpose. They needed goals! So hey, at least I knew what needed to be fixed, right? If only it was that easy. Because I had NO FRIGGIN CLUE how to fix it. All the ideas I came up with were boring, very tired ideas. My creative juices were jammed up. On an extended vacation in LaLa Land. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to write about, which I'm sure translated into what I finally came up with. Blahness. But at least the blahness had a goal!

I took Monday off, thinking I'd give myself some buffer room to finish the story, make it all polished up and shiny. Only problem is, my muse took this as a sign to procrastinate until the very last damn minute. An extra day? Wheeee! Let's watch a True Life marathon on MTV! (Damn is that show addictive sometimes.)

That's how she usually works, the Muse, and it stresses me the hell out. I didn't go to bed until 1am Monday night/Tuesday morning. And since I was focused on editing my story, my brain was so wired I didn't fall asleep until after 2am. I'm surprised I even woke up when the alarm blasted at 5am.

But it was finished! And turned in! And now, after its critiqued on Thursday, I can forget about it I have to edit it for finals.

And the crazy thing is, I think I'm still going to try and do nanowrimo. Now that I don't have to worry and fret and perform Frankenstein feats of brilliance over my class assignment, I have time to write silly nonsense. Yay for silly nonsense! Maybe the muse will come back for that.

See, this is why I haven't blogged in awhile. I can never keep it short. Once I get to writing I just whine and whine and whine and can't stop myself and next thing I know people at work are wondering why I haven't done anything yet. Maybe I need to start posting short random bits.