Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Chance Encounters
So, I'm riding the subway home tonight, coming up to my stop, and I glance down at the other end of the car, and there's a reasonably attractive man standing at the door, waiting for the same stop, who makes brief eye contact. I look away. I look back...he makes eye contact again. I look away again...look back to find him looking at me again. If this were a gum commercial, this is where I would frost up the window with my minty breath and write my number in it as the train pulled away from him at the station, (not to be confused with the similarly minty-fresh Mentos commercial, in which I would probably mysteriously lose my pants in a danish-related mishap and, in a minty candy-fueled moment of clarity, turn his coffee cup into a miniskirt in time to walk the fashion show that is about to begin on the platform) but that only works if only ONE of us is getting off at the next stop. If this were an episode of Sex and the City, this is where he would charmingly sidle up to me after getting off of the train and hit me with some cheesy pickup line, to which I would make a clever retort before he asks if he could take me to dinner sometime because he has a feeling he won't be able to stop thinking about me. But this is no gum commercial... no episode of It's not television, it's HBO... nope, this is Real Life. In Real Life, he takes one staircase, I take another, we go our separate ways, and I'm left wondering if he was looking at me because he thought I was cute, or I look like his Aunt Madge, or I still have wing sauce on my chin. Or maybe he was just thinking, "DUDE, why does that chick keep LOOKING at me???" Chance encounters, the stuff of Sandra Bullock movies and soft-core porn, just aren't all that exciting in the harsh glare of reality. But at least it makes the train ride a wee bit more interesting.
Friday, November 10, 2006
Things I Am Thankful For
Happy endings.
Oh, get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about happy endings to bad days. I started my day today feeling pretty damned good. I am officially back at the weight I thought had become a pipe dream...my Personal Best Since High School weight, which I haven't seen for about 2 years now. Which is quite fortuitous, as it's only a week until the wedding I was trying to look good for - YAY!! However, my day started to take a serious turn for the worse, as I took the bus out to FedEx to pick up the bridesmaid dress for said wedding and pay the import duties that FedEx was going to want from me before they would let me have said dress - BOO!! Then, back on the bus, with a stop at the mall on the way to work to have the dress altered because, contrary to what dress manufacturers seem to think, we ladies do not need a foot of extra fabric at the bottom of our skirts and THIS lady does not need the world to be checking out our lingerie above the neckline of our tasteful and appropriate bridesmaid dress. When this particular tailor shop was recommended to me, I was not aware that they were going to be sewing the hemline with THREAD MADE FROM THE FUR OF ENDANGERED MARMOTS, WHICH THEY MUST BE DOING FOR THE PRICE I PAID (are there any endangered marmots? There had better be...) All told, I dropped $100 before lunch on alterations and import duties - BOO!! Not fun. Now, I may have a better salary now than I had as a grad student, but I'm not making as much as a typical postdoc because my boss doesn't have a lot of grant money to cover me at the moment. It's enough to live on, but with my financial messiness back home in those expensive American dollars, I'm still living on a tight budget. Toronto is expensive. Even without marmot alterations. So the whole way to work, I'm thinking about what little treats I had my hopes up for this month (YAY!) that I'm now going to forgo (BOO!), and that's just freaking depressing as all get-out. So I finally get to work, at about 11:30 (because, of course, the mall doesn't open until 10 anyway), and the setup that I need to work on is occupied - BOO! When you're already in a foul-ass mood, little things like that just seriously tork you off even more. I go outside to fill up my water bottle, and run into the VGLM - YAY!! This is the first bright spot in my day since I got off of the scale - I vent my frustrations to the VGLM for a while, ask him to tell me something happy, only to find out that most of the things going on in his life aren't exactly going swimmingly, so at least we commisserate a bit. Hey, bonding is bonding, and I'll take bondage...er, bondING with the VGLM any way I can get it. Seriously, SO dreamy. And hey, at least I was looking relatively skinny and cute today - YAY!! And I come back into the lab, and the guy using the setup is finishing up, so I'll get to use it - YAY!! Except when I try to, one of the weak spots in the ground wire breaks entirely - BOO!! So now I'm trying to figure out what I can do with the rest of my completely ineffectual, unproductive day that might be somewhat effectual or productive, and a labmate (and my Male Canadian Alter Ego) calls from Chemistry. I happen to mention said wiring problem, and he offers to help - YAY!!! Except, being my MCAE, he insists on giving me a hard time the entire time - BOO!! - which normally I take pretty well but today am absolutely not in the mood for. So after he sauters my wire (which sounds dirty but I assure you is not), he makes me go back over to Chemistry with him for donuts (YAY) that I can't eat (BOO!!!) because of that whole trying-to-be-skinny thing. Finally, I come back over to my lab at about 5:30 and START working on my devices to see if they actually work the way they're supposed to, after spending a whole week trying to make them...
and...
THEY DO!!!! HELL TO THE YAY!!!
I feel the need to mention here that nothing... NOTHING ever wor k s for me the first time I try to do it. And this is a completely new field for me, and I really wasn't convinced I'd be able to do it. You spend seven years in grad school, and you start to think maybe you've chosen a career you're just not very good at. Now, I still have to figure out if the CHEMISTRY I want to do in them will actually work, but at least I've gotten through the engineering part of the project and go back to being a chemist for a while. It's a nice feeling. So this is my Happy Ending for the day. If something else shitty should happen to occur before I go to bed tonight, it's going to go in tomorrow's Shit File, because today ended well.
And with that, I shall end this rambling and not terribly interesting post. If you've made it this far, gentle reader, then you must really love me.
Oh, get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about happy endings to bad days. I started my day today feeling pretty damned good. I am officially back at the weight I thought had become a pipe dream...my Personal Best Since High School weight, which I haven't seen for about 2 years now. Which is quite fortuitous, as it's only a week until the wedding I was trying to look good for - YAY!! However, my day started to take a serious turn for the worse, as I took the bus out to FedEx to pick up the bridesmaid dress for said wedding and pay the import duties that FedEx was going to want from me before they would let me have said dress - BOO!! Then, back on the bus, with a stop at the mall on the way to work to have the dress altered because, contrary to what dress manufacturers seem to think, we ladies do not need a foot of extra fabric at the bottom of our skirts and THIS lady does not need the world to be checking out our lingerie above the neckline of our tasteful and appropriate bridesmaid dress. When this particular tailor shop was recommended to me, I was not aware that they were going to be sewing the hemline with THREAD MADE FROM THE FUR OF ENDANGERED MARMOTS, WHICH THEY MUST BE DOING FOR THE PRICE I PAID (are there any endangered marmots? There had better be...) All told, I dropped $100 before lunch on alterations and import duties - BOO!! Not fun. Now, I may have a better salary now than I had as a grad student, but I'm not making as much as a typical postdoc because my boss doesn't have a lot of grant money to cover me at the moment. It's enough to live on, but with my financial messiness back home in those expensive American dollars, I'm still living on a tight budget. Toronto is expensive. Even without marmot alterations. So the whole way to work, I'm thinking about what little treats I had my hopes up for this month (YAY!) that I'm now going to forgo (BOO!), and that's just freaking depressing as all get-out. So I finally get to work, at about 11:30 (because, of course, the mall doesn't open until 10 anyway), and the setup that I need to work on is occupied - BOO! When you're already in a foul-ass mood, little things like that just seriously tork you off even more. I go outside to fill up my water bottle, and run into the VGLM - YAY!! This is the first bright spot in my day since I got off of the scale - I vent my frustrations to the VGLM for a while, ask him to tell me something happy, only to find out that most of the things going on in his life aren't exactly going swimmingly, so at least we commisserate a bit. Hey, bonding is bonding, and I'll take bondage...er, bondING with the VGLM any way I can get it. Seriously, SO dreamy. And hey, at least I was looking relatively skinny and cute today - YAY!! And I come back into the lab, and the guy using the setup is finishing up, so I'll get to use it - YAY!! Except when I try to, one of the weak spots in the ground wire breaks entirely - BOO!! So now I'm trying to figure out what I can do with the rest of my completely ineffectual, unproductive day that might be somewhat effectual or productive, and a labmate (and my Male Canadian Alter Ego) calls from Chemistry. I happen to mention said wiring problem, and he offers to help - YAY!!! Except, being my MCAE, he insists on giving me a hard time the entire time - BOO!! - which normally I take pretty well but today am absolutely not in the mood for. So after he sauters my wire (which sounds dirty but I assure you is not), he makes me go back over to Chemistry with him for donuts (YAY) that I can't eat (BOO!!!) because of that whole trying-to-be-skinny thing. Finally, I come back over to my lab at about 5:30 and START working on my devices to see if they actually work the way they're supposed to, after spending a whole week trying to make them...
and...
And with that, I shall end this rambling and not terribly interesting post. If you've made it this far, gentle reader, then you must really love me.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Knock knock....
Who's there?
Ima.
Ima who?
Ima bout to smack some bitches up.
I don't actually work in the Chemistry building here at the U of T - I get to work in a much nicer, newer, shinier building a short walk away. Once or twice a week I walk over to Chemistry for one reason or another, but for all intents and purposes, I am not known in the department outside of my own group. So today, after group meeting, my labmate and I are leaving the building to come back over to our lab, and as we walk down the hall in which the first-year chemistry labs are taught, an old man in a lab coat asks us, "are you CHM 139 students?" To which we laugh and say no, in fact, we are not. Old Man's response is, "well, you look like it." He was all set to lecture us on being late to lab when he saw us coming toward him down the hall. Now, I am old enough that I am starting to appreciate that looking younger is a good thing, but young enough that someone assuming I'm A DECADE YOUNGER than I actually am feels more like insult than flattery. At least Labmate is a good 5 years younger than me and Chinese, so it's an easier mistake to make (no matter how long I live, there are two things I doubt I'll ever be able to do on the first try: understand an Indian accent or guess an Asian's age). And I don't care if I DID have my hair up and no makeup on (Looking Pretty is expressly forbidden while working in the cleanroom - nothing says SMOKIN' quite like booties and a hairnet...), I don't look 18. At least, not with my glasses on. Seriously, ever since I got them people tend to guess that I'm around 25 instead of 20, which is about how it should be, in my opinion. So I'm mildly torked off. Bring it on, Old Man, you're goin' DOWN - I may look young, but I can take you.
Oh, and did I mention that CHM 139 is the course I will be TEACHING next semester? Not TAing, LECTURING. Yeah. Good times.
Ima.
Ima who?
Ima bout to smack some bitches up.
I don't actually work in the Chemistry building here at the U of T - I get to work in a much nicer, newer, shinier building a short walk away. Once or twice a week I walk over to Chemistry for one reason or another, but for all intents and purposes, I am not known in the department outside of my own group. So today, after group meeting, my labmate and I are leaving the building to come back over to our lab, and as we walk down the hall in which the first-year chemistry labs are taught, an old man in a lab coat asks us, "are you CHM 139 students?" To which we laugh and say no, in fact, we are not. Old Man's response is, "well, you look like it." He was all set to lecture us on being late to lab when he saw us coming toward him down the hall. Now, I am old enough that I am starting to appreciate that looking younger is a good thing, but young enough that someone assuming I'm A DECADE YOUNGER than I actually am feels more like insult than flattery. At least Labmate is a good 5 years younger than me and Chinese, so it's an easier mistake to make (no matter how long I live, there are two things I doubt I'll ever be able to do on the first try: understand an Indian accent or guess an Asian's age). And I don't care if I DID have my hair up and no makeup on (Looking Pretty is expressly forbidden while working in the cleanroom - nothing says SMOKIN' quite like booties and a hairnet...), I don't look 18. At least, not with my glasses on. Seriously, ever since I got them people tend to guess that I'm around 25 instead of 20, which is about how it should be, in my opinion. So I'm mildly torked off. Bring it on, Old Man, you're goin' DOWN - I may look young, but I can take you.
Oh, and did I mention that CHM 139 is the course I will be TEACHING next semester? Not TAing, LECTURING. Yeah. Good times.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Things I Am Thankful For
Buskers. In particular, my favorite busker who, some mornings, plays the violin in the Queens Park TTC station. This morning, he was playing Csardas, with accordion accompaniment. That just starts my day off right.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Things I Am Thankful For
Kindred spirits. No matter where I go or what I'm doing, I always seem to find them somewhere.
And all I really want, is to meet a soulmate
Someone else to catch this drift
And what I wouldn't give...to meet a kindred...
-Alanis Morrisette
And all I really want, is to meet a soulmate
Someone else to catch this drift
And what I wouldn't give...to meet a kindred...
-Alanis Morrisette
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Independence Day
Tonight, November 2, my best friend is out celebrating her own personal Independence Day. A year ago today, she got out of a toxic relationship, began a new direction in her career, and set into motion a series of positive changes in her life. Congratulations, #1 - I love you dearly, and am so proud of you. It's been a big year for my loved ones - to all those who have made drastic and significant life changes, I salute you. Cheers.
Things I Am Thankful For
As a countdown to the real Thanksgiving (Canadians seem to think it happens in October - as IF), I humbly present the first installment of Things I Am Thankful For:
Men who know how to wear fitted clothing.
Men who know how to wear fitted clothing.
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