SHIT

I'm having a pretty awful day and am in a bad mood. When I was younger, the thought of cutting people out of my life seemed not possible. This is no longer the case, (un)fortunately.

AY

The cold, she has socked me!

Oh, reader, it's too beautiful a day to be bed-(or sofa-)ridden in one's pajamas, all blocked up with mucus. But here I am, congested and logged into work from home, while everyone at work has a spring in his and her step and an iced coffee in hand. Good things always seem to happen when I'm absent. For example, I was absent one Friday in the second grade only to find out on Monday morning that I'd missed out on a surprise viewing for grades 1-3 of Pollyanna in the auditorium. I've been unable to bring myself to view the film since. Later, in the 8th grade, I fell victim to (yes, yet another) stomach bug and was out for a couple of days, during which my fellow classmates sniggered through parts 1 and 2 of a sex ed video shown during Health class.

I wouldn't be surprised if everyone in the office is getting promotions and pay raises and possibly even ice cream cones as we speak. Sigh.

SPRING AWAKENING BUT A COLD

Apologies, kittens, for being such an absentee blogger but life, work and the rest of it have been hectic of late and there’s just no getting away from such things now is there? To top things off, I’m now suffering from a most bothersome cold. I hate being sidelined by something as silly as a cold so you better believe I’m od’ing on Vitamin C. Alas, I have exhausted my supply of green tea with echinacea and don’t have the energy to run out to the store to purchase more. Alas.

In other news, I watched Spring Awakening yesterday with one of my favorite people in the WORLD, really (I have a handful of favorite people in the WORLD and I LOVE ‘em all. Kisses, kittens, kisses) and it was everything that I’d expected and more. Spring Awakening is a dark and edgy musical—composed by none other than Duncan Sheik of “Barely Breathing” fame in the mid-90s—about the sexual angst of teenagers. Masturbation, wet dreams, sadomasochism, abortion, sexual abuse, suicide, homosexuality, naked breasts and a derriere—this musical’s got it all played out (anachronistically) against rock ‘n roll. Amazingly, the musical is based on a 19th century German play by one Frank Wedekind. I have to give Herr Wedekind props for writing in 1891 about topics that are still considered taboo today. The cast is very young and hot and talented, the songs are contemporary and excellent and the set is replete with neon tubing.

Trust me. Check it out.

CUTE

If my assumption that a large majority of my readers are folks I know in real life is correct, then most of you already know that I, SabilaK, overwhelmingly prefer the cute guy to the handsome man (ironically enough, I loathe the word “cute.” I’ll have to share my tale of the pseudo-surfer banker dude who left me with this deep-seated and likely life-long aversion to the otherwise harmless adjective at a time when I’m not nodding off as I am now). Many a sweet and nerdy male with boyish good looks has run off with my heart, a fact that need not be delved into any further right now, since the cab light is still officially off and I'm verging on slumber and I have a sore throat.

Honestly, I don’t know why I brought this up at all.

TUSCANY

I love, love, love Under the Tuscan Sun. No movie has ever made me want to get married, discover my husand's cheating on me, get divorced, lose everything to the philandering husband in the divorce, fall into depression, vacation in Tuscany in order to fall out of depression, impulsively purchase a ramshackle villa and set out to repair it in order to find meaning and purpose in my life and make out with hot Italian men along the way, more.

So, I've superimposed my head on Diane Lane's and I'm daydreaming that it's me in the movie, that it's my life that's been turned upside down. Taking a break from reading, I decide I'm going to Google Image pics of the Tuscan landscape and the only image that I find striking as a thumbnail is the following, which upon closer examination makes me gasp, "Even those Tuscans have sold out to the monstrosity of gated communities!! Anti-social Italian elitists be damned!"


But then I read that this is a pic of a gated community in Vegas called Tuscany. So, I breathe a sigh of relief, damn the anti-social American elitists of Nevada and continue surveying my search results. And then I come across this image--



--but quickly realize that it's a pic of a Las Vegas hotel. I damn Nevada for its obsession with Tuscany and move on until I find this, the only decent pic of Tuscany that Google-Image has retrieved for me. Anyone can see that there are several problems with it, that lady being the most glaring of them:



Plus, at first glance, that branch--or whatever the hell that thing hovering above the chair with the blue jacket draped on it is--looks to me like a taxidermied bird of prey. This freaks me out a little bit. Clearly, it isn't a taxidermied anything and, clearly, taxidermied isn't a verb. But then again, when did Google-Image'd become a verb? There are other problems with the photo that seemed to stick out at me like a monkey in a boardroom in one of those "What Doesn't Belong Here?" drawings, but they're no longer sticking out, so they couldn't have been THAT important or so monkey-in-the-boardroom problematic.

I'm sleepy.
Good night.

RANDOMNESS

Dear Readers:

It's 12 midnight and I have to be up super early tomorrow morning, the stress of which is seriously impacting my ability to blog properly. So, in lieu of a proper blog, tonight I leave you with the pic above, which was taken by yours truly during my 2004 trip to Pakistan. Apparently, the folks in the pic are engaged in a fierce game of cricket.

This is all I know.

Goodnight.

CIGS AND BIG RIGS

One night, years ago--I must've been 16--I dreamt that I was driving an 18 wheeler on a highway. The truck's cab was zero gravity, so I was floating, my legs swimming in the air behind me as I held onto the wheel. A cigarette dangled from my mouth (just for the record, I held or smoked a cigarette in almost every single dream I had that year; also, for the record, I think smoking is awful).

I've been thinking about the dream all day today. I've also been feeling nostalgic for high school, not the way it was but the way it could've been. A do over would be nice.

SYMMETRY

My hips are misaligned. The left hip is higher than the right hip, which is why I keep injuring the right hip. Jack, my physical therapist, assures me that while I'm doing everything right--warming up for effin' 45 minutes before every workout--he'll need to do some manual manipulation, etc., in order to set my hips straight again. I'm to see him twice a week for at least 6 weeks and I absolutely cannot run in the meantime. No, not even a little bit. Not even if I'm doped up on Motrin and pain free. And three miles will, most certainly, be just as bad as nine miles.

I will defer to Jack's superior knowledge of physical therapy.

I will also occasionally burst into tears at the sight of people running on the long line of treadmills at the gym, to the great horror and dismay of my trainer-friends.

They will give me pep talks and I will get over it.

In other, non-hip related news, I've recused myself from that wedding I was supposed to attend next weekend. I never divulged the details of the nuptials, so here goes: my paternal cousin is marrying a man who was handpicked by my maternal cousin as a potential match for me. I refused to pursue the lead, which terribly upset my mother so that, several weeks later, she threw in the proverbial towel and announced that she'd tell my cousin to put the man in touch with my aunt in Michigan whose daughter was on the market. She paused briefly after making the announcement. I took the opportunity to pat her on the back and tell her that she had a wonderful idea.

This isn't what she wanted to hear.

After a couple of months of meeting under the supervision of their families, my former potential match and my paternal cousin are getting married. The maternal cousins--some of the very same cousins who gave me the talk about biological urges a coupl of months ago--will be in attendance. As much as I'd like to have shared in my cousin's happiness, I refuse to be the fresh veggie bologna trapped between stale and moldy slices of bread for even just a weekend. Or something like that, anyway.