ny resolution is to find what it is that keeps me in this game...then go with that.

nye and i'm at my parent's house because i've been too sick to leave, had to rearrange my flight back for tomorrow from last wednesday...period pain gone but now the spirokeets have moved in and my sweet guy called earlier and i miss him so much...hny.

create your own visited country map.

cool. still. only 7% (17 countries) of the world i have seen. damn. yoda-style post.

i'm going to stab myself in the abdomen. repeatedly. until i can get to amsterdam. seriously...wtf, wtf, wtf is wrong with us?????????

oy...period, migraine...all early and all killing me and the phone keeps ringing and ringing here and the phones are all set to ring at "high" and now i remember why i turn the ringer off on my phone in c-u...waiting on my doctor at northwestern to call in a prescription, he's in surgery right now, i'm dying, i'm dying, i'm dying.

so this morning i ask my dad "so where's stevie" (the cat) and he's like oh, i thought she was in the basement in the workroom, mom hasn't even seen her yet. so we go looking around for her in the basement and my dad is panicking "oh great, i've lost her...this is not good." finally we find her in the spare bedroom in the basement and all is well. the psycho family twist on this is that it's her ashes that my dad had misplaced after bringing them home from the crematorium (sp?) and we were trying to find her before her birthday tomorrow. ah, sweet memories of xmas eve.

d.c.

alexandria, va, really. no luggage. home, yet not. did i really ever live here?

ok it's been over a month since my last post, which is the official version of "falling off the face of the earth" by many people's standards but i assure you that i can be handle much longer stints than that. leaving for dc wednesday afternoon and returning the following wednesday or thursday or something like that, i don't really care and i haven't really been paying any attention. the fall from my manic kingdom hit quickly this month, which i *medicate* with anti-psy's and either nyquil or tylenol pm...depends on my mood at the moment. i really shouldn't mess with the nyquil especially after last month when it put me into a coma fog and also downloaded a trojan horse onto my computer and i realize that, hey, uh the semester is over huh?

more neurotransmitters being hit and so even better living through chemistry as they say but the thing is that everyone seems to be talking in some dialect that i can't quite understand and some days i'm afraid of something that i can't quite identify and so that makes me feel.

telling an audience of unknowns about the thing is a lot easier than telling the people that you know, that you are related to...why now, why this venue was all that people could say a few years back...back when i was going to debut my life, a part of my life on the stage...the only place i've really felt totally comfortable opening up...a blacked out audience...you tell your stories to the light and it feels like you must be talking to god or some kind of higher power...or maybe the police or some terrorist organization...you can't make me talk.

lights...shining in my eyes, on the floor of my kitchen, light in my brain, flashing and flooding angry light and the next thing you know i'm telling the whole story...some of the story at least...and then i wait. i wait for the audience to respond, i wait for the reviews. why didn't you say something before when we could have prosecuted the guilty? who was that? me? you? the nameless, faceless other?

oh snap. snap. snap. snap. please have compassion, please have compassion and call back and maybe we can erase this from our minds, you know, because we can't change the past. why do you tell us such ugly stories, we are completely disturbed and we are completely devistated and can't you see how much that thing that hurt you hurt us how can you do that to us...

there never is a right time to say some things, is there? the more bothersome thing is that i have no fucking idea what to say about it now that it's been said. my stomach's in knots though and my eyes feel itchy and cloudy and all i can do is compulsively print things out...

don't we move our clocks back an hour today? that is...a half hour from now? no, jesse says it's on halloween. weird. i'm in my office, avoiding the end of the shining because i hate the part where the nice old caretaker gets axed. as far as days have been going these last few weeks, today was a pretty good day for me, mood-wise. i feel like i've been brought to you by the following pharamceutical companies...

wouldn't you like to know?

ah yes...art quilts have made quite the statement in the more "traditional" quilt world but it seems that the traditionalists still just can't stand it when people try and address "real" issues...take this piece, the l word, that was pulled from a show from a guild in the northern part of illinois. i shutter to think what will happen to my "pill" piece...

ok, so i'm back on my feet, lalala...well, that's not really true. right now i'm sitting on my ass writing this. my office smells like some kind of perfume/aftershave bizarreness and i'm wondering what the hell happened in here last night after i left. better not to ask, better not to know i'm sure. and it's raining out. and it's friday. and i got up way too early. and c was confused at the role reversal. and there's another debate on tonight. and what can i say really?

so the funny thing about the fentanyl the speed in which it knocks you to z-land. i mean i don't even remember counting backwards before the surgery. but i remember everything about waking up, including the fact that i JUST COULDN'T SEEM TO SHUT THE FUCK UP no matter what i was saying, how annoyed the hospital staff was getting, and how many other post-op patients were getting up thanks to my encouraging them to wake up, join the party. dr b says "ah you're a funny drunk." mmm. something along those lines. but anyway you know that reality show on a&e, i think, called american casino? turns out some guy on that show died of a fentanyl od, apparently taking it for recreational reasons and when i learned that i was like, what, did you think you might have random surgery that night? and i know that's not nice, bad me, bad me...but seriously...i almost said "well, i guess he's stronger than me because that stuff completely knocked me out for surgery, i can't imagine taking it for FUN..." and then i remembered...oh yeah...i guess it knocked him out too.

ok, ok. it's endometriosis. read up about it. i'm still recovering.

4am and i couldn't breathe from some respiratory thing i picked up after surgery and poor chris has got to be completely panicked by now and he's been so sweet and so good to me and i hope you all get to meet him soon.

amazingly tired feeling and my head is spinning and i feel like i have some advanced kind of jet lag...and i can hardly keep my eyes open to type this but just wanted to say that i'm alright, everything went well...and that i'm going to sleep now.

i mean he's like really old, he's like 22...

stop treating me like you're my mother, i'm a grown woman...

these and other comments swirling around my office, down the hall, round and round again...am i just remembering having said that once...or did i just say that because it feels like it can't be true that i've come full circle, that i'm hearing what i once spewed out, that these girls are both me and not me and that i need to be careful of overlaying my memories, the memories flooding back, on top of their own...

even though i asked the doc with no personality to remove my uterus right then and there, we're going with the regular surgery on the 28th...and i'm home for the second day in a row because i'm in too much pain to leave (read: amongst other things) and sweet chris bought and cooked me a steak last night and even though he said "well, it wasn't hard" it still meant more to me than anything else i could imagine at the moment...

so my period arrived a week early...just like i told the doctor it might...and despite the fact that he lectured me last month about how if it did come early he'd have to reschedule the surgery...it still came a week early...go figure that i couldn't comply with the doctor's orders on that...

so i'm sitting at my office at the dorm and my head's killing me and i feel like throwing up and if i have to take this damn medicine anyway...and i had nightmares all weekend about what if i do report the mess with everyone's number one fan...what happens then...and just thinking about it all makes my blood run cold...

fuck fucking fuck fuck fuck...i HATE when there's a computer crash and my post didn't get saved. anyway, in sum...i'm trying to stay awake so that i don't miss my flight to champaign...i'm at o'hare now...blah blah american businessmen...my team outperformed, outsourced, out, out, out....i just sent out ten emails to the team in california while i've been sitting on the ground...bush will win, they say, thank god for our business and i want to scream in their faces...baaaaaahhhhhhh baaaaaaaahhhhh

god...and to think i was missing hearing a voice that spoke english...what i meant was that i missed hearing a voice that i could stand hearing speak english.

protests all over the country and it seems that it's the best time to be leaving although i'll miss this city that is both beauty and ugly all wrapped up into one and the view from the 13th floor of the sovetskaya and the apartment house that looks amazing from across the water...

day of national mourning which means no tv, tons of places are closed and it's dark and gloomy out...although i'm not sure the russian government had control over that. still...it's a monday and the metro was so crowded that it took me three tries to get onto a train...and when i did it was only because i shoved my way in like the russians were doing.

meanwhile back at home...i've lost my tuition waiver thanks to departmental budget cuts and i'm really looking forward to figuring out how that's all going to work out when i get back. so no time to rest up after this! ooohh...i hate how thoughts of crap back home starts coming back into your consciousness as a trip winds down.

haha. good to know that russia is on top of the scene and anything can be had...for a price. well, except photo sqares...or photo corners. no one has those. but stockmann's in finland did...but not at the branch here in st. petersburg.

internet cafe -- huge internet cafe -- is where i'm at now on the nevsky prospekt. i saw the church on spilled blood...fucking amazing. fucking amazing. and the canals? omg. i took a little water taxi all over and it was...damn. cool.

ok, it's still insane here but it's mostly due to the GIANT amount of tourists out and about at this hotel that's making it so crazy. this place is hard to describe so far, this st. petersburg. i told chris that the metro was like new york...only soviet. that's the best way to describe it really. then...there's the show, big brother...russian style. damn where are the subtitles? and in case you were wondering? there's no forgetting about not drinking the water...something about the fact that it is brownish and smells like iron...yeah, hard to forget that rule!

btw, i'm now yet another hour forward...although they kept saying on the train that moscow time was one hour ahead of finish time...and? how about st. petersburg? the train isn't going to moscow and it sure as fuck ain't spring.

seriously, though, shit the russian people are good about helping completely lost people. say...like me! :)

dear expedia.com, you suck. you will all go to hell.

maybe the tip off should have been when the blonde russian woman asked me on the metro "uh, why the sovetskaya?" oh well. at least there's lots of ruins around of old soviet times. but let me tell you...the st. petersburg metro? i have no idea how i got here. thank god the gypsy woman saved me from the hard line lady guarding the station gates or i'd never have gotten my suitcase/backpack through. the most surreal moment was the ride on metro 1 when the little boys came by playing "hello" by lionel ritchie on accordian...of course getting of the train with the russia national anthem piped into the station was a little bizarre too...

greetings from cafe neo -- yeah like neo from the matrix...cheese -- an actual fucking internet cafe in tallinn estonia of all places. im here for another couple hours...not the cafe, the city...and im having trouble finding the apostrophe on this keyboard that is half in cyrillic and half in roman letters. 20 estonia crowns...about 1.50 us.

im getting closer...the nevsky cathedral...the dismantled bricked over kgb building...a manhole cover from 1971...and it was hard to tell the feelings of the restaurant owner who had cnn international on right as the russians went into the school...but come on...these are children, surely no one wants anything bad to happen to them...even if they do seem to hate the russians here.

god damn it's hot in this hotel lobby but here's the fucked up thing...for the past two days i've seen finnish soldiers everywhere and it seems...that they have collection cans. finally i go up to one and ask what's up? they are collecting money for the finnish war in iraq. man...how fucked up we've made the world...soldiers from other countries are now begging for money for the war on the streets?

the train back from joensuu was like a party train and somehow the australian woman and i figured out how to give an old woman who spoke only finnish directions to her train car (6) and the guy from west indies who only wanted to talk about cricket learned how to play baseball and basketball on a ps2 and, anyway, i'm back in helsinki and god knows how i found the hotel but somehow i knew it would be a stop on tram two öäåäöåäöåäöåäöåä ok i'll stop that now.

€€€€€€€€€€€€

alt gr gets you to useless symbols like @ and yes, i'm tired. thanks lucia and loria for the russia info -- at this hotel they have cnn international so i was able to catch up and it sounds like, yeah, all the trouble is down south (isn't that always the case?) so i should be ok but it is a little weird going into the craziness.

tomorrow i'll ferry over to tallinn estonia for the day, you know, check it out. then on saturday...russia. a strange feeling of homesickness caught up with me yesterday...a €60 bill awaited me this morning...

hfg september. hair = dark brown with red chunks, bored in joensuu, shocked the hell out of some new zealanders that i met at the conference and we'll see how the greek judge weighs in later today. for those of you back in the states? you won't be shocked...it's not that crazy. but...my hair REALLY needed the cut though...interesting souvenir.

um, can someone tell me what's happening in russia, you know with all the bombings and hostage situations? 'cause, you know, i'm going there in three days? for some reason cnn is blocked on this computer...go figure...and all the news on tv is in finnish.

god fucking dammit...ok i found a wired computer in the civic center. ridiculous. i had hope that there was an actual internet cafe here but no...seems that they just didn't take in finland...not unlike the us. out of business.

i'm dying for us news...i see protesting on tv...i tried looking on cnn but i couldn't bring it up on this terminal. people keep asking me if we are going to get rid of bush finally. god i hope so is all i can say.

tip: if you go to a small town on an excursion this time of the year...be warned...summer is over and winter isn't here yet so everything is closed...and hotel spa in the same small town called ilomentsi where they are the only game in town for a lunch is code for hospice and hospice dining hall. oy...which means 'company' in finnish. you see it after most business names. oy.

attention organizers of international conferences -- if you are going to make a printed proceedings, DO NOT GIVE IT TO US AT THE FUCKING CONFERENCE IF IT IS TWO INCHES THICK. fuck. now i'm going to have to mail it to myself cause i'm not dragging it with me for the next 9 days. i mean shit...it's almost as heavy as my damn suitcase. that's insane.

in joensuu now, small uni town. walking sticks and roller blading sticks are everywhere...that explains a lot. anyway, i'm presenting in less than an hour, internet access sucks in finland so you may not hear from me again for a few days...until i find a better, stronger, faster connection back in helsinki...not that access is easily found there either...since it is in finland and all.

this hotel's like a disco and it's raining outside and saunas are weird and helsinki is a very small city and my luggage didn't come with me from london but i have it now and i had a coffee at the oldest helsinki cafe only i didn't know it until a few minutes ago and there are tons of boycott american products signs and posters and stickers plastered all over the city and i'm like great, what now, and i'm leaving for joensuu in east central finland, which hopefully doesn't look like east central illinois (somehow i doubt that it does) and the olympics are almost over and i've had way too many toffee candies and i think i'm going to have a drink at the hotel lobby bar because my feet hurt from walking around all day and i got my train tickets to russia this morning and...

please kill me...i'm so fucking tired. i haven't slept in days and now i'm at heathrow where it's raining, well not inside the terminal, but i'm still waiting for them to announce which of 500 gates my flight will be leaving from and it's, oh say, 20 minutes until the flight leaves but they say oh don't worry it will be posted so ok here i am on the friggin' web and i really think i need my eyes examined when i get back because i can only see the flight board if i really squint my eyes but then again i just got off a 7 hour flight and i'm tired and not looking forward to getting on the next plane because who knows what trouble i'll cause there; i nearly clocked the same british woman 3 times on the way here with (1) my bag (2) my sweater (3) my sweater again. i mean there must be something wrong if the sleeping pill my doctor gave me for the flight didn't work on me at all. hey doc if that was a real pill versus a placebo...it didn't fucking work!!!!!!! and well, if it was a placebo then it didn't work either.

hey there's a new magazine called expatriate. coooool. us politics overseas report: a french mag has bush on the cover saying (in french) i regret nothing (although i'm sure he didn't say it in french originally). stay tuned to this channel for olympics and rnc coverage euro style.

ok...so the guy hauled away my dead washer/drier and, actually, it was really only the washer part but, you know, they were together as a stackable so both went out the door. so i'm going to the laundromat because, well, what else could i do? click. loading the laundry into the car. click. throw the keys into the front seat. click. shut the door...uh oh, front door won't unlock. oh. that was what that clicking noise was. the laundry hit the door lock button. well, ok, i guess i'll go inside...damn, keys inside car. well i'll call chris using my cell...that's inside my car. definitely the start of a beautiful week.

kafka is now in bal'more and sleepless is still in seattle and what can i say about anything and everything other than...i don't know. what can i say? change, maybe, i guess...too many nights lately, though, of tossing and turning and trying to...

whoa! a lomo tips blog...cooool.

phone message just left for diane: hey, i looked at my calendar and realized it was august, which means it's been, like, four months since you called so i thought i'd better call back.

that sums up the black hole void that has been at the core of my "communications strategy" for the last six months or so. feel the synergy. synergy. that's so 90s.

so starting next tuesday, 135 freshman girls (don't get any "fix up" ideas, weirdos) will be under my watch in the living/learning community at the u that i've suddenly found myself at the helm of and that's pretty friggin' hilarious if you think back to how i was when i was their age. wait...how i still am? am i any less random than i was back then?

anyway, i think that i'm going to get my hair cut this weekend. and, no, that has nothing to do with anything else i've said in this posting. not really. i think. ok, maybe the connection will come to me later. eat more fiber. or at least look at the box for the kashi cereal "good friends" that claims to have "tastier twigs!" twigs? finally granola food with a sense of humor. brill.

oh yeah...if you were also a teenaged girl in the 80s, watch 13 going on 30. i know it sounds insane but just trust me on this. it just came out on dvd this week. the thriller and love is a battlefield scenes are worth the watch alone.

first off, kinkos still does and always will suck. but more importantly, my passport came back today with the russian visa inside in that is half "very old school soviet official looking complete with my name in the cyrillic alphabet pasted onto one page" and half "some kid messing around with a copier that stapled another piece of paper in there with something that probably says 'kick me' in russian." so now all there is to do is, uh, go. i guess?

so let's see...every time i get my god damn inbox down to just under 60 messages, it goes back up to 346 messages, all of which must be dealt with now, now, now, now. well, except for the 60 i haven't yet replied to because i want to send an actual reply and not just a "hey, i'm lame, shoot me please" message. so something is clearly fucked up that i can't reply to the 60 because i'm spending too much time trying to keep the rest at bay. some day i will catch up and reply to you all unless the email kills me first.

movie rec: the village. you will love the village. you will love the village. if you do not love the village you aren't trying hard enough.

hfg. august. so what's up with yet another friendster social network thingee, this orkut crap..."orkusphere" as pomo freaks with faux british accents summering in some delusional place in their own narcissistic fantasies like to refer to their "network" of "friends" as. oh did that sound insane? so sorry.

anyway, i'm off the hook again 'til mid september with the whole up and back to northwestern memorial thing. so it gives me time to practice not having my blood pressure go up to 3 trillion over -- well, whatever you get the joke -- and jumping off of tables threatening to cut any one that tries to come near me with an iv needle, speculum fresh out of the freezer, or insurance form...and i wonder to myself, and now to you, how do they get those things so damn cold...but not so cold that your cervix sticks to the speculum like your tongue on a frozen piece of playground equipment. seriously. how do they find that perfect temp?

oy...ok sorry, sorry, sorry. my cable modem bit it a week ago in that storm that had jesse and i stuck at meijers and caused all kinds of electronics to get fried in my apartment. and before that there were the weekly trips to chicago to northwestern for tests to figure out why i'm having 80 periods a month. ok, not really. and ok, too much information. and ok, it's just been two visits so far with two more, so far, to go. soooo...i'm lame! lame, lame, lame. but i'm back online again and it seems that i'm always in some kind of email/web catch up mode, huh?

blogging at borders with my new wireless card on my laptop, about to start madly typing away on my latests lit notes for my diss. wireless is amazing. my throat hurts like hell (hlh) but i survived teaching my first computers meets fiber art class today! it was so cool to see how excited they were at the end of the class, being able to walk out with their projects DONE and ready to be integrated into their other work...maybe i do like teaching...well...sometimes. :)

a neon blue spain, a dark and wooded iceland, a futuristic plane...and i have this sense that we are running out of time...

top latest search to find my blog: penguin patterns sewed. think about it.

fuck it's june isn't it? yeah, ok, i already knew that but fuck. still. anyway, i now have plane tix for the ieee conference in east bumfuck finland, where i'll have to take a train to from helsinki. and i've made up my mind and i'm voting yes. now to get my visa...no, not for finland. i think that you probably have a good idea for where though...if you think hard enough about it.

god it feels like it's 4000 degrees outside because of the humidity after our very brief downpour earlier today and you know how i hate that feeling especially when it's cramp time...and even when it's not. i should live in siberia.

so here i am dizzy and crampy and burning up and trying to do some reading and cleaning...but mostly i'm just in a lot of pain and i hate this, i really hate this. but everything isn't all bad. after all, i located a little bit of funding for the summer, i have a full committee again, things are going well with my textile art work...but still...that voice inside keeps repeating its mantra...don't fuck this up, don't fuck this up, don't fuck this up...

haha! the *found* tour is coming to champaign the day after my birthday...which means it's still a long way away. but it is coming!

"evil empire drinking emporium" is the search of the day and it's funny because i've been thinking about that place, or rather, those places while thinking about what the hell kind of summer job i'm going to be able to get because, damn, i need a summer job and i'm not sure what direction to start looking in...

i keep thinking that i need to start writing another book...

latest search query that has found my blog? "crayz german keyboard." seems like it's a worldwide craze. or something like that.

so it may have dawned on you that tuesday is the anniversary of my total breakdown. yeah, two years ago and it didn't hit me until about an hour ago but there you have it...and it's hard to face up to that, to own that fact...yes, i went completely completely insane and it was sad and awful and there were days that i couldn't face and nights i wondered if i would ever see the end of. but i'm still here. and i'm still here.

jesse once told me to look at these things in my life, in my past, to look at these events gone by as badges of honor, like medals given to those who have served in the war...and i remember so many years ago an old professor of mine telling me that as he faced down the ptsd he had after vietnam, he held on to those old army medals until one day he realized that he didn't need them anymore. is that what having survived means?

the scars fade more and more each day but they remain. and maybe they always will. but, still...they fade.

i'm back and completely exhausted and used to german keyboards so i keep almost typing z's instead of y's, etc...chris is already asleep and i won't be up much longer myself...it is, after all, 3:30 am central european time.

oh yeah...trying to eat at a restaurant around 5:30 in prague this past sunday? no! we don't open until 7, it's hockey time!!!! oh yeah. duh!

ack sorry about the posting hiatus -- internet access in prague was less easily found than in vienna with the bignet sites and...i was just too damn busy anyway. :) so the czech republic is now part of the eu as i said and there was a big celebration complete with some really, uh, odd music groups in the old town square. and as we left prague, there was a nice old man (ask me about his eyebrows!!!!) who was learning american english and was so excited to talk to us so that he could practice up for his upcoming visit to chicago for his son's wedding and by some miracle our train back to vienna didn't catch on fire like our other train did so we didn't have to switch to a super slow stop-by-stop train.

now it's our last full day here in europe before we head back to the states tomorrow morning and it's been a crazy wild ride and i feel super creatively inspired now so watch out!!!! talk to you all soon. hugs (loria - haha).

blogging from prague where our train here caught on fire, we were standing next to a guy chris knew, and the cz is now part of the eu...more later!

ok, chris lands in vienna in about an hour, who knows when he'll get to the hotel. luckily i had to pay for tomorrow in the hotel as well (!) so he will at least be able to lay down for a little bit before we take the train to prague. he emailed me from the airport in amsterdam to say that he didn't sleep on the plane (eep) so i think he'll need the sleep for sure!! so here we go...into the czech republic where they will become part of the EU on saturday! i have no doubt that will be absolutely INSANE.

omg. i've been so careful with my money the whole time...and then...uh...a €40 meal...omg...i totally didn't understand that this meal was a la carte...and it was fish to boot...omg omg omg omg...

blogging at ya live from chi, down the corner from the google booth. hehe. gotta run to a session but i had to tell you that when i talked to the yahoo people earlier all i could think of was their damn commercial with the ya-hoooooooo-oooo obnoxious voice thing...

for microsoft readers...i have hilarious pictures of jun with ponytail holders all over his hair. classic stuff.

oh i forgot to say that i went up to the blogger booth at chi and said hello google i've been blogging just around the corner from you all week and the google people seemed very cool actually.

ok i woke up with a splitting headache today and maybe it was from standing in the smoking hall with jun and kevin at the city hall (rathaus) reception last night or maybe it was the half glass of wine i had or maybe my weird ass jet lag hours were finally catching up with me, i don't know...so i had to take a migraine pill but i only took half of one so that i don't end up totally doped up for the rest of the day...and it was brilliant catching up with jun, keith, kevin, and randy and it's really nice to know that the friendships that we formed years ago are still strong and even though so much time has passed so much still stays the same and that's nice to remember...

so i think i've finally figured out how to get tickets on the train for prague and the praguer that i met yesterday at the games sig said that it really isn't necessary to get train tickets ahead of time so that makes me feel better about not figuring it out until now and believe it or not yesterday i found one of those fabric shops with the austrian traditional fabrics and it seems that those sound of music style dresses sell like hotcakes and it was crazy seeing all the variety and it reminded me of going in to one of those sari stores last summer in london because it seemed amazing to me that these are everyday clothing stores because they seem so exotic...

service to feel well is my hotel chain's (austria trend) motto and what the hell does that mean? do i feel well? do they feel well because they provide us with a place to stay? baffling.

anyway the workshop that my csc* presentation was a part of was absolutely amazing so great to spend the day with people who really understand my area of work...some amazing amazing stuff is also happening in europe. the us SUCKS with regard to research in this area...

greetings from vienna where apple juice is the orange juice of the region! i woke up at 5am. yes. i did. and i#ve been drinking coca-cola from bratislava all morning, which has got to be good for me. coffee. now.

update: fucking cites and their fucking express email system upgrade that won't be done until 5 and a half hours ago vienna time...

fucking cites and their fucking express email system that is down half the time i try to check...what the fuck...

jesse...postmodern portmanteau...pass it on...

cold and windy and yet sunny so it was a perfect weather day for me and i learned that everything is closed on sunday, well, a LOT of things are closed on sunday including grocery stores, etc. but the museums were open and i went to the modern art gallery and saw the porträt exhibit, which was absolutely fucking amazing and when you get here, we will go see it because it deserves a second visit and the museumsquartier is like an art paradise and i learned for myself that you really can spend hours sitting at a cafe, outside, watching all the hipsters and pigeons parade past.

while the u-bahn is amazing and easy to understand, i cannot figure out how the hell one buys train tickets, say, from the südbahnhof down the street and, no, i don't want tickets for the bus to bratislava but where the hell do i get train tickets to praha from...ok, right, südbahnhof...established already. where where where at the station do i buy them am i missing something?

jun, keith, and randy have been sighted in vienna, going in to the austria centre as i went out and they were going to spend the day working and i was going to spend the day playing and so we parted ways and hopefully i'll catch up with them again later on but they seemed dazed beyond belief so i don't know about their plans for later on. if they had been with me, they'd have seen some of the amazing things that i saw like the lady at the wienerschnitzl place who parked her red car on the sidewalk, ran in to do her makeup in front of the mirrored walls, and ran out of there in her red suit and everyone, including me, got the joke...

btw, good luck tomorrow lucia!!! you can do it!

10:10am and i've registered and they gave me the giant ass proceedings book so now it looks like i'll be heading back to the hotel so i don't have to drag all this shit around with me for the rest of the day. i'm at the austria centre next to the vienna international center...but note that the two are not the same...i first wandered around some UN buildings for a while and finally someone from somewhere yelled at me from an intercomm that was located, uh, somewhere else "what are you looking for, go to the austria centre!" okok. damn everyone in vienna but me must know where i am supposed to go to...then again it could also be that i wasn't the first to go to the wrong building today and the guy was getting pretty damn sick of it.

hmm. for some reason this terminal at chi has u.s. keyboards. today is sunny and lovely, about 60ish and so i'm going to head to the museum quarter after i drop my shit off at the hotel. people next to me are bitching about the internet connection and i have no idea what they are talking about because it seems fine but then again they seem to be the bitching type...cranky.

on the u-bahn this morning i notice that no one looks at anyone but the thing that i can't figure out is what people are pretending to look at instead of one another? and now my hotel is filled with u.s. people and this morning at breakfast i got a bit freaked out by their presence and i wonder what that's all about, maybe it has to do with the fact that i've been hearing everything but english and suddenly realizing that the words around me matched the words in my head put me into a bit of a shock...and it's hard to concentrate on what you are thinking about when suddenly everything around you isn't just "noise," that it makes sense...your brain seems to cling on to that and won't let go and so you end up listening to stupid conversations just because you can.

8:25ish in the evening and it's raining and today it was freezing and hot and sunny and rainy across the region...i just ate some wienerschnitzl from some place up the street before i got back to my hotel that i finally found again after botching the street name pronunciation to everyone i said it to while making my way back from the u-bahn station that was a lot easier to get back from yesterday when i'd been up for over 24 hours and what the hell does that say? favoritstraße = favoritstrasse = favorite street. and, yes, i just wrote that last bit so i could write the ß.

so i spent the day in bratislava and i'm too tired to say much more than it's a strange experience to not hear the language that's in your head all day long and it seems that everyone in the world has seen that george w. bush cartoon that shows his picture next to a monkey, don't they look the same and all i can do is say, yeah...sorry about that...but central europe doesn't seem to buy the "but he wasn't REALLY elected" excuse anymore and they have a point...the election was a little too close to do anything but just apologize over and over about the whole damn thing.

black and yellowed welts on my shoulders from carrying my backpack yesterday and actually i think they are from my shoulder bag that has all my lomo cameras and that damn "portable" dvd player in it and tori amos is playing on the radio in the lobby of the hotel beim theresianum and it's raining out and i miss you but you'll be here soon and, truth be told, you are the one i've been talking to all day in my mind.

omg...ok it's 2:25 in the afternoon and i'm talking to ya live...from the hotel beim theresianum in vienna. yes i am still getting used to these german keyboards...it wasn't just a fluke back at that internet kiosk in düsseldorf. crazy. ok so i said that i got a passport stamp in düsseldorf...guess where i didn't get one? uh, yeah...here. there was like zero care in the world at the vienna airport. you just walked through either the eu or the non-eu door and there was no one there, no one standing there...nothing. somehow despite being completely exhausted and probably scaring the absolute hell out of the kid at the reception desk, i checked in and now the question is...do i go out and about or do i take a major major sleep session? damn it is so beautiful out though...it's about 70 degrees out, sunny, beautiful -- psst chris read that last bit again...and that train from the airport? you can't miss it -- it's called CAT and there are big green signs. take u3 to stephansplatz, switch to the u1 line you know the rest. the hotel is very close to the u-bahn station.

ah, so it's crazy beautiful and when i typed crazy just then i spelled it like crayz because the y and the z are reversed on the keyboard...you know...i'm going and taking a shower. i stink.

dusseldorf airport where the space bar on this internet station that is smack in the middle of the friggin' terminal says "leer" and i am discovering that the qwry keyboart is the qwertz keyboard here in germany and oh...looks like i could have written düsseldorf earlier. üöä
OK SO:::UGH IM IN ALL CAPS WTF how...ok how did i reverse that? i´m lost in translation...this is insane. and it is so damn quiet in this airport...oh and i got a düsseldorf stamp for my passport...they dont give you much choice in the matter so, no, i didn´t play a game of jump through passport control just to get a stamp.

last post before i leave for vienna (e - got your note, will do)...so i can't fall asleep last night, can't sleep, can't sleep...then when i must have passed into a trance state of some sort i apparently went out clubbing because now i can hardly move my neck, right arm, and my back's all locked up. so to pay homage to "the daily show"...that was making fun of "the view"...this is just like a reality show! yes, my real life is just like a reality show...and i think that i'm up for this week's survivor (tm) tylenol (r) push through the pain (c) contest...jesus christ this is not good.

happy three year anniversary of my blog. apparently it is also the five year anniversary of columbine.

for those of you not hanging around in vienna next week, i'm telling you now that i may be the first person to do an academic presentation EXCLUSIVELY using not one, but TWO xboxes. no powerpoint, no laptop...yes, still a MS product but not exactly the usual choice...

the three-year anniversary of this blog is coming up next tuesday and it seems that i haven't been super great about updating this in a long while and i wonder why exactly that is and that maybe i should start updating it again more frequently like i did when every day still seemed like an adventure, like it still had possibilities...before i woke up one day and saw my shadow and it's been winter ever since. but maybe this time the spring feels like it could be spring once again...notice how i said could...uncertain, as everything is...but possible, a potential.

driving up prospect around 9pm and i hit a red light. sitting there...i notice that the guy in the car next to me has his windows down and i can see something flickering and i see that he has a tv mounted into the front panel of his car and he's the only one in the car and i look more closely and he has on a friggin' porn movie and i remember reading how drivers watching porn in their cars while driving was now illegal in new york and i thought, pfft, right, who is doing that...but now it seems that the craze has hit fly over country and now i can't remember anymore if we are a red state or a blue state...

ok sorry about the break in posting here...nightmares again...spring...the eerie thing is that when i looked back to what i wrote in my journals (not this blog) a year ago...i realized that i'm having the exact SAME nightmares that i had this time last year...what the fuck?

posting from a mac in c's secret lab-or-atory...took many digi pix and lomos of some of the fancy finery and findings and who knew that poison liquids...or at least liquids that look poisonous when in lab-like glassware...could make such interesting photo lenses? ok, maybe i had my suspicions. but while i'm typing this, i'm waiting for the dollar store barbie and toy army soldiers and packing peanuts to finish up in the giant silver autoclave and i hope that they've all melted together well along with the plastic fruit and meanwhile c is in the "red room." red rum???? RED RUM!!!!!

sshhhh. ok it's just the room with mysterious red kool-aid style liquids that i'm sure if i drank would turn me into...

stay tuned until next time...

like clockwork, it's still like clockwork and i wonder how so many years went by with the anger seething inside and threatening to break lose at any minute and what the fuck if it did? what the fuck if it did. fifteen years...twenty-nine years...tick tock, tick tock...could i have made another choice? what if i had made another choice? it's a cancer that i can't cut out and i can either control it or let it destroy me but i can't remove it, there's no way to remove it and i think of angry mad thoughts on the couch in his office and i wonder if i have the courage to let them out yet?

period day! yay!

uh, ok...anyway some civic unrest over here but luckily it was mostly in our heads so no body count right now to speak of. i'm working on my online photo gallery so i'll let you know when the london pix are up...of course i seem to be on a psychotic travel schedule these days...vienna next month, plus maybe prague too. i've been busy with the diss so i keep forgetting to post here but i hope everyone is doing ok.

ok so i came back with bacteria pneumonia -- eep -- and so i'm super behind in updating my blog but thank god it is this last and extra day of february so i can catch up...while watching the ocsar prep frenzy. so let me speak frankly for a sec here...as if i wouldn't...to clarify, the british action was actually action in britain versus action with a briton and, no, not with an american who pretends he's british so that he can pump up his already amazingly overinflated ego...but, yes, with an american...the one i told you about briefly in december...the one who could have a big ego but doesn't have as compared with the one that had the big ego but shouldn't have?

hugs. hugs. hugs. hugs. hugs. hugs. hugs. hugs.

loria says: ""hugs!"?? what the??? when did you start saying "hugs"? you must have gotten some british action or some seriously good narcotics. either way, don't say "hugs" anymore, it creeped me out. (ha)"

dear loria. thank you for your concern. unfortunately i didn't cross paths with any seriously good narcotics on my trip to london but action in britain was had.

;)

back from london -- will post more and catch everyone up later this weekend! hope you are all doing well! hugs!

nyquil haze and a party next door and meanwhile it's still too cold to step outside and my face feels like it's in a vice grip or maybe it needs to be in one. or something.

fuck. i hate these hollywood award shows. fucking best foreign language film golden globe went to osama versus goodbye lenin. fuck. fuck. well, at least angels in america won every award in its category...finally something i thought should win did.

ok. so i was super mad when they first came out with this bullshit sounding premenstrual dysphoric disorder as a reason for doctors to hand out scripts for even more prozac. but you know...i'm really sick of fitting the profile of "all or more of the following symptoms." do i win a prize or something? and anyway, why the fuck am i having two or more periods in two weeks? maybe i'm still just having the last one. right. all i know is that i'm stocking up on good english chocolate and cramp meds next month.

i mean can being a woman be any more fucking great? i know...there are those who say that women should "celebrate" this time of renewal, blah, blah, blah. hey, bitch? lemmie try stabbing you in the stomach every minute for three straight days and see what kind of party mood you are in after that. ok, ok...that was way over the line. but try stabbing yourself in the stomach a few times if you'd like to empathize.

after four am and i've been dealing with formatting and re-formatting tables and charts most of the night which had to be done but i hated facing up to them and trying to figure out how to tell a somewhat interesting story or at least one that doesn't me tired before i've finished a single sentence. i'm getting there. at least i don't have the panic attacks that i used to have to deal with that almost forced me to walk away from the data in the first place.

i had a daydream earlier about being back in seattle, taking ferries to all the nearby islands, driving up to vancouver, sitting around and drinking good coffee, GREAT coffee...writing. that's what i want to do. write. create new combinations of narrative media. i'd like to live there again someday because, honestly, it's one of the few places that just felt like "home" to me and i really can't explain why that is...maybe it has something to do with the fairy tale dreams, maybe it's about letting go...maybe, maybe, maybe...who knows? but i've had the dream again recently...you just appeared there, appeared in my dream...but you couldn't hurt me anymore and the sneer you always used to wear was gone from your face. maybe time had done that to you or maybe it was simply what i wanted to see...but i wonder how it had ever crossed my mind that the knife i'd held, the knife that left it's mark on me time and time again, would ever take the hurt away, would ever make me forget...but not just you...not just you...

i cross...and i wonder...did you find what you were looking for, my pained and painted lady?

i think that there should be a pill created for women to slip into men's drinks to give them instant cramp hell so that they have a full understanding of what the hell we have to put up with, you know? any women chemists out there willing to give that a try? yeah, yeah, i know...seems like the same philosophy as the date rape drugs...so i don't quite buy my own story but it's satire people. deal.

i'm so freakin' tired today and i'd blame the fact that i had to move the famed fridge out of my old office, past all the rotc boys who said "that sure looks heavy" but didn't budge to open the door, down the elevator where i accidentally kicked the emergency alarm button and talked to the 911 operator who is probably used to that shit by now...i'd blame that but i really think that i just need a nap or speed...or maybe just some coffee. and i can't for the life of me figure out who sent me something by airborne express, nor do i know what it is because they didn't leave it at my door so i guess i'm waiting until tomorrow on figuring out all that. and i saw the smoke on oak street that swallowed up the trees and the cars and the buildings and i wondered if i drove through it, if i'd find some place hidden in there that made more sense?

"isn't he just creepy and weird?"

"uh, i think i left my car lights on, be right back."

so the v-day plan has reverted back to its original purpose and now i'm thinking that we really need to go to amsterdam and check out the urinal kiosks. seems like it's the only thing left to do at this point.

i've had a pretty bad headache most of the afternoon from what i suspect was a cross between dealing with stupid walgreens and the fact that it's now -9 billion degrees outside. so i'm allergic to sulfa medications, which knocks out a certain kind of antibiotics for me. well, i saw my doctor yesterday who wanted to see how i'd do on this new drug for cramp time. so i get it filled but this morning, i was reading the warnings section and it says "do not take if allergic to sulfa medications." which ticks me off because (1) it took me four months to see my doctor and that's what he prescribes even though it says on my chart ALLERGIC TO SULFA MEDICATIONS. but the thing that really ticked me off was (2) walgreens who somehow missed the whole THIS PATIENT ALLERGIC TO SULFA MEDICATIONS bit ON the same print out that they gave me that talked about how to take this medicine where i learned that i cannot take the medication. so, uh, shouldn't their computer have beeped and flashed or something when they started filling it? so i go back to see if i can get my money back (we're talking $98 for 30 pills here...and no, they are NOTHING that anyone would want to take) and of course they start on this "well...but there's only about a 30 percent chance that you would go into anaphylactic shock, not everyone that is allergic to sulfa medications goes into anaphylactic shock so you could go ahead and try it." yeah, because a 30 percent chance that you could die is something you want to check out.

shit.

oh but i did get my money back. no, i didn't have to do the fake panic attack act that i had to do to get my november and december paychecks...this time i just used dripping sarcasm and my patented death stare.

h.f.g. it's 2004.