my mom thinks it's fate

I just think it was pretty good timing, and a lot of persistance.

Yes, folks, I found a man. And not the one I thought I was looking for. But it turns out that he's the guy I SHOULD have been looking for. Thankfully, he's much more observant than I :-)

To top it off, dear readers, you may be happy to hear that this here blog was one of the main contributing factors to said kind and generous gentleman's interest in one Turtle.

More info will, I'm quite sure, trickle into future updates, but for now, all I have to say is life is not only looking up these days, but it is looking at the stars, and the clouds, and the birds, and all that really up stuff. Now we just need to find a spot of sea to dock a houseboat alongside some land where we can plant a garden...

Bluntwoman!

Heh. Big double en tendre inside joke to me*!

What is it about humans that requires us to be so afraid of being honest? Why do we feel the need to beat around the bush? (It's not like we're really interested in trying to beat the poor bush in the first place, not literally anyway.) This culture of fakeness (Oh, your new hairdo is FABULOUS!!!) isn't doing anyone any good, in fact it reinforces the bad. Misunderstandings are common enough without people intentionally spewing them out into the world, right? So why is it that even me, who is a card carrying member of the bluntness club, has a hard time just saying what's on my mind sometimes? (I'm sure you're all reading this and wondering what exactly I'm not saying about you. Well, you can all rest assured that it very unlikely that it's you I'm talking about right now. Really.) Thank goddess, a kind an generous third party made it very uncomfortable for me to be all running around the proverbial shrubbery with my baseball bat. I'm now so much better off than I was before the whacking of the landscape, and I think that my actions will go on to do even more good (not so much curing cancer, but you know). So what was I afraid of? What are any of us afraid of that makes us keep our mouth shut? (Oooh, I could turn this personal rant around into a sociopolitical one in a second, but that just seems too predictable...)

So, take my advice, knock off the mamby pamby indirectness and saccharine pleasantries and just out with it. What do you really think? What do you want to know? No need to be mean, just be honest.

* Note to self (in case I'm re-reading this in 10 years and wondering what the hell I'm talking about), and to the rest of you, since you're here anyway: I had a dream the other night that I wandered into a Kevin Smith movie set while they were making a Bluntman and Chronic movie. I caught the co-producer's eye and he decided that I would be great in the film as Bluntman's evil ex girlfriend. They gave me a makover that turned me into a super villian dominatrix. Who hoo! Unfortunately most of the dream involved me wandering around a forest full of broken dishes looking for a cast party. And I never did get to work with Kevin, as I was on the second unit's set. But it was clearly the most memorable dream I've had in a while. And I thought it was a particularly entertaining way for my Freudian brain to tell me to act more bluntly in my waking life.

Wait, last minute update. After you've read all you can take here, go to this guy's blog and get the other stuff that I'd have written if I'd thought of it.

despite it all

Despite some incredibly gloomy weather (quite possibly record setting), and some frustrating crap with the roommates (I talked to the landlord and he says he never agreed to kick me out) and a bit of panic about presenting at two workshops at the Bicycle Educator's Leadership Conference in Oregon in a week, I'm in a pretty good mood right now. I spent the weekend with a friend, and had fun, even if I am probably frustrating the heck out of him (sorry!). I decided not to push myself to ride on the SCUL mission on Saturday night in the cold rain. And I'm actually glad. I'm sure I had just as much fun, and I got to observe the Somerville police and fire departments as they wandered around hopelessly for and hour and a half looking for a fire somewhere in my neighborhood. I can't imagine that the fire did much damage, since literally no one could find it, even though it was burning for almost two hours or so. My friend and I might even have seen the kids who set the fire (yes, I called the police and reposted the suspicious kids). I can't wait until Thursday to see what our little Somerville Journal has to say about the whole thing.

I haven't decided what to do about my roommates and my home. I still have to talk to the landlord again and see what he's thinking. But I know that the rent is going to go up, since property taxes are shooting through the roof these days. And I think I can find a better deal, and a place where there aren't quite so many people (reducing the chance of insane people). So, I'm keeping my options open.

I've been blissfully out of touch with most of the news outlets, so I don't have much to complain about politically :-) Though the FCC is doing an amazingly job convincing me to get rid of cable tv, and stop watching much tv at all. (Also, Buffy is done, so tv is significantly less appealing anyway!) But, you should all be watching NOW with Bill Moyers on Friday night on PBS. It's about the only decent news show, along with Democracy Now and the Daily show. (The last two I will sorely miss if I give up cable...)

Finally, I now have a reason to look forward to going out to the Portland, Oregon bicycle conference, even with the daunting task of speaking in front of a whole bunch of real education professionals (who luckily don't know that I don't have any credentials whatsoever!). I'm happy I'm going now because I can hang out with my friend Rich Mackin who recently moved out there. He's always entertaining and an excellent source for creative political activist type inspiration. Plus, I'm curious to see what type of place could convince a die hard Bostonian to up and leave!

Oh, and I'm slowly cleaning my room. Yay for me.

homeless

It was a cold and rainy bike week, but it wasn't too bad. I, sadly, couldn't bike to work, since my bike doesn't fit in the space between my bed and the computer. But I did bike to a few events, and they were fun.

My birthday was very mellow, as was the SCUL ride. I did bring my first official Maggot (a new recruit) on the ride (Hi Pywacket!), and I built my first ship (chopper bike). So I'm just way cool now.

On Sunday, my grandmother (the other one!) took the big family to an herbal farm and restaurant in NH for lunch, ostensibly as a surprize birthday party for my aunt who's birthday was a while ago. The rest of the family pretty much used the party to celebrate everyone's birthday who was born any time in the spring, and I got presents (Yay!). It was nice, and, as a bonus, I bought a very cute wire model of an English 3-Speed bike as a present for myself. (No, Smasher you can't have it!)

The rides in my grandmother's and aunt's cars was less than pleasant, though. Both of them terrify me, and at least a couple of times we swerved into another lane and nearly hit other vehicles. Eeek.

Finally, as I suggested in the title of this entry, my favorite little band of misfit roommates have finally succeeded in their obsessive quest to make my life miserable, and they have apparently convinced the landlord to kick me out when the lease runs out at the end of August. I'm half thinking of asking several of my next door neighbors (who are good friends) to write letters to the landlord letting him know how good a neighbor I am, and how he is making a mistake. I was even considering asking my friends at the Office for Housing and Community Development to talk to the landlord. I'll see how I feel in a few days. But, in the meantime, I'm going to start packing (3 months might be just enough time!), and looking for a place near Davis or Union Square, in Somerville of course. This time, no lame roomates. The weird thing is, I always mention that I want to live with politically and/or environmentally active people in the roommate ads, but somehow I keep ending up with an astoundingly large percentage of uncaring, unstable, and sometimes just plain mean people who have nothing better to do than bitch and moan (and watch cartoons on tv, and play horribly violent video games, and drown themselves in alcohol!). Is there some definition of "activist" that I've just not heard of (activist: n. person who likes videogames a lot [1983 < English, dirived from product named Activision])? But seriously, I don't really expect much from roommates (people in general, really), just a little respect and some ability to act rationally...

visuals

How's this for a nice, random thought...

You know how men are supposed to be especially visually oriented? Well, I have a hard time buying it ('cept for the sexual part). Almost every guy I've ever met has has shown absolutely no interest in what his environment looks like. You walk into a man's bedroom and chances are that there just isn't anything interesting to look at, unless someone else put it there. I'm not talking expecting something out of a designer magazine or anything, but I just can't understand how these guys live without at least some sort of visual stimulation in their lives. I've thought about this for a long time, but only just recently, after having visited a bunch of artist's studios/homes, did it really stike me as being ironic. (You know I've been thinking too much about this when I was watching Dawson's Creek reruns and complained that the set designers had given one of the (straight) male characters a really stylish apartment that I just didn't believe someone like him would have in real life.) So, what is it about men that makes them not notice anything about their surroundings, yet be so good at the other visual concepts?

as per request

Someone I didn't know was reading my blog told me to update it, so here's two week synopsis of the chaos that's been my life...

I went up to Maine to be with my mom for my grandmother's funeral, and spent most of that week in South Portland. We stayed in my grammie's room in an old folk's home while my mom dealth with everything and got ready for the funeral and wake. It was all very, very odd, and my mother was sort of freaking out the whole time, but she's ok. Lots and lots of people appeared out of the woodwork to tell us how great a woman my grandmother was and how much she loved my mom and me. I had a ton of guilt at not having visited her in a very long time (2 years, my mom seemed to think). I was never all that close to my grandparents, and was always just a little disappointed with my grandmother's passivity. She was definitely a product of her time, and I had wanted a bit more for her. But she was nonetheless seen as an absolutely wonderful person by everyone who knew her. And the other people who spoke at her funeral made me realize how much she was appreciated by everyone around her. So it made me proud.

Several years ago, my grandmother wrote and collected a pile of her childhood stories and put them into a handmade book for all of her close friends and family. The local newspaper even published a few of them and made my grandmother into a real writer - somethng that she'd always wanted to be. She wasn't the greatest writer in the world, but she did have some wonderful stories and I'm so happy to have them now. I may put one or two on the web to share with you all (the three of you, that is!).

Anyway, the funeral and wake were interesting and made me think a lot about family and friends. I can only hope that I have one tenth as many loving people surrounding me in my old age.

When I got back home at the end of the week I worked a lot, hung out with the gang, and got an infected tooth. The tooth got progressively worse over the weekend (I never get teeth problems on a Monday...) and by Sunday night I was double dosing on the Excedrin (Acetominophin, Asprin, and caffine). By Monday morning the combination of lack of sleep, pain, OD of caffine, no food, and a bit of panic let me to collapsing in the T station just a couple of blocks away from the dentist. An ambulance with the coolest EMT ever (I decided that if I wasn't about to pass out I'd have been in love!) carted me the three blocks to the hospital where the entire staff spent the morning poking and prodding me with needles, pee cups, and electrodes before finally agreeing with my diagnosis of too much of some stuff and too little of the rest. They then abandoned me in the wacko room to bore myself back to health. By the time they released me the dentist's emergency hours were over and I had to suffer for another day. Packing my office stuff, and then a visit from a friend made the day go by pretty quickly. (In a completely different, annoying story, MassBike is now homeless, and who knows when we'll get into another office. For now 1/3 of MassBike is officially in my bedroom where my laundry used to be.) Next morning had me on the dentist's emergency patient list with no sireny detours thankfully. The extraction process was worse than usual and after the dentist kicked me out of the chair I decided to sit patiently in the waiting room looking miserable and crying a bit for about three hours until someone took pity on me and handed me a perscription for some real painkillers. Eventually I got home, took some Vicoden (sp?) and slept. Two days later I was voraciously eating bags of potato chips from Building 19, and I feel much better.

There's a ton of other stuff I could talk about. But I really should start dealing with some of the things I need to get to this weekend. So, I'll leave you with a parting note:

My grandmother left me the majority of her money. Weird. (No, I'm not rich or anything, she was about to run out of money in another 6 months or so,a but it's more money than I've ever had at once. Weird.)