7

Holy shit I've been blogging on this thing for SEVEN years? What the fuck? Really?

2009

Guess it's a good time to do a little life recap. Here are some highlights of my year. I'm going to omit the shitty stuff because I rehash that shit in my head every day. Don't really need to do it again here. Alright, in no particular order:

1. Visited Austin, TX for the first time. Fun city. Love the rooftop patios. Soooo many of them too. So now I've been to two cities in Texas. I think I'm good now. No need to see more.
2. Passed exams. Advanced to candidacy, became a Ph.D. candidate, got my Ph.C. Yep all that. The preparation for that was pure hell and I survived, barely. The challenge now is to finish. That will be really really hard.
3. Had my first (phone) interview for a faculty position. It was horrifying. But I got that first one out of the way and I know that I'm at least marketable because I was selected for an interview in the first place. I, of course, did not get a second interview.
4. Got my first smart phone. Palm Pre, used but new to me. Love it. Wish the plan didn't cost me an arm and a leg. But it is life changing for sure.
5. Visited Thailand for the first time. Awesome trip and cheap! I wish I could get that much sun all the time.
6. Unfriended a woman who is more self-centered, obnoxious, and offensive than anyone I have ever met in my life. A total waste of my time and energy to even acknowledge. That said, her violent online tirades are pretty fucking entertaining. Like, lol entertaining.
7. Went to New Orleans for the first time. There is nothing more fun than taking drinks to go. The air feels dense with history there. A must see.
8. Got a contract to author one chapter of an edited book! I guess it'll come out 2011. Possibly my first printed scholarly publication.
9. Got my Yelp Elite 09 badge! That means I write a lot of reviews.
10. Went to Korea for the first time too. Great airport. Even better excursions for folks on a long layover like we were, 12 hours!

twitter

Yep, that's where I'll be. @fumblingthough. Longer posts will still be here.

banking

That wasn't so bad. So Bank of America recently sent me some letter about a fee increase to my account which turned out to be the Rolls Royce of checking accounts, something I signed up for 10 years ago back when I had something called a real fucking job. Anyways, BOA was taking $20/month out of my checking account so it was time to give them a call. Almost 9 at night is a good time as their call centers close at 10pm and most people are getting kids ready for bed and all that. Oh yeah so also, they were taking $5 out of my Savings account each month starting recently and I needed that to stop. Turned out I qualify for a CampusEdge account for students which means no charge for 5 years, and by transferring $25 from my checking to savings each month, I don't pay the $5 fee on the Savings account either. They even refunded me that $20 charge. And the customer service guy was friendly and not a complete idiot! BOA and I can be friends again, especially since they have ATMs everywhere.

highschool

I derive a sick satisfaction from seeing former high school classmates on Facebook, especially those who crossed me or whom I otherwise found annoying, shallow, egotistical or ignorant which describes about 90% of them. My high school was in an (at the time) almost entirely white middle class suburb 40 min east of Vancouver. Things that crack me up:

- FB friends list comprised of, guess what, a bunch of people from high school and no one else except siblings in-law
- under fan pages, fans of the local pub 5 minutes from our high school
- nothing under education but high school
- nothing under employment but mommy or bar waitress or other hourly wage job
- status updates about babies and other people's babies and playdates
- photos of nothing but kids and babies
- photos of them bald, fat, or really fat, or really into female body building and tanning themselves silly/wrinkly and unnaturally dark brown
- still living in the same town, or worse, east or north of it in a SMALLER town

All I can say is I'm glad I've gotten the fuck out of there and had a life that didn't involve a marrying a high school sweetheart, having three kids by age 25 and moving deeper into the sticks.

upstairs

Oh yeah I forgot to update you all on the assholes upstairs. Read entitlement for a refresh.

See I found out that the n-word spewing soccer-playing douchebag frat boys upstairs actually moved out. Yeah, so that means the fucking bitch who was ringing my doorbell a million times is the mother of the NEW FUCKING TENANT. This also means the party that was going on til 4am the other weekend was hosted by the new tenants. But their wireless network name which is called "[lastname]TakesAnal" has stayed the same so I am guessing that the previous soccer assholes just passed their apartment on to their younger asshole friends. Fantastic.

Oh and let me catch you up on what other thing happened with the new tenants before I went on my far-too-short vacation to Thailand. So sometimes I get a little ripped at home here by myself and forget to lock my door. Not a huge big deal since there is another door leading to outside that locks. Well one morning I woke up and I swear to the gods I thought I saw a ghost in my doorway. It doesn't help that I'm practically legally blind so anything more than a foot away is really blurry for me. In fact I just took off my glasses and realize I can't read my laptop screen which is less than a foot from my face. Fuck. Ok so anyways, I'm in my bed and there is a white girl standing there barefoot saying "Joanna? Where's Joanna?" And I grabbed my glasses to see wtf was going on thinking, holy fucking shit, I'm seeing a full apparition!

But no. This dumb bitch keeps saying, "where's Joanna" and I'm like, "who's Joanna? I'm pretty sure you're in the wrong apartment"

Idiot says "I'm so scared, where's Joanna and [we'll call him Klein since he's my neighbor]. I was with Klein and Joanna."

And I reply, "Are you drunk?" (thinking, you better be fucking drunk and have a fantastic drunk tale to tell, or you have no business in my apartment)

Dumb bitch says "No, I'm so scared, I'm so scared. Where am I?"

I gave her one last, I-dont-give-shit-that-you're-scared-get-the-fuck-out-of-my-house look and she walked out the door.

I heard her run into her friends outside and apparently she was sans shoes, sans cell phone and sans clue as to where the fuck she was.

So I listened through my paper thin walls to get the scoop.

Turns out Klein is my new upstairs neighbor and his gf invited this girl, her best friend, to come party with them. They all got wasted and the dumb bitch ended up drunk sleepwalking into my apartment and sleeping on my couch. Even as she was explaining the story to the guys upstairs she was too stupid to understand what happened. She kept saying "but someone put a blanket on me so I don't know how I got there. Someone must've put me there" The guys told her the blanket was probably just there and she must've just grabbed it. They were right. Then she kept explaining that I looked really pissed and the guys said, "uh yeah, you were in her fucking apartment." At least they're a wee bit smarter than she is. Oh and of course she omitted the "I'm so scared" part of the story and played up the "she looked really pissed" part.

One day I'd like to live in a place that has a washer dryer and tenants over 21 whose guests don't end up passed out on my couch. Is that too much to ask?

twitter

So I can admit I've become twitter obsessed, but I twitter as myself, like my real name, which I hope doesn't bring up this blog when googled.

I wonder if I shouldn't just start a Twitter for FumblingThroughLife so I can more quickly put my misery into pixels for all to enjoy. Hmmm.

bumper

I'm not going to state the obvious by commenting on the last time I blogged. This isn't a fucking confessional. Anyways, I saw a bumper sticker today that said "liberals treat dogs like humans. conservatives treat humans like dogs." Awesome.

So despite the fact that I'm still working on my prospectus, I'm going on the market. Sort of. I'm putting one application out there for a school in the midwest. Yeah, not really where I want to be but let's face it. Faculty jobs are few and far between and if I can't get my ass into gear and either graduate on time or find another year of funding, I'm going to be paying international student tuition for my dissertation credits by Jan 2011. That's not going to be pretty. My waiver says that my 10 credits cost $7700 per quarter. I'd have to find a full time job to live on and to pay for the credits. I hate having a stressful unstable life. Hate it. Sometimes I wish I had a 9-5 job, husband, 2.5 kids and a dog. Actually the one part of that equation that is truly within my control is the 9-5 job part. The rest still requires luck and timing. Fuck my life man.

At least I'm heading out of town this week to a place sunnier than the northwest.

entitlement

So I've written many posts about the fucking asshole fratty white boy soccer player rejects who live upstairs from me. Apparently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree because the mother of one of them is a crazy raging bitch who thinks I fucking owe her something. Can you say entitlement? I was putting some groceries away when I heard a woman at the door (main entrance to my part of the building) yelling some sort of lame nickname like Monty or something. I could hear her pretty well because she was right outside my bathroom window. I ignored her because it's not the first time someone stood outside and yelled for my douchebag neighbor to let them in. It's also not the first time someone has rung my doorbell REPEATEDLY trying to reach upstairs. After several minutes of this bitch yelling outside, she decided to take a new strategy, ringing MY DOORBELL at a rate of about a million times a minute. I thought, like the others, she got the wrong doorbell so I stepped out my door and it went like this:

Me: You need to stop ringing this doorbell, you've got the wrong apartment. I live here, you want someone else. Stop ringing my doorbell.
Bitch: I'm trying to reach my son, he lives upstairs, I'm his mother.
Me: Why are you ringing MY doorbell. What do you want?
Bitch: I've been driving since 9 this morning and I'm here to find my son [as if I'm his fucking secretary and I should give a shit, what the fuck?]. Can't you let me in so I can knock on his door?

So I let her in to go upstairs and pound on his door.

What does she say to me?

Bitch: [with snarky bitch voice] Well you probably should've let me in the first time I rang.

Oh my fucking god did that piss me off. The correct response should have been, "thank you, sorry I rang your doorbell for like a minute straight. I'm just mad at my son."

But no, this fucking cunt makes it sound like I'm in the wrong for not opening the door for her when she's screeching at the top of her lungs, banging on the door, and deliberately ringing my doorbell to enter the building. I wonder if she would've talked down to me like that if I were a white man in my 50s...or a white women in her late 40s like her, huh huh? I doubt it. I hope she falls off a cliff and dies.

I have another neighbor story but I'll hammer that one out another time.

thereIfixedit

http://thereifixedit.com/ This has got to be the funniest shit I've read in a long time. Funnier than awkwardfamilyphotos.com. About as good as failblog.org.

And undoubtedly all of them are funniest when they're for real, not set up for the purpose of sending something they think will be funny on the site.

crash

Plane crash in Ko Samui. I'm going to feel awesome about flying that same airline to that same airport.

UPS

K's building no longer allows UPS to leave packages since there have been thefts. Fuck. So now we have to play tag with UPS. Today I waited until 5pm for a package. Awesome waste of my time, especially since I had planned to be working at a coffee shop where I usually get more done. Unless you're unemployed or work at home, who the hell is ever home to sign for a package??? And if you are unemployed, chances are you have no money to be shopping online. People no longer have housewives who sit at home doing nothing because we all need to work to eat these days.

What's more awesome is I'm not allowed to have packages shipped to "work" because the admins will not have it. There needs to be a new way to get packages. This is just too annoying.

Thailand

Flight is booked, hotel for the first few nights in Bangkok booked ($45 a night for a nice 4-star includes breakfast and taxes). Probably going to hit Chiang Mai as a next stop and then one of the islands for some beach hut laziness. Which island should I go to? Suggestions? Kinda picking between Phuket and Koh Chang (thanks Robyn!) but open to others...

shopping

I just attempted to fix a long unproductive somewhat miserable day by blowing a hundred bucks on vacation clothes for my upcoming trip to Thailand. But I got lots of stuff for that hundred bucks: 2 bikinis ($12 and $16), a yoga wrap cover up ($17), shorts ($5), pair of (Kids' size) Teva sandals ($35), breathable Teva hat ($9). The last two things from REI Outlet online and the other stuff from Old Navy (all stuff on sale). I'd say that's a good deal. I quite enjoy finding good deals. Doesn't fix the fact that I wasted my whole day doing nothing but being miserable but it helps.

trip

This was the year I was going to make up for a lifetime of missed opportunities to travel overseas with friends and now it looks like it's not going to happen because of conflicting schedules and travel itineraries. After this all my friends will be having kids, either their first, or even their second. And then there's me, the one with no stability, no control over my future, not even any rights in the country I have called home for 9 years. Add to that the 6 years of that I totally wasted with a loser who cheated on me with the office slut (who was also married with kid at the time). Ugh. Fuck my life to hell. I want those years back. 

Seattle

Went for a run. It felt shitty and not fun. What the hell is runner's high? Whoever coined that term clearly has never actually been high. I nearly twisted my ankle again thanks to these piles of broken up concrete that they call sidewalks in Seattle. Seattle also features long stretches of potholes that they call roads, and this crumbling piece of shit that is going to fall down and kill everyone any moment now called the Alaskan Way viaduct. But hey we have light rail now to the airport....actually no. That is delayed til December this year. But you can take a shuttle bus from that last stop to the airport. That sounds really convenient when you are carrying luggage. Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually runs this city.

suck

As in I suck at blogging these past few (more like 12-18) months. I think ever since I started twittering, I haven't needed the daily catharsis that blogging offered me. So I bitch and complain in 140 characters instead of 500 words or so each day. But I do miss the long winded bitching that I used to do here. I think I need to come back more often, maybe instead of playing Pet Society and Packrat on Facebook every fucking day.

So anyways, it's fucking cold outside and it's mid-July. Fuck Seattle. At least when it's raining or cold in Vancouver, you can go out and make yourself feel better by eating your weight in izakaya or smoking some BC bud. No recourse here. And Seattlites drive stupid slow to make things even more miserable and frustrating.

Anyways I was up in Vancouver a couple weeks ago and it was awesome. I had dim sum, brisket curry, johnny cakes at the Reefs Caribbean restaurant, izakaya, sushi, barbeque, and I can't remember what else but it was a lot and it was delicious. I miss eating in Vancouver. Also did a nice hike up the Baden Powell trail in Deep Cove to Quarry Rock. Totally fun even though it got pretty hot up there. Spent an afternoon out at Jericho beach too. I miss nice, accessible, big, beautiful beaches. The host's family is a seafood distributor so there were gigantic prawns on the gigantic BBQ that he brought in on a pick up truck. So yummy.

Wow I've forgotten what it's like to type more than 140 characters. I'm tired.

FML

Fuck my life. Name of a popular blog that isn't mine but should be. In fact it should just be full of tales from my life and my life only because I have plenty. I recently moved back to my department at school after taking a year's leave and working for another department that isn't full of angry old white people who still haven't figured out the value of women of color in academia. It was such a nice break.

However, the office across the pond sucked because it was in the campus "riot proof" building built in the 1960s to house the administration so that people couldn't storm the offices. Riot proof means it's impossible not to get lost in there. The offices are not numbered sequentially and the building has sections that you can shut down and also an elevator that doesn't actually work. It was also kinda dirty and the conference room doubled as a "kitchen" (ie microwave and mini fridge, no sink). So yeah, humanities folks are housed in there along with other marginalized fields of study in academia, with the exception of math and statistics which got a nice shiny renovated floor. Anyways I moved all my shit to my new office in my home department and thought, finally, I get an office with a window and non annoying office mates and everything. Then the IT chick barged in today with some old prof. Like she fucking unlocked the door and let herself in. I was holed in there working on my syllabus for summer. No excuse me, or hello or anything but she sure talked to the prof in a sugar sweet voice. They were talking about furniture and shelves and this and that but I wasn't listening. IT bitch then says to me, did you know you're moving out of this office? and I say, uh no, I just moved in and the admins just gave me the key last week. She says, well they know, they've known for 2 weeks that the office is going to be occupied by faculty. Well fuck me twice. Clearly if they gave me the key and told me to move in, they don't know and I don't give a shit if they do or not. So yeah I'm getting kicked out of the office I just moved into and I didn't even know until bitch barged in and held a fucking open house in there while I was trying to work. I should note that we used to have some super cool IT people but they quit. Not surprising.

Anyways, I decided I had to get the fuck out of there because the whole building gives me bad vibes. Went to the library to pick up my books and realized they just started closing early for the week because it's semester break. Awesome, no books. Decided to blow off some steam by browsing some books at the bookstore. That was nice til I went out to catch my bus. I saw it there at the red light. Light turned green and bam, it lurches forward twice and stops. Driver turns off the display and kicks off the passengers. I should mention this bookended a day that started with me missing my bus on the way TO school.

weekend

I had a surprisingly eventful weekend. Went for happy hour Friday with a colleague from out of town. Had some great nachos and beer there. Went to the Folk Life Festival here on Saturday, out with friends Saturday night for Tamarind Tree and the Hideout bar afterward, a wedding Sunday and did some grilling at a friend's house today. On top of that, finished all my grading and assignment development for the class I TA.

running

Ever since it started warming up here, I've been trying to get back into running, mostly because it's free, doesn't require going someplace special, and can be done anytime. I need that kinda flexibility to get off my fat ass. I've worked up to doing 4 miles and getting home with energy to spare, so I'm going to try to get to 6 miles, and maybe work up to a half marathon, maybe.

The coolest thing about running in Seattle (okay, maybe the only cool thing since a fair weather runner like me doesn't get much fair weather here) is that one of our local Seattle Celebs, John Curley, former host of Evening Magazine for years and years and years is a triathlete. So he gives money to charities if you register to Beat John Curley and succeed. I don't think I ever will but what an awesome (and charitable) idea.

I'm thinking of doing the Furry 5K because I love the idea of running among dogs and it's money for the animal shelter.