the friday five
1. What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?
bathtub
2. What do you do the moment you get home from work/school/errands?
pet the cat and the dog, they both usually come to the door. the dog wiggles and shows me whatever toy is nearby, so he gets a good rub. then i pick up the cat and pet her until she purrs. then i check to see if the fish is still alive (he has been since january!)
3. What are your favorite aromatherapeutic smells?
aromatheraputic....i like smells, i guess, but i dont think of them as aromatherapudic. i like lavendar, that's the smell of my bath salts.
4. Do you feel more relaxed with a group of friends or hanging out by yourself?
generally, i like being by myself. though, living with a bofriend in a small apartment doesnt often provide true solitude. maybe that is one of my problems?
5. What is something that you feel is relaxing but most people don't?
there is one thing, but i cant discuss that here.

the other night, in one of those post-bar, too drunk, dont want to go home we must think of something else to do episodes, we acted on the rumour of hidden features on our memento dvd. i had never known this secret side of the dvd; we crowded around the computer, it didnt take very long to find the cryptic instructions we needed: select "d" for every answer, choose the "apple," then the "pear," choose the "wrong answer" for every question, Voila! The closing credits start rolling up the screen. Memento in reverse! er...foreward, you know...in proper order! it plays the movie in the order in which it was filmed, and you know, it is an entirely different movie. it is nowhere near as good.

this is getting creepy. dave took the test, he is an INTP, which makes us both analysts. this article talks about analysts in relationships, how they have such high standards for everyone they tend to only end up with other analysts, if they have differences (like P vs. J) they will ignore the similarities and focus on the differences (the judge will view the perceptor as disorganized and the percecptor will view the judge as rigid), counseling rarely helps them because they have such high intellectual standards, only another analyst counselor will do, and an analyst counselor can be tricked into not seeing the true feelings since analysts aren't good with feelings, except at hiding them. as turned off as i have been by jungian philosophy, this shit is good.

i took the myers-briggs test again after a couple of years, just to see if i'd get the same result, and i did! im a good-solid INTJ. it's got the best name, anyway: mastermind. i wonder if you have to be INTJ to actually like that. is it a coincidence that i think my zodiacal sign is the best, too? i'm a scorpio, it really is the best.

yesterday i presented my work to a roomful of people including my two bosses, their boss, their boss's boss. that god that is over. my boss's boss's boss asked me a question mid-way through and i totally misunderstood him, and gave him a really dumb answer. that was just fantastic. (i figured out what he was saying eventually, thank god) on a happier note...one of my two bosses is trying to steal all of my research and publish it under his own name. fucking fanstastic, again. ive submitted a paper to a conference, there is another conference i was planning on submitting to, but for that one just an abstract is due on monday. so, my boss sends me the abstract he plans to submit, never mind that i thought i was going to write it, he just rewords the absrtact from the original (my) paper and puts his name as the author. he's the one paying me, yes that is true, but i am the one who desinged the whole thing, tested the whole thing, and wrote a ten page paper on it. i am not the type to be scrambling for publications like some pre-tenure professsor, but come on...this is mine! i cant let him do this just in principle.

and finally, the latest update on the guy who lives beneath us, the one who is afraid to admit he is balding so wears a wool hat every day of the year, the one with an affinity for techo bass thump thump on the porch on a tuesday 2am. he has invited us to his party on saturday night. we find this funny because we just saw a movie (it was actually pretty bad, with jennifer jason leigh and a party, the whole movie was a party at her mansion in hollywood hills) where JJL invited the neighbors to the party (the neighbors who they constantly fought with, who complained about their incessant noise, and who, the viewer is left to assume, they constantly bitched to their friends about) and, throughout the night, whomever the neighbors were talking to would eventually end up saying "ohhh, so yoooouuur the neighbors?" we've decided to save ourselves the trouble involved with banging on his door 6am sunday, and we are going to yosemite. (that is far less trouble)

while failing miserably as the duo bar trivia team, dave told me he is the type of person who likes to be micro-managed. i cant believe i even know someone who likes to be micro-managed, it is such a foreign concept to me. is it possible that's not a bad thing, by definition? i suppose so, people may just have their preferences. but whenever you hear someone talking negatively about someone's manegerial style they always say "and he insists on micro-managing everything, it drives me crazy." so, there are people out there that do want to be micro-managed. dave is difinately this, btw. when we are cooking dinner together, while i am across the room doing something else, he will say, while standing next to the cook book, "what do i do now?", or he will stand at the pantry door and say "where is the sugar?" i am having a hard time accepting that this is ok, that he will still be a successful ___ what ever he wants to be. can you teach someone how to figure out things on their own? i dont think so. am i making him out to be the biggest moron in the world right now? probably. he is getting a phd in one of the hardest fields from one of the worlds top universities, but he has the absent minded professor thing to a fault.

hangover gone. yoga rules, i never knew i was so bendy. now im too relaxed to work so im outie.

this sucks. im supposed to go to my first yoga class in a half hour, and now realize that this is the absolute first yoga class as in the actual first ever, and im so damn hung over i cant imagine myself bending around, or whatever it is you do when you yoga, and not running out of the room to vomit. this sucks. i was totally looking foreward to the relaxing fridays thing. why am i so hungover? i think i will leave after this class. (12:15, ha)

hmmm....but now im bored.

paper done. paper done!?! can you believe it? this is, by far, the hardest ive worked on writing anything, and it paid off. it paid off, and the amount of grammer i learned in the last month scares me. (i do have a master's degree) while we are on the subject of things not learned in school...

anyway, paper done. i will put it up here it as soon as im allowed to show it to anyone. (and jess, you will see all of your math input)

and again, the friday five

1. What is your biggest pet peeve? Why?
in the apartment when we moved in was a very old freezer, it was one of those "ice box" types, with a layer of frost two inches thick on every surface. the landlord said he would replace it before we moved in, and that was an absolute requirement for me. he didnt, of course, it took another month or so, but in the meantime i had to endure my biggest most pronounced and dramatic pet-peeve, which is the sound and feeling of something rubbing against the frost. a dull slow scrapping, dragging and burning my eardrums. god i hate that sound. its kind of like eating malt balls, which i hate for the same reason.
2. What irritating habits do you have?
i pick pick pick at my cuticles. its a nervous habit and ive been doing it for years.
3. Have you tried to change the irritating habits or just let them be?
ive tried to stop, using solar oil helps a lot. i cant stop though, i would if i thought that there was real harm in it, besides making my fingers unattractive.
4. What grosses you out more than anything else? Why?
i had to get a bunch of shots before going to africa last summer, and i absolutely lucked out because they had just recently released malarone, an alternative to larium, the anti-malaria pill taken every day. well, aparantly larium casues a whole lot of problems like hallucinations. me...in africa - the bug populous of the world...hallucinating bugs on me, maybe even seeing them on my skin, while i sleep, under my skin...crazy...bugs everywhere..help. that, to me, is the grossest thing imaginable.
5. What one thing can you never see yourself doing that other people do?
i dont know why anyone would sky-dive, or bungee jump, or anything like that. i dont even like flying. maybe im afraid of heights?

those of you who have been frustrated by the lack of functional links in the "photos" section will be happy to know that things are now in order

im turning over a new leaf. i have just signed up for some kind of aerobics class on tues. and thurs. during lunch, and a yoga class fridays during lunch. it will be the new aerobic and flexible me. it sucks i have to pay for it, actually. i think the taxpayer should cover it (i so do not actually believe that statement) but alas, i will pay. they have the option of picking just the classes you want to go to, but that wont work for me, i need the set classes that ive allready paid for. plus, maybe more people will be as out of shape as i am. im actually looking foreward to this!