9 posts tagged “whining”

This week has been pretty trying. I can't really go into the reasons why, but it has involved a lot of being extra encouraging and pleasant for the purpose of cheering people into fulfilling their responsibilities to me. Then right when I had finished dealing with a big dose of that, someone tried to give me a piece of candy by "cutely" rolling it across my floor instead of handing it to me. It rolled right under my desk and I hit my head on the underside of my desk when I went to fetch it. I had to act all like I didn't mind but my head STILL HURTS WAH.

I call them "toe lions."

I have carnivorous toenails. Even when I am absolutely on top of keeping them trimmed, the end of my nail beds falls at a point such that my big toes, at least, do not provide a helpful buffer between nails and world. The current very tragic effect of this is that I seem to be already on the verge of poking a hole in the toe of one of my precious, discontinued Hue micro-rib over the knee socks. Woe! Is sock darning something feasible for thinnish modern socks? If so, do I need to buy a darning egg and a darning needle and where exactly would I even get suitable darning yarn/thread? I would not know where to begin.

Actually, your corners are a little too poky for that to work so well.

This thread on Unfogged did not wind up being very well directed towards answering Ogged's original request, but it made me very happy by sending me on a trip through Books I Love Land. Oh, hello, A Change of Climate! Wonderful to see you, A Maggot and Woman in White and Mating and An Instance of the Fingerpost! I don't really have anything more to say about any of it, but I had just been feeling super cranky as I tend to do when I am working to many deadlines at once and thought it would be pleasant to revisit the way that thread pepped me up. C'mere books, let me give you some snorgles.

Then she said, "ahh. smell that lovely decomposing vegetation."

While I'm reminding myself that, in fact, this week has not been devoid of cheer, I should also remember that I got to spend a lot of time reading around in MICASE, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. This is always a great treat for me, because it is chock full of delights. It's a nice big corpus of some 190 hours of recorded and transcribed speech from lectures, seminars, lab meetings, advising sessions, campus tours, dissertation defenses, and various other academic adventures. I think my favorite are the off-campus labs where people are doing field research on fish and birds. Like this!

SU-f: you're not dictatorial you just want your own way.

SU-m: he's a despot (face it.)

S1: <LAUGH> yeah, pleased to meet you too. <SS: LAUGH> can you think what it would be like if you ever had me as a patient?

SU-f: (xx) is this mine? over there?

SU-f: um, yeah they were over there.
<PAUSE:30>

S1: dee di dee you know it's a really tough job but, someone has to do it.

SU-f: <LAUGH> me
<PAUSE:11>

SU-m: uh oh

SU-m: uh oh

SU-m: uh oh

SU-f: <GETS THROWN IN WATER> oh

About damn time.

Annnnd, we had a really good speaker at the department colloquium this week, smart and charming and practical and organized. So what exactly I have to be grumpy about, I really do not know. My hug meter is so low LOOOOOVE MEEEEEE 

This weather is bullshit. I know, I know: either you are experiencing pretty much the same bullshit weather yourself right now, in which case you don't need to be told about how objectionable it is, or else you are frolicking around in shorts and sandals, in which case I hate you and we can't be friends anymore. Whatever, I say it's bullshit, and I say to hell with it.

Office-work has been exploding ungracefully in my face this week, leaving me feeling rather as if a moderately large felled tree has rolled me over. Dissertation, can you hear me? I promise we can get together this weekend. We'll have a lovely time! Dinner and a show and lots of cuddling. Just you and me! It will be dreamy. But right now my brain is made of goo. Mentally impotent, I'm afraid, that's me.

In between working and groaning like the giant pussybaby that I am, I think about pants, and how there do not seem to be very many nice ones. I want pants that fit me and curve to accomodate my thighs without being all saggy in the ass, pants that do not have stupid front pockets that look okay when there are no legs inside them but go kerbloinging out to make you look stupid when there are. I want them to have a 30- or 31-inch inseam, not some ankle-bone-showing 28-inch inadequacy or the fucking THIRTY FOUR INCHES that seems to be standard in certain circles, certain circles that hate me and my dwarfish ilk. I'd like them to be machine-washable as well. If I found some pants like this, I would like them to come in more than one color that was neither pale nor navy.

Ha ha.

It seems, too, that there are no good plain, smooth, non-cashmere pullover women's sweaters available for sale anywhere on earth, in part because retail believes it to be spring, but also because someone decided that cheap cashmere was the only thing any of us could possibly want in a sweater.

Oh well, I won't need pants and sweaters when I'm reincarnated as the beloved and cosseted pet of gentle space aliens who delight in plying me with lattes and good novels. I'll be covered in sleek black fur, and it will look divine.

Today, my brain is made of cream cheese. The general trajectory of my day was not energetic, and then it wrapped up with a colloquium of staggering dullness, followed by a Q&A period of impressive non-sequiturism. Now I slump uselessly in my chair, slumpingly. Truly this is destined to be an evening of great intellectual activity.

This conveys much that is universal while at the same time saying something very charming about Finnish culture in particular. Also, like the turtle video I linked to a while back, this made me cry, though this time it is probably even more inexplicable. (Is there something special about tiny videos that stabs me in the tear ducts?) It's a choral work composed of the small and large daily irritants in the lives of the people of Helsinki.

I had such plans for cooking this weekend -- I really love having mix and match things ready to pull out of the fridge during the week, when I'm feeling wrung out and feeble, especially when it's hot out. It's easy enough when summer is a little bit farther on and one can just eat tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella night after night after night. But this week we're still on vegetables that I prefer to cook first, and we've been out of the house most of yesterday and today, and now it's so hot and sticky I don't know that I can face much in the way of cooking anyhow. Phooey.

I did make a little Morrocan-ish carrot salad and started some tomatoes that are not worthy of eating raw to slow-roasting (in a 200 degree oven, so not much effect on the house temperature) for a grain or pasta salad. But that's not saying much, I'm afraid. Oh! Maybe I'll start some sprouts for curry later in the week. I would probably thank myself if I could just chop up a cabbage and make some cole slaw too, which after all doesn't require heating a damn thing, but right now I can't bring myself to lift a finger. I'm sure, too, that S. would love it if I made his favorite Greek cheese-stuffed peppers for our lunches, but... no.

I recently bought some snazzy Sennheiser headphones with active noise cancelling. That stuff is amazing, especially when you turn it on without playing anything else to go with it. POOF! I'm deaf! Oh, except for the inconveniently orderly sound of Glenn Beck blathering on the airport TV. Perhaps a little music was called for, after all.

Anyway, almost immediately following my recent purchase of these headphones, I even more recently left them on the plane back from France, and realized it just after we'd emerged from immigration and customs at JFK. We got to the gate for our connecting flight and I explained my dilemma -- very sweetly, I promise! -- to the gate agent. She said, "Oh, you gotta go back to customs." To customs? But we had a plane to catch and customs was very busy and featured no one but wordless form-stampers and armed guards, and furthermore seemed to have only an out and no in. Could I perhaps fill out some kind of form in hopes that they found it later? "You gotta go to customs. Look," she said, with great scorn for my idiocy, "this here is the BOARDING GATE."

Obviously my headphones are long gone, but today I went to the American Airlines customer service website to see what I could find about finding objects that had been left on planes. "If you left an item at the airport or on your flight, you will need to contact the Lost and Found office of the airport from or to which you were traveling," says the website. Okay. But of course -- of course! -- when you call the number for the JFK lost and found office, you get a recording telling you that if you are calling in search of an item left on a plane, you should contact the airline. Sigh.

So I sent American an email explaining this unfortunate situation. In return I've just received an auto-reply:

Thank you for contacting us.  We consider feedback from our customers to be very important.  We are currently experiencing higher than normal email communications from our customers and our response to you may be delayed.

Hooray! Super. Also, do you think that the email communications are "higher than normal" because the customers have been resorting to chemical relief?

Did you know that when you tell people you are going to Paris, they tend to think that you should be looking forward to it? (I'm sure it will be lovely.)

Also, ONCE AGAIN I forgot to put my email address on my handouts, and only noticed after I had made all the copies.