Thursday...no no, still Wednesday

The week is going by so slowly! I am so ready for my birthday....
Had a lovely night last night with Beng and the kids, after our marriage therapy deal. Mary's is hard, I have to say I don't really like going...I mean, I like it some but also feel really uncomfortable. She was saying she went to a recent training and the guy said, "Therapy shouldn't feel comfortable" or safe or something - saying that for it to be good people need to be risking. Also he said that you need arguments for intimacy. Something like that.
Requests were the big thing I took from the session. Gotta make 'em.
Then we went out to eat - I had jasmine rice with my meal, that is kind of like keeping with my rice fast...a little. Another thing Mary said was to keep my protein intake up because if my brain isn't getting fed that could increase the depression. Yeah, good point.
Funny, I am reading the Hip Chick's guide to Macrobiotics and also another book about boosting your metabolism and they say nearly the opposite! Really, how is the average person supposed to understand any of that?! I mean, for me, I am just keeping what I like and trashing the rest, but what if you just bought whatever you were reading? How confusing ?

More morning

Ok, now I have a minute to talk. Yeah, I had a good conversation with my best friend last night, we must have talked a couple of hours at least. It's funny - I am much more guarded about my relationship with Bob when I talk to other people....I mean, in the past I would be quick to complain (or even roast) boyfriends to my friends...Hmm, let me think about this. Maybe the difference is not Bob.
Ok, so I am a bit more guarded, but that may just be age and experience helping me out a bit - you know - if you roast your partner then things work out, well, ya look stupid. Or if people only hear the bad stuff, they might think - no no that is not what I meant. Starting over. My roomie hears it all. But she also knows him and hears all the sweet things he does too (I think...I hope). With my best friend - that is different because she and I had a nasty falling out about 8 years ago and we are just now getting back to being friends. So I am more guarded with her. And she is much more ... more something than she used to be. Like, I was talking about PhD programs in the TC area and she was saying, why do you have to stay there? And I was saying, partly the house, partly Beng and she was saying, you could rent your place and if Beng isn't willing to let you go, then what is that about?! Sort of militant about it. But now that I am typing this, I realize that she was just going through that with her (now ex) boyfriend. Who didn't think she should go away to school.

Anyway I guess that is why I am sort of protective of information with her. Although we had a great conversation, I didn't really talk to her about him...or even much about feeling depressed. She is so militant these days, she doesn't seem very interested in letting me be depressed...she wants to fight it somehow. I am not in a fighting mood....

Yeah. Ok. That is enough soul searching for the day.

Either the rice is working

Or I am just high from lack of sleep....It was so good talking to K. I know she is busy and I am busy but I seriously think we need to consider talking regularly...like making a date with each other....sounds very monogomous, doesn't it? smile

I like plans...

When she was talking about the perfect partner and how they don't necessarily need to be in the same field...I do think that is true. I do think that you can not be in the same field and yet be interested and willing to talk about what your partner does, and that can be wonderful and supportive. Yeah. Seriously. Also, though, ain't it nice not to need to explain what you are talking about?! I am all about appreciating differences, but, there is something nice about someone who already knows.

That is something about spirituality too. I think I would have an easier time explaining what I do for a living than needing to explain my spiritual beliefs...I mean, of course I do explain and talk about them, but it is so wonderful that Beng understands (having done a lot of Buddhism/Zen type study) and I don't have to convince him of anything...

sheesh. Guess I better get to work...

Soimeone from work sent me a nice email...I think I am making friends!!!!

New goal

Ok, my new goal is to post every day. That is important to put right here, in writing, cuz when I post again and see this, several months back, well, then I will...I will...I will what? I really don't know what the point of that is, just getting it out.
So, lots happeneing since Sept whatever when I last posted. Working at a new job now, sometimes it is hard, sometimes it is not as hard. No big pay off yet but getting better, I think.
I made a new friend (maybe) who is a co-worker. I like her style. She does stress me out sometimes, but I like that she is a straight shooter and very down to earth.
I am not looking for other work, feeling pretty settled here.
Planning the wedding and honeymoon (Spain).
My birthday is Friday (yay me!).
Having a migraine. Maybe I should stop typing here and go HOME!
yeah, getting right on that.

Monday, monday

Dang, forgot the best part of my day...the Hmong Times...ok, it will have to be ok for tomorrow.
(since ya'll don't know what I am talking about, one of the "teachers" around here told a student that there was no such thing as Hmong and gave him a time out for being racist. She said that since she was dating an "Asian" guy, she would know. Right, that is logical. Cuz my mom is Korean, I speak all asiatic languages. Whatever. I think being called Asian is worse than being called Hmong. I mean, seriously, if someone said to me that my mom was Hmong, that would be an error, but calling her an Asian - that is oe of those "they all look alike" names. Or it seems that way to me, anyway. At any rate, while I was out this weekend I found a copy of the Hmong Times, which I planned to leave on her desk this morning. But I forgot it at home. So that is the scoop.)
ANYWAY, missed Jen today! Shocking, kind of. I haven't even known her that long but she is so my safe face around work! I was feeling so stressed out, I really needed a Jen "Hey, how're ya doin?" No, maybe not, cuz maybe I would have just broke down in tears.
No, it wasn't work that got me going. I mean, it was a hectic Monday - but I don't think too much more than usual.
No, my stuff was (is) definitely my stuff today. Just not feeling 100% - have a migraine and had a weepy weekend. Crying is hard. I used to be called a crybaby in my house when I was a kid - as an adult I usually take the strong role - so when I do get it out...it isn't as cathartic as I wish it were. I usually have some lingering guilt about it...
Fucking So-and-so just came into my office to ask me to do something, then left without shutting the door. Am I being touchy or is that just rude? Hold on, I have to close the damn door.
Sheesh. Dude, I need a therapist.

Found this while staying up too late...scary

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-frank/bushkat_b_6967.html

Tom Cruise and George W. Bush have more in common than a talent for acting and a distrust of psychiatry. The most stunning thing they have in common is their need for handlers, so they don't open their mouths and make public fools of themselves. This summer, they both jumped the couch.

Tom Cruise's wild and crazy declaration of love for Katie Holmes on Oprah was scary enough. Then, he publicly, and without provocation, castigated Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants to treat her post-partum depression. In a Today show rampage, he practically tore Matt Lauer's scalp off.

As a few Hollywood insiders knew, Cruise's impulsive outbursts were there waiting to happen, but for the tender and iron-fisted ministrations of his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley. Perhaps Kingsley did her job so well that Cruise came to believe that he didn't need her, and replaced her with Lee Anne DeVette, whose credentials are that she is his sister, and a fellow Scientologist. Those who'd been wondering all these years why Kingsley so fiercely guarded her charge finally have an answer: he had a keeper because he needed one.

Bush has also been under control, for years, by his doting and vigilant publicist, Karl Rove. But in this case, it was the agent who fired the client. Rove has been too preoccupied with the investigation into his wrongdoing in the Valerie Plame case to pay attention to the antics of his wild and crazy charge.

As a consequence, Bush joked about partying in New Orleans on the same day he visited the devastated Gulf Coast and hugged a few sanitized poor people for the cameras. Perhaps he'll hop on Oprah's couch this week to declare his undying love for oyster po' boys and Dixieland jazz. Maybe later, he'll criticize New Oeleans native Harry Connick, Jr. for visiting the Superdome as a way of alleviating his post-hurricane depression. And, he's already hired his mother -- who never allowed her son to do live TV interviews when he was Governor -- to run interference with the media.

Tom Cruise is a sideshow. George W. Bush is a disaster. It's the nation's bad luck that FEMA is too busy to tend to the real cause of our federal emergency.

poormusic

poormusic

This is funny

Ok, there is a site that some guys started up:

http://www.hotornot.com/

Wait, let them tell it (from their site)

Back in October 2000, Jim and I were roommates living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jim was in his seventh year as a grad student at UC Berkeley, while I was unemployed. In other words, Jim spent all his time playing pool and riding his motorcycles, while I went out and partied a lot.

One late Tuesday afternoon, Jim mentioned to my brother Tony and I that he thought a girl we recently met was a perfect 10. Meanwhile, I was drinking. Ever hang out with your friends drinking and come up with a totally crazy idea based on something someone said? Well, that's exactly what happened.

Jim built the site in a few days, and then HOTorNOT was "launched." Actually, all we did was email a bunch of our friends, telling them about the site. Within an hour, we started getting submissions to the site from people we didn’t know! It turns out that everyone we sent it to had passed it on to their friends too.

Ok, so, now, you can go there, and you can rate people. You rate the picture and then it shows you another picture. It sounds silly, right? But I just spent at least 10 minutes rating completely unknown people for no reason at all except to see the next picture. Man is a strange creature...

Love love love, love love

Everyone think positive, now, all together. Lifespan...lifespan..lifespan...

Part 2

It's a gas, gas, gas

Wedding stuff

So, my sister emails me that mommy wants to talk to me and that I should call her. I do. My mommy just offered to make my wedding dress!!!! I love my mommy.

Last one for tonight

Jerry: If you were a "burning bush" ...and I would like some guidance for my people, do you have "10 commandments" that you would offer?

Abraham: We have 10 good ideas. We would not command anyone to do anything.... we would offer...that which we have found to be a very good way of life.... So a commandment is what NOT to do. Rather than telling you what NOT to do, we will tell you what we do.

• Seek joy --- first and foremost.


• Seek reasons to laugh.


• See reasons to offer words of praise --- to self and others.


• See beauty in nature, beasts and other humans.


• Seek reasons to love. In every segment of every day --- look for something that brings forth within you a feeling of love.


• Seek that which uplifts you.


• Seek opportunity to offer that which uplifts another.


• Seek a feeling of Well-being.


• Know that your value can only be measured in terms of joy.


• Acknowledge your absolute freedom to do any of these things or to not do any of these things --- for it is, without exception your choice in every moment of every day.

That is the recipe for eternal joy. And it will provide a format for a life of dramatic, magnificent creating also. That feels like the "bottom line" to you: "How much success, or how much acclaim...how much value can I offer here and now?" And we are wanting you to understand is that your value can only be measured in terms of joy.

Abraham-Hicks, A New Beginning II by Jerry and Ester Hicks, pp. 217-218.

Forgot how much I love Abraham!

You've got to be a vibrational match to your own desire and when you feel
good you are and when you feel bad you don't.

So if your desire scares you, you're not a match.
If you feel guilty for not having achieved it, you're not a match.
If you feel jealous that somebody else has, you're not a match.
If you feel disappointed that it is taking too long, you're not a match.

If you feel eager about it unfolding, you're a match.
If you feel encouraged, optimistic, satisfied, you're a match.
So virtual reality is the game where you don't think about what you want
that hasn't happened. Instead you think about anything that you can find to
think about that feels good when you think about it, understanding that you
don't have to think about what you want in order to let it come. That's the
biggest thing that you will ever hear from us.

You do not have to be fixated upon the subject of your desire in order to
allow it in. You just cannot be fixated upon the absence of that desire and
let it come in.

Abraham-Hicks Dallas, TX 11/2/02A

Abraham-Hicks posting

"Some things you're not letting happen right now because the timing isn't perfect for you. Some you're not letting happen because you are very aware of where you are. But all things, as they are happening, are happening in perfect order. And if you will relax and begin saying, "Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding. And I'm enjoying where I am now, in relationship to where I'm going. Content where I am, and eager for more," that is the perfect vibrational stance. "

Abraham-Hicks, G-9-17-03

From Utne - a new trend?

Bullish on Art

Good-bye Paris salon—hello Wall Street hedge fund

BY JOSEPH HART

VAN GOGH: $12 million. Rembrandt: $13 million. Vermeer:$30 million. Gauguin: $39 million. You wouldn’t guess it from these rock-star price tags, but all these artists died in poverty. And for every Gauguin that now sells for a mint, there are thousands of Robert Bevans. The obscurity of Gauguin’s friend and contemporary matches his postmortem earning power. Bevan is known chiefly for his renderings of horses, which still sell for just a few thousand dollars apiece.

Concerned that most artists still starve, even when their paintings eventually fetch millions, a few financial wizards have hatched a plan to erase the words died in poverty from the artistic vernacular. They’ve created an artist pension trust, a kind of 40 1(k) that asks participants to contribute not their earnings, but their art. According to Wired (April 2005), an artist contributes a piece of work, and managers decide when the time is right to put it on the market. The proceeds are then divvied up: 20 percent for fees, half of the remainder for whoever created the work, and the rest divided among all the artists in the fund.

Of course, it’s one thing to hedge 249 Bevans against one Gauguin. It’s quite another to choose 25 virtually unknown artists and hope that one or two nail the art-market jackpot. Yet that’s just what investors Moti Shniberg and Dan Galai are doing, with the help of David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who tells Wired, “It’s all about finding the X factor. X doesn’t equal talent. . . . X equals the potential to hit it big.”

Free-market speculation has always been an aspect of the art world. But Shniberg and company, while they’re more altruistic than most investors, are part of a larger trend to, as Suzanne

McGee puts it in Barron’s (April 18, 2005), “treat art as you would any other asset.” Several start-ups with high-power pedigrees (Merrill Lynch, ABN Amro, Christie’s) are hoping to do for the art market what mutual funds and similar investment vehicles did for the stock market. They want to convince investors to put their money “not in a single sculpture to stand in your entrance hall but in a diversified pool run by savvy managers with decades of experience.” In this case, of course, the beneficiary isn’t the artist, but the investor.

The prolonged downward spiral of the New York Stock Exchange has many moneybags poking around galleries looking to unload a few bucks they might otherwise have spent on oil stocks. In 2004, sales at the art auction house Sotheby’s set records across the board (and drove the company’s stock prices higher). Moreover, recent research shows that the kind of diversified art fund examined by Barron’s might, in fact, outperform stocks. Two widely cited studies have tracked decades of art sales against the S&P 500. Their conclusion: Art wins. The implications are interesting, to say the least. Art history requirements for MBAs? Or how about a trading floor for artistic futures? And what about that starving artist stereotype? Could a fat and con tented Gauguin (who, incidentally, gave up a career as a stockbroker for art) have painted as well as the syphilitic and suicidal wreck we know and love? Shouldn’t you suffer for your art? “It’s silly to say someone is a sellout,” asserts the critic Lucy Lippard. “Everybody is a sellout. Art has no context in this society, so it’s forced into the capitalist context, the marketplace. The only way to be supported is selling it—that goes for people who are selling it on the side of the road up to the most famous galleries in the world.”

The real disconnect, in other words, is between this economic reality and the impulses and imperatives that inspire art in the first place: Art is a product of creativity. Creativity is a manifestation of a range of desires— from self-expression to formal concerns to cultural critique. What’s not clear is whether creativity can survive the pressures of the marketplace.

Of course, popular music, Holly wood films, television, and even commercial advertising are all products of the marketplace. So maybe the real question is whether we want to further conflate the categories art and market-driven culture. Or, more to the point, if we want Wall Street brokers to be tastemakers.

Joseph Hart is a contributing editor of Utne.

Meeting

No meeting yesterday. Susan didn't show up until the meeting was supposed to be over. chicken.

However, I did take a walk around Lake Harriet yesterday afterwards and had an epiphany.

Really, it doesn't matter what she says. What she says will not greatly change the course of my actions. I am currently working my cases. I will continue to do so (unless she fires me). I am actively seeking employment. I will continue to do so (even if she doesn't fire me). So it doesn't really matter all that much to me what she has to say.

I was looking at the qwest bill last night and thinking, great, now I have to defend/fight with qwest about this bill, too. And I realized I have spent a lot of time in the last - 6 months or so defending/fighting. I am tired of it. I don't really like doing it, anyway. I never did. And I remembered that I used to do it A LOT back in the old days.

Yeah, before enlightenment...smile

That is not who I am anymore and I am declaring that RIGHT HERE AND NOW. In fact, that was never the truth of me.

reading material...

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss

Yes. This is good. Very good.

I can sleep. I really can.

Reading Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Awesome book. Except that it reminds me of the errors I make regularly and quietly ignore...
Like that one "..." ! That is not always appropriate, and yet I use it frequently. I did spend some time a few years ago when I started using it to try to decide if it were appropriate, but then I gave up. No one else cares, anyway.
Now I remember. I care. Really I do.
I often remind the people around me, words are important.
(reminding myself)

Words are important!

Now I can't sleep!

I woke up at 630 and can't get back to sleep. I am spending my time wisely though, I am filling out YET another application for Ramsey County Social Worker, DD. I am hoping the tedium will drive me back to bed. Yeah, not of the job, of the application.
What is going on here? Talking to my wise roomie, listing my list of possible reasons for strange work situation...
When I mentioned my "thing" about Minnesotans, she said, Maybe you need to let go of your attitude about Minnesotans. I quickly discounted that idea!
We are so attached to our ideas about things, aren't we? I mean, I can defend my thing about MNs with lots of experiences and things that I have seen first hand over the last 5 years...so that makes it true, right? So what if I am the one driving those experiences? Defending is such a strong postition.
I got a Qwest bill in the mail the other day and the charges are all screwy - this isn't the first time that this has happened to me with Qwest. In fact, when I first got my DSL, EVERY month for about 6 months they billed me for TWO DSL accounts. And every month I called (I started with, "I had to call" but I decided that wasn't really true) them up and argued (self-righteously) about it till I got it back to the regular charge. Last night when I looked at the bill, I said to myself, "great, tomorrow you will need to call them and fight for the correct charges." But do I? Do I really? Seriously, my stomach contracted thinking about it, and typing those words gave me the same feeling.
I could just call them and let them know about the error, couldn't I?
I am not "fighting" to get a job, either. I am just letting employers know that I am available to work. I am letting the universe know that I am ready to contribute my particular talents to the world. Right now.