I have been creating lots and lots of LiveJournal-sized icons lately. I have big plans: I want to make a site where you can search for an icon by subject (of the picture, i.e. “birds” or “patriotic”) or mood (”angry” or “annoyed”) and get those results, etc. I don’t know if I’ll ever even do anything with them.

I wish I could feel

like myself

I do not enjoy wondering

why people like me

I want to be able to solve

all of my problems

sigh



but meanwhile…

I am Mature. I’m a very mature adult. With no time for nonsense. Or maybe I’m just a very calm person.

I wish!



I feel all weird and funny, and I think about lots of things to tell here but I don’t manage to get any of them written down. Bah.



Oh, and my knees hurt today. My girlfriend says that I “won’t see a rheumatologist” - it’s not that I won’t; I’d love to, but with my insurance situation the way it is and with my hives taking so much of my energy I just haven’t managed to yet. I feel kind of unloved and unappreciated all around recently. _R_ is a strange bright spot in that; he continues to appear to enjoy my company (note how I’m so unsure of my own worth that I assume he’s pretending to enjoy it rather than actually doing so) even though I’m useless in just about everything. We had lunch at Subway today; tomorrow we’re going to the Capital Bistro and meeting up with a girl who’s in ASL 2 and works vaguely near us. We had a pretty good “silent lunch” today, we’re going to try it again tomorrow but the girl in ASL 2 is worried because her vocabulary isn’t so good.

I have been feeling so down on myself lately. I feel like I’m not intelligent, not worth anything. Useless. Can’t succeed. I feel like I don’t have any friends. I know I do, but they all feel so distant right now. Kind of hopeless.

The good news is that on Monday April 8th I have an 8:00am appointment with a specialist for the chronic urticaria. He’s down in South Carolina, so I will be taking time off work for this. After three years of suffering with it, I will be quite glad to get it taken care of. The allergy center is sending an information packet.

Some morning!



I was a minute or two late getting out the door this morning, but traffic was light and my girlfriend got us to the bus stop at 7:19. The bus isn’t supposed to get there until 7:20, so when my girlfriend asked if I’d catch it I said “sure” and got out of the car. There was nobody else there, but I figured I was just the only one to show up. After a minute or two I started walking toward the next stop up the street, and passed a woman walking her dog. She said she was pretty sure the bus had already come and gone, so I thanked her and grumbled a bit to myself. I already knew what I would do if that ever happened, so I pulled out my notebook and a pen and wrote “METRO” big and dark so drivers could see it. I went and stood by the stop sign, and it was only a couple of minutes later that somebody waved at me. He was very nice, it was a very expensive car, and while we talked a little bit he didn’t insist on chatting the whole way. He even dropped me off near the parking garage’s exit to the station before driving away to find a parking space.



I tried to stay awake on the ride in but eventually gave up and put The Fellowship of the Ring into my bag and took a nap. Usually I wake up when we go under the Potomac (the pressure change presumably twitches my ears enough to wake me), but I didn’t today until I found myself at L’Enfant Plaza. There was a train across the platform when our doors opened, so I ran across and rode back to Metro Center. I stopped in at the newly renovated McDonald’s to get an Egg McMuffin Value Meal - only to find out when I got back to work that an Egg McMuffin has ham on it. When my boss got in I offered it to him, and he even gave me $1.50 for it and suggested I could run back and get a meat-free one (which I did).



The bathroom on my floor still stinks, no matter how many times I tell the concierge. At least the president is gone today, which means I won’t have him bugging me even if my regular boss (the VP) is still here.



Oh, and after Binary Blocks seemed to crash before I even did anything with them - I hadn’t even given them my credit card number, fortunately - I decided to stick with VirtualAvenue and pay them $10/month for hosting. So now my site is ad-free, whee!

I’ve switched my web host over to Binary Blocks, hopefully they’ll work out okay. The DNS will take a while to update but then I will finally have an ad-free site.

Today was a pretty damn awful day. Tomorrow I have an 8:30am dentist appointment, a 3:25pm allergist appointment, and a 4:00pm internist appointment. I’m quite glad that my dentist appointment is tomorrow; tonight the tooth actually started to hurt when I wasn’t eating anything. I wish I didn’t have to go to work at all - it would be so nice to take a personal day, but that’s just not possible.

I want ice cream but I’ll just go to sleep instead.

It feels like I am just one giant hive. It feels like my body is killing itself.

I haven’t been on E2 or MOO or Neopets or here or anything much recently. I have no idea what’s going on; e-mails are piling up in my inbox. I’m tired.

I might switch my website over to Binary Blocks, we’ll see.

Hooray for M, my girlfriend’s ex-husband! He managed to fix the laptop - well, more accurately, he helped me format the damn thing. I couldn’t have done it alone, so I am extraordinarily grateful to him for the help.



We went to the National Aquarium in Baltimore today, which I visited dozens of times as a child but hadn’t been to in many years. I was pleased to see that one of their original dolphins, Nalu, was still performing in the show - though he must be pretty old by now. They’ve also got two of the younger dolphins, Shadow and Cobie, in the show; plus two babies were born there recently and they were frolicking in the back pool. The Aquarium itself hadn’t changed too very much, though there’s now a special exhibit on seahorses, a little cafeteria in one of the conference rooms, and they’ve taken away the Touch Pool that used to be there for the kids. We went back to M’s house after that and he helped me with the computer; I ran out to pick up Chinese food for dinner and we watched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We were all pretty tired by the time the movie ended, though, so we packed up and came home as the credits rolled.



(Oh, my girlfriend had to go to the bathroom as soon as we got to Baltimore, so we stopped in at the Maryland Science Center so she could use theirs. M and I went into the gift shop while we waited, and he bought me a little keychain from their Beyond Numbers exhibit - it’s just like one I had years ago, but I lost it and had no idea what had happened to it. It’s great to have it again!)

On my way to work this morning I stopped by Staples and picked up supplies for studying for the Jeopardy exam. I bought a pack of 500 white index cards, a pack of 300 colored cards with five different colors, a big long card file box to keep them in, and a package of little dividers with tabs so I can sort the cards by subject. My girlfriend is graciously letting me watch the show every night, and she’s also promised to help me study by quizzing me with the flashcards. I plan to get a lot of those written up this weekend.

I’ve been creating a bunch of little icons for LJ, now that I can have ten instead of just three. We’ll see which seven I pick…not sure yet.

Thank goodness it’s Friday! I need sleep. We’re also planning to visit my girlfriend’s ex-husband, who happens to live in the same town where I grew up and where my parents still live. My mother said she actually mailed some of my old reference books to me as soon as I mentioned I wanted them, but there are a few more (almanacs, an atlas, etc.) that I still want to have so I’m going to drop by there this weekend as well.

I think it was an interesting night, but for the sake of storytelling I will try to be concise (as opposed to the New York story, which I will probably never finish).



Work was rather boring as usual, but I finally managed to meet up with _R_ for lunch. (Have I mentioned him before? He’s in ASL 5 at Gallaudet, also takes the shuttle there, and works about a block from me.) At 5:30 we met up on the corner and went to campus together. We’d planned to go to Politiki afterwards, but my teacher was sick and I ended up waiting around for an hour in the computer lab. Out of curiosity I started going through the alphabet with the browser’s auto-completion of URLs (just to see what kids had been looking at), and I discovered IP-Relay. I tried it out by calling my girlfriend; it worked just like AT&T’s online relay (which was in beta until June 22, 2001 and could only be accessed from Gallaudet servers; if it ever is open to the public they may charge a fee but this one is free at least for now) and was just as nifty.



At 8:30 I found _R_, and we met up with a friend of his who drove us all over to the bar. The bouncer checked all our IDs at the door (it was nice to be allowed in, made me feel really 21 if only for a moment before I got distracted by the interesting license _R_’s friend had, which I think she said was from Connecticut - it looked like the photo bled to the edge of the license, rather than fitting in a square, which I imagine is to make faking it harder) and we went downstairs. I stood by while the two of them ordered three Buds and a plate of nachos to share; it was my first taste of beer (I was not impressed) but it had been bought for me so the polite thing to do was drink it. I caught maybe 65% of the signed conversation; _R_’s friend had been raised orally so her signing was kind of Englishy and she spoke a lot of the time anyway. When other people joined the conversation I understood quite a bit less but tried my best ot keep up (I didn’t chime in much, sadly); _R_ was kind enough to as at one point how I was managing in terms of comprehension. I ended up sitting by myself for a few minutes, then _R_ waved me over to introduce somebody he didn’t know at all. The guy turned out to be oral hard of hearing, so we sat back at the table and had a mostly spoken, partly SimCom conversation. Shortly after I finished my drink he wandered off to pester his roommate, and having noticed on his watch that it was about a quarter to 11 I signaled to _R_ that I was vaguely concerned about when the Metro would close. I was pretty sure the last trains all leave Metro Center around 12:06 (which I knew from having examined all the timetables for the Metro projects) so there was obviously plenty of time, but _R_ took the hint immediately and offered to walk me over to the Capitol South station. He said a lot of his friends had shown up so he’d probably just take a cab home later, but he was happy to walk me over. I had mentioned a slight concern about walking alone - or rather a flat-out refusal to do it - when we’d arrived at the bar - it’s in Southeast, not such a nice part of town - and he had immediately assured me he’d walk me to the Metro. He’s from New Orleans, and said “I’m from the South, I don’t let a woman do that” which I thought quite nicely chivalrous and unique.



So we walked, and on the way chatted quite pleasantly (if a bit personally) and he offered his cell phone so I could let my girlfriend know I was en route home - I predicted about an hour and she agreed to pick me up at midnight. He left me at the station, and when I got down into it I realized I’d just missed a train: the electronic display claimed a blue line would be along in 7 minutes. I decided against calling my girlfriend to say I’d be later, figuring it was better that she wait in a warm locked car than I in a mostly deserted Kiss-and-Ride. I settled in on the train when it came, and was reading a newspaper when we stopped at Foggy Bottom.



I was quite surprised to see a girl I knew from high school get on and sit right in front of me. She was with someone, but I said her name anyway and watched her head cock in surprise before turning slowly to look at me. I hadn’t known her terribly well in high school, and she’d always been something approaching snobbish to me, but she seemed to vaguely recognize me and when I gave her my name she was quite friendly. It turns out she’s a graduate student at GWU, and was going home to West Falls Church. We chatted a little bit about what we’ve been up to since high school, and I got her e-mail address before she got off the train.



My concerns about getting in later than midnight proved to be unfounded, as I made it to the Vienna station at 11:55pm. Unfortunately I was wound up for a while and made the mistake of turning on the computer in the office, so I didn’t get to bed until 5am…which won’t do me any good if I’m getting sick, which I’ve thought for a couple of days that I might be.

No, I will not give you a LiveJournal code. If you want to know why, read this.

I’ve just paid for six months of LiveJournal! I’d been thinking about signing up for a while, and when an old friend asked for an invitation code I figured that was as good a reason as any. I’d already used my one free code, and so by paying and getting a code for her I’ll be able to keep up with her on a more regular basis. Hooray for Gaia! And now to find out what else I can do with my paid account. (If any of my friends without LJ accounts read this and would like one, let me know. I’ve got a few more codes.)



(Also, the Which Tarot Card Are You? test says I am the Hierophant. I’m not using the linking graphic because I don’t like the Rider-Waite deck very much. And although the What X-Men Character Are You? quiz tells me I’m Rogue, I’m not using its linking graphic because it’s huge, the site doesn’t work in Netscape and I had to use IE, and also I just don’t feel like it.)