from time to time

I am not what one would call a misanthrope. I generally find people enjoyable and worthwhile, and even when annoying, forgiveable. I am quick to come up with reasons for another's behavior and remember times when I have behaved similarly and thus excuse their actions, childish or rude as they may be.

Today, however, people were just being assholes. I have learned several things today.
1) I never want to run a business where I require employees and my profit margin determines my happiness or my ability to live day to day. I don't want to be the type of person who is willing to be a dick to better her profit margin and assumes that her employees are lazy or otherwise working against her. I learned this from dealing with my manager, Paul. He imagines himself to be an agreeable fellow; he is wrong. He is not horrible, he just needs to learn that shouting is not the best means of garnering quality work from most employees.

2) I don't want children. A moment of childlike delight and cuteness are blotted out by an insatiable preference for ice cream based upon its brightness of color, by whining, by the unmistakable signs of spoiling or more generic bad parenting.

3) If I am in any permanent sort of relationship with someone and he or she acts like an enormous asshole to service employees, he or she is going to be first gently corrected, and failing an apology and immediate amelioration, bitchslapped across the room. Anyone who thinks that another person is paid to take shit from them needs to have an ice pick lodged in his or her left ass cheek, be bound, gagged, and shipped to a third world country to eat maggots off the bodies of dead animals.

Not that I am feeling frustrated by my job or anything.

I did receive a letter in the mail today. I love the postal service (not the band, the actual government corporation). I love post offices and mailboxes and stamps and letters. Writing them, sending them, reading them.

So, send me your address. I'll write you a letter. Let's be penpals.

a date

It is still June 11 here in Hawaii. It's interesting to think that this is one of the last populated places where today is still today. There are not that many people in the world to whom that fact is interesting, but at the moment it strikes me as such.

In apparently unrelated news, the downtown Hilo glassblower has packed up and left shop. I am sad about this. He used to sell a variety of things, over-priced kitschy glass turtles and crap for tourists, and really awesome original jewelry, and I am told some very interesting pipes in his back room. Oddly enough it was this last item that I was searching for last time I went by his shop while I was at the farmer's market, only to find it is closed up and devoid of tiny glass hibiscuses (hibisci?). I was hoping to send souvenirs to some of my pothead friends, sort of by way of saying, I love you, thanks for being friends with me even though I'm not a stoner. So, sad day, I will have to keep hunting. With the number of hippies in Hilo, I'm sure I can find someone.

Speaking of friends, my parents, in their infinite parental wisdom, have noticed my off-kilter mood. Since "I'm fine" was getting me nowhere, I confessed to what I termed "homesickness." Despite the fact that, theoretically, I am at home. But I miss my friends, my social life, my reason to stay up past 10 PM. My mother began talking about how this was a poignant moment, that Mommy and Daddy weren't enough for me anymore, but that this was normal, a good thing, a sign that I am an adult. I spared her the news that Mommy and Daddy hadn't been enough for awhile and retreated to my bedroom to get dressed. I'm glad she thinks this is adulthood, since I feel like a whiny adolescent.

In fitting segue, I'm off to read the teen magazines that have been sitting on my bureau since I last came home. This way, I can find out such vital information as 10 MORE REASONS TO LOVE ORLANDO BLOOM! and Secret Signs He's In Love With You (I assume a generic "He" and not Orlando Bloom.).

Perhaps I will learn something important.
Or at least useful.
Or, not.

friendship with alcoholism

I e-mailed the professor of the philosophy course I took spring of my senior year in high school at the UH. I wanted to see if he and his fiancee, who was also a friend of mine as she taught French at my high school, might want to have coffee to catch up. Turns out they've separated. Well way to start out on an awkward note. I hate it when people I like break up. Except when I don't. (For the in tune listener [reader?] that was a note of irony. For those who are confused, that last note had nothing to do with this story, so don't worry.)

Meanwhile, I probably have to drop the summer courses I was going to take because so far, out of the dozens of applications and resumes, I have one job offer, and she needs me only 20 hours a week, which would fit perfectly around Stats 121 and "Pidgins and Creoles", except that she needs me, you guessed it, at exactly the time those classes are offered. This is especially unfortunate considering that I expect this job to be of the sort where you can sit and do homework all day.

Because I am pathetically lonesome trapped in my beautiful Hawaiian home, the new summer TV shows seem like news in my life. Ha. ABC family has a new show, brought to me by the people who created my favorite genre of TV show: the Canadian teen soap opera. That's right, folks, Degrassi has evolved into Falcoln Beach, a show about college age people who have no life, and yet plenty of drama. How enlightened, how perfect! There's even a bitchy but reforming blonde named Paige to have a love-hate relationship with, and date the hot surfer-type guy. What more could I ask for? Besides some tequila. It would have gone really well with my guacamole tonight.

I miss tequila. I miss my friends who get drunk and do unadvisable but entertaining things while drunk on tequila, and I miss doing it with them.

Emily, Earl, Jose, why are you so far away?

seeking a contented cat

My cat has become very demanding. She mewls insistently for attention, sits in my lap vibrating, and periodically nudges me for greater attention and petting. She wakes me up in the morning by climbing up my body and howling in my face till I touch her. I am not going for some gross innuendo here; this honestly is my cat. Her name is Fiona. She is watching me type this, or rather, sitting disinterestedly, hoping that my paint speckled fingers will quit their venture across my keyboard and pay attention to her, dammit. Instead, I am typing my daily cup of tea and listening to the rain pour down on my backyard jungle. The last two days have been the perfect version of Hilo weather; a morning dawning bright and clear, allowing those who rise about forty-five minutes earlier than myself these days to watch the sun rise out of the ocean. (this doesn't happen that often--usually the east is cloudy at dawn) Then, the afternoon clouds and cools down, a breeze blowing, and then with nightfall comes the rains to dampen and refresh everything. Several nights this week I have been able to see hundreds of stars, even the Milky Way one night. So why, for the love of God, do I wish I were back in Orange County, the land where the sky is the color of the namesaked fruit and you really can number the stars, often even if you cannot count without the use of your fingers and your right arm has been amputated at the elbow and your thumb paralyzed in a stroke? (go back and follow where that question mark comes from)

My outlook has ameliorated some since I have good prospects of obtaining a job (or two) that does not involve any likelihood of suntanning, muscle tone improvement, or weight loss, or the desire to lay down on my scaffold and sleep the sleep of the past caring. Especially good will be if I can sell shoes to boost my commission at Macy's --how bout, "Buy a shoe, save a South African AIDS orphan!" as a tagline?

With all this goodness in sight, I still wish I were back at school. Standing with one hand clutching the roof next to my head and the other swabbing paint onto eaves, receiving $10 an hour to paint a house that I (or at least my stuff) will inhabit in Hawaii with a view of both ocean and mountain, I reminisce on times spent in Tijuana, painting someone else's house (an orphanage to be precise) for no money at all, with only a clothesline and a creek/sewage line for viewing, and missing the latter. You see, dirty jokes become many times funnier when one is imbued with a sense of altruism and a(n un)healthy dose of enclosed paint fumes, and I have acquired, in Orange County, some acquaintances who are quite good with dirty jokes.

It's a pain in the ass to go home and still be homesick.

inscription

I need a new set of pens. I adore my Pilot rollerball pens. in five colors (or four since someone absconded from the Interfaith Center with my black one!), with their delightful liquid ink that permeates the epidermus quite nicely, leaving a nearly indelible, tatoo-like impression. It turns out, however, that using them to emboss one's personal design on one's skin during New Testament or Political Theory classes is not conducive to the extension of pen-life. Somehow, someone intended them to write on paper, and so as they have traveled hundreds of feet across both paper and skin (mine and others'), my beloved pens have begun to lose their longevity. I went to inscribe a book with my name so that I could lend it to someone else, and discovered that my blue pen, though clearly tinkling full of ink, has lost its writing capability. Alas and alack, woe is me.

I painted today. Most of the parts of my body which, when moved excessively, cause pain, do. You can go ahead and follow those clauses again, or this one: I hurt. Badly. and though I scrubbed myself all over with pumice and a brush, I am beflecked like one jaudiced, or else like I have really terrible dandruff of the palms. But the eaves on half of the house my parents will inhabit are primed. And I am, theoretically, $80 richer. I'm not totally sure it was worth it. But I'm going again tomorrow, and probably Friday, and then I think I will give up in hopes of finding a real job. This will give me a long weekend to remove my attractive speckles, sooth my interesting, construction worker type sunburn, and paint my toenails with allowance for sufficient hardening time before my shoe vendress interview.

Because remember: no one likes an unattractive foot. Especially on someone selling one's shoes.

It is most