But I'm not gay!

I heard (I guess I should say overheard) an interesting conversation at the beauty salon this morning. I went in to get my hair colored and cut, and while I was getting it cut, there was a guy sitting in the chair next to me having his hair cut. I didn't hear the first part of the conversation, because it apparently took place over at the shampoo station, but from what I heard, I deduced that he'd been out the previous night and some guy had hit on him. He was saying to the (gay) hairdresser, "But I'm not gay!"

He was saying that it wasn't the first time it had happened, and he didn't know why. He said he'd asked his sister, because she "knew a lot of gay guys" -- unfortunately, I didn't hear what his sister said. The hairdresser said, well, you're self-assured, and confident, and they feel comfortable approaching you -- which didn't make any sense at ALL to me. Just from his looks (and I know that's a snap judgement), I would have thought he was probably gay, too.

He was slender, wearing jeans and a tight black t-shirt, and when he spoke to the hairdresser, he leaned over close to him and covered his mouth with his hand and practically whispered in his ear.

He said to the hairdresser, "Did you think I was gay when you met me?" and the hairdresser said, "No, but I wished you were!" and they laughed, and I thought, yeah, right, you're not gay.

A few weeks ago I bought some instant green tea in individual servings (the ones that you pour into bottled water and shake up) at Target because they were on the clearance aisle. I thought it looked kind of intriguing, but frankly I was a little afraid to try it, so it just stayed up in the cabinet. I finally tried it, and I love it! It's Lipton Green Tea To Go -- I like the Mango Mandarin and the Cherry Blossom; I haven't tried the Lemon and Honey flavor. (I was afraid that it was on clearance because they'd stopped making it, which would be just my luck, but apparently it was because they've changed the box.)

I'm usually not crazy about iced tea, and I really don't like instant tea, but this is very light, slightly sweet, and really nice. I've been drinking a lot of it. Target had it on sale this weekend -- $1.99/box of ten, which probably isn't that great a deal if compared to brewing tea with a teabag, but not bad if you take the convenience factor into account.

previous | next

Disgust

At the gym last night I was walking on the treadmill and watching House; the woman on the treadmill next to me was watching Fear Factor, or that's what I assume it was. I was trying desperately not to look over at it. That's a hard thing to do, though. It's like telling someone not to think of an elephant--you just really can't help it. And I normally look around anyway, of course, just to see what's going on, particularly during commercials.

Not last night, though. I kept my eyes firmly on the television in front of me. How can people watch stuff like that? Why do they want to? It's a complete mystery to me; I'll never understand it. I don't even want to know about it.

Although I don't watch reality tv (except for What Not to Wear, which doesn't really count), I can sort of understand the trainwreck factor of some of them. They embarrass me and make me feel uncomfortable for the most part, and some of them are so stupid that if I happen across one, I turn it off in disgust, but Fear Factor takes disgust to a whole new level. How can that be enjoyable? Anyway . . .

And yes, I know that House can be disgusting sometimes, too, but it's in small increments, and I can look away (although not last night!). And of course, it's not that I really even care about the medical parts of it, strangely; it's the human relationships that interest me (I imagine that's a woman thing).

previous | next

Bridges

My drive to work now is so stressful.

Until last week I could just get on the highway, point the car north, and it was a straight shot all the way until I got off a couple of blocks from the office. Now I have to drive on three different highways, merge, change lanes, cross the river twice on scary bridges, figure out which lanes are exit only when I don't want to exit, and which ones aren't exit lanes when I do want to . . . And it's through a major industrial area, so even though there isn't a lot of traffic, what traffic there is is made up of huge trucks and cement mixers and tankers and all kinds of big equipment.

I'm sure in a week or two it'll be second nature and I won't even have to think about it, but right now I'm not enjoying it at all, to say the least. And the bridges! It's not as bad as it could be, these aren't the big suspension bridges that really scare me, these are big, but I can get into a center lane and try not to think about it or look around too much, and I'm okay.

I don't know what it is, exactly. I know, like most phobias, it's irrational. It's not a fear that the bridge is going to collapse, it feels more like I'm afraid that I'll suddenly spin the wheel and drive off the edge, lose control.

I guess I'm not the only one: Bridge Phobia

Gephyrophobia: An abnormal and persistent fear of crossing bridges. Sufferers of this phobia experience undue anxiety even though they realize their fear is irrational. Their fear may result partly from the fear of enclosure (claustrophobia) or the fear of heights (acrophobia). Phobic drivers may worry about being in an accident in busy traffic or losing control of their vehicles. High bridges over waterways and gorges can be especially intimidating, as can be very long or very narrow bridges.

Later . . .

I wrote that, I think, on Sunday night. On Monday, having finished my latest audio book and without anything else to start listening to, I filled up the car's CD changer with music. I merged onto the highway and hit the "play" button, and the first notes of Los Lonely Boys' Seniorita filled the air. That song just makes me grin, and I turned it up loud and sang along, and it really made me happy.

I'm not saying that my palms didn't start sweating when I saw that big scary bridge coming up--they did--but it wasn't as bad as I expected. I'll get used to it.

previous | next

A bit of weirdness

Of great importance to my happiness is having a good book to read, and something good to listen to in the car. The last is really the most important -- I have a long drive to work in the morning, and a long drive home, and if I have a good book to listen to, I look forward to the drive rather than dreading it.

I'm pretty picky about what I listen to. I find it's easier to read a book that might not be quite right -- you can skip over boring passages or icky ones, or do the speed reading thing where you just read down the middle of the page, but you can't really do that with an audio book. I quite often enjoy listening to the audio version of a book I've read -- for me, it's a much more intense experience -- I get a lot more out of an audio book because I find I listen to every word.

The last couple of books I listened to were Second Glance, by Jodi Picoult, and A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore. I had read, and enjoyed A Dirty Job, but I still enjoyed listening to it, maybe more so because I had read it. It's about a man--a secondhand store owner--whose wife dies shortly after giving birth to his daughter, and he has to get used to being a dad, a single dad, and at the same time, he starts having these weird experiences involving people dropping dead in front of him, and weird glowing objects in his store, and giant ravens . . .

Turns out, he's Death. Well, not the Death, as someone points out, but a Death -- or "Death Merchant." He and (he finds out) other secondhand dealers are charged with the responsibility of keeping the disembodied souls of the newly departed (those glowing objects) safe until their next owners claim them. It's a wonderful story, poignant and funny and suspenseful, but full of that Christopher Moore weirdness, of course. Well, yeah, "Death Merchants." And a used record dealer who is also a Death Merchant named Minty Fresh. (His mother named him after toothpaste.) Some really wonderful characters in this book.

The Jodi Picoult book, Second Glance, is a ghost story with several love stories woven through it. A man finds that he can't forgive himself for his fianceé's death -- she died in an automobile wreck and he couldn't save her -- so he tries to kill himself and join her in death, but he can't seem to accomplish it. In his quest for death, he joins up with some ghost hunters (he quickly tires of them and moves on), and finds that he may just have an uncanny ability to find them himself.

I loved this book. I had actually bought the book itself months ago because it sounded so intriguing, but I just couldn't get into it. But once I started listening to it, I could heardly bear to stop.

Right now I'm listening to Charlaine Harris' Definitely Dead, her latest Sookie Stackhouse mystery and, in my opinion, the best by far. Sookie, a smalltown waitress who happens to be telepathic, is so marvelously rendered that it seems impossible that she isn't really real. In this book, she's dating a were-tiger who sounds pretty irresistible -- Sookie always finds it easier to date "supes" (supernaturals) because she can't easily read their minds. Who would want to date a woman who knew your every thought? And vice versa.

Suspense, romance, mystery, thrills, vampires, weres, what's not to like?

Obviously, my taste in books is a little weird. My current book to read, as opposed to listen to, is Lawrence Block's Hit Parade, the latest book about John Keller, the dog loving, stamp collecting killer-for-hire. It's true, I find it hard to read anything without at least a little bit of weirdness.

Ooh, and I just read something else wonderful -- Curse of the Jade Dragon, by Yasmine Galenorn. This is part of a series about a woman who owns a tea shop and is considered the "town witch," although she isn't really anything of the sort -- she just has a close connection to the spirit world that she inherited from her grandmother. She comes into possession of a cursed object (the dragon, obviously), and things start going very, very wrong. It's a cozy, so everything turns out all right in the end, of course, but I thought it was extremely well written.

Okay, so I go for weeks with nothing, then three entries in one day . . . I guess I just have to get started.

Off to bed.

previous | next

In my garden

I went out this morning and took pictures of the backyard -- I was so proud of getting everything planted, I guess. And since we got a little rain last week, everything is looking green and pretty. I took these pictures at about 8:30 in the morning--this one of the birdbath, especially, shows how shady it is in the backyard. No wonder we can't grow grass. I've got a lot of ivy back there, and other kinds of groundcover; also a lot of herbs (mostly peppermint) and creeping charlie, which is a weed, but we won't speak of that.

Here's the little birdhouse that I made when I was a kid. I probably didn't really make it, just painted it, but each of us had one. It was blue at some point, but all the paint has worn off it by now. I probably should paint it again, but I kind of like the weathered look.

Flowers: a geranium and a gerbera daisy, a hosta in the front, and "live forever" in the ground next to the little stone girl that my mother-in-law gave me one year for Christmas. She gave me the birdbath, too. Behind the flowers is a big pot of anise hyssop.

This is the other side of the porch, with another gerbera daisy plant (though no flowers on this one at the moment), a pot of violets, a pot of chives in front, a small bush in the black pot (spirea? I can't remember), and the other plants that I brought from my mother's and have no idea what they are.

From another angle:

The shepherd's crook holds an old tin birdfeeder filled with niger seed for the finches. A close-up showing the sweet cast iron bird on top:

While I was downloading the pictures from the camera, I found some of the cats that I hadn't taken off. Here's one of Pye taking a bath in my chair, with the throw draped over it. Dinah likes to lie in my chair with the cover over her, and Pye will invariably lie on top of her. In this case, though, Dinah had already left when Pye appropriated the chair. I thought the green coverlet made a nice backdrop for her.

And a couple of the kitties in the front window:

I just loved the light in this one:

Sharon commented in the previous entry that she'd like to see pictures of the hatrack and the sock I'm knitting. Here's the hatrack:

As I mentioned, it was a $1.60 purchase from the Hobby Lobby summer clearance aisle. The "hooks" are pink ceramic flowers:

I'm still knitting the same Opal Petticoat sock I've been carrying around for months:

I wasn't happy with the heel that I first knit, so I ended up ripping it out and re-knitting it. Actually, I think I ripped it out twice. I usually make a perfect heel, but it had been awhile since I'd made one, and I wasn't happy with the attempt. This one isn't perfect, but it's not bad.

The sock is languishing on my Vera Bradley tote. I bought it with some birthday money last fall, and took a long time selecting the pattern, which is "Emily." Of course -- this goes without saying -- once I'd picked the pattern I loved, they almost immediately discontinued it.

Since then, I've bought a few matching pieces on eBay when they've been affordable--one was a wonderful laptop bag. I read somewhere that it isn't really a good idea to carry a laptop in a bag that looks like a laptop bag, and when I saw this quilted one, I got it. It's the perfect travel bag, with room for the laptop, and room for magazines or books--I couldn't really fit anything else in my regular laptop bag, so I always end up carrying it plus something else. Anyway, I'll enjoy it, and it matches my other stuff.

previous | next