conquering a man p without football
So I was definitely on my man p today.
For those who have yet to encounter this phenomenon, the man period is just what it sounds like. It's when I get all grumpy for no good reason and usually end up placating my bad mood with food and/or TV.
From almost the moment I woke up, I was unexplainably cranky. I got all mad at Toby when he slobbered on the leg of my pants, and he took my resulting temper tantrum to mean that I wanted to play with him, which of course made me even crankier.
Add in a bunch of other overly dramatic responses to otherwise minor inconveniences over the course of the morning, and it's clear that it was my time of the month.
Now, usually, I've found that the best antidotes for a man p are chocolate and football.
But televised football is hard to come by these days since the AFL canceled their season this year and Cox doesn't provide access to ESPN360.com, which provided CFL games to address many a man p last summer in LA. So I ended up being a Grumposaurus rex most of the day.
I knew I needed to switch out my negative knickers for some positive panties, and everyone's reactions to my posting such news online started to brighten my day. Then later on, when I was up at Lindsay and Ryan's for dinner and Bible study, I finally broke loose from the grips of the man p.
So I'll be adding friends to my list of man-p antidotes.
Oh, and another thing that, while untested, can probably go on the antidote list is Degrassi. And in a random occurrence that I'm going to interpret as an apology from the universe for there being no football on TV this spring, I returned home this evening to find the DVDs I ordered off of Amazon.com late Saturday night (including Degrassi Season 7!) sitting outside the door. And I chose the free, it'll-get-there-when-it-gets-there shipping option to boot. Hence my interpretation. :P
(Re)connectin’ with my peoples
Remember how I've been hanging out with folks who I met my freshman year of college?
Well, this weekend, I was able to take a trip even further down Memory Lane at the 40th birthday party of one of our old youth-group leaders from First UMC of Gilbert, where I went during high school.
At Norm's party, I got to catch up with Sarah and Willow, two of my friends from youth group who I've only seen a handful of times since graduating from high school. We had a good ol' time Saturday night reminiscing about all the epic things that happened on our '04 SSP trip as well as Sarah's and my first "SSP experience" (as Matt repeatedly called it) and the year that Willow was my camper at SSP. We also, of course, shared all of the "Where Are They Now?"-style details we had on our fellow youth group members from back in the day.
What's more, we took advantage of the fact that I was going to accompany Rob and Kyle in representing Wesley at First Gilbert this morning, and we decided to attend the 8:15 service there for old times' sake.
Plus, we've also started making some plans for future Gilbert-kids fellowship... and mischief. Expect fun and ridiculous things in the weeks and months ahead.
I’m a reading machine…
...and I don't work for nobody but the Tempe Public Library... and soon, the Chandler Public Library (once I get through all the books I have checked out from Tempe)... and, of course, UPI.
OK, so that reference didn't really work. But what I'm getting at here is that I read books now... from start to finish... for fun. Yeah, get jealous, still-in-college friends.
On Thursday, I finished Len Downie's novel, "The Rules of the Game." And tonight, I finished reading "War Reporting for Cowards," which many of you have seen me toting around Tempe and Chandler for the past few weeks. In case you're wondering what I thought of the latter, here's what I tapped out over at Goodreads after triumphantly moving the book from "currently reading" to my "read" shelf:
War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres
My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I first heard about Chris Ayres' "War Reporting for Cowards" when he appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" earlier this year to promote a more recent book that he had written. Ayres was a funny guy on TV as well as in this book, which details his short and unlikely stint as a Hollywood correspondent turned war reporter who covered the opening days of the American military's advance into Iraq in 2003.
I enjoyed the book and all of its tales of preparing for war as well as tagging along for war as a reporter embedded with the U.S. Marines. But I had gotten quite engrossed in the front-line war stories (much as Ayres' editors had) by the time a bunch of "Get out of Iraq free" cards dropped into Ayres' lap, one after another. Seeing as how the book is entitled "War Reporting for Cowards" and there weren't that many pages left, I correctly figured that his exit from Iraq was near... and so was the end of the war stories I was hoping for more of.
It was still a good read, but if you're the kind of person who really gets into tales of war fighting, this book will seem to end in a rather anticlimactic fashion.
View all my reviews.
CRACK DREAMS!’There’s a Jumble on the computer if you want to do it.’
So last night, I had one of those crazy dreams that Stacey affectionately calls crack dreams... and I didn't even have any cheese before bed! (Last summer, Chris had heard that eating cheese right before going to sleep would induce crack dreams, so he tested that hypothesis most nights of the week in our staff room by offering everyone cheese cubes while we candled.)
Anyway, here's what I can recall of last night's fairly entertaining crack dream:
The cabin kinda sorta looked the one in this photo by mhansen514 on Flickr.
It's Oct. 23, and I'm at a cabin-type place up in the mountains somewhere. Things probably happened at that cabin further back than my memory can reach, but what I do remember is that at night, I went over to spend the night at a house where these three ladies (sisters, maybe?) and some kids around my age lived. Said kids and I had a sleepover in the basement, watching movies and looking up dumb stuff on the Internet... you know, the stuff I do with my real friends. But none of the kids or the three ladies resembled anyone in particular from real life, which is strange since real-life people started making cameos right before my alarm went off.
Anyway, we're having a great time until I realize that it's 1 a.m. and I need to get up to start copy editing at 6... and thus, real life starts to intrude on the dream. So I go and brush my teeth and hit the hay (or, more accurately, pull-out sofa) and I think everyone else starts to pass out about that time too. But for some reason, I only get about an hour or two of shut-eye in before I wake up and can't get back to sleep. After many failed attempts to fall back asleep, I decide around 4 a.m. to just get up and to go next door to get a head start on packing or cleaning or something. (It's around this part of the dream that my 6 a.m. work start time turns into a departure time for some sort of excursion instead.)
When I get to my cabin, the complete mess inside makes me glad I came home early. All the lights in the place were left on, as well as multiple TVs and a laptop or two. I went around and turned everything off, thinking that I'd have to log into the SRP Web site later to see exactly how much power I had wasted overnight. Then I set to work on the mountains of dirty dishes and pans and everything else culinary that was piled up in and around the kitchen sink.
Picture the amount of dirty dishes seen here in emotionaltoothpaste's Flickr photo multiplied by like 10ish. That's how much stuff there was to wash in my dream kitchen.
Anyway, my mom appears around 6 or 7 a.m., making her the first real person to make an appearance in the dream. She's ready to go wherever it is that I and apparently now she are going for my birthday, but I realize that I left a bunch of stuff next door. I run back over and start cramming an inordinate amount of my junk, which had of course spread out all over the basement, into a single duffel bag.
Just before I left the basement, I ran and either got something from the bathroom or put my contacts in or brushed my teeth in there, and on my way out, I turned on the TV for a second. On a TiVo-like menu, there was some sort of news headline that caught my eye, so I selected it, thinking that would tune the TV to CNN or bring up an on-demand news video.
Instead, it brought up an unedited YouTube video showing a hostage who I presumed was about to be decapitated. He was holding up some handwritten sign that I'm sure summed up his captors' demands, and speaking of the captors, I was surprised to see that the one hostage-taker who appeared on screen was this somewhat petite blond girl. She didn't look like your typical captor, so I figured there were some rough-and-tumble kind of guys behind the camera who would handle the actual throat-slitting. I did not watch long enough to see if my hypothesis would be proved correct, though, because srsly, watching someone get beheaded is no way to start off your freakin' birthday.
Anyway, I got my stuff and went upstairs, where I ran into the ladies of the house. I thanked them profusely for letting me spend the night, and they all accompanied me out the front door.
As we walked — well... hopped, really — down the big hiking-trail-style steps that led from the house to the road (and that I somehow did not remember scaling on my previous two entries to the house) the most prominent of the three ladies — the eldest sister, queen bee or something like that — slowly morphed into my Aunt Susan. That makes her real person No. 2 in the dream.
But down at the road, the real-people tally went through the roof as I found a bunch of my real-life BFFs congregating down there. Of particular note was the fact that Phil quickly brushed by me, even though for some reason I wasn't expecting to see him either right there and/or right then. Since I had seen a tweet of his (both in real life and in this dream too, apparently) that hinted at a "reunion with the stage," I excitedly asked him if he was getting back into acting. I seem to remember his answer being somewhat similar to the real-life one he posted on Twitter overnight, which I didn't see until this morning... except for in my psychic dream! Oooh! Or maybe that's just a case of subconscious revisionist history. In any case, whatever Phil said to me in the dream got me so excited that I had to run through the pack of peeps who were milling about to find Claudia and tell her all about it.
Minutes later, though, I'm back standing outside my cabin, making sure I have everything I need for whatever trip I was going on when Chris Hoerber walks past me and says, "Hey man. There's a Jumble on the computer if you want to do it." But before I could get inside to see said word puzzle on my laptop... and figure out why it was there and/or why I cared, my alarm went off.
So sadly, I'll never know where I was headed for my birthday excursion or why Jumble, the bane of my editorial existence, reared its ugly, pain-to-download-and-get-over-to-the-Production-server head in the inner sanctum of my dreams.
But hey, it was a rather star-studded, hella interesting dream... and I might just have to have some string cheese before bed tonight to see if I can one-up it.
140 characters of fun
As I'm sure you all know by now, my stint as the editor of @statepress got me hooked on Twitter, the 140-character microblogging doohickey that is basically what the Facebook status feature would be if it were a standalone Web site. I even mentioned the dang thing in my graduation speech.
What you may not know is that my Twittering has reached ridiculous levels. Not only do I tweet my random observations about life as @btindrelunas, but a few weeks ago I started dedicating each and every shower I take to friends and celebs via @showertime. (If only I had been shower-tweeting last summer, that would've been a great way to keep track of my cleanliness — or, actually, lack thereof — during SSP.) And now that I don't live in Tempe anymore, I've started up @iMissTempe to chronicle all the things about Tempe that you just can't find in Chandler or wherever life takes me next.
Now, don't get me wrong; @btindrelunas is still where the rly rl stuff goes down. That's where I crack cowbell jokes...
...and it was the center of this afternoon's MILF-related joking around — you know, about the Filipino rebel group Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
But if you wanna get rllllllly rl, then you should check out my other Twitter accounts as well. If you don't want to actually follow them or if you still don't know what the hell Twitter is, no problem. I've put the latest tweets from all my Twitter feeds as well as @replies to and retweets from any of my accounts all together on one pretty little page: Brian.Indrelunas.com/twitter.
So check it out if you ever want to know if I've showered lately, what the latest thing that's got me jonesin' for Tempe is or what people are tweeting back at me.
P.S.: While I'm on the subject of Twitter, I think everyone in all of Twitteronia ought to follow the man who most likely bestowed that name upon their great and powerful nation, none other than @THE_REAL_SHAQ. So if you don't follow Shaq already, do it now and then come back and check out Brian.Indrelunas.com/twitter once you've gone and made your digital life truly complete.
So Chandler’s kind of exciting…
As many of you already know, I've moved out of my apartment in Tempe and am now residing at the fabulous Casa de mi Madre resort in Chandler.
I was worried that moving back to Chandler might make for a dull life, but as Leon Phelps would say, au contraire, bonjour.
See, since I don't live within walking distance of the Sol Train anymore, using public transit has become an even more multimodal type of thing for me, which I've found kind of exciting and suspenseful. By exciting, I mean it gives me time to read... but the suspense is real: How late will the bus be, and will I miss the train I ought to be on as a result?
Also, I had forgotten that every once in a while, our house in Chandler is visited by a scorpion. So when I saw something crawling across the floor in the bathroom tonight, my insect instincts — honed by long nights in the Matthews Center basement — told me it must be a cockroach. I quickly realized, though, that this cockroach had a curly, poisonous looking tail, and I then proceeded to freak out a little bit and search for something to smash the scorpion with.
My first attempt failed, and the little bugger scurried under the door into the hallway. It was tough to track it down since its desert hue blended in so nicely with our brown tile, as you can see in this post-mortem photo:
And as if that wasn't gruesome enough, here's another shot of the dead scorpion — this time on a more neutral background, the paper towel that took the scorpion to its final resting place:
For all my years in Chandler, I had never squashed a scorpion before. All throughout high school, my mom always seemed to be the one who spotted them when they found their way into the house. But now I can cross that off my list of desert-y things I've done.
