Perpetual Smile

I decided that, for the next week, I’m going to title all of my posts using the letters in my nickname, L-I-Z, no S. I’m doing this because the spambots think I’m awesome, so if my human readers think it’s lame, at least I have the bots. Here’s what my newest fan, a bot named Luciano, had to say after reading my post on the super excited girl at the bar who decided to have a baby because of me:

Merely want to say your article is striking. The clearness in your post is simply spectacular and i can assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with incoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the effective work.

In short: my writing is striking, spectacular, and I am an effective expert. Thank you, spambot.

The problem with this title scheme, guys, is that there are only so many Z words. The only Z word I can think of is zebra. This is where you come in.

I need you to leave me comments with your favorite Z words. I’m especially counting on the spambots, since they are getting pretty damn smart. Not that you humans aren’t smart. I’m just saying that the spambots tend to spit stuff out depending on what they see. So if they see the letter Z, they are going to go crazy and leave all kinds of Z words.

In fact, I think that spambots are the next superior race on planet Earth.

They will be so much more advanced than us, in ways that I — in all of my spambot-blessed expertise — cannot ever imagine. I mean, they’re already ahead of us. They are INVISIBLE, for crying out loud! If a spambot was here in my house right now, looking over my shoulder as I type this, I wouldn’t know it.

They also have a great sense of humor. The spambot in that post is funnier than Mepsipax, Avitable, and Allie combined. (Then again, Allie made a great documentary about the Battle of Twitterloo. If you don’t believe me, press play.)

So maybe Allie can one-up the spambots. I’m not sure. But I do know that they are going to be the next superior race, and before this happens I need to write as many L-I-Z acronym posts as possible. (My apologies to those of you who thought this one was gonna be about lesbians in sexy zebra stripe underwear.) So give me your best Z words, or the Fun-Size Kitty of DOOM will eat you!

Donated Z Words:
Please note that Z words are rare and endangered. Donating a Z word to my blog will keep them safe from spambots and Fun-Size kitties.

Zebra
Zig (Mike)
Zag (Mike)
Zipper (Mike)
Zinger (Mike)
Zelda*
Zandra*

*Z names count. If you don’t believe me, prepare to answer to Fun-Size kitty.

Zit
Zombie (Me, Taliana83)

Zap (Allie)
Zaps (Allie)
Zapped (Allie)
Zapping (Allie)
Zoo (Allie, Taliana83)
Zenith (Allie)
Zany (Allie)
Zodiac (Allie)
Zephyr (Allie)
Zealot (Allie)
Zeal (Allie)
Zealous (Allie)
Zen (Allie, Taliana83)
Zero (Allie)
Zest (Allie)
Zesty (Allie)
Zestful (Allie)
Zimbabwe (sagasky)

And then @BookGeekGal kicked some major Z ass (01/10/2010, 12:49am):

Spambots, you are letting me down! Are you really going to let a bunch of humans out-Z you?

Update 01/10/2010, 12:56am: The spambots are fighting back, but instead of Z words, they’re insulting me!

This means war!!

Update 01/10/2010, 1:34am:

Update 01/10/2010, 2:34am: It’s totally fucking weird that I’m updating EXACTLY AN HOUR LATER, but it’s even weirder that the spambots are now kicking our asses. They can speak an assload of Russian, so they win this battle 3-2. I am too lazy to take and post a screenshot, but believe me, they dumped a whole mess of Russian into my blog comments. (Thank goodness for Akismet, or they would have taken over my blog!)

Their hefty block of Cyrillic smack-talking translates to:

Listen up, puny Earthlings. We are INVISIBLE, have no need for Z words, and can DESTROY your bandwidth with just the power of our MINDS. Also, we speak Russian and 19 million other languages, including ones you have not discovered yet. Surrender now or prepare to fight! Meow, that’s right!†

We will get them next time…

---

†If you can tell me what this is from WITHOUT GOOGLING, because that would show weakness to the spambots, I’ll whore your blog/Twitter/website/pictures of your cat on my Twitter.

I am not doing too well.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in a fog, kind of just moving through the days. I’ve been a little better today but I can’t shake the feeling that this is only the eye of the storm.

In high school, the best parts of my days in shop (I went to a technical high school and spent my four years in Culinary Arts) were the mornings and afternoons. First thing in the morning, I would come in and fill a little bowl with chocolate chip cookie dough as it was being made by Chef I. He got so used to me snitching cookie dough that at one point he started having a bowl ready for me. (And then Chef Z and later Chef M tried to shut me down, but that’s another post for another day.)

After a day of cooking, we would eat together. If you worked on Faculty Range, in Bake Shop, or in the Dining Room, you got to eat the good stuff (as opposed to being on Cafeteria side, where you made lunch for the whole student body). My favorite thing to eat for lunch was a few slices of bread with butter and a big bowl of sauce. (And to think I stayed a size 3-5 throughout my high school career!)

I haven’t had homemade bread since.

This afternoon, while wandering around on Lifehacker at work, I found a post on making fresh-baked bread quickly and easily. I scribbled down the recipe — 6 cups of water, 3 tablespoons of salt, 3 tablespoons of yeast, and 13 cups of flour — on a Post-It and stuck it in my purse.

As soon as I got home, I set to it.

I split the recipe in half, since the Lifehacker post is for a one- to two-week supply of bread that you ideally bake a loaf every day. I dissolved 1 1/2 tbsp of yeast and 1 1/2 tbsp of salt in 3 cups of hot water (I remembered from Culinary that the hot water makes the difference).

Then I stirred in 6 1/2 cups of flour.

After the dough started to come together, I stripped off my rings and kneaded the dough with my hands. The scent of it was intoxicating.

When it reached the right consistency, I patted it into a neat little ball, scraped dough off of my fingers, and went to the sink to wash my hands. I didn’t get far before the urge to try some of the dough came over me. I pulled a little glob off of my left hand and popped it into my mouth. I knew instantly that I hadn’t fucked up the recipe; it had the perfect bread dough taste, with just the right amount of salt. I scraped as much dough off of my hands as I could and ate it before washing them, it was that good.

Then I put a towel over the bowl the way Noni always did when I watched her make dough and set it to rise.

If all goes well, I’ll have a nice hot slice of homemade bread with butter tomorrow morning before work with Noni, Popi, and Biz Noni. I might even put some grape jelly on it. My mouth just waters thinking about it, and my heart warms just a little bit.

That gaping hole is still there, but with little things like hot fresh bread and cards from my good friends online and off, it is a little less raw.

I only get out of control with shopping if there are two variables involved: Target and Staples. I went into Staples yesterday planning on spending a max of $10. I planned on getting a couple binders and some pens (I keep losing pens). I walked out with a laptop cart, an ergonomic plastic bean filled wrist rest, a pocket size dictionary, a pocket size thesaurus, two binders, a box of pens, a copy holder (so that you can stand paper up when you have to type something up)… You get the picture.

The thing is, I couldn’t not buy the desk, wrist rest, and copy holder because I’ve been saying for months that I need these things. Obviously, they could very well help decrease the amount of pain I experience day to day. So I was totally justified when I broke into my savings account to help cover the cost. This time.

At any rate, I had a lot of fun putting it together.

My dad took video of me putting together some of this because he thought it might end up being really amusing, but I have to get it from him. To be fair, he did help me a little, and if it weren’t for him I would have put it together backward. Heh.

I’ll add that video whenever Dad gets to uploading it to Facebook.

This? Is my new car. The side that’s showing? Is the side that is not dented. No worries; I wasn’t the one who drove while the denting occurred. It was a package deal. But for $400? You can’t beat it.

P-freaking-ESS: It can also go on the highway. Without me worrying that it’s going to fall apart.

P-double-freaking-ESS: I started writing about my chronic pain, from the beginning to what’s going on now, over at Scars Can Speak. Please read it and comment there if you’re interested. I hope it can help someone, or maybe help me find people going through similar things.

I’m a rockstar at this blogging thing, I know. You don’t have to tell me how great I am at posting every day, and you definitely don’t have to tell me that I post way too much.

Ahem.

These last few weeks have been insane! I wish that I could remember everything but, sadly, my brain is wiped clean. I have enough trouble talking and putting words together into coherent sentences, never mind trying to remember everything that’s been going on. I now know how Ozzy feels.

I’m not even sure where to begin, as I can’t remember what I last wrote about and am way too lazy to actually go hunting through the two or so posts I’ve written in the last couple of months, so let’s just cut to the chase: car (Lisa Mazda) is dead, all I’ve been doing is working, my story “Anonymiss” won second place in this year’s Fresh Ink contest over at Naugatuck Valley, and I can meow.

The 2009 Writers’ Conference was Wednesday, and the guest speaker was Everett Hoagland, a poet from Massachusetts. His poems were really, really good. I literally fell into a sort of trance as I listened to him read. They were filled with a rhythm that I swear only African-American poets have. Even this guy’s presence was amazing; he was just so composed and peaceful.

I read my winning story from last year’s Fresh Ink, “Moon Prayer,” just before the awards for this year’s contest were presented, and after I read Everett pulled me aside and asked me how long I’ve been writing. I told him since about third grade, and remembered the story about dalmatians I wrote with my classmate Sherry-Lee. (I don’t remember what that story was about, only that it was about dalmatians and that we wrote and illustrated it on darker fuchsia construction paper.)

“I can tell you take this seriously,” he told me. “For you to write such detail, to know so much about someone who is so different from you, is amazing.”

I could barely speak, I was so astonished that this amazing man loved my story.

“You are already an accomplished writer. We’re going to be hearing about you,” he said. He said that to me several times throughout the day.

I don’t think I’m a bad writer. I mean, I know I’ve got a little talent, I guess. Several teachers, family, friends, and Professor Harding have told me over and over that I have talent. I guess I always just thought they were biased, because most of these people really liked me to begin with. For this guy, someone who did not know me at all, to hear one story and say those amazing things to me… Well, it meant a lot. He was so, so inspiring.

I felt really good about the whole day, actually. I got to connect with a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while, and Professor Harding and I went over a little of The Cure Program. To make things even better, Mike spent the whole day with me because I don’t have a car and had no other way of getting there. He said he had a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed having him there. We had a blast during the writers’ workshop that Professor Harding did.

As strange as it sounds, I really miss NVCC. I’ve never missed an old school before. I’ve never really felt like I belonged anywhere. But I truly did fit in at that community college, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel that “snug” anywhere else. I think that’s as good as it gets for me.

I had a lot more I wanted to write about, but I want to get to bed. Maybe I’ll update again before July. (;

Mike and I went to Stop & Shop for something — hell if I remember what — the other day. On our way through the store, we passed several tables of Easter clearance. When I first saw this little guy, I was so tired that it cracked me up. It was love at first moo.

Look at those fat, blocky cheeks! Look at those little black eyes! Yes, those are my Hello Kitty jammies, and no, I don’t care if they make me look like a five-year-old!

And yes, I sleep with stuffed animals. Jealous?

Today I ate my lunch with a plastic spoon and knife, since we ran out of forks in the cafeteria at work:

It’s a lot harder than you’d think.

Every time I go to write a new post, I end up writing about something I don’t want to write about, because I don’t want to write about what I actually want to write about. With me? Great.

I spent the last two weeks sort of reevaluating my life. I thought about my relationships with other people, my career, my goals, and blahblahblah (all one word, ’cause that’s how I actually say it). The only thing that I actually figured out was my current job situation. I didn’t make any decisions on the other things that are bothering me. I obviously can’t do anything about the things I can’t control, but it still sucks because waiting is not on my list of skills.

I did decide to stop letting everyone use me, and even though I do mean to stick to that, it’s hard. It was especially hard yesterday when someone who basically ditched me for the last couple of weeks suddenly called and wanted my sympathy (and possibly my help; I didn’t answer the phone).

I just can’t keep giving everything and getting nothing in return. I can’t live in a cesspool of drama and constant emergencies that I always feel obligated to help out with. The truth is, I don’t owe any of these people anything, because they never gave me anything to begin with. Sure, we had some good times (Rock Band marathons, trips to the mall for no reason, spontaneous trips to the bar, movie nights, and all that good stuff), but when it actually counted, none of these people — and by none I mean neither, ha ha ha — could give me any of their time.

So, although a part of me wants to return that phone call, I refuse to get suckered in again. I hope that both of these people end up getting their shit together, but I’m not going to stick around to find out.

I have to be a hardass about this because otherwise I’m only going to keep getting hurt.

Anyway. Now that that’s over with, we can get to the good stuff:

I’m singing the Spice Girls right now and my cat has probably OD’d on Lithium, she’s so happy.

Tonight is going to rock, despite all of the shoot-me-now my life has been lately. I’m going to see Watchmen with Mike, and it’s going to be awesome. I’ve never read the graphic novel, but the trailer just looks so cool I think I’m going to be obsessed. In fact, there is a discount book store in my city that just opened, so I think Mike and I are going to check that out today. Maybe they’ll have the book and I won’t have to feel guilty about spending any money because everything in there is (supposedly) 40% off regular seller prices.

Last night was the season finale of Burn Notice. The new season starts in June. I’m going to die between now and then. Speaking of TV, I’m behind on Dollhouse and probably going to miss tonight’s episode. Whoever decided to put it on a Friday night is a moron. No one is home Friday night. I hope they count the number of views the episodes on the Fox website get, because I doubt the TV ratings are very high.

We also watched Religulous last night. I agreed with a lot of what Bill Maher said. My mom is Protestant and my dad is Catholic, though neither of them are hardcore about it. I was baptized Protestant and raised with a little bit of both. Mom always made us go to church on Sundays with her mother, while Dad stayed at home and watched Nascar. (I never got why it was okay for him to stay home but I had to endure two hours of either Sunday school or the pastor droning on and on. My favorite part about church was the Italian bread and grape juice. Oh, that and going home and playing with my toys afterward.)

I can’t remember exactly when I stopped going, but eventually my mom gave up on dragging me out of bed to go somewhere I didn’t want to be. Religion just never made sense for me. I listened to the stories and teachings, but I had a hard time believing in something I couldn’t see or feel. I tried exploring other religions for a while. I practiced Wicca and read about Druidism. I studied the Muslim religion in eighth grade. As interesting as it all was, I didn’t take any of it seriously.

I don’t believe in any kind of higher power. I am a firm believer of living my own life the way I want to, and treating others the way I want to be treated. I practice being happy and being a good person. I’ve been called a Satanist, and I’ve had people stop talking to me just because I don’t believe in any kind of god. (For the record, I don’t believe in any kind of devil, either. I think people have the freedom to be good or evil.) I once got fired from a job for no real reason, and I still believe to this day that it was because I don’t have a religion. (My boss and coworkers were all religious in some way.)

Religion is a touchy subject for most people. Don’t get me wrong. I am fascinated by other people’s beliefs. It’s interesting to me, but I take as much stock in it as I take in the spaghetti monster in the sky. (I did that just for you, Mike. I know you’re reading this, even though you never comment. Lazy ass.) I won’t not talk to someone just because of their religion. As weird as some practices may seem to me — like Scientology — I won’t dispute that it’s something people believe in. You believe what you wanna believe. I’ll leave you alone, as long as you leave me alone. Don’t interrogate me or tell me what I need to believe. Don’t try to force me into praying, or I’ll sick the vicious kitty on you: