Once upon a time there was this girl. She had an attitude. And a spirit nobody could tame. She was tough and attacked each new day without fear. She went by my name and spoke with a voice only I could hear. She lived in my mind. But now...she's coming out.
Archives:
31.1.02 ( 7:28 AM ) Val Joel came over last night and we all cooked dinner...curry...yum! My Fave Gal and I decided where going to do this whole dinner with friends thing more often; part of our whole brideship thing.
Starting to feel a little wierd now...my friend should be getting that card any day now...and I have no idea how he's going to react. Gotta love life.
And the Googlewhacking trend continues: Three other people are now addicted...
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30.1.02 ( 7:52 AM ) Val Snow...Snow that is sticking...Snow that is sticking and is still coming down hard...Snow...
28.1.02 ( 11:43 PM ) Val Unsaid Crap Sucks. That's a little wisdom from My Fave Gal. Latest application of that meant that I had to write to a male friend of mine and figured out what in the world is going on. I've been the biggest brat to him (even though I don't think he realizes the true extent of my brattiness) and things have been...tense...lately (at least on my side of the fence). So I found the cutest card...wrote an apology to him in it (I had to write a first draft of it cause I was ranting emotionally for a little bit)...and sent it off today. My Fave Gal read my edited version and agreed I said everything I needed to say (she's been on the receiving end of quite a few of my ramblings lately) in an entirely appropriate manner. Tonight I realized that everything's been tied to him lately: not in a romantic way or anything, it's just cause all the stuff I had to say but didn't want to was weighing me down and making me very distracted....I made a couple comments tonight and My Fave Gal would make a comment along the lines of my subconscious speaking...(although now she insists she was only kidding and wasn't actually trying to pschoanalyze me, she was right...)...
Dying To Self Yet another thing My Fave Gal and I have been having some intense discussions about...tonight, at HOP we were singing the song "Better Is One Day"...and one of the lines is "better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere" and I was struck by a *thought* (I'm pretty sure I read this somewhere but tonight it was a very real question for me): "Do I really believe that one day doing exactly what God would have me do is better than three years (a little over a 1000 days) of doing whatever I think would give me pleasure?" There's an indepth thought...it would be real easy to toss off a flippant "yes" but think about it...
Random Asides PJ let us drive his car today (well, he didn't let me drive his car: the obvious reason being because I don't have a license...but he let me ride while My Fave Gal drove)...that's a big deal. I bought 20 stamps today...I'm in the midst of a letter-writing frenzy. :o) And I went to House Of Prayer (HOP) tonight, the first time in ages I've gone, and it was amazing! Every song was speaking right to where I was at. Oh, and when My Fave Gal and I went to get food beforehand (Croc Rock, yum) we had an amazing conversation until they kicked us out because they were getting ready to close...but it was good stuff...we're gonna have some more "thinking/discussion things" (as My Fave Gal terms our "sessions") and then I'll get back to you on what we come up with. :o) My Fave Gal *dragged* me jogging with her and Dancer Girl on Saturday (why did I even think I should bring my sneakers when I decided to spend the week with them?) It was only about a mile and a half so I can't really complain and it (amazingly enough) actually felt okay (I've always wanted to be a jogger). Plus, My Fave Gal promised to do the New York City Ballet workout with us when I bust out the video later this week...payback...hehehe...(oh, wait maybe I shouldn't have said that. she does read this. bloody horse head. forget it, I don't feel like deleting it.)
Upcoming Topics Abortion part 2; Dying To Self part 2; Romancing and Relationship (*ooooh*); not necessarily in that order.
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26.1.02 ( 5:46 PM ) Val My Fave Gal made her first googlewhack :o) "apartheid transcriptionist" and her Mark's mark was 11,315,700,000....what's up with that?!
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25.1.02 ( 8:42 PM ) Val There is something very disturbing about the fact that Snow Dogs (at $17,814,259) is outmuscling Lord Of The Rings (at $12,473,748) in weekend box office sales...
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24.1.02 ( 8:49 AM ) Val I just made my first Googlewhack! Wow, what a rush! :o)
Okay, googlewhacking is some incredibly random game that some weirdo with nothing better to do invented (of course, i just spent ten minutes doing it even though I thought it was stupid, but now I think I'm hooked...). You go to the Google search engine and you punch in two words unlikely to occur together, then you hit the "Google Search" button. The goal: To come back with one search result. The major rule: Both words must be real words; the acceptable way for determining this is if they are on the dictionary.com website--words that appear on this website are underlined (with a link) to the website when your search results come back (if it's not underlined, it doesn't count).
My googlewhack was "helo nonagon", the website was in another language (which I think counts anyway). To score, at least I think it's for scoring purposes, you search each word separately then multiply their separate results-that's the probability that the two words would ever occur together. "helo"=193,000 results; "nonagon"=1,900 results (first search under "nonagon" had a little blurb saying the other term for a nonagon is "enneagon": fodder for another search *grin*); 193,000x1,900=(drumroll, please) 366,700,000 Yeah, baby.
Now I have to go e-mail the Googlewhacker guy and let him know about my find. I need to go get dressed for work first, I wouldn't want to miss my bus due to googlewhacking. I wonder how that excuse would fly at work?
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22.1.02 ( 10:57 PM ) Val So, I'm at PJ's house (we're watching Finding Forrester...I bought it.) and he puts the latest Relevant magazine article on his computer, tells us to read it...It rocked!!
I can't find the link where it's at, so I'm just posting the really really cool part of it now. Prepare to be amazed.
So this guy comes up to me and says, "What's the vision? What's the big idea?" I open my mouth and words come out like this…
The vision?
The vision is JESUS — obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is an army of young people. You see bones? I see an army. And they are FREE from materialism.
They laugh at 9-5 little prisons.
They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn't even notice.
They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the West was won.
They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free, yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.
What is the vision?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.
Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation.
It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games.
This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause.
A million times a day its soldiers choose to loose that they might one day win the great "Well done" of faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night. They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"
And this is the sound of the underground
The whisper of history in the making
Foundations shaking
Revolutionaries dreaming once again
Mystery is scheming in whispers
Conspiracy is breathing…
This is the sound of the underground
And the army is discipl(in)ed.
Young people who beat their bodies into submission.
Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms.
The tattoo on their back boasts "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain."
Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them ?
Can hormones hold them back?
Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them?
And the generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond talking,
with warrior cries, sulphuric tears and with great barrow loads of laughter!
Waiting. Watching: 24 - 7 - 365.
Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules. Shaking mediocrity from its cosy little hide. Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers cannot mold them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late night parties before the cockerel cries.
They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive inside.
On the outside? They hardly care. They wear clothes like costumes to communicate and celebrate, but never to hide.
Would they surrender their image or their popularity?
They would lay down their very lives — swap seats with the man on death row — guilty as hell. A throne for an electric chair.
With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.
Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.)
Their subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus.
Their words make demons scream in shopping centres.
Don't you hear them coming?
Herald the weirdos! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes. They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension. Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.
And this vision will be. It will come to pass; it will come easily; it will come soon.
How do I know? Because this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the Spirit, the very dream of God. My tomorrow is his today. My distant hope is his 3D. And my feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding, bone-shaking great "Amen!" from countless angels, from hero's of the faith, from Christ himself. And he is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.
19.1.02 ( 10:26 PM ) Val Abortion. Tonight's First Monday episode dealt with a case of a sixteen year old girl wanting an abortion and her parents not giving consent. The juvenile court bypassed the need for parental consent so the girl could get an abortion, the State Supreme Court upheld the decision and ultimately the Federal Supreme Court did as well. Miguel, the Conservative law clerk to Judge Novelli, is firmly pro-life. I am too. But the episode started making me think of the Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice controversy.
I think one of my Social Studies teachers, Mr. Cohen, explained it the best. He said that there could never be an agreement on abortion because the two sides see it as two different issues. Pro-Choice people believe that a woman has the right to choose what happens to her body and that the unborn baby is part of her body. Right to life advocates believe that the unborn baby is a human being with rights of its own and therefore not under the women's control. I believe that a baby is a living person as soon as it is conceived, therefore I don't believe abortion is a moral option.
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18.1.02 ( 7:36 AM ) Val I finally got my archives to look the way I want them! I also edited some random junk (all little things) out of the template I use. The surprising thing? That I didn't destroy my blog while I was playing. ;o) One day I'm gonna get a handle on this HTML thing I swear. *yawn* I need some more tea.
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( 7:15 AM ) Val I was hunting through the Blogger home page archives and found this completely random but totally cool essay comparing the emergence of blogging and rap...it's cool. Check it out...
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( 7:02 AM ) Val I left the house at 7:30 last night with Mark and didn't get home till 3:00 this morning. I had fun though...I've also only had three hours of sleep, but I'm doing all right for the moment (I'm also about to start chugging tea until I have to go to work at noon). We'll see just how hot I feel when I'm in the middle of my 12n-8p shift today. It'll probably be really amusing though because almost everyone (except for Jeff) is working today and since I'm working a mid I'll get to see everyone.
Highlights of the night: Erin singing (she has a really pretty voice), Kari & Caroline getting trounced in darts (after all the trash talk they were doing) by Karen & Mike (her brother), discovering that Jeff (one of the managers) had three earring holes that were starting to close up and reopening them all (I contributed one of my gold hoops to the cause), discovering that Jeff had a tattoo on his back (a bluejay? what is that? and it's a wack looking bluejay at that...he needs to get it removed...or something), attempting to convince Jeff that he needed to get his nipples pierced in order to make up for his stupid tattoo...We all basically had a blast; most of it was you-had-to-be-there stuff :o)
I was going to say something else, but I can't remember what it was. Oh well, maybe it'll come back to me.
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17.1.02 ( 4:23 PM ) Val I'm going to Starbucks with work-friends tonight; Chris's band is playing and Erin is singing. Should be fun. Mark (the host) is going to pick me up because I wouldn't go otherwise and he doesn't have anyone else to go with. I need to wash my hair, but since my Mom knows how to do it like this and I don't, I'm waiting for her to come home first...we decided it wouldn't be a good idea for Mark to come and pick me up and me have my hair in a shower cap with conditioner still on it. Chris is on the lookout for a girl to set Mark up with, so I think he's inviting some of his female friends to indtroduce to him. I think Chris just wants Mark to be as happy as he is (Chris has got a Thing-notice the capital "T"-going on with Sarah at work). Anyway, it should be an interesting night.
I worked with Kari today for the first time in forever, so I got to hear her comments on my hair. She said she loves it, then says there's a word that describes it...(I'm holding my breath, sure she's gonna say "adorable")...she says "sexy...like a model". Gotta love Kari. :o) Oh, interesting phenomenon I noticed today, my hair always looks worse in the bathroom at Barnes & Noble and better in the bathroom at Ruby Tuesday...wierd, huh? Ok, maybe "always" isn't the right word--I noticed it on Monday and again today...
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( 7:41 AM ) Val Yesterday I stretched for the first time in a very long time. It wasn't even anything strenuous, just Ms. Cavalieri's standing warmup from high school, but this morning I'm sore (especially in my back and hamstrings). I'm not complaining though...I've actually missed it (mostly the stretching and having a flexible, active, strong body, not necessarily the being sore but I'll take whatever I can get). Mom ordered me the NYCB Workout Video for Christmas (but she ordered it after Christmas-something funky happened with the order) but I'm still waiting for it to come. Until then, I'm left to my own devices.
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15.1.02 ( 3:23 PM ) Val Any doubts I had about my new haircut (I describe it as a "vintage flip" which isn't really accurate but it's what I think of when I look in the mirror) were vanquished when I went to work yesterday. Everybody loved it, although the number of times I heard the word "adorable" used to describe it started to make me a little queasy. There's nothing like group acclamation to pump you up.
Today's my day off and I was thinking about going to see Lord Of The Rings again but instead I decided to stay home. I am thinking about going to the mall and buying a belt or a book or something, but I'm trying to hold the impulse shopping instinct at bay until Saturday. I arbitrarily decided on Saturday because it's my next day off.
I got my Lucky Magazine for February today. I had to hold it hostage until I washed the dishes like Mom asked and changed out of my pajamas...I had been procrastinating on both counts for several hours. But now it's all done and I read Lucky from cover to cover (and saw a couple of things that I'd like to pick up).
I think that's about it...nothing deep or profound today.
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12.1.02 ( 1:26 PM ) Val I went to go see Lord Of The Rings on Thursday after work. I had just finished reading the book, so I noticed every little change they made. However, it was an incredible movie-the screenplay managed to capture the essence of the book and make it into a workable length (okay-workable length is debatable, it was just about 3 hours. But I don't think there was any way to make it shorter than that) without losing any of the essential Tolkien-ness.
My favorite thing about the movie? Orlando Bloom! I quickly fell in love with him, came home, checked out his bio and filmography (discovered he's in Black Hawk Down, another point in his favor). :o) It's probably because he played an elf...Elves are cool and he was as Elvish as they come.
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9.1.02 ( 8:59 AM ) Val I have a lot of books...Last night, I pulled all the books off my bookshelf and out of a box next to my bookshelf and piled them all (loosely grouped by series or topic) on the floor, and then I put only the "essentials" (books that I need easy access to on a regular basis) back on the shelf. The ones that I still need handy but not so often are all in a footlocker that is shoved underneath my desk. I have another box down in the basement and in one of the closets, but I was just trying to get a handle on the ones in my room. So, with that done, the task of cleaning/reorganizing my room jumps over its last major hurdle.
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7.1.02 ( 1:34 PM ) Val Oh wow, then I posted this last post talking about how freaky it was that the post before that disappeared and then the post I thought had disappeared reappeared. Cool.
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( 1:33 PM ) Val All right that was wierd--I just wrote a whole post about how I got to work an hour late today because of the bus and I got to go home a half-hour later because it was dead. And about how I picked up a bunch of hours this week, so my nexpected day off isn't hurting me. And about how I was thinking about going to a movie but I think I'm just going to end up chilling at home and maybe take a hot bath. I clicked "Post" and all of a sudden my post was gone. It just disappeared. Freaky.
I don't really care. The prospect of a long, hot bath and tea and a big meal when I (finally) get out of the tub have given me armor thick enough to withstand this little incident. :o)
( 1:29 PM ) Val So, my potentially disastrous day turned out to not be so disastrous after all...
I missed my bus (in my defense I was out there 5 minutes before it hits the stop before mine and stayed for 15 minutes after it was supposed to hit the next stop). My uncle's car was in the shop, my aunt wasn't around. I let Doug know I was going to be late and I caught the next bus which got me to Greece Ridge Mall at 11:55 (I was supposed to be at work at 11am). I clock in at 12:04, there's three or four tables in the restaurant...Mark gets there at the same time I do. At 12:32, Doug comes over and says, "You know I should have let you stay home today". I say, "You can let me go home now, my toes are still cold." He says, "Ok". I thought he was joking so I just stare at him. He says, "Really". I'm clocked out at 12:34 (exactly a half-hour later), I go to the bathroom, walk back over to the mall and catch the bus at 12:45...I'm home at 1:10. :o)
I'm not distressed about going home early today, I picked up extra hours on Wednesday and on Saturday and I gave up a day off tomorrow to cover a scheduling mistake...I already have more hours than I normally do in a week.
I was thinking about going to a movie but I think I'm just going to stay home. :o) Maybe take a hot bath...
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( 9:43 AM ) Val This last week was emotionally exhausting...I'm glad it's over. The funny thing is there wasn't even one thing I can point to and say "that's what took the energy from me"...It was all little stuff and mostly internal struggles and decisions that drained me. Wierd.
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3.1.02 ( 4:23 PM ) Val Look!--This is my second blog this week...so far, my resolution is on track :o)
I was actually going to update last night, but I didn't get home from work until 10 pm...Kristina had to jet early because her daughter (who is only 15 months old) broke out in hives from some medication she was taking.
I'm thinking about getting a haircut...kind of Halle Berry-ish (the slightly longer look she's sporting now, not her normal short-short look)...but I don't know yet. I bought a black hairstyles magazine that had a couple of pictures of the haircut I'm looking at...I'm going to show them to Mom.
One of my resolutions is to update this blog regularly. I'm not going for deep thoughts just consistency. And following the guideline of making resolutions attainable goals, I have decided that my absolute minimum for updating my blog regularly would be twice a week...I can do that.
It's 12:45pm and I haven't taken a shower yet...In my defense, I went to a friend's house last night for a Girl's Night to welcome in 2002. We didn't get to bed until almost 5am, and I woke up (for real) at 10am; however, that was only because I could feel the remnants of my Aleeve Cold and Sinus medication leaving my body... We all then went to Bruegger's for breakfast, I had a plain bagel with bacon and scallion cream cheese: delicious! but now my breath reeks, so I need to brush my teeth. No one else is home right now though and I'm chewing gum, so I'm gonna hold off for a little while longer.
Anyways, I read the Our Daily Bread for this morning and there was a quote by Oswald Chambers that I really needed to read: "At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise from remembering the yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God's grace is apt to be checked by the memory of yesterday's sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them in order to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual culture for the future. God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present....Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the irreparable past in His hands, and step out into the irresistible future with Him." Good stuff...and at the end of the entry was this little poem (couplet? I don't know):
Not yesterday's load we are called on to bear,
Nor the morrow's uncertain and shadowy care;
Why should we look forward or back with dismay?
Our needs, as our mercies, are but for the day.
Good stuff :o) 2002 is starting off all right. :o)
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