I am in love with it.



Seriously.



Lovelovelovelove. Please join. Please give me more credits. (I get credit when you join, and you get books with credits.)

It's a very simple and yet beautiful concept: you have a book you don't like? Wanna get rid of it? Then SIGN UP.

Alls you gotta do is click this:

or this:

or here:


or


Get the hint yet? I LOVE it.

Already, I will be getting rid of three (maybe four, by now) books that I was just gonna like donate to the liberry or something. Stupid Aztec and this one book about curious expressions and another book about slavery leftover from college - here I was all ready to dump them off wherever just to make bookshelf room. Instead, I can mail them off via media mail - like $1.59 each - and then I choose three others from the site I'd like.

Like oh say the frikken VELVET series from Deveraux which I'd never wanna pay more than $2 each for anyway and yet I really really really want them, and now they will be WINGING THEIR WAY TO ME WITHIN DAYS! Also, a replacement for my lended-out Last Unicorn.

Because is frikken BRILLIANT, and I hereby thank reader Kristin from the bottom o'my heart and man I wish I'd found this YEARS ago because I totally coulda saved myself money. And I know blah blah blah the author doesn't make money off the sale blah blah but it's not really a sale since no one is making money and anyway I don't care. I am on a VERY STRICT BUDGET, people, and if I can get reading material by giving unwanted reading material away? Sign me up, buttercup.

Or wait, you don't have to - I'm already signed up. YOU should sign up right here using me as your referal so I gets the precious precious credit points. You just gotta be in the U.S. (sorry, non-U.S. peoples, I really hope there's something like this in your country too) and know how to use postage and have some books you're willing to get rid of. Not exactly stringent requirements.

And if you just wanna peruse and consider and then sign up later, the link will always be over there on the side under the recipes, 'kay?

Yay books!

So I'm home from work today, because only in the last 30 minutes or so has the bod stopped with the aches and pains and light-headedness. And all day, after being a bitch on the phone with my mother (not to her, but in her hearing), I've been making myself acknowledge what an angry person I am. Because I have an awful lot of anger that five years ago - even two or three years ago - I wouldn't have admitted to.

And today I realize - it's pretty much all family-based anger. Not that I don't have other angers - cultural and class-based and gender-related and blah blah - but the family anger is the kind that I seem incapable of getting a handle on. I assume that's because I did have a handle on it, for the first thirty or so years of my life. One of the few very important things I've learned in my admittedly short life has been: Denial is a fabulous thing. Really. Denial and suppression and selective amnesia. Tools of a survivor. But one even more important thing I've learned: when the lid is even only slightly loosened on the airtight container in which you've stashed an emotion/event/thought/piece of yourself, there is no way to just tuck it all neatly back inside. Or to pretend to have it tucked all neatly inside, even. That's the case for me, anyway.

The thing is - I just want to be reasonable when it comes to family stuff. If I could take the attitude and tone that I employ in my work persona, and let only THAT part of me interact with my family? It'd be great. There would be much rational discussion, much open-mindedness and fruitful collaboration and mutual respect and communication. There would be much less yelling and sulking and resentment and overall ugliness. I would be somewhat detached and analytical.

Yet somehow, I can't be that me with my family. When I consciously force myself into that persona with them, it never lasts very long - an hour or two, maybe - and I get accused of being too detached, too indifferent. Lately, I forget to even try to be calm and cool and collected. And though in every other facet of my life, I can enforce good behavior on myself, I cannot do so with my family.

Because they make me fucking insane.

Now I grant you that even at the best of times, I am at least slightly insane. I have constant and consistent delusions of an absolutely ridiculous nature - like how I from time to time and without any provocation whatsoever succumb to the absurd belief that all my friends don't really like me and wish to god I'd go away. Me And My Moods: A Love/Hate Story. I'll be the first to admit that I am, indeed, rather fucked up. But my family takes me to a whole new and spectacular level of insanity. I become almost unrecognizable to myself. And it makes me hate them more, for turning me into someone I deeply dislike. In this most recent episode, my brother's thoughtlessness forced me into commiserating with my mother and thinking of her as the good guy in the scenario -- my niece gets to stay longer than a few hours with me because my mother recognized how strongly I felt about it, and offered to rearrange her own schedule.

At this point in my life, I don't appreciate any kind of set-up that forces me to express gratitude to my mother. Because I'm still fucking pissed off. About the hospital thing still, yes (there's the air seeping into that airtight jar), and about a thousand million other little things over the years that I managed to mostly overlook or forget or suppress or spin favorably or blah blah blah, but now the toothpaste is out of the tube and forget it - I am chronically angry. At this point in my relationship with my mother, I kind of hate her. And I want to keep on hating her until I'm sick of hating her and ready to love her a little bit, if that day ever comes. Maybe it won't, and I'm as okay with that as I can be. But in the meantime, I got a lotta anger to catch up with.

To the casual - or even not-so-casual - observer, it has no doubt been obvious for quite some time that I am an angry person when it comes to my family. But, you see, I am not a casual or not-so-casual observer, so I am only now slowly starting to realize it. It's not at all an easy thing to figure out how to live with. Love and hate towards the same people and things - Big Love and Big Hate, I mean, not common, garden variety ambivalence but huge crashing German opera crescendos of Love and Hate complete with cymbal crashes and tympani - existing side by side in my heart and directed at the same person? Let me let you in on something: I really suck at that. Really, really, deeply, seriously, majorly, grand in scope and epic-length suck. [many too-personal illustrations of the suckage deleted here]

So I just finished reading John Irving's latest novel, Until I Find You, and though it's not my favorite of his, I still love it. Most of the critics hated it, and maybe if I didn't have a sick fascination with how fucked-up a childhood can get, a fascination with how awful parents can be, a fascination with how the not-good things of childhood affect people, and what adults who came from fucked-up pasts see when they look back, how and if they overcome it, the effects of a crazy childhood -- all of that, it's all taken to an extreme in this novel. It could be more extreme, sure, but it's bad enough. So I understand it and could forgive a lot of the writing flaws that the critics apparently couldn't. But one thing that keeps coming up in the novel is seeing your parents with adult eyes, re-evaluating your childhood from the distance of adulthood.

More than once, the subject of forgiveness comes up. I don't understand fogiveness. Never have. The whole concept makes no sense to me; it's like a blind spot. I'm probably better at math than I am at comprehending the word "forgive". Either something still pisses me off and/or hurts me, or it doesn't. Either I'm willing to trust that part of myself to that person again, or I'm not. And the thing is, I really don't trust any parts of myself (or the things/people I love) with most of my family members. Because I'm still too pissed off and too hurt about too many things. And I can't imagine ever NOT being pissed off and hurt about those things. It's my own little bottomless well of anger, and I like it. Except I wish I could control it better.

There's this sentence in a middle chapter of the book, singled out and highlighted on the back of the Irving book: In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. The thing is, the loss keeps coming, on through adulthood. Maybe not for everyone - some peoples' pasts are past. Just the past, over and done and not alive inside them every day. Some people have the not-so-airtight jar, and have to let go, little by little and over the span of years (and I don't know that it ever ends), of what they thought they still had of their childhood, of what's turned out to be illusions and inventions and sometimes outright deceit and often a surfeit of imagination.

And maybe that's what I'm so eternally pissed off about - that I can't paint my family as a group of lovable eccentrics, My Big Fat [INSERT ETHNICITY HERE] Wedding. It's not all funny quirks and comedic misunderstandings and happy goddamn endings. I'm pissed because there aren't any villains, no discernable story arc, no last sentence to tie things up, very little redemption, and the only moral to the story is Bring a bottle of brown liquor and be prepared to hide in the shrubbery.

Hey Chas!

Cooking 102 .5!

It's still pasta, so I don't think we can call it a new skill. You'll need:

a pot
the colander
knife and cutting board
large bowl
ingredients

Fave Pasta Salad

So easy it's criminal and so easy to eat too much of that I only make it when going to a picnic. It's the oily variety, so you must look elsewhere, you lovers of mayonnaised macaroni. (Blech)

1 box of pasta (which is like a pound, I think)
1 bottle of oily Italian salad dressing which MUST be made with olive oil
1/2 a bell pepper
1/2 a cucumber
a few plum tomatoes

Boil up the pasta in salted water, not an instant past the al dente stage. I use that three-kinds-in-a-box, which is like rotini and penne and... uh... I dunno the third. But if you can't find it, you can use any one of the three. Or bowties or shells or even spaghetti or really whatever you want.

Drain it, then immediately put it in your large bowl and dump in the salad dressing. Really, it HAS to have real olive oil in the dressing or else it just has this gross aftertaste - and it can be hard to find, so plan to spend some time in the dressing aisle. The Newman's Own one is great. You can dump in the whole bottle, but somewhere between half a bottle and a whole one is all it takes. Just make sure the pasta is all coated in oil.

Then, chop your veggies. I cut the cucumbers into 1/2-inch thick half-moons, and I don't peel them. I cut the bell pepper (usually orange or yellow, for some color variety) into squares of about 1-2 inches. I chop the tomatoes into 4 parts long-ways and then make 3 pieces out of each part. I dunno, I absolutely LOVE to chop vegetables - borders on obsessive-compulsive, in fact - and I don't really pay attention. I just chop chop chop and it comes out how I want it. I just like good-sized pieces, not those itty slivers of stuff.

Then throw it all in with the pasta, stir it up, and eat. Yum. You can add more or different veggies. You can chop em however you want. You can add salt and pepper or finely chopped sweet onion or shredded (sharp cheddar) cheese or whatever. But that's how I make mine - plain and simple and really damn tasty.