I know that a lot of people are mirror posting on various sites. Let me know which site you want me to comment on. One comment from me is enough, eh?
State of the Union: Dreary like the weather
Listening to: Blur by Britney Spears
Edited: March 26th, 2009
The moral of today’s lesson is: don’t take on a project and expect to get thanked for taking on the extra responsibility and people will not appreciate anything you do because they think they can do it better. It’s a fact of life. Oh, but I’m putting the cart ahead of the horse. Let me backtrack.
I volunteer for the Junior League. Yes, how Southern of me. One of the girls is a chronic complainer. She has all these ideas of how to make things better, she thinks she can do everything better, and she comes up with all these plans, yet she complains about having to do the work required to make all her ideas come to fruition. I chaired the Hunger Drive last year and this chick was the #1 Grouser, so this year, I decided to sit back and let her do the work for a change.
She stepped up and I sat back to watch. It only took her two weeks and she saw what I had been dealing with the year before: everyone had an idea of what they wanted to do, but no one wanted to put in the effort or time to make it work. She got stuck working long hours with no one to help her. Everyone had a plethora of excuses for why they couldn’t show up or help out. Her efforts were criticized and picked apart. Then, when she complained about it, she got the same response I did: You signed up for it; Deal with it.
You get what you get. You have to make the best out of what you have to work with. If I was an evil person, I would have done her like she did me: I would have left her to her own devices and let her sink or swim on her own. I would have made fun of her behind her back. I probably would have made veiled references to her ineptitude on MySpace the way she did me and had all my friends join in. Heck, I probably would have made a scathing blog about her and had all of you trash her. If I’d have been a true bitch, I would have made sure that it wasn’t friends only where she could read it and be humiliated.
But I can honestly say that a year does make a difference. This past year has truly changed me. Am I a goody goody froo froo feel good person now? Absolutely not. I have, however, learned to look at things from both sides. I think this experience has taught her to do the same because she apologized to me. She said that she understood why I was so frustrated last year. She told me that she took some of my comments the wrong way (which people are wont to do when they don’t know a person very well) and, instead of seeing that I was asking questions for clarification, saw it as me challenging her.
I think that some of the mothering and understanding that I get from some of you has rubbed off on me (You know who you are as the three of you made my top friends on MySpace). That is the only reason I can think of for why I am waking up at the buttcrack of dawn during Spring Break to help her distribute fliers.
State of the Union: Surprisingly upbeat considering this was supposed to be a rant
Listening to: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Nina Simone
Edited: March 17th, 2009
So, I set up camp at the new blog site. I can hear you snickering and asking “which one?” I know we’ve had 50,000,000 of them. I’m laughing right along with you. I love you guys enough to migrate to the new site. That and the fact that it is a pain in the butt to flip from site to site trying to keep up with everyone, and I hate RSS feeds, and there is the fact that I’m lazy. I hope I see all of you over there once this place goes ker-plooey.
I’m totally unoriginal, so you can find me at: http://slayerbarbie.efx3.com.
I am glad that, in a spurt of anger at EFX after an extended downtime (damn you, spammers!), I manually transferred all my blog posts to Blogger. At the time, I thought I was being passive-aggressive, but it made it that much easier to transfer all of them to the new site. I just clicked two buttons and my whole blog was transferred in less than five seconds.
I don’t know how to do many techie things, but I love it when someone dumbs it down so much that even *I* can do it…..
State of the Union: Optimistic
Listening to: Me and Mr. Jones by Amy Winehouse
Edited: March 16th, 2009
I stole this from Amy’s BookFace page and was outraged.
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag others and pass it on.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible (x )
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (x)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (x)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (x)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (x)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (x)
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (x)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (x)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (x)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (x)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (x)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (x)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (x)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (x)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (x)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (x)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (x)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (x)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens(x)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (x)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (x)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (x)
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker (x)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (x)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (x)
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (x)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (x)
72 out of 100. In your face, BBC!! I’m not even counting all the movie versions I watched as well. I am totally kvelling. Yes, I am a nerd. I will admit it….
State of the Union: Smugly Superior (Only six? pssssh!)
Listening to: Horizon by Rachel Yamagata
Edited: March 16th, 2009
Just kidding, but that Miley Cyrus song is on. You know which one. Anyway, I stole this from everybody and I’m procrastinating because I should be studying for my Logic test. No matter, how hard I study, I get a C anyway, so why bother?
Anywho……
1. Who was your first love?
Phillip Bays. We were in first grade and I pushed him down and told him he had to be my boyfriend because I said so. He agreed and shared his Pop Rocks with me (Sad how my dating life hasn’t evolved much from then, isn’t it?).
2. Who was your first kiss and when?
Phillip Bays. I kissed him to say thanks for the Pop Rocks (Yes, LMC, I was putting out, even then).
3. Who was your first prom date?
My senior year, my butthole boyfriend, Anthony, refused to take me, so I went by myself, looked really hot, danced all night with my friends and their dates, and then he picked me up, took me to Bennigans before we went to this seedy motel in Bastrop for a night of passion.
4. Who was your first roommate?
That would be loser non-prom date Anthony.
5. What was your first job?
My first job I actually got paid for was bagging groceries at the grocery store for chump change.
6. What was your first car?
I had a red Neon.
7. When did you go to your first funeral?
My great grandmother’s when I was seven.
9. How old were you when you first moved away from your hometown?
I was 26. I lived in Las Cruces for a little more than a year and now I’m back in my hometown. I can never leave my mama long term. I don’t know how to quit her.
10. Who was your first grade teacher?
I had Mr. Campos for half of the year and then we moved to Oak Hill and I had Ms. Dumas. The funniest part? Mr. Campos was the uncle of nonprom boyfriend Anthony.
11. Where did you go on your first ride on an airplane?
I went to Montreal with my dad when I was three.
13. Where did you go for your first date and who was it with?
On my first official date that my mom actually knew about? Hmm, I went to dinner and a movie with nonprom boyfriend. In case you didn’t get the memo, my mom didn’t let me “officially” date until I was 18, no f’ing lie.
14. When you snuck out of your house for the first time, who was it with?
Latra Szal. We were 12. We snuck out just to say we did. Oh yeah, and she smoked a cigarette she stole from my nana.
15. Who was your first best friend and are you still friends with them?
Latra was my first girl best friend. She lives here in Austin, I think. I should look her up on Facebook. My first guy best friends were my brother, Brandon, and Gianni.
16. Who was the first person to send you flowers?
Gianni when I was 12. My mom pitched a fit (She was in the middle of her Fundamentalist phase and boys {and foozball} were The Devil).
17. Where did you live the first time you moved out of your parents house?
Off of South Congress and Ben White in Anthony’s cousin’s house. That was not a good time. We were like Romeo and Juliet, rebelling against our disapproving parents and you know how those clowns ended up….
18. Who is the first person you call when you have a bad day?
Julie
19. Who’s wedding were you in the first time you were a bridesmaid or a groomsmen?
I have been a bridesmaid 22 times. The first time was when I was 16 when my friend’s sister, Ashley, got knocked up and the shot gun put in a cameo appearance….
20. What is the first thing you do in the morning?
Roll over and go back to sleep because I’m normally having a good dream about a hot guy wearing some type of uniform.
WTH is up with that last question? We’re strolling down memory lane and then you ask me what I do in the morning. Random much…….
State of the Union: Befuddled at that last bit
Listening to: Joey by Concrete Blonde (All this high school stuff got me nostalgic).
Edited: March 16th, 2009
This is so sad. I don’t even want to think about how many times I have done this. This is it. This is the last EFX blog I am EVER doing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Edited: March 14th, 2009
slayerbarbie