Booyah

Okay, I admit, I do actually use a bunch of those phrases that annoy me. Particularly "at the end of the day". I once used that phrase twice in an e-mail that was only a paragraph long.

Also - I think "booyah" should make the list of annoying phrases. Aaaand I just used that phrase a couple of posts ago. Heh.

Lastly, this picture just makes me laugh.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/03/19/picard-cat/

Things that annoy me, part one: annoying phrases

Today Theresa and I made a list of phrases/words that annoy us. Here are the results, in no particular order:

1. Apples to apples
2. Just in the nick of time
3. Don't worry, be happy
4. Turn that frown upside down!
5. Petunia (I don’t know why, I hate this word)
6. To thine ownself be true
7. The road less traveled
8. At the end of the day...
9. The fact of the matter is....
10. Cut to the chase
11. Think outside the box
12. My bad
13. Start from square one
14. She’s good people
15. Whazzzuuuupp
16. Pick your brain
17. On the same page
18. Keep it real
19. Various sports analogies, i.e. "Give it 110%" or "right out of the gate"
20. Cut from the same cloth

Phrases that I am kind of into right now:

1. Snerk!
2. Jiminy Cricket!
3. That's the bees knees
4. What the hey!
5. Holy crap balls!
6. What the f***, a$$hole! (okay, I know this isn't really a "catchphrase", but I say it all the time while I am driving)

More to come, as we think of them.

Edited to add: O, added "Holy crap balls" just for you.

Cat plus bug

Cats plus random bug flying around the house = hilarity.

Also - day 4 of heat wave and I have yet to put on my air conditioner. This is a personal triumph for me. I kind of feel like if I can handle 4 days of 90 degree plus temperatures without succumbing to the temptation of air conditioning, then I can rule the world. Or something like that.

AND I played softball today in 100 degree heat. And we won! My awesomeness is astounding....

I'm in another play

Booyah - I'm in another play! How awesome is that. I'm playing an Italian-American character called "Tootsie". Which is funny because I am Italian-American and when I was a kid I tried to get people to call me "Trixie", which sort of sounds like "Tootsie". It never caught on, I'm sorry to say. Ah well.

Tom: hi. What's up. You are the only person that comments on my blog. I had fun at Eli's on Friday. Scott and his fiance (was it Kim? I'm bad with names) are very cool. You and Scott and your drunken Star Wars references were hilarious, even though I didn't get most of them. Wish we could have stayed longer. Sigh.

In which I am unintentionally offensive

So after years and years I'm finally involved in theater again. I did a play recently and now I'm doing some stuff for a local community theater group. We had a meeting last week and I got into a discussion about "the craft" of acting, and I think I may have made an unintentionally offensive comment.

There was a new guy at the meeting, and he told us he had only done one play in his whole life, and he kept apologizing for it. Which was just strange. I guess he felt insecure around people that have done more theater than he has, but it bugged me. I don't think it matters if you've done one play or 85, as long as you have fun and the audience is entertained. Look at me! This was the first full length play I'd been in since high school, and even though I majored in theater, seriously, all I remember is what a proscenium stage is (you can wikipedia that if you want to know, I'm too lazy right now to put in the link).

Finally, I said, "listen, please stop apologizing and making excuses, the truth of the matter is that no one really knows what they are doing anyway." And I'm afraid it may have come across as offensive. I think it's true, though - I think acting isn't really a quantitative thing, and to some extent no one really does know what they are doing. Good actors just have a natural ability, and they can hone their skills and put in hard work to understand a character, but when you get right down do it, either you have it or you don't. And as far as community theater is concerned, we're all just people who like to get up and act from time to time, and none of us will ever be famous, and it's really just a way to have fun and you can't take it too seriously. I mean, look, we do community theater in a bar. You have to take it with a grain of salt. All that matters is you learn your lines and you get up on stage and you say them, and you try not to mess up too badly.

So I wasn't really into the discussion about "the craft" that ensued. I guess it activated my bullshit-ometer.

Huh

So I had this realization today that I only check my "myspace" page when I have had a few drinks. What is up with that....honestly, I don't even check my regular e-mail that often because I work on a computer all freaking day long. I have been known to go weeks without checking e-mail, let alone myspace and facebook. I don't remember the last time I checked facebook. It's like watching "Lost" - it's just too much work.

So that is the revelation of the day.

In other news, no one looks at my blog anymore except for ex-boyfriends on other continents, and maybe Tom (maybe). Oh, and my softball team had our first game of the season and we won 8 to 3. Or maybe 8 to 4. Whatever, we won. I walked, then struck out swinging (in rec league softball, oh, the shame!!), and then grounded out to short. Sigh.

I have a feeling I will regret this post and take it down tomorrow.

So I got a new car, sort of

Two weeks ago today I was in a car accident. I don't want to go into details just now, but the main points are:

1. No one was hurt.
2. It wasn't my fault.
3. My car was totaled.

My car was 11 years old and had 132,000 miles on it, so it didn't take much to total it. Still, I was sad. I got the car during my senior year of college, and it's been through a lot with me. I had high hopes that it would last for 200,000 miles. It was running fine up until it's untimely demise (murder, really) so I think it would have lasted. Ah well, them's the breaks.

Anyway, I've been busy dealing with the insurance companies and looking for a new car for the past two weeks. Car shopping was very stressful, but I finally decided on a 2004 Volvo. I've always thought of a car as just a means to an end, a way to get from point A to point B. Whether you enjoy driving the car or not has always been irrelevant to me. But when I drove the Volvo I really enjoyed driving it, and after much hemming and hawing I decided to go for it. I got a great deal on it, and it has heated seats!

In other exciting news, I am in a play for the first time since high school. I studied theater in college, and I did a lot of scenes and student film stuff, but I never acted in a full length play. So this is the first play I've been in since I was 17 years old. I can't believe it's been that long. I have the part of the "lovely, 20 year old heiress", which I find rather amusing. We've been rehearsing for about 2 weeks now and I'm having a lot of fun. If anyone is interested in coming, e-mail me and I'll send you the details.

25 or 6 to 4

The woman I was sitting next to on the bus this afternoon got a phone call and her cell phone ring was "25 or 6 to 4". So now I have that song stuck in my head. What does it mean, anyway? And why would you choose that song as your ringtone?

My passport is up for renewal in April and I'm sad about turning it in. Do they let you keep the stamped pages? I like to look at my passport and remember the trips I've taken. I'm way to lazy to scrapbook or even put pictures in albums (I actually have undeveloped film from 2003), so my passport is my little bit of nostalgia.

I don't really need to renew my passport, as I don't have any overseas trips planned in the near future. My parents are going to Italy in April, though, and god forbid something happens and I have to go to over there to bail them out of jail or something. See, this is how I think. I am a little nuerotic like that. Plus it's good to have a passport - you never know when you may need to suddenly leave the country.

I remember getting my passport in 1998 and thinking 2008 was so far away. And now here we are, 2008. Freaky. Ugh, now I have to get a new passport picture. My current one is horrible - I look like a potato - but I doubt a new one will be any better.

Oh, and another thing, my check engine light went on today, and I have to get my emissions testing done before March 1st. You can't pass emissions if your check engine light is on, which of course I found out the hard way. So now I have to take a day off from work and bring my car in and get them to turn off the stupid check engine light. Oh well, I'm due for an oil change anyway.

Taxman!

So it's that time of year again. Time to do the taxes. Which means I have to actually find all of my tax stuff. Every year I say I'm going to file my tax stuff in one folder. I even have a red folder labeled "Current Year Taxes" in my filing cabinet. The documents in the folder are 3 years old. Whoops. So now I have to find my 2007 tax stuff. I have a vague idea of where everything is, but it will take a bit of hunting.

I checked my savings account yesterday and my rate has gone down almost an entire point! What the hey! Did ING e-mail me about that? Of course not. They are happy to e-mail me when my rate goes up, but not when it goes down. I'm on www.bankrate.com trying to find a better rate. 3.65 APY is just not cutting it, ING! Looks like OneUnited Bank is offering an account with a 5.30 APY. Much better, and Bankrate.com gives OneUnited the same number of stars as they give ING!

How does Ben Bernanke cutting the federal interest rate benefit me in any way? The stock market is tanking and my 401K and Roth IRA are bleeding money. Now my savings account rate drops to 3.65. I'm finally at a point in my life where I've been able to save money, and now we're going into a recession, and for the first time in my life, I actually care!

I keep thinking it's Scrabulicious

I have been playing Scrabulous on Facebook lately, and I'm currently losing a game 61 to 14. Only three words have been played so far - joy, jailer, and Zaire. Jailer was mine - worth a measly 14 points! I want to challenge Zaire as it is a proper noun and therefore illegal according to Scrabble rules. Scrabulous is just like Scrabble only you play it online. It's kind of like people who play long distance chess (people do that, right? Or did I just see it in a movie once? Searching for Bobby Fischer? Ben Kingsley is really bad ass in Sexy Beast....anyway...). Except in Scrabulous you play over the computer, and you can chat with your opponent if you both happen to be online.

Anyway, I'm currently losing one game and pretty much tied in a second game. I'm very competitive when it comes to board games. Nate and I can't play trivial pursuit together anymore, because he always wins and I always get mad. Ah well. Maybe if there were a Star Trek trivial pursuit I could beat him.

Domo Arigato

According to this personality test, I am a

Robot

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. You are not like the robots they show in the movies. Movie robots are make-believe, because they always get all personable and likeable after being struck by lightning, or they are cold, cruel killing machines. In all reality, though, you are much more boring than all that. Real robots just sit there, doing their stupid jobs, and doing little else. If you get struck by lightning, you won't develop a winning personality and heart of gold. (Robots don't have hearts, silly, and if they did, they would probably be made of steel, not gold.) You also won't be likely to terrorize humanity by becoming an ultra-violent killing machine sent into the past to kill the mother of a child who will lead a rebellion against machines, because that movie was dumb as hell, and because real robots don't kill--they horribly maim at best, and they don't even do that on purpose. Real robots are boringly kind and all too rarely try to kill people. In all my years, my laptop has only attacked me once, and that was only because my brother threw it at me. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. Or if someone throws a pie at you. Pies sure are delicious.

To put it less negatively:
1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.
3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.
4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:
Your exact opposite is the Class Clown.
Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty Intellectual.

This is highly amusing because my best friend often tells me that I am cold and heartless. For example (spoiler alert), at the end of the first Spiderman, I was really glad Peter Parker walked away from Mary Jane. My friend's husband took the test, too, and he is also a robot. Nate, however, is a Televangelist. Apparently Televangelists and Robots get along well. Who knew?

Parenthetical Thoughts

I really want to buy a slow cooker. Does that mean I'm officially a grown up?

People who talk loudly on the bus annoy me. Especially when it's the morning bus. And especially when they are talking to me.

Facebook is sort of fun, but I don't entirely understand it. I just recently started to understand how myspace works, but Facebook is harder. Does this make me old? It's kind of scary that there are thirteen year olds who know more about computers than I do.

I was thinking about making some New Year's resolutions. Did I put the apostrophe in the right place on "Year's"? Today I was at the supermarket and one of the aisles was labeled "Sock's". That is not right. The aisle does not belong to Sock.

Anyway, I was thinking about making some resolutions, but I heard on the news that most people don't follow through on their resolutions past February. So I thought maybe I should make some resolutions that are easy to keep. Sure, I want to lose 15 pounds, eat better, go to the gym more often. And as easy as it really is to stop stuffing my face all the time and commit 30 minutes a day to aerobic exercise, I have little faith that I can actually follow through on that.

So what resolutions are feasible? Not crossing the street against the light? I crossed against the light 4 times today. Curbing my road rage? That would be difficult. Driving is the only time I ever swear. I need that outlet.

I think I've decided on the old standard of "Try Something New". I'm thinking tennis. The only time I ever played tennis was in high school gym. It could be fun.

I hate running into people I know at the gym. Many people I work with go to my gym, so I tend to see people I know almost every time I work out (which honestly is not that often). I hate talking to people when I'm all sweaty and gross and wearing workout clothes. I also don't enjoy seeing other people when they are sweaty and gross and wearing workout clothes.

Okay, that's all the randomness I have in me tonight. I just don't have the energy to edit or devote time to any one of those thoughts. And I really suck at endings. I always want to figure out some cute, pithy way to end a post and it NEVER HAPPENS. Bleh.