42 posts tagged “qotd”

What movies do you have memorized? Bonus points for sharing your favorite quote.
Submitted by Andymatic.

I don't know that I have any movie completely memorized. But there are a few that I've watched enough that seeing them again feels like hanging out in the living room with a crowd of old friends.

One of those is "Office Space," which is not only funny but pretty much defines how I feel about work. Oddly enough, the first time I saw it, I found it kind of slow-paced and boring. I didn't hate it, but it certainly wasn't a film I saw myself watching again and again for years to come.

I think that might have been because I was fresh out of college and not ingrained enough in or jaded enough by office life to appreciate the truths and humor in the movie. The first time I watched it again years later, when I was channel-surfing and it just happened to be on, I was like "holy crap - this is brilliant!"

I think my favorite part is the neighbor who is in construction work and always talks to the main character, Peter, by yelling through the thin walls in their apartment building. Peter has an annoying chipper woman in his office (don't we all), who responds to him being less-than-enthusiastic in returning her greeting by saying "oooh, someone's got a case of the Moondays!" (think of a squealy yet schmoopy and drippy voice that drags out 'Monday' forever).

Peter asks his neighbor whether anyone at his work site says that, and the neighbor goes "Hell, no. Where I work, you could get your ass kicked for that!" Classic, and a line that had office-drones everywhere wishing they worked in the great outdoors instead.

On a more embarrassing note, I also know quite a few of the lines from "South Park: The Movie." In fact, it was on TV the other night when my friend and Lee and I came home from The Pub. When Cartman broke into his song "Kyle's Mom's A Bitch" I found myself singing along with him, and not just because I'd had a few beers.

I might need a life.

If you could leave notes for the future, what message would you have left in the past for today?
Submitted by Nameless.

"Do yourself a favor and stay in bed today!"

What question do you hate being asked?

Back when I was married, it was "why don't you have kids yet?" or "When are you going to have kids?"

I didn't have kids because I wasn't ready for a multitude of reasons, and I wasn't sure if I ever would be or wanted to be. But that's really tough to explain to people who really just think you "should" have children.

Now, the question seems to be "when are you gonna get hitched?"

I really don't HATE this question as much as find myself kind of bemused by it. Lee and I will go down that road someday - we're sure of it. And we're not putting it off for any particular reason. I guess maybe we're weird, but in our way of thinking it really doesn't define our committment to or love for each other. That definition comes from how we live, how we love, how we treat each other every day, and the plans we make for a future together.

My divorce wasn't a bitter one, and it didn't make me bitter about the concept of marriage. But I have to admit that what it DID do was make me place a lot less importance on marriage as a "defining point" or "next logical step" in a relationship.

We don't plan to be Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed or whatever her name is, being together 20-some-odd years and never tying the knot. Sure, Lee wanted to be a rock star at one point, but "Playboy Playmate" never came up as a goal on all the "what do you wanna be when you grow up?" tests I took. We just don't feel any sense of urgency about it, because honestly, being married wouldn't change a thing about our relationship other than our tax status and our ability to have a joint healthcare plan.

What bemuses me about the question is the way it is asked, like we've been together FOREVER. It has been just over two years, which really isn't all that long. I think people think I'm getting OLD and better get hitched quick!

And the other thing is, neither the "having kids" or the "getting married soon?" questions really bother me when they come from people who are close friends. I don't mind talking about personal stuff like that with people who are in my life. They bug me when they come from work acquaintances or people I see once in a blue moon up at the pub - people who don't really know me personally or have much involvement in my life. Which is weird of me, I guess, because I also have no problem pouring my feelings out in a blog where ANYONE can read them, but think casual aquaintances asking those kinds of questions makes them nosy!

What is your personal motto?

I so wanted to think of something inspiring and warm and loving and hopeful for this. But after the week I've had, the best I can do is:

"If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport."

Time to go home now!

How many meals do you cook at home each week? What do you do for the other meals?

Workweek breakfasts and lunches are always grab-and-go for both of us - a yogurt and a banana on the way out the door or something like that. Actually, I'm really bad about being a breakfast-skipper. I know I shouldn't, but I just tend not to think about it until almost lunchtime.

We usually cook dinner at home about 4 nights a week. When I say "we," it usually means Lee. He works a 6-2 shift and gets home around 2:30. If we waited for me to get home to make anything, it would be 8:30 at night before we sat down to dinner. As early as his day starts, that means he'd be starving and then probably get something to fill his belly with that sucked anyway, because he's just a much better cook than me. ANYONE is a much better cook than me, but he's actually also a truly good cook : ).

When I am home in time, I do help by throwing together salads or chopping veggies or whatever. And I usually do the dinner clean-up to be fair.

On Saturdays or Sundays, we'll make breakfast together sometimes. Or not, depending on if we feel like making a mess.

The other meals are a hodgepodge. It might just be "sandwich night" or even cereal if we're both lazy. Or we order Chinese or a pizza. Now and then we go to the Parental Abode for a meal. We don't go out to eat much unless we're celebrating something, road tripping or running errands and want to eat along the way.

All this food talk is making me hungry - I might actually eat breakfast today!

Why do you blog?
Submitted by littleduckling.

There are so many reasons I'm not sure where to start!

1. I love writing just about anything, so for me blogging is the perfect hobby.

2. I like having my blog and online journal to look back on as the years go by to see how I've grown and changed, and stayed the same too. I imagine myself reading some of what I wrote as an old woman and going "I remember that!' or maybe "Wow - did I REALLY think that way back then?" There's something kind of fun about going back to see how you've evolved (or in some cases, reverted back to childish thinking) over the years.

3. A blog is a fun way to chronicle events you don't want to forget. In the online journal I've kept since 2001, there are many tales of things that happened that were hilarious to me at the time, but that I might have forgotten already if I hadn't recorded them.

4. In addition to helping me see how I've grown, my blog helps remind me when I get stuck in self-destructive or unhealthy cycles or ways of thinking. I'll see that I'm venting about the same stuff over and over again. Right now, that cycle seems to be work.

5. I know I could get the same end results for 2, 3 and 4 as I get from writing online if I kept a paper or offline journal. I've tried before. But in spite of the fact that I enjoy that too, I'm just not as consistent with those. Long periods go by that I don't write anything, and I lose track of what I meant to write about. The feedback and interactive aspects of blogging keep me more motivated.

6. I've made some wonderful friends through blogging over the years. Some I've met in person, and we've become very close in "real life." Others live too far away for that to have happened yet, but our online friendships and involvement in each other's worlds has grown over the years much as it would if we met regularly for coffee.

7. I like the feedback I get from blogging. Sometimes, if I'm feeling stupid or off-the-mark about the way I'm reacting, that feedback is simple validation that I'm normal and others might react to whatever situation I'm in the same way. Other times, that feedback is a new perspective or way of thinking about a challenge or something that upsets me that I may not have considered without that person taking the time to comment.

8. Sometimes I'm just too "over-extraverted" from my job and other things in life to keep in touch with everyone who matters to me by phone. Blogging, and reading the blogs of my friends who keep them too, is a great way to stay in touch while getting my "introvert time" in.

 9. Sometimes snippets from my blog writing actually inspire my short stories or non-fiction essays. During cycles like the one I'm in now, where writer's block runs rampant in that respect, I feel good knowing I'm recording thoughts and ideas so they'll be "out there" some where when I get my storytelling groove back.  

10. Anything you can do in your PJs is a cool hobby, right?

What are some of the best(and worst) things about summer?
Submitted by L33tchica.

BEST

- Lots and lots of daylight

- swimming pools

- The kiddies getting out of school. I don't have any, and I haven't been one for a really long time, but it makes me happy to see them all free and full of fun.

- Steamed crabs

- Snowballs

- Fresh veggies

- Cookouts

- Outdoor parties

- The beach, when I can get there

- Flip-flops

- Fourth of July fireworks

WORST

- Heat, humidity and general swamp-ass weather

- Skeeters and other creepy crawlies that seem to only come out when the swamp-ass weather arrives

- Severe storms

- Worrying when we get the severe storms that knock out power that the Vinster will get overheated without the air conditioning. Seriously, ferrets are fragile critters when it comes to stuff like that, and if our power is out most likely the neighbors' is too, so I can't even take him over for an air conditioned "playdate" with their weasels.  

- Mongo-monster electric bills because I'm a wimp who worships air conditioning

- Adhering to work dress codes instead of wearing "swamp-ass appropriate" attire

- I miss being young and carefree (workfree) more in the summer than during any other season. Summertime just speaks of long lazy days and vacations ... it is the time when you feel the most that you shouldn't be a working drone.

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

Although I've pretty much lived in the same area all my life, I bounced around quite a bit along the way.

- When I was born, my parents lived with my grandparents on Dad's side of the family. They had (and still have) a tiny 2-bedroom house about a mile from where I now live. We lived with them for the first year of my life, my crib in my parents' bedroom. Since I was an infant, I really don't remember much about our time living there, but knowing how small the house is I imagine the 4 adults felt like they were climbing over each other all the time. My parents were young, just out of high school, and trying to get started. I do have a lot of fond memories of the house throughout my life though - my grandparents are still there.

- When I was about a year old, my parents were able to get into an apartment complex about a mile away. It is low-income housing now, and may have been then, too. I'm not sure. Again, I don't remember much about this place, because:

- When I was three, they rented a single-family home right across the street from the grandparents we had lived with. It had white siding and a big enough backyard for our first swimming pool. I loved living there - so close to my grandparents and my best friend and playmate, with a park and a lake right up the street. Good times for a kid.

- When I was 7, my parents bought their first home, a townhouse in a "circle" community, again not far at all from where we'd started. It had 3 bedrooms, but when my sister came along a year later we shared a room in the summertime since there was no central AC, and we only had 2 window units. I remember that rather than put the other one in their bedroom, my parents put it in the living room and slept downstairs in the summer. The yard was much smaller, but we still had a pool, and there were lots of kids in the neighborhood. I spent the rest of my childhood, my teenage years, and my first year of college in that house. My parents moved into the house they live in with my sister and niece now after I'd already moved away, so although it does feel like home in a way I've never actually lived there.  

- I moved to campus in my second year of college, when I became editor of the newspaper and developed a social life on campus and generally wanted to be able to hang out with my friends and fellow-paper rats until 4 a.m. and then just crash. Over the next 2 years or so, I lived in 3 different apartments on campus with 3 different sets of roomies. The apartments all looked the same - a living room and kitchen that were all one space with a knobby, uncomfortable couch, a round table and four chairs, and a tiny cooking area and fridge. There were four tiny bedrooms with a bed, desk and dresser in each, and a bathroom where the shower and sink were in an "open space" between the four bedrooms and the toilet was in a closet-sized space where you could at least close a door. I guess with four college students living together they figured one person would need the toilet while another was showering at some point, and that was ALWAYS true.

- Just before I turned 21, Chris (my then-future-husband) and I moved into our first apartment together. A lot of students from the college lived there, and we were both still in school. The place had waterbugs like crazy, and they fumigated for creepy-crawlies once a month and at one point accidentally killed our pet frogs with fumigation. The community was called "Meadow Lanes," but we called it "Meadow Ghetto."

- When I was 22, we "upgraded" to renting a townhouse near the college. I had run out of money and dropped down to part-time school, so it took me another two years to graduate. The "upgrade" was to a place called "Westland," which we promptly renamed "The Wasteland." We had more space, and laundry facilities that kept us from lugging dirty clothes to my parents' house every weekend. But other than that, it was Meadow Ghetto all over again. Lots of our friends were stuck there too (you lived where you could afford to live when you were an independent college student), so we had fun anyway.

- When I graduated college, we decided to leave The Wasteland and moved downtown to Fell's Point, again renting a townhouse. The place was old and dark and creepy. We were surrounded by crime. But we could get to the local waterfront bar and restaurant area in a short walk, and we were young and life was fun. We had another roommate, a guy we were friends with in college who turned out to be a superpig. Our house was always decorated with his Chinese food containers, dirty dishes and crusty bathroom towels.

- After two years of living with the grubby roomie, we decided to leave him in the creepy townhouse and didn't renew the lease with him, opting to rent another townhouse in nearby Canton. This one was much nicer, and the first place I'd lived as an adult that always felt safe, clean and "homelike." It was in an up-and-coming downtown area. When Chris and I got married and decided to buy a house, our landlord offered us the chance to buy the place and we thought about it. But we didn't, opting to head back to suburbia instead. We would have made a mint if we had done differently, because the guy was willing to sell it for a great price and the area absolutely exploded right after we moved. Live and learn.

- In 1997, we bought this house. Chris and I lived here as a married couple for several years, and as two people who were separated and trying to get back on our feet financially for a year. Then we refinanced, I bought him out, he moved and it has been my home ever since. Lee was renting when we met, so when his lease was up we decided that he would move in with me. Now it is our home, and in spite of the fact that it is even smaller than my grandparents' house, I don't think there's anywhere else I'd want to be right now.

Snow Day

5 comments

What was your biggest cooking disaster?

Embarrassingly enough, my biggest disaster ever involved Oodles of Noodles.

My clutziness is infamous among my friends and family (my niece has been getting told lately that she's growing up to be like me because she gets distracted and walks into walls or topples off chairs for no reason). My already amazingly accident-prone nature seems to triple when I'm sick.

So a few years back, I had either the flu or a seriously nasty cold. I'd spent a whole weekend pretty much curled on the couch feeling sorry for my achy, sneezy, stuffy, can't-do-anything BUT rest self, and decided to heat up some soup. I did, poured it into a bowl, and proceeded to dump the whole thing down my left leg.

It seared and burned like nothing I've ever felt before. That soup was HOT. Not knowing what else to do, I dropped the bowl and flew into the shower, peeled off my steaming-soup covered pajamas, and stood under cold water, stinging and burning and shivering all at once. It sucked mightily.

I had huges patches of raw red skin and blistered burns from the middle of my thigh halfway down my shin. I probably should have gone to the emergency room, but I didn't. It was about 3 weeks before I could wear anything other than skirts (long ones to hide the mess that was my leg) or baggy pants that didn't irritate my skin. It happened in April, and I pretty much didn't show my legs that whole summer because of the scarring. As much as I hate being hot, it was a bitch. Being out in jeans in 100-degree weather when everyone else is wearing shorts or bathing suits bites. But I was incredibly self-conscious. The one time I did show my leg - at a small family gathering where I couldn't resist jumping in the pool, my niece looked at the scars all wide-eyed and kind of freaked out, and that pretty much killed any urge I had to get over myself and just enjoy the summer.

The scarring lasted through the fall and into the following year, but then started to fade. It was still there the next summer, but was faint enough that unless you were actually studying my legs, you didn't notice. And now, with the exception of a small spot on my inner thigh and one on my shin where the burning was extra bad, the scars are gone completely. I was lucky in that respect. 

But really, when something like THAT happens to me boiling noodles, can you blame me for leaving the stove to the less clutzy folks and calling myself the Queen of Carry-Out? I make a really good salad, too.  

What did you do for fun when you were a kid? How is it different from what you see kids doing now?
Submitted by jaklumen.

- Jump in the pool and swim with my friends as much as possible between May and early September, even when my lips turned blue.

- Listen to hear the song "Pop Goes The Weasel," because it meant the ice cream or snowball truck was coming around the bend," then run out barefoot with a handful of change to get a spearmint or chocolate snowball with marshmallow topping.

- Slumber parties and scary movies

- Played lots of board games

- Roller-skating, all the time.

- Listened to (gulp) cassette tapes and RECORDS, and watched MTV. 

- Used my imagination. As a young child, I remember my friends and I always playing some kind of make-believe. In my best friend's big backyard as a kid, we were unicorns living in a magical meadow. In one of our backyard swimming pools, we were castaway princesses trapped on a raft.

- I wrote stories and drew lots of pictures. I was a decent, but not great, artist as a kid and pre-teen. I drew everything from gardens to Ozzy Osbourne. My portrait of Ozzy freaked out my little sister, and she still brings it up to this day. I also remember that one of my friends' grandparents were into painting clay figurines, and used to let us help them. We spent a lot of time painting clay animals and then playing with them.  

- I did play with Barbies, but not as much as other girls. And my Barbies were never being "normal" and keeping house or going to office jobs- they were always off on some great adventure, and none of them wanted to marry Ken because he was too pretty. I had a lot of toy horses and my Barbies always had ranches and went riding.  

- Let my hamsters explore my Weeble house and try to knock over the Weebles. They were right ... they do wobble but they don't fall down, even when a fat hamster twice their size is trying to topple them.

- I spent lots of weekends camping with my grandparents in West Virginia and hearing lots of campfire ghost stories, and then retelling them with my cousins and scaring ourselves to the point that we stayed up all night.

- Got into mischief. I was basically a good kid, but I was friends with a few neighborhood boys who were relatively harmless pranksters, and I used to egg them on.  They never destroyed property, but they were known to moon a passing car now and then.

- Read everything I could get my hands on. My mother always made sure I had a ton of books, and I read them voraciously. I was also known to sneak into her book collection and read things I shouldn't have at a young age - like Salem's Lot, and freak myself out.

- Dress up with my cousins and put on really bad shows for my poor aunt and uncle, singing along to country music on the radio.  

 The good news for me is that I do see my niece doing a lot of the more wholesome things I did as a kid. She's into arts and crafts and board games, she writes stories, has slumber parties with her girlfriends, and swims and rides her bike all summer long. Sure, she has an IPOD instead of a record or cassette tape player, and she never had Weebles. But the ice cream truck still comes sometimes, and her friends don't moon cars, which is a good thing!

Overall, I think what some children today miss out on the most is time for free-spirited outdoor play where their main prop is their imaginations. Between the tendency for kids to be involved in all sorts of clubs and structured activities and all the electronic diversions like the internet, computer games, Playstations and Wii's, I sometimes wonder if kids still get to be backyard wilderness adventurers, pirates, farmers, cops and robbers, deep-sea divers, mermaids, singers and dancers, veterinarians or kings and queens enough.