Owner: Let me get this straight. URL:http://meldraw.blogspot.com Join Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:07:25 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: Life, and all its moving parts. Site statistics:Click here
Late to the party. (By about 24 hours.) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I'm pretty pop-culturally savvy. My mother will vouch for my encyclopedic knowledge of television, movies, and music. (Of course, my mother thinks The Matrix was about mathematicians, so it's possible that judgment may be relative.) I'm familiar with most of the popular films and TV shows, I know more than I should about the IMDB profiles of most working actors, and I am more likely to recognize a celebrity's voice on a commercial than I am to recognize my own car in a parking lot.Still, over the last five years, there was a huge cultural phenomenon to which I never paid much attention: the television show, 24.I knew the show was good - smart people had told me so - but when it first started, I never had time to catch it. Its distinguishing gimmick is that every episode takes place in real time; each hour on my television is an hour out of Agent Jack Bauer's day, and 24 episodes in a season constitutes one day in his life. Interesting. But by the time the show started gai
Things I should probably not be doing at work. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Making pushpin "art" on my cubicle wall.Checking my personal email every five seconds, even though it's only filled with Gap ads and bookstore coupons, and I don't check it anywhere near this obsessively when I'm at home.Playing Allister's "Fraggle Rawk" on my iPod twelve times in a row and daring myself to head-bang.Binding my printed ad designs with matching colored paperclips, and placing them on my desk just at the edge of my peripheral vision in a carefully fanned-out manner, so that I can glance over at them occasionally and admire their matchingness, and then claim I'm not completely lost to OCD.Trying to rearrange the magnets on my metal bookshelf so that they don't look inappropriately suggestive, which is utterly impossible.Informing my coworker that she owes me a drink for every time she calls me "Michelle," which is not my name, for crying out loud.Silently reading all my ridiculous interdepartmental memos with a really bad Serbian accent, just to pass Read more:doing
Leave that periodical depository where you found it! 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Everybody has that one friend that always has a story to tell. The stories are fascinating and bizarre, often hilarious, and utterly unbelievable. Everyone knows that one friend should really grow up to be a sitcom screenwriter or a comedic fiction bestseller, but the friend never does. She is happy to be a mild-mannered professor in Jersey, with a really colorful past and a lot of chalk.I have that friend, and her name is BeowulfGirl. Since I've known her, I've been treated to countless jaw-dropping narratives involving society's most astounding characters that seem to be drawn to her like an ADD child to a drum set. Perhaps sensing that I felt unfairly privileged to be the only audience to her anecdotes, she has decided to start a blog of her own to recount her adventures with some of the more fascinating people to come out of western civilization.(And by "fascinating people," I mean fascinating in the way that you are fascinated when you turn on the Discovery Channel and l Read more:Leave
Car Talk 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I'm sitting in the VenJetta at the Sonic Drive-In the other day. (Don't judge me. When you need a tater tot, you need a tater tot. I know it's not healthy; leave me alone.)It's a beautiful summer evening, and I have my windows down as I sit in the carport, waiting for my chicken sandwich. There are a few tables set up outside the restaurant, and a family of five is dining near me. (Well, the parents are dining, and the children are climbing on all manner of things, which, I assume, is why the family is not eating in their car.) Suddenly, I notice one of the children keeps glancing in my direction. He's a small boy, maybe seven years old.Staring at me, he wanders away from his family and stands directly in front of my car. He looks studiously down at the grill, and stands there for about two minutes. His family does not appear to notice his absence; one parent is fetching some runaway sandwich wrappers, and the other parent is valiantly trying to keep a pair of tater tots from
Not dead yet. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Dear loyal readers of Let me get this straight,I'm sorry.Please accept my sincerest apologies for the dearth of bloggage lately. It's become apparent through an onslaught of inquiries, scoldings, complaints, and offers of bribery via baked goods that I am (once again) not posting enough, and have left you feeling discarded and ignored. I don't have a particularly good excuse for my absence, except to say that I've been feeling awfully busy, even though I know I'm not. I could detail for you exactly what's going on in my world, but it's likely far less interesting than the stories you have probably already invented for yourselves to justify my scarcity, which may or may not include the following:I've been kidnapped. Not true.I am completely wrapped up with my work, which I've begun to take home with me, slowly allowing severe workaholism to corrupt and devour my personal life. Also not true; I cleverly have no personal life.Leah finally killed me. Almost sadly not true
For Easter. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 There are three bunnies playing together on the lawn outside my sliding glass door. And when I say "playing together," I don't mean that they're just milling around in the same general vicinity, because I know that humans often amuse themselves by anthropomorphizing any group of more than one member of a species as having some sort of endearingly playful societal relationship, and that's not what I'm doing here.No, they are balls-out, gloves-off playing a game, and it has rules I don't fully understand. (Although my cat, GenV, really wants to get out there and referee.)The bunnies set themselves up facing each other, about four feet apart, locked in a Jets-versus-Sharks-gangsta-stare-down. They are intensely still, save the occasional whisker twitch or narrowing of the eyes. Then, just when you wish they had opposable thumbs so that they could start slowly snapping their fingers and approach each other in dangerously rhythmic steps, one of them will suddenly run straight at the ot Read more:Easter
A Mind-Boggling Holiday (or Why Parker Brothers Products Should Have More Comprehensive Warning Labels) 1970-01-01 00:59:59 It's the day before Thanksgiving, and I am 12 years old. We have a couple of not-terribly-distant relatives in town for the holiday, and my mother is planning a feast. Today, however, she decides to make a simple meal of burgers and homemade fries. She breaks out the oil-fryer and goes to work making dinner.Meanwhile, I have decided to play a board game with my rarely-in-town cousin. We settle on Boggle, which has the benefit of being both studiously quiet (during play) and uproariously loud (during the shake-up of letter die). We set up on the floor in the living room, which is attached openly to the kitchen, where Mama Meldraw is making dinner. My mother has an undiagnosed addiction to word games, and so when she hears the deafening tumble of letter die, followed by exclamations of "I don't know how anyone finds any words with these letters!" she is drawn to it like an Olsen twin to a bathroom stall.Mama Meldraw begins by simply peering over our shoulders during play, nonchal Read more:Boggling
, Holiday
, Parker
, Brothers
, Products
, Comprehensive
, Labels
, Warning Labels
Ball bearings. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I've had some (concerned) inquiries about the continuing saga of Leah the Fitness Nazi, and my interesting combination of sadomasochistic and homicidal gymnastic tendencies.Leah herself is just fine, I'm sure you're relieved to hear, and has not been entered into the Fitness Protection Program as of yet. Partly contributing to my softening feelings toward her is the fact that over the last month, my workouts seem to be a little less suicidal than when they first began. They haven't gotten easier (in fact, they've gotten progressively more advanced), but my body has grown more accustomed to its new routine, and I'm quite a bit stronger. While I'm still pushing myself to exhausting limits, the next day I no longer feel as though I wandered into an Iron Maiden that was two sizes too small. I daresay that I look forward to my workouts while I'm sitting behind my desk at work, and days that I can't get to the gym make me a little stir-crazy.So you could say that my new fit Read more:bearings
Clowning Around 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Every office has a clown. Generally a person earns this label by putting plastic fish in the water cooler or removing the ink cartridges from all of the pens in the office. Less often does the person in question actually dress in multi-colored polka-dots, sporting KISS make-up and disproportionately large shoes.My office has that kind of clown.There's this guy, Norm. Norm works in Compliance, which mostly means that he has very little sense of humor. I mean, even less than normal insurance people, whose best attempts at hilarity involve one too many "So a salesman, an actuary, and an adjuster walk into a bar…" jokes. (Seriously. I was in a meeting the other day, and the speaker made another one of those jokes, and everybody laughed like they were watching an anti-drug PSA by Barry Bonds, and I just looked around and said to myself, "Where am I?")At any rate, Norm is a strikingly surly and sarcastic man. He's ornery. He is not a person whose sense of humor makes other people
Gesundheit. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I've got this coworker who looks eerily like Tim Robbins. (In fact, I've never seen the two of them in the same room together, so take that as you will.) He's an extremely nice man, very even-tempered, and goes out of his way to speak kindly to everyone. But he sneezes like a damn grenade.Seriously. It comes out of nowhere, and is so loud and forceful that you are momentarily thrown back against your cubicle wall as little bits of debris fall from the ceiling tiles and car alarms go off in the parking lot outside. It's terrifying. It sounds kind of like "AHA!" as if he's just discovered some life-changing revelation, and he's so excited about it that an uncontainable exclamation bursts forth from his chest like so much Alien animatronics. Our department consists of four cubicles crammed into a room the size of a smallish walk-in closet, and Tim "Sneezey" Robbins has the cubicle next to mine. I wondered why I found shooting range style earmuffs in my desk drawer when Read more:Gesundheit
A healthy appetite. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 It's nice that my gym has eight or ten televisions hanging from the ceiling. Each one is tuned to a different channel, with an audio box attached to every exercise machine where I can plug in my headphones and tune in to whatever channel I'm interested in. That's convenient, and gives me one less reason to stay home and make a big Meldraw-shaped dent in my couch that too often fills up with pennies and rubber bands and stale kernels of popcorn that I never discover until I lose the TV remote.I'm appreciative of the wide selection of television programming available to me while I'm on the StairMaster. (And I'm talking about the machine with the little pedals, not the giant half-of-a-down-escalator monstrosity that I refuse to climb because it makes me feel like I'm trapped in a freaky, acid-trippy M.C. Escher painting that I will never, ever get out of, so help me God. It also brings back my childhood fears of getting a shoelace caught in the escalator at the mall and bein Read more:healthy
, appetite
I think there's a hotline for this. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 There's a thing that happens to a person in an abusive relationship. While the abuse is taking place, she can clearly see the injustice; she wants to get out. She's taken her last hit. She packs her bags and gives the cat to a neighbor and makes arrangements to stay with her mother for awhile. But then the abuser comes home with a bunch of flowers and a cubic zirconium necklace and an apologetic smile and tells her how much he needs her and how his feelings for her just overwhelm him sometimes. And she believes he wants to change, and she puts her bags down and admires the Sparkly. She convinces herself that the mistreatments are probably temporary, and may even be a necessary sacrifice for those times she think
s she's truly happy.I have an abusive relationship with Cox Communications. Specifically: customer support.You may recall that when I got a grown-up job, I had a List of Things to Get Now That I'm Gainfully Employed. One of the things on that list was high-speed internet
The people have spoken. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Meet Isabelle. "Izzy" to her friends, which include pretty much everyone. And thus ends the slowest pet-naming process in recorded history, which has resulted in me calling her "Kid," "Girlfriend," and "Dawg" a lot, which is going to be a hard habit to break.Thanks for your help! Read more:people
Love means never having to put your cat in the microwave. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Selected excerpts from recent phone calls, emails, and discussions with various friends regarding my kitten, Isabelle:Izzy is fabulous. She's adorable and sweet and perfect. She kind of gets the crazies sometimes, but she's cute enough that she has a sort of built-in Get Out of Jail Free card. Kind of like Britney.She and I have a new game. I drag a popsicle stick around in mad little circles on the carpet, and she attacks it like Denmark. Then I toss the stick away, about 7 feet. She bounds after it and makes it her mission in life to pick the thing up in her mouth and bring it back to me immediately for more mad dragging. Circles. Toss. Retrieve. Circles. Toss. Retrieve. 25 times. It's especially funny when I toss the stick onto the linoleum, because it's very difficult to pick up a popsicle stick from linoleum when all you have to work with are several tiny teeth and a conspicuous lack of thumbs. She gets So! Intense! when she thinks she's not going to be able to get the thin Read more:microwave
Get a load of this. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Look. I understand if it was an accident. You had a load in the dryer when I put mine in the washer. I left my basket in there without its nametag or collar. It's not hard to imagine a situation in which you might have inadvertently mistaken my laundry basket for your own, and used it to bring your freshly dried clothes back to your apartment. It happens. We're human; we err.I'm going to assume it was a mistake. I'd prefer not to think about the possibility that you might have seen my basket sitting there by itself, noticed its clean lines and sturdy handles and thought to yourself, "Hey! Check out this warp-resistant core! What convenient, ergonomic shaping! What glorious venting!" and made a conscious decision to basket-nap. After all, how intelligent of a crime is that, anyway? We have five people in this building; odds are that you're not the 80-year old woman with a bad hip who lives above me, and you're probably not me, so we're really down to three. And even if you tried
V for VenJetta 1970-01-01 00:59:59 (You have interesting timing with your comments, EntertainedinIN. And an eerie sort of sixth sense, since I was composing this entry at the very moment I received your comment. Have you considered having that looked at? Or perhaps you're not psychic at all, but merely stalking me, in which case, would you mind picking up my dry-cleaning while you're out there? Many hands, and all.)(Apologies for my recent absence. I've had my hands full. Charity work, orphans, baby seals. Forgive me? Excellent, moving on…)Those of you versed in the varying vagaries of the vexatious VenJetta will be unsurprised to learn that the vehemently venomous vituperation of verbiage you thought you heard vented in the echoing vapors of the atmosphere Friday night was just me, fervidly cursing my vehicle again.(If you haven't seen V for Vendetta, you're only getting half the joke. View this vital video vignette for reference. I'll vait.)***I just wanted to stay home.I was looking forward to a quiet e
Fetch me my horse. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I have no excuse.Actually, no, that's not at all true. I have several excellent excuses for why I've blogged only once in the last five months, and I'm surprised to say that none of them are "No news here, move along." But most of those excuses boil down to the fact that finding a way to fit my life's happenings into coherent, non-despairing little boxes with tidy little literary arcs has moved way, way down on my priority list.I think this has been a mistake.The past several months have held a lot of ups and downs for me, the downs often traveling in packs, and I didn't feel much like putting a "Let Me Get This Straight" spin on most of it. Lack of time, lack of inspiration, lack of energy—whatever the reason, I could not find the blog posts in me. Looking back, I wonder if I shouldn't have tried a little harder. Reading over some old posts helped me remember that my particular brand of blogging is sometimes also my particular brand of coping; it's my way of taking my life an Read more:Fetch
Year in Review 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Last week, on January 31, I celebrated my one-year anniversary working for The Man.It's hard to believe an entire year has flown since my first week on the job. When I was first offered a full-time job, I was delighted by the thought that I would no longer have to collect couch cushion coins in order to pay my rent anymore. My brain immediately began tallying all the loose ends I could finally take care of with a salary and some insurance, and you might remember I made a handy list to keep it all straight.So what became of those goals?Going to the eye doctor:What I Said Then:It would be nice to wear reading glasses whose lenses do not routinely throw themselves from the frames. One of the arms actually dangles when you pick the glasses up, and I'm pretty sure that you're supposed to have two of those little padded feet on the bridge. I guess the actual prescription is sort of important, too, and fewer ocular migraines would really lower my Advil budget....And Now:I did go to the
That time with the legs. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Every family has those stories. You know, those ones that people tell over and over again because they are unique and bizarre and charmingly characteristic of the people involved? They're the stories you constantly find yourself pulling out at cocktail parties and reunions, like that time the dog came into the living room wearing Grandma's dentures, or the time you accidentally found yourself marching in a parade in an evening gown and tennis shoes while trying to cross the street, or that one summer in Italy when a spectacular communication breakdown nearly resulted in a whirlwind marriage to a foreign stranger, or the time your mom almost burned down the house with a board game, or - oh! - remember when you couldn't get a sitter, so you had to bring your toddler to your meeting with that NARC?Or, you know. Similar stories.So, my family has a lot of those. I grew up hearing them so often that I'd tend to forget how great they are, and sometimes I'd tune out at the famili
Well, alright then. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 CharliesAngel513 (8:07:24 PM): I hate to be a nag, but I'd like to point out that, from now on (until two weeks from today, which, crap, I thought it was three) I have to study 12 hours a day.Auto Response from Meldraw (8:07:25 PM): You're trying to communicate with me, I know it.CharliesAngel513 (8:07:43 PM): So... all I'm saying is that you haven't updated your blog yet this month.CharliesAngel513 (8:07:55 PM): even Gigglesnacks has you beat in updates.CharliesAngel513 (8:08:22 PM): I mean...you could post pictures of your feet, and I'll be happy, so long as you do it more often, is all I'm sayin'.CharliesAngel513 (8:08:24 PM): :-)You know this is why "real writers" mourn the unsupervised popularity and accessibility of the blogosphere, right?
Kitten smitten. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Oh, yes. She IS that cute. There's a new addition to the Meldraw household, and she is happiness embodied. I have a kitten.She is very small and very soft. She can jump the kitten equivalent of the Empire State Building, and she weighs less than my television remote control. Her little "mew" sounds like the tiniest jingle bell in existence, and her favorite thing is EVERYTHING. She arrived in the wee hours of Saturday morning, and by Sunday afternoon, she had decided I was hers forever and ever Amen.The kitten was born on a friend's farm in Kansas, part of a litter born to a wild stray cat that sought solace in the farmhouse basement. The entire litter was gregarious from birth, and my little one had already left her mother and was eating dry food by six weeks old. She is now seven weeks old, and has decided she is a puppy.She made the four-hour drive to my place with my kitty courier friend without a single complaint. She sat on the dash of an extraordinarily loud diesel truck Read more:Kitten
, smitten
WILFOAK #87 1970-01-01 00:59:59 What I've learned from owning a kitten, #87:That scene in The Lion King, where they hold up the new cub prince in a shaft of sunlight and the African chanting swells, and the animals all bow down to their future King? They took some serious artistic liberties there. A real kitten would be squirming and contorting and otherwise trying to dislocate a limb trying to get down. And humming African chants totally doesn't help keep them still.So I hear.
WILFOAK #104 1970-01-01 00:59:59 What I've learned from owning a kitten, #104:Either remain clothed in heavy-duty jeans and burlap shirts while in the kitten's presence, or invest some time in drafting a reasonable response to all the people who wonder why you look like you tried to commit suicide with a thumbtack.
WILFOAK #112 1970-01-01 00:59:59 What I've learned from owning a kitten, #112:It is entirely possible for a creature without thumbs to break three glasses in three seperate incidents, yet all in the same day.Relatedly, it is highly likely that said creature has an unexpectedly thorough mastery of Rube Goldberg's principles of cause and effect, which might explain how it's possible to be five feet away from a full water glass, and still be able to send it flying off of a very high surface, tumbling end over end at a rather impressive rate of speed, soaking no less than nine surfaces, some of which are above you, and two of which include exposed wires. Shame is not a necessary component of this ability.
Regime change. 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I've been meaning to write this blog entry for awhile now, so this may not be news to some of you. But even though it happened two weeks ago, the glowy feeling inside probably won't leave me for at least a couple of months.::deep breath::The VenJetta is finished. I won.It started several weeks ago. The driver's side window wouldn't go down (again), and I brought the car to the shop to be fixed. Having already replaced the motor on every other window in the car, I expected to pay a couple hundred dollars and be on my way. Naturally, I was wrong. An inspection of the VenJetta's inner workings revealed that there was over $1,000 worth of other things that needed to be fixed, or else I would die on the side of the road in the very near future. I asked them to fix only the absolutely necessary items, and brought the bill down to $860, which I paid for with my slowly accumulating (and constantly deferred) New Car Fund. I briefly wondered why I was not more upset by this development
Wait, don't go away! 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Don't worry; you're in the right spot. Let Me Get This Straight has just had a little work done.I've had this blog for over a year now, and it was time for a nip/tuck. I grew tired of the old Blogger template with the orange star in the corner that looked like it belonged on an athletic shoe and the giant 897 watermark that wasn't code for anything. Typographically, there were things about the template I liked and it served me well enough, but it was beginning to feel worn. Since I couldn't find a template that expressed my individuality, or one that I even liked, I decided to make my own.Also, I think if one is being paid to be a "Multimedia Specialist," one really has no room to complain about a cookie-cutter template, and she should perhaps take some initiative already.So, I set about learning how to write my own blog template. Surprisingly, I found it a little more difficult than writing regular webpages or even entire sites. This is partly because I only ever taught myself HT
Executive decision. 2007-03-01 15:22:00 Dear Corporate Employers,Looking out my window, I see that when the snow is not falling in actual solid plates, it's moving in an angrily horizontal way. I can't see the building 30 feet away, partly because of the white-out conditions and partly because someone appears to have spackled over my windows. Al Roker tells me there's going to be 10" more on the ground by this afternoon, and although I don't put a whole lot of stock in his meteorological expertise, he seems to be backed up by Respected Weather King of the Greater Omaha Area, Jim Flowers.Every school is closed and every news station is telling me to absolutely stay off the roads unless it's an emergency, because crews are sick of hauling our asses out of ditches. News anchors are showing CityCam shots of nothing but white while plugging the Today Show’s upcoming segment on “Fun Things to do on a Snow Day!” because obviously, they say, no non-essential personnel should be at work today. Then they laugh superciliousl Read more:Executive
, decision
Based on a true story. 2007-03-16 15:18:00 I was all set to write a blog entry today that detailed the tragic, autobiographical Lifetime-movie account of a suicidal computer that had flirted with death and the devoted owner who wrestled it back from the brink in a tear-jerking and inspiring display of personal strength. It was filled with suspense, determination, heartbreak, and hope. When all seemed lost, the stoic owner pulled together threads of ingenuity and fortitude from every dark corner of her body and used them to MacGyver her despairing computer back into working condition, with some help from her charmingly techy-yet-accessible friends, and the intellectually dashing computer paramedic who made housecalls. There were some laughs along the way (she wrote a blog entry by hand!), some tears (she was about to lose everything!), and some nail-biting action scenes (her freelance projects threatened to come crashing down around her!), but ultimately it was a story
about perseverance, and it ended with smiles of relief and a
Evil never dies. 2007-03-20 00:23:00 These are the things I think of when I see the phrase “Evil never dies”:Halloween: Resurrection, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and, inexplicably, Busta Rhymes. Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies, starring pretty much nobody at all.Amityville Dollhouse, the eighth installment of the Amityville Horror saga. No, really. (Incidentally, I cannot believe they went through eight movies before falling back on this trusty tagline.)Christine, starring the VenJetta.I thought I was done writing about the VenJetta in my blog. I’d closed that chapter in my life, mourned the loss of some reluctantly great writing material, and breathed my first sigh of vehicular relief in five years.Unfortunately, I forgot that evil never dies. It only moves around, finding new makeshift hosts to carry out its rancor in imaginative ways. This, at least, is the only explanation I can find for the startling upheaval in all of my home appliances.It started with my computer. My PC began crashing with some regularity several
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