Know something? It’s not easy to take a picture of yourself. Or, well, it’s not easy for me… my aim’s all off and whatnot.
Really, only 3 decent pictures came out of this debacle. Hence:
(This was right before I screwed it all up.)
This morning I went to get my hair did at 8:00 AM. -Well, actually, my appointment was at 8:45, but Chris had an appointment at 8:00 and we went together — we’re fabulous! So anyway, the fabulous gay man I usually go to was already booked, so when I scheduled the appointment a few days ago I had to go to this other woman, the only one who was available. Turns out I went to high school with her (at Evans). She recognized me before I recognized her (probably because she was using a different name; I asked her about it and she said, “Yeah, when you start working here, if you have the same name as someone else, they make you pick another name.”) She started by asking me if I knew [name removed to protect the guilty] — and I said, “Wow… yeah, he was my boyfriend for 2 ill-advised months in 9th grade.” That’s when she told me who she was, and that was followed by a few minutes of the usual, “Ohmigod, how are you, this is so crazy…” etc. She informed me that she had kept in touch with the guy in question until a few years ago, and the last she’d heard of him, he had “come out” (“even though he still dated women, so I don’t know, maybe he’s bi or something,” she explained), was on drugs, had ripped a bunch of people off, had gotten a girl pregnant, and was “living with her in some crackhouse.” Nice!
She asked me if I kept in touch with anyone from Evans and I said just a few. I asked if she remembered Jenny, Niki, or Dipika. She said she knew their names, but that’s all. Which makes sense — they moved in entirely different circles. So anyway, I was kind of on edge throughout the entire haircut… because even as we reminisced and commiserated against the people who were the “popular” kids in high school and used to make fun of us, I was remembering that she used to make fun of me a bit. Now, let me regale you with tales of the social hierarchy at fantastic Evans High School! She was decidedly part of the so-called “freak” contingent. I was on the fringes of that group, but wasn’t cool enough (understand the extreme irony here, btw, as most of the people who were cool enough are now apparently dead or on drugs) to really be a part of it; I didn’t shop at the hip downtown stores — ok, store — or listen to music that was obscure enough…etc. I was a “poser” or whatever according to her group; I was remembering that. I was also remembering the time she ate some acid before home room and was freaking out by 3rd period. Nice.
Finally I’d gotten fed up with the complete and utter bullshit of this contrived social hierarchy, and my parents let me transfer to Augusta Prep. The rest, as they say, is history. To be fair, I probably would’ve liked Evans better during junior and senior year, taking refuge in AP classes with Jenny, Niki, Dipika, and the rest of those kind of people (uh, smart people). Still, it’s interesting how such a seemingly innocuous — friendly, even — reunion can turn a part of you right back into that awkward, depressed, self-conscious 15-year-old (and when I say you, I mean me).
Later I’ll have an amusing photo montage for you of my new haircut, before I climbed into bed and napped it all up. If I told you how long it’s taking me to do this in Photoshop, you’d laugh and call me a freak. So I won’t.
Now that I have a new Extreme Tracker on my blog (because I’m too lazy to read the Analog reports on my host), I thought I’d take a look-see at how people are finding me.
28 Apr, Thu, 08:45:10 Google: how many times is "Bennie" in Bennie and The Jets mentioned
28 Apr, Thu, 08:56:42 MSN Search: fred's car .com.
28 Apr, Thu, 12:01:33 MSN Search: types of monkies
28 Apr, Thu, 14:52:49 Google: corprorate information politics
28 Apr, Thu, 15:15:59 MSN Search: avril legs feet
28 Apr, Thu, 16:28:57 MSN Search: weird girl pics
28 Apr, Thu, 19:14:02 Google: how to get laid at nyu
Huh.
Is “my own personal opinion” really redundant? (You know where I stand on this; and I know Niki, for one, will back me up.) The debate has begun, over at Garrett’s blog (scroll to the comments section), where he’d wanted to talk about healthcare, but instead has been sucked into a semantics debate. Mwahahaha!!
I gotta figure out why my Kung-Tunes thing isn’t working suddenly (well, “suddenly” as in, the last few days). All it is is a simple PHP include. The file is getting uploaded correctly. If I paste the URL into my browser it works. (See for yourself: http://amber.tangerinecs.com/kt/trackinfo.php.) I’m giving it an absolute URL in the include statement. And yet, nada. Very puzzling and annoying.
Jeff Moore has consolidated some of the articles out there comparing PHP and ASP. This debate is getting almost as heated as the perennial “Mac vs. PC” debate, or the even nerdier “vi vs. emacs” debate. I think you all know where I stand on this, so I won’t start pontificating.
I feel safer now. Don’t you?
I’m up so late that I dared to put the f-word in the title of this entry.
I’m abusing the repeat function in iTunes again. This time with “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne. (And I don’t want to hear your shit about it.) All the teen pseudo-angst seems somehow strangely appropriate, alongside reading all my old blog entries and thinking about how different things used to be and how little I knew of what was going to come and hit me in the face like a sack of bricks.
Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?
In recognition of my blog’s third birthday, Chris was nice enough to dump the data from the old database onto my Dreamhost space, and I put up a front end to view it here. You can’t leave comments or anything; it’s for historic purposes only. Apparently I was wrong in remembering the exact date of my blog’s birth; it was April 17th, not April 22nd. I’ve been reading the entries from summer of 2002 and they’re tearing me up inside.
Let it begin…
And, as a bonus, Lewis Black was in the audience! OMG I was like 4 feet from him when we were walking out the door. Chris said I should go shake his hand and tell him I love his comedy, but I got all schoolgirl embarrassed (same way I did at the SES Conference, with Eric Meyer) and couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was awesome to see him in person anyway, though.
After the show, Chris and I went to IHOP. It seemed appropriate and even obligatory.
I also visited the ‘rents and my grandmother. As always, I am grateful for Atlanta after spending a day in Augusta. (Jen: hang out at PJ’s and Barnes and Noble.) I forgot to take a picture of this awesome billboard on Wrightsboro Rd., that said “Alcoholism” in huge letters, beside a huge glass of beer; smaller letters said something along the lines of, “There is help.” Hmmm… “who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
Tomorrow I’ll be spending approximately 3/5 of the day sitting on my ass.
