Being Amber Rhea

Since lots of people are posting about pumpkin carving (obligatory example) and other Halloween-themed adventures, I’ll put up a picture of the last time I carved a pumpkin, which was two years ago. Here I am, on my 24th birthday, in Dallas, carving away:

Between the three of us, John, Corley, and I (a.k.a. “Team Dallas”) produced five bad-ass jack-o-lanterns. Here are the fruits of our labor, as it were:

These are two of several pictures that I scanned last night, when I got weirdly sentimental about my brief stint in Dallas. (I blame the cold medicine.) Anyway, I added about 25 pieces of previously unscanned photographic evidence to my Texas Gallery. The new ones start on page 4.

I just realized, today is an anniversary of sorts. Two years ago, Cari and I were hurtling west on I-20, en route to Dallas and my new life there. Here is the fateful last entry before leaving Georgia (I know, it’s not exciting at all). Of course, we all know how The Dallas Experiment turned out… but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t regret it at all. I learned a lot while I was there. And I had some good times, too - being driving distance from Niki was huge. Anyway… that’s where that is. I can hardly believe it’s been two years.

Good for Texas! Finally, they are taking steps to remedy the problems that lead to teenage pregnancy. They see a problem, and they address it aggressively and proactively, in the interest of the welfare of the state’s teens. Their methods… what could they be? Realistic, comprehensive sex education? Readily available contraception? Dialogues about sexual behavior, which involve talking to teenagers like people instead of retarded monkeys?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong!

Let’s crack down on cheerleading!

Apparently, “suggestive cheerleading” leads to “pregnancies, dropouts and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.” It’s a perfectly logical progression. Just like how our friend in Every Young Man’s Battle drew a direct line of connection between masturbating at age 11, and his girlfriend having an abortion in college.

…why am I living in Bizarro World?

Now it won’t have quite the same effect. Oh well.

Referring to my pen-and-paper journal (how archaic!) from a year ago: Feb. 17th 2004 was the day I got my official offer letter (even though I already knew I had the job, since the weekend before that I flew to ATL to find an apartment) and put in my notice with Katapultz (who would announce less than a month later the fact that they were going out of business as of June 2004). Anyway, just thought it was momentous! Sadly, I don’t have an electronic or paper version of my blog from mid-January - mid-May 2004, so I can’t see what I wrote for public consumption.

Everyone knows where I work, but I’m feeling stupid and paranoid tonight so I’m not mentioning the company name herein. I know that simply saying where I work isn’t going to get me dooced — and I know that my boss knows about my blog and evidently has no quarrel with it — but still.

I’ve only been to Richmond, VA once, and I liked it, but I’ll defer to the girl who lives there. Anyway, my blog entry for today is entirely mostly lifted from a comment I made on her blog. (What can I say, I’m lazy.)

During my 7-month stay in Dallas, Texas, I tried really hard not to be one of “those people” [who complain about their new city of residence]. I gave it my all, to keep a positive attitude and see the good things about my new “home” (where I never did really feel at home). I knew it wasn’t just because the place wasn’t Georgia — because when I lived in New York City I felt at home there almost immediately. Anyway, I am glad I gave it “the old college try” with the positive attitude. I mean, what more can you do?

But in the end, I couldn’t hold it in. I mean… I could count on one hand the number of places you could get sweet tea in Dallas. There’s no excuse for that!

So that’s where that is.

I went to the Georgia for Democracy Volunteer Night tonight. It got me all riled up about the anti-choice bills coming through the Georgia General Assembly this year. (I actually wrote a fairly long entry about it earlier, but foolishly forgot to copy it to the clipboard, and then Safari crashed — which it does once every, oh, 3 months or so. Lucky me. :P ) I’m calling GARAL tomorrow. I’ve chosen my cause and this is it!

Oh, and I’m in a story on Nick’s blog. I’ll go ahead and warn you, though: it’s kind of disturbing. (It’s a two-parter; read the Jan. 14th entry first.)

Excerpt from my old-fashioned, pen-and-paper journal (which I don’t write in nearly enough), from Jan. 3rd, 2004:

I’m back in DFW now after visiting Chris in Georgia for 2 weeks. And I’m more confused than ever now. I’ve had a headache all day. … At first I was glad to be back in my apartment. And I still am, don’t get me wrong; my apartment is one thing that I do like about living here. It’s my little safe haven. … I have pretty much decided that barring a miracle, I’m quitting Katapultz after this year. But tonight I’m starting to feel this dread and wondering if I can even do it for 4 more months. I don’t want my life to pass me by.

So, yeah. Consider this the obligatory “Wow, look how much things can change over the course of 1 year” entry.

I’m thinking of starting a private, password-protected blog that’s accessible only to me. I could even just run it on my iBook. That way I could write down everything I want, but type instead of writing by hand… because I’m pretty sure I have carpal tunnel or something. :P My hand always cramps up.

My DSL modem finally came today, so I am all set up with that. Yay, no more dial-up! Now I just have to set up the wireless router so I can move my iBook around my [albeit small] apartment at will. I’ve never had DSL before and apparently it is PPPoE, so I hope that’s not a problem for the router.

On the 27th (next Wednesday) I will finally be connected to the “master satellite” on the roof of the building, so I can actually watch something other than the handful of DVDs and VHS tapes I own on the brand new TV I bought. In the meantime I am having a hell of a time getting in touch with DirecTV to cancel my order and get my money back. (I had thought that I needed to go through them and get my own little dish, because nobody in the leasing office bothered to tell me about this master satellite situation… thankfully my next-door neighbor did.) It’s always something…

Work is work. There is still a substantial amount of information I need that I don’t have. Some server passwords, for example. It irritates me a bit. I hope I get that stuff soon, since I need to install some software on a whole lab of machines. How thrilling!

I put some cotton balls in the bird cage to see what Franny and Zooey would do with it. One of them (can’t tell which from over here) is holding some cotton in his beak. :-) I hope they build a nest with it in their nestbox. :-)

Tonight I drove to Borders. -Okay, first, a note of clarification: I spent the afternoon with Niki’s mom. We had lunch at Fazoli’s (yay!), then went to a new Super-Target, and then to her office at Time Warner Cable to clean out the refrigerator (sp?) in the staff room. And get this, she let me borrow her *car*! She said I can have the Passat until Monday night! (One of the first things she said to me when she picked me up at the hotel was, “I’m mad at you, you should have called; if I’d known that you didn’t have any means of transportation, I’d have given you this car!”) They have like 3 cars so it’s not a problem. But I was totally floored, I couldn’t believe it! So now I have a car and it was hilarious what a sudden feeling of freedom came over me. (That sentence was a grammatical disaster.)

Okay, back to the story at hand. I drove to Borders tonight and bought The Language Police by Diane Ravitch. I managed to read one chapter of it before the store closed. Fascinating topic, and one which I would like to blog about (ack! I used blog as a verb! not to mention ending a clause with a preposition!) at a later time. This entry is more ethereal (read: cheesy). So anyway, as I was driving back from Borders I was listening to Automatic for the People, which, to my good fortune, had been left in the CD player. I stopped at the traffic light at the intersection across from the hotel, and I sat there… and sat there… there was no one else around and the light wasn’t changing, it was like those crazy lights in Athens that refuse to change even when there’s no one else coming for miles. But as I was sitting there at that intersection, with no sign of any other cars or people around, listening to Find the River and looking around at the dark, still night sky, it was just… I don’t know, a moment. I sang along quietly with the song and everything just felt kind of right. -Actually, it wasn’t so much that everything felt right, but more like the absence of feeling, but in a good way… -argh, I can’t describe this, I was never meant to be a metaphysicist. Maybe you get what I’m trying to say.

I parked the car in the parking lot and it was kind of funny because it was perfect timing — Find the River ended as soon as I stopped the car. I got out and walked toward the hotel; there was a breeze coming up and who knows, it might actually rain tonight (I doubt it though). As I walked through the parking lot I felt profoundly okay. My line of sight into the future was completely blind, but that didn’t bother me. A couple was walking a little ways ahead of me and they just seemed like another part of the surroundings. I took a second and thought about not thinking, and then went on into the hotel.

Now I’m here with my faithful little iBook, listening to Liz Phair mp3s and relaxing. The feelings that inspired me to write this entry have dissipated a bit. Starting to worry again about things like whether I have to pay a $100 deposit to TXU, and where the hell my new cell phone might be, and if there will be any problems with the moving truck, and so on. But today was a good day (don’t worry, I’m not going to make any Ice Cube references) and for the most part I still feel pretty good. Here’s hoping tomorrow will be a good day too. [takes a swig of Sprite]

That reminds me of something else kinda funny and noteworthy. Last night we were somewhere (dinner?) and I said that I wanted to buy myself an iPod as a present to myself for getting a job. One of my fellow TCs asked how much iPods cost. I said about $250 (okay, I see now that they start at $299, but whatever) and he made a noise that was meant to convey his feeling that that was expensive. I said, “It’s really not that expensive if you consider everything you get.” He was like, “Yeah, but I’d rather spend my $250 on — oh wait, you don’t drink…” So we had a little laugh at that. I don’t know what the hell I would do if I *did* drink — I mean, I’ve been broke enough for the past few years as it is, I can’t imagine what a hole I’d be in if I had to account for a “beer budget.” I said something to that effect, and the response was something along the lines of, “Well we make adjustments, we all have our priorities…” Yeah, okay, anyway… I do want an iPod, btw. It will have to wait until after several paychecks because I’m gonna be racking up even more debt with this move, but hopefully sometime in the not too distant future I will be stylin’ and profilin’ with my mp3 player/hard drive/PDA/Solitaire console.

Wow, this is pretty long; I haven’t been this verbose in a long time. Here’s your referrer search-o-the-day:

 26 Jul, Sat, 14:12:06 Google: g3 for gay urban women from june 2003

As well as your daily dose of Liz Phair:

What if I’m not able
To put my cards on the table?
And would it liberate you
If you knew what I knew?

And that’ll be all for now!