Peckels

What up, Blawg?!  Girl checkin' in here.  About to go hang out with my sister while her baby daddy (yep) goes to a tattoo expo here in Asheville.  Navy talks are slowing down.  I don't know what is going on.  No one ever calls me back.  I wonder if there is something weird in my background check.  I can't think of anything that I've done that could be considered unpatriotic.  Anyway, I'm going to keep bugging them and hope that my waiver gets passed through so that I can join.  If it doesn't, my only other options are the Marines or the Army and I just really don't think that's my style.  The Coast Guard is fucking hard as shit to get into and they don't normally grant waivers for criminal pasts.  Anyway, enough about that.  Leah got a new bad ass job.  I'm so jealous.  Anyway she's going to be serving at a new bar/restaurant downtown that apparently specializes in ceviche and tequila.  I didn't know what ceviche was until yesterday.  She told me they have the longest tequila list in Asheville.  HA!  Think of all the wild stories she'll have to tell!  I need some stories.  Oh, I'm learning Mandarin.  I went to Downtown Books and bought a couple guides a few weeks ago and now I can pretty well speak super simple conversational dialogue.  The kind of things that gets you from place to place and allows you to order coffee and liquor when you don't really know the language.  I also downloaded some classic kung-fu movies in Chinese so I can learn how to truly pronounce the words (lol).  I took the final step yesterday and got the Rosetta Stone Mandarin language pack.  That's right, I got it.  Bitches.  I hope that I can learn it well enough to pass a proficiency test in the Navy and get a CTI rating.  So far sentence structure is stripped down and very easy.  It's the reading and writing that I'm feeling discouraged about.  I'll have to devote half of my brain storage to nothing but strokes and characters.  The other half will go to recognition of those characters.  So I'm pretty much going to be a brain dead zombie who does nothing but write all over the wallpaper in Chinese.  That could be a good movie.  Leah and I are gathering up supplies to start pickling onions and lemons and weird shit like that.  We are also going to make peanut oil and weird vinegars.  You may not have known this about my girlfriend, but she is an AMAZING cook.  She knows about everything ever.  And if she doesn't know something right off, she has an endless supply of resources that she's been collecting over time.  She is really into Asian cuisine right now and wants to become a master.  Anyway we are going to bottle a bunch of sauces and oils and pickles and shit so she can sell them.  You guys know how much I love entrepreneurial opportunities.  I'm about to have a nervous breakdown due to lack of caffeine.  我想喝咖啡  DO YOU SEE THAT?!  God.

grl

See that desk? It had dinosaur cut-outs epoxied to it.

Valentine's Day: Pinot Noir, purple lilacs, raw bleu, Irish porter cheddar and smoked gouda cheese plate (girlfriend's faves).

It would have almost been romantic if I hadn't chosen Riverside Cemetery as the picnic location.

BTW, I'm joining the Navy. AGAIN, lol.


-girl

Misc. Update

grl

Scrooge McDuck

Papaw died :(

I am moving to Asheville on January 1st. Hopefully Leah can get all her affairs in order. My last day of work was today and the house is all packed up and ready to go. Now all we are waiting on is for her mom to get the financial aid squared away. It's taking longer than we expected and there is a chance that she may not get it in time. I will be very, very upset if I have quit my job and terminated my lease for nothing. But I guess that's life and I'll just have to get over it.

I'm a selfish person. I try not to be, but sometimes I am. It seems to me that I live my life for other people. I try not to piss my parents off and I try to be supportive of the people I love, but good god. I just want to be able to do what I want. I want a family who accepts me and I want to be able to take opportunities and chances. But then I remember that other people don't have parents at all and that I should appreciate the life I have. I'm sorry if I want more. I love my girlfriend and I want the best for her. I want to help her achieve her goals, but I can only do what she will allow. I feel really out of sorts about all this. I know I can make everything okay. Great even. No one will let me. Maybe I've taken all my chances and lived the way I wanted already. Maybe now I have to relinquish control of my life and leave it in the hands of fate. I don't want that. I want to be at the helm. But my decisions affect other people and I am having a hard time getting around that.

I've been laughing at this for days:


girl

Shocking Realization: Suicide!

This is my first "shocking realization" and I think its a great debut:

I SAW HALF OF A DEAD PERSON. Capital letters are really important here. Leah and I were driving home on Saturday night at midnight when we came upon two fire trucks and a cop car or two. There was a stopped train and lots of flashlights. The authorities hadn't been there long and we were the first to arrive after them. I cracked the window and heard a lot of dogs barking. Our lane was blocked so we had time to kill. I made Leah move closer so I could get a better look. The street lights follow the train tracks because they are right beside of a little green-way that runs through town (my cycling path), making the severed bottom half of a very unfortunate person perfectly visible. It was a shocking realization if I've ever had one. The legs and ankles looked thin. The feet wore orange flip flops and the legs sported navy sweat pants that appeared to be too small. There was nothing gruesome besides the blood that had stained the groin area of the pants black. Oh and the MISSING TORSO. His flip flops were still on his feet and his legs were in a spread eagle position. Nothing vulgar or distasteful. More comfortable than anything. Anyway, as you can imagine there was a lot of gagging and screaming in our vehicle. The usual carrying-on. There is no police report or anything and I finally found out today that it was a "homeless person". They won't give any other details. Leah and I thought it looked like a child aged 12-14 years. Based on the size of the feet. I mean that's all there was to base this observation on. I'm going to Nancy Drew this mystery until I figure out all of the details. I even went so far as to post an accident report on some accident report database website thing. The internet makes detective work a breeze.

girl

Sugarwalls

I know I've been posting a lot recently. Sorry, Chuck. I'll die of boredom if I don't. I'm at work right now. Being tortured by Kat Country online streaming. It's commercial-free! I endure this everyday. It's half the reason why I'm quitting. Having said that, what free time I have here is generally spent googling phrases like "the band perry sucks" or "luke bryan terrible" to find other people who share my contempt for these assholes. Surprisingly, the results I'm looking for are few. With the exception of Sugarland. There's a huge divide there. Either people love them or hate them. And by 'them' I mean the lead singer. Everytime "It Happens" comes on the radio I think, "Okay, I'm definitely going to have a seizure this time." I brace myself right before the "wally world" line.

Today, however, is my lucky day. I found a blog called Crappy Country Song of the Week. The person is a little pretentious, but what blogger isn't? Hell, I know I am. It's really funny though and you should give it a try. This person understands that, when refering to the genre in general, "country" is a misleading umbrella term. Good country music exists, but it belongs to a different generation. I'll be fair and say that good contemporary country music exists too. Somewhere out there. Just not on the radio.

girl

While Reading The Papers

Sweet article on the correlation between the price of drugs and violence trends: http://www.economist.com/node/21540452

Not the expected conclusion.

girl