Dress is in!

what if my dress looked like this?
it's kind of growing on me...

Oh no! With eleven months to go until the wedding, my dress has arrived! Why is this an "Oh no!" you ask? Because a) I am very indecisive -- I am afraid I will change my mind about loving the dress by having it around for So.Damn.Long; b) I am impatient -- it is going to drive me nuts having this dress and not being able to wear it; c) I am the opposite of discreet -- I don't know HOW I am going to have this thing in our house and not show my groom, who clearly has so much more self control than I do, because his only reaction to hearing my news was, "oh, cool!" instead of "oh, cool, can I see it, can I see it?!" which is what I would have done.

Now, I don't have it yet. I just know it is in the store, waiting for me to come and take it home. What if I go and I hate it? What if I go, I bring it home, I try it on with shoes to see how much I should get shortened off the hem, and I snag it, tearing to pieces, spilling food/drink/paint on it in the process? (WHY are these things near my dress in this scenario?! I don't know...)

I think I need to have faith that if I loved it when I bought it, I will love it when I bring it home. And if I don't love it... I better learn to, because I am pretty sure I can't return it!

Word of the day: Obnoxious

obnoxious |əbˈnäk sh əs|
adjective
extremely unpleasant.
ORIGIN late 16th cent. (in the sense [vulnerable [to harm]] ): from Latin obnoxiosus, from obnoxius ‘exposed to harm,’ from ob- ‘toward’ + noxa ‘harm.’ The current sense, influenced by noxious , dates from the late 17th cent.

Things I believe could accurately be described as obnoxious:

People who back into parking spots. Why do they do this? This is extremely obnoxious! An ex-boyfriend used to do this and it drove me nuts. I asked him for a reason once, and his response was, "it makes it easier to drive away." Easier than what? I do not understand. You can drive into your parking spot and back out of it when you leave (total time this takes, an approximate 2.10223 seconds), or you can look like a jackass backing into a parking spot, which I know takes more than 2.10223 seconds, and then look like a smug jackass when you drive away. If as you read this you realize you are guilty of this obnoxious behavior, please stop. You are obnoxious.

The luxury SUV L.A. population. These people are ridiculous. On the way out of L.A. last week, we played a fun game called, "count the big cars." It's a simple game, really -- you count how many big cars (SUVs, vans, pickup trucks) you see in a row before a small car (like a sedan, though we allowed Scions to be in this category) interrupts the flow. I think one time I got to 11. Then, a little car would come, followed by 7 or 8 big cars. But these aren't just big cars. They aren't just pick-up trucks; they are obnoxious big cars and pick-up trucks. They are Escalades, Explorers, Yukons, dual-cabin-extra-long-bed-wide-as-a-motherfucker cars. With 85-lb blonde, fake-tanned women driving them to pick up their chihuahuas from the beauty salon. This is obnoxious. Within 20 minutes (TWENTY!) I counted eight (EIGHT!!!!) Hummers.
*This is the appropriate time to include a subcategory of obnoxious people:
People who drive Hummers.
You are obnoxious. Please stop. You live in California, not a military base. You are going to the Lakers game, not a secret operation in the desert. You drink soy lattes with light foam, wear 200 dollar torn jeans, and the closest you've come to combat is playing video games. You probably spend half your paycheck on gas. You are obnoxious. Please stop being a jackass.
I regress. Back to the big cars. When we got back up to Palo Alto, I realized there are many big cars here too - but in the week that we've been back, I have not seen one (ONE!) Yukon, Escalade, Navigator, or Hummer (this is not to say they never appear). The point is, I have seen more Priuses driving on the way to work today (2.5 miles) than I have obnoxious luxury SUVs in a month. L.A. drivers who ride in luxury SUVs but never go offroading, or even out of L.A. -- you are obnoxious. (Here is a fun wrap-up of other obnoxious L.A. driving behavior.)

The medical industry. The medical industry as a whole is obnoxious. Kaiser Permanente is my insurance provider, so I can really just focus on them. The referral system is obnoxious; the fact that their website says "refill your prescription online," lets me enter all my information, confirms that my prescription is arriving in the mail, then FOUR DAYS LATER emails me saying, "your prescription cannot be refilled, and please don't reply to this email as the pharmacy will not read your message," and then directs me to the same page where I originally filled in my information -- this is all obnoxious. Also obnoxious -> trying to call KP and waiting on hold for 25 minutes until I get fed up and hang up, only to have to do this later. Kaiser is obnoxious.

Twenty year old college students who wear Ralph Lauren collared sweaters with dress shirts underneath. You are obnoxious. You are twenty, you binge drink, and you room with four other guys. You are not yet a businessman, a lawyer, or a senator. Act your age. Extra obnoxious points - when said collared RL sweaters are worn with sandals. Completely mind boggling. You are obnoxious, please stop.
(A note on the image: this is not exactly what I'm talking about, but the fact that this is how RL markets their clothes makes wearing them that much extra obnoxious.)

Old people who think that because they are old, they can be obnoxious. I will cite an example: On Tuesday last I was preparing for an event at work that was starting in, oh, about 20 minutes. I check on the room and find out 137 chairs have been set out, and I was only expecting a few over 50 people to show up. So, I scurry and try to take out as many of the extra chairs as possible - nothing worse than too many empty chairs!! -- and just then, an old man comes and sits down in a chair that was CLEARLY meant to be taken away (seeing as how every other chair in that column had already been cleared). I let him know, as nicely as I can, that I mean to clear all the chairs in that row. To which he responds, "Hmf! I think they call those columns." So obnoxious! If you are old, please do not be obnoxious just because you think being old gives you the right to do so. Being old gives you the right to fall asleep during boring talks, walk slowly when you cross the street, and tell the same story over and over again. It does not give you the right to be obnoxious.

This concludes my examples of how to use the word of the day: obnoxious.

I am not nice enough to work at Trader Joe's

It might be because I am getting older; or because I am getting bored of eating the same thing all the time; maybe it's because dining out is just too damn expensive, and again, becomes boring after a while. Whatever the case, I've recently decided that I want to be an amateur foodie, that fustian (GRE word!) label adopted by high-falutin' yuppies who occasionally cook and tell everyone they do so.

For this purpose, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are definitely my friends - a couple of weeks ago, I managed to make a surprisingly successful Indian-inspired lamb dish, complete with naan and curry rice (don't get too excited, it was just rice-maker rice with curry powder in it; but it was good!). Whole Foods has really good, cheap, Indian sauces, and you just cook up the lamb with the sauce for a super easy but delicious dish. I'd bought some fresh pesto from Whole Foods, and spread that on olive oil-sprinkled naan, topped with a bit of grated cheese, and stuck in the oven for ten minutes - easy, quick, and so so good!

Then, there was the ham tacos adventure, again surprisingly successful! Basically, just sautee the ham a bit with some fresh salsa, chopped onions, and spices, and fill tacos with said ham, top with fresh guacamole (I cheated and bought Whole Foods guac, instead of making my own, and it was delicious), and you have a quick, easy, and nutritious meal.

It helps that I have a good partner in eating. A few weeks ago, M made the best chicken-tortilla soup I've ever had! It sounds like it took a while to make, but the results were definitely delicious.

Last week, I took on the baking challenge. I don't think I've ever actually baked anything from scratch before, so when we decided to make cookies for Valentine's Day, I was a bit skeptical. But, our chocolate chip, dark chocolate M&Ms, and sprinkles cookies came out mmmm mmmm good! Perfect for the rainy long weekend.

Today, I'm attempting to make a polenta pizza dish I found in the New York Times. Seriously, it doesn't get yuppier than getting recipes from the NYT, but I have a feeling it will be delicious. I made the polenta this morning, and it's chilling in the fridge while I avoid doing homework at the library (more on that later). When I get home, I'll cook up some spinach with pancetta, cover the polenta with feta cheese (substituted for Gorgonzola, which the recipe called for), tomato sauce, and some fresh basil, and bake it all up.

Okay, now to the point of this whole post - with my renewed interest in cooking has come a renewed relationship with Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. I was at TJ's last night, buying up the spinach, pancetta, feta, etc. for tonight's dinner, and realized how friendly the Trader Joe's staff is. And not fake friendly, but genuinely nice, enthusiastic, and really chatty. I remember thinking this when I first moved to Palo Alto and started going to the local TJs a lot during the summer. But it's been a few months, and I was completely zoned out last night, so when the cashier started up a conversation while bagging my groceries, I was slightly surprised. "Why is this person talking to me?" I asked myself. That's when I realized, I am really not nice enough to work at Trader Joe's. I don't care what people have planned for their weekend. I couldn't care less about what people are planning to make with the things they buy from the grocery store. I truly don't want to make small talk with people I will probably never see again. I want to stay in my bubble, and have that bubble bump up against other people's bubbles without those bubbles actually merging into a conversation arena. For the majority of the time, I want to be left alone until I choose to make small talk with a very select number of people (apparently, aside from being anti-social, I'm also rather arrogant. Note to self - Food for thought?)

Here is evidence to back up my discovery about my lack of niceness. I got to the Mountain View Public Library, set up my computer, was syncing my iPhone with I-Tunes, and realized that there were - gasp - children running rampant among the shelves. (This seems to be a recurring problem). I could not see them - there were two! - but I could hear them. I could hear them giggle and whimper and make strange, alien, sounds that only small children can make. Did I think, how cute? No, I thought "Shut up, you little rug-rats!" Now, if I were as nice as the young man in Trader Joe's last night, I would have probably thought nicer thoughts, and even if I was annoyed to the point of doing something about it, I'd have done it in a nice, pleasant manner. Not I. Two more minutes and I would have walked over, looked at the mother with squinted eyes, and said something like, "Ma'am, this is a library. Please keep your snotty children quiet! I can't concentrate with all this noise!!" (Okay I wouldn't have said "snotty" but I like to dream).

The snot-nosed ones have since gone downstairs, I think. Little matter, because now I have my headphones on and Joni Mitchell is singing to me, so I couldn't hear them anyway. But the point is - I am not a nice person. I daydream about yelling at strangers' children, and wish cashiers would just leave me alone. I could never cut it in the country song mythical small town where everyone knows each other. That's a nightmare scenario for me, living somewhere where one can't ever be anonymous.

Now that I have that out of the way, I should really get down to studying. I had signed up for this writing class through Stanford's Continuing Studies program, and I haven't done my homework in five weeks! This is why, on a Saturday, I am holed up in the library. So, back to work!

Dumb comment of the week

On Sunday, M and I went exploring (aka got away from the downstairs' neighbor's loud-ass TV) and discovered a new mall close to our apartment. This mall has a Macy's, and this Macy's employs the winner of this week's "Dumb comment" award. Envision:
(me): "Ooh, look at this cute, long, flowy jersey skirt! This looks sooo comfortable! But, it's so flowy, and long -- what kind of shirt would this go with so it doesn't look sloppy?! Hey, there's a dependable-looking sales associate! I will ask her what she recommends."
[I approach said sales associate]
(me): "Excuse me, but what kind of shirt do you think would go well with this skirt?"
[The lady looks at me bewildered. Pauses, speaks]
(she): "We also have this in pants."

WE HAVE A WINNER for DUMBEST COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

The Week That Was (Oh, what a week!)

Last week around this time I was feeling a strange combination of elation and crapdom (yes, that is an emotion, the one you feel when your body decides to betray you temporarily by being sick on the happiest day of the year). I was in the middle of an Oracle Financials Training Session, and my body was quickly letting me know that I in fact was about to be sicker than I've been in as long as I can remember. As the lady droned on and on and on about iProcurement, I could not get "Proud to be an American" out of my head despite my abhorrence of overly-indulgent patriotic songs, and kept thinking that instead of wasting my time in class, I wanted to jump around Stanford hugging every person I met.

Last year, I watched "American Idol" with my parents, and every time Kristy Lee Cook came on and butchered the hell out of every "Proud to be an American/America the Beautiful/Yankee Doodle Dandy" rendition possible, I nearly puked. And now, this was me; cynic and critic, belting out this propaganda anthem full blast in my own head, even letting it escape out loud every now and then, and giggling to myself like a crazy person. I would have felt embarrassed if everyone coming into and out of the office was not also having similar issues, keeping Joker-sized grins plastered on their faces, and spontaneously breaking out in conversation that had clearly started in their head and was being voiced mid-thought.

The country had a new President-Elect, and the excitement was palpable. When our Director called us in for an emergency meeting and broke down in front of his staff when he confessed that he in fact had never felt more proud to be an American, I couldn't believe that someone who's had such a long career at the forefront of political thought was compelled to spontaneously share these feelings. I was also reassured, as young people need be by their wiser elders, that California and the United States will one day, and one day soon, do right by all - so that all of the boys, girls, men, and women living under this great American umbrella can share the same rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution. James Baldwin once wrote, "Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality." Prop 8 passing definitely says more about the people who voted for it than about the people whom it immediately effects. At this moment in time, I feel both disheartened that Prop 8 passed, but also hopeful because I know it won't last long until my friends won't have to feel like their own state sees them as second class citizens.

Last Tuesday night, having the experience of the last two presidential elections behind me, I thought the counting would go on all night. So, M and I went grocery shopping. Shocker! We came back and within minutes, Barack Obama had officially and by a huge margin gained enough electoral votes to cast no doubt that he would indeed be the next President of the United States of America. John McCain's speech that followed was the first time in months that I heard McCain's own voice. It did not surprise me when the crowd boo'ed at Obama's name (it also did not surprise me that the folks in Chicago cheered and clapped when Obama mentioned McCain), and it kind of freaked me out that most of the people in the Phoenix crowd were middle-aged white folk. I mean, seriously-- almost everyone was over 45 and white. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the hundreds of thousands of people huddled together, laughing, crying, chanting, were children, teenagers, college kids, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, middle aged, elderly, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, mixed, all colors and ages and creeds, which encapsulates what America is and has prided itself in being - the cultural, racial, ethnic, religious melting pot of this world.

The images of Jesse Jackson crying I have to say were pretty priceless, and I remember thinking, I wish James Baldwin was alive to see this! I wish DuBois could see this! I do think that John McCain made too much of the "African-American" issue when talking about Barack Obama in his concession speech, but at the same time, he reminded us that people whom we know remember a time when they could not go to the same school, or eat at the same restaurants, or walk on the same piece of street, as white kids. The fact that these memories are not historic memories but actual memories makes this election monumental, but I think that the nation and the world agrees that Obama being black is not the sole or even the main reason why he is perceived with such enthusiasm and anticipation.

My entire adult life has been spent with George W. Bush being the President of the U.S. The 2004 election was the first one in which I could legally vote after becoming a citizen. I remember when my roommates and I volunteered to cater a John Kerry fundraiser in L.A. (note to self- where IS that shirt?!) we all whole-heartedly believed Kerry would win over Bush, no doubt about it. I cast my vote and thought, "Now I am truly an American citizen." Four years later, I am feeling an interesting and hard to explain emotion. I was not born here, and thus will always harbor patriotic love for my home country. And for as long as I've lived here, I've always been happy to live here, and proud. Every time I drove through a particular part of the 5S Fwy in Anaheim, I got an irrational feeling of love and pride for California, and as the plane was about to touch down at LAX, each time I nearly teared up with excitement to be "home." But over the last 8 eight years, it really has become "uncool" to be an American in many parts of the world, because we are seen as bullies instead of liberators, as arrogant instead of accomplished, as ignorant instead of leaders in science. Last week, I actually felt like I was an American, part of the millions of people who went out and voted however they felt was best. But there is always that "adopted" American feeling to it. It's almost like I can see it from both sides - judging the U.S. from a foreigner's point of view, and defending the country from the insider perspective. Again I turn to James Baldwin, who once wrote, "I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." I think he was completely right in this, and this is the sentiment that I think so many Americans ignore in their blind patriotism. To truly be proud of your country, I think you should judge it with high standards, because you expect great things from it. If you take everything a country does blindly, you face a great risk of allowing that country to become an oppressor without boundaries. That is why I think all those Republican allegations that "they" are the "real" America and that Obama and the Democratic party aren't proud of America were so ludicrous. Don't parents chide their children so that the kids might learn to be better people? Anyways, now I am going off topic, which was initially this strange feeling of being an American, and an outsider, and feeling optimistic that in the next few years the U.S. can make its citizens even more proud to call themselves American than they have been in recent years.

***

Moving on from the elections, last week also brought more ups and downs in the Stockmarket, which has people all on edge. I can't believe that literally in a few days, people's entire retirement 401k money is gone!! I guess I am really lucky to have a looo-ooo-oong time to go until I retire!!! But on a positive side, gas is down to under $2.40, which is unbelievable considering it was nearly double just a few weeks ago!!

On a more personal note, M's parents came up for a weekend visit, and M and I had a movie date ("Changeling," which I give 4 stars, but don't recommend to anyone with small children because it will make you SO SO SAD and paranoid). I also bought a really fun hat! Having headed to the mall in search of black, flat shoes with an ankle strap, I returned home sans shoes, but with a super cute brown bowl hat. And yes, I did finish Taltos, a remarkable letdown by Anne Rice. I am now onto George Eliot's Middlemarch because I need to clean my mental palate, so to speak, after Taltos, but I think I might put that aside for some McEwan.

As for the moment at hand, tonight I am very excited about the Country Music Awards!! I think Kenny Chesney and Sugarland will perform, so I am very happy. A few weeks ago, when the VMA's aired on MTV, I had a quarter-life crisis when I realized that besides Britney Spears and Mariah Carey, I had no idea who the majority of the performers were. I didn't know the songs, I didn't know the singers' names, I felt like an old biddy!! That was when I started listening to more hip hop in the car to make up for my exclusive country habits, and now I feel more confident about my contemporary culture knowledge, but I'm still 100% sure that I will know most of the people at the CMA's, because that's just the country bumpkin I've become.