Gym Motivation

I went to the gym for the first time in a LONG while today. In the few weeks (ok ok months) I have been away a whole new mass of HOT HOT HOT Asian men have joined! I nearly fell off the treadmill when this guy with freaking amazing arms got on the elliptical machine across from me. I even ran 1/2 mile farther than usual because I was distracted and not looking at the display. I'm seriously considering getting a video ipod and playing a Jet Li movie while working out. I'd get skinnier than Nicole Ritchie.

Applied for job #1 today. It reminded me how much this whole cover letter, resume, interview process SUCKS. Ugh.

My baked ziti came out REALLY good! The cheese got all nice and brown on top and it tasted SO good! First Chinese, now Italian! What cuisine should I attempt next??!

Adventures in cooking Part 2

After last week's success with Fried Rice, I decided to attempt another cooking feat. Baked Ziti! With the weather getting colder I wanted to make something I could freeze and eat as leftovers all winter and thought it seemed easier than lasagna. I even strayed from the recipie and added some frozen (but thawed) spinach into it just to make it a bit more healthy. It's currently baking and browning in the oven so wish me luck!!!

Hmmm....anyone know if that whole E-coli spinach thing is over?

Thoughts from a Job Hunt....

I'm back on the market. The job market that is. I've been casually looking for a new job either in NY or IL, and the more I think about the kind of life I could have, I'm definitely leaning more towards focusing on the IL market, though I'm still actively looking here in NY as well. In IL I could have a car again, I could FINALLY get the dog I've always wanted, be closer to my ailing parents, have a rent that wasn't 60% of my monthly income, have space....it's all so tempting. When it comes down to it though, I'll have to go where the job is, so out go the resumes and cover letters and a hope for something better.

Wish me luck....I'm gonna need it.

Standing Update

Had my meeting with HR and was basically told "there is nothing you can do about it". Ugh. So for 8-12 hours a day I have to be in an environment where someone is rude, manipulative and evil. Ugh.

On the upside she seems to have taken to completely ignoring me now. She has blocked me from our inter-company IM program and when I had to ask her a work-related question yesterday in person, she refused to respond to me. She sat at her desk looking at me and would not say a word to me at all.

Guess its time to job hunt....

Standing Down

Update: My meeting with HR got postponed...I guess standing up will have to wait.

Standing Up.

I've been having problems with one of my coworkers for a while now and lately it has escalated to the point where she prevents me from doing my job. I'm tired of being emotionally abused at work, so I've decided to go to HR and ask for assistance in how to better communicate with her. When I made the appointment whith HR I was confident, but now that I'm home and reflecting back on it I've lost my confidence and I'm afraid of coming off as whiny and like I'm not a team player. I'm going to try to emphasize the "productivity loss" and less the "makes me feel like crap", but I'm still afraid its going to come off as a petty female jealousy (she's very attractive and well-liked with the men in the office). I want to back out and let it go, but I really AM at my breaking point and feel as though I can't continue working in a place where I'm treated disrespectfully every day. Ugh....wish me luck

Day 2

of going to bed before 10pm. Of course both nights were sleeping pill induced, but still it has been nice to get good quality sleep for once. I'm beginning to think I'm not sick, but just depressed. My weekend upstate couldn't come at a better time. A few days of quiet and photography are just what I need right now. This weekend can't come soon enough!

Lots of Nothing.....

Nothing much going on in the life of K these days. Just some random bullets of randomness to tide you over....

*I really want to go out and take photos, but I've been so unmotivated lately. NY doesn't really have a good Fall season like the Midwest, so I haven't gotten any good outdoor photos lately. I'm going upstate to my cousin's next weekend so perhaps there will be some photo potential up there.

*Upstairs neighbor boy is clearly watching a sporting endeavor of some sort. He keeps pounding/jumping up and down and yelling. It seems to be loosely related to the Cowboys/Giants game I have on so I'm guessing that he's watching that. Can't decide if this is better or worse than the fighting with his gf/headboard banging I usually endure.

*Going home to IL to see friends, family and my puppy in 25 days! VERY excited.

*I think I'm getting sick. I'm seriously considering digging out the Nyquill and having a good knock out sleep.

*Had a fantastic dinner of my favorite biscuits and those soymeat sausage patties. Put two patties and two biscuits in the toaster over for 15 minutes and that's it! Quick, easy and no dishes. That's my kind of cooking!

*Speaking of cooking, I made my first attempt at chicken fried rice last night and it was GOOD! I'm so proud of myself. My first cooking success! A co-worker came over for dinner and loved it too (though I had a moment of panic this morning when I realized she wasn't at work today....I seriously thought I had killed her with my cooking! I text messaged her to make sure she was alive. She was.)

Ok off to bed (at 9!). Hopefully one good night's rest will cure me. I LOVE Nyquill sleep!

They make it look so easy in the movies....

Picture it. A NYC gal trotting through the streets of Manhattan with her handbag over her shoulder, coffee in one hand and shopping bags in the other. She effortlessly makes her way through the crowds and traffic and arrives home no coffee spilt and hair in tact....and she did it in heels no less.

And then there's me.

After days of holding my drycleaning hostage (damn inconvenient NYC dry cleaner hours!), I finally was able to retrieve my clothes from the cleaners tonight. Unfortunately today was also the day the clothes I ordered online arrived, meaning I had to make my way home with not only my dry cleaning, but also a rather large JCrew box as well as my purse. During rush hour. In the rain. (Irony of ironies...my dry cleaning consisted of my raincoat). As I fought my way through the turnstile, the hanger of my coat got stuck on one of the bars, flinging me and the box through the turnstile, and leaving the drycleaning hanging on the other side of the turnstile mocking me. Thankfully one of the policeman patrolling the station had seen my very smooth maneuver and passed my drycleaning through to me. I managed to make it on to the train without further incident, aside from accidentally stabbing a fellow train passenger with my coat hanger when I sat down. When I finally made my way to my stop and got off the train I remembered that my stop doesn't have regular turnstiles. It only has the revolving door ones which are impossible to get through when you don't have a free hand to push them with. I managed to go in sideways pushing the bars with my shoulder with my dry cleaning draped over my arm. Until the coat hanger once again got stuck on the bars and since it was rush hour and people were streaming through the exit, my coat went round and round until I was finally able to rescue it. FINALLY I make it home and step into the elevator only to find it has JUST been painted and the walls are still wet, so I stand very still being extra careful not to let anything touch the walls...and then the elevator stops and my floor and I remember that you have to push the door open, it's not one of the ones that open automatically. I manage to get a hand free to touch the faceplate of the door and swing it open and run out (though not without stabbing myself with the coat hanger) and make it to my door. As I throw the drycleaning down on the couch and my purse on the table. It hits me. I could have just WORN THE COAT HOME.

Stylish NYC gal trotting through the streets of Manhattan. I think not.

I am SO disappointed!

I must confess I am a bit of a Project Runway addict. Not a huge fan of most reality shows (except the Apprentice), PR is one of the best out there. They pick talented designers and though there is some trash talking and drama, it's not the premise of the entire show, they really do focus on the designs. After watching last night's finale though, I was extremely disappointed. Jeffrey, the absolute jerk who treated another contestant's mother horribly, and who went over budget with his final collection, WON the competition. Just goes to show rule breaking and being disrespectful is what gets you ahead in this world. I truly felt sick when the called his name. I guess in the end being talented and creative makes up for being an ass, at least in the fashion world.

Hmm...just like being hot makes up for being an ass in the dating world come to think of it.

Lesson Learned: You can be an ass if you are attractive or if you have skill.....at least if you are a man anyway.

2%!

I heard an astounding statistic this morning. Apparently, only 2% of women think they are beautiful. 2%!! (Source:Dove Global Study: The Truth About Beauty (pdf)) Can this number really be that low?? I mean I'm certainly guilty of never feeling attractive, but I guess I assumed that the millions of attractive women I see on the streets of NY daily thought THEY were. As a teen I never bought into the "I have to look like the women in the magazines" mentality. I didn't seek to emulate characters on TV or feel pressure to look and act like them. I don't recall consciously relating to celebrities or looking to them as role models in any way. My own insecurities came from my peers. Throughout my entire childhood I can remember being mocked or ostracized by the kids at school. In junior high when other kids starting doing the pre-teen version of "dating", guys took no interest in me (a trend that continues into my 20s), even going so far as to tease me by asking me out, waiting until I said yes and then saying "Just kidding...Loser". In high school I mustered up all my courage to ask a guy to Prom and before I could even get the words out, he said "I heard what you were going to ask me, and you are a fool to think I'd go to prom with you". It wasn't just the guys either, In junior high I was (or so I thought) part of the "in" group of girls, we ate lunch together, I got invited to all their parties, I invited them to my own house, until one day I overheard them talking about how I was the "joke" friend. They were friends with me to get information about me and my life and then spread it around school for everyone to mock. I learned very early on not to trust people and that I wasn't desirable, not only physically but emotionally as well. I never felt beautiful because I never felt wanted. Why we choose other people as our "beauty" yardstick eludes me, yet we all do it. Beauty is measured by women in magazines, actors on TV, men we'd like to date, our peers, our enemies, even our family. It's less about how we feel and more about how close we come to the 5'10 110 lb standard. In a world of 300 million why is the measure of beauty based on 6 supermodels?

I wonder if the alpha junior high girls are part of the 2%.

Love it Love it Love it

As a single person who is culinarily challenged, I am constantly dissapointed by the portion sizes of food in the grocery store. I'd love to buy those bags of salad (minus e-coli of course), but I'd have to eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner to finish the bag off before it spoils. The giant boxes of cereal go stale long before I can finish them off, even in airtight containers. Bricks of cheese turn funny colors before I can make my way through it. The grocery store is anti-single cook, so when I saw this I fell in love. Biscuits packaged in twos! No more scary tubes that pop when you open them forcing you to make 10 biscuits at a time. Hurrah!!

How I make coffee.

1. Clean counter off.
2. Fill coffee pot with water.
3. Spill water on counter while filling reservoir.
4. Clean Counter.
5. Put filter in, add coffee grounds.
6. Spill coffee grounds on counter.
7. Clean counter.
8. Wait for coffee to percolate. Spill coffee on counter while pouring into mug.
9. Clean counter.

Now I know why Starbucks charges so much.

You know it's bad when.....

you get home so late/early that you can't figure out why the lighting outside the train looks so strange and then it dawns on you..the weird lighting is actually the sun rising.

Bonus points for anyone who caught the "dawn" pun.

The sounds of Fall.....

The temperature is dropping, the leaves are dropping. The air has a crisp feel to it. I can dig my cute coats out of the closet. I love Fall.

However;

This cooling off also means they turn on the heat in my apartment, which includes an extremely loud banging/hissing from the radiator in my bedroom. Every night without fail I am startled awake by the sounds. My heart pounds and I leap towards the baseball bat I keep by my bed (hey it's NYC and I live alone!) before realizing the clanking is not a burglar coming to steal my extensive collection of books and Target furniture, but just the sound of the radiator expelling heat. Googling the issue has turned up nothing useful. It's going to be a LOOOONG winter...sigh.

Date that keeps on getting worse AGAIN

Friday. 9pm. 1 week after our last pleasant encounter. Text message from the date from hell:

"Thank god its friday...it was a rough week for me..u?"

Why yes it WAS a rough week for me. Some guy was an absolute JERK to me and kept calling and harassing me because I didn't want to sleep with him on the FIRST DATE. Ugh.

I have a bad case of the "i'll never haves"

Sometimes I find myself stuck in the "i'll never have....". My mind races through all the little things and scenarios of life I feel I'll never experience. Practically I know it's stupid and I should "never say never", but it doesn't stop my mind and heart from temporarily losing myself in being sad.

I'll never have a child. I'll never own a home. I'll never know what its like to sleep with someone who loves me. I'll never have a job doing something I love. I'll never have a boyfriend....the list of nevers, never ends.

I know that everything on my list is a luxury, that I can only wish for those things because I have so much else in my life that is stable and my needs are more than met. It doesn't make me want them any less though. I yearn to experience a good love once in my life. My one experience loving someone was ugly, partly because he never loved me back and partly because he never respected my feeling and manipulated it to fulfill his own needs. I've never loved someone who loved me back. I have no concept of what it's like, and I fear the absence of it has made me cold to the world.

I was looking through my memory box the other night, and came across this card someone gave me for my last birthday. I don't think I had read it fully when my friend had given it to me and I was struck deeply by the words:

Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. delicious ambiguity....

So true and so hard to accept. I'm going to try though..there's beauty in the ambiguity...I just have to find it.

Enough already!

Could we stop with the planes crashing into NYC buildings please?!

Stupid x 2

Had another day off today. Spent it talking online for 6+ hours to Chicago boy again.

Will I ever get over him?

I am in DIRE need of french fries....

I have tried many remedies for a hangover....water, Advil, gatorade, m&ms, but nothing works for me except french fries. They have mystical healing powers and I'm in desperate need for a big plate of them right now.

Went to an AMAZING concert for work last night. Most of the concerts I have to attend for work are small venues or clubs, but when our biggest artist played in NY last night, we all got to attend the show (with VIP seating I might add!) and it was amazing. I noticed a cute guy in a blue shirt in our section that I didn't recognize, so I did some major asking around and managed to find out he was a guest of someone in our digital distribution department. I managed to get him an invite to an after-party I attended and ended up chatting him up all night. Unfortunately he is from LA and was only in NY for 24 hours. Sigh. We exchanged some emails this morning, but after the perfunctory "nice meeting you, have a safe trip back to LA", "great meeting you too, I enjoyed the concert and having drinks with you" exchange I'm not sure what else I can say. Oh well...it was nice to chat up a cute boy for a few hours....makes the hangover slightly more bearable.

Apartment 4A Curse Redux

I thought that when the volatile couple upstairs broke up and moved out, it would be the end of my days listening to tempers (and headboards) clash all night, but alas the curse of apartment 4A continues. From the hours of 11pm to nearly 4am the new couple who now live above me screamed at eachother incessantly, once again keeping me awake. Though this couple is far less amorous (or they have a better quality bed with minimal squeaking/no headboard), they add a bilingual flair to their hostilities and definitely have the competitive edge over couple #1. I know I could call the police, or complain to the super, but I've been in their shoes and I know that sometimes you just have to get the emotions out. If I thought she (or even he) were in any danger, I of course would do something, but I've been there enough to recognize the inflections of argument, even in another language, and though lengthy, this was nothing more than a heated discussion. I hope for their sake (and for mine!) that whatever it was they got it out of their system and there won't be repeat performance tonight.

I wonder if I should warn them of the curse....perhaps a belated housewarming gift of sage to exorcise the demons?

The date that keeps on getting worse...

I met a guy online a few months ago through Craigslist. I had posted something about looking for people to hang out with and he responded. We emailed back and forth for months before he said that even though he’s really apprehensive about meeting people online, he wanted to meet up. He suggested Friday after work…at 10:30pm! Even though it was totally a “I’m not committing to dinner until I see how hot you are” time, I agreed and we met up at a bar near work (I picked there because it was a place I was sure to know someone and the bartenders recognize me. I figured it was a safe place to meet up). We had a few drinks and the conversation was intelligent, yet still flirty. We stayed out pretty late and we finally left when the bar closed. As I started to walk to my train, he held my hand. Even though his train was in the opposite direction, I thought he was just being a gentlemen and walking me to the subway since it was like 3:30am. Once we got to the train I turned to say goodbye and he starts in on how he’s felt this “connection” and he wants to come home with me! I told him that I was sorry if I had given off the impression that I was that kind of girl, but that I do not take people I just met into my home. I thanked him for a nice evening and said goodbye. He kept yammering on about how we were both adults and how he didn’t see what the problem was. There weren’t many people around, so I decided to walk another 10 blocks to Grand Central where there was more likely to be other people around. He wasn’t being forceful in any way and I wasn’t scared, but I thought it best to try to walk to a more crowded location in case he got even more argumentative. By the time we got there it was nearing 4am and I just wanted to get home. I told him again very clearly that I was NOT bringing a stranger into my house and he kissed me goodbye and went on his way. I chalked his behavior up to typical tipsy horniness and still hoped to hear from him the next day.

He text messaged me a few times the next afternoon, mostly baseball trash talk since I’m a Mets fan and he’s a Yankees. It was cute though…he said he was coming back into the city that night (he lives on Long Island) for a party. I told him to have fun and that I’d be home watching the Mets game. That night (technically this morning) at 4:40AM my phone rings and it’s him, telling me he wants to come over. After telling him he was insane, that a guy who respects a woman does NOT call her up for a 5am booty call, he got mad saying he didn’t know why I was playing hard to get. After getting mad, I abruptly got off the phone and told him to go home. About 15 minutes later I get this text message “thanks for making me miss my train. I don’t know why u r playing these mind games”. I was IRATE. I resisted the urge to call him back and tell him off and shut my phone off and tried to go back to sleep.

I REALLY want to send him an email today telling him off, but I wonder if I should just let it go and quit taking his calls. I am so upset….his text message really pissed me off and I want to let him know. What do you guys think, should I tell him off or let it go?

Seriously, are there ANY men out there who respect women anymore??

UPDATE: I just got this text message: "my apologies for the 4am call...i was drunk and did not realize it was inappropriate"

I wish they knew.

I'm surrounded by many people who have been lucky in love. 90% of my friends married within a few years of leaving college, and a good portion of those met their partners in high school (and in some cases junior high!). My sister, though only 20 years old as of yesterday, had bf #2 stick and it looks like they'll get married after graduation as well. I know its a hard path to take and that it takes work, especially when you are so young, but so far all the marriages in my circle of friends have stuck and I wish them all many many years of happiness. I just wish my parents hadn't given up on me. Though my parents think my sister should wait to get married, my mom can't help chatting with my sister about wedding ideas, and my dad can barely contain his desire for grandchildren. They've both said to my sister that the pressure is on her since clearly she'll be the only one taking that path and fulfilling their dreams. I take at least part of the blame. I act like I don't care, that I'm indifferent to marriage and children. I joke about men not being interested and say I'm too much of a clean freak to have kids, but I'd gladly give up my Swiffer to have a family someday. I know that I've given up hope on me, but it hurts that much more to know that they've given up hope on me as well. I know I've been a constant disappointment to my parents....they never quite understood my path and view on life. I know you aren't supposed to care what they think, but I do. I was given up at birth and they took me in, gave me and my sister a very privileged life....I guess part of me feels like I should be more grateful and should show it by making them proud. It's never been something I've been able to do though and I'm not sure I ever will. At least my sister followed the "normal" path for them. She got it right....why can't I?

Bad things happen in 3s.

I can't imagine what it's like to have a child in school right now. 3 shootings in the span of a week, and in areas of the country you would least expect. When I was in high school, just 10 years ago, the thought of shootings and metal detectors was foreign. We had a uniformed cop who walked the halls, but I don't remember ever have a sense of fear aligned with going to class every day. If anything, I would probably have been voted most likely to be the one doing the shooting. My school years from preschool on were riddled with ridicule and incessant emotional abuse of sorts from my peers. The thought of retaliation of any kind never crossed my mind at all though and certainly not violence of any kind. It's a scary world we live in now, maybe it was always a scary world we lived in and now we are just more aware of it. I can't imagine what it will be like in another 10 years......

I'm not going....

I cancelled my interview tomorrow. I felt it just wasn't worth giving up my nights and weekends for $7 an hour. I'm still taking tomorrow off though....I'm watching the L&O SVU marathan tonight (well technically its morning) and sleeping in. I have personal and vacation days to burn so I might as well enjoy them!

Neighbors

Before my post on neighbors, I first want to say that I'm currently sucking so bad in the weekly football pool this week I may be kicked out of the running due to complete suckage.....

Yesterday while wielding the MANY boxes of to-be-assembled IKEA furniture up the stairs of my friend's new apartment building, we met two of her neighbors. In the first 30 seconds of being there we met her neighbors. I've lived in my apartment for two years and have only heard the amorous sounds of my (apparently talented) upstairs neighbor and his latest conquest. I've never spoken to any of my neighbors, I don't know their names, occupations or even what they look like. I have a cordial relationship with the contraband cat across the way who sits in the window that looks into my living room, but that's it. No I take that back, during the blackout I met the drunk Irish guy who lives in the building, but apparently in his sober moments he doesn't remember me, since the other morning when I left for work I passed him and he completely ignored me, so I'm gonna say that doesn't count. I would love to know at least the people who live on my floor, but I'm not the type of person to go knocking on doors introducing myself. I guess my building is just the anti-social, loud sex having, cat hiding haven of NYC.