HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAM!

big hug, a.k.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACKIE!

xo, l.l.s.

Whoops, I forgot to mention...

I don't know if any of you went, or if you even like Dave Matthews Band, which I do a lot, but there's a live broadcast of their free concert in Central Park right now through AOL at this site which I'm not even sure you can access, anyway. But I thought I'd post this, in case there's someone with broadband or DSL who's reading my blog now and likes the band. It's pretty good. These live broadcasts have a hell of a lot better in just a couple of years, like, scary much better.

Ah, well. Tra la.

Phoning in the blog posts

Late Night TV Political Humor

e-mailed to me by my elder sister

"Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German."
- Bill Maher, on Schwarzenegger running for Governor.

"President Bush is supporting Arnold. But a lot of Republicans are not, because he is actually quite liberal. Karl Rove said if his father hadn't been a Nazi, he wouldn't have any credibility with conservatives at all."
- Bill Maher

"President Bush is on a 35-day vacation, and before he left he had his annual physical, and it turns out his cholesterol now is lower than his approval rating."
- David Letterman

"Yesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would run for governor of California. The announcement was good news for Florida residents who now live in the second flakiest state in the country."
- Conan O'Brien

"Apparently Arnold was inspired by President Bush, who proved you can be a successful politician in this country even if English is your second language."
- Conan O'Brien

"They're saying Arnold will get 95% of the vote. At least according to his brother, Jeb Schwarzenegger."
- Craig Kilborn

"President Bush has been silent on Schwarzenegger. Of course -- he can't pronounce 'Schwarzenegger'."
- David Letterman

"Here's how bad California looks to the rest of the country. People in Florida are laughing at us."
- Jay Leno

"Well, we're all excited because President Bush has started his 35-day vacation. He's down there in Crawford, Texas, and on the first day of his vacation he went fishing. He didn't find any fish, but he believes they're there and that his intelligence is accurate."
- David Letterman

"The White House released a videotape of President Bush meeting with his cabinet, and today Iraqi officials say they believe the tape is authentic."
- Jay Leno

"The United States is putting together a Constitution now for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It's served us well for 200> years, and we don't appear to be using it anymore. So what the hell?"
- Jay Leno

"President Bush held his first full press conference in over five months this week. He announced that the war on terrorism is continuing, much, much more work needs to be done on the economy, and Saddam Hussein has not yet been captured. Then he said, 'I'm going on vacation for a month.' "
- Jay Leno

"The White House says that the vacation in Texas will give President Bush the chance to unwind. My question is, when does the guy wind?"
- David Letterman

"If you add up all the time he's spent on the ranch, he's spent more time in hiding than bin Laden and Hussein put together."
- Bill Maher

"[President Bush] used his press conference to come out very strongly against gay marriage. And then he said, on a personal note, that he apologized if he had done anything to lead Tony Blair on."
- Bill Maher

"President Bush's economic team is now on their Jobs and Growth bus tour all across America. I think the only job they created so far is for the guy driving the bus."
- Jay Leno

"President Bush has refused to declassify portions of the congressional 9/11 reports about the Saudis, because he says it will help the enemy. Not Al Qaeda, the Democrats."
- Jay Leno

Bumpersticker Ideas For The Republicans For 2004

also e-mailed to me by my sister

• Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Less CIA -- More CYA
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Lies and videotapes, but no sex!
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Making the world a better place, one country at a time.
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention.
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Four More Wars!
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Don't Change Whores in the middle of a screw.
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Assimilate. Resistance is Futile.
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Apocalypse Now!
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Compassionate Colonialism
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: The economy's stupid!
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: This time, elect us!
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: We're Gooder!
  
• Bush/Cheney '04: Asses of Evil
  
  
• George W. Bush: A brainwave away from the presidency
  
• George W. Bush: It takes a village idiot
  
• George W. Bush: He's Not as Dumb as Arnold.
  
  
• Vote Bush in '04: "I Has Incumbentory Advantitude"
  
• Vote Bush in '04: Because dictatorship is easier
  
• Vote Bush in '04: It's a no-brainer!
  
  
• Vote for Bush & You Get Dick!
  
• Who would Jesus Bomb?
  
• With a Bush and a Dick, everyone gets screwed
  
• One Small Vote for Bush. One Big Vote for Halliburton.

Okay, so I'll blog about this

The photos on Eric Conveys an Emotion range from make-me-smirk to crack-me-the-hell-up. Eric's latest Adventure, The New Pad, made me laugh very, very hard. Go see! (And check out the tee-shirt.)

On Being and Nothingness

I will probably not be posting much else to my blog for a while.

I'm not dating anyone. I'm not wishing I were dating anyone. I'm not being stalked. I'm not getting eyes from anyone.

I'm busy with much reading and much writing. I'm behind in reading and writing. I've research to do. I've hiragana to memorize. I've vocabulary to memorize. I've "action verbs" to memorize. I've index cards to write up to aid in memorization.

I'm not reading anything outside of class (except for Alan Moore's From Hell, which I got on sale from Powell's along with my Japanese-English dictionary, but I'm only reading it before bed and thereby guaranteeing eventual scary-gross-bloody-freaky nightmares). I'm not going to movies. You can see what I'm watching on T.V. from the list, and nothing I have to say about any of the shows would add to what has been posted on friends' blogs or printed up in newspapers or magazines.

I'm not travelling. I won't be going travelling any time soon. (Except for maybe to a Yankees game this weekend, but that's to use up rain cancellation tickets from my birthday.)

I do not have a job. I have no anecdotes about coworkers because I don't have a job. I have no anecdotes about classmates as they are a good portion drunken frat boys and sorostitutes, and drunken frat boys and sorostitutes are boring in their annoying habits of stupidity. (I do have one super-annoying Chinese girl in my Japanese class who has the worst fucking penmanship in the world and won't take correction because she is always, always right, even though she is usually wrong--and usually late to class. My only comfort in dealing with her is thinking how much ET would hate her fat ugly ass if she ever met her. She won't, though. ET should be very, very happy indeed in knowing she will, in all likelihood, never, ever, ever have to deal with this stupid, stupid bitch. The majority of the female non-round-eyes in that class are really pretty and smart and at least quadlingual.

I'm sure every white boy reading this is now drooling and trying to figure out a way to sneak into my class, mostly because I ended the description with a word that had "lingual" in it. You are gross. These girls--they're super-young in my eyes, so "girls"--are smart, have beautiful penmanship and make me feel old, slow, and super-stupid. But you're still gross, you pervy, pervy gaijin.) The rest of my classmates are mild and leave no mental aftertaste. They are all still about twelve years younger than I am, except on the occasion when they are twenty years older than I am. The ones who are older than I am are, without exception, deeply troubled people, as is shown by their distorted fashion sense (oh gawd the hair!) and their dumb commentary in class. They are not as dumb as the sorostitutes or the annoying ugly chick in my Japanese class, but they are dumb and it must be stated somewhere that they are so and that their stupidity reflects badly upon me, 'cause, for pete's sake, I am categorized as an "Adult Learner" too, so they are my equals in the eyes of UoA Admissions. Oh, lord, this means I am like them: I am an old, ugly, fashion-challenged, mentally-disturbed 'tard. I weep bitter tears at this revelation.

So, that's it. Nothing's doing.

Except I have a cell phone with a lot of unused minutes on it but have no one to call.

And I should have spent the time I just wasted on typing up this post on catching up on my reading for Medieval Lit. so I can get the journal up-to-date so I and turn it in tomorrow morning and not get a lousy grade.

I'm pathetic.

New song, true

This is probably the most honest I responded to the quiz, so this is me as a Cowboy Bebop theme song, most of the time. I might be the other two sometimes, though. People are complicated that way. Or I'm crazy, one or the other.

Not that this all means a damned thing. Still, better playing with this than reading more modern poetry, neh?

No, not really.

Today's song

Bear in mind, Cats On Mars was my theme song last time.

So what's your Cowboy Bebop theme song?

Measuring importance

Mom installed the Google toolbar to our Internet Explorer, mainly to block pop-ups, which it does quite handily. There are little handy items in the bar, like a space where we can type in what we might want to search on Google, an item to let us select where we want to seach in specific, an icon which let's me enter in a blog entry quickly, an icon which tells us how many pop-ups have been blocked so far (118), etc.

One interesting item is the PageRank bar. "PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of this page." This particular page, where I can edit my blog, is ranked 0/10, as I'm the only one who accesses it, I suppose. More interesting is the ranks given to blogs and sites I visit:

• Sam's blog: 5/10.
  
• ET's blog: 4/10.
  
• Maggie's blog: 3/10.
  
• JerkSquad!!: 4/10.
  
• Octopus Army: 3/10.
  ...and my blog?
  
• tmoltsk: 2/10.

Conclusion? No one likes me. I write a boring blog and nobody likes me and I have no friends.

Bwwaaaaa! sniffle

'Course, I could be wrong about that. I've been wrong before.

Whooosh!

The most we got of the rain today was a few hours of downpour in the morning. But since then, the wind has been strange. Strong, humid, swaying back and forth through the trees. It's driving the cats mad; they're running about the house, willy-nilly, meowing for nothing and everything, content to sit for only moments at a time, then leaping up and skt-skt-skt their back claws tap against the floor as they start the whole routine again, speeding into the next room and the next. Are they following the wind? Why do they respond so strongly to something outside the house which they can't even feel? I didn't feel like running until I stood out there early this afternoon, wondering why Mom would want to read the paper and do the puzzle in such strange, sticky wind, and then it was only to get indoors.

oh my fucking gawd

Follow the link and you shall see the one, the only, the dickhead.

A ribbon-like strip running around the back of the head bears an inscription, written in reverse, which translates as "every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks".

Oh, lord, how full of wonder is the world.

Change in medication

Finally got to talk to my doctor today (well, yesterday evening at this point), after nearly two weeks of phone tag. While I didn't get to tell him about everything that's gone wrong since the weird bump in my taking my meds this past spring, he said, "Ah, yes," about halfway through the list of problems and quickly thought up a replacement pill for the one I'm taking and wrote up the 'script' to mail my way.

I'm so durned happy about this; I've been feeling gawdawful for months now. Here's hoping the switch in a couple of weeks will make for a big, happy, non-new-ailment-inducing change. Yay.

If not, well, he says I'll have to go in for a sonogram or MRI or something like that, which will be FUN! and expensive, and I'm without medical insurance right now, so it'll be even more FUN! trying to figure out how to pay for all of it. Yay.

Or, as Joelly-bear might put it, Ooh, ecstasy joy.

I just wish there was a pill I could take just once which would take care of this weird-arse condition once and for all. I'm sick of having to remember to take this stuff. And my freak-girl reactions. Bleh.

Frustrated Yankees fan rant

First there's Boomer and Moose getting screwed out of winning their 200th career games. They would have been #99 and #100 on the all-time 200-game winners. Or 100th and 101st, depending on whose records you believe. That's another story, though. Pre-1900 baseball history is a tad fuzzy. Anyway, so Boomer gets screwed out of his 200th by the Yankees not being able to get a frickin' hit with a man on base even though the pitcher they were facing has lost more games than he's won this year. They're the Orioles, for pete's sake. They've been out of the pennant race for ages. They should be able to hit the crap out of their pitching staff, but they can't buy a frickin' hit. Then there's poor, brilliant Moose, who was made to pitch on the day the hurricane hit Maryland. The game was a 1-1 tie when they had to cancel due to inclement weather. No shit, inclement weather. They'd closed the schools, the federal government, the trains, but they just had to make these guys play a ball game? Plus, why, why can't the current Yankees hit these lousy pitchers? What the heck is going on?

Even worse is the rumor that Joe Torre, my dad's hero, possibly my favorite man in the Yankees uniform, will walk come the off-season. If he isn't fired first. Steinbrenner has not hit one good note with his bitching, whining and complaining this season. Giambi's not been half the player we'd been sold when he bought him off of the A's. Weaver was a horrible trade acqusition from the beginning. The bullpen has been dead all season long. Aaron Boone, while a good player, hasn't hit a lick; I really can't see how his being on the team is an improvement, especially when he's barely hitting over 220.

Steinbrenner has been a whiny, interfering bitch since before the season started, blaming people who've done their best to help the team. I can't blame Torre for wanting to leave. It's amazing he's withstood that mock-turtleneck bastard as long as he has. But at least Steinbrenner had the decency to keep his fat mouth shut the previous years (for the most part). He just couldn't shut up this season. And it's most definitely not having the effect he wanted. Yeah, that's right, Steinbrenner, demoralize your team and coaching staff. That'll definitely lead to the World Series.

I understand the impetus behind the complaints. The team has not been what it was in the past. But that's because the team is not composed of the players it had in the past. Sure, you have Posada, Jeter and Williams up the middle, and Matsui has been one hell of a player, but the rest of the field has been more miss than hit. Except for Nick Johnson, who might have had a year to blow baseball away if it hadn't been for that broken hand. Giambi has sucked more often than not. Same to for that platoon in right, where we'd once had the rock-solid O'Neill. Third has been a question mark, though Robin Ventura obviously did a lot for the clubhouse attitude. And Soriano. Oh, lord, Soriano. Apparently he has swallowed every bit of hype printed about him in the past couple of years. Yeah, sure, he's 30-30, but his fielding is piss-poor and his bat is dead more often than not. He is the Yankee in best need of a bitch-slap. Or an entire bitch-slap therapy session.

There seems to be an element missing, the fire in thebelly, the need to win. While there is a core of hard-working players, the rest seem to be lost on the field, dozing, content simply to wear the pinstripes instead of earning them. It's beyond infuriating. I hate them for what they're doing to the team on the whole, the lackidasical players. They could do with another angry O'Neill, someone to smash the water cooler after every strikeout, someone with a visible passion for the game, someone with a temper aimed only at himself because he expects perfection every time out there. For a moment, when Boone nearly blew his top at a botched call a few weeks back, I thought he might be O'Neill's heir, the fire in the Yankee belly, the burning heart of the team. But he isn't. Close, but no O'Neill, just like Giambi doesn't have half the presence of a Tino, even though he has the better bat. There's no real team, though the core pitching, Boomer, Rocket, Pettitte and Moose, appear to have bonded through this rough season of spotty swinging and erruptions from the bullpen and their own inexplicable occasionally faltering arms. There are cliques instead of the well-oiled team of the late 90's. Few of the players then had banner years, but they played so well together as a team that it didn't matter. Their whole was greater than the sum of its parts, even with the future-hall-of-fame Jeters.

The fact that Torre has been able to get this mismatched collection to hold onto the top of the AL East is a tribute to his managing skills. The fact that Torre has not quit already in spite of Steinbrenner's behavior is another tribute to his managing skills. The man has had to manage management, team and coaches. It blows my mind what he must go through. I'd definitely say he's been worth every penny of that $5 mil. And I'm sure I won't be alone in missing him greatly if the rumors are true and Torre isn't sitting next to Zim on the bench in Tampa next year.

Update on the unnamed cat

We have the best vet. Shaker Veterinary Hospital. They're great with animals, they run an animal placement service, finding homes for strays and animals whose owners can't keep anymore, and they were quick to help us when we brought in the dead cat we found last night. They took the cat, box and all (what, I want to keep a box which had had a dead animal in it?), and told us they were going to put an ad in the paper about the cat. The head vet said he and his staff would also try to ID the cat. So they might be able to find the owner. They probably will.

So that's a big relief.

Only problem is, there's this cat, Dresselmeyer

who has been in the little animal placement service cages (they call the placement service Save-a-Pet) for a couple of weeks now. When I first saw him, I thought maybe my sister, E--, whose family had just lost their cat Mitzi (hit by a car), might like to take him. I got my heart set on finding a home for him. He was sweet natured for such a large cat stuck in such a small space (not fat, but tall--he could most definitely take on a lapdog and win, if he were so inclined). He was also good looking; with his sleek black coat and small white bib he looked like he was about to go to the opera. But my sister told me they were looking for a kitten, that my nephew J-- insisted on a kitten.

I was unreasonaly angered by her capitulating to J--'s request for a kitten. There are so many good cats who need homes, I thought. Why can't she at least give Dresselmeyer a chance? I'd even taken pictures of him hoping a peek at the cat would persuade her, but I never got the chance to e-mail it to her. Still, it's up to them to take on an animal. Why should they bow to my choice?

So, he's still there, a couple weeks later, waiting in that cage for someone to notice how good a cat he is and take him home. I don't know what to do, as there's no way I could persuade Mom to take on another, a third cat, especially now that Oscar is starting to cost a lot more with his blood tests and all. But I want to know Dresselmeyer's in a good home. So I'm posting a couple of pictures of him, not the best pictures but better than nothing, on my Fotolog and hoping for the best.

It looks like it's sleepingor, why you should always make sure your cat has an ID tag

Mom and I left the house at around 10:30 this morning. (Juu-ji han. ...I have to keep practicing.) It was a beautiful, sunny, totally-no-sign-of-rain day, with the requisite super-blue sky and puffy/wispy white clouds. I was in class or studying until 8:00, when Mom picked me up after a day spent at the doctor's in Connecticut checking out her foot (she won't need physical therapy anymore and she got drugs, which are always useful). We were joking around, talking about our day, admiring how beautiful the evening was. Traffic was a horror as they're busy putting in sidewalks. When we got to the house, Mom saw something fluffy by the side of the road in front of our driveway.

"Oh, my god, it's Floof."

"No!" Mostly 'cause it makes no sense that our indoor-only cat got out and got herself run over. Also 'cause I didn't want her dead. I figure she's healthy and should have some years left in her (she and Oscar turned fifteen this past May).

Mom made wide berth around the cat and stopped the car saying, "How did she get out? How did she get out?" while I kept saying "No! No!" Mom opened her door and peered at the cat in the orange-tinted road light as I leapt out of the car and ran around to see the cat.

It was dark and had a longer snout than a himalayan (our Floof is a blue-point himalayan). "It's not Floof," I said, only partially relieved.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. It's too dark. See?" It had the markings of a seal-point himalayan or siamese, the super-dark brown points (face, ears, legs, tail) with dark brown to light brown body. It looked like maybe a himalayan mix, as it had the coloration and the long fur, but not the super-long, super-fine fur Floof has nor the himalayan squat snout, inherited from the cross-breeding of persians with the siamese. It even seemed to have blue eyes, though I didn't look too closely. It was a beautiful cat.

It looked like it was just lying there sleeping. The only blood had come from the ear on the roadside and we didn't see that until Mom moved the cat onto the top of a carboard box which I'd brought from the garage. I couldn't bring myself to touch or move the cat, as I didn't want to feel the cat's body without any life in it.

Mom and I have no idea what to do with the cat. We've put it in a largish and solid file box with a removeable lid and put the box in the garage near the doors so it can stay a bit cooler. We don't have a freezer to put it into. We don't want to have this anonymous cat burned by the ASPCA/pound without the owner ever knowing what happened. But there's no tag on the collar. How can an owner put a collar on a cat they allow outdoors but not put a tag on it? We have no way of finding out who owns the cat to let them know where their cat is and that their cat is dead. We're hoping that the local vet's office will recognize it when we bring it in, which we can't do until they open tomorrow morning. But I can't help but feel for these people who used to have this cat sit on their laps and purr while they pet its soft, dark head and stroked its long fur. If the vet can't ID it, we'll have to bury it without the owners ever knowing what happened. They'll think it ran away.

Poor cat. Poor, stupid owners. Mostly, though, poor cat.

It was really lovely. It was still warm when Mom moved it to the box lid. It felt like it was simply very relaxed, maybe deep in sleep, when I moved it to the box. You couldn't tell what was wrong until you saw the eyes, which were starting to film over. I tried to put the cat in a position in the box like it was just sleeping, but it didn't quite work. The head hung funny. I tried to close the eyes, but I just mussed up the fur on the head. I hope it didn't suffer, but it's hard to tell. The bladder was still emptying when I put it in the box. What can we do? Whom do we tell? Someone's lost their lovely pet cat. I suppose, if we can't find the owner, we'll bury it tomorrow. I'll have to think of a name for the cat. I don't think I could bury it without a name.

When I finally got inside, the cats greeted me, wondering where we had been for so long and if they could please have some dinner, which was two hours late. I fed them and gave Oscar his medication and pet them and pet them and pet them. I just wanted to get the feeling of dead cat off of my hands, to have my hands remember what my warm, living, responsive, purring cats feel like when I pet them.

When I was petting Oscar, I thought, "I feel like I'm touching him with hands of death." Like somehow I'm spreading what happened to that anonymous cat to Oscar, who's been sick lately and making me nervous. I've death on my hands that needs a name. I wish that cat hadn't died, and I wish I could give it a more dignified end. I don't want my cats to somehow catch death from the death on my hands and the death in the box in the garage.

I just don't know what to do.

Unsmart, as in lacking in smartness or "smarts"

So, I got up early-early this morning to work on the interview questions and response paper for these two short story collections for my Writers at Work course. What do I do as soon as I sit at the computer? Mess around with my new blog template. For what? Is it that much improved from last night? Not really. (Well, some of my links are there.) Oy. This is beyond procrastination. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Auuuuugh! Where the hell is my e-mail?!

AOL sucks ass.

But then, you knew that already.

Still, the latest version sucks more ass than usual. It is a vast vortex of ass-sucking. Can you hear it? That horrid, slurping, phhhhhoit-phhhhhoit sound? That's AOL v.9.0. Suck, suck, suck, suck. Massive suckage.

AOL: now even suckier than before.

I Miss My Friends

I am sick and tired of being hundreds of miles from my friends. I want to go see movies and eat at restaurants and have strange and winding conversations about everything and nothing. Perhaps my memories are shinier and happier than the reality of what was and what would be if I were there now, but I don't care. (To be honest, considering the inconvenience of my living in CT the whole time back then, is this that much different?)

And if I'm this bad just being in Albany, a mere three-hour drive from friends in two cities (from NYC or Boston), I can just imagine how whiny I'd be if I were in Japan teaching English like I'm hoping to be in a couple years' time.

Under Construction

I got bored with my old template, which was a nice, pretty blue, but boring, boring boring and lacking in design, so I've loaded one of the standard templates now available from Blogger and am currently fixing it to my liking. Lord only knows how long that will take as I have to get used to how this person writes in html (not being literate in html, it's a constant adjustment for me to figure out what's going on in various templates). Things should be up and running by next Monday. I guess.

I mean, I've a lot of reading to do and a lot of memorization. You know, Japanese. Five is go. That sort of thing. I'm learning the alphabet (hiragana) and how to count (ichi, ni, san, yon, go...). I'm like a frickin' preschooler. A preschooler with boobies.