Delusions of Grandeur

“Why are you so active in animal welfare work?
Because of my man-animal philosophy.
Explain your philosophy.
Man’s superiority on Earth does not grant him moral or ethical license to inflict suffering
upon animals–and expecially not for unnecessary or frivolous things such as rodeos,
bullfights, zoos, dog races, cock-fights, fox hunting, steel trapping, game and trophy hunting,
and senseless laboratory experiments.
What are you trying to achieve in this area?
A reduction in suffering for all forms of animal life.
That certainly is an unselfish dedication on your part.
It is not entirely unselfish.
Why not?
I believe in reincarnation.”

p. 31 Gleebs 2

So today, along with my dental appointment, I had my second therapy appointment, where we got to go through the long and messy history of my family….I couldn’t even have a regular tree, mine had all these things hanging off it like a banyan tree, or like those trees in lousiana with all the spanish moss…..although for the first time ever describing my mother’s boyfriend as “monkey-boy” actually had a funny second meaning since we were drawing a tree, he he.

I also had to go through this exercise where we listed a bunch of positive and negative traits, but you had to list the positive first and were only allowed to list as many negative as you came up with for positive. It was remarkably hard. Plus she questioned each of my negatives, asking why I felt that it was negative and why I saw that trait in myself. My numero uno negative was the fact that I’m extremely selfish and when she made me explain it I had all kinds of reasons I felt that way…..then after all that we had a little wrap-up discussion and she told me that part of my biggest problem was that I take responsibility for too many things that have nothing to do with being my fault. She told me something along those lines the last time too, but I guess she decided to re-iterate now that she had more to go on or something. So in response to her telling me that I told her to add “self-involved or egocentric” to that list of negatives and she just laughed and told me she was going to add “good sense of humor” to the positives, which I thought was pretty funny. Anyhow, so on the psychiatric note, here’s todays gleeb:

“It is odd that people say,
‘It’s all in your head.’
Certainly, it’s in your head.
Everything in life is in your head.
It’s not in your big toe.
If you stick a pin in your big toe,
The pain is registered in your head.
The next time someone says,
‘It’s all in your head,”
You say,
“Where do you think it is–in my big toe?”

don’t know why I love these things so much, but they really appeal to my sense of humor. 🙂

edited: oh yeah….the stomach pains are gone now…still no clue what caused them!

I was cleaning out our bookshelves the other day, which have become increasingly overstuffed, and came across a small green paper back titled “Gleebs 2.” Neither of us have any clue from whence it came, but it has some rather funny little conversation excerpts and random quotes in it. I’ve been looking through it and have decided that they would make great random journal entries, so look forward to gleebs scattered throughout my random daily updates…..I figured it would help relieve the boredom of listening to my selfish dribble about the useless nature of existence in general.

Seth thinks the cause of the stomach pains is the massive amount of sunflower seeds I’ve recently consumed. I don’t know how this is possible, but he ate a bunch tonight and found himself with the same sort of pain I’ve described…although his was very short-lived. I can’t believe it’s still hurting. Speaking of stomachs….

(paragraph space randomly inserted here to insure that I reach my quota of paragraph space insertions for the day 🙂 )

I saw the pictures from Friday’s anniversary party for our clinic….I have never looked so fat in my entire life….seriously. I don’t think even my baby pictures looked this chunky. My ARMS even looked fat and I have the most ridiculous chicken arms ever seen on a human on this planet. After seeing those pictures I became seriously scared, not just my usual lazy sort of worried about my weight. I have now made a firm resolution to loose said weight by thanksgiving…..I would make the goal date my trip to texas, but since that happens in a week I figured that was a bit unreasonable….although I hope I’ll loose at least a few pounds by then.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to accomplish this weight loss, having never seriously dieted or exercised in my entire life….I’m going to try to ride my bike every night on the gear that offers the most resistance, and try to eat my meals earlier in the day…..instead of eating no breakfast and eating such a heavy dinner. The problem is that I always feel hungry all day when I eat breakfast. I’ve been doing some reading though and I think this is because I tend to eat carbohydrate heavy breakfasts, which wear off relatively quick, instead of protein, which takes a bit longer to process….thus making you feel full for a bit longer. The other problem is that I have a desk job which is definitely less active than waiting tables so that’s led to part of the weight gain, along with the fact that I’m often bored and have the bad habit of snacking when I’m bored. Blah…..it’s ridiculous to feel this annoyed about it. I could care less how other people look, and I probably weigh about the the same as several other people who I wouldn’t judge as remotely chunky…why is it we’re so much harder on ourselves? Why is it I can recognize the fact that I’m being harder on myself than my standards for other people, and at the same time have a huge part of myself feel as if the part that recognizes the unreasonable expectation is just making excuses? Why?!?

With all that self-involved whining in mind, today’s gleeb from page 54 of the nifty gleeb book (what a GREAT WORD!! Gleeb, he he.)

Say something wise.
“Love someone.”
Say something wiser.
“Love yourself.”

edited to change the mood icon that annoyed me for some unknown reason…how pathetic is that?

So as an early Hannukah present Seth bought me the World Series replica home jersey with pudge’s name and number on it…..it should arrive in 7 10 days…..yippee!! Anyhow, just thought I would make a brief note of that……I’m trying to find ways to distract myself from the fact that my stomach has been hurting non-stop for the past two days……no idea what’s wrong, but it feels as though I have a huge piece of food stuck in the general vicinity of what I’ve always considered to be my lungs, but that really doesn’t make sense. Perhaps that anatomy course would have been a good idea after all? My only consolation is that it can’t be anything bad, I know my appendix is on the lower right side, which is pretty much the opposite corner of the abdomen area from where my pain is…..to top it all off I can feel a serious headache building up…blah. Back to thinking happy thoughts……nifty cool Pudge jersey…….:) Hopefully those sort of thoughts will work soon…….

For those of you out there who have read and loved the Harry Potter series there are three stories that can cheer you up, no matter how sad you’re feeling…..simply because you can’t help but laugh at them. Seriously……I was actually laughing so hard while reading Draco Malfoy the amazing bouncing…..rat (http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Maya/Amazing_Bouncing_Rat/) that I started coughing, almost choked, and had Seth in the room pounding my back asking what on earth I had done to myself…..pathetic, but true. Naked Quidditch Match (http://www.daisygrrl.com/fics/quidditch/quidditch1.shtml) was the first I read of the three……it’s a hilarious story of what happens when the weasley twins, a game of truth or dare gone wrong, slytherins, and a magical form of e-mail getmixed together….too funny to miss. The third story to cheer you up is Dumbledore’s inbox (http://www.fanfiction.net/read.php?storyid=815796&chapter=1), an indepth look at the email our beloved headmaster recieves on an average day…….you wouldn’t believe how bad mcgonagall is about sending chain letters……reminds me of angela really 🙂 Anyhow, there’s my daily dose of happiness…..if you haven’t read them already or if you’re feeling down, check them out and make sure you have somebody around to pound you on the back and look at you like you’re crazy when the laughter starts.

*Side note* I do NOT recommend reading these at work…..it’s rather difficult to explain hysterical laughter and tears freely flowing down your face to whatever higher ranking person happens to walk into your office at an inopportune moment. 🙂

The Marlins won the series in the sixth game tonight…..Josh Beckett, who is really really cute by the way, pitched the entire game and didn’t let a single run get by him…..the final score was 2-0, so not only did the Marlins win, but it was also a shut-out……Nobody can reasonably claim that the Marlins aren’t good now……they beat the YANKEES! The team that is synonymous with baseball…..way to go Marlins! Now that that’s over I can start prepping my mind for tomorrows Bucs game where they’re gonna stomp all over the Cowboys…..

He he….I love alliteration. Anyhow, silly subject headings aside, on to the actual entry. I found the car that I want today….I’ve been going back and forth between the Suzuki Grand Vitara, the Toyota Rav4, and the Ford Escape. I really like the small SUV’s and those all have their good and bad qualities. The Toyota was thus far the leader in the competition, but today I saw a Jeep Liberty that was just the tiniest bit smaller than the regular Jeep Liberties and that tiny bit smaller made it fall into the SUV size range that I want. I talked to the lady who owns it and she said it came out between the model years last year. There was some small writing on the back that said either “spitzer” or “spritzer” or something like that and it was the most beautiful color of sapphire blue. I want that car so bad. Of course, this is all theoretical since I can’t afford a car right now anyhow, but I figure by February or March I should be established enough in my job, and have paid off enough stuff thanks to my new raise, to be able to afford car payments. We’ll just have to see, but at least now I know what I want, which siginificantly narrows the search.

In other news, the pumpkin carving went really well last night. We got some great pictures and they all came out looking wonderful. I’m gonna go get some more pumpkins some time this weekend and do at least one more carving. The insides were REALLY disgusting…I don’t remember them being like that, but my parents probably dealt with all the mess and that’s why I don’t remember it.

Tonight we’re gonna have Dorito Chicken Casserole for the first time in like six months because I’ve been too lazy to make it for approx. that length of time. Milam’s finally got in the real Rotel tomatoes instead of me having to find an equivalent and add my own spices, which really didn’t come out the same and wasn’t nearly as easy to predict the results of. Seth is very excited since he loves the stuff. It’s actually really easy to make, it just takes a bit of time and of course the patience to find the ingredients in this city of inconvenience.

I suppose that’s all for now……I’d like to take this moment to thank our sponsors, Earthlink DSL, Lochjournal 1.1, and the letter “O”. 🙂 A great happy hello to those lurking friends of mine who refuse to get a livejournal themselves (even though I have tons of the free codes) and instead just read my journal…..which is still nice, because at least I know they care enough to try and keep up with what’s going on in my life…..no matter how little may actually be going on :). Also, all paragraph breaks have been brought to you courtesy of Katie, who likes to remind me of how difficult my entries are to read if I don’t hit the enter key every so often. 😀 😉

Okay, it’s finally almost not summer here! Today I think it’s actually down to 79 degrees…..can’t be sure about it, because it might still be in the low 80’s, but I’m too lazy to look on the weather channel. This is the first time since the beginning of March that we’ve been able to shut off our air-conditioner and open the windows and still feel comfortable for more than five minutes……IT’S WONDERFUL!!!! I love it when the weather is like this……warm enough to be comfortable outside, but cool enough that you don’t have to kill yourself paying your electric bill! Now, if only we would have a freak COLD winter, then I could buy all those cute clothes from Burdines and not feel guilty about it!

We went to Target today to pick up a pumpkin carving kit for tonight and as we were walking out of the store we walked past the calendar display, since it’s getting to be that time of year we stopped to look at them. Of course, they have the Harry Potter calendars…..I bought one of the wall ones, then looked around and they had the day to day desktop calendar…..now, the pathetic part is coming up….wait for it…..wait for it……I HATE those desktop calendars….you know, the ones that you peel off one day at a time? I always forget to peel the days and then end up two or three months behind, so I finally learned to quit buying them…..but I bought this one specifically because it has a different picture on every day and I figured I could scan them and get some really cool icons out of it…….see…..I told you it was gonna be pathetic. So there you have it…..I am once again the queen of ridiculous! That’s all for now, just thought I would share that thought with you.

Today we had the one year anniversary party for our clinic so we’ve all been running around like crazy. This is the first chance I’ve gotten to just take a breather and sit down in my office. Thankfully it’s Friday so there’s no real work to do today…..in fact I’m actually leaving relatively soon. Seth and I have to take the Helium tank back to party warehouse and then we’re gonna head down to Best Buy to buy this new game for game cube that he wants and I’m gonna pick up some pumpkin carving tools and a pumpkin or two. I’m going over to Jenny’s tonight so we can work with my psychologically damaged dog and carve pumpkins. I haven’t carved pumpkins since I was like twelve, so it should be a lot of fun.

Seth called me last night and started going into one of philosophical spiels…..he apologized for how angry he’s been lately and for taking it out on me, which was really nice because he really has been a stress case lately. He said he thinks with the new schedule I designed for him he’ll feel like he’s more in control of his time and not swimming against the current to keep up. He’s never really lived by a schedule before, always sort of going with the flow, which is very typical of Miami, so it should be an interesting thing to see how he lives with it. I imagine it’ll be pretty hard at first, but once he gets used to scheduling his time a bit better it’ll be much nicer for him. There’s no reason to only have four classes and no job and yet feel as if you have no free time. I can’t even comprehend that….I’ve never gone to school and not worked…..not since three days after I turned sixteen when I first started working at Perrone’s. At one point in time I was working three jobs and going to school…..talk about not having any free time!!! Anyhow, when he started complaining about the lack of free time I suggested the scheduling to him…..mainly because he was so resentful during his free time because he felt like he should be studying, so he didn’t enjoy the time he had, and when he was studying he was resentful because he wanted to be doing something else.

I told him how Angela schedules her study time and her free time…..and it seems to work out, you don’t have any guilt on your free time because it’s what you’re supposed to be doing. It took him about three weeks to listen to my suggestion, but he’s finally taken it so hopefully everything will work out for the best. That’s all I’ve got for now…my feet are killing me from standing around and talking to all the people I don’t know and my back hurts from all the decorating activity before the party started so I’m gonna take an aleve and wait for seth to pick me up.