Had a very good week. Am starting to feel cautiously optimistic that maybe "the situation" won't blow up in my face after all.

Plus I got a day off work, so what's not to like?

I've been spending a lot of time in the pool lately. I typically go over to my parents' house, where the pool is heated and stepping in is like wrapping myself in a silk blanket fresh from the dryer.

But sometimes I use my own pool, which is not heated and therefore feels like the icy wasteland that dwells in the hearts of evil men and bar examiners. It's so cold that it's impossible to simply step in gradually, because if you do you'll never make it, plus your prolonged and agonized shrieking will frighten the neighbors. The only option is to simply launch yourself in, get the shock over in one brutal swoop.

As much fun as it is to have friends over to swim – and I wish people would come over more often – swimming alone is a uniquely hedonistic experience. It's a bit like meditating, even more so than walking the dogs alone (where a certain amount of attention must be directed to the dogs and the traffic and the potential psycho killer). I think about everything while I'm out there, until eventually I think about nothing except the feel of the water around me.

Oh, and the sound of my little white dog yelping from the side of the pool. He thinks I'm drowning.

Raindrops Falling on My Head (and I Love It)

It's been rainy here...rainy for weeks on end, day after day.

It's a nice break from the usual summer, which features no rain and blazing sun and blistering heat. I could really get used to this...maybe I should move to Seattle? Is this what it's like in Seattle in the summer? Never having actually BEEN to Seattle, I don't know. But it rains a lot on Frasier, which I may have mentioned is the very best show ever.

The other day I was watching it, and suddenly instead of Frasier I was watching CSPAN. The cable company had said they would shuffle the channels, but that was so long ago I thought they'd changed their minds. Or at least I thought they wouldn't have the audacity, the NERVE to switch it right smack in the middle of Frasier. Frantically, hands shaking with urgency, I tore through the new channel listing in search of my sweet Frasier. And then I found the new location, but I couldn't watch it because the cable box hadn't been updated to recognize new channels. Damn you channel 12! Why do you torment me so?

So that really sucked.

Meanwhile, there's lots of rain. On Frasier and on my head.

The Slowening

Has anyone else discovered that as you become more proficient, it's actually taking you longer to do the same tasks?

I'm wondering if that's another thing that's unique to my (obscure) field. When I started, it made sense to use other people's work as a template (by which I mean, I'd change the pertinent facts but leave the rest exactly as I found it). I was almost religious about it – I felt even a tiny change was too risky, like the way that the original was written was the absolute epitome of legal perfection in all ways.

That was, of course, ridiculous. Yet I only recently became comfortable changing things up. I was probably hurried along my way when the recipient of one of my glorious works mocked it online, but that's a story for another day.

The point was valid – there are things in the templates that are clunky, outdated, or otherwise undesirable, and I've started making those changes. Sometimes I just start entirely from scratch. Which means that the five-page piece of prose that once took me two hours now borders on eight, much to the chagrin of...nobody, it seems, since I haven't heard a peep about it. They used to express amazement at how quickly I once did things, especially since they were so pleased with the work product (what amazed me was that people seemed not to recognize that I'd just used their own previous work virtually verbatim).

At least now I will fully deserve any further online mockery someone might see fit to bestow upon me.

Awooooooooooo

Today was the Solstice. I celebrated by getting all drunk. At a firm event.

Actually, I forgot all about the Solstice, but it totally worked out great what with the inebriation at work, 'cuz I was able to sober up in my office while surfing the Internet (which informed me that it was the Solstice), and it was still light outside when I was finally able to leave.

Sweet synchronicity.

Still 100% Alive

I'm not dead; just dealing with bad juju. If the bad juju turns into even worse juju, whither this blog I know not. One hopes (and by one, I mean ME) that the future holds good juju and mojo and even some mocha OR perhaps a splash of jumanji. But all that is, alas, out of my hands.

P.S. I hate coffee.

Untameable

An unexpected issue with the short hair has been my inability to pull it back out of my face. It was supposed to be long enough to at least get my bangs out of the way, but it's just a little bit too short in some layers for that to work.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that headbands are making a comeback. I have fond memories of my headband-wearing days of yore, so I figured it might be a solution to my little problem. I ran to the store, and in typical excessive fashion, bought 3,923 of them.

And so it was that, my heart alight with joy, I placed the sacred band upon my head.

All looked good. For a minute.

Then, slowly at first, then faster and faster, my hair began to appear from underneath the headband. The band trembled, fought valiantly, but soon began inching up off my head.

Finally, with an audible SPROING, it popped off and went flying, narrowly missing my little dog, who ran off crying.

Sigh. Anyone want 3,923 headbands?

Chop-Happy

After months of threatening to do so, I finally chopped my hair off. It feels great. It looks maybe not so great, but I really don't care.

Below please find a highly accurate pictorial representation of this process:

Before: Note the slumped shoulders and frowny face from all the heavy heavy hair.

After: Now bald, leaving head so light and airy it floats right off my body.

The best thing about it is the way that people react. It started at the salon, where the stylist kept asking me, very sincerely, "Are you SURE you want to do this?" as if I'd asked her to serve me up a suicide cocktail instead of just cutting some hair.

It's even better at work, where people seem to think dramatic haircut = crippling mental crisis. They look at me with concerned eyes and ask, delicately, "Is everything...okay?"

I assured them that I've gotten haircuts like this several times in my life. In fact, it seems like I'm only happy with extremes...I like REALLY long hair or REALLY short hair.

Which got me to thinking...maybe they're right. Maybe I really do have some kind of weird mental illness that makes me cut all my hair off.

If I do, it's all my mom's fault. (Isn't everything?) You see, it all started when I was 4. I was 4 and happy and had long princess hair and was a complete girly girl. I had lots of little girly girl friends, and the one I admired the most was the girliest girl of all. Her mother doted on her and bought her precious porcelain dolls and dressed her in perfect little dresses and spent hours on her perfect flowing hair. I imagine she ended up in rehab by age 14, but boy, I bet she looked good doing it.

Anyway, so there I was with all this curly girly girl hair that my mom had no idea what to do with and struggled every morning to brush. (Hint: it's called conditioner. Use it.) She decided the best thing to do would be to have it cut very short, and so she made it happen.

Oh, you can't imagine the trauma. All my hair, gone. The very core of my sense of self, violated. I cried and cried and for the first time in my life hated my mother in the way that a teenage girl hates her mother, filled with a sense of betrayal and rage that I, obviously, never forget.

---

So you see, it's a little bit sick that later in my life I took a liking to repeatedly growing my hair really long and then having it all chopped off.

Time Flies Nerdily By

I see that Star Wars is 30 years old. That marks precisely 15 years since I realized it was, undeniably, the best movie ever.

I remember it so clearly because I watched it on TV as part of a special "15th anniversary" event. I was so amazed by this great movie I had discovered. I introduced it to a friend, and she loved it too.

It's not that I knew nothing about it. I have a vague notion of it from the foggy dark of early childhood, and I somehow have always known the mechanics of who's related to whom through the pop culture osmosis that ensures that every person who grows up in a society knows all the really important things, like the "Batman" version of Jingle Bells.

But I hadn't actually watched it, as in watched it and took it all in and appreciated its awesomeness.

Meanwhile, how can 15 years have passed? How can that movie be twice as old as it was back then, when it already sounded really old? I know that time is gliding by me faster and faster, but I still find this impossible.

I thought about watching Star Wars to commemorate the occasion, but I really had no desire to do so. The prequels have killed it for me. All I can think about is Jar-Jar Binks and then I feel a bit like throwing up.

You Call This a Saturday?

I don't usually work on the weekends, but I am now. I've somehow become a lawsuit-filin' fool, which is bizarre since I was not supposed to be a litigator. And I guess I'm still not, since all I do is file 'em. Someone else gets to do all the rest.

I think the theory is that I know more of the background of the case up to the point of filing suit (since I handle all the finger-wagging and nose-thumbing and whatnot that goes on in the hope of avoiding litigation), so it makes sense for me to be the one who drafts the complaint.

Of course, lately I'm not getting much done at work (it being that clerky time of year). I like the lunches and happy hours and ice cream socials (P.S. so fat); I do not like billing four hours a day and having to work on Saturday.

It's weird being on the other side of the table in that it's not so weird. I still feel kind of nervous making chit-chat, I still want people to like me, and I still feel like I'm being evaluated (except instead of deciding if they want to hire me, people are deciding if they want to be hired by me). It's exhausting.

Hoisted by Someone Else's Petard

I don't know what that means either.

My phone number is used. I got it secondhand, battered and dingy and more than a little worn out.

I didn't realize it at the time – the phone company let me choose, and there's something fun about my number that made it appealing.

Except that it has been used. A quick reverse phone lookup would have revealed that, but I didn't think to try.

Had my number's previous owner been someone different, maybe it wouldn't have been a problem. Maybe then I would have received calls inviting me to celebrity soirees or Muffy's weekend manse or a chocolate fondue tasting.

But no. Instead I get some debtor's previous number. Oh, she bought and she bought, from ever so many places, but not a bill did she pay. Then, like so many before her, she ran off, leaving behind pain and heartbreak and my poor abused number.

So now I get all of her calls from angry creditors, four or five every day. I know a little something (very little) about debtor protection laws, but dang if it helps me if said calls aren't aimed at the actual debtor or particularly abusive (and, while annoying, they are not). I would explain that I am not her, but mostly I just get the messages later because I'm never home, or if I do answer it's just an automated message on the other end. None provides information on who the creditor is or how to get the calls to stop. I suppose I could call the numbers and hunt down the source and try to convince them that I'm not who they think I am and maybe even threaten legal action if they don't stop.

But geeeeez. That's, like, hard.