i'm back on the internet, hurrah! slowly, slowly working my way through to catch up on all that was written while i was picking up boxes... (livejournal-wise, i'm about 100 entries behind. yikes! but a big bunch of them are from the bookslut feed, which i generally skim. unless it's something super-interesting, like a suicide poem allegedly by abraham lincoln. maybe i have odd standards?)

but i just took a break, read a bit in a severed wasp... and one sentence happened to strike me. "Not everyone has to have a sense of vocation to be complete, but..." and it goes on with the conversation about a character who does. i suppose it's just the word, "vocation"... i hadn't thought about it in a long time. not having one, it's an incredible freedom... but dammit, it's been... has it really been nearly four years since mine broke or am i counting incorrectly? and i still miss it. sometimes i get impatient, i consider enrolling in the physics program at utk, attempting to hammer the old pieces back together. i've still got the same general mental capacity, i think, but i don't think i can make it work that way without the underlying pull... and i have no idea how to get that back, whether it's even possible to believe in one again. all the king's horses and all the king's men...

something to ponder later. but now, i've had too much coffee to sit still, i want to go play in the flower beds, see if i can figure out what's flowers and what's weeds.

(the quick-list of things this week that i'd normally have written about and might still if nothing happens next week... let's see, i learned the limits of my car's swimming abilities and got a classic damsel-in-distress rescue, dogs and cat aren't getting along badly as expected, i don't wish my now-former roommate any harm in iraq or anything but i could do without ever seeing her again, i can't believe ruby tuesdays can put more than 70 grams of fat in a turkey sandwich, and i need lawn mower buying advice... suggestions for a groovy new haircut and a place to get one are also being accepted, at least until tomorrow... see? you didn't miss much!)

How evil are you?

(actually, i got "twisted" when being honest, but i'd rather be using the human blood-created browser of evil...)

work was excruciatingly slow today. apparently no one needs new scrubs this week.

so i got to reading the littmann stethoscope manuals. and then figuring out what all the other languages included in them are. french, spanish, italian, german, dutch, norwegian, swedish, portuguese, russian, all pretty easy to recognize. but there was this other, calling itself "suomenkielin" at the top of the page. incredibly strange looking, i could at least tell that the grammatical structure wasn't germanic or romance... i was sorta betting on icelandic.

but no. just looked it up on google. finnish. it looks like it'd be fun to learn, if you're ever at a big university and need a language credit...

now you know too. maybe if it's that boring tomorrow, i'll memorize and post all the different words for "stethoscope" up here...

behold! i got a new pen! new pens make me happy! this one's a waterman kultur fine point, and buying it over ebay from someone in belgium was a helluva lot cheaper than i can find them here. i apologize for the blurriness, but bouncy happy wanting-to-share does not sustain itself long enough to wait on real pictures when a cell phone camera is handy.

i attempted to shop for work clothes today. i started the whole professional-ish thing last august, so i never bothered with buying much summer stuff...

looking for khakis, i ended up with the first pair of trousers that really fit... 40% off, slightly weird but cool, they convert into capris. however, unfortunately, they fall in some odd wedge of spectrum between slate grey and lime green. please remember, my wardrobe was mostly monochrome -- blue -- for years and years. i've just recently been starting to work in wine colors and dark greens and black. oh well, at least customers should quit asking me whether i think their potential scrub sets match...

in other news, i had a fantastic weekend. while i make a decent introvert, enjoy the adventure of adjusting to a new environment, etc., there's nothing quite like walking into a room full of old chums... while i didn't get to see all the cookeville folks i would've liked to, i hadn't talked and laughed so much in a good while.

the new coffee shop in cookevegas is great... spent a couple hours there sunday morning. the k-tron seal of approval is granted...

more breaking news... there is progress on the housing front! i called up lu the other day to see if she could get referral money if we moved into her apartment complex, and it turns out that she wants to get out and move to a house for the sake of her dogs. and is willing to consider roommates! it's almost too perfect -- she works in the same part of town as dave and me, her lease is up half a month after amy deploys... we're looking as fast as we can... i'm not so sure how her two dogs will get along with chelsea the cat... but i'm excited!

oh, and the society of heathens has a webpage now. they're FINALLY making a new batch of t-shirts -- a bunch of the people who got to tntech 2+ years before me had them when i was a youngun, i was horribly jealous, and now, at last i shall be a proud owner of one. hurrah.

ok, so my computer's mysterious inability to access msnbc hasn't bothered me. until now.

for some reason, internet explorer crashes every time i try to go there. normally, i simply solve this problem by avoiding msnbc.

but then neil gaiman posted a link to an interview with madeleine l'engle, who ranked as my top numero uno favorite author through pretty much all of elementary school. i want to read it. guess where it's hosted? the click-crash has suddenly become far less innocuous.

so what the hell's the deal? do i have some kind of virus on my computer that hates microsoft? (that'd be hilarious, normally, but i'm annoyed right now...)

the more time i have to write, the less i have to say...

let's see... rewinding to what i previously omitted...

way back last thursday... i lost my keys around the apartment, couldn't find them in the morning, caught a ride to work with dave -- who almost made himself late helping me look, and have i mentioned lately how fantastic he is? -- and discovered the knoxville bus system. you don't even have to be at a stop, just wave them down. i was the only passenger, the driver chatted with me the whole way, i couldn't really hear much of what he said over the general bus noises, but i appreciated the effort and attempted to listen.

still haven't bought any stylish scrubs to make work brighter and comfier. but i did manage to find some insoles to increase the arch support in my black shoes...

saturday... dad, dave, and i tromped around downtown nashville for a few hours before prairie home companion... garrison keillor wore red tennis shoes with a suit. the silly teenager i once was, the one who insisted on wearing chucks with everything including dresses, rejoiced. but really, the one to watch is the foley artist. incredible. we were too chicken to put in anything for the mid-show greetings from the audience...

dave and my parents spoiled me rotten for my birthday. now his is coming up next monday... he's on vacation all this week, which is nice, but leaves me little by-myself time to shop. i don't know why present-finding always makes me so anxious... i never know if what i'm getting is right. sometimes, i desperately want to be one of the people who always send thoughtful little notes and gifts... but then i get stage-fright or fail to notice the passing of time or simply get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of friends with note-worthy occasions... and the xmas cards go back in the desk drawer for another year...

my dad's taking dave and me to the taping of prairie home companion in nashville tomorrow! whee!

somehow i'm having trouble convincing myself to get in the shower because that will eventually lead to putting my shoes on again.

directly following standing up and hanging clothes for the eight hours of my first day on the job (but apparently that's the worst task they have... they're weeding, i guess)with a first karate class (my roommate gave me a free pass for the month! whee!) might not have been the best idea. i'm generally in lousy shape, so everything hurts today. i didn't realize that thumb muscles (used for pinching hangers) could get sore...

i just had to prove my over-18 status to buy wite-out. wite-out.

is this normal?

i hadn't bought any wite-out in a long, long time... i can just see it... had i not been too sloppy to hide the places i scribbled things out... back freshman year when i was a callow 17, i would've had to beg my elders to buy me... wite-out. yeah.