All these years, you were right in front of me.

As I was staring at my spoon bag today, I realized-- I love spoons. No, like, really fucking love spoons. There's not a bad thing about them. I've decided I love spoons so much that I changed my Twitter name this morning: http://twitter.com/spoonforyou.

I almost changed the name of this blog and almost abused my powers as the college newspaper web king to change our masthead to a big spoon. But I didn't. Because I have self-control.

And a deep love for spoons.

Augury

It's never constructive to engage in doomsaying.

But I have a thought that I would like to share. Several really, but if you have some time, I hope you read all the way through.

I had a pregnancy scare this semester. Several, really, hah. I'm pretty comfortable talking about it because the sheer scope of my irresponsibility with these sorts of things is hilariously absurd. But the situation made me think a lot about being a mom. Which I want to do, almost certainly, at some point, when I'm ready, and I know I'll know when I know, y'know?

A few months ago, I was out to dinner at P.F. Changs with three friends. Between bites of Dynamite Shrimp and Ma Po Tofu, the four of us happily gossiped about a couple at a nearby table. A man and woman, dressed well, both attractive, probably dating, and sitting in silence. They each had Blackberries out and were tap-tap-tapping away on them, hardly looking up, except to eat. And they never talked to each other until they got the bill.

I don't ever want to be like this. I don't want my kids to ever be like this. And I worry, so much, that people growing up today are so urgently bombarded with the multidimensional NOWNESS of technology that human interaction will become...fucking...gone.

Overstatement. I know. Cue the counterpoints about never being able to replace "a mother's love" or "a human touch." I'm right there with you. Allow me to sound off.

(Everything below is huge generalization):

Someone born in the 1950s, having grown up in The Time of budding suburbia and nuclear families, is probably going to be a player for Team Pro-Life, to create an example from a debate in which I hold heavy interest. A simplified, ultimate argument against Pro-Choicers is that we don't appreciate the value of a human life. Baby killers, we are. I see it differently, and a big part of that, I think, is the world in which I grew up. Independent women in control of their bodies = Abortion is an option for me, duh. I'm not getting into arguments of adoption or any other hypothetical issue, this is purely about the abortion debate. And I don't think anyone's wrong or right, there's no way to prove anything in a moral debate - it's up to the individual. But that 1950s person will die before I will, and I'll be pushing for abortion rights long after they're dust. That doesn't make me right, that just reflects the culture. But the generational gap now is so huge and the realms of understanding are so NOT overlapping, just because of how differently we grew up.

[switching gears, it's all relevant to my point, I promise]

In my journalism class this semester, Professor Zoffness prepared a brilliant lesson where we watched a ton of YouTube videos about journalism changing and technology transitioning and the unprecedented ways humans consume information, etc. We were asked if we thought newspapers and magazines would ever be phased out (&with them: books, paper, publishing, printing, and all the jobs that go with them). One guy said, no way: I love the feel of paper -- holding a newspaper in my hands and turning the pages could never go away.

"It's a tactile thing."

Yeah, dude, because you're used to it. You grew up with it. You watched mommy and daddy read the news that way too. Kids now are growing up watching their parents tap away on Plexiglas. The tactile thing for them will be a glossy screen, not a grainy newspaper. It might even seem totally gross to them, all those ink and papercuts. In a sterile world of smooth, glass interfaces, who the hell TOUCHES paper?

It's even kind of weird to just sit in front of the TV anymore. There's no way to interact with what you see. TV is a one-way street, dude. But this isn't about older people getting over their prejudices when adapting to technology. I can text faster than my parents can type and I'm sure my kids will be able to pwn me in whatever they'll use. This is about losing real life interaction.

Fast-forward thirty years. Hi, I'm 51-year-old Katrina and I hope I look damn good for my age because of all my Asian DNA.

My son doesn't talk to me. Not in a grumpy, rebellious teenager way, but in a legitimately-he-doesn't-feel-like-he-needs-to way. He speaks when it's necessary and socially expected - saying hello, brief small talk, voice activation codes (it is the future, after all) - but doesn't otherwise. He carries around his tablet computer everywhere. At dinner, I ask him how his day was and he's tap-tap-tapping away on iFaceboogle about how his mom is being super annoying. It is silent in the house, except for music. This wasn't how I grew up. I get fed up with the lack of voices and conversation and interaction and yell, "Why don't you appreciate the value of human life?!" and have an early stroke because neurons blow a gasket in my brain with deja vu overload.

It's not the same thing, I know. And probably would never happen in only 30 years. Humans crave interaction, everyone says. But what if they didn't anymore? What if it stopped being efficient? What if we're so blasted with quick information that the normal speed of talking and the singular act of conversation is too slow, too boring, not able to hold the attention of people anymore?

Does the human brain reward room flood with the same amount of good-feeling chemicals when I get a GChat "lol" compared to making a person laugh in real life?

If not, how do I actively keep people talking and interacting and touching and loving? All I can really do is keep talking myself, right? This is all probably trite and contrived and smart people have likely been thinking about these things decades before I have. I know I'm only scratching the surface. There's probably a sci-fi film in the works right now about a dystopian world where people never need to talk. Or maybe one has already been made and my embarrassingly minuscule knowledge of film has foiled me again. But it's 4am and I've had a lot of coffee and just want to be a good mom to some kid someday. If all else fails, I guess I could always put on my mom apron and blend.

* * *

The problem with the college bubble is how much I get into the critical analysis of literature and media and technology that I sometimes forget how to consume literature and media and technology for enjoyment, or forget to consume it at all. So when summer arrives, I have all these goodies to read and watch; I feel like I'm embarking on a huge archeological excavation and none of it counts unless I dig out the messages and am able to decipher what it all means for me as a consumer and citizen and living, breathing, dreaming chick in 2010.

(My fears about robots, coming soon in another post, especially with Christina Aguilera's new bionic album out).

Credibility

It seems like newscasts increasingly use the number of members in Facebook groups to demonstrate the popularity of an idea, event, person, etc. When my dad and I watch the news together, he scoffs when this happens while I go "ooh" in interest.

Tangible generational gaps, man.

The Next Four Months.

What's in store.

Internship at the New York State Senate, Department of Media

Moving into Xanadu, working in Admissions to get money for...

The Black Forest Writing Seminars in FREIBURG, GERMANY

Back early to AC for The Campus, Overkill, & ACTV.

Absolutely stoked and planning on baskets of writing, photographing, decorating, painting, journaling, traveling, and meeting new people.

I taste the summer on your peppery skin.

Mr. Browning, if you please.

It's Spring Break and I am not in Cancun.

I am sitting in my room at home, reading Victorian Poetry for my Later British Literature class, and listen, ROBERT BROWNING ROCKS MY WORLD. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Except in space, or riding a kangaroo.

But, you know.

"Nay, we'll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!"

whut?

I dunno, Browning, but to quote a modern day poet Dan Deacon,

I'm in love with sea horses. I'm in love with them, they're so beautiful and cute, I'm in love with seahorses.

They're fucking unreal, I love them. They're like all the clocks. I love them. I love seashores, and I love looking at 'em, and I love seashells. I love seashell things. I love things with seashells and seahorses on 'em.

Like blankets.
And towels.
And little bags.
I love 'em.

Seahorses.
Forever.

We all have something in common.

I'm Really, Really Into Dragon Age: Origins Right Now

...so much so that I have been reading, like, DAO message boards and the DAO wikipedia page. Like it is BAD. Admittedly. But I came across this quote from one msg board:

You know my gf loves those nugs, her reaction was pretty much identical to Leliana's. In fact in her playthrough she collected all the stray nugs and then didn't return them to the seller because she wanted to keep them for herself as pets, even if they only exist as a slot in her inventory.

And nearly died laughing. Then nearly started crying because I understood it all.

Cupcakes

Watch out West Coast grad schools. I have my sights set on you (but mostly on the Sprinkles shop two blocks over).

Important

I purchased my first popcorn shrimp basket at Late Night Grille this evening. It came with fries and cocktail sauce. It is delicious.

Behcet's?!

THAT'S MY GALL BLADDER! Isn't it cute? That little blue thing right there on the left, that looks like an itty bitty robin's egg.

So school started...about two months ago. And a lot can change in two months. I got my appendix out. That was a fantastical week. I thought that would be my big news for the semester, really.

It wasn't. At all. But I got all these cool pictures from my surgeon.
You can click on them to see my purple, broken appendix in all its ruptured glory.

More pictures can be found in my Facebook album "In bun mode," which really just refers to the state of wearing a hair bun. In any case, my appendix did, in fact, rupture, but I was at the hospital already, and the operation was quick and easy. The whole ordeal was painful, but the surgery was cool, as always. FUN GAME: Try to stay awake as long as you can when they administer the anesthetics. [You always lose, but as a result, you always win.]

I also have three new scars because the operation was done...lapriscopically? Is that the right word? Something like that. They healed up pretty quickly too.

Then! In the midst of H1N1 sweeping the Allegheny College campus, of course I get something else, something totally weird and unexplainable. It started as a sore throat, which turned into lesions in my throat, which led to general inability to swallow, pee, or go to classness, to put it briefly. Then my eyes got super-inflammed and started to hurt. Then the swelling.

So you know what they diagnose me with? Herpes.

HERPES.

You just don’t tell someone they have herpes without being sure. You just don’t. Especially to a young woman with her whole life ahead of her, arguably. So for two days, I had herpes, and all the requisite emotional rollercoaster jerks of being diagnosed with an STD: the horror, the hopelessness, the regret, the confusion, the feeling that my youth had been stripped away. Then two days later, the doctor's like, Kidding, that was totally wrong. Sorry.

You don't even know.

I had to re-evaluate my entire life.

So the Health Office cut down on most of the symptoms with a late-but-welcome dose of prednisone, which I've been taking ever since.

Point is, they still couldn't figure out what's wrong with me, until they started connecting the dots...tonsillectomy here...mono there...appendectomy, oh my! Maybe she just has a crappy immune system!

And I do. Or they're pretty sure I do. The fun part is you can't easily diagnose autoimmune disorders, it's kind of like a process of elimination thing. So I'm spending all this week going to specialists to get blood drawn and tested, instead of going to class and distributing Overkill, which I would so rather be doing.

They think I have Behcet's Syndrome, which is common in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The symptoms match up pretty well, and there's no cure, but there is treatment. And this is really upsetting because

1. I AM DISEASED.
2. Um, how will I pay my health insurance someday? They'll jack up my prices like crazy. Right? Isn't that how that works? Like there's no getting out of it. Dude, this sucks.

And it doesn't help to leave every doctor's office with another handful of prescriptions to fill. I'm TWENTY years old, damnit. Just- ok, I'm dealing with it, I am. Just don't complain about your workloads for school or anything around me, because seriously, I have bigger worries right now.

Then I'm like, oh no, there must be people on campus with herpes and cancer and other bad things. How do they make it through the day? Good grief. I take everything for advantage.

College.

John, Maggie, and Colin are sitting in my room playing an angry game of Mario Kart. There is much swearing. I feel at home.

Waiting

I'm done waitressing. My last day was on Sunday. You know how people have acid flashbacks? I have waitress flashbacks. Like sometimes I'll wake up in cold sweat and think I pressed the Side of Rice button when I should've pressed Side of Fries. I mean, I also have acid flashbacks but that's a different story.

Little things are coming back to me about the whole experience too. Like how remarkably feminist I am in (seeming) comparison to the other waitresses. I vividly remember one day when Adrienne was filling the soda machine with ice and dropped the bucket into the top of the machine.

She yelled out, "Oh my god. I can't reach. I need a boy!"

With this incredulous attitude that came out of NOWHERE, I strode up to the machine and pulled the bucket out, being quite taller than she. Then I said, more obnoxiously than I had liked, "You need a what? What do you need?"

"Or a...tall person..." she replied sheepishly.

"That's right."

Then I stalked off to serve my table, mentally scolding myself for acting so high and mighty.

But I kept doing stuff like that.

One day, I passed Heather taking a breakfast order from a grouchy middle-aged man. She was asking the standard questions you're supposed to ask, how would you like your eggs? Sausage or bacon? White or wheat toast? Butter or jelly?

And the guy just interrupted her and snapped, "Hey Blondie, why don't I talk and you write?"

I did a double-take and without thinking back to my "the customer is always right" training, I told him, "Hey, you don't talk to her like that." He wanted to see the manager. There were issues. But it felt totally right.

Then there's my whole deal with the correct term: waitress or server. I mean it's server if we're thinking political correctness and whatnot. But it's no coincidence every "server" I worked with was a young, attractive, skinny woman between the ages of 18 and 35. I don't dare put myself in that category, out of fear, because that can only mean I was yet another one to be gawked at and judged every single minute. It has to be different with guys. Waiters and servers. It has to be different.

We're very aware of the customers that watch us, that hit on us, that relish asking for each extra sauce one by one so they can watch us walk away (which we see in the mirrored wall) while they laugh with their buddies, that treat us like we all got pregnant in high school and are too dumb to go to college, especially when they give us their orders very slowly and repetitively, while I scold myself for even caring about the stereotypes and the commonly held beliefs.

There's a stigma to the waitress. There's a sexuality to the waitress. There's an urgency, an excuse to behave badly, a reason for mothers to feel the satisfaction of having someone else clean up their kid's mac&cheese mess after dinner. That is what the waitress is for.

There are people who just come out to eat and don't give their waitress a second thought.

But there are also people who come in to eat every day who complain about the food, who bitch about the wait, who shiver and say it's too cold in here, who want to see the manager, who want to used expired coupons, who loudly declare they're never coming back again, and you wonder why the fuck they come in to eat there every day if they hate it so much until you realize they have no job and no family and it's actually the best part of their day to come in and bitch and moan and feel like they have control over SOMETHING because they don't have control over anything else, so you pity them and deal with them because you know that letting them use you makes their day a little better, so you wait for them to come in.

We're all just waiting.

Really, this job taught me a lot about myself. I recommend waitressing to everyone because it's a very eye-opening experience to get to know yourself. I know the things I SHOULD'VE done...jobs with in-office experience...internships...grad school research...comp topic searching...but all I wanted to this summer was waitress, quite inexplicably. It was, in my mind, the biggest way I could push myself over the summer.

In any case, the job was enjoyable enough and certainly made me grow. My attitude going out to eat has become much more aware and empathetic now. And I'm better at small talk with people now, I think. I'm glad I did it. I kept the apron.

Psych majors, please comp on this?

Nails on a chalkboard don't bother me. At all.

But progressively, more and more,
and I have never before noticed this,
the following make me go gahhhhasjkldkge;lgjl:

1) Scraping plastic on styrofoam
(like a plastic spoon on a styrofoam ice cream to-go cup)
2) Scraping teeth on wet, wooden popsicle sticks
3) Scraping nails too hard on glazed ceramic coffee cups

Is this a psychological thing?
If nails on a chalkboard bother so many people,
then is this herd mentality or seriously a brain thing?
Can someone do their comp thesis on this please?
Or at least tell me if they know?
Because for the life of me, I don't know why these things
illicit such a strong and terrible gahhhaskkjkfriwe7!8n.

Kinda fascinating really.

A Thought

I am eating a grilled swiss cheese sandwich with truffle oil.
I am totally happy with it. Really freaking happy.


Do you ever stop to think: there is so much fucked up stuff in the world. So many people who can’t get what they want. So many dreams deferred and hopes crushed and goals so far out of reach. Even the most generic of people can make it through high school, go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, get a house, get life insurance, have a dignified tombstone… and it takes a whole life to get any of that stuff done.

But then there's food. Food is the only thing that give me total and immediate gratification. You eat it, you taste it, you swallow it, and it’s yours. No one else can take it from you. Food is fucking beautiful. I love food. I want to spend my life with food. This grilled cheese sandwich is beautiful.

Sex does not count as total and absolute immediate gratification. I can think of at least ten of my closest friends who would argue that. Sex gets complicated. You’re wrong. Even people in solid relationships can’t have sex whenever they want. But you can go downstairs at 4 a.m. and have a grilled cheese whenever. Masturbation is a little closer, I guess. This grilled cheese is probably a better sexual experience.

Why do some people waste their food time with crappy Lean Cuisine TV dinners and hard store-bought muffins when food is the best treat they’ll get all day?

I am so pleased with this grilled cheese.
If I wasn’t eating it, I’d have it plated with gold and put on display.

The Worst Line I've Ever Gotten

Customer: I'm Kevin, what's your name?
Me: Katrina.
Customer: What?
Me: Katrina. Like the hurricane.
Customer: Oh, cool.
Me: Yeah.
Customer: So hurricanes usually fly solo...you single?
Me: (stares)

Celebrity Morph by MyHeritage

MyHeritage: Family trees - Genealogy - Celebrities