She wants her cup of stars.

In the office where I've been temping this week, one of my few regular responsibilities is to send out an e-mail when the taco lady shows up with her cooler. I've taken to just placing "tacos" in the subject line, and then in the e-mail's body simply writing "...are here." Because why write "tacos" more than once?

This afternoon, the company's CFO sent out an e-mail. It read:

"please say hi to ee cummings who is covering our front desk"

So I sent him back a reply:

"since hunger is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never give you tacos"

Meanwhile, all day, the rest of the office has been stopping by my desk in confusion. "I thought your name was Jennifer?"

It has never been a better time to purchase an exclusive Abernathy Green t-shirt, designed by our own drawgirl. Why? Because drawgirl  and her boyfriend Slasher both got laid off their respective jobs this week. Merry Christmas, guys! 

If cute-culture is not your thing, check out Slasher's Jack of No Trades line for a more aggressive, political look.

Abernathy Green and Jack of No Trades shirts are comfy, high-quality, and sweatshop-free. This is a great time to support an independent artist and get a cool new shirt for the new year.

Of course I'm bloody ecstatic.

Amidst all the celebration, I think it's worth remembering:

I believe Obama will be a fantastic leader. But he has no magic wand. He's not going to patch everything overnight. He will not be able to accomplish any of this change without us.

Stay vigilant, stay involved, stay invested. This is your democracy. It's only as healthy as you make it.

I have three weeks left to finish all the writing I can this summer. As a result, I'm weaning myself away from livejournal for a little while. If anyone wants to talk to me, e-mail me directly--zenithblue@gmail.com. I'm still here, and not so busy I don't want to hear from people--I just can't keep up with my friends list right now.

xoxoxo

So now that I'm finished with my semester, I can get started on the real work. My program offers us a certain amount of money towards "professional development," which we can take for almost anything--conferences, production costs (for the playwrights and screenwriters), or summer writing projects. I've taken some summer money so I can get a jump on the novel. Here we go.

Thing is, the money is very generous, but I'm in the unfortunate position of having $17K in student loans that come out of deferral the instant my semester ends. As in, now. So the money I got from the Michener Center is going to be quite thin, and I'm in the process of tightening my belt. Anyway, the point is, I have a small list of the same 5 cheap meals I've been eating on and off during various harsh times for the past decade (baked potato, egg stir fry, eggs and toast, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, spaghetti and sauce), and I'm looking for new suggestions. What's your favorite easy-to-make, money saving meal? Post it here and earn my gratitude.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I like to eat vegetarian as often as I can. And the meal suggestion doesn't have to be totally dirt cheap--I'll splurge on things like fresh veggies a couple times a week. Thoughts?

Of the 360 warm/hot days of the Texan year, I picked the nastiest, wettest, coldest one to get locked out of my house. It wasn't even my fault; my key didn't work in the back door lock, which I didn't know, since I never really use the back door. But now that the doggerson is back there, I managed at 10 AM to get myself stuck outside with no cell phone, no jacket, and no computer. Luckily I had my Wollstonecraft so I went to class and shivered for two hours, then got on the school computer and e-mailed Hodge in Houston who called the landlord who called the locksmith. Finally at 5:30 PM I was allowed back into my house, after a full day of shivering and misery. This was the suckiest day I have had in a year.

In further bad news, the doggerson has no microchip. I'm in a tizzy because I don't know if I can afford to keep him, but he's more or less the perfect dog for me temperament-wise. I'm trying not to panic. It's only been one weekend that he's been here, and there's time for his family to find him. I got some flea treatment so now I can shut him in the garage for the night--I felt bad that he was stuck outside for the rainstorm last night, but I really don't want my cats getting anything from him.

Now I'm supposed to work on homework--I'm supposed to write a happy ending to No Exit, which frankly I just don't much feel up for. I might just have a bath and read some shojo manga instead.

I'm going to Portland on Friday, and because I'm so stressed right now it's becoming hard for me to look forward to. It just seems like a lot of work, when I want to have a few days to do nothing. Well, since I'm staying with drawgirl I should be able to balance a major slack binge with some fun and excitement. Would it be totally lame if I spent part of my vacation in Portland re-playing Final Fantasy VII? And if it is lame, do I even care?

So the desk is now officially an existential crisis. I'm not being melodramatic here. It's been a whole saga and every day I go into my office feeling cheery and hopeful that a vague desk-shape might start to appear from the MORE THAN FIFTY PIECES (!!!) that came in the box from Office Depot. And every day, when I slink out of the office, I feel like seppuku is a viable option. This constant discouragement is certainly not helped by the fact that even finding the desk was an ordeal. I 1) went to Ikea, 2) picked out one I liked from Ikea and got my heart set on it, 3) discovered that the one I picked couldn't hold a keyboard tray, which since my joints are now mush from five years of library work is a necessity, 4) went to the office store, 5) picked out one I thought I could live with, 6) was told it was out of stock, 7) tracked down another one at another Office Depot, 8) purchased the thing feeling excited that an end was in sight. And that was three days ago! Three days, of MORE THAN FIFTY PIECES of heavy desk debris scattered across the floor of the office!

And one of the MORE THAN FIFTY PIECES was broken, so I have to wait for the replacement to come in the mail before I have a hope of finishing the stupid thing.

Every painful quandry I get into (with the help of the utterly useless directions) gets resolved just in time for a new painful quandry to rise up.

I hate it.

The desk saga has also happened in concert with the destruction of my coffee maker. The carafe broke and it's out of production so I can't get it replaced, but I'm too stubborn to throw away an otherwise perfectly good coffee maker. The sad thing is, it won't actually percolate without the bloody carafe pressing against the drip just right. So I've been standing at the coffee maker pressing a spoon up to the drip to force it to give me caffeine. But seriously, there is just a shade too much antagonism in my life right this instant.

Of course, then I get back to the book I'm reading (Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and I feel like an asshole. Okay, so I have to jerry-rig my coffeepot. I'm not yet digging dirty seeds out of hay bales to feed my starving child.

Big news, at least for me: I have a new computer.

I can hear the collective gasp of those of you who know me in person, who've seen the machine I've worked on for years, a 1999 blueberry clamshell iMac that looks like an outsized cosmetics case. It was the first computer I ever bought brand new, and I loved it so much (and still do). But recently, it's started shutting down on me at random intervals. I think the AC cord is just not working right, so it wasn't really 100% desperate that I get a brand-new computer, but I decided since I had a tax return coming it was as good a time as any.

I simply don't buy new computers. The first reason is my resounding lack of funds. My family always inherited chopped-up computers from my techie uncle, who just gave us whatever broken crap he didn't want to use himself. When I went to college, I wasn't going to have a computer, but a friend's family gave me their outdated Mac in return for my tutoring skills. I felt like fucking Cinderella, even though it was already several years old. It was my own computer. I set the desktop. I set the screensaver (if anyone remembers the old falling stars screensaver from way old Macs, complete with cool falling star sound effects; I had a dormie who used to say if he felt sad or depressed and I wasn't there he'd sit outside my door and listen to the falling stars, which wasn't as creepy as it sounds since I was his dorm mom and absurdly maternal). My first e-mail account ever got set up on that Mac, and I wrote a lot of my first serious fiction attempts on it. It was mine, mine, mine.

So then a few years later, when I used my permanent fund dividend to buy a sexy new iBook, it was even more exciting. I had paid for it and it was new, just out of the box, just off the conveyer belt. I donated my old Mac to a dormie who'd had the misfortune to fry her hard-drive and never looked back.

But now I've used that iMac--named Violet Beauregarde, by the way (get it?)--for eight years. I wrote 1.5 novels on it, wrote my undergraduate thesis on it, wrote all my grown-up short stories on it. I don't know what to do with it. I'm hoping to find something useful, but for the time being I just can't conceive of getting rid of it.

Anyway, besides relative brokeness, the other reasons I do not buy computers are that 1) I'm vaguely a technophobe and 2) I stubbornly refuse to bow to the corporate whims that try to peddle me a new big-ticket item every few years on the grounds of "improvements" (most of which are meaningless to me). That said, here is a list of things I haven't ever had on a computer: mp3s, DVD player, chat capabilities, photographs. And for the past five years I haven't had internet access. I've weaseled my way onto Hodge's computer to do things like e-mail, blogging, applying to grad school, wasting time on YouTube, etc. But now...now! Now I have my own intarweb! I have the chat and the e-mail and the porn, oh the porn! Hahaha!

So for anyone looking for my chatty chatness, I'm zenithblue on gchat and jenithblue on AIM. And now you don't run the risk of someone replying, "Uh, this is Hodge" when you try to talk to me.

And the new computer? It's name's Veruca Salt.