Via demotivate.info.

So what have I done since June 9? Here’s a small sample of the happenings:

• I attended my brother’s wedding, which was lovely, touching, and held on a criminally beautiful beach in Delaware.
• I worked temp gigs at an architecture firm, an engineering firm, a private equity firm that doubles as the X Consulate, a real estate brokerage, a biotech company, a tech company, and another tech company. Yes, we’re high on tech here in the Bay Area.
• I watched with mild trepidation as my boyfriend gouged a hole in the wall next to his front door, made some electrical adjustments, and wound up with a perfectly functioning keyless entry system.
• I got an ongoing part time job doing user support for an application hosted on a popular social networking site. If you can guess the site and the app, I’ll buy you a drink.
• I convinced an organization that has owed me money for the last six months to pay me. I was assertive. You might even say agressive.
• I reacquainted myself with Oakland while sitting for my friends’ dog.

Thanks for (still) reading.

The verdict? Tastes like chicken. I mean, like regular Diet Coke. Hooray for horribly unhealthy substances made vaguely healthier! That is, if the “vitamins and minerals” don’t get warped into toxic waste by the other stuff in this glorified battery acid.

Hey, we all have our addictions. Mine is a lot healthier than most others’ in my neighborhood.

• You are generally trying to function in the United States or some other Gregorian-calendar-using place
• You are stressed out and not sleeping because you are trying to put together a job application due on December 21

At least I didn’t mix it up the other way around.

On a tangential note, this is my third “God Am I Lame” post in the last eight days. What’s happening to me? I used to be all rad, all the time, until I moved to San Francisco. Is there something in the water here that’s making me lame?

Apparently, I only know one person that uses Facebook. If you do, please add me as your friend so I no longer look like a loser.

Photo Credit: Blueberry; altered, photocopied, and scanned by Grimes

From “Insomniac” (1961):

And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

These lines, along with many others in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, really spoke to me once. My parents bought me that book, along with The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, a hardcover edition of The Bell Jar, several individual poetry volumes, and the wicked cool action figure from the Crazy Women Poets line. Just kidding on the last one, of course, although I would actually buy one now if it existed.

In short, my dad and stepmom were very supportive of my teenage Plath fixation. It was the aspect of my black eyeliner-wearing brooding phase they tolerated best, with good reason. They had finally found a way to steer me back toward actual literature after watching, aghast, as I succumbed to preteen series novels. Thanks to a brand-new circle of friends and a generally depressive outlook, I was reading poetry written by a woman who not only used big words but also won a (posthumous) Pulitzer. My father, who read us Moby Dick at storytime when we were in our mid-to-late single digits and tried to substitute War and Peace for my Babysitters’ Club book when I was ten, was vastly relieved. Although I never finished War and Peace (wholly on principle), I devoured the Plath stuff whole. Mainly in the wee hours, as appropriate.

Why, you ask, have I injected this anecdote into Project Janna? Well, I can’t sleep. At least not at night, as my current job requires simply that I work, with no prescribed schedule. I have slowly made my way around the clock to the 5 AM-2 PM sleep schedule. It’s not a bad schedule, except when I need to be awake in the morning for some reason, and tomorrow is one of those days. This dilemma brought to mind the poem quoted above, and I tracked it down in one of the volumes I have diligently transported from dorm room to apartment to apartment for the last ten years.

I was taken aback by the bleakness of Plath’s words, which you can read online here. The poem is beautiful (those Pulitzers don’t come easy), but, wow, it’s so depressing. My personality has changed dramatically since I was sixteen, and, reading this, I realize that’s a good thing. I do think it’s character-building to have moments of despair, but there’s a limit to how much of this:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

Lady Lazarus, 1962

is healthy.

Maybe I should have stuck with War and Peace. After all, sometimes macro-crises are better than personal ones. Regardless, I did make it out of the teen years without undue influence by a woman who, though unquestionably brilliant, stuck her head in an oven at the age of thirty. Fortunately for myself and for a few social justice causes, I learned to channel my angst toward fighting problems outside my own mind.

Happy Election Day! I tip my subversively patriotic hat to all the voters out there, and hope that you too saw Forrest Hill of the Green Party and a Medical Anthropologist from the Peace and Freedom Party listed as options for Secretary of State. If not, at least your ballot did not also include the name of a man once referred to as “Conan the Republican” by George Bush the Elder.

I signed up for permanent absentee, which means that my participation in this fun civic ritual involved padding downstairs in my pajamas to Brooke and Lian’s place to replicate their voting strategy. I argue that, instead of indicating laziness on my part, this is actually an example of how resourceful I am. After all, Brooke and Lian are both heavily involved in progressive politics, and know way more about this stuff than I do.

Um, yeah. Obviously, that argument is completely transparent. Upon recognizing my loser-ness, I went precinct walking for Aimee Allison, a city council candidate from the district next to mine. While I couldn’t vote for her, this race is crucial to ensuring a progressive majority on the council. Brooke has been working mad hours in support of her, and I figured the least I could do was take one morning to trudge up hills and hang door signs. I did a super good job, too. I am confident those door signs will play an essential role in getting out the vote.

I eagerly await the election results. They will surely indicate that we have cast away our Governator, and that the Oakland City Council is well-poised to start the Revolution.

The first test of Janna’s Ability to Properly Maintain a Website Sans Handholding is nigh. Wordpress, the blogging software that powers Project Janna, has been tweaked, prodded, and refined to produce version 2.0.5. It’s the second upgrade since I did the initial installation in July, so methinks I’d better play along. Damn Wordpress for being so security-oriented, and so, so … perfectionist. Who needs that?

This means Project Janna will be down, hopefully briefly, in the wee hours of Monday morning. I have to remember all the little hacks that were so seamlessly absorbed into the site I forgot to document them. Ha! If I don’t return, you, loyal readers, and you, new NaBloPoMo readers, know what to do. Lavish praise on Rad Businesses. Stick it to the Evil Businesses. Most of all, Blogicize the Revolution! The internets are counting on you.