d'oh!mestic

So, apart from getting waylaid by the sad woman with her sad story in Barnes & Noble last weekend, I also managed to get a little book shopping in.

Actually, it wasn’t shopping so much as it was replacement. Several times in the last couple of weeks, I had gone into the upstairs book-o-teria and book-bookery that is the home office in search of either Gone with the Wind (Every time I pick it up, I mean to read it with a critical eye, and every time, I fail — but damn it, I was going to try again) or Pride and Prejudice, and both books, both beloved copies were missing.

I looked everywhere. I mean, EVERYWHERE for either one, and came up with bupkis, so we went trooping off to the bookstore for replacements.

And now, if you looked at my nightstand, you’d get a snapshot of who I am these days: Jane Austen stacked on top of Margaret Mitchell stacked on top of Harper Lee stacked on top of J.K. Rowling, with Sarah Vowell and Abraham Lincoln (the man himself) leaning in on the action, all covering up the secret shame of a woman’s glossy and a doorstopper work of English chicklit.

I finished Pride and Prejudice the night I bought it, and I’ve been working my way through GwtW on my own, while reading a bit of Harry Potter (Sorcerer’s Stone) out loud to Adam every night, while the rest I pick up at random, open somewhere in the middle and just read.

I can’t believe a quarter of the American population is missing out on this joy. Really, it breaks my heart.

Today is day three of the new job.

Adam: It’s the third day. You know what that means?
Sarah: I have to put out?
Adam: . . . We’ve been together too long.
Sarah: Yeah.

The job is interesting, and eventually they’ll let me do it, but the past two days have involved HR paperwork and watching coworkers with longer tenure work. Eight hours. Of watching other people type. And since I’m not stalking anyone of them, it’s not as compelling as it could be.

But it’ll get better. Today they’re letting me file!

The job doesn’t quite feel like the job yet. I’m only about 1000 yards from the Journal, and I’ve had to make a concentrated effort to not turn into the editorial parking lot each time I’ve driven past. I keep bumping into former co-workers at Starbucks, and keep referring to my time at the Journal in the present tense. “On my desk, we do this” for example — which makes it sound like I’ve died and this is the afterlife.

But let’s not compare the new job to death. Let’s compare it to attending camp: it’s summer, it’s an activity to get me out of the house and it’s not school, but it doesn’t feel real.

It’ll feel real eventually.

And now, to follow in the footsteps of every other Albuquerque blogger, I give you the WaPo critique!

Washington Post reporter Sridhar Pappu opened a profile on former US Attorney David Iglesias thusly:

At 9 a.m. on the very edge of the dusty, desolate collection of adobe homes and Vietnamese restaurants that seem to form this city, David Iglesias begins his run through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This is not easy terrain. The footing is terribly uneven. The altitude can be unbearable. At certain times one can hear the grumbling of mountain lions and the feasting of coyotes.

There are so many things wrong with this lede. Like, dusty? Only in days ending in -y, but is that a problem? Desolate — I don’t think that word means what Sridhar Pappu thinks it means.

Webster’s defines it thusly:

1 : devoid of inhabitants and visitors
[That booming population of 750,000? Is all in your MIND!]

2 : joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful through or as if through separation from a loved one [I'm guessing that to someone from the east coast, we could all be mourning separation from using water with reckless abandon, but c'mon.]

3 a : showing the effects of abandonment and neglect : DILAPIDATED b : BARREN, LIFELESS c : devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope : GLOOMY desolate memories>
[No, no, it's a desert, no.]

And then he hits the pervasive stereotypes of Albuquerque: adobe houses and . . . Vietnamese restaurants?

I know. Neglectful.

So, I quit my job. That was the big hush-hush, don’t-jinx-it news. Maybe it’s not the hush-hush, don’t-jinx-it news that everyone is hoping for, but hey! New job! New challenges! New title!

I know!

I’ll be an assistant editor for an unnamed company, which means I’ll actually use the English degree for professional gain and profit. If I could, I would line up every person who warned me off the major and perform a version of the “I Told You So” dance tailored to their specifications. For instance, my dad’s version would go, “I told you so, I told you so, I-I-I told you so, that’ll be fifty bucks, please” with some Cabbage Patching thrown in for good measure.

It’s almost enough incentive to dig out the sheepskin, wipe off that questionable brown spot and frame it.

Almost.

Now I just need to survive my last week at the Journal without falling apart into a gooey puddle of panic. I’ve spent the last nine years here. Nine. Years. I don’t know any other professional life.

Yeah, I’ll get over it.

It is shameful how long I’ve gone without a proper entry. Sorry about that.

Since the last time I posted something meaningful, I turned twenty-nine. And if you’ll pretend I’m wallowing in angst about the Last Year of My Twenties, I’ll pretend like I’m wallowing in the Last Year of My Twenties and we’ll both ignore the fact that Flickr has completely taken over my life.

But life continues to go on. We’re still having the same debate between selling the house and waiting out the recession here; switching jobs, switching cities, switching countries. We’re still playing with cars and cameras and making salsa and baking cupcakes. I’m making a batch of chocolate peanut butter cupcakes right now; I’m just letting the batter rest for a minute.

I apologize for wandering off; there was something shiny on the other side of the internet. So please, tell me how you’ve been, and what you’ve been up to. I’d like to know.

For the sake of my sanity, let’s pretend that Flickr is my blog this week.

Or I could talk about my haircut. For hours.

So. I got a haircut, and for the first time ever, I had a stylist who understood the fivehead and who suggested a solution for masking the bulging real estate above my eyebrows.

Before. Long hunks of hair that just hung there. A slope of cranial space that Hillary wouldn’t have dared attempted.

Now? I should smile more. But just look at that demure forehead! Why, it’s only verging on a fivehead.

Don’t cha just love deja vu?

I’m not talking about a poorly executed Matrix-y black-cat-repeition scene, but that feeling of I swear, I had this dream six months ago which crops up from time to time.

When that feeling of “repeat!” hits me, I try to view it as the universe telling me my life’s sticking to its preordained track, or my inner Calvinist reminding me it’s all a lost cause anyway and hello fast train to hell! (Why yes, I do have Puritan ancestors; how could you tell?)

And yes, sometimes I like to indulge in a little magical thinking — maybe those vivid-but-boring dreams do hold the key to what comes next, if only I could remember — but most of the time I’ll shake it off and go about my business.

But today that old feeling of “I have so done this before” washed over me and I just wanted to scream. To go back to that magical thinking for a moment, if this is the path the universe has laid out for me, I’d like to speak to someone in charge, seriously. I’d like a little guidence, or at least a map and a dart, or reassurance that this is as good as it gets, and darlin’, it’s pretty damn good.

Or a martini. I’d take a martini.

I mean, honestly.

Have I talked about my busted-ass keyboard? No?

Well.

About a month after I purchased the iBook, my J-key popped off. Just the feature every girl hopes for in spanking new technology — a busted-ass keyboard.

It freaked me out in the beginning — having that piece of plastic slip out of place and fling itself towards sweet, sweet freedom was disconcerting to say the least — but I’ve learned to tolerate it over the months. And now? It doesn’t bother me so much. I’ll be tapping away and that J-key will make another break for it, I’ll catch it and beat it into submission again. It’s annoying, but fixable.

Startles the hell out of fellow Satellite patrons on occasion. Boink will go the key, causing the guy on my right to gasp and say, “Your! Your keyboard! It broke!” And I’ll show him how I fix it and then he asks if I’ve taken it to the Apple Store for consultation.

Well, no. Not yet. That would require stepping foot in the Albuquerque Uptown project and I haven’t worked up the stomach for that. It takes a lot of courage to face Appletopia and Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn.

Anyway. That damn J-key. In working on the project that will not be named, it has come to light just how often I use the word “just.” And I’m skittish, see, because if I hit that J-key in just (there’s that word again) the right manner, it could disrupt the narrative flow, damn up the stream of consciousness and otherwise impede progress.

Damn keyboard.

That really shouldn’t make me laugh, but it does.

A red light camera violation never did turn up, so I imagine I’m off the hook.

Which means there’s a stack of six violations sitting in my mailbox.

But still.