Happy New Year 新年快樂/

新年おめでとう
Feliz Año Nuevo
新年快樂
Happy New Year, everybody!

use yer imagination

I work for UPS--during christmas season. I've been busier than a one-legged man at a shit-kickin' contest. Use your imagination...

In case anyone's interested here's my helpful advice for handy holiday shipping:

1. Don't procrastinate. Procrastination is expensive. If you insist on procrastinating, wait until after the madness subsides and send it late. Most people don't mind getting stuff after the holidays anyway.

2. Smaller and lighter is cheaper. Don't use some big ol' box because you got it free outta some dumpster somewhere. If you got extra space, cut it down or something. That free box could put you into oversize 2 or something and add $20 to the price if you aren't careful.

3. Better yet, send money or buy gift cards. Corporate would hate me for saying that, but you know, most people would probably prefer to pick out their own stuff, and if nothing else, at least you aren't blowing tons of money on shipping. Most stuff costs between $10-20 to ship, you could definitely find something better to do with all that money, I'm sure. If you really want to send "stuff" buy it online and take advantage of the company's corporate rate. Sure you think you'll save money doing it yourself, I know we all fall prey to such delusions. But chances are they are gonna get a way better deal on their volume account than you will.

4. If you aren't doing christmas shipping, do yourself a favor and stay outta the fray, and come during off peak hours. Who wants to try to do standard business stuff in with 50 suburban housewives shipping christmas stuff?

5. Time is money. It is so worth not having to do certain things yourself, believe me.

6. If you are serious about sending tons of stuff, make sure you label everything very carefully. You never know what may happen when it leaves your custody....and neither will we if it's an
unlabelled box. At a bare minimum, put your return address on it. You'll thank me later.

7. Don't send huge things anywhere. Especially not for the holidays. It's seldom if ever worth doing. Most people live within 10 miles of a store that probably carries the very item you are sending, and can successfully acquire that same item themselves without you investing a hundred dollars in shipping it. (see note about giftcards) There's a good reason why corporations hire tractor-trailers to haul this stuff around, and frankly it's called freight for a reason.

Hmm, most of this information sounds eeriely similar to my normal shipping tips...oh yeah! That's right, this is good advice all the time. It's just that people take total leave of their senses, and find themselves in situations where they're spending $65 to send a box of cookies to New Jersey. Guess what? Relax. People get so worked up about christmast...breathe...it'll be okay. Seriously, most people are busy and no one will hold it against you. Nobody minds as much as you think. Not making the ground cutoff this year? Maybe you should just send a card. It's all good.

yep, it's about that time again

Alrightee then. I'd say Christmas shipping season is off to a roar based on the number of people who came in yesterday. Sure it was dead for the first hour and a half, but as I suspected, it was just the lull before the storm...and people who don't have to work on Saturdays probably like to sleep in, I'm guessing. I personally wouldn't know...I can't remember the last time I had a Saturday off.

We were slammed with people pretty much all day. I got massively dehydrated and didn't have time to really eat or anything, but never quite lost my sense of humor. In fact, people weren't that bad. They were mostly reasonable, civil and adequately prepared. Nobody just cranky, uppity or bothersome. All in all, it definitely wasn't a bad day, just a busy one.

By the time I got home, I was exhausted though. I yawned all the way home on the train, trudged up the street and fell down on the couch. I doubt I would have stayed up past 9pm except Brian insisted I had to watch The Grinch Stole Christmas with him. And it's kind of appropriate. The opening sequence takes place in a post office. There's lots of social critique on the materialistic side of the holidays. And a message of tolerance. It seemed appropriate under the circumstances.

73. Write about a day spent in another country.

73. Write about a day spent in another country.

I woke up, yawned and turned over when someone below me shifted in their bed pulling me out of my sleep. Looking out the windows of the youth hostel, I could see about a million cargo ships out in the bay circling around down below. From the top of the mountain, they looked like insects or toys.
I shuffled down to the communal kitchen and grabbed a bag of ramen noodles and a pot and turned on one of the propanes stoves until the blue ring of fire touched the bottom of the pot and let the water boil for the morning tea. Searching the shelves with sleepy eyes, I found an odd assortment of things one often finds left behind in a youth hostel, but finally I found what I was looking for...a glass bottle I had stashed the night before. I threw a few tea leaves in and poured water over them until they finally sank and settled on the bottom, turning the water a yellowish green. The ramen noodles went into the rest of the water and finally when they were soft, I fished a bowl out of the sink, hunted down a pair of chopsticks and joined the conversation at the table.
As it turned out, three of us wanted to go to the same place, Lantau Island...

writing prompt #96

96. Write about a movie that made a strong impression on you:

That would have to be one of my favorite movies, A Bronx Tale. I was thinking about that this movie early this morning for some reason while I was driving on the 405 with the sun rising in the east over the spine of the Cascades while trying to steer with one hand and drink a cup of tea with the other...whew. Probably what motivated this totally random thought was something J---- said to me the other day-he always says the most thought-provoking things rather unexpectedly. I got to thinking that you know, I honestly can say that if you see this movie, you'll have a pretty succint version of a good portion of my personal philosophy of life.

Yep, the Bronk Tale is a darn good movie, for both reasons of entertainment and contemplating the deeper philosophical questions of life and adolescence.

Coming of age "When you're older, you'll understand"

Street justice "nobody fucked with these guys", "This time, they walked into the wrong bar...I'm the one who did this to you. Remember me."

Peer pressure "We would cut class and hang out all day and night." "This shit is not for you. Those kids are gonna get you in trouble." "But they're my friends". "They're jerk-offs."

Who we admire and why "I always tried to imitate Sonny"

Street Education "I was getting two educations: from the street and from school. That way I'd be twice as smart..."

Living with Racial tensions "Stay out of our neighborhood!"

The importance of love "Worry about yourself, your family, the people that are important to you."

Doing the right thing. "You gotta do what your heart tells you to do."

Don't be a rat. "I didn't rat, Dad". "No, you didn't rat." "I did a good thing, right?" "All I knew was...a rat was the lowest thing you could be in my neighborhood...

Relationships: "On warm summer nights all through the neighborhood...you would hear young Italian men romancing their women."

- Hey, Marie!
- Get in the fucking car!
- No!
- Get in the car!
- Leave me alone!
- You know I love you.
- Yeah, bullshit!
- Get in the fucking car!

Know thyself: "The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.If you've got talent and do the wrong thing, nothing happens.But when you do right, good things happen..."The saddest thing in life is wasted talent."

Love knows no color. "She was tall, she was beautiful...and she was classy. But she was black. And that was a no-no in my neighborhood."

Let the small things go. "He's out of your life for twenty dollars. You got off cheap."


And these final words of wisdom:

I learned something from these two men.
I learned to give love and get love unconditionally.You just have to accept people
for what they are.
And I learned the greatest gift of all. The saddest thing in life
is wasted talent. And the choices that you make will shape your life forever.

all kindsa weird

"I'd a took the right road, But I must have took a wrong turn." I should just forget about trying to go a place by memory, especially one that wasn't easy to get to the first time. I tend to get myself into more trouble that way. Che-who? Don't nobody know WHAT i was talking about...

"I been in the right place, But it must have been the wrong time." No we weren't expecting you...Oh. After running around the field from first to third, it was all anti-climactic slide to the home plate-only no one was there. So much for that.

"I been in the right trip, But I must have used the wrong car." My car's been doing this crazy little thing where the check engine light comes on after you exceed 55 mph. Hope this is just a quirk rather than a wallet-cleaner-outer. Reading about it online at least makes me realize that it's a common enough occurrence, and the car IS about 13 years old so it stands to reason that things will get quirky whether or not I happen to like it.

"My head was in a bad place, And I'm wondering what it's good for" The moon musta been void-of-course all afternoon because I felt like I was in some kind of strange brain-fog. Luckily communication demands were low today and my taking 30 minutes to make each decision was not that big of a deal.

"I been the right place, But it must have been the wrong time." The nice thing about doing all your Christmas shopping early on a Monday morning is that you have every place in the whole wide world completely to yourself. No employees to pounce on you because they're too busy doing inventory or unloading boxes or cleaning. I had time to browse around unimpeded all day. Nice.

"Got to give myself a little talking to this time" I won't be able to get away with any of these moves tomorrow, that's for sure.

"I been in the wrong place, But it must have been the right time" I had some amazing strokes of luck at the book store. Shoulda gone to the library while I was on the roll of victory...I probably woulda found the most amazing things in stock today after a weekend of stuff accumulating in the dropboxes.

"Would have made the right move, But I made it at the wrong time" Shoulda got the Eric Cartman T-shirt when I saw it the first time...I don't think my student teaching career will be complete without the "Respect my Authority" shirt... heh. The response I usually get most of the time is "Eww, teens"?!, "No way, not me!", "No way in hell". It's times like this that I realize that not everyone is cut out for my crazy life, sometimes not even me...what WAS that girl screaming about anyway? I guess you can check my pulse tomorrow and see if I still feel this ambivalent.

3 volumes of vagabond=$3. The feeling of falling completely off the face of the earth and dropping out of life for a day=priceless.

word.

inertia, frigidity and post-fermentation ponderings

Today's been a pretty mellow day which means this ain't gonna be the most exciting dispatch. But sometimes it's nice to realize that sometimes interesting requires effort. These days I never feel like doing much of anything on my day off, but I don't have much of a choice since it's the one chance I get all week to make up for whatever I didn't get done earlier.

Aside from sleeping in, the day's been fairly productive. I made two types of soup to subsist on for the rest of the week (cream of brocolli and tomato/veggie), and Brian made chili for dinner. We also opened up the first bottle of the four gallons of apple/pear cider and watched a couple of football games. It's sunny out but really cold and windy and getting worse all the time on both fronts. Oddly enough it's beneficial in the sense that I don't need to worry about trying to fit large quantities of soup in the fridge, it's cold enough to just stick it outside.

Most of the garden is looking forlorn, but luckily we still have quite a few herbs that are fine with being cold, and of course the kale, chard, spinach and mustard is quite content with being out in 30 degree weather and has never tasted better. I still have peppers and tomatoes indoors and I haven't even had a chance to dip into the pumpkins yet, but sooner or later I'll get motivated to make pumpkin stew.

The cider turned out surprisingly well, it's fairly sweet, and has a surprisingly high alcohol content for something made with beer yeast. It's got a unique flavor because of the pears and a nice tang, but unlike my homemade wines, is not at all dry.

There's a lot of other things I probably should have tried to do today but I'm gonna have to let go of all that because I can't perform miracles 7 days a week, a body gots ta rest ya know...

not as bad

I thought for sure that today would be hell on wheels...but it was anticlimactic. In fact the day was downright sedate.
Seems like this is gonna be the year of procrastinators...nobody's rushing in to ship their christmas stuff yet, so I bet anything everyone will wait until THE VERY LAST MINUTE and come in huffing and puffing in a state of panic with tons of half-wrapped shit that they want to send out that should have been done weeks ago to avoid the hefty charges of expedited shipping. Yeah, I can just see it now...
But today was not that day so we were free to relax and kill time in whatever ways seemed appropriate.

It sure is cold right now. Cold enough to snow, were the sky not so annoyingly cloud-free. That's Oregon for you. If it's cold enough to do anything snow-like, it's clear skies for weeks. If it's 33 or 34 degrees it's raining cats and dogs. Snow is clearly not in the cards for us most of the time. Oh well.

After work we went for a victory over the forces of bureaucratic inertia celebration dinner and some light entertainment. And that my friends was all she wrote.

did I ever mention

Some people have the kind of jobs that no one in their right mind would want to be involved in. Others, like C------- V-------- have the kind of jobs I would sell my unborn children to get my hands on. Yep, I call those the "gravy assignments". Luckily I got to take a little ride on the gravy train for a day and see how the other half lives. Not the half that flies around in private jets and yachts the Carribean, but rather the people who are lucky enough to be doing exactly what I'd want to be doing right about NOW.

word.

outta the woodwork

Seems like all of my friends have discovered myspace alluvasudden. Shit, I procrastinated on getting sucked into it for years because (other than 2 people), NOBODY I knew was on there, because lets face it most of my crew is kinda technophobic. Now I wouldn't be surprised to find my grandma up on here somewhere. ;) Life's funny.