Well, I am recovering from a weekend road trip.  It was pretty fun, except when my fiance and I had a little come-to-Jesus moment when he basically told me that he feels like a fuck-up and like he will never achieve his dreams because he's too old and has made too many mistakes.    Kind of broke my heart.  Actually, his mom was talking to both of us this weekend about how she worked at a hospital years ago where the janitor was a guy who had served prison time for murder.  But he got out, did a 180 and cleaned up his life, became a good person, and was a given a second chance...and we discussed how that mentality doesn't exist anymore, at least not in this country.  If you fucked up once, GOD FORBID you should be allowed to MOVE ON, find a decent job, and get your life back on track.  The system doesn't allow it.

But I digress.  We took a road trip to Honey Creek State Park/Resort in Moravia, Iowa because we are considering it as a wedding location if plan A (Grand Canyon) turns out to be impossible.  Very nice place, and the lady who showed us around was very nice too.  The place was just built in 2008, and the lake is manmade, which I was not aware of.  They have a beautiful hotel, an indoor water park, golf course, all kinds of trails, and the rental for our venues would only come to a total of $300 (which, of course, does not include food, but is still really cheap for such a nice place).  Guest rooms the first weekend of October would be $109, which would not be out of the question for most of our travelling guests, which was also good news.

Then, since we were only about 20 miles away from the Missouri border, we decided to drive into Missouri.  Then, since we were in Missouri, we decided to head west to St. Joseph to visit my future mother-in-law.  I'm glad we went to see her because her 60th birthday is in a week and she's recently lost over 100 pounds and has a lot more energy so I think she spends a lot of time alone and was happy that we stopped in.  Her current hobby (along with video games) is African violets...she has about 15 of them in little pots in her kitchen and she gave me one to take home.  I have always liked African violets; they remind me of my grandma Esther.  I just hope our black cat doesn't eat the thing...I already caught him trying to eat a leaf in the middle of the night on the table next to my bed.  He is a crafty little fucker.

So we spent the night there, which saved us money for a hotel, and then on the way back we stopped in Des Moines to peruse Half-Price Books and Barnes & Noble, and went home and crashed.  It was fun; I like taking a trip where we don't have a very strict itinerary and can kind of do whatever we want.

His mom wasn't terribly fond of the Grand Canyon idea, though.  She basically said she doesn't think we can do what we think we can do on a reasonable budget.  And she said she most likely wouldn't be able to come.  Great...but he still wants to do it in Arizona, and if it doesn't bother him that his mom can't be there, then we're still going to try to go ahead with that.  There's still a lot of research to be done.  She said we should do what makes us happy, and he did tell me beforehand that she might not go if we decided to pursue the Grand Canyon idea.  So I'm torn.

This week, once again, I am working on Monday.  Really could have used today off, but whatever.  My 3-day weekend will have to be postponed to NEXT weekend.  Sigh.

Also, me and one of my coworkers have been saddled with a pretty big project at work, but we get bonus pay, which I hope will be worth it.  Basically we are organizing/coordinating/marketing/running a one-day majorly blowout clearance pricing sale on guitars, amps, and used audio equipment at the warehouse.  very straightforward, no returns, totally as-is, what you see is what you get.  I've been going over the item list today, and I am soooooooooo tempted to buy an electric guitar that it's not even funny.  But the only ones I could even remotely justify spending the money on right now when my fiance is unemployed are beginner J. Reynolds electrics (not that great of a guitar, no amp included), or a Squier Affinity Strat with a 15-watt amp.  But I am, after all, a beginner, and I HIGHLY doubt I will ever play with a band.  I have just always wanted an electric guitar to fuck around on and learn how to play.  I mean, we must REEEEEEALLY want to get rid of these J. Reynolds ones, because we're selling them for $50-$75.  CHEAP.

Anyway, somehow I have made it to the lunch hour so I'm out for awhile.  Happy Monday, kiddos!

I am going to TRY to be productive today; not making any promises.

I need to bleach my roots, but I can’t afford to spend money on hair dye until next payday, so it looks pretty rough right now.  Faded yellow and orange with mousy dark blonde roots.  HOT.  I parted my hair on the opposite side this morning, and I thought about every hair article I’ve ever read in a women’s magazine.  They’re all like “Take a chance: dye your hair!  (But not too bright because then people might think you’re weird)”  Or, “Shake up your routine!  Part it on the other side!”  As if that is some huge deal.  But I guess for some people, they have a comfort zone with their appearance and they don’t like to step out of it.  So I shouldn’t laugh at them, because I totally understand that concept.  But when I take a chance, it’s more like shaving part of my head or mixing 3 leftover colors of dye together to make green or purple or something like that.  But we can’t all be freaks, now, can we?  Because that would take all the fun out of it for those of us that are

Thankfully, today I have a Deftones song stuck in my head (which also happens to be the next single they released off of their album, so now that’s 2 songs that I can hear once in a blue moon on the radio).  They are one of my favorite bands because they have such a wide range of sounds, and ALL of them are great.  Chino’s voice can pierce your soul with a scream and then melt it to mush in a strained whisper, all in the same song.  There are still a couple albums of theirs that I don’t have, which is a shame because I want ALL of it.  There’s so much music I want to download/buy, but I never have the money to spend on it.  Maybe when I get my tax refund I’ll treat myself to a couple of CDs.  And yes, I still use CDs.  I like the album art and having the lyrics in my hand.  And I think it’s funny that “Koi No Yokan” (latest album) has a parental advisory sticker, because there are scant few swear words.  Not a single “fuck” on the whole album.  But the whole thing drips with sensuousness, lust, and implied sex.  It doesn’t come right out and say “hey baby let’s fuck” (like so many stupid rap and pop songs do—just hit you over the head with it).  You have to listen to the words and feel it and figure out for yourself “ahhhhh, he’s talking about that.”  And the fact that the record still gets labeled as inappropriate for youngsters speaks to the power of music and innuendo to say what people aren’t going to come right out and say plainly.  It still gets the message across loud and clear.

In other news, my mom left me a voicemail that she wants to discuss some “business matters.”  Great.  I am 99% sure I know what this means.  I have been getting collection calls multiple times per day from Iowa Student Loan and the collection agency that Victoria’s Secret passed my Angel Card account to after I couldn’t pay it for a few months.  I also have a Wal-Mart card and Best-buy card (neither of which I use anymore; learned my lesson)…but of COURSE, the one that goes as far as to look up my mom’s cell phone AND land line and call her had to be the card issued by the LINGERIE STORE.  Of COURSE.  So she’s going to call me because my debts have been bugging HER.  I know she is just trying to help, but I wish she would just ignore the calls, not answer them, and let me deal with it on my own.  It makes me feel like a child when we have to talk about MY financial problems.  I’m 27.  I’ll deal with it.  It may not be in the way that she sees fit, but it’s my problem and I would like to handle it myself.  Sigh.  At least I have parents that care about me.  I’m not bitching about that aspect of it at all, and I am very thankful for my parents.

Feeling philosophical?  Check this out: http://www.hightowerflashes.com/untranslateablewords.html

Words that are untranslatable into English.  Beautiful words.  But then I have always loved words more than the average bear.  “Koi no yokan” and “Toska” are my absolute favorites.  I have felt both of these on a profound level.  When I read Nabokov’s definition of “toska,” I read a description of what I feel in my darkest hours.

Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
--   "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” -- Vladimir Nabokov

And “koi no yokan”…what a beautiful thing.  It is not as rash and impulsive as love at first sight; it’s that sense when you meet someone, and you don’t feel it yet, but you just know that something big is going to develop.  You feel the seed planted and stirring in the soil, though the rose has yet to bloom.  There is no English equivalent to that other than a paragraph.

__

It occurs to me that most of my blog entries are just random rambling, which is probably why I can never come up with a good title.  I should title them all "stuff."  But it's a good way to empty my mind a little bit.  Peace out y'all.