jasmines

November 2007 - Posts

• Chaos in suburbia

  I am finally going to move out of this horrible neighborhood I've lived in for a year.  It's not horrible in the high-crime, dead-babies-in-dumpsters way, but it's possibly almost as bad.  Like all the houses look the same.  And this is no illusion.  All the houses on my street are based on the same house plan.  The colors vary from "grey" to "darker grey".  One home has a bit of red, which personally impressed me very much, because here I was thinking no one had souls in this place.  The only reason we moved here in the first place was because a) it had enough bedrooms (we need four) b) there's a built-in pool and hot tub in what should be our backyard.(But if you walk out there about 20 other houses have a view of you, so doing ANYTHING there's the chance that 40 beady eyes will be watching.  Also there is no grass, only cement and bark chips.  Which completely defeats the purpose of a backyard, but whatever.  The pool did come in handy last summer, and by handy I mean it got yummy boys into swim trunks.)  and c) they let us rent it AND have all our pets move in.  That's about it.  Why do we become so foolishly daft about house matters?  I mean, maybe we don't want to live next door to someone who has exactly the same house as us. 

   

  Posted Nov 28 2007, 11:23 PM by jasmines with 1 comment(s)

• A lesson in life

  There are a few things I have realized over the past few months that I wish to share with the world in general, given the world in general happens to read my blog and not doze off from consuming the abundance of holiday food. 

  First thing:  Drinking expired condensed milk in your chai will not lead to happiness.  In fact, it will lead to an entire afternoon spent lying in bed in the fetal position wishing that you were literate enough to read the date on the can.

  Second thing:  If you write something really embarrassing about a certain boyfriend and send it to the best editor ever, it might get published.  Which means you will get a ticket to NYC and a shiny new reason not to ever talk to your ex-boyfriend again.

  Third thing:  The best time to run into the one teacher you told about being published, who in turn invited you to join the school newspaper staff a year early is not on a plane home while hallucinating on minimal sleep.  But if this does happen, just act natural, and don't let him see you drooling as you fitfully sleep through two hours of turbulence.  And as soon as you "deplane" (as they so logically call it in airline lingo) run for the hills.  Because teachers are scary as hell outside school.

  Fourth thing:  If you recognize the creepy-flexible guy doing some sort of martial-art in the park, walk in the opposite direction because he is most definitly the guy who does acid and hung out with your old friend from sixth grade who now dates 26-year-old drug dealers.

  Fifth thing:  If you're stuck in a foreign country's train station without a cell phone or knowledge of how to speak the local language fluently, learn this phrase in the language and then use it when addressing a random person you find on the first train to stop: Do you speak English?  If they say yes, thank your god of choice, because now you will not have to become a hobo living next to a (very European) dumpster for the rest of your life.

  Sixth thing:  Cell phones are dumb.  Also they will give us all tumors the size of puppies.(and I don't mean the .03 oz-type breed of puppy that looks more like a skinned and roasted rat than anything else.  I'm talking saint bernard)

  This is the end of my bottomeless wisdom, I hope you learned something new.  Ciao. 

  Posted Nov 22 2007, 11:38 PM by jasmines with 1 comment(s)

• Thoughts on a crisis

  I have watched way too many TV shows to be considered healthy, but I have found something amazing in Degrassi(it goes there).  Degrassi is unique: it disgusts AND interests me, like watching someone fall off a cliff.  You can't bear to watch it because it's the single most horrible thing you've ever experienced, but your animal instinct forces you to stand there, losing oxygen from lack of breathing, and see the person fall to their death.  Or at least fall to their spinal fracture.  In any case, every time I start watching Degrassi, I find that I am instantly transported to a world where testicular cancer, date rape, counceling, pregnancy scares, panic attacks and shootings can all coexist happily within the walls of a few episodes.  Gay boys see their boyfriends go off to Switzerland to pursue mysterious hockey careers, good religious girls go crazy with a few drinks and immediatly end up suicidal and full of remorse, and that one kid in a wheel chair gets deep with his feelings (again).  It's basically the best thing ever. 

  Posted Nov 22 2007, 06:21 PM by jasmines with 1 comment(s)

• Oh gee

  Have you ever read your livejournal from two years ago and suddenly gotten really confused because you realize that yourself two years ago was a really horrid person?  I just logged onto my old livejournal (I switched to myspace long ago, I suppose because it's easier to have an obsession with a larger website, not that I have an obsession with myspace or anything) and it turns out I was kind of an alpha-***.  I hated my height (because I was about 2 inches taller than every guy I liked at the time.  I figure that it was a blessing in disguise because the guys have gotten so much hotter since their pubescent middle school days.  Not to bash middle school, but, if my livejournal proves anything, it's that 6-8th grade is a terrible, terrible time.  At least it was for me and everyone else I talk to these days.  The beauty is that my friends and I can sit around creating general chaos and be like "back in the day, when we were all much shorter and had considerable amounts of lunch meat, school sucked."  And because I happen to think that my high school is the coolest thing since FRIENDS (and I mean that most sincerely, having had an adolescent love for that show that included blowing off any chance at a social life for many Friday nights to watch it on DVD with a pint of ice cream and my cat.  Seriously, it was like I was a 60-year-old cat lady with a fiendish fear of society, but better.), I can pull the whole my-school-wins-at-life thing without feeling guilty and buying a box of band-aids for my breaking heart, or something less potentially awkward. 

   To continue(as one often does in blog-type things), I had no idea how spotty my memory of middle school is.  Obviously I remember the back-stabbing, the lonely angst(complete with angry diary entries with definitly more than forty-seven utilized IQ points), the mindless schoolwork and bad hair-dye jobs, but I forgot what it was like to spend days on end going to school feeling completely incompetent, like the world had created a "let's crush Jasmine because her hair looks suspiciously hamster-like" club and I was left to suffer.  Of course, if I would have opened my eyes I might have noticed how nobody was staring at my imaginary flaws, but hey, I'm just glad that phase was two years ago instead of now.  It's really nice to have jeans that fit (because it's ridiculously hard to buy clothes that look decent when you have low self esteem) and it's as good as tiramisu to know that I have a group of friends that have been there for me for two years now. (HA!)  Anyway, I'm just pleased that I was able to stop being so horribly mistaken about my worth as a person, and now have a budding shoe fetish that I really enjoy.  Life is sweet for the bitterly unprepared!

  Posted Nov 20 2007, 10:24 PM by jasmines with 6 comment(s)

• Common tasks for the absent-minded

  Blogging is fun.  Do you know what is not fun?  My cat is stalking me, there is not normal (and by normal I mean not coconut milk) ice cream in my freezer, and the five hours of homework ahead of me don't shine quite as brightly as the newest episode of Desperate Housewives just a click away.  Oh, and Brothers and Sisters is also available.  That's only three hours, plus the fifteen minutes it takes me to talk myself into procrastinating.  Yes, I have to talk myself into procrastination.  And then I procrastinate about completely procrastinating.  Meaning I'll half-heartedly open my books and get out a sheet of notebook paper, title it with my name and date, and then sit there silently contemplating my options.  How cool is my life?  My suitcase isn't unpacked, I gave away all my amazing NYC stuff to my family in a fit of generosity, and my life is suddenly angst-free.  It's so boring to be angst-free.  I might have to start doing something actually productive, which would not be amusing at all.

  Posted Nov 19 2007, 07:14 PM by jasmines with 3 comment(s)