I’m about to head off to the airport to leave the dreary Northeast and return to the mid-70 sunny weather of the south. But before I go – an update:

The weather here sucks. It’s been rainy, in the 50s, windy and downright cold. After only four and a half days of being here I have either developed an awful sinus infection, or a really, really bad cold. It’s kind of awesome. I miss lying by the pool, which I cannot believe I had the audacity to call boring a few days ago. The sun has finally poked its head out of the clouds this morning, but I am far too sick to enjoy it.

Despite the weather, the week/weekend has been delightful. My flight up here was delayed, and I expected to drag myself off the plane and be a little angry at the world for an hour waiting for my bags – but that wasn’t at all the case. As soon as I got to the baggage area, I heard my name. I was confused. There had to be another J. But then I looked up – and it was S! He was supposed to be out with friends at a bar, socializing, doing the grad student thing, but instead he had left his friends early, taken an hour ride on public transit, and waited 45 minutes for my plane to arrive, just so he could give me a hug. What a wonderful, amazing man! My luggage did take forever, but it was okay, because S was there with me. We took a cab to where I was staying and went out for pizza at 1am. It was a very nice date. He then hopped into a cab and went back to his new, fancy school.

Saturday morning I was awoken by a lovely 8 year old girl at 7am. It was early, but nice. After a fun day of hanging out with her and her mom, S joined us for dinner and then S and I went out to eat at a wonderful dessert place, Finale. We enjoyed a wonderful shareable plate called The Whole Nine Yards, which has 9 different desert choices in abbreviated forms. DELICIOUS! We were dressed up nicely, with the intent of going out dancing, but it was late, we were both exhausted, and I had friends coming into town the following day, so we wandered home around midnight.

Sunday the 8 year old popped her head into our room at 6:30am. Too early! After breakfast and other fun morning activities, S., R. & I hopped in the car to do some awesome shopping at Target. As always, it was slight chaos, but not bad. S bought a nice feather mattress topper for the uber-hard futon that we’d been sleeping on – what an improvement! we had intended to do some grocery shopping as well, but we had to get back for R’s piano lesson. S and I did the shopping at Trader Joe’s while her mom oversaw the lesson. We then rushed back to the house, because a bunch of my friends drove into the city to visit! We scooped up R., and the 5 adults and 1 girl went out for a great afternoon at the Children’s Museum! I think everyone managed to enjoy themselves. It was funny, because adults without children have to wear these little white tags identifying themselves as single adults, and turn over their IDs for their duration in the museum. At first my friends identified themselves as childless, but then quickly changed their story upon seeing their tags. We made many jokes about the “pedophile tags” that afternoon.

After the museum, we brought R home, fed her dinner, then went out for an adults only dinner at Tantric, one of my favorite Indian locations. After, we wanted an excuse to hang out more (although S. and I were so tired we could have fallen asleep on the table), so we went out to Finale for the second night in a row. Around the table we had two orders of the Creme Brulee, two Molten Chocolates, and we all had fun drinks, either of the coffee or alcoholic variety (S. and I shared an ice wine flight – yum!). After dessert, we made our way back to the T, and were very happy to crawl into bed!

Monday morning R. sneaked in for a kiss at 6:15, but S and I slept until 10. It was so nice! We spent the afternoon shopping in the Copley Mall, the Prudential Center, Stel’s on Newbury and we both ended up with new beautiful jeans. S. ended up with a pair of APC raw demin, and I got a cute pair on sale at Armani Exchange. nice! It’s funny shopping in high end trendy places. Way out of my budget, but still fun. I found a really cute dress (in white) that I hope goes on sale soon. I could never pay full price for an item that isn’t a staple. Even the jeans I found were on sale. But after buying a really cute little silk dress at Neiman Marcus Last Call last week, I just couldn’t justify another one.

After that shopping endeavor, S. and I caught a bus over to Harvard Yard so he could meet with a friend, and I traveled amongst both the thrift and high end stores looking at cute things I couldn’t afford. I did find one little dress that I liked that reminded me of Charlotte of Sex and the City, but my stylist (aka S), vetoed it, telling me I am too monochromatic and need to introduce color into my wardrobe this summer. Bah humbug. I didn’t need to spend any more money anyway. We enjoyed sushi for dinner, then wandered around S.’ new campus, and took a very long walk in the rain. We tried to get bubble tea, but the place we went was out of tapioca – bummer! We ended up getting dessert at Sunset, and we also tried some hard cider (yum) and mead (yuck!). After a very long day, with lots of walking and bad weather, we returned to the house and happily went to bed.

Tuesday morning I woke up of my own accord at 6am because I simply couldn’t breathe. After a few hours of drifting in and out of sleep, and driving S crazy, we decided to go enjoy some breakfast, open a new bank account for S, find a place to scope the MacBook Air, and buy flowers as a thank you gift for our lovely hosts. It was pouring cats and dogs, so we jumped on the train to the furthest destination, and found lots of excuses to stop in stores on our walk back. These included coffee and a bagel, my old college Chem lab (that felt weird to go in again!), a bike shop, a mattress store, and other fun things.

After a whole morning of walking, we returned with just enough time for me to shower and take R off the bus. I trained a new babysitter, and S. packed for his return home. He flew out last night (sad- I miss him already!), and as he dealt with a canceled flight, I battled this sinus icky thing.

This morning I didn’t drag myself out of bed until late, but when I did, I found R. was home sick – dealing with the same ickyness that I am. All morning I held her as she cried and and did all of the “I’m not feeling well!!” stuff that I was feeling as well. Her mom just packed her up in the car to go to the doctor’s appointment she had been fighting all morning to get, and I am now ready to depart myself. I am going to run to CVS, grab some more sinus meds (they’re NOT HELPING!), and hopefully don’t die when I’m on my flight home.

Since finals have ended, I have been working on my tan like it’s my job. I’ve been doing other things as well, such as revising my resume, writing cover letters, selling my belongings, packing, and oh yeah – studying for comps, but I’ve spent at least an hour by the pool every day this week attempting to rid myself of the pasty winter color that is my default. (Don’t worry, I’ve been putting on 45spf so I don’t burn).

This is what I’ve discovered: sitting by the pool is BORING! I’ve been getting by due to an influx of magazines (both good and crappy) that I’ve managed to get for free by following fatwallet links, but I have a slight problem -I get bored whenever I have to flip over and tan my back side. As a result, my front is almost the coloring of a normal person, but my back is as pale as ever. It’s a little silly. Okay, maybe it’s not that pale, but my back has been getting about 1/4 the sun that my front has.

Today I figured out how to fix that. Stand in the pool, with your magazine on the side of the pool, and your back facing the sun! Everyone looked at me like I was a loser, but I don’t understand how they can all just sprawl out and let their skin sear and not be doing anything!

Also, today I discovered the most wonderful magazine. Well, maybe not the most, because that totally goes to Mental Floss, but this is a good runner up – SEED. It actually kept me entertained while my skin attempted to create eumelanin. So much better than InStyle or some of the other trashy things that land in my mailbox, get flipped through, then trashed. SEED actually had a bunch of articles that I dog-eared and plan to have other people read. I like feeling like I’m getting smarter when I read magazines or watch TV – reasons I adore the Discovery and History Channels.

Ahhhh – I miss my TV friends :/

So I’ve been trying to think about the format for this thing (I know, a couple months too late, huh?), particularly what would be interesting to readers who don’t already know/like me. My first train of thought was “what would I be interested in reading from a stranger? I generally enjoy people who are experiencing/seeing things that I am not, or have an opinion on things that I am/have been /will be doing. I generally dislike when people blog about their own personal drama, that has no relevance to my life, and is not funny. If it’s funny/exciting/soap-opera-ish, then it’s good. If you didn’t know me, you wouldn’t care that I made the most delicious cheesecake last night, or that I drank a lot of sparkling wine last night and got really silly and made music videos.

So what in my life is interesting? Well, Although I came from a pretty lower-middle class family, I do have a good deal of privilege that I have become accustomed to. Despite that, that I am living off 600 dollars a month after rent, and 100 of that goes to my phone bill, 100 goes to utilities, and 150-200 goes to gas. That means I only have about 200/month to feed myself, buy any household/personal items I need, and occasionally add to my wardrobe. I am a pretty awesome shopper. Sometimes that’s interesting to read about – but mostly only middle class stay-at-home moms enjoy that, and that’s not the demographic I’m looking to draw.

So, what else? Well, I travel a lot. I do somehow experience a lot of nice things, eat at nice places, meet interesting people. However, a lot of it I feel uncomfortable talking about (I’m not good at taking compliments, even worse at bragging), or don’t feel like it’s my place. The elite crowd I spend my summer with isn’t the internet-savvy type, but I would quickly be outed as the author if this was discovered. And I like them – I don’t want to share their secrets.

I also currently have clients who are semi-interesting. But there’s only so much I can write about here as well. Stories such as “another one of my kids got sent to the juvenile justice system for holding a knife up to someone’s neck and saying he was going to kill her,” or “another one of my clients was involved in some really bad gang activity and he’s trying to get jumped out, but he’s not sure he can deal with it.” Those things are depressing, and I sort of need to get away from them when I leave work. It’s not as if I work with upper east side elite women with secrets to tell (although their therapy generally includes stressing over the type of wood they want for their new kitchen cabinets).

Okay – so I see some interesting things/go to a few cool places. Last year I could have written one heck of a southeast adventure blog. Hopefully this summer that will pick up again – and maybe I’ll have a monthly adventure in the fall? So those are things I may be able to talk about. However, if I talk about exact locations, I’m going to be completely giving up anonymity in some ways. I think it would already be pretty obvious that this is me if you knew me, so when (not if, when), this blog attracts more viewers, how do I keep my identity quiet. I am moving to a large city, and my circle isn’t that big – however it is constantly growing. I don’t know. I’ll think about that.

Just some musings on direction – if you have any thoughts on the matter, let me know. I may incorporate what I can of the above, but I have also been considering revealing my identity to some of my friends – so they can know more about what is going on in my life. However, I would ask them to keep it hush-hush, and use pseudonyms as well – and not be offended if I say something that may influence how they feel about me/remix a story they have told me/tell a story about them, disguising features. I sort of ran into that problem with this post.

I think it needs to be reiterated that this is supposed to be a place where I can pseudo-anonymously be a bitch, and express things that aren’t necessarily socially appropriate. And if I like you enough to have shared this with you, please be nice enough to ignore the moment where I express that I am human and have a completely mean, jerky side too. I’m not that snarky in real life, but I give myself permission to be so here.

I am always very confused on those rare mornings that I wake up naturally, rather than being jolted awake by my alarm clock. Those mornings, when my brain starts to shake itself awake, but my eyes are too asleep to even consider opening, I have to think about where I am, what time it is, what time I need to up (what activities I have planned), and if opening my eyes and waking up is worth the effort.

This morning, as I was in this coma like state, I somehow come to the conclusion that is was a Monday, during some sort of vacation, that I was at S.’s house, it was probably 9 or so, and that he was already awake eating breakfast, and yes, his company was completely worth waking up for. Needless to say, I was greatly disappointed when I struggled to open my eyes and was reminded that I was alone in my apartment, it was 6:30, S. was probably still sleeping, and being awake was NOT worth it. However, I also still incorrectly believed that it was Monday, and when I finally pulled myself out of bed two hours later, I still thought it was Monday. It wasn’t until twenty minutes later when I heard children playing outside my window that I realized it is in fact, still Sunday.

Why is it that days of the week are so easily lost during periods of time with little or no commitments? I know it’s a weird construct – that time, can be evenly split into chunks of 7. I mean, the whole day/night thing is pretty obvious. I’ll give you that days are a no brainer. If I was put on this planet without any knowledge, I would say that they most definitely exist. And months, or 29.5 day periods, they make sense too. The moon cycle is a pretty consistent thing. And whoever figured out that there are 365 days in a year – that’s pretty cool too. And leap years – I’ll give you that one. It all seems mathematically relevant.

Okay, so I understand that the moon cycles and number of days in the year don’t sync up. (365/29.5=12.37). I understand that the 30/31 days a month thing works out pretty well most of the time. It is sad that it’s not even, but whatever, it works. So why do we have 7 day weeks? Why not 6? 30/6 = 5, that’s a lot more clean. Yes, some months would have an extra day, but everyone loves extra time, right? Why couldn’t we have 5 week months, then tack on an extra week at the end of the year for the holidays?

This article is interesting and explains a lot of the above, which I already get, but it doesn’t offer a reason for weeks. Why? Is it a religious thing – “God made the world in 6 days and on the 7th He rested?.” Tradition is a fine answer I guess. But it still throws me off. Why should I remember the days of the week? Why do they exist?

Really, the whole point of this is : is there justification for me forgetting them? If they are run on a system which is illogical, then it is okay for me to ignore them. right?

ps. I really love mangoes.

Sometimes I create the weirdest food combinations – but they are just so good that I want to remember it, shout it from the rooftops, or at least tell my friends, but I am often too afraid that my friends will think that I’m far too weird and never eat with me again.

Granted, sometimes my combos are not as excellent, but often they are. Tonight is one of those nights. I had a myriad of leftovers in my fridge, and wanted more than one at once -so I ate more than one. I took left over general tso’s tofu and sauce, put it one top of some left over Kraft whole wheat mac & cheese, microwaved, then added chunks of avocado. YUM! It is so very good! I love the combo of the noodles with the spicy and sweet sauce with the texture of the tofu. And the avocado makes it perfect – creamy and delicious! And it’s not too unbalanced of a meal either – protein, carbs, avocado – the three main food groups, what more could you need?

/

I am free of classes! FREE! For at least two years. This is madness! I don’t know how to not be a student!

Existential crisis time.

Okay, enough freaking, I have to go to work :/

Although, I would much rather be lying by the pool :p

So, in preparation for Paris this summer, I decided I should learn at least a few key phrases in French. I decided to do this by watching Paris Je T’aime. Well, that was my obviously not well disguised reason for watching the film. I feel the need to say “film” rather than “movie” simply because it is French. Is that weird?

Anyway, when I started watching it, I wasn’t sure how I felt. I actually ended up watching it in three chunks a tiny but last night, a bit between meetings today, then I finished it this evening. After the first two segments I was afraid it was going to be sad: that there would be no resolution. But at the same time I was worried that it would be sappy – but it is a French film, it couldn’t be that sappy.

See, I loved Amelie. It is one of my favorite films. There’s just something so sweet about it – and I was hoping that this could capture that same sweetness.

And it did! It’s funny, the last character reminded me of my mom. And it made me really , really sad. But then, the character realizes that she loves Paris (I don’t think that’s really giving any part of the movie away), and is happy with life. It is sweet to know that although I worry about some people, because I absolutely would not want their lives, they are happy with them.

I know being in psychology this should not be a surprise. But there’s still something inside me that has completely different rules for my clients and for the people I care about. TOTALLY different.

So in my scheming to attract more cool people to my blog, I thought it would be funny to make up business cards and leave them randomly on the train and other public places and see what type of responses I get. Business cards used to be some super fancy thing, but you can order them now for about 2 dollars on VistaPrint.

This is actually what inspired the bikini photo conversation with S. The idea that I would like people to see this!

Anyway, I decided that maybe I would try it out in Paris, because the idea of international readers is almost more exciting than domestic ones (not to make you US readers feel less significant, I just love counting new countries!). Also, there’s much less chance of anyone in Paris recognizing any of the identifying features that I have put in the blog, because my chance of knowing them is much slimmer.

So, today I ordered completely silly business cards:

And since I was there, I added sticky notes for another 2 dollars:

However, I’m not sure I will ever get the chance to use the sticky notes – because I don’t want anyone to associate me with this blog. Maybe I will write funny things on them and stick them to subway seats?

Any fun ideas that you may have for attracting readers? I’m going to be in multiple big cities this summer, so something cheap, and not too litter-y would be a fun experiment. Maybe I could try different things in different cities and compare the efficacy of each?

oh – right.

For those who can’t read sarcasm through print on a computer screen – no. I did not actually post any pictures of myself. I hotlinked to myself via craigslist and killed my bandwidth. oops.

So – stop looking! There are NOT incriminating photos of me out there!

Whew. My site was down for the morning – sorry about that!

S. and I were talking about different ways to attract viewers to our blogs, and he suggested that I put up a headless picture of myself in a bikini (headless to remain anonymous, not because my face is any less pretty than the rest of me). That was a sure way of attractive viewers.

Well, it worked so well that I got too much interest and had to take it down to protect my bandwidth.

If you didn’t see it, you totally missed out. It was a good one ;p

I need to find a better, less provocative way to attract viewers. Although, the name pinkconfessions is pretty suggestive – maybe when I actually start living in the same city as S. again, I’ll turn it into a seductive sex blog….

But that simply wouldn’t be good for the few people I know who I actually know that read this. Maybe I’d need to break off and start another one for friend-appropriate chatter. Oh well.