dianaschnuth

Like the Jeopardy category: snippets of random this-n-that I’m finding as I’m sifting through all my old Post-It® notes.

Quote from a 50-something woman in my old office to a 40-something: “You gotta get some old lady shorts! You can’t be bending over there on the golf course and everybody can see Christmas…!”

Really bad joke from the Sky intranet:
Q: How do you keep a skunk from smelling?
A: Hold its nose.

And then there’s this thought: I forget what class it was in, but I remember learning in college about the four levels of competence. First, you have Unconscious Incompetence: You don’t know how to do a given thing, but you have no knowledge of it whatsoever, so you don’t know that you don’t know. Then there’s Conscious Incompetence: You know what it is, but you also know that you don’t know how to do it. After that, you have Conscious Competence: You know how to do it now, but you still have to think about it. (This is me in my new job right now.) Finally, there’s Unconscious Competence: You know how to do the thing so well and thoroughly that you no longer have to think about it.  Learning my new job in Loan Corrections made me think of that.

Oh, and speaking of my new job, I was on phone duty for the second day today (my first day was Monday). I actually didn’t mind it today, although it got annoying around 2:00 when I got call after call after call for a half hour straight. I learned new things today, too: I learned how to cut a loan refund check, and how to fix the billing schedule on a screwed-up loan, and all sorts of other stuff that I didn’t know before (and would make you yawn). I actually felt like I had a good, enjoyable day… but that’s probably just because I’m going on vacation after tomorrow. Whee!

Speaking of, does anybody know of a good place to camp? I think Aaron and I were looking at Harrison Lake, Maumee Bay State Park, or Mohican. Neither of us have been camping in years, either (outside of Amy’s and my ill-fated October camp-out with the girls on our floor in Kohl). We have no outdoor cooking implements (well, I think we have metal skewers) and only a couple crappy flashlights. Of course, we do have our one sleeping bag (I don’t know where mine is, but we have Aaron’s), and our new-last-year-at-the-wedding tent, and our two folding camping chairs.

I think that pitching the tent will be a test of our ability to work together. 🙂

I’ve heard a theory about friendships. I forget where I initially heard it, but it basically says that all friendships happen for a reason. Not in the sense of Fate or God, but in the sense that you and your friend are drawn together at a given point in both your lives for some interpersonal reason. Maybe your need to loosen up leads you to be friends with a nutty kind of gal. Maybe you and/or the other person can’t seem to find anyone else willing to befriend you. Maybe you’re drawn to someone with a common interest. Or maybe your individual personalities at that point in time just complement one another perfectly.

In each of these cases, the friendship can either grow to a dimension beyond the initial reason why you got together, or you can simply “grow out” of the friendship. In the latter case, the friendship isn’t (or shouldn’t be) cheapened or considered less meaningful than the longer-term ones; after all, it was what you both needed at the time. People grow and change, as do relationships, and you can’t expect that things will always be the same. Or that you would want them to be.

I know that some of my readership (all four or five of you; I can hear you breathing) is going through the same phase as I am: either growing out of friendships and acquaintanceships, or realizing that the relationship was over long ago and you didn’t even notice or care. Some old friends I try to maintain contact with, but then say to myself, “I don’t know you anymore.” Some friends try to keep touch with me, and I wish they’d go away, but I don’t dare burn bridges. And some friends just don’t answer me back anymore…

I’ve never had very many good friends at once, though. The fact that I currently have several people I feel I could confide in if necessary (or who could confide in me) is as much a blessing as an agnostic can have in her life. 🙂 So, thanks, guys. Even though Amy and Aaron will always be my two best friends (I’m not stepping on any toes here; you all knew that), I love all you guys.

In the most platonic way possible.

I’ve been finding some fascinating stuff off of BoingBoing lately. This one is a big heartwrencher—scroll to the bottom of the page and read from the beginning of the ordeal to get the full effect.

Am I turning into a big sap? I hope not…

First: After a little reflection on my part, I’d like to apologize for the fact that my blog is not a collection of well-constructed essays, such as the blogs I myself like to frequent. I feel like my pre-LJ blog may have been a touch more coherent, but I must admit that having an LJ client instead of entering my journal entries straight into Dreamweaver seems considerably more convenient to me. One of these days, I’ll need to do a redesign and make my page more dynamic and less static. Until then, though, you’re stuck with my iFrames and my ranting LJ entries.

Today was another one of those two-hour-nap-after-the-news days. I’ve heard it said that you can’t really “catch up” on sleep; all I know is that, when I’ve only had six hours of sleep the night before, a nap just happens. It isn’t really planned. Which tells me that maybe I needed it.

I finished my compilation The 90’s: Volume 2 last night. It doesn’t have as much OMG-I-haven’t-heard-that-song-in-forever impact as Volume 1 did, but is more of a collection of the most-played (and perhaps overplayed, but not necessarily hated) songs of the early to mid-1990’s. This time, to make things just a little programmatically easier for me, I arranged the tracklist in (roughly) chronological order:

1. Nine Inch Nails: Terrible Lie (1989)
2. The Black Crowes: Hard to Handle (1990)
3. Nirvana: Come As You Are (1991)
4. The Lightning Seeds: Pure (1990)
5. Screaming Trees: Nearly Lost You (1992)
6. XTC: Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead (1992)
7. Del Amitri: Always the Last to Know (1992)
8. Weezer: Undone (The Sweater Song) (1994)
9. Sponge: Plowed (1994)
10. Stone Temple Pilots: Vasoline (1994)
11. Green Day: Longview (1994)
12. Soundgarden: Spoonman (1994)
13. The Nixons: Sister (1995) *
14. Goo Goo Dolls: Name (1995)
15. Alice in Chains: Heaven Beside You (1995)
16. Spacehog: In the Meantime (1995)
17. The Wallflowers: One Headlight (1996)
18. Faith No More: We Care a Lot (1996)

*This was The Nixons’ only single for so long that I thought (at the time) the band was called Nixon’s Sister.

I think I may try for one more album of early 90’s before I start breaking all-out into the mid-90’s (mainly ’96 and ’97). Once I do that, songs like Folk Implosion’s Natural One and Oasis’ Wonderwall and maybe some of the less-insipid Counting Crows and Hootie (now, now, I’m not ashamed to admit that I liked them back in ’94 and ’95, just like everybody else). Perhaps some more research on the 107.9 The End memorial site will be in order, in addition to digging out the mixtape I made from my college roommates’ CD collections (Sara the Two-Week Roommate and Amy).

Maybe it’s good that my all-time favorite radio station switched formats when it did. I would have hated to deal with the strange morphing of “modern rock” into what it is now, and have to listen to my favorite station play cutting-edge crap. What I need is an all-90’s station. Heh—another couple mix CDs, plus my MTV Buzz Bin CD (which is actually pretty good), and I’ll have an all-90’s party mix for the CD changer. 🙂