pace yourself from me

Close calls and skin of my teeth (that is the weirdest idiom by the way) aside, I finally have booked my trekking tickets for the Inca Trail! Yay! Now I can slowly develop an ulcer worrying about altitude sickness, fatigue, Montezuma's revenge, wimping out, being without a shower for four days, things that go bump in the night, etc. Actually, even as I finally secured the trek, my travel partners started harassing me about all the other planning. I gave them the finger- I need a vacation from planning this vacation. However, as an offering to the Incan G*ds, I will go on the much loathed Stairmaster this evening.

Some random musical notes:

• Judas Priest covering Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust is really bizarre and jarring. Not necessarily in a bad way, but when I heard it, I thought "wait, is this... what the... and who?" Yes, I never complete sentences, apparently.
• They should consider not allowing DJ's to play Somebody Told Me during rush hour traffic. It's incredibly torturous to listen to this song while trying to limit your speed to under 40 mph in order to avoid a collision with the slow-moving vehicle in front of you.
• I can't get the new Weezer song out of my head, and so I bounce around my apartment, singing (very off-tune, I might add) "Beverly Hills, that's where I want to be... living in Beverly Hills" This troubles me because I have never, in fact, felt that way about Beverly Hills. Damn you, Rivers!

As usual, I'm behind on everything. I have this habit of dropping everything to put out the closest fire, and as a result, there is always another five-alarm flame waiting for me around the corner. Sometimes, it's especially frustrating because it seems as though I've just forgotten or talked idly about something I'm meaning to do- so I'm sure I come off as an insincere jacka**. I really am still meaning to do it, I'm just woefully tardy. So, if you get something from me that says "I'm sorry I'm late," you should know I've written that on everything I've sent for the past three months. Or years. Or decades.

On the other hand, there are some fires that burn fierce with the kind of heat that blue flames generate. Such a fire is what burns in my mother when she is not rewarded for the however-many-hours of labor it took to bring me into this world, on the exact date prespecified by Hallmark. The woman is also notoriously difficult to shop for- she once had a huge fight with my father because he bought her a dozen roses for Valentine's Day. Yes. You read that correctly. Her reasoning? This is a completely thoughtless gift... anybody can buy roses... you probably got them from a gas station. Besides... they're cut, they're dead. What kind of stupid present only lasts a week? It's funnier in Gujarati. You really can't win with her. If you buy her something expensive, it's a waste of money- she could have just waited until it went on the 75% off rack. If you buy her something cheap, it's a sign you don't care. This year, I just gave up and made her something. I put the finishing touches on it this morning before I left for work, running like a chicken with her head cut off. I might post a picture (not of me running madly, but of the present) if I finish it in time to also photograph it prior to rushing it off to her.

Here are some other random items:

• I hate getting into arguments where I'm 99% sure I'm right, but the other person is displaying 100% confidence with 50% knowledge. At lunch today, I gave up on an argument about the difference between capital and capitol, and I backed down because my opponent was practically banging his shoe on the table in certainty that he was right. And then I looked it up when I got back, and, sure enough, I was right. I was thinking about this later. He wound up feeling smart at the end of the argument, but hey, you know what? In actuality, I am smarter. So there.
• I hiked 10.5 miles on Saturday and got sunburned as a result. I don't know why I've been getting sunburns since moving to California. I'm brown, it doesn't make sense. I showed up to Greco on Sunday looking like Rudolph the Red-Nosed desi, and Anna said nothing about it- just another reason she is a rockstar (another reason is that she calls smokers "cancer cravers").
• In an attempt to further my education, one of my Brazilian buddies emailed me a message today written completely in Spanish. It was five lines long and took about 45 minutes for me to translate and respond back in Spanish. Pathetic.
• Yes, I know I have not posted a single news-related item in, oh, a year or so. Yes, I have fallen behind and become ignorant. I'm distracted at the moment. With any luck, this is temporary.

And that's all she wrote.