Here's lookin' at you kid!

Today I had some of the most amazing Paella perhaps ever made. I have no idea what was in it beyond the saffron in terms of herbs, but other than herbs there was chicken and meat and muscles and these massive shrimp still in the shell with their heads still attached. When Tal placed the food on the table my five year old cousin picked up a shrimp and dropped in on her plate. “I don’t like the head” she announced and with a small five year old finger poked the shrimp in the eye and wrinkled her nose. As the little black eyeball sort of squished I firmly suppressed traumatized teenaged memories of dissecting a crayfish in high school biology. Once it was explained to her that no one was expected to eat the head she did eat a great deal of the Paella. I ate more Paella than I actually think is possible for a body to hold. But I found a way! Over dessert she serenaded us with a stunningly rude world war two song which she was only allowed to sing in Mallorquin referencing something about Hitler and Carnegie Hall. Her father was barely able to suppress amusement and her mother sat there in absolute pain hating every second of it. She did sing it once in English and I had to gently break it to my aunt as she sat there with her teeth gritted and her face set that her own mother, my grandmother, had in fact taught such songs to my mother when she was even younger than Cassie. Tal was simply delighted by this information.

I had a scare with my computer. I would be sitting there working on something, something like my resume, and if I stopped typing for a while suddenly letters would start to appear… then words… as though someone was typing. It was quite startling. After an initial what on earth is that feeling that didn’t, DIDN’T I tell you! Make me think of ghosts in the slightest. I started to think that I had a computer virus. I ran the virus scan repeatedly but it found nothing and the problem persisted. This was not good. Now a virus isn’t the end of the world. At home I would offload all my files onto my external hard drive and then I would reload the operating system and all the software and start fresh. It’s not a bad idea to do this every now and again anyway so it never seems as much of a pain as it might otherwise. Unfortunately I have none of my software disc with me here nor do I have an external hard drive. I was looking at the loss of all my data which includes resumes and letters and just too much to think about losing. After all this drama, imagine my chagrin to realize that I had caused this ‘virus’. I had caused it by accidentally clicking on the little microphone icon at the bottom of my screen and not realizing that this had turned on the speech recognition program on my computer. The mysterious typing was my computer trying to interpret the static coming in from the microphone jack. Problem solved… and fortunately embarrassment isn’t fatal…

It turns out I have an unfortunate habit. More unfortunate because I have been known to give people grief about having this very same trait. I am passive aggressive. The problem is that I’m not very good at the passive part which means the lack of subtlety that is inherent to my nature added to the not entirely passive aggressiveness winds up resulting in me being a joy to be around. It seems when I’m mad at someone and don’t really want to think about why I’m mad, I just get really unpleasant. Bitchy even. Randomly within the conversation I become uncooperative conversationally and kind of mean. I like to think I learned from a pro, but probably I’ve done it all along and cannot pass it off on a bad influence.

I now have a dilemma ahead of me. To bang or not to bang, that is the question. You see I need a haircut and as such the time has come to decide if I should keep the bangs or let them grow out. It is a question that has often plagued me and has once again reared its ugly head. As such I’m leaving it to you. I’m taking a vote on the bangs issue. As a perk, not only will this help me decide about the hair but it will let me see how many people actually read through to the end.