Thanks to all of you who posted ideas & info about my possible move out of Diaryland into the “real world” where your tech support questions are answered quickly especially if you pay top dollar for the service, not like I’m still bitter or anything. I’m investigating the move and I might be emailing a few of you with questions and stuff. You rock!

I also finally finally FINALLY got a haircut!

I feel so much better now. And I keep swinging my hair around and smelling it, as I’m prone to do after getting it cut. My salon uses Aveda products and I usually can’t make myself cough up the dough to buy them, but they’ve gotten the tiny bottles of some of their products in and so I made a tiny splurge on the tiny bottle of Confixor, which is what CJ always uses before he dries my hair, and it works really well to make it softer and smoother.

I’m taking Friday off in order to give myself a four-day weekend that, as of this moment, is for once in my life not filled with commitments and obligations. I have loose plans to see Fahrenheit 9/11, and intend to see Spider-Man 2 also because I’m insanely excited about it. Other than that, though, nothing’s planned.

I was thinking that I might have a Lorie day on Friday – just spend it doing stuff that makes me feel good – but I’m not sure where to start, so I have to think on that a bit.

And that’s the news from here, for now.

I’m feeling pretty crampy and pissy today, and I think I’ve reached that point in every Diarylander’s illustrious career where I have to post a rant about the site administrators. I just submitted the following to the tech support queue:

I see that you still haven’t gotten to my tech support request from a couple of weeks ago, which I’m finding pretty troubling as I gear up to pay yet again to renew my SuperGold membership, with such perks as the following, quoted from your gold membership info area:

You also get a faster turnaround speed with your tech. support inquiries. Right now, most tech support emails do not get answered super-fast, because we’re pretty busy, but Gold members will get theirs answered as soon as we see them.

I wrote an entry on 6/11/04 and posted it at 3:56pm. It’s http://loriebug.diaryland.com/phyllisnrod.html. It disappeared, prompting my original unanswered tech support request (and I know I’m not the only supergold member to have experienced this disappearing entry phenomenon.). Then it briefly reappeared when navigating back and forth, but did not show up in the archives or in my edit/delete entries area.

Now, it’s not even in the navigation, but if I type the address into my browser, it shows up. Will you please take a moment to try to fix this, or at least to explain what has happened? I’d appreciate it so much.

I’m getting pretty annoyed about paying nearly eighty dollars a year for the special perks that supergold membership offers (I pay every three months because I never have enough to spare at a time to sign up for the year), and yet when I have one simple tech support problem, it goes unanswered for weeks.

I’ve had the supergold membership for a year now. In that time I have submitted exactly five tech support requests, including two on the same problem (the disappearing entry). Only one of them has been a request for help fixing a mistake I made – the others are about problems on their end that affect me.

Two of the problems were fixed immediately. I won’t count the most recent request since I submitted it only a little while ago. But the other two requests are “still in the queue.” One of them was submitted 15 days ago. The other? 264 days ago. That’s bullshit.

I’ve been wanting to go to an actual .com or .net web site, but don’t know enough about the process to even know how to begin. But I’m thinking maybe I’d better start learning already.

I had always been uncomfortable around people in wheelchairs. As a kid, I was flat-out afraid of them. This may have been exacerbated by a Girl Scout trip to sing carols in a nursing home, where a fairly senile old man in a motorized wheelchair yelled and chased me and Trina down the hallway, effectively scaring the bloody hell out of us and making us both afraid of not only wheelchairs, but also nursing homes.

Anyway. I got a little older and wasn’t afraid of wheelchairs or their passengers anymore, but I was still awkward, like so many people are. I encountered very few wheelchair users in my everyday life, and I wasn’t sure how to act. I couldn’t quite make eye contact. I found myself at a loss for words.

In my training for my brief stint as a Target employee, they told us that we should kneel down when talking to wheelchair users, because they’d feel better if we approached them on their level. I don’t know – that seemed awfully patronizing, like how you’d approach a dog or a little kid. I never had the chance to try it out, though.

I was really worried that seeing Ginny in a wheelchair would freak me out, that I wouldn’t be able to handle the sight. But I think that after seeing her go from being completely unable to even move or feed herself, to spending the majority of three months confined to a hospital bed or a giant orthopedic stretcher chair, seeing her in a wheelchair is a huge improvement and one hell of a triumph.

Even better – she can bear weight on her right foot in water, and her first pool therapy session was Friday. She said she walked all around the pool – the first time she’s walked since March 1st, and she was thrilled about it. And we’re thrilled for her. She’s going to have pool therapy three times a week for the forseeable future, in order to help strengthen her right leg for when she’s ready to bear weight on it.

For now, though, she’s mostly in the wheelchair. She’s gotten really good at getting in and out of it and rolling around and stuff on her own, but she still can use a little help sometimes.

Yesterday she wanted to go to the movies, and because I’m completely broke ’till Wednesday, she said she’d pay. Sammi is at basketball camp this week, so Jamie and Ginny and I got ready to go to the 4:30 showing of Mean Girls at the Cinema Grill.

The Cinema Grill is unique because it used to be a regular movie theater that closed down a few years ago. They re-opened it a while later as a combined restaurant/movie house with tables and chairs in its auditoriums, and they serve food and alcohol while you’re watching the movie. And the movies are really cheap. The March 1999 issue of E.S.P. has a good little story on the Cinema Grill’s conversion, if you’re interested.

We called ahead to make sure it was handicapped-accessible (all places are supposed to be, but you’d be surprised), got in the Jeep, and headed over.

(Side note: My parents’ Jeep Grand Cherokee is the transportation of choice for Ginny, as it is high enough for her to get in and out of easily, big enough to hold the wheelchair as well as people, and has handicapped plates. But it’s totally weird to get used to since I normally drive a small sedan. Anyway.)

People were all really nice and helpful. We were actually joking around that our waiter was being extra-super-special nice to Ginny because she’s crippled. It’s funny.

There were a handful of other people there, all with kids. Um, I don’t really call Mean Girls a children’s movie, but whatever. We ordered our drinks and food (hey, their cheese fries are AWESOME) and the movie started. About ten minutes into the movie, the film suddenly bubbled and burned right on screen. I knew exactly what was happening, and for a moment I got paranoid and worried that there was a fire in the projection room and began to mentally make plans for how to get out of there quickly if need be. But all that happened was that the film was old, the projector was old, and it got too hot. Apparently it had happened before.

They let us know that they couldn’t fix the film in time and apologized, offering free passes and inviting us to go next door to watch the other movie if we liked. The other movie was Van Helsing, which we had no desire whatsoever to see, so we passed and decided to just eat our food in there and go. Everyone else declined too. Notably, the woman with two little girls pitched a bit of a fit about how she had children with her and Van Helsing wasn’t appropriate for them, like, hello, you brought your ten year old girls to a movie rated PG-13 for “sexual content, language, and some teen partying” and in the first ten minutes we’ve already seen the sex ed scene and heard some language, so whatever, lady, because Van Helsing is also rated PG-13. Incidentally, she was also really angry about the movie being broken and personally offended that the management would be so audacious as to burn a film right on screen when she had brought her daughters out to see it!

Please note: The people whose crippled sister really wanted to see this movie, since she was in the hospital when it was in the theater, and for whom going anywhere is a major undertaking, weren’t complaining a bit. I’m just sayin’.

But I digress. (When do I ever not digress?)

We decided to go to the theater near the mall to see Harry Potter. And that turned out to be just fine – Ginny was even able to get into the theater seat there, which was slightly more comfortable than two and a half hours in a straight-backed wheelchair would have been. Sitting four inches from the theater screen took some getting used to, though – I thought I was going to get motion sickness during the flying scenes. Also, this is totally the best Harry Potter movie so far, and it’s a damn shame that Cuarón has said he won’t be doing another one.

The point (if there is a point) is that people everywhere were so friendly and helpful that it was really heartening. We had a complete stranger offer to help us when we were getting Ginny back in the wheelchair after the movie, and while we didn’t need the help, the offer was just so nice. Sure, a few people stared, but it didn’t bother us a bit. I think it helps, too, that we’re so positive about it and that Ginny goes around telling people she’s in the chair because she’s lazy, or because she wants attention, and at first they seem a little shocked, like how can you joke about being in a wheelchair? but it seems to put them at ease, too.

I freely admit that it might be different if Ginny looked ill, or if she were older, or if the wheelchair were permanent. People’s attitudes might be different, and so might ours. But this is working out just fine for us so far, and it’s kind of weird and cool to take Ginny back into a world she’s been missing for four months now. Crazy little things like going to the grocery store really excite her, and that’s fun.

Except when you’re pushing her and she keeps clamping down on the wheels to make you stop so she can dig through the $6.00 DVD bin at Kroger for shitty movies and you’re trying to push as hard as you can and then she puts the damn brakes on and people are looking and you threaten to wheel her directly into the next wall you see and leave her there. But then everyone laughs and it’s all okay.

It’s one of those absolutely lousy, dreary, chilly, rainy days today. And of course, I forgot to bring my sweater and can’t find my umbrella.

A little while ago I decided to go over to the campus bookstore to put the following essential items on my staff charge account:

1. Excedrin Extra-Strength or Excedrin Migraine
2. A big-ass Diet Pepsi (they don’t sell Diet Coke, bastards)
3. Peanut Butter M&Ms
4. A CD (nothing in particular, just whatever caught my eye)

I decided to drive over since it was drizzling and as I was making the drive, I noticed that there were millions of cars in the parking lots – odd since it’s summer. But then I remembered that it’s freshman orientation and I thought crap, I’m never gonna find a parking place at the bookstore. But, wonder of all wonders, as I drove up the hill I saw an open space, and I zipped around the corner and into the space far faster than was reasonable, and walked in the increasing drizzle into the store.

The place was packed, but I found all the stuff I desperately needed. Hint: Excedrin Migraine and Excedrin Extra-Strength have exactly the same ingredients. 250 mg aspirin, 250 mg acetaminophen, and 65 mg caffeine. Just FYI. Oh, and it packs one hell of a wallop. I can’t remember the last time I used the word “wallop.” I promise to excise it from my vocabulary immediately.

I buy CDs at the bookstore that I wouldn’t consider buying with actual money because payments on my staff charge account are deducted in very small increments from my paycheck, and I never even miss them. So I’m more willing to try stuff just on a whim. I was hoping they’d have the Bebel Gilberto CD, since I’ve been wanting to try it out, but they did not. So the two CDs that caught my eye were The Beta Band’s Heroes To Zeroes and the ridiculously well-advertised self-titled Franz Ferdinand album. I went with The Beta Band and it seems all right so far. I won’t know how I like it for sure until I give it a few spins in the car, which is my testing ground for all new music.

So I grabbed all of my emergency supplies and headed for the register, dodging four hundred thousand soon-to-be-freshmen in their varsity jackets and tees and stuff and their crazy weird-question-asking, trying-to-buy-books-for-the-fall-even-though-it’s-obvious-that-fall-books-aren’t-here-yet parents. Two things:

1. If the textbook section of the bookstore is completely empty, why would you go ask every employee in the bookstore how to figure out where your books for fall classes are? It’s freakin’ JUNE. Buy them when you get to campus for real or order them from Amazon.
2. It’s a rule, I think, that if you’re a high school varsity athlete, you have to constantly wear high school varsity athletic apparel of some sort until someone in your freshman year of college lets you know that it isn’t cool anymore. I admit, I did it too. And if you become a varsity athlete in college, especially at a Division I school, you don’t even have to buy clothes anymore. You can just walk around all day in the sweats and shoes and tees and bags and whatever else the corporate sponsors provide for you. All varsity athletes at my college were decked out in head-to-toe Adidas all day, every day. Anyway.

   I paid for my stuff and left, dodging a couple of people trying to get me to buy extra-long bed linens and lofts (hi, I’ve been working here for three years, thanks) and went out to the parking lot. It was pouring rain at this point and this is the sight that greeted me when I got outside:

   

   And as I walked to my car, yet another car was on its way in to park next to Stupid Girl, which would have blocked me in completely for who knows how long. Luckily, that woman saw me and backed out, but I still wasn’t entirely sure how in the hell I was going to get out of the lot to let her in.

   But through some miracle, or deadly awesome driving skills, I managed to execute one absolutely hellacious four-point maneuver that got me out of the lot without hitting a single thing. Thank goodness for my Neon with its outstanding maneuverability – that’s gotten me out of a tight spot more than once, and that’s a main reason I bought another one when the old one started to fall apart.

   I’m glad I was able to make it out of the lot, though, or else I’d have gone completely apeshit ballistic, probably yelling at the Holiday Inn driver who was sitting there in his van, and keying the truck and Stupid Girl’s car on sheer principle. I have a scale of moral relativity or something when it comes to illegal parking. I’m totally fine with parking in a student space, or in a no-parking zone, as long as I’m not blocking anyone in or out. I don’t park in handicapped spaces, though. And I never, ever, EVER double-park or block people in lots, and I hate when other people do it. It happened all the time on the street where I used to live in Evanston. People would blatantly park right in the damn middle of a functioning lane of traffic in rush hour and go into Starbucks to GET IN LINE for a mochalatte or whatever the hell they so desperately needed.

   Bleargh. I hate those people.

   Note to self: pills work a lot better when you put them in your mouth and swallow them. This is the third time in a week that I’ve gotten pills out of the packaging and put them on my desk, only to forget about them for a half-hour until I wonder why in the hell they aren’t working yet and turn to the left and see them still sitting there on the desk. Duh.

   Ooh, yay. It’s almost lunch time.

I was reading the latest post at the redhead papers the other day and it reminded me of something that happened to me a couple of months ago. I don’t think I wrote about it at the time, either because something else happened or because I trauma-blocked it. Anyway. Now I’m about to tell the tale.

A couple of months ago, I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by myself on a Sunday afternoon. I went to The Grandin Theatre, which is a historic theatre in town that used to be an actual theatre, with a stage and a balcony and stuff. Now the balcony is split into two (or three, maybe) sections where they show movies to smaller audiences. On the day I went to see Eternal Sunshine, it was showing in one of those small screening room-type places.

There were only a handful of other people there, really. A couple of young women, one bald guy by himself, another small group (3 people, maybe), and me. I was one of the first people in and I’m really, really picky about my seat in a theatre. I like to get as close to the actual center (horizontally and vertically) as possible.

It’s kind of hard to do here, because one quirk of turning the balcony into screening rooms is that the seats aren’t exactly centered with the screen. So I picked a seat near the left side of the row, one row in front of the two women but not directly in front of them. Everyone else spaced themselves out reasonably, like you do. It’s a small room but there were lots of seats open.

About five minutes before the movie is supposed to start, one of those granola-eating, natural-fiber-wearing, unwashed-feet-in-birks-sporting hippie type couples came in. You know the couple. They’re both really androgynous and somehow all the same color from top to bottom including hair, clothes, and skin. That’s not unusual in this particular neighborhood, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even have noticed them.

Except that when they came in, the guy let the girl pick their seats. And she walked into my row, and stopped at the seat right next to me, on the right. “Is this one okay?” she asked the guy, as if I weren’t even sitting there. He said yes, and she sat down right next to me. And her guy sat on her right.

I was tempted to get up and move, but there was the whole picky-about-seats thing, not to mention the fact that the place was so small and there were so few people there that I’d be making an inadvertent scene by getting up and moving, and I didn’t want to do that. So I sat there. And I felt totally gross, like my personal space had been unforgivably invaded.

I don’t like getting very close to strangers. In particular, when I’m going to a film alone and I know it’s one that I want to soak in and really feel, I need a space cushion. And now I didn’t have it. And I was freaking out and the poor couple hadn’t even done anything yet – they were just sitting there.

But then Granola Girlfriend had to put her stupid Coke in the cupholder next to my seat, instead of the one between her and Granola Boyfriend. And then she had to take her nasty smelly Birks off and put her nasty smelly feet up on the back of the seat in front of her – and the seat in front of me. And she was one of those really skinny fidgety chicks who folds her entire frame up into a theatre seat like a pretzel, with arms and legs everywhere, and then shifts her position about fifteen times a minute. Throughout the movie. And Granola Boyfriend was an Inappropriate Laugher – you know, the one who laughs really loudly at the shit that’s not supposed to be funny? Yeah. That guy.

I wanted to kill them both. I wanted to accidentally on purpose spill her Coke all over her shoes. And by the time I realized that I would have been better off moving to begin with, it was well into the film and I’m not going to get up and shift around in the middle of a movie, because, see, I have manners. So I just sat there and tried to block them out and fumed. And they almost ruined the movie for me.

It’s probably a testament to the power of that film that I was able to enjoy it so much despite my stupid neighbors.

Isn’t there an unwritten rule that you’re supposed to space yourself out at the movies? Unless it’s a sold-out show, and the managers come in and herd everyone to the center, in which case you pick up your coats from the coat-seat and make a big fat deal out of moving one seat to the right under extreme duress and all that. Am I just incredibly anal, or were those people really weird and rude?