where in the world is ren?

so i'm staring at your picture. wanting to go dancing. wanting someone to call on my way home and talk about the futility of life. needing your optimism to drown my growing pessimism.

goddamn it ren. will you quit dicking around in europe and come back to austin?
please hurry home! i miss you like crazy!

by the way, i've been reading your post and you need to stop drinking the water over there. it's making you do some crazy things. :D

happy birthday jerms

whew. the end of a stressful week.
had to work super late every day this week.
got my 50% drawing submission done though. it's quite amazing that at the age of 27, i will already get to see a building designed and built.

it's weird though because a lot of my stress this week wasn't about the job but the life i was neglecting on the side. jeremy's birthday is today (16th). i fretted for two weeks on what to get him. i can honestly say that for the first time in 10 plus years, i have not known what to buy him. in the past, i usually buy him 6-10 presents for his birthday. this year, a complete and utter blank.

a part of me felt guilty because i thought that maybe work was interfering with my thought process. maybe if i had been around more, i'd know what he wants. but then i started taking inventory of everything he ever wanted and all the things he already has. there is almost nothing left. for this birthday, he told me all he wanted was permission to dual out his truck (two mufflers twice the noise). but i've pretty much been refusing. i could never submit to allowing that kind of excessive nuisance.

so. instead of getting him some object of monetary value, i decided to get him a memory event. there are few events in our lives...lack of time..lack of will. we prefer to stay at home and play on our computers.

i bought tickets for him, myself, my brother, and our friend eric to go see the Spur's Basketball game tonight. I figured we could go hang out at the river walk and have a late lunch...then go to the game.

So, here's the message I wrote in my birthday card to him:
-----------------------------
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JERMS
What do you get a guy who has everything?
Not a single person could come up with a viable answer.
Not a single one.
SO, I wrote you a poem instead....


Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Who's going to a Spur's Basketball Game?
That would be you!

-------------------

Something in me thinks he'll still be disappointed in the lack of presents but I hope my creativity will make up for most of that.

sin city, plenty of sin

woke up this morning and starting doing chores right away. started with the bathrooms, then worked my way to the kitchen and laundry. now the house is squared away.

took a shower, ate left over Chinese from last night and then went to go see sin city with my brother and friends.

the movie is graphically interesting but i wouldn't say phenomenal or anything. story-line was right up tarrentino's alley who guest directed the movie. expect tons of graphic violence and a lot of penis severing. i don't recommend this movie for people who don't have a strong preference towards movies that over play the whole vigilante thing.

went to the groceries afterwards. we bought pie and fruit for when trish and alain come over. they're bringing us pizza for dinner. yum. i usually reserve pizza for once a year on jeremy's birthday. oh well. :) pizza is sooooo good. we're supposed to watch a movie called "being there". it's a really old movie. trish keeps raving about it so we'll see.

onward...

i'm becoming a masochist

lets talk about pain.
yes, shall we?

woke up at 6am and took an oral sedation pill. i got up and was completely nauseous. i waited for my brother to pick me up at 6:30am and then we headed to the periodontist's office.
when i got there, i was only a little groggy. it was pretty apparent to me that the oral sedation wasn't going to do me much good for the surgery.

around 7am. they started the surgery. i was to get a gum lift. i only had some idea of what it meant but i'm pretty glad i didn't know. otherwise, would have been petrified all week. the doctor started out by giving me a serious of 8 or so shots throughout the front of my mouth and in my lip. i could feel the first few of them but the rest were pretty painless since my mouth was becoming numb. next came the "claw"...

after he thought my gum was numb enough he started to use this claw looking tool to pry my gums away from my teeth. you can think of it like pulling carpet up to stretch it out again. once he got enough of the gum away from the tooth, he used tweezers to pull and stretch the gum up. after being properly stretched and pulled, he began to sew the gum in place. this is where the real pain started, if you can imagine.

i could feel the needle going through, at first only a very slight pain. then i began to have a feeling of soreness. he stitched it in place and then wired the stitches around my teeth for security. i was completely awake and aware of all of this. i could see the metal tools and blood and needles. the last part was the final blow. he pushed some gauze up against the area he had just worked on and then pressed very hard to apply pressure.
i thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head from the pain. then they gave me an ice pack and i was on my way home.

when i go home, i climbed straight into bed. i spent a good hour closing my eyes and trying to mediate the pain away. luckily, my sleepiness overrode the pain and when i woke up several hours later, the pain was extremely duller.

after i got up, i felt good enough to do my next self portrait shoot for Sunday. after jeremy got home, we watched bridget jones, the edge of reason and the incredibles. i def. liked the incredibles more than bridget jones. i just didn't really buy the chemistry between collin firth and renee zellwegger.

we ordered some chinese take-out and i'm now contemplating on heading straight to bed or working on my website.

trish and her husband alain are coming over tomorrow for dinner. toilets need to get cleaned, floors need to be vacuumed, kitty litter needs to get emptied, laundry needs to be done, dishes need washing..on and on on and on.. but i'm sleepy. maybe i'll have more energy tomorrow afternoon.

this evening...

around 6pm, everyone in the office had left except for trish and i. she had just told me some good news so i offered to take her out and buy her a drink. we went to this incredibly warm and lovely italian bistro called cippolina. they have the best pizzas in the world there. i love to get their maragarita chicken pizza. the crust is so thin and the meat is so tender. i find it wonderful that the place is very elegant and yet so simple and not stuck up. it's very austin.

she and i had a good chat for an hour or so. she's such an extroordinary person. it's amazing that she's the oldest of my friends (40+) but she's the youngest in spirit and vigor. it gives me hope that age doesn't define your character.

i've been so tired lately. i worked till 1am last night. it's scary being in the office that late sometimes. it's also very un-natural feeling. jerms wants me to quit my job.

a part of me thinks it'd be nice to play housewife for awhile but another part of me knows i'd grow tired of it easily. i like challenges in my life. i guess for me, if it's not hard, then it's not real.

i'm going in for more oral surgery tomorrow morning. i'm getting an additonal gum lift. apparently the gum graph wasn't enough to fix my recession. i'm hoping it doesn't impede my day too much. i plan on doing another photography shoot with daylight. no work tomorrow. it almost feels wrong. :-)

i have to think of something to get jerms for his birthday. it's coming up in two weeks. he'll be 27, just like me. normally, i have a pretty good idea of things to get but this years i'm totally at a loss. plus, i usually buy him like 10 presents. so ten things is a lot harder than one. don't ask me why but i think it's wrong to only give one birthday present. too dull.

any suggestions?

gallbladder

took a long lunch with jeremy on his break from jury duty, went to the doctor to check out my abdominal pains, organized my photography project, and still put in 8 hours of work. did i mention i haven't had any caffeine today either?

yeah. i'm officially a robot.

sounds like jury duty isn't so bad. jerms seemed to have a lot of fun. he said it felt like the movie runaway jury and he was john cussack. :) it may not be so bad but i'm still not looking forward to it.

went to the doctor after getting pressured into it by my co-worker trish. she insisted i get my abdominal pains checked out. i had a severe pain attack this past Saturday. i predict it's gal stones but who knows. the doctor i saw wasn't very nice. she was very curt and quick. i felt like she didn't even want to hear what i had to say about my problems. maybe she was annoyed that i had self-diagnosed myself already as having gal stones. who knows. i'm going to have to get an ultrasound done in the near future to have it all checked out.

lately, i've been on some false high. i guess it's part adrenaline and part stress. i feel so alive and so numb at the same time. maybe i'm dying. :)

kevin and i decided to stop talking about photography and start doing it. we're starting with self-portraits. a set is due twice a week to each other (wednesdays and fridays). he was right though, you'll never do arts if you don't make time for arts. i finished mine this evening when i got home (around 11pm). i already have ideas for my Sunday shoot.

i also wrote two poems today while i was at work. there is a spark in my mind but i haven't the energy to breath. weirdness.

but now i'm tired. debating on wether to shower before bed...

VICCI

a friend of mine from dallas came into town this week for the sxsw festival. i think he got in around thursday night but i didn't see him till like saturday afternoon. my work schedule is getting crazier as deadline approaches.

we went out to magnolia cafe and had lunch. i got two breakfast tacos and a shortstck of whole wheat pancakes. yes, they tasted like cardboard. sometimes the wheat thing is actually good but not in this case. kevin got an omlet and a shortstack of gingerbread pancakes. everytime he blows into town, he says he HAS to get those gingerbread pancakes.

after lunch, we stopped over at his friend's store, a local sex novelty shop on first street. while he chatted with his friend, i perused the goods. there was this entire wall full of dildos. standard stuff. but then i started looking at the butt plugs. it then occured to me that i didn't know what the hell those things were for. it wasn't until later when i asked kevin that i learned what their purpose was. i mean, i've heard of them before but until i saw one, i didn't realize their exact use. there was a sex swing which looked pretty intimidating, a bunch of whips, and a few corny things like candy shaped like boobs and sperm. morgan, who owns the store (sin sations) invited me to their one year anniversary party. she said their would be lots of good beer and jello wresting. hahaha. don't know if i'll be attending that shindig.

i watched a bunch of NCAA games that afternoon and evening when we got back. my bracket went to shit! wake forest went to double over time only to lose out to west virginia in a succession of terrible mistakes.

after that horrible game, kevin and i went downtown to go dancing. we stopped at sky lounge first but it was entirely dead. then we went to the light bar. that place was very cool for a bar but again, there was no dancing. we were on our way to check out boy cellar and saw a bunch a people waiting in line to get into this new club called VICCI. it was packed! i give it two months though. austin's dance scene is terrible. but last night, the place was wild. there were go-go dancers in suspended cages totally shakin' it. the dj was crazy. it was the worst mix of songs ever. he even played def leopard. i thought i was gonna puke. but most of it was dance worthy and so i shook it till around 3 in the morning.

kevin left this afternoon. i'm doing laundry and thinking about making a run to the grocery store. i need to vacuum the house. we got the new filterless dyson vacuum. our other one broke. the dyson is SO expensive. i couldn't believe it. we got the new dyson for pet owners. cost like 540 dollars. luckily, jeremy has cashback bonus awards from discovercard. we doubled his cashback awards by getting certificates to sharper image. so we paid half off for the vacuum. quite a good deal. anyhow, that thing is awesome!! makes vacuuming totally fun.

in other news.
i really want to redesign my website. convert it all to css. play WoW or recreate my website? hmmm..

off to the grocery store..