Chapter 113: Everybody Pays As They Go

Okay, so this blog is a little different than usual. This is the blog for Friday, February 26, 2010 although it is actually the morning of Saturday, February 27, 2010. This has happened a few times in the past, but normally I will have started the blog the night before and will write it as if the whole thing was written the night before. That is not the case today, though. I am just going to write from where I am right now – Saturday morning, not Friday night. I will still relay what went on yesterday, but I will not tell it as if I don’t know the ending as I have in the past because it just seems kind of silly.

So, yesterday morning I woke up feeling worse than I had on Thursday and I knew I wasn’t going in to work. I knew the consequences of that, of course, because I had already been considering them on Thursday night. I am pretty sure I will be okay, though. I actually have more money than I had thought initially. Silly as it may sound, before I was only considering the amount I had in the bank and forgetting about the fact that I still have about $80 in cash. It also helps that I have been outbid on one of my Ebay items, the Heatherette MAC eyeshadow palette, and I am not re-bidding on it. I do need to get more makeup colors because I have some really high quality stuff, but I also have a color palette that is really cheap and fades on me even with primer, so I need to replace the colors in that palette that I use frequently. I figure I will make a trip to Walgreen’s sometime this weekend and just pick up some Rimmel or Nyx stuff, which is considerably less expensive than ordering MAC online. Speaking of ordering makeup online, I received a package yesterday of 3 Christian Siriano for Victoria’s Secret makeup eyeshadows. They are gorgeous and I can’t wait to wear them! I can’t wait ‘til doing something like going outside to get the mail doesn’t leave me feeling worn out.

Yes, I called in sick yesterday because I was actually sick. I woke up with my alarm at 7:30am and called in sick a little while after that. Around 10am, though, I went and lay on the couch to watch some TV and wound up falling asleep. I slept until around 3pm and when I woke up I felt a little bit better than I had before. Not much better, unfortunately, but a little bit. I came into my bedroom and sat down at the computer to check out Facebook and Twitter and such, and found that I had an invitation to play the game “Sorority Life” on Facebook. I have always found the Facebook games kind of irritating, but recently Rachel had talked me into play “Farmville,” which I get the appeal of but don’t personally find very interesting or entertaining. However, since I had played “Farmville” recently, I figured the “Sorority Life” thing could be worth checking out. Let me just tell you, I wound up playing that damn game for a few hours. It’s really kind of fun. I guess I like it because I get to build a little sorority girl and make her earn money by playing silly games like Unscrambling words and finding hidden pictures and a strange version of that Bejeweled game. It’s not actually all that entertaining to be honest, and kind of pointless, but it sure helped pass a few hours yesterday. Plus, I gave my Sorority Girl a really hilarious name! Amber and I have this running thing we do at work when we come across customers with unintentionally hilarious names that sound like drag names. It all started with a customer named Ethiopia Mengetsu who I spoke with one day and afterwards was like, “OMG That is totally my new drag name!” We’ve come across some really good ones recently, though, including a woman named Rubinia Dicks, and the name of my Sorority Girl, Seema Vijay.

Fortunately, my day wasn’t entirely wasted on playing Facebook games. I decided yesterday afternoon that I should do SOMETHING to make the day worthwhile and be able to say that I did something slightly productive with it, despite being sick. So, I went back to my listing of places for piano lessons here in town and came across a place that had really stuck out to me when I was looking online before – the Allegro Music Academy. I called them and spoke to a really friendly, professional gentleman who scheduled me an appointment for Monday, March 8, 2010. It was pretty awesome and I am very excited about it. A few really cool things about this place include the fact that the first meeting/lesson is free, and the lessons are $26 for a 30-minute lesson and $39 for a 45-minute lesson, which they recommended and which I prefer, anyway. So, the rates are similar to Eliezer Rivera’s rates, except that this is an actual school and they really came across much more professional. I am really excited to have a music lesson scheduled again! I also like the fact that this school offers other lessons, as well, like voice and guitar, both of which I would like to take eventually. My voice is pretty strong on it’s own, I think, but I figure learning the technicals would only serve to make it stronger. That is something I would definitely like to look into further in the future. Then, of course, there is guitar. We all know the story with me and my guitar. I have always thought that I would probably be able to learn guitar better with a professional instructor, so that is something I would like to try eventually, as well. Piano is my main focus and first priority right now, though. Another reason I am really excited about this is because the book “How To Make Someone Love You Forever In 90 Minutes Or Less,” says that you need to make socializing a priority in your life in order to be out there and meet people, and one of the ways that the book recommended getting out into the world was by taking some sort of classes – like music classes. It is a way to meet people with similar interests to you and even if you don’t find your Matched Opposite in this way, you may find a friend who could lead you to your Matched Opposite. I’m not necessarily going to count on that, but I do think it would be a good thing to put myself into a setting where I will be around other people with similar interests to my own. Like I said, I am just really excited about this and can’t wait to get started.

My Mom came home at 8pm and we decided to get Chinese food for dinner. I was feeling a bit better by then and figured I was at the tail end of the sickness. I still think that is the case – I am feeling pretty decent this morning, although I still have a cough and am a little achy. It is nothing like it was yesterday morning/afternoon. I am pretty sure I am going to be okay at this point and should be feeling perfectly fine by tomorrow, I’m betting. I hope so, anyway. I made plans to hang out with Rachel tomorrow – we decided that we would go out and explore for a few hours. Explore what, I don’t know, but we both agreed we’d figure it out in the process. As I’ve mentioned a few times recently, I feel like this is exactly the type of activity I could use right about now in my life. I need to do things that are less planned, less structured and more spontaneous and outside of my comfort zone. Rachel is definitely a good person for assisting me in that. She is really good at getting me to try different things and look at things differently. I don’t know what we are going to do tomorrow, although I know we have discussed going to the Ringling Museum recently and I would really like to check that out. Maybe we’ll do that tomorrow. I don’t know what we’ll do, but I’m sure we’ll manage to have fun with whatever it is.

My Mom had to work some overtime today, so she went to bed pretty early last night. I hung out in my bedroom for a while and played some more “Sorority Life” and downloaded some music. I was in a Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac mood, so I downloaded Greatest Hits records from both Stevie solo and Fleetwood Mac. Listening to Stevie Nicks had me in a bit of an 80s mood, so I downloaded the Greatest Hits from the Go-Go’s, as well. I have always been a pretty big fan of the Go-Go’s, and 80s music in general, so I had a good little trip down memory lane listening to them. Of course, I don’t mean a trip down memory lane to when this music was new, since I was just a child then. 80s music, in general, makes me think of when I was living in Arkansas. There was this radio station there called Mix something or other that had what they called “Mixtalgia Weekends,” where they played nothing but 80s music for the entire weekend. I had already had an affinity for some 80s music, but this is where I really developed a deep love for a lot of it that I wasn’t overly familiar with before, including the Go-Go’s, Blondie, Billy Idol and one of my absolute favorite bands, The Cars. This music always takes me back to living in Arkansas. It wasn’t necessarily a good period in my life, but it had it’s moments and the 80s music was one of those better moments. However, my favorite album that I downloaded last night would have to be “Seeing Things” by Jakob Dylan. Jakob Dylan, for those who don’t know, is the son of Bob Dylan and former lead singer of The Wallflowers. The Wallflowers were one of my favorite bands of the 90s. Their album, “Bringing Down The Horse” has long been one of my very favorites. That was back in 1996, though, and I hadn’t really kept up with them since then. I happened to stumble upon this solo record from Jakob, though, and figured it would be worth checking out. I could not have been more right – it is an absolutely gorgeous record, more acoustic than most of the Wallflower’s stuff and a lot of it really has the vibe of those old protest songs, reminiscent of Bob Dylan in a lot of ways. It is a beautiful record and I am listening to it for the fifth time since downloading it last night. It has really gotten under my skin a bit. The opening track is a song called, “Evil Is Alive & Well,” that is both haunting and universally true. Favorites of mine on this album include, “The Valley Of The Low Sun,” “I Told You I Couldn’t Stop,” “War Is Kind,” “Something Good This Way Comes,” “On Up The Mountain,” “This End Of The Telescope” and, my very favorite, “Everybody Pays As They Go.” This song has a pretty clear message to it that I think is kind of important to bear in mind in life – “Some less than others, some right through the nose, everybody pays as they go, the young and old, rich and poor, your mother, she too owes, cause everybody pays as they go.” It’s so true. We all, every last one of us, has something in this life that we will wind up having to pay for. No, I am not talking commerce here – in the spiritual sense, we all have things that we do or pieces of ourselves that will wind up costing us eventually. All I know is that this Jakob Dylan record, “Seeing Things” is absolutely breathtaking, and I would recommend it to everyone. I mean, I don’t know if it would be up everyone’s alley or touch everyone in the way it does me, considering it is basically folk music, but it’s got themes in it that I think everybody can relate to and take something from.

Anyway, that is all for this morning. Like I said, I am feeling considerably better than I did yesterday. Not back to 100% just yet, but much better. I’m not entirely sure what today holds – maybe watching some movies with my Mom, or going out to lunch or something. I really have no idea. I guess I will let it unfold as it will. Speaking of folding and unfolding, I need to do laundry today. I think I will go get started on that now, although “Sorority Life’ sounds kind of tempting right about now. Must resist.