2003-01-03 - 11:04 a.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Bad is Bad", Huey Lewis and the News

I thought the Friday Five would be a hell of a lot more interesting with pictures, so I amused myself with the digital camera and Paint and made a little collage, to show you all my costume jewelry.

1. Do you wear any jewelry? What kind?

2. How often do you wear it?

On a daily basis, I wear my wedding band, sometimes my engagement ring (both shown together upper left) and a $5 silver band on my right ring finger that's vaguely similar to P's white gold wedding band. I also wear a Timex "easy-reader" watch, 'cause I like plain numerals on a watch face. It was hard to get the detail, but you can see the brushed gold on the engagement ring, which was why I bought it. That's the $10 CZ, there.

The more occasional jewelry is shown in the pictures. I wear a gold-colored watch necklace (1928 brand) with an etched design (my maternal grandmother used to wear one), that goes with the gold-colored earrings from my paternal grandmother. The brown Y-necklace is also "1928". The blue makes me insanely happy because it's BLUE!

The rings are, L to R: My engagement ring/wedding band, the $30 ring I picked up in Union Station awhile back, my paternal grandmother's "emerald" (actually green glass; I love the setting), and my maternal grandmother's garnet.

3. Do you have any piercings? If so, where?

The usual one piercing per ear lobe. I had a very strong impulse one day in the mall to get a second piercing on one ear, but decided against it because my lobes are VERY small. I considered getting a bellybutton piercing, too, but I like the idea better than how they look in reality. They tend to be too "deep" (too much distance from the piercing to the bellybutton itself) for my taste, probably because of the catching-on-clothes issue.

4. Do you have any tattoos? If so, where?

No. Thought about getting Chilly Willy on my ankle (my feet are always cold) and a happy face on my hip/butt transition. Finally decided to just go with the temporaries.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?

Find a warm coat. Watch a movie with Poindexter in the THEATER ROOM! (He just got it set up.) Go to Alicia's son's first birthday party. Celebrate Christmas Eve & Day with my parents. It'll be a busy one.

TMI Alert. Nothing graphic.

I went to the pharmacy tonight to pick up a bunch of stuff (videotapes, deoderant, Viadent, and Pringles), and while I was there I took my scrip over to the drop-off desk and asked if they had the All-Flex, Size 65.

"No," said the pharmacist, a very short, disturbingly odd (not because he was short) man. He looked again at the script. "No ... no."

Well, fine. I don't want a diaphragm from you anyway. Ick.

Went to another pharmacy, and this time a thickly accented woman ignored me for about a minute, then finally asked to see the scrip.

"We don't hab this," she said. "We hab size sebendy, is smallest."

(I'm always amused that there are so many languages where "V" and "B" are interchangeable. Spanish and some Asian languages, for starters. African slave dialects are often depicted in books as doing this. I also know a Good Ol' Southron White Boy who does this too, but I haven't figured that one out.)

At this point, I was flabbergasted. What do I have, the smallest cervix in Philadelphia? The next largest cervix is five millimeters bigger?

As it turns out, thanks to a little internet research, diaphragms range in size from 50 to 105mm, and are made in 5mm increments. The average size sold is between 60 and 85mm. So I'm not exactly an outlier here. Except maybe in Philadelphia.

We'll see how many pharmacies we have to call before we find one. Very odd.

Here's something interesting my MIL said over Christmas:

"Men behave as badly as women allow them to."

I don't think I want to get into a bunch of generalizations about the sexes -- I think the statement can probably have any combination of genders on either side of it. So I will just talk about my experiences.

I'm very hard to offend. You can say a lot of stuff to me and make fun of me or whatever, and I'm not going to care. But if there is disrespect in your tone, I will not stand for it.

My college boyfriend used to talk to his mother in a rather condescending tone at times. He and his brother and father all did it, and she didn't seem to care. I didn't like this at all. I can remember exactly two occasions when he used it on me. The first time, I walked out of his apartment. The second time, I told him if he used the tone again, he could leave my apartment.

All he did was say something in a certain tone. But it indicated a lack of respect for me, and I would not tolerate it. I assume this is partly why there were only the two incidents.

I've noticed, all my life, that people are often nicer to me than they are to other people, sometimes. Partly this is because of my deafness, I think. I can't understand people unless they're talking directly to me. Maybe people find it hard to be condescending or insulting directly to one's face.

Something I told Poindexter last night (not for the first time):

I remember that when I broke up with Sam, he said to a mutual friend (the woman he eventually married), "I don't know if I miss her or if I miss having a girlfriend." I thought that was interesting, because I felt often during our relationship that although he liked me a lot, the things that made me uniquely me were not the reason. The things I was that made him happy could have been fulfilled by a lot of different women. Whereas with Poindexter, I know that it is ONLY ME that he wants. The uniquely-me things are among the specific things that make him love me and want to be with me above all else. That's very important to me.

Gratuitous photo of the day:

Just another photo when we were visiting the carousel.

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