Do you remember, back in the Summer of 2008, (08.08.08, to be exact) we were bemoaning our respective fates, and I, in one of my bouts of optimism said “Yeah, but by 09.09.09? Things are gonna be different.”

Since then, I feel we’ve had a bizarre bond. We had our Year of the Terrapin (a creature who lives in less than salubrious conditions) and while things did not exactly get better, there were some notable improvements. (I got my DUI, but then I got sober. You started Georgetown and made friends) 09.09.09 arrived, and then the official New Year, and we spoke of a shared apartment, on the outskirts of some city, hanging out watching Degrassi, with our cats.

2010 was Year of the Crocodile (because The crocodile survived ice ages & meteors, & he probably was like, the bronze age will be so much better, or the pleistocene will be my time to shine, & then it sucked! But you know what he did? he ate a wildebeest, wrote a sad poem in his journal, & kept on trucking, because thats what survivors do).

Things had brought us down, but Fuck That Noise.

I desperately hunted for jobs. You battled girl drama. We commiserated on gchat.

I remember when The-Job-That-Wasn’t-2.0 was up for review, we were impatiently waiting for an answer, because it would make your decision; would you look for a studio or a 2 bedroom?

I got the call at the zero hour.

The night we moved into that hellmouth in Glover Park, we sat on the floor in the living room, eating take-out, laughing in disbelief that we were finally Here, and you said “I think we’ll always remember this night.” Maybe because it was one of the few happy nights in that apartment.

We agree that nothing good happened between those walls.

(However, I still miss you, roomie)

11.11.11 approaches my friend. We’re both unemployed, we’re both trying so hard to get back on our feet and get back together. We’ve only got one more year of this. One more chance. What do you say? Want to make 2012 the year of the Panther? At this point, we have nothing to lose.

Love, your favorite roommate,

Rachel

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/11/23/12-hours/feed/ 0 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/09/08/tuesdays-gray/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/09/08/tuesdays-gray/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:03:42 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/?p=5817 I started a post last night about how I really didn’t want to go back to work and how I was having this Pavlonian-esque response to Labor Day. My stomach was in knots and I was filled with just this dread that one feels the night before school starts. And I liked school, for the most part!

But anyway, I didn’t finish it, because whining is unattractive and to save myself from future cringing and deleting, I stopped writing. Also, laziness.

Anyway, so today was fine, of course, nothing out of the ordinary. Except tomorrow, I have jury duty. I have done everything to get out of this. I postponed it (for legit reasons) and I was hoping with all the furloughs and what have you, I would be one of those lucky people who gets to check the state website the night before and finds her number has not been chosen.

Alas, this afternoon there was a message IN GIANT RED TEXT informing me that ALL JURORS MUST REPORT.

Again, probably not a big deal. Trek down to the county seat courthouse tomorrow, waste the day away, and hope that they won’t choose me. Which of course will not allow me to even enjoy the fact that I can sit in the juror room and read, because I will be anxiety ridden about getting chosen for the jury, not being able to go to work, and I don’t know, an invoice not getting paid or the world ending, or something equally along those lines.

So now I am back to being cranky.

Do you know what this reminds me of?

The first day of Senior Year of high school. Brent and I took off after 9th, in the vapid mobile, to rage about the day. We both had Mr. Kuzma for AP US History II. Our assignment for the night was to draw a mind map about ourselves. This is exactly the type of pointless assignment that drove both of us insane. Brent was also irate because he had somehow (well, I know how. He is the smartest laziest person I know and he got Cs in AP English junior year) wound up in CP English, and it was filled with savages. Anyway, so we drove around, as we were prone to doing, and complained and whined and came up with whatever brilliant ways of denouncing things that we were so good at back in the day.

And I remember he said “Do you know what the worst day of school is? The second day of school.”

Which is totally true. The first day was usually no real work, you get your schedule, you see who is in your classes, teachers pass out books, and you think to yourself, “oh, this isn’t so bad!”

But then you’re alarm clock goes off at some ungodly hour the next morning and it’s like “God damnit, I have to do this for ANOTHER TEN MONTHS.”

It’s terrible.

And tomorrow, I have to get up SUPER EARLY and go to Jury Duty, and even though it’s only the first day back from a 3 day weekend, I AM CRANKY.

I just hope this doesn’t become a theme, like that time I was cranky for all of September/October. That was bad.

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/09/08/tuesdays-gray/feed/ 1 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2007/12/28/dear-2007/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2007/12/28/dear-2007/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:52:00 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/?p=3539 Dear 2007,

I’m so glad you’re over.

No love,

Rachel

Unless, of course, you work for an Israeli-affiliated non-profit.

The end of the year puts me in even more of a reflective mood than usual (who? Me? Never!) Last week, I was thinking how indifferent I was to Christmas, and how I kind of miss liking the season. I don’t mean in the little kid excitement way, I mean in the genuinely good, warm feelings that followed me around during Christmas when I was a teenager. I don’t know why. (Quote Marianne’s ‘carolgram’ to me in 11th grade: “You can’t say no to love.”)

It wound up being a nice Christmas. I ran into Jon on the train back to Jersey on Saturday. My brother gave him a ride home and Jon called me into the house for a minute. Being inside his house brings back far too many memories. Anyway, he got me a Christmas gift (?) and was telling me the whole ride over not to be excited, because it was really small and dumb. He got me “Cheaters” on DVD, which of course caused me to throw my arms around him and shriek “Oh my god, I love it! It’s perfect!” about 30 times.

Sunday, the sibling and I started and finished our shopping in record time, because we are awesome like that. Monday was pseudo-intellectual-Neo-Victorian coffee with the sibling and then Christmas Eve with my aunt’s house, aka the side of the family that I can actually stand. Tuesday morning, I did gift exchange with the family and then my brother drove me back to Astoria.

It was a boring weekend, mostly, with enough restlessness to cause my mind to wander a lot, but it could have been worse. Tuesday night, I did some rearranging of furniture (I still have tons of unpacking and cleaning to do) ordered Indian food and, because my roommate was still gone, listened to my Carrie Underwood CD at top volume.

This year, I feel as if I’ve done nothing. Now I’m sure you could come back and say “Listen missy, you got your Masters Degree. You got an enviable job with amazing benefits. You moved back to Astoria, just like you wanted to, to a great apartment and a great roommate, what the hell are you complaining about?”

All of this is true, but I feel as if I’ve done nothing. I haven’t grown, or changed, or learned anything.

But I am nothing if not a traditionalist, and so…

So as I have said before. Life is funny. The-Ex has disappeared out of my life as quickly as he had embedded and then reembedded in every part. I don’t really miss him or anything, and I’m quite sure in as short as a year from now he’ll be even less tied up in memory recall. And I don’t think it could have happened any other way. And even if it could have, it doesn’t matter because this is the way it happened, and we do not speak, and we will not, and it is not out of hate, but just indifference, and I’m still not sure how to take that.

I want to post this before its midnight and I don’t know what else to say, and so hehe, “and so it goes.”

Sure there’s been a lot of good in my life lately, enough to cause lots of moments of giddiness and self-affirmation bullshit.

But finding myself wanting to crawl out of my own skin for the fourth morning in a row, and remembering I felt this way last October, and the October before that. And hm. Because I’m self-absorbed, I’m reading over the Octobers, in my archive, and I found this  written one year ago today.

It’s incredibly frustrating to me to just not feel like doing anything. I’m back in Astoria, back where I belong, have a great job, great apartment, etc, etc and all I want to do is curl up and watch Saved! For the millionth time.

I want to force myself to be social to see if I snap out of this. but on the other hand, the absolute last thing I want to do is be social after work. I think about the little things I have to go home and do like clean up and pick up all the change on my floor and thinking about how I have to do little things like that makes me squirm and want to scream.

This is also frustrating, because NaNo is coming up, and I really want to participate full-on this year, and actually go to the meet-ups and write-ins. I want to write the story that’s been following me around for so many years, even though it may be ridden with cliches and horribly maudlin. Basically, I want to tell the story of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, and what happens when you get out of bed. But it would help me out a lot if lately, I wanted to get out of bed in the morning. Not that I’m horribly depressed or anything, because I’m not. I don’t know what I am.

So maybe it’s time to do what I did after I wrote that entry. Get back into therapy. I have good health insurance starting November 1st. And past experiences with therapy prove that I am indeed one of those schmucks for whom therapy works. Part of me hates that I “need” therapy to stay at an even keel, but…if it helps, I’m going to do it. I like myself too damn much when I’m happy, and healthy, and productive, and peaceful to deny it to myself just because I’m a little hung up on the stigma of therapy.

The $12 a week a pay for it is way cheaper than alcohol as self-medication. That G-d for my amazing benefits package

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It’s this-time-of-year, and although the past three years I have celebrated on May 1st in a variety of lovely ways, this year I will celebrate on May 4th, because that is when the final draft of my thesis is due. And quite frankly, this year I’m getting off easy; for the most part, I’m too wrapped up in Carl Schmitt to wait for the other shoe to drop, and then really, there IS no other shoe to drop, if that makes sense. Jill and I talked about this last May, when she was essentially waiting for the other shoe to drop with her girlfriend. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but suddenly things were off; listening Jill describe the torture of waiting for a phone call, of trying to talk to her, of how she got off the phone without saying ‘I love you’ I could only empathize. I’ve been there, and knowing something was coming was torture. Of course in hindsight you can go back and see all the signs and the things that no, it didn’t just come out of nowhere, but when you’re walking around feeling sick to your stomach with the anticipation of a broken heart, you have blinders on.

And while I know there have been times in my life when I have felt like that, it’s far enough away that I don’t remember what that feels like. So I’m getting off easy this year.

I haven’t been writing, because I have nothing to say. My life is boring. I work on my thesis. I go to work. I work on my thesis. I watch Law & Order while trying to read Nomos just one more time, to make sure I’ve got it down. I am basically incapable of talking about anything except my thesis. Today, some things clicked, and so my rough draft SHOULD be in good shape, I just have to put the re-writes together. The only thing nagging on me right now is some issues with “approval” and I won’t go into that in public entries because I don’t want to mention anything too specific to my program, because I am paranoid. Suffice to say, its very…amusing…looking back at some of my self-righteous behavior and rolling my eyes at how overly defensive I was being. At least, despite the fact that I can’t give up my habit of quoting scary-relevant-lyrics, I”ve matured. Or at least, I’m more honest.

I’m going to graduate in June. It’s not even going to kill me. ]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2007/04/03/live-from-this-time-of-year/feed/ 0 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2007/03/07/sex-lies-and-an-ma-degree/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2007/03/07/sex-lies-and-an-ma-degree/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:28:00 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/?p=3984 I wrote a long entry on all the things I missed about New York, specifically about this summer there yesterday, but then deleted it, because I was being unneccesarily maudlin. I realized that “this-time-of-year” is quickly approaching. I don’t know how I feel about that; I don’t see any ‘other shoes’ that are in danger of dropping, but one never knows.

I’m in the middle of writing final papers. I have a lot of words down on the page, but still need to do a lot of editing. In my Machiavelli paper, I think I quote Schmitt and Agamben almost as much as Machiavelli. My liberalism paper is kind of silly, but again, words are on the page, its just a matter of ordering them. I talk about sex a lot. And I’m meeting my goal of turning in 15-20 pages of my thesis next week, because I will graduate in June if it kills me.

As I very crudely put it “An MA in less than nine months, this is way more productive than getting knocked up.”

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