last night i made a startling discovery:



some stranger has been paying for my gym membership for the past three months.


the way it works is that you sign up and the gym automatically takes the monthly fee out of a bank account. when i went last night they told me my membership got canceled because my account was closed. upon seeing my astonished reaction, the guy behind the counter further explained,

"...yea, it looks like, uh, we tried to get into your account...on September 4th? and it was closed, so, uh, your thing got canceled"

obviously this was all some misunderstanding. i need my thing because i need to go to the gym. so i asked the loquacious gentleman if anyone had tried to contact me. (which i knew they hadn't) he said he had no clue. great. i tartly informed him that i had no intention of paying for a full new membership when i hadn't been informed that they couldn't get into my account. and guess what? it looks like the monthly membership fee was never taken out of the account!

which means that when the geniuses behind the desks entered the account information, they got the numbers messed up; and they hit the wrong account.

so whoever you are, thanks.

life is an adventure

i have been extraordinarily blessed. my life is never dull. things that seem simple, never end up being so. when i leave work for what should be a twenty minute break to go to the bank and radio shack, it takes me an hour and change to get back to my desk.


i flew to Israel with sister 1 a couple of years ago. we had a stopover in Switzerland and sister 1 was a little nervous at switching terminals, and then getting to the old city once we landed. my grandmother taught me something I've never forgotten. she said that anytime something goes wrong, i should look at it as adventure. and one day I'll laugh about it.


and she was right. when i was at a convention in Miami and i went for a five minute walk with my friend, and was still stumbling around north Miami beach at two am, i didn't panic. when my boss sent me out with his credit card...and i lost it, i didn't freak out. when i was late getting home one night during vacation when i was in Israel, and missed the last bus, i laughed. when i was cleaning up from the purim chagiga and i dropped a box containing six huge jars of pickle juice, and i dropped the box and got showered in pickle juice, i thought of my grandmother and didn't cry.

and indeed, it does work. somehow, the things that go wrong, and all the mishaps i encounter, somehow seem less terrible or frightening when i follow this philosophy. thanks grandma.

cubing a rubik

sister 1 and sister 2 both know how to solve a Rubik's cube. after many fruitless attempts to solve it on my own, I'm reduced to learning how from my fifteen year old sister. she doesn't want to teach me the entire puzzle, because then she'll have to actually share the cube (fifteen year old logic) but I'm slowly learning how. it's maddeningly frustrating because it's taking me quite awhile.

but i WILL learn how to solve it.

i WILL.

first impressions....

...anatomy and physiology lecture professor is a nutcase. she swears she'll take our firstborns if we come late to class. and she'll sic her German Shepard on us if we cheat....

...lab professor can't be older than like twenty eight. he says if he catches us on the phone he'll deduct ten points from our next exam be it a quiz or practical. and he'll deduct five points from everyone else at the table. a bit harsh, but i suppose he has to be, or half the class won't listen to him, as they're older than he is...

...five lab partners this semester. one of them is Indian and doesn't like the way formaldehyde smells. dunno the names of any of them. three of them bonded over a cow's eyeball. though i might change seats because i couldn't really see the board. the chairs are way too high so my feet dangle, and it's very uncomfortable to take notes in that position...

...statistics professor is sometimes slightly difficult to understand, but seems pretty fair. the girl who sits next to me in that class wears more makeup than a b.y. girl on her first date. i thought Asians were supposed to be really smart, but the one in this class is kinda dumb...

....grandville is good, i had him last semester. anyone who has a masters in pharmacology, which is said to be the hardest degree EVER, has to be pretty serious about what he does...

this semester...
...i will not need to drop my lowest quiz grade...
...i will not get a parking violation...
...i will not lose my college id...
...i will raise my gpa...

random conversation with sister 1

sister 1 is lauding all the wonderful things about her new chocolate3. fcg is pretending to be annoyed at her constant chattering, but really she's just plain jealous that she's getting so much agony from her old krazr and so little sympathy from the Verizon techs

fcg: why don't you stick your head in a vice and I'll turn the handle till your skull explodes?

sister 1: because that would be detrimental to my existence

fcg: yea i guess that would complicate things a bit...

amiable silence...

sister 1: wamu is the best bank ever.

fcg: oh really?

sister 1: yea, they have game boys there!

fcg: oh boy!

(slight whooshing noise as sarcasm goes over sister 1's head)

sister 1: yea when i went with BF she sat on the floor and played while i spoke to a banker (mind you, BF is 21..)

i feel bad for people who don't have sisters like mine....

verizon: where technology meets failure

i wonder if Verizon has a personal vendetta against all phone holders with brown hair. or maybe they don't like phone numbers with a 2 in it. either way, i feel like there's a constant war raging between me and Verizon.

I've been to the store so many times. i can tell you all the sales reps names and when they work. i can tell you which customer representatives work part time because they're in school and which ones work full time. i can tell you which sign in machines work the quickest.

I've been there so long, I've sat on every chair (except the manager's chair) tried out every single phone, played Surviving High School '08 and Diner Dash 2 on every phone, raced my sister to see who can sign in faster, and i still haven't been given a phone that won't give me problems.

two months ago my 8 button was stuck and that was all that worked. last month i was dropping calls. last week my phone was freezing and blacking out. this week i can't receive any texts or voice mails.

first day of school

it's not as exciting as when i was younger. i didn't get new shoes or tons of new supplies. i just went to walmart yesterday to get a bunch of notebooks. this morning i hastily grabbed some pens and pencils. there were no classmates to see and catch up with, no surprises about which teachers i would have (i got to pick them beforehand)

as i was going up, i met two girls i know who just came back from Israel, leaving. they both looked kinda shell shocked. they informed me that it wasn't the teacher that freaked them out, it was the students. to their credit, it is a bit of culture shock (to say the least) to go from bais yaakov schools to community college, but i almost laughed at them. and then i realized that i probably looked worse when it was my first semester, because i didn't have a friend with me. that sobered me up.

and as i walked down the path, trying to dodge the clouds of smoke and word bombs that were flying around me, i realized that i had become used to only being around frum people again. it wasn't as nasty as last year, but it still took some readjusting.

of course there was the usual mix-up. a female teacher came in and wrote psy 103 on the board, when the class was statistics and supposed to be taught by a male. but my college always double s the classrooms. so things got straightened out and i survived the first class of the semester.

i thought i was in school for a long time-until i met two chassidish women who have been here for four years-this is their fifth. they're somewhat of a novelty in this school-aside from their mode of dress which obviously makes them stand out quite a bit, they're a mother-daughter team, both married with little children. the mother started here by getting her GED, because she could barely write English. i guess if they survived, I'll survive too....