meisa's lagoon

one of my favorite things to do is screw "the man". that's right, be it the "goverment man", the "evil corporation man", or the "university man".
today i choose to mess with the "parking services man". i go about this by cleverly altering my temporary faculty parking permit. i bet the man didn't count on me having a wide variety of solvents on hand in my laboratory. with any one of these, i can simply dissolve away the date on the parking permit and rewrite in whatever date i choose.
hah! screw you, man!

Posted by Meisa at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

for reasons i can't put my finger on. he's not really all that attractive. he's funny, but lots of people are funny. maybe it's because he went to william and mary. but so did a lot of other guys. i don't really know what it is, but jon stewart, if you are looking for anyone to bear your children (aside from your wife, that is), look no further than meisa's lagoon. i'm here for you.
when i graduated william and mary, madeleine albright addressed our graduating class. an incredible, bright woman who should be an inspiration to many young men and women. and here i am disappointed that i was not part of the graduating class of 2004 where jon stewart, a fake news anchor, gave the commencement speech. but what can i say, jon stewart is hot, madeleine albright isn't.

Posted by Meisa at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

it's like his voice is slowly dragging a razor blade across my ear drum.

Posted by Meisa at 05:37 PM | Permalink

it's rare for me to be able to trace a fear back to a particular moment. like the irrational fear i get every once in awhile as i'm driving under an overpass that suddenly it's going to collapse on top of my car. where did that come from? or a fear from my childhood that someone was going to rob the 7-11 as my father was inside buying milk. i've never witnessed an overpass collapsing or anyone robbing a convenience store. but i was afraid nonetheless.
but my fear of storms i can trace back to a particular moment in my childhood. i remember i was in new orleans one summer visiting the fam. as with all summertimes in new orleans, there are many quick passing thunderstorms. i never really liked them, but they never scared the sh_t out of me like they do now. anyway, during one particular storm, we passed by an old man's house that had just been hit by lightening, and i saw it burning, or rather the remains of it. and from that moment, i've been terrified.
so how does this relate to my life now? well, i'm dog sitting. in the middle of nowhere, about an hour from my apartment in evanston. lucky for me, this 10 days of dogsitting seems to have coincided with the universe deciding to attack the midwest with incredibly severe thunderstorms and tornados. so there i am alone in a strange house with two animals i barely know, an hour from my comfort zone, with a surrounding vista so flat that i can see lightening that probably touched down in iowa.
so friday evening, i heard these strange wailing noises and watched as the sky became completely black. after making a call or two, i learned that what i was hearing was tornado sirens. i frantically turned on the tv and learned that i was under a tornado warning. not a watch, but a warning. the kind where they tell you to seek shelter immediately. i really didn't know what to do. drive away? hide in a closet? sit there? so what i ended up doing was obsessively watching the weather channel (which i decided sucks) and talking to khalid and andrea for 3 hours until the storm passed. i don't think i've ever been so scared in my life. every part of me was shaking. my butt was chattering.
the next nite, khalid and his brother came with me, as they were predicting more tornadoes that evening. and of course, nothing happened. that is, until the following nite when i was back alone, and the tornado sirens went off again. this time i piled the dogs into their owners' truck and fled to a house of the owners' friends. i hung out there with these very nice strangers for about an hour until it seemed safe again and then headed back home.
i'm hoping for a break tonite. we'll see what happens. i really don't think i can take much more butt chattering.

Posted by Meisa at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

except i'm not a teenager. and i'm not a drama queen. my dad calls me queenie, but that's about it.

1) one time, while running the mile in elementary school, i only ran 3/4 laps so i could be under 10 minutes. sadly enough, i was still one of the last people finished. juliebutt was on to me.

2) i used to use the burnt sienna tube of my dad's fancy watercolor to make fake scabs on my knees

3) my third grade teacher had a bucket of candy behind her desk. i used to throw my pencil into it and pick it back up, along with pieces of candy.

Posted by Meisa at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

can i just say that i love martha. she's just so...martha.

Posted by Meisa at 11:34 AM | Permalink

i found out this week for sure that my ex-fiance has a new girlfriend. i had suspected earlier, but now i know for truth. it's kind of hard to be uncertain about this when she answers the phone at his apartment and identifies herself as his girlfriend. the term "mixed emotions" doesn't even begin to describe how i feel. when i first suspected, i went crazy. while this whole mess was my decision, i just didn't take the news very well. i mean, who likes to think that they are that easy to get over? i was hysterical for a couple days...fortunately, this coincided with a visit home and i was able to get through it. and funny enough, i've moved on to feelings of true happiness for him. every once in awhile i get little twinges of "what if" and sadness that he has moved on, but most of all, i'm happier that he is happy.
what is it then, inside me that keeps asking and wondering what she looks like, if she's prettier than me, if she makes him laugh the way i used to, if his parents like him as much...basically like some sort of competition. it's kind of funny, i'm sure as she hears more about me, she will wonder the same things and feel like she is competing against me...a race where the two competitors have never met.
i really wish him all the best, but a small part of me will always hope to be better than her. which is silly because as i've learned since we have broken up, relationships and love vary so much. you can't really say one is better than another, but just different. i was truly in love with mac for a long long time and nothing will ever change that and i don't ever want it to. i hope he can say the same about me.

Posted by Meisa at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

what would i do without my mom?
there is no one else who would peel countless numbers of fruit for me, leave flowers on my nightstand whenever i visit home, send me packages that arrive on just those days when i need a pick-me-up from home, watch horrible made for tv movies with me from halfway across the country and talk to me during commercial breaks about what has just happened, always laugh as i endlessly tease her, try so hard to cook for me even though she hates to cook, and go with me to CVS and walk up and down every aisle with the little mini shopping cart.
and this isn't even the tip of the iceberg. my mother is an amazing woman. she should be celebrated everyday. here's to you, mommy!!!!!

Posted by Meisa at 03:12 PM | Permalink

i forgot how strange i was. last nite i went from laughing really hard into all out crying. it's like i knew i was experiencing some sort of extreme emotion and forgot what was happening. i continued the extreme, but just went in a different direction. and then i couldn't figure out why i was crying. it's like it was "that time of the month" but it's not. maybe the antibiotics i'm taking for my sinus infection are making my hormones out of whack. or maybe it's the mere fact that i'm a woman, and as the guys in my office have told me many a time, all women are crazy.

Posted by Meisa at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

have any of you ever been walking somewhere when you notice the back of your pant leg is wet and then you look in your purse and realize that a entire container of yogurt (not the small kind either) has tipped over and spilled open in your purse, coating all of your belongings in stinky goo?
no? hmph...just wondering. i thought maybe i wasn't alone.

Posted by Meisa at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

yesterday i went to the museum of science and industry. what a cool place!! everyone should go. it rekindled my love for science which has slowly been drained out of me throughout the course of my graduate work. but when i saw that giant periodic table with small vials containing all the elements, my eyes just lit up. i was comletely engrossed and had to read all 76 entries (older version, only had 104 elements and they didn't do anything on the lanthanides or actinides). they also had a chick hatchery and all these fun interactive quizzes and games. it was awesome. what a cool job that must be to design exhibits there.
i was really only grossed out by one of the exhibits. i've most recently gotten over my repulsion of small children and decided that, yes, maybe i would have a baby someday. they are too cute not to have. that is, until you see what they look like growing inside you. they had an exhibit of 41 fetuses (fetii?) ranging from immediately after conception to almost born. at first i just thought they were rubber copies of what a fetus would look like, but no. they were real, and they were disgusting. like some sort of alien being or parasite growing inside a host. blagh.

Posted by Meisa at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)