Nothin' to see here, folks...

I'm here. Brazil. Alive. Unharmed.... and thriving? I'm attending a conference in Curitiba next week...the International Union of Health Promotion and Education conference, to be exact ("I'm so fancy"). The conference is only a few days long so when the news came that I would be presenting at it, I thought I'd take the opportunity to turn it into a bit of holiday. This will be the first of many posts for the next few weeks as I make my way from Vancouver to Rio to Curitiba to Recife/Olinda to Praia de Carneiros to Brasilia and home. Thanks in advance for allowing this self-indulgence (loooove yoouuu). I can promise, however, there will be no selfies to exacerbate what is the already masturbatory act of blogging...travel blogging is particularly awful.

Welcome to Rio de Janeiro, home of the 2016 Olympic Summer Games!!! (a clogged toilet at the international airport upon arrival...not a promising start)

And now, here it is, for your pleasure or your lament, the non-stop chitter chattering of Adrienne (or "Adrienne-y", my Portuguese name which I'm not particularly fond of) about her anxiety-ridden, solo Brazilian adventures.... 

"Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn't talk? If you say so I'll stop. I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it's difficult.”--LM MOntgomery, Anne of Green Gables

This Anne-girl quote from my childhood heroine has a couple dimensions to it that reflect how I have felt about this trip and, so far, what I have experienced...much to my great surprise. I had been eagerly anticipating this solo adventure for quite some time thinking about how "splendid" and "interesting" the world is and that I'm so fortunate to have the opportunity to continue to learn more about places that, to be fair, I wouldn't usually take too much time to intentionally learn about for no good reason. Especially not with all the "splendid" and "interesting" netflix shows I have yet to find out about!

However, my excitement turned to horror last week as, prior to my departure, I accidentally stumbled upon  the Government of Canada's security advisory on the foreign affairs website. Some not very reassuring gems from the site included:

"Crime is a serious problem throughout Brazil. Rates of both petty crime and violent crime, including homicide, are highest in urban centres, including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Recife, and Salvador". [pretty much every city I'm going to]

"Foreign tourists are most commonly affected by theft but incidents of violent crime against tourists have occurred, due to the high  prevalence of guns..."

"Unaccompanied female travellers should exercise caution...avoid travelling alone at night and avoid carrying a purse..."

"Robberies occur regularly, even during the day, and are sometimes violent and at gun- or  knifepoint."

"Armed robberies at restaurants are a growing concern."

And my personal favourite because it is just about the only thing I can do to take some control back from all the gun-toting drug lords, thieves, pimps, and murderous scalliwag Cariocas :

"Tourists are more vulnerable to crime when they look and act like tourists, so try to blend in."

After reading this website, my first thought was: "what the hell am I getting myself into travelling around this nation of treacherousness and evil POOR and DESPERATE South Americans??"

Then I proceeded to think about the clothing I was bringing with me and promptly googled: "Do Brazilian women wear birkenstocks?". To which the interweb's response was a unanimous, "NO WAY! NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS WOULD A BRAZILIAN BE CAUGHT DEAD IN BIRKENSTOCKS!!!". This created even more anxiety for me as the only footwear alternative I own that can support my "strong" arches for long periods of travel pedestrian-ism are icky Asics runners which are not very stylish...and in Brazil, style is pretty important. 

I arrived in Rio and immediately purchased what are known as the ubiquitous "democratic" shoe that I hope will contribute to me "blending": Havainas!

"It is ever so much easier to be good when your clothes are fashionable." -LM Montgomery , Anne of Green Gables

Oh they're not much to look at but they are like walking on fluffy, soft rubbery/plastic clouds.

And I also was fretting about my purse being too purse-like so I purchased this nylon beauty from the ariport...

In my opinion, this colourful, formless 14.99$ sack, coupled with my new Havainas, have made me into a chameleon. I AM CARIOCA!  Nothing to see here, you Brazilian perpetrators of EVIL WHO ALL WANT TO STEAL ALL MY THINGS, EVEN MY 3.5 YEAR OLD SAMSUNG GALAXY FABLET!!!  

After all this fuss and muss about "blending", I actually felt immediately comfortable as soon as I arrived at my airbnb in the neighbourhood of Ipanema, where my airbnb host greeted me and got me settled into my tiny little apartment:

My airbnb on Rua Visconde de Piraja, Ipanema

Rua Redentor, Ipanema

Day 1 of successful AND highly PLEASANT-not-scary-at-all touristing included walking in the rain along Copacabana beach (I feel like I have regressed back to the Vancouver winter I just emerged from :-( ) and accidentally thanking everyone by saying "gracias":

Copacabana, the hottest beach south of Havana

Stopping in for steak snack at a churrasqueria:

Followed by a cooking class where we learned to make some, allegedly, traditional Brazilian food:

Cook In Rio-- group cooking classes with Simone

Enjoying some sneaky, easy drinking juice-like caipirinhas and flambe-ing

And I did this all without a map or a taxi! Public transit warriors 4-Eva! (I also can barely pronounce the names of the street I  am staying on and those around me so trying to give my destination to a taxi driver seems more frightening than accidentally getting a wee bit lost on the public bus in a city of 7 million people, weirdly).

And as for the other dimension of my AoGGs quote that I started this whole post off with... that I will leave for an outro dia when I feel like spending  a rainy Rio evening reflecting on normative gender ideals and travelling and daily life, etc.... (BOOORRRING!)...am I talking too much? If so, I can stop!

Day 17: Better than day 16...

Just finished one of the two papers! I expect to complete the other tomorrow and be off to Alberta for the holidays comps-free!

Today was better than yesterday. Yesterday I spent over 8 hours simply entering references into my reference management software. Every time I went to enter a reference into the paper, the program told me that the reference was not yet in the database and every time I responded, out loud, with "AW COME ON!! WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I BEEN DOING ALL WEEK???", followed by a frustrated 'roar'. Those who are aware of reference management programs know that there are two ways to enter references into it's database: 1) via direct export from a search engine (nice and convenient), or 2) manually. If I have a bunch of references that haven't been directly imported from the library database for whatever reason, I usually pop in an old fave movie or show, like Anne of Green Gables or Battlestar Galactica, and sit and mindlessly enter them in manually. In my head I had previously done this for hours for this paper's references. Apparently, in reality, I had not. So I spent the day manually entering probably over a 100 references and growing increasingly frustrated and angry, temperature rising, heat emanating from my chest outwards, so much so that I had to take off my snuggie.... a pleasant state to spend the day in, of course.

Ultimately, what was really going on was, not only Day 4 of my hangover recovery cycle, but also that, in my head, I was wanting to be somewhere else. There is no certainty as to where that someplace else is but I was not happy right where I was. Perhaps I'm excited to get home for xmas, perhaps I'm sick of writing, perhaps I'm disgusted with the clutter I've produced while working at home this week... I want I want I want. It is that rejection of the present, that it is not okay right where I am, that made my blood boil yesterday whilst sitting home alone entering references. White people problems... 

Day 15: the degradation of discipline

My immense discipline and focus has begun to degrade. It started late last week with a couple "social" interactions that included some wine and consequent sleep-ins. While awesome and healthy to see friends and family, and arguably more important than my academic goals in general, I have allowed it to distract me from the matter at hand. I'm on to  crazy cutting and editing this week and seemed to have resigned myself to the content that is on paper now, the content that I feel I honestly wrestled with the last couple weeks. But it's time to cut my losses and forget about the potential "nobel-prize-genius" I could include in the papers for this exam if I just worked a tiny bit harder. I am still further distracted as I get excited to wrap up the semester and head back to Alberta for the holidays this coming Friday.

I'm actually okay with this "resignation" because it is important not to be too hard on oneself when producing drafts. Typically in academia you would never just produce something on your own. There would always be checks and balances, supervisory committees, peer-reviewers, older and wiser collaborators to help add to a publication and make it 10 times better, etc. I have thought a lot about trusting in my abilities to produce something of quality by myself, trying to internalise first place ribbons for writing at county exhibitions when I was in elementary school, award winning poetry in high school, almost a decade of A+  university papers, and encouragement and praise for my writing products from various academics over the years. However, while the longitudinal evidence supports the trust I try to have in my capabilities, doubt rears its head time and time again....but alas I think this might be a product of the nature of academia.

Top of day 9: In other health news, scientist finds glee dance party breaks cure for detached-head syndrome...

I'm officially so cranially engaged I started losing moments of my day to a point where I apparently moved an object from the top shelf of the closet to my bed at some point during the day and have ABSOLUTELY no recollection of physically doing it. When I walked into my bedroom later in the afternoon yesterday and saw this item on the bed my first thought was  "oh my god was someone in here??!!" After my heartbeat slowed down following this incredibly creepy thought, I reasoned that "no, I've been here all day and heard nothing out of the ordinary so I must have taken it down from the shelf at some point earlier in the day".

To balance this detached-head syndrome, yesterday it dawned on me how important it is to, at some point during the day, preferably multiple times a day, just be in my body. I've devised a couple excellent tactics: the first is doing yoga, intense and fiery Ashtanga in the wee hours of the morning and calm, cooling yin prior to bedtime, breathing and just being mindful of the energy and feelings within the body. The second tactic is a day time one I've taken to, of taking a dance break (stolen from Tina Fey on 30 Rock) at which time I chose two of my favourite glee soundtrack songs and dance like an asshole. I'm hoping to do this more in the coming days to keep myself "here" as much as possible.

This Sunday I started working on paper #2 which is the theory/research methods paper. It is most certainly more challenging to make an entertaining read on these kinds of topics than on topics that include politically charged real-life examples of things. Also, it is most difficult to avoid writing something that regurgitates the theories of old from the writings of others (ie. to actually be creative and have an original thought). This week I have found that one must simply trust in the intellectual process. Reading and reading and getting "theoried out", as one friend describes it, will eventually lead to some creative and original conclusions but they cannot be forced. Realizing that this is how I've been approaching academic writing for the last few years but finally having articulated what my writing process is.The work of reading and writing things out in a manner that seems trite, unoriginal, and disconnected, accompanied by thoughtful and intentional reflection will tend to always result in something you can be proud of, that you have integrated ideas in way that no one else has before. Although they may be small insights, they add to the larger theory puzzle.

How cozy a day to be cooped up in my festive christmas-y apartment while the remnants of a tropical storm is lightly battering Vancouver today.

Day 5: this is awesome!!

Spirits and attitudes remain solidly high as I begin day 5. My only real crisis right now is how the hell I am going to cut 4000 words out of the first paper.Yes, being non-verbose has never been a shortcoming of mine. After vomiting over 15,000 words onto the page in the first two days I've managed to reel it in to about 12,000 so the trend appears to be in the right direction.

I had a meeting with my supervisor yesterday and we were discussing how the process of writing this exam has been for me so far this week and I told her that it's been interesting really thinking about the questions and trying to figure out what the committee actually means by them. She responded "I'm not sure any of us on the committee actually know what we mean either." Awesome right?? With the weight of providing specific responses to the questions lifted, today I feel ready to get CRAZY.

I've also been debating with myself whether I should leave in some of the "funny" and the unintentional colloquialisms that emerged during the first initial vomit on day 1 and day 2. I think that I'm an adequate enough academic writer that the "funny" can actually be pulled off because there is actual substance throughout. I feel relatively confident they won't fail me and kick me out of my PhD for using the phrase "but oh-so-tasty" when referring to the junk available for students to purchase in schools.

As far as I can tell thus far, being a bit hermit-y is kind of my jam when I'm being really productive. Probably if I were just watching netflix for 21 days straight by myself I might feel some craving to be around other humans...and I loves me some netflix.

Bonuses to writing comprehensive exams so far:

1) It's a solid excuse for staying at home and not being sociable which would otherwise appear as unhealthy

2) I have spent no money this week

3) I love reading and writing and learning

4) I've allowed' myself certain junky comfort foods that I otherwise try to avoid (Miss Vikis and skittles)


Challenges to writing comprehensive exams so far:

1) a little something I call "finger overexertion". The etiology of this short-term disorder is typing for more than six hours straight. The symptoms include clunky typing techniques where your fingers feel like they are tripping over keys, misspelling of the same word over and over again as you constantly miss one leter due to exhaustion.

2) "chair sores"

3) having really important library books checked out that keep getting recalled by the library because some ass-clown has requested them...I mean, why the heck do other people need books about mixed-methods research during the holiday, right??? I've decided to bite the bullet and not bring them back until I am done with them-- which brings me to my next challenge...

4) library fines


Writing tip #1:
To avoid lame-duck syndrome (occurs when you work from the top of a document to the bottom and by the time you get to those last couple paragraphs you are being redundant and unoriginal) I like to undertake the writing process in a table of three columns, one column contains the points you want to make, then the adjacent cell in the adjacent column is the full paragraph on that point you want to make, and the third adjacent cell in the column adjacent to that column is just for notes about what needs to be done on that paragraph. This allows me to jump from top to bottom working on just individual cells (which contain like one paragraph about one point) and then the unoriginality and redundancy, as well as the really good stuff, is dispersed throughout the entire document rather than just all the good stuff at the beginning.

Day 2 of Descent into Comprehensive Exam Insanity

DISCLAIMER: I know I posted in another earlier blog from a couple years ago but just a short preface to say that I acknowledge 1) how self-indulgent blogging is and 2) that all of my blogs are "white-people-problem" blogs and I am a privileged young woman who barely earned any of it.


DAY 2: As soon as I began the writing process on day one I immediately felt the onset of impostor syndrome, an extremely useful label for a non-DSM neuroses. Impostor syndrome has been defined by the experts on wikipedia as the inability to internalise successes, therefore always feeling as if you're faking it all and tricking a lot of smart people. It is especially common in female graduate students. I've often described it as feeling like I'm the wizard in the Wizard of Oz and one day someone is just going to pull the curtain back and just find me...little me with no original and creative ideas, regurgitating information, being pedantic. As I delved into day one, the doubts about my ability to produce two doctoral-level papers and whether or not I was actually be able to complete these two papers sufficiently in 21 days. So I turned on the obsessive maniac side of myself to push through the habit and desire I have practiced over the last few years of never working evenings... finding the will through obsession to push through an intense, non-stop 10 hours of writing. The obsession with what I"m working on and to have it finished in 21 days is so great that I've managed to ignore the fact that I have a bag of Miss Vikis salt and vinegar chips in my cupboard and I've only eaten half of it in two days. This is not small victory for those of you who know me and understand my shove-miss-vikis-in-my-mouth-until-my-tongue-bleeds addiction. This is good. After my masters degree I feared I'd never be able to harness the kind of focus I once had for writing lengthy 'things'. I guess I can! This is hopeful!

However, shortly into day one, by 3 pm, after only 7 hours of writing, I noticed the beginnings of the degradation of my ability to make a decision. My friend and I discussed this idea last weekend as we talked about an article that had made the rounds on facebook about why successful people wear the same thing everyday. The theory is that we only have so much decision making capacity in a given day and minimising petty decisions, like your attire, helps the decision-making process from degrading as fast throughout the day. Over the weekend I also spent the entirety of my Saturday cooking all of my meals for the next 21 days because I know myself well enough to know that as soon as I'm feeling presssure to finsish something I will not take the time to cook but rather justify ordering Papa Johns from across the street costing me precious dollars and life-years. As my friend and I discussed this I realised that the underlying reason of why I chose to prepare meals for the next month in the first place was precisely so I didn't have to add deciding what to cook for dinner to my daily decision making. Anyway, I noticed the degradation of my decision-making when, after going for a quick brisk walk at 3 pm, I entered into my apartment and took my boots off. I picked them up to throw them in the closet and noticed I had dragged in some slush on the bottom of my boots. Now, I have this beautiful vintage hardwood floor to which I have already caused some extensive (and expensive) water damage in the past year. I have no door mats around the front door nor in the closet to absorb the slush from the boots. I held the boots in my hand and stared at the bottoms of them for at least 60 seconds as I was unable to decide what to do with them while they dried. I finally figured out a solution but had lost precious moments staring at my boots in my hand.

Lastly, I've already resorted to methods other than "Easy Now" sleepy time tea and yin yoga before bed to ensure I get a full sleep. As the excitement of writing my comprehensive exams have built up over the last few weeks I have been having some restless nights, falling asleep by 8:30 pm and waking up at 1:30 unable to return to sleep as sub-conscious stress simmered on the edge of my dreams. The night before Day 1 I did everything I could to ensure a naturally good night sleep but to no avail. I woke up at 1:30 am and finished reading Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".  Last night, however, I will simply say that I found my "soma" (reference to the 'anti-anxiety' susbtance used in "Brave New World") in my freezer, leftover from this past summer and had an AMAZING sleep. We'll leave it at that because there might be a chance, albeit slim, that I'll have a disgusting desire to go into politics one day.

MY FAVOURITE THING I WROTE TODAY (which may or may not make final cuts):

"Where they [the American National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the British Colombian school meal program for socioeconomically vulnerable children] differ substantially, however, is when it comes to the nationalistic underpinnings of the NSLP, both in terms of promoting domestic food commodity consumption and in terms of making sure children are healthy enough to potentially be drafted for military service. This was a key reason for the original enactment of the federal NSLP in 1946 and continues to be so today (cite too fat to fight) with politicians in recent years referring to the obesity epidemic as a “matter of national security” (Fed-up documentary). The US is often criticized for  exploiting impoverished demographics by disproportionately recruiting soldiers from some of the poorest areas of the US. It's fitting, then, if these soon-to-be recruits are being fed their school lunches by the state during their formative years so they will at least pass the physical once duty calls."

You were wrong Cat Stevens, the last cut is the deepest

Given the dismal returns from my old fall back internet dating site, e-harmony, I downloaded the mobile app, Tinder. It is a quick and free download from playstore. Upon logging in, the app first seeks out your location via gps and then seeks out all men within 10 miles of said location. Then pops up what essentially appear to be “collector cards” of men. These “cards” include their pictures, their first name, and their age. Underneath of their pictures is two buttons, one X and one little heart picture. After seeing their picture, their name, and their age, you then decide if you like them or not and press the heart if you do and press the X if you do not. If you “like” someone who also has seen your “collector card” and has “liked” you in return, then you have a match. Only then can you begin conversing via the Tinder messaging system.

Needless to say, this provided me hours of endless fun the first evening much to the neglect of my school work. It is literally a game of “hot or not” and various personal parameters emerge as you forage through these stacks of men or, as some republican leaders might say, “binders of men”. First, you immediately press the X (the “Nope” button) if they: a)do not have a face shot as their first picture but rather have a picture of their dog or cat; b)have pictures of them with a bunch of other women; c) if they only have a pictures of themselves with other people and you actually scroll through all their pictures and you still don’t know which guy is the guy; d) if there are only selfies both in the mirror and ones where they are laying in bed; and e) obvious other aesthetics are not up to standard. The last parameter, e, is where the real reflective magic happen. You do not realise how superficial you are until you start having to pick through, literally, hundreds of men. I found myself muttering to myself as I shopped for men, saying “nope, mouth too small, nope forehead too big, nope too many sporty adventure pictures, etc.”

Anyway, I found myself securing 3 dates for the rest of the week. However, one of these young suitors could not meet on any of my other free nights so I cancelled the first date with one of the other men because I had a sense I’d like this other guy more. Too many options, really. So I go out on my first online date with a young man we’ll call “hummer-guy”. Before going out I shower and begin a massive hair removal escapade; legs and toes shaved, eyebrows plucked and shaped, and I check for stray old-man nose hairs. I smile at myself in the mirror and affirm out loud but with a tentative tone, “good for you for putting yourself out back out there!”

Hummer-guy and I met up at a nice cosy little pub on Broadway. We had a couple drinks and had a really lovely time. He was a bit ruggedly attractive, tall enough, fit enough, chatty enough, and energetic enough. He was warm and “touchy” as he talked with me and I welcomed this. He paid for our drinks and we walked arm in arm to his vehicle, yes, his little hummer. Ugh. Prior to seeing his monstrous vehicle, he did forewarn me and asked me not to judge him based on his vehicle because he is aware of how “douchey” it could be perceived to be. I obliged and climbed into it. We went for giant authentic poutines and soda pops on Granville street where we shoved poutines in our faces, talked, and laughed, and his warm and innocent affections continued. He drove me home. We planned to meet up in a few days later on Sunday evening for a pizza and wine night at his place. It ended with a small little lip kiss which was so nice and welcome.

Two things, I have never gone on a second date with someone I met online before nor have I ever kissed any of them. I felt that he and I clicked and that I would definitely like to spend more time with him. I was excited to see him again. I repeat, this has never happened to me before with someone I met on the internet.

After a long day of work-shopping at UBC the following Sunday I take the bus from the university to his apartment, his swank industrial loft in an artsy-hipster neighbourhood that was impeccably clean and renovated, like a real adult. We just chill, eat pizza, drink wine, watch baby animal documentaries, etc. He had even gone so far as to pick up some Miss Vicki’s Salt and Vinegar chips for me…yes folks, that is what is talked about on first dates, chips. I won’t go into details but it was a lovely lovely 2^nd date. It reminded me of why having a man-friend can be so nice, least importantly that he again paid for everything! The pragmatist in me started to think that dating is a really nice way for a young lady to have a social life and not have to pay for any of it!

A day or two later, I came to realise that this was the first time I had connected romantically with a man since my ex almost two years ago. This is a rare event for me to ever want to see a man for a repeat “performance”. I had felt extremely comfortable with hummer-guy, able to be myself, feeling drawn to him, to want to kiss him and to want to be affectionate.

The following week, I decided that I wasn’t going to just sit and wait for him to call me. I have sacrificed potential in the past, I think, because my pride would not allow me to pursue someone I wanted. We texted back and forth all week, I casually invited him over the following Friday. He said he already had dinner plans. I said what about Sunday, he said he was watching the Hockey game. Saturday morning I receive a text asking if I am free that night. I respond and say sure but I have a class on Sunday morning so nothing too late and rowdy. He does not respond. In fact I haven’t heard from him since. Weird right?? I was in a yoga class the following week and it dawned on me that perhaps he had up and died. Like the Sex and the City episode where the guy never calls Miranda back and she calls him to ream him out only to find his mother on the other line telling her he died earlier that week. Miranda responds “Carrie, they’re dying on us now!”.

As is the case with most women, no matter how confident or independent, I immediately think about everything I might have done wrong for him to decide he did not want to see me again. What is wrong with me? What did I do? Was it my enthusiasm for Miss Viki’s? My dorky wool socks? My love of baby animals? What??? Was I too opinionated? Was I too honest about my non-conventional true feelings about the meaning of Remembrance Day?? The only dating advice my mom ever gave me was “remember to just try to be a little more feminine”. I recall responding to her by asking “what in the fuck are you talking about? What is this the 1950s? Have you met me?”. She had meant that I needed to be less explicit with my opinions. My mom has been right more often than not and I do think she actually might be on to something. However, as I am in the midst of re-reading Jane Austen’s works, I am highly grateful to not live in a world where we are required by decorum to keep our uppity lady-traps shut.

So a week goes by, and I have not tried to contact him anymore as all traces of his phone number have been erased from my phone as a mechanism to save myself from myself and avoid any inebriated texting-mishaps. I tell myself comforting facts about him to make me like him less like “pffttttffww… he drove a hummer anyway!”… or “he works in oil and gas anyway!”… or “he really actually likes hipsters!”.. I go out one night with a good friend of mine and he tells me that, for the last month, his I-phone has registered my phone number as an I-phone and has been defaulting his texts to me as I-messages. Because my phone is indeed not an I-phone, I have received none of his messages. He had even invited me to his family’s house for thanksgiving. I never received that text. I just assumed him, and MANY of my other friends, had been really sucky at responding to texts I was sending. There were a number of other friends who had also told me that they had sent me texts that I had never received. I wake up the following morning and think… could it be? Had hummer-guy been trying to respond but I never received his texts? So I looked him up on facebook and sent a very non-threatening query as to whether he had tried to respond but received no response from me due to the shitty technology of the I-phone and that his replying to the facebook message was totally optional. I still have not heard from him soooooooo…. Cut my losses.  It is interesting that when a rejection happens, no matter how small, it tends to pick at the healed wounds and exacerbate the response. Luckily it is a short-lived response.

Ultimately, there have been so many men that I never called again. I suppose I view this as a bit of a karmic retribution for my heartlessness when it comes to men. In my early 20s they never called me again, since my late 20s I stopped calling them again if I didn’t actually want to see them again and many have complained to me about never calling them again. I always justified it by saying “so many men have never ever called me again and I never complained so these little pussies need to suck it up and get over it.” Ha! Even as I write those thoughts and that justification… truly a bit of karmic retribution. But good for you for putting yourself out there, Adrienne. Slow-clap.

Next stop: Programmer-guy and disconnect between texting and real life person.