I went to one of the thirteen thousand Verizon stores inside my square mile radius today to get my phone looked at (I was initially disappointed to discover that the store was closed, but hey! I lucked out; the Verizon store RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO THAT STORE was open!) because the reception's been kind of shitty lately. I can't imagine why that is... I mean, I only unscrew my antenna and CHEW ON IT about forty times a day. So I go in, all confused and indignant because my phone sounds like I keep trying to EAT it, and there's a guy in front of me in line. He's trading in his phone for that super sleek Samsung that my brother just got. That phone takes pictures like this:
I know. My brother sent me this picture of his gorgeous baby and I felt photographically incompetent, technologically stunted, and poor all at the same time. Oh, and barren. And old. And like I should buy my uterus a walker with tennis balls stuck on the legs and maybe some of those cherry lozenges to carry around in a really itchy purse made out of hay with stupid hay flowers all over it.
Anyway.
So this random guy is trading in his existing phone for the Samsung because he made it through the eleven-year contract without swallowing any of the parts (hats off, I say), and when he hands the old phone to the Verizon girl, she opens it and sees that all of those little clear blue plastic protective sheets (you know, those little "shields" that stick on stuff like colorforms to protect the original surface) are still stuck to the phone. To both screens, the outside screen and the inside screen. The outside one was in bad shape, like he'd had to spit it back down about a thousand times, but the inside one looked pretty good. From my vantage point, anyway. Which was... in hindsight about four inches too close to this guy. Sorry, guy.
So the Verizon girl laughs in amazement because, according to her, this is incredible. None of the phones have ever come back with the protective screen shields on; shit, most phones don't leave the store with the protective shields on. And the guy sort of forces a laugh and makes some comment about how he likes to "keep things new" or something, and the girl sides with tact in not mentioning that the little shields are blue, right, meaning that "keeping things new" meant that the screens had to be nearly impossible to read, and that everything he looked at, every number, every picture, every everything, ALL OF IT WAS BLUE, ALL THE TIME, FOR YEARS.
But then, totally unaware that she was single-handedly tweaking the space-time continuum, Verizon girl breaks the tact pact: she peels off the outer shield.
And then the Earth stopped spinning for a second. I didn't feel it myself, but one look at this guy standing there, mouth agape, one hand sort of clenched in his hair, the other hand making these weird wavy things in the air? If he hadn't started screaming almost immediately I would have pounded him on the back to jumpstart him. (Plus just to hit somebody.)
I wish you could have heard the way he lit into that poor Verizon girl. And I couldn't tell if the fact that he was almost certainly certifiable made things better or worse for her. Maybe worse. Because if human behavior can be measured by the amount of time it takes us to peel off thin plastic protective shields (and I think it can, I'm a scientist) and "one to five minutes" earns a score of "impetuous" and "ten to fifteen minutes" earns a score of "cautious", clearly this gentleman foaming at the mouth before me had landed himself a score of "biscuit dough brains".
Eventually she got him calmed down, gave him his new phone, I abandoned my sightseeing post from his left armpit and he left the store. The second the door closed behind him Verizon girl had that phone in hand, all the sheets violently peeled off, and she did everything but lick the screen. She actually held it over the counter to me and offered me a thumbprint.
"No, I'm good." Which was true. My own phone is slathered in some sort of food remnants most of the time, so I spend a good part of my day actually licking it. I'm all stocked up on phone touching, thanks.
"So what can I do for you today?"
"Well," I started, trying to get my confused and indignant face back on. "The reception's all scratchy. I don't know... I think it might be the antenna." Smoooooth.
"Okay, well," she started, "that could be any number of things. Have you ever unscrewed the antenna?"
"I... have unscrewed the antenna." Yes, your honor. Of course I have! Come on! It UNSCREWS! I hold it in one or the other of my hands in excess of six hours a day; if there's something that unscrews on it, IT'S COMING OFF! I AM ONLY A HUMAN BEING!
"Uh-huh," Verizon girl answered. "And do you ever place the antenna in your mouth?"
"Well YEAH, you know. I might have. Accidentally. Once." If you prick us, do we not bleed?
"Do you chew on your antenna? Yes or no." Apparently this was the part of the conversation where we cut the shit.
"Yes. I chew on the antenna. I unscrew it and I put it in my mouth and I chew on it until I get a call at which point I take it out of my mouth and I screw it back into the phone. I don't even dry it off, most of the time." I was in a confessional booth now, and unstoppable. "I just pop it back in there all mouthed-up."
Wordlessly she turned to the cabinet behind her, dug around a while, and when she turned back around she had a brand new dry antenna. I unscrewed the old one and tried to hand it to her, but she didn't seem down with that so I laid it on the counter.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you! I promise I won't eat this one!" Verizon girl just stared at me. So many promises, so many lies.
When I turned to go I saw that another woman was in line, and she was practically crawling up my back to see the counter. And I knew that this woman had just been standing there contemplating scales of human behavior (she is, after all, a scientist) and eating one's antenna probably scored a ranking comparable to that of a platypus or a marmot in terms of social assimilation.
Back in my car I tried to imagine what this new woman's phone problem could be: couldn't get the InTouch texts to stop? Couldn't figure out how to delete all those explicit PIX messages? Tried to clean it out with bleach? She looked plenty stupid, so it could have been ANYTHING!
By the time I got home I had successfully reestablished my human superiority by virtue of her imagined ridiculousness and, completely satisfied, I contemplated making myself a turkey and antenna sandwich. But then I remembered: I'm trying to cut down on bread.
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Monday, June 26, 2006
And then right after that some guy came in and had all the potatoes poured into an empty Thirstbuster.
I went to Boston Market tonight to get something for us to eat (we were in the mood for something homemade-ish, only stickier) and I ended up standing there for ten minutes, the sole customer in the restaurant, waiting for a side of corn. I was literally the only person in there, so I have no idea what was going on with the corn shortage; I imagine that just minutes before I parked my car some dude ran in yelling, "You guys got corn? I need all the corn. Immediately. No, for real, just throw it in this bag."
So I was patiently waiting at the counter, trying to figure out if I could silently remove a piece of apple pie from its plastic vault, shove it into my mouth and cram it into my lower chest cavity before the corn alarm went off when this girl walked in. I'd guess she was in her early twenties, maybe five-two, about ninety pounds. Very extremely shockingly small. Her hair was painfully dark, like she was trying to dye it a lesson. She either spent a lot of money on makeup or just applied it with the lights on; I don't do either so it's sort of hard for me to tell the difference. It looked good, though. Very... on her face. If you're thinking here that I spent an inordinate amount of time checking out this girl, remember that I was still waiting for the damn corn. It was either check out the girl or choke down another piece of stolen pie and frankly my throat still hurt from the first piece.
She ordered-- and I remember this exactly-- four ounces of turkey. Four ounces. Have you ever been to Boston Market? You can get a whole turkey or a half a turkey. You cannot get your turkey in increments that don't reference the animal. There is not a little scale back there between the giant, witch-worthy ovens. You are not ordering a bottle of Enfamil.
The poor server, no doubt praying that this tiny person wasn't going to next request an ounce and a quarter of corn, made a rough turkey estimate and plated it just as the girl's phone started to ring. She reached into a gargantuan Coach tote bag that I am convinced had to be housing a full-size dialysis machine and she pulled out her phone.
And broke up with her boyfriend. On her cell phone. In front of a frighteningly light styrofoam plate of sticky turkey. There was eye rolling, there was huffing, there was the silent denial of any side dishes... it was horrifying. "I just don't want to date you," and "Ugh, God, stop!" were the top two reasons why this relationship had to end on Monday night in a fast food chicken place.
And there I was, STILL WAITING FOR MY GODDAMNED CORN. Three or four minutes into her conversation this girl must have realized that I was standing there unabashedly staring at her (Boston Market was at this point completely out of pie) and she turned and looked at me. And as we looked at each other and I started to laugh, she rolled her eyes and gave me the "can you even believe this guy I'm breaking up with over the phone in Boston Market is still talking to me right now?" face. Which is not a face I'm particularly familiar with, FYI, but trust me, you know it when you see it. Turning back toward the buffet, the girl got the server's attention and held the phone into her sad, sad hair.
"Fuck it," she said, exasperated. "Throw some yams on there."
As I left with my corn and my however many ounces is in a whole chicken, she was hanging up her phone and laughing with the server. I wished that I had thought to tell the cashier to add a celebratory fudge brownie to her order, but then I tried to inhale and I remembered that the last brownie was snugly inside my left lung. But I guess it's just as well. I wouldn't want to tax that dialysis machine too hard; it's probably running on a generator or something.
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, June 26, 2006
Friday, June 23, 2006
It's easy to find your way around Los Angles... it's all right turns.
When we're feeling particularly... drunk, Randy and I will occasionally sit down and draw our ideal homes for each other: mine always has one of those moving escalator walkways and a bathroom big enough to butcher a cow, and Randy's is usually just two giant rooms-- one with like a pool table and air hockey and foosball and slot machines and Ms. Pacman and a Golden Tee and fourteen plasma TVs mounted on the walls and ceiling and floor and shit, and then another whole room full of cars.
I always look at his and say, "That's stupid. You're so eleven years old. And you draw dumb cars." And then he says, "Whatever, all you drew were hacked up pieces of bloody beef moving down a hallway. Oh, and guess whose house we actually live in, BITCH?"
And then to prove his point he brings home some enormous present for himself. This last time it was a giant pinball machine for the dining room. I was hoping for a ficus tree, but this is good too. More lights and buttons, less dead ficus trees. Pinball machines are good for the environment.
Funny thing-- I can walk by that pinball machine for two months straight and never feel the slightest twinge to play, but the minute someone comes over and they're all, "Sweet! Pinball!" I have no choice but to throw myself on top of the machine and call first game. Last night this guy stopped by and I told him if he didn't let me go first I'd start crying. Then I promptly crushed him in a down-to-the-wire five of seven series. It wasn't a half bad showing for a UPS delivery driver, and hey, I told him so. I'm no sore winner. He better mail me that check, though. What can Brown do for me? You can start by carrying some cash, motherfucker.
So today, still coming down from my pinball high (and knowing that the Terminex guy is coming next week and yo, that dude can flip like a whale) I played a quick game. And I don't know what happened but I started scoring and scoring, and my score got higher and higher, and then all the stars lined up in the sky and started tap dancing, and these beautiful little angles-- little right and acute and obtuse angles-- all came down from trigonometry heaven and flitted about, measuring things and singing about math, and THEN I BEAT RANDY'S HIGH SCORE.
Hell yes, I took a picture. I beat him by more than eleven million points! This could even be more powerful than that time I beat him arm wrestling by kicking him in the nads!
When he came home from work this afternoon I met him in the garage.
"I beat your high score!" I screamed. And screamed again. And continued to scream until he saw me, got off the phone, turned down the stereo, and got out of the car.
"Are you going to kick me in the sack?"
"No." My benevolence knows no bounds. But he still didn't seem that excited.
"So how much money did you make today?" he asked. No doubt trying to make another point about me not working which is SO TYPICAL OF A LOSER.
"Uh, none! Hi, the pest control guy doesn't come until like Tuesday." Duh. I cut to the chase. "Do I get a prize?"
If memory serves (oh, and it do), Randy got a prize when he beat the previous high score. The same prize he picks whenever there's a prize situation: it starts with an "s" and it ends with an "x" and it's BORING, frankly, to pick the same goddamn prize every time, especially one that you were probably going to get anyway. I say go for the gold.
"I say we get that cow we've always dreamed of!" I yelled.
"Why?" Randy yelled back, edging past me into the house. "You'll just kill it in the bathroom."
"PLEASE, OUR BATHROOM IS BARELY BIG ENOUGH TO KILL TWO CHICKENS AND A GOPHER."
Randy turned and stared at me.
"Okay, okay," I pouted. "But can I at least get new towels?"
Whatever. When you don't get those steaks for Christmas like I promised, take it up with Pinball Loserface. I wipe my hands of it. Well, of that, and some other stuff.
The air conditioner at the house is out. It actually technically works, I guess, in that all the lights come on and there's a whirrrrrring sound, but it only blows warm air so it feels a lot like the house is mouth-breathing on us. Like the house ate a bunch of salsa and fireants and boiling water and now it's yawning all over us. As an added bonus (no, really) the compressor's going through some sort of impossibly loud end-of-life crisis, so impossibly loud that it makes everyone in our neighborhood fly outside with gas masks and bags of canned goods, frantically searching the sky for the mothership and waiting for further instructions.
It's really hot in my fucking house right now, if I took too long getting there.
"But it's June in Phoenix!" you implore. "Death is surely rounding the corner even as we speak! Tell us your plan of evasive action. Fill us in on the sordid survival details! Are you having parts flown in next-day-air free of charge by the horrified and contrite manufacturer? Are you consulting with certified, licensed professionals and carefully evaluating the quickest, most efficient options?"
"Never fear!" I answer. "Randy is even now beating on the metal casing with the flat side of an axe! And I've been apprised that in the event that Plan A (Bang On Everything Until It Dents Or You Hear Something Break Off Inside) inconceivably fails, and the air conditioner isn't magically restored to tip-top operating shape after being... banged on, Plan B is an absolute sure thing. Plan B (dare I say it?): the Poke At Wires And Other Electric Shit That Can Be Reached With A Screwdriver Plan! WE'RE SAVED!"
WE SHOULD HAVE A CELEBRATION PARTY LIKE THAT ONE IN RETURN OF THE JEDI! YOU GUYS BRING ALL THE LIQUOR AND AS MANY EWOKS AS YOU CAN ROUND UP AND SOME ELECTRIC FANS. BIG FANS. I WANT A FAN SO BIG YOU COULD SHOVE A WHOLE GUY THROUGH IT. I WILL BRING THE DEATH AND THE SMELLS BAD AND THE WHINY DESPERATION. AND MAYBE LIKE ONE EWOK. A SWEATY ONE.
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Sunday, June 18, 2006
If my hands hurt later it's because Randy kept hitting them with a tack hammer.
I yawn-slumped my way to the kitchen this morning to find all of Randy's kids already there eating breakfast. They were only out until a little after four in the morning doing shots and ripping off their clothes and no doubt running from the law like a merry little band of gypsy heathens, so it makes sense that they'd be all awake and chipper with their eyes open and crap a full hour before me, a person who fell asleep with her mouth open on the couch last night watching Discovery Health.
Randy was busy at the stove cooking a third pound of bacon, so I punched him in the back.
"Good morning," he said.
"BACON!" I kissed him on the cheek. And then kicked him in the shin.
"Hey!" I hobbled over to Randy's son sitting at the table. "Look at my leg!" And I showed him an enormous purple welt on the top of my thigh.
"Shit," he said. "What happened? That's like six inches long."
"Your dad punched me," I sniffed. "He punched me in the leg."
"Let me see!" his girlfriend yelled. She's kind of a yeller. I hopped over.
"OUCH!" she yelled. "How'd you do that!"
"Randy threw rocks at me," I pouted. "Big heavy rocks, and when I said it hurt he laughed and threw bigger rocks." I looked at the coffee table. "And then he threw the coffee table."
"Come here," Randy's daughter called from the family room. I limpingly obliged.
"Wow, yeah, that sucks," she said. "What happened?"
"Your dad tied me down in the driveway and then backed over my leg with the car. He's MEAN, your dad!"
I spun around on one leg and squinted my eyes. "MEAN! Mean mean meeeeeeeeeeeaan." I was going for "foreboding" but I think I only pulled off "raptor skeleton". Making my hands into frozen, knotty claws might have hurt me rather than helped me there.
The kids stared at me a second and then looked at Randy.
Randy flipped a piece of pig. "She was trying to get out of the car in the garage because she heard the phone ringing and she freaked out and slammed the car door on herself," he explained.
"Nice!" the yeller yelled.
I pounced back into the kitchen on one now-shaky leg, claws still weirdly clawed.
"I heard the phone, though," I grumbled in Randy's ear. He lovingly patted a claw knuckle. I looked at the kids. "I did, I heard the phone." But they were busy again working on pounds one and two.
So I grabbed a piece. And bit Randy on the shoulder blade when I passed. Just to make us even.
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, June 18, 2006
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Annoying Questions To Which I Received No Response: Part 5 of 17
[directed toward Randy's daughter (as she cowered in her hall bathroom frantically rinsing her eyes out with Listerine and whimpering, and as I picked my jumbled fish-colored body off the closet floor where I had impulsively flung it) seconds after I made the awesome decision to try to walk from my bedroom to the laundry room naked, super naked, as naked as Eve right before she announced that she was done with goddamned grapes already, only to walk into the sightline of this utterly defenseless other person, a person who isn't used to seeing a hairy bedrumpled halibut meandering down the hall at 8:00 in the morning in pursuit of pants:]
"SORRY! Sorry about that! But... I mean... better you than your brother, right? HA! Right?? I mean, HA! Phew, right??"
"I drew you a picture which," writes Matt, "in my humble and honest opinion, is EXACTLY what it looked like outside your hut, or yurt, or whatever it was you stayed in."
Well, Matt, since you asked? Sort of? It was a chicken coop. I guess technically it was a "chik'in coop", the change in spelling no doubt meant to cutely acknowledge the long and arduous artistic and engineering process by which said "chicken coop" became a "coop for humans", namely taking the chickens out and putting in a couch. In point of fact, we were upgraded against our will to the "coop" from the "garden view suite", and though I certainly oozed graciousness (as you can well imagine) I spent the whole weekend trying to discern where that extra $50 a night was justified. Is it $75 more a night to sleep in the converted pig barn? For a hundred more can you bunk out back in a quasi-abandoned coyote den clawed into the rockface?
But I digress.
When Randy and I walked the thirteen paces from the coop to the bar on Saturday night (if only to stop the patrons from screaming, "Serious, ya'll come on outta that coop, now!") there was a gentleman sitting on the steps outside of the bar. It took me a minute to figure out why he looked familiar, but then I noticed the man's gigantic black dog yoked to a nailed down picnic table with a tow chain and I realized that he reminded me of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. (At first I was thinking maybe third horseman, but no, this guy had more blood on his pants.)
So then Randy-- my beloved Bastion of Important Social Contextual Clues-- goes, "Hey, that's the biggest lab I've ever seen!" And this for me was kind of like in Waterworld when Enola tells The Mariner that she wishes she had mutated webbed feet like his, and Helen's so completely horrified by this glaring social faux pas that she almost spits out her mouthful of raw sea beast. Because seriously, Randy, are you TRYING to get us thrown off this boat right now?
So then The Mariner/Horseman #4 goes, "She's not a lab, she's a rottweiler/akita mix," and I wanted to make a joke about how yeah, labs don't generally chew on bones with the fur still on, but instead I just kept my mind on dry land and pushed Randy inside.
Where he (and I'm not making this up) immediately hired the band to play this year's formal Christmas party for the Tempe Diablo charity group.
So, wait... dogs! Dogs, right? I think I just wanted to point out that the Paint hellbeast above is the same one that Matt gave us in his last piece in which he lambasted my piss poor hair stylist*** for being a cheap truck chick. I loved it then and I love it now. I better love it next time, Matt. No pressure, though.
*** Did I mention that she got fired? Because she totally did.
The Jake: Vice President in Charge of Semi-Liquids and Throw Up.
"It occurred to me that The Jake, what with all the Rolling he's been doing lately, is merely brushing up on his Katamari Damacy skills... you might ask him. Perhaps he's merely wishing to be The Jake Who Games. Maybe you should look into a playstation. Even less movement is involved than Rolling."
I hadn't thought of that, Jeff! But it does explain why I keep finding dogeared copies of the Best Buy catalog under Jake's food-ridden blanket bed mattress thing. Ah, and also why he has a smallish NATO satellite stuck to his neck. (I hate be too hard on him, though; frankly our internet connection has never been better.)
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Eyeglasses: Mainly A $245 Headband
I curled up on the couch to watch the last half of Mean Girls on cable last week, but after about the first ten minutes-- and the third hand grenade explosion-- things seemed a trifle fishy. So I got up, grabbed the remote, stood within a foot of the television and hit "INFO". Whereupon I discovered that I'd actually been watching Mean Guns. Which was both a relief and a disappointment. I was able to confirm what I'd suspected all along, though; that every teen angst drama would be ten times better if they'd just cast the founding father of gangsta rap.
¶ posted by Erin on Saturday, June 10, 2006
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
I started this website a little over three years ago. I was out of work and running out of ideas and I was trying to pull all the pieces of my life into some sort of legible form, a discernible order, trying to get everything under the same scope. Cohesion, is what I was looking for. Order in the cosmos.
Clearly, it didn't work for shit.
Three years and two months later, I'm out of work. Again. I'm dangerously low on ideas. I'm desperately trying to string all the pieces of my life on one chain, struggling to reign everything together under the same scope. Cohesion. Cosmos. Order in. Nope.
But! Three years later I'm in this book, motherfucker. And who needs a steady income, or a five-year plan that doesn't revolve around rescheduling a court date, or a quote/unquote "life path" when you're IN A BOOK?
Not me, that's for damn sure. I'm ALL SET FOREVER. I'm having a placard made to wear around my neck: "IN A BOOK: GET OFF ME".
So you should definitely buy this book. I mean, I'm in it, yeah, but a bunch of other great people are in it, too. I don't know if they'll live up to my shaky desperation and complete lack of focus and/or goals, but what they're missing in laziness and avoidance they make up for in other worthwhile things.
The official release date is June 30th, but if you use the link above to pre-order you'll get it a full week before anyone else. PLUS, it's only $15! And FREE SHIPPING! I'm buying two: one for when I'm thinking about maybe relaxing for a while on the couch, and one for when I'm thinking about maybe relaxing for a while in my bed.
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
It's good to set goals.
This morning I woke up and told myself that I wasn't going to the grocery store until I was a hundred and ten percent sure that my hair would look more stupid than anyone else's hair at the Safeway.
It's now 1:58. And I'm happy to report that I can now leave to go buy some chicken.
The only thing I can think of that might top the rabid excitement of this video is maybe a picture of The Jake sleeping. A black and white picture. With no flash. You're welcome.
I was doing some yard work this morning and a crazy old neighbor saw me and came by to see if he could borrow our mower. He was carrying a cracked igloo cooler in his arms that looked like it had been dragged a long way behind something fast. He gently shifted the cooler from his arms to mine, much like transferring a rectangular sleeping baby, and he explained that there were quote/unquote "delicious fruit juices" inside that I should enjoy as a thanks for the mower.
"It's how we like to 'beat the heat' at our place," he said. "They haven't had much of a chance to cool off yet, though, so maybe give 'em a little while."
A couple hours later, when I was ready to put the delicious fruit juice smackdown on some heat, I opened the cooler. And I realized that "a little while" is a completely subjective term when no ice was included in the cooler package to begin with.
It reminded me of those movies where the robber tells the store clerk to lie down and start counting, and not to get up until he gets to a hundred or the robber will shoot him. The robber of course jets when the clerk gets to "four", but the dutiful clerk stays on the floor and keeps counting. I feel like the store clerk. Crazy Old Neighbor could be halfway to Mexico on our mower by now.
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, June 01, 2006
