We could have made Pain and Hurtin' sandwiches.
Last Friday night we were in Rocky Point being lazy (I had just opened another beer bottle by banging it on the wall repeatedly until it finally gave up and just let go of its cap) when I heard a ruckus outside on the beach. That's right: a ruckus. I went out on the patio to scan the beach below and I discovered that this was the best possible ruckus available: The White Trash Wasted College Chick Ruckus. I dragged a stool closer to the balcony railing and started beating another beer against the door frame in anticipation because when a bunch of girls start spitting profanities and losing nail jewelry in each others' hair, count me
in.
This is what I told Randy a minute later when he came out onto the patio to see who was screeching the "c" word and what that banging noise was. He was nonplussed by my enthusiastic "count me in!" because Randy knows that while I'm better than average at screaming abusive shit at a stranger, if I'm put upon to actually
fight it's like that time at your step-cousin's bachelorette party when you happened to look over and witness your pinot-buzzed mom spontaneously trying to work the pole on the dance floor: all of your DNA strands in charge of pride immediately explode and then your heart shatters into a million weeping shards of pitiful.
"I'm the impotent old man of fighting," I said. "I can't
do it, so I
watch it a lot."
"They should make a Viagra for fighting," Randy suggested, squinting down to see who was swinging at who. "So you could kick someone's ass for three consecutive hours."
"And if I keep kicking ass for more than six hours, I should consult my physician."
"SHUT THE FUCK UP DOWN THERE, BITCH!"
Ahoy, what was this? A woman in another condo screaming down to the beach, entangling herself in the fray? I grabbed Randy's hand. Be still my heart.
The ruckus exploded instantaneously from a steady third gear situation into a fifth gear situation. A "getaway speed" situation. Apparently-- and this was made very clear very quickly-- Condo Yeller was about to get her fucking ass kicked.
Just as soon as she went downstairs and trudged down to the beach, that is.
Things got quiet after that on the condo side of the argument, and I can only assume that Condo Yeller was too busy putting on her shoes and remembering where she put her brass knuckles to keep up her end of the argument.
And the Beach Screamer was starting to lose steam; the original beach sparring partner had smartly used the condo distraction to make a run for it, leaving her nemesis to spit and kick sand and shriek at the building. With no one participating you could tell she was on the verge of losing interest. As inconceivable as that may seem.
"You need to MAN UP, whore!" she screeched at each of the four buildings. "Man up and GET DOWN HERE."
Silence.
I became concerned she might retire to her van for the night and leave me to what, stare at the sunset or read a book or something. I hid behind Randy and stuck my head over the ledge.
"Whoa, I think someone needs to MAN
DOWN, BITCH!" I yelled.
Beach Screamer's flailing head whipped in my direction. I hid my face in Randy's shirt as from
The Medusa. I don't remember specifically what was screamed next, only that-- still pretty proud of myself for the "man down" line-- I made several (empty) promises to join her on the beach, mentioning that if she didn't mind I would be bringing The Pain. Beach Screamer enthusiastically encouraged me to come down, taking care to assure me that The Pain I brought would not be lonely because she happened to have some Hurtin'.
"How fortuitous," I muffle-laughed into Randy's back. Randy did not think this was very fortuitous.
"You know, it's really not that hard to count four up and one over," he said, referring to our condo's position in the building. "Even in the dark. Even drunk," he added.
He had a point. When I'm drunk and belligerent I can sometimes count as high as eight or nine. Shit. I hunched down and started crawling backward off the balcony clutching Randy in front of me like an innocent man shield when the police roared up on the sand, chasing a somewhat unorganized Beach Screamer down the shore.
I popped back up. "WHAT'S THE MATTER, BITCH?" I yelled, Randy pulling me inside. "Who needs to 'MAN UP'
NOW?"
She's just lucky the police came and she got handcuffed, thrown in the back of a pickup truck, and booked into a Mexican jail because I swear, I was THIS CLOSE to fucking that girl's shit
up.
Where the hell's my mom?
You know what's good for heartburn?
NOT FUCKING SALSA.
So you can scratch salsa off the list, officially. I think it's right between "sidewalk chalk" and "matches".
Sunday night was Happy Hour here at "Last Wednesday's Fajitas Bar and Grill".
Really Sick All Night was on sale two-for-one, and oh! There was karaoke! Randy sang a sincere version of
I Don't Know, Everything Smelled Okay To Me and I got a standing ovation for my rendition of
Making It Into Nachos Doesn't Make It Safe To Eat / Maybe We Should Go to the Hospital***.
***It was a remix.
We opted to come home early after being advised that the Mexico border would be closed tomorrow due to a protest.
"It's happened before," someone in town said casually.
"How long does the border generally stay closed?" Randy asked.
"Thursday maybe? Or Friday?"
So we came home. I need to take a bath, so
just read this. It was by and large the same, only with an extra person in the car and McDonald's instead of In-N-Out and
Toto instead of
Don McLean.
Last night I got up to take The Jake down to pee at about three in the morning because it's actually significantly easier to wake up, get out of bed, leash him up, and walk him down four flights of stairs than it is to lie there semi-awake for the remaining dark hours while Jake stares bolts of outrage and disbelief into my supine skull. And while I was on the ground I happened to look up and notice that an under-construction condo project down the beach from us had been engulfed by and entangled in this weird maverick tentacle cloud. It was amazing looking, really, this distinct wispy-white cloud encircling a fifteen story building. I kept blinking, thinking I was imagining it but I don't think I was. We'll never actually
know, of course, since I didn't take a picture. I refuse to sacrifice sleep for artistic pursuits, apparently. So here's a picture I took during the daytime.
I'm pretty good with my feet.
It's low tide in Rocky Point right now, and so beautiful. I took three thousand pictures and I'm genuinely excited about them so I'm sure every single one will suck. It's odd and wonderful to be sitting here in foreign sand while the unmistakable smell of brown turkey wafts en masse from a thousand high-rise condos on Sandy Beach. Intermittent internet, constant Dos Equis.
Christopher, as promised, carried our pale sticky turkey to a popular chicken vendor in town and begged for help. An hour later he was handed five styrofoam containers full of marinated, charcoal grilled and cleaver-severed bird. Doubtlessly the best turkey I've ever eaten; we've had dinner three times since two o'clock. Or four times. We've eaten the turkey's back, which I think counts as four times.
Tomorrow we'll hand Chris our other clammy turkey and demand wine from water again. Maybe that one we won't eat with our hands.
That Stuffing! Innocent Children Ask For It By Name!
This is the first year in a lot of years that Randy and I will be spending Thanksgiving together.
He always takes his sons to
Glamis so they can roll around in the dirt and break shit and try to deep-fry a turkey in a quart of oil, and
I usually go to my parents' house, eat an exorbitant meal, roll around in the dirt and then go to bed. This year we've decided to spend the holiday together in Mexico. I'm not sure why.
So last night while I was trying to figure out how many hundreds of dollars in groceries I need to buy in order to put on a Thanksgiving dinner in Rocky Point, I muted the TV and asked Randy and his son, Christopher, what exactly they wanted to eat.
"Well, a turkey." Okay, yes. Turkey. Check.
"And those potatoes," Chris added. "The potatoes you send with us every year."
Every year I throw exactly one-half hour up against making sure Randy and Chris have something to eat in Glamis on Thanksgiving Day that won't result in a sand-spiked salmonella death. (If Randy owned an chef's apron it would have "IF IT'S PINK, JUST DON'T EAT THAT PART" written across it. The man pulls chicken off the barbeque after four minutes because he doesn't want to overcook it; there's not a doubt in my mind that he fully believes he can take a seventeen-pound turkey from frozen to edible in nineteen minutes.) The potatoes to which Chris is referring is a ten-minute casserole-- an indiscriminate amount of hash browns, an indiscriminate amount of cheese, a couple of cans of random cream soup...
"Okay, what if I did the scalloped potatoes instead?" I suggested. You know, the ones with the cream sauce and the leeks and the delicately shaved potatoes? The ones without the cereal on top?
"No, that casserole is always really good. Oh, and that stuffing! That stuffing you make is
awesome."
Oh good. The stuffing. Let me explain the stuffing. The stuffing recipe in question was somehow found in tiny print in the way back of a possibly embarrassed publication. It called for all sorts of haphazard ingredients and-- knowing I wouldn't have to actually
eat it-- I opted to run with it primarily out of morbid curiosity. Year number one I followed the recipe closely; I made cornbread from scratch and dried it into little crunchy cubes, I toasted the pecans carefully, turning them so they'd brown uniformly, I washed fresh mustard greens (yeah) and wrung them out before I steamed them... you get the idea. I took the time.
That first year Randy and the kids came back on Sunday filthy, exhausted, toting greasy unzipped Ziplock bags of bright pink turkey leftovers, and no one said a single word about the stuffing. I didn't ask, either, but I noticed that the stuffing dish was conspicuously clean when it came back in the house... it was "Just fling it" clean. Or maybe "Leave it out and the cats will get it" clean.
So the next year, knowing the stuffing was more than likely going to be scooped up and balled into squishy weaponry, I took a little less care with the preparation. I used prefab cornbread. And frozen mustard greens. I may have forgotten to turn the toasting pecans. I was out of chicken broth so I substituted corn.
When they arrived home, Chris remarked on the stuffing. He liked the stuffing. Nothing effusive, but the stuffing was officially not condemned. The Pyrex dish didn't look like it had been licked by strays. I was intrigued.
The year after that, I used white bread. I forgot mustard greens so I threw in some ham. To hell with toasting the pecans, and to hell with chopping them while we're at it. Corn instead of broth, corn instead of celery, corn instead of butter. The stuffing weighed twenty-seven pounds.
This time when they got home, talk of Stuffing took center stage. Apparently Stuffing had been the star of camp, appearing in Stuffing Sandwiches, Stuffing for Breakfast... oh, Stuffing was on the
rise. Look out for Stuffing, boy.
"I think what I like most about it," Chris said at the time, starry-eyed, reflecting on Stuffing, "is that it's not all
moist like other stuffings."
That's because I replace all of the liquids and semi-liquids with corn, I wanted to say. Not
moist? Holy shit, this stuffing is the moistness
antichrist, it's the Black Hole of moist; if you held Stuffing up to a river, the river would immediately disappear into Stuffing.
After that I tried to get out of making the stuffing. I felt sort of guilty about the whole thing, honestly, like a bad joke gone too far. But the damage was done. Stuffing is Tradition now. Family and Home and Holiday Feelings of Joy... yeah, Stuffing's got his big fat corn head in all those nostalgia doors. I'm just excited that Stuffing is my legacy. Years from now when I'm gone, someone will sigh at the Thanksgiving table and say, "You remember that stuffing Erin used to make? Let's see... it was stale Progresso bread crumbs, thirteen cans of store brand corn, some wet deli ham, a handful of pecans still in the shell... man, she sure could cook."
And that's what I was thinking last night talking with Chris, after attempting to steer him toward something a little more like
dressing but getting repeatedly shot down by Devoted Love of Stuffing, about how quietly and quickly the things we say or do-- or the things we cook-- can beome intwined with history. And also that after this year we're seriously never spending Thanksgiving together again, ever.
Moms: Always Embarrassed, Just Sometimes On A Different Page
Of the total time I spend driving, I spend roughly 85% of that time listening to Canned Heat on repeat and fantasizing I'm in Center Stage. This percentage is of course provisionally based on the time I'm alone in my car-- the vast majority of the time, actually, because as it turns out no one really wants to ride in a car the size of a smallish prune with six speeds and a roof made out of canvas that's being driven by a bleary-eyed woman listening to Canned Heat on repeat while fantasizing she's in Center Stage.
So I was driving to Safeway yesterday in my prune (fast, alone, reminding myself to keep my eyes open) and Canned Heat had started for the seventh time (I don't actually have to hit "repeat" to get it to restart, the car just automatically repeats the song indefinitely so I'll quit poking it in the button), and I realized that the only person I could think of who wouldn't make fun of me for this whole Jamiroquai thing is my mother. Unlike the rest of the world she wouldn't snicker or roll her eyes or "Oh, God" me to death... she'd just look me straight in the face and go, "See, I told you not to quit ballet."
Stuffing a whole chicken into a crockpot is annoyingly like trying to stuff a baby into a crockpot, only not as loud.
In other news, dinner will be ready in ten and a half hours.
So the hand that makes the "L" shape is the hand that faces East? Or... wait.
My
tax class final exam is on Monday, so in stealthy preparation I've been cleaning out my bathroom drawers and creating motivational posters on flickr.
I know I've led you to believe that I've done abysmally in this class, but I've actually done quite well... turns out knowing left from right wasn't on any of the quizzes, high five. But I've missed the last two classes and from what I understand the cumulative scoring goes something like "Quizzes: 5 points each, Midterm: 75 points, Final exam: 13,000,000 points". The class covered depreciation and amortiz... ammortiza... fuck, dude, something like depreciation that starts with an "
A" last week when I wasn't there, and surprisingly enough these are the two specific aspects of accounting that caused me to start crying at the office when I couldn't come up with an answer by repeatedly making furious "L" shapes with the thumbs and forefingers of each hand.
I'm sure it'll be fine. Hey, cool, it's naptime!
Apparently Caesar Salad Interventions Have A Low Success Rate.
I ate a whole bag of caesar salad for breakfast, and my only regret is that we don't have another bag of caesar salad for me to eat right now.
Okay, my other regret is that it didn't occur to me to mix the caesar salad ingredients together in the bag and just eat it right out of the cellophane. With my hands.
I'm officially doing that for dinner. Somebody write it down.
I was trying to find something about toilet seat removal, and I don't really want to go into any more detail than that.
Does anybody else remember those really colorful toilet tank deodorizers? I can't find a link or a picture anywhere, but they were oblong deodorizers that hung inside the toilet tank from a wire hook and they were usually in big round bins at the grocery store because the wire thing made them a bitch to shelve, I guess. They came in these bright jewel-toned cellophane wrappers even though they all smelled identically of Christmas trees made out of lemons and poison. My brother and I always got in trouble for messing around with them in the store, and even though they only cost like fifteen cents apiece or something we could never talk our mother into buying any. It seemed like a fabulous way to get the toilets clean to me (I'm cheap and lazy from
way back), but Mom always told us they were toxic and to stop swinging them around before we hit somebody.
Well, I don't think they make them anymore because apparently all the chemicals build up in your tank and cause your toilet to
explode while you're out of town. Or something. And that's a shame. Those things were good and tingly if you sucked on them hard enough through the wrapper.
Sorry, Dad. I know I wasn't kidnapped by a smoking, trunk-riding carnie.
In the car on the way to the airport to go visit
Stace I realized I'd forgotten my
Motion Sickness Relief Band. I really
need that band, or at least my brain
thinks I need it, and five years ago you could have asked the poor German man who was unfortunate enough to sit in the
Lufthansa row in front of me if there was a difference between the two. I'm pretty sure the back of his vomit-spattered head would have said "nein". I'm thrilled to see that the stupid thing's on sale for pretty much
free right now, too; I once barefoot sprinted through a mall in my pajamas five minutes before closing the night before a family flight and then happily threw down a hundred and fifty bucks at Sharper Image to buy a
backup of this thing, a
spare. And I would have paid double that amount if I thought it would further decrease the odds of my spontaneously throwing up on another stranger.
But standing in the airport without either of my two Relief Bands forced me to have a serious and perhaps overdue conversation with myself about the motion sickness issue (outside in the fresh air and without any exaggerated head movements so I was less likely to blow.) I haven't always been this much of a pansy; when I was a kid I used to ride from Pensacola to Atlanta lying on the floor of the car and
reading. My brother and I used to beg and beg and beg my dad to drive around with the two of us in the
trunk and he would DO IT, which is a totally different problem, probably. But my point is that when I was younger not only could I deal with stuffy, viewless spaces without getting sick, but unless my parents had a therapist install fake memories in my brain to cover up a violent, airless kidnapping (and I don't think they did, our health insurance coverage wasn't that gratuitous), I LOVED stuffy, viewless spaces!
And now? I'm getting queasy just typing "stuffy, viewless spaces" (oh my god, could you get me some water?). Often on flights I have to crank up the Band to the highest setting and the crazy electrical pulse causes my hand to spasm involuntarily every two seconds. This in conjunction with the fact that I have to pretend to be in a braindead unresponsive coma from liftoff to touchdown (if I'm in a coma I can't get you in my mouth crosshairs) creates a fairly unnerving sense of anxiety for anyone sitting in my row. Or, as I believe I stated earlier, the row in front of me.
So I'm standing in the Phoenix airport, Bandless, and I'm weighing my options. I can either a) ask somebody for a piece of gum so I can manage the elevator to the second floor without puking and then just slit my wrists on that moving walkway torture device, or b) admit to myself that 95% of this entire situation is mental, that I've turned a minor problem into a full blown vomit-covered, electrocuted issue, and that I need to stop catering to the pulling
suggestion of sickness.
I met myself in the middle. Five chewable orange Dramamine chased with the tiniest, most anemic US Air Bloody Mary you've ever seen. And I'm happy to tell you that things went well. I was in an unresponsive coma, sure, but I wasn't faking it. And not one single German approached me after disembarkment trying to get me to buy him a new tie. I truly thought I'd turned a corner.
And then my dad called me in Canada and broke the news that I'd been kidnapped as a child and driven around in a Tilt-A-Whirl-Mobile while someone chain-smoked with the windows up and made me forceread tiny-print newspapers at gunpoint. In the trunk.
That part's not true. I'm just trying to justify puking in my hand right after we landed. And here I thought I'd made such slow, deliberate strides in the right direction.
After last week's election Arizona incumbant Republican congressman J.D. Hayworth not only refused to admit defeat to the newly elected
Harry Mitchell, but he went so far as to pack up his blustery camp and move his blustery shit back to blustery Washington.
(I would have linked to Hayworth's site as well, but
here. It
talks, is why. Fucking naturally. Hit mute.)
When Randy and the kids and I went to D.C. a few years ago we managed to finagle a tour of the Capitol Building. It was a truly amazing tour, properly awesome and humbling in every genuine sense, and toward the end we were granted the privilege of standing in Representative J.D.'s office. This part lasted exactly as long as it took for me to inadvertently knock a glass-framed photograph off the desk. My inability to monitor my flailing appendages often interferes with the family's admiration of anything worthwhile, unfortunately. Just ask any liquor store owner this side of the Missouri.
The Hayworth denial situation has tickled me to no end, not only because I voted for Mitchell, but also because any time a man blindly soldiers on in the face of nay-saying adversity to fight for what he believes in against the tittering wall of grand scale ridicule, well, that's pretty much high-grade comedy in my book.
And having read just recently that J.D. has summarily acknowledged the campaign loss
via his website reminds me that he and I might at least have
one thing in common.
Two things if you count that whole picture frame situation. Which I totally don't. I mean, I only admitted to that on my
website and clearly
no one reads websites.
P.P.P.S. This Could Go On Indefinitely.
I was leaving for work this morning when a guy from the power company came to the door. Luckily he happened to come to the garage door-- the door from which I was in the process of exiting-- as I think I've
appropriately documented what happens when people approach our front door and knock on it.
"Hello!" Power Company Man yells. I fight my intrinsic urge to ball up like a fetus on the garage floor and feign trembling invisibility for five or six hours. If
Charles Darwin were alive he'd find me and shoot me right through the solar plexus. He'd have to really look for it, on account of my being curled up on the floor, but he'd take the time. If only for the pleasure of crossing me off his list.
"Hi!" I yell back. Upright. Fighting my comma spine and thousands (maybe even
tens of thousands, who can say!) of genetically recessive "flight" prone cells.
Power Man then explains (slowly, as he can see the target drawn on my... wherever exactly my solar plexus is) that his team is busy burying our neighborhood power lines and that he needs to use our hose.
"It's a long, long way back to the company yard," he exaggerates sort of musically, like maybe we're both on
Law and Order and he's in charge of Overacting and I'm in charge of Buying It. "I'd hate to waste that kind of time just to put water in my tank."
All I could do was nod, too busy trying to figure out what burying the power lines had to do with needing a handy water supply to notice that all of the electrical lines in our neighborhood are already buried. Since arriving home from work tonight Randy has asked me more than once if I know why the street's torn up and each time I just sort of cleared my throat and shielded wherever I thought my solar plexus might be at the time. Sometimes it was my chest, sometimes my ankle, whatever. It doesn't really matter. I'm doomed. Especially since I finally broke down and admitted that my immediate and primary concern surrounding the street situation revolved around the ambiguous threat of losing our cable television. I thought this was a good cover. Randy loves cable.
But being a man who knows exactly where his plexus of solar is-- and who guards it carefully at all times-- Randy was disappointingly and school marmishly quick to point out that our cable is delivered via satellite, and that satellites by their very nature are fairly difficult to bury. Or catch. Or even-- as I now pause to think about it-- see.
I'm proud to tell you I did the only thing I felt I could respectfully do in the face of so much unseemly scientific logic: I promptly curled up on the floor and took a little nap. And I guess later when Randy wonders aloud why the water isn't flowing from the street (or the river or the glacier or from wherever the water usually flows) to the house as it normally does with such efficiency, or when he tries to discern why the business end of our garden hose now disappears cleanly into the middle of the yard into a hole so snug and so deep I can't even
look at it for too long from fear of falling in (science!), well, I suppose I'll be the first one to haughtily point out that the cable is still working. And then I'll be the first one to take a long bath in said cable. It won't be the first time, and I already know I won't feel very clean afterwards. It's a good thing I brush my teeth with vodka or frankly I might be put out.
P.S. Not really that put out. We have some scotch.
P.P.S. Oh, and some gin.
So, okay, I've officially lost
NaBloPoMo, but the internet is one finicky son of a bitch. And sometimes it doesn't matter how many wires you lick or how many times you slam something against something else, that bastard's just out to lunch. A good high school friend of mine, Jody, finding herself grounded to her room without privilege, once constructed a clandestine telephone out of a computer keyboard, a wire hanger, and a nine-volt battery. With this in mind I tried something similar this weekend employing an mp3 player, an adorably happy baby, and a piece of aluminum foil, but alas. I clearly lacked some intrinsic talent.
I'm still going to try to post something every day, though, because I like the idea of it, and because I love reading what you've all been writing. And I feel like I'm getting to know you better because of it.
I love you
Stace and Sean! Thank you for everything. Thank you especially for introducing me to Ever-- perhaps the most smiley, agreeable, huggable baby on the planet-- and thank you also for agreeing with me when I claimed it was cold enough to freeze blood outside.
I mean that shit was really, really cold.
I mean, under ANY circumstances, seriously.
You know how sometimes all the stars line up with the moon and sun and satellites and... tall trees and shit, and you find yourself online at the
exact moment that someone you know is uploading pictures to flickr? And you can have this real-time heartwarming comment connection with that person because hey,
she happens to be on
her computer at the exact second that
you're on
yours? Yeah,
Stace and I are doing that right now!
Only I'm sort of leaning against the chair she's sitting in, too. While she uploads. I just actaully
emailed her a recipe. I'm not sure what this says about technology and weird, fruitless circles of laziness, but I
do know that I'm starting to suspect there might be a god after all, and his name might be Linksys.
I also took some pictures of
Ever sleeping this morning only mine turned out fuzzy and dark because I didn't want to use the flash so I was bracing my camera on my sleepy arm for the nine and a half seconds it took to get each shot. Stace assured me that Ever is a camera nymph and the flash doesn't affect her, but if I know anything about babies (oh, and I don't) it's that you DO NOT JEOPARDIZE THE STILLNESS.
And I haven't seen a single moose.
I'm officially in Canada and having a blast and really I'm posting right now purely
because I said I would.
Two Things That Are Quietly Disturbing Me About Canada:
1) I still can't get anyone to tell me how many inches are in a litre (how am I supposed to buy gasoline?), and
2) the toilets don't flush backward like I thought they would.
Proper Voting Eti-quit-it.
I didn't take my glasses when I went to vote today so I was hunched over inside my plastic booth trying to read the miniscule print like a bullfrog. The guy in the neighboring plastic booth smiled and offered to let me use his reading glasses.
"I'm almost through," he said.
I laughed. "No, I'm used to it. I always forget mine."
And then a minute later, trying to keep the
camaraderie alive, I leaned out of my cube again.
"Hey," I whispered. He looked over and grinned. "Do you want to be State Mine Inspector? I'll totally write you in."
Apparently he wasn't interested. So I wrote myself in. You're probably looking at the next State Mine Inspector-slash-State Senator-slash-Arizona Governor right now. I sure hope that pay raise proposition goes through.
Monday! The Day I Showered But It Totally Doesn't Look Like It!
I hear "Two and a Half Men" is on tonight so I need to hurry and pound this out so I can go drown myself.
1) I'm making roast beef sandwiches with onions and mushrooms for dinner, and it's going just really, really poorly. I don't know... the mushrooms won't cook and have weird spots on them, I tried to slice the onion with my eyes closed... it's just bad. I should seriously get back in the kitchen in a minute. What time is it?
2) "
The Class" is on right now and some chick has both legs in casts. I can't believe the whole "seriously maimed" demographic has been humming under the radar all this time.
3) It was just brought to my attention that the remote control I've been using to adjust the television volume for the last hour doesn't have any batteries in it. Next I'll probably find out my vodka tonic is really just
tonic-tonic and how am I going to explain why I'm crying jaggedly on the couch with my shirt off
then?
4) Yesterday one of my bosses from my
previous gig came to my house and dropped off a box of crap that I'd left at work. When I quit. In February. A box that I deliberately packed, kicked under the cubicle, and walked away from whistling. A box with a half a bottle of grainy gourmet balsamic vinegar in it. Some cans of soup, a flower vase with a line of crust water demarcation...
prizes, really. I was a little surprised she didn't come to the door and say "hey", but I guess my brilliant decision to tell her about this website sort of reduced our relationship to the "drive by and throw a box of shit in your garage" level.
5) I'm going to Canada on Wednesday to see
Stace and Sean and Ever. Okay, so... it's Vancouver. And it's November. How many pairs of flip flops do I need to take? Randy's sweet daughter understands my deep-seated love of the flop so she laughed and told me three. And then reminded me to pack my bathing suit.
Michelle suggested I bring just one pair of flops and twenty pairs of toe socks. Stace reminded me to bring a winter coat, so I need to remember to pack my tank tops. From what I've been able to ascertain, "zero degrees Celsius" is like 59 degrees Frankenstein (I can't spell "
Fahrenheit" and I really don't have
time to look it up), so brrrrrr!
6) I just had to loudly remind Randy that the plant sitting in the sink isn't trash. Yeah. Might be trash.
7) Goddamn, I'm hungry.
You know it's good stuff when you really want to kill yourself.
Last weekend Randy and I decided to go up north. We had heard that not only were there leaves up there, but that those leaves were in the process of-- get this-- changing colors.
"Yeah, right," I laughed, applying SPF 65 to my face with one hand and fist-fighting a scorpion with the other.
Randy finished spearing our rattlesnake dinner on its spit and squinted up at me. The sun had set about an hour ago so in another ten minutes we could take off our sunglasses.
"I know we'd planned to spend tomorrow painting burnt-orange kokopellis on our adobe walls and crafting turquoise jewelry from hand-forged silver," he said, plucking a lone cactus spine from his boot spur, "but let's go to Sedona instead. And prove those sons of bitches wrong."
"Excellent. I'll go saddle up the horses," I replied. A split-second before I remembered I was just making all of this crap up.
We did drive up north, though. But in a car because we don't have any horses and even if we did I'm not sure I'd want to ride inside of one for any extended period of time. Finding changing leaves in Arizona is like trying to corner one of the Hilton sisters in a nightclub-- you always just missed them-- but we lucked out on the West Fork Trail.
And after almost three hours of hiking through the colors of this pulsating forest with a million years of majestic red mountain quietly staring us down, I can honestly say I was completely at peace and fulfilled. Not fulfilled in the sense that I was in any way sated because I wasn't, I was fucking starving to death and clawing my throat out from rabid thirst, but fulfilled in a gut empty, almost crying way. And any fifteenth-century European monk will tell you that's definitely the best way.
Although now that I think about it, "frequency" might not be the primary issue.
You can tell it's been too long since you swept the house when 85% of what you sweep up has to be set free.
Twoxieme years of English. That's a lot.
Last night Randy and I were watching TV and there was a brief French conversation interjected into the show's dialogue. And when Randy asked me-- the person with approximately nine years of French class under her... skin-- to interpret what they were saying, instead of rolling my eyes with the exhaustive effort of pulling my hearty supply of extraordinary knowledge out of
my ass and making up the entire conversation off the top of my head, I looked at him blankly.
"The only French conversation I can translate, Baby," I said, "Is the one where a person looks directly at the camera and slowly recites all of the numbers between one and seventy-six. In order." I added.
"And... that's not what's happening here, I gather."
I looked at the screen with my mouth open. "No." I answered, confident. "Those are whole sentences."
Nine years of intense language training means that most of the time I can tell when someone's counting. (If you interpret holding the record for absences through all four years of high school French and then writing verb conjugations on your forearms for every college French final as "intense". Which I totally do, and I know what I'm talking about because I took like twelve years of English.)
Halloween Pictures: The One Thing I Forgot To Strip From My Office PC.
Looking at all your Halloween pictures and costumes and everything made me wonder when exactly I became the Spinster Aunt of Halloween. It didn't even occur to me to dress up this year.
"Why don't we ever dress up for Halloween?" I whined to Randy. "We" being code for "me" which is really code for "you", as in: "if there's something new wrong with me it's totally your fault".
"'Ever'?" Randy echoed. "You mean since last year?"
Ah. Nice catch, Randy. You're officially off the hook for when I locked my keys in my car last week. I did dress up last year, for the office contest. As the ocean. Oh yes. It was either that or go as "Fired!" and I was pretty much going as that every day. Allow me to break it down.
1) If you're thinking about dressing up as the ocean, quit it.
2) Okay! If you're thinking about dressing up as the ocean, first you need to have some kind of tentative grasp of the magnitude of the ocean as an entity, the enormity of it, and you need to try to visualize all of the mysterious facets of the ocean and maybe meditate on how you're going to incorporate all of its overwhelming life and history and majesty into one simple, humble costume. In short, you need to figure out what's going to be the sand part, what's going to be the wavy part, and what's going to be the middle part.
3) Sand Part: This was a pretty easy part. I glued a bunch of seashells on some white socks with airplane glue. It's important you realize here that I don't mean model airplane glue, I mean glue that Boeing uses to glue actual fucking airplanes together. And not "together" in the sense that "one airplane part plus another airplane part equals more of a whole airplane", but "together" like sometimes aeronautical engineers get bored and glue one entire airplane ON TOP of another entire airplane just because they can't get over how strong this goddamned glue is. I wouldn't harp on the glue so much if my feet hadn't been freezing inside their shell-wrapped cocoons thanks to the relentless chemical fusing process, and also if I could wiggle my toes independently right now.
4) Middle Part: The Middle Part made the Sand Part look like cake. Icy, pointy cake with the toxicity of a mercury sno-cone, but cake just the same. The Middle Part was a blue Hanes sweatsuit from Target covered in foam sea creature stickers that I bought in an enormous plastic container. As I began the sticker application I became slowly convinced that I had to apply all of the sea creatures or I wouldn't be wholly representative of the ocean. All of the lobster stickers ganged up in a shellfish posse around my sweat-ankles, the octopi hovered thither and yon, and I was pretty good about sticking the little clown fish stickers around the little coral reef stickers for about fifteen minutes until my focus made its inevitable slow crawl from quality to quantity. As my focus is so very wont to do.
5) Wavy Part: I almost can't talk about the Wavy Part without getting weepy. Any scientist worth his nametag lanyard can tell you that the most important aspect of the ocean-- both sociologically and philosophically-- is the Wavy Part. By, like, a lot. Now given that the Sand Part is my feet and the Middle Part is my body, it stands to reason that the Wavy Part should be my head. See? See what I did there? That's how they do it in Science.
I bought the biggest styrofoam disk that Michael's sold-- I don't even know how big it was, maybe 16, maybe 18 THOUSAND INCHES in diameter-- so that I could create the surface of the ocean on top of this flat base and then (yes) strap it to the top of my head.
I know.
So I mounded a desert island out of brown clay on top of the disk toward the edge, covered the clay island with actual sand, and then secured a gigantic fake terrarium palm tree from Petsmart to it.
Next I formed waves over the rest of the disk with varying shades of blue play dough. I was remarkably bad at this part, but it didn't matter because I was in that Zone that people go into when they're in the middle of passionately creating something imaginative. You know, half "I can't believe I just spent twenty-seven dollars on a plastic tree for a lizard" and half "I hope everyone else feels like a fucking idiot when they see how awesome this is". It's good stuff.
I walked around the office the whole day dripping weak purple lobsters in my wake and shaky-arm struggling to hold the forty-pound Wavy Part up off my head long enough for my brain to stop hemorrhaging. Most people guessed that I was a blue mushroom because I'm 5' 7" and only six people could actually see what the fuck was on my head, three people in my department had to go to Urgent Care with acid burns after touching my shell socks, and for the first time in ten years the office decided to spontaneously forgo the annual costume contest and just keep the hundred dollar cash money prize. Presumably to buy four-and-a-half fake palm trees for the office terrarium.
So! In a nutshell! That's why I didn't dress up this year. My creative soul was slapped in the face by corporate America, and what's worse I totally hate science now. Yeah. So thanks a lot for reminding me, Randy. Way to go.
I Can't Believe No One Else Has A Solar Powered Bird Feeder.
We haven't had a single trick-or-treater come to our house in five years. I guess that's the lonely price we pay for living in the middle of an unkempt horse pasture in a decrepit, low-eaved slump block house covered in ivy. (The "ivy" part sounds kind of nice, I know, until you grab the clippers one day and decide to maybe cull it back a little-- just enough to, say, see out one of the windows-- and you quickly come to the screeching, sprinting realization that the ivy is not just ivy but rather a clinging, growing, pulsating green shield between you and the unfathomably large insects living on the surface of the house. And that you love ivy. Fuck a bunch of daylight in the kitchen, anyway.)
But at least during the day you can tell the difference between a graceful black horse and a rambunctious four-legged ninja, between a solar-powered bird feeder and a tiny, low-flying UFO, between a male black widow spider under the mostly empty abandoned hot tub (harmless) and a female black widow spider in the mostly empty abandoned keg shell (deadly). At least during the day you can swat at things. At night all bets are off. We used to have a streetlight but our nextdoor neighbor two miles away swore he saw a pterodactyl hovering around the halogen so he shot it out with a pellet gun. We thought the lamps on our front porch were merely burned out but when I replaced the lightbulbs I realized with horror that the bulbs themselves were fine, but something had gnawed through the wiring. It's scary out here, seriously. If I leave to go to the grocery store or something and it's dark when I get back? Fuck it, I'm not getting out of my car. I just give up and go to a hotel. Halloween, you say? A night for us like any other-- except that it's the only night of the year it looks like we went to any festive effort.
Given this, imagine my surprise when the doorbell rang ten minutes ago. I was watching King of the Hill with a mouthful of sandwich... I didn't even immediately remember it was Halloween; my body spontaneously went into its everyday "Ring Ring! Creditors!" default mode and I was hunkered on the floor of the bathroom in bankruptcy lockdown before it dawned on me that Discover Card doesn't come to your house.
And what's worse, it was still early and pretty light outside so odds are that it was cute little round baby-kids-- keyed up first-timers-- with handmade costumes and both parents in tow, just beside their little round baby-kid selves to finally be old enough to knock on the doors of the few houses we've got in this residential zoning nightmare we call a neighborhood and yet too young to have developed a healthy irrational fear of ivy. They probably hiked for twenty minutes down the street, through the weeds, pulling out a GPS every now and then for city limit reference, and I bet the mom spied our frowning, lightless house on the horizon and said, "Oh. I know this woman. She was running down the street one day trying to flail a lizard out of her hair and I happened to be outside shooing a javelina away from my lantana with the weedwacker." And then the baby-kids probably jumped around a lot while their capes got fixed and shit, and dad replaced the battery in his camcorder and set the thing to zoom from his stance on the sidewalk three hundred yards in front of our house.
Inside of which I was sitting on the hall bathroom toilet with half a Blimpie's sub hanging out of my mouth, listening to the hopeful ding-dong! of the doorbell (evidently we've managed to salvage some of our wiring), and lamenting the fact that I'm now apparently a woman who ignores small children even when they aren't being patently annoying. And also a woman who puts off buying Halloween candy until never.
It's quiet again now. I've decided I should get out of here for the night; it's getting dark and I don't think I have time to get safely to Safeway and back with a bag of Tootsie Pops, so I'll just go whole javelina. I can either: a) go to my parents' house. They live in a remarkably well-lit area with paved driveways and street lights and Terminex. Yeah. It's pretty nice. They've also proven themselves to be particularly adept at showing favor to small children regardless of their annoyance emissions and they also answer the door every single time without hiding in the bathroom first. (I don't know how, they just do.) Or, b) go to some secret gymnasium that's taking in crotchety people with bad credit histories tonight, someplace where I can sit in the dark and titter to Raymond while plucking lint balls off my cardigan and sucking on lemon candy. Is there such a place? I would check the newspaper but it's still on the front stoop. It's hard to tell through all this ivy but it looks pretty dark out there. You go look and then tell me. I'll be in the pantry.
Last weekend Randy and I decided to go up north. We had heard that not only were there leaves up there, but that those leaves were in the process of-- get this-- changing colors.
And after almost three hours of hiking through the colors of this pulsating forest with a million years of majestic red mountain quietly staring us down, I can honestly say I was completely at peace and fulfilled. Not fulfilled in the sense that I was in any way sated because I wasn't, I was fucking starving to death and clawing my throat out from rabid thirst, but fulfilled in a gut empty, almost crying way. And any fifteenth-century European monk will tell you that's definitely the best way.