I Only Had The Yellow Side To Go Before I Could Crawl Out And Not Burn To Death.
We've been out of town since last Thursday: Randy spent the first five minutes of the weekend rolling a sandcar at fifty miles an hour, I spent it strapped in the passenger seat upside-down, praying it was transmission fluid dripping in my hair, and Christopher spent it furiously freeing his father and me from our five-point harnesses which were apparently manufactured by
Rubicks.
I have more to say about that, but right now I'm still really tired.
In other news, I did my first tax return at work today. Pray it wasn't yours.
P.S.
Blogger just forced me to upgrade to their new version. It was exactly like that time I was scuba diving off Ambergris Caye and those two hammerhead sharks cornered me at the reef around sixty-five feet and tricked me into upgrading to Norton Anti-Virus Professional. Only this time I'm crying.
P.P.S.
My next tattoo. Somehow I think
Banjeroo won't be offended that I stole the idea. We'll make it a whole movement.
Okay, I seem to be having a lot of problems with this version of Blogger. Are you being directed to this page as usual? Or are you getting to
this page first? I'm not sure that what I'm seeing and what you're seeing is the same thing.
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This Is How Lazy**** I Am:
Every so often I manage to think of a semi-literate comment to post on your website, and sometimes when I'm done thinking and typing and spell-checking I get that spam-bot authorization thing where I have to type in a series of random letters and numbers.
And I just give up. Is that a "t" or an "f"? An "h" or a "4"? A "zero" or a... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Usually I wake up three hours later with desk-face, a backache, and a hankering for something easy.
So I call your mom.
**** and mean
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Locking Things 102: "Just Because It's Pointy Doesn't Mean It Goes in the Knob"-- An Introspective on Key Indentification
I was the last one to leave the office tonight, and as I just recently completed my mandated alarm code course--
Alarm Codes 201: Four Specific Numbers in Order-- I was left to lock everything up. ( I tried taking the 101 level course--
Alarm Codes 101: Any Four Numbers, Just Pick Some-- a couple of times during my eleven years of college, but I failed the midterm the first time with my final answer of "33F9" and then the second time I got caught with a phone book during the final. I finally just bought the Cliffs Notes.) So tonight I said a little prayer, punched in the code, spent nine minutes trying to lock the door by jamming a pencil in the knob, and then started down the hall.
There's this office across from mine, I think it might be a title or a mortgage company or something, and every night all the lights are turned off inside and there's a group of people sitting in the reception area watching a powerpoint presentation. I actually can't claim that it's
every night because let's face it, I'm generally what you call a "ten to three-er", but the nights I
have been there-- me and the ADT alarm team and the police-- they've been in there watching a powerpoint in the dark.
So tonight I'm curious, right, and I slow down when I'm passing the window and just then a woman about my age turns around in her chair and looks me in the eye through the vertical blinds. I stop in the hallway and look at her, sitting in a straight-backed chair in some finance lobby watching what looks suspiciously like a powerpoint on the
weather, and I widen my eyes and shrug my shoulders in that universal "Are you fucking kidding me right now?" way.
She knew exactly what I meant because (not to toot my own horn or anything) I really perfected that expression at my last job, that and jagged crying, and she reached her hand out toward the window and touched the glass. It was like I was looking at a prisoner in her cell, only some weird maybe privately-funded prison where the cells have windows and flat-screen monitors and Microsoft Office for Small Businesses. It was poignant, really, and when she pressed her face to the glass, vertical blinds banging her in the head, and mouthed the unmistakable words, "HELP ME," I started for her office door.
But then my training came rushing back: I may try to start my car with a hair comb on a semi-regular basis, and I may think "AWAY" on a touchpad means the same thing as "STAY", but I wrote the
book on corporate recruiting, Missy. Your mascara wasn't running... your skirt wasn't ripped... no wild dogs... You're good, Honey, but you're not that good.
They'll never take me alive.
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Rome wasn't built in thirty-one years. But it WAS probably built by people wearing shoes who got from place to place under their own power, whatever.
Because Randy and I have decided that tomorrow begins our New and Improved Lifestyle Of Exercise and Self-Restraint, today necessarily became the Day That We Eat Everything We Can See. Randy was busy chasing an entire loaf of sourdough bread with spoonfuls of hot fudge so I threw some socks on and announced I was hitting the In-N-Out drive-thru. He nodded. And then squirted an entire can of Rediwhip into his mouth.
So once I'd wolfed down my Double-Double cheeseburger in my car, I deduced that I still had a few minutes before it was time to eat something else and I decided I'd go to
Joann's to get some fabric. In my socks. Because it doesn't really matter. I said this to myself,
It doesn't really matter, pshaw and then I drove over to Joann's with the heater blowing on my feet while I snacked on the cardboard box my cheeseburger came in.
Who needs me to announce that it
does, in fact, matter? That it's inappropriate for a thirty-one year old woman to shop in a busy department store on a rainy Sunday afternoon
without shoes on? And standing in the entranceway of this very public place I had a sort of "moment of clarity"; I saw myself as the other, much more cognizant shoppers must have seen me-- dirty hair pulled back into a half-hearted ponytail, jeans with the cuffs walked off and the ass sat out, wet striped socks and a mouthful of cardboard-- and I realized then that I was something of a spectacle. A crazy person spectacle. As soon as I'd had this slap-in-the-face revelation I took a deep breath and realized that this embarrassing acknowledgment was the first step toward Sloth Recovery.
In hindsight, a good second step might have been to stop asking people if I could please ride in their shopping carts.
I don't know what the big deal is, I don't take up that much room.
Are you going to eat that napkin?
My feet are numb.
Seriously, I only needed to go like two aisles over.
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I have a short and long and middle-term memory problem.
I've been working at a small accounting firm for the last few months and I haven't really said anything about it primarily because I was
expressly asked not to during my interview. At which point I broke out in a cold sweat, smiled gravely, then ran home and deleted my previous post wherein I had written that I was going to the interview in jeans because my business suit didn't make it through the last exorcism and I had to set it on fire.
It's not even like a real
job; the schedule is so lax and the dress code so nonexistent that really it's more like I wake up in the morning and say, "Hey, I think I'll throw on what I wore yesterday and Monday and last Friday afternoon and go hang out somewhere for a completely indiscriminate amount of time to do some math." I mean, today I'm only going in because we're out of Diet Coke here at the house. I guess I could just go to the store, but where's the paycheck in that?
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In other news, one pillowcase is plenty.
Okay, it's done.
I think it's a sign you're really passionate about doing something when your goal evolves from a pleasant sense of self-satisfaction into a soul-clenching need to just get it
done already. Like oral sex, only without the fifty bucks at the end.
Click on the picture for close ups.
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Just to establish some kind of personal technology baseline.
Amount of time required for me to accurately rewind ten seconds of a recorded television program while under screeching and exasperated duress of multiple apparently ambidextrous surgeon-handed family members: eleven minutes.
Amount of time required for me to accurately rewind ten seconds of a recorded television program when I am alone in the room: two-and-a-quarter seconds.
Amount of time required for me to set the microwave to cook for twelve minutes on 50% power: six-and-a-half years and counting.
Amount of time required for me to set the microwave to cook for fifty hours on 12% power: fourteen seconds at 45% power.
Amount of time required for me to get Fergilicious to stop blaring from my car CD player after the ignition key is turned and my grandmother is established in the passenger's seat: roughly the speed of sound. All she heard was a loud "CLAP", her ears popped, and then there was a quick gush of wind followed by smooth jazz.
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Last night I crawled out from under a pile of thread knots to yawn and ask Chelsea what was for dinner. She sweetly offered up leftover salad from her dinner out the night before, and I would have asked her if she was sure- and also maybe said "thank you"-- if my mouth hadn't been crammed full of her leftover salad.
I'm pretty sure this act of generosity meant Chelsea was left to feast on half a stale english muffin and some water. Warm water. With sand in it. There was a piece of raw bacon stuck to the bottom of the crisper, she might have had that, too, I don't know, I went to bed. It's a sad state of affairs when the kid has to go
back to college to avoid starving to death. Randy agrees.
"How did she survive in this house for the whole summer?" he asked.
"Wait, she was here during the
summer?"
I'm so
nonmaternal; sometimes I worry that maybe I actually
have a baby and I just put it in the back bedroom to sleep and forgot about it. So I get up, paranoid, and I walk down the hall and open the door and big surprise! No forgotten baby!
Just that same unfamiliar five-year-old.
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Coming right along.
I'm currently working on a talon. I saved the talons for last. Like a reward.
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I mean, think of all those new mothers planning their Neanderthal layettes!
I think thirteen changes in climate in under a week has taken a pretty big chink out of my immunity armor... the inside of my head is green and liquifying and every time I sniff someone snaps a giant rubber band around my brain. For the past couple of nights both Randy and I have lied awake wishing my face would quit making so much noise. The first night I took some Nyquil and made a lot of noise. The second night I took some Nyquil and some wine and made a lot of noise. Last night I took some Nyquil, some wine, and some vicodin and slept like the proverbial dead. Vicodin, baby: I may not be getting any better, but hey-- who gives a shit.
Because my laptop is still on basic life support, flitting ever closer to that Windows Blue Safety Screen in the sky, I've been spending my evening TV-slash-internet time working on embroidering pillowcases. Randy's charity group has a huge Craft Auction at
this annual event, and there's always all this heavy pressure to show up at the ten or so preparatory "craft nights" and make hot glue candles or flower baskets or pudding or whatever and I always just end up deleting the eighty-four reminder emails so I don't have to go; if I can delete them fast enough it's like I never even got them! No, it's true. Try it. Blatant avoidance is the new subtle avoidance for 2007.
So this year I've decided that I'll embroider a couple of pillowcases and donate them to the Hot Glue Craft Pudding Fiesta in lieu of actually attending any of the meetings. Upon seeing the pillowcases in question Randy wondered allowed if it wouldn't be a better idea if I just kept not attending like I have for the past six years
and watched some hands-free TV. And if that seems like a somewhat discouraging response, I direct you yet again to
Blanket Cam. Randy simply acknowledges what I continue to deny-- that when it comes to crafts, I have a total and inalienable lack of taste and/or prudence. And/or talent. Proof:
1) The embroidery pattern now contains within its trembling lines no less than twenty-three colors.
2) Randy couldn't tell what the pattern depicted, exactly. When I explained that it was a picture of several primordial birds eating and digesting their own legs, he refused to believe me.
I have no doubt that this is going to be fabulous. And each time I jam the needle in my nailbed or have to bite a knot out of my plum thread, I just remind myself of how awesome it's going to be to watch these bad boys sell to the highest bidder. Pictures to follow. I want to get more of the EYES AND BEAKS done before I document the majesty.
Jesus, I hope my laptop is fixable.
I'm pretty sure my brain is swelling.
And not in the normal way.
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When you find that person who will act as a coyote sentry while you crap behind a shrub, you should hold on tight and never let her go.
Styro, I love you more than I can ever say. The entire time is a whirlwind blur of awesome and Tylenol PM and Miller High Life and thirteen climate changes. The primary catalyst of Styro's trip was to hang out with the
Tom Cruisers, the Arizona branch of her kickass Moped Army. They staged an apocalyptic mountain camp out about nine thousands miles out of any county's official jurisdiction, and Stryo and I opted out of the whole "shiver and convulse on the frozen ground while the coyotes hump your sleeping bag" route and just slept in the back of Randy's borrowed Tahoe, i.e.; The Hyatt. I can't imagine how I would have made it without a giant car to sleep in... it was still so cold and foreign that I woke up about every three hours to pop more Tylenol PM. You know, it's really, really fucking dark at six o'clock in the morning, and those pills
work, yo. I had just swallowed another handful by Maglite when Styro
finally found my phone and announced that it was after six in the morning, and that by ingesting my fourth fistful of sleeping pills I had just ensured that we'd be delaying our morning departure. By about seven thousand hours. I think I responded by yawning. See you in a few, then! PEACE OUT! It was cool, though. It gave her extra time to walk around and find all the shit she'd lost the night before (cell phone, camera, flashlight, anvil, moped, etc.).
By the time we made it to the Grand Canyon days later our blood was thinner than turpentine.
We walked along the ice-rimmed trail, heads spinning from the majesty and from mass anelgesics, stopping occasionally to almost fall in or to toss a rock that never landed or to debate whether the scat on the trail was from a coyote or a
Chupacabra. It was the absolute perfect ending to a death-defying trip. Styro, thanks for being the most awesome, fun girl in the world, and also for being The World's Most Incredible Houseguest. If you and the A-Man are ever in town, I hope you know that my house is your house any day of the week. I'll even see if I can round up another child-size prison cot somewhere.
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