Like crabs from a comforter.
To whoever got here by Googling, "should I go back to school and quit dealing blackjack?":Someone needs to spend a little
more time shuffling and a little
less time listening to his mom.
To whoever got here by Googling, "can you catch an std from the speculum at the gynecologist?":No, honey. But you can
say you did.
SWEET.
Randy left this morning to take his daughter's bedroom furniture to her in San Diego. I'm sitting on the couch in my pajamas, watching Back to the Future and eating chocolate chips out of a coffee mug. He left me $20 to order a pizza for dinner and I'm pretty excited about that. Part of me thinks it's weird that at 31 years old I respond to my boyfriend leaving town the same way I responded when my parents left me with a babysitter at age ten, but hey-- the other part of me thinks I might have enough to swing some breadsticks and a two-liter of coke.
Someone please, PLEASE ask me who writes the Low Seismic Activity Newsletter.
Every morning Randy takes a bath in the bathtub because he is a little girl, and every two or three mornings I dash in and out of the stand-alone shower because I'm an eleven-year-old boy. Last week sometime, Randy ran out of shampoo down at the My Little Pony lagoon so keeps creeping into the shower and swiping mine. As it turns out, I am even less likely to jump out of the shower naked to traipse across my shuffleboard bathroom floor in pursuit of a bottle of runaway Pantene than I am to actually buy another bottle of shampoo. Meanwhile I’m biding my time, rationing my travel sizes and banking on Randy running out of conditioner soon so we can begin formal negotiations. Yesterday I sat down to write a note to last week’s interviewer. I needed to do something to jumpstart the situation, and sending a vial of tears and a medal of St. Jude seemed a little over the top. Or, at the very least, premature. So I pulled out this fancy packet of monogrammed notecards and a new Bic pen and I thought about what I wanted to say, and then I omitted like fourteen please-s and got to work. But something happens between my brain and my hand when I have something important to write down-- my hand kind of closes up like a monkey fist and everything comes out looking vaguely like a seismograph of Topeka. I’m a fan of no earthquakes and all, but offhand I can’t think of anyone who’s ever glanced at day's worth of horizontal earthquake activity for Kansas and then immediately thought, “Wow, you're hired.” The harder I tried, the worse it got, too. My hand cramped up like a raccoon paw wrapped around an Otter Pop and I must have thrown away ten of those cards. After forty minutes I finally had something resembling words and I jammed it in an envelope and went with it. Whatever. It probably won’t even matter because my name will be totally untranslatable and she’ll wrack her brain trying to remember when she interviewed a nine-year-old gorilla. Either that or: "Hey! My Low Seismic Activity Newsletter finally made it!"
Tag! Again.
It looks like I've been tagged by
Mister Crunchy for this Eight Things meme. I thought I'd already done this once, but no.
That was Seven Things. Completely different, as it turns out, from Eight Things. I worry about Nine Things rolling around, I worry I'll be out of Things.
1) On Saturday I was sitting on the couch in my quitter pants ransacking epicurious.com when my mom called. Turns out she'd made crab cakes, roumelade, gazpacho, peel and eat shrimp, roasted corn, blue cheese cole slaw, and a giant fruit salad. For two people. It's officially
genetic. Deliciously, deliciously genetic. Randy isn't a fan of the crab cake,
as I've previously noted, and to this I say BAH. It's crab and it's cake! What's
wrong with you?
2) Today's my brother's birthday! How old are you now, twenty-two? No, TWENTY-
NINE. Wow.
That's depressing. Happy birthday anyway, I guess.
TWO BOOKS THAT ARE SO CRAZY GOOD THEY PISSED ME OFF A LITTLE:3) Joey Comeau's
It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry. Ridiculously good. So good at a couple different points you'll want to throw it. So good I carried it around in my purse until I finished it and then immediately went online and
bought his novel. I'm sure it'll be devestatingly great too. Fucker.
4) Pat Hughes'
Diary of Indignities. So good I made myself stop reading it for a while so I wouldn't finish it. There's a chapter near the end called "I Sat In Some Gum" that I read out loud to Randy. In it's entirety. I'm pretty sure he couldn't understand me-- I was laughing so hard I was drooling-- but my god, it was funny. Fucker.
5) I recently offered to host my soon to be sister-in-law's bridal shower, their wedding reception,
and a Christmas party for 250 people. I don't know why. But trust me when I tell you we've got some shit to
do. Randy got all ahead of himself and rented a commercial-grade tractor and aerator, came home and spent three hours wrecking the entire yard. He couldn't have been more destructive if he'd been herding cattle with a Suburban. He apparently forgot there's a line of buried electrical cable around the perimeter of the yard, too, that keeps the dog from leaving. Whoops! Not anymore, there's not! Nice job, Lucy. Thanks for helping.
6) I interviewed for a job I MUST HAVE last week. It was a fantastic interview (I
thought, I mean I wore my best fishnets and gorilla mask) but I haven't heard anything yet and I'm getting nervous. If I don't get it, I'm going to drive my car off an overpass. I'm just saying. Public service announcement. Stay off the I-17.
7) I just found out (via the Underground Fast Food Inside Scoop You're Ridiculous Newsletter, July Edition) that Jack in the Box has a grilled cheese sandwich. What's for lunch today? That.
8) Guess who hasn't been to the gym in weeks. I'll give you a hint: it's me. Easy hint, but I don't have time to jack around. I'm late for work and I need a sandwich.
Tagged:
Colleen,
Elise,
Amanda,
Emily,
Mathew,
Bossy,
Mia, and
iamnot.
Kayak Valet: $10. Kayak Self-Park: Seven Hours.
One morning at Lake Powell I got up early and took a jet ski to the back of our cove to cruise the slot canyons. All those narrow, winding finger canyons that go on forever, the rock walls tall and close. Although I might have felt a trifle closer to the majesty had I not been perched essentially on a floating purple lawn mower, trying not to gag on two-stroke fumes. Sitting there, eyes burning, I started thinking about kayaks, and how a kayak would really allow a person to see these canyons in the perfect capacity-- low and quiet and with a stable oxygen supply. I wondered where I could rent a kayak and, more importantly, where I could rent a kayak with a small outboard or a jib or a chauffeur or something. Then I held my nose and sped back to the boat because with nineteen
In Touch magazines on board, the "Team Jolie versus Team Aniston" debate sessions were scheduled every hour on the quarter hour and by god,
someone had to be there to scream "HOMEWRECKER".
I'm going to take kayak lessons on Tempe Town Lake, is my point. In August. They're beginner level classes, so I'm psyching myself up for a challenge. It's no doubt going to be disastrous. I'm very excited.
What DOESN'T it go on, that's a better question.
The only thing Randy and I fight about over the Lake Powell trip (aside from the fact that I never really feel like having sex knowing I'm closely surrounded by seventeen other people-- three of whom are the Fruits of Randy's Loom-- but I didn't say I
wouldn't, I just said I
didn't really feel like it, so pretty much quit whining and welcome to any weekday since 2000) is how much food to bring.
Randy and I sit on opposite poles of the food compass. If food were a geographical concept, I would be the Prime Meridian of food, and Randy would be warm expired cold cuts lying on an atlas. Tonight, for example. Tonight I made a pot of homemade pasta sauce. I doubled the olives and added an extra can of tomatoes. The only people who will be here to eat that pasta sauce are Randy and me, and Randy a) is on a diet forbidding pasta, and b) hates the crap out of this particular pasta sauce. There's a barrel of sauce bubbling in a cauldron on the stove right now, and I'll be honest: I don't even feel like eating. So if this is how much food I make when I'm cooking for
no one, you can't begin to comprehend how much food I'll make if there's one other person in my vicinity holding a fork. It's incalculable.
Randy. Randy once
ate milk to prove to his kids it was still good. I once watched Randy-- from the other room, mind-- eat three-week old KFC cole slaw and not die. Randy's going to walk through the door tonight, he's going to make a passing comment about how my pasta sauce sucks, change into Red Shorts, pour a glass of wine and eat seven cashews for dinner. Maybe some sliced turkey if we've got some in there that's changing colors. If food were electrical energy, I would be Ampère's Circuital law, and Randy would be a bag of brown, liquid lettuce holding a flashlight.
Every year I try to be rational, I do. And I've gotten a lot better; you think I
like running around the boat on Day Seven quietly pouring runny cottage cheese and bad Yoplait over the side? No, of course I don't. But something about shopping with a man who thinks a package of six hot dogs will adequately feed five people really brings out my inner Depression-era farmer.
Chips, for example. Bags of tortilla chips are big and bulky and fragile, and we always buy two bags and then focus on ice. But Chris's girlfriend, Erin
2, makes this cheese dip every year that not only has the power to cure a broken heart, but may actually be the secret to immortality. I don't know, I haven't died yet so I'm still testing the theory. She also makes a salsa from this recipe handed down to her by a four-hundred-year-old mystic salsa sage. I had something in my eye one time and I poured a little salsa in there? Fixed it right up. My point here is that by the middle of Day Two, we're scooping up cheese and salsa with playing cards. We needed more chips this year. More chips were not negotiable. Erin
2 and I bombarded Randy during the Kitchen Table List Making Phase; I suggested we buy stock in Frito Lay, while Erin
2 tried to work the logistics of actually setting sail on a giant corn chip.
"Okay," Randy said, palms up, "We'll get one thousand bags of chips. One thousand." I wrote it down. Big. With some stars.
He welched, of course, and in the checkout lane he refused to go higher than six gigantic bags. I
knew he wasn't good for a thousand. I
knew we should have built a seventy-five foot corn chip barge. Sixteen wary eyeballs stared him down, sixteen eyeballs sick of sucking cheese off UNO cards.
"It's not going to be enough," I said, shaking my head. "Maybe like five hundred bags. I could work with five hundred." Erin
2 buried her head in her hands. All was lost. I briefly considered eating all six bags right there in the checkout lane, just to make a point. Each bag was roughly four feet tall. I worried the whole drive to the marina about the chips needing regulation car seats.
We ate chips like no one has ever eaten chips before. We dipped and double-dipped until the cheese dip was empty and we moved on to the salsa. When the salsa was gone, we triple-dipped our way through nachos, enchiladas, and fajita night. I scooped up mashed potatoes, I scooped up macaroni and cheese, I scooped up other, smaller corn chips.
At the end of the week, gums punctured and bleeding, tongue shriveled with salt, I had to admit defeat. We had two and a half bags of chips left, and anything soft enough to jam a corn chip in it had already been violated and conquered. I had a fleeting vision of Randy forcing me to eat the remaining eight pounds on the ride home, but it turns out watching me eat seventeen tiny peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on corn chips was revenge enough. Erin
2 and I contritely agreed that three bags would be more than enough next year. Someone made a note somewhere, a small note, with no stars. But! (we silently concurred), there's no
way we'll make it through next year without at least 116 ounces of sour cream.
Which is funny, because that's almost ALWAYS the point.
I walked out to my car this morning and there was a bra hanging from the passenger side mirror. It's
my bra, sure, but somehow that's not the point.
Ouija Scrabble: Perfect For Contacting Dorks Beyond The Grave.
A few years ago, we took another couple and their two kids with us to the lake. Great kids, a boy and a girl, real "please" and "thank you" types. Broccoli eaters,
Harry Potter readers, nap takers. My favorite kind. Jessica was eight or nine and Toby was six, I think, and the only thing in the world they wanted to do-- aside from eat broccoli and sleep in a cape all day-- was ride the jet skis. They were both too little to ride by themselves, so an adult had to be willing to ride shotgun. For eleven straight hours. Apparently that whole "little bit goes a long way" rule doesn't hold a lot of water with the under-ten set. I generally consider myself to be above to way-above average when it comes to ignoring the pleas of children, but I'd never seen anything like these powers of persuasion. Their conjoined longing oozed out their pores and permeated the air with the faint odor of two-stroke oil. We were at the table, the adults, playing Scrabble, when I spelled "
pleeease" totally against my will. Ouija Scrabble. I looked over my shoulder, and there they were. Draped lethargically over the arms of the couch, life jackets cinched up to their ears. Feigning innocence like only the genuinely innocent can.
I'd take Jessica out three or four times a day, riding on the seat behind her within quick reach of the controls. She liked to ride with me because I let her steer. Or, more accurately, she liked to ride with me because I'm stupid. I guess I'd assumed all girl-folk were engineered like me, with a socially debilitating set of self-preservation instincts in place by grade four. But Jess was tough, one of those kids who's made out of rubberbands, and she was only happy riding at Mach nine; once she figured out how to turn a 360-degree circle at top speed, it was all over. I held onto her life vest with a locust death grip, knowing if she threw me off she'd either run me over trying to save me or high cackle her way into the sixty-mile-an-hour sunset.
One evening, we'd been riding for three or four hours, probably, and things were starting to wind down. The machine was low on gas and so, miracle of all miracles, was this child. She took us out into the channel for maybe the thousandth time and shut the power, staring up at a giant rock face.
"See that butterfly?" Jess asked, turning to me as far as her life jacket allowed. She pointed to the mountain, to an enormous erosion in the rock that did look surprisingly like a butterfly. I hadn't noticed before.
"That's how we know where we are," she said. "That's how we know how to get home."
I loved so many things about that tiny exchange. I loved that after three or four days Jessica equated the houseboat with "home", an eight-year-old's easy and enviable transference of an entire small, secure world. I loved that the shape discovered was a butterfly. How utterly appropriate for this girl. And as we bobbed in circles, looking at the rocks-- the engine off, my ears and cicada claws relaxing-- I loved that for the first time in four hours I wasn't seconds from a watery 360° grave.
If memory serves, I was charmed for approximately ten minutes. At which point I took Toby out for a ride, and the little maniac shook me off and kept on going. Gleefully howling like first-degree just made parole.
Anybody Want To Play Crazy Eights? Come On, Half-Penny a Point!
We're officially on our annual Lake Powell houseboat vacation, the trip so consistently awesome that all we can talk about on the way home is how we can't wait to go to Lake Powell next year. We’re nine people this trip, three of whom are named Erin. I keep suggesting all the Erins mash our heads together to see if we can get some Wonder Twin action happening, but no one’s down. Erin 2 and Erin 3 claim this is because I can’t add, but I suspect it’s because their combined age is less than 45 and they think the Wonder Twins are two loaves of white bread side by side.
This year I am parlaying my advanced age into a Sit Down Ticket; you girls go ahead and tie all that shit up and down and unpack and unload and carry fifty-seven bags of ice on your head, for I am geriatric and I need to read “E” through “M” of the Susan Grafton books between now and next Friday.
“Please, you’re forty-five minutes older than we are,” Chris, Randy’s middle son, pointed out. He was carrying something heavy at the time, so I made a point of holding my lower back and searching cabinets for Metamucil.
Four months ago, I started spouting my standard noble shpiel about hiking and skiing every day, taking in-depth advantage of our immersion in nature, real break of dawn type armageddon shit. So far The Whippersnappers have been skiing twice, wakeboarding once, and Erin 3 and Chris are organizing a canyon exploration posse.
Hi, I’m on the internet. After this, I’m thinking about maybe setting up a game of solitaire that takes up the entire kitchen table so no one else can use it for three days. Complaining that the stereo’s too loud, campaigning for a little James Taylor “Something in the Way She Moves” on repeat action. Putting a Bloody Mary in the microwave because the ambient air temperature is 113 and I need something refreshing to cool off.
If it's more than $17 I'm going to need an advance on my Powerball IRA.
A couple of years ago I bought a house. I'm not sure why, except that Randy's in real estate and according to him I needed a house in my repertoire. I'm guessing it's because I have roughly $17 in my 401k, and Randy-- being generally smarter than I am and knowing how to count higher than forty-three-- periodically stares headlong into our future and is consequently overwhelmed with panic. I don't know what the big deal is; seventeen dollars earning interest for the next thirty-five years is going to be
plenty to live on, and that's if I don't win the Powerball which I absolutely am. I mean seriously, over thirty-five years what are the odds that I
won't? I tried to explain the mathematical certainty of this to Randy, but halfway through my presentation I ran out of "jackpot" paperclips and Randy's left eye was twitching too badly to see much, anyway.
If a person's wealth is at all relative to the sort of house he or she owns, then clearly I have less in my 401k than I thought. This is my house:
Click on the horror for more horror. The good news is I got it at a great price-- the
Blair Witch had to get the hell out of town so she let it go for a song. The bad news is, uh, I got it.
"I just hope she took all her little flannel-wrapped innards and twisted twig people out of the trees before she left," I joked to Randy. He pointed to the only tree on the property.
Oh. So she did, then. Great.
The house was built in 1648. According to public records, it was built in 1929 but that can't be right. The home inspector agreed.
"Oh, I'd say 13th, 14th century," he speculated, scraping the top layer of paint off a foundation that appeared to be wholly constructed out of mud daubers. "Sometime before we had levels or electricity or units of measurement. Or wheels."
"Should I worry about asbestos? Or lead-based paint?"
"Oh, noooo." He waved his hand dismissively and I visibly relaxed. "I mean, we're all going to die
someday, you know? No point in worrying how." Right about then, three shaky kids with backpacks and a video camera showed up and I had to shoo them away with a broom.
Later, when I called my insurance company to see about getting a homeowner's policy, the agent asked me about the electricity: "Is it 220 or 110?"
"It's 60," I answered. She asked me again. It's either 220 or 110. I stuck with 60. We did this like eight times.
"Look," I snapped, "It's 60. It's 60 AC. It's an old house (true), an old woman lived there alone for fifty years (true), and all she did was watch Wheel of Fortune and kill campers (true and probably true). She didn't need a lot of power." We can't
all have enough electricity to run a hair dryer and a carving knife at the same time.
So I fixed the house up to the best of my ability-- meaning I covered up as much of the underlying nightmare as possible with paint and carpet-- and I signed a tenant, Mary. Mary needs to be legally reminded to pay the rent most months, but she doesn't make a lot of superfluous, bullshit demands like having a bathroom sink that works, either, so I like to think we have a good working relationship.
I got a call from Mary a couple of weeks ago. This was rare; usually Mary is on the receiving and non-answering end of our phone call tree. But apparently there's a bee situation I needed to be apprised of. In the backyard. Bees.
"Really? How many?" Ridiculous question in hindsight; Mary is not a bee-tagger by trade, and even if she were, any number higher than forty-three is going to make exactly the same impression on me: lotta bees.
"Oh, I don't know," she answered. "Like in the evenings? At dusk? I'd say anywhere from five to seven hundred."
That's like forty times my 401k in bees.
"Wow," I said. "That's... a shitload of bees."
"And they've been here since I moved in," she went on, "but now there's a lot more. I have people over sometimes and they won't leave." It dawned on me then that this wasn't primarily a bee problem-- the bees have been there two years, after all -- but rather an "overstay your welcome" problem. I'm sure I would have found it funny if I didn't now have to figure out what to do with seven hundred bees because Mary was ready for bed and some pussy dinner guest refused to make a run for it.
So I called a bee guy. A guy specializing in bee removal. He went out and investigated the situation, and when he called me afterward I could tell he was amped. If you're a bee guy looking to challenge your bee wrangling skills, look no further. First of all, Mary was conservative in her estimate. Secondly, the bees appear to be using the fuse box as their base of command operations, and the actual hive is somewhere behind the box, inside the wall.
"So what I'm gonna have to do," Bee Guy jabbers, "is get the power company involved, see if they can shut the power off for a day or two so I can get back there. I'll have to bring some smoke in and lay 'em down-- and we'll do this in the middle of the night when they're quieter-- and then I'll start drilling holes in the wall until I find the queen and then part of that wall's gonna probably have to come down and let's just hope they aren't in the attic crawlspace and you might want to send a letter around to the neighbors for a couple block radius letting them know you're going to have a massive angry hive on the run here and..." I stopped listening.
I can't even imagine what this is going to cost. What if we just put some Silly Putty over the holes? Hey, it worked with the kitchen plumbing. Mainly I'm just pissed the Blair Witch tore my only tree down; I'm guessing knocking a hive out of a tree with a broom costs a lot less than a commando midnight crawlspace tear down. I don't even want to
think about how many dead campers he's going to find in there.
You should see Compaq's new PDA. It's 100% hamster powered, which is cool because it's always on vibrate.
Last Friday
Harkins opened a movie theater in Tempe that isn't attached like a popcorn tumor to a shopping mall, so now I can officially go to movies. I'd like to know who thought putting 258 mass retail stores, 42 restaurants,
and a 24-screen cinema on the same half-mile block was a good idea. If half the city's population disappears and the remaining half doesn't drive, there will
almost be enough parking. So essentially if there's ever a
War of the Worlds situation, the first thing on my agenda (after running really fast) is to head over to Chandler Fashion Mall for some platform espadrilles, maybe grab a bite at California Pizza Kitchen, and then see what's playing on Screen 16. It will be the first time I'll have done all three of those things concurrently without taking a failed swing at someone. I can't wait.
In the meantime, before the aliens get here and start cleaning house already, I can go to this whole other theater. Which I did, Saturday. Randy and I went to see
Die Hard: Live Free or Die Hard. I've been watching
Die Hard: With a Vengeance on repeat for something like eleven years, so I was understandably excited about this quadquel. And it was okay. It was good in the sense that it stayed true to its mutated "Everyman" roots; the common man can still dangle precariously above a fiery elevator shaft by two fingers of his left hand while playing a recorder with the other three, one against the world, good prevails, et cetera, et cetera. Plus, a whole lot of expensive shit got wrecked which is primarily what I was keeping tabs on.
Justin Long co-stars, the Bambi-eyed kid from the Apple commercials who plays the "Mac" faction of the famous-this-year "
Mac vs. PC" duel. A thirty-second character who oozes a pretension so wholly endearing, I'm always caught somewhere between fashionable amusement and smashing my Compaq Presario to pieces against the coffee table.
Watching "Mac"-- the resourceful, untucked minion of the sharper class-- bat his pterodactyl eyelashes for two and a half hours on the big screen, I found myself distracted by potential plot detours. I kept hoping at the end of the movie, when everything's lying in the usual ruin and the country's in crisis lockdown mode, John McClane and "Mac" would drive another SUV through another glass-front building only to find a dumpy guy in a brown Sears suit behind a bank of flaming computers.
"Oh," he'd say, waving with Cheetoh hands, "I was just trying to load FrameMaker 7.2 on my Vista operating system. Guess I really blew it
this time, hey?"
Mac would roll his bowling ball eyes and PC would try to clean his greasy glasses on a piece of used Kleenex but fall off his chair in a big messy heap instead. And then John McClane would shoot PC in the head four times. With one bullet.
That's not how it ended, disappointingly, but I'm holding out for a quintquel.
