Make it out of this Rivertown

I don’t even know where to begin. And they say if you don’t know where to begin you should just start at the beginning, which gets you halfway to begin. No one actually says this so just accept that I totally made it up. Because I’m a liar, and god hates liars.

Last Thursday night I was on day two of the Packing Spree, which is not to be confused with any other kind of Spree. This Spree had nothing to do festively coated Smarties-wannabees and everything to do with knocking over a liquor store and stealing all of their boxes. I’d been boxing up books for two nights and was contemplating having a Nazi-esque bonfire in the parking lot because those things are heavy and I’m damn tired of moving them. But then about eleven o’clock I realized I was done, done with the book packing! Huzah! So naturally I moved away from other packable objects because the paper cuts those liquor boxes can give you are just plain angry kittens. Hence, I found myself staring inside my wee little closet with a total sense of dejectedness.

I should first explain that I’m not an abominably messy person. I put my dishes in the dishwasher, I pick up my dirty clothes and I make my bed at least eight percent of the time. However, I hate washing clothes with a passion. Not so much because of the folding or hanging up, but because it’s wicked annoying lugging bags of dirty towels and sweaters into the car and across town to the laundromat. I have many stories from the laundromat, none of them good. As such, there tends to be a small laundry basket devoted to things I’m currently unwilling to wash, things like polar fleece sweaters from last spring or the heavy bathrobe I wore during the winter. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to rot away down there, so I just leave them languishing in their plastic basket until the time comes when I’m ready to sacrifice an extra hour doing laundry or it’s sleeting and I need a hoodie.

Because I was moving I thought it might be nice to start off with a clean slate, so I started pulling out the bags of normal laundry for separation into dark piles, darker piles and bleachable items. Then I pulled out the purple plastic basket that normally sits shoved in a dark corner with all my Lazy Laundry and started sorting it as well. Blue bathrobe into the dark pile, black jacket into the darker pile, green towel into the dark pile, dead rat in the EXCUSE ME WHAT IS THIS DOING IN MY LAUNDRY BASKET I HAVE NO ACCEPTABLE PILE FOR YOU UNLESS IT INVOLVES A HIGH SPEED BLENDER AND SOME BLEACH.

The nasty curled up monstrosity landed square on top of my fleecy black hoodie and because I am a girl I’m allowed to tell you I screamed at the top of my lungs and ran in the living room at wicked fast speed. Think of me what you will but imagine a large dead ferocious looking rodent falling within inches of your delicate and unprotected bare feet and there’s not a single one of you out there, at least not that I’ll believe, who’d have been calm about that situation.

I sat in the living room for a good five minutes and contemplated what, exactly, I was going to do with the dead rat. Obviously get rid of it, but how? I couldn’t imagine wrapping my hands in paper towels and picking it up *retch* and carrying it outside. Just the thought of feeling it’s creepy dead little body, even through the layers of an entire roll of paper towels, was enough to keep me from eating for a solid day.

In the end I settled on sweeping it into the dustpan, the one I was going to soak in bleach after I carried it outside for a proper burial in the city dumpster. But before I took it outside I decided this was a situation that needed documenting. I grabbed my camera out of the closet and clicked it over to the I’m Ready For My Close-Up, Mr. DeMille setting. Then I sat down on my wood floor and got way more personal with a rodent than I ever anticipated. I snapped him from the top, from the bottom, from the side where you could see the malicious glint in his beady black eyes. I got close-ups of his snarled mouth and ginormous rodent teeth. I immortalized the length of his thick stubbly tail and the way his claws had curled into his belly in death.

And then I sang the Robin is a Big Girl song as I carried his pleasantly scented carcass through the back door. If you’ve never heard the Robin is a Big Girl song well, you’re totally missing out. I’ve got a voice like two dollar prostitute with a two-pack-a-day habit.

Definitely Throw That One Back

Yesterday I was telling a friend of mine about how I had this urge to move to Iowa and get my MFA and I got this blank look followed by “What the hell is in Iowa?”

She may have a point, but it’s not like she, or anyone ‘round these here parts, can say anything because, hi, we live in Arkansas. A state that should for all intensive purposes be pronounced as ‘ar-can-sus’. And please, feel free to the emPHAsis on any sylLABle. But somewhere along the way, probably the point where the hill folk became known as hill folk and stopped caring about their lack of teeth, the state became ‘ar-can-saawww.’

It’s just I’m perfectly aware of the stigma this state has. Just like Idaho. What’s in Idaho? Potatoes. And Iowa? Corn. And Tennessee? A fucking lot of Elvis impersonators, that’s what.

So I get it, I get that some states are way cooler than others. Can you imagine a prime-time show about teenagers at Central High School? There’s one rich kid whose daddy thinks they need to experience a “mixed culture” and everybody else sports fashions from the sale rack at Target. That’s a far cry from the Gucci purse or Jimmy Choo shoes worn by the perma-bored cast members on “The O.C.” Also, there’s just something so infinitely less cool about flipping your 1996 Honda Civic as opposed your 2007 Range Rover.

Which is why, when I read stories like this, I get a little annoyed. First of all, who the fuck rolls around with a crossbow in the back of their SUV? And who picks up said crossbow and shoots it at another vehicle? God, what is wrong with people.

Though I will admit I laughed my ass off. Granted, wouldn’t have been laughing if some drunk country boy whipped out his crossbow on the interstate and shot out my back window. But funny nonetheless.

See, what happened was

Last week I bought some new Lower Sugar! oatmeal, because I figure it can’t hurt me to consume less sugar and I imagined that if they took away the ass fatening sugar they replaced it with the fake sugar.

BOY WAS I WRONG.

What is the deal here, folks? You think I want to eat vaguely sweetened insta-oatmeal? Do you? You are so very mistaken. If I have to pour four packets of Splenda on the top just to make it bearable then you should add someone smart like me to your marketing team, someone who will point out on the box that while it may be lower in sugar, you will probably have to add double your usual amount just to choke it down. And then I’d point out that the now fake super sugary taste will probably not distrct you from the fact that when we took your sugar we replaced it with Goo.

I do not like the excess Goo. It is gooey and strange and it makes a weird gooey mess in my bowl.

Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky

Last Thursday I decided I wasn’t going to move, I was going to stick it out in my apartment as long as possible. The rent is cheap and to be honest, it’s a beautiful place. Beautiful doorways, nicely worn floors- plus my furniture ends up looking less like an eclectic hodgepodge of flea market finds and more like an eclectic hodgepodge of intentional purchases. In brand-new-cookie-cutter-apartment-complex type places all of my things (the old hats, the antique purses, the stack of old-fashioned brown leather suitcases) look vastly out of place, almost sad and forlorn. But next to an imperfectly smooth wall or a slightly chipped window frame, they look content and at peace. They’re not competing with the fresh white paint and the brand new beige carpet, they’re winking slyly at the creaky floors in the kitchen and the door that doesn’t quite shut in the hallway.

And if I’m honest, I can say that I was a bit reluctant to leave a place I got a tingle in my back about. I found the apartment one evening over a year and a half ago on my way downtown for dinner with a friend. She was setting me up with an acquaintance of hers, one that I was just going to fall in love with and marry on the spot. I was a bit early and it was a breezy late spring evening, so I slowly drove around the downtown neighborhoods. On my way up a one-way street I saw a beautiful red brick building, shaped like an open U with three flowering trees planted down the center of the courtyard. The upstairs apartments all had French doors that opened out onto narrow New Orleans style balconies and I stopped my car in the middle of the deserted street because I knew, with a surety I can’t even explain, that this was where I was going to live. When I walked into the open courtyard I saw a tiny orange For Rent sign in one of the windows and decided it was Fate. I hadn’t even been looking and here It was, the tingly back feeling and a perfect apartment for rent. Done deal.

Two months after I had moved in, my dear friend Lilleeee needed a place to live and she moved into the apartment directly over my head. We used to sit out on our back porches and sip coffee on Saturdays, until her brother moved in a few months later and then she found Jeremy and he moved in too. It’s like the Brady Bunch up there, only with about seven less people, no maid and no creepy incest vibe.

But then I found a leak and then a rat and then rats-sah, which is my way of saying plural rat infestation without having to use that infestation word. Obviously that plan worked out well. And then I found another leak and then the bathroom ceiling popped a zit and then my friend Mr. Mildew took over and it makes me sneeze like nobody’s business. And then my landlord expressed confusion and dismay that it had never been fixed, because he didn’t get a single one of my five bazillion messages or threatening emails, and said he’d get right on it.

That was Thursday, and he agreed to have it all fixed on Monday. The ceiling, the mildew, the chewed up rat holes in the kitchen cabinets. And I smiled and agreed because MY APARTMENT IS SO DAMN CUTE. Plus I’m old and I’m tired, tired of putting my shit in boxes and lugging it across streets and counties and state lines. I have moved house eighteen times in seventeen years. Fourteen of those times have been in the last eight years. That’s a lot of moving. And did I mention that I’m tired. And lazy. Exactly.

But then it was Friday and I woke up and had a back tingle. It was the same kind of tingle I got when I woke up one morning and knew I had new job, a big snazzy new job with a big snazzy pay raise. I hadn’t canceled the appointment to see an apartment on Friday and I kept it mostly out of principle, because I thought it was rude to cancel on such short notice and it wouldn’t kill me to see what XXX.XX amount of dollars would get me in my neighborhood.

I rolled up outside the building on my lunch break with Amanda in tow, because the cardinal rule of apartment hunting is you never go in a locked room with some man you don’t know. That’s not to say I don’t ever break this cardinal rule, but if I have the opportunity to stick to it I’m mighty happy.

I knew the apartment was mine before I even walked in the door so of course it was utter perfection. Big windows, open floor plan, lots of closets. Plus, there is a second bedroom, something that makes me feel very settled and mature. Because nothing sucks more than having your mama come to visit and sharing a full size bed or attempting to get comfortable on The World’s Most Uncomfortable Couch.

So now I have a new apartment. And I’m pretty damn happy about that. Little scared about the one year commitment and all, because I may or may not be utterly devoid of that gene that lets me happily commit to things.

Try hanging up and slamming your hand in a drawer

Last year was the first year I have ever voluntarily participated in having a Christmas tree in my home. It’s not that I don’t like Christmas trees, because I do. I think they’re relatively pretty in their own way and I recognize that some people spend a lot of time and money making things twinkle and sparkle. And I will fully admit that I like they way they look, all lit up and glittery, through frosty windows in mid-December. It’s just that it was always an awful lot of effort, not to mention fundage, to get one of those things up.

The one-bedroom apartment I shared with two other people (no matter how expensive rent is, NEVER DO THIS) in New York didn’t have room for an extra coffee cup, much less a Christmas tree, but somehow my roommates found a way to cram it almost underneath the spiral staircase. This annoyed me to no end, seeing as how each and every morning as I stumbled down the staircase, bleary eyed and fuzzy haired, the tree made it it’s joy in life to scrape my legs with it’s stupid stubbly plastic green branches. It snagged my pants and tickled my feet and while I might be able to forgive you for snagging my pants, I cannot forgive you for tickling my feet. And so I spent two months with that green monstrosity hulking in the stairwell corner, doing nothing so much as reminding me exactly how much I hated my roommates.

The next tree came a year later, in the apartment on Broadway I shared with my old college roommate. Kasi is much more of the seasonal decorator and while I didn’t heartily object to her putting up a tree, I sure didn’t offer to help, either. I’d just gotten Llama five months before, the first addition in what would later become the collective entity of The Demonspawn, and he took great pride in worming his wee little runty kitten body up the center of the tree and knocking it over. I even once saw him take a flying leap from mid-living room, launching himself directly onto the middle branches with front and back legs spread akimbo. This was reason enough for me not to participate in the decorating because anything I put up was just going to be knocked over, plus people with no money shouldn’t spend it on useless things like ornaments. They should spend it on gas and cigarettes.

Then came the Year of Living With My Brother. Needless to say we did not decorate at all, because we have exactly the same views on decorations. Can you eat it? No. Can you fix something with it? No. Can it get you to a specific destination? No. Only my mother came to visit around the first of December and brought some random cast-off decorations for us to use, which really only served to emphasize the fact that Matthew had cooked a pound of bacon three nights before and yet again left all the cooking accoutrements strewn about the kitchen. But look! There is a garland above the door! Pay no attention to the smell of rotting pig flesh!

So last year I made my first attempt at seasonal decorating. I purchased a fake tree that looked decidedly better in the store, seeing as how the store person probably had many years of tree-fluffing experience while I was unaware that branch fluffing had to occur until my neighbor pointed it out. I purchased the cheap ornaments from Wal-Mart because I wasn’t quite ready to commit to this decorating crap and why spend $4.99 per ornament when I can buy a box of 50 for ten dollars. Unfortunately I later learned that cheap ornaments = nasty glass shards all over wood floor. I spent the month of December sweeping up colorful broken crap. Not cool.

All of this has been a very long lead-in to the real story, the one that involves me being totally perplexed by the strangeness of the human race and one of my co-workers and his recent move. In standard office conversation I found out that he had over one-hundred boxes of personal items that the movers picked up over the weekend. Of those one-hundred boxes, three of them contained his Christmas Village.

“Christmas Village?” I asked. “What the hell is a Christmas Village?”

Three pairs of eyes turned on me, expressing such shock and dismay you’d have thought I said something about draining the blood from small woodland creatures and nursing helpless infants with it.

As it turns out, several people in the office actually have these Christmas Villages. One woman has a Village so elaborate it takes no less than ten days to set it up. My coworker has one that comes with a little train that runs around the village. There are little teeney tiny figurines you can buy to make it look like your Christmas Village is full of happy, rosy-cheeked individuals. They buy special tables and set them up in their living rooms and foyers and guest bedrooms, all so they can have creepy Beetlejuice-esque town replicas full of tiny snow covered buildings and spindly street lights and you know what, I bet they make animatronic versions of these Village things and THIS KID DOES NOT DO ANIMATRONICS.

I’m not judging anyone because I’m sure there are people out there who totally don’t get why a woman who finds it acceptable to buy pants from Old Navy finds it unacceptable to purchase shoes that have a starting point of less than two hundred dollars. Right this very second, the shoes on my feet are worth more than my pants, my top, AND my earrings. So I get that people spend money on things that maybe don’t make sense to others. But these are shoes, people. You walk in shoes. They get you places, plus, they’re wicked cute. But the ultimate function is still there. Christmas Villages? Um, what the hell? They just sit there. And collect dust. And your kids and pets and stupid neighbors probably knock shit over all the time. This isn’t like a pretty picture that sits on your wall all year long. This is something that’s not only useless, but you look at it for one month out of the entire year.

Thank you but I’ll stick with my penchant for expensive shoes, rather than purchasing strange mini-replicas of a Dickens Utopia Snowy Townsville.

Upsy Daisy

Earlier this evening I was watching the premier of Saturday Night Live, only about a week or two late. Thankfully they replay such things on various channels which is why I occasionally get moderately caught up with this supposed icon of pop culture.

The host for the evening was Dane Cook, a guy with whom I’ve become only vaguely familiar since they’ve been playing the previews to Employee of the Month (starring Jessica Boobson) pretty much every 45.7 seconds. Apparently he’s some internet stand up comedian and a purported previous love conquest of Ms. Jessica Boobson, who totally doesn’t want to be known for her blond hair and boobs but still insists upon flaunting them about like cupcakes.

The thing is, for the first five minutes of his super lengthy opening monologue, all I could think was a) THIS is the guy everyone’s talking about and b) did no one tell that kid his shirt’s too tight? Because he wasn’t really that funny and his hips kept moving in strange quasi-flamboyant movements. Plus, and I know I’ve mentioned this already, his shirt was too tight. As in so tight I could tell he’d laid off the crunches the past few weeks and maybe it was time to go up a waist size in jeans. Which sucks for him because he’s not a chubby man. He’s not even a super flabby man. But when your shirt is 87% spandex with a little cotton thrown in to dull down the sheen, you have to be very secure in the fact that you’ve spent a lot of time in the gym or you’ve got a personal assistant who doubles as your emergency liposuctionist.

I was getting ready to change the channel because MY GOD this was the longest opening monologue I have ever seen on SNL and I could be doing important things like lint rolling my ironing board. I hadn’t managed to crack a smile through the opening act of politically correct holiday celebrations (oh, I’m sorry, didn’t you guys already to this sketch like three years ago? k, thanks) and this Cook chap was certainly not tickling my fancy or my funny bone. But then he started a bit about shoe shopping and I stopped my finger from pressing the channel up button because, well, here’s something with which I can relate. He saw a pair of boots and he needed them in his life. This I understand.

So he asks the shoe girl for a twelve and she hands him a nine. At which point he makes a joke about a bone saw and don’t ask me what I found so funny about a bone saw but it kind of made me snort a little. Shoe ladies the world over adhere to the same practice then, I thought. I ask for a ten and they say “well, I had it in a nine” and I have to hold myself back from pushing my finger in their eye. If I’d wanted a nine I would have asked for a nine you ignorant twat. And now, look, here was a grown man expressing the same shoe shopping frustrations. I CAN SO BOND WITH YOU NOW.

Then he launched into a bit about erections and I mentally rolled my eyes because I totally expected him to go with the beaten-to-death (no pun intended) joke surrounding those pills that help men get their thingee up and the ensuing joke about “if you have an erection lasting four or more hours...” Funny the first time and, if I’m really honest, funny eight-hundreth time, but still not funny for a paid comedian to add in their act.

But he took it in a totally different direction, not mentioning the thingee-lifting hydraulic pills but instead talking about a really dandy stiffy he’d had one day while making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Noticing a can of cashews he pops the top and places a delicately curved and salted nut right on the tip, pulls back his member and flings the unsuspecting cashew towards his head where he catches the nut between his pearly whites. At this point I’m actually laughing out loud in my apartment because This Man Be Crazy.

Cut to commercial and my laughter dies down. I think this situation through. And then it fully dawns on me that this Dane Cook guy has admitted on national television that he ATE A CASHEW FLUNG FROM THE TIP OF HIS PENIS. I’m still finding the situation amusing but am now very concerned about his personal hygiene. Because just in case you didn’t know, THAT’S WHERE THE PEE HOLE IS AND HE JUST ATE SOMETHING OFF IT.

Don't think for one second that I won't cut you.

I have a serious complaint and I’d like all four of you out there to read this in its entirety, because it’s of great significance, possibly even great NATIONAL significance. Or something.

People. Why do you not respond to my emails? I’m not talking about friends and acquaintances, though to be honest I can’t say I don’t want your responses, because I do. It’s just that I know that there are times when I’m not good at replying. I get distracted by the ceaseless noisemaking of the two felines that insist upon living in my house, even though I’ve decided they are good for nothing but lots of smelly poop and tracking miniscule bits of litter on the sofa. And so I read an email and hear a meeeOWWWW, mmmeeeoowWWWWW, MEOW BITCH LISTEN TO ME I WANT YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION meeeOOWW. And then I throw whatever unsolicited mail has managed to pile up on my desk right at their heads, halfway hoping the sharp pointy edge takes out their vocal chords. As such, my attention gets turned away from the laptop and towards a dust bunny that needs sweeping or a marathon showing of Laguna Beach. (Who gives a 16-year-old a Range Rover? Seriously.)

So while I don’t normally judge the friends/acquaintances group for not replying, because I have replying issues of my own, I most certainly judge the work/business inquiry group for not replying because, hello. Does your email not sit directly in front of you all day long? Have you somehow managed to figure out how to keep the little You Have New Mail celebratory message from popping up in neon lights on your desktop? HAVE YOU? Because it took me nearly a year of using Outlook to figure out that was even a changeable option, that I could somehow turn off that annoying function that not only shows I have a new piece of mail but also displays the first twenty or so words to whomever happens to be sitting in my office. Which is awesome, especially when I get a non-work-related email that starts off something like Hey hooker, how’s your day? Ugh. I’ve got major gas from those burritos last night…

More specifically, when I send you an email inquiring about an apartment for rent, one you listed on your confusing and inelegantly designed crock of a website, do not take eight days to reply. This is a cutthroat business, folks. Someone is bound to snap up an under priced two bedroom in the historic district and you with your slow replying and lackadaisical response of “I can set up a viewing anytime late next week” is totally unacceptable. I don’t apartment hunt for my health. I apartment hunt so I can find a place I like, sign a lease and MOVE IN. I do not dilly dally. I don’t wish wash about decisions. If anything I make decisions too quickly, only stopping to mock the slow decision makers along the way. This may or may not be a good trait but personally I could not give less of a shit.

So in conclusion, if your livelihood depends upon me and various others stroking you a check every month, it seems that it would be in your best interest to reply to my email already and in quick-like fashion. The sooner you get me in, the sooner I am likely to fork over a thousand dollars worth of security deposits and pet fees. And the sooner you can lease a new Porsche or twelve with your rental income, all because your wife’s father was loaded and gave you some change to purchase a real estate “investment,” which now funds your golf habit and that tennis pro you’ve been seeing on the side.

C'est la Viesitation Hours Are Over

Saturday afternoon a bug must have crawled up my ass because I decided it was okay to venture forth to Wal-Mart, the place where people walk three-abreast down tiny aisles with the sole purpose of pissing me off.

My original purpose for going there was to find some sort of container to hold the cat food. Since The Great Rat Hunt of 2006 I haven’t really felt comfortable with leaving the bag in the bottom cabinets and the upper cabinets are just too small. So that left me buying the medium sized bags of food and leaving them out on the counter, which quite naturally hurts my supreme decorating sense. I’ve just never been able to reconcile the shiny blue bag of cat nuggets with pretty Cuban pictures and apple green cabinets.

Not to mention the fact that now that the cat food sits within reachable distance of The Demonspawn, I spend a lot of my time shooing them off the countertops. Don’t ask me why it’s even tempting because it’s not like their special red bowls ever fall below the half-full line. Maybe they need the exercise or something. Or maybe they’re just throwback cats and I got the dank end of the kitty gene pool. Whatever the reason, it’s damn annoying to come home to a brand new bag of cat food that they’ve managed to claw, pull and swat of the counter. And they don’t just leave it there, either. They spend days in cat time chewing a hole in the bottom because again, IT’S NOT LIKE THERE’S READILY AVAILABLE FOOD IN A BOWL LESS THAN THREE FEET AWAY.

I started off in the pet aisle because I was absolutely positive that someone besides me had experienced this problem. I mean, they make automatic litter scoopers and electronically enhanced, free-flowing water bowls. Surely someone, somewhere has animals that find it amusing to attack their food bags.

No? Okay, then. Moving on to the next aisle.

A couple of rows over I found some of those glass food containers that people like to leave out on their countertops, usually filled with festive colored pasta or decorative rice. Those things always bother me because at what point do you need to change out the contents? Is it just one of those things you learn upon becoming a mother? Change out yellow and red pasta every two years! Clean rice container every three!

I thought about getting the biggest size, a five gallon monstrosity with a stainless steel lid, but decided I wasn’t really that keen on displaying multicolored brown nuggets so prominently in my kitchen. I mean, I love my cats and all but I don’t LURV my cats.

One aisle over had shelves full of all kinds of Rubbermaid containers and storage units, most of them of the design that lets you slide them under your bed for easy-breezy storage. Only my bed is like eighteen feet off the ground and it’s not the type for a bed skirt, meaning my see-through Rubbermaid storage container would be very see-able upon walking down the hallway. Again, not really the look I was going for. Plus, I’m lazy enough as it is so imagine having to pull some fugly plastic box from underneath my bed, open it (my arms, they are so tired), get a scoop of cat food (is it over yet??), walk to the kitchen (I’ll just stop here and take a nap) and finally drop it in the bowl. And then I’d have to repeat the process because there are two cats, two cats who must have separate bowls for separate eating.

At the end of that row I decided if I didn’t find what I needed in the next five minutes I was definitely headed home. I was out in public on a Saturday and I’d already passed three people (two men, one woman) who apparently found deodorant on the Optional list of personal hygiene. So it was with much elation that I made it to my last and final row, confronted with all sorts of containers that would most definitely suit my purpose.

Trash cans! Trash cans, everywhere! In every shape and size and finish! Small metal and red, oval plastic and yellow, flip top, step top, no top, hurah! So I purchased the medium oval brushed-metal step top, complete with removable black bucket (with a handle!) for easy cleaning.

On my way out of the store I was so pleased with myself for finding a solution to the food storage issue that I swung by the pet aisle again. Now that I had a nice sealed and relatively unmoveable container I figured I could again start purchasing the more cost efficient Giant Bags o Cat Nuggets, the kind that most people assume are dog food they’re so big. But apparently you haven’t met Llama, The Fat One, the cat who can eat through an eight pound bag of cat food in like two weeks. So I grabbed the chicken-n-rice formula and placed it in the buggy, merrily making my way to the checkout lines.

Where I stood for twenty minutes behind some crazy bleach-blond hair lady with five children, all girls, who’d apparently taken to mommy’s Sun-in over the summer because ALL OF THEM had three inch roots. Not so terrible, maybe, except the oldest was maybe nine and the youngest was pushing four, all with beautiful waist-length hair that their dear sweet mummy had irrevocably screwed up.

Once Roots and her seventeen kids had checked out (all five girls got some kind of white stuffed puppy in a pink carrier, very Paris Hilton-esque) I moved forward and handed the checker my boxed trash can and my giant bag of food. She scanned the trash can and handed it back to me, where I placed it right back in my buggy. Then the bag of cat food. Same process. Scan, hand back to customer. Only something happened on the transfer and the bag kind of caught on the plastic bag dispenser.

No worries, I think. I lift the bag up and over the edge of the buggy and drop it in the bottom, WHERE IT EXPLODES.

Not just a little leak. Not just a few brown nuggets on the floor. No sir. That bag ripped from top to bottom, side to side, spilling all sixteen pounds of multi colored chicken-n-rice flavored crunchy kibbles ALL OVER THE WHITE LINOLEUM FLOOR. There wasn’t anything I could to do to stop it, or even slow it down. So I just stood there, hand on my debit card, watching it bounce over sixteen square feet.

When it was done I just looked at the checker and told her she’d probably need to take that item off my ticket.

Ann Ranned Away, Far Far Away

A while back, Dan Dan the Can Can Man (who has abandoned his blog because he’s wallowing in the pits of despair) asked me why I did not care for the Evil Mayonnaise. And if I didn’t partake of the creamy substance, what condiments DID I enjoy? Honey Mustard? Ketchup? Just a smidge of lemon?

The thing is, I don’t think I can ever fully convey how much I hate on the mayo. Back when I was a wee little nugget, probably four or five, my mother made a plate of snack crackers for my digestive enjoyment. Normally these snack crackers came with peanut butter, but on that dark day my snack plate was filled with half the crackers smattered in peanut butter and the other half in a very innocuous looking white substance. Who was I to question a snack plate prepared by my mother? Mothers love you and take care of you, hence why would I have ever prepared myself for the UNRELENTING HEINOUSNESS OF THAT FIRST BITE.

Needless to say, I was disgusted with the mayonic substance even then, before I knew that it was nothing but liquid fat and eggs, before I made the correlation between what goes in HERE and then shows up DOWN THERE, right on my ass. My mother, on the other hand, will pour the substance on her bacon and tomato sandwiches, so much so that every time she takes a bite it kind of squishes out on the side. And every time she takes a bite, I die a little inside because somewhere along the line she’s going to hug me and what if some of that mayonnaise seeps from her pores and attacks me? The travesty.

Normally if I’m out in a public place with my mom I will totally and unashamedly make her check my sandwich for me, just to make sure that the waiter completely understood that NO MAYONNAISE WAS TO BE PRESENT DURING THE MAKING OF MY SANDWICH. At a wedding reception earlier this summer we filled our plates with the reception food and headed to a comfortable couch to talk amongst ourselves, seeing as how I lack social skills and it must totally get annoying having your grown ass daughter follow you around while you make small talk with guests. So we made our way to the back and began picking through the random shrimp sandwiches, cheese rolls and mini desserts when I came across a rye bread mini sandwich that appeared to be cream cheese but just to be on the safe side, I made her take a bite for me. Lo and behold someone had concocted up a swiss cheese and mayonnaise sandwich and just IMAGINE my horror had I bit into it, mistakenly thinking it was cream cheese.

As a final example I submit to you the incident in Atlanta, a mere two weeks ago on a business trip with two other women from my office. One of them was my friend Amanda who joined me for lunch in the office cafeteria. We’d placed our lunch orders first thing that morning, me ordering a roast beef sandwich with cheese and lettuce ONLY. I’d put that bit out to the side of my order, underlining and highlighting the line where I specified NO MAYO.

For whatever reason the “chef” (and I use that word very lightly) decided that I was being snotty about his special sauce and smeared it on my sandwich anyway, but only in the middle so when I lifted up the edge to check it appeared to be white-goop-free.

Nanoseconds after taking that first bite I felt the grotesque substance coating the insides of my mouth. Try as I might I couldn’t convince myself to swallow it, even after chewing with grown-up determination for a solid five seconds. I finally gave up and spat it back out, right into my napkin as discreetly as possible.

And then my dear friend Amanda took the mayonnaise-ridden bread from my sandwich and replaced it with her own dry bread. She even wiped the mayo from the top of my roast beef with her extra napkins, bless her.
So I’ve decided that I’ve added this quality to my Must Have list for Friends: Willing to wipe disgusting mayo from sandwich bread with proven ability to NOT JUDGE ME for behaving like a four year old when that crap comes within five feet of me.

Perhaps We've Met.

As a senior in high school I was a big fan The AOL, as my mother calls it. We’d had a computer in the house since 1990, back when The Oregon Trail was just a bunch of green dots on the screen and god save your soul if you didn’t have an extra spoke to fix your wheel after inevitably rolling over a green rock in the road. But dial-up did not become a factor in my life until the early part of 1996, The Year of the Move. (And I totally think they should reinvent The Oregon Trail for today’s generation, making it more Gen-X-er-y or Gen-Apathy or whatever the generation is that plays lots of video games.)

Just realizing that’s actually MY generation and feeling momentarily out of the loop. Also realizing that perhaps not everyone rolled their eyes upon seeing the lead story on MSN this morning, the one about some new Nintendo game thing that’s called Wii. I mean, come on. How the hell am I supposed to pronounce that anyway? Because where I come from, that sounds a lot like a slightly intoxicated honky-tonker wailing “But whiiiii?" after her boyfriend as he walks away from her and their volatile relationship, flipping her the finger as he tosses his lustrous mullet over his right shoulder, coveting the sweet ass on Bobby Sue and the new muzzle loader he’s going to purchase at Wal-Mart later on.

Back to The Oregon Trail thing, I think it should obviously get a little color update. And instead of trading oxen for a new wheel spoke, you should have the option to trade ugly family members or just ones that don’t pull their weight or get sick when you’re crossing Nebraska . And I think you should be able to artificially inseminate the oxen because a) I don’t really want to watch oxen do it and b) don’t you think it’s odd that none of the oxen ever got preggers while on a months-long trip to Oregon ?

**Have just been told that this is very similar to something called Sims? What has happened to the two-dimensional games of my youth?! Pong! Frogger! And then Nintendo came out with Mario Bros and all the world stood still and took a collective breath because THE GENIUS of that game, seriously. Are these languishing in some never-never land of cast aside games? My god people, my heart is breaking.

Have gotten a bit off track here, there was a point to this story and it totally didn’t involve The Oregon Trail or the death of the two-dimensional game force. It involved around AOL and the advent of instant messaging. Though I now consider “chatting” via IM as annoying as listening to someone clip their toenails within hearing distance of my office (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), back in the day the novelty of being able to think about my responses before hitting the Send button was damn near more exciting than waiting for Ross-n-Rachel to get back together already. Instead of tying up the phone line for one phone call to one measly friend, you tied up the phone line for one internet session and 15-20 instant message boxes.

My senior year in high school I was friends with this girl named Arwen, whose parents were obviously quite enthralled with books written by Tolkein. She had flaming red hair and a twin brother named Owen, whom I rarely saw because he was all wicked smart and shit and he’d been shipped off to a super smart math genius school in Dallas. Though I did spend one rainy day with him in New York when he took the train in from Yale or Harvard or wherever he was getting his doctorate in Super Smart Mathematical Theories and for some reason I wore my pretty knee high boots with four inch heels to walk around the city and I can distinctly remember purchasing some cheap (and flat) black shoes half-way through our excursion because my feet, they were threatening to amputate themselves with a dull wooden spoon.

One Saturday afternoon Arwen and I were chatting, discussing the vagaries of high school and the girls who most certainly DID NOT have the face for a Rachel-esque hair cut. She sent a ‘brb’ and a few minutes later came back on with very exciting news- Chicago was coming to town and did I want to go?

ARE YOU SERIOUS? CHICAGO IS COMING TO TOWN? AND DO I WANT TO GO? I’ve been searching for so long? Till the end of time? HELL YES!
So I gave her my money and she purchased my tickets and can I tell you how much we talked about the upcoming Chicago-ness? Like, every day. HELLO. It’s CHICAGO.

A week before the scheduled festivities we were in the midst of an in-depth discussion of our chosen attire when I became a little concerned with her choice of a nice black skirt and her mother's pearl earrings, thinking that maybe she did not understand the origins of Chicago but she was my friend and I would not judge her. I mean, just because she wasn't going to sport some ripped up jeans didn't mean we wouldn't have a good time. Besides, Arwen was way preppy and I struggled daily with just making my shoes match. This was a few years before I came to realize that shoes NEVER have to match on a woman and if I feel like wearing turqouise kitten heels with a grey sweater then by damned, I can wear them.

A few days later our excitement had reached peak teenage levels. After dance class that night Arwen asked me if I knew who would be playing Roxie Hart, and for the life of me I had no idea what she was talking about. Roxie Hart wasn't the name of a song I'd ever heard Chicago sing and if we were going to a Chicago concert, wouldn't Chicago be playing Roxie Hart?

And then Arwen scrunched her brow in confusion and said "No, I mean do you know who's playing Roxie Hart, you know, like, the character."

It was at that moment I realized I'd comitted myself to go see Chicago, the musical. Not Chicago, THE BAND.

Mae West by Northwest

This evening I’m heading out to Shotgun Dan’s for some pizza and beer, emphasis on the beer. I’ll be honest and say that I am normally a Liquor Girl, which is easily and quite frequently confused with Fruity Drink Girl. Fruity Drink Girls are normally just past the legal drinking age and are usually heavily involved in sororities. They are mesmerized by the possibility of being given a White Rose at a super secret fraternity ceremony and giving it up to the Frat Boy President because he’s totally going to call tomorrow. Fruity Drink Girls can also be above the age of sixty-five because, hello, have you ever been to Atlantic City?

Liquor Girls, quite obviously, drink liquor. And even though this liquor may occasionally be spiced up with some cranberry juice or a twist of lime, given the choice of on the rocks or frozen, we will choose on the rocks. I prefer things like cosmos and dirty martinis and the ever-popular Long Island iced tea. Frozen choices are reserved for times when a dessert is warranted but a creamy concoction of tiramisu just doesn’t cut it.

Definitions now aside, I can’t say as I have anything more to add about this evening’s coming festivities. Only that I’m ready for an evening with a very frosty mug full of very frosty beer.

This Hotel Lets Birds Fly In Their Lobby. Did I Mention HOW MUCH I HATE BIRDS?

Amanda and I went to the hotel pool last night, the indoor one that's surrounded by trees that are probably fake. All in an attempt to make you feel like you're outside, only without the SEARING HEAT and TOTAL LACK OF BREEZE.

It was deserted at 9:30 so we headed downstairs for a little splishy splashy. Inside the enclosed arena we threw our key cards and coverups on the benches and Amanda was quick like bunny and made her way to the edge of the pool, quickly stepping into the water and just as quickly stepping herself right out.

She claimed it was cold but I figured she was crazy, I mean, HELLO, it's an indoor pool. What kind of indoor pool isn't heated?

Apparently that one.

But I was brave and waded in to my waist, at which point I decided that was as far as I was going. About that time I noticed a strange noise coming from the end of the pool, sort of a grating humming noise. The longer I stayed in, the louder it got. I had mental images of being sucked into the pool filter and being spit back out as a tangled cheese grater like mess.

But the noise got louder and I just couldn't stand it so I told Amanda that the Langoliers were coming and it was time to roll up on out.

This isn't at all funny but it's a reasonable segue into the fact that our hotel has a total lack of free internet (stingy bastards) and this irregular scheduled programming will return, um, like Friday? Or Saturday? Whatever. I'm totally going to go sleep now.

Almost forgot: our hotel has an 'Adult Menu' on the television and Amanda called me up on Sunday night to laughingly tell me that our porn choices for the evening were "Titty Titty Bang Bang," "MILF and Cookies," or "Double Slut Sandwich."

Hold Tight, Wear Something White

Thursday night I showed up at the Doctors Building (the actual name of the building, I know, how original) around 8:45 for my sleep study, something I wasn't really looking forward to, knowing as I did that some strange person was going to be gluing electrode discs to my person.

I grabbed the overnight bag out of the back of my car and ambled up to the front doors and for a whole two seconds, waited patiently for those normally automatic doors to whoosh open. But they didn't. So I walked around to the side of the building, smiling and nodding politely at the homeless man with patchy fuzzy hair, only to find not one single door that had a handle on the outside, only anonymous looking key holes and dim flickering lights over the double metal doors placed at intervals down the building.

So I discarded my casual ambling and stalked back up to the front, muttering to myself about what total bullshit it is to have people show up here for a sleep study with no clear indication of how to get in. Back at the front doors I pushed and pulled a little, knowing they wouldn't move but still feeling it was necessary to try. I decided it was Fate, I was meant to go home and sleep in the privacy of my own home, and I whipped open my cell phone and called the main number. I forced myself to sound Southern and Girly and Bemused but by the end of the message, I was just flat-out annoyed and I may or may not have ended the call with "Oh, fuckit, I'm going home."

Just as I was backing out of my parking space, however, I saw a heavyset woman with dyed dark hair wearing a set of those really ugly printed scrubs, the kind with strange geometric shapes and swirlies and lighting bolts of pure unadulterated color. She was coming out of a small glass door that had previously gone unseen on the right corner of the building. I continued backing out and pulled up next to the sidewalk as she was walking towards her car and asked her if she knew how one would go about getting in the building for the sleep study clinic.

Why yes, she told me, just hit that little button in the brick beside the front door and someone will buzz you in.

I parked my car again, grabbed my bag and walked back to the front door, this time noticing the small (and matte black) button placed inconspicuously about three quarters down the brick wall. How I was to EVER know that button was there, much less push it for entrance, I have no idea. But immediately after pressing the button a voice came through a speaker, telling me that I was to come to suite 506.

all right, whatever.

Inside I was greeted by a very energetic black man with arms and legs long enough to make me think he probably got teased for being a Gumby back in high school. After talking to him for a few minutes I realized his accent was familiar and I asked him where he was from.

"Hattiesburg, Mississippi, sugar! Where you from?"

I KNEW I'd recognized that speech! It's the same accent I used to have, before I had some wild idea about being a television anchor and made myself try and emulate the indistinguishable accents of CNN reporters. He'd said something about going down to Louisiana for a family reunion and he'd pronounced the name right- Loo-ze-hannah, not Lew-ees-ee-ana. And then he'd made a comment about the "yellah" scrubs he'd picked up the day before and I knew he was born and bred bayou rat.

We continued to chit chat for the hour it took to glue on all the little discs, inside my hair, on my temple, beside my eyes, on my chin, my neck, my chest and back, then finally down my legs. When he was done I laid down on the mattress and sighed a sigh of great relief. I'd been exhausted when I got there at nine and it hadn't been my turn for gluing until after ten, so by the time he flicked off the lights it was 11:30 and even with the mounds of wires and glue and strange surroundings, I fell right to sleep.

To be exact, I fell asleep in forty-five seconds.

And there was nothing I could do to stop it. I'd felt it on the way over, that this was a good sleep night. If I'd closed my eyes on the drive over I'm positive I could have fallen right to sleep. And it didn't matter that this was the one night I needed to behave like normal, I needed to lay in bed awake for hours, I needed to show up on those little graphs and charts as being the insomniac I most surely am. But Fate thwarted me and sent me right to La La land, just like I'd asked every single night for the past few years, finally answering my plea on the ONE NIGHT I didn't want it.

But that mattress was so comfortable and the room was so dark and the nice man who'd glued on my discs, well, he doesn't play for my team, eliminating any residual fear I might have had regarding late-night visits from unknown men. And I was just so tired I could have cried and I laid my head down on that pillow and was out before my Gumby friend had time to get himself a cup of coffee.

In the morning I sat in the small office of the sleep doctor while he told me he didn't think I had a problem with falling asleep, seeing as how I'd crashed mere seconds after the lights had gone out. I don't think he much believed me when I told him this was fluke, I could count on my hand the number of time in the past six years I'd been able to close my eyes and head to La La land. He smiled and said maybe that was so, but I still had other problems to deal with.

He pulled out a stack of graphs taken from the night before, each page showing a five minute section of time with varying lines for my heart level, my breathing patterns, leg movement and brain activity. He pointed to the sheet in front of him and told me that in that particular five minute span, I'd woken up six times. He pulled another graph out, another five minute log of time, and said I'd woken up four times. Another sheet, showing I'd come out of stage 2 sleep a total of six times. Then five. Then four again.

I'd only gotten about 30 minutes of stage four sleep, the kind I was supposed to have, and the rest of the time, he said, I'd spent an average of fifteen seconds for every minute completely awake.

At the end of the visit, after we'd discussed things we could do and surgeries I could have (I'm one of the lucky few who can't be helped by pretty little pills, dammit) I walked out of his office feeling totally validated. I wasn't crazy, I wasn't suicidal, I REALLY WAS JUST FUCKING TIRED.

Random bittids (which is tidbits, only cut in half and reversed):

Sunday night I was working in the nursery with an exceedingly small group of kids. Normally I have thirteen Not Close To Walking-, Almost Walking-, Walking But Unstable- and Able To Walk And Therefore Also Think Can Climb Walls- children that take up every available brain space because have you ever tried to anticipate the amount of trouble thirteen pre-preschoolers can get into within a four hour period? No? Okay then.

But Sunday night brought only Natalie and her rambunctious older brother Micah (he of the ‘Ribbit’ fame) and little Charlie, a self-proclaimed vegetarian at the tender age of 2.7. Charlie was early and his mother left a dinner of peas and carrots and cheerios and half of a parmesan sandwich for his eating delights. Personally, of all the choices displayed, I would have gone for the cheese sandwich and maybe some carrots. But this kid shoved his grubby fist into the cup of english peas and unloaded them unceremoniously into his mouth, kind of what I would do with cheetos if it was at all socially acceptable and had no bearing on my daily caloric intake.

Dinner complete, Charlie and I played with the beach ball until Natalie and Micah showed up, and then Charlie abandoned me for a playmate that didn’t creak with age when standing up for the bazillionth time to retrieve the beach ball that had been thrown with really good intentions but had yet again lodged itself in the far right corner.

Charlie and Micah are within three months of each other and are normally all BFF until one of them thinks about that pubescent hair that’s going to get lodged in their ass and smacks the other one with whatever hard plastic object seems to be lying around. But Sunday night was relatively uneventful, and they managed to chase each other around the room, making intermittent high-pitched growling noises at each other, avoiding the hard plastic hit-able objects.

Natalie, being eleven months and of a generally Chill persuasion, sat happily on my lap and watched the two boys act a fool, making cute oooh, aaaah noises that I’m trying to form in to Rah-been. Say: Raaah-beeen, Natalie-bug. Raaaah-beeeeeeeeen.

Towards the end of the night, Micah came over to my chair and absentmindedly pulled on the two small stretchy headbands I had wrapped around my wrist. Both were about an inch thick and black, and I immediately thought about how wicked cool these boys would look with a little Rambo-esque headband. So I held them both still while I slipped it over their heads and told them both to go play Rambo. Only I guess there’s a bit of a generational gap there because they thought I said RAINBOW, not RAMBO and spent the next forty-five minutes screaming RAINBOW! GRRRRRR! RAINBOW!

****************************************************************************

I bought a Ricky Martin CD in 1998, right before he came out with that Livin la Vida Loca song, the one where he made that video that showed a super hot girl pouring hot wax on his chest and we were all too enthralled with his Latin-ness to notice that those leather pants? Just a smidge too tight.

I originally heard Por Arriba, Por Abajo in a Mexican restaurant in Texas and I’m sure the waiters were ready to stab me in the heart for asking who was singing the song on their loudspeakers (much how I would react if a German tourist heard Tell Me Whatchew Want, Whatchew Really Really Want on the radio and begged to know who sings that delightful little song, and I’d have to grudgingly tell them that the Spice Girls sing it and then go home and cry because those German tourists, they just didn’t know any better, bless their hearts.)

I brought this album before I’d taken any Spanish and I have to say that I wish more American singers would take after Senor Martin. I don’t even speak the language that well and I can repeat back to you what he’s saying, rather than Garble Garble Hooker Ho Bag Garble Mumble Mumble. Whatever the problem is with Americans and enunciation, I’d like to know. I mean, maybe it’s that fake-platinum grill (or is it grille?) that hip hop artists feel obliged to sport. Or the lackadaisical allmywordsruntogether sound of SoCal. Or they could be like that girl, Cassie I think, that sings a song entitled Me and U, which from her song alone I can tell you she’s younger than 25 because I don’t see a lot of people nearing thirty that name a song with singular letters. Anyway, this kid Cassie could not possibly sound more bored. As in so bored I think it was just too much of an effort for her to open her damn mouth and get a sound out that doesn’t sound like it came straight from a Casio keyboard, circa 1987.

****************************************************

Yesterday I wore the skirt that mother once paid me two hundred dollars to never wear again, except to Wal-Mart. Because it’s okay to look like a bag lady at Wal-Mart. But the thing is, it has big deep pockets. And it’s all big and flowy and a nice greenish beige color, which doesn’t sound like a nice color but really is. So I may or may not have broken our deal by possibly wearing it to work yesterday but it’s been over a year since that deal was made and I wasn’t making any money then and I think the deal was made in an effort to make sure her daughter had more than tuna and ramen in her kitchen cabinets.

After work I met up with Amanda in the furniture department of Dillard’s, because we had an hour to kill before nursery time and they were having a sale. I’ve been looking for a couch for over a year now and I’ve come to equate couch shopping with the Prince Charming fairy tale. I keep thinking that when I see it, I’ll just know. Unfortunately this has not worked out for with the whole couch shopping thing. Or the Prince Charming thing. Which is why I’ve decided it’s a fairy tale because OBVIOUSLY the perfect couch does not exist. It still doesn’t stop me from shopping for it, however.

So as we’re leaving the store, another furniture shopping expedition thrown to the dogs, I was walking up the two flights of stairs that lead up to the parking lot. Maybe I was tired from the day or maybe that skirt is longer than I think it is, but about halfway up I got my foot caught in the front of my skirt and apparently tried to rip it clean off. Thankfully, my ass got in the way.

Please, Reach Out To Others

My post-workout soreness finally went away yesterday afternoon and I stopped getting those strange shooting pains starting at my right elbow and careening down to my finger tips, leaving that whole extremity in a state of such confusion I think the properly functioning portion of my brain overruled my normal right-handedness and started forcing me to grab cups and pens and shampoo bottles with my left. It’s very odd to grab your morning coffee with your left hand, even when you know that there’s every chance a tree will drop a leaf into the silent forest and it will inexplicably piss off your right arm, which will then revolt by sending tingling, numbing pains down to your fingertips which in turn causes you to drop whatever it is you might be holding.

I think the Workout Feeling backfired on my psyche, however, because in the past few days I’ve been unable to resist the call of Cold Stone Creamery, that bastion of public fatness, a place that takes already sweet and delicious ice cream and INJECTS MORE FAT into it, just to make it even creamier and drool inducing. I’ve been inside the doors of this hell many times and never felt innately compelled to purchase anything. I’m happy to watch other people eat it but ice cream has never really been my thing. Unless it comes with cake, and then I’m all over it. Which is how I got into trouble on Monday when I ordered the cake batter ice cream with chunks of yellow cake and pecans, all mixed in. Seriously, if I could have promised my undying devotion to this concoction, promised to love and cherish it for all time, I would have thrown my marriage views to the wind and slipped a ring on it’s cold, icy finger.

And so yesterday I found myself in the grip of the cake batter ice cream again and pulled into the parking lot before I’d even had a chance to talk myself out of it. Thankfully I ordered a small this time but seriously, like those extra 200 calories in a medium would have had any effect on the size of my ass.

I should also add that in that same day, I ate a package of chocolate ho-hos and a bag of cheetos. Things I normally would never have an inclination to eat, except maybe the cheetos and even then the only time I let myself buy them is if I can find the baked kind on the chip aisle. I do this because the baked kind don’t taste near as good as the regular kind, which makes me disinclined to eat eighteen handfuls all at once.

So maybe this working out thing isn’t for me. Maybe I should throw all caution to the wind and shove bonbons and jellybeans and baskets of fried pig feet down my throat and embrace the oversize-lady adult film industry. Because if you’ve ever googled that, and I know you have, then you’ll notice that all the men are completely normal sized and they seem to find great pleasure in lifting yards of flesh away from the important bits so they can do, you know, the thing they were hired to do.

Blech. Right now that above paragraph is enough to keep me from EVER eating bonbons without serious restraint. I kind of just threw up a little, right in my hand.

Head Down, Outta This Town

The consequences of being able to whine to your friends about not sleeping is that that they automatically feel compelled to tell you how well they slept the night before. As if to prove, yet again, that something as intrinsically natural as laying your head upon a squishy surface and falling asleep is just something you should be able to do, something like blinking your eyelids or wriggling your toes. And while I know they mean nothing but the best, it still doesn’t curb that initial rush of hatred that wants to scream out SO WHAT, DO YOU THINK THAT MAKES YOU COOL OR SOMETHING?!?

When in fact it does make them cool. It also makes them less irritable and cranky, seeing as how they had at least six and sometimes nine hours of full recuperative rest. It’s just, imagine you eat lunch at a nice restaurant with one of your girlfriends and you both happen to order the salmon. It’s tasty and delicious and perfectly cooked but about an hour later you’re clutching your stomach as it does it’s eighth double back handspring in a row. Your friend is sympathetic to your cause because, hello, we’ve all been there. But somehow she feels obligated to tell you how perfectly fine her stomach feels, how she has no idea what could have caused your stomach to revolt against such delicious salmon and did you do something to piss off the chef?

And as far as I know I did nothing to piss off the Sleep Gods. I lay down at an acceptable hour every single night, usually eschewing an evening of festivities so I can recline on my pristine white sheets. I don’t watch late-night television, I dim the lights in my apartment to simulate evening hours and I don’t stay on the computer trolling dating sites until the wee hours of the morn. I rarely drink caffeine after 3pm. In short, I have a bedtime routine, the kind that all the sleep literature recommends. And still I lay awake, night after night, begging the Sleeping Gods to reward my good behavior and send me an all expense paid vacation to La La Land.

Once I realized a couple of months ago that this whole not sleeping thing wasn’t normal, not by any stretch of the imagination, I decided to go to my doctor. That visit didn’t go well, especially after he not-so-subtly intimated that perhaps my not sleeping was directly proportional to me wanting to take a razor to my wrists. I had to inform him that sleeplessness is not always related to depression, which is not always related to wanting to kill yourself. And if anyone in that small doctor’s room was in danger of losing their life, it was most definitely not me.

This morning I bypassed my regular doctor for one who specializes in folks who just want to get some shuteye. Inside his office on the fifth floor I spent over an hour chatting with him about family medical history (we die of everything, but we hang around for a really long time) and my jobs and my hobbies and as we wrapped up the hobby section, he told me that before we go any further, he’d like to confirm some of his preliminary thoughts.

“Your nose lists to the right a bit. I’d say you have a deviated septum. And your mouth is quite small, I bet you hate getting X-rays at the dentist.”

At first I was kind of insulted, like, who the hell are you to talk about my nose listing to the right? My nose is lovely, thank you. The only people who talk about deviated septums are overly indulged rich girls who think they can get their insurance to pay for shaving three inches off the tip and filing down the bump. But then he took out a mirror and said, see, look here, and pointed to the right side. And you know, I had to agree with him. Then he took out his little black instrument with the light on the end and shoved it up my nostril, proclaiming that he was indeed correct and the septum was actually touching the bone on the opposite side.

I had a little moment of panic because of all the surgery shows I watch, the only thing I can’t watch are the nose jobs. Noses are so delicate and fragile and while I agree that some of the people come out looking much better, seeing that poor defenseless bone get hammered into submission is almost too much for me to bear.

I told the doctor of my nose-job fear and he agreed that my nose was quite nice (my nose-pride was instantly restored, thank god) and said surgery was the least of our worries right now. His worry was getting me into the sleep clinic to see what a night hooked up to wires and a video camera could tell him.

And then he said he noticed that at the end of the questionnaire I’d filled out, the fifteen pages of yes and no and how frequently and fill in the blank questions, I’d answered the last bit with “If you make me sleep I will give you a cookie.” And then he told me he was quite fond of oatmeal raisin.

You Appear To Be My Dues To Pay.

I bought a yoga mat like six years ago and I can confidently say that in those six years, I've probably taken it out of the closet maybe ten times. Out of those ten times, I've probably used it for it's intended purposes maybe two or three. The rest of the time I normally throw it on the floor with every intention of doing something yogatastic and instead get distracted by a surgery on the Discovery Health channel and I'll sit cross-legged on it until my ass falls asleep, convincing myself that it's necessary for me to watch yet another cleft palate reconstruction or one more endoscopic brow lift.

Before I put the mat back up, I'll do a quick test to confirm that I can still bend over and put my hands on the floor. Then I'll roll it into it's little carrying case and throw it back in the catch-all closet, ready for the next time I think I'm going to make an attempt at being skinny.

But last night I was bored to tears, bored like I was at the age of twelve and sent to tennis camp for some aerobic activity and outdoor fun. Though if I'm honest the tennis camp debacle was a combination of boredom and outright annoyance, expressed to the full extent of my pre-teen abilities by sitting with my back against the fence and deliberately ignoring the instructor when she used her faux-enthusiasm to encourage me to get off my ass and try it already, I might even like it.

I did not like that woman very much.

In my boredom I somehow found myself driving to the supercenter across town with no list of groceries and no need for batteries or light bulbs or lint roller refills. It was odd walking in the store like that, with just a total lack of ambition or designated plan of action. I always have lists. Always. Right now I have a post-it note list on my laptop at work, waiting for me to walk in on Monday and know exactly what I need to do before eight. I have a list of things I need to do, letters I need to write, harassing emails I need to compose, friends I need to call. And somehow I still remain neurotic enough to forget to pay my water bill or deposit money in my bank account.

So I wondered around the store for a bit, stopping off in cosmetics and throwing random products in my buggy, products that claim to make my curls soft and frizz-free, another that promises to help straighten wavy hair. (To be used separately, obviously.) Then I was back in electronics, perusing the aisles of music and thinking how I have no idea who Ne-Yo or Chingy or Cheyenne Kimball are, but they're all featured prominently on the displays.

Then it was off to DVD's and I couldn't find a single thing that I wanted, because I don't buy DVD's that I can rent for two dollars at Movie Xchange and throw in the return box when I'm done watching them. But as I was walking down the last aisle a picture of an impossibly fit woman caught my eye and before I knew what I was doing, I'd picked up the double disc set of ab and arm and butt and leg and probably pinkie toe exercises and thrown it in the buggy, right next to the shiny green bottles of hair product. Then I marched over to sporting goods and threw in two ten-pound weights, just because whatever I was high on must taken over the properly functioning part of my brain. I've never purchased weights before, never had the desire to, simply because for my entire childhood my father kept a set of ancient brown weights on the fireplace and it drove my mother absolutely insane that the only time those things got used were, um, never. Their entire purpose in life was to collect dust and dog hair and cat fur.

As I was walking out to my car, however, I think I came a little to my senses. The bag with the weights was heavy. Like, for real heavy. And I was going to do what with these exactly? OH MY GOD I'M TURNING INTO MY FATHER. Next thing you know I'll keep stacks of engineering magazines by my chair as an homage to fire hazards everywhere.

Oh well, at least I'll get more productive with a hammer. Maybe even use some nails.

This morning I got up because some asshole was knocking on my neighbors door yelling JOHN! bam bam bam JOOOOHN! I could have helped the guy by politely pointing out that JOHN! is not home, see how there are no cars in the driveway? No car equals no JOHN! so please go home and have a nice burrito. But instead I opened my back door and anonymously yelled out "SHUT THE FUCK UP OR I'M GOING TO CUT YOU." And then I quickly shut my door and closed all my curtains, because I'm a little crazy but I'm not actually stupid.

Since I was up, I decided it was time to bring out the old blue yoga mat and pop one of my new get-yourself-skinny exercise DVD's. I grabbed a glass of water because, though it's been a while since I've deliberately made myself sweat, I hear it's good to keep hydrated while bouncing around your living room.

After fifteen minutes of jumping jacks and leg lifts and strange butt-lifting abdominal crunches, I lay panting on my blue yoga mat, thinking these people are smoking something illegal to think I can get my ass off the floor, much less do one more leg swirly kick thing.

And then I turned my head and got an in-depth look at the dust bunnies under my couch and I dragged myself off the floor to add Sweep Under Couch to my to-do list.

'La vache est un idiot' is the only thing I remember from French class.

As I was driving home this evening I happened to get caught at a downtown red light, one that afforded me an unobstructed view of the early evening sky. In the distance I could see a plane, obviously in it’s beginning efforts of climbing to a respectable altitude, and I was struck by the obscene angle by which it was traveling. It seemed impossible that the passengers inside weren’t being thrown upwards and over their uncomfortably close seats and I immediately envisioned the warning printed on bags of chips, proclaiming that Contents May Settle During Shipping.

For whatever reason I thought about the first time I’d ever been on a plane. The destination was Maastricht, a small university town about an hour’s train ride outside of Amersterdam. My friend Kasi and I had spent a weekend early in the spring semester writing grant proposals for our trip, researching plane fares and in general attempting to contain our excitement at embarking on our first-ever across the pond excursion. When our grants came through we immediately sat down to book our flights, an adventure in and of itself as Kasi had spent the entirety of her previous college career laboriously typing upon a word processor, eschewing The Internet as a thing of demonic possession. She was determined to make her reservations on her own, however, and knowing Kasi as I did, I finally slipped out of my room, leaving Kasi to her own devices and praying my computer would be in one piece by the time I got back.

Our tickets came a week later and both of us slipped them between the pages of our crisp passports, complaining of the hideousness of our passport photos. We’d scheduled the trip around spring break, choosing to miss three days of classes on either end of the vacation to allow for more travel time and recuperation from jet lag, which strangely I never felt. Probably because the entire time overseas I stuck almost religiously to my own local time, not caring that I woke up in early afternoon because the museums were open until five and the hash bars were open all night.

When it came time for us to leave, Kasi and I packed our suitcases full of everything imaginable. We would be staying with friends in the international dorms so they’d prepared us for the weather but it’s amazing how the words ‘Spring’ and ‘Break’ can infiltrate your head so that you still pack a few tank tops and shorts, just in case the weather should warm up. In March. In The Netherlands. Right-o.

We were scheduled to fly out of Little Rock at 4pm on a Wednesday but due to weather or plane malfunction or just some newbie with an affection for the delete key, our flight was canceled for the evening and we were given meal vouchers as compensation. So Kasi and I ate dinner and then drove the thirty miles back to Conway to wait out yet another day before our trip could begin. The next day we showed up in the airport again, still wearing our polar fleece ‘traveling clothes’ which looked nothing so much like actual clothing as soft and cuddly pajamas.

The first flight from Little Rock to Memphis was horrendous, and I remember thinking that if I had to survive this turmoil and tossing about I would surely never make it through the upcoming flights from Memphis to JFK, JFK to Amsterdam and Amsterdam to Maastricht. But the flight to New York was more subdued and the flight across the ocean was much like sitting on a cloud with a constantly rumbly tummy. The only parts I truly hated were the take off and landing, feeling myself either pushed back against my seat by some invisible and unkind hand or pitched forward against the paltry restraint of my seat belt.

The trip itself was fabulous. We spent hours each day roaming the streets of Maastricht and passing ourselves off as students in the dorm cafeteria, feasting on bread with butter and delectable chocolate sprinkles, avoiding the strange meats in the spaghetti and the other meats just in general. We made trips into Amsterdam and found a bar that was actually a boat permanently moored to the side of a canal. We took a four day trip to Paris where we climbed the steps of Sacre Coeur, amusing ourselves to no end with our ridiculous French accents, relying on my two years of high school French to count out bits of change and say things like ‘Laisssez moi tranquille!’ (leave me alone!) when shabbily dressed gypsy women tried to con the shoes off our feet.

Before the trip I’d convinced a new professor to let me take one of the media department’s new digital camcorders and I spent the majority of my time filming our bus rides and train rides and various museum excursions, one of them being a tour of the famous Amsterdam Sex Museum. The museum itself was worth far more than the paltry two dollars we paid to get in because inside were six, seven and eight foot tall penile replicas, along with various artifacts ranging from carved jade depicting rather amusing acts by extremely flexible individuals to short films detailing the evolution of sex (and our reactions to it) throughout the ages.

In my tv cabinet reside two small tapes that hold footage of Kasi and I inside this museum and one day I will befriend someone with access to a converter and the willingness to transfer these to DVD. Because one Christmas many years from now, I’m going to present to Kasi the footage of her standing directly under the curved overhang of an eight foot tall penis, lovingly throwing her leg around the base and ungracefully falling on her ass. And then I’m going to throw in the part where we ran across a shopkeeper who was quite enthralled with our Americaness and insisted on showing us his American Dollars, which happened to be very realistic looking dollars except for the fact that on the front, where George Washington’s stoic and immobile face usually resides, was Monica Lewinsky paying special attention to something that was most definitely not a cigar.

Spies Like Us

My oh my oh MY.

This afternoon I spent the majority of my time cleaning. Not because I really wanted to but because the one place I wanted to clean was and remains unavailable for cleaning.

You see, around 3am I woke up to this utterly atrocious splattering noise. I couldn't possibly imagine what it was but immediately blamed it on The Demonspawn. Upon further inspection, however, I ascertained that The Demonspawn were innocent of my accusations with the real culprit being my bathroom ceiling. Apparently it had been storing up a filthy present for a good long time and chose the middle of the night to make it's grand entrance, pouring and splashing a ricockulous (look YoJ, I used it in a sentence) amount of water all over my bathroom floor.

It would have been too much to ask that it burst over the bathtub, wouldn't it.

There wasn't much I could do in the middle of the night so I waited until morning to ring up my landlord. He sent over one of his maintenance men to cut out the sagging plaster and while I appreciate the gesture, all that did was put a layer of soggy dust over the already soppy floor. And because the ceiling is still dripping there's not much point in me cleaning it up, not to mention the fact that my bathroom is so small that there's no place I can stand to clean up the mess without putting myself in the line of (dirty dripping water) fire.

So in lieu of cleaning the bathroom I found myself angrily scrubbing the windows and polishing the armoire and mopping the floors. I scooped the cat litter and took out the trash and lint rolled the furniture. And then I decided I'd clean up the back porch, because I'd let it go all summer and in three short months my pretty glider had been covered in a layer of sticky dust and the poor potted plants had shriveled up inside their terra cotta pots. The plants have actually been dead for a year but I've just been ignoring them, hoping that one day they'd magically sprout again. I have a complete lack of anything pertaining to a green thumb and the opressive humidity found in this part of the country was the biggest deterrent in replanting some greenery.

As I was grabbing the broom off the wall I happened to look outside and spied an unusual vehicle. Not unusual as in lime green unusual but unusual as in I know the two cars that park on my neighbor's parking pad and this shiny SUV wasn't one of them, not to mention that it was parked at an odd angle. My next door neighbor is what you might call cranky and I almost went outside to tell this new person to move their car before Mr. Crankpot got home but decided whoever this was, they could fight their own battles and secretly I was kind of amused that the SUV was blocking the entrance of the driveway.

Upon going out on the back porch to begin the process of sweeping away a summer's worth of crap, I saw a woman in her mid-sixties walking around the edge of my neighbor's house, the part where the outdoor stairs lead to the upstairs apartment that Mr. Crankpot rents out. I smiled and waived and noticed she was getting various cleaning accoutrements from the back of the SUV so I stopped my sweeping to ask her if she was moving in.

No, she said, just my son.

About that time I see, out of the corner of my eye, a rather tall and broad shouldered individual emerging from the side of the building. The woman smiles at me and introduces her son, Jake, and I walk over and shake his hand.

Hell-o, sugar. My name is Robin and I'll be your cute and SINGLE SINGLE SINGLE neighbor. How ever can I assist you today?

Oh, you're gainfully employed? And you speak in complete sentences? And you have all of your natural born teeth? WHAT MORE COULD I ASK?

Now, guess who's going to be making a concerned effort to take her evening coffee on the back porch? GUESS.

Droplet

I have been trying to write a follow up to The Gospel for what seems like an interminable amount of time now, though in reality it’s only been like a week or so. Every time I go to talk about how the girls in my cabin made it their mission in life to convert me, how they attempted to lay hands upon me in hopes that something other than a virulent strain of bronchitis would find it’s way into my chest cavity, something like the Blessed Lord and Savior, I end up with one really good sentence and then one qualifying sentence. Like the one that’s coming up, where I’m going to say that while I’m sort of making fun here I’m not actually MAKING FUN, if that makes sense.

Because the thing is, I totally don’t care what you worship or even if you worship. I don’t care if you tithe to Maximus Daximus, the god of shag carpeting. Really, I don’t. The only time I’m going to get up in your bees-wax is when you try to convert everyone else to your particular sect of shag-carpet worshipping, because obviously it’s the only way to go. Also I don’t so much like it if you fire missiles or make things go big boom to make a point about how cool your religion is. And I don't like it when you tell little girls that if their family doesn’t convert to Southern Baptist then they’re all going to hell. Overall, I just want everyone to sing hippie songs and frolic in fields of flowers and not get so uptight about how MY church says mini skirts make you a slut and MY church says drinking the grape juice of fire makes you a heathen and MY church says you should wear yellow on Wednesdays because if you don’t, you’re going to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.

And since I obviously won’t be finishing up The Gospel story I’ll just move along to the Events of My Day.

This morning my alarm clock, which is really my cell phone, went off at 6:34. After I hit the snooze button three times I eventually picked it up and squinted at the screen, attempting to see the time. In theory I should know the time because each snooze is seven minutes long but this is why I set the alarm to go off on an uneven denomination. There’s not a chance in hell I’d be able to calculate 6:34am plus seven minutes plus seven minutes plus seven minutes before at least lunch and eventually I’m forced to pick up the phone to see the actual time. All so that I may have a heart attack and jump out of bed because it’s wicked late and I’ve still got to iron my pants.

But when I flicked open the phone I saw that I had a text message, which was odd because I didn’t have one when I laid down for bed and I didn’t have one when the sun came up so sometime in between those moments I must have slept, hurah! But my excitement was short lived because I saw the text was from an area code where my parents live and I had one of those moments when I thought something had happened, oh my, panic is welling and then I realized I hadn’t yet ingested any caffeine and what drug was I smoking to think that either of my parents could send a text message. (Hi, Mama! I’m not really making fun of you here, swear. And you know you rolled your eyes a bit when you bought Mama Sylvia a DVD player two years ago and still it sits, unused on top of her TV. So this is just like that, only I’m telling the internet. But look how far you’ve come in the cell phone age! You carry it with you almost all the time now! And you call me from places to tell me they have shoes on sale! You DO love me!)

As it turns out this text was from my brother. Oh, you don’t remember him? Let me refresh your memory. He was the one who claimed a kamikaze black dog ran out in front of his car which forced him into the ditch on the side of the highway. And then, because this was totally the best choice ever, he decided to run down the country highway at like four in the morning. Where he was subsequently picked up by the county po-leece and taken to the pokey. And then my father and I spent an entire day looking for him, calling his friends, not finding him, growing more and more grim as the day wore on. Knowing you don’t just leave a car on the side of the road, keys and cell phone and guitar scattered amongst the seats.

Obviously there was no kamikaze black dog and a day later the true story came out, the story that involved a bit of excessive drinking (surprise!) and a black out (shocked!) and my brother’s insane ability to pilot a motor vehicle whilst completely unaware and probably not even awake.

But here’s the thing: I’m not sure I can ever convey to him what that was like, how it felt to sit in my apartment all day and be absolutely convinced that he was gone, that I was never going to see him again. How I sat in a chair in my darkened living room and stared at the wall with tears falling down my cheeks. What it felt like to have something hurt that godamn much and have not a single mark on my body to accuse as the culprit.

After a conversation the next day that involved him proclaiming his innocence and me trying, without success, to tell him how scared I was (oddly enough, this is hard to do when both parties are shouting) he called me a bitch and hung up the phone. Not a word was spoken between us since, not until my mother came to town and tried to force a friendly family dinner on the three of us. While there I asked the right questions, made the right gestures, smiled at the appropriate times. But it wasn’t real. An entire trash bag of beer cans and liquor bottles was literally overflowing onto his kitchen floor and my fear of someday, soon, looking at my brother through dirty plexiglass or inside a satin lined coffin was even more a reality.

And this text message, well, I’m not sure how much it helped. He said he just wanted to say I Love You. That he knows he never calls but he loves me. And while this sounds a bit like a Lionel Ritchie song, you should know that no one in my family is of the inclination to go around spouting off I Love You’s and Can’t Live Without You’s. Even when I say it to my friends I say it in my sing-song voice, the same voice I use when I pick up a pair of five-hundred dollar shoes and talk directly into their shoe depths, proclaiming my unwavering love for them. It’s not that I love my friends with the same part of my brain that I love pretty shoes, it’s just that saying it like you mean it feels kind of like the morning after you ran naked through the What-a-Burger.

Also, this text came through at 12:51am and I know where he goes on Wednesday nights. It sure ain’t church camp, unless church camp serves dollar beer and greasy pizza. So I appreciate the sentimentality, I appreciate that he thought about me because I think about him. I think about him and I worry about him and I can never tell him that sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, heart racing, convinced that he didn’t make it home okay this time.

It was three hours later before I could say it back. It was three hours because it took that long for me to cry in the shower and get dressed for work. I had to stand in the cafeteria breakfast line and stare intently at the price of biscuits while my friend admonished me for not immediately replying. I had to flip open my phone a half dozen times. But I finally said it back, and I mean it. No sing-song voice.