Strudel: MOM taste this lollypop, it tastes like grape! I think it was mislabeled as chocolate.
Me: Ok. Mmmm.
Strudel: MOM! Now it tastes like WINE!
Whoops.
Author Archives: iasshole
Worst. Day. EVAR.
What has become of my nutsack
Why the fuck am I cone
The sign over the door says “Give Up”
In the dairy aisle, at that time in the a.m. when it is all nice little old ladies, con brio: “BLOODY HELL, MOTHER!” Tooo much Buffy and Spike. The blue heads swiveled. I wished I was dead. Franny wished she was dead. And we laughed.
At the Nordic Hertitage Museum
At sushi, with chopsticks and a miso spoon [nonchalantly]: “I’m unforkened!”
Soup!
At the antique store, confidently: “This typewriter’s broken.”
“How can you tell?”
“There’s no screen.”
Tryyy the motherfucking veeeeal people!
En Roy Dotrice Nouvelles
Franny is gone for one week each to Colorado and the San Juans with her father. She has a bad attitude about it in the way of eleven-year-olds who are not being allowed to sit around unbathed, reading comic books in their pajamas. He took her one day early and it was a FEDERAL CASE to even arrange that.
He emailed me the day before to tell me to remind Franny to loot a bunch of clothes and stuff from my house since she doesn’t have enough for a week’s vacation. Of course I paraphrase, but I tell you it was not an ask. Which, you know, I am still smarting a little over that whole being sued thing last fall. I don’t really think paying a small amount of child support makes this the Bank of Franny Clothes, especially since she tells stories about our clothes being absorbed into hand-me-down boxes for his other children. TAKE AN HOUR OUT OF YOUR FAPPERY-FILLED DAY AND GO TO GOODWILL FFS. Am I off base here?
This is all just so SIGH. Picture me, waiting outside of the girls’ school last September, on a sunny fall day waiting for Strudel, and knowing that he is about to pick up Franny. I expected him to be in his car, but up he strolls, knowing that we have been exchanging nasty emails all summer, with his threats getting cranked up up up post-child support all the time until I knew he was about to sue me. Like, as I was standing there I was expecting summons that week.
“How’s it going?” he said, GLIBLY, as he walked up. UM I’M ABOUT TO GET SUED BITCH is how it’s going. P.S., by you. I don’t feel like chitty chatting.
I get tired of this push push pull, you know? But I cannot stand that car dealer mentality (I know, insulting to car dealers) where I am being pecked for everything on the off chance I might say yes, or maybe he thinks it’s legit? I cannot tell anymore.
Do you get locked into eternal combat with something or someone and then imagine yourself letting go? I let go of a lot of things–with other people, with work, with my girls. It’s better to give when you can. What do you do when you cannot give that one person anything, because you know you will never get anything in return and it won’t benefit your kid to boot and you are just empty? I cannot imagine what letting go looks like. I feel that this is a major personal flaw right now. I have sensible talks with myself about being mature and flexible and then I just imagine myself bending over and taking it up the butt with a bowling pin the size of the Eiffel Tower (try to sleep tonight now, I defy you).
I’d like to think that when the ink is dry on the parenting plan, which is coming, SOON, like it or not, I can let a lot of this go. I sure it’s been a long year reading all this blibber blubber about court, but I think I’m in the home stretch now. Then it’s the fun part–I’ve saved every bill and I’m going to add it up. ALL OF IT. It’s going to hoit. How’s that for an x-ray into Changing a Parenting Plan for Dummies, and We Do Mean That You Are a Dummy. And probably like a recap about what I did right and wrong.
The bummer part is that every situation is different and walking into a court room is a coin flip, but I tell you I would do it all again. There’s also some stuff I have to keep under my hat til the paperwork’s signed, and then…oh yes.
And then I am on to other things!
Go go Gadget library levy
P: The daaaaay that sweet Jenny diiiiiied!
Me: I said, “Do you know when your BALLOT is due?”
I swear to GOD.
Aligned Nuts, and, Things I Learned from My Mother Part 1,338
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to see my family with fresh eyes, as you do. Especially if there’s some distance involved. There’s currently a lot of distance, since I’ve recently learned that my mother moved to Texas a couple of months ago. Of course, there’s been distance for years, ever since I did my final breaking off with my mother in 2005 or so. But I knew she was lurking around in town waiting to be unpleasantly discovered, like a mustard stain on your white pants.
I will confess to you I once saw her at the market when I was with Strudel and looked through her. What to say to her, anyway? Oh, hello, here’s your grandchild you don’t know, with that guy you called weird and whose hand you drunkenly slammed in a minivan door and then laughed about it. Oh yes, this is the same man you said I should look off because my “bar was way too low” after SeaFed to make any good relationship decisions. Er. And how have you been?
I guess lately I’ve been thinking about what you do about the hash that is how you were raised. I think I went through the Solemn Oaths Never to Do Certain Things Ever Ever phase in my twenties, especially with my children appearing on the scene. Some of those solemn oaths will stick. I promise never to get high with my girls in college and tell them in front of their roommates that they were almost aborted. I promise never to describe some hella monster cock that you would never even guess this married HR guy had, I mean, look at him. I promise not to spend their college money on a teal Pontiac Sunfire. These are just random examples of terrible things someone’s mother could possibly do (COUGH) that do not even scratch the surface really, and how much time do you have anyway?
Something good happened recently, though. Maybe. My mother has been appropriately, and by her own hand, medicated. I think this has allowed a tiny window of self-awareness to open up. My sister and I suspect that she may have been unbalanced since possibly her early 20s, maybe longer. I moved in with her when I was about 6 and she was 23.
How does it feel, I keep asking myself, to know that history could have been rewritten and my entire childhood could have had a different tone? It kind of feels like…nothing. Big deal, I think to myself. Everyone has some kind of childhood. Really, and I am not kidding, it makes for very amusing stories now. I want to amuse my girls with them when I’m older but I don’t want them to feel sorry for me. Franny cried once when she realized I have almost no family and then I was all, ” I have you, ya lolo.”
I had a glimpse into a loving childhood with my grandparents and this sounds very self-flagellating but I really think that early love and that stable environment that they provided–it was a liferaft for what came later. There was a part of me that knew what it was like to be loved correctly and without conditions and to feel safe and I kind of knew I was biding my time. I assumed that mothers were crazy and fathers were sadists. I saw a lot of that at my friends’ houses as well.
The really evil thing was that my theory about mothers and fathers kind of held out. My mother made certain to tear down my relationship with my grandmother by telling me stories about when she was young–about watching her stepsiblings get whacked with pots and pans, about sexual abuse, about her stepsister being possessed by the Devil and a priest coming to the house (go team Baptist). What happened between then and when they became my grandparents? Why was I being spared all this trouble?
I also wondered when my life was going to change. I became a mother eleven years ago…I held my breath for a long time. When would I start burning my children with cigarettes? My mother painted my father as all the bad things I was turning out to be in high school–gay, depressive, an atheist, into Monty Python. Cripes, when would my fatal flaw blow up and leave a big smoking crater in my life and everyone elses’?
So my sister got an email apology from my mother on her birthday, which was Sunday. Big one: 25. We ran into a yoga teacher that day I have known for many years who has been working with Morgan recently and had lovely things to say about her. “She’s very bright,” she said. I know that. I used to change her diapers. I’ve seen a lot.
The email was a long one about my mother’s life now in Texas. She’s with family and is seeing something like parallel lives down there–her stepbrother’s children describe him as abusive, and some of them are estranged from him. Perhaps that was food for thought now that her head is clearer. I wasn’t sure my mother would ever have a moment of clarity, since I didn’t know she could or would be “fixed.” No one is ever completely fixed–you are still yourself and your experiences shape you. I don’t begrudge my sister that apology, nor do I feel really happy about it. I think my mother has tried to apologize to me over the years, but she didn’t really understand or remember what for. These things don’t stick.
My mother, when we spent time together, used to call me a “closet Catholic” and was always telling me I took things too seriously. I remember her dismissing my college application letter as “pretentious” (to be fair, it was). Later I realized that it was me having a conscience and trying to find a sense of purpose. You can learn a lot from sociopaths and sociopathic tendencies and how people like this navigate through the world. You can learn how to charm people without turning it on them when they are weak. You can learn what motivates people without using their desires against them, or to rip what you want out of them. You can see people as vulnerable and flawed and love them anyway, instead of feeling superior. And you can get tested regularly for her very treatable condition, like she could have been years ago (I’m negative).
Namaste, bitches.
Commander Pineapple/Colonel Mustard Slash
“Then you have given up hope?”
“Hope of what, Sir?” she asked mildly.
Simon felt foolish, as if he had committed a breach of etiquette. “Well–hope of being set free.”
“Now why would they want to do that, Sir?” she said. “A murderess is not an everyday thing. As for my hopes, I save that for smaller matters. I live in hopes of having a better breakfast tomorrow morning than I had today.” She smiled a little. “They said at the time that they were making an example of me. That’s why it was the death sentence, and then the life sentence.”
But what does an example do, afterwards? thought Simon. Her story is over. The main story, that is; the thing that defined her. How is she supposed to fill the rest of the time?
–Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
It’s beyond the point, but I like to picture the main character as Gina Torres, though she’s a white Irish lady. It’s ok.
PNW Strawberries rather than store California ones
I have a little news so I will make a little post. ETA: Whoops, I am incapable of being terse.
THING THE FIRST: I have been a victim of FRAUD, FRAUD I TELLS YOU. I knew it was coming, due to my predilection to shop on dodgy sites at 2 a.m. and buy things like Drain Snake What Someone Has Glued Google Eye Onto (J/K, I always use the most trustworthy sites ever and this is not an ADMISSION OF ANYTHING, Giant Corporate Bank). I was looking over my account and there it was…Two pay-as-you-go phones, Match.com recurring monthly debit and then a cancellation (did you know that OKStraightPeople is $36 a month!!!???), and a pizza place in California.
It did not really bother me too much, since these things are so impersonal. I called, cancelled the card, etc. It did make me think of an old friend of mine who had her bank card number lifted right as she was traveling in to the U.S. and then went bonkers about how evil Americans crimed her, when it turned out that all the fraud was frauded in her own country. I still laugh when I think of that–not at the misfortune of being robbed, but how certain situations can bring out our deep and not-so-secret prejudices.
Heirloom is my favorite, though purple roses struggle here.
THING THE SECOND: I don’t know if this deserves its own Legal Beat update, but this is just to say that star of stolidness and screeds, Seattle Federline, is being VERY amusing as of late. Seriously. As you may recall a guardian at litem was appointed (by court order) to our case in December in the event that we did not just immediately settle.
We mediated in late January or early February and I don’t think I wrote about it because man was it a big bag of suck. That was when I was kind of running out of gas and jollytimes and working at shitty contract and this was just one more thing on the shit pile. It was shuttle mediation, where you sit in one room and the other party sits in the other room, at his insistence, which is unfortunate because I really wanted a chance to wear my new snake wig out somewheres.
The mediator was all Hard Bargain Harriet and I think she was trying basic bitch mind tricks or something, because I had canceled mediation the previous summer and I quote myself here (you’re welcome future biographer*):
For my mediation appointment with SeaFed we were required by the mediator to submit a statement saying why we wanted to mediate. I’m grateful to her for this since it clarified everything for me like bang. I would not allow myself to reply “I don’t want to mediate” so I made myself put “to appear cooperative,” which is a pretty shitty reason to do anything you’ll spend a lot of money on and get nothing out of (forced parenting class during my divorce comes to mind as well). He replied, well past the courtesy deadline the mediator asked for, naturally: “My purpose in mediating is to nullify the temporary living arrangement we’ve been adhering to and return to the original parenting plan.”
Well, that tore it. What a colossal waste of time this expensive discussion would be. I was also lulzing at the fact that when SeaFed is put into some kind of grown-up communication situation, he never uses one word when three officious ones would do, much like I imagine a twelfth-grade honors English essay reads. With a great sense of relief, I cancelled the appointment, saying that I didn’t think it was the right venue in which to make a change like this…because…it’s NOT.
COUGH anyway once I got in front of her she said, “I thought YOU were the difficult one since you canceled mediation. I never would have advised a client to say that they merely wanted to ‘appear cooperative.” Okay, a. not my most brilliant move ever and b. way to play hardball, lady. I am shaking in my negged boots over here. She also told me that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of getting what I wanted, in spite of the fact that what I wanted was what we’ve been doing, because she has Seen Things in Many a Courtroom.
This struck a false note with me, and I was done. We drew up something tentative, which SeaFed refused to sign, having been wanged by signing the Memorandum of Understanding in mediation in 2007. I took this as a clue that he was not buying her bullpucky either. I could not ask him, of course, since he was elsewhere. As I was leaving she said, “The next time we meet we push forward. We are not changing anything written down on this paper.”
“Mmmhmmm,” I replied, which is SJ for “I am done with you but have learned not to command people to fuck off and die willy-nilly.”
So nothing happened, and nothing happened, and we did not discuss mediation, and then in May(?) SeaFed sent a proposed parenting plan that looked very like the weirdy stuff from mediation. I made notes on it to the point where it became a different plan and sent it to my lawyer, asking her advice. Recently we had to furnish a witness list to court and get the ball rolling on the guardian ad litem and that is where SeaFed has decided to throw the brakes on. The GAL intake form was 107 questions (and there was a bonus “short” form about a quarter of that size). The retainer is $1450. I can’t imagine this had anything to do with the series of panicked emails he sent after the GAL contacted him recently. I reminded him we were on deadlines and that mediation had failed, due to the fact that we didn’t agree on anything and did not have a signed parenting plan.
“Mediation was successful!” he declared to me, the GAL, and my lawyer via email. “Expressions of complete and total surprise!” he narded on. I was ready to have my first appointment with the GAL and she called an canceled on me morning of. “Mr. SeaFed seems surprised and confused by all of this, so I will wait to hear back from him again…I know this is a court order but we should wait a bit if we can save you both some money.”
“Okay,” I said.
Later SeaFed sent out an email politely declining the GAL’s services. I had the exquisite joy of watching my exhusband politely decline a court order. Schadenlulz turned to schadenweeing my pants. I emailed my lawyer: “Can he politely decline a court order?” Her: “Um, no.”
I think the time is finally right to send on my proposed parenting plan–it’s ready now.
Nightmere
THING THE THIRD: Did you know that Modern Clue (aka Cluedo) has taken away the honoraries of the guests? I was thinking about how the men always had Professor or Colonel, but the ladies were all Miss or Mrs. This is very freeing, actually, since I remember the old names, but now Mrs. White is Dr. White when we play. Take that, patriarchy. And now Miss Scarlet is bringing Fierce Drag Queen realness.
I am almost always Colonel Mustard, since I have always identified with and admired pompous asses. His flavor text is still pompous: “Did I ever tell you about my glorious football years?” I approve. When I was a kid and I would stare at all the pieces in the Clue board that my mother and her siblings abandoned along with the rest of her childhood at my grandmother’s trailer, I liked to imagine the Colonel had elephant-foot umbrella stands and oryx heads on his walls.
Strudel cheats. “No, I have never seen a Mrs. Peacock card in my hand in my life.” Later: “Whoops!” You know if she is marking clues down mid-game and it is not her turn, then good fucking luck at the pool house. Usually everyone dies. I declare it Cluethulu.
* Working title: Cuntligula and the Art of Mastodon Maintenance
In Avian Appenings
Hello! Well, what an unexpected surprise this weekend.
Wants to live in Los Angel-leez
My friend emailed me this morning and told me that after repeated raccoon attacks like me, he was down to one orphan. You can’t keep an orphan–it’s cruel. So now we are home to his Black Francis. She is lovely. I am keeping her crated in the shade with food and water until tonight, when I will pop her in the coop. The idea is that the old girls will be too tired to fuss much, and then I will get up at half past the early bird’s ass tomorrow and let them out. Then Ms. Francis will know her home, and will be familiar to my girls. It’s been so long since I’ve had a rando bantam like this. I am delighted. I don’t roll the dice on them because they are impossible to sex as new chicks.
So the talk is that my friend and I will do the chick co-op thing next spring and go in on a order of sexed ones. I will have to rope some other people in as well to avoid ROOSTERS INCLUDED FOR WARMTH. (A picture of tiny Zsa-Zsa, FNIF.)
I have a post script on poor Veronica. It turns out she was hiding the fact that a raccoon had taken a chunk out of her side. The next day after the attack she came limping out of the coop and I took her to the e-vet before we went to Portland that weekend. Very sad! So now there are 6 with Death Ray being the O.G. chicken, and now she has a bantam buddy.
I will also say that when half your small flock gets traumatized, what happens is you often get rogue behavior like tree-sleeping and egg-hiding. We are lucky in Seattle to have cool days, and my coop is mostly shaded, so the weekend I came back from Portland (about one week after the attack, which was a week of chasing chickens out of bushes and stuffing them in their home) we did what I call a Home Day. The chooks spend all the damn boring day in their coop with food and water and any vents open, of course. You leave them that night and let them out the next morning. I find this often brings a certain cohesiveness back to a scared or divided flock (at least one that is not attack/feather-pecking each other). Now they hang out more. I also trimmed the flight feathers of one wing on each bird, which I should have done a while ago–no more cedar sleeping.
Gardening a lot this weekend…I am about to hull local strawberries for jam. YUM.
Gertie brought in the same flicker three times in 12 hours around the fourth. TSK, GERTIE!
Legally Pink
Update: My life continues to be a struggle not to dance around while shouting WHAT UP WITH THAT.
But first, I want to be serious for a minute and issue an apology to everyone I didn’t write to for letter writing month. Here is what happened: I got wrung out last fall, started a new work contract in January and thought for February I would try something different. Can you just put walnut catsup into an empty gas tank and expect it to go? No, you cannot. February was useful in that it really made me confront the fact that I had about zero creative outputs left in me. I choked on writing a really gnarly letter and just fell off everything for a while. Not much reading, not much writing, no drawing, not even shopping cock n balls onto selected foreheads with purchase. So I am sorry I did not write to you! Please know that your addresses have been shredded in triplicate.
Secondly, what is happening in legal land? ONLY EVERYTHING. This transparency I promised is paying off, albeit slowly. Welcome to my nightmare. I may have mentioned previously that I have a trial date in October, which is the drop dead date, the parenting plan gets decided. In the meantime, theoretically, we are settling. Not much is happening, at least not quickly. I’m working on the parenting plan with my lawyer now. Things were not progressing fast enough for SeaFed, who demanded to see my draft of the parenting plan and refused to sign some standard court-required progress paperwork, which, yeah. That’s a bargaining chip. Oh WAIT NO, that’s a possible non-compliance hearing.
There was a surprise side order of stupid when he did not check the temporary parenting plan and booked over my vacation and refused to change anything until I made a formal request to ask…for…my…time? Don’t bogart the tail pipe, man. I sent the kid over with charts of what made sense for summer (basically trading time since he had taken a bunch of mine). Every time I wrestle with this fucking proverbial pig I get muddy but sometimes it works out and I get mud and a happy kid, at least, who is glad not to be spending seven accidental weeks there. I returned her call after she left me a message saying her father had conceded finally.
“MOM summer is working out!”
“So, are you happy?” I said.
“YES.”
I like this outcome because I am hoping she feels like pitching sense to her dad actually gained her some ground for once, even though I’m sure it was my last email to him with my lawyer cc’ed on it. I have her back.
The next thing is awakening the kraken guardian ad litem. I have a hundred-question intake form to fill out this weekend. ABOUT THINGS THAT HAPPENED TEN YEARS AGO. FFFFfffuck I think I was a unicorn then.
The dark covers me and I cannot run now
Let’s get this out of the way immediately: this morning I woke up to GRISLY CHICKEN DEATH. Zsa Zsa, JWOWW, and So-and-So the Easter Egger got the axe. I locked them up at dusk last night and it was quiet outside and they were burbling in their house and everything seemed well. There was a lot of noise at 5 a.m. but I didn’t think much of it. Sometimes they get noisy when the sun comes up. I came out at 6:30 to let them out (I surrender, I am a morning person now, yes I hate myself appropriately) and the first thing I saw was feathers under the coop. Too many feathers. There were three broken and gutted little bodies around the backyard. One of the raccoons had eaten the eggs out of Zsa Zsa’s body, which just made me furious, really.
I walked to the corner of the yard and old lady Veronica was hiding behind the shed, standing upright and eying me warily. A feather was stuck to her head and at first I was afraid that her eye had been poked or something, but she was just sticky. I let her be since I figured she’d get it off herself, and also because after what she witnessed she is probably now Chicken Dexter Morgan and I didn’t want to get too close.
Watching her stand there made me feel really sad. I surveyed the little piles where the raccoons had left the girls laying around the yard half eaten and all I could think of was how scared they must have been in the dark and how terrible I was to have shut the door too early and locked them out. It’s like a horror movie when the door closes too soon and you watch your friend get torn apart by zombies/tentacles/LaRouchies through the porthole. I cried–I couldn’t help it.
The thing about chicken deaths is that I don’t really bond with them the way I do with my cats and now the dog, but they are trusting and defenseless and just kind of generally good animals, I believe. I know chickens peck each other and sometimes they eat eggs and they are stupid, but after ten years I feel that most problems can be prevented with proper conditions and control. You can steer them like a waterway and they do good work for you. And I had let them down.
Once the bodies were cleaned up I opened their door to check on the remaining hens. No one came forward, and normally they burst out like they have been shot from an extremely short range cannon.
“Girls?” I stuck my head in. There was an egg open on the coop floor and Silver Belle’s beak was wet. That was weird. They rarely break their own eggs. I walked around back and the back egg hatch was open. Strudel had done her egg duty yesterday and had left it open.
I was still crying when I came into the house and I sat on the couch. Frannie came upstairs and it’s extremely rare but I feel bad when the first thing the girls see in the morning is me bawling like a big soppy muffin. I told Frannie what went down and she hugged me while I sniffled and felt terrible. After a couple of minutes on the couch, we heard Strudel’s door open and Frannie went down to fill her in on the news.
When Strudel came upstairs she looked stunned. Strudel always has strong notions about justice and responsibility, and spent a few months asking me hard questions about things like police justice and morality. I have NO IDEA what she is going to turn into when she grows up. For a long time the people who were most responsible for breaking and taking things in my house were Not Me and Must’ve Have Been My Sister, but lately she has been coming forward more and talking about how she could handle things better the next time. What a fucking relief.
“I’m sad about the chickens,” she said.
“Yeah. Thanks. Me too,” I said. I waited for her wheels to turn to where I knew they would go next.
“Did someone leave the door open?” she asked, gently.
“Yes,” I said. “The egg door was left open on the back of the house.”
I watched her face flicker through several changes before the needle got stuck on, “Oh shit, this is my fault.”
“Sorry, Mom,” she said, almost inaudibly.
“Thanks for saying that.”
I got a note on a sugar packet.
Today is the last day of first and sixth grades. She was a very quiet cricket on Wednesday.
Horace vs. Mere and Goethe
He is SO LUCKY they humor him.
Tart, melon, and guac.
Cherry Cheese Tart for Father's Day
Oh god please may I have some please
Noooo you may not.
“I couldn’t wait to get home last night and wash the jail outta my hair”
Poor Dirt McGert. She got picked up by the popo! I got a call after they closed last night so I couldn’t pick her up til after noon. There wasn’t a name attached to her microchip so the description on the message was just “brown tabby.” Thanks, I have three of those. Now her name is on her microchip so that’s good. At first I wasn’t sure if it was her or Matilda missing since they were both AWOL until this morning.
As soon as I saw her in her cage in the back I started crying and didn’t really stop until I paid my fees and left. Here is my blurry miscreant on the stairs. I’m keeping her in until she’s tagged so hopefully next time a neighbor will call me first. We’ll see.
I think I got a “weeping moron” discount. It could have been a lot more expensive. Plus I was nice and grateful. The lady in front of me was threatening to sue because she was from out of town, had lost her pet, and they were requiring her to license the pet in Seattle, which the man explained to her was a local law thing.
“If you are here with your animal you are bound to local laws and statutes, just like with moving violations and parking tickets,” he explained, sighing.
“I’m calling my LAWYER so we’ll see about THAT,” she retorted.
Maybe dealing with me and my hankie-wringing was easier after that. Gertie’s mother is hissing at her now. She stinks.