A couple of nights ago P. and I were squabbling over, I swear, the order eggs should go into the fridge and how to tell if they were older or newer. For some reason I was getting louder and louder until I was shouting! Over something SO STUPID! I took a breath and I heard a voice though the window from outdoors:
“HEY, WHO’S WINNING?”
It was our hobos who always wander the neighborhood, chatting to us and being friendly. I was so embarrassed my mouth snapped shut.
“Who does that? Who SHOUTS through WINDOWS like that?” I said a couple of minutes later.
“They are probably from the Midwest,” P. said.
It took a couple of seconds, then the ice burn sunk in. GOOD DAY SIR.
“SJ COME HAVE SOME WHITE WINE OVER HERE,” my neighbor, Elsa, shouted at me from the open picnic tent they erect every summer and spend most days under. Strudel and I were just getting home from her school and it had been a long tense day of no new work coming down the pike. There’s nothing like being the most expendable person at work with nothing to do due to corporate bottleneckery.
The tent is an oasis, containing shelves, a radio (which blares classical, smooth jazz, or Edith Piaf depending on the day), patio furniture, a miniature Swedish flag, and loads of booze. Also, Elsa and her partner Steven. It is carpeted with green close-cropped Astroturf.
Elsa went into the house to get wine and something for Strudel. Elsa turns the color of toast in summer and with her white-blond hair and clothes is very striking.
“How are you feeling, Steven?” I asked. About a month ago Steven had a giant brain tumor removed.
“GREAT!” he replied, in his rich booming voice. “Much better. I’m just taking it easy.” He lit a cigarette. Steven retired from radio voice-over work about a year ago and has been a regular fixture in the yard since then. He and Elsa are usually drinking and shouting and watering their lawn and grilling.
“Here, honey,” Elsa said, pouring about half a bottle of white wine into my giant glass. She brought a box of raisins and a tumbler of root beer for Strudel, who shunned the mysterious dark beverage in favor of rootling around the raisin box with her grubby fingers.
Steven made his way up, slowly, and moved towards the house.
“Poor Steven,” Elsa said to me, quietly. “Our living room looks like a pharmacy with all the chemo drugs. And he never got his vision back in his left eye. Did you see all his scratches?”
I recalled then that I had seen a scratch on his head and one on his arm.
“Yes.”
“His balance is all off and he fell on the stairs out here the other day,” Elsa said. She told me horrifying stories about steep medical bills and the limits of insurance.
As usual, we traded news and gossip about our neighbors. Elsa mentioned that the old lady who lived in the house across the street from ours (before the house was knocked down and replaced with three townhomes) hated everyone who lived in my duplex on principle.
“Isn’t that funny?” I said. “We took her roses before they bulldozed everything. I thought it would be nice to keep part of the old neighborhood.”
“And they look so nice,” Elsa said.
“Elsa is the neighborhood patrol!” Steven said, teasing her.
“It’s not gossip if it’s true,” Elsa said.
“It’s ALL TRUE,” they said, almost in unison.
Talk soon turned to what I was up to, and Strudel’s dad.
“P. LOOKS JUST LIKE GEORGE CLOONEY!” Elsa declared, pouring me more wine. “Don’t you think so, Steven?”
“He’s a very handsome guy,” Steven said.
“Are you two going to get married, do you think?”
“I doubt that,” I said.
“How long have you two been together now?”
“Uhh…Six years,” I lied. It’s funny how no one really knows we broke up a year ago. How do you explain these things to people?
“Well, that’s great!” Elsa said. Eventually George Clooney came home from work, set his backpack down, and had a beer with us.
Finally we made our excuses and went home so I could make dinner.
Elsa and Steven seem like such summer people to me. Suddenly they look much older, and I worry about them this winter when the weather will chase us all indoors and everyone on the street becomes strangers again.
It’ll Be a Breeze
This is a nice cover, but a little fast for my taste. My sister and I used to argue about this. She thought the song was about a break up, and I thought it was about death and leaving the person you love the most. Today I found out it is about being in a coma.
The sound quality is a little dodgy, but I am told it will improve. When we get to Ep. 3 we will get proper hosting and you can Really Simple Stalk us and stuff. WOO! I imagine the posting will get more scheduled/reliable as well.
If you have questions/comments for this weekend’s conversation, Ep. 2, please leave a comment or send an email to sj at this domain.
I woke up this morning and remembered it was summer! How did it take me this long? I went to the farmer’s market and did chickeny and yard stuffs. I AM AWAKE!
I got my grocery delivery this morning and decided to throw on one of the CSA fruit packages they offer. It came with some blackberries that were rather crushed and some blueberries that were very nice.
I made about a half cup of simple syrup in a small saucepan, put in a handful of blueberries and boiled them until they popped, and then put in about half the blackberries and crushed them as well. At the end I put the other half in and sort of gently poked them so they were only half-mushed. To finish I added about a half teaspoon of orange flower water. I am having this on vanilla ice cream later. SO GOOD.
Hey, I got a new modem. WOW! My friend whatladder has been wanting to podcast with me for YONKS and it took me this long to sack up and consent. I will be aided by my assistant, teal wine.
Apparently I am podcasting TONIGHT, and we would love to have questions to answer. Need advice on love? Grammar? Sexual DIFFICULTIES? Dubious childrearing practices? There will be other topics as well. I will let you know when the asscast is up.
Leave a question in the comments or email me at sj at this domain.
So. It is established that Seattle cannot really handle anything above or below 65F. Winter brings OMFGBBQpocalypse if there is a half-inch of snow on the ground, causing school to be slammed shut and workplaces and bridges to close. (It should be noted that when I was working for barely above minimum this fall and winter, those workplaces did NOT close, not once.)
A couple of days ago it was over 100. Most houses have no air conditioning, which, fine, I can hang. I can make cereal for dinner and cheese and cracker and be cross and drink Mexican beer for a couple of days during the wave.
What cannot handle the heat is my stuffs. My router melted! I called Qwest to tell them and ask them if they would disown me if I used a non-Ma Bell model and they tried to troubleshoot me.
Them: Have you tried plugging it into another phone jack?
Me: It is melted!
Them: Have you tried cycling your modem by unplugging it and…
Me: IT HAS WAVES IN IT FROM MELTING AND IS TOTALLY WARPED!
Them: Oh.
Also, I had one of my favorite things, a big chunk of cocoa butter type moisturizer from Lush in my shower and it melted right down the side. It was not even in the sun.
Looks like I am offline this weekend. I might even have to GO OUTSIDE, UGH. Last night I spent about an hour trying to make dialup work, but no dice. It was kind of soothing hear the modem try to dial in though. NOSTALGIA. When I first started blogging, I used to click “connect” and then wander off and grow a beard and stuff. I also used to write all my posts in Word and copypasta them into the blogwindow, hit send, and get out again as if it was some kind of blogograph service. I almost pooped myself the first time I typed a post directly into the window, OMG.
Franny is off to her dad’s for two weeks, and she is hella pissed. I figure it’s good for her to have some not getting her way in her life. I think of myself as an advocate for her, generally–someone who can help her navigate the seas of WTF. Sometimes I say “Verily that sucks darling” about her traumas and sometimes I give her the little pep talk. She gets frustrated with SeaFed because he comes from the Jolly-but-dismissive school.
Lately she is having nightmares that I am dying and that she goes to an orphanage because her dad doesn’t want her. She has been worried about this lately because she knows she will be whisked away from our house and P. and Strudel if I died. I am the bridge.
I put on my gypsy lady rings and played Dream Interpreter.
I told her it’s normal to dream about losing the people we care about most. I told her about a dream I had about her where I lost her and panicked. Also I told her that last time her stepmom spawned she felt all left out and I wondered if her brain is worried about the new baby.
“See how it’s better to expose these things to light,” I said.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“Does it seem less scary now that we’ve talked about it?”
“Yes,” she said.
I have changes afoot–what else is new? I will fill you in in a few days. I am so feeling the Smiths today. HOBO LIKES SONGS ABOUT BEING BURIED ALIVE. Here’s to a new chapter.
ETA: whatladder says this is a DO NOT EAT WHILE READING post. I say WALK IT OFF, PUSSY. You have been warned.
I went out to Calgary and I told the story so many times I don’t feel like telling it again! I went, it was fun, the end. You saw the pics, probably. “Critics Declare Buttcon 9 a Success.” Really, the most fun conference I have ever attended. Buttcon 10 is in Iceland, so I had better start saving up now.
I think what I want to talk about what a wreck my skin is. That’s more interesting anyhow. THIS IS MY HOUSE I’LL DO AS I DARN PLEASE. So, I have keratosis pilaris, and pretty much always have since I was a baby. When I was a kid, this affliction was known as “I don’t know why your skin does that, weird, huh?” I didn’t really realize what it was until I read about it on Tomato Nation, and I had that OH moment. The cool thing is that it starts clearing up between twenty-five and thirty, so my skin looks fine most of the time. But if something goes wrong now typically I can’t go, “Woe is moi I have skin affliction,” I have to say, this is a ZIT. Alas.
I have a history of just attacking myself, too. Years of fucked up skin combined with pretty good healing ability has made me somewhat fearless. I used to beg to pull my sister’s teeth when she was a kid and I would do home surgery on someone else in a second, if they let me. So my thing in more recent years has been what I guess are sebaceous cysts, where sometimes I will get a zit and it will just NOT go away.
My first experience was this monstrosity on my back, which was a zit that looked done and felt done, but would refill itself repeatedly. It got larger and larger and I could feel something lurking under my skin. So in the past year or so I got one in one of the worst places–under my BOOB. Right where my bra sits. I would prod it and I could feel something was in it…pirate’s booty? Spider eggs? Jeff Goldblum? Sorry, I am still running that into the ground from yesterday. It wasn’t funny then, either.
I was trapped in the hotel Saturday night with my sleepy kid, kind of bored and knocking around. Lewd texts I sent went ignored. TV was meh, as usual. But I had a pair of tweezers and a magnifying shaving mirror in the bathroom, and I noticed as I took my bra off it was sore again. Hmm…
It was a pretty easy operation as these things go, unlike the first time, which was on my back and very hard to reach. I could see the center and grabbed it after a few tries with my tweezers. What always sticks with me is the feeling of pulling some relatively hard object out of a hole in my body. I can feel it sliding out and then I have this THING that causes me sometimes a year-plus of irritation. I am the princess, and it is my pea. It is HEAVENLY having them come out, no joke.
Then I have the huge hole that goes down to forever and I am like CAN I SEE MY LUNGS through there? GRACIOUS. And it does not bleed. The next morning I woke up and it was a krillion times better, and today it is just a little scar. GO TEAM HOME SURGERY!
In Other News: FUCKING WHOOPS TIMES INFINITY
Franny: AUUUGH, Mom, what IS that at the top of your website???
DO NOT use these elevators. However, there is no indication that the numbers actually relate to the elevators the sign hangs next to. These signs are not on every floor. Additionally, the only elevators that open are the possibly-taboo elevators.
I could not resist the potential of the taboo elevators. What was in them? Doubloons? Narnia? $240 worth of pudding? An elevator operator saying, “ROOM FOR ONE MORE!”?
I stepped onto one of the verboten elevators and a panel hung menacingly from its hairlike wires. It did not go. I stepped into the next, illegal elevator that opened: it was perfectly well-behaved and lurched up to my floor and I dropped my item off.
On the return, finally, finally, the one of the non-taboo elevators opened and I stepped into it. It smells like electrical fire smoke. The stairs smell like solvent.
Without our daily tiny mindfuck, do we forget we are little cogs and begin to aspire to other things?
 
