Franny took physic all weekend (yes, I am still on my Pepys jag, thanks for asking) and was feeling very happy this morning. So happy, in fact, she was in the mood to tell stories. Sometimes when Strudel is super tired she wakes up and puts on a second pair of underwear over the pair from the day before, so she will be undressing at night and will be rocking the modern petticoats or whatever. We discovered this had been the case this morning as I was chucking her into the shower, and I reminded her to take OFF one pair before putting a new one on.
“That reminds me,” Franny said. “One day my dad was home with me and my other sister, and he let her get dressed and she put on her pants and THEN her underwear, so it was on the outside!”
“WHAT?” P. said from downstairs, incredulous. Franny repeated it. “Nooo,” P. said. “For how long?”
“He didn’t notice until the middle of the afternoon!” Franny said. “I decided I was going to let him notice himself.”
I was laughing so hard at this point and P. still looked skeptical.
“He still has kitties running around in his head, Mom.”
“Ohh,” I said, “that is TOTALLY a SeaFed story. I believe it,” I said.
Later I was still kind of giggling about it and Franny walked by and said “LOOOOL underpants story. I’m going to tell that again in like two months.”
In Related News
Franny’s stepmom is pregnant again! I was subjected to the subsequent mental images brought about by the phrase “We have been TRYING for a long time” AUGGH but I held it together and congratulated. I am very excited. That is all.
“NO MOM, he’s on his boat drinking sock beer in the summer!”
“UP TOP,” I said to P., and got my five.
I almost had to kill him this morning because I caught him RUNNING UP THE STAIRS with this bucket of dry ice from the grocery order and he ALMOST TRIPPED. I don’t know what would have happened, exactly, if he would have spilled it on himself, but if I had to take his ass to the emergency room I would have been HELLA PISSED.
FROOTY!
In Other News: Eggbags for Sale, Ten Cents a Pail
So, I am putting a little line out there now. The cute chooks I got when I was on hiatus yon these two months are now halfway grown and need new homes. This was my plan all along, to have some spring chicken raising funtimes and then move them up and out. Here we go! Write a blog! Tell a friend! Say it was horrible!
Fifteen per or all three for forty. You pick up and bring crates/boxes. Hatched March 29.
Saffron is a very elegant and sexy Easter Egger who will lay pink, blue, or green eggs. Dunno yet. She seems smart, like most EEs I have known.
Aloha is a Silver Wyandotte, and so named because the girls thought I was saying Hawaiiandotte. Of course. She will lay brown eggs and is VERY OMG PRITTY.
My favorite, who I will be sorry to let go, is Rose the Giant Blue Cochin. She is pretty mellow and has the cochin waddle and the fuzzy feet, so probably not ideal for a super wet run. She is extra sweet like Marty McFly was last year. I love this breed.
Anyway, drop me a line if you’re interested. If I don’t hear anything for a month or so I will move on to Backyard Chickens.
Me: I am going to call it “Music You Will Hate When We Break Things Off.”
Z: Ha ha!
Z: :(
ETA 6/21/09: HELLO VOYEURS. I have been given special dispensation to post mixtape. This is aimed at someone who has rock/electronica sensibilites. And I think the order may be off, but it is all G in the H. Oh yes I did. No Hall & Oates, WISEACRES.
I was having one of those periods where I felt like everything was slipping through my fingers—that I couldn’t get a hold on anything. I was working constantly, doing evictions and digging trenches. It was ungodly hot, even for Illinois in July, which was scrambling my brain further. I was living in my first apartment, which was cheap, and clean, but a hole, with neighbors who did not enjoy hearing KMFDM through the walls at midnight, oddly. My family wasn’t speaking to me and I was on shaky ground with my remaining friends, who were sort of horrified at what I seemed to be transforming into.
It’s funny how periods like that get burned into your mind. Some things are lost from then, thank god. But I can remember the exact layout of that apartment down to the fixtures and the pattern of the tiles. Makes sense, really, as I spent enough time on the tiles. Rice for breakfast, beer for dinner, sometimes the other way around. On payday there was sweet and sour chicken, Boone’s Farm, and a pack of Marlboro menthols, and for a few months this was all I wanted out of life.
This was the summer I was horribly, fatally afflicted with poison ivy, which I deservedly got fooling around on my live-in boyfriend in some unfamiliar woods. I think I have mentioned this before, but it is worth saying again, when I get poison ivy, it does not go away. EVER. Steroids will knock it out, as it turned out, but when you are scraping so hard it is a daunting thing to even think about seeing a doctor.
So I was vaguely out of it, covered in a rash and various swellings, and working in the sun every day. Finally I ponied up to see a doctor who took pity on me and cut his fee once I told him I had been afflicted for six weeks. He prescribed me some generic steroids and I was on the road to recovery. I slept without a fever for the first time in two weeks, which was heavenly in our 90-degree non-air conditioned apartment.
I had been spending a lot of time with one of my oldest friends, who was letting me couch surf at her house that winter once my parents kicked my useless ass out. I finished high school and got the apartment, and we still hung out a lot. She, my boyfriend, and I were a tight threesome, and often our other roommate would hang with us too, which was somewhat awkward because the two of them had dated and he had moved on and was entertaining female guests with power tools and vegetables.
I went out of town, abruptly, and when I returned the predictable happened, considering how sloppily and drunkenly we were leading our lives at the time. I put my things down in the room I shared with my boyfriend and found a woman’s ring on my bedside table. I picked it up; it was bits of shell set into a silver band and recognized it as one of the rings my old friend had been wearing in the past couple of weeks.
I slipped it onto my finger and it was tiny like she was; she had small bones, delicate tapering fingers, long limbs. I had spent my whole life feeling awkward and large around her. When we played, she always made me be the boy, which I didn’t mind. She was always the boss and got shirty if I tried to decide what we were going to do, play, eat. I have always been happiest as a follower.
The ring gave me a strange feeling as it sat on my pinky. I wasn’t angry or surprised. I just had a cold, sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. All I could think was that I had known her since I was five and the sheets hadn’t even been changed. I saw her little freckled face in my mind with her braids, tan, eating ice cream and us running away from her annoying little sisters. Now her face was hard, angular, and her hair was short after her mother’s sudden aneurisms and death our senior year. She was sleeping with everyone and it never lasted longer than a couple of weeks, and my roommate told me why.
I knew this situation was coming to an end. I wasn’t getting anywhere and had to find another way. I left the ring on and it amused me somehow to wear it throughout the week as I threw people’s shit into garbage bags and got blisters on top of my blisters.
Friday was coming around again and payday was coinciding with yet another party. Sometimes it was one group of friends or another, but this time it was to be a mix. People I knew from high school came, my boyfriend’s friends came, and our roommate’s as well.
The party was in full swing and I was working on polishing off my second bottle of Boone’s Farm Sangria (sophisticated), had a stomach full of fluorescent sauce, and was sucking down cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. This was after my rapid fire series of unfortunate head injuries and I was often feeling a little off, especially while drinking. Did this stop me from drinking? It did not.
Finally my old friend had drifted over to the couch, next to me. It was a fine couch from our roommate’s parents’ basement and had scratchy upholstery that dusty rumpus room smell to it. He had drilled holes in the back of it and we had stuck the lawn decorations I had stolen from the neighborhood when I had gotten bored during a party we had thrown a few weeks ago. Plastic spinny daisies and flamingoes looked down on me where I was slumped, exhaling cloud after cloud of smoke.
As I was wondering if she had noticed her ring was missing, I was also noticing the corners were starting to bend. The spins were coming on and I knew I had about five minutes before I blew my stack, ten before I was face down somewhere.
“So,†I said, turning to her and slurring through the malt liquor to be heard over Lords of Acid. “Have you been looking for your missing ring?â€
“What?†she said in a genuinely confused way. No one was paying attention to us; people were shouting or laughing or dancing.
I put my cigarette in my mouth and held up my right hand. Her eyes widened. She knew the look on my face and that I was serious. My mouth started watering and the time to get up and hit the bathroom or the bushes would have been right then. I saw the window close in my mind.
“Oh,†she said, trying to emulate the expression of the remorseful. “Sorry.â€
“It’s okay, I know it won’t happen again.†I said, putting out my cigarette.
“Why’s that?†she said.
“Everyone knows you’re a lousy fuck.â€
I moved as if to get up and leaned over her lap, letting go two bottles of Boone’s farm and a takeout container of sweet and sour swimming in pink sauce into her lap. I was a horrible vomit waterfall. I could actually see the pineapple in her lap, on her skirt. I got up and staggered to the bedroom and closed the door. My sleep was uninterrupted and untroubled.
Up betimes and into my office, to commit further acts of devilry.
Notes:
“Half” refers to No Brane Babby. If you don’t know about Babby Hope Faith, you should look into it so you can be fully appalled by my tastelessness. I understand that some people enjoy being appalled and I am here for you.
Also it is interesting to note that a GIS for Denise Richards (I almost used Denise instead of Cleese) yields mostly full body shots including nude ones one the first page of results. This was not the case with Abraham Charles Vigoda.
In Other News: Two Short Stories About Last Night
Ruby took me to KEXP last night to snap some local rock dudes, which she does on the regular. It was tiny and hot in there and I was starving, so I ate and drank at the adjacent Holiday Inn bar.
After the first show, one of the rockers offered me a CD, which is presumably full of their rockings, and Ruby took the opportunity to say, “SJ listens to (stage whisper) HIP HOP but we are trying to get her to branch out.” The rocker guy withdrew his hand after giving me the CD as if he had just taken a great risk by giving a poore leper some alms. I think he was mostly reacting to the tone of Ruby’s voice, but it was pretty funny.
Translation: “Here,” Ruby says, “take pity on my friend Herpes Helen and give her some REAL music.”
When I walked into the Ho-tel Mo-tel Holiday Inn bar a familiar sight greeted me: a white guy, probably in his 50s, drinking alone. Countdown to comment on the personal appearance of woman entering who just wants a fucking cheese burger in 3…2…
“HEY you should probably get out of the SUN,” he bantered. HYUK HYUK.
“Yeaaah I always look like this. I’m Irish.” No eye contact.
“Oh, I was talking about your hair…er…sorry if I’ve offended you.”
“What can I get you?” interjected the bartender, who was attractive, looked to be about my age, and puts up with this for a living.
I ordered scotch and the dude continued to flail a bit. “That one’s on me,” he said.
I considered being huffy and prideful and shutting him down, but you know what? That’s a stupidity tax, man. I enjoyed a free scotch just as much as I would have enjoyed one I paid for myself.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again, awkwardly.
“You have to try harder than that to offend me,” I said. “Cheers.”
So, Strudel finished school! Now she is ready to apprentice with the village tailor. Ha ha, don’t I wish. We went to lunch at the Rocking Wok, which changed my favorite dish, the honeydew beef. It was still good, but not as delishus as before. It used to have little crispy basil leaves in it, and now has minced peppers.
We went for ice cream and a walk around the neighborhood after. She surprised me by ordering the lavender honey ice cream instead of a more kidalicious flavor like chocolate.
I have also decided to emerge into the amazing year 2003 and actually use my flickr bucket instead of spamming my blog all the damn time. YEAH five years from now I might even have a Bookface.
Up betimes and out in the garden; peas and radishes coming along. The new batch of chickens is utterly indifferent to my presence and the old ones still cleave like burrs. It’s amazing what a difference handling a batch of chickens to the point of smothering makes. It’s fun to walk around with them. It’s like wearing a giant pair of fuzzy slippers that makes cross noises. Components break off and stop to eat bugs or peck at a spot before rejoining the ankle entourage, Voltron-style.
I am thinking the last days of new computer approaches already. I seem to be the 1337 Widow when it comes to computers since about November. I have that disoriented feeling where I don’t know where my files are or what’s on a box at any given time. I am constantly redownloading software, reformatting, rebooting, whatever needs to be done. I think I have lost years of photos and music files but I am unsure; they could be two machines ago on the laptop that just lost display capabilities. Half my novel is on there as well. I just don’t want to make time right now. I’m starting to think the lesson here is about halfassing things or looking for an easy fix, but that would imply the universe makes sense somehow and there’s a plan to it. HA.
I am being challenged because there is this part of me that loves starting over, releasing whatever I have made into the wild and forgetting about it. The challenging part is putting my money where my mouth is on this and being able to live in this advanced state of disorientation for however long it lasts and to still retain some kind of functioning. I think I am a different person than I was in November; it’s kind of sickening how symbolic all this computer mess is. Breakdown, restart, repeat. I need to decide now if I want to be more organized and have things like external hard drives and sensible filing systems. Destroying paintings and erasing writing is different than this, somehow–that feels discrete whereas somehow my hard drive feels like a more complete mirror of what’s in my mind.
Everything we create is an expression of what is happening internally, our past, and our thought processes; what does it say about me that parts of me, the reflection of me is a complete tangle right now? Once I was trying to figure out where the old stopping point is and where the new one starts, but I don’t believe it’s at all that simple anymore.
When I was in college I was obsessed with the Western mutilation of the idea of wabi-sabi. I think a tree that has a dead part is most beautiful. Things like perfect gardens or anything that implies there is nothing left to be done is completely uninteresting. I like people with an edge who have figured out how to be nice, to function. People who can take the dark parts and the good ones and put them together. At the same time I was surrounding myself with chipped pottery and domestic work with a repetitive nature I was squeezing onto myself so tightly I almost cracked. The asymmetry would be that I was perfect somehow and my external world was not. What a load of crap that was.
Now I guess I have to accept that I am wabi-sabi everywhere. The change now is not the shame of being brought to my knees several times, rendered mortal repeatedly. The change is balance and growth. I am taking it a little at a time.
Could I be any further up my own ass? No, I could not. I can tell this is one of those notes to myself for six months from now, when things have shifted again.
Tomorrow on I, Asshole: vengeance puking. Have a good day.
Tonight is the end-of-the-year school picnic and do you even have to ask? Hells yes I am dreading the CRAP out of it. Awkward conversation with people I usually avoid? YEAH SIGN ME UP. But Strudel is singing and this is Franny’s last hurrah at the school, so I feel obligated.
Strudel has been positively Satanic lately. A couple of nights ago her father, who I am getting along very well with since I know you are wondering and who shall be henceforth referred to as P., ahem, put her to bed without reading to her since she was being crazy naughty. She was quite distraught and stood at the top of her stairs screaming down.
Eventually she climbed into bed, and all was well until about 2 a.m. when she woke up and began emitting an ear-piercing scream until I came in to see what the ruckus was.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“I am still mad because Dad didn’t read to me!”
“What, you woke up and were so furious you had to scream? It is the middle of the night.”
She looked at me with Bambi eyes and a quivery lip. I actually understand waking up furious.
“All right, want to get into bed with me?” She nodded.
The next morning she was still sleeping when I left and I told P. what was going on. He talked to her later after I left.
“It is not nice for you to scream in the middle of the night like that and wake your mother up,” he said. “You should apologize to your mother when you see her tonight.”
“Well, you did not read to me,” she said. “So you should apologize to Mom for making me scream.”
OH SNAP. I got the evil twin.
Strudel is singing tonight for a moving on ceremony before the picnic. Will post video later. Also, on Friday I wrote about Literal Video and forgot to tell you. I am still getting back into this filthy habit.
Also sitting in my office in the dark with my hood up and listening to Chet Baker. EEEEMMOOOO
Nothing new here, just thought you should know what is on repeat. Have a good night. Ruby is getting me drunk at the picnic. I am unashamed. I will relate the inappropriate things I say later.
UPDATE! 8:24 p.m. A fun time was had by no one.
Strudel did not sing, and refused to stand with the other children, so there are no pictures.
On Saturday I went back to The Mall. Yes, that mall, my home-away-from-home and/or prison for five long months this winter. One thing that’s important for you to know, if you haven’t figured out already, is that I am a person at odds with myself. I wrestle with where I’ve come from and what my life is like as an adult. Every choice I’ve made has either involved me trying to improve myself, often to the point of putting on airs, like my decision to take le Fronch in le eighth grade instead of Spanish, which was a gateway drug to snobbier things; or it’s been a decision that has involved me tearing myself down back to where I think I belong, which is wearing a tube top to the monster truck rally while balancing a Solo full of SoCo on my giant pregnant belly. I dunno.
So when I was younger and first entered the horrifying world of work I made every attempt to find something dignified, or at least hip, to do. I wedged myself into the record store rat track early, and did not leave until halfway through college. I felt relieved and smug about the fact that I had avoided the mall morass that so many of my friends had gotten into, which left them glazed-looking, overly-chilled from the air conditioning, and smelling vaguely of corn dogs. And bitter about the entire human race. Very, VERY bitter. Because who doesn’t go to the mall? Especially in the middle of winter when it is pouring and the economy is utterly going to hell in the backseat of a Volkswagen?
Lesson: there is no uniting factor about who goes to the mall. The most specific thing you can say about a person who walks through the doors into the cool Muzak is that they are human beings. Probably. Other places I had worked in the past collected people with common interests. Record stores: music. Coffee houses: paying too much money to get fatter. Evictress: deadbeats. University writing tutor: weepy ESL students. You get what I’m saying here.
I had looked for professional work for about three months this summer and I was getting interviews but no offers. The closest I came was second-runner up for a company that did insurance-related stuff, which I was both relieved and disappointed not to get, since it looked like a dead-end, albeit a really comfortable one in an office downtown with plushy leather chairs, bookshelves, grandfather clocks, and potted palms. I spent more and more time on Craigslist and got increasingly farther from what I wanted to be doing category-wise: into part time and the dreaded “Misc,” which is like the job equivalent of “???” in the personals (“M seeks ? who enjoys rubbing and popping balloons, being submerged in mac-n-cheese, and Strap on Saturday“).
(On second thought this sounds kind of awesome. Email me at this domain.)
BUT I DIGRESS. Veering off into the other categories on ye olde CL led me off into exciting holiday retail opportunities. Here was a store I had shopped at for years that did not seem totally evil, and well, if it was at the crazy ghetto mall downtown, that would probably lend itself to some really great writing material later, right? I was sure if they offered me a job I would bounce out of there, having scored some rad professional gig by Christmas, tops. RIGHT? Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.
It was cosmetics work and I jumped into it with both feet and developed a sort of a persona and look to cope with what horrors were in store. Sasha Fierce: Mall Edition. Basically I was a busted-ass version of a MAC girl with doorknocker earrings. I did interviews and copious amounts of running and sleeping on my days off.
I was also lucky enough to face my fears and snobbery on one of my very first days at work. I was outfitted in my apron and my slut warpaint when someone I worked closely with in library school (but had lost touch with after) walked in and we came face-to-face. The last time I had seen her, she was attempting to help me launch myself into the PhD program at my school. (Ah, remember that? Ass zits FTW Y/Y?)Â
“SJ!” she said, looking confused. “What are you…doing here?”
This was it. I had to own it. Where could I go, anyway? There was no hiding.
“I WORK here. Crazy, huh?”
“Wow, great,” she replied. “Okay, well, see you around.” She literally started backing out slowly with one of her besties whom I recognized from grad school as well, who was standing in the doorway looking sort of perplexed at me, like I was a bug. “Take care….”
My face burned. Six years of school. I had done…things. I was a published writer, MAAAAN. People recognized me on the street and addressed me as “Asshole.” (Okay, dubious pride over the last point.) What was I doing there? I was a thirty-one-year old mallbitch who worked closing and weekend shifts and rarely saw her children. I was supposed to be lecturing someone on hidden penises in Rococco clouds or working in an art library somewhere. I should have at least married a more ballin’ drug dealer. Left turn at Albuquerque and all that. There was a lot of OH GOD OH GOD what have I done, apply booze, rinse, repeat.
That was kind of a hinge for me. I stepped out of my notion of what I should be doing and into the reality of what I was doing. The “worst” had happened: I had been spotted at the most tragic mall in Seattle in an apron, not even allowed to work the register yet, and survived. Something else happened over time, too. I came to see the mall for what it was: its own little society, with a complex social system and hierarchy. Instead of just skimming the surface I got sucked in and became part of it. More on that later.
In Other News: Tell Your Bitch to BE COOL
I will spray you with some boring truefax before I get out of here. As usual, my blog sitch is hosed. I am working on upgrading WPÂ and closing all comments, so you should be on the comment approval tip the first time through. Also I got this hilarz craigslist computer as a gift and it is popping and locking on me. I think I need moar ramz and am hoping I can pry them out of Hester Prynne’s corpse.
Yesterday I felt SO funny because I have been wanged by my occasional inner ear vertigo and I got so desperately nauseous I took some Dramamine. You cannot spell Dramamine without DOOM or something, because it knocks me out every time. The struggle to stay awake on the bus and the resulting stoned feeling can only be compared to huffing glue out of empty Mountain Dew soda cans while no one is paying attention in the back of sixth period art, or SO I HEAR.
This made me think of my art class, of course, where I met one of my high school boyfriends in a haze of glue and bad thrift store polyester. The short version is that we had a great summer relationship and saw lots of concerts and ate a lot of fried meat. It is notable that this is the first summer I experienced vertigo, as well, which came after a quick secession of head injuries. Can’t complain, though really, because some people (me)Â think that uneven pupils are FASHION.
He moved away, and we broke up, and I carried on with my last year of high school, which involved continuing my mission to turn myself into a human pincushion. WHAT? It was the ’90s. In a previous episode I recounted my absolutely ignorant and boneheaded attempt at getting my nipple pierced. After this failed attempt I had my nose pierced by a proper shop in Colorado and knew what to look for after that–or so I thought.Â
I decided to go for the ultimate badass hard-to-the-core piercing. YES. I would get a hole popped in my junk drawer. I called up a local shop that was less scary crusty old tattooed dude, and more “hey we’re so hip” and made sure they did it properly with needles. Another bonus: unlike Chicago shops I knew they would not card me. I brought a friend with me for moral support, another lonely young punk who I would drive around with for hours, listening to Damaged and throwing bottles at people out the window.
We showed up at the appointed time and the shop looked clean and the hole-pokers were friendly. My friend sat with me by my head like I was having a baby on a bad TV show.
“Okay,” the dude said. “I have to tell you I’ve had training on this, but have not actually done this piercing.” I shrugged.
“Go for it,” I said.
In the end, it went well and was a really standard and good piercing which healed well. Months later I moved to Seattle, and was happy to have a fresh break. My ex-boyfriend who I had spent the previous summer with was making noises about moving to Seattle and getting back together, which horrified me. We parted on good terms, but I had lived through probably my worst year ever, and I wanted something new. My roommate, who had developed a friendship with him and what looked like a fatal crush on him, invited him to move in with the caveat he would sleep in her room. Fabulous! My ex-boyfriend, who was clingy and whiny on a GOOD day, was going to be underfoot constantly.
After kind of avoiding serious conversation for the first few days he finally cornered me late one night about getting back together. It was already midnight and I was sunburnt and wiped from sightseeing in Seattle in August, the only reasonable month here. What should have been a ten-minute conversation turned into one that lasted HOURS. I watched snails and slugs ooze across the sidewalk and up and down the walls outside our apartment and considered what a terrible metaphor it was for the conversation I was currently mired in. I could not be moved; no, I did not want to try dating again. I smoked constantly, incessantly, a habit I had not yet kicked and one he hated, to keep a barrier between the two of us.
He cried. He was always a crier, which, fine, but it was a little disconcerting sometimes. Once he had shown up at my house, completely unbidden, in full face Eric Draven makeup (I know, WAT). I look back now and realize he was kind of a proto emokid.
Finally, I had squashed any last hope he had about our reunion and rejected any limits he tried to set on my activities, dating or otherwise. He sniffled and said, “Well, can I ask you something at least?”
“What.” I was tired as fuck and thought I could hear the birds waking up.
“I…uh…I heard so much about your new piercing.”
“Yes?” I said, staring at him through a screen of angrily-exhaled smoke.
“Wellll, can I see it at least?”
My only answer was to grind out my last cigarette and bang back into the apartment.
Â
IN OTHER MF NEWS
Maybe I’m in your Really Simple Stalkzors, I dunno, but I am also resuming Blogher today at some point. The article is written, I just have to mark it up and publish it. I will link later, since friends who have my back more than I have my own (read: lazy) think I should pimp more.
