Strudel’s dad calls to wish me luck in my interview today.
“Yeah, and I just went to a big meeting with a surprise guest. Guess who?” he said.
“Ugh, I dunno.” I can tell by his voice it was someone sucky.
“Tom Cruise!”
“Ew!”
“He was talking about movies and his career, and he was tanking.”
“Awesome.”
I am just so happy today. I have been randomly tearing up all day. It felt so good to work. And, I have an interview tomorrow for a writing position. To warm up for my interview tomorrow, I will tell you all about my training day, which was wacky. Looking up for now. Now that Ohio’s in the bag I think I am going to turn it off and watch my favorite movie EVAR, Double Indemnity. Have a happeh night.
Thx, Lorelei!
10:42 p.m.: fireworks in the streets ahoy!
10/5, 6:47 a.m.: email from beloved overseas friend!
I am trying not to bawl my eyes out with joy at the election result.
god i am so happy. wow. you should see the papers over here, everyone
loves your country again :P wow… i am going to cry again!
Welcome to National Choad Poking Month 2008, or NaChoPoMo. Anyone can write a crappy, dashed-off novel. How many choads can you poke?
Okay, so I’m late this year! You still have 20+ days to get busy!
I had a driveby flaming on my old youtube videos today. Someone threatened to expose me (dun dun dun, etc.) and called my kid a bitch. Gotta love the internets. I checked him out to see what level of nuttiness I was dealing with (nutty level: orange, don tinfoil hat immediately). I was going to just say “meh” and click away when I noticed his atrocious grammar. Free of charge, I magnanimously offer some tips to user “Madradicalmad.”
I would have replied directly on your YouTube, MRM (can I call you MRM?) but you appear to have flamed me and then blocked me. The subject of this missive is not online troll etiquette, so I will let that one go.
Here is your current profile, and what follows is my proposed changes.
I report! Many times Subjects the no one will Dare touch! I do not LIE, and will not Post any Video that is not True…
Name: Rad
Age: 48
I Love You Tube!
But there are Problems here, and I want to help others! Not to be rude to You Tube, or to others, but to help them see the Problem and Fix-it Quickly!
City: Dallas, Texas
Hometown: Hingham, Massachusetts
Country: United States
Occupation: Reporter
Schools: Boston College
Interests and Hobbies: Helping to make the World a little Safer
Movies and Shows: You Tube’s Videos
Music: You Tube’s Vast collection of Music
Books: You Tube for Dummies
Alright, let’s do this thing. My advice is as follows:
1. Generally, we don’t capitalize nouns in the middle of a sentence. As an example, you wrote, “Many times Subjects the no one will Dare touch!” I would only capitalize “many” in that sentence. If you are looking for emphasis, may I recommend italics or my friend FUCK YEAH CAPSLOCK. You can use capslock for effect judiciously and still look post-alphabetic on the internet. In conclusion, I do not recommend capitalizing mid-sentence unless you are aping Chuck Palahniuk or someone from the eighteenth century, in which case May God Have Mercy On Your Soul.
2. As a reporter, you may be used to working with an editor. But, now that the paradigm has shifted and many of us are self-publishing on the internet, we must carefully self-edit. I find typos all the time that certainly, Word will not catch. Again, I use the above example: “Many times Subjects the no one will Dare touch!” Putting it candidly, this is not even coherent English. It is Also a Fragment! Darn it, MRM, now you’ve got me doing it.
3. I will turn to content for a moment and talk about your goals, or, dare I say, your manifesto. It might help people understand what you are trying to do if you clarify your goals somewhat. What problems on YouTube are you addressing exactly? What do you hope to accomplish? What help are you offering people? I digress into the subject of professionalism and personal ethics, but I would be surprised if your technique of threatening people on the internet with your journalistic superpowers falls under the SPJ’s Code of Ethics. Just saying.
4. YouTube is one word.
Have a nice day, YHBT properly.
I am sucking down Mad Men like it is 2007 and I am Britney Spears with a Big Gulp of Purple Monster before me.
Likes:
1. Child “abuse”
a. Children with plastic bags on their heads
b. Children mixing drinks
c. Children being told to sack up and go to bed
2. Constant Smoking and Drinking*
a. At work
b. After work
c. Before work
d. During the commute
e. With your spouse
f. In a house
g. With a mouse
h. In a box
i. With a fox
* Makes me regret not smoking constantly, or at all**
** Makes me remember old relatives who died horribly of Cancer of the Cirrhosis in the ’90s.
3. Stylistic Stuffs
a. Clothes
b. Music
c. Women being exploited at “nudie bar” somehow mitigated by the fact that I cannot see each individual rib.
Dislikes:
1. Egregious Littering/Resource Hogging
a. But I know that people are running after and picking up the beer cans chucked in the woods.
b. Also, three-mile long Cadillac, lol.
2. “Sweetheart, Make Yourself Useful and Get Me a Glass of Water.”
a. I can’t help it, it makes me cringe every time. I keep expecting women to say “bite me,” but they never do. And if they speak up they spend more time apologizing after.
In Other News: UGH
I have to go downtown today and buy black pants for my job, which starts tomorrow. Yes, there is a dress code. What is the opposite of a dream coming true? I am going to be working in a MALL. I have avoided working in a MALL for 31 years. If Satan chooses to smite me on my way downtown, that is okay at this point. What the hell happened to me?
I have two phone screens in the can at the moment and I am waiting to hear something, anything back about them. They both pay about the same but are different types of writing jobs. I would be happy with either. I guess at this point I feel lucky I am still getting interviews? In the meantime I will be wearing a nametag and making $9.25 an hour, which won’t even cover rent. WOW. Living in Seattle is stupid.
I have been feeling kind of anxious and frustrated lately, because I feel like I am exactly where I was during the last election: tense, not enough money, looking for temporary work. Life Same as Four Years Ago, except now I am probably wiser (read: moar bitter). In a way that situation was scarier because I was pregnant then, but it was also giving me something to look forward to, at least until I lost Strudel’s twin, which I thought was all of Strudel. Now the child is here, and I love her, but her feet keep growing and she keeps termiting my cabinet bare. When I was pregnant the first time, I was like JFC this is hard, but then the baby came out and had to eat and be clothed and put somewhere besides a sack on a nail in the barn, and I was like OH SNAP LIFE JUST KEEPS LEVELING UP. I think I would rather be carrying my children around inside me at a time like this. Maybe I can put them in stasis for a while. I’m sure that wouldn’t mess with them psychologically at all.
I scrubbed my kitchen counters today for the first time in months. And I mean, scrubbed. I always clean up after meals and wipe around my utensil jar and shit when it gets messy, but I have not removed everything from the counter, dusted and scrubbed those objects, and then scrubbed in the cracks for eons.
I cleaned up my window sill, which was dusty and covered in litter from my shamrock and the bugs that my kitchen spider is kind enough to kill for me. In a couple of weeks when the vinegar flies are completely gone, I imagine I’ll be cleaning up her, too. I got up all the faint wine and tomato sauce rings that soak into the crappy Formica and the metal streaks from opening cans on the counter that only Comet seems to remove. I like the cold season sometimes because I can rest assured knowing that I won’t find a fly in my salt pig, at least.
It was long overdue. Regular readers probably know that my kitchen gets some heavy-ass use, and this would probably be a food blog if those were invented in 2001. *waves cane*
I was thinking today as I scrubbed of all the hours I have spent cleaning rental houses, and all the rentals I have spent cleaning in my life. It’s kind of a bummer but not disconcerting to me to see the edges crumbling like it was in the brief period I was an owner. And this house is crumbling. The people who built the townhouses across the street helpfully told me that it’s leaning. I know. I know that every time I spill something and it rolls into the corner. They built the driveway next to the foundation. Interestingly, the neighbor’s unit leans even more than ours. Sometimes I lay in bed and worry that at two a.m. someday I will hear a horrible cracking noise and this duplex will become an in-twoplex.
I used to think that I had to own a house to raise children in or I was doing it wrong, but I realized today I have let that notion go. It’s okay that I gave birth in a rental in Shoreline, and that I almost had my second daughter in a nasty apartment on Aurora. The children are still here. It’s not about the place.
Also I am thinking of when I houseshared with my mother in my early twenties and I cleaned the kitchen on a regular basis, scrubbing corners and cracks and getting grease off her canisters. One day she asked me a question out of exasperation that made me think of the old ad with the kid who’s doing drugs and his dad says how did you learn to do this? It haunted my Saturday mornings. That dad was a DRUGGIE. Then I found out that everyone’s parents were doing drugs.
She asked me, “Why do you clean like this? It’s obsessive.”
“One of the guys taught me how to do this,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“But–”
“Who taught you how to clean like this?”
“I learned it from watching YOU, okay? I learned it from WATCHING YOU.”
There’s been a lot of this sassypants business lately. I kind of jokingly corrected Franny, reminding her to keep the guts over the pot. Then the other one chimes in with “I’m not doing that.” If I correct Strudel, then the other one says, “It wasn’t me.” I KNOOOW. Sheesh, meddlers.
Quite a difference from two years ago, in some ways.
I carved my pumpkin for a contest for an online game with a first prize of ten million meat. I hope I place, because even second and third place is good, and there are two of each place. Bonus points if you know what this is! Where my fellow nerds at?
Okay, so it’s old, but it’s STILL AWESOME. I love this week almost more than my birthday.
Ugh, what a drag, we have a flea infestation up the ass.
I am fighting the big fight right now, doing pretty much every recommended thing under the sun to be rid of them. The cat is NOT helping at all. We treated her with Frontline on the nape of her neck, and she cleared up in a couple of days, but she is not helping by being a mobile poisoning unit because she figured out where the fleas were and avoids those areas now! Frontline is supposed to work by allowing fleas to jump on your cat and ingest the poison in their blood. Sadly, Nietzsche is now spending all of her time on the kitchen stepstool, a sewing machine that for some reason lives in the kitchen now, and an end table in the living room. She refuses to set foot in the girls’ room, where she dropped her big load of fleas in the first place on their little rug.
I have tried shutting her in the girls’ room for short periods of time, trying to get her to sleep on their beds in the sun, and she cries and paws the door. Useless thing!
So I am vacuuming, putting their blankets through the dryer on hot, washing things, sweeping, and spot-spraying with Knockout ES. One morning we wake up and the girls have no bites, and the next morning they wake up with twelve. Of course they have no self-control, so they scratch and scratch, and end up all scabby. They insist on showing me this repeatedly: “Look, this one burst!” Ugh, lovely.
This morning I was stretching before my run when I stopped to slap some of the bites on my ankles, rather than scratch them. I have tried to teach the girls to do this as well, but when Strudel gets mad at me or tired, she claws herself raw. That will show me who’s boss.
Franny noticed I was itchy and said, “Mom, do you have flea bites too?” All amazed.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“I didn’t know!” she said.
“Well, I don’t complain about them.”
It was like you could see the hourglass turning over. I love these moments where there’s a little glimmer of realization that adults have problems too. Sometimes it takes her a couple of days to discover that I have the same cold she does. She is always amazed. I am not playing momtyr, but I was raised not to complain until I am half dead, so generally I don’t. That’s what this place is for. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
In Other News: The Wall, I Have Hit It
Oh my heartbreak this morning as I was out, dashing happily around the lake, when I was taken out by shin splints. I was so angry I thought the top of my head was going to pop off. I NEED this running right now.
I slowed down and stopped to rub my legs. “FUCKITY FUCK FUCKLOAF ASSBURGER FIDDLESTICKS COCKTOAST…Oh, hello, ma’am, I did not see you and your stroller full of impressionable preschoolers there.”
The lake is kind of a funny place to run, since I kind of fall into myself and pretend I’m invisible when I’m doing it, and it’s full of people. This morning the center of the lake looked dead white, like it was the gateway to the edge of the world or something. I saw herons and falling yellow leaves. I am so happy that I can’t see shit generally, except, er, when I’m driving at night. People’s faces are a blur. I pipe music in through big ass cans instead of ear buds, which always hurt. This makes the world even more muted. Today I was listening to A Night at Birdland, and with Art Blakey’s wet cymbals you can’t even hear the gabbling, latte-swilling stroller moms.
So I hit that wall and walked until they settled down. I think I need to change a few things: more stretching, and new shoes. I think I am resting enough. I also need new jog bras. My currents are from before Strudel, and they are not quite doing it. They fit around, but the cup…it is a little like putting a small egg into a regular egg carton. It just rattles around and looks sad in there.
By the time I got to “Night in Tunisia” my shins felt okay again. That’s gotta be one of my all time favorite songs. I think I have a dead musician crush on Lee Morgan. I have almost all of his albums and a few of Blue Mitchell’s. I think trumpet is my favorite. Rock N Rolla!