(Conversationally, as if questioner is interested:) So, SJ, what’s new? Are you done alienating the gleefully childless and weak-stomached peeps?

Yes, I think so. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough with torn vulvas, cranky fat women, and boobs that are gigantor for unpleasant reasons to last…a lifetime, probably. And since is the Me Show, starring Me, S. Al, my sophisticated audience probably wants to know what I’m up to in Now Time.

Yeah. So work started, which is great. I am paid to have rad conversations with people about their writing. I never get tired of talking about writing, so this is good.

Being a writing tutor is one of those classic flim-flam artist positions. People come in, and they are skeptical about you, skeptical about what kind of help you can provide, overwhelmed by assignments, and so on. I have figured out that I have a five-minute window where I can convince them I know what I’m doing, and everything will be OKAY, and they won’t fail, or they won’t buy my schtick at all and I’ll never see them again. Even if I am flailing about like Whitney Houston at a PTA meeting, and they get scared of me, I can lure them back; all patients get one (1) free Dum-Dum or one (1) free set of sensual red wax lips with fangs during each visit.

Your job sounds boring!

Yeah. Well. I like talking to writers. SAT answer wrapup: SJ is to Writing Manuals as Mulder is to Porno Closet.

Let’s just say I got the skillz to get a part-time uni job and leave it at that.

Damn it! That doesn’t rhyme with “skillz” at all.

Tell us about your chickens, because that is the only reason we slog through your other prattle.

The Ladies are good. I used to call them The Girls, but I guess I shouldn’t anymore, because when I had roosters briefly most of the girls were forcibly made into Ladies. Have you ever seen chickens mating? It’s like when you’re a little kid and you know a little bit about S-E-X and you bang your stuffed animals together in your room and the smaller stuffed animals become the instant spawn. Unless, you know, you never did that.

Two things to take away from that ramble: they are LADIES now, and chook sex is brutal.

My Ladies are doing very well. The ones that hatched out last year are taking a respite from laying, which is common in the fall. Penny the Easter Egg Hen is pooping out teal-colored eggs daily, and Marzipan is making lovely brown ones. I have no more crouching chooks, hidden eggs, or egg-eating, thank you Giant Head of Conan.

Now that all the Ladies are laying in the box, I often get a surprise when I go out to collect eggs. I started with bantam hens (they are little half-sized hens and top out at four pounds) and when I open the egg door they are sitting on the nest still. They always poof themselves up and go “aaawk” to scare away me, the egg predator. It’s cute, because they become the size of tea kettles. I just chortle and stick my hand under their skirts to fish out the eggs.

It is a different story with the new ladies. They are full-sized hens. When I open they egg door on them, they say “AAAAWK” and poof up to the size of medium dogs. I put my hand toward Marzipan, who had made herself the size of a Jack Russell terrier, and she eyed my hand and turned to better position herself for some choice hand-pecking.

“Okay, Marzipan. I’ll come back later.”

Well, what’s going on with Mr. Husband? Tell us a taxi story!

Here’s what’s happening: Mr. Husband is in court this morning, because of yet another taxi-related traffic ticket. I keep telling him you can only drive on the sidewalk on Sundays, but he doesn’t believe me.

Look what I found at some kind of archive thingy:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020206051356/www.shauny.org/iasshole/

Yeah, okay, this blog used to be cool. Sexy ass design. What the fuck.

Drinking okay yeah, loose cannon.

Killing some time today, are we? Your comments keep rolling in as I am writing this awful crapping paper. Say Hello, lurkers. I can’t bite you from over here. Maybe I want to read what you’re writing.

I can’t believe how lucky I am sometimes. On my primary thesis advisor’s advice, I asked a professor I didn’t even know yet to be my secondary. She agreed, which was miracle number one. I think the odds were with me on that one, since only one person is doing the optional thesis this year. I will probably be the only person next year.

ANYHOW, I raised myself right, because when someone does something awesome for me, I write them a thank-you note. I left a simple one in my secondary advisor’s box yesterday, you know, “Thanks for being nice even though you don’t know me from Adam’s housecat.”

Then I ran into her later as she was leaving the main office.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” she said. You will have to imagine the rest in a Newfie accent. “Thanks for the nice note. Would you like a job this summer?”

I think my brain went piff a little at that point. I stammered something about needing to consult with the minister of finance at my house and she told me to get back to her, which I did this morning.

So now it seems I am a research lackey for the professor that brings in half-a-million-dollars a year in research money. Not a bad star to hitch your wagon up to. And it’s the first time I’ve had a paying job since the amazing year 1999.

The only foreseeable drawback is that I will be so busy this summer I won’t have time to pluck my eyebrows or do my roots, which is a shame, because up to this point I had prided myself on not looking like one of those eccentric, ungroomed scholars.

I wanted some quick mint tea from the garden yesterday.

“Well,” I said, “too bad I don’t have that mortar and pestle anymore.”

“What happened to it?” said Mr. Husband, who was driving. I jacked my knee up while running, and now it hurts to shift, so he is driving now. Pathetique.

“I made you take it back, remember? We were fighting.”

“Oh, yeah, you and your gift weirdness.”

“I don’t see what is so weird,” I replied. “I can’t accept nice gifts from you when we’re cross with each other. That bike you got me a few years ago, every time I rode it I would think about the events that led up to our anniversary.”

“Hmmp,” he said. Not ‘hmmph.’ I couldn’t live with a hmmph-er, I’d feel like I was in a bad movie.

“Anyway, I’d rather have the memory of the mortar and pestle and bike than actually have them.” It was raining lightly and we let the windshield wipers punctuate the pauses.

“That’s better than having the stuff?” Mr. Husband said, after a minute.

“Yes, because I have the memory of your considerate presents, without having to see them and remember the fights. It’s the best of both worlds.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “That was a nice bike.”

“That’s why we’re still married,” I said.

In Other News

Personal library kit.
I usually just resort to scribbling my name on the inside, but this is cooler.

Okay, I don’t love me some Adam Sandler, the way I love me some Cadbury Eggs and the way I love me some latex kitchen gloves. But his new movie, Punch-Drunk Love (I would love to see how that gets translated in the foreign markets) is definately worth seeing.

Now I should mention all the disclaimers that people mention when they stupidly say “a movie is good.”

1. You have to like PT Anderson. This movie has that terrible tension of Boogie Nights with out the despair, and the coolness of Magnolia without the length or ridiculousness. (Well, maybe a different kind of ridiculousness.)

2. You don’t have to like Adam Sandler. Seriously. I thought The Wedding Singer was cute and very non-Sandler, but I was really skeptical going into this new one. The great thing is that Anderson starts the movie off slowly enough so you can get used to looking at him, and you can get that image out of your head of him going, “I’m crazy Newspaper-Head Man! Give me some damn candy.”

Plus it’s got super-cool Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Emily Watson, and Luis Guzman, and you can’t beat that with a stick, even if you fucking tried. Anyway, maybe it’s a love or hate thing, I don’t know. Me love.

In Other News

Bad ideas: Robotic Vacuums, Menopausal Tours, and Carrottop.com.

I wake up in the morning and I cough like I smoke a pack a day. Oh the delights of my annual October cold. I was really over it about a week ago, but the cough lingers on. Stupid germy university students! How I hate them. It is also troublesome that Mr. Husband seems to be immune to any cold that I get, and continues to walk around tra-la-laing.

Sometimes when I am walking around the house in the morning, opening curtains, hacking my damn brains out, I reflect on my seventeen hours of childbirth labor (pretty normal for the first time out of the gate) and how those seventeen hours culminated with me at the edge of my bed, in a squatting position, desperately trying to pass my adorable little parasite. For most women, myself included, this results in some pretty horrible hemorrhoids, usually temporary, praise Jesus. Basically, you push so hard you create a rupture and try to push out your own intestines, like those disgusting lizards that poop out their intestines to lure birds or whatever.

Anyway, I think about this when I’m making my first cup of tea; I wonder if someday I will cough so hard I will end up looking like a Martian Popping Thing, or perhaps a Naughty Animal Pooping Toy. Where will I buy pants?

In Other News

Right before we left for Canada, one of my chickens ran away, right after she started laying, crazy bitch. I think hormones (and the fact that I keep stealing her eggs) made her all loopy so she just up and left, leaving only three.

Today she came back, demanding food. I imagine she’ll go off tomcatting around again soon, as soon as she rememembers why she left in the first place. I never thought I’d want to trade places with a chicken.

Also, lookit the Goog today. Oooh, pretty.

What’s the deal with getting “checked out”, anyway? I got checked out today, and let me preface this blab by saying that this is a Rare Occurance Indeed, for I am Very Weird Looking. (I think a boyfriend said once, “An acquired taste.” I would have shitkicked him instantly had he not been so good at fixing my car and giving me head. What CAN you do?)

Anywho, I got “checked out” in the most ridiculous fashion today. I was walking on campus past the giant George Washington statue that is supposed to make you feel all reverent or democratic or SOMETHING when these three boys were PIMP-ROLLING by (seriously) and one of the guys says to the other two, “Hey, man, check her out.” “Who?” “Pink,” and nods “subtly” at me, because I have pink hair right now. (Honestly, I guess I like this identifying feature better than a third arm or a hump on my back.)

And they didn’t say it like you would if you were a grocery store manager with too-tight pants and you are talking to a checker: “Fran, check her out, she’s next in line” It wasn’t like, “Whoa, dude, what a freaky-looking person, check her out.” It was like “Check her ooowwww-t,” like I expected Jimmie Walker to show up any minute and start fucking high-fiving them.

The funny part is that I was only about six inches away from them. So I heard the whole thing clear as day, and saw them nodding at me. Isn’t the point of whispering and “checking someone ooowwww-t” that they DON’T KNOW you’re checking them out? You’re BEING SUBTLE, perhaps?

Maybe not, maybe the point is that I should hear them, and scramble off for a freaky menage-a-quartre in a conference room in Kane Hall.

Getting checked out is funny. I wouldn’t call myself flattered; perhaps it would be more like what Mr. Husband calls “being humored.” I don’t know what that means either.

In Other News

I cannot stop listening to the new Emenem album. Seriously. I keep rotating it with a certain Frank Sinatra album just so I can stay sane. You know it’s bad when you accidentally say “Glock” instead of “gun” in front of “normal” people. Eheeheehee. In addition, I also told someone on the bus the other day that “The Emenem Show” is our generation’s “Fear of a Black Planet” with a straight face. Yawhawhawhaw!