This morning I sat down to write marketing-type copy for the fundraising auction at my daughter’s school. You write one procurement letter, then all of the sudden everyone thinks you’re John Fucking O’Hara or something. So now I have been tapped to write/edit the copy for the auction catalog. “Hey, jerks! It’s a wagon. Pay too much for this! Hey! It’s a quilt. Pay too much for this!” Ad nauseam. I am cleaning up a lot of typos and turning blunt sentence fragments into something you might actually want to bid on.

Needless to say, I am doing volunteer work for a project that my companion and I can’t afford admission to, let alone bid on any of the items on offer. A lot of it is typical stuff, like spa packages and ski trips, but then I ran across this badly mangled blurb:

Join S.C. for dinner and wine as we discuss the book Cahndy Freak [sic]: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by award-winning Steve Almord [sic]. Reminisce about our own favorite candies from childhood. We will sample an array of the regional chocolates [sic] he discusses in the book. Valomilk, Twin Birg [sic], GooGoo Clusters. [sic, sic, SIC! Weep!]

Some of you may recognize this garbled passage as an offer to have dinner with Steve AlmoNd, not Steve AlmoRd, who wrote Candyfreak as well as My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, two excellent short story collections that I devoured after reading Candyfreak. I like his down-and-dirty writing style–often, simple passages that seem like they should plod along breathe sensually.

Most of the time I am okay with being the scholarship perp at Franny’s school. I listen to the other moms talk about things I have no understanding of, like nanny problems and the travails of being retired at thirty-eight, and where on earth to “summer” this year. I like the program and the teaching philosophy, but they are expensive private schools so most of the families are wealthy–that’s baseball, man.

But then I see stuff like this and it makes me wish I had money. How fun would it be to drop money on a dinner with an author you really like? Is someone at my daughter’s school really that pally with Steve Almond? Ack. I hope the person who bids on this at least knows who he is. Again, WEEP!

My update, which is nothing special but is at least spelled correctly:

Perfect for bookworms with a sweet tooth! Join S.C. for dinner and wine as we discuss the book Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by award-winning writer Steve Almond, a hilarious and touching reminiscence about favorite childhood candies. We will sample an array of the regional chocolates he discusses in the book, such as Valomilk, Twin Bing, and GooGoo Clusters.

Steve Almond’s website
My friend Ed has a different opinion on Steve Almond, and so does his friend Mark Sarvas.
Steve Almond commenting on his encounter with Mark Sarvas in Salon.

I would like to make it clear that Ed’s commentary came after the Salon piece. I had listed Steve Almond’s piece as a rebuttal earlier, which was making things unclear.

Perps a plenty! Last night behind the A-1 Motel there were many, many officers and some shouting perps. It was like a scene from Cops. Hell yes I was out on my patio taking pictures in my underwear. They didn’t turn out well, which is fine because there was no brutality to report, just some apparently legitimate perpetration.

But let’s talk about some VISIBLE perpetration.

It is heartbreaking to me that an idiot like this can spawn and endanger her child in such a cavalier fashion, while other responsible, loving grown-ups I know cannot get pregnant. Yes, I know I’m a little old to be rattling on about how unfair the universe is. Don’t care.

I hope two good things come out of this. 1) Her mother, Lynne, will call her from Louisiana and have a good long talk with her. 2) I also hope this will raise awareness of airbag dangers and the general dangers of having little mushy-headed and soft-spined babies out of their car seats in general, at least among Britney’s five remaining fans.

At the middle of this Venn diagram of Perps and child-neglect lies my first babydaddy, Seattle Federline, whom I am back on the emails with. (You may remember a few weeks ago I discovered he lets Frannie ride in the front seat of his car, as well as other people’s children.)

SeaFed is strongly advocating public school for Franny next year, which I am really ambivalent about. On one hand, my fella and I aren’t completely financially stable yet because he’s still a contractor, so there’s a risk we will have financial fluctuations this year. So it doesn’t seem like the best time to commit to another year of tuition. On the other hand, public schools in Seattle are in a huge state of flux themselves–they don’t have enough money, and they are talking about closing some again.

I am taking cold comfort in the remark SeaFed made in a recent email defending Seattle Public Schools:

I have full confidence in Seattle Public Schools as I am a product myself along with That Poor Woman, Auntie Jaguar, and all of my current friends.

Why does that not make me feel better AT ALL? Why would he be so foolish as to even make a remark like this to me? Maybe a long-dormant, twisted sense of humor has finally awakened in him. Such are the mysteries of Seattle Federline.

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Just want to leave you with the image of me, walking around with my pink leopard robe open, blowing my nose on a dish towel. I have a scratch on my butt and I don’t know how it got there. Everyone is sick; no survivors. Things will be better tomorrow.
This is rocking my ass right now. The Super Mario music on a marimba and drums. I swear I teared up when they played the invincibility music.

PS Now I am blowing my nose on one of our nice dinner napkins.

1. You there, with the new blonde highlights, who manages the office at my daughter’s school. Hold still. You asked me to write a procurement letter for the school’s auction, which I did happily. I drafted it up from scratch and it was perfect, I tells you. Don’t tell me that you are going to make edits for the letter’s audience and then MOVE MY FUCKING COMMAS AROUND. Is your “audience” a bunch of seventh graders from Portugal? Because perhaps they would not notice how ESL-riffic you made my mechanically-perfect letter.

2. Hey, dickhole. Yes, you, downstairs neighbor. You may think it’s super off-the-chain that your bass and amp sounds like a medium-sized jet taking off. We’ve also noticed that you’ve scheduled some late-night flights recently, if you know what I mean. We are still sleeping in the living room so when you practice the vibrations go right into our skulls as we are trying to sleep. Last Friday night you practiced so loudly you scrambled my precious brain cells that were desperately holding onto the twelves timetables and most of the names of the Thundercats. Thank Fuck I can still remember Cheetara.

But that’s all right. Because your bedroom is right below the room my baby sleeps in. We all wake up NICE AND EARLY around here. And tomorrow I am going to teach Franny how to play Mary Poppins, which I used to play when I was five. Grab your umbrella, Baby Cat, because the bed’s the roof and the floor’s the street. Mary Poppins floats down from the sky at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning. Repeatedly.

3. Before I forget…you, Princess, with the new baby in my favorite neighborhood restaurant. God your baby is so fucking cute. I have to admit that my last one looked a little bit like a baloney loaf for the first month or so, but yours is a looker. But not when she’s fucking crying all through lunch. I know cries. Infants kind of all sound the same, in the beginning. That wasn’t a hunger cry or a pain cry. Jiggling your baby around in her little baby bucket and shaking an electronic doodad in her face is not going to placate her.

Do you know why she’s crying? DO YOU? ALLOW ME TO BUY YOU A VOWEL HERE. Get ready…babies LIKE TO BE HELD. She is crying because she wants to be picked up and held. I know, WHAT? Human beings crave contact and comfort from their mothers? They don’t want to spend their infancy in those plastic baby bucket car seats? I KNOW, NEWS FLASH FOR REALS. You may email me the Nobel Peace Prize for making this startling discovery.

This is not rocket science, people. This is not even the Chemistry for Fucking Morons class they forced me to take in high school because I can’t even add with a calculator. If you have a baby, hold it. It’s not a fucking purse dog. Maybe you should have gotten a fucking purse dog. The woman who was sitting across from you, who I presume was your mother-in-law, who was white-knuckling the table because her granddaughter needed to be picked up called. She says you should have gotten a purse dog instead.

Happy New Year to all the Grumpy Chumpys and Slap-Happy Chappys from the Offices of I, Asshole. Today I am in the latter camp, because I was given the gift of a nap. After waking up at 7:30 to rain that sounded like needles being thrown against our window, I went back to sleep at 9:30 and slept until 12:30 BITCHES! I feel just like the irresponsible suburban teen ingrate I once was, instead of the irresponsible stay-at-home-mom ingrate I am now.

My companion took the babies out to a video store death march while I indolently slept, and he mentioned he saw many hungover Walk-of-Shamers out, and that one woman was wearing purple feathers, though he didn’t say where or how they were being worn. The view out our window this afternoon features many unfortunate fuckers moving, which was us last December 15.

Last night we put chairs on our patio and watched them blow up the Space Needle. It was kind of wack this year, with a bunch of gaps in the timing, and then the cloud of smoke obscured the end, because the wind wasn’t moving. This year there were people in the street below us with pot-and-pan drums, as opposed to last year when there were shots fired from the A-1 Motel. Of course there was the obligatory woman in the street going, “Woo, I’m drunk!” Her mating call was unanswered and she went back into her house alone, tooting her noisemaker forlornly.

Later today I hope we will all go out for our traditional New Year’s Walk, which is cold and fun, and kicks off the exercise resolution I make every year.

Resolutions, 2006:

1. Exercise! Not more, just enough. I make this one every year and I haven’t disappointed myself yet.
2. Write more! I need to get back into fiction, and ridiculousness, and get this blog back to its roots, which is shamelessly entertaining people idiotically.
3. A PNW’ed every Friday. Because the world needs more bad, illegible comics, and I need my unitorn art therapy.

That’s probably about all I can resolve, since some days I don’t even get dressed or comb my hair until noon. Here’s to a year of not being in labor for 47 hours or getting divorced.

I love the Firefox browser. But I hate, hate, hate this little bug that it has.

I have been saving links up in my bookmarks toolbar of stuff that I use a lot. So I threw my blog up there, which does not have one of those cool little picture icon thingies. And I’ve noticed that sometimes Firefox will grab other sites’ icons and use that in lieu of your own, especially if you don’t have one at all.

And now, next to “I, Asshole” on my toolbar is the fugly My Space logo. I know it’s supposed to be little blue people all lined up in a networky-type fashion, but it just looks like a stupid blue foot. Hate.

“My Space: Now Only Slightly Cooler Than Alan Thicke” ™

Do you know how you can have that feeling like you are being an adult, and are super on-top-of-things, and then all of the sudden some idiot says, “HAAAAY, what does this button do?” and then the bulldozer’s off and running, careening into one of those shops full of glass kittens and walnuts with googly eyes glued on them?

Ugh, even my metaphors are ugly and out-of-control.

ANYWAY, I received my diploma last November and I noticed right away that my name was misspelled. Did you know that a name containing only two letters could be misspelled by your university? Me neither. One year later I finally thought I got things settled.

I called them three different times and asked them to reissue it. I had a hard-ass final year in graduate school, and when they sent my diploma I was doing crappy temp work and realizing that my baby was still very much alive and in my body, despite all evidence that she had jumped ship two months before. On one hand, I was like, “Yeah, whatever, diploma, I’m busy,” and on the other I was like, “HEY I AT LEAST want my GODAMN NAME spelled right.” Are you feeling me here?

So all three times I called them they said, “Okay, we’ll reissue it with the next printing.” LIES.

Finally, I was doing some housecleaning for Fangsgiving this year, and I found it in my “non-urgent to-do” pile. Hmm, I thought. Let’s see what happens if I take this to the top dog. I wrote the King Registrar a very polite email about what had happened, and he replied with, “Yes, we will do a rush order and get this to you very quickly.” He was very apologetic and promised to investigate why I had been blown off by his office.

I got cc’d on the email to someone who actually handles the nuts and bolts of this sort of thing, and she told me that an academic hold had been placed on my account. I investigated, and it seems I am in arrears for my smallest student loan, and I owe a small sum on it. Glah! I thought I had bumped all my loans because of broke-assedness, but apparently I missed one. Man, I sure could have used a personal assistant last year. I was so stressed out I could barely remember to clip my ass horns brush my teeth.

I was going to go through the rigmarole of deferring this one too, but it is such a small amount it would be easier to start paying it. I’m just sorry they didn’t have my address sooner so I don’t have to be all arrearful. So the government found me and it turns out that Fat Tony won’t have to break my face after all. Maybe if I pay them, they will release the diploma that they fucked up and owe me in the first place. Well played, The Government. Well played.

Government: 1
Registrar’s Office: 47
SJ: half a point for stylish flailing around

In Other News: Put Down That Pop Tart First

Oh, man, I do not want to tell you what I am about to tell you, but I have to. I don’t want this to turn into one of those Poop Blogs–mostly because I feel like there are more dignified and important things to write about (such as boobies), but here goes.

This morning was crazy–my house turned into an intensive care unit dedicated to log-jam removal. Poor Strudel. She is an infrequent pooper anyway, but I have never seen her this backed up before. I was hovering over her with a glove and some non-irritating cream, to help things along. It was like a scene out of some lame, low-budget medical show. “I need some poo here, stat.” She would poop a little and then I would dress her again and she’d do a little dance in my lap with that sad, sad, confused look on her face like when your Gay High School Boyfriend breaks up with you for the last time, but you don’t realize he was gay until, like, five years after high school. All you know is that he is breaking up with you and won’t give you a reason. Why, GHSBF, why???

Finally I lay down on the couch with her and nursed her until she dozed off. She popped up ten minutes later, stinky and smiling, with a little log in her pants that was full of carpet fuzz, hair, and, I am quite ashamed to say, some lightweight, non-scratchy plastic that she narfled when I turned my head for a minute.

I think it’s time to invest in one-o-them giant hamster balls, so she can travel around the house that way. I just hope she doesn’t turn out like me; some problems can take YEARS to overcome.

I saw this one near Northgate today:

Sin fascinates, then it assassinates.

I have loved church signs since I learned to read. Not enough to go in or anything, but that’s another story. Man, churches must have their work cut out for them here, what with the high numbers of godless communists and all. There are more church signs here. Mostly stupid, but number ten made me laugh.

In Other News: Crash Course

My sweet, formerly immobile slug of a baby has decided to begin pulling up at just eight months old. But that’s not enough. She also has to let go and swan dive to the floor, or cruise using the futon so she can menace the cat. I didn’t sign up for this! I don’t want an upgrade. If she starts walking next month I’m going on strike.

She wanged her head at least three times before my babydaddy left for work. I dub thee “Little Baby Welty Face,” which is better than “Little Baby Whiskeybreath,” at least.

I know it’s been a while since we talked. You’re busy with your helpless, vomiting child and your new baby, and I imagine that takes a lot out of you. Like, perhaps you are too busy to think about what you are wearing all the time. Did I tell you one day last week I spent most of the day in my bathrobe? No? Well, I know my baby’s older so let’s keep that between you and me.

Anyway, I hate to tell you I had a breast-related “why god why?” moment yesterday. Not over myself. I am a grown-ass woman and have come to terms with my breasts. We’re speaking and sometimes we even have coffee together. But yesterday…I saw some other breasts that took me straight back to Arizona State, when I used to work out in the gym there.

Let me tell you about a young woman who used to work out at the same time my gym buddy and I did. And when I say work out, I mean, she used to treat the ellipticycle like her own personal little bitch. She pwned that thing so hard I thought it was going to jump off its frame and go crashing through the plate glass in front of her. She always had a top knot that used to bob along in time with her furious pace.

This woman’s poor breasts had the extreme misfortune of being at least C-cups, so they would move on the same beat as the rest of her body, but one step behind, of course. Body up, breasts down. Breasts up, body down. We made light of it by calling her “The Fraggle” because her movements looked like the characteristic “Fraggle” walk–with the bobbing and the floating feather hair. “The Fraggle’s at it again,” my friend would say as she nudged me. We would wince and look away. “Strap those bitches down, jeez.”

I suspect she looks like this now.

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Yo, Assmizzles! Off to Atmosphere at the Showbox tonight with Daniel AND Supa. It’s like the funnest friend smashup ever. And so ends my fall concert-going blitz. If you see me, “honk” if you’re a blogger. Or “blog” if you’re a honky. YEAH!

Here is what I will look like as I am being amazed by the awesomeness tonight. Except probably I will not be wearing my bathrobe. Wait…no, I’m sticking with probably.

I know, you wouldn’t even have realized it was a robe had I not mentioned it. BATH. ROBE. AT NOON. HARDCORE, my friends, hardcore. Hardcore in the housey. In her robey.