Category Archives: Rantin

MAAAverick; Or, Witness as I Throw Motes at People’s Glass Houses

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Do you remember at the beginning of the summer when I wrote about letting Franny walk herself to school and the helicoptery flack I was getting as a result?

Well, friends, hell has frozen over. Today I am walking the girls to school when I see childrens A, B, and C walking together but otherwise unaccompanied to school.

Child A has lovely parents but is a manipulative bully. She’s the kind of child who hisses lovely things when the teacher isn’t looking like, “Give me your pencil or I won’t be your friend” and swoops in and takes a kid’s seat when the kid gets up for water, and then acts all innocent upon the first child’s return. I reluctantly allowed a playdate with this child last year because she has a long history of playing with Franny while at her dad’s house.

[As an aside, I told Franny that a tactic for dealing with her was to shame her. When Child A did something sneaky and manipulative, I suggested that Franny should call her out, loudly. “WHY DID YOU TAKE MY CHAIR?” Franny said this was successful and got the child to pick new targets. I should tell you about this year’s bully. She makes Child A look like amateur night.]

There was a friend schism for a while during the divorce after the whole SeaFed getting the mommies at school to sign paperwork attesting to his awesomeness after knowing him casually for three months. I didn’t really trust anyone for a long time, because I know the busybodies and gossips, lo they walk among us. There were mommies who were reporting various things that SeaFed was doing to me, totally unprovoked and unasked for.

So finally I said, well, okay, let bygones be bygones, they have all been in this school together for many years, let’s try it. Child A left the house, picked up by one of her very nice parents, I turn around, and Franny is in tears about some weird psychodrama involving Child A and Strudel, who Franny felt was being treated unfairly. The fact that she couldn’t even really describe what had happened made me think that the mind-fuckery was going deep. I asked Franny if she wanted to keep doing this. She said no, but she kind of dithers on it. This year they are in separate classes and Franny’s teacher has expressed relief about this, because she sees Franny is under a lot less pressure. I think a lot of people want to be friends, but they don’t know how.

The point of this long ass build up is that Child A’s mother offered Franny a ride home last year when she saw that Franny was all by her lonesome for two whole blocks. I do not resent the offer, really, but it was a clearish late spring day and it was more about people meddling, no matter how well-meaning.

Children B and C. That is more complicated, though I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say her children are stunted and neurotic due to some of the most pernicious helicoptering I have ever seen. The mother of children B and C got in Franny’s face last spring and told her that she didn’t think Franny should be walking by herself, which undermined Franny’s confidence, made her angry, and made the teacher decide to hold Franny back for five minutes every day so she could walk on her own, happily independent and unharassed.

This mother’s youngest is two years younger than Franny and a year younger than Franny was last year when she walked alone. You can say, yes, well, at least they’re walking together. With the way they have been helicoptered, I would not trust those children to be able to make it out of a wet paper bag with a map, flashlights, and a trail of breadcrumbs.

The icing on the cake is that they were going in at the same time as my kids, for the earlybird program, which the mother of children B and C had previously referred to as “glorified daycare for parents who just want to ditch their kids,” despite having friends whose children are in the program and claiming to respect the choices of women with careers. And people ACTUALLY ASK ME why we’re not friends anymore.

Utter Licentiousness

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Okay! AnEmily tells me via comments that OG Listerine is the way to go to nuke the little bitches off your head but good. Two nights of Nix and something like $40 later did not fix me up. I have the suggestive typing thing built into my browser, my favorite, and interestingly it suggested “listerine kills lice” as I began typing Listerine. Hooked on Groogle works for me.

TODAY! We have a trip to One (1) Fred Meyer! We purchase many showacaps. And generic Listerine, which was two bones cheaper and when I compared ingredients they were the same! Here I sit with OG Antiseptic Mouth Rinse on my head, dabbing at the occasional drips that leak out of my purple and white polka-dotted pink cap.

According to my learnings at the People’s Pharmacy with Joe and Terry Graedon, you can also do a second step and squirt your head with white vinegar to loosen the FLEA SPIT JIBBLIES JIBBLIES JIBBLIES JIBBLIES

…and then supposedly some of the nits will rinse out. Apparently some parents even use it as a preventive measure, spraying it in before school on Mondays. Interesting.

And when the lice are gone, I can drink the rest of the juice. HA HA, just kidding. I only drink green Listerine. Listermintz! MmmmmMMMMmm.

Tomorrow: I talk about something else beside fucking lice! I promise to let you know if the OG Antiseptic Mouth Rinse works, though.

Recap and Loose Ends

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I have been writing so much online lately I feel obligated to catch you up on things. A lot of times when I am depressed or otherwise unmotivated I just puke into the wordbox and run away, which leads to people going “what happened with so-and-so” to which I say “paisley banana” because I am irritating like that. So, an update.

1. Okay, so the lice are beaten into submission for now. I am not so foolish as to say that they are gonesville, because we know where that kind of hubris gets us. That’s right, pregnant with triplets, a pegleg, and with a car we can’t afford to take out of hock. You know, despite the fact that lice can go and be everywhere, I thought I was living some kind of charmed lice-less existence, kind of like how I have never (yet) had strep throat.

This morning I was talking to a friend about it as well, and she was recounting her family’s experience with parasites and how loaded that all is. There are so many implications there about class and money or lack of, and everything. I will say that when I was in school there was one girl who we knew was the lice vector repeatedly and she was always kind of a hot mess and was nicknamed “Booger” because guess what she used to do in the front row of music class? I’ll never forget when Mrs. Giardini stopped playing her autoharp to snap, “JESSICA! Stop that.” I guess I made some kind of connection between lice and personal habits and possible moral turpitude, I don’t know.

I am also feeling extra empaddled by the universe since we just did a month of flea battling. Wug.

2. Job hunting rambles on. Today I stormed off a website that is taking applications for a job because I found it to be one of the most horrendous pieces of application software I have ever seen.

a. The multistep form. FUCK RIGHT OFF with that. You know the form’s going to crash on you when you’re on step seven of nine and it will eat everything.

b. Salary expectations. Hmm, let’s see here. The job description did not include a job title and was rather vague about allocation of duties and time spent. Honestly, the job requirements were even a little vague. I can work well in those vague areas because I am fast on my feet and a quick learner, but you want me to assign a value to a job that sounds, at this point, rather vague? I’d really like to get to know you better and hear what you can offer me before I under or overbid myself, thanks. And what’s that, you won’t accept the values “negotiable,” “$00.00,” or “$1.00”? Screw that.

c. I’m a job applicant, not a study participant. Please don’t make me fill out multiple steps about where I heard about your job or other stupid information like that.

Your application page is my first indication of you as a company, as opposed to your products. You sound like boobs. I had to X the fuck out of there.

3. Further, I have now been to two trainings for retail job, totaling nine-and-a-half hours of training. Next Sunday I have ANOTHER two-hour training. After the most recent training, they drop the little bomblet on us that because of the way the economy is, we may not get called to work for three weeks in a row, if at all. When I applied I was told that I would probably be working between 20-40 hours a week. They made us come to the training in uniform, which I had to buy, because I did not own pants in their company colors. Some of us may be kept on after the holiday, but don’t get your hopes up. I filled out the availability form with a heavy heart.

The feedback I am getting repeatedly, when I get it, is that whoever interviewed me “liked me a lot” but that they had someone else with x experience. I get it. I have a phone interview for a job I am really interested in on Friday, and am waiting to hear back about a second irl interview I did late last week. I’m tired.

4. Also, lucky me, I wrote the inaugural post over on Uppity Women today. I am going to be posting there Tuesdays at a minimum, with whatever current event strikes my fancy. Some posts will be more feminist than others, I reckon. I am probably going to keep it light over there until I find my voice and figure out what I’m doing. It’s been fun making the shift between here and Blogher, which is a different sort of blog with a different audience, so I look forward to exploring another facet of how I want to write there.

5. I made an Obama cake and I want to show you it, but I cannot transfer pictures onto Abacustop. I am still working on prying my harddrive out of Hester Prynne. Life feels so slow this week and I am all getting my tired on because I am ramping up my running again now that my legs feel better. I ran two miles today and did a mountain of lousy laundry. Booyacah!

Sigh

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A question and a story. If I tell you a story, will you answer my question?

I was at the doctor’s the other day, sitting there talking to her when I realized something was jutting into my breastbone. I reached down and found a wire. An underwire, in fact, creeping out of my bra.

“Oh, dear,” I said, interrupting the flow of everything. “I seem to…hmm. My underwire seems to be sticking out of my bra.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Uh…” I dithered, unsure of what to do. “I think this will be okay.” I sort of shoved it back in. “Hang on,” I said.

Fuck it. I fished into my shirt and pulled it out.

“Okay, I’m just going to put this in my purse…and done.”

That was awkward. As it turns out, this is my only beige bra, which is critical for wearing under light clothing because it “matches” your skintone. All my other broosieres are like black or pink zebra or some shit. Since I am putting off buying things like bras for now, I was like fuck it, Ima keep wearing this.

So I had the slightly sad boob and the higher, differently-shaped boob. I don’t care if I’m cockeyed! I do what I want! Then I was stretching a little and heard a snapping sound-the other underwire broke on the inside. Yes, I’m still wearing it. I DOOO WHAT I WAAANT.

A question: is it possible to comb nits out of your own hair? Has anyone ever done it? Thanks. It’s days like these that I really deplore my poor life choices.

Blue Screen of Def

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Hester Prynne is stroking out on me and according to my internet learnings, I am going to have to reinstall Vista, or, alternately, upgrade to XP, but I feel like my XP disk wasn’t working last time I tried that for some reason. So for now I type on the world’s fanciest abacus, Bob, the six-year-old laptop. Of course I have to write my Blogher article on this thing today. Seriously folks, I was looking for an old file and I stumbled across one that told me how many head of cattle the pharaoh had.

WHOA there’s no call for that, is there? No, there is not. Anyway, I turn HP on and there is just this loop that sounds like the AVG bug, but I know I didn’t take any action with AVG lately, so I dunno. It also says it’s XP only, but I am disinclined to believe a lot of what I hear because people are basically always just guessing until they get new info. Vista does a lot of things to itself, so…Hester Prynne, did you self-destruct?

Anyway, I hope I’m not the only one who feels like they can’t breathe when they lose access to their bookmarks and ReminderFox and all that shit. Wish me luck.

P.S. It is important for you to know I dreamt that I went to a party with my gay high school boyfriend and we had sex in the coatroom (YEAH, like that ever even came CLOSE to happening IRL). I think this is because I just picked up Which Brings Me to You, by Steve Almond and Julia Baggott, which starts similarly. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book that actually had a good sex scene in it. Plus, I just finished Fangland which is a modern update on Dracula and it had the WORST sex scene ever (you may be surprised to learn that the damned don’t bother with oral hygeine).

Sex in a coatroom is probably the best way to begin the epistolary novel, because sometimes they can be a bitch to get into. I didn’t know who Baggott was, but Almond gives me a literary boner for serious.

Fuck it, I’m going running. I’ll be the one wheezing pathetically and listening to NPR. I think I’ve lost a little weight, which is good because I am like in my third try on week five. And now I am fine when I dash up stairs and across streets to the bus. It’s nice to have some encouragement. Downside: let’s not talk about or look at my stomach. It’s funny what babies and ten pounds here and there can do to you. PING I’m Doug and I’m OUTTA HERE!

Free Consulting Now for Trolls!

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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.

Well, At Least We Won’t Get the Plague, Probably

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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!

Meanwhile, Back at the Angry Lesbian Fortress of Solitude

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I finally got one glorious day of temp work. Well, a half day. I was downtown at a car company’s convention that was some kind of reward for the top sellers/managers of the year. I had kind of a feeling of dread that you get when you’re dealing with the public, and if you know that public is going to be mostly middle-aged white men. Mostly they were nice, but a couple felt the need to make jokes at me, which was kind of frustrating because I was basically taking transcription of the focus group/Q&A portion of the day, and I was trying to concentrate on typing like a furious demon and catching all their unfamiliar company jargon. Type for fifteen minutes, and then switch to a new table and start all over again.

It’s that thing I’ve been dealing with for years, that hyuk hyuk, you won’t mind if I ask you loud personal questions in front of everyone or make a joke about your name. I understand I am going through a phase right now where I am Overly Sensitive to male entitlement, which helps me smile in the face of all this to make my moneys and GTFO.

At one table this hambeast of a guy insisted on knowing what my name “stands” for. I always want to say something bizarre like “ending inhumane chicken farming practices” but that wouldn’t go over well.

“C’MOOON, it’s gotta stand for something,” he pressed. I shook my head nonchalantly.

“It doesn’t stand for anything!” snapped the only other woman at the table with me, who looked like she was in her early thirties and had her arms all stacked up with bracelets and a jaunty cap. Right on. I’m sure she deals with that shit more than she would like as well.

In conclusion, please kill me, I can’t get Smell Yo Dick out of my head.

In Other News: Reader’s Advisory from Awesome Jerks!

Thanks! Here is the aggregation of the awesomeness that you left in my comments the other day.

Nailing Your Wife. Nathan Fillion in PG porn from Lorena.

Violet sent me something from Walmart that was no doubt lewd, but they apparently got huffy and moved it?

Beloved grad school homie JT sends me Darth Montague. ANOTHER channel from the Cheezburger people. They are poised to take over the world, methinks.

Rothbeastie gave us Diesel’s SFW Porn party invite.

Tuckova sent me new Grace Jones! Holeee shit. News flash: she still scares me, almost as much as she did in A View to a Kill. Awesome video.

Krumpy my Krumpy sends me Gay Porn Twins Go On Robbing Spree (Srs)

La Pequeña Sarah Palin comes from Styro. YEAAAAH. [NSFW, NMS.] “When John McCain dies I will be president. MWAHAHAHA!”

Julia sends Gay Mount Everest. Doh. I love live news redonkulousness.

Lady GaGa! How did I not know her? Man, I love pure pop music like this around the house. And yet I am running to Andrew Bird right now. I dunno! Thanks, Meredith. I need to listen to our local dance station more and less NPR. Oh, the economy’s bad today? How about now? Still, yes. And tomorrow too, right? Yeah.

Also, today I wrote about Tim Burton’s film homagery at Blogher. I love writing over there. I know I’m not curing cancer or anything with my pop culture blurbery, but it’s so much fun to focus and nerd out on a topic besides…well, me.

Hey this is like a real weblog or something today! Thank you, my homies, you are cheering.

And In the Darkened Underpass, I Thought, “Oh God My Chance Has Come At Last”

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I took a shower yesterday (rah rah basic hygiene) and I completely forgot to comb my hair. This is hair that now extends a good foot past my shoulder, catches in the car door, and hangs in my face. I even caught some in my armpit the other night, inexplicably clotheslining myself. I dunno. Don’t ask. I don’t know how I did it.

So I shouldn’t forget it’s there, is my point. Every so often my hand wanders up to sort of pet it and manipulate it into some kind of position resembling not a bad wig or perhaps a pot scrubber, but my hair is not having it. Then I curl it back up and throw an alligator clip in it and pretend it’s not happening. I saw a woman at Safeway today with a big, blonde, unkempt bun on top of her head with her sides and top all smooth and perfect looking, and the bun looking like something the neighbor’s dog had stolen for three or four days, worried over, and then dropped in the storm drain. Who is she trying to fool? I thought to myself, and then saw those stones of judgment hurling right back at me. Bun Twins. “Shut up, Brain, I have the flu still, mostly. Je suis fucking morose.” “Oh, yes, Body? We used to have standards,” brain replies.

It’s funny how you can go off the rails a little bit and not even realize it. Things I do now would just not have happened a few months ago. It’s important for you to know that my underwear is on inside out. I made note of this, and did not switch it. GOOD. Who says my fricking labia can’t have some interesting scenery? Why must the inside of my pants get the window seat? If this were a party, it would be stagnant. Inside of Pants? Meet Cotton Crotch. Labia? Meet fleur de lis pattern. I’m sure you’ll have loads to talk about.

In a lot of ways I feel like I just had a baby. Kind of basted in craziness with a melange of confusion and a deglazing of franticness. My eyebrows look GREAT. My house is filthy. I have watched every episode of The Office on hulu (whom I am now apparently being sponsored by! Invisible Paycheck!) but laundry piles up around my ears. My friend prods me to action with this writing project I am dragging my feet on, and she’s right and she means well. I just have to find that right mix to get me going and keep me running: I think it’s equal parts desperation and self-revulsion and love. It’s all in there. Run, asshole, run!

The Bugs, The Bugs, Etc.

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Photobucket
Your author in repose, just like Frida Kahlo before they burned her up, except with a stuffed bunny.

Last night I managed to scrape the ceiling of 103. You can’t see, but under the blankets I am wearing fleece mittens. I am having the weirdest pains, too, like in my sitz bones. I had some cool hallucinations, though, in between the spots in front of my eyes. When I closed my eyes I saw a spider spinning and Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian man, but moving, like on some commercial when I was a kid.

I feel guilty about it, but I am going out for a while. I am going to make Strudel’s dad and the girls shop and touch everything. I’ve been in the house since Friday afternoon and I have ants in my pantaloons.