Monthly Archives: July 2009

If You’re So Very Entertaining, Why Are You On Your Own Tonight?

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So. It is established that Seattle cannot really handle anything above or below 65F. Winter brings OMFGBBQpocalypse if there is a half-inch of snow on the ground, causing school to be slammed shut and workplaces and bridges to close. (It should be noted that when I was working for barely above minimum this fall and winter, those workplaces did NOT close, not once.)

A couple of days ago it was over 100. Most houses have no air conditioning, which, fine, I can hang. I can make cereal for dinner and cheese and cracker and be cross and drink Mexican beer for a couple of days during the wave.

What cannot handle the heat is my stuffs. My router melted! I called Qwest to tell them and ask them if they would disown me if I used a non-Ma Bell model and they tried to troubleshoot me.

Them: Have you tried plugging it into another phone jack?
Me: It is melted!
Them: Have you tried cycling your modem by unplugging it and…
Me: IT HAS WAVES IN IT FROM MELTING AND IS TOTALLY WARPED!
Them: Oh.

Also, I had one of my favorite things, a big chunk of cocoa butter type moisturizer from Lush in my shower and it melted right down the side. It was not even in the sun.

Looks like I am offline this weekend. I might even have to GO OUTSIDE, UGH. Last night I spent about an hour trying to make dialup work, but no dice. It was kind of soothing hear the modem try to dial in though. NOSTALGIA. When I first started blogging, I used to click “connect” and then wander off and grow a beard and stuff. I also used to write all my posts in Word and copypasta them into the blogwindow, hit send, and get out again as if it was some kind of blogograph service. I almost pooped myself the first time I typed a post directly into the window, OMG.

Franny is off to her dad’s for two weeks, and she is hella pissed. I figure it’s good for her to have some not getting her way in her life. I think of myself as an advocate for her, generally–someone who can help her navigate the seas of WTF. Sometimes I say “Verily that sucks darling” about her traumas and sometimes I give her the little pep talk. She gets frustrated with SeaFed because he comes from the Jolly-but-dismissive school.

Lately she is having nightmares that I am dying and that she goes to an orphanage because her dad doesn’t want her. She has been worried about this lately because she knows she will be whisked away from our house and P. and Strudel if I died. I am the bridge.

I put on my gypsy lady rings and played Dream Interpreter.

I told her it’s normal to dream about losing the people we care about most. I told her about a dream I had about her where I lost her and panicked. Also I told her that last time her stepmom spawned she felt all left out and I wondered if her brain is worried about the new baby.

“See how it’s better to expose these things to light,” I said.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“Does it seem less scary now that we’ve talked about it?”

“Yes,” she said.

I have changes afoot–what else is new? I will fill you in in a few days. I am so feeling the Smiths today. HOBO LIKES SONGS ABOUT BEING BURIED ALIVE. Here’s to a new chapter.

Appalling Personal Problems That A Person Cannot Hide, Not Even for One Night.

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ETA: whatladder says this is a DO NOT EAT WHILE READING post. I say WALK IT OFF, PUSSY. You have been warned.

I went out to Calgary and I told the story so many times I don’t feel like telling it again! I went, it was fun, the end. You saw the pics, probably. “Critics Declare Buttcon 9 a Success.” Really, the most fun conference I have ever attended. Buttcon 10 is in Iceland, so I had better start saving up now.

I think what I want to talk about what a wreck my skin is. That’s more interesting anyhow. THIS IS MY HOUSE I’LL DO AS I DARN PLEASE. So, I have keratosis pilaris, and pretty much always have since I was a baby. When I was a kid, this affliction was known as “I don’t know why your skin does that, weird, huh?” I didn’t really realize what it was until I read about it on Tomato Nation, and I had that OH moment. The cool thing is that it starts clearing up between twenty-five and thirty, so my skin looks fine most of the time. But if something goes wrong now typically I can’t go, “Woe is moi I have skin affliction,” I have to say, this is a ZIT. Alas.

I have a history of just attacking myself, too. Years of fucked up skin combined with pretty good healing ability has made me somewhat fearless. I used to beg to pull my sister’s teeth when she was a kid and I would do home surgery on someone else in a second, if they let me. So my thing in more recent years has been what I guess are sebaceous cysts, where sometimes I will get a zit and it will just NOT go away.

My first experience was this monstrosity on my back, which was a zit that looked done and felt done, but would refill itself repeatedly. It got larger and larger and I could feel something lurking under my skin. So in the past year or so I got one in one of the worst places–under my BOOB. Right where my bra sits. I would prod it and I could feel something was in it…pirate’s booty? Spider eggs? Jeff Goldblum? Sorry, I am still running that into the ground from yesterday. It wasn’t funny then, either.

I was trapped in the hotel Saturday night with my sleepy kid, kind of bored and knocking around. Lewd texts I sent went ignored. TV was meh, as usual. But I had a pair of tweezers and a magnifying shaving mirror in the bathroom, and I noticed as I took my bra off it was sore again. Hmm…

It was a pretty easy operation as these things go, unlike the first time, which was on my back and very hard to reach. I could see the center and grabbed it after a few tries with my tweezers. What always sticks with me is the feeling of pulling some relatively hard object out of a hole in my body. I can feel it sliding out and then I have this THING that causes me sometimes a year-plus of irritation. I am the princess, and it is my pea. It is HEAVENLY having them come out, no joke.

Then I have the huge hole that goes down to forever and I am like CAN I SEE MY LUNGS through there? GRACIOUS. And it does not bleed. The next morning I woke up and it was a krillion times better, and today it is just a little scar. GO TEAM HOME SURGERY!

In Other News: FUCKING WHOOPS TIMES INFINITY

Franny: AUUUGH, Mom, what IS that at the top of your website???

Me: That. Is a wound. On a man’s. Leg.

Franny: That looks like a BAD one.

Me: Yes, but they sewed it up and he is okay now.

Franny: Okay, good.

FAIL!

Them Chickens Is Ash and I’m Lotion

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DO NOT use these elevators. However, there is no indication that the numbers actually relate to the elevators the sign hangs next to. These signs are not on every floor. Additionally, the only elevators that open are the possibly-taboo elevators.

I could not resist the potential of the taboo elevators. What was in them? Doubloons? Narnia? $240 worth of pudding? An elevator operator saying, “ROOM FOR ONE MORE!”?

I stepped onto one of the verboten elevators and a panel hung menacingly from its hairlike wires. It did not go. I stepped into the next, illegal elevator that opened: it was perfectly well-behaved and lurched up to my floor and I dropped my item off.

On the return, finally, finally, the one of the non-taboo elevators opened and I stepped into it. It smells like electrical fire smoke. The stairs smell like solvent.

Without our daily tiny mindfuck, do we forget we are little cogs and begin to aspire to other things?

On the Way Home I Was Thinking

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About all the ways to be sad. Right now I am about 26 kinds, and I am too embarrassed to tell you what they all are. When I get to about 21 I start to feel like I am on my back and someone is shoveling my mouth full of sand. Do you ever feel like that? I was thinking about undertaking a project to make a list of all the ways, but I don’t know WHAT that will serve really.

1. Death, in total
2. Dropped food
3. Dead pets from childhood
4. What you should have said
5. What you actually did say
6. Too many nachos, AGAIN
7. Misinterpreted text messages
8. Feeling sorry for yourself (sad that you are)
9. Not being able to protect your children every second
10. Saying unpleasant things in front of your children TO protect them
11. Scars that you don’t remember how you got them
12. Lying about who you are
13. Lying about who you aren’t
14. The feeling of listening to the same song over and over for a crappy reason
15. Being told to “snap out of it”
16. Empty bottle of champagne
17. Trying to have feelings to match someone else’s
18. Pulling out your favorite sweater after summer and discovering it is really ratty and you had built it up in your memory as this Ideal Sweater and then being repulsed by it
19. Half-starts to what could have probably been a really good story that you find two a.m. drunkenly and your brain starts howling JESUS FUCK I AM A CRAP WRITER
20. Memory perfume
21. Crying on the bus
22. Trying to figure out what actually matters
23. Calculating when you will die
24. Waking up and realizing that you don’t care about the thing you used to care about the most
25. Same thing, only it is a person
26. Realizing that you can fall out of love in one day
27. OR realizing it will take much longer than you thought and could this hurry up at all?
28. Seriously? Some people do get eaten by their nine cats.

I guess I am still obsessing on this “when do you stop noticing you are bleeding” business. I had a nice time in Calgary and I will tell you all about it tomorrow, when my head is more traveloguey and less stratospherey.

Let’s Blow This Fire-trap, Eh?

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Franny was tired and in a snit after her summer camp today and looking how I feel pretty much every day after work. Sometimes I lose it and lay on the couch and eat Chinese food, but most nights I have to smile while I hear that I paid so my kid could have a bad day and that she did not bring enough money to go on the outing, which meant that she had to put it back in her bag, which was rifled, and the money was stolen. Some days she gets shoved, or someone says something mean to her and she cries.

It made me think of a story an old friend told me once about how he got cut and was bleeding everywhere and did not notice, but his sister saw the wound a little later and the dried blood. They were both amazed: how could he not notice? I used to feel like Franny did, every day. When do you stop noticing the bleeding?

Strudel was in better shape but seems to have forgotten how to eat. Seriously. I presented her with a slice of pizza tonight and she turned it on its end and tried to shove it into her mouth toppings-side up. I thought children were supposed to have the whole spacial/3-D understanding of how the world works by the time they are at least a year old, but it’s like she regressed. She also smacks loudly with her mouth open and wipes her fingers in her hair, leaving her napkin untouched. Who are you and what planet do you come from that you do not know what to do with pizza?

This all led up to World War 3 here, in which Franny decided to smack her sister and I caught her. I got the full watery-eye treatment, the sad, imploring, “You NEVER believe me!” Yes, because I SEE you hitting her. She was cranking up into a little pre-teen tanty when I told her that she needed to get in the shower. “I HATE THE SHOWER!” she wailed. “MY LIFE IS HORRIBLE.” Oh, cry me a RIVER. Your life is summer camp and time with me and her sister on the evenings and weekends, and horse camp FFS when she goes back to her dad’s house next month. The only thing horrible about her life is that I caught her in the act.

Tomorrow we are flying out of the country, which I am slightly nervous about because of a recent chain of events. We can let the viewer decide…well, whatever they want.

I have passports and birth certificate, of course. What I do not have is signed permission letter from her father. Of course there is a history and a backstory here, and, holy cow, it makes me realize that SeaFed has been married for like three whole years already. BOY was I histrionic in that episode. You can practically feel the heat coming off the screen. But you know what? I would call the cops all over again. That shit is not any less illegal today. So we have that under our belts.

We also have me saying “no” to him three times in the past week or so about stupid shit, like a tax law that he didn’t look up and yet demanded some unowed moneys from me anyway. I can sense from afar that he is in a temper, or at least less of a stupor, than usual.

So me trying two weeks out to get a signed travel permission letter? Not going to happen. Emails go ignored. Dates go conveniently forgotten. Half-assed attempts are made to schedule a notary meeting several miles and a ferry ride from my house in the middle of a workday. “Thanks for your efforts anyway,” I finally texted him sarcasmically.

But I am going, and I think we have a fine shot. We have all the documents and the same last name. The letter would have been icing on the cake. And we are going to have a fantastic weekend in a hotel that is more like an apartment with a pool and fine friends. I will throw pics up and travelogue all about it when I return. MONKEYCHOW OUT.

Do You Hear Me, Seans?

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I was cross on the second bus and regretting declining a ride I’d been offered. The other riders were too close and it was too hot. The girl next to me was wearing too much perfume and kept elbowing me. More people piled on. One guy I see almost every day on the commute with his laptop sat in his usual spot, catty corner from me as I perched up in my corner and we exchanged glances. We never say hello.

A man and a woman got on the bus. She sat next to the laptop guy, and her companion sat across from her. She was probably in her late 30s and had a cowboy hat and was missing a tooth. A strong smell of cheap booze wafted over from both of them, not an uncommon thing on a Friday afternoon on the 44. I looked up from my book and saw that her face was twisted. She was in a deeply drunken state of grief.

She began talking about her father to her companion.

“He’s gone!” she said, her face crumpling. She started low at first, speaking seldomly, then raised her voice and spoke more as if she wanted to hold the whole bus captive to her grief. She began telling laptop guy about her father, who had recently died.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Sean,” he replied.

“Sean! That’s my brother’s name,” she said, pointing at her companion across the way. “Two Seans!”

She had moments where she would sit quietly, or even smile. She sincerely thanked the Sean next to her for listening.

“My brother and I are going to a powwow,” she said. “You ever been to one of them?” Laptop Sean shook his head. “Last time we went to a powwow it was in Olympia, and THAT Sean got LAID!”

Her brother turned his head to the side and reddened. “Shhh,” he said, futilely.

“Well you did,” she said.

The topic moved to a horse her father had given her as a gift.

“I ain’t never put a bridle in my horse’s mouth. You can’t control an animal like that.” She looked around the back of the bus. “She’s wearing a nice dress,” she said, nodding to a woman standing next to her wearing a wild print.

“That horse was a stallion! When I had to get on him, he would get down like this,” she dipped her head low and put an arm out, indicating a horse that was bowing. “My daddy hated that horse. His name was Mr. Motherfucker!”

I laughed out loud at this and she smiled at me, the gap in her teeth winking at me. She soon turned serious again.

“MABEL! I will never leave you,’ he said!” Mabel said, crying softly for a minute. Then she laughed. “Sean, this is Sean. We are going to a powwow.”

I pulled the bell for my stop.

“MY DAD IS GONE, DO YOU HEAR ME, SEANS?”

“We hear you, yes,” they said.

“I’m the baby,” Mabel said, and closed her eyes.

OOH Bitch That Ain’t Fair Give That Horsie Back His Hair

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Hey. Heeeeey. Sexy man on my vending machine. Baby, I like the way you eat that potato chip. I can see all the way back there. Kind of wish I had a dick to cram in there, but I could probably find something else in a pinch. Man, do you still have your tonsils? That’s pretty hot. I have mine in a jar at MAH CRIB. Yes, for reals. Do I look like the type of person who would just say I have my tonsils in a jar at MAH CRIB if that was untrue? That hurts, baby.

Yes, I know snacking is an important personal decision, or at least that’s that the sign next to your sexy head says. I still don’t want to pay two bone for a bag of peanuts with a weird sweet coating. You know, when I squint my eyes, you look kind of like my geometry teacher. Sort of like that, or one of my aunts. I really like your ethnic ambiguity. Feeling included is making me want to eat potato chips. Also not feeling like anyone else is excluded. That is making me want salty snacks as well. You sort of look like the dude version of a Bratz doll. What kind of accent would you have? HEY, you’re not a digital composite, are you? I think you might be.

That’s okay, I’m open-minded.

IN OTHER NEWS: Could I Please Have a Look at the Lyrics?

On Saturday I went to the Symphony. I had heard the Seattle Symphony was like totes casual, like we just need to keep it real and hear some damn music, there’s no time for peacocking. FALSE. Seattleites are lazy as hell with disgusting personal habits. I dressed up, but MY BADS it was Final Fantasy, so there were people there in costumes. Can people not contain their appalling personal problems for one night? No, they cannot. Bonus: I discovered that not only are they still manufacturing tuxedo-print shirts, a wall of unholy neckbeards wearing them can sashay toward you as you are innocently on your way to the bathroom. The composer was there with a giant fish and there was a huge screen behind the musicians. It was still pretty cool though, when you closed your eyes.

I am going to a wedding this weekend (not mine FTW) and Hazel is coming and sleeping at my house. I am her date. I didn’t see her for months and now twice in a summer. It’s amazing what a difference having a little extra money and not working constantly and odd hours makes. Also I am getting close to fleeing the country with my shiny new passport for a weekend with Franny. How happy I am to be traveling with her again so soon. She is back from her dad’s now after a two-week sojourn so I will probably be writing more now. I was sort of at loose ends without the routine she makes for me.

The conversation recap from breakfast was Franny recounting sacking up and asking her stepmother why she is not allowed to say “butt” when she’s there. Of course the butt-deprivation resulted in an acapella duet to butts and vulvas, and how awesome they are. It would be an overstatement to say I enjoy this. Let’s say I feel benignly toward this. Strudel is struggling with this as well. She wants to use the proper names for her body parts, and in her summer program these words are known as “bathroom words.” On one hand, I don’t like to hear the proper names for things referred to this way, on the other hand, Feral Dwarf, do you have to talk about your VULVA constantly? Do we need to hear that it likes the quesadillas? Does it need 27 sonnets and an epic? Why can’t my children rebel by aspiring to get an MBA?

So what we are working on now is APPROPRIATENESS. Yes, yes, my very existence is ironical now. I think Strudel is probably going to grow up to be one of those menstrual blood artists or something. I will come to her openings.

Things I cannot stop with today: 1. Shakira’s new single, She-Wolf, GOD HELP ME. LOOK at this PREVIEW. She is a Hooters girl up to her NECK and is in a cage. SO MUCH AWESOME. 2. The last Girl Talk album. 3. Seattle has awesome hiphop, even if people are slobs. 4. Also Tony’s Bitch Track.

I See My Reputation Precedes Me

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11:13 AM Ruby: Whats up?
 me: Helloo
 Ruby: good day to you!
 me: I met a hot guy!
Ruby: what is his disability?
 me: OH LOL
 Ruby: :-)
 me: WOW ice burn
  Awesome

This is basically the problem with opening up to people.

So it seems I am remiss in my comment approving duties. No Offenses! I just wandered off. I have been wanged by hormones.

Also it is important for you to know that I got my Hot Tip published in my local gay rag!! Lookit July 1! Hooray I finally saw something gross at a bus stop.

A Weekend of Domestical Bimboness

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I think I decided to turn my brain off this weekend. No challenging books were devoured, no useful writing was done, and shoes were lusted over. Some weekends are like that.

Because of the aforementioned Betty Crocker “bio” reading I decided to make an orange chiffon cake. [Thoughts on “Finding Betty Crocker”: the author could have spent more than 45 seconds thinking up a title.]

Out of season, but still delicious. Chiffon cakes were entirely “new” cakes when invented, meaning not butter or sponge-type. The secret was vegetable oil and an unholy shitton of eggs.

The drawback is that though it stays moist for quite a while, the cakes don’t taste of much. This one has orange juice, zest, and candied orange peel on the top to gussy it up.

You mix the flour and other dry stuff with the zest and oil and juice, and then you get to my favorite part, which is gently folding the stiff egg whites into the batter.

Then it bakes for an hour and LO! it can be friends with Halo’s cake.

Other than that, I was like teeny tiny crafty. I glued fat blunt plate back together (it exploded apart tragically at some point), after getting some proper glue and mooching a cocktail glass off P. who bought it at Goodwill this weekend. Goodwill was fricking groovy and yielded clothes for littleley and biggie people and a tablecloth and this hilarious plate.

Does this make you want to start a niche blog about hilarious plates with poor grammar? I can smell the book deal already. I almost replaced my elegant top plate with this one, but I snapped out of it and hung it on the wall above my stove instead.

I have been saying this over and over all weekend as it is written. P. says, “I KNOW. sigh.”

So, the tiered plate will go in my LBJ room in my future bed and breakfast, next to the photo of The J swinging his dogs around by their ears.

And while wandering around the fabric store waiting for my seamstress (who fixed part of my robe before snapping a needle, and sewed up a loose seam on the dress I was wearing on F-Off England day), I found tassels. Tassels class everything up, IT ARE A FACT. I guess I have grown out of Hello Kitty cell phone charms. :'(

Today I gave up any pretense of trying to do anything and went to the Fremont Market with Srcsmgirl.

I think I needed the weekend off like whoa. Happy weekend! Was it good for you?