Monthly Archives: October 2012

Seriously, Stop Trying to Handle My Style

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It’s Burt. Yes, that Burt. I don’t know, I just do the makeup.

GET IN THE CAR

Because hark it is a fruitbat.

“MOM the whiskers make me look like a kitty! Do I look like a kitty?”

“Well, you have batwings and creepy claw hands and a furry fat belly and no tail…”

“Okay.”

Unless you’re a lady
Then you’re cordially invited to have a giant slice of my styyyyle

LATER:

MAD LOOTZ 2012!!!!

“Perhaps you could just part with just one little Mike N Ike I don’t think you would miss it because you have a whole pile of candy right there and OH I CAN ALMOST TASTE IT.”

If You See Me Walkin By, And the Tears are in my Eyes, VANDALAY! BABY VANDALAY!; Or, Apartment Heresy

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Last night I dreamt (here we go again, I know) that Horace yakked all over my chest while I was trying to sleep (barkake) and the cats were peeing everywhere. I reckon this is better than the home invasion dreams I was having. I saw Sorry, Wrong Number last week and SPOILER ALERT at the end the main character is killed when someone breaks in. To kill her. Whoops. I did enjoy the chemist in it who really reminded me of the Gale Boetticher character from Breaking Bad.

What is up? Pup is up, Brown is down. Franny turned 12, since it is October and all.

She finally got a friend to sleep over, which has been a real challenge in the past. There was giggling from her room until midnight. I think this neighborhood is going to be a lot more fun for since her friends mostly live close to their school. We ended up outside the school district in the last place, since our neighborhood school was closed for remodeling and the girls were sent to the next one, which we now live near. Strudel is taking the brunt of the overload of kids who were shipped to their current school, since she was the last kindergarten class before the other school reopened. There are 35 kids in her second grade class, and I think there are 4 second grades. The classes below her are a more reasonable size, I hear.

I’m enjoying the house, especially now that the heat is on (um literal heat, not crime type). I know that the inspector looked at the furnace, and pronounced it new and in good working condition, but I was nervous because of years of moving into rentals and rolling the dice on them. How cold and leaky would the house be, exactly? It turns out it is as snug as a bug in a rug, as they say. I am SO WARM. I always think about SeaFed’s grandmother, who was Seattle’s own Dowager Countess. She was responsible for such Mal Mots as “You would look so pretty if only you’d lose ten pounds” and “You’d look so pretty if only you’d take that metal crap out of your face” and many, many variations on the theme of “THE JAPS!” which she could not be corrected out of, gently or otherwise. However, there was one thing that she said to me once that was not racist, sexist, or insulting, an observation that she made when SeaFed was out of the room and she noticed he was kind of dragging his feet on getting his shit together and doing things like working. “It’s okay to be poor now,” she said. I was 24 and had a two-year-old Franny and was in school. “But not in your 30s. You’ll just be too tired.” I am glad to be in a comfortable house that I like now. I am tired. But more relaxed now that the automatic gun turrets are installed.

I’ve been fooling around with the house a lot as the painting is kind of winding down. I decided the dining room wasn’t blinged out enough and needed a stenciled medallion.

If it wasn’t hard enough painting on a ceiling, the paint started blobbing around under the stencil and I could tell it looked bad. I know enough to know when to quit, so I did!

Of course I tried to wipe it to minimize the damage, but it was already drying. My first fuck up! Kind of nice to have that Band-Aid ripped off I suppose. My last phone came out of the box scratched, much to the clerk’s horror. He tried to take it from me, but I wouldn’t let him. Pre-scratched means you don’t have to have that unique gadget sad when your new shiny gets its first fender-bender.

I decided to “fix” it with a real medallion. Sure, I could have just painted it white, but I decided to just try a different tack(y).

I got a white polystyrene one and painted it. I started with a base of black spraypaint, and followed up with Rustoleum “hammered” Rosemary, which is kind of a metallic green/grey. Rustoleum is theoretically for things like patio furniture, but I cannot tell you how many of the junk shop rescue objects in my house are covered in it. After that I gave it a tiny spritz of some Rustoleum Copper I had laying around from spraying the giant vampire head on my porch (umm, I need a pic of that up I suppose) and then, my favorite thing, Rub N Buff. I am worshiping at the altar of this woman who is the Rub N Buff Queen. So I pulled out the highlights in it using Gold Leaf.

I also realized that something was missing from the dining room.

Come to me, Banditoooo. I cleaned him up a little–my velvets are way dusty. I also oiled the frame with some almond oil, which I use on the dining table and the free standing butcher block counters as well. I’m getting to the point where I’m finally hanging stuff. This house is designed with such an economy of space that I don’t actually have enough walls. I’m going Victorian art gallery clusterfuck on my only large, non-wood paneled wall as soon as I am able to lay out my paintings and Tetris them together before hanging. I measured a space on my floor to arrange my mirror wall and that worked a treat.

The paneled wall is coming along. I think it can hold at least four more heads.

IN OTHER NEWS (OLDS)

This is what 35 looks like. If you’re me anyway. Tired, yet optimistic. This is the age of being asked if you’re feeling tired. OF COURSE I AM. FUCK. WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE, HANDJOB BON-BON PARTY BUS?

Look! It’s a real camera! No Instagrams were harmed during the making of this blog. This is rich, coming from a blogger, I know, but I am feeling like I should be taking more pictures of myself lately. I will tell you I am interested to see what my face is going to do in the next ten years. I see pictures of myself when I first started blogging at 23 and I say WHO IS THAT BABY?

NAMASTE, FUCKERS.

It Burns When I Monday

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I came home yesterday to a pile of receipts and some other odds and ends on the table. There is nothing like the feeling of something not making sense and trying to figure it out. Sometimes I imagine I have the spinning hourglass over my head. I turned around to face the living room and all of my electronics were gone. Well, that tears it: robbed. It’s never good timing, is it? It feels kind of extra bad right now because the house was the good thing happening, and it still is, I have to remember that. As I tried to go to sleep last night I had this feeling of wanting to go home, like I was on some kind of nightmare extended trip, but I am home. Bad things can happen in your home and you have to kind of move forward and pave over them with better things.

The good news is that the thieves were kind of morons–I guess if they weren’t they would have, like, real jobs? I assume it was kids, because most of what they took was Franny’s, including all of her pajamas, strangely. They weren’t even like super fancy jammies, either. So today for her birthday, I took her pajama shopping and got her a couple of other odds and ends since some of her other clothes were nicked. The electronics they took either needed set up software or they could be bricked remotely. Passwords were easy to change and took only a few minutes. I haven’t even finished hanging up all my pictures yet.

The receipts were on the table because my purse itself, which contained nothing valuable, had been emptied and stolen. My camera happened to be on me at work, which is nice. I haven’t been robbed since I was a kid–and then it was my parents, of course. All of my stuff is kind of old and outdated and/or easily rendered useless. I have crappy weird antiques, mostly, and a lot of books and kitchen stuff. Overall I think we were a bad score–I don’t even have a TV. But it sucks because I liked my $80 refurb laptop from dinosaur times. If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t have bothered even unplugging it.

The thing that people say when you are robbed is that it’s such a violation. I don’t really feel that. My house felt the same, only messier, and emptier. I feel like the real damage is that now the girls are nervous, and I worry about that. The officer who took the report was very reassuring about people not being hit twice close together–of course not, all of the things of apparent value are gone.

In other amazing news in these amazing end times, my trial has been postponed again. I sort of feel like I can’t really talk to people about this anymore. It’s like going into your twelfth year of having some obscure disease. “How’s it going, still dying?” Yes. Anyway, it’s pushed out to November, the week of FANGSGIVING. The temporary parenting plan says that we have her for that week but her stepmother told her they have her that week, so I imagine that will be another fight. I really don’t understand the confusion over a line of text that says: Thanksgiving, mother, even years. TWELVE IS STILL EVEN, RIGHT? I told SeaFed recently that he should perhaps consider sitting down with another adult and reviewing the parenting plan, like his wife, but wow do I take that back now.

My lawyer suggested I try to settle with him just for funsies, so I emailed him and told him I would pay his half of the GAL fee if he signed now, and we could avoid missed work for trial. Because I am a jolly cockface I pointed out that this would also save me the trouble of filing a lien to get the money later. This, of course, has been entered as a THREAT against him in his trial brief. His trial brief is not quite the comedic document that his divorce proceedings were (which for some reason included the FACT that only 6% of his diet is snacks) or for that matter his impassioned defense against the evil known as child support (which included a moving passage urging the commissioner to change child support guidelines right then and there in court for his case, as well as some fascinating math that ended in a calculation that his fair share was $81 a month and that the King County Office of the Prosecuting Attorney was in my pocket, hello hello mind the lint and crumbs boys), but it still has its moments.

He turned in his trial brief late and as monstrous hard copy. Once my attorney submitted hers, which was terse, easy to follow, and contained actual case law citations, he turned in another document, claiming that he had accidentally left part of his trial brief off. This document, naturally, looked a lot more like hers. My lawyer has asked the commissioner to award a portion of attorney’s fees due to intransigence and general jerkymandering, so naturally he has asked for attorney’s fees as well (N.B.: He still has no attorney). He has also asked for me to be supervised by a CASE MANAGER because I am bad, bad, super bad, and naughty. The basis for this is that I gave him a few days’ notice the weekend I moved that I would not be able to drive Franny all the way to his city that day, and he would have to make arrangements to pick her up at school. Also I should be held in CONTEMPT OF COURT because of this. Okay, his trial brief is not really fuck yeah, caplocks, but it kind of has that flavor. Or maybe some Random capitalization for Emphasis.

Unfortunately my deviation from the letter of the temporary parenting plan one time in eleven months has made him decide it’s now a good idea to begin text/email harassment three days before any drop off is supposed to happen. The good news is that this harassment prompted my lawyer to push back and point out that he was violating the parenting plan himself by not remitting her passport to me. He went away but has ignored her request.

So, as I said: endtimes. I am going to write about this, and then it will be done, and I will dénouement around a little, and then I will be happy to put this to bed.

My last word today is that this is the only time in about 8 years that I have wanted to have a TV. Dr. Horrible is airing live tonight on the CW. I will have to catch it later.

Dial “M” for Moonpants

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So I was stuckish in downtown traffic last night because I am attending the noir series the museum throws every year. This year the focus is on DAMES, EVIL DAMES. Barbara Stanwyck ahoy! Did you know she was born a Ruby? And her stage name was BARBARA? I know, I know.

My phone rang and it was not a DAME, it was Moonpants, so I threw it on speaker. As you may recall Moonpants is my former neighbor who I am feeling quite fond of now that he doesn’t want me to entertain his child via mine and borrow “Like some butter and some eggs because Pantlet woke up craving pancakes man.” He is kind of like The Dude and Tim Robbins’s character in High Fidelity mated.

“Hi SJ, it’s Moonpants.”

“Hey!” He is throwing a party for his 50th birthday on Saturday, so I figured it was about that. I was waiting to be asked to bring, like, all the food or something. “Sooo the neighbors are wondering about your chicken because they keep seeing her running around in the alley…” I had given Moonpants the heads up that we had tried to catch Mary Jane several times before and after we moved but that she had gone feral after Raccoon Slaughter XVII: The Nommining at the beginning of this summer. I suspect she is mooching off the concerned neighbors now, who have a coop too.

“If they can catch her, they can totally keep her,” I said. “You know we tried to catch her several times.”

“Yeah, it sort of is like, maybe she made a choice not to be caught,” Moonpants said. I wasn’t really following his logic that any chicken really makes a choice about anything, but his worldview was totally in my favor this time so I went with it. At least this wasn’t the 45-minute discussion we had once about “Is bindweed really like a weed man, and who determines what a weed actually is?” as I plucked bindweed off our shared fence so it would not block the sunlight and strangle my blueberries.

“Sure. She’s lived in the tree for a few months now and has been safe. I had the thought that if I took her to a new house and she roosted in trees she did not know it might be more dangerous for her.” Seriously, I really had thought about this. She was doing pretty well where she was. If I did manage to catch her and take her with me, she would probably get eaten the first night. Additionally, a chicken that comes down every morning and eats your chicken chow and hides her eggs is really not much better than the crows who eat the chickens’ table scraps before they can. She would do okay in a closed run, but I never have one of those.

“Okay, well, I’ll tell them they can have her if they can catch her.” He was quiet for a moment. “Hmm…I kind of like the idea of having a wild alley chicken.”

“It’s more common than you think,” I said. I have seen runaways in almost every neighborhood.

“See you Saturday!” he said and rang off.

Shit Just Got Real

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“MOM don’t look in my pants, there are secrets in there,” Franny said. I was about to stick a carton of orange juice down her pants while she was doing the dishes, because electrolytes.

“Really!” I said. “What kind?”

“I have a BUTT TATTOO of my face on my butt.”

“Oh, from when you were in prison?” I asked.

“Yes, this top crime guy offered to do it illegally while I was there. It is awesome to have a face on your butt. ASS FACE!”

Franny will be twelve in six days.

This is my happening and it freaks me out

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Billy: I can’t imagine anybody firing you.
Penny: Neither could I. Now, I can visualize it really well. But you know, everything happens–
Billy: Don’t say for a reason.
Penny: No! No, I’m just saying “everything happens”.

–Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Hey Team. How’s tricks? I am taking two minutes to say that trial has been bumped. It was supposed to be today but got pushed forward a week. All I know about how these things work is what I’ve been learning as I go. Apparently we fell off the case schedule somehow, which the judge’s bailiff says…happens sometimes. SeaFed is taking things up to eleven right now. On Friday he was haranguing me via text because we were interpreting the temporary plan differently. He thought it was his weekend, and I did not.

I used to think that showing any vulnerability to anyone unfriendly was a weakness and would present a problem. That it would be used against me somehow later. I think it’s true still in some cases–you can’t really have a groovy encounter session with someone who is yelling at you for no good reason at a bus stop. I think I kind of fell inward because of I was raised. If I could make a hard shell around myself, nothing would really affect me. Pretty typical, right? I think this is a common reaction for kids exposed to abuse. I always told myself if I was a little tougher, I would be okay, that I could survive anything that dropped into my path. I read books on survival, like literal survival, a la field dressing animals, and I tested myself. I fantasized about running away to somewhere safe, and I didn’t think that place was in the world of any adults I knew, so I thought about the woods. My freshman year of high school, sometimes the only occupant of the apartment I shared with my mother and sister for several days in a row was me. I stayed up for days at a time just to see if I could. I taught myself how to meditate from a weird book I took out from the library and would zone out for hours at a time, just kind of maintaining. You get a little weird when you’re a social person and you spend that much time alone.

Nowadays I care less if people see my human face. You want to throw my real actual feelings back at me and mock me for them? You are uninvited from this party, because not only can I not relate to you, but I feel sorry for you. Not that people care…but I can’t really achieve parity with someone I pity. I think some people never quite evolve out of that cruel childish place. And we all slip back there sometimes. I’m not saying I’m some kind of superior evolved creature.

Anyway, Friday was one of those days that I did something kind of unexpected. SeaFed started texting me, and lately he’s been trying to catch me out with some amateur Columbo shit. He emailed about a month ago and was asking me about upcoming dates in October that extend past the temporary parenting plan. I replied that I thought we should discuss it later since I reckoned the permanent parenting plan would supersede the temporary one. “Are you saying you’re NOT going to return her on the weekend of X?” he replied. No, that is not what I’m saying.

So when I started replying to his texts on Friday, we really went to the “does not compute” place. I told him, impolitely and forthrightly, that I felt his lack of ability to synthesize information was causing trouble yet again. Naturally, he replied with NO U and continued to harangue me. “You better consult with your lawyer,” he warned me. His inability to understand documents that get ever so slightly off black and white and require some thought and finesse means that he hits the wall and immediately starts demanding the kid. I’m trying to finalize a parenting plan that is pretty black and white. That is how wrong I was and how serious this was. I decided to tell him the truth. “I will report to my lawyer that you’re bullying me,” I said. I told him he was upsetting me by harassing me like this and that I wouldn’t be replying to any more of his texts that day. His last response included something similar to, “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing here.”

His next move was to email me, my lawyer, and the guardian ad litem to tattle on me. He attempted to attach the parenting plan, but instead attached a different document, our Orders re Motion for Adequate Cause to Change the Parenting Plan, and cited sections from the temporary parenting plan that naturally were not there. I really didn’t see what good this might do. The GAL had finished her investigation (and was supposed to submit her findings on Friday but is AWOL, which is completely confounding my lawyer), and my lawyer wasn’t going to jump to help him with a contextless email with an incorrect attachment.

The point of relating all of this, which I am aware is beyond repetitious and tedious by now, is to say I’m glad I told him he was bothering me. He will continue to do so regardless, and obviously doesn’t believe I am having feelings or whatever. I understand that in communicating with him, achieving whatever goal we have is the first priority (establishing drop off time or whatever), but when things get circular like that, pointless, why not try a little personal growth? I don’t think he understood the “game I was playing” because I wasn’t playing one. This whole, um, journey for the past year and a half or so has involved him trying to get someone, anyone to see how I “tricked” him into moving away and giving up his residential time. I am constantly being tricky, and also probably glib.

I told Strudel’s dad what was happening with all this on Friday and he said something that brought me up short: maybe he’s acting like this because he’s frightened. He was hammering my lawyer with questions at the pretrial conference about what would happen and what trial is like and how long it is, and he has no lawyer, so maybe this recent increase in assholeism is fear-based. Much like I don’t really show him anything beyond the most terse responses, typically, I never see anything human from him anymore. Though, to be honest, a great deal of the reason I left him is because he didn’t seem to care about much of anything, in word or in deed. I got tired of all my feelings falling on deaf ears.

Feelings: I am still having them, shocking, I know. They are still pointless to share with SeaFed, especially now. And I know this. I am not affronted to be perceived as playing games. I am glad I was honest with myself and how I felt on Friday, though. It feels better somehow. I’m actually not freaked out, despite my title-quote, nor am I afraid like I was last year. Everything will…turn out. Like it always does.

In Other News.

Goethe hates Neato. Horace loves Goethe and just wants to be part of her life, man. Goethe loves Horace when she is not defending hearth and home from INVADERS! Get used to it, Gert. Neato works every day from 8-10 now.