As I grow more frolicsome and less resentful in the kitchen, I've come across some great "learning experience" recipes. These were recipes that originally sounded delicious and not so challenging and ended up either jeopardizing my physical safety or resembling surgical leftovers. A few examples:
New Orleans Lasagne
Prepared the same as regular lasagne, but submerged in a soup of water that I neglected to drain off of the canned tomatoes. Conveniently refuses to maintain structural integrity from dish to plate.
Low-on-Prozac Chicken
A burned unholy mess left untended in the oven while I cried. Sobs increased upon discovery.
Boozy Lady Fingers
Small sausages wrapped in ready-made croissant dough, dipped in hot mustard, and consumed with much beer. Delicious!--until the last batch, where the beer catches up with me and I horrifically burn four fingers by not using the oven mitt.
Noodle Water
Pretty much just some fucking water. Noodles were supposed to be added, but evidently something fell under the burner and into the drip pan and caught fire, filling the kitchen with acrid smoke and setting off the fire alarm. Repeatedly. Interesting tableau as I balance the tasks of waving a towel under the shrieking alarm and trying to extinguish the tiny fire under the burner, while adding the noodles anyway because hey, the damned water's boiling-- I'm not starting over.
Baltic Penis Cookies
After a long winning streak in the kitchen (read: edible food, no emergency room trips) I got cocky and decide that delicate cookie-cutter Christmas cookies were in order. Unfortunately, I hadn't brushed up on my eyelid surgery skills and was thus totally unprepared for the uncooperative dough. Stars and snowmen and Christmas trees soon turned to Baltic states which soon turned to penises. Penises are remarkably easy to fashion, and can even be made quite festive with a few raisins and some cinnamon sugar. By the time it occurred to me to make a few yuletide vulvas, I was out of dough, so that will have to wait.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Monday, November 28, 2005
Swingin'
There's a weird dude in my neighborhood who sits on the swing set in the little public park across the field behind my house. All day, just swinging, with the swing chains going creak creak. Every day. He's Tweedle Dee huge and always wears a yellow hat and sits with his left hand behind his back.
My first thought was sex offender, and I haven't really had a second thought yet.
Every day the dog and I run past him and even though it's at a point in my route when my lungs are on fire and my legs feel noodley and made of cement at the same time, we always pick up the pace. He's probably some eccentric genius with heartwarming tales of human suffering and redemption, but I'm just chickenshit enough to let that opportunity pass.
By the way, I totally needed a jacket today. Someone at this website needs their internal thermostat sissy-fied.
My first thought was sex offender, and I haven't really had a second thought yet.
Every day the dog and I run past him and even though it's at a point in my route when my lungs are on fire and my legs feel noodley and made of cement at the same time, we always pick up the pace. He's probably some eccentric genius with heartwarming tales of human suffering and redemption, but I'm just chickenshit enough to let that opportunity pass.
By the way, I totally needed a jacket today. Someone at this website needs their internal thermostat sissy-fied.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Thanksgiving Hurl-a-Thon
What do you do when the man you married rises from the bed ashen-faced at two in the morning, lurches into the bathroom, and then morphs into a terrifying human fountain of partially digested Thanksgiving feast? You wake your brother- and sister-in-law, gather a pile of their medicines, and then try to reassure them that nothing's happening in their guest bathroom-- not scenes from The Exorcist, not that stomach-dwelling thing from Alien-- and then you cower in the hallway and wait for the bathroom door to open so you can toss in Immodium and Pepto and Advil and words of encouragement.
Earlier that day: the husband and I are standing in a long line at one of San Antonio's Army bases waiting to be issued two soldiers to take home and subject to a family Thanksgiving. Always fond of pointless delay and formality, the Army makes 1,000 soldiers stand at attention for half an hour while the civilians are subjected to bizarre music blared over loudspeakers. "Proud to Be an American," which has to qualify as torture under the Geneva Convention, is followed by a strange rendition of "Under the Boardwalk," complete with totally-out-of-place Tejano yipping and "ay-ayyyyyy"-ing, and then finally, two smiling clean-cut soldiers in blindingly shiny shoes are issued to us. Thoroughly briefed on good manners and polite conversation, our guys were fun and easy to talk to-- which made it all the more difficult to break it to them that though it was now 9 in the morning, dinner would be at 6. A whole day to kill.
Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard. We played pool at my mother-in-law's house and ate her cookies, and then went over to the brother-in-law's for some X-Box and some taunting of the two-year-old nephew. (My nephew now has a fully-developed alter ego whom we have named "Lyle." Lyle announces his presence by issuing some kind of ear-splitting Comanche howl and then jumps straight up into the air, lands full force on his ass, and then lays back and thrashes and screeches. All because you stopped him from dialing Sweden on your cell phone.) Before we knew it, both soldiers were coated in a thick layer of dog and cat hair (just the ambient air of pet-dwelling homes is enough to do it when you're wearing nicely pressed dark green wool pants), the X-Box was exhausted, and it was time to head back to the mother-in-law's house for dinner.
My mother-in-law goes all out for major holiday cooking. Almost every other day of the year she and my father-in-law subsist entirely on cereal, but for big family gatherings, hers is the test kitchen from the Food Network, and she presides over it with the kind of nervous energy that makes everyone else subconciously hunch and tiptoe when they enter the kitchen. Part of this is the presence of her own mother, an ancient Oklahoma panhandle plainswoman, who sits in one corner by the breakfast table and watches the commotion, occasionally throwing out a remark that could be 50/50 "just making conversation" or "subtle, soul-crushing criticism." My mother-in-law rolls out homemade pie crusts with grim, tight-lipped competence, and I distract her mother with tales of my outlaw ancestors and my own shitty tomato-slicing skills.
The dinner was beautiful, the conversation amazingly light after all the stress of preparation, and the soldiers actually seemed sad to go when we took them back to the base. I found myself praying for each of them to break their ankles or something on the way back to the barracks just to be good and sure they wouldn't be headed to Iraq any time soon. They were both so young.
My husband and I returned to the brother-in-law's house to play with the dual personality nephew (as heinous as Lyle can be, the real nephew is angelic) and bed down for the night. And then 2 a.m. rolled around.
Your first marital bout of explosive diarrhea and unstoppable vomiting is really an underrated milestone. I believe scrapbooks should make room for this moment. Here is where you find out if you're both in it for the long haul. Are you willing to hold a trashcan in front of someone whose colon is rebelling so that they can simultaneously vomit themselves inside out? What about when that vomit is a stage by stage recount of your delicious Thanksgiving feast? And are you willing to find and point out weak bright spots like, "Hey, it's been 12 hours-- we're almost halfway!" or "I haven't seen sweet potatoes the last two times-- I think we're nearing the end of your stomach contents."
As near as we can tell, it was a virus brought home a week ago by Lyle, spread to both his parents simultaneously (imagine the irony of changing someone else's diaper when you could really use one of your own), and then passed on to the mother-in-law and possibly the great grandmother. Somewhere in all of this it found its way to my husband but not to me. Yet.
Remember that scene in "Stand By Me" where the pie-eating contest goes horribly wrong and the protagonist of the story, a kid named Lard Ass, sets off a chain reaction vomit melee? I've been riding out my probably temporary pocket of digestive health and fanatasizing, with no small measure of guilt, that this scene is taking place in a barracks packed full of young soldiers right now, and that any plans for deployment have been scrapped because of it. Permanently.
(By the way, try image googling "explosive vomit" and explain what that random woman is doing there.)
Earlier that day: the husband and I are standing in a long line at one of San Antonio's Army bases waiting to be issued two soldiers to take home and subject to a family Thanksgiving. Always fond of pointless delay and formality, the Army makes 1,000 soldiers stand at attention for half an hour while the civilians are subjected to bizarre music blared over loudspeakers. "Proud to Be an American," which has to qualify as torture under the Geneva Convention, is followed by a strange rendition of "Under the Boardwalk," complete with totally-out-of-place Tejano yipping and "ay-ayyyyyy"-ing, and then finally, two smiling clean-cut soldiers in blindingly shiny shoes are issued to us. Thoroughly briefed on good manners and polite conversation, our guys were fun and easy to talk to-- which made it all the more difficult to break it to them that though it was now 9 in the morning, dinner would be at 6. A whole day to kill.
Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard. We played pool at my mother-in-law's house and ate her cookies, and then went over to the brother-in-law's for some X-Box and some taunting of the two-year-old nephew. (My nephew now has a fully-developed alter ego whom we have named "Lyle." Lyle announces his presence by issuing some kind of ear-splitting Comanche howl and then jumps straight up into the air, lands full force on his ass, and then lays back and thrashes and screeches. All because you stopped him from dialing Sweden on your cell phone.) Before we knew it, both soldiers were coated in a thick layer of dog and cat hair (just the ambient air of pet-dwelling homes is enough to do it when you're wearing nicely pressed dark green wool pants), the X-Box was exhausted, and it was time to head back to the mother-in-law's house for dinner.
My mother-in-law goes all out for major holiday cooking. Almost every other day of the year she and my father-in-law subsist entirely on cereal, but for big family gatherings, hers is the test kitchen from the Food Network, and she presides over it with the kind of nervous energy that makes everyone else subconciously hunch and tiptoe when they enter the kitchen. Part of this is the presence of her own mother, an ancient Oklahoma panhandle plainswoman, who sits in one corner by the breakfast table and watches the commotion, occasionally throwing out a remark that could be 50/50 "just making conversation" or "subtle, soul-crushing criticism." My mother-in-law rolls out homemade pie crusts with grim, tight-lipped competence, and I distract her mother with tales of my outlaw ancestors and my own shitty tomato-slicing skills.
The dinner was beautiful, the conversation amazingly light after all the stress of preparation, and the soldiers actually seemed sad to go when we took them back to the base. I found myself praying for each of them to break their ankles or something on the way back to the barracks just to be good and sure they wouldn't be headed to Iraq any time soon. They were both so young.
My husband and I returned to the brother-in-law's house to play with the dual personality nephew (as heinous as Lyle can be, the real nephew is angelic) and bed down for the night. And then 2 a.m. rolled around.
Your first marital bout of explosive diarrhea and unstoppable vomiting is really an underrated milestone. I believe scrapbooks should make room for this moment. Here is where you find out if you're both in it for the long haul. Are you willing to hold a trashcan in front of someone whose colon is rebelling so that they can simultaneously vomit themselves inside out? What about when that vomit is a stage by stage recount of your delicious Thanksgiving feast? And are you willing to find and point out weak bright spots like, "Hey, it's been 12 hours-- we're almost halfway!" or "I haven't seen sweet potatoes the last two times-- I think we're nearing the end of your stomach contents."
As near as we can tell, it was a virus brought home a week ago by Lyle, spread to both his parents simultaneously (imagine the irony of changing someone else's diaper when you could really use one of your own), and then passed on to the mother-in-law and possibly the great grandmother. Somewhere in all of this it found its way to my husband but not to me. Yet.
Remember that scene in "Stand By Me" where the pie-eating contest goes horribly wrong and the protagonist of the story, a kid named Lard Ass, sets off a chain reaction vomit melee? I've been riding out my probably temporary pocket of digestive health and fanatasizing, with no small measure of guilt, that this scene is taking place in a barracks packed full of young soldiers right now, and that any plans for deployment have been scrapped because of it. Permanently.
(By the way, try image googling "explosive vomit" and explain what that random woman is doing there.)
Friday, November 18, 2005
Hair of a Hulk, then of a Bush
(Image courtesy of Wallsoffame.com)
This is a remarkably close approximation of the haircut I got in April. I paid close to $100 for it, and then went to a wedding the next day where I was the maid of honor, or as I called it, the freakish Hulk-head of honor. I was sans corrective eyewear on the day of The Haircut, and feeling pretty dumpy besides, so I directed the stylist to "make it fun-- update it." Apparently "fun" to this woman is waking up every morning with a bushy box-shaped head and hearing the sad, lonely piano theme song of "The Incredible Hulk" as you brush your teeth. As punishment, every strand of my hair that has grown in since April has been lightning white, as if terrified that one day it will meet a similar fate.
Luckily, the wretchedness of the original haircut has been ameliorated over time with several careful, way over-instructed haircuts from various women across the Gulf Coast. One curious lingering aftereffect of the layers growing out is that every morning, straight out of bed, my hair looks as though it's been styled for the next Republican Convention. Conservatives coif me at night. So my morning routine has become unnecessarily complicated as I try to realign my hair with my political affiliations.
On unsuccessful days, it looks like this:
(Image courtesy of cesnur.org)
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
No Excuses
Typical conversation at our house:
"Hey, how was work today?"
"Eh, you know-- OK. I got to use my Boba Fett oxygen mask and dive between some cloud banks, and then I dipped my wing tips into the tops of the clouds. Then I did a few barrel rolls. What about you?"
"Well, I paced around a tiny room of bored twenty-somethings bitching about how in America, we punctuate inside the quotation marks."
Boo-yah. I think we all know who the badass is here.
Today my students had a paper due. Actually, calling it a paper is like calling golf a sport-- it was a mere paragraph with a single source citation. Still, I got all kinds of excuses. Per course policy, I had to turn down every one of them, but that didn't stop them coming. And the tragedy! The drama! The variety! Nothing would surprise me at this point.
"My grandma got shivved at the Jiffy Mart last night and I had to fly to Baltimore to pick up some replacement organs for her, but then someone broke into my truck and stole my god-baby, so I had to go sit up all night with her parents, you know, as moral support. Plus, I have diarrhea."
By far, the best response to my "I don't accept incomplete work" speech came from one of my oldest students, a part-time rapper. "Oh, word?" he said. "Shit." Then he smiled, shrugged, and let it go. I've got to admire that. That's called taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, which was one of my dad's all time favorite Droning Lecture topics.
Update on my dirtbag neighbor, the hit and run bandito (incidentally, also a juicy example of not manning up and facing consequences): the bashed up pick-up disappeared within an hour of the cop finding it. I can only guess the thing's been impounded. Whatever else happens, I hope there's at least one prolonged, awkward encounter where he has to face the girl whose car he totalled, and who he left behind without even checking to see if she was OK.
"Hey, how was work today?"
"Eh, you know-- OK. I got to use my Boba Fett oxygen mask and dive between some cloud banks, and then I dipped my wing tips into the tops of the clouds. Then I did a few barrel rolls. What about you?"
"Well, I paced around a tiny room of bored twenty-somethings bitching about how in America, we punctuate inside the quotation marks."
Boo-yah. I think we all know who the badass is here.
Today my students had a paper due. Actually, calling it a paper is like calling golf a sport-- it was a mere paragraph with a single source citation. Still, I got all kinds of excuses. Per course policy, I had to turn down every one of them, but that didn't stop them coming. And the tragedy! The drama! The variety! Nothing would surprise me at this point.
"My grandma got shivved at the Jiffy Mart last night and I had to fly to Baltimore to pick up some replacement organs for her, but then someone broke into my truck and stole my god-baby, so I had to go sit up all night with her parents, you know, as moral support. Plus, I have diarrhea."
By far, the best response to my "I don't accept incomplete work" speech came from one of my oldest students, a part-time rapper. "Oh, word?" he said. "Shit." Then he smiled, shrugged, and let it go. I've got to admire that. That's called taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, which was one of my dad's all time favorite Droning Lecture topics.
Update on my dirtbag neighbor, the hit and run bandito (incidentally, also a juicy example of not manning up and facing consequences): the bashed up pick-up disappeared within an hour of the cop finding it. I can only guess the thing's been impounded. Whatever else happens, I hope there's at least one prolonged, awkward encounter where he has to face the girl whose car he totalled, and who he left behind without even checking to see if she was OK.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
My Neighbor the Dirtbag
Near the end of my daily commute today, I came across a terrible hit and run accident in front of what my husband and I call "Pee Pants Day Care."*
As I turned onto the street I could see that it was showered with the light green glittery stuff that means "no more back window," and off in someone's front yard was the rear bumper of an otherwise pulverized silver TransAm. A scared looking woman in pink heels was pulling out a cell phone and running over to check on the driver, who was signaling with her hands that she was OK. I pulled up and asked if I could help and Pink Heels told me the guy who did it had just driven off in a gold Chevy pick-up.
Check.
If there is anyone I'm willing to ride on fucking gangster-style it's a hit and run driver. A friend of mine was almost killed in June when a couple of boys in a stolen car somehow flicked her truck over the rails of an overpass in Houston, rolling it and wrapping it around a light pole like a wad of foil and breaking her neck in five places. The week before her wedding. And then they ran, convinced they'd killed her. So I'm riding with the retroactive wrath of a broken-necked bride (who is recovering beautifully, by the way) and giving the stink eye to all the gold pick-ups I come across but not finding one bashed up in the front.
I went back to the accident, which was by now crawling with cops and firemen, and apologized for being a useless revenge posse. The driver looked mostly unhurt, but was badly shaken, and I wished more than anything that I could have told her that I found the guy. But instead I headed home. There, in the alleyway leading to my carport, is a bashed up gold Chevy pick-up, parked at my neighbor's house with the driver's door hanging open and radiator fluid spouting out the front. The front tires are wedged pigeon-toed. The only thing missing is a terrified trail of urine leading into the house and upstairs to the underside of the bed.
I pulled out my phone to make possibly one of the most satisfying calls ever, but right as I do, a police cruiser rolls into the alleyway and up to the house, and for the first time ever, I am so happy to see a stocky, buzz-cut cop saunter out of his car holding a big fat notebook.
Neighbor, thou art a dirtbag.
*(Pee Pants Day Care got its name when I was in town on initial apartment-hunting recon, and I happened to pull over to read a map in front of this day care place. A little boy was trudging out with a towel around his waist, hanging his head in shame, and his day care teacher was leaning over trying to say something encouraging, but you just knew this was one of those formative moments that would burn itself into his subconscious. So I helped by christening his school Pee Pants Day Care.)
As I turned onto the street I could see that it was showered with the light green glittery stuff that means "no more back window," and off in someone's front yard was the rear bumper of an otherwise pulverized silver TransAm. A scared looking woman in pink heels was pulling out a cell phone and running over to check on the driver, who was signaling with her hands that she was OK. I pulled up and asked if I could help and Pink Heels told me the guy who did it had just driven off in a gold Chevy pick-up.
Check.
If there is anyone I'm willing to ride on fucking gangster-style it's a hit and run driver. A friend of mine was almost killed in June when a couple of boys in a stolen car somehow flicked her truck over the rails of an overpass in Houston, rolling it and wrapping it around a light pole like a wad of foil and breaking her neck in five places. The week before her wedding. And then they ran, convinced they'd killed her. So I'm riding with the retroactive wrath of a broken-necked bride (who is recovering beautifully, by the way) and giving the stink eye to all the gold pick-ups I come across but not finding one bashed up in the front.
I went back to the accident, which was by now crawling with cops and firemen, and apologized for being a useless revenge posse. The driver looked mostly unhurt, but was badly shaken, and I wished more than anything that I could have told her that I found the guy. But instead I headed home. There, in the alleyway leading to my carport, is a bashed up gold Chevy pick-up, parked at my neighbor's house with the driver's door hanging open and radiator fluid spouting out the front. The front tires are wedged pigeon-toed. The only thing missing is a terrified trail of urine leading into the house and upstairs to the underside of the bed.
I pulled out my phone to make possibly one of the most satisfying calls ever, but right as I do, a police cruiser rolls into the alleyway and up to the house, and for the first time ever, I am so happy to see a stocky, buzz-cut cop saunter out of his car holding a big fat notebook.
Neighbor, thou art a dirtbag.
*(Pee Pants Day Care got its name when I was in town on initial apartment-hunting recon, and I happened to pull over to read a map in front of this day care place. A little boy was trudging out with a towel around his waist, hanging his head in shame, and his day care teacher was leaning over trying to say something encouraging, but you just knew this was one of those formative moments that would burn itself into his subconscious. So I helped by christening his school Pee Pants Day Care.)
Monday, November 14, 2005
Drug Dealer Economics
In the next week or so, I may be getting a desk at work. As in, my very own, with my very own computer on it and not one that I share with a girl who customizes the desktop with pictures of an underwhelming climbing trip (fixed rope hooks? please) and who has a variety of viruses growing in her mostly-empty, lipstick-smudged bottled water collection. The one remaining corner in the office is about the size of a toilet stall and has a load-bearing support beam running right down the middle of it, so it'll be interesting to see how they plan to wedge me in there with a giant farting dinosaur of a computer. I'm rooting for some kind of hammock system.
This is part of a recurring trend in my employment history. The more valuable I become to an organization, the more they try to physically compact me into a smaller, more powerful version of the original. My paycheck grows at the expense of leg-, arm- and headroom. I started my last job pulling down a modest salary in a vast, poorly-lit back room full of servers and spiders and ended up making gobs of money tucked under my boss's left ass cheek. I had to make three-point turns just to back out of my cubicle and had devised an ingenious way to suspend my coffee cup from the hanging file folder next to my head.
Just today I found the perfect analogy for this equation in the economics of drug dealers: I am a sack of weed bought cheap and then concentrated and compressed both metaphorically and physically into a big sticky ball of hash that gets my employers very, very high. So high that it seems reasonable to ask someone to work in the half lotus position.
But hey, if it means I get to customize my own desktop with images of the chupacabra, I'm totally down with it.
Last week was my birthday, and for once it didn't suck. In fact it was awesome. My folks came down and visited briefly and I helped them get their truck dug in to the powdery, surprise-ridden Padre Island sand. Luckily we were rescued in short order by chain-toting redneck angels.
Then we went to San Antonio for the weekend to see Dave Chapelle's stand-up. His routine was predictably hilarious, but he also managed to gracefully address his much publicized personal problems right from the start, which made the rest of the show feel surprisingly intimate, given that it was a theater packed to the rafters with howling San Antoni-hoes. Seriously, the sheer volume of sequins in that place was staggering-- if you plucked all the sequins from all the overstuffed tank tops and all the limp, muppet sac-like armpit purses, and then burned them, the resulting lump of smoking plastic would be the size of a Hummer. Too many of those there too. And then for every hoe there was a hulking, hair gelled dude in a shiny button down shirt grunting into one of those awful walkie-talkie phones. In between obnoxious shouts of "WOOOO!" and "I love you!" from the audience, Dave managed to make a few deft, cutting remarks about the war, the hurricane, the vacuum in black leadership, and the politics of marital masturbation. "Jerk-Off Ninja" has got to be one of the greatest terms ever coined.
Other than that, I got to spend time with my husband's incredibly normal family, including my sister-in-law, who kicks ass, and my leetle nephew, who, while being the cutest kid on the planet, still managed to reinforce my ovaries' self-tied knots of protest when I got a look at one of his unspeakble green-splatter diapers. Despite the occasional hiccups from my biological clock, I am so not ready to clean someone else's taint on a daily basis.
And thus began my 27th year.
This is part of a recurring trend in my employment history. The more valuable I become to an organization, the more they try to physically compact me into a smaller, more powerful version of the original. My paycheck grows at the expense of leg-, arm- and headroom. I started my last job pulling down a modest salary in a vast, poorly-lit back room full of servers and spiders and ended up making gobs of money tucked under my boss's left ass cheek. I had to make three-point turns just to back out of my cubicle and had devised an ingenious way to suspend my coffee cup from the hanging file folder next to my head.
Just today I found the perfect analogy for this equation in the economics of drug dealers: I am a sack of weed bought cheap and then concentrated and compressed both metaphorically and physically into a big sticky ball of hash that gets my employers very, very high. So high that it seems reasonable to ask someone to work in the half lotus position.
But hey, if it means I get to customize my own desktop with images of the chupacabra, I'm totally down with it.
Last week was my birthday, and for once it didn't suck. In fact it was awesome. My folks came down and visited briefly and I helped them get their truck dug in to the powdery, surprise-ridden Padre Island sand. Luckily we were rescued in short order by chain-toting redneck angels.
Then we went to San Antonio for the weekend to see Dave Chapelle's stand-up. His routine was predictably hilarious, but he also managed to gracefully address his much publicized personal problems right from the start, which made the rest of the show feel surprisingly intimate, given that it was a theater packed to the rafters with howling San Antoni-hoes. Seriously, the sheer volume of sequins in that place was staggering-- if you plucked all the sequins from all the overstuffed tank tops and all the limp, muppet sac-like armpit purses, and then burned them, the resulting lump of smoking plastic would be the size of a Hummer. Too many of those there too. And then for every hoe there was a hulking, hair gelled dude in a shiny button down shirt grunting into one of those awful walkie-talkie phones. In between obnoxious shouts of "WOOOO!" and "I love you!" from the audience, Dave managed to make a few deft, cutting remarks about the war, the hurricane, the vacuum in black leadership, and the politics of marital masturbation. "Jerk-Off Ninja" has got to be one of the greatest terms ever coined.
Other than that, I got to spend time with my husband's incredibly normal family, including my sister-in-law, who kicks ass, and my leetle nephew, who, while being the cutest kid on the planet, still managed to reinforce my ovaries' self-tied knots of protest when I got a look at one of his unspeakble green-splatter diapers. Despite the occasional hiccups from my biological clock, I am so not ready to clean someone else's taint on a daily basis.
And thus began my 27th year.
Friday, November 04, 2005
In the refrigerator
This should never happen: my dog just threw up in the refrigerator.
A little background on that statement-- if Abby were human, she would be that girl who always makes straight A's but still manages to hyperventilate before the SAT. She makes nonsensical phrases like 110% possible. We had just been out playing, which is basically me tiredly flipping through junk mail while repeatedly trying to hurl the ball as far away from my person as possible and Abby continually thwarting me by launching herself into the air and intercepting every throw, only to toss the ball back into my lap or face. She has one blue eye and one brown one, so she looks even crazier than your average dog when she tries to drill through my head with her concentrated throw-the-fucking-ball stare.
So I obliged her. Nearly 50 times. In fact, I only stopped reading the paper and mindlessly throwing the ball because it soon became impossible to scrape the spit from my hands before turning the page. So we headed back inside so I could fix a sandwich, leaving the gob/ball outside, and I did something pretty normal-- I left the refrigerator door open as I went back and forth taking things out. Abby decided to investigate, but right as she looked inside, all the playing caught up with her and she barfed. In the refrigerator. Nothing will change your mind about a sandwich quite like cleaning congealed dog puke out of the bottom of your fridge.
Other randomness: I got my husband his birthday present, which was a ginormous Man Grill. I've never been able to do that for anybody before, buy them this giant thing they've always wanted, and it felt really cool. Seriously, he could cook a human in this thing-- an adult in maybe two rounds or an 8-year-old whole-- and it's got its own smokestack-looking thing and shelves and wheels... And I had my own not-tiny paycheck to do it with. Awesome. He got so excited! I've only seen him jump up and down about something a few times, but he was definitely jumping for this. Nice feeling.
Also random: there was this great old guy selling framed butterflies by the side of the road today. He does all his own framing and preserving, and he had cool bugs too-- a giant tarantula, some leaf bugs, all kinds of irridescent beetles. It makes me wish I wasn't completely broke now. He even had my favorite species-- it's not Parantica melanta, but it looks similar-- very classy and pared down colorwise, just an off white like rice paper on Japanese doors and then a brown-black velvety lace overlay. I've seen one in the Butterfly Museum in Houston, and the way the light hit it from behind, it was just amazing. He also had a species from the Phillipines called the Redneck, whose wings were mostly black with green slash marks, but then it had this fuzzy scarlet ring around its neck, like it was wearing a scarf. Gorgeous. I may go back and look at them again even though I can't afford one...
A little background on that statement-- if Abby were human, she would be that girl who always makes straight A's but still manages to hyperventilate before the SAT. She makes nonsensical phrases like 110% possible. We had just been out playing, which is basically me tiredly flipping through junk mail while repeatedly trying to hurl the ball as far away from my person as possible and Abby continually thwarting me by launching herself into the air and intercepting every throw, only to toss the ball back into my lap or face. She has one blue eye and one brown one, so she looks even crazier than your average dog when she tries to drill through my head with her concentrated throw-the-fucking-ball stare.
So I obliged her. Nearly 50 times. In fact, I only stopped reading the paper and mindlessly throwing the ball because it soon became impossible to scrape the spit from my hands before turning the page. So we headed back inside so I could fix a sandwich, leaving the gob/ball outside, and I did something pretty normal-- I left the refrigerator door open as I went back and forth taking things out. Abby decided to investigate, but right as she looked inside, all the playing caught up with her and she barfed. In the refrigerator. Nothing will change your mind about a sandwich quite like cleaning congealed dog puke out of the bottom of your fridge.
Other randomness: I got my husband his birthday present, which was a ginormous Man Grill. I've never been able to do that for anybody before, buy them this giant thing they've always wanted, and it felt really cool. Seriously, he could cook a human in this thing-- an adult in maybe two rounds or an 8-year-old whole-- and it's got its own smokestack-looking thing and shelves and wheels... And I had my own not-tiny paycheck to do it with. Awesome. He got so excited! I've only seen him jump up and down about something a few times, but he was definitely jumping for this. Nice feeling.
Also random: there was this great old guy selling framed butterflies by the side of the road today. He does all his own framing and preserving, and he had cool bugs too-- a giant tarantula, some leaf bugs, all kinds of irridescent beetles. It makes me wish I wasn't completely broke now. He even had my favorite species-- it's not Parantica melanta, but it looks similar-- very classy and pared down colorwise, just an off white like rice paper on Japanese doors and then a brown-black velvety lace overlay. I've seen one in the Butterfly Museum in Houston, and the way the light hit it from behind, it was just amazing. He also had a species from the Phillipines called the Redneck, whose wings were mostly black with green slash marks, but then it had this fuzzy scarlet ring around its neck, like it was wearing a scarf. Gorgeous. I may go back and look at them again even though I can't afford one...
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Wifin' it up
Today I'm experimenting with the concept of enjoying wifely chores. I'm a naturally clean person, but it tends to happen in sudden violent bursts of scouring and scrubbing that tend to happen around 10 p.m. This tends to look crazy. So today I decided I would clean slowly and methodically, in daylight, after I got home from work. Actually making space to clean made the whole process suspiciously relaxing, and I began to imagine myself in black and white with industrious-sounding classical music playing softly overhead and a little gleam shooting off of my calm, not-crazy smile.
I even cooked dinner last night without it turning into a bad episode of "I Love Lucy." I made sauteed basil chicken cutlets, garlic couscous, and broccoli. Cooking without scowling is a new thing for me. I went through long periods in college and my early twenties where my oven was used for extra storage space and I lived on a diet of power bars, apples, edamame, and microwave popcorn. Cooking anything just made me angry-- it was messy and time-consuming and if it was just me eating, the effort hardly seemed worth it. Even sitting down and clearing a space for food seemed ridiculous, so I ate while walking to the mailbox or sitting at my desk at work. For years, breakfast was a glass of milk and a glass of cereal which I would alternately take shots from while driving. The only times I used silverware were at restaurants.
Two factors were at work here-- loneliness and a pathological fear of getting fat. I hate eating alone. When I was growing up, my mom made what I recognize now as a heroic effort to fix family meals. Mostly, these were pleasant affairs with civilized conversation, but even during the occasional spectacular disaster-- burned mangled food, a huge family fight breaking out-- I had company. So in this dynamic food equals not being alone.
My fear of getting fat is more complicated. I don't see it as the logical outcome of consuming too many calories, a biological process that happens slowly over time. I see it as something Kafka-esque, something that happens suddenly without you even knowing it-- you wake up one morning and BOOM! you're huge, like you pulled some sort of auto-inflate ripcord and now your body could serve as a survival floatation device. (Obviously this is not logical. Few fears are. In fact, even now as I'm trying to describe what it feels like to be afraid, I can hear the exasperated voice of an ex-boyfriend who worshipped at the Temple of Logic--"If you know it's not logical, why are you even wasting your time with it?" Replace "it's" and "it" with "I" and "me," and you get the central dynamic of our doomed relationship.) Here food equals over-indulgence and greediness leading to the condition of being fat which in turn leads to being no longer worthy of love, hence aloneness.
So it's push/pull. In fact, if you just substitute the whole concept of food with the idea of love, then you get a pretty good picture of a lot of my relationship fears. Loving and being loved are desirable because they mean not being alone, but one must always be on guard not to get too close or dependent because if one were to become suddenly unlovable, the loss of love would be devastating.
I think Freud should be an active verb, as in "I just spent way too many paragraphs Freuding myself."
I even cooked dinner last night without it turning into a bad episode of "I Love Lucy." I made sauteed basil chicken cutlets, garlic couscous, and broccoli. Cooking without scowling is a new thing for me. I went through long periods in college and my early twenties where my oven was used for extra storage space and I lived on a diet of power bars, apples, edamame, and microwave popcorn. Cooking anything just made me angry-- it was messy and time-consuming and if it was just me eating, the effort hardly seemed worth it. Even sitting down and clearing a space for food seemed ridiculous, so I ate while walking to the mailbox or sitting at my desk at work. For years, breakfast was a glass of milk and a glass of cereal which I would alternately take shots from while driving. The only times I used silverware were at restaurants.
Two factors were at work here-- loneliness and a pathological fear of getting fat. I hate eating alone. When I was growing up, my mom made what I recognize now as a heroic effort to fix family meals. Mostly, these were pleasant affairs with civilized conversation, but even during the occasional spectacular disaster-- burned mangled food, a huge family fight breaking out-- I had company. So in this dynamic food equals not being alone.
My fear of getting fat is more complicated. I don't see it as the logical outcome of consuming too many calories, a biological process that happens slowly over time. I see it as something Kafka-esque, something that happens suddenly without you even knowing it-- you wake up one morning and BOOM! you're huge, like you pulled some sort of auto-inflate ripcord and now your body could serve as a survival floatation device. (Obviously this is not logical. Few fears are. In fact, even now as I'm trying to describe what it feels like to be afraid, I can hear the exasperated voice of an ex-boyfriend who worshipped at the Temple of Logic--"If you know it's not logical, why are you even wasting your time with it?" Replace "it's" and "it" with "I" and "me," and you get the central dynamic of our doomed relationship.) Here food equals over-indulgence and greediness leading to the condition of being fat which in turn leads to being no longer worthy of love, hence aloneness.
So it's push/pull. In fact, if you just substitute the whole concept of food with the idea of love, then you get a pretty good picture of a lot of my relationship fears. Loving and being loved are desirable because they mean not being alone, but one must always be on guard not to get too close or dependent because if one were to become suddenly unlovable, the loss of love would be devastating.
I think Freud should be an active verb, as in "I just spent way too many paragraphs Freuding myself."
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
An Open Letter to the Children of Our Town
You suck.
Where were all of you last night between 5:30 and 10:00? Taking shelter from sheets of stinging rain and bolts of lightning and howling wind? Fine, whatever. I just want to point out that when I was a kid, NO ONE cancelled trick-or-treating. Not God, not Satan, not even the whacko fundamentalist family down the street who passed out Bible verses and toothbrushes.
So now I have two heaping bowls of candy-- not the cheap nasty hard candies but the mini chocolate bars and Reese's peanut butter cups and Starburst-- that I now have to burn because no little witches or superheroes showed up to eat it any of it.
Where were all of you last night between 5:30 and 10:00? Taking shelter from sheets of stinging rain and bolts of lightning and howling wind? Fine, whatever. I just want to point out that when I was a kid, NO ONE cancelled trick-or-treating. Not God, not Satan, not even the whacko fundamentalist family down the street who passed out Bible verses and toothbrushes.
So now I have two heaping bowls of candy-- not the cheap nasty hard candies but the mini chocolate bars and Reese's peanut butter cups and Starburst-- that I now have to burn because no little witches or superheroes showed up to eat it any of it.
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