Oh dear Lord where to begin?
It’s so very hard to keep a diary and entertain tens of readers when your life is as boring as sin.
I haven’t made the cookies yet. I was planning on it tonight, but instead Esteban hauled me to the Maul (TM K.Lo) so that he could have a professional portrait taken for his job. Being a typical Esteban thing, he has procrastinated so entirely badly that the magazine he writes for needs the pictures TOMORROW.
Thus, the only place that could do it fast enough was a place in the Maul that specializes in taking pictures of the children born out of wedlock to teenage mothers. All of the employees were wearing beanies. My heart bled for them.
I felt like scum because Esteban was dressed impeccably, in his grey suit, perfectly pressed white shirt and designer tie, while I was standing there looking like some kind of scary girl in my rock star jacket (which doubles as my raincoat, since it’s pleather and waterproof), mussed hair, big clumpy Doc Martens, and v-neck sweater which has gotten baggy and reveals a bit more cleavage than I usually feel comfy with. Oh, and my grey Ass Splinter pearls and even they couldn’t counteract the Cheap Skank Ho quality of the rock star jacket.
After about five minutes of children wailing and mothers yelling ‘If you don’t stop hitting the nice photographer, I’m going to sell you to the Irish gypsies!’, I left him there. It was probably a good thing, since I had this extreme urge to say ‘We’re here to get little Estebanie’s 32nd birthday pictures done!’ in my most Soccer Mom tone of voice.
I browsed at a jeweler and found a lovely diamond and platinum solitaire on sale for a mere thousand dollars. They seemed quite eager to sell it to me, so maybe I wasn’t as White Trash as I thought. They finally tried to get me to haggle and I told them that I’d think about it for $600, which was the honest truth. They seemed so disappointed. Maybe I smell like a big-ticket impulse shopper to the sales weasels. Well, actually, the Ass Splinter pearls WERE a big-ticket impulse buy, so perhaps they were right.
I then went to the cookie store and purchased four cookies, then returned and gave them to Esteban. Well’ most of them. I ate one. I’m not a saint, people! Besides, if you can’t have cookies on Operation Hottie, then it’s just Operation Suck.
I unclogged the drain in our bathroom sink yesterday. Esteban fills it with former pieces of Esteban and then gets a rather bewildered look on his face when it clogs. He then blames me, because I stand over the sink for hours at end, washing my face, brushing my teeth, plucking the non-existent woman facial hairs (I say non-existent because there is NO WAY that I have a mustache, oh no sirree’ that’s from that Nesquick that I drank a minute ago. And those Groucho Marx things happening above my baby blues? Just a trick of the lighting. A mere shadow, really.) therefore I must be the guilty sink clogger. Honestly, the only thing I put down that sink is my minty fresh toothpaste spit. If anything, I would think it would help keep the drain clean, as it is Tarter Control.
Helpful hint of the day: if the organic enzyme drain unclogger thingy that costs $15 per bottle doesn’t take care of the drain, try plunging it while you’re soaking wet wearing a towel because you want to brush your teeth. It works. I know. I was rather surprised too.
Then I felt all sorts of Amy Wynn after my successful drain declogging, I decided to attack the toilet seat. You see, Esteban cracked our toilet seat awhile back and I sent him, as punishment for the repeated pinches in my hiney, to fetch a new one. Because he is Esteban and has a love for all things tacky, he purchased a plastic padded seat. I suppose if LayZBoy made one that reclined, he would have carted that home instead. This would have been fine except that he turned the damn thing blue somehow. I don’t know how. I suspect it was from wearing new jeans without washing them first. I don’t know. I do know that it looked like Papa Smurf had spent a rather constipated afternoon in our lavatory. Took almost a whole container of bleach wipes to get rid of that too.
So about three months ago, I purchased a new toilet seat. Solid oak with brass hingie things. It’s a lovely toilet seat. Very classy, as toilet seats go. I expect that it will make a lovely Clunk sound as we lower it to prevent Tilly from drinking poop water. And being Double-Standard Girl, considering the fact that I have a Gloria Steinem book sitting in the bathroom, I declared that Esteban should replace the toilet seat. Because now he’s good at it. And also the fact that I’m fairly certain he is responsible for the indescribable boy pee schmeng that is constantly appearing in the general vicinity of the toilet.
Toilet. That’s a funny word, isn’t it? Toilet. Teehee. It’s one of those words that the more you read it, the more foreign it begins to look. Toilet.
But because Esteban is King Procrastinator, even worse than I, the lovely oak and brass toilet seat sat in our unfinished kitchen, which is apparently where all of our good intentions and abandoned home improvements go to die. Thus, after clearing the sink and brushing my teeth, I took one look at the plastic trailer toilet seat and said ‘ENOUGH! I HAVE THE POWER! I can FIX this toilet! I am woman! I can use tools! If I can be expected to push a baby through my cervix, I can fix a goddamn toilet seat.’
To paraphrase Deb: the plastic toilet seat is not my bitch.
Swathed in only a towel, I put on my new plastic gloves, a lovely retro yellow with reinforced red hands of death, and began to try to unscrew the plastic cheapass screws. They didn’t unscrew. They didn’t screw. I opened the oak seat and looked at its accoutrements. There were screws that apparently came out the top. I pried the plastic pieces off the top. They wouldn’t come off. I realized that I could use a screwdriver and pry the top off. After much searching, I found a Phillips head in the pen cup on Esteban’s desk (crazy Esteban logic’ don’t ask). Great! I used that to pry off the little things hiding the screw tops. Off they came’. To reveal standard slotted plastic screws. Fine. I searched for a standard screwdriver. I found a little itty bitty one because my husband fixes computers for a living. No big ass screwdriver. By that time I was sweating, even though I had just taken a damn shower. I no longer cared about the blue plastic toilet seat. I didn’t even care if it had a big picture of damn Richard Petty on it, with Tide symbols on it. I didn’t care if I had to use a five-gallon bucket in the garage at that point. The entire thing just seemed way too hard and I finally admitted it: The damn $12 toilet seat kicked my ass.
Mofo toilet seats. Sometimes you just got to admire the French, the way they pee in those little holes in the ground. I’m just saying.
In other news, that stupid Phil Collin’s song from the Tarzan movie seems to be haunting me. I keep turning it disgustedly whenever it appears on my radio, but it continues to multiply on every channel. I’ve ended up listening to the weather reports of every large town in Wisconsin on NPR, just to escape it. At lunch today, it began playing again and I thought “Ok, maybe it’s karma that I should just listen to it and then it will stop repeating like some horrible telltale you’ll-be-in-my-heart.” But I couldn’t. I could not do it. I can’t think about Phil Collin’s arms keeping me safe and warm. I can’t think about how if I just look over my shoulder, he’ll be there in puppet form, like in the Genesis video for “Land of Confusion” and it just makes me want to scream “GAH!!!!!!!!!! GAH GAH GAH!”.
So anyway, there it is. Phil Collins is just wrong. But I still like “Throwing It All Away” from the Invisible Touch album. I’m just saying.
Well, this entry has gone nowhere fast, so I’m outtie.
