Time is running out to enter the Banner Ad contest! And then you’ll be kicking yourself that you didn’t make me a banner ad. You know you will. Go.
Do it now. I’ll wait.
See. I waited. Now doesn’t that feel better, knowing that you finished up that nagging little project. Good job. Now mail it to me. See how easy that was?
Oh goodness. And I’ve been complaining that my life was as boring as sin and suddenly I have so much to talk about that it’s not even going to fit in one entry. Perhaps not even two. Well’ ok, probably two.
The little housekeeping stuff first:
Esteban’s home. And grumpy. He’s decided that he hated New York. He’s so completely rural that I sometimes wonder how I ended up married to him. When I met him a few months after my 19th birthday, I was fully intending to move to New York City after I graduated college. Gah. The strange little decisions we make which end up influencing our entire life path. Give your heart to the geek’ stay in Green Bay Wisconsin. Luckily no one ever put it to me that way when I was 19. He’s going to Atlanta for something like 21 hours next week. He leaves on Wednesday, back on Thursday, and I leave for JournalCon on Friday. Busy jetsetting week at Chez Weetabix.
I’m totally overwhelmed by what I have to accomplish before I leave. I must somehow finish my swag project. I must pack. I must load several things on my laptop from my home computer. I must print out a list of the stores in which I want to shop. I must figure out which entry I’m going to read during the readings. I should at some point actually PRACTICE reading that thing, because it must fit in a specific time limit (five minutes, I believe) and also because I’m contemplating reading the Uterus entry, and I want to see if I can pull it off without sounding schizophrenic or feeling weird calling myself a ‘fat pasty white feminazi who hates babies’ (although that’s still possibly my favorite line ever), and while I do tend to write the way I talk, I also write in these incredibly long and complicated sentences (usually with parentheticals that quite possibly go on for entirely too long) and while it is fine for the average reader to comprehend at their own pace, my rushed style of speaking combined with what will likely be nervousness at public speaking and being at JournalCon in itself, this might be a more difficult task that it might seem on the surface and I very well might run out of breath entirely and collapse, undoubtedly garnering myself a mention in nearly everyone’s journal as the poor pathetic fat girl who fainted at the podium. Gah!
Ok, and now for the best damn piece of gossip I’ve heard in a year.
It’s probably wrong that I take so much absolute joy in this. It’s probably completely wrong and it reflects on how I’m an immoral person and have a heart that’s two sizes too small. I would probably take the roast beast and cackle while I was doing it. Oh yes. Considering that I keep bursting into complete and utter gigglefits thinking about this, I am most certainly going to hell.
Anyway’ the dirt:
You’ll all remember my good friend Jasmine? She of lovely smiles and Jennifer Love Hewitt resemblance? Well, the lovely Jasmine has recently been the apparent victim of an identity theft.
It seems that several months ago, someone made an appointment at an upscale and trendy beauty salon under Jasmine’s name for some rather expensive procedures. This woman went in for the appointment and when it came time to pay, she said ‘I left my checkbook in the car.. I’ll be right back.’ And never returned.
Then again in June, the woman made another appointment at another salon under Jasmine’s name. This time, she walked with several hundred dollars of vitamins. Jasmine found out about it from HER salon, when her stylist heard the other stylists talking about what a deadbeat Jasmine was at the local hair stylist saloon or wherever the hair stylists commune with themselves, waxing poetic about spiral perms or some such. To her credit, Jasmine’s stylist stuck up for her and said ‘Oh no, not OUR Jasmine. She always pays. You must be mistaken.’
So Jasmine herself went to this other salon and the people there identified that she was indeed NOT the person who had walked out without paying for several hundred dollars worth of services and vitamins. She also worked with the police and provided alibis for both incidents. The police asked if Jasmine knew of anyone who might have a grudge against her. Jasmine had no clue’ many people MIGHT carry grudges against her but she didn’t really know of anyone off hand.
This is where the plot thickens. Like a fine congealed pork gravy.
A few weeks ago, the Faux Jasmine went back to the SAME SALON, where the SAME PEOPLE were working. They recognized her. Stupidly, because perhaps they were too busy sniffing hair dye or something, they did not call the police. They did not ask her any questions. They instead left the room so that she was alone with these prized vitamins. And she walked out with more vitamins. That time, however, someone had a clue and ran out to catch a description and partial license plate on her vehicle.
Pork gravy. Right here. Get a biscuit to sop it up. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The police then ran the description and the partial plate. They had an easy job of it because the perp (see how I work in very cool criminal lingo there? It kind of enhances the drama, non?) had a very special issue of license plate. The same special issue of license plate that I have on my car. No, don’t worry. That little bit of trivia was just a red herring.
So they found someone with the matching bit of license plate and make/model/color car. They dispatched a cop to interview the subject at her house. The subject, of course, denied it. So the cop called Jasmine back because he was suspicious and wanted to run the name of the suspect by her, to see if it rang any bells.
May I have a drumroll please?
People’ god, I’m giggling again’. It was my Aunt Bruhilda. Yes. That Aunt Brunhilda. The one who starves her kids. The one who used to make me do forty-five minutes of aerobics before she’d let me eat breakfast when I was eight. Now, if you’ve had the unbelievable tenacity to go back and read my archives, you’ll know that there was a family turmoil about two years ago that centered around my Aunt Brunhilda and my sister, Mo. It’s all an elaborate web of juicy family skeletons, right there. Here’s the scoop in a nutshell: Aunt Brunhilda used to babysit for my niece Abigail and Jasmine’s daughter when they were roughly 18 months old. One morning, Jasmine walked in to drop off her daughter at Aunt Brunhilda’s house. She found 18 month old Abby sitting there and no adult anywhere. Jasmine called out. Nothing. Jasmine sat down and waited with the two babies. About five or ten minutes later, Aunt Brunhilda drives up. Jasmine went to work and told Mo about the incident. They both removed their daughters from Aunt Brunhilda’s care that evening. Aunt Brunhilda’s excuse was that she was going to drive Skinny and Malnourished to the end of the block, so she called down to her husband, who was supposedly in the basement, that he should come up and watch Abby. What we think really happened: her husband, who works a swing shift, didn’t hear Jasmine yelling because he was in the basement sleeping, and Brunhilda really drove her children all the way to school, because honestly, who only drives their children to the end of the block on a cold and miserable morning when they could just as easily drive them the rest of the way to school? Not that we’re dealing with a sane person here, but still.
The entire family rifted over this. This summer, Abigail’s fourth birthday, was the first time my Mafia Grandma and Aunt Drusilla have attended since the incident. Aunt Brunhilda still will not attend. What is more, two years ago, she told me that if she ever saw Jasmine, she would have probably had to walk up and slap her for causing so many problems. So I’m certain that in her psychoworld, she felt she was getting back at Jasmine for outing her as something less than the perfect June Cleaver that she pretends to be, because apparently she felt that she could excuse the fact that her teenage children looked prepubescent and stunted, but she couldn’t as easily excuse herself for leaving an 18-month-old crawling baby alone for ten minutes, regardless of where her husband was supposed to have been.
It’s entirely wrong that I am so gleefully watching this go down. Apparently, the police haven’t charged her yet because they’re waiting for Jasmine to make a statement or do some wicked copfu sting operation involving vitamins and pedicures, possibly.
In all honesty, I hope that this forces her into some counseling. She’s obviously unbalanced somehow and it’s been so quietly pervasive in that she’s a perfect suburban housewife who is strikingly attractive and has a perfect thin body and therefore cannot be a nutjob. But we know the truth. Perhaps in my family, you get to pick between a screwed up head and a fat ass.
I swear to God, my gene pool is filled with Draino.
