That's My Bix!

It is cold here. Ever so cold. I know that this idea of cold is one that everyone is familiar with, but this morning, I was talking with one of my dotted line reports (this is apparently what they do in the grey nubby walls of cubicle farms, when you regularly say that you don’t want to be a manager, they make you a pretend manager with no real power) he told me that it was not bad there in India, about 60 degrees Celsius, which doesn’t even compute in my crazy Fahrenheit brain. Do you double it? Triple? Divide by pi? I don’t know, but whatever, even 0 C is many many degrees above what we have right now, right here.

But the snow! Oh the snow! This has inspired Esteban to stop complaining about having bought the Nissan Murano with its fatty boom batty tires and wicked road sensibilities, because damn, those ridiculous yuppy sales points have seriously come in handy so far, especially barreling over the plow berm that’s usually at the bottom of the driveway. I haven’t seen our driveway in months, as it’s always snowing and sometimes, it’s just not enough to bother with, so it ends up freezing in this crusty fondant of ice and death on the pavement. I’m sure there’s pavement down there somewhere. Sometimes our hippy neighbor feels charitable and plows us out, but I always want to just tell her not to bother. It’s just going to snow again in four minutes. Oh god, the snow. The universe is sending every single atom of whiteness in a Fed Ex envelope, straight for Wisconsin this winter. We are 10 inches away from breaking a snow record set in 1894. At least half of those near record breaking inches have fallen on days when I have to drive to Milwaukee for class. Which, you know, is the stuff of bad anecdotes and I’ll shut up and leave you to soak in the schadenfreude. The piles of shoveled stuff at the ends of driveways are six or eight or four million feet high. The roads all look fortified against an advancing army. The sidewalks are foxholes. When I’m driving down, it’s all I can do to pay attention to the tidal waves of white drifts threatening the sides of the highway. Even the non-drifted snow turns fence posts into little garden trellises. In some places, only the flat top of the fence posts are visible, a wooden coaster in the snow. Where there are open fields and not a lot of hills, the snow drifts have drag races with each other, barreling across the land and spilling up over the tops of small trees. It is the bottom of the ocean floor and a moon colony, all at the very same time. And the sun is so bright off of all this pristine snowfall that it just breaks off two icicles and shoves them straight into your eyes, that’s what. Hi, is winter over yet. Ok, it’s not that bad. I’d much rather then fourteen tons of physical winter that I have to brush off my car every morning than the horrible brown withered vegetation or the dismal black snowbanks that make me despair the state of the planet. As I drive by in my non-hybrid. Ahem.

Last weekend, I participated in a reading for the creative writing program at my school. (Shout out to Lesley, Lisa and Rachel!) Esteban, Ward and June and my sister and her new boyfriend Eric (yes, my drinking buddy who smells so good and makes all the girls swoon, that Eric) came down for the reading. I was super nervous, but two double vodka plus red juice in the hotel bar before we left helped a great deal, enough to make me a little silly for the ride over (we all piled into Ward and June’s van and it was totally like being driven to a homecoming dance by your parents or something) and then still allowed for the coast downward through my nerves once we hit the bookstore. Esteban’s aunt Teresita and uncle Dawid came too, which was a surprise. I had mentioned it to them, but I never really expected that they’d show up, so it was very neat to have a serious posse in the audience as well as some of my classmates from previous fiction workshops. Also, how old am I that I just used the word “posse”? Let’s just move on! Professor McDreamy was also in the audience, but thankfully, I didn’t know that he was there until he came up to me after everything was done. I flubbed the paragraph he had asked me to read aloud last semester, so I am certain that his dreaminess would have undermined my ability to be all Ms. Serious Artiste for fifteen consecutive minutes.

After the reading, I was a little torn between two lovers, as the writing crew invited me out to some dive bar with them, but since I had the posse (woof! woof!) I couldn’t really ditch them to go laugh at stupid writer jokes, so we just headed back to the hotel, had really abysmal hotel restaurant food, then sat in the bar and chatted until I gave up and sacked out. In the morning, Amy and Eric headed home because Abby had a basketball game, but we took the parents to the Milwaukee Public Market, where we bought a bunch of snooty cheeses and beers and wines and truffles, and then June bought me a bottle of really lovely olive oil as a “reading present”. OK then! We then hit a mall and sat in the Bare Escentuals store, because now that half of my product requirements are being pretty much covered by testing skincare stuff, I have more play in my beauty budget for ridiculous things like 24 different kinds of brown eyeshadow.

We also ended up spotting a purse that June absolutely positively lusted after but I couldn’t convince her to buy it (and she wouldn’t let me buy it for her), but she decided that when the boys do their annual Men’s Camping Weekend in July, that maybe I would take her shopping again and then she was going to save up her money and buy that purse, a matching wallet and also some perfume for herself. The whole thing was setting itself up for tragedy, because it was clearly a spring line purse and there’s now way it was still going to be around in July! Then we met up with Esteban and Ward (who decided to sit in a bar to watch sports while we shopped for makeup), I whispered to Ward about the purse at the store up the way. He agreed that she needed the purse, so while we had lunch, I grabbed my receipt (I had bought a pair of sunglasses and a new scarf) ducked into a corner of the restaurant and called the store, described the purse and where it was displayed, and asked them to just get a new one ready for Ward and Esteban, who would be there when we finished eating. Then I made a suggestion that they take a walk while we ducked into Cacique to look at lingerie. June was oblivious, and I just love it when a plan comes together. She didn’t even notice the bag in their van until they were almost home and then she assumed that somehow they had gotten my shopping bag mixed in with hers, and panicked until Ward told her to look inside the bag. So adorable!

After they headed home, we decided to mosey over to Mayfair to check out the Apple store. My pc has been eking along, crashing intermittently and being a general flake case, but then two weeks ago, Esteban decided that maybe the problem was that it needed more memory and put an extra gig in it. Clearly, the pc was not ready for any sudden movements because it then had a series of seizures, rebooting and overheating and generally shitting the bed. Esteban took the memory back out, but then was all creeped out by how it was behaving now that he had messed with the guts. Sadly, my PC is such a Frankenstein that I would have to pretty much build one from scratch to replace it. Esteban, knowing me much better than I know myself, suggested that maybe I would be happier with an iMac. After all, they are built for graphics and have that whole hipster snobby sensibility that appeals to me (he did not say this out loud but he did not have to) and the first thing that comes out of my mouth whenever Apple releases a new product is “WANT!” So yeah, now I’m one of those Mac people. My friend Mike sent me an email saying “Yeah, welcome to the cult. Get prepared to start buying organic food and driving a hybrid next!” and I was like “Dude, do you not know me?” Seriously, I live in fear that they will open a Whole Foods in Appleton because then I’m going to have to drive 30 miles to get milk because that’s just how sick and fucking twisted I am! I cannot help myself!

But the iMac is very pretty. And also, now that I figured out how to make the mouse right-click, I no longer want to throw it out the window. My Total Hipster Douche membership card should be arriving any day now.