That's My Bix!

I’m sick.

I think Esteban tried to poison me.

Ok, that doesn’t explain why he had this same thing yesterday. Maybe he was putting the poison in my Carnation Instant Breakfast drink and accidentally licked his fingers. Maybe it was somewhat delicious poison?

Apparently, it’s the “Don’t go far from a bathroom” poison.

I went to work for four hours. Someone hurled in the hallway. Mo came and told me about it and made me laugh because after she passed the chunder, she had to go into the bathroom and gag for a bit. Then she came and told me about it. That’s the kind of relationship we have. So then I told her about my flutter tummy and how I’ve been awake since 3:30 this morning and how you know it’s really bad when you feel the water hit your ass. And then I made her fall down on the floor of my cubicle, drooling. Which made me laugh.

Puke, poop, and drool are very funny, you see.

So I was thinking about writing this weird entry, but I chatted with Eloi when I came home for a bit, and told him what I was thinking about writing, and all he said was “oh my”. And that scared me a little. So I didn’t. Because it was questionable. And I didn’t want people to point at today’s entry and say “January 4… that’s the day that Weetabix jumped the shark.” So I just wasn’t going to update. But Eloi thought that maybe people would think I’m dead.

No. Just feel like that.

Diaryland is a cruel mistress sometimes.

Anyway, I just installed this cool guestmap thingy. Because the message boards were such a hit. Chauffi and I have fabulous conversations upon it.

But right now, I’m avoiding the whole thing. Maybe I’ll write the questionable “oh my” entry tomorrow. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll be dead by then, Esteban on to find his next chubby round sex goddess.

Maybe he’ll use the guestmap? You never know.

Oh, yeah, that reminds me of another thing I talked to Eloi about (gee, this is like the All Eloi All The Time entry):

The Diarist Awards.

Honestly, these awards cheese me off a bit. There’s an admitted prejudice against Diaryland, I guess. Weird. I don’t put much stock into them, actually. In the words of a very excellent convo I had through email with another diarist, “who’s to say that my diary or your diary is better than some kid who hasn’t figured out a way to get read yet.” Which is completely true. Some of the best writing out there does not have a huge following (yet).

Anyway, if you have a favorite entry or diarist (on Diaryland or elsewhere) who you think should be nominated… go nominate them. Oh, but there’s a catch. You must be a diarist or blogger yourself. It’s sort of like the Academy Awards or something. Only without Billy Crystal and repeated camera pans to catch the reaction of Jack Nicholson, who just looks like a dirty old man who may break Lara Flynn Boyle one of these days. Just snap her little dandelion head off one of these days.

Now that I’d watch. Because you know Jack would pop those eyebrows and just sort of look bemused and maybe say something inane like “Now how did THAT happen?” and everyone would laugh hysterically, because, you know, he’s Jack Fricking Nicholson, and he might axe through your bathroom door one night.

Anyway, check out the guestmap thingy.

It will be cool. Way better than the message board. Honest. Really.

And I’ll just lay here and shiver, ok?

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions. I find that New Years is a crutch for people who can’t get motivated. I honestly think that if you find something about yourself that you feel you should change, then begin right now’ this very second. Doesn’t matter if it’s March 22 or the day before your birthday. You just do it. Right that second. And maybe you fail. But you made an effort. You didn’t have this weird hedonistic Fat Tuesday kind of fling with your vice before you stop.

Thus New Years never really holds any fascination for me. The one thing I hate about this time of year is that everyone vows to lose weight and the fast food places all rush to have many many sales and specials on calorie-laden treats. That the McRib comes back every January is no coincidence. I’m entirely certain that Satan is a major stockholder in McDonalds. How else would it explain my unhealthy addiction to McDonald’s Diet Coke? Huh? It’s just an effervescent 32-oz cup of sin and that tingling in my nose is the tingle of brimstone.

Would you like a disembodied tormented soul with your Happy Meal?

But the resolution thing is, I suppose, admirable in a way. I shouldn’t put down those people with New Year’s resolutions. But I think that this ‘saving up your ambition until January 1’ thing is half the reason that 90% of New Year’s resolutions fail. Because if you are that unwilling to change that you must actually set a day to do it, chances are that you aren’t going to be able to change in the first place.

I resolve to lie on warm beaches and be washed in sunlight, drinking $9 pina coladas brought to me by bronzed cabana boys who relish pale plump chicas.

Oy vey.

Besides’. January is miserable enough without adding a bunch of guilt over misguided resolutions that you really secretly know you won’t be able to accomplish.

I resolve to stop sleeping with strangers I meet at truck stops.

I resolve to wear clean underwear.

I resolve to no longer obsess over Brussels sprouts.

I resolve to not slam my sunglasses in the front door. Repeatedly.

Speaking of clean underwear, I got the cutest set from my In Search Of: Expensive Panties expedition. It’s a navy blue demi bra and string bikini panties set with little white snowflakes on it. For those of you who received my Christmas cards, you may recognize a theme there. The panties weird me out. They are so skimpy and weird, with their connotation of coconut oil, two drink minimums and dollar bills deposited by hairy old man hands. The bra is all cleavagy too, and I somehow am pained to think that legions of young girls will think that demi bras are so named for a marginal actress rather than the French word for half. Yet, the print is so wholesome and cute, it’s hard to hate the sluttier aspects of the ‘under outfit’ as a whole. I wore it on Sunday and I had this urge all day to lift up my shirt and say ‘Look at my cute undies!’, like a child with lacey bottoms. I tried to do this to Cheri. She just didn’t seem to think they were all that cute. I don’t know what her problem is. Perhaps it offended her strong moral fiber. Perhaps they were not the undies to be wearing on a Sunday. Perhaps Sundays are for bulletproof Grandma bras with five, nay SIX hooks on the back and elastic that could hold up the entire world at pointy attention.

Or maybe she was just jealous.

It’s probably unhealthy for me to think about it so much.

The Guestbook is obsessed with its socks too.

This weekend, I’ve been suffering from a rampant bout of stupidity.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I’m too dumb to figure it out.

I think I go through these phases’ it’s all a way of evening things out. I can be really freaking brilliant for moments but then must suffer from intense retardation at other times, otherwise I believe a vacuum will be created and I will be sucked out of existence as we know it.

Ouch. That just made my head hurt.

Anyway, Esteban and I were going to go over to Markus’ house to give him Christmas presents. But I wanted to play my little winter addiction, a little 3 meg game called SnowCraft. So I told him to go over without me and I would follow in about an hour. Now why I did that, I’m not certain. When my mouse hand finally started to hurt from slamming little kids wearing green parkas with slush balls, I thought, ‘Ok, let’s go.’ But then I realized that there no longer was an ‘us’ because I had sent Esteban away over an hour ago. So now I had to go and drive over in a cold car myself.

I packed up the gifts that Esteban hadn’t taken and went to close the front door. Hmmm’ didn’t want to close. I reopened it and slammed it hard again. Still didn’t close. Something appeared to be blocking it somehow. So I tried slamming it extremely hard. Still wouldn’t close, but this time I heard the glass breaking. I looked down. My sunglasses had somehow fallen out of my jacket pocket and were preventing the closing of the door. My favorite pair of Rayban aviators that make me look oh-so-cute… the ones that allow me to pretend that I’m the girl in the “Boys of Summer” song by Don Henley… albeit without the “brown skin shining in the sun”. My $70 pair of sunglass now lay shattered in the doorway.

Esteban later asked me why I had demanded that we both separately go to Markus’ house, I could only answer ‘Because I’m a girl and we’re dumb sometimes.’ And sadly, that was the best answer I could come up with.

Stupidity, I’m telling you.

Saturday night, after Esteban left me alone for hours on end, I chatted with Levontaun about firearms and how niply cold it is here, then went to Barnes & Noble for some late night shopping. I’ve long loved the fact that Barnes & Noble has some outrageous (for a bookstore) hours, but I’ve never been able to take advantage of it, being that my only access to them was in far away lands, far away from our sleepy little burg. Thus, I was cold and in need of some hot tea and DVDs, so I traversed town in a cold Monte in search of some. Wearing my cute, kicky DKNY glasses so that I looked like a literary quirky girl and not a loser who has nothing better to do than go to the bookstore on a Saturday night, I entered B&N and immediately felt my Estrogen Radar turn on. Men were scoping me out! Men! In Barnes & Noble. Apparently, the bookstore is some kind of Smart Person Meat Market. A guy made small talk with me while I waited in line at the caf’. Another guy (and he was yum! He looked like the teacher who falls for Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed‘ uh,’ not that I’ve actually seen that movie or anything’ nope, not me’ just, you know’ the commercial) smiled at me while I stirred the sweetener into my tea. I’m telling you, if I weren’t married, I’d so be hanging out at the bookstore more often.

Hmmm’.. Maybe I might hang out there more anyway. I do so love Godiva chocolates and tea.

Later, however, I was carrying around a copy of The Vagina Monologues and I think it scared them all away. Maybe they thought I was a militant possessor of a vagina. Perhaps if I had been walking around with ‘Ways to improve your life with Kegel Exercises’, I would have been beating them off with sticks. Or maybe if I had started tonguing my Blackberry & Sage tea or perhaps doing a pole dance by the 50% off calendar display, someone would have asked me for my phone number or started to quote Sartre.

I think that’s what smart guys do when they’re trying to sound smart. Quote Sartre. Possibly Sartre is kind of a code word for ‘I’m smart’ are you smart?’ A way of recognizing smart people, since we don’t have our own club houses with ‘No Dummies Allowed’ printed in messy handwriting, or possibly written on calligraphy upon fine linen paper. The same way dumb people recognize their own by the displaying of large number 3’s in the rearview windows of their monster trucks.

I later left Barnes & Noble with a DVD, a calendar, a box of very cute holiday cards, the afore-mentioned Vagina book, and an impulse purchase of Creed’s latest CD. Then I drove around the city, looking at the pretty lights, occasionally head banging to the tunes.

I can already tell that this is going to be one of those CDs that I listen to and listen to for weeks on end, a sort of musical one night stand, then burn out on because they are not able to go the long haul, then eventually replace with one of my old favorites, a Violent Femmes CD or Sting, to cleanse the palette. And then will never pick up the CD again. Then eventually, sometime in the future, I will hear ‘My Sacrifice’ on the radio and it will instantly transport me back to those weeks in my life and I will become enormously nostalgic.

This has happened before. The Pulp Fiction soundtrack brings me back to when Esteban and I moved into our second apartment, all sunny and bright. The Goo Goo Dolls CD with ‘Iris’ on it reminds me of the month I purchased the Monte, the wonderful feeling of being in love with my car, of driving faster, of feeling it purr, feeling the leather seats envelope me. My Shawn Mullins CD reminds me of driving to Milwaukee for my grad fiction class, where no one talked to me and immediately discounted me as a dumb Cheesehead and then totally changed and sucked up when they read one of my stories, found out that I was related by marriage to Joy Harjo, which almost makes me a literati by default in those circles. The Counting Crows ‘August And Everything After’ reminds me of my undergraduate short fiction class. It makes me wonder what will stick out about these weeks, what I will be nostalgic for in the future’ what will be missing that I will long for.

Ouch. I just made my head hurt again.

Speaking of things I do so very love, I got one of the best things ever in the mail the other day from one of my very favorite people, Chauffi. A package containing four Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers. How damn cool is that? My lips will be Dr. Pepper scented for years to come. And things like that make me just giddy.

I’m only at work for a partial day today, but it feels like the last day of school. I don’t want to actually do anything. I want to drive to Appleton and buy HobNobs at the Irish store there, and also some very lovely expensive panties, which are not at the Irish store, but rather at the mall, at Lane Bryant, whom I despise for fashion sense but adore for undergarments. I think I no longer fit their demographic’which seems to be The Better Dressed Plus Size Skank. But their panties are divine.

How girlie is that’ going on a shopping excursion for lingerie and cookies. This is what my life has come to. Sometimes this feminine thing really sneaks up on me and makes me want to urp.

I bumped into Penny in the hall, one of my partners in Girl Golf, and she actually quoted a line of this page back to me, about ‘slutty ho lipstick’. Things like that give me performance anxiety. I shouldn’t let that bother me. It’s sort of like how I feel about camping, having to poo or even tinkle in the pit toilets, which are cleverly disguised as public restrooms, with stalls and industrial-style toilet tissue, but when you open the lid, you realize that you are actually suspended over a very deep pool of unmentionables, with a sign in front of you, warning not to put sanitary products into the pit or they will get stuck to raccoons and the National Forest rangers don’t want to see their raccoons running around with Always Supers stuck to them, wings fluttering.

Anyway, something about hovering my very pale and tender butt over that scary pit of poo’. (shudder) it makes it nearly impossible to do anything. I’m too frightened. Which of course prolongs the event. Which is even scarier. Because then I start looking around, noticing the spider webs, thinking about what foul thing possibly is crawling upwards toward my luminous behind, with full intent upon sinking its jaws into my nether flesh. So then I must visualize the best restroom experience I ever had in my life and pretend I am there. It was in London and I was shopping in a lovely little bookstore in Notting Hill with my very good but now very missed writer friend Nate, who looks and sounds like Gilbert Godfried. And I had to go. Bad. I could not wait until we returned back to the flat we shared in Little Venice. But there was no public restroom to be had within the bookstore so they directed me to the very lovely expensive hotel across the street. There I found the women’s toilets to be room full of very solid cherry doors, each one opening to an actual room (not a stall) containing a lovely toilet, sparkling clean and somehow almost a piece of art. Also, each little room contained its own miniature brass sink perfect for cleansing the hands of proper ladies, which are never so dirty that they need a large sink. The soap was lavender scented Crabtree & Evelyn. Mozart was piped into the room through unseen speakers, to camouflage any unladylike noises. What is more, each of the little bathrooms were decorated in a different Victorian style’ the one I chose had gold leafed celestial stuff, moons with faces, stars, and clouds, painted over the walls and ceiling. A peak into some of the others revealed different fairy tales, a mermaid scene, and an English garden. Thus, to combat performance anxiety, I conjure up that bathroom experience in my mind, and somehow by the grace of God I am able to tinkle into the pit.

I didn’t mean to equate writing in this diary with defecation. I hope you understand. Sometimes my analogies don’t pan out the way I had originally hoped.

Every now and then I read something that is just so superbly written that it makes me ashamed to be writing the fluff I do here, ashamed to be wasting your time with talk of boobs, butts, and orange puke sawdust. Jelias has such an entry here.

Plus, I think I may have a wee crush on him, not because he has my dream job or lives in one of my dream cities, and not even because he’s a fine writer and funny as well, but because he thinks about channeling Robert Mitchum. And that’s just so hot I can barely stand it.

Men today could do very well to take a page from Mr. Robert Mitchum.

Apparently, no one was interested in the possibility of winning my ass splinter. I’m trying not to be offended. Which is why I need HobNobs now… to soothe away the hurt with their Nobbly goodness.sniff