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The swirly hair that broke the camel’s back

Friday, April 4, 2008

I am SO lucky that I actually buckled down and made an appointment for my spring personal cleaning, as oh my god, the moratorium on shaving my legs was totally going to end this weekend. It happened when I was applying lotion post-shower. I looked down and instead of a little golden aura of follicular prickles, the hairs were long enough to actually flatten out when wet. I went from a Billy Idol to a Bret Michaels, overnight. I applied the Body Butter and suddenly, there were swirls. I squeaked and almost jumped back in the shower, but my mid-week evening appointment at the spa allowed me to steel my resolve. Come Wednesday, I will once again be smooth head to toe and my nose pores will be suitable for close viewing once again. It’s sad that I feel more scandalized about my blackheads than having misappropriated Chewbacca’s calves.

Our refrigerator has The Funk again. It seems like every 8-10 months, it has some kind of episode and starts superfreezing and then gathering a weird disgusting toxic slime mold slurry on the top shelf that dribbles down and infects the rest of the shelves. Even if the food on the shelves weren’t rendered inedible by Funk, you lose your appetite just opening the door. I was about to say that it’s a new fridge, but actually, it was a wedding present from Ward and June, so huh, it’s 9 years old. How long do fridges last? I have no idea, but I’m so ready for this one to just commit seppuku or something. June, in her strange wisdom, decided that we needed a beige fridge, to match the used beige hammy down stove we were using. The strange thing is that she actually knows me and knows that my favorite colors in all the world are white and black, and sometimes red or grey. If I were to continue naming favorite colors, I would be twenty, fifty, eighty million colors in before the word “beige” even crossed my lips. Incidentally, a year later, that beige stove kicked the bucket and we got a white stove to replace it. So that’s been eight years of non-matching appliances. It’s amazing that my head hasn’t exploded.

In truth, we need a new stove much more than we need a new fridge. We have one of those glass-top units, which just doesn’t heat tremendously well. Certainly not as evenly as a nice juicy gas flame on the stove of my dreams. Although, quite honestly, if I had my way, I’d totally replicate the kitchen from the camp where I used to work, complete with giant walk in cooler and double convection oven. Yes, I go overboard.

The theme of 2008 has been “making do” however, and I’m sure this is the theme in a lot of US houses this year. And this, boys and girls, is the retribution for reelecting a chimp for President. Remember that bleeding heart liberal you crucified for getting caught with his pants down (as if Republicans don’t cheat)? Man, I miss that stellar economy, don’t you? Anyway, we’re keeping it in our pants (our wallets, that is) until things start to look up. With everything going into the crapper, no major purchases until we’ve got at least 6 months of income saved up in something that can be easily liquidized in one or both of us feels the recession’s wrath. In truth, it really sucks, this self-imposed frugal state. I freely acknowledge that I wrapped a lot of my sense of security in my disposable income. That’s all sorts of fucked up but it’s totally true. Growing up poor fucks with your mind. Hence the spa appointment mentioned above. Shut up.

Over the weekend, I worked on my master’s project and am happy to report that I have now finished 55 pages out of 70 minimum required for the project. The problem is, despite evidence to the contrary on this here rambling diary, my fiction is actually pretty economical with the language. Usually, that’s preferred, but in this situation, most people could probably get away with 5 stories, but I’m having to pull out at least 7 to make the page limit. Which is sad, because I was hoping to have more choices in the matter. I haven’t written a lot of stories that I actually like. I like the iPod Guy story (which actually contains a lot of this entry) but I think a lot of my liking it has to do with the fact that it’s the only thing that’s gotten published since getting into the Master’s program. On the other hand, it’s the only thing that I’ve actually SUBMITTED, too, and I only submitted it to the one place, so there’s that. Flip flopper, party of one. I also really like a body image story and the sleep story, but no one seems to like those as much as I do. And then there’s the boat story, which people seem to like a lot but I don’t like nearly as much as, say, the sleep story. I’m probably just saying that because I had to do so much more research for that one. One doesn’t just bust out with anecdotes about K-complex brain waves without a little backwork. There’s also the baby story (which, for long timers, is actually hanging out in the password protected area last time I checked), that I don’t really like very much at all, and I get worried that it has too many themes from both the boat story AND the sleep story. And then I worry that I’m a two-trick pony, because the remaining two respectable stories in my dwindling pile of work are the bingo story and the car salesman story written oh so long ago, and they have practically the same plot! Why did I not see this before? The bingo story is more recent, and needs some major work (the verb tense is all over the place) while the car salesman story is currently in a state of dismemberment that would make Frankenstein blush. It’s sad, really, because I love the final page of that car salesman story so damned much. It’s one of maybe two endings that I actually really and truly feel proud having written them (the boat story having the other good ending) but the idea of slogging through all that ancient stuff just gets very wearying. Now, the bingo story has some problems, but I think I can work through them, and I had a flash of brilliance on the mechanics and story framing last night while I was falling asleep, so that’s a super bonus. Right now, the bingo story is 19 pages long, which would put me over the page count, but given my need to tighten when I edit (as is clearly not evidenced by just this lonesome paragraph right here, hello, are you still reading?) it might truck on down close to the 15 page mark. Which then begs the question about whether or not I want to walk into my oral exam and project defense having done just the bare minimum, in front of these three brilliant professors whose work and opinion I truly value? Probably not. Probably need to resurrect the stupid car salesman story. Stupid stories.

Anywho, enough of that. I’ve got so many social occasions coming up in the near future! I have two different sets of printed invitations coming my way that need to be sent out and addresses to collect and guest lists to draft and also, a book list to concoct. But I will think about that tomorrow.

Filed in Casa Bix, Graduate School, Literary stuff | | Comments Off on The swirly hair that broke the camel’s back

show me how you do that thing

Friday, April 4, 2008

I spend way too much time away from this thing. I know. I KNOW. What I’ve been doing in the interim: finishing my master’s thingy, writing a paper, doing a shitload of work and client meetings at work, watching my employer grind the business into the earth, celebrating Ward’s retirement and Ward and June’s 39th wedding anniversary (separate celebrations, same venue), planning social engagements, Weetapidoling, podcasting and rolling my eyes over the annoying commenters over on Yahoo Shine (one day, probably the most insipid and generic posts I’ve ever written was featured on Yahoo’s main page and inspired a lot of semi-moronic comments) and also, sleeping. Suffice to say, the (fucking) laundry? She is not done.

The more things change.

This weekend has been the creamy filling in a two-parter West Coast adventure for Esteban. He got home on Thursday and will be flying out on Tuesday again. Had we known his travel arrangements (and not had the moratorium on spending money) I might have leveraged some time off and just flown out to Las Vegas/San Francisco with him and hung out, doing my own travel thing. But unfortunately, the crystal ball was uncertain.

I did get my legs waxed. Actually, the appointment mentioned in the previous post was postponed, as it coincided with Ward’s spontaneous retirement party, and I was forced to live with Wookie legs for another two weeks. The waxing was seriously not painful. Not as painful as my typical removal of 90% of my eyebrows, but the downer is that not only were my freshly waxed legs NOT smooth, this whole idea of not having stubble for some freakishly long period of time (4 weeks, I think my aesthetician said)? BULLSHIT. I had stubble on Day 5, people. Not worth $40 and waiting through all of that leg thicket for five measly days. I’ll stick with my shaving gel and Mach 5, thank you very much.

Despite Monday’s disturbing incident of abnormally large snowflakes, it’s more or less spring here in the GRB. I have turned off the furnace for the seventh time this year (much to Esteban’s dismay, because he’s much less cold-tolerant and energy-conscious than I am) and am once again having very hot and bothered fantasies involving landscaping. I don’t actually want to DO any of this, however. I would like to just point and have things done. Actually, my biggest quandary is how to lay things out in our big green blank canvas of a yard. I never understood why people hired interior decorators to makeover their houses, but right now, if Martha Stewart offered to come and tell me what should be planted where, I would happily just sign over the yard to her. I have lots of theories that involve closing off the space between the potting shed and the garage and turning it into a walkway of some kind, and doing something to make some privacy between the street and the dining room window but sans magic wand, I really don’t know when it’s all going to happen. Oh well, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

On Tuesday, I will be spending the entire day in Milwaukee. In the morning, I will be facing my master’s oral examination, whereby Dr. O’Henry, Professor Dreamy and my current adorable lady professor (who really deserves a nickname because she’s pretty awesome… hey, Dr. Awesome) will be asking me questions and I will in theory be answering them with some kind of intelligent combination of words and phrases and perhaps even punctuation. I’ve heard that someone was asked to define a novel in one of these things, and thinking about how I would answer that question pretty much makes my head explode. The only way I can do it is to make my hands into two right angles and then focus in on a pencil and say “This is a short story” and then spread them wide enough to pull back the shot until it fills the table and say “and this is a novella” and then spread my arms again until my hand frames encompass the entire room and say “And this is a novel”. It’s a piss poor answer, quite frankly, but it’s a better one than “A very long story that has more than, ooooohhhh, 45000 words.” I’m a little bit nervous, because, well, Dr. O’Henry is my advisor and thus, running the show, and I would have to say probably my biggest concern out of the three. He scares me, a little bit, and I totally know that it’s all because he won the O’Henry recently. And Professor Dreamy is an AMAZING writer, but for reasons I’m not entirely understanding, seems to dig my stuff. And the cool thing with Professor Awesome is that she is outside of the creative writing program, meaning that she’s a lit person. The lit program people all seem to look at the creative writers with a little tilt to their head, like you would if looking at a trained monkey. And she volunteered to me, one night after class, that she was so surprised to hear that I was actually a writer, not a lit and comp person, because I was totally holding my ground in the class with the lit PhD folks. Which, I have to say, almost made me burst out into tears, because after the disaster of that stupid scifi paper, I was honestly starting to doubt whether I could hack critical analysis at all and maybe I was just an idiot savant when it came to words, able to string them together in a way that sounds pleasing, but not really able to think about the fundamentals behind all the lovely phrases. And, quite honestly, between the lack of funding in the program and the fact that the PhD requires an additional 12 credits in lit classes, it’s driving a lot of my decision not to continue on for the PhD. Which is another thing that I know I’ll be asked to explain during my oral exam, and it’s quite honestly, something I’m not looking forward to doing, because I know that my decision is a disappointment to at least Professor Awesome.

Thus, this Tuesday is also a big deal because not only is it the last day of class for the semester and also, it will be my last time that I attend a class that I’m taking as a requirement for a degree. At least in the near future, anyway. Which makes everything a little bittersweet.

A few weeks ago, on one of the first truly warm days, I was sitting on a bench next to the big water fountain, weeding through the fiction slush pile for the campus lit magazine, and listening to my iPod. My favorite song in the universe, “Just Like Heaven” came on and the moment perfectly encapsulated my experience in this program. Sitting in the middle of everything, hiding behind a pair of sunglasses and some white earbuds, half there in person and halfway an observer untouched by anything. The sun was warm and under the sparkly synthesized rhythm, I could hear the spatter of the water against the flat cement and watch the students and faculty rush by, oblivious. Robert Smith’s voice was full of nostalgia for a time that has passed and even at that moment, I could feel it slipping away, as though I had never been there. Because I practically never was. And then just when I thought that everything would go fuzzy, dissolve into a faded montage, a shadow broke the page and it was Trent, who was running late for his class but just wanted to say hi. And for the first time since being in the program, I honestly felt like maybe I was really there.

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Return of Lady Bigfoot

Saturday, March 22, 2008

After a quicky dinner of Swedish meatballs (out of the freezer… love it when I plan ahead) I was stretched out on the couch, as I am wont to do, and Esteban had just proposed a Friday night trip to the Hundred Dollar Store for a new showerhead. We have one of those supposed rainfall shower heads, but it’s more of a gentle rain, not so much a deluge as you would prefer. Or maybe as I would prefer. I don’t know, I have a lot of like, square inches that need to be doused, so maybe for the average person, the gentle fall of droplets is sufficient, but while showering, I am always left a little wanting. Esteban’s been regularly warring with the showerhead since we brought it home, and had just come off of a very frustrating few days where he’d dismantle the beast, soak it in calcium deposit remover, then put it back together whenever we’d need to shower. He did this repeatedly, thinking that it just didn’t have a long enough soak, but had just come to the conclusion that perhaps the problem was somewhere further up inside the contraption and really, maybe we should just call it a day with the stupid shower head, because while it wasn’t here when we moved in, it was one of the very first little home improvements we made, and really, no one is handing down a showerhead to their grandchildren, so the things just aren’t meant to be legacy hardware, right? Especially not this piece of crap. He postulated that maybe it sad something about us, something depressing, that we were about to get up and go to Home Depot on a Friday night, but quite frankly, I was perfectly fine with that. Saturday mornings at the Depot are a nightmare, so if we could get that off our plate, rock on. Besides, I said, I was anxious to take a long shower and deforest my month’s long growth of leg hair.

“Really? You’re going to shave it? After you conquered your fear of the stubble?”

“Yeah… I mean, look at it! Just look!” I hiked up the bottom of my yoga pant and wiggled my foot around at him.

“You know, I think you should take this to the logical conclusion.”

“Shaving? I got a new Mach 3 and a second set of replacement blades if I run out.”

“No, babe. I mean, braiding. You should let it go for another month and see how long it will get.” He touched my calf as though petting a cat. “It’s so soft. It’s not bothering you, is it?”

“Well, I’ve had three dreams about my leg hair. I think that’s a sign that I should, you know, get rid of it.”

“No! That’s a sign that you still have some psychological, you know, hurdles to work on. Let it ride until cropped pants season!”

I laughed and decided that he was insane. Off we went to Home Depot, bought a showerhead and a bunch of light bulbs and then got rootbeer floats and drove home, where Esteban put up the new fixture and I walked around replacing lightbulbs. We are utter fucking rock stars. When I took a shower, I was amazed by how much faster I could get things done. I no longer had to wait a minute while my short hair got saturated… it happened in seconds! In fact, I was completely done in about four minutes. I thought about grabbing the shaving cream and razor, but then… how can I fully appreciate the quick shower if I screwed it up by spending 10 minutes deSasquatching myself? I decided it can wait another week. Especially if Esteban seems to be kind of grooving on the whole Woodstock thing. And I may get it waxed too, per your suggestions in the comments, because it seems a shame to waste the opportunity. I actually have my own waxing kit (because I’m that way) but I’d probably go into the spa and have someone else do it. I tend to make a mess with the wax anyway, so it’s just a much better thing to happen on someone else’s turf.

And then I read the preceding paragraph and seriously, I don’t even recognize myself anymore. Is this what aging is about? Is this how those old ladies end up with the giant chin hairs and major mustaches? Because they look in the mirror and go “Nah, who gives a shit?” What will be the next standard I will let drop? White before Memorial Day? Clothes from Wal-mart? Putting a foam piece of cheese on my head?

shudder

I can’t believe that I’m almost done with my Master’s degree. I’m supposedly graduating in seven weeks, which is just bizarre and weird to imagine. I say “supposedly” because I still have to get a passing grade in my lit class and get my Master’s project approved and have my committee say that yes, they like me, they really really like me. I have to order a cap and gown, and things like graduation announcements and stuff. I’m such a sucker for that crap. I loaded up my cart on Jostens with a shitload of stuff, things I’m sure I don’t even need, but somehow the idea of invitations with my name printed on them? And Summa Cum Laude under it? Giddy! Absolutely giddy.

They have a thing where you can get a faux diploma printed up, or I guess it’s a certificate of appreciation for someone special you feel really helped you in your education, and immediately, I decided to get one for Esteban, because he is absolutely my center.

And then I was thinking about who else would get one, and I realized that I’ve pretty much documented my entire quest for this degree on this here website, and a lot of the encouragement and support has come from the comments and emails I’ve received from you guys. Thank you for that. I can honestly say that if I hadn’t been able to vent and sort out my thoughts and frustration on this site, I don’t know that I would have made it through to the other side. In fact, I can honestly tell you that I’ve never had more encouragement on my writing from any other source than the people who read this site. Not from Esteban, not from my teachers, not from anyone. And I try not to front like a big fancy artiste, and try to keep the more annoyingly purple prose away from this white page with the fairy on the top, and I know that sometimes it doesn’t always work and that you forgive me anyway. And for that, you can’t even imagine how much I love you guys.

Thank you. More than you know. Thank you.

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Unshorn Sister of the Apocalypse

Sunday, March 16, 2008

About two or three years ago, I embarked on this whole get up and go kind of self-rejuvenation kick. It was probably around this time of year, as this is usually when I get all Zen about my life and shit. I mean, this weekend, I went to a home and garden show and then poured over the internet trying to find some kind of Idiot’s Guide To Hipster Douche Gardening or something, and if that’s not crazy self-rejuventation, I don’t know what is. I only remember a few of the changes: one was whitening my teeth, which I still do on occasion when things start to look a little Candy Corn (stupid Starbucks), and the other thing was that I amped up my moisturizing routine because I no longer could get away with just Dove bodywash and my own natural Brand Weetabix skin quality. Nope, the whole aging thing was kicking in and I definitely was finding myself a little itchy, a little scratchy, a little bit you, a little bit me, etc. I picked a soy-based moisturizer, on the premise that it would reduce the texture of your body hair. Now, I don’t want to give you the idea that I had a hair situation or anything (not that there’s anything wrong with that) because I have northern European ancestry, so it’s not like there’s a thicket happening or anything, but man, I have a thing about feeling stubble. And if I can reduce the number of times I need to shave my legs in the summer? Rock on. And I’m not in love with my arm hair or anything, so if it’s a casualty, whatever.

And because I am sort of a fanatic about shaving my legs (or rather, avoidance of stubble. It’s not like I really get off on that sense of danger when swiping the Mach 3 over the blind spot on the back of my ankle but rather, I am absolutely disgusted by the sensation of stubbly legs and have actually gotten up from bed to take a shower and shave my legs, just because I couldn’t fall asleep with the feel of the stubble against the sheets… yes, neurotic. I’ve never been able to get my legs waxed by a professional because I’ve never been able to wait until I had the minimum quarter inch of stubble required), I picked up Aveeno Positively Smooth Shave Gel and just used that instead of Kiehl’s Close or philosophy’s razor sharp (which is a silicon shave gel and super awesome). Bonus: a lot cheaper than my other standards and Esteban is always complaining about the Anarchy of my Products in the shower.

Fast forward to last summer when I noticed: hey, the shit really was working. I used to have cheese grater leg stubble that bothers me by the second day so would just automatically shave every day, but on Day 2, I could run my hand up my shin and not even detect a trace of stubble. In fact, over the winter, I only noticed that I had to shave when I could actually see hair. Then, over the last few months, I noticed that even visible leg hair didn’t make me wince in discomfort when my bare legs touched each other in bed. Most peculiar. Is this how other people go through life? Is this how those Woodstock types are able to walk around with Wookie legs? My goodness, is this what it’s like to be a guy?

I decided to experiment. How long could I go? What would be the straw that would break this hairy-legged camel’s back? I wish I had noted the first day of the No Shaving decree, but as these things often do, it happened not with a bang but with a “Meh”. I can guess that it’s been three weeks at this point. It might be longer. I totally don’t even know. But regardless, I can tell you that this is the longest period of time that I’ve gone without shaving my legs since I was 12 years old. Which is, you know, really fucking sad.

And now? What’s happening on my legs? FASCINATING.

Obviously, dresses are out right now. And shorts, because my own calves freak me right the hell out. In fact, I have one pair of cropped yoga pants, and when I caught sight of my own leg sticking out of the bottom, I had a mental picture of a Manpri Parade in South Beach. I’ve actually had paranoia dreams about forgetting and wearing a skirt to work and then getting caught with half inch or longer tendrils, waving free in the mysterious sourceless breeze in my cubicle farm. Clearly, if you’re having dreams about it, it’s time to shave, right? You would think, but I’m writing this having freshly showered and ape legs? Still intact. I think I understand secret cutting now, because I know it’s wrong and yet.

And yet.

To be clear, Esteban has mentioned several times that he really doesn’t care if I shave my legs or not, he just hated the beard burn he’d get from my 3-Day Industrial Stubble when we’d be out camping (and yes, I’ve totally shaved my legs while camping, getting mocked by my guy friends in the process), so this kinder, gentler leg thicket? He’s down with it. I’m not, suffice to say, but the incredulity that it’s gotten to this point is kind of amazing. And it’s time to draw this experiment to a close. Now that I know that I can actually survive on a deserted island without a Mach 3, I need to buy a few new razors and do some serious deforestation. And maybe some drain opener for the impending blockage. It’s an old house and really, that’s a lot to be asking of our plumbing.

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Schmear campaign

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

It is 1993 and I am a full-time college student commuting to a little community college about 40 miles from my house. Given the drive and the inclement winters, once I get to campus, I don’t leave until after my last class late in the afternoon, which means two meals at the teensy cafeteria–basically a soda machine and two ladies in hairnets, standing in front of a griddle, waiting to take your order. Most of the time, I have about five bucks to get through two meals. Breakfast is the cheapest vegetarian fare (and the most delicious), so I usually have a biggish meal between my first and second class and then coast through lunch with a cup of vegetable soup ($1.25) and two pieces of wheat toast with peanut butter ($.50).

On this particular day, I am ravenous and the line is long, with lots of people hanging around waiting for their pancakes, omelets and whatnot. I order three scrambled eggs (one with yolk, two whites), a carton of skim milk, a whole wheat bagel without butter (the ladies, god love them, slop a fake butter substance on practically everything) and then I silently deliberate between choosing peanut butter or cream cheese. Finally I decide and complete the order and yes, that is all, and no, no bacon or hashbrowns with the eggs, thanks.

“So close!” A guy smiles at me from the waiting area.

“Excuse me?” Is he talking to me? What?

“You were so close.” He says again.

“What do you mean?” I am completely confused.
“Oh, the eggs, no yolks. Not getting bacon or any meat with the eggs. The whole wheat bagel without butter. The skim milk. And then you had to go and ruin everything by getting cream cheese!” He groans, like he’s just revealed the twist to an elaborate movie plot.

I don’t know what to say. I want to say that I just don’t like egg yolksbecause sometimes I’m creeped out by the taste but scrambled egg whites just aren’t the same. I want to explain that I have a mild allergy tomilk fat, so the skim milk is an easy way to have milk without getting congested 15 minutes later, and I could then court danger and get away with a little cream cheese on the bagel. And I want to tell him that I already knew what they called “cream cheese” was actually Neufchatel, a very happy low fat soft cheese that doesn’t make me very snorky. I want to ask what makes him think that I want his consolation prize of a “So close and yet so far,” how he has the audacity to make any comment about nutrition whatsoever when the counter lady just plated up his double cheese and bacon omelet with hashbrowns topped with melted cheese and a goddamned chocolate milkshake. I want to ask him if he considers himself some kind of superhero of saturated fats and if so, where are his cape and tights? I want to ask him if he knew that people were saying he had an adorable little penis and say that I’m sure those testicles are going to drop any day now, he just had to keep eating his Wheaties and thinking positive thoughts and being a good little sprout.

I want to say all of these things, but all I can blurt out is a feeble, “It’s light cream cheese.”

He chuckles, shrugs and takes his plate back to the dining area. I fume and wait for my meal, not really wanting it anymore, horrified, terrified. I want to rewind everything, want to throw the cream cheese into the trash. Clearly, I am not to be trusted with food choices if strangers are commenting on my inability to feed myself correctly.

When my order is done, I take it out to the dining area and see that he has joined a group of coed friends. He has clearly just finished retelling the anecdote of the Fattie and the Bagel because after a bout of laughter, someone at the table says “That’s like the girl in front of me at Burger King who went in and ordered a Whopper with cheese, large fries and a DIET Coke.” Everyone groans and nods in agreement that they too have witnessed such a grievous sin against humanity.

I sit down at an empty table and sense that the guy’s entire table is now aware of my presence, because they’ve gone silent and then someone says “So anyway!”. I have turned my back to them, but I know that they are all watching the little packet of cream cheese that sits on my tray, blinking in orange neon with its own ground effects, like a bouncing  lowrider at a traffic stop. I am unable to eat and sit there studying Piaget’s theories of development, not really understanding the words, until they all finish eating and leave.

The eggs are then cold, so I defiantly smear the illicit cream cheese on my bagel. After the first bite, my throat closes and I choke and cough and sputter. Some of the heads in the dining area turn, to see if I will be okay or if the fat girl is going to pull a Cass Elliott right there in the damned quad. I realize then that this is how it always is. This is how it always will be. No matter what. I throw everything in the trash and sit in the library. My stomach growls and it is a defeat but also a success.

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That which does not kill you

Monday, March 3, 2008

Everything’s changing this month! Diaryland’s user interface changed (oh, does anyone actually use this site anymore? Everyone seems to be Somebody Dot Com these days but still! It’s weird to not have the girly light blue Diaryland GUI! Also, hi, that was just a brief snippet of my day job sneaking into where it shouldn’t be. Carry on!) and Elastic Waist had a big redo this month, which means that there’s not nearly as orange-ness on the site and also, a weird illustration of yours truly on the sidebar where I think I look kind of cross-eyed, but that’s just me. Also, they now show you who wrote the damned things, and while before it wasn’t really so obvious that about 90% of what was on the site was written by yours truly, now Plork/Anne is also contributing to the main site, so it’s handy to see who is talking at you.

And also, speaking of work, shit is changing there, and I might actually finally be moving over to my window cubicle, which was promised to me lo these many months ago (MOTHERFUCKING JULY 2007). And apparently there are other changes afoot at the Circle K, scary changes, like jobs going away, but no, not me, never me. I know, I know, it sounds like I’m an ungrateful bitch and if I don’t like the job I should just leave. That’s not it. I’ve just “survived” so many of these things that I know that things are never really better from the peeon perspective. But really, I embrace change, which is one of the reasons that the suits like to keep me around, because most of the time I spend walking aimlessly around nubby beige halfwalls, waving my arms and shouting about social injustice. If I also asked for spare change or called people “whore”, I might be indistinguishable from a street person, but in corporate America, this gets you noticed and patted on the head or something. I don’t know. I’m grumpy and this is boring so let’s talk about something else.

This weekend, we decided to spend Saturday night curled on the couch watching one of the Bourne movies and Esteban declared that popcorn would really make it an event. I cosigned that, because I do love popcorn, very very much, and also, I just researched a huge blog entry on whole grains and was surprised to realize that popcorn is actually not the carby sin that I thought it to be. Also, can I be frank? The pooping? I don’t know what the hell is going on with me (god, am I pre-menopaus–nevermind, I’m not even going to say it) but JESUS with the not pooping! Forgive me for the brief entrance into Doocedom but I clearly have been neglecting my fiber. Or something. Actually, I’ve been wondering if it’s not a chain of events having to do with my nightly two chewable Vanilla antacids. Like, do they act like some kind of cork or something? I only have to take them if I’ve had anything remotely acidic or wine during dinner, but judging how often we eat garlic-based meals, that’s practically every night. Which basically means that I’ve just turned into my great-grandmother right this minute.

So, the popcorn. Amazingly, despite our plethora of kitchen gadgets, we didn’t have a popcorn popper. We made a special trip to Target for a Stir-Crazy popper. This was the same popper we used to have, one that ended up developing some kind of weird schmeng on the popper, so we ditched it ten years ago. Ten years and my only venue for popcorn has been the movie theatre! A crime, is what that is. A crime. Target, however, was out of popcorn poppers, so we went to Shopko, which carried the same Stir-Crazy popper, only for 40% more than Target. Bastards! No wonder Esteban’s Shopko stock is tanking! Because they are bastards! Esteban decided that since his options on our side of town were dwindling and he really just wanted to go home, he would pay the extra cash and be done with it. It’s our fault for having these irrational popcorn impulses to begin with. We hit a grocery store and stocked up on popcorn, a bunch of different seasoning salts and two kinds of oils (some peanut oil and one that purports to be usable as a popcorn topping as well as an oil, the one we call “Freaky Grease”) and made a giant bowl of popcorn, then settled in under the Muppet blanket and watched Matt Damon be cooler than everyone that ever was. We decimated the bowl and then made another one, this time using the correct amount of oil (note: there is a difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. I totally knew that.) and did a tasting of the various salts and coatings. Verdict: “Freaky Grease” tastes the best, but we’re torn between loving the Nacho Cheese (me) or the Garlic Parmesan (Esteban) toppings. Although I also do enjoy just the plain stuff with a sprinkling of grey Fleur de Sel, which is very nice because it kind of clumps, so you get these bland areas and then the fragrant salty pieces. You just never know what to expect.

I love the popcorn so much that I ended up making a batch for breakfast on Sunday and then another batch for dinner that night. I am addicted! I’ve been thinking about spritzing the popcorn with white truffle oil instead of butter, or maybe even breaking out my truffle salt (although the crystals are pretty big and I’d have to hit them with a grinder first, I think), or maybe hitting it with some pecorino romano instead. I might just be eating all popcorn all the time! It could happen! I might die of scurvy, but it would be a good death.

And also, I feel about ten pounds lighter since the Popcorning. So there’s that.

 

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That which does not kill you

Monday, March 3, 2008

Everything’s changing this month! Diaryland’s user interface changed (oh, does anyone actually use this site anymore? Everyone seems to be Somebody Dot Com these days but still! It’s weird to not have the girly light blue Diaryland GUI! Also, hi, that was just a brief snippet of my day job sneaking into where it shouldn’t be. Carry on!) and Elastic Waist had a big redo this month, which means that there’s not nearly as orange-ness on the site and also, a weird illustration of yours truly on the sidebar where I think I look kind of cross-eyed, but that’s just me. Also, they now show you who wrote the damned things, and while before it wasn’t really so obvious that about 90% of what was on the site was written by yours truly, now Plork/Anne is also contributing to the main site, so it’s handy to see who is talking at you.

And also, speaking of work, shit is changing there, and I might actually finally be moving over to my window cubicle, which was promised to me lo these many months ago (MOTHERFUCKING JULY 2007). And apparently there are other changes afoot at the Circle K, scary changes, like jobs going away, but no, not me, never me. I know, I know, it sounds like I’m an ungrateful bitch and if I don’t like the job I should just leave. That’s not it. I’ve just “survived” so many of these things that I know that things are never really better from the peeon perspective. But really, I embrace change, which is one of the reasons that the suits like to keep me around, because most of the time I spend walking aimlessly around nubby beige halfwalls, waving my arms and shouting about social injustice. If I also asked for spare change or called people “whore”, I might be indistinguishable from a street person, but in corporate America, this gets you noticed and patted on the head or something. I don’t know. I’m grumpy and this is boring so let’s talk about something else.

This weekend, we decided to spend Saturday night curled on the couch watching one of the Bourne movies and Esteban declared that popcorn would really make it an event. I cosigned that, because I do love popcorn, very very much, and also, I just researched a huge blog entry on whole grains and was surprised to realize that popcorn is actually not the carby sin that I thought it to be. Also, can I be frank? The pooping? I don’t know what the hell is going on with me (god, am I pre-menopaus–nevermind, I’m not even going to say it) but JESUS with the not pooping! Forgive me for the brief entrance into Doocedom but I clearly have been neglecting my fiber. Or something. Actually, I’ve been wondering if it’s not a chain of events having to do with my nightly two chewable Vanilla antacids. Like, do they act like some kind of cork or something? I only have to take them if I’ve had anything remotely acidic or wine during dinner, but judging how often we eat garlic-based meals, that’s practically every night. Which basically means that I’ve just turned into my great-grandmother right this minute.

So, the popcorn. Amazingly, despite our plethora of kitchen gadgets, we didn’t have a popcorn popper. We made a special trip to Target for a Stir-Crazy popper. This was the same popper we used to have, one that ended up developing some kind of weird schmeng on the popper, so we ditched it ten years ago. Ten years and my only venue for popcorn has been the movie theatre! A crime, is what that is. A crime. Target, however, was out of popcorn poppers, so we went to Shopko, which carried the same Stir-Crazy popper, only for 40% more than Target. Bastards! No wonder Esteban’s Shopko stock is tanking! Because they are bastards! Esteban decided that since his options on our side of town were dwindling and he really just wanted to go home, he would pay the extra cash and be done with it. It’s our fault for having these irrational popcorn impulses to begin with. We hit a grocery store and stocked up on popcorn, a bunch of different seasoning salts and two kinds of oils (some peanut oil and one that purports to be usable as a popcorn topping as well as an oil, the one we call “Freaky Grease”) and made a giant bowl of popcorn, then settled in under the Muppet blanket and watched Matt Damon be cooler than everyone that ever was. We decimated the bowl and then made another one, this time using the correct amount of oil (note: there is a difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. I totally knew that.) and did a tasting of the various salts and coatings. Verdict: “Freaky Grease” tastes the best, but we’re torn between loving the Nacho Cheese (me) or the Garlic Parmesan (Esteban) toppings. Although I also do enjoy just the plain stuff with a sprinkling of grey Fleur de Sel, which is very nice because it kind of clumps, so you get these bland areas and then the fragrant salty pieces. You just never know what to expect.

I love the popcorn so much that I ended up making a batch for breakfast on Sunday and then another batch for dinner that night. I am addicted! I’ve been thinking about spritzing the popcorn with white truffle oil instead of butter, or maybe even breaking out my truffle salt (although the crystals are pretty big and I’d have to hit them with a grinder first, I think), or maybe hitting it with some pecorino romano instead. I might just be eating all popcorn all the time! It could happen! I might die of scurvy, but it would be a good death.

And also, I feel about ten pounds lighter since the Popcorning. So there’s that.

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Smug materialistic stereotype, party of one

Thursday, February 21, 2008

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.

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Guest Post by Golf Widow

Monday, February 11, 2008

Hey, you know an easy way to increase your website’s hit count without even lifting a finger? Ok, one finger, the one driving your mouse.

Seriously, give Golf Widow two bucks and she’ll just volunteer to write you a guest entry.

by

Golf Widow

Weetabix is kind of like Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. No, I don’t mean she looks like him, or even acts like him. I mean she’s everybody’s favorite. No one ever says, “Moe” or “Larry” when asked “Who’s your favorite of the Three Stooges?” Only the occasional rebel will volunteer any sort of preference for Shemp, and anyone who says either of the “Joe” Curlies is just plain suspect.

Back when Diaryland was the only way to fly, Weetabix was absolutely my favorite, so fricking popular she couldn’t break a fingernail without at least five hundred readers running to her rescue. I aspired to be that popular, but circumstances conspired against me:

1) She’d been doing this far longer than I had. Time was on her side.
2) She really was just that good.

This wasn’t like the evil girls in high school, where you could hate them for being popular, even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. Weetabix earned her following by being the best. And it was impossible to hate her. So I jumped on the bandwagon and loved her. Still do. Always will.

Times have changed, technologywise, of course. Weetabix is still a hundred percent loyal to Diaryland. After a combination of growing pains on my part and terrible service to me on Diaryland’s part, I took my leave of that venue and moved out of the diary pond into the vast unknown ocean of Blogs.

It makes me less caring about being the popular one, since in a pool this astronomical, it’s just plain impossible for someone like me to stand out as original. Which means I have to just write for myself, and if anyone else gets anything out of it, it’s a bonus, but it can’t be my ultimate goal, because I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

The fact that Weetabix, still in the Diaryland pond, manages nevertheless to glow in the blog ocean like one of those weird biophosphorescent swimming things you see on the Discovery Channel, is therefore both frustrating and awe-inspiring to me.

The only thing keeping me from saying that Weetabix is my FAVORITE favorite anymore is that I haven’t got one single favorite anymore. Being outside of Diaryland has led me to have, literally, thousands of blogs on my reading list as opposed to the seventy-five or so I used to read on Diaryland. She’s still ONE of my favorites though …

… because she’s still just that good.

P.S. When I say “weird biophosphorescent swimming thing”, I mean it in the nicest possible way.

And holy hell, if I would have known she was going to write all of these awesome complimentary things, I totally would have felt guilty for taking advantage of her generosity by basically giving her half what I spend day on my morning mocha. And because she carefully tiptoed around the fact that I hardly update anymore and really don’t have any kind of following whatsoever, I’m going to pretend that she didn’t compare me to a jellyfish.

I will also point out that this is not the first time Ms. Widow has been a guest poster on this site.

If you want your own such deal (and seriously, you’d be daft not to take her up on this), head over here, throw two bucks into the tip jar and then wait for the goodies to arrive. And also, if you want more of her golfy goodness, buy a copy of her her book over on Amazon.

Also, feel free to leave a comment telling me what you’ll do for me for two bucks. I’m all about stimulating the economy when it’s for my own lazy gains. Mwuhahahaha!

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here comes the bride, big fat and wide

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Katherine Heigl, who is unabashedly gorgeous, admits that she was hating on her weight when getting ready to walk down the aisle. Katherine blames the dress and while granted, white is not exactly the most slimming of colors, what is it about an upcoming wedding that turns on our internal inferiority complex? Logistically, isn’t this guy marrying you for, you know, you? They say that when a newly engaged guy thinks about his upcoming marriage, the biggest thought in his mind is “I hope she doesn’t change”. And yet, I’d be willing to bet that the percentage of women who didn’t actively try to lose weight for the wedding would be in the single digits.

And I wish I could take the high road here, but then I’d have to pretend that my short walk down the aisle didn’t come after several dozen miles spent huffing and puffing around the walking track at the local Y. You see, I ordered a custom wedding dress that was supposedly cut to fit my proportions and in theory should have fit right out of the box. I had spent the extra money to do this specifically because I knew that I had a propensity to react to high stress situations with disordered eating and I knew that the wedding? With everyone looking at me? With this big expectation that I would be the most beautiful girl in the room? Yeah, that was gearing up for one huge amount of starvation that was thinly veiled as crazy-assed dieting.

Finding a wedding dress when you are a size 24 can be summed up in one word: SUCKS. Oh, they have them. There are wedding dresses out there. And if I were Amish or 75-years-old or enjoyed swathing my fine ass in a three-foot wide bow, to gift wrap the very thing I wanted to hide, there wouldn’t be a problem finding a wedding dress.

Instead, I went to every bridal store in a 130 mile radius (and I am not making that up) and stripped to my bra panties in large rooms surrounded by giant mirrors while waiting for the dress store women to return with size 6, 8, and sometimes 12, and be told to either squeeze into the sample or hold it up in front of my naked self and imagine. In what other industry would this be acceptable? If you’re trying to buy an Escalade, would the salesperson bring you a CTS and tell you that if you close your eyes, it’s practically the same thing? Would you buy a pair of shoes by just looking at the floor samples and not giving them a few trots around the department store? Of course you wouldn’t.

On top of the rest of the emotional issues surrounding an impending nuptual, I also had to deal with the bridal store employees, which fell into one of two categories: either it was a lithe youngish woman wearing way too much makeup and perfume or it was a matronly type of woman wearing flat shoes and so many foundation garments that she didn’t walk so much as dither across the floor. The youngish types were the worst. One actually made a gagging sound when I told her my bra size, and then pretended that she had an impromptu cough (and later tried to lie and say that the store didn’t carry such gargantuan cup sizes, even though I had visited the store earlier and been coerced into trying on dresses with one of their longline bras by one of the matrons, so I knew damn well that they carried Zeppelin-sized bras and larger). Another of the youngish types actually did a little head tilt and then patronized me by saying how lucky I was to find someone who loved me “You know, despite how you are.” Bitch, please.

However, three months before The Big Day, when my wedding dress arrived, things went horribly wrong. It didn’t fit. Not just a little Didn’t Fit. A LOT. The zipper went up to my first rib bone and then refused to budge. I trembled and my mother-in-law reassured me that it could all be altered and I wasn’t wearing the right bra and things would be ok just don’t panic don’t PANIC! My mother-in-law is a saint, people, a saint. However, then my own mother walked in and got her first view of the dress. Apparently she was already perturbed that my mother-in-law had unwittingly usurped my mother’s role as trusted older female advisor during the wedding dress shopping process (although in all fairness, my mother was so not interested in shopping with me that it just wasn’t funny). My mother has never had a weight problem in her entire life. She could spend all summer dining on hot dogs and potato chips and the pounds would jump off of her body as though out of fear. I stood on the little carpeted box that they make you stand on, wearing a princessy bundle of white matte satin, waiting for her to say what everyone had said up until that point, that the dress was lovely, that it accentuated my waist and hid my upper arms and basically took all of my areas of tragedy and whisked them away with a fury of sequins (it was the late 90’s, and plus size gowns were still stuck in the late 80’s, so I didn’t have a lot of choice here).

She took one look at the dress, somehow criss crossed her lips into a perfect X (how she does that, I still have no idea) as she caught sight of the open zipper in the mirror behind me. “Well, what are we going to do about this?” She walked behind me and stared at my back, the red bra I was wearing suddenly feeling very tawdry and slutty.

“I have a seamstress already for the bridesmaid’s dresses, so she’ll–”

“No, Weetabix, what are we going to do about THIS?!” She grabbed each side of the open zipper and tried to shake me into the dress. My mother is surprisingly strong, and for a moment I almost lost my footing between the layers of crinoline, the little box pedestal tipped and threatened to throw me headfirst into a very flustered bridal store clerk.

“I’m not wearing the right bra right now and I’m not going to worry about it until the seamstress looks at it.”

“There’s no seamstress that can fix that.” She clicked her tongue.

“Well, then I’ll just buy a new dress!” I snapped. She said no more and my bridesmaids and mother-in-law all looked in random directions, feeling awkward.

On the surface, it might have looked like I won, but in reality, I was lost, so very lost. The seamstress, however, was an angel. She pinched and gathered and pointed out that the dress actually did fit my measurements perfectly, the problem was that the inches just weren’t in the right spot. So she took in two inches at the waist and took out two inches in the bust. Result: perfect fit. But I still went to the gym four times a week, because I was so afraid that it was going to all go to hell. I would open my mouth for a bite of our delicious wedding cake and blammo, the side seams would split and there would be a cataclysmic ripping of yards upon yards of European taffeta and then I’d hide behind the ice sculpture and cry bitter tears of fatness.

So who can blame Katherine Heigl, she of the Amazonian physique and sometimes bad potty mouth, for trying to lose weight when faced with these stresses? Despite your best attempts, the second you accept a proposal, your beauty and look is suddenly up for discussion. It might be the closest most of us ever come to walking the red carpet. The wedding industry is the equivalent of Joan and Melissa Rivers waiting for us, microphones in hand and wicked glints in their eyes. It can only exist if it fills us with self-doubt and sometimes, self-loathing. If you don’t have the right cake topper, just the perfect embossing on your invitations, the right length of veil, all will be lost! You will be doomed! It’s a minor miracle that any of us survive to tell the tale.

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