That's My Bix!

Have I mentioned recently how woefully unprepared I am for the holidays? I have? Of course I have, because I am very much like a broken record, perhaps warped and if you look at it spinning too long, you’ll get sort of seasick feeling and then have to sit on the couch nibbling on Saltines and breathing through your mouth.

So yeah, everyone’s getting gift cards. I swear. I think it’s because after every Christmas when I nearly kill myself to find the very perfect bestest gift in the whole wide world of giftdom, the recipients are just like ‘yeah, huh, thanks’ because what in my head seems like a very appropriate gift is probably not all that great. And just now, while I was patting myself on the back, I just remembered that once I gave someone a bag meant to store their jumper cables. And thought it was the most clever thing ever, because certainly that jumble of jumper cables in ones trunk must bother other people as well. A jumper cable cozy. Go me. That’s even worse than slipper socks, medium. And really, most of my favorite gifts are gift cards, so damn. Damn. Gift cards all around. I even bought a bunch of silver Chinese takeout boxes so that the person actually has something to open, rather than handing them an envelope and gee, I wonder what’s in it? Of course, after the first person opens their moo shu gift card, the secret will be out, but there it is.

However, if you need a gift for the kitchen magician in your life, Amazon has 5 qt. Kitchen Aid Mixers on sale for $169, with an extra $25 off for spending more than $125 in Housewares, bringing the grand total for a true gourmet lust item to $144, since there’s free shipping and no tax.

I don’t know a single cook who doesn’t covet the Kitchen Aid mixer (save for the people who already have them, and then they probably want another one in pink or stainless steel or something). Personally I clicked on the Empire Red version without even thinking. Squeee! Sure, I don’t mix anything, but only because I don’t have an Empire Red Kitchen Aid mixer! Until now!

Yeah, I’m a piece of work. I buy my family impersonal gift cards and then buy myself the girly equivalent of a Harley Davidson motorcycle (although technically, that would be a Vespa) but you see, this way my loved ones can decide for themselves if they want a mixer or something else! See, it’s genius, really!

Denial is nine tenths of the law. Especially at the holidays. God bless us, everyone.

Dear Johnny Depp,

I am sorry to inform you but the crush that blossomed in my heart when you portrayed Captain Jack Sparrow with such effortless salty goodness may very well be dead for good. (Confused? Please refer to this)

Sincerely,
Ms. Bix

PS. Please cross ‘Dorothy Hamill Bob’ off your list of potential hairstyles and the entire planet will thank you.

Ok, this diary is doing weird things to my mind. In my response paper, I wrote Frankenstein showcases the fight of good vs. evil. But who is exactly evil, the intelligent but immoral Dr. Frankenstein or the hideous monster who has been scorned by society for his looks (much like Shelley’s countryman John Merrick would face years after her death). Anecdotes suggest that Shelley conceived this story after her baby was stillborn, perhaps stemming from a dream (or nightmare) in which she reanimated the corpse and suffered the fate of playing with life and death. Much like I am playing with danger (Mother May I sleep with danger?) when I keep eating this frosted sugar cookies because goddamn, goddamn I say! They are so very delicious and perhaps will force me into a diabetic coma at which time an evil scientist will try to salvage my bod for parts. So to sum up, science=bad, playing God=bad, cookies=good. Dear Mr. Scientist: please give my undead monster Beyonce’s ass, thanks.

And the sad thing is that I need six sources, and I honestly thought about quoting my own internet persona, but I have no idea how to cite that.

Funny thing: my Norwegian coworker and I often bond over things that bug us about our office. For instance, there is a gaggle of post-menopausal women who all work together, eat together, take breaks together, go for walks together, etc. When they walk down hallways, they walk side by side, chattering (about what I cannot imagine, since they have been working together in this inseparable manner for twenty years) and walking very very slowly, like distracted cattle, trapping you behind them in our narrow corridors, so you are weaving around like a hyperactive sheltie, hoping they will notice you and allow you to pass them, or possibly break a step so that you may squeeze past. They like to stop suddenly when the topic has distracted them from the task at hand (or foot) of traveling through the hallway, and they will exclaim ‘You’re kidding? Cream of mushroom soup and onion soup mix?’ or something of the like.

Today, my Norwegian coworker brought me another pearl. You see, there are three bathroom areas in the building. One of the sets is in an area that is densely populated with females, so they turned the men’s room into another women’s bathroom. The larger of the two sets is always plagued with problems. They’ve had an ‘Out of Order’ sign on the men’s bathroom since Friday, which leaves them with one. Nils informed me that there is only one stall in this bathroom and the rest is urinals (ah urinals’ one of my favorite things about being a girl is the fact that I never have to think about socially accepted pee sinks). One stall for all the men in a 300 person building. And someone leaves a newspaper in there, so whoever is in there for some quiet time, sits there reading while a line grows outside the bathroom.

I don’t know why that makes me laugh, but it does. Probably because there’s such a sense of entitlement there. ‘Look buddy, I know you’ve got to go, but I’m here now and I’m setting up camp’ while a throng of men line the cubicles, trying to avoid eye contact and the poop shivers.

I try not to talk about this too much and am fond of making grand jokes about it, but the truth of the matter is that I had kind of a shitty childhood. There are things I’ve never told anyone, not even Esteban. Once without thinking, I mentioned something relatively minor in passing to my sister Mo and when I heard her reaction, I realized my head is just a Pandora’s box. Besides, to drag things back into the front of my brain makes me angry and bitter. The story is full of lots of maudlin bullshit that would fill an entire Weetabix-themed week of primetime on the Lifetime network, starring Tracy Gold, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Ricki Lake, Yasmine Bleeth and Camryn Manheim (in the heartrenching body image themed feature) respectively. In it, there would be the physically and emotionally distant father (played by Tom Wopat, John Heard, Mark Ruffalo, Craig Bierko, and Dale Midkiff), a good old boy stepfather (played by David Keith, Gary Cole, Nick Searcy, John Schneider, and from beyond the grave, Steve McQueen) and a struggling and occasionally unfocused mother (played by Cher, Valerie Bertinelli, Cher, Naomi Judd, and Cher).

In truth, I try not to focus on it very much, or even really talk about it. After my mother divorced my father for what was most likely a very good reason (drinking and cheating are likely, but I can’t remember if I knew that or if I heard it in a Patsy Cline song), she began dating (and eventually married) my stepfather, the man who I would later call in a national magazine ‘an ogre.’ In what is almost a perfect metaphor for that time of my childhood, I have a faint memory of watching my father’s back disappearing down the stairs of the tiny second-story apartment we were living in after he dropped me off after a soon-to-be-ended father/daughter weekend. In what is also a perfect metaphor for that time of my life, my first memory of the man who would become my stepfather was when I was about two or three and couldn’t fall asleep during naptime. He came into the room and spanked me. Hard. I remember sitting there crying, shocked that a)he thought spanking me would somehow make me sleepy, b)my mother had just sat there and let it happen, and c)this person I barely knew was now someone I would now have to fear.

When a story has more than one villain, it’s hard to remember who to root for.

There were other things. Things that happened. Things that were done. You’ll have to trust me on that, as I’m not going to be the poster child for childhood trauma anymore than is necessary.

However, the one shining thing in this was that my new stepfather had a wonderful large family of very loving good old Wisconsin folk. They hunted, they fished, they drank and they laughed. There would never be a doctor or a scientist from their ranks, but they were hard workers, decorated for every holiday and threw on a good spread at dinner time. And, to their credit, they seemed to accept the fact that the first wedding in their brood was going to be to a girl who had one failed marriage and a three-year-old before she had hit a quarter century. Apparently anything that would domesticate the family hellion was probably a good thing.

And even after my mother packed up my sister and I in the middle of one cold November night (after I had accidentally spilled that he had left me (age 7) to watch my sister (age 2) while he and his friend went off somewhere with two giggling girls until after dark and I had been too afraid to go into the ancient farmhouse where I decided Frankenstein was waiting, so I made us stay in the barn where I felt safe with the horses), his family would still invite me to their Christmases (although there was a weird disparity between the presents for my sister and myself, mostly because my stepfather chose to only lavish attention upon his blood daughter) his mother always made sure that she treated me exactly the same as the other grandchildren. And then as I got older, I started to feel a weird vibe that may or may not have been legit, but I decided to stop going. However, his sister Sharon still sent me birthday cards, still sent Christmas presents home with my sister for me. She came to my graduation. She attended our wedding. I still think of her as my Aunt Sharon, in a weird post-millennial family kind of way.

So when I got an invitation to her 50th birthday party, I was pleased that she had thought about me, but I felt weird about going. I mean, there surrounded by all of those memories. It wasn’t like I never saw any of those people. I saw them at Abby’s birthday parties and bumped into them from time to time around town. But all at once, with no buffer save for my sister. It was pretty intense. So my passive-aggressive tendencies took over and I forgot about it, despite the handwritten invitation that I left on my bathroom counter. And then there was a work thing for all the people who are getting riffed. I sort of had to go to that too. They were both on Friday evening.

Truth be told, I didn’t want to go to either. I really didn’t want to be in a bar. I didn’t want to deal with the thick subtext, all of the things going unsaid in both situations. I went home after work because I had a headache and ostensibly to change my clothes and eat something before going out. Except that I didn’t’ I stayed in the performance fleece pullover and tshirt and jeans I had worn to work. I ate a pear and some cheese for dinner (very European, non?) and then after chatting with Esteban, who was trying to catch up with his Sisyphusian job, we talked about how I sort of didn’t want to go be around all of those people. Esteban then declared that he would go to the birthday thing with me, because he wanted to get out of the house. Great, way to lock me in, babe.

In bold deflecting move, I decided that I would just check into the coworker thing. As soon as I walked in, I was glad that I didn’t submit to my curmudgeonly ways and had kept at least one of my social obligations because I do genuinely like many of my coworkers. I chatted with them a bit, made plans for later, and then left to make an appearance at Aunt Sharon’s birthday party.

But then I started waffling. I didn’t have a present for her, and I hate going to birthdays without a present. Also, the coworkers wanted to go to the Bad Bar later and were going to call me, so I needed to go home and charge my cell phone. Or something. There were clearly a million reasons why I should just go home and take a nap instead. When I walked in the door, Esteban said ‘Your sister called’ she wanted to know if you were going to show up.’ ‘What did you tell her?’ ‘That I didn’t know. She wants you to call her.’

‘Fine, let’s go.’ I grumbled. Esteban was happy, because he’d been working for fourteen hours at that point, but I was already making plans to come in, wish Aunt Sharon a happy birthday and then hide in a corner, perhaps using Esteban as a flannel plaid shield, for an acceptable amount of time and then leave.

When I got there, I went over to Aunt Sharon, who was so ecstatic to see me, that immediately I felt bad knowing that I had been about to pike for my own comfort rather than thinking about this sweet lovely woman who had made it a point to always sign her cards ‘Aunt Sharon’ long after her brother had remarried. She tactfully reminded me of everyone in the room, by going up to her own siblings and saying ‘Uncle Mike, you probably don’t recognize Weetabix because she’s all grown up now’ but of course I recognized all of them. However, with this reintroduction, I was forced to talk to them and it officially broke the wall of years between us. I was chatting with his mother, whose face absolutely lit up when she realized that I was there, when someone tapped me on my shoulder. I turned, expecting to see Esteban, but instead, there was my stepfather.

I hadn’t talked to him in years. It was always a mutual understanding of a nodding distance, and quite honestly, I was fine with that. Avoidance is my medium of choice, and I paint elaborate still-lifes of estrangement and silence. However, apparently after more than a few drinks and watching his family all excited to talk to the unofficial first of the next generation, he felt the need for an armistice.

And so there I stood, trying desperately to receive this conversation in the spirit it was intended (a little drunk, perhaps, a little ‘God, I shouldn’t check out her boobs’, but still well meaning). I escaped back to the bar where Esteban and Mo were smoking, but he followed me. There he told a story about how once we had been at my Great Grandparent’s house and I had apparently slammed a cupboard door and he had yelled at me then, and how my Grandmother had never liked him from that point forward, and then even called our house later to tell him that the cupboard door did tend to close very loudly and how she was going to have my Grandfather fix it. I was struck by how touching that was, how these people, this man, were all conduits of my history. Despite how I had tried to forget about them, he was now the only person who could share how my little five foot tall quiet and ladylike Great Grandmother would champion my case against a hard ass, in her own impeccable polite way.

Mo heard the tail end of the story, so he repeated it, this time demonstrating with eerie verisimilitude how he had said ‘Weetabix! You don’t slam the cupboard door!’ It’s amazing how the tone of a particular voice can make you a child again, but in that second, I tensed right up, could have iterated exactly how he would sound had he needed to say it again, and how he would sound the third time and how there wouldn’t be a fourth time.

He hugged me at least three times throughout the evening, kissing my cheek and telling me that he loves me, he means it, he loves me, and anything I need, anything, work on my car, work on my house, call him and he will be there for me. Which, to be honest, is more than my own father has ever said in my entire life.

I rolled my eyes at Mo and Esteban, because I’m an asshole. Mo reminded me that he was trying and I should be nice, and she was right. He was obviously trying and I should be nicer. It’s just very hard and I can’t resist being a bad person sometimes.

On the ride home, Esteban and I were talking about it. I was wigging out, because the whole thing had been really surreal. I didn’t know how I felt being suddenly accepted by the Public Enemy Number One from my shitty childhood and how it was to be hugged and kissed by him and how I couldn’t respond when he said that he loved me, how human instinct is to reply ‘I love you too’ but I couldn’t make the words with my mouth. I mean, who tells a five year old that no one will like them because they are too fat? Who? Especially when they are just a normal-sized kid? And then sends them to their room because they can’t finish their supper? And the worst things that happened weren’t the worst things, the viewer discretion advised scenes that would get Emmy nominations for Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and dead Steve McQueen ‘ they were these little comparative nothings that shouldn’t have mattered as much as they did.

I didn’t say any of that, though, because sometimes you just can’t talk about such things, especially when the completely unexpected happens and the villain gives you hugs and tells you how much he loves you.

Esteban, however, could hear everything that I couldn’t say. ‘You know, maybe he’s trying to make up for being such an asshole when he was younger. Maybe he knows and he’s sorry now. Maybe he’s trying to show you that.’

‘He should be’ was all I could answer. There was so much to say, so much anger and sadness that I have every right to have, but at the same time, I want to be done with all of this crap. It’s such a waste to spend the next sixty years of your life trying to get over the first ten. ‘He should be.’

I know that every year I bemoan my lack of holiday spirit, but seriously, I am sort of looking at Christmas like it’s a guy I knew from high school and I’m desperately hoping that he’s not going to come over here’oh shit, he’s totally coming over here’ Heeeeeeey! How are you? What have you been up to? Man it’s been, what, fourteen years? Yeah. Yeah. No, I haven’t heard anything about a reunion. No, kidding, you’re selling Amway now? You don’t say. Wow, that’s great, really great. Well, it was good running into you again!

Maybe it’s because snow continues to evade us. Over the weekend, I drove to Pulaski (hometown of people who work for the smelly factory place and also my neighbors, the Clampetts) looking for some cookies, because I had a major jones for frosted sugar cookies and sometimes the non-squicky butcher has cookies from a Pulaski bakery that are unbelievably wonderful, even though they are often kitschy designs like smiley faces and whatnot, because the smiles are made with piped chocolate and the cookies are made with crystal meth. I (perhaps you should know that just now, I hit the ‘i’ key so hard that the crack of the key made the cat jump and now the middle finger of my right hand sort of hurts. (I don’t know why I felt compelled to tell you that. I’ve had these weird compulsions to overshare recently. Last night while driving home from Milwaukee, I called Esteban to inform him that my hind portions were so chapped from repeatedly* using the UWM’s vellum-esque one-ply industrial grey toilet tissue that I was contemplating bringing my own roll of Quilted Northern to class but then it would necessitate buying a book bag, as right now I just haul in my purse, notebook, liter of Dasani, and whichever book we’re talking about that week. Esteban commented that only I could turn a chapped ass into a reason to go shopping)) hit a bunch of deer hunting traffic coming south. Each car was covered with a good three inches of snow. At the one stop sign in the middle of town, there was a stretch of about fifteen feet of road, wet with slush where the inertia of stopping would send snow sliding off the cars. It looked like someone had smashed a fifteen foot tall snow globe right there in the intersection. Everything else was completely snow free. I considered driving north, to find out where the snowline was, but then decided that I wasn’t that curious and had a ton of (fucking) laundry to do. Which I then didn’t do. Such is a weekend. But I did make some really good homemade bread instead. Priorities, people!

Then, last night after class, as I was walking out of our weird urban jail-type building, it was raining. As I crossed the courtyard, it became sleet and then I watched as big fluffy white flakes landed on my black t-shirt. I turned back and could still see rain in the light by the building. In crossing the courtyard to the library, I had traveled through the beginning of the weather system that then followed me halfway home. There were giant flakes, accumulation, slushy crap, black ice and idiots driving too fast for conditions: everything that makes winter in Wisconsin a marvelous thing. And then it all stopped again and there was just dry road and starlight and the faint glow of the Borealis as far as the eye could see (and tragically not, as I originally typed, ‘Boreanaz as far as the eye could see’). Apparently the wicked wizard Winterbolt is messing with Northeastern Wisconsin. Frozen Tundra, bah. Utah is making us look bad, and that’s just not right. Come on, Jack Frost! We’ve got a reputation to uphold here. Ah well, at least we can buy alcohol on Sundays.

*This was due to a recent Taco Bell kick because I am feeling nostalgic for my college underclassman years where the extent of my dining out consisted of two bean burritos (minus onions) and an ice water from Taco Bell, all of which could be purchased for the princely sum of $1.59 and if I timed it right, would enable me to coast until Arsenio, when my entire dorm got together and ate Franco-America** canned spaghetti (available at the local supermarket for 50 cents a can, and I think hasn’t really been affected by inflation, unlike the lowly Taco Bell bean burrito, which now cost almost twice what they did in 1990). I also feel compelled to tell you that I cannot eat bean burritos from Taco Bell in front of my coworkers or anyone, really, because I always have to massage the filling up to the tip of the burrito before sticking it into my mouth and it feels very pornographic, stroking the filling up through the shaft like that and then planting my lips around it. And then biting and tearing off a hunk. Actually, that’s were the metaphor sort of unravels and goes into a very scary place. I would like to take this moment and apologize to my male readers for the above paragraph. You may now unclench your legs.

**For readers who like to play the home version of Dumber Than A Box of Rocks, Franco-American’s brand name is being discontinued but can be found under the brand name Campbell’s, who really owned it (along with other surprising things like Pepperidge Farm Brussels cookies and perhaps the biggest shocker, Godiva chocolates), all along. I have to waste my brain capacity to know this stuff for a living and so I pass the wisdom on to you.

I had to break up the entry so you get confused and think you’re reading Mimi’s page and wonder where all the funny went (although sometimes I do torment Tilly by saying ‘Cat! Now! Cat eat eat cat meow meow meow!’ except that it is not cute because I am not Nora and I am also not two years old. Tilly however doesn’t care as long as she gets to gorge herself on Science Diet and then purge rather dramatically over the side of the basement steps, as she fancies herself a feline Jackson Pollack and is just waiting for the money to start rolling in so she can rid herself of our annoying cover stealing asses) but by now the preponderance of parentheticals should make it quite obvious that You Are Here.

Esteban : Babe, Rudolph is on.

Weetabix : Rudolph!!!!! EEEEEEE!

Esteban : I knew this would happen.

Weetabix : Oh, it’s mostly over. They’re already on the Island of Misfit Toys, see? That means I missed my favorite part where Clarice sings ‘There’s always tomorrow, for dreams to come true’. Now I totally want a red polka-dot bow for my hair.

Esteban : Ah Hermie and Yukon Cornelius, the most misunderstood love affair of our time.

Weetabix : I sort of dislike Yukon Cornelius. He calls the Snowmonster a Bumble because he can’t pronounce Abominable. He’s the type that misspells words to be cute too, I’ll bet.

Esteban : Yes, certainly, Yukon is a fan of the written word.

Weetabix : Polar bears and puberty’ man, it must be tough to be a reindeer.

Esteban : (as Rudolph gains antlers)Hehehehe’ he’s horny.

Weetabix : Yeah, whatever. Dork. This is one of the few Christmas specials were Santa is kind of a crochety old bastard. ‘Oh Santa, where is my mom and dad and sexy deer girlfriend?’ ‘I don’t know, Rudolph, but quite frankly, but what about MY needs? Me, me, me!’

Esteban : Santa clearly has a lack of people skills, which explains the North Pole thing. Oh, the Abominable Snowmonster, with a weakness for barbecue.

Weetabix : And this plan, I never understood. Take away his teeth and he’s a what’ incredible angry strong animal with jaw pain. And then the writers fake you out, like they killed Yukon and all of the little dogs, including the Pomeranian. Sure, he’s only dead for like, a minute, but still.

Esteban : Did he just say ‘had to get the women back to the North Pole’? (laughs) Tell me, babe, do you feel the urge to give the Burl Ives snowman a lecture now?

Weetabix : It’s all part of the times. It was apparently ok in the sixties to cast out noncomformists if you were absolutely sure that you wouldn’t have a use for them in the future. Oooh, it’s the ‘Eat Poppa Eat&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9- that’s probably my favorite line of the whole thing. Of course he didn’t want to eat. That apple is GREY.

Esteban : Fresh fruit is probably hard to come by up there.

Weetabix : Whoa’that elf is totally Ted from Queer Eye.

Esteban : All elves are gay, actually, because there aren’t any girls.

Weetabix : There are so many things wrong with that sentence, but the first being that there are so girls.

Esteban : Where?

Weetabix : See, right there.

Esteban : ONE! Like Smurfette.

Weetabix : No, and there, in pink, see? They all wear pink. Actually, they are all exactly the same girl elf, over and over and over.

Esteban : They’re just Stepford Elves.

Weetabix : That’s not fair. The boy elves get some personality. Look, there’s the hipster elf, in Wayfarer sunglasses. I’ll bet he’s a pain in the ass when the other elves talk about a cool band, he sniffs ‘Oh yeah, them? I saw them at CBGB’s in 94, back before they got too didactic.’

Esteban : You know, YOU’RE the hipster elf.

Weetabix : I haven’t worn Raybans since 1993. Aw, look, Hermie got himself a beard.

Esteban : A beard?

Weetabix : You don’t know what that is, do you?

Esteban : No, and I don’t want to know.

Weetabix : You should know. It’s a pop culture thing. It’s what you call the girlfriend of a guy who is in the closet.

Esteban : Oh, you’re totally not the hipster elf.

Ah, I’m Bono and this is the Saturday Night Live. This is not a rebel song. This is Saturday Bloody Live. Something. Camera? Is this my camera? This is Bono’s camera. We get three songs because we’re U2, fronted by Bono.

Yeah. That’s right. I’m Bono. Big B, two ohs, little n. No. Not Boon. Bono. I’m art, you wouldn’t understand. That’s why I speak Spanish in the beginning of Vertigo. Because no one understands me. That’s how I can get away with saying “One two three fourteen”. Because I’m Bono.

Now we swing the camera around. Swing the camera. This is Bono’s camera. And this is Bono’s camera. What? Where’s Bono? Where did Bono go? I play hide and seek. You weep when you cannot see me and now here I am and you may smile again.

This is the Edge. The Edge and I aren’t talking right now because I tried to tell him that those Converse shoes were low rent and I was wearing my leather blazer and D&G Bono glasses which convert me from my secret identity into Bono.

Hello Miss Frightened Blonde Lady in the Audience Watching Bono. Rejoice because you’ve got Bono humping your lap. Don’t hate me because I’m Irish. Heeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaahoooooh! Hear my pain. And now I wink at my camera and then clutch Blonde Girl From The News Part That I Never Watch to my breast. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. You love me. Hey. Don’t weep on the leather. Heeeeeeaaaahooooh! You love Bono! Fourteen!