That's My Bix!

So I was sitting there last night on my LayZBoy recliner, the one we inherited from Ward and June and I hate because it is the color and texture of the insoles of a hundred old man shoes, and I had just made dinner for myself because Esteban was working uber late and ditched me yet again, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself over the dinner because it was pork loin, covered in Shake N Bake (something that I make once a decade for Esteban, as it was something his grandmother used to make), green beans, refrigerator biscuits, and actual real mashed potatoes that I peeled and boiled and put through a ricer and then mashed with chicken stock and fat free sour cream and just a wee bit (half pound) of butter and also there was brown gravy making a nice ishy skin on the stove, and I had changed into my pajamas even though it was still light out because hey, I wasn’t going anywhere and pajamas are just little coordinated outfits that you sleep in, right, and there was nothing on because the primetime Monday night lineup is God’s way of saying ‘You know, you really should read a book sometimes, I’m just saying’, so I was watching EVERWOOD of all things, (EVERWOOD!!!!) and thinking, man, I could go for some tapioca pudding, still warm and frothy, and then I realized, my god, I’m sitting here at 7 pm in my pajamas and it’s two days after Daylight Savings Day so it’s really 6 pm and I’m in my pajamas eating old people food sitting in an old person chair.

So here’s my question: why am I not dead yet? The shame of that should have rightfully struck me dead on the spot.

Weird moment: this weekend I trekked out to find myself a potato ricer and found myself in Kmart for the first time in a bazillion years. I was a bit dismayed, for if you listen to Martha Stewart you would have thought it was all redone and looking like Restoration Hardware in there, but I tell you, that is not the case at my local Kmart. The smell of cheap plastic crap still wafts through every now and then, but I suppose that even a liberal dousing of Febreze (blue light special in aisle 15, two for five!) would eradicate years of vinyl tablecloths, plastic pink flamingos and jelly shoes. However, it was almost a kinder, gentler shopping experience. Lots of old people in the store and lots of quiet accidental people, the people that don’t want you to notice them, the miscellaneous people that probably went to your high school but no one remembers, even after they look them up in the yearbook. It was strange. It’s almost like there was a mass merchandising consumer reorganization that sent the Loud and the Smelly to Wal-Mart and the Quietly Confused to K-Mart and the Too Snotty To Be Seen At Wal-Mart Uppity People over to the Target. I was mystified.

But then the answer rang out over the PA. Katie Couric telling the good shoppers of Kmart to get their colons checked.

Katie Couric. Talking about her rectum. At Kmart.

I actually looked around at the other shoppers. Were THEY hearing this? It was so surreal. I actually stopped there in the Household Organization aisle, where they had a sale on Martha’s lovely glass jars, to listen to the message from Katie about getting your butt checked by a registered physician.

Then I understood. The answer was clear. Kmart was for the people who could remain calm when reminded about colon health. People who are not thwarted with reminders of the existence of a morning personality’s elimination processes.

I am obviously not a Kmart person.

I’m still not entirely certain that I didn’t have some sort of blackout and dream it all, but my unconscious meanderings usually have a fashion montage set to an 80’s comeback hit and there is a very important lesson learned for all involved. But usually not involving my ass.

Is it online diary flirting if someone keeps linking me?

Last night, the collection of various angry hormones in my body got together and kicked my ass thrice. I am responsible for 1.2 packages of consumed Oreos over the last four days. This is not my beautiful diet but rather a recipe for diabetes. I don’t care. Fuck anyone who says anything. Fuck anyone who looks at me cross-eyed. Fuck everyone. Fuck.

Esteban has something wrong with his left eye. He looks like a pirate. He keeps asking me to analyze it, because I am the veteran of more than my share of eye infections. All of you perfect people who never get infections, thank me because I’ve got your back. Two days ago, he asked me how it looked and I advised him to put a hot compress on it. He pshawed that, wondering where the Burning Drops are from my last bout with the dreaded pink eye. I had thrown them out, but his eyeball is not infected, rather the eyelid. He thought about going to the doctor. I told him that he can but he will be told to put a hot compress on it. He sighed. Last night, he asked me how it looked. It now has two whitehead things on the inner lid. Put a hot compress on it, I said, resisting the urge to say ‘Arrrrgh, matey! Swab the deck or walk the plank!’ in my best Captain Hook.

He shocked me by agreeing and went to find a washcloth. The balance of our relationship is very fragile. It is my job to make sense and be nurturing and his job to be stubborn and resist. I do not know what to make of this.

He did a hot compress for 60 minutes, reheating the cloth every ten minutes. I held a heating pad to my abdomen, but no one needed to tell me five times to do that. You know, the Be A Girl recruitment posters never tell you about the 30 years of crampy agony. Maybe in the fine print.

This morning, again, ‘How does my eye look?’

Arrrrrgh matey, want to see my treasure?

All he needs is a parrot. Seriously.

Sometimes my head is a very funny place to be. And the phrase ‘Pain Thumbs’ still cracks me up. As does an email we received several months ago from the receptionist at work, bearing the subject line ‘Suspicious smells’. Good times.

An ice monster swiped through Green Bay last night and turned everything to crystal. All of the blades of grass are standing at regimental perfection. The trees are sponsored by Waterford, the garden gnomes by Swarovski. The street sign directing me to Broadway and Main was adorned with a beaded fringe stolen from a Cher costume, circa 1978. Currently, there are tiny square pellets of ice raining down and when the wind blows the branches have voices of breaking glass. All of the schools have closed. All of the daycares, all of the gyms, all of the everything. Except for my office. Everyone but my office. We never close. Because all life would cease if we didn’t know how much stuff people buy.

My car door was frozen shut. After twenty minutes with the heater running, I rolled down the window on the windward side and a sheet of ice remained independent of the window. The Sbux menu was art glass, blown by a Mexican peddler for tourists in Cancun. It was Mocha by Monet. Inside: Baristas by Degas.

As I drove over the ‘big bridge’ today on the highway, passing no less than four fallen SUVs in the ditch, I mentally prepared myself for sliding through the guardrail and the swan dive into the Fox River which churned like a chocolate Slurpy 150 feet below. Which should I do, open the car door during the fall or should I wait until in the water and break the window out with my feet? Could I break it out with my feet? No, open the window during the fall and swim out Dukes of Hazard style. Note to self: remember to do that.

There’s a new barista at Sbux.

I pulled up the other day, cranking some NIN and wearing the Rock Star jacket. Baransky Barista took my order through the speaker (‘Venti Cr’me de Menthe non fat no whip mocha please’), with her snipey little smugness, repeating it back to me incorrectly (‘Venti Cinnamon Mocha?’ ‘No, Vente CR’ME DE MENTHE non FAT no Whip mocha.’ ‘Cr’me de menthe mocha with skim milk?’ ‘And no whip’ ‘(big dramatic sigh) Drive up please (under breath) youhighmaintenancebitca’), but when I got closer to the drive through, I saw a hairy arm in the window. A hairy MAN arm. What was the Man Arm doing in the Sbux window? There hasn’t been a man barista at this Sbux since the Matt Damon barista and the Viggo Mortensen barista disappeared. Perhaps the Baransky Barista ate them as part of her ritual to stay young and snipey. She does have the look of a praying mantis who lost the faith and became an atheist and now doesn’t know what to do with its hands.

Do bugs have hands? But I digress.

And I know that God doesn’t love me enough to have brought back Starbucks Guy.

I drove up to the window and was greeted by one very manly looking barista who will from this point be known as the Ed Harris Barista because he had the buzzed head and the piercing blue eyes thing going on. And because he dazzled me with his smile. Was there flirting? Oh yes. There may have been. And he put a cup condom on my Mocha, something the other baristas NEVER do. But then, do not underestimate the power of the Rock Star jacket and the penetrating thump of Trent Reznor. Oh no. Do not.

An aside here: I just love it when a man who might be thinning a little on the top decides to just go for it and buzzes the whole thing off. It’s just’ I don’t know’ growl. On some men. Like Jean Luc Picard. Never Anthony Edwards, though. But then, the last time I watched ER, they showed a close-up of Dr. Green’s groiny region in scrubs and it burned a spot of crotchal green on my eye for days. (shudder)

I forgot to mention’ I bought a Starbucks card. It was probably a bad move, because I treat it like a license to caffeinate. I’ve already blown $60 and I’ve only had it a month, but actually, it really just highlights how the little $4 trips to Sbux can add up over the weeks. Gah. But then, summer’s coming and I’ll be back to a Diet Coke in the morning anyway and can put that $4 a day into a nice money market account. So I can eventually buy stock in Sbux. It’s a shame spiral in a cup of latte, no foam.

Yesterday, I was slowly tensing up until you could have cracked a walnut between my shoulder blades when my fun Norwegian coworker looked up and said ‘Wow, it’s only 9 o’clock’. And all of the little projects that constantly multitask in my brain came to a screeching halt. What? I already had that much stress and I had only been there officially for an hour (I say ‘officially’ because I wake up at 5 am and usually get into the office by 7:15ish to get 45 minutes of extra time in. It means that I don’t have to stay an extra 45 minutes above and beyond the night hours I’m already working.) So I looked at my vacation accrual and even after visiting New Orleans and San Francisco, I still had almost three weeks left. 14.5 days, to be exact. That half-day was aching to be tidied up, so I announced that I would be leaving for lunch at noon and not coming back. And then I made an appointment for a massage before I could second think the scariness of Bad Naked.

You see, in order to be massaged, you must be naked.

Insert ‘Eeek!’ here.

But I kept thinking about Sundry’s comment that she is practically stripping her clothes before she gets into the room now and I bucked up like a good little cowgirl. And I made certain that my massage therapist was a girl.

Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

I managed to stave off the hyperventilation until Jayme actually brought me into the room, showed me where I should leave my clothes and then closed the door. Actually, I didn’t start to hyperventilate until I was lying naked on the table, staring at the thing you put your face into and thinking, wow, I’m lying on my gordo stomach and my boobies are squashed under me but you can totally see everything and now she’s going to be touching me and my naked parts under this sheet and slathering me with Aveda stuff and I’ll be naked and Fat Girl Table for One and hey, these are totally my boobies getting squished and THAT can’t be attractive.

So she made me take three deep breaths and started to massage my back and you know what? It was good. Really good. I stopped thinking about computer issues and connectivity problems at client sites and brand movements and company buyouts and formatting problems on reports and just started enjoying my back rubbed and how nice and warm it was. I didn’t know what she was doing, but I started to name the things in my head. Like the Twisty Twirly Ladder and Tickle Dancy Fingers and the Popping The Packing Bubbles and the Skooshy Skooshy with its backwards movement the Wooshy Wooshy. And then there was the movement I called The Pain Thumbs. Jayme was a very tiny little girl, but man, her thumbs were evil thumbs. Perhaps she was in some accident wherein her thumbs were accidentally chopped off and her donor thumbs were from a criminal mastermind. She had thumbs, oh yes. Thumbs of Pain.

I got to this point where everything became simple. Yes, I was naked. Yes, I was under this nubby blanket that for some reason reminded me of oatmeal, and I was all slick and smelling of sandalwood and there was Enya playing in the background, but here I was, wondering why I wasn’t really born a Princess so that I could enjoy this every day of my life and have discussions with my masseuse about whether or not I was going to accept the hand of the Prince of Some Regal Small But Important Country in marriage because it would make for an alliance between our peoples and he has offered up chest full of valuable jewels and OH MY GOD PAIN THUMBS!!! THE PAIN THUMBS! NO MORE PAIN THUMBS! And now we’re back with the Skooshy Skooshy. Phew. If I were a Princess, I would have a differently colored Jaguar for every day of the week, yes I would. And I would have them painted to coordinate with specific outfits. Yes. Very nice. Hmmmm.

Even with the evil thumbs, I tipped Jayme $20 because touching the fat lady’s naked body should get some sort of hazard pay. And thus I am a massage virgin no longer. I am thankful that I have a lifestyle which will allow me to get the occasional massage or I fear I would resort to standing on the street corner offering up my skillz like some kind of massage junkie, or worse, some sort of Paypal Button at the bottom of my page, urging you to donate to the Rub A Bix fund. Because seriously, it’s just that good.

Last night, as is his way, Esteban began to rub my shoulders after our goodnight kiss.

‘Wow, they really did a job on you.’ He said, finding no stress, no tight muscles, nothing but smooth languid silk.

‘Yes. Massage good. I feel so relaxedzzzzzzzzzzz.’

‘Man, I’m bummed. Normally, I feel like I’m helping you out a bit, making it better, but they totally took that away from me. God, you don’t even need me anymore!’

‘No, of course I do, sweetie. Sometimes there are pickle bottles that I can’t open. And also, you know, spiders.’

‘Great.’ He said, and coped a feel. ‘Wow, you really are relaxed. You just let me touch the good stuff without saying a thing.’

‘See? When Mama’s happy, everybody’s happy.’

And then we both said nothing because we were totally squicked out by the implication that I was his mother.

There’s a new contest at Quoted.

I’ve been having strange dreams recently. Colors and tastes and textures not often seen in real life. Perhaps on the set of a movie or in a world manufactured by Michael Eisner, but not here, and certainly not there and definitely never in Green Bay Wisconsin. Lots of slick reds and yellows so glowy that it becomes painful to look at them and blacks so black they seem to hold religious value. I have never seen blacks as black as that.

I had a tiny mind movie at the Tori Amos concert. (which, by the way, I ended up somehow with a THIRD set of free tickets that went unused). The songs began to blend together and I was hidden under my jacket with my feet up on the railing, comfortable, so much more comfortable than a wooden backed chair should have been, cocooned in a chamber made of sound and light, sung by a woman who began to look like a witch from far away, when I squinted at her and I could only squint.

My eyes had gotten blurry and the lights kept collecting in the corners and chasing away my blinks. Until the women with leaves for hair was gone and the lights with the vine gels over them stopped spinning and I was back on our horse farm, the farm we had when I was six and seven.

I was collecting water from stumps because I suspected that it was poison. I was going to use it to kill my stepfather.

He had threatened to kill my mother and maybe me and then run away with my baby sister the previous night. So I was going to be prepared. And I planned to live in the 29-acre woods on our farm where the police would never think to look and sneak back to the barn to sleep at night in Bunny’s stall’ the motherly Palomino that was gentle and never kicked.

Once before the premeditation of his murder, I had been walking and got that shiver scary that you always get when you’re walking in the woods and the trees behind you gather closer and hide you from where you came. I braved onward, pretending I was a boy and not a girl who slept with a teddy bear already looking ratty from being accidentally covered with puke. I listened to the heartbeat in my ears subside and waited for the urge to pee my pants to settle down. But it never did. And then the feeling that someone was watching me hit a crescendo. I saw adult men through the trees watching me, materializing as though they had been there all along and it had taken some time for my eyes to adjust. Like darkness. Like seeing shapes in the night you think is a monster but it is only a bureau, but this was in reverse. They were dressed in old clothes, buckskin and beads, with long hair not braids as you see in movies, but long and wild. I wasn’t really afraid until I saw their eyes, which were white, only white and lit up in the bright sunlight as though there were a flashlight in their brains shining out at me. Lighting me up. Somehow making me feel guilty, as though I had stolen their eyes.

I had run back down the path screaming.

I decided that if I poisoned my step father, I would be put to death by lethal injection. I liked the way that sounded. Lethal Injection. I did not realize that Wisconsin was not a death penalty state. Or perhaps the police would burn me the way the Stormtroopers burned Luke’s aunt and uncle. So the plan was to go hide in the woods and well, if the light-eyed men came for me, I would explain to them that my aunts were both Native American and their dad was sort of like my grandfather and gave me beads once and I’d give it to them if they would show me how to pretend to be a birch tree the way that they did so well. And I would show them where I buried three baby bunnies that my stepfather had brought back (after he realized that he shot their mother) and I would show them where I let the fourth one go. And I would explain to them that I buried the snake that was run over in our driveway, which would prove right there that I didn’t just care for the cute animals, I had respect for all of them. I just wouldn’t look into their eyes. That’s all. I would just look at the ground so I wouldn’t see their light.

My stepfather didn’t kill us. Which was a good thing because my mother wouldn’t give me one of the good glasses to put the stump water into (which I had planned so very cannily switch for his water glass at dinner time because I was clever like Halley Mills). He didn’t die a retching violent death spewing stump algae. Such a waste of a perfectly poetic end for a villain. The devil is in the details.

But I did fill his 8-track tape deck with Johnson & Johnson Baby Lotion. Just to show him the damage I was capable of.

It’s probably a good thing, anyway, as he would haunt me to this day. And I’m certain that I wouldn’t be as ravishing a murderess as Queen Latifah or Catherine Zeta-Jones. I would have ended up as somebody’s bitch. Women’s prison is the worst place in the world for a girl with the Lesbian Catnip condition and Curvy Round Sex Goddess thing going on. But was it a memory or was it a dream. Or a memory of a dream. There are enough truths to make it reality and enough omissions to make the worst truth seem like a trifle. I remember the panic (that’s where the root of the word came from’ Pan’ the thought that Pan was frightening you out of his kingdom) when I’d walk in our forest. I remember the collections of ingredients, the potions that I’d make, usually involving ground burdock and nightshade and pulverized thistles. I remember the men with light instead of eyes but just don’t know what I’m remembering anymore. But I know the part about the 8-track tape did happen because while ghosts and premeditated murders may seem fuzzy, rather spectacular punishments are quite crystal.

The dreams aren’t all uncomfortable. I had one this morning about sitting alone in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate State Park, working on my laptop, listening to the rain and eating little spicy crackers while drinking green tea. It was quite lovely but also very very real, the sound of the rain, the gurgle of the waterfalls, the sound of footsteps on the wet paving stones. When I woke, I thought I smelled the green mossy rain and could taste the nip of the crackers.

Brains are so cool. We’re so very lucky to have them. But to be truthful, I’m a bit uncertain whether I should be nervous or thrilled to fall asleep tonight.

It’s one of those weird weekends where time slows down. I’ve noticed that they only seem to happen about once a quarter, and it almost feels a bit of a waste for it to happen on a weekend that is a nothing weekend. Although it is nice today, nice yesterday too although not as nice as today. I suppose it’s better that an extended weekend happen on a beautiful day rather than a dreadful one.

I had a half-day on Friday, to make up for working hella hours earlier in the week/over the weekend. When I left work on Friday, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to drive to Appleton to shop at the big mall, drive to Milwaukee (about two hours away) for Torrid and spices and possible Hootchie Mama store action, or just go home and make myself a sandwich. I ended up going home, making a sandwich, and then noticing my Prescriptives color analysis sitting there. I’ve carted that thing to San Francisco and New Orleans because we do not have a Prescriptives counter in Green Bay. The closest one is Appleton, but the closest real counter, where they do the custom foundation blends, is in Milwaukee. I took it as an admonition from the Goddesses of Shopping that my ass needed to go to my favorite mall in the world and get myself some good makeup. And chubby punk girl clothes.

I blew down there, bebopping on caffeine and my newly created Techno mix CD. I stopped downtown at my favorite spice store, then went out to the ghetto to find a Hootchie Mama store. I did, but there was nothing that really looked promising. Perhaps the magic is gone after the first time. I’m so disappointed now. The good store, with the excellent clearance merchandise, was downtown. The girls at the ghetto stores pick the racks clean, leaving strange fashion crimes against humanity in their wake. I do have my Rock Star jacket from there, but truthfully, it’s bittersweet. Carissa was picking me up at 8, so I had to leave by 5 to make it home by 7. Then it was off to Mayfair Mall, which is where I would like my ashes scattered when I die. When I pulled into the Mall’s parking lot, it was quarter to five. Not good. I rushed up to Torrid, found only a hot pink t-shirt advertising a Wench Auto Mechanics and some black rubber bracelets and received some overly friendly attention from the female store manager. The store is going through some wacked Avril Levigne phase right now and it was making me feel really old. And they had the short plaid skirt that I covet, but only in the Barely Curvy sizes. Then down to Prescriptives where I blew way too much money on lipstick, lip gloss, eye shadow, and a $50 bottle of something called Line Preventer, but I call ‘Crevice Filler’. It makes the foundation look better or something. Crazy girl logic.

I wasted even more precious minutes by scouting for a Sbux. The girl barrista checked me out in a very obvious way. Apparently I was sending out the vibes again. I then sped my way out of Milwaukee, fighting rush hour and avoiding the traffic delayed freeway. About fifteen miles north of the city, the caffeine in my Venti Mocha hit and I was scream singing to Weezer and Green Day, trying to suck up as much cool radio station as I could before I lost them the static. I missed two phone calls with the screaming. Not to mention, the road noise is rather incredible at ninety miles an hour. Chauffi called at one point, having just visited the hospital for allergy shots. The conversation was something like this.

So the rest of the drive was more or less a blur, but I made it home by a little after seven and made myself look cute and was ready at the very moment that Carissa’s headlights hit my front door.

The Bad Bar evening really deserves its own entry, but the sexually charged highlights were as follows: Scotty Boom Boom showed up and got to see my sparkly cleavage; after asking them to play a certain song four or five times, Carissa asked me to ask them to play it, so I asked the Bald Bartender and he walked over and immediately played the song because he cannot resist the power of the Bix; Eric smells really good; I licked a trail of Pixy Stik sugar off of Penny’s thigh for Scotty; the Bald Bartender gave me several free drinks and also licked his finger and trailed it down his chest which I think was his way of flirting; I was given not one but TWO free bottles of Boone’s Farm; we were all doing ok with our level of sobriety until the Boone’s Farm came out; Carissa, Penny and I went outside and stood so that just the bottom of the window ledge was chin height and then lifted our shirts so that the people in the bar could see that we were flashing them but they couldn’t see what we were flashing and that made us giggle. A lot. And then later, Penny flashed us in her kitchen then later Carissa and I were talking about nipples so now we both know what each other’s nipples look like.

It’s a Bad Bar. That’s all there is to it. Bad Bar.

I had more to write but I must get dressed for The Andys. I have no idea what I’m going to wear and Esteban is balking on attending. He doesn’t want to walk down the red carpet and deal with the Rivers women. I suppose I could always call Russell Crowe, as he has been calling and calling, wondering if I wanted to split a limo with him. Gah. That boy is all hands.