That's My Bix!

So potlucks.

I got somehow roped into organizing a potluck at work. And that involved somehow various overly processed meat products. Yeah, that’s a great idea. Give the former vegetarian the job of meat-wrangling. Go team.

I procured mass quantities of various hot dogs, wieners (because they ARE the same thing. Yes they are! Don’t argue.), and frozen pre-fab ground sirloin patties. I figured that the penile-shaped meat thingies would be no big deal. I’d just through that crap into a crock-pot filled with water and be done with it. But the discus shaped meat thingies would involve some Weetabix intervention.

Ok. So I informed Esteban that he would be designated grill monkey for this project. He agreed. Problem solved. Only I did not take into account that he has the short-term memory of your average bobbing head Chihuahua and was going to be in Las Vegas during the necessary grilling time.

Ok. This is controllable. I brought home some twenty pounds of frozen meat discus (Discuses? Discus’? Discusii?) and heated up our grill.

Then the sky turned black. And a strange half-warm/half-cold wind started to blow and change directions. All of the people with trailers started huddling under the El Caminos which are up on cement blocks in their front yards.

Oh dear.

Now, I realllllllly didn’t want to cook 50 burger patties in my house. I mean, that’s more meat than our stove has seen in its entire life. It might go into shock. Secondly, I don’t cook negligible meat products for my husband, so why would I do that for the people at work? At least with the grill, I could have sort of an assembly line thing going on and also get to play with fire.

So the tornado.

It started to rain and I kept creeping the grill further and further into the garage until big splotches of rain were hitting the top and sizzling. I was jamming out to an old Elvis Costello CD and trying to more or less ignore it because sometimes I have found that if you pretend certain things don’t exist, they go away. Finally, I pulled the dang thing into the garage, which then filled up with smoke and then I realized ‘Oh, so this is why you don’t see people grilling in their garages.’

Yeah. I know. I never claimed to be smart, people!

So I coughed and coughed and couldn’t sing about a girl whose name was Veronica any longer, thus I turned off the grill and brought the cooked (which turned into what I can only describe as ‘meat cookies’) and uncooked alike into the house.

And that’s when I heard the warnings. First I thought it was the smoke alarm going off due to the massive cloud of smoke I brought into the house with me, but it was in fact, an actual big old meteorological event of crisis proportions.

There were twisters, Auntie Em, and they’re coming our way.

And the worst part of this is that if I should die today, I will die smelling like propane and smokey beefyness. I hope St. Peter is not a vegetarian. Because, seriously, I have a rather tenuous hold on that whole heaven thing already and I don’t need to be racking up carnivore points as well.

True story: for three days, I worked as a grill cook at a rather pathetic drive-thru hamburger place. Seriously. I was 19 and I had just moved out with my psycho roommate and needed a job because I was living on frozen corn and instant mashed potatoes. Under significant pressure from Esteban, I applied to a drive-thru hamburger place because he was constantly telling me that my standards were too high.

They were too high. And for good reason.

The hamburger place hired me on the spot. I didn’t want to work in the front because I didn’t want anyone I knew to see me wearing the stupid little red bow-tie and goofy ‘My Name Is Hamburger Pimp Daddy’ name tag. That left working the grill. The first day, my shift ended up being three hours, during which they made me watch insanely stupid training videos, the type which amounted to ‘This is a Grill. It is hot. Don’t put your face on it. And don’t crush the hamburger buns.’ I completely identify to Buffy’s job at DoubleMeat Palace because it is so eerily similar to my tenure at Hamburgers R’Us that it makes me cringe. The only difference being that instead of ground meat, we had frozen meat wafers which were practically see-thru.

My first shift was three hours long. That was training. That’s how high-tech it was. There were little buzzers which told you when to do everything. Beep put the burgers on the grill Beep flip the burgers Beep take the buns out Beep put more burgers on the grill.

The second day, I was considered an apprentice. I stood there and watched the experienced burger guy do his stuff. He was 25 and had a wife, who also worked at Hamburgers R’Us. They lived in his father’s basement. I am not making that up.

The second day, I decided that I hated it.

I wanted to quit right then. Esteban harassed me and made me feel like a slacker and gave me this entire speech that I swear could have come from my great grandfather. Something about work not being fun and you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do and suck it up, ya whiner and stuff like that.

So I went another day. And that’s the day that I had to strain the lard for the fries. Yes. Lard. And I burnt my hands no less than 42 times. And the worst part was that my ‘shifts’ were only 3 hours long, so basically my entire day was shot and I had to press this white shirt thingy and drive across town to this burger place and back, all for roughly $12 before tax. I did that math as I was sorting through very fried crusty fossil-like things and decided that I could be a slacker. So I gave my notice and they said ‘Oh, buh-bye. Make sure to hand in your bow tie or we’ll keep your check.’ Yeah, because I’d had just the outfit which needed a pork fat laden red bow-tie.

And I learned a valuable lesson that day (cue sappy poignant music of self-love, voice possibly by Mariah Carey or some other bellowing songstress): never subjugate yourself and go against your original instincts, especially not your fashion sense.

Anyway, me and cooking hamburgers’ not so much. That’s all I’m saying.

If any of you are any good at making web layouts, let me know. I’m feeling a little antsy and need a change. The only two requirements are that Chubby Tink must remain and the text part must be wider. I don’t like it when I put in pictures and then you have to scroll to see them. Oh, and some people print this page off and that’s a lot of dead trees on my karma.

Do you think that Kirsten Dunst actually looked at herself in that soaking wet dress and said “Hey, you can totally see my Gwyneth Paltrow’s in this thing?” Because, if I were her, I’d be totally pissed that no one mentioned how nipply she was. I mean, Tobey is a nice guy, you’d think he would have said something.

And the bad weather seems to have passed, so I guess I’ll get back out to the grill and keep making meat cookies.

Esteban: (farts under covers)

Weetabix: (swats him gently) Aahhhhh!!!! Flag the covers! Flag it!!!!

Esteban: (waving corner of the comforter around) You hit me.

Weetabix: You farted directly on me.

Esteban: That’s no excuse to hit me.

Weetabix: Directly. On. My. Leg. Your noxious ass fumes.

Esteban: Seriously. You’re a spousal abuser.

Weetabix: Arrrgh. You smell.

Esteban: You’re a husband beater.

Weetabix: You’re a walking toxic waste facility.

Esteban: I’m amazed that you don’t burst into flames at those Take Back The Night rallies you go to.

Weetabix: If you lit a match in here right now, I think my leg would burst into flames.

Chelsea: (climbing atop his chest) Mrrrow’mrrrowwww’.mrroooowwwww

Weetabix: Don’t do it, Chelsea. Run. Flee.

Esteban: Oh my god, cat, you have foul breath.

Weetabix: That’s karma right there.

Esteban: Aaarrgh. Move back.

Weetabix: See’ bad smell karma. For every bad smell you inflict upon me, you will receive a similiarly or worse smell in return.

Esteban: Yeah. I’m going to hell.

Weetabix: I say that all the time.

Esteban: You say that I’m going to hell.

Weetabix: No. That I’m going to hell.

Esteban: Why would you be going to hell?

Weetabix: Oh, in fact, just the other day, I was writing this conversation with my uterus’

Esteban: I wish I could tape you sometimes. Like, I could use it as evidence if I ever need to have you put away.

Weetabix: It was on my diary.

Esteban: Tell it to the shrink at your new mental health facility. You know, Joel reads your diary in front of me and just sits there saying ‘Oh my God. Oh my God! OH MY GOD!!!’

Weetabix: Why would Joel say that?

Esteban: Oh, you know. He doesn’t realize how you really are.

Weetabix: I think I’m pretty much how I am in the diary.

Esteban: I know you are. But I’m saying, Joel doesn’t usually have that much concentrated exposure.

Weetabix: Does he think I’m evil now?

Esteban: No, I didn’t’

Weetabix: He thinks I’m crazy now, right? And mean?

Esteban: I’m not’

Weetabix: What else did he say?

Esteban: (announcer voice) Here we go. This is the Weetabixapolis 500. The cars are beginning their first lap.

Weetabix: What?

Esteban: It’s like a cycle with you. You get on a track and fuggedaboutit.

Weetabix: My next husband won’t make fun of me.

Esteban: Oh, yeah, Henry what’s his name.

Weetabix: Henry Rollins.

Esteban: He’s gay.

Weetabix: He is not gay!

Esteban: He is so.

Weetabix: He’d so kick your ass for saying that. Why is he gay?

Esteban: Because Melissa Etheridge is gay.

Weetabix: WHAT???

Esteban: It’s the universe’s way of equalizing everything. Melissa Etheridge is gay and Henry Rollins is the yang to Melissa’s ying.

Weetabix: That’s a logical fallacy.

Esteban: Ooooh’ aren’t you high fallutin’ wit your colledge edumacation.

Weetabix: Besides, Henry Rollins so is not Melissa Etheridge’s yang. Ru Paul is.

Esteban: Oh, now you’re just being ridiculous.

Weetabix: Seriously’ what did Joel say about the diary?

Esteban: (announcer voice) We have a yellow flag as they round the 35th lap. We ask that you remain seated in the stands while a crew investigates.

Weetabix: That’s it. I’m going to fart on you.

Esteban:Spouse abuser.

Weetabix:Fart karma, baby.

This is cool. I’m so flattered. I’m in some great company there.

Ok, three things.

Thing the first:

I sent Esteban out in search of a disposable heating pad thingy I saw advertised. Heat really seems to be the arch nemesis of the uterine cramp, thus I like to go to war with it, but our heating pad sucks for various reasons. First off, there’s a cord and you’re basically stuck sitting there with the thing pressed up against your gut all evening. Secondly, the cats like to lay on it and absorb it’s residule heat, thus it always looks like a damn Tribble. Also, it shuts itself off after forty-five minutes, and it takes about forty minutes for the heat to start to work, so just when you start to relax, it goes cold on you. I could make a sexual euphamism there, but I just don’t have the energy.

I also demanded some Cheddarwurst. Esteban has this gracious ability to become my willing servant during my grumpy time, thus he willingly went to the grocery store and then to Mallwart to procure the elusive disposable heating pads. They were $6.58 for a pack of two. After balking at the price, he picked up two packs. He is a smart man who knows me scarily well. Besides, it’s not like it’s more costly than his little nicotine habit or anything.

He told me last night that I have a delightfully reactionary personality when I’m all hormonal, like a tenacious lobster. I don’t know what he’s talking about, honestly. He said that while laughing histerically when I called him a big loser. He’s lucky he was smiling or I would have kicked his damn dish-avoiding ass.

Just give me my cheese-filled sausage, beyotch.

In case you haven’t guessed, this week the news on the “Losing Part of My Bulbous Ass” front has not been good. The Ass, after retreating for the past month, has had a newfound resilience and has begun to take prisoners. We suspect that it is being aided by other parts of the body. We don’t want to name names but our spies intercepted a missive from an anonymous source allegating that strains of Sir Mixx Alot’s “Baby’s Got Back” were heard coming from the vicinity of the uterus.

So, anyway, disposable heating pad thingy is a good thing. The cramps are subdued. I’m wearing one right now under my pants. So I have very hot pants. I’d shake my groove thing with my hot pants but it would be just be tempting fate.

Thing the Second:

I am totally The Frontier House‘s bitch.

In case you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s a miniseries on PBS. It’s like you took Little House On The Prairie and smushed it together with The Real World. Except that most of the women are Mrs. Olesen and all the teenage girls are Nellie and the Michael Landon role is played by a newlywed hottie named Nate who is my Frontier Boyfriend. It’s the true story (Teruuu Storayyyy!) of eleven strangers, picked to live in Montana, and have their lives taped for PBS.”

On last night’s episode, the kids made one boy stick his hand up a chicken’s bum. I haven’t laughed like that since Ozzy’s dog Lola chuffed and chuffed and then URRP! on the imported Italian slate patio. And that’s paid for by support of viewers like you and brought to you by the letter Q and the number 12.

You just gotta know that Bunim/Murray are kicking themselves over this Frontier House thing. They’re probably pulling late night meetings this week. “Ok, look, we’ll take Genesis and Amaya and Puck and give them two oxen and a couple of sheep. We’ll tell Puck that he can’t make the sweet loving to the livestock.” “Good idea! And Flora too! Oooh, and that girl with the really long fingernails who didn’t like to get her hair wet! Yeah!”

Of course, PBS is screwing the whole thing up and only made six episodes. The people were there for 5 months and they only got six episodes out of it, whereas the Real World/Road Rules Challenge happened over two weeks and they got an entire season of 26 episodes or something out of it. Apparently, however, these Frontier people are all too tired to make the rope bed rockin’, so maybe that cut on some of their intended footage. They just fight. Oh, and one has an honest to goodness moonshine still. That one reminds me of my friend Phil. Not to mention the fact that I could totally see Phil with a still. And not just because it rhymes. He’s all bohemian and alternative and completely driven by his convictions. Therefore, if he drinks the liquor, he would see no problem in making the liquor.

Thus, the last two episodes are tonight, but I’m certain that PBS will rerun the thing. I’m surprised they didn’t do this during Pledge Month. Maybe give you some of Pappy Clunes’s moonshine at the $250 level instead of that stupid “I’m a Granola Cruncher” coffee mug.

Thing the Third:

Dishes still haven’t been touched.

I didn’t make him cookies last night, either. That will show him!

Oh, and Another Thing:

Spike on Buffy last night?

Grrrrrrowl!

Once upon a time, there was a curvy round sexy girl.

And she drove a white Monte Carlo. Which was also curvy and sexy. At least sexy to white trash Nascar wannabes who mate with their cousins and drink lots of Yoohoo mixed with Cr’me De Menthe.

And this curvy round girl wasn’t a white trash wannabe, actually. She just lived in a land far removed from the rest of the world. A land in which the good fine hardworking people of the area actually thought they looked cool when they put foam dairy products upon their heads. Our cute curvy girl has never done such a thing, so we can forgive her choice in automobiles.

In fact, this was a land in which most of the butt wipe is made. Without this far-off place, the rest of the world would be using palm fronds and anthrax-laden Weekly World News to wipe their tender behinds, thus we should be indebted to the good foam dairy products-wearing people for their contribution to our world, especially when you consider the fact that their beautiful landscape gets polluted horribly because we like nice pristine white toilet paper rather than off-white natural toilet paper.

But we digress.

Our girl didn’t make the ass wipe. But she liked to think that she was a bad ass. But only in small safe dysfunctional ways. Such as by wearing fake leather clothing. Or driving her white trash car around with an empty gas tank.

Or by taking pictures when she is driving on the freeway.

Including self-portraits which show how short her new haircut is, as well as her impossibly groomed Mr. Spock eyebrows.

Even though she had most of the hair on her face painfully ripped out once a month, she still refused to adhere to fashion dogmas that necessitate ridiculous clothing or starvation.

And then she ran out of things to write about, so instead she went home to her home which smells like cat pee but her 19-year-old cat looked so cute that she couldn’t be mad at her.

So this morning.

I read Mechaieh’s Friday entry and one of her answers to the Friday Five questions was that she collects cancelled stamps.

I don’t collect anything. Well, that’s not really true. I don’t officially collect anything. I have a number of black Hard Rock Cafe hats with white writing on them, but they certainly aren’t displayed or anything. One’s in my trunk. One is on our hat rack. I don’t know where some of them are. It’s just that I buy them when I have the opportunity.

Likewise, I have spent a rather disturbing amount of money upon scrapbooking supplies. Oh, under a thousand dollars, certainly, but easily more than $500 in the last three years. I’m ashamed to admit that. But that includes a $120 suitcase thingy to hold it all, as well as several very nice leather bound scrapbooks, so there is that. I don’t know if you could call that a collection. I think most people would just call that sad.

I also have many china dolls, mostly from my childhood, although I did purchase a one-of-a-kind sculpted one when I went to England. They’re all in a Xerox box stuffed into Computer Room #1, next to another box filled with non-matching English china tea cups, another half-hearted collection. The tea cups used to reside in the china cabinet in our dining room but they were dethroned by century-old Austrian cut crystal, passed down in Esteban’s family and given to us as a wedding present, along with our hokey engraved wedding champagne glasses and Ward and June’s even hokier engraved wedding champagne glasses. I also have 8 retro lunchboxes, stuffed into Computer Room #2 and I’m constantly on the lookout for more.

But I suppose that I don’t really consider any of these things really collections. More simply, just a reiteration of a singular theme. No. The only thing that I really truly collect would be Kool-Aid stamps.

You know, those little squares on the backs of Kool-Aid packs stating that they are worth so many points? Yeah. Those.

I tear those little stamps off soggy packets of Kool-Aid like they were redeemable for gold bars or something. It started about eight years ago, back when we were very poor and Esteban was working a full-time job and a part-time job and I was carrying 18 credits a semester and also working 30 hours a week. We were poor. We were very poor. We had two car payments, rent, and we could only afford soda if it was on sale for less than $1.50 a 12-pack. Very sad. We lived on rice-a-roni and chicken breasts, which could be purchased for $2 a pound, or ground turkey. I made my own pasta (which, in retrospect, was really really tasty and I should probably make some again). I hauled all of our laundry to the Laundromat because it was cheaper than using the coin-ops in our apartment building. All of our furniture was stuff that Ward and June had given us (which, actually, is mostly still the case). And we drank a lot of sugar free Kool-Aid because it was cheaper than soda.

This frugality spawned a compulsion to tear off the little red-stained squares and store them. I was envisioning all sorts of free Kool-Aid stuff. Maybe I’d get a nice glass Kool-Aid pitcher out of it? Maybe I could save enough to get a new tent for camping? Maybe they’d have a Raspberry red convertible that ran on Sharkleberry Finn Kool-Aid? The possibilities were endless. When we purchased our house, June threw away scores upon scores of loose ones she found in various kitchen cupboards. I still fixate upon those lost points sometimes at night when sleep is a hard-fought battle between embittered souls on a desolate landscape of our lives.

Ooops, got a little James Joyce there. Sorry. I forget sometimes that it’s not forging our destinies upon Fate’s bitter anvil…. it’s just Kool-Aid points. Anyway…

I doubt that there is a time when there is not a half-soggy Points square drying on our countertop, leaving little red smudgy marks everywhere. When I removed all the stuff from the cabinets before they were painted, I gathered up all of my torn Points and put them in a Zip-Loc baggy. God, there must have been at least 500 points there. Probably more. You get about 20 points per box of Kool-Aid and we go through a box a week during the summer, easily. Sometimes two or three.

So when I read Mechaieh’s entry, I thought to myself “Hmmm…. I wonder what kind of stuff I can get.” So I mosied over to the Kool-Aid website and clicked on their free stuff.

insert pained look of 8 wasted years with red-stained Lady Mac Beth fingers here

There were no tents. No glass Kool-Aid pitchers. No beach towels. No red Lamborghini.

A yo-yo. Two plush toys. A sport bottle. A super ball. Some cheap-ass ice cube tray. And a piece of foam you use in a swimming pool.

Oh my god. I think the last remaining bit of my childhood na’vet’ has been completely dashed. All of those packets. All of those carefully torn little squares. All of those dreams of decking my house in lovely Mission-Style furniture with the Kool-Aid insignia. All dashed. All gone. A mickey fickey sports bottle, which costs $1.50 in shipping and handling above and beyond the 50 Points. A damn sports bottle I wouldn’t pay 50 cents for!

And the worst thing is this: I’m torn about what to do. I don’t want anything they’re offering on that page, but at the same time, I feel as though I can’t throw those Points squares away. There’s too much invested, too much history. But if I keep them, they’ll mock me, every time I open the drawer to take out some aluminum foil.

The worst part is I feel like I’m being screwed over by a big red smiling pitcher, who’s smacking my ass and saying “Who’s your daddy?”

On a similar vein:

I was chatting with Poor Yorick yesterday and he told me “So I’m sitting in my Pastor’s office and he says ‘Who’s this Weetabix?” And I was all perplexed, so I asked “How does your pastor know about ME?” So PY replies “He must have followed a link from my diary. Anyway, he says, exact words, ‘Some of the entries I could do without, but for the most part, I was rolling on the floor laughing.'”

Which was totally supposed to be a compliment, but all I could think of was all my entries about sex. And the tuvalee one. And the one where I went to a gay bar and watched gay men strip. Or how much I use the word “fuck”. And the uterus… oh dear Lord, the uterus. And the boobs… there’s a powerful lot of boob talk. And suddenly, Chubby Tink started looking all salacious and wanton, flirting and exposing her cute dimply thighs to the world.

So I tried to get more information from him. “Was this Pastor Justin, the young hip Youth Ministries guy?” And PY replies, “No, this was Pastor Ed.”

Oh my god. The full-blown regular pastor. And then I gulped because I used the term “full-blown”.

So now Pastor Ed is out there, I’ve got to clean up my shit… I mean, er, act.

I’m so going to hell. Like I wasn’t having enough trouble trying to get into heaven, here’s a man of God reading this doodie. And I’m swearing like a mofo.

Can I say the word “mofo”? If it’s an abbreviation, is that as bad as swearing? And when I say that I’m a “curvy round sex goddess”, that’s just hip talk for “curvy round praying Child of God”, Pastor Ed. Seriously. Did I mention that I went to a parochial grade school? And you should hear me sing “Amazing Grace”.

Gah. I’m going to spend eternity in purgatory, trying to teach Milli Vanilli how to sing or something. Or wiping the butts of the entire cast of The Golden Girls with the really thin horrible kind of toilet paper, the kind that your finger rips right through. I can already hear Rue McClanahan saying “Can’t you use Charmin?!” and Estelle Getty asking me to rub her old lady feet.

(shudder)

Crap. I mean… doodie.