Archive for October, 2006
I was thinking about what I specifically enjoy about being here, and truthfully, my mind was full of nothing but crickets, because oh my God, I am going through one of those phases where it feels like I am going to be here for the rest of my godforsaken life, only to die a slow, sweaty death from a terminal case of swamp ass.
However, when I calmed down, I did realize that there are a few things that I really do love. Unfortunately, they all centered around food, and while I recognize that no one cares what I had for lunch, I am going to miss so many edible things I can’t get up north. Things like actual Mexican food and strawberries and tomatoes that never, ever taste like they’re from a hothouse even in the middle of January. Shrimp the size of my fist that are bright pink even when raw, and fresh fish so meaty and tender it almost tastes like chicken (which begs the eternal question: why don’t we just eat chicken, then? No one is really sure.) And while in theory, that sounds like a craving haven for being pregnant, it just…well, just no, and that’s territory we’ve already covered, so wow, it is time to move on to an equally uncomfortable topic!
I haven’t been kissed in more than a week, and while it sucks, I wouldn’t kiss me either, with the open wound and all. But the real beauty is that along with The Herp on the left side of my lip, I have also contracted The Stye (they come together sometimes for reasons unknown), which means that my left eye is swollen beyond natural proportions, but hey, I am wearing earrings, although they aren’t really working for me with this look. In fact, all it really means is that all that’s left for me to do is scream “Hey you guys!” and shimmy down the sail of a boat by a pocket knife in a cave along of the coast of Oregon with a partner named Chunk.
It doesn’t end there, oh of course not. My left side has declared open war on the universe, basically, for today, as I was gracefully heading into the bathroom (which is, embarrassingly, a unisex hole in the wall in the back of my boss’s office, which is merely a giant cube in front of everyone), I slammed into the door and, perhaps even more conveniently, crushed my boob with a force that made me cry out, “I slammed…my… you know! HA! SEE YOU LATER!”
Which, uh, see you later? I was going to pee, not climb the Andes. But that’s not really the point – the point is that the crushing has rendered my left boob – the entire left boob – black and blue, as in, it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced, and in fact – even better! – it’s SWOLLEN to an unnatural shape, as I discovered on my way home from work. I am now supremely uncomfortable, in every possible sense, on my entire left side, and my bras are too tight, but of course, only on one boob.
To recap: open wounds, a near-shut weepy eye and a bruised left boob. In other words, I’ve never been hotter. There will be ripe heirloom tomatoes this weekend, however, and in a strange way, that will make it all better.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
*Siouxsie and the Banshees
October 12th, 2006
One of the extraordinary pleasures in what I get to do every day is hearing other people talk about themselves. Happenstance would dictate that the vast majority of people I talk to are over 70, and while sometimes it makes me want to pick my eyes out with grapefruit spoons (because, well, sometimes I just want to talk to someone who’s in the same stage of life as me), for the most part, it makes for some truly amazing moments.
A lot of people here never cease to blow me away in some really wonderful, quiet ways, as opposed to the usual blowing away that involves asinine behavior, drunken parties and hearing my neighbor scream rude things to the Indian family playing tennis up the street.
It’s funny – I spend so much time being afraid of things. Afraid of disease, afraid of Adam getting sick or dying, afraid to have kids because I’ll love them so much that I won’t let them leave the house (or the womb) out of fear for their safety. I mean, we all have some fears, and while we don’t let them consume us, they lurk in the shadows every day. Some of them are based in reality and some of them, like the ridiculous fear I have of being homeless and drunk on the streets of New York (why, just why?), are simply silly, but they’re still there. And yet just about every day, I talk to people who’ve lived through my greatest fears and not only survived, but rebuilt an extraordinary existence.
I spend a lot of time with the elderly – more than anyone I have ever known, in fact, save for nursing home workers and retirement village entertainers – and it has truly turned out to be an unexpectedly joyful privilege. They tell me about their lives – about their heartaches and losses and triumphs – and I can’t believe how much they have lived through. It’s enough to make your head spin, or at least be very afraid to leave the house in the morning, lest you be mowed down by a garbage truck or a rogue Trans Am or, I don’t know, the plague running rampant through your neighborhood.
Roughly 75 percent of the couples I talk to are on their second marriage, and sadly, it’s rarely due to divorce. I met a man recently who had four children, three of whom were nuns scattered in convents throughout the country, while his only son died of ALS two weeks after his first wife passed away. When I met him, his second wife was going through radiation for breast cancer with a brave smile, and they held hands so tightly I thought her fingers would break. Another man, a World War II veteran, survived three typhoons in the Pacific, barely missed being carried out with the tide while shelling for cat’s eyes in China, and – 50 years later – watched his wife slowly die of cancer. And yet, he sat there with his beautiful, whip-smart second wife and they smiled at me, and laughed as they remembered the lives they had before they’d even met, when they were married to other people who moved on. It always seemed to me that listening to this kind of thing would be enough to rip your heart right out of your chest.
But talking to them, it’s nothing like that at all, but I can’t properly explain what it is like. They’re so calm and peaceful and…well, they’re so happy. I mean, they aren’t happy that their lives turned out to be nothing of what they planned when they were 25 – and trust me, not one of them has ever said that their lives turned out according to plan – but they’re content with the experiences that they had, and in the remarkable memories they made with each of their loved ones in the time that they had them, however short. Yesterday and tomorrow mean very little to how they live their lives today, and it’s just such a completely different life – albeit dangerously clichéd – than the one most of us lead that it makes you think twice, really it does.
These aren’t couples you read about in People or a national newspaper, or watch on Dateline. They aren’t celebrities, actual or manufactured, and they don’t want anything from their stories other than the pleasure of retelling them to someone who’ll listen (often I’m the first and only person to ask in a very, very long time, if ever). And it’s insanely uplifting, I swear, even though you wouldn’t think that listening to people talk about the losses that they’ve suffered would be at all. It’s just that people are nothing short of amazing in how they survive things and move on with their lives, and there is nothing quite so hopeful as knowing that if the worst happened – if the very worst happened to any of us – that we would be able to pick up, start fresh and rebuild, while honoring the memory of what we lost.
People are really something else.
*Peter Gabriel
October 10th, 2006
Every time I get a cold sore, I get paranoid that I’m going to spread it, uh, everywhere, and I don’t just mean there, I mean EVERYWHERE. If I get a mosquito bite on my arm, I freak out, screeching that I’ve got The Herp on my elbow! The Herp on my elbow! like Maria Von Trapp and the damn Nazis. I read somewhere that it can happen, you know, on alternate Tuesdays when the moon is full, and despite obsessive handwashing and the adamant refusal to put anything non-disposable to my lips, I can’t accept that it won’t happen to me.
As happens every month, we are winding down the hypochondriacal portion of our hormonal curve, and now that I’m rational again, I can say with total honesty that I gave myself no fewer than 37 breast self-exams, each with a different result, ranging from “It’s cancer OMG, we’re all going to die,” to “This should clear up with a lumpectomy and one round of chemo and THANK GOD I like my hair short already!” to “Uh, that lump you’re feeling? Is YOUR BOOB, you dumbass!”
I have finally accepted that the final diagnosis is more than likely the correct one, but I cannot rest yet because my boobs are still extremely sore from all the poking and prodding and perpetual feeling-up. And although the pain could mean something really ominous (like getting my period, OMG!), it likely means that I need to just sit up and get my damn fingers out of my fleenies.
Speaking of boobs, tonight Sunny and I were walking with my neighbor and her one year-old son, Nolan (not that Nolan!), who was dropping vanilla wafers and creme sandwiches the entire way, which was basically Shangri-La for Sunny, who now doesn’t understand why tasty creamy vanilla things don’t appear at her feet with every step she takes. When Nolan and his mom peeled off to go home, we walked by the gym/clubhouse (shut up), where a couple of kids I recognized were hanging out and yelling loudly. After a couple of lines, I realized that the smallish one was singing about his teacher in some sort of pre-pubescent sexual ode that involved sticking his “honker” into her “hooter” as retold in that really gorgeous way that only a 10 year- old can manage. After he reached a frenzied crescendo of hooters, honkers and weenies, he looked in my direction and shouted:
“Hey sweetheart! I think your boobs are pretty hot too, babe! Rock them hooters!”
He’s 10. TEN. I know his mother. Are 10 year-olds really into boobs and hooters and teachers and honkers? When I was 10, I may have had a crush on John Schneider (Bo Duke to you and me), and I most definitely had an ill-advised crush on Bowzer of ShaNaNa (Um, oh my God?), but seriously, my fantasies were centered around hitting the local ice cream store/dairy farm and holding hands behind the hay bales for crying out loud and maybe some hugging. I was not interested in feeling up either of their honkers or weenies or anything, dude, and if the opportunity presented itself, I would have run screaming for the hills, because I’m sure the sight would have petrified me, as I’d never seen man-junk before, and secondly, uh gross. And finally, although this is entirely irrelevant because again, he’s TEN, my boobs are nearly impossible to see from any distance, so maybe he was ahead of his time and being an ironic 10 year-old smartass? I’ll kick his ass either way.
And finally, I did, indeed, wear earrings today and no one noticed, which is awesome and I may even do it again! Woot! That is, I was home free until I got home and brought Sunny out for her evening walk (pre-honker) and my (very stylish and also very observant) 8 year-old neighbor Lexi eyed me suspiciously and asked:
“You goin’ somewhere?”
“No. Why?”
Her tone was accusatory and her hand was on her hip, defiant: “Uh, because you’re wearing EARRINGS. You never wear earrings. WHAT IS GOING ON WITH YOU?”
I’d almost gotten away with it. Almost.
*Electronic. Oh, Bernard. Oh, Neil.
**Oh my God, Beth, you were totally right.
October 9th, 2006
I barked my way through Friday afternoon and was pretty much inconsolable due to a series of hormonal crests and troughs. I was only able to perk up at dinner, when I actually got tears in my eyes as I whimpered, “I want…jalepeno poppers…with ranch dressing.” And though I paid for those poppers in the form of searing midnight cramps, I can honestly say they were worth it.
The hormones made for an exciting weekend for all of us, and no wicked menstrual cycle is complete without a well-timed cold sore, which is affectionately known around these parts as The Herp. Yes, thanks to the wonders of being a woman, along with the herpes simplex virus, my lower lip is tingly, angry and pustulated, waiting to freak the hell out of my coworkers tomorrow, and it’s already well into a bout of terror for poor Adam. By tomorrow morning, I fully expect it to be lying supine on its own pillow and shouting demands for ice cream and pickles like Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker.
And as if getting dressed in the morning wasn’t already a challenge – for the next seven days, I will have a demanding little creature on my lower lip that will require some sort of disguise or distraction. I’ve addressed the issue of my fashion sense here before, and really, it continues to plummet below acceptable levels. Foul-smelling skirts and wrong shoes aside, I don’t need a garment mishap to find myself in an awkward situation. And the worst thing about it is that I’ve actually managed to get my sad little ass awake before 8 a.m. – hell, I’ve even managed to eek towards 7:15 at times, but I don’t actually do anything to improve my appearance, because my mind and body are operating at the same level as a bowl of banana Jello. Instead of showering, putting on makeup and/or figuring out something to wear other than a t-shirt and wrinkly skirt, I spend my time staring into glazed space, surfing the Internet (sometimes wildly answering e-mails in manner of drunk person) and occasionally sitting on the (closed) toilet and catching up on US Weeklies from last July. I shower, then pick up whatever random bits of clothing I can cobble together from the closet and/or floor and leave the house with wet hair. Hot hot hot.
The other day, I found myself in a semi-important meeting-type thing and when I looked down, I was wearing a random Threadless t-shirt with Barney on it (!!), and a heather gray skirt that was so…gah, it was so limp it looked like I was wearing sweatpants that were cut off at the knees. God. It’s time for a change.
The thing is, I don’t do well with change of any kind, and worse, I hate when people notice that I’ve changed something. I hated when the clerk at the hardware store noticed I’d colored my hair, which is stupid, just stupid, I know. It’s just that when someone notices something new, I get all self-conscious about it, like they think I’m trying too hard, and nothing horrifies me more than someone who is trying too hard. Are you catching the flawed logic here? I’d rather look like I rolled out of bed into a pile of rotten milk than look like I put any sort of effort into changing my appearance for the better, because God forbid I look like I tried.
This same flawed logic applies to any article of clothing or accessory that doesn’t perform a specific function, i.e., simply covering the body, holding up pants, etc. I’m afraid of accessories, and does anyone remember when vests were in, back in the late 80s/early 90s? Vests were my nemesis. They didn’t do anything, they just…well, they just vested. And please, the suspender years? They were some of the worst in my personal fashion history, because man, I looked like I tried. I looked like I tried and failed, to be very specific.
Which brings me to my completely random and entirely senseless point which is that I’ve noticed that my pierced ears are starting to close and, well, I have a feeling I might regret that. And while noodling through my belongings this weekend, trying to find something – anything – that would help with The Herp, I discovered that I actually have quite a broad collection of earrings, and while I was young and not such a tightwad pain in the ass about things, I actually wore them.
And God, how easy is it to just throw on a pair of earrings? Much easier than trying to construct some sort of wild fashion statement that involves straps and/or any shoe that is not a flip flop.
Yes. Tomorrow, I will start with earrings. But honestly, if one person notices the earrings, I will never change anything again, and it’s back to sour milk-scented watermelon skirts for everyone!
*Barney. Yes, that Barney.
October 8th, 2006
I woke up this morning with a thick trail of dark red – brick, if you will – streaked along my pillowcase, and for a brief moment, was thoroughly convinced that I’d been shot in my sleep and well, this was it. It wasn’t until I rocketed bolt upright in bed and felt up my entire body (lingering for a little too long around my left boob, which was, I was sure, the source of the wound because it hurt like hell) that I considered that there may be other possibilities other than, you know, a stray bullet screaming through the bedroom window.
I got my hair cut and colored last night (until 11freaking30 p.m.), and I get most of it done a couple of shades of reddish something, and I guess it all didn’t sink in, because I am now resting my head (yes still, because I haven’t done a damn thing about it) on a pillowcase that is exactly the same shade as my hair. And you know, I was so, so close to having a normal haircut with my hairdresser, until I told him the condom story, which in retrospect was an obvious pitfall I could have avoided. When I mentioned that I made the grievous error of taking a whiff of my slippery fingers (SORRY SORRY SORRY), he agreed wholeheartedly and said, “Oh yes, you can’t help it! Like when you accidentally scratch your anus in public and you want to make sure you didn’t pick up any odorous remnants!”
Uh, yeah. Like that. (I am not making this up, and believe me, I wish I was.) After I finally managed to steer the conversation away from male genitalia and anuses (it can’t be anii, but I want it to be), we ended up debating whether I should get the peach fuzz on my cheeks waxed (I brought it up, and it’s very pale, okay, but GAH, it’s there, and what am I going to do? When the light shines behind my head, I AM FUZZY), he proceeded to tell me how he gets the male equivalent of a Brazilian every three weeks, and God, it sure is painful, given his hemorrhoids (that reside, conveniently on his sphincter muscle. He was sure to detail what that means in vivid terms). And just…Jesus Mary and Joseph. This is getting out of hand.
And yet, bloody panic aside, my hair is as good as ever.
The gunshot wound happened, incidentally, at 7 a.m. and this time, because my heart was going about a frillion times per second (you know, because someone SHOT ME), I decided to get up and start my day all fresh-like and put on some coffee. From my embarrassing stash of deeply-discounted and discontinued Green Mountain grinds, I selected French Toast (mmm….buttery!), and was knee-deep in a beatific General Foods International Coffees moment when I came upstairs to take a shower and found my husband lying in bed, all rumpled and awake, glaring at me and hissing “URINE” in a very angry tone.
What? I was baffled.
PISS, he insisted.
I guess the maple syrup accord in the French toast coffee smells like day-old urine if you’re not drinking it, and what better way to wake up, I say? Except that he’d just spent the last 10 minutes in a half-awake stupor convinced that I had peed the bed in the night, and left it for him to fester in. Nice. (Incidentally, syrup is a word that irritates me immensely, because there are people who say seer-up, and then there are sirrup people. I’m a seer-up person, and I’m rapidly learning that I am in the minority and to that, I say, pshaw! And also, you’re all wrong, sirrups!)
And separately, I didn’t shower today, and well, I probably should have, it’s just that I got all distracted by the piss-talk, and my hair had just been done at 11:30 last night after four hours with the Lenninator, and hell, I opted for playing with the dog instead. Except that around noon, the ammonia from the dye in my still-unwashed hair started to smell like – you guessed it – urine! Only I thought it wasn’t ammonia, but was in fact, maple syrup, after this morning’s fiasco (I don’t know how I made that leap, I just don’t know), and I spent an inordinate chunk of my lunch hour Googling “maple syrup smells like urine” and convinced myself for a few moments that I had (oh my God) maple syrup urine disease. Which, uh, it’s a DISEASE. Maple syrup urine disease is an actual disease and oh, it’s genetic! So then, of course, I was sure that not only did I smell like piss on a day that all of my coworkers are in the office, (all because I am a sad, lazy sow) but P.S., my kids were going to die as infants while smelling like caramel and syrup (seer-up!) from some sort of amino acid deficiency or mutation or whatever, and great, just fucking GREAT.
And then I thought: the boobs, the shooting, the syrup, the panic, the dates. Ahhh, the PMS. And all is right with the world. There is an explanation for the madness.
And so, I hope you all have a fine weekend, full of French toast and pancakes and blueberries and…syrup. But if you plan to serve sirrup, don’t tell me about it, okay?
*Cat Stevens. I love Cat. Don’t make fun of me.
October 5th, 2006
I’m sick of being hot. I see pictures of crisp yellow leaves and people wearing fleece jackets and vests and cordouroys and… well, I’ve seen footwear other than flip flops in other people’s pictures, and gaah, it’s too hot for me to consider anything else (my feet need to breathe. BREATHE.) But hell, I sure would give anything to put on some hiking boots and snuffle around in crunchy leaves and I don’t even hike. It’s blazing hot here, and every day it seems, it feels like it gets hotter and hotter as the day wears on, and by 7 p.m., I can hardly breathe.
Speaking of footwear, and apropos of nothing, I wore two different shoes to work today. Did you know that people actually did that? I’ve seen it played out in cliches and cartoons and television shows and thought, who does that? Are they afflicted with retardia? I then I did it, and though it was only in Reefs, it was humiliating to realize that my left foot was clad in a lovely brown leather little number, while my right was in screaming hot pink. This hot pink clashed with my watermelon skirt, incidentally, and the fact that I was wearing a watermelon skirt really freaked me out.
The elderly snowbird-type folks are starting to trickle in, and our dinners out are becoming more and more peppered with hugs and cries of “OH MY GOD! How was MINNESOTA?!” and there is an alarming increase in traffic, and an even more alarming increase in fender benders that result in exceedingly wealthy 80 year-olds being wheeled away from their Jaguars on orange guerneys.
And the outfits! My God, it’s October! October is a time for fall colors and fisherman knits and wool v-necks with dark jeans and – ooh ooh – maybe some BOOTS. Not so much here. Instead, this is about the most tame thing you’ll see. (Please, if you’re a Lilly Pulitzer fan, I’m so sorry. It’s just…well, I find her stuff vile and everything that’s wrong with suburban affluence, all wrapped up in a sherbet-themed confection, and I thought this parentheses would be more forgiving than that, but I can’t even fake it. Hate Lilly.) Tropical prints leap off of pants all over the place. Sweater sets with applique’d raspberries dance atop lime green skirts printed with giant parrots on them. Perfectly pedicured feet twirl inside gold leather sandals adorned with giant pink rhinestones. I’ve seen more palm tree-themed jewelry than I’d like to admit.It’s like Jennifer Lopez-meets-Betty White down here, and it’s untenable.
And I wore a watermelon skirt today, and I flipped out, because GOD, I looked like a pod person, and when I went home to change my shoes, I peeled it off in favor of some new fall pants. (I’ve had that skirt since well before I moved here, but I had no idea what a sad significance it would adopt in this place.) The new pants, by the way, were a really bad idea, since I was seriously sweating through them by the time the day was halfway over, giving new meaning to the term ‘swamp ass.’
I’d give anything to throw on a pair of cordouroys, a nice lightweight v-neck sweater, and maybe some sassy little…uh, loafers? (Please remember that I cannot dress myself. Do people wear loafers? Is that lame?) Instead, I’m wearing limp jersey skirts and t-shirts with Reefs, and God, I even briefly hallucinated and considered changing my tune on Lilly Pulitzer just to change it up a little, and that’s about as scary as it gets, folks. And I know, I know, when January comes, you’ll all be shoveling, and I’ll be at the beach with a bunch of tropical-printed tourists with their umbrella drinks, but for right now, GOD, I just want a new season. And warm pants.
*Exposé . Surely you remember Exposé
October 3rd, 2006
We all lie. And while most of us tell lies to other people every single day, those lies are usually harmless. Unless we’re pathological and insane, they are usually innocent lies borne out of a desire to spare someone else’s feelings. Things like, “I don’t mind!” and “I love morning meetings!” and “That sounds great!” are lies that serve no other purpose than to ease someone else’s discomfort, spare their feelings, brighten their day.
We save the real lies for ourselves. The little delusions we tell ourselves, like if we buy that bag of caramels that we’ll only eat two at a time, that we’ll get up and go to the gym tomorrow. We tell ourselves that a situation isn’t that bad, and that we don’t deserve something better. We harbor illusions about ourselves, our personalities. (Oh my God, I’m going all Meredith Grey on you. Sorry.)
For the most part, I’m relatively forthright about my shortcomings, and if I wasn’t, it wouldn’t last long, for I live with the world’s most honest person and vigilant reality checker. He never hesitates to call me out on my shit, and if I so much as hyperbolize, there is much fun made of me and my dramatic ways. He also doesn’t hesitate to point out if I’m being too hard on myself, which is at least as often as I’m being overly dramatic, if not more, and he’s very, very fair. However, despite my own instincts and perennial watchdog, I still manage to harbor a few personal illusions that I just need to suck up and face, and while they are still too numerous to list here, it’s a start.
I tend to think that I’m organized in matters of the home. Dude, I am not organized. I can’t find shit in my house, and it’s largely because I have no sense of…well, organization. I make things about a frillion times harder than they have to be, because I can’t put things in a logical order. I can’t put my keys on the key rack, and I damn sure can’t file anything in a folder or receptacle that makes any sort of sense in this, or any, universe. I’m absentminded. I put cheese in the silverware drawer. I carry things upstairs and I’m not sure why I came up in the first place. I file things in random, senseless order and hell if I can ever find it again. I am not organized, no. Not at all.
The truly sad delusion isn’t organization, however. Because although it is an admirable trait, I don’t really care. I don’t like organizing things. But the truth? The cold hard truth, if I peer deep into my sad little heart? I’m a bad cook. No, I am a terrible cook. And yet I tell myself that I’m good! I even tell other people, oh yes, I cook! And then I nod wisely, like I’m pondering some sort of burgundy reduction sauce I plan to whip out later.
This wouldn’t be a problem if I could just face it and move on, accept it and go out to dinner. But I love to cook, dude. I love getting the ingredients and trying something new, and getting onion skins on the floor and mincing the garlic into little tiny pieces. I love being able to taste the raw ingredients first, to see what it might be like if there were just a little more oregano, a little dash of sugar. And I’m not bad! Not bad at all! At seasoning, that is.
My downfall is foodborne illness. As usual, my neurotic nature ruins the day, and I live in terror of salmonella and E.coli and so I cook everything – I mean everything – to the point that it is tough as the skin on the bottom of my dog’s little Frito feet, and it’s virtually inedible. Vegetables are reduced to a mushy mess, and the last time I made chicken, the texture bore a remarkable resemblance to…well, to really ancient, dried-out beef jerky.
The only meal I could make with any sort of skill was a slow-cooked pot roast I used to make in the oven (cooks all day on purpose! No diseases can survive that!), and I haven’t made that since New Year’s Eve 2001, when I put the roast in the oven and told Adam it couldn’t hurt if we ran out quickly to get a bottle of champagne, which then turned into a detour to buy a new television. And, um, by the time we came home, the fire department was camped out in the living room after axing down the door and putting out the violent flames caused by my delicious New Year’s roast. And frankly, they were wondering where the hell we’d been, and what kind of idiots leave the oven on? Which: they’re right, except that dude, the oven was BROKEN (which is a story in itself for another day), and though the electrician swore he’d fixed it, we later discovered that the temperature gauge was permanently set to “melt your eyes off” no matter what you put it on (in my case, 250 degrees. You can so leave an oven for 30 minutes at 250 degrees. I mean, not that I’d ever dare do it again. ) (Oh and PS, we ordered Chinese from the Hong Kong Cafe and had to put two chairs in front of the doorway, which was now plywood, to keep us safe because remember: the door had been AXED DOWN by the fire department.)
Anyway, this delusion has never really had any consequences before, until now. Until I have offered to (oh God) cook, uh, Thanksgiving dinner, for Adam’s entire family. And I am just…well, I’m just panicked and frenzied and even though there is an entire month and a few weeks left just…well, just what am I going to do? I will have the turkey catered because again: foodborne illness (as a friend put it, who wants to get up at 3 a.m. and then give them all salmonella anyway?), but sides? I can’t, I just can’t cater sides. I CAAAAAN’T. And sides, my friends, are the real prize of Thanksgiving. And my in-laws? Do not cook. None of them. And well, I can’t even boil water without making a mess and doing it wrong.
Someone help me. Throw me a recipe. Give me a tip. Anything.
*Fleetwood Mac, y’all. (Uh, channeling Paige here, clearly, on multiple levels.)
October 2nd, 2006
My neighbors are weird. I’m friendly enough with a lot of them, I suppose, given that I circle the blocks over and over again screaming things like, “Poop! POOP! Go poop!” It’s a little hard to stay anonymous when you’re toting around a snarfing, hoovering dog who’s pooping things like earplugs and cigarette butts and chomping on frogs and dead lizards, but that’s really not the point.
I live in a gated community in a snooty-type town. Incidentally, the Snootypants Factor is one of a frillion reasons why we struggle here, and yet another thing we failed to fully play out in our minds before we got here. We are decidedly un-snooty, if it isn’t obvious, and teenagers should not drive their own Escalades, is all I’m saying. And yet, travel two blocks outside the area, and people like Junior ain’t got no ear!.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the day, my particular gated community has absolutely none of the snootfactor, and all of the…well, God, sometimes, it’s like every other neighborhood I guess, with drug deals and rednecks and out of control teenagers who break into common areas and steal televisions (three are missing from the gym, and they were taken by a resident. Awesome.) Of course there’s Organ Lady, and I’ve certainly mentioned Mulch Lady, and Domestic Violence Lady, and there is, of course Nice Midwestern Lady, whose version of “getting tough” with the Vicodin dealers (He’s a young veteran, and has been selling his prescription refills to teenagers) who live across the street from her is yelling, “WE JUST SAY NO IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD!” every time they leave the house.
Anyway, I had too much to drink on Friday night. Too many liters (liters of wine. LITERS.), and it wasn’t on purpose (it never is). I feel compelled to point out that all of this drinking was taking place while I was playing the new-fangled Monopoly “Here & Now” version, and if that doesn’t illustrate the kind of rock n’ roll lifestyle we live, I don’t know what does.
So, Friday night, in my drunken haze, I decided to come home after a walk with the dog and take copious notes of my interaction with my neighbor – the one who, by the way, is fresh from a divorce and living a fratboy-type existence at the age of 39, complete with a Mustang. Every night he scares me by jumping out from behind his truck, which is always mysteriously full of watermelons, and screeches “PUPP-AY!” I can always smell the acrid beer on his breath, and there is always a six-pack of Bud Light within reach.
Near as I can tell from my notes (Notes. I made notes of this. Who does that?*), I walked in on a party of sorts, with my neighbor (who is dating our other neighbor, a single mom with two little girls), making out with what I think was a teenager I recognized from the neighborhood inside the damn car in the driveway. Meanwhile, another one of our (married, with children) neighbors was making out with a 22-year-old OTHER neighbor on a folding chair, and well, it just got VERY VERY AWKWARD when I showed up walking my cockeyed dog, and can I just add that throughout this whole situation, the car was blasting Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” on the stereo system and they were bobbing their kissing heads to the music? And that I was veryvery drunk as I watched this all go down, so I probably stood there open-mouthed for far too long?
I just stood there awkwardly, while the Philandering Men (who are having this sort of drunken make out fest in the driveway – THE DRIVEWAY – of the fratboy’s girlfriend) proceed to act very, very cheery towards me, I guess to try to defuse the situation, by yelling things like “DOG!” and “DOG’S MOM!” because they have no idea what my name is, and I just wanted to die, that much I remember.
It finally ended when Mustangman awkwardly asked if my dog had to poop and then announced:
“BECAUSE I SURE HAVE TO POOP RIGHT NOW! AND WHO DOESN’T?”
Then he ran away into his girlfriend’s house.
I haven’t seen either of them since. And it’s just…well, it’s just so fucking weird.
*For the record, I do this all the time. Not the drunken part, but the notes part. Writing a book has rendered me a fool for the Moleskine, and I document anything and everything out of the ordinary, and some of the ordinary. It’s an embarrassing habit.
**Sarah McLachlan
October 1st, 2006
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