foul-mouthedesoterica

2007-01-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

why can't someone just take him for a month? one goddamn month is all i ask.

if i were divorced, i'd be receiving child support every month and i'd get eight weeks off every year.

fuckballs.

whatever happened to grandma's farm?

2007-01-08T21:38:00.000-08:00

why is it so f'ing cooold??

oh, yeah. winter.

this certainly explains the scheduled outage. hope they wear their hats. 7:45 pst in a wind-storm sounds mighty brisk.........

2006-12-26T00:02:00.000-08:00

i need to go scare up some trouble. being all generous for about two seconds during the holidays took it all out of me.

somebody's going dowwwwnnnnnn.........

2006-12-21T23:37:00.000-08:00

i think i'm suffocating chris. do you think i'm suffocating chris? because i think i might be. i just keep commenting and commenting and he just keeps pulling away.. withdrawing. what could be the matter? am i being too needy? i don't want to come across as needy. because if i appear too needy then he'll think i am actually needy and he's likely to accuse me of suffocating him and that's a bad thing.

at least i didn't practically fuck him in the front seat of my car.

i think a relo is in the cards...

2006-12-12T21:15:00.000-08:00

did anybody see last night's simpsons episode? marge and homer play the tape of a fight that they had contrived so the kids will stay out of the bedroom while they 'snuggle.' the tape reverses to calliope music and bart pushes open the door, only to witness them in mid (or post) coitous. the next scene takes place the subsequent day, wherein a trembling bart implores milhouse to 'hand him some (milk) duds, man (because he's too truamatized to engage in simple manual tasks)'

milhouse, looking typically bewildered, reflects: 'trust me, bart. it's better to walk in on both your parents than it is to walk in on one!' milhouse lives with his mom. i fucking love this show.

sensing a prospective awkward moment, i muse: 'why didn't they just lock their door??!' as i continue my passage through the room where my son is watching tv. i'm not feeling a great deal of sympathy for kids' perspective on parental sex this week, and there is that little nagging, unresolved issue of his walking in on me a few months back.

it's not like i didn't try to obfuscate my actions with a plausible lie, but ever since this dreaded mishap the big 'M' has descended into an overly-publicized point of non-prurience with me. once you cross THAT boundary, coyness seems a wasted effort.

to that end, i'm proud to announce that a good roll in the hay (sourdough) has done wonders toward helping me render friday's antics forgotten and inconsequential. cleaning helps. vacuuming my car helps. no relatives in town helps.

let's hope that controlled tedium continues to aid me in the path of solitary enlightenment.

as you wizzle....

2006-12-04T22:34:00.000-08:00

BORED! bored bored bored bored bored bored. somebody post something!

you know what you people are? selfish, that's what.

isn't this supposed to be the best night on tv? well, that explains a thing or two...

selfish.

i'm through with the first two discs of firefly. i have 'til thursday (ah reckon) to finish the box off. i smell it a few more times, then i return it.

my erstwhile novelist/coworker calls this offering a 'leave behind.'

maybe i should keep it.

perhaps i could also attempt to produce something of value and check a few hundred things off of my 'to do' list, which might alleviate my 'boredom.'

somehow i doubt it....

2006-12-04T02:07:00.000-08:00

anyway, my crush lent me this boxed set of the first (oh wait -- only) season's episodes of a sci-fi series that got killed after the first season in response to some doubtlessly retarded, drunken thing i must have said about how much i like 'american dad.'

i like the series. i was so panicked that might be incredibly stupid or so technical that i couldn't follow it. instead, it has been so plot-and-character-packed that you have to rewind a jillion times to figure it out, but that doesn't differentiate it from 24 or prison break or a ton of other tv shit that is built for savants with 54" flat-screen tv's, but i digress.

i just wish he were lying naked with me while we watched it together.

(man, he'd better not ever stumble onto this or any other of my online shit.....)

as you were, my vacationing homies (which explains the traffic of late, or that incurable case of ebola i got during my travels....)

2006-12-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

okay, so you remember the guy whose kid i babysit every summer for innumberable weeks and always end up resenting it but i do it anyway, kind of like sex? erm...

so yesterday at work he's looking really somber and says: 'wanna buy a boat?' (he lives on a boat)

etc. etc. where you gonna move, under the bridge is nice this time of year......

so he wants to move to az where his brat lives to be closer to him so he stops flunking out of school like my son does anyway.

SO!! this means two things: i may not have to babysit next summer (or ever again) and i have an opportunity to buy his boat and use it as a liveaboard/weekend retreat. given that a boat was plan b) in the whole 'i'm moving somewhere affordable, which translates to not here' schematic, i can entertain the option of doing so in spring, 'aught seven. plus i'm not doing anything to make enough money to fulfill plan a) which was actually save some up.

i'm just sayin'

is it me, or can i not feel my fingers? stupid december.

2006-11-27T04:38:00.000-08:00

GHAAA!! what's with this new font? brought to you by makers of large-type books for the over-70 demographic? it's bad enough that this online drunken thought forum is now officially in the history of my neighbor's computer (my vox presents its homepage and requires signing in each time -- no, i was not going to eliminate all of their internet history for my purposes, and yes, i was too lazy to not post from their computer) but this ridiculous, new LARGE PRINT renders my previously unreadable text merely indecipherable. i liked it better when you couldn't see it.

anyone see american dad and f.g. tonight? "Roger! where'd you learn to skate like that?"
".... on my planet! you REALLY don't read my MySpace page, do you?"

also of note: "what am i doing? it's just a friendly skating contest! why must i turn everything into a brutal competition? can't i just enjoy this?"
two gay guys skate by in flawless union.
"whoops, there it is! time to turn this back into a brutal competition.."

*aahhh...just like home*

whoever thinks that american dad is the weak, tag-along half-sister of family guy did not grow up in my house....

2006-11-26T01:28:00.000-08:00

I need to post something.

should it be about how a couple of shots of Crown give you the fuggiest sleep ever, rendering you panicky and useless on the last day before your housesitting duty ends? should it be about cowardice and hesitance and regret -- how you called in to work to maybe get the day off (there haven't been the requisite number of servers on a friday or saturday since december, 2005 and the one time i called in because my niece was visiting, the other die-hard server requested the day off due to food poisoning and got yelled at) so you could finish all the laundry, cleaning the sheets and the comforter the dog barfed on, but neglected to assert your position at the exact moment that the bartender on duty was contacting the one server who thinks she runs the place to tell her not to come in because she never does anyway and he needs the money?

but that would be too 'tonight at work two days after thanksgiving.' who could be bothered?

i want to talk about love and intrigue and romance and the stuff of unrequited passion and then i realize that writing's so darned hard and i just can't be bothered.....

so i'll just stick with: tonight sucked, laundry's in the tub, my son doesn't know where he's sleeping tonight and someone at work enlightened me to the 'tri-delt (phi-delt?) cow award', an honorarium that makes me want to spit in the food of every frat boy who graces my presence. there are a lot of frat boys who grace my presence.

i'll leave this little over-the-holidays post-midterm homework assignment to you, and in so doing, pay homage to university deadlines observed everywhere.....

2006-11-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, i've got two lasagnes and an empty house all ready for anyone who wants to drop by....

i'll be waiting...

it's 'pajamas only.'

happy t-day, my homies!

2006-11-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

i just bought fifty bucks worth of makeup. apparently, i didn't learn my lesson when i shelled out all that cash this summer, and ended up sending it all to my niece. how do you spell 'neice?' 'niece?'

i think i'm feeling cocky, as i'm about to come into possession of a very expensive home with a good bathroom and lighting. maybe i'll dye my hair again. now THAT's an addictive process.....

i like the whole marketing of the baby boomer thing. just about every cosmetics manufacturer now has a 'formulated for old bags over forty--you know who you are' line, which is good. the models are always gorgeous, but at least they aren't recent graduates of 'america's next top model (the drinking game)' so i bought some stuff. this is marketing brilliance at its apex.....

now if the hair-dye bottles would just stop screaming: "80% GREY COVERAGE!".... i swear i didn't even know how much grey hair i had until my first most recent dye job started growing out. i'm pretty certain the chemicals in the dye actually penetrate your hair follicles and permanently render your hair colorless.

'the first one's free...'

2006-11-19T00:15:00.000-08:00

i've gotta figure out this dating thing, stat.

because i am a moron.

and sick of being alone.

oh, wait. the repercussions of not being alone are: potentially finding myself under psychological and moral scrutiny, potentially unveiling to him my dysfunctional fuggy family, and potentially knowing that his friends are all: 'what up, oldspice?' which potentially sucks quite a bit.

the 'booty call' thing is looking pretty good right now.

is there a contract? because if i could download the form........

2006-11-17T00:14:00.000-08:00

"Texas? i'll be visiting a friend of mine up here pretty soon...a buddy of mine who i met in the navy, coming up on ten years ago.....wow. ten years. that sounds so ominous. -- ever since i turned 30..."

"delineating everything in decades? yeah, it creeps up on you.."

i have rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed the following conversation, in its innumerable, myriad iterations and still it sneaks up on me unprepared.

"so what are you--pushing up on 34?"

i look up, unable to suppress a smile directed toward my girl 'M' who has managed to ingeniously face-crush a grin while occupying herself with the money. she doesn't know how old i am. i had, however, indicated to her that our age differential was 'pretty out there' earlier that evening.

"28? 38? 40? 45?" oddly, i had predicted these options. random, not terribly insulting, no prime numbers...

"don't you know it's impolite to ask a woman her age?" fires off M through an irrepressable smirk.

"oh, yeah. beyond a certain age, a woman never tells," i volley back.

once comfortably removed from this interrogation, i asked him if he actually turned 30 this year. "so, you're a dragon?"

"yes, and a gemini."

i'm a dragon.

in spite of the apparent disadvantages this may have wrought, by night's end M was all: "he gave you the dimensions of his boat! the size of his bed! he asked you where you hang out and drink! you missed two critical cues! i'm gonna confirm this with my boy, but i'm pretty sure he's gonna laugh and laugh and laugh at your stupidity!"

....but he has to get up in three hours for work.....

did i mention that i love my girl M who had to waste an extra hour waiting on our/his/friends' drunken selves??

i got a side hug anyways....

i missed every cue. i am so horny..........

2006-11-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

I tried to send one of those retarded e-cards to a person whose birthday is in five minutes. holy mess, batman.

i ended up cancelling the whole production. that's right: caterers, florist, bartender, band, the whole thing! teach y'alls to mess with me.......

not composing the letter yet. can't decide if it's two: one, a formal thanks to the school system and all its administrative incompetents for doing such a bang-up job of educating my son in these last six years, and the other a mission statement of my total unwillingness to commit to the 'contractual obligations,' signed by me, as the parent of my middle schooler, as to my homework supervisory duties.

just think: drew barrymore was attending hollywood parties at (my son's) age and 'falling (can you say: 'ruffies?')' into bed with the likes of jack nicholson (american cultural hero, pedophile extroardinaire and general creepy asswipe) and the like. and i'm a neglectful parent.

i'm not in a great mood. i'm glad that desktop publishing allows for little people like me to engage in vitriolic responses to those posturing as authority figures.

because it's all in good fun.

bring it.

2006-11-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

well, it's a good thing my son and i got so much sleep last night or that 'conference call' about his attendance would not have gone so smoothly.

and the 'contract' that i'm supposed to sign regarding my responsibilities toward the fulfillment of his attendance requirements might have a nasty rider attached.

oh, wait. i almost said i won't be writing the school (system) a nasty letter.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

raj manhas isn't hating his life enough right now, following his resignation as the superintendant who proposed the closing numerous elementary schools to save the school system money. couldn't handle all the fat, ugly soccer moms cussing him out at the hearings that were held to dicuss these closures.

apparently he's a caver.

this should be fun.

2006-11-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

i can't post comments on vox and it's driving me crazy like ms. daisy.

and what a tragedy for my prospective comment recipients to be denied this invaluable resource. i can only shake my head in pity.

so if any of y'alls have wondered where oh where has their little irv gone, and what praisworthy pearl of wisdom might she have rendered about the star trek poster near the entrance of their hallowe'en maze, rest assured you will never know.

2006-11-03T01:49:00.000-08:00

plus i'm horny.

saturday plus a week minus the time change -- 12 days, give er take...

*sigh*

good thing i don't believe in premarital sex......

isn't there an exemption for watercraft? something about jesus and water and being a craftsman....

2006-11-03T00:29:00.000-08:00

sizable drama at work. this dude (texas D), whom everyone's trying to get fired, shows up with a broken up arm after a bicycling accident monday night. i don't mean to be dismissive, but why do these things always befall woefully inexperienced cyclists?

anyway, his elbow pin surgery is gonna cost a bundle, and his friend, a former cook who is being reconstructed as a bartender, was in tonight to train to replace him (i don't think he fully realizes his part in this betrayal). last night, texas D was being a typically obstreperous, irritated dick, additionally helpless with his newly immobilized arm, and the details of his behavior were (today) made clear to the manager, who already has him on probation. so his friend (training) informs him at some point that he's being talked smack about. tex calls the restaurant and tells me to 'nip any gossip in the bud' at about 10 pm. good ole morphine. my girl M says: "D has an ally? that's new."

i guess my boy ("your friend. your friend...? at the bar? you know, your FRIEND?..") broke down under the influence of D's increasingly agony-riddled groans and drove him to a pharmacy to get his pain meds filled last night. apparently this is an ordeal if attempted too late and, curiously, yielded nothing. i kept querying as to whether the drugs were supposed to be scored on the street or what the hell...all-night pharmacies are, apparently, not as easy-access as winona ryder during a full moon.

additional supports were called in.

that's what i have to say about my boy. and work drama.

nothing happens on my shift. if it does, i just deny ehr'thang........

2006-11-01T23:25:00.000-08:00

why can't i title?

VANITY, AND I MISS TOM

saturday, while attempting to decipher an inscrutable credit-card conundrum, one of the members of tom's old band approached the pass-through at the back bar. i don't know if he wanted to pay or required a drink, but i exclaimed with a measured enthusiasm: 'how are you??' he seemed to recognize me, or fake it, and we discussed tom, missing from all our lives since sobriety took hold. i think dude was with the band, because even though i didn't see him stand in, he requested to be fed at night's end (oh, the money that is lost when the house hosts these events)...

i queried about the band that tom, 20 years younger than its average member, had headed up -- they were still playing. they are a '60's and '70's cover band. my favorite memory of tom is our lip-syncing journey's 'lights' at an after-work party in the smoke-saturated apartment of a friend, after which he silently retired to the bathroom and barfed all night.

other people's favorite memories of tom include: beard contest with fellow coworker jim, in which after x months of beard growth (fall through winter) a competition as to nastiest beard, including guinness foam holding ability, overall appearance and strength are measured and scrutinized by a fair panel of judges including girlfriends, drunken coworkers and kitchen staff who have been paid off. also, beer chugging contest (my girl bree is one of these unlikelies who can outchug an entire fraternity, so the perameters included time elapsed before regurgitating into the kitchen garbage), the ubiquitous blue-cheese chugging dare, a flawless imitation of walter mattheau in 'dennis the menace' saying "it tastes like paint," and his timeless classic: an impersonation of our neurotic east-indian/vietnamese boss getting head from.....it doesn't matter... it's just fabulously wrong on every possible level.

mondays were always pretty slow.

so later i reapproach tom's ex-band mate, because we are cleaning up and cleaning up and cleaning up and cleaning up and i put forth: 'so i'll try to make it to your next performance. it's on the fourth? where in west seattle?'

he brightened up and clarified time and place. an aquaintance with whom he'd been hanging snapped his head in his direction, eyebrows raised. a younger version of me would have been grossed out by the implication that this gesture foretold. saturday, shortly after my second 21st b'day, all i could see was: 'helga the serving wench wants to see you play? sweeet dude. she's got some bomb tater tots all up in this piece..'

i think i work that night.

it's all good.

2006-11-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

I really really really really really hate my son.

maybe if i move to the south, with their strong military tradition, i can send him to an academy.

somebody needs to rewire his m*therf*cking brain, stat.

i suppose 8 million fun-size snickers and no sleep for three nights don't help.

it's funny: i've been thinking a lot about the endless stream of ludicrous, soul-eviscerating relationships that i was in over the ten years that comprised my 'dating' period (was i ever taken on a date?? one? maybe two...), and like most extremely jaded, older single women, i can sum up my experiences with one word: 'backtalk.'

as in, give me somebody for whom habitual backtalk (whose forms may include the ubiquitous ADHD-retard perpetual interruption/obtuse subject change, the pseudo-intellectual repartee-turned-argument-that-he-always-has-to-win, or everyone's favorite: 'i'm 15 years older than you so i will spend the entire relationship talking down to, dismissing, and/or engaging in both a and b with you) is a complete unknown.

it could happen.

maybe the reason i've broken it down this way has to do with my son's behavior.

obviously, i'm an enabler.

take him away. take them all away and put them in front of a firing squad. who would notice?

2006-10-29T20:23:00.000-08:00

see, now there; i found it. but i wasn't able to access my updated page without publishing a new post, which seems like my portal now.

oh, i get it. the first 117 are free, but then you have to post one every time you want to gain access, or they cut off your service.

verrry clever, blogger. verry clever.

cable companies got nothing on you........

2006-10-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

sooo...i'm not getting what's happening with blogger. i posted something and it won't publish.

it's in the hopper, recorded as 'posted' but it doesn't publish, and when i go to view, i get '401k cannot be found,' or whatever that page says. i'd like a 401k. but i don't think that's the point.

slept all day. woke up once to go grocery shopping and then hit the hay again.

too old for this business. what business i don't know, but i'm certainly too old for it.

2006-10-29T01:20:00.000-08:00

aight.

the work marathon est termine (need some accent marks here or italics, or both...)

costume was pretty successful. i was making critical, critical decisions about some of the most important components of its final appearance at the eleven-and-a-halfth hour (i was late to work) about how to string up the shirt, with what, and which bra to wear. the bra part had me nearly in tears. it's funny with hand-cobbled stuff--all these minute details that go into the attempt to imitate something, to perfect it so it can simply appear normal. the one bra gave me 'dent-boob' but was more presentable when the inevitable shirt fallout would occur, the other gave me a better profile but i kept 'fact-checking' all night.....

however, i can't complain. one of the cooks commented: "you look like, what is it, 'st. pauli's girl?'" and, many drinks into the evening a 'pirate' with a meditterranean accent said between band sets: "i've been meaning to tell you that i really like your costume. i feel like i'm in a bar in ireland or somewhere!" my response? 'st. pauli grandma.' (laughter)

now, if somebody would just invite me to a costume party (blinking like betty boop) i could have this thing tweaked pretty good.

2006-10-27T00:38:00.000-07:00

tonight wasn't an unmitigated disaster, because none of the thugs got behind the bar.

it was a complete wash for me, though.... i had all-night pass campers and none of the 'business' that this group brought in. just so you know, the 'business' that entertainment fiascos like this bring in is a bunch of people eating and drinking for free. tommorrow? same. the place actually loses revenues on nights like this.

so i held up the end of the bar and admired the pleasant countenance and nice (autographing) penmanship of one of the older players, only occasionally stopping to notice what a whore i can sometimes be for fame. i just like to study people. yeah, that's it...

tomorrow? round two.

obviously, i'm not working on my thingee right now...........

not that thingee.

2006-10-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

Well, today's tow truck driver wasn't as cute as the last few, but he was pretty helpful. pretty much a third of the way into the precipitous ascent of the giant cobblestone-strewn hill overlooking town upon the top of which my son attends school, my hood started to smoke.

i popped it and that outlet valve that sits atop the antifreeze container was sputtering like mad. some dude walks by and says 'looks like you have an overheat....i'm not much of a mechanic but....' and pretty much got into his yuppie ride and drove off. there was a bit more dialogue than that, but this neighborhood, the apex of yuppiedom in a town that isn't very friendly to start with, wasn't yielding me limitless charitable passersby, in spite of the fact that i was freezing, in a bus zone, and nearly in tears. i was also in a residential neighborhood and stranded without a phone. and my AAA card wasn't on me.

so i made the decision, once i let it cool, to restart it. i figured i'd circumnavigate the hill and seek the easiest path toward summit. naturally, the second my car started the precipitous re-ascent?...

'come on, baby. just get me there. 6 blocks tops....' yes. i am an idiot.

i managed to pull in front of the school, only three blocks past summit, implored my son to 'have a nice day (poor guy)', and went out in search of a payphone. yeah, right. this nice kid at noah's bagels didn't seem to know where one was, but told me i could use theirs. i just shook my head and walked away. i'm a total dick when i'm distraught.

so i made my calls from the school office and the tow-guy came and insisted on diagnosing it. thermostat. he also informed me that my obviously brand new alternator only requires two bolts to connect to the engine, but that the shop probably charged me $120 for labor to install it. yep. thanks.

god hates me. maybe it's all those mean things i say to chris. or the fact that i'm an athiest.

anyway, i'm home now and my face is just starting to stop tingling from the cold. gotta work on this stupid costume.

2006-10-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

oooooh! there's a scheduled outage at two pm. i love how they never tell you what day. so then is it like when you lose power and the street lights are all out, and traffic gets backed up because everyone is treating the intersections like four-way stops? and you have to reset your thermostat, phone and all the electric clocks in the house?

i'm cold, i'm breaking out into rashes from the artificial heat, and i don't want to spend another year in this town. especially not a winter. it's anxiety attack season, and i just got finished paying the hospital (okay the collections agency) for the last one......

the number of the beast hasn't started his homework and i'm too lazy to haul my 25 pound (i swear) sewing machine up into warmer environs. so you see, i'm making a lot of progress. i'm thinking of dying a rug.

2006-10-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

the blouse isn't working, my son has double-overdue homework that he didn't bother to tell me about, i'm old and ugly and the world can kiss my ass.

mimi's sounding pretty appropriate right about now.

it's not like i was gonna get laid anyway........

enjoy your monday.

2006-10-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

vox is pissing me o-off.

so i found an '80's blouse, white with a big giant pocket and and elasticized waist (remember that linebacker look back in the day that sent every woman of fashion in mad pursuit of foam shoulder inserts and the spoon to engage in reverse parastolsis necessary maintain proper emaciation?) at the thrift store yesterday. i ripped off the pocket and the buttons and i'm hand-stitching button holes on the button side so i can thread the top. then i studied the st pauli girl bottle at work and doubt started creepin in. however, it occured to me that she's just a drawing and customers tell me i remind them of a waitress at a german pub whenever i carry 4 pitchers in one hand, so i figure i have room for error. after some prompting, i revealed my plan to my homies. so now i'm going to be held to it. ugh. better keep mimi on the fallback in case this doesn't pan out.

ugh. my sewing machine's on the shits, so i'm going to be cannibalizing this mess with a whole lot of iron-on adhesive in lieu of actual tailoring. wish me luck.

off to the thrift store again.

i promise if something actually happens in my life i'll post about it....

2006-10-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

well fine dirty dewitte. now i have to repost that--post

btw, i can relate to the addictive nature of second hand smoke, being in the service industry and all..

btw, i'm posting this comment here because vox is 'error on page'-ing me 'til death does us part.

i just need to tweak dirty and felching some more...

he came in tonight with his homies. this turned out to be a quick visit--a precursor to a birthday party. tonight seemed all about big groups germinating and burgeoning like fungal fields. his party's drunken, aisle-ridden demeanor reinforced the collage of entropy that had been established hours before.

i think one of his 'girls' was shooting me the dirty. i'll presume she has figured out my posture of sexually-charged ambivalence and is feeling a little protective of him. or she's just cute and stuck-up.

who can tell nowadays

2006-10-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know why i keep pulling that last post back to draft. I think it's a) because no matter how many times i edit it, it still sucks, and b) it's too much descriptive narrative (albeit about nothing) about people with whom i actually interact, and i'm paranoid as hell.

..for the one or both of you who read it and failed to comment out of boredom.

otherwise as you were.

happy monday. it's rainy here. at least i'm not pulling a tree off my car. to think i came *this* close to buying a house in buffalo a few years back.

whew

2006-10-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

so this morning, for the second day in a row, my car doesn't start. beastie boy didn't attend school yesterday for this reason, so i couldn't risk another absence. the diagnosis originally was an alternator. this was quickly remedied and the car returned within the day. so when i get up to start it this morning, i get nothing. no power, maybe a little *huhwoog*, but otherwise nothing.

shitballs. so i call a cab. we're already late for school so there was truly no other option at this juncture. twenty-eight bucks to get him to the top of the cobblestone-riddled hill overlooking downtown. he exits the car, and i realize that i can just bus it to downtown and then transfer to another bus to get home. the shortest distance between two points in any public transportation labyrinth involves rerouting through the central hub.

it was a gorgeous morning, and this particular neighborhood rivals the north beach section of san francisco, with all its old architecture, bistros, and ever-changing nightclubs to peer into. with something new to look at every two seconds, i opted to walk. my brakes were a little warbly at the terminus of the main descent (i forget that about really steep terrain), but overall it was very refreshing. plus some italian hole-in-the-wall is hiring, so that's FMI while i'm polishing up the resume.

and of course, i got to walk by, or near, his jobsite. in retrospect, i can't actually remember what street he is working on, and i should have taken a different route to avoid any possible spotting (of me), but what the hell. i'm embracing my inner stalker.

("inner..?")

so during the ride home i pondered the possibilities of a complicated electrical problem and, more importantly, of potentially not having use of the car at all. things just could not be worse. ("things could always be worse. just keep telling yourself that.")

so the AAA roadside assistance monkeys came out, hooked a battery-charge-measuring thingy onto the car's battery, and the woman got in and started the car without incident. without even charging it up. i had tried it three fucking times ("how many times?") on two different occasions this morning to no avail. i must have moved the seat about a nanometer too far back and was not depressing the clutch pedal far enough towards the floor.

or gremlins. i'm going with gremlins.

lesson for the day: i'm actually grateful that the car works, rather than resenting my egregious stupidity and the money wasted. i needed a dose of gratitude this month. i have a car. yay. stop complaining.

i hope that bistro's hiring.....

2006-10-10T00:13:00.000-07:00

engineering a date (shitballs -- i never do this)

"so, what do you do on sundays? i just sleep in..

"..you're probably still recovering from saturday..

"..how do you feel about red robin?"

sometimes i think that a well-executed hamburger, prefaced by a green salad rendered at about 4 pm on a sunday, is god's way of saying i love you.

plus they still card me. 38 1/2 years or younger.

bring it.

i'm still not even close to his age........

you game?

lil' funk...

2006-10-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

*sigh*

guess we'll get started in with some homework.

mood stabilizers, anyone?

happy monday.

2006-10-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

arite. i have to take two hefty bags to the laundromat 'cause my boy projectile vomited in bed thursday night. my bigger boy came to work in thursday night because texas bartender told him on wednesday that i miss him. he showed me cell phone pix of a remodel he helped with and our forearms pressed up against each others'. also knees. what base it that? i love being in middle school, erm, age.

skinny hippie coworker dude crushed me in an arm-wrestling contest last night 'cause my girl, 'M', an ex-powerlifter, wouldn't take my challenge. i had to pick the next person in my weight class. i'm still pouting.

there was something else........no, i think that's about it. better get the laundry done before all that barf morphs into live cultures.

2006-10-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

you know that stupid joke about jewish foreplay being two hours of begging?

what's a quiet homework session at home with my son?

45 minutes of backtalk and 20 minutes of disruptive behavior followed by 30 minutes of screaming, thrashing and profanity.

i'm preparing my 'tell us about your child' letter to the school as we speak.

my favorite part is the collective insistence on the part of his elementary school teachers that he was 'really holding it together' and 'doing really great' (maybe at school until he got home, and no). now his middle-school instructors and administration are relegated to throwing up their arms about his attendance, the near-absence of homework and his poor test scores. huh! so he finally gets the screws put to him academically, and he's completely buried. boy, nobody's as surprised about this as i am!

psyche.

i don't need this this year. i should have put a down payment on a condo two years ago when i had the money. now i'm completely fucked. i probably won't even be able to get a second job.

2006-10-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

man, you guys suck.

which is good because i have now officially parted with about fourteen hundred dollars in incidental costs in the past two weeks. the collections guy called today. apparently northwest hospital wants their money for that little ER run at 2:20 am back in march when i finally decided that four hours is the longest that i'm willing to endure an anxiety attack. apparently, i don't qualify for the discount rate. must be my monumental income.

so anyway, i don't have the ten bucks.

plus, the computer guy calls today and gets my son and asks him to have me call him back. it's been over a week. what's wrong now?? what do i do? just hand him a hundred bucks and tell him to keep the [edit] CPU? i swear, i'm into it for more than a replacement is gonna run me, and i think it isn't even fixed yet. holy shit.

june, 1997. i think it was june. july?

2006-10-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

(slurring) and, so anywayzzzz

i'm not certain to what i should dedicate this rendering. chris' so-called 'inability to read comments or post', my newfound association with vox, my son's increasingly dysfunctional approach to homework and life, my disintegrating relationship with my workplace, my monetary/geographic goals which are strategically designed to render four out of five of the preceding problems inconsequential, or the fact that fifteen-year-old girls emasculate all women by merely existing.

let's talk about my boy: so much for previous topics...

i like that even the crudest of my co's references him as 'my dude'.

recently, during closing and in the presence of an erstwhile ancient, my fave new coworker offered: 'so has your friend come in?' dubiously proud and extremely obvious, i made all manner of obviously rendered slicing motions across my neck and fingers to the lips -- a shallow, comedic allusion to the fact that said mutual attraction might seem problematic to those who are the business of forming judgements, the context of which i have been tremendously instrumental in perpetuating.........

in the meantime, i highly suspect that he has made a conscious effort to give up. rightly...

ten bucks (i will seriously send a check or money order) to the person who can pinpoint, with reasonable accuracy, the last time i got laid.

2006-10-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

Actually, my plan is solidifying. Said bartender, among other things, bragged, on saturday night, another night without one of our several seasoned servers who have taken the summer off, and featuring our newest hire, someone close to my age and therefore sufficiently humble, hard-working and (thankfully) assertive, boasted about how he cleared (typically) more money than i have ever made in the eight years i have worked there and, among other things covered in the gossipy aftermath of said shift, implied that there's 'a new game in town.' Unfortunately, the new game in town is his, and he has no intention of relinquishing it. Somehow in the conversation, i must have unwittingly conceded the veracity of his comment. My mind was reeling shortly following; the next day i was incredulous.

This (and my drunken verbalization of my reluctant disloyalties to my closest homies at work) seemed to have summed up my job's dynamic. Management, along with senior servers who think prime shifts will simply remain in reserve status whilst they take huge chunks of time off and then pretend that they have some say in the machinanizations of the restaurant, along with the new greedy avarices, have blown a hole in the power vacuum. Short form? There are those who do all the work and those who make all the money. It has become quite prostitutional.

Significanty, everyone who has been caught in the middle (yelled at, screamed at, marginalized by management) and who have been the troopers who show up for every shift in spite of the morale-crushing absence of prima-donna servers whose absence has unwittingly handed said aforementioned bartender all the money, has quit. except me.

My favorite allegiance-destroying comment from the bartender who helped create and exploit this vacuum: have you noticed that B only shows up for weekend shifts when it's a Husky Saturday?

(A double at that: a great sacrifice that she was willing to make for the 'team' to the tune of about four hundred bucks. Take the rest of the month off, please. And while you're at it, tell us all how to run the restaurant. Make a sidework list. Anything. Because things have gotten really out of control...)

bitter? certainly. focused? i hope so...because what else is there at this point??

I need to score about eight grand by about april.

i need another job.

wish my old work-ethic ass luck. i need it.

cheegers.

2006-09-28T23:45:00.000-07:00

this is i my hundredth post. that's a prime number, right?

i haven't spoken more than two words to redbeard in three weeks. waah. this weaning thing was supposed to work; wilford brimley gave me his word. i hope i can cancel payment.

there is this new drama at work wherein the latest employee is struggling to comprehend the invincible greed of recent bartender hires.

I SO NEED A DAY GIG!

my goal is to get about eight grand up and buy a condo in DFW. for thirty. shut up. lowest-end condos in arlington are roughly as copious as my son's bedroom.

i'm just sayin'

presumably i can then rent it out (depending on HOA restrictions) while determining my next maneuver. you see? my logic is seamless.

but that's just the beer talking...

oh, wait: i came up with this plan stone fucking cold sober.

"you never used to say 'fucking'"

points for whomever can access that quote. points = sugar-free butterscotch sucking candies.

duh

2006-09-28T00:21:00.000-07:00

oh, and hey. today? my (second) computer dude credits the fact that i installed a norton anti-virus into my CPU with the fact of its slow-downness. that and it never had enough ram to begin with. i'm willing to buy into the latter, but his scare-tactics about removing the former unwittingly throw me into an agreement about norton's laborious disassembly.

"'big pain.' there are programs written to remove norton. i'll just charge you an hour to do so and install AVG (like your grandma's monkey couldn't install AVG)"

i just uninstalled norton from this computer. took five minutes. will september never end?.........

wishing the fall leaves and snarfy allergens balance their orchestral beauty to render y'alls a peaceful, uneventful september the twenty somethingth or other....

i'm off to bed..........

2006-09-27T00:33:00.000-07:00

when i grow up, i want to be the waiterrant guy. he is a cabable writer with exceedingly questionable ethics who gets more comments for his random posts about infamous customers whose dubious dining antics routinely enable him to repeatedly appear as a self-knighted dude in shining armor, as his delusional narrative posts daily conclude. in the meantime, he has gotten himself a radio appearance, a (cancelled) shadow vignet on good morning america, and a book contract.

who knew being an unscrupulous server could be so fetching and/or lucrative? appropriately, i find the comments (often quite incendiary) to his page to be the most substantial portion of his blog entries. i wonder if simon & schuster are taking this into consideration..??

asshole.........

but that's just me: to extrapolate his analysis -- I'm an embittered old-lady lifer....of course, he's just shy of 5 years younger than I.....

2006-09-26T17:43:00.000-07:00

picked up the car today six hunnerd bux. feeling kind of blah'sy.

must be the no money blues.......

my brother just sold his business. i should say, it's 'pending sale.' inspired by said event, i am inspired to branch out into endeavors the likes and scale of which will amaze and astound each an every one of you.

or maybe just pick up a six-pack and finish the laundry.

as you were.

2006-09-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

god i hate fucking computers. they suck homeless guy dick. I'm sick of my comments getting fried. conversely, my comment recipients are indoubtedly tired of my stupid comments, so i'll blame computer karma.

TODAY: WE SALUTE YOU, EVERYDAY AMERICAN HERO

Today, in an effort to pick up one of my CPU's and get in a joyride, I found my car's engine hump-chugging at an intersection, located on a steep hill, and totally losing power on the turn. Freaking out, i killed the engine, hit the hazards (where are they again?) and, shaking like a crack-whore, attempted to look for fluid reservoirs that might have been neglected. some dude pulled over and accused my engine of possibly overheating. 'give it 15 minutes, then try again, pull off the road and give it another 20 minutes: that should get you home'

he sped out, and a cop pulled behind. obviously a victim of chronic smartassery, he quipped: 'you can't park here.'

i returned: 'actually, i just finished off a fifth of J.D. and I'm trying sober up...'

he allowed me to remain, stranded in the right lane of a busy thorougfare for five or so minutes, until i might attempt to turn my engine over again. this was hardly an adequate cooling interval as the engine absorbed the hot sun through a dark hood, but presently, i re-attempted ignition.

'you can really see the heat coming from the hood when you try to turn it over' oh good: he knows something about cars.

'what do you think? more time? engine coolant?'

the upshot of said conversation was that he could get a tow out more quickly than i through police dispatch if an auto club membership happened to present itself. I shudder at the prospect of entertaining the options available to me in the absence of AAA; my card's tenancy in the front of my wallet made for some prospective smooth sailing.

fifteen minutes later a tow truck showed. the driver pointed out to the cop that there was another stalled vehicle a couple minutes back. the officer returned that he saw another squad car pass him, so the situation was likely being remedied. "i usually don't stop myself"

i snickered inwardly at our newfound fraternity of sarcasm.

I said something about overheating to the tow guy. his response was 'not good.'

He went about the business of hitching up the car, bonked his head on the hitch and BS'd with the cop.

"Do I need to grab my purse?"

"It's coming with us, right?"

Us.

I had spent the entire 15 minute wait attempting to configure how, exactly, I could get the car to the shop (or should I have it towed home? was this an overheat? could the situation be remedied with some coolant and time? would we be in for another tow to the shop if this diagnosis was faulty?), pick up my CPU (there was absolutely no fucking way that I could tell my son that after a week with no computer that I killed the car, the CPU's still in the shop, and I'm taking off to work for 7 hours--see you tomorrow), get home and back to work, considering that I was at this moment equadistant from the auto mechanic and the computer doofs, and closer to home than I would be if and when we dropped the car off at the mechanic's. If I were to rule out picking up the CPU altogether, I would be closer to work once the car was dropped. Did I mention that I was in the midst of a potential time crunch? Thankfully, I wasn't due in to work until 6. It was 3:30.

Additionally, I had no concept of tow-truck protocol, which presumably governs how far, where and whether stranded drivers accompany the tow dude to his intended destination. So his response to the statement: "I think it's overheated" potentially governed my first decision.

"Where we going?"

90th and Roosevelt. the toyota mechanic was exactly 40 blocks south of the intersection where i had met my demise. As I pulled my seatbelt over, I queried: "do you think I fried my engine?"

"possibly."

my AAA card initiated its residency between my teeth. "wow. not good."

after an excruciating long, desperate silence, he offered: "what did it sound like when it stalled?"

i clunkily described the stalling process and my attempts at re-starting, and he clarified: "so you mean it's turning over, but not catching? maybe you're out of gas."

"that would be hilarious. the gas guage didn't seem low."

"i don't know; with these older cars the guages can be faulty; this truck's only about five years old, and the other day my guage read 1/2 tank and i found myself completely out of gas. on I-5. during rush hour."

"'i'm gonna need a tow...'"

"seriously. my buddy had to come and bail me out. if you want, we could stop at the arco up here and put five bucks in it and see if that's the problem." in my adrenaline-besotted mind, I could not clearly recall if I had put $20 in the previous day or the day before, or whether that meant anything, since $20 gets you about 3 gallons any more. besides, 'out of gas' seemed an unlikely diagnosis, but if it was correct, i could be on my way after filling up. was he going to have to unhitch my car at the station? I had two blocks to decide. "i mean, either way; it's up to you..."

"might as well try it." this would prove interesting.

we pulled into the station lot, an electron field of cars jockeying for space in the eight bays provided. in order to pull in, two bays would have to be empty at once in order for the truck to pull far enough forward. a cute asian woman was futzing around with the debit payment bay. numerous attempts to get her card to read were rendering nothing. the bay in front of her was empty. her speed in execution was critical to our mission. typical of somebody young and attractive, she was oblivious to the unfolding events around her.

"come on, dollface.." my knight mumbled in a gravelly voice. someone entering the bay in front of her utilized the still-empty room to jockey for an adjacent bay. he lost it to a woman in a cadillac coming from the opposite direction. "oohh! tough luck buddy...it's his fault for not being more assertive." dollface moved to a different payment bay. miraculously, the spot in front of her remained empty. the people on the other side of the lot must have seen us and construed our needs, or their gas tanks were all on the wrong side, because nobody attempted to enter it. after her payment was finally acknowleged, dollface returned to her car and began to pump. "you mean you're just getting started?!! aw, come on!!" my card dug itself deeper into my incisors. this was starting to seem like a really bad idea.

a couple of random dudes jockeyed around the far end of the lot, exiting busy traffic and executing near-misses with other cars attempting to leave the station. "way to go, Spaarrky!" my knight exclaimed, after one dude nearly hit another car attempting egress. it occurred to me that this guy sits in his cab and listens to Lycus all day long, five days a week. his was a flawless impersonation.

dollface was finishing up. "of course this isn't gonna work unless that bay remains open." at one point, another gentleman, also coincidentally named 'Sparky' had attempted to enter it. my dude yelled in protest, completely insulated by the glass of the truck, and the driver chose an adjacent bay instead. dollface re-capped her tank. "if you run in for cigarettes or something i'll kill you." the bay in front of her remained open. she entered her car "..good job toots.." and pulled out, leaving us the necessary two bays.

i sprinted inside with a 5, undid my cap, which did not hiss, indicating that i was not down to fumes (hmmm. i've never cut it close like that or anything), and filled up. i asked the driver if i could enter the car, raised on the front end by the hitch. "huh?"

"will my excessive weight overwhelm the hitch?" he waved away my ridiculous statement.

"i just don't want to unhitch it..." of course not. that would be disastrous. i stepped up, tried to turn my engine over for a minute, and it didn't catch. he indicated that we should forget it and go.

as we pulled out, he ruminated: "sounds like your engine isn't getting gas. probably a fuel pump."

oh good. that sounds inexpensive. i mean, how much cost can the word 'pump' imply? sump pump? breastpump? penis pump? bicycle pump? i'm not getting the same monetary image i would if the diagnosis were 'cracked block.'

we made our way up the hill and i pondered how people, unwittingly or otherwise, emulate media figures and how fitting, and sad, that my driver would choose lycus as his role model.

"it's up here on the right. it sneaks up on you, and you literally can't see it until you're passing it. i think there's some kind of tree..."

"yeah. it's probably a fuel pump."

we passed right by it, and I exclaimed: "there. see? you pass it first" he backed us in, miraculously not squishing the parts truck that was sharing driveway space with our articulated behemoth of vehicular nonsense.

i think the name 'sparky' was utilized again, but once we passed the parts truck and he realized that the driver was a woman, he rendered a gruff apology.

he pulled me in, and the head mechanic queried: "what happened to your baby?" i got carte blanche service since i was pulled in by a tow truck. he popped the hood, tried to turn it over, got his assistant to start futzing with the distributor cap, attempting to diagnose it while i stood there.

my knight unhitched, went to the truck to put something away, and said goodbye. i had failed to employ a momentary window to reach into my tornado of a purse to fumble around for a twenty, and suddenly the possibility of saying: 'let me give you some money' felt awkward. i let the moment pass, knowing i was going to need that money for a cab, and he sped off.

he was actually pretty hot in a short, pudgy, bald, goatee'd tough-guy kind of way.

i want to drive a tow truck when i grow up.

2006-09-20T18:30:00.000-07:00

HEY! THERE'S A SCHEDULED OUTAGE AT 4PM. LEARN MORE!

I promise not to swear in this post, even though both my home units are broke and the fixy guys haven't even started on the first one, 3 days after i dropped it off. there was supposed to be a 1-2 day turnaround.

i feel out of control. i hate this feeling. my son is ballistic because he can't play runescape and his friends keep calling him to go online and he can't. on the bright side, this frees up time for homework that he's been neglecting and his progress report revealed some wicked, nasty bad grades for work not accomplished.

they're not as forgiving in middle school. i'd better step up to the plate. i hate doing homework with him......... he needs a quality tutor, big time.

so i'm at the library enjoying city-sponsored DSL, the only place i can type into DeWitte's comment box without a delay. FYI.

i can't think of anything interesting to post. thanks for yer comments; i'll try to read some more posts when i don't have the timer gun to my head (an hour).

in the meantime, keep it rill's. bilingual storytime is meeting in the conference room by the front door. i'd better go. it starts in 5 minutes.

2006-09-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

looks like the bitches gonna get smoked is my computers.

my downstairs CPU is in the shop because it's virus content rivals the product of my expectorations (is that a fucking word?).

i bought a moniter for my upstairs computer at a thrift store, and it works (yay!) but now that bitch is telling me the modem can't be found when i try to dial-up, and it's just being a connection bitch. this better be a quirk of to much traffic tying up the phone line and not the fact that i knocked the CPU over when i was fucking with the moniter connection. shut up if it was, shut up if that's a stupid theory. just shut up. i'm in a shitty mood.

fucking technology.

somebody better sex me up quick or some bitches gonna get smoked.

this post brought to you by the number 666 and the letter 'fuck'.

as you were....

2006-09-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

this shit better be gone by tomorrow or some bitches gonna get smoked. *scchhhnnnaarrrf!!*

i'm not sick very often anymore, so i'm being a big f*cking baby about life.

i'm gonna treat myself to a trip. any suggestions? a coworker of mine's gonna fly to d.c. in october to check out the fall colors and the clubs. or atlanta.

i'm thinking maybe savannah.

2006-09-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

I hab a code in by dose.

It started out as a scratchy throat a full week ago, following a cranky sunday, evolving into occassional bouts of sneezing, smoker's cough and general expectoritus. Couldn't tell if it was seasonal allergies or not.

Then, as we were sitting at the back bar, chillin' and drinking cheap champagne poured into glasses of day-old orange juice, i could feel my nasal passages swell and constrict with each passing minute as the drippies started to form.

Pretty cool, actually: i don't remember a time when i could actually feel myself taking on the symptoms of a cold over the course of a few minutes. i usually wake up in the middle of the night or the morning to it's fully realized misery.

it's my birthday. I had a family in last night who were celebrating their son's 21st. they asked me to card him so i could squeal with delight. i complied and then quietly added: "my second 21st is tomorrow." momentarily, one person in the group acknowledged the quip.

i work in this pizza dive that has a legendary following. parents bring their kids in for their 21st all the time, and regale me with the same story: they'd promised their child that as soon as they turn twenty-one we're going to enjoy this swill in-house, because heretofore its consumption was limited to carry-out.

these kids always seem vaguely miffed at the effort. i generally write it off to the arrogance of youth, and then it occurs to me: who the f*ck wants to spend their 21st at a pizza place surrounded by parents, grandma and assorted other adult relatives? aren't you supposed to spend your 21st surrounded by your frat brothers, a couple of hookers and your best friend in the whole world who has lovingly encouraged you to drink as close to 21 shots as your body will allow, before ending up in the emergency room of harborview with your stomach being pumped and hooked up to an I/V in preparation for a total blood transfusion?

call me old-fashioned, but kids nowadays just don't respect tradition.....

2006-09-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

so, i've been taking my son one way to school pretty much so far.

6 am just isn't early enough to set your alarm if you expect to get up, get lunch made and haul yer ass to the bus. my bad mostly: i refuse to make lunch the night before.

god bless him: he's in love with his alarm clock and his newfound efforts at independence -- if the attendance ladies at his previous elementary schools knew what herculean efforts he were making to awaken literally 3.5 hours before he even made it onto their campuses 87% of the time, they'd throw him a ticker-tape parade.

so school's really far away, but i'm learning the most efficient routes.

this neighborhood is the original cul-de-sac. not only is it built on a hill whose elevation gain the majority of my readers will never even witness in their lifetimes, but some turn-of-the-other-century cutie-pie decided that swirly-gig streets that lead nowhere fast maximize privacy and confuse drivers fast. so there are only one or six efficient routes to its apex. i am considering this figure from all cardinal directions.

the fun part is all the insanely lovingly restored craftsman homes, which, by my rubber-necking, nearly careen me into parked cars. and cobblestone streets.

ah, cobblestone.

when i moved back here in the early '90's, i was disquieted to find that all the yuppies who were gentrifying the other precipitous hill overlooking town (4000-foot Craftsmans were a frumpy afterthought to this neighborhood of 19th C. victorian mansions), were insisting that all the cobblestone was interfering with the driveshafts of their Cherokees.

cock.

suckers.

cobblestone, at its worst, is incredibly lumpy.

moreover, i have noted that, with its collective civil indecision as to how to allocate road funds (overland light rail? bury the viaduct? trains? an all-expense paid trip to the gayest resort in Cabo?), this city's roads are worse than those in any town that i have ever lived, except D.C., which is all tar, and repaved every year to maximize inefficiency.

i have literally blown through two sets of driveshafts in four months. if i approach a stretch of cobblestone, at least i know to slow down and navigate the street as i see it. potholes? surprise grooves? fifty-year-old asphalt????? grrrrr.

what can civil engineers learn from this crazy anomaly? not much that they are willing to listen to. as much as i can agree that newer technology is best, our unwillingness to allocate funds to its implementation makes me wonder why we rid ourselves of cobblestone in the first place.

and that's the news, for september the something, getting closer to my birthday, two thousand and six.......

2006-09-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

Do you ever have one of those epiphanies? me too, then i go have a beer and it goes away..

i was reading today's MSN page on weight loss from the stuart smalley school of behavior modification. "i'm good enough, i'm smart enough, and therefore i don't need to eat three pints of haagen-dazs, a pound of bacon and a sixer of hefeweizen."

the article covers an episode in the author's life when she appears to have been living out of some room-sized shack with no indoor plumbing or other amenities, presumably in the capacity of an artists' retreat, and, miserable, kept stealing granola from her neighbor. he was a famous psychologist, and upon learning of her indiscretions, regaled her with shame-based accusations that she was a thief and totally neurotic.

and people hate psychologists why?

anyway, stuart smalley is my man. i'm gonna embrace the author's theory that self-love (no, not that kind, chris -- though it's an efficient calorie-burner) is the motivational fat-elimator for the 21st C. one simply requires a mirror and a bad scarf. i'd better go out and rent that movie again.

that is all.

2006-09-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

never mind. it's all dark again. maybe it's a time of day thing.

time to go monitor shopping.

like the rest of y'alls, i'm going to embark on my 'monitors in the closet collecting dust' project. especially since it's ten bucks each to envirohazard (i.e. get rid of) them.

i want a skinny one. because i'm a princess and they are more space-saving, in case i ever get a place i can afford which will necessarily be tiny.....

other than that and filling out forms for my son's school and listening to him complain about how confused he is all the time and can't remember what his homework is and he hates school and he hates his two friends who spent the latter third of the summer trashing my house and now they team up on him all the time, and scribing "mrs. heather fatman" over and over in the 500-page spiral-bound notebook i bought expressly for this purpose (i'm gonna send it to him when i'm finished), not much else to report from this end.

if i think of anything else i'll let you know.......

2006-09-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

guess what? it works again. i unplugged it and hooked up a 'spare' that a 'friend' gave me, which didn't work at all, and then i re-plugged this one in and after some time and turning the computer on and off a couple of times it works like new.

i'm as smart as chris and dewitte put together with this computer repair stuff....

go fig.

thanks for your comments.

2006-09-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

so my monitor's fried. kaput. toast. on the fritz. gone.

or completely blank, anyway. writing this from another computer. a really slow computer.

maybe this is a good opportunity to practice 'screen-free' day, or month, or life....

2006-09-12T02:06:00.000-07:00

so, nobody will give me an answer about my monitor. this hasn't exactly been my night, or week. a comment got eviscerated, and random emails are, coincidentally or otherwise, unreadable.

everything's ureadable. i'd get all fired up about my monitor being the culprit, but i don't want to give it the satisfaction......

i don't want to give anything the satisfaction.

bring it, cocksucker....

bring it.

2006-09-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

I think middle school might work out. today he asked me to help organize his stuff. 'it's like i have to carry my entire desk in my backpack.' if you ever saw his desk......

so in true virgo fashion, i divided his ring-binder, tore folio envelopes out of his spiral notebook, labeled his dividers and helped him kick my ass in his homework.

i'm not the disciplinarian, so some unfinished homework from three days ago remained so... (paranthetically, i'm all fired up to send him to this new non-profit homework center close to my neighborhood in the afternoons. i can't handle this duty any more than i ever could...)

aside from this additional allusion to my parental incompetance, i find the whole idea of 'one class per subject, be responsible for your own organization' to be the theme that has been missing in his educational construct since pre-k. parents of kids like mine wig out over middle school, and then breathe collective sighs of relief when they see how well the sixth graders are being hemmed in.

for my part, i'm glad to see that six separate classes conducted by four different teachers yields a less structurally and disciplinarily chaotic vibe than one room with a single teacher conducting class all day, relying on inconsistent classroom support......

crossing fingers.

2006-09-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

A) why does my computer screen keep fading in and out? dude who sold me the package kept carrying on about this ViewSonic monitor, how it was such a sacrifice to part with, etc. i didn't care one way or another. is it my monitor? or gremlins? fuckers.

B) finally succeeded in getting my son's hairs cut today. it is after school and we are at a hipster salon that charges ten bucks for a buzz and i am sitting on a bench outside. a very small person with a rolling backpack meanders by. "i'm kind of...lost. hmm. i was supposed to go down the hill, and take a left, but i don't know. i think i'm kind of ... lost"

I look down the sidewalk. an elderly woman is hobbling at the crosswalk about a half block back. is that grandma? "huh. i'm kind of lost"

"Are you lost?" i ask (i may not be a lot of things, but i'm a quick study), looking both ways down the sidewalk for evidence of an adult.

he told me about how he was supposed to turn and go down the hill, but the bus driver forgot to drop him at the stop closer to his house. he had a sticky with his address printed on it pressed onto his shirt.

"do you want me to walk you home? wait here." i walked inside, told the stylist i was going to walk this kid home and left my purse. kid walked about ten miles an hour and talked a blue streak. "how was your first day of school?"

"how did you know it was my first day of school?"

i felt like a kidnapper. they know things. want some candy?

we got to a block from his house and he was confident that he could make it the rest of the way alone, in spite of the fact that he was convinced his dad would be waiting for him in 'this' direction, to the left and still a block short of his street. "i'd better walk you all the way to your house. a kidnapper could just pick you up like a football and take off running." he seemed to find that amusing. i wonder how that one got spun by the time he got inside.

i feel like i should be there waiting for him at the corner tomorrow, to see if he re-orients himself to his drop-off point. a busybody psycho (i'm only a busybody psycho in my cyber iteration) would have followed him to his front door and called his dad out on his negligence.

i walked back to the salon, and a largish preschooler with his mother's red hair cropped into a perfect dennis-the-menace emerged from the 'kidz kutz' place next door. 'GOOD HAIRCUT!' his mother squealed congratulatorily. this kid was literally the same height and weight as my kindergarten escort.

the salon chick was all: "what if you hadn't been such a nice person? who would have their son ride a bus that young?" i shrugged. my son rode the bus to pre-k. it occurred to me after i left the salon that she probably thought he had been disgorged from a city bus.

now THAT would have been impressive....

2006-09-04T21:56:00.000-07:00

so my son decides he wants a shave and a haircut -- two bits! before school starts, so we set out in pursuit of the elusive barber. nobody's open. so, through a circuitously unplanned labyrinth of decisions, we end up dining at the red robin across the bridge from my work. he likes the fries, comments on everyone's height, and refuses to get braces (good! i had earmarked that money for a boob job anyway) any time in the future. among other accomplishments of the evening, he remarks that big afro's mom is 29. big afro is 11. i had already pretty much surmised that big afro was a high school pregnancy....

by the time she's my age, she'll be done. i fucking wish i were done.

i dragged him down to the water and pointed out work, obscured by a boat dealership, and asked him how many lights were illuminated amongst the boats in the marina east of the bridge, and if he saw any persons there. this is what is commonly and legally known as 'stalking,' and thankfully or otherwise, he was too dumb to have the first clue as to what i was instructing him to do or to carry out my instructions. hell, he was too chicken to walk out onto the slip, a specially constructed piece of nautical architecture designed for the local crew team and essentially flush with the waterline. yes. my son has decided he is afraid of the water. and swimming is his only outstanding skill.

life just gets better and better........

i spent a considerable number of minutes (about two) wondering whether being in an isolating relationship (marriage or its variants) would be less lonely than not being in a relationship at all, and just resigning myself to this solitary, unredeeming parental hell that is my life.

moving strikes me as an increasingly attractive option. given that there are few things that are more exquisite than summer in sea-town, especially when standing by the water and embracing all of the potentially fulfilling recreational options that avail themselves to me, the fact that sitting in front of the computer and yakking on the phone are the only activities that my son embraces solidify my decision to move somewhere cheap, humid, miserable, roach-infested, bigoted and hot.

because they have computers and phones just about everywhere now,

don't they...

2006-09-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

i'm in a weird mood. mondays are weird, holidays are even stranger.

yesterday i was in a really hostile mood, especially toward all of the shitbag men i have kept company with in the past. the really creepily misogynist ones, specifically. i kept replaying conversations in my mind that should have taken a different direction, had i the presence of mind to argue instead of just absorbing their idiot opinions. then i was banging around on the internet and stumbled onto carrie's blog.

her boyfriend (the really cool one she recently met and absolutely adored) died from injuries related to a motorcycle accident he was in a short while ago. he was projected to recover over the course of a few months and didn't make it.

holy crap.

today i feel empty.

2006-09-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

worked the first at-home football game last night. which is to say worked at a fifty-two year old restaurant and longstanding institution of the university on whose property it stands. we do a little business for home games. nobody's here this weekend so i worked a split. fun, until about nine. i'm a bit sore and logey, but it's all good. i need to get a day serving position. i prefer it -- there's just no money there.

other than that and pestering bloggers, ain' no thang..........

2006-09-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

anyway, blogger completely fucked up a post i was trying to write last night.

eff.

2006-08-31T14:39:00.000-07:00

My stummy hurts.

I'll be dead in a week.

2006-08-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

coming to the end of a two-night sleepover/reunion with two of beastie boy's friends, one freshly arrived from a summer vacation. they were up for thirty-six hours straight at one point. i just left the house. got some good thinking done.

good thing there are so many beaches around here........

i swear that's the last sleepover ever. besides, his homies ended up crashing on the bare floor in his bedroom; no wonder they put off sleeping as long as possible. in the meantime, there are two extra beds and three couch/sofas distributed throughout the house. oh well -- one of them's got this huge afro that I think he just rearranges as a pillow, so it's all good (man, that's just racist...)

other than that, slow-going around here. my son's middle-school orientation is this evening, which should come in handy, since I don't even know where the school is. huge afro's mom went there. it's on a gigantic hill overlooking downtown from the north, but the neighborhood high school was shut down in '81 and was resurrected as condos. interestingly, the only people who can afford to live in these apartments were students there around mid-century. since this town has evolved outward radially, this neighborhood, once middle class, is now posh and transitory.

dude's mom was then assigned to attend high school on the other huge hill overlooking downtown from the east. that school was ghetto. how'd my son get assigned a central-area middle school? got me.

2006-08-27T23:04:00.001-07:00

D'y'all's ever have one of those peak moments wherein everything bad sort of just congeals into something good??

So tonight I'm listening to my bro talk about how much too busy his recently purchased rv park/campground has gotten, thanks to their efforts to clean up said, strategically focused marketing efforts and the strength of the canadian economy. I find myself thinking: 'yeesh. i should retract all those nasty things i said about their selfish....selfishness.'

"It's REALLY hard on the kids. I mean, the social atmosphere is great for them, but there is really NOT any room for structure."

Wow: That must suck. Raising your kids in a place of business, where people come and go at all times of the day, nobody can predict the number of cars in the driveway or whether you can actually exit at any given moment, in addition your phone line allowing in all calls, welcome or not.

Yeah. Take your mammoth profit and head for the highest hills, stat!...before your precious preschoolers are completely destroyed.

At some random point, Texas came up. Bro states: "I think Texas would be fun to visit. I haven't been anywhere past the Houston airport (...these bargain flights with their crazy changeovers)"

Stupidly, I interject: "I'm thinking of visiting Dallas."

This is the kind of statement that, when made at work, would typically initiate a stream of responses including, but not limited to: 'what part? do you have people there? family? friends? i have a friend....he's a trip. i visit him every three years or so. i have relatives there but closer to the gulf....that was a fun visit... you know, you might like it: you should fly down when the fares get cheaper and just check it out. you'll love it. don't bother -- don't even bother to check it out; just go. just...go.

my sil (and native san antonian)'s response to the fact that i even alluded to texas as a potential momentary destination? 'shshqpphth!!'

did i bother to mention that i have spent nearly the last thirteen years attempting to raise my child in 'a place of business?'

let me put forth the following directive: my dismissive, using (this place for its ends when convenient, weekly and quarterly), condescending-about-my-parenting-style family can stick its collective tongue up my lovely, pink pussy until it gloriously accesses my g-spot, thereupon sending me into rapturous ecstasy.

at which point y'all can freely express shock that myself and the beastmaster have booked a one-way ticket to the land of the free and the home of affordable living..........

2006-08-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

wean - v. to absolve a person, through the process of gradual, scheduled deprivation, of a dependency.

let's see how we did. random house, def. 2. to withdraw (a person, the affections, one's dependency, etc.) from some object, habit, form of enjoyment, or the like.

yawn, mine's more readable.

I think he finally reconciled his beer goggles with reality.

I'm almost there. Another week and i'll have forgotten the whole thing.

I'm sorry -- did I mention in prior posts, personal exchanges with any of y'all's, or screaming from the top of a three-story building that I HATE MY JOB?

I'm just sayin'.......

2006-08-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Bleah.

Everything's just.

Bleah.

2006-08-25T00:06:00.001-07:00

okay, so for my 69th (heigh-oh!) post i was determined to write something worthy of this infamous moniker, but I got's nothing. so you shall be subjected to yet another useless update on my life that is same.

spent the day shopping for matching paint for the bathroom, that i might undo the undoing of the paint on the part of the bathroom door that i went to all that trouble to strip, a project that turned out, in many ways, to be my undoing. finally found something close (of course our house's paint inventory yielded nothing satisfactory), and applied a coat. after all that driving around, this seemed comparatively fun. i'm not crazy about the match, but i think another coat may convince me otherwise. fucking paint -- i HATE that bitch!

so while one-stop shopping, i decided that another hair color was for me. back to blonde. or at least what used to be blonde, esp. when I lived in Cali and put peroxide in my shampoo.........

so after coating the door with martha stewart 'muslin' (i think dude picked the wrong color of white for the base -- do you see how quickly this process becomes stupidly complicated?) i decided that it was my hair's turn. i don't have the package with me so i can't tell you this color's name, but blonde wasn't the yield any more than muslin was the paint. after cautiously applying the stinky, self-mixed elixer to my hair, observing various warnings about mishandled chemicals causing potential blindness, and waiting 1/2 hour, i rinsed.

I went to work. between still-wet hair and bad lighting, i wouldn't know the exact yield until i got home. reddish. kind of '90's. remember when it was de rigeur to go copper? i'm getting platinum highlights. and the next coat of paint better turn out darker or i'm going postal.

adonis didn't show tonight. do you think he reads these posts? so little to look forward to on a random thursday *sigh*

that's my day. brought to you by the number 69 and the letter F.

2006-08-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

my lil' hottie was engaging in an 'intervention' the other day at work. he was in with two friends: this cute hippie chick and a young engaging dude. my interaction with his companions consisted of the following: in my spazoid attempt at a flirtation, I flung a beer coaster at him for the purpose of 'breaking the ice'. for those of you who understand physics, flat rectangular and/or oval shaped cardboard objects do not predictably soar through the atmosphere like your garden-variety frisbee, designed to yield aeronautic efficiency. i whacked hippie-chick, seated to hottie's right, in the eye.

"OW!!" she melodramatically exclaimed. After I offered a stumbling explanation, she furthered: "I'll sue!!!!" it was immediately evident that she was cool.

Dude interjected: "throw one at me! I can catch a coaster in my mouth!" I offered a beer if he could, but myriad attempts yielded nothing.

Their venture at the bar was formulated for the purpose of inspiring said engaging coaster-catching fun-loving guy to rid himself of his unsolicited roommates. He had, as a matter of course, found himself in the possession of, with the acquisition of a girlfriend, several parents, cousins, friends, sarcophagi and amphibians whose primary objective was to watch tv and smoke pot all day in his living room. I heard: "you know, when it comes down to it, I just confront someone once they've pissed me off.." among other things from my adonis, whom i would occasionally catch perusing the sole desirable horizontal cross-section of my corpus with a vaguely quizzical look on his face, likely wondering: 'so, I was attracted to her...when? maybe if i drink more..'

"Shit or get off the pot," comprised my studmuff's blunt solution to his friend's plight. Though the evening did not exactly end well, I wonder if his amiable acquaintance was ultimately willing to embrace said advice.

As his friends peeled off (and my busy and irritating but lucrative night came to a close) his studliness, after some loudly-rendered words were exchanged, sat alone.
Initially deciding not to bug him because intervening on a flirtation between a coworker and a customer at the back bar seemed eminently more fun, I eventually joined.

He explained the situation to me and his position: bt/dt; stop letting people use you; you're an enabler; if you just move out where will they go? One assumes from this that he was tired of all the griping.

Today I went to the beach. 5:45 is still mid-afternoon, 6:38 ushers in an evening calm. Everything about this venture is nominally desirable. Tonight was not a pompous weekend endeavor, with posers hovering around sanctioned fire pits with the ravenousness of hungry wolves -- it was neither too cool, too warm, too bright nor remotely pretentious.

I walked, making my way to the dunes, a bit of off-beaten track reserved for thinkers, the homeless, nature and other hiders. I sat, absorbing the clarity that dusk renders. A middle-aged couple navigated the sand, her insensible shoes creating a situation worthy of newlyweds, a young lesbian couple stumbled across me realizing that one couldn't sneak a pee and proceeded toward a vain picture-taking endeavor amongst the scenic trees, and someone whom i'm certain is the father of the child i took care of this summer navigated his bike through a sand-ensconsed path, stating to a rapt companion: "i'm fine; this just freaks me out!"

the sublime, relaxing beauty of these environs, whose fetching aura might compel one to stay unto eternity, ironically and ultimately gave way to a sense that I was in the way.

this town is beautiful, unfriendly, overly expensive. shit, or get off the pot: make a decision. grassy dunes don't pay the rent, and when you get home it's still the same old mess that makes you crazier than a dying fruitfly.

shit. or get off...the pot.

2006-08-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

'i got a really bad sunburn on my nose when I was little, so i have to watch out for that...'

'you're a redhead; sun-sensitivity is an issue.

'those are cute freckles on your arms -- my son has them all over his face. i never put sunscreen on him when he was little because i'm the world's shittiest parent and we would be out every day in the summer. they just seem to emerge at the slightest provocation. they're cute. i torture him to death with my cloying compliments.

anyway...'

he has the cutest ass. for a big fat guy he is looking damn smokin' in those carharrt's...

'aight...you have a good one too. get some sleep...'

got-damn gargly-ass ball-wranglers i'm fucking horny........

2006-08-16T19:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, so now i'm trying to address a 'wild hair' project from some time back in which I began to remove a couple of layers of paint with a stripper (yes, I'll be composing a post called 'i'm in love with a stripper' very soon) from the frame of a paneled door leading into a built-in medicine cabinet. I have this decor thing going on in the bathroom that involves two-toned paint, a layer of distressed painted wood... anyway, I started this and now have to finish it.

here's my complaint about pussy-ass environmentally friendly paint/varnish strippers ca. any time after 1956. (see upcoming post) they don't work. they turn the multiple layers of paint into glue, which merely allows for a narrow window of opportunity to remove said, and then unevenly, often resulting in your scraper bottoming out into the raw wood below. if the stripper gets too far into the wood, and you're working with the pussy-ass doug fir that is indigenous to this area (yes, even in 1929. you think clearcuts are an '80's thing?), you literally splinter off pieces of wood while random areas of the paint refuse to budge. this is especially wonky when stripping a door that has that multi-tiered stop moulding, actually milled into the doors in the '20's before power tools (and whose shape can't be replicated) and is so fine in its detail that catching one splinter of the wood through this method of stripping literally compromises the moulding's shape. I have been known to glue back splinters of wood using thumbtacks and duct tape just to keep from perpetuating the damage that this process had initiated.

the solution to my too-lazy-to-sand-or-scrape-by-hand plight? why, a vibrating sander, of course (you realize my 'stripper' post will have a 'vibrator' component to it, don't you? of course you do). i decided I was sick of the wrist-thrashing, crescent-gouge inflicting labor that using my drill with a sander attachment entailed, so I bought a 'sander.' power tools. therein lies the answer *ahr ahr* right?

guess what my sander does to the paint? not only do I have no control over the speed or the depth to which it sands (to richard sands? to which it stands? damn pledge of allegiance), but all that vibrating creates a buttload of friction. guess what friction produces? heat. guess what heat does? please see paragraph two.

this, my erstwhile friends, is why the phrase 'stripping and sanding (usually followed by some outrageous number of) layers of paint' strikes mortal fear into the hearts of all homeowners/restorationists. because the work sucks balls. there is little or no control over the process which consists of 'hit and/or miss, muddle through and slop and glop' from beginning to end. this is why painting contractors swing by the millionare's club to pick up a couple of mexicans to labor away at it for two bucks an hour to be spent on cigs and malt liquor at the end of the day (who wouldn't?) whilst the contractors grab the glory for converting your overly remodeled dump into a restorationist's dream. i'm willing to settle for 'shabby chic' at this point; who knew that said trend grew out of incompleted strip-downs?

2006-08-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything to post about. It's an emotional thing. Just D said that once. That you have to be in a 'mood' to post.

I have to get my son a chicken pox shot or he will not be allowed to enter middle school. this is annoying because a) i never take him to his PCP anymore so when people say 'who's his doctor?' i just shrug, which makes me the crack-whore of moms apparently. but one time when we went for a checkup they left us in the waiting room for an hour and a half and i said 'i'm done.' i didn't like the nurse-prac anyway. so now i just take him to the clinic. b) he and i caught (what was for me) a near-fatal case of chicken pox from some kid at the pool seven years ago, but there is no way to document that, except for the one scar on his face and the seventeen on mine because I had to return to work after a week off and I had to rip all the pox (gross, TMI) off and fill them in with makeup or i would have lost my job, and they didn't heal back correctly. i hear the manager who ran the restaurant back then has miserably bombed in an attempt to start his own business. awwwww. as you can see, management at my job has changed significantly since i started out there. c) i've been so monumentally depressed lately that i think i neglected to update my dshs paperwork, so they've stopped sending me medical coupons. or not. i just throw my mail in a drawer. d) i don't even care if he starts school or not: it's just gonna be round three-hundred seventy five thousand of daily tantrums and unfinishable homework.

i lifted the toilet in my bathroom yesterday. the caulking came loose so i took that an an excuse to 'check on my work', as i have suspected that my last job was shoddy, since there's always brown shit staining the caulking on the tile floor. it turned out that i was probably incorrect, even though there was staining unevenly distributed around the floor beneath the bowl, and i had forgotten the steps that i had taken to replace the wax ring and gasket and didn't want to fuck with it, so i scraped the wax off of my replacement gasket and reformed it onto the old one. clusterfuck lame-ass DIY'er in the house, but it's identical to the old set-up and i think the staining on the tile around the bowl is just my son peeing everywhere but. i swear if i were a rich eccentric i would buy a house and set up a urinal for him. toilets serve no purpose for men, especially of the 'can't lift the seat because i'm mentally retarded' variety. anyway, that was 2 hours of sweaty labor, since the only tools i had to work with were a wrench and a chisel for a screwdriver, but my hair looked cute after from the sweat.

guess i'll finish some sanding today. i'm trying to quit drinking (a resolution that will last until exactly the next time i work) so i have all this nervous, irritated energy......

2006-08-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

took a super long drive up to nature and looked at it today. met some 8-year old who introduced himself to me as jason levi reginald or something. they were all first names. 'i like the levi part.'

'thank you. what's your name?'

'erm, heather...'

'middle name?...'

good grief. he was really friendly and cute, and i realized how much I miss kids. the ones who always called me 'butthead(name changed)'s mom' when i took my son his lunch at school, the ones at taekwondo before we quit. they all loved me and i lapped up the attention.

decided to keep the a/c off all the way home, and fully dressed for this morning's nippy weather, was enjoying balmy 100-110 degree temperatures in my car. in intermittantly congested traffic. this is the only sweat i break in life, so i do it up big while i can. plus, if i move to texas or atlanta or somewhere, i'm gonna have to deal with heat like this, so i think of it as a preparedness exercise.

i don't consider the trip a rousing success in the 'vision quest' sense of the word, even though my destination was called 'troublesome creek' so it's a good place to go when you're troubled. not enough time i guess.......

2006-08-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

does anyone else think they have died and gone to comedy heaven when they hear those 'we salute you: our everyday american hero' bud light ads for the first time on their car radio?

inventor of the boneless buffalo wing ('i hope i'm not eating bu-u-u-ut!'), fantasy football manager (lo-hooo-hooo-ser), wearer of too much hair-gel ('or is it stalagmi-i-ites?') holy crap. i need to get out more....

i guess that goes without saying.

2006-08-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

the nice thing about runescape is that it keeps him preoccupied 17 hours a day, 7 days a week. he tends to play all night and sleep all day. that's right; that's the extent of my parenting right now.

the shitty part is when he 'dies' because the computer that I bought for him so we could employ the upstairs phone line and get off the main one is occasionally a bit slow, we have these tantrum-fests that conjure up the image of doctors in lab coats looking through two-way mirrors.

people who work in nuthouses have nothing on this shit.

just come take him away. i've been done for years........

2006-08-11T00:41:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking this girl-at-work-who-is-really-a-talented-musician-but-sketchy-in-her-work-habits-but-all-the-dudes-mac-on-her-'cause-she's-built-though-this-isn't-necessarily-a-good-thing home tonight (i really enjoy her company when she's coherent), and soon after settling into the passenger seat, she says: "so! do you think R****'s a fan?"

"a fan of..?"

"you?"

"yes."

"how old do you think he is?"

"about ten years younger than me..."

she couldn't stop giggling. fortunately my battery light kept coming on and my engine was hump-chugging, so "you could definitely feel the tension" kept being interspersed with "why are we stalling? just a sec, i'm pulling over...okay, what?"

i got her home and spun over to the gas station and poured oil into my fucking car. runs good now.

i'm actually a little concerned about his coming in late(r and later), often trashed from the day's antics, showing interest.........

my worry? his proximity to work: "i live across the street." the lake is across the street. he lives on a boat. he is dependent upon a number of businesses to provide for his food/beverage/hospitality needs. if i become a booty call, how would that ultimately affect his relationship to my workplace, especially if things bomb out bad?

but virgos wouldn't be virgos if we couldn't worry and worry and worry..........

quote of the night: my texas coworker is bitching about non-custodial child-support issues, and I'm all: 'child support. what's it like?'

he responds: 'man, I wish my baby's momma were fucking stupid like you!..'

life is good.

peace.

2006-08-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

the previous entry doesn't make any sense. there's a bunch of misused words and nonsensical frags strewn throughout. but i'm too fucking lazy to fix it. i'll just blame it on the Scheduled outage at 4:00 PDT. Learn more.

or the crack. i gotta lay off the rock. i'm running out of strangers to perform fellacio on for five bucks anyhoo's. they're starting to expect it for free...

2006-08-09T22:39:00.000-07:00

so things seem to be slowing down here a bit: the gerbil is thankfully navigating his 'twilight years' with a limpid tenacity, I don't have any non-rodent charges or relatives whose needs require immediate attention, and I have busted out a toy-chest's worth of toys and separated for the shredder quite a few files of unnecessarily-retained mailings. bo-o-oring, but life is designed to be boring; spiritual realization cannot be achieved in the absence of tedious routine.

and yet...something seems not right. when I address the remaining mess, I fall back on the 'room-to-room' approach that is severely discouraged by my organization self-help texts. what could I be doing wrong? I read that thing about thrift and grief being the biggest roadblocks to expulsion and I absorbed the excruciating tutorials as to method: "set aside a staging area. work only with one room at a time. do NOT move about your house, displacing objects"

They need a high-priced organizer to instruct me on the simple details? 'staging area.' thank you again captain obvious, my preschool teacher.

but as I wander about and observe my (son's...now) 310 sq. foot bedroom, 'neatly' strewn with three gerbil cages, a 4-poster bed (that's right, bitch: you can't find my post about its assembly 'cause only chris has it) random file boxes with 6-year-old schoolwork, a bookcase, portable shelving, dresser, two apple-crates and more electronics than Best Buy can maintain in its inventory, I find myself saying: maybe a staging area isn't such a bad idea.

as I buck up to prepare said, my son declares that he's hungry. fine and good. my uber-plan has no temporal perameters.............

so we break camp and head for the store. a perfectly agreeable arrangement, until we arrive back home to the smell of salmon being cooked on the stove. I smell something funny and reflexively look for the garbage can at the end of the driveway.

he loves bringing in the groceries, and as I witness him grabbing and sprinting back to the car, breathlessly, as if a contest has been assembled, I question his dutiful enhusiasm as he brings in the groceries (to a point).

soon, I realize, cacking and spitting, his announcement: 'salmon!' explains his hasty, breathless despair. I instruct him to make his way upstairs toward (his master's) suite, and to hold his breath, and he complies. Soon thereafter, he is back downstairs, outside, in tears, spitting on the driveway.

fucking prima-donna drama. so I head upstairs to throw open the windows to his bedroom, within full view of the driveway, and I quickly become aware of the two piles of wood-chips at the bottom of said, one of which he is spitting into. he has seriously puked up the slice of pizza I had bought him at the store from the smell.

so we spent the remainder of the evening burning pointless student-loan billings and a 3-hour log in a metal fire-pit on the patio while eating takeout pizza. apparently my purpose and my son's travesty converged to contrive an ill-considered picnic of sorts...

so it's all good.....

2006-08-08T09:20:00.000-07:00

One of my gerbil charges is, shall we say, 'not doing very well.'

my son pointed out a bloody patch next to his ear and the fact that he's been gimping around the cage for a couple of days, following his fall from the third story of his enclosure.

i left a message with his owner's mom last night, saying I didn't know if he'd make it 'til morning. he's still active, but scratching the bloody spot like mad and acting erratic.

i don't want to bury another one of these guys. but I'm certainly not going to haul him to the vet....

i've been having some shitty luck lately, maybe we're finally on 'number three.' okay, that was mean.........

2006-08-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

wow, that was a cludgebomb. good thing nobody reads this shit. i especially like the 'eager trepidation' part. perhaps if I had unhinged my cloven bust beneath your trembling fingers and unleashed my ravenous tongue upon your eager orifice, your burgeoning manhood could have satisfied the quivering vacancy between my ample, waiting thighs.

I'm gonna leave the post intact just for the cringe factor.

because I enjoy to feel the suffering pain.

2006-08-06T00:41:00.000-07:00

My tongue forces its way past your lips and scales your beautiful, slidy teeth. Your smile is mixed with trepidation as you open your mouth to me. As my jaw unhinges, my lips quiver, anticipating the eager protuberance that is your tongue. You appear reluctant. I whisper an apology for my aggression. My eyes, rendered useless by dilation, flutter and close as I unbutton my blouse, my heaving ample bosom eagerly awaiting.........

I'M SO FUCKING HORNY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

aaany-hoo.....

no good post tonight. I'm working on a sprightly one, though.

wait. i'm always working on some bit of important business.........

2006-08-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

so this couple who own/run a crime scene cleaners (homocides, suicides, accidental deaths 1-800-555-yech) business came in last night. the dude was this crazy loquatious ex-marine and his partner was a super-quiet native american-looking broad. the dude was showing us cell phone pix of blood-strewn bathrooms and some brains on a bed. sweet. except for the maggots.

how does curt cobain collect his thoughts?
with a squeegee.

so these two cannibals are eating a clown and the one cannibal looks at the other cannibal and says: does this taste funny to you?

2006-08-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get that where someone just grates your last nerve, both on sight and after about two minutes of interaction? There was this broad in tonight: roughly my age and thin, a prim salad eating first-generation yuppie whose demeanor would artfully vacillate between apology and dictatorship -- women like that make me want to drink a fifth of Jose Cuervo, head up the hill to have a platypus tattooed on my ass and post naughty pictures of myself on the internet (which logistical problems have precluded thus far). I HATE BITCHES LIKE THAT! They are the sole reason for the beauty that is my tomboyish, indolent potty-mouthed persona.

also of note: why do we have to come in at 4:30 in the summer when we don't get busy until 8 and it's not dark 'til 10? Why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why? why?

um...what else? oh! I've been thinking a lot lately about breadwinners. specifically, old-school dads who would go to a job that they absolutely, totally and completely despised five days a week, ten hours a day, decade after decade after decade, because they had a wife at home whom they wanted to please and kids whose sports memberships, clothes, cars and college educations required underwriting. unfortunately, after the kids left the nest, their wives would meet someone on the internet and sue them for divorce. i know a lot of people whose dad that was. ironically, they're all drug addicts. i'm hoping there exists an old testament god, because his wrath is deserving in many cases........

GUESS WHO TOOK THE TE-EST! GUESS WHO TOOK THE TE-EST! That's right, ho's and bitches, it was only a matter of time before his pudgy, goateed, sticky-outy-eared ass would be subjected to the examination in whose honor said bitch was cre-a-ted. My texas buddy was sniggering at the brazenly obvious nature of my approach, but what's a ho gonna do? Plus he's gonna come out to the house to look at some wiring. Or maybe not: I wasn't really listening when he described that 120/240 stuff. I think the upshot of said conversation was that he'd have to tear the house apart. I liked it better when it was: 'I'd really have to take a look at it.'

anyway, his answers (detracting wildly from the previous of you who are SO not going to be my boyfriends):

1)D
2)A
3)D
4)A
5)D
6)C

So I'm getting a really analytical, studious, semi-politically correct vibe from his responses. This could be a problem. Because that's me.

anyhoo, life is fun if you're willing to be stupid enough to make it so. the remainder sucks.

oh. my ghetto texas coworker can get me a job in DFW. walk in and start today. and I can score a crack-house for fifteen kay. and live like a kween. a crack kween. shut up bitches; i'm sick of being postcard poor.

2006-08-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

why do you give me such pleasure
and cause me so much pa-ain.

fucking cramps. so it's day two and I wake up with them, but day one was a false alarm of sorts, so I'm all 'fuck it' i'm not pouring any more advil into my system. MIS-TAKE. once I realize the stupidity of my ways, I am in the car, rocking back and forth to distract myself from the monsoon of pain that is building up in my pelvis, en route to the ibuprofen store.

you think i'd be used to this by now. I've been experiencing this oh, say... monthly since I was fourteen, and the pain literally never ceases to amaze me. i should be all: cramps? I'll tell you about cramps! september, 1982. now THAT was a period. sent myself to the infirmery after lying in bed writhing in agony for five hours (true). the nice doctor there gave me this new medicinal elixer, and anti-somethin-er-other, s'poseta arrest the twitching of the muscle cells that cause pain, or some such thing. they called it 'ibuprofen' and that's afore you could just walk in anywhere's and get it like it's candy. you kids today, you're too soft, s'what! I used to walk a mile in the snow in august in a blaze 'a cramps just to get a bottle of that stuff, but now. with these internal combustion engines and flying machines everywhere.....

but no, I moan and writhe and grimace and pace and try to do that stretch and wish the world were watching, feeling sorry for me and feeding me hot-water bottle....

anyway they're gone (jinx). the miracles of modern medicine, endorphines and a nap seem to converged upon my gut and temporarily alleviated my agony.

that is all. back to your cubicles.

2006-08-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

various observations of august first two thousand and six:

my nephew has a grill. a silver, completely encapsulized molar. it is the bomb shiggity. a tanned, white-blonde, adorable curly-haired five year old with a gangsta toof is truly something to behold.

i look a lot like a penguin. I get this from my father's side. he was a lawyer. lawyers are often referred to as penguins, so this was a convenient fluke of genetics for him. anyway, said observation is causing me start second-guessing my self-porntrait idea.

I am moving to texas. any of those of you who know me really well (none of you) are aware that I went through an 'i'm moving to some midwestern town where you can still buy a house in the low five-figures' phase. this lasted two years, or as long as it took for my money to run out. kids and medical bills are expensive.

I have it on good authority, thanks to a family birthday party tonight, that EVERYTHING in texas is cheaper than here. except the ho's, which is good, because I'm not sure what I'm going to do for gainful employment when I get there, so I'd feel safer knowing there's some sort of career safety net available to me......

It really is hard to get anything accomplished when there is no structure, in the form of some outside authority, to motivate you, and all the incentives are negative (getting caught up on stuff that should have been done by now, only to be faced with one new, insurmountable challenge after another...).

What the hell happened to MSN spaces? Holy crap; I feel like Fatima at airport security. "I said my passport address is ****! Allah's word will be your fate! f**k it: i'll just go greyhound! your dogs fly faster than your planes! how ashamed are you, stupid americans with your technology that can't secure your place in the global economy without enslaving the descendents of my people and a bunch of other nationalities whom I don't care about....."

2006-08-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

Absolutely no motivation to post. The august doldrums seem to be affecting everyone alike. My 5-year old extremely hyper nephew will be visiting today; that should make for some good fodder. after he breaks everything. guess I'll take inventory before he gets here........

2006-07-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

I wrote this yesterday because I have bills to pay and lots of paperwork to catch up on, and who could be bothered? Two guys at work actually took the test, the other sensed entrapment. He's no fun.

The Boyfriend Qualifier Self-Test

The following test will be timed. When the proctor instructs you to do so, please raise your pencils and begin the exam. At the end of the time period allotted, the proctor will ask you to put your pencils down, signaling the end of the exam. You are to heed this instruction and any other directions that the proctor may give during the test period. Cell phones are prohibited from the examination room, as is peeping over your neighbor's shoulder, shouting out answers to your best buddy in the form of a "cough" or fiddling with your unmentionables. Failure to abide by these rules will result in an automatic "F."

1) The following sentence summarizes my feelings about my beloved:
a) She's ravishingly beautiful.
b) She's brilliant, incisive and witty.
c) I'm the luckiest man alive.
d) She'd better have rent this month.
e) She's gotten too fat.

2) I think it's important to keep my woman satisfied in the sack because:
a) That a woman's sexual gratification might be unequal in importance to mine is a sad vestige of an arcane, misogynist social construct that we, sadly, have not completely liberated ourselves from.
b) The knowledge that I can satisfy any woman is central to my definiton of manhood.
c) Who doesn't want his neighbors to hear "oh, yes! oh, god!" coming through the walls of his apartment?
d) My daddy done set me aside one day, and said: "boy! if momma ain't happy, ain't nobody gon' be happy"
e) I'm actually a really lousy lay, and my last girlfriend kept smashing all my dishes. Plus, she never made me sandwiches or anything after about the first week.

3) My idea of the perfect weekend is:
a) Golf, gambling and fiddy dollar ho's in Vegas.
b) Drinks around the pool with my best boys, plenty of hot bitches and a few lines of blow before embarking on a freaky threesome in the master suite.
c) Forty straight hours of grand theft auto: vice city, a bag of weed and four hours of sleep.
d) Rubbing my beloved's feet and basking in her sublime glow while she complains ceaselessly about her family, followed by hours of sweet lovemaking. The following day I fix all her appliances.

4) The correct response to the query: "Do these pants make me look fat?" is:
a) I'm not playing into that trap.
b) You know, that's not the best look on you, because you're so long-waisted. I really like you in those cropped, low-rise jeans. Do you have something you could wear with those? How 'bout if I take you shopping?
c) Well, if you'd get off your fat ass and hit the treadmill a few times a week instead of sitting around all day, eating ring-dings and watching Jenny Jones, we wouldn't have to have this discussion night after night after night now would we?
d) "Fat" is such an ugly word.

5) If I were in a relationship I would never:
a) Look at another woman, even if she were eighteen and smoking hot and strutting around in the produce aisle in a bikini. Did I mention it's really cold in the produce aisle?
b) Have a quicky in the janitorial closet with that bespectacled hottie in accounting, even if she begged me and gave me a million dollars.
c) Dial any of those numbers where local girls just want to talk to me.
d) Scratch my 'backside' immediately before drinking orange juice directly out of the carton and returning it to the fridge.
e) Get caught doing any of the above.

6) My idea of commitment is:
a) Accompanying my beloved to dreaded family functions that neither of us want to attend, because I believe that familial duties are sacrosanct and I want to be in attendance to show my support.
b) Love means never having to say 'excuse me.'
c) You used my razor for what??
d) Finally being able to go 'halves' on the cable bill.
e) Two words: booty call.

2006-07-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

Do you ever arrive at one of those epiphanies as a result of two solid days of working on a problem, and realize it's a bumper sticker?

Mine is: 'failure to plan on your part does not constitute a crisis on mine.'

I have been spending entirely too much time attempting to figure out how and why my coworker who has his kid here for half the summer thinks that childcare is just simply going to appear out of thin air. The decision to question my role in this is based, in part, on some new self-help book that was being reviewed in the paper this week. I think it's entitled 'nice guys finish last' or something like that, and it's a primer for doormats like me (it's actually aimed at men, which is cool...) who just grimace their way through life, doing everyone's bidding, and perpetuating the lie that is their amiability........

so I'm all: cool. I just won't babysit anymore. But what is he going to do with his kid? At some point, prior to his son's arrival, he had said: "[our boss] needs to hire more women! I need babysitters!" If somebody on the internet had made a crack (oh, wait: he was serious) that obnoxiously presumptuous, that egregiously sexist, I would have disemboweled them. Probably gotten myself banned from their site. Had a post dedicated to me, something..... But I just smile, insincerely.

The circumstances of their divorce (prison-shower sex is nothing compared to how bad his wife screwed him), the outrageous expense that running two households entails, the near-impossibility of affording decent housing and childcare on one salary in this town, all swim through my head, as my resentment builds and builds and his kid becomes more comfortable being a snotty little smartass to me...

And I think: how did I enter the picture? We weren't even friends! How do the circumstances of his divorce become my problem? And what about that crack? Does he really think that's what women are for? And then it occurs to me: "[our boss] needs to hire more women!" does not constitute a PLAN. You do not have a plan. Flying by the seat of your, your friends', your son's friends parents', and your coworkers' pants year after year after year does not constitute a PLAN.

Anyway, I'm going to attempt to apply this principle to my own life issues. Having a plan seems like a plan. I'm going run right out and buy a calendar.......

2006-07-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

Hey, I've got a question for all you tech-geeks out there (the few, the proud, both readers of my blog...): I've got an Olympus digital camera with a wonky battery that's currently missing its cord hook-up-to-the-computer thingy. I can replace the battery, and that chip thingy that records all the pictures (wow, my digital prowess just singes the hair off your chest, doesn't it?), but it's an older, pre-millenial model, and I'm wondering if procuring a new cord thingy would be feasible, or if I need to dig around and find the original, due to after-market obsolescence issues (such a rarity in the world of electronics). I've got exactly a week before my friend natalia leaves forever ("see you next year, aight?...") for europe and new mexico and stuff, and she is the person whom I have entrusted with dirty-picture-taking duty. mostly because she has a strong stomach and almost no gag reflex. ask her boyfriend.

where was I?.... Oh! If you ever expect to see me (semi) naked again, I expect a response to this query, stat!

2006-07-25T23:15:00.000-07:00

It's hot. ninety-nine thousand hundred million degrees. pretty hot.

not getting my cleaning done. however, in true chris fashion, I have decided to adopt a time-based deadline, in this case my birthday, as a goal-date for decluttering my insufferable hovel. OOOHH! I love perameters, a gun to my head, someone to obey...

anyone wishing to distract me from this purpose by offering sex will not be turned away.....

2006-07-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

Just busted out Da Vinci Code. Oh yeah. You WISH you were me.......

I guess Dan Brown beat me to the punch with my little 'fringe-set' porn idea (you remember the one: OPF, for the viagra set). Huh. Pagan sex rituals, if you consider it, are actually an ancient precusor to porn.

{Quick critique -- don't read the following statement if you haven't read the book yet: I find Sophia's rather hasty reversal of judgement toward her grandfather, after listening to Langdon's brief synopsis of the sex ritual's historic and religious significance, to be a tad implausible. I'm sorry: most peoples' views on sex, religious piety and the role of grandparents in life are too ingrained to be expunged by a two and a half minute theology lecture.}

end critique.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to embrace my inner chalice.

{oh, and p.s. while reading last night, I got to hear my very exhibitionist Korean (I don't know why that matters, except that they own eight businesses and work all day and the only evidence I have of their existence is that after 10 pm they initiate 'arguing loudly followed by bizarro sex rituals' sequence) neighbors f*ing. 'slap, slap, slap' so I close the window quick before my son figures it out and they have their bedroom light on and the blinds up. A brief glance reveals something human in form but no evidence of movement, and my momentary curiosity is overwhelmed by nausea and the fact that I am much less interested in watching them f*k than they are in being watched by me. yeah, that's right. I could turn off my lights and observe, obscured by darkness; they are fully aware of this. they are gross. I hate them.

the significance of this p.s.? probably the irony of the proximity of the novel's numerous references to the sacred womb and the reverential ritual of sexual coupling in pagan observances to my nasty neighbors' spanking exhibition.

this ain't no sex rite, bitches. shut up, close your curtains, and tell your stupid girlfriend to stop with the lilting arpeggios. Bert from Sesame Street feigns enthusiasm better than she.}

while i'm at it, disregard my last post. i'm joining a convent.

2006-07-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

maybe I should just ask him out.

it's not as if i have anything to lose at this point.

dignity, elegance, and self-respect went out the window as soon as I had a child, so really: what more could go wrong?

2006-07-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

In related news, I bought a couple of really cool 'decluttering' manuals (shut up dewitte) written by the latest oprah-approved experts on the subject. One is incredibly funny, the other has cool pictures and realistic timelines. I think this might be the springboard I need to tackle this hurdle.

next I'll work on tired metaphors.

the seafair pirates came into work today and: 1) mac'd on a table of lesbians (seize the irony, but the latter were good sports); 2) mac'd on some woman who was either a groupie or a whore (her dress and comportment seemed to point to the latter, though we can't figure out who could have paid her, as this is a non-profit that comprises entirely of diehard locals who volunteer their time to this effort); and 3) mac'd on a customer whose ethereal vibe mimicked a state of licentious intoxicity. she allowed an especially randy pirate to lift a bandana emanating from her pocket (a plant?) so he could lick, in an expertly circular and suggestive way, a decorative patch sewn onto a space that was squarely in the midst of her rump.

I could never be a waitress in a strip club. The goings-on would be so distracting and my preoccupation with attempting to record everything for my disposable american novel would literally land me out of a job...

To this end, I scribbled down a quick song to synopsize the evening's antics. I know it sucks, but shut up.

We're Pirates we're Pirates we're Pirates,
Arriving on yer shores today!
We'll sack and we'll plunder and tear things asunder,
And then we'll be on our way.

We're Pirates we're Pirates we're Pirates,
We're storming the beach today!
We'll ravage your brood and we'll eat all your food,
And then we'll be on our way.

We're Pirates we're Pirates we're Pirates,
We'll be in your town today!
We'll mac on the Cheap Ho's and maybe the Lezbo's
And then we'll be on our way.

We're Pirates we're Pirates we're Pirates,
Lock up your daughters today!
You think us invalid while tossin' your salad
But soon we'll be on our way.

We're Pirates we're Pirates we're Pirates,
We'll make fishwives of ye today!
We'll gobble some tuna and have us a schooner
And then we'll be on our way.

We're Pirates we're Pirates we're Pirates,
We're bor'd of the young boys today!
We'll make a whore sandwich (one dost hope that she gets rich!)
And then we'll be on our way.

so you see, most of the effort, which I wanted to bust out before my third server and most of the pirates left, in spite of getting slammed with about eleven tables, was getting this down on paper. damned repetitive stanzas anyway........

[*edit* I fixed this so that it's somewhat better than the original hackneyed version. you may be able to purchase an original copy of said 'draft' at a southeby's auction in about 120 years when my overlooked, underappreciated ass is dead, dead, dead.]

2006-07-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the previous days' antics, I have decided to take on cleaning.

wow, do I hate this. I am attempting to think of everything as a potential 'throwaway,' but it's not helping. I just go into vapor lock after about an hour. my erstwhile employer recommended some book called 'taming the paper tiger' for shite like this. maybe it will help with psychological roadblocks, and all the shitty music on the radio that is doing nothing to inspire this effort.

eff.

I guess it looks better. it'll look like shit in two days, though....

2006-07-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

In other news, I'm helping the neighbor lady complete a cleanout of her son's 'starter home.' He has upgraded to a corner lot with a view in a fancy neighborhood, so this little five hundred thousand dollar crackhouse is being kicked to the curb.

I am so in the wrong business. Oh sure, being a two dollar food whore is fun (by which I mean that it sucks), the benefits are fantastic (nonexistent) and the clientelle make it all worthwhile (if you like preschoolers on crack), but I'm actually thinking there might be more out there for me.

Cleaning is lucrative, too, if you live in a town that's as full of rich, busy a*holes as this one.......

Makes me really want a house, too. This one is identical to a little number I almost bought in pittsburgh for ten k. One fiftieth the price for the same house. One. Fiftieth.

The mind reels...

gotta go, my scrub-brush and chariot await....

2006-07-16T23:09:00.000-07:00

In response to the hundreds of queries that I have had regarding the continuing saga of 'Heather's Never Gonna Get Laid (sponsored by Calgon bath products, Lady Grecian Formula and Babes In Toyland, the local sex-toy store)' inasmuch as they pertain to my flirting style: I tend to lean toward vicious when I'm nervous or I don't know how to address a situation.

Shockingly, some of you out there already know that about me. el oh el

(chris can skip the next paragraph unless the prospect of being bored seems fetching)

Amongst the stupid, retarded things I did and/or said while he was parked at the bar, casually tossing back beers and practice-testing some exam for his electrician's apprenticeship was: "So you realize you're going to need to have at least a pitcher of beer in you when you take this test because you'll have to be in the same state of mind as you were when you absorbed this information." He renumerated his strategy of waking up really early, still buzzing from the night before, for the purpose of busting this thing out.

I asked him if he was comfortable going to work like that, and he responded with a shrug. I quipped, "Remind me never to occupy any building that you have wired." (insert laugh track here)

He didn't look too pleased.

To respond chris' query "are you just looking to get laid or trying to find something more meaningful?" which I have sidestepped, honesty forces the response: 'neither'.

What my delusional ass pines for is that life's daily frustrations be expunged by sweet, soft sweaty intimacy.

When my psychotic son and the boy I have been charged (out of courtesy) to take care of 3 days a week for seven weeks every summer start in with the fighting and name-calling and demand that I provide the solution with mutually agreeable entertainment, when houseguests come and go like semis pulling into a truckstop, leaving the stench of condescension and ingratitude in their wake, after enduring the maddening inefficiency and ineffectual management style that makes my workplace a heat-sink for prima donnas and avaricious lassitudinal airheads, and when I catch a glimpse of myself in the car window and observe that I'm old and ugly and have nothing to look forward to in life but more of the same, I find myself wishing that I could just curl up and crawl inside somebody sensitive and understanding and warm and strong, thinking that I might emerge better prepared for life's innumerable onslaughts, and not resurface.........

i guess that's what we all want.

In the meantime, I'll continue to sabatoge any possibility of finding this thing by insulting anybody who graces my presence with cuteness, a shred of interest or any semblance of decency....

2006-07-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

houseguests again: phase two. babysitting: continual. tantrum-throwing, irrational 11 year-old: one of life's interminable, hopeless challenges.

having him come into work tonight and stay for hours? priceless.

I have, however, decided that women, children and I should be seen and not heard, because my flirting technique sucks sweaty decomposing donkey balls. It was good to see him though. Gave me something to fantasize about during the long ride home slash fortissimo whine tasting....

good times, my friends. and I'm glad you are my friends, during these special Hallmark moments that we can all share.....

2006-07-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

I am officially recommending April Winchell (I'm too lazy to figure out how to link, just google it bitches), radio talk-show host, glam-goddess and comic extroadinaire, to my mammoth readership today.

I first heard of her when reading Jason Togyer's Tube City Almanac last year, when news of her father's death (Paul Winchell, voice of Winnie-The-Pooh's 'Tigger', ventriloquist, inventor, tv personality, madman) sent ripples through the hollywood gossip community about their estranged relationship. Apparently, she had written a retraction (review) on the amazon site to her father's scathing, and largely fictitious, autobiography of his career and their family life, and had incurred massive criticism from her father's fans, who panned her as a thankless hollywood brat who was simply riding her father's coattails for her own gain. Anyway, it's all archived in her blog somewheres and that isn't the point.

what the fuck WAS my point?........... Oh! She's awesome! So go check her out! You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll see paris hilton doing the naughty not once but more than once!

that is all...

2006-07-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

Interesting couple of days. I'm didn't work saturday because I felt that transportation constraints would impede quality time with my niece, so I called work early for the purpose of beating the other two servers who habitually call in to the punch (as it turns out, the other of us who had suggested we both ditch to protest the lax management style that typically results in our getting stuck without a third, called about two hours later, deathly ill. she got yelled at. i apologized profusely today.......).

My synopsis of this weekend concludes that there are no 15-year-olds within 15 miles that my cute (but not as hot as she thinks she is) niece can cruise for; and that no matter how many games of 'let's count the number of men who leer at you (different versions include: the over-thirty set, shameless married middle agers and subtlety-challenged construction workers),' all the replies of 'that is just disturbing' do nothing but reinforce the fact that I have once again failed in the arena of 'cool aunt' caregiving.

I suppose that if I cared to make this visit interesting prior to its inception, I might have researched some more teen-appropriate options. Hell, if I weren't flying by the seat of my pants, I would have had us rent canoes on the lake rather than wasting an hour on the sound anticipating low tide. But I executed nothing right, as usual, largely due to hastily-wrought efforts to entertain in the face of my resentment at this imposition and my neices' ephemeral definition of 'fun.'

On a lighter note, my hair is a different color...or...pretty much the same color. I allowed my niece to dye my hair and choose its shade. During said process, I paused to remind her that the runoff of this 'cinderella transformation' was going into the same tub that I had once dunked her baby butt into to address the uncontrollable detritus of an overloaded diaper, her reaction to which was to bend down and stick her face in the water so that she might partake of its chocolatey deliciousness. ...lest she get too cocky as my 'weekend makeover' stylist...

Medium brown, her selection for me and the winner of a drunken tally at work the night prior, ultimately proved to be an appropriate choice, given our history with this bath, this room and this tub.

Unfortunately, she also went with a similar makeup palette -- one that I paid for, trusting her against my better judgement. The resultant 'Anne Bancroft exhumed' effect was pretty depressing, so I cleared off all but the racoon-eye'd vestiges of mascara.

I ditched work from her cell phone from our 'bathtub boutique' so we could spend our newly liberated afternoon at the beach. We were there for a little more than an hour before we realized, in the absence of hermit crabs and anenomes, that there was nothing to do. So we tallied up the leerers, came home, aborted evening freshwater swimming plans (other side of town, bitches!) for a barbeque, and hit the grocery store.

This was our second trip of the afternoon. I was eager to size up the bagboy that she had become smitten with upon our first visit. Though it's my grocery store, I couldn't place him by her description: "He's gone. I don't see him."

"I see someone who fits your description..."

"Ohmygosh. that's him. Isn't he cuuute? He's still heere??" It had only been four hours. Somebody hasn't had a job yet.

I threatened to place an 'I Saw You' ad in The Stranger:

"Shoreline Central Market. Me: Valkyrian Britney Spears-a-like. You: Diminutive, bespectacled bagster. My crazy aunt and I discussed hair color; your style is soo rad. She tallied up all the gazes in my direction, but I only have eyes 4U."

When we got home, I told my son of our pending barbecue, instructing him and friend to ignore previously-scheduled plans to swim. His reply: 'what happened to your eye?'

Our hasty, cornucopic feast, complete with burnt chicken prepared on the scorching barbeque by our princess of impatience, along with salad and burgers, miraculously made its way to dining plates. I called the boys down to eat.

"Mom, you look ugly."

Good call, kid...good call.

2006-07-07T00:03:00.000-07:00

You know what would be kind of fun right now?

SEEEEXXX! THAT'S WHAT!

not in this fucking lifetime.....

2006-07-06T22:49:00.000-07:00

and then my son announces that he went hungry tonight, because of a 'walking to a restaurant that was closed' fiasco engineered by the houseguests........

holy shit is he pissed. and everyone in the house can hear his tirade through the heat vents.

god my life sucks indescribably.

i just escape this hell by posting and sleeping as much as possible....

i had a really disturbing purgatorial dream last night.

i wonder why my imagination would bother? it's where i spend every minute of my life...........

2006-07-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

WHY IS IT THAT THE ONLY PEOPLE REMAINING IN TOWN ARE STUPID, UGLY, TOOTHLESS SOCIALLY RETARDED ASSHOLES? BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T INVITED TO DO ANYTHING THAT REQUIRED TRAVEL?

WHY DO I HAVE TO WAIT ON THEM? WHY DO I WORK HERE?

WHY DOESN'T HE GET OFF HIS FAT KEISTER AND JUST POP IN FOR TWO LOUSY MINUTES, BUY A SIXER OF BEER AND GRACE ME WITH HIS PRESENCE? I NEED TO SEE A SMILE THAT HAS AT LEAST 28 TEETH IN IT. I DON'T CARE HOW MUCH I FUCK UP THE INTERACTION BY BEING A SPAZ, I JUST NEED ONE EFFING THING TO LOOK FORWARD TO.

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE? WHO THE FUCK ARE THEY? MY RELATIVES I RECOGNIZE, BUT A STRAINED POLITE CONVERSATION COMING FROM THE LIVING ROOM AT TEN P.M.? WTF? I DIDN'T EVEN ADEQUATELY PREPARE THE SECOND GUEST BEDROOM (MY BEDROOM) FOR ALL THESE COUSINS......WHO THE FUCK IS THIS??

not the best day, or week. 'cause I don't do enough for others, that's why........