No grab-ass, college boy.

The title of this blog has very little to do with the content, even in the abstract fashion that anything in this blog manages to relate to anything along the borders/sidebar. Some guy said it in the movie that I watched last night (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) and it was the only thing that made me giggle during a 2-hour tour of bug-eyed women and sailors in short shorts having heart attacks. The whole thing convinced me that my life is just an endless dance marathon of doom and that if someone rips your last silk stocking you should ask them to shoot you with a petite handgun and, provided they are a gentleman, they will oblige you.

Unfortunately, the above rant pretty well summarizes my feelings on the film, and as that paragraph is a fairly crummy blog even by my (admittedly slack) standards, we’ll have to leave the topic and continue onward.

Everyone who is anyone knows that I’m obsessed with email. When my main squeeze and I returned from our vacation last night we both crouched in front of the computer for an emergency email evaluation. We aren’t much into taking turns, so together we scrolled though my mess of job-site spam and Facebook comments, and then sorted through his digital pile of Amazon ads and real estate correspondence. Nothing was determined to be pressing, and we left the usual junk to be dealt with individually. Now, you could argue that the real estate stuff pertained to me and that the Facebook comments that I receive are often directed at my FB-free pal. But, however I phrase it, we still checked our email together. And that’s a little freaky.

There are a couple of truths that I learned from reading lady magazines that I hold to be completely self evident. One is that you shouldn’t steal anything that someone might recognize (a boyfriend, a hair style, a hundred dollar bill) from your lady friends. The second is that checking someone else’s email means that you are a super scumbag. This motto extends to cell-phone messages, instant message records and works for family and friends, but especially for gf/bf combos. I frequently tell my main squeeze (never an offender of this rule) that reading your spouse’s email means that you are a sleazebag and will eventually get a divorce.

I’m not trying to be a stickler, completely. Obviously I discuss the contents of my email with just about who will listen and especially with my spousal person. And I see the temptation of checking on someone’s email and the ways that you could write it off as your computer/your property/complete honesty ect. But I do think that having private routes of communication are important.

Here’s another angle. Our house is full of notebooks and none of them are joint-custody. When one party encounters a notebook that doesn’t belong to them, they politely decline reading it. This means seeing temptation and having to move the temptation from the kitchen table before you can sit down to enjoy your meal. This strife is particularly keen for my husband, since I have a bad habit of seizing the back of a grocery list or receipt in the drive-thru to record my sudden whims and feelings. Spousal person reported last week picking up a seemingly empty stack of sticky notes only to find on note 3 the beginning of an impassioned rant of mine from the summer of 2007. I’m not a very discrete person.

Is the whole point here that people curb their commutations to fit a certain audience? Or is it that people know when they look into something that wasn’t intended for them that they will find something that they don’t want to find? To be vaguer yet and more melodramatic, nosiness can seem almost self destructive.

I don’t know really. Mainly I was just thinking about the weirdness of joint [email] checking, private journals in plain sight and life being an evil dance party of horse-themed doom. That’s it, I guess. I don’t have much more to say on the topic – thought when I envisioned writing this while showering this morning it was a lot more poignant.

Sandal Season

It might be silly to write this while it’s raining, but I am willing to overlook present circumstances in my enthusiasm for the big picture. It is sandal season and I’ve got a giant blister on my right heel to prove it…a blister from the pair of brown faux-Pocahontas flats that I was wearing in protest of sandal season.

(Always a mistake to wear cheap, plastic flats when you plan on being sweaty. Not that anyone ever plans on being sweaty, but you know what I mean. )

Man, do I hate sandal season. I like the first part of spring alright, when the sun is just warm enough to make the sidewalk pleasant to stand on and during that 3-weeks of green before everything burns to a dull brown, but I hate the summer. I hate the heat and the way that the sun reflects off the stupidly clean bumpers of the other cars on the freeway. I also hate how I never got around to getting prescription sunglasses when I had eye coverage and how little kids giggle at the way I wear my over-sized sunglasses over my regular ones. There are few things about summer that I don’t hate, and for a long time I assumed that was why I hated sandals.

But recently when I fixed the compulsive gaze of my brain on the many sandals that fill my workplace, it occurred to me that my hate for sandals is an entirely different issue. I don’t like sandals because they are so god-awfully casual and because I have never been able to affix my affections to casual things. I don’t like sandals for the same reason that I don’t like shorts or plans that involve “texting you when I get there”: beneath my attempts at being a bra-burning liberal I have a rigid, propriety-loving soul.

I love people who are overly formal and things that are structured – maybe that’s why I suck so thoroughly at being self-employed. I like people who wear slips under lined dresses and own completely needless business cards. And thus, I hate sandals, the shoes that promote foot nudity.

Or maybe it’s just because I have such pale, fishy feet. Either way, it's going to be a long, blistery summer.

In Bangkok

The following is an excerpt from the box of the weird insta-noodle thing that I just tried to eat:

"Trader Ming's Noodle Boxes were inspired by the noodle carts on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand. In Bangkok, people enjoy all kinds of wonderful foods from street vendors.

In a way, the streets are really just one big open air cafe. We have imported three great flavors from Thailand and now you have an easy way to ear these noodle dishes."

Trader Ming is grossly mistaken. Those noodles (Best by: August 2009) tasted like burnt plastic and the the shoe leather of someone who works at Panda Express. Spend a little less time on the sweeping generalizations about Bangkok and a little more time on the noodle sauce, Trader Ming.

Peanut-butter toast it is.

Probably a dog calendar

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and thus I have devoted no small amount of time to tidying my house. It's not like I have a spectacularly messy house (and I have lived in some spectacularly messy apartments, so I know the difference) but the house does seem to accumulate clutter very easily.

When I was younger I used to adore clutter, and would spend hours arranging my various clutter items on shelves. However, somewhere between here and there I got a bit more OCD about things, but because my clutter-gathering habits haven't changed, I now find myself with an alarming amount of crap stacked on every flat surface and an insatiable urge to tidy.

I will make this brief, because the vacuum is rebelling and I feel a little guilty pawing away at my computer while my indentured co-cleaner attempts

to fathom the mechanical innards, but I had a few random thoughts of note during the process.

Firstly I would like to voice my concern over buying furniture. Our house is filled with a variety of second hand and loaner items, the crown jewel of which is my rickety plaid loveseat. When I look around at the menagerie I wonder how a person could undertake the creative and fiscal responsibility of buying a set of furniture. I may be a lady, but charge me not with choosing a motif for my house.

My second point is in regards to photos on display. As any internet savvy procrastinator does, I rarely manage to print photos out physically. As a result of this coupled with an alarming lack of photogenic tendencies, our house is devoid of any pictures of the occupants together. And though I do think that pictures add to a certain quaintness, I think this might be nice. I don't want to look at me. Yetch. And I feel silly buying a frame to put myself in for my own looking enjoyment. So back to framing pictures ripped off of calendars.

No automated cursor here.

If there is one thing that I enjoy more than obsessively reading the blogs of emotionally stagnant teens (Please, no more white backgrounds and personalized cursors, you dreary little punks), it’s reading the same material in a vaguely early-modern format.

I recently finished reading The Coquette after having put it off for some time because of an irrational fear that someone might think I was reading a saucy novel in my cube on my lunch break. However, I have lately whittled down the unread portion of my main squeeze’s collection to only novels with compromising names (current furtive cubicle read: Sons and Lovers) and so after a few suspicious glances at the cursive-handwriting font of the title, I started in on The Coquette.

It saddens me to even make this comparison, but the periodic letter format full of romantic drama and parental reprimands was delightfully similar to the electronic epistles of some of my favorite teenie-bloggers. Get it? It’s like teenie-bopper. I’ve just made it up, but mark my words, that media-savvy new president of ours is going to be dropping “teenie-bloggers” before long to prove his groovy vocab.

So where was I? Yes, indeed. The Coquette was what a teen blogger would write, if teen bloggers where clever and well-spoken. Also, it was what a misery-blog would be if blogs had morals, which perhaps they should.

To prove my point and show my earnestness, I’ll tack the same moral onto this one as was slightly more obviously tacked onto The Coquette.

Don’t go around rejecting pleasant clergymen just because you are charming and used to be engaged to an old fellow. Relishing autonomy and sexual freedom will only end in one way: dying in a shabby roadhouse birthing your illegitimate baby while your mother and god-fearing friends sob into embroidered handkerchiefs in parlors across the eastern seaboard.

I went as a pseudo-intellectual for Halloween

Today I had the top of a muffin for breakfast and I must admit that it was very tasty. It reminded me very much of the time of my life when everyone I knew was a barista and I ate millions of muffin-tops off day-old pastries. Blueberry muffins with the crumbly junk on top were always my favorite.

The second reason that I found the muffin very satisfying is that it came from a bakery and I have very ambitious feelings about bakeries. To be clear, it’s not that I like coffee shops overmuch. Nope, I’ve never been one to patronize coffee shops, even though I love to loiter with what I might call a delightful decaf-coffee-bev. Probably I’m just afraid that someone will call me a pseudo-intellectual when I hang out in coffee shops looking pensive, and since I am a pseudo-intellectual I don’t want anyone to blow my cover.

Anyway, I like bakeries because when I imagine myself I like to think that I am the sort of person who frequents bakeries. I try to believe that this is just because I am naturally nostalgic and I like small business and quaint things and I definitely love bread. But it’s possible that I’m just lying to myself.

Maybe this is a product of Hollywood. Imagine for me (look how bossy I am, regardless of national holidays like Veteran’s Day) the beginning of some unlikely love story movie.

The likeable and endearingly loopy character surely stops at a bakery during the opening sequence and the bakeristas will know his or her (her or John Cussack) by name. Peppy music will fade, he/she will jovially get the “regular” donut and coffee bev combo and pleasantries will be exchanged.

Now, you might think that this is used to create juxtaposition with the other, more uptight character (who will probably be trash-talking a cabby while drinking a raw egg for breakfast) so that we know exactly how unlikely the love affair will be.

Really, though, I think Hollywood is trying to tell us that people who go to bakeries are plenty more charming than people who drink raw egg protein drinks while looking at their Rolex. And I’ve never known them to lie before.

Thinking frugally

It seems that I will soon be making a large and car-shaped purchase. As a result of this I have renewed my interest in being a paranoid and frugal penny-pinching-type shopper.

Currently I'm asking myself: Are alternatively shaped pastas the critical missing link in my food budget?

Something icky for your Tuesday.

I am annoyed with my lunchmeat for not pretending to be a more wholesome staple.

Sandwiches being a very important part of my theory on eating, I usually spend some small part of the day selecting the choicest ham in the Tupperware for my lunch. This morning I was trying to get a few slices for my sandwich and was very frustrated with the way that it was all squashed together and crumbly, like one big handful of puesdo-meat.

This imagery pretty much grossed me out and put a swine-shaped damper on my appetite. Should I be eating something that doesn’t have enough nutritional integrity to hold its shape? Quickly paranoia set in. What about my mayonnaise, when did it expire? *

So here’s my plea to you, makers and packagers of cheap meat: try a little harder to conceal the gunky, miscellaneous pig-part origins of your product, because you are disturbing my feeding patterns.

*My mayonnaise expires in April 2009. Furthermore, I suspect that this might be the first time in my life that I have typed the word mayonnaise.

Dogs can climb chain-link fences.

I was very distracted last week by my search for employment and various betrayals (artistically rendered by my car with special malice) that I did not write. Not that I feel guilty about it or that I am a blog whiner, but I just thought that I would mention it. In an off-hand way, you understand.

Even though I was too preoccupied to actually perform my blogging duties, I won’t have you going around thinking that my brain was barren, completely free of the pointless sort of commentary that I find suitable for the Internet. On the contrary, I opened my Word program several times last week with the great intent of writing something driveling. But I found that after I had set my window to the correct rambling settings (10 point font, 75% zoom and Print Layout view) I was utterly unmotivated to continue.

So back by popular un-demand, is a list of the things that I neglected to blog about recently.

A) I spend a hearty chunk of my day cruising down the freeway, listening to various yelping DJ’s hawk their stations and while I’ve got no problem with pre-paid self-aggrandizement, I really hate when radio stations run little sampler-platters of the sort of music that they play. In my experience it nearly always leads to a severe disappointment.

For example, an ad might go something like this: “This is blad-blah-blah FM, playing the best music ever, in the best regional subsection of the best state ever!” and be followed by a loud animal call and a series of 5 second spurts of a few songs.

If you are an easily appeased individual like myself, you probably nod along with these partial songs in distracted appreciation. However, I inevitably find that the entire song that eventually follows this compilation is totally crap. And so now I greet these ads with wariness, hoping that each semi-decent fragment will continue to its full length, instead of stopping short to make room for a more obnoxious song. But it never happens that way.

B) I am in a literary funk. And not the fun kind of funk, either. I just can’t seem to finish anything that I start and just meander around starting new things for the sheer joy of getting bored and giving up. On my bedside table there is a variety of ambitious (Daniel Deronda, assorted stories by Maugham, To The Lighthouse) and lesser ambitious re-read (Franny and Zooey, The Fountainhead) undertakings.

Here I would like to make some kind of play on words that incorporated “literature” and “littering,” but nothing really leaps to mind.

C) Twitter. Could it provide me with the happiness I once realized during the AIM away message hey-day of my college career?

Dropping-eaves

Best thing I overheard all day (and I spend my days eavesdropping so this should be good):



"Ohhhhhh man. I need me some Sega Genesis."

-Provoked by a discussion on the possibilty of money exploding forth from a person on impact.

Lawn art, it's always ugly.

I know it must be tiring for me to always be puttering on about such-and-such book that I read to console myself for such-and-such mini-tragedy, but as your (you, they, them, Internet, ect) feelings mean squat to me, I'm going to do it yet again.

[Side note regarding my spell checker: when I neglected to capitalize Internet and lazily left clicked upon the red-lined word to view my correctly spelled options I was shocked to see the first one was “INTERNET.” We get it; the Internet is hellsa important and brought us life-altering amounts of free information, bloggity blogs and Neopets. I don't think there is any reason for a full CAPS option, however.]

So, to venture forth with my tirade. Yesterday was crappy as crappy days go and as I love to wallow I had set my sights on being self-indulgent when I got home from work. As I drove I toyed with the idea of spooning ice cream from the tub, passing it perilously over the DVD player to my mouth without removing my eyes from the television where a loop of MASH eps would be playing, but as I drew more disgruntled with traffic I knew that nothing less than James Herriot would do.

There! Now you know my deepest and darkest Scottish secret. [My deepest darkest Middle Eastern secret? I cried while reading The Kite Runner on a plane.] For those of you who either live in a box, or aren't interest in British word-smut, Mr. Herriot is a fellow who practiced veterinary medicine in Britain in the thirties and uses the word “boot” to describe his trunk in his many quasi-fictional memoirs. He was in the war. What war you ask? The Great War. Actually I'm kidding; it was WWII.

I just can't help but feel up-lifted by the haphazardness of veterinary practice before penicillin. These fellows are always dashing out at night and washing up in a bucket to birth a cow (which is then laid in a nice box-stall in a bed of Yorkshire clover while the JH goes on a rant about how a new birth is always magical.) And practically every other story is about a lonely old salt who wears a cloth cap and has no companionship beyond his querulous sheep dog. I eat that stuff up.

I first discovered these books when I was a sloppy little youth who wanted to be a vet when I grew up. This may comes as a shock for those who know me now as a easily panicked and nervous sort (and particularly shocking I'm sure to those who have to suffer through my squeamish shrieks during any suggestion of blood on the television) but I was sure that I was destined for a life of helping animals overcome colic. I even indulged in this Sterling North-esque fantasy where I had cured a friendly otter and built a small river in the back of my vet-house in which it swam playfully.

Since then I have thankfully recovered my sanity and want a nice indoor job that rarely (if ever) requires me to consider the complications to twin lambs in the birth-canal. Despite this, when my bike tire blew this morning I was certainly glad that I hadn't quite finished the story where JH is assigned to measuring ponies in the horse show and people try to swindle him with their rural trickeries.

Ode to biking; Short tirade on bikers.

Today when I was biking in the wind beside a field of threshed hay, I was trying to have "amber waves of grain" type thoughts. I was trying to direct my imagination at the world before the hay bale and to consider narratives about little prairie runts sliding down hay stacks like they were pre-industrial Six Flags (but without the weird Looney Tunes affiliation). Perhaps I could even have been contented with some Willa Cather-ish notions with plows [read: hard working men] silhouetted against the setting sun [read: death of the Mid-Western farming community] or the young widows of Civil War veterans selling their beauteous meadows to support their frivolous life style [read: oh, Willa Cather]. But try as I might, I just kept thinking: That is some ugly burnt grass, and biking in the wind is unfathomably annoying.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love riding my bike. I consider the rediscovery of the bike as one of the most valuable lessons I've learned here at my venue of higher education. Being the sort of person who hates driving and fears the bus [I once sat down in the seat kept symbolically vacant for the ghost of Rosa Parks on Rosa Parks Day and got told off by the bus driver] biking is a preferable alternative. I'm currently cruising on a teal-with-purple flecks Huffy road bike with dysfunctional gears but very nice tires and generally have a pleasant time wheeling about...when it is not windy.

As much as I like biking, however, I can't seem to get over my distaste for bikers. You know, the sort of people with more than one helmet (matchy, matchy), a spare tire attached to their backpack and are always yelling things like "On your right!"

What, pray tell, is a normal person supposed to respond to "On your right!"?

Because I am a polite person, I feel that some response is required. Unfortunately, because I am a both a polite and a nervous person, I can't think on the fly. So, I usually end up tentatively saying "okay...thanks" long after the fiercely peddling helmeteer has glided past. As I duck my head and peddle sluggishly on in shame, I console myself that my awkward response probably rolled right off of their sleek spandex torso, unheard.

So today in the wind along the field of hella burnt threshed grass, I thought about how people fall into threshers and get all ground to bits and when some chick in a camouflage sandals gave me the "On your right!" I just gave her a knowing glance.

A plea for wood paneling.

I’m just sickly enough to like wood paneling in the professional atmosphere.

I used to work in a very nice ugly building. The ceilings were low and made of the same kind of paneling as high school portables, that disturbingly porous stuff that makes you think of worms and asbestos and if you stabbed your pencil into it, it just might stick. I never tried to stick anything into the ceiling, being too much of a pansy in both the school and work phases of life, but I imagine that a nice mechanical pencil would work nicely. In my old work station the aforementioned wood paneling was decorated with post-it notes and weird folk-y art featuring roosters with santa hats and driving tractors into endless fields of hay. All of this was overseen by the paper machete skeleton hanging from the pencil sharpener (which certainly no one ever used because we were all hanging onto our mechanical pencils with our eyes on the ceiling). Although I can’t vouch for what material the counter tops were made of, I can assure you that it made a very cheerful noise when slammed with a date-stamper.

Very recently my workplace has migrated into a new, shnazzy building. To my estimation it looks exactly like a Nugget market, without any of the cheese wheels that makes Nugget tolerable. [As a side note, I have experimented in calling the Nugget “the nug,” after being influenced in that direction by pals. Although it was more as a sandwich reference than a supermarket, I still find this nickname is poorly received.]

This new building is bright and inviting…and consequently sucks like the south. Because I have an “Okay-please-have-a-seat” kind of job, I am suddenly exposed to a multitude of cranky, confused and generally shrieking individuals, which is a mild rendition of my worst nightmare. Gone are the days when I would slouch over my text books and be so infrequently disturbed that I was often startled by any noise. Now I have to use my text books to slap away the hands of the rabid brats attempting to climb over the counter and soil my beloved date-stamper with their sticky little Reese’s Pieces fingers.

Maybe I’m just feeling extra surly because my new mandatory headset (emblazoned inside: “I Don’t Want Your Lice”) is squeezing my brain a little too tightly.