Thursday, August 30, 2012

Read this OTHER thing I wrote!

OH SNAP, ya'll!  I love it when somebody wants to publish something I wrote wherein "K" does not represent the carrying capacity of a population and there is no mention of alleles.

The Hairpin, which is basically the world's best blog in the world, just published a little essay on Virginia, everybody's favorite old lady.  Or maybe just my favorite old lady.

Is it weird that I'm a little bit obsessed with my grandmother?  It is kind of weird, isn't it?

Uncomfortable derailment: Also, in case you want to propose to me, I've decided I like ALL THE DIAMONDS.  The bloodier the better. I even like them a tiny bit haunted.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Fearless Like a Skunk

I have a Work Husband named Chris.  Having a Work Husband is a lot like having a Home Husband, without all the being in love with each other business.  Chris has a very beautiful and vivacious Home Wife named Lila who he'd much rather spend his days with.  But he's stuck with me for now, two and a half days a week.

Here's what Work Husbands do: Chris reminds me about my calendar events that I can also see on our shared calendar, he asks me if I want coffee when he's making coffee, he tells me when I'm being unreasonable, but mostly he just listens to me bitch about things like mechanics, Odessa's speech therapist, and my Home Husband forgetting what size family picture I have to take to Odessa's class for the Family Month bulletin board because I, stupidly, sent Bryan to the informational meeting on Back-to-School Night instead of going myself.

Appropriately, Chris always sides with Bryan in situations like these. He'll nod slowly and sagely all the way though my story, and at the end say, "So, what you're saying is you're surprised it happened this way.  I find that interesting...."

Chris and I share an office, a phone line, a calculator and a black stapler, which is how the whole Work Spouse situation came to be.  This morning, I came into the office and got him to show me how to make a single cup of coffee with the coffeepot in the kitchenette.  He's got this special system for that....

Anyway, as he talked me through the process the way Bob Vila talks over some house framing specs with Norm, he kept saying, "But be careful not to burn your fingers."

And I was all, "GOD, I'm not in second grade, Daaaad."

And he was like, "You know the problem with people like you and Lila? You aren't afraid enough. In order to not burn your fingers doing this, you have to be a little bit afraid of burning your fingers.  And then you know what always happens? You burn your damn fingers and then you complain about it for the rest of the day.  And then it becomes my problem.  I'm just trying to prevent your problem from becoming my problem."

"It's because I'm fearless," I said. "Like a skunk."  And then I had to tell him this story:

In college I used to go to this psychic named Ann Marie--I've told you about her before.  She was really into what she called "Animal Medicine," which means she believed that we all have animal spirits that kind of guide us through life.  Anyway, the first time I ever met her, she did some kind of Reiki Juju magic on me with her eyes closed, making some little symbols with her fingers.  When she was done, she looked at me sideways, took a sip of Diet Coke and said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you've got a lot of Skunk energy.  You're fearless like a skunk."

So I told that story to Chris this morning, and he just rolled his eyes.

"Quit bragging," he said. "Just don't burn your fingers.  Or do if you want. I have a meeting to go to this afternoon, so I won't have to listen to your whining."

He's actually a really nice Work Husband, even if he is sometimes kind of mean.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Gay Pairee

That's Becca and her dog Squinchy
So, my friend Becca Rose is in Paris right now.  You don't meet people like Becca very much--she's kind of like a character in a book: she speaks English and looks like an average human, but then...there's something else, too.  You could chalk it up to the fact that she was home-schooled on a farm in Snoqualmie, Washington but then went to Stanford.  Or that since she was a teeneager, she's been running a hippie camp for Seattle's counter culture youth out on her parents' land.  She has a lot of  practice playing farmer, fairy, medieval merrymaker.

Becca just does what she wants. However, unlike other people I know who do what they want, she does it because she can't help it.  I suspect she sometimes tries to be like other people, and each time I see her, I feel a little pang of relief that whatever half-hearted assimilation methods she might be using are failing.

Anyway, Becca's subletting a studio apartment in Paris this summer because that's what she felt like doing.  She's there for another couple of weeks, and yesterday she pressed me to come visit her--like, next week--just in case I wanted to act on some spontanéité

You can stay with me in my artists' studio and get hit on by the 20 year old Halal butcher down the block and eat lots of figs.  She said.

Of course, Becca is unaware that her invitation fills me with this mournful brand of panic. Because I want to go, but just can't. First of all, my passport has expired; second of all, I'm too poor; and fifthly, I have a kid and two jobs. I can't, but I've always wanted to go to Paris, ever since I read the Madeline books when I was zero years old.  Sometimes when Odessa's feeling particularly magnanimous at bedtime, she says "I want you to read Madeline. It Mommy's favorite. It Dessa's favorite, too."  Which is a lie, but a generous one.

And here's an even more pathetic secret: when I'm feeling sad for no real reason, Bryan asks me what's wrong, and my answer is, I never got to walk around Paris at night.  And now I'm too old. Which makes no sense, but as humans, we enjoy a few inalienable rights, one of them being that we don't have to make sense if we don't want to.

So someday, when I'm very, very old--too old to walk--somebody will doubtless roll me around Paris in a wheelchair at night.  I guess that will be okay.

Boo hoo hoo hoooo!

Here's a boo hoo song just for poor old me:

Nils Frahm - Familiar

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

First Week of School

Ah, they halcyon days of summer.  Before school started this week, Odessa sometimes made this face:

On an Adventure Day(TM), earlier this month.  With Bestie 4 Life, Tucker Belle.
Now she mostly looks like this:

5:45 PM. First Day of School.  No nap.

But, I remember what the first week of school is like: it's stressful and exhausting and not fair.  Yesterday we went to Target and I wouldn't buy her a $20 fairy dress, so she lost her shit.  I had to push the cart at arms length while she screamed blue murder and took swipes at my head with her tiny claws. It was a temper tantrum, the likes of which I hope never to see again.

But I have a lot of compassion for the kid.  It's kind of hard being a grownup, but I'm really glad I don't have any more first weeks of school ahead of me.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

This is Happening

You guys.  Things are moving fast. And by fast, I mean in the past week I've become a member of the 21st century elite.  Here are the steps I've recently taken to ensure my future as a successful and respected Woman of the Two-Thousand-Teens. In no particular order:

Step #1: Get an iPhone, CHECK
That's right, I got an iPhone, which means I'm now one of those people who has an iPhone.  A couple months ago, I was Skyping with a freelance client who was wearing some of those little white earbuds with a mic on them so you can talk on the phone without irradiating your brain. And I could hear the guy really well on Skype, but he couldn't hear me.  So, he was like, "Why don't you just use the earbuds that came with your iPhone?"

So, it's come to this.  We just assume everyone has a magic pocket computer that tells you your business.  It's not just for rich/important people who are smarter than me anymore.

So then my cell phone broke and I got an iPhone. The End.

Step #2: Get a New, Classier-Seeming Studio, CHECK
We had that old studio, right? Me and Drew and David? But then our landlord decided he wanted to use it himself for a work room, so we had to/got to move to a slightly smaller, marginally fancier room in the same building.  The good news is I was out of town this weekend, so David and Drew had to move my freightliner of a desk with their bare hands.  But then they made a sign for our door that says "Manly Mash Bar and Grill." So, whatever--I say we're even.

Notice: that door has a transom.  Claaassy.
  
Step #3: Bangs, CHECK
So, I had bangs for most of my childhood and I totally hated them, primarily because my parents insisted on my having them. Not sure why, but in my family, children have bangs. It's just a rule.

My bangs, right; my sister's bangs, left: 1984
Anyway, my friend Claudia has an eight-year-old girl who totally rocks the bangs, and I complimented them the other day while I was at her house and Claudia was like, "I cut'em myself!" One thing led to another, and over the course of like one minute, I went from not even considering having bangs to having bangs just like I did when I was 6!

And thanks to my new iPhone, they're probably the best documented bangs in the nation.

See?  We got sultry bangs:



We got weird-face bangs with baby butt:


We got the trying-to-figure-out-the-iPhone bangs:


We got'em all.

Step #4: Eradicate Ringworm, CHECK
Are we at the place in our relationship where I can talk about my ringworm?  I hope so, because if not, you should stop reading now.

For several months, I've been noticing a sort of...I dunno...rash on my abdomen? It's not super conspicuous, and doesn't itch or anything, so I just did what I usually do with rashes and waited for it to stop being there.

Because my skin, you guys...it's epic-ly sensitive, and if something's bad's going to happen to me, it's going to happen on my skin.  One time I got this weird skin parasite that took over my whole arm because I was unwittingly making it stronger with Hydrocortisone.  Finally a nurse told me I could kill it with rubbing alcohol, which worked, but it was horrible--that parasite fought me for every inch of arm I took back.  When I was a kid, I spent the summers incapacitated by poison ivy and sun poisoning. There have been warts.  If I have a stressful thought--just one--I get a huge zit on my right cheek with roots that wrap around my brain.  My skin challenges me each and every day of my life.

So this rash was kinda the least of my worries until I was walking around the house the other day without any clothes on, and Bryan was like, "Grrrrrrrl, you got The Ringworm." Yeah, Bryan is probably the only awesome straight guy in America whose wife regularly walks around the house totally butt-ass naked, and the only thing he pays attention to are her dermatological abnormalities.

Anyway, I went out and got athlete's foot medicine and we're taking care of it.  It's just a little fungus.  No biggie.

Annnnd, yeah.  That's what's happening.

Until next time, this is your sophisticated 21st century woman, signing off.