Hereditary Disability

It's been really dry here lately and Dad called me yesterday morning, mad as a bear. The news had been calling for rain this weekend--a seething, apocalyptic gullywasher that was going to carry off our livestock and force us all onto the roofs of our houses. So dad busted his butt on Sunday to plant all his garlic before the rains came. Instead what happened is it got really cloudy and it drizzled half an inch. Dad blamed the Madison County Board of Education.

"These people," he said. "They move out here to the country and everybody says 'oh, we gotta build'em a new school.' Because the county's 'projected to grow.' But then they build this big, ugly new school building and it sits around nearly empty because the economy crashed and now I'M paying taxes on it. What they should be doing is building all these schools like concourses at the airport with a bunch of docks on it so they can pull trailers up depending on how many kids they got."

Dad's rancor is nearly always misdirected at local government or hack meteorologists.

To tell the truth, I was grumpy yesterday too because I'm related to my dad and our emotions run on sunlight and hugs and Lay's Original potato chips. It took me a little longer to sink into the sweet pit of despair that dad was wallering in when I talked to him in the morning, but it happened. At around 5 in the afternoon, I flopped on the bed (it had started raining again) and I looked out the window at the dripping camellia bush. Bryan came in and asked me what was wrong.

"I don't think anybody likes me," I said.

Bryan laughed and then stopped kind of suddenly like a lawn mower running out of gas.

"Honey, everybody likes you," he said.

"But...." And then I didn't say anything else. Bryan rubbed my back for a while and left me to glare mournfully out at the mist and rain. When the rain let up, I went for a run and felt better. But here's the thing: I'm a psychologically healthy person with a crippling hereditary aversion to cloud cover. I'm not sure what to do about it, other than live someplace very sunny. But I've lived in the desert before and I like it better where it's green. Sunny and green like it usually is here.

The fact is, we're probably going to have to move away sometime next year because Bryan will finish his PhD and have to find a job. He was looking at postings today and he found one in Berkley, California that looked nice.

"I can't live in Berkley," I said. "Too foggy. I'd probably throw myself off a bridge or into a marina or something. Actually, I think there are a lot of bridges there, so I'd probably do that."

Bryan made a face like he was trying to condense all his features into the space right below his eyes.

Although I can accept today that I'm a generally likable person, it must be hard for Bryan to live with someone with my disability.

Ethereal Lady Jams

My friend Chester and I love the crap out of each other, but we detest each other's taste in music. We spent an entire week this summer driving around south Georgia in my car with two very well-stocked iPods, and the only things we jointly agreed to listen to were "Edlewiess" performed by Captain Von Trapp and The Very Best of Prince in its entirety. The good news is I now know all the lyrics to "When Doves Cry."

So usually when Chester calls me he puts on this weird Napoleon Dynamite voice and says, 'Hello? What are you doing. Are you listening to some ethereal lady jams?"

To Chester, pretty much every song I've ever heard (even those not written, performed or produced by a lady) automatically classifies as an ethereal lady jam by virtue of the fact that the sound waves were carried to my ear and were processed by my brain. Chester doesn't know very many straight women besides his mom, so he basically looks to me to see what the ladies are into. Not that he's terribly interested.

Well, I listened to this song about 8 times today, and it's a genuine and authentic ethereal lady jam. So, if you're writing a term paper about ELJ and want some primary source material, I suggest you start here. I bet you could also interview Chester.



(BTW: I hate the stupid look on her face, too. But though that video leaves me with the distinct impression that girlfriend has zero self respect, this song very nearly makes up for it.)

Dream Interpretation: DOs and DON'Ts

I had this dream a couple of weeks ago...but no, wait.

First let me tell you that I know you don't want to hear about my dream. People hate hearing about other people's dreams. Because it's like this:

1) "Hey, I had this crazy/amazing/scary/weird dream last night." {And then they proceed to tell you a vague, boring, disjointed story that has no narrative arc because IT WAS A DAMN DREAM. I get it--I've had dreams before. It seems really cool and important while you're in the middle of it, but most of us just don't have the rhetorical powers to do our dreams justice. So instead, let's just go get some frozen yogurt and gossip about a mutual friend's relationship problems.}

2) "Hey, I had a dream about you last night." {SUBTEXT: "Wherein YOU were doing something gross or weird...let me tell you about it." To which I respond: This is not my problem.}

So anyway, back to my dream:

In the dream I had snuck into my friend Vicki's house and stolen a knife out of her knife block--one that was really dull--with the plan of taking it to the kitchen store to be sharpened as a birthday surprise. So I took the knife to the store and the two guys working there poured vegetable oil on the counter and sort of sloppily sloshed the knife around in the oil, all the time talking to each other about Fantasy Football. When they had finished, one of them went over to a cash register and, "Beep-boop-boup--that will be $106.36."

And you guys, in my dream, I started sobbing. Wailing like I was at a Romanian funeral. But I wasn't really all that upset--it was just that I was hoping that those guys would cut me a deal on their shoddy workmanship because, HEY--a lady's crying over here. But the more I cried, the less concerned they looked. I woke up and there were ACTUAL TEARS streaming down my face. I'm here to tell you it was intense.

So, why the hell did I just tell you that? Because that wasn't just a dream, it was my brain thumping me on the side of the head saying, "Look kid, you just exercised the nuclear option and it didn't make one bit of difference, did it?" And you know, that's been happening to me a lot lately in actual reality. I pull out all the stops, perform the grandest gesture I can think of, and whoever it's directed at is just sort of like, "ehhhhhhh. What else you got?"

All this is probably in my horoscope and stuff, but my dream pointed it out to me instead. So dreaming was actually useful this time! Did it give me the answers to what to do about it? Hell no. But my point is, THIS is dream interpretation, my babies.

The Most Romantic Thing

Did you guys see THIS?

The way I'm reading it, Moammar Gadhafi and Condoleezza Rice are soul mates. They found a whole photo album of her in his compound in Bab al-Aziziya when the rebels took it over and ransacked it. He's also been known to say weird stuff like this:

"I support my darling black African woman," he said. "I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. ... I love her very much. I admire her, and I'm proud of her, because she's a black woman of African origin."

Aw. As they say where I'm from: "Bless."

Is it weird that I like them both better because of this? Because a tiny part of me wants to believe these crazy kids might have a shot at love. You know, after her country stops trying to kill him.

Perfect Day

Hello, you divine creature.

You know, today was really nice. I couldn't really tell you why, but it was the kind of day you suspect you didn't actually deserve. Like whoever's in charge of dealing out days accidentally handed me a way better one than I had coming, but didn't realize they'd done it until sometime this afternoon, at which point they were like "ah, just get on with yourself...."

So a big THANKS to that cosmic administrator. And Friend, here are some carefully-considered songs for you, in the spirit of Jesslyn's Good Day:

Mashed Potatoes

We got back from California on Saturday afternoon and my expectations were not met. What I expected was this: I was going to get off the plane and it was going to be hot like someone emptied the contents of a jacuzzi over my head. Then I was going to drive home and all my zinnias were going to be dead and the sun was going to set through the trees behind our back yard tattoo parlor, and I was going to sit on the porch and drink a cold can of seltzer water under the rattly fan, and I was going to feel like Bilbo Baggins at the end of The Hobbit: relieved and pleasantly exhausted and victorious and a tiny bit bored. Because that heady feelings cocktail is a big reason people invented homes to begin with. It's also why people invented long term romantic relationships.

The funny thing was, coming home didn't feel like that at all. We walked off the plane and the heat wasn't half as overwhelming as I had hoped--in fact, I don't think it broke 90 that day. Driving home from the airport, I noticed the wind kind of rustled through the tops of the trees like it does sometimes in mid August, just before the summer goes through a midlife crisis, buys a really obnoxious car and makes everybody miserable for a couple weeks. My plants weren't even all that dead (thanks Ben!). But besides all that, something just felt weird. The only way to describe it is that I came Home and Home didn't recognize me.

So here's what I did: I waited until the sun went down and I went for a drive. I took some overdue books back to the library, slid them into the after hours book drop and listened to them clump when they hit the bottom of the box. I went to Daily Groceries and selected vegetables while the girl behind the counter tried to convince the night manager not to cut his hair. I drove past some parties that were spilling out of houses into front yards, and I knew by the looks of those guys that they were probably graduate students in the Poultry Sciences department. I went to Vision Video and forgot how to act around the cashier so that he wouldn't judge me for not renting something French. And then I drove home in a bemused sort of stupor.

But then it kind of hit me as I was driving up Sunset: it wasn't the place that didn't feel like home. It was me that was different.

I sometimes forget that I'm a little bit like a pile of mashed potatoes--my brain is, I mean. And, you know, I'm generally pretty pleased with the reality of my potato lump. Usually the pile just sits there on the plate in the regular old lump shape, but then sometimes it's like someone walks by with a butter knife and spends some time rearranging the shape of my potato lump. Like maybe they make it look like a topiary of a goose or something. And after that things just feel a little different for a while until the goose falls over and it goes back to being a lump shape again.

What I'm saying is, traveling sometimes makes you different. It made me different this time and though I'd like to discuss this in greater detail, it's one in the morning now and I have to get up at 7 to write a newsletter. So fun!

Bonne nuit!

California

Ya'll, I've been in California for over a week and here's the thing: it's freaking cold in California. No no no, Jesslyn--you are mistaken! California is full of tan people! Skinny, blonde people in bikinis! Swimming pools and Luke Perry! Wine tastings in sunny vinyards! It's the damn American Mediterranean!

Ah yes. I can see where you might have gotten that impression. However, the California I'm experiencing is chilly and socked-in like Greenland in November. But I'm notoriously thin-blooded, which doesn't make rational sense because most of my ancestors were ruddy-faced, heroically built, horse-and-dog loving Englishmen who would have chewed up the northern California coast and spit it into the Pacific. Apparently I'm an outlier.

The really remarkable thing, however, is that Bryan's family thrives under these barbaric conditions. And they're all about 4"11 and are constantly saying things like, "I know we didn't eat breakfast or lunch and it's 3 PM, but I'm actually not very hungry. Let's all 14 of us just share an appetizer." I'm currently at their family reunion in Santa Cruz and we've been hiking and going to the beach and kayaking and surfing and otter watching, all in freezing arctic grade fog. And they're all like, "Isn't it bracing? Isn't it divine? Who wants to play team building games on the lawn with this paper bag?"

This is the self portrait Bryan, Odessa and I took on the beach yesterday:

It was 49 degrees and Odessa was deeply unimpressed by the sand castle building conditions.

But we've been wearing wooly sweaters and I've been drinking quarts of hot tea and viscous, domestic red wine. So, don't feel too sorry for me. I'll just wear all these bathing suits when I get back to Georgia.