After much wacky fun with insurance agents and used-car dealers, LJ picked up the Tahoe while I was at the dentist. In fact, my entire appointment was punctuated by a frantic exchange of text messages and cell calls regarding "did dude call?" and "what did the insurance company say?" Finally, four hours after the dealer was supposedly going to call us to tell us it was ready, LJ called me and said "I'm just going over there to see what's up." The next I heard was when I was on the bus going home--LJ called to tell me he had it and it was running fine.
It's got some minor issues, of course. The up/down function on the drivers' mirror doesn't work; the A/C doesn't work much; there's something screwy with the power locks; and LJ said he was having problems with the radio. All of that, except the radio, is covered by our warranty--and LJ wants to get a new radio anyway. (We have to get one with more presets, though; I am NOT going to have the presets in my car be WGCI, Power 92, B-96, V-103, and The Other One For Gladys.)
He drove it first, of course, and spent the night out in Maywood in the hopes of getting stuff done today--keys made, mechanical inspections, business of his own that needed doing. But this evening, he picked me up at the El and we switched places, and I got into the drivers seat of the second-largest vehicle I've ever driven--the first, if you don't count U-Hauls. Raj and Smoke were in the car too, so I had an audience--which only made me more nervous, if that was in fact possible. And of course, the seats were WAAAAAYYYYY back and the wheel was WAAYYYYYY up, set perfectly for 6'7" LJ but not so well for 5'6" Gladys, and I couldn't quite figure out what buttons needed pushing to move the seat to a point where I could actually reach the pedals. I felt like an idiot, but LJ had apparently spent a few minutes playing with the gadgets and showed me where everything was.
And then I dropped the guys off at the crib, and I drove myself to the grocery store, in my own car, for the first time in five years. I spent twenty minutes in the Dominick's lot, just playing with buttons and switches and levers, seeing what worked, what didn't and what it all did.
Then, when I'd loaded up the groceries and started up the car, I turned on the radio, ejected the Twista CD, and tuned to Q101--and there it was: "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I said a little prayer to JP, who would have loved the symbolism; and I drove myself home, in my own car, for the first time in five years. Driving down Roosevelt I thought to myself, I'm going to like this, I think.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Dentistry
Yesterday I left work early to go to the dentist.
It should tell you something about the nature of my day that when I left my workplace, I was happy to be going to a place where they were only going to poke needles into my gums.
I have got to, got to, got to get out of that job. Beverly the Big Boss treats me like I'm a puppy that crapped on the carpet; Amy speaks to me like I was a mildly-retarded toddler; and nearly every conversation with RuthAnne makes me wish for a "voices in my head" type of excuse so that I could bludgeon her with impunity.
Yesterday's indignities included:
--a meeting with Amy and Stan, the IT director, which Amy told me was to discuss "what happened with the summer computer configuration and how it could be prevented next time". Apparently, "what happened" was that I had the nerve to mention to Stan that the IT guys who did the configuration did it in a way that left me with a lot of work to do after they were done, because they hadn't preserved or noted the original configuration before they blew it away and re-imaged the disks. Then we moved on to "by the way, Bill didn't like the way you talked to him when you e-mailed him about..." and "Joe thought you were very short with him when...." Meanwhile, Amy is sitting there pulling these sheafs of e-mails out of her folder--e-mails that had been forwarded to her by Stan before the meeting. (Keep in mind that I am repeatedly treated with total disrespect by my superiors in my own job, and repeatedly witness people interacting in disrespectful ways. But somehow I am not supposed to absorb this culture at all--I am supposed to be little miss ice-cream and bunny-rabbits, and never convey dissatisfaction or dismay to anyone, ever, for any reason. You think I'm exaggerating?? The e-mails that were so problematic were simply direct requests for assistance, letting someone know that something appeared to be wrong at their end. Apparently I'm supposed to just say "Hi, I noticed this, but I'm absolutely SURE it's something I did, because it couldn't POSSIBLY be an error on YOUR end. Could you check and let me know how I've failed again?")
Now, I was prepared--still am prepared--to take the advice that was given in that meeting. I am not disputing that I might have been short with someone, or too direct, or frustrated in a noticeable way. That's not only possible, it's probable.
What I objected to was the way it was done. I was sent an e-mail describing a friendly sort of "touch base" meeting, in which a fairly-innocuous topic would be discussed, with an eye towards optimizing procedures. What I got--and this is STAN'S word, not mine--was an "ambush". Amy clearly knew what the meeting was about; the stack of e-mails she pulled out of her bag proves that much. I should have been told what I was walking into before I found myself being attacked from both sides.
By the end of the meeting I was in tears. I spent ten days staying late, skipping lunches, working my ass off to get the summer computers up and running in the face of total cluelessness from an entirely new staff, and instead of "good job" or "we noticed how hard you worked on that", I get the sneak-attack. In fact: Amy said during the course of the meeting, "I didn't know if today was a good time to have this meeting, since you're just coming off three weeks of high stress setting up the stuff for summer...But then I thought, we'd better deal with it NOW, because otherwise I'll have a backlog. And I don't like backlogs." (That is a direct, unembellished QUOTE. In other words: Yes, I know you were under stress and you might be more than normally vulnerable to this criticism. But given the choice between concern for your feelings, and my own need for constant and unceasing productivity, I decided that your feelings were secondary. Fuck THAT, you know?)
THEN, as if that wasn't bad enough...after she shanghai'ed me to that meeting, after she saw how upset I was, what did Amy do when we got back to the office? Did she take me into her office and discuss what had happened, explain to me why it had to be done that way? Maybe even give me a little pep talk and tell me I'm really not a gross fuck-up?
No--she sent me an e-mail to bitch me out for not sending her my list. She demands a list of my projects every Monday, and her e-mail said "The last list I have is dated June 1, which means you've missed four weeks." (This would have been impressive counting, except I was on vacation for the 7th and 14th, and had sent her a full accounting of where everything stood before I left for vacation on the 4th.) For the other two weeks, all I did was summer stuff. Nothing else. That was it, and she knew it. But no, we simply MUST have the list. Nothing I do matters unless I've first sent in the list. No matter how hard I work or how much I accomplish--all for naught unless Amy has the list. And that couldn't possibly have waited for a day or two after the meeting--no, absolutely not. (After all--that might create a backlog!)
After that, I was GLAD to be going to get my teeth drilled. At least the dentist used Novocaine.
It should tell you something about the nature of my day that when I left my workplace, I was happy to be going to a place where they were only going to poke needles into my gums.
I have got to, got to, got to get out of that job. Beverly the Big Boss treats me like I'm a puppy that crapped on the carpet; Amy speaks to me like I was a mildly-retarded toddler; and nearly every conversation with RuthAnne makes me wish for a "voices in my head" type of excuse so that I could bludgeon her with impunity.
Yesterday's indignities included:
--a meeting with Amy and Stan, the IT director, which Amy told me was to discuss "what happened with the summer computer configuration and how it could be prevented next time". Apparently, "what happened" was that I had the nerve to mention to Stan that the IT guys who did the configuration did it in a way that left me with a lot of work to do after they were done, because they hadn't preserved or noted the original configuration before they blew it away and re-imaged the disks. Then we moved on to "by the way, Bill didn't like the way you talked to him when you e-mailed him about..." and "Joe thought you were very short with him when...." Meanwhile, Amy is sitting there pulling these sheafs of e-mails out of her folder--e-mails that had been forwarded to her by Stan before the meeting. (Keep in mind that I am repeatedly treated with total disrespect by my superiors in my own job, and repeatedly witness people interacting in disrespectful ways. But somehow I am not supposed to absorb this culture at all--I am supposed to be little miss ice-cream and bunny-rabbits, and never convey dissatisfaction or dismay to anyone, ever, for any reason. You think I'm exaggerating?? The e-mails that were so problematic were simply direct requests for assistance, letting someone know that something appeared to be wrong at their end. Apparently I'm supposed to just say "Hi, I noticed this, but I'm absolutely SURE it's something I did, because it couldn't POSSIBLY be an error on YOUR end. Could you check and let me know how I've failed again?")
Now, I was prepared--still am prepared--to take the advice that was given in that meeting. I am not disputing that I might have been short with someone, or too direct, or frustrated in a noticeable way. That's not only possible, it's probable.
What I objected to was the way it was done. I was sent an e-mail describing a friendly sort of "touch base" meeting, in which a fairly-innocuous topic would be discussed, with an eye towards optimizing procedures. What I got--and this is STAN'S word, not mine--was an "ambush". Amy clearly knew what the meeting was about; the stack of e-mails she pulled out of her bag proves that much. I should have been told what I was walking into before I found myself being attacked from both sides.
By the end of the meeting I was in tears. I spent ten days staying late, skipping lunches, working my ass off to get the summer computers up and running in the face of total cluelessness from an entirely new staff, and instead of "good job" or "we noticed how hard you worked on that", I get the sneak-attack. In fact: Amy said during the course of the meeting, "I didn't know if today was a good time to have this meeting, since you're just coming off three weeks of high stress setting up the stuff for summer...But then I thought, we'd better deal with it NOW, because otherwise I'll have a backlog. And I don't like backlogs." (That is a direct, unembellished QUOTE. In other words: Yes, I know you were under stress and you might be more than normally vulnerable to this criticism. But given the choice between concern for your feelings, and my own need for constant and unceasing productivity, I decided that your feelings were secondary. Fuck THAT, you know?)
THEN, as if that wasn't bad enough...after she shanghai'ed me to that meeting, after she saw how upset I was, what did Amy do when we got back to the office? Did she take me into her office and discuss what had happened, explain to me why it had to be done that way? Maybe even give me a little pep talk and tell me I'm really not a gross fuck-up?
No--she sent me an e-mail to bitch me out for not sending her my list. She demands a list of my projects every Monday, and her e-mail said "The last list I have is dated June 1, which means you've missed four weeks." (This would have been impressive counting, except I was on vacation for the 7th and 14th, and had sent her a full accounting of where everything stood before I left for vacation on the 4th.) For the other two weeks, all I did was summer stuff. Nothing else. That was it, and she knew it. But no, we simply MUST have the list. Nothing I do matters unless I've first sent in the list. No matter how hard I work or how much I accomplish--all for naught unless Amy has the list. And that couldn't possibly have waited for a day or two after the meeting--no, absolutely not. (After all--that might create a backlog!)
After that, I was GLAD to be going to get my teeth drilled. At least the dentist used Novocaine.
Monday, June 28, 2004
Insure One And Why Their Customer Service Department Sucks Ass
LJ and I have finally picked out The Car. If all goes well, tomorrow we will be the owners of a very expensive, forest-green Chevy Tahoe, financed for four years at an exorbitant rate of interest. I'll admit I'm scared to death. Actually, though, The Behemoth is a better name: it's a Chevy Tahoe, for god's sake, something of the sort I swore I'd never own. Well, the ol' male "car size = genital size" theorem is once again operative, and so--a Tahoe. In fact, I plan to begin referring to "drivin' the 'ho" as soon as it's possible to begin referring to driving ANYTHING.
That it is not currently possible to mention driving as an option is owing entirely to the fucktards at Insure One's 800 number.
Here is the sequence of events.
I am told by the dealership that they need to have proof of insurance before we can take the car.
I call Insure One's 800 number and get a quote. I am told by them that I cannot be covered before they see and inspect the car. But, I tell them, I can't take possession of the car til I have proof of insurance! No problem, they tell me. We can cover you if you have a debit or credit card.
Well, I don't. The credit card is maxed out and the debit card is empty. Besides, LJ is paying the insurance down payment, so that problem is solved. I tell them he will go to the office and make the payment.
He can't do that if he's not on the policy, they tell me.
Okay, so I put him on the policy. NOW, I say, he'll come to the office and make the payment; how late are you open?
7:00, they say. But you don't have to do that today; we can send the dealer a temporary binder which will cover you until you're able to come to the office and have the car inspected and make the payment, the woman tells me.
Read that again. According to them, they will fax a temporary binder to the dealer, which will cover us til tomorrow and enable us to take the car. Then we can go to the office tomorrow and make the payment and have the car inspected.
Okay, I say. We'll do that. (I'm trying to avoid putting too much on LJ's plate; he's a wonderful man, but a wee bit lazy, truth to tell.)
Flash forward. LJ arranges a ride out to River Grove to the dealer; I rush out of work (still half an hour late, but a fast half-hour late) and ride all the way out to Harlem on the Green Line. (I hate riding out to Harlem. When you get off at Harlem, people look at you like you're one of those people who get off at Harlem.) LJ and Marcus pick me up and we ride out to the dealership.
I call Insure One to give them the fax number...and I am informed that the person I need to speak to has already left. The person who answers the phone claims "I have three people here" and offers me the "internal" number. I dial the "internal" number and explain my plight. They tell me "oh, we don't do that sort of thing. We need a credit or debit card." I tell them I don't HAVE a credit or debit card available; I have CASH, and I was told by the person I spoke to at the 800 number that they could issue a temporary binder. "We're sorry you were given faulty information," they tell me. I ask them "can we go to the nearest office and pay there?" "The office closes at 7," they tell me. It's now 6:40.
I call the nearest office (Melrose Park). I explain the situation--I'm at the dealership, I need proof of insurance, I was given bad info at your 800 number, and now I'd like to come into the office and pay to start up the insurance. Can they PLEASE make a TINY exception and wait for us til we get to the office a few minutes after seven?
"You know, I'd really love to help you," says the woman at the other end, in a heavy Hispanic accent, "but I have an appointment tonight and I can't stay." She gives me the number of the SECOND closest office, Elmwood Park.
I dial the number she gave me and I get someone's voice mail. Thinking I've misdialled, I try again. This time, I reach the Elmwood Park office and make the same request. It is now 6:50. I am placed on hold. The exchange that followed was enough to make me long to be back among the lilting strains of the hold music.
The hold music stops, and I assume I'm about to speak to the person who'd placed me on hold in the first place. Instead: "Insure One, may I help you?" comes another heavily-accented voice.
"Yes, I was waiting to see if someone could wait for me til I get to the office?"
"Yes?"
"I need to make a payment? I just talked to someone and I was waiting..."
"Yes."
By now I am nearly ready to throw my cell phone. "Okay, I'm going to start from the beginning here. I'm at the dealership, I need to make a payment..." I go through the whole story again.
"Yes. Did you call the number I gave you?" I suddenly realize that though I've dialled a different number, I've got the SAME STUPID BITCH.
"Yes," I say. She reads the number back to me with the last two digits reversed. "No, I called..." whatever I'd actually called.
"Yes, that's the number."
"No, you said 05, not 50."
"No, it's 50."
"That's what I DIALLED!" I am nearly shrieking, and the dealers and LJ are all chuckling.
"Well, that's the number you need to call," Stupid Bitch says.
"I'm telling you, that's the number I DID CALL!"
"Well, try it again."
When I try it again, I get the same voice-mail box I got the first time I called--a voice-mail box which apparently belongs to the main Elmwood Park agent.
At this point I give up. The dealer--still laughing, by the way--says he will take the insurance money, take the car over to the Melrose Park office tomorrow, have it inspected, and LJ can pick it up tomorrow. I sign all the paperwork and we leave.
If I can take ONE single happy thing away from all this: further proof that LJ is WAYYYY more patient than CR ever was. Had that happened with CR--had we planned to purchase something and run into bureaucratic troubles--it would have resulted in hours and hours of verbal abuse directed at white people/smart people/rich people/females in general, and smart, white, employed, female me in particular. LJ just hopped into the front seat of Marcus's car, and laughed as he blasted evil misogynist hip-hop. (It _was_ pretty funny, though--talking about six-foot dildoes and how it's hard for a guy to keep up anymore, what with all the stuff women have to pleasure each other with. Even I laughed--though I also said "they're going to revoke my feminist card for this!")
When he got out of the car, to let me out of the back seat before he and Marcus headed back to Maywood, I said to him "I'll explain this later, but I just want to say: thank you."
"For what?" he said.
"I'll tell you later," I told him.
That it is not currently possible to mention driving as an option is owing entirely to the fucktards at Insure One's 800 number.
Here is the sequence of events.
I am told by the dealership that they need to have proof of insurance before we can take the car.
I call Insure One's 800 number and get a quote. I am told by them that I cannot be covered before they see and inspect the car. But, I tell them, I can't take possession of the car til I have proof of insurance! No problem, they tell me. We can cover you if you have a debit or credit card.
Well, I don't. The credit card is maxed out and the debit card is empty. Besides, LJ is paying the insurance down payment, so that problem is solved. I tell them he will go to the office and make the payment.
He can't do that if he's not on the policy, they tell me.
Okay, so I put him on the policy. NOW, I say, he'll come to the office and make the payment; how late are you open?
7:00, they say. But you don't have to do that today; we can send the dealer a temporary binder which will cover you until you're able to come to the office and have the car inspected and make the payment, the woman tells me.
Read that again. According to them, they will fax a temporary binder to the dealer, which will cover us til tomorrow and enable us to take the car. Then we can go to the office tomorrow and make the payment and have the car inspected.
Okay, I say. We'll do that. (I'm trying to avoid putting too much on LJ's plate; he's a wonderful man, but a wee bit lazy, truth to tell.)
Flash forward. LJ arranges a ride out to River Grove to the dealer; I rush out of work (still half an hour late, but a fast half-hour late) and ride all the way out to Harlem on the Green Line. (I hate riding out to Harlem. When you get off at Harlem, people look at you like you're one of those people who get off at Harlem.) LJ and Marcus pick me up and we ride out to the dealership.
I call Insure One to give them the fax number...and I am informed that the person I need to speak to has already left. The person who answers the phone claims "I have three people here" and offers me the "internal" number. I dial the "internal" number and explain my plight. They tell me "oh, we don't do that sort of thing. We need a credit or debit card." I tell them I don't HAVE a credit or debit card available; I have CASH, and I was told by the person I spoke to at the 800 number that they could issue a temporary binder. "We're sorry you were given faulty information," they tell me. I ask them "can we go to the nearest office and pay there?" "The office closes at 7," they tell me. It's now 6:40.
I call the nearest office (Melrose Park). I explain the situation--I'm at the dealership, I need proof of insurance, I was given bad info at your 800 number, and now I'd like to come into the office and pay to start up the insurance. Can they PLEASE make a TINY exception and wait for us til we get to the office a few minutes after seven?
"You know, I'd really love to help you," says the woman at the other end, in a heavy Hispanic accent, "but I have an appointment tonight and I can't stay." She gives me the number of the SECOND closest office, Elmwood Park.
I dial the number she gave me and I get someone's voice mail. Thinking I've misdialled, I try again. This time, I reach the Elmwood Park office and make the same request. It is now 6:50. I am placed on hold. The exchange that followed was enough to make me long to be back among the lilting strains of the hold music.
The hold music stops, and I assume I'm about to speak to the person who'd placed me on hold in the first place. Instead: "Insure One, may I help you?" comes another heavily-accented voice.
"Yes, I was waiting to see if someone could wait for me til I get to the office?"
"Yes?"
"I need to make a payment? I just talked to someone and I was waiting..."
"Yes."
By now I am nearly ready to throw my cell phone. "Okay, I'm going to start from the beginning here. I'm at the dealership, I need to make a payment..." I go through the whole story again.
"Yes. Did you call the number I gave you?" I suddenly realize that though I've dialled a different number, I've got the SAME STUPID BITCH.
"Yes," I say. She reads the number back to me with the last two digits reversed. "No, I called..." whatever I'd actually called.
"Yes, that's the number."
"No, you said 05, not 50."
"No, it's 50."
"That's what I DIALLED!" I am nearly shrieking, and the dealers and LJ are all chuckling.
"Well, that's the number you need to call," Stupid Bitch says.
"I'm telling you, that's the number I DID CALL!"
"Well, try it again."
When I try it again, I get the same voice-mail box I got the first time I called--a voice-mail box which apparently belongs to the main Elmwood Park agent.
At this point I give up. The dealer--still laughing, by the way--says he will take the insurance money, take the car over to the Melrose Park office tomorrow, have it inspected, and LJ can pick it up tomorrow. I sign all the paperwork and we leave.
If I can take ONE single happy thing away from all this: further proof that LJ is WAYYYY more patient than CR ever was. Had that happened with CR--had we planned to purchase something and run into bureaucratic troubles--it would have resulted in hours and hours of verbal abuse directed at white people/smart people/rich people/females in general, and smart, white, employed, female me in particular. LJ just hopped into the front seat of Marcus's car, and laughed as he blasted evil misogynist hip-hop. (It _was_ pretty funny, though--talking about six-foot dildoes and how it's hard for a guy to keep up anymore, what with all the stuff women have to pleasure each other with. Even I laughed--though I also said "they're going to revoke my feminist card for this!")
When he got out of the car, to let me out of the back seat before he and Marcus headed back to Maywood, I said to him "I'll explain this later, but I just want to say: thank you."
"For what?" he said.
"I'll tell you later," I told him.
A Substantial Part Of My Problem Is That I Simply Don't Care
Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize.
Having just read the Mimi Smartypants blog--not for the first time, but for the first time while not in the "I refuse to be impressed by anything, no matter how good it is, because if I admit to being impressed, then you know something about what I value and can use that information to hurt me" mindset which has hampered me since infancy. (Literally, since infancy. I can remember being maybe five and trying to be all hip and blase--though of course at five I could have defined neither "hip" nor "blase". At least, I don't think I could have. I did have a penchant for big words, even at that age, but mostly it just caused people to laugh at me)...
Let me start that sentence again.
Having just read the Mimi Smartypants blog, I realize that I have exposed several of my own personal weaknesses within this blog. First of all: I have a boring life. Oh, my past is just chock-full of tasty tidbits; it's the present that could put a meth-head to sleep. As I believe I've stated before, my current life consists of public transportation, work in a stifling environment, the continuing drama of my house, and my relationship with LJ. Though some or all of these can occasionally make for a good story, for the most part they, and by extension my life, are boring as hell.
Secondly: The aforementioned stance--my overwhelming guardedness, refusal to reveal anything REAL about myself--has sorta outlived its usefulness.
"Wait," I hear someone saying. It's my one reader, the only one who ISN'T interested in canine-human sex. (By the way: the Bestiality Buddies account for 3 out of the last 20 accesses to this page; however, they're in danger of being eclipsed by those who search for "sick of Dale Jr." Seriously.) "Wait," says my sole non-bestial, non-NASCAR reader.
"You said you were GUARDED? Not REVEALING anything about yourself? Holy crap, woman--we know things about you we never wanted to know in the first place! We probably know more about you than your MOM does!!"
No--well, okay, you DO know more about me than Mom, but there's a good reason for that. But what you know are FACTS, mostly. Facts are nothing. You can know all the facts of a person's life and know absolutely NOTHING about what makes that person who he or she is. I am not sure whether the converse is true--can you know what makes someone who they are, and not know the facts of their existence? Maybe.
I remember at JP's funeral, his brother said something to me about how JP had always loved airplanes and flight. I remember thinking that was something I'd never known about him, a piece of the life he'd had before we knew each other--but that if it came down to what we knew about who JP was--what he believed, what he dreamed of, what he feared most, what he wanted--that I probably knew more than any of his family members. In fact, that's yet-another reason I feel guilty: I didn't speak up for what he wanted to be done when he died. I didn't speak up for the things he'd told me in the middle of the long, dopesick nights. Instead he got exactly the funeral he would have never wanted. (There was a moment I remember--when they were reading the mayor's letter to his dad, expressing "sympathy" in typical government-form-letter tones, where I realized for the first time that JP was absolutely, truly, irrevocably dead; because if there'd been the slightest spark of life in his body, the minute he heard the name "Richard M Daley", he would have sat up in the coffin and bitched up a storm.)
As usual, I digress.
It occurred to me several times Saturday, mostly while walking all over the workplace, building to building, installing the summer computers--it occured to me that I have adopted a less-than-useful strategy for living in the world in the aftermath of what CR did to me. When I came back to Chicago in 1997, I was still very much myself, my out-there, ready-for-anything junkie-girl self. By the time CR had left for good, back in 2002, I was a self-effacing shell, doing anything possible in order to avoid being noticed. I justified this inaction by saying to myself that I was "flying under the radar"--that I was hiding in plain sight, dressing like an "average" person, acting like an "average" person, not stirring the shit, never standing up for myself in public or in private--but inside, still as subversive as ever, still as radical as always, still the girl who fell in love with JP and dreamed of taking over the world.
The problem is: I really AM still that girl. I really AM still subversive, pissed-off, shit-kicking, world-changing...but who on earth would ever know? The point--if it ever WAS a point, if it ever WAS anything but an excuse to do nothing and move silently and unnoticed through a world that had stopped making any sense at all--was to not be noticed BECAUSE I WAS DOING SOMETHING, not because I was embarrassed to be seen, because I was afraid of getting hurt again, because I didn't want to exist anymore. I used to tell CR that there were times I would just think about sinking down to the pavement and weeping til someone picked me up and put me somewhere safe. In part that was because of what he was doing to me; mostly it was because I missed JP. I still miss JP, of course, but the drama of CR's constant betrayals is entirely gone. (And I am eternally grateful for its absence.) But without that drama, I have to deal with the things that aren't so overt and obvious--and one of those things is that I've gotten out of the habit of doing anything, being anything, wanting anything. And I've justified it with the same "reasons" that were so popular in my family: keeping the peace (What peace?), not rocking the boat, being ladylike, not drawing attention to myself.
Well, I WANT to draw attention. Not so much to myself, but to my ideas, the things I believe. I still have those--I've never let them go--I've just silenced them. I am tired, tired, tired of that silence, and I'm ending it--immediately.
Having just read the Mimi Smartypants blog--not for the first time, but for the first time while not in the "I refuse to be impressed by anything, no matter how good it is, because if I admit to being impressed, then you know something about what I value and can use that information to hurt me" mindset which has hampered me since infancy. (Literally, since infancy. I can remember being maybe five and trying to be all hip and blase--though of course at five I could have defined neither "hip" nor "blase". At least, I don't think I could have. I did have a penchant for big words, even at that age, but mostly it just caused people to laugh at me)...
Let me start that sentence again.
Having just read the Mimi Smartypants blog, I realize that I have exposed several of my own personal weaknesses within this blog. First of all: I have a boring life. Oh, my past is just chock-full of tasty tidbits; it's the present that could put a meth-head to sleep. As I believe I've stated before, my current life consists of public transportation, work in a stifling environment, the continuing drama of my house, and my relationship with LJ. Though some or all of these can occasionally make for a good story, for the most part they, and by extension my life, are boring as hell.
Secondly: The aforementioned stance--my overwhelming guardedness, refusal to reveal anything REAL about myself--has sorta outlived its usefulness.
"Wait," I hear someone saying. It's my one reader, the only one who ISN'T interested in canine-human sex. (By the way: the Bestiality Buddies account for 3 out of the last 20 accesses to this page; however, they're in danger of being eclipsed by those who search for "sick of Dale Jr." Seriously.) "Wait," says my sole non-bestial, non-NASCAR reader.
"You said you were GUARDED? Not REVEALING anything about yourself? Holy crap, woman--we know things about you we never wanted to know in the first place! We probably know more about you than your MOM does!!"
No--well, okay, you DO know more about me than Mom, but there's a good reason for that. But what you know are FACTS, mostly. Facts are nothing. You can know all the facts of a person's life and know absolutely NOTHING about what makes that person who he or she is. I am not sure whether the converse is true--can you know what makes someone who they are, and not know the facts of their existence? Maybe.
I remember at JP's funeral, his brother said something to me about how JP had always loved airplanes and flight. I remember thinking that was something I'd never known about him, a piece of the life he'd had before we knew each other--but that if it came down to what we knew about who JP was--what he believed, what he dreamed of, what he feared most, what he wanted--that I probably knew more than any of his family members. In fact, that's yet-another reason I feel guilty: I didn't speak up for what he wanted to be done when he died. I didn't speak up for the things he'd told me in the middle of the long, dopesick nights. Instead he got exactly the funeral he would have never wanted. (There was a moment I remember--when they were reading the mayor's letter to his dad, expressing "sympathy" in typical government-form-letter tones, where I realized for the first time that JP was absolutely, truly, irrevocably dead; because if there'd been the slightest spark of life in his body, the minute he heard the name "Richard M Daley", he would have sat up in the coffin and bitched up a storm.)
As usual, I digress.
It occurred to me several times Saturday, mostly while walking all over the workplace, building to building, installing the summer computers--it occured to me that I have adopted a less-than-useful strategy for living in the world in the aftermath of what CR did to me. When I came back to Chicago in 1997, I was still very much myself, my out-there, ready-for-anything junkie-girl self. By the time CR had left for good, back in 2002, I was a self-effacing shell, doing anything possible in order to avoid being noticed. I justified this inaction by saying to myself that I was "flying under the radar"--that I was hiding in plain sight, dressing like an "average" person, acting like an "average" person, not stirring the shit, never standing up for myself in public or in private--but inside, still as subversive as ever, still as radical as always, still the girl who fell in love with JP and dreamed of taking over the world.
The problem is: I really AM still that girl. I really AM still subversive, pissed-off, shit-kicking, world-changing...but who on earth would ever know? The point--if it ever WAS a point, if it ever WAS anything but an excuse to do nothing and move silently and unnoticed through a world that had stopped making any sense at all--was to not be noticed BECAUSE I WAS DOING SOMETHING, not because I was embarrassed to be seen, because I was afraid of getting hurt again, because I didn't want to exist anymore. I used to tell CR that there were times I would just think about sinking down to the pavement and weeping til someone picked me up and put me somewhere safe. In part that was because of what he was doing to me; mostly it was because I missed JP. I still miss JP, of course, but the drama of CR's constant betrayals is entirely gone. (And I am eternally grateful for its absence.) But without that drama, I have to deal with the things that aren't so overt and obvious--and one of those things is that I've gotten out of the habit of doing anything, being anything, wanting anything. And I've justified it with the same "reasons" that were so popular in my family: keeping the peace (What peace?), not rocking the boat, being ladylike, not drawing attention to myself.
Well, I WANT to draw attention. Not so much to myself, but to my ideas, the things I believe. I still have those--I've never let them go--I've just silenced them. I am tired, tired, tired of that silence, and I'm ending it--immediately.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Cleanup in the Pharmacy Aisle
Whenever I mention my old life--places I've been, people I remember, stories I have to tell--I'm faced with a variety of replies that remind me I'm the only one who values my memories. There are just a few people who know about my five years as an addict, of course; two folks at work, the only ones who I consider real friends; LJ, of course; some people who knew me then, and some who knew me long before then; and my mom. My mom's reaction to these stories is, I think, the most illustrative:
"Aren't you glad to be away from THAT life?" she asks me, each and every time the subject comes up.
The correct answer, needless to say, is this: "Of COURSE I am. I would never want to go back to that life. I was miserable for every moment, I realize now what a horrible mistake I made, and I'm so very sorry for everything I put you through."
The only problem is, the correct answer is a lie.
I've moved the heroin posts to my new blog: elevenevele.blogspot.com.
I have toyed for years with the idea of writing everything down, and in 1996, living in North Carolina, I made a list of memories with that aim in mind--just something to jog my recollection. I knew then that if I was to have any hope of changing my life, I was going to have to choke back these memories from my daily life, lock them in a vault that I could only open at moments when it would be safe to do so. But like any knowledge that doesn't get used much, time is eroding these memories, and I don't want to lose any more than I already have.
"Aren't you glad to be away from THAT life?" she asks me, each and every time the subject comes up.
The correct answer, needless to say, is this: "Of COURSE I am. I would never want to go back to that life. I was miserable for every moment, I realize now what a horrible mistake I made, and I'm so very sorry for everything I put you through."
The only problem is, the correct answer is a lie.
I've moved the heroin posts to my new blog: elevenevele.blogspot.com.
I have toyed for years with the idea of writing everything down, and in 1996, living in North Carolina, I made a list of memories with that aim in mind--just something to jog my recollection. I knew then that if I was to have any hope of changing my life, I was going to have to choke back these memories from my daily life, lock them in a vault that I could only open at moments when it would be safe to do so. But like any knowledge that doesn't get used much, time is eroding these memories, and I don't want to lose any more than I already have.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Eric Zorn Apparently Does Not Hate My Blog
Update 6/30/04: I sent EZ a tweaky e-mail about his indifference to my blog, and he did point out an important hangup with my Jack Ryan hypothesis--and also asked me for my URL, so I must conclude that he does NOT hate my blog--he just failed to register its existence among the squizillions of e-mails he receives daily. Hell, I can barely remember half the stuff that comes through my e-mail at work, and I only get 50 or 60 in the course of a day--and I'm not a major-paper columnist, or even a minor-paper one. End update...)
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Top Priority
From this article, about a plan to open 100+ schools in Chicago over the next several years, including some charter and corporate schools which are allowed to employ non-union teachers:
"Keep in mind our priority is first and foremost to protect our members," said Marilyn Stewart, the Chicago Teachers Union president-elect, in a statement Tuesday.
Correct me if I'm wrong--and I may be. But shouldn't the "priority" of ANY teachers' group be to protect the interests of the STUDENTS???
"Keep in mind our priority is first and foremost to protect our members," said Marilyn Stewart, the Chicago Teachers Union president-elect, in a statement Tuesday.
Correct me if I'm wrong--and I may be. But shouldn't the "priority" of ANY teachers' group be to protect the interests of the STUDENTS???
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Jacked
One of my co-workers, from her previous job, knows Jack Ryan. When I came in this morning, I said, "Hey--looks like your boy Jack might be out of a job..." Her immediate reply summarizes, for me, the problems of this case.
"I don't believe he did those things," she said. "I know Jack, and--she says he wanted her to have sex in PUBLIC?--I KNOW Jack. The thought that he did something like THAT--Besides, the divorce just ALLEGES those things. That doesn't mean they happened. You know, people hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe...."
Yes, yes they do.
Here's the thing, though. Try this experiment--it's instructive, I think.
Take every single statement Jack Ryan has made regarding the unsealing of his divorce records: all the things about the potentially-embarrassing allegations, the welfare and privacy of his son, etc.
Now. In place of "alleges that he forced his wife to attend sex clubs and pressured her to have sex in public and engage in similar behavior"...
...change the allegation to something that's not so likely to push the panic button on the family-values crowd; something a bit more acceptable in GOP-land. Let's try the following sentence--
"His wife alleges that he forced her to conceal portions of their joint income as they filed their taxes in 2000 and 2001."
Now. Go back. Using this (entirely false) allegation of tax evasion as the "big revelation", review Ryan's pleas for privacy, for the files to remain closed, allegedly for the good of his son / for the welfare of his family / to avoid embarrassment for his child.
Sounds...kinda ridiculous, don't it?
If this "scandal" had to do with anything other than sex, people (including, since I'm in a generous mood this evening, the media) would see Ryan's protests for what they are: a transparent attempt to hide behind his son's innocence. But because they see the words "sex clubs", immediately this becomes a sex scandal--not a disinformation scandal, which is what it truly is.
It's not about what was in those divorce records--it's about what he implied was in those records, and what he said would be the end result of unsealing them. HE said the end result would be embarrassment for his son; the fact of the matter is, the only one with even the potential to be embarrassed by those allegations is Ryan himself. Not for visiting a sex club--if he did--but for deliberately misstating his true reasons for wanting that allegation to remain hidden.
"I don't believe he did those things," she said. "I know Jack, and--she says he wanted her to have sex in PUBLIC?--I KNOW Jack. The thought that he did something like THAT--Besides, the divorce just ALLEGES those things. That doesn't mean they happened. You know, people hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe...."
Yes, yes they do.
Here's the thing, though. Try this experiment--it's instructive, I think.
Take every single statement Jack Ryan has made regarding the unsealing of his divorce records: all the things about the potentially-embarrassing allegations, the welfare and privacy of his son, etc.
Now. In place of "alleges that he forced his wife to attend sex clubs and pressured her to have sex in public and engage in similar behavior"...
...change the allegation to something that's not so likely to push the panic button on the family-values crowd; something a bit more acceptable in GOP-land. Let's try the following sentence--
"His wife alleges that he forced her to conceal portions of their joint income as they filed their taxes in 2000 and 2001."
Now. Go back. Using this (entirely false) allegation of tax evasion as the "big revelation", review Ryan's pleas for privacy, for the files to remain closed, allegedly for the good of his son / for the welfare of his family / to avoid embarrassment for his child.
Sounds...kinda ridiculous, don't it?
If this "scandal" had to do with anything other than sex, people (including, since I'm in a generous mood this evening, the media) would see Ryan's protests for what they are: a transparent attempt to hide behind his son's innocence. But because they see the words "sex clubs", immediately this becomes a sex scandal--not a disinformation scandal, which is what it truly is.
It's not about what was in those divorce records--it's about what he implied was in those records, and what he said would be the end result of unsealing them. HE said the end result would be embarrassment for his son; the fact of the matter is, the only one with even the potential to be embarrassed by those allegations is Ryan himself. Not for visiting a sex club--if he did--but for deliberately misstating his true reasons for wanting that allegation to remain hidden.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Yard Work
I am in pain.
I will admit that I am probably a pathetic wuss--for example, my plumber is currently trying to pass 30 kidney stones--or rather, he HAS 30; he's only trying to pass one, at the moment. But that one sounds like a howling bastard--pissing blood and all that shit. His wife was telling me about it, but I was only half-listening because I was having a bad case of the jibblies...almost as bad as when my mom talks about her upcoming cataract operation. The thought of someone cutting on my eye just makes my neck prickly. (In fact, just writing that gave me goosebumps.)
So really, the pain I'm in wouldn't amount to a hill of beans, in the grand scheme of things. But holy crap, it hurts.
I spent the day doing yardwork. I am only 34, but right at the moment I feel like I'm about 74. Then again, there was a lot of digging, hauling, pulling, and crawling involved. (Kinda makes me wish it was sex and not gardening. At least when I'm in pain after sex, I know I had some real fun!)
I started out with a small and noble goal: to dig the fucking prickerbushes out of the middle of the lawn. That was all I intended to do. But the minute I started digging, I realized the grass was too long--I couldn't even see where the weeds were, and when I started digging, the grass was interfering. So I got out the lawnmower. This is the first time I've cut the grass in this yard, and those fences really fuck things up. Plus, when I re-seeded, I apparently didn't do such a hot job of levelling things afterward--because the yard is lumpy as hell. So when I was done, there was a ton of stuff around the edges, so I got out the trimmer. Then I started digging out those edge weeds, and before I knew it, I had brought out the pavers from the garage, and I dug out trenches around the edges for the bricks--harder than I'd have thought--put in the bricks wherever I could, and then re-seeded, watered the grass, and scrubbed down the porch.
And I'd promised--stupid girl--to make a lasagna for dinner. So the lasagna is in the oven, the Busch race is on the TV, and I am going to go take a long hot shower and put lotion on my sunburn. And then I'm going to sleep, possibly for days.
I will admit that I am probably a pathetic wuss--for example, my plumber is currently trying to pass 30 kidney stones--or rather, he HAS 30; he's only trying to pass one, at the moment. But that one sounds like a howling bastard--pissing blood and all that shit. His wife was telling me about it, but I was only half-listening because I was having a bad case of the jibblies...almost as bad as when my mom talks about her upcoming cataract operation. The thought of someone cutting on my eye just makes my neck prickly. (In fact, just writing that gave me goosebumps.)
So really, the pain I'm in wouldn't amount to a hill of beans, in the grand scheme of things. But holy crap, it hurts.
I spent the day doing yardwork. I am only 34, but right at the moment I feel like I'm about 74. Then again, there was a lot of digging, hauling, pulling, and crawling involved. (Kinda makes me wish it was sex and not gardening. At least when I'm in pain after sex, I know I had some real fun!)
I started out with a small and noble goal: to dig the fucking prickerbushes out of the middle of the lawn. That was all I intended to do. But the minute I started digging, I realized the grass was too long--I couldn't even see where the weeds were, and when I started digging, the grass was interfering. So I got out the lawnmower. This is the first time I've cut the grass in this yard, and those fences really fuck things up. Plus, when I re-seeded, I apparently didn't do such a hot job of levelling things afterward--because the yard is lumpy as hell. So when I was done, there was a ton of stuff around the edges, so I got out the trimmer. Then I started digging out those edge weeds, and before I knew it, I had brought out the pavers from the garage, and I dug out trenches around the edges for the bricks--harder than I'd have thought--put in the bricks wherever I could, and then re-seeded, watered the grass, and scrubbed down the porch.
And I'd promised--stupid girl--to make a lasagna for dinner. So the lasagna is in the oven, the Busch race is on the TV, and I am going to go take a long hot shower and put lotion on my sunburn. And then I'm going to sleep, possibly for days.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Oh Hell No
And this is probably the WORST thing I've read--not including most of the memos and e-mails at my job.
I don't disagree with the premise of this article: that we are becoming more likely to be flexible and vital in our lives as we age. What I loathe about this article: the notion that artificially-maintained physical attractiveness--Botox, lifts, surgeries, hair dye, etc--is equivalent in worth to mental openness and flexibility in making choices about what to do with your life. There's a profound difference, to me, between superficial attributes--the appearance thing--and the fundamental nature of a human being--their choices, their beliefs, and how they intersect. To conflate the superficial stuff with the down-to-the-core stuff....well, then again, that's why I don't get along too well in this society most of the time, isn't it. But because so many people think like Them, and so few people think like me...that makes ME the weirdo. Oh well--it's good work, though the pay's abysmal.
I don't disagree with the premise of this article: that we are becoming more likely to be flexible and vital in our lives as we age. What I loathe about this article: the notion that artificially-maintained physical attractiveness--Botox, lifts, surgeries, hair dye, etc--is equivalent in worth to mental openness and flexibility in making choices about what to do with your life. There's a profound difference, to me, between superficial attributes--the appearance thing--and the fundamental nature of a human being--their choices, their beliefs, and how they intersect. To conflate the superficial stuff with the down-to-the-core stuff....well, then again, that's why I don't get along too well in this society most of the time, isn't it. But because so many people think like Them, and so few people think like me...that makes ME the weirdo. Oh well--it's good work, though the pay's abysmal.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Oh Hell Yeah
This is probably the best thing I've read this week. (The fact that I haven't read much this week, being innundated with work-related idiots, should not mitigate my admiration for this piece one iota. Even if I'd read something unreleased by Nelson Algren, I think this piece would still win the prize for this week.)
I will expand on this post later. But this is the first time in a long time that I've read something that validates me instead of putting down my choices.
I will expand on this post later. But this is the first time in a long time that I've read something that validates me instead of putting down my choices.
It's Gotten Awfully Quiet Around Here....
No, I have not been jailed for doing some nonspecific violence to the man who forgot my birthday. (Like everything else, we sorta glossed that over and got on with life...neither of us is much for arguments.)
No, instead, I'm back to work--which is now officially on my list of People, Places, and Things Which I Must Get Out Of My Life At All Costs. In fact, it's not only on my list--it's #1 with a bullet, and if I had the choice of where to SEND that bullet, I've got a short-list for THAT honor, as well. (Hint: a rant about RuthAnne is rapidly building up steam, to the point of explosion. Though I'll admit that I hate it when people don't know what they're doing, I'm much more accepting when they at least ADMIT it. When they flat-out LIE about it, and when that lie makes ME look like the one who doesn't know what she's talking about---well, fuck THAT, I say. And RuthAnne has now told such lies TWICE in less than 24 hours.)
Meanwhile, I'm ready to fire my plumber--except that for the first time yesterday he actually had a valid reason for not being there when he said he would: he was apparently in the hospital, attempting to pass one of his many kidney stones. His wife called me with the gory details--and I DO mean gory! I had the jibblies for half an hour after hearing all that.
Goals for today:
1. Avoid getting fired for snapping off completely at Lying Hag RuthAnne
2. Leave work on time, instead of the 90 min-2 hours late I've left every day this week.
No, instead, I'm back to work--which is now officially on my list of People, Places, and Things Which I Must Get Out Of My Life At All Costs. In fact, it's not only on my list--it's #1 with a bullet, and if I had the choice of where to SEND that bullet, I've got a short-list for THAT honor, as well. (Hint: a rant about RuthAnne is rapidly building up steam, to the point of explosion. Though I'll admit that I hate it when people don't know what they're doing, I'm much more accepting when they at least ADMIT it. When they flat-out LIE about it, and when that lie makes ME look like the one who doesn't know what she's talking about---well, fuck THAT, I say. And RuthAnne has now told such lies TWICE in less than 24 hours.)
Meanwhile, I'm ready to fire my plumber--except that for the first time yesterday he actually had a valid reason for not being there when he said he would: he was apparently in the hospital, attempting to pass one of his many kidney stones. His wife called me with the gory details--and I DO mean gory! I had the jibblies for half an hour after hearing all that.
Goals for today:
1. Avoid getting fired for snapping off completely at Lying Hag RuthAnne
2. Leave work on time, instead of the 90 min-2 hours late I've left every day this week.
Monday, June 14, 2004
Another One In The Books
LJ forgot my birthday.
He was on the block last night, came home sometime before I woke up, ate and went to bed. I woke up when the plumber showed up in the middle of the afternoon, and I puttered and watched the race til LJ woke up around 6 PM. By 7, when he hadn't said anything, I put on my shoes, gathered up my bag, and headed for the door. "Where are you going?" he asked me, and I said, "Just out."
In reality I was going to the movies, and I sent him a text message while I waited for the bus. "Just so u don't get the wrong idea, I'm going 2 the movies. I'm not gonna sit at home on my birthday--that would just be pathetic."
A few minutes later, while sitting on the bus, I got this in reply: "Be safe, we'll talk later." I think that's as close to an apology as the man will ever come, and it will have to do, I guess. But I have to admit, it hurts like hell. And what was worse, the bus ride took me up Western, past all the places I remember from JP. I remember when JP and I used to run this city til all hours of the night, together--and oh, god, how I miss that. LJ and I do our separate things, and never do anything together--other than sleep and occasionally eat. I just miss that companionship, though I understand LJs choices and his reasons--I just hate that he doesn't want to spend more time with me.
Anyway, I went to see Shrek 2 and it was really cute. When I got home, LJ was still here; he didn't mention it, and neither did I. A while later he left for the block. So that was that.
I think he knows he fucked up, but I don't think he's gonna do anything to make it right--which just makes me sad, really. But short of leaving, there's nothing I can do.
He was on the block last night, came home sometime before I woke up, ate and went to bed. I woke up when the plumber showed up in the middle of the afternoon, and I puttered and watched the race til LJ woke up around 6 PM. By 7, when he hadn't said anything, I put on my shoes, gathered up my bag, and headed for the door. "Where are you going?" he asked me, and I said, "Just out."
In reality I was going to the movies, and I sent him a text message while I waited for the bus. "Just so u don't get the wrong idea, I'm going 2 the movies. I'm not gonna sit at home on my birthday--that would just be pathetic."
A few minutes later, while sitting on the bus, I got this in reply: "Be safe, we'll talk later." I think that's as close to an apology as the man will ever come, and it will have to do, I guess. But I have to admit, it hurts like hell. And what was worse, the bus ride took me up Western, past all the places I remember from JP. I remember when JP and I used to run this city til all hours of the night, together--and oh, god, how I miss that. LJ and I do our separate things, and never do anything together--other than sleep and occasionally eat. I just miss that companionship, though I understand LJs choices and his reasons--I just hate that he doesn't want to spend more time with me.
Anyway, I went to see Shrek 2 and it was really cute. When I got home, LJ was still here; he didn't mention it, and neither did I. A while later he left for the block. So that was that.
I think he knows he fucked up, but I don't think he's gonna do anything to make it right--which just makes me sad, really. But short of leaving, there's nothing I can do.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
That Question, Again
So today, in an effort to finally get the HUD paperwork out before my vacation ends, I brought in an electrician to give me an estimate for 4 outlets in the basement, one in the garage, and one out in front of the house so I can plug in the mower.
The guy shows up 25 minutes early, for one thing--which, for a morning appointment, is not terribly forgiveable in my world. But okay--he's punctual.
He proceeds to tell me that I need $3800 worth of electrical work--including an entirely new circuit breaker box. Okay--fine, not what I was hoping to hear, but shit, by now I've gotten used to revoltingly-huge estimates on bills for this place. Fair enough.
We go upstairs for him to write the estimate. This is where the fun begins.
He's about 45 or 50, I would imagine, maybe a little older. Shortish, white guy, fairly articulate but absolutely secure in his supremacy as a skilled white male. One of those types who think he's a hardass because he beat someone's ass when he was in his 20's, or fought in some war or another 30 years back.
He brings up the issue of financing, and I tell him I can't finance jack shit at the moment, what with all the other bills--but that I'll shortly have this lawsuit going against the shitstick that sold me this albatross of a house. He raises the point, and admittedly a good point, that it'll take years for that to go through--and then begins to tell me a pointless and unrelated story about his issues with some satellite-dish company and a carpet-cleaning company--making himself sound like Mr. Uncompromising Hardass, of course.
Halfway through the story, he pauses. "Hang on a minute," he says. "I wanna look at my truck--there's a convention outside, and I don't wanna have to kill anyone."
"Oh, they won't hurt anything," I said, "They're mostly harmless."
"Harmless?" he said, in that oh-you-stupid-girl tone of voice. "NO convention is harmless. I was in Viet Nam and I can tell you--no convention is harmless. I was a street kid, and I can tell you the least harmless thing around--me!"
"Well, that may be," I tell him, "but I'm still probably the safest person on the block. Who's gonna mess with the one white girl on the block when they're trying to conduct business fifty feet away?"
"Yeah!" he says. "That's what I'm telling you--they're conducting business fifty feet away! You call that 'harmless'?"
"Harmless to ME," I tell him.
He gives me the stink-eye, but goes on with his story. Once he's done--I still have no idea what the point was--he sits back on the chair and advances the issue of financing again. "Can I ask, what do you do?"
"Computer tech," I tell him, and mention where I work.
"Not that it's any of my business," he says, and immediately I know what is coming--"but why in the world did you buy a place HERE?"
I look him dead in his beady little eyes and tell the absolute truth:
"Because I like it here."
He laughs, and I just smile my most I-dare-you-to-say-a-single-word-against-it smile until he looks away. Then and only then do I give him his reward: something he can contradict. "Plus, the yuppies are moving this way, and it'll be worth something someday..."
"It'll take ten years or more before they get this far," he tells me, and I make some noise of agreement, though I'm fairly sure that's horseshit; if it's five years I'll be surprised. I would have dearly loved to see the look on his face if LJ had walked in right then, but he didn't; in the end, electrician-man and I wound up our conversation, and he left. But of course, once again, I've been asked that eternal question: why in the world would you want to live THERE?
And maybe today--my 34th birthday, by the time this is posted--maybe today I'm finally ready to say it at last:
I live here because I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I cannot imagine being the woman I was in 1993, for example--living in the suburbs in a cushy air-conditioned apartment, throwing dinner parties for people who I didn't even know or care about. I can't imagine sleeping in a room above a silent street, or in a place where no one says hello when you walk past them on the sidewalk. I want to learn to be more like the people who live here, and less like the people who live there. For the last four years, before I bought this house, I lived in an apartment building where I knew no one. Not ONE person; not a single individual who I would pass in the hall every day, or say hello to in the laundry room. I would see their names on their mailboxes, but I never knew any of them. I don't want to live like that anymore.
I look at my mom's neighborhood, the street where I grew up. There are no kids outside; no one goes out unless they're going to their cars or tending their lawns. They all stay inside in the perfectly climate-controlled air, out of the rain, safe and secure. It's sterile and desolate and absolutely not the life I want.
Then there's the issue of why I associate with the people I associate with; why I don't date white men, why I don't move in the same circles as some of my co-workers. And really it's fairly simple, broken down into its component reasons. As I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, and a family where I was considered the "mutt" for not being 100% Irish, I absorbed a set of expectations that I could not live up to. In no way did I fit the definition of a "normal" girl, as defined by my environment. I was not pretty; I was not delicate or graceful or flirtatious. I was extremely intelligent and opinionated, and I used a lot of big words. I didn't even listen to the "right" kind of music. I was interested in books and computers rather than cheerleading and cliques, and I was absolutely pathetic at sports. As I grew older, my strangeness just became more and more apparent. I had waterfights and played laser tag with my friends, instead of going to someone's basement and drinking beer. I read science fiction instead of romance novels. I never learned to accessorize, never learned how to find the right clothes, never learned to braid hair or put on makeup like they did in _Seventeen_. My friends and I created maps of fantasy worlds, plotted to take over the world, wrote novels. The only boys who liked us were the ones who were just like us: intelligent, strange, misunderstood. From the time I was six I knew I was different; by the time I was nine, I had begun to consider suicide.
It was never up to me what I wanted to do in my life; or perhaps it was, but no one ever bothered to show me what the options were. I knew of only the jobs I'd seen in my family or my neighborhood: engineering, nursing, education, police and fire, and writing. I wanted to write but I was told I had to have a "real" career to fall back on; there was never any notion of taking a chance, of working without a net. It had been decided soon after my birth that I would go to college; I never even thought to question any other possibilities, not that it would have been accepted if I had thought to question. My career choice was made by default, as the thing I imagined I would hate the least, the thing that would free me up to write for the greatest amount of time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of independent decisions I made at any time before my 24th birthday--and yes, I'm taking into account things like dating, sex, and marriage. I dated Chris because Chris wanted to date me and because you had to date someone. I had sex with him because, well, we'd been together for a year and he was pressuring me--I went along because I wanted to, but I'm not sure I wanted to right at that moment. I think breaking up with Chris was maybe the first truly independent decision I ever made; I did it despite my fear and despite the objections I knew would be forthcoming. I married David because I was 23 and it was time to get married, and because if I broke off a second engagement, people would have thought I was flighty. It was only when I started seeing JP behind David's back that I started to feel like I was in control of my own destiny.
All of this is to say: In the world I grew up in, I could not be what I was expected to be; much less could I try to force myself into that mold and still be happy. I -tried- to mash myself into that mold, most notably the summer I was cheating on Dave with JP; I spent so many hours trying to convince myself to stay, and I did so many things to try to force myself into being a good wife. In the end I realized that I either had to be myself or I would kill myself. And to be who I truly am, I had to leave that place of unreachable expectations and go somewhere else. For some people, "away" is a place; for me, there is no "away", no safe haven as there is for anyone else. I do not fit into the society I was born into; therefore, I had to walk away from that society and go somewhere where the expectations are different. Here, it's not necessary to be thin and graceful for a man to find me attractive; it's not necessary for me to be a career woman to gain respect. All I have to be here is me, and being me is enough to get me attention. Not that I want attention, not like that--but even just to fit in, back in my "own" world, I have to be someone other than who I really am, and I just can't do that anymore.
Therefore: I am here because I can live up to the expectations here--and I can live with myself if I don't live up to them. There's no sense here, as there is back in the white world, that I'll be a failure in anyone's eyes, no fear of disappointing anyone just by who I am and who I'm not.
So that's the answer, or one of them, to the question behind this blog: why do you want to live there? I want to live here because I know who I am and I don't feel like there's anything wrong with being who I am.
Oh--and it is now my birthday. Happy birthday to me.....
The guy shows up 25 minutes early, for one thing--which, for a morning appointment, is not terribly forgiveable in my world. But okay--he's punctual.
He proceeds to tell me that I need $3800 worth of electrical work--including an entirely new circuit breaker box. Okay--fine, not what I was hoping to hear, but shit, by now I've gotten used to revoltingly-huge estimates on bills for this place. Fair enough.
We go upstairs for him to write the estimate. This is where the fun begins.
He's about 45 or 50, I would imagine, maybe a little older. Shortish, white guy, fairly articulate but absolutely secure in his supremacy as a skilled white male. One of those types who think he's a hardass because he beat someone's ass when he was in his 20's, or fought in some war or another 30 years back.
He brings up the issue of financing, and I tell him I can't finance jack shit at the moment, what with all the other bills--but that I'll shortly have this lawsuit going against the shitstick that sold me this albatross of a house. He raises the point, and admittedly a good point, that it'll take years for that to go through--and then begins to tell me a pointless and unrelated story about his issues with some satellite-dish company and a carpet-cleaning company--making himself sound like Mr. Uncompromising Hardass, of course.
Halfway through the story, he pauses. "Hang on a minute," he says. "I wanna look at my truck--there's a convention outside, and I don't wanna have to kill anyone."
"Oh, they won't hurt anything," I said, "They're mostly harmless."
"Harmless?" he said, in that oh-you-stupid-girl tone of voice. "NO convention is harmless. I was in Viet Nam and I can tell you--no convention is harmless. I was a street kid, and I can tell you the least harmless thing around--me!"
"Well, that may be," I tell him, "but I'm still probably the safest person on the block. Who's gonna mess with the one white girl on the block when they're trying to conduct business fifty feet away?"
"Yeah!" he says. "That's what I'm telling you--they're conducting business fifty feet away! You call that 'harmless'?"
"Harmless to ME," I tell him.
He gives me the stink-eye, but goes on with his story. Once he's done--I still have no idea what the point was--he sits back on the chair and advances the issue of financing again. "Can I ask, what do you do?"
"Computer tech," I tell him, and mention where I work.
"Not that it's any of my business," he says, and immediately I know what is coming--"but why in the world did you buy a place HERE?"
I look him dead in his beady little eyes and tell the absolute truth:
"Because I like it here."
He laughs, and I just smile my most I-dare-you-to-say-a-single-word-against-it smile until he looks away. Then and only then do I give him his reward: something he can contradict. "Plus, the yuppies are moving this way, and it'll be worth something someday..."
"It'll take ten years or more before they get this far," he tells me, and I make some noise of agreement, though I'm fairly sure that's horseshit; if it's five years I'll be surprised. I would have dearly loved to see the look on his face if LJ had walked in right then, but he didn't; in the end, electrician-man and I wound up our conversation, and he left. But of course, once again, I've been asked that eternal question: why in the world would you want to live THERE?
And maybe today--my 34th birthday, by the time this is posted--maybe today I'm finally ready to say it at last:
I live here because I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I cannot imagine being the woman I was in 1993, for example--living in the suburbs in a cushy air-conditioned apartment, throwing dinner parties for people who I didn't even know or care about. I can't imagine sleeping in a room above a silent street, or in a place where no one says hello when you walk past them on the sidewalk. I want to learn to be more like the people who live here, and less like the people who live there. For the last four years, before I bought this house, I lived in an apartment building where I knew no one. Not ONE person; not a single individual who I would pass in the hall every day, or say hello to in the laundry room. I would see their names on their mailboxes, but I never knew any of them. I don't want to live like that anymore.
I look at my mom's neighborhood, the street where I grew up. There are no kids outside; no one goes out unless they're going to their cars or tending their lawns. They all stay inside in the perfectly climate-controlled air, out of the rain, safe and secure. It's sterile and desolate and absolutely not the life I want.
Then there's the issue of why I associate with the people I associate with; why I don't date white men, why I don't move in the same circles as some of my co-workers. And really it's fairly simple, broken down into its component reasons. As I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, and a family where I was considered the "mutt" for not being 100% Irish, I absorbed a set of expectations that I could not live up to. In no way did I fit the definition of a "normal" girl, as defined by my environment. I was not pretty; I was not delicate or graceful or flirtatious. I was extremely intelligent and opinionated, and I used a lot of big words. I didn't even listen to the "right" kind of music. I was interested in books and computers rather than cheerleading and cliques, and I was absolutely pathetic at sports. As I grew older, my strangeness just became more and more apparent. I had waterfights and played laser tag with my friends, instead of going to someone's basement and drinking beer. I read science fiction instead of romance novels. I never learned to accessorize, never learned how to find the right clothes, never learned to braid hair or put on makeup like they did in _Seventeen_. My friends and I created maps of fantasy worlds, plotted to take over the world, wrote novels. The only boys who liked us were the ones who were just like us: intelligent, strange, misunderstood. From the time I was six I knew I was different; by the time I was nine, I had begun to consider suicide.
It was never up to me what I wanted to do in my life; or perhaps it was, but no one ever bothered to show me what the options were. I knew of only the jobs I'd seen in my family or my neighborhood: engineering, nursing, education, police and fire, and writing. I wanted to write but I was told I had to have a "real" career to fall back on; there was never any notion of taking a chance, of working without a net. It had been decided soon after my birth that I would go to college; I never even thought to question any other possibilities, not that it would have been accepted if I had thought to question. My career choice was made by default, as the thing I imagined I would hate the least, the thing that would free me up to write for the greatest amount of time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of independent decisions I made at any time before my 24th birthday--and yes, I'm taking into account things like dating, sex, and marriage. I dated Chris because Chris wanted to date me and because you had to date someone. I had sex with him because, well, we'd been together for a year and he was pressuring me--I went along because I wanted to, but I'm not sure I wanted to right at that moment. I think breaking up with Chris was maybe the first truly independent decision I ever made; I did it despite my fear and despite the objections I knew would be forthcoming. I married David because I was 23 and it was time to get married, and because if I broke off a second engagement, people would have thought I was flighty. It was only when I started seeing JP behind David's back that I started to feel like I was in control of my own destiny.
All of this is to say: In the world I grew up in, I could not be what I was expected to be; much less could I try to force myself into that mold and still be happy. I -tried- to mash myself into that mold, most notably the summer I was cheating on Dave with JP; I spent so many hours trying to convince myself to stay, and I did so many things to try to force myself into being a good wife. In the end I realized that I either had to be myself or I would kill myself. And to be who I truly am, I had to leave that place of unreachable expectations and go somewhere else. For some people, "away" is a place; for me, there is no "away", no safe haven as there is for anyone else. I do not fit into the society I was born into; therefore, I had to walk away from that society and go somewhere where the expectations are different. Here, it's not necessary to be thin and graceful for a man to find me attractive; it's not necessary for me to be a career woman to gain respect. All I have to be here is me, and being me is enough to get me attention. Not that I want attention, not like that--but even just to fit in, back in my "own" world, I have to be someone other than who I really am, and I just can't do that anymore.
Therefore: I am here because I can live up to the expectations here--and I can live with myself if I don't live up to them. There's no sense here, as there is back in the white world, that I'll be a failure in anyone's eyes, no fear of disappointing anyone just by who I am and who I'm not.
So that's the answer, or one of them, to the question behind this blog: why do you want to live there? I want to live here because I know who I am and I don't feel like there's anything wrong with being who I am.
Oh--and it is now my birthday. Happy birthday to me.....
Bestiality Watch, 6/12/04
Number of times "dog f*ckers" has been the search term responsible for bringing visitors to this site: 6
Total number of visits to this site: 82
Percentage of visitors to this site motivated by an interest in viewing canine-human sexual congress: not quite 8%.
(And it's not repeat business, either; the requests are coming from different ISPs and different IP addresses. There are just a whole lot more hound-boinkers out there than one might initially guess.)
Total number of visits to this site: 82
Percentage of visitors to this site motivated by an interest in viewing canine-human sexual congress: not quite 8%.
(And it's not repeat business, either; the requests are coming from different ISPs and different IP addresses. There are just a whole lot more hound-boinkers out there than one might initially guess.)
Friday, June 11, 2004
Apropos of Nothing
A further confession:
Even though I appear to be the epitome of the ethnically-confused urban female, I have two secret, guilty pleasures, both of them televised.
One is professional bull-riding. I stumbled across it on some obscure cable channel one Saturday night when there was nothing else even remotely worth watching, and even through the vague thoughts of animal cruelty, and the overt and pervasive Christianity, my overwhelming sense is Damn, those guys are hot. Though I bet they need a 90-minute shower before I could even bear to be in the same room with them...
Anyhow--one of my redneck eccentricities is bull-riding; the other is NASCAR. And it is NASCAR which fuels the following very short rant:
I am SO sick of Dale Jr.'s smug ass. I am sick of the NASCAR establishment treating Dale Jr. like the second coming, simply because he's Big E's son. Now mind you--Dale Sr.'s death was a tragic thing, no mistake. But Dale Jr. is like the Britney Spears or the Paris Hilton of NASCAR--overexposed, all over everything, even when you're hoping not to see him anymore. The new KFC promo is a prime example; why, exactly, should I CARE whether Dale Jr. says KFC is his favorite chicken??
What's more, when he's racing it seems like the bugger's got a charm around his neck or something--last weekend at Dover, 75% of the field was torn up in that one big wreck, but who comes through unscathed? Dale Jr. And then, Mears blows oil all over the track, Kahne goes slam into the wall when he hits the slick patch, and who comes out smelling like a rose? *Ding!* You guessed it--good ol' #8. It's just not cool. I'm even sick of DEI Racing--I can't stand Michael Waltrip, and the only things I can pin down about him that I don't like are his voice and his mannerisms--and the fact that he races for DEI! I just don't think Dale Jr. is all that--I'll take Kasey Kahne over Dale Jr. any day.
End NASCAR rant.
I am not even going to detail exactly how weary I am of all things Reagan. His death was inevitable--he'd been dying by slow degrees for ten years--and was probably a merciful thing both for him and his family. But from the extent and depth of the coverage, you would think it came in the prime of his life and out of the clear blue...Furthermore, it's the most one-sided coverage I've seen since...well, since the war in Iraq, a whole different story. But I'd just rather let history decide what kind of president Reagan was, rather than listening to all these pundits donning their rose-colored retro-spectacles. And further, Fox Chicago spent the entire evening taking us through every agonizing moment of the Reagan funeral--which, in the end, caused them to pre-empt The Simpsons. Call me shallow, call me a prime example of Generation X, call me anything you want--but don't screw with my Simpsons.
Even though I appear to be the epitome of the ethnically-confused urban female, I have two secret, guilty pleasures, both of them televised.
One is professional bull-riding. I stumbled across it on some obscure cable channel one Saturday night when there was nothing else even remotely worth watching, and even through the vague thoughts of animal cruelty, and the overt and pervasive Christianity, my overwhelming sense is Damn, those guys are hot. Though I bet they need a 90-minute shower before I could even bear to be in the same room with them...
Anyhow--one of my redneck eccentricities is bull-riding; the other is NASCAR. And it is NASCAR which fuels the following very short rant:
I am SO sick of Dale Jr.'s smug ass. I am sick of the NASCAR establishment treating Dale Jr. like the second coming, simply because he's Big E's son. Now mind you--Dale Sr.'s death was a tragic thing, no mistake. But Dale Jr. is like the Britney Spears or the Paris Hilton of NASCAR--overexposed, all over everything, even when you're hoping not to see him anymore. The new KFC promo is a prime example; why, exactly, should I CARE whether Dale Jr. says KFC is his favorite chicken??
What's more, when he's racing it seems like the bugger's got a charm around his neck or something--last weekend at Dover, 75% of the field was torn up in that one big wreck, but who comes through unscathed? Dale Jr. And then, Mears blows oil all over the track, Kahne goes slam into the wall when he hits the slick patch, and who comes out smelling like a rose? *Ding!* You guessed it--good ol' #8. It's just not cool. I'm even sick of DEI Racing--I can't stand Michael Waltrip, and the only things I can pin down about him that I don't like are his voice and his mannerisms--and the fact that he races for DEI! I just don't think Dale Jr. is all that--I'll take Kasey Kahne over Dale Jr. any day.
End NASCAR rant.
I am not even going to detail exactly how weary I am of all things Reagan. His death was inevitable--he'd been dying by slow degrees for ten years--and was probably a merciful thing both for him and his family. But from the extent and depth of the coverage, you would think it came in the prime of his life and out of the clear blue...Furthermore, it's the most one-sided coverage I've seen since...well, since the war in Iraq, a whole different story. But I'd just rather let history decide what kind of president Reagan was, rather than listening to all these pundits donning their rose-colored retro-spectacles. And further, Fox Chicago spent the entire evening taking us through every agonizing moment of the Reagan funeral--which, in the end, caused them to pre-empt The Simpsons. Call me shallow, call me a prime example of Generation X, call me anything you want--but don't screw with my Simpsons.
This Absolutely Could Not Be Any Cooler
Play this. NOW. No cheating and going past the exposition passages, please. You might learn something.
(Then again, if you're reading this blog, it might all be stuff you already heard--nobody on the other side could tolerate much of this blog.)
(Then again, if you're reading this blog, it might all be stuff you already heard--nobody on the other side could tolerate much of this blog.)
Induce Vomiting
My mother wonders why I don't do religion anymore.
I don't do religion for two reasons. One of them is very personal and relates directly TO my mother; essentially, she told me on my 26th birthday that she attributed JP's death to her prayers on the morning of the day he died, prayers that a "miracle" would bring me back home. That's one reason.
The other reason is because too large a share of religious discourse in America has been co-opted by the sort of people who bring you things like this.
If the "one true god" is this judgemental, hateful, sanctimonious, and loathesome, then I pray for the safe harbor of Hell.
(And besides, according to this, my mom is screwed too. Hey Mom--look out for The Death Cookie!!!!)
I don't do religion for two reasons. One of them is very personal and relates directly TO my mother; essentially, she told me on my 26th birthday that she attributed JP's death to her prayers on the morning of the day he died, prayers that a "miracle" would bring me back home. That's one reason.
The other reason is because too large a share of religious discourse in America has been co-opted by the sort of people who bring you things like this.
If the "one true god" is this judgemental, hateful, sanctimonious, and loathesome, then I pray for the safe harbor of Hell.
(And besides, according to this, my mom is screwed too. Hey Mom--look out for The Death Cookie!!!!)
Wednesday, June 9, 2004
An Infusion of JBTV
Every so often--and it's usually late at night in a non-routine moment--I am given an insight into everything I have given up and everything I would like to recapture.
Confession: for all my agitant ways, I am LOUSY at change. I criticize people who can't change, and characterize myself as "adaptable", and I am--to a point. But if I am capable of changing in a certain situation, it generally means that I had no emotional investment in its continuing existence. And there are so very few things in which I truly am emotionally invested--I can count them on one hand: LJ, this house, the memory of the time I knew JP (and all related things both antecedent to and concurrent with the "relationship" part of the relationship--everything from August of 1991 through October of 1995)--That's it, mostly. Anything else that changes doesn't really unhinge me anymore....but let any one of those things change to which I DO have an emotional attachment, and god help us all.
Sometimes I can endure this change by just...not...thinking....about...it. I would have to class JP's death in this area, and the same with the compromises I've made in our shared vision. As long as I don't think about the fact that I am not a writer, not an artist, not a musician, not a professional provocateur, agitator, or shitstirrer; as long as I don't think about the fact that I have tethered myself by circumstance and choices to a job in which my creativity withers, a job in which I am not appreciated and which does not offer me even the salve of a disgustingly-huge salary to ease my injured ego; as long as I don't think about the fact that I have in many, MANY ways settled for much less than I want--not even to say "deserve"--as long as I don't think about those things, the sum total of which is the dreaded and dreadful word SELLOUT-- it is much easier to endure them. But that involves a great deal of not-thinking-about the converses of these things--the summer of 1995; the feeling of being equal to, and as valuable as, any man; the dream we had where JP was a revoltingly-famous musician and I was the poet to be reckoned with....
Pause.
I feel here, since I'm rambling anyway, that it's important to state something: When we dreamed of being celebrities, it was a very different version of "celebrity" that we embraced. The current culture sickens me; I do not give a flying monkey's red-rimmed ass about J Lo, Ben Affleck, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, any of their ilk. We wanted to be old-school celebrities--rock stars in the old, decadent sense--not the new, decadently indolent sense. We wanted to be celebrities for what we could do, not who we were.
Anyway.
As long as I don't think about who I'm not, it's perfectly easy to accept who I am. But sometimes--in these late-night, break-from-routine epiphanies--sometimes, I'm forced to face it.
Tonight was one of those nights. It's hot as hell, and I'm sitting here in my tank-top and pajama pants with a cold wet cloth on my neck and fans blowing on me. Frasier was a rerun, so I changed channels and came across JBTV.
Now, JBTV has been a fixture of my emotional and creative life since 1993. I can remember nights in JP's room at his mom's apartment, with the 20th-floor view of the city out the window and the thin blue light from the TV the only illumination. I remember the night my mom threw me out--after the Mazzy Star concert, before I actually went home--and JP and I lay on the mattress down on the floor of his room, after screwing for -hours-, watching JBTV---I remember "Screenwriter's Blues" from Soul Coughing, for one thing...a few months later, in the apartment at 1460: the second or third night I ever did heroin, lying in bed watching "Junior Citizen" by Poster Children. I remember nights that summer, and then once we lost the apartment and moved back to his mom's--the weeks before he died, I remember JBTV too. And then after, moments with CR, where he would be in one room and I would be in another and I would sneak JBTV so as not to set him on another of his tirades. I remember the night I found out that Layne Staley was dead, sitting in the bedroom, watching "The Diamond Sea" by Sonic Youth.
All of these were breaks in my routine. All of these memories are from moments long-removed from the circle of get-up-got-to-work-come-home-eat-shower-and-sleep, the rhythm that has ruled all of my most stultifying days. I have never been happy at any time while adhering to that structure--but because I have made choices that require me to have a steady income, I am afraid to leave the structure that makes me unhappy. Rather than be miserable all the time, I've just chosen not to think about how miserable it makes me to have to get up at 6, commute for 90 minutes, work for 8 hours, commute for 90 minutes, and only then arrive home--the reason I'm doing this all in the first place.
And now this: I am in the middle of a week off--the last week off I am likely to have until at least Christmas and probably longer. I am doing the best I can to get things done, but it's just been waaaay too damn hot, and so I'm being forced, essentially, to relax. And once again, during this break in routine--JBTV.
It wasn't so much what they showed--though they DID show "I Am One" by Smashing Pumpkins--but just what it all represents to me. In 5 days I'll have to go to work again, and summer season will start, and they will expect all kinds of things of me which are a waste of my abilities, handing off projects which would be a better use of my talent. I'll leave the house at 6:30 in the morning, and get home at 6:30 at night. And the summer will go on, and fade, and then the fall and winter, and soon another year will be behind me. My mother turned 75 years old today; I'm nearly as old now as she was when she had me. Huge chunks of my life have escaped me, and unless I stop them, unless I stanch this bleeding away of time, before I know it I'll be 75 years old myself...but I won't have even the simplest things my mother has. Not that I want those things, most of them--but it's scary anyhow, to know that I'll most likely be alone when I get old. I don't expect any man to stand by me forever; since JP, I've been braced for every disaster, and since CR, I've understood the treachery of love. LJ may stick around and he may not; my money is on "not", but that doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy it while it lasts. But eventually there will come that inevitable moment where, when one man leaves, there won't be another to take his place.
It seems I'm already at the stage in my life where men have to look past things--last night I had a long talk with Terrence, to tell him that I've made up my mind that nothing is going to happen with him. (After l'affaire Marcus, I've made a conscious decision to stay faithful. Not because I'm afraid LJ would do some physical harm to me--but because I actually care about LJ, and I think in his way he cares about me.) Anyway, I had this long talk with Terrence, and at one point he was telling me about his current-verging-on-ex girlfriend, how shallow she is, and how he ended up with her. "See," he said, "I made the usual mistake. I had a choice between her beauty and your brains, and I went for the looks. But see, you have the most important thing to me in a woman--you're smart. I mean, physical attributes are nice and all--but in your case I'm willing to look past that, because you're so intelligent. Maybe not more than me--but close."
So Terrence, provided I'll screw him, is willing to overlook my obviously-inferior physical appearance; LJ, though he doesn't often say it, looks past all the things I do that get on his nerves. I'd rather take LJ's view of things--after all, we ALL do things that get on our partner's nerves--but here's the thing about Terrence: It doesn't matter if the woman knows she's not the most beautiful woman in the world. It doesn't even matter if the woman knows the MAN doesn't think she's the most beautiful woman in the world. I don't care WHO the woman is--we would all like to BELIEVE our man thinks we're the most beautiful woman in the world. To be told that the man is "willing to look past" her appearance...well, let's just say that didn't do much for my self-esteem.
To JP I was beautiful; to CR I was contemptible; to LJ, I guess I'm just here. I have to keep reminding myself: I am his third major girlfriend, and the only one he's stayed with for this long. That counts for something.
All I know is, I have to change my life. I just can't do this monotonous routine anymore, can't spend 12 hours on work and 8 on sleep, and leave myself only 4 hours on a good day for being who I really am. I'm very close to losing my real self completely, and if that happens I will have no reason whatsoever to keep going in this life. I'm not prepared to just give up, so something has to change, and soon.
Confession: for all my agitant ways, I am LOUSY at change. I criticize people who can't change, and characterize myself as "adaptable", and I am--to a point. But if I am capable of changing in a certain situation, it generally means that I had no emotional investment in its continuing existence. And there are so very few things in which I truly am emotionally invested--I can count them on one hand: LJ, this house, the memory of the time I knew JP (and all related things both antecedent to and concurrent with the "relationship" part of the relationship--everything from August of 1991 through October of 1995)--That's it, mostly. Anything else that changes doesn't really unhinge me anymore....but let any one of those things change to which I DO have an emotional attachment, and god help us all.
Sometimes I can endure this change by just...not...thinking....about...it. I would have to class JP's death in this area, and the same with the compromises I've made in our shared vision. As long as I don't think about the fact that I am not a writer, not an artist, not a musician, not a professional provocateur, agitator, or shitstirrer; as long as I don't think about the fact that I have tethered myself by circumstance and choices to a job in which my creativity withers, a job in which I am not appreciated and which does not offer me even the salve of a disgustingly-huge salary to ease my injured ego; as long as I don't think about the fact that I have in many, MANY ways settled for much less than I want--not even to say "deserve"--as long as I don't think about those things, the sum total of which is the dreaded and dreadful word SELLOUT-- it is much easier to endure them. But that involves a great deal of not-thinking-about the converses of these things--the summer of 1995; the feeling of being equal to, and as valuable as, any man; the dream we had where JP was a revoltingly-famous musician and I was the poet to be reckoned with....
Pause.
I feel here, since I'm rambling anyway, that it's important to state something: When we dreamed of being celebrities, it was a very different version of "celebrity" that we embraced. The current culture sickens me; I do not give a flying monkey's red-rimmed ass about J Lo, Ben Affleck, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, any of their ilk. We wanted to be old-school celebrities--rock stars in the old, decadent sense--not the new, decadently indolent sense. We wanted to be celebrities for what we could do, not who we were.
Anyway.
As long as I don't think about who I'm not, it's perfectly easy to accept who I am. But sometimes--in these late-night, break-from-routine epiphanies--sometimes, I'm forced to face it.
Tonight was one of those nights. It's hot as hell, and I'm sitting here in my tank-top and pajama pants with a cold wet cloth on my neck and fans blowing on me. Frasier was a rerun, so I changed channels and came across JBTV.
Now, JBTV has been a fixture of my emotional and creative life since 1993. I can remember nights in JP's room at his mom's apartment, with the 20th-floor view of the city out the window and the thin blue light from the TV the only illumination. I remember the night my mom threw me out--after the Mazzy Star concert, before I actually went home--and JP and I lay on the mattress down on the floor of his room, after screwing for -hours-, watching JBTV---I remember "Screenwriter's Blues" from Soul Coughing, for one thing...a few months later, in the apartment at 1460: the second or third night I ever did heroin, lying in bed watching "Junior Citizen" by Poster Children. I remember nights that summer, and then once we lost the apartment and moved back to his mom's--the weeks before he died, I remember JBTV too. And then after, moments with CR, where he would be in one room and I would be in another and I would sneak JBTV so as not to set him on another of his tirades. I remember the night I found out that Layne Staley was dead, sitting in the bedroom, watching "The Diamond Sea" by Sonic Youth.
All of these were breaks in my routine. All of these memories are from moments long-removed from the circle of get-up-got-to-work-come-home-eat-shower-and-sleep, the rhythm that has ruled all of my most stultifying days. I have never been happy at any time while adhering to that structure--but because I have made choices that require me to have a steady income, I am afraid to leave the structure that makes me unhappy. Rather than be miserable all the time, I've just chosen not to think about how miserable it makes me to have to get up at 6, commute for 90 minutes, work for 8 hours, commute for 90 minutes, and only then arrive home--the reason I'm doing this all in the first place.
And now this: I am in the middle of a week off--the last week off I am likely to have until at least Christmas and probably longer. I am doing the best I can to get things done, but it's just been waaaay too damn hot, and so I'm being forced, essentially, to relax. And once again, during this break in routine--JBTV.
It wasn't so much what they showed--though they DID show "I Am One" by Smashing Pumpkins--but just what it all represents to me. In 5 days I'll have to go to work again, and summer season will start, and they will expect all kinds of things of me which are a waste of my abilities, handing off projects which would be a better use of my talent. I'll leave the house at 6:30 in the morning, and get home at 6:30 at night. And the summer will go on, and fade, and then the fall and winter, and soon another year will be behind me. My mother turned 75 years old today; I'm nearly as old now as she was when she had me. Huge chunks of my life have escaped me, and unless I stop them, unless I stanch this bleeding away of time, before I know it I'll be 75 years old myself...but I won't have even the simplest things my mother has. Not that I want those things, most of them--but it's scary anyhow, to know that I'll most likely be alone when I get old. I don't expect any man to stand by me forever; since JP, I've been braced for every disaster, and since CR, I've understood the treachery of love. LJ may stick around and he may not; my money is on "not", but that doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy it while it lasts. But eventually there will come that inevitable moment where, when one man leaves, there won't be another to take his place.
It seems I'm already at the stage in my life where men have to look past things--last night I had a long talk with Terrence, to tell him that I've made up my mind that nothing is going to happen with him. (After l'affaire Marcus, I've made a conscious decision to stay faithful. Not because I'm afraid LJ would do some physical harm to me--but because I actually care about LJ, and I think in his way he cares about me.) Anyway, I had this long talk with Terrence, and at one point he was telling me about his current-verging-on-ex girlfriend, how shallow she is, and how he ended up with her. "See," he said, "I made the usual mistake. I had a choice between her beauty and your brains, and I went for the looks. But see, you have the most important thing to me in a woman--you're smart. I mean, physical attributes are nice and all--but in your case I'm willing to look past that, because you're so intelligent. Maybe not more than me--but close."
So Terrence, provided I'll screw him, is willing to overlook my obviously-inferior physical appearance; LJ, though he doesn't often say it, looks past all the things I do that get on his nerves. I'd rather take LJ's view of things--after all, we ALL do things that get on our partner's nerves--but here's the thing about Terrence: It doesn't matter if the woman knows she's not the most beautiful woman in the world. It doesn't even matter if the woman knows the MAN doesn't think she's the most beautiful woman in the world. I don't care WHO the woman is--we would all like to BELIEVE our man thinks we're the most beautiful woman in the world. To be told that the man is "willing to look past" her appearance...well, let's just say that didn't do much for my self-esteem.
To JP I was beautiful; to CR I was contemptible; to LJ, I guess I'm just here. I have to keep reminding myself: I am his third major girlfriend, and the only one he's stayed with for this long. That counts for something.
All I know is, I have to change my life. I just can't do this monotonous routine anymore, can't spend 12 hours on work and 8 on sleep, and leave myself only 4 hours on a good day for being who I really am. I'm very close to losing my real self completely, and if that happens I will have no reason whatsoever to keep going in this life. I'm not prepared to just give up, so something has to change, and soon.
Okay, Now Let's Be Serious Here....
This is an open letter to the individual who found its way to this site via the following search term:
"story the young brother fuck the sister divorced"
We all have our issues--I understand this. Really I do. And I understand, what with the economy over there in Eastern Europe, that maybe you gotta take yer thrills where you can find 'em.
But I've gotta tell you--You're not gonna find that here. I can hook you up with my second husband--he's a scary freakboy and would probably have a line on something like what you're looking for--but otherwise you'd be better off looking elsewhere. (And really--if your search term hasn't led you to what you're looking for by Item #35, I'm thinking you better find a better search term, my horny Russian compadre.)
Buh-bye now....
--Gladys
Oh, and PS to the person who wants to know "what is a sistered joist?"--THIS one I can help you with: A sistered joist is a joist that's been reinforced by having another piece of wood screwed or bolted to it along its length--the piece that's bolted to it is called the "sister" and it strengthens the joist. Generally this is used where the joist is starting to crack or rot and it would be too difficult to remove and replace the entire joist. I've got several of them in the basement of the Catastrophe. Hope it helps....
"story the young brother fuck the sister divorced"
We all have our issues--I understand this. Really I do. And I understand, what with the economy over there in Eastern Europe, that maybe you gotta take yer thrills where you can find 'em.
But I've gotta tell you--You're not gonna find that here. I can hook you up with my second husband--he's a scary freakboy and would probably have a line on something like what you're looking for--but otherwise you'd be better off looking elsewhere. (And really--if your search term hasn't led you to what you're looking for by Item #35, I'm thinking you better find a better search term, my horny Russian compadre.)
Buh-bye now....
--Gladys
Oh, and PS to the person who wants to know "what is a sistered joist?"--THIS one I can help you with: A sistered joist is a joist that's been reinforced by having another piece of wood screwed or bolted to it along its length--the piece that's bolted to it is called the "sister" and it strengthens the joist. Generally this is used where the joist is starting to crack or rot and it would be too difficult to remove and replace the entire joist. I've got several of them in the basement of the Catastrophe. Hope it helps....
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Homicide in Chicago (No, not a story from the block.)
This is an incredible link for Chicago history freaks--of which I am one. It's a database of all recorded homicides in Chicago between 1870 and 1930, with detailed search capabilities--circumstances, age of victim, verdicts, outcomes, all that. It's amazing--I logged in to check the online newspapers, and I've whiled away two and a half hours just screwing around with this and reading the cases.
(Yes, I know; I am a freak.)
(Yes, I know; I am a freak.)
Monday, June 7, 2004
A List of Entirely Useless Information
Because it's hotter than hell, it's just after midnight, and I'm feeling unusually lethargic and bizarre even for me, I offer:
Strange & Completely Useless Information
--A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
--A snail can sleep for three years.
--Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
--Butterflies taste with their feet.
--Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
--February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
--If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
--In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
--Leonardo DiVinci invented the scissors.
--No word in the English language rhymes with month.
--Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
--Shakespeare invented the word 'assassination' and 'bump'.
--"Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand, "lollipop" with your right.
--The cruise liner, QE2 moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
--The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with. (Wait--hold up--what about North America? Or South America? Well, no one said they were correct useless facts.)
--The words 'racecar' and kayak' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.
--TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
--Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
--If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at a red light.
--In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch face, is 10:20.
--The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
--Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks, otherwise it will digest itself.
--There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
--There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times, "indivisibility."
--The Bible does not say there were three wise men; it only says there were three gifts.
--Did you know that crocodiles never outgrow the pool in which they live? That means that if you put a baby croc in an aquarium, it would be little for the rest of its life.
--A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle; a group of geese in the air is a skein.
--A 'jiffy' is an actualy unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
--Pinocchio is Italian for "pine eye".
--The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
--The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".
--Barbie's full name is Barbara Milicent Roberts.
--It's impossible to lick your elbow.
--More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
--Rats and horses can't vomit.
--The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language..........try it!
--Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
--In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
--The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
--Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
--A duck's quack doesn't echo anywhere, and no one knows why.
--In the course of an average lifetime, you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders. (Eeeew, eeeeewww, fucking EEEEEEEWWWWW!)
--Most lipstick contains fish scales.
--Cat's urine glows under a black light.
--Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
******************************************************************************
And, because you didn't ask for it:
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
Strange & Completely Useless Information
--A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
--A snail can sleep for three years.
--Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
--Butterflies taste with their feet.
--Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
--February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
--If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
--In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
--Leonardo DiVinci invented the scissors.
--No word in the English language rhymes with month.
--Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
--Shakespeare invented the word 'assassination' and 'bump'.
--"Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand, "lollipop" with your right.
--The cruise liner, QE2 moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
--The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with. (Wait--hold up--what about North America? Or South America? Well, no one said they were correct useless facts.)
--The words 'racecar' and kayak' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.
--TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
--Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
--If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at a red light.
--In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch face, is 10:20.
--The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
--Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks, otherwise it will digest itself.
--There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
--There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times, "indivisibility."
--The Bible does not say there were three wise men; it only says there were three gifts.
--Did you know that crocodiles never outgrow the pool in which they live? That means that if you put a baby croc in an aquarium, it would be little for the rest of its life.
--A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle; a group of geese in the air is a skein.
--A 'jiffy' is an actualy unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
--Pinocchio is Italian for "pine eye".
--The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
--The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".
--Barbie's full name is Barbara Milicent Roberts.
--It's impossible to lick your elbow.
--More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
--Rats and horses can't vomit.
--The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language..........try it!
--Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
--In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
--The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
--Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
--A duck's quack doesn't echo anywhere, and no one knows why.
--In the course of an average lifetime, you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders. (Eeeew, eeeeewww, fucking EEEEEEEWWWWW!)
--Most lipstick contains fish scales.
--Cat's urine glows under a black light.
--Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
******************************************************************************
And, because you didn't ask for it:
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Adware Must Die
Okay, so after my Fishy encounter, I got an e-mail from Eric Zorn, who said he hadn't had that problem. So, in an effort to inform myself further, I did a little research.
The programs installed when you access Fishy--whether you click "yes" or "no" to the prompt--come from a company called Claria, formerly known as Gator. Gator has a long-standing reputation as a bunch of really bad guys, as detailed below.
***************************************************************************
From PCPitstop.com:
What does Gator/GAIN do?
As a general rule, Gator applications do a lot more than the original purpose that may have persuaded you to download them. Some of these things are spelled out in Gator's license, that very long document that most users inevitably don't read very carefully.
GAIN displays advertising. A lot of pop-up advertising if you visit popular web sites or search for advertiser's hot words like "auto loan". Our experience was that its advertising was sometimes poorly targeted and therefore unlikely to be helpful.
GAIN interrupts your work. Usually, your computer does things as a result of your own actions. GAIN actions don't follow that pattern. Their ads are often timed to pop up a few seconds after you've finished clicking on a link or entering data, which can be very distracting. If you want some more examples, see our review of Search Scout.
Several Web publishers said they have been approached by L90 or Gator to run such download ads, but they refused out of fear of a consumer backlash. "We thought it was dirty," said one Internet executive who asked to remain anonymous. "It's the kind of thing that makes the phone ring." (cnet.com)
GAIN can install software without your knowledge. With so many security issues on the Internet, it is important to know when and why software is being installed on your system. Our survey shows that most users do not know how GAIN got onto their system, and Gator can install even more software without further notice.
GAIN collects extensive information. Perhaps Gator doesn't know who you are, but it certainly collects a lot of information when you consider all the things that the company lists in its Terms and Conditions. Take our Gator license quiz and see how well you know it.
GAIN uses up valuable system resources. Gator's simple WeatherScope application takes up about 14 megabytes of memory because of the GAIN software that comes with it. It also uses up 15 percent of system resources on Windows Me. On systems with small amounts of memory this can degrade performance or cause system instability.
*********************************************************************************
Okay. So here we have a piece of software which downloads itself without getting the consent of the user, and does a number of things which go against the wishes of the user, or which the user doesn't know about....
Isn't that the classic definition of a computer virus???
Yet because the assholes behind this "program" send it out under the aegis of "marketing", it's allowed. This isn't marketing--it's the distribution of a virus. The FTC needs to get in on this. These people are not offering the consumer the chance to make an informed decision--and portions of the software install on your computer even if you click "NO" at the prompt. (I know--because I did!)
I look forward to the day when people who put out programs like this are prosecuted just like the virus purveyors. This is NOT a victimless crime, and unless someone warns you about a specific site, you can stumble into one of these sites very easily.
Gator, Claria, or whatever your name is: Get a real job, you jerks. You're a pack of parasites.
The programs installed when you access Fishy--whether you click "yes" or "no" to the prompt--come from a company called Claria, formerly known as Gator. Gator has a long-standing reputation as a bunch of really bad guys, as detailed below.
***************************************************************************
From PCPitstop.com:
What does Gator/GAIN do?
As a general rule, Gator applications do a lot more than the original purpose that may have persuaded you to download them. Some of these things are spelled out in Gator's license, that very long document that most users inevitably don't read very carefully.
GAIN displays advertising. A lot of pop-up advertising if you visit popular web sites or search for advertiser's hot words like "auto loan". Our experience was that its advertising was sometimes poorly targeted and therefore unlikely to be helpful.
GAIN interrupts your work. Usually, your computer does things as a result of your own actions. GAIN actions don't follow that pattern. Their ads are often timed to pop up a few seconds after you've finished clicking on a link or entering data, which can be very distracting. If you want some more examples, see our review of Search Scout.
Several Web publishers said they have been approached by L90 or Gator to run such download ads, but they refused out of fear of a consumer backlash. "We thought it was dirty," said one Internet executive who asked to remain anonymous. "It's the kind of thing that makes the phone ring." (cnet.com)
GAIN can install software without your knowledge. With so many security issues on the Internet, it is important to know when and why software is being installed on your system. Our survey shows that most users do not know how GAIN got onto their system, and Gator can install even more software without further notice.
GAIN collects extensive information. Perhaps Gator doesn't know who you are, but it certainly collects a lot of information when you consider all the things that the company lists in its Terms and Conditions. Take our Gator license quiz and see how well you know it.
GAIN uses up valuable system resources. Gator's simple WeatherScope application takes up about 14 megabytes of memory because of the GAIN software that comes with it. It also uses up 15 percent of system resources on Windows Me. On systems with small amounts of memory this can degrade performance or cause system instability.
*********************************************************************************
Okay. So here we have a piece of software which downloads itself without getting the consent of the user, and does a number of things which go against the wishes of the user, or which the user doesn't know about....
Isn't that the classic definition of a computer virus???
Yet because the assholes behind this "program" send it out under the aegis of "marketing", it's allowed. This isn't marketing--it's the distribution of a virus. The FTC needs to get in on this. These people are not offering the consumer the chance to make an informed decision--and portions of the software install on your computer even if you click "NO" at the prompt. (I know--because I did!)
I look forward to the day when people who put out programs like this are prosecuted just like the virus purveyors. This is NOT a victimless crime, and unless someone warns you about a specific site, you can stumble into one of these sites very easily.
Gator, Claria, or whatever your name is: Get a real job, you jerks. You're a pack of parasites.
You People Just Crack Me Up
Recent search terms which have led folks to mine 'umble blog:
--"dog fuckers" (featured in my rant against my seller)--this one was used as a search term TWICE. Gotta wonder why, don'tcha? Hope you found what you were looking for, buddy. But I'm thinking you didn't find it here.
--"Humboldt Park" and "porn" (I know where I've used "Humboldt Park", and I'm sure "porn" has been mentioned in a couple of places)--I can't imagine there's too much porn coming out of Humboldt Park these days, at least not the one in Chicago. But maybe I'm just not paying attention.
--"horny text messages" (ah, yes, good ol' Terrence--the post referred to isn't here anymore, having been moved to Quobble)--What the searcher here might be trying to access, I'm not entirely certain. What fun would it be to read other people's horny text messages? I guess I'm just not trying hard enough.
--"Marilyn Manson Flood interview Bowling for Columbine" (I can see three of these in this post, but where "Flood" comes in I can't say.)--This one came from Japan, ostensibly, and at least makes a moderate amount of sense.
--"I TURNED MY GAS METER VALVE ON BUT IT DID NOT WORK" (yeah, I remember that feeling)
And then there's the group that must come from SOMEWHERE in my blog, but damned if I know where..
--"Appliance Delivery and Arizona"
--"Install a Washer/Dryer" --Where these two came from, I can't conjecture.
--"WHY TAKE A BATH IF OVERDOSE ON HEROIN"--Good to know I'm providing a public service, apparently. I hope it helped--I remember JP throwing me into an ice-cold shower once, under similar circumstances, but it didn't really make much difference.
Just for the added search traffic it will bring in, I will now add the following sentence to my blog:
"Avril Lavigne, Anna Kournikova, X-Box, PS2, Hoobastank, Smarty Jones, George W Bush is an idiot, baby names, Ronald Reagan, Serena Williams, Lord of the Rings, Phish, D-day commemoration, XXX adult site, Free Free Free Porn Porn Porn, Harry Potter, Usher, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera."
This sentence will be periodically updated to rope in as many unsuspecting culture-vultures as humanly possible. Heh heh heh....
--"dog fuckers" (featured in my rant against my seller)--this one was used as a search term TWICE. Gotta wonder why, don'tcha? Hope you found what you were looking for, buddy. But I'm thinking you didn't find it here.
--"Humboldt Park" and "porn" (I know where I've used "Humboldt Park", and I'm sure "porn" has been mentioned in a couple of places)--I can't imagine there's too much porn coming out of Humboldt Park these days, at least not the one in Chicago. But maybe I'm just not paying attention.
--"horny text messages" (ah, yes, good ol' Terrence--the post referred to isn't here anymore, having been moved to Quobble)--What the searcher here might be trying to access, I'm not entirely certain. What fun would it be to read other people's horny text messages? I guess I'm just not trying hard enough.
--"Marilyn Manson Flood interview Bowling for Columbine" (I can see three of these in this post, but where "Flood" comes in I can't say.)--This one came from Japan, ostensibly, and at least makes a moderate amount of sense.
--"I TURNED MY GAS METER VALVE ON BUT IT DID NOT WORK" (yeah, I remember that feeling)
And then there's the group that must come from SOMEWHERE in my blog, but damned if I know where..
--"Appliance Delivery and Arizona"
--"Install a Washer/Dryer" --Where these two came from, I can't conjecture.
--"WHY TAKE A BATH IF OVERDOSE ON HEROIN"--Good to know I'm providing a public service, apparently. I hope it helped--I remember JP throwing me into an ice-cold shower once, under similar circumstances, but it didn't really make much difference.
Just for the added search traffic it will bring in, I will now add the following sentence to my blog:
"Avril Lavigne, Anna Kournikova, X-Box, PS2, Hoobastank, Smarty Jones, George W Bush is an idiot, baby names, Ronald Reagan, Serena Williams, Lord of the Rings, Phish, D-day commemoration, XXX adult site, Free Free Free Porn Porn Porn, Harry Potter, Usher, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera."
This sentence will be periodically updated to rope in as many unsuspecting culture-vultures as humanly possible. Heh heh heh....
Saturday, June 5, 2004
And You Shall Know Them By The Foot Up Their Asses
So the other night, LJ told me that a couple of the guys were coming over to watch the game--Marcus and John. I've seen them both before, but--another manifestation of my apparent name-recall problem--I couldn't have picked out which of them was which, or distinguished them from any of LJ's other friends. When they came in, I recognized Marcus--he's the one who always smiles at me and asks, "How you doin'?" Cute, kinda; not as fine as LJ, but then who the hell is??
As usual, I went upstairs almost as soon as they arrived; it was late, for one thing, and LJ has told me before how much he appreciates it that I leave the guys to their own devices and don't try to hang around. Plus I had a ton of laundry waiting to be folded, so I ducked up the steps and went into the bedroom.
I was watching TV, folding laundry, just puttering around; and suddenly I heard one voice downstairs get much louder, and the other two get correspondingly quieter.
"Who the fuck was THAT?" said the voice.
Pause. "I said, who the fuck was THAT who answered your phone?"
"Your what? Bitch, has you lost your muthafuckin mind? That's my crib. I pay for that shit, and ain't no way no other n****a is gonna be up in my shit, that I pay for......"
"Kisha! Stop talking....Obviously you ain't listenin' to me, because you keep sayin' that same....I said, stop talking! I'm over here, and this n***a come over there and come up in my shit, which I pay for, and answer your...."
"He's your WHAT???? Bitch, just let me get in this car--Oh, so he's your 'husband' now....Is you playin' me, Kisha? Is THAT it? "
"Okay, then--now I know. But just let me get up out of this crib here and get in that muthafuckin' car--and don't let me get there and find some other n***a over there, 'husband' or no husband--bitch, I will put my foot up your ASS!"
There was more, of course; the diatribe went on for a good twenty minutes, and at the end LJ came upstairs and told me that Marcus said to tell me that he was sorry for getting all loud like that in the house. I said to him, "Don't worry about THAT--and by the way, I'm sorry I ever compared you to your friends..."
He didn't get that, I don't think; he looked vaguely perplexed, but in a way I think he did get it, because he gave me that smile of his. And then I went downstairs and there was Marcus--the same man who had just sat there for the better part of half an hour, detailing the fifty-eleven ways he was going to beat hell out of this woman--here was Marcus, sitting here watching the game, seemingly content.
LJ told me the next night when I got home that we were going to have company--Marcus was coming by. "And he's gonna have a friend with him," was the oddly-delicate way he phrased it. Then, catching my quizzical look--"No, not the one he was yelling at last night..."
"I was gonna ask, would I know her from the foot up her ass?" I told him.
This whole episode made me question a lot of my beliefs. First things first: I don't believe in domestic violence. I've made it crystal-clear to every man I've ever dated that the first time they raise a hand to me, they better kill me right then and there--because I will fight them til I can't fight further, and then I'll bring the law. And I don't condone it even when it's against some OTHER woman, someone who's not me.
But here's the thing, see; there are some circumstances when it's understandable. Understandable, not excusable. And this was one of those times. When David found out about me and JP, he told me later that he'd followed me to the apartment and if he'd found me there, he would have beat the hell out of me. And while I still find that perfectly illustrative of his asshole propensities, I have to admit--I understand it. I can understand the rage of finding your partner with someone else--finding that you've been betrayed. Hell, I've BEEN there--the night I walked out into the living room and found CR peering at me from between Bertha's tree-trunk thighs, for one. So I can't condemn Marcus completely...especially since, to judge from the evidence, he didn't actually go and beat on the other female. (Though somewhere in the conversation, I got an impression that he HAD beat her in the past...)
And there's a harder question inherent here, as well.
I tried to think this situation through as though it were another man speaking--Tim, for example, or David, or some other white guy--and tried to imagine how I would react to hearing them say the same sort of thing. And oddly enough, I have to admit: I'd be much more repulsed, much less tolerant, if it was a white man.
I think that's because I have such contempt for 75% of them to begin with--I just seem to run into too many assholes like the guys who rode with me on the Red Line this afternoon, who were more than happy to flirt and charm some woman because she had a Wrigley Field employee pass around her neck and they thought they could get her to comp them in--but then one of those same guys wouldn't even stand up to let me out of the seat; he just moved his leg one bare little bit and assumed I'd squeeze past. I'm not saying I assume white guys are assholes just from the jump--but I will admit that I'm usually ready to interpret their least little rudeness or obnoxiousness as proof that they are assholes. Somehow I'm only that way with white men, though--and I'd like to say it's just because I've dealt with too much of their assholery and too many of their unfounded judgements based on how I look--but that doesn't explain it completely. I don't know what does.
This is a prime example of one of the following two propositions: either a)the world is a complicated place and every belief must be evaluated in shades of gray, or b) Gladys is a wishy-washy hypocrite. As of this moment, regarding this situation, I'd have to call it a tossup.
(An update, 6/6/04--LJ came home tonight and told me Marcus was in the hospital. Figuring the worst, I said "What the hell happened?" I thought he'd been shot, of course. LJ just laughed. "We were playin' around, boxing and wrestling and shit, and Marcus dislocated his elbow, or broke it or somethin'." (You can say what you want about women--and I usually do--but say what you will, the fact remains: we don't usually injure each other, especially not while "playing".) I told LJ "When you said he was in the hospital, I thought maybe ol' girl's 'husband' beat the hell out of him. Or maybe ol' girl herself.")
As usual, I went upstairs almost as soon as they arrived; it was late, for one thing, and LJ has told me before how much he appreciates it that I leave the guys to their own devices and don't try to hang around. Plus I had a ton of laundry waiting to be folded, so I ducked up the steps and went into the bedroom.
I was watching TV, folding laundry, just puttering around; and suddenly I heard one voice downstairs get much louder, and the other two get correspondingly quieter.
"Who the fuck was THAT?" said the voice.
Pause. "I said, who the fuck was THAT who answered your phone?"
"Your what? Bitch, has you lost your muthafuckin mind? That's my crib. I pay for that shit, and ain't no way no other n****a is gonna be up in my shit, that I pay for......"
"Kisha! Stop talking....Obviously you ain't listenin' to me, because you keep sayin' that same....I said, stop talking! I'm over here, and this n***a come over there and come up in my shit, which I pay for, and answer your...."
"He's your WHAT???? Bitch, just let me get in this car--Oh, so he's your 'husband' now....Is you playin' me, Kisha? Is THAT it? "
"Okay, then--now I know. But just let me get up out of this crib here and get in that muthafuckin' car--and don't let me get there and find some other n***a over there, 'husband' or no husband--bitch, I will put my foot up your ASS!"
There was more, of course; the diatribe went on for a good twenty minutes, and at the end LJ came upstairs and told me that Marcus said to tell me that he was sorry for getting all loud like that in the house. I said to him, "Don't worry about THAT--and by the way, I'm sorry I ever compared you to your friends..."
He didn't get that, I don't think; he looked vaguely perplexed, but in a way I think he did get it, because he gave me that smile of his. And then I went downstairs and there was Marcus--the same man who had just sat there for the better part of half an hour, detailing the fifty-eleven ways he was going to beat hell out of this woman--here was Marcus, sitting here watching the game, seemingly content.
LJ told me the next night when I got home that we were going to have company--Marcus was coming by. "And he's gonna have a friend with him," was the oddly-delicate way he phrased it. Then, catching my quizzical look--"No, not the one he was yelling at last night..."
"I was gonna ask, would I know her from the foot up her ass?" I told him.
This whole episode made me question a lot of my beliefs. First things first: I don't believe in domestic violence. I've made it crystal-clear to every man I've ever dated that the first time they raise a hand to me, they better kill me right then and there--because I will fight them til I can't fight further, and then I'll bring the law. And I don't condone it even when it's against some OTHER woman, someone who's not me.
But here's the thing, see; there are some circumstances when it's understandable. Understandable, not excusable. And this was one of those times. When David found out about me and JP, he told me later that he'd followed me to the apartment and if he'd found me there, he would have beat the hell out of me. And while I still find that perfectly illustrative of his asshole propensities, I have to admit--I understand it. I can understand the rage of finding your partner with someone else--finding that you've been betrayed. Hell, I've BEEN there--the night I walked out into the living room and found CR peering at me from between Bertha's tree-trunk thighs, for one. So I can't condemn Marcus completely...especially since, to judge from the evidence, he didn't actually go and beat on the other female. (Though somewhere in the conversation, I got an impression that he HAD beat her in the past...)
And there's a harder question inherent here, as well.
I tried to think this situation through as though it were another man speaking--Tim, for example, or David, or some other white guy--and tried to imagine how I would react to hearing them say the same sort of thing. And oddly enough, I have to admit: I'd be much more repulsed, much less tolerant, if it was a white man.
I think that's because I have such contempt for 75% of them to begin with--I just seem to run into too many assholes like the guys who rode with me on the Red Line this afternoon, who were more than happy to flirt and charm some woman because she had a Wrigley Field employee pass around her neck and they thought they could get her to comp them in--but then one of those same guys wouldn't even stand up to let me out of the seat; he just moved his leg one bare little bit and assumed I'd squeeze past. I'm not saying I assume white guys are assholes just from the jump--but I will admit that I'm usually ready to interpret their least little rudeness or obnoxiousness as proof that they are assholes. Somehow I'm only that way with white men, though--and I'd like to say it's just because I've dealt with too much of their assholery and too many of their unfounded judgements based on how I look--but that doesn't explain it completely. I don't know what does.
This is a prime example of one of the following two propositions: either a)the world is a complicated place and every belief must be evaluated in shades of gray, or b) Gladys is a wishy-washy hypocrite. As of this moment, regarding this situation, I'd have to call it a tossup.
(An update, 6/6/04--LJ came home tonight and told me Marcus was in the hospital. Figuring the worst, I said "What the hell happened?" I thought he'd been shot, of course. LJ just laughed. "We were playin' around, boxing and wrestling and shit, and Marcus dislocated his elbow, or broke it or somethin'." (You can say what you want about women--and I usually do--but say what you will, the fact remains: we don't usually injure each other, especially not while "playing".) I told LJ "When you said he was in the hospital, I thought maybe ol' girl's 'husband' beat the hell out of him. Or maybe ol' girl herself.")
Friday, June 4, 2004
Kills Time Dead (Updated 6/6/04)
Note: The "Fishy" link described below, being Fishy in more ways than one, has been deactivated 6/6/04. Keep reading.
I really, really, really must stop reading Zorn's blog. Don't get me wrong--it's one of my favorite features about the Trib online-- but he keeps putting in those links to time-wasters, things like Pingu and the Orisinal games, and now this --Fishy! I'm sure these are lovely little distractions for a dull moment--for those who have willpower.
Apparently this is not a category of human into which I fall.
This game has absolutely destroyed my at-home productivity for the past three nights. It's addictive to the point of lunacy, and it's compounded by the lack of a "pause" feature--once you get your fish going, you'll ignore all other competing stimuli in the quest to keep the little bastard alive. (The other night we were in the living room, LJ watching a movie on the couch, and there came a knock at the door. I had a good fish in progress, and instead of springing up to answer the door--after all, I was closer to it, and he was sitting on our Man-Eating Sofa--the kind it's impossible to stand up from once you sit back--I actually said to him "I ain't gettin' that--I've got a fish going here!!" I'm lucky he's a patient man who already KNOWS I'm slightly odd.)
So far, my high score is a pitiful 2241.
Update, 6/6/04: DO NOT GO TO THIS SITE!!!! I have DE-linked "Fishy" because it installed beaucoup adware on my PC, which has caused me five days of trying to get rid of it and trying to figure out where the hell it all came from!! I'm a diligent techie--I run SpyRemover every week, in an effort to cleanse my PC of any crapware installed when LJ or his friends access some skeevy site--and suddenly, a day or two after its last run, my PC started spewing popups and my browser turned to molasses. I've spent five days alternately running spy-removal programs (incidentally, AdAware is WAY better than SpyRemover)and accusing LJ of having gone to some heinous porno site--which, of course, he denied. Apparently he was being truthful; I must remember to apologize to him.
I finally pinned it down to Fishy this afternoon. Stupid adware creators!!!! I loved that game.
I really, really, really must stop reading Zorn's blog. Don't get me wrong--it's one of my favorite features about the Trib online-- but he keeps putting in those links to time-wasters, things like Pingu and the Orisinal games, and now this --Fishy! I'm sure these are lovely little distractions for a dull moment--for those who have willpower.
Apparently this is not a category of human into which I fall.
This game has absolutely destroyed my at-home productivity for the past three nights. It's addictive to the point of lunacy, and it's compounded by the lack of a "pause" feature--once you get your fish going, you'll ignore all other competing stimuli in the quest to keep the little bastard alive. (The other night we were in the living room, LJ watching a movie on the couch, and there came a knock at the door. I had a good fish in progress, and instead of springing up to answer the door--after all, I was closer to it, and he was sitting on our Man-Eating Sofa--the kind it's impossible to stand up from once you sit back--I actually said to him "I ain't gettin' that--I've got a fish going here!!" I'm lucky he's a patient man who already KNOWS I'm slightly odd.)
So far, my high score is a pitiful 2241.
Update, 6/6/04: DO NOT GO TO THIS SITE!!!! I have DE-linked "Fishy" because it installed beaucoup adware on my PC, which has caused me five days of trying to get rid of it and trying to figure out where the hell it all came from!! I'm a diligent techie--I run SpyRemover every week, in an effort to cleanse my PC of any crapware installed when LJ or his friends access some skeevy site--and suddenly, a day or two after its last run, my PC started spewing popups and my browser turned to molasses. I've spent five days alternately running spy-removal programs (incidentally, AdAware is WAY better than SpyRemover)and accusing LJ of having gone to some heinous porno site--which, of course, he denied. Apparently he was being truthful; I must remember to apologize to him.
I finally pinned it down to Fishy this afternoon. Stupid adware creators!!!! I loved that game.
Thursday, June 3, 2004
Matt Rosenberg and Blogging
Having not actually heard Cosby's speech in context, I'm leaving THAT portion of this content alone. The point isn't what Cosby said or didn't say; the point is what Matt Rosenberg's opinion on blogs shows about his way of looking at the world.
"Matt Rosenberg on Bill Cosby & Blogging on National Review Online: "Enter the humble blogger. True, the percentage of Internet users who report they view blogs regularly is still low. But even then, we're talking some 31 million regular blog viewers. Admittedly, some blogs are about knitting, snow-boarding, or origami. Others are authored by navel-gazing college students, polyamorists, vegan anarchists, or self-declared alcoholics detailing each wretched night's debauch. But watch out for many of the rest. Their reach grows.
The Cosby story -- like others before it -- has shown that a news story can grow 'legs' thanks more to repackagers in the blogosphere than to 'legitimate' print and broadcast outlets.
--Freelance writer Matt Rosenberg is a freelance writer who hosts Rosenblog."
So in other words, Rosenberg's implication: "The only blogs whose existence truly matters are blogs not written by any of those groups mentioned--in short, blogs like mine."
What a self-congratulatory piece of crap. Apparently, his definition of an "unimportant" blog is "a blog specific to a certain person or group's interests"--and isn't it funny, how he includes only groups whose members tend to believe leftishly? "...polyamorists (and) vegan anarchists..."? I've seen plenty of blogs by "white separatists" or "NASCAR devotees" or "Christian housewives"....Why not include THOSE groups in that list??
"Oh, wait, I know!! :::waves hand wildly::: Pick me! Pick me!"
"Yes, you--the lesbian-looking fat girl in the middle of the third row...."
"Because it's EASIER to make fun of those OTHER people--
especially since the target audience for this article CLEARLY includes ONLY those wise enough to see those LIBERALS for what they really are--ratty, sinning, wool-over-the-eyes, unAmurrican snakes-in-the-grass!"
::::applause::::"Give that fat miscegenating lesbian-looking broad a cookie!!!"
See, this is the same sort of mind who values everything quantitatively--as long as it fits his worldview, that is. So the fact that many people read news-based blogs proves their value. However, the fact that many people listen to "pimp rap" (as his quoted writer so interestingly phrases it) just proves that the masses are idiots. So: If the masses like something, and I also like it, it proves that the thing I like has value. If the masses like something, and I -don't- like it--or the inverse--well, that proves that the masses don't know what they're talking about.
It must be really comforting to know that YOU are right, all the time, and the rest of the world is only right on those rare occasions when they agree with you. I'll have to try it sometime.
"Matt Rosenberg on Bill Cosby & Blogging on National Review Online: "Enter the humble blogger. True, the percentage of Internet users who report they view blogs regularly is still low. But even then, we're talking some 31 million regular blog viewers. Admittedly, some blogs are about knitting, snow-boarding, or origami. Others are authored by navel-gazing college students, polyamorists, vegan anarchists, or self-declared alcoholics detailing each wretched night's debauch. But watch out for many of the rest. Their reach grows.
The Cosby story -- like others before it -- has shown that a news story can grow 'legs' thanks more to repackagers in the blogosphere than to 'legitimate' print and broadcast outlets.
--Freelance writer Matt Rosenberg is a freelance writer who hosts Rosenblog."
So in other words, Rosenberg's implication: "The only blogs whose existence truly matters are blogs not written by any of those groups mentioned--in short, blogs like mine."
What a self-congratulatory piece of crap. Apparently, his definition of an "unimportant" blog is "a blog specific to a certain person or group's interests"--and isn't it funny, how he includes only groups whose members tend to believe leftishly? "...polyamorists (and) vegan anarchists..."? I've seen plenty of blogs by "white separatists" or "NASCAR devotees" or "Christian housewives"....Why not include THOSE groups in that list??
"Oh, wait, I know!! :::waves hand wildly::: Pick me! Pick me!"
"Yes, you--the lesbian-looking fat girl in the middle of the third row...."
"Because it's EASIER to make fun of those OTHER people--
especially since the target audience for this article CLEARLY includes ONLY those wise enough to see those LIBERALS for what they really are--ratty, sinning, wool-over-the-eyes, unAmurrican snakes-in-the-grass!"
::::applause::::"Give that fat miscegenating lesbian-looking broad a cookie!!!"
See, this is the same sort of mind who values everything quantitatively--as long as it fits his worldview, that is. So the fact that many people read news-based blogs proves their value. However, the fact that many people listen to "pimp rap" (as his quoted writer so interestingly phrases it) just proves that the masses are idiots. So: If the masses like something, and I also like it, it proves that the thing I like has value. If the masses like something, and I -don't- like it--or the inverse--well, that proves that the masses don't know what they're talking about.
It must be really comforting to know that YOU are right, all the time, and the rest of the world is only right on those rare occasions when they agree with you. I'll have to try it sometime.
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
Breakthrough, of Sorts
I left work late tonight--like nearly an hour late--and so I didn't get home til nearly 7, by the time I'd stopped to pick up chicken. (Apparently I'm a little more noticeable than I would have thought; when I walked into Uncle Remus, and the guy behind the counter asked me for my order, the girl who had just finished her shift recited it to him verbatim. She was close, too--normally I -do- get 8 wings, but I'd had a late lunch and so I only wanted 6.)
So I walked home, as usual, and when I turned the corner the block was pretty active, particularly if you counted the kids. Normally there are five or six; today it looked closer to twenty. As I opened the gate, a little knot of them were walking toward me, headed for the corner; and as I opened the gate I heard a little voice: "Hello..."
I looked up, pleasantly surprised--having just graduated from apartment life, where no one said anything unless they were hitting on me in the laundry room or needed some favor, I'm not yet used to people being sociable and nice to me--even kids. So I smiled, trying to figure out which one of the seven or so little ones had spoken. "Hi there," I said.
They were heading toward the corner, I think, maybe to the yard with the basketball hoop--but the woman who lives in the building that belongs to that yard was out on the walk, having one of her Moments. (A further portrait of this woman, whose name I don't yet know, may be attempted at some other time, but truthfully I'm not sure I'm up to the task; the best snapshot I can offer isn't mine, but comes from Shondra next door: "Girl, when she gets to drinkin' and smokin' that stuff, she get FOUL, and I mean FOUL. One night? She come out and start screamin' at that man who lives in there, her landlord, and she was cussin' him out, and then?" :::pause for effect::: "....she reach down the front of her pants and start wavin' her period in his face!!" Clearly, this woman has some big ol' capital-I Issues.) Anyway, Issue-Lady was on the walk, just completely acting the fool--I mean, pointing, gesturing, "motherfucker"-ing at the top of her voice, wagging her head like she was deep in a very serious argument, except there was nobody there. If I was a kid, I would have been scared to pass her; hell, I'm nearly 34 and _I_ wasn't even sure I wanted to risk walking through her sight-line!
So the kids stopped in front of Len and Phoebe's house, next door, and just milled around a little, waiting, as I walked up my front stairs.
Then--the little voice again. "You got kids?"
This time I could pick out the owner of the voice, a little girl maybe eight or nine, with pigtails--the front of the group, its clear leader despite being younger than a couple of the others. "Nope, no kids..."
"You got any nieces and nephews?"
"No, sorry--just a couple of bad little kitty-cats..."
"Is your husband home?" (I'm not sure whether the inherent assumption here comes from the innocence of children--any man who lives with a woman MUST be her "husband"--or from the moral stance of the adults--even if they're NOT married, we're gonna CALL him the "husband" so the kids don't get the wrong message. Either way, I think I'd better stick with the accepted terminology--I'd prefer not to offend the neighborhood mores just yet!)
"No, he's out." I'd gotten the front door open. "I'll see you all later..." I said, and closed the door.
I'd just sat down to eat my chicken when there was a knock on the door. When I went to answer it, there was no one there--but Pigtails, a smaller girl, and a slightly bigger boy, were standing suspiciouly close to the front gate.
I made a very big production of looking to both sides of the door--which was entirely unnecessary, since the view of the porch is clear even from inside the house. Finally I looked at them and said, "Did someone knock on my door???"
The boy--in a gesture I remember as entirely typical for boys of that age--pointed at Pigtails. "Her..." he said accusingly.
"Nuh-uh!" she said. They opened up the gate, and a small squadron followed them into the front yard and up the steps.
"Is this a house?"
"You live here by yourself?"
"Can we see the kitties?"
At this point, Whitey came sauntering up to the front door, with a wary look. Immediately, seven or eight little hands reached for him.
"Is he gonna bite me?"
"What's his name?"
"Where's the other one?"
Whitey was getting very nervous, all those hands and little voices, and he finally decided that "out" was the best direction. So he hopped over one little arm, to a chorus of yelps and one decidedly-terrified shriek, from a little boy of about seven. The shriek set off a chorus of imitators, Whitey sprang back into the house, and the little boy shot down the stairs like the fires of hell were at his back--if the fires of hell could make you giggle, that is.
I coaxed them both back--the little boy to the porch, the cat back to the door--and said to the crowd "Okay, so what are all your names?"
There was a Monique and a LaRon and a Jasmine (who was about two and had recently had a very close encounter with a purple popsicle), and a Tamika and...well, that was where my short-term memory quits. The boy in the front, I remember because he was quite incensed that I didn't already know it..."YOU know MEEEE," he said. I knew him by sight because he stays with Len and Phoebe; now I know not only his name, but his nickname (Bug) and the fact that he's quite the practical joker.
This fact I discovered when, following Whitey's next retreat into the house, the crowd decided it would be a good idea to pursue him. En masse, they moved in--some through the hallway, some toward the kitchen, some into the living room to check out LJ's PlayStation.
Apparently the grown folks were watching from their assorted porches, and when the kids came in, the chorus of mama's voices began--"Tamika! Come out of there, and bring your sister..." (I can't say I blame them. If there was a total stranger living on my block, in questionable circumstances, and my kids went over there and disappeared into the house for a minute--well, I suppose I'd worry too.) When I finished herding them out the door, I noticed the mob seemed a little thin--and when I turned around, there was Bug, hiding behind my bookcase with a big grin.
I finally got everyone out of the house and told them I had to go eat my dinner, but I have to admit I was charmed. Kids are like the advance team for the adults; they're the ones who carry the info back home that the strange white lady, the one who never comes outside and doesn't talk much to anybody, really isn't that scary. I know I have to go out of the way to get to know more people on the block; once I get the porch painted, I'm going to get myself a chair and sit out there at night, get to know people a little more. I mean, that was the whole reason I wanted a house in this neighborhood in the first place...well, one of the reasons, anyway. I wanted to put down roots, develop some ties--but for eight months now I've been hiding in the house, except for the few minutes when I'm walking to or from the bus stop. When I was out digging up the grass, every time I went out there, someone always stopped to ask me "Do you live here?" I think the only ones who knew I was here were Phoebe and Len and Shondra, and the guys on the corner--whose names I -also- still don't know.
It's becoming clear that the strategies which worked well for me in my apartment-living days aren't going to be advantageous anymore. I have to train myself out of this annoying shyness, if I have any hope of being accepted here. But for a few minutes, when the kids were crowded onto my porch asking questions and scaring White Cat, I felt like I might yet fit in.
So I walked home, as usual, and when I turned the corner the block was pretty active, particularly if you counted the kids. Normally there are five or six; today it looked closer to twenty. As I opened the gate, a little knot of them were walking toward me, headed for the corner; and as I opened the gate I heard a little voice: "Hello..."
I looked up, pleasantly surprised--having just graduated from apartment life, where no one said anything unless they were hitting on me in the laundry room or needed some favor, I'm not yet used to people being sociable and nice to me--even kids. So I smiled, trying to figure out which one of the seven or so little ones had spoken. "Hi there," I said.
They were heading toward the corner, I think, maybe to the yard with the basketball hoop--but the woman who lives in the building that belongs to that yard was out on the walk, having one of her Moments. (A further portrait of this woman, whose name I don't yet know, may be attempted at some other time, but truthfully I'm not sure I'm up to the task; the best snapshot I can offer isn't mine, but comes from Shondra next door: "Girl, when she gets to drinkin' and smokin' that stuff, she get FOUL, and I mean FOUL. One night? She come out and start screamin' at that man who lives in there, her landlord, and she was cussin' him out, and then?" :::pause for effect::: "....she reach down the front of her pants and start wavin' her period in his face!!" Clearly, this woman has some big ol' capital-I Issues.) Anyway, Issue-Lady was on the walk, just completely acting the fool--I mean, pointing, gesturing, "motherfucker"-ing at the top of her voice, wagging her head like she was deep in a very serious argument, except there was nobody there. If I was a kid, I would have been scared to pass her; hell, I'm nearly 34 and _I_ wasn't even sure I wanted to risk walking through her sight-line!
So the kids stopped in front of Len and Phoebe's house, next door, and just milled around a little, waiting, as I walked up my front stairs.
Then--the little voice again. "You got kids?"
This time I could pick out the owner of the voice, a little girl maybe eight or nine, with pigtails--the front of the group, its clear leader despite being younger than a couple of the others. "Nope, no kids..."
"You got any nieces and nephews?"
"No, sorry--just a couple of bad little kitty-cats..."
"Is your husband home?" (I'm not sure whether the inherent assumption here comes from the innocence of children--any man who lives with a woman MUST be her "husband"--or from the moral stance of the adults--even if they're NOT married, we're gonna CALL him the "husband" so the kids don't get the wrong message. Either way, I think I'd better stick with the accepted terminology--I'd prefer not to offend the neighborhood mores just yet!)
"No, he's out." I'd gotten the front door open. "I'll see you all later..." I said, and closed the door.
I'd just sat down to eat my chicken when there was a knock on the door. When I went to answer it, there was no one there--but Pigtails, a smaller girl, and a slightly bigger boy, were standing suspiciouly close to the front gate.
I made a very big production of looking to both sides of the door--which was entirely unnecessary, since the view of the porch is clear even from inside the house. Finally I looked at them and said, "Did someone knock on my door???"
The boy--in a gesture I remember as entirely typical for boys of that age--pointed at Pigtails. "Her..." he said accusingly.
"Nuh-uh!" she said. They opened up the gate, and a small squadron followed them into the front yard and up the steps.
"Is this a house?"
"You live here by yourself?"
"Can we see the kitties?"
At this point, Whitey came sauntering up to the front door, with a wary look. Immediately, seven or eight little hands reached for him.
"Is he gonna bite me?"
"What's his name?"
"Where's the other one?"
Whitey was getting very nervous, all those hands and little voices, and he finally decided that "out" was the best direction. So he hopped over one little arm, to a chorus of yelps and one decidedly-terrified shriek, from a little boy of about seven. The shriek set off a chorus of imitators, Whitey sprang back into the house, and the little boy shot down the stairs like the fires of hell were at his back--if the fires of hell could make you giggle, that is.
I coaxed them both back--the little boy to the porch, the cat back to the door--and said to the crowd "Okay, so what are all your names?"
There was a Monique and a LaRon and a Jasmine (who was about two and had recently had a very close encounter with a purple popsicle), and a Tamika and...well, that was where my short-term memory quits. The boy in the front, I remember because he was quite incensed that I didn't already know it..."YOU know MEEEE," he said. I knew him by sight because he stays with Len and Phoebe; now I know not only his name, but his nickname (Bug) and the fact that he's quite the practical joker.
This fact I discovered when, following Whitey's next retreat into the house, the crowd decided it would be a good idea to pursue him. En masse, they moved in--some through the hallway, some toward the kitchen, some into the living room to check out LJ's PlayStation.
Apparently the grown folks were watching from their assorted porches, and when the kids came in, the chorus of mama's voices began--"Tamika! Come out of there, and bring your sister..." (I can't say I blame them. If there was a total stranger living on my block, in questionable circumstances, and my kids went over there and disappeared into the house for a minute--well, I suppose I'd worry too.) When I finished herding them out the door, I noticed the mob seemed a little thin--and when I turned around, there was Bug, hiding behind my bookcase with a big grin.
I finally got everyone out of the house and told them I had to go eat my dinner, but I have to admit I was charmed. Kids are like the advance team for the adults; they're the ones who carry the info back home that the strange white lady, the one who never comes outside and doesn't talk much to anybody, really isn't that scary. I know I have to go out of the way to get to know more people on the block; once I get the porch painted, I'm going to get myself a chair and sit out there at night, get to know people a little more. I mean, that was the whole reason I wanted a house in this neighborhood in the first place...well, one of the reasons, anyway. I wanted to put down roots, develop some ties--but for eight months now I've been hiding in the house, except for the few minutes when I'm walking to or from the bus stop. When I was out digging up the grass, every time I went out there, someone always stopped to ask me "Do you live here?" I think the only ones who knew I was here were Phoebe and Len and Shondra, and the guys on the corner--whose names I -also- still don't know.
It's becoming clear that the strategies which worked well for me in my apartment-living days aren't going to be advantageous anymore. I have to train myself out of this annoying shyness, if I have any hope of being accepted here. But for a few minutes, when the kids were crowded onto my porch asking questions and scaring White Cat, I felt like I might yet fit in.
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