Friends Don't Let Friends Make Waffles

So, feeling much better today, I decided tonight to fix myself one of those self-indulgent breakfast-for-dinner dinners that every child dreams of. I plugged in the waffle iron, beat milk and eggs in a bowl, and went for the flour.



I keep my flour in a big square Tupperware-type bin, just big enough to hold the contents of a five-pound bag. It sits--because I have no cabinets (don't ask)--on a shelf with the rest of my canned goods and staples.



I grabbed the bin by the lip, and somehow it got away from me. And somehow in the process of getting away from me, the lid came off. And--of course--the bin was brim-full. (These sort of things never seem to happen when the bin is 3/4 empty, do they.)



Did I mention that I was wearing a fleece sweatshirt and fleece slippers at the time?



I now look like the Cocaine Princess. And that's AFTER beating both the slippers and the shirt.



And we won't even discuss the condition of my kitchen--even AFTER sweeping, mopping, sponging, and blotting.



The waffles were good, though.

So This Is Getting Ridiculous

I am now sick for a record-setting FOURTH day.



I don't get sick like this. The last time I remember being sick like this was back in college. In fact, Firefly and I were BOTH sick, so we lay in our bunk-beds and whimpered pitifully (in that case, it was Incapacitating Death-Flu, not Lung-Hacking Malarial Plague or whateverthefuck this is) and begged our friends down the hall to take my car and bring back some ginger ale.



At the moment, I'd settle for Robitussin, even though THAT can set off a really entertaining pharmaceutical interaction. (Methadone + Robitussin= Gladys Gets Really Goofy and Then Sleeps For Thirteen Hours.) Instead I'm sitting here drinking gallons of hot tea and watching Seth Green on Sesame Street. And you know, Seth Green would be kinda hot, if he was taller.



Meanwhile, work has called five times, for issues as varied as "could you move those records?" to (ten minutes later) "have you moved those records yet?" and then "Where is Samuel's problem box?" (Samuel's problem box is approximately five feet to the left of where it was before. For some reason, this was a problem that merited forcing me to unglue my tonsils from the back of my trachea.)



There's nothing terribly delicious to eat here, either. One of those green-and-black, warm-blooded, fire-starting Popsicles would go down well right about now.

Free To A Good Home

Would anyone like a lung?



It's a lovely shade of pink. I think it's a right one, but I don't know if that's "right, facing ME" or "right, facing AWAY".



I just hacked it up about ten minutes ago, and now it looks lonesome.



Also, the cats are scaring it.



I'll throw in a free bag of Purina Lung Chow.

Wacky Shit You Probably Didn't Know About Popsicles

Okay. So here I am at Place Where I Work--yes, I'm blogging from work because...well, you'll see in a moment.



In the morning I have a set routine of things to read. Some of them are relevant to my job; others (coff--televisionwithoutpity) are not. Eric Zorn's Notebook is a little of each. And today he had a link to "20 Questions".



I ran through a few less-common items: an eggplant, sour cream, hydrogen peroxide, a mailing label--and then I tried a popsicle.



At the end of each session, it gives you the other questions it COULD have asked about the item, grouped under the heading of "uncommon knowledge about _______" Here's the results for "popsicle":



Uncommon Knowledge about a popsicle:



Is it green or black? I say Probably. (A BLACK popsicle? That kinda makes me WANT to eat the black jellybeans.)

Is it made of crystals? I say Probably.

Does it have lots of buttons? I say Yes. (And I say: WTF???)

Is it a carnivore? I say Probably. (That must be the dreaded Popasaurus Rex flavor. )

Does it have cash value? I say No.. (Except in the barter system of the Quiescently Frozen Land. There, it is more precious than gold.)

Does it bounce? I say Probably. (Um..... I know a bunch of four-year-olds who would say different.)

Does it hop? I say Probably. (Man, what are YOU smoking?)

Is it an insect? I say Probably. (Now, I know the purity standards for food are a little lax here in the States, but aren't you being a little excessive?)

Do you use it when it rains? I say Probably. (Let a popsicle be your umbrella...and you'll have sticky purple hair.)

Is it green? I say Yes.

Can it be measured? I say No. (So all you popsicle-measurers out there are shit outta luck.)

Does it have good vision? I say Probably. (If you can't see it, it can't see you.)

Is it very large? I say Probably. (Compared to one of those piddly little ice-cream sandwiches, perhaps.)

Is it a warm-blooded animal? I say Probably. (If it was warm-blooded, wouldn't it melt itself?)

Does it have lights on it? I say Yes. (So you can see it before it sees you, is my guess. Safety first!)

Can it be used to start fires? I say Yes. (I'd pay to watch that....)



THEN it gives a list of "similar objects". For "popsicle", these are its similar items:



a bottle of pop, a bloody mary, ice cream, gazpacho (cold soup), yogurt, a can of soda, lemonade, a milkshake, a TV dinner, a fajita, custard, lip gloss.



20 Questions also was kind enough to inform me that if I was inclined to try to stump it, "celeriac" would be a good item to choose. (Also, it doesn't seem to know what quinoa is.)

Spitting Out Body Parts, Part 2

So now I am sick.



Fortunately, THIS is just a nasty cold or something--I'm not congested or sneezing or anything, but I have a pretty good fever--and every time I take a deep breath I start coughing. It's like my airway seems to be annoyed...much like the rest of me.



This is what I get for eating his dinner, I guess. Because this morning, after coming home at 10 AM from wherever he was last night (the man never learns!), he came into the bedroom at 11:00 to let me know that he and his buddy were leaving.



"You that tired?" he said, when I failed to budge.



"Nah--I'm sick," I told him.



"Oh," he said. He paused for a moment to ponder. "You mean like, 'stay-away-from-me' sick?"



This is where thinking on my feet would be a really good trait to have--I feel like George Costanza. Because there were two perfectly good retorts here, neither of which I used:



1.) "No--as in 'be exceptionally nice to me and coddle me just a little bit' sick. Is that a kind of sick with which you're familiar, buttmunch??"



or



2.) "Oh, you mean there's a way you could actually manage to stay MORE away from me?"



This is where the whole machismo bit starts to wear a wee bit thin, boys and girls.



And yes, I'm feeling neglected and un-adored, but the main reason I'm cranky right now has nothing at all to do with LJ:



There's no way I could call off work tomorrow. Even if I felt like ass on a plate, I still have to go in, 100+-degree fever and all. And I can't begin to tell you how much I think that blows.

Don't Drink The Kool-Aid, Part 6

I love my man. Truly I do.



But whatever it is he drank last night, I would like to know its name...



...so I can avoid it like the plague.



That man was puking out BODY PARTS this afternoon, from the sound of things.



I did feel sympathy for him, truly I did...



...but I also ate his dinner.

(Hey, he wasn't gonna be needing it.)

Gladys C., Countercultural Attache

So, as I mentioned yesterday, we have some anti-Wiccan-ness going around the office.



And I swear, I was going to just drop the whole thing. But this morning Stella brought it up again, and finally I just couldn't take it anymore. She said something about "Wiccans or witches or whatever she is that wears all that black nail polish and pink hair..." and I finally couldn't keep my mouth shut.



"You know, it sounds like you're describing two different things. There's Wiccans, and then there's Goths--they're the ones with the black clothes and the music."



"What's the difference?" Stella asked. "Every time her mother mentions 'Wiccan', somewhere later in the same sentence she mentions 'Goth'. So aren't they the same?"



There were so many things wrong here that I wasn't even sure where to begin. But one thing is for sure: no WONDER Tracy has issues. If she's doing something that is upsetting her mother, and her mother doesn't even take the time to get her terminology straight before she ties her ass into a knot about it--yeah, obviously ol' Moms is really connected to her daughter's life, you know?



With that in mind, I began my first Counterculture 101 class.



"Wicca is a belief system or a religion. Goth is a lifestyle. Wicca has more to do with what you believe, and Goth has more to do with how you present yourself. Wiccans--REAL Wiccans, which is a necessary qualifier because so many people CLAIM to be Wiccan without having the slightest grasp of what Wicca supposedly really is--REAL Wiccans have a more positive outlook on life. Goths are more known for their despair, their depression, their unhappy outlook. It's very rare to find a true Wiccan who is also a Goth. They may dress alike, sorta, but their outlooks just don't mesh.



"Now, there are people who CLAIM to be Wiccans, but they're really what are more commonly perceived when you say somebody is a 'witch'. They're kinda the 'bad witch' vs. the Wiccan 'good witch', if you want to see it that way. They're more likely to have a darker outlook that would mesh better with Goth-ness."



"So do Wiccans believe in God?" Stella asked.



"They believe in a god--actually, goddess--but not 'THE' God."



She seemed slightly comforted by the fact that at least they believed in SOMETHING. "So they don't worship Satan or anything like that."



"No, not Wiccans. Wiccans are more into the earth-based beliefs--again, REAL Wiccans." I digressed here to tell her about the Trib article with the "parking-space Wiccan", and how it made Pepsi come out my nose. "Now, the so-called 'witches'--there are some of THEM who claim to worship Satan, yeah...not all, but some."



"Well," she said. "This is what I'm hearing...." And she went on to tell me the story: apparently this girl is involved with a boy who is a Goth, whose parents are ALSO Goths, and whose parents apparently spend all their time hanging out with their son and this girl.



Now, call it Goth, call it Wiccan, call it a commune, or call it Bob--something there just ain't right, if you ask me. Adults are adults; kids are kids. And at 15, kids should be making their break from adults. Something is DEFINITELY fishy about this whole situation--Wicca, Goth, and Marilyn Manson sound like the least of the problems in this picture.



The mom says the girl refuses to spend any time with anyone other than this family and the few other kids the boy's parents have sorta gathered this way. Tracy says they're "the only ones who accept her and understand her completely." Apparently there are two girls in this group who made suicide attempts, and apparently the parents of this boy were justifying the attempts--around the kids!--with the whole "it's a cold, cruel world, and you gotta do what you gotta do" theory. Meanwhile, Tracy is defending the Columbine killers in arguments, saying that she understands why they would do what they did; her grades are falling, and she says she doesn't care about anything else, even the things she used to enjoy.



Now, call me crazy, but does anyone else here think it sounds like maybe Tracy is depressed, and that all this darkness and despair is a symptom? But somehow everyone's blaming the depression on the people she's hanging around with, rather than considering that she's looking for acceptance and these are the people she's found--people who seem to accept her even though she isn't all cheery and perky?



And here's why that worries me. A lot of times, sketchy adults latch onto kids who ARE depressed, who are dealing with things too big for them to handle--kids who need someone to accept them--and with the acceptance comes an introduction to whatever skeevy stuff the adults are into. I'm wondering if that's what's going on here.



It sounds to me like the parents are either a) into something sketchy themselves--some weird coven-type fantasy where they're "recruiting" kids, for lack of a better term; or b) extremely immature themselves, and trying to be "cool" parents by manifesting the same attitudes they see their son manifesting. Or c)--and c) is what scares me for Tracy's sake--something even worse. Either way, as I said: something doesn't sound right.



I did mention to Stella, though, that the "telephone" effect may be in play here: Stella is getting her information from the mom, who's getting it second- or third-hand herself. So there may be other distortions here as well.



I don't even know this family. I just couldn't listen to the distortions anymore. People are so facile with their terminology, and it really fucks up any hope of tolerance when you're conflating the Earth Goddess with the so-called "Trenchcoat Mafia" (another Columbine myth, incidentally). If you're going to judge people, at least get a handle on what it is you're judging. For fuck's sake, that's why there's Google! Two million search results, and though you're claiming your kid is into this, you can't even be bothered to check a couple of them out?



As for Tracy...I'm starting to agree with Stella that there could be cause to worry here. Not that their worry will likely do any good, since it's entirely misdirected...the adults in her life seem to be worrying about the symptoms rather than the disease, which sounds less like "fringe beliefs" and more like "a textbook case of depression".



But at least I think I acquitted the Wiccans.