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Merry Christmas to me. Forget everyone else. Next Christmas I'm going to pretend I'm not home. I'm going to see how long that lasts. I have too much family. I need to shave a bit off. I can't figure out where to put them all...they take up so much space. Space that I need to fill with cocktails and witty poltical jokes, and gossip about who's dating who. I need that space for frivolous self-involved things. But Christmas forces me to be flexible and I don't like being flexible. It's too exhausting.
I tell you what helps, though. Presents. Glorious presents. Something about ripping open paper, none of this gift bag nonsense, but ripping open and truly wasting hoardes of colorful wrapping paper...there's just nothing that can compare. The sheer excess of it all truly delights me, like the window of a candy store to a little brat. Like Las Vegas to the middle class.
I can't stop singing Christmas songs. It's like a sickness. I'm not merry or drunk off the nog. I'm not an over-decorator, I don't have a tree. I don't get it. I can't stop singing the stupid songs. Is it because I have all my shopping done a whole week before Christmas? Is it because my headband is too tight and it's squeezing my brain? The possibilities are endless. I just can't imagine. Perhaps the songs have subliminal messages that say "sing me or I'll eat your children". Yes, that must be it.
What the fuck is the point of a paper towel company whose paper towels do not tear at the perforated edge? I am confounded by this. This has become my own personal symbolic proof that America is fucked.
My step-dad had a VCR for over ten years. It was silver and heavy and the size of a record player, but it worked for TEN years. I've had my DVD player for 2 years and it's starting to sound like a bleating lamb when I try to play a disc. Lambs bleat, right? Anyway, it's cool looking and silver and has lots of pretty flashy lights, but what does that matter if it's going to end up in a landfill within two years? Aren't we supposed to be reducing waste at this point in history? With all this recycling, why are companies making big heavy plastic pieces of shit that can't be gotten rid of any other way than dumping it within two years of purchase? I know the answer to this is "money", but it pisses me off all the same.
My main issue with all of this is that the system was invented by men. Stupid, silly, illogical men. The same men that take you out on a date...seem to really like you...email that they liked you...and then never call again. They are the reason for paper towels that don't tear and landfills overflowing with wasted DVD players. If women were in charge, everything would be re-usable and smell like lavender.
Life changing events. They're so...life changing. I resent them for that. It's not fair. You have a path, and it's a wonderful path and then there's a life changing event and totally fucks up the path. Who's in charge of that? Who can I send my letter of complaint to? What can be done?
When you get dumped, you feel like you've walked through some door into a world that looks exactly like your own but some how, it's slightly askew. Nothing is where you thought you put it. You don't know what to do with yourself at odd times. You follow all your same rituals, but something is missing and at some point in the day, you stop and wait to figure out what comes next because there's an empty space. You hear something important and go to repeat it and then you stop and realize you have no one to repeat it to. I suppose the feeling is the same whichever side of the drama you were on. But it feels more vibrant being the dumpee, I'd say. You haven't prepared yourself for those lost moments. You have no pre-planned ways of filling them. And so your life changes.
I assume the reasonable thing would be to believe that little by little, you find ways to fill those moments, or people to tell those important tidbits to and before you know it you're back on the right side of the door.
At least that's how I hope it works. Right now that door seems to be stuck...like maybe there's a chair under the knob. And I can't find my keys. They're not where I put them.
I've returned to Chuck E. Cheese after a 22 year absence. 22 years...the first 5 or so consisting of my sister and I BEGGING to be taken there but Daddy said the pizza was gross and called it Yuckie Cheese. As if it was EVER about the pizza. So I went back with a friend and her two year old. It was a Friday night and I had worked almost 55 hours that week. All I wanted was to sit and eat and decompress and let them go play. The place is insane, it was packed to the gills of poorly dressed adults and kids with runny noses and glazed eyes. I refuse to believe the place doesn't get lawsuits as frequently as the Archdiocese of Portland.
Big kids were literally walking on smaller kids, kicking them off of gyrating helicopters and stealing their turns on video games. I saw a grown woman sucking her thumb. Sucking her thumb. I saw a woman sobbing in joy at the sight of her suprise birthday cake for her suprise 24th birthday party...at Chuck E. Cheese! My friends would be toast if they did that to me.
But the most disturbing...of the many many disturbing things I witnessed that night...was the man with a gun. He was a tall slender man with his wife, a small group, and his two children, a blond boy of about 7 and a little girl who couldn't be more than 2 or three. He was wearing cowboy boots, tight black jeans, a white turtleneck, and a leather vest that was a size or two too small, and a gun in a holster on his hip. A GUN in a holster on his hip. There was no uniform, no badge, no indication that he should be carrying such a thing. We noticed it when he was tossing his little girl into the air. I just have one question. Who the fuck let this man into Chuck E. Cheese with a gun! How is that allowed?
Granted, you get a stamp on your hand to prove you had a kid with you so you can't leave without a kid (though you could probably just go shopping for one with the most pleasant personality and saunter on out the door with them 'cause, hey, you have a stamp and so do they! They must belong to you! There are a few rules posted about where you can and cannot wear shoes, how many refills you can get of pop, but nothing about bringing weapons into a children's playplace.
So after a 22 year absence, I returned to the place of childhood mystery. The mythical land filled with fun and adventure of epic porportions. The place where the childlike empress sits in the Ivory Tower and beats gophers over the head with a mallot. It's hard to admit it when your parents are right. What the hell is Chuck, anyway? A rat?
This show Greys Anatomy is stupid. What happened to Scrubs? Did Scrubs get cancelled? I hope not. Cause if I'm forced to watch beautiful people cutting other beautiful people open and suspend my disbelief that they just threw on scrubs but then meticulously applied expensive and tastefully dramatic make up, I want them to at least be funny.
So it's been a while since I've written on this thing. Since then, New Orleans has drowned, Houston has secured yes votes for highway improvement ballot measures for the next decade and Kashmir has been swallowed up by the ground. I think someone is trying to tell us something. Not sure what, though. These natural disasters are so hard to read. The 700 Club always seems to think they can translate. I disagree with them on a regular basis. I dislike television programs with numbers in the title.
Today is the end of August. The weather tells me so. It's like 65 degrees outside. This is horseshit, this Oregon Summer. Anyways. I wonder what the White House is like while the President is on vacation. Is it more relaxed and functional since there isn't the constant need to re-explain everything and update the President on how people are finally realizing how idiotic he is through poll numbers? I bet Scott Mclellan stops stuttering all together. Does Condi bother to curl her hair? Does Rumsfield...well, I don't think he even notices. TUMS and Rolaid sales probably go down in the area. 3 syllable words get used again. French fries are openly eaten. Or perhaps not. Where is Rove? Is Rove on vacation too? Or is he still in the mansion with his beady little eyes carefully montoring what everyone says and does? Is that why Bush feels so comfortable taking vacations? Because his pit bull stays behind to guard the junk heap? French fries still have to be stuffed down within the confines of the broom closet adjacent to the China Room? Here's a thought...maybe Rove sends Bush on vacation to throw everyone off so he can finish writing his autobiography of the days when he had the power to send the President on vacation. This is a mystery worthy of Hercule Poirot
I went camping recently and came to the realization that I had perhaps spent too much time in the city. I was siting in a folding chair, having a berry flavored beverage, looking around at the natural wonders, etc. and then reached over and pulled a weed out of the ground. I went camping and tried to weed the forest. How messed up is that? Who does that, I mean really. I have no defense, but to say that they were those really annoying long green stemmed ones with the little yellow flowers on top. They drive me nuts. I guess knowing they were permeating what I considered to be untouched beauty was too much to bear and I had to take action. Or, I'm anal. Hard to decide which.
So I won't be doing that anymore. Camping, I mean.
The northwest is considered by some to be a kind of green thumb Garden of Eden. Today is June 28th and the sky hasn't changed from gray to blue once. Yesterday it rained all day. Apparently, one may not use a lawnmower in the rain. I find this intolerable. What kind of geographical excludism is this? I should sue. Or write a letter. How do people engage in the proper level of lawn care in other wet locals? Especially since rain makes things grow like they've been injected with steroids. How hard can it be in this day and age to give something back to the poor, overfed underexercised northwesterners who don't get to see the sun?
Anyways, I saw some tourists the other day and that cracked me up. Summer time comes and it's time to plan a vacation...where to go, where to go...Oregon! The land of the beaver and the blueberry. I don't know that I've ever seen a beaver actually. No non-football playing beavers anyway. And while you're here, before the water soaks through your hiking boots and makes your socks all moist and uncomfortably stuck to your feet...you should try to walk outside a little bit because things are oh-so-green!
Our area of the country is known for ONE type of cuisine...and that is salmon. If you don't like salmon then your stupid and you will starve.
We're also known for our hypocrisy, as the only state that voted for both Kerry and an amendment to ban gay marriage (and thereby equal rights) forever. What does blue and red make together? Ah yes, we're a purple state.
And we're known for our exceptionally bad basketball team, the Blazers. The team where they get more press from their drug busts than their playing.
We DO have some great bands from here. But they're easier to see in other cities.
That being said, I still don't' know what to do about mowing the grass in the rain.
Today I'm wearing monkey shoes in protest. I'm protesting Scientology, George Lucas, platform shoes, non-payday Fridays, and puns. All together. At once. Collectively. Because they all make me equally angry.
I'm done being angry at the worthwhile stuff, 'cause there's really nothing you can do about it, but everytime I hear a pun escape from someone's mouth I can just slap them.
If I read about Scientology in the paper, I can wrinkle it up into a ball and set it on fire, then put it in my Weber grill under some coals and cook burgers on it.
If I see George Lucas' ewoky face on television I can quickly turn it off, throw the remote across the living room, call Comcast and cancel my basic cable eliminating all reception. I'll even cancel the TiVo, I'm so angry.
I will call in sick on all non-payday Fridays. And each time I call, it will be with something deadly and/or contagious like the Consumption or Typhoid.
As for platform shoes, I have one word for you...chainsaw.
And my monkey shoes will sparkle and shine with glee.
Or, I can calm the hell down with a nice cup of tea.
Ahh, the wonderful world of public transport. Supposedly each bus is keeping 245 cars off the road or some such nonsense. I don't buy it...too many people are afraid of the crazies to deal with public transport. And too many people like their small man complex SUVs to even want to have to TRY to deal with public transport...high gas prices be damned. I saw a guy on the local news once that said, "Hey, as long as I can afford the gas, why shouldn't I get to drive as big a car as I want?". That guy is missing the bigger picture, and probably a good portion of the average person's brain mass designated to the use of common sense. Selfish American.
However, for all my self-righteous brouhaha, I got really angry at the public transit system this morning. Almost enough to go get my non-fuel effiecient, non-emissions tested, hippie Volvo and drive it the mile and a half into the city and use my lunch money for parking. But I didn't. Why this urge to move to the dark side? Oh god, I just made a Star Wars reference. The freaking bus left me. Was I late to the bus stop? No. Was I hiding behind a tree? No. Was the bus driver just an asshole. YES. So he passes me and stops at a red light. I figure, I can make it, and try to run to the next stop before the light changes. Right before I get there the light changes and the asshole roars off. Where the hell does he have to be? Is it urgent that he get to the end of his route so that he can turn around and come back in time to pass all his other stops early to screw over the afternoon riders? Is this what shall be forever known as bus driver's glee? The definition being the act of bus stop assholishness?
Now with all the drama going on in the world currently, do I have any right to be so TO'd? Oh god, a Napoleon Dynamite reference. The answer my friends, is yes, I flippin' do. Why is that? Because I'm taking nasty ass public transport with the crazies and the smellies, and the seats covered in questionable substances and the old lady with the rolling cart and the white dreadlocks so high I'm convinced there are birds nesting somewhere within. She must ride the bus 20 times in a day, back and forth aross the bridge, and she's ruining my life! Displacement? Maybe.
I saw a picture of Condoleeza Rice's hair in the New York Times this morning. What's amazing here is not that I read the New York Times, cause I don't really...I just like Maureen O'Dowd's op-ed pieces; what IS amazing is how much nicer and less like she stole Rick Moranis' helmet from Spaceballs Condi looks with her hair all curled under instead of flipping out in an eerily unmovable way. Of course she's still an idiot. Just because she FINALLY paid attention to the considerable free fashion advice permeating such media outlets as the E Entertainment network, VH1 and Bravo doesn't make the fact that she's giving a speech in Saudi Arabia enouraging the country to jump on the equality of women bandwagon any less stupid. Here she is in a country where women are still set on fire for disobeying their menfolk and it doesn't occur to her that they might get a little insulted at being told BY a woman how THEY should be treating women. Yeah, men are traditionally so accepting of critcism from the opposite sex. And since lectures from American government officials have gotten us so far in the Middle East in the past, I'm sure we'll see women in the Saudi voting booths in no time. Please note sarcasm.
Next time...what the hell is with pearl necklaces? Can you not live or work in Washington as a woman if you do not own one? Is a First Lady only respected if she's seen wearing a strand in public? Do they both sleep and bathe with them on until they leave Washington? Why is it that pearl necklaces transcend political affiliations and clashing value systems in a way that nothing else can?
