Whatever's in my head during the second cup of coffee.
The often less-than-thrilling thoughts and adventures of UALabGeek and Lori-Fred in Little Egypt.
There's a reason today is the day for posting our favorite things. Apparently it's also the 48th anniversary of the Broadway opening of "The Sound of Music" -- which, coincidentally, is on my long list of favorite things. I have many fond memories of the movie, not the least of which is the story about how my big sister smashed in the front bumper of my dad's brand new VW bug.
My sister had a brand new driver's license and the Catalina Theater was showing the brand new Julie Andrews movie. In order to be allowed to use our dad's car, she was forced to take me along with a couple of her real friends to see it. After the movie we piled in the bug and headed for the parking lot exit with my sister exuberantly singing "Climb Every Mountain" at the top of her lungs ... and that's when she plowed into the car stopped at the parking lot exit. We fabricated a huge whopper to tell my parents, and it was at least 20 years before we told them the truth on one of those great days you get to have with your parents when you're all grown up and can smoke and drink and confess things to them on their patio by the pool.
And so, with nostalgic memories of that evening in 1965 playing in my head, I shall proceed to wax all mushy about my other favorite things:
1. Christmas:
Exhibit A -- The Christmases of my youth - especially the year Santa brought me the book "The Littlest Angel" and I sat on my mom's lap while she read it to me and then explained, in one of the best mothering moments of her life, that Santa was not a real person, but the Spirit of Christmas and giving to those we love ... just like the Littlest Angel gave the things he loved the most to the Baby Jesus. I believe that may have set the stage for my lumping Santa and Jesus together under the heading of "great fairy tales."
Exhibit B -- Christmas trees - especially the Christmas trees of my youth. We used those big Noma lights with the red-hot bulbs and the thick, fabric-wrapped electrical cords for twenty years, and it was my dad's job to find the blown lights, change the fuses, string the lights on the tree and then cuss and move them around until they met my mom's approval. No same-colored lights together, of course. Then we took turns hanging the ornaments. My mother performed the last detail --the ritual Hanging of the Tinsel -- because it was a job no one else wanted. It was the bean picking of tree decoration and it took roughly three days to hang those thousands of strands of tinsel, starting from the inside of the tree to the tips of each branch. Equally as labor-intensive as the tinsel hanging was the tinsel retrieval from the dead tree a couple of weeks later. Because you can't just throw it away, you know ... you have to save each strand, untangled, in folded newspaper to re-use next year. Ahhh, but when it was all done and my mom's tinsel all hung there neatly and tidily reflecting my dad's lights, and we laid underneath it in our footie pajamas peering at the little lighted Christmas village under the tree, it was so worth it! I can still picture the tiny trees, little groups of snowman candles (sort of squatty from semi-melting while in storage), and Santa in his sleigh coming down a "snowy" hill covered with cotton batting and mica snow.
Exhibit C -- Christmas music - especially the traditional Christmas carols. While I enjoy "Grandma Got Runned Over By a Reindeer" as much as the next guy, it's Bing Crosby singing "Adeste Fidelis" that really does it for me. I can remember shopping in downtown Tucson when there still was a downtown Tucson. All the fancy department stores had Christmas displays in their windows (just like New York!) and elevator operators who said things like, "First Floor, ladies dresses, Second Floor, lingerie" and let you off at some mysterious non-floor called the "Mezzanine," and they played "Silver Bells" over outside loudspeakers. One of my great Christmas memories is shopping with my son when he was little. I would threaten to embarrass him if he wandered off from me, and I did it by singing "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" ... at a steadily increasing volume ... until he would run back and walk with me to shut me up. I have no shame.
Exhibit D -- The Miracle of Snow - especially snow in the desert southwest. Over the course of my life in Arizona I probably saw snow fall on Tucson a half dozen times. It would leave a light dusting of white on the tops of cactus and about 1/4 inch of flakes on the ground, and we'd call it a "snow day" and stay home from school, but it never happened at Christmas. But the year my son was born, it really snowed. He was three months old and we were driving from Phoenix to have Christmas at my parent's house in Tucson, singing along to the Christmas music on the car radio, when it started. But this time, for the first time in my life, it didn't stop. It snowed all night. On Christmas morning Tucson was blanketed with almost a foot of snow. It was piled up on our poolside lounges and the diving board. It had to be swept off the front porch. There was even enough for my ex-husband to construct a full-sized naked snow woman with nipples facing the kitchen window to greet my mom when she got up to cook Christmas dinner.
2. Thanksgiving -- especially big Thanksgivings with lots of relatives and lots of food and the playing of board games after dinner.
3. Autumn -- especially now that I live where there are visible seasons and the changing of leaves. I love the smells of Autumn, not the least of which are woodsmoke from fireplaces and the kitchen smells of baking and roasting.
4. A long hot bubble bath with a good book.
5. A movie that makes me cry in a good way. Guaranteed multiple-tissue choices include The Trip to Bountiful, The Color Purple and Seabiscuit.
6. The first bite of a perfect, juicy, medium-rare steak.
7. Thick-sliced bacon, toasted buttermilk biscuits and plum preserves for breakfast.
8. Going places in the car with Ev. I love long car trips to actual destinations with her, or short day trips out touring around aimlessly, but I'll settle for a five minute drive to WalMart. She's my favorite person to be alone with, always.
9. Our house. I love coming home, especially when Ev's been off work and there's a fire in the fireplace. I love the way our house looks, especially the antique furniture we've bought to add to the antique furniture Ev already owned. It's roomy and yet cozy -- colorful without being an assault on the senses. It sits up on a grassy hill tucked up into the trees with a broad view from the back deck.
10. Having all the clothes washed, dried, folded and put away.
11. How good the bed feels when you first crawl in at night and the sheets are cold and the pillows are fluffy.
12. Driving with the top down.
13. Hearing a song on the radio you haven't heard for a zillion years and still remembering all the words.
14. Looking through old picture albums.
15. The little coffee cup I inherited from my grandfather that came from a Southern Pacific Railroad dining car, my fraternal grandmother's glass cream and sugar bowls, the tiny cordial glass my dad used to fill with chipped ice and a tablespoonful of Kahlua so I could have a "cocktail" when the big people were having theirs and my maternal grandmother's crockery mixing bowls ... and having a place to put them all out where I can see them every day.
16. Necking with Ev.
17. A hug from my grown son now that he's all tall and lanky and I'm the little one.
18. Good lord, I almost forgot to mention chocolate!
I'll stop there, but I might want to revisit this list in the future. This morning I read Feral Mom's blog post suggesting we all list the five things that always cheer us up. My first thought was that I don't have things that always cheer me up, but I guess I do. Making this list was certainly cheery!
I've got 18 minutes before I have to get in the shower and get ready for work. In the meantime, I was reading Linda at Straight Up and Slightly Dirty which, though amusing, is not NEARLY dirty enough. However, just because she doesn't have enough hot realtor-on-realtor porn doesn't mean I won't steal her ideas like a white-trash meth addict steals your pit bull out of your yard. So I'm stealing Linda's idea and chaining it up in my OWN yard, and pretending it's my own.
A list of my favorite things, which I hope will encourage you other toothless wasted meth addicts to steal this idea and chain it up in your own yards:
1. Lori 2. beer 3. cats 4. aimless driving 5. books 6. bonus games 7. tractors 8. haircuts 9. quiet Saturdays at work 10.doing piddly-ass things with my kids
What are a few of your favorite things?
Oh...and Katie is just a little outraged that she placed lower than the tractors and the bonus games, but hey...a few years ago, she wouldn't have made the list at all. Half full/half empty...don't be such a baby. You're lucky to have a mother. When I was your age, we had to walk 10 miles in the snow to be insulted by our mother.
You kids don't know how easy you've got it. Now shut up and eat your brussel sprouts.
I got a flu shot at work yesterday. It's not quite mandatory, but the Nursing Supervisor will be down every day to bully you until you consent. It's not a bad idea anyway, since I'm in the sick people business and the flu mightily sucks.
But I was talking about it with a coworker and she said, "I never take a flu shot." That sounded weird to me. I would have said, "I never get a flu shot." To me, take is something you actively do...take a pill, take a friend to lunch, etc. Get is something that's bestowed on you...get a gift, get a sharp stick in the eye.
Now I wonder if the two...take and get...are interchangeable in this situation, or if that's one of those examples of Southern Illinois language butchery, like the use of "whenever" instead of 'when", like in this sentence:
"Whenever I went to the doctor's office, he said I should take the flu shot."
So what do you think? Take or get? Which do you do?
I stole this from Ms. Sassy Pants. It has the advantage of being fun AND fulfilling my blogging obligation in case I dont get to it.
A buy one-get one deal. Who doesn't love that?
Your Heart Is Blue
Love is a doing word for you. You know it's love when you treat each other well.You are a giving lover, but you don't give too much. You expect something in return. Your flirting style: Friendly Your lucky first date: Lunch at an outdoor cafe Your dream lover: Is both generous and selfish What you bring to relationships: Loyalty
I've long subscribed to the notion that sacred cows make the best burgers, so I find myself drawn to bloggers who know how to grill them. As a result, I confess to having what amounts to a case of bloggy hero worship where Feral Mom is concerned. She's funny, she's smart, she's irreverant, she's unabashed, she swears like a sailor and she's a product of the Midwest ... she's the total Blog Package. So you can imagine that seeing our little blog tagged by Her Feralness was quite a thrill for me. I was tempted to blow off work just to stay home and respond to the tag.
8 Random Things About Me:
1. Among the useless skills I possess is the ability to write upside down and backward in cursive. This took a considerable amount of time and concentration to learn, and I believe they may have been teaching math while I was working on it, which is why I can barely do basic arithmetic.
2. I can sing several songs in Spanish, Latin, French, Italian and Irish. I cannot speak any of those languages, but I have some kind of weird gift for dialects.
3. I wanted to be either an actress, a writer, a singer, an anthropologist or a marine biologist when I grew up. I became a lowly, overworked, underpaid ophthalmic technician instead. Don't feel bad if you have no idea what that is ... no one does.
4. My sister and I started out life sharing a last name. It took a combination of seven husbands between the two of us to wrap around to sharing a different last name. There's probably a mathematical probability in there somewhere, but I wouldn't have a foggy clue what it is or how to determine it (see Random Thing #1).
5. I'm terror-struck by the sensation of falling. I hate both negative and positive G's, which keeps me off the back of motorcycles, three meter diving boards and roller coasters, and would have been a huge drawback to my other childhood dream of being the first woman astronaut. I couldn't voluntarily jump out of a perfectly good airplane wearing a parachute if it was spiralling toward the ground and my ass was on fire.
6. I love the sensation of floating. I float in the tub, I float in the swimming pool, I've always wanted to float in a sensory deprivation tank (but I don't want to come out with blood all over my mouth, no vocal chords and chimpanzee hair on my knuckles) and I'd like to experience weightlessness if it didn't involve experiencing either positive or negative G's to get there (see Random Thing #5).
7. I lived in Arizona for 50 years and never saw the Grand Canyon. Never hiked it, never stood at the edge and looked into it -- never even drove past it. I've flown over it a couple of times, but I don't think that counts. More importantly, I don't feel that my life has been diminished in any way by missing it.
8. I watch the You Tube videos on Feral Mom's posts, and feel that they've vastly expanded my mind and spirit. I was especially moved by the glowing moose genitals on the Michigan post. More importantly, I feel that my life might have been diminished in some esoteric way if I'd missed it.
Now comes the part where someone else gets tagged! Okay ... Urban Pedestrian, Flea at One Good Thing, and Suzanne at CUSS ... 8 Random Things, please. (I'm letting Cedar off the offical hook because she's recuperating from surgery, although I think blogging is a perfectly good way to spend time while recuperating, so she should really do it, too.)
Unfortunately, Feral Mom tagged us for 8 Random Things About You. Since we recently did it with only 7 things, I'm low on things. Also, it was unfair to raise the bar by 14%, so you can have...three. Maybe I'll think of 5 more later. Or maybe Kwachie has 5 she'd like to throw in. Here are my three:
1. When I was a teenager I got in a car wreck that threw me out onto the pavement on my face. Among various other owies, I knocked out one of my front teeth. I had a crown put on it, and that lasted until I was 30-ish, until I knocked the same damn tooth out at a fire. After that, I didn't want to look like toothless white trash (I prefer the more classy look of white trash with teeth.), but I could only afford a temporary crown. I've had this "temporary" crown now for 14 years. It falls out at regular intervals, but I glue it back in with Super Glue and it lasts another 6 months or so. I'm hoping to continue doing this until I die.
2. Along that same vein...I hate change. So I own 4 identical pairs of faux-Carhartt pants, and about 10 identical shirts in various colors. I rotate them all, but I'm pretty sure my coworkers think I only own one pair of pants.
Although I've met a lot of people online that I really like, I only have a strong desire to meet Cedar and Marl, because I suspect neither one of them would be likely to be off put by my social ineptitude. I'm not exactly sure why I think this. Kwachie, however, has fabulous social skills and would be a pleasure for anyone to meet.
Clearly, she doesn't love me for my fabulous fashion sense OR my social grace. It must be the tooth.
As Ev said, we're real low-rollers. We're the people who play the penny slots and we really do play them for pennies. We play one credit per line, we blanch at anything over a 25-line game, we sit together taking turns spinning the reels on the same game and we high-five each other like ninnies when we hit a line pay over a buck. We play these games because our goal isn't to walk away with a life-changing wad of cash. Our goal is to plink away a few hours for about the same money other people spend on dinner and a movie, and what we really want is to get to play the bonus game. A game sucks if it takes our whole ten or twenty bucks and never lets us play the bonus game.
When we're playing a sucky game we have the following conversation, verbatim:
Ev: See? That should have been a shape.
Lori: Everything should be a shape.
Ev: And everything should be wild for everything every time. Lori: And it should pay from both directions.
Ev: And we should hit the bone-ass. We're nice people.
It's all about The Bonus. This weekend, in between people watching and designing the perfect slot game, we also came up with the perfect bonus game, which we call The Cocksucking Bonus. It would look something like this (use your imagination) and the Big Win would payout when the hilt is all that's left.
I ask you, is it too much to ask to hit the Cocksucking Bonus??
I've decided to pretend that 30 posts in 30 days in November is the same thing as my post-a-day commitment. In order for that charade to stay airborne, I'll need all of you to clap your hands, sprinkle yourselves with fairy dust and say, "I believe!"
So anyway...we're back from NeverNeverLand (which can be distinguished from NeverLand Ranch by the lack of zoo animals and seductive 7 year old boys) and we had a fantabulous time. The food was good, the companionship was fantastic, and the sex was mortifyingly loud. We actually spent Saturday slinking up and down the hotel corridor, in case we accidentally bumped into our next-room-over neighbors, who probably hate us.
On the bright side, though...we had fun. And we don't get enough vacations to feel too guilty yet. After all, if they didn't want to hear loud middle-aged lesbian sex, they should have stayed in a different hotel. It was clearly poor planning on their part.
We stayed at the Harrah's St. Louis, distinguished by it's comfy king-sized beds, Tiffany rotunda, and freeness. As in, pay-nothing-ness. We got a three free night offer, and we took it. In exchange for the freeness, we probably gave them back the cost of the free room by dinking away at the penny slots in the evenings. However, since we're low-rollers, we can get 6 hours of amusement and a couple of exciting jangly $10 jackpots out of $100 and not hate ourselves later.
Here's the two fascinatingly appalling stories that Lori threatened you with:
Saturday night we were sitting in the penny slot section, playing the Gem Drop game for 20 cents a spin. I think we'd been playing the same $20 for about 2 hours...up $10, down $12, up $15, down $20...that sort of thing. Behind us was a bank of games we refer to as "That Damn Lion Game", which is a 100 line penny game, 2 lines per penny, that tantalizes you with flashes of greatness, but never actually produces any....at least not in our case.
As we were dinking away at our machine, the man behind us shouted, threw his hands up, and danced back from the Damn Lion Game. He had hit the jackpot, the REAL jackpot...all 100 lines, every single square in every possible combination had lined up with lions or wilds. He won $1700 on a single spin of a penny machine.
So he hooted and hollered and kissed his wife and danced around...all that stuff that people do when they've won a ton of money. The casino people came over and hand-paid him his money and took his picture, and the guy next to me nudged me and said, "He's gonna get some good lovin' tonight."
Except that our Big Winner was drunk off his ass, and the minute they paid him for his huge win, he turned around to the machine behind him and dropped in a $100 bill and then lost it in about three minutes. Then he dropped in another one...and lost it in about two minutes. We watched him, in the space of about 15 minutes, lose at least $600 of his big win. Me and the neighbor guy exchanged glances a few times, and decided that his window for the Good Lovin' was closing fast. If he didn't knock that shit off soon, instead of the Good Lovin' he was gonna be getting the Bad Ass Chewin'.
We left while he was still staggering around slinging his big jackpot around like a guy who wins $1700 on penny slots all the time. We decided that the next day, when he sobered up and iced down all the places the wife had beaten him with the baseball bat, he was going to be a very depressed man.
The other story, a cautionary tale for those of you who cling to the fantasy that our children will take good care of us in our dotage:
We wandered through the casino on Saturday afternoon, and saw a middle aged couple playing the slots side-by-side, with an ancient old woman in a wheelchair behind them. She looked like a contemporary of King Tut, shrivelled and wizened like an old apple, and held in an approximately upright position with a series of straps. She had her chin on her chest and a bib tied around her neck to catch the drool leaking from her toothless mouth. She was completely oblivious to her surroundings, and quite possibly dead.
In the meantime, her children were enjoying Mom's Day Out of the Home by gambling feverishly. Family bonding, it seems, looks all kinds of ways for all kinds of families.
Anyway, other than those starkly unattractive displays of the more unseemly side of the human spirit, we had a good time. We ate the free buffets, enjoyed the free room, cursed the non-free WiFi (and c'mon...who knew there still places in the world that don't have free WiFi?) and toured and shopped St. Louis.
Now we're waiting for the coupon for three free days in New Orleans to mature in January. Watch for us, we'll be coming to a free hotel near you.
We had a totally wonderful time in St. Louis and spent four fun days and three nights in a very nice room at Harrah's with the best bathtub on the planet, a beer fridge and a flat screen TV the size of a small theater screen ... but NO free Internet access. They'll be happy to charge you $10.95 PER DAY for Internet access, but we thought that was a little bit exorbitant for something every other hotel on the planet gives away for free, so we didn't pay it. We made a half-assed attempt to drag the laptop around St. Louis on Friday searching for free WiFi, but then we got a little distracted by the excellent beer sampler and kick-ass food at the Schlafley Pub ... and then there was the excellent sex ... and the sleeping till noon ... and ... well ... we didn't blog. We didn't even take pictures.
We did make it to the Miniature Museum, which rocked, and Ev surprised herself by enjoying it and being fascinated by the detail in the tiny things and the very cool enormous doll house displays (although the term "doll house" doesn't come close to describing them). From the micro world to the macro world, we also went to the Woodcrafter store and shopped for all the woodworking tools and exotic woods of Ev's dreams. I think I might be able to convince her that doll house construction is almost woodworking ... and, in turn, I'll help her assemble the pretty turned wood pens she wants to make. In the meantime, she bought me a kit to make a group of miniature houses for the mantel this Christmas ... and we picked up two cases of her favorite beer at Schlafleys.
At the very least, I think we both have a reason to want to go back to St. Louis again soon ... like Christmas shopping, for instance!
I'll let Ev blog about the rest of the weekend and the two most pathetic things we've ever seen in a casino, because she'll tell the story much better than I will.
We got home and had company ... Ev's ex-husband and his friend Lori were here hanging out with the kids (yes, Ev and Rob both have "Lori's"... just to avoid confusion). So Ev and the girls regaled them for a few hours with family stories and showed Rob's "young and studly" pictures to Lori, which is always a fun and embarassing thing to do, and we all laughed and enjoyed the fireplace while I made a gigantic mess out of a skein of yarn I was trying to knit a muffler with.
If Ev ever gets unwound from her determined attempt at untangling it, I'm sure she'll blog.
It's time once again to revisit the topic of Evie's Head Injury.
As I've already mentioned, I got new glasses last week. They're a lot stronger than the old ones, and they've really taken some getting used to. But I've been adjusting slowly over the last few days. Yesterday, however...I couldn't see crap. My vision was so distorted and weird that I kept taking my new glasses off and looking at them to see if they were damaged or dirty or something. It was so bad I could barely shuffle around the yard, let alone actually try to drive somewhere.
Last night, I complained about my glasses to Lori. She said, "Umm...Ev? Did you take your medicine?"
Ah! Coincidentally...no. But I did then, and an hour later my glasses had miraculously healed themselves.
Urban Pedestrian posted a reply to our blog entry yesterday, talking about our adventures. That cracked me up. Feral Mom goes out of her way to meet other bloggers. Suzanne from CUSS travels and writes books. We rarely do anything. We hang around the house with the family and never go much of anywhere except to work and to town. We've recently started taking little driving trips around the Midwest (this weekend we'll be in St. Louis), but even that much activity is pretty new for us.
I joke a lot that I'm autistic, but what actually happened when I injured my brain is that my ability to sort stimulus and ignore the unimportant stuff...ambient noise, movement, smells, etc...was severely diminished. As a result, I'm easily overwhelmed by sensory input. Loud things freak me out. That takes a lot of activities that other people do... movies and concerts and things like that... off my plate. Crowds of people freak me out because they all move around a lot, and in unpredictable ways. That takes care of events, plays, malls, etc. I tend to be undone by seeing a lot of movement, especially if it appears random. I want people and things to just sit still, please.
Now that I'm sufficiently and steadily medicated, those things are less of an issue in my life. I can go places that have people and not flee after a few minutes, but I think I still have enough residual caution to keep me from going too far out of my comfort zone. I'm happy to hang around the house, putter in the yard, and fantasize about what the neighbors are up to.
I worry that I might be crazy, or that I might appear crazy, so for a long time I avoided people who knew me before I hurt my head. Occasionally I bump into someone who says, "Ev! I heard you were back in town! It's great to see you!"
And I say, "You know? I got hit on the head a few years ago, and I don't remember a lot of things, and well...I don't remember you. Can you tell me again why I know you?"
Or else I just avoid going places where people might recognize me.
So all of that is the lead in for this: We're going to St. Louis tonight, and I'm really excited about it, but I can feel that I'm also a little apprehensive because it's out of my routine. That means that the things I do that soothe me when I'm rattled won't be available...no puttering in the yard or petting the cats or sitting on the porch in the sun.
So I kind of laughed at the word "adventures" since I'm the least adventurous person I know, but we'll go to St. Louis, see the Botanical Gardens and the antique stores in St. Charles and visit Hannibal, MO and see Mark Twain's home and have fun. I'll feel safe with Lori...I know that if I tell her I'm overwhelmed, she won't mind stopping whatever we're doing and do something else. We'll take a lot of pictures and see lots of interesting things and blog about the things we see, and I'll be proud of myself for doing something different.
And then we'll come home and I'll be able to get back to my rituals. Whew!
It took us almost a year to notice the aforementioned next door neighbor, because his house is entirely grown up in weeds and it just sort of blended into the woods on that side. Not just tall-grass-weeds. but the kind of weeds that have a several year head start, and now has thistles as high as your head, and maple trees spontaneously springing forth every two feet or so.
As a dedicated anarchist, I totally support the right of anyone to live any way they like. However, last winter when the leaves fell off the trees and we noticed that there was a house a few hundred yards away, it was sort of a surprise. At the time, we thought it was abandoned...it's in terrible shape. It appears that any repairs that have been done at all have been done with scraps of plywood or 2x4s and left, mismatched and unpainted, to warp in the sun and rain.
So my next guess was that this was the house of some elderly person who couldn't afford to pay someone to take care of it. That's pretty common here; old folks try to stay independent as long as possible, but they have more and more trouble with big maintenance projects and things start falling apart unless there's an adult child to help.
But no. No elderly person.
Since I first noticed that house over there, I've been sort of fascinated by it. It used to be a nice house. There's a big porch in front that would be excellent for porch-sitting if it were repaired, a nice big yard, a couple of outbuildings, and a garage. Now that I'm paying attention, I see a fairly young man, maybe 40-ish, dressed professionally and driving an SUV, going up and down the unbelievably overgrown and rutted gravel driveway and parking in front of the falling-down garage every day.
So what the hell? He's not old, he's not disabled, and he's not even very busy. He seems to work something like banker's hours. Why not cut your grass and fix your porch before it falls off?
Unless this is one of those horror movie scenarios where he's got his dead parents in the house and he's eating them for supper every night after he comes home from work in his Dockers and his SUV and he let the weeds grow because he doesn't want the house to be noticed because that might remind people that no one has seen the parents in 10 or 15 years.
I'm just sayin'.
Or he's just REALLY lazy.
But for the last few days, the electric company, CIPS, has been cleaning up his yard for him. They've been cutting down all the trees that have sprung up under the power lines, and now his sordid life with his dead parents is about to be exposed to the world. Or at least to us.
I'd love to Gladys Kravitz him and go look through the windows and see if the house is really a dungeon and find out if he tortured his parents for years before killing and eating them, but that seems rude. Maybe I can get Lori to do it.
I know it must be getting close to wintertime because I'm organizing my head to start brewing beer. The steps that precede any project for me are:
1) Think about it.
2) Imagine what that project will look like.
3) Drive by it once or twice, and see if it looks scary.
4) Do it.
So I'm planning to brew beer soon. I've been in Step 1 for a couple of weeks, and I've recently progressed to Step 2. I'm planning to start with my two favorites: An oatmeal stout with a bit of coffee and chocolate added, and a lighter honey ale.
The stout is super rich and creamy, and ends up with some ungodly amount of alcohol in it...something like 9 or 10%. Really, it's more like dessert than beer. But it's the kind of dessert that knocks you on your ass and makes the rest of the family roll their eyes in disgust and embarrassment at your pathetic drunken antics.
The honey ale uses about about quart of honey as a fermentable sugar for the yeasts to metabolize into their life-sustaining alcohol. Combined with a ton of Willamette hops to bitter it up, it's the kind of beer you can drink all day long (especially if you have this handy and stylish hand-free beer dispensing device) and not notice it's effect until you cut off your leg with the chainsaw. And if you've brewed it in kegs, there'll be plenty to share with the EMTs when they come to pick you up!
So now I'm moving on to step 3. I'm going to drive by the plan, and see if it's more of a commitment than I'm willing to make. I'm going to go root around in the shed and see if I can track down all the tools and vessels and bottles that go into this project. If that doesn't break my spirit, the next step will be to track down the ingredients from an online brewing supply house like Northern Brewer. After a couple of weeks of fermenting and then the bottling phase, there'll be nothing left to do but kick back and watch my liver enzymes go through the roof between now and springtime!
I was so excited about my stuttering biker and dwarf experience last night that I raced home to tell Lori and then blog about it. Unfortunately, I got ahead of myself and ended up posting it before Midnight, which caused it to be dated the 4th and didn't fulfill my NaBloPoMo blogging obligation for today, the 5th.
However, just posting to bitch about it has taken care of today's posting requirement, so I'm not bitter anymore. It's all good.
This is it. The quintessential Southern Illinois story. The reason all of you in the rest of the country wish you could live here:
I was driving home from the hospital tonight at 10:30-ish, because I work evening shift. It's a 25 mile drive from our house, down a two lane highway that has pretty much nothing...no gas stations, no stores, and barely any houses. About halfway down the road between work and home, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, I saw an old green 1970s Olds Cutlass pulled off onto the shoulder, and a little farther on, a big hairy biker-ish looking man with one of those biker headscarf thingies on his head, walking down the road with a little kid.
I felt bad for them. There's nothing that sucks worse than having your car break down with kids in it. So I went back and asked them if they needed a ride somewhere. The man said, "Yeah...we ran out of gas." I asked him where they were going, and he said to his brother's house on Union Springs Rd.
That's sort of on my way; maybe a five mile detour, but, like I said, it sucks to be broken down. So I told them I'd drive them, and they climbed in. That was when I realized that the child was really a dwarf woman. So the biker guy hikes the dwarf up onto the bench seat of my Ford Ranger, then crams himself in next to her. It was a very tight fit for the three of us, and I realized that the woman was probably sitting on my drill that I've been driving around with for the last few weeks....but at least she didn't say anything about it. I put the truck into first gear and took off. It was crowded. Very crowded. The dwarf was panting from the walk with the long-legged biker, and it was beginning to have a surreal feel, like a bad movie or maybe too much mescaline.
When I tried to shift into second gear, I banged the stick shift into the sole of the dwarf's shoe, which was sticking out slightly past the end of the seat, straight out into space. Did I mention that the dwarf was a woman, by the way? She was. A woman. I think she was the girlfriend of the biker guy.
So we took off down the dark highway, me shifting from 1st to 3rd to 5th, trying to avoid those gears that would make me bang my hand against the tiny shoes of the tiny woman, and force me into a position where I might have to say something about her tiny little feet, and how they were in my way. Instead, I made small talk with them. They told me they were from Mount Vernon and had come down to visit the Biker Guy's brother. It was hard to follow the conversation, because the biker had a pretty bad stammer.
So just to recap...I had a stuttering biker and a dwarf in my truck, sitting on my drill, at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night, driving off into the middle of nowhere.
They told me that they thought they'd make it down from Mount Vernon okay; they had brought some extra money, but they inexplicably stopped to go bowling on the way down, and that left them short on gas money.
I swear, I'm not making this up.
At the turn off to Union Springs Road there's a big mercury vapor street light, since the migrant camp is on that road and that makes it easier for the county cops to find the Mexicans for their tazing. I turned the corner under that bright light, and that's when I saw the gun inside his jacket in the waistband of his jeans.
So...now we have the dwarf, the bowling, and the stuttering biker, packing a pistol. I didn't actually laugh, but I did wish I could somehow capture this moment for posterity.
As we're driving, the man asked me how come I was out driving at 11 o'clock at night. I told him I work at the hospital, and I was on my way home when I saw them. He said, "I'm glad we got picked up by someone nice."
Hello? I'm not the one with the gun?
The man and his tiny girlfriend switched to discussing the brother, and how much they hope he's still awake, since apparently he has a vicious guard dog chained up in the yard and they're both terrified of it. I asked him if maybe the dog would recognize them, and he said maybe him, but the dog had never seen the dwarf girlfriend, and she could never outrun it. Then she said, "If that dog is out and your brother's not awake, I am NOT getting out of this truck. "
Like hell. I'll throw your tiny ass out the window if I have to. I am NOT going to take these two home with me and explain them to Lori.
Finally, way down at the end of Union Springs Road, past the place where the pavement turns to gravel, and next to the snake-handling church, we came to a little clearing in the woods with a singlewide trailer and about 30 broken down cars and trucks scattered around it. The biker guy got out of the truck and tapped on the window of the trailer. A child appeared. The dwarf woman said, "What's Brittany doing up this late? On a school night!"
Just because they're a gun-toting biker-and-dwarf couple doesn't mean they don't take an interest in the kid's education.
Brittany came out and tied up the vicious dog, which was sleeping on the porch and hadn't even noticed our arrival. Then the biker guy lifted the dwarf girlfriend down from the seat, and they disappeared from my life. But left me so much richer for the experience of having met them.
Proving that the themes of male endowment, inadequacy and the use of phallic enhancement devices are universal and timeless. Really, this sweet little film gives a whole new meaning to "hung like a moose" doesn't it?
The other day I went out to the shed to look for a book I promised to loan to my friend Wanda. We have many, many boxes of books in the shed...probably 50 or 60 after having brought in all that the house could hold. So I was rooting around in all those boxes, and I came across a couple of boxes of movies that I thought the kids might get a kick out of. They were full of all the Disney movies and shorts that they used to watch when they were kids.
This morning, while Lori and I were lazing around in bed watching Charles Osgood and contemplating The Deed ( and who ever thought of Charles Osgood and The Deed juxtaposed that way??), We had a parenting moment. Carrie, my adult daughter with a home of her own, practically a fully-functioning adult, came into our house, then into our bedroom, then stood at the foot of our bed, begging us to get out of bed and entertain her.
So I did what moms have been doing since time immemorial: I popped in a Disney movie to distract her so maybe she wouldn't notice if we snuck back to bed for a little sex. Unfortunately, as a full grown adult, she wasn't falling for that anymore. Instead, Carrie, Lori and I sat in the living room in our jammies and watched The Reluctant Dragon and Morris the Midget Moose.
Oh. My. Freakin'. God.
If there is a gayer half hour in the whole Disney World?...well, forget it. There isn't. The Dragon and Sir Giles the Dragon Slayer compete in the Disney Gay-Off...having tea parties, singing to each other, and taking turns reciting poetry... until the townspeople demand some action. And not the queer guy-on-guy action, either. They want some butch MAN action. With pants. The Dragon and Sir Giles then stage the gayest mock battle ever, complete with pirouettes, a tea party, and the phallic use of a lance, until Sir Giles pretends to thrust the lance into the Dragon and the Dragon falls to the ground with his erect penis..err, tail...pointing heavenward. All the while, the Dragon and Sir Giles' real competition is for the queerest poem, with lines like, "Poor little upside down cake, his top is on his bottom."
Personally, I'm pretty sure Sir Giles was the top, but if he ever does end up on the bottom, that dragon will crush the resistance right out of him. But since there wasn't enough testosterone between the two of them to coat a china teacup, I think the only real danger in their relationship was poking out an eye with the Dragon's mascara wand.
Next, Morris the Midget Moose, with his a tiny little stunted moose body, and enormous rack.
...Of antlers, gutter brain.
After enduring a lifetime of mockery from all the straight meese, Morris joins forces with Balsam, a huge, beefy, puffed up, steroid-enhanced moose with tiny little steroid-diminished antlers...but plenty of rage. Together, Morris and Balsam (with Morris riding Balsam in the most homoerotic 30 seconds of children's filmdom ever) strike a blow for gay pride.
Unfortunately, it's all fun and games until one of them goes to donate blood. "Have you had sex with a moose that's had sex with a moose since 1977?"
I can't believe parents let their children watch this stuff in the '50s and '60s. No wonder we're all queer now.
Once I get through this weekend, I've got seven days off in a row! I'm going to spend the first two or three puttering around in the yard. I've got a few more dead trees to bring down, and I'd like to finish a few projects before winter arrives.
But then at the end of the week, we're going to St. Louis for a four day weekend! The kind where someone else does the cooking and makes the bed!
Even though St. Louis is our local Big City, we usually go there for some specific reason, do that thing, and then come home. This time we're going to do all those things we always mean to do...go to the Botanical Gardens, the miniature museum, go antiquing in St. Charles, and see Hannibal, MO.
I got a visitor's guide from the Chamber of Commerce with 25 fun things to do in St. Louis, but we're not much fun, so we don't want to eat out in snazzy restaurants or go to plays. We DO, however, like a nice brewery tour...we've done the Anheuser-Busch tour twice...and we're always on the lookout for cool things to see and do that doesn't involve shopping in malls. We've been to the Arch a few times, and seen the museum underneath it, so I'm pretty much done with that.
So...any recommendations? Anyone ever spent time touring in St. Louis?
High school kids all across the country take the SAT test before college. The scores are added to the myriad other factors that are supposed to be indicators of their potential academic success. These include their high school grades, class ranking, community activities, and parental legacy status.
George Bush, for instance...noted moron, dismal student, failure at everything he's ever attempted including numerous businesses, baseball operations, and of course...presidenting. However, the one thing he DID have success at was riding into Yale on the legacy coattails of George Senior and Prescott Bush, proving that it can certainly help your academic career to be spawned by the right sperm.
But I digress, as usual.
Every college-bound high school kid in the country takes the SAT except Midwestern kids. Kids here inexplicably take the ACT test. The ACTs are used by Midwestern colleges and universities the same way that the SATs are used everywhere else...to ferret out the kids that may actually graduate, and then sign them up. But the ACTs also have another purpose: they tether Midwestern kids to Midwestern colleges.
No one who's spent an entire day in a high school auditorium trying to decipher "Dog is to table leg as pencil is to..." really wants to repeat the experience with the SATs. So kids who have parents who can actually afford out-of-state tuition frequently choose to apply to Midwestern colleges anyway.
Sneaky, huh?
Katie is signing up for her ACT test today. She's an honor student with a crapload of AP courses, including the math and science classes that kids are supposed to dread. She's also in the marching band, which ought to help her chances in college, since it proves that whether she actually absorbed any calculus in high school, she can at least count to four.
However, since she's taking the ACT, I hope that means she'll be staying right here, going to a good solid Midwestern University the way God intended. Heck, I've already paved the way for her. I'll bet she can get some legacy points from Southern Illinois University for my distinguished SIU career, in which I managed to skulk away with a 4 year degree in a mere 6 years. Besides, I'm sure SIU looks just like Yale if you drink enough.
People scoff, but mark my words...someday this country will be run by SIU Ag majors. Then those Yale sissies will be sorry. Skull and Bones has nothing on "taking the Strip" in Carbondale on a Halloween night. THAT prepared a kid for post-academic greatness.
So Katie, do a good job on the ACTs, graduate from a nice Midwestern University with a good Ag program, and then take over the world. And if you can do it in Carhartts, so much the better.
Since NaBloPoMo recommends we go with a theme to sustain our month long marathon, I've decided to write about Midwestern life, more or less. Although that's not too terribly different from what i write about anyway, my theme will mostly be to make 30 lame justifications about why it's better to live here than somewhere people have actually heard of. Why Nowhere is better than Somewhere.
I was taking my supper break last night at the same time as our new phlebotomist, Brittany. Or maybe Brianna....something like that. Anyway, Brittany/Brianna and I were talking about how low paying her job is here, and I told her how much Robbie makes for the same job in Tucson.
She was amazed that we left Tucson to move back to the Midwest. She did that typical Midwestern double take and said, "Why would you want to come back here?" I told her I was homesick, and she was amazed.
After a while, I went back to Hematology and considered that, while I waded through the diffs on my bench.
Almost every Southern Illinois native I've ever known plans to grow up and escape. They see Southern Illinois as hopelessly backwater, and dream of life in the city. Their goal, as Tom's daughter Emily famously phrased it, is to "Get out of Hooterville." People seem to be vaguely embarrassed and apologetic for living here, like the only ones who stayed on were too lazy or too stupid to get away.
But then...we all come back. It doesn't take too many years of living in the city somewhere to make us homesick. Cities are expensive and loud, and city dwellers are much more competitive and unkind. People drive aggressively and thoughtlessly, because there are no repercussions. If you drive like an asshole here, 9 times out of 10 the person you cut off is one of your mom's church pals, or one of your coworkers, or the clerk at your pharmacy...and they'll recognize you, and remember that you acted like a jerk. It's a lot harder to be rude and bad mannered when there's no anonymity to hide behind, so people tend to be a little more polite. They'll take a personal check without a phone number, because they know your parents and recognize you. If you don't have enough money for the gas you just pumped, they'll tell you to stop by with it later. If your car breaks down, not only will someone stop and give you a ride, but he'll also come back with tools and fix it for you.
When you first leave Hooterville, it's exciting. Big cities have a lot of cool things to do. You can buy beer on Sunday. The same crappy job you had in Carbondale pays twice as much in Chicago. But then after a few years, you realize that it's not worth it. You stop going out to the cool places, and the extra money is more than offset by the extra expense of city life, and many of the former refugees get homesick and come back.
When anyone we know leaves here triumphantly proclaiming, "I'm so glad to glad to be getting out of here!", we old refugees smile and say to each other, "She'll be back. They all come back."
I was listening to a piece on NPR a while ago about Amish teens. When they're grown, they have the option of leaving the community and living a secular life in the larger society. They are also welcome to come back at any time if they choose. Most of them return. After they get their fill of all the cool things they've always dreamed about, they realize how much harder and less rewarding an anonymous life is. Consider Southern Illinois as an Amish community, but with power tools and without those funny hats.
So I believe Brittany/Brianna when she says she plans to take her Junior College education and hightail it to California some day. But I also won't be surprised when I see her back at her old job in a couple of years. There's nothing like spending a few years in a place where you could die and be eaten by your cats before anyone noticed you'd gone missing, to make you appreciate a boring small town life with it's nosy, gossipy neighbors, unnatural obsession with the weather, and many festivals named for agricultural products.
It's now t-minus one hour and fifteen minutes to November (or, as it's known around the blogsphere, NaBloPoMo). That's right, once again the world is counting down breathlessly to the dawn of National Blog Posting Month -- that mystical, magical month when bloggers large and small vow to post something every single blessed day of the month for strange and unknown reasons that are now lost in the mists of time (but may include prizes or awards of some sort). Last year Ev snuck around and NaBloPoMo'ed without telling anyone, just in case she changed her mind halfway through the month. I didn't even know we had NaBloPoMo'ed until it came up again this year.
We were thinking we might sneak around and do it again, but this year we've been officially challenged by our friend over at Flippy Odegard, so the gauntlet has been flung.
Expect a veritable plethora of random musings about our sometimes less-than-thrilling adventures in Nowhere, Illinois. You asked for it, Nancy!
Today is the official kickoff of that annual nightmare: the Holiday Season. The Holiday Season now lasts for roughly three months, beginning with Halloween and running through the post-New Year sales. This is the time that Americans traditionally open their wallets and then empty them, then take out their credit cards and max them...all in the name of the peace, love, and Jesus.
Jesus wants you to spend more. Have you considered a home equity line of credit?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who dreads the onset of the Holiday Season. I love Thanksgiving...what's not to love about a holiday devoted entirely to food?...but Christmas just about breaks my spirit every year. It's everything I hate in the world, all draped in twinkly lights and borne in on a sleigh full of electronic gadgets playing Xmas music 24 hours a day for months.
And no, "Jesus is the reason for the season"doesn't help. I'm almost positive that Jesus wouldn't get too choked up about memorializing his birth with a diamond ring from Macy's.
It's just weird. It's weird and wrong and sick to have this 60 day shopping frenzy to commemorate the Prince of Peace. Or the Winter Solstice. Or whatever else drives people to the mall and to Best Buy to fight the crowds for this year's Nintendo Wii to prove they love their children as much as they loved them last year...about $1200 worth each, according to the estimates.
Lori and I were squabbling yesterday about the things people squabble about in relationships...the distribution of chores, the need to feel valued and respected, and the need, sometimes, to be compassionate instead of right. (This may be my weak spot...a little.)
Anyway...somewhere along the line, the Princess and the Pea story came up, and we figured out where we're fundamentally different. We decided to put the question out there to you, our Friends and HomeSkillets.
The Princess, as you'll recall, was such a delicate flower that she had to sleep on twenty mattresses to avoid being kept awake by a single pea under her bed. At some point in the midst of the squabble, we managed to articulate how our strategies for dealing with discomfort are very different. If I were the Princess, I'd crawl under there and dig out that damn pea that had been making my life so goddamned miserable for so long. Lori, on the other hand, would try adding a 21st mattress...maybe that'll cushion that pesky pea.
So when we argue, it's the same thing. I want to get in there, identify that goddamned pea, and get rid of it. It's a pain in the ass now, but at least that's one problem that's off your plate forever.
Lori wants to see first if maybe it's not really the pea...maybe we just need to go out to dinner and let someone else deal with the dishes. Maybe we'll discover then that it wasn't the pea at all, it was the stress-induced insomnia keeping us awake. Add a little extra cushion to the stress, maybe a couple more mattresses, and maybe it won't be so uncomfortable.
Needless to say, we're coming at this from very different perspectives. What say you, Internet? What's your solution to the Princess and the Pea dilemma?
I just spent a couple of fascinating hours perusing the website of Skulls Unlimited of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Internationally recognized purveyors of museum quality skulls and skeletons, both articulated and disarticulated, the good folks at Skulls Unlimited have recently built a Museum of Osteology, which will house 5,000 specimens representing over 2,500 vertebrate species, including both fossil humanoids and modern humans, when it opens to the public.
You may have seen their operation showcased on the Discovery Channel's "Young Scientist's Challenge" or a particularly gnarly episode of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" back in 2005, where Mike was introduced to the tasks of brain demising and carcass flensing.
Cleaning skeletons may, indeed, be a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, and the folks at Skulls Unlimited do a whiz-bang job of it. Founder and President, Jay Villemarette, started out cleaning skulls in his kitchen with the aid of what must be a very understanding wife. Today the company employs masters in the crafts of skeleton cleaning and articulation.
Skulls, Unlimited appeals to me on many levels. I've always been fascinated by anatomy and physiology, and I like to know how things work. I'm a sucker for museums and factory tours. The fact that I'm a living thing and my house is full of other living things, large and small, makes me all the more interested in knowing how we're constructed and how we function. An intimate understanding of the inner workings of living things is sort of the ultimate factory tour.
It's a fascination best summed up by this quote from the website:
"In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." Baba Dioum
Skulls, Unlimited appeals to me on many levels. I've always been fascinated by anatomy and physiology, and I like to know how things work. I'm a sucker for museums and factory tours. The fact that I'm a living thing and my house is full of other living things, large and small, makes me all the more interested in knowing how we're constructed and how we function. An intimate understanding of the inner workings of living things is sort of the ultimate factory tour.
It's a fascination best summed up by this quote from the website:
"In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." Baba DioumIf
If I had my life to do over again I'd be a museum curator. Barring that, I'd like to have a private collection of weird scientific gadgets and anatomical artifacts. Skulls Unlimited sells a lovely (and reasonably priced) Economy Skull Bag that includes several specimens from the fur-bearing and feathered species. For a mere $89, plus shipping and handling, they'll send you the skulls of a raccoon, a fox or coyote, a bobcat or lynx, a rabbit, a squirrel or muskrat, a badger or otter, and either a duck, turkey or pheasant -- whatever they have in stock. For about $300 you can purchase a complete, ready-to-assemble cat skeleton, which would make a terrific Christmas gift for people who like puzzles. Hint, hint.
We're all busy watching the fires in Southern California this week, right? And everywhere I go, I hear people saying things like "We're praying for those poor people."
This is how I know I'm an insensitive asshole, in case I needed another way to prove that to myself. I can't get past the part where I know that all those canyon homes with their beautiful views, snuggled into the forests... they're all fire magnets. And I know all those homeowners made the decision to live in those homes, knowing that fire sweeps through those beautiful canyons every five years or so. Those people are dumb. And even though I applaud their God-given right to be as dumb as they want in a democratic society, I question our obligation to reward them for it with federal money and FEMA trailers .
Wildland firefighters hate those people. They make the job a million times more dangerous, and they shift the focus from trying to contain the fire to trying to protect their million dollar firetraps. It's not that hard to section off a fire and contain it until it burns itself off. It's practically impossible to do it while defending 100,000 indefensible homes.
About a million years ago I was a wildland firefighter with the Forest Service. When a fire crew arrives at a fire at an "urban interface" area, which is an area where humans cohabit with forests, the first thing they do is triage the area. They start at the end of the road and count the mailboxes. If there are 10 mailboxes, there's usually 10 houses to look for, give or take. Next, they drive down that road and see if any of those houses are potentially defensible. If, for instance, they're wood sided houses with cedar shake roofs, tucked back into the woods with a pile of firewood leaning against the house, they just keep driving. They may stop, check to make sure the humans are out of it, release the pets, mark the house in some way to indicate it's been triaged, and move on to the next house, but that's pretty much all the risk 'most firefighters are willing to take for a house like that.
Those houses, in the vernacular, are "losers." No one's going to even bother trying to defend them.
Okay...so how about a whole canyon full of houses like that? Insurance companies balk at insuring those homes, and if they do, they charge obscene premiums and put a million restrictions and clauses into the contract. It's not like the people who build those homes don't know what they're getting into. These fires happen every few years, and then afterwards they all heroically vow to rebuild. For what? So it can burn again in 10 years?
It's like all those people who insist on building their homes on the barrier islands of the Carolinas. Yes, it's your money and you can spend it any way you want. But no...don't expect us to bail you out every time your house gets flattened by a hurricane.
The residents of Orange County for the most part aren't an impoverished bunch. It's not like they don't have housing options. If they choose to continue to build and buy houses in areas that have a predictable pattern of being wiped clean by catastrophic fires...how many times should we have to bail them out?
I guess I do feel sorry for them in the moment, but I also have to shake my head in disgust a little. I'm willing to bet that most of them will be back, building new cedar sided homes with shake roofs with a pile of firewood leaning against the house. And they'll be shocked(SHOCKED!) when they burn again. And they'll expect a check, please. And a FEMA trailer.
Plus, they're mostly Republicans, and I hate Republicans. Maybe they can set up their FEMA trailers on the White House lawn.
Carrie and I are going to get our eyes check Monday for new glasses. I'm already dreading it.
First of all, I hate any medical interventions having anything to do with my eyes. Ironically, although I'm in an intimate relationship with an Eyeball Professional, I'm completely phobic about the eye doctor; even that little puff of air on the glaucoma test stresses me out.
Secondly, I hate the fact that my vision is crap, and it's getting crappier all the time. My favorite form of recreation is reading, and my livelihood depends on my ability to look into a microscope and actually see something. I totally resent the fact that large print books and 100x diffs on the microscope are soon to going to be a part of my life. However, I'm not too thrilled with the thing I do now...I hold my book at an angle so that me head is tipped back and I am looking through the very bottom of my bifocal lenses. Ever since Carrie told me how much food servers hate looking up the nostrils of old people in bifocals, I've been extra aware of the bad etiquette involved.
So Monday...new glasses. The last time I got new glasses, the prescription was so much stronger than my old pair that I misjudged the distance when I got into my truck and smacked my forehead on the door frame. I walked around with a massive bruise on my forehead for a week, and had to tell a variety of lies to avoid looking like the moron everyone already knows me to be. But most people try to be polite under those circumstances. You know how it is...lie and the world lies with you.
In general, I like being middle aged. But I wouldn't mind having my 25 year old eyeballs and my 44 year old wisdom. Oh...and maybe the feet I had when I was 6 or 7. Those were some cute tootsies. People used to comment on them, so I know it's true. Now I have feet like Fred Flintstone.
But I know if I had that healthy body and those good eyeballs from my ill-spent youth, I'd abuse them in the same ways I already have that's made them old and decrepit anyway. Except that I'd avoid hitting my head on that softball this time, and maybe I could be a little less blind and crazy. Maybe.
So Monday I'm going to sit in the chair while Lori says "Is 1 better than 2?" And I'll say, "I don't know...they both suck." And I'll feel bad, and she'll feel bad. Then we'll go to her chiropractor appointment and she'll feel bad, and I can feel bad for her. There's some nice poetic justice there, don't you think?
And in the end, I'll see better and she'll feel better, and we'll laugh at how we drag our feet doing the things that actually make our lives better. And then we'll do it again next time.
The first of the bad news is that Katie's Jeep continues to sit patiently in the front yard waiting for attention. I'm just grateful that it's not one of my kids, or it would be out there honking it's horn and flashing it's lights and backfiring, trying to get me to pursue it's agenda quicker, and with more money.
The good news is that, although I completely blew off the needs of my youngest child, the outdoor cat that we inherited from my ex-husband now has a spacious and comfortable home, complete with a shingled roof and vinyl siding. Although the picture is oddly distorted and makes it look sort of cockeyed, I promise it's both square and true. I think she needs a nice flowering perennial in her flowerpot to provide shade for her flamingo, though.
And yes, I AM aware that this is another step down the ladder to crazy cat-ladyhood, but it's not entirely my fault. That nice boy down at Rusty's Home Center threw in the shingles and the siding for free. What was I going to do, say no? It's not my best pet housing effort, but it's decent and affordable. I'm thinking of mass-producing them as public housing...but maybe with a door. I actually intend to add a front wall with a door eventually, but first I want her to get used to the idea of entering and exiting without feeling trapped.
The bad news is that we took Carrie's latest rehabilitated stray cat to the vet for a checkup before releasing it from the laundry room into the rest of her house with her other pets, and it had both feline leukemia and feline AIDS, so we had to put her down. Even though she'd only been living in the laundry room for a couple of weeks, we'd gotten pretty attached to her. She was a good natured calico; she spent most of her time sleeping on the dryer. but she'd hop right up for some petting. Her previous home had been the trash cans of the across-the-road neighbors, so it was pretty easy for Carrie to entice her over with some vegan cranberry kibble.
So we're sad about that. We try not to name the strays until we know if they're going to live or not, but she was an exceptionally sweet girl, and it was sad. Also I feel sort of guilty because Carrie nursed her from a scraggly half-starved mess into a pretty, bright-eyed pet. She was too pretty to die, even though I know that we couldn't let her come in with the other cats, and if she'd stayed outside she would have infected a bunch more cats before she died an early death from one or the other of her terminal illnesses.
I'm eternally of two minds on the feral cat rescue question. I'm generally aware that it's a good thing (Carrie rounded up a family group of them last week and bullied her friends and coworkers into taking one apiece), but it sure is heartbreaking when you save one, just so you can have it put down later. That doesn't feel very rescue-ish to me.
After last night's sort of intense thinking, I'm back to the pinball-style that usually makes it so much fun to be me. My brain is like the weather in Southern Illinois: if you don't like it, wait a few minutes...it'll change.
1. So this morning I rolled out of bed at the crack of 10 o'clock because the cats were crashing around in the kitchen. Now they're sitting in a semicircle around the dishwasher, intently peering at the bottom of it. That tells me that either they worship dishwashers as a god in their culture, or there's a mouse under it. I'm hoping for the worshipping, but I'm betting it's the mouse.
2. Remember that guy who was trying to publish a book by getting people to tattoo one letter apiece on themselves? The last time I heard, he had thousands of people willing to do it. I don't have the slightest desire for a tattoo, but I'll admit this one intrigues me.
3. The day before yesterday was cold and rainy. Yesterday was hot and sunny. Today seems to be cold and rainy. I need to put an alternator in Katie's Jeep so I can get back to worrying about her every time she steps out the door, like nature intended, but I hate to do it on one of the cold rainy days. This is why I need a garage. Are you listening, Lori?
4. I love days off. Days off are like travel magazines or spare money in the bank...they're full of potential. I may not ever visit Chile or buy anything from the Sharper Image catalogue, but it's fun to think about.
5. Instead of getting down on the cold wet ground today to fix Katie's Jeep, I'm planning to build a little cat house for the hookers. Nah...just kidding. I'm going to build a little cat house for the outside cat, who's been getting soaked standing on the porch in the rain every night, waiting for me to get home and feed her canned food. The cardboard box she's currently sleeping in just ain't cuttin' it in this weather.
6. My friend Traci's mother died a couple of days ago, and I worry about her. She looks tougher than she is. Traci, when you get around to reading this in two or three weeks...I'm sorry for your loss. There's no other relationship in the world like mothers and daughters. I know you grieve for her, but I grieve for you. Hang in there.
Huh! I went to read C.U.S.S., and she mentioned that it was her 2 year blogging anniversary, and I checked...and it's my one year! Just another coincidence that proves that God has an infinite plan for all of us, and his plan for me is that I waste hundreds of hours with my feet on my desk and a cat on my lap, writing a blog that people may or may not be reading.
However, since this is the anniversary edition, I thought it would be timely to repost the first entry:
I wanted to come up with some clever title for my blog, but I don't feel clever and I have to go to work in a few minutes, so I went with what I know. The name comes from back when my kids were little and we'd make that looooong car trip to Chicago from Southern Illinois through 350 miles of cornfields, punctuated by the occasional truckstop.
They would sort of melt into little puddle-children on the seats, and periodically one of them would say, "Mom? Where are we?" And I'd say, "Nowhere. Go back to sleep."Eventually, they began to say, "Mom? Are we still in Nowhere?"
Nowhere is our family shorthand for the thing that separates us from the thing we want. Miss your cousins? You'll have to do a little time in Nowhere to see them. Nowhere is the Midwestern version of Purgatory.
So...I'm Ev, and this is my brand squeaky new effort at self-expression. I'm not absolutely certain that my self has anything interesting to express, but I suppose that if that's the case, it'll become glaringly obvious in short order and I'll go back to my first love, tooling around on the mower with a beer in my hand.
We've been having a discussion, or maybe a discussion-ette, on a message board we host. The topic is sex offenders.
Okay, let's start with the assumption that we're against it, okay? People should only have sexual contact with other people who want it from them, and are old enough to provide informed consent.
However...that is not always the case. So the country is chock full of convicted sex offenders that have been released from prison. In most states, they're on a registry, they're prevented from living near schools and/or playgrounds, and they're universally reviled.
Well, okay. But there's lots and lots of them. And you can register them until hell freezes over, but they still exist. But there's a huge range of offenders, from the most innocuous pornographers and Romeo Rule violators to the most vicious predators. Are they all the same? Should they all be treated the same?
I happen to know a guy who is a convicted sex offender. He was a police officer who raped a teenager in a drunken rage a decade ago. Her life was devastated by the experience, but oddly...so was his. He lost his livelihood, obviously, and went to prison. Since his release he's spent years in therapy and anger management programs trying to get his demons at arm's length so he could look at them.
I didn't know him then, but I know him now. He's a good guy who struggles to always be honest about his actions and his motivations. I like him a lot. And THAT makes me uncomfortable more than anything. Should I like him? Or trust him? Are there rules of etiquette for this sort of thing?
Sex is a different way to violate people than, say, stealing their car. Stealing a person's relationship with her own body is a small step away from stealing her soul. I know this because, like many of the women I know, I was sexually abused as a child. I was raped one night when I was 9 years old, and was spending the night at a friend's house. Her father came into the room during the night, pulled down my pajama bottoms and raped me...in the same room his daughters slept in. Years later, it occurred to me that their silence that night probably implied that it wasn't the first night they experienced that in their room. But it was my first night, and it changed my relationship with the world forever.
I stayed in that bed until dawn, and then got dressed and went home. I never told my mother, or for that matter anyone, until probably 20 years later when I told Robin on a long car trip full of disclosures.
So now I go back and forth between my own childhood violation and my friend the sex offender. I wonder if my friendship with him has anything to do with my own story. Am I more or less accepting of him than a person without my history would be?
Every time I stop and think about this, that almost every one of those convicted sex offenders have families and friends who struggle to make sense of them, my head reels. Is it bad to care about the people who don't care about the rest of us? If it is...what should you do with them?
It's hard to imagine the degree of anger that would make a person rape, and it's uncomfortable to wonder if everyone has the capacity for that much anger. Maybe they don't know how destructive it is to people's lives? Or maybe they don't care? And how bad must a person's own emotional dissonance be to inflict that much damage on another human being and not care?
And this is always the place where I get hung up. I know how damaged I was by the experience. I'm always curious about how damaged rapists must be to inflict that kind of pain on someone else.
I'm mostly a tabula rasa kind of person. I believe that people are mostly born without malice towards the world. So except for people who are biologically driven towards insanity or evil, most "bad" people were presumably like "good" people at some point. And so, presumably, bad people can make the decision to to good people again. And why wouldn't we encourage that? And is it naive to consider it?
Do you hear my confusion as much as I do? Every single person has things in their past that they're ashamed of. How horrible do those things have to be to not deserve forgiveness?
It would be nice if people would fit neatly into boxes. If bad people were bad, and good people were good, and there was none of the gray parts that happen when bad people do good things and good people do bad things. It would be nice, or at least easier, to be one of those "one strike" people who would be comfortable lining up everyone who does something bad against a wall and shooting them. But does that make that well-intentioned person become a bad person?
I'm the fastest freakin' showerer in the world. My showering needs are few: I wash my stubble of hair, soap up everything that potentially shows dirt or generates odor, and count on the Trickle Down Theory (which works much better for showers than it does for economics) to take care of the rest.
So I spend maybe 2 minutes in the shower each day, which is handy, since we have a water heater about the size of a thimble. And yet, some of the most memorable moments of my life happen when I'm naked, dripping water, and least prepared to deal with them. In lieu of having anything meaningful to talk about, I'll share a few of them.
Several years ago I managed to make it out of the shower, but was still naked and wrapped in a towel, when I heard the mewing of newborn kittens. I found them in the closet. Carrie's moron cat had gotten up onto the top closet shelf to give birth to her kittens. I climbed up on a box to get a look at them and realized that they were conjoined siblings.
Fuck!
While I was peeking up at them on the shelf, several other people crammed themselves into the closet with me and my towel for a look-see. On the bright side, it turned out the kittens weren't really conjoined (or siamese siblings, for the un-PC among us), the mama cat had cleverly manage to tangle all the kittens's umbilical cords together with the placenta and wrap the whole mess around both the babies and herself. The cords were wrapped around her left upper forearm and all three kitten's heads and torsos, and dried into leather. Her forearm was hugely swollen and the tangle of kittens were bound to it and each other so tightly that they couldn't move and I couldn't separate them, and she bit me several times when I tried.
So I kicked everyone out of the closet, put on some clothes, climbed back onto my box and lifted down the whole clump of snarling cat, kittens and placenta and set it on our bed for Lori and I to examine in the light. There were several obvious problems: The cat was beyond pissed off about her sore arm, and me moving her babies, and her painfully swollen nipples caused by her inability to nurse them, due to them being wrapped around her arm like a Walkman. So I took a little pair of scissors and nipped away the strands of cord attaching her arm to the bundle of kittens. She took off like she was shot out of a cannon.
Next, after determining that there were three kittens, or at least three heads, we tried to figure out how to separate them. I had visions of nipping at a piece of cord and accidentally eviscerating one of them, which would have caused me to spend the rest of my life in therapy to heal from the trauma.
The cords were so tight that I couldn't even get a finger between them and the cats, so I started making small cuts in places that, I hoped, were far enough from any vital organs that if I screwed up and cut one of them, we'd both survive.
Eventually, we figured out a strategy, one small cut at a time, and got them separated. However, I firmly believe that these cats, which probably weren't blessed with overly high IQs to begin with, managed to dumb-down even further from oxygen deprivation in those first few hours of life. Unless you're a Republican, in which case their lives began at conception, probably in a ditch behind the Circle K.
So...That's shower story #1.
#2 took place a few nights ago. I was just getting out of the shower. I pulled my towel off the hook and was drying my face when Lori came into the bathroom and said, "Ummm...Ev? Can you come out here? Quick? Sage killed a possum."
I threw on my jammies and indeed, there was a soaking wet grinning Sage, and a soaking wet crumpled ball of dead possum on the deck with his tongue lolling and his glassy eyes staring off into space. This, by the way, was my first view into a possum's mouth. Who knew they had such sharp pointy teeth?
Okay...I'm not good with dead things. In spite of the fact that I'm in the dead-thing business, my dead things normally come in parts, which makes it easier to pretend they're something other than pieces of other humans. This was an entire dead possum. There was no option of pretending it was a standing rib roast or a hunk of Tofurkey.
So I decided that the best course of action was to scoop the possum onto a shovel and throw it onto the burn pile that had conveniently been burning in the yard all day, then go back into the house and watch CSI, drink a lot of beer, and pretend this was someone else's life. Me and my shovelful of dead possum, with his head hanging over the side, walked around the house. I slung him into the middle of the fire, and he bounced against a log and immediately rolled back out. Just as I was getting ready to scoop him back up for another throw he got up and ran off into the woods.
Now I understand the phrase "Playing possum."
We've done a little research, and it turns out that a dead possum isn't really a dead possum until it stays dead for four hours. Until then, cremate at your own risk.
Huh. Who knew?
My third story is the naked job interview, but I'll save that for another time when I have nothing to talk about.
"Raining" is actually a misnomer for what's going on here. You know all that rain we didn't get for the past three months? It's pouring out of the sky in a thundering, crashing deluge that started about mid-morning and hasn't let up for about twelve hours. The kind of rain that no windshield wiper known to mankind can keep up with. The kind of rain that turns blacktop into a sponge that soaks up headlights like a black hole in space.
So, of course, I chose tonight after work to run a couple of piddly errands on my way home. I needed to get my awful haircut fixed, and I needed to pick up a couple of items at WalMart. No biggie, right? And yet, I managed to turn my usual half hour drive home into a four hour trip through hell. I pride myself on being pretty independent, especially behind the wheel of a car, and I've driven all over Southern Illinois just for fun, but I may never leave the house again.
My first stop was the mall in Carbondale. It was raining ... hard ... but it was still daylight, so it was merely inconvenient. When I got to the hair salon, the evil incompetent ninny who butchered my hair last weekend was the only haircutter standing around, so instead of confronting her with my weed-whacked noggin, I went shopping and tried to screw up the courage to face her. I finally figured out how to approach the problem diplomatically, but when I went back she was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief and asked the receptionist for someone REALLY GOOD to fix my haircut. She had me talk to a pleasant, competent woman named Julie, who was appropriately appalled, but assured me she could fix it. She had to finish a hair color on someone, so I sat and waited.
When she finally got to me, she looked through the disaster on my head and we discussed what the hell is wrong with the girl who cut it in the first place. Julie said, "She's nervous and doesn't know how to talk to people." Talk about your understatements! I also suspect she lied to get the job and has never seen the inside of a beauty school. I lied about my experience (or lack thereof) to get a bartending job once, but anyone can pour a shot and a beer. It's another thing to attack people with sharp, pointy objects. As it turned out, Julie has cut Ev's hair before and she remembered what I'm supposed to look like. She also finds us funny and charming, so she hugged me and apologized and admitted that it was, for sure, the worst haircut she'd ever seen. She warned me that the only way to fix it was (as I suspected) to cut just about all my hair off ... which she proceeded to do. Now I don't have odd chunks of variable length hair, but I do have a weird horizontal stripe straight across the back of my head. I asked her what the hell it was and she said (sigh), "uh ... that's a patch of gray hair." I also noted two other large-ish patches below it, and marveled at how distinct they are against my flesh without all that pesky hair covering it. I commented that I looked like a hairless dalmation, which Julie found hilarious. I'm less amused, but at least I don't have to see the back of my head.
She had to charge me for the second haircut (which I assured her was worth it if she could fix it, and I tipped her generously on top of that) but she gave me the corporate phone number and said to call them and give them her name and they should send me coupons for several free haircuts. When I left the mall I was still thinking about my hairless head, and I took a different parking lot exit than I usually do. I ended up on an unfamiliar street, thinking I was headed for the main street through Carbondale, but it was dark (and rainy) and I got so completely turned around I ended up going in the opposite direction. I kept watching for street signs, but I couldn't see for shit, so I didn't figure out where I was until I realized I was headed for Little Grassy Lake. The road to Little Grassy is a winding, two lane blacktop through the woods, and by now it was way past dark, and the fog was getting heavier by the minute. As I drove slowly through the rain and fog, with leaves and all kinds of shit blowing around, I must have run over a couple of hundred hopping frogs. I had just finished swerving to narrowly avoid smashing a 'possum (who did not lay down and play dead, but ran like hell), when I came around a curve and was blinded by oncoming headlights which prevented me from seeing the HUGE FUCKING DEAD TREE that had fallen and was laying across both lanes until I was already running into it. I drive a low-slung Chrysler Sebring which is great for hugging wet curves but not so great for driving over fallen trees. I couldn't swerve and I couldn't stop, but luckily I crashed into the branchy part and not the trunk, so other than the crunching noises and flying chunks of dead tree limbs, there was no harm done. I fully expected all my tires to go flat, but they didn't ... and the front of my car is miraculously unscathed. Just after the spillyway, I came to the road leading through Giant City ... the deer capital of Southern Illinois. The only thing that hadn't yet happened was hitting a deer, and I seriously considered driving to the Giant City Lodge, calling Ev and telling her I wasn't budging until she came to rescue me, but I pressed on, creeping through Giant City at about 25 mph, dodging oncoming cars careening around the blind curves, and finally made it back to the highway. The rest of the drive home was uneventful, except for the continuation of driving, blinding rain.
I stopped at WalMart for the two items I needed, grateful to be back in familiar territory, and made a mad dash for the door. The rain was pouring so hard it sounded like being in a barrel going over Niagara Falls, so I decided to shop until I could reasonably get back to the car. I bought myself a couple of $5.00 sweatshirts and some cheap yarn from the bargain bin to make us pretty winter scarves and a new broom. I finally made it home at 9:15 ... bald, wet and traumatized.
I can't say I enjoyed my evening, but I'm proud of myself for surviving it and not crying or calling Ev to fetch me home from Giant City Lodge.
Since we're fun party animals, yesterday we went to town to hit the library book sale, Wal-Mart, the mall and the LoneStar for steaks, sans dancing. And also to pick up my truck from where I'd left it the night before when I'd had a seizure at work and Lori had to pick me up and take me home.
The library book sale is one of the mainstays of our year. They sell off roomfuls and roomfuls of books for $1 each for hardcover and $o.50 for paperbacks. Right off the bat, I found about 15 that I wanted. I asked the library ladies, who were stylishly arrayed in powder blue vests that matched their powder blue hair rinses, if there was some place I could stash them while I kept shopping. One of them gave me a box and a "sold" sign to set on my box. Okay...not my box, although that's sold too. But there's no reason the library ladies need to know that.
So I went back to my shopping, and Lori and I gathered up another dozen or so books that we wanted, then went to check out.
My box was gone.
AAAAAHHHH!!!! I said, in my most distraught voice, "What happened to my books?" And the library ladies looked at each other and said, "Oh. We probably gave them to that man. We thought they were his."
"That man" had already stolen my box of books and headed home. Bastard. Book-stealing bastard. I stood there, looking forlorn, and babbling about how excited I was to have found the new John Irving for $1, and how much I'd been looking forward to my new books. The library ladies kept exchanging glances, probably some kind of signal for "She's crazy. Call the police."
Finally, one of them remembered that the book-stealing bastard had paid with a check, and maybe his phone number was on the check. It was. One of them called, and Mrs. Book-Stealing Bastard apparently hemmed and hawed for a few moments on the phone, then agreed to send Mr. BSB back with MY stolen box of books.
The Library Lady closest to me, who was about 300 years old and desperately trying to stave off my near-meltdown, said to me, "If this were a romance novel, that man would bring back your books and you'd laugh about this with him and discover that he was your One True Love."
I shot the bitch where she stood.
No. Not really. Really I said, "That's my One True Love over there.", pointing at Lori. "I just want my books back."
Eventually he came back, with a somewhat depleted box of books. I pawed through them for a minute; there were a few less than I'd put in there, but the John Irving was there and a bunch of mysteries, so I thought it was probably good enough. We paid and left, another book sale crisis averted.
Next we went to the mall for haircuts. Mine is easy: #4 clippers all the way around and a little more than that on the top. I always ask the girl du jour if she's ever cut Asian hair, and she always looks at me warily and says, "yes?"
I'm not Asian, but for some reason, my hair is. It's black, thick, and absolutely, completely straight. It grows out of my skull exactly perpendicularly to the point of attachment, like a KooshBall. So there's always a danger that in the hands of a bad haircutter I'll either LOOK like a KooshBall, or if they cut it too short, like those oranges-studded-with-cloves that little children make in school for their moms every Fall. Either way, I will look like neither a Hot Butch Lesbian nor a Laboratory Professional.
So she did a good job on my hair and laughed at my jokes and I was pleased. But three feet away, unbeknownst to me, Lori was NOT pleased. Her hair girl was busy anxiously hacking the shit out of her hair, which moments before had been girl hair. Now it was gender-ambiguous hair, and in another 30 seconds it was going to become Marine Gunnery Sergeant hair.
Lori finally said, "Stop cutting!" And tried to direct her more specifically towards her hair goals.
Kid wasn't having any of it. She stood with the scissors in her hands and looked like she was headed for a panic attack, until Lori said, "That's good enough. I'll stick with this." and got out of the chair.
Eventually, we bought some undies, ate some meat, and headed home. Without the truck. See why we never go to town? We're not good at it.
I was just writing a comment to Marl about her "7 Things" post, and I realized I actually want to write a whole post about it.
I'm very gay. It's one of the most very basic descriptors I use about myself. I'm 44, I'm gay, I have blue eyes, etc. But I didn't understand the fact of my gayness until I was 30 years old. Not that it didn't exist, but I couldn't recognize it for what it was. So I never really fell in love with men. There were a few that I loved, and I married a great guy, thankfully, who helped me produce these wonderful kids and then didn't hate me later...but I never fell into love with in that devastatingly swoony way where you can't breathe and can't think and can't really do much of anything except be in love. The kind of love in which love is an activity, instead of just a feeling.
So when I was young I just assumed I was emotionally defective from my weird childhood, and that that sort of passionate love was beyond me. I never considered that I might be intimate with the wrong kinds of people, just that that lackluster intimacy was all I was capable of.
When I was finally able to tell myself the truth about my gayness and began meeting women, I found:
A)...There were a lot of them to meet. Once you start looking for dykes, you realize you can't hardly swing a dead cat without hitting one.
B) That's why my skin never fit quite right. And here, finally, I found that kind of ohmygod love that I never thought I was capable of.
Okay...that's the back story. Fast forward to now. I work with a nice young dyke who sometimes says to me, "Why do all you older lesbians all have kids? Didn't you know you were gay??"
And when I cast my mind back, I don't think I didn't know I was gay as much as I didn't know the concept of gayness was an option for me. And looking back...I'm not sure why. I certainly knew lesbians. I remember being fascinated by them. But I don't ever remember thinking, "Oh! That's where I ought to be!" I didn't struggle to keep my gayness under control. My gayness was so completely under control that I never even knew it was there. It's like keeping your appendix under control. It's not a struggle...you never are even aware it's lurking there. Until the day it makes it's presence known to you so strongly that you don't have an option about whether on not to acknowledge it.
So I try to imagine sometimes how much differently life would have been if I'd come out in high school. Although I might have experienced Great Love sooner, it probably would have been that same angst-filled love that young people have that makes them jaded about love when they're older.
And I never would have had kids, because I never saw myself as a person who would like having kids. And THAT would have been such a tragic loss to my life that thinking about it is like touching a hot stove...I don't want to go there.
So, while it's true that us "older lesbians" often tended to get married and reproduce for a few years before getting down to the business of being true to ourselves, I think most of us would say we're better for having the experience. I envy people with early self-awareness, but I don't regret the circuitous path it took to get to who I really am. I just hope I have enough years left to feel like I got my money's worth out of my tardy self-awareness..
