DISCONNECT

My Canadian Marriage Never Mattered

2012-01-22T19:34:00.000-05:00

As some of you reading this are probably aware, in 2003 Iwent to Toronto with a chronically depressed, bulimic morphine addict and didthe most sensible thing I could think of--I married her. I didn't really wantto, but I also didn't want to hurt her feelings, and since the whole gettingmarried thing was the reason we drove the 8 hours from Columbus in the firstplace, it seemed like I should hold up my end of the bargain. The closest thingI had to a bachelorette party was when, the day before we were to be married,my betrothed couldn't bring herself to ~~stop doing drugs~~ get out of bed, and I spent the afternoon walking around town alone. I did somewindow shopping and treated myself to dinner. Then I went to Second City. The same improv company that brought us Dan Aykroyd and the lady who played Kevin's mom in the Home Alone movies. We'dalready gone once, but I found out that every evening after the officialperformance, anyone who wanted to could stick around or come in off the streetand watch company rehearse for free. So I went and, while I waited for the showto let out, I had a couple drinks at the bar and flirted with the bar tender.This was the highlight of my time in Toronto. There were brief, hopeful momentswhen I thought maybe, just maybe my fiance would be too altered, tired, busy throwingup, or some combination of the three to go through with the ceremony. Well, letme tell you, love really does conquer all. That girl, who just 12 hours beforehadn't been able to hold her own head up, sprang out of bed like a gymnast whenthe big day finally arrived. I've officially been married for 8 years, 4months, and 10 days, and I've regretted every one of them. Well guess what thenumber one requirement for getting a Canadian divorce is. If you guessed beinga Canadian resident, you win a block of 100% pure maple candy.

Anyway, I've written about this epicmistake before, and it's not the point of this post. The point of this post isthat a little over a week ago someone in the Canadian government tried to say that mysuper legitimate marriage was, in fact, invalid. Not because at least one of uswas high when the ceremony took place. Not because a big part of the reason Iagreed to get married was that I was afraid my girlfriend would kill herself ifI said no. No, they were saying my marriage was invalid because neither my wifenor I are Canadian citizens. The nerve.

We know now that the proclamation was a false alarm, but I nearly cried whenI first heard that I might be off the hook where my marriage was concerned. The thing is, I'm now in a relationship with someonewhom I'd very much like to marry. In this country. When doing so becomes legal.I don't know much about the United States' polygamy laws. I don't know if, oncethey legalize gay marriage here, my big Canadian screw up would automaticallytransfer, making me also legally wed in this country. Another thing I don'tknow. Where my wife is or whether or not she's still alive. What I'm saying is,I wish my friends up north would decide that my marriage is invalid, I'd bejust about the happiest discriminated against lesbian you'd ever meet. Andthat's the sticky wicket.

The threatened invalidation of the estimated2,500 same-sex marriages that have been conducted over the last 9 years wouldbe great for me, but it would be kind of a kick to the balls for the other2,499 couples (okay, let's be honest, what's the divorce rate in this country?I'm not the only person who hasn't seen their gay Canadian wife/husband in morethan 5 years). My point is, making sure that gays don't get kicked in the ballsis something I care deeply about. Specifically, marriage equality for same-sexcouples is something I not only care deeply about, but that I also actively (byactive I mean once every few months) advocate for through my website, I Can't GetMarried. And that's why what I've already said, that I think it wouldbe awesome if all the foreign gay Canadian marriages were declared invalid, andwhat I'm getting ready to say make me a hypocrite, and an asshole. Here goes.As far as I'm concerned, the Canadian government would be right to say same-sex couples from other countries who were married in Canada aren't really married after all. Those foreign gayCanadian marriages have never been valid in any legal way that matters. Not really. When I gotback to Ohio after getting hitched, I wasn't any more married than I had beenbefore I left. I couldn't file my taxes with my wife (full disclosure: she wason disability and food stamps, so she didn't exactly have to file anyway). Noone would defer to me when it came to deciding what to do with my wife's bodyin the likely event of her unfortunate demise. We couldn't appear onThe Newlywed Game. And just as my marriage wasn't recognizedhere, and I, therefore, couldn't benefit from all the wonderful, U.S.government sanctioned benefits of marriage, neither was the Canadian governmenthaving to grant me any of the legal benefits that go along with being a weddedCanadian couple. I don't know what these benefits are, but I assumepersonalized hockey jerseys are part of the deal.

Accordingto some of the reactions I'm reading about, non-Canadian gay folks are up inarms about this recent proclamation. They feel like if the Canadian government were to invalidate these marriages then said government would bediscriminating against them. Well let me clue you in on something. The Canadiangovernment wouldn't be discriminating against you. YOUR UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ISDISCRIMINATING AGAINST YOU! Suppose I wasn't already married in Canada and myformer co-worker and penis wielding friend Jason and I went to The Great WhiteNorth and got hitched. We'd come back to the states, show our marriage certificateto whomever it is within our government that you show these things to, andwham-bam-thank-you-ma'am we'd be married in the U.S. He dies? I can tell theundertaker to cremate him, take his cremains home, and flush him down thetoilet (per his wishes).

While I'm on my little rant, let mejust finish up my semi-defense of the Canadian government deciding to put my marriage out of its misery bypointing out that, in at least one very important way, we (when I say"we" I mean right minded people who think that two grown, consentingadults should be able to marry each other regardless what combination ofreproductive organs their collectively sporting) have been dealing with thisbrand of discrimination and disappointment at the exclusive hands of our owncountry for years. A Same-sex couple living in Omaha, Nebraska who traveled1900 miles to Vancouver to get married is in no better or worse shape legallythan a same-sex couple living in Alexandria, VA who drives 15 minutes intoWashington, DC and gets married there. Both imaginary couples go home, and haveno more rights than they did when they left. So, instead of getting pissed offat the Canadian government for saying out loud what has essentially been trueall along. Let's get pissed off at our own government and demand that it repealDOMA. Let's keep electing democratic presidents so that maybe someday theSupreme Court can be occupied by enough of those crazy, activist judges thatthe republicans like to complain about to finally declare it illegal to refusemarriage licenses to same-sex couples. Not just in Iowa or California, but inall 50 state. I'd like to enter into a marriage that matters, and I don't thinkthat's too much to ask.

If You Really Want to Hear About It: In Defense of My Favorite Book

2012-01-14T23:22:00.000-05:00

When I first turn to the first page of a book I'm starting, I get the same feeling I get when I cruise onto the highway at the beginning of a long road trip. The same feeling I get on the rare occasion I open the mailbox to find a real honest-to-god letter addressed to me. It's the feeling I get during that last hopeful moment right before I check lottery numbers. But it hasn't always been this way.
When I was in the 4th grade I was in this gifted program, and our teacher assigned us a book report. We could read anything we wanted, but I'm pretty sure the implication was that we should read something a little more advanced than Beverly Cleary. I don't remember what the other kids in my class chose to read. Probably Proust or Faulker or something of the like, but that doesn't matter because, as far as I know, none of my classmates (wonderful people, all of them) are any closer to curing cancer than I am. I say this in the literal sense. As far as I know, my classmates and I are all doing well. Successful in our own ways. But as far as changing life as we know it goes, I haven't red about any of us on the front page of The Times, in celebration of our breakthroughs in time travel. I think I was 28 when I finally realized that my 4th grade book report didn't actually fucking matter. Anyway, the point is that while my peers were off reading The Sound and the Fury I decided I would read A Wrinkle in Time, a respectable enough intermediate level, Newbury Award winning book about whatever it is that that book is about. I couldn't tell you since I never actually read it. I'm sure that, 22 years later, I have this number completely wrong, but I seem to remember being on page 17 about 2 days before the report was due. My mother, my amazing, wonderful, future-writer-of-my-book-reports mother, said that maybe I could get away with doing a report on The Velveteen Rabbit. So what if it was only 40 pages and half of them were pictures? This book was a fucking classic. I trudged through, and, since the gifted program wasn't a graded class there wasn't a thing my teacher, Mrs. Baker, could do about it.
Then, when I was 5th grade, I stupidly chose to read Hound of the Baskervilles for a book report. I say this move was stupid not because there is anything particularly wrong with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's third Sherlock Holmes novel. I haven't the first clue whether or not there's anything unappealing about the book, I didn't read it when I was 10, and I still haven't read it now that I'm 31. No, I say that my decision to read Hound of the Baskervilles for a 5th grade book report was stupid because, up until that point in my life, I'd never read anything more sophisticated than a 100 page, Matt Christopher basketball novel, so catapulting into the world of adult fiction was probably a little unrealistic. The night before the report was due, I had barely started the book. My mother, the aforementioned saint, chose to teach me a lesson about doing whatever is necessary to make sure your family is okay instead of a lesson about making sure you get your own shit done. She speed read my book, summarized it for me, then practically wrote the report herself.
I'm not sure my mother knew what to do with me at this point. Everyone on her side of the family read a book or two a week, what the hell was wrong with me? If this is starting to sound like I'm leading up to a big reveal about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia, I'm really sorry to have to disappoint you. The truth is, I was probably just exceedingly lazy, and too into Designing Women and LA Law. You know, typical 10-year-old shit.
Though my mom and I shared a love for Julia Sugarbaker's ability to cut anyone who messed with her fellow interior designers down to size, I did get the sense that she wouldn't have minded if I'd picked up a book every once in a while. She did everything she could think of to get me to read. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, but my mother never, not once, said no to me if I asked her to buy me a book. I'd watched the wonderful Wonderworks versions of The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe and Anne of Green Gables so many times that I had them memorized, so my mom bought me all 7 of the Narnia books and a beautiful, gold-leafed, illustrated version of Anne of Green Gables. I leafed through. I tossed aside. I went back to watching a coked up Drew Barrymore in the made for T.V. version of Babes in Toyland. Sure it came out when I was 5, but I had that shit on tape, and I would have rather watched it a 47th time than crack open Super Fudge. But this would soon change.

Something started happening to me around the 6th grade. No, it wasn't boobs. I got those, and all the joy that goes along with them much earlier. For one thing, I had a reading teacher, Mr. Kenny Moore, who I actually liked, which I think helped me get to the point where I could get through a whole book if someone had a gun to my head. Mr. Moore made us keep a journal about the books we were reading. We handed these in weekly so that he could make sure we were actually doing what was expected of us. I remember reading a children's illustrated version of Robinson Crusoe and writing in my journal that sometimes I wished I could be stranded on an island. Mr. Moore jotted on comment in the margin, "Why?"

This brings me to the major thing that started happening to me around the 6th grade. The thing that was way more profound than secondary sex organs. Depression Like, I had both melancholy and infinite sadness, before Billy Corgan ever even thought to shave his head. By the time I made it out of elementary school and into the 7th grade, I'd graduated from sort of passively wishing I could be on an island of my own to a full-blown, burning-tapered-candles-in-your-otherwise-dark-room-and-writing-poetry-about-corpse-souls-while-listening-to-Imagine-over-and-over-again-on-a-loop teenage angst. The last bit about John Lennon's Imagine is of particular importance.

Even though I was a devout atheist, and nonbeliever in heaven and (non-metaphorical corpse-like) souls, I had the silly little notion that I was John Lennon reincarnated. I had always loved the Beatles, but John was the individual mop head who had my heart, so I assumed, what with my being born less than a month after he was assassinated, that now, at least on a spiritual level, I had his heart too. Well, it was in the 7th grade, when my grungy angst was in bloom that I remembered something a kid named Jared said to me when were were still just 6th graders. He told me that the guy who killed John Lennon had done so because he'd read The Catcher in the Rye. Now, all I knew about the book was that I couldn't remember a time when there wasn't a copy of it in my house and that my mom liked it a lot, but since I was walking around with the victim's soul between my ears (or wherever souls are kept) I crept out of my room long enough to grab the iconic maroon and gold family copy. I read it. And fuck me, I loved it. I loved that book. I still love that book. The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book, and even though it's a giant cliche, I'm not going to apologize for it.

The protagonist, Holden Caulfield, swears (sort of) right in the first line. The kid's a mess. He's locked up in a loony bin for Christ's sake. That scene where he's remembering talking to his sister Phoebe, and he tells her that his dream is to stand at the edge of a cliff that some kids are playing near and catch any kid that's about to go off? I think that's the first time I ever understood a metaphor. How could I not love this book? And where the hell was my Holden Caulfield to keep me from going off my cliff?

Look, I know that The Catcher in the Rye isn't the greatest book ever written. But I also know that, without that book, I'm still sitting on a couch watching Golden Girls reruns until my eyes bleed. You know what I did shortly after I read The Catcher in the Rye? I read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Then I read a little Truman Capote, and some Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. Without The Catcher in the Rye, I never take all the literature classes I can fit into my schedule at community college in Dayton, and I never meet the professor who encourages me to transfer to Ohio State to get a BA and take some writing classes. Without The Catcher in the Rye, I never move to Columbus. I never meet any of the friends I have now. I never meet Jen.

So, you can ask me tomorrow, or you can ask me 50 years from now, and the answer will be the same. My favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye. What's yours?

The Case for Rick Santorum

2012-01-05T13:31:00.001-05:00

I'm just kidding. There is no case to be made for Rick Santorum for president. Not as far as I'm concerned. There is, however, a case I'd like to make for Rick Santorum for republican presidential nominee. It has nothing to do with a belief that he's a worthwhile candidate. In fact, it's just the opposite. I don't think there's any way in hell he could beat Barack Obama. And that's the point. Mitt Romney could beat Obama, and right now, it doesn't look like there's any chance that Romney isn't going to be the nominee. He may not appeal to the republican base, but he might just appeal to people who claim to be independents (though I feel the same way about independents as some people feel about bisexuals, which is that they don't really exist) and that's what's got me scared.
I say we let Rick Santorum gain all the momentum he can. Let him finish a respectable 2nd in New Hampshire, so that he can win in South Carolina and Florida. There is the risk that, as happened with the drawn out primary between Obama and Clinton, prolonging the seemingly inevitable nomination of Mitt Romney will only make him (Romney) a stronger candidate in the general election. That's why I'm not just talking about drawing this thing out. I'm talking about getting Rick-former-senator-from-Pennsylvania-who-lost-his-2006-reelection-by-one-of-the-widest-margins-in-U.S.-history-Santorum nominated as the republican candidate for president.
If you want Obama to be reelected, like I do, you shouldn't be telling folks that Rick Santorum wants to deny people access to any form of birth control. You should be talking up how he seems like a really sincere, and down-to-earth sort of guy. For now let's talk about his great moment at the Meet the Press/Facebook debate this morning when he was asked how he would feel if his son came to him and told him he was gay, and Santorum responded, "I wouldn't love him any less than I did the second before he said it." Then, after we get him nominated we can point out that it's doubtful any son of Rick Santorum's could ever muster the courage to tell his father he's gay given that good ol' dad once compared gay sex to "man on child, or man on dog" sex. To be fair, he was saying that gay sex isn't quite as bad as man on child or man on dog sex, but, you know, still pretty freaking close on the disgust-o-meter. And whatever you do, please wait until Mitt Romney is hiding out in one of his mansions licking his wounds, before you go ahead and point out to anyone who will listen that you're not even sure it would be constitutional to elect a muppet president.

A Book is Worth 40,000 Words

2011-12-15T12:04:00.000-05:00

I was on a real roll there for a while with my blog posts. Well where the hell have I been for the last month? Have I slipped back into the abyss of blogger slackerdom? How dare you suggest such a thing. Let me explain.

As most of you don't know (because, seriously, what's more boring than listening to someone talk about her New Year's resolutions?) at the start of 2011 I set a goal for myself of reading 26 books during the calendar year. To some people that probably sounds like a lot of reading. To the types of folks who are much faster readers than I, it probably sounds like I may as well have made the resolution to remember to breathe once every few seconds. For me, the only person who really matters as far as setting goals for me goes, I just wanted an achievable, realistic number. One book every two weeks or so. For a person with a job, and a genetic need to spend a few hours a week at the gym, and an unabashed willingness, if left unsupervised, to watch 25 hours of television a week, 26 books felt attainable. In the interest of full disclosure though, I am currently supervised for about 90% of my waking hours, and I really only watch about 3 hours of TV a week, most of which is Friends dvds; otherwise, I'd never have reached my goal. Oh, did I just bury the lead there? Yes, I just said I reached my goal of 26 books read in 2011. In fact, I got so into this whole, reading thing, that I couldn't stop myself and a read a few more. I'll admit, when I got to November and I realized I still had 6 books to read, I got a little twitchy. I put the blog on hold, but I filled a few pages in my little pocket notebook with blog ideas, so don't fear: there's more on the horizon. As soon as I figure out what in the hell I meant when I jotted down, "Jason Stark, Einstein hair," we'll be back in business.
If you're the sort of person who's interested in what other people read, here's the list of my 2011 books. Just to clarify, when I say "books" I mean those bound things with all the wonderful smelling pieces of paper with squiggly lines printed all over them. The ones you can hold spread open in both hands. The solid masses you can swat people with if they dare interrupt you right when you're getting to the best part. Books.

Here's a simple breakdown of what kept my eyeballs and my brainball occupied this year:
Fiction: 22
Nonfiction: 8
Male: 22
Female: 8
Memoir/Personal Essay: 6
Science/History/Biography: 2
Scandinavian Crime Fiction: 5

Rapeseed, rapeseed, my friend

We read a book for my book club that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I decided I desperately needed a literary pallet cleanser. I asked a friend if he could recommend a good mystery, and he pointed me to Scandinavian. I have no real explanation for how I ended up dedicating 1/6th of my reading efforts to Scandinavian crime fiction. They're good, but they're not that good. They were all sort of slow burns that took me longer to read than they should have given that the genre is supposed to compel you to keep going, just one more page, one more chapter, one more plot twist further. Three of the five were part of the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. The first I read of that series was Sidetracked, and once I figured out what in the hell rapeseed is (this book is full to the gills of rapeseed fields) I really enjoyed it. Mankell is considered something of a rockstar of the genre. All I know about the man I learned from Wikipedia. He's married to Ingmar Bergman's daughter, and he hates Israel. But Wallander is damaged goods with a gruff exterior and a soft, hidden underbelly. How could you not want to spend a few hundred pages with him. If you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I don't see why you wouldn't like the Wallander books too, especially since they aren't bookended by 100 dull, tedious-to-read pages at the beginning and end of the story.

I can't believe how few books by women I read this year. I should be ashamed of myself, and I am. Having said that, easily the two best books I read this year were written by women, so stick that in your pipe. My last read read of the year was Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. You may be familiar with her without even realizing it. Perhaps you went to see the movie, The Namesake, because it stars Kal Penn from the Harold and Kumar movies. I've never seen those movies, but I'm assuming he's Kumar. I hope that doesn't make me a racist. Anyway, my point is that Jhumpa Lahiri wrote the book that the movie The Namesake, starring the guy who played Kumar (or Harold?) in the stoner flicks. Lahiri has also won a little thing called the Pulizter Prize for her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Sorry, I've gotten off the very important track of talking about how good Unaccustomed Earth is. It's really good. If you you enjoy character driven fiction, then it's really really good. I'd say more, but I have 20-something more books to get through, and I've already gone on and on about Kal Penn. Suffice it to say, for now, that Unaccustomed Earth might have been my favorite book of the year. Or it could just be that it's the one I read most recently. Who can say?
Either my second favorite book of the year, or my favorite book that happens to be less fresh in my mind than Unaccustomed Earth was Karen Russell's, Swamplandia!. That exclamation point is part of the title. I don't just throw those around willy-nilly. This book was fantastic! The most common way that I've described it unsolicitedly is to say that it's sort of like a The Smiths song. It's kind of fun and poppy, and then you start to pay attention to the lyrics and you realize he's singing about his girlfriend who is in a fucking coma. That's not poppy. Well the setting and the language in Swamplandia! gave me a similar feeling. What a charmingly eccentric family of alligator wrestlers dressed up as Native Americans, and selling worthless souvenirs to the mainlanders they disdain. Oh wait--the mother's died, the father has no idea what in the hell he's doing, and the protagonist has just wandered off into the swamp with a gypsy. I can see how this story might not be for everyone, so if you're on the fence, you might leaf through Russell's earlier collection of stories, St. Luce'y Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. There's a story in there called, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," that Swamplandia! is based on.

Another common theme for me this year was reading nonfiction by people who are funny who have strong voices that I admire. If you want to be a person who writes, you should also be a person who reads. It's a wonderful way to hone your craft. It's also a wonderful way to spend 2 months not writing while still feeling self-righteous about the fact that you're working on something that you're obnoxiously snobbish enough to call, "your craft." The two best books that feel into this category this year were, Half Empty, by David Rakoff and, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin.
If you've never read David Rakoff, I'd like to make a couple recommendations. First, start with one of his other books. Fraud, for example. Second, even if you're not the sort of person to do this, get the book on cd. David Rakoff is one of those people who's actual spoken voice adds something to what you're reading. If you've ever listened to David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell read their own work, you know what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting that Half Empty isn't as good as his other books, I'm just suggesting that, since this one is largely about his experiences with his own cancer, you might want to get to know that guy first. He's dry and snarky and wonderful and I don't understand why my girlfriend, who read this book in 2 days and claimed to love it only gave it 3 stars on goodreads. Jen?
Another book that Jen only gave 3 stars, though she read it in a day, couldn't put it down, in fact, Steve Martin's, Born Standing Up, gives the best glimpse of what it must be like to slog through the early years of being a live performer or standup comic, something it's never occurred to me to try, but which I found fascinating nonetheless. Having said that, I have always been madly in love with Steve Martin, so maybe I'm not a reliable source as far as this one goes. If a book of the same theme had been written by, say, Andrew Dice Clay, I wouldn't have picked it up with rubber gloves.

I'm going to be honest with you, dear reader, I'm running out of battery power on this machine. I'm out of town, and I have no charger with me. It's the last day of the year, and I swore I would get this posted before the year was over. I'm going to finish this one up quick and dirty.
Book 26 almost killed me, and it took a year of on and off reading to get through. Jon Meacham's, American Lion, is quite good, and if you had access to unlimited amounts of Adderral or Cocaine, you could probably get through it in fewer than 9 disjointed months. I'm sure it was me. The book won the Pulitzer, and it was about a president whom I've always found fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone looking for an American History or American politics suggestion. Really, it was me, not the book.

I just scanned through the rest of the books I read in 2011, and, yeah, I think I'm good. I don't feel compelled to mention any of the others here. I did mention another of my books in a previous post. Please do check out the rest for yourself though. If you see anything you'd like to know about, you know where to find me.

2012--35 book, 52 blog posts. Hold me to it.

Listen Local: Is CD101 Being Sold

2011-10-26T21:05:00.000-04:00

(I don't know if I'm allowed to use an image of the old CD101 logo, so picture it here.)

Let me start by saying that if I hear that horrible new Jane's Addiction song, "Irresistible Force" one more time, I don't care how far outside of Columbus and the reach of CD 102.5's signal I have to drive to find one, I'm going to drive off a cliff. But other than the good folks at central Ohio's only independent radio station's desire to please and appease fans of alternative rock other than just myself, I have no complaints about CD101(at 102.5 fm). They play good music. They're involved in the community. They bring good bands to town. What more do you want from a radio station?

Now, any of you who know me know that I am a rather political person, but I've tried to tamp that down for the sake of this blog as of late. Not everyone, in fact mostly no one, wants to hear my rants. So for the past few months I've kept to myself every time President Obama has backed away from a fight or Mitt Romney has contradicted himself or Ron Paul has sounded like the most sane person in a debate right up until the point when he got on a roll and started sounding completely bat-shit crazy.

What I am not going to keep quiet about is the news that CD101 (at 102.5 fm) may be going the way of the dodo. Yes, they've released their official statement about having an LMA in place with Southeast Ohio Broadcasting, but since that doesn't seem to have put things to rest, and since Brian Phillips, Lesley James, Rachael Gordon, and Tom Butler have all changed their Facebook profile pictures to the CD101/102 logo in some apparent sign of whatever the word is for radiostation patriotism, I'm going to assume, if not the worst, then something like it. Even if all the speculation is completely off base, keep reading. I'm trying to make a point here.

Like I said two paragraphs ago, I've been trying to bore you all to death with stories of my life on this blog as opposed to screaming at you about the only other thing that I think about more than myself (politics) since I got back onto this blog band wagon, but today I'd like to complain. What I would like to complain about is the fact that a handful of giant corporations own just about every source of news, television, and radio that most people are able to get their hands, eyes, and ears on. Maybe I wouldn't care so much if I was a white, conservative, Christian, heterosexual--the subset of folks who are considered the mainstream and are, therefore catered to, even if they aren't the majority. But as it so happens, I am white (though I'm 1/8 Hungarian Jew, and my grandmother who is 1/2 Hungarian Jew told me this weekend I should feel free to tell people this as well as to mention that some of my family died in Auschwitz should I ever find myself feeling a little too privileged and white) but I'm also a liberal, atheist woman of the gay persuasion who is sick of reading the latest Columbus Underground tweets about how the John Kasich loving Columbus Dispatch is buying my favorite newspaper or how some Christian media group is buying my favorite radio station.

Over the last couple years in this city there has been a wonderful push for folks to go out of their way to shop local. Take a look at the current list of members of the Small Business Beanstalk (SBB) if you don't believe there's a real passion and commitment to buying local in Columbus. Thanks to the support of local shoppers Tigertree in the Short North recently moved to a bigger space. Wholly Craft in Clintonville can be just as crowded on a Saturday during the holiday season as some of the shops you'd find in a mall. No one really wants to pay $5 for a bag of bruised apples, but we show up in Clintonville in droves every Saturday in September for the privilege of doing so.

So with all this push in this city to buy local, why is there no push to listen local? Yes, that's what I said. Take out your earbuds. Turn off your iPods. Turn your radio dial away from whatever sports talk radio station you're listening to. You already own whatever's in your iTunes cloud and you already agree with everything the die-hards are saying about the Buckeyes. Instead, tune into 102.5 whenever you can. Increase their market share so they can charge more businesses more money for more ads and buy themselves out of any future bumps in the road. Maybe this is too little too late, but I don't want to live in a town where my girlfriend and I can't speak along as Brian Phillips warns us about the perils of "tubs of subpar yogurt," or where Joe Jewett doesn't feel clever EVERY FUCKING TUESDAY when sometime between 8:45 and 9:00 a.m. he plays the Pogues, "Tuesday Morning," or where Lesley James doesn't religiously follow up the 5 spot with some new wave or gothy classic presumably just because it's what she wants to hear, or where Rachael Gordon shouldn't feel perfectly free to speak for all of us when she proclaims on air that she hates Ke$ha.

What I'm saying, like the way-too-old-to-be-such-a-fangirl I am, is I will keep listening to these people play their music at whatever frequency or at whatever website or out of whoever's basement they end up in, but until we know how everything is going to shake down, I will be listening local. I will be tuned to CD101 (at 102.5 fm).

As Long as I'm Holding this Flag, I am God.

2011-10-20T22:30:00.003-04:00

It has long been assumed in this country that a known atheist will never hold a high public office. Well what would you say if I told you it's already happened? No, not Thomas Jefferson. Deists believe in god. Think more recently? Think the early 1990s. Think of an armed woman in uniform.

In an effort to appear like a uniter (I'm guessing), Gary Alexander (R-Kettering, OH) reached across the aisle and appointed me, Carrie Curtner (D-Miami Twp., OH) to the post. I was Mr. Alexander's Ray LaHood (President Obama's republican Secretary of Transportation). The confirmation process was much less of a headache than what you're used to hearing about. I think my mom maybe had to sign a permission slip. A fellow democrat, she was happy to oblige. So, from July 1992 through June 1993 I served as Harold Schnell Elementary School's safety patrol captain. I took over the position from an avowed Mormon. The the exception of the fact that the entire school only had about 3 black kids enrolled, Harold Schnell was a pretty progressive place in the early 90s.

My uniform was a blindingly bright, highly reflective, orange plastic harnessy-sash thing (or a not-quite-as-bright giant yellow poncho if it was raining). I was armed with a flag the same color as my harnessy-sash thing which was affixed to the end of a yard long, 1-inch-diameter dowel rod.
Though it didn't come up during my interview for the post, I think on some level I believed that my atheism would make me a better captain. My firm conviction that there would be no power higher than myself intervening should a first-grader walking home dart into oncoming traffic gave me the feeling of (dare I say godlike) omnipotence that all power-starved-dictators need to posses in order to keep their people safe (under control/completely dependent upon them). I'm not saying that my inclinations toward control-freakism are caused by my disbelief in god. I'm just saying it's a little easier to not feel like a dick for being a control freak if you believe the buck stops with you anyway. Margaret Atwood would be better at explaining what I'm trying to say, but I don't know if she ever used her position of power and influence as safety patrol captain to try and convert people away from Christianity, so you're stuck with me for this blog post anyway.
I was raised as one of those people who only go to church on on Easter. I don't know if the once a year on Easter thing was an attempt on my father's part to affirm his Christian faith or if it was just that he wanted to make it crystal clear that he wasn't Jewish. I mean, as holidays go, it doesn't get much less Jewish than Easter. We'll save how wonderfully open minded and accepting of people not like himself my father is for another post. My real point in mentioning the church on Easter thing is to offer up some proof that I was not raised as an atheist. I have been subjected to hours long protestant services by a parent who really does believe in the guy with the white beard. (God's still a white guy with a white beard, right? We haven't switched to a more politically correct Asian-God-in-wheelchair model while I wasn't paying attention?)

The first sign that I wasn't totally hip to the deity jive came when I was about five or six. I remember playing outside with my friends Krista and Kyle Kettering who lived up the street from me. Their mom taught at Dayton Christian middle school (I think, my 6-year-old memory might be a little fuzzy on some of the finer details) and they believed in god and Jesus and the whole works. I don't know how the subject came up, but we were talking about Jesus and the virgin birth, you know, like kids do. I have vague memories of my mom reading to me from a children's bible when I was really little. I can see some of the pictures in my mind. I remember the Garden of Eden, the flood, and the Tower of Babel. I don't know that we made it much further than that. I'm thinking we definitely didn't make it to the New Testament, because I had some rather heretical things to say about how Jesus came on the scene. "So, Jesus' mom was Mary and Jesus' dad was God, so Mary and god were married." I don't remember how they told me I was wrong, and I don't remember how I responded to their correction, but I think it must have been the 6-year-old equivalent of, "What the fuck?!" By the time we finished our argument, the only thing the three of us could agree on was the fact that Jesus had come out of Mary's butt. At some point my mom was informed that the Kettering kids couldn't play with me anymore. I don't remember whether or not this was related to my heathenism, but let's pretend that it was, because I think this Mary and god were married debate can turn into a pretty badass chapter in the biography that someone will write about me hundreds of years from now as a result of my single-handedly turning the world away from religion and toward a peaceful coexistence. Or not. I don't really care if you believe in god or not. Whatever gets you through the night. Just try not to be an asshole about, and try to encourage other people not to be assholes about it either. See? Peaceful coexistence. I'm sure my Nobel is on the way.
The first time I remember flat out telling someone that I didn't believe in god was third grade. I was talking to my strict Southern Baptist best friend at the time, Joseph S. I have no idea what I said other than that I didn't believe in god and I thought it was foolish that he did. Whatever I said, it must not have made much of a mark; he lists the Bible twice in his list of favorite books on Facebook and Jesus Christ first (four places ahead of Reagan) in his list of influential people. The Joseph S. phone incident was a full 3 years before I was injected with the ego boosting shot of pretty much limitless power that my promotion to safety patrol captain gave me.
One afternoon when one of my fifth grade underlings, Shane M. and I were walking back into the school after a successful shift of life saving, we were talking about god. I had formed real opinions and thoughts based on logic by this point. It was a major step in my intellectual growth. I know this sounds like I think pretty highly of myself, but let me follow-up by saying that my opinions and my ability to argue on this topic have not matured or expanded one iota since that spring 18 years ago. But back to my conversation with Shane M. "Just because we haven't found all the answers through science doesn't mean the answers don't exist. Religion is just ignorance settling on an answer," I told him. I have no idea what he said to that. It's hard to listen to other people when you're too busy being impressed with yourself. Remember that thing I said a couple paragraphs ago about not being an asshole about your faith? That goes for atheists too. I was a real schmuck when I was twelve. In case you were wondering, according to Shane's Facebook page, he still believes in god too. Good for him.
As I said, I haven't come up with any sounder arguments against the existence of god since I was twelve. I'm sure if I'd read more of what Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens had to say on this matter, I'd be further along argumentative education, but the truth is, I don't go out of my way to read books or essays that try to disprove the existence of god. I may not be any good at convincing other people not to believe, but I think I've pretty well mastered my own disbelief, so why spend the time? Something I do spend time on though is reading collections of essays written by people who I think are funny, skilled writers (something I clearly haven't mastered as proven by this essay). Well, sometimes when you're looking for one thing, you find something else just as valuable. A few weeks ago, I read Penn Jillette's new book, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. I will say that the title was the first thing to catch my interest, but the reason I bought the book was that as I was standing in the book store reading the books introduction I noticed the strength of Jillette's voice. He writes like he talks, which is something I try to do, and he's funny, which is something that I try to be. I thought maybe I could learn something from this guy. I was right, but what I learned had nothing to do with being a better writer (no offense Mr. Jilliette). No, what I walked away with after reading page 129 of Penn Jillette's book was the best argument against god I've ever heard. Here's the quote:

There is no god, and that's the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion were wiped out
and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. there might be
some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out,
it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

As my dear mother, the same woman who baptized me in our bathtub with holy water she stole from the hospital chapel, says "Well shit twice and fall back in it." That's a pretty fucking solid argument. I'm sure, for those who believe, there are arguments against the aforementioned, but I'm not going to go out of my way to think of what those arguments would be. In fact, I think I'm set on reasoning against the existence of god for another 18 years. But I'm still not proud of the way I talked to Shane M. that day after we'd finished our safety patrol shift.
You could say that I let my position as safety patrol captain go to my head. You could say that it ws inappropriate for me to use my position of authority to try to sway the beliefs of my subordinates, but let me just leave you with one last story.
School had just let out, and all the kids who lived within a safe mile of the building were anxious to get home. Students walked along the quiet suburban streets with nary a care in the world. Students, that is, except for me and the rest of my force. I was standing on the corner of Carnation Street and Palm Drive, proudly wearing my glow-in-the-dark sash when a small group of kids walked up behind me. They were chatting amongst themselves, paying no attention to the traffic situation around them, but so what--that's why I was there. From my left, a car approached. I held my flag/dowel rod in width-wise in front of my waist and gave the command, "HOLD!" The kids walking behind me didn't stop, but neither did the car. When the first girl in the group ran into my outstretched dowel rod, so firm that the rod broke against the force of her forward momentum. She stopped, unharmed, just as the car passed.
Maybe there is a god after all.

Mom Crush

2011-09-28T22:19:00.000-04:00

To say that I was a morose teenager would be an understatement. I did the typical morose teenager things. I mastered sarcasm. I wrote bad poetry, comparing my soul to a corpse at least one time too many. (For aspiring poets out there--one time is one time too many.) I spent a lot of time alone in my bedroom playing in the hot wax dripping off the tapered candles I purchased at the local Hot Topic while listening to Bush's "Alien" over and over and over again. Other than my tortured (dare I say corpse-like) soul, I still have no fucking idea what that song is about. Since it was track 11 on the Sixteen Stone album and never released as a single, I allowed myself to feel particularly isolated and angsty since, obviously, I was the only person in the world who'd ever taken the time to listen to it. The only person, that is, other than all the people at the concert in the below clip who are singing along to it. Whatever. No one feels emotional pain like a 13-year-old.

For those people not hanging out with me in my bedroom, by which I mean everyone, I made sure my pain was clear by basically being an incommunicative, manipulative bitch. The real key was to be happy enough of the time for people to notice when I wasn't. I'd be fine on Friday afternoon, then come back to school on Monday refusing to smile. Teachers would ask me if everything was okay, and I would say, "I'm fine," as if the words were being pushed out of my lungs with my dying breath, which is exactly what it felt like on account of the fact that I was dead on the inside. God help the teacher who took the time to ask. Probably showing an interest in a 13-year-old-potentially-suicidal girl is the right thing to do morally, but boy was it asking for trouble. The second anyone gave me the time of day, I elevated them to JD Salinger status (oh, the other thing I did that you're required to do when you're a morose teenager is read The Catcher in the Rye--several times). And this brings us to the real point of today's post. THE MOM CRUSH.

The only thing standing between me and Maria is that damn whistle.

I had a lot of mom crushes in my day. With the exception of the fictional characters (Fraulein Maria from The Sound of Music, Reggie Love from The Client, Miss Honey from Matilda) all the mom crushes were platonic mom crushes as opposed to oedipal mom crushes. An oedipal mom crush is when you want to stab Christopher Plummer, er I mean Captain von Trapp to death with his bosun's whistle and have sex with your not-quite-a-nun-yet nanny. In addition to all the objects of my real person mom crushes being platonic they were also all teachers. I suppose this makes sense. The only grown-ups most adolescents hang out with are their parents and their teachers.

Fairly certain she's thinking "I really wish someone would stab the captain with that whistle."

When my parents were getting divorced, I was in the sixth grade. I don't know for sure what prompted my chorus director to offer to listen should I ever want to talk. It could have had something to do with the fact that when she wanted to give my class a lesson in movie musicals and showed us Grease, I spent the entire class period lying on the floor under my chair making sarcastic remarks about every stupid thing John Travolta did. The incident still embarrasses me, but I maintain that that movie is freaking horrible. As for whether or not it was a cry for help, I'm not sure. It may have been more like a cry of, "You're the one that I want [to be my mom] ooh ooh ooh, honey." Whatever it was, I trolled past that poor woman's classroom twenty times a day everyday for the rest of the school year in the hopes that she would acknowledge me. To her credit, she often did. We had lots of long talks and she never made fun of me (to my face) for being the most melodramatic preteen ever to grace her alto section. Now that I'm an adult not too many years younger than she was when all of this was going on, I can imagine the conversations she might have had with the other teachers in their lounge, and thinking about it makes me squirm...ooh ooh ooh.

Obviously the kid's seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show

After sixth grade, I moved to the junior high school. Well, not just me. Everyone moved. That's where they kept the 7th grade. According to informal surveys that I've taken, I understand that grades 7 through 9 are universally wonderful for everyone, so I won't give some sort of, my-parents-were-getting-divorced excuse. Life sucked. I sucked. Everyone sucked. Pass the razor blades. At this point, the care-and-maintenance baton was passed to my basketball coach. In addition to firmly grasping how a 2-3 zone defense works, she was also a Social Studies teacher, and her classroom was close to the library. I had to (chose to) walk right past her first thing every morning on my way to my locker. If I didn't say hello as I walked by or I purposefully avoided eye contact, she'd pull me aside and ask me if everything was okay. Looking back, I can't think of a single thing that was ever wrong--you know, except my inner decomposing soul. Sometimes I think that I must have been at least a little more miserable than everyone else, but then I remember the thousands of people that were at my first Tori Amos concert and I realize I wasn't as alone I liked to think I was.

I think Matilda and Miss Honey are watching Tori Amos on Letterman here.

Things got a little better but not great once I made it to my freshman year. I was still in the junior high, but I wasn't alone. I had a good group of friends who were as depressed as I was, which is to say they were exactly the right amount of depressed, which is to say they were paying attention. That's not fair. I don't mean to say that I didn't have any friends in the 7th grade. I did. It's just that instead of shutting myself in my bedroom and being sad while really only talking to my friends while I was at school, I switched to occasionally going to my friends' houses to be sad, sometimes while wearing fishnets, watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show and making instant pudding. It was my first attempt at ironic depression and it was mostly delicious. Still, there were times when I needed to know that there was an adult out in the world who gave a shit, so I was pleased as punch when the varsity softball coach came and sat next to me on the bench during practice one day (sad people are really really good at finding benches out in the middle of fields to sit on alone) and told me that he was there for me if I ever needed anything. I did say he. Mom crushes know no gender.

I know Rocky. I know.

I could dedicate volumes to the relationships that I formed with some of my teachers when I was a kid, but, meh--I'm lazy and it's not that interesting. I will say that I might not have survived my teen years without these people. And, you know, without the shelter, clothing, food, and unconditional love that I was getting from my real mother at home. What 13-year-old is crazy about her actual parents?

All any of the aforementioned people had to do to earn my unconditional admiration was show me that they cared about me, and I do still admire these people, even if I haven't talked to any of them in fifteen years. I don't know why none of my mom crushes lasted. All the real people I mentioned, and lots more who I didn't, got me through some pretty rough times, but eventually things just fizzled. As for the fictional mom crushes, I still think it would be just about the coolest thing in the world if Fraulein Maria (or Mary Poppins or even whatsherface from The Princess Diaries) was my mom. Come to think of it, it's probably best for your mom crushes to be fictional characters. I mean, eventually you'll figure out that your chorus director's shitty taste in men won't stop her from saying, "I do," to her third husband. You'll be out of town watching a professional women's basketball game with your 7th grade basketball coach, and she'll accuse Ohio State's women's basketball coach, who was Nancy Darsch at the time, of "dyking up the program," as if that's a bad thing. Or your varsity softball crush (male mom crush) will get fired and go to jail for sleeping with a 14-year-old student (okay, maybe I do know why none of the real people crushes lasted). On the other hand, Fraulein Maria will always help you escape the Nazis through the power of song, Reggie love will always get you into witness protection through the power of blackmail, and Miss Honey will always offer to adopt you and raise you as her own through the power of the fear of dying alone. These realities can be counted on no matter how many times you start the movie over.

Now excuse me while I go stare symbolically out a window in the hopes that Susan Sarandon will happen by in her underwear to ask me what I'm thinking.

***

Just for fun, I created a Spotify playlist for this post. If you've got an account, check it out: Songs for 90s-Era Teenagers to Hang Themselves By

This Is Not a Funny Post

2011-09-22T12:08:00.001-04:00

(Photo from American Academy of Orofacial Pain)

My absolute biggest fear is cicadas. But my second biggest fear is of being wrongly convicted of a capital crime, spending 20 years locked up in prison and working my way through the appeals process before finally being executed at the hands of the government which I have worshipped, in spite of its utterly flawed and broken state, since I was 10. I'm feverishly scribbling this at 12:30 in the morning with an alarm clock on the nightstand rapidly ticking toward it's 6:00 a.m. call time, so when I say this is the sort of thing that can keep me up nights, I'm not exaggerating. (Quick confession. Though I wasn't making up the bit about being kept up nights, I was fabricating the alarm. It's 2011. I use my cell phone to get up. It doesn't tick in the same kind of impending doom way I needed to set the scene though.) I accept that this fear of mine is unlikely, but I won't say it's irrational. Since 1973, 130 people have been released from death row based on wrongful convictions. You could say that this is proof that the system works. You could also be realistic for a minute and admit that probably some innocent people have been executed in the name of justice.
Enough of this soapbox though. Let's get back to important matters. Let's get back to ME. Since I was a little girl, no one has ever seen me sleep. My girlfriend who has slept next to me almost every night for the last 3 1/2 years has never seen me sleep. This isn't to say I have not slept in the company of others. I've shared beds with my best guy friends in State College, Pa; Savannah, GA; Columbus, OH; and Gatlinburg, TN. I've crashed living room floors with Tim and Susan. But I'm careful, and I'm a light sleeper. The second my bed or living room floor mate turns over or stretches or yawns or unconsciously scratches his or her stomach, I'm up. I open my eyes, I turn over too, or I say, "Hey there." I do whatever it takes to send the message, hey you, no funny business. No sticking my hand in warm water or writing the word "idiot" on my forehead with a permanent marker or whatever it is that awake people do to asleep people when they're not vigilant. I'm onto you, mother-fucker. Seriously, what is it that people do? Someone tell me so maybe I can conquer this fear.
For whatever reason, this is something I've been thinking a lot about today. I don't know why, but it suddenly dawned on me that, unless I meet some sort of Wile E. Coyote cartoon demise or I'm shot in the head because I flip the wrong person the bird for cutting me off on the highway, I'm not going to escape this life without someone seeing me sleep. Death, when it's drawn out, like it will be for most of us (come on asteroid the size of Texas), is not pretty. It's days, if not weeks or months, in hospital beds with doctors and nurses coming to poke at you at all hours. Loved ones sitting by your side, involuntarily measuring the time between your breaths.
If you're on death row, people waiting for you to die is your whole life, not just the last few sick days. It's years, maybe even decades, of people watching and waiting for you to take your last breath. No, literally, in the end there are people in a gallery behind a pane of glass, eager and waiting to see you fall into permanent sleep, so that maybe, finally, they can rest. How does this not freak anyone else out?
Whatever the cause of my inevitable death, whether it's cancer or conviction, at some point I'm either going to have to get over my fear of people watching me sleep or else come to terms with dying of exhaustion.

God's Love: The Case for "Working" from Work

2011-09-20T19:43:00.001-04:00

Photo from: http://foodiewanderings.blogspot.com/2010/09/coffee-art-or-heart.html

The unfortunate thing about the location of the office where I work is that it's not close to any good coffee shops. Since Jen and I only have one car, one of the things I spend a lot of time doing is driving around looking for places where I can work. I could just go home, but once you factor in drive time, I often lose an hour of potentially productive work time, so I'll often try to stay close to the office.
Now, when I say I'm looking for places to "work," I mean I'm looking for places where I can read things that will make me feel smarter and write things that will make me seem dumber (like this sentence). Here's a bit of free advice for you. If you have dreams of one day being respected for doing something that is, in all reality, completely frivolous and technically unnecessary for human survival, you can practice that dream during your free time and call it "work." You don't even have to use air quotes when you talk about it. People will think you're hot shit. And if you're wondering where the reading part fits into the whole, "work" myth, then you've obviously never taken a writing class. Spending four years in college being told by professors that, in order to hone your craft, you not only have to write every day, but you also have to read every day is worth the price of admission, especially at today's historically low interest rates.
It only took me two months of driving around for an hour at a time (that same hour I would have lost by just going home) before finally giving up and settling for places I know about that are nowhere near the office before I finally got wise and remembered that I carry the world around with me at all times. A phone is only as smart as the person whose pocket it lives in. I have three different apps that can figure out where my phone is (as in globally, not just in my pocket) and point me toward the closest coffee shops.
When my phone told me that there is a place called Heavenly Cup right down the street from the office, I thought nothing of it. People call things "heavenly" all the time. It's secular euphemism at this point. "Please, try some of this corned beef sandwich; it's heavenly." "The full-release massage I got on vacation in Thailand was absolutely heavenly." You get what I'm saying.
After I payed for my chai and grabbed a window seat from which to work, I opened up my laptop and looked for Heavenly Cup's wireless network. There were several password protected networks listed, but I was expecting to see something like, "Heavenly Cup (Free)." There was nothing like that in my list of available networks though. In fact, the only free and open network that was listed was one called "God's Love." I am, at times, not bright. My first thought, I swear to God, was, huh, is there a church around here or something? To say that I have an aversion to The Lord (do you capitalize "The" when referencing The Lord? I can never remember. Is it like The Godfather? The Sting? The Terminator?) would be going too far. I have an aversion to cancer, and carrots, and people with the nickname "Cooter," but it's not actually possible to have an aversion to something you don't believe in. The reality of the situation is that, unless I'm directly confronted with Him, I don't give Him much thought at all. Hence the fact that, despite the name of the wireless network I'd just connected to, despite the fact that every customer who walked into the coffee shop while I was there somehow managed to work talk of the previous Sunday's church service into their conversation, despite the name of the goddamn coffee shop, I didn't notice the fucking halo hovering over the "u" in "cup" until I'd been sitting there staring at the sign hanging below the register for an hour.
It's cool. It's not like I stood up and left as soon as I realized that I was in Christ's Coffee House. The woman who owns the place was very friendly (that's how they get you), and the men who kept coming downstairs from the church offices upstairs (the talk of Sunday's service finally made sense when I noticed that all the customers coming from upstairs were wearing matching polo shirts complete with embroidered crosses) seemed to know everyone and even offered to help some guy with his algebra homework. From what I could tell, everyone who walked into the place knew everyone else who was there. Folks came in and left a couple minutes later with their preferred drinks without ever having to order. The proprietor would sit at a table with her regulars and chat with them between customers. That sort of atmosphere is nice. It's also the sort of thing that will put you out of business, which is what I assume is happening with this shop since every patron who crossed the Heavenly Cup threshold asked the owner, "Have you found a buyer yet?"
"Maybe if I won the lottery, I could afford to take one of the offers I've gotten. Of course, if I won the lottery, I wouldn't have to sell it in the first place." At this point, I imagine someone suggested that she pray on the situation, but I was too busy packing up my shit to notice. It wasn't that I wanted to leave. It was a nice enough place to work. It wasn't dirtier than any other coffee shop; after all, I bet even the cleanliest baristas find spent coffee grounds in the strangest places after an 8 hour shift. Sure, it was small. There were only 4 small tables, but I had found a seat right away. Yeah, it seemed to be a heavenly, I mean heavily Christian establishment, but the owner was very friendly. No, I had to leave because, in spite of its values driven charm, Heaven's Cup was missing one vital ingredient. Power outlets within reach of the tables. As a wireless network, God's Love is nearly as omniscient and omnipotent as its namesake. God's Love can give you the latest world news, resurrect our fallen heroes, and grant access to porn. What God's Love can't do is power my laptop for more than 90 minutes. Off to greener pastures I went.
I still had more than an hour before I had to be at work. All out of ideas, I gave up and headed to the office to do a bit more "work" before work. It turns out that's where I'm most productive anyway.

I'm an Urbanite Snob

2011-09-14T21:04:00.000-04:00

This post was supposed to be about something else. Then it turned into what it is. Which is not very good. Oh well. Blogs are supposed to be off the cuff, fast and dirty. They can't all be winners. I'm saving the really good stuff for The Paris Review or my neighborhood newspaper. Same diff.

I recently started a new job. It's great. I love it. I couldn't be happier. But.
Jen and I now work in the same building, for the same company, at the same job. No, literally Jen and I have the exact same job. She does the job full-time during standard business hours. I do the job part-time, typically starting at 1 in the afternoon. It's wonderful to have my mornings free. But
I now take Jen to work every morning. Then I typically drive back home before driving back up to the office at 1:00. I don't mind it, but it's maybe not totally practical. See, Jen and I only have one car. I know that's un-American. We are commie-urbanite-snobs. Why don't we just move to New York (City, not Buffalo) with all the other commie-urbanite-snobs? Well, judgmental reader, because, Life is expensive. Until recently, we couldn't afford to. If we could've afforded to do that, we could certainly have afforded to have 2 Pontiac Grand Ams with 128k miles on them in our fleet, instead of just the one. Also we didn't need two cars when I had my old job. Also we like it in Columbus. Also, did I mention we both have jobs here? Try to keep up.
Now, back to my point (which I'm painfully aware I never established in the first place).
When I worked at my previous job, I was within walking distance of my office. Having just one car was perfectly perfect. Jen drove the car 15 miles north everyday on a highway she hates to work at the cool job that I coveted, and I walked 1.7 miles through a neighborhood that I love to a job that I hated. Well now everything is right in the world. It's been 2 months since Jen has almost died trying to merge onto the highway and it's been almost 2 months since I've nearly been run over by some d-bag from the suburbs who doesn't know what a crosswalk is. (Wow, I'm starting to understand why you might think I'm a commie-urbanite-snob. For the record, I'm actually a socialist-urbanite-snob.) Anyway, this way everyone wins. Everyone except the aforementioned Pontiac. But.
Let's be honest. We live in a place where a two adult family needs to be a two car family. Let's also be honest that the real reason Jen and I haven't yet bought a second car is not because we're so principled in our snobbery. Sure, we're conscious (but not concerned) of our carbon footprint. And, we do like to leave the car at home and walk to local restaurants for dinner (except when we drive 20 miles into suburbia for Turkis/Mexican/Chinese). No, the real reason Jen and I haven't bought a second car is that I'm a child. I would rather spend the money we should be saving for a down payment on a vacation, or great seats at a Notre Dame football game (insert laughter here), or 40 really good dinners out. Ongoing debt makes me twitchy. Paying someone interest makes me irate. It's why I don't buy a house, or a car, or a master's degree. The thought that someone else should make money off of me just because they happen to have it to lend and I don't have enough of it afford things that, at least in this country, are considered necessities--well that just pisses me off. Did I mention that that job I just recently left was at a bank? You could say it was a bad fit for me.
I realize that according to my ideals, most people would never be able to own houses (hello, Mother Russia.), or new cars (I'll sell you the Grand Am for $1500.), or educations (We don't need no...). I'm not asking anyone else to live by my ideals though. I'm not even expecting to live by them, myself. Someday we'll buy a house (I'm not spending my Saturdays mowing the lawn, sweetheart.). We'll have a second car by Christmas (Sorry, none of you will be getting gifts this year). And I already have a degree (that I'm still paying for and will be until I'm forty, and I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in Communist China). But.

This is a Story about Love

2011-09-12T00:15:00.000-04:00

This is a story about how amazing I am. This is a story about how tolerant Jen can be when it comes to my desire to exploit her personal pain for my personal gain. This is a story about carrying a semitransparent bag of vomit across a busy parking lot. Like the title says, this is a story about love.

One thing I've learned over the course of my time as a woman who forms romantic attachments to other women is, people in same-sex relationships can get away with things that people in opposite-sex relationships can't. Like believably impersonating your partner to get drugs.
I can't tell you how many times I've pretended to be Jen and filled the prescription for her migraine medication. On some truly unfortunate nights when Jen wakes up feeling like William Howard Taft is sitting on her head (scary, because he's dead; painful, because he's fat) and we realize that, stupidly, we've forgotten to fill her prescription at the non-24-hour pharmacy 3 blocks from our house, I jump in the Grand Am and crank the radio, thankful that no company wants to waste money on advertising at 4:00 in the morning and drive 20 minutes to the closest pharmacy that can help us out. The poor, disheveled pharmacist who's been relegated (for what crime, I don't know) to working the overnight shift doesn't need to know who I really am. "Wow, your headache must be pretty bad if you've had to drive out at this hour."
"Yeah, hopefully this will help," I say while trying to smile my appreciation for his concern. It's harder than you might think to smile in a way that appropriately conveys a pain that you've never experienced. I'm not Meryl Streep.

I'm Carrie, and I've never had anything worse than a sinus headache, but as soon the pharmacy opened this morning, I called and asked whether or not there were any refills left on the prescription for my migraine medication.

"Name?"

"Jennifer ____."

"Date of birth?"

"xx-xx-19xx."

"Nope, looks like you don't have any refills." Fuck.

Today it wouldn't have mattered if she'd said there was a refill left. The headache was too far gone for the pills to do any good. The only solution at this point was to head to urgent care where some unfortunate doctor who didn't have the good sense or the skill to go into plastic surgery where the real money is made is, therefore, now stuck diagnosing 5-year-olds with strep throat 8 hours a week to supplement his/her general practitioner salary in order to pay off the $200,000 in student loan debt that he/she incurred in med school when he/she still dreamed of having some never-before-discovered disease named after him/her. (Don't worry, I can't make any sense of that last sentence either.) The point is, the doctors who work at urgent care clinics are sad, and Jen needed one of them to give her an injection of the high test stuff if she wanted to get rid of her headache. The only question at this point was do we go now when Jen's only had the headache for 3 hours, or do we wait a couple days (yes, these migraines can last for days) so that the dead-on-the-inside physician won't think that Jen is a drug seeker? Since Jen had already run to the bathroom to throw up on 3 different occasions, and I had dreams of salvaging our weekend I made an executive decision. These drugs she had to get for herself. "Get dressed. We're going."
The last time we made this trip, 3 months ago, we learned the hard way that discarded fast-food bags that you might find in a pinch in the backseat of your car are not water proof, especially if that water is being projected at 62 feet per second. before we left this time, Jen grabbed a couple plastic grocery bags that we normally hang onto for when we scoop that cats' litter box. As she grabbed the bags, we looked at each other the way two people in love do when they're sharing an inside joke that doesn't even need to be spoken to be understood. In this instance, the joke was, let's don't throw up all over the floor mats again. Hilarious.
The worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus when you're coming from south of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game. We had to take a less than direct route. Lots of turns. Lots of jostling. Lots of me thinking, she's gonna throw up. She's gonna throw up. Don't take that corner too fast, Carrie. She's gonna throw up.
We were so close. If I had been driving an all terrain vehicle, a tank or one of those four-wheelers that I see daddies proudly driving their 3-year-olds around on when we're driving along back roads, we'd have made it. Since I was in a Grand Am, though, I couldn't just drive over the median and down the grassy hill that stood between us and the miracle cure. Instead, I had to stop at a red light and patiently wait to turn onto the street in front of the urgent care. "I'm so sorry," Jen cried as she pulled the plastic grocery bag up to her face.
"That's okay, baby," I replied, though I doubt she heard me.
They should really put trash cans outside big office buildings. They should especially do this if within the office building is some sort of clinic where people who are too sick to wait for their regular doctor's office hours to be treated for ailments or injuries more severe than a cold and less severe than a bullet to the hip. What I'm saying is, I bet Jen isn't the first person to show up outside this building with a bag of vomit.
She got out of the car and looked around. "I don't know what to do with this," she admitted as she limply moved the bag forward in case I wasn't sure which, "this" she was referring to. We walked around to the side of the building. Nothing. Jen just stopped, not sure how to proceed. It was at this moment that I did the thing that makes me amazing. I stepped up to her, and I grabbed the bag.
Resolute and determined, I marched the length of a football field through the parking lot that the urgent care shares with a very busy grocery store. Fittingly, the bag that Jen had grabbed before we left the house had been one from this chain. What I had in my hand was not only a semitransparent bag of vomit, but also a sign of customer loyalty. Thank you for your plentiful selection of cheeses and your conveniently located trash cans, Giant Chain Grocery Store.
By the time I got back to the urgent care building, Jen was checked in and seated in the waiting room. Now, if the worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game, then the best time to arrive at an urgent care north of the The Ohio State University's campus is 30 minutes before kickoff. Since the rest of the city was either at the game or in the Giant Chain Grocery Store across the parking lot picking up last minute game day necessities, Jen was the only person in the waiting room. As far as I could tell, we were the only people in the office other than the staff. Within half an hour Jen had been injected with an anti-pain/anti-nausea cocktail that could have made us a lot of money on the black market. We headed home with most of a weekend yet to look forward to.

A few days ago I asked Jen, "If something happened, and I was paralyzed, would you take care of me?"

"Of course."

"I mean, like if I couldn't even go to the bathroom myself?"

"Of course."

"Really?"

"Well I wouldn't be happy about it, but..." The truth is, I wouldn't even go to the bathroom in the middle of the woods if I could somehow be guaranteed that there was no other human or woodland creature within 100 miles of me, so if I ever found myself in the position where I needed help going to the bathroom, I'd have no other choice than to will myself to die, but that wasn't the point of our conversation, and I didn't want to hurt Jen's feelings by seeming ungrateful.
One of the more immature, yet understandable reasons that some young people give for not wanting to have children is that the thought of cleaning up piss, poop, and puke multiple times daily for 3 or 4 or 8 or however many years it takes to potty train kids is repulsive. Knowing parents always say the same thing, "It's different if it's your child." I don't know from experience, but I imagine that's true. Or maybe it truly is really fucking disgusting, but you do it anyway, because a) you love the kid, and b) you don't have a choice. In any event, I hate to be the one to break this news, but whether you have kids or not, someday you're going to end up responsible for the cleanup and disposal of someone else's piss, poop, and puke, and, if you're lucky, someone else, someone who you're lucky enough to be loved by, will be responsible for the cleanup and disposal of yours.
Stuff happens. We get drunk. We get sick. We get old. We get paralyzed from the waist down. Whatever it is, it ain't pretty. I just hope when the time comes, you have someone as amazing as me there to carry your semitransparent bag of vomit wherever it needs to go, and that, if that person asks permission, you're as amazing as Jen for letting them tell the story.

I'm Always Tired, and You Should Be Too

2011-09-06T12:59:00.002-04:00

I haven't consistently slept well since autumn 1980. I was a fetus, and for two blessed months, life was good.
According to Science Daily and, you know, scientists, after about 7 months in the womb, fetuses spend most of their time sleeping. For me, this is easy enough to understand for two reasons. One, if I don't have something mentally (say an intense political debate with a libertarian) or physically (say running away from a cicada) stimulating happening to me for 45 consecutive seconds, I get bored. As a fetus, once you've counted all the ceiling tiles 1000 or so times and mastered every yoga position that the space your stuck in allows, you're bound to want to escape to dreamland. Two, it would take me 7 months to adapt to and block out the ceaseless cacophony of my mother's beating heart, growling stomach, and echoing external conversations ringing in my ears. (Yes, I know fetuses can't hear right off the bat, but this is not a science article.) If you think about it, the stream of noise that fetuses are subjected to for weeks on end probably violate some of the anti-torture regulations of the Geneva Conventions. Boredom or no, it would take me 7 months to get to a place where I could sleep, but once I could fall asleep, I think I'd want to go ahead and ride it out.
After birth (not to be confused with afterbirth) I found no shortage of reasons not to fall asleep, not to stay asleep, and to wake up 15 minutes before the alarm went off every single time. The same explanation can be given for all three scenarios. Unlike so many of my fellow humans, my sleeping brain never evolved beyond the Pleistocene. As far as I'm concerned, a saber-toothed cat could come barging into my den at any moment, and I'd damn-well better be prepared. As far as my prehistoric brain knows, every sound, the flushing of a toilet, a 3:00 a.m. clap of thunder, an alarm clock sounding, could mean death. Constant vigilance is required.
In addition to these perfectly logical, completely involuntary reasons not to sleep well, other more far-fetched yet doubly terrifying reasons were given to me by sadistic film makers and trusted teachers. My 8th grade science teacher, Mr. Bruns (who always had chalk on his crotch) showed us the 1983 made-for-tv classic, The Day After. I've mentioned this before. The film is about life in Kansas City, Missouri in the days and weeks following a nuclear holocaust. If the image of Steve Guttenberg's face rotting off due to radiation exposure hadn't been enough to keep me up nights, Mr. Bruns soothing words, "The crazy thing about this movie is that this could really happen," were. Forget the fact that I'd seen the Berlin Wall come down with my own eyes five years earlier, and the USSR had dissolved 3 years prior. The Cold War raged on and Russia still had nukes pointed right at my bedroom, and I knew it. To make matters worse, I grew up a few miles south of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and every time a cargo plane flew over, which was several times nightly, the words that ran through my head were, "Oh my God. This is it."
If fear of prehistoric feline attack or the end of the world aren't enough to keep you up nights, how about the possible death of a loved one? I don't know how old I was when I figured out that "everyone you know, someday, will die," but once I grasped this concept, it stuck with me.

For several years before I was born, my parents owned an Australian Terrier named Barney. By the time I was born, he was in his prime. By the time I was 4, I realized he, my best friend, would die. By the time I was 9, I would stay awake nights just to watch him breathe. I'm not sure what I would have done had the poor deaf, blind, and hairless 15-year-old mass of perfection stopped breathing, but, at the very least, I was more than prepared to collapse into heap of sobbing hysterics when the inevitable happened. I do this with humans too. I was lying in bed, trying to get a couple hours of sleep before returning to Hospice when I got the call that my grandfather had died. I hadn't actually been asleep, of course, because of the nagging fear that an unexpected and jarring predator in the form of my phone's ringtone could sound at any minute. Still, when the sound came, I was startled. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. Then, when my mother's words finally made sense, I wished it would.

Who could sleep knowing that you're likely to wake up to feline attack, nuclear holocaust, or the death of a loved one? Doesn't 90 or so years of complete and utter exhaustion seem like a small price to pay to prevent so much pain? Pour yourself a cup of coffe and quit your whining.

They Don't Make Panhandlers Like They Used To.

2010-07-05T13:05:00.008-04:00

Jen and I approach Columbus' homeless population very differently which is to say--I approach them and she walks the other way. I've seen homeless people scream obscenities at passersby. I've seen them chase after pedestrians with the jagged necks of broken beer bottles. Scariest of all, I've seen the homeless sneeze on people who are fishing in their pockets for spare change without even attempting to cover their noses. Given all this, Jen's method for dealing with panhandlers is, at worst reasonable, at best, wise beyond calculation.

It's a wonder Jen will even leave the house with me. I'd like to say that the reason I'll gladly stop and listen to the story of any panhandler I encounter is a sign of altruism. This is nonsense of the, politicians really love babies, and, therefore, kiss them at every opportunity vein. I fear being disliked to such an extent that I put myself in foolish, even dangerous, situations. I'll take a drink out of someone else's beer when they offer me a sip, for fear of offending them if they should think my refusal is an indication that I think they may have a dormant case of mouth herpes. I'll run off to Canada and marry a drug addict out of concern that one more rejection in her life could be the thing to finally convince her to inject a lethal dose of class 3 narcotics. I'll stand on a street corner and listen to a man who may very well have an Alien-style alien growing inside his stomach, because the thought of being labeled an uppity bitch would put a serious damper on my day.

A few weeks ago, Jen and I were leaving our hair salon in The Short North (Columbus' gallery district). Having just successfully finished an hour and a half long flirting session with our Kuwaiti hair stylist (exotic looking, laughs at all your jokes, touches you when she's talking to you--you get the idea), I was feeling pretty full of myself. If I'd been wearing a hat, I would have doffed it at everyone I passed--including the charming homeless fellow who approached us about a block from the salon. As you should have assumed from my earlier commentary, when this gentleman called for our attention, Jen smartly kept walking. I, on the other hand, didn't want this guy to think I thought myself too good to stop and talk to someone down on his luck. After all, aren't we all just one or two missed paychecks away from the streets?

There are a few types of beggars. There are the guys who stand on the side of the road at the end of exit ramps who let their "Hungry veteran. Anything will help. God bless you," cardboard signs do the talking for them. There are the honest, friendly drunks standing outside the gas stations who'll tell you straight, "Look buddy, can you spare a few cents? I really need a drink," and there are the story tellers who seem to exist everywhere else. I was able to take one look at this fast talker with the bouquet of red, white, and blue cloth flowers and know which type of he was. The conversation went thusly:

"Pardon me ma'am. I just need a minute of your time. Ma'am I don't mean to bother you, but I am homeless, and, praise Jesus ma'am, I do have cancer . . ." At this point my new friend crossed himself and lifted up the front of his t-shirt to show me what could only have been one of three things. Three very distinct tumors, three very painful hernias, or the head and two fisted alien claws of the otherworldly being gestating in this man's stomach waiting to achieve full maturity at which point it will A) burst through this man's stomach and wreak havoc on the city I love or B) high kick down the street in a straw hat singing "Hello My Baby" at the top of its little alien lungs. Obviously, I prefer the Mel Brooks version, but either scenario would be unsettling at best.

There are times in life when it's inconvenient to have an expressionless face. "Honey, we're having a baby," isn't one of them. "Ma'am please take a look at my cancerous baby alien stomach and give me some money," is. It would have felt rude to show outward disgust or fear or the sort of curiosity that could only be accompanied by the phrase, "Can I touch it."

When I looked unphased by this man's stomach. He continued. "I'm trying to save up some money for treatment. Now, I am selling these flowers today." (Thank God. I was really hoping there was going to be an opportunity to buy these flowers in this for me.) "Now I'm asking five dollars for them, but I would be grateful for anything you could afford."

I had about $40 in my pocket. "Aw buddy, I'm really sorry. I don't have much cash on me, but I can give you a dollar, just to have. You don't have to give me any flowers."

At this point Jen was ten paces south of us, looking at me like why are you giving this crazy person our grocery money, and this is where things turn ugly. While I'm digging in my pocket, Baby Alien Head Man looks up at Jen and says, "Hey what about you?" Now, Jen and I have been together for a couple years, and we're so together that I assume it's obvious to anyone who happens upon us that we're together, and, therefore, when one of us acts, we're acting on behalf of the whole unit. Even if one half of the unit is 30 feet away. Because of this, there are some things that still take me a bit aback (at least when we're in Columbus, where you can't swing a dead cat around without smacking at least one half of a lesbian couple upside the head). For example, there's a moment of confusion if we're at a restaurant and our server asks us if we want the checks separately? Really? Similarly, I find it a little jarring when I'm getting ready to hand a panhandler cash and he calls up to my girlfriend, "Hey, what about you?" At this, Jen, similarly surprised, ignored him. "What's a matter? You don't talk to black people?" And this is why someone should start a nonprofit that teaches successful selling techniques to the homeless.

"Whoa man, that's not cool."

"Well look at her. She looks scared."

"I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to help you out today."

"Oh come on."

"Look I'm standing here trying to do you a favor and you call my girlfriend a racist."

"I wasn't calling her a racist."

"You said, 'What's a matter? You don't talk to black people?' you don't think that's the same as calling her a racist?"

"I'm sorry. Look, here, have some flowers."

"Sorry man. Have a good afternoon," and I walked away from the host of what could be the scariest thing ever to descend on Columbus and toward one pissed off girlfriend who was more displeased that I'd stopped to talk to this guy in the first place than she was charmed that I'd tried to defend her honor.

I'm fully aware that I'm the one who comes out of this story looking like the asshole, and part of me still feels bad about not giving him money. Not just the one dollar I promised him, but all of it. It's not like we wouldn't have bought groceries anyway. I just hope that he survives the tumors or the hernias or the explosive abdominal alien syndrome long enough to have the last laugh. Something tells me he will.

The Bitch Is Back

2010-06-29T19:09:00.005-04:00

A lot has happened in the world since my last post.

With Glenn Beck as their fearless leader, thousands of lunatic, gun toting men and the women who love them held rallies is major cities all over the country. In the beginning they proudly proclaimed themselves to be Teabaggers until someone got wise to exactly what that means and they casually decided to start referring to themselves as Tea Party-ers. I assume they hoped that the rest of us wouldn't notice the switch. Sadly, since a clan of angry white men running around state capitals proudly telling the world just where they'd like to stick their balls is the greatest thing to happen to me since Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face, I promise never to forget.

According to this ABC Affiliate, 92 famous people died in 2009. Among them are Gordon's wife from Sesame Street (you know, the lady from 227--no, not Jackee, and not the lady from The Jeffersons. The other one), Brittany Murphy (who I saw swear to Ellen Degeneres that she was speaking in full sentences at 6-months-old), and University of Georgia's bulldog mascot. I know there were plenty of other famous people (and possibly animals) who died in 2009, but these folks at ABC have defined "famous" so loosely that I couldn't make it further than example 20 without falling asleep, so I can't list them all for you.

In October, the Dow closed above 10,000 for the first time since October 3rd, 2008 even though I'm told that Obama is running this country into complete financial ruin. Al Franken was finally sworn in as the freshman senator from Minnesota, health insurance reform passed, 25 coal minors died in West Virginia due to lax regulation, 11 oil drillers died off the coast of Louisiana due to lax regulation, an ecosystem was destroyed. I could go on. My point is--there's a lot of shit I could have written about in the last 15 months. Instead, I have sat on my ass feeling uninspired and sorry for myself.

Well, I'm back. No gimmicks, just getting back to basics and typing whatever pops into my head (that won't get me fired). This is my 60th post to DISCONNECT, but it won't be my last. There are fascinating topics on the horizon. Jen and I are driving on a cross country adventure next week; it's festival season here in Columbus, and that means lots of suburbanites to make fun of; the midterm elections are right around the corner; did I mention my brother-in-law is living with us; and, oh yeah, there are still a million gallons of oil spewing into the ocean every day. I want to talk about all of it.

In the meantime, I've started a new site where I'm uploading some posts from my old blogging days at myspace. Just a little something to remind myself of where I came from and what it felt like not to give a shit what human resources or anyone else thought about what I had to say. Unlike in banking, there are no confidentiality laws in cookie sales.

Now, like Tina Fey says, "Bitches get shit done." So let's get to work.

The Curious Case of Thanks, Now I Wish I was Dead

2009-01-04T20:11:00.006-05:00

There are a lot of things that serve to remind us that there is never enough time. New Year's Eve; birthdays; the death of a pet, grandparent, fictional character in a movie based on a short story written by someone who is also dead, etc.

"Carrie, did your mother tell you that Polly died?" Polly was the cat that my mother and I rescued from the clutches of an obese, smokey smelling woman at the local pet store. The 6-week-old kitten kept scurrying away from the woman and the woman kept picking her back up and placing her on the side of the cage, apparently amused at Polly's iron grip, the direct result of what must have been Polly's desire not to plummet 5 feet to what surely seemed like certain death. My mother and I bought the kitten and took it home to my grandparents' house, explaining that it would be good for them to have a pet, which it was, for eleven years, right up until the moment the vet on the other end of the phone explained to my grandmother and her sister (who lives with her) that Polly's red and white blood cells were low and that it might be something treatable or it might be cancer, but that they would need to wait for test results to be sure. "Kill it." I don't know if these were my grandmother's exact words, but, as they didn't even wait for the test results, they may as well have been. I don't blame my grandmother. She's been rather touchy about the C word ever since my grandfather died of prostate cancer three years ago. People fill your head with the idea that, once you get to a certain age, you sort of come to terms with mortality. Bullshit. My grandfather lived to be 83. He traveled the world, had a successful business, raised three children, saw those children get married and have children, he met two great-grandchildren. I never heard the man talk about regret or start a sentence with, "I wish I'd . . . " but that man was afraid to die right up until the end. "Yeah, grandma. Mom told me."

The cat dying, finishing out 2008, having a birthday, and seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is too much of a reminder that the clock is ticking for one week. As a friend recently pointed out, "you grow up with your parents telling you that you're going to grow up to achieve great things. Then one day you realize that you're just like everyone else." I think Benjamin Button is supposed to teach us something about the way we experience life, but that's not what sticks with me. What sticks with me is, when Brad Pitt's character's daughter turns 1, he skips out on her and his partner and travels all over the world, supposedly it's what's best for everyone. That's the thing our parents don't tell us when they're filling our heads with the notion that, if we want, we can be doctors or astronauts or presidents. They don't tell us that getting what you really want out of life requires sacrificing the other things that you're supposed to really want out of life like family and paying the mortgage. I could write 10 hours a day if I didn't mind the idea of getting kicked out of my apartment and having to move back in with my mother. I could travel all over the world if I was okay with getting kicked out of my apartment and having to move back in with my mother upon my return. I can't actually think of any way to realize a life-long dream that doesn't involve having to move back in with my mother. That is except for the childhood dream of independence from my mother. All I have to do to achieve that is keep working ten hours a day at a job I don't like, the job that I'm off to now. Take that, Brad Pitt.

School Supplies, Similes, and Shame

2008-12-16T22:36:00.003-05:00

I went to Staples yesterday because I had a 6 dollar coupon and 6 dollars can get you 25,000 staples. When you consider that just one staple can comfortably bind together 20 sheets of paper, that's 500,000 sheets or 100 reams of paper once carefree and loose now bound for eternity. What I'm saying is one 6 dollar coupon can save a lot of paper from isolation and loneliness.

Now I happen to be the kind of person who lives with the kind of person who thinks school supplies make perfect Christmas presents. She's also something of a softy, so I'm sure once I run my staples = cure for loneliness hypothesis by her, she'll be excited about receiving 3 pounds of them for Christmas. That or she'll exchange them for stationary. Either way it's fine because 1) I'm not really stupid enough to buy someone staples for Christmas and 2) this has nothing to to with my actual story. My point is, I wouldn't have been at Staples yesterday if not for the coupon. If not for the coupon, all of the more factual events of my story could have been avoided, and I wouldn't have had to belabor a too long, not funny enough fantasy about buying staples at Staples.

So I'm standing in line with my 3 pound bag of staples (obviously staples don't really come this way, but the image of someone standing in a checkout lane with a bag of 25,000 loose staples in a bag slung over her shoulder amuses me almost as much as the image of that same person trying to load those same individual staples, one-by-one, into a stapler, so I'm going with it) and I glance over my shoulder, and there she is.

The she in question is none other than the subject of my previous blog, But Would You Walk Across Hot Coals? The woman who inspired me to write every day, no matter how frustrated I got. The woman who offered (without giving me the chance to ask) to write me a letter of recommendation for grad school admission. The woman who I lovingly (and, as far as I know, without her knowledge) refer to as Aunt Erin. This woman lit a fire in my belly that no amount of over-the-counter, prescription-strength acid reducer could relieve. I hadn't seen her since May when I accepted an award for an essay I wrote--you know, back when I still had promise. So what did I do the second I realized that Aunt Erin was standing seven feet behind me? Did I run out of line and jump into her outstretched arms, wrapping my legs around her waist like an excited 3-year-old? Did I tell her how much I enjoyed her last book (which I haven't read because I'm not reading anymore either)? Did I inquire into the health of her husband and her dogs? No. No I did not. I didn't even think to do those things. Instead I turned my back like a girl who's 20 years and forty added pounds out of high school when she doesn't want the homecoming queen to see her in the ice cream aisle. I think, if I don't make eye contact, she can't hold my not saying hello against me. For all she knows, I don't realize she's behind me. I conduct my entire transaction with my back to my old mentor, knowing that, as she is next in line, she will see me and recognize me. I mumble and make my voice slightly lower than it typically is. I do everything short of putting on a pair of Groucho Marx glasses (which, had I had them handy, I wouldn't have hesitated to throw on for good measure).

I think the why of my behavior is pretty obvious. I haven't written anything in months. The only pieces I submit are essays that I wrote a year or more ago. The well is dry. Not that I've been trying. Maybe I don't want to work. Maybe if it doesn't all come to me in a flash, I'm not interested. Maybe I like having money to spend and the though of going to grad school and trying to live on $12,000 a year doesn't really sound appealing to me (even under the guise of chasing my dreams). Or maybe I'm just trying to convince myself that that's the case. Maybe Aunt Erin saw me too. Maybe she turned around and pretended to see something interesting in the opposite direction, something more interesting than the look of disappointment permanently plastered to my face.

Now for something a little bit different

2008-08-07T15:45:00.002-04:00

I didn't blog the entire month of July. Obviously this is unacceptable. Suffice it to say there's been a lot going on. Some of it is not interesting enough talk about (I got a job as a personal banker). Some of it is quite interesting and quite none of your business. The other reason I haven't blogged has more to do with the fact that I am, apparently, emotionally and, therefore, creatively crippled. Yes, it is sad. At this time I'd like to give a shout out to my best friend, Tim. He's on my ass in the most loving way possible, and I appreciate it. "I don't care if it's one sentence, just write something." Well, I've stumbled upon a website that will allow me to do just that, so until I get my words back, check me out at www.twitter.com/carriekosicki

On this new site, I am limited to 140 characters. That includes spaces and punctuation. Even I can handle 140 characters a day, dead soul or no. See, I'm making vague references to Russian Literature--that's how broken my creative bone is right now. Anyway, just click the link. Add it to your bookmarks. Do whatever it is you actual bloggers do. See you there.

I Think I'm Going to Throw Up

2008-06-17T23:37:00.005-04:00

I walked into my quite clean apartment a few minutes ago and turned on the light. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted something defiantly frolicking across my kitchen floor. It was, how do I say this? THE BIGGEST FUCKING BUG I HAVE EVER SEEN OUTSIDE OF INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM! Now, I'm kind of like MacGyver when it comes to killing bugs. It's all about thinking outside the box. In this instance I needed there to be absolutely no way of actually coming into contact with the kitten-sized creature. I also needed to not hear the impending crunching sound. Most importantly, I needed not to take my eyes off it or make any sudden motions lest I scare the thing into hiding and, therefore, have to break the lease on my apartment leaving all of my stuff behind in the crippling fear that the thing might wish to feed on me in the night. I was standing between my coffee table and my television. Within arms reach I had a few lightweight paperbacks, a mason jar full of pens and nails, my television, and some bamboo. The thought of throwing my television at the thing (let's call him Beelzebug) was, thankfully, fleeting. I knew I couldn't do much damage with the paperbacks, and, while you can make everything from hardwood floors to bed linens out of bamboo, I didn't think it would be of much use either. Then I spotted it. My large, hardback copy of World Philosophy: An Explanation in Words and Images. Let's just call it what it is. It's a book on world religions. So, I picked the thing up, slowly so as not to frighten my uninvited guest. I did a little mental calculation of the distance so as to determine the force with which I would need to toss the book (I knew I only had one shot at this). I said a brief prayer, "bless me Father, for I am about to crush the shit out of one of your children." I launched. Do you know what it sounded like when it came crashing down on Beelzebug? It sounded like a heavy, wide book being dropped on a tile floor. No crunching noise. I was half expecting the book to just bounce off the back of this six-legged equivalent of a linebacker. Or for there to be a two second pause before Beelezebug carted my book away on his back. Thankfully, the book seems to have done the trick, but now I have a problem almost as dire as the bug being in the apartment in the first place. I can't just leave the book there. I mean, I could, but I shouldn't. At some point cleanup is going to be necessary. Here are some of the things I'm struggling with. Do I first jump up and down on the back of the book so as to ensure that the little fucker is dead? Do I just plow ahead and pick up the book like a girl with ovaries and tell myself that I'm not completely repulsed by the carnage? I think I'll definitely slip the book cover off and put the book back on the coffee table. I didn't need the cover anyway. This is going to be among the most ghastly things I've ever had to endure. Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, I guess there's no time like the present. Be right back........Turns out the answer is, jump up and down on book, remove book jacket, back away in case the thing really is from the devil and it wants to jump out at you just to prove a point, lift book jacket off floor, push contents of stomach back down your esophagus, take picture for blog, sweep up carcass with broom and dust pan, flush carcass, flush once more for good measure (I like to think that even Al Gore would approve of this waste of water) mop floor with undiluted Mr. Clean, forget about sleeping tonight, instead lay awake in bed scratching at phantom itches that can only be explained by giant bugs crawling all over you.

Tim Russert

2008-06-14T11:18:00.002-04:00

There are lots of reasons that Tim Russert's death sucks. The thing that makes me saddest is no one loved politics more than this man. Now we're in the middle of the most historic election season of a generation, and now Russert doesn't get to experience it.

Let the Looting Begin

2008-06-12T21:46:00.003-04:00

I know we in Columbus, OH don't have much to complain about on the shitty weather front. There's no flooding. We haven't had any tornadoes this year. We're too far inland to worry about hurricanes. But fuck me if we didn't have some crazy-ass lightning tonight. There were downed trees everywhere. I'm not talking a branch here and a limb there. I'm talking entire 30 ft tall trees scattered throughout my neighborhood. When I came home after the rain, more than a few streets were blocked off due to the fact that there was a big fucking tree laid out in the middle of the road. The park by my house looked like a disaster area; however, as a sign that everything would be okay, the local juggling club was outside the rec center tossing and catching various blunt objects. It's like I always say, if the Columbus Juggling Society doesn't get together and practice on Thursday nights, then the terrorists--I mean Thor-Norse-God-of-Thunder has won.

Before I even got to the park, I was shunted all around Third Street which was closed for a couple blocks due to waist-high water. When I drove back through a couple hours later, the water had all gone, but the street was caked in mud, and the poor bastards who'd been parked along the street when the storm came were either having their cars towed off the sidewalk or trying to will their newly fried electric to correct itself.

After driving through town for a bit, I would say that roughly 50% of the traffic lights are out. Speaking of which, I'm sure my educated readers know this, but just in case someone else stumbles across this blog, when a traffic light is out you are supposed to TREAT IT LIKE IT'S A STOP SIGN! I can't say how many people I saw just barreling through busy intersections without even slowing down. See, when people do that, THEY CAUSE ACCIDENTS!

When I finally came back into my neighborhood it was dark. Lots of power out. Not mine, but just about everyone for the 10 blocks north of me. I live in a part of the city where it's never completely dark. To see it that way was a little creepy. Creepier still was the little old shopkeeper I saw standing outside his storefront, sweeping and looking at the big hole in the front of his store where his window used to be. For the first time in my life, I'm glad I sleep with a loaded gun under my pillow--did that fool anyone? I'm trying to practice my bad assness in case there's trouble tonight.

Insert REM Lyrics Here _____

2008-06-10T12:26:00.003-04:00

I made the mistake of watching the news for five minutes today. Here's what I learned:

**Parts of Washington State are expecting 10 inches of snow today.
**Aspen, Colorado still has some slopes that will be ski-able this weekend (less than a week before the official start of summer).
**A river in Iowa is getting ready to crest at 25 feet--a mere 13 feet over what the levees can withstand.
**two eleven-year-old girls were shot on a dirt road outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.
**House republicans have blocked a bill that would tax the five major oil companies on the windfall profits that they have made by charging $4.00/gallon for gasoline. The bill would also have taken away $17 billion in tax cuts over the next 10 years for those same companies.

Here's the thing that really chaps my ass over the whole oil thing. Yes, a barrel of crude costs more than it ever has, but gas does not need to be $4.00/gallon. A barrel of oil now cost around $133. At $4.00/gallon, that brings the consumer cost for a barrel to $168. Now, $35 might not seem like all that much of a mark-up. It's about a 26% mark-up. Other things in this capitalist economy get marked up a lot more severely; however, Americans consume about 9,253,000 barrels a day. That's a total mark-up to the consumer of $323,855,000/day. I get that everyone who touches the gas has to take their share of the profits, but last quarter Exxon reported a net profit of $10.89 billion. That's a 17% increase from last year. All I'm saying is, fuck those guys.

I don't get math, and I've never taken Econ. I'm sure I've fucked up something in my rant, but still--$10.89 billion? And that's just one of the major oil companies. There are four others.

Poetry Kills

2008-06-03T23:49:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading The Caged Owl, which is a collection of poems by Gregory Orr. Reading poetry is something that I've only recently gotten into. I think I don't have the attention span for prose right now. Anyway, there's this poem, "Everything," It goes like so:

Is this all life is then--

only the shallow breaths

I watch you struggle for?

That gasp right now--

if it was water

it would be such a small glass.

And I could lift your head

from the hospital pillow

and help you sip it

to comfort your parched

throat

into the ease of sleep.

Your agony makes no

sense when air

is everywhere, filling

this room where you lie

dying, where we move

as if in a trance, as if

everything is under water.

So anyway, this poem got me thinking about my grandfather. Not a huge leap since, once a person gets to the gasping for air portion of the living/dying process, the experience really sort of becomes universal. I was looking on my old blog for posts around the time my grandfather died. I remembered posting the eulogy that I wrote for him, and I wanted to give it a gander. I remember getting a couple laughs and a few tears, and I wanted to look back over my own brilliance. I went to October 10, 2006 and remembered that I pulled the eulogy after only a few days, because keeping it posted seemed lame or disrespectful or something. Instead what was there was the post the I put up just a few minutes after he died. I'll include it here. Why not?

Then Came the Dry Humping

Grandpa died last night, which sucks the proverbial ass.
Here are some funny things about the situation.
There's this nursing home on the way to Hospice in Dayton. I forget the last names of the families running it, but the initials are S and M. On the awning outside the entrance is written, "S&M". I'm picturing leather and latex clad funeral directors whipping the shit out of those dirty, naughty corpses.
There was this group of folks parading around the circular corridors of Hospice last night singing gospel music. The organ music was prerecorded, and it was rather creepy sounding. Very Count Chocula. One of the songs they sang went something like this, "King Jesus is a listenin' for the sinners to pray." That feels perhaps more suitable for a prison than a Hospice, but maybe they had a limited number of prerecorded numbers on their little ChristCasio 5000.
At one point last night, the aids came in to change my grandpa's bedding and his diaper (obviously this was before he died). I averted my eyes, not because I was embarrassed or ashamed, but because my first concrete memory of my grandfather is of his penis and I was very aware that I didn't want that to be my last memory as well. Not quite the book end of 25 great years of memories I'm interested in.

Better Late than . . . Wait, That's Ridiculous

2008-06-02T19:41:00.001-04:00

Today I filed my 2005 tax returns.

Like a Cat out of Hell Pt. II

2008-06-01T09:56:00.002-04:00

I slept at my friends' house last night. They're on their honeymoon, so I'm rabbit sitting. Unlike my cat friend from the previous post, Sugar the rabbit does not try to kill me in my sleep. That coupled with the fact that my friends with the rabbit own season 3 of Frazier on DVD made the decision to stay over pretty easy.

When I came home this morning, Cat did not immediately come strutting out of my bedroom to say hello. I found this puzzling since he normally likes to lull me into a false sense of security when he first sees me. I walked into my kitchen to check on his food situation and found the above wreckage. I know this seems pretty cut and dry. He climbed above my cabinets, knocked over the bottle of Pernod which then landed on his food bowl, causing said food bowl to shatter. Here's the problem with that. Say the wall in my kitchen is ten feet long. The food bowl is at foot 0 while the Pernod bottle is at foot 4. How the fuck did this cat catapult the Pernod bottle 4 feet east? Does he have opposable thumbs? Did he knock it over then roll it down to the end of the cabinet before tossing it over? How did the bottle survive an 8 foot fall without breaking? Strange things are afoot is what I'm saying.

After I noticed the situation, I immediately panicked that my friend's cat's corpse, having bled to death, was going to have to be ferreted out from under my bed. This is not a phone call you want to make. "Hey friend, remember how you said your cat would find a way up on my cabinets and I stubbornly decided not to take the bottles down? Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is, you were right. Good for you for having such prophetic psychic abilities. The bad news is, I killed your cat. Fear not, I have a friend who owns a pet cemetery, and I'm sure once I explain the situation to her, she'll give you a good rate. Will you still be my friend?" I was thinking this and planning my escape to Mexico when Cat came around the corner, limbs in tact and both eyes in their respective sockets. As I write this, he's drinking out of my toilet.

And now I take the bottles down.

Like a Cat out of Hell

2008-05-31T22:47:00.002-04:00

Look at that shifty-eyed little nix-nux to the right. I'm cat sitting this special little guy, and he's causing me to behave in ways I would never behave otherwise.

I keep these empty booze bottles lined up above my kitchen cabinets. For the last four days el gato has been trying to figure out how to get to these bottles. My concern is that I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of something shattering and that I will come into the kitchen to find broken glass and a profusely bleeding cat sprawled across my kitchen floor.

People tend not to trust you when you kill their loved ones, even if the loved one in question is a trouble maker. I know the obvious solution is to get rid of the fucking bottles. More specifically, the obvious solution is to come to terms with the fact that I am a 27-year-old woman and not a frat boy and that empty bourbon bottles are not art.

You know how after 9.11, people kept doing shit in the name of not letting the terrorists win. Musicians the country over were all, "I thought about canceling the show, but then I realized that if I canceled this concert, the terrorists will have won." This is, of course, complete and utter malarky. People trying to make themselves feel justified in their selfish decision to move on with life by playing for the door. Anyway, if I take down the bottles, not only has the cat won, but also he has not learned a lesson. Since I was specifically told that the cat should be returned a better cat than he was when he was dropped off, the bottles are staying put.

Back to the story. A few minutes ago, cat figured out that the hood over the stove is wide enough and sturdy enough to support his weight. He jumped from the floor to the stove top to the hood and finally, victory of all victories, on top of the cabinets to my own little Jim Beam graveyard.

The thing is, when I took the cat, I meant to ask for the spray bottle. Most cats don't like getting wet, so spraying them with a light mist can be at once horrible and surprisingly refreshing. Sadly though, I did not actually go through with asking for the spray bottle. I thought to myself, Carrie, you're a 27-year-old woman. You should have a spray bottle. Play it cool. Don't let on that you don't have a spray bottle. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Well, with cat running back and forth behind the bottles like a feline possessed, I was staring at the bridge. Here's where we get to the part where I'm doing shit that I would never do. I turned on my faucet, pulled out the spray hose, and doused that little fucker. Yeah, it occurred to me that maybe I didn't want to get my ceiling, cabinets, and wall soaking wet. It also occurred to me that if I scared cat bad enough, he might panic and inadvertently knock over a bottle and hurt himself, which was the thing we were trying to avoid. Well, he did panic, and all my shit did get wet, and now it seems like he's not speaking to me. It also seems that I've turned into the kind of person who blogs about their cat, or, sadder still, someone else's cat. Shit, maybe the cat has won after all.

Harvey Korman

2008-05-30T14:06:00.002-04:00

One of my heroes died today. Harvey Korman was a brilliant comedic actor who was best known to most as one of the cast members of The Carol Burnett Show. He was best known to me as one of Mel Brooks' go-to guys, costarring in such films as Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and History of the World Part I. While on The Carol Burnett Show, Korman was best known for the work he did with Tim Conway. He had a near impossible time keeping a straight face any time he and Conway acted in a sketch together. Below is one of my favorite such incidences. Korman plays the patient.

My Best Friends' Wedding

2008-05-27T16:37:00.002-04:00

A few folks at Tim's and Susan's Wedding asked if I'd post the poem that I read. It ain't literary, but they liked it. At one point, about three stanzas in, Susan and I had one of our world famous giggle fits. After the wedding, people asked me if I had gotten choked up because I had looked down for a few seconds. The truth is I was trying and failing to not be the kind of douche bag who laughs at her own jokes. Anyhooter, here it is for those of you not there or in the back and unable to hear my mumbling.

Observations from the Third Wheel

Painting his toenails

was the exact right way

to get the girl of his dreams

and the weight of holding

her purse is a small price to pay

if he gets to watch her dance.

After five years, laughing

until they cry is

better than holding hands anyway.

There’s good and then there’s gyood,

and it’s important to find someone

who knows the difference. And it’s hard

to get mad at a man in a green facial mask.

Sometimes he puts on that sweater

just to see the look on her face right before

she tells him to change. I see the way

they look at each other, and I know what I have

the right to hope for. I realize I already have it.

2008-05-15T06:41:00.003-04:00

I spend all day in a low-walled cubicle taking shit from people and talking to answering machines in the naive hope that someone will actually be stupid enough to call back so that I can verbally break their kneecaps over their unpaid medical bills and Lane Bryant credit cards. Yesterday, as an added bonus, my headset was busted and I spent eight hours with a fundamentalist Christian radio station chirping in my ear. Between 11:00 and noon, I was treated with an infomercial in favor of virginity until marriage. The woman giving the talk was nice enough to tie science into her argument. It seems blind faith and a strong desire not to get knocked up or The HIV is no longer enough of a reason for people to abstain. Now the Christian right is trying to scare us with neurochemistry. According to our host, semen is God's "superhuman glue." I left my phone in idle for a couple minutes to jot that one down. Spooge is "God's superhuman glue and it's used to make new life." Additionally, one of the chemicals released in the brain when we have sex is diminished with each subsequent partner. According to this woman, the awkward, fumbly sex that I had as a sixteen-year-old with my first girlfriend was the best it was ever going to be. Maybe there's something to this. For example, the most mind-blowing orgasm I've ever had was while my first girlfriend and I were watching The Color Purple. If I'd known then what I know now, maybe I would have fought a little harder to keep her. I am hereby
instating a three partner limit. This Christian brain juice stuff could be for real, and I don't want to risk a life of mediocre sex. Sure this means that by the time I'm forty I'll be limited to dating 15-year-olds and ugly people, but hey, I can't possibly enjoy myself if the girl I'm with isn't.

Nose to the Grindstone

2008-05-09T23:48:00.001-04:00

"Sir, I'm sorry your wife's heart transplant didn't go as well as expected, but someone has to pay this hospital bill."

Earn More Sessions by Sleeving

2008-04-26T00:32:00.004-04:00

Tonight I came home from hanging out with my friends and I watched the Steve Martin movie, Roxanne for the four hundred seventy-sixth time. It's based on the Rostand play, Cyrano de Bergerac.

When I was six, my aunt made me a tape with three movies on it--Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Splash, and Roxanne. I watched the tape in it's entirety every day for a period of time that could easily be considered clinically insane. I learned something different from each movie. From Willy Wonka, I learned that sometimes good things do happen to good people, even if those good people are poor. From Splash I learned that sometimes being in love means abandoning everything you know and spending the rest of your life under water. And from Roxanne I learned everything else I needed to know about getting by in life.

There's a scene where Steve Martin's character, C.D. Bales, is sitting on a roof with an overweight boy who is upset because he's getting teased at school. Bales asks the boy if he's talked to his mother about his problems and the boy replies, "Once I tried, but she said I had to clean up my plate first."

Bales, thinking the boy has just made a joke says, "Now see, that's good. You're way better than those guys who make fun of you. You're smart and you're funny. You can make things up."

All through the movie, Bales lives by his own, smart+funny+the ability to make things up=better, equation. The scene most remembered by anyone who's ever seen the movie is the scene in which Bales has to come up with twenty insults about his nose better than "big nose." One of my favorites, "Fashionable: You know, you could deemphasize your nose if your wore something a little larger--like Wyoming." Or how about, "You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on."

I applied the things I learned from Roxanne to my own life. I remember being in the sixth grade and making my Art teacher, Mrs. Cadic, laugh. Referring to my hairy self I said, "Gee, now I see why some people think we descended from apes."

These are the things I generally think of when I watch Roxanne--how to be the kind of self-deprecating person that is liked by all and maybe stumbling upon some hot, brainy chick like the movie's title character who will be so swept up in my charm that she won't notice my faults.

When I watched Roxanne tonight though, another scene caught my attention and gave me pause. Towards the end of the film, Bale's is yelling at Roxanne through a closed door. He says, "Ten more seconds and I'm leaving." Roxanne opens the door and asks him to repeat himself. When he does, she turns to go back inside and he asks her what she thought he'd said.

Roxanne replies, "I thought you said 'earn more sessions by sleeving.'" As far as my current station in life is concerned, this might be the most important line in the movie.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to disclose that I have a slight, yet completely annoying, hearing problem. The ability to hear sounds is not my problem. I can hear a pin drop from three rooms away. My problem is in differentiating sounds.

I remember the old days at the cookie store, taking orders over the phone. The customer might tell me that the person receiving the cookies name was Nora.

ME: "Is that Nora or Maura?"

CUSTOMER: "Nora."

ME: "With and M or an N?"

CUSTOMER: "N."

ME: "As in Mary or Nancy?"

CUSTOMER: "What is your fucking problem? It's Nora, NOra, NORA!"

I found that mashing the phone into my ear to the point of giving myself and Indian . . . I'm sorry, a Native American burn served only a psychological benefit. My point is, "bat" and "pat" have always sounded the same to me, and according to an audiologist, they always will.

Now, I'm a smart girl. Context clues are helpful, and I'm a fan of looking at people when they talk to me, so I can see on someones lips what is being said whether my ears can figure it out or not. The problem is the telephone.

Why then, you might ask, did I just accept a job offer for a position that will have me talking on the phone forty hours a week? I suppose this weekend I should spend some time thinking up deaf jokes.

PERSON IN DEBT: "I'll pay it Sunday."

ME: "Sunday or someday?"

PERSON IN DEBT: "Sunday"

ME: "As in the Lord's Day or just when you get around to it?"

PERSON IN DEBT: "I'll pay it right now if it'll end this conversation faster."

Huh, now I think I know what people in wheelchairs mean when they say they're handicapable. I'm going to be the best collections agent in the city of Columbus. See, you really can learn everything you need to know about life from Roxanne if you're willing to connect the dots yourself.

Adventures in Hair Removal

2008-04-11T01:20:00.005-04:00

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I am one hairy chick. When I was little, my classmates teased me by calling me Hairy Carrie. Yeah, rhyming is fun. I was so famous throughout my school district that even older kids that I'd never met would shout, "Hairy Carrie" at me from across the mall then laugh to the point of wetting themselves when I turned around and gave them the old stink-eye. I've always had enough hair on my forearms to make it look like I'm permanently wearing long sleeves, and I can grow a mustache that would make most sixteen-year-old boys jealous. Well, no more. And for my Spanish speaking friends, no mas.

I remember a conversation I had as a little girl. "Mom, when will I stop having all this hair?"

"When you're older," she said, leaving me with the impression that sometime during my adolescence, I was going to wake up to discover that all of my body hair had magically fallen out. I wish some teacher would have taken me aside and taught me the importance of follow-up questions, but since none ever did, I just took my mom's response at face value. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I found myself still waiting for the shit to fall out, all the while growing more and more self-conscious about my looks.

The one bright spot in my adult life (if being humiliated can ever be considered a bright spot) was one time when a friend and I went out for Chinese. This was one of our favorite restaurants in Dayton, and we'd had this one tiny little Asian waitress at least a dozen times before, but for some reason on this one night she decided that she had to pay me a "compliment." When she brought our check, she started stroking the hair on my right arm and said, "Oooh, so sexy." My friend had to immediately excuse herself from the table. I could hear her crying with laughter as she walked away. Sure, it's a funny story now, but at the time I was mortified. I thought only little kids and retarded people were allowed to get away with commenting on people's physical shortcomings like that. I know. I know. What she said was theoretically nice. How was she to know she was pointing out the thing about which I was most self-conscious?

A few years later, I was working at a bookstore when another Asian lady caught my attention and motioned for me to come join her in the children's section. In a rather broken accent she told me, "I used have hair like you. I know where you can get fixed."

"What?" I asked, not quite sure I'd understood her.

"Hair. Your arms. Can fix."

"Thanks. I'm good."

I wasn't good though. I was again embarrassed by the cards the Geneticist in the Sky had dealt me. And what was it with these Asian people? Seriously, is there some sort of cultural propensity toward inappropriate frankness that I didn't learn about in school?

So jump to yesterday. Yesterday I woke up feeling like shit. I felt unattractive for the 3876th day in a row, and, frankly, I was over it. Carrie, you can't go to job interviews looking like this, I told myself. Looks do matter, no matter what your mother tells you. This hair would have to go. I thought the best place to shop for hair removal products would be with other classically unattractive people, so I drove to Wal-Mart. You would think that in all the places in all the world, Wal-Mart would be the place to take care of all your hair removal needs. I mean, look at the people who work and shop there. I know I'm sounding like a real a-hole, but seriously. Wal-Mart isn't exactly a bastion of trendiness and good grooming. Sadly though, my choices were limited. There were creams. I had tried these when I was 8 and I already had hair under my arms. I think my mother felt that 8 was too young to wield a razor. In the end, she had to entrust me with a Lady Bic, because these hair removal creams, turns out, are total bullshit. So creams were out. There were waxes that needed to be heated up and applied with wands. This seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. I mean, how do you get hot wax out of your eyeball? Or what about 2nd degree burns? I don't need that sort of mayonnaise in my life. Then I glanced the bottom shelf. Nads. I'd seen Nads on tv. I'd seen the Australian woman who created the product rip the hair off her beast-like daughter's arm with three easy motions. The daughter, she didn't even wince. I mean, Nads has kava in it, for Christ's sake. Who else is going to offer me all this in in one ready-made-wax-preapplied strip? No one. That's who. I bought the face kit as well as the full-size strips and went about my business.

When I went home, I waxed my lip. I'm not going into great detail about it, because I owned that shit, which makes it not that interesting and not at all funny. So I'm moving on.

Later that night, all the optimism about life and the feeling less hideous had already worn off. There was still the matter of the arms. How could anyone ever love me with these arms. Did I say love? I meant hire. Is there a difference really? It was 1:00 a.m. and I was as unattractive as when I woke up that morning. For a moment I thought, Carrie, is this really something you want to get into in the middle of the night? I thought, this is one of those mistakes that you know you're making even as you're making it. Like asking a friend for a cigarette or driving to Canada to marry a drug addict. The hair will still be there in the morning, I assured myself as I walked into the bathroom and took out the full-size strips. Well, here's the thing about applying a waxing strip to some part of your body--there's really only one way to get it off, and, whether you mean to or not, you're taking some hair with you. What I'm saying is, once you've got the strip on, you're fucked, so you might as well go for it. I stood there for a moment, looking down at the 3x6 inch strip pasted to my left arm. You're a fucking idiot, I thought. There's a reason people pay to have this shit professionally tended to. Deep breath. Yank. Stars. I saw stars. My eyes teared. I looked down. There was a perfect patch of perfectly smooth skin that I'd never seen in its full, hairless glory now exposed on my left arm. Fuck, I thought. I can't walk around like this. This is the thing you don't think about. Once you start the process, you have to see it through. An hour and a half later, after several breaks to stop the cold sweats and the shaking, I had two bare arms. Well, mostly bare. I spent half of the next day meticulously plucking any extra-fortified follicles which had been strong enough or sneaky enough to thwart the kava-infused wax.

I'm told that the hair will not come back all black and brillo-paddy. I'm told that someday, the hair will recognize its own futile need to grow and I'll hardly ever have to wax at all. I'm told that looks don't matter, and now that I feel a little less like a wereperson, I'm sort of inclined to agree.

The View from the Mountain

2008-04-04T23:21:00.004-04:00

So it's been a while since I've written anything. I'll go ahead an apologize now for this not being "typical" Carrie. It's the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's death. I thought I'd post links to the transcript of the "I've been to the mountain top" speech that he gave the night before he was killed as well as a video clip of it.

Transcript with brief clip: www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm

I just stumbled upon this website when I was trying to find a transcript of the "I have a dream" speech for my mom. It's pretty cool. All these rhetoricians have gotten together and picked the top 100 American speeches. The site has full transcripts of all of them as well as audio and video clips of the speeches that were given at times when that technology was available. I recommend checking it out. http://www.americanrhetoric.com

As for the speech at hand, and for Dr. King's speeches in general, they were the best. Period. He was the best. Period. I'm not saying that Senator Obama's speech on race wasn't a good speech. I am saying that it wasn't soul stirring. I've heard the "I have a dream" speech 50 times and I tear up every single time. When I watched Senator Obama's speech, I just saw an eloquent man trying to keep his poll numbers from sliding, which is, let's don't forget, exactly what he was doing.

From the Road #4

2008-03-31T10:30:00.002-04:00

Saturday, March 22, 2008
5:16 p.m.
Out back of the Chalet
We went into town and I had the kind of cramps that could drive a girl to grab a steak knife and cut out her own reproductive organs. I mean, what the fuck? I’ve got no plans to use the shit. Cramps are SO the antithesis of everything bachelor party.

While the men sat in the bar watching West By God Virginia beat up on Duke, I walked down the main strip and tried not to spend money. But what’s a girl to do when she walks past a store and see’s “Designer sunglasses $9.99?” My mother’s voice shoved and elbowed its way from the back of my head past the worry about what I’m supposed to do with my life and the resentment for my reproductive system and it said, “Get yourself some good sunglasses.”

I walked into the store and recklessly tried on sunglasses that countless other folks, lice infected honeymooners and blue haired old ladies already on the lookout for Christmas discounts for their grandkids, had already slid behind their greasy ears. Nothing looked good and as soon as I heard the clerk recommending “a pair of Nike’s that are perfect for wide heads” to a man with a wide head, I took off, afraid that he’d look at me and make the same embarrassing suggestion.

Thinking I was destined to leave Gatlinburg sunglassesless, I moseyed on down the road. I walked not fifty feet and was greeted with another in a long line of Easter Weekend miracles. There to my left was an Oakley store. I went in thinking I would just look around. As far as I knew, these were expensive sunglasses. Imagine my delight when I realized that these were rip-offs too. I can’t even tell you what the sunglasses I bought look like, but I know that I’m staving off cataracts and crow’s feet and it only cost me ten bucks.

From the Road #3

2008-03-27T23:45:00.002-04:00

Friday March 21, 2008
2:29 p.m.
Off the mountain—a retrospective
Today I drove us off the mountain, through Gatlinburg and into Pigeon Forge, thinking it would be good practice for Sunday morning when I’m fleeing at the ass crack of dawn. Now that I know I can do it without getting myself killed, I feel a lot better about things.

Tim really wanted to go go-cart racing, so we did. My wide ass barely fit in the car, and then I needed the help of the local guy running the place to expand the seat belt enough to get it over my massive triple d’s (since I know you want to know). Though, the way I had myself wedged in there, I’m not completely sure the seat belt was necessary. When we got the green light, the four of us took off in our little go-carts, and it wasn’t ten seconds before Tim passed me. He and Collins are nice enough to insist that the only reason they lapped me is because I had a slow car. Given the fact that I could feel my undercarriage scraping the concrete on every turn, I’m more inclined to believe it was because my fat ass wasn’t meant to be carted around on a lawnmower motor. I paid Tim and Collins back for their words of encouragement by accidentally calling both of their families retarded, but more on that later.

After the go-carts, we decided to go to Pigeon Forge’s classiest tourist attraction—Jurassic Jungle Boat Ride. We paid fifteen dollars for fifteen minutes. I don’t mean to imply that there was a pay by the minute option. That’s just the way it worked out. I can’t really do this ride justice with my words, but basically here’s how it went. We sat in a boat and inched forward through a dark warehouse. Every few feet, the boat would stop and a loud screeching sound would come over the blown speakers. Then a light would come on and illuminate whatever horrible animatronic dinosaur-like thing was in front of us. At the end of the ride, we sat, in our boat, in front of the door that led to the outside world. Just when we thought we were going to have to get out of the boat to push the door open, the boat was reared back to a 50 degree angle. Even though the front of the boat was pointed uphill, I’d call this the climax of the ride. If there was a falling action, it was that the door finally opened and we got out.

Last on our list of touristy shit to do was Hillbilly Golf. I’m not sure what exactly made it hillbilly, but I do know that we had to take this gondola thing halfway up a mountain and that most of the holes had farm equipment incorporated into them. This is where me calling Tim’s and Collins’ families retarded comes into play. I don’t know how you play putt-putt, but in my family and with every family I have ever played, each person in the group putts, then everyone goes and has their second put, unless, of course, you’re and all-star like me and you only get holes-in-one. Anyway, Tim and Collins always played that each person in the group kept going until they got their ball in the hole. Then the next person would go until they got his ball in the hole and so on. I was astonished by this silliness, so I said, “What the hell kind of family did you grow up in that you played like that?” Tim took that to mean that I was calling his family retarded. In hindsight, I can see how he might have interpreted it that way, though that’s not at all what I meant. For the next 16 holes, Tim made jokes about his retarded/inbred family. I laughed hysterically and felt like shit simultaneously. The ability to make me do this is a unique gift of Tim’s. I guess maybe I had the last laugh. I won at Hillbilly Golf. Maybe I can put that on my resume.

The Candy Man Can

2008-03-26T23:07:00.004-04:00

The votes are in. It’s official. I am the spokeswoman for lesbians everywhere. I was having coffee with a friend today, and out of nowhere he looked at me and, as if he'd been waiting for this moment since the first moment we became friends he said, “Carrie, I need to ask you a question.”

“Is it personal?”

“Yes, and please feel free to tell me that I’m over the line or answer as much or as little or not at all.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“I love going down on my girlfriend, but I was just wondering, from a woman who loves women’s perspective, is there anything I can do to make it better?”

I have to admit. This question was a relief. I’m used to people feeling like they’ve all of a sudden reached some sort of level of emotional intimacy with me, specifically the level of emotional intimacy that makes them feel like they have the green light to invite me to have sex with them. The reason that I know that these other people feel like they’ve reached that level of emotional intimacy is because they then ask, “Carrie, would you ever consider joining me and my wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend in the bedroom? You know, for the sex?” The answer has always, and I think will always be, “no.” I know I’ve strayed a little from the topic at hand, but I just thought I should include some example as to why this particular gentleman's question came as a relief.

I will admit, this question made me a little uncomfortable, not because of the subject matter, but because I didn’t have a ready made answer for him. “It’s all about the amount of pressure you apply,” I said.

“But how much?”

At this point I’m thinking, how the fuck should I know? No two vaginas are alike. Yay for you for having the rest of your life to figure just this one vagina out. I didn’t say that though. Instead I just said, “You’re going to have to rely on her to tell you that.” I felt bad for not being able to help the guy out more. The thing is, for me sex, in all its forms, has always been very intuitive. If you read people well, you can pick up on what’s working and what isn’t. How do I tell a guy that he should pay more attention to the minutia of his girlfriend's sexual responses? The answer is, I don’t. Instead I tell him an embarrassing fact about myself in an effort to make him feel better. “In the two years we were together, Liza never got off. Not once. I couldn’t get her off. She couldn’t get herself off. It fucking sucked. That’s what being on a shit ton of illegal drugs and antidepressants can do to you.”

“Not even with vibrators and shit?”

“Buddy, we could plug a fucking jackhammer into the wall and it wasn’t going to give that girl an orgasm.”

We contemplated this. Rather, I watched him contemplate it, and I tried to come up with something more helpful to the question that, I was mildly offended that he had the audacity to ask. “I don’t know how you straight people get along. Do you ever just use your fingers? Or is that something that grown people don’t do?”

“Well, you know, not often.”

“All I can suggest is, if you know how to get her off with your fingers, try recreating the same sort of thing with your mouth. It’s all about friction.” This seemed to bring this part of the awkward conversation to an end. When I thought we could move onto sports or something, my friend started up again.

“What about the g-spot?”

“Buddy, unless you have a dick shaped like a candy cane, you’re not finding it with what you’ve got below your waist.” Okay, so these weren't my exact words, but you get my point. I wish I had thought of the candy cane thing. I think we both would have laughed about that. I did make a hook shape with my index finger and told him where the illusive spot should be.

“I hear it’s like a come hither motion,” he says. I suppose he’s right.

“Can she find it?” This is the best question I can think to ask. I mean, seriously. Why don’t people understand that, unless they know what works for them, no one else is going to be able to figure it out either?

This whole line of questioning continued until I finally knew that his girlfriend had three vibrators when my friend met her and that she had names for all of them. “Well does she still use them?” He just looked at me. “Why don’t you guys incorporate whatever works, let her do whatever she needs to and just watch and learn?” Christ almighty. I haven’t had sex once during President Bush’s second term, and I’ve got this guy asking me how to get his girlfriend off.

I thought, why don’t you give old Carrie a crack at it? I’ll take notes and get back to you.

Bruce Springsteen is not the Boss of Me

2008-03-25T14:50:00.003-04:00

I have a friend with a lovely and generous mother. This lovely and generous woman invited me to go along with her and her daughter and future son-in-law to see Bruce Springsteen. Though I've never really been into The Boss, I do have one of his albums, The Seeger Sessions, which is amazing and not his music. It is, in fact, Pete Seeger's music hence the name of he album and its ensuing awesomeness. I knew that none of the songs I like would be played at the concert, but I also knew that Bruce Springsteen is a musical icon and anyone who claims to be a music buff should, if given the opportunity, see him in concert just to see what it's all about. This is why I happily accepted the invitation of the lovely and generous woman.

I will say, Bruce Springsteen puts on a hell of a show. I may have only known two full songs and one refrain of "sha la la la, something or other," but the man busts his ass and he still nicely fills out a pair of Levis. And, as a longtime fan of Late Night with Conan O'Brien, it was pretty cool to see Max Motherfucking Weinburg panting and sweating and pounding away behind the drum kit. I've never watched The Sopranos, but Little Steven's, as in the guy who played Silvio, do-rag was a sight to see. The thing I liked most about the concert, though, was the same thing I like most about being out in public in general. The people watching, in general, was top notch. This one man in front of me, specifically, was amazing.

The man in front of me was, I think, a retired marine. I say this because he was wearing a tee shirt that said "jarhead," a jacket with patches all over it, one of which said "combat veteran" and a cowboy hat with some other mariney pins on it. Yeah, I'm sort of like Sherlock Holmes. So, Jarhead was there with either his wife or the woman he's cheating on his wife with (he was wearing a wedding band) and he could not have been more excited about seeing Bruce. As soon as Springsteen took the stage, Jarhead got a major emotional hard-on, and it became pretty apparent that he needed some sort of outlet for this pent-up, Bruce induced (should I say inBruced?) sexual energy. When The Boss sang, Jarhead immediately grabbed his girl and started giving her such an intense back rub that I thought he was going to pop the poor girl's head off like a cork from a champagne bottle. This went on for the first couple songs, then some love song came on, so he stood up and started serenading his lady friend and doing some sort of pantomime that I guess sunk up with the lyrics. My favorite part of the evening was about 3/4 through when the "sha la la la something or other" song came on and he stood up, turned around, and looked me right in the eye, "come on you know this one." I just nodded.

In the end, it was refreshing to see a grown man get that excited about something. I have always had this theory that once a kid stops believing in Santa Clause, there really isn't any magic left to be found in anything. Who would have thought that it would take an ex-marine with a man crush on a New Jersyite to re-instill hope that maybe someday I'll have something to be that excited about too.

From the Road #2

2008-03-25T00:26:00.005-04:00

Thursday, March 20, 2008
2:15 p.m.
At the Chalet:

Three stories. Three balconies. Six beds. Eight boys. Looks like snuggle time for Tim and Carrie.

I can’t begin to describe the train wreck that is Pigeon Forge. It’s like a hillbilly extravaganza. Giant arcades. Go-carts. An enormous upside down theater that just does Laser-light-Christian extravaganzas. Easter’s a big weekend for the Bible Belt. Luckily, we’re not staying in Pigeon Forge. It’s just the first stop off the highway. The little redneck strip of land set aside for the lesser-thans. No, we’re in Gatlinburg, the Swiss Alps of North America. You drive down the main strip and right after you drive past Cooters (the Dukes of Hazzard themed attraction) the scenery changes. All the airbrushed tee shirt shops have an outside façade that suggests, we’re part of a luxury ski resort. There’s faux timber everywhere. Everything is the color of evergreens. There are restaurants and bars and wax museums and a Ripley’s Believe it or Not haunted house. It’s everything a southerner with a bit more cheddar in their bank account would want to do in Pigeon Forge’s snobby older cousin.

We got here earlier than we were able to get into our chalet. What are seven thirsty men and one uptight lesbian to do when they can’t get into their vacation paradise? Well, for us the answer was clear. We paid ten dollars to park downtown and spent an hour at the local hangout, Puckers. Inside this wannabe Hooters establishment, there were big bosomed bartenders with dirty blond hair eager to take our drink orders, and more eager still to ascertain which of the men were single. “I’m thirty-two, have been married for fifteen years and have four kids,” said the woman behind the bar. “Can I get you fellas a shot?”

With the help of sweet baby Jesus, the man responsible for all that is good in this part of the country, we were called and notified that our chalet was ready early. We settled our tab with Chesty McGee and made our way to the top of the mountain.

Before I came down here, I was adamant that mama was going to have to periodically come down the mountain. After the harrowing experience of making it up here, I now realize just how foolish this idea had been. To get up here, we crisscrossed the 3500 ft mountain for ten of the most terrifying minutes of my life. We made 270 degree blind turns shitting our pants and praying that no one was headed around the corner in the other direction, because there was no way to do it without wandering five feet over the yellow line. When we made it I announced, “I’m not doing that again until I leave Sunday morning.” Everyone agreed and we came inside. Like an atypically boring reality show, we all picked our rooms. I’ll be sharing the master suite with Tim. To answer your next question, yes, there will be cuddling. There are plenty of nooks and crannies where I can see myself stealing away for all the alone time I could ever want. Like now for example.

I have to say, the view here is one of the most breathtaking I have ever seen. As I sit typing this, I’m sitting on one of the three balconies. To be specific, I’m I on the balcony that is perched right outside Tim’s and my bedroom. I’m listening to the boys on the balcony above me, and not one of them has asked where the fuck I’ve run off to. This is as I like it. I’m sitting across from a frost covered mountain. These ain’t your mama’s foothills, it should but does not say on the brochure.

I’ve had three beers and a shot of Jaeggermeister. I am not even tipsy. I will be drinking plenty of water.

One last thing—there’s an eleven pound brisket sitting in front of our fireplace. I think it’s marinating. I hope it’s marinating. Otherwise I’m confused. Maybe it’s a boy thing.

One more thing. I’m eavesdropping on the boys on the balcony above, and at this bachelor party, the men are talking about childrearing. Their women would be so proud.

From the Road #1

2008-03-24T01:01:00.001-04:00

Thursday, March 20, 2008
7:20 a.m.

From a hotel that I’m told both Ted Bundy and Charles Manson stayed at—not at the same time:

Cold. It’s the only word I can really think of to describe my first night on the road with the boys. We initially reserved 3 rooms for 8 people, but once we got to Jellico, TN, most everyone decided that it would be best to just pay the extra fifteen bucks for the extra room so everyone could have a bed. This was fine by me. Collins and I roomed together. I guess this was because we drove together, though that wasn’t my idea. It all worked out though, and it’s probably best he was with me, because it snowed/rained the whole way down, and the visibility was shitty, and I’ve always found that when it’s like that, it’s nice to have a friendly voice chirping alongside me.

I’m pretty sure Collins is radioactive. This might be the real reason he finagled his way into my man-hating lesbian heart. His temperature is always 99.8 degrees. I never really believed him or cared until we were driving and I noticed that all the windows on his side of the car and his half of the windshield were fogged up for the entire five hour trip. It didn’t matter how high I cranked the defrost. In fact, turning it up only made matters worse, because the poor bastard was sweating to the point where steam was rising off him.

Now the unfortunate thing about a girl who’s always cold rooming with radioactive boy is, someone’s going to be miserable. Being the kind and generous person that I am, I told Collins that we could sleep in this icebox of a room (the very room that I’m sitting and typing in now) without turning the heat on. Now, I don’t know if you’re aware, but they don’t wash the comforters in these hotel rooms with any regularity. So, the first thing I do anytime I check into one of these swanky establishments is tear that fucker right off the bed. I don’t even sit on top of the thing. Well, last night it’s Collins sleeping happy as a pig in shit on top of what I’m sure is a very warm sleeping bag and me wrapped up like Nanuk of the North under a measly top sheet and thin-ass blanket. By about 4:00 a.m. my muscles were all tensed up from shivering and trying to conserve what little body heat the Good Lord gave me. The attempt failed and now I feel like I got run over by a truck. In case you’re wondering if I ever actually fell asleep last night, the short answer is no. The long answer is nnnnnoooooooooooo.

I’m told that the last part of our journey entails winding around a mountain for an hour or so, white-knuckelling it the whole way. If radioactive boy and I go over the edge of the mountain, could whoever finds this give it to my mother, and mom, could you make sure Jen T. gets a copy of this?

More later, hopefully.

I Don't Want to Show You Mine

2008-03-14T07:16:00.003-04:00

On my first day of kindergarten, Kelly Simms was the girl who showed up dressed like she was competing in a pageant. She wore a powder blue, frilly dress. At recess, I sat on the swing next to her. I think we must have become friends that day, but I don’t remember why or how that could have happened, because, while she was the girl that showed up dressed like she was competing in a pageant, I was the girl who showed up wearing shorts and a tee shirt, and, let’s face it, those aren’t the types of girls that usually become friends. In fact, I remember in the third grade finally telling Kelly Simms that she was the kind of sort of pretty girl who only wanted to be friends with girls who weren’t as pretty as she was, just so she would always look much better by comparison. I guess that made me kind of an odd third grader. I digress.

So, one day, in girl scouts (Girl Scouts?) Kelly Simms comes up to me and pulls her shirt away from her chest and says, “look.” As in, look down my shirt. What was a girl to do? She told me to look, so I did. To this day, it’s one of my biggest regrets. After I looked, she closed her shirt and said, “now you.” Well, I was already quite modest by then, so I did the only logical thing I could do. I ran away. I don’t remember exactly how Kelly Simms retaliated, but I know she wasn’t happy. I believe she may have gone with the old, I showed you mine, so you have to show me yours, defense.

Well, one day, later on in our kindergarten careers, this group of old ladies with puppets came to our classroom to talk to us about “personal space” and how it was never okay for someone else to invade your “personal space.” At the end of the old ladies’ routine, they took some questions from the class. I don’t remember what sorts of questions my classmates asked. All I remember is that I sat there, ready to throw up, convinced that Kelly Simms was going to raise her hand and tell the little old ladies and their puppets that I had molested her that day in the girl scouts (Girl Scouts?). I don’t remember ever being so nervous before or since. Well, that’s a lie. One time since.

When we were in the first grade, Kelly Simms and I were still friends. One day, without any warning at all, the little old ladies showed back up with their puppets. They gave the same routine. I sat there, once again, ready to throw up. I might have sweat profusely, or I might just be making that part up to help increase the dramatic tension of my story. In either case, I was sure I was going to jail. Thankfully though, Kelly Simms did not rat me out, but this didn’t help the guilt, because now I was thinking, are these little old ladies going to put me through this every year? I don’t remember if it was the same day, or a few days, or a few weeks, or a few months later, but eventually my guilt and fear started to erode the productivity of my everyday life.

Here’s where we get to the climax. One afternoon, after school, I said to my mother, “I have to tell you something.” My mother asked what was wrong. I don’t know how long it took me to spit it out. I just remember the two of us sitting on the floor in the hall, and me sobbing, and my mother probably thinking that I’d killed someone, because that really is how hard I was crying. I think I finally choked out, “one. time. at. girl scouts (Girl Scouts?). I. looked. down. Kelly’s. shirt. and. then. I. wouldn’t. let. her. look. down. mine.” It was the hardest thing I ever had to say to someone, ever.

“Well, why in the hell did she want you to look down her shirt?” My mom has always had a great way of making me feel better by pointing out that everything I feel bad about is someone else’s fault. I love that about her.

In case you were wondering, I’ve never been arrested for molesting Kelly Simms. I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is on that sort of thing. I feel like there isn’t one. I feel like, even when I’m seventy, Kelly Simms might still be able to tell on me, and the cops could still arrest me, and I might have to register as a sex offender.

So that’s my Kelly Simms story. Now for a much shorter Kelly Simms’ mom story. This kid, Nathan Yux, had a birthday party at Hardees when we were in the third grade. During this party, Kelly’s mom not-so-casually leaned in and asked me, “Have you started your period yet?” What kind of a question is that? I think, without my knowledge, I must have been in a race to menstruation with her daughter, and she wanted to make sure I hadn’t won. It was at that moment that I decided that maybe Kelly came from an even stranger family than I did.

Number One Reason I Suck at Life

2008-03-09T23:24:00.004-04:00

Dear Carrie,

Please stop assuming that no one knows what you're talking about. You are not the queen of trivia and pop culture. Billy Joel, for example, is one of the most popular singer/songwriters of our time, so please do not talk to me like I'm three and spoon feed me thinly veiled references to his songs. I have his Greatest Hits CD too. Also, who hasn't watched, Scooby-Doo? I know who Hanna-Barbera are, and I know what cartoons they were responsible for. What's that, you say? The Flintstones was inspired by The Honeymooners? Gee, I had no idea, because I've spent my life under a rock.

In the future, if I don't understand some not-so-clever little pop culture reference in one of your stupid blogs, I'll ask. Stop treating me like I'm a moron. It's insulting, and it makes you look stupid.

Thanks,

Your Jiminy Cricket-Like Alter-Ego

Friction Down Below

2008-03-09T13:29:00.003-04:00

Because Josie called, "bullshit" on me, I'm reposting this. I wanted nothing to do with it, so I had to reproduce it from memory. It's a bit beefier this time around. Pun intended. I'll get back to the funnier posts soon. I promise. Unless, of course, you find my self-loathing funny, in which case, I'd like to dedicate this post to you.

I'm conscious of the swish swish swishing that announces every step I take through the library. You look up, slightly annoyed that I've broken your concentration. Embarrassed, I break eye contact and switch to a wider corn-cob-up-the-ass kind of gait. It's only a matter of time before I rub a whole in the crotch of these jeans too. I try, for as long as possible, to put off my inevitable trip to Old Navy, worried that this will be the time I discover that I've expanded further than their biggest sizes can contain. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to buy a couple pairs in colors that I don't particularly like, but that I'm stuck with because they don't bother stocking all the sizes in all the colors. I'll walk away, like I did on Friday, with a light wash, the likes of which I haven't seen since the early '90s.

I'm in a German Village State of Mind

2008-03-08T22:15:00.007-05:00

For those of you born after 1976, that title's a reference to a Billy Joel classic. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I've been drinking. Six pints (the American 16 oz. and not the British 20 oz. that is) of New Castle are coursing their way through my bloodstream. What I'm saying is, this is the drunk-dial version of a blog post.

I hate snow. I have always hated snow. I don't hate the situation it puts people in.

Today, I didn't even bother putting underwear on until 6:00 p.m. I had Ramen Noodles for lunch, and couldn't bear the thought of having them for dinner. I was hungry. "Mom, you don't understand. Where I live, the people working in the restaurants live close enough to walk. They will be open, because the people eating and drinking there also live close enough to walk. I will not starve to death." My mother, who lives in a suburb of Dayton, didn't sound convinced.

It took me fifteen minutes to walk two blocks. The snow was up to my knees, and, even though I was wearing my Dr. Martins, I was sliding all over the place. I peered into the Easy Street Cafe and saw dozens of folks drinking and laughing and eating (in that order). Thank God, I thought.

Sometimes people feel sorry for the pathetic single person sitting at a table alone, pretending to read a book. Fuck that. People watching is so much easier when you're by your onesy.

As I sat and read, The Other Paper, Columbus, OH's free newspaper, I saw all the heads in the bar swivel to my left. At the traffic light outside, not one but two trucks were stuck in a 2 foot ridge of slugde. The man in the second truck got out, realizing that he was in a, "we're-in-this-together" situation with truck driver #1. As truck driver #2 pushed the other truck into one of the worn down, icy track marks on the main road I asked, okay, now who's going to help driver #2? The answer was, no one. Ten people, at least, stood up and pressed their hot moist noses up to the window of the bar, just watching and laughing and placing bets as to whether the poor sonofabitch would ever free himself and asking why in the hell he was driving in the first place. I thought, "this is so Seinfeld, I should help." As I thought this, another woman from the bar stepped outside. My thoughts changed. She's kind of cute, I thought. The two of us watched, she from outside in the cold, me from inside holding a newspaper, waiting for the man to rock back and forth, building the momentum to free himself. This failed and I thought, how pissed would I be if that was me and no one was helping? Then I thought, that girl is cute, and she'll think I'm a wonderful example of a human being if I go help. I shot up and walked outside. I looked at cute girl and said, "let's go." It was very, super-hero. The short version of this already too long story is, we unstuck the guy. It took us a few minutes, and I fell twice, and the other woman fell and hit her chin on the last push, but we got him out. We got him out while a bunch of men stood by and watched. Chivalry may not be dead, but it's the women picking up the slack in German Village. I spent the next two hours considering how cheesy it would be for me to buy the mystery good samaritan a drink. I can't lie though, I was also thinking, this was a two woman operation; she should buy me a drink. My point is, we shared a moment.

I'd never met anyone in The Easy Street Cafe, but blizzards have a way of bringing people together. "I live in Reynoldsburg," said the girl next to me at the bar, "but I saw that a storm was coming in, so I drove into German Village last night knowing, at least I'll have a bar to go to." This weather may be a little annoying, but the only inconvenience that derives from it is that people get a little more familiar with their neighbors.

But Would You Walk Across Hot Coals?

2008-03-06T07:03:00.007-05:00

I have a rather clear memory of being 3 or 4 and having the woman who ran my preschool informing my parents that I don't eat my vegetables at lunch. Their master plan was, one day at lunch, they would give me I bite's worth of whatever the vegetable was that day. Well, somebody fucked something up, and they gave me one bite's worth of everything. A thimble full of chicken noodle soup, a tiny wedge of bologna sandwich, and one piece of iceburg lettuce with a tiny sliver of carrot on it. I sat at the end of a table by myself and ate my measly lunch. Afterwards, I was submitted to mandatory nap time. I remember laying on my cot with the knowledge that I'd eaten a vegetable at lunch, and I felt stronger, healthier, and like whatever nourishment I'd gained from the situation would be enough to last a lifetime.

My tastes have matured. I like enough vegetables to get by, but to this day, there is a quite long list of things that trigger my gag reflex on contact. Tomatoes, carrots, peas, broccoli, and mushrooms just to name a few.

Consider the last time you were in a large group situation and someone bought pizza without asking anyone what sort of pizza they like. One cheese, one pepperoni, one veggie. This is standard procedure--try to accommodate everyone without offending anyone. Imagine, if you will, the panic that set in during class last night when, out of the goodness of her heart, my professor bought the class pizza, a pizza that screamed, FUCK CONVENTION. A pizza with vegetables all over it. Green peppers, red peppers, onions, and yes friends, MUSHROOMS. This is a woman with chutzpah.

I feel that at a certain age, it becomes inappropriate to sit in a large group and pick individual toppings off your pizza. I'll have to consult Miss Manners to get the exact age, but I'm confident that it's something under 27. Couple this with the fact that I have tremendous respect and admiration for this particular teacher, that I would jump off a bridge if she told me to, and that I would, one day, like to earn her respect in return, and I was fucked two ways. I had no choice. I sat there and I ate the shit out of that pizza, mushrooms and all.

When I got home, I did an http://www.blackle.com search for the health benefits of mushrooms. This is what I found at http://findarticles.com: Researchers find new health benefits for mushrooms: The latest analysis techniques have enabled scientists at a U.S. university to find previously uncharted fibers with advantages for cardiac health in commonly eaten mushrooms. So, the way I see it, I'm good to go for another 24 years, but I still think I would have preferred jumping off that bridge.

Aww. Is Someone Feeling Sorry for Herself?

2008-03-03T22:05:00.003-05:00

I've come to this page ten or so times tonight with every intention to write about, I don't know what. It just occurred to me that the title of my blog is "Disconnect." As in a lack of connection; a disparity. Funny seeing as how the reason I write the thing is so that I might feel a connection to something, which brings me back to why I've come to this page ten times tonight. I'm feeling a bit raw. A bit like I'd like to be in the fetal position. A bit like fucking, because, let's face it, isn't that everyone's favorite coping mechanism?

My mother is asleep on my couch. She has an appointment with her neurologist tomorrow. Next to me is a list of things we need to talk to the neurologist about:

1. White outs, because when she wakes up every morning, she can't see for about five minutes
2. Balance, because she's like a walking pinball
3. Cataract surgery, because, if nothing else, at least now she can see what she's stumbling into, unless, of course, it's less than five minutes after she's gotten up
4. Passing out, because apparently she blacked out last night and laid in the middle of the
living room yelling for my sister, who could sleep through a tornado, to come and help her
5. Need to change migraine medicine, because, the one thing we've found in ten years to help
her headaches causes severe breathing problems
6. After a bad migraine, balance issue seems to get worse, because, maybe it isn't just an
expression. What if her head really does explode?
7. Refill Percocet, because if you can't see and you keep falling over, you may as well be high.

"You know, I was thinking, there could be something really wrong with me," my mom said five minutes before she fell asleep. "I was thinking that as I was driving up here."

"Yeah, I was thinking that too," I said. I forgot to say, it's all I think about. Well, that and the fact that I'm graduating in two weeks and I have no money and no job. And how I haven't slept in a month. And, and, and, well, you can see how fucking is better.

Franz Liszt and Other Reasons to be Scared Shitless

2008-02-29T17:18:00.004-05:00

I've been trying (and failing) to write an essay about my relationship with my father. The problem I'm finding is, I don't remember much about living with the man. So, for the last couple days, I've done nothing but think about a way into this essay. How does one deal with a relationship that one does not remember? The conclusion I'm starting to come to is, find examples of the parts of my childhood that I do remember that were directly or indirectly influenced by the parts that I don't. It came to me while watching a program about the "thrill rides" at Disney World. When I see anything about Disney World, I automatically think of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. When I think of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I automatically think about what a huge pussy I am. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride scares the shit out of me. I don't even remember the whole post traumatic stress inducing experience. I only remember a shadowy room with weird looking sculptures and being terrified to the point of tears, praying that it would all end soon. I've had similar experiences with other child-friendly amusement park rides, which brings me back to my father.

I grew up in Dayton, OH. Forty miles south of my hometown there lives an amusement park called, King's Island. Once a year, my family would enjoy a Saturday of fun at the park. Things at King's Island have changed a lot over the last fifteen years or so, but when I was a wee thing, there was a section of King's Island designed especially for kids. This section was called, Hanna -Barbera Land. Hanna-Barbera Land was fucking sweet. All the rides were based on cartoons produced by, who else, Hanna-Barbera. For the under forty crowd, these cartoons include, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, the Fintstones, Scooby-doo, and the Smurfs, just to name a few.

It didn't matter what time of day you showed up. The longest line in Hanna-Barbera Land was always for the Smurfs ride. The Smurfs ride was like an acid trip for the 2-12 set. Folks would stand in line for what felt like hours so that they could eventually climb into a taffy colored boat and wind their way through the Smurf's Village. The color's were bright. The anamatronic Smurf's were life-size. The cheery little theme song echoed at a deafening volume off of every lacquered surface. Most importantly, the air conditioning was cranked to the max. For one reason and one reason alone, I wanted nothing to do with it. GARGAMEL.

For the first half of the Smurf's ride, everything is sunshine and daisies. Who doesn't love little blue midgets living in mushroom houses? Well about halfway through the ride, the first movement of Liszt's "Piano Concerto 1 in E flat" starts to mix in with the "laa laa la la la laaas" and this sinking feeling that shit is about to go down starts creeping into your consciousness. As you round a corner, you see him. Twelve feet tall and cackling in a dark room next to a giant boiling cauldron, Gargamel stands with his branchlike arms lifted over his head, fingers spread as if he's either going to reach down and snatch you or break into the world's bitchinest air piano solo. My money was always on the former. Petrified. I was petrified. As in too scared to move. Too scared to breathe.

Every couple years I would convince one of my parents to take me on the Smurf ride again. I would explain how I knew what was going to happen and that I was older and surely not as much of a wuss. The result was always the same no matter how old I was, and until a few years ago, I couldn't understand why. Is it weird that I think Gargamel looks just like my dad? The giant hooked shnaz. The dark hair. The bald spot. The satanic, I-am-fucking-crazy-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it, look in his eyes. It all makes sense. I know at the end of every episode, the Smurfs got the best of Gargamel, but they didn't have to live with him, and there were dozens of them and only one of me and I wish that ride was still around so I could give it one last shot.

Homer Simpson Politics

2008-02-26T10:27:00.005-05:00

Thank God in Heaven that MSNBC is bringing news junkies like myself the stories that really matter. In case no one else has noticed, MSNBC has the most attractive anchors in twenty-four-hour news, but aside from that, MSNBC is the self-described, "place for politics." How could I not watch?

Well, today the good folks at my favorite cable news network are doing more than their share to help undecided voters pick their ponies. In the most exciting presidential race in forty years, a race with no incumbent president or vice president running for either party, a race (especially on the democratic side) that is closer than anyone would have ever expected, only the folks at MSNBC are doing their part to leave no stone unturned. In the last two hours, MSNBC has shown me, eager viewer numero uno, the same compelling graphic no less than three times, and now I would like to share it with you:

Campaign Bakery Bills:
Clinton: $5,950.53
Dodd: $3,301.22
Obama: $1,877.28
McCain: $1,040.49
Romney: $ 992.91
courtesy of MSNBC

Yes, Dear Friends (an expression I've picked up from Senator McCain), isn't it just like a liberal to be a big spender in the pastry department. But I have to hand it to her, Senator Clinton knows that the way to a voter's heart is through his or her stomach and has allocated her donut money accordingly. Senator Obama, widely accepted as the most liberal candidate has spent less than 2 grand on donuts. Who are you trying to fool, Senator Obama? Don't think that, just because you're in the middle of the pack in the pastry expenditures department, the more fiscally conservative independents are going to be foolish enough to think you're not going to spend this country into the ground. Governor Romney, that cheap bastard, never even broke the thousand dollar mark. Perhaps it is this thriftiness that's made him the millionaire that he is.

More telling than what's on the chart is what isn't. Where's Mike Huckabee? Perhaps, as a thank you for spreading The Word, Sweet Baby Jesus, Himself, provides the Southern Baptist preacher and vehement creationist with donuts free of charge. Governor Huckabee is, after all, in the business of miracles. Just ask him. And where is everyone's favorite libertarian, Ron Paul? Well, I think the answer is simple. He firmly believes that the government should not be responsible for supplying its people with pastries. The people should feel free to invest their pastry money in what ever way they see fit. Maybe they don't want to invest in pastries at all. Maybe they're a bacon and eggs kind of crowd. "Buy your own fucking breakfast," says the Texas congressman.

Tune in next week when MSNBC reveals which candidate tops the list in toilet paper spending.

And Then the Prophet Said

2008-02-11T13:56:00.000-05:00

I had a dream the other night in which I met Senator Hilary Clinton. She asked me how I felt about her. I said, "I don't know. I have this viscerally positive reaction to you. I know I shouldn't like you, but I do. What can I do?"

"Get me the youth vote," the senator said.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall

2008-02-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

When I was little, the thing they told kids about tornadoes was, "they sound like a train." I didn't question what seemed like an absolute, so every time I heard a train whistle in the distance, I shit my pants a little.

When I was in the eighth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Bruns, showed my class a horrible made-for-t.v. movie called, The Day After. It was an uplifting little film about nuclear holocaust. Here's what I remember about that movie, after all the bombs went off, people started drinking well water without realizing that it was loaded with radioactive deliciousness. Someone had the unfortunate experience of being outside at the time of the explosion and was instantly blinded. Some man sat on an overturned cow carcass with a shotgun and blew anyone's brain's out who came near what was, presumably, the man's only food source. Steve Gutenberg, of Three Men and a Baby fame, got stir crazy and went outside, then, after a few days, his skin started rotting off. A few days after the explosion, a disgusting looking Gutenberg hobbled to the hospital to find it packed to the gills with people in varying degrees of gamma-ray-induced decay. A baby was born to symbolize hope. Jason Robards (an older, now dead, actor) went looking for his family, and when he got to where his house should have been, he just crumbled in a heap of despair and waited for flesh-eating death to take him away. After the movie, Mr. Bruns emphasized two things. First, the shit in these bombs has a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, if one ever goes off, even if you survive the initial blast, which you won't, you can never go outside again for the rest of your life or your flesh will rot off, begging the question, how many packets of Ramen Noodles should I buy to get through the next 80 years. Second, "this could totally happen. Right now, Russia has dozens of Nucs pointed right at us." The Cold War was over by this points, but I didn't sleep for five years. I grew up close to an air force base, and every time a cargo plane flew over my house, I thought the end had come.

There's a satellite falling out of the sky. It's expected to crash sometime in late February or early March. We're not to worry. In the past five years, 328 satellites have fallen out of the sky, and no one has been hurt. After all, the earth is mostly water. In the unlikely event that there is damage or injury, the government is fully prepared to offer some monetary compensation to the victim(s). At four-in-the-morning a few nights ago, when I was sleeping as deeply as I ever do, which is not deeply at all, a window rattling clap of thunder startled me and my heart nearly to death. My first disoriented thought was, the satellite has come early, and it's landed on the White Castle across the street.

Last night I dreamed that I was on a plane that crashed. No big deal, we were only hovering about ten feet from the surface of the ocean when we went down, and we landed on a sandbar. It was really more an inconvenience than anything else. As we switched planes and the young pilot responsible apologized for the mishap then took his seat in the new cockpit I turned to the flight attendant next to me and asked, "are they really going to let this guy fly this plane too?"

"Not to worry," she said, "he just gets it off the ground. Then the real pilot takes over from there." Apparently getting off the ground is the easy part.

The Game

2008-02-02T01:31:00.000-05:00

This is not chivalry, nor is it your best pick up line, "you can go ahead of me. It's not like I'm going to wet myself or anything."

When Bad Movies Happen to Good People

2008-02-01T00:16:00.000-05:00

My hero, Janeane Garofalo, is starring in a Lifetime movie. It doesn't appear to be of the Meredith Baxter Birney or Markie Post variety, the sort where some woman's husband turns out to be a murderer, or where a teenage daughter has a raging eating disorder. No, this appears to be a comedy of sorts. The synopsis on imdb.com states that, "a disgruntled music critic travels cross-country with her inheritance, a Jack Russell Terrier named Binky." This is, I think, the acting equivalent of getting a job as a greeter at Walmart. I want to cry.

Nancy Sinatra Can Kiss My Ass

2008-01-31T23:54:00.000-05:00

I have this pair of riding boots, which is to say that that is their style, not that I have ever worn them while riding a horse, or a motorcycle, or a lumberjack. These boots, I fear, were not made for walking. A few days ago, while walking to class, the heal of my boot got caught right around the sixth step from the ground. I would like to say that I caught myself on the railing. I would like to say that I, at least, took the guy I was walking with down with me. Alas, it was just me and my fat ass, tumbling towards humiliation, landing on the edge of the first step with all my weight on my left shin. I think it went, left shin, right shin, left knee, turn, ass before I finally hit the bottom, at which point I was facing the steps that I'd just gracefully descended. I ignored the pain, and immediately sprang up like a gymnast who's hoping that the judges won't notice she fucked up her landing. "Oh my God, are you all right," was the most popular question posed by the onlookers.

"I'm fine. I'm fine." It's just my pride.

Are you ever disappointed to discover that you haven't really hurt yourself as badly as you think you have? As I walked toward the bathroom to pull down my pants and assess the damage, I was semi-convinced that the only reason I was standing was that I was in shock. I was hesitant to look down, afraid that I would see blood seeping through my jeans, due to the fact that I'd almost certainly partially severed my leg at the spot on my shin that took all the impact. Imagine my dismay when I got into the bathroom stall and dropped trow only to find that I'd scraped a bit of skin off my shin and my knee. This was kid's stuff, really. The sort of thing my fourteen-year-old self would have done with an eraser if she felt that people weren't paying enough attention to her. Annoyed, I pulled up my pants, flushed the toilet (not because I'd used it, but because I didn't want the other ladies to think that I had and then hadn't flushed,) and walked to class, taking a moment to consider throwing myself down the stairs, this time on purpose, in hopes of more dramatic results.

Waxing Political Again

2008-01-24T23:37:00.001-05:00

During tonight's Republican debate Mayor Giuliani said, "when the country was 7 out of 10 in favor of the war, Hilary supported it. Now that the country is 6 out of 10 against it, so is she." He says this to show that she's flip-flopping at the will of the people. Here's the problem: we live in a republic. We live in something called a representative democracy. There are a couple reasons for this. One, it's impractical for everyone in a country to vote every time a decision needs to be made, so we elect people who we think would vote the same way we would when it comes time to make one of these decisions. I personally find it refreshing that there are people out there representing us who follow polls, who say, "well, my constituents don't like this, I better not vote for it, or they're going to assert the power that they have over me, and they're not going to re-elect me." That's how this government works, if the people who represent us act in a way that we don't agree with, we get to fire them. What is wrong with Senator Clinton voicing the will of the people she serves? This brings us to the second (read real) reason that our government was set up the way it was. The founding fathers, and apparently most of the people who currently represent, or wish to represent us, don't think we're smart enough to make informed decisions. Now, I get that we don't have the resources at our fingertips that elected officials do. I don't remember the last time a 5-star general sat down with me to talk military strategy or disclosed classified information to me. But I do think that after 6 years of war in which nothing seems to be getting accomplished, in which we start to see people who have served in the Middle East saying that enough is enough, I think it is well within our right to say, we've had it. Your time is up. Let's put an end to this, or we'll fire you. Whether Mayor Giuliani thinks we're smart enough to make this decision or not.

Can't Sleep. Guilt Will Eat Me

2008-01-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

I miss my grandfather. The man's been dead for over a year. One year one hundred and sixteen days, to be exact. Forgive the large chunks of exposition, but my grandfather's death and the impact it has had on my psyche are things I've written about before, so I'm not going into it here. What I will say is, I had a dream about him last night. In said dream, my grandfather calls me from his death bed. "Where the hell ya been?" he says, "I haven't seen you in a month. I don't think I've got much time left here." Let the record show, I saw my grandfather the day before he died. In his last hours of lucidity. I also saw him the day he died; he was in a coma, but I sat there with him. Stroking his hand. Running my fingers through his hair. Telling him I loved him. What I'm saying is, this dream was not a re-enactment of events that actually transpired. Well, next in my dream, I drive to my grandparents' house, but it's too late. My grandfather is already dead. Next the dream turned into one involving sex with someone who I will not mention. The kind of sex that I really desperately need to believe was something highly symbolic and not at all literal. (No, not with my grandfather, though that seems the obvious conclusion to be made here.) I woke up feeling dirty and no further along in the grieving process than I was the day after my grandfather died. WHAT THE FUCK!? I'm not one for CAPS LOCK or dramatic use of punctuation, but for Christ's sake. My mother has dreams about my grandfather all the time. They're lovely dreams in which they're simply spending time together. She wakes up thankful for the impromptu visit. Why can't I have a dream like that. One where we're golfing, or playing gin? It's the kind of shit that makes me miss my insomnia.

Excuse me, do you have the time?

2008-01-22T19:02:00.001-05:00

Something odd happened to me today. I was walking to class. Up ahead I saw two people canvassing. I knew who they were, because people just like them had been standing in the same spot on behalf of the same organization everyday for the last month. They were there for HRC or the Human Rights Campaign or the By Human Rights We Mean Gay Rights Campaign. "Hi, do you have a minute for gay rights?" they say when someone walks by.

"I actually just re-upped my HRC membership," I have said every time someone has asked. It's a lie, of course. I haven't had an HRC membership in years. When I did have one, it was unintentional. I bought a watch from the HRC catalog, and the next thing I knew, I was getting monthly newsletters. I've been meaning to renew my membership. Truly I have. It's just that, do you know how many Ramen Noodles you can buy with $50?

As I continued walking toward the canvasser, I was sure to make eye-contact with him. Certainly he'll recognize me in all my transparently homosexual glory, I thought. Then I can make his day 1) by knowing exactly what he's getting after and already knowing about HRC and 2) being enlightened enough and compassionate enough to already have a membership.

It all happened so quickly, I'm not sure I can adequately describe the experience. I walked past the man and veered to the right. At the same time, a blatantly straight girl walked past him and veered to the left. I'm not saying this girl was actively participating in heterosexual activities (like sex with a man, for example) as she walked by. I'm just saying that if you put the two of us in a line-up, 10 out of 10 people would pick me out as the 'mo'. "Hi, do you have a minute for gay rights?" he said to the straight girl. To the straight girl?

The way I see it, there are a couple explanations:

1. The canvasser was a breeder with bad gaydar.
2. The canvasser was a breeder with perfectly fine gaydar but was very much interested in
talking to this cute, straight girl, so that he could potentially engage in breeder-type
activities (like sex with a woman, for example).
3. I don't represent myself nearly as gay-ly as I think I do. Note to self: wear more flannel.

In any case, I feel discriminated against. I have just as much a right to lie to a do-gooder in an effort to make myself feel better about myself as anyone else does. Maybe it's time to invest in a new watch.

Setting the Women's Movement Back Thirty Years at a Time

2008-01-19T23:42:00.000-05:00

I'm lonely.

Goin' Out In Style

2008-01-16T21:32:00.001-05:00

I'm taking a fiction writing class, and though I love the class, it's making me want to scream. It's not that I can't tell a good story. It's not that I can't bullshit on just about anything and make people believe that I know what I'm talking about. It's just that I have to have some prompting. There's no fictional nugget dying to get out of my head right now. I suppose I could tell myself, I'm going to write a story about a boy who falls in love with his imaginary friend then gets institutionalized when his mom walks in on him and this imaginary friend in the throws of passion, because to her, it just looks like little Billy is humping the air. I could do that, but I'm not compelled to do that. I did have this one sentence that popped into my head as I was trying and failing to fall asleep last night. The sentence was, "dead is a strange way to describe your best friend." It's not brilliant. It's probably not even good, but I got to thinking about a character dealing with the sudden death of his best friend, and what that would be like. So, I'm sitting down to start writing, at this point any words on the page would feel like a victory, and I go to describe the casket only to realize that I have no idea what caskets are made of. I do the old blackle.com search for caskets, and stumble upon the most wonderful shit I have ever seen. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, here's the link http://www.casketstore.net/Special_Caskets.htm . You know how sometimes you'll be driving down the highway, and you'll come up to a van, and the whole rear windshield is some graphic of the Crucifixion? Or the American flag being raised at Iwo Jima? Or Sponge Bob? Well, that seems to be what they've done with these caskets. Friends, for the low, low price of $2863, you too can be buried in a steel box with the Last Supper Photoshopped onto it. Or a beautiful mountain scene. These, though novel, are not my favorites. My favorites are, "The Last Hole," complete with life-sized golf clubs and the 18th pin in the distance, this is the best way I can think of to honor a golfer; "The Race is Over," in this casket we have a side view of stock cars racing through the checkered flag; then there's my personal favorite, "Return to Sender," this classy casket is made to look like an ordinary package, wrapped in brown paper and held together with string, the words, "return to sender," printed in giant red ink across the lid.

Before I saw this website, I was emphatic about wanting to be cremated. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps it would be better to go for one of these flashy custom jobs. If anyone asks, I'll take the one with the Simpsons couch, with a picture of me sitting right next to Homer. "Doh!"

My Ass Is Chapped

2008-01-15T10:44:00.001-05:00

Robert Johnson (as in the founder of BET, not the blues guitarist who famously sold his soul to the devil) alluded to Barack Obama's drug use when he introduced Hilary Clinton at a stump speech last week. Fine. It lacks tact. If the media wants to point that out, okay. I personally don't give a shit if Obama wants to snort blow off his desk in the Oval Office, should he get there. Maybe he does his best thinking when his pupils are the size of dimes. Here's my issue. Everyone is taking this enlightened stance, saying that no one should care what the candidates did in their youth. I agree with that. The thing that pisses me off is this. Anyone remember the 1992 campaign and the way these same pundits wanted to crucify Bill Clinton over the fact that he smoked pot in the '60s? Could the media please just point out and embrace its own hypocrisy? If Obama is willing to own up to his own mistakes, so should they. Maybe the fact that we no longer care whether or not the candidates led exemplary lives before they entered the public arena is a good thing. It shows we're growing as a nation. I'm not sure where we should draw the line, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Plugging Away

2008-01-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

I told myself I was going to sit down and write here everyday. Now I'm sitting here a couple drinks in resenting this whole process. It's not like the words aren't constantly streaming through my skillet. It's just that when I try to get them out, it all sounds like shite. So here I am, holding up my end of the bargain with myself. Who's holding up the other end, you might ask. Well, that's me too. No one to blame but myself, really. People ask me why I write, and I say something rehearsed like, "because I don't know how not to." Well, that's not entirely untrue. When an idea pops into my head, it has to come out. Problem is the days, weeks, months between worthwhile ideas. When it comes, it's normally in the form or a perfect sentence. I rarely change first sentences. Seriously, they stay exactly like they first appear in my head. Almost as if Little Baby Jesus Himself has crept into my consciousness and hand delivered them. That's a strange thing for an atheist to say, don't you think. Even when the words come, it's an excruciating process. Sitting and toiling over every word. Is there a synonym for drunk that doesn't sound like I got it from a thesaurus, for example. No one wants his/her writing to sound contrived. It should flow. It should be conversational. People who know you should hear your voice in their head, narrating along as they read. Better yet, they should have you over for dinner so that you can read it to them. I'm tired of Ramen Noodles.

I just read this piece in The New Yorker about Raymond Carver and his rather tumultuous relationship with his editor. I found myself reading Carver's letters to Lish (said editor) and thinking, I don't care how long this guy has been sober. He's either on a bender or he's fucking nuts. His letter insisting that Lish stop the publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a collection that I've never read, sounds panicked and desperate and slightly psychotic. The way a person might sound when they're pleading with a person standing on the edge of a bridge, moments from jumping off, begging him to reconsider. It's pathetic in a way that I can relate to.

Drivel.

Energy Equals Mass Times the Speed of Light Squared

2008-01-14T14:49:00.000-05:00

My father looks like Albert Einstein. It's a strange thing to be reminded of every time I'm browsing the science section at a bookstore. They both have permanently sad eyes. And a Magnum P.I. mustache. Once, I took a sharpie to my fourth-grade basketball picture. I drew a thick black mustache across my upper lip and scared myself half to death when I looked down at the picture and saw my father staring back at me. There's no getting that sharpie ink off the picture either. I rubbed my whole face, sad eyes and all, away in the attempt.

An Old Friend's Smell

2008-01-12T23:48:00.000-05:00

It's strange the way you don't notice how good a person smells until it's 15 seconds after you've hugged her good-bye, her scent hanging in the air around you, as you watch her shrink away in your rearview mirror.

Taking Things Four Years at a Time

2008-01-11T16:57:00.000-05:00

The day of the 1988 Presidential Election, all the second graders gathered in the common space between our four classrooms, and Mrs. Shirley took us through a simple process. “Okay, raise your hand if you want to vote for Michael Dukakis?” After a quick glance through the crowd during which she counted myself and the others who didn’t care or didn’t know about Dukakis’ wife’s alcoholism, she continued, “now which of you would like to vote for George Bush?” She counted, not because it was close, but because she wanted to get it right. She then went to the board and wrote:

Dukakis--3
Bush -- 96

I imagine the thought was that the students’ opinions were likely to mirror those of their parents. I can’t speak for the results specific to my hometown, but I do know that nationally things were bad for Dukakis, but they weren’t that bad. The popular vote went:

Dukakis--45.65%
Bush --53.37%

This margin of defeat isn’t terribly embarrassing. The problem, as is typically the case, was with the Electoral College:

Dukakis--20.6%
Bush --79.2%

Thus Dukakis has served as a worthy political punch-line for the last twenty years.

In January 1989, the four classes gathered again, this time to watch the inauguration. I sat as close to the television as I could get and listened to the banter from the news team. As a still lucid President Reagan got out of his town car one of the reporters said, “Every president who was elected in a year ending in zero, going as far back as Lincoln has died in office. President Reagan is the first president in 120 years to break that pattern”

“Well, there’s still time,” Mrs. Young said. An odd comment coming from an obvious republican, I thought. Looking back, I’m not sure I was meant to hear her say it, and I’m certain I wasn’t meant to get it. Still, that comment is the thing I remember most about the second grade.

***

My mom took me to the Darke County Fair. While we were there, we came across a booth where they were selling shirts with, “Clinton/Gore ’92” printed in patriotic red and blue. I begged my mother for one of those shirts. Months earlier, I had seen Clinton at a debate. At the time he was still polling in the single-digits. I didn’t care how Paul Tsongas was doing or whether Mario Cuomo was going to enter the race. I just knew, as I sat there watching the debate, that that governor from Arkansas was going to be the next president. “We just got to the fair,” my mom said, “why don’t you wait and see if there’s anything else you want to buy.”

“No. This is what I want.”

That November, I was proud to wear my Clinton/Gore shirt to school. It was election day and my school was one of the polling stations. My sixth grade science teacher, Mrs. Crompton, and I sat outside at recess, and while the other kids played basketball or swung or did whatever normal kids do when they’re at recess, Mrs. Crompton and I talked politics. “That’s who I voted for,” she said. I just smiled.

That afternoon I went into the chorus/band room where the voting booths and old lady volunteers were set up, and I participated in the kids’ voting. Mr. Alexander, a fifth grade teacher and transparent sexist made fun of my shirt or was he making fun of me? I don’t really remember. I just remember lowering my opinion of him. Then this old woman with nothing better to do than embarrass an 11-year-old kid said, “you know, you’re not really allowed in here with that shirt.” I thought she was joking, so I laughed. “I’m going to have to ask you zip up your jacket while you’re in here. What you’re doing is illegal.” I know she was just trying to do her civic duty, but at the time, I didn’t get it. I cried the whole way home, humiliated that I wasn’t more familiar with the legal system as it pertained to elections. The woman had single-handedly ruined Clinton’s victory for me.

***

Forgive me. I voted for Nader.

***

I have never been less excited to vote for a man as I was to vote for John Kerry. Still, I stood in line for 3 hours to do so. I would have stood there for six.

***

Yesterday, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico ended his campaign for the presidency. For months I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about this guy. Four time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Second term governor. “No sitting senator since Kennedy has been elected president. Clinton and Obama might not be electable,” I would say. Energy Secretary under President Clinton. Hostage negotiator. He’s done amazing things with North Korea and Iraq. Name a bad guy. Richardson has had him by the balls. I’m just saying, the man was clearly more qualified for the job than just about anyone who has ever applied for the position.

Richardson did one smart thing for himself after he bowed out. He declined the opportunity to back one of the three remaining democratic candidates. I would be very surprised if Bill Richardson isn’t at the top of everyone’s list of possible running mates. If Obama wins the nomination, he’s going to have to attach someone with experience to his campaign, whether he likes it or not. Having been Bill Clinton’s Energy Secretary, it would make sense that Hilary Clinton would try to get him on board. Edwards might just need some help in the West, where Richardson is strong. The biggest thing though, the thing that all three remaining candidates should be thinking about--Bill Richardson is half Mexican. Though it doesn’t make a lot of sense, the Latino vote almost always goes to the Republicans. Maybe it’s something to do with conservative, Catholic values. Maybe it’s something to do with the way conservatives have attached themselves with the concept of the American Dream. Probably it’s a combination of both. If Governor Richardson can help get the Latino vote, and I think he can, that’s going to be the difference between the Dems winning in a landslide and waiting 48 hours after the polls close in November to see which way Ohio goes. None of us wants to do that again.

I think Keith Olbermann said it best. At the end of his interview with Governor Richardson on last nights, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” the pundit said, “I know it’s not of great practical use right now, but you’ll understand why I couldn’t have said something like this earlier, I think you would have made a fine president.”

Nobody is Safe

2008-01-09T13:42:00.000-05:00

It isn't that I'm not interested in what's being said in class. It's just that I'm more interested in the 2-inch-wide, black, leather band clasped noticeably too tightly around my instructor's right wrist. While he's talking about a famous criticism of Proust, I'm imagining the cool damp moistness that's undoubtedly collecting beneath the band. I rub my thumb over my wrist and feel sorry for how red and irritated my professors must be by this point in the afternoon, and I start asking myself why he would put himself through that. This line of questioning can't end well, and in fact, it doesn't. To be more specific, it ends with the assumption that my professor is some sort of bondage/s&m fetishist who is almost certainly wearing his wife's underwear beneath his loose-fitting cotton pants. As he turns around to write, "epistemology," on the board, I can't help but notice the not-so-subtle indication of a wedgie, and my suspicions are confirmed.

I took my friend to a psychic once. The psychic took a moment away from my friend's reading to tell me that I'm, "the kind of person who can size people up instantly, and [I'm] not often wrong." While I take the assessment as a compliment, and as a way to boost my already out of control ego, I hope, in the instance of this professor, that the psychic is wrong.