oh, rebecca

So, hi, hey, hello, goodbye.

2010-11-12T12:22:00.001-08:00

I've finally sort of almost got my site at ohrebecca.com up and running, so, I'm defecting here and will eventually clear out all and sundry posts. Won't you join me at the new site for all things ohrebecca?

http://www.ohrebecca.com

2010-03-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I just don't understand people, or if I just don't understand people.

I try very very hard not to say things I don't mean. It's a point of contention with me. I've been lied to an awful lot, so if there's something serious that I've got to say, and saying it could have awful repercussions, I tend to think and think and mull and mull until I'm sure it's true. I don't say it and hope it comes true: that's a wish, not a statement, not a fact, and wishes are best reserved for:

11:11

birthday cakes and candles

beggars who want to ride

upon stars

lists on amazon.com

sick children

I do know that things change and feelings change and thoughts change, but actions play a big part in this too. Time, too.

I'm rather simplistic in that I expect that people mean what they say, when they say it. Apparently I need to put the blinders on though and assume the opposite whenever possible. I thought I was getting better at seeing through bullshit, but was wrong about that.

I'm wrong about a lot of things.
I think I should start saying what I don't mean. Or not saying what I mean. Or not meaning what I say.

Four Beers Later

2010-03-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

I want you all to know how difficult it is to be a new art-school student, ten or so years older than most of the other students in my classes, with a mentality like mine:

I wound easily, bruise on contact, scare loudly, blush maddeningly, embarrass publicly, have a thin skin and an irascible temper. I offend quickly, bite sharply, cry freely, apologize ridiculously, lose ambition often. I miss the mark, I resent sentiments, I upset myself, I upset others, I hold grudges, I get nervous, I quit early, I analyze overmuch. I refuse to look you in the eye if you've hurt my feelings, I hold my head low but my eyes high, I look above and beyond where I currently am: if you are in front of me, you might soon be behind me.

I'm human.
You are too.

I worry, I misstep, I make mistakes, I regroup, I learn, I re-learn, I sometimes need a refresher in my learnings and re-learnings. I'm bad at math and logic, I'm good at creativity and troubleshooting. I don't suffer fools kindly, quickly, wisely, or surely. I don't mean to hurt your feelings but I probably will, at some point, unwittingly, unwillingly.

But I say yes to new things, new challenges, new people, new projects, new places, new me, new you. I give chances and chances and chances. I try alternate routes, different roads, consult maps, search, research.

I almost never know, but I almost always think.

If something is too much for me: I stop, collaborate and listen. I come back with a brand new invention. I not-so-begrudgingly reference Vanilla Ice well into the 21st century.

There are few things that give me more anxiety than group or one-on-one critiques (this specifically applies to art school, but can be broadened to nearly anything: work, relationships, family). In the past, I have habitually neglected to leave anything resembling or representing my own creativity up for debate, or criticism, or review, or help. Unfortunately, there's no way around that in art school. Though every time I'm required to tape up a drawing or painting in front of the class and sit imperceptibly shaking in the corner, my heart beats a little faster, I pray a little non-denominational prayer, I think that that which doesn't kill me only makes me stronger (trite but true). Old Rebecca fobbed off compliments, took criticism harshly, ignored ambivalence. New Rebecca is learning, albeit slowly, slowly, slowly, to accept compliments, take criticism constructively, and question ambivalence.

In art, in life.

Art school is not giving me confidence (which in my opinion and experience is often falsified and short-lived), but acceptance, of how things are (normally, regularly) done and should be done. It's a process, in progress. I don't do it right often or correctly, but I do it nonetheless.

Did I just enumerate a bunch of negative things about myself without accentuating the positive? I did. But I'm not sure you're ready for all the positives about me. Some people never will be. Some people already know and are thinking all those things in their computative brains just reading this, countering each and every negative trait I've mentioned. Just know and remember that I am me, and I am human: the bad things about me may be more noticeable, more prominent on first glance, but there is a veritable goldmine of good things, and you don't even have to dig far. They are there, yea and verily.

Because I, according to art school and various other sources, including myself, and probably you, am awesome.

I think you are too.

In fits and starts.

2010-01-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

And here's why I missed New Year's Eve:

I was in the hospital! Hooray!

Christmas weekend, I was working at the barn by myself. My boss was on vacation, which I guess she's allowed to do once in awhile, so I was in charge of a bunch of horses, a bunch of cats and chickens, a llama and a cow. I can barely take care of myself for an extended length of time, so all that responsibility for two whole days really took a lot out of me. Sunday night, at home, my tonsil started to hurt. This isn't out of the ordinary, I have a lot of tonsil problems and sometimes before I get a cold or something they tighten up and get mad and then settle down. I took some Nyquil and tylenol and called it a night. It still felt bad on Monday morning, so I went about my business but made plans to go to the doctor the next day. Tuesday came and it was even worse, so I had my mom take me to the ER. I had two peritonsillar abscesses and it sucked! I had a very bad time partly because of my roommate's very annoying, very loud, and VERY Midwestern daytime (and once, at 11 pm) visitors, and the fact that I was on a clear-liquids-only diet because I could barely swallow my own spit. But my mom visited me every day, and my friends Katie, Julie, Jarred, and Dawn took time out from their lives to visit me too. My boss at the barn and her daughter rode my horse, my mom took care of Frankie for me, and I really appreciate everyone's kind words, thoughts, and actions during that time.

I basically spent a week in the hospital, trying to get better. I was stuck in a no-man's-medical-land, where I wasn't quite "better" enough to go home, but not bad enough to commit to a surgery. So I stayed in and got pumped full of fluids and antibiotics and steroids and now I have a big fat huge hospital bill and have to make an appointment to take out these tonsils - which I can't afford. Hooray.

Also, I got dumped while I was in the hospital, and that was awesome, and by awesome I mean, 'what the fuck is wrong with people?'

But here's some good news, guys.

I rule.

Here are some examples:

In my brand-new Drawing 1 class, our first assignment is to draw a lightbulb. Prof told us if we thought we were "good" at drawing to choose one of the translucent bulbs instead of the opaque ones. I did. I asked him if I could do something to jazz up the drawing, like include my hand. He looked at me a little funny and said "Uhh, sure. It'll be hard though..." and I shrugged and said "have a little faith in me!" Well, I showed him my compositional sketch:

and he said: "Wow. I didn't think you'd be able to do that. Hands are difficult to draw. You can draw, though. And you can draw hands. We're going to have fun this semester!" I did tell him that I'm fairly good at drawing what I see, but I have problems with unlocking my pretty vivid imagination and making my hands draw from that, rather from my eyes. So he said he'll work with me on to develop that. Color me happy.

For my painting class, I'm not displeased with my first project. I'm NOT a painter, I'm not good at it, I don't understand paints, they don't understand me. Apart from this being a required course for my major, I'd like to develop my painting skills *a little.*

It's not the greatest still life, but it's not the worst, I think. Also, it's my first still life painting, ever. So there's that!

Here's another reason I rule:
I've been doing awesome on my resolutions. I have tried to be creative every day, in some way shape or form. It hasn't always been awesome, but every little bit counts. I shopped locally/handmade - I went to a few Detroit small-businesses to get stuff to send to my lovely Sharon in New York, and I supported local (and national) artists like Perfect Laughter at 323 East. I've been more appreciative of things and people in my life. I've tried new things (an okra/split pea fritter at Slows, different kinds of nigiri sushi I've never thought to try before like scallops, yellowtail, red snapper, eel), and made something new at home (maple glazed salmon with ossau iraty risotto and garlic asparagus - see pic below!). I've been saying "I'm sorry" less and less. I donated batteries and hand sanitizer to the Art Department's supply drive for the Humane Society in the first week.

And I haven't fallen for anyone yet. Though I do have a few crushes. That's nothing new.

It's gonna be a good year.

delicious foods

New Year's Real Solutions.

2010-01-07T21:59:00.001-08:00

So, I'm kind of a week late because I kind of missed out on doing New Year's Eve (that's for another entry yet, I promise). Tonight I did a do-over NYE, continuing a family-and-friend tradition that's gone on for the past 18 years, at least: the kids I used to babysit come over and we get buffet food and go to Meijer and load up on more sugar and snacks, we go play video games and board games, and ring in the New Year with confetti. It's no raucous party, it's no explosive celebration, but it is my New Year's. This year we did it without the confetti, because I didn't feel like cleaning up the mess (and it gets verymessy), but the rest of night was the same so now I'm officially considering it 2010.

New years mean new starts!

Here are some resolutions. Some real ones. Real solutions. Wow, that worked out handily, didn't it? Some are new, some are old, like the ones that spring up every year but maybe with some slight changes so as to differentiate them from previous, unsuccessful years, and some work in concert with each other: similar concepts with different end-results.

*be creative(outside of school) EVERY day. Doesn't matter how small a show it is. Sit down and write a very short short story. Draw a doodle. Make a craft. Something. Somehow. It doesn't take long. I need to get over my creative blocks and realize that just because I'm in art school doesn't mean I can't make art outside of it.

*contribute in some way or another, every week, to the new Detroit blog my mom and I set up: http://detroitbitbybit.blogspot.com. (though this also falls under the creativity umbrella, it's got an actual purpose in my mind's eye, so it warrants a separate resolution)

*be more active as a Metro-Detroiter, for Detroit's sake. In the past year I've made a ton of new friends who are really devoted to Detroit, and my love affair with the city is going through a renaissance. I've been really lucky to have these people in my life and moreover, to have this city in my life, even though she and I haven't always seen eye to eye.

*add more "handmade" into my life, buying *and* selling (locally, etsy, etc) and reduce my commercial consumerism.

*be more grateful/appreciative, for all the myriad wonderful things in my life. Too often, I get bogged down in the bad times, the bad things. I don't say thank you enough. Thank you. I said it. It's a start.

*become more active in some aspects online (blogging, finally setting up a real website for blogging and arts/creative stuff, etc.) and less in some aspects (uhm, Bejeweled Blitz on facebook? Looking up questions to the random, pointless questions that race through my brain at any minute? Unnecessary.)

*stop saying sorry so much, and think about why I'm saying it when I do use it.

*cook more, goshdarnit, and use locally-grown/locally-produced ingredients whenever possible. I'm not a *talented* cook, but I have faith I can learn. When not cooking at home (and, well, even when cooking at home) try new things! After an involuntary week of a clear-liquids-only diet, my taste buds are crying out for new experiences. Who am I to deprive them? Foodie-land, here I come. My palate has expanded considerably just in the past year, and there's no reason to stop where I'm at now. Old dog, new tricks.

*be healthier overall. Normally I want to lose xx amounts of pounds, and though I'm not 100% happy with my weight right now, I'm generally feeling pretty good & confident about my body. As long as I'm making a concerted effort to get out and do more/run more/whatever more/and take in less, then I'm not going to worry about the numbers on the scales. I have 2 mostly-working legs, a paid-for membership at my school's gym, a dog who loves to run, and a horse who needs riding. It'll work itself out.

*ACTUALLY keep track of every book I read this year, and write at least a few sentences about what I thought about it. I've tried this every year for the past 3 years and each time peter out at the halfway mark, it seems. I'm always reading, I always have a notebook with me, and it takes like four seconds to write a few sentences.

*do not fall for just anyone. This is the most important. I feel like this could be a big year for falling, so I don't want to waste it. I've done that enough the past few years. You won't fool me again.

*I almost forgot this one, but it's kind of silly. Maybe not. The art department at my school is running a supply drive for the Michigan Humane Society, in memory of a former art supervisor. I'm making it my goal to donate at least one thing, once a week, till the drive is over at the end of the semester. Baby steps to greatness.

What are yours? Do you bother? I do every year and fail every year. I suppose my last one should be:

*do not fail at the resolutions this year.

the grades came in.

2010-01-05T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm working in retrograde this week. The last few weeks, even last month of December was a trip and a half, but not the best kind where it's all expenses-paid to the Bahamas or Sandals or something. More like the trip where you end up in some podunk town with twelve bucks on you and an empty gas tank and six hundred miles left to go before you're home safe and sound. Such is life.

So instead of talking about the bad things of the past few weeks, just right this second, just for you now, I'll instead let you know that:

You guys. I pretty much owned my first semester at art school*, as you expected.

After missing one assignment out of seventeen, I knew I had to work pretty ridiculously hard to get a good grade on my final so I could get away with a B in my design class. So I did... just, I did it in the eleventh hour. Or, at least, the thirty-first through the eleventh hours. The project I chose was pixelating a photo and then gridding an illustration board and painting the pixelated image on it. I'm not good at math, not in the least, no how, but I did manage to figure out that the 8x10 photo of a kid in a lemonade stand, manipulated to 5 pixels per inch and blown up to 20x25, was going to be 2000 half-inch squares. I knew when I started the project, two weeks before it was due, that 2000 squares was a shit lot of squares. I didn't realize exactly HOW MANY SHIT LOT OF SQUARES that was till the day before it was due, after I had lunch with a friend and went home around 4pm to get down to brass tacks on the painting, which had only been about 12% done up to that point.

Well, I got to work, for twenty hours straight - mostly. I took three naps totalling two hours, and in each of those naps, my brain treated me to a magically rendered, tedious dream of my hand mixing colour. Like those work dreams where you're working for the entire 8 hours you sleep. It was fun. And that was an egregious lie.

I twitpic'd some of my progress:
20% done: http://twitpic.com/t59g6
30.95%: http://twitpic.com/ter9j
41.9%: http://twitpic.com/tfv3m
50% and change: http://twitpic.com/tgg47
60%: http://twitpic.com/th1yg
and the end result: http://twitpic.com/tmv70

I finished at 1 pm; class was at 3 pm with about a half hour of travel and parking and walking-to-class time to factor in. I had enough time to shower, grab a sub on campus and get to class and poop myself, but it was worth it for that A+ on the final, which gave me an A- in the class.

Not too shabby for missing one whole assignment**.

My other class, Astronomy (for my Physical Science req), I was really worried about, but thanks to it being a large LARGE online class with a huge HUGE curve, I managed to walk away with a not-entirely-deserved-but-you-bet-I-will-take-it B+. Thanks for somehow sucking worse than me, everyone else in the class!

So Monday starts the cycle of school again, with the culprits this time being: Art History 1, Drawing 1, Oil Painting 1, Nutrition (online), and a Nutrition lab.

Full-time art, here I come!
And also I will update you on the very very inauspicious beginnings of my 2010. Next time. Trust me. They are worth an update of their very very very own.

*Nevermind that I only took one art class this semester.
**Which I actually HAD ready to hand in for the "make-up assignments" period, but since that class period was actually a work-on-your-final period and my final was too big to fit into my portfolio, I left the whole thing at home, missing assignment and all... so it's my own damn fault for not getting an A or A+.

part-time-art.

2009-11-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

I still really don't have the time, but I want you to know I'm alive and well, and in some respects, extra-well. Other respects could surely use a boost in the wellness department, but all in due time, I like to think.

Being a part-time art student is weird and wonderful; I wish I'd been blogging about it these past few months. I guess I could still write about the experiences I've had, but that seems wrong, going back in the past. I'm supposed to be moving forward. I wanted to do some kind of a comic about it, but obviously that didn't happen. Hmph.

In just 2 short months, I'll be making the transition to full-time art student. Scary. Wonderful. Scary. I can't wait. I have to wait.

In the meantime, would you like to see some of my projects from my (one) art class this semester? Or would you rather wait till my final project is completed and graded, and final grades are in, so you can all bask in my awesomeness and inherent glory, and eagerly await January whateverth when classes start again? Your call... less than a month till this semester is over and done with.

2009-11-14T21:07:00.000-08:00

See the thing is... I just don't have the time. :/

Girls will be boys will be girls will be boys.

2009-10-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

Apparently, I am not a girly girl. I think I might be a man's lady. Or, alternately, a dudely girl.

Right?

I love pink. I love flowers. Baby animals. Stuffed animals. Baby babies. Chick flicks/chick lit. Scented candles. Fruity drinks (hi, new love of my life, Framboise). Fancy scented lotions and creams. Skirts. Dresses. Fancy underpanties. Silky things. Nail polish. Mascara. Getting my hair 'did.' The whole nine yards.

But I also really really love blue. Beer. Burgers. Baseball and hockey. Dude flicks (The Big Lebowski remains my favourite, most-watched, most-quoted movie). Robots. Graphic novels. Video games. Simplicity. Pants. Being stubborn. Being confusing. Being stupid. All very dudely qualities. (No offense, dudes, but... you own the patent on those last couple of things. I'll cop to women being crazy (see later on in this post where I elucidate my own crazy) but dudes broke ground on the stupid/confusing/stubborn front, built a foundation, and erected* a skyscraper upon it. Own it.)

When I google-imaged "stupid skyscraper" this came up. Seems pretty apt.

I squee (heavily) at cute things, but I also scoff at people falling down or getting hurt or (especially) getting hit in the nuts. I want a baby (someday), but I want a baby boy first, dammit and he is going to grow up playing baseball in the park if I have to be the best single mother in the world ever**. My hips swing when I walk, but I curse like a sailor, when I'm not at work***.

I have a handful of close-ish female friends, the most I've had since I went to an all-girls Catholic high school a million**** years ago and little to no choice to have at least a coterie of girlfriends (especially ones who had boyfriends at the all-boys school next door, so I could acquire some much-needed dude friends). But my closest friends, the ones I consistently turn to when grumpy, needing a drink, or need help dissecting matters of the heart, are resoundingly male. I grump to my lady friends, but I always feel a disconnect, like they're not getting all of the story because I'm forgetting vital parts of it, mostly because I probably am.

I also don't get invited out "with the girls" as much as I do with the guys, probably due to my propensity for drinking too much beer, swearing too loudly, and making lewd jokes at every opportunity. The retort "This is why we can't have nice things" basically applies to me and intangible things: I will never be able to serenely sip from a Cosmopolitan or Sex on the Beach in a sophisticated dress. I will be the girl in jeans in the corner, playing darts or pool and drinking pint after pint with the guys, telling highly inappropriate tales and guffawing at theirs. I've only recently found a little niche of girls who somehow, for some reason, like me and want to hang out with me, even if I am too loud and too brash.

I do love dresses and skirts, and I use girly perfumes with names like Seductive Goddess, and I like***** being a girl, but I like hanging out with the dudes, because on the whole they are so much fun to be around, except when they are being TRULY dudely and mucking up everything around them. Which is often. Very often.

I might just be metro-Detroit's version of Sweet Dee, only fatter and shorter and browner-haireder. If I found a baby in the dumpster, I'd probably call it DB too.

Last week, I spent a few hours at my friend Darin's house, with a couple other dudes, watching the tiebreaker game for the AL Central Division. I got teased, mercilessly, about something that came up during a no-holds-barred game of Balderdash last year - something highly inappropriate, that I can't even share with you, internet, other than to say that it rhymes with boatmucking, sorta. Anyway, it was crass and crude and I blushed and demurred and fobbed it off ("I still have some decency left," says the girl who once explained something that rhymes with mukakke to a bunch of dudes who, in retrospect, probably knew what it was and just wanted to see if I would get embarrassed talking about it. Note: I did not get embarrassed) but I still took that goodnatured verbal abuse and rolled with it. Because I'm The Girl Guys Can Talk About (Really, Super) Gross Stuff With. I think.

Later that night, though, I found myself out and about with three of my wonderful lady friends, for an event I like to call "lady burgers," if only because it sounds a little bit perverted (again, that's a pretty dudely quality). I'd left Darin's house still on a game high, since it was only the bottom of the seventh and I would've loved for the Tigs to clinch the pennant, even if we didn't stand a chance against the Yankees in the league playoffs. We girls sat in a booth far away from a television and I strained to see the game, while the Tigers struggled through twelve long innings. Not being able to see the score or anything really except for dots of white and grey and blue and black on a field of green, I determined what was going on in the game on the enthusiasm of those seated far closer, and provided such helpful commentary to my boothmates as "They're fighting? I think it's a happy fight. There are people still on the field and they're just standing there so it can't be over." I almost got kicked out of 'Ladies Night'/the girls club when I demonstrated my too-vast knowledge of sports****** ("Baseball was invented in Cooperstown!"), but quickly regained my hold by being adorable. I think.

Basically, it was a weird night. I was almost too girly to hang out with the dudes, and almost too dudely to hang out with the girls. Catch-22.

My friend Jon once drunkenly told me "I don't know why you don't have a boyfriend. You're so awesome. You get along so well with dudes - you're like one of us," and then decided that that was actually probably the problem.

The problem is actually that while I am in many ways, shapes, and forms very dudegirly, I have the unwieldy and totally out-of-control emotions of a girly-girl. A pretty vulnerable girl who ~~sometimes~~ always tries too hard and is a champion natural-born-worrier and invents elaborate scenarios in which people screw her over relentlessly just for bragging rights. I overthink, I overanalyze, I worry 92 hours of the day, I think you don't like me, I think I screwed up, and it's mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bonnie says I have to "rein in the Rebecca." But that Rebecca, she's a headstrong one. It's a dirty job. (PS Mike Rowe, you are welcome to help me.)

I am trying really hard to not let that happen this time. It's a slippery slope, with wicked turns at breakneck speeds. I've gotten "good" enough to know when I start slipping, but not good enough to know how to stop once I've started down that hill. I pump the brakes and tell myself I'm entering a world of pain, a world of pain, but it's no use. I'm there, I'm on it, I ride it out as best I can. I've recognized it this time, and am working on stopping that vehicle of destruction, and I'm trying to chill the fuck out and maintain the best parts of me, both girly and dudely (please see the opening paragraphs) because they are me and I am pretty awesome, if you must know, so if you are reading this, please realize this! I acknowledge my faults, am working to mend them, so hopefully you let my ludicrous overreactiony (but quickly-realized, remember! Remember!) antics get in the way of your enjoying my out and out awesomeness, which is plentiful and intense.

It's funny, because I started this entry a few months ago, with no real idea of where it was going, until the universe spelled it out for me recently in no uncertain terms. Keep being a dudely girl, but chill down on the crazy girly-girl emotion bullshit. Okay? Okay.

Rebecca ~~is trying to abide.~~

Rebecca abides.

She's calmer than you are.

Far out, man.

*okay, so yeah, 'erected'? I LOL'ed at that when I was typing it, and left it in for comic relief, for myself. For real.
**which will probably happen, as I'm not convinced that anyone will ever be stupid enough to want to marry me, given my extreme levels of fucked-up-ness.
***mostly.
****ten
*****This was originally "I love being a girl" but then I remembered periods and how much they suck and how every month they cost me money, sanity, and normal human contact as I sequester myself from humanity so as not to lose all my friends when my hormones raise their nasty, ugly, many-tentacled heads.
******here is me being a girl: when my friends Ron and Eric start talking about sports (mostly college and pro football) too much around me, my eyes glaze over and I stare off into the distance until I can't take it anymore and just blurt out "sports." That's usually their cue to talk about something different. An acceptable segue is cupcakes, since sometimes they talk about cupcakes in relation to college football, a connection I haven't yet figured out, but might have to look more into. I'll suffer college football for some cupcakes, you know? Mmmmm... cupcakes.

2009-10-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

I am terrible at blogging lately. Between a new barn, new barn job, regular job, new school (!!) and new boy (!!!!!), I have no time, motivation, or inclination to write sometimes.

I have lots to say! I'm going through lots of awesome things! But that's all I feel like saying right now. Maybe this week I'll have a few minutes to sit down and type up something right and proper. Maybe.

(no guarantees)

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been a little crazy.

2009-09-14T10:22:00.001-07:00

Life has been, if not difficult (but it is) then at the very least, confusing and weird, and I have not been responding to it as I should.

I found out roughly a week and a half before classes started that I actually was accepted, which resulted in a rush of trying to get my financial aid taken care of, and registering for classes, and an inordinate amount of freaking out.

I freaked out because I'm switching majors entirely, meaning I have to get all of my college-specific courses done (most of my cores are out of the way), and besides that, it's ART school. I have always kept my 'art' pretty close to the vest and never really considered schooling in it or a career in it until a talk with Bonnie sparked it and set the wheels in motion. But as I am not very good with criticism or critique or bullshitting art students and art teachers about art, it's a little worrisome.

I freaked out because I really cannot afford school right now, especially if my financial aid doesn't go through. I already had to have my aunt buy me my studio/design class supplies and my astronomy textbook, and am scrounging for parking money by finding coins in my couch cushions and returning pop bottles that have been languishing in my kitchen for months and months. As of right now, I don't even have enough gas money to get to both my jobs tomorrow, much less eat anything besides ramen or oatmeal (staples in my residence). Today I dropped off the last of my documents for the aid office to review though, and hopefully some dollars will be forthcoming.

I was only able to register online for two classes, all the others I wanted or needed having been filled up by people who were probably notified of their acceptance more than a week and a half before classes started. After hemming and hawing and considering I could just show up to some of the others I wanted and wheedle and whine my way in, or wait a week and register in one once some losers dropped out (and therefore miss a weekish of academia), I decided to stick with the two classes. For one, in case my financial aid *doesn't* go through (fingers crossed), it will be far less of a strain on me; also, given that I'm trying to a) balance my two jobs as it is and b) find a new job or get more hours at my current job, only having two courses to work around (one of which is an online course) is a lot more flexible and less stressful.

All that school shizz aside, life is STILL pretty ridiculous. I'm still dealing with stupid feelings for at least three people I shouldn't even be thinking about, plus having at least two crushes on people who probably aren't interested in me, my terrible knees, the whole ridiculous work situation, stupid barn drama, my lack of commitment to losing weight because I don't have the money or time to eat well right now (or so I tell myself), money drama up the wazoo and out my friggin' ears, and general malaise, and, well... I cracked a little bit, a lot bit.

Last weekend I was in a fairly depressive state and rather stupidly decided to watch Grey Gardens, which I'd never seen even though I'd owned it for probably two years at this point. Well, let me tell you that this is not a good movie for a crazy girl with a crazy mother to see, ever, much less when she's already in a fairly depressive mood. I spent the evening laughing at some of the film (the parts in which I didn't see either my mom or myself) and crying at the rest of the film (the parts in which I saw more of myself or my mother than I'd care to admit). After the movie was over, I felt restless, empty and scared. Really scared. And then proceeded to delete the whole of my phonebook (except for my mom, my aunt, my grandma, and inexplicably - Twitter). One of my crushes texted me shortly thereafter, because I'd logged onto facebook and said I was down (true) and he didn't want me to be down (true). He helped erase some of the crazy, but there's only so much other people can do.

Sunday was fine. Barn, riding, good times, etc.

Monday, Monday had another incidence of crazy. I worked at the barn in the morning and then met my mom up at the State Fair for the last day of it. We took a million pictures and ate a million foods and had a million funs. I was ultra-tired when I got home, so I chalk some of the crazy up to that, but really, not all of it. When the evening news came on, they started talking about the State Fair and its closing and what would happen to the fairgrounds, and I fairly lost it, again (so maybe some of the crazy can be attributed to my feeling of helplessness over that whole situation - but maybe I'm winnowing down my feelings of GENERAL helplessness over my whole life to that one thing; scapegoating, anyone?). Well, I became a quivering, sniveling ball of mess, thinking Very Bad Thoughts about life and how I didn't want it anymore. Cue text-sniveling to a good friend, and phone-sniveling to Mom, and I fell asleep, restlessly, uneasily, but asleep nonetheless.

Nothing's really been fixed in the past week, but it's a new Monday and I'm still here and I've got friends I love who love me back and it's almost my birthday and my horse is doing great in her training and I am officially a (part-time) art student and my dog is being good and my house is (slowly) getting clean and ultimately I have a lot to be thankful for and be proud of, even if sometimes I need a giant fucking smack in the face to realize it, and I will not end up like Big OR Little Edie.

I promise

Your Michigan State Fair!

2009-09-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, every year my Mom and I journey (uhm, a mile) to 8 Mile and Woodward to partake in the country's oldest state fair - a state fair that is unfortunately on its very very last legs. In its 160 year history, I have gone approximately 19 of those years, sometimes multiple times in the week-and-a-half course of the fair. This year, Mom and I went twice, and she's already been once without me, and will likely go by herself another time or two.

These are our last grand hurrahs, last-ditch efforts to support the fair in an attempt to revitalize it.

Earlier this year Governor Granholm unceremoniously evicted all the businesses* at the State Fairgrounds and announced that this would be the last year for the Michigan State Fair. There was outrage, there was protesting. There were townhall meetings where citizens voiced their objections to the fair closing and the grounds being vacated. One of Granholm's cabinet cohorts said "A two-week fair cannot support the 164-acre asset."** So... where was all the money from the year-round business ventures on the grounds going? I can't imagine that leasing a 50,000+ square foot equestrian facility on the grounds 12 months of the year was cheap, nevermind the six other businesses leasing space, nevermind the numerous trade shows and events that lease space throughout the year (Gun & Knife shows, computer shows, building material auctions, the Shrine Circus, wrestling & MMA competitions, etc). Something rotten in the state of Detroit?***

(Sidebar: can you imagine what's going to become of 164 acres laying vacant and unused at the corner of 8 and Woodward? My overactive imagination has come up with quite a few scenarios, and none of them are pretty.)

There's been a lot of conjecture and rhetoric floating around about what could become of the grounds, and a lot of (very good) ideas thrown about, none of which have apparently met muster. THIS is an excellent, outstanding, mutually beneficial idea, not to mention one that stays true to the fair's purpose. It's also one that I could fully get behind. But who decides what happens to the fairgrounds?

Partly, we do. It's *our* State Fair. If attendance is up from years past, then that (ostensibly) adds some weight to saving the fair.

Having attended for so many years, I've definitely seen a trending decline in many aspects of the fair: most notably in the agricultural sectors. Every year there seem to be fewer cows, fewer sheep, fewer pigs, fewer goats, fewer vegetables, fewer horse shows. Huh? Agriculture is Michigan's 2nd largest industry. Is the fair not targeting farmers and homesteaders in an appropriate manner? Surely with the growing interest in slow food movements (et al) it would behoove more residents to know WHERE their meat/grains/vegetables come from? Though there isn't AS much agriculture in the counties closest to the fairgrounds compared to the mid-state and northern/western counties, I've seen in years past exhibitors from Canada and Ohio - journeying from points much farther than our own in-state agriculturists. Maybe a better marketing program from the State Fair is in order, to more effectively draw in participants from all around the state (and beyond, if they want to come! Why not?). While exhibiting livestock in the fair probably isn't cheap, there are benefits to be had (exhibition points, premiums for winners, scholarship opportunities for junior exhibitors) and maybe they need to be talked up. With agriculture holding such a prominent place in Michigan's financial history, and the other industries losing ground, it could be poised to take their places in the future. Seems kind of silly to miss out on ANY revenue-building opportunities, given the state of the state (and nation). As far as non-animal-based agriculture, it seems like possibilities for urban farmers to showcase their work are being missed. "Google "urban farming detroit" and you'll see that it's getting to be a HUGE thing. Why waste THAT opportunity, especially in light of the aforementioned proposal to build an agriculture education center?

Another fair program I've seen less participation in is the Community Arts program, though this year seems to have bulked up again ever so slightly. This is SUCH a great program for the average (non-farming) citizen. For $12, you can enter up to ten items in varied "homemaking" categories (everything from knitting/crocheting to photography to baking to quilts to wine), and have the opportunity for the State Fair judges to tell you that your muffins or drawing or sculpture or pickles are The Best Ever (of That Year, in That State). Along with that honor come cash prizes, of $7 up to $25 per winning piece! AND, with your $12 entry fee, you receive two complimentary passes to the fair, and the option to purchase parking passes at $2 off the normal price of $7. A few years ago I made a bunch of muffins and got a 3rd on one batch (I forgot what kind) and a 1st place on my banana muffins - which also won Best of Show for All Muffins Ever (of That Year, in That State)! I won back $10, got to go to the fair, got a few ribbons and a whole lotta bragging rights. It's really a win-win-win situation! My mom, who enters almost every year, has walked away with $50-60 before, even after the parking pass and entry fees. Winning is fun, guys, but you can only win if you enter. I promise.

For the past few years, Mom and I have talked about how the Michigan Mart has devolved from a showcase of Michigan-made products into ... a trade show mish-mash of ShamWow! knockoffs, anti-abortion groups, cutlery hawkers, and all sorts of other salesmen of useless gadgets and ideologies. What if the Michigan Mart were actually... a place... where people could sell... MICHIGAN-MADE PRODUCTS? Scary thought, I know, right? It really is. Oh, sure, every year there's a maple syrup farm and a honey farm selling their goods (though this year there was no one selling honey - sad. So sad. I love honey. Honey loves me.) Okay, so let's set up a little farmer's market where you can buy fresh veggies and fruits from the people who won that nifty little Best of Show ribbon in the eggplant category. Or a mini artist's market/craft fair where our local creative community (which I assure you, is vast and varied) can sell their homemade, handmade clothing, prints, photography, accessories. Yes, there's still the cost to get into the fair, and the cost for vendors to set up booths in the fair, but also a possibility to generate more income and keep it in the metropolitan community. This is a business method that I think a lot of companies are scrapping strictly because of the economy, but scrapping it can backfire pretty badly - sometimes you need to spend money to make money.

Michigan is not in a position right now to close off any avenue of income or industry, and yet Granholm wants to cut off a channel of it off? Ridiculous.

Are you thinking of going to the State Fair? Have you ever been? You should. It's not the most inexpensive thing in the world (gate is $10, plus $7 per car for parking, or there are lots across 8 Mile that charge $5, or if you are a big cheapskate you can park somewhere in Hazel Park or Ferndale or Detroit and just walk)

Here's why you should go:

•baby animals GALORE. If you don't like baby animals, you are probably a terrible person. You can even see BRAND NEW, VERY BABY animals in the Miracle of Life exhibit! There are baby quail there that are so adorably bite-sizedly tiny. Too too freaking cute and precious. You can also get your picture taken with an adorable baby lion or kangaroo or fennec fox! The baby lion didn't eat me, mostly because Id idn't get my picture taken with her. She is very cute though.

•regular animals. Though not as cute as baby animals, they are still pretty cute. And neat. I guess. JK, I love them. Check out the poultry house for prize-winning chickens, pigeons, turkeys, and bunnies (uhm. Not poultry, by the by), and then go into the pavilion in the center to see a duck and goose pond! Stop by the dairy barn to get bottomless glasses of the VERY best chocolate milk I have ever tasted in my long and illustrious career of chocolate-milk-taste-testing for FIFTY CENTS a glass! Best bargain ever. Watch the daily horse shows, featuring youth classes, one-to-eight horse-hitch driving classes, and speed events. Meet a bunch of big friendly pigs or sheep or cows or goats!

•piggy races. So cute. Also, petting zoos with llamas, alpacas, yaks, and exotic breeds of cows, sheep, and goats. And you can see the Budweiser Clydesdales (well, one of six eight-horse teams they employ across the country)!

•rides, games, FUN!

•hello, fair food!

•this scary clown garbage can!

•things you might not have ever seen before! Yarn-spinning, sheep-shearing, horse-shoeing, cow-milking, etc! There are competitions you can watch and contests you can enter, and some crappy bands (sorry, that part is true) you can watch! Check the daily schedules of events here.

•show the Governor that you AND the State Fair mean business! Sign the Save the State Fair petitions located in buildings all around the fair!

*Joe Dumars' Fieldhouse looks to have escaped the guillotine for the time being.
**"State Fair in Jeopardy" http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090202/POLITICS/902020353
***Actually, there very may well have been something funky going on in the SF offices that billed our barn for utilities, but I'm not at liberty to say, as it is merely hearsay; we never figured out what was going on, as far as I know.
All images in this post are the copywritten property of Rebecca Pierzchala from the MI State Fair 2009 and cannot be used without express written consent

new art (and some old[ish])

2009-08-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

(Don't forget to click on the thumbnails for bigger versions!)

Here are my doodles and sketches from the past week:

L to R (in order of date drawn):

•TOP ROW
he is careless - 8/23 part of a new 'series' called 'handsome men made ugly by hideous truths [and my pen]'
rainy day - 8/24
full of himself - 8/25 also part of 'handsome men'
sunglasses - 8/26 just trying out a profile
miss mary - 8/27

•MIDDLE ROW
pug dog - 8/28
handlettered a - 8/29
handlettered r - 8/29

•bottom row
michael jackson lady - 8/29 some lady in an article in Vogue looked JUST like MJ, only... older. And alive, I guess.
turtle - 8/29 for my mom!
cock and hen and chicks - 8/29
in his shoes/in his footsteps - 8/30

So I drew some dudes and there they are, mixed in the mix. I'm not 100% happy with them, but oh well. That's what I get for drawing only in ink where I can make more mistakes and they're less fixable.

To prove that when I actually dust off a pencil and sit down and concentrate on things I can draw a face pretty well, here is one I drew last year or so from a Fringe [hair salon] ad.

And sometimes I can draw dudes. Ish. Although this was done entirely in pen and no pencil, so really I have no excuse.

There is a week's worth of doodles, plus some sketchies culled from my sketchbook! Enjoy!

From a Broken Gnome

2009-08-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

Or, The Best Way to Break a Girl's Heart is to Destroy Something She Loves.

My mom shares my affinity for things odd and insane, for things that look like or could be construed as being other things, and for things missing important parts of their being, which is why one day, I came home and she excitedly proffered a garden gnome who looked like he was playing air bass.

"Why is that gnome playing air bass?" I asked, not really caring to hear the answer, because a) it was a gnome, and b) it was a musically talented gnome and I was already in love.

"Well, he's not, but he was holding a rake or hoe or something and it fell off and broke and so he was discounted!" she replied with glee.

For me! For me! A rocking gnome! The rockingest gnome I ever did see!

He held a place of honor in my room, along with Barnabas the light-up gnome I acquired before going to MSU (at State, light-up gnomes are considered proper room decor, it's true), and a few other gnomey friends*. Then when I went back to State for a second, equally fateful go-round, he came with me** and was revered and adored by all my friends and family and neighbors and acquaintances. How could he not be? Do you know any rockin' gnomes that like to air-jam out to Pink Floyd's "Money"? Seriously. He was bad-ass, and as such, never needed a name further than Rockin' Gnome. What would be the point? He'd already fulfilled his destiny, by losing his rake and gaining an air bass guitar, a name other than the Original RG would sully his reputation. So Rockin' Gnome he remained, to one and all.

My boyfriend at the time was sort of infatuated with RG as well. He felt he carried a certain... cachet, being a mythological woodland creature with a penchant for a mean bass lick. It's true. Gnomes are usually preoccupied with menial tasks like gathering food, growing food, attending to the growth of foodstuffs, sometimes building small houses for their small ilk, and once or twice I'm sure one has cracked open a book (probably about food or building , but generally they are an industrious folk, not so keen on the arts. Rockin' Gnome somehow rose above that and dedicated his life to the pursuit of playing along with the radio/cd/mp3 on an invisible, meaningless instrument. It takes chutzpah to dispel with such tradition and embark on the road to pleasure and play, I'll give him that.

Anyway, my boyfriend, who kind of looked like if Johnny Knoxville and Carson Daly had a mildly retarded baby, did some video stuff for a local band who happened to be friends of his, and somehow it was decided the the Original RG would make a special guest appearance in a music video for them***. This was fine with me, and I lent him to the filmmaker and as far as I know, he appeared in the video, which probably never made into wide circulation given that it was a local band and I'm not even sure why they were making a music video. Then, being the amenable and otherwise unoccupied fellow he was, Rockin' Gnome lived on in the filmmaker's van, accompanying him to various photo shoots and probably the bar, silently rockin' his way to fame and gnome fortune.

Then we broke up, the filmmaker and I. Furious****, I demanded all my stuff back from his apartment (clothes, some owl stuff I'd bought him*****, some video games, and of course, the gnome. I was staying with my friend Emily for a bit because my dorm room situation was a mess and a half and I wanted to hide from him a little bit, so I had him drive to her apartment complex to give me my stuff back. And he did. He drove up in his van, and he threw the garbage bag full of my belongings at me, and then he reached into the van for the gnome. He held Rockin' Gnome high over his head, and my stomach lurched. The look in his eyes was venomous and full of hatred, and though I deserved such a look, the RG was but a pawn in the game and didn't deserve what I knew was coming.

"Don't--" I pleaded, more fearful for the plaster life of a garden statuette than for my own.

But he smashed the gnome on the cement, and he splintered into what seemed like a million little pieces, no relation to James Frey's monstrosity. I stood there, gaping at the mess and wondering what the fuck to do, and the filmmaker got in his van to drive away, and I retaliated by throwing a wooden owl plaque at his retreating van, which bounced off a tire in a most unthreatening way. As he drove away, I screamed at him, "YOU'RE JUST LIKE ANDY******!" Then I grabbed my garbage bag full of 3 months of my life (I know, right? All my little breakups prove to be this dramatic, and my long ones fizzle out rather stolidly) and ran upstairs to cry about my little gnome (not the breakup).

Emily comforted me while I called my mom to tell her about the bad news (again, the gnome, not the breakup) and mom tried to console me by telling me we'd find another rockin' gnome.

NEVER. There will never again in the future of gnomedom be a gnome brave enough to buck convention and "drop" his rake or hoe or whatever in the pursuit of rock 'n roll. He died so young, with so much promise.

I was, unbelievably, stricken with sadness. Over a gnome. True story. (Whether you want to use that as an analogy for the failed relationship that became of my inability to handle telling someone I don't like them anymore, that's your prerogative. I will continue to assume that it's because I have an unnatural attachment to weird things my mom gives me.)

I went back outside at some point, only to discover what had become of the remains of the Rockin' Gnome in the hour or so I'd needed to recuperate from witnessing his untimely demise. The filmmaker had picked up all of the larger shards of the Rockin' Gnome and used them to spell out, on the trunk of my car "I'm just like Andy?" with the gnome's mostly intact arm as part of the question mark. Were it not so creepy that he'd come back to do that, I would've found it sweet(ish). But really, it was super creepy. Right? I kept the question-mark-formerly-air-bass-playing arm in a paper bag and swept the rest into the trash. And kept that arm for rather a far longer time than was necessary or probably healthy.

But seriously, that was creepy, right?

And now for the part where Rockin' Gnome TRULY fulfills his destiny...

So, the next St. Patrick's Day, I got a card from my mom. Weird, right? Who buys St. Patty's day cards? Who actually sends them? Well, my mom does, apparently. I opened it, bemused that my mom had in fact become The Woman Who Sends a Card for Every Occasion (this turned out to be fiction, actually), and gasped when I saw Rockin' Gnome's visage on the front of the card, underneath the script "Have a ROCKIN' St. Patty's Day!" I gasped, I cried (not really), I nearly died (not really).

Fame achieved posthumously.

You gotta hand it to that gnome. He knew how to get things done.

Nevermind that my mom and I were probably the only two people in the whole wide world to find this card as touching and apropos as we did. That's fully beside the point.

*Uhm. I may have failed to mention that I have a thing for gnomes.
**Barnabas was pissed.
***Since he couldn't talk then and can't now, I'm assuming this is one of his life's goals, other than actually playing bass, but I never found one the right size. So sorry, Rockin' Gnome.
****Which is ridiculous, because we were breaking up because I cheated on him (first and last time). But I cheated on him because I didn't like him anymore and didn't know how to tell him. Hmmm. That's 21-year-old logic for you.
*****I also have a thing for owls. He did too. I thought it was meant to be. It was not.
******Probably the biggest insult I have ever thrown at a guy. Andy is this guy and the filmmaker knew all about him. Sorry, filmmaker.

close, but no cigar. Doesn't have quite the same cachet.

dewdles. by me. i dewdled theese.

2009-08-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

Okay so, hi. In lieu of actually making a productive, worthwhile, meaningful post*, I decided I will share with you some of my nightly doodles. At night, while being bored by network television and wishing I had cable and/or internet to occupy my time, I thumb through my extensive stash of magazines and draw from photographs and add words, or I draw things I see around my house and add words. Or sometimes I don't add words. One of them is a painting on a cardboard circle I found in a box at work (I have a few more of these to art up, wheeee!).

Here they are, in order of appearance in my life:

become a productive member of society

but every year is longer

he said he loves my hair

big gulp

even something needs nothing sometimes

boxer what

boxer big nose

i am going away

thank you to Thao Nguyen for those words.

hello, dog

running doggy

parsley and celery

side 1

side 2

As you will see, I hate drawing faces, so I just don't. I fill them with words, or, in the case of "side 1," I pencil in the face (something I don't do often - it's pen or nothing for me with these doods), decide it looks okay, pen it in, and then go "UGH. RUINED." So then it all gets blacked in. Such would be the case with my alien girl, whose profile looked like shit, so she got squiggles and fill-ins, and then I branded her an alien and made her feel like an outcast just because I'm the worst at faces. See?

she is obviously super sad. I did that.

Frustrated with my inability to draw noses, I once went through a magazine and drew every single nose I saw in it. It happened to be a smaller, not very thick magazine, and it happened to be one without a lot of models, but there were still thirty-some-odd noses to be drawn (I didn't bother with the ones so tiny a dot would suffice). This method seems to have helped my proboscis drawings, so I'll probably adopt it again for all other facial components. Stupid lips, especially. Grumble, grumble.

So, these are my doodles, and these are why I sometimes don't answer texts or return calls between 9-11pm, or 1-4am if I've gone out. SORRY.

BYE.

*something I have yet to accomplish. Someday. Probably not.

In Which The Girl Realizes She Won't Ever Be The Girlfriend.

2009-08-12T17:40:00.001-07:00

There is no more Bossa Nova. No more new thing. It's just the same old thing over and over.

I saw him last week and had a spectacular time. Flirtations, ass-grabbing, contented sighs, warm hugs, hand holding: all ingredients for a nice night out; fold into one warm evening/early morning, let sit in the parking lot of a local bar for an hour; check back in one hour after you've taken leave of each other to give the girl a good night, a promise of a long-awaited Talk™ the next day, and an ASCII smile.

I was on Clouds Ten through Thirty. Million.

But if you know the story, you know he doesn't call. And stupid me, stupid me with a few PBRs under her belt the next night, and a friend who's too drunk to drive home just yet and wants to take a walk, stupid me and my not-stupid friend end up at Long Lost's house*, just a hop and a skip away, at 2.30 in the morning. Whereupon Long Lost exhibits behavior that is the polar opposite of that which he showed 24 hours prior.

Excellent.

There were moments of niceness, glimpses of the Long Lost I had come to be quite fond of, but mostly, there was prickish, terse, assholery behaviur.

Once all the revelers had either left to walk back to their cars, retired upstairs to sleep, or retired downstairs to do god-knows-what to the crooning of Lionel Richie, we were left alone, save for the elephant in the room.

The very, very, very large elephant in the room.

"So."
"So."
"What did you want to talk about?"
"What do you mean?"
"You said we'd talk tomorrow. It's tomorrow today. What's on your mind?"

I made the sophomoric mistake of thinking that he actually meant what he said the previous day - go figure. What happened then was an hour and a half long circular conversation in which he denied basically everything I thought had happened or was happening - including the trip to Chicago to see my hometeam play on my birthday, his suggestion. That apparently, was "just as friends." Because I know of so many dudes who want to go out of town for a weekend with a girl with whom they have had mutual romantic-ish feelings for: but just as friends.

And along the way, I found myself apologizing for things I had no apology jurisdiction over:
• my feelings
• my interpretation of his feelings, as dissected and discussed by myself along with others
• my being confused because he has been confusing ever since I've known him
• my being an asshole
• basically, me.

Four days later, after a couple of ill-received apology texts from me to him (what. the. fuck. How am I still apologizing?), it hit me. I have nothing to be sorry for, other than the fact that I should be apologizing, readily, steadily, and unceasingly, to myself for putting myself, my brain, my heart, and my emotions through the wringer repeatedly.

At one point that night I told him he was being a dick to me, a statement which, as you can imagine, was probably not the highlight of his night. He got angry and mad and stomped around, but he didn't seem to argue with me. I don't think. I don't know.

I don't need to go into specifics for any of you to understand that I Am Done, of the Stick A Fork In Me varietal. It may have taken me months from the first go, and four nights from the last go, but it's impossible to keep hanging on to this thread. I hope he apologizes to me someday for treating me like one of those fuzzy mice my cats used to love, but I won't expect it; it won't come. I am always wrong in his eyes, he is always right. That's bad enough, but when he has me thinking I'm always wrong, that's a no-fly zone. This isn't an attempt at villainizing him, or victimizing myself: we are both at fault, though right now I'm more inclined to think that my fault was giving him chances too many.

I can't delete the bossa nova tone from my phone (stupid preloaded content...) but I did delete him, or at least his contact info**. I can guarantee this: I will always wonder; but I won't wait anymore, and I won't worry anymore. He means a lot to me, but I mean a lot more to me.

*We did forewarn him that we were stopping by, a fact he seemed not displeased with. But apparently I read all things wrongly, so I am stupid and wrong.
**Not that it helps, because I know his number by heart and every single time I've deleted him before***, he has texted me within a few days - which is how I know his number, from seeing it pop up so frequently.
***Countless times.

Rebecca Is Not That Kind of Girl. (Or is she?)

2009-08-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

I went to an awesome party on Saturday, held as a scholarship fundraiser/memorial for a friend's sister. I hung out with a handful of great people I already knew, met a lot more great people I'd never met before, and was around even more great people whom I didn't necessarily meet. Drank a lot of awesome drinks, ate some amazing food. I had a superb time.

I was also, apparently, That Girl.

Because I am easily frustrated, self-dissuading, and extremely impatient, and because the rest of the world does not move at the same blisteringly superhuman pace to which I am accustomed to moving, I was at a few points on Saturday convinced that nothing was going to ever happen with LL. Ever. I talk about it like it is, and I severely hope it is, even though we've both made mistakes where the other is concerned (personally, I have probably made more with him than I have with all other guys ever in my life. Okay, probably not, but it feels like it). And I was even telling a friend at the party about some things LL said to me when we hung out last week, things that giddied me to the core, made me more hopeful than ever (and have the utmost potential to let me down/destroy me).

But, a few whiskey sours and a few jello shots later and I was on the hunt. I might as well tell you now and be upfront about it, but I'm a flirt. A big, flirty flirt of a flirt. I don't care if you're male or female or somewhere-in-between-ale. If you are capable of holding a conversation with me, replete with humor, intellect, and hopefully a few references to Lebowski, you will be subjected to my flirting. I'd say it's no different when I'm drunk, as you'd think I'd still be Miss Willy Nilly Flirty Filly, but it is a little different, as I have a target, an objective in mind. Minds out of the gutter, my dears, not quite that far. I just like making out, okay?!

So with that being my goal, I like to hone in on one person, and devote my flirtations to them. It doesn't mean that if others flirt with me I'll turn away and deny them that chance. No no. In that regard I am equal opportunity. In fact, in addition to the one person I flirted the most with, there were at least three to four whom were in flirt periphery zone. If they flirted with the flame, the flame flirted back. But I didn't seek them out, I let them come to me. It's how I operate.

The only thing is, I had no right to flirt with my main objective, and for two reasons:

•Ostensibly, I am wanting to be with LL, and thusly shouldn't be wasting anyone's precious time by flirting and/or wanting to make out with him.
•(that this is second in the list to me speaks volumes) This guy has a girlfriend.

Major party foul.

I am not That Girl. I have made it my life's course NOT to be That Girl after an unfortunate months-long escapade* in which I was, and felt shitty about it the whole time and for months after. And even in the case of LL, when I found out the lines between him and me and his ex were all pretty fuzzy and blurry, rather than try to duke it out with some invisible opponent, I withdrew from competition, though rather ungraciously/ungracefully.

(If you are wondering, I have also been The Girl Who Cheated, once in my entire life and never again. I gave myself the worries so bad that I had a stomachache for a week. And all I got out of it was a broken gnome**.)

But because I was pretty tipsy and in the company of new and newer friends, I felt quite brazen, so the flirting was shameless, relentless, and, might I say, not ill-received. Even after it was apparent to us, and to others, that our flirtations were perhaps the subject of much ire from a certain woman, we didn't stop. I can't say anything for him, as I'll probably never be allowed in the same room as him, much less talk to him, but I was a flirt-snowball rolling down the hill, picking up momentum and purpose every inch of the way. And I don't know why.

Yes, he was adorable, and awesome, and we had a lot in common, but not so much as to be creepy. But he has a girlfriend. And having also been in the position where a girl was hitting on my boyfriend, it is not a fun thing to behold, and I know that, emotionally and intellectually. I knew all this, I knew all this and more and it didn't stop me. (Or might I add, him) Was it because I honestly didn't expect anything more to happen, and thus felt secure enough in that to let the flirting continue? Or was it because I honestly thought something (negative) might happen between them and I would walk away the victor, maybe not that night but the next, or next week, or next month, or next year?

I wish I knew the answer. The truth is, I'm no better off today than I was four or five days ago; I don't know any better why I did it. I know that if I had a boyfriend like that, I wouldn't be mad at him all the time; but if I had a boyfriend like that, I would be mad at any girl that tried to get with him; but if I had a boyfriend like that, I'd treat him so nicely that he'd like me so much that he wouldn't flirt back; but who knows? I don't have a boyfriend like that - or any boyfriend - so all I'm saying is mere conjecture and random rambling.

Do I want to be with LL? Yes. Even if it doesn't last, I need to try it. Does that mean I'll keep waiting forever? No. Even if, as my friend Eric said, I need to move slowly with LL, like a glacier. He says glaciers always win. Win what? Win the game of having ships run into them and capsize and lots of people die? That game sounds unfun to me. Let's play Mille Bornes instead.

Do I think I could have had a shot with Mystery Guy? Well, that's a tough call. I'd normally say that in different circumstances - for both of us - yes (or at least a maybe), but then who knows what those circumstances might end up being. And maybe that's just magical thinking anyway - I want to pretend this could happen in my magical little world, because I know it won't, because he has a girlfriend.

My point is that I'm, in the words of the Pernice Brothers, "waiting for the wait to stop." And until the wait stops, I'll probably end up having little fits of this here and there. I hope it doesn't always turn into me flirting with girlfriended guys. I hope it never turns into that again!

Good lord, do I want this wait to stop.

*It was a case of "I'm not happy with her, she's not happy with me, you make me happy, but I can't break up with her right now." Which, I know, is the pre-marital version of "I don't love her anymore, she doesn't love me anymore, I love you, but with the kids and the new house we just bought... I can't just leave now." Rather, I know that NOW. At some point, I surely thought that he was going to leave her for me - when he was ready. Right. In any case, it was months of waffling before we did anything, and when we did I felt evil, which is a feeling I don't like to feel. I'm generally a pretty sweet person, though I have my moments erupting into sailor-or-truck-driver-worthy swearing on the road or playing video games.
**Which is definitely a story for another day. I mean it. I can't believe I haven't told the story of the Broken Gnome yet. It's a life-changer.

Pavlov's Dog, Part Two: In Which I Salivate, Excessively.

2009-07-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

At one point in time, I'd assigned specific text tones to the ten or fifteen people with whom I text/texted most frequently, so that I knew who was texting me before I even looked at the screen. There are ten generic "tones" in my phone, as well as four alert noises, and a few random message-only alert noises (one short beep, one long beep, two short beeps, two long beeps - you get the picture). "Insignificants" all got lumped into one of the alert noises (Alert 1, for all you LG Rumor users following along), which I like because it is sweet and short. Or short and sweet, however you prefer to look at it. Sharon got Tone 10, because it sounded dancey and fun like she is. My boss at the barn got Alert 2, because it was well.... alert-y. Twitter, when I still got tweets delivered to my phone (before an unfortunate incident in which I walked out of a 3 hour movie to find near 50 texts from a Twitter conversation between two mutual friends filling up my inbox) got one of the random "custom" noises, a bird tweeting - I'm so original, I know. Everyone else's I've surely forgotten, having since replaced that specific phone with a new one (same model) and losing all my assigned information. Booo.

There was one more "custom" noise, that really set my heart aflutter - the bossa nova.

This I used exclusively for one person: Long Lost.

It was sweet, short, sultry. I don't know how else to describe that little noise. It sounded a lot like love, or like, or lust, or all three swirled together in some awesome, delectable, dangerous, decadent milkshake. And that's why I chose it for Long Lost, because I couldn't tell what was going on in my heart or brain for him, but it was definitely at least one of those, if not all three.

Regardless, it twisted my insides every time I heard it, and for awhile I heard it a lot. But, I don't know if it was actually the sound that spurred such feelings in me, or the words in the texts that came to me from him, or the expectations I placed on our "relationship" that I thought would be or were being fulfilled. After a time, it became clear that again, it was at least one, if not all three of those circumstances.

I'd became one of Pavlov's dogs. At the sound of those six or seven notes, I all but salivated for the sweet words I knew were waiting for me when I reached my phone. I bounded for it from across the room; I thrilled to press "back" on the keypad to unlock it, knowing that a flirtatious " ;-)" or "<3" would be waiting for me. If I happened to fall asleep, it was the only tone, ring or text or otherwise (and bear in mind that I use my phone as an alarm clock, so all of the tones have been used at one point or another, ostensibly, to wake me up), I would or could wake up for, because I knew what - or at least who - was waiting for me on the other side.

Even when things turned sour*, when they sweetened up, when they soured again**, and sweetened up again, and soured AGAIN***, and have since sweetened up again (I think) - every time, that "song" still sets off a visceral reaction. I had and have tried reassigning that tone to other people - other crushes, even other friends to try to dissuade myself from associating it with romance - but to no avail. Even if Long Lost and I were in a non-talking period, of which we've had a few, I still thought it was him, and was utterly disappointed when the screen showed that it was not.

Bossa Nova is His text-tone. No two ways about it.

No matter what happens between the two of us (and as I said before, I don't feel that the story is anywhere near to being over - and whether we remain in the capacity that we are now, as friends, or it evolves into something we've both been waiting for, we really aren't even halfway through the story. I can't wait to read it though), it will always be His tone. I've changed other friends' ringtones and text-tones multiple times since the start of all this, and now everyone has the same text-tone (Alert 1! Again! What can I say, it's cute), except him.

"Bossa nova" means "new trend" or "new thing" and I suppose that knowing that intellectually might have somehow guided my seemingly meaningless decision to assign him that particular tone. I wanted this to be a new trend: a guy I liked, who liked me back****, a friendship that turned into a relationship that really meant something. I'm still waiting and wondering if that will happen, and it might not, but let it be known that he will always mean something to me: if nothing else, he meant those six or seven small notes. They seem small, insignificant, but in the grand scheme of things, those six or seven small notes held a world of promise, a world to come.

I heard it this morning and my heart raced.

*my fault
**my fault
***my fault
****Either I have liked a guy and he hasn't liked me, or vice versa; it's the same old story. Or in the case of Male Coworker, well, I don't think we ended up liking each other much at all. Hmm.

Pavlov's Dog, Part One.

2009-07-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

This is a story, or part of a story; a true story.

Long Lost and I have known each other for seven years now - or known *of* each other for seven years. He used to come into the cafe where I worked, and have me make a million drinks for him and his friends, and he'd tip me big. Like, super big. And I had a crush on him the whole time, but I was chicken and scared because I'm a big stupid baby, so I didn't do anything about it, even though I DID (during that time) a) make out with one regular in his car one day because I thought I had a crush on him b) flirt with enough tenacity with enough regulars that I was certain a fight might break out one day and b) ended up dating two coworkers I had crushes on. I'm a girl, I make no sense, let's move on. Speaking of moving on, after I worked in the cafe for ten months I moved out of town to go to college - and abruptly came back less than a year later. Needless to say, Long Lost and I lost contact with each other, seeing as how our only contact with each other heretofore had been daily, in my cafe. When I got back into town, I happened to run into him at the store, and he happened to start coming back into the store and cafe regularly again.

One day shortly after a lady coworker had basically forced one of my male coworkers to ask me out and he'd delivered, lady coworker also said "I think Long Lost* likes you! I think he wants to ask you out!" Except that I was kind of busy being with the male coworker she'd forced upon me a week prior. I blushed and told her that he could have/should have done something a few weeks (or a year) ago.

That thought nagged me for the entire two point eight five years I remained with Male Coworker**. In that time, I occasionally ran into Long Lost at the store, here, there, not everywhere, and sometimes it would be months before I ran into him again. Then it got to be an awfully long stretch of time. Sometimes his friends would come in for coffee or books and I'd recognize them or they'd recognize me, and we'd wave and smile and say hi. But no sign of Long Lost, anywhere.

I thought about him a lot during those long stretches of time. I thought about what would have happened had I made a move in the beginning, or had he. I thought about how I possibly would not have wasted almost three years with a man I didn't ultimately want to be with (he wouldn't even let me have a dog when we lived together! TORTURE!) and who would never marry me because he never thought of marriage as important. I thought about what Long Lost was doing. I thought about how he was doing. I thought about him. Even while I was with Male Coworker - you've done it too, don't lie.

Then, Facebook heard me thinking about him. Or something. His name came up in my "people you may know" suggestions, but with no picture. I took a look at the mutual friends we had - and couldn't put together how they might know each other. So I put it out of my head for a few days.

But, as a worrier, I can't keep anything out of there for very long, even if I've padlocked the entrance and barred all the windows. The thought that it might be him nagged at me, so a few days later when his name came up in my "people you may know" - this time with a picture, I messaged him, did he remember me? I worked at the cafe in the bookstore? He responded in kind, of course he remembered me! How was I doing? What was going on? It had been awhile since we'd seen each other, hadn't it? Message him back! I did.

We messaged back and forth that day, and then that night when I was a little tipsy and testosterone-y from drinking beer and playing Gears of War with my friend Brandon and his then-roommate Dan, I got on Facebook mobile and messaged him to tell him I'd had a crush on him all those years ago. When the response came, I don't remember, but I do remember that he said the same to me. The next day was spent furiously Facebook messaging each other back with the logistics of our mutual crush, and I was out with my friend Peggah getting pizza and playing with sad puppies at the puppy store when the message suggesting that it'd be easier for us to talk outside of Facebook, so when could we hang out? came.

When I got home, he called me, and we talked for around an hour and a half before he asked me what I was doing - and by now it was around ten, ten thirty at night. He came and picked me up - we live less than a mile from each other - and we went downtown and had a great meal and some great ice cream and a very long, long, very fun, fun night.

A lot has happened between Long Lost and myself since early November. Some of it has been very fun, most of it has been very long. I don't even know what has happened. I don't know what's going to happen. I feel like all those years ago at my store were what has become The Introduction To The Story; this story I've recounted here is The Prologue To The Story, and the ensuing months, and difficulties, have been Chapters 1 and 2 Of The Story, but I don't know how many chapters it holds.

What comes next isn't one of the chapters, but a footnote, a sidebar to the whole story: a testament to either a) my feelings for him or b) the efficacy of association a la Pavlov and his dogs.

*OBVIOUSLY not his real name. I gave him this moniker, this codename, because my friends find it easier to remember the guys I've dated by such codenames: otherwise the flow of names, many of which are similar or the SAME, is kind of hard to follow.
**Also not his real name. I don't have a cute moniker for him though. He was the long-term blip on the guys-I've-dated flowchart, so mostly he gets to keep his own name, but here for the sake of codenames, I've bestowed this blase one upon him.

oh, hai.

2009-07-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

I promise to put up a new blog post SOON. Within a week, and you can hold me to that. I've been SO busy the past two weeks, and I've been typing up some stuff at home but then don't have time to post it online!

But, I promise.

With sugar on top.

Miss Understanding Things

2009-07-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to log onto freecreditreport.com to get my free, annual, well, credit report*. In choosing my title, I vacillated between "Miss" and "Ms," eventually settling with Miss, mostly because when my grandma writes me letters, that's how they're addressed, and because my friends' little boy calls me Miss Rebecca.

But what am I? I'm 27, unmarried/never married, without so much as a serious love interest** on the horizon. I'm feminist to the point that I read BUST, but not bitch or Ms. I'm unfeminist to the point that I admittedly don't really know much about feminism but am unreasonably annoyed by militant feminism/feminists. I like to consider myself a humanist, or if we really have to break it down, a Rebeccaist (fair and equal rights for Rebeccas among all people; extra ponies and puppies and caramel corn for Rebeccas; undisclosed amounts of money for Rebeccas for being preternaturally adorable: the usual.)

Google was consulted, and the first resource that popped up was a mishmash selection of this and that and the other thing; you may know it as Yahoo! Answers: Where Anyone With a Keyboard Can Answer.

Next.

Then I found pages insisting that the fundamental difference between Miss and Ms. was whether or not they are dating someone or available. Buh? How is anyone to know that? As much as I'd like there to be some visual indicator of whether or not someone is available for dating/flirting***, there isn't. Then came the pages denoting age as the discriminating factor in the great Miss v Ms debate. I'm no spring chicken, but I'm no aging spinster (yet, though the descent into spinsterhood has begun, I'm sure). Even then, the ranges varied widely - the Miss cutoff varied from anywhere to 12 years old**** to 30 years old. That's a whole Miss - or Ms.!

I only bothered to wade through a few of them, but there were lots of pages detailing lots of ways to determine Missitude or Ms.itude. And I'm still confused.

Then I started thinking about the Miss/ma'am. Ms. is generally not used in everyday or colloquial conversation, it's got more of a formal or business tone, if you ask me, which you didn't, but it's my blog, so hush up. But Ma'am isn't really the colloquial form of Ms. - to me, they're not quite interchangeable. Their applications are even different - generally someone applies the Ms. title to herself, whereas ma'am is bestowed by someone else. Ms. seems to carry a point of self-pride/self-righteousness within itself; ma'am has a tone of veneration and respect given to a matronly woman by a cashier or stranger. Miss is not UN-respectable, it's just... you know. Not matronly. Young, fresh, hip. Means mistress. You know. Not a crone, not a beldam. But also not a matriarch, not a doyenne.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been called ma'am - Miss seems to be prevalent, and I hope that can be attributed to my youthful *cough* good looks. I figure if I can't fully buy into the whole Ms. thing for myself, and other people aren't buying into the whole ma'am thing for
Am I denying my womanliness and desperately grasping my vanishing girlhood by using "Miss" for just a little longer? Am I deluding myself into thinking that I'm delaying the inevitable (me turning into a lonely biddy with sixteen cats or sixteen dogs, which I'm sure will happen if this love interest situation doesn't right itself and soon)?

I was really hoping to just use my existing title of "The Revered" or "The Unquestionably Cute" or "The Best in All the Land." Those weren't in the choices, though? Color me baffled*****. They really should have been.

*abysmal. I don't want to talk about it. But I should, to get a clear grasp of how screwy-uppy I am. Maybe some other day.
**Okay, well, there is one guy in specific. I don't want to talk about it. But I should, to get a clear grasp of how screwy-uppy I am. Maybe some other day. ;)
***Mostly for guys, because lord knows most of the time they won't be forthcoming with that information.
****I'm pretty sure girls 12 and under should be referred to as "hey, you" or "hey, kid." Nothing fancy; they don't need it.
*****In my estimation it's sort of teal.

Soy Un Perdedor*

2009-07-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, I'm a loser!

Chill out.

I have perfectly healthy self-esteem, mostly, even though my life consistently seems to be in the pooper.

I just mean that I physically lose tangible things, far more often than is normal.

Things I've lost recently that I decided needed to be found, at 11 pm on a Tuesday night, in no meaningful order:

•my iPod, missing for months, thereby depriving me of aural pleasure in many situations where it's warranted (zoo, work, car)
•a $75 gift certificate** to a local saddler, which would greatly help in the acquisition of things I need for Gabby Leigh (new half pad, fly spray, new pulling comb) and things I want for Gabby Leigh (new polo wraps - because five sets is not enough, new saddle pad, martingale)
•my car insurance certificate (somehow I have the ones current through 2007 and 2008, but not this year's. Weird.)
•a container with 8-10 DS games and a container with 8-10 GBA games (I gave my DS to a couple of friends, and promised to give them all the games when I found them)
•my last electric bill
•a $10 Target gift card I got for buying two Venus Embrace razors as part of a sale/promotion (Sidenotes: I love the Embrace, and I love sales/promos where I get money for spending money)

Only two of those are seriously pressing, the insurance and the electric bill. But I was honestly more concerned with the iPod and the gift certificate, which I assumed were buried somewhere in the trash caverns of my room and my car, respectively. So I started cleaning, pretty hardcore and heavy duty.

The problem is that I have lots of little hiding places for lots of things - and most of the things I've "misplaced" are little to little-ish things. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that 90% of what I "misplace" ends up as a bookmark in a book I'm reading, and except for the containers of games, everything on this wee list has been used to mark a page, even the iPod. The problem with that is that as a matter of course, I read 6-10 books at a time. And am constantly misplacing the books.

It's a lose lose lose situation. Seriously.

After poring and probing, searching and scouring, I crossed off two point five items on my list: the iPod***, the Target gift card, and the container of GBA games. That leaves three point five items needing to be found! I don't have time for these hijinks! I need that saint guy! I need three point five miracles, post-haste!

But I have a serious problem with his hair being a part of the process.

Why do I lose things so readily? Why these things? Why can't I have an easier time losing the fifty pounds I'm carrying around like a layer of skin clothing? If I managed to lose that between here and the car, I wouldn't be too upset about it. I might conduct a cursory and perfunctory search, but shrug and move on with my life. Not so with my List of Things Recently Lost.

I googled for a saint of weight loss; there is none. There should be! From Saints.SQPN.com, I got the response: "I have no documentation of any saint or beati who has been "assigned" to this topic, or around whom a popular devotion has developed. Related areas are: temptations, against."

NO! I don't care about temptations. I can somewhat handle that sorta almost on my own. I want there to be a saint that I pray to who magically takes a few pounds off of me at a time with no work on my part. Is there a saint without devotion that needs a following? Or one who has a really lame devotion? Time to break out my book of saints and find a worthy candidate. (If I manage to lose these ~~fifty~~ forty-five pounds, I offer myself up for consideration!)

This**** is why Catholicism is seriously flawed, and why I'm no longer a Catholic.

(But I am gonna try asking that funny-haired guy to help me find my other stuff.)

*Except only sorta, because I just won a giveaway from a the lovely Jamie's lovely blog! But I'm sure I'll be back to being a loser in no time at all.
**This one absolutely needs to be found soon. It expires around Christmas and it's halfway to Christmas right now!
***iPod was, miraculously, not in the bedroom-shaped trash cavern. It was in my laptop bag the whole time. Months, it was in there. The laptop bag that I take everywhere with me. The laptop bag that has about thirty pockets and compartments too many for me to deal with - another example of this is that today I "lost" my phone for about fifteen minutes - and it too, was hiding in one of the multitudinous pockets of my laptop bag.
****I guess there might be other reasons too.

2009-07-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

I have about seventeen (slight exaggeration) blog posts I'm working on, but don't seem to have the motivation or inclination to try to finish them.

I'm sorry!

I am, I really am!

For now you will have to be content with me checking in to let you know that I survived this massive blaze 3/4 of a mile from my house, mostly because I was nowhere near it when it happened, though I had travelled up that way just a half hour to forty-five minutes prior to the collision/explosion.

Scary stuff, especially as I'm terrified of fires/explosions (there's a blog entry about that in the works, actually). Now off to real life...

Time for newness!

2009-07-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

I have a new blog, and it's just for me! But you can look at it if you want... I guess. It's to track an exciting new adventure I'm going on, called being healthy and losing weight. We'll see how that goes!

You can cheer me on (or jeer at me when I inevitably fail) at: http://www.rebeccalosesit.blogspot.com

Check out that hot-hot-hot banner. I did that. Honestly.

Eulogy on the Bird .

2009-07-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

When I was wee and lived in a big square red-brick house flanked by fir trees with my mom, grandma and cousin-uncle, I had a pet bird. When I was even more wee and lived in a house I don't remember with my mom and maybe other people and/or pets and definitely some Floridian wildlife like lizards and bugs, I had that same pet bird. A parakeet, to be exact, the aptly named Birdie, he'd made the long trip up to Michigan from Florida with my mom and myself, along with his furry brethren, a hamster aptly named Rodie (short for Rodent. I was a very imaginative child who later grew up to name a litter of kittens Mouse (he was grey), Gingerbread (she was ginger-coloured), Patch (he was black and white patched) and Harlequin (he was a tux cat). I think/hope my ability in naming pets and creatures has matured as I have). As far as I can remember, Birdie was your average, garden-variety parakeet, bluey-greeny-whitey-yellowy with a beak, two eyes, two legs with assorted talons and suchlike. He was my Easter present, purchased with money sent from my Michigoose grandmother, when I was a tiny smooshy baby-type creature, roughly a year and a half old. What a gift!

He was kind of a jerk.

Birdie didn't really like anyone. Not even me, even though I was his 'mom' (or as much of one as a six-year-old girl can be). So when he started acted friendly, after about five years of being a dick, we knew the jig was up. Birdies just don't make that kind of change - they don't undergo any life-changing breakups, or mid-life crises, or anything of the sort. They're birdies, dig? He perched on my shoulder, he cooed, he let himself be petted and picked up, for about a couple of days.

And then he died.

According to Mom, I was relatively fact-of-life about this. Stoic, reserved, but understanding. Rodie had yet to perish, and I'd never before intimately dealt with death*. I insisted on a funeral and prepared for the interment myself: a shoebox lined with soft things, and Birdie set serenely in the midst of softness and quiet. As I gathered my family around the big magnolia tree in the back, staring down into the hole in the earth we'd dug for Mr. Birdie Parakeet, I started my eulogy.

"This bird has died," it started. I don't remember the bulk of it, but according to sources, it was very informative, very matter-of-fact, and very ... inventive. I'd witnessed only one funeral prior to this, for my great-uncle and great-aunt's son, but didn't process much of it other than the following details that I inserted into my soliloquy:

"And who's gonna play the music? ME." Even though I was terribly unskilled at any sort of musical instrument, I must've remembered an organist playing at Mark's funeral, and posited (incorrectly) that someone close to the deceased was required to 'play the music,' as it were.

"And then we are going to go to Cathy's or the Golden Duckling." Polish people, we love to eat. We are a hearty kind. We eat to celebrate birth, death, and all the other points on the life spectrum. Visits to such establishments as the Golden Duckling were strictly reserved for special occasions: funerals, weddings, communions, paydays. Cathy's was a little less special; I seem to remember having cornflakes there on more than one occasion. But that might've been because I was a picky child and refused to have anything more sophisticated or appropriate.

Somewhere, somewhere, there is a tape of this, as my grandmother found it prudent to record it for posterity. This is a sore subject for me, as my mom takes every opportunity to ridicule me for my solemn statements about avian death, even going so far as to threaten to play it for my future husband, so he knows what kind of ridiculously cute children we will have someday. Wait, that's not a bad thing.

Well, we had to have such a ceremony yesterday. Percival E. Starling did not make it through the night, and though I'm beating myself up for not taking him home overnight (though most accounts say that fledglings will be okay through the night without food, and I did leave a little bowl of food as well as the food straws if he felt so inclined as to have a bit of a nosh in the night), Mom insists that he fell from those great heights and had unknowable internal injuries. I sure hope so. I'd hate to think that I'm a terrible mother who will end up killing her kids with negligence.

To date, my ratio is not good. I've only four living pets right now, two of whom live with my mom, so they aren't even really mine (Hi Mabel Pauline Cat! Hi Professor Eido Baby Kitty Cat!). Franklin George the exuberant pit bull and Gabby Leigh the uhm, opinionated redheaded Selle Francais x TB mare are going strong, at three and five years. Molly lived to the corgi-esque, ripe old age of fifteen, and my old cat Mr. Kitty, nee Darkwing Duck, nee Velveeta, lived to a not-entirely-unrespectable-for-an-unfixed-tomcat (I know, I know) eleven years.

But amongst those big pets there has been a menagerie of smallish rodents (hamsters, gerbils, an unfortunate baby barn mouse), larger rodents (guinea pigs), a turtle**, a few zebra finches, two more parakeets post-Birdie, innumerable fish, and now a baby starling. All have met their demise under my care.

I hope this doesn't mean I'll be a bad mother. If anything, I hope it means I would have been a bad mother at the ages of six-twelve, so I'm really glad I didn't have any serious boyfriends or marriage proposals at those ages.

I'm sorry I failed you, Mr. Percival E. Starling. I hope you had a fun time with me that one day. Rest in Peace! <3

*I am MUCH more emotionally unstable and nervous about it now. Frankly, death, whether it's my own or someone/something else's, terrifies me.
**Mr. Tuttle the Turtle's death was NOT my fault, and technically his life did not expire under my care. He was stolen from his backyard habitat by our very white trash neighbors, who then kept him in a beverage cooler for a few days until he died, a fact I didn't discover till I found him there, belly up, whilst snooping around. What a terrible way to discover that your neighbors are horrible human beings - but sadly this was not the last demonstration of this.

For once, I didn't steal these photos from The Internets™, they're all from a trip to the cemetery that Sharon and I took in April. More from that day here, if it should please you to see them (i.e., you are bored.)

2009-07-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Guy (or Gal) Who Won the $133m Mega Millions Lottery,

I have a proposition for you. You apparently don't want to pick up your ticket, even though it's worth $82.7mill in a lump sum payment, which judging from the area where you purchased your ticket, is an amount the likes of which you'll never see again. Unless you are one of those strange and fascinating creatures who dresses poorly and chooses to live well below their means (rather than well above their means like the average American) while hoarding cash money dolla bills like they're going out of style, until they die and it is discovered that they've left their vast fortune to some unheard-of charity or their barber. Even if you are one of those creatures, my proposition still stands.

Here it is:

I'm betting that maybe New York state is one in which maybe your identity is made public as a lottery winner, and maybe you don't want your nasty great-uncle* or your wicked stepmom** or your brother's next door neighbor's dogwalker little cousin calling in that favor you drunkenly promised him/her when they bought you a $3 beer after you'd clearly had too many to begin with, and that's why you haven't stepped forward to claim your prize. I can understand your apprehension.

Here's the thing though, buddy, or lady. This is not one of those church-fair prizes, a basket of mismatched toiletries and a random book or kitchen gadget. This is not one of those home-expo prizes, where they call you a week later and WOW HOORAY CONGRATULATIONS, you've won a security system, valued at $1000, and you only have to pay the $850 installation fee!

You flat-out won a metric ton*** of money. Own it.

And obviously the best solution, rather than going through the (I'm assuming) lengthy and arduous process of setting up a blind trust to anonymously claim your winnings, hire me. I will be the face of you. If you don't like my face, you have my permission to change it****.

I will make public appearances identifying myself as having won that metric ton of money after purchasing my ticket at Shiv Convenience Store in Jamaica, NY. I will have to deal with the outpouring of long-lost family, former friends, and one-time acquaintances and colleagues looking for a handout - and they won't even be yours to deal with, because it will be my friends and family falling for our great hoax, our switcheroo!

You, new friend, can just sit on your tuchus on your brand new 1500 thread count sheets on your new California King bed and order ridiculous things like the Transparent Canoe Kayak and the 7-foot Robot or the most expensive non-commercial espresso machine I have ever seen in my entire life. I will be out dealing with the crazies and the craziers for you. I will hand over comically over-sized checks to the charities of your choosing, if that's the route you want to go (and I hope it is, at least for about $5mill of it - it's the right thing to do). I will shield your true identity from the media and your circle of family and friends, as long as I can*****.

All this can be yours for the low price of $25,000! That's .03% of what you're getting from the lottery: totally doable, and absolutely affordable. Think of how much easier your life will be with me running interference for you. So, think about it, okay? I mean, really. Think long and hard about it. It would save you so much trouble in the short run, and probably in the long run too!

I'll be making sacrifices, too... all those friends I've acquired over the years by promising to hook them up with some cold hard when/if I win the lottery? They're gonna be pissed at me when I refuse to give them dollars. I'm probably not gonna have any friends left! Or family! So, really, I'm willing to lose friends and family for a pretty small fee. Did I say $25,000? I meant $50,000******.

Yours, sincerely, truly,
Rebecca

P.S. I am mostly serious.

*I'm not in any way implying that I have or have had one of these.
**Same
***I'm not actually sure how much $82.7mill weighs - it probably doesn't weigh that much when broken down into dollar bills, but I bet it does when converted to dollar coins or quarters or pennies or something. Let's try it out when we get the money, okay!?
****At your expense, plus another $10,000 for me for pain and suffering. It's only fair. I'm kinda used to my face, after all.
*****For at least one year. After that you can hire me as your lifelong stand-in******* for all financially-related appearances, at a cost of $50,000 a year - a paltry sum, if you ask me. If you're really frugal, you can look forward to having me act as your public stand-in for a very long time!
******An extra $25k for loss of friends and family is perfectly acceptable, in my opinion. Probably a lowball estimate, too, so you're getting off easy. Real easy. Easy street. Easy as pie. Easy peasy.
*******I will also be your live-in maid/butler/chauffeur/cook for an additional $25,000 a year. What a deal! What a bargain! HIRE ME NOW! Also, if you are attractive/smart/funny/pleasant enough of a fellow, I will offer to marry you for FREE as long as you will support me in the way to which I would love to be accustomed. If you are a gal, well, we'll figure something out, I promise.

Are you my mother?

2009-07-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, I didn't find something disturbing out about my provenance and my mother. Mom's still mom, birth and all. All is kosher on that front.

The thing is, now I'm a mom.

It was very sudden - and kind of ironic, considering last night I was watching TLC's commercials for "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" and smirking at the women on there. Then wham, bam, no thank you ma'am, the next day I'm a mom.

I was at the barn, taking out a wheelbarrow full of horse poop and shavings. On my way back into the barn I saw a dead mouse, grimaced, and went to get the shovel to pick him up. Then it happened.

He was sitting there in our indoor arena - which is no longer really a riding arena, since all our dirt is gone. Now it's just ... a big space with fences and gates, in the middle of our barn. He was a little lump of gray fluff. He could have been anything - a lump of horse poop, a big rock, something bigger and deader than my friend the dead mouse.

But I knew it was a baby bird.

We have high rafters here - it's the old Dairy Barn at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, and its ceilings are high. I don't even want to postulate on how many feet from the ground the rafters/ceilings are; I'm afraid of heights and even just thinking about such great heights makes me queasy. I don't know if he fell from far, or fell from somewhere nearer to earth and has been lurking around since. He's not injured, just a fledgling who doesn't quite know how to fly yet, but has no trouble hopping around.

I looked and looked for his birth mom or dad - no such luck. Nobody was making noises for him, so he might've been disowned for saying something mean to someone. I was just going to leave him and let him fend for himself, but when I bent down to get a closer look at him, he came up to me, right to my shoe, looked up at me and chirped once.

Are you my mother?

I'm a sucker for a chirp.

Gloves were found and donned, and baby bird was picked up carefully (though not without some indignant squawkage) and transferred carefully to a clean bucket with a base of straw in it. Mom, Expert At All Things™, was consulted on the care and feeding of this fledgling, and then just to be sure, I conferred with The Internets™. I consulted The Internets™ mostly to be sure that this was not a baby pigeon. I hate pigeons. I hate them all (Except for Mo Willems' pigeon. But he's not real, so he's okay).

Pigeons would be cooler if they played the trumpet and were drawn by the adorable Mo Willems*.

All was well. I ran home to get some wet dog food to mix up for him**, and jury-rigged long food-tipped straws to sit in the bucket at heights he could reach easily while I finished my chores. I am, if nothing else, a master of invention, and after all, necessity is the mother of invention. I've since moved him to a big box filled with hay, still with the necessary food-straw contraptions. When he comes home with me in a few days he will have a bigger box in my shed, with the usual suspects. After that, I don't know.

The Internets™ told me this baby bird is a starling. I've always wanted a starling. I remember a few stories heard as a young girl, of starlings taught to speak like mynah birds or parrots. The story of the starling in Mary Poppins, the starling who speaks only to Annabelle and that oddity, Miss Poppins, always gave me the warm fuzzies. Even the name is cute - stars are pretty, and -ling = small. Small stars. Cute.

So I guess now I have one. We'll see how this goes. Time to read up on starling behavior!

*Hello, proof, here is your pudding. So. Cute.
**As the baby bird is helpless, noisy, messy, and fuzzy, I assume his gender is male. This formula (helpless + noisy + messy + fuzzy = male) has never failed me in the past.

2009-07-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

My lovely friend Angela made this lovely and awesome drawing of Michael Jackson in his memory. Through the suggestions of many a friend, she has decided to put them on teeshirts so that people can wear his visage on their body in a most unique way!

Here is the item on etsy. Make sure you check out the other stuff in her store as it's quite whimsical and (dare I say it?) lovely!

Blasty-plasty (differs from rhinoplasty in every way/shape/form)

2009-06-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

I just joined 20Something Bloggers a few weeks ago, and I'm loving it. I found a bunch of great people, some I already knew, some I didn't know, and a bunch of great people found me.

Sometimes I troll around their blogs and their friends' friends' blogs, and sometimes I find neat stuff, like this promotion from Blog Carnival. I don't know about you but I love free ice cream. I even love ice cream I have to pay for (the five packages of ice cream [plus ice cream sandwiches and freezy pops] currently living in my freezer are testament to this).

So here goes: “This post is a part of 20SB’s Looking Back Blog Carnival, and Ben & Jerry’s is awarding free ice cream to lucky bloggers and readers!”

And here you have a post, a blasty from the pasty, about my current job and my (hopeful) future job and how they dovetail quite nicely.

Originally published at beeswaxed on October 2, 2008.

I seem to be getting (a tiny bit) nicer, or at least more forgiving of annoying people/annoying things people do, as I age -- though I don't extend this courtesy to asshole drivers, who still top my "what the hey" list and render me criminally insane for many minutes at a time, many times a day. Is this uncommon? A few years ago I was the very epitome of grandma-chic, from the cardigans and old-lady skirts to the shouting and fist-shaking at hooligans in the streets and around my house. I feel more placid now. Oh, let the ruffians engage in fisticuffs! I don't care! I might even smile and shake my head with an "oh, to be young again!" type of bittersweet regret. Even asshole and otherwise difficult customers at work (and there are plenty, ohhhhh there are plenty; they come in trickles, then spurts, then droves, the closer the holidays get) get the VIP, kid-glove treatment from me (mostly). Children, who used to annoy the everloving poop out of me on the basis that they are small and get in the way and ask too many questions, I now find a little charming. Kids at the barn are especially prone to getting underfoot and asking the most ridiculous questions and now I find myself going just slightly out of my way to help them, to try and come up with kid-friendly answers to those queries.

I have no idea what is going on with me.

I had a thought that maybe it was because some sort of friendly-librarian gene was rearing its amiable head in me, if such a thing exists.

The thing is, I've been following an online community of librarians/media specialists, and it honestly depresses me how many of them seem to hate their jobs and their patrons. Okay, okay, I KNOW it's not all sunshine and roses and great books. I know there are indigent patrons, stinky patrons, frankly and terrifyingly insane patrons, patrons who bring in their 2-year-old children and leave them there unoccupied for hours, patrons who are looking for a book or scholarly article on some obscure topic on which little (or none at all) up-to-date and in-print information exists, and patrons who are looking for a librarian to handhold them through narrowing down an extremely broad subject into one suitable for a school project/paper. I know there are "entitlement" patrons and patrons who look down on those of us who choose to spend roughly a million (or six-ish/seven-ish) years in school only to end up basically serving the public.

I've worked in a bookstore for seven years this fall. I have met and dealt with all of the aforementioned archetypes, repeatedly, in all their various and yet unvaried incarnations. Yes, there is the difference of money being exchanged in the bookstore biz, but the goal is the same: find the book. Obtain the book, if it's not readily available. I'm pretty confident that over a half-decade's (dear god... it's been that long?) worth of dealing with the vast cast of the book-buying public has somewhat prepared me for a life of dealing with the book-borrowing public.

But the posts on this forum for librarians depress me. They're all really snarky, quite bitchy, and have that vaguely superior "I work in the academic arts, and I know the DDS (or LCC) by heart and backwards, so up your uneducated farthole" air about them.

Please, god, don't let me be like that.

It's not just that the posts or posters are whiny and self-indulgent (though they are) - but that's a common occurrence in the blogland or online-forum-world. And why not? Relative anonymity has its perks, not least of which is the ability to gripe about friends, coworkers, clients, etc. with few people knowing about it. Not gonna lie, I've done it all. A while back, I joined an online group of booksellers for the express purpose of bitch-and-moaning about the coworker/client end of the "dudes I have to deal with" spectrum, but it's lost its glitz, the glamour is gone.

My main problem with the whole spectacle is that as a librarian, you work for the public, which includes the dirty, the stinky, the challenged, the bitchy, the culture-addled, and information-befuddled. That is your job. If you have a hard time dealing with the less-desirable members of modern society, then you should probably have a job writing a vitriolic blog about said members of society from the privacy and comfort of your own home, or at least look into some profession where you can inflict the physical pain you dream about inflicting on those unlucky people, like a phlebotomist, or I dunno, dominatrix or something.

I'm no saint. I'm frustrated endlessly by people. I inwardly roll my eyes at stupid questions teenagers ask about Shakespeare or Camus, but I'm still happy to introduce them to the works, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't always dealt well with the stresses, major and minor, of working in a bookstore, but I've come a long way since 2001. I've even come to regard many of our more problematic regulars at the store with a sort of affection. It's so strange.

I don't know. Not really sure how I wanted this blog to go, but kind of wanted to get it off my chest.

One more thing I was thinking about: my company, like many, I'm sure, has an intranetwork. One of the features of this network is a sort of "employee of the month" segment, where via letters from satisfied customers, booksellers and bookstores get the highest praise for doing their job. Maybe I'm just jealous because I've never been commended in there, but every month or week or however often it's updated, it seems that the people mentioned are being lauded for doing things like actually looking for a book in their store, or actually calling a customer back, or actually bothering to ask and find out what book a customer might be looking for. Guess what? This is not extraordinary customer service. This is customer service, period. I do things like this every day I work at the bookstore. It is my job. I have also gone above and beyond (driving 20 miles to hand-deliver a book that a customer desperately needed right away is one example I can think of off the top of my head - and no, I was not reimbursed for mileage, thank you very much - and yes, I was off the clock!)

I dunno, guys. Have the values of customer service gone so far down that now we have to pat heads and give cookies for people merely doing their job?

I'm not implying I'll be some kind of Super Librarian, kind helpful, and gracious to all, whether they deserve it or not. But it could happen. Nor am I implying that I'm currently some kind of Super Bookseller, but I sure do try.

P.S. I still do rock at my job, even though my position now is mostly just shelving.

The Mystery of My History

2009-06-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

You might not know that I carry the indelicate title of being a bastard kid, or the decidedly more genteel 'love child,' or the legal-ese-y 'illegitimate.' Well, you might not have known, but now you do. And needless to say, bearing that weight has been sort of an issue for me.

It feels to me like a lot of people know their personal history, how they came to be: how their parents met and fell in (and sometimes out of) love. Beyond that they probably know their familial history, carrying some knowledge of the mothers and fathers that came before their own, where and why the family tree branches out, how and when new leaves burgeon.

I might be generalizing, painting broad strokes over a subject I know little about, because I'm embarrassed of my own provenance. Maybe more people are like me than not. Maybe family histories are not passed down as they used to be. Maybe every family needs to have a griot so their histories don't go unheralded.

This is what I know about whence I came: My mother and father met, and having some sort of mutual attraction, they copulated. Science conspired to make me, allowing sperm to swim to egg, egg to be fertilized by sperm, a tiny human to sprout like a seed in my mother's womb, nutrients to be delivered to me for nine months inside that cavern, and then I was born. I grew, and grew more, and grew more, and then I was grown. All of this I figured out via common sense and logic; I was told none of it other than the skeletal bones of the reproductive process in sex-ed class, but deduced it over a period of some years, being a child with enough prescience to realize that I was not the second coming of the Immaculate Conception.

What I don't know about whence I came is limitless, unbounded, infinite. I don't know how long they knew each other before they knew me, or what kind of relationship they had, or if they were even in love, or if they even knew each other's last names. Or first names. I don't know any cutesy stories about their time together, if they gave each other gifts or carved each other's names in the barks of trees. I know my mother, and I sort of know my father, but I don't know my-mother-and-my-father as a whole being.

My not-so-blissfully-ignorant lack of knowledge stretches back even further than my very humble beginnings, dipping its ignoramus toes into my mother's very humble beginnings. I can think of two stories about my mother's childhood off the top of my head. One involves a tank of turtles, my aunt, and talcum powder, which apparently is not conducive to a tank of turtles staying alive. The other consists of a lead pencil meeting skin and leaving an indelible mark on young skin- but that may be an amalgam of similar stories I have heard or witnessed (surprisingly many). Ultimately, what I know about my family is limited to the here-and-now, what I have encountered among my relatives in my twenty-seven years with them. In brief: my grandmother smoked, one aunt is an artist and the other is a doctor, my cousins are plentiful, my uncle plays guitar. There's more to them than that succinct collection of descriptors, of course, but I can't tell you every story of every memory. We've made memories together, all of us, and somehow I have contributed to the family history without knowing or seeing the bigger picture.

Also, what little understanding I have of my origin is limited to my mom's side. I only got in touch with my dad ten years ago, only spent a handful of times with him (distance is a discouraging factor) and have since been introduced to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a whole score of cousins - not to mention three gorgeous half-sisters and a wonderful stepmom - I barely, if ever met, when I was wee. I remember my paternal grandparents only vaguely, and basically only for the fact that they owned or ran a soccer store where Gatorade orange gum was readily available. Gatorade orange gum: a taste that rates as high in my memory as that of two of my grandparents. I have one picture of my father and myself from when I was about two - it's Christmas or my birthday, as evidenced by the mounds of destroyed wrapping paper surrounding us, and I don't remember it at all. I remember growing up sneaking glances at that picture, thinking that the male in it resembled Freddie Mercury (mostly due to the mustache), and making the (incorrect) conclusion that my dad was the singer in Queen and that is why he didn't live with us. It made sense at the time, honest.

It's not that I don't care. Quite the contrary, actually. I want to know how I came to be, why my parents weren't married, and to be entirely impolitic and macabre, why I wasn't aborted or perhaps given up for adoption. I want to know the stories my mom has to tell about how she grew up. I know how I grew up, and it wasn't the prettiest, but all I can gather from her intimations is that hers was even uglier. I want to know about my dad's childhood/adolescence/adulthood too, but having been raised almost exclusively by my mom (with help from my grandma and aunts/uncles), I feel like hers is one I should know intimately by now.

So why don't I ask?

It's a sensitive subject - one that, having been broached but a handful of times by me in the past twenty-seven years, is even more awkward to discuss. It is, undoubtedly, the biggest elephant in the smallest room. It might even be a blue whale in a walk-in closet in a studio apartment in NYC. I talked about it briefly in the counseling sessions last year, and while my counselor thought it was important for me to know my provenance, I was torn about it. Does not knowing make me any less 'me'? Would knowing make me any more 'me'? Would asking my mother about potentially upsetting things make me feel any better about my life? Does not asking her make me feel any better?

I don't know.

I don't know that it would accomplish anything at all, to be honest. Knowing more of my pedigree wouldn't fix the problems I am having now, or the problems I've had forever. It could shed some light on them, possibly, probably, but I've managed to make inferences about them on my own, given the facts I do know and clues I have found.

The ebb and tide of my desire to know is pretty predictable: when I'm feeling okay with myself and life, it's not a pressing matter. When I'm pretty messed up and making mistakes left and right and have no idea how to fix them and am quite literally at the rockiest, bottomest of rock bottom, then it's of utmost importance to me to find out. Because I want a scapegoat? Probably so. (I never said I was fair.) It's easier to point fingers at the family to which I was borne, than to accept and acknowledge that my prevalent and plentiful predicaments are probably all my own doing: not their nature but my own nurture, not biology but sociology. This is extra-foremost in my mind due to talks with a new friend about similar pre-historical circumstances (only his are decidedly more problematic and potentially sticky), the PBS show History Detectives (because every time they speak of provenance I think of my own - should I hire them to find out more about me, and would they do it for free?), and A.M. Homes' startling memoir of being the bastard child, adopted after birth, of a man and his mistress, "The Mistress' Daughter."*

Knowing won't solve anything. I'm aware. It's not a panacea. It won't keep me from being a worrier, or cure my abandonment issues, or eradicate my men problems, or make me smarter/thinner/prettier. It won't remedy my panic attacks or render me more apt at finance/math/logic, or quell my nervous habits, or make me more likely to clean my house on a regular basis. It won't give me a retroactively happier childhood or put me in a better, saner place today.

But it's a piece of the puzzle, and every piece counts, otherwise people wouldn't work so hard to finish jigsaw puzzles. The question is: what do you do with that puzzle when it's completed? Shellac it and hang it on the wall? Destroy it and start over again? Swipe your hands together, pat yourself on the back for a job well done, and throw it away? What is the underlying purpose of those damn puzzles anyway? What is the underlying purpose of me?

Mom, I love you. I love that you love me and that you made me. I hate that I don't know how to ask you about this other than one time suggesting you write down every story about your life you can think of, and now writing this blog post about how little I know you and ultimately, pieces of myself. I hate that I barely know Dad and feel even less comfortable asking him for his version. But I'm not holding anyone at fault but myself, please know this.

What about you, gentle readers? Do you know your history and not care? Not know and do care? Have you made any effort to rectify it, either way?

Is it more important to know where you came from or to know where you're going? What if you don't know either?

*Seriously, this book, though short, is killer. Homes was given up for adoption at birth, and much later in life, her birth mother initiated contact with her - but turned out to be completely crazy - even stalked Homes when she wouldn't contact her. Phenomenal book.

I Britneyed last night.

2009-06-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

I am horrified with myself.

I watched it again. I was sucked into an old episode of an old cycle of ANTM even though I've seen it before and know the winner of the cycle (McKey. Ew.) And helpless to change the channel, even though the remote lay just millimeters from my fingers, I left it on CW. When the previews/start credits rolled, I thought "No. It can't be... I mean, it is exactly one week since the last episode. But... there's no way. Not a chance. Right?"

Wrong.

Hitched or Ditched. Shoulda ditched it, but I remain hitched to it in a sick perverse way.

I won't talk at length about it, other than these thoughts (which will probably end up being quite lengthy):

•Moving from Chicago to LA to pursue an "acting career" when your intended spouse has a great job at an ad agency in Chicago is not a great idea. Insisting that your intended spouse give up said great job so you can pursue some pipe dream (as for her "acting career" I'm envisioning either a) waitressing tables or b) porn, because she's got the boobs for it.) is a terrible idea. Breaking up is a much better idea. Rebecca moving to Chicago to win over the cute ex-intended spouse in question and never force the issue of relocating is the best idea. Game over.

•The father of the bride and his wife/bride's stepmom live in a house filled with dolls. Creepy antique dolls. And to "celebrate" the announcement of their sawed-off-shotgun wedding, she brought out a dancing plush pig wearing a leather jacket and leather cap the likes of which has only been seen on Village People. And then she insisted on dancing with the groom-to-be and making sexual innuendos to him. ~~Something~~ Everything is not right with this picture. Creepy.
•Father of the groom and his wife made out, rather intensely, rather disgustingly, and for rather a far longer time than was necessary, on camera after hearing the news of the impending wedding. Inappropriate. Highly.
•Of three rings (a princess-cut with trillium on the sides, a round cut, and some abomination of gauche taste, a pave something or another that looked like a diamond ate a diamond and threw up diamonds in an indiscriminate way all over diamond diarrhea), she chose the hideous one. Poor taste, pt. 1.

This ring is classier than what she picked.*
•When asked what her perfect wedding dress would be, she replies "tight, maybe a little boobalicious." Poor taste, pt. 2.
•Hot Cops at her bachelorette party. This normally would be Great Taste, pt. infinity. These guys were pretty hit, though, so it gets designated as: Poor Taste, pt. 3.

This is what a real Hot Cop looks like.

Want to know what happened? Me too. My buddy Eric dragged me out for cheap beers at a local bar so I have no idea!**

*Okay, I really just don't like super flashy engagement rings. So maybe to normal people it was simple and elegant but to me it looked like poopies.
**Just kidding. Of course I didn't leave till it was over.***
***You still wanna know, don't you? Okay. They actually got married! This is shocking and upsetting to my cynical heart. I am not quite sure what to believe about life, love, and happiness now. HALP.

I am a creature of habits, many and nervous.

2009-06-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

I am a skittish person, easily affected by changes in the weather, billboard ads, songs on the radio, things in the road that I perceive to be baby animals or worse, baby babies. My mind works in an associative manner that I manage to keep pretty much under wraps, for fear of blurting out something to you that ultimately has no relevance to what we're discussing but happened to hop from one reference you made to something that sounds vaguely similar to it but is not related at all, and having you brand me as some sort of socially malfunctioning human. Few but my closest friends have witnessed the jumps my mind makes from one thing to another, and the ones I feel free sharing that with can generally relate.

This is what it's like being in my brain all the time.

On the occasions when I'm in a social setting and somehow I manage to herd all those thoughts into a corral so they can bleat back and forth to each other and not come out of my mouth-hole to be directed at you, my brain is still working overtime and I end up babbling about something or another. I want to amuse you, astound you, teach you things. Little tiny grad students are excavating random bits of information from my cerebral cortex, paying little to no mind to my present company and their respective interest in what might get pulled out of the nooks and crannies. Among my favorite avenues of discourse are: bees, insects besides bees, birds, racehorses/horse racing, art, weird murders, weird stuff.

•Did you know one German cockroach female, Blatella germanica, can produce up to a million offspring in one year?
•Did you know Secretariat had the biggest heart on record for a horse, at 22 pounds?
•Did you know bees can't see the color red?
And so on and so forth.

I am basically that kid from Jerry Maguire.

When I'm not doing either of those, I'm desperately trying to recount a funny from 30 Rock, the Office, How I Met Your Mother, etc., and miserably failing because I don't necessarily remember funnies in the order that they happen so I have to backtrack and add in seemingly minor details that end up being essential to the joke. By the end it's a jumbled mess that makes sense to me because I've seen it, but leaves you wondering whether or not I'm sane and thinking perhaps that my favorite shows suck and aren't funny at all. My mind works better in cold hard fact, apparently. (Not.)

I'm also a worrier, as if you couldn't guess. I worry about everything: you, my friends, my family, strangers in the store, baby animals/baby babies in the street*, world peace, my life, ad nauseum. I have kept myself up all night worrying about things that are either completely and utterly out of my control or were previously in my control until I screwed up (another side effect of being a skittish girl). I have had panic attacks about the most inane and trivial things, panic attacks where my lungs cease to function in any reasonable matter and I am left quivering on the couch trying to breathe like a pregnant woman to stabilize my nervous system (no pun intended). I have worried relentlessly and without reason that family and friends, if they haven't called me or texted me back within what I consider a reasonable time frame (e.g. a few minutes), are lying in a ditch on the side of the road. This particular trait is one I inherited from my Polish grandmother, who probably has all manner of security and safety phone numbers either memorized or on speed dial in her giant-button cellphone.

One Devil's Night I tried to get a hold of my mom to no avail. Every time I dialed her number I was greeted with the monotone beeping that says she is on the other line - except that my mother rarely talks on the home phone. So I tried again all night, on the off chance that perhaps she was on the line, with an old friend or a bill collector whose voice sounded pleasing. Two thoughts (it being Devil's Night and her living in Detroit amidst abandoned houses ripe for torching) screeched into my discombobulated brain, crashed into each other lustfully and with abandon and bred a scenario in which arsonists and other wrongdoers broke into the house, tied her up, knocked out the phone line, and were proceeding to vandalize/rob the house and torture her and the pets. Breathless, I had my then-boyfriend drive me over to her house about twenty minutes away, and burst into the house with as much bravado as I could muster, sort of ready and almost willing to fend off any ruffians I might encounter. Mom was sitting in her living room chair working on a cross-stitch pattern. No hoodlums. No torture. No wrongdoing. Just that tame and relatively harmless art of embroidery. The cats had knocked the phone off the hook hours before and she'd neglected to notice.

I wish I were joking that that happened. It did. You can ask Mom. I was practically beside myself with embarrassed tears. I'm embarrassed just thinking about it now. I did that.

My anxiety also physically and publicly manifests in nervous hand motions. I twiddle, I pluck imaginary or unseen threads out of the air, off my clothing, I twirl my hair, I crack my knuckles, I 'play' the keyboard, I 'play' the drums, I conduct imaginary orchestras, I scrape my fingernails along my palms, I pull my fingers, I pick at my lips, I fuss with my eyebrows, I spin phones on tables, I swirl straws in glasses, I will basically do anything to keep my hands busy.

This is apparently one of my favorite pasttimes at the bar.

I shred napkins, a lot, mostly when I'm outwardly nervous (watching The Red Wings muck up Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals with Sharon) or inwardly nervous (out with friends at a bar whilst being inappropriately and quietly concerned about the status of a relationship that's not really a relationship at all). Few people have failed to comment on this nasty little habit of mine, least of all the various and sundry bartenders and waitresses who are no doubt appalled at the mountain of paper I manage to create. I always say I'm sorry and I always clean it up, to my credit.

It's often been suggested that I take up smoking, and it's something I've thought about, with and without the prompting. Being able to move my hands about, give them a busy task, all the while engaging my mouth and my oral fixation (uhm. More on that later. Maybe. Maybe not.) sounds like a killer deal. But I've never so much as touched a cigarette other than to hand it to someone, or make sure it's 100% completely out (p.s. I have a rather deep-seated fear of fire, which will absolutely be addressed in a forthcoming post as we near a very harrowing 'anniversary' for me), or to throw a pack of them in the lake when my cousin and I thought we would "teach" our grandma a lesson about smoking. I grew up with smokers, I rode in cars that had a thick carpet of ash on the driver's side, even in the backseat (I don't know how that happens), I probably have the lung capacity difficulties inherent in living with smokers. I also don't even have the cashflow necessary to start my career as a smoker, given that I struggle to pay my bills each and every month.

I am, however, thinking of taking up smoking candy cigarettes. They seem so chic. Obviously cheaper than real cigs, too.

So now you know at least 1% of my idiosyncracies. Pat yourself on the back. Go get a cookie. Go smoke a cigarette in my honor, and try, in my honor, to not worry about cancer.**

*I'm sure it has become painfully obvious now that I am quite concerned with this.
**this came out way more judgmental than I meant for it to be, but I'm not really that concerned with how it came out***; I will be worried enough about you getting cancer for both of us!
***This is me trying to take control of my rampant worries, concerns, and woes. Go with it. It's a good thing.****
****I love you, Martha Stewart.

Why I Hated Myself For Exactly One Hour Last Night.

2009-06-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

Love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage

Wow.

Last night I wasted an hour of my life watching the monstrosity of a television spectacle they call "Hitched or Ditched."

I guess the basic premise of the show is that once you are chosen to be on the show, you have one week to decide whether you get married or break up forever and ever (at least till the cameras stop rolling and your 15 minutes of 'fame' are over and done with). That, in and of itself, is a disturbing basis to set a show upon. I didn't expect to become so emotionally involved in this episode though.

I am a neophyte to reality shows like this, involving matters of the heart. The reality shows I hold near and dear are, well, basically the one where Tyra Banks and a coterie of fashionistas choose The United States' Future Foremost Living Mannequin, and the one where a bunch of judges ask dancers if they think they can do what they are doing on a dancefloor. I watched Fashionista (sorry, there's really nothing clever I can do with that) for the one season it was on, and I've caught a few episodes each of American Idol, Project Runway, Top Chef, the Apprentice, and unfortunately, what my friend Ryan dubbed "I'm a Celebrity? Get the F*** Out of Here!" Most of those are career-oriented. Not love-oriented.

I would not consider myself well-versed in either careers or love. I hold two jobs, one menial, the other slightly less menial, but also retail. I have changed majors many times before (hopefully) finally resting on graphic design, and still don't know one-hundred-percent where I'd like to go with this, career-wise. But by mere virtue of simply having a job, I feel I am qualified to follow the aforementioned shows and judge whether or not people get to keep going for the job they're after, though I've never tried being a fashion model, dancer, sub-par singer, designer, chef, or whatever it is Trump wants people to do. On the love side, I don't have a boyfriend, and I either fall too quickly or immediately hate most of the guys I meet, so I'm obviously not emotionally capable of deciding which Bachelor the Bachelorette* should marry (!!!) or anything of that ilk. Though given my propensity of having multiple crushes on multiple guys at once, perhaps reality-dating shows are an avenue of income I should explore. They do get paid, right?

This one, this show, is so screwed up. I'll cop to this being the only episode of the show that I've watched, and hopefully the only one I'll ever have watched, ever.

A couple was put to the ultimate test, the ultimate ultimatum, not by one of them, not by one of the ONLY TWO PEOPLE IN THE RELATIONSHIP, but by a friend of the bride-to-be, who thought that Anthony and Courtney, dating for two years, needed to decide whether they are going to get married or break up, within a week. One week. Seven days. 168 hours. 10,080 minutes. 604,800 seconds.

...

(I know you can't tell, but I hit those three periods with utmost, careful force. They are very weighty ellipses, pregnant with 'wtf'ness.)

Right off the bat this sounds like a terrible idea. If your options as a couple, in a 'loving' relationship are to a) break up or b) get married (so you can presumably break up years down the road, when houses and mortgages and second incomes and dogs and children and car payments are involved), that is SCREWED. UP. Especially more SCREWED. UP. if that decision is presented to you by some meddling friend.

Thanks a lot, meddling former friend, is what I would have said to him/her, were I ever put in the same position.

So Courtney and Anthony have to tell their families, as most people getting married do. Oh, except that the groom-to-be's mom is a control freak who apparently has not let dear Anthony cut the umbilical cord, or the apron-strings as a backup. He and his 30-year-old sister still live at home with Old Mother Hubbard and Old Father Hubbard, (and a dog and a bird) and everyone is happy and dysfunctional and extremely weird. Being a control freak, she butts in and practically screams that she will not let this happen, that they can't get married, and Courtney has a nervous breakdown and has to walk out. I don't blame her. Anyone forced into a room with that emotional Mount Vesuvius would have to have fortitude in spades. And probably have to be dead. Or at least deaf/blind.** (Sidebar: Mom's name is Violet. I love the name and the flower, but you only have to insert an 'N' in for it to go crazy.)

Now, bride-to-be admits that there are problems that she and Anthony need to work on before they get married. That she acknowledges this glitch tells me that perhaps they should not be thinking about the M word at all, and maybe not accepting ludicrous offers from farcical, puerile television shows looking to make a buck and a laugh off other people's misfortune.*** Having just read the "biggest issues" (trust, jealousy, family, wanting different things, etc.) for the participating couples from the CW site, I'm thinking these are things that maybe should be worked on by the actual members of the relationship (i.e. not meddling former friends) before anyone utters the M word. With these issues, it's not a good idea to bring out the old maxim of "poop or get off the pot." It's much safer to say "Here's an Immodium and today's crossword puzzle and a pen, I hope this helps; if not, maybe you need a colonoscopy or for your guts to be palpated or scanned." Or something. (PS - the Hitched or Ditched site itself states that this couple have a 'rollercoaster relationship' - know what sounds fun at the end of a rollercoaster? GETTING THE HELL OFF THE ROLLERCOASTER AND GETTING SOME ICE CREAM.**** Not getting married.)

So blah blah blah family drama, are you choosing your family or me, we are going to work this out, kissy face kissy face blah blah blah.

They try to make up with his mom, and it works for about four seconds before she goes all crazy-bitch on them and threatens to have herself committed if they go ahead with the marriage. Because that's sane and sensible and not at all psychotic.

Fast forward to the bachelor/bachelorette parties, where every single one of Anthony's dude friends admits to thinking that the upcoming wedding will be an outright disaster and they're not ready to get married. Courtney's friends are of course in the camp of "They just need to get his mom to chill out!" because they are stereotypical girls who think that if the guy doesn't need to be changed, then his family needs to be changed, and can be changed and they will be the ones to do it, by golly!

Anthony's friends are right. This is a disaster in the making. Obviously. Obviously. I'm glad I'm not the only one to see this. Even if not for the horribly ill-suited family-girlfriend relations, it is bound to end badly either way. If they don't get married they are probably contractually obligated by the show's producers to break up, and if they manage to avoid that trap and stay together, whichever one of them isn't the one to say "I don't" will resent the one who did say those two words until they eventually scream at each other all day every day and break up. If they do get married they face the daily, if not hourly wrath of the Medusa who supposedly birthed the seemingly pretty-sane Anthony, or they are disowned by his whole side of the family in solidarity with Medusa. That part doesn't seem like such a bad thing at all, considering the powder keg she and her kin appear to be, but then you factor in the major resentment Anthony would have for his wife over losing his family forever and ever and BAM, break up.

There is literally no way this can end well.

Then it's the day of the wedding, and I'm not going to blame the inevitable outcome on the fact that they took their decorating/designing clues from Ashlee Simpson's wedding. Or on the fact that she wore a gunmetal silver wedding gown, which spits out to the traditionalist in me, "I am a whore and I am so proud of it that I will wear a colour closer to blackest black than pure virginal white, and I will wear it on national television and I will be proud of it."

Gunmetal silver: okay for guns, cars, and caskets. Not for wedding dresses.

She walks down the aisle, grimacing, looking like she is about to poop out a 190 pound man and his attached 130 pound mother at the altar and leave them there for all the wedding-goers to gawk at.

Because THAT'S how I want to remember walking down the aisle. Not overjoyed at possibly spending the rest of my life with the man I love, but grimacing, obviously upset, obviously fearing the worst. Sounds like the Most Fun EVER!! And to get to do it on national television!?! BONUS!!

Once she got up there, they whispered to each other for a bit and he said they would get married, but it wasn't the right time, as if this were shocking to anyone in the room. I think three-year-olds probably realized this. They turned around and he announced this to the congregation, none of whom looked surprised; Mom looked practically orgasmic. Courtney insisted on walking out first (I don't blame her; when in doubt it is always better to leave at the altar than be left at the altar) with Anthony trailing behind. He tried talking to her, but she was inconsolable, and then she went beyond inconsolable to become a whining, sniveling, ball of mush. I'm not entirely making fun of her, as I can only imagine it sucks to be told that your boyfriend doesn't want to marry you - in front of a room full of people and a priest. But at the same time, back the truck up. Remember the preposterousness of this situation? "Hey guys, here's a week. Decide if you want to get married or not. I'm sure things will go awesome! TTYL!!!" Remember how it wasn't even one of you who brought up this preposterous situation, but that meddling, hopefully former friend? Seriously. Put things in perspective a little, would ya? You agreed to this.

So they didn't get married, and according to the epilogue credits, they are no longer dating. The story ends with:

"Anthony still lives at home. With his bird."

I'm not sure if they mean the actual bird or his crazy mother, but I'm sure the experience is similar enough for the two to be interchangeable.

Next week's episode?
"I want to get married but I also want to get out of Chicago. NOW." vs.
"I'm never leaving Chicago. Ever."

SOUNDS LIKE FUN, SEE YOU THEN.*****

*I WILL NOT talk of how earnestly I have been watching this show with Sharon this season, texting furiously back and forth about Jillian's naivete and the dashing good looks of bachelors: Ed, Kiptyn, Tanner P., Reid, etc. That is a different day, a different topic.
**I mean, honestly, the bitch just looks crazy.
***They have got to be expecting the "win" percentage of this show to be about 3%. This situation and the situation they present for the following week's episode are so potentially ripe for heartbreak that there has got to be some sadistic, jaded CEO somewhere putting the greenlight on all the most screwed-up ways to break up couples on national television in the guise of a grand, "love conquers all" romance.
****I hate rollercoasters. Real ones and figurative relationship-type ones. I am however, advocating getting ice cream whenever possible.
*****This is a lie. I hope.

A Happy Letter! (In Whispered Tones: I Think The Smiley Is A Bit Scary, However) ENJOY!

2009-06-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

In preparing for Sharon's and my second serial yard sale, I went to my mom's house to excavate some items of interest from my old room, to sell. I found a lot of those kinds of things (books, household things, vintage clothes, regular clothes, knick-knacks and bric-a-brac), I found a lot of things to throw away, and I found a lot of memories lurking in corners and hiding in boxes like mice.

I thrilled at finding old postcards and letters from the girls I talked to all.the.time (many of whom I still talk to with some regularity) on old-school boards like EstroNet and ChickClick. We'd set up a lot of postcard and letter exchanges, so I have awesome words from awesome ladies from awesome places all over this awesome world. I tweeted about coming across such items from Ashe and Lara. I felt like an archaeologist, finding these 9-10 year old pieces of paper in near-perfect form.

I was less than enthused, but equally amused, at finding high school paraphernalia, mostly prom and senior year photos. Senior year was NAGL* for me, I'll just say that. Well, actually, by the end of the year I looked better, but I will say that short hair does not suit me well. At all.

She is much prettier than I was in my Senior photos.

Then I found the letter.

It's exaggeration to call it a letter; it's really a note, at best.

It's from my worst boyfriend, hands down. The guy gave me his used PSX with crappy burned games for my birthday, after he bought himself a brand spankin' new PS2, which had serendipitously come out right around my special day. The guy kept me waiting for around 3 hours, outside and eventually inside his apartment when his roommate came home) while he smoked pot with the next-door neighbor, the night before we had a SUPER early flight to Florida with my mom, when mom and I had paid for his ticket. The guy said to an utterly beyond-comprehension-upset me, after we both learned that the barn I'd been working at had burned down and 19 of my equine charges had perished, "Hey, you probably just need to try some weed to chill out..." The guy belittled me and mocked me at every turn after his initial charm had worn off, whether it was about school or work or life or whatever. The guy, when I was hanging out with him and his roommate very early in our relationship, made inappropriate remarks about a) his ex-girlfriend doing b) a sexual act I won't name but it rhymes with "MuttMex" with no regard for c) me, his girlfriend at the time, until roommate came to the rescue with "Not cool, dude." The guy bumped into me on an escalator at Oakland Mall and knocked my stupid Mrs. Field's cookie frosting-side-down onto the stupid floor and refused to buy me a new one. Oh, and the guy pushed me - hard - into his coffee table once when he was stoned and getting angry (and I know that's not a natural response, but from an already-angry guy it doesn't seem too off-base).

All these things, plus all the things I can't or won't mention or go into detail about, add up to the guy being Not a Good Dude (NAGD?).

Needless to say, I didn't remember this note/letter/whatever at all, when I found it, given all the horribleness I just transcribed. Niceties like that in a sea of shit tend to either stand out like a narwhal's horn or drown in the muck. Obviously the latter was the case.

So I read it. I didn't recognize the handwriting immediately, as most guys' handwriting seems painfully similar to me in a sloppy, weird way. It's four small pages long - about as big as a 4x6 photo, and stapled together in the upper left corner. A weird, grimacing 'smiley' face graces the cover, with a sloppy border drawn around the edges, and the words: "A happy letter! (in whispered tones) I think the smily (sic) is a bit scary however. ENJOY!" cower under the grimacing, neon-yellow face, faded a bit from time or anger or constipation.

This is a startlingly similar approximation of his version of a smiley face, and I fear that making this sort of "art" is what he went on to do in life.

The inner pages of this possible Tijuana Bible are purple, and swirly, and Hello Kitty, and princessy.

Who in the world is this from? I thought.

Dearest Rebecca, I bet you wonder why I'm writing to you on hello kitty stationary huh? It's because I'm at your house using your stationary silly girl! What else could it be? Anyhow I would just like to say I have had a wonderful afternoon and I'm sorry if it hasen't been the most fun for you. I wanted to thank you for all the effort you put into me all the time. Sometimes I think I don't deserve you because of all the nice things you do for me. For instance yesterday you spent the whole evening and night shopping/cleaning just so I could come over and have dinner. It was delicious and I really appreciated that. You also did "fun" things for me and helped me burn a CD even though you were tired (and a little cranky) ;) You are always going out of your way to do things for me and I am sorry I ever said that you don't do what I want 'cause you do a lot. You are the nicest, bestest (a Rebecca word) girlfriend I ever had. You are so sweet and nice and thoughtful to me and so pretty and sometimes I don't deserve you. I do appreciate you and don't forget that! If you do re-read this letter, ok! I must go talk to you now so goodbye my princess. Love you! - your Andy- 4/22/01

(any and all spelling or grammatical errors - yes, even (ESPECIALLY) the 'hasen't' - in that block of text are solely the work and responsibility of that guy)

I went through quite a range of emotions after finding out the author of the note. A rainbow of them, starting with raging red and ending with violently unhappy violet.

Mostly I wondered if I'd been wrong about him. If he was maybe not such a terrible guy. If maybe my 20 year old psyche had erased the happy parts of our relationship and left me with the unsavory parts looping in the background like on a DVD menu screen in a sick highlight reel. If maybe I'd done something wrong, and if maybe I'd been doing the same thing wrong ever since.

There were times when we were dating (for the eight months or so we dated) that I actually physically hated the guy, even though I told him I loved him and I sometimes believed that.

On the other hand, I can think of two periods in the time I knew him when he was nice enough to me - not exceedingly or cloyingly nice, but the kind of nice boyfriends should be to their girlfriends. Neither period lasted very long, and the transition to and back to assholery was not seamless or invisible enough to render me confused and clueless. The first was, of course, the pre-dating. We didn't pre-date very long: we were probably boyfriend/girlfriend within a week of meeting, having met on match.com or nerve.com/personals or one of their ilk. He was very sweet at first; called me 'bean,' which I thought was the cutest thing ever, he took me out to dinner, he made me dinner, he cuddled me. But the mask fell and he grew acerbic, caustic, mean, rude. I didn't like going places with him, or being around him, or talking to him. I hated the very sound of his voice, and I hated his face, and I hated him. I don't remember why or exactly when we broke up - but if my backwards-composite recollection is semi-accurate (I started dating another guy around Thanksgiving 2001, I'd gotten the job at the bookstore in October and I think we broke up about 1-2 weeks after I started work there, so let's say mid to late October is when we broke up, which makes sense because my birthday would've been a few weeks earlier and I would've been still pissed about that whole mess: minus eight months (that part I am sure about) means we started dating in February, which sounds right because the more I think about it, the more certain I am that we met each other a week or two after Valentine's Day, as I know I didn't have a Valentine's Day with an SO until Nate and I started dating in 2004. WHEW. So anyway, we've established that it was about mid-February to mid-October, 2001. Back on track...) but that letter definitely came after the initial glow had faded dully, because the 'cranky' comment means I was starting to realize what a greedy, selfish, cantankerous bastard he was. My makeshift timeline correlates that it was after the 'honeymoon' period of the new relationship, before shit got really bad, but bad enough that he felt he needed to write me a letter to tell me he appreciated me.

The other period of nice was right at Christmas. This I remember very vividly because he'd been back in touch with me shortly after I'd started dating J, and in the interest of keeping friends close and (fr-)enemies closer, I'd agreed to trying to be friends with him. Only his interest wasn't so altruistic. He knew I'd been dating J - I'd been nothing but honest with him about it, and sometimes he'd ask how it was going, which I assumed was just par for the course in the trying-to-be-friends-with-your-ex game. What I didn't know, and didn't assume, was that he wanted me back, and bad. He sent me flowers. He sent me notes. He sent me a box of Mrs. Field's cookies to make up, quite belatedly, for the one that had suffered a most tragic death on the escalators** - nevermind that they were not the frosted kind, but some mix, half of which I didn't eat because they had nuts in them and I abhor nuts and he SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THIS! For EVERYONE who knows me knows this about me! In short, he wooed me. And on Christmas Eve, at midnightish, he begged me to let him come over and plead his case, and I stupidly agreed. We sat on the couch and he begged me to take him back, saying how broken and torn up he was without me. I listened to him, with an empathetic ear (something that is a curse most times), but I did not take him back. New boyfriend notwithstanding, I didn't want Andy back, even though he'd made quite the valiant effort and I had to admire his tenacity - especially as he'd told me countless times that he never re-dated someone, and here he was, trying to re-date me, to no avail. And when I said no, he got angry. He didn't get angry that night, he said he understood and he left, but he got angry the next day and the day after that, and he kept it up.

How dare I spurn him!

I have NEVER regretted standing firm on my decision to not take him back, even when the relationship with J fizzled and I was alone again. Until now, until reading that letter - which is excessive amounts of confusing to me, since there is nothing in the letter that tells me that he was The One That Got Away. Two months into it, he was already telling me that I was too patient with him and went out of my way to do nice things for him and he didn't deserve me.

So what's making me worry about every decision, every choice, especially romantic, I've made in the past seven and a half years? What's making me doubt myself?

Was it that my relationship (harrowing, chaotic) with him set the precedent for all my subsequent ones? Am I destined, nay, doomed to try too hard for all the wrong people? Am I terminally, lethally patient with people to whom I should not even give the time of day, much less hours of my thought and effort?

I'm not blameless, obviously. I'm not trying to paint a self-portrait of myself in the mantle of a martyr, an innocent caught in the crossfire. I fought with him, I yelled at him, I cried or sulked to get my way sometimes. I am not, never have been, and never will be the perfect girlfriend. I get bitchy, I want to be left alone sometimes, I don't always clean up after myself, I play my videogames and music too loudly, I don't always want to do what you and only you want to do, I get snarky. I'm a person. It's what we do. And once the copper shine of his persona acquired the scaly green patina only time can give it, I could have left, should have left, and I didn't, so anything that happened past that point was at least partially my issue.

But why did I stick it out? Why do I still? I recently wasted another eight-ish months on wanting this one guy who'd come back into my life with a bang and a boom last year. Since reconnecting, we never got together because he was more into playing cat and mouse games with me and leading me on and trying to decide if he wanted me or his ex-girlfriend. But I kept on keeping on. Oh boy, did I ever! I tried once or twice or three times to give up, to let go completely, but something drew me back again, and again, each time with renewed hope: fruitless, devastatingly naive hope. I put effort - a lot - into him, and into me as well. He wooed me with the right words in the right phrases: "I'm not as cocky now as I used to be, back when we first met" and "I really appreciate things more now, the little things, people in my life." Of course I bought it all, I bought it all like Carrie Bradshaw buys shoes or like I buy Ramen noodles on sale at Kroger (ten cents, dudes.***)

I have learned nothing.

It would seem.

After I bought into his Ramen-noodle-like charm (cheap, tastes good at first, fills you up fast but you feel dirty and sick with yourself later) and he bailed on me to hang out - as friends, mind you - three days in a row, I told him goodbye, in no uncertain terms. I unfriended him on Facebook. For the second time. And then I saw him at a show where a million of my friends were, and he spoke words to me, and I was there with a guy I like now, for whom I also might try a little too hard, be a little too patient, go a little too far out of my way to be nice. And it confused the hell out of me. So much so that the next night, at another show with my friend Bonnie, after long talks about men (and two beers), I texted him, asking him why he'd been civil to me. He said he was merely saying hi. And I told him not to; that we were not friends, that we would never be friends, and I didn't want him to talk to me anymore because I couldn't handle the game anymore. So far he hasn't. I have mixed feelings about it. Maybe if I'd tried harder, stuck in there longer, been a little more patient.

F that s.

I obviously haven't completely learned my lesson, and will probably get burned repeatedly until I either give up completely on everyone ever, or until someone proves to me that they know how to not take advantage of people. But I'm getting more careful about it; trying not to fall down flat for the users, the losers, the abusers. I might trip, but my balance is improving.

Are you wondering what happened to That Guy, the first one? I have no idea. We tried to be friends, on and off for the next couple of years. He started dating another girl and insisted we meet (another semi-creepy thing he did; he wanted all his exes to know each other and hang out, probably in hopes of a threesome or some such act), and she and I actually got to be pretty good friends and still are. But then the old hatred/desire to not ever be around him resurfaced and I made myself scarce. And he found me every time (damn myspace, livejournal, AIM, email, etc.) but I refused every advance. My MO with him was, if you didn't make a good boyfriend, you won't make a good friend either. He got mad, really mad, and we exchanged a few strongly-worded emails before he faded away into the ether. Last I heard he had a new new girlfriend and is living in Florida.

I'm really sorry, Florida.

*Not a good look
**I still have an unhealthy fear of escalators, and this is one of two reasons for it
***I was at a Salvation Army the other day that was selling them for 25c. There are so many things wrong with that sentence, no?

hierarchy of colas.

2009-05-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

This isn't important in the least, but I feel it bears saying.

1. McDonald's fountain Coke
2. Pepsi from a 2 liter bottle, poured into a thin-lipped plastic glass, with 4-6 ice cubes
3. Fountain Coke from any purveyor other than McDonald's.
4. Pepsi from a can
5. Pepsi from a 20 oz. bottle
6. Fountain Pepsi
7. Coke from a can
8. Coke from a 2 liter or 20 oz. bottle

Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi don't exist to me, hence their exclusion. And as for flavors: Cherry Coke > Cherry Pepsi. Mostly because of one unfortunate drunken night where I tried to mix Cherry Pepsi and coconut rum. Bad idea.

Yard Sale Tales, take three.

2009-05-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

Seven thousand years after the fact, I realized I have not updated this olde blogge with the rest of the yard sale tales. I'm rectifying this situation, post-haste. Sort of.

After the lady who punked us out of two quarters, the strangeness kept coming. A bunch of ladies kept moving boxes of books to peer at the (empty) boxes we'd laid on the ground as a buffer between books and damp grass/soil, and I kept having to tell them that the items pictured (my crappy pot/pan set, my crappy dishpan set, etc.) were not in the box, nor were they for sale. I didn't point out that if they were for sale, they probably would be in a more prominent place than under a very heavy box of very heavy books.

Sharon and I made a pizza run and left Noah to his own devices, pleading with him to not a) walk away or b) let people have things for free. In return for obeying, he got a free pizza from us. Not a bad deal. Of course, while we were gone, an actual book lover came by and asked for a specific author, one I'm sure I had some books by, but they were probably on my 'keeper' shelves. Harrumph. After a near-disaster at the pizza parlor*, we made it back to my house juuuuust as it started to rain. Hurriedly, all the books on the ground were covered with a plastic groundcloth, while everything else got a bedsheet, and we retired inside to enjoy our pizzas and not get rained on. A lady (waiting for the bus down the street) came by so we all marched outside and listened as she inquired as to whether we had very specific items, like elastic waistband pants, or Wrangler size 34 mens jeans. We didn't. She also really liked to look at the empty boxes to see what they might've held, and was really interested in the box that held my torchiere living room lamp. She asked if it was battery-operated. I have never met a battery-operated tall (6'+) lamp ever in my life. Like our very first "saler" she talked a lot and bought nothing. I guess for lonely older people, garage sales are like free therapy. Or new friends. Sharon and I also were pretty certain that she was going to try to walk into my house, as she slowly made her way over to the front door and stood uncomfortably close to me as I sat on the stoop, chomping on pizza. Sharon inched over to help blockade the door. After saying repeatedly that she didn't mean to make us come out in the drizzle and she would let us go, she stood there still, talking more and more about her life, and then finally made her merry way down to the bus stop. Before she left, though, a couple who'd visited briefly earlier that day came back, and with $40 in hand, bought Sharon's big-ticket item: a set of authentic, licensed Harry Potter chairs. It was really fun seeing him try to get them in their midsize sedan: two in the trunk, one next to his baby in the backseat, and the last one went upside down on his wife's lap in the passenger seat. Ha! Hopefully she made it home without any of her vital organs impaled by the chair legs.

Our last honest-to-goodness legitimate weirdo was an older man who came up, asked first off if we had a table and 4 chairs for sale, then picked up one little dayplanner thing with ponies and pandas on it and asked if, nay, proclaimed that everything we had was for children. (Nevermind the clothing, kitchen and household paraphernalia, books for one and all, poker and drinking stuff, movies, etc.). He then started a lengthy conversation with Sharon about a (women's) leather belt, trying to fit it around his rotund belly and marveling when the ends didn't meet. This is a nice leather, he said. Sharon said it was. He said it must've cost fifty dollars or more. Sharon was pretty sure it didn't, because she is like me in that she rarely spends $50 on something like that. But he insisted. He browsed around and argued incessantly with me about the price of two books, which he assumed went together just because we'd placed them together. I did cut the price a bit because he was buying two of them, but was pretty firm on the $1.25 for two freaking books. He was pretty adamant about paying me no more than $1.00. I'm a fairly stubborn person and don't like bargaining or haggling or any of that stuff, and I also like saying no with some regularity. In my big-chain bookstore day job, I rarely get to say no to people, and when there is a chance to say no, I have to 'turn it into YES!' for the customer's benefit. Barf. So I took all the 'no's I'd been saving at the day job for years, and I countered every "$1.00?" he uttered with "No. $1.25" and eventually it worked. Took a while. But it worked. After he paid up the dollar and the freaking quarter he'd been so reluctant to fork over, he stood creepily in front of my house/door. We three had been tromping through the house fairly regularly, for snacks or bathroom or to unearth more treasures to put outside, so the inside door was open, screen door was closed. He started asking me if there was a refrigerator for sale inside. I got to say no. An oven. No. A washer and dryer. No. A refrigerator (again). Wait for it.......................... NO. Undeterred by my negativity, he babbled on about buying my house, with all my appliances. I'm pretty sure all I gave him was a stony glare, and eventually he left. Thank goodness.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, and I don't recall having to argue with anyone else about quarters, which is always a good thing. A few more book people came, and some kids from across the street came, and one of them asked about baby clothes which kind of freaked me out because it put notions of that kid in England who impregnated some girl at a ridiculously young age, and then some neighbors from down/across the street came over with their cutie orange tomcat following them like a dog or a child. He investigated many of the books we had for sale while his people looked at the dvds. They left with a few things each, while he left with nothing in hand (paw?). When they left, he hesitated slightly, obviously wanting to check out more of our wares, but then trotted after them with much aplomb. It was probably the cutest part of the day. Wait, no it wasn't**.

As we were closing up a few people came and went and one woman even bought some stuff, apologizing because we were hustling to get everything inside and here she was buying stuff. She was nice, so we let her browse and didn't give her a hard time. (Not that we would've done that. We're probably a little too polite to do that. Maybe.)

Everything got shoved into my second bedroom, formerly the library, more recently, the former potential roommate's room***, and it only took about a half hour to get everything back inside where it belonged. We divvied up the cash money and though we didn't make the millions we expected to make, it was a fairly good haul for both of us, for our first EVER yard sale, and relatively early in the season. Noah got to take home some of my vintage clothes as compensation for all his hard work, and he was chuffed about that, I think!

I expect that with the additional advertising/pre-planning we intend on doing for the next one (June 13/14! Be there!) we will have an even crazier cast of characters, and probably some recurring ones too! Woo! Can't wait!

I will keep hoarding my 'no's at the day job, and plastic bags at the grocery store, and keep reading through my 'to sell when finished' pile of books... till next time!

*So, we ordered pizza at the parlor, ran to 7-11 to get refreshments, and came back. This kinda skanky girl - ok, she was REALLY skanky, kinda hit, and way too orange-tan for the middle of May - was waiting with her derelict boyfriend in the parlor. An order came up that looked suspiciously like it could be ours: two mediums, a small, and an order of bread. The cashier called out my name. I went to go up there to get it but skankwhore was right up at the register and nabbed it. I watched incredulously. Halfway to the door she goes, in a skankwhore way, "I don't think this is ours." So I grabbed it back. Disaster averted.
**Neighbor brought over some bricks to hold down our tarps when it was sprinkling. With her were her adorable children, the tiniest one clad in a too-big raincoat that overflowed past her hands and knees. She found a puddle, splashed in it, and entranced, could not be pulled away. That's adorable spelled with a capital ADORABLE.
***jerk reneged. End of story (for now).

I want fifty cents.

2009-05-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

Though I used to troll garage/yard/estate sales with the rest of the weirdos, I'd forgotten how weird they could get. When you're shopping, browsing, your contact with the other shoppers is pretty limited. You might be eyeing the same strange little ceramic creature as another, both nervously hoping that the other won't pick it up. You might bump butts in cramped quarters bending over to look at kitchen doohickeys on a plastic shelf. But generally, it's a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am affair, unless you happen to spend an inordinate amount of time at one garage sale. When you're behind the 'register,' however, your contact with strange strangers is neverending. Never. Ending.

Day one of Sharon's and my yard sale was a little slow, and not too harrowing as far as customers. It was a Friday and we belatedly realized that most people work Fridays and might not be out garage saling. We weren't expecting the barrage of crazies that hit us on day two, from the get-go. Thank goodness Sharon's brother Noah was there to help too!

Our first "customer" didn't actually buy anything. She was traversing the neighborhood as crazies tend to do, and happened upon our yard sale. I have the distinct pleasure of living just 6 or so houses off a fairly busy road, right by a few bus stops and businesses, so a lot of people come by during the day. (There is also a daycare center at the corner, so my favorite time of day is when the daycare employees and their wee charges come walking down the sidewalks like a mama duck and her many little ducklings. It's been known to give me cute attacks.) Customer #1 browsed a lot, and talked even more. She was obviously lonely, and probably didn't have many people to talk to, so we obliged, answering with the requisite "right!" or "mhmm" or even "that's what I hear!" and often even a full-fledged, legitimate sentence. She was almost back on her merry way down the rest of the street when she saw the 50c stuffed animals we'd piled in a plastic box, and regaled us with a half sob-story, half plea, about how she doesn't have kids because of "serious health problems" (never mind that she was in her sixties) but a lot of kids come over and she always has stuffed animals for them to play with and they always want to take them home so she gives them to them, and boy would she like to have some new ones for them but she is on a limited income....

I am sympathetic to those on a limited income because I am on a limited income, as is my mother, but the point of a yard sale is to exchange goods for a small amount of money. If I were truly a bleeding-heart liberal, I probably would have just given them to her, but I guess I am colder and more rotten than I give myself credit for, because I was really holding out for those two quarters to rub together. Perhaps this is why on those "political leanings" quizzes all over the internet, I come up as "fiscally conservative." I told her that we were going to be having this sale monthly and she should check back then for them and more stuffed animals, which prompted her to ask if maybe I would hold them for her till then. I'm going to reiterate myself and say again that yard sale = goods for money (small). Which means I want these things out of my possession. Now. For a small fee. If I wanted to give things away for free, expeditiously, they would have been at Salvation Army last year. But Sharon and I paid good money for those things, and we are obviously not expecting to recover our costs, since everything was at about a 95% discount of the orginal price, it would be good to get enough money to get a candy bar or a package of carrot seeds so we could eat in some way or another. I told the woman, very nicely, that if the stuffies were still there at the end of the day I would be more than willing to hold them for her, but implied that I would not be so much willing to stuff them away somewhere so I could make 50c next month instead of 50c today*.

After that woman, we had a drove of people. Two separate families came and milled about, and one family bought some things and left while the other family looked at everything and made piles of stuff, all while the doyenne of the family was making odd remarks about tarot cards and pennies in shoes. I was selling my modded PSX** with a few original games and a bunch of burned games and one of the kids in the family wanted to know how much some of the games were. He was about nine years old so I made sure to tell him and his mom that the burned games would ONLY work on a PSX with a mod chip - like the one I was selling. They looked at me blankly. So I repeated everything I'd said, no less than four times, before I finally just said "You can have the whole system and all the games for $5." Sold.

Sharon and I tallied everything up, essentially slashing prices in half because they were buying so much, and came to the grand total of $21.50, for the game system, a bunch of books, a bunch of household stuffs, and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm sure I completely forgot about: a whole box and a bag's worth of stuff. Pretty good deal. When she heard the total, though, the mom put on a great show.

"What are we going to put back, kids? Gonna have to put some stuff back..." even though they'd already carried it to the car. Sharon and I sat there, stone still. She rummaged in her pockets, muttering "hope I got enough money..." and pulled out a twenty. We sat there some more while she stood there, then rummaged again, pulling out a dollar and then walking away. Sharon and I stared at each other, whispering "Did she just punk us out of fifty cents?"

Oh yes she did.

On her way back to her car, she stopped, turned around and wandered back to Sharon, thrusting a dollar into her hands. Sharon, assuming that she was making good on the four bits she owed us, made change and was giving her four bits back as change when the woman said "Why are you giving me this?" Apparently she wanted to buy something else, priced at $3, and Sharon stuck firm on the price rather than slashing it in half like we'd been doing. So the woman dug out her money again and handed over the other $2. Strange. We looked at each other incredulously. She had money. We undercut everything she bought. What happened to our 50c?! Jerk.

I think my ire over the fittycent incident is taking over my brain right now and filling me again with rage and ire, so I'll have to continue with the yard sale tales another day.

Because it didn't end there.

Oh boy, did it not end there.

*Even though it is just 50c. I must sound ludicrous getting so uppity about 50c. But did you guys know 50c is one half of a dollar? And that dollars add up? And that I really like/need dollars? Do the math.
**Oh boy. This is a fun story. An ex of mine from another day and age, my pre-21 days, gave me his old PSX, for my birthday, with a bunch of crappy burned games that I wouldn't want to play (at the time, I didn't like dude games like I do now.) Why did I get a hand-me down birthday present, you ask? Was he destitute? Nope. He bought himself a brand-spanking new PS2, which had just come out. He bought himself a gift. For my birthday. Now you can probably see why I broke up with him.

Yard for sale. Make offer. House and contents not included. Day one.

2009-05-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

Garage salers are a weird bunch. Of course, I'm including yard salers, estate salers, and anyone who buys anything potentially/probably/most likely used from any private source other than an actual resale or thrift store in this group. This was one of the most important things I learned in the past two days, having co-chaired my first ever* garage/yard sale with my lovely friend Sharon.

It was a somewhat hastily-thrown-together event, mostly because I forgot that we'd planned it for this weekend, and the leftovers of 'mostly' was because I procrastinated in getting stuff together when I actually did remember. I was up on and off most of Thursday night/Friday morning, catching a few hourlong naps on the couch, with TV blaring and lights blazing so that I wouldn't actually allow myself to fall all the way asleep; my waking moments were spent frantically washing clothes to sell, frantically gathering my multitudinous boxes** of books to sell, frantically trying to price things, frantically making signs for the sale, and frantically doing everything else I forgot to do beforehand, but sleep. Yep, nope, I frantically slept too (see: "TV blaring and lights blazing"). I might've eaten at some point; I probably did, because I love eating and it's one of my favorite activities, but really I was so busy it's hard to say. (I would never forget to eat, we'll leave it at that.)

We didn't have many customers the first day. I was at my 'day job' when we got our first sale, with Sharon manning the sales tables and holding down the fort most excellently, after doing most of the set-up without me, due to my stupid job(s) that require me to be up at the ass of dawn. The first thing to sell, conveniently, was one of the remnants*** of my life with my ex-boyfriend: boxes of Legos we bought together so he could make Mario, Luigi, the Dr. Mario viruses (virii?), and Link with the connecting tiles, and Lego kits so we could make weird-ass dinosaurs and creatures and whatever. Good riddance, Legos! - a phrase I never thought I'd utter, but in this context, it works. Sort of. Don't know what you've got till it's gone. (I mean the Legos, not the ex, in case you were suspicious.)

I came home laden with soups and sodas for all - well, not all the shoppers, as I'm not that nice, but for Sharon, my mom, who'd come to visit, and myself. When I got there, my adorable neighbor with her two adorable children were there, shopping and being adorable. I hate how some people get to be adorable all the time and not have to work hard for it like I do. I gave her small adorable little boy a banana, and didn't even charge him, all in the name of brotherly love, even though I live in Hazel Park and that ain't Philadelphia. I also learned that her darling baby daughter was having a birthday the next day, and that said darling baby daughter has the same name as my dearly departed doggy; I did make mention of that, but left out, for Neighbor's sake, the fact that dearly departed doggy's ashes were in a planter not six feet (get it?) from where she stood. Neighbor and I introduced ourselves, formally, which was good. I'd never actually MET her, or any of my neighbors really, so it was a pleasant surprise and I welcomed the chance to get to know the people I've lived around for the past THREE YEARS but have neglected to make any sort of contact with. My bad.

My friend Paul and his wife Katie (MORE adorable people) with their equally adorable baby Lilly accidentally showed up - I know Paul pretty much only through Livejournal, and then by stalkingly looking him up on Facebook since he lives near me and I love being a creeper, and it would facilitate me stealing his two adorable dogs. Luckily this didn't deter him (much) from being my friend, and he occasionally visits me at work and even once threatened to give me a hug when I was feeling particularly garbage-filled. Anyway, they don't know where I live, other than in the grand sense of 'The Universe/The Milky Way/The Earth/America/Michigan/Oakland County/Hazel Park/a street/a house.' But they saw one of my awesome signs**** and were either awed by its awesomeness (in which case I'm glad it fulfilled its destiny) or were bored enough to come check out a yard sale where there might be stuff they could buy. Given that they didn't know my address (but do now, in case they want to stalk me and/or leave their baby with me so I can have her), I was surprised to see them walk into my jungle-esque backyard.

"Did you read my tweet on Twitter about my yard sale?!?" I squealed to Paul when I saw him, even as I remembered that he doesn't have "The Twitter" yet.

"Did you read about it on Facebook!?!" I squealed again, even as I remembered that I didn't post anything to Facebook about it.

I guess olde-fashionede print advertising still works these days, somewhat.

Unless they saw my post on Craigslist about it, which I just forgot about till now.

Anyway they bought a bunch of stuff, books and a DVD that I later forgot was sold when my aforementioned adorable neighbor sent her father back to inquire about the next day. Paul made me take a dollar more than I was going to charge him. I hate him. So much.

Most of our customers on Friday were tolerable, except for that rapscallion Paul. Some stop-and-lookers, but mostly everyone bought something or another. Sharon and I were both shocked that she priced and sold a whole stack of little plates (six or so?) at 25c. For the whole stack. When she easily could have asked for/gotten 25c for each one, or all for a dollar. WHATEVER*****.

If you know me or Sharon, you know we are Giant Book Nerds™. Sharon used to work at the bookstore where I still work, and has not lost the ingrained sense of bookly organization that bookselling inflicts upon those who deign to enter its ranks. At one point, instead of being as lazy as we previously had been, we decided, ridiculously, inanely, "omfg, what is wrong with us"ly, to organize all our books into categories: beach reads, chick lit, school books/classic literature, cooking, house/home/garden, health, general fiction and general reference. I'm not talking like two boxes of books here. I'm talking a lot more than that. Ten? Maybe more. Fifteen? Maybe more. Between the two of us? Entirely likely. Probably more, considering the next day I dragged out five more boxes of new additions and it felt like nothing. It was ludicrous. But we did it. And we felt such such nerdy glee and satisfaction when it was done, so it was worth it for that, even if our shoppers didn't care.

I'm not even gonna talk about the snacks we had. We had so many snacks. So many. Snacks are our BFF. They kept our energy up, so don't hate on us for loving snacks. You'd probably love snacks too if all you had to do on a beautiful Friday was sit in a cute, if overgrown, backyard and sing along to the oldies station and talk about people and read and make origami and wait for people to buy all the stuff you didn't want. Snacks are LIFESAVERS.

I also shouldn't talk about the shopping we did, both from each other. Or the shopping we did from ourselves as we realized we couldn't, wouldn't part with whatever it was that we once deemed useless in our lives. So I won't talk about it. Compared to what we put out, what we took back or bought for zero dollars from each other was miniscule. But I got some killer stuff, dudes. So did Sharon! Granted, we could have probably gotten dollar dollar bills for that stuff, ya'll, but sometimes you need to treat yourself to something you spirit away from your friend, right?

Around five, we closed up shop, which consisted of putting a heavyweight dropcloth over the 'book section' on the patio and packing up & putting inside some stuff that might get ruined by dew overnight. Shortly after Sharon left, I left to go visit my mom at our barn and try to coerce her into buying me dinner since she forgot, for the millionth time in a row (or third), the fudge, my very favorite kind of fudge, she'd bought for me in Ohio (Maple- no nuts -by the way, if you want to get me some). Shortly after that, it started sprinkling. And then it started raining. I ran home to lug everything inside, eliciting a promise from my mom that she'd come by and help me (since she refused my offer to let her buy me dinner - hmph) as long as she didn't have to "bring in EVERYTHING" by herself. Well, she didn't have to bring in anything because I brought it in all myself, a great feat of accomplishment. That was the least fun part of my day, and it is with this that I justify the aforementioned snack consumption and in-house shopping. So there. Take that, naysayers in Horseville! WORD PLAY!

So that was our yard sale, day one. Day two tomorrow. It might have pictures. Day two was the crazy day. Boy howdy, was it ever the crazy day.

*When I was about ten or eleven I would gather up stuff my seven-year-old neighbor would never need, and insist she give me quarters or dollars for them. It usually worked. One time her mom made her return the stuff to me to get the money back. Losers. Apparently that doesn't count as a garage sale though, since I was really only targeting one mark, errr, person. So this was my first ever official garage sale.
**It is sick how many boxes of books I had/have to sell. Sick. You'd commit me to a mental ward if you saw. Sharon's about to, I think. That's why I'm at Starbucks, hiding out and nursing a white chocolate mocha and stealing wifi, instead of waiting for the short bus to come get me.
***All of his life with me that's left now at the house, other than the Uglydolls he gave me over the years (which I'd rather hide in a closet and occasionally hug when I need a hug than sell) is the vacuum cleaner he "lent" me, and a few plates I tried to sell but might keep so I don't have to keep not-washing the ones I already have. Everything else sold this weekend. But then I found a necklace he gave me. That's going in the next sale. True story. PS those Lego figures of the 8-bit Nintendo characters were pretty BAMF. But I broke them down one day when I was feeling particularly vindictive towards our failed relationship. True story. Sometimes you have to take it out on the kids, you know? (Jokes)
****On my way home from work, I stopped at a stop sign in my neighborhood, and looking to the left, saw a cute handmade sign for a yard sale. "What a cute sign!" I thought. "I should stop by there before I go home... wait. That's my sign. I made that. That's for at my house! For our yard sale!" Tricking myself into going to my own sale: awesome, or devious? Deviously awesome? That.
*****Our main objective in this sale was to Get Rid of Stuff. With Sharon's impending move to the Big Apple and my impending descent into poverty, it is imperative that we both get rid of stuff and obtain money. The best way to do this, it seems, is to sell things. Anything. At almost any price. If 25c for a whole stack of plates accomplishes both objectives in one fell swoop, so be it. Even if the money obtained is probably not even enough for a pack of gum. But it will buy one individual mini Reese's PB Cup at 7-11. They're only fifteen cents, so you get change back, almost - but not quite - enough to buy another one. Maybe you can haggle the cashier down, which is the theme of tomorrow's blog post about day two of the yard sale.

Rooming with roomies. In a house with rooms.

2009-04-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Today I have a friend coming over to see my teeny tiny house, not as a hanging-out visit or to play with my dog or to borrow a dvd or eat my food, not that I have any. He's coming over to check out the living quarters, as a potential roommate.

This, to me, is a Very Big Thing.

I'm a solitary person. Apart from the many many years I spent living with my mother, I've only lived with a handful of people: my best friend in college (Very Bad Idea), two other girls in a house/apartment built into a barn (Not A Lie), and with my last serious boyfriend (Not My Finest Hour).

Very Bad Idea seemed like a great idea at the time. High school best friends, going to college, living the life? Sounded awesome. It was at times - on some levels, it's great having a roommate you've known for awhile. It's also living hell sometimes. Our friendship pretty much died over the course of one and a half semesters, though, all because of a microwave. My microwave, a graduation gift from my aunt, was coming home to live with me after I unceremoniously quit halfway through the second semester, and this made my best friend Quite Mad. It was all so long ago, so immature and trivial, on both of our parts, that for all intents and purposes I've blocked out the worst of it, and now we both choose to gloss over the fact that we didn't talk for about two years after the incident. We've grown up and all but forgotten the intricacies of the situation, but it was Not Pretty while it was happening, and it made me ask myself, if a tight friendship can be torn asunder by a microwave, what chance does any live-in friendship hold?

My second roommate situation went a little better, mostly because it was with girls I'd never met before. After trying again, unsuccessfully, to attend the university I'd flunked out of during the Very Bad Idea era, I got a job doing barn chores at a nearby farm. Pay wasn't much, or anything really, but room/board were included, and it was close enough to the university and the county community college that I could pick up and go to one another if I should choose. Also, it kept most of my college friendships intact, and it was not *that* far from all my favorite bars. (Bear in mind, I was newly 21. I had a LOT of favorite bars.) My two new roommates and I literally lived in a barn - a house that was built into the barn - hence the "Not A Lie." Exit out the front door into the main aisleway; exit out the bathroom to the tack room, to the side aisleway. Other than the gigantic windows in my bedroom that always made me think someone was outside watching me do whatever I was doing even though we were in the middle of nowhere, it was a good experience. Oh, also other than waking up in the middle of the night every two or so hours to go bottle-feed an orphaned foal; that wasn't my favorite part. We were all very different girls, but managed to have fun together and get along pretty well. Even if we did live in a barn. By the way? It is very difficult to explain to houseguests exactly what a breeding dummy it is and why it is the first visible thing on turning down our driveway. After awhile in the barn, I got homesick and came back to Detroit and lived in my mom's house again for awhile, which sucked for reasons that belong in another blog. (Love you, Mom!)

Then, a few years later, I had what we will call Not My Finest Hour. I learned a lot from this experience; namely, that a boyfriend and a girlfriend struggling to get along with each other in the first place should probably not move in together. Oh, especially if they work together, too. For a year and a half or so of being together, I pushed for it till it happened, and then I didn't know what to do, and I couldn't wait to get out, or get him out, or please for the love of God, someone leave already. We fought, we made up, we fought again, made up again. At some point I went to Ohio to visit family, and came back to say "Are we still together? Because it doesn't feel like we are." We'd broken up for hours at a time on countless occasions, and I'd screwed up pretty continuously because I guess I didn't like him that much, but this was it, the real thing, the break-up. That led to a month-and-a-half long stint of walking around on eggshells, tiptoeing around each other as we tried to figure out which of us, if either of us, stayed in the house, and who got what, and when, and why, and how. With some finagling of the finances I figured I could handle it, so we went with that plan, but in the meantime, he had to stay somewhere. Somewhere was there. That was fun. It's a lot of fun trying to sleep on a mangy old lumpy couch while your ex slumbers effortlessly on the queen bed you used to share in the room you used to share, a few feet away. Likewise, I'm sure it wasn't fun for him when my Dude Best Friend, who coincidentally had just come home from being overseas for four years, who I mayyyyyy have had romantic feelings for over the previous many years, came over to pick me up for a sort-of-date. As I said - Not My Finest Hour.

Since then, the only being I've lived with, apart from an assortment of betta fishes, and for a brief stint, a darling cat named Mabel Pauline who ended up being better suited to living at my mom's house, is my pit bull, Frankie. Admittedly, Frank is not the most ideal roommate. I come home from one of my jobs and he is either a) lounging on the couch without a care in the world, sometimes licking one or another of his nether regions or b) sitting guiltily in a corner because he's destroyed a book/shoe/trash can/plastic doohickey in his boredom, nevermind the box of toys and bones and kongs I conveniently place at a doggily grabbable height. He doesn't clean up after he wrecks something, and he sure doesn't clean up after me. Menial chores like dishes and taking the trash out are too plebeian for him. But he's a big black pit bull, so he must make a good watchdog and earn his keep that way right? Well, although I have those signs saying "Beware of Dog," this 'watchdog' is more likely to kill your face with kisses than to attempt any sort of malice or ill will, unless you are actually a cat or squirrel in a human disguise. He only barks when he has to go outside, and much like me, he hides when the doorbell rings. I hate answering the door. It's usually Jehovah's Witnesses.

But now. Now I have bills racking up on bills, and no money, and a second (paying) job not looking likely, and the urgent need to find my horse somewhere else to live (more on that later), and a friend happened to mention that he was looking for a room to rent. That lightbulb went off, and it's not used often so it was a little dusty and flickered with potential conflict and apprehension for a minute before it burned bright, but I offered him my second bedroom, which has always been my library/den, meant (in my mind) only for books and a chair and a lamp to read by.

He declined but thanked me for the offer, and I was inwardly and outwardly relieved, given our somewhat complicated friendship, the details of which I won't dare go into here, other than to say what I just said about it: it's complicated. I had made The Friendly Gesture and offered, but knew he would refuse, and was content and secure in that knowledge.

A few days later, though... the question came up again, from him, and as I've never been fond of the take-back, I didn't bother with that, but reinstated The Friendly Gesture. Before I knew it, I was detailing the ins (few) and outs (many) of the house, and we were talking internet and bills and rent. And now he's coming over today to check out the place, meet that vicious dog of mine, and see the room that may be his room for a while. I've been cleaning like a madwoman, trying to get every room, or most every room, in tip-top shape. I've also been freaking the hell out about things like: our complicated friendship, potentially losing my God-given right to walk around pantsless (or less frequently, shirtless), having someone else in my tiny house when I have to poop or fart, our complicated friendship, whether or not my dog will like him or vice versa, whether he will be a dependable roomie, our complicated friendship. Most of my friends have had a predictable response, given the nature of our complicated friendship, which is now a vastly overused phrase in this post, but the generalities of which you can probably infer by now. That's what worries me the most.

But, being a generally optimistic person, depression and life circumstances notwithstanding, I'm looking at the positives as well: that complicated though it may be, our friendship is still that, a friendship, and there are many times where I need a friend around but don't feel like putting on pants (there's that again...) and leaving the house to find one, and don't feel like inviting people over to comfort me, preferring to wrap myself in a blanket and curl on the couch with my dog and The Big Lebowski. Having someone who goes to all the same bars I go to, who knows a bunch of the same people I know, and who (hopefully) won't let me sit around and throw pity parties for myself every night is gonna be awesome. Or it better be.

Also, I'm not gonna lie... the rent-money-help is quite appealing.

I think the benefits (companionship, monetary helps) are going to outweigh the negatives. I don't have the kind of relationship with him that I had with the people in the Very Bad Idea, Not A Lie, or Not My Finest Hour situations, so who knows how it will end.

Should be fun finding out, though.

Oh, also? After I warned him that I don't have internet, he said he'd pay for it. That's pretty much an automatic win. Right?

Eulogy on the Dog.

2009-04-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

I don't have taxes on my mind today.

I don't have them on my mind in part because I finished them months ago, as soon as I got my W2s and my 1099 with my paycheck and in the mail, respectively, as I always need my tax monies in a Very Big Way As Soon As Is Humanly Possible. Until all the media outlets started reminding me and every other American of tax-filing age that the ides of April were upon us, I had all but forgotten about that aspect of the date.

I don't have them on my mind because last year April 15 gained a new meaning for me.

On April 14 last year, my mom called me, saying the four words I'd expected to hear for months prior, every time she called, every time I called. Every time I hadn't heard those words at the onset of a conversation, I'd inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. Every time we started off with "Hi Poopy Butt" or "Hi, it's me," my heart unclenched, relaxed, pumped its blood, went about its daily business. It was by unspoken agreement that should the time come, those four words would start the conversation, not be buried in the middle of it, as an unwelcome surprise, as a hefty credit card bill in a pile of junk mailers, as a decision in the midst of frivolities.

"I think it's time," she said when I picked up. April 14, my heart stopped. April 14, my heart resumed normal function, but my brain's function slowed to a crawl, not able to formulate the necessary words. April 14, I wanted one more day.

"I'm coming over," was all I managed.

I wanted to see how bad it was, how bad she'd gotten. She was old, fifteen years, a good age for a corgi-mix pound puppy, but she'd never lost the spring in her step, the wide smile on her face.

Molly had gotten out of bed that morning, done her business, and retired back to the bed. After that, nothing could coax her out, not even food, and especially not her favorite food in the whole wide world, cheese. When she did move around, it was drunkenly, with no semblance of balance. I got there after work, and lay with her, all night long, holding her, petting her, not wanting to let go but knowing that in the morning, I would have to. I hardly slept at all. I had a bottle of water for her, and a plate to pour it into. When she looked thirsty but unable to drink, I wet my finger and let her lick it. She ate a few bites of cheese, a few bites of rice, a few bites of chicken, and my hope soared. It's not her time, I thought. My selfish heart told my logical brain that, and they had a conversation, and my logical brain almost took my selfish heart's side, until it looked the facts squarely in the eyes.

In the summer of 2005, Molly had developed a large bump on her face. We took her to the vet, they drained it of a lot of blood but not much else. It came back shortly after, Bigger, Badder, probably Bloodier. Back to the vet she went, and this time, even though she was 12 years old and not an ideal candidate for surgery at all, our vet said he would do surgery on it and biopsy the lump in case it was more than an infection. She had the surgery on July 20, and the lump turned out to be cancerous, so we were all extremely glad that we'd gone ahead with the (expensive) surgery. There was no bone involvement, so that was a good thing, but we were advised that nasal carcinoma in dogs is extremely invasive, and it could come back.

Molly in the car on the way to the vet for surgery

the size of Molly's BBB lump

Molly, post-surgery, beautiful and happy as a clam

Molly's incision site

In October of that year, Molly's "sister," Raisin, my mom's Lab mix, lived out her life, and Molly lost a good friend. Raisin Anne and Molly Jane had not always gotten along perfectly; in fact, in their early years, Miss Raisin used to terrorize Molly with alarming frequency, being about 30 lbs heavier, three years older, and of a more aggressive nature than Miss MJ. As the years went on, they grew more comfortable together, settling into the kind of canine life that could be most accurately described as affable doggy spinsterhood. Since we'd gotten Molly a few years after Raisin, she'd photographically fallen under the radar, due to "Second Puppy Syndrome," in that we took many many photos of Raisy as a wriggling baby pup (and far too many of me at 9-10 years old, in huge glasses and technicolor clothes, sporting an unfortunate haircut, but it was the early 1990s) but considerably fewer of Molly, who was, in my VERY Humble and Completely Unbiased Opinion, the cuter of the two dogs (sorry, Raisin, I do love you and miss you very much, but Molly was My Dog). I regret letting Molly fall victim to SPS, because honestly... adorable. She was an adorable puppy.

Molly and Raisin, their last summer together.

Mom got a new dog a few months later, and Molly sort-of accepted him, in the way that much-older sisters or brothers accept new baby brothers or sisters: reluctantly but with a touch of happiness at having someone to boss around.

Molly and Petey

Two years after Raisin's death, Molly was wheezing and having trouble breathing at times, so she got vetted, and we were told that it was likely that her nasal carcinoma was making a comeback. There was a small chance it was simply an Upper Respiratory Infection but in all likelihood, it was the cancer. We got her on antibiotics, and some pain medication. She improved, but not enough to blot out the probability that her cancer was back. The vet talked with us about our options, which included radiation and a second surgery, neither of which she recommended due to Molly's fourteen years.

She made it through both my birthday in late September and Thanksgiving, when Mom and I packed up all three of our dogs, her dog Petey, my Miss Molly, and the dog I'd adopted at my new house, Frankie, and went down to Ohio to visit family. Frankie, a pit bull, adored, loved, and respected Molly. He doted on her. Cherished her. Would not let her out of his site, and was at her side to protect her if anyone dared to disrupt her. (Molly had always been a happy, loving dog, but in her old age had grown a little crotchety and a lot opinionated!) She, on the other hand, accepted his adoration reluctantly and gave him little back - a character trait I consider slightly virtuous now and wish I could adopt in my own interpersonal relations.

Molly in Ohio around my birthday

Frankie, always on Molly-Watch.

Two months later she already looked older and not as "there"

Christmas passed, with Molly intact. She had no patience for the unwrapping of gifts, though she did enjoy the bones and treats we plied her with.

Winter came, went, gave way to spring and the green grass made an appearance. What I really really wanted most for Molly was for the grass to come in thick and full, as one of her favorite things in the world was to roll, back and forth, in it, and then luxuriate in the sun on her squashed-down patch of earth. She got it, but barely. The effort was tremendous.

Molly in her squashed-down patch of earth in earlier, better days.

So when my mom called that day, I was ready, and I was not ready. I'd grown up with this dog, she'd been there for me through some very tough times as I went through high school and its accompanying angst. I'd loved her for fifteen years, longer than I've ever loved a person outside of my family, and I'd lived with her for nearly that length of time, spending most of my nights with her at my feet on the bed, or snuggled into the crook of my knees. I wanted more time, my selfish heart wanted more time, I wanted one more winter of throwing snowballs to her - the one "toy" she would willingly try to fetch, but end up destroying between her flailing paws. Yes, I wanted one more summer of her lolling in the grass. I wanted one more of every season with her, and one more of every one after that.

I stayed by her side that whole night, went home briefly in the morning to take care of Frankie, went back to take her to the vet. I carried her downstairs, as one does a baby, and in essence she was one again, just bigger and older. I talked to her the whole ride to the vet's office, while my mom drove and I tried not to cry.

"What a good dog."
"What a beautiful girl."
"You are my favorite."

We hadn't even made an appointment. Dr. Smaller had been seeing Molly for years, knew her age, had arranged her surgery, had been there when the cancer came back. He saw us walk in, Molly helpless and a bit confused in my arms, and he knew.

It was quick. We were in the examination room and she was being prepared before I had the chance to change my mind. It was my decision after all, I was her caregiver, her "owner," but she was as much mine as I was hers. If this was the wrong decision, if I was killing my dog because I couldn't afford another surgery or radiation or more aggressive treatments, or if I was killing my dog because... no. After the split second where my selfish heart battled my logical brain, they came to an agreement: she was suffering, she was old, she was ready to go, she did not blame me, but loved me for my decision. I'd made "if" compromises at the last minute - "If she struggles during preparation, I'm changing my mind," etc. She didn't struggle. She was ready to go, and I let her go, which to date has been one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in any facet of my life.

I held her. I stroked her all the way through the end, and past the end, past when the last breath of life had left her. Dr. Smaller let us stay in there with her as long as we needed, which was a very long time. I used a lot of Kleenex. We told each other stories about her, like the time when Mom brought home a pizza and Molly had been accidentally shut in the computer room, which was not an uncommon occurrence, as she was very quiet and rather liked her solitude. She rarely made a fuss of being shut in there alone, but on that day, she made a royal racket about being shut up in there, having smelled the cheese and grease and delicious that was being enjoyed, sans her, by her human companions. We talked about the grass in the summer and the snow in the winter, and the trot she affected only when we were going for a W-A-L-K: purposeful, strident, businesslike. We talked about the smile almost always on her face, and her gentle nature, and how in the past fifteen years the only sign of aggression she'd ever shown was once when she was feeling sick and I tried to pull her out from under the bed and she snapped at me only as a warning. We talked about her begrudging acceptance of the two new dogs in her life, Pete and Frank, and the comfortable companionship with Raisin that we were sure she'd missed in the past two years.

When we couldn't talk or cry anymore, when all we could do was look at her and know that we'd done the right thing, it was time to go. I took her collar off to take with me, and then I did something utterly sentimental and utterly unlike me: I scavenged a scrap of paper from somewhere within my cavernous purse, and wrote on it "I love you, Molly" and put it under her nose with a strand of my hair that'd fallen out, as if she could still smell me. I'm good at make-believe.

I hadn't made any aftercare plans, even though I'd known this day was coming for quite some time. The staff at the vet's asked if I would like to have her cremated, but I didn't have any extra money, so I said no. After getting home and remembering a segment on Oprah about dog pounds, I freaked out because I was worried they would put her body in a black plastic bag with ten other dogs, and throw her in the dumpster. I called back and said I would rearrange some funds so that I could have her cremated and keep her ashes. A bunch of lovely, loving, wonderful, beautiful friends donated some money to me to make that even more feasible, and for that I am forever and ever grateful. I got a very lovely card from a very sweet friend, who had printed out and enclosed The Last Will and Testament of An Extremely Distinguished Dog, a eulogy of sorts that Eugene O'Neill had written after the passing of his Dalmatian. I still love reading it.

The day I got her ashes back, I cried, and cried and cried. I cried when they called, I cried when I drove there, I cried in the office when Dr. Smaller hugged me to him, I cried on the way home. I still cry.

Today Molly lives in a wooden planter in my backyard, with a tree branch fashioned of metal on the front. In it, I planted "Irish Molly," a strain of viola that serendipitously happened to share her name and also resemble her colors, along with a black varietal of viola that may or may not be called "Molly Sanderson."

Frankie and I say "Goodnight, Molly" every night when we go in the backyard for Frank to do his business. Well, I say it, but I'm pretty sure he thinks it.

Goodnight, Molly. I still miss you.
Whenever you visit my grave, say to yourselves with regret but also with happiness in your hearts at the remembrance of my long happy life with you: "here lies one who loved us and whom we loved." No matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail.
-from The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog, Eugene O'Neill

best error message I've gotten.

2009-03-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

The following error was encountered:

* Zero Sized Reply

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I'm sorry, Squid.

I am making a post.

2009-02-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

I had a long talk with Bonnie today about life as we know it, which is weird and sometimes wonderful, but also very very confusing. Bonnie and I are very similar people in different circumstances. Sometimes I wonder how we would cope in each others' situation. It'd probably be pretty much the same. We are that similar.

Bonnie thinks I should go to Wayne and study graphic design, which is a thought I've been bandying about in my head for a few months after being frustrated with myself for lack of commitment/motivation in my English major. I love books, I love reading, but maybe reading analytically, looking into things at great detail, is above my head. Maybe I'm doomed to be a pleasure reader. I've always been interested in design & typography but have never delved into it academically. I haven't even taken a drawing class since high school; even those were the basic mandatory art classes required by school administration. I futz around in Photoshop and never show anyone the fruits of my labor. I recently got Creative Suite which both terrifies and excites me to no end. I have things to play with! And for once in my life I'm feeling pretty creative; needing to make things, do things, alter things, transform things is an intermittent need I have, but lately it's been more constant. So I'm trying to challenge myself to do that. Sketch, paint, design, letter, sculpt, felt, knit, crochet, bead, collage, build, construct, interpret, re-imagine: these are a few of my favourite things. I used to keep an inspiration book of things I saw/heard/read that impressed me; hopefully I ca do some such thing online here for quick and easy reference. It's do-able. I see people do it all the time.

I'd recently brought up the whole idea of art school/graphic design to my loving and supportive glass-artist-aunt, but with more of a "I'm thinking about getting a second BA in graphic design when I'm done with my BA in English" slant. Her response was "why don't you just switch over to design completely? Or continue the major in English but add a minor in design?" which was eerily similar to what Bonnie suggested today. The fact that both of them said essentially the same thing means a lot to me:

1. My aunt has tried to nurture and foster my interest in art since I was wee, and is the proud owner of many a thing I've created, from terrible terrible pottery done when I was taking classes at Pewabic Pottery at age 10, to some sketches I very much like and am secretly and not-so-secretly quite proud of. She has always wanted me to look into art school (even once going so far as to try to get me a secretarial position in her department at CCS so that I would qualify for reduced-rate tuition, but the girl who was to be leaving the position ended up staying. Jerk.) but I've never really felt that I had the talent. Sudden surges in the needing-to-create sector of my brain and being lead me to think otherwise. And what better time than now?

2. Bonnie is pretty well versed in design and typography (love!) and I value her opinion greatly as a friend and contemporary. She has seen my paltry "portfolio" and told me that I do have talent and can and will make it work: she's trying to dispel my worries. I like that in a friend. I love that in a friend. She says anything I don't know (specifically relating to design programs) I can learn. I'm a quick study, at the very least, and I like playing around and trying new things on my own.

Overall I'm pretty sure I can do this, or should at least look into it. Bonnie gave me the name of an advisor to talk with at Wayne, to suss out if it'd be a good fit. If it's not a great fit maybe it'll stretch; OU is definitely not a good fit for me right now.

I will never be as awesomely creative and insanely good at design like so many of the amazing designers I've met and gotten to know better recently (and you should know who all are, I could name names though if you want the ego-boost), but it's worth a shot. Can't hurt. Probably won't hurt. Much.

Art school: I want to go to there.

2009-02-12T14:02:00.000-08:00

The infrequency with which I update this blog would lead you to believe that I have little or nothing to say. This is not the truth, but I can't explain away my absence or reluctance to post, or overall lack of updates, other than I fail at most things, blogging being yet another one of them.

I can try harder.

Ownership

2008-11-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

Today we will have a little discussion about ownership.

Something happened today which brought to mind an incident Sharon told me about awhile ago, where her coworker happened upon her looking at pictures on Facebook of a friend's baby. Said coworker, for some reason, assumed the baby was Sharon's, ignoring the fact that it was a newly-newborn (which would cause alerts to go off for all sorts of reasons, not least of all because why in the hell would Sharon be back at work so shortly after giving birth?) and that Sharon didn't have any pictures of said baby anywhere around her workspace (mostly because it's NOT HERS). Sharon and I guffawed about this and applied it to all sorts of things: If I look at a picture of a Porsche online, it's mine. If I look at a stack of money online, it's mine. If I look at a fancy warmblood, it's mine. Logic!

So what happened today?

I was innocently sitting in the breakroom at work, wasting my 15 minute break on my various web-addictions. I happened to be sitting next to a (rather ugly) sparkly red mini Christmas tree someone had placed on the table. A coworker comes in, and seeing the tree next to me, asks if it's mine. I also want to let you know that this is the SECOND time this week that I've been asked that question, because apparently I repeatedly make the mistake of sitting next, or in close proximity to, the tree.

What the fuck?

First of all, that tree has been in the breakroom for over a week now, minding its own business, sitting in the same spot on the table the whole time. I can't be the only person who's sat next to the tree. I can't. Yet I get asked, twice by my witless coworkers, if it's mine.

Should the theory of "if you look at it online, it must be yours" be extended to include "if you sit next to it, it must be yours"? I really hope so, because I'll make it a point to sit next to cute boys, expensive jewelry, and anything else I want but can't have.

Dear gosh.

Honestly.
Let's look a little closer at this whole scenario, and maybe put ourselves in the mind of the coworker asking me if it's mine. What logic dictates the question? Does Rebecca seem insane enough to carry around a sparkly red Christmas tree with her everywhere she goes? If Rebecca does own the tree but is not insane enough to carry it around with her, is she so insecure about its safety and well-being that whenever possible, she sits next to it so as to provide it with some stability and comfort? Wouldn't that make her even more insane? Do my coworkers really see me that way?

I'm hoping not. I'm thinking not. The two coworkers who asked me aren't exactly the brightest bulbs in the bunch. So I'm hoping.

But still.
Honestly.

"my words"

2008-11-19T08:36:00.000-08:00

as saved by my t9word entry on my phone:
:/, :\, :C, ahh, aww, blah, brandon, calexico, couldn't, crap, cunt, damn, doggy, doke, ew, frankie, fuck, fucking, gabs, haha, haven't, hd, hehe, hmph, how's, i've, lindsay's, long-lost, longgggg, mcd, nah, olga's, okie, omg, ouch, peggah, peggah's, pissed, pres-elect, sharon's, she's, shermrock, shit, ss, tipper (this one has me at a loss... I don't recall ever typing a text message about Tipper Gore, which is the only logical explanation I can think of for ever typing "tipper"), txts, ugly-cute, wasn't, wouldn't, wtf, yay, you'd

I love how the only emoticons are ones depicting sadness, awkwardness, or general meh-ness. And I don't know why it saved "shermrock" but not shermrock's surname, "fuckface." Also, I used Calexico all of once. Hmm.

Now, for your fapping pleasure, I present you with Rebecca's Updated and Probably Complete For A While List of Totally Lustworthy Chefs and Cooks!

1. Anthony Bourdain.
Hello? Maybe you're like most of my friends and find the picture of him nude with a GIANT BONE in front of his dude-hooha appalling, but if you're cool and NOT like them, you can find it in the book My Last Supper. Aside from the myriad pleasurable hallucinations this picture (and admittedly, other, more appropriate pictures) has given me, I like the dude because he is a straight-talking, no-shit, son of a bitch, and that is commendable. I also like him because he loves Kraft Mac n Cheese when stoned. I love Kraft Mac n Cheese any time, so we'll figure out a compromise. I also wouldn't mind sharing a plate of, like, hagfish or bull pizzle or something with him, and that's saying a lot for me. Must-try recipe: Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Nova Scotia Salmon, Chives and Creme Fraiche, with Osetra Caviar on Buckwheat Blini - hello amazing!!

2. Johnny Iuzzini.
Unlikely pastry magnate and rough 'n' ready sexpot. I first saw him on, of all things, Paula Deen's show. (sidebar: I abhor Paula Deen and all of her Southern-fried cooking because every single episode I've seen of the show consists of slathering something in butter or straight-up lard and deep-frying the ever-living-fuck out of it. For a Thanksgiving ep I caught once, she sliced up canned cranberry jelly, fried the slices, and covered them in sugar. To me, that screams "trailer trash cuisine" more than anything else, but whatever floats, I guess. I digress.) The only good thing Paula Deen has ever done for me is to introduce me to his tattooed ass (well, I can only assume). He can bake me a cake, any day of the week. Preferably Mondays. Must-try recipe: Warm Honey Tart, Grapefruit-shiso granite & charred oranges (though I wonder if mayhaps blood oranges would be even awesomer).

3. Jamie Oliver.
Hi. He's British. I don't think much more needs to be said. If every American household kitchen came equipped with a Naked Chef, we wouldn't eat so much fucking fast food. I'm fairly confident of this. I can't vouch for the validity of this story but rest assured, I'm not the only one would've been more than happy to rub some aloe on that. Oh yeah, his recipes are pretty awesome, too. Must-try recipe: Asparagus, Mint and Lemon Risotto sounds amazing to me right now.

4. Tyler Florence
Looks like a nice, friendly, awesome dude. Unfortunately also looks like any number of my old crushes, and one really really assholeish friend-of-a-friend, but kitchen skills crush unfortunate look-a-likes in my contest. Dude shops for potatoes with the cutest "determined" face I've ever seen. Must-try recipe: Crispy Parmesan Butternut Squash Chips. Holla!

5. Rocco Dispirito
I don't really know much about this dude or his cooking (or his dancing since he was apparently on Dancing with the Stars), but he is some serious GQ-worthy eye candy. He seems like he might be a little bit of a douchebag because of aforementioned calculatedly smokin' good looks, but for a man who can cook, we can let that slide. For the record, that is why I put him in slot #5. Must-try recipe: Blueberry Pomegranate Consomme with Whipped Cream Fraiche. He had me at Froot Loops.

Disqualified for blatant meanness: Gordon Ramsey
Disqualified for blatant trying-too-hard-ness: Guy Fieri
Disqualified for TGI Friday's affiliation: Guy Fieri
Disqualified for blatant annoyingness: Emeril Lagasse
Disqualified for neglecting to take me to Spain to be a part of Spain, a Culinary Road Trip: Mario Batali, Mark Bittman
Disqualified for being Paula Deen's sons: Paula Deen's sons

So there you have it, 2008's list.

hmm.

2008-11-13T13:24:00.001-08:00

Boss-type people (store manager, as well as District Manager, and Regional Manager) are talking about me just a few tables away from where I sit.

Interesting.

I've always wanted to be a fly on the wall!

Results

2008-11-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

Last week when I was on campus I saw a flier for a free depression screening, which I thought was this Wednesday. I've been feeling pretty blue lately so I decided to do it, and came up to school today with the intention of taking the test or whatever it is, knowing full well what the answer would be.

Got to school, can't find a booth or anything so hop on my trusty Mac to look it up on the OU website.

It was last month.

I don't know my months, apparently.

It's not that surprising to me.

Just another disappointment in a string of failures.

I took a few online screeners. "Your results are consistent with moderately severe depression." "Your results are consistent with anxiety disorder." At least I'm consistent with something.

Next up on the docket: find free or low-cost help. This probably won't be easy, as I have no money and no health insurance. I've thought about doing this for awhile, since before Nate and I broke up, but never did. This month I can't make rent, I have an eighth of a tank of gas and no money to fill it, just got some stuff out of pawn that it looks like will have to go back in so I can fill aforementioned gas tank and my tummy, I'm probably going to fail all my classes, I can't get enough sleep, I eat like shit, I'm sitting here in the OC trying not to cry for reasons unbeknownst to me, and I generally don't care.

So, it's time.

That having been said, at least one thing is going right for me. For now. I'll probably mess that up too.

Time to fix me.

In other news, I took a Colorgenics quiz which told me the following about myself:

You have exaggerated demands on life but you are cautious enough to try to hide these beliefs from the outside world. You are covert enough to try to impress other people around you with your achievements and at the same time able to put on an act of pretending to be 'humble' - being the same as everyone else. It would appear, however, that whatever you are doing seems to be working out O.K.

You like the better things in life. You are sensuous and emotional. You are a follower of the Arts and you seek an environment that will give you the fulfilment to the senses that you need.

You know what you want and you are very dogmatic and demanding - especially in your emotional demands. You have specific ideas and beliefs and if these beliefs are not realised you can become extremely frustrated. You may not be that perfect but you are looking for perfection with the perfect partner.

Unacceptable restrictions have been forced upon you and this is resulting in severe frustration and stress. You are looking for independence and consequently you shy away from any restriction and avoid obligations of anything which might prove hampering. You are being subjected to considerable pressure and want to escape from it so that you can obtain what you need, but unfortunately at this particular moment in time you lack the necessary strength of purpose to succeed in this.

You seem to be always on the defensive and that is because you have failed to establish yourself in a manner consistent with your own high opinion of yourself. You are trying to prove yourself with inadequate resources and this has resulted in considerable stress. You are trying to escape from these excessive demands on your reserves by adopting a defensive attitude in which you refuse to be committed or to be involved in further unpleasantness.

I'm not sure what Colorgenics is, and it's probably the kind of New Age-y bullshit malarkey I love to mock, but that seemed pretty accurate. Could just be that I'm really susceptible to suggestion, though. It probably is that. I still read my horoscopes, too.

2008-11-04T20:31:00.001-08:00

Thank you, America.

Thank you.

Bragging.

2008-10-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

Odell wrote this.

Sometimes Odell gives me dollars to buy pop or crackers. Maybe now that he's famous he will have more dollars to give me so I can get real food.

2008-10-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

I HATE horses today. Actually, I hate them from Sunday through today. Hopefully Thursday will be better.

Apart from the hatred/now bum knee/weird-feeling fingers, I rode awesomely.

Just so you all know, throwing packets of ketchup at a mouse does little to scare it, since it's probably already scared out of its mind.

2008-10-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Dear English-speaking inhabitants of the world,

Please learn the different meanings of the following words, and in what context they should be used:
-weary
-wary
-leary

Thank you!
me.

invisible.

2008-10-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

I love this because the cat looks like the type of asshole who'd ride (drive?) a Segway.

more animals

Un-curmudgeonly. Very librarianly.

2008-10-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

I seem to be getting (a tiny bit) nicer, or at least more forgiving of annoying people/annoying things people do, as I age -- though I don't extend this courtesy to asshole drivers, who still top my "wtf" list and render me criminally insane for many minutes at a time, many times a day. Is this uncommon? A few years ago I was the very epitome of grandma-chic, from the cardigans and old-lady skirts to the shouting and fist-shaking at hooligans in the streets and around my house. I feel more placid now. Oh, let the ruffians engage in fisticuffs! I don't care! I might even smile and shake my head with an "oh, to be young again!" type of bittersweet regret. Even asshole and otherwise difficult customers at work (and there are plenty, ohhhhh there are plenty; they come in trickles, then spurts, then droves, the closer the holidays get) get the VIP, kid-glove treatment from me (mostly). Children, who used to annoy the everloving shit out of me on the basis that they are small and get in the way and ask too many questions, I now find a little charming. Kids at the barn are especially prone to getting underfoot and asking the most ridiculous questions and now I find myself going just slightly out of my way to help them, to try and come up with kid-friendly answers to those queries.

I have no idea what is going on with me.

I had a thought that maybe it was because some sort of friendly-librarian gene was rearing its amiable head in me, if such a thing exists.

The thing is, I've been following an online community of librarians/media specialists, and it honestly depresses me how many of them seem to hate their jobs and their patrons. Okay, okay, I KNOW it's not all sunshine and roses and great books. I know there are indigent patrons, stinky patrons, frankly and terrifyingly insane patrons, patrons who bring in their 2-year-old children and leave them there unoccupied for hours, patrons who are looking for a book or scholarly article on some obscure topic on which little (or none at all) up-to-date and in-print information exists, and patrons who are looking for a librarian to handhold them through narrowing down an extremely broad subject into one suitable for a school project/paper. I know there are "entitlement" patrons and patrons who look down on those of us who choose to spend roughly a million (or six-ish/seven-ish) years in school only to end up basically serving the public.

I've worked in a bookstore for seven years this fall. I have met and dealt with all of the aforementioned archetypes, repeatedly, in all their various and yet unvaried incarnations. Yes, there is the difference of money being exchanged in the bookstore biz, but the goal is the same: find the book. Obtain the book, if it's not readily available. I'm pretty confident that over a half-decade's (dear god... it's been that long?) worth of dealing with the vast cast of the book-buying public has somewhat prepared me for a life of dealing with the book-borrowing public.

But the posts on this forum for librarians depress me. They're all really snarky, quite bitchy, and have that vaguely superior "I work in the academic arts, and I know the DDS (or LCC) by heart and backwards, so up your uneducated farthole" air about them.

Please, god, don't let me be like that.

It's not just that the posts or posters are whiny and self-indulgent (though they are) - but that's a common occurrence in the blogland or online-forum-world. And why not? Relative anonymity has its perks, not least of which is the ability to gripe about friends, coworkers, clients, etc. with few people knowing about it. Not gonna lie, I've done it all. A while back, I joined an online group of booksellers for the express purpose of bitch-and-moaning about the coworker/client end of the "dudes I have to deal with" spectrum, but it's lost its glitz, the glamour is gone.

My main problem with the whole spectacle is that as a librarian, you work for the public, which includes the dirty, the stinky, the challenged, the bitchy, the culture-addled, and information-befuddled. That is your job. If you have a hard time dealing with the less-desirable members of modern society, then you should probably have a job writing a vitriolic blog about said members of society from the privacy and comfort of your own home, or at least look into some profession where you can inflict the physical pain you dream about inflicting on those unlucky people, like a phlebotomist, or I dunno, dominatrix or something.

I'm no saint. I'm frustrated endlessly by people. I inwardly roll my eyes at stupid questions teenagers ask about Shakespeare or Camus, but I'm still happy to introduce them to the works, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't always dealt well with the stresses, major and minor, of working in a bookstore, but I've come a long way since 2001. I've even come to regard many of our more problematic regulars at the store with a sort of affection. It's so strange.

I don't know. Not really sure how I wanted this blog to go, but kind of wanted to get it off my chest.

One more thing I was thinking about: my company, like many, I'm sure, has an intranetwork. One of the features of this network is a sort of "employee of the month" segment, where via letters from satisfied customers, booksellers and bookstores get the highest praise for doing their job. Maybe I'm just jealous because I've never been commended in there, but every month or week or however often it's updated, it seems that the people mentioned are being lauded for doing things like actually looking for a book in their store, or actually calling a customer back, or actually bothering to ask and find out what book a customer might be looking for. Guess what? This is not extraordinary customer service. This is customer service, period. I do things like this every day I work at the bookstore. It is my job. I have also gone above and beyond (driving 20 miles to hand-deliver a book that a customer desperately needed right away is one example I can think of off the top of my head - and no, I was not reimbursed for mileage, thank you very much - and yes, I was off the clock!)

I dunno, guys. Have the values of customer service gone so far down that now we have to pat heads and give cookies for people merely doing their job?

I'm not implying I'll be some kind of Super Librarian, kind helpful, and gracious to all, whether they deserve it or not. But it could happen. Nor am I implying that I'm currently some kind of Super Bookseller, but I sure do try.

2008-10-01T20:06:00.001-07:00

Supernintendo Chalmers.

I copied this from my tumblr account that I just created today, and I don't know why I created it. I don't like it.

2008-09-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

I managed to go to both of my classes today, which if you know me, is a Major Feat. I was bored to tears in both. Then I called my fake-boyfriend and he actually picked up, which was surprising considering I thought he was ignoring my texts. Turns out his cellphone provider’s server was down and he hadn’t been getting any texts. Whoops. Thou shalt not jump to conclusions, ohrebecca.

(It’s difficult not to. I say/do stupid things on a near-constant basis. I said/did stupid things yesterday. Any other normal human being would ignore me, hell, I’d ignore myself. The logical conclusion was: he is ignoring you; he no longer likes you.)

The truth is, I don’t know.

Fake-boyfriends are hard to have.

Especially when you’re a worrywart like me. I’ve always been like this. I worry incessantly, it’s what I do. You know how Detroit is dirty and there are bags and boxes and random piles of things all over the streets? Well, one time I saw a video of a guy dumping garbage bags of puppies (no, really) on a street — you didn’t see that they were full of puppies until the puppies were crawling out of the bag. And anyway, now whenever I see a bag or box or random pile of junk on the road, I freak out and worry that it’s a bag or box or random pile of kittens or puppies and I will simultaneously try my hardest to avoid hitting said object in the road while also feeling compelled to stop and check on the “kittens” or “puppies”. That’s how ridiculously worried I can be.

I guess fake-boyfriends are kind of like bags or boxes or random piles of kittens or puppies on the road, to me.

Also, I hate dating.

I think I deserve better. Maybe. I’m not sure yet.