The Hangover Journal Bus Project: Asheville Buses SUCK

I rode the bus again today. As you may or may not know, my daughter's car went belly up, died, was nailed to the perch and is currently providing charming condo space to varmints in my front yard. Therefore, for over a month now we have been a four person family with one car. The strain is beginning to show because the buses SUCK. Yes, they suck. I'm sorry, Brainshrub, but they SUCK donkey balls in hell.

My daughter ends up getting the car most of the time, because she works way the hell out Hendersonville Road and public transportation out to South Asheville and beyond is a sad, sick joke. The bus goes two or three times a DAY (yeah, a DAY, not an HOUR) and it does not stop between the Wal Mart and the Airport, a distance of 12 or so miles. Somewhere in the middle of those miles is where my daughter works. Note that this is still theoretically within Asheville city limits. She has found that the individual drivers are usually pretty nice about letting her out, although the people on the phone at the Asheville transit authority say that they're not allowed to, and if you need to get anywhere within those 12 miles you're just fucked, sorry. And then, once you've persuaded the driver to let you off somewhere, you still face walking down Hendersonville Road, which seems to have been specifically designed to discourage pedestrians. Or possibly it was designed by crows looking for human roadkill - something like that. At any rate it was taking A 3 to 4 hours to get to work via public transport, and then a taxi back home costs $30 (if you're not in Asheville, you may think that buses run all the time! Ha ha! You are so naive! The Asheville buses, my friend, just this year started running past 6:00 pm at all and now they quit at 10:00 pm, although in actual fact that really means 9:00 pm) so A gets the car most of the time. I, in turn, am taking the bus, because after all I work downtown, which is very close to West Asheville, and what the hell, I said. How bad could it be? Pretty damn bad.

M has been taking the buses for months now, because I have always felt that a teenager who can get himself around town is a happy teenager, and, more to the point, has a happy mother who doesn't have to be chauffering him on all his dubious teenage errands 24/7. M has complained bitterly about the buses, but I mostly ignored him, since M is 14 and complains bitterly about many things. Until lately, when I myself have started taking the buses and have discovered that they do, in fact, as I may have mentioned in the first paragraph, SUCK.

Why do the buses suck?

1. They are routinely late; that is, when they show up at all. The 9 bus I rode today was 35 minutes late - I stood out in the cold for 45 minutes tonight, waiting for the bus. Last Friday, after waiting for 40 minutes, I gave up and went to the bar and got a ride home from a friend.
2. They hardly ever run anyway. The buses that run between downtown and West Asheville run once an hour. Once. An. Hour.
3. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they simply do not post. On Wednesday, I had to go pick M up at the bus station, since the 6:30 bus was just not going to happen. Tough shit, people. Wait another hour.
4. The people on the buses are scary. And I say that as a long time denizen of inner city Baltimore who has ridden buses and trains all over the east coast, through all of New York and Baltimore and DC and so on and so forth, not a naive young thing fresh from the suburbs but a woman who has routinely been lulled to sleep by the comforting roar of urban gunfire. Yet even to me, the people on the Asheville buses are actively frightening. Last week I ended up getting off the bus two stops early and hoofing it halfway up the hill because I really thought there might be a crack whore war and I was standing right between the two of them. Also, I had heard all the details I could take about Crack Whore A's big fight, subsequent months in the hospital, husband in jail and Mexican pimp.
5. A corollary to 5: the people on the buses are so damn depressing I can't stand it, and the advertising on the buses, which is pitched to the depressing scary people (i.e.: Sell Your Plasma Here!) is also deeply, deeply saddening and wrong. The class system in this country is wrong. The educational system is broken. And nowhere, nowhere, my friends, is that more evident than on the buses.
6. The bus that routinely goes to West Asheville, the #9, is tiny. It's the short bus, but it's packed full of people. It's packed full of people because a lot of people actually live in West Asheville, which you would think the transit authority would have noticed by now, but alas, not so.
7. A corollary to 6: Not everyone who is waiting for the bus can fit onto the tiny bus, so some people must wait for the next bus. An hour later.
8. If you are one of the lucky and or rude ones and have managed to squeeze yourself onto the tiny bus, then your trials are not over. The driver goes like a bat out of hell and the bus heels way over to the side on the turns and the rims of the tires scrape on the roadbed making sparks and frightening noises and you think you're going to die. I have never seen Clingman Avenue flash by so fast as when I'm on that bus - and I have driven it just about every single frickin' day for five and a half years. Some time soon that driver is going to kill a whole lot of people.
9. You never know where the driver is going to stop. It's totally fucking random. You push the stop requested thing or pull the little wire and he will stop. . .eventually. When he feels like it. When a sufficient number of bus stop signs have flashed by. Whatever. Walk, you stupid bus riding peon.
10. The bus maps and schedules are indecipherable, which doesn't really matter, which is why I put it last, since none of the drivers obey them anyway.

So fuck the Asheville buses. I am sorry to report that they suck most horrendously and you know, as a good little liberal type person, I went into this really wanting to like them, but I can't, because (did I say this already?) they SUCK.

Alpha Dog

Puppy is the alpha dog now. We pretend his name is Django, but he doesn't know it and we don't call him that. We call him Puppy, because this is a household of four fairly bright, fairly creative, extremely verbal types. . . who call their puppy Puppy. I realized that he had become the alpha dog today, when Theo stood back gloomily and let Puppy have his pick of the doggy dinners. For a while there, Theo was in charge of which dog ate out of which bowl; this was a time in which Theo grew fat. Now, though, Theo hangs his head and lets Puppy have the first go at both bowls.

My first emotion was to feel sad for Theo, but then I realized: Theo doesn't want to be the alpha dog. I empathize strongly with that, because I'm not alpha either. I know I'm not alpha because I went to one of those PR meet n' greet thingies this afternoon with some of the WNC tourism movers and shakers. I used to dread these thingies and not take them seriously but nowadays I have decided that my ass depends on networking like a motherfucker. So I am networking, which isn't really too hard, because at this point I've actually known most of these people for years (and by know I mean seen at a bunch of cardboard chicken luncheons and smiled and exchanged business cards with) and they're all really pretty nice and so what the hell? I'm going to get a new boss sometime soon and if s/he isn't to my liking, I'll be back out there with the resumes. This is how I know I'm not an alpha: I am not applying to be my own boss, and several people I saw this afternoon who hadn't seen me since my year's hiatus from the tourism scene said, on hearing about my place of employment, "Oh, did you take the director's job?"

No. No, I didn't, and I don't want it, and frankly I don't want to be in charge of anything at all, really. If I was in charge at a real job I couldn't fiddle around with photoshop or do elaborate Excel to Word mail merge letters, which, take it from me, is the absolute best thing to do when you're hopelessly hungover at the office, which might have happened to you the day after Halloween. I know that this state often happens to people the day after Halloween, because some people are incapable of staying quietly home on Halloween and instead must go off to the bars to see the costumed masses and in the process drink entirely too much beer and stay up until quarter to two in the morning, which is a really bad idea on a Tuesday night.

That is why some people are not out at Drinking Liberally but instead are quietly at home on this Thursday night, like the actual dedicated and good employees and homebodies and mothers and carer for alpha Springer Spaniel puppies that they, in fact, are, despite their occasional resemblance to wild drunken revelers. But you see, if you are an alpha dog, you can't ever shed those responsible moments and act like a wild drunken reveler but instead must be sober and responsible at all times: among other, more pressing reasons, you'll be the first one called when the alarm goes off for no apparent reason at 2 in the morning, and if you'd been revelling, that could get ugly. So fuck being alpha. I can take being second at the food bowl if it also means that I get to be second or third when the shit hits the fan.

Alone With a Bowl of Candy

me halloween 06
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

So here I am, in my default Halloween blue wig, just me and a bowl of candy. Fortunately, I am currently immune to candy, since I gave in to temptation at work and now my teeth hurt and I feel a little ill. I keep watching the clock and wondering if I should go out and then listening to the little voice of sanity in my head, squeaking from under the sugar high. The little voice says, "You have barely recovered from the hangovers of the weekend! You do not need to go out drinking on a Tuesday night even if it is Halloween! Besides, you don't have any money!"

I must listen to this voice. Hell, I should have it recorded on a loudspeaker (maybe like M has done on his cel phone - whenever he gets a text message his own voice says, really loud and dripping with teen irony, "WOW! Hey, I got a text message! Gee!") and make it play a small recording of sober goodness to me all day long, every day. God knows that should certainly make me even more interested in beer than I usually am -

In other news, I finished the painting I was doing for the New French bar and I will attempt to photograph it tomorrow before work. It's very shiny & thus hard as hell to capture. I had not one, not two, but THREE hangovers last weekend, which is some kind of crazed record, but I'm better now. The party turned out to be a huge success with tons of people showing up. In fact, it was such a success that the puppy got sick on Monday from all the goodies he ate late Saturday and then all day Sunday while I lay there and watched episode after episode of Lost while resolutely ignoring the dishes, the mess and the dogs. A good time was, I think, had by all, or almost all. I haven't finished cleaning up yet anyway and a three or more day cleanup usually means a good party.

And now it's Halloween and I'm all partied out. Ah well, I think I've done enough Halloween over the years - it's somebody else's turn this year. Although. . .

A Quick Note

This is just a quick note to say that I am having a bunch of people over for dinner tomorrow night, so if you're in the area and hungry, come over around 6:30. Or later, because I usually ask people to come over about an hour or two before I actually feed them, since hunger is the best spice and tends to disguise any heinous cooking mistakes the chef de nuit (that's french for me) might have made.

This was a good idea about 5 days ago when I first conceived it and it's still a good idea but going out to Broadways tonight and getting all drunk up and taking pictures of J playing pool (really well) was probably not such a good one, preparation wise. But oh well, what the hell, so forth and so on. Come on over tomorrow night. I'm making pasta.

On Being A Celebrity

So I go into work on Wednesday morning (just for the record, for once it is not my own lameness that causes this blogging lag. No, just this one time, it is the fault of blogspot/blogger. I could at this point insert some undeserved vitriol towards them since they were down much of yesterday or I could say, which I will, thank the gods they exist, and honey, this is FREE, and so anyway. . . back to our regularly scheduled programming.) and I'm a celebrity. My bosses watched CNN, my friends watched CNN, friends I haven't even spoken with for three years watched CNN and a coworker who didn't even know I was going to be on grabbed me to tell me she saw me on CNN. Yes. I am famous now and apparently people on DailyKos were slamming us all for not having team spirit and supporting Heath Shuler unconditionally, for which I say to them, fuck off. Heath Shuler is anti-choice and anti gay marriage and for those two things alone I will be GOD FOREVER DAMNED if I support him unconditionally. I'm supporting him because he is, a) the lesser of two evils and b) because he is not Charles "Darth Vader" Taylor and c) because he is pro universal health care and pro union and d) because he is earnest and honest and trying very hard and e) because his campaign staff is doing this for love and not for money and f) because he named his kids cute names and f) because he is, yes, extremely cute. And also because I am a dead yellow dog Democrat, for better or for worse, or until we finally get a third and fourth and fifth party in this country who will actually represent my own personal political wishes, which are not aligned with the Demopublicans at all but instead favor accountability and the crushing of the corporatocracy and the question, what can governments do for their citizens, to wit, health care and time off and limits on the credit card companies and food for the children and the artists. God damn it.

I watched Iraq for Sale tonight and while I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly in the spirit, say, in which I would wholeheartedly recommend Mars Attacks , still, if you want to see something utterly depressing and sobering, I recommend it. The gist of it all is that there are far too many private contractors in Iraq, making horrifying bazillions of tax dollars doing things that we shouldn't be allowing them to do. This is not really a huge surprise to anyone who is even slightly politidcally aware, but it does bring it all together in a chillingly thorough way, plus a lot of very sad and depressing interviews with families of people who went over to Iraq apparently naively expecting that these companies wouldn't send them into the line of fire which is, of course, exactly what happened and then these people died. I will say that if you take a job with Halliburton and they send you to Iraq you are really kind of staggeringly innocent if you think you're not going to get shot at, but still, in the larger sense, the growth of "private contractors" in this country from the truly horrifying like the interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the small and sad like any given clerical employee at your favorite telecom is a large and terrible evil worthy of record and eradication.

And now I must go and do the dishes because I seem to have been talked into a written private type contract with my son whose dish night it is supposed to be, in which I will do his dishes tonight and then I get to take actual pictures of him for 10 days, except I'm not allowed, of course, to blog them. Hmmmmmm. Perhaps it is unwise to sign contracts when you get home from Drinking Liberally.

Malevolent Deities and TV

You know that last post? The one where I’m all happy and shit and say I’ve been replaced by a joyous pod person of loving grace? That’s just the sort of drooling idiocy that you’d expect from someone who momentarily forgot that this earth is a vale of struggle and thorns and the gods are armed malevolent beings with macabre senses of humor. In other words, my car broke down and the Saturn people have no shame at all about charging a hundred bucks for a radiator cap. Such is life: we’re all doomed and the best you can get is a gallows laugh on the way down. Or not. Actually I’m still pretty cheerful – significantly poorer, with no prospects for being able to heat the house this winter, but cheerful. Relatively, anyway.

REMINDER! I am going to be on NATIONAL TELEVISION TONIGHT, as part of a documentary on CNN this very evening at 8:00 pm. Sources say my part is towards the end, so if you don’t tune in until 8:30 you might still see me. Or you might not. If not, can you live with the guilt? Hee hee. My brother said, “Aren’t you going to tape it?” and I said, “Of course not, I don’t even have a TV, remember?” Which is true – all I have is a DVD player with a screen. I mean, I could turn it into a TV with the application of $15 or so a month but I have these moral qualms about paying actual cash money to invite the media demons into your house to corrupt your children’s brains. Also, TV makes me jittery and I don’t have enough of an attention span to actually watch it. So my brother said, “Oh, I see. There are two kinds of people – those who are ON TV and those who WATCH it and you’re going to be the first kind, huh?” These words, believe it or not, were just slightly tinged with sarcasm and irony but I chose to take them literally and actually they made me feel like a photographer from People Magazine might appear behind the butterfly bush in my backyard at any moment, which is a really good feeling unless, of course, you happen to be wearing your red plaid fleece baggy pants.

Perfect Fall Day

It was an uncannily perfectly beautiful day and so I went hiking with A & J and both the dogs. It was great and I hereby command that you, whoever you are, must go hiking out at Bent Creek immediately, because you just will not believe how totally beautiful it is. Actually, it's been a pretty awesome weekend here at Hangover Headquarters - yesterday I actually worked on a painting and while it's not done, just having worked on it feels pretty damn great. There are omens and portents abounding, and they're all good - yesterday I walked outside and looked up only to see a red tailed hawk about 6 feet above my head. I could see his whole belly as he swooped by me, chased by 3 angry crows. My friend J says this is a good omen, and since he was utterly dismissive of the jabbering crows, I tend to agree with her. Then today I got a ladybug on my hand just as I reached the highest point of the trail. These are all good omens, happy portents, and so I think the words ominous and portentous must be reclaimed for luck.

Things are actually wonderful lately and it's beginning to unnerve me a little. I'm happy; I like my job; my kids are fine;(sure, M is fucking up at school wildly, but for whatever reason I am not stressing about it. Probably I should be, but I'm not.) the puppy is almost housetrained; my mom's health is only at about low yellow alert & anyway my brother is sort of living there, which takes a lot of the weight off my shoulders and all in all, y'all? I am genuinely cheerful every day. I am feeling alert and creative and beautiful and all kind of good things and to top it off, I'm managing to lose weight and save money. In other words, I seem to have been replaced by a pod person.

I can't thank the aliens enough. This pod person is fabulous. I think I like her and I definitely intend to keep her.

Collies, Springers and Shepherds

the wily stalk
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I've just been out watching Django & Theo play in the sock strewn backyard. I found my sneaker out there yesterday morning, which prompted me to give a lecture on logic to the dogs. "You want me to take you for a walk," I said furiously, "so much that you get excited whenever I put my sneakers on, but then you steal one of my sneakers and take it out to the yard to chew on. Is that logical? Does that make any sense? See, now we can't go for a walk and it's all your fault." They looked suitably chastened but I'm not sure the message got through, somehow.

Theo, as you know, is a mostly Collie dog from Madison County. He was raised by a mostly German Shepherd from Baltimore. I have a theory that in parts of the country which were settled mostly by German/Eastern European immigrants, like Baltimore, most of the mutts are Germanic as well, whereas in areas like Appalachia the dogs are mostly Scots Irish collie types like Theo. It's a good theory. Someday someone will get a masters thesis out of it. Not me. Theo, however, never picked up any Shepherd traits like guarding the house and children. Theo thinks the house and children can take care of themselves, although it makes him very happy to herd children into small groups in the center of a field. He also does this weird, purely Collie thing where he lies down if he sees another dog or something to herd approaching. Toby never did that in his life and he was as puzzled by it as I was at first, until I met another Collie owner who told me that it was a total Collie thing. Therefore I postulate the Collie genes are tougher than Shepherd traits.

Now Django, as we also know, is an aristocratic full bred Springer Spaniel. I had Springers before, as a child, and knew them to be just as dumb as posts. They like swimming and eating and, well, I never noticed much in the way of instinctive Springer behavior, which apparently consists of flushing game anyway. That's probably why intellect is not high on the list of Springer traits: hell, even I can flush game - all you have to do is run through the bushes with a complete disregard for the fact that there are men with guns getting ready to shoot past you. Yes, idiocy would seem to be helpful. Django, so far, appears to be rather brighter than the average Springer, which may explain why he is turning himself into a Collie.

He's started doing all kinds of Collie things, from nipping at everyones heels to get them in order to lying down whenever he sees or hears the cat approaching. Since he's still a baby, and he looks nothing like a Collie anyway, the effect is both strange and hilarious. It's very cool though, and gives one hope for the future. If he can stop being a Springer and become a Collie, perhaps even my son can graduate from high school before he's 30 and maybe someday I will earn a living wage despite my unconscious vow of poverty. Miracles can happen after all.

Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone

I went and volunteered at MoveOn this evening; they have an office in Asheville since our congressional race is so important - we're trying to replace an old, evil, corrupt Republican with a young, fresh, soon-to-be-corrupted Democrat. I was reluctant to go volunteer - I'm terrified of things like that and I was afraid they would ask me to make phone calls, which I loathe. Naturally, that's exactly what I had to do. I had to call and try to convince people to volunteer to make calls themselves - GOTV calls, which I learned tonight stands for Get Out the Vote - that's a good thing, because everyone at Drinking Liberally (DL) was talking about doing GoTV this weekend and I thought it was yet another TV station that I would never encounter. Anyhow, our upbeat MoveOn staffer told us we would be calling only other Move On members and it would all be fun. Naturally, though, the third person on my list listened to me say, "Hi! I'm Felicity, calling for MoveOn about our Call for Change campaign to get the Republicans out of Congress" and then snarled, "I'm a Republican! Goodbye!" This sort of thing takes the heart out of one, particularly when one doesn't have much heart to begin with and besides one has never been very good at recruiting volunteers even when it is one's actual by god job which it in fact is.

Still, it is a good thing to do and I felt virtuous - and I even told them I would call people to GOTV myself. I snuck out a bit early, because I felt duty bound to stop in at DL (Drinking Liberally) and knock back a pint or two and a couple of slices of pizza. Then I took the 8:30 bus home (another virtuous choice. I am just steeped in goodness at the moment.) so that I could reach a new low in the homework wars. We have this homework plan now, see, where I sit at the computer and type M's papers while he lies on the kitchen floor behind me, moaning occasionally. It's very productive: I ask him questions about important choices he's made in his life (god love the 9th grade teachers. Can you imagine anything worse than 90 papers on important choices written by 14 year olds?) and he grunts in agony.

For more of me on politics, by the way, check out CNN next Tuesday, October 24, from 8 - 9 pm, because sometime after 8:30 is my national TV debut. I was interviewed about the Taylor/Shuler race and that's when my little segment is going to air, I hope, and if the October surprise doesn't preempt me. I'm psyched: I'm going over to my Mom's to watch it with the whole family so we can all be impressed with my television star self. You must watch it too, so that I can soak up the adoration, or, failing that, the laughter.

Oooooh, Shiny!

I went on a field trip today at work - a very dangerous field trip, as it turned out, a field trip into the dark valley of temptation: a field trip to the wholesale gem and jewelry show at the Civic Center. Yes. Wholesale gems and jewelry, scattered across a bazillion tables in a huge room full of bright lights that made all the multitude of strings of beads extra, extra shiny. They were so shiny. And all of them were so incredibly cheap that my self control just snapped and my magpie instincts took over. The good news is that approximately 1/6 of my Christmas shopping is now done. The bad news is that I spent 1/3 of my saved Christmas money for a ratio that is really, in the cold light of home, rather distressing.

I spent money on ridiculous things. I bought a jade alligator. And three Halloween charm bracelets, and two hair clips with skull & crossbones on them - the skulls have rhinestone eyes! Is that too cute or what? - and, uh, a couple of pairs of earrings and some pendants and a bracelet and, um, another stone creature that looks kind of like a cross between an alligator and an aardvark and possibly some other stuff that I don't remember too clearly, like a boar tusk and a couple of aliens carved out of bone. It was the shininess of it all, and all the signs saying 50% off marked price and. . . and. . . there's no excuse. I've just been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave lately and it is true that I have the instincts of a drunken, sailing magpie at the best of times, eccentric taste and no self control.

I even bought some beads in a sort of hopeless, doomed, last ditch attempt to redeem myself by pretending that I would make jewelry with them and sell it, thus recouping my losses! Yes! And pigs will sprout those proverbial wings, etc. I came home and made two bracelets while I was having my brain sucked dry by M's science and math homework. "No offense, Mom," said M, peering over my shoulder, "But your crafts suck." Alas, he is right. They are shiny, my bracelets. . shiny. And if I was five, they would be excellent but somehow, they are, uh, lacking that subtle je ne sais quoi, that certain something that marks objects as having been created by a mentally competent artistic adult. Which is partly because they keep falling apart, since I'm not very good at tiny knots, and partly because, well, stringing shiny beads on a piece of elastic string, while brilliantly good for recovering brain tumor patients and the criminally insane, just is not a technique that really cuts it in the world of serious jewelry.

Ah well. I'm way broker now than I was this morning, and I was not flush this morning. But I am bedecked. I have jewelry all over me. And a jade alligator to admire (he is a handsome fellow indeed) and a whole bunch of shiny beads all over the dining room table, safely dragged back to my nest where I can stare at the shiny for a nice long time.

One of Those Days: Self Pity Redux

craggy gardens view five
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I got out to Craggy Gardens on Sunday; a perfectly beautiful perfect fall day with the leaves changing and the blue sky and the crisp wind and so on. Good thing too, because I need to look at those pictures right now, when it's pouring, as it has been since yesterday night, and gray and damp and cold and miserable and fuck it, I'm wearing leggings. I have a sore throat; M is home in bed with a cold; A is home in bed with ennui; the plants I dragged in so they wouldn't get frostbitten are drooping all over the living room and the puppy ate my umbrella. I got stuck in traffic and was late; I got locked out of the building in the rain and I can't find my PSP disc. Also, I have to pee and I'm the only one in the museum except for three visitors, so I am sitting here with my legs crossed. I don't usually blog from work but when you have to pee and you cannot leave your desk all bets are off.

Also, I wrote a haiku. Here it is:

Return of Winter
Still No Heated Toilet Seat
Cold Butt Memory

Halloween is Up

I decorated my house for Halloween today. If you live here, you should most thoroughly drive by. Hell, you should drive by, park, gawp, and then knock - chances are very good that I'll give you a beer, particularly if you say nice things about my fucking AMAZING Halloween decorations. I swear, it always give me such a total kick to put them all up. I impress myself, and then I go around doing a loud mad evil scientist laugh and pointing and occasionally, god help us, even cavorting about the front lawn, while, naturally, rubbing my hands in that special evil way. My children are mortified. My mother will not even drive by my house. It's awesome.There's just something about Halloween, even if it's true that all the women dress up sexy and all the men dress up as women: okay, gender anxiety aside, it's a fabulous holiday. It makes no real sense; it isn't officially sanctioned (when I become the Evil Overlord, etc, etc, the day after Halloween will SO be a national holiday) and yet it chugs along, year after year, the closest thing our puritan nation has to Carnival. I love it. And I love the utterly awful tackiness of it all; the unfettered dreck that we bring out to teach our children not to fear Death. It's great. The macabre become banal, on a large Dollar Store scale.

Damn.

teenager
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

A long lost friend just emailed me this photo - holy opium den, batman, that's me on the side there, long hair, fabulous jacket clashing with striped skirt, reflected in the mirror. Me at age 17, when I think I looked quite different, but people keep walking into my office and telling me I look exactly the same. That's absolutely wonderful in one way - do they not see the 50 extra pounds? The wrinkles? The gray hairs? Dude, awesome! - but kind of weirdly disheartening in another. I mean, it's been, uh, more than 20 years. Perhaps I should have changed my hairstyle by now? Although it's good to see my natural haircolor again and to realize that damn, I've just been dying it back to the real thing all this time - before it got darkened by kids and age. It's such a strange feeling to see this, so amazing, so weird - a photo of me I had never seen, floating around all these years. Thanks J! I promise I will send an email soon! And a picture of YOU that I happen to have, bwah ha ha.

Anyway, though, what do you think? Do I look the same? Different? Is that skirt awful or what? Well, it was 1981. Fashion was different then. For comparison purposes, here is a recent (and good, thanks S!) picture of me - same, or different?

A Day In Jeopardy

Today I drove 8 hours so that I could subject myself to 2 hours of abject terror. Also, buy a shirt I don't need at Macy's, but that's all part of the story. I went & tried out for Jeopardy today. Did I make it? I don't know, although I seriously, seriously doubt it. I blew it, actually. I completely blew it, but oh well, what the hell?

I went and got a rental car this morning, which was a big enormous PITA as always: apparently by law, renting a car cannot be a simple, straightforward procedure. This morning's particular and unique problem was that they did not, in fact, have a car for me although I had reserved one. After we had discussed that for a while, they drove me to the airport to get a car, which put me about an hour behind schedule and screwed up my plans to take the back route to Atlanta whilst taking photographs on the way. I took the highway. The drive there was uneventful and I'm happy to report that the CD player worked like a charm (in order, there & back again: XTC, Neutral Milk Hotel, Counting Crows, John Hiatt, different XTC, Amadou & Merriam, the Ramones, lots and lots and lots of Ramones.) and the small gold rental car moved smoothly. Road trips always make me feel like my head is floating about three feet over my body. Which I'm still feeling now, just in case you're noticing a certain disconnected factor to tonights installment of deathless prose.

The hotel where the Jeopardy tryouts were held was a large and fancy one smack dab inside the Lenox Square Mall, which is an extremely ultra super fancy mall: it's the mall I was looking for the last time I was in Atlanta 2 1/2 years ago, actually. Not because I can afford anything in it, but because it makes me feel sophisticated and glamourous to walk around ogling incredibly high end merchandise - they have Betsey Johnson and Neiman Marcus and stuff like that. Not an Old Navy in sight. By the way, if you ever want to spend huge sums of money on something utterly impractical for me (and god, I hope you do, whoever you are) you could do worse than this. I was early to my Jeopardy appointment, which was unfortunate, because it gave me time to decide that the sweater I was wearing Would. Not. Do. and then buy a blouse (and put it on) at Macy's that only seemed cheap by comparison to Bloomingdales and the fact that I then had 15 minutes to make it back to the hotel and I was starting to panic.

Panic would be the keynote of the next two hours. Of course I was the last person to arrive and I had to fill out paperwork and have my picture taken - a truly attractive polaroid that showed each of my chins to its fullest advantage - and then we all traipsed into the room to sit facing a screen and meet our cheerful and perky hosts, who apparently do this for a living. They told us what was going to happen and asked us some general trivia questions and asked us where we watched Jeopardy, which was difficult for me to fudge, since I haven't watched it in many years, gulp, and then Alex Trebek came on in the form of a DVD and told us all how incredibly great we were to even have passed the online test and yay, us. Meanwhile, I edged into full blown panic, and looked around to see a room full of people so normal I suspect they were grown in vats. Nice people. People dressed like they had a job interview. For an accounts receivable position at Boring Corp.

Then we took a written test and I'm sorry to report that I bombed this utterly. And I still don't know, and may never know, which state flag has a badger on it and why this would be considered self evident enough that the question was phrased "Naturally, this state has a badger on its flag!" Nor do I know which flower vanilla comes from, who the 2003 winner of American Idol was, or, shamefully, the last name of Helen Keller's teacher. So I blew that test, and I was kind of happy (except I felt small, and dumb, and utterly outclassed by the nicely dressed grownup vat people,) because I thought, "Aha! Now they will flunk me and I can slink out of here and go back to the mall and get up to the mountains in time to take the back road and get some pictures of the sunset!" Alas, no. They don't do it like that anymore. Now they make everyone go through everything, which is why, I guess, that I still might have a shot of actually appearing on the show, although I think possibly hell might have to freeze over first, along with the appearance of the winged pigs.

The next step was the mock game. We were called up in groups of three to stand in front of everyone and play a mock game, complete with buzzers. My buzzer technique was not perfect, but they asked me a lot of questions. Those questions, I mostly got right, except for the Susquehanna, which does not in fact have four letters. All would have been well, except then everyone had to make a perky little speech about themselves.

Well. I was not prepared. Everyone else had this perfect Jeopardy speech prepared, but as I said, I haven't watched the damn show in ages, and when they said "interview," I foolishly thought they meant, you know, an interview. I was the 4th person up, too. And, I made the classic mistake: I forgot that the internet is not cool. I said I was a blogger and spent a lot of time on the internet, and they all moved away from me on the bench, and then I tried to redeem myself by mentioning political involvement (don't ask. Along with Drinking Liberally I've been roped into doing a volunteer stint for Move On) only to realize halfway through my sentence that politics was a No No. I should so totally have skipped the mall visit before the Spanish Inquisition and gone to the hotel bar for a bloody mary instead; I know, that would have been Wrong, but oh my lord, I bet if I had I would be feeling a lot more confident about my chances now.

Then they let me sit down again to watch everyone else and that was that, except for a long speech about how they only pick 400 contestants a year out of about 6000 qualified candidates and if we get picked they'll call us and if not don't be all bummed out, just reapply next year, because they only keep candidate files for one year. They also said we could keep the pens, and there at the top, as you see, is my Jeopardy pen to prove that actually did go and try out for Jeopardy. Yes. Yes I did. The drive back was utterly hairy and horrible and full of weird lightning storms and fog and shit and took five frickin' hours but I think it was worth it, if only for the fact that next year, I will so have a suit on and a little speech prepared.

And you never know. Pigs may grow wings yet and I may yet be called to California to panic on national television.

Neuroticon 6

Tomorrow, gentle readers, tomorrow I'm going to drive for 8 hours to make a goddamn fool of myself. At least that's how it seems right now. I have been going through all sorts of interesting stress symptoms since this morning, ranging from a hot red face that will not fade to going to Belks. My friend S called this evening and said, "How are you doing?" "Fine!" I babbled, "I've just been to Belks and bought some shoes! They're super cute!" "I'll come over," she said, because random Belkian shoe buying is, as we all know, a major distress signal.

Everyone at my work wished me luck and told me if I won any money I would have to give it to the museum. This made my craven plan of just staying home tomorrow under the bed and then lying and saying I had been to Atlanta and failed the test look bad, so I had to give that one up. Okay, I'm not THAT neurotic and I wasn't really going to do that, no matter how comforting it seems right now. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be wearing new shoes, so how bad could it be? Pretty goddamn bad, I know.

Which leads me to the title of this post. Neuroticon 6 is a planet I occasionally visit, an unpleasant planet, but a familiar one. It's a planet where all kind of bad things happen, like you show up to try out for a quiz show and they laugh and jeer at you and then save your audition tape to put up on Youtube with the title Moron! At one point I thought I would write a cogent and funny book of essays entitled Neurotica, and I may yet. If I do it will probably be on Lulu.com and you, given sufficient masochism, might even be one of the four people who buys it. It will have an essay about waiting to drive to Atlanta to fail a quiz show test - possibly this essay, even. Only a bit more obsessively proofed.

So I am hanging tonight on Neuroticon 6, where the bars are glossy and elegant and full of mean strangers and perfectly turned out smart blonde women who look far, far better than I ever will; the beers cost $11 and, worst of all, noone will listen to me babble. My friend S gave me some beers and told me how smart I was, and how it was all going to be okay, which should have made me feel better, and it did for a bit, but now I'm back on Neuroticon 6, revisiting all the various ports of call, continents and capital cities and, hey, major waterfalls. At least I have cute shoes.

Winging It

The day after tomorrow. . portentous music here, please. . I'm getting into a rental car and driving 3ish hours to Hotlanta, where I will try out for Jeopardy. I have not studied. I have not dieted. I have not, god help me, even had my eyebrows waxed, which was like the total minimum thing I was going to do before I tried out for Jeopardy, as everyone knows that excess eyebrow hair pull your IQ down. They extrude it. Or something.

My daughter made me play the online version of Jeopardy for a while tonight and I'm here to tell you that it kind of reeks, although I found that if I used the bald guy with glasses as my avatar I got smarter. Maybe I should shave my head tonight. Or not. My daughter is disgusted with my lack of doing anything about jeopardy but honestly, I find that I don't care. The whole thing kind of fell out of the sky in the first place: I wasn't really looking for it and being on Jeopardy, while it's always been something that I thought would be sort of fun, hasn't ever really been a life's ambition or anything. In fact, I haven't even watched the show for like 10 years, unless you count the couple of times I've been in a bar at the right time. In those bars, and alas, there are far too few of them, I rock and people are impressed with me, except of course for those people who find me intimidating, or, like the guy at the Brew N' View (which isn't Jeopardy but that weird trivia online bar game thing that people play at the Applebys in Timonium as well as other assorted creepy bars all over the interior of the US) get all offended and obnoxious because I'm beating their high scores. Actually that guy was the only one and I think he was just your common garden variety asshole. Too bad for him: I beat the pants off him - not, thank god, literally.

So wish me luck. Off I go. Unprepared, unwaxed and unthin, but with a devil may care attitude that's okay, not hard to beat, but well, more interesting to beat anyway.

Bat Cave Garlic

fog countryside
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I went up to Bat Cave today to visit my friends D & A, and their kids, N the prodigal son & R. It was a gray, misty, rainy day and cold up there on the mountain, where the leaves are just starting to turn. I took my brother, because ever since my brother read this article, he's been obsessed with the idea of becoming an organic gourmet garlic farmer himself, and this idea involved using my backyard as the starter farm. He came over on Friday and looked at my sad excuse for a vegetable garden, which I abandoned to weeds a while back and listened to me explain my vision for the backyard, which involves raised beds which in turn involve a lot of money and an obscene amount of work. "Lot of work," he said dubiously, and I agreed. I don't have that kind of energy for gardening this time of year: I get gardening energy in about March and it begins dwindling in June, only to peter out altogether by August when the weeds get fierce and I never want to see another goddamned green bean again anyway. Garlic, though, must be planted in the fall, thus keeping vampires at bay throughout the wintry months and a good thing too.

Then I bethought myself of my Bat Cave friends, and their large well established garden, so we went on up the mountain today to check it out. Worked like a charm: I am patting myself on the back with the simple joy of the successful matchmaker. Now D & A will have a frequent visitor; my brother B will have somewhere else to go on his motorcycle, and in a few months, we'll all have enough garlic for, well, pretty much anything that requires gigantic amounts of garlic. I knew they would all get along, with visions of garlic millions dancing in their heads, and soon, Bat Cave Garlic will be a reality. A reality with a really great name; I've already got the logo designed in my head.

Sure, He's Cute

django run
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Yeah, he's adorable, but arrrrggggggghhhhhh! Yesterday he peed on my bed and then, in case that wasn't enough, he got into my closet and took out all my shoes, which he redistributed around the house and yard before settling in to eat one of my favorite, favorite clogs. Grrrrrrr. That is why he and Theo are now locked in the kitchen when there's noone home, which isn't fair to Theo, but oh well, them's the breaks. I've never been one of the crate people, because Toby was claustrophobic and hated them totally, and Phineas, the awful Shih Tzu (Shih Tz'livingroom) just shat all over his and spread it everywhere and after that experience, I decided I never wanted another shih tzu or another crate. So no crate for young Django, but oh. my. god. I had forgotten the true scale of the destruction a puppy can create in a very short amount of time.

OVERHEARD RECENTLY:
While walking down the street, said by a very drunk guy outside the College St. Pub: "If you're being chased by a bear, what you want to do, see, is run downhill."
"Naaaaaah. No way."
"Yeah, I swear. Run downhill."
At work, one geologist referring to another geologist:
"Well, he's a sedimentary guy."

Dude, New Phone!

Occasionally that which starts out rotten can end happily. This morning, I walked both the dogs: Theo, the old responsible one and Django, the tiny bouncing one. This was not as easy as it sounds, because by walk I mean get wrapped up in leashes and fall over not once but several times and by dogs I mean furry agents of Satan and by responsible I mean used to be good on the leash but now is pulling my arm off again and by bouncing I mean, in fact, bouncing like a motherfucker. If a motherfucker usually bounces, with which fact I am not acquainted, but I can totally assure you that a 9 week old Springer Spaniel indeed bounces, vertically, several feet in the air at a time. Which is why I needed a new phone.

You see, I took the dogs out on a walk through scenic foggy West Asheville (see photo) around 7:25 this morning, leaving M with instructions to get his ass out of the shower and onto the school bus in a timely manner. Which, you would think, a 14 year old could manage. Then around 7:40, when I was not particularly far along in the walk (see above, particularly referencing bouncing and getting wrapped in leashes, A called to complain bitterly that her brother had called her to demand a ride to school and it was unfair. I fielded that call okay and was thus not surprised when my phone rang again 5 minutes later, since I knew it was M calling to complain bitterly about how unfair his sister was to refuse to give him a ride to school. I had just gotten past the "You still have time to catch the school bus for chrissakes" part of this conversation when 1) puppy bounced and 2) Theo lunged and 3) phone went about 5 feet up in the air and 4 feet laterally before plunging to the pavement with an unhealthy crunch. Then I shouted JESUS FUCK! and so on, and made my unhappy broken phone way through the rest of the walk (including past that spooky playground - I did have my real camera and I hung it around my neck and hung on like grim death, so it didn't get puppy-ed) and got home where I found that M had indeed amazingly taken the school bus.

I spent the rest of the day metaphorically girding my loins to do battle with Sprint, convinced that I would walk into the Sprint store and if they didn't actually rush me with spears, well, they would certainly do so metaphorically. I told everyone how tough I was going to be and I walked in there with a fierce look on my face, ready to stand up for myself! To listen to them say tough shit and actually get mad back instead of caving meekly, apologizing for my temerity and slinking out. Which is how those encounters usually end. For once, though, I was happily surprised. "Oh yeah," said the guy, "You're way overdue for an upgrade. Here, you can have $150 credit towards any phone we have." Which is why I now am sporting a seriously slick shiny black phone WITH A CAMERA, DUDE, WITH A CAMERA and I am so, so cool now and both my children are overcome with jealousy, which is always just a sweet, sweet feeling.

Fog

There's been lovely fog in the mornings lately, as there often is in Asheville in October, and here's a charming little foggy slide show of fog images for you to mistily enjoy. You will probably notice, as I have noticed, that I actually used to take better pictures with my old point & shoot 3.2 megapixel camera than I do with my large, impressive, bells & whistles & manual stuff 5 megapixel newish camera. This has been kind of depressing me, as I have also noticed that I seem incapable of holding a camera straight. There's always a list to port on my horizon, and yes, I know, that lends itself to commentary right there, except I don't like port. I had port once, by mistake, when I was so young that we couldn't tell the difference between it and the sophisticated beverage we actually desired, wine that was not Strawberry Hill, and it was quite gruesome.

A week from tomorrow I'm driving to Atlanta to try out for Jeopardy, yikes, and alas, somehow time has gotten away from me and I'm not smart or thin yet, the two things I blithely assumed I would be by now. Damn. Oh well. I'm just going to go and wing it and if I blow it, I blow it: such is life. My family, particularly my mother, disapproves of this attitude. My mother told me sniffily not to let my children hear me talk like that, in case they started acting that way. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was far, far, far too late for that.

Comments That Make Me Oddly Happy

Yesterday, M called from his sister's car (my car, actually. Argh. Argh argh argh.) on their way home and all he had to say was "Uh, Mom?" and I said, "FINE! Just fine! It's okay with me, but then I'm not making the garlic bread!" and he started laughing and said "Okay." That left me home alone with a big pot of spaghetti while my children went out and ate burgers without me but hell, you know you grab your solitude where you can, and it was, actually, in more than even a passive aggressive way, okay with me. It's a little tight around here since A's boyfriend formally moved in. Argh. Argh argh argh argh.

Then this evening he called me at work and said, "Do you know where I can get a stuffed penguin?" "There's one in the back yard," I said practically, knowing that this was true. Not everyone can say that and it's the little things that mean so much, eventually, in one's childrens' memories. Ah yes, they will say eventually, Mom always had a stuffed penguin or two lying around in the back yard. Possibly they will use this sort of thing to make their future spouses feel inadequate which would actually, in an evil sort of way, be just fine with me.

Unfortunately, though, that wasn't the sort of stuffed penguin he had in mind, since our back yard penguin is a little the worse for wear. He wanted a clean fresh one to, hold on to your hats, give to a Girl. Being the good parent that I am, I said I would go and find one. Well. Hell. You know things have come to a terrible, gentrified pretty pass when a citizen of Asheville, a tax paying citizen and downtown worker such as myself, cannot buy a stuffed penguin in downtown! But alas, it is true. The stupid toy store was closed; TJ Morrison's has gone the way of the dodo, and there was not another stuffed penguin to be found, lo, not even in the whole of the terrifying upscale ghost mall that is the Grove Arcade. "I'll make you one!" I said feverishly on the cel phone and he shrieked, "Noooo!"

He's right. Going up to a Girl and saying creepily, "Here's a penguin. My Mom made it for you." is definitely the short road to social suicide. Even I can see the problems with that one. Pity, because I had some truly awful penguin crafts in mind.

Puppy Love

A week ago, things changed around my house. A week ago, my daughter found a puppy. And now, it's all over: we are all madly, but madly, in puppy love. Puppy has chewed everything he can get his teeth into, widdled neat little puddles in most corners of the house and done other dreadful things: isn't he pwecious! Mama's own baby angel OW STOP THAT sweetest wuzzle AAGH PEE OUTSIDE fuzzy wuzzer beans! Mama didn't need those ugly old shoes anyway. Izzum sweetie pie.

A found this puppy near a park by the Nature Center, early early on Tuesday morning when she was dropping her boyfriend off at work. The puppy was soaked and bedraggled and completely happily wandering along the side of a very busy street, so A stopped her car (my car, actually, but that's another long sad tale) and the puppy nonchalantly hopped right in. So A, having a kind heart, brought the collarless, tagless, microchip-less (we took him to a vet & checked) puppy home.

This is a purebred puppy, about 8 weeks old, fuzzy & sweet & with a badly docked tail that's already healed. A did the responsible thing: she called the Humane Society (aka the animal shelter; there's only one for Buncombe County) - about 8 times over the next 3 days. No one ever reported the puppy missing. A papered East Asheville with Found Puppy flyers. No one called her cel phone. A checked all the newspapers and the websites and everywhere someone might post a missing puppy flyer: nothing. Noone, apparently, is looking for this beautiful baby dog. And of course, by now, the worst has happened: the entire family is madly in love with Django, as he has been finally named after considerable wrangling, since I favored the name Chauncey and A was holding out for Ringo and M, disgusted by the whole thing, thought Killer or Spike were suitable.

Note that I am not posting any pictures of said adorable (OH. MY. GOD. HE. IS. ADORABLE.) puppy even though I promise you I have taken many, because the only way someone is claiming this dog is if they can describe him with no hints. At this point I kind of think they may not get him back anyway, partly because I feel that anyone who doesn't call the Humane Society about 20 minutes after they've misplaced a puppy that young doesn't deserve to own one and partly because, as I may have mentioned, we have all fallen in love with him.

It all goes to show you that you must be careful what you whisper into the ear of the universe. About two weeks ago I was saying that Theo was lonely and perhaps I should get another dog. I was thinking about a young dog, you know, not a puppy. A young shephard mix, to be specific, or possibly a lab, and not this kind of puppy at all, and certainly not an 8 week old baby with his milk teeth barely in. But there you have it: the universe, while it hears news of a vacancy appearing, is not good at specifics.

Meanwhile, Theo just remarked bitterly that noone asked HIM if he wanted a puppy, and Jesus H. Christ on a proverbial crutch, anyway. Theo is now desperate for his missing loneliness and somehow not at all as enthusiastic about the puppy as the rest of us, not to mention prone to heaving long accusing sighs in our direction as the puppy merrily chews on his cheeks. Still, he is patient, and the puppy does everything he does, which is just so cute! Stuff like taking all our socks outside, which is an old trick of Theo's, had long since ceased to be considered cute around here, but now, it's adorable again! The puppy does it so much more cutely! Mr. Bill is also not enthralled; in fact, Mr. Bill has reacted as if we had taken in a giant squid with a particular fondness for gray cats as hors d'oeuvres, not a fuzzy puppy. Every time he comes in the kitchen and spots the puppy, he reacts exactly the way I would if I came into my kitchen to find a giant squid wrapped around the refrigerator, reaching out for me with one huge and suckered tentacle, which is to say he screams and vanishes. I don't think he's really eaten in a week.

Poor Theo. Poor Mr. Bill. Poor us. But happy, lucky puppy, who is getting lavished with gigantic truckloads of love, gourmet puppy food courtesy of my mother, who is also gaga over him, a fancy collar and special new leash. Not to mention the chew toys, the gentle puppy centric flea medication and, of course, the hugging. Ah, puppy love.

A Quick Political Post

The other night he who shall not be blogged about discovered some new information about his beloved 1960s age of revolution online. "Hey mom!" he called, "Check this out! Here's this guy who blew up a CIA building with a home made bomb in 1969 and guess what happened to him?"
"No idea," I said, fully planning to ignore this.
"He got 39 months in prison," said my son, "What do you think would happen if somebody did that nowadays?"
Well. What do YOU think would happen, gentle reader? I think probably that bomb building university student would go off to Gitmo where his legs would be "pulpified" and then, likely, if he was poor he would just disappear and die, and if he was rich he might make it back to the States where he would be in jail for the rest of his miserable life. Unless he got the death penalty.
And I ask you, where the fuck did we go so wrong?

Fair Planet

fair planet
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Because I just can't stop making tiny planets. Created with the help of the tutorial found here, where they also have all kind of other nifty and cool stuff. I am madly in love with that site, so look for more weird photo mods coming soon. Here's another planet, and another (I think they look best big) - and there are more. I know, I'm getting a bit carried away, but seriously, even if you don't like mine, these planets rock. I did a series of paintings of little planets with giant trees on them years ago, a la Little Prince, but this is just so much quicker and easier; it's fabulous. In other art news, I'm making a table for the New French Bar, which should be fun and I have all kind of weird ideas for it, and I'm building a monster in the front yard, or possibly a pagan god: he's not done yet. Either way my neighbors will be horrified and one hopes that the patrons of the New French Bar will be moved - into buying something.

My Children Are Demons

It has come to my attention that my kids are demonspawn. I had kind of thought this before but now I think we have empirical proof. I like to think of myself as an easygoing and tolerant person. I think I'm openminded and friendly with all ethnic groups, even those originating in other dimensions, but I have a slight problem with this. That problem would be origins - whence came this demonic tendency? Usually, when my kids demonstrate some failing that might be genetic, I happily blame it on their fathers, and so far in their lives, this has worked admirably, since their failings tend to be dissimilar and thus easily blameable on the defective DNA contributed by dads one and two. This time though. . . this time they're acting alike and even I must see the truth: the cursed apple doesn't fall far from the twisted boughs of Yggdrasil, after all.

How do I know they're demonspawn? Well, first they hatched a plan to take all of M's disciplinary referrals, those dreaded sheets of paper the school sends home wheny your kid does something truly unspeakable, and make a lovely display of them. "I"m going to have a 9th grade wall, a 10th grade wall, an 11th grade wall and a 12th grade wall," said M, falling over himself with his own wit. "And I'm going to highlight the best ones so they really stand out and I can show them to people and reminisce." "Aaaarghhhh." I said, and then the kids cheerfully informed me of their plans for the day.

They're going to the gun show at the Civic Center. Not only are they going to the gun show, they're stopping at McDonalds first, and they made up a little song and dance number about the gun show which they have just performed in the living room to great hilarity. The words go something like this: "The gun show, the gun show! We're going to the gun show! To look at guns because we like them! We want to shoot things! The gun show! We'll eat Big Macs and go to the gun show!"

This is it. This is probably finally the time when I completely lose the last shreds of my hippie mom cred and get ridden out of Asheville on a rail, tarred and feathered by an irate crowd of yoga teaching vegan astral healers and their peaceful Indigo children. I knew it was coming. You just can't fight genetics.

Things Were Great and Then

fogandwires
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I was in a good mood this morning when I walked Theo in the fog and took a bunch of foggy pictures and even when I went off to work I still felt pretty cheerful despite a bit of a hangover and so on. And then all hell broke loose and he who shall not be blogged about got into some fairly serious trouble and she who loves to be blogged about's car finally gave up the ghost and just died on the edge of Fairview. That's two bad things and so now I'm anxiously waiting for the third shoe to drop which is a rotten, rotten feeling. Argh.

I have been all cheerful for the past couple of weeks and in fact on Monday my Zen therapist and I called it quits because, you see, I am just so sane and stuff and there I was, smugly enjoying my life and feeling gratitude and so on and now, fuck, it's all gone to shit again.

So A says to me that the problem with M is that he needs a very strict and unvarying routine and I said, "That is impossible. We don't live on Camazotz." which is true, and I guess I am glad we don't but sheesh. Sometimes an all knowing brain taking care of all these pesky details would be nice, you know? And when you ground a kid you essentially ground yourself, so if you're wondering where I am, I'm at home, being grounded.

In a complete nonsequitur, I just googled Camazotz, which as you probably know is the evil totalitarian planet of A Wrinkle in Time, which I in my 12 year old wisdom always assumed was a thinly veiled reference to Soviet Russia - in Soviet Russia, brain thinks you! - but it turns out that Camazotz is a Mayan bat god. Cool.

Homework: A Warning to Prospective Parents

I know how it is. There’s childhood, adolescence, college and finally, thank the gods, adulthood. It’s a bit angsty at first, but then you get the hang of it. You go along , enjoying being an adult, having all kind of adult fun (particularly that one particular adult activity that adults, you know, enjoy) and one day you wake up and say: “Hey! This life is awesome, but you know what would make it better? A rug rat or two!” And then you go ahead and propagate. Or possibly you don’t put quite that much thought into it and it kind of happens (our political message for the day: wouldn’t it be a better world if the human default was set on NOT getting pregnant rather than the reverse? Imagine. Discuss.) or maybe you put tons more thought into it and work very hard for a miracle child.

Mistake. It was a tragic mistake, sorry. There is one thing you haven’t thought about, and that’s true even if you are one of the people who worked for years to have a child. Sure, now you have a baby, and it’s really cute and stuff, and it drools and crawls and you can dress it in utterly adorable little suits or checked dresses with smocking and ducks and, holy shit, there are baby docs! And there is nothing more adorable in this world than baby docs. But it doesn’t matter, because the only trouble you have in those years is sleep deprivation and actually that’s a bonus, because honestly, if you weren’t that sleep depped, would you seriously ever think that the $150 yellow plastic thing that speaks in 100 equally intolerable electronic versions when you smack it is cute, or, gods forbid, necessary for your child to grow up literate?

What hasn’t entered into your fuzzy equation of love and ducks and bunnies and babies is the single, simple horrible and eternal truth: homework. Specifically, algebra homework. Say you have three kids. All three kids are going to have to take algebra and that means that you, yes, you, the person who thought that algebra was gone forever from her life, is going to have to take algebra not just once more, not just twice, but THREE more times. Ha, you say. This is the 21st century! Surely they cannot have algebra anymore. Oh no. They still have it, and it’s gotten worse. It’s gotten harder, meaner, leaner, toned for the new century and far more evil. And you will have to do it every. Single. Night. For. The. Rest. Of. Your. Life. Or until your kids graduate, which, given the evil of algebra, may be more or less the same equation. X=misery; Y=puzzlement; Z=the test is tomorrow Mom!

And this is not even to mention Harriet Tubman and Helen Keller, for although you may have fondly thought that they were phantoms of your past, you were wrong. Every American schoolchild must write at least one paper or make one diorama (you pick which is more traumatic; they’re both pretty goddamn bad) on Harriet Tubman and Helen Keller. It’s unfortunate that they can’t do them simultaneously and get it over with but alas, these are separate assignments. As is the algebra. Every night, the algebra. And then, there’s geography. Tigris and Euphrates rivers, holy shit, do you know where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are? And if so could you call me? Because we have a map due tomorrow.

The Five Hour Haircut, or, Other Tales of Slightly Surreal Weekend

Yesterday, I got my hair cut. Well, let's put that another way: I got my hair FIXED, which involved highlights, lowlights, trimming, consultations, a spell under a rotating space age dryer thingie and FIVE HOURS of work by several dedicated professionals. Also the going price for a small condo in Manhattan, but we won't go into that because, you know, who needs to buy heating oil or food when she is beautiful? The reasoning behind this extravaganza was that it will allow my hair to grow out into it's long neglected natural color (tactfully referred to as "dark blonde with some red" or, more accurately, brown) and let the gray go ahead and do it's thing, thus enabling me to, gulp, "age gracefully" without too much awful trauma in there and meanwhile maintaining a glamourous yet professional appearance. One hopes. Sheesh. The upshot of all this was that I sat for a long long time (do you know how long, boys and girls? Yes, that's right! FIVE hours!) in front of a mirror. I don't think I've ever contemplated my own visage for so long, not even when I was in the throes of adolescent zits and melancholy. It's hard to look at yourself for a protracted period of time when you're as old as I am: you keep hearing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald playing in the background. Either that, or, if you share with me the tragic glory that is the Celtic heritage, you realize that you're starting to look like an early documentary photograph of some fun event like the potato famine or a weeping mother from the Gangs of New York era. I look like I should be clutching my worldly goods on a cart while the British beat my family with sticks and let the cattle graze over my cottage. Yes, my cheekbones are getting more Irish by the moment, as are my giant eyebrows and, thanks Dad, sideburns. Ah the joy that is sideburns. The hairdresser was sympathetic but firm: there's nothing you can do except put pomade on them and hope for the best. Prayer, perhaps. To St. Brigid of the bushy eyebrows and gray sideburns that make us Irish women of a certain age so resemble muppets.

I reeled out into the daylight to discover that I had fabulous hair and a whole bunch of guests from Baltimore waiting impatiently for me at home. There were people here I hadn't seen for many many years; one in particular since she was seven, and now she's thirteen and looks like a particularly stunning twenty two. I commiserated with her mother. All these young teenage children seem to have more self possession, maturity, good looks and fashion sense than I ever have had or ever will, and I include my own son in this daunting category, even if he does spend hours standing in front of the open refrigerator door whining about the lack of food therein. So we all went off to the Brew N' View, which, as I have mentioned I think about a thousand times, is where I always take out of towners. We let the kids pick the table, which meant that we sat next to the Dance Dance Revolution machine, which is why there are approximately a thousand blurry photos of the Dance Dance Revolution machine on my Flickr photostream. Including MOI, since I got up there and, I thought, did not too badly for being a)elderly, b) somewhat intoxicated, c) fat and d) unable to read instructions in Japanese. I got up to Level 2 and the other adults thought that was great but the kids shook their heads pityingly and gently escorted me back to my seat. I'll probably die of some mysterious disease now anyway: I was barefoot at Asheville Pizza. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

It was great to see everyone if somewhat disconcerting to discover that they were not, after all, frozen in time six years ago but have kept right on growing up. A & her boyfriend and I drove up to Bat Cave this morning with muffins for the crew and then slowly made our way home through the apple corridor that is 64, stopping to ooh and ahh over chainsaw bears, a chainsaw wizard and even a remarkably wonderful chainsaw rhinocerous. Yes, a rhinocerous, a beautiful carved thing who was light years better than your usual run of the mill chainsaw bears, raccoons holding signs that say Howdy, and, inexplicably, a life size chainsaw cowboy with two guns drawn. Alas I had forgotten my camera. We bought dusty apples from a creepy old farmstand that had decaying possum and raccoon hides stapled all over it (turns out old WNC hasn't completely disappeared just yet) and somewhat nicer apples from a bright and shiny farmstand that apparently laces their cider with sugar. It's been a nice weekend. And I look fabulous. Right? Right?

The Yellow Jacket

Today I went out of the office to smoke a cigarette at around 3:00 pm, as is my wont, whatever the fuck a wont is. Certainly it's my habit, and thank god, really, that I smoke, because otherwise whole weather systems would pass me by, locked in hundreds of feet of solid concrete and mineral specimens as I am. I mean, Armageddon may have come and gone by the time I emerge from the office: I'll never know. So I spend a lot of time in the Rhino courtyard, smoking alone, feeling every inch the social pariah and getting on first name terms with the cardinal family and the mysterious worms that mysteriously emerge from solid pavement every time it rains and then, of course, not mysteriously at all, die horrible deaths at the hands of the cardinal family. Nature: it is a mystery. Mmmmm hmmm.

And today it was even more of a mystery than usual, because I smoked my 3:00 cigarette, bid a wistful goodbye to daylight and the sky, and went back inside to chop membership forms at which point I became hideously aware that something large and angry was buzzing around in my hair. "help!" I called softly from the kitchen, as I tried to brush it out. "Help! HELP!!" and my coworker finally heard my pleas and ran out to help me. Sure enough, yellow jacket. She got it out of my hair without either of us being stung, utterly amazingly, and proceeded to stamp it into oblivion with extreme prejudice while I waxed eloquent equally with thanks and with the still bitter memory of the yellow jacket in a soda can who stung me on the upper lip in 7th grade. That sting, positioned directly in the center of my lip, caused it to swell up to National Geographic proportions. For several days. In which my unfeeling mother forced me to go to school.

That was horribly cruel and I'd never do such a thing to my own kids, unless, of course, they were really getting on my nerves. Heh. But I'm over it though. Really. I mean, seriously, I'm so over it.

Waaaaaaaaaaahhhhh! Poems of Self Pity

RAIN
I thought my umbrella was in the car
Resting
But no,
It was already in my office so I
Got wet
Because
I am too cool to wear a raincoat.

DINNER
I forgot I had said I would
Go out to dinner tonight
And now I can't
But not for fun reasons
Because I have to go see my mother
Because I have to help my son write an English paper
And because, god help me, I have to go to a large
and evil store
to buy sweatpants made by depressed Chinese children
Wednesdays suck.

CLOTHES
All my clothes today
Came from LL Bean
And they look it.
I used to be hip
But alas, no longer.

Comfort Clothes

I just got home from work and a couple of post work birthday beers for a friend and then, ah, I got home and pulled off my work clothes and put on lovely, lovely sweatpants and giant ancient purple T-shirt and cozy hoodie. Ahhhhhhhh. There is nothing better than comfort clothes. I like my job, which makes me lucky and one of the few, even if after a month the novelty is beginning to wear off and I'm kind of back to that "working for a living sucks; jobs, meh" thing. Probably, though, I'd still be totally enthusiastic if it wasn't for the bra factor. When you work, if you are female, you must wear a bra. This is the law, and if you don't obey it the bra police will come and take you away to bra jail, or your kids will taunt you and frankly I'm not sure which is worse. At any rate, I went through a joyous braless year of unemployment, during which I sometimes looked at my laundromat pile of sweat pants and giant hideous antique T-shirts and thought "Uh oh. I have kind of let things go, haven't I?" but nonetheless kept right on wearing my lovely, cozy, repulsively grotesque clothing because, you know, what the fuck? I wasn't working and the special torture which is the brassiere is reserved for the gainfully employed - just a little thorn in their sides, bless their hearts.

Now, though, I'm back in that 9-5 world about which Dolly Parton and Loni Anderson in their glory have sung and acted so eloquently. (Huh. According to IMDB I'm misremembering Loni Anderson as having anything to do with the 9 - 5 franchise. Well, go figure. I had this large breasted vision in my head - kind of terrifying, actually.) Now, Dolly needs a bra; I grant you that. I could see where support might be vital there. But I, who am artistically under endowed, as once semi-affectionately explained by my evil ex: "You know. Artist tits. All you artsy intellectual girls got them tiny titties," I, unlike Dolly, do not in actual fact need a bra for anything but camouflage. Yet I must wear one, because you just have to when you work, or else it's wrong, and against the American way, or something evil whose depths I have never plumbed, because I give in and put the damn thing on every fucking morning. And it's the fastest thing to leave my body as soon as I get home again.

Ah The Joy

The joy of having M living back at home and attending public school is just too great for words, because it only took him three or four weeks of school to bring home a particularly virulent cold and now we're all sniffing about miserably. I went to get the cold medicine out of the bathroom for my darling boy, who rarely gets sick, but tends to go all the way when he does succumb and discovered that it had all expired in 2004 and 2005 - when he went away to school and took his horrible kid germs with him. He is back. So are the germs. They may have had a point, in grade school, when they said boys had cooties and germs. Ah choo!

And then there's the joy of the laundry, and finding the neatly folded jeans from last laundry day underneath the dirty crumpled jeans that have to be washed, like, immediately please Mom because I have nothing to wear to school, is a joy that is hard to communicate. It's one of those joys that involves a lot of cuss words. Ah well. At least the worst things I'm finding in his pockets are world history notes, candy wrappers and the occasional dollar, which I keep as my rightful due.

I'm Still Alive

And I know, I haven't been blogging. Let's see, what have I been doing?

Well, I've been taking and posting a ton of pictures. And I've been working a lot - on Friday night alone I managed to cover myself and most of the office in copy machine toner, so you know I've been accomplishing simply tons of useful work. I went to Drinking Liberally last Thursday - there are pictures. I went to the Flying Frog on Friday evening, which was nice and then I had my tarot cards read today at the Lexington Avenue Arts Fair. The tarot card lady told me basically the same stuff that my therapist keeps telling me, which is either awesome or scary (you pick) and then, last weekend, in a most blog worthy but as yet unblogged episode, I had the everliving shit scared out of me by a balloon, so you know, life goes on.

I got the balloon at the Hendersonville Apple Festival; it was a standard issue blue helium balloon that said True Blue Democrat in white letters on the side. Very nice. I had it tied around my wrist, which made me feel about six, but you know, whatever: we Democrats are so full of childlike glee and stuff. I brought the ballooon home and let it go in the dining room and forgot all about it. I went to bed and then, about 3 in the morning or so, I woke up in total darkness to this weird and terrifying FWAP FWAP FWAP noise. I opened both my myopic eyes wide, already freaking out a bit, and a blue orb swooped down directly at my face at superhuman speed.

I stopped screaming eventually, having lost several years off my life, to realize that the accursed Democratic balloon had somehow mysteriously made its merry way into my bedroom where it had gotten stuck in the ceiling fan (hence the FWAPping) which managed to propel it into my eyes just as I opened them. Well, either that or the spirits of Democrats past were having a nasty joke at my expense, or possibly the almost certainly Republican resident ghost was moved to political commentary. Maybe my poltergeist is actually Lyndon LaRouche. One may never know, but from now on all balloons in this house, particularly political ones, must be kept safely under lock and key.

In other breaking news this evening, M has a cold and is miserable; A is working all the time and I never see her and Theo is moping because he doesn't get walked enough. Same old, same old around here. Go look at the pictures.

The Fair is Back

the state mammal is a box turtle
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

S and I went to the fair last night. No, it hasn't started yet - I was doing my yearly volunteer stint as Mountain State Fair Art Handler In Chief and Wise All Knowing if Somewhat Snarky Judge. S was there because she's still new enough in town not to quail in despair when someone smilingly suggests a volunteer gig. Thank the gods she was naive enough to come, too, because this year the fair crew, in their ultimate wisdom, decided to cover the white pegboard walls we usually hang the art on with black burlap. It looked much better - it was awful to work with. If you think hanging a bazillion terrible pencil drawings on pegboard with these sort of hook-y pegboard things is hard, you should try doing it through one and sometimes two layers of black burlap. It took four people the same amount of time to hang less art than two people with twice the art last year. Or something like that. I recognize that that sentence was, in fact, unreadable, but it's been a long day.

Hanging the fair art is great fun in a weird way, particularly while drinking Yuengling in plastic root beer bottles so as not to epater the proletariat. It's also fun because when, like me, you hang the adult art (not adult like that, you fool. Adult enough to do 3 detailed pencil drawings of Johnny Depp and pay for them to be triple matted and framed.) you can be all mean and rotten about it and make hilarious comments at the expense of the entrant who decided that it would be a good idea to do an oil painting replica of the cover of a box of Sleepytime herbal tea. You can be mean without fear of karmic repercussion because, you see, you're there hanging the art as a volunteer and the good karma cancels out the bad! It's a beautiful balance. There are always some serious winners at the fair - and then there are the people who do the landscapes from the TV shows on how to paint. And then, there's Heather, whoever she is, bless her heart: she's apparently unhappy in these mountains: she paints lurid seascapes with wildly waving ferns and pirate ships under full sail. Heather rocks.

Everyone rocks, actually, for all that I double over in convulsions of laughter at the earnest soul who painted two giant and rather owlish sparrows fluttering madly around a green snake crawling up their birdhouse and then decoupaged in the words to a hymn (God Is Watching Every Sparrow, I think - yeah, judging by the painting he may be watching but he's not planning on helping much) there's something endearing and sweet about the art at the fair. These people take it very seriously, and they work their hearts out, get their work framed and take it in to be judged amidst the jars of pickles and vegetables shaped like Richard Nixon, the llamas and the sheep, the kids' diorama contest, the chainsaw bears and the man with the live bees. So I take it seriously too. Or kind of seriously in that I give points for ineptitude and dedication, and none for polished shininess.

And this turtle? This turtle is the state mammal of North Carolina, man! This turtle is on display with the kids' diorama contest, where the theme apparently is either NC's various state totems or pig racing, it was unclear. Dude! This turtle is AWESOME.

Mice, Again

The mice are back; they love the change of seasons. Even though it isn't really fall yet and the weather is still hot, still their tiny mouse brains and their even tinier little mouse day planners tell them that it's time to come into my kitchen and curl up snugly for the winter among my canned beans and oven insulation. Bastards. I hates them. One died some time back in the cabinet and was recently discovered: so that's what that smell was. A called me at work last week to tell me about the dead mouse - you know, breaking news, my daughter the anchorperson, coming to Mom live from the kitchen with a complaint about the dead mouse. So I cleaned out all his horrible decayed mouse corpse detritus and put down some more traps, lavishly baited with peanut butter.

Evil little bastards ate the peanut butter and didn't spring the traps. Naturally. At least, I guess that's what happened, unless it evaporated into thin air and I don't think peanut butter does that. Rum apparently does: I had a big old gallon bottle that I bought for my party in early August, that I figured would last me until Christmas, since I rarely drink liquor. Alas, no, even though it was all sealed up, it's mostly disappeared: just evaporated, I guess. Gone. Vanished. I haven't heard any sounds of mousy revelry coming from the walls (well, no more than usual this time of year) so I doubt the mice removed the cap, constructed a siphon and drained the rum. Perhaps we have Borrowers (she said sarcastically, with an evil glance towards her oldest child.) I wouldn't even have known it was almost gone if it hadn't been for the mouse, so I guess he did do me one favor: without him, I wouldn't have had a chance to rant and rave and holler at the kids and loudly mark the bottle level with a sharpie.

In other breaking news, I went out to lunch today with my mother and my friend S at Fig Bistro and it was lovely. There's something about a really nice lunch and a glass of wine that just makes one feel all civilized like - civilized and ready for a nap. While we were there we saw this lovely creature out the window: truly one of the biggest praying mantises I've ever seen and he posed so graciously for the camera. I keep on trying to take pictures of the orb weavers at work at night on my back porch, because their webs are astounding but alas, my photographic skills are not up for it. The spiders also get exasperated quickly and I have found in my long years of life that it is not wise, oh my children, to exasperate a spider. Or a praying mantis, or a mouse, actually, now that I think about it.

Holy Trivia, Batman!

I've been invited to go to Atlanta to audition for Jeopardy!! OH MY GOD! I am so incredibly excited! I took an online Jeopardy test (that I found out about on Metafilter, naturally) a couple of months ago and, since I didn't hear anything back, forgot all about it, figuring that I had blown the test on the Dreyfus Affair question, which I had completely blanked on. Oh well, sure I have always wanted to be on Jeopardy, but you know, whatever: it hasn't been a high priority in my life, not really even up there with such goals as owning a llama or a pygmy fainting goat and well behind marrying Nicolas Cage. BUT NOW, OMG, I AM GOING TO GO TO ATLANTA AND TRY OUT FOR JEOPARDY BECAUSE I GOT A SPECIAL EMAIL INVITATION, HOLY FUCK, CAN NICOLAS CAGE BE FAR BEHIND? Perhaps I will win a pygmy fainting goat! Help, I will have to lose a ton of weight and get my eyebrows waxed! Yipes!

This is what the email said:
Congratulations! You have been selected for a follow-up appointment at an upcoming Jeopardy! contestant search for the Atlanta area, exclusively for those who successfully passed the online test. This is the next step in becoming a Jeopardy! contestant. We have reserved the following appointment for you:

When: Wednesday, October 11th Time: 9:30am
Where: Atlanta, GA

You must RSVP within two business days of receipt of this email to secure your place in the audition. When you RSVP via email, please provide the following:

1) Date and time of your invite
2) Your name
3) Your City & State
4) Your Phone Number

Due to overwhelming demand we can only hold your spot for two business days. If you respond after that period of time, and if we still have space, we will be happy to provide you with an appointment.

Your appointment is non-transferable, and only those who receive this invitation directly from Jeopardy! may RSVP to book an appointment. Each RSVP will be matched against an invite list and forwarded invitations will not be honored.

The auditions will last about 2 hours.

Once you RSVP, we will email you a letter of confirmation within five business days that will give you the exact location and other information regarding trying out. Should you have a major conflict with the time and date provided, you may respond to this email to explain the nature of the situation. Again, please provide your name, city and phone number. If you do not receive a response in three business days, please contact us by phone.

Appointments are very limited, so please be sure you can join us before you RSVP.

So of course I immediately emailed them back and said, oh yes, I WILL be there, although it would be nice if I could come later, like around noon, so I don't have to leave Asheville at 5 in the morning, but if I have to, I will. So here we go: I am already nervous. I better go to the library and read the encyclopedia or something, holy shit, how does one prep for a Jeopardy tryout? How will I cope with the shame if I don't cut it at the auditions? Or, possibly even more frightening, what if I do cut it at the auditions and I have to get on a plane (I'm terrified of flying) and go to California, a distant and foreign land? Eeeep! I am scared! I am afraid! I am nervous! I am excited and jubilant! Wheee! And so, here is a picture of cloggers from the Apple Festival which I went to yesterday to calm us all down. ;-)

M Won't Let Me Take His Picture

kids 4
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

M, lately, hates hates hates me taking pictures of him. He refuses to let me take a picture, which is a drag, since he's a cute adorable boy and I would like to put his picture up in my office so I could point to it proudly. When I tried last night to take his picture with his sister thus proving that he is now at least 6' tall, he took off to his room while A, who adores having her picture taken, tried to drag him back out and I snapped away. Serve him right for being a pain about a simple thing like pictures: now his blurry self is on the internets.