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.

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.

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. ;-)

Wish Me Luck

I am about to turn off the computer and install a new CD-R drive. Yes, all by my techie little self. Remember, I'm the woman who successfully installed RAM - upside down. Which is supposed to be impossible, but I managed it. Now, I'm about to install a CD drive, because the vast number of photos on the hard drive is making World of Warcraft slow, and we cannot have that, boys and girls, because then our fire breathing horse will get cranky and we cannot gallop seamlessly through the desert for ages and ages while insisting we are doing something much more important than homework or sleep. So the photos will go onto CDs and be stored away to be forgotten, and the horse will gallop on.

It's a bit worrisome, because I can't back up my data first, because. . . wait for it. . I don't have a CD drive to back it up onto! That's why I'm installing one! Actually, that isn't strictly true. I have not one but TWO CD burners in my computer; problem is, neither one of them really work. Each of them works just a teensy bit, now and then, when they aren't busy making thwacka thwacka flop noises, refusing to release my CDs or being snubbed by the rest of the computer. I always feel bad for snubbed hardware; it seems so mean to say "Computer does not recognize the CD drive", or, even more cutting, "there is no CD drive." There was a CD drive there two weeks ago, asshole, and you were perfectly friendly then. What happened? Someone let their bar tab get out of control?

At any rate, I decided not to go out tonight so I could complete this vital task, and I had better hop to it. I also printed out a rasterbation of a sunflower that I made and I'm going to hang in my office. It's going to look fabulous, but, having now done one rasterbation, I would recommend, if you are going to do one, to pick a very clear, very graphic image with very few colors. The rasterbater is just not so good at color and my sunflower is kind of washed out looking. Still, it's cool. Supair cooo-ul, as the French radio announcer said of Augustus Pablo. And it will help my concrete dungeon of an office, as will the betta I'm going to install there at some point in the near future, at least, until it dies (she said cheerfully.)

Apologies and the Traffic Report

It has come to my (admittedly fleeting) attention that I haven't been a very good friend lately. Many emails have gone unanswered; many phone messages have gone unlistenedto and worst of all, I totally forgot to go to a birthday celebration on Sunday night. So, friends, I'm sorry and I suck. Don't worry, it's not just you: I'm also busily being a bad daughter, bad sister and bad dog owner. I am, however, being a really goddamn good museum employee and also, I think I might be being a good parent, but it's difficult to tell, because my children are pretty much never home. When they are, though, I'm doing a lot of shouting from the kitchen about things like homework and responsibility and duty and good citizenship and, naturally, the dishes, and while it's just vaguely possible that they aren't listening to me, deeply absorbed as they are in such vital occupations as World of Warcraft and watching Fun with Dick and Jane, still, according to the 1952 Dr. Spock, quantity shouting = quality parenting. Things will shake down soon and perhaps I can resume what tattered remnants of my family and social life remain. At least I hope so.

Either that or I'll die of being too busy and in that case I want whatever eventual mythical inheritances are coming my way to go to my kids, because I saw some street kids walking depressedly from the Rescue Mission towards the park, and it put me in a tizzy of worrying about my children, who may yet wake up one day and discover that achieving Level 40 and the resultant fire breathing horse in World of Warcraft does not a useful job resume make. Then I thought about how I had nothing to leave them if I fell over and just died, as sometimes seems likely, particularly in heavy traffic on the Smoky Park Highway Bridge (which bounces alarmingly when you're sitting there at the red light) and I nearly sobbed at the thought of the two poor waifs with noone to buy their frozen junk food or wash their dishes or hear their sadness over the clothes that they must have that their evil parent will not buy. That proceeded into a small Shakespearian frenzy over who would be more likely to kill me for some mythical inheritance: my brothers or my kids? Ah, the time honored question that all mad tyrants are prone to - it is a poser.

I have come to the conclusion, by the way, that there is no good way to leave downtown Asheville at 5:00. No matter which way you go, you will sit there in hot traffic, trying to take blog notes and discovering that stopping and then going 10 feet and then stopping again in a standard shift car is really, and I do mean really, not conducive to taking blog notes. Or much of anything else, really, except wondering what the hell Ms. S.D.A. means on the vanity license plate on the white minivan in front of you and hoping that the rapture comes within the next four minutes. When the rapture comes, the traffic will improve. In the meantime, it's probably better to go have a beer at 5:00 than try to go home.

Giant Mushroooooms! Oh, and Class Structure in America

I went and picked up my friend D on Saturday and brought her down off the mountain where she had been trapped for 10 days without a car and with a crazy, deeply crazy, neighbor. On the way up to her house I stopped my car on her twisty narrow dirt road to take pictures of these amazing mushrooms. I swear when I saw them out the window I thought they were fake: twee little ceramic or resin thingies from the Kountry Shoppe in Chimney Rock Village or something, but no, they are quite real, and the biggest one was easily a foot across. One of these days there are going to be two cars going opposite directions on that road, and I'm not sure what's going to happen then. It's too narrow to pass, there's nowhere, not even a driveway, to turn around, and it's over a mile long; I was thinking about this the other day and even briefly wondered if I should google it, because I want to know if there is some kind of etiquette to cover such a situation, like, does the uphill car start reversing? Or the downhill one?

Poor D got immediately submerged in the city, as I promptly dragged her along on the Drinking Liberally/BlogAsheville blog slog pub crawl, which was huge fun. I was reluctant initially to take place, feeling like a)I would be a slumming yuppie and b)that was exploitative of me and c)besides, if I was going to be the only girl I was SO not going (there turned out to be more girls than guys, actually, which just goes to show you, uh, something.) It's terrible, when you think about it, how segregated "old" West Asheville and "new" West Asheville are. We "new" people - never mind that some of us have been here for a long damn time now - go to the Westville Pub and Burgermeister, the Lucky Otter and the Gray Eagle, while "old" West Asheville goes to Cowboy's Nite Life and the B&D Bar, Mike's Side Pocket and the Burger Barn. Separate but equal? Not really. The new places are all spruced up; someone spent time designing them; they have light and windows, plants and funky paintings and, perhaps most striking, they're clean, which you can't say about the old places. The old places hew to the design ethos of the original local bar'n'grill which just got that way without anyone thinking about it: panelling (why, oh lord, is panelling?) darkness, a beer mirror or two, some neon and one helluvalot of good old fashioned dirt on the theory that the darkness and the smoke covers it up.

So what makes the difference? Why does one group go to one set of watering holes and the other go to the other? We all know, even though as Americans we're wildly uncomfortable talking about class. We try to cover it up by talking about education, and opportunities, and "old" versus "new" in much the same way that we try to cover up racism (that's not an issue in these bars, btw, I mean, it IS, of course, but this is a pretty damn white neighborhood and these are all white bars.) But it is, of course, a class issue, this segregation of my neighborhood. Because we the crawlers are the "educated" "new" people, I think we were all a little worried about our reception: we thought it was possible that those rednecks were going to kick our yuppie asses. We are chickenshits, and clearly prejudiced to boot. The people in the "old" bars were uniformly pleasant and funny and welcoming and thought our pub crawl idea was great. See what unfamiliarity can do? Scare you silly - for nothing.

The pathetic thing about this - okay, one of the many, many pathetic things about this - is I'm not sure when I made this transition to group A: for years I hung out in redneck bars by choice. Well, on the other hand, for years those were pretty much the only kinds of bars there were where I lived. Being as how I have a liking for bars in general and have always lived in a state of complete and dire poverty which lends me a certain low class dollar store shopping cred with The Working Classes, I became and remained a redneck bar habitue for many years. Redneck bars or art bars: it is also true that I always have gone to the art bars but then sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference and yes, I'm thinking about you, Mount Royal Tavern. Then I got older and discovered a fondness deep within myself for a real beer selection, the occasional fern and the ability to see what it is I'm drinking and I moved away from what are blithely called Holes in the Wall, although usually they stand alone and are made of either cinderblock or panelling and duct tape.

I doubt I'm going to suddenly switch back to the group B bars, although it's cool to feel like at least I know my neighborhood options now. And, people? The jukebox at Mike's Side Pocket? Awesome.

All Good

So, things are really pretty good right now, despite the fact that yes, I confess, I went to Mall Wart this evening and it was every bit as horrendous as one might think. I know that a visit to the Store of Evil is a sign of weakness and lack of resolute purpose on my pansy liberal ass but I wanted to buy a whole bunch of disparate stuff at once and still get home in time to serve dinner at the sophisticated and continental hour of 8:30 p.m. Those women's magazines that tell you never to eat after 7 have clearly never tried to juggle kids, job, dog and so forth, because there is no way, on the night before the first day of high school, that you can make it home before 7:30. Also, I ended up buying 4 quarter goldfish (they cost a quarter; I didn't buy 4 quarters of a goldfish and plan on reassembling him at home) and really, the only place where you can buy horrible frozen breakfast crap, pork chops, boy's jeans, pastel sharpies AND live goldfish is, of course, Mall Wart. And I neeeeeeeeded those things.

So it looks like I have a real and permanent job, and I'm really happy about it. Watch out, friends and acquaintances, because in my job I also look for volunteers, and volunteers make MY life easier; thus, QED, YOU need to volunteer, about which there will shortly be tons more on Blog Asheville. All this has made me realize that although I'm frantic and busy and zooming around (mental note: having 5 cups of serious black coffee is not a good idea when you can't leave the museum unattended to go to the bathroom) I'm actually enjoying myself, feeling challenged and cheerful and hey, the kids are okay, my mom is okay, the dog is okay and the cat is okay. And the new goldfish, while their lives may be short (I'm not sure if the old goldfish are still alive, and if they are, well, sayonara kids, because Uncle & Auntie are easily 4 times your size and they hongry) at least they will be interesting and fraught with the glory that is an outdoor setting as opposed to an aquarium.

I'm knocking on wood, but things are great. And I won best post of the day on Metafilter which makes me feel truly warm and fuzzy and Sally Fieldish (which you can see from my last post in that thread, oops, oh well) because it was on a subject near and dear to my heart and not designed to win a contest, which contest I had completely forgotten existed. On top of all that, my library books were not that overdue, and I rented Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which I fully plan on watching extremely soon. Or as soon as I finish the pork chops, collards and sweet potatoes that will hopefully make up for the Thai curry debacle last night.

Another Day, Another Hangover

Actually, the hangover was yesterday, and was so bad that I stayed in bed all day. 24 hours on that futon and my back hurts like hell today; oh well, another lost day, it was raining anyway. This rejoining the 9 to 5 world is kicking my lazy unemployed ass, I must say, although I grant you that being utterly sober all week and getting hopelessly sloshed on a Friday night is not the healthiest way to be gainfully employed. (Wow, that rhymed! I am a po-et and I don't. . the rest was omitted in the interests of not sending all of us into a crazed axe ridden fury. This has been a public service announcement.) Let's get all angst ridden, or rather, let's not, and instead dwell on this super groovy fabulously cool art show at the LG gallery. That's my friend H in the picture there, and his stunning work along with the work of a bunch of other extremely talented people is currently on view. The opening, which I went to on Friday night, was spectacular. Some of the best work I've seen in ages and so I urge you to make tracks downtown - 63 N. Lexington, to be precise - to check it out. Finally, finally someone has taken the technology behind that cool thing, the plasma ball and turned it into art, and the results are as amazingly wonderful as you might think they would be. The gallery is only open on weekends; don't miss it.

In other news, old friends are flocking to Asheville; my good friends D & A have successfully moved to Bat Cave and after I clean up this horrifying kitchen I'm going to try to go find their new house. That should be fun, since I don't think even they have a clue where it really is. Apparently last weekend in the midnight throes of moving with kid and friend and giant piano bearing truck they came over and banged on my door at about 3 in the morning. Noone woke up - not even Theo the watchdog. If only they'd put on dog or squirrel suits: that would have done the trick. Theo is really good at alerting us to the presence of animals; humans, not so much. Other old friends L & A and their three adorable daughters appeared suddenly in town and I met them for a drink at the Brew N' View, which is where I take all Ashevegas neophytes and visitors and which I think is probably directly responsible for D&A's decision to leave Baltimore and come here.

A went off to NY for the weekend and took my car to the Charlotte airport with her, leaving me the keys to her Frankenmobile. I hate the Frankenmobile; clearly, I'm an unfit parent, since although I won't drive it, I seem to think it's fine for A to toodle around town in a car with the hood bolted on by giant bolts (hence the name,)a drivers' side door that's in imminent danger of falling off into the street and a passenger seat that wobbles alarmingly all over the car, to say nothing of the assorted thumps and bangs and unnerving clunk noises the damn thing makes constantly. She left me a long voice mail about how to get Frankenmobile into reverse: put it into all the other gears first, let up slightly on the clutch etc., but I've come up with a better plan, which is just not to drive if at all possible. Every time M leaves the house I keep telling him in a doom laden voice that I cannot, can not, will not, pick him up no matter what, especially at night or in the dark. So far, so good, but A doesn't come back until tomorrow night, eek.

Hi, We're From The Internet

It was the internet meetup to end all internet meetups, the ne plus ultra, the supreme, the compleat, the absolute coollest: Bunnystock. Eight people from the internets get together for an Asheville weekend: it was wild and tremendous fun. I'm exhausted today. I had all these plans and things I had to do today - did any of them get done? Hell no. I've just been sitting here obsessively looking at my photos and eating Utz crab chips which the mid Atlantic contingent kindly brought me.

It's funny getting together in Real Life with people you only know online, but not as funny as non internet people think it is. They feel like old friends; there's not much shyness; it's not at all like meeting strangers, because, well, they aren't strangers. They're friends of mine, people I know - from the internet, which to me is pretty much the same thing as knowing them from work, or a class, or wherever it is that you meet your friends. Still, it's a bit odd in the greater social context, and we were all aware of that. So we made a lot of obligatory axe murderer jokes: "Everyone get their issued axe? This is the axe murderer's convention!" and we told waitresses that we were From the Internet, which went over much better than we kind of thought it would. The stigma that used to attach to online socializing seems to be thankfully disappearing.

And now I'm going to bed. Good night!

Fliss' Day

If you were me (and a close friend has said, "That's why everyone loves your blog! They can read it and thank god their lives aren't like that!) than your day would have gone like this:

7:45 a.m. wake up out of interesting dream to sound of horrible alarm
7:45 - 8:00 a.m. deny possibility that you are waking up, vastly prefer dream life, cling hopelessly to dream in which life is sane, also, you were married to a very sexy man.
8:00 - 9:20 a.m. get up. Make coffee. Turn on computer, pay bills, discover that you are out of cheques and you've forgotten your online bill paying password, discover that car insurance people say you didn't pay last bill, snarl at daughter who meekly asks what you are doing, apologize to dog for not walking him, frantically remember that paid employment requires you to be in place at a certain time, i.e., 9:30 a.m., freak out, make lunch, take shower, run out door without lunch or cel phone.
9:30 a.m - 5:00 p.m.: The Work Day is Full of Discoveries
****1. Discover that previous people in your new position interpreted "filing" as "throwing in big heap on floor."
****2. Discover that new coworkers think you are a tool for evil management (it is true, actually, you are) and thus hate you forever.
****3. Discover that although you thought YOU were disorganized, compared to previous people in your new job you are actually Martha Stewart on crystal meth in the organization department.
****4. Discover that you can gasp a lot.
****5. Discover missing lunch. Curse. Buy turkey sandwich.
****6. Discover missing cel phone. Curse. Call son. Demand that he read first two chapters of school summer reading book before departing to adolescent happy land, a.k.a. his gang of fun friends who apparently have no parents. Son hangs up. Envision son in Dickensian land of carefree albeit tattered teenage orphans. Curse more. Get jealous.
****7. Run into one of oldest, closest friends in world, who is in town for Tom Waits concert. Remember guiltily that you had agreed to host many old friends here for said concert.
****8. Work feverishly, dash out door.
5:15 p.m. Walk to auditorium, run into plethora of old friends, walk to Jack of the Wood with them.
5:20 p.m. Call kids and apologize; it's okay, they're already gone. Feel that this is a bit unfair. Remember when they were little. Realize that they no longer need you. Thank the gods.
5:20 - 7:45 p.m. Drink heavily with old friends. Say, "Do you remember. . " way too much. Smile a lot.
7:45 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. Old friends leave for concert. Run into other group of unexpected friends who are mourning dearth of Tom Waits tickets. Drink more beer with them.
9:00 p.m. Come home. House is hot as hell. Put on sexy nylon slip because it is coollest thing you own. Put on rubber clogs. Take out compost bucket in sexy nylon slip & rubber clogs. Dump it in compost pile. Water vegetable garden in sexy nylon slip and rubber clogs. Dump compost bucket full of water on gourds at bottom of garden. Think that there is something perverse in all this, but be unable to put your finger on it. Hope devoutly that neighbors can't see you, but still, kind of weirdly enjoy rinsing out compost bucket while wearing sexy nylon slip . . . and rubber clogs.

Surrealist Weekend

It's that time of year again - the dreaded Bele Chere, Asheville's annual ode to all things drunken, sunburned and redneck. Also, crafts. Not, for the most part, good local crafts but instead shiny machine made crafts from New Jersey and of course obligatory mass produced hippie clothing reeking of incense. I kid, because I love. Or no, not love, love is too strong a word - but kind of enjoy. Although this year I am fuming over the music selections, since all the national acts are ticketed and 95% of the free music is local. I love local music; I support local music - I can see local music 365 days a year for $5 in far more pleasant surroundings and with better sound quality than at Bele Chere, so having all local music does not tempt me downtown. I used to pick a couple of bands I really wanted to see, the kind of bands who don't play here often - George Thorogood and John Hiatt spring immediately to mind - and go, but this year? Forget it. I like Government Mule but I'm not paying $20 to see them outdoors, from a distance, standing up, squashed in a giant crowd with hooting idiots spilling beer on me. I want that experience to be free of charge. And, as you may have guessed by now, I'm not much of a crowd person anyway. I always start uneasily looking for the exits.

However, I did go downtown, because, hold on to your hats gentle & fierce readers: I have acquired a Job. Yes. An actual Job. In my field. In what passes for my Career, or what used to be my Career and I guess is again. It's contract and part time for now but it may become salaried and full time in the very near future and I'm excited and I basically started Friday, at Bele Chere. Since I like this job, or the idea of this job, I'm not going to blog about it, for we all know where that leads. Nevertheless, there I was, starting work - in the middle of giant inflateable Ingles bags and kids swimming in the Pack Place fountain. The sky was unutterably blue and the crowds were much thinner than usual and so it was quite bearable, not to say fun.

But I left Bele Chere (by public transit! I took the bus downtown and back and it was not bad at all!) because I had heard that Walk In Theatre was playing a Monkees movie and I was excited. I gathered up a posse consisting of my friends S and J, who are also old Monkees fans and we plunked our folding chairs down in the Westville parking lot and prepared to discover the answer to that eternal question: who's cuter, Mike Nesmith or Mickey Dolenz? Because Davy's too short and Peter, well, Peter's just too Peter. Although cute. And it's eerie, I must say, how all of them have gotten, well, younger. When I used to watch them on TV they were, you know, old, and now they look about 12.

Yet we were fooled, for Head, the Monkees movie is not cute. No, cute is not a word I'd use - bizarre, yes. Drug induced, check. Psychedelic, mmm hmmm. Makes Eraserhead look like a stroll through normalcy, yup. It may have been the weirdest movie I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of weird movies. What the hell was it about? I have no idea. I wasn't on enough drugs - I'm not sure there are enough drugs in the universe to make that movie coherent. It seemed to be the Monkees' Manifesto: rather in the spirit of Karl Marx, manifesting away about being trapped in the library, the Monkees used Head to protest their terrible imprisonment in, uh, whatever state of consciousness it was that they were imprisoned in. Possibly their pants, which were scarily tight. It was brilliant and bizarre and there were sudden impossible glimpses of Teri Garr and Jack Nicholson and Annette Funicello and, holy shit, Frank Zappa! And somehow, juxtaposed against the surreal transformation of downtown Asheville into even more of a three ring circus than it usually is, it fit most perfectly.

Long Week

sunflower, backlit
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

It was a long wild week, a week where it was necessary, for one reason or another, for me to go out drinkin' every single night. I know, that's a lot to ask of any mere mortal. Not everyone could bring themselves to make that kind of a sacrifice simply in the name of fun, but let it never be said that I quail at such responsibilities, that I cower in the face of taverns or that I, god forbid, can't hold my liquor like a gentleman. Actually, you could say the last and be terrifying accurate, but let's not go there. Ever again. It was, as M would say, epic. Yes. An epic week, like an old Norse saga, with similar amounts of beer and sagas, if slightly (only slightly) fewer horned helmets and clashing sword on shield. Which gives me a chance, oooh, to link to one of my new total favorite pieces of Viking flash in the world!

I went out, I drank vast quantities of beer, I had fun, I had hangovers of varying proportions, although none, I'm happy to say, as cripplingly bad as I almost certainly deserved. I even somehow managed to clean the house up, mow the yard and get a little work done. And watch the first two installments of the Back to the Future movies, which I hadn't seen in many years and about which I can only say, "Scientists, get cracking. There are only 7 years left before I get my flying car - hop to it!"

And meanwhile, the garden is rocking right along and the sunflowers, which I love so much are, as my friend C would say, raging. Raging most awesomely, dude.

A Few Vague Unrelated Things

First, the Computer
My computer is fucking up all over the place and I'm scared. I was working a couple of hours ago (working on one thrice damned .jpg, pixel by fucking pixel, mind you) when my computer just suddenly completely shut itself off, blam, kaboom, no warning. And my cable internet has been erratic at best lately; it seems like I have to reboot the modem every single time I turn on the computer and sometimes it just goes off randomly in the middle of what I'm doing. During this cable internet down time, by the way, the lights on the modem flash madly, which worries me. Add to this the fact that in the last three weeks my printer AND my monitor both died and signs point to ominous. I'm scared. I need computer help. My computer is 3 years old and I know, that's 90 in human years (similar to dog years, computer years are set at a 30:1 ratio with human years) but I neeeeeeeed it to keep on working. Argh.

Some Random Notes On Photography and Dreams
My camera, as we know, is something of an obsession. I like to take it everywhere, but alas, this is just not possible, since it's big and bulky and not necessarily easy to carry without either a) looking like a complete touristic doofus or b) worrying the entire time that it's going to get scrunched or smushed or, gods forbid, stolen. Sometimes both a and b apply. So I don't always take it with me. Inevitably, when I don't have it, photogenic things happen all around me. Yesterday, for example, when on my way home from my mothers I got caught up in one of those oh so Asheville mountain microclimate events: to wit, there was a huge and very local thunderstorm over Biltmore Village and Biltmore Forest. The sky was utterly amazing and driving along Swannanoa River Road (wait, I don't think that's what it's called there, the portion of it on the other side of Biltmore Avenue that goes past all those concrete factories and trainyards and Victoria Road, the part that gets flooded when it rains) was even more amazing, since it was pouring sheets of rain behind the trains and over the woods that border the estate, but sunny and bright where I was, some 500 yards away. I love it when that happens. At any rate, this wishing for the camera thing must have struck deep into my subconscious, because that night I dreamt about constantly walking into places that were unbearably perfect to photograph: perfect shadows, great contrasts, amazing colors, remarkable circumstances - and, you guessed it, I didn't have the camera and it caused me much grief. Wailing and gnashing of teeth, as PG Wodehouse so famously said.

Book Review! Whee!
The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith, are the literary equivalent of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light (who I will not dignify with a link) and I find it wildly weird and offensive that they were shortlisted for the Booker.

Wait. Stop the presses. I based the above Booker information on a vaguely remembered blurb on the jacket of the first book. Googling reveals that in fact they were NOT shortlisted for the Booker prize. Doesn't look like they were long-listed either. So what were they? Well, let's google a little more. The jacket copy is: "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement." Hmm. Interesting. WTF, exactly, is a Booker Judges' Special Recommendation? Googling that turns up. . . that book and that quote. Over and over again, repeated ad nauseum in every magazine and paper that reviewed it, which was a lot. Nothing else. No other book in the history of the world, apparently, has won this recommendation. Which could mean that these books are just, you know, uniquely incredible, or it could mean that Booker Judges' Special Recommendation means exactly NOTHING. Nada, zip, or possibly a couple of people who once served as Booker judges said something like "Well, yes, I do specially recommend that book - to the feebleminded." Ah advertising, PR and the endless marketing campaign. It never fails to surprise me, although not, probably, everyone else.

I wondered about this recommendation because frankly, the books SUCK. I know this because I read the first five. Why? So you won't have to! Also because my brother gave them to my mother to read during her hospitalization and I can't help myself: I'll read anything, especially when it's free for the borrowing. It is true that they have much in common with crack cocaine: you can't put them down, even when your better self is screaming Stop! Stop now!, you know how bad they are for you and they may leave some residual brain damage. I learned a lot from these books, I must say. For example, did you know that most everyone in Botswana is happy, particularly those who hew to traditional values? And that they express their values in simple sentences because, you know, they're natives and natives are so cute! Eeeurrgh. They remind me of those gruesome Jan Karon books. Warning: more Thomas Kinkade horriblity awaits you if you click that link, "gentle reader", within the Mitford books, which are not recommended for those with diabetes, since the sugar content is approximately that of a tanker truck full of coca cola syrup. The Ladies Detective Agency books are very similar, but with a creepy added overlay of colonialist paternalism. Bleck. I read them and now I wish I could scrub them off my brain.

Run, Walk, Run

I've been busy as hell today. Adding actual working to my day to day schedule is, like, impossible, dude. Just trying to keep the kids and animals fed and the house and garden in some remote kind of shape that's just shy of somebody calling the health inspector takes up every minute of my time: imagine how totally time consuming it would be if I did any of it well! And then there's avoiding paperwork, which I spend an awful lot of time doing. Right now my kitchen's a mess (and by mess, I mean I had to dig out a plastic fork to eat my salad for dinner: there isn't a clean one) I need to can - or freeze, or eat, or something besides compost - a metric ton of green beans and, oh god, a million of things to do. Weed the garden, do laundry, force the kids to clean their rooms, get my hair done, get the rug cleaned, organize this party I'm having the first weekend in August, answer my emails and so on. Not to mention work, which I only did 2 and a half hours of today.

However, I did go see my therapist today and he made me go on a walk with him, which scared me at first but turned out to be awesome, if hot. Turns out his office is right in this cool neighborhood with tons of adorable houses and some great gardens. I love my therapist: we have these lengthy intense conversations about all kinds of cool things like quantum mechanics and existentialism and whether faith is a good thing and Qi Gong and changing your world perspective from the inside out and achieving a balance between the intellect, the emotions and the body and chakra colors and Vivaldi's neuroses being cured by Freud on a walk around the lake in Geneva and so on. That's one helluva big lake, as I recall: I can see why Vivaldi was cured. Two quantum walk things: I found a playing card on the sidewalk - the 9 of diamonds. And we saw a sunflower, a volunteer on a weedy bank, so smothered by morning glory vines that it was horizontal instead of vertical, but it was still utterly gorgeous and a perfect, perfect flower. It even had a couple more buds on it, in these crazy unlikely surroundings where it was flourishing despite being swamped and covered by clinging vines. Ha! Do we see the metaphor? Anyway, I wonder what the 9 of diamonds means.

And then I went to see my mother, who has been reminiscing about her childhood and told me all kinds of stuff about her father's family, Dutch from Greenberg, Pennsylvania, and what it was like being a child in the Depression. That was cool and my mom is getting better by leaps and bounds, so it's all good there. I like being busy. It makes everything seem more fun somehow.