Wigging Out

On Wednesday night, I wigged out. I was sick and running a fever and generally orbiting the third ring of Saturn and thus: wigout. I started getting sick on Tuesday - actually, at 2:00 on Tuesday, when I went from feeling fine to feeling like death on a popsicle stick with the suddenness of a snapped finger. Tuesday night, feeling bizarre, I went to the Drinking Liberally election night party and knocked back a bunch of beers which affected me not at all: I felt gruesome and peculiar, like my head was the size of a particularly tacky mylar helium birthday balloon that was 4 feet above my body, and the beer was utterly nonconsequential. So I went to work on Wednesday, still with my head floating horribly above me, and people started saying, "You look awful. You should go home, and please don't breathe near us."

I went home. I went home at 3:00 and planned to sleep a bit, get up at 6:30 and make dinner. When I woke up at 8:30 to find the house empty, dark and messy, and my daughter calling on the phone to tell me she had fed my son fast food and cautiously enquiring if she could have the car for the rest of the evening, I lost it. I started screaming at both my children. I mean I hollered. I mean I yelled like there was no tomorrow and I said all kind of things, including that I was taking the car and leaving them both forever and they should consider themselves divorced: this was it, Mom was gone.

After they had hung up a bit startled, I started weeping, which I never do, and suddenly I realized that noone loved me and the smartest thing I could do was to take my pillow and blanket and go sleep on the floor of my office. This is the flu: when you think that if you just take your pillow and blanket to work everything will be fine. This is not coherent thought. My children came carefully home when I was in the throes of this and my son walked gently into my room.

"Mom?" he said, "Are you okay?"
"No!" I sobbed, "No, I'm not okay! I'm sick and alone and hungry and noone loves me! Noone will ever love me! I am alone!"
"Shut UP YOU EMO FREAK!" said my son (the joy of my life, this kid) and damned if it didn't work like a charm.
"Don't you DARE call me EMO!" I shrieked. "I was EMO before there was a NAME for EMO!" Which comment woke even me up into laughter.
"You," said my son, "Are acting like a total emo freak."
"Shut UP." I said, but happily now, "I can't help being emo if noone loves me and I'm sick and alone."
"Oh Mom," he said, "Cut that shit OUT."
And I felt better, got up and had some soup, and I've been getting better, bit by bit, ever since.

I Cannot Resist

Billy Idol has a Christmas album. Be still, my heart - or stop beating faster at the apparent imminent apocalypse, anyway. This is all via Metafilter, by the way, and I was going to just email it to my brother with a snarky note, but then I actually watched listened to (couldn't . . .quite. . watch . . it. . too . . many. . snowflakes. . ) the Billy Idol version of White Christmas and it was so, uh, indescribable that I had to share it with all of y'all. Wow. Words fail me. And you know, Billy Idol is one of those people who I have always had a secret crush on, even though I know that the purer people and those with good musical taste scorn him, and like I also have a crush on Billy Bragg, who is like the anti-Billy Idol, so I realize that having crushes on both of them simultaneously could maybe make the universe explode, but still. Ever since I was a teenager and first saw the video of White Wedding, I can't help it, I've been subject to mild Billy Idol crush flareups.

But those snowflakes. My god, those snowflakes. They may have put a quiet blanket of white death on my Billy Idol crush forever.

I Have A Cold

I am sniffling and miserable and that is why there have been no posts lately. Also, if you didn't hear about it elsewhere, we mostly won the election. Me, I was too involved in the process of getting ill to enjoy the victory party much, but apparently the entire government is going to get better now. And Donald Rumsfeld resigned, which is awesome, and I seriously hope he is off somewhere in outer darkness weeping and gnashing his teeth. So, to sum up: Yay politics - clearly my year of attending Drinking Liberally has had a beneficial effect on the whole country and Boo colds - they're closing schools and churches and stuff all over this area because everyone has the flu, but I'm at work, moaning now and then.

Communes

I went to a big party on Saturday night at a big house that is also a more or less communal living situation. It was fun; I drank too much and danced to a Dead cover band and gave out a lot of my newly printed non business cards. They had an awesome bonfire and all in all it was nice and it reminded me of my misspent youth, specifically the portion of it I spent living in vaguely communal living situations. Since I haven't got a damn other thing I can think of that's going on right now and is remotely interesting to blog about, I'm going to tell you a story about when I lived on the Tick Ranch.

The Tick Ranch was a big semi farmhouse out in northern Baltimore County and I lived there with my then five year old daughter, six or seven other artists and a vast, varying number of dogs and washing machines. The dogs had a tendency to produce other dogs, you see, and so, surprisingly enough, did the washing machines. They broke down a lot and shortly after one died, someone would get fed up and find another half broken washing machine cheap and haul it home. We put the old ones in the yard and occasionally considered making an art project, or something, out of them. We called it the Tick Ranch because, as in all of rural Maryland, the surrounding woods and fields were teeming with ticks, and all the dogs brought them home to us on a regular basis.

At the party the other night I noticed that the inhabitants of that commune had a nicely organized job board up on the kitchen wall. We never got that organized, which is one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart. Also, as I mentioned to one of the residents on Saturday night, we threw our parties in the middle of the summer, when it was warm and so we always lost all our sheets, since guests would wander off in pairs to the woods with a sheet or two and reappear an hour or so later, happy but sheetless. This is less likely to happen when it's 36 degrees outside. At any rate, the job board looked to me like a good idea since I have never forgotten the morning I came downstairs to find a really horrible doggie mess on the floor in the hallway.

There was no telling which end of a dog it came from, and certainly not which dog. It was large and odoriferous and truly terrible, and I was not the first person to encounter it. I could tell that, because the first person to encounter it had gone to the trouble to make small warning flags out of red paper and toothpicks and stick them in it and also to rope it off with a square of yellow police tape. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with communal living, and particularly the problem of communal living with artists. It was hilarious (if it had happened nowadays, we'd have put it up on Flickr) but, of course, it was still there. It remained there for some time. And that is today's instructive commune tale for you.

The Painting Is Done

tabletop for new french bar two
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

This is a painting/collage I did for the New French Bar in downtown Asheville. Soon, it will join the rest of their collection of local art - as a tabletop, having beer spilled on it, cigarettes ground out on it, you know: the appropriate treatment for art. ;-) I've been a museum person for long enough where this thought both horrifies and amuses me. I get tired of people being all precious about art. You make it, you use it, it goes away - some things need a lifespan.

Actually I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out - it's a thoroughly new medium for me. Acrylic on wood and then collaged with images from the internet & from me, printed on transparency. There are a couple of my own photos, normal prints, also in there. I'm also really glad they asked me to do it, since it got me working again. It had been ages since I sat down and made a painting. Now I'm all fired up again and want to go get some Fredrix of Hollywood canvases (I hate making stretchers and then stretching canvas - hate it, hate it, hate it) and more ink for the printer and more transparencies (which are expensive as FUCK, why can't I have a cheap hobby like leaf collecting or something?) and make more, more, more!

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.