Dear IncrediblyhandsomeNearlyForeignGuy4you,
I noticed your posting last night and felt I had to write to you. You seem to be everything I’ve ever looked for, and I’m sure we’re mutually compatible and can build a lifelong, solid relationship based solely on the random ways in which we ‘match’ as determined by this site, such as the fact that both of us prefer to avoid parallel parking, and once had a dog when we were growing up.
I find you fascinating and your photos have riveted me, so much so that I may just renew my Internet service next month rather than letting it lapse as I’d planned.
Please let me know more about you. And, how have your experiences been with this dating site? How long has it been since your last relationship?
Breathlessly staring at the keyboard until you respond,
BigJugsAndBrainsToMatchAsIfYouCaredAboutThat
Dear BigJugs,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me and a little bit about your life. I have viewed your profile as well and must say, I think we have very much in common, which tells me even more than I’d originally thought how wonderful it is that we’re writing. What a connection I feel, already! Not only did I have a dog when I was growing up, my dog was orange, just like yours, and don’t get me started on parallel parking. I once parked three blocks away just to avoid it. Which tells me more than anything that you and I are destined to be together and we’ve made such a connection!
You would like to know my experiences on this site, and to be completely honest (because that’s what I am, always and without question, underlying motivation, and completely at the expense of any self-serving tendencies). My last relationship ended (nearly) 48 hours ago, so as you can see, I’m clearly ready to move forward and make my life better by having that perfectly matched companion to spend it with. Not that I need one or feel one is necessary but surely you can see that after 48 hours (nearly) of thoroughly processing my last relationship, I remain more than ready to move on.
And I feel very strongly, based on all these ‘coincidences’ that we share, that you and I should meet. Especially given the connection I feel that we’ve made. Sooner rather than later.
Cheers, Giddyup, and All That,
IHNFG4Y
Dear IncrediblyHandsomeNearlyForeignWhateverTheRestOfYourScreenNameIs,
I couldn’t agree more! Orange dogs! Such a rarity, and yet…you and I share them. I couldn’t agree more, and feel that same connection. My heart understands completely how difficult the past (nearly) 48 hours must have been for you, and having once myself mourned, grieved, and completely recovered from my last relationship in (almost) twenty-eight minutes while stuck in traffic en route to the mall, I feel even more so that we must explore this connection. Let’s meet somewhere for dinner! Just say when!
Out of Breath Completely and Carrying The Keyboard Around With Me At This Point,
Big Jugs
Dear Big Jugs,
Ordinarily, I would never move so quickly, but given this strong connection I feel we’ve made, not to mention my intense (nearly) 48 hours of plumbing the depths of my soul, there’s a steakhouse on the corner of 8th and Main. Care to meet me there in five?
With My Heart And Soul In Hand and Thanking The Universe We’ve Connected,
Incredibly Handsome
Dear Handsome One,
There’s no parking on 8th and Main, so make it in seven. I need time to get to the parking lot across the way.
Prematurely but what the hell xoxo,
Jugs
Dear Jugs,
You are SO tuned into me! I will be there in 8. Need to find the lot, as well.
Perhaps not prematurely, as it has, after all, been (nearly) 48 hours, right back atcha with the XOXO,
Incredibly Handsome
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Mission(ary) Maybe Possible
I’d only been home a few minutes, just long enough to change clothes, when Lainie texted me in search of a duffle bag for a Lake Powell trip that had popped up just hours earlier. She was on the front step, she said, with her man friend Blake, and if I had one could I bring it out so she could borrow it? I grabbed my old Polaris bag, the only thing large enough to handle Lainie’s gear for an entire weekend and a thank you from a convention last year, and headed out the door. As I stepped onto the landing, a gorgeous, early-twenties brunette with a mild case of ‘bed head’ slithered down the stairs.
Chad.
And it wasn’t even seven p.m.
“Some friends of mine are coming by in a minute,” he said, appearing behind the brunette and patting down his own somewhat more acute case of bed hair.
“And?” I said, as in “and this is supposed to mean something exactly why?”
“You’ll see,” he called over his shoulder, in a near jog by then to catch up to the brunette after stepping past Blake and Lainie. “You’ll see in a minute.”
That was odd but odd is typical Chad. He’d been my nemesis since the day he moved in, as I’ve observed before. But time heals just about everything, and we’d found a way to live in the same building together and actually get along. He’s not a bad person, just a very, very young one.
After depositing the duffle with Lainie, I decided to sit with them for a few minutes, and we talked about a bike ride they’d taken earlier that evening in the canyon, and plans for their Lake Powell weekend. Blake threw in a joking comment every now and again and I enjoyed his sense of humor. Spending more than ten minutes with them as they finish each other’s sentences and expand on each other’s thoughts is like spending an evening at a comedy club, except there’s no cover charge.
There is, however, cigarette smoke. Lainie had just lit her second Marlboro when she looked up and spotted the two women walking into the courtyard. I saw them at about the same time, and we exchanged a look. Mystery solved as to which friends of Chad’s were stopping by.
They approached and quickly introduced themselves. Sister Evita, apparently, and I can’t remember the other’s name (I wouldn’t have remembered Evita if it hadn’t been so unusual. Sister Evita proceeded to present each of us with a nice shiny postcard with a glossy shot of the LDS Temple on one side and her contact information on the other, as well as a handy link to web-based information on the Latter Day Saints religion and a quote from the Book of Mormon.
“Chad asked me to come to see you,” Sister Evita explained to Lainie (at this, I had to feel more than a little relieved. At least he hadn’t sent the missionaries after me).
“Well, I’m not Mormon,” Lainie started, but Sister Evita was on a roll and cut her off quickly with as big of a smile as I’ve seen since the Donny and Marie show went off the air in the seventies. A demure girl, but obviously loaded for bear.
“Oh, you don’t have to be Mormon,” Sister Evita said, “but if there’s anything I can help you with, anything at all. Just anything. Anything in your life at all, at any time.”
“Well, I don’t need anything,” Lainie said. “I’m fine. My life is fine. But thank you.”
“Yes, thank you,” Blake threw in, and I could tell he was on the verge of saying something humorous but was too polite to intrude into Sister Evita’s moment. It was apparent it was her moment alone because her companion had contributed nothing up to that point other than to nod her head affirmatively and beam huge smiles at all of us simultaneously.
“We have a program that’s guaranteed to stop your smoking in seven days,” Sister Evita announced with all the enthusiasm of an old Billy Mays pitch. “No drugs are involved. It involves grapefruit juice, vitamin C, and we will ask you to pray. You do pray, don’t you?”
For anyone who knows her, asking Lainie if she prays is like asking the sun if it’s hot. She’s probably one of the more spiritually grounded people I’ve ever met in my life, it’s just that she isn’t grounded in the Mormon faith. Which she explained, very eloquently and politely, to Sister Evita and her companion (who continued to nod and smile, especially as Sister Evita attempted to shoot down every point Lainie put out there about her own religious views) and the whole conversation probably would have continued for all time and eternity (which Sister Evita emphatically assured Lainie that she could have if she’d just drink the grapefruit juice and take the Vitamin C) when suddenly, for no reason I could determine, Sister Evita just stopped. Maybe there was a time limit or something, and she wasn’t allowed to exhort longer than ten minutes in any one visit.
We thanked her and her companion for their time, and graciously thanked her again for her offer to be of assistance “with anything, any time, in any area of our lives at all, no matter what it is”.
“Chad,” Lainie observed, lighting a final Marlboro as the missionaries departed the courtyard, “is a dead man.”
I wouldn’t have wanted to be Chad at that moment, so it’s a good thing he was off wherever he was with his brunette. I excused myself then back to my place, and realized halfway up the stairs I was still holding onto my postcard. I thought about throwing it away, but stuck it in a book, instead. I’m always losing bookmarkers and that would work as well as anything, although I couldn’t imagine myself calling on Sister Evita for ‘anything, at any time, in any area of my life’. Unfortunately, she hadn’t won any converts with her visit, and I didn’t think I was alone in feeling I was the only person who wouldn’t be calling her in the future. Which made me think the whole business of being a missionary must be pretty difficult. Kind of like door to door sales, only without the commission check at the end of the month.
It probably took a lot of perseverance to tackle being a missionary at all, and for a minute I thought maybe I’d call her back just to give the poor kid a break. But the minute passed pretty quickly. I knew what the conversation would be, and I really didn’t want to have it. So that’s one missionary I couldn’t help with their track record of converts vs. those who never called back.
That had to be, if you think about it, as discouraging for missionaries as it is for door to door salespeople. They probably share a lot of the same frustrations as Mary Kay reps, Avon ladies and multi-level marketers the world over. Maybe what they needed was a gimmick. Mary Kay pulls women in by the thousands every year with the ‘free facial’, and Avon pulls them in with the free samples. If it was true that Sister Evita would show up at a moment’s notice to truly assist me with ‘anything, at any time, in any area of my life’, she might be onto something and actually get a call back so at least she could report some level of progress. But missionaries never show up when you really need them.
I could have used a missionary on Monday night, when I was tackling the plumbing in my bathroom sink.
I could have used a missionary last time I walked to The Store and bought more groceries than I should have, considering I didn’t have the car to offload them into and Basil was too small to strap one on her back.
I probably could have used a missionary when I was painting the den, and I know I could have used a missionary the last time I moved the TV armoire.
A missionary or two would have been immensely helpful the last time Basil bolted in a snowstorm and I trudged through the neighborhood looking for her.
If I had a missionary with a ladder, I’d be thrilled because I could get my exterior windows clean.
Maybe Sister Evita and her companion were going about this whole thing the wrong way. Maybe instead of calling on people who hadn’t asked to see them, they should focus on converting the Mary Kay crowd. Mary Kay women are the most persuasive, persistent women I’ve ever met in my life, and they sway even the most intelligent women over to their way of thinking. I personally fell prey to the free facial in my thirties and paid over $160 for a face cream actually believing it was going to make me look twenty-five again, possibly even as young as twelve if I applied too much, too often. Maybe Mary Kay and the Mormon Church could join forces, even if there would be a few differences in operations once that was accomplished. You’d see less bicycles and more pink cadillacs (but only for the most successful missionaries, and the car would be subject to repossession if their success records slipped). They’re both, if you think about it, big believers in not smoking, and the powers of liberal doses of Vitamin C.
If I don’t manage to lose that bookmarker, I might just give Sister Evita a call some day, and present my idea.
Chad.
And it wasn’t even seven p.m.
“Some friends of mine are coming by in a minute,” he said, appearing behind the brunette and patting down his own somewhat more acute case of bed hair.
“And?” I said, as in “and this is supposed to mean something exactly why?”
“You’ll see,” he called over his shoulder, in a near jog by then to catch up to the brunette after stepping past Blake and Lainie. “You’ll see in a minute.”
That was odd but odd is typical Chad. He’d been my nemesis since the day he moved in, as I’ve observed before. But time heals just about everything, and we’d found a way to live in the same building together and actually get along. He’s not a bad person, just a very, very young one.
After depositing the duffle with Lainie, I decided to sit with them for a few minutes, and we talked about a bike ride they’d taken earlier that evening in the canyon, and plans for their Lake Powell weekend. Blake threw in a joking comment every now and again and I enjoyed his sense of humor. Spending more than ten minutes with them as they finish each other’s sentences and expand on each other’s thoughts is like spending an evening at a comedy club, except there’s no cover charge.
There is, however, cigarette smoke. Lainie had just lit her second Marlboro when she looked up and spotted the two women walking into the courtyard. I saw them at about the same time, and we exchanged a look. Mystery solved as to which friends of Chad’s were stopping by.
They approached and quickly introduced themselves. Sister Evita, apparently, and I can’t remember the other’s name (I wouldn’t have remembered Evita if it hadn’t been so unusual. Sister Evita proceeded to present each of us with a nice shiny postcard with a glossy shot of the LDS Temple on one side and her contact information on the other, as well as a handy link to web-based information on the Latter Day Saints religion and a quote from the Book of Mormon.
“Chad asked me to come to see you,” Sister Evita explained to Lainie (at this, I had to feel more than a little relieved. At least he hadn’t sent the missionaries after me).
“Well, I’m not Mormon,” Lainie started, but Sister Evita was on a roll and cut her off quickly with as big of a smile as I’ve seen since the Donny and Marie show went off the air in the seventies. A demure girl, but obviously loaded for bear.
“Oh, you don’t have to be Mormon,” Sister Evita said, “but if there’s anything I can help you with, anything at all. Just anything. Anything in your life at all, at any time.”
“Well, I don’t need anything,” Lainie said. “I’m fine. My life is fine. But thank you.”
“Yes, thank you,” Blake threw in, and I could tell he was on the verge of saying something humorous but was too polite to intrude into Sister Evita’s moment. It was apparent it was her moment alone because her companion had contributed nothing up to that point other than to nod her head affirmatively and beam huge smiles at all of us simultaneously.
“We have a program that’s guaranteed to stop your smoking in seven days,” Sister Evita announced with all the enthusiasm of an old Billy Mays pitch. “No drugs are involved. It involves grapefruit juice, vitamin C, and we will ask you to pray. You do pray, don’t you?”
For anyone who knows her, asking Lainie if she prays is like asking the sun if it’s hot. She’s probably one of the more spiritually grounded people I’ve ever met in my life, it’s just that she isn’t grounded in the Mormon faith. Which she explained, very eloquently and politely, to Sister Evita and her companion (who continued to nod and smile, especially as Sister Evita attempted to shoot down every point Lainie put out there about her own religious views) and the whole conversation probably would have continued for all time and eternity (which Sister Evita emphatically assured Lainie that she could have if she’d just drink the grapefruit juice and take the Vitamin C) when suddenly, for no reason I could determine, Sister Evita just stopped. Maybe there was a time limit or something, and she wasn’t allowed to exhort longer than ten minutes in any one visit.
We thanked her and her companion for their time, and graciously thanked her again for her offer to be of assistance “with anything, any time, in any area of our lives at all, no matter what it is”.
“Chad,” Lainie observed, lighting a final Marlboro as the missionaries departed the courtyard, “is a dead man.”
I wouldn’t have wanted to be Chad at that moment, so it’s a good thing he was off wherever he was with his brunette. I excused myself then back to my place, and realized halfway up the stairs I was still holding onto my postcard. I thought about throwing it away, but stuck it in a book, instead. I’m always losing bookmarkers and that would work as well as anything, although I couldn’t imagine myself calling on Sister Evita for ‘anything, at any time, in any area of my life’. Unfortunately, she hadn’t won any converts with her visit, and I didn’t think I was alone in feeling I was the only person who wouldn’t be calling her in the future. Which made me think the whole business of being a missionary must be pretty difficult. Kind of like door to door sales, only without the commission check at the end of the month.
It probably took a lot of perseverance to tackle being a missionary at all, and for a minute I thought maybe I’d call her back just to give the poor kid a break. But the minute passed pretty quickly. I knew what the conversation would be, and I really didn’t want to have it. So that’s one missionary I couldn’t help with their track record of converts vs. those who never called back.
That had to be, if you think about it, as discouraging for missionaries as it is for door to door salespeople. They probably share a lot of the same frustrations as Mary Kay reps, Avon ladies and multi-level marketers the world over. Maybe what they needed was a gimmick. Mary Kay pulls women in by the thousands every year with the ‘free facial’, and Avon pulls them in with the free samples. If it was true that Sister Evita would show up at a moment’s notice to truly assist me with ‘anything, at any time, in any area of my life’, she might be onto something and actually get a call back so at least she could report some level of progress. But missionaries never show up when you really need them.
I could have used a missionary on Monday night, when I was tackling the plumbing in my bathroom sink.
I could have used a missionary last time I walked to The Store and bought more groceries than I should have, considering I didn’t have the car to offload them into and Basil was too small to strap one on her back.
I probably could have used a missionary when I was painting the den, and I know I could have used a missionary the last time I moved the TV armoire.
A missionary or two would have been immensely helpful the last time Basil bolted in a snowstorm and I trudged through the neighborhood looking for her.
If I had a missionary with a ladder, I’d be thrilled because I could get my exterior windows clean.
Maybe Sister Evita and her companion were going about this whole thing the wrong way. Maybe instead of calling on people who hadn’t asked to see them, they should focus on converting the Mary Kay crowd. Mary Kay women are the most persuasive, persistent women I’ve ever met in my life, and they sway even the most intelligent women over to their way of thinking. I personally fell prey to the free facial in my thirties and paid over $160 for a face cream actually believing it was going to make me look twenty-five again, possibly even as young as twelve if I applied too much, too often. Maybe Mary Kay and the Mormon Church could join forces, even if there would be a few differences in operations once that was accomplished. You’d see less bicycles and more pink cadillacs (but only for the most successful missionaries, and the car would be subject to repossession if their success records slipped). They’re both, if you think about it, big believers in not smoking, and the powers of liberal doses of Vitamin C.
If I don’t manage to lose that bookmarker, I might just give Sister Evita a call some day, and present my idea.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
If The Smart Money’s On Letting The Dog Go, I’m Keeping My Money Stupid: Thoughts On A ‘News’ Article
There was a very disturbing article on what I’ve always considered a reputable website (MSN) this morning.
Unless, the article asserted, you felt you could easily access approximately $8,000 per year, you should not consider owning a dog, especially if the industry you worked in was currently in or could possibly face being in, a downturn due to the economy. As someone who works in the hospitality industry I’m about as subject to downturns as anyone else and probably more so, and as someone who shares her life with the world’s greatest Wheaten terrier mix, that wasn’t happy advice to read. As someone whose personal bonus potential is down roughly that same amount for the year due to the economy, it was even more unsettling.
I’ve never read such garbage in my life, but I feel compelled to at least break down the math.
That figure equates to roughly $670 a month. Unless Basil is eating every meal at the French restaurant up the street instead of from her food bowl in the kitchen, it doesn’t make sense. Even considering the basic costs of her care (or the itemization of her indulgences, as it were):
Daily Doggy Day Care - $20 a day times 5 days a week times 4 weeks a month equals $400
Dog Food – Negligible, at this point. She was lucky enough to be given a 40lb bag of some very good stuff and has one in reserve, so I figure she’s good until the middle of next year. Dog treats, however, are another story. I roughly estimate two bags of Carvers Chicken Chews per week at approximately $5 per package, equals $40
Doggy Doctor – In an off year, $300 max. That equates to $25 per month, if you average it out.
Grooming – Anyone who’s seen how she generally looks realizes this is not an expense. It’s just something that happens once in a while when it’s possible to have her hold still long enough. Still, there’s the once a month trip to the Self Service Dog Wash (not an indulgence. A necessity, as anyone who’s ever cleaned a bath tub following a dog’s use of it can attest), including tax, tip, green tea and mint shampoo, conditioner and blow dry equals $25
Miscellaneous: I’m estimating she collects stuffed animals at the rate of about one per month, so that adds another $10.
So my grand estimated total per month, for the pleasure of her company and the indescribable enjoyment of her companionship is: $500. Which, over the course of the year, is only $6,000, so clearly the article was not only ridiculous it was full of bad information to the tune of about $2,000, roughly $167 per month for Basil to spend at the French restaurant up the street. The figure can also be reduced slightly by considering she’s generally only up to three days per week at the daycare (she’s either anti-social or just likes a lazy day at home once in a while) so that cost is really only $240 per month, bringing my revised monthly total to a mere $340 per month, or $4,080 per year, thus rendering the article even more ridiculous to the tune of about $3,920 per year, or $326.67 per month for Basil to be frivolous with in order to assume the piece has any credibility whatsoever.
As if the basic financial assumptions in the article weren’t bad enough, the author went on to state her opinion that when it came to making budget cuts, a dog was the first one to make. She then went on to refute (again, unsuccessfully with me) that while dog owners work under a rather false assumption that the dog is a part of the family, the dog remained just a dog, a luxury ‘even in the best of times’, and that dog should be cut from the budget.
As if to further make her point (or maybe because she realized, at this juncture, that she was floundering miserably and making about as much sense in the long run as the 55 mile per hour national speed limit we had in previous decades so she’d just throw some more words in to meet the required count) she threw in some scare tactics. Tales of pet owners whose veterinary bills were placed on credit cards which were never, ever paid off. The owners were, of course – financially ruined.
Because of a dog.
I mean, give me (and my dog) a break.
After another few paragraphs of ‘helpful suggestions’, such as how to find a new home for your dog and how to procure a hamster or goldfish and pretend they were real companions, she did, however (and if you’ll excuse the pun) throw dog owners such as myself a figurative bone by saying there were some people who, despite her best efforts, would insist on holding onto their dog as part of the family during these uncertain economic times. Perhaps, she said, they could make this a viable option by cutting other things from the budget. Cable television, she suggested. High speed Internet. Going out to eat. Purchasing new clothing. If, she again insisted, we felt going without these things was worth having the dog.
I was sure she was going to suggest we give up buying groceries too, but fortunately, she quit while she was behind, and that was the end of the article. As I said, a pretty ridiculous piece of writing. I actually thought about writing the author, but thought better of it. Or maybe I will, at some point. But let me think it over for a bit first.
I’ll discuss it with Basil tonight, when we’re watching Animal Planet on cable.
Unless, the article asserted, you felt you could easily access approximately $8,000 per year, you should not consider owning a dog, especially if the industry you worked in was currently in or could possibly face being in, a downturn due to the economy. As someone who works in the hospitality industry I’m about as subject to downturns as anyone else and probably more so, and as someone who shares her life with the world’s greatest Wheaten terrier mix, that wasn’t happy advice to read. As someone whose personal bonus potential is down roughly that same amount for the year due to the economy, it was even more unsettling.
I’ve never read such garbage in my life, but I feel compelled to at least break down the math.
That figure equates to roughly $670 a month. Unless Basil is eating every meal at the French restaurant up the street instead of from her food bowl in the kitchen, it doesn’t make sense. Even considering the basic costs of her care (or the itemization of her indulgences, as it were):
Daily Doggy Day Care - $20 a day times 5 days a week times 4 weeks a month equals $400
Dog Food – Negligible, at this point. She was lucky enough to be given a 40lb bag of some very good stuff and has one in reserve, so I figure she’s good until the middle of next year. Dog treats, however, are another story. I roughly estimate two bags of Carvers Chicken Chews per week at approximately $5 per package, equals $40
Doggy Doctor – In an off year, $300 max. That equates to $25 per month, if you average it out.
Grooming – Anyone who’s seen how she generally looks realizes this is not an expense. It’s just something that happens once in a while when it’s possible to have her hold still long enough. Still, there’s the once a month trip to the Self Service Dog Wash (not an indulgence. A necessity, as anyone who’s ever cleaned a bath tub following a dog’s use of it can attest), including tax, tip, green tea and mint shampoo, conditioner and blow dry equals $25
Miscellaneous: I’m estimating she collects stuffed animals at the rate of about one per month, so that adds another $10.
So my grand estimated total per month, for the pleasure of her company and the indescribable enjoyment of her companionship is: $500. Which, over the course of the year, is only $6,000, so clearly the article was not only ridiculous it was full of bad information to the tune of about $2,000, roughly $167 per month for Basil to spend at the French restaurant up the street. The figure can also be reduced slightly by considering she’s generally only up to three days per week at the daycare (she’s either anti-social or just likes a lazy day at home once in a while) so that cost is really only $240 per month, bringing my revised monthly total to a mere $340 per month, or $4,080 per year, thus rendering the article even more ridiculous to the tune of about $3,920 per year, or $326.67 per month for Basil to be frivolous with in order to assume the piece has any credibility whatsoever.
As if the basic financial assumptions in the article weren’t bad enough, the author went on to state her opinion that when it came to making budget cuts, a dog was the first one to make. She then went on to refute (again, unsuccessfully with me) that while dog owners work under a rather false assumption that the dog is a part of the family, the dog remained just a dog, a luxury ‘even in the best of times’, and that dog should be cut from the budget.
As if to further make her point (or maybe because she realized, at this juncture, that she was floundering miserably and making about as much sense in the long run as the 55 mile per hour national speed limit we had in previous decades so she’d just throw some more words in to meet the required count) she threw in some scare tactics. Tales of pet owners whose veterinary bills were placed on credit cards which were never, ever paid off. The owners were, of course – financially ruined.
Because of a dog.
I mean, give me (and my dog) a break.
After another few paragraphs of ‘helpful suggestions’, such as how to find a new home for your dog and how to procure a hamster or goldfish and pretend they were real companions, she did, however (and if you’ll excuse the pun) throw dog owners such as myself a figurative bone by saying there were some people who, despite her best efforts, would insist on holding onto their dog as part of the family during these uncertain economic times. Perhaps, she said, they could make this a viable option by cutting other things from the budget. Cable television, she suggested. High speed Internet. Going out to eat. Purchasing new clothing. If, she again insisted, we felt going without these things was worth having the dog.
I was sure she was going to suggest we give up buying groceries too, but fortunately, she quit while she was behind, and that was the end of the article. As I said, a pretty ridiculous piece of writing. I actually thought about writing the author, but thought better of it. Or maybe I will, at some point. But let me think it over for a bit first.
I’ll discuss it with Basil tonight, when we’re watching Animal Planet on cable.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The Tawanda Moment
What possessed me to grab a pipe wrench at 9:30p.m., I’ll never know. Maybe the after-affects of a less than scintillating gathering of the book club. An hour’s discussion of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union had certainly made me drowsy (the story line and overall character development has the same effect. Proof, I suppose, that once you’ve garnered a Pulitzer you can get away with letting the writing not only slip but fall away completely). I left Jessica’s condo wanting nothing more than sleep, and was grateful to Basil that she only required a walk around half the block, a detour from her usual evening full block requirements. So maybe it was that. Had we been reading a James Patterson, or a T. Jefferson Parker (as we seem to be on a crime/mystery mission of late) I’d have been more awake, more inclined to make a better decision, one along the lines of, “Forget it. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
But no. Something had to remove my mind from disenfranchised Jewish street cops pondering random homicides on the allegedly mean streets of Alaska’s Juneau. So much wandering, and three hundred pages to go (clearly, August was going to be a long month in book club).
That something was the bathroom sink. Clogged, seemingly irretrievably, since that morning. Clogged perhaps irrevocably despite my best efforts with a drain snake, a plunger, and not one but two full size bottles of Liquid Plumbr, the remnants of the last of which foamed in the sink, unclogging nothing.
“You need to call a plumber,” Lainie advised. Or better yet, she offered, she’d have her boyfriend fix it.
The plumber was not an option, at least not until I’d exhausted my own resources (or myself). There’s something so…well, defeatist…about calling a plumber. Likewise having her boyfriend fix it. He’s very nice and I like him, but my plumbing is not his problem.
“I need,” I said, knowing she’d have one, knowing she might right then pull it from her back pocket and I wouldn’t be surprised, “to borrow your pipe wrench.”
In five minutes she was back with two of them, as well as a promise to call her boyfriend if my efforts were unsuccessful. Which of course only made me that much more determined not to mess this up. So at nine-thirty-five, I faced the problem head on. This was my self-created clog, so I would clear it. I knew what lie beneath that foamy sea in my sink. Lurking in the bend of that pipe I knew were hairs. Perhaps thousands of them. The cumulative result of three years and one month of standing over this sink, brushing my hair, rolling my hair, sometimes even washing my hair. Three years and one month without so much as a preventative snake or preemptive plunge to ward this off.
Yep, I’d done this one to myself.
I started bailing, coffee mug after coffee mug of Liquid Plumbr, tossing it (where else) down the shower drain, considering that a preventative measure of its own and not wanting any more ammonia-laden drain cleaner than necessary splashing into the bowl under the sink when I got the pipe removed.
Which was the next part of the process. Wrench in hand, I surveyed the underworkings of my sink. Two joints which, theoretically (and according to the Ask dot com information I’d printed on how to clear a sink trap) when loosened, would allow me to pull the pipe off, clear the clog, and go on with life, my sink no longer draining at a rate of ½” per half day when it drained at all.
Sounded so simple.
And probably is simple, for anyone else. I, however, never realized how heavy a pipe wrench really is. Going at it one-handed was my only option because every two minutes I needed the other to alternately pet and push away Basil, who for some reason found the smell of toxic drain cleaner as alluring as the aroma of sizzling bacon.
Or perhaps she was just being supportive. The project was not going well.
I won’t embarrass myself by admitting exactly how long I twisted the first joint on the pipe to absolutely no effect until remembering the old “righty tighty” adage and realizing I’d been turning the wrong direction. That correction made, in a mere twenty minutes I had it loosened, and the drain cleaner hit the pan.
Maybe I was onto something.
Feeling terrifically empowered at this point, I set to work on the final joint. Soon it became obvious that, ‘lefty loosey’ be damned, the thing was not turning. Nearly a half hour later, Basil having withdrawn her support and hopped into bed, I had to admit defeat.
And somehow, the idea of spending my time reading about unsolved cases on the Alaskan tundra was much, much more appealing than the project at hand.
So I thought about it. Calling a plumber. Letting Lainie’s man friend gallop in here and loosen the thing in five minutes. I decided I’d give it one more shot.
That shot wound up being nearly forty-five minutes long. Plumbing installed the same year I was born does not, apparently, go down without a fight. And once again, I felt like giving up, when it happened.
It turned. It loosened. Completely. I removed the bend of pipe, used the snake to extricate the indescribably disgusting mass of hair, hair spray, and two earrings which was roughly the size of a small animal from the pipe, and reassembled and re-installed the whole thing.
Talk about a Tawanda moment.
I completely understood that scene in Fried Green Tomatoes, knew exactly what Fannie Flagg had been thinking as she wrote her character knocking down a bedroom wall, wielding a sledgehammer for the first time and handling her own home improvements.
Honestly, it was a milestone. Like that first piece of published writing. I wanted to hang the pipe wrench on the refrigerator door as I’d done that first article, but number one it didn’t belong to me and number two I had no idea how to adhere it.
I went to bed and slept like a rock, even with Basil’s semi-constant space-shifting and intermittent snoring. I fell asleep thinking about all the possibilities this simple accomplishment opened up.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I’m seriously thinking cordless drill, and re-installing my own curtain rods.
But no. Something had to remove my mind from disenfranchised Jewish street cops pondering random homicides on the allegedly mean streets of Alaska’s Juneau. So much wandering, and three hundred pages to go (clearly, August was going to be a long month in book club).
That something was the bathroom sink. Clogged, seemingly irretrievably, since that morning. Clogged perhaps irrevocably despite my best efforts with a drain snake, a plunger, and not one but two full size bottles of Liquid Plumbr, the remnants of the last of which foamed in the sink, unclogging nothing.
“You need to call a plumber,” Lainie advised. Or better yet, she offered, she’d have her boyfriend fix it.
The plumber was not an option, at least not until I’d exhausted my own resources (or myself). There’s something so…well, defeatist…about calling a plumber. Likewise having her boyfriend fix it. He’s very nice and I like him, but my plumbing is not his problem.
“I need,” I said, knowing she’d have one, knowing she might right then pull it from her back pocket and I wouldn’t be surprised, “to borrow your pipe wrench.”
In five minutes she was back with two of them, as well as a promise to call her boyfriend if my efforts were unsuccessful. Which of course only made me that much more determined not to mess this up. So at nine-thirty-five, I faced the problem head on. This was my self-created clog, so I would clear it. I knew what lie beneath that foamy sea in my sink. Lurking in the bend of that pipe I knew were hairs. Perhaps thousands of them. The cumulative result of three years and one month of standing over this sink, brushing my hair, rolling my hair, sometimes even washing my hair. Three years and one month without so much as a preventative snake or preemptive plunge to ward this off.
Yep, I’d done this one to myself.
I started bailing, coffee mug after coffee mug of Liquid Plumbr, tossing it (where else) down the shower drain, considering that a preventative measure of its own and not wanting any more ammonia-laden drain cleaner than necessary splashing into the bowl under the sink when I got the pipe removed.
Which was the next part of the process. Wrench in hand, I surveyed the underworkings of my sink. Two joints which, theoretically (and according to the Ask dot com information I’d printed on how to clear a sink trap) when loosened, would allow me to pull the pipe off, clear the clog, and go on with life, my sink no longer draining at a rate of ½” per half day when it drained at all.
Sounded so simple.
And probably is simple, for anyone else. I, however, never realized how heavy a pipe wrench really is. Going at it one-handed was my only option because every two minutes I needed the other to alternately pet and push away Basil, who for some reason found the smell of toxic drain cleaner as alluring as the aroma of sizzling bacon.
Or perhaps she was just being supportive. The project was not going well.
I won’t embarrass myself by admitting exactly how long I twisted the first joint on the pipe to absolutely no effect until remembering the old “righty tighty” adage and realizing I’d been turning the wrong direction. That correction made, in a mere twenty minutes I had it loosened, and the drain cleaner hit the pan.
Maybe I was onto something.
Feeling terrifically empowered at this point, I set to work on the final joint. Soon it became obvious that, ‘lefty loosey’ be damned, the thing was not turning. Nearly a half hour later, Basil having withdrawn her support and hopped into bed, I had to admit defeat.
And somehow, the idea of spending my time reading about unsolved cases on the Alaskan tundra was much, much more appealing than the project at hand.
So I thought about it. Calling a plumber. Letting Lainie’s man friend gallop in here and loosen the thing in five minutes. I decided I’d give it one more shot.
That shot wound up being nearly forty-five minutes long. Plumbing installed the same year I was born does not, apparently, go down without a fight. And once again, I felt like giving up, when it happened.
It turned. It loosened. Completely. I removed the bend of pipe, used the snake to extricate the indescribably disgusting mass of hair, hair spray, and two earrings which was roughly the size of a small animal from the pipe, and reassembled and re-installed the whole thing.
Talk about a Tawanda moment.
I completely understood that scene in Fried Green Tomatoes, knew exactly what Fannie Flagg had been thinking as she wrote her character knocking down a bedroom wall, wielding a sledgehammer for the first time and handling her own home improvements.
Honestly, it was a milestone. Like that first piece of published writing. I wanted to hang the pipe wrench on the refrigerator door as I’d done that first article, but number one it didn’t belong to me and number two I had no idea how to adhere it.
I went to bed and slept like a rock, even with Basil’s semi-constant space-shifting and intermittent snoring. I fell asleep thinking about all the possibilities this simple accomplishment opened up.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I’m seriously thinking cordless drill, and re-installing my own curtain rods.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Mean People Should Be Returned Promptly For A Refund: A Brief Message From Somewhere That Isn’t In Kansas Anymore
There’s an old saying along the lines of, “You can’t choose your relatives.” I’d like to modify that by observing, “You can’t choose your relatives and unfortunately, you can’t turn them in for a full refund either, like you would a really lousy product of some kind, say a hair color that left you with chartreuse waves and irritating poofy dreadlocks that wouldn’t comb out ever.”
Basically, when it comes to family, you’ve got what you’ve got. I’m not thrilled with that but it is a fact, so I’m not going to expend any time, energy, or emotion in trying to change it, mainly because I realized long ago that my odds of changing this person rank right up there with my odds of making the sun rise in the west instead of the east. What I am going to do is be very, very grateful that the one relative I would like to return for a refund (or, being entirely practically minded, just return – period. Sometimes you’re better off with nothing than with something that’s never going to function for more than a handful of nanoseconds) lives on the other side of the country, in an area I can’t think of a single reason why I would ever find myself in (or honestly, why anybody would want to find themselves in), and this suits me absolutely fine. The odds of our running into each other are pretty much zero, and I take comfort, at this point, in those odds.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail because I did that already (see, “Chopping Down the Family Tree” and “Five Emails”) and considering they were written only a few months, or weeks, apart, you can see by the date of this post that I’ve been on a pretty good run lately of not having my life interrupted to listen to someone go on and on with all the drama of a really irritated five year old pitching a fit in the middle of Safeway because he couldn’t have the four boxes of candy he’d snuck into the cart and hidden beneath the Wheaties. As soon as the email popped up on the Blackberry on Sunday afternoon, as I sat in the Park and Wait at the airport, ready to pick up Roy, who was flying in from an event, I could just about hear that little tantrum on aisle five starting up.
Here’s a free trip to the weird world this person lives in:
In a nutshell, or a thumbtack, or whatever you like, this email informed me that my parents had just left her house, and apparently had expressed what a wonderful time they’d had during their visit to me. And frankly, she knew ‘all about’ my ‘boy toy, Roy’ (I took offense at that, while he was more grounded than anybody I’ve ever known, and immediately saw the humor, and the left-handed compliment. “Oh come on,” he said later, “let me have boy toy, will you?” He was right. Not many people almost fifty, as he reminds me often, are often accused of being boy anything. )
That part of it, mean spirited and ridiculous as it was, I understood. Not that I’ve had any immense training in psychology, but more because I’ve read enough books and seen enough Lifetime Television movies to recognize the ugly head of jealousy when it rears up so blatantly. What a cad I must be, to have found a wonderful person, and found him on the Internet, and had the audacity to have him be attractive and genuinely…genuine. What nerve to actually find a match on match dot com.
So basically that was it, that was the big thing I’d done wrong, I suppose. The cardinal sin of having a nice visit with my parents, and sending them off with a beautifully done collage of candid shots of the visit that Roy put together without my even knowing it. Dad couldn’t stop saying it was the greatest birthday present he’d ever had. How horrible of me to have anyone in my life who could be that great of a person. How terrible that he opened his home to them, helped them with repairs on their motor home, and helped them maneuver the city in search of two needed tires.
He’s got almost as much nerve as me, if you think about it.
The last part of it I didn’t understand, as in I don’t know what in the world she was thinking to write it, but I did understand it meant this lady had gone off a very deep end just as surely as if she’d driven her car off a cliff into the Grand Canyon (provided she had a car reliable enough to get even close to the Grand Canyon, which I can’t remember a time within the last 25 years or so that she has):
“Don’t you ever cross me again! Ever!”
Huh?
I mean, what I’m imagining as I’m reading that is a variation on the Wizard of Oz, you know, the part where the evil witch is staring into her crystal ball saying something about how, “I’m going to get you, Dorothy, and your little dog Toto, too!”
Yeah, um, mentally, I don’t think the lady is in Kansas anymore.
So as I’ve been given some intense, if unasked for, experience with receiving these ridiculous emails, I was prepared, at that point, to just delete it and move on, especially as I’d just glanced up and noticed that the flight from Minneapolis was no longer Delayed but had actually Arrived. It was time to go pick someone up, not give another minute to the rantings of a lunatic. Deal with your own clean-up on Aisle 5.
Still, experience taught me that when it comes to my sister and emails, it’s much like the old jingle for potato chips, “Nobody can have just one”. I’d barely put the car into gear when the second email came through, and that’s the one that made a real decision for me. Even I have lines that can’t be crossed, points beyond which you go where it’s just not possible to ever go back. While I’d felt these lines had already been crossed, let’s just say the final email turned them into the same Jersey Barricade placed around the last hotel the President stayed in, to keep the bad guys out.
She said something about how she knew Trent Babcock had committed suicide (well, of course she would know that, my parents had been told that, and they’d been very, very sorry and Mom talked about sending flowers) and she said something so very ugly about that, closing with, “I love you, you Moron.”
OK, I’d been upgraded to Moron from Misfit, which prefaced the first email, but then again, as I said, I realized full well I was dealing with someone who needed serious help of the kind I certainly wasn’t qualified to give them.
“What kind of a person is so hateful just because you’re happy?”
The same person, I thought, who was hateful whenever anyone was happy. When my brother and sister-in-law bought a house. When they expanded their family. She years ago had angst and anger over the fact that they used a diaper cream she couldn’t afford, and I actually listened to the rant for over twenty minutes on the phone.
I’m not making this up. Seriously. Although I could write it word for word as a psychotic character in a short story or novel and it would come out perfectly believable because there’s a certain element of the unbelievable in all good fiction, so she’d be a no-brainer to write about.
I got this “What kind of person is so hateful because you’re happy?” from several people today, people I could only have been so lucky to have been related to but no, I got the bad haircolor and the dreadlocks, instead.
“I don’t have any idea,” I said, and that’s the truest thing I can think of. I don’t know this person, I don’t understand this person, and frankly, I think this kind of instability is creeping me out, much like a Stephen King novel.
I quit reading those years ago. The story was always good, but nothing is worth being so wound up and scared you can’t sleep half the night. You reach a point you realize enough is enough, and you don’t even notice them when you go through the bookstore.
I waited a few hours, and left a voice mail. She should never contact me again. Frankly, it would have been nice if she’d stopped contacting me months ago, about the time she first contacted me to tell me never to contact her, which I hadn’t done anyway. It’s a ridiculous one-sided game of volleyball where she has to reach out every few months and make contact, say mean, stupid things, and dramatically exclaim, “Never contact me again!!” as if I’d contacted her at all. It’s like a movie, sort of….that one with Sharon Stone where she kept stalking Michael Douglas because he didn’t want her in his life, only she’d be Sharon and I’d be Michael (which is really weird, because had I been a boy, I was going to be named Michael Douglas, anyway).
She’s not even in touch with reality enough to realize that it was she who made contact. Repeatedly. Do not contact me again, I said. And I am removing you and your son as my beneficiaries. Not that I’m planning to kick the bucket any time soon, it’s just that at this point, not only do I not want that kind of ridiculousness in my life, I don’t want it within spitting distance of anything left after I’m gone. Not when there’s a world of great animal shelters out there who have homeless dogs to feed and cats to take care of. Maybe she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t have the right to harass me the way she does, but I certainly have the right to say I’m not going to put up with it.
So that’s that, and it’s not the greatest thing that could be and it’s not, really, anything I had hoped to see happen and wind up being the Blog Post Du Jour. What would have made more sense to me instead of her emails would have been, say, a little silver saucer descending from the sky and landing in the Park and Wait and having little green men climb out and offer Two For One Trips To Planet Xori or something.
If I have to see it in any light, I’ve really only got two perspectives at this point. The first is that whole Wizard of Oz visual I can’t get out of my head, i.e., “I’m going to get you, Madeleine, and your little dog Basil, too!” but which isn’t really disturbing, just sort of humorous in the way train wreck humor is humorous because getting a chuckle out of it beats the alternative of how painful it really is, and the second is the truth of another platitude that can’t honestly be disputed:
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to keel over.”
She’s had herself on such a constant diet of it, it’s a wonder she can stand upright at all, and she’s still waiting for me to be the one to get sick.
I’m sorry her world is so small she doesn’t even realize how pointless of a wait she’s looking at.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to my boy toy.
Basically, when it comes to family, you’ve got what you’ve got. I’m not thrilled with that but it is a fact, so I’m not going to expend any time, energy, or emotion in trying to change it, mainly because I realized long ago that my odds of changing this person rank right up there with my odds of making the sun rise in the west instead of the east. What I am going to do is be very, very grateful that the one relative I would like to return for a refund (or, being entirely practically minded, just return – period. Sometimes you’re better off with nothing than with something that’s never going to function for more than a handful of nanoseconds) lives on the other side of the country, in an area I can’t think of a single reason why I would ever find myself in (or honestly, why anybody would want to find themselves in), and this suits me absolutely fine. The odds of our running into each other are pretty much zero, and I take comfort, at this point, in those odds.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail because I did that already (see, “Chopping Down the Family Tree” and “Five Emails”) and considering they were written only a few months, or weeks, apart, you can see by the date of this post that I’ve been on a pretty good run lately of not having my life interrupted to listen to someone go on and on with all the drama of a really irritated five year old pitching a fit in the middle of Safeway because he couldn’t have the four boxes of candy he’d snuck into the cart and hidden beneath the Wheaties. As soon as the email popped up on the Blackberry on Sunday afternoon, as I sat in the Park and Wait at the airport, ready to pick up Roy, who was flying in from an event, I could just about hear that little tantrum on aisle five starting up.
Here’s a free trip to the weird world this person lives in:
In a nutshell, or a thumbtack, or whatever you like, this email informed me that my parents had just left her house, and apparently had expressed what a wonderful time they’d had during their visit to me. And frankly, she knew ‘all about’ my ‘boy toy, Roy’ (I took offense at that, while he was more grounded than anybody I’ve ever known, and immediately saw the humor, and the left-handed compliment. “Oh come on,” he said later, “let me have boy toy, will you?” He was right. Not many people almost fifty, as he reminds me often, are often accused of being boy anything. )
That part of it, mean spirited and ridiculous as it was, I understood. Not that I’ve had any immense training in psychology, but more because I’ve read enough books and seen enough Lifetime Television movies to recognize the ugly head of jealousy when it rears up so blatantly. What a cad I must be, to have found a wonderful person, and found him on the Internet, and had the audacity to have him be attractive and genuinely…genuine. What nerve to actually find a match on match dot com.
So basically that was it, that was the big thing I’d done wrong, I suppose. The cardinal sin of having a nice visit with my parents, and sending them off with a beautifully done collage of candid shots of the visit that Roy put together without my even knowing it. Dad couldn’t stop saying it was the greatest birthday present he’d ever had. How horrible of me to have anyone in my life who could be that great of a person. How terrible that he opened his home to them, helped them with repairs on their motor home, and helped them maneuver the city in search of two needed tires.
He’s got almost as much nerve as me, if you think about it.
The last part of it I didn’t understand, as in I don’t know what in the world she was thinking to write it, but I did understand it meant this lady had gone off a very deep end just as surely as if she’d driven her car off a cliff into the Grand Canyon (provided she had a car reliable enough to get even close to the Grand Canyon, which I can’t remember a time within the last 25 years or so that she has):
“Don’t you ever cross me again! Ever!”
Huh?
I mean, what I’m imagining as I’m reading that is a variation on the Wizard of Oz, you know, the part where the evil witch is staring into her crystal ball saying something about how, “I’m going to get you, Dorothy, and your little dog Toto, too!”
Yeah, um, mentally, I don’t think the lady is in Kansas anymore.
So as I’ve been given some intense, if unasked for, experience with receiving these ridiculous emails, I was prepared, at that point, to just delete it and move on, especially as I’d just glanced up and noticed that the flight from Minneapolis was no longer Delayed but had actually Arrived. It was time to go pick someone up, not give another minute to the rantings of a lunatic. Deal with your own clean-up on Aisle 5.
Still, experience taught me that when it comes to my sister and emails, it’s much like the old jingle for potato chips, “Nobody can have just one”. I’d barely put the car into gear when the second email came through, and that’s the one that made a real decision for me. Even I have lines that can’t be crossed, points beyond which you go where it’s just not possible to ever go back. While I’d felt these lines had already been crossed, let’s just say the final email turned them into the same Jersey Barricade placed around the last hotel the President stayed in, to keep the bad guys out.
She said something about how she knew Trent Babcock had committed suicide (well, of course she would know that, my parents had been told that, and they’d been very, very sorry and Mom talked about sending flowers) and she said something so very ugly about that, closing with, “I love you, you Moron.”
OK, I’d been upgraded to Moron from Misfit, which prefaced the first email, but then again, as I said, I realized full well I was dealing with someone who needed serious help of the kind I certainly wasn’t qualified to give them.
“What kind of a person is so hateful just because you’re happy?”
The same person, I thought, who was hateful whenever anyone was happy. When my brother and sister-in-law bought a house. When they expanded their family. She years ago had angst and anger over the fact that they used a diaper cream she couldn’t afford, and I actually listened to the rant for over twenty minutes on the phone.
I’m not making this up. Seriously. Although I could write it word for word as a psychotic character in a short story or novel and it would come out perfectly believable because there’s a certain element of the unbelievable in all good fiction, so she’d be a no-brainer to write about.
I got this “What kind of person is so hateful because you’re happy?” from several people today, people I could only have been so lucky to have been related to but no, I got the bad haircolor and the dreadlocks, instead.
“I don’t have any idea,” I said, and that’s the truest thing I can think of. I don’t know this person, I don’t understand this person, and frankly, I think this kind of instability is creeping me out, much like a Stephen King novel.
I quit reading those years ago. The story was always good, but nothing is worth being so wound up and scared you can’t sleep half the night. You reach a point you realize enough is enough, and you don’t even notice them when you go through the bookstore.
I waited a few hours, and left a voice mail. She should never contact me again. Frankly, it would have been nice if she’d stopped contacting me months ago, about the time she first contacted me to tell me never to contact her, which I hadn’t done anyway. It’s a ridiculous one-sided game of volleyball where she has to reach out every few months and make contact, say mean, stupid things, and dramatically exclaim, “Never contact me again!!” as if I’d contacted her at all. It’s like a movie, sort of….that one with Sharon Stone where she kept stalking Michael Douglas because he didn’t want her in his life, only she’d be Sharon and I’d be Michael (which is really weird, because had I been a boy, I was going to be named Michael Douglas, anyway).
She’s not even in touch with reality enough to realize that it was she who made contact. Repeatedly. Do not contact me again, I said. And I am removing you and your son as my beneficiaries. Not that I’m planning to kick the bucket any time soon, it’s just that at this point, not only do I not want that kind of ridiculousness in my life, I don’t want it within spitting distance of anything left after I’m gone. Not when there’s a world of great animal shelters out there who have homeless dogs to feed and cats to take care of. Maybe she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t have the right to harass me the way she does, but I certainly have the right to say I’m not going to put up with it.
So that’s that, and it’s not the greatest thing that could be and it’s not, really, anything I had hoped to see happen and wind up being the Blog Post Du Jour. What would have made more sense to me instead of her emails would have been, say, a little silver saucer descending from the sky and landing in the Park and Wait and having little green men climb out and offer Two For One Trips To Planet Xori or something.
If I have to see it in any light, I’ve really only got two perspectives at this point. The first is that whole Wizard of Oz visual I can’t get out of my head, i.e., “I’m going to get you, Madeleine, and your little dog Basil, too!” but which isn’t really disturbing, just sort of humorous in the way train wreck humor is humorous because getting a chuckle out of it beats the alternative of how painful it really is, and the second is the truth of another platitude that can’t honestly be disputed:
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to keel over.”
She’s had herself on such a constant diet of it, it’s a wonder she can stand upright at all, and she’s still waiting for me to be the one to get sick.
I’m sorry her world is so small she doesn’t even realize how pointless of a wait she’s looking at.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to my boy toy.
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