kdiddy.org

I got a bag of coffee beans from a local roaster in my CSA box last week. I was really looking forward to trying them and yesterday morning I ground them up and brewed my morning medicine, that which fuels me to actually get out of the house each morning.

I poured my cup and took a sip. It sucked. It was bitter and tasted like the stuff that sits on burners all day at the 7-11. I was upset. And it all went downhill from there.

My kid has been a real pain in the ass lately about getting ready for school. He dawdles and whines about how he doesn’t want to go. As far as I can ascertain, there’s no real problem causing him anxiety, no bullies or anything, he just doesn’t want to go because, “all we do is LEARN.”

So he was pulling out all the stops yesterday. Whining. Stomping his feet. Trying to slap my hands away when I dragged him out of bed. Screaming back when I told him for the sixth time that he needed to eat his breakfast. Far too much for me to deal with on a half cup of shite coffee.

While I was explaining to him that, “What do you mean why do you need to put your socks on? You need to put your socks on because WE. NEED. TO. LEAVE!” the sleeping husband peeled open an eye a little and mumbled, “What’s his problem?”

I stomped out of the house with the baby and put him on the bus. When I got home I started working on getting the husband up and out of bed in a reasonable amount of time. Around 8:20, I told him to get out of bed for the third time, and he snapped at me, “I KNOW! I HAVE A FUCKING EXAM TODAY! LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I hated both of them in that moment. I couldn’t believe that I had to endure both of them getting pissed at me for trying to get them off to where they needed to go, especially when they just had to go to school while I had to go to work and school and deal with situations at my job that, frankly, aren’t always that fun or easy to deal with. Plus, the nagging anxiety that my husband is graduating from college in the midst of the shittiest economy ever and it’s possible that the thin financial string that we’ve been hanging by the past few years will have to sustain us even longer, provided nothing catastrophic happens like me getting laid off.

And the people who were so terrible at their jobs that our economy is now in the state that it is not only are guaranteed to keep their jobs, they get millions of dollars in bonuses.

That thought set me off and I went on this misanthropic spiral thinking about all of the utterly shitty people in the world and how they go on to create shittier copies of themselves and how I wished I had some superpower where I could drop 2 liter bottles of Coke on the toes of people I hated without consequence. And it’s not that we need to start regulating the number of children that people have but there does need to be some kind of social shift in the face of biological imperatives that it’s okay to not want to have kids but goddammit why do some of the most vocal proponents of the childfree movement have to be such a-holes and it’s not that I’m a total nihilist because I’ve felt something real when I’ve been in the presence of my family.

Oh and THEN I read this article that pissed me off even more. I mean, it’s not that it’s hard to draw parallels between Pittsburgh and Detroit but they’re two totally different places and what works in one place won’t necessarily work in the other. And I must have been looking for things to make me angry because then I went and read the comments which just made it worse because I hate people and all of their stupid “thoughts” and “opinions.”

I don’t know. Maybe I should go back on anti-depressants.

Or spike my coffee once I get better beans.

I was pissy throughout the day. I think my little family is at its worst when we convince ourselves that we’re not in this together. That we’re the only ones bogged down in our struggles and the other two members simply don’t understand what we go through day to day. I don’t know how to fix that.

Both my husband and I unintentionally participated in a moronic American St. Patrick’s Day tradition: green or “Irish-themed” garments. He wore a Guinness tshirt and I wore a green sweater. I didn’t think of the significance until someone at work pointed it out, all like, “Oh, of course you’re wearing green because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and you’re Irish!” Grumble.

I did, however, do one corny Irish thing. I made Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, which admittedly have a rather offensive name but are so SO good. I brought some into work yesterday and three people bit into them around the same time and all collectively groaned in delight. I tried one last night but it had been in the fridge and I hadn’t let it warm up enough. The now solid ganache filling fell out and the icing fell off and rolled around on the floor. I had to go searching for it under the couch and that was a proud moment in my life, let me tell ya. “Honey, lift up the couch, my cleavage didn’t catch that mouthful, dammit.”

Anyway, this post is titled “irish kelly” for a reason. Years ago, I was a rather active participant in the “rave scene” (ugh that phrase makes me barf) in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. You may be surprised to know that back in the late 90s and early 00s, Pittsburgh had a thriving dance scene, with multiple large events every weekend and plenty of smaller things during the week. I think between 1999 and 2000, I got a total of 15 hours of sleep.

Now, I’m sure I’ve conjured up plenty of frightening images for you. And while I did partake of the “party favors” for a short period, I was not 20/20 special report fodder. I did not wear pounds of plastic kiddie jewelry, my pants did not double as parachutes, and I did not regularly collapse into a puddle with a chattering jaw and dilated pupils to work on catching mono from a guy named Smurf. I mostly just had a blast being young and taking advantage of my total lack of responsibilities and my now non-existent ability to stay up for as long as I like by going to parties and dancing my butt off.

I did, however, have a “rave name.” Rave names, of course, were the nicknames that people gave to each other to enforce this identity that we were part of “the other,” the alternative, the underground, the secretive, none of which was really true by the late 90s when raving was firmly above ground, peppered with the odd renegade party under a bridge or in a cellar somewhere.

Raving’s inextricable relationship with the nascent internet probably aided the creation of rave names. Party information was passed along via email and message boards and I was on an email list called pb-cle-raves (Pittsburgh-Cleveland Raves) for many years. As nearly everyone with an online identity goes by something other than the name that they were born with, these identities bled into raving.

Many people had nauseatingly sweet and sunny rave names like Sunshine and Bumblebee and Rainbow. Others came into raving in the age of Hackers and cyberpunk (see also: my buddy count zer0), and then there were guys like my husband’s crew of friends, who had rave names like “Hector.”

Mine was Irish Kelly. At the time that I subscribed to pb-cle, my email address was CCeallaigh at AOL (ha!). Ceallaigh is Kelly in Gaelic (so I’m told), but of course someone else on AOL already had that handle, so I added an extra C. Nobody, least of all me, could pronounce that name. To add to the confusion, there was another Kelly who was one of the biggest rave promoters in the city. To differentiate between us, she was Kelly Downlow (her promotion company’s name) and I became Irish Kelly, owing to my Irish-themed n00b email address.

I noticed a little bit ago that I have a gigantic grease stain on my pants that I’ve had a total of three months. I now remember that I got the stain because of my poorly handled treatment after an unfortunate egg roll incident about a week ago. I put very little effort into my appearance as it is, and if I continue along this path, I will be in sweatpants and Tweetie Bird tshirts by summer.

…

I’m taking the bus into work this week, which takes me into downtown. I haven’t been downtown in the mornings in quite some time and had forgotten how wild it can be. Yesterday, I was hit on by a very forward but nice construction worker who told me that, were he and I to have a baby, we could name it Butterscotch. I then found myself in the midst of a fight between two women and man, all of whom seemed to be in the depths of some kind of substance dependency. Woman 1 had insisted to Woman 2 that cigarettes cost $5.50, but Woman 2 soon found out that cigarettes actually cost $5.57 and when the fuck was Woman 1 going to pay her back that 7 cents? And, you know, money’s money. My only beef was that they were SO LOUD at 8:30 in the morning. And finally, a man rode by on a motorcycle blasting some song about Jesus.

This all happened within about 10 minutes.

…

The husband and I went to see Margaret Cho last Saturday. She was awesome, of course, though she’s started to incorporate some songs into her act that I’m kind of “meh” about. I’ve never really gotten into my body issue stuff on here because, frankly, I get sick of thinking about it since it’s been a constant neurosis of mine since I was about six years old. But whether or not I have ever fit into any traditional molds of beauty (and honestly fuck those) her words on the matter echo through my head all the time:

“I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.”

Also, after the show I finally got a goddamned Shamrock Shake and it was sooooo good.

The Google Maps street view of Bangkok Balcony in Squirrel Hill looks like this:

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Bangkok Balcony is not, in fact, a milk truck. If you enter a milk truck and expect to get Thai food, you may be disappointed.

I live to inform.

I took these with my phone on our way into work today.

And this is a rendering of Sunday’s game in Lego as imagined by the baby.

‘Twas the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the house…

Dudes were sleeping and drooling all over that heinous couch.

The pie crusts were baking, the mum without care…

…for she knew that wine would always be there.

I would totally translate the whole thing into “‘diddy” but I’m a tad too tired at the moment. But I will say that I am thankful for my family, for my opportunities, for writing, and for having time to think with a full belly. We saw Synecdoche, New York earlier and I’m thankful to know that I’m not the only one who thinks such weird things. I’m just glad that Charlie Kaufman puts them down on paper and has beautiful actors speak them for the screen. I’m thankful that art helps me to feel human. I’m thankful for my son, seeing the best pieces of me in him, knowing that I help people to experience him and all of his amazing thoughts and actions. I’m thankful for the husband and our life together.

And I’m thankful for Sidney Crosby and Yevgeny Malkin. 😉

This commercial has been shown pretty frequently lately during Steeler games:

Yeah.

Also, me being all laryngitised up makes for some pretty pathetic game watching. I try to cheer and it sounds like a dying camel or something.

Yesterday was mostly pretty awesome. I got so much love and birthday wishes. We got our house looking pretty cool:

I like having decorations for holidays but I don’t have any…creative vision, I guess. Nor do I have any patience for that sort of thing. Oddly enough the husband usually pulls those things together. He’s fancy like that.

I think this was the first year that the baby really got into trick-or-treating. He came away with a really impressive haul. We had a lot of trick-or-treaters, definitely more than in past years. Weirdly enough, a lot of them complimented me on the jack-o-lanterns, all of which I ended up carving myself while the husband was at the ER with his severed tendons and whatnot (horf). I mean, sure, they looked decent, but they were just the usual triangles and toothy grins. Occasionally, I switched it up with some circles. But these kids were all, “Wow, did you carve these yourself?” I don’t know. Maybe with those fancy patterns everywhere, these jack-o-lanterns are all throwback and shit.

We stopped down to the mother-in-law’s and while we were there some crappy head cold just descended on the husband and me. It was weird. We were fine and then all of sudden we both felt awful. We came home and I fell asleep at like 10:30 or something. I guess it helped since I don’t feel too terrible today.

The Pumpkin King rests after another successful Halloween.

I need to catch up on my shared items! Since October 29th:

Kittehs help wif science

God Hates Signs protest waged against Westboro Baptist Church

Are you talkin’ to ME? My note: “Thackeray Hall? I wonder if this was at Pitt.”

Ice Cube signs on for NBC cop comedy My note: “Wait. What?”

Wonkette: Jesus people pray that false idol will save God’s economy My note: “good luck with that, assholes.”

basement cat

Roseanne’s Halloween episodes

Wobbegong shark costume

The Libby My note: “Somebody make me this.”

Drew’s Due My note: “I can already see the defense for this as some kind of twisted interpretation of free speech. Being a bully to people your own age is one thing. Bullying a kid when you’re an adult is just fucking messed up. I hope this asshole gets hit with a baseball bat many times.”

RA: The good, the bad, and the deep: Rick Wade My note: “My husband bit my style and became a writer.”

Witch Head Nebula

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Charlie & Mac sing the song from Ferris Bueller My note: “HAAAAAAAAAAAA I’ve seen bits and pieces of this show and I’ve always ended up in tears from the awesome, promising myself to start watching it regularly and forgetting but now I must renew my commitment to this show and run-on sentences and candy.”

In Videos: Anti-Candy Corn Song My note: “Sigh. I miss the days of Noggin.”

10 Castration Scenes from Movies As a card-carrying feminazi, I consider this important research. I’ve only seen three of these, though. I’m slacking.

Graphic Design Fail

Welcome to Britney’s “Circus” My note: “I had to say “If You Seek Amy” fast like 50 times before I got it. These kids today and their innuendos.”

The baby won “Most Funny” (seriously, that was the name of his category) at the neighborhood Halloween parade yesterday. He felt particularly triumphant after going home empty-handed last year and was rewarded with a $25 gift certificate to any business on the main boulevard that is a member of the local chamber of commerce which means he can get…uh…maybe an ice cream cone. Or what might happen is I’ll say to him, “Take mommy to the nail shop to get a fill-in and some airbrush. I want to get a beach scene on my right hand and I think ‘Water Lilies’ on my left. Chop chop.”

Or maybe he can go to the corner store that is a very poor front operation and buy some used jelly shoes and some chips.

We went to see the Zack and Miri premiere at the Oaks last night and it was so good. I’ve heard that it’s not been getting very good reviews which is just stupid. It’s so funny and really classic Kevin Smith. He did a Q&A afterward and was really funny and interesting.

After watching the movie and driving through “the wrong side of Pittsburgh,” I got a really strong swell of love for the city. It really is an awesome place to be.

I’m going to go bake a pie.

We’re heading to Kelly’s in a little bit to wish the sister-in-law bon voyage. She’s being TOTALLY ORIGINAL and moving out of Pittsburgh now that she’s done with college. Gee, no one’s ever done that before. Yes, jump right into my diaspora, the water’s warm.

I just wanted to pop up really quick and let you all know that The Search for the World’s Most Useless Hospital Gown is now over. I found it at Magee. It features 9 straps, none of which are able to meet and tie at any point. Four of these straps are, bafflingly, around the neck and the rest dangle like undercooked fringe around the waist. I also wowed the nurse with my prowess when I backed into and nearly knocked over that flashlight that they shine in your vag. See, if they had just let me have my appointment yesterday none of this would have happened.

Later.