A recurring problem that we’ve had this half of the school year is the baby’s school bus. At least once a week, we’ve had to deal with it being extremely late or not showing up at all. I’ll call the bus company. They’ll apologize. Things will be fine for a few days with a new bus driver…until that bus driver disappears into the ether, taking my son’s ride to school with him or her.
I have no idea what it’s like to be a bus driver. It seems like one of those jobs that’s probably very stressful and woefully underpaid, because that’s how we tend to treat difficult but essential jobs in our society. And I imagine that for my son’s bus route, which is made up of a very small group of kids from our area going to their magnet school, a low-seniority bus driver is usually stuck on that route. It has seemed like the drivers that we’ve had were kind of young and maybe just starting out.
All of this is to say that I understand where the problems might come in. That doesn’t make it okay, though, and it really doesn’t make the 40 minutes that I waste on the corner any more worthwhile.
Yesterday, after the bus was again absent, I called the bus company and was told, “Oh! We’ll send someone!” What the? Do I need to prompt them now? Did they morph into a cab company? The deal is, at the beginning of the school year, they say, “We’ll be picking up your child and transporting him to school at this time, Monday through Friday,” and I say, “Great! See you then!” and place the one and only fruit of my loins into their care as they navigate potholes, construction, and *gulp* Pittsburgh drivers. There’s no, “Hey! Guess what, bus company? I’m sending my kid to school again today! I know! Two days in a row lulz!”
Yesterday’s flub was particularly bad because the husband had to go to the airport and having to take both the baby and me to school and work wasn’t really on the agenda. Also, the longer I stand at the bus stop, the better chance I have of encountering some of our neighborhood’s, er, characters. Like the under-toothed woman who, a few months ago during a similar incident, alerted me to a used condom lying on the ground nearby. But, like, in an insane way. Like, she got all in my face with her Newport breath and lisped, “There’sh a yewshed condom over there. A yewshed condom. What should we do?” and I wondered when, exactly, my life turned into a David Lynch movie. Yesterday, I heard her yelling, “MA’AM! MA’AM!” as I was finishing up ordering a school bus and she approached me and said, “The poleesh are looking for a light-shkinned fella who broke into a lady’sh houshe. An 80-year-old lady. And he had a gun. I’m sho glad you have a shell phone. If you shee him, call 911 becaushe he’s light-shkinned and hash a gun.”
Got it. Neighborhood block watch in effect but seriously NOT RIGHT NOW, OKAY?
Anyway, we eventually got to school and work and the airport and no light-shkinned armed fellas or yewshed condomsh were encountered. I put in several stern phone calls to my son’s school and the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ transportation department and today, the bus arrived, manned by a very professional older gentleman who gave me his card and introduced himself.
I managed to saunter over to my bus stop in plenty of time because apparently the earlier PAT bus never showed up, which sucked for the people who had been standing there for 30 minutes in the 90 degree heat. Of course, I was then in the direct line of my enemy, the sun, and tried to avoid getting a sunburn first thing in the morning by positioning myself behind a five-inch wide utility pole.
Survival skills. I have them.
Alas, the bus came and I boarded without incident…until I found an ant crawling on my face.
Over the long weekend, we made our annual pilgrimage to Detroit. After carefully considering the lineup and cost for this year’s festival, we decided to not attend the festival proper, and instead save our time, money, and energy for the after parties and the city at large.
It felt a little weird to not be marching down Jefferson toward Hart Plaza every day. But, as I explained to someone who asked, I just don’t feel like it’s for me anymore. The promoters are catering to a different crowd (read: wealthier and, I’m sorry, not at all sophisticated in musical taste or public behavior). The lineup is just not as worthwhile for me to endure the discomfort of sharing a space with people who are either too young or too old to act the way that they do…not that there’s a good age to wake up and say, “Today I think I’ll experiment with wearing just underpants.” Although, from what I understand, the behavior of festival attendees in general was extremely subdued compared to that of people in town a few weeks ago for a country music festival. Apparently, nightmares came to life and rode into town on John Deere tractors.
Anyway, our loose plan was to do some touristy things that had been on our list for awhile, take it day by day as far as the festival goes and set aside money for daily admission if there was someone who we really wanted to see and didn’t think we would have another opportunity. We would eat well, check out the sights, head back to the hotel for disco naps, and then enjoy the nightlife.
This worked out wonderfully.
My Twitter and Facebook remained virtually silent throughout the weekend, until finally I stopped laughing long enough to report:
By that point, I had spent nearly every minute since Friday afternoon with the husband, the sister-in-law, the sister-in-law’s boyfriend, Frank, and Noleian, plus other groups of Pittsburghers like Jwan, Liz, Adam, Preslav, Shawn, Kristine, Curt, Amanda, Tony, Sarah, and Arnie. We had been all over the city, exploring eateries and neighborhoods that we’d never seen before. Then we would go out and dance ourselves silly before returning to the hotel and waking the birds up with our slumber party antics. We had so much fun.
There was a decent amount of cutting loose, including an ill-advised plan on Friday to sample Four Loko and Blast by Colt 45. As I heaved the cans down from their shelves at the party store, I explained, “We’re all going to try a little bit of each. It’ll be like a wine flight!”
I took some tasting notes from the assembled imbibers:
“It smells like…something I’ve smelled before.”
“It looks like…something I’ve seen before.”
“Hmm…It’s like you soaked a urinal cake in beer and drank it.”
“Gives you corpse tongue.”
“Tastes like they had a bum swish this around in his mouth and then spit it in a can.”
The Strawberry Watermelon was terrible. The Blueberry Pomegranate was okay, but we were alarmed when a small amount spilled on the nightstand and stained it immediately, as we suddenly became aware of what this concoction might be doing to our insides. The Lemonade Four Loko was almost pleasant, but it’s worth remembering that we were probably irrevocably brain-damaged by the time we cracked that bad boy open.
With that milestone behind us, we headed out to see Suburban Knight and Juan Atkins. Suburban Knight was awesome. Juan was apparently hiding a wet blanket in his leather pants because he immediately made things weird and not fun, so we left.
On Saturday, the sister-in-law and her boyfriend and I went to Hamtramck, which is a city within Detroit, and met up with the husband, Frank, and Noleian at Detroit Threads. It was a cool record store but is also a vintage clothing store. This was a huge bonus for me. When I go on record shopping trips with the husband, I usually poke around for a little bit and keep an eye out for stuff that I know he’s looking for, but I can’t help but get bored after awhile. The selection of clothing that they had was really impressive and well-organized. The sister-in-law and I both actually found a number of items that were a) cute, b) decently priced, and c) fit us. It’s pretty hard to find all three of these qualities in many vintage stores, in my experience. I bought two dresses and a totally badass coat that I’ll have to take pictures of and show you. So excited about them.
We were going to go to Slows BBQ for dinner but they had a two-hour wait and we were getting murderously hungry. We ended up at Mexican Village, which was decent but not outstanding. I was pretty proud of us for going through multiple pitchers of salsa (yes, pitchers of salsa) and margaritas.
That night, we went to a cafe/performance venue to see Kai Alce and Omar S, which was so, so great. The venue is notoriously hot and within minutes we were all sweating. This did not deter us from going crazy the rest of the night, especially since Omar S’ set was completely bananas. I kept looking at the husband and saying, “What is this track?” and was frankly disturbed when he didn’t know any of them, because that dude is a veritable walking encyclopedia of dance music. I then said out loud, “I think maybe Omar S was abducted by aliens and they gave him a stack of records to play. I’m concerned.”
We finally got to a point where we had to step outside, and the husband and I bumped into Scott Grooves. He and the husband needed to exchange records, so we walked with him to his car. It was a unique kind of delight to come upon Scott’s mid-80s Pontiac Parisienne and to watch him open the trunk to reveal a meticulous collection of plastic bags. What an odd fellow.
On Sunday, we went to a Detroit Tigers/Boston Red Sox game at Comerica Park. It was slightly miserable for the first inning or so as it was in the mid 90s and sunny. But it eventually cooled down. It was cool to see a Major League baseball game somewhere other than PNC Park and we got to see Big Papi hit a home run. Comerica Park is very…busy. It seems like when it came time to decorate it, anything that was standing still was outfitted with a tiger, a baseball, a bat, a Chevy, a fountain, a bridge, or sometimes all six.
Also, this happened:
Which only bolstered my suspicions that aliens were present and indicated to me that CLEARLY I need to drink and get little sleep more often since it does so much for my critical thinking capabilities.
For dinner, we went to Buddy’s Pizza, which was ridiculously tasty. I’ve not done extensive pizza taste tests over the country, but I feel like, objectively, Buddy’s has some of the best.
The after party that we had planned on attending was shut down and without a real back-up plan we ended up just staying in for the night, which was kind of dumb. We should have just gone out, but oh well.
Monday we finally made it to Slows which was OHMYHOLYGOD delicious. Let me blow your mind here for a second (vegetarians, look away).
Green beans, pulled pork, chicken, and brisket. The brisket literally melted in my mouth.
An unfortunately too dark picture of our ribs, macaroni and cheese, black eyed peas, and baked beans. I wish I could have documented the meal better but my hands were shaking in anticipation from the meat fumes.
Banana pudding with banana slices and Nilla wafers. Swoon!
Then we were all kinda meat-drunk.
Since we were right by the iconic Michigan Central Station, we decided to walk off a little bit of our meal and check it out like good yuppie wannabes post-industrial ruin tourists urban explorers I-can-see-this-becoming-some-really-wonderful-loft-apartments-starting-in-the-low-300s!
It’s just…stunning. It’s huge and smells kinda weird but is still really, really beautiful.
Someone who used to work there just happened to drive past and told us how gorgeous and busy it used to be. He didn’t sound sad. Just matter-of-fact.
I felt kind of bad about the pictures that I took this year, since so many of them capture what people would see as negatives. But it’s hard to capture stuff like this:
…a grown man and his friends, laughing, for a few precious days not caring about whatever has them down, genuinely having a wonderful time with people who truly understand each other. Or this:
…the beauty of a renaissance center shrouded in fog late at night. If you’ve been there, then maybe you understand what I’m talking about.
Anyway, our last night was going to be at a house party featuring Andres and Malik Pittman, both of whom I adore. I was especially excited about Andres since he’s responsible for one of my personal anthems.
Unfortunately, the barbecue turned on me and I spent an ungodly amount of time in the bathroom. I resigned myself to the fact that I was too sick to go out. I crumbled into bed and turned on TV while everyone else went out. I was in the middle of a really depressing program about Gettysburg (the average time of a limb amputation in field hospitals was 12 minutes) when Frank texted me and asked if I felt like I could possibly make it out. “Maybe,” I replied. Then I decided that there was no way that I was spending our last night there in bed. The husband drove back to the hotel to get me and I shuffled to the car, ginger ale in hand. When we got to the venue, the bouncer let me in for free because I was wearing my Northland Roller Rink shirt. I was pretty proud of myself for rallying, even though I had to elbow some people out of the way to get some choice real estate near a window, as it was too hot for me in my, er, sensitive condition.
I came home to Pittsburgh feeling tired and kind of gross, but my spirits were totally rejuvenated. I love my friends. I love my husband. I love that we do this together every year.
Remember on Friday when I admitted that we hadn’t been grocery shopping since, like, Bin Laden was still alive? Yeah, still haven’t gone. Normally, we would do such a thing on the weekend, but, well…my weekend was wack. It was a wackend.
Saturday I had to work, which is inherently ugh. Yes, it was for a fun thing (graduation) and yes, I’ll get overtime, but it’s still working on Saturday. After that was over, we headed to the baby’s first piano recital, which was in his piano instructor’s storefront church in Swissvale. The baby, always one to tempt that struck-down-by-lightning thing, displayed the kind of religious tolerance that comes from only having brief glimpses of opulent Catholic churches and loudly commented, “This isn’t even a real church. It’s small. And plain.” I have a feeling this is going to be one of the things that comes up if The Rapture is, in fact, this Saturday. The recital was nice enough and not too long. The baby was adorably nervous but got through his piece, “Yellow Submarine,” just fine.
The husband had to DJ after that and I, after putting the baby to bed, passed out on the couch holding my drink. Classy!
Sunday should have been devoted to groceries and laundry but instead I had to attend a Ladies’ Luncheon. I was not in the mood, but went anyway because I decline them fairly often (they’re always at the worst times of the year) and I know it bums my grandmother out when I don’t attend. Of course, I started coming down with a bear of a headache and contributed little to the conversation, but that was good because I started babbling about Ghost Adventures and saying stuff like, “I wonder how much ass Zak gets in those small towns.” Nobody offered up any guesses.
I came home, still vaguely intending to go to the grocery store, but ended up nursing my headache the rest of the day.
Last night, the baby was supposed to have a baseball game but it was cancelled because the weather here has been less than cooperative. It’s rained so much that my grass is starting to look like something that people work on with sickles.
Speaking of baseball, Jwan came over for a little while last night and we were discussing the Pirates and their quick slide back down beneath .500. The husband commented that he still has faith in them ultimately having a winning season, that this recent streak of losses was a momentary hurdle. “More like a HURRDURRDLE,” I replied. The husband laughed but Jwan, who apparently is not aware of DERP, thought I was having a stroke or something.
My friends, I stand…er, sit…before you today as a changed woman. I ran my first 5k on Sunday.
It was cool. Like I mentioned before, I signed up for the untimed*, non-competitive 5k run/walk because I was intimidated by the competitive runners.
I set my alarm for 6:00 p.m. that day because I am kind of dumb, but luckily my mom called around 7 a.m. to wish me luck and ask me why it sounded like I was still asleep. We made it into town with relatively little trouble and I left the husband, the baby, and my mom near CMU to make my way over to the start. I followed a few people who looked like they were participating and then suddenly came upon a mass of people in Schenley Park. I could tell from the timing chips on their shoes that they were there for the timed race and so walked over to Flagstaff where the tents and booths were set up. I wasn’t willing to admit that I had no idea what I was doing, so I just kept walking until I saw a sea of people walking toward Phipps and over the bridge. I shuffled into line with them and asked a few people around me, “Are you going to the untimed run/walk thingy?” “Um, I think so?” was the response that I kept getting. For some reason, I found it comforting to be moving slowly along toward an unknown destination with a bunch of people who were as clueless as I was. This might explain so much about my life.
Eventually we stopped just over the bridge near what I figured must be the closest we could get to the starting line. Right around the time that the wholly unnecessary blasting of “Runaround” by Blues Traveler was giving me the shakes, the crowd started moving slowly forward. “Great! The race must be starting! Or we’re moving toward our slaughter. Whatever! At least the Blues Traveler will end!” I thought.
I had been expecting a lot more joggers in the mix, but it turned out that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people there were indeed intent on Walking for the Cure. Or, in some cases, Standing for the Cure. I had been taking baby steps for at least 10 minutes when I finally caught sight of the official starting line. My heart sank because I thought that I wouldn’t be able to run at all and that this, my first 5k, would end up being a total dud. I texted the husband that it looked like I might just be walking the whole thing. Then I saw a few people jogging along the side and decided to try to follow their lead. I walked sideways and then trotted for a few feet, but it was still so crowded that if I wanted to jog, I would have to do so on the side of hill. Since my goals for the day did not include breaking any ankles, I fell back in with the crowd, frustrated.
Around the time that we hit the .5 mile mark, the crowd was finally starting to thin out and there was enough room for me to jog without risking mangled feet. So, off I went.
And it was fun! I started to see other joggers, which was extremely encouraging. Whatever anxiety I had about being the slowest one disappeared and I allowed myself to just go with it. And the normal feeling of, “Ugh. Can’t wait for this to be over,” that I usually get when I’m jogging by myself never showed up.
I took a few walking breaks as there were a few hills that I was just not up for and sent the husband updates on my progress, right up to the finish line.
Or the "finjishef" line, for when you've just completed your first 5k and are a Swedish chef. Bork bork.
It took me about an hour and four minutes to finish, but I didn’t really care considering it took me so long just to get started.
The husband and the baby and my mom greeted me afterward and congratulated me. I felt legitimately proud of myself and resolved to do another one as soon as possible.
Since Sunday, I’ve been having some kind of extended celebration. That, coupled with a huge work event on Saturday, have me going into some kind of maintenance mode. I’m functioning on like the bare minimum level of adulthood. I’m going to work and getting the baby off to school, but I scoff at grocery shopping or cooking dinner or any of that bullshit. Last night, I felt totally justified in having a hoagie and some of that Jimmy Fallon potato chip ice cream for dinner. Then I got a gross stomachache and passed out in a food coma around 10 p.m. As for housekeeping…
That’s two empty milk cartons that are waiting to be rinsed out and put in the recycling. And some knives and shit. But, hey! The milk is (was) organic. That counts for something, right?
Tonight, after the baby’s baseball game, we’re running to the store to get cereal (and, uh, milk apparently) so that my child can have something to eat in the morning. Parenting, FTW. Maybe I’ll invest in some TRIPLE HEALTH ENGLISH MUFFINS.
Seriously, what’s triple health?
* Can we discuss the gross misuse of “un-” as a prefix? It’s not like the run/walk was timed and then that time stricken from the records. Unsweetened is another one. You don’t sweeten something and then take the sweetener out. Surely there is a better way to distinguish such things.
I did something really immature about two months ago and unsubscribed from a blog in a huff. The author, who I have never interacted with, had hurt my feelings by posting her thoughts on recreational runners: people who set out to run a 5k during some crisis period in their life. It’s not that activity that bothered her so much, it was the perceived oversharing of said recreational runners, posting their results on Twitter or Facebook and proudly displaying their post-race pictures with their participation medals. She assured any recreational runners reading the post that this was highly irritating to everyone and anyone who hadn’t pointed that out to them was just being nice. She also informed them that real runners, those who had been doing it for a long time, thought they were a huge joke. The comments validated her, with both friends of recreational runners and “real runners” confirming that such people were both irritating and full of it.
It made me feel very sheepish and upset. I have no evidence that anyone in my life, either online or in meatspace, is actively irritated with my jogging and the fact that I share my jogs on the internet. However, to the above blogger and her supporters and anyone in my life who feels that way: it is not the mark of a good friend to mock their efforts at turning their lives around or literally slogging through a dark time. You are doing them and me no favors, so please remove yourselves from our lives.
Like I said, this is immature and overly sensitive of me, but that’s just kind of how I am these days.
ANYWAY.
For those of you still here, I’ve been shuffling on treadmills and around Pittsburgh for over a year now and on Sunday I’m going to participate in my very first 5k. I’ll be doing the Race for the Cure. I’m extremely anxious about this. I’m afraid of making a fool of myself because, honestly, I’m not very good at running and I know that I’ll have to walk at least a little bit of it. So I’m doing the non-competitive, un-timed run/walk.
I’m excited about it, though. I’ve been feeling really, really down on myself lately and I think being able to do this will give me a little boost. And I’ve heard lots of stories about how cool it is to experience an event like this.
It’s for a good cause, too. So, hopefully I won’t be too irritated with myself for voluntarily getting out of bed so early on not just a Sunday but Mother’s Day.
That’s me. 23 years old. 9 months pregnant (though it felt more like 20). In our living room in our old apartment in Squirrel Hill. Smiling but scared to death.
About 3 months prior to when that picture was taken, I had sat in that room in my bathrobe and watched the September 11, 2001 attacks unfold on our TV.
“This isn’t real,” I had said, as mighty towers crumpled and fell. “This can’t be real.”
I don’t like to…own too much of the emotion of that day. It was terrifying for everyone, but I didn’t know anyone in those towers or on those planes, and the few people I knew in those cities were safe. I didn’t have any loved ones in the military.
All I had was a baby inside me. He squirmed and turned, blissfully unaware of anything outside of my belly, as I sat and seriously wondered if this was it, if this was the end of everything. And if it wasn’t, what would happen tomorrow? Being pregnant had stirred up so much introspection of my worth as a human being and now I had to wonder, really wonder, about the worth of the world that I was forcing him into.
There’s a Bob Dylan song called “Masters of War.” It’s angry and chilling and not at all pleasant.
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins.
I’ve felt this way toward many people, not just toward cartoonish men with dastardly terrorist networks. I’ve felt it toward presidents and governors and senators and captains of industry. When I’m particularly angry, I listen to this song and I get it out. I let the anger happen, I let it have its moment, and then I’m ready for action, whatever form that may take.
Strong emotions live inside moments. I thought it was weird to see people celebrating, but I’m not going to tell anyone how they should feel immediately following something like this. I’m not rejoicing bin Laden’s death, but I am glad that his time among us has come to an end. I heard and read a LOT of things after his demise was announced. Very little of it was constructive, but all of it was emotional. That moment is over now, though. Now we figure out where to go from here. Things felt and said yesterday are in the past and there are hopefully many tomorrows to be lived.
The baby’s school bus actually showed up this morning. And then we recovered the bananas that we purchased last night that had mysteriously gone missing. They were in the trunk of the car. Both of these events made me feel triumphant.
My expectations out of life are pretty low.
A light scarf seems like a cute accessory. Until you have to tend to feminine matters and the scarf wants to be all up in your business.
One of my favoritest people on the internet is Gayle. As she so hilariously puts it in her bio on MoxieBird, “she works as an actor and writer to support her passion for secretarial work.” A few weeks ago, she told me that the Bricolage Production Company was going to be having a blogger night to celebrate the opening of their newest play Hunter Gatherers. It had been awhile since Gayle and I had hung out, and there were going to be some free drinks, so I agreed.
I had never been to Bricolage, but it’s a very cool space downtown with an intimate stage, plus a resident dog, Odie. There was a quiz before the show started to find out if you were a hunter or a gatherer. I am an Ultra Gatherer, which they didn’t have an explicit sticker for. So I hacked mine with a ballpoint pen, hence the horrific scrawling.
So, the play…
Two couples have been friends since high school and have continue their annual dinner through their 30s. On this particular night, all four people are at a crossroads in their lives and none are satisfied with keeping things the way they are, no matter how badly they want to believe that they’re living the lives that they’re supposed to. Over the course of the evening, they each strip away their middle class veneers and get down to their base human natures. They’re shocked at how primal they really are as they allow themselves to indulge in carnivorous urges of all kinds: sex, procreation, alpha male posturing, and actually eating meat.
Yuppies breaking down might not sound particularly funny but the writing was quick-witted and hilarious. And the actors were inspirationally good. As in, I wanted to become an actor SO BAD watching them on the stage, fully engrossed and kicking ass.
Hunter Gatherers will run at Bricolage now through May 7th and I highly recommend that you take in a performance. As we emerge from that excessively long winter, it’s wonderful to be reminded of what an amazing cultural community we have here in Pittsburgh.
To get you started on your spring/summer activities, I would like to offer you the chance to win two tickets to a performance of Hunter Gatherers. All you have to do is leave a comment here and I’ll pick a winner at random next Friday, April 22nd. Good luck!
“Alright, let’s get going. We still have to go to the store.”
I gathered up my purse and my camera. The baby girl stared up at me from her swing and I bent down to tickle her behind her ears one more time and pressed her tiny, round feet in between my forefingers and thumbs. We hugged her daddy good-bye and walked outside into the late afternoon sun.
The smell was almost intoxicating. The ground was warming up on the first legitimate spring day. It inhaled the sun and exhaled the possibility of life beginning again, much like how the baby girl’s sighs and giggles had filled the room. The nearby steel mill pumped its scent into the air. The baby girl’s mother had commented on it earlier with a somewhat weary tone, not looking forward to another hot summer with that smell permeating the humidity. “I kind of really like it,” I admitted. “There was a mill in my neighborhood where I grew up. I’d forgotten all about that smell.” That mill was long gone now, the land being reborn into luxury apartments and townhomes. Those don’t have a scent, as far as I know.
The train roared past, announcing our departure from Braddock. Entering that small town had been like a trip back in time for both me and the husband. Despite the tremendous efforts pouring into the community to restore it, it remained a worn version of itself from when it started its rapid decline when we were kids. “This is exactly what Pittsburgh looked like when we were little,” we marveled. “All of it. The houses, the streets…” and the intangibles that we couldn’t quite grasp, like the way your dad smells when he comes in for dinner after working outside. Everything seemed…slower…drowsier. Happy and sad with the knowledge that life just keeps on going, like spring afternoons and baby toes and a groaning, creaking steel mill that used to pump the lifeblood of a community and now just pumps weird scents into the air.
We rode toward our end of town and I let the wind create small knots in my hair, brief suggestions of red lace. We sped past Carrie Furnace, which imposed itself against the landscape of still brown trees aching to burst with yellow-green buds. The rusty red stairs and bridge demanded that you look and respect it. As my baby dozed off in the back seat, the husband turned up the song that had come on.
Home is where I want to be. But I guess I’m already there.
I was sure I’d been somewhere else all this time, lost and alone with no way back. Looking at that huge furnace and its bright red appendages, my chest suddenly ached. This is my home. This landscape created me. It shrivels and dies and seems to disappear, but its elegant beasts remain, landmarks to remind me of where I’ve always been.
If you are a cashier at a coffee shop/cafe and you suddenly resume your conversation about meatloaf with a co-worker who is invisible to customers behind a stack of boxes, some confusion may occur. You see, the frazzled secretary waiting to pay for the somewhat dodgy sushi lunch will assume that your question, “So, you don’t like it with gravy?” is regarding her impending meal. And she may be overly polite and will produce an answer, despite the terrifying nonsensical context, and reply, “Um…no, I don’t think I’ve ever put gravy on sushi.” And you and your co-worker, who has suddenly peered from behind the boxes to study this odd creature who allows words to just tumble out of her mouth about meatloaf and gravy and sushi, will suddenly become just as confused as the now thoroughly embarrassed secretary. And eye contact will no longer be bearable.
So, you know, don’t do that.
* * *
The husband whisked me away for a restorative weekend of food and walks and TV because I’ve been really sad lately. We watched many episodes of Food Network’s offerings to the reality TV gods, including Chopped, Cupcake Wars, and…I don’t know…manufactured drama over fondant. Much like the tic of reality stars of other competition-based shows to say, “I’m not here to make friends,” competitive chefs have a tendency to say, “Go big or go home.” This makes sense when you’re talking about cupcakes, as they’re known for their gigantic size. The husband, who doesn’t absorb bumper sticker folk wisdom or cliches very readily, which is odd since one of the first gifts he ever gave me was a book of cliches, took note of this repetitive boast: “They keep saying…like, ‘If you’re gonna go, go big.'”
We took great delight in reconstructing cliches in this manner over the rest of the weekend.
There’s a box and you’re outside it. Thinking.
That’s evil but less so than this other evil.
If there’s something that you can do now, you should do it and not wait because procrastinating is doing stuff later.
Mi casa es mi casa but you can come over whenever.
* * *
We watched most of Sex and the City 2 last night. It was offensive. And terrible. And offensively terrible. And two and half hours long. The husband and I have a really unhealthy habit of watching particularly bad movies for the sheer delight of giving them the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment.
“What happened in the first one?”
“Uhhhh…you know, honestly, I think I blacked out in the middle of it. But it was also two and a half hours long and I remember the realization that I had been watching it for hours depressing the hell out of me.”
Upon seeing Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda peek around a corner wearing burqas:
“I know that it is not in any way okay to say this, but I’m pretty sure this is why planes get flown into buildings.”
“Maybe the 9/11 terrorists saw this movie and traveled back in time to try to stop it.”
“Like Terminator?”
“Yeah…I think.”
“Maybe John Connor wrote Sex and the City 2?”
Upon watching Carrie, insecure in her marriage after confessing to kissing her old flame in Abu Dhabi, come home to a Big-less apartment and the TV missing:
“I bet he’s just out buying a new TV.”
“I hope she goes totally Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale and is halfway through burning all of his clothes when he comes home.”
Pondering the last five minutes of the movie, in which all plot development abruptly stopped and the writers just threw all of the characters back together happily with their spouses:
“Huh. They must have been two hours and 25 minutes into the movie when they realized that it was going absolutely fucking nowhere and were like, ‘Okay, let’s just end.'”
“Orphan is coming on. That movie was also terrible. Come to think of it, Orphan was similar to Sex and the City 2. This girl is being weird and killing people for over two hours and you’re supposed to be thinking, ‘What could possibly cause this little girl to go on this rampage with this ridiculous accent?'” And the big reveal is that it’s because she’s actually 35 and you’re like, ‘Uh…’ That’s not even a twist. Someone being 35 is not a twist. That’s just starting a whole other movie.”
