they buy stonehouse bread! celebrities-- they're just like us!

There was only one other family in the bakery when we entered. A rotund man with orange hair, a young boy who was maybe twelve or so, and a grandma type. The man looked very familiar, but in that way that people start to look familiar Up North, like maybe he sold you bait over the summer or he teaches organ at Interlochen and didn't that girl Megan take private lessons with him when you were thirteen? There are not a lot of strangers here, especially when in the dead period between Christmas and the New Year and the ski resorts are all empty because it's forty degrees and dry as a bone out.

We sampled the pesto hummus on the counter and instantly decided we had to have it. I followed Jen as she picked a container from the fridge next to the family. I definitely knew the man from somewhere...

Wait a minute. No, it couldn't be. Why the hell would he be in a bakery in small-town Northern Michigan? Shouldn't he be braising pigs' trotters in Puglia or something?

I not-at-all-subtly peeked down for the telltale sign. Sure enough.

Orange Crocs.

But no, it had to be a coincidence. No one remotely famous ever comes to this part of the world. I mean sure, Tom Selleck and Tim Allen have cabins here, but that's because we have lots of woods full of things to shoot and long straight roads where you can drive all coked out and never get pulled over. And sure, Jeff Daniels lives in Michigan because he hates Hollywood and loves the Midwest and a fun part of growing up where I did is selling him Girl Scout cookies. And yes, Demi Moore sent her daughter to the Academy for a hot minute, but apart from her one very random visit to the Interlochen Public Library, it's not like she ever spent a lot of time hanging out with the locals, snackin on pesto hummus and calling the baker by her first name. Celebrities don't do that. They're not normal. They hang out in their celebrity pod worlds, where everyone is very beautiful and very short and is so over being famous, like, it's such a pain. Except for Chris Noth, who was unexpectedly tall and has lost the weight and was in a very loud conversation about a ski trip in January in the middle of 41st Street. But I digress.

By this time Jen had noticed too. She probably couldn't help but, since I was at this point flat staring. I wasn't gawking, I was just really, really confused.

Back at the counter she stage-whispered "Is that...?" in a manner that was the exact opposite of smooth. We were still maybe seven feet from the family, and I'm sure they heard exactly what was transpiring. "I'm not... no, can't be..." I muttered back.

Suddenly the son was at my elbow to pay the cashier and I noticed that his t-shirt was from a Clinton Foundation event. And, because I have been in Washington for entirely too long, that's when I finally realized it really was him. Because no twelve-year-old in Leland, Michigan would be wearing a Clinton Foundation t-shirt unless he was the son of someone famous.

"Merry Whatever and Happy Whatsitsdoodle, Mary!" The orange man suddenly joined his son at the counter and ushered his family out as he waved to the cook and her assistant. As soon as the door shut behind them Jen and I gawped first at one another, then at Mary.

"So, um..." Jen asked, "was that who I think it was?"

"Oh yah, sure!" Mary replied. "He only uses our bread when he's baking here and does all sortsa charity events in the area. He's very particular about using local ingredients, dontcha know?"

Our mom looked at us as if we were nuts. "You girls could watch Food Network all day!" she said. "How did you not know that Mario Batali lives up here?"

Um, because we're normal and assume that all famous people live in New York and LA?

But whatever. That totally made up for not getting reservations at Babbo earlier this month. And Internet, aren't you proud that I didn't rush after him and ask him if Raechel Ray is that annoying in person? Because I really kind of wanted to.

bow people

Bow People are the people who place coordinating bows atop their Christmas presents. The parents make sure that presents from Santa and presents from family are never wrapped in the same packages, lest inquiring young minds put two and two together and innocence is forever ruined. Bow People beget offspring who don coordinating velvet hairbows and thick white tights, then sing carols to neighbors in high piping voices, knowing full well that their sweetness will get them invited in for some Christmas cookies.

Bow People never scream at the hapless, lying sacks of incompetence that cancel their connecting flight from Chicago to Traverse City for the second major holiday in one month and then lose their luggage. Bow People would certainly never demand to speak with a manager and upon being told that a manager was not available, a Bow Person would never say "Then I just hope you have a shitty Christmas, too."

We are not Bow People, we Hornes. But I did feel badly about the "shitty Christmas" remark later. Much later, after I finally received my suitcase at 7:00 on Christmas Eve.

When my sister and I were growing up, the Hornes were Bow People. We began making cookies around the first week of December, generally the same period when we would select and decorate our Christmas tree. Boxes upon boxes of red and green decorations would emerge from the basement, and knitted dollies and our mother's collection of Santas would parade across every unsuspecting surface in the family room. Mom would make pepper cookies, a raisin-stuffed concoction that no one else in our immediate family would even taste, and ship them to her siblings across the country. On Christmas Eve we attended services at our church, raising our candles on the third verse of Silent Night when you sing in German. Stille Nacht, hilege Nacht... I still know the alto part to pretty much every Christmas carol. I don't remember the last time I sang melody in church. Mother wouldn't stand for it.

The energy that other families conserve for Halloween, Easter, Veterans Day, whatever, was for the Hornes concentrated in December, as if we were trying to cash in our Martha Stewart points before years end. It is no coincidence that I grew up in a house that did not give a hoot for New Year's Eve. By December 31st, our parents were so spent from all the comfort and joy that they were left with the ability to do little more than pass out on the sofa whilst watching Law and Order reruns.

We all knew this year would be different. Dad's surgery was successful but the spectre of it has cast a pall over our holiday preparation, or lack thereof. It is difficult to coordinate presents for a litany of relatives from a hotel room in Rochester and the nurses in the ICU frown upon baking in hospital facilities. Jen managed to do a lot of our decorating after she finished her finals, but we outsourced our Christmas tree to the neighbors.

On Christmas morning my aunt (and nemesis) called to say hello and Merry Christmas, but really to brag about her family. To her, holidays are a competitive sport that is meant to be surmounted and conquered, not enjoyed. It was about 11:30 when she called, and I could imagine the horror in her voice when Mom informed her that 1) we were just now cooking Christmas breakfast and that 2) Christmas breakfast consisted in part of French toast soaked in Bailey's. We are Bailey's people, we Hornes.

I've been wearing the same pajamas since that breakfast. For the first time in my life, we didn't go to church on Christmas Eve. It didn't make sense to, since Dad needs to constantly both stretch and nap and also since we ate our Christmas dinner of mustard crusted tenderloin around, oh, 10:30. We've spent the last two days opening obscene amounts of presents while saying "you guys, we were going to take it easy this year," eating lefse and cornbread dressing and entire cloves of roasted garlic. We've slept in and watched Christmas classics like Scrooged and Elf and the entire second season of The Office. We've consumed an embarassingly large amount of wine, made even more embarassing that two of our family are technically not allowed to drink, one on the orders of the head of cardiology at the Mayo Clinic and one because she's nineteen. Granted, the cabin is gorgeously decorated tea candles and garlands and stuffed mooses wearing sweaters with fir trees on them. But we have not gone a-wassaling all week. In fact, except for a hideous trip to the Traverse City Mall I haven't left the cabin since I've been here, except to walk outside on Christmas Eve and marvel at the stars. Jen somehow knew every half the constellations and pointed out Cassiopeia, Orion's Belt, the North Star, the Big Dipper. Okay, the Big Dipper I could find myself. If it had been any clearer, I could have plucked it out of the sky and used it to scoop a snowball off the ground.

When that judgmental tone crept into my aunt's voice when she heard how we'd spent out Christmas-- being lazy, materialistic gluttons stewing in each other's company-- our mother silenced her with a quick "Well, we're doing Christmas with four adults. Four adults who all live in different states and never see each other and just went through a fairly major crisis. And we can do whatever we want for the holiday."

I can't believe how happy not being a Bow Family is making us.

of horndogs and poltergeists

It's Christmas, I just paid my AmEx bill, and I'm broke. So imagine my consternation when I open my DirecTV bill and found it to be almost three times the usual amount.

"But why?" I wonder. "DirecTV doesn't pay-per-view The Office or reruns of Scrubs on Comedy Central, and that's pretty much all I watch these days."

Further inspecting the statement, I find an impressive listing of charges labeled "Adult PPV" for the weekend I was in New York. This means one of two things:

1) The ghost who lives in my apartment took advantage of my absence and had a little Me Time (more on this ghost later)
2) My very polite and lovely Republican Hill staffer upstairs neighbor, with whom I share the account, had herself a little Me Time and I would have to ask her about the charges.

You know, there is just no good way to say "Hey, did you watch a lot of porn between December 9th and the 12th? Because if so, you owe me $104.79."

Of course I did ask (cringing all the way; I emailed her, since email is the coward's phone), and it turns out she had some "friends" staying at her house that weekend who spent their vacation in Washington watching pay-per-view porn instead of visiting the National Gallery or eating at Old Ebbit. In any case, she's paying me back, so that's nice.

But NOW I feel like I can't ask her what I really want to know, which is: "have you also heard that freaky tapping in the walls when you turn off your light in your bedroom? Because I'm seriously pretty sure I have a ghost, and would you maybe want to go in on an exorcist?" Seriously, I was up until 2 AM last night and the tapping. Will. Not. Stop. Every time I start to fall asleep I hear another *tap,* and it sends a jolt of adrenaline through my veins so potent it might as well be speed steeped in espresso.

But I feel like porn and ghosts all in one week would be too much for someone as sweet as she is, and she would start telling stories about that crazy girl who lives in the basement and spends her weekends performing seances and accusing her innocent neighbors of being perverts.

I mean, I'm curious about the ghost thing. But not curious enough that I'll risk coming off as some crazy lady. Y'know, because living alone with a cat never gives that impression.

don we now our gay apparel

I haven't felt much like blogging lately. I am really going through some major personal issues right now. You know, I just feel like I need to take some time to really work on myself, like, delve or whatever. To do some really heavy soul-searching and deeply ponder eternal questions, like "what does it all mean," and "what am I doing with my life," and "how do I look in this enormous green cardigan with jingle bell buttons and candy cane trim?"



The answer to the latter of course being "ridiculous."

I clearly have major problems. Because people who DON'T have major problems DON'T go to Buffalo Billiards on a Saturday night dressed as Cindy Lou Who.

My apologies to my poor friends who are also implicated in Donning Gay Apparel in this photo. But really, after our (very loud) public conversation about the relative merits of Mariah Carey Christmas albums versus Amy Grant Christmas albums, we pretty much gave up all hope of ever being allowed to sit at the cool kids' table in the cafeteria again.

praise be

My Dad is out of surgery. He's going into recovery in the next half hour.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm not sure exactly who I'm thanking, but thanks seem to be in order.

Am still holding my breath for recovery, but feel like the noose has been slightly loosened. And oh, does drawing that breath feel good.

Oh crap. Just realized I took Nyquil instead of Dayquil with my chicken noodle soup.

This is going to be a long afternoon.

and when i asked her what classic DVDs she wanted for Christmas, she thought for a moment and answered "Bring It On"

First, we have to get some business out of the way. You heard it here first: Spring Awakening is the next Rent. Actually, strike that, because it's inventive and raw in a way that Rent never was, or was before it had all its authenticity sucked out of it by commercialization.

"But EJ," you whine, "musical theater is so lame and unrealistic. It's gay men and Barbie doll women standing with their legs apart singing covers of ABBA songs out into space." "No friend," I respond, "this is not that kind of musical theater. This is the kind of show where the powerhouse eleventh-hour number is a song called 'Totally Fucked.' If you at all enjoy theater and/or rock music, click here. You can thank me later."

There. Dorky musical theater business accomplished. But seriously, this show was amazing.

Mom and I had a great weekend. She completely shocked me by enthusiastically spending Saturday poking around the Lower East Side and Mott Street with me, eating crepes and spending too much money on shoes. She was also kind enough to only gently laugh at me when we stopped by the Essex Street Market and I practically went into fits of excitement at a spice shop. But! Lavender-infused sea salt! It's like heaven bottled in a test tube!

Now, individually, my mother and I befriend gay men. Together, we make an unstoppable Fag Hag Delta Force Team. Once our (fabulous) waiter on at Del Frisco's on Friday night heard we were going to Spring Awakening, he told us to hit the bar next door after the show. We'd spent the entire meal chatting with him and finding out his life story, and once my mother learned that he had trained at another Big Ten school she talked his ear off trying to figure out what young actors they knew in common. I expect that he sent us to this bar knowing that friends of his would be there, and that later they could trade stories about that really funny woman from the Midwest who talks with her hands and has a slightly alarming mental Rolodex of New York-based chorus boys.

Now, based on what I've told you about my mother so far on this blog, would you at ALL be surprised to know that the night ended with her doing a shot of SoCo and lime with a musical theater professor and the advertising director of Ralph Lauren? Yeah, I didn't think so.

This is all apart from the advertising director of Ralph Lauren telling me he liked my coat (!!!), or when we saw A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday, or when we followed it with cocoa and wild boar papardelle at Fiamma in SoHo. And oh heavens me, I haven't even told you about how I walked smack into Chris Noth outside the theater.

Like I said, it was a great weekend.

consumerrific

I'm heading to New York this weekend with my mother, who has already warned me that we will spend a significant amount of our time there shopping. Not that I don't like this particular activity, but much of it will be shopping for Christmas and/or wedding presents for extended family members. It boggles my mind why someone who has Internet access, a bottle of wine and a corkscrew simply does not do all of their holiday shopping online from the comfort of their couch, preferably while watching The Office on DVD and nursing naughty fantasies involving John Krasinski, copier toner and Dwight's bouncy ball chair. But I've said too much.

I enjoy shopping and I enjoy New York, but the twain should not meet. I've nearly been killed by the hideous sea of humanity that floods into Manhattan on a Saturday. The worst was two years ago when Mom insisted that we get our picture taken at the Christmas tree outside Rockefeller Center. We wound up getting caught between the crowds exiting the 3:00 Radio City Christmas Spectacular and the crowd entering for the 6:00 show. It took a half hour to walk one block. The evacuation of Saigon was more efficient. And in the end the only people we could find to take our picture were some very short Japanese tourists, resulting in a photo angled so low that both Mom and I appear as if our faces are being eaten by our own chins.

The stores are better than the streets, if for no other reason than I refuse to enter an H&M anywhere on the island of Manhattan and therefore can avoid some of the more obnoxious visiting New Jerseyites, but not much better. I love to prowl for uniquely New York cute boutiques or neighborhood marketplaces, but that is because I live in an urban center surrounded by wealthy suburbs and can stop by places like Anthropologie after work. My mother, on the other hand, lives in Indiana and northern Michigan and therefore visits nice chain stores in New York with the kind of gusto usually shown by furloughed sailors at a whorehouse. Again, let me state-- I enjoy Coach, Club Monaco and the Container Store. It's just that I enjoy them so much that I go to them here, and would rather spend my vacation time hunting for vintage slips at a mothbally store on the Lower East Side.

However, we will have to make at least one pilgrimage to Rockefeller Center to visit the NBC Studio Store. It really is a fantastic place, especially the back room where they keep knickknacks and souvenirs from long-canceled NBC shows. I've purchased no fewer than two Saved By The Bell t-shirts there. The big reason, however, is to fulfill my mother's and my December-in-New-York tradition for the third year in a row: to see if the NBC Studio Store is finally making a Law and Order Christmas tree ornament. It's become our version of seeing The Nutcracker.

cawhfee tawhk

"Okay, I'm at the cawhfee shawhp.. what should I get?"

I look behind me at the teeny brunette in the black Northface jacket who has just barged into line behind me, yammering on her silver Razr all the while.

You have got to be kidding me.

"No, I'm eating breakfast. So, what should I order? Like, am I hungry or should I just get a drink?"

I am instantly reminded of Michael Caine's best line in Austin Powers in Goldmember: "There are only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch." Swap "Dutch" for "really Jappy girls from Nassau County" and I might have found my epitaph.

"So, like, should I get fruit? Or like, tea? Or is cawhfee better than tea?"

Oh, she is so lucky she is not in front of me. Seriously, I would yank her Japanese thermal-straightened hair right out of her head and stuff it down her throat just so I wouldn't have to hear that whiny, nasal voice.

"So like, what I should I get? I'm gonna be, like, late for class."

It's as I feared-- she's a college student. She could pass for a visiting high school student who is scared and overwhelmed and needs a little hand-holding, but no, she is a college student calling someone and asking them if she is hungry and if so, what she should eat. I weep for the youth of America.

"Are frappucinos the fatty ones? Am I getting fat?"

If she takes a cameraphone picture of herself and sends it to this person for pre-drink-order analysis, so help me, I am not responsible for my actions.

"Okay, so, like, I gotta go, cuz I'm like in the shawhp and like, I'm gonna order soon."

Maybe she's some kind of sex worker in a dom-sub situation, Ã la Maggie Gyllenhaal's character in Secretary. Is it wrong that I'm so much more okay with that than with a college student who has to call her mother from several states away for permission to order a latte?

reason for the season

I did something a little shocking this morning. I went to church.

Since I quit being a Methodist in a fit of self-righteous protest, I've been back a few times. Like a lot of other people, I went a few times after 9/11 and I also went once after a particularly ghastly week at my first job out of college. Mostly it's been with family for Christmas or Easter services, or to a holiday singalong. I may have doubts about the whole Jesus our Lord thing, but I still know all the alto parts to sing His praises come Christmastime.

Even though I write about it self-effacingly, leaving my church was actually the first painful adult decision I ever made. I don't regret it and am proud that I stood up for something I believed in despite the consequences, small and personal though they may be. That said, as I continue to age and mellow, adolescent absolutes become adult ambiguities. Right now, I think God and I are working on what we mean to one another. So it is with all my other relationships in my twenties.

Maybe I went because today was the first Sunday of Advent, maybe because I actually said a prayer of thanks when I finally got my sight back on Thursday. More likely it's because for the first time, someone in my immediate family is legitimately in harm's way and I'm pulling out all the stops. Prayer, chanting, fasting, self-flagellation, just get my dad through this and make him well and Lord, I will do whatever you want. Whatever the reason, I woke up this morning and felt a genuine tug. I wanted to be at church.

I wanted to wear control-top tights on a Sunday and shake hands with elderly strangers and whisper "Peace be with you." I wanted gentle smiles from pastors and light, indulgent chuckles from the adults during the children's sermon when the one little girl starts dancing around and maybe lifts her taffeta dress up over her head (there's one in every church) (my sister was the one in ours). I wanted the familiar rhythm of voices rising and falling as we chanted the Lord's Prayer, how everyone just knows where to pause because we've all been saying this prayer for as long as we can remember. I felt alone, and I wanted to feel a common bond with strangers.

It was ritual I was craving, not a spiritual awakening. I wanted familiar. I took Communion for the first time in years, but for the comfort it gave me, it might as well have been mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese instead of a torn chunk of pita bread dipped in organic grape juice. And that was fine. As a matter of fact, it was really wonderful.

Leaving church this morning, I felt calm and full. There were no surges of faith, a sudden flash of certainty that Jesus is the light of the world and there was no shame or eye-rolling when I remembered how the very strange girl on my freshman floor had hung a poster proclaiming "Jesus is the Light of the World!" on her door and my friend Josh had in very tiny letters written "Courteney Cox" above "Jesus." The world felt big enough for sincerity and sarcasm, and that being bitter and afraid and angry was fine, go ahead, the big guy can take it. For the first time in a long time, my mind wasn't racing ahead of where I was trying to keep it. It just... was.

Maybe that's enough of a reason for the season.

we're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave

Current Temperature in DC: 75 degrees


Current Temperature in Galveston, TX: 47 degrees
Current Temperature in San Jose, CA: 57 degrees
Current Temperature in Temple, AZ: 60 degrees

Whither the winter wonderland, people? Would someone please explain to me how I am supposed to deck my halls when DC is currently hotter than the entire southwest?

Memo to the Baby Jesus: when Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye sang "Heat Wave" in White Christmas, it was part of a kicky cabaret act and not in any way a prayer for actual weather they wanted to experience. Because if it stays this hot, then there is no way that the General's ski lodge will have enough snow to get visitors and it will be way too toasty for Bing and Rosemary Clooney to count their blessings in front of the fire and poor Vera Ellen will be entirely too sweaty to wear all those turtlenecked leotards and tap dance her skinny little heart out and THEN what will we do with the General when he stops being a General because the General is not smart enough to get with global warming and the fact that in ten years Vermont will have the climate of Belize!

Ahem.

Sorry. The heat is making my brain melt. The point is: shorts and air-conditioning in December = unnatural and wrong.

a whole lot about my eyeballs that you probably never wanted to know

In case you were wondering, it turns out that getting two liters of saline solution dripped into your pried-open eyeballs-- *drip... drip... drip*-- at two in the morning is even less fun that it sounds.

If you can imagine such a thing.

I'd wanted a chance to hate my new optometrist since I first visited him three weeks ago and he literally wagged his elderly, wrinkled finger in my face as he lectured me on my improper lens care regimen. He also stuck the same wrinkled finger in my eye to take out my contact lenses, even as I squawked "Um, can I do that?! I hate having people touch my eyes!" Of course he didn't stop as he rasped "Young lady, I've been doing this for fifty years, I think I can manage."

Ahem.

If you want me to hate your guts, calling me "young lady" is a fantastic way to get the ball rolling.

He gave me a new lens cleaning solution, and I tried it for the first time on Monday night. Around lunchtime on Tuesday I noticed that things were looking decidedly fuzzy, as if my office had become the set for a Barbara Walters special. By my 3:30 meeting with my boss, her boss and all of the deans at the Education Corporation, I was on the verge of tears from the stinging pain in my eyes. I spent the meeting darting my eyes at whatever dark surfaces I could find (table! blackboard! shadow under the table! gah, not the computer screen, owowowowowow!), trying desperately not to start sobbing in front of all the VIPs. I mean, I cared about the subject matter of the meeting, but so much that I'd weep over it.

By the time I got home, it was bad. Like, "unable to see out of my right eye and can't stop crying" bad. I took out my contacts and called the friend I was supposed to shoot pool with to cancel, thinking that the whole "unable to see..." thing might hurt my game. I spent the next few hours gnashing my teeth, popping Aleve, going through two rolls of toilet paper in lieu of Kleenex and yes, crying.

When 9:00 rolled around, it got worse. My right eye had completely swollen shut, the left one was on it's way to join the right one, and I was sitting in the dark in my apartment, surrounded by a pile of snotty toilet paper and a very confused Sadie, who didn't understand why Mommy had just kicked her. I was so sensitive to light that the glow from my cell phone was incredibly painful as I called my boss to let her know that, um, I might not be in tomorrow and then called my friend B to bring me whatever anti-allergy meds she had in her apartment.

B, being the amazing friend that she is, padded right over, took one look at me and almost instantly agreed that I should go to the ER. She guided me into the car, helped me fill out the paperwork when we go to the ER and since the act of rolling my eyes was enough to send me into screaming fits of pain, she did it for me when the night clerk asked me to sign off on the forms. Because, y'know, when you CAN'T SEE ANYTHING AT ALL, that is the PERFECT time to go back and re-initial medical paperwork.

I was worried that I was overreacting by wanting to head there, but that worry was dispatched fairly quickly, right about when the ER doctor on call used the words "severe reaction" and "I'm going to get my attending." I may not know a lot about medicine, but I've watched enough episodes of Scrubs to know that the phrase "I'm going to get my attending" almost never means something good is going on.

I'm condensing for the sake of brevity; by the time the attending came, B and I had been at the ER for over three hours. The attending decided that they were going to flush out my eyes with saline solution, and I asked B to take the car and her poor tired self home before they wheeled me away to a brightly lit corner of the ER to drip fluid onto my eyeballs for ten minutes. Not surprisingly, she agreed fairly quickly.

Thus began the flushing of the eyes. They set up an IV line on my nose with a hole over each eye, and instructed me to keep my eyes open for as long as possible. Now, I am a well-reknowned wuss when it comes to pain and all medical procedures, but PEOPLE, this was Chinese water torture on my EYEBALLS. In a BRIGHTLY LIT ROOM. With EXTRA blaring in the background. Because the only way to make the procedure worse was to perform it to a soundtrack of MARK MCGRATH YAMMERING ABOUT BRITNEY SPEARS' EXPOSED LADYBITS.

At least, I thought that was the only way to make it worse until it didn't work, and they had to repeat the entire thing again an hour later.

I'm really not ready to discuss that part.

By 4 AM I'd regained enough sight to pour myself into a cab, collapse, and sleep like the dead until my alarm went off at 8:00. I managed to wake myself up enough to call the hospital's optometrist, who asked me a series of questions about my ability to focus my eyes and be exposed to light. I was somewhat bereft when I found that I was unable to do either. Actually I was incredibly fucking angry and freaked out, but doesn't "bereft" sound more polite?

Tonight is the first occasion since Tuesday evening that I've been able to look at a computer screen, watch TV or go out in the sunlight without LITERALLY blinding myself. Let me tell you, it's a darn pleasant change. I had really missed that whole "sight" thing. Plus, you cannot believe how incredibly boring being blind is, especially when the rest of you feel physically fine. Not being allowed to watch TV, use my computer or read for two days has made me so stir crazy that last night I stumbled over to an exhausted B's house to coerce her into conversation as she tried to pass out in front of the TV. Of course, I did walk into a fencepost on the way home, which I think was God's way of telling me "Um, EJ, if you can't focus your eyes then maybe you shouldn't be out and about in the world."

But on the upside, now I don't feel the least bit guilty for wishing very bad things on my optometrist.

whatevering whatevers

We all know that online friendship networks-- your Friendster, your MySpace, your Facebook-- are rife with land mines. Besides the obvious time-wasting factor when I'm on one, I inevitably see someone I used to despise in high school/hook up with/engage in emotionally destructive behavior with looking incredibly happy and fulfilled, usually accompanied by someone far more attractive than myself. The always-brilliant Hey Pretty wrote about the pitfalls of seeing an ex-whatever on MySpace, and I generally agree with her that such online encounters usually leave me feeling worse than when I began procrastinating.

(And for the record, I don't have a MySpace page. I figure that Rupert Murdoch owns enough of the world without staking a claim to a portion of my identity, however virtual.)

But during lunch today, I happened to be playing around on an online friendship network and came across photos of an ex-whatever looking... not so good. Specifically, he's gotten really, really tubby. Like, man-pregnant tubby. He still has a shit-eating grin, but the enormity of his belly, swathed in a massive untucked pastel polo shirt, suggests that he has been eating a whole lot else over the last several years.

Now, I perpetually struggle with a stubborn ten pounds that refuses to get off my body, and find fat jokes to be really unhelpful and offensive. However, I don't particularly mind telling the Internet that this guy is packing it on because this particular ex-whatever

1) was by FAR the best-looking person I ever whatevered with, an NCAA athlete who took enormous pride in both his incredibly chiseled body and his Abercrombie-model face,

2) in everything he did, fulfilled every negative stereotype about frat boys, including his proud ownership and frequent wearing of a t-shirt reading "Freshman Girls: Get 'em While They're Skinny,"

3) dumped me in an incredibly cold-hearted fashion that involved him sleeping with his ex-girlfriend while we were still together and then suggesting that we didn't work because I gave it up too soon.

Oh yeah. You can bet I am cackling my still-toned ass off right about now.

home, where my thoughts are sleeping

So perhaps I should have tried NaBloPoMo another time. Another time when there would not be five days in the woods, stealing the neighbor's already-weak wireless signal and then being called away because the compost needs to be taken out and will someone please cut up the turkey carcass and come on, everyone, let's head into town because Santa is lighting the Christmas tree at 6:00!

Distractions + unfulfilled good intentions = the holiday season.

It's been 98% loveliness, with the remaining 2% actually being incredibly entertaining in retrospect, but there is a definite pall cast by my dad's upcoming surgery. My mother the planner is constantly repeating the itinerary for December over and over, asking my sister questions about her finals schedule that she has already answered several times. Everyone is being very hearty and Midwestern about the whole thing ("he's fine! he's going to be fine! who wants more ham?!"), but it's major surgery with a long recovery period and it is not the kind of thing where we can all just swallow and ignore it, like we do when certain individuals in the family make loud and completely unsolicited remarks about Asians not being very good drivers.

Oh, but one unexpected yet totally welcome consequence of the collective worry over my father's surgery? No one has given me any grief whatsoever about being single! Heaven bless us, everyone!

i now pronounce you shorty and wife

The dress was unquestionably lovely. And yes, she is scrunched down so that they're eye to eye, but I am also a tall girl who has dated not-so-tall men, and I understand The Scrunch that tall girls do for photos with their shorter men.



But why does Kat(i)e Holmes Cruise have my hair from after I go to the gym?

i am NOT talking about the game today

At this point, it's pretty much just blogging for the sake of NaBloPoMo.

bo knew best

How is this possible?

Bo Schembechler is dead.

Today.

The day before the biggest college game ever. No, I would say, the biggest football game ever. The biggest game of the biggest rivalry ever in sports.

God help any Buckeye who rejoices in this. I will slaughter you, so help me Jesus.

If I were watching this game in a movie, watching all the events that led up to it, I would reject the coming together of all the elements even before this happened. Michigan and OSU are already the bitterest rivals of any two sports teams (yes, including the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry), but never before have they played each other when ranked as the top two teams nationally. OSU has the best QB in college ball, probably the best QB in their history, while Michigan's defense has given up on average only 30 yards per game, the best record of any team since 1959. Put it this way: this game is so big, the loser gets to go to the Rose Bowl.

But now... now it is a completely different game. Bo Schembechler coached the Wolverines during the most intense ten years of the UM-OSU rivalry, opposite his foul-tempered mentor OSU coach Woody Hayes, proud owner of the number one most unsportsmanlike moment in history. Growing up in Ann Arbor in the 80s meant that you worshipped at the altar of Schembechler. People spoke about him in hushed, reverent tones. He lived for Michigan football and he loved Game Day with Ohio State more than Christmas.

I seethe when Michigan alumni accuse me of not being a "real fan" because I didn't go to Michigan. That is a load of crap. I spent 18 years going to football games, four of them going to school directly across the stadium. I was at the Rose Bowl when Michigan won the 1997 National Championship (along with 20,00 other people from Ann Arbor-- it was very strange; you'd be walking along the pier or down Main Street in Disney World, and hey! there's the Rosenwasser family! and there's Dr. Joyner from the church!). You might call me a townie, fine, but I have years of being a Wolverine fan on most Michigan alums. I chose my own college in part because it didn't have a football program, and I wouldn't have to divide loyalties.

Michigan football is one of the very few things, along with my family and A Prairie Home Companion, that is forever tied to my fondest memories of growing up and that I deeply, affectionately cherish with no irony whatsoever. Bo Schembechler was the greatest coach that Michigan ever had, and more importantly, he was a great man who cared for his players and his community. He was aware of his place in history and took it seriously.

I was already jittery and excited for tomorrow. But now, we're winning it for Bo.

Which is more annoying?

1) When a coworker non-ironically refers to "having a case of the Mondays?"
2) When a coworker refers to Wednesday as "Hump Day?"**

** Disclaimer: This is of course a completely hypothetical question that is in no way related to the author's own workplace. She is not so stupid as to blog about work, even in the most tangential of ways. Of course, if it were to have any coincidental relationship to the author's professional arrangements, well, then you couldn't prove it, nyah-nyah.

you take the bad with the good

I don't have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy!

However, after three weeks of comfort eating and not being allowed to work out, I do have an unsightly extra few pounds.

If you need me, I'll be at the gym.

no business like it

WARNING: The following is a story I wish to tell. However, its inherent randomness does not lend itself to traditional narrative structure. Please bear with me.

Friends, I am a deeply ridiculous human being.

Basically, I am the kind of person who has three glasses of cheap Merlot at happy hour, hears about an open audition for a professional theater company and says "Brilliant! Let's go!"

Really. Really. Ridiculous.

Perhaps some background might help here.

I went to this audition because several of us from Company were gathered for the birthday of one of our own and several of his friends (hi C!). After a few drinks and a lot of mutual adoration (have I mentioned how much these people rock? because they do), another friend shows up and tells us that she's on a break from an audition over at Studio Theater, waiting to be called to sing. Then her eyes got really big, and she said "EJ! You should totally come with!"

Now, I'm not the kind of girl who just steals someone's thunder and tags along with their cool lives. This goes double when it involves sheet music. But I had spent the last hour bitching about how much I missed being in a show. And even though it was an Equity production, it was an open call audition.

And also, I was nicely drunk by this point.

Smashing.

So, to make a very long story very short, three hours later I found myself in a green room backstage at the Studio Theater. Everyone else was very small, looked about fifteen and was groomed within an inch of their lives. One girl had so much blush on it appeared she'd been slashed in the cheeks on her way to the theater. The amount of overdone makeup and nude pantyhose in the room made it feel like a Young Republicans meeting.

And so, you ask, how did the audition go? Well... let's just say I don't think this will be my big break. See, for auditions you're always asked to prepare 16 bars, or 32 bars, or something. Most often, the musical director will cut you off when he or she has heard enough. They let me sing about 44 bars, all the way to the end of the song, and I honestly couldn't tell if it was because they liked my voice or if it was like when everyone cheers extra-loud in gym class when the "special" kid scores a goal.

Lessons Learned From Spontaneously Attending an Equity Musical Theater Audition after Cocktails on a Monday Night:

1) Don't.

2) Okay, fine, do. But know that you're going to sober up halfway through and find yourself in a little hallway filled with short girls wearing nude pantyhose and insanely high heels humming songs from Hairspray! under their breath and you're going to wonder exactly how this happened. And you might freak out a little bit.

3) Actors at a professional audition? Not nice. Really quite bitchy. Am used to community theater auditions, where you sit with friends and people smile at one another and whisper "you did such a good job!!" as people sit back down after singing, even if they forgot the words and started crying onstage.

4) Three glasses of wine + sudden drop in temperature + complete lack of preparation + inability to warm up voice = cracking while trying to belt a high E on a song I last successfully sang in the shower. So, um, warm up. 'Kay?

5) Write a really disjointed post about it on your blog, abandon any sense of structure or order in relating the story and know when to stop.

party in the back

Washington mornings on the Metro. Every day, the same. Company Men and Women in anonymous suits and sensible shoes. Maybe a particularly daring twentysomething guy will have floppy yet noncontroversial hair, a la Jim Halpert. The tired souls coming off a night shift might sprawl across two seats as they rest greasy heads against smudged windows, trying to catch a nap as they barrel out to the suburbs while dropping off commuters downtown.

Everyone stares vacantly and intently at nothing. IPod buds jam into the younger ears, while several middle-aged black women bend over worn copies of the New Testament, diligently taking notes in the margins. A girl in too-tight pegged jeans with purple beads clacking at the ends of her braids picks up a discarded copy of the paper from under her sneakered foot, scans the headlines and tosses it back to the floor.

Every day, the same.

Portly white gentleman outside Union Station who looks exactly like family friend Harry? Check.

WaPo Express barker, full of smiles even though it's a rainy Monday morning and his job is to hand papers to an endless stream of grumpy, scowling people? Check.

FeMullet Lady? Um, hello. That's new!

She has the most spectacular example of a femullet I've ever seen outside of the Midwest, and without the typical accompanying overalls, gaping maw full of Skoal and four rugrats clinging to her. Her blondish hair flows halfway down her back, but as the viewer's eyes travel up her mane they are abruptly assaulted by the sudden crop into a spiky two-inch buzz cut that begins at her crown. From this back view, it looks like Senator-elect Tester started playing with Jessica Simpson's line of hair extensions but got bored after the first round of gluing and went outside to butcher a cow.

She looks like any other middle-aged, white, petite, somewhat meek downtown Washington worker. Maybe a bank teller or a paralegal. Except for that glorious hair.

I'm overjoyed when she sits down beside me at Metro Center and I can get a closer look. She appears to be wearing slightly smudged brown eye shadow and has painted her fingernails a tasteful (if slightly dated) shade of dusty pink. She's wearing white sneakers with her black pantsuit, but in Washington that is less a crime against fashion than a sadly expected norm. She's also sporting a gold circle on her left ring finger.

In other words, FeMullet appears to pay attention to her appearance and take pains to make herself look good. She apparently has a partner (I'm guessing a husband, though the hair could be throwing off my Gaydar) that she wants to impress. She works in downtown DC, not downtown Duluth.

So.. how?? How did this hair happen? What inspired this woman to wake up one day and say "Mullets. That's where the future lies." Did she lose a bet? Is it a medical condition? Why does the rest of her look so normal while from the neck up she looks like she wandered out of an Evangelical Hoedown for Christ Weekend Retreat?

Before I can think of more questions, we lurch to a halt at our mutual station and she stands up to gather her purse and umbrella. As she turns to the door, her underlayers flap ever so gently in the ensuing breeze.

And I have to bite my lip from telling her "thank you for not being like everyone else in this town."

on doofy grins, and the causes thereof

Very first trip to Forever 21 (my God, the bliss), Blogger Happy Hour, playing in leaves on an 80 degree Saturday in November, cheap wine in used bookstores, the Prettiest Person on the Internet turned 30, another semi-offensively themed suprise birthday party, Skyping with Libs, shrimp pasta, Baileys and John Cusack double feature during a chilly wet Sunday.

Now to get through Monday morning...

one of those entries that would make my parents SHRIVEL with pride

"So when we do blow off a hooker, do you think it would cost more to do it off the ass or the belly button?"

"Wait, out the ass or off the ass? Because that's an important distinction."

"No, no, off, definitely cheek region, nothing internalized."

"Okay, in that case I'd have to say belly button."

"Really! You think? I'd have said ass for sure."

"Yeah, like, how can a belly button be more intimate than the ass?"

"It's not a matter of intimacy, it's simple physiology. The belly button has more crevasses, more coke would get caught in the skin flaps. You'd inevitably wind up spending a lot more just because you wouldn't be able to hoover everything you put in there, whereas on an asscheek, it would be much more efficient."

"Oh, wait, we're talking two separate paradigms here."

"Yeah, you're talking overall cost of the endeavor, while I'm talking cost of the hooker. As in, how much would she charge you for letting her do blow out of her belly button versus off of her ass."

"Ohhh, that makes sense. No, I see what you're saying."

"Yeah, she would likely charge less for the belly button, but it wouldn't make up for the deficit of extra coke lost in the flesh folds."

"You do realize this is the worst conversation anyone has ever had, ever in the history of all time?"

"Yes, completely."

"Good, just making sure."

sadie is a demo-cat

Inspired by this brilliant site.

one more leeeettle favor this week

This week has been full of incredibly good things. Nationally we've celebrated Democrats winning back Congress and the unceremonious dumping of both Donald Rumsfeld and Kevin Federline, and on a personal note, the birthdays of my most favoritest people and weather so freakishly warm that I wore flipflops to work today (yes, in NOVEMBER, sorry Al but I'm kind of loving global warming at this moment). Best of all, my sister's heart test results came back fine. Exhales.

Now, I don't want to be greedy. It's been an amazingly good week. But I would have no objection at all if the Baby Jesus decided to extend this luck at the very least through tomorrow morning, when I have my own echocardiogram. Y'know, just saying.

And while we're at it, how about some inspiration? Because honestly, I'm running out of topics to make daily blogging interesting, and we are but nine days into NaBloPoMo. Suggestions from the peanut gallery are welcome.

See you guys at Blogsiving tomorrow-- I will hopefully be able to let you buy me a "Congratulations, You Don't Display the Symptoms of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy!" cocktail.

Yeah, NOW he wants bipartisanship.

I am so happy. So very, very happy. Still biting fingernails to the quick because of Virginia, but still incredibly, extremely happy.

britney spears: political prognosicator

Does anyone else feel that Britney Spears filing for divorce is a really, really good omen for the election results tonight? There's a sense in the air of rolling up sleeves and cleaning up after big mistakes, mistakes that EVERYONE KNEW FROM THE BEGINNING were terrible ideas and bad and costly and would make you have two babies in fourteen months with a D-list David Silver and invade a nation that did not at all pose a direct threat to our safety thus getting America involved in a hugely unpopular and costly war that makes the rest of the world hate us and, like, appear on Dateline looking like something Pa dragged out from under the '78 Buick LeSabre propped on cinderblocks in front of the trailer park.

It's all very "waking up from our long national nightmare."

this porcupine has to win

This NaBloPoMo business is proving tougher than I thought. Day Six and I'm hurting for content.

Blog about the election? Hrmmm? What is this "election" business you speak of?

Sorry, don't got much for you there. There are a million other people who do that way better than me, and judging from the lack of comments when I do blog about something political, you all would much rather read thoughts on why we're going to hell in a handbasket elsewhere.

It's not that I'm not excited about the election. I am thrilled with the very thought of removing Republicans from Congress, and am very pleased that finally, finally Americans seem to be letting substantive issues guide their votes, as opposed to wedge issues like gay marriage or ill-defined "morality" concerns. Unpopular war from unpopular president = removal of president's party from Congressional power. I may have only pulled a C in trigonometry, but that's an equation I can get behind.

What makes me unenthused is that Democrats don't seem to have any more of a plan for getting us out of Iraq while leaving it even close to the shape we found her in. Nor is there a comprehensive party platform on domestic concerns such as raising the minimum wage, implementing a national health care system, making college tuition tax deductible or any of the major issues you can hear on the campaign trail. It's a lot of promises but there isn't even agreement within the party of 1) if they should be acted on or 2) how to act on them. "Not Republican" is good, but "in possession of a comprehensive strategy to get us out of the mess the Republicans got us into" is much better.

Maybe I'm too cynical and tomorrow will usher in a new era of progressive social policies designed to help the most disenfranchised members of our society in the ways they tell us they need help, all while mending fences with the increasingly anti-American world at large. Or, maybe nothing substantive will change tomorrow.

Um.

Did I depress you thoroughly there? So sorry. Here, watch something funny and appropos of nothing. Oh, and vote.

cringe!

As some of you may know, the brilliant Sarah of Que Sera Sera runs a show called Cringe! where bloggers and writers hang out in bars and do dramatic readings of their childhood journals. I've been a huge fan of this for a long time, because, well, imagine how overwrought I get in this space and then add in adolescent hormones and being stranded in a large Midwestern high school. The ANGST, people. Oh my god, the ANGST. The way I wrote in 1996 you'd think I was living in Bosnia instead of suburban Detroit.

Back in January I'd asked Sarah if I could borrow the Cringe! name to organize a similar show at the DC Fringe Festival called Cringe! At The Fringe! She wrote me a very polite email back explaining that they were in the process of securing TV rights for Cringe! and therefore I would be unable to use that name. Frankly, I thought she was taking the piss out of me, because while I loved the idea and everyone I mentioned it to loved it, it seemed to require a certain distance and appreciation of irony. Repatraited East Coasters would completely dig it, but would the people who stayed in their hometowns and started popping out babies upon receiving a high school diploma appreciate the hilarity of publicly reading their diaries?

It turns out yes, because Sarah recently included me on an Evite to attend the first taping of Cringe! (Sarah, if you're reading this, thank you and good luck!) I really wish that I could go, but there's that whole pesky not-living-in-New-York thing.

Getting the Evite inspired me to pull out my old middle school and high school diaries, which I brought back home with me the last time I was in Michigan. Last night I poured myself a very large glass of Cab Sav, put on The Cure t-shirt with Robert Smith's face on it that my high school boyfriend gave me when I asked for something of his to sleep in (oh, how my father just LOVED that), and cracked open the diaries.

And, sweet Merlin's beard, it was horrifying. More hysterically scary than I ever could have imagined. I mean, I remember watching a lot of My So-Called Life and thinking that I WAS Angela Chase because I moped a lot and had dyed red hair, but I honestly had no idea that that level of tormented angst had seeped into my journaling. Has it really been only nine years since I was that tortured and self-obsessed? Did I really throw around the word "love" with so much abandon while being such a gigantic prude? Was I seriously that dramatic? If so, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone I ever knew between the years of 1994 and 1999.

There were some entries about my high school boyfriend that were actually really quite sweet, and I'm so glad I wrote down the things he said because they are to this day the best things that a guy has ever told me. Sorry, kids, I'm keeping first love to myself. But I will leave you with two passages I once wrote in complete dead seriousness that last night made me laugh so hard I snorted wine out of my nose onto the cat:

"Dear Diary, Mike is so incredibly cute... without his glasses, he looks exactly like Harvey in Sabrina, The Teenage Witch!"

"Dear Diary, In one instant, my dreams were hopelessly shattered in front of me and my family is picking up the pieces and cutting me with them. It is so unfair that I'm taller than Donny Osmond!"

adult education

"So, does anyone feel like taking a blowjob class with me?"

Long pause.

"I thought we were taking Argentinian tango classes."

schadenfreude is the new prayer

It is very un-Christian of me to be so damn gleeful about Ted Haggard, the (former!) head pastor of the National Association of Evangelicals, admitting that he purchased meth (but didn't use it!) and solicitied a gay male prostitute. But whoops, don't get too gleeful, because now Haggard is saying that he solicited a gay male prostitute for a MASSAGE. After all, it's written in the Bible:

"And Jesus did sayeth unto his disciples, 'thou shalt have none of thy fairy bretheren anoint thine junk, nor shalt thou anointeth theirs, but thine shoulders be sore from tilling thy fields for mine glory, a rubdown is totally okay.'" Luke 6:9

This guy happens to be a "character" in the movie Jesus Camp, which I saw last weekend at E Street Cinema and has been sticking with me since. The kids in this movie are really great-- obviously very passionate and incredibly well-spoken for such young people. They are clearly smart enough to handle a complex and ambiguous world, which made it all the more painful to watch them being molded to see only black and white, good and evil, heaven and hell.

Reverend Ted came on at the very end of the movie, just in time to yell at the camera operator as they filmed him preaching in his (former!) church in Colorado Springs. That smarmy grin of his was practically demonic as he preached just the most vile, incindiary hate speech at this really great boy who gazed at him with wonder and awe. Knowing that scum like that-- someone who gleefully brags about shaping a "Christian army to take back America" and who takes obvious pride in brainwashing children to hate-- has the ear of the President while good people work for worthy causes and face the derision of the White House every day made my blood boil.

Or rather, I should say "had the ear of the President." Something tells me that from now on Dubya will be too busy on Mondays to meet with his favorite Evangelical Hypocrite.

into the fray she descends

What is fair game on a blog?

Several people have written on this lately, and it's an interesting question. How much should you censor your writing when you aren't the subject? Does a blogger have the right to tell another person's story?

How much of a blog about another person should be abstract and disguised with euphamisms and nicknames? I'm not even talking about about quality of your content here (I once referred to an ex as The Boyfriend, thereby committing Awful Blogging Cliche #417); just the responsibility factor. Because there is some majorly effed up stuff going on with some other bloggers, and the hints and winks and nudges don't disguise it and don't make it less ugly than the people who put a name to a face, or blog, or whatever.

I happen to think that criticism of writing is fair game. You write, people read what you write, they have opinions on it. And yes, I know I enjoy run-on sentences and split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions way too much. And I type in all caps way too much. And many other things. And I start sentences with "And." If someone wants to call me out for that or other things about my writing, that's definitely playing by the rules.

This doesn't mean that all criticism is good. A lot of critics are tools, or stupid, or ill-informed. But hey, even the dumbasses get space on the Internet just like we do. That whole First Amendment thing is such a pest.

Where this gets murky is when the criticism starts to get personal. A lot of us write about our personal lives on our blogs, which begs the argument that as content, our personal lives are fair game for other people to comment on. Even if we bloggers don't like that, we have to accept the reality of it.

Just as readers have the right to call out a blogger, so does a blogger have the right to defend him or herself. We get these little corners of the Internet so that we can make our voices heard, and it's completely understandable to get defensive when someone makes fun of or disparages what we do here.

I don't believe for a single second that there is one person on the planet who is immune to criticism and mockery. Whenever people say "I don't care what you think of me," I instead hear "Oh God, pleeeeease like me." Bloggers especially-- be honest, we all have open comment boxes and Sitemeters for a reason. I mean, if you really don't care what other people think, why are you giving them your writing in the first place? Why not just keep a journal?

So, how much responsibility should a blogger take for the stories he or she does tell? If your readers choose to get very fired-up about a topic and take it beyond your original intent, do you have to own that? Recently some well-known bloggers (who I read and enjoy) had their children's posted photos taken and Photoshopped in rather crude ways by some blogger looking for attention. He got it, all right-- we're talking hundreds of comments calling him sick, vile, a pervert, threatening legal action and violence against his right to publish and his body. Honestly, those strings of comments, which were meant to be supportive, creeped me out more than some random loser who Photoshopped a turd into a photo of a toddler.

Sometime the cure is worse than the disease, people. Righteous anger from the parents is understandable, but a there is a difference between a child molester and a garden-variety jerk, a distinction that seemed to be lost on the general audience.

Something similar is happening now, and the bile that people seem to have for someone who "attacks" a popular blogger is really disturbing. I assume there's other, non-posted stuff going on that I don't know about, because people are saying some really nasty stuff that in my opinion is not fair game. Not to get too Pollyanna here, but if we channeled all of that nastiness into getting angry about something that actually had significance to the general world, like, oh, say, that war we're in or the pathetic state of the public schools in this city or the fact that my Safeway seems to have stopped stocking Softbatch cookies and that is REALLY NOT OKAY, then maybe we could get some good done out of all this anger? Productivity, not mud-slinging? Is that too idealistic a pipe-dream for this town?

Writing and writing styles are personal, but bloggers are all about making the personal public. So where does that leave us? Bound by very few rules and safe to hide in comment boxes and write things we would never say in public to a person's face because most of us really are very decent, very nice people who don't harbor violent fantasies or walk around telling perfect strangers that they're twatwaffles. Or we hide behind "personas" to bash people and lifestyles and choices and defend being a jerk because we're writing in character, like, it's just a role people, and you know I don't really mean the things I write here but I'm still keepin' it real.

Hell, I don't know where the line is. I doubt there is one. But I've read a lot of stuff lately that made me think "wow, that was not cool."

but at least i never gave whiskey to any children

So I decided to skip M Street and hand out candy this Halloween. Going out on Halloween is fun, but since I've already dressed up as a filthy pirate whore once this year, I didn't feel the urge to replicate the experience with thousands of drunken college students dressed as Borat, Mark Foley or more filthy pirate whores in Georgetown. I mean, you've seen one grown man in a twelve-foot penis costume, you've seen them all. Am I right?

So instead I poured my mini candy bars in a bowl, lit a bunch of candles and set up the speakers by the windows to blast the Decemberists over my tiny yard. It ain't "Thriller," but the lyrics of "Shankill Butcher" are quite Halloweeny, thank you. Plus I'd just seen The Decemberists the night before and was still in the post-concert mode of listening to everything by the band you just saw (still am; am listening to the NPR recording of the concert as I type this and humming along to "Sons and Daughters").

My walk home should have warned me what was about to happen. If the lighting technicians working on the haunted house on 7th and East Capitol hadn't clued me in, you'd think I would have perhaps gleaned from the house blasting "Thriller" so loudly I could hear it a block away as purple strobe lights flashed all over the front yard that Halloween on the Hill was going to be a BFD this year.

I had thought that two bags of mini Hershey bars would be sufficient for trick-or-treaters. After all, though my neighborhood is decidedly safe and charming, it's still transitioning and is not the kind of place where kids ride their bikes on the street before Mom calls them into dinner.

The trick-or-treaters came. They came in hordes, packs of five and ten little Spidermen, witches, butterflies and basketball players, little feet clopping down my dungeon-like steps to grab at the mini Hershey bars. I was completely out of candy in twenty minutes.

I pulled the drapes shut and blew out the tea candles in the window to discourage more trick-or-treaters until I figured out what to do. It was barely 7:00 at this point, and more kids would be demanding more candy. I didn't want to be that mean lady who gives out apples or toothbrushes, because I always made fun of that lady when I was a kid and more importantly, because her house always got egged, but I had no candy anywhere in my house. Finally I took the brownie cupcakes I'd planned on using for my boss' birthday party tomorrow and started stuffing them in plastic bags to distribute. I didn't really want to give them away, but it was either that or my collection of mini liquor bottles, and hey, the cobbler needs to be paid.

I gave a brownie to the next girl who came by with her parents, and I think she must have a My First Blackberry or something, because suddenly every kid on the Hill seemed to know that the white girl who lives in the basement with the gray cat was handing out brownies. I got mobbed, people. Brownies were gone almost as soon as I finished bagging them up, and not just to kids dressed in costumes-- parents were helping themselves. One dad looked so excited you'd think I'd given him a space cake.

So I'm out of candy, out of brownies and there are some hungry kids at the door. A sane person would have just run to the 7-11 down the street, or perhaps would have just shut the blinds and turned on the TV to ignore Halloween. But we all know I'm not a sane person, and besides, think of the children! Yes, even the boys who have clearly not attempted a costume and are wandering around the Hill in basketball jerseys and mumble "turkurturt" then shove an open backpack at me! I can't turn them away, little rascals!

Seriously the only sugary thing I had left in my kitchen was a half-eaten pint of Haagen Daas Bailey's Ice Cream, and I was fairly sure that most Halloween chaperones would object to both its ingredients and consistency. But- ahha! That giant container of pretzels from Costco that was leftover from Drunk-In-The-Woods! Pretzels keep well, right? Pretzels keep for like, nine months of living on top of a refrigerator, right? Right? And a handful of nine-month old pretzels in a hastily assembled Saran-Wrap bundle is way better than, say, a Hershey bar! Right?

The lesson is, as most lessons are: Buy More Candy Next Time.

E.V.O.Bleeeeeeech

What. The. Hell.




Why would Nabisco do this? Why would they take the most perfect snack food in the world, Reduced-Fat Wheat Thins-- that sweet, salty, rib-stickingly delicious nourishment of the angels-- and ruin it by sticking Rachael Ray's stupid face all over the box? I have made my feelings about Rachael Ray VERY CLEAR and so can only assume that Nabisco wants me to feel conflicted and cry. That is the only explanation.

It was bad enough when I opened my new InStyle to find a six-page spread on her perfect New York loft, and it was really bad when I started coveting her kitchen (those tiles would look so good on my backsplash!). But this... this is completely unacceptable. I do not want to see that smarmy, annoying catch phrase-spouting, criminally undertipping face anywhere NEAR my most favoritest snack food ever. Nabisco, I will "Yum-O!" your ASS. No, I don't know exactly know what I mean by that and realize that I don't exactly have a plan for how I will do that, since the most damaging thing I could do would be to not buy Reduced-Fat Wheat Thins and that is so not an option, but know that I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU.


And her recipe for Mexican Poblano Bean Dip looks like barfed poop.

your tax dollars at work

Imagine my surprise when I found this little gem of an email waiting for me when I got out of my meeting this afternoon:

You submitted an application for vacancy 050298: Writer-Editor, GS-1082-11. Although we greatly appreciate your interest in this position, ultimately another candidate was selected.

Again, we appreciate your interest in employment with the Library Of Congress.

Yes, I did submit an application for this position. IN DECEMBER OF 2005.

Good thing I wasn't holding my breath there.

Though to be fair, the Library of Congress is very, very busy making sure their employees are properly equipped with Glow Sticks in case of a terrorist attack. Probably HR was diverted from processing job applications because the Library needed them to distribute anti-aircraft disco balls.

warning: contains highly concentrated doses of dorky musical theater stuff

People, the things that HAPPEN when you don't blog for a week!



Like, I found myself with a weekend of nothing to do and decide on a total whim to visit my high school best friend who is now a struggling actress in New York. It turns out she's not so much "struggling" as "doing really well and booking a lot of modeling and commercials," and we spent Saturday night having drinks with the current Broadway cast of Wicked and I found out all sorts of really awesome gossip about current Broadway actors which is of NO interest to nerds but myself, but it was really damn awesome.



Sunday morning we walked/ran an insane sixty-block trail around Riverside Park and Columbia, me constantly pausing to gasp for air as Lakisha zoomed ahead of me with the same ease of movement I display when crossing my apartment floor to pour another glass of cheap red wine. Hey, if my body was a critical component of my livelihood and I didn't have the distraction of a nine-to-five job, I'd be in that good shape, right? Right???



I added up the numbers, and I walked/ran over 250 blocks in 36 hours. Most of it in two-inch heel boots. Luckily, most of it was through scenery so beautiful I didn't notice the vile, throbbing pain south of my ankles. A big chunk of the walking was over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan at sunset, which is where a lot of the new photos in Flickr are from. Of course, I found out yesterday that because of my dad's illness I have to get an echocardiogram to make sure I don't have an englarged heart too, and by the way, probably shouldn't work out until this procedure. Um, I'll take "things that might have been helpful to know before walking the length of Manhattan" for a thousand, Alex.



As if New York wasn't enough, the bus ride home proved to have its own surprises. I finally had my Before Sunrise experience. Except for, it ended with exchanging phone numbers instead of promising to meet halfway around the world in six months. But real life can never be exactly like the movies, can it?

Oh, and last night I saw Anthony Rapp perform "What You Own" literally three feet in front of my face. And later, emboldended by Chardonnay, approach him to tell him how much I love him and how I enjoyed his work with Interlochen students. I thought about asking him to join me in a rousing chorus of "Sound The Call!" but couldn't qute muster enough nerve.

Sometimes I really wish I could go back in time to assure my 15-year-old self that life would someday be full of fantastically random and delicious moments like sparking with a stranger on a bus and talking for six hours nonstop and getting to tell the father of your favorite songwriter how much his son's music meant to you and watching the sun set over New York as your dad tells you that yes, he is going to be okay and will be around for another thirty or forty years to bug you and sing off-key. If I could have clued her in that life would be full of these, she probably would have been a lot more fun to be around.

cranky closet corn

I'm irrationally cranky tonight for reasons relating to the Education Corporation, one of which is entirely my fault and one of which I saw coming MONTHS ago and took every possible step to prevent, knowing all the while that it was like trying to stop a Metro car by planting a daisy in the trackwork.

I'm also cranky because all my shelving and racks in my closet just... fell off the wall. Last Wednesday. My landlord has not yet fixed them and so getting dressed in the morning has developed into something resembling an archaelogical expedition, as all my clothes have spread about every other available surface. Every surface except for Sadie's fur-coated section of the sofa, natch:



I'm also rather rationally cranky because, though he is not in any immediate danger and is getting great care, my dad is not doing well. He's still sick and he's still alone and when I last talked to him he did not sound good. Actually, cranky is not exactly the right word for my response to this. Usually when faced with a problem, even one that does not have a ready answer, I tackle it head-on and start looking for any element of it that I can contribute to resolving. With my dad's illness, I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head and pretend the rest of the world has stopped existing. Except I can't, because I'd get fired if I stopped going to work and more importantly, that because of that whole closet thing this is what my bed has looked like for a week:



A bunch of us did a Corn Maze in Leesburg on Sunday. This sounded really good on paper, and began promisingly. Perfect weather and wholesome funtime:





However, nothing really quite captures the joy that is the reverse hangover (where you wake up feeling fine and gradually get worse and worse as the day goes on) quite like spending the afternoon getting lost in acres of corn. Especially when I spent the night before enjoying yet another chapter in the ongoing Tribute to Aaron Spelling that has been my recent love life.

Plus, we were the only people at the Maize (hahaha-- get it?!?!?!) who were over 18 and not dragging babies around with us. There were so many children running around the place, I felt really guilty waiting in line for onion rings and saying things like "Fuck, you guys, I'm sweating pure vodka." Not guilty enough to not swear, mind you, but just enough to politely cover my mouth when I burped to better emphasize my point.

But you know what they had that makes me feel better? Better about all the things that made me cranky?

The Corn Cannon.



Two days later and I'm still giggling at The Corn Cannon.

"see the man with the big gun? you go smack him with your trapper-keeper and tell him we don't stand for this in America!"

One of my favorite things about this country is how, when gripped in the clutches of fear, we calmly and rationally extract ourselves from that fear using clear-headed logic and entirely proportional repsonses to adversity.

Teaching kids to fight back against classroom invaders

"Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success," said Robin Browne, a major in the British Army reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing the training to the Burleson schools. That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and some fear it will get children killed.

But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania last week.

Browne recommends students and teachers "react immediately to the sight of a gun by picking up anything and everything and throwing it at the head and body of the attacker and making as much noise as possible. Go toward him as fast as we can and bring them down."

Response Options trains students and teachers to "lock onto the attacker's limbs and use their body weight," Browne said. Everyday classroom objects, such as paperbacks and pencils, can become weapons.

"We show them they can win," he said. "The fact that someone walks into
a classroom with a gun does not make them a god. Five or six seventh-grade kids
and a 95-pound art teacher can basically challenge, bring down and immobilize a
200-pound man with a gun."

Yup, completely rational and well-advised. Everyone knows that public schools in suburban Texas are even more dangerous than downtown Baghdad, and that armed gunmen burst into classrooms EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY. Therefore, the only way your children are not going to be murdered between morning recess and Ms. Pingleton's art class is if you teach them to gouge out a would-be gunman's eyes with their colored pencils. Yes, teaching kids how to punch and kick and attack is truly the ideal use of classroom time.

But of course completely random and unpredictable school shootings are teeny baby potatoes when compared to the long national nightmare that is: Terrorism in the Rural Midwest. Good thing the Coast Guard is now using Grand Haven, Michigan as a base for submachine gun practice.

U.S. Firing Plans for Great Lakes Raise Concerns

For the first time, Coast Guard officials want to mount machine guns routinely on their cutters and small boats here and around all five of the Great Lakes as part of a program addressing the threats of terrorism after Sept. 11.

“The Coast Guard has looked at an increased terrorist threat since 2001,” Rear Adm. John E. Crowley Jr., commander of the Coast Guard district that oversees the Great Lakes, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t know when or if something might happen on the Great Lakes, but I don’t want to learn the hard way.”

Some members of the Coast Guard assigned to law enforcement duties always carried weapons, but most of those were personal semiautomatic pistols. Since the arrival of the boat-mounted machine guns, the Coast Guard has conducted 24 training sessions on the lakes this year, although it has halted the exercises temporarily after news of the program seeped out last month and, with it, a barrage of objection.

“When I heard, I thought it was something from The Onion newspaper or an Internet hoax,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, Ontario, which sits beside Lake Huron, where 6 of the 34 live fire zones are planned. “This whole thing was done way below the radar.”

You may think that there is a really high chance that soon an innocent family out sailing will suddenly find themselves under assault from friendly fire. You may then think "this is something that is generally not supposed to happen on Lake Michigan." You may think that it is completely absurb to use the Great Lakes as a repository both for spent machine gun rounds and our ever-crumbling faith in national leadership. Yes, you might think these things but you would be WRONG. This is:

1) highly necessary to our national security interests and if you have a problem with it THEN YOU HATE AMERICA, and

2) highly necessary because Grand Haven, Michigan is a well-known center for terrorist activity. Those terrorists are going to strike America right where it will hurt us the most: the whitefish industry.

*Sigh.* These days, you don't really have to read The Onion for absurdity. Just crack open the New York Times and get the hilarity begin.

My Dad is sick.

I knew he was sick, but didn't know how sick until yesterday. Before I thought it was "stop eating sausage pizza and try jogging and popping more Gaviscon" sick. Now he's going to the Mayo Clinic to be evaluated for potential surgery and we're having conversations about whether Jenny and I should undergo genetic testing.

I can't stop thinking of the Cottage Inn Pizza on Stadium Road in Ann Arbor. One time when I was maybe ten or eleven, Dad and I drove there to pick up a takeout order. Dad asked the pimply high-school kid behind the counter how he was doing and the kid jokingly replied "Fine, sir, but I could sure go for an ice-cream bar." Dad paid for our order and had me wait by the counter for the pizza while he went to the gas station next door. He walked back in a few minutes later and handed the surprised kid an ice cream sandwich.


He won't tell me how bad it is. After a day of Googling "hypertrophic cardiomyopthy," I can't tell what he's not sharing. Our family is spread out all over the country and he's alone.

I can't wrap my head around this. I'm not even sure where to begin.

He's going to be fine, because he has to be. Because anything else is too scary to think about.

optional step four: slink away in mortified shame

How To Lose All Dignity In Front Of Your Shoe Repairman: A Three-Step Plan

1) Rummage through handbag for wallet, setting various items on the counter as you sift through the contents. Extract wallet from bag and begin to return items on counter to the bag. Only then, note that one of these items is a mini bottle of Wild Turkey.*



2) Hastily shove whiskey back into handbag, open wallet and hand repairman credit card. Continue returning items to handbag, then pause when you see repairman extending credit card back to you. Realize with horror that instead of your AmEx, you handed him a condom. From Brew at the Zoo. With "Wrap It Up, You Animals!" written on the packaging.

3) In an effort to make light of an awkward moment, burble "Well, that's one way to pay for re-heeling my boots!"


*It's for my voice. Seriously. It's also left over from the show I did last fall and I'd already embarassed myself with it in a similar scenario in the library. Perhaps it is time to consider cleaning out this particular bag.

the engine rattles my bum like berserk

A rainy day like today should mean sweatshirts and cabernet franc and cats on laps and pillar candles tonight. But since I have tickets to Jamie Cullum and will therefore be out dealing with the weather and actual people, I've had the video below playing on my office computer all afternoon to make feel all snuggly and nesting before slogging out. Watch it and then try to feel bad about the world. It's not possible!




Have a good weekend, friends.

bluegrass is the new black

Maybe it's the football or maybe it's because I no longer live in Michigan (a place where children have to incorporate snow suits into their Halloween costumes), but autumn in Washington tends to bring out my inner Southerner. Didn't know I had one, did you? Well, half of my family is from East Tennessee, and if given five minutes and a bourbon I can drawl along with the best of them. I think it's also because my own accent is Midwestern by way of Long Island, thanks to my choice of college, and this means that I have no affect and pronounce "orange" as "aaarhhh-ange." I really don't like this.

One of my lifelong bad habits has been to immediately slip into my Southern accent whenever I'm around people who normally speak one. They often think that I'm making fun of them, but 1) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as I covet their beautiful drawls and the way it doesn't at all sound fake when they say "all y'alls" instead of "you guys" and 2) I legitimately can't help it. It's not just my family background and personal distaste for my normal voice; I have pretty extensive accent training from my acting years and just naturally absorb the accents of other English-speakers. I do the same thing with English accents, and please be assured that after the summer of 1998, the entire population of London hated my guts.

I caught of whiff of this after having lunch with Law-Rah and Betty Joan last week. These two Dixie gals have their own slightly assimilated yet fully gorgeous accents, whereas my East Tennessee twang sounds most appropriate when hollerin' for Pa to git in, the vittles are ready! Since our lunch I've caught myself inserting more "y'all"s into my speech patterns and saying "whut?" instead of "could you please clarify that?" and "raht" instead of "yes, I concur" at work.

Last night I reached the apex of my faux-Dixie identity when K and I went for soul food at Oohhs and Aahhs on 10th and U (cannot recommend this highly enough; try the beef short ribs, green beans and cornbread if you want to know what heaven tastes like) and then caught Old Crow Medicine Show at the 9:30 Club. We'd seen OCMS at Prairie Home Companion earlier this summer, and were looking forward to a mellow night of hardcore bluegrass played by really cute 20something white boys. Imagine our surprise when we got inside to find out that the venue had sold out and was filled with people who looked exactly like us. I'd been expecting more of the NPR set, perhaps some Baby Boomers in tweed blazers with frayed elbow patches. But no, we were parked right behind the entire Ole Miss Sig Ep DC-area alumni association, and lordy honey, they were whoopin' it up. They even brought their own beer cozies (from Bass Pro Outdoors-- because if you're going to BYOBC to a bluegrass concert, of course they're going to be from Bass Pro Outdoors).

Our bellies filled with soul food (I named my soul food baby Jamal) and surrounded by congenial Southerners, K and I lapsed into hardcore twanging. K is originally from Oklahoma and has a more legitimate claim to her accent than I do, and was soon shouting things like "Euyh-muh-lee! Did y'all want uh Haaah-nuh-kyn or uh Milluh Laaaht this tahm?!" It was around the second of my Haaah-nuh-kyns and the band closing their first set with "Johnny Get Your Gun," that the crowd shifted from Congenial Southerner to Drunken Redneck. There was much ill-advised square dancing on the beer-soaked floor, and the faster they fiddled the more the crowd whooped like we were at an SEC tailgate. K and I sang along "Tell it to me, tell it to me, drink the corn liquor, let the cocaine be, cocaaaaaaaine done killed my honey dead!" and whooped with the best of them.

As we stumbled pack to the car, ankles twisted from do-si-do-ing and sides hurting from the dual effects of hollerin' and fried chicken, K and I were still twangin' away. "Eyuhm," K said as I unlocked the door, "I am so puh-raoooowd of uhs fuh doing sumthayn diif'reeeent."

I nodded. "Honey, we haaayve to do this agayn."

"Don't y'all wi-yush that we sahnded lahk this awl the tahm?"

I thought about the beer cozies, Jamal straining my pants waistband, and the look on the indie snob bartender's face when I'd ordered my Haaah-nuh-kyn.

"Honey child, no. I do nawht."

the lesbian feminists with their abortions made him do it

I cannot WAIT to see how much more dirt the press can get on Foley, because there is no way that even these revolting IMs are the end of it. Keep digging. Trust me on this.

Although, it's really nice to know that Republican congressmen have such strong, decisive opinions on the whole "bare-handed versus lotion" debate. No flip-flopping there! No siree, this here is DECISIVE LEADERSHIP. Those wishy-washy liberals would probably equivocate their way into no cybersex at all!

Watching Foley, Hastert, the NRCC and the White House attempt to rein this in, I wonder if perhaps the Republican party has turned over their damage control operations to a freshman Political Communication seminar as a "Welcome to Washington" project. Since there's no way to spin the Republican leadership covering up one of their congressman soliciting sex from teenage boys whom he supervised in a professional capacity while holding up a floor vote, they're just try throwing out random phrases from the culture wars to try to distract from the incredible perviness of it all. It was the booze! The liberal atmosphere perpetuated by queer-loving Democrats! The priest touched him forty years ago and we're only going to hear about it now, and yes he accepts total responsibility DID I MENTION THAT A PRIEST TOUCHED HIM FORTY YEARS AGO?!?!?!?!?!! LOOOOOK, it's SHIIIIIIINY!

Ahem.

And exactly when is the FBI going to be done "examining the messages they've obtained so far?" Because from what ABC has posted online, I wouldn't exactly take "Mark has absolutely agreed on his own and with our counsel not to do anything with any computer, not to delete any messages, not to obliterate or attempt to obliterate any IMs, e-mails, Internet communications," and wrap myself in it to stay warm at night.

not enough

He said he might want to come back, but wasn't sure.

He said he didn't think he would hurt me again, but couldn't promise that he wouldn't.

He said it was perfect right now, and I buried my head in that familiar spot on his shoulder and nodded. For that moment on my couch, both of us slightly tipsy on cheap Chianti and possibility, with no one else-- no friends rolling their eyes, no parents drawing deep breaths, no expectations beyond the night, beyond the moment-- yes, it was perfect.

And when I hand you my heart, would you like the silver platter to be plain or filigreed?

If only it could have started now. If only he hadn't already broken my heart once, I might give it to him. If only I hadn't spent the last year telling everyone how much I hated his guts while watching him be happy with other girls. If only it could just be him and me then maybe it could be something.

Maybe it even could have been Something. You know, That Thing. That Thing that twenty-something girls in urban centers don't talk about because we're supposed to be chill and fun and enjoy being slightly slutty and watching football and not get all commitment-crazy because, like, ew, commitment. We're not, like, old.

I don't know if it was that, or could have been. But I can't think about what could be when there's already too much what was.

I told him it wasn't going to happen. That I couldn't be sure of him and I couldn't make the leap. When I talked to X about it, she tooted "Never trust a dumper!" Blunt, but good advice nonetheless.

It's miserable to turn down something that makes me happy now because there is a chance that it will hurt me in the future. At this age, I'm not supposed to be so cautious and thinking about the future. And if it was anyone else making me feel this way, I'd be over the moon and annoying everyone I came across with bragging about how happy I was.

Maybe if he'd said "I promise not to mess it up this time" Maybe if he'd made declarative statements for once, if he'd said "this is what I want" instead of mumbling "I don't knoooow." To be fair, I didn't know either. But his not knowing told me all I needed to know.

If he'd asked, maybe. But suggesting... suggesting is not enough. I only get one of these heart things in a lifetime, and in the end, I'm the only one around to protect it.

So, no.