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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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MY IRRITATION ON THE BUS, AND HOW IT BIT ME IN THE ASS Stopping to let one lone person on, my bus sits and sits and sits and I get increasingly impatient because LET'S GO ALREADY, I AM ALMOST HOME, home being where I get to burst through the door and scoop up the Nora. She will smile with her whole face and flap her hands in her crazy little Spasm Of Happiness at seeing me, and the bus sits and sits and the person getting on the bus is taking so long that I think JESUS! WHAT ARE YOU, CRIPPLED? At that exact moment a twisty-legged man struggles up the steps and I see that yes, he is. Hey Universe? I'm a nicer person than that would seem to indicate, really I am. Please don't smite me. I think I need a Sex Holiday. Not to Thailand or anything nasty like that, but just a day off from work to do the deed, because it would undoubtedly improve my spirits and lessen my stress. I am always much more interested in sexing it up during the daylight hours, before the day beats me down into a little smushed shape like a can in one of those can crusher recycling things. Do you remember when metropolitan recycling programs were first getting started and every "home gadgets" catalog offered a wall-mounted can-crushing device? I always wanted one of those, although my mother could not see the point of it. I may even have put it on my Christmas list, because I was a major dork about recycling for a time. I have been getting tons of mail from local Democrats running for various things, and Blair Hull is so far leading the junk-mail race. Every other day I receive a flyer for him, some addressed to me and some to LT. I think we once both registered as Democrats to be able to vote in the primaries, even though I normally bristle at being categorized. I do usually vote Democrat, yes, because I like it when poor kids get to eat and when schools have things like chalk, but I am really quite cynical about the entire system. Blair Hull unfortunately shares a name with a Facts of Life character, but that is not his fault and not my main beef with him. What I am really unhappy about is his campaign literature. The flyers that keep arriving in the mail all have the sepia-toned childhood portrait of him on the front, which you can see at the top of the Blair Hull link. Every day I get the mail and there is another one of these stupid flyers and I think WHY ARE WE SUPPOSED TO ELECT THIS WISTFUL-LOOKING CHILD TO CONGRESS? And what about having once been a cute kid makes you qualified to be in charge of anything? Even G. W. Bush was probably a nice-enough baby. GROIN MAKES A COMEBACK LT and I are obsessed with the word "groin." This has happened to us before. Groin went away for a while in favor of other silliness, but now it's All Groin, All The Time. We have this routine where he says "grooooiiiin" in bed in a deep, scary voice, and I pretend to wake him up all scared: "Honey? I heard a noise!" and he says, "Oh, it's just the house settling." Or we pretend that the voice saying "groin" is a ghost, because as it turns out our house is built on an ANCIENT GROIN BURIAL GROUND. A HEAP OF GROINS. A GROINHEAP. (I'll stop making private Samuel Beckett jokes now.) There is a variation of this funny-only-to-us schtick, and in this version he says "groin" under his breath, and I say "I wish you wouldn't mutter the word 'groin' all the time." LT then acts very angry and defensive: "Why would I say 'groin'? I didn't say that!" and I say "Yes, you did, you do it all the time!" and a big fake fight ensues. Then we imagine that we go to marriage counseling, and that during the first few sessions we play it straight so that the therapist begins to think I am nuts, ready to divorce a man for allegedly saying "groin" under his breath all the time, what the hell is that about. The plan then is that LT will gradually start muttering the word "groin" during the counseling sessions themselves, and we will have the pleasure of seeing the therapist change her plan as she realizes our problems are a whole lot weirder than she originally thought. TODAY SUCKED More drama and upheaval at work. I ate the top half (the frosting part) of a chocolate cake doughnut in a convulsion of emotional eating after dealing with the crisis, and I deeply regretted that decision because all that sugar and chocolate and fat had a strange effect on my brain. I spent the rest of the workday staring into space and chewing on my lower lip. Oh, except when I was standing on the corner of State and Randolph, waiting for a lunchtime pal who never did arrive, and why, why, why are the majority of my friends so flaky? It turns out that this particular being-stood-up-ness probably could not have been avoided, and I mostly understand that and am mostly not mad, but because I am mopey I feel like making a bit of a fuss about it. For crying out loud, I ask very little of people except that they show up and eat their falafel at the appointed time. While I fruitlessly (and falafelessly) waited, I played a little game where I collected my impressions of the people who passed by that busy corner and sorted them into categories in my head. Sort of like hipster bingo but much more general, less smirking irony, and more fun. FASHION ERRORS Full-length mink coats. Too-short skirts. Lots of makeup. (I was standing in front of Marshall Field's, after all). Leather pants. Three different black women with long blonde wigs. THE MOM IN ME COMES OUT Children not wearing hats. People with no gloves. Girls with their coats unbuttoned. It's winter, people! CRAZIES AND OTHER UNFORTUNATES A woman shouting "BUY MILK BUY MILK BUY MILK!" at everyone who passed. Double amputee in a wheelchair who parked himself around the corner from where I waited, and then pulled a newspaper out of his pants and began doing the crossword. A guy with a really big head, so big it looked inflated, which sent my brain off on a marketing campaign for an imaginary toy called "Inflate-A-Head." PLEASANT INTERACTIONS AND BLASTS FROM THE PAST Cute girl with cute shoes who smiled at me. (Come back, cute girl!) Punk kid dressed eerily like he's LT and it's 1991 (black fatigue pants tucked into black combat boots, subversive t-shirt under leather biker jacket, asymmetrical hair) asks me for a cigarette and says "okie dokie, no problemo" when I say I don't have any. (Ned Flanders in disguise?) A tiny Japanese man in earmuffs who looks so cute you could easily make him the mascot for something. SNIPPETS OF OVERHEARD CELL PHONE CONVERSATIONS "It was fun until we got sick." "Well, if he had a secretary, then someone would answer the goddamn phone!" "There is nothing left. Nothing. It's all gone." If only that guy knew how right he was: there is nothing left, it's all gone. Today sucked so much, in fact, that I think we need a picture of Nora to balance the suckiness. She looks like she's saying, "You talkin' to me?"
---mimi smartypants would knit you a sweater if she could knit. back/forward |
