LaurieWrites

I'm on my way.

Everything is off kilter. Everything. It's all knocked around like crazy shit gets knocked around.

I hate it.

Let's see. The list of everything that's akilter is boring, so I'll spare you. It's nothing that sounds that terrible even in the aggregate. It's just a bunch of...

Like, wait. See? Just there? I had to stop writing this because I was overcome with a sudden urge to purchase "Goodbye Stranger" as performed by the almost-elderly group Supertramp and so I stopped and bought it and then got further distracted by the opportunity to acquire a Skid Row EP. Problems. No focus. 

GOODBYE STRANGER, IT'S BEEN NICE. HOPE YOU'LL FIND YOUR PARADISE.

Also? PARK AVENUE leads to SKID ROW. FYI.

Well, that little problem's solved, but I still can't write for shit. I feel stupid all the time. If I've interacted with you in any way in the past two months, I probably feel like an idiot for some reason related to something I said or did or wrote. I can't finish e-mails. I can't make decisions. I am deleting this post in my head right the hell now.

I don't know what happens to my brain. I do know though that after much internal whatever over a whole bunch of different whatevers since the end of August, the other day I was so humiliated in a meeting by someone I generally trust that something further snapped. I admitted to a chorus of agreement that I sucked at something I do routinely in my job, and what it meant when I finally could think again was that (brace for this quantum leap) I am bad at everything. I have no aptitude for what I do. I am a terrible person with no skill whatsoever at interacting with the people I need to interact with daily to accomplish what I am charged with accomplishing.

I wanted to walk out the door and never come back and make good on that continued threat that I really only make to myself to drop out and rent beach chairs in coastal Carolina.

AND I WILL GO ON SHINING SHINING LIKE BRAND NEW. I'LL NEVER LOOK BEHIND ME MY TROUBLES WILL BE FEW.

Cue ironic Supertramp interjection.

If I could sum up this period photographically it would be thus:

Hi, that's my last New York hotel room when I was there a couple of weeks ago. 22nd floor, no screen, and a weird compulsion to jump - I'm Super Girl. I can fly - in spite of zero desire to end my life decimated on the sidewalk.

I know. It's horrible. It's not good. What it is is the truth, and after weeks of not showing up here to dump my thoughts and feelings into this little white box, I feel it's the least I can do.

Good news? I have a little bit. The Washington Capitals bring me joy. I'm spending money I ought not to spend on tickets to home games therefore because it's actually fun to go (Except for when they lose to New YORK, the lowest ranked team in the Southeast, that was AWESOME.) and if there is something I believe is underrated it's fun. I mean, I'm on Twitter, and I read the litany of activities, some of it family/kid-related, some of it personal, and mostly it just sounds like...a litany, which in the Catholic church is basically the repetition of something over and over and over and over until you feel you've reached the end of the list of the saints or the popes or the rosary, whatever it is you're litanying. Fun? Probably not. And no I'm not saying these daily activities can't be, I'm just saying a lot of times it feels more like a list to check off than something genuinely fun. 

I don't like where this is going now. I don't like preaching about fun because if you want the opposite of fun that's probably up there.

THE WRITING'S ON THE WALL.

Anyway, it's not all bad, I guess that's the point. I had what might count as a minor breakthrough yesterday. I have some ideas of things that will make things better. And what's more important is that I had the crystallized idea that I could make things better, that I could change them intentionally and mindfully just by resetting the dials, by rebooting - like my blog friend Leah is doing, but not exactly. I don't have to do what I'm doing. I don't have to stay in the same ill-advised place. That was the old way. It doesn't have to be that way anymore. And my incessant feeling of disconnection to anything - a family of my own, a home, a community - is not so much a destiny as it is a current state of affairs that I don't particularly care for and that in the next chapter I have some say over whether it remains the same or completely, positively changes.

And that's really the heart of the matter, gentle reader. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's actually the best possible outcome of this year of transition and change and pervasive, underlying grief.

Maybe that's why I'm buying the Skid Row ep. Maybe that's why my Thanksgiving plan this year includes a roadtrip and the beach with my family for my uncle's milestone birthday and a week with my college best friend in a southern coastal city. And I'm so counting the days, counting them over and over in my hands. I will be in the sun and the warmth on your birthday, that also happens to be the birthday of two little girls I'll be visiting, who will be high on a trip to Disney and will be all the promise in the world that everyone needs to see. I will not be in the space I'm in that is currently a space of biding time, of not feeling good about where I go at the end of the day.

Maybe that's why I have this and a couple of other numbers on repeat.

Oh, what the hell. Bonus!

Points if you guess which one contains part of my high school yearbook quote. And at which erstwhile lead singer's concert I broke my dress this summer while making a completely overaged fool of myself but having such a good time I didn't give a DAMN. Lord, will live and die a closet groupie.

I think sometimes I have to go back to go forward, and right now in my mind a lot of the time I'm in a concert parking lot with a pint of Jack Daniels in my jean jacket pocket, looking over the next 20 years, looking at a few forks in the road where although I went left now I have new ones and a chance to go in a different direction.

It can be worse than that, is all I'm saying.

Three Places I've Lived - Roommate From Hell Edition

Becky, one of my new favorite people, tagged me in a note on a site that dares not speak its name. I occasionally do memes as a writing prompt, and because the past year or so it's been really hard for me to get anything written at all besides, well, nothing, I was doing it a lot - notes, lists, Yelp reviews, whatever. I obsessed over that 25 Random Things thing like I was gunning for a Pulitzer, and I can't remember what even one of them was now. Wait. Let me check.

They were really boring, actually. Did you know that I often count along with the syllables to words? As in tapping them out like Nell? No? Didn't care, either, did you? Should have definitely played that one funny. I kind of want to punch myself in the face now.

I had already written the Three Things thing last month that new favorite person Becky tagged me in. Typically, you list three things about yourself in each category, i.e., three tv shows I watch are Top Chef, CNN on endless loop and The Office and that's pretty much it, aren't you glad you know that now too? And also how unoriginal am I? At least I rent the Weeds dvds when I get a chance (which is never, never ever ever anymore. If my life would slow down I might be able to catch up with my stories, kids. But I'll never miss Top Chef. Write that down. No really. Write that down for me, please, so I remember I said it.)

ANYWAY, when I went back to this note to tag Becky, my answers to the three places I've lived actually made me laugh out loud, as in for real LOL. Apparently I had a lot of pent up feelings about these roommate situations. So now you get to read it too, if you want, and I get to put something on my blog from that nameless site and it all just kind of mashes up super nicely for a Monday evening that capped off a really traditionally underwhelming Monday, thanks for asking.

It should be noted that whereas I can be an embellisher in certain circumstances, my life and interpersonal encounters are fucked up weird enough on a daily basis to not really require it very much, and these descriptions are particularly accurate and unembellished. Sadly. Also I really loved living alone.

Three places I've lived (the roommate from hell edition:)

1. In a crazy grad student house in Dayton where my mail was stolen out of the box and I lived with an insane girl from Chicago who moved to Ohio to stalk her ex-boyfriend who went to the same university, who called everyone "jag-offs" and spent her time compulsively shopping at Wal-Mart and doing insane things. These included getting her car keyed at Wal-Mart because she yelled "FUCKING MOTOR" out the window of her car to a little Ohio lady who then apparently keyed her car while we were still inside; trying to write checks for her food at Subway and then raging because the Subway boy wouldn't take her check; telling my loveably, perpetually high boyfriend all about how she was going to get back at her perpetually high ex by writing an editorial in the school paper about marijuana use on campus, causing my said boyfriend to go, "Oh my God, you live with a narc. I can't be here."; getting into a fight with my other roommate and accusing her of drinking a beer each morning [ed. note: something she only figured out because she dug through the garbage to find each solitary can, hello KRAZY] quoting Sheryl Crow's lyric, "I like a good beer buzz/early in the morning" to her in a nasty note that pretty much ended all serenity in the house [ed. note: and escalated into a full-on, back and forth Post-It-Notes-on-doors war that stuck together added up to the length of War & Peace, because both of them, it turns out? Yeah. The K-word] until we all had to move out in second semester. Invigorating.

2. In a house in Kettering, Ohio, with a very neurotic girl who was on the phone talking to her friends or her mother loudly every morning by 7 a.m. and also stomping around at that hour in her played out Doc Martens (wtf? Who calls people just to randomly chat at 7 a.m.? I can't even talk yet at 7 a.m.) and ended up hating me because I didn't want to pay a $730 gas bill so charged because the previous tenants screwed with the meter and we didn't know it until they shut off our heat in February. In Ohio. In February. To which I replied, "Fuck you, Dayton Power & Light. There may not be any elderly people or children in this house but that stunt earns you none of my money." So then she got all crazy and passive-aggressive and started with the e-mail messages in stilted, weird language and eventually it just all fell apart and that was that.

3. In a horrible, alternately boiling hot or freezing cold house in Hyattsville with one normal guy who liked to dance the salsa dancing and played hockey on alternate nights, the totally shady Jimmy Buffett Parrothead wannabe Annapolis sailor without a boat who owned the place and a tiny British math ph.d student who drank a twelve pack warm in his room every night and wailed along poorly to pop/folk-type songs (i.e., Mad World by Gary Jules) and worse yet never (NE.VER.) flushed the toilet or put his food down the garbage disposal even though the hole is RIGHT THERE, just push your leftover salad down there and flip the switch, you pretend to be a hippie so shouldn't you be composting anyway?...Who wandered around drunk in the early morning hours doing things like breaking the bathroom window and helpfully explaining that "it broke" when asked whether or not someone had broken in or he'd punched it or what.

At least I don't name names.

 

You're the deepest well I've ever fallen into

I began writing a blog four years ago with one of the most frightening broken hearts on record, a completely (so completely) fucked up head and a shattered sense of who I was on every level of which I am and am not conscious. I felt like shit and it showed, and I continued to feel that way and show it to varying degrees across these ensuing four years, give or take some days when I was happy.

Me and B and a juice box on Moon River. When your best friend's baby - a magic child indeed - immediately decides you're soul mates when you meet her for the first time in that way that only open-hearted children and dogs do, if you're not immediately happy about that situation, (if you're me anyway) you'd need to be hospitalized if it didn't make the lights come on for a minute, or in this case the week I spent with her following me around calling me Laurie Wife and getting in bed with me before preschool just to chitchat about the day's plans and send me home with a raging case of the flu. I am overdue for a visit with my girls.

New Orleans, 2008, the night we met Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler. I called these days breaks in the crazy. It's even worse to feel bad when you've got a life that involves this kind of love and opportunity, but it's no less real at the time.

Anyway, motion was crucial. I threw myself with insane, frenetic abandon into whatever activity or diversion or stopgap measure I could get my hands on, from one of a gazillion bottles of wine to a trip across several time zones. Some things were smart, like the whole camera thing, which has worked out pretty well, and writing in general, but everything in the aggregate was just a lot. Other things, like blowing money at Target when I didn't need to and pushing myself past the point of exhaustion for relatively trivial things, maybe not so smart. It was just that I had a strong belief that if I stopped I'd die, or implode, or make poor fashion choices or ill-advised phone calls, sometimes concurrently. I was on a mission with no theme, which means I think that I can simply call it survival.

Today I am better, pretty good even. I look at my now as distinctly different from the days that began in January, 2005, and really escalated from the end of 2007 until they tapered off in January of this year, that last 15 months a period of such loss as I've never had in my life, which served its purpose so thoroughly that I'd almost consider it useful if I hadn't hated most of it quite so much.  

I never called you a furbaby because that's not my style but you did have a t-shirt that said "Rock star" on it and I miss you every day.

I've talked about you enough, maybe? There's just a lot to say. It was a bit of an unusual situation.  Thanks for teaching me that swearing was therapeutic and entirely forgiveable by you and Jesus. (Guess whose opinion mattered to me?)

I'll always be sorry for the way she left which is probably why it was so important to shoot the roses the day after.

I've completely come to terms with the way love walked out (whatever, Sammy Hagar. WHAT. EVER.)  and the very unbalanced way I responded to that development, which in a sentence is a miracle of whose magnitude only I'm aware, plus maybe the two or three people who were willing to listen to me at my most jacked up about this, when I was completely convinced I'd nevereverevereverseriouslyever be better. I'm even comfortable with the idea that what I lost was better off that way, that what was allowed to emerge as a result is such a better thing even though it's still totally rough-draft and work in progress and utterly, comically half-baked. Suffice to say that I never liked Barenaked Ladies as much as I forced myself to, and I also don't like tennis and I can admit that now. 

Also today I don't check my stats for twice-daily hits from a college in a city that I thought took away everything of value that I had or would ever be given or become, which was a simple, reflexive belief and not in any way an over-dramatization of events as they occurred, both externally and in my brain.

And when I started this blog that was all I thought about and couldn't write about, not really, because of the person behind those stats, hello, so the posts on here  weren't even really openly about what was going on at the time, which makes all the very authentic stuff that's happened to me as a result of this site all the more awesome and serendipitous.

It's thankfully not about a man at all anymore. Today I don't check those stats or any others (which some of my best sources of writerly conscience would remind me is because who the hell reads you if you don't write so why would you need to check on nothing? So yeah we're gonna try to get on that around here.) I also don't censor myself in real life or in print so much anymore in fear of who will read or stick around, or what they'll think about me as a result of it. There's nothing I can do about that anymore. There was, actually, nothing I could do about that then, but I still thought I was driving this train all alone at the time, which, sorry, none of us ever is.

So I'm better. I don't know how or exactly when it happened, whether it was journalism school ending or my grandmother dying (because when you lose someone so elemental to your existence who would never voluntarily leave you ever you realize that most of the other stuff, it matters so much less, and a person who would isn't meant to stay) or the sudden emergence in my life of a number of absolutely perfect-for-me people in various quarters or maybe it's all the eclipses. Sometimes I think it's just time rewearing a new route through my neural pathways, to cut the counter-productive, played-out bullshit ones off at the knees. (That's a wreck of a metaphor but I'm leaving it.)

You know, I don't know, and honestly I don't really care. I'm just grateful. I'm so grateful that after years of anti-depressants alternately saving me and kicking my ass (because they came along when I desperately needed the curtains to open so I could see some alternatives where there hadn't been any but I am terribly non-compliant with any kind of medication and with these, for me, it was part of the "I feel better I don't need you although you made me feel better in the first place" game), and off and on- with therapists who didn't really get it beyond that they liked the way I told stories and finally one who completely got it and I believe, in a few hours of discussion, helped my head, that I am not miserable. I'm not (entirely) manic and I don't obsess over my problems to the point that I can't act. I'm conscious of goals and somewhat able to complete them. Every funny thing I think or say isn't an exercise in darkness or sarcasm, which was the case for awhile there. I don't cry every week, much less every day, except for when I hear a song or see something in real life that appropriately triggers it (i.e. the difference between mistakenly coming across the Leader of the Band (shut up.) on the radio and crying real tears or, conversely, just weeping out of nowhere at work because that's how my body needed to process unprocessable emotions. Important distinctions.) 

Speaking of that, I can really listen to music again, which is huge, because for awhile there I couldn't handle the places it took me, and whereas I'd still go out and listen because I can't not, I didn't have the ongoing relationship to it that is essential to my life because I couldn't swing the triggers.

I am thrilled by depression's absence, to the point that the normal both acutely and chronically upsetting stuff that's woven into every day is manageable now. When you've felt existentially unable to function, like the ground is going to open up and swallow you or you don't really want to die but you just kind of wish you didn't exist without needing to act in any way to end your life, when you need to medicate yourself with something in order to simply make it to the next block on the calendar, I don't see how you can look at being content without feeling incredibly grateful for the simple absence of pain. I'm not arrogant about it - I know with 12-step acuity that on any day, around any corner, the bad place could open up again, although I'm thinking that I have some coping skills now that will make it less likely to take over in such a comprehensive, long-standing way. I just take every minute of it now. I'd pay for it. I kinda did.

This really has nothing obviously directly to do with where I've been for the past several days, but in lots of ways it's inseparable from my ability to experience these things now. Because you know, today I can look you in the eye with minimal need to mask my panic that I'll say the wrong thing, like, every time. And although I might wake up and think, God, I was a pain in the ass, or worry that all I did say were the wrong things (so many of us are too hard on ourselves, I think) I can shut my own shit down long enough to listen to your story without being too distracted to take it in and I can trust myself, from this place of relative contentment like I haven't experienced in my adult life, to tell you mine in a more constructive, maybe collaborative way. I don't have to control so much, although I'll always want to control a lot of it, let's face it. Bottom line, I can hear you (the lot of you, the so many of you that I'll be getting around to naming in a few days because I can't not, not this year because you're too important to how this is all playing out) and not completely freak out at the prospect of you hearing me. I think that means we all sound pretty good.

(Image courtesy of best conference roommate ever and very good friend, GenieAlisa, who also wrote one of the most beautiful things about me - in a larger context - that I've ever read, which is one of the reasons I'm so stupidly lucky at this point in my life. I cannot tell you what those words meant to me, and I thank you from the bottom of my messy little heart. It loves you. You are going to be the best mom.)

I think that all of this collectively means I'm back in the game, and somehow I needed to state that for the record before I moved along here. We'll see how it goes.

Dear Heart, Wherever You Are

Cross-posted from BlogHer,  as part of our Letter to My Heart project.

Dear Heart –

You really are all over the place.

You had an innocent murmur at birth, which more or less means you made an extra sound, a breather between beats. And now you’re oddly palpitating such that I can feel you in my chest, which I really wish you’d stop.

Always a risk-taker with impossible depths, you took off running a long time ago, and it takes some backwards tracing to figure out all the places you’ve landed. You’re down the hall at my parents' house, for sure, and in the two wooden boxes of dogs' ashes downstairs. You split time and space between California, Delaware, Georgia and Virginia, because that's where my people have gone, and you’re in more places in Maryland - my home - than I can track.

You've stayed behind in places where I've lost things. There are shards of you frozen in mid-air in Boston, in the southwest corner of Ohio and hanging in an apartment hallway and a cemetery, both a few miles away in either direction from where I sit. You’re in Vietnam and New Orleans, places where I've seen love and pain, and I'll cop to feeling you big time in a Denver stadium last summer. You're in the songs that make me cry. I unfailingly keep records, so you’re between the covers of many journals and all over the place in the crazy attic of the Internet. You’re in thousands of photographs, in the stories of vacations, birthday parties, sunsets, and self-portraits.

A lot of times I don't like you. You're difficult and stubborn, and you're also, in case you were wondering, not funny at all. Sometimes I (really do) think I lost you along the way. Never lucky in love, nine years - an eternity - ago, you fell in it with an utterly compelling, fairly odd, equally defensive person who seemed like the counterpart you'd been looking for since you started looking. You trusted, planned and dreamed a life when you had no business doing so, and then you sold me out. Once you met him, you were done, in spite of my need to never lose you again for no good reason. You stayed in, way over your head, for way too long. You ignored alarms, stuck your fingers in your ears and went "lalalalalala," seriously. You refused to see the obvious.

And while that’s all thoroughly and completely over now, it cost me so much for far too long. You went with him when he left, you would have crawled into his pocket if I'd let you, in spite of my best efforts to keep my center, to be okay, to stay safe and happy. I can’t forgive you yet for this. It still doesn't make any sense and it still pisses me off.

Worst of all, as a result, even if I had a reason, I can't trust your judgment and I don't know when, or if, I want to again. I can use you for the no-brainers and the necessities, for the puppies who suck you in and the family and friends who give me so much that I need whatever you can dredge up to reciprocate it. I use you for my work, for my students, for my stories, for the sheer will it takes sometimes to get through the day alongside other human beings in all the places we find ourselves together.

I use up a lot of your reserves for the news, for what I see of the world that isn't kind, and is in too many cases unbearable. I feel you. Because I still produce tears on a regular basis even though I really don't want to, I know you're there. I rely on you for awareness of what others experience, for freedom from the self-centeredness that would, if it took me over, make my life a nightmare and my value questionable.

I admit, I've wondered over the past few years how much you can take before you shut down entirely. Some big losses have piled up, the inevitable surrender of loved ones and the crushing exhaustion that I've learned goes with it. I've had to be stronger than I felt like being most of the time, because along with the loss there's been an absence of true joy, of anything solid to replace everyone and everything that checked out. I feel sorry for you, because a lot of times you're lonely, and often you feel like your chance is past. And the effort to think that's not true, that you just have to do this or that thing to get it back, to still believe in magic and the power of possibility, sometimes feels like a little too damned much.

What I've learned is that while it may look messy in the moment, given the choice between feeling and the absence of it, I'll still try to take you, as messed up as you are. A lot of times it doesn't look very graceful. I have to ride out those hours where it feels like the black hole's opening up again, where I don't feel at all like being a team player or a good sport. Even when it doesn't look like I'm trying, I am - to reach out, to be grateful maybe, to shut up the panicky thoughts that what I've got's not enough, that what I lost was the best there was, that everything poured out through your senseless holes and nothing can and will ever patch them. And I guess even though sometimes things feel dire and old and over, together we try to foster something, anything, better than that.

I still hear the faint whoosh of an innocent murmur, pushing 40 now. An idealist and a romantic in spite of myself, I wish this were a different letter, a love song or a poem or God help me a valentine even, but that's just not how it's played out. I'm keeping an eye on you, and in spite of the lack of warm fuzziness lately there must be a reason I still sign my notes "xo" like my mother has since she left notes on napkins in our school lunch bags. I feel a little bit of hope, in spite of all evidence and every reason to dismiss it. Because like it or not, from what I understand of biology and other things not at all scientific, I really do need you, wild and random as you are, to survive.

xo, Laurie White, who writes at LaurieWrites.

Serious

I've had a Myspace account for a long time that I check but I don't use. Turns out I am dumb because clearly my destiny awaits me here:

Hello,
My name is Ken,male, single , I saw your brief profile here and was impressed hence my sending this mail to you to enable us get acquainted to each other.I want us to be good friends so that we will have a long standing relationship that will mature and blossom to a better,intimate and romantic affairs.
I await to hear from you to enable us establish a more cordial relationship. i am new will like to chat with you on my message and get to know each other and written me back here mcdonald1964ken@xxxx or mcdonaldjones1@xxxxx
Much Regards
Ken

A cover letter or a come-on? You decide.

And yes, Tom is his only friend. (Head - meet wall.)

Your Choice Your Voice It Takes Me There.

So I'm walking down the street in DC yesterday, in totally the opposite direction from the National Press Building, although I didn't know that at the time. It was hot as my own personal hell, and I was wearing a dress and I was sweaty and having to go be in a room with people who didn't need to see me looking a literal hot mess.

A cab appeared. I flagged it down. I got in and began inappropriately disclosing information to the cabbie, as is my thinking-out-loud habit and my genetic programming courtesy of my mother.

"WOW I THOUGHT I WAS BARELY GOING TO MAKE IT!" I said, hyperbolically. "It is HOT!"

He looked at me in the rearview.

"OH, you are pregnant?!?"

"No. No, I'm not."

(Please note that the next ten minutes were conducted from him in heavily accented English and from me with an internal monologue of "it's totally okay that I'm discussing fat fetishes with a cab driver who thought I WAS EFFING PREGNANT, which I AM NOT, although it would be NICE to be since I'm OLD AND SINGLE AND CHILDLESS AND ALL AND ISN'T THAT A FINE ENOUGH TORTURE COCKTAIL, WITHOUT BEING MISTAKEN FOR BEING PREGNANT ON TOP OF THESE HORRIBLE CURSES???????" Just sayin'.)

"Oh, haha, I think you are pregnant because you say you can barely make it."

(Nice save. Try again.)

"No, I say I can't make it because...I am hot and out of breath. There are likely pregnant women who can run circles around me. I am just fat. And out of shape."

"OHHHHH, haha, I LIKE THE FAT WOMEN. My wife is fat!"

He giggled, honestly - I'd say it was joyful on some level.

"Really?" (Insert conflict here between nervousness that I am complicit in the actions of a man calling his wife fat, and my own sense of solidarity with this perhaps-imaginary-fat-wife-of-cabdriver whom I've never met.)

"OHHHHHHH (ed. he was really loud, sorry for going all Owen Meany on your asses.) she is SOO fat. (ed. My wife is sooo fat she sits AROUND THE HOUSE. Sorry again.) She is 280 pounds!"

(I begin using outside, oxymoronic voice.) "That is a LITTLE big. Is she okay with it? IS she healthy? Does she have trouble getting around in this heat too?"

WHAT? WHO AM I????

"She is a nurse! It is a myth! The myth that you are fat and lazy!"

PREACH IT DUDE. Oh Christ, where is my money? God I hope I can pay him after all of this nonsense and don't need to go wheezing off in search of provisions AND cash while he wastes away, all 120 pounds of him.

"IS A myth! She walks all day! She walks and walks! And the thin people, THEY are unhealthy!"

This really got me going.

"YEAH! Like, I don't even SMOKE anymore. I used to smoke! You can be thin and smoke! And be all SICK. I have to be on a diet to MAINTAIN my weight!"

"MY WIFE TOO! Yes. Your numbers. It is all your other numbers. If your BLOOD PRESSURE is GOOD..."

At this point the gospel choir from the "Like a Prayer" video busted out somewhere in the universe with "Your choice your voice can take me there!" and there was witnessing and praise from my several subconscious selves, me and this tiny little cab driver and his fat wife who I'd never met, but who I imagined I would soon, at a beautiful pastry-laden table.

"And your SUGAR! My sugar is FINE!" I interrupted, compelled by the power of the choir.

He continued.

"I have ALWAYS like the fat women. It does not matter to me, but people say to me, 'Why? Why do you like them?' And I say, 'I do not know.'

"Yeah, there are men who seem to prefer larger women. How long have you been married?"

"38 years! It is no problem for me. It is the FAT men who like the thin women, you see them? The big fat men with these little tiny women?"

"Um, yeah. Must admit I do see that sometimes. Do you think it's because they have money?"

I step into this man's car and I become prejudiced against everyone in my fat solidarity all of a sudden. What can I say? It was like a wrinkle in time.

More continuing. "They have SOMETHING, those men, of course they must have the money too. They have the something something. WHAT DOES IT MATTER? THE PERSON MAKE YOU HAPPY IN BED, THEY LOOK HOWEVER YOU LIKE THEM TO LOOK."

Should have seen that one coming maybe?

"I guess so, yes. Well, your wife is very lucky that you see her so positively, because in my experience many men don't. Or is that just because she could beat you up at this point?"

Look at the jolly fat jokes with a side of domestic violence all of a sudden! Nice! I have no idea what happens to me sometimes.

He thought that was hilarious.

"Haha, she could beat me up ONE time, but oh, she is disabled now, she is fine but another story for another time, not enough time, but you know we are all okay with whoever, whatever we like."

Yes, I hope so. And I'm not sure what I said when I got out of the cab, since cab arrivals are times for my synapses to collide in a frenzy of making sure I have my camera and my wallet and my keys and to figure out how many dollars I let him keep from a twenty, which more or less prevents any other rational thought.

I do remember thanking him for making me laugh, because he totally did, and too many people don't. Right or wrong, I have to admit that although validation from random strangers really doesn't factor into my daily bread, it was kind of cool that fat was where it was at in his cab.

*I don't disclose my weight just because I don't, but if you've arrived here for the first time or haven't ever seen me, it should be noted that I am not and have not been since the age of 10 a small girl, and in fact have recently reached a weight that for me is a personal high. I'm cool with it on lots of levels, and don't take any political stance on fat acceptance other than believing that whatever's healthy and comfortable for you, that's what you should do and be and handle. I'm a reporter at the moment, so forgive me my need for background. ;)

Crazy Like A Monkey

Let me get this straight. You stop your car, get out, and try to capture a monkey standing in diaper, on a leash, by the side of the road because you think "it'll make a nice pet." The monkey chases your ass, because you've pissed it off, and it can sense your messed up intentions.

And the MONKEY'S crazy? Do you see that monkey? That monkey is laughing at you, dude. Because you're an idiot, and monkey's are really quite smart.

This is what happens when you google "Boston Terrier tattoo"

Why? WHY????

Random.

Speaking of which, I had no idea Herve sang. 

How stupid ARE PEOPLE?

So I'm still dealing with the story that's slammed headfirst into DC-area news for the past month, about Banita Jacks, the woman who killed her daughters and lived with them in the house until the Federal marshals came in to evict her and found them all and she said the devil made them do it. Not her, them. This might lead to the conclusion that you even have to watch out for your mother, but I'm still more afraid of the devil I DON'T know.

That said, I do not have children, but if I did, I am ever more certain that I would never hire a stranger to watch my child. I've never been the type to think I'd say it, because I've always thought I'd be open to babysitters outside of my family if it was someone I trusted, but what the HELL?????

But after more questioning, police said Torres said Elijah was injured in a game in which she bundled him in a closed sleeping bag and she jogged through her apartment with the bag slung over her shoulder.

Going through one doorway, Torres lost her balance and the bag struck the door frame twice, police said. When she opened the bag, Elijah was pale and not breathing, according to the police report.

God bless you, Elijah, first of all, because this was not fair or right or just on any level, and this is why when people say "everything happens for a reason" to me it makes me want to smoke or drink heavily or lay inert on my couch watching Rock of Love marathons for the rest of my days, because EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON, RIGHT? Who CARES? I'm watching Bret Michaels kiss 15 women for a REASON. Leave me alone.

It's just the wrong thing to say to me, as it is patently illogical. Sure it happens for a reason, but it needs to be amended. "Everything happens for a (sometimes shitty, totally nonsensical, overtly upsetting) reason." If my baby died in a sleeping bag because someone else was an idiot, if anyone mentioned anything about God's will or a reason to me, I'd probably be in jail, and the reason would be aggravated assault.

Anyway, this was NOT A GAME. Games are fun. Games do not involve you being shut up in something that makes you NOT ABLE TO BREATHE. Had she never heard of PLAY-DOH? GO FUCKING FISH? Sorry I'm yelling, but this little kid will never be ABLE TO YELL AGAIN. Consider it one for him.

This sucks and I don't know why this one stuck out for me amid the sea of bad news on MSNBC and CNN and in the local paper and everywhere else. But the thing is that I just do not understand grown people who don't have any possible level of sense or intellectual functioning, to the point that babies die because of it. It is quite possible, as the article stated, that this woman didn't mean to kill this child, and "initially lied about the boy's injuries because people would think she intentionally hurt the boy if she told the truth." Perhaps she is too stupid to have any idea that putting a baby in a BAG, and then swinging him AROUND, and JOGGING inside, is a bad idea, and therefore didn't have the capacity to reason. I don't know. I could never sit on the jury to decide it though, because I don't know how I'd be unbiased. Um, hi Ms. Torres. Let's have you climb into this bag right here, and I'm going to demonstrate how I throw you over my shoulder. Really hard. Like into a door jamb.

The story is also notable for this part, which interests me the journalist and not just me the hater of fools who kill children:

The arraignment was televised under a new state program designed to make the courts more open. It was believed to be the first arraignment in the state at which cameras were permitted. The state previously allowed cameras during a few criminal trials.

That is a big deal. Minuscule compared to the loss this family suffered, and the knowledge of how he died, but still notable.

I don't even know what to do anymore. But I do know it's the stuff you can never foresee that's the most frightening, which in and of itself isn't terribly comforting. And I also understand nanny cameras, totally. As opposed to surveillance as I've been in the past, I'd say it's a worthy investment because as the commercials blather on about, peoples' kids? Priceless.

I don't know how this whole business started.

Watch it. Ambrosia will fuck you UP.

HAHAHAHAHA.

(That picture courtesy HeavyHarmonies.com. Hi guys.)

No, seriously. You don't want to meet this crew in a dark alley. See?

(Photo courtesy inertron.com who must accept my deepest apologies. And if you want to see it in its original glory, which you really should, plus watch David Pack LIP-SYNC the damned song I've had trapped in my head for 48 hours now, go here. Ashlee Simpson lip-syncs the pants off this guy, is all I can say.)

Could I call Burleigh Drummond's hat a bonnet? Or more appropriately a tam-o-shanter. A top 'o the mornin' tam-o-shanter, matey, but I'd still prefer to call it a  bonnet.

See, I decided to confront this Ambrosia madness head-on, so I searched for the images and decided to, you know, snark it up around here a little bit. It's been too warm and fuzzy lately (yeesh) plus I need a new post today since every time the site pulls up so I can delete one of the million spam comments I'm getting I see my big old head and that's more shock than I need. It's like I'm staring at myself. Weird. And when I did the search, I realized that Ambrosia ALSO did that creepy "I see your face when I have sex with my wife" song, "How Much I Feel". So now they're doing battle in my brain. Because like I said, Ambrosia will fuck you UP. And don't even get me started on England Dan and John Ford Coley.

It's one of the two busiest times of the year at work for me, this one coming conveniently right after "holiday" exhaustion. I'm also in terrible chronic pain from falling in the yard of the house I just moved out of, and altogether this means that laughing at stuff like this and Aleve are just about the only things getting me through right now. Good thing, because I know no one really wants to hear about pain. It's the most boring thing to talk about, which is challenging when you hurt constantly and you're a verbal person and you just want to keep commenting on it. Like when it's 100 degrees outside and everyone knows it but you keep on saying, "My GOD it's so HOT. Stop the MADNESS." It's kind of like that. I might capitulate and go get a heating pad. Sad sad sad.

Should be a good weekend, though. I'm joining the sheep on the last day of the Annie Liebovitz show in DC (I don't like going on the last day of anything but...but...yeah) and the Ansel Adams show is still there, so I'll have time to see that too. too. Such different photographers, so the contrast alone should be interesting. I hope the rain stops and the weather's nice, because today sucked. If it is maybe I'll resurrect my SLR and do some old-school film shooting. I really want to do some Polaroid work. And I also need to spiff things up around here. So much, so much I want to do.

May all your weekendy dreams come true. : )