in which lois throws a shoe
Monday 3 May 2010 | 4 cookies in the jar
I kind of love her. This movie clip too. We should host a Rocky Horror-style viewing of this at my home group meeting, in which we all dress in forties clothing and furiously throw shoes. I think it would be cathartic.
Hard as it is to accept Winona as Lois, I have even more trouble with Barry Pepper as Bill W., just because I imprinted on him when he was the BP goon in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (which is a genius small film, a gruelling film, a film we should all watch this weekend, just because, well, because you know why. Because “Show me your papers!” has suddenly become our new state slogan here in Zonie-land). Possibly Ms. Ryder has some qualifying codependent past of which we were unaware. Sandra Bullock or Téa Leoni might have been good casting choices; though perhaps they were, um, busy at the time.
black dog
Sunday 2 May 2010 | I like a cookie
I think mine is different from Churchill’s; it’s certainly different from Robert Plant’s. For one thing, it has a lot more to do with PMS/PMDD (is this what the whole next decade is going to be like, before menopause? in which case, should I set up a Paypal button so you can all chip in for the gorram hysterectomy?)—
but in any case it’s partly relieved by a) swigs of Essential Woman chocolate raspberry swirl (which I all but chug straight from the bottle, à la Lucky Jim), b) Al-Anon meetings, c) doubled-up therapy (twice a week! at the Therapist’s suggestion! because she likes me so much, I am sure that’s why), d) Klonopin, and e) knowing that I TEACH MY LAST FUCKING RHETORIC CLASS TOMORROW. And not just last one of the semester, but last one ever, if I have anything to say about it. Which I seldom do.
Our favorite Thai place closed, with a paper sign taped to the door saying “We are now no longer able to serve you, our loyal customers.” Also an eviction notice. “Time to move,” says the Brujo phlegmatically. All my friends prepare to pack up and start over elsewhere. Endings, beginnings, yet tonight I am too depressed for words, thus I send you out with Zep. Is Robert not still, after all this time, teh sex? It’s the way he flaunts that lickable little hairless puer potbelly of his (cf. 2:30, also around 3:00). Also his girly blonde tresses. He may have been my model for Jesus, come to think of it, in the nearly finished Cherry-emily. Rizzle, bless her thoughtfulness, shared with me her heavy expensive paper; must print thesis out and take to bookstore for binding by May 7.
all I ask for, all I pray
steady rolling woman gonna come my way
need a woman gonna hold my hand
won’t tell me no lies make me a happy man
the one that got away
Tuesday 20 April 2010 | 3 cookies in the jar
who will come to my defense
Tuesday 20 April 2010 | 3 cookies in the jar
You are certainly all invitated; and many of you are thanked in writing.
i am a moth
Tuesday 20 April 2010 | someone left a cookie
It’s two years LATER I discover the Radiohead/In Rainbows/In the Basement series? And, I needed these songs THEN, Thom. I know I’m an out-of-touch dork, but you might have emailed or given us a ring. I mean REALLY.
denial; denial.
Tuesday 20 April 2010 | I like a cookie
I’m a freaking buddhist!
Tuesday 6 April 2010 | I like a cookie
I swear this blog is not just going to turn into a selection of youtube clips.
Wait, do I really swear that? No. No I do not. This blog is off playing by itself until the first week of May, and that’s that. Who knows WHAT it will get up to in my total mental absence.
gone utterly beyond
Wednesday 31 March 2010 | someone left a cookie
best e-card award: ms. bovary
Tuesday 30 March 2010 | 2 cookies in the jar
birthday, with utterly meaningless german horoscope
Tuesday 30 March 2010 | 3 cookies in the jar
| Holiday! | *** |
Happy birthday! Today the Sun  returns to the position it was in when you were born. As would seem appropriate with this transit, today is a day of new beginnings, and the influences you feel today will affect the entire year to come. However, this does not mean that the whole year will be disappointing if today doesn’t work out exactly as planned. You are receiving a new impulse from the energy center within you, as symbolized by the Sun. Therefore any new venture that you start at this time will ride the crest of this new energy and will very likely come to an acceptable conclusion. Whatever you do or begin today will bear the stamp of your individuality more than anything else. This is the day to assert yourself anew. |
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| The interpretation above is for your transit selected for today: Sun Conjunction Sun, exact at 19:17 activity period from 29 March 2010 to 31 March 2010 |
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So it’s funny, that today’s my birthday, because I have to spend it grading. Though that is no one’s fault but mine, of course.
I’d had this big plan to finish the grading on Sunday; and the Brujo wanted to go cactusizing and we thought if he left me at home I’d collapse in despair and not get any grading done; so I went with him but he left me at a little café in Florence so I could work; and the sign on the café read OPEN; but lo, it was not; so I spent a couple hours at the Subway chain restaurant, in Florence; and got only a few papers graded. But it’s okay, I thought—I’ll go with him early to the AA/Al-Anon meeting and knock out another 15 there, and then the remaining 20 tomorrow morning before/between classes.
And lo it came about that we got in the car Sunday evening around 6 pm to go and do these things which would involve us until about 9 pm, and the Brujo said to me, Where is the Al-Anon literature bag? And I looked at him blankly and said, It’s in the back of the car. And he looked at me and said, No it isn’t. And we looked at one another, realizing that the car which had been burgled/rifled sometime between midnight and 6 am on Friday, actually DID have something of value to be stolen from it (besides what we already knew the car-burgler had taken, which was—we laughed about it—about 30 pesos off the dashboard, and a rose quartz crystal I had hung off the rearview mirror in a little Guatemalan bag from Madrid, NM, with the Virgin Mary—thereby bringing just all kinds of motherfucking bad luck down on her/his unsuspecting head).
Well anyway. There was just nothing to do, but something had to be done. The bag containing, in addition to maybe $100 worth of books and brochures, also the church keys to the room we rent, and the meeting format/script (“We who live or have lived with the problem of alcoholism understand as perhaps few others can. We, too, were lonely and frustrated….”), the phone lists, the birthday lists, and a fat binder containing nearly the entire history of the group (meeting minutes, etc.). I went into Paralytic Shock mode, and the Brujo became compensatorily Cheerful & Efficient. We coudn’t imagine that the thief, once s/he had lugged this mysterious 60-pound black bag more than a block or two, thinking with glee what it might contain (money! drugs! gym clothes!) would keep it, once they opened it up and saw with disgust that it contained…a bunch of books with fatuous-sounding titles like One Day at a Time and Hope for Today. And the next morning would be trash day.
So I took the Brujo to his AA meeting and then drove numbly around the neighborhood looking in the shrubbery and looking in dumpsters and being shouted at by shirtless men and realizing, gradually but with some certainty, that we actually live in not such a great neighborhood. The weekly gunshots over by the liquor store might have told me this? but I guess I am a slow learner. Anyway no bag being found, I came home and called my sponsor, who started trying to figure out how we were going to get into the church room, while I went online and downloaded various Al-Anon meeting formats and began, with the aid of my befuddled enfeebled memory, to try to cobble them together into something even remotely similar to our own weekly structure (which had been itself laboriously created over a couple of decades of group consciences and so forth. It’s part of why I liked this group originally—why it’s my “home group”—and why I took on the commitment of being keyholder, a commitment which I obviously didn’t treat with the responsibility it required, more on that in a moment—is that all their group consciences had led them, for example, to stop saying the odious Bedouin/feudal “Lord’s Prayer,” and, they are the only group in Tartarus I’ve heard do this, to say “God as we understood God” etc. rather than “God as we understood Him,” so I liked them)—
The point is I left this bag week after week in an unlocked car. Ever since my own car got towed away in December last year. And I thought because the Brujo’s car was parked in the carport, inches from our house, it was safe. And it wasn’t. And Finny died, and anyway was so old she would have slept through a burglary, maybe. It’s like the feral cats—with her dead, they practically try to come in the house now when we leave the door open. Actually they DO come in the house, we’ve had to take down Pyewacket’s cat door.
And the point is I always lose stuff. Casualties from spring break include my favorite black cap, left in Tucson, and the gobelet magique, left in Ajo (though the cabin people found it and can send it back). My last year in school (before being home-schooled), the nuns would make us pay $1 to pick up our lunchboxes, if we’d left them in the cafeteria the day before. I basically paid $1 every other day of the entire sixth grade, much to my mother’s bafflement and fury. There was no mitten I could hang onto, no winter coat I could not misplace within moments of taking it off.
But is that true? Or is that the story I was always told about myself?
I know this is tedious, my being both characteristically absentminded and then characteristically racked with shame, but bear with me—it gets a tiny bit weirder.
Yesterday, between when the mail was delivered at about 2 pm and when the Brujo got home from school around 2:30? Someone carefully placed an Al-Anon card, FROM THAT BAG, in our mailbox ON TOP OF THE MAIL. There’s nothing on the card (“Bothered by someone’s drinking?” in English and Spanish, plus the AZ web address/phone numbers) to connect it to us or our address—it was left there by the person who took the bag.
And, this person either seems to know our schedules very well—to know neither of us were at home then—or, is simply very foolhardy. Is it meant to be taunting, is it all “we have your bag you poor 12-step idiots,” or do they think it’s funny, or is it meant to be creepy, or is it a prelude to asking for money to get it back, or is it just drugged-out and random? Is this our barking-dog neighbor trying to fuck with us? And most importantly to me WHERE IS THAT EFFING BAG, is it maybe in the bushes somewhere in a nearby alleyway?
Anyway I called the police, who duly took the report but were ultimately uninterested in the idea that someone had stolen a duffel bag out of an unlocked car and then were randomly returning tidbits of it during broad daylight.
The point is also, I haven’t graded any papers.
There are several points, actually.
One is that the teaching award turned out to be $350, which is, you know, kind of mindblowing for the State School. Of course they wouldn’t be them if they weren’t weird somehow, so they took out $80 for Arizona withholding, ha ha, ha ha! I’ve never had an award check be subject to employee taxes before, but hey. Money’s money. Birthday!
The other point is that the Brujo and I (happily, accompanied by Rizzle and Allycomelately), go tonight to see Krishna Das! Which will surely make up for the fact that I am about to spend the next eight hours grading the rest of the papers. And maybe we can get pupusas beforehand?
Another point (this is a very prickly post) is that the 85-page something was turned into the Graduate College yesterday, with all its signatures; and no one appears to have noticed that a crazy woman wrote my comprehensive exams (and included PICTURES, like as if they were a blogpost); and so far only the Alcoholic Poet has ditched me, so I still so far have enough committee members; and so maybe I am really going to graduate in five weeks?
Another point? Is that the Brujo and I have now had two whole therapy sessions and not only has no one killed anyone else, but we actually seem to be treating each other much more affectionately. I am being all euphemestic here and amusing myself (hint: we = he). However, this may change as, stupidly emboldened by all this domestic harmony, I have written him a five-page (single-spaced, horrifying, à la Rachel to Ross during their break) letter explaining how I feel and, honestly, what I want, if we are going to be able to move forward, whateverTF that means. He hasn’t read it yet. We have another therapy on Thursday. And therefore we may not be so sunny and all, afterward. But I guess the good news is, that’s okay with me. I feel like I can handle the truth, even if the truth is yelling and telling me I have ruined everything that we were carefully restoring and correcting my spelling.
Is there another point? Of course there is. It is that my friends are unbelievably thoughtful, kind, and generous and they send me things for my birthday (coughMARACOLLINScough) even when I send them nothing for theirs. So I am going to take pictures of all these things and rave about them. When I do not have the papers.
(But when do I ever not have the papers? Therapy doesn’t seem able to help me with my dread of and hatred for, and worse, flat avoidance of, the papers. Perhaps I should seek a job in the fall which does not involve papers at all. Do they have such jobs? Hm.)
And finally, also, this same boyfriend with whom I am on some kind of spiny hedgehoggish tenterhooks, he bought me a beautiful purple something, the very thing I had requested, and left it on the kitchen table this morning, as I wasn’t awake (or even human) when he left at 7:30, to do this horrifying thing he cheerfully does every morning, of going to an ugly little classroom in a portable building to teach MATH to 160 deranged HIGH SCHOOL students, from roughly 8 am until 2:30 pm, without more than a 10-minute break, every day of the week. They yell at him, they blame him for the existence of math and its presence in their lives, they moan, they drag their feet, they claim they were never taught how to solve this kind of problem, they have temper-tantrums and break-ups and cat-fights and fist-fights (the Brujo broke up one in his first year, where one guy was shouting at the other, incongruously: “YOU FINNISH PIECE OF SHIT!” Which we thought was hysterical and which we now say all the time); they have all kinds of mental-health issues involving drugs and depression and eating disorders and self-mutilation and abusive families; and concerning all this they cry stormily in trigonometry. And he makes some bare $30K a year for this, with loathsome benefits, and teaches several weeks longer than I do, on either end of the academic year. And is, perhaps thanks to a pot of strong coffee every morning, generally very amiable about so doing.
I would happily have this year be the year in which we both stop teaching entitled snowflakes who don’t want to learn what we know how to teach. And that’s not really in my horoscope, but—
This blogpost, like all the other 1,027 posts, makes very little sense.
I am wearing sweatpants and getting ready to grade. I need a cup of tea and to lock the door in case Mr./Ms. Stalkery Al-Anon Bag Thief returns. I need to brush my hair and to send about two more emails, to friends whose lives are quietly imploding in much more dramatic ways than, someone stole the damn literature bag.
Anyway: happy, um, birthday! Thank you for writing about it on my (completely uncurated and unattended) Facebook wall! Pretend it’s YOUR birthday and have a piece of chocolate on me! I will add a zillion pictures later. From spring break, and taken with my NEW PURPLE CAMERA.
