Author Archives: Tata

Friday Cat Blogging: Before You Go Go Edition

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By the time I got home, Pete had already eaten lunch, so I tossed a few vegetables on little corn tortillas and plunked myself down at the dining room table. Pete sat down next to me, holding a catalog.

Topaz curled up on this old chair and dreamed of dancing mousies. Drusy, wishing to play with dancing mousies, curled up next to Topaz. Drusy, closest to you, waits for Pete to knock it off with the flashy flashy, though she adores him with the purest love and would like to nibble his toes.

Tata: Are you going to read to me? Like a bedtime story?
Pete: This is a story of composting toilets.
Tata: Give me your shoe. I have to yak now.
Pete: Composting toilets use very little water, require no plumbing, and little space. A composting toilet would be perfect in that pantry we’re making into a bathroom. Here, look at this diagram.
Tata: Seriously, I am going to ralph. Wait. What is that?
Pete: An explanation of the composting.
Tata: That, my friend, is an indoor outhouse.
Pete: No. Look, an outhouse is an open hole into which you throw lime. This is a closed system –
Tata: That will stink up my kitchen over my dead body.
Pete: No stink, see? Fresh air! That’s a picture of fresh air!
Tata: And what happens to the poop? Doesn’t someone eventually have to –
Pete: Remove the compost? Yep.
Tata: Forget the shoe. I’m going to throw up down the inside of your shirt. Where’s my phone..?

Gorgeous Drusy and lovely, lovely Topaz cuddled up on afghans Pete’s mom crocheted more than twenty years ago. The pussycats like the afghans because Pete naps on this chair, so it smells like his butt. Pete’s explanation involves less farting, but I have yet to hear it. It’s a secret between him and the cats. I might feel betrayed if I weren’t so glad to be left out.

Tata: I have two words for you, mother of three small children: composting toilet.
Daria: THAT’S HORRIBLE!

I hand the phone to Pete. Daria’s still gagging. The volume’s up so I hear every gasp.

Pete: How are you today? Going to watch football? What’re you making?
Daria: Hot wings, celery, blue cheese dressing.
Pete: Ta’s eating lunch and we’re talking about composting toilets. I just got a catalog.
Daria: (Hacking, wheezing, stuck hairball)
Pete: There are several different models.
Daria: (Hacking, wheezing, hairball now in motion)
Pete: They’re compact, odorless and produce excellent compost.
Daria: (Hacking, wheezing, hairball threatening to make a gooey cameo appearance)
Tata: Tell her about the diagrams!
Pete: The catalog includes various diagrams of the composting process…
Daria: THAT’S HORRIBLE! That is HORRIBLE. Don’t ever speak to me again!
Tata: She is going to mail you a bag of puke, you know.
Pete: I’ll call you tomorrow.
Daria: Bye!
Tata: I can’t eat this.
Pete: I’m going to send her the catalog.

Inside So No One Can Hear

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Hush, hush. Out there, words fly and bite and melt where they land like so many snowflakes flung at us by the winds on an icy night, but we have been here before, and we know it can end well, even if the quiet is only for a moment.

The Tomten saves the chickens from Reynard the fox and offers his own porridge to feed the hungry fox so that all ends well for the animals on this winter night.

What matters is whether we can do some simple good when we fear for ourselves and all around us seems very frightening indeed. The answer, my darlings, is yes.

I Need A Moment To Deliberate

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I’m thinking of making videos in which I speak slowly, calmly and say fuck a lot. I feel this will add spice to the public discourse. In the meantime, it’s a relief to find people like RH Reality Check speaking rationally and factually on the very serious topic of reporductive health.

RH Reality Check: Framing Reproductive Rights from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

Of course, he’s acting. But it irritates me beyond description to hear men discuss their opposition to abortion. I simply don’t care why dudes think women should be baby factories, and that includes every dude, no matter who makes his ruby slippers.

To Keep On Keeping On

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dday reports:

Yesterday, at two major rallies for the Republican candidates, audience members yelled out that Obama is a terrorist and that he should be killed (or maybe that Bill Ayers should be killed, hard to know from the context, but when you’re talking about someone approving of murder in the presence of a Republican candidate, it’s a distinction without a difference). Today, an audience member screamed “Treason!”

The right has made a cottage industry of whipping up their side into a frenzy, demonizing liberals, blaming them for every ill of society and ramping up that rhetoric louder and louder until it essentially has no distinction from eliminationism. And as much as the conservative noise machine gets all wounded and indignant when you say this, such rhetoric does play itself out into acts of violence.

Indeed, John McCain has actively shielded domestic terrorists from prosecution through his votes in the 1990s. These are the characters, the Randall Terrys, the Chad Castagnas, that are never subjects of ads or whisper campaigns.


Republicans, in the words of the immortal cinematic antihero Marcus Brody:

You’re meddling with powers you cannot possibly comprehend.

For the complete, terrifying rundown of rightwing hate groups operating in the US, the authority is Dave Neiwert, and the last word is Orcinus. If I were a registered Republican voter, I would give very serious consideration to with whom these candidates make common cause.

You More Than Anything

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Yesterday, Jim Cramer appeared on The Today Show, a humbled and beaten man. His appearance was no less striking for what he said, but it’s hard to have sympathy for the man who predicted this would happen, repeatedly called for GM to break the UAW and continues to kowtow to unfettered capitalism.

Last night, within only a few hours of his appearance on The Today Show, Cramer turned up on The Colbert Report, where he refused to blame the current administration for the unfolding economic disaster but says Republicans had a lot to do with it. Don’t worry, he finds plenty of blame to lay at the feet of Bill Clinton. I would have been disappointed if he hadn’t. This bit of fancy footwork is unbelievable. If his career as a guy screaming about Wall Street on TV is over, I’m sure he’ll do very well on Dancing With the Stars.

This morning, poor Jim Cramer again appeared on The Today Show, defending his warning to Americans that they should remove anything they’ll need for the next five years from the stock market. Oddly enough, Americans did not want to see the defeated Mr. Cramer admit defeat, and they attacked him for – well, you’ll see. It is the most pointed example to date of the administration’s successful campaign to numb Americans to fear. Congratulations, Republicans. Congratulations, runaway capitalists. Your oracle of venality gibbers on. This disaster is all yours, and none of it was an accident. Fortunately for you, when told to take cover, people who’ve been conditioned to believe you will take care of them still believe it, and they will stand there believing it as the sky falls.

As for Mr. Cramer –

It is impossible to pity him. He will be fine, once the humiliation of being right, a moral failure and unable to see what he could have done differently wears off. It is plain that he will not suffer the loss of his home – or much else, probably. He won’t see what he contributed to the vast harm bearing down on billions of people. His blindness protects him. I wouldn’t want to be him if it fails.

Paint the Sky Upon the Ceiling

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Bob made a good point in comments: the composter wasn’t cheap. Let’s not laugh that off. As people of modest means and vivid imaginations, we wouldn’t have had the cash except for two little things. One: moving afforded us a little found money because we saved like wild animals. Two: when I spend more than $100 at a time, I feel faint. Pete and I talked over what the property’s needs might be, and I shopped carefully. Very carefully. More carefully than that. The result: a handful of really good prices on the method and model I wanted more than shiny shiny jewels, and we bought the one with the best shipping. It’s an investment in making the crappy pulverized shale into better soil, and putting our money where our mouths are, ecologically. That is an image you should immediately scrub from your brain pan.

The house is old and has other needs, too. For instance, Pete’s climbing into a wall today to stuff insulation into a crevice I wouldn’t touch without a hazmat suit and an Iditarod dog, but that’s me. And speaking of me, I can’t figure out how to carpet stairs without a powerpoint presentation.

Tata: This is the fourth store we’ve been to and we can’t seem to find square throw rugs. Where are they?
Department Manager: That section over there has throw rugs.
Tata: That’s true, but I want a square rug. Do you have those?
Department Manager: Yes.
Tata: Where are they?
Department Manager: Over there with the carpeting.
Tata: No. I don’t want carpeting. I have a landing on a staircase. It’s about 36″x36″ and I want to put a little throw rug on it.
Department Manager: You can buy those online.
Tata: I’m in your store right now. I’d like to buy it, take it home and put it on my floor today, preferably so I can jump up and down on it and make little noise. Also: my cats should enjoy the fluffy warmth and shed all over it.
Department Manager: What you need to do is go to a carpet specialty store where they do binding and you can buy a custom carpet and they’ll do the binding and then you can have the carpet but we don’t have that here and I can’t help you.

If I turn and look at Pete, he will tell the Department Manager that she should go shag herself, not to mention Berber and Scotchguard, and I just can’t picture myself getting the bum’s rush at Lowe’s before the cocktail hour.

Tata: Thank you. Pete, dahhhhlink, we need friction tape, possibly all of it.
Pete: She didn’t hear a word you said.
Tata: Well, I used several at the same time. So: no. But let’s not dwell, when I have a Buy One, Get One Free coupon for Febreze! During the season when everyone stays home and farts, our house will smell delightful and our cats will be perplexed…

To Parade Your Snazz

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Creamy, chewy Christ on a cracker! Grab a Kleenex and clutching pearls, Poor Impulsives!

Heavens to goddamn Mergatroid, my girlfriend’s a half-eaten cheeseburger! My boyfriend’s been plated and sucked clean of sour cream! Who knows who ate ’em first! Whatever will I dooooooooo?

Kids, Auntie Ta’s never steered you wrong. No, the sled’s not at all going to rocket down the hill, across the frozen yard and voooosh! into space, and you won’t even a little slam into the street and the snowbank on the other side. So hop on.

Let’s be completely honest. Your partner in chem lab makes your insides titrate, and it’s a different world now than in the exotic antiquity when your parents and I smoked pot with our gym teacher. They’ll deny it, since old age and sloth are a whole lot easier to live with than the memory of how we used to get tanked and drive the farm hills with the lights off, because the idea that you might scares all dainty shit out of them. And with good reason. We were young and stupid, but you are on camera almost every minute of your day. Are you under arrest yet?

Yep, your parents fight off night terrors imagining what theories you’re testing with that lab partner. They’ve become the kind of spineless ninnies they once despised, but the change is not irreversible. You can be brave for them. “But, Auntie Ta,” you say, “my parents want me to save myself for marriage. Stop laughing!”

Kids, please don’t make me tell you about how your parents learned special macrame knots at scout camp or about those parties in the prop room that involved a can of Spam and tap shoes. You’re going to date – preferably outside of your high school – and dating means coming into physical contact with another human being, on whom you will practice the little tricks that will make your adult sex life happy and well-adjusted. Cover up, pets! Just – don’t tell your parents, don’t get any diseases and don’t make any babies. They’re less hilarious than in the movies, and they’d remind your parents of the prom. Which reminds me: how’re your big brothers and sisters, anyhow?

Look, chances are super-good you’ll get nekkid and do the happy cha cha cha, then you’ll break up and feel heartbroken, and after that you’ll get nekkid and do the happy cha cha cha with someone else. You might not even be all that heartbroken, but anyway: the point is that worrying about where your Sweet Baboo has ba-been is a ba-big waste of time. Plus, what you’ve been safely up to is your own mmm-mmm-mmm biz.

Don your gloves and mittens, kids. You don’t have to lose your cool or your nerve when you get rid of that nonsense no one needs. So when your parents experiment with this crazy abstinence and shame thing, don’t forget it’s not too late for you to raise them right.

Friday Cat Blogging: the Low Spark Edition

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Some folks want diamonds. Some want money, power or sex with rubbery girls resembling Britney Spears. But I am not like all the others. In my heart of hearts, I wanted a composter. Yesterday, it arrived.

The Sun-Mar 200, reseplendant in our dining room, and about the size of an Oscar the Grouch trash can. From the manual – don’t worry, I didn’t read it, no one in my family can read a manual, but if I had, it would’ve said:

The Sun-Mar 200 is a continuous composter with a 6 bushel (50 gallon) capacity. It’s excellent for composting kitchen scraps and garden trimmings.

The AutoFlow® system allows material to continuously “flow” or move through a special double-drum setup. Heavier material settles to the bottom. Lighter, decomposed material finds its way to the top and eventually enters the inner drum.

Using the flow system, finished composed is “forced” out when you open the port and rotate. Dispensing compost is simple!

These devices are so popular it’s fairly standard to order one and have to call up the vendor and tell them you paid for it, could they actually ship it, please? They wanted a three-week window, but no way! Mama’s gotta compost! By the way, after all this fuss, the FedEx delivery guy said, “That’s a composter? And you had to sign for it?” Because it’s not any composter. It’s my composter, and I wanted it bad. But don’t worry, you. Though I love the composter, it’s not serious between us. How could it be, when I am loved by beautiful cats?

I’m the torso in the middle. Pete jumped up to take this picture when Drusy, right, sat down on the blanket and Topaz, left, settled next to me. Topaz loves us with a gooey, starstruck teenybopper love that seldom includes getting close enough for autographs, so her lying down between Pete and me was quite a surprise. Drusy, meanwhile, is lying on a blanket pinched between my toes, which sounds like a strain but isn’t because Drusy practically levitates. Then the kittenpile watched TV in the dark.

Topaz and Drusy do not like the composter. They want me to be happy at home.

I am happy at home.

The Slow Parade Of Fears

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I’m not 100% certain where I learned this – I think it came from Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park, but it might have come from another novel I read in my early twenties. See: everyone seeks himself in what he or she sees. Artists endlessly reproduce themselves in their work, which people kind of know. The Mona Lisa might have been DaVinci’s self-portrait, as any sophomore art history major knows. So in Gorky Park, forensic reconstruction of a skull is undertaken by a dwarf who says to the protagonist, “Trust the freak’s eye.” We don’t have to go that far to examine an image. For instance, I missed my soaps for a few days because I was buffeted by real life so I checked in for episode recaps. There, I found this image. What the hell?

At first glance, the residents of Llanview, PA have little in common aside from their penchant for drama. Diversity is the key word in town: Cowboys and cops, the wealthy and working class, lovers and enemies mix amidst a collection of different races, religions and families. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent these disparate individuals all share the desire to triumph in the one life we have to live.

Really? Why is the banner image six white people with blond hair and – as far as I can tell – blue eyes?

Trust this freak: you now know who the graphic artist is.

Like A Leper Messiah

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This morning, I had a fight on my hands.

Tata: I don’t wanna go to work!
Tata: We’re going!
Tata: I don’t wanna! You can’t make me!
Tata: Aw, come on, little camper! We can get some fresh coffee…?
Tata: No!
Tata: That’s it! I’m throwing you in the shower!

Man, she’s a BITCH! So I got dressed in the dark because Pete wasn’t really asleep. I can’t explain that. Anyway, some time later, I realized I was inching away from me.

Tata: What in glamorous tarnation are you wearing?
Tata: Pants. My co-workers like when I wear pants.
Tata: And what else, Missy?
Tata: I’m wearing – oh, help.
Tata: Yes, exactly. Your Inner Angry Toddler dressed you in pretty, pretty colors. In fact, all of them.

So I tried buttoning or unbuttoning, to make it look like I’d assembled this ensemble on purpose.

Tata: That shirt you gave me. I suppose you knew the buttons don’t unbutton.
Mom: Are we playing Anagrams?
Tata: I cannot unbutton this shirt. You have cursed me.
Mom: Are you at work?
Tata: I am, and they like when I wear shirts. But this one, I cannot unbutton, even on purpose. It’s permanent or something.
Mom: Now I remember: you didn’t graduate from high school!
Tata: That was then, this is now, and I have lefthanded scissors.

I am now wearing a modified, less terrifying version of the this morning’s outfit in tones of purple and brown. I’ve also discovered that standing in front of one’s co-workers and shouting, “HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT I’M WEARING?” will produce a wide variety of responses largely dependant upon what you’ve shouted beforehand.

Thus, you will be surprised I had the nerve to stare at this Go Fug Yourself picture of Traci Bingham like dogs stare at ceiling fans. I’d never heard of her before, so I figure she’s one of those starlets on a reality show I can’t name. She’s got lovely skin tone, a super shape, and she doesn’t look like one of those meal-skipping waifs, so yay. Anyway, Kali knows I’ve put on some get ups in my day, including a gold lamé toga I should have had dusted for fingerprints, so I observed this dress with milder mirth than others might, at least until Miss Bingham turned around. Irridescent fake snake skin is one thing. Fake dress is another one altogether.

In fact, it’s not a dress. It’s someone’s resumé.

Dear Traci’s Plastic Surgeon,

Nice work.

Signed,

Princess Tata
Pun intended.

I once went out wrapped in cellophane, showing less skin than this. However, on the day you issue the demand for better video of your grandson, it’s mighty weird to mention your erstwhile hotness. You must trust me that I would never have mentioned either Miss Traci With An I, my closet full of industrial kitchenware and mismatched knits or my super-adorable grandbaby who now says, “Hi!” if not for the third picture, which caused me to scream, frightening my cats. My poor darlings! I simply wasn’t prepared, as a gal who treated every day of her late teens, twenties and thirties as one long costume party, to meet the almost certain Guest of Honor. Said Jessica of Go Fug Yourself:

…what can I say? There are literally no words in the human vocabulary that can express my horror/glee at the fact that you have gone out wearing a dress with a giant detachable ruffle, which you, at some point, removed and presumably shoved into your purse. I am terrified, and yet thrilled to the very marrow of my bones. That is all. I have no further witticism. I am so confused/excited. I’m going to go lie down with a washcloth over my forehead and attempt to parse my own emotions. Farewell.

Bravo! This is a fashion crime on a par with the Brinks Armored Car Heist, and I say that as a little old lady with her hair in a ponytail, wearing black shoes with a brown outfit. Even I was left – briefly! – speechless by the color scheme, texture and clashing patterns when I quit screaming. This dress reminds me of the weirdest parts of childhood, like pretending to be a mermaid and not noticing you can’t move. Like pre-teens auditioning for a dance troupe to “Hey Big Spender.” Like at every little girl’s birthday party before 1970 where Barbie stood in the center of a bundt cake, not at all like a human sacrifice up to her neck in festive butter cream. Friends, we are in the presence of greatness.

Fortunately, I smell clean.