Author Archives: Tata

Is That the Question?

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Two days.

Struggling a bit to get the 5,000 things done I need to do before I desert the joint for week. Today, I made arrangements for car service. Tomorrow, I have to call Grandpa and get my teeth fixed, work two jobs and Nair my facial hair. For crying out loud, I can’t let people see me in daylight with an unsubtle mustache! I’m too young for the jade green feather boa and matching faux shearling bolero jacket.

A little old lady’s got to have her standards.

Tonight, I emailed the cruise line and asked them for my heart’s one desire: to be able to sit daily on an exercise bicycle and watch All My Children. I realize technology is in a time of mad flux and that virtually anything is possible for a price, so on a sea-faring contraption, shouldn’t I be able to pedal my way to fitness while keeping tabs on fab thing Greenlee? I believe I should be able! We’ll see if the cruise line agrees.

For You Follows Wherever I Go

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Yesterday and today.

Working to get ahead of the week away from the family store. I feel kind of responsible for the online aspect of what happens to Anya’s and Corinne’s livelihood, though I know that’s silly. They could replace me in a flash with someone ten times as code savvy and they probably should but they don’t. I offer twice a week; they turn me down, so it may be more difficult than it at first appears to determine who is responsible for whom.

The other day, Pete looked up from reading a cookbook and made an audacious suggestion. “How about we make bread?” Bread takes forever! Dinner was so near! How could we make fresh bread? I stuttered and backed up, believing this endeavor could only end in tears. Pete persisted, measuring flour, baking powder, salt, a little sugar and a whole bottle of beer into a big bowl and smoooooshing it together until it looked relatively dough-like. Fifty minutes int the fuuuuuture, we had fresh bread. Later, he read me recipes like stories. Oh, those ingenious leveners!

To Relieve This Bellyache

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Sometimes good advice is good advice, no matter its source. Horoscopically speaking, I should consider what I want out of life this year because with luck and hard work, I might get it. Well, I can’t argue with that. Pretty much any year good luck and hard work might bring me what I want. So, there you go. What do I want? It’s not as simple a question as it sounds.

1. A government that works all night for the fresh, hot and freaky common good and makes scrambled eggs in the morning.

2. A body that is ready to go, rather than a physique that signals where the mind’s wandered.

Let’s be clear: I’m never going to have the body I had when I ate virtually nothing and lifted weights two hours a day, but that’s not the point. No matter what anyone else’s body says or does, mine wants to be strong and in motion, and when it isn’t, that’s all my doing and it means my brain’s somewhere else. This summer, my Guatemalan cousin Regina, who is my age and a couple years ago survived a very serious cancer scare, will swim around Manhattan Island. If she can get up off her death bed to run marathons I can get off my ass and do some pushups.

3. Clothes that actually fit. Damn it, no more feeling squeezed like bratwurst!

4. Projects out of my brain and seen to completion. Dad’s slides will be organized and restored. My art projects wil come to fruition. More things will move from where they are to where they are needed.

5. To save a little more money. I’d like to nosh on a better grade of cat food in my old age.

In short, I want a leaner, stronger, more capable me. A few years back, I wondered if I could learn anymore, such was the brain damage I was living with. Today, I’m going to help Pete paint a hallway for fun, which would have been a preposterous notion four years ago, when I would have been dead certain I didn’t know how, let alone couldn’t muster the strength to do it. Woe was me! Pfffft!

So that’s what I want. Seen that in a catalog?

Friday Cat Blogging: Move On Sometime

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You’ve seen Topaz recently. How about some Drusy?

Believe it or not, this is not a picture of a giant hand. No, it is a tiny cat head. Drusy is tall and thin but her face fits in my palm. Giving her the Kitteh Face Press is a matter of some delicacy, but that’s not important right now. No, what’s important is that Drusy walked around my shoulders and across my chest a few times before flopping down in my arms for scritches, and I deliver! See the blinky pussycat contentment. See the glinty eyes of the purring person who is a cat. See that black cat on a red couch in a bluish sage green room.

Drusy’s favorite spot.

Nearing the successful conclusion of this morning’s Iron March to Workplace Domination – in the dark hallway by my front door I was donning my coat and mittens – when I stepped on invisible little Topaz. She let out an almost human scream I will never forget, in part because since I couldn’t see her I didn’t know which foot to lift. Pete came running. Topaz went flying. I’m hopping. I ran after the flying kitty but when I got to the bedroom, both cats stared at me. Topaz was breathing a little heavily and looked kind of freaked out but let me scratch her head a little. Then she retreated to a defensive position behind some clean towels.

She’s plotting revenge. I just know it.

Drop And Give Me Twenty

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I’m a union gal. I belong to a union again since my co-workers at the unnamed university voted to unionize after more than ten years of trying. Since the writers’ strike began, I’ve heard some complaints in conversation about how the writers are spoiled millionaires wrecking it for everyone; mostly I’ve heard people talk about how strikebreaking is no longer inevitable, and the writers, who are mostly regular not-millionaires like you and me, may win their demands yet. When we stand up for ourselves, other people are in a better position to stand up for themselves, too. That kind of real security can only be good for us, for our neighborhoods and for the economy. I support the WGA 100%. I haven’t watched The Daily Show since it came back on the air.

That said, the temptation provided by Jon Stewart’s fileting of filthy idiot Jonah Goldberg and his filthy and idiotic book proved too much for me. I won’t link to it. If you’re inclined, you know where to find it. It’s bad, choppy video of an incomprehensible interview on a galling topic, and I had to shut it off before it was over because I use dictionaries rather than my imagination to define words. So. Now you know my secret shame!

The pomegranate’s on the table and I’m off to the tanning salon.

Kisses,
Persephone

Update: alternatively…

Your Eyes Make A Circle

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Gianna and I are standing in the ladies room discussing my cousin and our mutual hairdresser Carmelo, who’s been AWOL since Friday night. His shop is on the main street in our little town and the front wall is glass. When the doctor is OUT, the whole town can see it. So where is he? We discover neither of us knows what Carmelo’s doing besides covering our roots just as the lights fail. We are left in total darkness just as Gianna walks into a wall with a thud! and delighted laughter. I ask if she’s heard what I heard on the Italian news last night: the Pope’s still nursing a grudge against Galileo. Last night, I couldn’t believe what I thought I was hearing, though that’s perfectly okay since I don’t speak Italian. But holy cow, I was right! In a related note: if you want to have fun with an Italian news report put it through Babelfish. Did you know Italian names are nouns and adjectives? It’s like someone squooze all the naughty out of Mad Libs.

Today is the actual birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which I would have realized if I ever knew what day it was. Further: if I’d picked up a datebook in December I might’ve known, for instance, that today was Wednesday. Even so, I was surprised to find that on this day Answers.com highlighted a king of redneck culture, NASCAR’s A. J. Foyt. For me, being small and covered with fur has some distinct disadvantages. Fortunately, Digby and the littlest gator reminded me of what I was missing. I can’t write more eloquently than they do on this or any other topic, so those posts speak for me, and for the loving us that we become when we work to make this world more just. We learn, we fail, we learn more. Just this morning, I marveled at my own idiocy. I was mulling over zapping an email to my local NBC affiliate asking what happened to my morning newscaster, when I have been rendered completely and utterly speechless by this by brownfemipower, via Shakes.

Lesbians sentenced for self-defense

That sound you hear is all the oxygen sucked once again from my lungs.

On Aug. 16, 2006, seven young, African-American, lesbian-identified friends were walking in the West Village. The Village is a historic center for lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) communities, and is seen as a safe haven for working-class LGBT youth, especially youth of color.

As they passed the Independent Film Cinema, 29-year-old Dwayne Buckle, an African-American vendor selling DVDs, sexually propositioned one of the women. They rebuffed his advances and kept walking.

“I’ll f— you straight, sweetheart!” Buckle shouted. A video camera from a nearby store shows the women walking away. He followed them, all the while hurling anti-lesbian slurs, grabbing his genitals and making explicitly obscene remarks. The women finally stopped and confronted him. A heated argument ensued. Buckle spat in the face of one of the women and threw his lit cigarette at them, escalating the verbal attack into a physical one.

Buckle is seen on the video grabbing and pulling out large patches of hair from one of the young women. When Buckle ended up on top of one of the women, choking her, Johnson pulled a small steak knife out of her purse. She aimed for his arm to stop him from killing her friend.

The video captures two men finally running over to help the women and beating Buckle. At some point he was stabbed in the abdomen. The women were already walking away across the street by the time the police arrived.

Buckle was hospitalized for five days after surgery for a lacerated liver and stomach. When asked at the hospital, he responded at least twice that men had attacked him.

There was no evidence that Johnson’s kitchen knife was the weapon that penetrated his abdomen, nor was there any blood visible on it. In fact, there was never any forensics testing done on her knife. On the night they were arrested, the police told the women that there would be a search by the New York Police Department for the two men – which to date has not happened.

After almost a year of trial, four of the seven were convicted in April. Johnson was sentenced to 11 years on June 14.

It turns out the newscaster was on vacation, so there was no need to write. For details of the actual outrage, please see FierceNYC. These events happened months ago, even more than a year ago. I read about this yesterday and I am still reeling.

A datebook would not have helped except to remind me it is 2008 and our futures can be deftly stolen from us, whoever we are.

You Got It, Now You Know

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My hair has grown out for the last year, which means when I wake up in the morning or from a nap, there’s a nest on top of my head. One morning, I looked in the mirror and decided to call storm chasers: Hello, fearless IMAX guys? My hair is on the rampage. Last week, Pete and I began playing a new game called How Crazy Is My Hair? Here are the rules: my hair does whatever the hell it feels like, and Pete assesses the insanity. “Pete, how crazy is my hair? Is it Son of Sam-Crazy or Ed Gein-Crazy?” If I’m feeling movie madness: “Is it Errol Flynn-Crazy or Joan Crawford-Crazy?” And there’s always politics: “If my hair is crazier than Giuliani, I’m getting a restraining order against my head.”

It’s just a game. Or is it?

At 7:17 a.m., I dropped off Pete at his house and drove to work with the camera in the car. I should carry one all the time, really. Two blocks from the bridge over the Raritan, I fell in line two cars behind… behind… Flying Spaghetti Monster, that’s a truck full of portapotties. I pressed the ON button on the camera, aimed, zoomed, zoomed some more and took this crappy picture just as the light turned green. The truck turned right. I held my breath as it rounded the corner, then I drove straight over the bridge into town. That’s New Brunswick in the distance, in all its self-loathing glory; in fact, those are several of the same buildings pictured above from a different angle. No truck drivers were harmed in the making of this post. The same cannot be said of my head.