Tata: You called the house number. I waited a minute and dialed your cell and then you called mine. It took me a year to answer the phone. I’m learning how to use it.
Miss Sasha: Still?
Tata: Stop laughing! I was born before the cut off date! Besides: your voicemail is full.
Miss Sasha: On purpose! Grandma was driving me crazy with messages.
Tata: Fix that. How am I supposed to call and menace you?
Basket full of drowsy Drusy, who needs her beauty sleep.
You can always tell when I’m obsessing about something to distract myself from whatever’s really bothering me.
That’s the first time I’ve seen someone else knit like I knit, which is to say that she too apparently knits upside down and backwards.
No way do I have the attention span to cable knit. I distract me!
My brain hurts! Several of my personalities are nonplussed. I may totally forget I’m worried about money.
I started this post yesterday, then a gin and tonic called my name. Next thing I knew it was after midnight and I felt not at all like talking.
It’s cold here. This morning, frost weighed down the leaves of our backyard sage bushes. We’ve retreated to the attic exercise room for sweaty activity, but it’s tricky. We currently have no TV in the attic. I have the attention span of a toddler in sugar shock. As much as I love the mosh pit sensation that is pushing hard and fast on the elliptical, without something to focus on I climb off the machine after ten minutes to go clean something. For two weeks, I managed 8 or 11 or 10 or 12 minutes, then found myself having a lemon-scented polishing incident. Thwarting my own plans was starting to frustrate me, lack of waxy build up aside. Yesterday, without thinking about it, I dragged my laptop to the attic, found a playlist I’d made for a friend years ago and howled along with Little Green Bag from the executive position atop the elliptical. When it was over, I was four minutes into a pretty decent workout and wondering how I’d tricked me into it. Five songs I truly love later, I felt great and only a few of my neighbors had called 911 about the shrieking. I excite even people who cannot actually see my extreme beauty. Everybody wins!
Last Thursday, I got about halfway through the workday when I realized I was trying to lie down at my desk which, while flat, offered limited coziness options, so I went home and slept until dinnertime, when I wasn’t entirely sure how many fingers I was holding up. Friday morning, I decided to stay in bed and monitor the broadcast culture from a supine position, so perhaps I was able to trick myself into kicking my own ass on Saturday because I was either well-rested or still asleep.
It’s three. I’m holding up three fingers and back to work I go.
Oh. My. God.
I have to make this.
Nutty things says, "Eat me." Ta says, "Ten bucks, same as in town."
Drusy and Topaz, no doubt planning their next robot.
Executive lounge and executives, lounging.
Panky regards you with suspicion and tomato sauce.
Circe: Can you believe it? A canned goods drive! That does nothing to solve the underlying problems.
Me: It solves two problems: what will these families eat, wash and brush with for a month or so and what presents will these homeless kids get for their gift-giving holiday, but you’re right. Nothing changes.
This is the work I can do within the framework the unnamed university offers me and I can totally rock it, but nothing changes. Is that enough?
It’s a funny little moment in life for me. It’s the first night of Zappadan. What’s that? Look it up. The unnamed university’s anti-hunger project ended its donation phase on Friday; my inventory, packing and waiting phase begins tomorrow morning. Miss Sasha, Mr. Sasha and the little Sashas are driving home after an eventful ten-day visit, taking with them two cases of jarred foods that cleared a whole shelf in my pantry. The temperature’s dropped to the tricky range in which some days are too cold for bicycling so we use the exercise equipment in the attic. The seemingly interminable baby blanket project for a local hospital is finally almost in the rearview: sometime this week, I’ll hand over the April-fresh good deed. It’s very soft. I can’t wait to never see it again. Frigging transition periods. I hate ’em.
Pete bought me a new phone. My last phone was a step above a tin can and string, which was A-OK with me since I did not and do not want to talk on the phone with the other humans if I do not have to. The fact is: sometimes in life you have to talk to other people.
Sasha: Aunt Daria’s frantic. She prowls around her house and paces in her living room. She runs upstairs and back down and sneezes the whole time.
Me: She’s allergic to you. Dab some Nasonex behind each ear and spritz your children.
Technology brings us all closer.
Me: Sorry I hung up on you. What’s your mailing address? I’m going to mail your adorable daughter’s Christmas present savings bonds.
Cousin Sandy: Blah number blah blah street, blah town, NJ blah blah zip code. That’s really nice of you.
Me: Merry Christmas. Also: I’m hanging up on you again.
Setting up the phone was a miserable experience in which a young dude in customer service repeatedly told me what I was seeing wasn’t possible. My natural hostility mushroomed. I’m going to have to dedicate my next yoga practice to uncursing that bastard’s ancestors to, you know, mop up untidy karma. I spent a few hours on Saturday discovering fun and interesting aspects of the phone like that Cold War microdots were printed in larger fonts than my phone uses for Crooks & Liars. Phone numbers imported from my old phone matched with pictures from Facebook, sometimes of the wrong people. I had to ask our housemate for help dialing a phone number, because apparently I am 900 and technology takes practice.
Poor Impulse Control appears without color and text is atrocialiciously tiny. Who can thus apprehend the gigantonormosity of my personality and talent? I might as well carve sculptures inside quail eggs as be bombastic in word and deed. Images, however, may be spectacular. Once again, I have to rethink what I’m doing and adapt it to what’s really possible right now.
Crap. That sounds like work.
Last night, I had no net connection so I missed this brilliant rant.
After Willie Horton ads, Swiftboating, GOP convention-goers waving purple band-aids to mock a veteran’s war wounds, birtherism, Ann Coulter saying the “only choice was whether to impeach or assassinate” President Clinton, Coulter claiming 9/11 widows were “enjoying their husband’s deaths,” Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, ads falsely claiming Barack Obama favored “comprehensive sex education for Kindergartners,” Rand Paul supporters trying to stomp the head of a protester, ads claiming Kay Hagen was “godless,” Michelle Bachmann calling for an investigation of ‘un-American views” among the Congress, “If ballots don’t work, maybe bullets will,” “Obama hates white people,” ‘GET OFF MY PHONE YOU LITTLE PINHEAD!” “YOU LIE!”, wingnuts at FreeRepublic calling 11-year old Sasha Obama a “street whore” for wearing a peace sign on her t-shirt, outright lies about “death panels,” “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy,” cheering for executions, booing soldiers in war zones for being gay, comparing poor people to stray animals you shouldn’t feed, “’we’ve got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion,” supposed “Christians” suggesting that people pray for the President using Psalm 109:8 (“May his days be few; may another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow”) as a text, Limbaugh calling the First Lady “uppity,” and on and on and on, all without a single peep from the Right…They can take their whiny-ass bullshit about liberal “rudeness” and peddle it somewhere else. We ain’t buyin’ it here.
Balloon Juice commenter J.D. Rhoades
That is a thing of beauty.
Cats can't stop their thievin'.
Poor Impulse Control 