Trouble with Dreams

We/I had a bad experience in the woods today. I, being me, would not want to read about it, given the choice. I know I said in the last post I said I'd read anything one of my favorite writers wanted to sit down and write about, but here is the exception. So, as a courtesy to all of you out there who are like me and don't really want to hear about certain things, I will write the rest of the post in white, and if you choose to read it, just highlight it. (The dogs and the husband are fine, it's not traumatic in a familial way.)


We were walking along the trail. Lou was going rather nuts, a little more nuts than usual, because the squirrel brigade was out in full force. He disappeared into the brush, as he does often, and came up on the path behind me a minute or two later, poking the back of my leg with a stick.

Jane Dog is the one interested in sticks, and balls, and toys. We'd just spent several minutes in the park throwing the tennis ball for her, and the few times we threw it for Louie, he grimaced and ducked. He's been hit between the eyes with a tennis ball, multiple times, and just gives us this pathetic look, a look that says "Why do you keep doing that?"

So, when he poked the back of my leg with a stick, I thought, huh. What's Lou doing with a stick?

Well, the answer, of course, is that it was not a stick. It was a deer leg. Oh god. I believe that's what I said, oh god. There was a hoof. Lou had just poked me in the back of the leg with a deer hoof.

Oh god.

He dropped it on the path, and stood over it, wagging, like, I know! Isn't it great? Let's bring it home! He started to pick it up again, and the strangled yelp I let out gave him (and perhaps every creature within hearing distance) a pause.

So. I know things die, I know they decompose back into the ground. I just really was hoping never to be poked in the back of the leg with something in the process of doing that.


Anyhow, on to cheerier things. I heard a story on the radio today about how a law will go into effect soon making it impossible to get Medicaid benefits without showing proof of American citizenship. The way to prove your American citizenship is to show an American passport.

Which makes a whole lot of fucking sense, because I'm sure that those people in our society who can't scrape together $2.63 for a handful of generic Lasix have plunked down the $97 it costs to get a passport, which they need for all their luxury vacations overseas.

Divine paper trail, (explosion) (explosion)

As this morning's walk rendered my hands pretty much unfit for making stuff (what with the leash burn), I have spent part of this afternoon spiffying up two new sections of Doinstuff: Knitting Stuff and Quilting Stuff.

I've thought a lot about how to organize the content of this site, and this is what I've landed on: Doinstuff, the main site, will be general life stuff - stories about going to the grocery store and my stupid opinions on a myriad of issues - as well as, here and there, a link to one of the new parts when I have actually finished a project.

Knitting Stuff and Quilting Stuff will be knitting and quilting blogs. I actually haven't read any quilting blogs - the knitting blog arena seems to be much more booming, from what I can tell - but I want to have one because I quilt a lot and don't want all the knitters to think I'm being a slacker when I'm actually off quilting.

Because I have very little idea who reads this site, I'm not sure if this format is going to work. With the knitting blogs I read, I'd read just about anything the knitter wanted to sit down and write, so I wouldn't like them to separate their life-stuff from their knitting stuff. But, since this started off as a life-blog, I would feel weird about throwing something about knitting in every once in a while.

So, basically, here and there I will throw in a link to my other blogs, and you can go look at whatever I've just stuck a fork in. Or you don't have to. It's up to you. OR, if you can't stand grocery store stories and are very conservative but think I'm some kind of knitting prodigy (god help you), you can just read my craft blogs.

And, if you have strong opinions or potentially helpful feedback about how you would like to be able to navigate my site, e-mail me (orooni at g mail dot you know).

Zacharias B.I.G.

Every once in a while, I'll write a post on here that niggles me. Do I really mean that? Do I want to say that? That's not mean, is it?

This post has been niggling me for... wow, almost a year. Perhaps it's because I exaggerated the typical number of syllables in an Arab name. Or perhaps it's because I'm pretty, um, hateful I guess towards the good folks who bring us the local news, and perhaps can't even view them from an objective lens anymore.

But I recently heard a local newscaster pronounce the name "Zacharias Moussaoui" as if the "Zacharias" part rhymed with the word "vicarious." Za-KAR-ee-us.

And let me just say that this is not like the time that I went off about Bush using the word "dismantlement" and then the next day found out that yes, there acutally is a word "dismantlement." I have done research.

So, this is all to say that those local newscasters who are not employed by NPR can continue checking it, bitches.

Downward Dawg

Hey, so, recovered kickboxing memories have given way to a woozy sleep-deprived feeling.

And farfin G-mail just gave away the score of the Paraguay-T&T game.

They might not be giants

Today was the first day of a one-week quilting class - the doinstuff philosophy dictates that whenever possible, I take a week off of work and make stuff - and I feel about as I might feel if I'd spent the day learning to kickbox. I should really learn how to quilt sitting down.



Storms rolled through, those kinds of storms where the thunder seems like it might just be people in the next room banging on metal. Plus today there actually were people in the next room banging on metal.

That had better not be partially hydrogenated.

Ho-kay, so I'm back on the Dog Whisperer thing. It's just that Dooce's post at alphamom about Cesar is more of the yes-yes-yes.

It reminds me of two things observed recently:

1) I was eating at the student union. Two later-middle-aged men, clearly professors, were talking loudly, and the one with his back to me was confessing to the one facing me that he felt he could not control his students' behavior with regard to cellphones in class. His friend had told him to be firm and perhaps even a bit scary (I paraphrase), and his response was that he could "never pull it off."

I wanted to interrupt and say, Dude, if I can pull it off, you can pull it off. I'm STILL mistaken for a student and I started teaching here four years ago! I look like a 12-year-old! Look at your sweater vest and tell me that you have no gravitas! Look at the leather elbow patches of your sweater vest!

2) We were eating with friends. The woman has been quilting for seriously decades and decades, and when Other brought up that I'd be taking a quilting workshop given by the university, she said that she'd always been too intimidated to take any of those courses. She hand pieces quilts with hundreds of components. She has made a bed-sized quilt out of old silk ties. She could eat the lunch of everyone in the workshop, including the instructor, and still have room for a burrito.

Clearly, these people need dogs and a visit from Cesar.

But seriously, though, many different things I've been reading have been telling me about how your brain listens to your body even though it seems your body only listens to your brain. People who view a cartoon with a pen held between their lips will find the cartoon less funny than people who view a cartoon with a pen clenched between their teeth, because the latter group is being forced to smile as they watch it. So when Cesar comes in and makes people lower their shoulders and lift their chins, it's affecting their brains. Their brains are saying, well, since I'm walking like a confident person, I must be a confident person.

Think of the applications of this!

Lucky Lady.

Over the weekend, Other and I were standing on the sidewalk with my now-retired-and-moved-across-the-country advisor and his wife, who were in town to visit, discussing university politics that could eventually affect my job.

We were accosted by a group of young men who were celebrating a blushing groom's upcoming wedding. They were doing this by publicly humiliating him; he was wearing a t-shirt (meant to be signed by well-wishers such as ourselves) with condoms pinned to it and holding a teddy bear that if I remember correctly was wearing a diaper. It was a pub-crawl and sorority initiation rolled into a bachelor party.

But the more I think about it, the more baffling the array of signifiers becomes. A ball and chain around the ankle would have been pretty straightforward. But what do the condoms mean? Now that you're married, you won't have to use them? Or now that you're married, you can finally have sex? (unlikely...) Or is it meant to simply make bystanders think about sex and then somehow reach the conclusion that they signify that this poor schmuck isn't going to be able to have sex with anyone else for the rest of his life?

And the teddy bear is even more puzzling. It tends to be used by sororities to infantalize their pledges, along with things like pacifiers. But in this case it might seem to signify a baby - you know, because then comes baby in a baby carriage. But I know they sell baby dolls at the grocery store... why wouldn't they just have gotten one of those?

So I guess I'm making the case that the best man totally should have been fired. Can't even put together a sensical humiliation.

Raise your hand if you too are locked in a battle of wits with your iPod.

Today, someone phoned up and asked me for the phone number for the Wal-Mart Pharmacy. This was, of course, while I was at work, and I work on Saturdays at a teeny independent pharmacy in a rather teeny town.

Would you call Borders and ask for the phone number to Barnes and Noble? Would you call an independent bookstore that's been owned and run by a single person for 50 years and ask for Barnes and Noble's phone number?

Here is the debate that I had with myself in the milliseconds available for forming a response (which was slightly lengthened by my original snappy comeback, which was "Which Wal-Mart pharmacy?" Subtext: you stupid toad, there are like 7 Wal-Marts in a 10-mile radius of here.):

REASONS TO GIVE THEM THE PHONE NUMBER:

• Being rude is not polite*. This person is making a request, and as an employee serving this person, I should comply with it.


• Perhaps this is some sort of test, like where God asks that one dude to kill his son and the dude is totally like about to and then God's all like no, no, no, I just wanted to see if you would. You can come to heaven, or whatever.


• And if I gave them the phone number, then they'd be all like, Ha, I wasn't gonna call Wal-Mart, but you've earned my business with your selfless dedication to service. Could you call them and have all of my prescriptions transferred to your store?
  
  

REASONS NOT TO GIVE THEM THE PHONE NUMBER:

• The request is utterly inexcusable. You want me to do work so that you can give your business to a competitor? WTF? You are lucky that I do not scold you.


• I am lazy. You have interrupted the series of tasks that must be done before I leave, and if it had been up to me I'm not even sure I would've stopped to answer the phone, much less root around in some outdated file-o-fax to help someone who needs help shopping at Wal-Mart.


• Seriously, do you live in a barn?

The appaled and lazy side won. I did what I seem to fall back on in situations where I feel that someone is making a request that is over the line: played dumb. Not an "I'm stupid" dumb, exactly, more like an "I don't know anything useful, go bother someone else^^ with your ridiculous requests" dumb. What I said was, "I'm looking at the list, and I don't see it on here." There was a pause. I clairified with something like, "I guess we don't have it," or "I guess I can't give it to you." I was indeed looking at a list of phone numbers on the wall that had probably been there for 15 years or so. That's not really where we keep the updated list of other pharmacies in the area. I don't know how I feel about that.


*I get slightly tautological in crunch moments, okay?
^^Like, I don't know, an operator? A phone book? A prescription bottle from the farfin Wal-Mart pharmacy where you apparently shop?

RE: THAT GIANT SUCKING SOUND YOU HEAR

Well, it has become physically impossible for me to leave wherever I am with everything I'm going to need. If you remember, a while ago I expressed the idea that death might be a pleasurable alternative to a bunch of stuff I was going to have to do. I'm a baby, it was all fine, I can't really think up an interesting metaphor for the nature of the enormous task, so just use your imagination. Feel free to make it glamourous.

My point, which I realize probably doesn't merit all this jaw-sawin'* is that I can't remember anything. I went to my parents' house with a cd of pictures to get printed and couldn't find it and figured I'd left it at home and got home and found it in my bag, which I'd thoroughly looked through at least 3 times. I needed a cd of data and thought I'd left it at my parents' house and my poor mom was walking around with the phone in Spider Land (well, the basement) and turns out it was in the cd slot of my home computer - I'd checked one, but not the other. I have left the same six sheets of paper either at home or at work, wherever I didn't need it, three times in the last week.

You know when someone's talking and their tongue tangles up and they mess up a word or two, and you're totally sitting there, hoping they'll just move past it, because you were actually listening to what they were saying and maybe even needing information that it seemed like they were about to get to? But then they don't move past it, they stop and laugh and repeat it ("HA HA frucking day, whatever that means!!") And you're trying to make your face be polite but really you're like GRRH shut up just say whatever you were going to say already?

Right.

*I just totally made that up

Notable Yankees Ailments

From the Why the hell didn't somebody tell be about this?! file: NCAA Softball World Series. Awesome. We'd flipped over to check the scroll for one of the boys' games and it took about three seconds to become completely engrossed in the wonder of women playing sports. It's sad that it's so weird and great to see college-aged women - some pretty, some athletic-looking, some overweight - being shown as athletes, rather than as a pair of boobs hovering over beer, or tacos, or whatever, rather than as a catty slut who wants to scratch every other bitch's eyes out, rather than as omgomgomgyoujusthadbradpitt'sbaby. It's actually a jarring difference.

If I had a daughter, I'd totally be plunking her in front of the tv right about now.

a small "hu-" can make a big difference.

Last week we went to the City and ate pizza and caught a movie. Between the pizza parlor and the movie theater, the storm happened, the storm that had been threatening to happen on the drive to the City and all through dinner. We stood under a green awning and the wind rhythmically whipped water at us and the thunder shook our bones. Half of the block lost power.

When branches stopped hitting the ground on either side of us and the rain let up a bit, we booked it over to the theater. I had to kind of swerve upon reaching the door of the theater to avoid running into a man with a gigantic umbrella, a briefcase, and a formidable mustache. As we went in one door, he crossed right behind us and went in the other door, opening it so hard that it hit the door I was going through and almost knocked me over. As I was trying to figure out how I'd just been jolted forward three feet, guy marches up to the counter and demands to know what's going on with the power over at Luciano's Restaurant. Uh, says teen working at the local indie movie theater, the power went out a few minutes ago. They're closed then? guy asks. Uh, yeah, I guess. They don't have any power, teen says. Well! the mustache huffs. I had reservations! They could've called me! And he slams his briefcase down on their counter, slams the umbrella on top, and says, You can watch this for me, can't you? and marches off.

Uhm. I'm sure that the second the power went off, three waiters and the hostess all lunged for the phone at once, knocked heads, and slumped to the floor in a black-and-white clad unconscious pile.