Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars

I don't know about y'all, but in my fucking day (see how I mitigate the fogey factor with gratuitous swearing?) it was not acceptable practice to demand more candy after the first round has been passed out. What is this? When did it start? Am I horribly stingy to have a basic policy of one piece of candy each, unless you seem shy in which case here is half the bag? (And can I also add that this is good candy, quality Hersheys and Reeces stuff, no Boston Baked Beans for me?)

Twice tonight I was lobbied for more candy. One way not to get something from me is to demand it, so both times the appeal was declined. (That is, if you're still small enough for me to bench press -- if you have the capacity to fire me I handle it differently.) The second one was an incredibly persistent two-year-old, who was literally in my foyer, blocking my access to the rest of the group, and who also happened to be making that whining/shrieking noise that I can only imagine that pregnancy renders one immune to.

So, what's up? Is there a tacit agreement on quantity of candy distribution?

You have got to be freaking kidding me.

Hello! I can post! For no apparent reason at all!

This was my first time contacting Dreamhost for help, and I must say that I'm very impressed. Their feedback form prompted me for things that I wanted to say (e.g. this is not a dire emergency but please help me anyway, and btw I don't have too great a grip on how this whole "Internets" thing works) but did not know how to say. And a person wrote me back and said "Hmm"! Color me satisfied.

I am nervous for November; for some reason, I was able to post at Quilting Stuff (but not Knitting Stuff, natch), so if a post does not appear here on any day in November, you might check there. Ha. Like you care. This is mostly about the sweet sweet prizes.

More content and less covering of my future ass tomorrow. And if not then, definitely the day after the day after that.

Bite the wax tadpole

November 1st is drawing nearer, and still I cannot publish. Woe is me. I'm stuck in a vestibule.

I am in the market for shirts/sweaters with kangaroo pockets but no hood. Do you make these? Send me some, and I will shamelessly plug you. Where do my hands go if not in kangaroo pockets? Why make a cardigan without pockets? I do not understand.

Some kind of goat convention.

I'm writing this feeling pretty confident that it's not going to post tonight. After a bit of googling, I'm finding that other Blogger users are having this problem, so I'll be patient and see you when I see you, with the understanding that if the problem persists into NaBloPoMo, I will be VERY UPSET. (The error I've been getting is "001 java.net.UnknownHostException". Ideas? It seems to be internal to Blogger.)

This lack of publishability is partly to blame for my dearth of posting, but part of it is also that I've been seriously skimping on sleep to get everything done that I need to. "Need" might be too strong of a word, because I'm using it to include Extended-Family Time as well as a too-long amount of time walking around identical streets in the rain holding a six-pack of beer, dressed as a landfill. But whatever.

I'm working on some quality content for the month of November. I think I'm writing down my ideas somewhere, which is good, because along with dizziness and mild hallucinations, sleep deprivation shoots my memory all to hell.

I can push out the jive just fine, but I really have problems bringing in the love.

I'm taking a bit of a risk, blogging tonight. Not because I am currently hanging off a cliff with my left hand and typing with my right, but because the power has been off for about a total of three hours tonight and has gone off and come back on many, many times, and my computer is a delicate flower.

The first light I could find came from my phone - cordless, schmordless, I've had this phone (see-through with teen-girl-color insides) for years and will have it as long as it works. So I called my mom, and after forty minutes of talking to her from the dark, accepted this new lightless reality and went off in search of real light - flashlights, candles, lighters, whatever.

I'm quite lucky to have the mother that I have -- she talked to me basically the whole time, taking my low-voiced "it's back on again. now it's off. on. off" interjections in stride. At one point, she said "Wow, I think I'm turning on every light in the house because I know it's dark for you" (this because I was keeping her thoroughly updated on the status of darkness). Nothing like gratuitous light-turning-on to make a person feel loved.

It's amazing to me that in middle America in the year 2006, I would be scrounging around in the dark looking for a way to make fire. This is not a complaint about the electric company's service -- in fact, it's probably telling that I had such a problem coming up with alternatives to electricity. It's more like, damn -- we see ourselves as so very advanced, and yet at any second you can be plunged back into the most basic world, sewing by candlelight.

But, 1806 conditions or not, the Halloween costume must go on.

Wow, that's the nicest "Pay us now or we'll shut down your account" letter I've ever gotten.

Friends,

There is a country song that I need to warn you about. It is probably called "I Got A Brand New Girlfriend," judging by the number of times this phrase appears in the song, but I do not want to google it, for fear of finding out for sure. This song is alarming on at least two levels, the more straightforward level being the one on which the guy sings "somethin somethin blah wearin' nothin' but a smile, goin' kissy kissy smoochy smoochy somethin somethin else blah etc." Grown man + kissy smoochy = undeniably troublesome. We are still together? Good.

The more insidious and disturbing level that this is on involves, of course, the phrase "brand new girlfriend." As if this woman has sprung from the womb -- or perhaps her father's head -- clad in tight jeans and a tube top, virginal and without the taint* of a specific past; but, judging from the kissy kissy smoochy smoochy and all that this implies (fucky fucky?), imbued with carnal instincts, knowledge, and talents. The guy sounds pretty happy about his new find.

Because what is she, a truck? No pre-owned girlfriends for this guy.


*hehehe, taint. This is an inside joke, just so you don't think I'm a 13-year-old, but it's also a dirty one, so I guess you would have been right in the first place. Carry on.

PS - Why do I trick myself into thinking I can watch Dooce's videos? I'm on dialup, for God's sake.

Lots of gingham, I'd imagine.

Other and I went to Jesus Camp last night, and it was a real experience. The movie itself was a bit appaling; I guess there really are people who homeschool their children so that they can tell them that evolution and global warming are lies made up by the left (though their reasoning for why the left would make this up was never clarified). That's kind of scary in and of itself, and the parts where they made all these little kids cry because they're sinners and don't believe in Jesus enough were hard to watch. But the interesting and surprising aspect of the experience was the audience.

This was at the local indie theater, so of course the people who would show up to see a movie called "Jesus Camp" weren't going to be of the Evangelical persuasion, they were going to be pretty damn liberal. What I didn't expect was for them to need to prove how liberal they were by laughing hysterically at the Evangelical Christians.

Yes, the part where the rather portly prayer leader inveighs against McDonad's, fast food, and sitting on your ass and getting fat was pretty hypocritical and funny. Yes, the part where she is driving along talking about how much she loves America and the view out her front window is of a particularly hideous strip of sprawl, with gas stations, fast food restaurants, and endless pavement is a heck of a juxtaposition. We all had a nice laugh.

But then a theater full of young adults was laughing at a little girl explaining her religious beliefs. The theater was tiny, and four people took up the whole row to my right, and it crossed my mind at one point that I should lean over to them and say (in an affected Southern accent): Ex-cuse me, but y'all're laughin at a nahn-year-old. If there had been another scene with the girl, that probably would've happened.

I'm not sure where the accent would have come from. Perhaps it has to do with my inability to be confrontational with strangers; I could put on a character and thus distance myself from the situation. (I'm not a person who can admonish fellow moviegoers.) But it might also have something to do with the politics of the thing. It's one thing to sit in a tiny indie theater in a big city and laugh with your fellow liberals, but what if all of a sudden the person sitting literally next to you revealed herself to be something else entirely? What if the "enemy," i.e. a person from a different part of the country, and thus with potentially (and stereotypically) different beliefs than you, was there in the room, present in a way that the people in the movie were not?

We were very bothered by all this. To sit and laugh at these people (these children) on the "other side" of the culture war seems to be just as bad as what they're doing. I had the impression that the Left, with its Theory and its Intellectuals, was supposed to be about getting above the black vs. white understanding of issues like this. You're laughing at them because they take the Bible literally? They're laughing at you because you believe we came from "goo." Where does that leave us?

These people were laughing at a 9-year-old girl because she believes the explanation she's been given by the entire world around her. As if they themselves would believe anything different as children having been homeschooled in Missouri. No, they'd probably be walking around quoting Nietzsche.

I've given it some thought before, and I believe that if I'd grown up Christian, I would have eventually lost my faith. I think that it would've been painful and traumatic for me, because I would have wanted to be a good person, and therefore a good Christian. That's what I found most striking about Rachel, the nine-year old; she really wants to be good. She really wants to be good, and to be good is to believe. What will happen to her if one day she finds that she can't make herself believe anymore?

Where is the empathy for these children who are being made into "foot soldiers" (their phrase)? The "children's preachers" made no effort to disguise the fact that they are using -- their word -- these kids for their own means. Where is the understanding that these foot soldiers are actually having a serious impact on the country?

As Other put it: Ha Ha Ha; we're so superior. Ha Ha Ha; the Evangelicals got the Presidency. Ha Ha Ha; they took over the Supreme Court. Ha Ha Ha; they stripped us of Habeas Corpus. Ha Ha Ha; they overturned Roe vs. Wade. Ha Ha Ha; we're living in a theocracy. Ha Ha Ha; they're herding us into camps.

Curse you, Help Fight Breast Cancer M&M's!

Ah! So I am not the only one to have appreciated "banana tycoon."

time to go cry in the bathroom

Beck has a new cd out, hooray. So soon! I've been listening to it - it's best, to me, through headphones, which is lucky because headphones drown out the world, which I've basically wanted no part of the last few days. (When I got my iPod, the instruction manual said not to use the iPod to drown out background noise. Silly iPod, I thought, that is why I bought you.)

With the new knowledge of Beck's embrace of Scientology, I'd been a bit worried that the songs, instead of being goofy yet profound reflections on postmodernity (I know, gag me, sorry), would be some kind of earnest argument for Scientology. So my first listen where I could actually hear the words went something like this:

Beck: When the Lord...
Me: [cringe, that thing where you both squint and raise an eyebrow]
Beck: ...brings me my hot dog...
Me: Phew!

I still have my suspicions regarding the title ("The Information") and the last song, which is 10:36 and has some long talky parts where spaceships come up, but it's entirely listenable by a heathen gentile infidel pagan such as myself.

And, while I feel a bit out of line making any sort of generalizations about this sort of thing, I must confess that while I was disappointed to hear that he'd taken up such a set of religious beliefs, it does kind of make sense. Scientology seems pretty off-the-wall, but whereas it makes some people jump on couches and yell, it might naturally fit in to the image of the world that comes through in Beck's lyrics. There's a different set of facts about things like gravity and normality that hold in the realm of his songs.

... which is why my feet smell like gum. If you were wondering.

**A warning, added after writing: I'm apparently feeling a bit saltier than normal this evening. Apologies to those readers with delicate sensibilities. You may just want to tune in tomorrow, when I go back to talking about tatting.**

The squirrels are out in full jittery force these days, and that's how I would like you to think of me. I am your blogging squirrel, out in the cold, wet world gathering little nuggets ("nuts," if you will), pausing when I can to bring them to you. And so, sans ado, here are my nuts:

1) Here are two phrases I found for you:
* "banana tycoon"
* "faith-filled intercessory prayer warriors"

2) Here is a quick bunch of stuff about this weekend's road trip:
*The Smokies are beautiful.
*We ran out of gas, right in the middle of a switchback. We were saved from certain death by a grubby, grumpy angel subcontracted by AAA.
*I profess to understand that our dogs are not children, but I really don't mean it.

3) Here is a spontaneous product endorsement:
Vaseline Lip Therapy Cherry Flavor. It is great. I put it on every night before bed, and it's to the point where I can't really be comfortable without it, which I attributed to silly old habit, but after going without it for a whole two nights, it became painfully clear that, no. I need it. It is great.

Addendum:
Burt's Bees lip balm may be nicely packaged and cooling and soothing and all that, but it does not take away chappedness. No sir.

4) Here's a mini-essay about Yahoo! and how Yahoo! can suck my balls. I mean nuts.

This is the message I got upon trying to go to the Yahoo! Mail sign-in page:

Coming soon to a screen near you!

Bummer. It doesn't look like the new Yahoo! Mail Beta
is available for you just yet. It's nothing personal,
we promise -- we're simply rolling it out gradually
for the time being. But rest assured you can get your
hot little hands on it soon.

In the meantime, sign up on the beta waiting list and
we'll keep you posted on release dates.

For now, you can check your email in the original
Yahoo! Mail

Now, you might say that I wasn't in the greatest frame of mind when attempting to collect all my junk mail, but it is accurate to say that even fresh off some highly pleasurable experience this text would rub me the wrong way. I could ignore the "yay yay yay Yahoo! is upgrading!!!" nonsense way back whenever that was, but "Bummer?" What, Yahoo!, are you stoned and just realizing the vending machine in the basement is out of Cool Ranch Doritos? My "hot little hands"? Waiting list??? I didn't want to say this, but Yahoo!...

I DON'T GIVE A FUCK.

God. I just don't care if you're upgrading. Seriously. Please, please stop telling me about it. Or just stick to the slightly annoying proclamations of wonderfulness, that's tolerable. Sure, I get a little jab in the eye every time you ask me if I "wanna share" your trophy. I don't wanna share your trophy. I wanna delete my spam. But I can deal with that. But you put page of "oh boo hoo for you maybe you can be cooler next time with my sweet-ass upgrade" between me and my spam, before my morning organic pop-tart, and that's really awfully infuriating.

I was going to have this whole other point about how I've stopped reading your news articles and almost stopped checking my spam because of those God fucking awful ads with the silhouettes dancing on the rooftops (ooh, mortgage rates, me so horny)... but I feel that I'd laid into you enough with the whole Beta page thing. So.

5) And, finally, my favorite exchange from the weekend:

Me: Fabric shops.
Him: Fudgesicles?

Caudate nucleus, anyone?

Hey, holy cow, I posted something on my knitblog. Don't feel bad about skipping it, though, it's boring.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over here conflating homosexuality with pedophilia.

As if we own the yard or something.

Thank god, I was about to start googling "alison hurley + obituary."

So, a couple of days after I posted about cream cheese I went to the store and bought the next installment of cream cheese (back to the plain old baking brick) and got home and popped a bagel in to find that the cream cheese had not made it to my fridge. I checked all the places it could have been if it hadn't been left at the store - bags, the backseat of my car - to no avail. It was listed on the receipt, but since I was already out of my being-in-public clothes, there was no way in hell I was going back to reclaim the cream cheese. So I stretched the remaining whipped stuff as far as I could and went back the next day. Felt a bit like a crank inquiring after $2.39 worth of cream cheese, but when I said what I needed to and showed my receipt, the girl said, "Oh, yeah, we had one of those turned in last night."

And I can't tell you how happy it made me that they are keeping track of my lost cream cheese.

I had another long, convoluded story about cars and keys and how very absentminded and well-meaning we are in this family, but oi. Just take my word for it.

Jerks ruin everything.

Our softball season ended unpleasantly (though not surprisingly) today when we lost by spectacular margins to a team full of jerks. Whereas over most of the season, the general atmosphere of the games was jovial, friendly, and comfortable with our rather pathetic level of play -- in both dugouts -- these people were, after gaining a ten-run lead, still yelling at each other to move in when a woman came to the plate, still cursing themselves when they didn't head home when they could've stretched a triple into a home run.



Oh well. It's a beautiful fall day.

Now I Know How Dilbert Feels

Overheard:

Girl on cell: I'm just saying that sometimes it might be a good idea to tell your girlfriend that she's really good-looking.

Found on the internet:

Sentence on school website: "Due to virus carrying web robot-spiders we can no longer offer "hot links" to our staffs' email addresses."

Beware, all, the virus-carrying robot spiders!

Seen at grocery store:

Sentence on cheap and puzzling new candy (/game?): "Magic Tong Included"

Super double triple! Ka-pow!

I am really just not feeling it these days, but onward I slog, through the text, to bring some (awful, awful) sunshine to the world.

Yesterday I was doing some stuff (hee) in the kitchen, having just excercised my body (uungh) and taken the dogs out. And there in the doorway of the kitchen was a spider whose whole diameter was somewhere between a half-dollar and a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I stood staring at it in horror for what was probably a long time, then Lou, who does not have the sense to be afraid of anything in the world that can actually hurt him - traffic, large dogs, Jane, etc. - goes sniffing up to the thing. When he moves away, it has disappeared. There aren't too many places a doughnut-sized spider could escape to, so I assume the thing had made it to the bathroom. Other, though he's not afraid of spiders, comes reluctantly - he "doesn't like to kill things" or some such nonsense, and searches in vain for a few minutes.

I spend this time helping by saying things like "Oh dear God," and "WHERE IS IT?!?!" and also hugging myself and shaking. And planning to go sleep in a motel if we don't find it.

And here is why I love Other: When he lays eyes on the monster, which happens after two or three sweeps of the bathroom, he screams. Not a high-pitched, girly scream, but a full-throated war cry of terror. He screams for so long that he has time to look from it to me, it to me, screaming all the while.

So, not only did he get rid of the stuff of nightmares, he made me laugh really hard. Even though I kind of felt bad about it.

Yeah, we all not smokin reefer

Spamku #5

put this in your stocking
Flora; Get it straight;
lazy Susan GIRLS KISSING;
sensory working.

Dueling googles!

If something drastic changes (blow to the head, fever that wipes out my memory and old self) and I decide to start a credit card company, I'm going to make the asterisks they put next to the words "free" and "credit" and "zero percent" lead to footnotes that say nice things like, "you look hot today, baby" (only one 't,' can't push this too far) and "wow, is that you that smells so good?" My company will prey upon the dim-witted and under-complimented. It didn't start out this way, I just was wishing that one time I would look down at the asterisk and it wouldn't say "actually not free" but of course if any serious-business correspondence got fresh with me in the footnotes, I would roll my eyes and feel incensed that it probably took two years of business school for some jerk to come up with the idea of quirky footnotes, and then spend the next ten minutes thinking about how advertising becoming self-aware is probably the worst thing to happen on a cultural level in a long time... So...

Ummm...