Better than fruit salad

WELCOME TO THIS ENTRY THAT IS REALLY DISJOINTED AND I’M NOT SORRY

Currently, my favorite expletive is “mother-shitter,” which I picked up from a coworker. It has replaced my previous favorite, “fucker-my-nuts,” which was also secondhand but just as lovely. Curse words are of course not meant to be taken literally ever, though when I first heard mother-shitter I was unable to not think of some great blobby being that went around popping out Moms. Thanks, dude! But also mother-shitter sounds much more forceful than the overly used “motherfucker.” It is not actually used as a hurtful epithet but rather as a great alternative to damnit.

Person one: Hey! Here’s a great big problem!
Person two: Mother-shitter.

FROM PROFANE TO TRASHY

Last week my landlord came by with one of the repair guys they use, to measure my windows upstairs. That was fine, but of course they came by at about 10 in the morning, and it was a particularly lazy morning so Anthony and I were still sitting on the futon in our flannel pants and blankets not reading so much as staring off into space. I think a lesser person (or arguably, a person with a little more pride) would feel more than vaguely sheepish to invite their landlord inside and then flop back on the futon as he and the repair guy step over the big blanket and invariably all of the bras and clothing strewn about the room upstairs. Good thing I am a relatively good tenant otherwise.

FROM TRASHY TO DORKY

Sometimes when I pour myself some coffee I do it from a ridiculous height, slowly, and assume a look of sort of stoned detachment, and I summon all of my Cate Blanchet impersonation prowess and recite that thing from that movie:

Things that were
Things that are
And some things
That have not yet come to pass

FROM DORKY TO DOWNRIGHT INTOLERABLE, SOMETIMES

I need to nap more, or get to bed earlier, or just be able to tell precisely when it is at night that I start to fall apart like a crabby toddler. These days I feel like all the sleep in the world wouldn’t be enough, and yesterday I actually napped twice and went to bed early, and I still woke up completely exhausted. This fatigue is like nothing I have ever experienced before and goes beyond any sort of strictly mental tiredness. My joints ache and my legs are noodley and my eyes are slowly sinking into my eye sockets. Just thinking of walking up the stairs to go to bed makes me tired. Walking the half mile to school in mild weather listening to happy music and with plenty of time seems like this huge undertaking, and my leaden feet and droopy eyelids can hardly make it in time. This overarching sleepiness (and subsequent crankiness) is not helped by the fact that Anthony on average gets about 2 hours more sleep a night than I do, despite the fact that historically he needs less. This makes that nightly fall-apart thing that many people experience thousands of times more intense. I have been picking meaningless fights and have just been a general pratt. But with the school-related stress level reaching it’s crescendo (April showers bring May PANIC AND ILL-FATED MISGUIDED PAPERS THAT STILL DON’T HAVE A TANGIBLE THESIS, don’t you know) I don’t even have time to even check it out, despite my nagging thought that perhaps it is something Serious. I have a coworker roped into me-monitering, and now I’m making an extra effort to eat properly so we can rule out anything else. I am calling it operation Isolate The Tired!

CORK PLASTIC-LIKE GIZMO

So I have been thinking a lot about Walter lately, mostly because the circumstances of his life were so similar to Banana’s. His circumstances were not quite as sudden but I was steered towards Euthanasia in a similar way (it was that vs. weeks of hospitalization, which was not guaranteed to do much) and my heart has been aching for Mimi and her cat’s sudden passing, to the point when I read the entry I got a little teary. And of course then when I was rambling around in her archives I found an entry about the neti pot, which sounds a lot like one of the many things the vet did to Walter the first time I brought him in. The small bird version was to take a little syringe filled with warm salt water and squirt it all into one nostril as the other became unblocked and leaked the rest of the water. It was the most extreme vet thing I have ever witnessed to date, but Walter so freaked out from the general experience (leaving the house, riding in a car, and so on,) that I don’t think that struck him as much as it would have me. But I guess breathing freely was a good trade off.

The other thing is that my friend has taken some orphaned kittens from her mom’s farm. It isn’t a permanent thing — just until they are smart enough to fend off the other kittens in the barn and can feed themselves — but they need near-constant care as they are so young. They are cute but emit a near-constant high pitched squeak that is heartbreaking in it’s own right, but it is hard for me to deal with on another level because it is exactly the sound that Walter made exclusively from the time he became sick to the time he died. Apparently birds and cats have the same primal need sound. Poetic, but very troubling, for me.

WE PAUSE TO AKNOWLEDGE A SENTENCE FROM HEIDIGGER

If we ask her, ‘who are you,’ presumably she will not answer,
‘a sample of homo sapian’.

Like hell she won’t.

I know a person. Said person has a very common name but it is through no fault of his own and it is not my beef with him. I called him Snivel-CommonName for a while secretly to myself, and now I just call him “Street,” because one can very easily walk all over him, take no exceptional notice of him, yet one has this underlying uneasy sense that through him terrible things can happen. Though in his case with the English language, not with fast-moving vehicles. You see, Street uses the wrong words. A lot. Street uses the wrong words in a way he thinks is poetic or perhaps artistically unkempt, but which is actually very stupid. You are never sure if he is genuinely unaware of what he’s saying, or if he’s being ignorant on purpose. This has been difficult to explain to people since there are some other things I don’t like about him so already I seem bias against, and when the crux of it all is linguistic you sound like a big snob in saying he uses the wrong words, and yet are unable to think of good examples when asked to do so. Until! Last week! When literature gave me the perfect example! Our Shakespeare class was discussing Much Ado About Nothing, and in revisiting the text it occurred to me that good old William must have himself known a Street, because he gave me the character of Dogberry. Dogberry mangles words and says things in a way just as disfiguring Street’s. Dogberry says “odorous” when he means “odious”. He says “discerns” when he means “concerns”. “Opinioned” instead of “pinioned”. “Reformed” instead of “informed”. It is more than a little irritating, to hear a person do this more or less in earnest, and even more so when you learn he is sort of aware of what he is doing. And now I have passages to flip to when I am on a tirade against him, or the IDEA of him more like, because really he isn’t SO bad, it’s what he does that I despise.

Starting this entry with a little ball of hate is not really what I meant to do, because in contrast to how much of my life has been lately, today has been lovely. And I guess the ball of hate wasn’t ALL hate, since the point was I Found Something Illuminating, which is usually a good thing. Though if it’s enabling my hate I’m not sure it’s so good. But it makes me feel less like a crazy misandrist and more like a normal egghead.

Saying “little ball of hate” just then reminded me of the pizza dough I made this morning. Because those were indeed little balls (the recipe is intended for individual pizzas, though I’m sure there is wisdom in keeping pizza dough parceled out into smaller doses and putting them in sandwich bags in the fridge,) though they weren’t quite balls of hate so much as they were balls of insatiable stickiness. I probably added an entire cup of flour in the countertop portion of the blending just to keep the damn stuff manageable. It was like trying to knead a hardy wood glue. Hopefully they turn out okay despite all the initial trouble, though my abilities with yeast are shaky and thus I am resigned to the possibility of it being scrambled eggs night.

HEY WHAT ABOUT THOSE GOOD THINGS

1. I had pair of goldfinches at my thistle feeder yesterday, and in fact they have come back several times since. It makes me giddy because it means I was right about my amateur eyeballing of my surroundings in thinking that this flat-yet-bushy farmland is a lot like my friend’s neighborhood in the Springs, and therefore should get more goldfinches than Mom does at her forest-esque foothills location. It’s great to be right, and it’s great to be right about happy sunny-colored birds.

2. Some clothing ordered from the USS Internets came today. It was clothing I had been anticipating for a LONG TIME because one was shipping from an eBay seller in China and had to wrestle with customs and also to be even remotely affordable needed to take about a month to get here, and the other was a sort of pricier-than-my-normal-range cashmere sweater, so the waiting came from amassing funds. So both came, both are worthwhile, huzzah for internet shopping.

3. I got to hear someone say, “only from up there would you see a mysterious rune-like cipher”.

4. Lovely food continues: you already know I am making pizza from scratch but did I mention brownies? And ravioli? And baked beans that I think even Anthony, Snubber of All Things Legume, may enjoy? All of these are happening, will be happening, or have recently happened in my kitchen.

4a. This foodening is not strictly coping-mechanism, though the brownies are a bit of let’s-make-Friday-okay, because Missy is switching departments and Friday is her last day with us. It’s really a great situation since she’s moving herself ahead and doing something that will be challenging but ultimately a much better fit for her, but of course for us it means we don’t get to see her as much. I am not as torn up about it as some of them are since Missy and I hang out somewhat regularly, but it still sucks in a petty sort of way and I spent a lot of time on Wednesday being supportive but also trying not to lump it in with STUFF THAT ROYALLY BLOWS list, because the damn thing is GROWING. So, brownies. During one of the more heated moments yesterday at one point I did get to feign total exasperation and shout “I’m calling the dairy!”

And then I did! Boy did I ever! A small town south of here survives by delivering fresh dairy products all over the front range, and since lately I have an accelerated need for decent eggs and milk and since I tire of the sub-par quality of the Safeway stuff and have been counting the days until the farmer’s markets start up again, I figured it was time. To have the milkman treat me right. It is surprisingly cheap to get this service and the gentleman I spoke with on the phone was very nice and chatty. I am apparently not even in the ’normal’ delivery range for my town but he said they’d add me to someone’s route which made me feel all special, and they’re delivering my box this weekend! And then next week I get milk and eggs! It’s all so sudden! And terrific.

5. There was a discussion earlier about how perfection is this commodity that realtors use as a selling point. The safe, homogenized, gated-community, picket fence sense of ‘perfection’. The guy saying this was frustrated with perfection, because in his mind (or just in the context of what he was saying) this was all perfection meant. But I couldn’t help but think of last night, when Anthony and I spent most of the evening lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling and the weird shapes of the underside of things, and how my head was kind of resting on a corner of the wall and we were kind of had our shoulders bunched up against each other, and how somehow that was so perfect in it’s own weird crumpled paper kind of way. There wasn’t wine or a movie, no fancy food (he’d just finished a bowl of ramen and I’d had yogurt and Ritz crackers for dinner) and no real structure to our conversation, it was just a nice moment that lasted for about three hours. And I think that’s the kind of perfection I’m after. Good human perfection. Accepting the hair and crumbs all over the floor as well as the simple happiness staring at ceiling shapes with someone gave me.

Here is a wonderful video Will Ferrell made

I have been all obsessed with light yellow and lemons these days. This contributes largely to the Build a Happier Maggie program, which works in tandem with Keep The Caffeine Flowing coalition. The former has kept me on a strict diet of Bela Fleck albums, real food* and of course taking time to notice yellow things. I have decided that every day this week I will wear somewhere on my person at least one yellow thing, in the spirit of hue appreciation. It’s spring! There’s no need to be stressed about the horrifying amounts of work to do! Or massacres on college campuses! Or how shockingly bad the Aqua Teen movie was!

Weirdly I am not the only one thinking this. About yellow, I mean.

*Last night in particular, with this sauce. Next time: more carrots, tomato sauce not paste, possibly thyme. But as it was I found it spine-warmingly lovely, pretty much exactly what I wanted.

Or was it complaining you wanted?

1. Oh my God. I am an Aqua Teen fan, but I really cannot recommend the movie version. The opening sequence was brilliant, and the first few minutes were golden if only for the fact that I heard about them from a friend saying, “It’s after they’re in Egypt, a little while after they start speaking English.” The rest of the movie was kind of like a regular episode of Aqua Teen except way too long (you know that with a Dada gibberish show like that you can only stick to one thing SO LONG before it starts demanding real explanation), incredibly and needlessly violent (I have not seen as many organs and organic-matter explosions since that one scene in the Meaning of Life, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t have nightmares,) and disturbingly reminiscent of a porn film. Really. It’s like they took the id of a hormonal 13-year-old boy and made a movie out of it. The worst part was that I was all hyped into thinking it was going to be awesome, so I was let down AND made to endure psychologic assault.

2. I find it vaguely sexist, or showist, or something, that Wikipedia objects to the plot synopsis of the Gilmore Girls as being ‘unencyclopedic,’ yet there are countless pages on Star Trek, an extensive branch devoted to all things Monty Python, a catalog of every episode of Mythbusters, and so on.

3. I need to do laundry. I can’t keep up with dishes. It’s too nice to be inside studying. And so on.

SOME THOUGHTS ON SEXUALITY AND A GREAT STORY

I was thinking some about the first time I ever encountered homosexuality. It was when I was like 5. There was some protest going on on TV, and I remember seeing the women marching and carrying signs. What are they doing? Mom said: they want to be able to marry other women. And I remember thinking, oh. They can’t? They should be able to I think, it makes sense. To marry your best friend. I’d marry Jennifer. (Given the demand of quick! time to get married now! at age five, and really only knowing that marriage = being with someone forever).

Since then my encounters with non-straight people have always amounted to a non-issue. This seems like a strange thing to say, particularly because I am bringing it up in this weird stilted kind of way, but I was thinking about it because something about derogatory children’s rhymes in my Folklore class came up the other day, and of course then we had this big discussion about how ugh that’s so GAY is not really specific to children in this culture, and what that means, but also how in usage it’s really more about the sound of the word and the way it has been used more than calling something homosexual really, and so on. And suddenly it became this huge Issue. We had some people trying really hard not to put there own two cents in about where they stood on the sexuality debate, crossing arms and frowning. And at the same time we had people trying a little too hard to be open and YES YES I’M TOTALLY COOL WITH THAT MM HMM which seemed just as ingenue. I’m not saying it should be ignored, I’m just saying that while I’m down with where I stand on the Kinsey scale I’m not going to let it dictate my entire existence. There is so much more to life than What Goes In Which Orifice.

A professor told this story last week:

I was much younger and probably arguably much stupider at the time and I was living with some friends in some apartment…and I was going to cook something…I think I was just heating up oil for french fries or something, so I put the pan on with the oil and i cranked up the gas on the oven…and in the midst of this I noticed that someone was trying to steal my bike, and it was a cheap bike… and in retrospect I probably should’ve just let him have it…but so I took off running after him and then eventually I got my bike back, and as I was coming back I was doing what people so rarely do which is to say I was looking inside my own house, through the window…and as I was doing that the first thing I thought “I don’t remember starting that fire.”

“I don’t remember starting that fire.” Is such a wonderful sentence and I’ve been thinking about it all day, to the point where I had to stop myself from saying it in the next class.

I grabbed a quiz I just received in class instead of my schedule of attack for today. Damnit. I know it’s essentially do everything but I had an order and a method sort of that made me feel less overwhelmed. So much for that.

I CRAVE SHREDS OF NORMALCY AND FAMILIARARITY

Have I mentioned how incredibly nervous I get about doing stuff lately? I mean everything from big projects to stuff like eating dinner. Usually I have to micromanage a little bit just to make sure something big and unexciting gets done, even if it means setting the oven timer every two hours and getting up to make tea or something. Now I am in this weird phase where I can hardly fathom doing the boring day-to-day stuff, much less term papers and reading several Shakespeare plays a night. I think some of this stems from how busy I’ve been lately. I was telling someone (who?) over coffee a while back that I am currently living three lives:

1. Student, albeit a slack-tastic student. If you think about how (statistically) per credit hour you average about 1-2 hours outside of school studying, and how I’m currently taking 13 credit hours, you can see how even the slack-tastic student keeps busy.

2. Desk-job holding Sensible Grownup, which is a huge exaggeration of course, but having an 8 to 5 and sitting at a desk doing stuff with computers and copy machines and fax machines and (these days) testing software are all very desk-jobby kind of things, and even part time work can become a little crazy.

3. Artist living in more-or-less constant low-level anguish that nobody wants to see my art anymore and wrestling over whether or not to pursue it again post-college. Who spends many an evening drinking tea in front of the easel oscillating between heart-racing excitement in what I’m doing, and a gaping ache in my gut that it really has become a ‘hobby’ for me, no longer something that can fuel my everyday existence like I want it to. (This may change slightly, see last post).

All of this can’t really get sorted out. When I ask myself ‘what needs doing,’ my brain has a tendency to offer up options for any of the three lives, or what I want to do most, and not really prioritizing by any means. This is why last weekend I worked on finishing up project at work but then sat around and collaged for two hours rather than do my reading for class later that night. I like to be spontaneous, but at the same time I like to rely on routine to get a sense of general shape of everyday. I don’t have that right now, so I’ve been running around like a psychopath, as well as leaving notes to myself that say things like:

12-5: work
5-6: dinner
6-8: read, think of something engaging for paper due Thurs.
8:30-10: art

This hasn’t actually been working because on the days where I really need a play-by-play directive it’s not specific enough. What for dinner? And which readings? And which paintings? Or did I mean drawings? I need a plan of attack on all bases. So when I saw a bunch of moleskine planners on sale the other day I grabbed up a daily planner to see if I couldn’t knock some sense into myself. Historically I like to go with what feels right rather than adhere to pre-written rules so I’m going into this giving myself the option of not sticking to this too rigidly. It’s more like a reference guide more than anything. For the days when I really do need to remind myself to eat dinner.

BOOKS

Today is great because it is the day of the annual book sale at the Student Commons. Paperbacks are fifty cents, hardbacks are a dollar. I came away with such gems as “Granny’s Wonderful Chair,” (1932). I also got a High School Handbook of Composition, which reminded me of the grammar book I picked up in Newburg, as well as Laird & Lee’s Webster’s New Standard Dictionary (intermediate school edition, 1929,) that features a picture of Webster himself.

FOOD

I really dig this, because sherbet and I are pals and what could be better than home-making a freaky weird sherbet that you cannot buy in stores? Nothing. I love how it is presented in that post as well, all crisp and lovely with the little flowers. So not only is it freaky weird sherbet, it is FANCY sherbet. Fabulous. And it seems pretty easy to make from the looks of the post. Of course this recipe necessitates an ice-cream maker, which I am far too broke to purchase at this point. (I am currently saving up for a smallish charcoal BBQ grill from Target, in fact. That alone should speak volumes.) But all is not lost for I do know of a kick-can method that requires duct-tape, a couple of cans and about 40-60 minutes of kicking a can around in the dirt and grass outside. (Due to the possibility of leakage, particularly when playing kick-the-can with gusto, this is not really a good thing to do inside.) This seems like a glorious addition to a BBQ, since waiting for coals to get ready outside and sending the delicious fiery smells all through the neighborhood are all integral parts of BBQ’s. Let’s recap: freaky weird flavored fancy sherbet prepared in a dirty jostled can. Holy shit. I’ve got my summer dinner plans all set.

Does anyone know why I purchased dried apricots? They are in a re-sealable bag in my pantry unopened because why would I buy dried apricots? I barely eat fresh apricots, since I tend to be a little squeamish of my mushy fruit selection. And the only dried fruit I’ve ever enjoyed besides raisins were some apple chips we had in Seattle, in a land where there is so much moisture around eating dried fruit is simply eating dried fruit, not crunching into thick fruit-flavored paper. I have a feeling they were merely meant to flavor something, from some recipe from Clotilde because I’ve been completely obsessed with her website lately — much more than usual — but nothing really strikes a chord.

Speaking of Clotilde, I just wanted to point out: speculoos. They look great (if you have an appreciation for rectangles and squares as fanatic as I do,) they taste great, they are delightfully easy to make, and they are called speculoos. What more could you ask for in a coffee-cookie? I ask you!

THE PART WHERE I BORE YOU ABOUT WORK DETAILS

1. My boss is leaving for better things. These things are life-related, not work-related, which makes me feel happier for than if she were just transferring to Snowmass to make more money, but I am still sad to see her go. I have never had a boss as level-headed, who says “school comes before work,” any time that I feel stressed about juggling my two lives. She has been impossibly patient, very flexible, basically let me write my own schedule, and answered my subtle protests at answering the phone and meeting my sales goal by offering me the newly-crafted position of ‘legal notice assistant.’ I do not doubt things will continue to run relatively smoothly when we hire her replacement (KNOCK ON WOOD,) as we will be very involved with the hiring process, so the overall feeling of “no” is a simple human sad. But she’s happy, and that’s what it’s all about really.

2. Today someone on the phone wanted to place an ad applying for a title on his mobile home. Or something. He was kind of vague and wouldn’t tell me what company he was representing although it was clear from his snappy jargon that he was with one. When asked what agency he was with, he simply replied, “I AM the entity,” which was irritating as it did not answer my question, but it was hard not to laugh. I am the entity. It sounds like some Zen koan. You are the entity, I am the entity, the universe is the entity, we are all the entity.

IN WHICH I RECLAIM THE PAST

I met with the head of the cultural studies department this morning. My intent was to somehow make a convincing argument that as an ex-art major with 20 unusable credits laying around from my Freshmen and Sophomore years, I should be able to use at least a few of these credits in lieu of any predetermined credit hour plan as outlined on the flier. This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds — the cultural studies minor at my school is essentially 3 classes of cultural study and 9 hours of your choice and the credit hour plans merely exist as a sort of guideline for the truly lost — but the idea is to have some sort of set focus rather than just use-what-you’ve-got-and-do-less-work, which is what I was afraid it would sound like. I was prepared to do battle. This is sort of becoming a huge issue, this lack of a declared minor, and every time I had seen my main advisor she would practically scream WHY HAVEN’T YOU PICKED A MINOR? because the English major requires that you have one and you cannot graduate without one. And because of the aforementioned ex-art major status, I was starting out a little behind to begin with.

My initial worry was completely fruitless however, because as soon as my degree audit was printed and my feeble story struggled out, Dr. K immediately affirmed that the logical choice would be a cultural studies minor, and hey 495 that is required for the course is going to be focusing on visual media isn’t that neat, and here use these two classes (thus setting my focus officially on everything post-1800’s, and hey that works for me,) and take something else in the Fall. And he mentioned art history of course because the other two classes we were using were in fact art history classes. I waited but figured there was no way we could justify a studio class. But then he started talking about maybe Sculpture? Or Graphic design? You could take Painting II, or maybe Typography. He even said that since I was nearly wrapped up with my English major, that I should consider exploring some other things in the art department, and consider how to supplement my future plans. He said don’t be afraid to take more art classes.

Most of this stuff — the stuff about supplementing my future career choices with classes that apply — I have known for a while now, but having been squelched by the administration again and again, to hear this from someone in a position of power nearly brought me to tears. Suddenly it was like I was sitting in a ray of sunshine, and I felt like leaping over the piles of books and the ibook on the desk and kissing the man, for knocking some damn color into my world again, for handing me the paintbrush and being encouraging.

Getting into these classes will be somewhat arduous as the department, among other things, is very favoritist and tends to only open their classes to students on their list, but even just being sanctioned by an advisor to do something I live and breathe was enough, and when I left his office I could not stop myself from running, spinning, and yelling. Holy crap. It’s like I have my life back.