« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 26, 2006
cold snap
This past weekend our friends from CT came up for a visit. Our lives are eerily similar in that our friends are originally from the East coast, moved out to Seattle, lived there happily for many years, then moved back East. Now we are all dying a slow and uninteresting death from re-entry culture shock.
“I feel like all the air has been sucked out of our days!” I yelled to my friend Rock, drinking my 18th beer and clutching my throat for emphasis. “I feel like everything is made of glass!” he drunkenly countered, gesticulating wildly around him. We then gathered our loved ones near and played a smokin’ hot game of states and monsters (pictures coming!).
I myself feel like a monster in this state, or at least, town. None of our neighbors came over to introduce themselves when we moved in. When we see them now, getting in and out of their cars, they duck their heads. No one says hello, no one smiles at strangers, no one says Have a Nice Day during regular transactions of commerce. About 80% of the time I find the situation to be fascinating, and get some pleasure from not washing my hair, pinning it up with bejeweled beetle hairclips, wearing a giant fake fur coat, and going to the grocery store to mouth-kiss my child and buy tofu. It’s like I’m getting a second chance to be the quirky Molly Ringwald character in an 80’s high school movie, only all the jocks have grown up, become businessmen and married the cheerleaders who are now home raising clones of themselves. The rest of the time I am wondering what the hell I did, moving my family across the country to a place where we are so viscerally unhappy that it borders on performance art.
Thankfully, my little family enjoys each other’s company a great deal. The other day I was driving with the Bean and flipping around radio stations. I finally stopped on one station because it was playing music not ads. The Bean listened for a minute and then we had the following conversation:
Bean:Hip-hop, mommy?
Me: No baby, I think that’s salsa.
Bean: Oh.
Me: It’s fun to dance to.
Bean: Yes!
Me: But so is hip-hop.
Bean: Umm-hmm.
Me: But they’re different.
(long pause)
Bean: Yes.
I’m no ethnomusicologist, but I’ll do what I can to keep him in touch with his urban roots while the climate and the residents conspire to freeze us right the funk out of here.
Posted by Max at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2006
throgsneck
Note to weird guys in drug stores: when you are staring at toddlers in such a creepy fashion that the ordinarily completely disinterested sales clerk comes over and asks if he can help you find something, causing you to stammer out a reply while so obviously nervous that your comb-over is shaking and yet your beady eyes still cannot remove themselves from the adorable child the next aisle over, do not say you are looking for RUBBER GLOVES because that just makes you 10,000 times creepier! Mothers everywhere are wise to you, creepo.
One of the many differences between our old hometown and new is that, back in Seattle, when weather was happening it got a name: Windstorm 2005; Spring Snow Flurry X-treme; Cloud Clave No. 9. At the time, it was something we mocked. But now that we live in a place that actually has weather, I kind of miss the names. It gives "weather events" a sense of unfolding drama as well as a narrative arc that I can appreciate. Were it that this region named its weather, yesterday would have been Horizontal Rain/Wind PhreakPhest. It was so mighty that mid-conference call - KABLAMMO! Out goes the power.
With my typical emergency grace and smart thinking, I ran into my husband's office gibbering about batteries and weather clocks and power bars, none of which we had. I left him calmly reading a book about woodworking while I dashed to the aforementioned drug store to stock up on supplies, heart racing as I imagined fighting the hordes of people doing the same. But it was pretty much just the creepy guy and me. When I returned home, the power was back on already but dammit! We can listen to the weather channel now electricity, catchy names, or not.
I like how things sometimes catch us off guard here, such as last weekend while my husband was back in Seattle, it was so butt cold here that our car froze. I managed to get the Bean loaded into his car seat and open the driver's side door to start the engine, but the hatchback where the ice scraper was had completely frozen shut. I had no idea what to do, so I began kicking the car really hard, employing long-dormant pre-baby sidekick skills honed from months of K-force* with my hot hot trainer Cliff. With each kick I grew giddier, imagining our neighbors peering out the windows of their mansions and wondering just what the fuck the broke hillbillies from Seattle were doing now.
*K-force is sort of like karate-lite, albeit with no opponent. I tried to take Cliff's actual karate class at one point with the belts and the robes and the fighting etc., but alas, it also involved grappling. Grappling meant rolling around on the floor hugging and giggling with Cliff, and at one point he pinned me by placing his (ample) crotch on my throat. This felt too much like cheating on my husband. When someone's crotch comes that close to your face, you should at least have gone to the movies a couple of times first.
Posted by Max at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2006
old salty
Today I was quite literally faced with a boob conundrum. The Bean and I were at the pediatrician’s office getting a belated though hopefully still effective flu shot. In the waiting room with us was a full-figured teenage fly-girl with a tiny baby. When the girl rose to bring the baby into the doctor, her gigantic mama mias, already busting out of her tight V-neck t-shirt, somehow spilled up and out of her shirt entirely and exposed her right baby feeder to the waiting room. She was so exhausted she didn't notice and gave me such a sweet, tired smile as she passed me that I wanted to grab her and say, “Excuse me young miss, your shoshana is out and about, there!” but I didn’t. How would one even tactfully do that? So I just smiled back and let her pass, flesh flag a-flying.
In retrospect, I guess it probably doesn’t matter since she’ll likely be sticking her Sister Christians into the kid’s maw about 12,000 times a day soon enough, general public be damned.
In other, non-boob related news (although, is there really any other kind worth noting?) for about fifteen years or so, I’ve been ending most of my sentences with an extemporaneous little flourish of punctuation that I like to call a period. Then, as a reflex, I hit “space space”. Twice. Two spaces. Along comes the new tech writer guy at work, who is working with me on a project. The guy and I are like the oil and vinegar of writing. Whereas I am all yammer yammer yammer adverbs misspelling fluff fluff!! He is like “Communication. Is. Useful.” He’s a great asset to the project in many ways, but he rocked my world by sending me some edits that I um, disagreed with (“I see you are attempting humor here. Please note that humor cannot be quantified.”) He also broke the news that apparently since the time the dominatrix who taught my ninth grade typing class lorded over her collection of Underwoods, some rules have changed. Specifically: the kids aren’t using two spaces anymore after a period. They are using one.
Telling me to start using one space instead of two after all these years is like asking someone to suddenly begin exhaling twice before inhaling once. I think I might have earned a little salt in my shaker over this one, since I was like ”You don’t say,” with audible nose whistling, tea slurping, bone creaking, and little or no intention of changing my ways. Call me a codger – I don’t care. Some habits are too hard to break, by gum.
Posted by Max at 10:58 PM | Comments (3)