November

my november

a few pics from my november...

Be Happy

Be Happy. It's okay to be happy- since when did being happy become a crime? I used to have this job; okay, it was a maid job, but in fact, I really enjoyed it (aside from the fact that they made me wear pleated polyester uniform pants. That's criminal, and I stomached down the putting on of said pant for the love of my fun job) but I worked for a woman who was obviously Unhappy, bitter and slightly evil. (Classic woman boss?) uh oh.
So every day i came to work smiling, happy. It didn't bother me that I was going to be cleaning pubes off of urinals, or lifting chair after chair to get the vacuum under tables. I made it my mission to hunt the stray macaronis that got away from their plates and mouths of children. They weren't in the clear yet...they'd have had to grow legs or a roachy passenger for that.
But when I walked in, ready to face the day, my boss would sneer. Some days, she would question me.
"Why are you so happy?"
"What are you, on drugs?"

Sheesh. Nowadays, a pretty good response to that would be chimpanzee smile. I see all these arrests made for meth heads on the news, and they have this uncanny resemblance to old granny from Beverly Hillbillies. Then you read they're 23, and you think, damn. No teeth.
So when they jealously made snide drug remarks upon seeing your happiness, just give em
Chimpanzee Smile.

I discovered myself doing something today that made me a hypocrite- though small in action, after catching myself in this act I'll have to change my ways. Walking through the kitchen, I opened the gummy vites, and when an orange one came, after two attempts putting it back, I got a pink and purple. However, I do not let my children have the same luxury. I'd have made them take the orange one. But I just didn't want it. So my new rule is "Get the flavor you want, then we'll eat all the orange ones at the end." Because the orange ones are pretty good when its all that's left.
The sun's come out. Have a cool day :)

Hehe.
Again, it's been forever!
I just haven't been the same since the lobotomy.
(That's a joke. But only barely...)

So I apologize for not checking in; sometimes I'll think of something really interesting and blog worthy, but by the time I'm here I don't remember what that thing is.
What have I been doing? Have I read any good books? What have I learned this year?
I'm not that person that's going to awaken your spirit with some sorta great revelation.
Oh! Okay.
I guess I learned that scrunching your hair when it's wet does not make it curly. I also learned that towel drying your hair (basically towel-scrunching, so I'm just being repetitive) & then the non-combing of said hair also, does not make it curly.
For some people, it takes a long time to learn something like this. You might be one, I don't know. I might too. But I have adopted a hair brush when wet thing that is working out pretty well for me.
I learned that the phrase "If you can't do something right, don't do it at all" is not necessarily correct. A half ass job is still half. And that's better than none. Staring at a pile of magazines on the floor, going thru half the pile and trashing a little is better than walking past the pile. Washing half the dishes is better than no dishes. So my new phrase is

A Half-Ass job is still half.*

I have a class reunion coming up this month. Yay.

But my husband's smokin hot so I guess I have one thing going for me. The man is beautiful, seriously.

And I can always blame my lack of finesse in the area of smalltalk, my stumbling into the consistant wrong thing to say on brain surgery if I screw up too badly. But hopefully it'll not come to that.

Because both before and after brain surgery, I'm the same. I'm simple. I like to just put it that way rather than the derogitory phrase 'simple-minded.' It sounds better. Lynyrd Skynyrd made it into a bragging right somewhat. But I haven't been able to listen to LS since the mid-nineties; Years ago we saw them at the Tabernacle and the smoke, mullets and speaker throttling lack of volume control left me deaf for a few days. Freebird has never been the same. If you've been reading this for a long time, I'll have to turn to the Taterbug reference. If you haven't, back track. :P

Went to a potluck yesterday. Oh! But before the potluck, I went to the grocery store. So the girl asks me what's new when she's bagging my gro, and I say 'I'm going to a potluck!' And she says 'What's that?' So I tell her it's a thing where people bring food, then I'm trying to think of the words to explain it and all that came out was,

"You know when somebody dies and everybody brings a covered dish? It's like that without the dead person."

"Oh," she says. (If you've come to the conclusion that this person made me feel smart by not knowing what a potluck was, this isn't the case. Sometimes intelligence is purely a matter of life experience. If you know what a potluck is, that's probably cause you've been invited to one. Which doesn't make you smart, just lucky). :)

So the potluck in question was a UU (Unitarian Universalist) Potluck. UUers are pretty random but liberal types, and this UU group is like an extension of my family. I really do love them all, and though the faces change from potluck to potluck, they are familiar and warm, and the food is always good.

The New Guy. So there were maybe thirty or forty folks there, mostly that I knew, and then this one new guy. The new guy had become disgruntled with his previous UU group due to 'too much New Age talk,' stating he'd made a fuss about it and couldn't go back. I'd seen my mother set her lovely pie down, and knew doing the math, 30 or 40 heads versus 8 slices of pie, that my best option wouls be to go straight for the pie, because hell, the cheese slices and macaroni salad would still be there, but there were kids present, and this was my own mothers pie we're talking about. So I selected my pie, and then framed the pie with little bits of things; a meatball here, two spoonfuls of salad there, til it was folding over a little and Linda handed me a tray. (God bless Linda...She's too good for words).

So I sat across from Steven at a little table, and set down my pie. Then the new guy sat down beside me. He told me about how he'd been disgruntled with his old group. How he didn't see how they could carry on so. Growing up fundamentally Christian, he told me, what was the difference between listening to that hubub (Hubub is my word, not his, but I'm just trying to tell the thing) than going back to what he'd heard before? He wanted scientific proof behind anything in order to make it truth. So he brings up Stephen Hawking (?) and his new theory that because the conscious mind dies when the brain dies, there's obviously no afterlife. He is seeking debate. "I grew up with reincarnation, so it's a little different for me," I tell him. Then he begins with his evolution speech, and asks about apes. Did Apes reincarnate? So I'm trying to be polite but then he keeps asking me questions, and I say that I just always felt that our spirits seek higher consciousness, and that we will continue to evolve until we no longer need to, spiritually, and then we go back to being one with God- but that it was just one persons idea, and that I felt people have to find their own spiritual conclusions. But what I said in my head was, "I just want to eat my pie."

Damn! Let me eat my pie. F*ck, if you came to try to disprove other people's belief systems, maybe UU is not right for you. Or maybe it is exactly right, just not with me, and definitely not with me and my pie. I'm simple! Let it be.

Agnostics. So I get along well with athiests/agnostics, perhaps because believing in a bit of everything can be similar to believing in nothing. It is what it is, or maybe not/we'll see. (It's those people who believe in the one concrete thing that you have to worry about- those are the troublemakers, lol). So my mother asks me if I invited this friend I have to the potluck.

"No," i say, "She's athiest. I don't think she wants any part of a religious organization."

"Why?" she asks me, so I try to explain that sometimes when you don't believe in anything, you don't feel the need to look for it. If you don't believe in aliens, a shooting star will never be a spaceship.

So I'd brought up religion with this friend in the car, and she said she didn't really believe in anything in particular. Then, I said, 'So would you say your agnostic, or more like athiest?'

'I don't really like to label myself or people in that way.'

She was right. Darn it if I didn't take a look at myself later on and feel slightly like one of those Baptist ladies that ask you if your saved in the check out line. I was the New Age crazy person. But it's not so much I want to label people, but that I'm 'grouping' in my head. It's just a weird thing I do- which doesn't mean one group is better or worse, it's just a strange thing. Whatever you are is accepted, I just kinda want to know how you got there.

Which just brings me back to the new guy. Maybe he had what might've seemed a pushier way, but wasn't that what he was asking all along? :) It's odd how the train of thought often loops back to where it started. Much love, Kat

*unless you're getting paid for it. Then half-assed is truly half-assed.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

-Georgia O'Keefe

Amy Winehouse

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqSKVv6YO8g

Huge Amy fan, so this is just the pits.

If you haven't seen this AW Valerie video, it's one of my faves.

Sending good thoughts to you, Miss Winehouse.

You were a treasure.

I have been crying for two hours.
Don't even look at me. Seriously. I have had it.
Ticketmaster Customer Service, you have done the equivalent of bashing my brains in with a rusty hammer. I can't take it!
Well' it's obvious I'm having a very very bad day. :(
So I waited one afternoon to buy tickets online for Adele (sweet sweet Adele!) at the Tabernacle. While it sold out in 30 minutes, I got through! And thrilled the girlies. We were going to Adele! Very cool. But Adele got sick, and it was postponed.
I recieved an email. Adele has been moved to the Fox Theater! Online Presale Only, use this number (which is my previous order number). Cool, I thought. Sounds easy enough. I'll sit a half hour early, have everything ready, and get Fox tickets. Not cool. :(
It would not let me enter my presale number. So I've called over and over. Finally what it amounts to is this...They see that I had the original tickets, and tell me it shows I have not purchased tickets to the Fox show. But it also shows that someone used my presale number and bought three tickets already, and only one purchase per presale number can be used.
"Who bought those tickets? What address are they going to?"
"We cannot tell you that."
"But you can see I did not buy those tickets! That's my presale number! How can someone that doesn't match my previous order name use my presale number???"
"We can't answer that."

Motherfuck.

So they say, "Wait by the phone and someone should contact you within the next 24 hours (while the tickets are selling out) to maybe resolve this and perhaps give you a new presale number, but Ticketmaster cannot." I'm screwed. And now I'm just a slobbery mess, my nose running down my shirt and no relief in site. Where are those little finder angels when you need them?

A long time ago I'd read that there were finder angels who helped you, say you lost your keys, you could silently call upon, 'finder angel, I can't find my keys again...' and then of course they'd turn up. Maybe finder angels were only a nice though all along. And if not, really, finder angels, i'd like you to search for whoever typed in random numbers until one worked (mine) and bashed they're brains in with that same rusty hammer. But a real one.

Oh, that's terrible. God help me.

I think I need some pie. Blueberry or blackberry. A la mode. I know food is not a remedy for mental stress, and that's such a crap solution. Honestly, I have a twenty year class reunion coming up. Pie shouldn't even be an option, that last ten pounds seems so damned content. The last thing it needs is pie. But this situation is special.

Sometimes I think of my cousin Jack when I think of angels. I think of car rides with my mom driving the old catalina, the felt hanging low on their heads in front; me laying across the backseat, with my legs dangling out...feet in the wind. I think about laughing back then, because everything was funny. I think about how now when I see feet dangling out a car window it reminds me less of those times, and more of the idea that someone will lose toes to a mailbox or something. I wonder if I googled it if any toe loss from dangling feet would come up. And I wonder if Jack is still funny, wherever he is. I wonder if he hears me when I think my silent conversations up or out to him. I think of Joust on Atari and ramen noodles and silver aviator glasses. I think of cards. Crushing cans in the stairwell.

But Jack is gone. And I'm having a bad day, or I wouldn't even be going back to that.

later.

:(

observations

Stuff I observed this week..
The girls, talking in back while I was driving,
"Nationwide has it's own store? Wow! I didn't know that! Did you know that?"
"Cool! Progressive does too. I saw it the other day."
Hmmm.
I don't know how people without kids do it, how they make it without those random funny kid moments. You think your too grown up for your britches, shopping the Coldwater Creek store, then the kids'll pop up behind you, "Did you see that sign? It said 'Irregular!!!'"
Irregular. I think they watch too many commercials. Funny.
Last week when we took my man to eat Indian, I watched a woman finger-comb a fat guy's long hair. While I was eating. And I was disturbed.
Probably just jealous nobody was finger-combing my hair while I ate my paneer.
And then at the bookstore, there was this lady. So whenever I find a book, I always back away from the shelf, so I'm not in the way. because I'm nice. And lately I've thought I'd like to learn to draw caricatures, you know, the kind you find in malls and amusement parks. So I stroll to the Art and Drawing section, and there SHE is. Stuck to the wall like a Chiquita banana sticker on a refrigerator. Like a bug on a windshield. Guarding the wall like one of those dumb birds that lays eggs in your yard. SPRAWLED out ON the wall. She was literally making love to the wall. And as I walked around her to try and view books, her beady bird eyes watched me, never straying from her coital positioning. And it was just really weird, I was obviously intruding. So I walked away. I went back later. Didn't find anything.
Anybody know Contrary Guy? That guy who has a contrary opinion to everything you say? I was thinking of the neighbor the other day and it reminded me of that. Cause he hates blueberries. But he may really hate them, i don't know.
I hate to go to the dentist now. Super Excited! Wish I could stay and hang out :).