You can call me "Perky Dumplin"

Last night I when I got home from LT's, Brandon and Alpha were talking in the living room and I took to the bedroom with the laptop with the idea that I'd check my e-mail/google reader real quick and then read. (Yeah right. I never get on the internet real quick.) I saw that Chrystal, my BFF from high school, had a new post and when I started reading it, I began laughing. Quietly at first, then louder and louder. It was a kind of laughter reminiscent of hiccups, rising in small unpredictable bursts, and growing with intensity until I had to go read the entry aloud to the boys in the other room. They thought it was funny, but not as funny as I did, since I have met Mama Ann and heard various accounts of her through the years that I'd define as "tragically hilarious." The blog post reminded me of why Chrystal was my best friend all the way through high school, because she was the most hilarious person I knew, and could tickle my funny bone relentlessly. She was so ballsy about it, and the best evidence I can think of would be the time in which she drove her ex's huge truck into a old car that his parents owned, several times, just to entertain the both of us. I think this incident might have made me pee in my britches a little bit.

We've been taking a lot of walks in the afternoon on days when the weather's lovely. Yesterday was the kind of day that makes living in the South so satisfying. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say it was the kind of day that makes living satisfying, but something about the route we took felt so deliciously Memphis to me. We scrambled up the rise to the train tracks right around Central & Cooper and were happily surprised to come across thick curtains of blooming wisteria, which is heady with the most amazing perfume this time of year. We were right around the area where Brandon took this picture a couple of weeks ago:

There are similar pix from the same day here, if you're interested.

Because I was ingrained with a healthy (unhealthy?) sense of fear by my parents, at first when B suggested walking along the tracks, I was skeptical of imminent death by trains and homicidal bums. I couldn't help but remember the opening of Fried Green Tomatoes, in which Buddy's shoe becomes stuck in the tracks and he meets his maker at the tender age of 17. However, like the many times when my dear husband's lack of fear has trumped my overly cautious nature, we strolled leisurely along without incident and had a lovely time.

Reviewing yesterday, I think it was nearly the perfect spring day. Sunshine, simple delicious food, a reminder of the intellectual & comical prowess of women I am lucky enough to know, and spiritual & physical communion with my dear, dear partner.

Signed, Mary Sunshine

Ree. Dick. You. Lus.

Keywords that brought people to my blog... thanks, Google Analytics. Now I've got approximately 22% less faith in humanity.

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I guess this blog has a strong beastiality/incest vibe.

Why can't I ever get my sugar?

Everyone reading this will be glad to know that I have moved to a new desk at work and am now in the part of our building that can be called cozy. In fact, yesterday afternoon, after I got settled in, if I had wanted to, I could have described the climate in my cube as "stuffy," but after bringing a space heater back from my lunchbreak with me last week, I didn't dare breathe a word of complaint.

By the way, do y'all know where I work? I mean, I'm pretty sure you know what I do, but do you know precisely where I drive to every day to do my clickity-clackity?

That's right, my humble office is right next to the Crystal Palace. WHICH WAS FEATURED IN HUSTLE N FLOW. Yes. We rented the movie not long after we moved here, because I had never seen it, and I was pretty excited for about 30 seconds. I have no idea if the parking lot is as jumpin' on the weekends as the film makes it look, but this guy's Flickr caption is funny and makes it seem like it could be true.

(I just reread this paragraph and I'm pretty sure I have written about this before. I'm like a senile grandmother in the fact that I repeat all my stories over and over again all the time. But I'm pretty sure that last time I didn't go to the trouble of stealing a picture from someone's Flickr to illustrate my point, so Goddammit, I'm letting it ride. Just like a granny does.)

The wedding this weekend was just smashing. The combination of Matt (gosh he looks so attractive in those photos it causes me to feel embarrassed)+ Kerry (the cutest person alive, I'm pretty sure)+ Earnestine & Hazel's really could not be beat though, you know? They had sausage from the Rendezvous. Vivian, one of the people who reopened E&H in the mid-nineties was upstairs telling stories about Ray Charles fucking whores and lots of other incredibly interesting things that I was a tad too buzzed to pay the appropriate amount of attention to. All of my favorite Memphis family of friends were there, except for David and Amy, who are in Goddamned Hawaii. There was a moment late in the evening when Ben made me dance with him and it was a little bit like some mid-nineties teen comedy in which a ugly duckling blossoms into a swan. Except every time I make a 180 degree turn on the dance floor I lose all focus of what my body was doing in the moment before. It is my personal dance reset button. Plus, at the end of the night, when legendary Nate, the upstairs bartender, was going to work, I shook his hand.

I'm sure anyone who looks in on this beastly thing from time to time remembers just a few weeks ago when I was whining and complaining about my job. I hated doing it, but it felt like it had to be done, or else I was going to go batshit ratshit crazy. When that was going on, I decided I needed a creative little project to take my mind off my troubles, so I started working on a zine. I had never made one before, just been the recipient of ones made by cooler friends. So I typed and cut and glued and now it's very nearly done, I just have to stick in a couple of more things and make a trip to Kinko's. As a reward for the pain and boredom you must have felt when reading a middle-class white woman's woes over a career she chose for herself, I am offering you, dear reader, one free cooking zine entitled "Beans & Cornbread," to be delivered to your home via USPS. All you have to do is send me a little email with yr name and address to longtallanimal@gmail.com, and I myself will incur the expense of copying and mailing a copy of the little booger into your open arms. I know that sometimes people charge like $2 for a zine, but who's gonna buy a zine from me? It's not like I'm Kathleen Hanna or something!

I fear this last comment has showed my age a bit. Oh well, I wasn't fooling anyone anyway, was I? By the way, my friend used to be pen pals with Kathleen and the letter she'd received from her would always be written in crayon. Bitchin.

I am off to work some more, and also to listen to some Bikini Kill. I will close with a Youtube video of the BK song "Carnival," one of my favorites of all time. The first mix CD I ever made for B Dill had this song on it, and I think I got cool points for it. The opening of this song is possibly the most compelling thing I've ever heard, lyrically. Heh heh heh. NSFW (the song, not the video).

And I craved I ate hearts of sharks...

I've been getting ready for the wedding of the Radio Sweethearts today (which included defunktifying my feet... Lord God, they were scary!) but I took an internet break and came across this new Neko Case video. Because I believe in beating a musical dead horse by continuing to talk about NC on my blog, I'm posting it. At least Ashley will appreciate it. 

It's adorable!

Everything that's so shallow is everything about me

It's heartening to have the weather get warm, but unfortunately along with this phenomenon comes the incessant hum of the air conditioning unit in my workplace. All day yesterday and so far today I've been goosebumped freezing with a rush of cold air sweeping over me for 8.5 hours solid. I've taken to the blanket once again, which I had retired for awhile. It's a wool - I think, it's pretty itchy - patchwork blanket that my mother gave me when I was bitching about the freezing temps around here during a visit to her house. It's lap-sized, and came from my grandmother's house. I remember laying underneath it on her couch when I was too sick to go to school when I was a little girl. I never liked it because it was so itchy, but I have to admit that in my arctic office world, it is serving me quite well.

The above paragraph shows that no matter how great something is, like warm weather, bitches like me can always come up with newer and more exciting ways to complain about it. I just realized that. I didn't mean it like that! I don't want to bitch on this blog! I'm serious! I'm so tired of whineasses on the internets.

Let's talk about something nice. The roller derby. I went for the first time this Saturday, and I really liked it. Beforehand, I wasn't even particularly in the mood to drink, but I felt as if alcohol was kind of REQUIRED for the experience for some reason, so we bought a bottle of Seagram's whiskey, which we kept in the car and took turns going to sip. Because that's how we roll.

So, the derby. Never before have I wished to have a young daughter like I did when seeing those righteous ladies muscle their away around each other. Something about seeing all those women with such different bodies show such strength and guts made me feel empowered about my own womanlyness, my own body and its imperfections. There is nothing like believing in the power of our sex; it's something that I do with certainty every day, but an experience like I had on Saturday night makes it more real, validates it for me.

Speaking of bodily imperfections, I had a small revelation the other day. I was reading some comments on Jezebel... possibly on this post. Of course, I've been thinking about the media's mindfuck of women's body images for years now, and discussing it with fervor with likeminded ladies whenever I have the chance. But it wasn't until I was scrolling through these comments that I had the revelation: "This applies to you, too." I think I have always considered it well and good for other women to stop feeling shame, guilt, and revulsion over their bodies, but that when it came to me, the worse I felt about my "problem areas," the better off I was, because that guilt could serve as a reminder to keep myself in check. (Not that I do a particularly good job of it, but it is hard to live in a culinary climate like the city of Memphis sometimes! Fat = Delicious). And so it took nearly 28 years but I think I have started to learn that I shouldn't hold myself to the standards of the internet, or magazines, or even cute college girls on the street; the ones with smooth brown legs and tiny perfectly fitted dresses. If I am going to be a happy woman, and even more importantly, a good mother someday, I need to stop giving myself looks with such a critical eye and try to simply be strong and healthy.

End bodyhate women's studies rant. I was talking to Lindsey last night at the P&H, and we were discussing the women's studies classes at MTSU, and how they were basically group therapy. It was LT's spot-on diagnosis, and it had never occurred to me so exactly before. The conversation arose because I mentioned how I had once watched a documentary that intercut Jody Foster's rape scene in The Accused with booty-shaking rap videos. In turn, this snippet had arose, because unfortunately, on the TVs at the bar, Death Wish II was on, which has umpteen graphic rape scenes. This is rape-trauma #2 for the P&H and honestly, I don't know if I can return. I may have to start taking my occasional beer drinking to The Cove instead. I want to sip beer without seeing my worst nightmares being played out across 27", thankyouverymuch.

What am I doing, exactly? And why?

Do you ever feel so restless that it seems like your muscle-covered skeleton might leap right out of your skin and run away without you? I feel like that lately.
The way I'm living my life is getting to me, I reckon. Earlier in the week I had a complete breakdown about my current work situation. I've calmed down now, which is nice, because it means I don't have to direct my face toward the inside of my cubicle and try to cry covertly. Plus I ran out of Kleenex last week, so I couldn't even mop at my face and nose when I was done, I just had to let it dry naturally. Which feels as weird as when there's no TP and you have to "drip dry," as we called it when I was growing up. (Some people use humor to diffuse emotional talk... I use potty scenes).

So I've choo-choo'd past the self-hatred phase of this lovely epiphany and now I'm in Confusion Corner. Which is in the same zip code as the Desperation District, apparently.

I'll cut the shit now. I feel at my very core that something is wrong with the way I'm living my life. I feel like I know the truth, and that is that all of us don't have to participate in society in the normal way. I'm so close to being free. I don't have a mortgage, or a child, and these are things I don't have on purpose at this moment, so that if I wanted to or needed to, I could step out of the life I'm living now with relative ease. But the problem is that I have a big voice inside myself that tells me I need to do what's practical, what's responsible. The voice is the one that wakes me up in the morning and ushers me along to work. It has some big points, like health insurance (fucking health insurance!), and sometimes it ticks ticks with an annoying insistence about the fact that neither myself nor the tiny eggs inside me are getting any younger.

The battle between these two parts of myself is getting more heated every day. They're both so insistent that sometimes the psychic force of their collision feels like an actual vibration in my head and chest and stomach. I know, I sound like a crazy person. But honestly, I just don't give a shit anymore. I am tired of being careful. Blog entries in which the person is depressed are really boring, but it's just as boring to tiptoe around your personal dysfunction just because you never know who's watching. And I don't feel depressed! I feel like I'm 10 seconds away from bursting out of myself! WHO'S WITH ME! ?!?

Bueno bueno bueno

Because I haven't blogged lately and inspiration didn't seem to be dawning from within, I thought that I would take a cue from my dear friend, who, in turn, took a page from Martha Stewart Living, and write about just a few things that I think are good. In other words...

Good Things!

1. The other night I was terribly depressed about something really boring, and in order to cheer me up, after we went to bed, Brandon only whispered. He kept whispering everything he had to say to me, and it made me laugh and laugh and laugh. It might have been the mere whispering itself, or it might have been the fact that his personality changed a bit, into someone more prudish -- a goody-two-shoes seventh grader crossed with a librarian, I'd say -- but it did the trick and I managed to cheer up in time to shuffle off to dreamland.

2. The coming of Spring, and its little details, including the sprouts that have been successful in our kitchen. Black Beauty Zucchini is very eager for the sun; only the peppers and one type of tomatoes have proven unenthusiastic. The fact that the next time I visit my mom's house, it will be the beginning of April, and more than likely, sunny and breezy enough to fly kites, and since it'll be my Decatur County birthday weekend, we'll do this very thing, like we did last year and the year before. Those are nice things. I had the idea to buy a croquet set or some kind of outdoor game thingy too. Which, really, just makes me think of Heathers.

4. The new Neko Case album, which you can preview for free on NPR right now, and Ashley was kind enough to burn for me. I think I will buy it when it comes out anyway because if there's anybody I want to give $13.99 to, it's Ms. Case. She is the nearly always the first person I put on the list when pressed by some social networking tool to list musical interests.

5. Tofu. I can't get enough tofu. Usually when I'm not eating tofu, I'm sitting around fantasizing about it. Liz gave me the ultimate tofu advice that has changed my tofu-life. FREEZE THE TOFU. That's right, freeze the tofu, thaw the tofu, press the tofu, cook the tofu. Cook it like this and it's cheap and easy but incredibly satisfying. Especially if you steam the potatoes, I have to say.