Long Tall Animals

i do my best but i'm made of mistakes

2009-11-13T08:37:00.004-06:00

Today someone shared the posters for the new Alice in Wonderland in Google reader, and it reminded me (and I swear this is true) that when I was a child, before I started school, there was a recurring nightmare I only had when I had been read my Little Golden Book version of AiW. In the dream, I was always lost in Wonderland, unable to find my mother, and FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. I was a neurotic child. The only bad dreams I can still remember to this day from when I was 3-4 years old are the ones in which I was without my mother and struggling to do something alone. The other one that stands out in my memory is one in which I was, at 4 years old, driving my mother's burgundy Mercury down the winding country road leading to our house, crying hysterically while being chased by a tiger. The car looked something like this:

Please note that is not our house. I believe it may be a screencap from "Uncle Buck." (Do you remember those pancakes he makes for Macaulay Culkin's birthday? Talk about UNREALISTIC.)

Anyway.

I have avoided writing because I felt like such a Debbie Downer for six weeks or so. I have always been pretty much unable to write without automatically spilling into the kind of self-confession that will automatically inform any casual passerby about nearly every facet about my state of mind. (This made for some regrettable Myspace blogs before I came over here, trust me. Nothing more embarrassing than realizing you have shared anything of import on MYSPACE for God's sakes). So I stayed in a little hole for awhile, crying spontaneously in the car twice a week or so over the baby, the baby, the baby, but then the sun came out and I shook myself off and I'm back in the world of people who enjoy living. For now, anyway. My due date would have been right at Christmas and things will be up in the air until then, and that time will be shitty, I think, and then it will be over. Not really over, but at least the day will be done with, and I'll be very glad when it passes.

Let's talk about something else. I went to a lot of shows in November, and I've been left shaking my head and whimpering under my breath "Never again." Actually, all the shows were awesome in one way or the other, but Neko Case at Minglewood pushed me over the edge as far as general admission rock shows go. The problem is that people are Stupid Inconsiderate Asshole Fuckers. I'm not speaking of people who enjoy the act of anal sex, no no. I'm talking about Assholes who act like Fuckers at shows I paid $28 to attend. Yes ma'am.

I was so, so excited to see Ms. Case, right here in my hometown. So excited that I collaborated with Ashley la Rouge on a small art quilt that we gave to Neko at the end of the show. (More on that later). However, my parade was rained on slightly by the fact that although we had to share the premium space at the foot of the stage with Asshole Fuckers who seemed to be from some bumblefuck rural area outside of Memphis. I think they were rural dipshits due to bits and pieces of conversation I overheard in which the following terms were used: "Black people," "faggot," and "retard." I'm not suggesting that everyone who hails from the country uses such terminology, don't get me wrong. There are fine, fine people from the country who know how to act in a public setting. However, generally the Asshole Fuckers who don't know better are unenlightened about codes of conduct because they've spent the last 20 years of their life in a place where they're surrounded solely by people who share their ethnicity, religion, and prejudices. AND OH GOD IS THAT ANNOYING. Ok, there was a little Anthropology by Amanda (I know what I'm talking about. These are My People). There was one Rural Asshole Fucker (the one standing right by me, of course), who was particularly objectionable. He had long fingernails, which gave me bad flashbacks of the guys my ex hung out with in high school -- they were nice guys but those fingernails are disgusting. Truly. Right before Neko & the band came out, he shouted "Bring that bitch out!" and continued to yell dumbass things throughout the whole thing. And during the entirety of every song he knew the words to, he SANG VERY LOUDLY in an out-of-tune, drunken fashion. It was disgusting.

God, I'm sorry I'm such an old lady, but I just can't do it anymore! I can't! I can't share space with drunken 20 year olds who insist on ruining live music that I care about! Jeeeeeeeeeeeeez. Whew.

Here's the quilt:
(Also, here's a link to a bigger picture because that one is kind of small and shitty). I made the top right and bottom left-hand squares, and Ashley made the others. We were really pleased with it. I shook it at Neko and gave it to her at the end of the set. It was ridiculous because the first time I tried I didn't wave it excitedly enough and she didn't see it, and I got really nervous and my heart started pounding and I was practically shaking. I got that freaked out trying to hand a small piece of fabric to a singer that I like... can you imagine what it would be like if I ever had to go to war, or maybe even be in a car wreck? Jesus Christ.

tain't what you do (it's the way that you do it)

2009-10-26T14:29:00.006-05:00

Now, have I been quiet because I haven't had anything to say? Or is it quite the opposite? Do I have TOO much to say? Or maybe it's that I have too much I can't say. That's probably it. Usually it. I find that I haven't written a blog of substance in so long that I have a hard time trusting my own sense of spelling.

October is drawing to a close. I am not scouring thrift stores for costume components; rather, I hate to tell you, I am a bit of a party pooper when it comes to dressing up. I like the idea of it, sure, but I always find myself limited by one thing or another. This year I am going to a show on Halloween night, and feel no pressure to dress up.

Although I've been such an underachiever in keeping up here, luckily I can peek up at the calendar above my computer and give you a pleasant run-down of my month, however.

Friday, October 2: "Brandon 29! GT!" My husband turned 29 (gasp. We are swiftly approaching 30 and, don't get me wrong, I don't think 30's old or anything, but you have to admit... it's sort of a milestone) and to reinforce our own mortality, we stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a crowd of people and saw Girl Talk at Minglewood Hall. Judging by the black "Xs" scrawled on their hands in sharpie, a LOT of the audience was under 21, rather than older. It was the perfect birthday present for B, however, who loves GT soooo much, and beat back flu-like symptoms enough to dance his ass off in the hot sweaty throng of children. He even saw a trio of nineteen-year-olds three-way-kissing, and what better gift can one receive? After shaking our asses as hard as we could, we came back home, where B watched LOST on Hulu and I read my newest cookbook. Postively riotous.

Friday, October 9: "Claire." My 12-year-old niece came and spent the weekend with us. My mom delivered her on Friday, and spent the night. We went to the Farmer's Market and Elmwood Cemetery before she left on Saturday, and after Claire & I went to Graceland and Muddy's to buy cupcakes. We made pizzas that night and her crust was perfect (unlike mine). She saw me drink a beer, and did not seem to be disturbed (no drinking in front of the kiddos at my mom's house, unless you sneak it). We had a really nice time, and after I delivered her back to her mom on Sunday, I went to the Whitton Farms Octoberfeast with Brandon and Liz & co. It was worth every penny, and I have to say that Jill & Keith Forrester should win some sort of "cute farmers" contest. I love them. Their farm was glorious, and the sun came out just long enough to make the day perfect-o.

October 16-18: "Chattanooga." We went to visit our brother & sister-in-law in Chattanooga. We ate too much (of course) and went to a bitching used book store where we spent too much money, and just had a nice chill hang-out weekend with them. Our sis is an artist, and we bought a gorgeous painting from her, which made me really excited. I always see art in other people's homes, and envy it, and since we have a little bit of money right now, we agreed that the only way to aquire art is to start buying it. This was our favorite of all the pieces that she had:

So now I'm kind of caught up, right?

Also... I have to admit that there is a lot that I just don't want to talk about here.

Too Good Not to Post

2009-10-06T13:33:00.002-05:00

Ok, I was looking at Ye Olde Google Analytics today and had to share this new collection of search terms entered that brought people to this blog.

First we've got the classics:
animal dicks
animal love nsfw
animals pussy breast milk sex video
beastiality/breast feeding animals

Then it gets personal:
amanda fucking animal

Then there's your random WTF shit:
look hot for high school reunion
ole long dick
orphans at christmas early hallmark
sexylady in zoo
smokey mountian kin vol 3

Eventually we get into WTFF(fuckity fuck) territory:
i must pee when i fuck
is there dog pee in coors light

And sometimes it's even a little bit poetic:
travel because of heartache
utube. ladysex

give me that old fashioned morphine

2009-09-18T08:22:00.003-05:00

It is raining in Memphis and it has been all week. We go through a monsoon at least once a season it seems, which is generally OK. I remember the draught that threatened to dry up my mom's spring in 2007, and as a daughter of the rural South, I know that rain is a good thing, but this dump of precipitation is threatening the Cooper Young festival tomorrow, so for now, I say "RAIN! Go! Away!" so that I can stroll around drinking beer out of a plastic cup and looking at arts & crafts which I probably won't buy. I am not completely broke as a joke, but seeing as how I just got a half check the last two pay periods, I will be coasting on fumes as the month runs out. Boy, I hate that. That is what leaving work for two weeks to see cool shit will do to you.

Paychecks. With the same regularity of Memphis monsoons, I experience a crushing disappointment in myself quarterly with this fucking job I hate. I go to work and come home & go to work and come home & go to work and then come home unable to smile or laugh one day. Then I lament loudly, in a really boring fashion, about how much it SUCKS, how STUPID I am to have gotten myself into this position, WHAT ON EARTH will ever change, how I have NO SKILLS, etc. etc. etc. Usually by the next day it is gone, because, well, what's the point.

All of this is accompanied by Brandon's insistance that we don't have to keep doing any of this. We don't have to have an apartment, I don't have to have a 9-5 job; we don't have to live or stay anywhere for longer than we want to. We've seen enough of the world and people thriving in it leading unconventional lives to know that it works. We have this bundle of money in the bank that sits and waits for us to do something with it, and over the last six months we have made all sorts of different plans for it. I am terrified of doing anything; I am terrified of doing nothing.

A few months ago we were going to have a baby, and now we are not, and I can't say that I don't think about it every day. I think about it when I see a fat pregnant stomach; I think about it when I interview women who, in this city where the infant mortality rate is absolutely stunning, have managed to push out 2 or 4 or even 6 babies under a banner of poverty & stress. I wonder why & when & how, and then I just sit quietly with it all. I don't feel depressed by it, I don't get in a really sad mood about it, it's just always there, reminding me that I won't have something that I thought I would.

So I think about having a baby; I think about buying a house in this city that I do really love. I think about putting all our stuff in storage and cutting the strings for awhile. I think about moving to the field behind my mother's house and planting a really huge garden and living out of a camper. And I think and I think and I think...

And then I get up, walk the dog, take a shower & come to work again.

Trips & Travel, Quatro

2009-09-02T15:40:00.011-05:00

The drive from the Grand Canyon to Zion was about 5 hours long, which is a breeze on a trip in which you drove as much as we did. The drive took us through the scrubbier beige parts of the desert into my favorite, the red parts (Do these descriptions sound Kindergarten-ish?). It also took us through the Indian reservations, which are just... Oh man. I am not kidding at all when I say that the White Guilt was heavy upon me when we drove through those reservations. There were roadside stands with handpainted signs to attract tourists, one of which said, "NICE INDIANS." This was single-handedly, one of the most depressing things I have ever seen in my life. When I think of what our nation has done to those people, it just makes me want to cry and cry and cry. Even though the nice thing to do would have been to stop and buy something from them, we just couldn't deal with it at all and drove past.

We ate lunch at a pizza buffet in Kanab, UT, that was staffed only with children. (I would prefer to keep this as much a mystery to you guys as it was to us, and offer no explanation. We did not get one.) We ate a lot of pizza, and the bloat and the heat made me sleepy and unenthusiastic. When we arrived at the park, however, the FAB (fuckin awesome beauty) woke my ass up. Behold! Pictures! (Finally, can you believe it? Although these are repeats to my FB friends and readers of GST. Sorry 'bout that.)

This is probably indicative of the first sights I saw when we entered the park. Like I said, I was all full of pizza and slightly grumpy and groggy from the "road soda" I had consumed on the way in, and the sky, the huge fucking boulders, they were pretty cool, but I wasn't threatening to piss & shit myself like I was when I started seeing things like this:

The Virgin River runs right through Zion, and has formed the canyon. Learning how it has done so, and how many years it has taken, makes geology seems really, really fascinating.

Cliffs like the one above were formed from sand dunes that existed where Zion is today thousands of years ago. The sand dunes in Utah were 3,000 feet deep! Or tall! However you want to look at it. One bus driver told us that, in comparison, the dunes in the Sahara are 250 feet high. Doesn't all of this knowledge make you feel just crazy?

Above is the formation known as "The Great White Throne." All of the rock towers had similarly weirdish and/or forbidding names. (Although in Googling for some other names of landmarks at Zion, I am reminded that they were biblical, so maybe my heathen bias is showing... but seriously, "The Altar of Sacrifice"?)

We had all afternoon and most of the next day to explore Zion before heading to Vegas, where we'd catch our flight home Saturday morning. We didn't do anything major the first day, just a couple of short hikes to check things out. On the second day Brandon woke me up not long after the sun rose and we took off to hike the Narrows.

Like I mentioned earlier, the canyon was formed by the Virgin River, which runs right through the park. When you first drive into the park, the canyon is quite wide, but as you drive further into it, the canyon narrows until, at the end of the Riverside trail, it is only passable by foot, through the river itself. Since the high temp that day was 105 degrees, it turned out to be the perfect day to go for a hike up the narrows.

The river only got a little deep in a couple of places, and you can see how deep it got by the watermarks on our shorts. Those are my camp counselor shorts, by the way.

We didn't intend to spend as many hours as we did in the Narrows, but it was so, so gorgeous that we couldn't stop ourselves from going further and further. We hiked in 3 miles, which meant we hiked out 3 miles, and didn't leave the park until late afternoon.

And now for the conclusion of my travelogue.

Las Vegas, NV.

People love Las Vegas, it seems. Flights to the city are cheap, which indicates to me that it's a popular destination. There's a shit-ton of hotels, and gambling, and titties. When we arrived at our hotel, the Sahara (the cheapest on the strip that didn't seem really really manky), I hadn't bathed in 3 days or so, and had spent the same amount of time immersed in the natural grandeur of the American West. I got out of the car while Brandon navigated the valet parking abortion (even though it was free, we parked ourselves. I can walk, you know). It was hot as fuck in Vegas, all that concrete and defeat had sucked any kind of coolness out of the city. I went in the hotel, through the casino, and was greeted by this bizarre assortment of overly groomed girls in short summer dresses, grandmas on oxygen, skeezy dudes of all ages, and, oddly enough, a seemingly high concentration of disabled people. Every kind of disabled you can imagine, they were spending their SSI checks at the Sahara on August 21, 2009. It was so, so weird & depressing, and I started to feel like Hunter S. Thompson in the Fear & Loathing movie when everyone looked like weird dinosaur lizard people. So, after I had eaten my tuna melt in the 24 hour cafe at the Sahara, I said, "Thanks but no thanks, Las Vegas," and went to sleep. Vegas is not my kind of city. I can't understand how it's fun to go on a vacation where the purpose of the whole thing is to lose a bunch of money! I mean, you spend enough money travelling already!

So, all in all, it may have been one of the best trips we have ever taken together. I am not kidding when I say that we didn't have one fight the whole trip. Sure, we got annoyed with each other a few times, but there was never one of those shitty fights that can erupt when you're in a car together for so many hours. We logged more than 2500 miles in 11 days, drank approximately 6 bottles of $2 chuck, ate 6+ fish tacos, and married off our dear brother & got a sister. You can see a shit-ton of pictures on FB, if you're interested.

Personally, I'm just glad I can go back to blogging about real life again.

Trips & Travels, Vol 3

2009-08-26T18:54:00.010-05:00

Damn, I didn't mean to have a gap this big in between trip reports, but believe it or not I have been BUSY at work. However, I am determined to get this done, so here we go again.

All right. Last you heard, we were in California witnessing the loving union of our dear brother & sister-in-law. Then we went to sleep, woke up, packed, and once again hit the road. We were heading the Arizona & the Grand Canyon, but first I wanted to go to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano. It is where the swallows return to roost every year, and supposedly "the jewel of the California missions." It was indeed beautiful, and we did what tourists do at such destinations, walked around, gawked, pretended to read the captions at a variety of historical markers, etc. After wards we ate some RFA (really fucking awesome) Mexican food near the mission. The town was very charming and so was the saucy pork I ate with corn tortillas. We swung by Trader Joe's to buy some car-food (I can't even talk about TJ's. I realize that I am 5 years behind on this, but good Lord! I couldn't even believe HOW CHEAP everything was. Food that would be considered swank and therefore expensive in Memphis, TN was amazingly thrifty. Not to mention our dear, dear friend Charles Shaw), then set off into the desert.

The desert was hot and dry. I know I'm blowing your mind here. I am not much of a desert person; some people love it, but there were really only parts of it I found appealing. It seems like every 70 miles or so you pop into a "town" that has a gas station and maybe a few small buildings, and you think "What in the fuck are these people doing out here?" and all of a sudden, even though I haven't even seen it, everything became very The Hills Have Eyes-ish, and I couldn't help but imagine the inhabitants of these outposts, their leathery skin, their desire for rape and flesh-eating. That's very unfair, I realize, and I hope some desert-dweller doesn't happen upon this blog. Sorry guys.

The next day we were visiting the Grand Canyon so we drove through the night until we were in the national forest about 30 minutes outside the GC. We had been schooled by G that camping in national forests is a free-for-all, and we were so tired and chilly that we just slept in the car. My mind raced for about five minutes with thoughts of bloodthirsty hillbillies before I dropped off into an uncomfortable night's sleep. I woke up off and on all night with a kind of anxious tightness in my chest, which I couldn't figure out since I wasn't THAT worried about being hacked to death in my sleep. The next day I figured out that the altitude was to blame, when walking 30 feet had me panting slightly.

OK, so the Grand Canyon. The first sight that greeted me was not the massive, stunning canyon itself, but actually a Japanese man pursuing a squirrel with a potato chip, making kissy noises. Despite the fact that there were only, oh, I don't know, 30 signs in the immediate vicinity asking that no one feed any animals. Past Mr. Japanese Potato Chip Man laid the Grand Canyon... Wow. "Wow" with a period behind it kind of summed up my feelings about it. Yes, it is huge and it's crazy how huge it is, and the colors of the cliffs are really gorgeous, but I wasn't as bowled over as I thought I would be. Maybe it was the haze that hung in the air that prevented us from getting a crisp view, maybe it's the fact that we are inundated with images of the GC all of our lives, but I guess I felt kind of underwhelmed? I know the preceding sentences make me sound like a spoiled bored baby, but don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to take a shit on our beautiful national jewel. For me, I just didn't feel overwhelmed, which is how I expected to feel. Brandon thought that perhaps my feelings would be different if we had the time and stamina to go down to the bottom of the canyon, and I can imagine how that would be so, so different and just BIGGER. We chose a trail to hike, the Bright Angel trail, which only went 1.5 miles down into the canyon. I say only, but when you're coming up that 1.5 miles and you're as physically inept as me, that 1.5 miles is humiliating as fuck. Especially when there are a lot of skinny French people everywhere. I'm not obese, but good Lord, I'm not French either. The most insulting part of the whole thing is that I'm pretty sure they were drinking cream instead of water to stay hydrated, and still they're just so lithe and JUDGEMENTAL.

You don't think I'm being paranoid about the French, do you?

I picked up a fantastic new bathroom book in the gift shop, Over The Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. If you click that little link, you will see the really fantastic cover, which features both a rainbow AND a skeleton. This book answers the question "How many people have fallen off this shit?" and many, many more. Personally, I think the creepiest stories are ones of people dying from exposure, going off into the canyon terribly unprepared for the heat & dehydration. Although some of the stories of people falling off the rim made me pretty creeped out as well, given Brandon's propensity to leap around on rocks that are high in the air all in the name of photography. As his domestic partner, I certainly don't want to "break" him of anything, but man, oh man, sometimes these vacations that involve high altitudes make me wish I had some of his sperm frozen.

We said goodbye to the Grand Canyon on Thursday morning and headed north to our final destination: Zion National Park. B had gotten his info from his brother, who lived out west for a good while and went to a good number of parks out there; G & almost everyone we talked to agreed that Zion was The Place To Go... and they were totally right.

Ok, I am going to wrap it up in the next entry. Then I will be done talking about our vacation, and I'm sure everyone who did not go on a vacation this summer will be very pleased.

Trips & Travels, Vol II

2009-08-26T13:34:00.006-05:00

Ok, I said I'd be back and here I am. Back. As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I have been feasting on tomatoes from my mom's garden, cottage cheese, tuna & crackers for lunch today, and all the rest of this week as well. It is the Patsy-Lunch-Special; my mother ate this lunch many, many days of her own boring office job. It's pretty tasty. Also sounds like diet food from the 70s.

I mentioned in the last post that we stayed in a cheap motel on the first night of our PCH adventure; this was not our intention, mind you. Brandon and I are Cheap Ass Travelers; we will only accept The Worst & Thriftiest in terms of lodgings, and we had (sort of) planned to camp out on these first two nights on the road. I had, in fact, reserved campsites at our two post-wedding destinations, but since Brandon seemed to be non-committal in the way of making definite plans, I decided to hold off on reserving anything for our two nights in the Big Sur area. I said to myself "Be cool. Adapt your husband's lassiez-faire attitude! Take that stick out of your ass and GO WITH THE FLOW." Well, what you don't find out when you don't plan is that both the private and public campsites in areas as spiritually rich as the one we were in? Those campsites fill up 6 months in advance. So instead of pitching a tent, we drove inland until we found a little independent crappy (but not scary) motel room. We took possession of a room with two Queen beds with the understanding that we could only use one bed and receive a reduced rate; however, B was so tired that when he got in bed with a dinky plastic cup of Shiraz, he promptly fell asleep, leaving an enormous crimson stain on the blanket and sheets. (Please comment with joke about broken hymen. I am too boring to think of one right now).

So we drove back down the coast the next morning, everything was as beautiful as the day before, plus there was a gathering of folks with classic cars that were driving down CA 1 in spurts that day. I am talking 1930s' Rolls Royces, not 1960s' Mustangs. I kept having the spooky feeling I had somehow been transported into The Great Gatsby, and kept checking the highway for the corpse of Myrtle. All along the cliffs there were gorgeous homes and the mere sight of them made me want to vomit with jealousy. (For some reason, on this trip, beauty kept inspiring me to vomit/piss/shit myself, which B found odd. After reading a Pablo Neruda poem to him in the car, I said "GOD, this just makes me want to murder someone!" which he found equally strange).

We stopped in the woods and sat on lovely, large Adirondack chairs that were in the middle of the Big Sur River, drinking coffee and taking pictures. We hiked on a couple of trails, and on our way down South stopped at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park, where there is a waterfall that pours into the ocean. Let me stop right now and reiterate: there is a motherfucking waterfall pouring into the motherfucking ocean. Once again, I fought off the urge to crap myself and soldiered on. We spent that night inside another cheap motel (I believe it was the Holland Inn in Morrow Bay, CA); I remember that this one had a really skanky throw pillow on the bed, and a dramatic picture of a single red rose on the wall, the kind of print that you can win at the fair if you're lucky.

We trucked ourselves back down to Orange County for the beginning of the pre-wedding festivities without incident, having some particularly tasty fish tacos in Santa Barbara on the way down. (Fish tacos may be the culinary highlight of the trip. I love you, fish tacos! You never do me wrong like warm rum in a hot tub!) Somehow, despite the snail-like pace of traffic in Los Angeles, we arrived back at our lovely sis-in-law's family's home right on time. Her family was just as wonderful, hospitable & sweet as our sis-in-law, E, is. They made us feel so welcome and just like we were part of their family, and it made the whole weekend so nice & easy.

Let me pause my already long as hell trip story to explain a little bit about my brother & sister-in-law, G&E. They are just a little bit younger than us, and we all get along really well. They are also big Avett fans so we usually try to go to shows together if it's geographically convenient, and in the past couple of years Brandon has grown really close to his brother, so we try to get together as often as possible. They are both smart, funny, and cute; they're like Brandon and I... only better. By better, I mean that E never says the C word like I do, and G doesn't harshly confront people about politics. Also, they eat less and exercise more than us. However, they love & accept us anyway, and through them I am experiencing the kind of sibling relationships I never even realized I longed for; we are family and we are friends, it's great.

We camped out in a dry creekbed the Friday night before the wedding (which was Monday afternoon) with a big group of G&E's friends, which included a large contingency from Bowling Green, KY, where they both went to college. We drank and ate cookies and saw a tarantula and I introduced the ladies to the amazing P-Style. Thanks to it, I indeed peed in style during all camping excursions. We spent the weekend hanging out with all kinds of friends and family, drinking at night with B's cousins that I was too much of a Frantic Southern Bride to hang out with during out wedding. They are all as cool and weird as I would expect anyone who shares the Dill bloodlines to be.

Monday morning we woke up and B dropped me off at the wedding site, where I helped E's mom & family do wedding prep. I was really happy to do this, because I feel like I have wedding karmic debt to pay off from all the fine ladies that helped my mom and I when we got married. They got married in a park overlooking the ocean; it was a really relaxed & sweet site. E's mom is the workingest work machine that I have ever met and was literally decorating and preparing 35 minutes before the wedding. She had to be shooed down to the hotel, where I watched her fix her hair, get dressed, and sew a panel on her dress in like 20 min. It was awesome.

So then they got married and everyone cried and I was so, so proud of them. I don't know why that's how I felt, I guess it's just so nice to see two people who you know are making the right decision. It's not like that at every wedding you go to, you know? And, as B said in his wedding toast, I think that we're just so excited that they're together and we get to share our lives with them, and someday our kids will grow up together. (I'd like to request a simultaneous awwww right now).

Still to come: canyons, panting, wading, (actual) camping, driving, driving driving!

Trips & travels, Vol. 1

2009-08-25T12:58:00.004-05:00

I have been a really terrible blogger lately, just as I was an underachieving diarist in elementary school and awful journal-er in high school (somehow I think those are and should be considered different). However, the good news is that upon my return to this lovely page I have done a lot and have much to report.

So, around 2.5 weeks ago, I straightened up my depressing cubicle, leaving things that people might need in neat, organized piles, and then I drove away from work cackling, since I was to be not only off work but also out of town for the next 15 days. Yes! I hope you know how much I love this feeling. Although airplanes themselves are uncomfortable, making Brandon's leg twitch involuntarily and my hair and face feel greasy, I cannot help but be exhilarated when I am dropped off at the airport. My favorite part is when you ditch your checked luggage and get to wander around buying coffee drinks and/or reading magazines (FOR FREE AND WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT) in the numerous Hudson News stands that dot each and every airport I have visited in the past two weeks, which have been quite a few, actually. I smell a monopoly.

I had been on an airplane not very many times when I met Brandon, but in the past 3 years that we have been together, we have flown this way and that, across oceans and up and down the eastern seaboard several times. I really like it, and when I am in a new place with him, I cannot help but quietly think "Thanks, babe."

Anyway. Let's at least DELAY the corny cheesiness, I may not be able to eradicate it entirely.

So we zipped up to New York for a friend's wedding. The state, not the city, mind you. It was a fast in & out kind of a trip, but invaluable for the simple lesson learned by yours truly: Do Not Get Wasted In A Hot Tub. There are all sort of scientific reasons, as it turns out, but for some reason, although I'm approaching 30 years of life, I had never been informed of the situation. When I woke up on Saturday, I had the worse hangover of the past 2 years at the very least, and although I was greeted when I was finally able to awaken at 1:00 p.m. by ibprofen, biscuits & gravy, and a tall boy Mountain Dew, I felt like hell for the rest of the day. I hate drinking. I love drinking. I hate it. I love it.

Anyway, the wedding was gorgeous, went off without a hitch, and since I was still suffering too much to indulge in the top shelf open bar, I was sober enough to drive everyone back to the other side of the lake in the bride's father's SUV. He is a judge, and I had never driven a judge's car before. It was... uncomfortable.

So we had one full day back in Memphis before we were to leave on our big trip, 11 days out West. B's brother was getting married in Orange County, CA, and we decided to take full advantage of our flight out there, and spend extra time seeing some sights. The last time I had been out to that part of the country, I was too young and trifling to appreciate any of it, and B has been wanting me to go out there with him for forever, so now was the time. We flew into Vegas, spent the night at our new sis-in-law's parents' house, and woke up really early the next morning and drove north to Monterey. Our plan was to drive south on the Pacific Coast Highway back down to the LA area, and we had 2.5 days to do it. Before we left, I had been checking things out, looking at the map, and one day I did a Google Image search for "Big Sur," (because I remembered the Kerouac book) and I came up with this:

So needless to say that I was RFE (really fucking excited). We spent part of the day walking around Monterey, where the water was full of a ton of jellyfish, great big blobby brains with streamers of tentacles hanging off on all sides, eating clam chowder, spying otters, briefly napping on the beach, and discovering the incredible cheapness of wine in California. Then we started our drive down CA 1. We wound out of Monterey, through Carmel, and then the trees cleared, we looked down, and there was the ocean.
And it was really & truly, the most stunning thing I have ever seen.

Seeing that stretch of coast makes me wish I was a much better writer. If I could express myself in a more beautiful way, maybe I could convey to anyone who would read this how much the crashing waves, the craggy cliffs, the blue water, the golden light made me feel. How much it made me feel. Brandon and I drove and stopped and drove and stopped, climbed on the rocks and took pictures, talking about the sealife, the plants, the waves, the tide, and how we felt unable to express the flood of emotions that we were both experiencing. We drove until it got dark, then turned around to find the cheapest motel we could, and then in the morning we did it again, travelling south to the parks around Big Sur, which are nestled in Redwood forests. That's right, you see all that incredible coastal beauty, then drive about 15 minutes to find yourself in Redwood forests. I couldn't believe it. I told B the whole thing made me want to laugh, cry, and piss my pants, all at the same time (sounds a little bit like a mushroom trip).

Unfortunately I have to go back to work now, but I am determined to blog about every part of this before I forget it all. So, installment #2, and hopefully pics to come. You can see B's first gallery of images here -- they're not pretty pictures as much as they are the things he really enjoys shooting.

Can't Title Now, Must Pee

2009-07-21T15:58:00.004-05:00

I was just listening to a particular Gillian Welch song, "Wrecking Ball," to be exact, that reminds me of the sore, sensitive end of a relationship that I shall not speak of in any detail. Even though I was the one who weaseled my way out of it, when I hear this song, I always think of a day when I was driving to work (down the highway from Murfreesboro to Smyrna, to be exact), and I heard it and my face crumpled up and approximately 3 hot wet tears escaped down my cheeks. That was pretty much all I could muster; I'm not trying to be cold, but lots of times if I am blue about something, I will have these bouts of near-crying, usually while driving my car. It's just enough crying to make you look ugly, not near enough to make you experience any sort of relief. I can no longer seperate the idea of what I look like when the cry is breaking from this:

Claire Danes, you are an ugly crier.

And this lady has noticed, too.

I have been having some pretty decent times lately. This little lady scampered into my life:

She is pretty damned awesome, and growing like a weed. Her name is Lucy, and I am sorry if we are Facebook friends and you are having to see these for the tenth time. I am slacking on my new puppy photography. Everybody is in love with her except for the cats, and they hate my stinkin' guts for bringing her into the house.

I had a lovely weekend with some really good old friends. We drank champagne and talked shit and went swimming, a little bit. The weather has been the most fantastically gorgeous thing that you could ever experience in Memphis, TN in July. I GOT COLD LAST NIGHT. YES, COLD. Keep in mind that we don't have any AC in our bedroom, only a fan. I was very happy that Mr. Dill was back from his bachelor mountain adventure.

Bachelor Mountain Adventure... if this was a reality show, what would the plot be? I imagine a diverse group of bachelors, from overly-groomed & coiffed slicksters with waxed eyebrows (oh God, I cannot handle that shit), to the kind of guys who you bought pot from in college, who only wear band t-shirts and live in houses in which the toilet hadn't been cleaned in 3 years. They're all doing challenges and co-habitating, and then they punch each other.

Excuse me, now I have to go buy tofu for dinner. B is detoxing from Bachelor Mountain Adventure. Apparently, they had beer and red meat for every meal.

I'm happy just because I found out I am really no one

2009-07-01T15:23:00.004-05:00

Do you guys know this Bright Eyes song? It's a real winner.

Last year B discovered this song on a mix CD that wasn't his. It was his brother's and had fallen into his possession somehow. He loved the song and then I heard it and I loved it too. He drove me back and forth across the Mississippi river on the I40 bridge and played it for me. It was like were were teenagers for the 10 or so minutes that it took for us to play it 3x in a row.

P.S. I will give you a kiss on the face if you can tell me who is singing in the background.

The other day I saw a man who I don't see very often, and I was in a weird awkward mood, and when he came to greet me, I thought that he might be going to give me a kiss on the cheek. It seemed very natural, and like that was exactly what he was going to do. But he was not, so then I said, "I thought you were going to give me a kiss on the cheek. Why don't you do that?" and he did. It wasn't very awkward. Maybe I will start the summer of greeting people with a kiss. Maybe we'll all get mono and lose 15 lbs. One can hope.

Check check checking in...

2009-06-26T13:44:00.004-05:00

I only have a minute. I am terrifyingly behind at work and trying to get everything approved before next Wednesday. I wanted to say that everyone at my house is feeling better; well, not the cat. He is still hot, fat, and tired. Brandon and I are feeling better in the head and heart, if I may dare speak for him. It was a dark week or so; I laid out of work playing the Sims, watching Intervention, and drinking rum. Oh yes, and feeling very sorry for myself.

However, the clouds are lifting because life has to go on, no matter what. You have to be somewhat philosophical about these things, and tell yourself that although you were happy and excited, it wasn't the right time. And the right time will come, right? As the Avett Brothers said, "To this awful news, try not to hold on / The day will come, the sun will rise, and we'll be fine."

Anyway, I also wanted to try and express to everyone some kind of thanks and gratitude for the overwhelming outpouring of love and affection we received from everybody. It's the terrible times that make you realize what a community is, how much care and concern means, and how important it is to be loved. People brought us booze and pie and hugs and showed us how sad they were for us in so many different ways. Thanks to all of y'all. You have no idea how much it meant, really & truly, all of the messages and comments and everything else.

however...

2009-06-19T21:57:00.004-05:00

Inevitably there will be points in which humor arises from sadness. It was 95 degrees outside, and both my husband and I have been too stubborn up to this point to have retrieved the window unit AC from the basement. The cats lie around the house, desperate and dramatic.

One might say, "Spread out like dinner on the grounds."

Please do not call the ASPCA. I know that he is fat. I do not fill his bowl to the brim every day, we dole out carefully measured scoops. He just refuses to run and play, no matter the temperature.

Addendum: Air conditioner was set up, screwed in, plugged up today. Not the most efficient machine in the world, but I feel a little bit less like I'm going to die now. Cat continues to languish in drama.

sadness so great it has created stanzas (apparently)

2009-06-18T21:38:00.005-05:00

disclaimer for disclaimer's sake... I was more than halfway drunk when I wrote this thursday night. I was all the way there, although I considerately washed my broken-out face and brushed my teeth before I went to bed. also, I never ever EVER write poetry. I don't even like poetry very much. I like about 2 poems a year, and I usually hear them on the Writer's Almanac.

in other words... you don't have to read this. It might be embarrassing. BUT I reckon it's authentic so I'm keeping it, goddammit.

halfway drunken thoughts composed at 9:38 pm when the husband's taken to bed (who's to blame him) and you're upset about something that seems to have no end...

shut the fuck up, bloggers
shut up about your ranch
shut up about your fresh fruit granita
and homesewn camisole panty duo
shut up about your trip to london... it's so unauthentic. why don't you go somewhere REAL, like India or Thailand or motherfucking Turkey, even?
shut the fuck up.

shut up about your baby
he's very cute i'm sure
but not everybody wants to hear about it right now
in a house
where it's hot
and the cats are all there is, anymore,
and they're itching and miserable from the greasy flea medicine they've been dosed with
that you've begged them not to lick off each other

why does sadness wake you up
shake you sober
make you get drunk
and then realize that you'll soon be back asleep
with everything still bullshit

shut up about healthcare
and guns
and thugs
and everything you have pretentious ideas about,
in memphis, tn, in your office, at 3 in the afternoon,
but can't actually fathom

i don't want to see the pictures of your trip to
arizona
the skate park
texarkana
gulf shores even (although I laugh about it, and avoid it myself)

this bleeping digital vessel is nothing
but somehow all i have
at 9:43
when i already finished my book today
and nothing waits but sleep and then
wakefulness
too early
too hot
too restless
too everything

2009-06-17T08:16:00.005-05:00

You have to make decisions when you have a blog. You have to decide how much of yourself you want to expose, and how much you want to keep quiet and hidden. How personal you want things to get. Generally, "in real life," I am someone who is pretty frank with most personal things. But in the blogosphere, it can be different. If my husband and I are fighting, I don't post about that, probably mostly because I am kind of gross and crazy, and I want people to think our relationship is nearly perfect. If I am a little depressed, I don't really post, because have you ever read blogs by people who are depressed a lot, or only write when they are down? It's really boring. And a downer.

Inevitably, however, there come the things that you don't know how to say, but feel like you must anyway. Things like this: We went to the midwife on Tuesday, 6/16. The midwife couldn't find the heartbeat of the baby with the doppler. We decided to go to the ultrasound clinic. At the ultrasound clinic we found out that although I was 12 weeks pregnant, the baby had stopped growing at 8 weeks. We aren't pregnant anymore. We are just waiting for the inevitable to happen. The inevitable being the actual physical miscarriage.

This happens a lot, but, you know, it doesn't get talked about very much, unless you are involved in certain internet communities in which women congregate to spill their guts about their experiences with miscarriage, for the sake of catharsis, and sharing, and building a network of women who know exactly what it feels like and find commisseration helpful.

Does this seem very unemotional? I feel odd. We have both gone back and forth between feeling a lot and being very numb. It is hard to lose something you hardly had to begin with; it's easy to keep making yourself remember what you're not going to be experiencing. (This time around, anyway). In grief, I find that sometimes I seem to tend towards... emotionally torturing myself, a bit. Maybe that is an extreme characterization. After my father died, I kept reminding myself of all the weekends I had spent away from home, away from his sickness, getting drunk with my friends, wasting time satisfying myself, trying to have a good time while he was sick and suffering. The same thing happened Tuesday, back at the house that the midwives are using as their office; when we returned, there was a pregnant woman there with her five children, one of which was a baby girl who was maybe a year old. I kept looking at her little arms and hands, and reminding myself that it will be a long time before I have a baby to call me mama, and reach for me, and all that. It's pretty fucked, I guess. It is like sprinkling salt into a wound; when I'm upset I feel like I should make myself feel really really upset, or I'm not having an "authentic experience." Then when it starts it's gets out of control until I'm nearly sick with it.

So that's what happened to me on Tuesday. And I'm not pregnant anymore. And it feels pretty shitty.

A debate which will rage for months.

2009-06-11T15:26:00.004-05:00

I'm making y'all crazy with my prolific-ness, ain't I? You can't believe it. This is a microblog.

We have been talking about baby names, a lot, of course. For some reason we talk about girls' names more than boys' names... it's like we think we are having a girl although there is no kind of evidence to back that up. Also, we don't plan on finding out the sex of the baby before it is born, so we're liable to go through this entire pregnancy with the idea at the back of our minds that we're having a girl, only to have it come out a boy. I don't know why I feel like it's a girl so much; maybe I just can't imagine that a penis growing inside me? Now that I bring it up... it is kind of odd.

That is not the point. The point is that Mr. Dill and I have a major difference in tastes as far as girls' names go. I tend towards more old-fashioned names, or nature-y names. I like flower names; I really like the name "Wren," but he is less than enthusiastic (he says it has something to do with the way my country-ass pronounces it). He likes spunky, boyish names; he has wanted a daughter named "Charlie" for as long as I can remember.

So we'll be having conversations about baby names; I'll sit with the laptop and browse baby name websites, and throw ideas that I like at him, and he'll do the same. Our exchanges often sound like this:

A: "What about Pearl? I kind of like it."
B: (Looking at me aghast) "Pearl is an old woman's name, Amanda."

B: "Roxanna, that's a good name. Roxanna."
A: (Studying his profile intently, while he plays a flash game) "Are you being serious?"
B: "Yeah, Roxanna. What do you think?"
A: "Brandon... Roxanna is a whore's name. We cannot give our daughter a whore's name."

Sometimes a name is declared both old and whorish.

I've just seen a face

2009-06-11T10:25:00.005-05:00

I hope that you are ready for a mushy love post. Consider yourself warned.

Sunday was our first wedding anniversary. We spent most of the day at the same place where we were married, my mom's house. You know that already from yesterday's boring post. When I woke up Sunday morning, I told Brandon happy anniversary, and remarked that a year ago I had awoken at around 5:00 AM, completely filled with a superhuman energy that propelled me out into the yard, where I connected a complex series of extension cords that lit the orchard with pretty white lights; then I made and remade some flower arrangements, and spent most of the rest of the day paralyzed in the house because of a carefully arranged hairstyle that, despite a heavy shellac of hairspray, kept me immobilized with the fear that it could be destroyed.

I decided to post these pictures on this mushy entry, rather than any wedding pictures. These are pictures that were taken the day after our first date... so this is July 16, 2006. B had asked me out on a date a few weeks before but we weren't able to get together sooner because of his crazy work schedule. I was living at home with my parents and went to Nashville that weekend, stayed with Wendy and Mark in preparation for hanging out with Brandon. We hung out for the first time in Murfreesboro, in the hovel that B was living in, a terribly hot apartment on the second story of an old house on College St. He told me that he didn't have an air conditioner, little did I know that in fact, the AC unit was in the closet because he was determined not to use it that summer. This was a harbinger of B's extreme attitudes regarding heating and cooling that make my life hot in the summer, cold in the winter to this day.

We (maybe it's just me) look rough as fuck in these pictures because we were up all night the night before, and by the time we were ready to go to sleep, it was about 170 degrees in the hovel. We laid on the floor, too hot to touch one another, and watched Baraka, which was really awesome right up to the point where they chopped all the beaks off the baby chickens. Have you ever seen this film? My favorite part is the monkey in the hot springs, in the snowy mountains. You can see that at around 2:00, here, and I promise, you won't see any debeaked chicks.

God, look at my thigh. I swear to God my thigh was only that skinny for 18 hours, a gift from the Lord in order that the match of Amanda + Brandon could be made. That was the skinniest time of my life, probably due to all the depression and obsession and many nights of "drinking my dinner." I know that liquor is high in calories but when it's all you're consuming, eventually it makes you thin. I think.

I never really believed in soulmates before I met B. I mean, how can you possibly pronounce that in all the zillions of people in all the world, there is one person out there who is your perfect match? I still think this is bullshit. However... I definitely believe that there was a certain set of situations that occurred at the right time for both of us that set our relationship in motion. And, as cheesy as it sounds, I have to call it fate.

The other day I was writing an email to someone that I don't see or communicate with that often, and he had made a compliment to me about our relationship. In response, I told him that it wasn't always easy, but it is always worth it. I know that being together has changed the both of us in so many ways, the way we see ourselves, the way we see the world, and the way we see ourselves living the rest of our lives. We're at this stage of life in which the decisions we make are taking have more and more weight -- having a kid, deciding where we want to settle, and how we want to do it -- and it's really daunting sometimes, to have these decisions to make. But I try not to worry about it because you know, as long as we're together, we can make it all work out. That much has to be true.

"I give you my love, more precious than money
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"

That's from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road, and we used it as our vows.

You don't move like no virgin.

2009-06-10T15:53:00.003-05:00

We went to church with my mom this weekend, the church that I grew up going to. {Listen, are you ever typing a sentence and see that it is going to end in a preposition, try to stop the freight train explosion of a sentence ended in a preposition, but all the replacements you can come up with ALSO end in prepositions? God I hate that.}

Even though my feelings about organized religion, Christianity in particular, range from ambivalence to fits of violent annoyance, I really do love most of the people who go to church there. It is a tiny church in a white wooden building 15 minutes down the road from where my mom lives. My dad and paternal grandparents are buried there; I have known most of the people who go there since I was an itty bitty thing, and I have to say that a few of them really exemplify that Christians can be really good people who don't use their faith as an excuse for intolerance.

I haven't been to church with her in months because they have a new preacher who literally makes my skin crawl. He just makes me so so uncomfortable, and I find so many things about his personality completely objectionable. Now, for 15 years or so, they had a great preacher down there. He was a professor at a Methodist university in Jackson, and he was very kind and tolerant, obsessed with Apple computer products, and really talked more like a teacher, than a preacher. Not so with this new guy. I could make some kind of list of the things I don't like about him, but honestly a) I have to leave work in 15 minutes and b) the list would sound vague and petty because I have tried to block out any memories I created of him during his last 40 minute sermon. He says the word "God" just like Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire. GAHWD. I fucking love that movie.

"Devil, you gonna git a black eye today!"
"If I'm going to hell, I'm going there playing the piana."

In a week I will have heard the tiny whooshing heartbeat of my unborn child. Weird! Awesome! I. Cannot. Wait.

I'm yawning and snacking at the same time.

2009-06-01T10:23:00.007-05:00

I have been pretty terrible at this as of late, huh? I will tell you something I hate more than anything, and that is the bullet list blog. You know, a list of this and that that has not been formatted into paragraphs? Disgusting. But I feel as though I need to do a list like that, because I have a lot to report.

3. We went to New Orleans for Memorial Day weekend. I didn't drink a drop (more on that later). There were a lot of really drunk people there, and not being one of them was... odd. I am pretty positive it saved us a pile of cash, the lack of bar hopping. All the root beer barrels we had at the Green Parrot in Key West really broke the bank on that trip. We did eat a lot, because we're gluttons from hell. We ate things like this, that made us very full and satisfied, while at the same time disgusted with ourselves.

Also, we met up with Megan and Shane, who are Memphis-Americans (I have robbed that term from Toby, by the way) that we have never met in Memphis; we rode the streetcar a lot, I lost $5 in a slot machine, Brandon found out too late that he could not order a sandwich at the Cafe Du Monde, we saw some nice jazz at the Rock and Bowl, went for walks in the Garden District and Audobon Park, and, yes, laid up in the hotel room watching cable, drinking gin (B) and napping (me).

2. We had a pretty fine potluck in which Brandon took some of the finest party pics I have seen in quite some time. The theme was "Summertime" and the food was very nice and Liz came, which made me very very happy!

1. Ok, on with the show. The big news: We are going to have a little baby Dilbro at the end of the year! Yep, that is right, we decided to make the big leap into parenthood. I think turning 28 made the tick tock of my clock go bang bang bang and I decided it was time to shit or get off the pot. We made the baby in the normal way, as in we took off our pants and looked each other in the eyes tenderly. I have to say that sex without a net for me was pretty mystical and now feels even moreso since I have the knowledge that everything went to work as it was intended and we created a teeny spark of mushy human life that is growing bigger everyday. According to Babycenter.com, it's now the size of a kumquat, which looks like this:

Crazy shit, huh? We are terribly excited and I am ready to get a nice round belly. I am 10 weeks along as of this weekend and I am already ready to meet this weird, tall person. However, I can wait, and in the meantime I am giving the little booger lots of water, veggies, cookies, fried chicken, yogurt, tofu, cheese, cereal, and fish oil capsules, which are apparently very good for its brain. Although my boobs are a size bigger and I have to take a nap 5 days a week when I get home, the whole thing is still just *brimming* with unreality, and in two weeks I will be very glad when we return to the midwife and get to hear the heartbeat for the first time.

Ok, now I have to do an interview and have a snack. I'm fucking starving.

you thought that you could outrun sorrow

2009-05-08T09:35:00.006-05:00

I have been running back and forth ferrying clients from the waiting room to my desk, my desk back out to the waiting room like a crazy person all morning. With the sun emerges all the people who need to recertify their Food Stamp cases do as well; what you may not realize is that people who ride the bus or have unreliable transportation do not keep appointments on rainy days. I learned this some time ago, and when I wake up to thunder and lightning my first thought is no longer "O Goddamn, I wish I could stay in bed all day," but "Yay, I will have so many no-shows and can catch up on work hardcore." Needless to say, the rainyness of this week has had me spoiled. Not to mention the fact that I called out of work Tuesday based primarily on the uneasy night's sleep I had, which was most notably punctuated at around 3:00 AM by a dream in which my bed and home were completely infested with a particular species of black ticks that had a white dot on their backs. I awoke from this dream scratching my arms and legs and chest and neck frantically, and immediately took the cat into the bathroom to inspect him for fleas. I found none. I believe this dream was a message that I need to buy Frontline for my cats.

But it costs $60 every other month!

But you need to buy it. Or else you'll get fleas. Like you did last summer.

(The sound of hysterical crying)

I have been abstaining from coffee in the morning, which may explain my notable absence from LTA as well as Twitter. When I'm not unbelivably jacked up on caffeine, I find myself with notably less to say.

After several tragic and annoying debacles, nearly every one of our precious tomato/zucchini/pepper/basil seedlings were destroyed. This culminated in our landlord somehow chopping the tender top off every potted plant on our front walk with brutal, careless weed whacking. But you know what I said? I said "FUCK THIS NOISE. YOU CAN KILL ALL MY PLANTS, LANDLORD, NEIGHBOR'S DOG, REGULARLY FLOODED FLOWERBED IN THE BACKYARD, BUT YOU'LL NEVER KILL MY DESIRE TO GROW THINGS." And I went to the nursery and I got an orange pepper plant and a Green Zebra tomato and another heirloom variety, and then I went to Home Depot and I bought some ridiculously large pots because Martha said that when you're growing vegetables in pots, they have to be at least 15 gallons, and I planted them. And I think they're growing. I can't say for sure.

This weekend will be full of fun because Brandon's brother and his fiancee (God, I hate that word I hate that word) are coming to town, and we wish to squire them around and show them why we love Memphis. We're going to the farmer's market and the symphony (free tickets) and maybe to Mud Island. Hoping to hook up with Bette since she'll be in town for Bands Not Bombs. So, Go Away Rain! You can come back on Monday and give me a vacation from interviews.

One more thing: I have been using Tom's of Maine apricot-scented deodrant, and I find that at the beginning of the day, my pits smell like apricot. The middle of the day? Apricot flavored BO. By the end of the day, straight up BO. Which is kind of fine with me, because I think we Americans are an oversanitized lot, and I'm not one to squelch the natural workings of my body. But it is pretty funny to smell like a piece of rotting fruit by 3:00 every day.

MZM 09

2009-04-28T13:39:00.021-05:00

Another week, another post with pictures where my words should be.

Last Friday we went to the third annual Memphis Zombie Massacre downtown. Last year I was knee-deep in wedding preparations and couldn't make it. Since my husband is an avowed zombie enthusiast, and I am a fan of odd social happenings that are seemingly pointless, nonetheless compelling, we met at Handy Park after work and stood in line for a couple of hours in order to get zombiefied.

I haven't heard any kind of count, but I know there were at least a couple of hundred people there. Here's some highlights.

This guy was offering a zombie cure of some sort. It was odd because I recognized him from his blog, which I had just discovered that very day. I think he's pretty hilarious, and as I later told Lindsey, anyone who executes an idea like that must be at least one quarter amazing

Do you know what the deal is with this whole thing? You can either go dressed as a zombie or in old ratty street clothes with a duct tape X on them. When the zombies see folks marked with the X, they attack them and they get zombiefied. Which is incredibly fucking creepy the first few times you see it:

This zombie was my favorite. I was near him during nearly the entire thing, and he never broke character once. I was lying. This zombie is really my favorite.

I'll close with the loveliest of all images: Undead Lovin'.

Even more pics here & here, if you haven't seen enough fake blood and wounds yet.

Nothing that this world could bring would hold me back from you

2009-04-21T15:19:00.005-05:00

Hey y'all. I have just been dry as a creek bed as far as blogs go. When I post I want to be funny or entertaining. Not boring or bitchy. Even though life's been just fine, I haven't had shit to say as of late. I am pretty sure I will be back, though. I'm just super busy at work these days, spending my days interviewing 6-10 clients per day and working working working to keep up with their cases. But I wanted to pop in and post this exciting and bloody picture to whet your appetite for more of my keen wit.

Lovely, huh? Yeah, we went to Chattanooga this weekend to have family time with B's brother and soon-to-be-wife. We try to visit them somewhat often because we all love each other and get along well, and since the timing was perfect, a few months back I got us all tickets to go see The Avett Brothers at the Tivoli theatre in downtown Chattanooga. I am sure that I have mentioned before that TAB are my favorite band. I am as emotionally and sentimentally involved with them as I have ever been with any current band, and this show was the ninth, count em, ninth time I've seen them. Pretty cool. I know I've bitched about going to shows before, and dear Bette sums a lot of my complaints up in this post, but shows like the one this past Saturday are what keep me buying overpriced tickets and putting hundreds of miles on my small rollerskate-like car. It was gorgeous and worth every penny and every mile; they played nearly every song I ever want to hear, and I want y'all to play this song. I preach these boys to anyone who will listen; I hope you can love it a tenth as much as I do.

But my knee, right? What the fuck am I even talking about anymore? Jesus, the structure of this is giving every English teacher I've ever had a headache. They don't know why, but they have one.

Ok, my busted ass knee: earlier on Saturday, my brother-in-law drove us up Signal Mountain so that we could take a casual little hike. I have to explain that my BIL, G, is very outdoorsy and fit and active. Now, I'm not a total obese shut-in, but I get a little... pant-y when walking up hill for long stretches. Know what I'm saying? So for nearly the extent of our relationship, I have been a little afraid of the day that G realized that I am LAZY and DECIDELY NOT FIT. (Although I am sure he already knows this, he hasn't yet heard the panting). So it was a bizarre twist of events when, nearly as soon as we started our walk on the trail, I tripped and went flying leg-first into this little buddy:

The only fucking sharp rock in the entire vicinity. That is the precious denim from my jeans that got ripped open on the rock. My leg feels a lot better now, a few days later, but we had to go back and I had to drink vodka with cream soda out of a mason jar while my wonderful husband carefully picked dirt out of the bigass hole and flushed it with water and peroxide. Then I had to go to the show with my sore swollen old lady leg and deal with the silent taunts of 17-year-old hardbodies. Fuck you, high schoolers of Chattanooga. Usually I can climb stairs JUST FINE thank you.

A balloon just popped somewhere in my office and I swear to God I heard someone hit the decks.

You can call me "Perky Dumplin"

2009-03-31T12:34:00.005-05:00

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.

2009-03-26T15:04:00.003-05:00

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

a lady pilot who does not have her two hands
animals making love with each other
daddy you're mean but i love you anyway
eaten alive by animals
fuck lady pilot video
fucking sexy lady with zoo animals
hot lady pilots
how can you whitten my clitoris and labia
how to say heartache in spanish
long ow ow
misogynist
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really tall animals
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sexes in tall animals
vedio "breastfeeding puppy"
woman breast feeding puppy video

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

Why can't I ever get my sugar?

2009-03-24T12:57:00.007-05:00

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...

2009-03-21T13:35:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-19T10:16:00.003-05:00

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?

2009-03-05T10:32:00.004-06:00

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

2009-03-03T14:53:00.003-06:00

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.

I didn't know they made bikinis in size fat fuck.

2009-02-18T08:58:00.005-06:00

I love my kitchen. I was up 15 minutes earlier than normal this morning (although I was still my standard 20 minutes late to work), and I straightened up in there and watered the seeds that we planted Monday. We have ambitious plans for the teeny bed just outside the back door, and have started our peppers, zucchini and tomatoes from seeds purchased from Bountiful Gardens and got their tomato mix, which contains heirloom varieties with names like "Big Rainbow," "Cherokee Purple," and "Moneymaker." They're on a shelf that Brandon fixed up in the window last week; the kitchen is perfect for this because it's the only really sunny room in our house. The entire corner of the room is windows, and there is no better feeling to me than just hanging out there in the morning, drinking coffee, and plotting out my day. There is certainly a lot to be said about the restorative powers of sunshine. My mood is really dictated by whether or not it's sunny when I go out for work in the morning. Gloomy days make me want to hibernate.

I'm sending in our application and payment for the Whitton Farms CSA this week. I'm so excited, because it's the first time I've ever participated in a co-op. Starting in the middle of May, we'll be getting a sack of farm fresh produce from these good people every week!

Thanks for your many comments regarding the high school reunion thing. I remain undecided. I may be swayed by the price of the thing -- I saw the blurb in the county paper about the 1998 reunion last summer, and it was somewhere around $60 per couple for what I pessimistically assume was overcooked prime rib, a baked potato, and no booze. Plus, you had to pay cover to be in the same venue as some shitty band. Double Ew Tee Eff, man.

I had a nice three-day weekend (that's the kind of thing that makes me heart working for the gov't). Sushi on Friday night, the symphony on Saturday. I got a pile of lovely cookbooks, as well as a tome entitled "The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People" from my dear husband. He knows me too well. The next time you use the potty at my house, you are free to browse it. We spent a rollicking Saturday night at Mr. Whitten's, where too much booze was consumed, for sure. My memories may be foggy but LT had sweetly posted the photographic evidence of it before I even woke up the next morning. What a doll. We made tamales on Monday, which was an all day ordeal that resulted in success! Everything on the internet advises that if you're going to go to the trouble of making the babies, you should go ahead and make 100 or 200 and freeze them. After cooking the meat and mixing the masa, and rolling all those little sons-of-bitches, I could see why. They were tasty and steamed perfectly, though.

Speaking of food, if you guys have not been checking in on the blog This is Why You're Fat, you should. It's photographic evidence of everything that's wrong with America's gastronomy. Be careful, vegetarians. There's a lot of graphic meat up in that bitch.

High School Reunion Hell !?!?!1!

2009-02-13T09:12:00.003-06:00

I know I just posted a blog, and I usually don't do this, but this is a different topic. Therefore = different posting. Plus, I wanted to solicit some responses with this one.

I logged onto Myspace the other day and saw a bulletin from one of my classmates from high school soliciting ideas for our 10 year class reunion, which will take place this summer. I have actually thought about this fact occasionally throughout the past year, and I am still completely undecided as to whether or not I want to attend. Is it weird to think about it this much? Now, I didn't have a horrendous high school experience, and actually a very ice group of ladies who I graduated with came to our wedding this past summer. See exhibit A.

I wasn't a big stoner; I didn't drink a lot in high school. I wasn't particularly popular. I was pretty much a weirdo, but not as much of a weirdo as people who wore Marilyn Manson t-shirts and pierced their own noses. I have one really tight group of girlfriends, and we stayed friends for years, off and on; now, for me, the majority of those relationships are switched to "off." Except for Chrystal, who is as weird and funny as ever, and remains "the bridge I never burned."

I just don't know if I really want to see all those people again, though! I mean, I think it would be really weird, and I have the sneaking suspicion that years of weed abuse have erased some people's names and memories from my poor pitiful brain. And it seems like 10-15 minutes of "oh, hello, there you are, how are you, what have you been doing?" would be enough but an entire evening would be... pushing it.

So, if you'd be so kind, I'd like to survey your reunion experiences. If you don't mind. There was a 5 year reunion, but that was definitely too soon, and I didn't go. I've never done this before. And if you've never been to one, tell me why. Are you planning on going to any upcoming ones? I need your thoughts, friends!

Cardio Psychosis

2009-02-13T08:49:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I finished my first full week of exercising regularly. I went after work every day Monday-Thursday. Hope & Healing closes at 2:00 on Friday, and I'm considering Saturday an optional day. Hooray me! I did 35-40 minutes of cardio every day, and I have to say: I don't hate it too bad. Going to the gym gets to be like going to class -- something you know you need to/have to do, but you get that wicked little charge from skipping. I'm going to try to keep this up a least through the end of March, and see where it gets me.

We had two truly delicious dinners this week; on Tuesday, Brandon made pinto beans from this recipe from the Pioneer Woman, and after I got home I made the cornbread, spiked with jalapenos, and we ate it with some sauteed turnip greens, raw slices of sweet onion, and my mother's "Amish relish" -- it's a tomato, onion, & pepper relish with a touch of sweetness. I felt a bit of shame that it took a recipe found on the internet to inspire me to make this meal that is so, so Decatur County. So country-ass and delicious. I felt as though my daddy's spirit was laughing at me somewhere, and he'd feel a little pride in seeing his daughter and her decidedly non-countryass husband moaning in taste ecstasy over one of the most basic meals in creation. The next night, I mashed the beans up, adding a little cumin and chili powder, and B fried some corn tortillas and plantains (Jesus fucking Christ, I love plantains! Why didn't someone clue me in about these years ago!) and we had the tortillas with the beans smeared on top, covered in that crumbly Mexican queso, salsa, romaine, and avocado slices. NOM NOM NOM.

Meals like that remind me that although I have a tendency to go spend $50 on Kroger preparing for some meal that includes at least a few pricy, hard to find ingredients, sometimes the simplest can be the most satisfying.

Although I have to say that after two days of bean consumption, my cubicle/our bedsheets have taken on a peculiar aroma. Ahem.

Spanish heartache

2009-02-05T11:02:00.008-06:00

I should be working right now, because it's the first of the month and as all of us sheltered middle-class people learned from Bone Thugs N Harmony, offices such as mine are quite busy at this time.

But today I feel like spilling from my brain out my fingers onto this pitifully neglected blog. So I'll take a carefully timed, sanctioned 15 minute break and do it!

I was looking over photos from our travelling together on Flickr, something that makes my big red heart ache for the days of having nothing to do but explore new places with a man who is easy to both love and yell at, and I thought I'd revisit that time and write a little bit about it. And post some pictures! Because who doesn't love pictures!

So in the spring of 2007, Brandon and I had been together for nearly a year, I reckon, and were living pretty unhappily in Nashville. We're just not Nashville people, just not cut out for it. We're much happier here, a place that makes lots of middle-aged white people's faces crumple in fear and revulsion. He had some fat cash socked away from photo work he'd done, and I was sitting on a pile of money I'd been granted after my dear, dear father passed away. I had never been anywhere, really; no kind of extended travel, and one reason Brandon had made me all starry-eyed in the first place was the knowledge that he'd been places and done things. So even though it was terribly impractical, which flies in the face of in way I was raised completely, I started quietly planning a trip. I checked out Lonely Planet guides from the library and researched the internets like mad, trying to find volunteer opportunities abroad that aren't simply resume builders for rich-ass college kids (Hand out crayons for two weeks at Panda Kindergarten for only $10,000!). Finally I stumbled upon WWOOF, which is like mommy's miracle from heaven and was perfect. You don't know how bad I wish I'd had the knowledge and the balls to WWOOF earlier in my life.

So there's the background. It is funny to travel with your spiritual/sexual/emotional partner for an extended time like that. As I told him often, you see the best and the worst of that person, and they see the same in you, over and over again for all the time you are away. B saw me crying like a titty baby because my pack was heavy and we couldn't find our hostel in Barcelona, and I dealt with him patiently when he was wasted in Madrid and had to go back to the bar and take a shit.

Here's the bar, by the way; or, rather, the guy who played piano there. It was in the basement of a building, and Brandon called it the "piano cave." We had mucho sangria there. Duh.

It was just perfect, which was how I'd describe most of what we saw of Spain. Barcelona and Madrid were the most beautiful, interesting magical cities that I've ever visited. There is something about the Spanish culture that I just lust after; their daily schedule along is so laid-back and conducive to leisure and pleasure, and who can argue with that?

So, the day after that picture was taken, was probably one of the most overwhelmingly incredible days of my life, so far. We went for a picnic in Parque del Buen Retiro, which was just gorgeous, and then we rented a cute ass little rowboat. And then Brandon proposed, and I said yes! I mean, I wanted to say yes anyway, but how could I resist??

He looks pretty pleased with himself, huh? He had had a ring on loan from his mom stashed away for the entire trip, and brought it along that day, thinking that the time was right. The ring didn't fit on my bigass man hand, but other than that it went down perfectly. And now we both have "Buen Retiro" inscribed in our wedding bands, which means "good retreat."

We knew that bullfights were going on, and had read in some travel guide that although they were most often sold out, you could sometimes buy tickets if you hung out in front of the plaza where they have the fights. Brandon was determined to have the perfect day, so he memorized the Spanish word for tickets and worked his ass off until he happened upon some French girls who had chickened out of seeing the poor bull be stabbed to death. Now, I love animals, and I don't support this kind of thing at all (especially after reading about what exactly goes on during the "fight" on the internet. Did you know they bring out a guy on a horse to stab it with a spear repeatedly before the matador comes out to fight it so that the bull will lose blood? And they do this so that its blood pressure will drop and it won't drop dead from a heart attack from the pure panic and shock of being pursued by the matador? Pretty awful). BUT. We were in Spain, during bull fight season, in maybe the #1 place in the world to see them, and we wanted to experience all we could. So criticize me if you must, honestly, it doesn't make any difference now.

The bullfights were intense as hell, but much like viewing "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," I became pretty immune to the violent act not long after it started. Thinking about it reminds me of the same feeling of disconnect it was easy to have when watching the Twin Towers fall on television -- it seemed like watching a movie. The crowd was immense, as you can see, and matadors who couldn't do a quick, clean kill, got booed by the spectators. There were lots of well-dressed old men smoking huge cigars; Brandon said that it's the only event he's ever been to where the men's room line was twice as long as the women's.

Oh, Madrid.

I guess I am just feeling a bit wistful and I miss that little bit of time that we were free, back there in 2007. Wwoofing and living on a shoestring don't really fit into my "now" plans, but life has a trick of making you wonder if you're doing the right thing or not. I have a lot of faith in our union, though; it seems nearly impossible that we'll fail at being happy no matter where we are or what we're doing. We have each other to keep the whole thing in check.

that's what she said

2009-02-03T09:14:00.003-06:00

We've been combating a serious addiction at the Dilbro house, and that would be a little series called The Office. I bought my mother a Netflix subscription for Xmas, and since I set up her account for her, she's been sweet enough to give me access to the "Watch Instantly" option. One ill-fated night we dragged the couch over in front of the computer monitor and made the genius decision to start watching the show from episode 1, and from that moment our fate was sealed. Sometimes The Office makes me laugh so hard that I get flashbacks to watching Seinfeld with my mother in the mid-nineties when we'd both hoot and holler until she peed her pants.

What is winter good for though, if not watching entirely too much TV? I remember when we moved into this apartment; we had sold our Wii to Toby, since we didn't really want it in the first place (it was a Christmas gift to Brandon in '07), and decided to once again live life sans TV. We had done it originally when we moved to Memphis, but had to give in when we were given that devil video game system. The problem is that TV on the internet makes TVs obsolete! I don't need a fucking TV to watch TV. So no matter how hard I try not to watch TV (OK, not very hard), I keep watching TV. OH THE HUMANITY.

I wrote up 2/3 of an entry about the inauguration last week. No, two weeks ago. It's kind of a basic we were there and this is what happened and this is how I feel about it entry. But then, some time passed, and I didn't finish it, and then it seemed like too much time has passed, and I've been trying not to drink coffee in the morning and without a healthy dose of caffeine, both my teeny humble presence in the blogosphere and the success of my pooper, they suffer. So that is what happened to that. Maybe in the next few days, I will indulge myself in some extra strong coffee, take a huge shit, and finish and publish it. You will think, this is entirely too late, this is not a timely entry at all, but by then you'll be reading it and hopefully by the time you're done, you'll be too exhausted by its mundanity to have the energy to hit "comment."

The air conditioner's on in here. Why's the air conditioner on, for God's sakes? Oh wait, I know, MENOPAUSE.

The reason I've been laying off the coffee is that one day I was minding my own business, walking to the bathroom and a lady who started working here the same time as me, who I went through 3 months of training with, felt it was an appropriate time to ask me whether or not I was trying to increase the size of my booty, and then commented that it was looking "fluffy." Yes, fluffy like a cat or a baby ducking. However, instead of "adorable," I believe she was insinuating something more like "covered in a dimply layer of disgusting blubber." Ahem. I became distraught, went to the Amazon marketplace and ordered a copy of Skinny Bitch for $3. I'd seen Bianca on the Vegan Crunk blog mention it, and I was feeling in need of salvation. Apparently, the heaps of chocolate and cheese consumed during the holidays had made their presence known on my derriere. According to the Skinny Bitch bitches, the best way to be skinny, and therefore happy, is to be a vegan who drinks no coffee and, if you must get boozy (I must, I must), your only option's organic red wine. Is there an organic version of Franzia??

So anyway. Mr. Dill and I have been exercising at the Hope and Healing Center (which totally makes me think of a rehab facility) and while I have not become a vegan, I've been trying to change my habits a bit. Everyone who saw me drink 6 Natural Lights and a Sparks on Superbowl night is tee-hee-heeing at me, but what you don't know is that that was my dinner. So there.

I went on a huge weight loss bender in the spring of 2006 and sometimes, after working out at the Y, would choose to "drink my dinner." Instead of having a nice healthy salad, I'd just buy the dinner of champions:

But then one of those nights, I tried to drive to a boy's house to have sex with him, and THANK GOD he was not there, because we really didn't know each other that well and he was not the kind of guy you make booty calls on and it would have all been really humilating. And maybe he had a girlfriend? Who can tell. Now I drink Jerry with my husband, though, and sometimes I bootycall him. Other times I just pass out on the couch while he goes to the Taco Bell.

Obamanos!

2009-01-16T11:02:00.002-06:00

So we've made BLTH (bacon, lettuce, tomato and hummus) sandwiches and packed our warm socks, and we're off to D.C. in an hour or so, to see the big American dick in the sky and witness one of the most historic events of our lifetime along with one or five million or so other people. I will try and post as soon as we get back to let y'all know how it went. I might even tweet some while I'm there.

Excuse me, I've got a million Food Stamp cases to do. For some reason our economic crisis is producing applicants at a breakneck speed.

Interspecies animal relationships FTW!

2009-01-15T19:15:00.002-06:00

Repost from Dooce:

Videos like this make me clutch my hands to my heart and make laughing crying noises. In other words it's like the first 20 minutes of a mushroom trip.

Volume whatever...

2009-01-10T09:53:00.003-06:00

From the "People are weird/sick/strange and they google these words to find my blog..." hall of fame...

more clever than ever now
animals eaten alive
animals that are 55" tall
do animals that hibernate wee and poo while sleeping
happy 1 day late anniversary myspace comment
jezebel smoky mountain witch
me doesn't fearful love
pillow smothering image cartoon
why do animals keep moving when they are dead

The perennial favorite is still "animals cumming in women," by the way.

a spook, I tells ya

2009-01-08T11:20:00.003-06:00

Yesterday in a vain attempt to burn maybe 35 calories, I asked Brandon if he wanted to go for a walk after work. When formulating this sentence it occured to me that I should try to think of a more exciting way to get exercise, and immediately I sprung (heh heh) upon the notion that 45 minutes of strenous sex per day might fit the bill. And that's possible right? I mean, I am IN A RELATIONSHIP. But I digress.

Anywho, I asked him to go for a walk, and he said yes, can we cross Parkway (whichever Parkway it is, those roads are a COMPLETE mindfuck to this ol' girl) and try to gain entrance to Libertyland? and although I'm the type of person who is stricken with terror at the concept of rule-breaking, I reminded myself that this is one of the reasons that I liked this dude to begin with, and remember that time that we were in the mountains and gained entrance to the funhouse of mirrors cash-free by merely running in the out door, and giggled and gasped and lost ourselves in corridors of mirrors? wasn't love young and fun then, and nothing bad happened at all, sissypants! buckup!

So we trotted down the broken sidewalks and he told me about his first day of master gardener school, which was funny because 1) a lady introduced herself by sharing that she had been fired from her job and she'd had to put her dog down, which is not funny in inself, of course, but is funny because who in the world would choose to introduce themselves to a room of fifty people in that fashion? I'd rather say, "Hi, my name's Amanda, and I like to read and watch movies." and b) a man got rounds of applause and tears by merely stating that he was an Iraq war veteran. maybe that's not funny or weird at all but we're commie bastards so we marvelled at it together.

We approach the Libertyland and in case you don't know or didn't click my helpful link above, it's an abandoned amusement park. THEREFORE VERY CREEPY. In my corduroy jeans and checkered vans, walking along with Brandon, who seems to be dressed eternally these days in a red zippered hoodie, I felt as if I was walking into an episode of Scooby Doo which had been deanimated (in some type of exhaustive computer editing process, I'm sure). There was a gap in the fence in the back that made Brandon suck his breath in in excitement and made me do the same in the terror & dread that in order to avoid looking like a pussy I'd have to wriggle in after him. He thought I'd be a chicken, and was happy and proud when I wasn't. We both had the big eye because IT WAS VERY CREEPY IN THERE. My mind immediately created a scenario in which a squatter with the same face/personality/soul as the leper hobo who lives under the porch in the abandoned house in Stephen King's IT who offers Eddie Kaspbrak a blowjob. Unless I've got some part of that wrong. Maybe he wants a blowjob. It's been a few years since I read IT. I thought he'd amble out and offer us blowjobs and then part of his face would fall off.

That did not happen, dear readers. I didn't get a blow job from a leper hobo; rather we wandered around a corner and saw "SKEEBALL PALACE," which I assured Brandon is precisely where I'll go when I die, and then he saw a security car and got spooked and I got to leave Libertyland without contracting leprosy from a horny hobo squatter. The end.

ADDENDUM: When searching Google image for "leper" to come up with a visual aid for this entry, I discovered this gem from the "Cosmic Conservative" Double Yew Tee Eff.

we both wish I had something interesting to contribute

2009-01-06T13:59:00.002-06:00

I feel so boring, but I'm going to try to summon something up for you, Internets. I know you miss my gentle Southern voice.

Our holiday travels are complete; I made Mr. Dill, math whiz, calculate how many miles we drove from December 23-January 3 and it was approximately 1300. I am tired of being in the car! And we still have a 26 hour round trip to D.C. in a little more than a week! I know that I should be getting juiced to visit a (practically) new city but all I can think about is the comfort of being back at home after all that.

The winter makes me go into hibernation mode. I add 5 or so pounds to myself during the holiday smorgasbord of eating, look down one day and realize I've lost all of the physical reminder of sun kissing my skin, put on a big ol' sweater and big ol' pants, and wish I didn't have to emerge back out into the world again until April. Winter makes me feel fat and pale and hopeless regarding spring's eventual return. I feel like I don't have anything interesting to contribute to conversations, and my desire to socialize disappears.

I think a combination of the holiday travel blitz and my aforementioned disinterest in the outside world kept me from merrymaking on New Year's Eve. Brandon had to go photograph Benjamin Hooks late that night and I laid up in the bed attempting to regain some kind of energy after finishing up quite a bit of shitty wine and shitty Moroccan chicken that I had made after being mislead by the fine folks at Everyday Food. I napped; I showered; but by the time he got home, I was still completely disinterested in going out and revelling with partiers. I just had that "Not in a mood for a party" feeling that I couldn't shake and that I know from experience doesn't make for a real fun time. So we skipped it. We stayed home, in bed, finished off the wine, and rang in the new year with some sweet lovin', after which the Mister fell asleep and I read Agatha Christie, ate pretzels, and listened to our upstairs neighbor sob in the New Year accompanied by some depressing-sounding tunes. Apparently she was a wee bit too wasted to click them off before passing out, because we awoke to her music streaming through our paperthin ceiling the next morning.

Bear with me folks; some sunnier me will return. I'm not depressed, actually; I just feel as though the blood that runs through my veins has thickened and left me slow to respond and disinterested in anything other than the most basic stimulation.

December may as well have run straight up my ass and called my colon home

2008-12-30T09:57:00.005-06:00

The last time you heard from me, I was moaning about my period. Now my period is over, and so is Christmas! Time flies when you're desperately trying to provide gifts for your friends and family and FAILING. I didn't fail a lot, but I definitely failed a little. I'm hoping to remember to buy the people I shortchanged in December an array of weird gifts throughout January so they will continue to be my friends. I'm just not very good at this, y'all.

OK, now for the holiday rundown.

On the Saturday before Christmas we had a housewarming/holiday potluck at our new place. I had to scamper myself around readying things that evening because I had the vodka hangover from hell when I woke up that morning. When someone like Zach calls, and offers you access to an "ocean of free booze," let me tell you that you should go, and it will be fun, but don't try to move before 3:00 p.m. the next day. I made some food and some mulled wine with orange zest, star anise, cinnamon sticks, and more importantly, brandy, in it, and our teeny-ass new apartment was soon filled with a bunch of people. It was kind of like a party in a dorm room. But, there was a reading & dramatic reenactment from an erotic lesbian spy novel, as well as li'l smokies, so it's safe to say a good time was had. When you make l'il smokies, the good time is pretty much guaranteed:

Doesn't that look wonderful? Tubes of meat, soaked in sauce, you have a deliciousness that is guilt-inducing on several levels.

On to the next major event of the past couple of weeks, which is the news that my adorable, loving, intelligent, hilarious, erotic, and thrifty husband, genius photographer, has started a little blog of his own in which he waxes poetic about the photos he has taken. It is right here. Also, remember that he is probably the best photographer in the Mid-South as far as weddings, parties, portraits, and anything else that could possibly ever be in need of photographing is concerned. So hire him! And read him! And look at him!

He's something I like to call "PFC," or Pretty Fucking Cute.

All right, onward and upward. On the afternoon of the 23rd, we hopped in my roller skate-like car and drove to my mom's house, where a time in my life that I like to call Amanda is a Fucking Lazyass Glutton began. Sure, I helped my mom with some cooking and picking up around the house, but otherwise we watched a lot of satellite tv and ate approximately 4,000 calories per day. Highlights of this time included my assemblage of Deb's chocolate peanut butter cake, which was probably one of the best things I have ever eaten in my life, with not a single crumb going undevoured. I have got to post some pictures of it, because I wanted it to look perfect and it came pretty dang close, if I do say so myself. Gift exchange with the family on Xmas eve was mostly pleasant, only occasionally punctuated my five-year old nephew offering screaming fits. Somehow he makes up for it when he starts talking about things like digging poop out of his sister's butt with a knife. I know, what the hell, but I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

Brandon and I exchanged letters to one another on Christmas morning, which I am hoping to make a yearly tradition, and it was pretty nice to see us reiterating a lot of the same things to one another in them. On the 26th we drove to Knoxville to see our friends Rebecca & Michael in her parents' pimped out new house. While we were there, we watched The King of Kong, which I had heard a lot about but never seen. It was the best movie I saw during the break (although it doesn't take much to beat out Jurassic Park: The New World). Also, I have to say, BILLY MITCHELL IS A DOUCHE. Thank you.

I love documentaries more than anything. Good documentaries, I mean. Another terrific one I saw this year was My Kid Could Paint That. You should check it out. Totes.

All right. We drove back from Knoxville yesterday, stopping in Crossville at a wonderful used bookstore called The Book Cellar. We got a huge bag of books for $30, including A Summons to Memphis, The Kitchen God's Wife, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Household Saints, Bag of Bones, and a bunch of others. They were all $1 or $2 apiece! I love books. I could have stayed there for two hours, but B Dill gets bored after awhile. Also, we had a date with a Mexican buffet in Ashland City. That's right, I said Mexican buffet. I had told myself it would be my last hurrah before returning to Memphis and doing extreme penance for 6 days of unlimited cheese, bread, and chocolate. We ate at this buffet last year when returning from Nashville; it is Effing Ridiculous. Would you like some quesadillas? Oh, here's a huge pan of them. How about unlimited cheese dip and guacamole? Oh, right here. I ate some, realized I had not yet made myself sick, and returned for seconds. Or thirds. Who can keep up at that point? I was in a salsa haze.

That was our holiday, pretty much. Oh, of course there were all the little details that are none of anybody's business, but that's the news that's fit to print. I am working today & tomorrow and we're going to Chattanooga to visit B's brother on the 1st. Then we'll be going to D.C. in two weeks! It's a travelling time right now. But I tell you, I couldn't have a better partner. Yesterday I got my giggle box turned over and everything Brandon said made me collapse in laughter, which is maybe the best feeling in the world??

Ow, ow, ow: The pain of nature

2008-12-09T09:46:00.003-06:00

TMI if you can't handle menstrual talk. I'm talking to you, single dudes. (The other night at the potluck, it was confirmed that men in realtionships can handle period talk much more easily when a group of ladies somehow brought up the P word and after 3 minutes, the only men left in the room were Matthew and Zach's step-dad, Bill).

So, I am experiencing my first period off the pill (technically the ring). It hurts like hell. I am someone who never, ever got cramps and I've been hunched over my desk all morning, sweating and swearing while my uterus feels like it's being folded in half, and then in half again, and then in half again. And again. This is shitty. I think I must have been that lucky, lucky person who experienced the best hormonal birth control had to offer -- no depression or weight gain, clearer skin, and no fucked up periods. I keep trying to figure out via the internet what's been really going on all these years of my life when I've been bleeding despite the fact that I haven't ovulated in 10 freaking years, but I'm too much of a dummy that can't grasp science to figure it out, other than the fact that my body is apparently now going back to its natural state. Which apparently includes the kind of pain that makes me want to curl up in the nook of the couch with a stack of recent tabloids and eat cream puffs.

I did sign up on this website, My Monthly Cycles, which helps you track your periods. It is pretty interesting to me, since I bought and browsed Taking Charge of Your Fertility last year, but decided it wasn't time to go off birth control when a discussion with my mother regarding the rhythm method resulted in her saying, "That's for Catholics, Amanda. Don't do that unless you want to have a baby." Also, I wasn't sure I was smart enough to chart my cervical fluid & other symptoms daily.

Ow. Ow. Ow. Cramps.

A completely on-topic link: My Beautiful Cervix. Midwife-in-training, with the help of an industrious boyfriend who owns a headlamp, photographed her cervix for every day of her cycle. I like this website because it enabled me to show B that everytime some seemingly odd substance comes out of my vagina, I'm not sick. Except that time with the salamander. KIDDING!

Even though it hurts, I'm really enjoying the idea that my body is slowly getting back to the way it's supposed to be.

One day late.

2008-12-08T11:39:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was the six-month anniversary of our wedding (which was 6/07/08, fucking darling, right?) I wanted to post because in the past little while we have been so happy, or as we like to say at our house, "et up." As in, "I am feeling absolutely et up with love for you today, honey." And I wanted to say "Happy Anniversary," to myself & Brandon, eventhough a) it's really only a half-anniversary, and those are generally not recognized in our house, and b) B doesn't really read my blog very often. He's a technophobe.

I have this spooky, mystical, rock-solid certainty in our relationship. I can see all these ways that we have made each other different, happier people, and I just thrill at the mystery of our future.

I walked down the aisle to the Cat Power cover of "I Found a Reason," recovered by our wonderful friend Pete, who flew down to TN from NY just to come to the wedding and play guitar & sing at the ceremony. Here's the Cat Power version, accompanied by the least-weird homegrown video that I found on Youtube. There was one "for House fans." The internet is weird.

If you're reading this, I love you, darlin'.

personal history, by address

2008-12-05T10:47:00.005-06:00

So, we are all moved in. That's the best feeling ever, although it is accompanied by the crushing reality that every room of your new place is filled with boxes. I have moved A LOT since I graduated from high school, I thought that I would document the list here for posterity.

1. Fall 1999. Moved from my parents' house to dorm @ Lambuth. Ate many cheeseburgers and cup-o-noodles there, and was generally miserable.
2. Spring 2000. Lambuth ---> parents' house. Worked at the newpaper that summer. Had sex with ex-boyfriend in our respective cars in many locations around Decatur County.
3. Fall 2000. Parents' house ---> dorm @ MTSU. I lived with Angela, who really lived with her boyfriend. Had a light mental breakdown, I think. Met Liz.
4. Spring 2001. Dorm @ MTSU ---> Parents' house. See Spring 2000. Plus more pot, I think (It's hard to remember that kind of thing, heh heh heh).
5. Fall 2001. Parents' house ---> Apartment @ Nottingham in M'boro. Liz and I lived together and had a really good time unless we were having a really bad time. The bad times may explain why we didn't really talk from 2002-05.
6. Spring 2002. Nottingham ---> Parents' house. See previous summers. Later, rinse, repeat.
7. Fall 2002. Parents' house ---> Lytle apartment w/Wendy. It was a really weird place, and WF stayed @ her boyfriend's, all the time too. You know, that's a common phase for couples in their early 20s who are still too scared of their parents to officially move in together. The apartment was the upstairs of a big house that our landlord lived in, and he got really grumpy with me when I repeatedly let in a stray cat that frequented the yard. The cat loved getting high. From shoddy recollections, this was the time in which my substance abuse really kicked off.
8. Spring 2003. Lytle ---> Havenwood w/my ex, Logan. First time we officially lived together. Acquired two cats. Smoked many bongloads. Graduated from MTSU but continued an illustrious career at Bellacino's Pizza & Grinders. Was fat. Embarked on ill-fated experimentation with "open relationship," that would eventually destroy both my relationship with the ex as well as my then-best friend. In an incredible twist of fate, this was the same apartment complex that LT lived in with her ex-boyfriend. But we didn't know each other! Weird!
9. Spring 2005. Havenwood ---> Poplar (still with ex, but it was definitely the beginning of the end). Many, many sexy/dark/depressing things happened at this place, but I also lost 20 lbs., and isn't that all that matters? Weight loss, ladies, bottom line.
10. Spring 2006. Poplar ---> Parents' house. Stayed there all summer since my Daddy was sick. Drank a lot of cheap beer. This was when I started drinking in front of my parents. Started dating Brandon. Very exciting, very terrible time.
11. September 2006. Mom's house ---> E. Nashville. Signed the lease on the same day my dad died, horribly enough. B & I moved in together pretty immediately because it was GD fate. Called this place "ice house" because the floors were granite and it was so cold, all winter. Little did I know this was a precursor to every other winter we've had so far.
12. April 2007. E. Nashville ---> Mom's house. Actually just my stuff moved down there, and B & I went Wwoofing. My mother was certain of a disasterous fate, but looky, I'm still alive. Got engaged in Madrid, and a hundred other things happened too.
13. August 2007. Mom's house ---> Monroe in Memphis. We moved in on the Elvis death anniversary and it was so hot I thought B & T would have heatstrokes moving all our shit in. We realized that we were happy in Memphis in ways we never were in Nashville. Landlord unceremoniously kicked us out after selling the building (it's now Restaurant Iris).
14. December 2007. Monroe ---> Lawrence. Nice but very cold. Had several good parties here. And got married! And got fleas! And had lovely out of town company come & stay!

So that makes this last move, Lawrence to Evelyn, my 15th. 15th! I don't know if this is normal or not. Granted, lots of time I was simply moving from one place to another in the same city (I beat the dead horse of Murfreesboro for a ridiculously long time, and I'm here to say, it is totally possible to leave that town & never look back. People bitch so much about M'boro, and my advice is, if you want to leave & you can leave, save a little of the money you're spending on watered-down beer @ Jim's, and get together a deposit on a new apartment. Dream the dream, people.)

I liked making this list because I got flashes of memories I thought that I had forgotten. Flashes of myself standing in certain rooms of these places, and things that happened to me in them. All the afternoons I spent packing bowls with my ladyfriends, watching shit TV and eating loads of crap food. Having a sobbing fight with my ex in my car, parked outside our place since his friends' house caught on fire and they were staying with us in the interim. Meeting somebody for clandestine afternoon sex while our for-real partners were at work/school. (All these memories seem to have happened post-2004, because my brain is mush).

OK, you can return to whatever you were doing before I wasted your time.

I am, indeed, dreaming of a Smoky Mountain Christmas

2008-12-03T09:18:00.006-06:00

Made it through the first of the family holidays more or less unscathed. We've never had a truly awful family gathering at my house, as we are of the "Avoid Public Confrontation at All Costs" school of Southern families, but unfortunately there are certain parts of my immediate family who fall a little short of the tolerance level that I am comfortable with, and there were a few tense moments in which family members vocally expressed both homophobia and racism. That's right, folks, it was TWO TWO TWO for the price of ONE, all in the course of maybe 30 minutes.

Because of the enlightened, liberal friends that I have who were also raised in rural West Tennessee, this is a topic that has been on my mind a LOT as of late. I cannot express the ultimate respect and awe that I feel for Liz, who recently committed the ultimate sin of verbally sparring with her father over the most tiresome issue of our region (make that our fucking nation), race. Anyone who knows me is aware that I am inherently anti-confrontational, and the simple knowledge that I have to, say, make a phone call to demand service, fills me with an anxiety so great that my hands shake while dialing the phone. HOWEVER. I don't know how much longer I can take this. I don't know how many more years I can be complicit to this fucking hate because it makes me sick and sad inside to know that it's being passed directly into the next generation. I can't imagine how I will react in the years to come, when I have my own children. I don't want them to hear shit like that, especially from people they're supposed to love & respect.

It makes my heart hurt, and I don't know what to do. It makes me wish Daddy was around, for some reason, although that may just be a kind of futile reaction to my own impotence in this situation.

In other words, DEAR ABBY, HELP!

Q: How did moving go? How are things in your new place?
A: I don't want to talk about it.

I'm getting all jingly/sparkly/jazzed about the upcoming holiday season. I'M GETTING A FUCKING CHRISTMAS TREE. YES I AM. And I plan to make paper snowflakes and cover them in glitter for a thrifty Christmas. Kind of like this:

Did anyone read that book? There was also a made for TV movie based on it, starring the incomparable Jason Robards:

They were poor, and her Daddy was kind of an authoritarian asshole and refused to let her have an Xmas tree, ever. And her mom was dead. (That's her grandmother knitting up there). And she was super-nerdy. But then, in an act of charity they got a free Xmas tree and she had saved the silvery paper from cigarette packs for MONTHS in order to create beautiful silvery decorations. I'm a bit foggy on the details from here on out, but I do know that at the end, her father's ice cold heart was warmed by all the Christmas good cheer and he was magically cured of assholism.

My favorite Christmas movie of all time, however, is probably this jewel:

Can you believe that this is the best image Google could come up with? Where in the fuck are all the Smoky Mountain Christmas enthusiasts? I know my Dolly-loving Tennessee girls are going to say "Amen" on this one... A Christmas movie with a Snow White plot! Orphans living in the hills! A sexy witch! Mountain Dan! What in the fuck?!?! I'm just glad it exists. Also, I have to say that I will uphold until my dying day that Dolly Parton is indeed a good actress.

Lord I've degraded very quickly. I'll hit "publish" before anything else flies from my fingers.

ETA: Goddamn, I love Dolly, but this makes me a little scared, then ashamed for being scared, but then scared again (click on it, it's too wide for this DUMB BLOG):

Please stop, Dolly! At least stop fucking with your face. I'm afraid you're approaching Wildenstein territory.

Someone told me... It's all happening at the zoo...

2008-11-25T08:55:00.002-06:00

Things are incredibly busy and none too pleasant in my part of the world (end of school craziness + work + moving + crazy landlord situation). Luckily, I get a reprieve for Thanksgiving. I don't think I'll be posting until after then, but I wanted to provide this, one of my favorite internet videos that I find never gets old.

Begging Bears
Uploaded by Herbert-Leonard

I want all of y'all to have a just plain lovely holiday, and I'll do the same. Kiss kiss.

Trips out of town: One good reason for living

2008-11-20T14:29:00.005-06:00

I suppose with the upcoming holidays, I haven't had time to start getting excited about the fact that we're going to the inauguration in January. Yes! We have a pair of lovely friends, Roger & Vivian, who we hung out with a bit before they relocated to D.C. in the late summer, with the usual "If you ever want to visit, just call..." and, in this case, we did. Shameless, huh? But they're sweetasses and even though they're being invaded by several friends that weekend, they told us to come on as well, so we will. Today I started my research of food in the area, which is Priority One for me when visiting a new city. So far, my major discovery is Ben's Chili Bowl (whose site, for some reason, my work browser won't allow me to visit, declaring it "Malicious," WTF). Behold!

I feel the rarity in which I eat sulfide-ridden hot dogs robs me of any shame that might be attached to the act. I love tube steak, I have to admit. I get particularly excited when I realize a special devoted to unique and/or extraordinarily popular hot dog joints is airing on television, and I watch them again and again. Hopefully Mr. Dill and I will have the time to someday crisscross the nation eating the best dogs it has to offer.

The last time I visited Washington, D.C. I was on a 6th grade field trip, which would've been approximately 1993, and all us kids wore those hideous shiny track suits that were so popular in that era. I remember having a purple one that I wore with a matching Mickey Mouse baseball cap from Wal-Mart; I had a looooong (Pentecostal length, mind you) spiral perm and VERY fat face. I wish I had pics to scan, I really do... I'd feel like I was telling you a very special secret if I showed you 6th grade Amanda. Anyway, we visited all the monuments but all anyone cared about was getting back to the hotel so we could go swimming in the pool. Except for me, who was a) chubby & self-conscious; b) not a good swimmer. I still have a "Cherry Blossoms of Washington D.C." shot glass that I bought as a memento, being unaware that it was meant for booze consumption. Oh, the charm of naivete!

ETA: If y'all have any good restaurant or any other recommendations for D.C., let me know. We'll be there a few days before the inauguration. I'm hellbent on getting a visit to at least one Smithsonian in.

oldie but goodie

2008-11-19T13:50:00.003-06:00

As of yesterday, I am officially *off* the hormonal birth control. First stop, VCF. The package has a cute little sexually active cartoon woman on it. She wants to talk to me frankly about contraception. I will not let you know how the VCF is, probably, because that's TMI, and although my middle name could be TMI, I have to draw the line somewhere. It seems like I do, anyway, but why is that again? Oh yes, because it'd rather embarrassing for everyone, because I'd mention:

a. queefs
b. menstrual blood
c. that thing that happens sometimes when a dude's balls slip up inside his body
d. all of the above!!!!

Maybe this game gets tired for y'all, but I'll tell you, IT NEVER DOES FOR ME, SUCKERS!

School is fast coming to a close, and for me, it is forever. Or at least for now. I have decided that this whole graduate school thing is definitely not for me at this point in time. I know people who have had very successful forays into advanced degrees but for a variety of reasons, I'm not going to continue with my master's. We are making other plans, and although, at first, I felt the dread of failure welling up when I thought about quitting, it was soon surpassed by the idea of how stupid it is to continue something when you know that you shouldn't, and one thing keeping you going is the dread of others' judgement. I say "Fuck that shit," so I'm quitting and I'm not ashamed, world.

Last night, in the course of searching for a recipe for wilted lettuce, a dish my mother makes in the springtime when her greens & radishes are ripe in the garden, I cruised through old Myspace blog entries. I am really happy that I was blogging often there in '06, because it means I have these pretty honest-sounding, well-constructed accounts of my summer -- daddy's sickness and the very beginning of my relationship with my husband. Like this classic! From September 30, 2006!

"I'm living in East Nashville with Brandon -- we will steal your lawnmower. Our apartment is really incredible, a deal we stumbled upon after a stressful breakfast at the Knife & Fork. I can see downtown from my kitchen window. We are so busy loving each other that everything else seems like half-time until we can get together again, and I feel like things are so much better now that I am older. Knowing what I want to hold onto is so much easier, and I'm certain he feels the same thing. We just want to have a good happy life with one another for as long as the momentum lasts -- and I think, I hope -- the momentum can last for as long as you choose for it to, as long as you keep gas on the fire. We laid in bed the other night watching a Metro helicopter spotlighting, trying to track down some criminal, safe in our sleeping nook with the cats stomping on our heads. I don't know how life can be so happy and sad at the same time, honestly. It makes you feel heavy with guilt and light with the ease of love and freedom. I'm like a science experiment in which you float an object in the middle of a glass of water."

Hmm, I can't help but think "Why can't anything I write these days be as perfect as that is?" Maybe because now my life is pretty normal , and back then it was so tumultuous, in the best and worst ways.

It's a ridiculously busy couple of weeks coming up -- moving & the end of school, which means papers & test, not to mention Thanksgiving, which we'll spend at my mom's house, joined by Brandon's brother & his girlfriend, which is awfully terrific. I've made the resolution that the holidays spent with my family will be exponentially more fun if at least somewhat under the influence, so I must remember to buy wine and/or liquor before leaving Shelby county each time. God, it would be so much easier if drinking around my brothers/their wives & children wasn't so fucking taboo. Do you know how many people I know whose entire families cannot make it through a gathering without a liberal helping of liquid courage? I don't want anyone to get smashed, I'd just like it if we could relax together in the best way: under the influence.

I'm gone tomorrow... baby, follow me down

2008-11-14T08:21:00.011-06:00

As I was driving to work this morning, a rather frenetic sense of just fucking being alive washed over me, and I filled up with a certain kind of energy that you feel when you are very lucky. It's much better than caffeine. The only problem is that I have to come waste it here, and although I'm very willing to shill food stamps to people because Lord, everybody wants to eat, I can help but selfishly wish that I was either a) sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River, drinking a 40; 2) sipping a galao with my husband in a small cafe in Porto, Portugal; or 3) lounging naked on springtime clover eating a Tomboy cupcake. Instead, I guess I'll try to hang on to some sense of vitality until 4:30, which I am telling myself is NOT a long time away.

I am feeding my mood with the Avett Brothers this morning because they are like the best band ever ever ever. Seriously. If anyone needs to know, I can burn you a copy of my "Amanda's Ultimate Avetts Mix," some of my favorites. I have every CD of theirs in my catalog now, thanks to my lovely brother in law:

It makes me particularly proud because I turned him onto them. I'm kind of like a Christian missionary, see? But instead of forcing my religious beliefs on indigenous peoples, I'm just spreading the gospel of music holy music.

Yesterday I discovered a seller on Etsy that just knocked my socks off, and made me consider papercutting, which, I am ashamed to say, I never had before. A few examples of her gorgeous, intricate work:

Aren't those incredible? She has a whole blog devoted to her papercuts here, and you can find her Etsy shop here. I think I will get my mom & niece a couple of her smaller storybook character prints to frame for Xmas presents, and I really really want one of the larger ones for myself. I bookmarked it on our computer, we will see if Mr. Dill remembers that I did so. Time will tell. I want to just order one for myself right this minute but I'll have some self control.

What else, what else? Oh yes, inspired by posts by Mrs. Lies, and the experiences of other married friends I have who have gone off the pills and been pleased with the results, I have decided to ditch the hormones. Liz has been induced into reading Henry Miller by this, for God's sakes, how can I ignore that? So now I have to decide what alternative I want to use. I wish I could just go to Walgreens and buy a sampler platter, like appetizers at T.G.I. Friday's. I have experiences with condoms, but that's it, so I believe I'll weigh my options. Since I'm a child/young adult of the 1990s, I feel the impulse to try the Today sponge, in a nod to Elaine on Seinfeld, but I don't know if contraception choice based on a sitcom is wise.

so I'm going back to the place where we met, I'm going to find the beer bottle we left

2008-11-10T21:54:00.003-06:00

The hatches have officially been battened; I am sitting under our huge down comforter, nestled on top of the electric mattress pad, or as I like to refer it's "Mama's Gift from Heaven." We inherited my parents' king sized bed and all its accessories, and my mother had invested a lot in the past few years. It has a couple of nice memory foam pads as well as the lifesaving warm-up-your-cold-ass mattress snuggle. Boy, it's nice.

B & Toby are watching The Fall in the office, but it is too cold for me in there. I really, really want to watch this movie, but I'll do it tomorrow since it's VETERAN'S DAY!! Hooray veterans! Thanks to your sacrifice, I get to sleep in on a Tuesday. Why don't y'all honor me by taking tomorrow off killing Iraqi and/or Afghani and/or Pakistani civilians?? And I'll go buy some outerwear at Goldsmith's. Do you see how everyone wins??

I have to do homework & start packing tomorrow. We did the application process today for an apartment in Cooper Young, which is slightly old & busted, but quite a bit cheaper than our current place, and has a washer/dryer. And... drumroll please... heat that (supposedly!) works. Works well, even. Time will tell, but I feel all right about it. The dangerous part is that it is within eyeshot of Black Lodge and I feel that our movie rental bills could possibly sky rocket.

All in all, we had a really nice weekend. On Saturday I met my mom in Jackson, and we watched The Secret Life of Bees, which I thought was worth the $5.50. Well worth, possibly. My mom and I had both read the book not long after it came out, and meeting her in Jackson for a movie has been something I've meant to do for a long time. It's about 1/2 way for both of us, and it's nice for us to spend a couple of hours together. The movie portrayed the South in the way it should be: slow, sweet, & golden. Oh yes, and pervasive racism, and hate crimes! (Nervous laughter!) That night we first went to Ashley & Will's, then to Leslie & Mark's. God I'm hotlinking like a whore. I'm all "Look at the people I know! Behold their internet presences!" At the end of the evening I realized a) we weren't totally wasted; b) we hadn't offended anyone; c) no one had offended us. All in all, a success. It is weird to consider yourself mature simply because the thought of spending time with others that you may or may not know very well doesn't fill you with incredible fear & revulsion.

For some reason, every night by 9:00 p.m., my back seizes up with this weird stiff pain that makes it tough to bend over. What in the hell will become of me if I'm having back pain of this sort at 27? I carry every bit of tension around in my neck, and when Brandon touches it to feel the muscles, drawn taunt in the manner of rubber bands, he wrinkles his nose with disbelief. I don't know what could ever fix that. Are chiropractors just a big screw?? In Decatur County, there was one, and my daddy used to call him "The Rubbing Doctor." I'll leave you on that note.

Dobamanuts for Democracy

2008-11-06T14:21:00.003-06:00

I'm back at work today after waking up on Wednesday morning with a splitting headache and calling in sick. I'm sure it's a brain tumor, not the Franzia. Yes, I'm absolutely chockful of class. From what David told me the other day, the husband and I share sophisticated drinking tastes with one Ms. Janice Fullilove. I don't know about Ms. Fullilove, but I have great appreciation for the "Chianti" variety.

Election night turned out to be really awesome. I made spring rolls, and Brandon cooked up some dumplings from the Viet Hoa and we gorged ourselves while listening to NPR. I had fallen victim to the liberal paranoia, which I'm pretty sure sprang from flashbacks to 2004, and B and I agreed that we wouldn't go out until it was looking good for Obama. I prefer not to let others see me when I'm suffering, that's all. Anyway, after Ohio was in the pot, we threw the wine & leftover rolls in the car and headed to Mr. Whitten's, where there were a lot of merrymaking and excitement and happy voters. Part of us were sitting in the living room, some people were out on the porch, and B was in the bedroom on the phone with Simon in Chicago when the banner popped up on the television naming Obama the winner, and we all just erupted with screaming and laughing and motherfucking relief. It was quite beautiful, and I was really happy to be in a group of people to share it, it made it all the more poignant. When John McCain made his concession speech, there was a cut to a teary-eyed Sarah Palin, and I couldn't help but yell "SUCK IT CLEAN, BITCH" even though everyone was supposed to be quiet.

Like I said the other day, my country making me a little bit proud doesn't happen very often, because I'm an ungrateful socialist, I suppose, and although I don't think Obama's gonna cure AIDS or anything, I'm just happy that a majority of my fellow Americans voted the most liberal of all U.S. Senators to be our Commander in Chief, and an African-American to boot.

It was noted on Jezebel today that Michelle Obama played Barack the Mariah Carey song "Hero" when they were waiting to hear the results, and I was quite touched, as this is a song that I learned in chorus my freshman year in high school, that I punish my husband with at least once a week. He tries to smother me with a pillow when I do it, but I'm tough and I'd never let anything like a pillow-smothering keep me from singing this very very special song to him, especially.

I am officially bored with work entirely, and although my inbox is filling with alarming rapidity, I am finding it hard to give a fuck.

After I recovered enough to go out into the sunlight yesterday, we went apartment hunting. Although B is quite grumpy about it, I refuse to spend another winter in ice house. Due to the delightful combination of high ceilings, complete lack of insulation, and the presence of only two wall-mounted pitiful ass gas heaters in our house, it was pretty much like we didn't have heat last winter. If you put on two pairs of pants and sat directly in front of the teeny heater in the living room, you wouldn't die. Otherwise it was total misery. I'd usually come home from work, turn on the dryer & the stove in the kitchen, and just hang out in between them until it was time to go crawl under the electric blanket, which needed to preheat for a minimum of 30 minutes. Yes, my life was a hell. If anyone sees anything that looks good around Midtown, please let me know. I am looking for a place that's less than $600/mo., I'm totally tired of throwing away money on rent that we could put towards something real & sustaining. But no, we're not going to buy a house here.

According to the ladies in the cube next to me, government cheese was really something, but I'll never know because you haven't been able to get it for 20 years. I wonder about it. Was it processed cheese food? Surely it wasn't, like, cheddar. That seems to swank for the gov't to provide. What's up with American cheese anyway??? I'm sure that gov't cheese was American, and in my humble opinion, American sucks. I'll eat it on a cheeseburger, but that is for tradition's sake only.

Truly Horrifying

2008-10-31T09:02:00.005-05:00

In honor of this, the spookiest of holidays, I decided to post a series of YouTube clips that are both dear to my heart and incredibly disturbing. Those who have known me for more than a couple of years can probably remember a time in my life when I harbored what some might term an unhealthy obsession with little girl beauty pageants. There was no sense of pedophilia involved; more like a feminist-driven anger. My obsession was born one late summer evening in the late nineties, when browsing the satellite TV channels at my parents' house, I happened upon this little gem:

Painted Babies. This documentary was made by the BBC, and featured two little girls, white trash Asia and spoiled rich girl Brooke Breedwell (I am totally not kidding). I instantly realized the rewatch value of this doc, and taped it onto a VHS that became worn in the next few years, as myself and my sick friends viewed it time and time again, memorizing key lines and critiquing it in ways it was never meant to be critiqued (we had a habit of doing this, most memorably with the classic Lifetime film For My Daughter's Honor; that's a story for another day, however). The most exciting part about PB is that they just made a sequel, and my mother has promised to tape it for me. Painted Babies at 17!

Anyway, some years passed, I taped some more specials, slowly building a master VHS that had Baby Beauty Queens from A&E, and also an episode of American Justice about the Jon Benet murder. Then, in 2001, HBO did me the great favor of getting into the game with my next featured selection:

Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen (dammit, embedding is disabled)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwttqXiCE-I

This lovely focuses mainly on a little girl named Swan, and her trashy (and now, unfortunately, dead) mother's quest to win them money and fame on the beauty queen circuit. However, it is worth mentioning that there is an INCREDIBLE subplot regarding Shane & Michael, a gay couple living in Alabama, who for a few thousand dollars can turn even the homeliest little girl into a champion. I can't tell you how it makes me feel inside when I see Shane do a complicated choreographed routine, swirling a blazer and strutting so enthusiastically for an audience of one 4-year-old girl who is expected to mimic him, but I can tell you that your life will change for the better if you see this too. I've learned through scouring the internet that Shane and Michael have since seperated, and it really bums me out. Bums me out that Swan's mom is dead too, but... you know...

All right, the final selection for any BBQ (that is Baby Beauty Queen, not bar-be-que) virgins out there is a totally new doc I discovered when rewatching these a few weeks ago, and that is

Toddlers & Tiaras (once again, embedding disabled)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsy-rRzkufQ

I have only watched this one once, so I don't have much to say other than you will get to see a toddler spray tanned until she cries, and there's a pair of African-American lesbian moms who, for some Godawful reason both a) live in Jackson, MS [I just don't imagine Jackson is too gay-friendly. If I was gay, I'd save my money until I could move to a major city. I'm just saying, is all] and b) have decided to put their adorable, sassy little girls in this terrible pageant. Regardless, it's really interesting, not to mention the fact that their friend handmade their dresses from material they bought at like Hobby Lobby, which would normally be disastrous, but since he's so fierce, they turned out amazing.

All right, those are your spooky Halloween goodies. I'm going to "work" for another hour, go home, strap on my moustache and tie and go to Bette's H'ween party. Hope everyone has a safe weekend.

In which Amanda exercises her civic duty

2008-10-29T13:28:00.004-05:00

Today I early voted for Barack Obama at the Pyramid Recovery center in South Memphis. The whole process took nearly an hour and a half because there were so many people there, and, also, the computer system went down temporarily (Goddamn, these electronic voting machines are a bad idea people. A bad idea!). When I arrived, I counted approximately 30 people in line ahead of me, and when I left, there were at least 50 still waiting, including a huge group of kids that had to have just turned 18 this year; they were all baby-faced and flirting with one another while waiting their turn, but really well-behaved. There were also people there so elderly that they could not walk without assistance; the turnout today in S. Memphis really ran the gamut.

In line, I looked up on the wall to see a trio of portraits: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela, and I was seized by my own satisfaction in being able to vote for an African-American man for president in a city, in a region, that has seen so much violent oppression of minorities. My stomach clenched and my eyes filled as I thought about Dr. King and all the other activists who did not live to see this day in America, a day in which it seems (not getting overly cocky here), a majority of people are eager to put a black man in the White House.

Maybe I was relieved because there have been so many stories in the press in recent weeks that exposed the inherent racism that still thrives in this country. I hate it when stories like that become commonplace, and they have, and it makes me so sick and sad that people cling so desperately to hate. Even members of my own family find it easy to toss off comments that reveal their own distrust and distaste of Obama, indeed their own negativity toward anyone Not White, and I'm so pathetic that I can't even find a way to express how wrong they are.

I cannot speak of race eloquently, so I'm not going to try. But when I stepped up to that little machine, I took a deep breath and stared at the screen for a long time; I wanted to register the moment in my memory, and I wanted to really feel it in my heart. Every once in awhile I need a day like this, in which I feel a little bit proud of my country and the things that can be accomplished here, the -- dare I say -- Change that can occur when wrongs turn to right.

Keywords, Pt. 2

2008-10-24T11:21:00.002-05:00

Will I ever tire of this game? Probably not.
People are crazy. And sick. And weird. And, yes, sometimes just inquisitive.

Keywords that sent people to my blog:

"his finger in my belly button"
benefits of playing with tambourines for children
cumming gaces (?)
jim beam and headache
jim beam bedroom
jim beam vomit
long, tall lady sex (I really like this one)

OK, in retrospect this list is not as good as the last one, but I've already typed it now. I haven't posted all week and it leaves me troubled. Will my dear readers, lovers of the words "cumming," "animals," and "Jim Beam" desert me if my internet presence fails?

Things I'll do this weekend: go thrifting for my "well-dressed man" H'ween costume. Cook a chicken & cornbread for dressing for the potluck Sunday. Clean house. Do laundry. Force myself into doing school work (I've really slacked this week). Smooch on husband. Avoid hangovers.

When I don't have anything to say, I'll just repost something political from now on, OK?

2008-10-17T15:23:00.004-05:00

Ok, I read this essay earlier and it kept resonating with me, and I just had to repost it here. In my mind, it's the ultimate truth about this election, as well as the generalized present day bullshit political climate in this country. It was written by Joan Didion, and has reminded me that I need to read The Year of Magical Thinking, immediately. It also makes me wish I was smarter.

P.S. I got it from here, and it's really short, so you need to read it. Read it now.
*********************************************
Election by sound bite
Obsessed by "lipstick on a pig," economic "free fall" and other "great stories," America has failed to see the real challenges it faces.
By Joan Didion

Midway through August, before the Democratic and Republican conventions, Chris Matthews made an offhand judgment on MSNBC that pretty much summed up the political mood in which the country found itself: "I've seen this election before, I think it was 1988." He was referring of course to what was supposed to have been the certain 1988 victory of Michael Dukakis over George H.W. Bush, and to the ways in which a political party, most reliably the Democratic, can get overtaken by its own enthusiasm for being victimized; but what he said resonated beyond the concerns about Senator Obama's candidacy just then beginning to surface.

It resonated because what seemed striking about the long and impassioned run-up to this election was not how different it had been -- but precisely how similar it had been to previous such seasons.

We had kept talking about how different it was, but it wasn’t.

On a single mid-September morning these phrases would appear on the front page of The Washington Post: "stocks plummet," "panic on Wall Street," "as banks lost faith in one another," "one of the most tumultuous days ever for financial markets," "giant blue-chip financial institutions swept away," "banks refusing to lend," "Russia closing its stock market," "panicked selling," "free fall," and "the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen."

These were not entirely unpredictable developments.

For at least some months it had been clear that we were living in a different America, one that had moved from feeling rich to feeling poor. Many had seen a mandate for political change. Yet in the end the old notes had been struck, the old language used. The prospect for any given figure had been evaluated, now as before, by his or her "story." She has "a wonderful story" we had heard about Condoleezza Rice during her 2005 confirmation hearings. "We all admire her story." "I think she’s formidable," Senator Biden said about Governor Palin a few weeks ago. "She has a great story. She has a great family."

Senator Biden himself was said to have "a great story," the one that revolved around the death of his first wife and child and taking the train from Washington to Wilmington to be with his surviving children. Senator McCain, everyone agreed, had "a great story." Now as then, the "story" worked to "humanize" the figure under discussion, which is to say to downplay his or her potential for trouble. Condoleezza Rice's "story," for example, had come down to her "doing an excellent job as provost of Stanford" (this had kept getting mentioned, as if everyone at Fox News had come straight off the provost beat) and being "an accomplished concert pianist."

Now as then, the same intractable questions were avoided and in the end successfully evaded. The matter of our continuing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and our looming engagements throughout the region had been reduced to bickering over who had or had not exhibited "belief in the surge." "Belief in the surge" had been equated with the "success" of the surge, and by extension of our entire engagement in Iraq, as if that "success" were a fact rather than a wish. Such doublespeak was rampant. The increasing destabilization of the economy was already clear -- an average of 81,000 jobs a month were lost all through the summer -- but discussion of how to resolve the bleeding still centered on such familiar favorites as tort reform. This word "reform" kept resurfacing, but the question of who exactly was to be reformed was left to be explored mainly on "The View," by Barbara Walters.

The leading candidates duly presented their "health care solutions," not one of which addressed the core problem, which is the $350 billion a year it costs, according to a Harvard Medical School study, to cut in the commercial insurance industry. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we were assured, had run into trouble not because of the systematic deregulation of the financial industry, the delinking of loans from any imperative to get them paid off -- but because, according to Governor Palin (who had apparently missed the briefing at which it was explained that neither entity received government funding until the recent necessity for bailing them out), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "too big and too expensive to the taxpayer."

Time got wasted in the familiar ways. The presence of Barack Obama in the electoral process allowed us to talk as if "the race issue" had reached a happy ending. We did not need to talk about how the question of race has been and continues to be used to exacerbate the real issue in American life, which is class, or absence of equal opportunity. Instead we could talk about what Barack Obama meant by "lipstick on a pig," and whether it was appropriate for him to go off on vacation "to some sort of foreign, exotic place." The "foreign, exotic place" in question was of course Hawaii.

We could argue over whether "intelligent design" should be taught in our schools as an alternative to evolution, and overlook the fact that the rankings of American schools have already dropped to twenty-first in the world in the teaching of science and twenty-fifth in the world in the teaching of math. We could argue over whether or not the McCain campaign had sufficiently vetted its candidate for vice-president, but take at face value the campaign's description of that vetting as "an exhaustive process" including a "seventy-question survey." Most people in those countries where they still teach math and science would not consider seventy questions a particularly taxing assignment, but we could forget this. Amnesia was our preferred state. In what had become our national coma we could forget about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and AIG and Washington Mutual and the 81,000 jobs a month and the fact that the national debt had been approaching $10.6 trillion even before Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke mentioned the imperative need to spend, which is to say to borrow, $700 billion for securities backed by bad mortgages, a maneuver likely to raise the debt another trillion dollars. ("We need this to be clean and quick," Paulson told ABC.)

We could forget the 70 percent of American eighth graders who do not now and never will read at eighth-grade levels, meaning they will never qualify to hold one of those jobs we no longer have. We could forget that we ourselves induced the coma, by indulging the government in its fantasy of absolute power, wielded absolutely. So general is this fantasy by now that we approach this election with no clear idea where bottom is: what damage has been done, what alliances have been formed and broken, what concealed reefs lie ahead. Whoever we elect president is about to find some of that out.

"They hanged 13 natives at a time in honor of Christ Our Savior and the 12 apostles"

2008-10-16T08:44:00.002-05:00

Clip from the film "The Canary Effect;" you can get more information here.

Happy Thursday! I leave you with the subjugation of native peoples!

so it's better my sweet, that we hover like bees, 'cause there's no sure footing...

2008-10-15T08:23:00.004-05:00

I'll tell you what I hate, and that's having an evening like I did last night. Come home from school, take off your bra, reheat the pineapple tofu leftovers from the Saigon Le, talk to your husband and say, "Stay at the bar as long as you want, I've got homework to do anyway," eat some salad with entirely too much ranch dressing on it, throwing your fears of fattyhood to the wind for the moment, sit down in front of the laptop to study genetics and attachment theory and the like, only to find yourself totally seized by THE TRUTH. THE TRUTH will not leave your pathetic little brain alone; it talks to you in both the voices of a sing-songy little child as well as a smug, know-it-all adult. Last night THE TRUTH shared with me the shivery proposition that all this school nonsense might be a total waste of time, and it's possible I get done and still find myself in total hate with whatever job I have, which, as THE TRUTH helpfully reminded me, I am right now. In hate with my job, that is. It smirked as it said "You always talk shit about college being a waste of time, do you really think it's your hope for this so called 'better life,' Amanda? What a chump."

THE TRUTH is really fucking rude.

So I slid down the mega-slide of doom, which happens to me pretty rarely in these modern times, especially considering the depressive mess I was from, oh, I don't know, 15-22? When reaching the bottom of the mega-slide of doom, I can stare at a wall for hours. I guess the idea of proposition of living in complete misery for the rest of my life entertains me so much, I don't need anything else. If I saw someone staring at a wall like I do in these times, I'd say "Jesus Christ, that person is fucking depressed!"

I hate remembering things like, in my life, I'll spend more of my waking hours being paid for working somewhere instead of getting to spend time with the people who actually mean something to me, and I have to have a full-time job in order to have health insurance so that anything that might happen to me wouldn't destroy our lives financially. All this, plus you just die at the end of it all, anyway. Sometimes I just don't think I am cut out to live a conventional life, but I've been hammered into the shape of it by the way I was raised and my poor little brain just freaks out and feels desperate when trying to figure out a way to escape it all.

I'll be better in a few days, I always am. I don't really stew in misery that much anymore, something I am really grateful for. There are a lot of things I am grateful for, actually, don't get me wrong. I am so happy that we have these great friends in this city that love us as much as we love them, and I'm happy that I have an understanding mother who is my best friend in a lot of ways, and I can share so much with. I'm so happy that I have a partner who I can lay in bed with at night and be completely entertained and entertaining by dumbass shit we do for one another, and laugh until I cry with him. So, I'm not miserable. I am just boringly confused and uneasy.

Photo tour of the potluck life...

2008-10-14T09:02:00.015-05:00

Well, we had our second potluck on Sunday night, and I have got to say, first off, that these fools can cook. Earlier in the week I had sent out a big email suggesting that we have an Italian theme, and everybody went all out and once again the food was muy delicioso. Which is a fucked up thing to say, technically, but I don't know any Italian. We had fresh pasta and meatballs, toasted lasagna, antipasto, vegetarian white lasagna, wild mushroom risotto, an Italian spinach dish, some awesome sauce with eggplant, and a lovely selection of wine brought by the wonderful David, who keeps any party well-lubricated. Since we were expecting to have several people over, Brandon set up the photobooth and took some pretty lovely pictures. He's so smart, y'all.

What can I say, other than these folks can photograph as well as they can cook. The whole set can be found right here, including one of Brandon with NO SHIRT ON. Back off ladies. Potluck will be back in session not this coming weekend, because I'm going to Decatur county to hang out with my mom and attempt to make & can butternut squash chutney, but the next, October 26. I think we are going to do the whole traditional Southern home cooking thing, so y'all can put on your thinking caps, which, in this case, may be camo trucker hats, and start conceptualizing.

Photography Love -- NSFW

2008-10-10T10:27:00.010-05:00

I got Brandon this book for his birthday, and when we were browsing it in the tent during our camping trip, I came upon the work of the photographer Justine Kurland, and was just overwhelmed by my appreciation. The first set are from a later series, "Of Woman Born," the next four are from an earlier series she did with adolescent girls in gorgeous landscapes. I just love these, so I wanted to share them. You can read an interview/profile of her from the NYT here.

"The Milk Sucker"

"Mama Baby Procession"

"Waterfall Lesson, Drawing Stick Figure"

"Walking the Rowena Dells"

"Raft Expedition"

"Cyclone"

"The Mud Puddle"

"Jungle Gym"

"Grassland Drifters"

you're a mean ole daddy, but i like you

2008-10-08T22:19:00.003-05:00

Is it just me, or am I being bombarded by images of jiggly flab bellies on a large number of websites these days? Even the fantasic food blog Smitten Kitchen sometimes has large ads that scream suddenly, out of the midst of images of glorious full fat foods, suggesting that maybe I need to lose weight, and the simple act of clicking will reveal calorie-burning secrets I've never even considered. The tummies on Myspace are really too much; I wonder if it's targeted for women, or those of a certain age, or if everyone gets them. I know that sometimes, when they catch me off guard, I suck in my breath and my gut at the possibility that I look just like that when I take my shirt off.

I'm in need of a butcher; Sunday night potluck is on again this week after our Arkansas hiatus last weekend, and the theme is Italian. I am determined to make meatballs with beef, pork, and veal, and after visiting a butcher in Millington on our first camping trip, I'm pretty convinced this is the way to go. Note to self: Check Viet Hoa and see if they have veal. After all, they have duck heads.

School has been kicking my ass this week, but I have to say that the more I am immersed in the cirriculum, the more I feel as though I am doing the right thing. The bottom line of all my policy studies so far is social justice, a concept I can confidently say means a lot to me. I've been learning all about Clinton's welfare reform, why it is bullshit/doesn't work, and, most interestingly, why corporates appointees had a say in the changes and the corporate interest in welfare reform. It's a lot like listening to Democracy Now; the truth about the nation is gut-wrenchingly depressing, but putting your fingers in your ears and pretending that none of it exists is even moreso. Anyway, all this reading and studying has at least saved me from the string of violent hangovers that seem to have affected my Memphis peoples this week.

OhmyGod tonight I will make veggie sushi rolls and EATTHEMALLUP because the sushi craving has hit and I haven't made any at home in a coon's age.

they'll make a moving for-tv movie on lifetime about my life

2008-09-30T08:27:00.003-05:00

Today I'm obsessed with the song "Underground" by Kimya Dawson. Behold:

Some people hate Kimya Dawson, I'm sure. Like, people who can play guitar really well and bitch about musicians only knowing 2 chords. Last year at about this time Brandon and I discovered the sweet brillance of her album Hidden Vagenda and spent great amounts of time on the road singing along at the tops of our lungs. When I was going through a box the other day I found another CD of hers that I had lost promptly after buying it, and brought it out to my car and have been revisiting it. It's appropriate since it was in the fall when I first got into her music. Anyway, this song has a lyric that is kind of sweet and morbidly depressing at the same time, something Kimya's really good at, that goes like this:

"So I tattoo instructions on my ass, that say don't ever put this body in a casket, burn it and put the ashes in a basket, and throw them in the Puget Sound, I don't ever want to be underground, oh no"

I agree with Ms. Dawson, please, please, burn me up. I am a little torn as to what to do with the ashes, however. I am sure that by the time I die, there will be a lot of places I've gone that I could feel very confident about being scattered. But what if my family wants to keep me with them? That would be just fine. I feel like when someone dies their loved ones are so overwhelmed that it would suck to leave them with a decision to make. I was OK with seeing my dad in his casket, but after the funeral I had nightmares about his body underground and I still do sometimes. Including one in which I had to hire a cleanup crew to dig him up and like, clean the moldering moss off his body? Yeah, maybe that is TMI.

Somebody please comment and tell me what you want them to do with your body when you die. I am morbidly curious.

Last night I went to Mezcal with Toby and Brandon -- this is our Monday night, post-school tradition -- and sometime during the meal I got a phone call from this ex-friend (God, I hate using that term, it makes me feel so DRAMATIC and IMMATURE, but it's honestly the truth). I didn't know I got the phone call until I got home, since my phone was on silent, but I also had a follow-up text from her that said something about her calling on accident and not to worry because she'd delete my number so it would NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. This is someone who I had been friends with since high school when things went South, and I thought the text was the most pointless, immature thing ever. Pretty much like saying "Please don't be mistaken. I still cannot stand you and will never be able to stand you again." I find that the friends I had in high school, on the whole, when worse came to worse with our friendships, acted much like we would have at 17. I have to include myself in this appraisal, too. Has this been anyone else's experience, that if you've known someone since you were a kid, in your interpersonal dealings with this person, there's some sense of arrested development?

I feel pretty confident that since I have asked pointed questions to readers today, that no one will respond. That will show me.

The Brandon Dill birthday spectaular phenomenon is planned for Thursday night. I am having his little friends over, and buying him soda and making pizzas. Also possibly ordering wings? Ugh, I just realized that there's an obvious connection between events in our lives in the past 6 months and my desperate attempt to mother him this Birthday day. I am not sure that I like it, but caring nurturer me cannot -- must not!! -- be stopped.

Also, I just caught myself choking myself a little bit at my desk. I'm a pervert.

Last night, I dreamed...

2008-09-26T08:30:00.005-05:00

So, last night I drove Mr. Dill and I down to Oxford, MS for the much discussed Neko Case show. I have things to say about this town. First off, it was weirdly off its rocker because the presidential debate will or won't be there today. (Jesus McCain, suck it up and get down there and get your ass handed to you. We all know you're not doing anything in particular in Washington, dumbass.) Ok, Oxford. I didn't hate it, it just left me, as it did Liz some time ago when she went, with a big Meh. Meh. I'll tell you something I did find incredible irritating about Oxford, and that was its mens' fashions. I don't know what has happened to young prepsters in the South, but Jesus Christ on the cross, thank God I'm not a different person in a different place, because there is no way I could stomach thinking these dudes are attractive. Let me tell you the basic uniform for a guy, age 18-28, in Oxford, MS, on a Thursday night in September. 1) Light blue collared shirt. This may or may not be worn with a white undershirt, depends on how studly you are feeling. 2) Khaki shorts or pants. 3) Brown leather loafers with no socks. Not wearing socks shows everyone how Goddamn casual you are, and that you're too Johnny Reb to give a fuck. (Don't their shoes stink really bad? Any pair of shoes I've ever tried to wear without socks, especially leather, stunk like the Devil. Maybe I'm just disgusting.) 4) Visor or cap shoved down over what I hate most about the Southern Prep, THEIR BIG BANG OF HAIR. Do y'all know what I am talking about? I'm talking about this:

Our two friends on the left are sporting the megabang. The one in the middle demonstrates how it looks under the most favored headgear of all frat boys, the "I'm too Johnny Reb to give a fuck" weathered baseball cap.

Here are some Ole Miss boys and girls. Notice the guy bangs??? Omnipresent, like Baby Jesus.

If the girls feel like being cute, they wear mini-dresses such as these. If they're on their period, they wear short athletic shorts with baggy Bid Day t-shirts. But they still straighten their hair. I bet y'all are surprised to hear me pull a term like "Bid Day" out of my ass, and I'll tell you, I'm surprised too.

Where am I going with all this? (Things like this happen to me. I start a blog with some purpose in mind, and then coffee drives me into a shaking frenzy unable to transition into The Bigger Picture.) OK, so what I am trying to say is simple: These people get on my fucking nerves. But then I think, Amanda, you're a smart girl, delve deeper. The notion of sororities has long bothered me. Of course, this originated in my own, leagues-deep insecurity in early college when faced with packs of these tan, seemingly perfect girls; I channeled that insecurity into hatred, but now that I'm older and have more perspective, I still have a problem with the notion. I think that a sorority is just another way of grooming a woman into the pretty disgusting societal ideal of what she should be. Their uniforms, their identicalness, it all grosses me out and makes me sad for them. This article says it all much better than I can; it's a great one from Rolling Stone, written in the aftermath of the Duke rape scandal, and the first time I read it, I nearly wept with gratitude that I was too fat, nervous, and weird to be accepted into Greek life.

How does stress affect the brain, anyway?

2008-09-24T08:44:00.004-05:00

We had a nice weekend out at Shelby Forest, camping with Dave and Amy. The ultimate in miracles has happened, you see, and we have found couple friends, in the town that we live in, that we can agree on, and who seem to want to be friends with us as much as we want to be friends with them. This is an elusive animal, as I think those of you who have been/are in relationships can attest. Either one half of the duo doesn't get along with someone in the other duo (usually split along opposite gender lines), or the dynamic between the other couple starts to get to you after awhile, and what was once your casual analysis of the relationship explodes into a situation in which, after every episode of hanging out with them, you end up saying things like "Did you notice how he said/did this thing and SHE JUST LAPPED IT UP?? THAT IS SO ANNOYING!!!!" Anyway, the point is, as of right now, Dave & Amy are our couple friends and we like it. I like it, anyway, I can't speak for the rest of the three of 'em.

We went to Shelby Forest because it was close by and I was happy that we'd picked it. Camping had never really occurred to me before 2007, I don't think? I had a tent that I'd bought for Bonnaroo... 2004?? I believe, and it had merely hung out in my closet/under my bed since then. I think that my enjoyment of camping relates directly to what a pseudo-spiritual guy told me soon after meeting me one time, that I was a "householder." I really squee over getting to set up a little home away from home in the woods. I think I'm certainly a householder. The intense joy I feel when seeing my primary colored Fiestaware stacked up in the kitchen cabinets confirms this. I feel the same satisfaction when smoothing a plastic gingham tablecloth over a concrete picnic table, rolling out our sleeping bags in our newly popped up tent, and spreading Patsy's homemade cherry preserves over a slice of peanut buttered bread in the chilly morning time, surrounded by trees. I am planning a birthday camping spectacular weekend in Arkansas for my best husband next weekend, and I believe we are going here, Petit Jean State Park, which the internet has told me was Arkansas's first ever state park. Say what you want about Arkansas, it does have all that natural beauty.

Yep, Mr. Dill's birthday is next week, his 28th (it feels surreal to be getting so close to 30) and I am orchestrating gift-giving and special dinner-making to make up for last year, when I had just started my job and was broke as a joke and only gave him a subscription to Aperture magazine. I am super proud because not only have I had both his gifts, which were ordered off the internet, in my possession for more than a week, I have secreted them away in my work cubicle away from his prying eyes. Score! My goal is to prepare more surprises and pull them out at random times from October 2-5, at which time all birthday celebrating will finish. It's funny because he doesn't really give a shit about his birthday, which I took full advantage of in both 2006 and 2007, but Goddamnit he deserves some attention and I'm going to give it to him.

The last point I want to touch on is the fact that I am considering initiating a weekly Sunday night potluck at our humble abode on Lawrence Avenue for old & new Memphis friends. When we first moved to Memphis, we happened to stumble upon Brandon's ol' MTSU friend, Jen, at El Mezcal, and she and her husband invited us to one they had each Sunday night that was attached to viewing of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I miss the tradition, especially since Fall is coming and the cool weather is inviting me to make homemade mac and cheese and pad 5 additional pounds onto myself. We will not be watching any tv shows, but we will be talking and drinking wine (if anyone has the forethought to buy it on Saturday). We would do it at like 7'ish, and anyone would be invited to come and bring friends with them. We can get a real little network built, and it's the perfect night for Lindsey & Dave to hang out. I will be discussing this more with youse guys in real life, I hope y'all want to do it.

P.S. I have been spending at least two hours daily at work listening to Suspense old time radio. Is that really weird??

let it leave me trembling, trembling

2008-09-16T08:49:00.005-05:00

I'll tell you a phenomenon I love: Listening to music that reminds you of a particular time in your life and having the same feelings that affected you then rise over you in an awesome wave. That is an incredible feeling. I am sitting at work this morning listening to Neko Case's album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (and no, she's not the only music I EVER listen to) and I am stricken with the sensation that I am driving my car down the interstate on a hot summer night and falling in love with Brandon Dill all over again. I remember one particular night distinctly, driving the both of us from Wendy & Mark's in Nashville to B's hovel in Murfreesboro, right after I'd gotten this album. Despite the fact I should have still been traumatized by the end of a long-running relationship, I knew deep down inside myself that what Brandon and I were feeling about one another was pretty dang undeniable and I was so fucking excited about the whole thing every minute. And I still get really excited, even though sometimes we are freaked out about money or generally pissy or bored. I really believe that things are better with him than without him, and better than they would be with anyone else because something that lives inside the both of us, something deep and old that connects to our hearts & our minds, that part of the both of us recognized the other as soon as we looked at each other and paid attention. We try to remind each other how lucky we are to have found one another quite often.

I had a lovely time at my mother's this weekend. The air is crisping up and her orchard is full of apples, pears, and muscadines. If you've never eaten muscadines before, they are very sweet when they get ripe but have a thick, bitter skin and seeds. When I was a little girl my father used to !PoP! the pulp in my waiting mouth and this is the way I still eat them today. I tried to teach my five year old nephew how to feed them to me in this way, and ended up with a mouthful of fingers.

My relationship with the land I grew up in, the house my great-grandparents built there in the 1930s is very deep and complicated. There's some kind of psychic impression that has been left there by the four generations of Yarbros that poured their love and work and lives into the place, and I feel like it's my destiny to end up there with my own family someday. Finding a way to survive there would be wonderful for Brandon and me, but it's a hard thing to figure out, because the nearest towns offer nothing in the way of opportunities financially, much less socially. In some kind of fantasy world, we could have a retreat for all types of creative people and that would solve both problems at once. I have long had dreams of living in that house and inviting a huge circle of friends to visit twice a year to eat fresh food from long tables scattered across the back yard while lightning bugs flash and naked babies run around with great abandon. Maybe this is possible? Some practicality in me pooh poohs the possibility, but it's the same little voice that tried to tell me it was impossible to go live out of a pack in Europe for three months, and I did that, so you never know.

Friday good stuff of all kinds

2008-09-12T08:36:00.003-05:00

I don't know about you guys, but I'm happy it's Friday; Brandon and I will be visiting my mom this weekend while all the rest of the Memphis folks get TEE-rashed at Cooper-Young fest but it's okay, because I love my mom and she makes me lots of good food and gives me all her elder woman wisdom when I come around.

Last night I uploaded a video to YouTube for the first time ever, and I'm going to try and do some more soon. When we are travelling B always shoots lots of video on my little camera, and we've been meaning to start postin' em on ye olde internet for a long time. For a grand, adorable debut, I give you: Puppet Bike!!!!

Now, we saw Puppet Bike outside the poster shop where we bought this (let me tell you, it took much hemming & hawwing to make a decision). I don't know the gender of the person inside the Puppet Bike stage thingy, but whoever it is, I love them. This is probably the most awesome street entertainment I have ever seen, because it is so unexpected and out of the ordinary and CHARMING. Look at those puppets! I'd say what you need to do right now is go get in your car, or, be more environmentally responsible/cheap and get a megabus ticket and get your ass to Chicago and DO NOT REST until you see this puppet wonder for yourself. Amen.

Also, in the grand tradition of Liz, also known as Bette Davis Lies, also known as Peggy Noir, I wanted to post a recipe that I cooked last night, boosted from Recipezaar. I have to say that the dinner I made last night was one of the best dinners I have cooked in my life. Like, definitely the top 10. And it was vegetarian! And it was an incredible amalgam of spicery! Yes! (Can you tell I've had my morning coffee??) OK, so I made I Can't Wait for Chole, which I had made before, except this time I added some sliced zucchini in with the chickpeas because I am in lust with zucchini. But the real star of the meal was the COCONUT RICE, people. The recipe follows. Make it. Make love to it, and thank Mother Earth that coconut milk exists.

COCONUT RICE

1 cup long grain rice or jasmine rice
2 cups unsweetened coconut milk
1/2 cup finely shredded unsweetened coconut
1/2 inch peeled fresh ginger
3/4 teaspoon salt
chopped fresh cilantro (optional)

1. Bring the coconut milk to a boil in a medium sized pot.
2. Add the rice, ginger and salt.
3. Stir and bring to a boil.
4. Reduce heat to low and then cover and simmer for 20 minutes.
5. While waiting, heat the shredded coconut in a skillet, toasting it lightly.
6. Remove from heat and set aside.
7. When the rice has cooked for 20 minutes, fluff it with a fork and throw out the ginger root.
8. Toss with toasted coconut.
9. Garnish with chopped cilantro just before serving.

I love this game

2008-09-11T12:05:00.002-05:00

Keywords that people have searched for that lead them to me, according to Google Analytics:

animals eaten alive videos
amanda tall video
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animals cumming in women faces
cummin all over mom
cumming all over the place
jesus on a vacation far away
milk tall mature women novel
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puppy eaten alive video
sexy lady pilots
tall pussy
woman breastfeeding puppy video

Oh, you internet psychos.

well it's hot in the yard, and cool in the bed

2008-09-10T09:19:00.004-05:00

I decided I'd better blog before some well-meaning blogosphere passerby read my last entry and assumed that I had thrown myself down an old well. Or something like that. Honestly, I am doing fine today, and in the past week I have had a gutbomb of anxiety off and on but I think it can be attributed to the dread of tomorrow's anniversary as well as my clenching fear regarding the upcoming election.

I have been reading this blog lately, as recommended to me by Liz. She actually pointed me to Nienie's sister's blog, because the sister is taking care of Nienie & her husband's four kids since they were critically injured in a plane crash in August. Yes, very heavy. One of the first entries I read was this one, in which Nienie describes the back to school dinner party she had for her two school-aged children. It was freaking incredible. When I am sucked into some kind of real life drama that is playing out on the web, I am always stricken by an "Oh my God, this is real life" feeling. Anyway, reading her blog makes me feel so very underwhelmed by my own creativity that I want to cry. That is something to work on.

Last Thursday I was stricken by the certainty that I needed to cut off all my hair, and handled the urge the way I usually do, but making an appointment at Dabbles (one of the most embarrassing names ever for a place of business, surely) for Saturday and rushing there to get John, a very nice stylist, to cut it all off for me. Behold, a shitty Photo Booth image of yours truly sans flowing locks:

Jesus Christ on the cross, I am fairly sure that a Very Large Man that sits near me is afflicted with whooping cough or another such malady that launches him into coughing fits that goes ON and ON and ON, and is the kind in which you can detect phlegm. Sounds like he is going to die and I can't muster anything more than disgusted annoyance. What kind of person am I.

B has a wedding in M'boro this weekend, and I am going to my mother's. This burgeoning autumn weather makes me want to drive in the car, don't know why it does that. Also makes me want to go camping, which I think Baby B and I will do, in Arkansas, for his birthday in October. He will be 28. 28! He is old! We are nearly 30! But we have a savings account, feels good that we've at least accompanied that.

"It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch"

2008-09-04T16:08:00.010-05:00

My dad trying to force my trifling-ass nephew's birthday gift on his head; early March, 2006

In less than a week's time, my family will mark the second anniversary of my father's death. He was 69 when he died on September 11, 2006; I was in Nashville, he was in Jackson, TN. He died alone in a room where he'd been taken to have tests administered. My mother and brother were in his hospital room a few stories above. Every time I visit Liz, I drive by that ugly ass hospital and think about it all, and sometimes I laugh bitterly.

The day of his death I was in training for the one and only job I had during my 8 months in Nashville, doing sales calls for a medical transcription company. The people were nice, but I am not a person who should have ever worked in sales, because I simply don't give a damn about selling things. Anyway, I'd had my cell phone off all day and when I got off work I had a voicemail from a friend, also from my hometown, who had heard that things had turned bad with Skip (that's my dad) and my family had been called to the hospital. I had no missed calls from my mother; she didn't know what to do at the time. I was 3 hours away; she didn't know that he was going to die. I didn't know what to do myself, after I spoke to her, I got more and more upset and wasn't sure about driving myself that far; I went to my best friend's house and sat waiting for her. I got a lot of mosquito bites, which I relished, because I thought I should be feeling some physical pain; things with Daddy were bad, and I wanted to feel on the outside the way I did on the inside.

Eventually I got a call from my sister-in-law that he was gone, and even if I'd left Nashville as soon as work had ended, I wouldn't have seen him alive again anyway. My mother has told me since that she is glad I did not see him that day, because he was (obviously) so deathly ill. She always adds that the last day I did see him, two days prior, he had been lucid enough to tell me goodbye, and asked later where I'd gone, and when she'd told him, responded with "Good, she doesn't need to be hanging around here with us old people, anyway."

My father had huge hands, and he could fix or build anything. Even after he retired, he worked pretty much morning to night every day outside, doing whatever was to be done that season. He tilled, planted, weeded the garden. He cut and hauled wood to keep the house warm. He built my mother furniture and bird feeders and whatever else she needed. 69 might seem old to some people, but my dad was so damned hardy and healthy; the nurses and interns at Vanderbilt never failed to mention his dark brown (farmer's) tan when he was being examined. He had an electric sense of humor, and when he was in a room, you couldn't help but pay attention to him, because he was so charismatic and funny.

I got home and all my family was there. My dad was gone. I hugged everyone; somebody gave my mom a Xanax. Drug of choice for white Southern people dealing with loss. Everyone left and I sat at the computer to write his obituary for the newspaper. My mother went into the bathroom to shower, and a few minutes later I heard her wailing; an animalistic sound that came from low inside her and went on & on as she pounded on the wall. We hardly cried together during the course of his illness because we didn't want to admit to ourselves, to anyone else, that, all of a sudden, his life had an expiration date. The doctors never gave us a timeline. They never said, you have 6 months, 6 weeks, but as soon as he was diagnosed a cursory check of WebMD confirmed that the odds were against us.

I lived at home with my parents that summer, from May until September; on June 1st, at Vanderbilt, they cut my daddy open and tried to remove the "very aggressive" tumor, as well as part of both his pancreas and small intestine (I think; my memories of organs have ran together in the past couple of years; could've been his stomach) in a surgery called the Whipple procedure. He was in the hospital for a month and when he came home, he had an open incision across his belly that had to be flushed and repacked and bandaged twice a day; a nurse did it in the morning and my mom did it at night. He had to try and heal from the inside out because he'd had complications when they'd initially sewn him up. My mom didn't think that she could do this until she started doing it, and then she did it every day like a champ. He couldn't eat until his intestinal track had had enough time to recover, so there was a tube, kind of like an IV, that ran into his shoulder and delivered him the nutrients that he needed to survive (straight into his heart, I believe; if that makes any sense). We had to hook him up to the bag every night, prime the pump, and let it run until morning. This went on for weeks, no food, no drink; just a bag of life potion disguised as a blue backpack that ran on batteries. He could however, have a wet swab to keep his mouth moist.

I could go on an on about this horrific experience. I question why I am putting this up anyway; no one wants to read this; no one wants to think about my pain or the possibility that they themselves could experience something similar. But I think it's important that since I feel an urge to document this time in my life, I do so. Maybe I will not publish it. I don't want to try and make y'all respond to this, because there's nothing to say, nothing to do. "I remember, I remember," that is what I am saying to myself and to everyone else.

I don't know how people cleave to religion after facing sickness and death. I wouldn't say that I had any faith to speak of when the whole mess started, but at the end of it, I was left certain that there was not a God, and in the off chance there was, I was really, really pissed off at It. If there was a God, assholes would get cancer and die. Racist fucks with venemous hearts, for example. Men who abuse their partners and children for shits & giggles. Not my dear, sweet Skip, who believed in ol' JC 'til the day he died, even having a vision of him while hopped up on pain meds and waiting to go into surgery. "Don't worry about me, y'all," he said to my tearful mother and I. "Don't worry about me, because you see who's right here next to me? Jesus." I appreciate the fact that my father was comforted by his strong, unquestioning faith, not afraid when walking through the valley of the shadow of death, only heartbroken to leave us all behind, but faith has not comforted my grief. I don't believe it has offered my mother any relief, either, although she sure has tried. I am ultimately mystified when people praise God in the face of great tragedy. It's obvious to me now that life is a series of random events that are sometimes terrible and sometimes wonderful, and it doesn't how much you talk to some invisible person, whatever's gonna happen's gonna happen.

I think I'm done now. I wrote virtually nothing when I was living at home, but I do have a lone word document on my laptop that I wrote in the late summer; I'm going to close with a paragraph that I cherish because it is something I wrote about him while he was still with us.

"Tonight I sat in the bedroom with him – I was going to check on him, he’d been in there laying down, hoping the hiccups would go away – and I held his hand, kissed him, hugged him, until we started to talk. He asked me if I knew what the doctor had said, and I gently reminded him I’d been there. You don’t know what to say a lot in times like these. We talked about how sometimes people lived for years with cancer. I didn’t say “But it’s already making you this sick, and that can’t be a good sign.” I didn’t say “I don’t want you to die,” which is what I think every time I’m in his presence. It seems selfish, and I know he knows anyway."

"It’s so quiet down here – if this is the end, shouldn’t we be talking and making sure we mark all this time with its true importance? Yet we cannot do that, because it would be admitting it might be the end, which is not something any of us want to say. Or feel. Or believe."

My lovely parents; Christmas 2005

Your body was the map; I was lost in it

2008-09-04T15:55:00.002-05:00

Okay, day three of Master Cleanse finds me feeling much better and without the chronic headache I had ALL DAY yesterday. It followed me through 8.5 hours of work, (non)dinner at Jasmine's, running around with Amy, and the two hour season premiere of ANTM at Zach's. It was a devil of a pickle.

But, I'm sad because food is gone and I love food.

Since I have so little to contribute, let me leave you with what's possibly the best documentary ever filmed about little girl beauty pageants in the South. This had some sort of serious impact on me at 19, I'll tell ya.

"Painted Babies"

My mind is on the blink...

2008-09-03T11:13:00.002-05:00

Well we had a pleasant journey to Chicago and back and here I am, once again, working for the man. My job has been shifted around, September being the first month that the change took effect, and let me tell you, so far, it's the bees knees. Two days in and not a single interview!

I really do love Chicago. It's so overwhelming to be in such a HUGE city when I'm so used to living life here in what now feels like teeny Memphis. We went to the Jazz Fest, and the Art Institute, the beach, hung out with our great friend Simon, and ate lotsa food of course. Incredible deep dish Chicago pizza and Indian food; also, I went into this sweet shop on a street full of Indian & Pakistani restaurants & shops, and got some excellent halva; I hadn't eaten any since I was in Greece, and what I got in this shop was excellent, both carrot and pistachio. I have to check some markets here in Memphis and see if I can get any. So, Chicago joins the list of "Cities in Which We Might Breed;" it's really the only one on the eastern side of the states. We have to do some more scouting in the West before making any kind of decision. The thing about being married, in my late twenties, is that I feel that the decisions I am making right now will really have an incredible impact on things for years and years to come. Oh Lord, anyone who ever reads this has seen this diatribe countless times, so I will spare you.

I started this Master Cleanse thing yesterday. I have done it once before, in early 2007; it's that cleanse where you have no solid food for 10 days, you only drink this lemonade concoction that is sweetened with maple syrup and spiced with cayenne. Also laxative tea at night and a "salt water flush" in the morning. I have not yet done the salt water flush because I'd have to do it at work and we all know how shit-shy I am (it pretty much makes you pee out of your butt. No joke). I've got to figure that part out. Today is day #2, and I have a kind of slight dull headache and a serious lack of energy, even though I slept like the dead last night. I know from my prior experience that my exhaustion will go away in the next couple of days, but dammit, all I want to do is go home, crawl in bed, and pull the covers over my head. Speaking of sleeping, I had a terrible dream this morning in which Bad Guys were somehow taking my mother's house away from her, and in it, all dream-Amanda could do was sob uncontrollably. I mean, throughout the whole dream, all I did was cry. I have these on occasion and they're particularly sucky because the already present helpless feeling is just magnified tenfold by the crying.

So all in all, this blog is much like my dietary life right now: BORING AS HELL. However, when I'm once again on the food wagon and regaling you with tales of my booze-fueled evenings, it will be all worth it, kittens. Because I'll be skinnier.

P.S. Liz, Amy, and I, as well as some people around here who don't actually blog, will be meeting at Jasmine's in Cooper-Young tonight for an early dinner (5:15ish). The husband and another pal will be tagging along, and anyone from my wee internet world is welcome to come, too. We'll have a fine time. Jasmine's got some of the best tofu that you've ever eaten, buddy.

baby, we'll ride in style

2008-08-28T11:08:00.002-05:00

I have been neither a dependable blogger or cook lately. Some vague form of uninspiration must be the cause, but I can't pinpoint the why of it. I have often expressed that cooking in the evening when I get off work is therapy for me, but as of late I have been more prone to convenience foods. Maybe that means that I'm so well-adjusted that I don't need the therapy anymore?? Who knows. I'll be back in the saddle, eventually, I'm sure. I'll just blame it on hormones, that's so easy and since I have a complete lack of knowledge regarding hormones, it's a mystery diagnosis that can't be questioned.

I'm getting all juiced about Obama. I was only vaguely interested in the election during the primary process because at the root of it, I'm one of those pessimists who feels that the country has gone so far down the shitter that no mainstream candidate would or could engineer the sort of change we really need. However, my little Democrat heart has started to rat-a-tat-tat with the hope that evil motherfucking Republicans will be ousted after these eight long years of hell, and I like it. I was reading a blog by my ex, who has been seized by a great shining hope in the light of the convention, and he mentioned our 2004 post-election slump. Our anniversary was Nov. 3 or 4, we could never settle on which, and that year we'd both taken off work/school to celebrate together. W was recrowned the night before, however, and I remember us moping listlessly around the Blockbuster video together, unable to muster any energy to pick out a movie, or care about anything. More than anything I wish my dad could have outlived the Bush regime; he was a self-professed "Yellow Dog Democrat," and after his retirement discovered the left wing blogosphere and became obsessed with anti-Bush rhetoric and conspiracies. He drove my mom fucking crazy.

Anyway. Every time I talk about my dad I feel weird about it, like it's too heavy or I'm trying to garner some sort of sympathy. This "Daddy's Girl" tattoo I have is the perfect example; random people in public will ask me about it, and then I have to say, "Oh, he's dead," and then they get all awkward. It's kind of weirdfunny, but to be honest, sometimes I just act like he's not dead. For example, when a fireman in the Whitehaven Kroger was asking me about in order to hit on me.

I'm doing a case in which a 70-year old couple are raising their daughter's six children, ages 13-5. Can you imagine? For God's sakes. My mother would fucking kill me.

I want to leave y'all with a fantastic tune, the "first rock'n'roll song" EVER, "Rocket 88" performed by Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats. This is some mystery video that I found on Youtube, but you get the picture. There is some bonus Bette Page, meeeyeow!

All right, I hope everyone has a positively lovely holiday weekend!

Blood from his heart spilled out onto my dress and was warm

2008-08-25T14:20:00.002-05:00

If my body's slow recovery is any indicator, My So-Called Drinking Game party was a rousing success. It is a very hilarious and intoxicating thing to do, but it has unfortunately clued me in to the fact that I just can't drink like this anymore. Over the past two months or so, anytime I have had a hangover, it's been a total body experience that last well into the next day and after being a complete lush and ignoring the obvious for all this time, I think I'm going to finally listen to my poor wrecked tummy and head and just take a little break. I mean, this is a beer hangover for God's sakes, it should not be so vicious. It is unfortunate that I must take a hiatus from my wino ways right after discovering the delight of this game, because it's a real crowdpleaser. Oh yeah, and high school? It's a battleground for your heart.

We're riding the Megabus to Chicago Thursday night to spend the long weekend with the adorable Simon Strikeback. His band was opening for the Indigo Girls the weekend we got married, so he couldn't come to the wedding. I don't know when I became the kind of person who gets so excited about exploring cities, but I'm really anticipating wandering Chicago with Simon & Brandon since the last time we were there, New Year's 2006, I got a huge blister on my heel and could barely limp. That's what you get for trying to be cute. Anyway, it's apparently swimming weather so maybe we'll hit up Lake Michigan? I'm sure we'll have some fantastic pizza, we did the last time. The crust of that Chicago-style pizza is like freaking pastry; tender and delicate. All my trip planning revolves around eating.

So, Neko Case is coming to Oxford, MS in September. I could not be more ecstatic. I love her.

Brandon has to go with me because no one I know really gives 2 shits about Neko; well, Simon does, actually, but he lives too far away for it to matter. B will have to suffer through it with me, unless I go alone, which is possible. He does not care for her "suicide music."

Best phrase I've heard all day: "Enigmatic scats," used to describe mystery poop that may or may not come from the ass of Bigfoot.

A Call to Drink...

2008-08-23T09:47:00.003-05:00

To all my Memphis/West TN peeps:

We are going to be playing "My So Called Drinking Game" tomorrow afternoon/evening at our house, and y'all are invited. Bring your own booze (I think beer and/or wine would be better; if you drink liquor during the course of this, we'll probably be scraping you off the floor). I am not sure what time we'll be starting up, but probably fairly early. Then we can all either stumble home to bed to maybe to Mezcal to soak it up with chips. Just call me or Brandon and we'll tell you when, or message me on Myspace or WHATEVER. It's not up to me to tell you how to get your shit together.

Love,
Amanda

All this and sexy too

2008-08-22T15:37:00.002-05:00

A bit of the photographic goodies from Rebecca & Michael's trip to my mother's lovely farm in historic Decatur County, TN can be found here. You will be quite sorry if you don't check them out. They're from the talented lens of Mister Brandon Scott Dill, keeper of my heart and daddy to my future babies.

Lord, hold my tongue, guide my thoughts

2008-08-22T14:18:00.003-05:00

I'm not dead; I've just spent the week first relishing the return of my long-lost, long-limbed Californiated husband, then attending two days of orientation at UT, all the while trying to adjust to a big transition at work. This was capped off by a LOVELY pelvic exam this morning, not by aforementioned husband, but rather by a nurse practitioner named Seraphine. She was very nice, by the way, and provided me with exceptional care as well as 12 more months of security against an embryo taking hold in my all-too hospitable uterus. Thank you, Women's Physician Group of Memphis.

After the first 30 minutes of graduate school, I was disappointed to find out that although they have been validated by their GRE scores and essays and transcripts, a lot of my fellow students found it necessary to complain over the unexpected administration of a 30 minute standardized test gauging our critical thinking skills. I didn't know I was so mature until I found this so incredibly annoying. Of course, the possibility that I am just always pouncing at the chance to be incredibly annoyed, especially at people whose presence in my life I cannot control, is a matter to be considered.

I am at once afraid and excited about grad school. It will be hard, I think. I was rather shocked to discover that one of my syllabi was 29 printed pages. But I am very hopeful that it will give me a chance to prove that I am capable of succeeding at school, something I never did @ MTSU, partly because I didn't see the use of any of it, and partly because it's hard to do assigned readings when you have a rather phallic pink Graffix bong surgically attached to your face. Anyway, it's all kind of a big deal and I'm going to have to learn a lot of complicated things, that's my point. Also, I had to have a TB test and glory to the heavens, I found out I will not be going down like Doc Holliday.

Have a good weekend y'all.

Everything a misogynist wanted to tell you about sex

2008-08-14T21:16:00.003-05:00

Tonight's selection is from...

...which lives on the back of our toilet. One quick flip through it exposes you to the sexist, racist, homophobic revelations of one David Reuben, M.D. (in this case, M.D. seems to have stood for "Mean Dick".

In response to the rather bizarre question "Do Western women masturbate that way?" which seems to arisen from a discussion of ben wa balls, Dr. Reuben states the following:

"In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in this country, many young girls worked in garment factories. The hours were long, the pay poor, and the working conditions dismal. They operated treadle-type sewing machines which required constant pushing of the treadle with one or both feet. Gradually the girls discovered that by pushing the treadle a certain way with their thighs pressed together, they could rub the labia minora and massage the clitoris. What had been drudgery became almost a pleasure. The long hours at the sewing machine melted away as this new diversion took hold. Fortunately (or unfortunately) electric machines were soon introduced and the pleasure went out of the garment industry. The introduction of electricity was not all bad news, however. It opened up new horizons in the area of masturbation."

I don't think this needs any commentary, really. This book is chockful of misguided stereotype-enforcing gems, and I invite anyone pissing, pooping, or merely passing the time in my humble little bathroom to give it the once over. There's so much crazy shit in there that I can't begin to make you understand. Only a Caucasian, white-collar man could turn a sweatshop into an erotic privilege.

The infrastructure will collapse

2008-08-14T08:47:00.003-05:00

Yesterday's moment of shame: I was in Midtown Video, waiting to check out, and Juno was playing on their huge, discolored television set. I saw this movie in the theater, back in December when it came out. It was right after I had started listening to Kimya Dawson a lot, plus it looked cute and cool. And I'm not saying it was a bad movie, I'd watch it again. But Ellen Page makes me want to pop her head like a grape, and the dialogue was a little Dawson's Creek-y. (Speaking of which, some commercial for a new TV drama that stars Joshua Jackson came on at the movies the other night, and before I could help myself, I shouted "Pacey!" Ok, maybe I didn't shout).

OK, back to the story in which I am a total stereotype of a woman approaching 30... The birth scene begins, which is accompanied by Cat Power's cover of Sea of Love. And my face starts doing that crumple cry thing, because a baby is being born on television. And my uterus wants a baby inside it, Goddammit! And then I'm like SHUT THE FUCK UP UTERUS, YOU'VE GOT TO GO WITH ME TO GRAD SCHOOL AND THEN WE'LL TALK ABOUT IT.

Am I the only one who wants to have sex immediately upon hearing this song??

The kind of sex you have with someone you at least sort of love, in a room that is dark but slightly illuminated by a streetlight shining in the window. Lots of intense eye contact sex.

None of these thoughts are helping my dedication to my work this morning.

Breastmilk: Better than mangoes??

2008-08-13T13:22:00.005-05:00

OK, without any hint of judgement, I am going to post this. You might pretend you aren't going to watch this, but you really will.

BEHOLD THE EIGHT-YEAR OLD THAT STILL NURSES

"I'd rather have lots of breast milk than a million melons."

All right, so I'm really pro-breastfeeding. I plan on breastfeeding our children, when/if we have them, for at least a year. But boy oh boy, eight! Wowee zowee. There's an infamous story in our family about my great-grandmother Keeton's youngest brother; there were lots of kids in that family, and you know back in the day the idea was that if you continued to breastfeed, it would act as birth control. Apparently all the Keetons were pretty fucking hilarious, and one of the older brothers taught the youngest to ask to nurse in a rather rude way. One day their mother had some company over -- I'm sure they were sitting in the parlor -- and the youngest son came in and said to his mother, "Goddammit, maw, give me some titty."

I can hear the eerie sounds of "A Day in the Life" floating across the cubicles...

2008-08-13T11:25:00.006-05:00

I had a client come in yesterday whose middle name was Pecola. I was reminded of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and the stage version of it I saw in Hartford during my girls' bachelorette Yankee weekend. Look, Liz, I even found a picture!

I have not seen too many plays, to be honest. It's kind of a form of entertainment that I just forget about. But this version of The Bluest Eye was so masterfully done, it was a real treat. I had read the book years ago in high school, and I was really happily surprised when L&R told me we had tickets to see it. It was just perfect.

So my dear husband is in California for the week; his brother works in Sequoia National Park (I think that's the one) and he had been wanting him to come visit him so that they can go hiking and bond over cans of beans and beef jerky. That leaves me at home by myself, free to loll around the bed watching episodes of Intervention and eating cereal for supper. That was yesterday; I plan on being more productive tonight. We'll see. I've got a can of Red Bull worked into the plan that may help.

El Tee and I (God, don't these cute nicknames make you sick!) went and saw Gonzo on Monday night. I really didn't know that much about Hunter S. Thompson; don't tell anyone, but although I lived in Murfreesboro for 5 years, I never read or saw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'd have my M'boro citizenship revoked for that one. The recreational drug patrol will go back in time and remove all psychotropic goodies from my sweaty palm before I get the chance to swallow/chew/snort them up, and only Jesus knows how my present will be affected. Probably I'd wake up a lawyer.... jeeeez.

Anyway, I liked the movie. Basically, if someone's past involves any illicit activities, I want to know all about them. Also, the whole element of Thompson committing suicide because he felt he was obsolete was interesting to me. The suicide note: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt." I've been having little conversations with myself about all this (bear in mind, I'm not that well informed; I hear there are some conspiracy theories). On the one hand, I do think that although suicide should never be glamorized and all that hoohah that you, of course, have to say regarding it, Jesus Christ, it does kind of take some balls to succinctly end your life. But maybe not?? Maybe if you never bought into the heaven/hell scenario and you don't give a shit what may or may not follow, you can end it without fear. The argument arises then that it's selfish. Selfish because of his wife & son and everyone else who cared about him. But what kind of life is lived with one who doesn't give a shit anymore? None of this is very enlightening, I know. As far as euthanasia goes, I do think that people should be able to end their lives when they choose; but this made me think about that idea as more than just something that applies when a person is terribly ill, but if the same laws should be applied when one is merely sick and tired of living. Hmmm.

I guess the point really is: Damn, HST was a hottie.

We had a great weekend all together in Decatur County. My mother was the consummate Southern host, preparing approximately 2.3 tons of food and trying to deny anyone's help in cleaning up the messes. I was so happy to be surrounded by my lovely friends; they are so smart, so funny, and so mature. I love it! These women are confident and, most importantly, low-maintenance. Their husbands aren't half-bad either. I would give anything to have a big weeklong retreat every year at my mother's house for all our dear friends. Hammocks would definitely need to be installed.

I'm super excited to be going to the vigil @ Graceland this weekend, and to have my lovely friend Claudia visiting for the weekend. I am hoping to show her a good time. Is anybody else wanting to go to the vigil? I don't know why in the hell you wouldn't.

Eaten alive + puppy video = I am bored/boring

2008-08-12T15:09:00.004-05:00

Not much to say @ this point in time, other than an itchy bug bite on the areola? Yeah, nothing sucks quite as much.

We've got a lady pilot; she's not afraid to die

2008-08-07T09:07:00.007-05:00

It is suspiciously quiet at work today. But, as soon as I type this, I can hear the ladies in the row next to me crank up their daily unending yammering. If they would shut up, for even a few minutes at a time, I could have my morning quiet time, getting wildly caffeinated in peace.

Also, I have both a "Delicious," and a "Iguana" on my schedule today. That is all I will say about that. It writes itself, really.

When I came home from work, it was so hot outside and in our apt. that, it wasn't that I wanted to die, but I just didn't want to live anymore. I wanted to take a hiatus from life. I eventually mustered up the energy to got some clothes back on, since the first thing I do every day upon entering the house is take off all my clothes, and we ran errands, including our good deed of the week, which was taking a man from Walgreen's down to Ike's to get some gas. His woman had tricked him into taking the car out when she knew it didn't have any gas in it, apparently. Because I am a Crazy Mooney,* while he was pumping the gas I imagined that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse and, in fact, his plan was to immolate himself in my backseat while we both freaked out and I wrecked the car. This did not happen. Instead, we engaged in a completely boring, predictable conversation about high gas prices. Our friend predicted that prices may rise to as high as $12 per gallon by Christmas.

We watched The Last Picture Show last night.

This is a movie that I remember that my parents both used to talk about as a favorite, so I picked it out at Black Lodge. Also we both like Paper Moon a lot, and that is another Bogdanovich film from the same time. Anyway, Picture Show did not disappoint, it was really sexy and weird and depressing, all at the same time. Plus it had a young Cybil Sheperd (a Memphian, how 'bout that?) in it, and she is super easy on the eyes:

So, put this on your "Movies To Watch List." It's in B&W, which also scratches my current constant desire to watch old movies. Larry McMurtry wrote it, and he is also responsible for, in no particular order: Terms of Endearment (which is playing at the Orpheum this evening, in an odd coincidence. I will not be seeing it, I don't think; I don't want to invite the whole parent-child/death from cancer theme into myself today), the mini-series Lonesome Dove, and the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. What a weirdo, huh?

This weekend, our great friends Rebecca & Michael are coming to Tennessee, to my mom's house in Decatur County, actually, to be more exact. They live in Massachusetts, and Rebecca is a performance artist originally from Knoxville. She misses the South a lot and when they were down for the wedding, decided that she wanted to shoot some pieces down on my mom's land. I think it's going to be video, but I'm sure B will shoot some stuff too. Liz & Dusty are coming as well, so we're going to have a rural southern couples retreat on Saturday night. I'm terribly excited, and probably going to make the following dessert. We ate this when WWOOFing at the Sunshine House in Greece last summer, and I ripped the recipe off Takis. I've never attempted to make it; I'll have to figure out the metric equivalents of all this shit.

Takis’ Chocolate Avocado Cake
½ kilo oats (soaked for 2 hours)
juice of 2-3 oranges
½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup pumpkin seeds
½ cup chopped dates (soaked with oats)
½ cup raisins or chopped figs (soaked with oats)
2 spoons of flaked coconut
cinnamon
water
2 tbsp. honey
½ kilo nice dark chocolate bars
rice milk
zest of one lemon
zest of one orange
2 avocados, pureed very well
Various fruits for topping

Mix oats, orange juice, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, chopped dates, raisins/figs, flaked coconut, cinnamon, and let sit for one hour. If not think enough to form crust, add more oats (unsoaked).

Oil 9” cake pan very well.

Pat oat mixture firmly down in pan. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 30-45 minutes.

Melt chocolate bars with a small amount of rice milk. Add to this the lemon and orange zest, as well as the avocado puree, and combine thoroughly. Top with sliced fruit (fresh cherries and peaches are primo) and nuts while chocolate is still warm. Chill until firm.

Celsius??? KILOS?? WTF?

*Oh, yeah. The Mooneys are my mom's side of the family, and they are definitely crazy. The particular shade of Mooney crazy that this fear of immolation in the car came from is probably Cousin Joy-flavored. She, who once plead with her pregnant daughter-in-law not to go outside during fireworks because "one might light on your belly."

Fiddle dee dee

2008-08-05T10:49:00.011-05:00

So, I laid out of work yesterday, feeling poorly (ahem). Calling in sick makes me feel both triumphant and guilty; I lay there trying to go back to sleep after making the phone call and my stomach twists up in a knot as I imagine that something dramatic will happen on my return, such as being quizzed on my exact symptoms or called into my boss's slightly larger cubicle for a Serious Conversation regarding my responsibilities in the world of benefit determination. Nothing ever happens, of course, pretty anti-climatic.

The weekend with my mom and niece went well; it was pretty low key. On Friday night, we went downtown a little bit early and rode the trolley all the way down South Main to the Arcade and then back up to the little Court Square park. My mom has memories of eating lunch in this park when she was a young hot secretary; it has a really gorgeous fountain that we admired before walking back down to the Orpheum and settling in for 226 minutes of Gone With The Wind. Now, I was excited because neither B nor my niece had seen the film before, and I thought it was a really nice experience for all of us to be seeing it together in the incredible Orpheum. Goddamn, I love that place.

GWTW did not disappoint; I could, of course, spell out a lengthy diatribe regarding the film's racism and sexism, however, everybody knows that shit and it would just be boring. I would describe myself as a movie snob, and my love for good film has only been heightened by my relationship with B, because he is extremely picky when it comes to movies, and fast to call bullshit on any combination of factors that make a movie a stinker. Anyway, watching GWTW reminds you why the phrase "golden age of Hollywood" was termed; it is so big & beautiful, and over the top with epic scenes of post-battle fields littered with the dead & dying, fiery explosions, and lavish parties rich with all those ridiculous hoop-skirts. So, needless to say, I enjoyed myself. Not so sure about the niece; she looked terrifically bored at times, although I'm sure 3.5 hours of Hannah Montana would have left her happy as a clam. (Vomit on that, by the way).

To make a long story short, the family evacuated our apartment on Saturday afternoon after some Indian food, visits to The House of Mews, Viet Hoa, and Flashback, a game of Scattergories, and many flash games shared on the internet between B & niece. I swear to God, I think she could have just played flash games the whole time and been happy. Also Webkinz. I don't know exactly what this is, but apparently children's satisfaction with virtual pets has not died. Do you remember Tamagotchi? Umm, that shit is stupid, obviously. Get with it children of today! Or at least the ones I know.

All right, also I must mention that we had a small gathering on Sunday night (hmm, could it be possible that this event might have lead to Monday's absence from work?). It was a nice time, and I'll tell you that it is a nice feeling that we are developing a circle of friends in Memphis. We officially failed to do so in our brief time in Nashville, and actually disassociated ourselves from the few friends we did have there, all of which leads to the conclusion that for now, we are supposed to be here and are succeeding at life. I love it when that happens! Now for the pictures. If you are in them, then you've probably already seen them, so I apologize in advance for the redundancy. The internet'll do that, you know.

We made Summerbrew, and somehow a half-full glass was left on the dresser in the bedroom, found toward the end of the night and consumed quickly by the industrious Kerry Crawford:

Next up, we've got Dave and Amy. Aren't they cute? I think that seersucker dress is *quite* becoming, myself.

I made some homemade pizzas, and Zach made incredible quesadillas. Incredidillas, if you will. Below we see evidence of food, and Zach, and Alpha. See, I'm not lying about any of this.

B and I were discussing how in both of the above pics, Zach Whitten appears as Worldly Observer. He can't really say as to why humans act as they do, but he'll gladly provide a prop to facilitate their ridiculous behavior. Also, he provides that mega-photogenic moustache.

So, I had a great time y'all, and I hope you did too. I apologize for going to bed kind of early and, in the process, possibly exposing my panties to anyone, but it's really no less revealing than a bathing suit, so I think you'll be okay. I think I need to develop some sort of espresso shooter to combat my alcohol-induced narcolepsy.

ETA that, of course, all photography is courtesy of my brilliant husband. Please, hire him, fuel our adventures.

Prepare for your mind to be blown

2008-08-01T12:30:00.003-05:00

Ok, this is probably old news to everyone much more media savvy than me. But can I just say that Girl Talk makes me shake my head and mutter "Oh shit" with disbelief at each ensuing track? He makes me want to have the most badass party ever and have the most perfect drunk ever, in which I am totally buzzed but do not slur my words like a stroke victim.

Thank you, Gregg Gillis. You are my PERSON OF THE WEEK.

Think of giraffes cumming all over each others' faces...

2008-07-31T11:49:00.006-05:00

I thought I'd post the poem that was the inspiration for the blog title as well as a reading during our wedding. Good ol' Peggy Noir (that's a really smart nickname, Dave; especially for those of us who have an issue with the pronunciation of the word "peignoir") was crying but still did a very nice job, as I knew her textual studies ass would.

Now, I've never really been a poetry fanatic, but one night, right after B & I started getting kind of seriously serious about one another, which was pretty much as soon as we met, I got tipsy and discovered this jewel in my original copy of Our Bodies Ourselves, and left a voicemail reading of it for him. Then he thought I was really bitchin'.

Love Song of a Species

think of

long tall animals

making love

into themselves

breaking themselves

together

swallowing

each other's air

each other's songs

think of these

animals
not knowing

their species

their strangeness

think of them

trying to tell each other

all day long

with words

think then

of the most

natural

way of

saying

I love you

eyes
mouth

a place

there is a place

that has no thoughts

think of something

of a thing that cannot think

inside a place

that cannot contain thoughts

think of these things together not thinking

think of the most natural way to think of this

then unthink everything that follows from that

then sleep

a sleep

in which all dreams

and these words

are stolen from the dream

you are having

-- Cora Brooks

When we rehash this reading, B always says that he had forgotten how dirty this poem is, and goes onto parody it with lines like "Think of great hippoes fucking each other, ropes of jism ejaculating from their swollen members." And I think that's funny.

He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.

2008-07-30T14:21:00.005-05:00

Arrgh my head hurts and all I want to do is dumb internet shit, but the first of the month arrives in two days and I am trying to prepare myself for the onslaught of interviews and having cases up to my neck. It doesn't help when I try to be nice and really help my clients out instead of giving them the bureaucratic runaround, and they do things like roll their eyes when I ask them for the kids' GD shot records. Listen, lady, I know you've brought them before? But that was 2006, and this is 2008 and IT'S JUST THE RULES. I CAN'T CHANGE THE RULES. Be responsible for your shit, in other words.

I got some prints of vacation pictures and the like and put them up in my darling adorable little cubicle. Did you know that the cubicle turns 40 this year? Oh, tis true, tis true. I don't love this cubicle, but I do appreciate the fact that if I start crying from a particularly stirring episode of This American Life, I can just hide my face toward the inside of it and no one will try and ask me what's wrong. People die tragically, that's what's wrong, dumbass. Anyway, as you may have picked up or know, I interview applicants for food stamps daily, and I thought it'd be pretty insensitive to put travel pictures of myself & Mr. Husband on prominent display for people who don't have any money to buy themselves food, so I cleverly placed them to the side of a cabinet, so they won't be like "Goddamned white girl is rich." Because I'm not. I just saved my tax return and some other money, man.

Those are my heroics for the day.

Also, after letting my birth control prescription run out, yesterday I finally got to replace my best friend, the Nuvaring, in its warm safe home, and next Tuesday it's game on again. FINALLY. Jesus.

I have to go home today and prepare my home for this weekend's visit of my mom & niece, which pretty much means removing any trace that humans live there and have bodily functions and drop things on the floor. Or that I have cats. My mother would never say anything, but if I went in the bathroom while she was there and saw, oh, I don't know, let's say some dust on the floor, I'd be horrified because she had seen it and 9 months from now she'd casually mention that I'm fucking nasty. Which sucks because I am fucking nasty and although we can keep the dishes washed pretty much daily, we don't really notice things like the bathtub, and these are the places in which grime forms and makes my mom puke a little in her mouth.

They're coming to town because I invited them to go see Gone With the Wind at the Orpheum Friday night and do some other city stuff. My niece is 11 and lives in the same little-shit town I was raised in, so I am hoping it will be fun for her to come spend time in a place where you don't have to drive 15 minutes to buy a gallon of milk. Last fall she stayed with us a night, and ended up feeling pretty intimidated by the whole thing, but maybe it will go better this time around.

If there are any Memphians out there who have not experienced the movie series at the Orpheum, you should really check it out. It's only $5 for an adult ticket, and the theater is just breathtaking. Upcoming showings can be found here; we saw To Catch a Thief last week and it was fucking awesome. Things that puzzle me in old movies: the men are always just whapping th women across the face, really hard, and then they kiss, just as hard. Of course I don't approve of this behavior but I find it utterly fascinating.

I know, I know, GWTW is completely racist and inappropriate in a lot of ways, but it's a movie I had a lot of love for as a little girl, before I became politically aware, and to see it at the Orpheum will be some sort of pinnacle of cinema-loving-Southern-womanness for me. Be there or be square.

Jim Beam wrecked me, body & soul

2008-07-29T08:49:00.004-05:00

We had a pretty quiet weekend. Saturday was spent recovering from a gargantuan hangover that experienced as least as many stages as death and loss. Technically, the first stage was confusion as B summoned me to bed early that morning from the couch in the sunroom. I had angrily stormed out of the bedroom the night before, sobbing, after he had accidentally spilled a huge cup of water directly between my legs in an attempt to urge me to hydrate myself. Every morning, noon, and night, this man urges me to drink more water, and this is only heightened in the times that I try to replace all the H2O in my body with alcohol (both beer and Jim Beam on Friday night, if you are keeping score). Also, you should know that I am very prone to sobbing in the early hours of the morning after a serious bender like that. One night B stuck his finger in my belly button, I suggested this act was akin to rape, and, of course, left the bedroom, sobbing.

The second stage of the hangover was headache, of course. Although I took 3 aspirin tablets, this was the kind of hangover that makes your head as heavy on your neck as a baby's, and all you can really do is lay in bed with your laptop on your stomach and webstalk dead girls on Livejournal while you wait for the Indian buffet to open so that you can try to soak up all the booze that's left in your stomach with some naan. Yeah, that kind of headache.

When the clock struck 11:00 AM we trucked it down to the India Palace. Although we always walk there, it's only about 2 blocks from our apartment, I had reservations regarding whether or not I could make it this time. It is July in Memphis and I was already experiencing symptoms of the next stage of hangover: clammy sweatface. B always expresses this stage as what happens when your body's trying desperately to eject any leftover alcohol in whatever means necessary, and while he is a person who might randomly vomit 2 hours after waking up with a hangover, I am a sweaty girl anyway, and as soon as I stepped out in the hot late-morning sun, beads of JB broke out all over my face, with a particularly high volume emitting from my upper lip, or, as I call it, my sweatstache. I grunted all during the trek to IP, holding my stomach, which should have been a warning of what was to come.

Stage Four: Debilitating stomach ailment. This was the final stage of hangover that stuck with me all day, making me both the laziest and whiniest person on earth. I don't know what's wrong with me kids, and why I can't hang like I used to, but Goddamn, all day I was wracked with the most vicious tummy ache that ranged from full-out monster poop to a huge gas bubble that makes you feel as if you're pregnant with a stomachful of wriggling ghost puppies. We went to see the new Batman movie at 8:00 that night and I was still limping around and pitiful from it. I bet you are thinking that maybe the Indian food did it, but I wouldn't blame anything on that lovely naan and tandoori. Palak paneer wouldn't try to hurt me.

I never learn my lesson though. I mean, I didn't touch a drop on Saturday, and I rarely booze it up on liquor anymore anyway, but by next weekend I will have forgotten all about my troubles and, if offered, will swill again. This heat is oppressive and it makes me want a tall drink beaded with drops of cool sweat.

Man-hating fodder (with regard to the fact that there are good guys out there)

2008-07-24T10:42:00.003-05:00

There are so many dark stories coming out of Iraq that you don't even hear on the nightly news... here's a very tragic example.

Suicide or Murder? Three Years After the Death of Pfc. LaVena Johnson in Iraq, Her Parents Continue Their Call for a Congressional Investigation

It is so heartbreaking to hear this soldier's father describing having to look at postmortem pictures of his daughter in order to investigate her probable death himself, since the military has apparently done a cover-up of some sort.

"98 military women have died in Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain; 40 of them have died of 'non-combat incidents' as the military terms it. 19 of those 40 are under suspicious circumstances; 13 of them have now been termed suicides by the military." --Ann Wright, who spent twenty-six years in the US Army/Army Reserves and was a diplomat in the State Department for sixteen years before resigning in March 2003, protesting the then-impending invasion of Iraq

Ms. Wright goes onto describe other specific examples in which the families of dead American soldiers were lied to about how their family member was killed.

I can't imagine being in an environment like Iraq, and being sexually harassed, raped, or abused and unable to take action because the perpetrators are higher ranking officials and members of the good old boy network. It makes me so incredibly sick to hear stories of women like Suzanne Swift, Tina Priest, and LaVena Johnson. Why are there so many sick, violent men in the world? God, being aware of things like this makes it so hard not to be a man-hating feminists. All the men I know are decent, but why are there so many assholes in the world??

Shitshy: One Woman's Tragic Struggle

2008-07-23T09:32:00.005-05:00

Although anyone who knows me is aware that pooping is one of my favorite topics of conversation, and anyone who has spent time with my husband and I has been either inundated with, or possibly even chosen to take into their own lives overuse of the word "shoo shoo," some might not be aware that I am afflicted with a common affliction I like to refer to as "shitshy." Just this morning, I had an attack of shitshyness, when, upon approaching the bathroom, I was disheartened to find another woman entering at the exact same time. The situation was further impacted by the fact that there were only two stalls that had toilet paper in them and they were right next to one another. I can't make this stuff up people. I locked myself in the stall, unable to do my business because not only had she seen my face, we were in neighboring stalls. I mimicked doing my business, noisily putting down a paper seat cover, sitting down briefly, and then even unrolling toilet paper and even wiping, although there was nothing there to wipe. She was going about her merry way next to me, using the ol' flush-to-diguise-the-sound-of-plopping routine. I had to go back to my desk, wait 10 minutes to ensure the coast was clear, and then return to scratch the shoo shoo itch the large McDonald's coffee had delivered upon me this morning.

I know that pooping is normal, and for God's sakes, every man, woman, and child on earth does it every day, but I cannot help but feel enormous shame when someone knows I am doing it. I want to be at home, alone, with the door closed, reading Southern Living quietly when my time to shit comes.

Onto other, not-poop-related topics: so long Estelle Getty.

I remember that in high school, my tight group of girlfriends and I would watch umpteen episodes of The Golden Girls and always argue over who we were. No one was ever happy to be assigned to the role of Blanche, the slut, or Rose, the airhead, but among our friends, the stereotypes were evident and too hard to deny. When it came down to it, I always wanted to be Sophia, but was forced to be Dorothy because of both my height, and, I suppose, my awkward unattractiveness at the time.

Ok, I have to process cases and listen to the news now. For some reason, every time I try to listen to Democracy Now, I cannot concentrate. Too stupid, apparently. Maybe I'm just an optimist and the truth about the imminent destruction of everything good in the world make me unattentive.

Josie's on a vacation far away...

2008-07-21T10:13:00.004-05:00

In my house, we have a new deep obsession with The Outfield's "Your Love" [The assholes have disabled embedding, so I can't put the cheesey video on here for your viewing pleasure. You will not be sorry if you go to the link above and listen to this song, especially if you like 80s songs that seem to have been written to provide you with a platform to screech lyrics such as "I DON'T WANT TO LOSE YOUR LOVE TONIGHT!!! I JUST WANT TO USE YOUR LOVE, TOOOOONIIIIIGHT!! (YEAH!!!)" in your best eardrum-splitting falsetto.]

What's up with this heat haze in Memphis? It's humidity, I am thinking? I think I've been told it is humidity. They put it on the forecast, along with warnings about not leaving your house. This time of year I start developing elaborate fantasies about living in a part of the world where the peak temperature in the summer is 80 degrees. Our apartment has 3 window unit air conditioners, 2 of which work pretty well (especially if you are sitting directly in front of them, which I am known to do), but considering we live on the second floor of a house built in 1925, with piss poor air-conditioning... well, yeah, it is Hot as Hell. I have tried to tell B that he is going to have to run the AC when he's at home by himself, but he refuses. I imagine that I'll come home one day to find him passed out cold (hot?) from the intensity of the heat. August is coming, be afraid, be very afraid. These are the dog days and senior citizens will start kicking off any minute now.

We are supposed to go to a BBQ this evening and last night I made bettedavislies' Church Lady Creamy Lemon cake to take, and I'll put some presliced & seasoned eggplant slices in a baggie too, for the hosts to throw on the grill. I don't know about you, but I get very impatient when waiting for a cake to cool down enough to spread on the old icing. The afforementioned Mrs. Lies gave me the most handsome, thoughtful handmade cookbook for the wedding, and as of late I have been trying to cook a recipe a week from it. My mother and I recently had a conversation questioning how young Bette maintains her lovely figure with her well-known penchant for sweets, and came up stumped. I suppose her allegiance to exercise could be the answer but the lazy American in me refuses to believe that moving could be good for you.

more clever than ever

2008-07-16T13:38:00.006-05:00

When I was home this weekend, my mother cautioned me to look out for snakes when venturing out to her walking path. Tuesday in Overton Park, the thought to watch my feet didn't even cross my mind until, mid-run, I looked down to find myself just about to step on a small snake. Now, I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but when I saw it, I noted that it had a diamond-shaped, rather than rounded head, and some nugget of wisdom buried deep in my skull reminded me that this was a trait of a venemous snake, and sure enough, when I investigated on the internet, it seemed pretty certain that my little friend was a southern copperhead:

He was pretty ittybitty, I'd say 9" at most, but I felt pretty smart leaping over him in the nick of time. Apparently although I was surrounded by woods, it didn't occur to me that a snake might want to leave the comfort of leaves and dirt for pavement.

I am pretty excited for a weekend in which I do no travelling; I have been coming or going every weekend for the past month, it seems. The flea market is in town this weekend and I'm thinking of going and see how it compares to the big one in Nashville; also, I think we'll go see the new Batman. Summer's the only season I can really get behind the idea of seeing blockbusters; maybe it's just that 1 or 2 per year is all I need.

Tonight: chilled avocado soup & tomato sandwiches with basil mayo. Yum yum.

Mystic '06 (sounds like an energy drink)

2008-07-15T08:46:00.002-05:00

I returned from Decatur county on Sunday with approximately 20 pounds of fresh produce; 6(!) eggplants, multiple ears of corn, tomatoes, okra, squash, zucchini, & cucumbers; a head of cabbage. I love it but it's a lot of pressure to receive this much stuff because it ROTS and you have to DO SOMETHING with it before it starts stinking up your fridge and all you're left with is the incredible guilt that your family's blood, sweat, and tears has come to ruin in a big runny mess in your crowded fridge. Last night I made moussaka, a dish that we had in Greece. I kind of bastardized these two recipes, substituting ground beef for turkey and adding a boatload of fresh basil, which is par for the course for most recipes I prepare these days. I think baba ganoush is next because I still have 4 eggplants! My mom has them coming out of her ears.

When I was home (even though I'm grown and I live with my husband and we have a whole separate existence, also referred to as "home," I think my mother's house will always be Home with a Capital H). I went for a run on the walking path she mows behind our house. I saw a rabbit and multiple deer, and as-yet unripe blackberries growing on stickery bushes; but I also saw myself, in the summer of 2006, walking down the same grassy strip, listening to PJ Harvey and experiencing the undeniable feeling that everything was changing. I have attached a lot of significance to 2006, particularly the summer, when I left Murfreesboro at long last and lived at home with my parents for 4+ months, watching my father first undergo a horrific surgery for pancreatic cancer and struggle to recover; he didn't, because the cancer was so aggressive and wanted to eat him from the inside out, and it did. I am incredibly grateful that I had those months with him, although considering it now, I can only think of the selfish parts of myself that was so restless and spent weekends in Nashville getting wasted and pursuing an old, bad relationship that gave me physical satisfaction and not much else.

2006 was the year I became a woman, though. I seriously believe this 100%. I was an uncertain, unhappy alcoholic kid at the beginning of it, and by the end I'd gotten my shit together. I lost things in 2006; I lost my father, I lost my first love, I lost my best friend, but I gained so much: the man who would become my husband, friends with whom I share a lot of love and respect with, and confidence and maturity.

I know that this probably sounds really egomaniacal. I'm not trying to show how great I am; growing up is just something people do, eventually. I feel like I was just in a fugue state for so many years, going to work at whatever shitty job I had, coming home to hit a bong or drink a lot of beers and '06 was the year I woke up and tried to change things for myself. When I thought of it in the hayfield the other day, with an identical sky over me, that light mist seeping over the landscape, I felt like I was back in time, in those days and weeks that I was waking up.

Please don't let me be misunderstood

2008-07-11T10:37:00.003-05:00

I'm listening to the All Songs Considered "Best CDs So Far" show, and I've got to say that I'd always heard of Panic At the Disco! but I didn't know how much they truly sucked until a few minutes ago. Goddamn, I hate shitty music that is just a ripoff of bands too old for kids to know the difference. They sound just like The Smiths to me. I'm always desperately trying to find some new music that's not too whiny or overproduced. Sometimes I have good luck with ASC, plus, I love Bob Boilen; he's so earnest and sweet. If I haven't found a new band in awhile, I start to feel dead inside. I have a couple of good leads from this show.

So, I am starting the Masters in Social Work program @ UT Memphis this fall, and I was really pleased and surprised to find out just how cheap my tuition's going to be since I'm a state employee. Yippee for cheap schoolin'. I can't believe that I'm going to be back in school again... this time I plan on actually studying. I was struck yesterday by the idea that I might be ready to leave Memphis by the time I get done; it will take 3-4 years for me to get my degree, and I'll be at least 30. It will more than likely be baby-making time, unless I inherited my mom's reluctant eggs (that's unfair, could've been my dad's sperm that were reluctant). Do I want to raise kids in the South? Do I want to stay here myself? Etc. etc. Just your normal "Oh jeez, I guess I'm a grown-up now" confusion.

There is a rather complicated debate about navigating to a certain resturant going on in the next aisle of cubicles. It's getting heated. Every once in awhile, you can hear punctuations of "Ridgeway!" and "LAMAR?!" For some reason, I love to hear people trying to give directions, it always ends in a big debate.

Well, I am heading to Decaturville for the weekend. B is still tied up in Memphis Most photography work, so I decided to head to my mom's for some family time. I bought some smoked salmon, cream cheese, bagels, orange juice and champagne so we can have a special breakfast one morning. What a sweetheart, huh?

Why am I such a pussy??

2008-07-10T18:04:00.002-05:00

Well after procrastinating for several days I did my first installment of Couch to 5K today. Just got back actually. I don't see how running for 9 minutes* (OK, more like running for 3 minutes, limping excitedly for 6) can make any non-elderly person so fucking weary and exhausted. I am in such terrible shape! The good news is that even though I really wanted to quit after the third run, I mean, really REALLY wanted to quit, I kept going, and even got a second wind on the very last run. It was a perfect day to start because a) it is very overcast out right now, and the heat doesn't possess anywhere near the raw violence it does on a clear afternoon; b) I drank a Red Bull at around 3:30. Red Bull is just like beer; the first time I tasted it (in a Jaegerbomb B made me in our apt. in East Nashville), I was like "Ugh, disgusting, this is some sick shit!" and now I crave both its taste and mind-spinning after affects.

Okay, now I'm going to go watch the end of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Fell asleep before it ended last night. I love that movie, it's so purposefully cheesy. Please behold, my favorite part of this fine, fine film:

! NSFW unless your boss is kosher with vampiric wolf sex !

If you get bored, skip to 1:33; your day's not going to be complete without this little Coppola gem.

*FYI, Couch to 5k eases you into running by having you run/walk for specific combinations. Today I did "Week 2," which, after a 5 minute brisk walk, has 6 intervals of 90 seconds of running, 2 minutes of walking. If someone tried to make me run 9 minutes without stopping at this point in time, I would cry, then collapse.

I hate it when bad things happen to good people...

2008-07-08T20:32:00.000-05:00

Especially when it makes me so sick inside.

On a brighter note, I made the most gorgeous salad ever for dinner:

romaine
red cabbage
carrots
beet root
cucumber
broccoli
cucumber
tomatoes (from Ripley, TN)
zucchini (from Mt. Carmel)
red pepper

Topped it with basil lemon dressing with a fuckton of fresh garlic in it. I'm now having honey nut cheerios for dessert, and Django's trying to put his shit paws in it and drinking the milk. My cat loves cereal milk. I love to eat cereal before bed, makes me feel like a kid.

B is shooting the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss show tonight at Mud Island for the CA. I can't begin to imagine what kind of music they've made together. Must investigate online.

health, life, and fire

2008-07-08T12:45:00.000-05:00

I have a terrible pretzel addiction. Why, oh why, do I go to Kroger and buy the enormous bag of pretzels?? I will not stop eating them until they are gone.

So we returned Sunday from our lovely, lovely honeymoon in Key West. I had been there once before, on a cruise ship stopover when I was a pissy 14-year-old. B lived there for 5 months in 2005, working as a bartender and living on a busted ass trimaran with a few other guys. I have teased him many times over what a panty dropper "I live on a boat, wanna check it out?" must have been.

My memories of Key West were faint at best; it is a truly gorgeous place. All the lush tropical vegetation and stunning old houses left me speechless. If you don't know me, you should be informed that big old houses are my bread and butter; I think that's one thing I especially love about Memphis, because old Southern homes, in particular, absolutely dazzle me and break my heart. It hurts inside and I don't know why; I don't have any grand fantasies about living in a mansion. I do know, however, that my deep appreciation for old homes is a genetic trait passed directly from my mother.

We ate and drank like pigs down there. We are cheap as fuck in our normal lives, and "allow" ourselves to eat out once, maybe twice a week, but on this honeymoon we went batshit crazy, eating out three times a day sometimes. Highlight: fine dining on the porch of a huge pink house that butted up on the edge of the Atlantic; lowlight: shitty Indian buffet that featured a side dish that was mostly canned green beans. We've been so spoiled by India Palace that we couldn't imagine a bad Indian buffet, apparently. Luckily we ate much more good food than bad: guava ice cream, a blackened grouper reuben, key lime pie, fish tacos, cuban sandwiches & coffee, fried plaintains... yummers. Also I discovered Root Beer Barrel shooters, signature shooter at the Green Parrot bar; small glass of beer with a shot of root beer schnapps set down in it. Fucking delicious.

I think the reason women get so fat when they get married is that they are on such a superdiet before the wedding, trying to be as thin as possible, then they go on that honeymoon and feel like it doesn't matter anymore, and thus the spread begins. Anniversary one comes around and they've gone up two dress sizes. I've seen so many fat wives (not to mention fat husbands, God knows they're around too) that I am determined not to become one, and after much big talk about restarting a running program in MARCH for God's sakes, redo Couch to 5k. Yes, it is 100 degrees outside and I'm a whiny bitch about the heat, but I feel so lazy not exercising at all. I don't want to die as an overweight miserable diabetic at 60 just because it's not always fun to move your body.

We have returned with a huge collection of pictures that you can find on the flickr. B has organized them painstakingly. Subfolders are his primary disease; this can be verified by clicking on the "Honeymoon" collection.

I have said many times in the weeks following the wedding that I don't feel any different, which is true in a lot of ways; however, sometimes I am struck by the gravity of marriage, and I think about how the roles we play in each other's lives is so much more important now that it's definitely for keeps. Before B, I always kind of thought the idea of soulmates and true love was bullshit, but I do know that there is some completely undeniable force that holds me to him and vice versa. Something I never felt in my prior relationship, I don't think. I was overcome by many beautiful feelings on this trip, that travelling is something that we will do with one another for the rest of our lives, and that all the important things we ever do, we will do together. It is certainly not always easy and fun but I am starting to consider the beauty of marriage is a shared commitment to make the hard things as easy as possible for the other person.

Jesus, play the tambourine for me.

2008-06-26T08:41:00.000-05:00

I have been mulling over starting a blog for weeks and weeks now; I always enjoyed blogging on Myspace before the total mindfuck of its convoluted politics got to me and I just shut up. Then the blogs of two of my close IRL friends penetrated my internet routine, and the stage was set for bloggery.

Jesus Christ, how many times is some form of the word blog in those sentences?

I had a real fucked up sitation at work yesterday that I am still mulling over. I had a client come in who was applying for Medicaid benefits. Not full benefits, but if someone has Medicare, which this person did, they can apply for special benefits that pay their leftover premiums and whatever else the Medicare does not cover. He told me that he needed these benefits because he is trying to get on a kidney transplant list, and his social worker advised him that he had to obtain this Medicaid. He had pretty high social security income, and when I ran the case, he failed. He has a wife and two children, and I can put them on the case but his wife apparently has a good job that might fail the whole group. I've got my tit in a vise on this one. I can put the wife and children on there and state that she has no income, which is a lie and pretty easily caught because of the systems the state has in place, but get him these benefits, or I can request the work info for her and risk him failing again. I'm not used to sitations like this; usually it's the same old same old around here, with welfare mommies and unemployed people living with friends or family that want their little bit of Food Stamps. It might be hard to believe from the outside, but I am rarely placed in a situation that is truly fucked up, but Mr. Kidney Transplant is like a scene from Sicko playing over and over in my head.

So, I have resolved to eat no fast food for the entire month of July. This decision was made somewhat drunkenly at El Mezcal last night. B forces me to go there at least once a week, and since I'm so incredibly weak we go feast on chips and I have two metric tons of sour cream and guacamole. The resolution sprang from an outing the night before, when we drove back and forth across the Mississippi river, listening to a Bright Eyes song he'd just discovered, and then, oh no! what's this! ended up with chili cheese fries and teeny burgers from Krystal. "Oh," B said, "I forgot these Krystal burgers are the so gristly. It's like chewing up an ear." Yum yum. I am actually quite fond of the mustard-pickle-cheese taste explosion, as well as the soggy meatness that happens when they steam those babies. Plus, miraculously I got no stomach cramps immediately after, which usually occurs with Krystal.

I just do so well eating wisely during the day, then pop a 1/2 bottle of wine in me and ask me if I want Taco Bell at around 11:45 at night and it's all "I may DIE if a chalupa isn't in my mouth soon. Make it a baja." So I'm cutting it out, like a tumor. A tasty meat paste tumor.

Amanda as the whitest person at DHS anecdote: The other day we had our biyearly party. We ate catfish, there was a hula hoop contest, and we played a bastardized version of Family Feud, called, imaginatively enough, "Fantasy Feud." The question was "Name a Famous Athlete," and although the top answer was, of course, Michael Jordan, the first thing that sprang to Whitey's mind was Babe Ruth. Good Lord.