Why can't I ever get my sugar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.

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.