Volunteer Fail

So, in honor of my birthday I volunteered to go help build cots for homeless dogs at a shelter in Madison, Tennessee because that seemed like a safe way to help without accidentally bringing home 12 dogs and thus beginning my inevitable decline into animal hoarding. I woke up this morning and there were about four snowflakes in the air, and so Houseboy and I joked about how maybe they would cancel. You know where this is going, of course. We drive out there and stand around for about 5 minutes trying to figure out where to go before finally the barking dogs roused a man in sweatpants and Crocs* who informs me that they cancelled due to the weather, seeing as how it is so cold. From that I gathered that they intended to do this work outdoors, which brought up the question: which was more of a Southern moment, that they planned a four hour outdoor project in January**, or that they cancelled it when the temperatures dropped below 40 degrees?

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* Totally not judging, if you run a dog shelter you should wear what's comfortable, I'm just fleshing out the story, you know.

** Not that us Northerners won't do the same:

Things to Do in Denver When You're Only Half Dead

So, as a reward for all my hard work and also the insect genocide whose carnage is still visible in my laptop screen, I got to go to Denver and hear people almost as pretentious as myself talk about things that should be interesting to me, like achievement gaps and tracking and forecast modeling and whatnot, and I imagined someone other than myself sitting in that airport shuttle listening to the people all around her droning on about their local school context and the vagaries of job-hunting with a PhD and feeling very energized, but instead I felt tired and wondered whether I had passed my econ final, which I turned in in outline form, rather than essays, because I ran out of time, and I know what you're thinking, which is "She writes outlines? That implies she organizes her thoughts!" But you should realize that blogs are different than PhDs, or at least I hope they are, because otherwise all this nonsense isn't really worth it, since I already have a blog.

Anyway, all I got to see of Denver was downtown, with the exception of the shuttle ride to and from downtown, during which I decided that the rest of Denver looks a lot like the town I grew up in, which is to say short, quaint to outsiders, and covered in dust from the feed mill and canning factory. Downtown, on the other hand, was boring, as downtowns usually are, and mostly populated with other conference-goers, wearing their badges around like it would get them a better table at the TGI Fridays. Houseboy and I are walking folk, so we walked about 17 miles and saw most angles of downtown, I think, the very best of which was this place called Cafe Berlin, which is the best German food I've had since living in Minnesota, where even the Hispanics are German. They apologized profusely for making us wait for 5 minutes at the bar for a table, but at the bar they had this:

Which is a LITER of beer, and they recommend you pair with a Schnapps, so we did, and then ordered mushroom cutlets and dumplings and something meat for Houseboy and some spatzle and then the resident German Mother-type yelled at us for not finishing our spatzle and offered us more beer to help with the problem, which it did.

So, all in all Denver is all right if you avoid the people with PhDs and hang with the Germans, which is just a good rule of thumb in life as well.

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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Like, totally

OMG, hello everyone! I realized how long it had been since I'd written when I had a dream last night that I crafted the most awesome post ever around the "@" symbol and something having to do with Twitter. There was some deep stuff in there about how on the internet we all communicate by talking @ each other now, not TO each other. Isn't that hilarious and insightful?

In other news, in the last month I have been in Maryland, Kentucky, Minnesota and Tennessee for about a week each, and relatedly my cats are very very mad at me and I have to sleep with one eye open at least partly because the neurotic one has taken to sleeping on my face. Wait, that doesn't make sense because if I slept with my eye open and the cat sat on my face... well, anyway they are alternating between hissing at me when I walk by and trying to climb inside my mouth while I pet them so you get the picture.

The third most important thing that happened in the last month is that we decided to get cable because the digital antenna thingy kept kacking out during How I Met Your Mother and that was just unacceptable, so now we watch MTV and Sports Center in the morning instead of The Today Show, and I remember at least one reason that The Today Show is better and that is that they don't mention Bret Favre and how sad he is and how old he is and how special he is every three seconds. They also don't have Lady Gaga though, and she just makes me have faith again... faith in the idea that the alien invasion will continue almost unnoticed.

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles

This afternoon I'll be flying out of Nashville to visit Houseboy's family out East, and I just finished packing, Round I, in which I try to shove too many different t-shirts into a carry-on bag and then realize that my contact solution is more than three ounces, so I can't carry the bag on anyway and then think about getting a bigger bag so I can bring my nice boots for Christmas Eve because everyone knows that church is all about looking cute for the Catholic/Presbyterian in-laws. Guesses as to which religion is better dressed? Anyway, after a lot of shoving and balling up and re-thinking I did decide to check luggage, which is tempting fate considering that when we did this two years ago we unknowingly participated in "voluntary separation" from our luggage, which is to say that we apparently gave up our right to our own bags by taking a different flight when ours was cancelled due to weather.

But all this is just practice for the fact that I have TWO week-long data collection trips in January, one of which involves driving a rental car up to Louisville, Kentucky, and the other of which involves flying to Minnesota, and both of which involve driving rental cars all over the city to visit middle schools, which is something like evil torture to me. So, I had to have the embarrassing conversation with the project manager about how I, like, have a driver's license and all, but I haven't exactly operated a vehicle more than three times in the last seven years, and that was most definitely by choice, so even though I'm probably the only member of the team qualified to drive in the snow and who used to drive in downtown Minneapolis regularly, I'd prefer it if someone could chauffeur me around. Because I'm really smart and pretty I got what I wanted, of course. That was anti-climactic, wasn't it?

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Rain in December

Al on the Today Show informs me that it may snow 9 to 12 inches in Minneapolis today and 1 to 3 inches in Chicago, and meanwhile in Nashville it's drizzling outside and I've only gotten to wear my nice blue coat twice this year. In class yesterday I wore a short-sleeved sweater (which is neat since I don't think there are more than four hours together in Minnesota when a short-sleeved sweater makes sense) and my classmates wore jackets and scarves. Indoors.

All of this reminds me also that our first year in Chicago Houseboy and I lived in a crappy apartment with giant roaches, a broken shower drain and, as we discovered in the winter, heat that was spotty at best. For about three weeks in December it shut off altogether and we survived by wearing several pairs of sweatpants at once, drinking a lot of coffee and cuddling under four quilts with the Neurotic Cat, while it dropped to about 35 degrees inside as measured on the Jack Daniels wall thermometer. I developed a nasty cough that lasted about six weeks, but the landlord ensured us that the problem was "being addressed."

Meanwhile, we only turned the heat on here yesterday because three fourths of our windows are cracked or stuck open and the temperature got down to about 57 degrees, which makes the cats chase each other around and around and around the apartment, knocking things over and interfering with the digital antenna on the teevee. 57 degrees, though. In December. With no insulation and a gentle breeze coursing under the front door.

At least down here I'll probably never get the pig flu.

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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

We are too adorable, deal with it

So, it has been well established I think that Houseboy and I are adorable and lovable and you wish you were us, but don't you ALSO wish you knew how we met and fell in love and got married and moved to Australia, all except for that last part? Well, you're welcome.

The year was 1997. The time was 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, the second day of freshman year. The place was a poetry classroom in the basement of the English building. Me: aspiring English major. Him: totally asleep because he had morning practice and also was only there to pick up chicks, which by the way, he was doing a stellar job of by being asleep while the only other two guys in the class were NOT asleep.

So, yeah, I thought he was cute but mostly was really digging on the guy with the earring who wasn't asleep in class.

Then, the year was 1998. The time was afternoon-ish or something. The place was the common room in the weird Sophomore dorm housed under the football stadium. Me: totally going to cut my hair really short and dye it blue. Him: watering a plant he called Kate because he thought that would appeal to the chicks, which it totally would have except that he never ever talked to any of them, including me.

UNTIL. The year: 1999. The time: 2 am or so. The place: common room again. Me: deep in the throes of a serious caffeine addiction and trying to come down by watching Lambada: The Forbidden Dance. Him: finally figuring out that the way to a girl's heart is by sarcastically mocking a really obscure movie in the middle of the night, especially if you follow that up with nightly viewings of public access programs and Adult Swim before it was Adult Swim and when it was just weird. Follow up by asking her out on the day before Valentine's Day because it's the first Friday you've had off from practice and meets all year.

Then, do all the dately things like going to an Italian restaurant and sitting in the window making fun of how people park. Open the door for her and all that. When she offers to pay, do not let her. However, and this is key, DO NOT tell her that "My mom told me I should take someone out." That might seem like it's a good reason for you to pay, it might seem like it will satisfy the 20 year old feminist's desire to be an equal partner, but in fact it will just make her wonder if all your other friends were busy and this has been the biggest and most embarrassing misunderstanding OF ALL TIME.

Also, since you live in the same dorm, literally about 300 feet from each other, make sure that there is an awkward pause at the door, but no kiss and then you go back and sit in the same common room and watch a John Cusack movie, joined half an hour in by your R.A., who sits in between you and your date. All that is very romantic.

It worked pretty well on me since about a month later I asked him if he was bored and maybe wanted to go see a movie or something and then about a month after that he asked if he was allowed to tell people I was his girlfriend and then about 5 years after that we got married. Whirlwind romance!

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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

McMinnville? REALLY??

It's possible I have mentioned before how I grew up in a Small Town. One thing growing up in a Small Town does for you is make you completely aware of your insignificance, particularly in the scope of the local, regional and National news, and growing up in a Small Town in Minnesota helps this issue, because your small town probably doesn't have a per capita income of a million and a half dollars like some New England "small towns" and probably doesn't have lots of pro football players come out of it, like small towns in Texas or have a really pretty beach like small towns in California. So, unless you live in International Falls, Minnesota, where you make the news once a year for "Being Really Cold Right Now," you get used to the idea that things that happen around you are really more gossip than news, and weather and war and other Big News might hit you, but they'll tell you about how it's going to hit "This area about-ish" and then reassure their Real Public that it's not heading for any "populated areas" and be a little sorry when the robot changes direction and takes out a suburban mall full of teenagers.

That apparently isn't how it works here. Here, they interrupt the end of Friends and the first half of an episode of How I Met Your Mother that I haven't even seen yet to give me a half an hour of a red and orange blotchy map of a part of the state that I'm not even currently in, and when I google it, it turns out to be the county seat of Warren county and have 12,749 people in it and be the Nursery Capital of the World and not even meaning babies, but meaning flowers. Where I come from that place is called Northfield, and they have rich college students and they don't even get to be on the news for a tornado that hasn't happened yet and isn't heading toward the cities. I mean, if it turns their pretty town square into rubble, sure...

Not that I want that to happen.

Unless, you know, they don't get back to my program soon.


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Because once I got stuck in a locker

This story was well known among my elementary and high school friends as the "Time you got locked in the locker" story, but I'm going to go ahead and clear something up right now: I did not get locked in the locker, I got stuck. I know, you're saying to yourself right now, "Why is that better? Why would she rather have wedged herself into a locker in such a way that her body could not escape than have been shoved in by a group of 80's movie bullies and locked away?" Well, you make a good point. But it matters to me.

So, anyway, on or around the year 1988, when my family had recently moved [back] to Minnesota and I was settling into writing in cursive with the big loopy loops instead of the spikey loops and the idea that check marks meant correct instead of incorrect and the fact that there were no brown or yellow people in my class and no one said "cussing" and all in all it was a pretty good scene I think. The school at that time was K through 12, and had just (in the last 10 years or something) gotten a pool, though they still had no swim team, but it meant that once a year we little nine year olds got to trudge hand-in-hand into the high school end of the building and have swimming lessons during gym class. Since it would have been weird for us to go to school all day in our swimsuits or to get changed in the classroom or out in the street for the benefit of the neighbors, we got changed in the locker room, of course.

And, after we learned to backfloat and froggy kick and whatever, we also got to change back into our Osh Kosh B'Gosh in the locker room, and since we had little to no adult supervision, as the gym teacher was male, I learned that pastimes in Minnesota include slapping your wet swimsuits and towels against the poles and benches and other third grade girls until your teacher yells at you to hurry up. I was not conscientious about actually getting my swimsuit dry before shoving it in my bag, or getting myself dry before shoving myself in my clothes, but for some reason I was really picky about not getting hit with flying water after I was dressed. So, I made the informed decision to step into a locker until the madness was over.

Now, I wasn't stupid. I knew, just as Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe did, that if you climb inside something like that that you'd better leave the door open a little so you don't get trapped. Unlike Lucy I didn't find a magical land, though. Instead, one of the girls walked by slamming locker doors, didn't see me (or did, and thought it was funny), and slammed the door to my locker/hiding place. Which would have been fine, except all the locker doors were a little bent, probably from all the slamming, and they stuck. And this one really stuck. Really really stuck. Me on the inside and 10 nine year old girls on the outside could not get it open. A male gym teacher and female third grade teacher could not get it open. A male principal and a janitor needed some kind of very long and scary metal instrument to be snaked around the inside to wrench and tear it open.

In a graduating class of 100 students, you can see how this story was still brought up nearly ten years later on our AP History class trip, as in "Remember that time you got locked in the locker in third grade? That was HILARIOUS!"

Yes.

Hi.

Lar.

I.

Ous.



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Bananarama

So, I'm not really super great at meeting new people because I usually assume that they're just looking for an excuse to hang me from a meat hook in their basement or make me come to out to dinner with them or something, which makes me feel a little nervous about impressing them just the right amount so that they will like me but not want to make me their zombie bride or whatever. I'm better than I used to be, in that I have discovered that being silent and hanging in the back will goad a certain type of person into poking you with sharp sticks until you participate in whatever it is they're gabbing about.

Anyway, as a result of this, things like orientation weekends cause me anxiety and make me sleepy and drain important juices out of my brain, so that when I come home after skipping only half of all the required activities on Friday I sit in front of the computer and apparently narrate everything I'm doing in what can only be described as a Pee Wee Herman voice. And when Houseboy points it out to me, I have to just stare at him with a blank look because I have no idea what he's talking about.

It is also possible that when one of the professors introduced herself and said she was from Minnesota and didn't even know what the sports teams were, I shot my hand in the air like we were participating in some kind of quiz that would win me chocolate.



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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

The power of tripe in the conversion process

So, yesterday I promised to tell you all about how as a child I helped my family convert the Mexicans, and I'm nothing if not a woman of my word, so here it is.

As I mentioned, in many of the small towns across the upper Midwest there is a tradition of making use of what we call "The Migrants" to pick our corn and peas and soybeans and also to put them into cans and those awesome frozen boxes and bags and then ship them across the country to the sad people who can't just go out into their backyard for corn on the cob like civilized folk.

Anyway, for many manies of years, the Migrant people were truly Migrants, in that they came into town mid-summer (sometimes a little earlier if they were going to help with pea pack) and stayed until October at the latest, so all we saw of them was if we went to play on the swings at Green Giant park, or if their kids showed up for the first month of school and talked to no one and sometimes weren't even in class because they were in ESL and then they disappeared again to go pick fruit in California and Texas or to go back to Mexico for the fall, winter and spring.

On the factory property out on the edge of town they had a bunch of trailers that they rented out to the workers, and a picnic area and some other stuff, and all of this was basically off-limits to us town folk. Well, during this time, as I may have mentioned, my mom was the rector of three tiny congregations spread about forty miles in every direction, each of which had about 10 to 20 people attending every Sunday, most over the age of 50. So, she had the idea to get these folks involved in actually reaching out to others, rather than just showing up on a Sunday, and started the Hispanic Migrant Services, which involved two church services spanning the shift change on Sunday afternoons, with a free lunch in between.

The first few years we got all these old Episcopalian ladies and gentlemen together in the ancient church basement and made hundreds of bologna sandwiches, assembly-line style and then delivered them, with potato chips, cookies and lemonade, to the park where we handed them out and then stood in the back of the outdoor church while a Spanish-speaking priest from the Cities led a short church service.

Little by little more people started to show up, and as the Migrant people slowly became Resident people, there were more brown folk helping with the sandwich making and reading the lessons, and we even got a Spanish-language hymnal and I played our Casio in the back with one hand, because man their songs are too fast to try to keep up with both hands.

Anyway, as they got more involved in their own services, the Hispanic folk got interested in maybe having something besides bologna and turkey and cake, and they had the idea to cook ethnic dishes in the kitchen of my parents' house, which was only a few blocks from the factory*. First out of the gate: Menudo. No, not the band, the soup. This is a spicy red soup made from tripe. Go ahead and click on that link. Can you tell what that is? Yeah, it's intestines. Did you know that your intestines are what turn your food into poop? That's what it smells like when they clean a massive pile of tripe in your kitchen and then boil it in giant pots for hours. And that's what it will smell like in your kitchen for days afterward, no matter what your mom says, it still smells like it and it's gross, and no the soup doesn't taste any better, it tastes spicy and slimy and still reminds you of the poop smell in your kitchen.

But, it turns out it works pretty well to bring all the heathens** in to church, and they'll even want to get their babies baptized and themselves married and practice Spanish with you and maybe even make some dishes that don't involve offal.

So, that is the story about how we used tripe to make good Episcopalians out of a gaggle of papists. If only it were always that easy.



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* Yeah, enviable real-estate. It smelled like rotting corn all summer, and I loved it.
** A.k.a., Catholics

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Movie and a bean roll

So, last week when I talked about our quest for barbecue and pizza, I forgot another important food group that seems to be missing in the country western south, and that's Mexican food. Now, if you're not from the Midwest you might think I wouldn't know much about this anyway, but you'd be wrong because in Minnesota there's a little thing called "Migrant workers," and as a result every summer when I grew up the ethnic groups in my little town went from "Czech and German" to "White and Hispanic," and little by little many of these people stopped living in trailers near the Green Giant factory, and started getting apartments or houses in town and stayed into the winter working in the steel mill or even driving to jobs in the suburbs like the white folk and just like the white folk they liked to have churches, grocery stores and even restaurants. For tomorrow's Way Back Tuesday maybe I'll tell you all about how my family helped poach them away from the Catholic church too.

Anyway, this means that there was a really fantastic Mexican restaurant in the "big" town about 20 miles from where I grew up, where they made their own tortillas and brought them hot to your table and used different colored chilies to make salsas that we had never heard of and put them over dishes we couldn't pronounce, but I promise you they were good. And for a couple years there was even a little Mexican grocery store in our town that sold things like jalapeno suckers and spicy freeze-dried grasshoppers. Then I moved to Chicago, and being a Big City they also had all kinds of good places to eat, including various Hispanic restaurants, not even just Mexican, but right in Hyde Park there was a place called Maravillas that delivered giant burritos and huevos rancheros and sopes and flan and it all cost about $2, which was awesome.

So, you'd think if you can get a bunch of people who lived in sunny South America and Mexico to travel all the way up to Minnesota to pack corn into cans and to Chicago to pack pigs into cans, then somewhere along the way they might have come to Nashville to pack... something into something else. Peaches? Tobacco? What do they have here?

But no. It appears that no brownish people from the land of the habanero have ever so much as passed through and stopped to check out the cowboy boot stores, because if they had, they would never have allowed the abomination that is the "Bean Roll." This is what passes for Mexican food down here, as far as I can tell. It's a tortilla wrapped around pureed beans (they add chicken if you're into that) and slathered in nacho cheese. We've been to three or four different restaurants now that offer this dish, though it's only our awesome bar that has the self-respect to call it a Bean Roll rather than a burrito. It doesn't make it any more tasty, but it does at least lower my expectations.

Well, I was going to also tell you about how I went to see the Harry Potter movie at the matinee the other day, but I got so upset about the Bean Roll that I'll have to save that for another time.


Sigh.



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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Technomolology

Back in action, Bidges! I sit here in my apartment in Nashberg, happily getting the Internets because I got one of those laptop stick things from my cell phone company, so now I can be connected to all of you no matter where I am, assuming that where I am gets cell phone reception (sorry rural Maine and northern Minnesota, I guess you'll remain wild and Internet free!) I also sit here notably NOT bitching with all my might about the heat, because we have glorious air conditioning that comes out of vents in the floor and will probably cost me hundreds of dollars a month because I'll be running it all through December. I'm also happy to report that we get great water pressure in our shower, and the electricity is on, even though I accidentally set it up for tomorrow.

On the flip side, it stinks in here because they put the last coat of varnish on our wood floors just hours before we got in, and they haven't finished the molding that connects the walls to the floors. Did you know you need that? If you don't have it, it looks like your house is made of Legos and the kid that assembled it forgot to snap them together tight. We also have all kinds of weird corners and 50 year old appliances in this place, but as long as it's not 500 degrees and humid, for now I'm happy. Houseboy has already realized that being married to me is about to get a lot more challenging as I make this noise every time we go outside "Meeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhh! It's hooooooooooootttttttttttttt! I need some water!"

10 years in Chicago and Minnesota and he's not the little bitch he used to be about winter, so now he thinks he gets to laugh at ME. The truth is that people who can survive winter are just better people than those who can survive summer. It's a scientifically proven fact, most likely.

Anyway, now I'm off to get some Krispy Kremes and finish unloading the truck, including my 8,000 pound dresser, which I wish we had just set fire to instead of moving. I have bruises in places you don't want to hear about.


Hint: It's my thighs.


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Pretentious Hipster

So, there's this new Facebook quiz that got circulated among my friends recently, and I made the mistake of taking it, despite everyone's universally disappointed comments on their results.  Those of you reading this on Facebook will probably know what I'm talking about.  It's the fantastically intuitive and eminently universal question of "Which Mac Stereotype Are You?"  Whoever wrote it got all clever pointing out how Macalester is all anti-establishment and hates labels and shit, which is actually why I took it, because I like labels and boxes and the establishment and all that.

Anyway, my result was "Pretentious Hipster," and they predicted that I currently work in a coffee shop and have ironic facial hair.  Well, they're right in that any facial hair I have is certainly ironic.  Other than that, this doesn't seem very accurate to me.  All right, so I moved to Uptown Minneapolis after graduation and worked in a record store and watched independent films at the Lagoon.  That was because I had no money.  And that was because I was an English major.  And that was because I didn't think about my future after college until I was exactly 22 1/2 and graduation had just ended and all my shit was in a Pontiac Sunbird and I had nowhere to go.  And that was because I had a really hot boyfriend who was a really good kisser and etcetera and we were going to move in together (somewhere) and probably get two phone lines so his very Catholic mother would not find out.

Ok, and yeah, I own a t-shirt or two that has some kind of incomprehensible photo/slogan combination and was bought at Metro Mart for ten cents along with a pair of oversized men's pants and a cross-stitched pillow that reads "Forty is Farty."  But someday I'll be forty andI'll sit on that and fart and then it won't be ironic anymore, so that takes care of that issue.

Anyway, what it all comes down to is that none of the questions on that quiz had answers like "because I never really thought about it" or "I spent most of my time drinking and studying" or "the red-assed baboons," so it really can't reflect my college OR post-college personality very accurately.  

...

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Spidercat! Spidercat! Does all the things that a spidercat does!

This morning Houseboy and I took the Neurotic Cat into the vet specialist way out in Buffalo Grove, Illinois to turn him radioactive.  Apparently they blast him with some kind of isotopes and that will make him less angry and pukey and skinny butt-ed.  On the way out there I let him out of the cat carrier and he puked, looked out the window for a really long time, and then made a break for it, via the back of Houseboy's head.  

Also on the way up and back, I paid a dollar (each way) to drive on the absolute worst stretch of road (not counting the Pennsylvania Turnpike which isn't really a road so much as a state-sponsored death trap) that I've ever had the pleasure of paying for.  It was actually amusing how as soon as we passed the tollbooth, it went from nice pavement to bomb zone.

That's as much of a segue as you're going to get into this week's reading, featuring: Anarchy!  First, I read an article in The Believer from some other month that is not this one, about a guy going undercover with the Anarchists who were protesting the Republican National Convention in Minnesota last year.  From this I learned what I already know: southern Minnesota is mostly corn and water towers, anarchists do not bathe as regularly as the rest of us, and the Anarchy Movement is kind of an oxymoron.

Similarly, A Girl Among the Anarchists, which was originally published in 1903, didn't really challenge my assumptions about Anarchy or Anarchists.  Most of the "characters" (this is loosely based on the real lives of Helen and Olivia Rossetti) are doing very little outside of writing and publishing tracts on Anarchy and debating with one another what Real Anarchy is and occasionally stealing shit because ownership of property is a false construct, or somesuch.  About 2/3 of the way through the book, the "Girl" of the title somewhat ironically lays out exactly what I see as the problem with Anarchy.  She is describing two brothers who stole all their employer's money and took off with it, because 1) they don't recognize private property, and 2) they needed it.  The employer then shot himself:

What they lacked was moral strength.  Under ordinarily good influences they would have acted in an ordinarily proper way.  They had not the force of character necessary for handling the Anarchist individualist doctrines, which, excellently as they may work with men of character, are fatal to weaker men.

(p. 206)

It seems obvious to me that not everyone would act in a moral or thoughtful way if they were left to their own devices.  If completely "freed" from  any understanding of obligation to our fellow man, how many of us would still feed the poor or refrain from stealing whatever we want, or even pause at a stoplight?  Maybe I have a lower view of human nature than Anarchists do, but it seems to me that she is here acknowledging that issue.  And as long as there are some who cannot handle "the Anarchist individualist doctrines," then it's a system that cannot work, because it is a system without any recourse or solution for those who don't fit in.  In fact, it's not a system at all.  

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I want to pick up an accent

So, I long ago lost most of any kind of Minnesota accent I had... which wasn't much considering my parents are from upstate New York and Cincinnati, Ohio, so what was modelled at home was a mix of semi-southern phrases and nasally vowels, and I had to pick up my penchant for saying "Oh Gosh!" from school friends, who were confused and appalled by me chastising them for "cussing." 

Anyway, at the age of 8, moving to a new state where everyone was related to one another and hardly knew of another way to speak, unless you counted Spanish, I worked hard to become more Minnesotan, but it was short-lived.  I went to a local college, but one with lots of out-of-state and out-of-country students, like my boyfriend-cum-husband*, who honestly didn't know what "pop" was and laughed uproariously whenever I said it.  So, now I say "soda" instead, and "yeah" instead of "yah" and cut off the "uf dah" before it reaches the "dah."  

All of this is to say that I now speak something like a newscaster with poorer diction, and I'm thinking I need to ethnic it up again.  Thanks to the Coen Brothers, the Minnesota accent (or a gross exaggeration of it, anyway), is almost as well known as the hick accent as a southern one, so I don't think I'll go back to that just now.  Considering my reading material lately, I'm thinking of picking up some Irish, and I don't mean liquor.  

For subtlety's sake, my model is going to be Mayor Carcetti in The Wire:

... who is supposed to be Italian, I think, but the actor is too Irish to completely cover up his accent, and occasionally says words stuff like "I tink" and "the letter haitch."  I was also inspired again by watching Hot Fuzz to say: "God rest 'im" and "God rest 'er" whenever talking about dead folk.  

In conclusion, coming soon, a pretentious and annoying fake accent!

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* Stop laughing!  That's not dirty, it's LATIN.

Minnesotans Sure Know Noir

This weekend Houseboy and I watched "Lucky Number Slevin," recommended to our Netflix queue by Netflix buddy Soda Pop, who has an unhealthy obsession with Minnesota boy Josh Hartnett:

Ok, looking at that now, maybe it's not so unhealthy.  A hometown boy and graduate from South High School in Minneapolis (along with Rachel Leigh Cook and Carl Lumbly!)... I suppose it's ok to make secret plans to leave your high-powered DC lifestyle to cook and clean in the nude.  

Anyway, incitements to infidelity aside, this recommendation was a good one.  It could be described as a kind of "light-hearted noir" if that isn't a total oxymoron.  One of those more modern dark mystery pieces that nods towards its own outlandishness, rather than attempting to bury it in gore.  I'm not a student of the noir genre, exactly, but I've seen and read my fair share, and I'd argue that in the 1950's, when this was particularly popular, there was a certain humor to the situations, but also a certain unselfconsciousness that can only come from not having been done and redone eleventy hundred times.  When moviemakers dip into this pool these days, they're only too aware of the ridiculousness of the situations their characters end up in, and they really have only two choices: 1) distract us with a rising body count, eventually bordering on horror rather than mystery or 2) wink a bit at the camera, as Philip Marlowe might do.  

Lucky Number Slevin chooses the latter route, giving us the Lucy Liu character, who is an amateur detective and professional medical examiner, as well as the off-kilter charm of the Josh Hartnett character, who claims to have a mental disorder that does not allow him to feel fear, and results in him rather calmly making jokes when his life is in danger.  I think this approach is more in keeping with the original noir concept-- one in which we are all alone and the forces we fight can barely be contained, much less defeated, so why not throw in a wry comment between punches to the nose?  We know we cannot win the war, so we fight the battles with a certain freedom, humor and even affection.  By burying our self-awareness in sky-rocketing violence, the other "new noir" movies subvert this paradigm.

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Vitame Vas

In the tiny town I grew up in, we had a yearly festival called "Kolacky Days," in which we pretended that everyone living there was Czech and knew what the hell those ladies in red dresses with frilly aprons were lip-synching to on the Czech Singers float in the parade and said things like "Vitame Vas" (We welcome you!) to one another while eating dumplings, sauerkraut and cheese curds.  It was good fun, and also involved beer, as all good fun does.  There was a corn-eating contest and my dad competed in it (as was required of the local doctor), and lost miserably every year to men with arms as big as my head who worked in the steel mill or the Green Giant canning factory.  As kids we bought tickets at a dollar a piece to ride amusement park rides that had been put up overnight in the park and would be taken down and packed off to another town the next week, and as far as I know no one ever died on them, even though I'm pretty sure they were short a few more bolts every year.  

On Saturday night there was a dance in the park and it started out with one of the local polka bands, and the children and older women polka'd together until it started to get dark, sometime after 9pm, when a rock and roll cover band came on and my parents would walk us home, where we could hear the bass and the drums from the upstairs bathroom window.  On Sunday we all went out with wooden stakes and rope to mark off our lawns and keep the drunken parade-goers from parking on it and then walked down to the funeral home and sat on the curb and waved at local politicians and the winners of the Kolacky Queen Pageant so they would throw us Tootsie rolls and suckers.  If we were feeling athletic we competed in the Bun Run, a 4-mile race that went straight out of town on the highway, looped around an abandoned dirt road by the railroad tracks and headed back in, chugging up the hill on mainstreet in the 95 degree heat and being hosed down by volunteers that used to be our elementary school teachers.  

If we were old enough we spent Friday and Saturday night on Main Street (which was really First Street, but no one ever called it that), which had been blocked off to traffic and the six bars spilled out onto the sidewalk and street with beer specials and karaoke, once that got popular.  Boys and girls flirted and men and women drank like teenagers and started fights and drove home through the town, beaching their trucks in my parents' backyard and good-naturedly tearing up the grass trying to get back out.  

After the parade on Sunday people trickled back to their homes with bags full of Kolacky and pockets full of candy, and the municipal employees headed out to the parks to gather bags and bags of trash, and on Monday the Green Giant workers sat at the same picnic tables and ate their lunches and talked about how much the festival had changed.

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If It's on a List, It's an Accomplishment

This is what I really love about Netflix... not the "convenience" of having movies delivered to my home or the cheapness of $17 a month or even those adorable little red envelopes.  It's the fact that when I watch a movie, I get to cross it off a list and that makes me a Good Person.  People who make lists and then accomplish what is on those lists are better than people who do not.  This has been proven by Science.  

So, I thought about telling you about the dream I had last night where Crissy from Crissy's Page was the guest priest at my church and kept showing us her butt and singing nonsense songs and then I got in trouble because I was sitting in another guy's seat and wearing my pajamas, including this Natalie Dee shirt:  

And plus I was at the church I grew up in, in Minnesota and about 400 miles from the Sunday School classroom I was supposed to be in.  

But I decided that was boring, so I'll tell you about the two movies I watched this weekend:

Don't they look good together?  The Fall came out recently... let's say "the other day" to be as unspecific as possible... and it's about a man in the hospital telling a little girl an "epic" so that she'll go get him morphine to kill himself.  Yay!  It's directed by Tarsem Singh, of The Cell fame, who has apparently become a one-name guy:  just TARSEM, if you're nasty.  

Anyway, I've heard that people thought The Cell made no sense and that this one hung together only slightly better.  Those people are not smart like me, and they probably don't even make lists, much less check things off of them.  This one did have a slightly stronger storyline, but much like The Cell it relies heavily on being gorgeous and on the fact that most of the gorgeous stuff takes place inside someone's head, so you really can't expect it to follow totally logically.  If you like pretty things and can understand that a story told in bits and pieces to a child might have logical leaps in it, then you'll like this movie.  Also, there are several men with very good abs who take off their shirts a lot.  

Asphalt Jungle, on the other hand, came out not recently.  Let's say "before I was born."  It has a very early appearance by Marilyn Monroe, who looks thin and young and not at all stoned, if that kind of thing gets you off.  Basically it's a heist movie, but most of the action is pre- and post-heist, as the heisters double- and triple-cross each other and get shot all over the place.  Houseboy and I enjoyed pretending that the mastermind was a Nazi doctor, because he had a German accent and a couple people called him "doctor."  We're imaginative like that.  

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Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

That title is just too good not to steal.  This month I got TWO books from McSweeney's book club, plus one I bought for myself because the bookstore didn't have The Wire boxset and I can't leave a bookstore without buying something.  

I haven't gotten to the collection of short stories I bought yet, but these two were great:

    

"Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama" is just what it sounds like.  It's letters.  By kids.  To the President.  Obama, not the other one.  They range from cute to touching to confusing and frightening.  I'm about as liberal as the average Internet Personality, and I was raised by a hippie, but I have to say that the one where the little girl tells Obama to get rid of the right to bear arms and reduce the right to free speech kind of freaked me out.  I suppose that growing up in rural Minnesota gave me a healthy appreciation for the correct use of guns, even if I'd never touch one myself.  And as much as I wish that almost everyone else would shutup, I'd hate to find out all of a sudden that I can't say whatever I want on a blog read by at least three people a day.

The Cold Fusion book is one in a series by Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis on Whey, the comically mismatched couple who are rewriting the encyclopedia.  It provides all kinds of important facts about Cold Fusion, like exactly how to make it and which common items are made better with Cold Fusion.  I keep capitalizing that because it intimidates me, and capital letters intimidate me, so it's thematically correct if not gramatically so.  Anyway, it also had an advertisement in the back for more informative books that I look forward to buying and reading, such as "Giraffes?  Giraffes!"

Both of these books were under 100 pages, and in the case of the letters to Obama, written in very simple and easy to understand words and phrases, such as "What are you going to name your puppy?" and "Smoking is bad for you."  So, get to cracking and report back to me when you've read something that cannot be decoded into ones and zeroes.

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Everything about me rocks

I think it's important to blog about current events and share your unique viewpoint on situations with the inter-world. On the other hand, my biggest excitement this week was realizing that white people chips actually work on my migraine elimination diet.

So I ate about 43 bags of these while lying on my back on the couch and watching Veronica Mars episodes. The cats hovered around the ground near my futon, knowing that eventually I'd drop an entire chip and just not have the energy to reach down for it. And Houseboy wonders why they annoy him when he's home alone all day and don't bother me on the weekends.

My big plan for the whole weekend was to swap out my summer clothes for my winter clothes-- an occasion I look forward to every year as a recurring rite of passage initiating me into the followers of King Boreas for yet another winter. The breaking out of the tank tops that usually occurs mid to late April (my capitulation to Vulcanus' domination) is also a big event. However, in my potato chip stupor I forgot, and I had to dig a sweater out of the box under my bed for the forecasted snow showers (which haven't shown up yet) today.

So, now I'll have to save the clothing frenzy for this weekend, by which time it will be November, which really seems like pushing the envelope if you ask me.