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.

---

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

I don't have any pictures of this one

So, once upon a time I was a Hamster Person. (Ever since I accidentally had two cats that find rodents delicious, the hamster thing has kind of gone by the wayside). But anyway, I got my first hamster when I was in first grade, and what I remember about him is that I named him Brian after my two boyfriends and that I stuck my finger in the little holes in the cardboard box on the way home and he bit me and I bled a lot, but I didn't want to tell my mom because I was afraid she'd take him back. As I recall, I was watching the blood drip down to my elbow when my mom was like "Um... what's up with that?" and I was like "Um.... I don't know...." After that I had a hamster named Sarah, named after my best friend, and this hamster was an Escape Artist. She lived to be about 1,058 in hamster years, which is to say more than three years, and she figured out how to take the top off her plastic cage and used to go galavanting around the house eating crackers out of the pantry cupboard and forcing us to un-trapify all the mousetraps for a few weeks until she'd suddenly decide she missed pooping in cedar chips and then she'd just come back. By the time she passed away, she was missing clumps of hair and one of her eyes had exploded. I also had a hamster I shared with my college roommate, who we named Xena and let run around in her ball up and down the dorm hallways until one time we kind of forgot to pay attention to her and she went bumping down the stairs and when we reached her she looked all dazed and accusatory. She was also probably responsible for the mouse that lived in our couch and chewed a hole in Xena's food bag and then one day just up and died inside something which led to a week of sleeping in the common room because our college's response to that was to just spray some air freshener and let him rot. Which also reminds me of another hamster I had during my Greek mythology phase, who I named Hercules, which was sadly inappropriate as he escaped just like Sarah, but got trapped in the air ducts in our house somewhere and never made it back, and we found him or at least where he was mostly by the smell. Speaking of the ways things die, I had a dwarf hamster that my dog stepped on, and she felt real bad about it, but she didn't know how to do spinal surgery and neither did I and thus we both learned a life lesson about letting dogs and hamsters play together. I also had two other hamsters, named Alf and Taffy, and they both lived regular hamster lives and died regular hamster deaths and then I had another one named Nicholas who had some kind of baby hamster disease so I guess that's a regular hamster death too.

Aren't you glad I cheered up your day with this story? Maybe this will help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfqNXADl3kU&feature=player_embedded#

Now do you see why they're worth it in the end?

---

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!

---

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Stata, my nizzles

I can say nizzles, right? We can pretend it's just a totally made up word and not based on any other word that I would never ever say, even when singing along with Ol' Dirty Bastard on car trips because yelling is a good way to not fall asleep while driving or being driven through Wisconsin. Well, if not, consider this my apology.

Anyway, today I got my new Stata 11 disc, which is awesome because it's the third data analysis programming language I've learned which makes me trilingual in Nerdland I think, but also means that I don't have to go into my office every weekend to do my Practicum assignments which are really really important and all, but I have this thing about putting on pants and walking a mile and a half to sit in a windowless room and explore publicly available datasets when I could be doing it from home. It's not every day you can pick up a pizza on the way and watch the Twins, particularly since they did the honorable thing and bowed out of this sham of a playoffs.

So, I'm wishing right now that I had come up with some much more better and interestinger topic for a blog because there's just really nothing interesting about downloading a program from a cd onto your laptop, no matter how you spin it unless you spin it like remember floppy discs when they were still floppy and it took twelve of them to download solitaire onto your desktop computer which was beige colored?

My laptop is black.

---

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Yet another way that I am crazy

I think I've made it fairly clear throughout my various stories here that I'm not what you'd call a "normal" person, and so maybe one more example of that doesn't really count as TMI for you all, but nonetheless, here it is. I talk to animals. And sometimes (often) they talk back to me.

I was a big fan of Dr. Doolittle when I was a kid, so this isn't new or anything:

That's me with my dog Inky in about 1985, and obviously I'm explaining something very important and complicated, hence the hand gestures.

Throughout high school and college and into adulthood, I did what I imagine many if not most pet owners do, which is say things like "Oh, you like that? Yeah, you really like when I scratch you right there! Mushgtyegithey!!" and "I'm just going to the kitchen, I'll be right back, you just stay sleeping right there like you are, boogieghtieiebum!" That's all fine and good.

Then, this happened:

I mean the dog there, not the kitten. Though it's worth noting that the kitten is now three times the size that dog ever was.

Anyway, that dog was special. She had expressive eyes. You'd talk to her, and damned if she didn't basically talk back. I'd be like "What's up, frog monkey?" And she'd be like "Get me some delicious chicken! Please and thank you." And, yes, maybe she'd say that in a voice that sounded a lot like my own voice, but really really high pitched. And maybe sometimes she said it in a really really high pitched version of Houseboy's voice. And maybe sometimes these conversations would go on for, oh say, awhile. And maybe the cats decided they were being left out and they also made us channel them and then even there were conversations between the pets that we weren't involved in.

Which really is all fine and good and a private matter, which no one needs to know about except that sometimes I forget that I'm crazy and that the things I do aren't normal, and so I start talking about them at the lunch table at work while Hedgehog is there and she thinks I'm funny and so when our boss's boss walks by she's all "Hey! Department Head Lady! Antelope has a funny story for you! Antelope, do the voice! Do the voice!" And so I have to do the high pitched voice my dog talks in for a person who has regular meetings with the guy who plays basketball with Obama.

So, yes. I still worked there for a couple more years, but then AFTER that I totally resigned in embarrassment.


---

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Happy Birthday, Dad!

So, today is my Dad's birthday, and since I now live like a million miles away, I will not be eating cake and ice cream with him, and also I have a birthday card next to me that I haven't mailed, and I realize that it's much less fun to get a birthday card a week after your birthday, so I decided to make today's blog a birthday card. So, on that note, I hereby dedicate this post to the guy I owe half my genetic material to, who gave me a nickname (against my mom's wishes) and took me to baseball games even though he hated sports. He taught me to make Hollandaise and bookshelves, and even though I don't do either of those things anymore, I DID make a really delicious apple pie (including the crust!) the other day, and I can only assume that the success was the direct result of latent genes and/or training, so thanks Dad for making me a sleeper agent, I mean pie maker:

He's the reason I knew what a grit was before I got down here, that I'm not afraid of the doctor and that I know how to ride a bike (though my mom had a hand in that too... that one took a lot of work. What? That's normal!) He's why anytime anyone makes a pun I go "Ohhhh! Nice Dad joke! You'll make a great father," and I'm not even being sarcastic, mostly, and he's also why I know that being a feminist doesn't mean hating men, it just means making them do the dishes.

So, happy birthday to a great cook and carpenter, and a smart, funny, incredible person who's at least half of who I am today.

And tomorrow I promise to be back to my usual insane and curmudgeonly blogself, maybe with a post entitled: F$&#ing Cellphones Almost Killt Me.


---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Goodbye Metrodome

Yes, it's another baseball post. Yes, I know it infuriates you because you feel lost and confused and you wish I'd talk more about how I woke up yesterday with grime under my fingernails and a cut on my hand and I don't know why, so I'm just waiting to see which thing in my house I disassembled and reassembled in my sleep, but that's just too bad because the Twins played their last game in the Metrodome last night, on account of losing to the Yankees in game three of the first round of the playoffs, so they had to shuffle out without the big celebration the Hefty Bag deserves. Or at least I think that's what happened, since we were watching it on TBS with the sound off and they kept showing the stupid Yankees players with their halfhearted celebration, rather than focusing on Joe Nathan stealing dirt from the mound in the background and a couple groundskeepers trying to pull up home plate with crowbars. I can only assume that Michael Cuddyer also cut some material from the baggie, Delmon Young nabbed a piece of turf and Alexi Casilla tried to fit second base in his back pocket.

There was also a distinct lack of nostalgia for the Dome in our local bar, even though the day manager is from Minnesota and there were other Twins fans in the bar even, because the Tennessee Titans were busy losing very badly and also a paranoid schizophrenic came in and sat down next to us and started accusing the bartender of being in the CIA and then got tossed, but was allowed to bring his tacos with him, which he seemed to be grateful for and only a little put out that they didn't have Louisiana Hot Sauce for him to take with him.

For some reason that got more attention than the game for awhile.

Anyway, a tearful farewell to the place I learned to love baseball and hate the outdoors, to where Kirby made catches and hit homeruns over plexiglass, where Tori rattled his brains against an unpadded outfield fence, where Doug Mientkiewicz did the splits at first and Joe Mauer just wouldn't stop growing behind home plate and where Johann Santana threw seventeen strikeouts in a game and Big Papi got his start and Terry Tiffee sold some jeans, where Paul Molitor got a lot of his 3,000 hits and Cristian Guzman got accused of loafing at shortstop and Eddie Guardado did deep knee bends and rearranged his junk at least four times per batter. Not even to mention the hall of famers that have Minneapolis streets named after them and the ones that undoubtedly one day will (Morneau Avenue, anyone?) and the Canadians and Venezuelans who were almost as plentiful as the Minnesotans and Alabamans and the balls lost in the roof and the ones that bounced off the infield turf and turned into doubles and 60,000 screaming fans who made it almost impossible to hear:

There is NO SMOKING in the METRODOME!!!


Goodbye and we will miss you.


Sniffle.



---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

I remember the 80s

It's not like I was exactly "socially involved" or "aware of much outside my third grade classroom," or whatever, but I remember the decade. I remember wanting (and getting, thanks mom and dad!) awesome neon-colored clothing and knockoff-Vans*, and because of the whole small-town-in-Minnesota thing, the 80s kind of extended into the 90s by quite a bit, so I remember spending significant time in Junior High trying to get my bangs to stand up and failing because my hair has a Mind of Its Own.

So anyway, for the most part even though my childhood was awesome, I don't exactly miss the fashion and when I get a catalog in the mail that is trying to sell me leggings and fingerless gloves I kind of shrug and think that it's a little funny that thirteen year olds want to look like Cyndi Lauper, just like I did. On the other hand, when that catalog is also selling flannel shirts and combat boots, I get a little itchy inside and feel like time is collapsing like a telescope and maybe I'm going to spin off into another dimension where Kurt Cobain is still alive and started a new band called "Happy Fun Time Band" and everyone in the universe works for their own online startup and/or Microsoft and that Dell guy is still popular.

On the third hand, when people start talking about a "comeback" of Blink 182 and how they like their "old stuff" better and there is concern about them selling out, well then that's just when I give up and realize I'm old and it's time to buy life insurance and a share in a retirement community and maybe start voting Republican or something.

Or maybe I'll just wear my awesome 80s boots to class today and start the cycle over again.



---
* Yes, I wanted the knockoffs, not the originals. What?

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Guess how lazy I can be

I can be so lazy that I combine MySpace Mondays with Way Back Tuesdays and pretend that a blog post from 2004 about my internship for my master's program counts as interesting material for you. And I can be so lazy that I pretty much just copy it here like this:

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Totally for real serious, this happened

Ok, so we're in week 4 of this quarter, and I've only seen my boss at my internship ONCE, and my last day is Friday. Every day I come in no one's seen him, no one knows where he is... the woman at the front desk has only seen him a few times in the last month. The other intern who shares an office with me also had no idea where he's been... until today. Today she finds out that he is actually actively avoiding us. He works evenings and weekends so he won't have to see us, and here's why: Lisa, a dual degree student with the Div school who works there on Tues/Thursdays started up a Tenant's Rights group under his direction. She got really involved in it, got all the tenants at the three buildings that WECAN owns coming to meetings, and got two guys from an organization called Magic and a campus organization called Angels of Def involved as well. Well, come to find out that some of the tenants rights that they'd been teaching the tenants about, WECAN was not meeting in its own buildings. Angels of Def decides that it would be more appropriate if they just worked with Lisa and Magic and the tenants directly, leaving out WECAN. Well, now Arvis (my boss) gets all pissed off, saying that they're going over his head, and he tries to shut the whole thing down. Brian (of Magic) and Lisa won't let it go, however. Arvis ends up screaming at Lisa in front of pretty much all of WECAN, and ever since he hasn't been in the office when she's around. That's scandal 1! Scandal 2 involves my officemate, Rose, who works with afterschool programs with kids in one of the apartment buildings owned by WECAN. She does a little asking around and finds out that the smoke detectors and security system in her room have been purposely disconnected. Also, the gate just outside their door is permanently locked, so if there's a fire, they have to go all the way around the building to get out. She tries to talk to Arvis about it, and he disappears on her too. So, every day I show up he's avoiding some scandal, and now I don't even know if he realizes that I won't be here after Friday and that he has to turn in a grade for me. So I'm staying home from work for the rest of today.

And then consider that my blog entry for the day.

You're welcome.


---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

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.



---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

If you're bored then you're boring

So, since yesterday I got all lazy and just reposted something I wrote five years ago, back when I was young and funny and had great skin, I should really work very hard on my post today because I'm getting the gray hair and wrinkles, so I really can't fall back on my cuteness anymore and besides which you don't even know what I look like because this is a blog, not a vlog and so I can't bat my eyes at you or nothing.

But on the other hand, another side effect of getting old is that I have almost nothing interesting to say unless you want to hear about how I was trying to wash in between my toes in the shower today and I almost fell over or about how a bug bit me on my ankle while I was running and I swore and hopped on one foot and almost fell over or about how I was walking from the living room into the kitchen and I almost fell over.

On the third hand which we will all be growing in our next step of evolution, it IS Tuesday, so I could bore you with a Way Back Tuesday about how I first got the internet when I was fifteen because one of my best friends stole AOL cds from a computer magazine in the K-mart and brought them into school and I was the only one who would download it and then talk to him in the chat rooms until all hours of the night until the end of the first month when my parents found out that how the internet works when it's 1994 and you live in the country is that your computer makes a long distance call to the Twin Cities and then stays on that call for all three hours that you're talking to your friend who happens to live in Kilkenny, which is a local call and so would have cost you twenty five cents but instead it costs you like $400 and all of a sudden you're not a Good Daughter anymore. Whoops.

I could also tell you about how my very first AOL screen name was Eve15, because I was an X-Files fan and I was fifteen, and you know how that ends because the Internet Predators were like the first people ever on the internet and all they wanted to do was go into the Private Chatrooms and ask me how much I weighed and what my bra size was, which I thought was FUNNY and I laughed at them, so I wasn't traumatized or anything, especially since I didn't have a Webcam, so I didn't have to stumble on anything especially dangerous to my innocence, but nonetheless if I had a fifteen year old daughter now, right after I berated myself for getting pregnant in high school I would definitely not let her in the private AOL chatrooms, if they still exist.

But I don't feel like telling you about all that, and besides I have a meeting to go to, and since I predict falling down at least twice more before I get there, I should start putting on my protective equipment.



---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Way Back Whenever I Feel Like It

Ok, so I forgot yesterday was Tuesday. Which is my favorite blog day usually, because it allows me to be even more self-centered than usual and tell you about things in my life from more than twelve minutes ago and pretend that you give a poo about where I come from or what nonsense shaped and molded me or whatever. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if you cared about what happened to me 12 minutes ago either, because that story mostly involves re-reading an article about socio-emotional factors affecting achievement outcomes because the first time I read it I more stared at it and turned pages than actually read any part of it.

So, because I want to and because you have to read this because the rest of the internet is on break today and you know you can't just go read a book, I'm going to tell you about how one time I moved. Ok, lots of times I moved, but this is about the time that I moved between Kindergarten and first grade, because my mom was going back to seminary at an age which, it interests no one but me to point out, was suspiciously close to my age now.

We moved from a house in what was, at that time, a small town in Minnesota, to a town house apartment in what seemed to me to be the bustling metropolis of Alexandria, Virginia. Since I was, what, six years old, I don't remember the exact time line, but I do remember I didn't have to do any packing or hauling of furniture, and instead I got to hang out at my grandparents' awesome house in New York, where they had a pond and a big wheel thing that looked like a duck, which I'm now questioning why I couldn't do for our move to Nashville too. Anyway, at some point there was a giant moving truck that someone drove the wrong way up a one way street and at some point there was a little bit of sock skating on the floors, but at the most important point there was a cross-country drive in a car with my grandpa, who was and is my hero because you could sit in a car with him for 400 miles and just think about the way the numbers on the clock change or the funny shapes of the clouds or how great Punky Brewster is and he wouldn't interrupt your thoughts*.

Anyway, on this car trip at some point we stopped at a restaurant and joined the chatty cathies** for lunch, which was also nice and there was probably grilled cheese involved--all I know for sure is that Suzie really enjoyed it, because she decided to stay behind. Which I did not notice for at least another hour or two. Oh, and Suzie was a doll. Except that she wasn't, she was a real person/my best friend/a surgically reconstructed Frankenstein's monster version of the original Suzie, made for me by my grandma***. And she was all alone in some restaurant because I had been thinking about my kneecaps and whether they would pop off if I pulled hard enough, rather than the safety of my charge.

So, I had to clear my throat a few times I think, and maybe even started crying before I actually thought of a sentence to say, but eventually communicated to Grandpa the tragedy that had occurred, at which point he wordlessly turned the car around and drove some hundreds of miles back to the restaurant on a rescue mission. Suzie now rests safely on top of a bookcase where she is queen of all she surveys.



---
*When I called my grandparents, my grandma would put it on speaker phone to talk, but I wouldn't hear a word from my grandpa until the end when he would say "Nice talking to you!" That's a quality conversation, in my book.

** Grandma and my sister. And maybe my parents? I don't remember.

*** I loved her so much her face and hands and feet kept coming off. And Grandma loved me so much she kept sewing her new ones.


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.



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

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

I'm not a tattletale

For this edition of Way Back Tuesday, we'll travel across time and space to a little place called Farmington, Minnesota which used to be a pretty small town and is now a semi-suburb of the Twin Cities, and to which my family moved when I was a year old and from which we moved when I was six years old. This means that I started my academic career there, with half day Kindergarten (I had mornings), during which I spent most of my time playing with trucks alone in a corner because I already knew how to read, so I didn't need to sit in a circle and learn the alphabet but my parents had decided I wasn't ready for first grade because I only had one friend. By the end of Kindergarten I had two friends and then we moved 1,000 miles away, so that worked out well for everyone.

Anyway, my teacher was Mrs. Rhode-Goggin, who was about four and a half feet tall and wore her headgear and a wok stand around her neck on Halloween and called it an alien costume. She also got pregnant that year and my best (only) friend asked her if she was having a baby or just fat. She was awesome.

So, next to her desk she had a thing called The Tattle Ear or something like that, which was a construction paper ear which you were supposed to go tattle to, rather than bugging her about how little Jenny bit you. I found out much later from my mother that the idea behind the thing was that five and six year olds don't whisper so good, so they would come up and do that loud wet whisper into the ear that they all do, and Mrs. Rhode-Goggin could overhear what they were saying and decide whether she needed to do anything about it. I'm guessing Jenny the biter would have been in trouble.

Well, apparently in addition to being ahead of the curve in the whole reading thing, I was also an unusually good whisperer for my age, and my teacher could never hear what I was tattling about. I also 100% believed that this ear was somehow magical and made all your tattle-worthy problems go away, so it never even occurred to me to tell the teacher as well as the ear.

This is relevant because one time during recess or whatever they called our play time outside, I had to go to the bathroom, and the aide let me come in and use it alone. I was probably also a potty genius of some kind. Anyway, when I came in and burst through the bathroom door already working on the clasps on my overalls because damn those things were complicated, I found one of my classmates sitting on the floor surrounded by Oreos and with chocolate all over his mouth. It seems he had discovered the hiding place for the snack and went buckwild. With no one else in sight, I promptly went over and told the tattle ear and then went back outside to play, figuring my work was done.

I was more than a little upset when the teacher only discovered the missing Oreos at snack time and the thief just sat there all happy and full of cookies and frosting while the rest of starved until our mom made us tomato soup and shells for lunch during Sesame Street.



---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

I think it's Tuesday

Is it Tuesday? Well, it's Way Back Tuesday anyway, no matter what day it is. For this edition, we'll go way back to ninth grade, which for me was in 1994. If you're clever, you can figure out how old I am from that. Since (as I may have mentioned) I grew up in a small town in Minnesota, this was about the time that grunge hit our scene. Since I had a father who owned flannel and a sister a size or two larger than me, I was set as long as I just wore anyone's clothes but my own. Also, I grew out my bangs, which were never curled and hair sprayed the way they should be anyway, because I'm lazy and because my hair does whatever the fuck it wants; I am not its master.

Anyway, I was 15 years old and thought I was tough in some way I can't really remember or explain, especially since this story involves a band trip. Not Band Camp, you understand, just a fun-filled overnight trip to Madison County, Iowa to compete against other tough band nerds and go to a classical music concert and out to the dinner theater. Rockin!

This was the end of the year*, and as such it was time for the seniors to pass their awesome torch to us freshmen. Because they got rid of hazing after some band dork had to be taken to the hospital when he was wrapped in tape and all his skin came off**, all this meant is that the Seniors gave us those "Awards" which are really just pieces of paper making fun of you. I got "Best Section Leader" because I was (after my senior left) going to be the only person in my section. And because apparently I was so devoid of personality that they couldn't even make fun of me properly. One of my best friends got "Anastasia." Because they couldn't remember her name. Hint: It was not Anastasia. Another best friend got something like "Practice Freak." Because she was really really good and practiced her instrument and it sucked how much other people in her section sounded like ass next to her.

Anyway, that night after our rockin' dinner and awards ceremony, me and my three best friends retired to our hotel room and lit those awards on fire in the tub. I'm not sure how four nonsmoking fifteen year olds got a hold of matches and/or a lighter, but I'm going to guess it involved my friend flirting with one of the older boys who was also a band badass and once called me anorexic and street dumb, but that's another story.

Anyway, there was glue involved in these awards and a fair amount of smoke ensued and we had to turn on the shower and did not burn the motherfucker down like Lisa Left Eye Lopes, but all in all we felt pretty awesome.

I used to have a thing with fire. It's pretty.


---
* I think it was the end of the year. My brain kind of sucks at, like, remembering stuff like times and dates and places and names. This story is all true though many details may be confused and/or made up.

** That may have been The Breakfast Club. But maybe it happened in my school too. Who knows?


http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

How to be a responsible underage drunk

So, because in high school I was not "cool" and didn't like to "drink and drive" and didn't have parents who "let me drink in the basement" and lived in a small town where the bartenders knew I "wasn't 21," I didn't have a lot of opportunities to drink and those I had I didn't take advantage of.

Anyway, so I got to college, which was in the Big City, by Minnesota standards anyway, and I lived in a dorm, so I didn't have to drive anywhere to get liquor, and I knew people with fake IDs and siblings who were over 21 and bartenders who didn't know me from anyone and might have believed I was 21 if I wanted to get a fake ID, which I didn't, but anyway, the point is that I made the very carefully considered decision that drinking was cool and I was cool too and as long as we all went about it in a responsible manner, all things would end well for all involved parties.

This decision was made on a dorm room floor while surrounded by half filled bottles of various liquors dropped off by my friend's sister, who was just tickled that her little brother was taking the plunge into alcohol experimentation, and so gave us many many options to choose from. My roommate and this friend* and I chose vodka as our drink of choice with peach schnapps as our chaser. My friend's sister had neglected to drop off any shot glasses, so my roommate and friend were using small plastic cups, while I chose a measuring cup, which as the night wore on seemed more and more brilliant, as I became more and more convinced of my ability to exert absolute control over my own levels of drunkenness.

This might have been before I decided that I was dizzy sitting on the floor and the chair would be safer. It might have been before we decided that being in the hallway would solve all our problems. It was definitely before everyone on the floor decided that they would join us, including the RA, who was definitely on things besides vodka and peach schnapps.

This obviously set up weeks and months of all levels very controlled and responsible partying, which included:

• Establishing and codifying a ladder of intoxication that began with "buzzed" and ended with "blasted" and had a bunch of other levels in between that I no longer remember,
• Drawing an intricate Drunken Makeout Map with lines connecting all the people on the floor who had made out with each other while drunk,
• Some girl who might not even have gone to our school wandering into my friend's room and trying to steal the liquor, but first trying to cut the screen off the top of the Bacardi 151 bottle and slicing her hand open and then running out into the street before we could even try to help her,
• Wandering into a local band's practice session in the dorm's basement and narrowly saving one of the band member's daughters from drinking a rather large glass of "juice" that was actually about 14 kinds of liquor mixed with just a little Sunny D (that we had brought in with us),

And lots of other stuff, I'm sure. Those were just the most responsible things we did. And I have REMAINED a responsible drinker. Yesterday, one of my very best friends in the world, who we call Sweetbreads**, was in town for a wedding, and we started drinking at three in the afternoon because we're badasses like that. And we passed out at 10:30pm, because we're 30 years old like that.

Wooooooo.




---
* Incidentally, I had known this friend since I was eight and he just happened to choose to go to the same college as me, which I didn't find out until a week before orientation. Just a random sidenote.

** In-joke alert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetbread

Two Weddings and a Funeral

Highlights of my cousin's wedding in rural Maine:

• Before anything began, before even my first drink, I bent down to get something out of my purse and smashed my head into the back of a chair, so now I have a bruise on my forehead implying raucous drunkenness that never really came to fruition.
• My uncle leaning across the table to ask my sister "What's that between your BOOBS?" in reference to her tattoo.
• The early no-show for karaoke which resulted in my deaf cousin (the bride) stumbling through "Summer of '69" by herself until she was bailed out by the everyone present in a terrible cacophony of off-key singing
• All the cousins from my side of the family collaborating on Monster Mash (my choice)

So, in the spirit of Way Back Tuesday, I was going to tell the story of the first wedding I ever went to or something, but then all I could remember was something about some organza and champagne and being really really bored, so I decided to tell about the first funeral of someone I knew.

I was about 10 or 11, and the husband of the organist in our church passed away. It being a congregation of about twelve people, and my mom being the priest, this was one of the Adults In My Life, so I went to the memorial service, and my parents even let me go right up to the open casket in that whole "check out the body" time. I was interested to find out that dead people look a lot like alive people, but sleeping and with darker eyelashes, and I was leaning in to see what they smelled like, when I was also interested to discover that they talked like alive people too. Except that they talked about themselves in the third person.

Then, his wife answered him, and I realized that the voices were actually coming from behind me. Turning around, I discovered the organist and her husband standing behind me. I figured then that the thing in the casket must be one of those wax sculptures like we had seen in Ripley's Believe it or Not and the organist's husband had faked his death and then been so ballsy as to show up at his own funeral and talk about himself in the third person, and everyone was playing along.

My mom told me that he had an identical twin, and that was the man I met at the funeral, but I still think my explanation was better.



---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Worst Road Trip Ever

So, this is in answer to an assignment from Jeff, who has one of the cooler site name/address combinations out there and wrote all about his crappy spring break last week and asked us to do the same.

Anyway, this was also a spring break, in my sophomore year of college, spring of 1999, and my roommate, my high school friend and I decided to join our three other friends for a road trip to Texas. Before leaving my mom informed me (mistakenly as it turns out) that my insurance did not cover any other drivers besides me, so if I let anyone drive my car and they so much as got a ticket, it was out of my pocket. So, we begin the 26 hour drive at about 6 p.m. with me behind the wheel the whole way.

That's all right though, because we get as far as Story City, Iowa when my car starts spewing black smoke, sputtering and swerving and I have to pull over to the nearest gas station and call AAA. The mechanic who comes is about four and a half feet tall and appears to have had his hand amputated and put back on incorrectly and he informs me that "cars ain't meant to be drived long distances at high speeds," and that I should have it towed in in the morning. So the next morning we tow it to Ames, where they replace two spark plugs and tell us we're good to go.

So, with a lot of caffeine and Twizzlers, I drive the rest of the 20 hours myself and collapse in a hotel room while the five other people go out to the pool. A couple hours later I'm awakened by the police pounding on the door. They inform me that while all my friends were out at the pool, my car was broken into. They smashed in my window and stole my stereo.

So, I spend the third day of my spring break (the first day was in Iowa, the second driving to Texas) getting my window replaced in some shady strip mall in the suburbs of Houston.

The middle part of the vacation went pretty well... we drove over the border into Mexico and bought some Chicklets from little Mexican children and drank Corona and felt all cultured and shit.

Then, on the drive home I saw a drunk driver weave in and out of traffic and drive right off the road and into a sign. At that point I decided it might be a good idea to let someone else drive for a few hours, no matter what the insurance said. So I let my roommate take over, gave her the keys at the gas station, and she promptly put the ignition key in the door and broke it off.

So, we had to call a 24 hour locksmith out to an Oklahoma gas station at 11 o'clock at night and I'm not even going to describe what that experience was like.

Houseboy and I are starting on a roadtrip ourselves tomorrow--out to my cousin's wedding in Maine and down to his family and around to Tennessee, etcetera... here's hoping it's better than that one was.


---
http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

The Tubing on the Apple River Story

So, back when I was being Jesucated myself, instead of Jesucating others, I (as you may have heard) was living in a really super duper small town and went to a really super duper small church. Small meaning there were about 10 people on a Sunday, and 80% of them were over 60*. The "Confirmation Class" was me, my sister and my friend Barb talkin' 'bout Jesus with my mom and my piano teacher.

It was also the three of us joining up with other Jesus folk to go tubing on the Apple River. Occasionally I find out that things that I thought were totally normal are not normal, so I'm going to go ahead and explain what that means. That means you get in an inner tube (like the tube inside a tire, only much, much bigger) and float down a river. In this case, a river that runs through the suburbs of the Twin Cities. It's mostly about getting a tan and drinking beer. Except we were 12 and 14 years old, so there was no beer. Except for the chaperones. Who had coolers and coolers of beer.

Anyway, we were told before takeoff that there would be two sets of rapids, a little one and then a big one. We could get off after the little one if we were big pussies and just wanted to get to the hot dog cookout. We were not big pussies, we were tough rural kids and definitely wanted all the suburbanites around to know it.

Oh, also, that year there had been a lot of snow and then a lot of rain during the spring. No big deal. That will just come in later.

Anyway, so me and my sister and my friend Barb and my other friend Lisa, who I invited along to get Jesufied via a tan and some muddy water, all strapped our inner tubes together and hopped into the river. We floated on down, feeling good, but not as good as the chaperones, who were stinking drunk by the time we reached the rapids, which were boring as shit, and we let everyone know it. "Boooooo!" We said. "These little rapids are BORING!" Then we saw just about everyone get out after them and we LAUGHED. "Suburbanites!" We cried, "What pussies!"

We continued on to the second set of rapids. "Oh dear," we whispered to each other, "These are a bit much. Lisa, grab that low hanging tree branch, we'll bail out and go back to the hot dog cookout." So, Lisa grabs the branch, rips a layer of skin off her arms and winds up hanging over the river as the rest of us float downstream without her. Oops. With much effort, we're able to get her back to the inner tube raft, but now we're too far in the rapids to go back and there's too much underbrush to walk around them, especially since I managed to lose my shoes, so we decide to just keep going to the second check point.

Which we figured will be coming up any moment now.

Aaaaaaaaaany moment now.

Yup. Just around this curve. Or that one. See, the thing is that the river must double back on itself. Or maybe that big field up there is where everyone is waiting. Hm. Those signs with the big red danger symbols on them can't be good.

About three hours later, we finally see a house over looking the river. Atop a 50 foot cliff. So, we scramble up the cliff and knock on the glass doors of the dreaded suburbanite who doesn't even ask us if we're on drugs before calling the organizers of the field trip, who inform my father that we totally ditched on purpose because we are evil bad children to the core and not even Jesus can save us**.

I proceed to dream about bear attacks and hot dog cookouts for about a week.

---

*Smart people may notice that the math there doesn't make sense, unless either me, my sister or my friend Barb were also over 60. Well screw you and your math. God is not about math.

** Which may or may not be true, but the actual problem was that spring flooding obscured the first rapids and made the second set seem "small" to us bad asses. Also, the drunken adults didn't help.

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Formative moments in serial killing

When I was about 9 years old, and we had recently moved back to Minnesota, fulfilling my lifelong dream of Not Living in Virginia Anymore, there was this 16 year old kid named David Brom who murdered his entire family with an axe in a town about 70 miles from where we lived. Of course I heard a thing or two about it, but, being nine and of the overly imaginative and spazzy type, I was forbidden from reading any of the newspaper accounts or watching anything on tv about it.

Except that my parents were good hippies and kept a stack of newspapers next to the fireplace to be bound and brought to the recycling center in St. Peter (this was before everyone had recycling pickup, if you can believe it). So, of course I snuck downstairs after my bedtime one night and sat in the middle of the living room floor reading a long and gory account about how he bashed in their skulls and then went out for drive through with his girlfriend.

I spent the next few nights wondering whether it would be better to close my door so I could hear my sister coming when she inevitably axe murdered me, or if I should leave it open so I could die peacefully in my sleep*.

I decided I couldn't take her even if I heard her coming, so I'd rather die peacefully, and I have slept with the door open ever since.

---

* It should probably be mentioned that this is the first time I had my own bedroom, upping the scary factor, since she'd have to stalk down the hall with the axe, rather than just coming down from the top bunk. Actually, maybe the top bunk thing is scarier. You decide.

http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com