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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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.



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

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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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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.



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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.



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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

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.



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Barbecue and pizza, but no barbecue pizza

So, an important task for these few weeks I have off, besides finding out that the Today Show is actually on past nine o'clock is also finding out if there is anything worth eating down here, besides Krispy Kreme, which I can tell you is a big fat winner. So, because I'm a Midwesterner and Houseboy is an East Coaster neither one of us knows very much about barbecue, but we figured that our Midwestern and East Coasten friends and family, if and when they visit us, will want to eat of the pig, basted in the sauce and expect that it will be the best barbecue in Nashville, if not in Tennessee, since I hear that Memphis has better barbecue anyway. Since I'm a vegetarian this will result in a citywide search for the best cornbread and mac and cheese and the least disgusting boiled and salted vegetables, because down here it's warm enough to grow vegetables year-round, so they have no love or respect for them and would rather eat something brownish and soggy that they ironically call "green beans."

The other important search is for edible pizza, which is more of a stretch. Having just emigrated from Chicago, I realize that we have the bar set pretty high, what with the Chicago style stuffed pizza and Medici's pesto and sundried tomato and goat cheese deliciousness and the cheesy crust on the Lou Malnati's and the cornbread crust on the Leona's.... you get the picture. We do have the back up of Papa John's delivery, which I haven't had in about seven years, but remember fondly from simpler times in Minneapolis, back when I was young and excited just to have multiple delivery options. We ordered Chinese! It was quite metropolitan.

Anyway, all of this is to say that so far we've found Mellow Mushroom*, which has awesome delicious sandwiches and white pizza and pesto pizza and is decorated like an LSD trip, but does not deliver, so we're still on the search because when it's 90 degrees out, I'm not walking half a mile to pick up a pizza, and I think we've had the discussion about me driving already.

However, we will be taking people there because eating pizza under a giant psychedelic mushroom is just cool.


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* I love the picture on that website of the three greasy hippy dudes making pizza. That's exactly what it's like there too. No hairs in my food yet, luckily.

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I probably won't become a prostitute to pay my bills

So, last night we sat through our first tornado watch and warning in Nashville, and I'd forgotten what a pain in the ass they can be. Growing up on the plains in Minnesota, I had my fair share of hunkering down in the basement with my dog and a pot of macaroni and cheese, and I know the "head between the knees, hands over head" position that has probably never saved any small schoolchild from a wind storm, much less a tornado or nuclear bomb.

I've been living in Chicago for awhile now, though, and there's something about giant buildings and 100 miles of suburbs that keeps the twisters away, I guess, so I haven't had to deal with this in awhile. And Houseboy's from the DC area, where nothing bad happens ever except that the whole place is so polluted that in the summer exercising outside is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes, and oh yeah that's where they have all the politicians who cheat on their wives and then kill interns. But at least there are no tornadoes.

Anyway, since it's been awhile I forgot which is worse, Watch or Warning, and Houseboy asked if it was tornado season and I kind of stared off into space and then said something about the cats, and I hadn't realized until we were watching the twelfth interruption of our regularly scheduled programming that we don't have a basement in this building, so if we were upgraded from Watch to Warning we'd have to hunker down in the bathroom with the cats, and also not to mention I haven't been able to get ahold of our insurance agent, so technically we don't have renter's insurance right now, we have condo insurance on an apartment in Chicago with nothing in it.

Oops.

Luckily, no tornado touched down on or near our place, and all our belongings are intact, despite a mild panic attack that led to me throwing things around the room and sobbing about how Allstate doesn't love me anymore. Today I will be calling our agent every hour until he picks up or calls me back, otherwise I'm going to the State Farm office next door, where there's a nice young man who tried to sell us insurance as we were still unpacking our giant truck of furniture.

Happy Friday!


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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.




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* 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

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.

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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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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Lessons Learned

So, in case you're not from where I'm from and you wanted a quick primer on at least some of what Minnesota (and parts of Wisconsin) is "like." Here is a quick fact for you:

I have twice nearly run out of gas while AT a gas station. Both times were hunting-related.

In the first instance, I was a high school pizza delivery driver and so quite often running on fumes from town to town while waiting for my next two dollar tip. In this case I had just delivered an extra large with extra pepperoni to the bar in Shieldsville, and rolled into the only gas station for about 10 miles. The needle was already on zero. Sadly, that day, the local owners of the station had "Gone Hunting." Luckily much of Montgomery is downhill from much of Shieldsville and I didn't have to hike back along the highway for very far.

In the second instance, I was making one of countless trips between the Twin Cities and Chicago (I think in this case it was when Houseboy and I were first visiting the University in fact) and I had miscalculated how much gas I had left in the tank, expecting to make it as far as Tomah. Instead, I see one of those blue and white "Gas -- Food" signs and a sign for "Millston" just as I'm thinking I have about 5 miles left in the tank. Pull into the station to discover, whoops, it's the Fishing Opener. In that case I actually had to call AAA to bring me gas.

Now, some people might interpret this as me telling you that Minnesotans and Wisconsonians sure do like their killing. And there is that, of course. But there is also the fact that, in addition to the good old-fashioned Midwestern work ethic there is a deeply built understanding of what life is all about. And it's not about making the customer happy. It's about fishing.

P.S. For more Minnesota fun, see the Fourfold Root .

Huffing Paint

Disclaimer: If happen to know me and know you are from my hometown, please recognize that if you are reading this right now it is most likely because I like you at least well enough to not avoid you completely, which is saying a lot. Therefore, don't take anything you're about to read to apply to you. Probably. Thank you and have a nice day.


So, I was interacting via the world wide interwebs today with an illustrious alum of a certain small town high school which shall remain nameless (though certainly obvious), and she informed me that our 10 year high school reunion is coming up. Two things are obvious in this: #1 That is simply a falsehood and the bitch should watch her mouth in the future, and #2 I dropped out of that school so I'm unlikely to be invited, even if it were true. Which it is not.

Anyway, it started me off on an unfortunate train of thought about how important it is that I am better, smarter and prettier than all those losers I grew up with, and how difficult it would be to explain that to all of them at a beer bash in Richter's woods. I'm pretty sure it would involve new jeans and some sort of t-shirt that says "I'm good at math and make more money than you and I live in the same building with 'people of color' and don't even freak out about it and I can walk to an art gallery and a coffee shop and where I live it smells like people's shit instead of like cow's shit." And you can see where I'm having a hard time here.

So, mostly then, I was thinking that rather than bragging about living in a city I hate or doing a job none of them would understand, or marrying a man who is neither Czech nor related to anyone in town, that I would find some sort of "I've never huffed paint" angle. I could work on showing all the ranges of emotion I'm still capable of feeling and expressing with my face or saying complete sentences with minimal slurring.

I think we're on to something here.