Sunday, August 31, 2003 Dinner Party extremists stage bloodless coup; catsup substituted
I picked up another stinkin' speeding ticket on the way to work today. A county cop was hiding around a bend in the road I take to work every day.
I was about 6 minutes late to work, so I had to explain to the boss on duty why I hadn't been there at 4 to hear the specials. When I told him, he said, "you wild woman!" He was not being sarcastic.
I didn't kick him.
That was my good deed for the day.
My bad deed for the day was taking the cats to the cat store to get gawked at. They hate it, and it doesn't work. Why don't these sweet, pretty cats get adopted in a heartbeat?
Because they are always getting upstaged by kittens. Almost every week it seems like there's a fresh batch of kittens at the adoption, and they get snapped up in a heartbeat, presumably by people with poor impulse control, while the pair of big cats languish in their catcage, getting pawed at by yokels.
Today I saw a well-meaning but idiotic teenage girl try to pet the cats through the bars of the catcage. There is, like, a door in the catcage, but little Avril hadn't found it, so she was "petting" the cats by poking her fingers through the bars and waggling them at whatever parts of the cats were nearest. She poked brown cat in the rump, and then said to her friend "Look, he's twitching."
Brown cat didn't even bite her. That's what a good cat he is. I took them both home after that.
I may suggest that the cat ladies bring in their own obese and sore-covered pets (I'm not just being snarky... to hear the cat ladies talk, all their pets are either obese, deathly ill, or plagued by skin conditions, but the cat ladies themselves might be suffering from Munchausen-by-Proxy syndrome) in next week, and hold the kittens in the back until the foster cats, who will be the cutest under those conditions, get adopted.
Seriously, though, if you live in the southeast and want cats, e-mail me at my ridiculous blog address. I'll try and post pictures of them someday, but rest assured, they are very fine cats indeed.
Also: only 2 more works shifts 'til I hang up my polo shirt and mustard-stained pants for good.
posted by Frenz | 8/31/2003 01:02:00 AM
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Thursday, August 28, 2003 T-minus
Today I took the car into the sanitorium and day spa for its weekly sup of money, and since the last time I did that, I stormed out yelling "You will never have any of my business again, ever," I took it to a new dealership, which takes you on a limo ride while your car gets snacks of gold bullion. You pretty much only get to go to your house, or whatever house you pretend is yours.
Other people were riding in the limo too, but there was no champagne and no making out, and nobody even raised the privacy wall, so it was like the bus, a little, but with even more obligatory conversation. I met a lady who gave me a hot tip that a certain local museum is rabid for banquet waitstaff.
I called them, and even though they didn't e-mail me the application like they said they would, I think they might hire me.
I'm hoping they do, because that stripping thing totally didn't work out. When I finally found the club that would hire me, it turned out it wasn't one of the clubs where if a customer touches a dancer, 5 or 6 giants come and break his hand right then and there. It wasn't like that at all. I mean, it was classy and all. They'd sprung for the little touches that turn a bawdy house into a bawdy home, like carpeting with the "sittin' pretty" silhouette of a nude, busty female that you mainly only see on the back of trucks, and a secondhand couch for the dressing room. The other dancers seemed nice, but nice co-workers and great decor are not the incentives I need to get pawed at on the level that that place allowed.
In other news, my ister-say's edding-way is fast approaching. I had to say that in pig latin, because I don't want the papparazzi's search engines to be tripped. She's planning an quiet, tasteful, underwater ceremony in a specially constructed Diamonique dome. Teams of oompaloompas have been working on commemorative wedding gum for weeks. Vera Wang is in the basement of my ister-say's apartment building, chained to a loom-stove combination that my father welded together as an early gift-pertif. She alternates between squeezing out silk worms over a piping-hot kettle, weaving their output into the prettiest dress that has ever been worn by a human female (it makes the lesbian wedding dress from Friends look like a goddamn potato sack with dirt on it), and crying quietly. She is not crying because she is chained to things. She is crying because she will not get to wear the pretty, pretty dress, and you will too, soon. We all will.
For my part, I've been hard at work catching doves, because the ceremony's program calls for the release of several types of birds, including hummingbirds and swans, and the important birds need servants.
posted by Frenz | 8/28/2003 01:03:00 AM
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003 This diamond ring doesn't
Made 19 dollars today, plus the hourly $2.13. Lowlight: the table of elderly people who all ordered half a cashew salad, and all wanted separate checks. On their table, after they left (after sitting around for 40 minutes after they were done eating), the left me about 2 dollars and an (empty. I definitely checked) bag from a not-low-end jewelry store and a little earring card with no earrings.
You buy your diamonds at the teen mall.
Scum.
I have an audition this Friday at a local strip club. Here's hoping the money will be better.
But, oh, God! I need an outfit to audition in. Finally, shopping experience more humiliating and ridiculous than swimsuit shopping. "Well, the colors are nice on this one, but will it appeal to truckers?"
The mate is no help here. None. posted by Frenz | 8/20/2003 05:02:00 PM
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003 I go out walkin'
My neighborhood now is safe, I guess, but above all it's quiet. No gun shots, no sirens, no crackheads yodeling greetings to each other out in the street. There isn't even a domestic disturbance family in the area, which leads me to believe that we may be it, but that's another story.
My point is that, in this neighborhood, should one want to walk a small, toothless dog at all hours of the night (because the dog is not the most continent animal one has ever met, although one might not actually be sure what is the absolute most continent), one may feel very comfortable doing so barefoot and in one's pajamas. Maybe too comfortable.
For example, one might get bored walking at the approximate rate of half a block per hour, and start doing excercises of sort. One might notice that the higher one lifts ones legs, the more the problem areas in the backs of one's thighs get "worked." One might. So, one might try to "work" them.
And, just as one is beginning to "feel the burn," and elderly neighbor might walk out from the building next door and catch one goose-stepping. Or, actually, "working" the problem muscles, but sure looking like goosestepping.
Worse, one might have gotten carried away with the excitement of "feeling the burn", and outdistanced the dog by two-thirds of a block, so, in the eyes of the neighbor, one is goose-stepping around the block in one's pajamas at one a.m. with no plausible excuse to do so.
Hypothecially, I mean. posted by Frenz | 8/19/2003 11:58:00 PM
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Sunday, August 17, 2003 I did have a brain tumor for breakfast!
I actually haven't eaten yet, but last night the mate watched Heathers for the first time. It was kind of painful for me to be in the same room, because I saw that movie so many times when I was a kid, and at the time I thought it was like, the coolest thing on earth.
I don't think it was healthy for me to be exposed to it so young. I was absolutely disdainful of the rich, shallow popular kids long before I ever met any in person. I don't think I missed much, but I think the movie contributed in a big way to my generally bad attitude and mood throughout my school career, which was only six years long, pre-college, because I'd been homeschooled. That turns kids weird and self-involved enough. I perhaps did not need pre-conditioning to be a nutsy loner.
Winona Ryder, when I come to think of it, probably did more to turn me weird than any other one person. I probably wouldn't have tried to cut my bangs into points in 10th grade if it wasn't her. It wasn't even her in Pump up the Volume, but it might as well have been, and it also starred her accomplice in child-warping, Christian Slayter. If wearing black and being moody were wrong, I didn't want to be right. Movies had taught me all I needed to know by the time I got to highschool. There were three subsets of kids: the pencil-necked pocket protector wearing nerds, the shallow and mean popular kids (which included jocks), and those noble creatures, the cats who walked alone, and sat alone at lunch, and wore too many dark colors regardless of whether it flattered their complections.
I'm not saying I wouldn't have gone that route anyway, or that I wish I had been cooler in those long-ago days. They're kind of a blur now, and I've forgotten most of the fairly mild, fairly run of the mill bad stuff long ago, with mainly the good memories remaining.
Still, I probably could have saved myself about a hundred hours of listening to moody dork boys rattle on about their knife collections and moody dork girls compare self-injury scars (you see the symbiosis in action here, I trust?) if I'd decided to walk in the sun just a little bit.
Heathers is and was a fine movie. Even after having seen it well past the point where I could enjoy it, I found myself anticipating my favorite lines, noticing little in-jokes I hadn't before, and still envying Winona Ryder's mastery of the wide-eyed look. Still, it makes sense to get a chance to feel the unadulatered bullshit of the object of the satire by going through it a little bit before eating the satire up with a spoon. posted by Frenz | 8/17/2003 10:33:00 AM
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Wednesday, August 13, 2003 In the heat of the night, they are having a fiesta
The neighbors across the hall are playing some sort of world music really loud. While I was off being a phone pest, Robocop had a fiesta, too. She whizzed on the floor. Also, everything in the apartment smells like bacon.
I am not having a fiesta. I am disappointed. I didn't see the lady who was going to buy my pasties at work today. And! I seem to have misplaced my apron, so now I have to go all the way down to the car and look for it.
On the up side: The restaurant where I work is attached to a mall. A few days ago, the mall marquee began to advertise an exhibit in the center (centre) court: "Celebrity Shoes for Orphans." posted by Frenz | 8/13/2003 10:03:00 PM
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You're a chicken, Rose-Louise
I've posted a little bit about my failed attempts at stripping for money before. In Philly I auditioned at a club, but never got called back, and in Richmond I was all set to go audition at one of the nicer clubs in the area. "Come in on Thursday," the guy said. "Ask for Meaty."
"I'm sorry, what was your name again, sir?" I fluted like Shelly Lomg on Cheers.
"Meaty. Em-Ay-Tee-Wye," the very large man said.
I gulped, and put together the closest thing to audition wear that I have (which is close to audition wear in the same way that the shirts and pants I'd combed through Bradlee's for in middle school were the closest thing to a cool outfit.)
When I showed up Thursday, though (this was a while back), I didn't have to take off any clothes at all. The downside was that I didn't get hired. Another club had just been closed abruptly, and the 40 women from there were all trying to get hired at the few other local places. Meaty showed me the door, but not before giving me a really helpful tutorial on the local clothes-removal scene.
Among other things, he told me every local club makes one wear pasties. State law.
So, I lost hope of going to work in a lucrative, yet sleazy field, and went bakc to m y old shit jobs. After 3 weeks of these, I feel like I could pretty much do anything for money, as long as it's more than I'm making now. I need to get the diving well in my Scrooge McDuck vault up to regulation, you know?
So, at my phone pest job, I sat down to make my first pair of pasties. I wasn't doing it out of the Martha Stewart urge, but because when I went to the stripper store to price pasties, I came out in a state of shock. They were like, 20-40 bucks a pair.
So I got canvas and sequins at the crafts store, and for the last two shifts at the phone job stitching what looked like little yarmulkes for the cats. I prepared a list of vague, non-sleazy things to say if any cubby-mates asked what they were, but then last night a woman two cubicles away swiveled over and asked, in the 20 seconds between calls, "Are you making pasties?"
I told her I was, and now she wants to buy them. I may not be a burlesque queen, but it's an extra $10 in my pocket, and everything's coming up roses. posted by Frenz | 8/13/2003 10:58:00 AM
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Sunday, August 10, 2003 Turn it up
Sayonara, Texas. We are calling Alabama now. In the course of the survey, one woman said to me, "well, I love the Governor." She was serious. Who knew classic rock was so accurate?
Everybody else said "Go to hell," and "None of your business." posted by Frenz | 8/10/2003 01:33:00 AM
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Friday, August 08, 2003 Hulk guest blog
This guest blog is brought to you by Licketysplit of Vomitola
Hulk just say
Hulk SMASH
Hulk sorry posted by Frenz | 8/08/2003 12:36:00 PM
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People Food
Everyone in the house has been eating terribly lately. The mate and I are generally too tired to do complicated cooking when we get home, and besides not being able to really afford them, I'm kind of creeped out by restaurants now. I feel like I Know Too Much.
So, Most of my food lately has come out of boxes of some kind, and most of the mates has come off of fatty animals. The dog gets our leavings, besides her not-quite-the-cheapest-brand dog food. The cats, it seems, get nothing but their own hair.
Everyone is slightly ill at all times. In the future, I will not live like this.
posted by Frenz | 8/08/2003 10:44:00 AM
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Wednesday, August 06, 2003 This is just to say
I read the workplace copy
of Reader's Digest, from 1996,
that seemed a little familiar.
I had also read it the last time I temped
at the call center
and was desperate. posted by Frenz | 8/06/2003 04:04:00 PM
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Tuesday, August 05, 2003 Dial "C" for Crackpot
My favorite thing about working in the little feedlot set up at the call center is sitting next to the mate and swapping nutshell recaps of callers between the beeps that mean we have to start out spiels again. Today's winners: Daytime--My call. A man who told me that this was not a Marxist country, but the liberals were trying to turn it into one. Night--the mate, by a long shot. A man who declined the "Save Texas Courts" yardsign, because the only sign on his property declares it a UN free zone. Apparently no UN personnel are allowed in his yard at all.
I would quit this job, but for the crackpots, and the general "cursed" nature of my car. The back tire, which I had to replaced just a month ago, has this tumor popping out of it. I'm hoping to tap into my sense of entitlement and get the mechanic to replace/fix the tire for free, because I don't know much about cars, but tires are totally supposed to last for more than a month.
I wish I hadn't destroyed my old, functioning car and gotten the haunted car instead.
I wish a lot of things.
Now I wish for desert. I will go and acquire it. Goodnight.
posted by Frenz | 8/05/2003 11:52:00 PM
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Friday, August 01, 2003 I like where I'm living
I took a short, slow walk with Robocop tonight, because I'm very tired, and my legs are more tired than the rest of me. It's nice weather outside, cool and dry with a breeze that the little dog likes to sniff.
The sidewalks in this neighborhood are all overgrown and witchy with hoardes of slick black beetles and finger-sized slugs. I usually go barefoot, so I have to watch my step.
My building is pinkish brick. It is a utilitarian rectangle plunked on the corner of a semi-busy street and a non-busy street, right next to the ramp that leads, eventually, to interstate 95. The signs pointing that way are all covered with honeysuckle vines which soften their edges and add a nice green border to the red and blue of the signs themselves.
All the houses and apartment buildings around mine are prettier than the Don-Mar appartments, where I live. The name and the general air of the building make me think of Don Knotts. My mother saw him being rude in an elevator one time. She and her friend were riding from one floor to another in a tall building, when Don Knotts stepped through the open doors. My mother's friend said, "Hey, you're Don Knotts!" And he got very surly and said, "I know who I am!"
That's the kind of star-quality my building has. posted by Frenz | 8/01/2003 02:25:00 AM
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