Your Own Private i(da)Ho

Comment of the week

From some celebrity blog linked to by FARK.com regarding this photo of Michael Jackson on the eve of his 50th birthday in Las Vegas:

Blogger:  "If I was in Vegas and wandering around drunk and this rolled up on me in the casino, I would immediately return to my room and swear off booze."

Commenter: "If I was in Vegas and this rolled up to me, I'd shove money in its mouth, yank its arm and see did I hit the jackpot."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. . . "

". . . so here's a cat with an eggplant on its head."

Which is pretty much how Grampy McSimpson's spokesperson reacted when it came out that the candidate was not in "a cone of silence" (oh, the unintended irony!) during Rick Warren's questioning of Obama on Saturday night.

"The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous," bleated spinmistress Nicolle Wallace.

WTF? Oh, right, since McSimpson was canonized, he's incapable of wrongdoing. BZZZZT! NOT!

My only other thought was that the McSame campaign must be really worried to haul out the POW reference right off the bat. That is, after my brain stopped hurting from the cognitive dissonance and I was able to form a thought.

And they're not crooks, either. Right?

Attorney General Michael Mukasey today, in a brief respite from knobgobbling other members of the Misadministration:

“Where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute,” he said. “But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

Since FUCKING WHEN? Okay, I understand the difference between civil and criminal law.   But in the case of Monica Goodling or Kyle Sampson. . . oh, most certainly violations of the law and crimes have been committed, and "negative publicity" isn't nearly enough punishment for the damage done to our justice system.  Not to mention that some acts that aren't against the law are crimes--against decency and against the public good.

And this person who maintains otherwise is the chief law enforcement officer of our nation.

AAAAHHHH!

Bad hair--month.

Good hair is an impossibility on a day when it's 97 degrees and raining. And anyway, you're not worrying about your hair; instead you're wondering, "When the hell did I move to Calcutta?"

Kittens: Nature's happy pills

You need this to get through the day.  You really, really do.

Changes

I've found a new and exciting job--here at the university where I've worked for seven years already.  Though it's a permanent position, most of what I'll be doing until October has to do with helping to plan the first presidential debate, which will be held here on the 26th of September.  I am up to my eyeballs in spreadsheets and meetings, but so far it's been great fun.  Will share more interestingness as it develops!

Oh, snap!

It's such a bitch when your Thousand Year Reich only lasts for twelve years--or eight.  Then all the rotten things you did to other people and your country in the name of loyalty to your Dear Leader come crawling out into the light, and you can't hide them anymore.

Disbarment and jail time for lawbreaking sycophants, please?  Pretty please?  Even though they're taking the fall for Gone-zales, Il Ducebag, and Satan's porcine handmaiden*, Karl Rove, they still deserve it.

 *TM Maru

"It is not."

In the mid-1980s a friend introduced me to a character rightly called "The World's First Surrealist Superhero," otherwise known as the Flaming Carrot. The Carrot, loopy brainchild of artist Bob Burden, was drawn in black and white, ran a crappy laundromat, packed heat and nonsequiturs; in other words, he was a refreshing departure from other superheroes.

If you know the film Mystery Men, you know some of Bob Burden's other superheroes, odd birds all, such as The Shoveler, Mr. Furious, and The Bowler. Flaming Carrot didn't make it into that film for obvious reasons, being too surreal for the big screen.

Life has been changing for me fast lately, and last night I noticed a panel from an early issue of Flaming Carrot Comics that I scanned and put on my refrigerator door a long time ago. Funny how those things you see every day become invisible, but then become visible again at the right moment. Though I'm slightly less surreal than the Carrot, the coin toss turned out the same way for me, and I'm going to keep trusting it.

(click on image for larger, weirder)

Geek love

So I got a new mobile phone this week, and I haven't been so mesmerized by a physical chunk of technology since I got my first iPod 5 years ago. I rather expected the process would be a pain in the butt more than anything else, since I have exponentially more data to transfer from the old phone to the new each time I get a new phone. But no. . . I just saved my contacts, etc. to my SIM card, popped the card into the new phone, and that was that.

It's not an iPhone, but frankly those are still too expensive for what they are right now. (Heresy!) But it does everything I need (and a few things I don't), and it really is a very beautiful object for a phone.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp"--I'm still waiting for the model that has a "Make me a latte" button.

Silence of the Lungs

Almost two weeks ago, when I was traveling during my break,  I caught a cold, or so I thought.  It started like a cold: sore throat, headful of mucus, all the usual pleasantness.  I was feeling better after a day or two, and even went back to work, but then it invaded my chest and I started to wheeze. 

I've had bronchitis before, but never had my lungs made such noises.  Now they sounded like a Naugahyde couch when your fat aunt sits on it; now, a nest of birds or mice; now, birds and mice.  The other morning as I was lying in bed, I breathed out, and piped a D above middle C, as true as can be. (The third note of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," if you're curious.)

Along with the wheezing came fever, a hundred and two at its highest, and I've been quite miserable.  I went to the doctor, who did chest x-rays and bloodwork.  "You're just going to have to outlast it, baby girl.  It's viral."

The fever broke two nights ago, but still I've had trouble sleeping with all the lung noise.  Last night each exhalation was a chamber orchestra tuning up, and I didn't fall asleep until well after 2 a.m.  When I woke this morning, though, something was different. I needed a while to figure out that it was silence, at last.  After an hour or two of the humors flowing and the dust stirring, the sound effects recommenced, but on a much smaller scale. 

I'm trying to be patient, but I'm so ready to be well and to hear that beautiful quiet again.

Needs no further commentary

Except that it made me spit coffee this a.m.  In the good way.

Smash hit

I had lunch with a good friend yesterday, and as I told her goodbye and got out of her car, I shut the door on the tip of my left thumb. I didn't want her to worry about me, so I waved her on and was walking back to my office several seconds later when the pain hit. Dizzying, nauseating pain. Luckily the employee wellness center is near my building, so I literally ran there and presented myself and my injury to the nurse on duty. She put an ice pack on me right away, and had me elevate my hand to slow the bleeding--by the time I got there, my thumb was a nice shade of purple. What a weird sensation, though--part intense pain, part numbness. . .

When the doctor got there, she decided the thumb probably was not broken, but that we had to relieve the pressure from the bleeding between my nail and the nailbed. "We're going to make a small hole in your thumbnail," she said.  She hauled out this oddball instrument that had a wire attached to the end of it, and I watched as the wire began to glow red hot. So "make" was a slight euphemism for, well, burn. "Will it hurt?" I asked, and then I realized it already hurt so much that I would not even notice a little burning.

In the end, though, the smell of my own burning thumbnail was what did me in. I was sitting down and the doctor was touching the glowing wire to my nail, and a tiny curl of smoke was rising, and next thing I knew I had to lie down, I was so woozy. I have never fainted in my life, and this is about the closest I've come to breaking the forty-five year streak. I suppose that the doctor telling me at the same time how I could make a hole in my own fingernail with a red-hot paper clip "if you ever needed to" DID NOT HELP.

About half an hour later I lurched home (the doctor called my boss to say I was not coming back to work), grateful that the throbbing had let up, but with a queasy stomach that has lasted all night and into today.

THE END

I like to think I do my part, too

Best post title of 2008

Oh, Sparkles, I love you!

If there's a better one in the succeeding eleven months of the year, it'll have to be damned good.  (As in:  "Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld Indicted for War Crimes by Hague Tribunal")

forever now

I'd just graduated from college and I was going abroad for the first time, to spend a year in Germany as an exchange student at the University of Stuttgart.

School didn't start in Germany until mid-October. I'd fly to Bremen on the 7th of September for a week of orientation before I went on to my host university in Stuttgart. Until then, I was at home but in an odd limbo, watching all my friends start jobs or graduate school. People would talk about this party or that band, two weeks from now, next month, and I would stop listening, knowing I wouldn't be there. I was not in this narrative any more, I felt ghostly, as though my hands would pass through things instead of touching them.

The humid August weather gave way to a brilliant week of autumn: cool dry mornings and impossibly blue sky. Rare for NC so early in September. I felt like a person who is going to die--I thought, Leave this? It's far too beautiful to leave.

On one of those mornings I said goodbye to my boyfriend, who was from another city and still had a semester left to finish at the university. We'd been pretty serious, and leaving him was almost too much for me.

We'd also decided to date other people during the year I was gone. It was the only thing that made sense for us to do, but still it was hard.

And I was scared out of my mind to go to Germany. I could read and write German passably, but speaking and understanding were much more difficult. I had no idea how I'd manage over there, but I was going and that was that. I'd throw myself in the water and I'd have to swim then.

I came home from telling my boyfriend goodbye, and my best friend from college was waiting for me. She saw that I was in a daze, so she dragged me into my room and packed my suitcases for me. Yes, every item in my suitcases, for an entire year, she packed. (She is still my best friend.)

Then there was somehow sleep. By the time S. left the next morning, I'd pulled myself together enough to put the finishing touches on what she'd started.

My parents took me to the airport in the mid-afternoon. I have a crooked photo of myself and my father taken by my mother (who is Not A Photographer). I'm smiling, but you can tell it's not easy for me, you can see the mix of eagerness and grief and desire and alarm on my face. My father's smile, however, is big and proud and purely happy.

I was lucky on the plane to Frankfurt. My seat partner was a German businessman of about forty. In the overhead bin he stowed a live lobster in a box with handles (presumably for boiling in the Fatherland), and introduced himself in fluent English. Through the evening he ordered us a steady stream of gin and tonics, and I kept up with him, my Southern head for alcohol not forsaking me, even at altitude.

I never did sleep, and was still a little drunk in the morning. As we landed, the businessman laughed at my state and handed me his card, said to call him if I ever needed anything while I was in the country.

He kissed me on the cheek as we left the jetway and strode away with his lobster.

Now I was in the Frankfurt airport, still buzzing away on gin, with a three hour layover and shaky German.

I managed to change money and buy a cup of coffee (Einen Kaffee, bitte! I will survive!) I drank it and then, because I was afraid I'd fall asleep and miss my connecting flight, I began to walk around the airport.

I had my Walkman and pulled out a tape my boyfriend had made for me. "Psychedelic Furs," the label read.

I popped it in and a moment later, the first song, "Forever Now", was crashing in my ears. It was perfect for walking again and again around the airport. I didn't play the rest of the tape, either, just "Forever Now," over and over, as loud as I could stand it:

you and i are walking past yeah
having lost our way
we don't count our money
we are giving it away
yeah giving it away

By the time they called my flight at last, I was sober and had a dull headache. I drank more coffee on the plane, took two aspirin, and was so excited to arrive I forgot my fatigue.

From the airport I took a taxi to my hotel, I'd burned the name and address into my brain: Ueberseehotel, Wachtstrasse 27. Like an incantation that could save me from all harm: Wachtstrasse siebenundzwanzig, bitte.

I arrived at the hotel, checked in (oh, thank God they speak English) and tried to sleep in the strange German bed with the big feather comforter.

After a couple of hours I gave up on sleep and went outside in the afternoon sunlight to the city marketplace, only a block away. It was "long Saturday," the first Saturday of the month, so the shops were open until 6 p.m. I was bemused and entranced; the whole sight seemed as unreal as Disneyland.

doesn't this remind you
of these things we've done before?
like counting all the times
we've seen ourselves in other scenes

In the late afternoon someone knocked at my door. He introduced himself as A. Several of us in the program had arrived a day early, did I want to go out with them that night to the local disco?

Oh, yes.

So twelve hours after walking in the Frankfurt airport trying to sober up, i was drinking gin again. This time without ice.

At some point in the night, A. and I looked at each other with some kind of recognition. It was beyond gin and newness, and it was mutual. And I suddenly knew my boyfriend and I had been wise to decide we would see other people.

everybody's busy
listening and pulling blinds
this is all so stupid
we're just shouting.
i want you

The next day I was tired but otherwise I felt well and was ready to start again. I would figure out how to make a new life far from everything I'd ever known, in a new language. I wouldn't have to do it entirely by myself. I would have help. I would be all right.

If I had to choose a week of my life to be living always, this might be one. And yet I know I have days and weeks like this yet to live.

you and i are walking past yeah
having lost our way
we don't count our money
we are giving it away
yeah giving it away

let it stay forever now

Anniversary reaction

I lost my stepdad a year ago this week. He was three days short of his 92nd birthday; today would have been the 93rd. I loved him dearly, and am hit hard by these dates coming around again, even more than I thought I'd be.

He was an incredibly young-looking and acting person, sharp of mind, physically active and healthy up to the very last (except for the cancer that killed him). He loved Saints football, which shows you that he was tenacious and loyal. ;) In fact, when the Saints lost in the playoffs last year, my brother and I both went, "uh-oh." We'd both thought he'd hold out for a while longer if they went to the Super Bowl.

But they lost; and the next morning, for the first time since his cancer had been diagnosed, he didn't get out of bed. That night he told my mother he loved her, went to sleep, and didn't wake up again. It was a very peaceful death, and we were grateful, because his cancer was of an ugly sort that could have made him suffer for a long time.

At his memorial service, people kept coming up to us and saying, "He had a wonderful life." It was true. And not only was it a wonderful life, but one with few experiences untried and few regrets. An example to strive for.

I wish we could open our eyes
to see in all directions at the same time
Oh what a beautiful view
if you were never aware of what was around you
And it is true what you said
that I live like a hermit in my own head
But when the sun shines again
I'll pull the curtains and blinds to let the light in.

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pinhole
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound
But while you debate half empty or half full
It slowly rises, your love is gonna drown

Death Cab for Cutie, "Marching Bands of Manhattan"
for DK, 1/25/15-1/22/07

I'm awake now

The online literary journal McSweeney's has a regular feature called

OPEN LETTERS
TO PEOPLE OR ENTITIES
WHO ARE UNLIKELY
TO RESPOND

Today I'd like to follow in this tradition with

AN OPEN LETTER TO
R.E.M'S MONSTER

Dear Monster,

Oh, most maligned of R.E.M.'s albums (often found in multiple copies in the "Used" bin in the CD store), how I love you! People who had never heard the band before Out of Time and Automatic for the People expected R.E.M. to sound like that forever:  folky, melodic, smooth, and pensive as all get-out. To their ears, Monster was more like a monster truck rally with a side order of sex and guitars, but from the first loud power chord it electrified me and reminded me of when we first heard R.E.M. in the bar across the street from our school. Every song was loud and fast and danceable; we left exhausted and happy and somehow soul-cleansed.

This morning, Monster, I woke at 5 a.m. and tried to go back to sleep. When I finally gave up at 6:30, I wasn't sure how I'd survive the day. Then for some reason, I remembered you.

Oh, Monster, this morning you are my wake-up bomb, my caffeine, the sparking and firing of my neurons, the bridging of my synapses, my way into existence, and the antidote (thank God!) to Christian radio. Long may you annoy people who love "Everybody Hurts"; long may you be discovered by twenty-somethings who realize that it's never too late for a troubled adolescence.

Love,

divageek

That is all.

I love Indexed!

For 'tis better to has cheezburger than to be cheezburger.

Does anybody understand more than I do about the tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo? I'm very sorry for the family of the boy who was killed, and sorry for the beautiful animal that the police shot. It seems to me that the zoo didn't protect either their visitors or the animal in this case.

Big "however": I have a hard time imagining that something didn't provoke this animal to attempt leaving her enclosure. Does anyone else think that maybe these kids were doing something to irritate and taunt her? Animals do know when you are laughing at or contemptuous of them--I've seen that before. Was it a random occurrence, or did this kid Darwin himself in some new way?

We certainly need more facts, but I'd love to hear the opinion of someone more informed on the subject of wild cat behavior than I am.

Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip. . .

. . .the dogs—oops—nope.  Dang.  What was that quote anyway? ;)