Sunday, August 30, 2020

Syllabus #68

Even though I'm working a sort of normal schedule and days of the week now have significance and I'm accountable to others for bathing, dressing, and leaving the house at regular intervals, the weeks are blurring together.  A week lasts 18 seconds and also 9,000 years.  

Also, guys, the census is really important.  If you haven't filled out the census yet, please do it.  That being said, if one more census enumerator comes to our door asking about the vacant house next door, I'm going to start telling them it's a haunted meth lab.


You'd look out of sorts, too, if you lived in an abandoned shack next to a pile of urine-soaked mattresses
 (Mom, it's cool, this is not the vacant house next door, this is a totally different abandoned property full of feral cats)


Somebody make me a mix tape.

Yo, guys, I cooked a pork chop.  It wasn't for me.  But I hear it was damn good.  

Ah, something uncomplicated and unironically nice and joyful.  Like an oasis in the desert hellscape that is the year 2020.  Thanks, Keanu.

Why are we trying to do school in person right now?  Colleges and K-12 schools are petri dishes under the best of circumstances, come on, people.  

Heh.  Dutch Oven.  Heh.  I am here to tell you the 5th cleaning technique really does work. 

I placed my hold at the library!  I would read a refrigerator manual if Elena Ferrante wrote it, so, you know, I'm excited.

I'm not normally a litigious person, but yes, please, sue the ever-loving shit out of them.  

Things that make you ask - what the actual fucking fuck

Watching:

Drunk Parents on Netflix.  I'm just glad the movie came in at an hour and 45 minutes.  I have a rule with shitty movies - waste 1-2 hours of my time, shame on you.  Squander more than 120 minutes of my actual life on a movie that makes no sense, has continuity issues, and isn't that funny, shame on me.  

Analog Reading:

Finished Rick Steves' For the Love of Europe.  Or was that last week?  Honest to Christ I can't remember.

Read Samantha Irby's Meaty.  Laughed out loud, wished we were friends, you know the drill.  The essay about her mother, though - devastating.

Midway through Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I wish we had come further as a society since this book came out in 2015, but sadly, every moment of 2020 has been an appropriate moment to read this book.

Sunday, August 23, 2020

Syllabus #67

 It's pretty much the twenty four seven cat show up in here these days.  Baby kitty has wormed her way into all of our hearts.  Emphasis on wormed.  She's fine now, everyone's fine, it's just, she had to be dewormed at the vet last week and we contemplated just moving again rather than cleaning the bathroom where her litter box is.  

OMG two cats, one chair


Hadley is still a skeptic, but Lola is slowly wearing her down with her charms.  THEY ARE TOUCHING.  We haven't even had Lola for two weeks and they're already rounding second base.  Not that they're ever gonna, you know, bang, but like, in the platonic cat friend version of sexual baseball, they're really giving it a go.  

Was that a weird metaphor?  Did it even make sense?  I'm so tired, you guys.  Just so so tired.  Back to school, virtual style, is substantially more draining than regular-back-to-school in a lot of ways.  At least with regular-back-to-school, the kids bring their unbridled enthusiasm and pent-up summer energy, and say/do hilarious things that make you forget how tired you are during the school day.  Now I just talk to grownups who don't understand how to use their children's laptops, which is emotionally draining on another level.  The other day, this mom put her kid on the phone so he could follow my troubleshooting instructions and it was the most fun 10 minutes of my entire week.

Here's some stuff I read this past week.  Look, there's a little bit more this time!  I'm slowly reclaiming my time.


Yep, get on my level.  If you weren't awkward before, you're gonna be now.  The upshot for me is that I've been so starved of non-Andy human interaction that I'm delighted to talk to strangers when the need arises.  We'll see how long that lasts.


This is an interesting take on the role of race in Seinfeld and other sitcoms.  As a kid watching Seinfeld, I didn't have the critical faculties to realize what terrible people they actually were, but wow, looking back, they were the whitiest white people behaving so so badly.  In some ways that makes it even funnier in retrospect.  


Did you DNC this past week?  The stakes are so high.  Literal lives depend on making sure Biden wins.  


It's interesting how even the fringiest primary candidates have had an impact on the current messaging of the Democratic party.


Talk about a winter of our discontent.  If we don't have a vaccine or herd immunity by winter, things are going to get so much worse on so many levels.  


Let's end on a high note - have you heard of the Food Timeline? Just an amazing digital distillation of cultural and human history created by a New Jersey reference librarian.  If you love food and research and unpaid labor, they are looking for someone to take over the project, as its creator died a few years ago.  I love the first two but not so much the third, or I'd be all over that like white on rice.

Analog Reading:

Finished Kiese Laymon's Heavy (I think I finished it this week...I'm too lazy to look at last week's post.). It was moving and sad and funny and I respect his honesty.

Read Samantha Irby's mini-ebook from a few years ago, New Year, Same Trash.  It was hilarious, as usual.  Again, I can't remember if I read it this past week or the week before, but does that even matter?

About halfway through Rick Steves' For the Love of Europe.  I just fucking love Rick.  He's a scholar of the world, an open-minded celebrator of all the ways to be a human.  He appreciates the good things in life without being a hedonist or a snob.  If we can't go on vacation ever again for the foreseeable future, at least there's this book.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Syllabus #66

Another week, another round of excuses.  This week's excuse has 4 legs and a tail and is very cute.  The cat rescue had this kitten on their website.  He was described as very playful.  He was described as already neutered.  He was wearing a blue collar.  He looked like he would be a good playmate for Hadley.  

We paid the adoption fee, brought him home, and deliberated about names.  We opened the envelope of vet records from the rescue, and found out he...seemed to be a she.  Not that a cat's gender matters all that much, but we thought there would be less rivalry between a new cat and Hadley if New Cat was a boy.  We had to know for sure.  I'm not gonna lie, my Google search history the past week has me looking like some kinda pervert.  British man arm penis, Malcolm MacDonald penis arm, cat vagina, cat penis, cat genitalia, and apparently also some Eastern European foot fetish websites.  The long and short of it is, Cardi B and I have something in common.  We got some w****s in this house.  (As I was searching for that video and making sure I was linking to the explicit version, Lola jumped up on the table and I shot her with a spray bottle of water, and now she is an actual wet ass p***y.  It's like, everything is connected, man.)

Lola


 So here's my paltry collection.  


Dolly Parton is a national treasure, and Tennessee doesn't deserve her but I'm so glad she's ours.


Speaking of Tennessee...we could maybe try doing better?   Like, I'm no stranger to the place I call home being the butt of national jokes.  New Jersey pretty much has that market cornered.  But we've really brought this on ourselves with this horse shit.


And maybe instead of only thinking about yourself and the immediate gratification of partying and going out without a mask on, you could think about how your selfish behavior is perpetuating an impossible situation for so many families as school resumes this fall.



Analog Reading:


Finally finished Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang.  I love his work but this was probably my least favorite book of his.  It might be that I was too tired to read more than a few pages at a stretch every time I picked it up, but the pacing of this one felt off to me.  Also, I think having two protagonists hampered my connection with either one of them - neither one of the Fang siblings was particularly likable or sympathetic.


Halfway through Kiese Laymon's Heavy.  It is that.  But it's also brilliant and sometimes funny.  


That's it and that's all.  May your Sunday Scaries be mild and your week be mellow.

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Syllabus #65

You like numbers?  You like stats?  Let's break it down.

Number of times in my life I have ever skipped a meal because I just forgot to eat: 0
Number of times I have ever purposely skipped a meal: 0
Number of times I have skipped a meal because I was friggin' hungry but didn't have the time or ability to safely consume food:  7
Number of meals skipped in the past two weeks: 7

To anyone who says teachers have a cakewalk during virtual learning, I have this to say to you:  Give me all of that cake because your girl needs the calories right now.

And let me be clear, no person or entity is forcing me to forgo meals or bathroom breaks.  This is not an Amazon warehouse pee in a bottle situation.  There's just so much that needs to get done, for so many people, in so little time.

Given that, this week's readings are a little thin.  Still haven't finished any of the books I've been "reading" for the last three weeks, because I read about 3 pages before my Kindle lands on my face.  If I show up with two black eyes and a broken nose, you can blame Jeff Bezos for that.

Alley flowers


Where was this acne positivity when I was a teenager?  I'm still traumatized.


I read this on Wednesday as I was chowing down on a plateful of sauteed red onion (and some other shit, but seriously like 1/4 of a big onion). If this post goes up on Sunday, you know I dodged a salmonella onion bullet.  This time. 


Safe is sexy, y'all.  It shouldn't be surprising that sex workers are making a point to stay safe in an intimate setting.  They don't want the 'rona any more than they want chlamydia.  But like, if Tammy can work the pole all night with a mask on so she can keep a roof over her head and food on the table, you can suffer through the 10 minutes of mask-wearing it takes to grab your pork rinds and beer at the Kroger, you redneck monsters.    


And finally, did you hear the one about the guy with a penis growing out of his arm?  My search history is now full of phrases like 'British man penis arm' 'Malcolm Macdonald arm penis' 'arm penis uncensored' and finally 'how to wash the inside of your eyeballs to unsee disturbing mental images.'  If you can find a picture of this guy's arm without the pixelated armdick, please post a link in the comments.  

My favorite part of his story is that he has lived with a surgically reconstructed penis grafted to his arm for 4 years because he kept missing the appointments to have it attached to his groin, sometimes due to transportation issues.  Like, mate, do you need a ride to the hospital to get your new penis transferred from your arm to your crotch?  Just hitch a ride.  Roll up that sleeve and stick out your thumb, which no one will even notice due to the generously sized phallus growing out of your goddamn arm.

Sunday, August 2, 2020

Syllabus #64

Well well well.  Here we are.  I feel like this is the digital equivalent of giving a school presentation in your underwear.  Only this isn't a nightmare, this is real life.  

Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but here I am, nakedly unprepared on this Sunday.  Normally, I collect links and deposit them in a draft post throughout the week so that on Sunday, I just have to edit a bit, add a photo and some commentary up here, like so.  Imagine my surprise when I opened this draft post and found...one link.  It's an interesting one, but it's the only one.  I honestly haven't had time to do more than skim headlines this week.  I am still reading the same three print books I was reading the week before.  I'm slacking on all fronts.  I mean, I'm slacking on the reading and writing and exercising fronts.  Temporarily shifted my efforts elsewhere out of necessity.  

It's fine.  Everything's fine.  Or it will be.  



So here it is.  Here's my meager offering this week:


I learned so much about the au pair system from this article.  I never realized it was a formal program, one that has been deeply impacted by the closing of borders and the cancellation of visas.  This might be the saddest thing I've read in a while:  “I was honestly heartbroken,” said Kristina Kobzeva, 23, from Kazakhstan. “My mom told me that I can’t wait so much time until next year, that I’ll have to quit the program and get married if the borders won’t be reopened this year for au pairs.”

Also, just now I am eating a plateful of roasted eggplant for dinner and watching Obama's eulogy for John Lewis.  It's very good and very sad in every way imaginable.  


Be well and be sure to find a moment to breathe this week.

The Isolation Journals - 102

Prompt:  Reflect on your earliest awareness of a disconnect between what the world said was okay and what you instinctively felt wasn’t right. How did you react? What action, big or small, did you take? Since then, how have your beliefs changed or stayed the same?

---

I fell into a void the past couple weeks, and this post is excruciatingly late.  It's going to be harder than I thought to keep up a regular writing habit when life resumes its usual routine, although the last week has hardly been typical.  We moved and I got involved in a time-sensitive work project that had me working through lunch and well into the evening three days in a row last week.  Even just typing that sounds gross.  I have no aversion to hard work, but lately I find it really icky to toe the line of conflating your self-worth with the amount of time you spend working.  So that's not what I'm doing here.  Just describing a hopefully temporary situation.

Back to the prompt, though.  When did I first realize the world is sometimes like that really bad babysitter who never got asked back because she drank your parents' liquor, let you stay up late watching an R-rated movie that gave you nightmares, and put you to bed in your grass-stained playclothes without brushing your teeth?  I never had a babysitter like that because my parents hired only vetted members of The Baby-Sitters Club I might have been watched by a non-family member a grand total of once ever, but it sounds legit.  And sometimes the world is like that, too.  Bad things happen all the time, and collectively we look the other way because it's easy or convenient or provides instant gratification.

I'm sure the world sent a lot of signals that didn't compute in my kid brain.  Messages about racism, sexism, classism, you name it.  The specifics of most of those lessons are lost to time, but I do have a crystal clear recollection of the first time I learned that some people think girls aren't as capable as boys, and shouldn't be allowed to hold certain roles, just because we are girls.  

It was 1989, a Saturday afternoon in Florida.  Ninja Turtle action figures were a hot commod, and I was stoked when my mom bought me an April O'Neil action figure.  I'd still love to have that rad yellow jumpsuit in my size, but I digress.  I couldn't wait to go play with the two boys next door, who had loads of TMNT action figures.  

Up in their messy bedroom, toys spilling off the bottom bunk onto the floor, we sifted through the pile of Turtle paraphernalia.  "I'm Donatello.  And Rafael.  And Splinter," said Brandon.  "Then I'm Leonardo and Michaelangelo.  And Bebop," claimed the brother, whose name I forget but was probably something generically douchey.

"Who can I be?" I asked.

"April," they both insisted.

"But, just April?"

"Well, duh, you're a girl.  You can't be the other ones."

I think I knew that was horse shit, but I was a shy kid and I'm sure that whatever happened next was one of two things:  a) I cried and went home immediately or b) I cried silently while doing whatever they told me to do until it was time to go home.  

That I still vividly remember the scene to this day shows that it wasn't something I accepted and moved on from - it stuck in my craw and still pisses me off to this day.  I wonder how much it subconsciously influenced choices I've made throughout my life?  Were there times when I forced myself to do something I wasn't sincerely interested in doing just to prove a girl could do it?  I liked to take (mild) risks and loved gross-out humor as a kid (...some things never change).  Would I have felt the same way if I wasn't, deep down, trying to prove that girls can do anything boys can do?  

Do I still, even at age 35, do things that I could ask Andy to do, that he could do more easily, just so I don't seem like an incapable priss?  Honestly, probably yeah.  Is that entirely a bad thing?  No.  But should any woman feel she has to do things just to prove a point?  No.  How many other women face these questions, jump through these mental hoops every day?