Oxymorons & Hangovers

Exactly

There are bits of wood chips on the carpet around my desk. Co-worker asks, pointing to the mess:

"Are you a beaver?"

I uncuffed my jeans and it turns out I brought home some of the playground at the park when I was on the swings the other day.

"Aw, you and Kiddo?"

...no. Just me.

Kiddo can make almost everything more fun (except a good wine or makeout session) but I certainly don't need her as an excuse to play in the park. My inner kid just comes bombarding out sometimes and I'm forced to embrace her. And push her on the swings.

-Pretty Lush

Susie fucking Homemaker!

Wednesday, seven a.m.: Honoring my pledge to myself to make my furlough days the most productive ones of the month, I cut the sleeves off an old breast cancer walk shirt and set to work with the help of a rake, a shovel and a fabulous new Ipod dock pointed out my backdoor in an effort to remove every weed that ever lived in my small dirt yard. The sheet of stubborn but shallow green weeds is gone now and in its place, a small table I found propped up against the Dumpster in the alley, adorned with candles and an oil burner, freshly rinsed folding chairs from the garage, and a hand-me-down fire pit and wood pile from one of Ree’s friends. The small patio is clean; the grass is still overgrown and threatening to absorb my dogs, but mostly purged from dog toys and shit, and ready for mowing.

Oh, please lend me a lawnmower.

I swept and mopped the kitchen and dining room floor, vacuumed the living room and bleached my counters. The way the dogs lay in the small patch of sun by the front door was an expression of exhaustion by osmosis. I was sweating and shaking from all the furious cleaning, singing Cherry Poppin’ Daddies like my neighbors were deaf, and still had it in me to wash my car and throw dinner in the crockpot.

I’d be the coolest, most unconventional housewife ever. I’d clean like a madwoman and hardly ever cook. Most of my days would be spent in the park, which is exactly where I went when I felt I deserved a reward for my efforts.

Now my legs, hips and upper arms are sore and lending a wobble to my walk. I choose to find this entertaining and not embarrassing.

This morning Kiddo overheard something about Las Vegas on the news. “Mama, what does Las Vegas look like?”
“It’s NUTS. Lots of lights and… I’ll show you a picture.”
“…is it just like the gas station?”

My neighbor had spent the better part of the day watching baseball at the bar. She stopped by our front door on her way in last night and told us of the car blocking her garage in the alley. Ree asked, “What kind of car?”
"A newish.”
“Uh, is it silver?”
“Yeah. It’s gold.”
Together, we will all solve the earth’s mysteries.

Ever the last on the trend, I rented 30 Rock with Ree the other night and watched the first few episodes in the last two nights. Shit makes us hysterical. But now Ree’s gone for a few nights so I have to refrain from watching them without her. *Or* watch them without her and practice my enthusiastic laughter so she thinks I’m hearing all the jokes for the first time when we watch them again. Muaha.

I have become a Freecycle junkie and I should have new steak knives tonight!

-Pretty Lush

Happy Birthday to O&H

Yesterday marked two years here at Typepad for Oxymorons & Hangovers. Considering my layout has only changed once there’s hasn’t been much physical development but I think my writing has evolved considerably. I became familiar with my personal style in a way I wouldn’t have in writing shitty fiction. Not to mention there exists another written account of the day-to-day happenings that no one but me cares about and I’m less likely to forgot the time that Kiddo was my ‘little doctor’ or the time she used apprehensive in a sentence and I subsequently fainted.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep it up, but I hope to be here a while.

Three day weekend highlights:
-1 Dodger win
-2 days spent with my younger sister

-1 backyard party with...
-1 awesome cover band
-487 mimosas at champagne brunch
-1 beautiful, heavenly and rare nap

The Dodger/Angel series this weekend was exciting despite my boys losing two out of three. They were all really good games and lest we forget how much they ROCK, they scored 16 runs yesterday. Because showing mercy is for bitches.

I thought it would look super cool if I burned around a halter top and left the awesome ass-white shirt shape to glare off my red skin so Kiddo’s dad and I took Kiddo to Huntington Beach yesterday with every other human being in southern California. Christ, I forgot it was Memorial Day (“Mem-roll Day,” if you ask Kiddo) until I saw the $12 parking fee in the normally free lot. Vendors took advantage of the crowd and set up shop along the strip, right off the pier where I was tempted by exquisite art and handmade jewelry. Having been worn out from the sun (& bronzed a perfect gold, lil wench), Kiddo collapsed into bed and I watched movies, which is all I fucking do anymore. I am addicted to seeing something new as often as possible. Hedwig & the Angry Inch was a free On Demand feature and The Reader had arrived in the mail over the weekend.

Prop 8 is in supreme court right this minute and I’m told there should be results in one hour. I’m going to plant myself in front of the flat screen here at work and chew on my hands for a while.

-Pretty Lush

Although her Mary Janes are sexy...

Twice this week, strange men have complimented Daisy Mae.

The thing is, I had a short sleeve shirt on both times and she was only visible from the waist down.

...perverts.

This is where you live

I thought I knew, but I had no idea. All information is from PBS.org.

-"After months of controversy, President Bill Clinton signed "don't ask, don't tell" into law on November 30, 1993. Prior to this, the U.S. military explicitly prohibited people who identified as being gays and lesbians from serving, and specifically asked recruits about their sexual orientation. Any military members suspected of being gay were often investigated, interrogated, criminally prosecuted and discharged dishonorably, and were thus denied retirement benefits."

-"The policy also failed to offer any protection against harassment. The military continued to investigate the family members and friends of those suspected of being gay, discharging more than 12,500 servicemembers between 1994 and 2009. (Women were disproportionately fired, totaling only 15 percent of military service members but nearly half of DADT discharges in 2007.) Almost 800 of these discharged members were considered critical specialists, including linguists, pilots and intelligence analysts—all positions for which the military was suffering a shortage. The cost of training and replacing these specialists between 1994 and 2003 is estimated to be more than 363.8 million dollars."

-"Facing a severe personnel crisis during wartime, the military began to lower its standards for accepting recruits to compensate for the more qualified members discharged under DADT. From 2006 to 2007, the number of moral waivers granted to Army and Marine recruits, who would otherwise be ineligible for service because of their criminal convictions, doubled. In 2006, the Army issued 511 waivers and enlisted seven soldiers convicted of rape, incest or sexual assault; three soldiers convicted of manslaughter; one convicted of kidnapping; three convicted of performing indecent acts with a child; and three convicted of making terrorist or bomb threats. That same year, 612 service members were discharged under DADT."

According to the power of the military, it is a worse offense to be homosexual than to touch a child inappropriately or to end someone's life.

There is a free screening by Independent Lens next week in Los Angeles called Ask Not that 'exposes the tangled political battles that led to DADT and examines the societal shifts that have occurred since its 1993 passage.' You can read about it and watch the preview at: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/asknot/film.html

Come with?

-Pretty Lush

Let's sort this out

Good things:

• The other day, someone left a sucker on my desk. I don’t know who and it tastes better that way.
• Yesterday, a co-worker left me a Rancid promotional domino for their new album Let the Dominos Fall. I am overcome with the urge to throw bones.
• The jasmine in the parking lot at work is more fragrant that I’ve ever realized was possible. I am tempted to pull them up and hide them in my clothes.
• (I settle for jasmine oil in spray form, saturating my shirt as we speak.)
• A friend from over a year ago came back around after a tumultuous split and said essentially, ‘Hey. No more bullshit, k?’
• Freeway series (Angels vs Dodgers) starts tonight and my boys are playing from home.
• I hopped around three bars last night, having beers with a girlfriend, to celebrate my last day of speech and my A in the class. We saw one awesome band and one god awful one.
• I WIN AT SPEECH.
• It’s Friday & payday, all at once.
• My hands are soft and smell like purple. That may sound weird but take one sniff and you’re with me.
• I got an Ipod dock, finally, three or fours years after acquiring my lil black, inscribed Nano. (It says, ‘To my sexy, geeky lover.’)
• I am super tall today, in two inch creepers.

Bad things:

• There is not enough iced coffee in California to keep me from yawning.

-Pretty Lush

& for what?

In Trash, Dorothy Allison is taking the name she’s always known (trash/white trash) and owning it as a generation of people born into something they could not help and certainly knew no better than the conditions they were afforded and the roles the women around them played.
I can’t say too much about the book because I’ll ruin a perfectly good thing with my shitty words but I love it so hard for everything it makes me think about. My mind goes crazy reading this book and stretches out to open doors for ideas I never had. It makes me want to say so much that I can hardly say anything at all.

I think when I wrote the last half of this post, I was mostly trying to say this:

“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

—Fight Club

…but of course, I couldn’t quite get it out the way Tyler Durden/Chuck Palahniuk did. Chuck could say the alphabet better than I can.

I think I need to have this (horribly depressing but ultimately true) quote in my life somewhere – perhaps on the bathroom mirror where I’m prone to scrawl inspirations in lipstick – as a reminder that I have to make my life worth more than a fucking desk job. Has anyone ever died on an overdose of routine?

I think about this degree I’m trying to obtain and how it won’t benefit me at all except to prove to myself that I can finish something. I talked to a doctor the other day who half-complimented my efforts before saying, “That’s how I did it. I put myself through one class at a time since my son was two, as a single parent.” And she’s a psychologist. I’m just trying to get a fucking AA at twenty-four years old and it is not easy. I thought about scrapping the whole thing so many times already. It should be encouraging that someone else could do threefold what I’m doing and be very successful but it’s not. It was discouraging. It was her looking at my situation and saying, “Yep, it sucks. And I did it longer and harder than you. Suck it up, child.” I felt like my difficulties and struggles were insignificant because her triumph was ultimately better.

This can be boiled down to self-esteem and insecurity and the infallible pressures I put on myself to do better, do more and to prove something. I’ve yet to figure out what I’m proving and who’s supposed to see it, but when I do I figure the load will get a little lighter.

-Pretty Lush

Pride: I haz some

Long Beach Pride and its 80,000ish friends took up most of the weekend, as did dancing, beer and exchanging rants about fresh facial piercings and their interference with everything. There was also incredible taquitos and the fuckin’ slumber party of the year. The Vagabond Inn staff can expect a thank you card/apology note for the mess.

Trying to sleep with five girls in two beds anytime before dawn has yet to happen, ever. This should not stop anyone from planning monthly slumber party shenanigans because I have not done that shit since never and I truly appreciate knowing such kickass girls and their contribution to my amazing time will not be forgotten.

Ree & I paid someone to stick needles through us during Pride shenans on Saturday because we're masochistic but now adorned with cute accessories. I poured blood everywhere as a result of the sun and beer intake. And I'm just sayin', when you're a professional skin poker, maybe don't show your customer how freaked out you are because her nose is spilling blood all over. Fake it, for fuck's sake.

I don’t know if it’s as simple as a celebration based entirely on sexuality or the fact that there are so many really cool, really friendly people all in the same place, bringing reunions or new friendships every time you look up, but I was drunk on 100 proof glee all weekend.

And then the Dodgers got twelve runs for the win on Sunday and Kershaw almost pitched his first no-hitter and let me tell you, I was so overwhelmingly happy that I burst, causing a 4.7 earthquake in southern California and consequently scaring the living shit out of my dogs.

On a serious note, I was at a very gory part in my Kill Bill DVD when the house rattled harder than would be caused by low flying jets and helicopters, which is pretty normal considering our proximity to an air force base. This truly enhanced the scene and then I wet myself* when I realized what was really going on.

*I mean ran uselessly out the front door.

-Pretty Lush

Letter from a loved one

I’ve actually reached out for guidance in the direction of my fiction. As in showed it to someone. And let them read it. With their eyes. It’s so much easier to tell people that I’m passionate about writing than it is to show it. I feel like the collective reaction is usually, ‘is she for real?’
When I say I need direction, I mean simply a few pointers, not for someone else to tell the story for me. Guide it away from that cliff it will inevitably approach if I get stuck, more or less.

I was very arrogant in the beginning of this semester. I told Ree that I would get an effortless A in speech. And then I got my first test back. And I wasn’t so sure anymore. Since then I applied myself a little harder and then even harder when it came to the persuasive speech and to be honest, my time was 7.5 minutes and I could have gone for eleven more, had I not already exceeded the limit. Tonight I find out my same sex marriage speech grade and get to read the critiques my classmates wrote on whether or not I convinced them that same sex couples are entitled to the same rights as heterosexual couples. These mean a lot more to me than I will let on.

Last night I finished the second disc of The Gangs of New York and reveled in the fact that I had successfully completed two whole DVDs in three nights. For six years now, I have not been able to watch a movie in one sitting. (See also: nap, read, sleep late, eat ice cream without sharing.) There’s always something to be done or a certain blue-eyed little bombshell to entertain. All this week as bedtime rolls around, the kid has tucked herself in and all but excused me from her sleepy presence. She usually likes to fall asleep in my bed and while I don’t mind moving her into her own when its time, feeling the weight of her forty-nine pound frame and seeing the length of it draped over my arms reminds me that she’s growing into a big girl. There will be a day that fulfilling my ten grillion kisses a day quota and laying together with our fingers interlocked will not happen and it will be because she’s a big girl and there are some things that are outside of big girls’ league, like affection for mom or silly face contests. Hurray for healthy growth and all that but if it was stunted for one more year, I really wouldn’t cry about it.

The day she stops writing me letters, she will be so grounded.

-Pretty Lush

On parenting

I totally forgot to tell you guys, my friends, something you really should know. Cracker Jack toys have gotten increasingly suck. For someone that is so easily pleased it's silly, I was sorely disappointed. I have no need for a paper pencil toppper, decorated in ants, of all things.

Speaking of pencil toppers, as they're the hot new thing with Cracker Jacks and with kindergarteners, I believe when Kiddo referenced her 'boingee' over the weekend and I demanded an explanation as to what in fuck her boingee is and why she was trading it on the playground, she described a very fancy pencil topper. This conversation is relevant only in it's beginning and end, some of which you may have caught on my Twitter.

"Mom, I have to ask you something I've never asked you before." This was said gravely, as if she wanted to know my true opinion on her new girlfriend's Mormon family.

"Yes, love?"

"Are there take backs?"

Que my long-winded explanation of how taking something back after giving it away is generally quite rude but if you or your friend really, really wished you hadn't traded something, like perhaps your boingee or virginity, you could ask nicely. I put Ree and I in an example situation where a take back was in order.

"...and if Ree were my real friend, a good friend, she would probably say I could take back my boingee since I really loved it."

And Ree and I looked at each other, and it was useless to hold back any longer. We laughed hysterically. Kiddo demanded, "MOM. Are there take backs, yes or no?"

My poor child. Getting answers out of me can be so difficult and she already has so much to deal with.

Yesterday Lucy contributed greatly to my overall after work mood. This was following the appointment I'd had with a doctor who suggested I 'cut back on drinking' but if I didn't like it then I could 'always just go back to drinking.' I say no experiment necessary, you say tomato. I came home to an empty house as Kiddo was with dad for another few hours and beloved roomie was gone. Lucy greeted me at the door as I tapped my keys on the window like I usually do. And into a trash strewn house, I walked. I took one look at her and she ducked her head, tucked in her tail and retreated slowly all the way out the dog door and into the backyard. I spent the next half hour picking up trash from every flat surface and stuffing it back into the trash can that was lying on its side in the kitchen, and scrubbing some strange orange stains from the carpet. While I applaud my own stain removal skillz, I curse my dog raising skillz. She still does not understand just how off limits that delectable trash is.

And to prove she really, really, doesn't get it, just in case I still wondered, she got into my bathroom trash while I slept. And then I locked her out so she got in the other bathroom trash.

I love her and all, but I am so not kidding when I say she will be the death of me. I will be at my wit's end with crotchless panties and suddenly collapse. My tombstone will read, Death by way of idiot dog.

Who will salsa with her then, I demand to know. She has no idea how good she has it.

-Pretty Lush

PS. I hadn't noticed just how outdated my Love Interests section was so I cleaned it up. Show some love to my new friends.