Month: June 2006 (Page 1 of 3)

That’s a camera-phone shot of the interior of the safe at the bank. I’ve never done the whole safety-deposit box thing, and it’s always had mystery and intrigue around it. It was on my list of things to do today, but instead I started out my day closing accounts, opening new ones, blah blah blah. Then I did the safe thing.

We were burglarized yesterday, and while some fucknuts are out there pawning all our shit, I’m spending time out of my life cleaning up the wreckage. At least good friends came over and cleaned up that wreckage, because these people went through EVERYthing and dumped them out on the floor. It sucks getting burgled. I know, you thought it would be fun, right? All the electronics (my precious big tv!), all the PS2 games, all of it just one big vacant hole in the living room. Then my computer, all the electronics upstairs – ugh. It just is one big list to turn in to the insurance company at this point. For, if we were going to reflect on the month of June and all her evil fucking lessons, we know that this, while an invasion and a cause for angst, is just stuff. Stuff can be replaced, forgotten about, paid for and rebought. Stuff that can be made more secure (and oh yes, it will, I’m going to have an alarm system that will make the dogs belly crawl around the house). And our dogs were padlocked in their kennel, and oh-so-thankfully not hurt or stolen. We might have avoided the break-in had they been in the house? But it could have been worse, too. So I’m trying not to spend all my time running down dead-end thought roads that will only make me more tired than I already am, and just focus on having some normal life stuff this weekend.

I could not be more grateful for the friendships, the work that was done, the help and support that was offered up, yet again, on my behalf. I started crying last night, in front of four people, which for me is already really pushing my limits, and I told them that I’ve spent most of my life fighting any need to rely on other people, avoiding asking for things, not wanting to lean too hard, and I guess what I’m getting right now is a huge lesson in humility, to accept the kindness and love and help and friendship and to not give it back in equal or greater amounts right now, and realizing that it is, after all, ok. My father was a proud man, and he never wanted to be beholden to anyone, he never had debt of any kind – monetary or otherwise, and he always made sure he gave more than he received. I learned a lot of my value system from him; it explains my extreme discomfort and awe at the outpouring I have received. May it come back to everyone tenfold, for I am just one person. Without a lot of stuff, energy, or strength right now.

Hour 8.

I expect by 5:00 I’ll be feeling this way on the inside:

Good news for my knit night buds! Tonight’s fun is hosted by PREDATOR. Mind you don’t lose a hand or a nose and for god’s sake, don’t come between this woman and her food.

Yeah, I had a great big post about the horrors of being awake at 4 a.m., and then my computer froze up, further reinforcing the horror, and then Li’l P decided to explore the entire neighborhood when I let the dogs out, so I stomped around for half an hour, until I spotted her and dragged her home, which also reinforced the horror of early mornings, actually for both of us.

Let’s just try, in a quick recap, to gather the essential nuggets before my head blows off my body. I do not like early mornings, and now I’m mothertrucking wide awake. I also referenced a desire to buy the Time-Life Superstars of the 80’s CD set, because Huey Lewis was telling me how awesome it was, and I also saw this commercial for fatherhood, because the only other commercials on that early are PSAs (for me and the dairy farmers). But that commercial was damn cute. There was another one about a woman who fought a company to get them to stop dumping in streams and their waste was causing cancer and she got the company shut down but it put half the town out of work and all the kids are sick with NO insurance now. The message payoff? Give blood (instead). WTF???? Give blood, and let the motherfucking polluters run rampant ’cause Lawd knows we’re better off having a job, insurance AND cancer than just cancer. Whatever truth may lie in that statement, doesn’t support the ad. And I still don’t like 4 a.m.

yours,
H.R.G.
(Her Royal Grumpiness)

That’s Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer. Yes, he’s a stud.
But we have a new stud in our life, named Mike Rowe.

Star of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel. Holy Toledo, this is an awesome show!!!! We’ve been DVR-ing them and catching up on all his escapades. I have to say, the pig farm outside of Vegas that uses all the buffet leftovers & cooks the refuse into slop is still the worst one, ever. Though the cockroach-infested home comes a close second. I told JWo if that were my house, I would just burn the motherfucker to the ground and never look back. I’m still itching at the thought of all those hideous roaches, everywhere. And the funniest episode (so far) has to be the ostrich farm. I could not stop laughing at the ostriches & their changed behavior once their little heads got black hoods pulled over ’em. It was like all up-in-your-grill angry-could-kill-you-ostrich maneuvers and then whoosh, a little blindfolding and they’re all, Heeeeeeeey, duuude. Where ya wanna go? Like stoners smelling pizza.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen this show, and you work at a desk job, it’s good to remind you of all the other things out there that you could be doing and maybe wouldn’t want to – and you learn stuff, too. Plus there’s Mike. Funny, fast, and charmingly handsome. Sigh.

But I wouldn’t wanna do his laundry, that’s for sure.

She’ll be droppin’ her new album in a couple of weeks, featuring her badass self with a few of the tunes featuring the hot new artist Li’l P. (We will get photos of Li’l P at some point; she’s been busy doing her Dogly Duty patrolling the perimeter and keeping the homefront SquirlFree as part of her contract.)

I feel like my father’s memory, my love for him, the love he gave me, are like an indentation you make with your foot when you step from the beach into the ocean. The water rushes around, you feel specific grains of sand slide away, you sink a little deeper, and yet, when you lift your foot, what once was a hole becomes filled with fresh water, new sand, broken shells. It becomes easy to believe this, to become paralyzed, because to move is to chance forgetting, to blur and obfuscate the past, the things you treasure. But the more you stand immobilized, the less you are living your own life.

Back and forth, back and forth. Waves visit the shore and leave, and these similar push/pull feelings wash back and forth within me. I am so weary of crying, yet the tears still come. I am still searching for patterns in the tides. I know one truth: I will not drown, even if sometimes it feels like it could happen.

I attended a big to-do industry banquet last night, mostly because one of my co-workers was up for an award, and our agency was nominated for “agency of the year”. (We didn’t win.) They had a couple of local talking heads as the masters of ceremonies, and boy-oh-boy, you just have to be able to read off a card to make it in the world of TV. And these two? Not making it.

There were two grammatical flubs that I seized like an otter on trout. The first was when the smiley-chick pronounced “Czar” – and after two stuttering tries, settled on “Cesar” but more like seeZAHR and I announced to our table if we won the agency award, I was going to proclaim I felt like the seeZAHR-ina of media. (At the last agency, I was dubbed the Czarina of ProBono. And we said it right.)

Then, another woman was painfully trying to simultaneously understand and pronounce “mimeograph”, and this, dear friends, is why you REHEARSE if you’ve been given a script. So she went with MIME-o-graph, as in Marcel Marceaux pantomimes a document for you, 16 times. I, of course, immediately began my own miming at the table. Hey, I was sandwiched between the non-stop laughing of Kristin and my boss who is afflicted with ADD. He kept muttering and snarking, until finally I strongly advised him to “GO INSIDE.” (as in, yourself. That’s what I do, anyway, when faced with long speeches or painfully forced banter and I can’t escape.)

That or I just get uber-snarky. Like when my boss said, “Hey! Check out the tat(too) on (name of person who f’n hates me)!” And I replied, “Yeah. I think she got it in prison.” (Thanks to Kristin for remembering that one.)

Actually it wasn’t the lunch itself, but what happened right afterwards, that was jaw-droppingly hilarious. Kristin and I dined at Cupini’s (I had the salsiccia sandwich and am now Dragon Garlic Breath Extraordinaire…) After we finished eating, we went back towards the entrance so I could refill my soda. There was a man who had just ordered, getting ice/water from the soda machine – precariously holding his little wire table spike that held his number, so the servers would bring him his order. However, this man wasn’t succeeding in his efforts – the ice had gotten stuck in the spout. He was shoving his hand up into the spout, trying to dislodge the ice.

Now, that kind of freaked me out a little, but it seemed like he was mainly touching the ice in question, so I just stood back, waiting patiently. (Thinking, “Self, we will not get ice. THE GERMS.”) He was slamming his cup under the spout, alternating with the clawing, and I finally said something like, “Not co-operating, huh?” He grunted something, and then the clawing began with redoubled fury. I was thinking, ok, don’t burst out laughing, even though this is kinda funny. I tend to assume most people find uncooperative machines (soda, fax, copy, computer) to be generally amusing and frustrating at the same time. In other words, nothing to have a heart attack over. This guy? The recalcitrant ice somehow unleashed some sort of holy fury within him. He started dropping his glass, ice fell on the floor, he FLUNG his table number & holder at the lemons & coffee pots, to free up his other hand, and once he got his ice and water, gathered his table number (leaving the wire spike with the lemons) and huffed off in A Great Pique to await his lunch.

I stood there with my mouth open.

Kristin broke into a hundred peals of laughter. I was looking around & finally caught the guy’s attention behind the counter. I gestured to the ice on the floor with big swooping arm movements:

“Number Three? He just had a MELTDOWN.”

bloggraph
Originally uploaded by plazajen.

Enter your blog addy here & see what it looks like!

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

My friends aren’t even going to know who I am. I give you proof that the slippery slope to insanity has begun, and pretty soon I’ll be blogging from our trusted institution, Two Rivers. (A girlfriend of mine just started working at the state-run nervous hospital, and she said I won’t get to keep my knitting there. So much for my tax dollars helping me in the long run, I guess on some level I always knew I’d have to pay for quality institutionalization.)

Yep. I have no idea why I’m doing this, except it was a small-ish project and I thought it would be good to do something different. And I ask, what is more natural in the 96-degree heat than to knit a wool hat? The answer, as you back away slowly, is: NOTHING. The kit is from Bea Ellis. I know, I know – it’s as if the Amish suddenly started driving SUVs. I’ve professed such an utter distate of knitting with cotton (hey, this was less than 3″ of that behavior – it’s just the lining of the hat, the lighter burgundy that’s crazily, mad-cap stitch-marker “hemmed” to the underside of the hat), and then I’ve been equally vocal with my dislike of fair isle knitting…. well, all I can say is, send cards. Come visit. Because I have the yarn to make at least two or three more of these.