Seriously, the difference between me & a meth addict is that my addiction is legal.

I will prove my point shortly. I got up early this morning, meeting my friend Kyra (look at her watching Cesar Milan in her finished socks!) for some coffee before we hit The Studio for their annual sale (25% off everything!) Our friend Jimmi showed up, too, and we huddled & chatted while we waited for them to open. I actually surprised myself with how little I ended up spending – a skein of Schaeffer Anne for socks, two skeins of Noro Kureyon & a co-ordinating color of Woolpak (for a second, modified Kristina) (boy, I’m link-happy today for some reason.) I also got a skein of the softest, yummiest mongolian cashmere, because Kyra was knitting a pair of socks from the same stuff & I fell completely in love with it.

SO, after that adventure, I went to Costco, did some shopping there for staples, and then did a little Thai Place takeout. There was a girl sitting at the bar, looking through the Sunday paper. She looked at me and said, “Do you go to the Thai Orchid, too?”
Uh…… I said, “Well, once in a while. I used to go a lot more often but since this opened in Westport, it’s much closer to work.”

“Well, I thought it was you. I used to waitress there. Red curry beef, right?”

I could only nod, stupefied. It’s been several years since I went there with a lot of regularity. (Of course, red curry beef? That’s what I was getting today….)

“And your friend? She always gets the Massaman Tofu.”

“Oh, yes, yes, she did.”

Hah! I’m not the only one with my addiction. Though I don’t know if she meant my friend Liz or my friend Shelley, since that’s what they both always got there, and they’re both blonde.

There’s something about staying in one place for a long time, though, that fosters being known places. Obviously, going to a restaurant 2x/week probably helps reinforce recognition. But it’s kind of strange for me, so many connections with people who know the same people, something I see particularly at work. My boss, my friends, all the people who grew up here have that intertwined connectedness even more so. All I ever wanted to do was escape everyone knowing everybody else when I was growing up – after all, in a town of 721 people, the main form of entertainment is staying current on everyone else’s business. Being the outsiders, we were like a Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes trainwreck worthy of weekly speculation and gossip. Now, I meet people who know other people I know, and it’s kind of fun. Oddly enough, it doesn’t bother me the way I thought it might. There’s a sense of community in the connections, now. It doesn’t feel invasive or oppressing. Come on, sing it with me:

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.

Yeah, I’ve become “Norm” at Thai Place & Thai House.

Tonight, I was leaving to go pick up pizza, and I spied a lady with her dog, walking up alongside the big telephone pole by the street. Her dog stopped and began dutifully sniffing, at the place we’ve dubbed “Pee Mail”, ala Survivor’s “Tree Mail” communications. That is our dogs’ favorite place to sniff in the yard, and I’m sure there are stories and visitors and all kinds of things we simply can’t detect. Thankfully. I thought it was funny & I rolled down the window to tell her that was “THE” spot in the neighborhood. So, she came over to the car, and I met her dog, Noah, who’s a bruiser of a chocolate lab, super friendly and then suddenly his owner, who I learned is from Argentina, explaining her heavy accent, is being dragged through our garden island – because a cat is running through our front yard & Noah is going to catch it! Holy crap. I put the car in park, and looked back just in time to see Noah’s owner fly face-first off the rock wall towards the pavement and drop the leash, letting Noah tear off into the dark.

Since our dogs have pulled this number numerous times, I wasn’t too worried, assuming Noah would come back shortly (as it dawned on him the cat would not be caught), and I could even hear him in the next yard, snuffling around. Noah’s owner did not feel the same way, and started wailing and shrieking, and wringing her hands. Unbeknownst to me, OUR dogs were also tuned in to all this drama from inside the house, barking & whatnot, so JWo opened the door to see what was going on and then we had BURF BURF BURF First Line Against Terror Reporting For Duty, SIR! surging around us! But I think it was good they came out because it zipped Noah right back to us, to check out “the ladies”…. he only knew them through their “correspondence”….. Then the lady from Argentina told us her employment history, her street address & a good portion of her life story, and might have given us a key to her house if I hadn’t pointed out JWo wasn’t wearing any shoes & was obviously a bit cold on the pavement….and she collected her dog & went off to finish walking him.

Yes, we have some seriously bizarre Saturday nights, even if we just stay home.

Garsh. We had lunch today at the Taj Mahal (not to be confused with the Bob Mahal, my favorite name for the new building being built just to the south of our offices), and I had not been there in a couple of years. Mostly because I had a falling-out with a friend, and in some strange unspoken agreement, I got all the Thai restaurants & she got all the Indian restaurants. I wondered (worried) just a smidge as we got there today, if I would see her, and how I’d react. Since she wasn’t there, the queasiness was replaced with voracious hunger for the Chicken Tiki Masala, as I had forgotten just how much I love that stuff. And the tamarind sauce. I want to smear it on my face.

Sigh. Yum. And now I’m in a coma.

I was never in band. The closest I ever came to playing a musical instrument includes the following items, which will slam the door shut on any supposition you might have had that I did, in fact, play in the band: Flutophone (a.k.a, the Recorder), an Autoharp (jammin!), a Harmonica, and a Fisher Price keyboard with pastel keys.

I can’t read music, except for singing, sort of. I was in chorus, and what I lack in a beautiful voice is more than compensated for with my gusto and volume. I do quite well if the tenor section needs help, I’m definitely an alto….

I do recall composing a sad, dirge-like ditty about (bad timing, but sorry, it’s true) miners on my Fisher Price keyboard, and performing this song for the entire fourth grade music class. I did not realize at the time that in performing my self-perceived talented & brilliant composure with its sad, sad, SAD words about how lonely it is in the mine, I had just exploded my final chances of EVER fitting in with my classmates. At least it wasn’t on the autoharp.

So, I really liked, nay, LOVED, the flutophone. I adored when they arrived and Flutophone Music was all we did in music class. I can still smell and taste the blue liquid all the mouthpieces floated in, and the challenge was to get a good white flutophone with red trim. The black ones were simply not as glamorous. My father, perhaps hoping he was raising the next Zamfir and her Magic Pan Flute, noticed this enthusiasm, and bought me a wooden recorder. I would practice my warbling notes in the loft of the dome home. In between BONG HITS. (OK, just kidding, but seriously, I look back on the hilarity of all this, and the fact it was the 70’s and I wore a lot of corduroy, come ON, it wasn’t just ME, man….other people loved the flutophone, too! Right?)

Then came 5th grade. And the Musical Instrument Aptitude Test. We were given all these different mouthpieces to blow on and try – not connected to the rest of the instrument, and under the supervision of the music teacher, who then wrote down on a notecard what your destiny would be. I brought my little card home from school, and my father blanched. For I was most adept on the mouthpiece of? THE TROMBONE. My father called the music teacher. Was there anything else, anything AT ALL I would do well at. The flute? No. The clarinet? No. The violin? Nobody here knows how to play that, Mister, we can’t teach it. I still can hear him saying, beseeching the teacher for a different solution: “Look. It’s not like you can really go out on the hillside and play the trombone all by yourself! Isn’t there SOMETHING else she could play?” I immediately visualized myself barefoot, in a field of clover, tooting and honking away on a giant trombone. Did you remember that I have short arms? (Not short arm syndrome, that’s different.) Clover & trombones, all in all, it was not a pretty visualization. I knew when that line was uttered, I was not going in to band.

So my musical education stayed confined to chorus, all through high school, and some of our concerts and songs are still completely ingrained in my head. The solo at the 4th of July concert that required a brassy alto, to ham it up while singing – gee, guess who was picked for that spotlight? I was a shoo-in. I have always danced along in life to a different drummer – and I guess now you know it’s a drummer who also can play a mean flutophone.

So, yesterday, at the end of the day, I brought up the fact that it would be very challenging to actually put your head in an oven. Yes, I was feeling overwhelmed at the time, but not seriously contemplating the maneuver. Kristin countered that Sylvia Plath did it, as did a character in Hedwig & The Angry Inch. I say that unless you have a stove bolted to the floor, you would tip the oven over. And the whole thing would be a very uncomfortable way to go. The low bending, the sprawling, the delicate balance of keeping the stove from crashing on your head – after all, if you wanted to exit with crashing, you’d take on the fridge, or a vending machine. I mean, even a little non-fat person would make our oven tip over, it’s simply a matter of physics, with the door acting like a lever! (Now, I better stop, because that’s as far as my smacktalk about physics can go. I can reference Archimedes, and then, like George Costanza, my hands are up in the air and I’m outta there.)

I’m just saying. It would be incredibly awkard and uncomfortable, and once you got your head in there, hell, I’d start getting all OCD about the crap on the bottom of the stove, and I certainly wouldn’t put my cheek on that, so I’d have to clean it, and then I’d be back out of the oven & living life to my fullest with my bright yellow gloves and a can of EasyOff. Hmmm. EasyOff. I wonder if that works on salespeople….. and how do I spray them through the phone….

We are in the throes of negotiating some buys for a potential new client. It is hilarious, to listen to each other. Some of my markets are northern – Sioux Falls, and Fargo – and I immediately revert to my old-school accent as soon as these people pick up the phone or call me. Oh, ya! You betcha! Oh, ok now. mMM Bye. (Did you know that Up North, 90% of the population ends their phone calls with “mmmMMBye”? Well, they do, and that is a statistic. I made it up, but I bet it’s true.)

Kristin, on the other hand, gets up in the occasional grille of a stupid rep, and she just asked about getting into Smackdown, which immediately made me visualize her on the ropes. LEAPING.

And the Junior Buyer (aka, our boss?), he is a never-ending font of questions about the software and has “issues” with it. So yesterday, I told Kristin we’ll be in a better place once the new person starts next week. Because the Junior Buyer is SLOWING US DOWN. Like the gazelle with the broken ankle.

If you don’t love the song “Dance, Dance” by Fallout Boy, then you can just click on “next blog” and move along. Because today, I dedicate my love to “Dance, Dance.” Is it pop-esque? A little bit. It has enough blazing guitar and lack of syntheticness to keep it halfway under the alternative umbrella. (I would hate to lose my alternative music lover’s card – I’m already on probation for the J.Lo and Beyonce songs from last summer…)

It’s one of those songs that make you want to slam dance, or be in a dance troupe, doing a choreographed number at lightening speed. I find while listening to it in the car, as loud as possible without distortion, I become an air drummer. And a triple-time shoulder shimmier. People who see me? Must conclude I am having a seizure. Because I am! A SEIZURE OF HAPPINESS.

I have a feeling this could be an open-ended, ongoing blog – there are certainly more than three things that define my own peculiar brand of Crazy. It seems particularly appropriate for a Monday, so here you go. JenCrazy(tm) at its finest:

*I do not like to open those packages of dough that explode when you press a spoon along the line. I shut my eyes, turn my face, and behave as though I am opening a bottle of champagne that has been in the back of a pickup truck travelling across rutted gravel roads. Speaking of which, I also don’t like opening champagne bottles.

*I do not like to open the small encapsulated pockets that contain cold medicine liquigels. I freak out if I have to tear them open, because I am certain my Herculean tearing will result in the gels bursting open and my medicine ending up sprayed, all over me. At a time when I am most likely to burst into tears from the misery and catastrophe. So, I use tiny manicure scissors to cut a “T”-shaped incision so I can free them. If I had a scalpel, I’d use that.

*I cannot stand the sound of plastic grocery bags being whipped around by wind, when you’re in the car & the windows are down. Just typing this made me shudder & want to scream. Recent discovery? The film wrapping on dry cleaning sounds EXACTLY the same.

What’re a couple choice oddities you possess?

I spent three hours yesterday, cleaning out my Honda (LaFonda). It became abundantly clear why having your car detailed costs so much. I armor-all’d every vinyl surface & now I have a reflective glare on the windshield, it’s so shiny. (I’ve wiped it down again.) I vacuumed, put upholstery cleaner on the carpets, vacuumed again, cleaned the windows, took out everything that wasn’t necessary, cleaned out the trunk and behold! She’s a new car all over again. I then spent the extra cash on the deluxe car wash for her, because after all, she deserved it.

As we were driving to Thai 2000 this afternoon, JWo praised the clean windshield: “It’s HiDef Honda!” We stopped at Super Target (it truly is Super. Thanks for asking!) & I bought new car mats, because hard as it was to toss the factory-installed Civic mats, they were grungy. They just represent my negotiation skeelz, because I demanded they throw them in for free (It was an extra $100! For car mats! With embroidered Civic logo! Highway robbery.), but after 4 years, they needed to go. And, after spending three hours of quality time with our shop vac, there was no way I was going to revive them or bring them back to high-level of cleanliness LaFonda deserves. If I’d installed anything new or fancy, we could’ve called this blog, “Pimp my LaFonda”, but that sounds, uh, kinda bad. I prefer “LaFonda: Now in HD”…..

I have shown great success this past NFL season (yes, I know it’s not over, but it is over for the Chiefs) in developing my ability to comment on the game, and I would like to take this moment to also state that I am an excellent judge of yardage. Might be all the knitting, might be me trying to find one area in which to excel, but I’m good.

So, last week, James was going to bed at 5:00 or something crazy, because he’s practicing to be a dairy farmer when he retires (and he gets up at the crack o’ dawn for the waterfowl hunting), and I’m standing by his side of the bed, getting more & more wound up talking about something. I end my statement with both arms straight up in the air by my head.

JWo: “So, now that you’ve shown me the referee’s signal for a touchdown, show me what they do when the kick is no good.”

I pause. I think. I wave my hands in front of me, crossing wrists.

JWo: “Very good! Now show me holding.”

I think again. I know I know it. I give him this:

JWo: “Noooooo. What is that? THIS is holding.” and he proceeds to show me, and I immediately go, “Oooooh, yeah, yeah, right.”

(Correct Referee Signal:)

We’re both laughing, and JWo says again, “What was THAT?” referring, of course to my incorrect signal.

I say, “Oh, it was holding. It was the ‘Bein’ HELD DOWN BY THE MAN’ hand signal.”

Needless to say, I’m setting the bar & getting ready for next year. Why, right here, I’ve discovered a transgression called the Illegal Crackback. How snappy is that? I think that could work in the office. Shut up! I’m not taking your call, I call Illegal Crackback on your ass. I see a lot of potential, integrating all this into daily life. Perhaps Kristin will learn Ref signals, too, and we can handle faux pas in meetings by, say, simply standing up & kicking the back of our foot (to indicate tripping). My problem is, she’ll be calling me constantly on the Facemask. I’m grabby like that, and I don’t always have good boundaries.