Author: avidbruxist
Peeve-iful
Know what I hate? When people try to combine words that don’t go together to promote something.
For example, nail salons called Nailsations. Or Raleigh’s Buzztival, which celebrates local NC honey. I can deal with Scent-sations for your fragrance business, or even Festifall, for your fête to all things autumn. Eat your egg-cellent eggs.
But Subway, right now, is promoting ANYtober, a month during which you can get any foot-long sandwich for $5. That’s some bullshit. Rocktober, yes. ANYtober? Seriously?
Anything with the suffix -tastic that doesn’t rhyme with fan: off limits. Move-tastic, Heel-tastic, Frog-tastic, you’re all out. The only exception is my friend’s weight-lifting shoes, which she had embroidered to say Snatchtastic. That’s hilarious.
Set Rat Thur in That Rockin Cheer
I’m reading aloud Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick to my students. The narrator, a 12-year-old boy named Max, bears a striking resemblance to his convict father (WHO TOTALLY KILLED MAX’S MOTHER IN FRONT OF HIM WHEN HE WAS LITTLE, BUT SHH, THAT’S FOR LATER). Another character comments that he’s the spitting image of his dad, so I was explaining to the kids where the expression “spitting image” came from: originally, people said “spirit and image”, but folks from coastal South Carolina don’t really pronounce their Rs. Voilà. Spittin’ image.
I like to think about the differences in southern dialects. In fact, I hate it when people say, “He has a southern accent.” What is that? Drive from Charleston to the opposite corner of the better Carolina, and you’d NEVER have gotten “spittin’ image”. For your enlightenment, in the Blue Ridge, the Rs are as hard as Sarah Palin’s, fortunately without the flat vowels (shudder), but, yes, Rs are very ARRRRy up yonderrrr.
Also, many monosyllabic words with short vowels get an extra syllable, so ran becomes rayun, pin is peeyun. Actually, both pin and pen are peeyun but if it’s the writing utensil, you say ink peeyun.
I’ll just keep going here. If it’s the first word in a sentence, the word it is pronounced with an H on the front, and since it fits the previous rule, it sounds like heeyut.
Regarding verbiage, you don’t push a button; you mash it, but it’s pronounced with almost a long a: maish. You also don’t turn the light off; you cut it off. And you better lift a fanger when somebody passes you on the road.
And if you ride bus 27 home from Cove Creek School, your bus driver will bang a spelling book against the metal ceiling and yell, Y’all better quieten down. Yep, quieten down, not quiet down. And for a long time, I thought quieten was a word. Years later we’d laugh at her redneck expression. But just now, since spellcheck didn’t pick it up, I looked it up and quieten is totally a word. Go on, Pat Shore, Driver of Bus 27 and Quietener of Children!
Now, one of these days, I’ll have to make a vlog of myself saying these things—ooh! and reenact my phone interview with a principal from Rocky Mount, and you could hear the difference a couple hundred miles make. I won’t right now because I haven’t showered, and I think you could probably smell me through the internet.
My point is: there’s no such thing as a southern accent. There are eleventy-five different southern dialects. (I had to stop watching True Blood because every character had a different southern accent, and only two of them were any good. Would it have been so hard for HBO to hire a dialect coach?)
Y’all wanna sheer (that’s share to you) what people say and how they pronounce thangs in yer neck o’ the woods?
Harden the Fuck Up
I can’t believe how good I feel. I was cracking UP with my fourth period class today, and sitting here now, I’m just delighting in the color of my kitchen walls. Which is gray. But it’s such a cool gray!
It kind of pisses me off. I mean, clearly the amino acids work for me. But (a) I don’t understand why because I no goot at syintz, so (b) there’s a niggling little neuron in my brain that keeps saying, “It’s just a placebo effect.”
Even if it is all in my head, I shouldn’t care because I feel better, but I really wish I could conduct a controlled, double-blind study on myself. Because, if it turned out that a placebo cured my depression, then I could stop spending money on the amino acids and just harden the fuck up.
Making Things Better
When I was mowing the lawn yesterday, I thought, “Everyone should be outside right now!”
I went out to dinner last night with friends and wasn’t scared to come home to just myself.
I sat on the deck in the sunshine today and read the super-creepy Room by Emma Donoghue for book club and did not feel nihilistic.
As I walked the dogs just now, a monarch butterfly flitted across the azure sky, and I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was.
Two days, no episodes. Keep your fingers crossed.
Making Things Worse
I can see how people who’ve never been depressed dismiss it as a figment, because when I’m not depressed, I can actually talk myself out of the idea that I ever was. You just needed to buck up. You were being dramatic. You should’ve gotten more exercise.
But depression is real. It’s real, and it’s not sadness or histrionics or lethargy. It’s an uncontrollable, unrelenting all-of-that, mixed with something else. The only term that comes close is bleakness. A sense that nothing’s working out, nothing will ever work out, why even try?
Events can aggravate it: an internet troll trashes your work; your 92-year-old uncle’s cat gets killed by a coyote, and you realize he can’t get another cat, he was hoping to die before that cat; the touch-screen on the grocery store credit card keypad won’t register your finger’s warmth. You watch the movie About a Boy and, as Toni Collette’s character bursts into tears when she can’t quite reach to put a bowl on a high shelf, you think,
Yes.
Exactly.
But there need not be an event. Circumstances can be perfect. You can be on vacation, walking the dogs on a sunny-but-cool day after eating your home-cooked breakfast at the picnic table on the deck, and it comes. The bleakness. Your cheeks and temples tighten. You have thoughts like, “I’ll never [do X] again because I’ll never be really good at it, so why bother?” Then you beat yourself up for feeling this way on such a perfect sunny-but-cool day. Which makes things worse.
And you can be Sunny Smiles-a-Lot in public. So people never have to know. Which makes things worse because alone? Alone, it’s bad, so you kind of feel like you’re lying all the time.
Three weeks ago, I stopped taking the amino acid supplements I started a year ago. Why? Because I talked myself into thinking maybe I could. Because they cost over two hundred dollars a month. Because I wanted to use that money to get a different car. Within days, I started having depressive episodes.
I had asked my osteopath a long time ago if there were a cheaper brand. He said the ones he sold were the ones he’d found to be of highest quality. But last week, I thought, I’ll try some others. I looked at labels and did some math and got on the internet. I ordered L-tyrosine, L-lysine, 5-HTP, all of them—plus calcium, selenium, all the -iums—for about half of the cost. Still expensive but better. I filled up my
I’m on day 5, and so far I feel no change. I know I need to give it some time, and I’ll go back on the super-expensive ones if the others don’t work. But right now it’s bad, and all I can do is worry it’ll get worse. Which makes things worse.
New Feature
New feature on the Avid Bruxist blog! You can comment on people’s comments.
The Nighttime
Interesting things happen when it’s nighttime. To wit: my friends and I threw a prom of sorts on Saturday night. It was nominally a birthday party for me (36) and Anna (three-oh!) but, as I said in the invitation, mostly an excuse for us to get dressed up in fancy clothes and sway to the musical stylings of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Of course, we also told people they could wear pajama pants if they wanted to.
In the planning phase, we tried to come up with a suitable venue. We weren’t sure how many people would show up. I didn’t trust my mansion to hold the crowd so we asked the owner of CrossFit Durham if we could have it there and, being the coolest ever, he said yes.
Do you remember going to your elementary school at night, like when your mom had a PTA meeting or something? Remember how weird it seemed? The light was different, no lines of second-graders waiting to put their germy cheeks against the water fountain spigot. You’d pick up a pencil, and it just wouldn’t seem like the same implement as it did between 8:00 and 2:30. That’s a little how it was being at CFD without the overheads on, without the grunting.
Four of us had spent an hour hanging up glittery stars and white Christmas lights on the pull-up bars. Anna had had the presence of mind to bring floor lamps, so we could turn off the fluorescents, thank god. Lindsay made an awesome polaroid frame (see pic below). And that was it! We were ready for prom.
Now only 20 people came—I don’t know if folks were scared off by the prom theme or what—but those of us who were there had a ridiculously fun time. The equipment we use for WODs? Suddenly it all became props in our prom farce.
That big open space we use to do burpees? Well, that was the dancefloor.
Anyway, IT WAS SO FUN.
All because it was nighttime in the gym.
Of course, last night, I woke up because my foot was all sting-y. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to look at the sore spot. The underside of my ring toe was cut, right where the toe meets the foot. I washed it, slathered it in Neosporin, stuck a band-aid on it, and crawled back in bed.
But just as the elementary school library looks like a labyrinth after 7:00pm, ideas take different shape in the nighttime. I started spinning tales in my head. See, my friend M had a blister about this time last year, and maybe it was the State Fair and maybe it was the gym, but somehow that tiny foot wound sent her to the hospital with a staph infection. In the nighttime, with me in my bed, it seemed not only plausible that that would happen to me but an absolute done deal.
But nighttime doesn’t stop there. In the few months after her hospital stay, M’s house got robbed, and she got breast cancer. (Talk about all-time worst years, right?) So there I am last night, in the fetal position, certain that I’m going to lose everything I own and need a double mastectomy. Stupid nighttime.
This morning, after my coffee, I soaked my foot in salty water and applied more antiseptic cream, and I sit here pretty sure that I won’t be coming home to a pillaged house after my chemo treatment in a few months.
But I’m still worried I’m headed for the ER in a day or two.
Daytime. Bah!
VIHR
Sometimes I get really dedicated to Very Important Hair Removal. Now there’s one thing I’ll never do, unless maybe I start a porn career. (My doctor friend: “It’s mucosa! Would you ever shave your tongue?!” Exactly.) But I do wax my eyebrows, trim the ol’ nostril cilia, and use a
on my leg and armpit hair.
And then there’s the mustache. The mustache that my friends swear they can’t see, and I usually don’t either, until I’m sitting in my car with the late afternoon sunlight pouring in, and I flip down my visor mirror, and GOOD GOD, I LOOK LIKE GERALDO RIVERA.
And I can’t help myself, I head for the wax. This is a bad move, a stupid move, because it always ends the same way. Whether I wax it myself, or I have it waxed by a professional, no matter what kind of wax I use, or if I pluck it with tweezers, or if I steam my pores open first, or even get it threaded at the mall, I always spend the next five to seven days with tiny whiteheads on my upper lip.
What’s worse? A mustache that can only be viewed on sunny days between 4:00 and 6:00pm in my vehicle or a week’s worth of lip acne?
The mustache, right?
(Everybody pretend you don’t see my lip acne for the next week, K?)
T to the A to the S-T-E-Y*
My friend Bea has been trying to dress more like a girl. I really want to do this too. Before you get all “what is gender anyway?”, I’ll clarify and say that every person has the right to dress however he or she feels most comfortable/beautiful/happy/etc. without regard to social constructs.
…AND I know that I feel best about myself when, on the spectrum, I fall about halfway between gender-neutral and “Toddlers and Tiaras”. I like jeans and flip-flops and hoodies, but I also enjoy pink and sparklies and skirts that twirl up when you turn.
There are challenges to dressing like a girl though:
I rarely wear dresses and skirts for reasons I’ve already discussed. (But I feel pretty in them so I’ll grudgingly frock out for special occasions.)
Also, I’ve never met a pair of heels that I could wear comfortably for more than ten minutes. (That doesn’t stop me from trying every two years or so. I buy a pair, wobble around one event, and then donate them to Goodwill.)
However, I thought I could try injecting more girliness into my daily outfits. You know, put on tinted chapstick. Sometimes wear my fancy silver watch instead of my Timex Expedition. Or find some ballet flats to sub for my Tevas.
I had a $5 off birthday coupon for DSW, so I scooted over there today, thinking, they have a couple thousand pairs of shoes—I’ll have loads of options. Not so. Nothing proves the adage “Different strokes for different folks” like the array in a shoe store. This is me walking through DSW:
- No.
- No.
- Nope.
- Ew.
- What even?
- Those look like shoe-shaped poop.
- Those shoes are sluts.
And so on.
I tried on a few ballet flats, but as I mentioned in the comments of the post I linked to above, the problem with putting tiny shoes on my already-small feet is that they contrast with my substantial ass, and just in terms of physics, it seems incomprehensible that I could even balance. (Relax: This is one of the times when I’m laughing at myself.)
But eventually, after I’d snaked through ALL the aisles, I tried on a pair that didn’t make me contemplate why I don’t fall over all the time:
I mean, that’s the brand.
Thirty bucks, minus the coupon!
Pretty sure I look like a girl!
*I’ll grant that when you’re a hitmaker like Will.i.am, you probably have a lot of Yes Men around you, but seriously? Nobody wanted to tell him he was spelling ‘tasty’ wrong?