Because first place definitely belongs to Jamie Casino.
What a journey this opus took me on!
When it started out, I was all
what is happening? He’s commercialing about his old commercials?
But then, fifteen seconds in, I was like
he’s made a commercial that’s also an episode of Law & Order! AND HOLY SHIT, HE’S DOING PACINO. I DON’T KNOW IF IT’S MICHAEL CORLEONE OR TONY MONTANA, BUT HE’S DEFINITELY DOING PACINO.
It just gets better and better after that. Dude clearly spent some cashish on production, which makes the script problems/delights all the more glaring: “’til one day my little brother Michael and his friend were two of four people whose lives were taken.”
Um, what? Two of four people? We’re doing fractions? Also, “lives were taken”? By whom? That brick wall? And UGH (EEEEE!) with the passive voice.
And then we hit 0:45, and I don’t even I don’t even I can’t what is
IT’S A MUSIC VIDEO TOO?!?!?!
These are my thoughts after that point:
So many roses.
DEATH ROSES. (I thought this in a heavy metal voice.)
Fog machine-strobe combo. Mm-hm.
Church. Sure.
Sledgehammer? OK.
FLAMING SLEDGEHAMMER WITH A CROSS? MY LIFE IS PERFECT RIGHT NOW.
So many cartoon newspaper pot-shots at the Chief. Probably had it coming. You don’t go up against a guy like Casino unless you’re Frank Serpico, which would be Pacino versus Pacino, which would be weird, and by weird I mean awesome.
Emotional manipulation, heavy metal, hair gel, and fiyaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh—god, this commercial is everything, everything, EVERYTHING!
I’m CMV-negative, so Mr. Happy Pants, a 6’4″, 205-lb, atheist, mechanical engineering postdoc who said this in his donor profile
What life lessons would you hope to pass on to your own child one day?
Work hard. Read voraciously. Be well rounded and always improve your skills in some area. Ignore television at any cost; learn to resist socialization, advertising, and propaganda; eat whole foods. Go to the mountains and the desert. Cultivate a respect for evidence and develop the power of accurate observation. Learn mathematics and calibrate your standard of “knowing” in everyday life against the mathematical one.
is out.
I’m sad about it. I wanted to have Mr. Happy Pants’ babies. To be honest, I wanted Mr. Happy Pants to be my husband.
Now I’m leaning towards a grad student in systems engineering who’s summited Kilimanjaro. His parenting philosophy doesn’t make me swoon like Mr. HP’s, and neither babykilimanjaro.com nor babysystemsengineer.com do anything for me, but he’s CMV-negative.
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I’m not making the decision to have a child on my own out of fear, per se, but my sense of urgency is renewed when a 41-year-old friend goes in for her 7-week appointment and they can’t find the baby’s heartbeat.
I want this. If I wait too long, it may not happen. Or it may happen and then no heartbeat.
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My period comes on like a earthquake. Out to dinner with friends, I find myself pressing on the flesh under my belly button and rocking side to side. By the time I get home, my cramps are the worst I can ever remember. I climb onto my bed, prop myself on my elbows and knees, and jam a heating pad against my uterus. I moan and sway there for long time. The situation is not improving. A hot bath helps, but damn if it isn’t 90 minutes before the ibuprofen starts to kick in and the tremors subside. Is my womb trying to prepare me for childbirth?
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Last visit, the clinic told me to come in for a baseline ultrasound on Day 1, 2, or 3 of my cycle. I’m led to a dimly lit room with black and white photos of cherubic babies on the walls. The nurse’s assistant tells me to undress from the waist down, hop up on the table, and cover myself with the drape. I go to the restroom and remove my tampon first. Worried that I’ll bleed on their table, I’m relieved to find one of these under the drape:
Minus adorable wall-eyed puppy.
The nurse enters the room and tells me to put my feet in the stirrups. She slides a lubey wand up-in. My ovaries—at least that’s what she says they are—appear on a grainy screen. “There’s the right one… aaaaand left. Beautiful,” she says.
I guess that bodes well. Now I just have to order sperm.
See, that puppy just wants to be with her horsey best friend and even goes through the RAIN to say hi, and that hot rancher just keeps takin her back (sigh—ha ha), and the puppy lady is like *sorry about that*… *again*, and *hey, quit escapin under the fence!*, and then the puppy gets adopted and put in that fancy car, but that puppy is not a fancy car city type, she’s a *ranch dog*, and that Clydesdale does the horse equivalent of running through a crowded airport to stop a loved one from boarding a plane for that internship in Paris because it LOVES that puppy, and it jumps over that fence RIGHT AT THE SWELL OF THE SONG, and its posse is all *Yo back that ass up, city slicker*, and the city slicker’s like WHOA WTF, and the puppy goes back to the hot rancher and her horsey BFF, and I’ve watched it seven times.
Eventually, I ended up at Macy’s, which seemed to be no better.
Maybe I should start carrying a backpack again. (Cue Kate screaming at her screen.) — Avid Bruxist (@avidbruxist) January 10, 2014
The only half-decent ones I found were like 160 bucks. No. Absolutely not.
Purses I won’t buy, part 1: those with a # > than 0 in the hundreds place It’s a glorified bucket for my stuff. It’s a stuff bucket. Jesus. — Avid Bruxist (@avidbruxist) January 10, 2014
My gay husband Paul reminded me that Gypsy Rose Lee, too, wore tassels. That was a good point. I told him I’d buy a tassel-less purse and some sassy pasties.
Finally, I hit Sears--yes, Sears--and the first one I picked up was from a designer with the same name as my sister. Fate.
You may be wondering why I needed boots, given that last year I bought tall boots and short boots. Well. The tall boots, which I loved so much, are wicked uncomfortable. They just barely zip around my calves. It's like wearing calf-tourniquets all day. Plus, as I mentioned, they're so tall, the tops dig into my inner thigh fat. So I never wear them.
See, Violet does this thing when she's nervous. She collects my shoes and bras. Doesn't chew them; just puts them in her bed or snuggles with them on the couch. I often come home from work to find a shoe, a slipper, a flip-flop, and/or a brassiere next to a warm spot on the chaise.
Look closely at the top right and bottom left. You can see her shadow against the wall.
Annoying to have to go around the house, gather my footwear, and toss my undergarments back in the hamper, but I can't get mad at her because
she soooooooo cuuuuuuuuuuuute.
And besides, she never chewed them.
MOTHERF
She must've been real nervous that day. So long, short boots.
The good news is, I went to DSW and found the same exact ones, except they didn't have them in brown, so I bought black. Fine, since I can't wear my black tall boots anyway because torture.
But now I need brown boots. Maybe brown tall boots? That don't boa-constrict or jam themselves into my laygs?
I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
Also, Kate told me to buy
Old Navy t-shirts
in a variety of colors, you know, for layering with cardigans/jackets/whatnot. So I did.
...It's possible I've done less of the layering and more of the just wearing them with jeans and calling it a day.
Also, I haven't worn a skirt yet this school year.
1. I only cry twice (once bc Feelings, and once when they draw blood for the infectious disease screening).
2. The nurse takes my height and weight by saying, “How tall are you, and how much do you weigh?” That’s cool.
3. Then she says, “You’re here alone?” I reply in the affirmative, and as if to explain the question, she says, “OK, sometimes the husband is coming in from another direction.” (ahem—hetero-normative!!, and also, See #1.)
4. A 38-year-old woman’s chance of conception, when trying, is 12%. With drugs, it can go up to 20%.
5. My insurance covers blood tests but maybe-probably not ultrasounds, insemination, and such because I’m using donor sperm. It would, definitely, cover all of that for 3 cycles if I were using a husband’s. (Read: discrimination.) The financial person says she’ll call BlueCross/BlueShield and let me know what she finds out.
6. The doc says he’d guess I’ve been exposed to CMV (a virus that can cause birth defects) because I hang around germ-monsters for a living, but the blood test results will be back on Friday. If, by some random chance, I’m CMV-negative, I’ll have to choose another donor because Mr. Happy Pants is CMV-positive. Guess I’ll wait to set up the new blog because I don’t want to jinx it by registering babyhappypants.com.
7. As of today, a real thing I’ve uttered to another person: “I’ve been told I have a tiny cervix.”
8. I could already pass for 4 months pregnant any day of the fucking week.
#nofilter #hahahajk #allthefilters
[Edit: After a commenter told me to “stop it”, I realized that it sounds like I’m putting myself down here. I’m not. I think I look pregnant, but it’s kind of cute, no?]
9. My iPhone app tells me I’ll ovulate on Valentine’s Day, which I think is a really sweet gesture on my ovaries’ part. But turns out the druggy drugs they’ll give me will make me ovulate whenever we say Go. So.
I don’t really talk to strangers much. Maybe because I have some social anxiety that prevents it. Maybe because I learned about Stranger Danger when I was kid—you remember: mustachioed guy with Mars bars offering rides home in his windowless van.
But one place I always found it easy to strike up conversations with people I didn’t know was the dog park. I used to go there all the time when my dogs were younger, and something about being in a fenced-in space watching these lovable beings running around, and slobbering, and pooping, makes people want to share with others about how their specific dog runs around, and slobbers, and poops.
So one day, I was chatting with a stranger—I’m sure—about the minutiae of our dogs’ bowel movements, when somehow we got off on a different topic. We started talking about creamsicles. You know what those are, right?
Orange popsicles with a vanilla center.
I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid and I’d hear popsicles, I’d be like, “Ooooh!” but if they turned out to be creamsicles, I was all
Good god. They were the best.
Anyway, this particular stranger said, “You know, Arby’s has a creamsicle milkshake.”
STOP.
WUT.
Now I was at the dog park in Carrboro when this happened, and if you’ve ever been there, you know there’s an Arby’s, like, a quarter of a mile away. And I was like, Fuuuuuuuuuuuck this place—I’m out. I loaded up my dogs and headed for the drive-thru.
I wasn’t familiar with Arby’s menu—I mean, is anybody? Does ANYBODY go to Arby’s? Be honest, how many of you have been to Arby’s in the last month?
No, it’s definitely a nationwide drug front.
Anyway, I got some kind of sandwich and some fries—you know to balance out the meal—and the motherfucking creamsicle milkshake.
I only ate about half the sandwich and half the fries because they were just OK, but when I tell you the creamsicle milkshake… was a creamsicle milkshake—listen, it was a creamsicle… but also a milkshake. I was in dire ice cream headache pain but could not stop slurping it down. Thing was gone in 2½ minutes.
I lived in Hillsborough at the time, so I went home, dropped the dogs off, and headed to Durham to go out for the night. So I was on I-85 headed east when the stomach cramp hit me. It was one of those that makes you kind of stand up out of your seat, as if you might be able to get away from it?
And I was scared because I was on that stretch of highway between Hillsborough and Durham where there are no exits whatsoever. Hoping that the cramp was a one-off, I settled back into my seat, but alas. Alas! My guts started convulsing inside me. I hit the gas pedal. I needed to make it to Route 70, and I needed to do a very rude thing indeed to some poor gas station’s bathroom. I sped towards Durham, but it became VERY clear VERY soon that I was just not. going. to make it.
And that’s a weird moment, you know? When you realize that in a very short time you’re going to be a person who has shat in the woods next to the highway.
For the rest of your life.
You can’t un-become that person.
Forever and ever, if you find yourself in a game of I Never, and somebody says, “I’ve never dropped a roadside deuce,” you’re going to have to drink. It’s very humbling.
But I didn’t really have time to consider what was happening. I pulled off the interstate, grabbed some napkins from the Arby’s bag still in the front seat, and sprinted—as much as one can sprint while squeezing her ass cheeks together—into the woods.
Now I grew up in the country, just down yonder from Mr. Proffitt’s cattle farm, so I know of which I’m about to speak. When I say what came out of my body was a cowpie, I mean, in circumference, height, volume, consistency, everything—
’twas a cow pie.
Like, have you ever taken a shit so big that, when you stood up, you were off-balance? That’s how it was. Like all my organs had shifted to make room for it and now they had to slide back into place.
I staggered back to my car and made it home, and everything was totally fine—I didn’t end up in the ER or anything–but the take-away, of course, is that Stranger Danger is not always a dude in a van with candy. Sometimes it’s a friendly person at the dog park with advice about fast food.
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Dad and I drove to Massachusetts and back for Christmas. You’re welcome.
Dad: (apropos of I don’t know what) I am one clever son of a bitch.
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Dad: (recalling an acquaintance) What was her name? Siduri? No, that was the barmaid from Gilgamesh.
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Dad: Stuff is fuckin delicious.
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Dad: (on the trip north) My ass hurts. Not the ass. The muscles underneath the ass. The ass muscles.
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Dad: Hard to know who to root for. I guess I’m rooting for the Buddhists.
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Dad: You and I could start a dog farm!
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Dad: (digging in his coat pocket, where he has stowed a few, loose) Care for a ginger snap?
**********
Dad: I pressed the button for water and instead the machine gave me something disgusting, like root beer. Who drinks root beer? You like root beer?
Me: Sure.
Dad: Well, de gustibus no est disputandum. That means “Carthage must be destroyed”. No, just kidding.
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My 4-year-old niece: An M&M is a dead gumdrop.
Dad: That’s poetic. Metaphor.
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Dad: (after the waitress set my steak in front of me and headed back to the kitchen) What’d she say?
Me: Your liver’s coming out.
Dad: That sounds serious.
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Dad: (at Starbucks) Large black coffee. None of their hippie concoctions.
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Dad: (on the trip south) My ass hurts. Not the ass. The bones and joints underneath the ass.
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Dad: I don’t go to Mummy’s dentist. I don’t like Mummy’s dentist. She’s all smiley and nice.
**********
Dad: I’m glad I showered and shaved before we ran into your friend. That way she didn’t go around saying, “I saw Amy Scott with her derelict father.”
“There’s probably another explanation.”
“Could anything else have happened to it?”
“Maybe it’s just misplaced.”
But it was in that box. Inside another box, in my closet, next to my socks. And my house has never been broken into. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw?
There isn’t any. Someone I know took my great grandmother’s engagement ring.
I filed a police report. Durham PD has a detective who does nothing but pawn shop investigations. He’s very good, I was told by a clerk at National Pawn as I peered into their jewelry case. The investigator asked for a photo. I didn’t have a photo. I drew a picture, added details from the 1998 appraisal I had in my files, and emailed it to him.
I haven’t heard anything.
I didn’t expect to, really. I can’t imagine a friend or acquaintance taking it for the money. I don’t have destitute people as guests in my home (though I don’t like what that says about me). Years ago, a woman in my therapy group shared about her shoplifting compulsion. It wasn’t that she needed to—she had plenty of money—and she clearly knew better, but she had a pathology. I assume it’s the same in this case.
Speaking of pathology, my mind is doing weird things.
The day after I wrote the last post, I let the dogs in and found myself standing at the door unable to move. I stared at the door jamb and, in the middle of the day on a Sunday with my two pit bulls at my feet in a house where I’ve never felt unsafe, flipped the lock on the knob and threw the deadbolt.
In a fit of “Do I really trust who I trust?”, I changed the password on all my protected blog posts.
And I keep having fantasies of the ring’s return. Of a friend coming to me, crying and sheepish, to confess. Of finding an anonymous package in my mailbox. Of the detective calling and saying, “It turned up at the Picasso on Roxboro and Club.” And yes, of finding it in my laundry basket and having to eat crow. I would gladly eat crow. But it’s not in my laundry basket. It would’ve had to slither out of the box, that was inside the other box, in my closet, next to my socks.
Maybe this experience hasn’t changed me. When a friend asked if he could invite two new acquaintances to my New Year’s Eve party, I said yes without any hesitation. Is that because I still believe in people, love people, want to know people? Or is it because I literally have nothing else to lose? There’s literally nothing else anyone could take from my house that means anything to me.
I guess that’s not true. If someone took the dogs, I’d lose my fucking mind.
In my life, I’ve owned only one thing of any value. I mean, aside from my house, which is supposedly worth more than anything else, but let’s be frank, it’s a 750-square-foot glorified shed in the ghetto. People have cars worth more than my house.
And my car, which cost—I don’t even remember—$18,000? I’ll be paying my car off for a couple more years.
My computer is a 2006 Mac desktop which weighs approximately a pood. The television that sits in my spare room was a hand-me-down from my friend when she moved back to Europe in 2008.
So really, it was just the ring. My great grandmother’s engagement ring that my parents gave me for my college graduation. Platinum, a round-cut diamond in a square setting with three tiny diamonds on either side, the stones together weighing almost a carat.
I never wore it. Why would I wear it? Most days, I remember to put on a pair of silver earrings, but I don’t do sparklies, I don’t do baubles. No, I kept the ring in a little tan velvety box, which itself sat in a gold cardboard box, accompanied by a brooch and the only pair of gold earrings I own, in the small closet in my bedroom, next to my sock box. Every six months or so, I would open the box, look at the ring, slip in on my finger, and put in back in the box.
And now it’s gone.
I don’t know why—maybe because I was getting dressed in a sparkly sweater for a Christmas party, or maybe because a friend at the gym got engaged last weekend—but last night I noticed the box, next to my socks.
I opened it and found the brooch and earrings. The ring was gone.
No, I didn’t lose it.
No, I didn’t put it in a safe deposit box and forget.
It was in that box, next to my socks, and now it’s gone.
And the hardest part about this situation is that my house has never been broken into.
So what that means is that someone came into my house, invited, looked through my stuff, and stole my ring.
And it could be anybody. I have parties. I invite friends and acquaintances and neighbors. I don’t know them all well. I hang out by the fire pit while they mill about my house. I do that because, and this is the hardest part, it would never occur to me to walk into a person’s house—friend or stranger—and take so much as a postage stamp. So I never imagined anyone would do it to me.
When I was in 5th grade, Monica Green got a birthstone ring. It was purple. She was skinny. It fell on the floor of Mrs. Heller’s classroom. I picked it up and tried it on. It more or less fit my pinkie. Eventually, Monica realized it was gone and saw that I had it. She told Mrs. Heller, who then inquired. No, I said, this ring is my sister’s. And remarkably—I can’t, as a teacher, imagine letting something like that go—I was allowed to leave school with the ring.
Years later, when I read “The Telltale Heart”, I would get sweaty remembering the way the ring had felt awkward on my little finger, the way it had sparkled in my dollhouse bathtub where I dropped it, the way I hadn’t been able to shake the cloud that hung over me, the way the next day I had waited until Mrs. Heller wasn’t looking, walked casually by Monica’s desk, and dropped it on a pile of pencil shavings inside. And the relief—good god, the relief.
I should have said sorry to Monica. I should have confessed to the teacher. I still think about that. But the important thing was the lesson I learned, which was that it’s real shitty to take something that’s not yours. For them, definitely, but in addition, it will make you feel real shitty.
And so I don’t do that. I don’t take things that don’t belong to me.
And now I feel so mad and sad and stupid. The box wasn’t hidden. It was in my closet, but it wasn’t hidden.
Why didn’t I hide it?
As I sobbed to Mom this morning, she said it’s a good thing, or it means a good thing about me, it means that I’m trusting. Is that a good thing?
I know it’s an object. And objects are just objects.
But this object can’t be replaced and neither can my belief in people.
In my life, I’ve worked very hard to become less judgmental, and I have had great success. But lately I’ve been seeing this photo show up in my feed
and to those of you who have Liked or Shared it, I want to say this: I am judging you.
I am judging you because you’re sharing propaganda about an issue you don’t even understand. LITERALLY NO ONE, not even those who are on strike themselves, thinks fast food workers should be paid more than soldiers.
But some of us think that LITERALLY EVERYONE deserves a living wage. And if you comment that minimum wage is a living wage, I will judge you so hard, my head will probably ‘splode.
And if you truly believe that raising the minimum wage and paying soldiers more are mutually exclusive prospects, that lifting the bottom doesn’t in turn bring up the middle, I don’t. even. know. where. the hell. to begin.
