Category Archives: Social

Weekend In Review

August 6, 2007SocialMush

In which I love it when y’all bitch me out for not posting for a few days! And then I tell you about my weekend.

I was offline pretty much all weekend because I don’t have my own computer and sometimes when I go to get on the Internet, someone else is already on the Internet. Or they’ve taken their laptop into their room with them and fallen asleep with it, which is totally their right. Someday, when I grow up, I will have my own laptop, but until then I can’t always post when I want to. And sometimes I don’t want to when I can. It’s one of those things.

A Cucumber Party

Friday’s evening vegetable sales gathering mysteriously devolved into a crazy drunken dirty dancing party. At one point there were about five people in the kitchen lined up and silently grinding to the music from the stereo. The silence passed, as it has to with a group as voluble as ours, but the moment was amusing. Such serious drunken kitchen dancing!

When AmmZon and Truck went up to bed at eleven, the six of us remaining decided to vacate the house in favor of the bar. After a quick stop at Raybo’s so she could freshen up – lip gloss doesn’t apply itself, bitches – we walked up the street to the Dead Cock. Raybo and I did all sorts of fun stuff, like tweak an off duty bartender’s pierced nipples until his knuckles turned white, and dance with drunk girls in the middle of the empty dance floor in front of desperately horny rednecks. (Not that I don’t have sympathy for their horniness, but after all, it ain’t my responsibility.) After the bar closed, we all stood on the sidewalk out front hoping for a decent after hours party to be announced but it wasn’t, so we walked home where I fell asleep laid out on the back deck between Bindu and Bghead listening to Raybo and Bowling Jesus have an entirely circular argument about agnosticism and atheism. When I woke myself up a few minutes later with a little snore, I hauled myself off to bed.

A Rainy Day

Saturday the weather broke and it rained. I roused myself only to make a huge feast of Indian food. The rest of the day I lounged, napped, read, and knitted. It was lovely and relaxing and lazy.

A Trip To Greece

Sunday I straighted the house, did laundry, unloaded my jeep (it still had crap in it from the last time I went out to The Ex’s house a month ago), cleaned the party off of the back deck, took out the garbage, got my stuff upstairs, took a shower, and then went to Iowa City with the Stylist, where I had a burrito and a coffee and later, after shopping, a cocktail.

I didn’t actually shop, though, because I have no money. What I did was sit in the sci-fi section at B&N and read three entire Boy Princess mangas (they weren’t in order so I really have no idea what was going on), and then I walked from one end of the mall to the other marveling at how utterly weird malls are.

I am a foreigner to mall culture. I don’t have the right clothes, or look, or sensibility. I do not use Clinique or get my hair trimmed every six weeks or wax or wear the the clothes they sell, and neither am I properly inured to the imagery used there: the gihugent torso shot in the entrance to Abercrombie & Fitch literally stopped me in my tracks for a second. I was like, Can you have pictures like that in the mall? What about the children? And the lesbians? Do they really want to see stuff like that? And holy SHIT that’s a hot photo.

Later as I was walking along talking to the Stylist on my cell (we were at opposite ends of the mall) I said, “What? Are you kidding? That’s totally gay! And not in the fun way,” a boy working the kiosk I was passing at the time spun around with his mouth open as if he were about to be completely offended when he overheard me use the word gay in what could have been a non-PC context. But (when he saw me in my floor-length custom-made linen hippie dress and Birks) and heard me finish with, “–and not in the fun way,” he broke into a sweet grin. I winked at him and breezed on by, thinking, “Wow. The mall is like ancient Greece: check out the architecture, and all the beautiful young boys! It’s the gayest place ever. I wonder if it’s democratic, too?”

Boating Is So Fun

July 29, 2007SocialMush

In which a day of swimming and sunning on the river is so fun!

Yesterday I got to go boating on JW’s pontoon again. I had so much fun! Besides JW himself, Core and Baby Girl were there, and I invited Bghead along because the other people who were slated to go lamed out. (It turned out to be Bghead’s birthday, so I was doubly glad he was able to come along on such short notice.) We ate, we drank, we swam, we lounged in the sun! It was so fantastically relaxing! I took Bindu along too, and she freakin’ loved it. She thinks she might just be a boat dog at heart; she looked so cute in the prow sniffing the wind.

We went to the closest lock first and anchored and swam for a bit. The water felt great (yes, yes, I swam in the Mississippi: I’ll probably grow extra limbs soon). We went back to Burlington to air up the inner tube, and then went out to a nice sandy beach and parked. I laid out and swam for a few hours. Bindu met the other dogs on the beach. We humans talked and ate sandwiches and met our neighbors and people-watched or sat quietly soaking up the sun. I sat in the water and rubbed my dog all over with wet sand and she loved it. JW wanted to play cards, but I said, “We can do that at home. Here, we should enjoy the sun and the water!”

The boat had engine troubles, though, so we had to be towed back to Burlington, which took forever. Then we had to get the boat out of the water, which was much easier said than done, but suffice it to say we did not lose the trailer to the bottom of the river after all and the boat is safely trailered. After that debacle, Bghead took our sunburned and sandy selves out to dinner at The Drake.

We were seated out on the patio. There was a band and, I shit you not, they covered Big Balls! For the dinner crowd! (Our table screamed along, natch.) I sang back-up with the band for awhile, because apparently that’s the kind of attention-getting self-involved diva I am, but the river bugs were dive-bombing the stage lights something fierce and kept ending up in my cleavage so I went and sat down again. I had the pan-seared tuna and fries, but I didn’t eat the mango chutney that came with it because I think mango chutney is yucky.

Eventually we got rid of the drunk 19-year-old girl we’d picked up along the way, and piled into to the truck for the drive home. (Baby Girl did the driving because she’d managed to stay sober.) We rolled into Fairfield a little before midnight, I think, and the group parted ways.

Today I’m sunburned and lazy and didn’t even bother doing laundry. The redness of my face and shoulders is easing, so I might end up with a tan rather than having to spend the next week peeling my skin off in chunks, for which I’m prepared to be grateful.

I was napping earlier, and I had my door open to let the air conditioned air into the roasting, sweltering sauna that is the blue room in the summer. AmmZon came upstairs and informed me that she’d purchased Fudgesicles, so naturally I got up and ate one because Fudgesicles freakin’ rawk.

Oh, and then I ate an entire frozen pizza and watched television for an hour, because that’s the kind of exciting rock star stuff I do. Now I’m going back to bed because I’ll need to get up early enough to wash something to wear to work tomorrow and pick up that loan check and pay Goodyear the rest of the money I owe them for fixing the jeep last Friday.

Home so totally rocks, peeps!

July 8, 2007Social, Spiritual, WorkMush

In which it’s good to be home.

(First of all, let me just get it out of the way: I love my blue dog soooo much! K thx.)

Saying “I had such a good time at Amma!” is so silly I’m not even going to say it. I didn’t have ‘a good time,’ I was led back to myself – as I am every year when I go to see Her – and I feel several orders of magnitude better than I have in a long while. (And yes, I’ve started the Amma post but it isn’t finished yet.)

When NLW dropped me off yesterday, Truck was on the porch. He told me he was going to have a few people over later; I said that would be fine ’cause I didn’t think anything short of a full-on rave in my room was gonna keep me up past seven or eight because I’d slept from 5 to 11 that morning and was a wee bit behind on my sleep.

All sorts of groovy folk showed up, and I had a BBQed veggie burger and some lovely carbonized carrots and sweet onions, too. I played with kids a lot ’cause they were sort of right there and couldn’t be ignored.

Then I went to bed and slept for 12 hours. Yay!

This afternoon I called The Ex and he said I could swing out to the house tomorrow evening. I’m going to take some boxes out and try to organize my shit; I also want to grab some summer clothes (IT IS SO FUCKING HOT IN JULY OMGWTFBBQ) and some books and my altar and crap like that.

In other news, I may have an interview this week in Cedar Rapids, IA for a support job of some kind. I don’t even really know what the job description is yet, but if it turns out to sound way cool I’ll want your good vibes.

I quite possibly should be getting off my arse here soon, and using my life for something more profound than trying to do as much sleeping and avoidance of stress as I can. There’s a lot to be said for a nice decompression period, but part of the battle I fought in my marriage was about being trapped too far away from the things I wanted for myself. Now I’m nearing the one-year mark (I left The Ex last August) and I think I’m about to rejoin the land of the living. The booze and drugs and laziness and sleep-a-thons were great, but hardly the best use of my life. Or if I’m going to continue to live like that, I should at least do it in sexier shoes, which means I need to make some money.

I’ve been considering and shelving a variety of ideas about what I want to do now – I hadn’t moved out of Fairfield before because it seemed impossibly hard while I was recovering from depression – but now it seems like something I could actually manage. I am rather a city girl at heart, and I enjoy things like being able to eat at restaurants on Sundays, public transportation, culture, and fewer flying insects. Maybe I’ll live in Iowa City for awhile; who knows.

Today I ate leftover broccoli and potatoes from brunch and have spent much of the rest of the day in my room. Truck’s started making electric guitar noise in a different key than the song I’m listening to, though, so it might be time to turn off the iTunes and head outside for a bit.