In which we find the “Greenwich Village of Indianapolis,” (don’t laugh, it isn’t polite) and it really is Good!
There’s a neighborhood north of downtown called Broad Ripple where all the brew pubs and coffee shops and bike shops and jazz clubs and groovy people hang out. It’s a half-hour drive from here, of course. It’s adorable — centered around a greenway that used to be a train track and all the buildings are homes rather than business buildings.
We went to eat at a Thai place but it no longer existed. We ate instead at the Broad Ripple Brew Pub and it was the best food I’ve had since we got here. The menu had a vegetarian Shepherd’s Pie on it, fer chrissakes, along with several other vegetarian options. They also served traditional pub fare, like fish & chips and Scotch eggs. I had a spinach melt and chips, and it was amazing. (Iron and dairy! What more could a veggie girl ask for!) Bread had a blackened tuna sandwich, BoSe had a shrimp po’ boy, and PaKa had the fish & chips. The guys shared a Scotch egg appetizer. Apparently the pub’s IPA was really good as well, but I settled for water since I’m really not much of a beer drinker and I wasn’t really in the mood for a raspberry ale or mead.
After we ate, we sat in the grass near the greenway for a bit, examining a bit of random art. At first glance it was rather cartoony, but the more you looked at it the more you saw. (The piece has faces on all four sides. It’s pretty amazing.) We got some dog love from random canine passersby. I saw some cute boys; the guys saw some cute girls. Then we meandered the block and a half back to BoSe’s rig and he drove us back to the motel.
The next time we go up there, I want to eat falafel and listen to jazz. Oh yes I do.
In other news, I spent much of yesterday afternoon lounging by the pool, and I have a patch of sunburn on my chest and it itches.
In which we go to the airport.
Yesterday evening Bread, BoSe, Truck and I got into a motor vechicle and went in search of dinner. We ended up in the Mexican ghetto at a taqueria. Once I got the door open and stepped into the restaurant, an extraordinarily drunk man approached me…
…and promptly passed out on the floor. Hard.
No one in the joint even twitched.
I bent over to examine him — the floor was hard and he’d bounced his head right off of it — and satisfied myself that he wasn’t bleeding, convulsing, or puking. Then I straightened up, twitched my purse strap back up on my shoulder, and said, “Hard day, huh.”
A guy sitting alone at a booth with a beer and a basket of tortilla chips chortled. “Hard day,” he repeated. “Heh.”
We sat ourselves and ate Mexican food.
Then we went to downtown Indianapolis, bought coffees, and sat near the war memorial fountain and people-watched. I made friends with a horse who was working pulling a buggy around and around the circle.
Indianapolis, while kinda cute, didn’t particularly impress me. Indianapolis is closed on Sundays. There’s a few coffee shops and a lot of bail bondsmen open, but everything else is locked up tight. The war memorial park circle was full of tourists with cameras, which I expected, and middle-aged profilers on motorcycles, which I didn’t.
After collecting Bowling Jesus from the airport, we hopped on the Interstate and headed back to our motel. Bowling Jesus told us about his whirlwind trip to a family wedding. He said, and I fucking quote: “I got to dance naughty with my hot cousin.”
Which might be the white trashest thing I have ever heard in my entire life! I laughed so hard I nearly wet myself.
In which it works!
I used to use Gallery rather than Flickr, then shit happpened, and I started using Flickr. But now! Finally! Gallery is back up on the box! (I’m still importing old albums, so the content will increase as time goes by.)
In which you can hardly tell it’s the weekend.
Today is the first day of our third week in Indy. I feel both as if I just arrived, and as if I’ve been here forEVer.
BoSe and Bread had a nine o’clock this morning. I tried to get the bid done last night, but it’s hard to work in the evening because the boys wanna relax and keep popping in and out so it’s hard to get any questions answered, like, “What the fuck is a D&R wrirmiumumm?” or “Don’t you know how to spell chimney?” or “Is this a 4 or a 9?”
So I had the bid nearly finished except for calculating the siding (damn gable ends, man) when I went to bed. Which means I got up at 7:30 this morning to do math.
Math, people.
Actually, I made Bread do it. But still.
I got the bid finished and printed for the guys and turned in our expenses to Dee all before 8:30 in the morning. BoSe ran for coffee, so now it’s nine and I’m listening to Mozart In The Morning and sipping a hazelnut latte and the door and window are open and the guys have five appointments scheduled for today and I’ll probably be alone much of the day. Unless Truck or PaKa come over to hang out.
I don’t think I have anything in particular to work on, so I guess I’ll troll Xactimate’s built-in Help system (I totally RTFM) to see if it can teach me how to make it calculate siding easily without having to draw the entire goddamned house.
Sunday, of course, is laundry day. I hope to God we manage to actually sleep in tomorrow.
In other news, Bread had one of those disturbing anxiety dreams that make you feel all discombobulated when you wake up. Apparently he dreamed Indiana had weird laws and his mom called to warn him but he got arrested anyway and was in one of those paper suits, handcuffed into a paddy wagon, and kids were asking him for cigarettes. He said he felt all weird all morning.
In which I woke up on the wrong side of the bed entirely.
I woke up totally fucking aggro this morning. Then my computer was acting like a slow piece of shit while I was trying to produce some printed bids. Then the guys were freaked out about this thing and that thing (this gig is incredibly talky — everyone’s always talking, and either freaking out or reassuring each other in turns… I think it’s a sales thing). Then Bread had said last week he would for certain take Bowling Jesus to the airport this morning, but then he changed his mind and left for a scope with BoSe so now I have to drive to the goddamned airport and I don’t want to do it.
I hate it when he flakes like that, especially when he expects me to unfuck it for him. He does it to people all the time, but if someone flakes on him you never hear the end of it.
There are still contract issues between WGC and 2X4, and our ‘team leader’ is maddeningly vague about it. We keep hearing that “everyone’s making ten grand a week here!” but no one admits to it. Who the hell is this nebulous “everyone”? It’s frustrating and maddening and we’re all vascillating from really feeling confident that this was a good idea to feeling convinced we’re being made chumps of. The emotional rollercoaster, while interesting, kinda sucks.
You wouldn’t believe how much talking goes on. We’re all living in the same motel, so every evening everyone comes back from the various corners of the city, changes into shorts, pours a drink, and starts making the rounds. There are guys wandering around for hours, chatting and chatting and chatting and chatting. It’s a huge game of “so-and-so said this, did you hear what what’s-his-face said?” and information and gossip swirl around like oil on a puddle, forming and reforming into different configurations.
I’m the defacto software expert, so people call and drop in all the time looking for help with Xactimate. Rarely do they actually need help using the software; usually they have a policy question but they don’t know enough to know the distinction. I’ve helped people put images into Word documents, I’ve designed and distributed templates for business cards, I re-wrote the 2X4 flyers into 4th grade English, and I’ve helped my team leader on his bids more than once. PaKa is coming over in a few minutes because he doesn’t know how to calculate drip edge or water&ice or something.
I’ve been drinking too much coffee. Grrr.
Update: It’s gotten worse. The talk-talk-talking, the rumours, the crazy girly insanity. This whole scene is driving me nuts. One guy was ousted today; he was attempting to do what I do — support salesmen by doing back-end data entry and officy stuff — but the team leader told the guys who were using his services that they’d be fired if they continued to do so. It’s worse than high school, peeps. If we don’t get that check today I’m gonna go postal. I think it’s time for a drink.
In which it’s weird.
Being this close to the time line means that the sun is still (just barely) above the horizon at nine PM. It causes us to eat dinner really, really late. And we tend to stay up until eleven or twelve every night.
I bet it’s awesome to be a kid here ’cause it’s light sooooo late during summer vacation!
In which I bitch and moan. A lot. About stupid sophomoric shit. All because I made the mistake of examining myself nude in the big motel mirror after my shower this afternoon.
I heard when I was a kid — and I have no idea if this is true or not — that one forms all of one’s fat cells as an infant, and that their density determines how fat one can become as an adult. Really fat Michelin Tire babies are capable, therefore, of growing up to be hugely obese, while skinny babies aren’t. Or something. Anyway, the point is, I guess I wasn’t a very fat baby.
Now I’m 37, and although I’m not dimensionally all that big, I think I’m carrying about as much fat as my body can possibly carry. I’ve suddenly developed this weird spare tire above my hips, and my ass, believe it or not, has developed dimples. Of all things. Six months ago I was pudgy but smooth; suddenly, I’m barely bigger but I’m dimply and bumpy and I’m grossing myself out.
You have to understand that I am a very, very sedentary person… for a variety of perfectly reasonable reasons:
- I work sedentary desk jobs.
- I live in a state where the majority of the time it’s either really fucking hot or really fucking cold out. (Iowa isn’t like Oregon where you can just go out and do stuff.)
- I don’t like to exercise for the sake of exercising. It’s excruciatingly boring, plus I think I don’t make those nifty endorphins that sporty people go on and on about. I don’t feel good after exercise, I just feel hot and pissed off, usually.
- I tend to enjoy things like reading, writing, thinking, making music, watching films: not exactly athletic pursuits.
- I’m left-handed and a bit awkward so I never really developed feelings of confidence doing physical things. (For instance, in grade school, my P.E. teacher claimed he couldn’t teach me to hit a ball with a bat because I was a lefty. Ditto tennis. And even bowling. And when I was able to learn how to do something, I generally wasn’t any good at it anyway.)
- I live in the country, so I drive everywhere because literally nothing’s within walking distance.
- My spouse is also sedentary. (He hasn’t realized it yet. He worked construction for a long time so he got his physical activity at work, but he’s been doing truly physical labor less and less and less over the years and, like me, he’s never learned the habit of doing physical stuff in his free time for the purpose of being healthy.)
- The only physical activities I like are the ones I don’t notice I’m doing (like walking for transportation or dancing or sex), yoga, and swimming. I couldn’t care less about any of the rest of them. Honestly.
- I’ve never made an effort to be physically active because, I think, I don’t actually know how.
When I was a kid, I played outside and ran around a lot like kids do. When I lived in Oregon, I went out and did things like hike Multnomah Falls or Mt. Hood because that’s what you do when you live somewhere like that. When I was in college, I walked everywhere because that’s how college works.
Now I’m old and married and fat and I live a lifestyle that is self indulgent and lazy, and I’m ready to admit now that I don’t know how to change it.
I don’t look like I feel; I look like a fat white married chick who’s pushing forty. I look like a Midwesterner, and not like the clever, funny, friendly, hip, talented, sexy creature I really am. I hate being vain. I do. I never cared about this process (of getting fat and dumpy) until one day I’d passed some limit I didn’t even know I’d set: it suddenly appears that I have become too fat for me to stand my own self.
There are problems elsewhere as well, as long as I’m listing the many obstacles to achieving any kind of beauty. For instance, my skin is still lousy. I thought it would have cleared up by now, but it hasn’t. I still have oily skin and blemishes, and I’ll always have scarring. Oh, and another peeve is the upper lid on my right eye; it will apparently always be a little heavy so my gaze is lopsided. I will always have this huge Morgan nose, of course. And I will always have this soft Hall jawline, if one can even use the word in reference to the slope between my jaw and throat. And my hair, oh JOY, is still falling out and has been for a few years. (My paternal grandmother had extremely thin hair; I think I’ve inherited some female pattern hair loss gene. Christ.) At first I’d thought the hair loss was anxiety-related, but it hasn’t stopped and my hair keeps getting thinner. And, if all that weren’t enough, my two upper front teeth are overlapping more and more as time goes by (because teeth move toward the front of the mouth and crowd each other out, that’s just what they do), and obviously I didn’t deserve nice, even teeth because I was already just so pretty.
I’ve never had hopes of being a great beauty, but damn this is an awful lot of strikes against one girl. I made peace with my nose and chin in my early twenties (mainly because my excellent eyebrows and my awesome ass made up for any other shortcomings), but the rest of it is pissing me off. Especially the hair — that’s just insult to injury. And my ass, well, it’s pushing 40 like the rest of me.
I almost wish I had a fundamentally weaker sense of self-worth, or at least self-image, so that I’d have freaked out earlier rather than letting this fat thing go so inexcusably far. It’s just that I’ve always generally been pretty much at peace with how I looked, rationalizing, as all average-looking girls do, that I had a killer personality and great talent and I totally put out on first dates, so I didn’t have to worry about not being beautiful… even though women are still judged more on their looks than their worth.
The plan:
Doesn’t exist. Umpteen times I’ve started these very small, easy exercise regimens in the past six or seven years. Some were so simple it’s weird I didn’t do them, like: ‘do 25 sit-ups before bed three nights a week,’ or ‘go to low impact step aerobics at the rec center twice a week.’
Perhaps I had to get truly grossed out with myself before I could develop the gumption to do something like eat differently or work out. We’ll see. In my heart of hearts, I believe I need to make drastic changes to the whole shape of my life because the inertia is just too great… for instance, I’ve walked more since we’ve been in Indy than I have in the past year. It’s like they tell addicts: one has to change one’s playground and one’s playmates to effect real change in behavior. I have tried before to eat better and exercise, but it lasts a few weeks and then it’s the dead of winter and I never go anywhere and no one sees me so I forget even to be vain and it’s freezing in that old house so I end up baking sweets and cuddling up with a book and some cake. Or a whole milk latte. And then I have great intentions again but the next thing you know it’s a hundred and ten degrees outside with a humidity index of 98% and all I want to do is lie in front of the box fan with a very cold cocktail, and it’s too hot to eat dinner so we don’t and then the sun goes down and we drive to town for whatever’s available at ten o’clock at night which is usually something fried in Whirl like Torino’s or McDonald’s food.
I know I need to make changes, but I have never tried to form a new habit that I didn’t actually want to form, so I don’t know how. (Obviously I’ve started various new habits over the years, but they were things I genuinely wanted to do.) I might have to develop a whole new form of humility and join Curves or something, and force myself to become genuinely emotionally involved in the process. God knows I can’t buy pre-packaged diet food systems, because they’re none of them vegetarian.
Gack. Just… gack.
In which I’m entirely too old for this meme, but wtf.
[PREP]
[ ] You’ve been to a tanning salon.
[ ] You watch The OC and/or Laguna Beach/ The Hills.
[x] You own a cell phone
[ ] You own something designer.
[ ] You love going to the mall.
[x] You take your cellphone everywhere.
[x] You own an iPod and/or an MP3 player.
[x] You love Starbucks.
[ ] You love flip flops.
Total x’s= 4
[GOTH]
[ ] Red or black is one of your favorite colors.
[ ] You have thought about death.
[ ] You wear chains.
[ ] You like heavy metal.
[ ] You love/ like Hot Topic.
[ ] You have worn black lipstick.
[ ] Your hair is dark.
[ ] You dislike preps.
[ ] You’re an atheist.
[x] You have/Want piercings in unusual places?
Total x’s= 1
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In which my head is like a sieve.
I applied a new template today. I like it. I’d gotten sick of the last one, because I have a short attention span.
I think I’m almost caught up on my blogroll. Having sketchy connectivity got me way behind. (If I haven’t been reading you lately, I’m sorry and I’ll try to be better, my babies!)
I’m missing having a real kitchen. Eating out and grilling, while fun, are hard on a vegetarian. (Er, mostly vegetarian. I eat fish under duress, and there’s been a lot of that lately.) I miss meals with side dishes. I miss spinach. I miss being able to cook what I want to eat, instead of having to find something on the Denny’s menu that isn’t pork.
I think I need to buy some vitamins or something.
I can’t think of anything clever to write. I think of clever things all day, but when I go to write them down they’ve fallen out of my head.
I intend to start every paragraph with “I”.
I want to go swimming and lie in the sun, but it’s become overcast and breezy outside.
I’ve been sending random pics to my Flickr account, though, so you can go see for yourself how exciting life in Indianapolis is for an office chick living in a motel.
In which it takes money to make money, and I’m loving not living in the country.
We’ve been here for eleven days now.
We’ve got a gas grill set up, and bought speakers for the laptop so we could enjoy tunes in our room. (The built-in speakers were like listening to iTunes through a telephone handset.) There’s food in the fridge, and we’ve even been to the laundromat.
We’ve been to OfficeMax and Office Depot more times than I can count. We’ve purchased reams of paper and cardstock, pre-scored business card stock, Sharpies, highlighters, notepads, files and hanging file folders, and more. We’ve got a plastic file bin with actual files in it. We’ve got two printers, one color inkjet and the other a B&W toner jobbie, that print, scan, copy, and fax. We’ve got two laptops, mapping software with a GPS receiver, and half a gallon of margaritas in the fridge.
We’ve got an entire little office set up in this hotel room. I am not shitting you. It’s totally legit.
Last night Truck and Bowling Jesus came over to our room, and all the guys grilled bratwurst, zucchini with butter, baked beans, and sauerkraut. (As the token vegetarian, I nuked some soup and had a few potato chips.) I put on JTQ‘s In The Hand Of The Inevitable and boogied around. Such a smokin’ album. [Thanks, Jay-rob Jethro! I love this fuckin’ album, bro!] People were eating, drinking, talking, the tunes were smokin’, the weather had cooled off and a storm was rolling in, and I felt great. Happy. Comfortable. This is my scene, man, groovy folk hanging out and talking, food, tunes… At some point I realized that I actually like living here better than I like living in my real life.
It’s a lot like dorm life because people are always popping in and out, and because the space is small and requires one to be extremely tidy and organized. Also, we don’t have that much stuff with us; a week’s worth of clothes, the office equipment, and a few toys like my guitar and the laptop speakers and the gas grill. It’s so clean, pared down, simple. Light.
To compare and contrast, at home people rarely if ever pop in because we’re 13 miles away from town. We don’t own a stereo. (Actually, we do, but Bread plays the TV through it. There’s no antenna on the receiver, and our CD changer died years ago, and I never did buy a cable to connect an iPod to it. Due to the house’s layout you can’t really hear it unless you’re in the living room with it anyway.) The place is huge, which means it’s been filling up with shit since we moved in and it’s not tidy and organized and it’s not clean. And it’s under construction. And it’s out in the country, so my toenails always have dirt under them. (My feet are clean right now, people! Clean. I’m barefoot as always, but it’s all manicured grass lawns and pavement and sidewalk, not actual dirt I’ve been walking on.)
I now realize that I prefer having a small area to manage. Turns out I am still an incredibly organized, tidy person — I just don’t know how to manage more than a thousand square feet. I don’t like accumulating a bunch of shit; I prefer a small amount of functional and/or meaningful stuff to an assload of crap I don’t really care about but which causes me vague anxiety when I realize I don’t even know where most of it is, let alone what it is. (My dad’s been sending me “family” stuff and I haven’t even opened the boxes. They’re stored in a closet somewhere.) I like living in a highly social situation that I need to occasionally escape from instead of an isolated situation that lets me mope and dwell easily.
I’m in total denial, of course, about shit like the overcrowding and pollution and rush hour traffic because I hardly ever leave the hotel. 😉
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4 random books from my Library!
