Random Thoughts from the Hog Wallow

Are you sick of me? I'm sick of me. I'm sick of me so hard.

1) You can only listen to "Something Stupid," by Frank and Nancy Sinatra four- or five-hundred times in a row before you stop thinking boohooingly about The Guy, and start thinking things like, "Wow, Nancy Sinatra has a singing range of three notes!" and "It's really kind of creepy that a father and daughter sang this song together."  It's a little icky, when you think about it. And I mean in a "Papa John Phillips" icky kind of way.

2) A smart Opinionator piece from the NY Times about Tea Partiers.

3)  A co-worker called me "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" today, then cornered me and wanted to know how I did it.  (I gave her the abridged version of How I Did It:  "Eat Less."  I left out the part about subsisting on coffee, cigarettes, the occasional half tomato that I didn't need to salt because I just cried on it.) So Ha Ha Ha.

4)  When I met Mr. MWBMH (tm) on Sunday, I had a giant red pimple on the side of my nose. We're talking a Mt. Saint Helens-sized pimple, folks. It burgeoned all day Saturday and finally blew late that night with one of those satisfying shplats that leave you searching for the Windex. It felt like an exorcism. Maybe it was. But that meant I had to try to spackle it with cover-up on the most humid day of the year, mostly unsuccessfully, when I would have preferred a burlap sack over my head like the Elephant Man.  In the meantime, all of this feeling stuff  has left me with the complexion of a 13-year-old girl having her first period. I look in the mirror and say, "REALLY? At my age?"

5)  I do wonder if Mr. MWBMH (tm) thinks, at all, ever, "Holy shit, I broke JANE."  I wonder what that feels like? Is it like the guy who shot King Kong off of the Empire State Building, or more like the Enola Gay pilot looking back and going, "Uh-ohhhhh. sheeeeyit!"  Anyway, oh, well.

6)  If nothing else, it has set Aileen free, which feels kinda cool. Part of me wants to rest here in the mud of the hogwaller where it's cool and quiet for a little while longer, but the part that's been freed almost wants to gambol.  Maybe after I get my legs under me, to try to throw a half-assed herkie.  Is that strange?

7) When Miss Midwesterly came over on Friday night, the look on her face told me everything I needed to know about how bad things had gotten on the home front.  She was, literally, agog.  And I saw my place through her eyes.  My apartment looked like a crack den, like Bushwick, August 1977, like Robert Chambers' apartment.  So I swept my floors, then vacuumed, then mopped with the good-smelling Murphy's stuff and changed the utterly disgusting litterboxes. Coming home on Sunday night, I was quite pleased.  Then, I got home last night after work, and the Little Cat had apparently developed opposable thumbs during the day and gone to work, like a good little Tinkerbell. There was kitty litter strewn all over the fucking place, from the front of the apartment to the back. How does she do it? Perhaps I've underestimated her. Litterbell.

8)  Two days to MERMAID.  There will be photos.

9)  Name the movie reference in the subhead of this post and win a prize!

10)  I just went off a little on a vendor. Now, it takes MUCH to make me go off, but when I do, it's not with yelling or anything. I just become hyperarticulate and very quiet. The thing that most people don't realize is that when I am yelling, they don't need to worry.  It's when I get reallllly quiet, that people should be afraid. Because then I've passed blowing off steam. Then I'm enraged. See, I had asked for something last Thursday that I needed by the end of the day Tuesday.  Nothing hard, just some rough dates for delivering files to them in order to make a delivery date in September.  This is something any experienced production person who owns a calendar can ballpark in 10 minutes.  So Tuesday comes, no dates. Wednesday comes, no dates.  Promised I'll have them this morning. At 5:00 I called California and said, "Where are my schedules?" and get the same old song and dance about the production manager over there is a temperamental sort and you don't want to piss off Beckie, blah, blah, blah, and the coordinator has been having a couple of bad days, so she was allowed to leave early, come in late, blah, blah, blah. I closed my eyes, and took a really deep breath and said, "Please let me stop you right there. I am tired of having MY reliability jeopardized and MY requests held hostage to Beckie's bad temper and Shawna's bad days! I have had a MONTH of bad days, and you know what? I show up and do my job! Would it help you if I called Jeff (company President)? Would that make Beckie do her job? Because I will do it. And there, now you can go down to your production department and say that they have pissed off Aileen S___ enough to make her yell at you."   I don't understand people who seem to be mad all the time and who yell at people a lot.  Let me tell you, folks, that didn't feel good. That didn't feel good at ALL.

11)  I've been listening to an old friend's CD for the past couple of days.  Sort of alt-country-ish in a Ryan Adams way. He was never going to be the next Dylan or anything, but he did write respectable, catchy pop songs. Singable.

He wrote on the cover "To Aileen, my best friend and biggest fan, XO Will." I am named in the acknowledgements on both of his records. We had a terrible, stupid fight a few years ago, said horrible things to each other, and we haven't seen each other or spoken since. After a fifteen year friendship, and I mean, we were like Mutt and Jeff, I told him I was sick of his shit, gave him the backs of my hands, and stayed gone. For some reason, I felt the need to pull down his CD and listen to it, and now it's making me miss him and wonder if I should reach out to him on Facebook or Linked In or something.

Maybe the Buddhists are right about that whole "broken heart = open heart" thing. When your heart cracks open you never know what is going to fall in -- or out.