Halloween Spirit

October 31st, 2006

In a show of Halloween spirit, Stevel has taken the plastic pumpkin full of peanut M&Ms to work. He has been opening and reading his Halloween cards. I think this is also spirited on his part.

This morning, I saw a “parade” of about 50 school children in costumes in Long Beach. Although I was driving by quickly, I was able to isolate a few outstanding costumes, including a petite ladybug and a very tall princess. I wish we could have trick-or-treaters at the Villa Monica, but we are gated. I’ve been sharing our pumpkins with our neighbors, though. I hope they enjoy my rudimentary smiley pumpkin and Steve’s non-representational pumpkin-of-shapes.

Carwash Fare

October 30th, 2006

At the carwash today, I noticed that the ENTIRELY FULL vending machine contained ONLY bags of Cheetos. Must have been a hundred bags of Cheetos in there. Apparently there is big demand among car wash clientele for Cheetos

If Red Means Stop, What Does Pink Mean?

September 21st, 2006

Driving home tonight, I had one of those magical moments of coincidence. On the off-ramp, I looked up at the exact moment necessary to see the three, stacked circles of the traffic-light with the setting sun, the same size as those circles, spaced just-so above them so it was like a fourth light in the stack, blazing hot pink.

Grateful

June 21st, 2006

Many thanks to Dave for enabling comments for me again. Muchos crepes.

I have nothing to say

April 15th, 2006

It’s 5 a.m. Can’t sleep. Had Pop Tarts. Still awake.

Why.

Ode to Excedrin Migraine

March 21st, 2006

i have 20 minutes until the homeowners meeting, so i thought i’d post. i had a headache but it’s fading. what’s new is i am still teaching high school in santa ana. im having a blast, even though i never want to do this again (it takes over one’s life). that said, the teacher (jen) who has been on maternity leave is going to be very lonely when she comes back in two weeks, because i am taking all of her students home with me. the golf may be a sub-compact, but it has a large trunk, and if they leave their books and violas behind (did i mention this was an art school?), i think we can squeeze. i just love them all. even the annoying ones, even the whiners, even the bored ones who are too cool for school. i havent told steve yet but i put our names in to adopt as many teens as they can give us because i decided i love teens. theyre so dramatic and fresh and wild. theyre overwhelmed, theyre underwhelmed, theyre just plain whelmed. we adults try not to be whelmed, so teens are refreshing.

in cat news, mia and linus continue to fight and poop a lot. linus continues to trounce our heads all night long, and mia continues to wake the entire villa monica in the middle of the night with banshee-like howling. when i got back from texas last weekend and asked steve how it went here at no. 6, he said, “i spent most of the weekend trying to figure out what she was screaming about.” good man.

so i went to texas, to AWP in austin. it was good and fine, but i was in an off mood. i don’t think i made the most of it. friday night i went to burlington coat factory. saturday night i went to the mall. i was worn out and lonely, and when i feel lonely, i like to go into chain-stores and shop and while im there pretend im in a chain-store somewhere else, like my hometown or santa monica. anyway, i did tool around austin some. i did eat tasty texican food, and i did attend some AWP panels. and i did run into meredith from UNLV, and her sweet, mellow laugh made my weekend. austin’s cool. AWP’s cool. meredith is super cool.

i ordered collapsible silicone measuring cups online and they arrived today. theyre so space-age. too bad we never measure anything.

my niece, erica, turned seven on saturday. seven seems like a big year somehow. her hair is long now, long enough to shag over her eyes all the time. she has lost some teeth, which have been replaced by giant beaver-teeth in front. she’s become an incredibly astute and sensitive girl, comic and driven. she reads like a grad student and with dramatic flair. her imagination is larger and more full of black holes than the universe. if she forgets her lunch box at school, she goes into sobbing hysterics. if she farts, she makes sure everyone’s heard it. she called a few weeks back because she wanted me to pledge to a jump-rope-a-thon for school. she asked, “who do you live with?” and i said steve. she remembered him but asked why he doesn’t visit with me anymore. i told her he works a lot and has a hard time getting away, and she said, “he should take a break.” so i think she will grow up to be either a pop star or a life coach.

her sister will grow up to be either a radio DJ or a representative standing by for time-life books. the talking never stops.

ok, time for homeowners. let the spam-comments begin.

Fore!

February 1st, 2006

Today is much better. I just got tagged to do this list by this guy.

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Maid
2. Liquor store clerk
3. Pet store clerk
4. Poetry teacher

Four movies I like:

1. The Life Aquatic
2. Being John Malkovich
3. Out of Africa
4. Badlands

Four TV shows I love:

1. Law & Order SVU
2. The New Detectives
3. Forensic Files
4. CSI: Miami

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Baltimore
2. Las Vegas
3. Syracuse
4. Savannah

Four places I’ve vacationed:

1. The Grand Canyon
2. Niagara Falls
3. NYC
4. The boonies of Idaho

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Cake
2. Lasagna
3. Kay & Dave’s cheese enchiladas (no sauce)
4. Eggs & bacon

Sites I visit daily:

1. Dooce
2. Yahoo crossword
3. Poetry Daily
4. My friends’ blogs

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. A warm Caribbean beach
2. With my cute nieces
3. Wherever this adorable boxer pup is!
4. A magic island where everything is made out of cake

Some Days are Stones

January 31st, 2006

Today wasn’t great. My afternoon lesson bombed. They were bored to death and hated the reading. Our grad class was cancelled—professor sick. A nice thing in some ways, but I’ve been missing my pals, and I wanted to see their smiling faces.

Right now it’s 7:30 p.m., and I’m in bed, because I’m looking forward to this day just being over. Mia climbed up and got under the covers, and then about ten minutes later, Linus hopped up next to me. Mia began growling and hissing from her invisible hiding place under the covers, and she has not stopped. It is as if the linens are unhappy with us. Isn’t it, Linus? (He totally doesn’t care.)

Mac Porn

January 17th, 2006

I learned a new term today. I will quote Steve, who defined this for me: “Every time a new Mac comes out, someone in Japan immediately takes one apart and displays it on the Internet. They call it ‘Mac Porn.’” Check it out.

Blabber

January 15th, 2006

Rain in the Southland confuses me. There’s the cozy-come-inside aspect, the nostalgia-for-the-East-coast aspect, and the just-plain-wtf,-Cali? aspect. Today as we drove in Steve’s car, he turned on the vents for a sec, and it smelled just like a subway tunnel in DC or NYC (or, I guess, SF). This was on the way to a restaurant he’s been insisting we’ve eaten at before, although I knew I had never been there. Once inside, I confirmed that, yep, this was noplace I had ever been. But it is somewhere I’ll go again. Cheesy spinach ravioli mmm. This week is wearing me down. It’s been a while since I had to get up every single day and go to work, and that’s part of it. Takes a little adjusting. But mostly it’s the grading-end-of-the-semester-stuff, planning-for-new-semester-stuff on top of orienting to a new job (in happy news, I’m making amazing progress in learning 100+ names). The teacher for whom I’m subbing had a baby girl on Thursday. She named her Ella Josephine. Her students are so excited you’d think this kid is something they birthed themselves as a student body. Adorable, these teens. And so smart and mature, too. They truly are “young adults.” And they have super creative brains. They are not the kind of students who respect someone just because she is the “teacher.” When I sense moments of respect, I cherish them. I’m loving working with them.

Emu Flu

January 9th, 2006

It’s 3:15 a.m. I’m so tired and unwell, but I can’t sleep, and for a weird reason: The antibiotic my doc prescribed, Biaxin, is one I’m supposed to take with food. And I have been. But at night. So for the past three nights I’ve been awakened by the taste of poisonous Biaxin fumes rising up my esophagus. Yes, imagine a taste SO BAD it WAKES YOU UP. And won’t let you sleep. You try everything: mouthwash, eating, sleeping sitting up. Nothing works. Add this to the frustration of the antibiotic not making a dent on the sickness. I really don’t think I’ve ever been quite this sick, this long. I’m so over being under the weather.

Randoms

December 8th, 2005

Overheard on campus today:

Teacher: Just study for the test. Stop talking to me about your grade; you’ve talked to me about your grade a hundred times this semester.

Student: No, not a hundred times. Just ten times.

(Ten times??!! That’s almost once a WEEK! Stop stalking your teacher.)

Seen today from the bus window:

A delivery truck for Yosemite Water with the first of three side-panels rolled up so that the side of the truck actually read “SEMITE WATER.”

Recent events:

Hectic for me as the semester winds down. Steve had a birthday but has been really sick. Awful. Congestion, sore throat … in bed three whole days. He’s back at work today, hopefully not pushing himself too much. In case I don’t get what he has, I seem bent on insuring a state of illness via the box of cookie dough I’m polishing off here in the TA office. But this is not my fault, because my friends each only had one dough-ball (yes, Sarah, what kind of friend are you). In other news, I’m traveling to Atlanta tomorrow night for a weekend early Christmas celebration with my dad and Pauline AND with Cheri, Erica and Dani. I packed my suitcase yesterday, and it is in the car already. Is it obvious I’m excited or what?

Always What We Haven’t Got

November 10th, 2005

When I had a year of “free time” before Stevel and I got married, I was lonely and depressed. Now that I have a social life and projects and meaningful work, like I wanted, I keep wishing I could just ride my bike and watch crime shows all day. Not because I don’t love my friends and school and teaching, but because I can’t ride my bike and watch crime shows all day. You know?

Our Other Trip North

September 10th, 2005

Last night I dreamt that my sister and I went on a trip to a part of the country so remote there was no electricity. We were staying with relatives: a family with so many children we couldn’t count them. Many of them were dressed like the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. There were several feet of snow on the ground. We arrived at the house to find that the adults had set tables out on the front porch and were cooking the dinner meal at an outdoor kitchen (well, fireplace) on the side of the house. Cold as we were, we headed inside. The children gathered around the small indoor-kitchen table to talk to us. We knew we were sort of being rude by ignoring the dinner setup outside that had been prepared for us, but we were too cold to go out there. Then the children led us upstairs to see their toys. My sister and one of the younger girls went out of the room, while I became interested in a very strange toy: a cardboard house with a slot on top for coins. The children explained that with the right combination of coins, the toy house would produce a prize, although they had never been able to “win.” I started inserting coins, and after a while, I had the right combination. The cardboard house sprung legs and ran over to a corner of the room, where it spat out a prize at me from its underside. The prize was a slinky red and black nightgown. Just then, my sister and the young girl returned. They were dressed in matching, trendy, provocative outfits—little skirts and tank tops—and they showed themselves off to us and then took off to go outside to try and meet some people. The other children and I went and told the parents. We all went out into a side yard of the house, where I took pictures with my camera, and my grandparents took pictures with theirs. One picture I worked hard to get a good shot of was of one of the little children on the swingset with Santa Claus. Then we heard a very loud sound, and a strange aircraft appeared in the sky. The wilderness family was terrified, but I explained that it was a rescue helicopter and started shouting for them to get under things so the rush of air from the blades wouldn’t knock them over. We all ran for cover, and the helicopter dropped my sister and the little girl in the snowy yard. Then Steve and I were driving up the road from the wilderness house. We found the nearest town, which was barely a town and also had no electricity. Steve kept finding little Barbie doll shoes everywhere and putting them in his pocket. We saw a very strange animal in a pen—a furry sort of llama/camel/buffalo thing. We met some cowboys and talked to them about the rough farming life and about farm subsidies. We went to the library, which only had one shelf of books and a silent, glaring librarian. Then we were packing up our things, and in place of a sleeping bag, Steve had brought a big comforter, and we had a hard time rolling it up. Someone’s surf board was in the back seat of our car, which was frustrating, since we were trying to fit everything in to leave. We really wanted to get out of that town. As we were getting ready to get in the car, Steve emptied his pocket of the Barbie shoes, but I squatted down and picked them all up to take with me.

Boy

August 20th, 2005

Last night I dreamt that Steve and I found some photographs in which someone was clearly missing. We investigated and found that we had had a son, but he disappeared—from our lives and from our photographs and from our memory. We went searching in our memories for what happened to him and found that he had been a normal little boy until he became obsessed with something he thought he saw moving in a bush in our backyard. He began smearing his feces on the swingset to write messages to the thing. He told us it moved so fast we couldn’t see it and that you had to watch constantly in order to catch sight of it. He refused to leave the swingset, from which he could watch the bush. We tried everything. He stopped talking and eating. Then he turned into a plate of hot dogs. We put the hot dogs in a plastic bread box and tried to bring them inside the house so we could take them to a psychiatrist, but our hot dogs/son squeezed from the bread box and went to the bush and then went away with the thing that moved too fast to be seen. We were devastated, but almost immediately, our memories of our son began to fade away.

Burn this Motherf*&#@r Down!

July 29th, 2005

(If you saw “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” you just laughed.)

I’m wearing a bra today, and I don’t like it. I had gotten very used to wearing just those little stringy-strap tank tops as, or under, my shirts for the summer, but today I went with a t-shirt and bra, and my my, the bra is a cruel invention. It is time to bring back the fainting couch. My corset is too tight!

I have to ease myself back into bra-wearing, though. Since I’ll be instructing again this fall, I’ve had to beef up my “professional” wardrobe. No more pink satin roller-skater shorts. No more backless, see-through shirts.

Groundhog Web

July 26th, 2005

I dreamt I was staying with strangers in a house that was part my parents’ house and part not. There was a large garage shared with other families that was carpeted, and in which everyone let their babies crawl around. There was a windowsill made of cement with graffiti carved into it. There was that character Grace from the old sitcom “Grace Under Fire,” and she was watching TV in the bathroom. Her daughter lent me a piece of paper outlining the classes she could take at school, and I left it upstairs where I had been watching “Law and Order” (after watching it downstairs with my grandma), but then I couldn’t remember how to get upstairs to get the paper back for the daughter, so much of the dream focused around my trying to fit into the air conditioning ducts until I remembered the stairs. But then there was this long, weird part where I was coming back to the house after leaving it and going through the front yard. The yard was thick with vegetation but had been sprayed for insects. Still, there were gigantic spider webs, and these large, bright green, hairy spiders running around. Totally scary. Just as I was thinking, what are these spiders eating if all of the insects have been sprayed away, I noticed a small groundhog struggling in a net … and then another. It was horrifying, and I rushed inside. Alas, I could gain no sympathy from the residents for the awful scene I had encountered in their yard. They were proud of their groundhog-eating spiders.

And thus, my dreams have truly become multimedia. So much for reading friends’ blogs at bedtime.

Dreamtown

June 26th, 2005

I just napped and had an elaborate dream that included a Yeti, a goblin, my graduation, plans to order office supplies, a squirrel, evil creatures that could be killed only with sharpened pencils, Linus, my nana, a shape-shifter, a bohemian mother in love with the Yeti, Steve, and movie rights.

Apparently at some point during this nap, Linus threw up on me. Unfortunate, but I count the glass half full since Linus’s vomit is just softened cat food, typically resulting from a very recent binge at the food bowl. It fell right off when I stood up. He’s better than Mia in the puke department.

I went to the Genius Bar at the Apple store today because a number of the letters on my iBook keyboard have been fading off. There is no longer any “N,” for instance, and the “S” and the “E” are reduced to their bottom thirds. Since my crosswording career is at stake, I naturally leapt to fix this disaster only months after the keys began eroding and Steve told me it would be Mac-sphemy to just Sharpie them back on. Anyway, the genius had to order me a new keyboard that will arrive this week. He tactfully advised something about lotion and “blah blah blah purchase a key-cover-thingy-from-that-shelf-over-there.” It seems like I am leading up to a punch line here, but I’m not. Just reporting the facts.

I had my last day teaching poetry in the high school. Well, I didn’t actually get to teach, since the LA Unified School Dsitrict administrators decided to impose surprise testing on the schools on Friday. I was able only to distribute the students’ literary anthology I had put together, then I had to leave. No last day for goodbyes. I was pretty sad.

In happier news, Steve and I went with our friends Eitan and Jacquelyn last night to see “Mad Hot Ballroom” at an outdoor performance in downtown L.A. In spite of several hours spent sitting on cold cement, I enjoyed this documentary a lot. It made me want to (1) MOVE/dance, with Cuban motion for extra points and (2) adopt an adorable fifth grader right now. On the way home, we listened to the Playboy station on Eitan’s XM radio.

Oh, this (the downtown part, not the Playboy part) reminds me, too, that my friend, Sarah, showed me around some of the cool things to do in downtown the other day. We took the train from Pasadena (she lives near there, in Monrovia) and checked out Olivera Street, Grand Central Market, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and more. Sarah is a great guide-to-all-things-hip, even if she did walk me into a state of extreme muscle soreness.

A Table of Flowers

June 10th, 2005

Last night’s dream had me crouched under a white blanket in a hallway. I was on a cruise ship that was being invaded by murderous turn-of-the-century Frenchmen, and under the white blanket, I was passing for a table of flowers. The Frenchmen kept racing by me in the hallway, murdering other people. When the hallway cleared, a few of the other passengers I knew crept out from other hiding places and gathered around me. We could hear people being thrown off a balcony onto pavement (uh, I guess it was a grounded cruise ship?), and we were so scared and crying. My friends heard the murderers returning and got ready to scatter. Then they debated whether to take me along or even expose me (!), but I was pretending to be a table of flowers under my white blanket, and they decided to leave me as I was. I debated crawling into a utility closet behind me. Just then, the murderers came running by. A few of them paused at the table of flowers and looked at it closely. Then they ran on. I was terrified, and to distract myself, remembered a similar time when I had hid under a blue blanket pretending to be just a table to survive some similar danger.

Yesterday evening I was talking to Steve about my dreams and said I intended to analyze them. “How?” he said. I declared that I had purchased multiple books, and he said, “Oh, don’t …” as in, don’t become one of those people who analyze their dreams, those people are lame.

“You just dissed my whole thesis!” I objected. How un-husbandly. He defended his comment by questioning how I expected to defend said thesis to my thesis committee, and I reminded him that this is a creative thesis open to any and all ideas/topics and that no, I don’t think there’s anything to dream symbolism, it’s just an avenue for exploring something fun and weird (i.e. my weird dreams), and my thesis committee doesn’t care.

And then I forgave him, because when we were first becoming friends via long, daily e-mail letters, and I worked in the office in which he had previously worked, and left a year before I worked there (coincidence? or FATE?), and I mentioned that I had cleaned out the office and thrown away a giant box of very outdated CD-ROMs, and it turned out he had created those CD-ROMs, he wrote, “I forgive you for throwing away a whole box of my entire 1997.” So now we’re square, don’t you agree?

I have to report for jury duty today. This sucks, because I was supposed to teach poetry at the high school, and not only do I hurt at the thought of missing one of these teaching opportunities, but I feel like I am leaving them in the lurch. Any day but today! That said, though, I would love to be on a jury, since I love crime shows so much. But Steve says it won’t happen, because they’ll ask me where I live, and it’s too nice a place for the kind of jurors they usually assume will be sympathetic to the defendant, and he says I can’t lie about where I live.

[Hack]

June 9th, 2005

Last night I had a dream in which I was in the shower, and it was so dirty, and I was so dirty that the walls of the shower were turning black. Then I had a coughing fit, and I coughed up a big lump. I was astonished at the size of said lump and nudged it with my toe. Realizing it was cloth, I picked it up to discover that it was the white half-slip I usually wear under summer skirts. The rest of the long, long dream involved my telling various strangers about this incident–trying to make them understand what a “slip” was, and trying to convince them I was telling the truth about coughing one up.

Ever since I went on an anti-depressant for panic attacks a few months back, I have had vivid, memorable dreams. In the past, my dreams were fragmented and fading; once in a great while, I might remember a little of one, but then the memory quickly receded. Now I can remember dreams in their entirety as if they were memories from waking events. Often, I wake up confused, because a dream has crossed far enough over into the real details of life to seem actual. Last week, I woke up very sad. I had dreamt that I was going to move in with a friend. I had lived at No. 6 long enough, and it was time. When I woke up next to Steve, I felt distraught over having to live somewhere without him. It was a long moment before I realized that, no, we were married, not just roommates, and I had no reason or plans to move out.

  Next Entries »