Review and you

I love this image because my brother created it. It is man-centric (notice the boobs but also the baby is just born - wearing a hat, but no pants - winkle evident) but also is woman and baby positive. The image is full of love and boobs and winkle. It is not about anything else. Does anyone know where this image comes from?


I blog because a whole lot of what has happened to me in the last few years has been out of my control. Writing about it (or not) gave me a feeling of control. Also, it's fun.

Two people I love who you should go check out just because I said so:

Julie who has been my friend through many dangers, and Woodrow who says he will not be my internet friend anymore unless I turn off the spam blocker on my comments function. If you are not reading their blogs, you are a punk-ass. Get to it.

To the right you will find a new poll. It asks you to indicate whether (and what) you would like me to knit for you.

I am preparing a mighty tribute post for you, my readers. If you wish to be linked and included, please comment. (Lurkers: feel free to comment anonymously so you can preserve lurker status. I love you, too).

Blog for sale

My blog is worth $24,146.14.
How much is your blog worth?

Obviosly, we don't blog for the money. Most of us don't run ads. Those of us who do don't make any money anyway.

I can think of a lot of good reasons for blogging, but before I tell you mine, I want to hear yours.

Click the comment button and tell.

Sparkle hour *updated*

Two nights ago, I scrambled in from wherever with a grocery bag full of frozen dinners. I might have had a bag from the liquor store and two weeks worth of mail under my arm. I can't remember. But I do remember very well that Angelo, my doorman, stopped me.

Now, when Angelo stops me, it is not a "hey, yo, what's up" kind of stop. It is a put your shit down and talk to me full stop.


So I put it all down on the desk and looked full-on into the blue eyes of the lovely sixty something year old Italian first generation off the boat Angelo. He reached across the counter and took my hand, as he always does.

"Baby," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"You know it has to stop," he said.

I said nothing.

"All this," he said, gesturing at seemingly nothing and everything, "It destroys you."

What do you say to that? I said nothing.

"Baby," he said. "You are not what you were. You used to smile and be happy. Now you are sad. Always."

"Well," I said.

"It must stop now," he said.

"Ok," I said.

"Yes?" he said.

"Ok," I said.

"You come to Brooklyn. I make you pasta. You will see how the world should be," he said.

"Ok," I said.

It is unlikely that I will go to Brooklyn and eat pasta with Angelo, but it would not be too far a stretch to say that the man basically owns me.


If you move to a building with a doorman, your doorman will know more about you than your own mother inside of six months. They don't need to be told you have a new boyfriend or a new job. They don't need a memo to learn that your dad is dying or you are going on vacation or that your last break up is haunting you. They know everything while they know nothing.

How do they know? They know because they watch you walk in and out of the building every day. The look on your face, the clothing you wear, the take out you order, the packages you pick up? These things tell all. The doorman knows because he knows.

And so while I could do without the strange sparkle in Angelo's eyes, I can do just as well with it. And it's ok that he calls me baby. He does, after all, own me.

Around here there are two times of day that I especially love. Sparkle hours A and B. Sparkle hour A happens at around 9am, when the sun hits the river just so and the whole thing sparkles. Today it is dark and stormy so it doesn't sparkle so much but has a certain charm, nonetheless. I would upload pictures of these events for you if blogger would cooperate, but it won't. I have been trying to upload the pictures for three hours. It is not working. It is not likely that my continuing to try will have any effect. So I am giving up.

OH LOOK! I got the pictures to load!





Have an excellent, sparkley Wednesday.

lalalala baby

My internet service provider doth not serve me today. It took me an hour just to get this page to load. So I am not going to say much today. (Do I ever?)

Have I mentioned I am a hopeless insomniac? Have I told you how badly I need to either start getting to the gym every day or cut off my own brain from the main generator? I am a mess.

Tomorrow morning I'll tell you the one person on earth I permit to call me "baby." And why I permit it.

*airkiss*

Steeped happily in disaster

My girl LAS tagged me for the Book Meme.

Directions: pick up the nearest book. Open to page 123. Type the fifth sentence on the page.

OK.


"He sat slouched in a camouflage jacket with Velco closures, steeped happily in disaster."

Tagged herewith:

Uisce

Ki

Sizzle

Chelsea

Country Roads


Now, if you are tagged and you'd rather not be tagged, then un-tag yourself. I am well aware that some people are anti-meme. That's cool. Just move on.

If you were all like, Oh, pick me! pick me! then consider yourself tagged. I'll even tag you officially if you request a tag in comments.

Love and stuff,
Nina

Sin of the week, 3/2/08

Leaving aside yesterday's confession regarding the wearing of someone else's pants - which I am doing right now - both the leaving aside and the wearing - I have some surprising things to report today about this week's shabby behavior.

The first is that for the first time in my life, I have had thoughts that might rightly be described as violent. I know this may come as a shock. Indeed, I am shocked myself. So i'll just get on with the business of humiliating myself by describing my recent violent thoughts (and occasional violent actions). (Yes, there was real violence, on two occasions).

One of the instances of fantasy violence involves work, so I can't describe in too much detail for fear that the one lurker I have (who happens to reside in a certain place that will remain unmentioned) could be my boss. So I'll put it this way: when you tell 80 people to complete a three part process by midnight on a specific day, you should (if you are me) expect only 38 of those people to complete it correctly. The other 42 will deviate from the directions between step 1 and 2 and nearly all of them will lie to you about it because they don't want to get a zero. The rest will contrive a narrative in which it is also somehow your (my) fault that they didn't follow the directions. By the time you have explained the directions again and again and again and again over your cell phone, which, by the way cuts out every two and a half minutes so that you have to start and stop that same phone call over and over and over again, you will be fiercely glad you live in a state such water-tight gun-control laws. In fact, there might be a provision in there that says teachers can't own firearms. I am in favor of it. Otherwise I might have been in jail by now. (The irony, of course, is that none of these miscreants lives within shooting distance. Awesome, no?)

A second instance requires no special description either because I think you all know that I threw a tuna fish sandwich against the wall the other day. Why did I do that? Well, it was disgusting, but more to the point, I had spent the remaining money I had left in the world to buy it. Why was I so short of cash? Because Panic once again, chose not to complete the paperwork to get me paid on time.

Last and finally, when I realized that my syllabus and most of my course materials were destroyed when my hard drive crashed the other week - well. After calculating the number of hours I did not have to replace all that work, I might have ripped the leg off my desk chair and thrown it at the wall. It hit the window.

It felt great.

I am not sorry.

What does this mean? I have never been like this before in my entire life. Never, ever have I wished harm to stupid people. I might have made just a little bit of fun, but I didn't want to bash their faces in for wasting my time and disrespecting the CONTRACT they signed when they entered my class. Never before have I been so childish as to throw food just because I hate it and I am mad at someone else. Never, ever have I destroyed my own furniture because I am so ever-loving OVER things sucking the ass crack of hell for no apparent reason. Never. I scare myself.


I am sure my childish fit-throwing is temporary, anyway, since as previously noted, I have never responded to stress in quite this way before.

If you care to comment,* leave out the part where you think I am dangerous and should be permanently stored in a padded room. Instead, put in stories of your own childish fit throwing. If you have ever broken your own toys, tell me today. I sort of need to hear it.

Happy Sunday

*Oh and by the way, yes. Yes, I know I have fallen off on responding to comments and visiting your blogs. I am working on it. I will be better to you all very very soon. Promise.

I am so in your pants right now

Dear Neighbor,

Last weekend, you and I did our laundry. I was the filmy troll with the enormous breasts. You were the cute thing with the glossy hair and the pink-trimmed sneakers. I give you credit, girl. You've got a great ass. But I still wouldn't want to be you - and it's not (only) because I am the one with the graduate degree and the additional one (or two) decades of rich, meaningful, soul-refining life experience.

I wouldn't want to be you, neighbor, because I know for a personal fact that no matter how well your week went, it was, in fact, a disaster. I know this because while your ass may be cute, it is not......

Well. I think you know.

Let me turn now to the painful subject of your laundry error. You hastily extracted your garments from the dryer without ensuring that the drum was empty. Otherwise, how could I have placed my own garments in that same dryer, hit the 40 minute low heat cycle, and six hours later extracted the wonder of your pants?

True, the error is half mine. I did not carefully examine the dryer to ensure that it was unoccupied. I did not think to clean the lint trap or add a dryer sheet, either. I, like you, was in a hurry. I am also at fault for not noticing, as I was folding my garments last weekend, that the inky black wonderous sweatpants with the extra perfecty-perfect waistband and the flattering drape were not in fact my all time favorite DKNY track pants. Your pants and my pants are similar. Just different. I folded your pants and put them in my closet. Right next to my other track-y sweat pant-y stretchy clothes. (Shut up).

Only this morning, a week later, when I reached into the stretchy pants pile and unfolded your wondrously comfortable pants - and applied them to my own ass - did I realize my error. Unfortunately for you, I also discovered that you are the owner of the dearest, bestest, coziest, cutest sweatpants ever blessed by Mary, Virgin Mother of God and Patroness of House-Pants.* I have never, ever in the history of gaining and losing the same ten pounds, ever felt the way I feel about this pair of pants.

To put it plainly, I am in love. And no, this is not drunken late night bar sniffed a little something can I take a hit off that sure you can grab my ass infatuation. Neighbor, this is solid, true, cold light of six in the morning just out of the shower uncaffeinated devotion. I am not crushing on your pants. I am in love.

I am right now, as we speak, wiggling around at my desk in their voluminous, fluffy, coziness.

Love.

I want these pants.

Now, technically, neighbor, I have your pants. See above re: wiggling.

What is bothering me, of course, is that I do not own your pants. I realize that it is trashy and in poor taste and maybe even a little bit hygienically ill-advised to even make the suggestion to follow herewith, but neighbor, I must own these pants. It is not enough to simply have them for a day. I want to marry them and wear them forever and ever and ever. Amen.

If you wish to enter into negotiations with me regarding the formal unification of me and your pants, please see the doorman. To prove your title, please identify the designer, the size, and the location and circumference of the one barely even noticeable hole. If you pass security clearance, the door man will give you my apartment number and you may visit me and your pants at your leisure. I will likely be wearing your pants when you arrive, which makes your bargaining position both better and worse.

I look forward to your visit.

(You are never getting these pants back).

Your neighbor,

Nina



*

Blog365 Day of Rest

Apparently, I am not supposed to post on February 29th because if I did, that would mean by the end of 2008, I would have posted 366 times. So instead I am posting a little bit of nothing tonight to commemorate the most hellacious work week of my entire life: two grade appeals, one bullshit plagiarism challenge, roughly four million papers and a some unbelievable bullshit involving certain people not knowing how to find the "internet." (Apparently that's my fault, too).

If I had the time and I were not so pulverized, I would write a post about how much I appreciate you showing up here day after day to read my daily blather about how much I don't appreciate my excellent life. I whine a lot and so I don't say enough how much getting up every day and saying something, anything to you means to me. (It's a lot).



Feel like commenting? Say something about this image. On Saturday, I'll do the same.

Rewind, Reward, Award

An entire month ago, my girl Mal awarded me the prestigious Excellent Blogger Award.



How did I respond?

Hahahahahahaha!

I think you know.

I responded by being happy for like half an hour before returning to the bathroom mirror to check myself for suspicious moles. I am a crappy blog friend.

I wish to redeem myself today by passing the award on to others. Before I list my award-ees, I wish to clarify something: some of you, such as Em, P, Utenzi, Supajewie, Woodrow, Liz, LizB, Duchess Maggie, Horny Bitch, Jen, Jennifer and many many others, are already familiar to the small circle of my beloved readership. I pass the award on to people you may not know but should get to know due to their awesomeness.

I give this prestigious badge of honor to the following buddies:

Effortlessly Average.

Sturdy Girl.

Urbanhippie.

Dumdidum.

Benjamin.

Check these folks out. They are worth your clicks and energies.


Anyway you must know I love all of you. Obviamente.


Have a good Thursday.

Fill in the blanks

Because I am overwhelmed by your beauty, here is another perfectly context-free picture for you:



Because I am once again too covered in work to write anything today, please help me out by filling in the blanks:

*I would rather be ___________ than ____________.



* Yes, N-A, I know where I saw it first.

Lights out

Some of you may be aware that work for me has been, lately, exciting. Very exciting, and not in a good way. So today, instead of writing more stuff about myself, I offer you the follow two photographs I took last night whilst looking out my window between grading papers 1,221 and 1,222.






I must now grade paper 1,223, so I can't write much today. If you want to read an actual something, I recommend this post from July of 2007, when my blog was about a week old. As you will see, not much has changed.

See you tomorrow.

Filter malfunction evident

I was in Home Depot yesterday trying to buy a vacuum cleaner. I was talking to the sales guy when a woman with two small kids walked up and joined the conversation. She and I had the same basic needs. Something that works but does not cost $500. Also something small and extra suction-y would be nice.

The sales guy was showing us a Hoover and a Bissell and explaining the differences between the two. One vacuum cleaner cost $99 and required bags. The other cost $169 and required no bags. Both the woman and I selected the $169 version and we were pushing the boxes onto our carts when the woman's husband joined the vacuum cleaner circle. The conversation about the bagless vacuum cleaner versus the bagged vacuum cleaner was repeated. The husband was not pleased with his wife's decision.

"What the hell are you doing? That one cost $70 more. Just get the one that needs bags," he said.

"No," said the wife.

"No?? What the fuck! We can't just throw money away!" he said. Let me just say that from the size of the diamonds in this woman's ears and the drape of the cashmere overcoat this fucker was wearing, $70 was most assuredly not an issue at their house.

"I do not want a bagged vacuum cleaner," the wife calmly replied. Her children were playing with drill bits on the floor next to her.

"Well maybe we just won't get you one then. How would you like that?" He folded his arms across his chest for extra manly emphasis.

Here is the part where Nina loses her mind. Perhaps it was the part where he used the pronoun "you" in reference to her vacuum cleaner, as if it was some sort of special treat for her to own a cleaning implement. I did a quick calculation as to how rude it would be for me to intervene and get into their business. Result: 10. I made another calculation as to how much I disliked the droid this perfectly nice woman as married to. Result: 10. I calculated again whether I cared if I got into a screaming fight with a stranger at Home Depot. Result: 1.232. And then my filter malfunctioned.

I looked at the man.

He looked at me.

"She will be the one using the vacuum cleaner and she will be the one who has to run all over town with two small children with the serial number for the bags written on the back of an envelope. She won't be able to find the bags. If she can find them, she'll have to buy fifty and then find a place to store them in your too small apartment. Then she'll be out of bags and there will be people coming over for cocktails in half an hour and there will be no bags and the floors will be filthy and she will be mortified. Another $70 for bagless is a bargain."

"Who the fuck..."

"SEEE?" interjected the wife. "SEE? She gets me!"

The man unfolded his arms and puffed up his chest, real big-like.

"Who the fuck asked you?"

"Just saying," I said. "You will not be the one who has to manage all the problems caused by this bagged vacuum cleaner. She will. Therefore, it's her decision."

"It's none of your goddamned business!" he said.

The wife interjected, "Don't you yell at her! She gets it! You don't get it!"

"Well both of you can shut up," he said.

"She's RIGHT, asshole!" said the wife.

"Look," I said. "Obviously I should not interfere but as you said, this vacuum cleaner will be hers, so. Shouldn't she be the one to choose it?"

The husband's face turned purple. The sales guy stood there, gob-jawed, watching the husband and wife hurl insults at each other until finally, the woman won and got her vacuum cleaner. Before they turned and stomped off to enjoy the rest of their happy marriage, the woman turned to me and said, "Thank you. Clearly, I married a complete prick."

All of this in front of their two children in a public warehouse store.

Yeah, so, anyway. I have never done anything like that before in my life and I am still a lot freaked out that I did. But I was in just the right foul mood and just the right vacuum cleaner moment and that guy was, as his wife so said, a complete prick. And the filter that lives up there in my teeth malfunctioned and you see the results. I am insane.

Thank you for reading. And have a good Monday.

Sin of the week, 2/24/08

It was 1995 and I was in my mother's bedroom. The windows were open and the TV was on. I was at the foot of the bed, painting her toenails. I stopped to look at her. She seemed to want to say something.

"Nini," she said, "I just can't seem to get it back."

"Get what back, Mom?" I asked.

"I can't explain it," she said. She levered her thumb over her morphine drip and pressed.

"What can't you get back, Mom?"

"It," she said.

I put the cap back on the polish and turned my attention to the television. She was watching home shopping network and she was, near as I could tell, moments away from ordering a door stopper made out of lead crystal.

"What is it, Mom?" I said.

She looked at me again and I could see that her pupils were dilated and that it had taken all she had to say that one thing to me. She was already on to the next thing: buying a charm bracelet off the other home shopping channel, the one she flipped over to so that the subject would be effectively changed. A month later, she died. My dad still has that charm bracelet.

For years I wondered what the It was, but now I think I know. The It she was trying to get back was hope, belief, even the weakest grasp on the idea that It might be okay somehow, that It might all work out. That It was all part of a plan.

My crime this week and every week is my belief that that there is no "It," that my life so broken that there is no "It" to fix or any "It" to work out okay or any "It" to hope for. Every time someone says "it" is going to be okay, I think "you say that because you think there is still an 'It' that can be saved. Every 'it' in all areas of my life has already done its turning out and "it" turned out the opposite of okay. But thanks for trying."

I know. I got a serious break. One thing did turn out ok. My dad is alive and well and that was a huge friggin' "it" to have break my way.

The odd thing is that I can't seem to get "it" together in the other sectors of my life. I can't quite transition into behaving as if "it" is going to be ok because there was a whole lot going perfectly wrong in my life before my dad ever got cancer, and even now that he is ok, all that "it" is still right there waiting for me, and "it" is all just as bad as before - only I am two years older and a lot less resilient, emotionally speaking. You would think that I would extrapolate the miracle down the line and have hope that I might someday get my career together, that I might stop behaving like a droid and start dating again, that I might stop mainlining cupcakes and staying up all night clutching my skull, sobbing, and saying "no no no no no no no" as many times as I can say it without needing another thimble of vodka/cupcake/white xanax or, as is lately my custom, Cheeto.* Um, no.

Like my mother, I can't seem to get it back.

The living as if I were going to die** next week, as if there is no future but waiting to die, is I think what they call the opposite of having hope, which is to say "despair," which if you know the rules I operate under is the queen-mother of all sins. It's worse than being a thief, a hooker, or a megalomaniacal serial murderer who rapes children and tortures animals. But that's me, really going for it, as usual.

This concludes Dark and Stormy Week, 2008. I hope you didn't dislike it as much as I did.


* Yeah, I ate about ten Cheetos at three in the morning. I couldn't very well dip into the vodka. I was fresh out.

** Stop calling your local intervention hotline. The list is (mostly) a metaphor

Warning: Reader may be hazardous to your relationship

One afternoon while I was typing at warp speed to Supa, the main receptor of my innermost thoughts and feelings, she interjected that she was having some marital badness. Of course I was stunned and awaited an explanation.

The explanation that followed was "Rich thinks I am having an affair."

Now, people, no one knows better than I that Supajewie is most assuredly not having an affair. If she were she would almost have to be IMing me from her cell phone while having sex with the extra-marital subject because Supa and I are attached at the back of the mind via IM all day, every day. Plus I also know other things about her, like the fact that she has a toddler and a serious attachment to her husband, that would prevent her from straying.

Several months back Supa and her husband Rich put a WEP password on their wireless internet to prevent their neighbors from sponging off their router. Since then, Rich has checked the logs to make sure no one is sponging. When he checked a few days ago, he discovered that his beloved wife, Supajewie, was logging in several times a day to an internet dating site, Justsayhi.

Can anyone hear a confrontation coming? Yeah, me too.

So Rich comes home from work and suggests that Julie, who is, as recently documented here, still in love with her husband is screwing around.

Now, I have known Supa a long long time, and though I can't claim to know everything about her, I can tell you one thing with mathematical certainty: she does not lie. If Supa does something untoward or absolutely disgusting or even unambiguously immoral, she tells me. Like that time she drank a whole lot of bourbon, smoked some grass and had sex with that idiot she was dating back when we worked at the bookstore? Yeah. The first thing she did when she got her underwear back in place was tell me (oh and probably Xris) that she had in fact gotten drunk and high and naked with that idiot. (RICH! CALM DOWN! This was years before she ever met you).

My point is, there was never any doubt in my mind that Supa was not logging into the an internet dating site. Never. Any. Doubt.

So we set about proving her innocence. When telling Rich that the problem had to be an sponger, he only half believed it because LOOK! It's right there in black and white! It's Julie's IP address!

I had the bright idea that Julie show Rich her browser cache, which of course had no "Justsayhi" history. He was then relatively certain she was not having an affair, so they were out of the badness woods. But still confused as to how those bits about the dating site could have made it into the log.

Well.

It turns out that another website known as "Justsayhi" has a widget generator and that, uh, the widget generator once generated a widget for this blog. Glance over there at that "rated R" widget. It is generated by Justsayhi and it sends a line of justsayhiness to your internet logs every time you read my blog. And if your spouse finds out about this, it could be a marriage altering event.

So think twice before you stop by to read my daily ramblings. It might seem like a harmless read, but you might being doing real harm to your marriage just by learning more about my back fat and my daddy issues.


Have an unbad Saturday.

Columbus Circle

I took a few pictures on my way home today. There was a snow storm today, so technically I am still within the bounds of Dark and Stormy.





More tomorrow about why this week was so stormy (and dark).