And this is why I don’t leave the house much…

For the past few days I have been incredibly irritable, cranky, sullen, aggravated & sleep-deprived. No, I don’t have a newborn baby that I must care for, instead my body decided to birth the mother of all rashes all over my skin parts. That’s right… I’ve got it:

Poison Ivy.

And it’s EV-ERY-WHERE.

*****

I want to die.

-No. That’s not quite it.

I want to kill myself.

-Hmmm… close, but still, that sentiment isn’t totally fitting.

Ok, got it…

I want the rip the flesh from my body, soak it in acid & bleach, scald it in boiling water, pass it through an industrial strength blow dryer and have it re-attached all while I am under heavy sedation so I can catch up on the COUNTLESS hours I’ve not slept ever since Mount St. Hellish erupted all over my oh-so sensitive limbs.

What probably sucks more than the itching and discomfort and lack of sleep at night is the fact that I have no one but myself to blame for this debacle.

Am I unreasonably susceptible to toxic weeds with poison oils? Why yes, yes, I am.

Have I, in the past, contracted said poison oils simply by washing the clothes of another who came in contact with the plant, although I had not? Damn right I have.

As a child, did I come down with multiple horrific cases of ivy poisoning during summer months, so so SO so bad that I once got it inside my eye, causing my lid to swell to the approximate size of a golf ball, forcing me to spend the following days trying to slide a thin layer of tissue between my swollen lids to collect my miserable, unjustly afflicted, childhood tears? This scenario, sadly, is also all too true.

So then why, when warned of poison leaves in the area, did I not flee? Why did I not wave my middle finger in the general direction of my offenders instead of waving the wand of a weed-killing spray in their face. That same blasted wand that literally managed to blast the irritating oils of its plant host back onto my body and clothing?

Because I am an idiot and an asshole.

At least that’s all I’ve been able to come up with.

*****

Do you want to know an interesting fact that I read about poisonous plants? One of the WORST things you can do is to spray them with weed-killer for the exact reason I mentioned above. It causes teeny-tiny offensive poison particles to become airborne, and for those of us with extreme cases of what I like to call “new-born dermatitis” (Do you get hives from moderate alcohol consumption while sitting in the sun? What about from applying certain types of sun block mixed with chlorinated pool water? Then this is you and your life if screwed…) you are risking not only spraying vicious oils all over your skin but you may also end up ingesting them, thus causing a shit storm of shit you do not want to deal with. Trust.

The worst thing about this particular instance is the fact that I didn’t even know I had poison ivy until about 3 days after it first reared its ugly pimpled head. It wasn’t until I awoke one night last week attempting to saw off my own leg with my ragged fingernails that I realized that what I assumed were above average sized mosquito bites were in fact, much much worse.

The next day I noticed a rash had begun to form and spread and those once large circular “mosquito bite” sized blobs on my legs had begun to transform themselves into things that looked more like red sand tropical islands rather than innocuous rosy-red orbs.

It wasn’t until this past Friday night (mind you I contracted the “sickness” on the previous Sunday afternoon) that I realized I had not only entered my home that Sunday, while covered in the offending oil, sat on the couch (which seconds as our bed), touched numerous household items and the cat, before I realized that I was also sleeping on the same sheets since that day. The same sheets that I’d been rolling around in for the entire week wondering why this shit was spreading all over my body like wildfire.

Needless to say… it was too late. A week since I first noticed the rash I am still accumulating new patches of discomfort. I have washed my sheets & any and all associated materials I may or may not have (can’t risk it) touched since the incident twice over now and I am on my way to get a shot of steroids from my doctor because I have left myself with no other options.

The bee and I have barely said a word to each other in days, mostly due to the fact that my emotional range is either that of a crazed, hypersensitive crying lunatic, weeping at the sign of a new blister or bump or that of an aloof, angry madwoman whose main purpose in life is now to eradicate all toxins from my living space.

*****

I’ve seen a doctor, received a shot of cortisone in my arm and am currently taking steroids despite the fact that I was always told they give men breasts and women mustaches. This was a risk I was mostly willing to take and since I already have both breasts and a mustache. I think I can say I’ve won this round.

*****

It is now a day after the doctor and the welts have begun to subside but more than that my state of mind is slightly more balanced than it had been. To put things into perspective I have included photographic evidence from the day I first noticed the bumps arise:

I sent this photo in a text to the bee with the light-hearted comment that my “bug bites” resembled two giant nipples. HAHAHA!

That joke proved even less funny after my leg started to look like this:

if possible, please try to ignore the unshaven-ness of my leg. it’s kind of hard to drag a razor over your skin when your legs are covered in festering sores.

In short…

Happy 4th! Stay safe, have fun, and stay the fuck inside.

Wii Crazy

In an effort to not be such a flaccid, slovenly ball of flab for the rest of my existence I decided that now was as good a time as any to start working out regularly.

It has not been easy.

I used to enjoy taking hour-long walks through my neighborhood where I probably only burned about a Twizzler’s worth of calories but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Plus, I regard it as a considerable feat when I manage to leave the house at all. Ever.

Baby steps, friends. Baby steps…

Since the New Jersey landscape has been little more than a wasteland of snow and ice for the better part of a month and a half, taking leisurely and physically unproductive walks has been out of the question.

Instead, I decided to dust off the ol’ Wii Fit that had been lying quietly dormant since well before we moved into our house in December ’09. Stepping on that bad boy after all that time was humbling. To say the least…

In an effort to shed the extraneous 10 pounds that I have been nurturing and oh so sweetly laying to rest at night with each bowl of ice cream and fistful of peanut butter pretzel bites devoured I realized I needed to do something. Like, NOW.

The Wii Fit can be fun, which is probably why I’ve stuck with it for the past few weeks. It can also be incredibly frustrating and shaming. Still, I suppose I prefer being laughed at by a computer than by actual people after they’ve seen my superfluous muffin top spilling out of my stretched thin spandex leggings at a public gym.

What I find to be especially cool about the system is it allows you to log any additional activities you may partake in to gain fitness credits for the day.

Since I can really only do about an hour on the Wii Fit daily without wanting to punch the tiny ponytail off my “trainer” I usually supplement my regime with some ball-busting aerobics which really amps up my activity log.

That being said, I was pretty surprised at what Nintendo classifies as credit-able activities, especially under their examples of “Light Activity”:

I figure if “Laundry” counts as legitimate physical activity then I could come up with a few of my own and give myself points for each of those I manage to accomplish:

I suppose I’ve spent enough time on my butt writing this so I’m outta here so I can go full-throttle on that last one…

*****

BONUS MATERIALS:

It is quite possible I have a seriously perverse cat. I might expect a dog to eat the crotch out of a pair of leggings but a cat? Seriously? GAH.

Waterworld. Except subtract the part about water. And don’t expect any Kevin Costner references either…

Since Saturday morning we’ve been praying to the gods of water and early springtime thaw in the hope that one of them might hear us and grant us a taste of modern civility, in the form of luscious, glittering, watery water flowing from the taps once more.

Considering we’ve had a foot or more of snow on the ground for the last month, finding our pipes frozen was likely to have happened. I probably should have been expecting something regardless since I also managed to get two flat tires on two different occasions just since the new year, which leads me to ask:

For who?

For ME?! (presses hands to chest)

Oh, no… (fans hand out as though to say: I simply COULDN’T)

I mean…

I simply COULDN’T.

It wouldn’t be fair to all the other, less fortunate car tires with fully inflated rubber housing…

It seems only fitting that we should top it off with this now.

I mean, it’s not the WORST thing that could happen with the house. No, because the WORST thing that could happen probably-already happened to us last year. And it’s still nowhere near as bad as that time when we had crickets in our bed. Because I’m still not OK with what happened there…

I’ve been fine with not being able to do the dishes or brush my teeth using running water. I’ve learned to “spot clean” myself with baby wipes and de-crust dirty silverware with the leg of my sweatpants.

It’s been a lot like camping. Only a lot less fun.

I even figured out a way to make coffee!

Part one:

Collect some snow.

Part two:

Wait for it to melt.

Part three:

Make coffee?

Because of its “nature-y” ingredients I’ve taken to calling it Winter’s Blend…

But this post isn’t supposed to be about the merits of making snow coffee. It’s about how much it sucks using the toilet when you don’t have any running water.

It’s also been a really long time since we’ve had a proper discussion involving poop on this blog so here you go:

Saturday, 11:30 PM

me: *tummy gurgles* Oh. Um. Yeah...

I think I need to, you know, “go”. Don’t mind me, I’ll be right back…

the bee: Wait. Where are you going?

m: To the BATHroom. I have to “go”. You know, like “go” go.

b: Yeah, I get it but you can’t “go” in there.

m: (squints eyes, furrows brow) Whadaya MEAN I can’t go in there? Where am I supposed to go?!

b: My mom’s house, for one. If you run you could be inside in 10 seconds.

m: Excuse me, but I am NOT going over to your mom’s at midnight just to have to explain the reason for my visit is because I need to “drop something off”. UGGGGH! Embarrassing much?

b: Well, you can’t “go” in our toilet if we can’t flush.

m: (drops to knees and shakes fists) You can take away my toilet, bee… but you can’t take away my priiiiiiiide!!!

b: Oh, please… I’ve known you to use a trash can if you rea-

m: (lightbulb illuminates above head, eyes widen and finger points upward in excited victory)

*door slam*

b: (faces bathroom in disgust and horror)

*shouts* Just make sure you take it out when you’re done! *under breath* …you filthy animal.

unprofessional diagnosis? life-sucking death-belly with a side of the runs.

The week following BlogHer I spent laid up, all fetal-like, writhing and moaning with an intestinal pain so intense I became convinced I must be afflicted with a late stage stomach cancer of which there is no cure. 

My unprofessional diagnosis? Life-sucking death-belly with a side of the runs. At least that’s what it felt like.

The best way I could describe my discomfort was that someone was giving my lower intestine one helluva indian burn, wringing their hands violently back and forth upon my delicate innards. Eating made it worse and my countless trips to the bathroom did nothing to save myself from the pain. On top of that my head was fuzzy, my footing poor (when I could even bear to walk) and there was a gray cloud of limitless funk hanging over my head due to my overall less than stellar condition.

On Tuesday I made it into work only to leave by 3:30 because I felt so shitty.

On Wednesday I called out after spending most of the night like this:

By Thursday I was lured into the false hope of a day without ailment and I decided I would go into work after the doctor’s appointment I had scheduled for that morning. Professional diagnosis? Gastroenteritis. Basically a bad case of heartburn and diarrhea. According to the doctor this could have been caused by either an infection or by stress.

I felt better just knowing the prognosis and having some medicine to quiet my symptoms but my doctor suggested that if I still felt bad on Monday to schedule an appointment with the diagnostic clinic and provide them with a stool sample. Since I wasn’t bowled over with the prospect of having to present my shit in a cup to a stranger I told myself I was on the road to recovery and I was basically as good as new!

Once mid-day hit I realized just how wrong I was. Here’s a peek of me at the office that day:

Not to say that scene is all that different from any normal day at the office:

And YES I do, in fact, give my work phone the finger in real life because I truly HATE that fucker with every fiber of my being and because I’m super mature like that.

Turns out I WASN’T better and the worst was yet to come.

But I survived (even though the same cannot be said for President Zachary Taylor) and I didn’t have to give any of my infected dumps away! Even worse than the crappy way I felt during that whole time, my week of ailment put a serious kink in our “things to get done for the wedding before the wedding which is ridiculously soon and we probably should have been on this stuff a while ago but who knew wedding planning was so hard?! WE DID but we just procrastinated the fuck out of it all anyway because apparently we like to do things the hard way and because of that it might have caused the life-sucking death-belly sickness by adding to the stress of trying to get it all done in the span of 2 months” list.

So yeah.

I’m kind of jealous of Zachary Taylor right now…

Sucka

Somehow I have been sucked into spearheading a project for work that I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever.  

Maybe you’re wondering how something like this happens?  

Well, appaaaaaaaaarently, it’s because I am a sucker.  

Who sucks.  

Mightily.  

As you may already know, I hate my job. As more and more time has passed since I started here I have become less and less interested in impressing anyone with my awesomeness. I know I’m awesome. So why should I waste all that magnificence at a place that ranks only slightly above having a persistent stabby migraine accompanied by moderate anal leakage? I just want to do the job I’m paid for and forget this place at the end of my day. That includes avoiding any and all “special projects” that would “look good on my resume” or “present strong innovation for the department”.  

I’m JUST. NOT. INTERESTED.  

mmmmmkay?  

My boss presented the idea of creating a department-wide newsletter a few months ago and I feigned a smile and a nod hoping he would just forget about it like he does everything else in the way of ideas brought to his attention. What I should have realized was that he only forgets the ideas that others come up with. When it’s his idea, one that his boss is now privy to and that will reflect exceptionally well on his annual review, (since it was his idea. you see where I’m going with this?) you can bet the last sugar packet in your grandma’s handbag that it’s going to happen.  

I was told the reason I was approached for this task was due to my having graduated with a degree in Communications.  

When you tell most people you have a Bachelor’s of Arts in Communications it’s usually followed with a closed lipped smile and a raised eyebrow similar to one you might receive if you were 5 years old and just declared you had returned from the moon.  

Apparently, in my line of work, a Communications Undergrad degree screams (use your best Oprah voice): NEWS LETTER!  

Despite my numerous protests and general declarations of disinterest I still managed to get roped into this mess under the pretense that I would work with a group of people to produce the final product. What started as a “group” mysteriously devolved into just one other (highly unreliable) person who, upon our first meeting to discuss said newsletter, stated “Well since this is your project (meaning me) I’ll let you take the reins and you just let me know what you need help with”.  

Yeah, GREAT.   

This is why I didn’t want to be involved with the project in the first place because I knew “being involved” was just clever semantics for “do EVERYTHING”.   

So here I be.  

Forced to actually WORK at work (oh, the HUMANITY!) except as you can see I have chosen to use my time wisely and compose a blog post rather than start on this newsletter mess.  

It’s called prioritization, people…  

My deadline is Friday to come up with SOMETHING in the way of a layout for this exercise in time-wasting. Since I already blew off my responsibility for this project during our last meeting I need to get cracking, otherwise… well otherwise I imagine something truly horrific will happen to me like getting poked in the hand by a bag full of HIV needles that someone disposed of in the public restroom at work instead of in the proper receptacle OR getting mauled in the face by a rabid bear with HIV even though finding a bear in New Jersey is about as probable as finding a bear with HIV so in reality my punishment would be more along the lines of getting a well deserved stink-eye from my boss.  

***  

On my way home from work yesterday I get this text message from the bee:  

ur cat shit all over the place  

Since “all over the place” wasn’t enough detail for me, I asked “WHERE exactly?” to which the bee responded:  

by the door, by the shoes, by the ottoman, by the fireplace, by the litter box, on his legs, on his back, on the side table next to the door, EVERYWHERE.  

I expected to find diarrhea smeared and splattered across every inch of the house based on the level of disgust I could sense from his response to my question. Instead by the time I got home I found a totally un-fazed, mostly shit-free cat and a bee with a severely furrowed brow.  

In my quest to discover what could have been the cause of my little stinker’s butt dysfunction I noticed that, in my haste to make it out the door, I had left the filter complete with the ground remnants of that morning’s coffee in the sink. Since the stinky one is getting bigger by the minute and has recently discovered the joys of the kitchen counter/sink area I deduced he had gotten into my left-over caffeine and thusly exploded his bowels all over the house.  

I thought my explanation/admittance of guilt in the situation would speed up the forgiveness process between the bee and the shit source himself but it didn’t really work the way it played out in my head and instead resulted in a grudge now being held against me.  

Awe-SOME!  

To honor his poop-tasticness, the little orange monkey who lives in my house who is really a cat but probably at least partly a monkey, even more so now since “the incident”, named Scott McKitten, has his own Facebook page and he wants to be your friend!  

He’s new to the whole social networking scene so he might hit you up with a “meep” or a “mrowr” here or there but mostly he just sleeps and plays and looks cute.

He also wants to quiet the vicious rumor that cats suck out your breath while you’re sleeping, especially that of children.

Cats don’t discriminate, silly! They are just as likely to kill a grown human as they are a child and it has more to do with suffocation rather than the act of  sucking breath.  

And if you’re still not convinced he’s “friend” material, he wanted to leave you with this message:  

b mah friend or i shit on ur evrything...

Who, (me)me?

I’m new to this whole meme thing but it really couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve been feeling highly uninspired and generally exhausted these past few weeks which, needless to say, has taken a major toll on my mind grapes…

Maybe you’re wondering:

What the hell IS a meme?

Don’t feel bad. I read this and I’m still not entirely sure.

No matter!

We are DOING this people.

Ok, so here’s the jizz on this one:

I was tagged in this meme by Jules over at Mean Girl Garage. She is sarcastic and snarky which, clearly? = AWESOME. She’s damn good at this whole blogging thing; she posts regularly (WHAT now?!), is highly entertaining AND entrepreneurial. She is a co-founder of Studio 30+ which is a home for 30-something (plus!) bloggers to come together, share ideas, bitch, moan, rant, rave and find other like-minded comrades in blog-land.

Basically Jules is the 3o+ age bloggers networking messiah.

A moment of silence in honor of Her Holy Presence, please…

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Memes have rules and here they are:

• Thank the person who gave you the award.  My gratitude knows no bounds, mi’ lady…
• Share 7 things about yourself.  ONLY seven?!   *sigh*   FINE.
• Pass along the award to 15 bloggers who you think are fantastic.  Hmmm… This makes me feel funny. I could EASILY think of 15 worthy bloggers but since I’m more of a “doer” than a “delegater”, imma leave this one up to y’all. do you want to do this meme? AWE-SOME! you totally should…

Now, let’s get on with it…

1.  I can be very stubborn. Being this way can often be misconstrued as plain ol’ ignorance but I assure you it’s not the case. For instance: I know that technically, the proper name for the colorful fruity ice-creamy substance you might find in your grocer’s freezer is actually sherbet or sorbet, however I have never called it anything but sherBERT and I don’t plan on changing my ways anytime soon. Also, both (me) and the bee verbalize the abbreviation “vs.” so that it sounds like the word “verse” as opposed to the correct pronunciation of “versUS“. Is this a common thing? I’m not really sure, I just know that we both grew up in different areas and managed to carry-on with this incorrectitude into our adult lives. No plans on changing there either…

2.  I rarely wash my hair. At most my head hits water only twice a week, but usually just once. There are a couple of reasons for this:

• I am lazy.
• I have very thick curly/wavy hair that not only requires a LOT of maintenance to look decent but actually looks better with some head grease to weigh it down and keep that bitch in check.
• I am lazy.

3.  As a kid, I was convinced that I was black. Well, at least somewhat. This idea was put in my head because of some of my physical dissimilarities with my family members. I was the only one in my immediate family with coarse/curly hair and DARK brown eyes. Also, I once saw a picture of Harry Belafonte in a magazine and mistook him for my paternal Grandfather. Now that I’ve shared this I think the only thing this proves is that I was a childhood racist.

4.  I used to think that I was  “selectively” ambidextrous but now I know there really is no such thing. What does exist is something called cross-dominance which Wikipedia explains as “a motor skill manifestation where a person favors one hand for some tasks and the other hand for others.” For me, this means that although I generally write with my right hand, I eat with my left. I also have much more control over the left side of my body when it comes to physical activities. Not that I’m much of a partaker in sports (UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT!) but I hold a bat/tennis racket in my left and swing a golf club from my left side exclusively. In any of those activities, my right side is kind of useless. I can only wink with my left eye and curl the left side of my lip (think Elvis). The two times I’ve ever gone snowboarding I was goofy-footed all the way. I actually can write with my left hand, just not as well:

 

5.  On a similar note: I also have extremely dexterous feet. Sort of like monkey feet. Beyond being able to pick up items with my toes, the bee is often astounded at my ability to splay them out and move and wiggle them with such range. I attribute this to my past as a dancer and, no, I do not mean “dancer” as in another word for “stripper”. That being said, I have no issues with exotic dancers or those who get naked for money (more power to ya) but anytime I mention my past as a “dancer” I usually get the ol’ arched eyebrow look followed by a “REALLY?!“. No. I have a hard enough time getting naked in front of a mirror so doing so in  front of strangers is not high on my list of priorities.

WARNING!!!

Pictures of feet to follow:

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got nuttin' but love for ya...

 

'cept this one's got a mean left hook...

ps - the littlest piggy has a FREAKISHLY small toenail. seriously, it's like practically invisible...

6.  Ok, I’m going to get pretty serious for a moment:

Like many people out there, I suffer from depression. I currently treat my disease with medication but for a long time I didn’t. There was a time, not too long ago, where I used self-harm to cope with my fractured mental state. I would cut and burn my skin to transfer the pain in my head to my body. I don’t say this to garner sympathy, I say it because it is a part of who I am and I truly wear my scars on my sleeves. I can’t hide most of them and I don’t really care to anymore anyway.

I actually wrote a whole blog post on this subject once but never published it. It’s not that I’m embarrassed or ashamed but I just know there is a stigma with these types of things, plus people I know who don’t know about all this read this blog and I didn’t want to freak anyone out. (there goes that) Anyway, it’s not a huge thing. It’s something I deal with on a day-to-day basis much like any other form of addiction. I’ll probably never NOT have thoughts of self-harm floating around in my head, it’s just that I deal with those urges differently now. Maybe I’ll finally publish that post one day. Maybe.

Now, back to it…

7.  I have pooped myself as an adult and it was not the result of being intoxicated. It was actually the result of needing to fart after eating baked beans. Without going into TOO much detail, I’ll just say that I ended up with what looked baked beans in my underwear after that incident. This was about a year ago.

Did you really think I was gonna do one of these things without mentioning a poop story?

PUH-LEEEEEESE…

I could have gone on and on and ON with this list but thank god there was a limit of 7 because I have a chronic case of verbal diarrhea most days and you folks have better things to do. I’m sure of it.

So, there you have it!

7 (mostly embarrassing) things about myself I’ve never shared in blog form before. Hopefully I haven’t alienated anyone with these admissions but in case I have you should know that I still love you…

and you can suck it.

Hair Apparent

I am a hairy beast.

I fucking hate it.

It’s embarrassing and time consuming and a source of major shame and body image issues for me. It’s unfortunate because I feel that I’m actually a very low-maintenance person save for my obsessive need to rid my body of any and all excess hair. If I was trapped on a desert island and I could only have one luxury item you could bet your bottom dollar that mine would be a set of tweezers.

I once went a week without shaving my legs and the result was horrifying. Each leg contained enough black bristly hair that I could have brushed my own head with that shit. All it takes is a soft breeze to come rustling by and my set of freshly shaven legs will immediately sprout porcupine quills.

I remember first shaving my legs in the 5^th grade or so. Admittedly, this might have attributed to the problem I have now. I probably started a bit young but you have to understand that puberty, for me, came with some very unexpected surprises for a girl who, up until that time, was naturally fair-haired. As the hormones started coursing through my body so did the immergence of my Italian heritage. At least that’s who Imma blame for this shit.

I’m half Italian. This, in itself, says a lot.

1/4 from my dad & 1/4 from my mom and for whatever reason I think that made me like DOUBLY hairy. I’m also a bunch of other shit but that did little to balance out the hirsute-ness imbedded within my genetic code. Before I started shaving I used depilatories which, needless to say, with my EXTREMELY sensitive skin resulted in nothing short of disaster. And, as I’m sure you’ll agree if you are even remotely furry, that once you START ridding your body of hair it’s almost impossible to stop unless you want to look even WORSE than you did before.

I had heard the old wives tales that said the more you shave the darker and thicker the hair would return and that scared the living SHIT out of me. I mean, I was already behind the 8 ball with hairiness and I certainly didn’t want to screw myself over any more than Mother Nature already had. By the time I hit the 6^th grade I had started waxing… EV-ER-Y-WHERE. Legs, arms, face, stomach, back, anywhere I felt the presence of hair unacceptable. If I could find some peach fuzz, that shit was immediately sentenced to death by the ol’ hot & sticky wax and riiiiiiiiiiiiip.

This, also, was probably not the best idea I ever had. I can remember the day I decided to wax my upper lip even though I really didn’t need to. By the time I had ripped the strip from my mouth I had turned my nonexistent lip fuzz into a red skin mustache. I went to school the next day and told everyone that I had scrubbed my face too hard the night before. Yeah. Pretty sure nobody bought that.

I try to be thankful for what I’ve been given because lord knows there are fates worse than being hairier than a wildebeest. Were I not this way, I’m sure I would just find another area of my physical form to obsess over and focus my disgust upon. Shit, I do that anyway: cheesy thighs, flabby arms, double chin, flat ass, giant square hips, fistfuls of love handles, spare tire stomach…

Damn. If I wasn’t already spoken for, I’m pretty sure folks would be crawling through the innernet to get a date with the sexy-piece that I am.

I’ve spent a lot of my life lying to myself or living in denial about certain realities. I know I’m not alone with that practice. It’s just been recently that I’ve even been able to consider facing some of the harsher truths in my world. The more I embrace them the more I find myself “OK” with them and able to move forward to become the person I want to be. It’s weirdly refreshing; I only wish it hadn’t taken me 27 years to realize all this. I was born 3 weeks overdue so I guess being a “late bloomer” is just inherent to my nature.

So there you have it!

Perhaps as part of my desperate need for weekly therapy that I’m too cheap to pay a professional for weekly blogging schedule I will include an expose’ item, such as this one, where I mostly embarrass myself but in actuality help myself by being more open & honest and likely connecting with at least ONE other person out there who has a similar issue.

What are your thoughts on this idea?

Would you like to share a tidbit about your most unfavorable physical attribute?

Damn straight you will!

I just outted myself as a wooly mammoth, yo…

The least you can do is leave me a comment with tales of your horrendous toenail fungus or pervasive back-ne.

Oh, and before I forget…

Make sure you check out Mean Girl Garage to vote for this season’s Out of Tune Idol Winner! (Jules was nice enough to ask me to be a judge even though I totally flaked out on my duties last week…)

So hit those comments, bitches!

I’ll wait…

Queen Cricket WILL Have Her Revenge (on my sorry ass)

Can I just say something?

I would love nothing more than to send this subject matter to the (me) and the bee vaults forevermore. I do not want to write yet ANOTHER post on our hellish insect problem but, based on the events of Sunday evening, it’s unavoidable.

Mind you, since the last time I wrote of our cricket woes and this past Sunday night, we were living what one might consider “insect free”. It was glorious, albeit short-lived. I am not one to tempt the fates so I kept my big trap shut about us being mostly rid of our infestation. The first batch of glue traps we bought were overflowing with the bodies of ill-fated hoppers and we finally had the decency to dispose of them Sunday afternoon before setting up new carcass-free traps to catch and collect any tiny stragglers.

Now…

Do you remember my saying how the crickets we had been catching were just baby-sized? Like, not even the full-grown HORROR-movie-sized proportion the adults can develop into? Do you ALSO remember me saying that as punishment for our killing all the baby crickets the cricket parents would likely be hiding inside shoes and in my underwear drawer poised to spring out and attack us for our thoughtless infanticide?

Well, I almost had to eat my words there. Thankfully, I never found a cricket in my shoes or drawers. I did, however, find a cricket in a place eleventy-thousand times worse than I could have ever imagined…

In bed.

ON my pillow.

Shall I set the scene?

We have a tiny house and because it’s so tiny we do the best we can to maximize on space. So in lieu of a more traditional sleeper, we have a loft bed which is basically like a bunk bed except instead of having a bed below the top bunk we have a desk/storage unit.

Capice?

Cool.

Although our crickets are extreme hoppers (I really cannot emphasize this enough) I typically feel safe in the bed because it’s about 5+ feet off the ground and in my mind a source of sanctuary in our insect filled home.

Boy, was I WRONG about that.

After a great weekend filled with movie-watching and photo shoots, we decide to retire to the bedroom in preparation for the new work week. In my groggy daze I climbed the ladder to our bed with the light in the room switched off because I wanted to make my transition from laying on the couch to laying on the bed as seamless as possible. The only problem with that plan was my being a violent sleeper by nature and as I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t make the bed regularly so the blankets were all balled up at the bottom of the bed and I couldn’t make heads or tails of them in the darkness. This was when the bee suggested he turn on the light so I might see what I was doing and thank fucking GOD he did, because this is what happened next:

 

I just barely made it to safety from psycho-ninja cricket. To say I was traumatized by the event is putting it mildly. I had the bee re-check my hair for cricket multiple times because I wasn’t entirely convinced that crazy bitch wasn’t clinging to me somewhere in the hopes she could do her darndest to me mid-slumber.

Lucky for us, we have a pull-out bed that we slept on that night because there wasn’t a chance in HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL I was going back into bed with that knife wielding maniac after me.

PS?

We never did find her so we’re still sleeping on the pull-out.

Probably forever.

Pray for us…

***

To read this mess from the beginning, click here.

Don’t Put Marbles In Your Nose/Put Them In There/DO NOT PUT THEM IN THERE (or anything else for that matter)

I’ve always been a “different” kind of person. Words that have been used to describe me since as far back as I can remember include: weird, strange, eccentric, alternative, unique, quirky, DIFFERENT. And those are just the nicer ones.

I mention this because when I was much younger I decided that shoving fuzzy willows* up my nose would be a great idea because I liked how they felt.

There is no doubt that fuzzy willows are perhaps some of the most decadently soft and luxurious little suckers in all of existence. In fact, if someone was entrepreneurial enough, I’d bet that harvested willows could be turned into some seriously excellent fabric, potentially putting the fur industry out of business.

Think about it…

Now, picture this:

I am 3 years old.

At the time, we lived with my grandmother, and my Gramm, being my Gramm (and likely my direct link to eccentricities abound) had less of a house and more of a museum filled to the brim with various tchotchkes, antiques and oddities. One of those oddities was an old spittoon that held branches of fuzzy willows.

My mother is busy at the sink, finishing up the last few dishes before she has to jet off to work. I am all of 5 feet away curiously picking at the fuzzy roundness of the willow branch emerging from the brim of the spittoon when one after another after another AFTER ANOTHER find their way into my pint-sized self’s nostril. No sooner than the last of ’em have been shoved into my nose, my mom turns to find her 3-year-old looking something like this:

My mom has now entered into full panic-mode.

So here I am, 5 or more (nobody is really sure) fuzzy willows unceremoniously shoved into one nostril, my breathing is struggled and my complexion is spotty.

~momentary aside~

I was very inquisitive and somewhat independent as a child, frequently looking to push the boundaries of what was the norm or acceptable into something that what was straight up bizarre-nified. I went through a brief phase where I would only wear different shoes together. I can remember being in kindergarten and wearing 1 pink cowboy boot and 1 rubber soled canvas slip-on to school. Rubber soled so I could still participate in that day’s poor excuse for physical activity: jump roping. So while I perfected the one-legged double jump, I’m sure my biggest success was establishing myself forever more as a closeted extrovert.

I’m not entirely sure something like that even exists but I’m totally claiming its discovery as my own.

(except i can’t because i just googled “closeted extrovert” and found someone’s blog! check. it. out.)

So!

The closeted extrovert (according to my own definition) is someone who just lives to push the envelope but doesn’t want to be seen as overly “show-off-y” or “obnoxious”. Just sort of outer circle and mysterious/weird, strange, eccentric, alternative, unique, quirky, DIFFERENT. Apparently there is also something called a “clos-et extrovert” and that’s basically the exact opposite of what I’m talking about so let’s forget I even mentioned it…

~resuming~

My mom runs next door to get my uncle (because what the hell ELSE do you do in a situation like this?) and he looks at me and then looks at her and suggests I be seen by some medical professionals.

The next few hours are a blur of lab coats and arms holding down my tiny body to an exam table so I don’t squirm away while a GINORMOUS pair of tweezers infiltrates my nostril in the hopes of removing the fuzzy perpetrators before they lodge themselves too much farther inside my nasal cavity.

Thankfully, I was left physically unscathed by the whole incident and (probably) all willows were successfully removed from my head.

It was a highly traumatic event to say the least but I learned my lesson. If you’re going to put things up your nose make sure they are BIGGER than your nostril.

Like a tiny marshmallow.

Duh.

*i had to ammend the name of said item due to a large number of kiddie p()rn perverts finding my blog.

Dining with Slob-zilla: The OCD Wackjob

At our house we don’t eat meals at the kitchen table.

We don’t even have a kitchen table. What we do have is a very tiny house and all that works as an eating surface in the kitchen is the countertop. Even when we did have a table and room for its existence in an appropriate space as we did in our old apartment, we rarely (MAYBE twice) ate a meal there.

Our meals, from breakfast to dinner and any and all snacks in between, take place in the living room over the coffee table and in front of the television. It’s like killing 3 birds with one stone. We get increased comfort, sustenance AND entertainment all rolled into one.

We are so fucking evolved it’s not even funny.

I’ve mentioned before how I’m not much of a cook  and I’m more than a little neurotic.

I have been late to work on numerous occasions because I simply can-not leave the house unless the entire living room is straightened up; blankets folded, throw pillows *just so*, all miscellaneous items returned to their proper place and good LORD! let’s pray there are no dishes on the drying rack because I’ll have to put those away too even if it’s 7:30 in the morning and the bee is still asleep and the sound of dishes being slapped on top of each other followed by the BANG! of the cabinets is completely disruptive to a sleeping bee and I. KNOW. THIS. but something deeeeeeeeeeeeeep down inside my inner sanctum tells me that the world will COLLAPSE if I don’t put that fork in the drawer before I leave.

Maybe you are like this too?!

Hey!

We should start a club!

We’ll just arrange for someone to mess up a room and we’ll all get together and put everything back where it should be for like an hour every Tuesday night!

How fun does that sound?

Here’s the part where I explain what an anomaly it is that I am the way that I am based on what exactly it is that I am.

(what?!)

You see, I am completely deranged into order and balance but I fear this is all because I am, in actuality, a complete and total SLOB-zilla.

I usually spend most of my time cleaning up after myself because I’m such a sloppy klutz. My clothes are always wrinkled and disheveled and just the other day I almost walked out of the lady’s room at work with my skirt tucked into my underwear.

True story.

Thankfully, another bathroom patron was kind enough to bring this to my attention before I embarrassed myself (more than the norm) in front of my colleagues. If I wore lipstick, there would certainly be more on my teeth than my lips, hence why I don’t wear it.

Yet, when it comes to any area of my life that I can seemingly control, WATCH OUT! because my obsessive need for order will likely overtake all else, leaving your own life’s needs/wants to be swallowed up by me and the need to sort things out MY way.

For instance…

To the great dismay of the bee, we can’t have a certain pillow/pillowcase combo on the bed because then it would throw off the balance of the bed. The really funny thing is I almost never actually make the bed (because WHAT is the point?). It’s just that were I to know that one of the pillows wasn’t the right weight/shape/consistency to appropriately match its “pair” then I would likely obsess about it until I had pulled out all my eyebrows and my teeth were ground down to a pulp.

Say we had 6 identical cups and one of them broke.

I would rather break another cup to keep the set even rather than have an additional, perfectly good cup ruin EVERYTHING by leaving the set with an odd number.

I love Häagen-Dazs. It’s probably the best ice cream in existence and it comes in containers sized most perfectly for just the right amount of over-indulgence.

Like a lot of people, I eat it my Häagen-Dazs straight from the container. The only problem is in order for me to finish I need to ensure that I have eaten the ice cream in an even method so that the surface remains flat, without dents or chunks missing before I put it back in the freezer. If there are dents? (god help us) I will have to continue to eat it until the surface of the ice cream is smooth once more. This is a highly delicious yet ill-advised technique because on numerous occasions I’ve been forced to finish an entire tub in one sitting because I couldn’t get the symmetry right which typically ends in midnight belly woes.

It seems like symmetry/balance is the real motivator to my madness (being a Libra, I guess it’s just meant to be) and come to think of it this would also fit the M.O. behind my recent haircutting massacre mishap.

I believe this post proves that I am not only OCD but, quite possibly, ADD considering I began discussing one thing and ended with another without really concluding either thought effectively.

Both (me) and this post are a mess.

I’m starting to think of it as less of a negative and more of an asset/major part of my charm.

Yeah, that’s it…