Since Darren has a real job, working full time as web designer, and I have a fake job that involves lots of lounge-work, I have become interested in perfecting our morning routine. He gets up around 9 to get ready for work, while I occupy myself with sleeping. Then he kisses me goodbye around 10 minutes to 10, and turns on my bedside light, asking me what I’m going to do today. “Shh,” I say. “I am sleeping.” Then I hear him dawdling around upstairs, and I want to impress him with my productivity before he leaves the house, so I stumble to the kitchen in my pajamas (do not pass Go, do not brush teeth) and tell him I am ready to work. Then he finds me reading the CNN and Page Six websites in my office in the dark, and again he turns the light on me before kissing goodbye for the second time. Then I may or may not go back to bed. Then later in the morning I email him explaining that my vacation ends tomorrow and I am going to buy a dry erase board where I can write out my daily schedule, and this will change everything. Then I go looking for breakfast ice cream.
French Restaurants: A Haiku
Love French restaurants!
When I visit la belle France,
Just plain restaurants.
To the Cast of the L Word
I get it, you’re gay.
Bad Girlfriend
I went away for one night, and when I came home Darren was laid up on the couch with sunstroke, a lost wallet, and a sprained ankle that someone kicked in at his Sunday soccer game. He is burnt, broke, and limpy, but I am happy to see him. I better make him some dinner because he has probably forgotten to eat for 24 hours.
Last night when Keith and I went to see our friend’s band Greenland play in Baltimore, I found a girl who just got engaged and convinced her to let me try on her diamond ring. She had to show me where to put it. Then I texted Darren back in Charlottesville, “A girl here showed me which finger the love goes on. Her hand is more bitten than mine.” This seemed like a very Isabel-type message to send. An example of one of hers (also sent last night): “Privacy has a wild prettiness, a spice box at its heart.” Another: “Reading bisexual’s guide to the universe & baking green cupcakes. I’m such a perv.”
Swimming in the City
If I had known in advance that I was going swimming at the city pool this afternoon, I probably would not have had six beers last night and a cheese omelette/home fries/English muffin/french toast/Gobstoppers for breakfast. But if I had known that someone was going to take a crap in the city pool today, I probably would not have gone swimming. Darren and I discussed who might have taken the crap in the Washington Park pool. There must have been a hundred witnesses, all of whom had to evacuate the area promptly after the incident. Who took the crap? Was it a kid old enough to feel ashamed at being responsible for closing down the pool? Was it an oblivious toddler or baby whose parents had to suffer the wrath of all the other swimmers for not putting their kid in a swim diaper? The timing of the accident could not have been worse. There is a drought going on so it’s not like the city can just empty, sanitize, and refill the crappy pool. We’re all supposed to be conserving water. Summer is basically over now. At the Meade Park pool the lifeguards won’t even let you go off the diving board because the splashing depletes the water supply. You are only allowed to dive for ten minutes per hour, and the fat kids and I just had to make the best of it.
Music for Your Landscape
I drive to DC fairly often to visit friends, and when I’m there, left to my own devices, I take pleasure in listening to the worst radio stations in the world. I usually have fairly decent taste in music, but the second I get into the DC/Northern Virginia area I want to listen to Top 40 Billboard countdowns or DC 101. [Haha – the DC 101 homepage is currently featuring “Sum 41 Pool Party Pictures.”] I will be driving down Route 29, listening to something really cool on CD, and then the second I get on Route 66, I start hunting for the radio station playing Rihanna’s Umbrella song. I tell myself that I just want to be familiar with what the kids are listening to, so I’ll know the songs next time I get invited to a high school party, but really I just have a sick fascination with bad popular music. Like the new Fergie shitfest that is supposed to be so heartfelt. That is truly one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. And yet it goes so well with Northern Virginia’s endless chain restaurants and strip malls. If I tried to listen to the Pixies or Sonic Youth while driving through McLean, my stereo would probably explode.
Important Stuff I Did in the 1960s
Last night I went to DC to visit my friend Keith, whose birthday is tomorrow. Everyone say happy birthday to Keith! Keith is the best. He does not judge you for thinking tapioca pudding is a good late night drunk person food. He is also the ideal person to accompany you when you go the wrong way on the Beltway at 3 in the morning. This is because he knows all the words to every Meat Puppets and Shangri-Las song, and those CDs happened to be in my car. The Shangri-Las help me and Keith relive our teenage years – growing up in small mid-Western towns in the early 60s, drinking malt milkshakes, putting nickels in the jukebox. Keith likes to question why the rebellious leader of a motorcycle gang is hanging out in a candy store. I respond that when I say I’m in love, you better believe I’m in love L-U-V. He had never heard the PSAs at the end of Myrmidons of Melodrama, so that was a treat. Mary Weiss advises the young lady on a date not “to barge on ahead like a baby elephant.” In the early 60s, baby elephants were controversial figures, infamous for their wanton and whorish ways. They were thought to be perverted and sick little beasts capable of corrupting women from good middle class families. But then in the late 60s, Keith and I launched the baby elephant civil rights movement, redeeming baby elephants from their undeserved reputation. However now the public service announcement’s baby elephant simile doesn’t make as much sense. Just try to understand it in its historical context.
Word of the Day
How come Dr. Dictionary’s “Word of the Day” is more like “No Words of Three Days and Then Ten Words of Five Seconds”?
Sleepy Little Town
This morning Darren drove me down Locust Avenue to retrieve my car, abandoned the night before so we could carpool to Superbad. As I drove home, I realized how sleepy Charlottesville is. Downtown, I was the only person waiting at the stoplight in front of an empty Lucky Seven convenience store. The former gas station/five star restaurant Fuel had For Lease signs in front of it. The few cars I passed on the road dawdled along at 20 miles per hour, the dulcet tones of NPR emanating softly through their windows. Only the sidewalks were minutely populated with lesbians out walking their babies and cute kids out walking their back-to-school puppies. And I wondered if this soporific Saturday morning could be attributed to the arrest this week of Charlottesville’s serial rapist, a man who has terrorized women in the area since 1997. The alleged rapist was described by his neighbors as a kind family man with a wife and four children. He held two jobs – one delivering newspapers for The Daily Progress and one working in the meat department of the Harris Teeter grocery store. [On a side note, my older brother once described this UVA-coed-frequented grocery store as a “great place to meet chicks.”] But now, due to DNA evidence, the rape threat has been neutralized and the women of Charlottesville can unlock their doors again.
I don’t want to give too much away, but in Superbad Seth Rogen plays a cop and he explains to the victim of a liquor store robbery that there’s no chance of them catching the perp because he didn’t ejaculate on the crime scene, leaving DNA evidence. So smooth move, serial rapist. You are a stupid jerk. Now I will go brunch complacently on organic omelettes and fresh fruit from Whole Foods while reading the New York Times on my sunny, rape-free back porch.