Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

Laura Ingalls Wilder Did This Everyday

2005-10-20T12:37:00.000-04:00

I'm so sad about moving sometimes. Yesterday the terminex man didn't believe my cheerful assurances that our turkey wouldn't bite him so I had to accompany him (the man not the turkey) to our backyard as protection. To be fair, the turkey has been once again misusing his superior poultry intelligence to outwit the chickens. He has discovered that humans often have food and so have deduced that walking up to humans, cooing a few times and then staring at them with hunger in his eyes is the way to go. Now that he's around 25 pounds and taller than your average dog this is a little bit scary.
Sometime next year, after I've persuaded the downstairs vegans, I will have my own flock of golden yellow chickens. Then I will die of bird flu.

Aren't you glad we're alphas?

2005-10-20T00:12:00.000-04:00

The company I work for is corporate but aescetic in that annoying left-wing, luke-warm showers kind of way. We use only donated office space, to save valuable cash for the improvished African children. The people who work out of our CT office get to work in the world headquarters of a certain evil corporation but we here in Michigan get spare cubicles in one of our high schools.
It's a magnet school that prides itself on diversity and draws from the 8 wealthiest school districts in the wealthiest county in the state (and third wealthist in the country)*. It's like a training ground for the future alphas of America.
These kids are required to choose an afterschool activity like Beginning Hindi, Scuba Diving in the Galapagos and Build Your Own Computer, costs of which range from $300-$2500. They, at the age of 15 can boast such resume builders as "month spent in South Africa with family" and "spent 2 years living in Germany" and "interned at prestigious law firm for the summer".
The weird thing is, I always felt pretty conscious of my own list of privileges, a family that paid for college, a good suburban public education, middle-class parents who help me out when money is tight. I unconcsiously but, guiltily, ranked myself amoung the alphas of the world. But spending any time with these kids just proves that I'll still, with all my advantage, never be able to compete with that kind of born and bred alpha-osity.
I dont' hold it against the kids. They are, overwhelmingly good hearted and respectful, hard workers and really want to make the world a better place. They didn't choose to be alphas. It adds a creepy tension to the cheerful rivalry my co-worker and I have over our favorite schools. The Alpha Institute is her favorite of her 4 schools and she is rooting for them. My favorite school out of my three is a in an impovished neighborhood that I love and am moving to soon. Even when we are jokingly comparing her student's 178 hours of community service to my students' 156 hours, there's this tiny unnecesary element of outrage I feel that one group of good hearted 14 year olds has as many advantages as this other equally good hearted group has obstacles.
Pulling down the self-esteem of a high school kid is easy and cruel but I want to find some way of reminding the alphas when they come together with other schools of the injustice that gives them all the things they have.

*it's the diversity claim that irks me the most. Sure the student come from many different countries but there are, at my count, 4 black students. Yeah, that's diverse.

Oh-Em-Gee

2005-10-18T09:50:00.000-04:00

Have you seen our mayor, internet? If not, you really need to take a look, the following anecdote is much, much less funny without being able to visualize him.
Also, do you know he refers to himself at the "hip-hop mayor"? Do you know his entourage is bigger than Britney Spears' and that he spends city money on strippers and lobster and lobster for strippers? Okay, now you do.
So this nice woman came by yesterday and internet, she had really good hair, which is the new standard by which I judge people. There is so much bad hair in the world that people who take the time to have good hair deserve a little extra appreciation. Anyway, this woman with good hair came by and explained that she had arranged a roudtable discussion between residents of Woodbridge and the mayor and council members about issues that specificly affect our neighborhood. They were good issues; development and gentrification, the role of the arts in the city, gay marriage*. But, the art gallery where she was going to have it is so totally not up to code.
So, she wanted to have it at my house. You know, the house that is just one big zoning violation wrapped in black mold wrapped in chicken poop. As cool as it would be to sit on our living room and yell at the mayor for being SUCH A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER AS TO CANCEL BULK TRASH PICKUP. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?, we told her we'd get back to her.
Oh boy, did we giggle at the thought of Kwame Kilpatrick trying to fit his massive, former linebacker self into our tiny bathroom, and wondering how many of his equally massive bodyguards it would take to just fucking break our house.
But we had to tell her no. We'd have too hard a time finding someone to babysit our illegal poultry for the evening.

*This reveals alot about the character of my soon-to-be ex-neighborhood and why it is the Dupont Circle of Detroit.

testing

2005-10-16T22:13:00.000-04:00

blogger, you are such a butt

oh the awkwardness!

2005-10-13T11:28:00.000-04:00

I did my first 4 work-required presentations to 4 classrooms full of high school students this monday. It's a good sign, I hope, that by the fourth I was no longer paralyzed with nervousness.
I am so damn intimidated by high school students. jeebus.
Somehow, during the presentation I was making the senior physics studens the topic veered into Female Genital Mutilation. I mean, god damn. I really wanted to bring it up because it is so relevent to the work my organization does. We've built 15 schools in Mali in the past five years and I really think that advancing educational oppurtunities in areas where FGM happens is the most effect and least culturally imperialist way to stop it. The villages where we've built have 100% illiteracy rate. These are Muslim communities where no one knows how to actually read the Koran so they are open to all sorts of misonceptions and superstitions about what the Koran actually says. Now there's some 20,000 kids who are going to grow up literate and able to look at the Koran and notice that it pretty much straight out forbids this kind of mutilation of women. Plus, we require the villages to commit to educating women and men equally so a whole generation of girls are going to grow up with the tools to stop this from happening to their daughters.
Nonetheless, I will face all the tortures of hell before I will say "clitoris" in front of a bunch of 17 year olds. Damn. Fortunatly, the teacher came to my aid. She has, evidently, no such squeamishness. The 3 girls in the class were absolutly incensed and 2 of them came to the afterschool meeting I held.
Yay.

Breaking up is haaaaard too-ooo-oooo do

2005-10-13T10:34:00.000-04:00

I'm moving at the end of the month. My busy new lifestyle is no longer compatible with the inconsistent hot water, leaky roof and late night heavy metal practices that are a daily occurence at the compound. My new apartment seems so plush in comparison. I'll even have a washing machine! and a claw footed tub! and a kitchen with windows!
But, in a lot of ways, I'm just moving to much larger compound. The neighborhood I'm moving to has been Red Row for the past hundred odd years and the downstairs neighbors are a pair of anti-government militants who I tend to normally avoid because they are too cool for school. As part of my new (school) year's resolution to be more socially active I've decided to give Sid and Nancy downstairs a try. They really are good hearted kids once you get past the attitude.
Also, I've cleared it with my new roomate. She is totally down with getting some chickens.

Notes from the Staff Meeting

2005-10-05T17:02:00.000-04:00

Ug. I threw my back out Busting Blight this weekend. This job rocks, in that I get paid to do community service which I am now to busy having this job to do for free. But, I fucked up my back and I didn't even win the Michigan "Most Disgusting Thing Picked Up at a Community Clean-up Day". I was disqualified when the horrible smell emenating from the dead possum kept me from picking it up. The default winner was a social studies teacher who threw away a pair of dirty panties found on the side of the road.
We had a staff meeting on Tuesday (don't worry this relates back to the panties, I promise). All our staff meetings are done on conference call in a tiny room listening to the senior staff in Conneticut blather on about what is, I assume slightly more interesting than the average staff meeting nonsense. This week it was informing us that our corporate relationship with the Maoist rebels in Nepal was good enough that they promised to warn our groups of high school students to evacuate villages where they are about to get into firefights with the government at least 24 hours beforehand. *Yawn* Really. What do I care. I have youth to empower. Shit.
Anyway, we thought we were moderatly hot shit with the panties story. But the New York crew had their community clean-up the same weekend and one of their earnest teen do-gooders found a loaded gun. We're going to have to find a dead body next time to beat that. We should open an office in Baltimore. I've had more than one person from Baltimore tell me stories of finding multiple corpses just laying on the street.

Hypothetical Sheep

2005-09-21T10:29:00.000-04:00

In my enviromental planning class we've been endlessly discussing the world wide enviromental problem of hypothetical sheep. God, fucking hypothetical sheep ruin everything. The crux of conventional wisdom about hypothetical sheep is that left to our own devices and holding hypothetical land in common, we'll have no judgement at all about how many sheep are too many sheep and pretty we, and our sheep, will be wallowing in eroded mud all day long. The only solutions offered are a) have some powerful government bureacracy regulate how many sheep we can have or b) turn us all into private property owners.
I feel that this is dumb. As a bona-fide wingnut who is trying really hard to be a responsible adult I'm irritated as all get out that really smart responsible adults are convinced that too lousy solutions are all that stand between us and soil erosion. I really don't see why reasonable people can't get together and say, "you know, we have too many sheep. Let's have a bbq."
My planning class is on wednesday; on sunday I went to the barnyard meeting. Ten people in a room, not a single one of them reasonable, discussed exactly how many, totally non-hypothetical, pooping, wool producing, baa-ing, child-trampling sheep we should have. Solution: one more than we currently have.
It's really not that hard.

2005-09-18T23:16:00.000-04:00

Oh man. This whole job plus grad school operation sucks my butt. I spent last week blowing my student loan money on coffee drinks and tofurky jerky as I dashed from work to school. Honestly, the only real problem is that my office is out on like 19 mile or some shit and I can't even tell because that far out in the suburbs they stop using perfectly civilized mile road names and started calling everything after beavers and bodies of water. Perverts.
I had a major moment of joy on thursday, where, in my new professional capacity as a youth development worker, I convinced an appalachian stripper, with promises of beer and backrubs, to abandon her breakfast of dumplings fried in raccoon fat, to give a presentation to a group of high school students. Or at least that's how I'm going to spin the story from now on. The girl in question, Erica, is our new houseguest/future housemate and when she's not snuggling with Keith or skinning roadkill or lounging around in a white lace nightgown and pig tails like something out of Tennesse Williams, is making adjustments to her car, a 1982 mercedes diesel that runs on used vegetable oil.
I think grease cars are cool and I definitly think they are way cooler than informational videos on life in rural Africa. So, using my professional contacts inside the high school I was able to get something like thirty or forty kids to come out into the parking lot and crowd around Erica's car while she demonstrated her modified engine system, totally blase about the fact that alot of the modifications were obviously duct-tape based. The high school kids let out a genuine ooooh of interest when she started the car and the smell of french fries wafted out of the tailpipe.
After we finished and were packing up to go the official high school police officers came mosying over. Before I even had a chance to really start thinking,
oh fuck we're gonna get yelled at they said they'd heard this car ran on vegetable oil and would Erica mind doing the whole demonstration over for them.
As a token of appreciationg for being the guest speaker, the high school librarian gave Erica a keychain and a pen.

As an American I have a Desperate Need for Attention

2005-09-10T01:10:00.000-04:00

I check the blog for the past view days and get no comments. Does no one love me, I think to myself. I decided that once I start talking about roadkill the love and affection will come pouring in.

Save the Animals

2005-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

I'd spent the last hour picking u-pick raspberries and getting hi-hi-hello using a pipe carved out of a deerbone by Keith, who is such a litle McGuyver and is totally the one I'm sticking with come a zombie attack. He's also a good sport about taking over driving responsibilities when I'm unwiling; so there we are, Keith, Erica, Sidewalk and I, driving down this dirt road in a far out suburb when we see a dead raccoon lying in the middle of the road where no raccoon had been a mere hour ago when we were picking raspberries.
Keith and Erica carry a plastic bag on them at all times for just these kind of oppurtunies. While I still feel the whole thing is still waaay gross, I have to admit, were I going to eat roadkill raccoon I would eat that roadkill raccoon. It was so fresh rigor mortis hadn't even set in and there wasn't a mark on it; it's neck must have broken is the only thing we can figure.
Just is Erica was about to pick up the tasty morsel by its tail a pick up truck slows down in front of us. I'm about 20% undone with hilarity and about 80% totally mortified. Fortunatly, the roadkill eating thing is a relative secret and this dude made very different assumptions about what the pretty, hippy-looking girl crouched over the dead raccoon was intending.
"I don't think the best vet in the world can do anything for him anymore, Sweetheart." He said.
"Oh" said Erica, "I"m just moving it out of the middle of the road"
Worst. Excuse. Ever. Poor thing, dude must have thought, She's going to go do CPR on that dead animal and cry when it doesn't recover.
They're probably haveing raccoon noodle soup as we speak.

2005-09-04T19:38:00.000-04:00

Things are going pretty good for me, right now. So good that I don't even have to think, well, at least I haven't been stranded on a rooftop surrounded by alligators for the past week while George Bush goes biking. I start school on tuesday and the jobs been working out and Keith is home.
Keith and his sweety, Erica were actually supposed to be home earlier but her car died in Muncie, Indiana on friday. After being told by every mechanic in Muncie, Indiana that they were unwilling or unable to work on a car with a modified extra gas tank built out of punk rock and gumption and which is stalled, almost certainly, because of the partially hydrongenated oils that managed to float loose in the engine, they gave up and hitch-hiked. They arrived just in time to take over my assistent chicken killer duties, something which, in theory, had Erica all excited. I like that girl a lot but she's a damn caveman and a bad influence on Keith. She's got him eating all kinds of roadkill, up to and including bbq rattlesnake and I just don't hold with that kind of thing. When I left I could see her starting to have a change of heart; the doomed chicken was one of our attractive and friendly chickens, and I didn't want to be around to watch it die either.

Have I neglected to tell you, internet, that I have a new kitten? He's adorable of course, blonde and blue-eyed and ferocious. I think my favorite thing about new life, especially when that life is attached to a creature that will never grow up to cut funding for flood walls or leave thousands of people to die just because they are poor and black or start a pre-emptive war based on false information, is the total innocent joy. Some many times lately the world has seemed like a sad, scary, doomed place. It does my heart good to spend time with someone for whome just the opposite is true.
And I mean, dude, he's playing with a ball of yarn.

Oh yeah, did I mention I don't have health insurance?

2005-08-31T14:53:00.000-04:00

I have a sty in my eye so large that as I type I can feel it pressing into my eyeball. In case you're wondering, this is not a pleasant state of affairs. What's more annoying is that I had my first work meetings with the faculty advisors at two of my high schools this morning. I't the first time I'd seen them face-to-face and nothing says "professional demeanor" like a blazing eye infection.
I deal, I deal. At least it's not an anti-biotic resistant staph infection or leprosy. I figure it's hard to hide your identity while doctors race against the clock to stop the progress of your flesh eating bacteria.
Oh boy, oh boy, do I increasingly hate not having health insurance. When the student loans finally come through I am so getting my teeth cleaned. So bourgois. Really, though, if I get promoted enough in this job to ever get healthcare I worry it'll make me soft. Honest. If I ever forget that my primary fear about car accidents and super germs is oh my god i'll go bankrupt then I'll forget how much the American healthcare system fucking sucks.
So thank you eye infection. You press into my eyeball with integrity.

Personal Responsibility

2005-08-30T22:32:00.000-04:00

This whole affair led to a beer soaked discussion about the importance of personal responsibility in anarchy. Part of what is actually hard about trying to live out the idealogy that nobody gets to be in charge of your life is accepting all the unpleasantness of actually being in charge of your life. But that's a boring discussion. You want to hear about blood and guts and drama, dont' you?

So I wake up Thursday morning to hear that one of my compound-mate's dog had escaped in the wee morning hours and eaten two of our most beloved chickens, including Megan christmas hen and, not satiated by that, had to be physically pulled of one of our turkeys.
On the list of people whose repsonsibility this is, I am like, so far on the bottem. It's not my dog; it's not my turkey; it's not my seven year old that didn't slam the door; it's not my job to watch the seven-year old. I'm not even sleeping with anyone who fits any of these qualifications. I go off to work with clean concious, confident the turkey issue will be taken care of by the time I get home. Ha. You can, of course, see where this is going.
I get home around 4 o'clock. The turkey's owner is in Chicago. The dog owners are at work. As much as I don't want to have to drive a wounded turkey all the way over to the east side, I call the vet, who tells me that it's not worth it to do surgery on a turkey. fair enough.
So I sit on the front porch, hoping that if I don't say anything for a while it will become somebody else's problem. Then Patrick comes out with the homesteading encyclopedia in one hand and a cleaver in the other. He says, "if you'll help me I'll kill the turkey and pluck it so it doesn't go to waste." We sit on the front porch studying the homesteading encylopedia and sharpening the cleavers for a while. At some point a crack head wanders up and announces it is his birthday and he needs some spare change. I try to be really polite and friendly to roaming crack addicts, 'cause why not. But I was not in the mood. I was little curt and on the off chance that the he reads this blog; i'm sorry and happy birthday.
I gather up the turkey and carry him over to the chopping block (note: this requires me to walk about 25 feet down the sidewalk on a busy stree, carrying a turkey and following a man with a cleaver) I hold the turkey and Patrick chops off his head, spraying blood all over my sandals, which are fortunatly my Official Poultry Killing Sandals.
We get about half-way done plucking the body when it's obvious that the dog did such a number on the poor guy that he's not fit for human consumption (the maggots and the gangrene smell were our major clues) so we dig a whole in the side lot. I go and pick up the head, because Patrick doesn't want to, "see him lookin' at me" and toss it in the whole with the body.
"Shouldn't we say a few words?" Patrick asks.

"Sorry turkey" I say.

Bal-Ti-More!

2005-08-15T22:30:00.000-04:00

As I'm sure the entire internet knows by now, Cara and I experienced our first Balto-mugging friday night. I won't rehash details because any interested parties can cross reference this with the rest of the internet.
We spent most of the rest of friday night barricaded in Cara's house with a variety of goofy weapons. I, personally, rotated between the big ol' u-lock and the fireplace poker. I felt that it was very much like every zombie movie ever made. After asking Dina if she would be offended if, due to her almost sexual passion for fire arms, I cast her as practical minded redneck, allowing all of us to fullfill Night of the the Living Dead archetypes. I was given a brief opening to expound, as I will do at any given situation, of the total fucking brilliance of George Romero's zombie movies after I commented to Tracy that his archetype would live the longest in a faithfully adapted zombie attacked. "How progessive" He said. Well, sort of progressive. All the women characters are essentially passive screamers who get eaten alive about half-way through. But maybe I'm too critical. My mugger fighting technique was just to scream and scream and scream. I think dude was pretty amatuer, 'cause unlike with zombies, screaming totally worked.

But the mugging was hardly the high light of m Balto-adventure. I attended a fabulous dance party featuring some of the most amazing pants I have ever seen before collapsing in stupor on a bed constructed entirely of milk crates and fouton mattress. I also got to hang out with a certaincelebrity terrier. Oh Baltimore, you've stolen my heart.

your old shoes in your new feet

2005-08-09T21:22:00.000-04:00

My new grown-up shoes have given me blisters, but what the hey, I've got a per diem. I left in a hurry early monday morning and played a mean prank on Keith by leaving him in charge of our finances after I'd moved the finance binder. Her forgave me. I also played a prank on the whole house by fermenting kefir in the fridge. They'll all be living to ripe old age like those peasants in the caucuses so they'll have plenty of time to hold a grudge against me for leaving fermented foods.
I feel like such a hillbilly. During my layover at Grand Central I was so busy staring at the stars on the ceiling that I walked right into a trash can. Lukily I didn't walk right into the terrorism sniffing german shepherd standing 3 feet from the trashcan. Blush Blush Blush. A whole massive building full of people and I'm convinced they are all staring at me.
I'm debating right now whether or not to buy a train ticket to balitmore this weekend. It sure beats sitting around the faux-tudor decor of the Vassar alumnae house on the other hand I'm broke. Tonight's mission is to question my boss as to whether or not any travel expenses will get reimbursed.

Liberals: What's Their Deal?

2005-08-07T23:09:00.000-04:00

I got a grown-up as of thursday, a job so grown up that they are paying for my plane ticket to job training. I found out that I got the job while I was at my current job and was in the process of pretending not to notice my client vomiting all over the sidewalk for no apparent reason other than that she was kind of bored. whee!
I fly out tomorrow morning to go to two weeks of training. I having this inner dialogue with the optimistic and pessimistic parts of my brain:

"It's going to be great! I'll make friends, maybe I'll find a boyfriend!" (optimistic Leah is really into getting a boyfriend lately)
"It's going to suck. You'll be surround by earnest liberals all day. You hate earnest liberals"
"Shut up. They hired us, after all. They must have a pro-wingnut policy"
"Oh goody. I cant' wait to hear how peace is patriotic and how nostalgic we all are for Bill Clinton and how that war in Kosovo was so totally justified and how George Bush is totally the worst thing to every happen to the world and gun control...can't you just wait to hear about gun control????"
"We've decided to be open minded and friendly to all sorts of people, remember?"
"Lexus and the Olive Tree!!! lalala lalala! John Kerry RULZ!!!

Optimistic me is going to win out here, honest. I need a non puke-oriented job and considering that Earnest NonProfit Inc. totally, totally knew what wingnut I was when they hired me, I figure I can't be the only one.
I'm arriving at the training late. They originally had me leaving early Sunday morning but I demured, saying I had, "a few loose ends to tie up". I'm still unsure about exactly how pro-wingnut they are so I didn't mention what those ends were. You see, I needed time to find a substitute goat milker and to rack off my honey wine into glass bottles.

it makes sense if you're really high

2005-08-01T22:28:00.000-04:00

It's been so damn hot this summer. We've been considering throwing enviromental responsibility right to the wind and installing central air. What's holding us back is a) we're broke and b) the compound would explode with that amount of electrical current run through it's original 1890 electrical system.
I have floated the idea of dragging all our matresses into the library and buying a window unit...but the connotations are too creepy.
A relatively well-dress 50-something stopped by about a month ago and treated Megan and me to a rambling monologue about all the good time he had at the compound in the early seventies, probably back when the dumb fucks were dropping acid and doing roof "repairs". grr. About ten minutes into the monoglue he said, "yeah, those were crazy times. I heard once everyone who lived here dragged mattresses to the third floor and just had orgies all day long."
There was a brief dramatic pause, after which Megan replied, " ew. "

A Spider in the Sugar Bowl

2005-07-31T20:19:00.000-04:00

We have a new housemate and jesus is she young. She's so young that if we lived in a town where legally enforced drinking ages were considering anything but bougie-as-shit, we wouldn't be able to take her to bars.
We celebrated by cleaning the house, including the disgusting parts that we usually leave alone because they scare us, like the "spice cabinet" and the "area under the stairs". ew ew ew. No me gusta las cucarachas. I sprayed them over and over again with a bottle of what was advertised to be "nature's neurotoxin" until Patrick demonstrated that the most efficient way to murder las cucarachas with that stuff was to smuch them with the bottle cap.

it's all fun and game until somebody gets stabbed to death

2005-07-30T00:07:00.000-04:00

Were I in the mood to file for 501(c)3 status I'd form my own religious cult: The Followes of St. Linda of the Unwaveringly Reasonable. It's purpose would be to embrace unconventional beliefs and lifestyles while not being a total, irrational wingnut.
Lately, I value reasonableness above all other virtues. I argued passionatly in favor or our new roomate, Louisa, on the basis that she is a deeply reasonable young women. A little before that I said harsh, unkind words to another housemate regarding her story friend who was, she feels, not properly counseled by Planned Parenthood and now has cried every night for twelve years, grieving over her dead fetus. I should not, in retrospect, has commented that this friend is obviously, "a fucking nutcase who shouldn't reproduce". But that's exactly the kind of unreasonable behavior that gets my goat because of the nasty political consequences of someone wishing their every irrational feeling be indulged instead of addressed. Next thing you know the Beatles'll be sending you secret messages to kill Paris Hilton or some shit.
I think the housemate in question has forgiven me my unkind words. After we attended a lecture by this guy, she turned to me and said, "Wow. You must love him. He's so reasonable, and yet such a wingnut."
At least my housemate understands me. Sandorkraut is exactly my kind of reasonable wingnut. I'll frickin' canonize him when my paperwork goes through. Sure, he recomends leaving goat milk on the counter for a few days and then refering to it as "sour cream" but even after much goading from the crowd he refused to endorse any sort of food eating dogma ("I mean, I guess aluminum is not that good for you, but I'll pretty much eat anything you offer me") or alternative medicine orthodoxy (" I take a lot of pills to stay alive and I wouldn't consider sourkraut a subsitute, but you know, it's good for you).

I think we're all pretty inspired by the demonstration. I finally went to the brewing store today to buy the yeast and tannic acid needed to start making my mead. Frugal as I am, I realized, with the help of Patrick, my obsessively frugal housemate, that a full bottle of Carlo Rossi wine is cheaper than the exact same bottle for sale at a brewing supply store. Now the only thing holding me back is drinking a gallon of wine in the next day or so. shit. That's totally unreasonable

Tenured Radicals

2005-07-27T13:59:00.000-04:00

OMG! I am officially a graduate student! Whee! I got my acceptence email today!
I am so goddamn excited, witness the unrestrained use of exclaimation marks!
I am going to be such a tenured radical! I can't wait to start having a legitimate reason to wax philosophic about hyperaccumulators in bioremediation have really firm opinions about which CDC is more, y'know, down. I'm going to be fucking insufferable and when called on it I may be slightly tempted to say things, like, "look I have more college than all of you put together."

my cup of stars.

2005-07-23T15:32:00.000-04:00

egg foo young instead

2005-07-22T14:57:00.000-04:00

There is the life of the farmer and there is life of the drum player in a loud crust punk band. The schedules of the two lives are very different and it is the rare man who tries to combine the two.
After playing a show in Lansing last night the Cap'n was feeling so tired and grouchy that I agreed to drive him to the barnyard and help him with the chores. The Cap'n turkey's are almost adults now and they are just beginning to grow the robin-hood like feathers that will flop in front of their heads. Right now, the spot where the feathers will be are little round nubins on top of their blue and pink heads. Lord those things are funny looking.
I'm convinced they're smart. I figure it's usually mean to rate animals as smart or dumb since a chicken is plenty smart enough to be a chicken and people use that kind of shit to justify mistreating the objectively dumber members of the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, these turkeys certainly seem to have more problem solving ability and awarness of the world around them than either chickens or ducks. They've come very close to learning that a certain amount of obnoxious behavior will cause someone to squirt them with goat's milk and then the only trick is to open their beaks at the right moments. They look at you with their weird dinosaur eyes and I am convinced they know exactly what is going on.
I really don't want the Cap'n to eat them.

cats cats cats

2005-07-21T16:02:00.000-04:00

In a month or so I am going to have a new kitten. Dude, I am such a cat lady. If I had permission from my housemates I would so totally have 5 new kittens and one new cat a month from now.
It's not, I don't think, even that I'm so gaga over cats more than it's that I am a closet misanthrope with the same instinct to swoop in and rescue people from their own dumb lives that permeates left-wing do-gooders. I just want to swoop in and rescue people's cats from those people's dumb lives. This makes me more like Cara's mom who used to sneak into people's backyards and build them Buckmeister Fuller-esque dog houses when she feeled that the dogs rightful owners were neglecting the animals shelter needs.
This could be a big problem for me. I'm torn between feeling like a judgemental college actvist for being disgusted at the casual and utilitarian approach to pets that permeates the working-class neighborhood where I work and just, well, being disgusted. For example: My client's mother has a chow dog which lives in her backyard in a dog house, never, ever enters the human house and because he is never brushed has a tangle of dreadlocks all over his body. Now technically, this dog is not abused at all. He has food, water, shelter and isn't sick. But, I feel strongly that dogs belong in the house. That they deserve constant attention, medical care and to be appropriatly groomed. Many times I've contemplated stealing the dog. Cats get off even worse. My clients mom and several of her neighbors see nothing wrong with leaving small children unsupervised around cats and letting the small children toss the cats up into the air or whatnot, without so much as saying, as I've said, "that cat won't like you if you treat it like that". Then they say nothing when the children smack the cat for "being mean".
Anyway, a stray cat had a litter of kittens in the un-used dog house in my client's grandmother's backyard. When I arrived at work in the morning I was told that the cat was vicious because it kept hissing at my client at the neighborhood children who poked it. The cat, for the record, is anything but vicious. She's barely more than a kitten and purrs while being petted. I was also told that the grandmother's plan for the next six weeks or so was to feed this skinny mother cat bread and milk. I went home and brought some cat food.
Part of me so wants to take this cat and all her kittens home and put myself in charge of finding homes. I hear the family discussing people to give the kittens to, (well they might want another one. they kicked that one they had out of the house for making too much noise) and want to hold the cats hostage, demanding proof of rabies vaccines and nuetering from anyone who gets one. But that's not going to work. Instead I plan to bring more cans of wet catfood tomorrow morning and try and convince my roomate that a cat plus a kitten doesn't really count as two more cats.

Sexy Sadie

2005-07-19T18:20:00.000-04:00

I had the worst day at work today. Details I won't bore you with, internet. But really, I want a job where the issue on which I must stand firm and hold the line is not, I repeat not, that no matter how many times a person crashes her head into the wall while screaming obscenities that person is still required to give me a little bit of token assistence while I scrub the urine stained mattresses (yes, plural), sheets, three sets of clothing and two blankets that the aforsaid person pissed on in an early morning fit of spitefullness.
Malicious peeing is really where it's at and it's something I'm thinking about taking up. God. I am so damn hostile these days! I have totally abandoned my old 'live and let live' policy towards stupidity and antisocial behavior. What if I just started sneaking into the homes of people who bug me and peeing all over their suff?
I've keyed 1 hummer and 2 Candillac Escalades in the past 48 hours. I've scratched "Pig" into their driver's side door. Yeah, I know, how Sadie Mae Glutz of me. But I'm a weenie about vandalism and I can't think of anything equally short that will express a similiar sentiment. I feel pretty justified about it, like it's my own personal throwback to the days of branding thieves and making lepers wear a bell. If you are going to be a goddamn pig about everything then you should have to drive around with a personal reminder of it slowly rusting your sty-mobile and announcing your pig status to everyone you meet.