All posts by Licketysplit

Let’s sue some bears, or arm them, or something. It hurts.

Uncategorized, , , ,

I haven’t discussed politics as they relate to this presidential election as of yet. I have thought about writing something down about a zillion times, and I end up feeling sick and queasy and just inarticulate and angry. Friday’s Republican VP pick actually filled me with cold fear. Here is someone who has the charisma and “spunk” that a certain segment of America loves to see, bringing a zeal and energy that John McCain cannot muster. She shoots the bacon, brings it home, fries it up in a pan. Just remember, Moxie is actually rather vile in the end.

I find her brand of ideology repugnant, and yet people are urging me to give her a chance because she is “nice.” Why is it always a woman who trades in nice? Why is this a redeeming quality when you have nothing ideologically in common with a person? Do Republicans sit around and say “Well, that Barack, I sure do disagree with him, but he is SO NICE!” I think not. Would I enjoy chatting with Ms. Palin? I am sure we could crack wise and yuck it up over some bourbon. Hot tub at the ski lodge all the way! Does this have anything to do with how I vote? Not in a million years.

Sadly, many people get their news exclusively from TV and interpreting photos of smiling, accessible looking people, and maybe she looks and sounds more like their America than the Democratic ticket does. To me, she sounds snide in her delivery (which I kind of like, as long as it’s not in an elected leader), inexperienced and full of contradictions, but different strokes, I guess. Her speech last night was certainly rapturous for a group of the homeliest white folks I have ever seen, so she’s on to something.

Anyway, I got off my ass, made my Obama donation
 til it hurt, and I hugged my little girl, filthy abortion-seeking slut that she may turn out to be. The irony of Ms. Palin “choosing” to have her son despite his medical condition and her daughter’s “decision to have her baby” is priceless. Apparently it IS a choice, unless you’re everyone else. Probably 75% of the women I know have had abortions. I must run with the wrong crowd.

Miserable depression greeted some of us the day after the 2004 election, and I had actually allowed myself a ray of hope this time around, that maybe people would realize that we as a nation are NOT better off than we were eight years ago, not by a long shot. Me, eh, I’ve never been without private health insurance. I’ve never been afraid of not paying my rent. I’ve never gone without food or delicious, delicious prescription drugs. My credit card pays ME. I bet I’ll be fine, no matter who wins.

Until, I dunno, the economy contracts further, there’s no more budget for stupid web applications, we lose our jobs, blow through our emergency fund paying for our own health insurance, and walk away from our mortgage. And eat the caaaaaaat, if she doesn’t eat us first. Unless you are at a McCain level of wealth, chances are you’re closer to the edge than you might like to consider. It’s the economy, stupid. The endless beast of a war. The environment. Social services. Equality. Possibly three Supreme Court justices. I have never been more scared than in realizing that the majority of the country may not be happily champing at the bit to undo the last eight years. I just can’t picture these two chatting up foreign leaders, but I guess after W, anything really is possible. Let’s just go ahead and put an addition on the double-wide and park it on the White House lawn and call it a day.

Wooooooo

Uncategorized, ,

I got a scale that measures my body fat percentage, and you are about to be painfully informed of how happy this makes me. Some people are afraid of the numbers on the scale, but I take it in stride as Science. I have 25% body fat, by the way! Wooooo! I am excited not because this is a good number to have (it’s smack in the middle of the optimal range for my height, which means that Anna Wintour would actually throw up at the sight of me), but hey, if I can have a device in my home that shoots electricity through my feet, it’s only a matter of time before I can buy a home MRI machine.

OK, if you need me, I’ll be wearing a jacuzzi suit. In the future. ThatswhatImtalkinabout.

I have a Peter Schilling song stuck in my head

Uncategorized,

Man, I took the trash out, and I found out just how low of concerns my neighbors really are. Not only do they not recycle, they read “In Touch Weekly!” Didn’t even have the decency to hide it under something else!

Although who can really blame them, since this one lady in the building went to court to get the communal recycle bin hauled off because she felt its location made her parking space less convenient. I really do sympathize with her inability to back her SUV out with the flourish to which she was accustomed, but now I am stuck shredding and eating my own magazines, and this is harder than one might think. I saw a woodchuck up the hill, and I am going to see if I can kidnap him to eat the magazines for me. He can live in the washing machine when I am not using it. When I am, well, we will work that out when we get there.

I have to go figure out who I can sue about something. The weather: inconvenient or malicious?

Math: fad or here to stay?

Uncategorized,

Dear the internet, I wasted my whole weekend trying to buy a TV. Apparently no one wants me to buy a TV, as there are eleventeen thousand choices, with hundreds of dollars in price variance between sellers of TV sets. Plus the poor slobs at Sears will haggle, I hear! Is it even called TV anymore? Apparently it is called HDTV, and I am getting a “screen,” not a set. Also, my old DVD player is a few letters too short to just plug into the holes on a “display.” As Mr. H said, we have put more research into this TV than we did into buying our Indian Burial Ground, but then, look where that got us.

I backed into needing a TV by getting a TV stand, er, media wall, (from here!) and it is fantastic, but so completely attractive that maybe putting a TV on it would spoil it. It may well just sit there, languishing glamorously, until someone comes up with the notion to sell TVs in three flavors, like Apple products. You know: nice, nicer, really nice, and no, you can’t afford it. I cannot abide more than three choices, and I become so paralyzed that I would rather stare at all this reclaimed Brazilian barn wood than watch TV. I hear there is nothing good on TV anyway. Oh, barn wood, you have a lovely and fascinating pattern of holes. By the way, its beauty is superlative when placed against our new wall color.

Other than that, cruising altitude is nice. Is it the Oprah book or my stop smoking medication (I don’t smoke anyway, so really, this is approximately the same as taking speed, with less scratching holes in myself)? Now I’d go watch some Olympic Facebook updating, if I had a TV. My money is on the team from my old highschool, where people I don’t even remember meeting will still add me. You who what? Is that your married name? No? I really just don’t remember?

Oh, Jesus, remind me to tell you about the going jogging some day. My shoes are shiny like a robot.

JetBlue is DEAD TO ME

Uncategorized, ,

Internet, give me the strength not to scream at the Mormon CSR trying to charge me $15 to do the thing I am supposed to do on the website, yet the feature on the website DOES NOT WORK. Happy Jetting, you perky fucks. Thanks for not flying with us today. Thanks for JETTING. Yeah, we will indeed not be flying with you today, because you cancelled our flight. I assume this is because our particular plane is routed efficiently from the seventh layer of Hell, as the skies above Boston are rather lovely this morning. Give me back my money! The Utah accent is not helping me process my loss. Don’t make me send my Zellweger down there.

Have you given up?

Uncategorized, ,

It is a banner day when one gets personally invited back to the Republican Party by embossed stationery. I wonder how they found me? Perhaps from my subscription to “Entitlement Quarterly?” Or my presence on the Klan roster? Glory be.

It’s a sad day. Estelle Getty has left this earth, and a small child has figured out how to use a kazoo. I did scare someone into giving me half off a custom framing order though. He even carried it to the car. And I received a preliminary attractive person’s discount on a fine product! At last, acknowledgment that my eyebrows start at the exact proper point on my face. Life is so, so bittersweet.

I am never leaving the house again.

Home improved

Uncategorized, , ,

Oh, I didn’t mean I was DONE. Just that two walls, some baseboards, and a door are impeccably painted. Like art restorer at the Met painted. I get strange urges while on my knees. The little brush. Oh yes. The tiny one. Give it here to me!

This has taken the better part of 3 weeks, interspersed with cleaning, throwing out, donating, screaming, huffing, stomping, threatening, and other things Bob Vila must do as a matter of course. To celebrate the limited success thus far, a ybab came over and dragged a screwdriver down one of the newly painted walls. We can’t have. You know.

Why did a ybab have a screwdriver? Why ever not? Children need to fucking learn to be useful.

When I was at a large home product chain retailer the other day, I noticed they sell tastefully faux weathered placards inscribed with “Everyday is a gift.” I stuck my head in a foot spa and muffled my screams with a stainless steel polishing cloth.

In other news, Mr. H got stung on the toe by a wasp of some sort.

But the ocean ain’t whiskey and I ain’t a duck

Uncategorized, ,

As I was teetering on a ladder carefully painting the edge of a wall, it struck me how this will be one of those stories where we’ll look back and laaaaaaaugh. “Oh,” I’ll chortle, “One time, long, long ago, before the mutant wars, I had to make a thing called a condominium look like a West Elm catalog in order to convince someone else to buy it!”

“What’s a West Elm, grandma?” the kiddies will say. “I thought trees were illegal now?”

Then I will tell them about arranging vases of dried sticks, and they will laugh at me and ask me to tell them the story of how I lost my eye at IKEA. We will all relax in our hovel until the radiation winds kick up. One of the skins from the mutants I killed over a’ter holler will blow off, and we’ll have to make due with some tattered Pottery Barn catalogs to cover the hole.

The kiddies will drift off to sleep, muttering “And you could get meatballs at this place called IKEA? Made from animals?”

In other news, the secret to trimming a ybab’s nails seems to be singing “Rye Whiskey” over and over again. I was trying to get Mr. H to join in on “Alabama Song,” and then “Mack the Knife,” but he is not familiar with those works. He didn’t even know “Rye Whiskey,” but it’s simple enough to jump in at any time.

I am not who I think I am

Uncategorized, ,

Apparently, I managed to buy $220 worth of gas at a place in the Bronx that also hosts a check cashing place starting on the same day I bought groceries at Whole Foods in Massachusetts. I guess I *could* have nipped on down and returned in time for a ybab’s birthday party, stomach virus and all, but eh. And sure, my H2 is expensive to fill, but I have never spent more than $60 on a tank thus far, and I only fill up once a month since we walk to stuff. The plot thickens. Could it be that someone is playing funsies with me? I cannot imagine. According to the helpful American Express representative, these were pay-at-the-pump transactions, so I must have physically been there, buying $75 worth of gas once a day for three days running. There is no chance, none whatsoever, that my card details were re-encoded on a new card, or that some shady fucker has a shady fucker of a friend who works at a gas station/payday loan place in the Bronx.

I have got to get off the Ambien. If I can’t stay out of the Bronx, what’s next? Sleep fucking in order to get the hobo semen necessary to join the Gloucester High pregnancy pact? I have a few things to say to those poor girls: meet my ybab. I took her to her two-year-old well visit the other day, and she screamed and wrapped her legs around my waist like a monkey and would not stand on the scale. She fell asleep from sheer rage in the exam room, and thus and only thus was the doctor able to physically approach her and listen to her lungs and look in her ears. Perhaps my special purpose is to do ybab “Baby Think It Over” demos around the state.

Of course the “pregnate” issue is being muddled in with birth control access. Birth control access = good, as far as I am concerned (and I make sure to access it as much as possible), but what do you do about a fifteen-year-old who thinks having a child is a good idea? They are not interested in using birth control. Women may control their bodies, but deeeeeee-amn. Shee-it. What a mess. I also don’t understand the concept that there is only one dead-end community to live in for the rest of your life in all this great land. Why, move to Lowell! You could work at the CVS favored by 90% of the city’s methadone users and steal my credit card info from the Express Pay reader. And my ybab will have a fit on the floor and then bite you.