Bowl Of Cherry

I am back from China is more or less one piece

2005-06-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

I was planning on transcribing my journal that I wrote while I was there, but now of course, that I am back I can't find it, so I will just give a quick tour of the highlights.
And of course most of my fears turned out to be silly. Let's start with them.

Malaria: I did get eaten up by mosquitoes one day but it was in a city and therefore, according to my travelling compasnion, not a malarial risk. But then I got scared that the malaria medicine I was taking would make me go psycho, as my travelling companion warned. Turned out not to be a problem.

Bandits: As far as I could see, China was crime free. But our guide Dorjee did refuse to let us eat in one place because the owners were muslims and he thinks muslims eat people. We spent some happy moments trying to assure him that this was VERY VERY unlikely, as Muslims have very strict dietary rules, but I don't think we succeeded. It's possible that he didn't really mean Muslims though.

Chinese airports: The Shanghai airport has three confusing floors, with the roof of the top one looking like a giant hairbrush, huge bristles coming down. On the way there I managed fairly well, with some running around, but on the way back I had a really long layover so I decided, what the hell, let's get drunk. I had a long island iced tea and then I made the mistake of ordering iced coffee with brandy, wwhich came with ice cubes (potential dysentery carrier that I had to pick out) and a big raw egg that i had to scoop out. And then when I went to check in they told me I had to retrieve my luggage and recheck it in, which meant a frantic drunken dash through the airport, sweating sheets, and only just making my plane.

yak butter tea:
I had some, and it wasokay. Salty, creamy, and reminiscent of breakfast cereals. It was fine except that the idea made me nauseous. But it was worth it to see Dorjee's father, a wizened little old Tibetan, hand churning the tea.

hepatitis: well who knows? I don't even know what the symptoms are.

altitude sickness: In Ba Mei, the most remote place we went, I had to rest every few feet I walked and my lips and fingers went numb and I had a symptom I can onloy describe as butt weirdness. But then later I got true altitude sickness. Headache and nausea, lying in the dark groaning, after a brisk little eight kilometer hike which my travelling companion said was "almost" enough exercise for her. I just lay there and groaned.

insomnia: and plenty of it! Especially the night we spent with Dorjee's adorable relatives and their adorable screaming baby. It really was cute but not a wink of sleep!

not being able to find anything to eat there
right on the money. Turns out one week is about all I can handle of Szechuan food. Dorjee would find something we liked and make sure it was at every meal after that. or maybe small village restaurants don't have a lot of variety. Either way, I won't be eating pork again anytime soon.

Getting on my friend's nerves:
And how!

stranded in China with no place to sleep:
we were okay there--lots of dirt cheap hotels, but we got tired of towns. All day long we would drive through gorgeous countryside only to fetch up in some dingy, nasty little town where we would spend the night.

Those were my fears, but tomorrow I will write about the good stuff, the cool stuff that I saw and bought.

Cherry on

Why did I say I was going to shanghai?

2005-06-01T22:20:00.000-07:00

That's the title of one of my favorite Doris Day songs, but the truth is I really am going to Shanghai. Tomorrow, and I am more than slightly freaked out by it. I am taking off, leaving on a jet plane, with toilet paper and a towel.
So it all started a few weeks ago when I was trying to find something extra special to do on my birthday, and my friend said she couldn't do anything with me, she was going to Tibet. So I said I wish I could go to Tibet. She said, "Come with me!" And now I have a ticket to China (we're actually going to be in the Sichuan province of China) and I am more than slightly freaked out by the whole prospect.
My fears include
1. malaria
2. bandits
3. not being able to figure out how to navigate a Chinese airport to make my connecting flight from Shanghai to Chengdu
4. yak butter tea
5. hepatitis
6. altitude sickness
7. insomnia
8. not being able to find anything I can eat there
9. being a burden to my friend because of my weakness and constant neurotic fears and finally
10. being stranded in China with no place to sleep

So the next time I write I will be a seasoned world traveller with a two week trip to China under my belt.

Is this the death of the Cherry Terror?

Side note: I just came back from a weekend in heaven with a hundred or so of my closest friends and can I just say i llove my friends with a more fanatical, heartbreaking and pure love every year? Hell YES. Did we have a good time? We made the history books of good times. After a weekend like the one I just had I just walk around glowing for a long long time. Love is in the air...

Cherry on everyone

YES!

2005-05-08T21:35:00.000-07:00

So I got mself worked up into a royal tizzy over this whole "wrestling naked in oil" thing, and then when I got there it turned out to be very simple and lots of fun. Drink tequila, get in the ring. I wrestled twice and only in the second match did it get oily: halfway through they started to pour baby oil on us and I'm still a little greasy, truth to tell.
The hidden content of all this is my identity crisis: I used to be a svelte little number rampaging through the San Francisco streets, drunk as a skunk, kissing women and running away. There used to be nothing I wouldn't do. Porn shoots and sex parties. But then I gained twenty five pounds and lost my mojo. I let too many naysayers and party poopers tell me that I was too loud. I tried a couple of schemes and plans that went awry. Stuff happened. I had to go to Florida to visit my mother an grandmother, and a vulture hit me in the face.
And the truth was---pause--I just wasn't sure I was Cherry anymore. Gasp! No, it's true! I thought my days of wild parties and antic behavior might be in the past. Because you can't fake that stuff and you don't even want to try, it's no fun wrestling someone in oil because you're trying to be someone you used to be. It's just not a good motivation. You either are that bad girl or you're not.
But Friday night I was. And met all kinds of people and they actually liked me and asked me out and want to kiss me and do all kinds of stuff.

Which brings me to the other problem: I'm not ready for anything more than giggling at someone from across the room. This is still day sixteen or so of heartbreak, after all. I'm not ready! It's all moving too fast! I have to practive saying what I mean and meaning what I say, or I'm going to end up in another one of those situations where I am sneaking out of God knows where at three in the morning thinking, oh my God, what have I done? I hope this dude doesn't know my real name!

And then there's the energy expenditure! I was up something like five hours past my bedtime and the entire rest of the weekend was more or less spent recuperating. I so envy my friend Petra (not her real name) who seems able to stay up till five, sleep till two, eat a pizza and repeat the procedure. One night out and I have to spend the entire rest of weekend on the couch, watching Cary Grant movies and drinking nutritive teas. Did I get any real writing done yesterday like I promised to do? Certainly not. Why can't I remember that I am something like a nineteenth century invalid, suffering from the vapours and neurasthenia and hysteria and requiring smelling salts and hartshorn on an hourly basis (that's atavan and coffee in this day and age). And how am I ever going to reconcile the fact that I need to drink too much tequila and run around making trouble in latex with my other need to live an unruffled and productive life with lots and lots of time for writing? And what am I going to do about the very cute couple who asked me if I want to do a threesome with them?

I'm feeling a little like a kinky Bridget Jones. I have a feeling I would get very little sympathy from most people: oh no, I have too many friends and too many parties to go to and too many people asking me out on dates so I can't get my writing done. And next week the party I have to go to is of course Friday, and I have to teach a class Saturday morning, and then there's another party Saturday, but I probably will be all done by then, I'll probably be hitting the couch with Cary and tea, or maybe back episodes of South Park and a bag of cheesy poofs. And then I think I am making dinner for friends on Sunday. And when will I get my writing done!!!????

Wrestling naked in oil

2005-05-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

One of the downsides to being someone who has done some crazy shit is that people will expect you to do even more crazy shit, which you (I) don't always feel in the mood to do. Which is why I find myself semi-committed to wrestling naked in oil tomorrow night. Do I want to? Should I? How does one even begin to evaluate the question of whether one "should" wrestle naked in oil?
I want to want to wrestle naked in oil; I want to feel that raging cherry spirit that says "pass me the tequila and oil me up, boys!" After all, I have wrestled in tapioca and in lubricant but not, yet, in oil, and I have so few occasions to wear my latex cherry thong.
But truth is truth, and I am feeling flabby butted and heart broken these days. I was two years younger and thirty pounds lighter the last time I wrestled in anything!

Well, I tried to compromise. I made arrangements to be there--"Sorry, Mommy has to miss movie night this week because Mommy's so-called friends want her to get drunk and wrestle in oil. Put I promise that tomorrow we can play a fun game called 'Nurse' where you get to take care of Mommy's hangover." (I know, I am the worst mom ever, but my kid loves me, so screw you). And then I said, okay guys, to my friends who are planning this caper. I will come. I will live by the boy scout motto and come prepared: I will bring tequila. I will shave my naughty bits. I will wear cherry pasties and a thong. But if I don't want to do it when I get there, the hell with yall.
But then my so-called friend says, oh great shug, sign up for a match. And I said, say what? So if I don't sign up ahead of time I can't wrestle? What if I sign up and then don't feel like it? What if I don't sign up and then I DO feel like it? This is already one of the reasons why I am not a famous stand-up comedian: I don't feel like performing on demand, goddammit (not quite being funny enough might be another reason, but I doubt it). I refuse to go around coking myself up just so i can live up to promises I made before I knew what I was going to feel like doing. Keerist. So who knows what I m going to do. Then again, one of the joys of being me: who knows what I am ever going to do?
Just where did I put my latex cherry thong anyway? Tequila, anybody?

Cherry on, yall

The true meaning of chisman

2005-05-04T21:14:00.000-07:00

Life continues. This week I read an essay that saved Christmas-- excuse me, I mean Chisman, as that holiday will now, thanks to this poor ESL student forever be known at our college. She wrote an absolutely charming essay about how hardly anyone knows the true meaning of Chisman and we should all renounce our materibble-ism and get in touch with the true meaning of Chisman, and by the time the essay was done, I was gushing tears of mirth. Merpy Chisman everyone!

day 10

2005-05-02T23:30:00.000-07:00

Had to read paper after paper today, all these test papers. ESL found poems are some of my favorites: The thoughts of children, however,therefore; the color of snow (i think it) in additonally.
Long tiring day. Then I forgot to dry my clothes. So right now all my pants are wet. Not the fun kind of wet either.

poop cracker

heartbreak, day 9

2005-05-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

This has been a long long day. Saw lots of people, gots lots of love, told people stories. But here's the thing I don't like to say: there's this loneliness seeping into everything, even when I am with people, even when they tell me they love, as if everything and everyone is just faintly blue and sad. And this loneliness says it doesn't matter how many people I see, because only one person really exists or can make me feel as if I exist.
Still and all, it is good to have people to see and places to go and stories to tell. I met an Enlgish guy named Benjamin and we talked about the Protestant ethic and Max Weber. I met another Brit named Simon who wore orange pants, and yet another guy whose name I forget who told a tory about wearing a sundress while on a road trip in Texas: "Yall should just git." I met my friend's hunky boyfriend: yowza. I told the story today about the time I caught a mouse with my bare hands.
Remind me to tell you sometime.
I listened to a lot of people perform at a cabaret but got so tired I decided not to perform myself and just came home. And now: herbal tea, melatonin, brush the teeth, good night.Heartbreak's not so bad. It's here on the end of lonely street...

Cherry on everyone

my asshole smells like cinnamon

2005-05-01T02:22:00.000-07:00

And what else is there to say, really? It was a good party.

Day 8 of heartbreak

2005-04-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

This has been a fairly upbeat day. mostly because of the amazing amount of caffeine I consumed in order to spend the day working.
Yes, well, about the Dalai Lama: I am slowly embracing some form of Buddhism, having seen the truth that if I could rid myself of desire, especially for my ex, life would be a lot happier. Unfortunately, he's very very gorgeous. So I am not the Dalai Lama, and sometimes when I'm in bed brooding about this and eating ice cream (another thing to not desire) I think that maybe I'll be the Dalai Lama in my next life, though that is silly because the point of the Dalai Lama is that he always comes back as the Dalai Lama!Which sucks because he's totally hogging all the spiritual enlightenment!
So anyway, heartbreak isn't that bad as long as you have the right drugs to mask it, but they have to wear off someday...
But I'll worry about that tomorrow; tonight I am going to a party.And tomorrow to another one, and tomorrow night another one, and so on.

Cherry on, everybody.

heartbreak

2005-04-29T21:33:00.000-07:00

A month gone by without blogging, and all because I had a fit of the dismals after reading my neighbor trouncing post. I should just take it off, because I hate the way it makes me sound, mean and evil and horrible, but then I decided not to, because that would be a dishonest attempt to hide my blemishes and also because I comfortably decided that no one ever has or will read this, so it allows me a place to practice writing with the thrilling possibility that at any moment someone might read it but with a comfortable surety that they won't.

So I am starting a heartbreak blog now. Some details witheld to protect the guilty but let's just say that after four turbulent years I think I have finally seen the last of my now ex. And also this morning I said goodbye to the therapist I have been working with for three years to help me cope with the emotional damage caused by now ex. So I am feeling a little adrfit in the world and as a result, I took to my bed with atavan and tequila and vicodin and nitrous and Georgette Heyer.
Georgette Heyer is a romance novelist from back in the day when a chaste kiss was all you could expect.
--Nowadays romance novels are hardcore stroke books for chicks and the hero is muff diving by page twenty. If interested in this, you might particularly want to check out the works of Susan Johnson,whose romances usually feature eightteen year old boys and mid thirties mothers of five (still outrageously beautiful, with a nanny to bundle all the kids off to) having sex in every conceivable position and talking dirty to each other.--
Georgette Heyer, on the other hand, keeps her hero and heroine clothed at all times, but she has a great ear for period cant and, what I love most, is not afraid to dress her heroes in the style of their day. In one of her books the hero comes mincing onto the first page in high heels, decked out from head to toe in purple: capes, silks, brocades, the works. And she makes it manly somehow, as if the whole outfit was a quiet dare to anyone who had the effrontery to misjudge him. Sigh...send me a man who knows how to wear purple brocade...please...

Anyway, that's heartbreak, week one for you. Drugs aplenty, and Georgette Heyer. In my more serious moods I read about the Dalai Lama and

I got disconnected and lost everything I wrote after this. So suffice it to say that I have many things to say about the Dalai Lama and they were very very funny, but I am not the Dalai Lama, nor was meant to be, and I have to go to bed now and be not as good a person as the DAlai Lama. More on that tomorrow.

nitrous, ice cream, vicodin and sushi

2005-03-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

This would have been my recipe for an almost perfect day if it weren't for the two hours of horrifying dental work that occasioned all the rest of it.
Vicodin is the new lollipop at the dentist's office; I get some for coming in and being a good girl.
I auditioned my dentists intelligently for a change; I called them up and said that I needed a dentist who was very drug friendly because I am extremely neurotic, have a low pain threshold, and am terrified of dentistry. Since my mouth represents huge dental profits (I have had something like six root canals over the past two years), most dentists are willing to comply.
I think that dentistry is really just a scam anyway. They invented the anitbiotic that would knock out the bacteria that feeds on teeth many many years ago, but they need to keep their oral rape terror squads in the big bucks. So I sat there breathing in the nitrous and I have been in such a bad mood lately that it felt good to feel euphoric, even with a stranger's hand in my mouth.
Once, when I went to the dentist, I had this suden insight that if I just really really maintained and claimed it wasn't affecting me they would raise up the level really high. Well, I'm a natural born loady so I tried it out and got them to jack it up. And then I started feeling this weird feeling, like something I almost could put a name to, something I had felt before somewhere, what was it? man I know that feeling and it was just about at the tip of my tongue when...
it came right off my tongue and all over the dentist's walls and floors. What is nausea, Alex? Christ. there is nothing like feeling nausea really gradually sneaking up on you when you are so fucking high you can't even recognize it. What was great though was that after they mopped me up we got started again and I got them to give me even more nitrous (not as high a level though...)
But I digress. I got out of the dentist's office and went to sit miserably at the Long's while my prescription was being filled, and they REALLY should plan it better than that. I need the vicodin RIGHT AWAY after having the oral rape squad banging away in my mouth, not in a half hour after I take my blood pressure 18 times out of boredom.
One of my cardinal rules of life is that on a day when I see the dentist I no longer have to do anything at all after that. That's e-fucking-nough for the day, don't you think? So I took two vikes and lay in bed reading and nodding out and reading again and I was happy as a clam all day. And that night I waltzed myself out to sushi, got offered a free movie, and the whole rest of the day was just bliss.
Which brings me to the idea that if you're unhappy, it's a pretty good idea to do something that will make you even more dramatically unhappy (I recommend a mushroom trip if you're in bad mood) because afterward you're so relieved not to be THAT fucking unhappy, that you're relatively, um, happy. It's Cherry's homeopathic mood treatment. Afterward, you're just grateful to be alive. You can just lie around and think, hey, at least I'm not tripping balls anymore.

Well, that's it. Cherry on everyone. Treat yourself to some ice cream and vicodin, i recommend it. I didn't go for it this time, but a little corralejo in that mix will take you far.

Cherry

My Accursed Apartment

2005-03-13T20:17:00.000-08:00

So I have lived in my cozy little apartment for coming up on three years, and generally I like it fine, but it comes up radically short in one department: noise.
The whole place is four shoeboxes stacked on four shoeboxes with the cardboard thin walls you would expect in the aforementioned shoeboxes. Luckily I'm at the end and on top, the best place to be, and the neighbor beside me is the sweetest most quiet person you could ever hope to meet. But the downstairs neighbor? Oy. I'm on the second set of neighbors there and both have been some bad bunches of bananas.
I mention this because the thirteeen year old girl and her mom downstairs have just had a lively exchange of platitudinious insults and momisms--"No, you'll do it NOW!" followed by a duet of door slams, adante and con brillo.
The girl seems all right but boring, a typical teen with her typical friends. She used to hang out with a pack of loser boys who would come by and yell for her at the balcony (conveniently located right above my balcony). They all had crushes on her and would bay at her window like a pack of fat homely wolves. But lately she has smartened up and traded those weenies for a pack of monosyllabic skateboarders, so all in all I can deal with her.
And I have to admit that all in all these two are an improvement from Ubercunt Nicole. That girl came at me when I had been moved in for about two days and told me I was walking too loud. And that this was clearly me because she had never had this problem with the rock band/kickboxers/tako drum/samurai warrior/sumo wrestlers who used to live in the apartment before me and would practice all their craft simultaneously in the apartment but who were still not as loud aas me just walking normally across the flooe. And when she told me this she had this weird squirrelly look in her eye. So I said ok, I'll try to watch it and the next thing I knew the landlady was after me saying Ubercunt had complained (the plaster is falling off my ceiling! she said. Pictures are falling off the walls!) So I suggested that she start knocking on the ceiling every time there was a problem so I could know exactly what was bothering her. And over the next few days, she started knocking every time I so much as breathed too loud. Books dropping off my bed and my daughter dropping her shoes from a distance of six inches onto a carpeted floor were particularly venal sins. So I documented all her nuttiness and sent a letter off to the landlady and that more or less shut the bitch up, except then...
She gets a saxophone-playing roommate who starts to use the apartment to practice in all the time. And it's loud and it's driving ME crazy, and frankly, despite the fact that she was crazy as a bag of rats, I had always felt a little sorry or her too because I am neurotic and vulnerable to sound as well, and for the next five months I lived in hell, escaping my apartment day and night , living in fear of the saxophone player but not able to confront the situation because I wasn't totally sure it wasn't cuntmunch herself taking up the horn, and I didn't want to scrap with her about it. And what was worse, sax guy never played whole songs, just riffs and runs. If it were whole songs, I think I could have dealt, but this was just endless little blats and honks and splats of sound never adding up to anything.
Well eventually I figured out it wasn't her and went downstairs to talk to the sax dude and he turned out to be a very reasonable person and we agreed on a schedule, and I turned to leave, but not before Her Cuntitude accused me of throwing daily cocktail parties at three o'clock (a time when I am at work)(she never seemed to go to work herself)and that I had to stop inviting all those loud partying pot smokers to my house every afternoon. Even knowing that she was one crazy bitch, I got paranoid for awhile that the fbi was bugging my apartment and throwing parties there while I was at work, (ever since studying Russian and being involved in leftist politics in the 80's, before the Cold War ended, I have an ongoing fear of surveillance that I deal with by being a mouthy leftist who never actually does anything but talk--let them waste their time listening to me). Anyway I sternly reminded myself that she was a screaming neurotic crazy girl and to ignore her.
But ignoring her became impossible shortly after tht, when her relationship with her boyfriend deteriorated and I started getting to hear one-sided hour-long screaming sessions, often at four in the morning (if I streined, I could hear the soft pleading tone of the boyfriend as he begged her not flip out). Shortly after that the sax dude fled (we commiserated a few times about what a crazy fucking cunt his roommate was), and I was left to the joys of round-the-clock angry screaming punctuated by descents into hysterical sobbing. And then, hallelujah, he decided to leave her and she could no longer afford the apartment and one blessed blessed day, silence descended.
Really I am bring very flip, but it was very draining living with that much acute misery, and she was absolutely miserable, and not being able to do anything about it. I didn't even ever complain about the screaming because I figured she had enough misery without having to live with the humiliation of knowing that the upstairs neighbor that she despised could hear her yelling, "Don't leave me! Don't you fucking leave me!"
When you live in a stack of cardboard boxes, you often have to maintain the polite fiction that you can't hear other people, even when you hear everything. Sex becomes particularly problematic that way, especially if you like it loud, and I do (not Tarzan loud but, you know, what's the fun in living alone if you don't even get to have loud sex).
Anyhoo, after a month or two of sheer heaven, the lady and her daughter move in, and right away, I don't like this lady. She gives me a funny feeling. Hard to say what it is but it soon becomes clear to me that she's an A1 passive aggressive bitch and her daughter hates her. So we're back to periodic screaming fights, plus she has a whole bunch of friends that don't seem to be able to get the "tenant parking only" concept. And (proof that she's passive aggressive), she broke the law of not asking about noises that aren't that loud and don't concern you at all--in order to let me know that she could hear my vibrator..."What's that motor-like thing in your house? It comes on and goes on and off for fifteen minutes or so?" And giving me this nasty coy shitlicking face.
I told her it was the vacuum cleaner and tried for awhile to just preface every masturbation sessions with a hearty, "Boy, are the rugs dirty again?!" but it was no use. She made me self conscious, which is just not sexy.
So now I have to wait for her to leave the house to use my bad boy hitachi. I tried buying a quieter vibrator, but you know how it is when you're in love. Nothing else will do.
And, of course, like the cuntzoid in the apartment before her, she seems to have no job. All other six tenants obediently get up and are gone by nine am and don't come home till five or six,like good little worker drones, but she and I are the only ones with irregular schedules. So she puts a major crimp in my style (if you consider regular masturbation a "style".
To make matters worse, there is the cutest little free-standing two bedroom hosue for sale a block away with fireplace and hard wood floors, and I get to walk by every day and think, "If America valued education and paid teachers even half of what we deserve, I could afford a house in this neighborhood ann masturbate anytime I want in peace.It's just not fair! It's just not fucking fair!"

Moral of the story: support pay raises for teachers!

Other moral of the story: if you live in a small apartment, mind your own damned business!

third moral of the story: Don't have children. Overpopulation is jamming us together so tight we can't breath already, okay? If you have kids, you'll just end up in a small apartment slamming doors and yelling, "No, I hate YOU!" at them. What's the point?

OK, I'm cranky and depressed. What can i do to relieve this tension?
Hmmm....gee.... "WoW! I can't believe I let my rugs get this dirty!"

Cherry on everybody

Blah Day

2005-03-01T15:53:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here after a weekend of raucousness and tomofoolery wishing that I had something to say. This is real duty-blogging. I have the OED open beside me for inspiration, but even all the different ways you can use the word dolt are not sparking my imagination.
And what's more, it's Tuesday, and in an hour or two the organic delivery guy will be coming with the chard, and what will I do with it? It's going to be one of those straight-to-the-garbage days.
So it seems like thr right kind of blah grey day to talk about Gilligan's Island. Why not?
So when I was a kid I hd a deep and abiding love for Gilligan (and also Peter Pan--I have a thing for islands, actually). I had such a gut level unending love for Gilligan that when they shifted the time it was on to a time slot just before I could get home from school, I demanded that my mother watch the first few minutes of it every day so that she could tell me which one I missed (she did this once and then told me it was just too silly). Why did I love Gilligan, and what effect has it had on me since?

First of all, I loved Gilligan bceause Gilligan was a grown up who acted like a kid and everybody yelled at him, but they atill all loved him. For a kid that was afraid of ever doing anything wrong, this was intensely reassuring. The message of Gilligan was that you could always be forgiven, no matter how tragically stupidly you had fucked up.
Second, Gilligan was both sizzlingly sexual and completely innocent at the same time. Mary Ann and Ginger were slinking and bouncing and walking around in all these tight sexy outfits, which had my young bisexual heart all hot and bothered, but they never had any sex, which I was too young to deal with anyway.
Third, my understanding of Gilligan as a child was sort of existential in nature. In one episode, they get caught and put in these bamboo cages, and in this one shot-- not the greatest production values--you could totally see that the cages weren't complete and that they could step out from behind them. But I didn't realize it was a mistake. Ah-hah! I thought. They always could get off the island and out of the cages if they wanted to, but at some level they are always choosing to stay. They are caught in traps of their own minds!
And finally, years later, watching them again, I realized that Gilligan's Island, at the leat the first season, is totally communist! Over and over again in the first season they have plots that revolve around them learning that the resources of the island are limited and that they have to work together and share if they are going to survive--isn't that communist? The Howells are ridiculous in their belief that their money changes the situation and have to be taught over and over again not to be greedy and to consider the welfare of the group. Gilligan, with his bright red shirt and his completely trustworthy ethical nature, represents the proletariat whose labor is absolutely essential for their survival but who is often not given enough power or taken seriously enough, In one episode they think the island is sinking but it turns out that no one told Gilligan to leave the pole that they are checking with alone. (Yuk! That sentence was almost as ungainly as a badly executedprat fall. )
Anyway, there is another episode where they have an election for president and due to some hilarious hijinks, Gilligan wins, but when he tries to get people to take their share of the labor and make a whole bunch of improvements, they don't grant him the authorirty that they elected him.
Well, this was all a lot of musing for an afternoon and my shoulders are hurting. More on pop culture, vocabulary, chard and tequila on another day.

now you're cooking with chard

2005-02-15T21:08:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone, I am having a foul foul foul day.
And not for any good reason, no, if there were a reason it would be bearable, but really I have been in almost unbreakably foul mood ever since Saturday when, instead of going to a party I had planned on going ato and was looking forward to, my mood and plans zigged instead of zagged and I stayed home and took morphine instead.
I on't think morhpine is the drug for me. First it made my neck and head hurt, then it took away all pian and left a somewhat pleasant auphoria except that I couldn't actually sleep, and then it left a dank foul cloud over my life that hasn't lifted.

I'm obsessed with cookbooks and cooking these days and made a decent lime mousse this weekend before the existential nausea set in. For the past two days I have been lying around contemplating combinations of various wines and cheeses and hoping that soon I'll grow hungry so that I can have the entertainement of staiating my bloating, swelling belly. Then I remember the desititution of so much of the world and feel bad, go out and give a homeless person five dollars.
But tomorrow I will be virtuous and good, tomorrow I will cook chard.

I have one of those deals where organic fruits and vegetables get delivered to my house every two weeks. I also have one of those deals where every time I eat about half of them and the rest go bad, taunting me with all their wholesome nutrients while I scowl and make grilled cheese sandwiches. But the worst of all offenders is the ubiquitous chard. Every two weeks, another grotesquely large amount of chard comes to my door, and every two weeks I sigh and dump it right in the garbage. But I don't go online and tell the company that I am not and never will be a chard eater, because somewhere I cherish the idea of a leaner healthier chardloving version of myself who can't wait for the chard to come, who will open up her big green box and say, "Oh boy, I love leathery green leafy vegetables! I will make chard mousse and chard lorraine and chard a la king and sweet and sour chard!"

If only chard came once every few months instead of EVERY TIME! Who in their right mind could possible have enough recipes to account for all this chard?
Anyway, I m going to try to face this bottomless abyss that I am wallowing in by forcing myself to make chard strudel. It's a real recipe, in a real cookbook, and it calls for wilted chard layered in a puff pastry and cooked with jarlsberg. But fuck jarlsberg. I'm going to make it with provolone. I don't know what jarlsberg but it sounds like one of those dense rubbery swiss-type hard cheeses jam packed with those flavors of scandinavia like caraway. I hate caraway and I largely hate the cuisines of scandinavia, all those hard flavorless breads and bracing liquors.
I tried to look up Jarlsberg but got nothing other than a vague suggestions that it's "nutty." A quality I like in comedians and nuts but not cheeses.
Well, I ams till in a foul foul, convinced I'll never come to anything mood, but that's the extent that writing about it can do for me, so screw you, goodbye, and remember, don't take morphine.
Cherry on

My day--musings

2005-02-01T16:47:00.000-08:00

MY DAY TODAY

So I decided last night that I wasn't going to go to yoga, because the only time I could go was 6 in the morning--my kid is sick and I have to take care of her in the morning: her father was supposed to drop her off around ten or so. I'm not going to go--but my body has other ideas.

5:30 a.m!! My very irritating body jerked me out of bed, rolled me into yoga clothes and shoved me down to the studio.

6:00 a.m. Yoga was taught by a very energetic German guy, which made me decide never to get up to do this again. I don't like having orders barked at me in German accents under the best of circumstances, but at six in the morning at 110 degree heat it made me feel like I was in the ovens.

7:30--11:30
I went home and tried to rest, but my body decided that this was the day for going through all those piles of paper stacked in snowdrifts around the periphery of my apartment while watching my newly bought third season of Soap. I am growing really irritated with my body at this point so I try to convince it to calm the fuck down by a nice midmorning wank or whatever the female equiv of that would be. But it didn't work. It was up and doing again, and that was about the time my kid's dad called to say she wasn't coming over anyway, leaving me with way too much time and energy. One kitchen floor washed later, and I am finally tired enough to try to get a little rest before leaving for my job of trying to tame wild animals and teach them where to put semi-colons (community college English teacher). But it seems that my neighbor has decided that this would be a great day for letting a dog bark in her apartment when she isn't there. She doesn't have a dog, so I gather she must have rented one for the morning just to piss me off.
So I get up and go to work, figuring I can use the extra time to find a book I need for a class. I go, I park on the sixth floor of the parking garage, and by this time I am really tired, and I am almost to the bookstore when I realize I have left my wallet in the car. Reverse, back up the elevator, back down. Definitely coffee time.

12:00 Choices. I am tired and cranky and the corporate coffee place and bookstore are more likely to have what I need than the non-corporate coffee place and bookstore which are also across the street. Conviction wins out and I trot virtuously across the street.They don't have what I need. I slink back. I then buy some of what I need but the book I need most, they don't have.
After a few minutes of looking, I get the existential dread that always afflicts me in bookstores as I stare looking at all the trees that have been mulched to publish OTHER PEOPLE'S BOOKS. I stare at all the books, feeling a horrible mixture of lust and envy and despair: will I ever write a book? if I do, won't it get lost in all this sick spewing of print? How can I ever read all the books I want? Will I die hopelessly ignorant? Shouldn't someone put Ann Coulter out of her misery?

12:45 I am sexually harassed on my way to my office hours by a crazy black man who demands pussy. Due to the demands of my job, he is officially the third crazy angry black person I have dealt with this week. I curse the racism of this nation that has broken so many people and then put them on a collision course with me. I just want to peacefully teach semi-colons; leave me the fuck alone!

1:00 Sanctuary. I chat with other teachers in my hidey hole and surf the net. No students come.
2:00 After a dazzling performance on the subject, "What, really, is a noun?" (To most of my students, an abstract noun is a strange and mythical beast that must be approached with caution), I put my students in groups for the exercise in teacherly negligence that is the rough draft workshop. While they are engaged in giving each other bad advice, I reread The Land of Oz.

The Land of Oz is a very weird book, the most disturbing of all the Oz books, because in it a bad army of bad girls take over Oz with their knitting needles and proceed to steal jewels from the city and lie around and eat chocolates. Then Glinda, the good witch, confronts them with her trained army of disciplined good girls and forces the bad old witch Mombi to tell her where Mombi has hidden Ozma, the true ruler of Oz. Mombi tells Glinda that she hid Ozma as a boy! And then Tip, whose adventures we have been following, has to become a girl in order to take the throne. He doesn't want to at first but he bows before his royal duties and becomes a beautiful dainty princess. This must be both enticing and heartbreaking for young transsexuals, I tell you. I mean what was Baum thinking? What is this crazy world all ruled by women, and what the hell is he trying to say? Was Baum a cross dresser, I wonder?

Anyway, what with not having to actually do any work, the time sped by and soon enough it was time to leave, but I thought that I would swing by one more bookstore on my way home, so I went in and, once again, didn't find the book I was looking for but three more books that I somehow needed found their way into my possession, and i left the store poorer to the tune of something like thirty dollars. The sad thing is that the book I have been looking for all day I used to own but lost, and I'm sure it's somewhere in the slowly swirling vortex of papers, clothes, and books that is my apartment. But instead of replacing it, I am just buying more books that I don't have shelf space for. Crap in a felt hat.

Came home, called the kid. She and the dad are on the way over and we're all going out to eat and then we'll watch many many episodes of Gilligan's Island. I used to love Gilligan's Island as a kid and think now that it is responsible for many of my political convictions. But my Marxist interpretation of Gilligan's Island will have to wait for another day.

two tequila

2005-01-20T18:56:00.000-08:00

I have had many fine fine drunks with tequila, but pehaps the time I drank a whole bottle of Gusano Roja on Pink Saturday 2003 was the best drunk ever!

First of all, Gusano Roja--not exactly the best tequila in the world but at the time I cared very little. During the days when I was a conceptual artist working in the medium of a bus full of drunks, this tequila was my friend and helper. The picture on the label shows a worm in some sort of traditional garb that to my strange yankee mind looks like a worm in diapers and wedding veils. So I used to tell my happy drunk friends that in the town where the tequila was bottled, it is the custom to drink tequila nd dance until you piss yourself at any wedding. Frankly, if I ever get married again, that is exactly what I want to happen at the reception.
So it was Pink Saturday and I was doing a little volunteer work for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, manning the coat check at their green room and swabbing down any of the Sisters who get overly sweaty, etc. So I hung out, drinking a little discreetly, while my friends went out and enjoyed the street fair. Now I don't have the knack for enjoying street fairs, which always seem to me to be an exercise in how unpleasant it can be when you jam too many people together and play loud music over bad quality sound systems at them. But my friends Shilo and Shannon came back and got me and announced that they were there to take me out into the night so I took one long swig of the worm and took off.
After that my memory is pretty much of a blur: there were five of us swigging my tequila, though I am pretty sure I got the lion's share, and we were running through the crowd kissing all the women and laughing hysterically and running off to do it again. I remember kissing this ugly woman in a cowboy hat and that kiss was deeply magic, the whole world got soft and thick and time bent around us and unicorns passed by and I looked into her eyes and said, "Ugly woman in a cowboy hat, you're magic," and then ran off whooping and grabbing other women and kissing them.
Four hours later we were back at the sisters giggling and running through the party while Shannon's boyfriend desperately tried to herd us into one spot and throw us into a cab.It was pretty hard because as soon as he got Shannon under control I would tear off again, and vice versa. We were so frisky in the cab that Iain had to fend off lewd suggestions from the cab driver that Iain might not be able to handle us alone and he knew of a guy with bad B.O and a cab license who could pinch hit for him. When the cab got to their place the door flung open and we tumbled out still on high manic energy and ran into their place where we literally bounced against the walls shrieking with laughter and occasionally kissing or even, I think, having a few moments of some very shoddy half-assed oral sex before shrieking and bouncing off again.
And then at one point I bounced into the bathroom and saw the toilet. Ah, the toilet, I thought. Good idea. So I threw up everything I had in me. Mind you, I went from hysterical to vomiting with no intermediate stage through nausea-- it was great. When I got out, Shannon was passed out and I thought, "Good idea," and joined her.
In the morning, Shannon was one hungover she-demon with a scab on her face from pitching drunkenly off a curb when her heel broke (let's be fair to Shannon--she can maneuver in high heels at any stage of drunk and would never have hurt herself if not for the broken heel). But me? I was fresh as a daisy with no problems at all. Tequila--it can conquer fear and make ugly women beautiful--s long as they're wearing a cowboy hat. Long live the bitch goddess. If you are loyal to her and drink nothing else, she will treat you right the next morning (also if you just proactively hurl).

Next tequila installment: I discover the magic of corralejo on my trip to Mexico.

long lost gay orchid farming cousin

2005-01-18T21:58:00.000-08:00

Sorry to interrupt the tequila saga, but this just in!
So I just got off the phone with Mom. My stepbrother is coming back from Iraq this week, and my grandmother is all atwitter because she just got back in touch with her gay cousin. He hated his father, my grandmother's uncle, and hasn't been in contact with any member of the family in 60 years or so, and he's an orchid farmer in Tennessee with his partner of 40 years and I really really want to go there and see him. I don't know why, I hate every member of my family that I do know, except my daughter, and she'll hate me soon enough, but I really want to meet this cantankerous elderly gay Southerner; he must be a hoot.
I guess , for almost the first time since Aunt Flora died (my grandmother's gay sister, who loved evangelical preachers and organ meat sandwiches) I feel as if something has saved our family from the pit of banal stupor. Suddenly I feel as if there is a "family" instead of a few people who all live in separate states and try to ignore each other. Anyway, I'm probably a little too excited about this.

Cherry on, everyone

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor

2005-01-14T15:26:00.000-08:00

One tequila--First installment of a four part blog on why tequila is the best liquor in the whole frickin' world

The title of today's blog is a quote from the late great George Carlin. Okay, he isn't dead yet. But shouldn't he be? Hasn't he outlived his usefulness? I loved him once, but now I don't: George Carlin, you are dead to me! I would rip my clothes symbolically but I'm not wearing any. Ooooh, live nude girl blogging. A whole new kind of porn.

So today I'm a little slap happy and after sharing this story with my thereapist I have now officially told everyone I know, so it's time to write about it in a blog: why I love tequila. But first, a little inspiration--I think I'll crack my bottle of Corralejo and have just a little afternoon delight to help me write this story.
God that's good. Keerist.
So, like many many others, I am the child of a drunk. My drunk father was a frustrated poet, a dreamer and an adventurer who had been sold a really shitty bill of goods on what it meant to be a man. The end result of his misbegotten notion of manhood was that at 24 he was in the military and shackled to a wife and child (me)--and the child wasn't even his, biologically, but we'll talk about that another day. In addition to all that, he was, I suspect, a spectacular failure at what the military had him doing--he was a computer programmer. He had wanted to be a weatherman when he joined, but it turned out you can't do that if you're color blind, so he was reassigned and started to suck and hate life. When you're stuck and you suck and you hate life, you drink, and my father managed to go through a six pack of beer and a pint of scotch every day.
You might think that this would either make me hate or love alcolohol myself, but I'm lucky, no real addictive yen for alcohol and smart enough to see that drinking was a symptom of my dad's problems, not the cause. But still, I'm not the biggest fan of scotch. My father would start in on that stuff and swill it down in sodden, sullen self-pity that occasionally erupted into a rant about what was wrong with everybody and everything in the world except for himself.
But once, just once, something changed. He got drunk and set off, into a blizzard, heading drunkenly down towards the docks, swearing that he was going to get on a steamship and go to Jamaica. Jamaica! A Neverland where everybody sits stoned on the beaches and there are no snotty officers to telling you what a shitty computer programmer you are and no snotty daughters glowering hatred at you! I watched, peeping through the railings from upstairs, as my father tore out into a snowstorm (after my mother refused to give him the car keys) determined to walk through snow and ice and wind and get to Jamaica.
I cheered. Suddenly this trap of a life that had us all caught had been sprung, and fresh air rushed in. I didn't hate him at that moment--I was exhilarated, giddy, I wanted him to get to Jamaica or die trying. And I secretly harbored great anger at my mother for calling up their friends and organizing a search party to find him, wrestle him into a car and bring him back. Let him go! Let us go! Let's face the future without fear for a change and head off into the night drunk and crazy and bold! And if he dies in a snowstorm, even so, that would be a better life than this sad bleak life held together by duty and obligation.
But, unfortunately, he didn't die. He came back and slept it off and we all went back to frustration, oppression, seething resentment and scotch
My mother's explained my father's change of heart with one terse word: tequila. And for me, a great love affair was born.
To tequila! the drink of madness and possibility, the drink that takes self-pity by the throat and tears out its beating heart. The drink that conquers both fear and logic. Tequila, tequila, I love you.

Next: I tell you all about the bestest drunken night I have ever had! Fueled by tequila, naturally.
Live nude girl signing off--
Cherry on, everyone!

Rainy Day Vocabulary Fun

2005-01-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

It's raining outside and that means it's time to pour a nice cup of Earl Grey, hot, and curl up with the bestest pimp-daddy dictionary in the whole world , the OED, and learn new words! Yay!

OK, so my favorite ever way to incoporate new words into my writing is to find old words that everyone always words and find new forms of them, so that when you use them people have a small chance of knowing what you mean and feeling very clever. Nabokov, every word geek's big daddy, could do this trick very featly, as when he referred to the male virilia in Pale Fire. Some of my favorite finds while looking for these kinds of forms:

Feculent: having to do with, sharing the properties of, or imbued with feces.

Wrongous: yes sir, it's the opposite of righteous. How could this word ever have fallen into disuse? For every righteous person I know there are at least 100 wrongous.

Angersome: Something what angrifies someone who is angryable.

Apparently, also, another definition of gnome is a maxim or truth. But a gnomide is a female gnome, and a gnomographer is a writer of maxims. Unfortunately, there is no such word as gnomenclature. But there really should be, I think.

Infructuous: Barren, sterile.

Don't angrify that gnomide by telling her she's infructuous; that would be both wrongous and feculent.

Bye now.
Cherry on

Bad Trip

2005-01-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I drove back to the Bay Area from San Diego, second leg of a two day journey back from Mexico. Not a good trip. Allow me to share.

7:30: Day begins in queen-sized bed in overly expensive hotel room outside of San Diego. Boyfriend still sleeping in other bed. Massive fights with B yesterday. Let him sleep and go get breakfast in "breakfast room," come back to room, he wakes up; I take a bath. All well so far. It will get worse.

9:00 to 10:00 I watch "Made" on MTV. Adorable black guy from Tennessee wants to dance, homophobic frat brothers look askance (that rhymes!). Reconcile with B. High point of day.

11-2:00 Check out. B wants to drive to LA up Highway 1. It's a long drive. US seems depressingly, smugly, absurdly arrogantly affluent after Mexico. Pretentious cutesy pie bad taste beach communities depress me. As we approach LA, bleak urban ghetto scene with angry black people depresses me. I realize I am hard to please, think back to poor dusty Erendira, the town in Mexico we passed through. It did not depress me. In order for a landscape to not be depreesing, it needs people in no particular hurry drinking beer in the street and laughing. Neither rich nor poor in America have this.

2-3. B and I decide to eat. Through we agree we want non-chain or franchise hamburgers, B wants burger from place where you order at counter off a board with plastic letters, some missing, and can also get chili fries and corn dog; I want a place with a tired waittress in ugly uniform where can also get bottomless cup of coffee and pie. We find a place with both close by and park. We go to his choice, but crowded with bad acoustics and wet seats. Go to my place which turns out to be his kind of place after all, and we eat bacon cheeseburgers, read Entertainment weekly. Report of 1978 Star Wars Christmas Special. We are both consumed with lust for this rare, Carrie-Fisher-and-Bea-Arthur-singing, Wookie-centered novelty. If you can make me a copy let me know.

3:30. Deposit B at his cousin's house in Santa Monica. Brief relationship chat makes B want to drive to Bay Area with me but I dissuade him, telling him that this will Undoubtedly Lead to More Fighting. Wave goodbye to B.
Bounce around area for a while like bug who flies in a window and can't find way out. Am about to get on the wrong freeway when Voice of Reason speaks up and says never, never, never navugate LA freeways by guesswork. I lived in LA for a long time and recognized the bitter wisdom. Go into a Von's to buy map/get directions. ALL WORKERS IN VON'S ARE BEING FORCED TO WEAR MOUSE EARS. Their eyes express various degrees of indignation, shame, resignation, and loathing. I want to express sympathy, but the woman I ask for a map looks at me with such barely concealed hostility, daring me to mention it, that I decide to tactfully ignore headgear. Personally I have some mouse ears myself and like to wear them with micro miniskirts and pasties, feeling it gives an insouciant and dissolute air to slutwear, but I am not forced to wear them on the job.

I get on the freeway. YES!

I miss the first freeway exchange of the day. Doh! I turn around.

4:00 A sign tells me the 5 is CLOSED! Closed due to snow. I briefly consider turning around and getting on the much longer 101 but I decide that the sign was probably KIDDING and keep going.

Sign not kidding. Am shunted to Palmdale to take the "114 to the 58."

The 114 is very boring. I listen to PG Wodehouse (B calls him PG Whorehouse, which is funny in at least two ways) on tape. The actor does a fine range of British voices but American ones stump him and there are three American characters. He seems to think Americans pronounce "thought" as "thort."Do they do this anywhere? Maybe Boston? I have way too much time to think about this.

5:00 Getting dark and raining. I see a sign saying to take the 138 to the 5. Thought I must have not seen the other sign, saying 58, properly, so I take the 138. Miss the content of a big sign right after changing but go barreling down tiny country highway in rain anyway. After third flooded area of freeway and 12 miles, Voice of Reason says to go back. Odometer informs me that 12 miles out was 18 miles back, which seemed experientially true but unlikely. The missed sign had said, Don't take this highway, go to the 58.

6:00 Miserable blattering rain and bumper to bumper traffic in town of Mojave where freeway stops being freeway and all the diverted 5 traffic is piled up. Takes 45 minutes to go 7 miles. I start to think wistfully of hotel room and promise self to stop if driving conditions start to get bad. Start to need to pee, eat, get gas, but all of these can wait.

7:00. Past the traffic! I see a sign that says the 58 is ending and Sacramento traffic should take the 99. Thinking this would take me to the 5, I get on it. 30 minutes later, Voice of Reason says to get off freeway, pee, get gas, and check. Got gas, found out had to turn around, cursed vigorously, went to pee. Bathroom at lonely side of station has weatherbeaten man sitting in front of it. He flashes me a look that says, "I sure can't wait for you to go in that bathroom so I can follow you in, rape you twice, kill you, rape you four more times, then cut off your tongue and stick it in my fly so when someone says, hey, you're hanging out, I can say, nah, that's just the tongue of a dumb cooze I kiled at a truck stop." I repress the urge to tell him that anyone as eerily expressive as he is should consider acting and get back in my car and get on the 99 South, then take the 46 over to the 5. The 46 is a charming road, going right by a State prison and Gun Club Road. At one point I see a sign for the 5 but don't see the 5 so I turn around and look and then have to turn around and keep going. Am really really starting to need to pee.

8:36. I pull triumphantly onto the 5. I really really really really need to pee. No place to pee. None at all.

9:15 Rest stop! Triumphant pee which takes so long the automtatic toilet flushed mid stream, misting my backside in a refreshing froth. I ponder vending machines but decide to keep going.
It's 193 miles to San Francisco and I am going 80.

10:15. 160 miles to go, somehow, despite hour of booking it. PG Whorehouse done. Start to write cowboy melodrama based on place names off the 5. Perky heroine Buttonwillow McKittrick, dimwitted but really hot cowboy Lemoore Hanford, evil banker Shafter Wasco, whore with a heart of gold Gustine Merced, and salty ranch hand Gilroy Hollister.

10:30/ See flying saucer. No one else seems concerned so I don't stop.

10:45. Finally hungry enough to eat. Go to Jack in the Box and begin era of eating healthier by getting touted "lowfat" item. The packaging baffles me and I end up ripping into and shoving the whole package in mouth and then harvesting bits of food off lap.

11:00 Cowboy melodrama has turned dark, incestuous and Oedipal. Lemoore doesn't know that Gustine is his mother, rapes her in fit of frustration, unable to understand why the only whore in town refuses him (it's a one whore town--this almost made me crash it amused me so much when I thought of it). Story now is Greek tragedy infused with Arthur Miller's the Misfits.

11:05 Oedipal dark Arthur Miller Western now unrepentant porn fest. All permutations of partners considered and lovingly embellished.

12:30. HOME AT FOCKING LAST. Pour myself a stiff tequila, masturbate and turn in.

And that was my journey. I am very very glad to be home!

Cherry on everybody!

Cherry

i hate christmas

2004-12-25T16:42:00.000-08:00

Christmas gives me gas. It wouldn't be so bad except I have to do the Mom bit to an eight year old careening from ecstatic to whiny with sideswoops through unbearably bossy. So we did the Christmas thing and now it's over and I have to get geared up to go to Mexico, and also I have to get my ass in gear to go over to my friend's house for sophisticated Christmas dinner fun, and all I'm in the mood to do is sit in the dark and quiver. I don't know why the whole thing is so emotionally exhausting. My ex talks about the "Christmas despair." I don't have the despair now that I have given up any illusions that I could ever enjoy it and have settled for a faint hope that I won't go berserk or gain ten pounds. That last battle I lost. I stuffed my face with cookies and chocolate and French toast and can feel the horrible corpulent bloat upon me.

Well, I hope that your return to infant lactation fantasies in service of the capitalist economic machine has been as much fun as brawling with a drunken Welch Santa (Did you hear? five Santas arrested! Man I wish I had been there to see that one).

I'm going to go drink some green tea and take a nice hot bath.
Cherry on.

vibrators, tequila, whipped cream and fear

2004-12-23T16:01:00.000-08:00

Fear!

So today I am trying to shop for a trip to Baja and this was making me a little anxious because I haven't been to Mexico since a childhood trip to the border town of Laredo, and I am afraid: what if my car breaks down? What if the Mexicans are mean to me? What if I get lost? What if I don't have enough money to bribe the police? What should I bring?

Vibrators!

So to alleviate the fear I decide to give myself a little treat and swing by the neighborhood Good Vibes, which I have been meaning to do for awhile, and go right up to the sassy helper girl and say, "I want your most powerful and most quiet vibrator." See, my old vibrator is a great old guy with a heart of gold but man is it loud. I used to start every session with, "Boy, is my rug dirty!" in the hopes that my neighbor would think I was vacuuming, but she finally actually asked me about it.
"What's that sort of...engine noise...it sort of stops and goes for about...umm 15/20 minutes...and then shuts off?"
So I tried to cop 'tude: "It's my apartment and if I pay rent I can use my damn vibrator." But it killed the mood. So today I bought the very excellent Wahl all body massager, and I recommend it heartily. It comes with 7 fun attachments for "deep tissue" and "spot application." I have been lying here in bliss this afternoon ignoring my filthy house and just bonding with my new favorite possession.

Tequila!
Here is a recipe for an excellent Chilean Christmas drink. With tequila.

Heat six cups of milk with one cup of sugar until good and hot, then throw a quarter cup instant coffee in there and stir until it's good and dissolved. Chill it and when it's cold add a teaspoon of vanilla and 2 cups of tequila. Chill and then get that kind of wasted that you can only get when you're being caffeinated at the same time.

Whipped Cream!
I have a good story about whipped cream that involves my friends' menage a trois and an uptight Canadian mother, but it will have to wait for another day.

Bye now. Cherry on.

someone read my post!

2004-12-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

Someone read my post! Someone I don't know and everything. I find this such an interesting writing situation, like exposing yourself on public access television with not a clue whether someone or anyone will actually see it, so that I find myself simultaneously thinking and not thinking of the potential for audience. I think at some level I wrote the last entry because I thought it might flush out (so to speak! Ha!) a commenter so I could know, whereas I suspect I could take people for little OED rambles for a long time before hooking the fish of actual reader response!

I think that I'm so bored today that I m overusing exclamation points as a sort of punctuation caffeine. Sorry, everybody.

So I haven't learned any new words or had an interesting bowel movement in the past two days, so I guess that's it for me. And I have a lot to do before I am off to sunny Baja California to celebrate New Year's in rocking high style with lots of fresh crab and, my favorite drink ever. tequila. Perhaps soon I will post a rhapsody about tequila. Ah tequila, mistress of madness and moonshine.

Cherry on, everyone.

this is really gross, yall

2004-12-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

Ever gone to the bathroom, and a plug of pooh comes out, and it's like a champagne cork followed by the frothiest burst of diarrhea ever to foam out of your ass?

That just happened to me.

OK, Cherry on, everybody.

Fun with the OED

2004-12-20T11:47:00.000-08:00

So I had this moment where I woke up late two nights ago, going, "Doh!" Paraphernalia might be Greek, not Latin. Bacchanalia is Greek after all, and isn't the "ph" sounds like "f" a Greek giveaway? Like philosophy?

So out I whipped my trusty OED (a girl's best friend) and looked up paraphernalia, only to be pleasantly surprised that it is a mid-Latin term after all.

I love the OED. Wanna come on an OED ramble with me? (For those of you who might not know, the OED is the jammin'est pimp daddy of all dictionaries!) Let's learn something!
In the words of the immortal Johnny Ryan, learning is my heroin!

So let's explore the dictionary! Come on!

Here's an awesome word: quaquaversal: turned in every direction at once, as in.
"I took mushrooms at Burning Man and got lost, and man, was I quaquaversal for while there."

Let's stay with q, qs are qewl.

"Quar" to curdle. Can't top the OED's sentence on this one, "Keepeth the mylke from quarring and crudding in the brest"

When I was lactating, I had some brest quar once and man, that shit hurts.

I have been talking lactation a lot lately, by the way, because of my theory that Christmas is a return to infantile preoccupations with the overflowing breast fantasy, a la Melanie Klein's good breast/bad breast theory. In this interpretation, Santa jiggles like a bowl full of jelly because he is nothing more nor less than the big milky tit of goodness that we all crave. And that's why his hat looks like a nipple.
Oh, yeah, the OED. Let's see how many words can be formed off the word "query." I have a hunch that someone who asks a lot of questions can legitimately be called "querisome." Wanna see?

OK, I lose that one. I'll take a spanking when you see me. But guess what? This is really good! The root "quer" can refer to a question or a complaint, and you can be "querimonious" if you are a big fat whining complainer.

All right, let's go see what my kid is doing. She's been quiet for awhile and the last time that happened, she set my quilt on fire.
All's well. Just sitting and spacing out on the couch, writing stories in her head.

Well that's all the time for fun and games, shits and giggles, that I have for today. Tune in next time for more child arson, lactation metaphors, and dictionary hijinks.

Cherry on, everybody.

my cherry blog

2004-12-18T17:36:00.000-08:00

Cherry, as in, it's my first time, which is what being Cherry is all about, that and to boldly split infinitives while wearing as much cool Cherry paraphernalia as I can find.

Etymology minute: paraphernalia, rooted in the latin, refers to the clothing and etc. a woman takes with her when she marries. I prefer "cherriphernalia," the stuff a woman takes with her when she cherries.

Excuse me, I'm a little loopy with the supremely awesome boost to my ability to be self-absorbed and solipsistic that blogging will bring. It is no longer enough to write biographical essays and comic books and to perform monologues about the ever fascinating mystery of the heart that is me: now I will blog as well! Beware! Beware!
Okay, as you were. Over and out. Cherry on.