September 29, 2003
Happy Anniversary, Lad
Saturday marked the ten year anniversary of my long, tortured history with the Lad. We went camping. It seemed appropriate because:
Both our history and this trip have caused us physical pain.
Both have left us breathless.
Both have taught us that we can make do with less than we thought we could.
And both have involved freeze-dried beef.
Posted by didofoot at 03:41 PM | Comments (4)
September 24, 2003
No Rudesby
'I wore a bridal gown to my ex-boyfriend's birthday party' must be the first sentence of someone's dystopic memoirs. However, the invitation did say formal wear, and I am no rudesby.
An ex-boyfriend's birthday party has many things in common with a high school reunion, but the main thing is that you want to arrive at both functions triumphantly half-of. The Lad could not go so I had to dress like a wife. All evening I stood in my bridal gown silently pretending to be married.
"How is life with the new boyfriend?" asked one of the boys I used to adore.
I blushed becomingly and said, "Oh, we're still in the honeymoon phase."
"It's nice to see you again, it's been a long time," he said.
"Yes," I said. "You should give me a ring some time. Oh wait - too late!" And I held up my left hand.
"So, you're a grants administrator?" he asked. "You must really be married to your work."
"No," I said, "I'm married to my husband!" Oh, we had such a time.
Posted by didofoot at 01:57 PM | Comments (1)
September 22, 2003
Oh, my virgin eyes.
My Russian coworker just flashed me. She was talking about how she wished she was wearing the summery cotton frock that I am wearing, and then she said "I should walk around like this" and rolled her Russian shirt up to walk around in her Russian bra.
Posted by didofoot at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
Beat it
"We're going to be so miserable in about two minutes," I said, as our air conditioned car glided through Napa's excrutiating heat wave, two minutes away from our destination.
"Let's see how bad it is," said the Lad, turning off the air conditioning and opening all the windows. Sean and I were shocked and awed by this.
"What's the rationale here?" I asked, as the blistering 107 degree heat panted wolfishly down the front of my dress. "We're going to be miserable in two minutes so we might as well be miserable now?"
"It's like saying 'I'm going to go to prison in two days, so I might as well stay in my house with all the windows shut, to get used to it,'" Sean said.
"And thinking, Maybe I can find some other men to beat off in front of, too," I said, and then melted into a gooey puddle on the back seat.
Posted by didofoot at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2003
Howard who?
Like many of my clove smoking college brethren, I'm having a hard time understanding politics these days. I decided to do a little research to try and get a handle on things.
The Moms is strongly in favor of Howard Dean, and pretty much has threatened to disown me if I don't vote for him, so his website was my first stop. According to the biggest headline on the main page of site, Howard is in favor of Democracy, Freedom and Action. I am definitely in favor of those second two, but I'm not sure about Democracy, because there's this whole socialist group on campus that puts up a lot of flyers and I've been sort of meaning to check them out. Are socialism and democracy in the same category? I would know if I went to those meetings. Howard Dean gets an arbitrary rating of three out of five.
Next stop: the President. George's website's banner has a quote from the man himself, as follows: "When government and landowners and conservationists and others work together, we can make dramatic progress in preserving the beauty and the quality of our environment." I didn't really follow this sentence, but I like the environment, and I am definitely in favor of beauty and drama. I also like that "the voters" are not being required to take action on this very important but also kind of dull issue. Although the vague use of "others" has a threatening sound that I don't much like. I'll give George four out of five for his use of a complete sentence.
I looked up Ralph Nader but he doesn't appear to be running for president. I guess we don't really need a Green Party candidate this time though, since George seems to have the environment covered. But even though this candidate is clearly superfluous, I'm still giving the party two out of five. Because weed is green and I fully support the weed-based culture of college students.
I clicked three different links on the Libertarian Party's site and couldn't figure out who they're running this time around. But they still get one out of five because their name sort of sounds like "liberal" and I'm preprogrammed to hand out my voting candy to anything wearing that mask.
After my tedious quarter hour of research, George is the clear winner. And it turns out that Arnold isn't even running for president. So I guess my vote is obvious. Sorry, Moms.
Posted by didofoot at 12:20 PM | Comments (5)
September 12, 2003
Dear Johnny,
I hear you wrote good songs
And I'm sorry that you've stopped
Now I'll never get to write to you
In my celebrity writing workshop
Now I won't see you play concerts
Or jam live on MTV
Because the wake of nine-eleven
Has swept you out to sea
Sure, I don't own your albums
But I hear they're kickass noise
And I've always talked them up
To get in with indie boys
I wish I'd known you better
But I guess it's not too late
To call up my friend Maggie
And request a Cash mixtape.
Posted by didofoot at 02:09 PM | Comments (3)
September 08, 2003
My too much fun is not having enough
This weekend I found a Waiters On Wheels catalogue which lists dozens and dozens of wonderful restaurants that are willing to deliver right to my very door. To a semi-agoraphobic, this catalogue is crack cocaine.
A couple of nights ago I had a dream that all my friends told me I had a drinking problem, so I (in the dream) joined AA. Obviously I do not have a drinking problem, except the problem of being a lightweight, but I have become pretty addicted to staying in the house whenever possible. I've even been finding excuses not to walk the seven minutes to the Lad's house because it would mean leaving my apartment.
After having this dream and realizing that I am addicted to not going out and having fun, I have started trying to disobey every inclination to stay inside. I find that my life goes pretty smoothly if I just assume that all my instincts are wrong. But I still have that catalogue burning a hole in my coffee table, waiting for me to slip up. I wish there was a support group for this kind of thing, but I think they would have to come to me for that to work. Maybe I can find something online.
Posted by didofoot at 08:35 AM | Comments (7)
September 05, 2003
I will be Rachel
The Lad and I are fast approaching our one year anniversary. Last September I told myself that if I was still happy in this relationship at the end of a year then we should move in together. Oddly, this cohabitation has not come to pass exactly how I pictured it. Instead of the Lad, I got the Lad, Sean, Jack, Maggie, and Christine. "I said DOM-estic, not DORM-estic, you spazz," I told him, and he playfully stuck my head in the oven and ran.
Actually though, this community thing is kind of cool. It's like living on Friends. The Lad is Ross, a spouting geyser of science. Sean is Chandler, the funny one, and Jack is Joey, because their names both start with J. I will be Rachel because we are both secretly married to Brad Pitt, and now I am thinking about that and have lost interest in this limp analogy.
Posted by didofoot at 03:18 PM | Comments (2)
September 03, 2003
From back when I had time to read anything but school books
Dear David Foster Wallace:
I'm trucking through Infinite Jest for the second time, even though it's hard to read on the subway. My nearly-symmetrically-named friend Sean Keane has a theory that the jest the title refers to is that the book goes on and on with an all you can eat buffet of footnotes but then doesn't really resolve the plot threads or tie them together in any way. The jest in this case being a big yoke's-on-you to the reader.
I would like to think that you are not actually such a dick, especially after I read your essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." I, too, am a slight agoraphobic with a real hatred of waiting in line to eat. For a while after reading your essay I had a daydream wherein I wrote you this letter and you wrote back and we started a whole correspondence based on mutual fears, which eventually led to us meeting in a coffee shop of my choosing where you would be sort of surprised and taken aback by how I am fairly pretty and this would make you shyer even than I am, thus allowing me the rare delight of feeling like the gregarious and socially adept person in the conversation. But I eventually gave this up because it seemed sort of far-fetched.
But not that far-fetched, since I have a history of attracting and being attracted to fairly morose, withdrawn men with enormous vocabularies and passions and interests and talents, and for all I know you are one such man.
But on the other hand even though I am more or less in love with you for using so many words I have to look up, I do have a boyfriend who is gregarious and charming and sort of, to be honest, kind of loud at times, but certainly good looking and friendly and brave. So this letter is to inform you that I have entirely given up my wish of corresponding with you and possibly meeting you in a coffee shop, unless you are inclined to write back and tell me what the hell you thought you were doing with the ending of Infinite Jest.
Yours sincerely,
Didofoot
Posted by didofoot at 12:27 PM | Comments (3)
