tactfullyblunt

It's official, I'm in love with Bob Schieffer

Listening to the election results this evening, we were musing about whether or not Bob Schieffer missed his old buddy Dan Rather's election night antics (my personal fave: "This situation in Ohio would give an aspirin a headache").

Right about that point Kate-ums goes on and on about political scandals, including Sherwood who got in trouble for strangling his mistress. Then Sparkles asks Bob Schieffer what he considers the most high-ranking political scandal of the year. Bob, not missing a beat says, "Well, I guess if I had to rank them, Katie, strangling your mistress would have to be at the top of the list."

The expression on his face was priceless.

I had to point out to Bill that we pretty much had our answer there.

I heart this man. He suffers fools graciously and with heaps of humor.

This stuff writes itself

So I just got back from walking to my polling place where I blindly followed Bill to the incorrect precinct voting area (there are two hosted at our neighborhood elementary school). But following Bill blindly isn't what this post is about, that's just more of a disclaimer of my own stupidity so that you won't hate me for what I'm about to write.

Anyhow, we're waiting in line when the next couple comes up behind us. They're late middle aged, large people (both tall and wide), with the woman using a cane. The only other thing I can tell you about what they looked like was what I saw when she was walking away—her kelly green, too short (and tight) jersey pants and sweater a la 1982.

The reason I couldn't tell you any more about what they looked like is because I was afraid of them. I knew as they were walking up that there was something not right about them. Before you dismiss me as being too judgmental, consider, if you will, the following items:

1. I couldn't look at them because I have a morbid fear of staring at people who might go completely insane and chop me to bits in the too small lunch room of the local grade school.

2. The smell of stale smoke and sickly sweat coming off them made me too light headed.

3. Oh, wait, that wheezing isn't wheezing. It's actually the woman breathily (and repeatedly) mumbling "Ewwweeechubbachubbachubba...ewwweeechubbachubbachubba...ewwweeechubbachubbachubba". One time she got so wound up that she said the chubba part seven times. I counted.

4. This was offset every few moments by the man mumbling in a very base toned voice "MMMMMmmmmmrrrrrrgggrrrroooonkkk."

5. Then the woman lapses into a very coherent diatribe about how 2am comes very early in the morning when you've not had your nap. "Waayull, I just HAyud to watch MASH."

6. Then she goes back to talking about chub again. Hers? Mine? Someone else's? Who knows. I call my cat that sometimes, maybe she was talking about him.

7. Him: "MMMMMmmmmmrrrrrrgggrrrroooonkkk."

8. Right about that point, God help me, there was a adolescent looking male walking away from the voting booth towards what I can only supposed was his mother (she had a similar vacant look on her face) who was saying "umph" with every kick-legged step. He didn't look right to me either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I'm thankful that I don't live in Precinct 10 (yayyyy Precinct 13), it's no surprise why we wind up with certain persons voted into power.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Moved by The Spirit

Having been responsible for the holiday gift purchasing for the Lockard clan for the last three years, I have learned a thing or three about what's involved. Last year was a bit more painful than I'd planned because I didn't think I needed to control five adults (I learned I was wrong, have repented of my ways, and am going to spare my marriage the trauma). This year, I've already go the jump on a few gifts and just now sent out this email to my siblings in preparation for the holidays:

Fellow Spawn,

Since it is now officially the month of the Thanks, I would ask you to look down deep into your hearts.

Enjoying the holidays as much as is humanly possible necessitates my sloughing off certain hellish duties. Duties such as chasing after people for their wish list. Duties such as spending the 48 hours prior to Christmas being driven mad by searching, searching, searching high and low for what? Gifts of unknown nature or value for parties who shall remain nameless.

This year, in the name of all things holy, God has come down from on high with the following decree: "Harvest thine wish lists prior to the day of The Feed Ex. Woe unto you, whomsoever shalt forgeteth to deliver thy holy writs to the Prophet of the Gifts! For Ye shall be scorned of gifts on the Day of My Birth! And I really mean it. So Sayeth The Lord. Amen."

one nap later

In the week after 9.11, they began again; vivid dreams about an impending nuclear holocaust. The dreams had stopped sometime in my early 20s, after plaguing me from the time I was old enough to understand what those words meant. I won't bore you with the details of the "reinitiation" dream, but suffice it to say that even five years later I can recall every detail of the dream as if it were a life experience.

I put the resurgence down to the fact that I am admittedly neurotic with a tenacious imagination for all things therein. However, even I could never have predicted that the largest terror of my adolescence was not only going to move back into my psyche but also pick up pervading American culture where it had left off so many years ago. Apparently the writers of several new shows had some of the same apocalyptic dreams I had, only they decided to sell their souls to the devil to put it on tv.

The thing that surprises me about this is the fact that people my sisters' age (twelve years my junior) and younger never had to grow up worrying about this. I've asked two of the three of my sisters if they ever worried about a nuclear attack growing up—both said no. I vaguely remember seeing an article about the effect of the terrorist attacks on people their age and younger which did make mention of the fact that theirs were generations which had never had to contemplate living during a time where there wasn't mostly peace for the western world. It made me feel alternately jealous and infinitely sad for the potential loss of innocence for these people.

Until I realized that most of them haven't changed their way of viewing the world and that for many these tv shows are just entertainment. Even the recent nuclear testing in North Korea is nothing for serious alarm. You know, because it happened half a world away, which makes it someone else's problem.

Me? I'm still dreaming, only now in addition to the mushroom cloud on the horizon, I'm surrounded by crowds of people who, in the face of the blast, have placid looks of acceptance on their faces.

I can't tell which of these things horrifies me more.

screepy

I'm whupped. I've spent about 12 of the last 24 in a car driving all over Murlin. Driving home about 45 minutes ago I was doing the head bob when I remembered something that happened last night at my Dad's.

The volume on the tv is always up past the threshold of pain, even when he's trying to carry on a conversation with you. At one point, having sat in silence for, oh, about five seconds, his ADD gets the better of him and he starts flipping through channels. He flips past VH1's jiggly girls, past BET's jiggly girls, goes past E!'s jiggly girls, past The God Channel, pa—... Then he flips back to TGC, where a greasy looking dude is gesturing wildly.

Dad's nose screws up. His eyes narrow. I can tell he's wondering why this freak in a t-shirt, with the hair standing off the back of his head in such a strange way, is standing there in front of the most god-awful (no offense, Big G) stained glass window and gold wall in probably the Whole of the Western World. Oh, he's talking about how that's when he knew, KNEW, what Jesus was talking about in those boo—

Dad's arm jolts up and he starts flipping past E!'s jiggly girls, past BET's jiggly girls, and even back past VH1's jiggly girls before he stops for a moment on A&E, currently showing color photos of a bloody crime scene, to comment on what he'd seen.

"That man just reeked sa baad of wrongness, I had to cleanse my pallet."

Right on, Papi. When I see Steven Baldwin, I too suffer from the psycho-somatic hair-grease-I'm-freeekkkky-so-look-out! disorder. Probably makes me judgmental, but MY God washes his hair once in a while and doesn't look like he's coming down from a three-day crystal meth bender.

Go preach crazy somewhere else, Steve, you're scaring the church going folk.

musings of a monday

If we are a nation of conservative hick rednecks, how come the majority of commercials running right now use alternative music to market their products?

In researching images to represent the concept of priority, why do the first three pages show corporately dressed women in various poses on the phone or in front of the computer, a little too obviously ignoring toddlers, most of whom are screaming? The toddlers, not the women. (Well, some of the images do show a screaming woman, but those are in the minority.)

My father called yesterday to tell me about the most recent rumor one of his "friends" had shared with him about his upcoming surgery. Seems some fool decided to tell him that he will lose the ability to have an erection—for the rest of his life. This was enough of a concern for my father that he said he's been seriously considering not going through with the surgery at all. This conversation left me thinking several things:

1. Wow. It's nice to be old enough that I'm not squeamish about acknowledging my father as a sexual being. In fact, it makes me love him more that he can talk about it so openly with me.

2. Thankfully, I've done more research about the potential side-effects of his upcoming surgery than he has and am able to dispel these ridiculous (and overtly cruel) rumors these fright-mongers have been telling him over the course of the last few weeks.

If I were given a moment with this particular loser, I would say "How about I come over to your house and give you a homemade Brachy therapy treatment and then we'll see how much you want me to tell you that not only are you getting older, not only do you have cancer of the privates, but now your whole sexuality is caput? I didn't think so."

idea for story

I had to complete some horribly overdue and terribly mundane tasks this morning which don't really rate a mention here beyond the fact that I was required to actually leave the house for an hour and a half to get them done. Driving around on a cold, wet day is always exceptional thinking time for me, and I often come up with really interesting (read crazy/funny probably only to me) ideas.

Today I had a story flash through my mind, beginning to end, in about 3 seconds. This is a rare occasion for me, because usually I only get a locale or maybe a character study, but this time I got a location, a situation, some characters and even a smell.

The story is a little ridiculous in a "What plausible reason would cause those people to be in that situation at that given time" kind of way, but I can actually see myself watching it onscreen at my local indie theater.

After all this time of talking about writing a book, here, finally, is the idea. Now the onus is upon me to figure out what to do with it.

I imagine I won't get much sleep tonight.

a breather

After many weeks and months of working like a fiend, this afternoon I'm taking a little bit of a breather. Don't get me wrong, I'm still working, just not as feverishly as I've done for the last eversolong. What with going a little more slowly today, eating a salad for lunch (surprising how eating poorly makes me crave veggies like a freak), and awaiting this evening's teleorgasm of the Lost premiere and the Project Runway reunion episode, I'm feeling pretty magnanimous. I'm hardly even bothered by our uber conservative neighbors yelling in their front yard or by the fact that Guy, the guy who lives behind us, is persisting in his lumberjack routine on all the wet tree trunks in the backyard. In fact, his normally ratty looking "headband" (it looks like strips of his own underwear tied around his head) is rather charming to me today in its sweatitude.

For the last two years I also seem to get an emotional "break" from the beginning of October until the middle of November. Aunt Mary called to wish me a happy Mom's birthday on Saturday—during which I was experiencing the tail end of a hangover that felt like a stroke—and commented that she experienced the same things in relation to her mother, and now her sister, when specific times of the year roll around. It's not like she's wallowing in depression or despair, she's just more apt to wax nostalgic and cry at commercials. I couldn't help but see the strange analogy of this kind of body memory with a hangover: when you're drunk you're out of control, but you keep moving forward as if nothing is wrong, hoping for the best and that you'll be able to weather the after effects. It's not until after being drunk that your body clues in and tries to turn itself inside out. I'm sure there are all kinds of medical reasons why this happens, but it's never made sense to me. Why not throw up and feel like ass while drunk and get the euphoria afterwards? Seems like that would be a better way to recover from, well, stuff.

Anyway, that's how I've been feeling since August. I'm glad to get a break.

Especially since Poppy is going in for Brachytherapy the end of this month. That's right, folks, Poppy's got the big C in the big P. I still see him as indestructible, so I'm not that worried about it. That's not to say that I'm not concerned, because I'm totally concerned. I'm also thankful that I get to spend time with him. More than some people get.

I'm trying to get my newly-local brother and local sister to get the crap scared out of us this weekend. I've not done this since college with Lop and Julie. There is nothing like getting so scared that afterwards you laugh so hard at yourself you have tears rolling down your face. Or that someone wrongly accuses you of running them over. Or that someone gets so scared of the chainsaws that they run back into the haunted house. (Ed note: except for the laughing at myself, none of these were me. I do, however, threaten to have diarrhea as I'm waiting to go inside. The waiting is the worst.)

I've never been with my brother and sister to one of these. Mom and I used to go together all the time. Those were good times.

owhn ma mine

How come one drink is called a vodka tonic but another is called a gin & tonic?

Last month Real Simple had some suggestions for what to say to someone who's suffered a loss. I wondered, vainly, if they'd come to my site for suggestions. That would've been cool.

Why is it that even though my biz is (unbelievably) successful I still look like a reject from an early 90s grunge-style Church bazaar?

How come I'm having so many dreams about people I've not thought about in years? I had a dream recently that Lop's high school friend, Jill G., was abducted by aliens. The last time I even thought about Jill was probably around 1994, so does that mean that that dream was a sign that that portion of my brain finally just up and, as my husband likes to say ever so frequently, shit the bed?

You'll Never Find, As Long As You Live

Poor Bill.

No, we didn't make it to Longwood Gardens on Friday. Or Saturday.

We also didn't go to the winery.

No, instead the plan was to go to a small (bring your own wine) French bistro named Charlotte's, which had gotten great web reviews. We were going to catch a late lunch there and then meander through the gardens before driving the 2.5 hours back home to walk our vacationing neighbors' dog.

It was pouring down rain as we left the State store (that's liquor store for those of you who don't know the original name the State uses for their highly taxed and controlled alcohol disbursement system). If it was at all possible, the rain was coming down harder as we drove past Charlotte's the first time. We knew it was Charlotte's because that's what it said on the sign; right above the word COCKTAILS. Omen number one.

By the time we pulled into the parking lot, the wind was howling so hard that it nearly blew over two of the 85-year-old men running for their Caddys. Omen number two. This point was the first time that I asked Bill if we were at the correct address. He assured me that we were, checking the mapquest directions again. We looked at the windowless, stained cedar-shingled building, considered the wisdom of going inside and instantly checked it against our growling tummies.

As we reached the door, there were four more 85-year-old men holding it open and yelling about the rain. Their 85-year-old wives were sitting at the top of the stairs immediately in front of us—and immediately below the most enormously tacky crystal chandelier I've ever seen. And yet, dear reader, I did not hesitate one bit to enter the abode. I knew I was in for an adventure, and adventure I would have!

As a very heavily Emerauded Maude led us into the dining room, I was totally overwhelmed by the ambience. I can honestly say that I have never seen alcoves covered with camel-covered carpet before, especially when accompanied with a pressed and punched copper convertible Dusenberg wall-hanging! I musn't neglect to point out that there were separate brass and crystal chandeliers for each table. The piece de resistance was that every table had a huge piano bar tip glass (a la Making a Living's piano player) full of, um, some kind of 10-month-old balls of crunchy dough which we bit into with our molars as we perused the menu of over 75 offerings. To say it was all overwhelming is totally selling the place short. I did some minor translation for Bill with the waiter and we were on our way.

I can't really talk about the food. There was a lot of it, for sure, but like all good design, there must be a hierarchy—and in this restaurant the decor was definitely in the driver's seat.

Bill was crushed; his plans had been entirely romantic, and here I was mocking the velvet and gold floral patterned wall-paper. At the time I asked him if it was comparable to a woman laughing at a man's ding-ding and he said it was. From my perspective, I couldn't have asked him for a more hysterically intimate afternoon if I tried—my imagination is good, but my imagination would never have come up with a bow-tied, 90-year-old waiter offering me alfredo shrimp fra diablo (ewwwww and wha?) and prune liquer in a crusty glass, while Tom Jones sang It's Not Unusual over the restaurant's hi-fi system.

Unfortunately, by the time we were done with the meal, we had to immediately drive home. Still, no one else has ever given me anything like that.

ED Note: Yes, we went to the Phila. Museum of Art on Sunday for a champagne brunch. It was most welcome.