| Tuesday, October 31, 2006 |
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Hollow Weenie |
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That's right. I am the Empty Hotdog of October. I hate Halloween. I don't get it. I get costume anxiety. I make myself crazy every year trying to make sure that the Kiddo has a great costume, mostly made by my hands, so that he can covet the costume purchased at Walmart by a mom that had no time or just doesn't give a shit. I had that shitty costume growing up, and a mother who wouldn't let us cover our faces and always thought someone was slipping razor blades into our treats and trying to snatch us on the "scariest" night of the year. The only thing making the night scary was my mother's paranoia. One year I was a flower. My mother wrapped me in green fabric so I couldn't move my arms, then stuck some fabricky-elastic thing on my head. I hated it! People thought I was a pickle. The Kiddo wanted to be Golem, from Lord ofthe Rings. I vetoed it. There was no way I was letting my gorgeous perfect angel be a groveling, slimey, OCD creature with a limited vocabulary. He finally settled on Gimli the Dwarf, from the same showcase of cinema. Someone suggested he be Gimli, our cat, which I thought was much funnier, but I had already made a red beard and didn't have time to make a black mangey cat suit. No, I don't really hate Halloween. It is just the gateway holiday to Thanksgiving, which is really more my style. Lots of eating, lots of drinking, lots of hanging out with friends. "But Rosie", you might be thinking, "that's what we do on Halloween." Yes, but we don't get days off of work for Halloween, and we don't stuff chickens inside of other creatures only to then be stuffed into a turkey and presented as a treasure of culinary extraordinariness, when really, if we found that thing in the barnyard we'd be very worried and totally grossed out. Yeah, I am looking forward to Thanksgiving, with the traditional drinking all night on Turkey Day Eve, and the attempts to get Shay naked and snap pictures for Xmas cards. Tryptophan comas and lots of football. And the Macy's Parade on TV. And it's a totally American holiday, by timing, that is. Not that I am a jingo about our holidays, but is kinda cool knowing that all across the U.S., families (of all ilks and pedigrees) are sitting down together to celebrate abundance, whether they have it or not. So if you want to join us for Thanksgiving, give a shout. All are welcome. As for Halloween, have a safe time liquor-treating or whatever it is that you will do. Watch out for snatchers and stumbling pickles, and the paranoid mothers lurking in the shadows.
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/31/2006 10:00:00 AM |
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| Monday, October 30, 2006 |
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Fall's Last Hurrah |
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Yesterday was one of those amazing days that you couldn't have ordered up perfectly even if it was on the specials menu. It was glorious. Not only did it follow a great tailgate, an evening with a friend visiting from Spain whom I had not see in years, but I got an extra hour on Sunday morning - not to sleep - so that I could write the sermon that I needed to deliver at 9 a.m. Somehow there things always work out for me, and I accomplished what I was attempting: making a roomful of stodgy intellectuals let down their guards and weep in public. SUCCESS! Of course, I had to weep a little myself, but I was able to bite my lip and stare at the floor and scrape myself back into a pile, and get thru the rest of the annual Dia de los Muertos service that I run. Afterward, I hung out with the Sunday school kids and the high school group, throwing hedge balls while tricking them into cleaning up the church yard. Loaded them up in two cars, and drug them and 2 fourth graders to Louisburg Cider Mill on its last day of the corn maze and punkin patch. I was having so much funI even ate a cider donut - something I would even think about doing if I weren't surrounded by a million families from Johnson County sending me into a crowd-induced panic, and the hormone-bags of teens that I was chaperoning. And that was the best part. Watching 3 teenage boys and two 13-year-old-girls vie for each other's attentions. They came up with every game possible to find excuses to hug, touch, and maul each other. The smell of the pheremones in my truck was overwhelming - I was gagging! Finally got them out of the corn maze where I am sure they were working at getting pregnant ("not on my watch" I kept telling my chaperoning cohorts) and off to the mongolian barbecue in O.P. They were getting tired - in general, and of coming up with clever repartee to woo the opposite gender. The girls made a LONG trip to the restroom together which did not go unnoticed by anyone in the restaurant, and I noticed their hair was straightened up and fresh lip gloss had been applied. At last, we were back on the road for home, while A and W sat in the back seat, closer than they had to with quiet longing hanging between them. An absolutely marvelous day. If you can make yourself do it (and they keep their shoes on so you don't have to smell their feet) a day hanging with high schoolers can be a bittersweet way to spend that last really good day of Fall. And we got free punkins!
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/30/2006 09:00:00 AM |
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| Friday, October 27, 2006 |
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Now he's gone and done it |
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Here it sit in my disheveled kitchen, lukewarm coffee in one hand, no cigarette in the other. That is a problem. The hubby took my pack last night and I am left stranded for the day smokeless. Usually not a problem, since I hardly ever smoke during the day, but today is different. Today my day began coming into a kitchen that has been totally reset. After four years of living in MY house, the hubby decided he couldn't find anything and went and rearranged the kitchen cupboards. I am lost. I am a stranger in a strange land. I can't hide in the living room in front of the TV because the carpets are still wet from the cleaner being here yesterday. So the dogs and I are trapped on hard sufaces that hold the jumbled up mess of our culinary lives. To top off the morning (ohgodwhatwillhappentherestoftodayohshit), Princess Andrea showed up bawling her eyes out about her breakfast and the Hubby ran one of our cars into the other of our cars. Yeah! Rightfuckingon! At least we had taken the rental back and retrieved Big Blue from Jim Clark Morons. Not that it's fixed - noooooooo. The parts will be in on Tuesday so that they can redo the transmission again. Never buy a Dodge, never buy it at Jim Clark, and if you forget the first 2 rules and do them anyway, always buy the extended warranty. So Beware out there today. There is something funky in the air, and you can't dance to it. And Happy Weekend before Halloween! There should be some good parties and haunted houses going on... but my house is scary enough for me right now, thankyouverymuch.
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/27/2006 09:24:00 AM |
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| Saturday, October 21, 2006 |
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verb it |
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I love taking words that aren't verbs and making them into verbs. Is there a word for this process? "Reverse gerunding"? That was one of the best parts of Calvin and Hobbs. Calvin was always verbing words. I have a new favorite website that inspired me to write this morning.... slangsite.com I was just sitting here killing time after writing tomorrow's sermon in my PJ's, sucking down full-caffeine coffee, jittering, and chain smoking, when I perused the "M" category and found something I needed to share! "megan: to laugh until liquid comes out of one's nose Example: When he told his joke, Wendy meganed all over the lunch table" How perfect is that!? So I got to looking more.... "Heather: A popular, controlling person. Inspired by the movie _Heathers_. Example: The head cheerleader of our high school is a Heather" "verbicide: An act of word destruction; i. e., a word ceases to exist or loses meaning due to the act of an individual. For example, some would consider the act of verbing to be verbicidal. Example: Valley girls haved used the word like so inappropriately for so long that I would like to charge them with verbicide." Sadly, there were no especially fun definitions for "rosie", "lulu", "amy", "gyspy", and I even looked to see if "tomasek" was there, but it just hasn't caught on, yet. There was also this: "verbology: The study, science, or practice of creating new words. Example: I decided to utilize my verbology skills, so I logged on to pseudodictionary.com." Can I get a PhD in that?
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/21/2006 02:20:00 PM |
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| Sunday, October 15, 2006 |
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What's going on? |
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Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that people are behaving differently (i.e., assholish) lately? Honestly, it could just be me, so I really need to know. I just keep thinking to myself, "what's going on?", which got me to singing the Marvin Gaye hit from 1971 that was penned as a protest song addressing Vietnam, drug abuse, poverty, and oppression. He made history with it. Where is our current-day Marvin Gaye, asking us without attacking, with a calming voice, WTF is going on? The frenzy of it all is making my head vibrate to an inaudible pitch, and I can't believe that I am the only one who is freaked out, geeked out, stressed, messed, and continually on the verge of totally losing my cool. My friend Marisa'a sister is the cool folk rocker chick that I always wanted to be. Her modern day protest song/look at American society today can belistened to at: http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwsongspage.html It is definitely worth your time. Last time I checked she was at #20 on the list. Her name is Raina Rose and the song is Nursery Rhymes. And in case you can't just sing it off the top of your head, here's Marvin Gaye, who left us much too early. Mother, mother Father, father Picket lines and picket signs In the mean time Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong Picket lines and picket signs
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/15/2006 08:47:00 PM |
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| Friday, October 13, 2006 |
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Vanity, |
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Thy name is burnin'. Friday, November 10th, Sundown. My house. Childcare provided, but they'll take tips. BYOB. That last "B" means booze and burnables. Camping encouraged. Anything else? Hope you can make it!
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/13/2006 04:55:00 PM |
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| Thursday, October 12, 2006 |
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These dreams go on when I close my eyes |
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I woke at 7:00 this morning, which is a half hour earlier than normal, and also odd since I was up well past midnight with 2 cups of coffee and 2 red beers in me. I made myself wake up because I was having one of my airplane dreams. I only have 2 kinds of recurring dreams - tornadoes and plane crashes. I'll address the tornado dreams some other time. I am never in the plane crash, but I watch them helplessly. In this one, I was across the road from the house I grew up in (which no longer exists) with my Dad (who exists in memory... deceased 5 years), talking to some hunters. We saw 2 air force jets take off strangely away from us, then minutes later, 2 passenger jets, one larger than the other and joined at the hip (really) came hurtling from the sky and were obviously going to crash very close to us. They skidded into my dad's jobsite (our house came with the job), which was an underground storage facility for natural gas and other petroleum products and not a good place to be crashing any planes. Huge flames ensued. Harley and Andrea were asleep in the house across Hiway 56 so I ran to the house to get them (they were fine - scared, but fine) and Dad ran to his office. By the time I found all these lost children and mothers (no male survivors except wee ones) wandering around on my lawn and got them cared for, I could not find any flames, firetrucks, Dad or his employees, or any sign of the catastophe other than a big burned skid mark leading to Dad's workplace and some mangled wreckage that used to be where he worked. I looked at some different dream interpretation sites, and I am pretty good about figuring these things out myself, but I am curious what other people think this all means. So have at it, for fun. Oh, I forgot... I have snake dreams when I am mad at the man in my life. I dream that there is a bad snake in the house and I am not afraid of it, but I know that it needs to be put out of the house. It hides and sometimes bites my hand, but it isn't poisonous so I don't fear it.
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/12/2006 10:21:00 AM |
3 comments
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| Tuesday, October 10, 2006 |
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You CAN go back, but no one's there |
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Harley and I just spent the weekend at White Memorial Camp on Council Grove Resevoir, a camp complete with cabins and dining hall owned by the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United Church of Christ. This is important because this is the place that I spent one week every summer for eight years. This place is the site of some of the most meaningful moments in my life. Camp is the place you get to go and reinvent yourself. I could go to camp and be slightly less dorky than I was where I came from. I could finally hang out with people who didn't know I was the largest girl in my school, which didn't take much since everyone else was especially thin but I stuck out at an enormous size 11. Talk about your messed up body image. I could go listen to music that wasn't the same old crap being played at home, because there were kids from Oklahoma City, and Topeka, and KC, and Wichita. This was a big deal for those of us from rural Kansas who seldom got to go more than an hour from home without the parents having dragged you to wherever they thought you needed to be or having taken the bus there - and that usually meant a football or basketball game against some equally po-dunky school also in the middle of nowhere. So I spent the weekend at the place that I have been scared of returning to for 20 years. Scared because of the ghosts that I thought would be there. Not much had changed - the dining hall has carpet now, the Point is overgrown with scrub and you can't get down to the lake, there is a low-ropes course permanently built on the site, they changed the name of one of the cabins. I slept in Big Red, like I did my last summer there. We carved punkins - me and about 15 kids - on the same back porch where I gave Ken from Topeka a BJ while we slept in a puddle of other teenagers. I walked past the spot where I kissed Mike Conrad from Gaylord, Kansas, and I barely paused. We had a campfire and I handed out s'mores fixins at the spot outside of Green cabin where I downed a jug of Lord Calvert with Toby and Blair and we somehow didn't die of alcohol poisoning. I took a group of children to the Vespers chapel and they proceeded to play "minister" at the pulpit, not realizing that is the place I realized I was an atheist. The ghosts that I expected to haunt me really weren't present. Perhaps I was away so long that they got tired of waiting and went on their way. Perhaps their invitations got lost in the mail. Perhaps they were never there to begin with. I plan on returning there next summer when we rent the camp for a week-long family event for UU's, and Harley wants to come too. There is a strange full circleness to the whole idea of taking my kiddo with me and knowing that he'll have some of the same kinds of powerful experiences that I did. Hopefully not EXACTLY the same kinds that I have shared with you here, but the kinds where he develops relationships in which he can experiment a bit with being someone different than the kid who people at home think he is. That is one of the beauties of camp.
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/10/2006 09:00:00 AM |
2 comments
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| Tuesday, October 03, 2006 |
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Living vicariously through my son |
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     Can you tell that I grew up with a room that had multiflecked gold shag carpet and brown panelling on the walls. The folks said that the panelling would hide thumbtack holes and the carpet would hide dirt. So, now I am having the childhood room that I never got. Mine probably really would have had horses painted all over it, or unicorns - not sea creatures, but the idea is that it looks like a place that an 8-year-old would want to be. I have to admit that I am pretty darn proud of myself for having finished this project, and I think I did a really great job, to boot. You'll have to check it out up close when you come out to the bonfire. It's November 10th. Be there.
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/03/2006 08:36:00 PM |
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| Monday, October 02, 2006 |
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On a Bender |
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I love Futurama. I am watching right now. I watch at least once a day, usually with the 8-year-old son. Lately I have felt like Bender, the endearing clepto/alky robot who was built to bend. When Bender runs low on alky, he just doesn't function well. I have been low on party time as of late and also am not functioning well. Even thinking of this made me worried about myself. Does wanting to go get loaded with my pals make me an alcoholic? Crap - I just blew the keg of Rosie's Riveting Rye as I paused to refresh the Dala-mug. Anyway, I decided that I do not have a problem with The Drink, but rather I have a problem with The Gab. I miss my friends. I need to do some serious sitting around pounding beers and catching up, especially on all the old stories that we always tell that I haven't heard in a while. I was lamenting with Gypsy earlier tonight that we are suddenly acting very responsibly: task-mistressing allthedamntime. I joked over the weekend (working in Iowa City) with a person that I met who was fasting, that I am dabbling in a spiritual practice I call sleep deprivation. Like fasting, it puts your mind in a very different place. Fasting is supposed to cut away the superficial flesh of one's daily routine, so that the faster can experience life in their bones. Not sleeping can do the same thing, right? What can bring one more in tune to the mundane cycles of daily living than going thru the motions while one is in a detached state of somnambulance? It's like a chance to step outside of yourself and watch yourself behave in the most vulnerable (to our own weirdnesses and impulses) and preposterous of ways! Like when I started whining at church Sunday about how my brain feels like swiss cheese and my thoughts keep falling out the holes to a man who I knew had suffered a horrible, debilitating brain injury when a steel rod got thrown through his skull and was then successfully removed. I just watched from right outside myself as I said more and more stupid things to this kind, gentle, man, who told me I was under a lot of stress and probably needed to back off a bit on the workload. He was full of Grace. I was full of caffeine. I wanted to be full of bloody maries.
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| posted by Rosie @ 10/02/2006 10:17:00 PM |
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