Andrew Lets The Bedbugs Bite

July 17, 2008 | Comments (4) | Permalink

I should be doing one of three things:
- finishing dissertation proposal
- continuing to plan blues class
- doing french homework

Or even
- jogging
- cleaning the bathroom
- returning "Superbad" to effing Blockbuster
- touching the cat
- getting rid of emotional baggage
- doing yoga
- learning how to make gingerbread without eggs
- figuring out something to do with my hair so I don't look like a stunt dummy from a low-budget 80's film
- almost anything else
- sleeping.

Dear god, sleeping. Sleeping! What is it like, to sleep through the night? What must it be like? I can not remember. For four months, I have been kept continuously awake by the cat for whom I am caring. I miraculously got used to this and managed to get enough rest anyway, but then summer began and the yowling/clawing/walking-on-face really ramped up, as did the
- neighborhood tiny barking dogs
- loud boys "having parties" i.e. "screaming the word 'dude' over and over again for 4 hours"
- sleep-destroying heat
- Andrew's presence, which often entails a lot of wrangling (he is a troubled, loud, often deeply confused sleeper, full of whimsical questions, rages, and ideas for comedy sketches, none of which he remembers in the morning)

Andrew's presence also sometimes entails a lot of weird problems such as: sudden attacks of allergy-related hives that make you suspect you have bedbugs, as was the case last night. I was awakened at an ungodly hour--two hours earlier than the cat normally first wakes me--to the sight of Andrew standing up covered with enormous welts. Bed-inspecting followed, as did body-examining and also some googling. There was ultimately no other choice but to go back to bed, and then lay awake all night feeling phantom beasties tickling our ankles with their ghostly probosces (proboscises?). In the morning, the welts were gone. This strange outbreak follows close on the heels of another one, a month ago, when Andrew woke up with a swollen face and became convinced that one of the facial implants from his reconstruction surgery had exploded. This turned out not to be the case, and I hope the same will be said for the bedbug scare. Apparently when you get bedbugs you have to burn everything you own and move out of the state. Damn liberals and their DDT-banning!! What's a little leukemia when compared with bedbugs?? LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I IMPLORE YOU

Sleep: Friend, brother, secret lover. How I miss you. How I long for you. How I dream of you in the waking nightmare that is my daytime life. Conjugating French verbs is difficult when you haven't slept more than 2 consecutive hours since April.

And yet, I am young! My whole life is ahead of me. As my father says, you can sleep when you're dead.

Yesterday we invented a new way of predicting the future or answering difficult questions. You close your eyes, ask the question, and then flip to a random page in "The Member of the Wedding" by Carson McCullers. Then you stick your finger down and read whatever it touches. "Will we have a dog with a funny face?" was answered with, no kidding, "Why, I wouldn't vote for him if he was running to be dog-catcher." "What is the nature of art?" was answered with "Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward," which is obviously brilliant. It's the new Farmers' Almanac. And if you haven't read "The Member of the Wedding" to begin with, I have no idea how you get through your days. RUN DON'T WALK.

French class is making me feel really old. Everyone in the class is roughly 19 years old, and the questions in our book are like, "did you listen to your iPod during your first year of high school?" and "did you watch 'the O.C.' during your first year of high school?" Dear Lord, NO. iPods were not even close to being invented, and the people who star in the O.C. were probably not even born yet. The teacher asked us what was the first movie we ever saw in the theater, and one girl said "Beauty and the Beast." WTF? When "Beauty and the Beast" was inexplicably up for a best picture Oscar, I was rooting for Silence of the Lambs, which I had seen several times, including once in the theater, and certainly not sitting on my parents' lap. If she'd asked me, I would have had to say something like "ET," which these kids have probably never even heard of. Imagine being old enough to have screamed hysterically in the theater during ET! Sweet Christ!

Also, Zarah and I have an older edition of the textbook, and it's depressing to see how they've updated the questions. "How old were you when the Challenger exploded" has become "How old were you when the Columbia burned up while re-entering Earth's atmosphere?" I don't even remember that happening. I was probably drunk.

By Regarding @ 12:14 PM | Comments (4)

C'est la vie also

July 12, 2008 | Comments (3) | Permalink

Julianne and I had our epic Four Families yard sale today. It started at 8:00 in the morning. At 7:45, a bunch of old Russian women showed up. We had only put a couple of cardboard boxes in the driveway, and hadn't arranged anything or brought any of the main stuff out. They started dumping the cardboard boxes out and rooting through them and then one of them said, "you have kitchen stuff! you bring kitchen stuff now." I said, "uh...okay, I think I have some kitchen stuff, hold on," and I turned to tell this old man to stop going through my purse. "That is not for sale," I told him, as he unzipped the case for my digital camera. The old woman poked me in my side. "EXCUSE ME, I AM WAITING FOR KITCHEN STUFF." Okay, lady, I will get the kitchen stuff. Here is the kitchen stuff. "How much for this?" "A dollar." (look of total shock) "NO! One quarter!" etc.

These people were brutal. I was beginning to regret telling Andrew that he could sleep in and come later. "EXCUSE ME!!! KITCHEN STUFF!!!!!"

The haggling was actually insane. "How much for this?" "That is a brand-new air mattress that cost $85 when I bought it a month ago. It is now ten dollars." SHOCK AND OUTRAGE "No! One dollar!"

One dollar! HA HA HA!

Haggling is one thing. I say 20, you say 10, I say 15, we agree on 12. That sort of thing. "Ten for that you must be mad!" you know, from Life of Brian. But the way these people were haggling was outrageous! Plus I hadn't even had coffee yet. This one old woman wouldn't leave me alone about this space heater I was trying to sell. We actually had this exchange:

"How much for this?"
"That's ten."
"No, ten is what it cost in store. How much now."
"No, thirty is what it cost in store. Now it costs ten."
(really mean laughter) "No. Three dollar."
"I am not selling you that for three dollar."

5 minutes later.

"Miss? (holds up space heater) one dollar?"
"What? No."
"I saw in store! It was only five dollar in store!"
"You just said it was ten in store."
"ONE DOLLAR!!!!!!!"

5 minutes later, repeat. Then it turned out that she didn't even realize it was a heater!

I finally sold it for $3 to this really nice quiet woman who I liked. Even though the mean lady had long departed, I still felt righteous about it, like I was doing it just to spite her. I hate that lady.

Katy and Laurel showed up and set out a bunch of their stuff, which Laurel promptly began giving away for free. Some hot and heavy trading began. I traded Katy some books for this really amazing Indian-themed groovy shirt Andrew wanted. Buck and Erin showed up with a microwave, which they immediately sold to a woman who had just bought my "Slumberjack" hippie chair which had just made Katy really nostalgic about our college dorm room, in which that chair held quite a prominent position. Laurel gave Erin a t-shirt with a cat on it. We gave Laurel this book about Russia that Julianne's 80 year old landlady had given us to sell. A lady came by with a huge dog. Another lady wanted to buy my sugar cannister that says "sugar" on it, and when I told her there was a special bonus inside in the form of it already being filled with sugar, she said "I KNOW!!!!!!!!" The mean persistent lady who wanted my space heater instead bought an enormous spaghetti sauce jar filled completely with dill. There is truly no accounting for it.

The thing that blew my mind was how this certain kind of customer (okay, they were all really old Russian women) would give you this really condescending look of complete shock REGARDLESS OF WHAT PRICE YOU SAID. One lady wanted this pretty bowl, and I had been planning on asking a dollar for it, but by this point in the day I'd learned her type (one becomes shrewd during a yard sale!), so I said "fifty cents," and she looked at me like I was the biggest idiot. She goes, "No. One quarter," and I finally got kind of mad and held my ground and said, "NO. FIFTY CENTS" back to her in her same tone, which apparently made her respect me because then she gave me fifty cents and didn't say anything else. SWEET!!!

Zarah and Alexandra brought a desk to sell, and took my desk away, in return for which Zarah gave me $25 and a photocopied French workbook I wanted. Later, she came back with Lauren at the end of the day, at a time of great desperation amongst the troops, and I tried to sell Lauren a very large amount of furniture, which she wisely did not buy. Two dudes came by in an enormous brand-new Lexus SUV and wanted to buy our couch, which is very small, but COULDN'T FIT IT IN THE CAR. My god, that more than anything else just made me so steamed about SUVs. It's like the thing was designed specifically so that it would LOOK at giant as possible without actually having any of the space that a normal giant car would have. I was filled with cold contempt, but I held my tongue and thus successfully sold the guys a lamp instead. The lamp did fit in the car. They were really nice, cute dudes, to be fair.

Pete and Ryan came and bought books. They were very supportive. Pete kept wanting to pay more than our asking price, which frankly was quite refreshing after the day we'd had. Hyun bought a bunch of furniture. Friends buying stuff at your yard sale makes you feel so good, because you are just starting to face the fact that you're hideously hot and exhausted and yet you're going to have to load that goddamn couch back into the garage anyway.

Kelsey and Peter came and basically bought everything else we had left, which was pretty awesome of them. Peter got my 4-track, which was purchased with college graduation money in 1999. It's nice to leave it with someone I like, in the family, instead of with the creepy guy who pretended to be interested in it in order to get closer and closer to me and ask me things like, "where do you live? Uh huh...so, what street?"

The upside is that I made $200!!!!!!

The downside is that someone (i.e. that old man from the very beginning of my story!) stole my digital camera, which cost $200.

So I guess you could say that I broke even. I could have just stayed home, thrown the camera out in the street, and had the same fiscal experience, but then I would have missed the sight of Laurel giving a Woopie cushion for free to a quiet little boy and then dying laughing when he made it fart.

Honestly, who goes behind the hedges and steals a digital camera out of someone's bag when they're trying to hold a yard sale?? Disappointment piled on top of disappointment as I realized FIRST that I had not yet taken all my pictures and videos of Steve on Melrose in the cut-off jean shorts and "I LOVE LA" t-shirt and American flag doo-rag and SECOND that I had ALSO failed to take off the pictures Andrew took of my butt wearing sunglasses. "You can't recreate that," Katy pointed out. Even though my brother offered to give me his old camera, which more than made up for my loss, I was still dejected at being forced to see yet another example of the remorselessness of humanity. I gave Buck my turntable.

Now we bought a watermelon and are going to go rent something really decadent at Blockbuster, like "Wild Things" starring Denise Richards and Neve Campbell.

By Regarding @ 5:06 PM | Comments (3)

Ce la vie

June 30, 2008 | Comments (2) | Permalink

Fiona emailed me with a new comedy sketch she's been working on, which is brilliant as usual (when oh when will someone give Jamz Foods corp. inc. a huge grant so we can take time off being a professor and an ER doctor and finally film the greatest sketch comedy show the world has ever known?? Note: we have never applied for a grant of any kind). She is also apparently writing an essay in order to apply for some travel funds for a toxicology conference she wants to go to (and I thought MY life was interesting!). Her essay includes this gem:

"Last summer I found myself hiking along a rocky beach on an island off the western coast of Australia where hundreds of blue bottles had washed ashore. Cradling a delicate, bright blue air-filled bladder between my fingers, I was able to contemplate this strange creature not as simply the curious remnant of a Portuguese Man O' War, but as a colony of zooids with specialized nematocysts that release multiple high molecular weight polypeptides, altering membrane ion transport and resulting in cytotoxicity, neurotoxicity, and sometimes cardiotoxicity in its unsuspecting human victims."

There is really nothing like Fiona. If you're ever in the greater Minneapolis area and you have some sort of traumatic medical emergency, hopefully you'll get to meet her. The world of toxicology has no idea what's about to hit it.

Last night we were trying to go to sleep but there was this weird noise on the patio underneath the bedroom window. It sounded like someone was taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in. I realize that this is a very specific sound, but it is exactly what it sounded like. "It sounds like someone's taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in," I said to Andrew.

"No," he said, "it sounds more like CDs."
"No, it's way too clunky and heavy to be CDs. It has to be VHS tapes."
"Why would someone be taking VHS tapes in and out of their cases?"
"I don't know, but that's exactly what it sounds like."
"No, hear that? That's a jewel case."
"No, that's one of those weird plastic VHS cases that snaps shut."

He got up and looked out the window.

"Well," he said, "guess what it was."
"VHS tapes."
"Yes."

The human ear, specifically mine, is a wonder of nature. But then I became sad, thinking of how my children will be unable to identify the sound of someone taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in. Like glaciers, the sound of VHS tapes will be a mythical thing of the past, called upon in the storytelling of useless old grandparental figures nostalgic for the birds, plants, polar bears, glaciers, life in general, and VHS tapes of their youth. How beautiful it is, I thought to myself, that there is still someone in the world who wants to spend a Sunday evening taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in.

"It's probably porno," said Andrew.

By Regarding @ 3:11 PM | Comments (2)