I have been cleaning my house like mad lately. My school year is so busy, usually with between 50-80 hours of various commitments a week (work, coaching, traveling, school, teaching, sighing). Then school stopped, and I’m working under 30 hours a week, and I am not freakishly poor at the moment and all of the sudden I am cleaning things. I reorganized my bathroom organizers. I grouped the gifts I have for people in my storage room. I scrubbed the toilet and I vacuumed when I was not to have company. While my apartment is very messy right at the moment, around a week ago it was clean enough for company. The spare time I’ve had has been plentiful, and I can only hope I continue to use the majority of it in ways that are not self-destructive.
Everyday, in every way, I am becoming a cleaner and cleaner person.
I guess this summer is gonna be kinda sedate for me. My mom is coming to visit in a few weeks, to celebrate my big birthday. I’m turning 25. I’m hoping that some friends might find a way to come visit sometime this summer (no one in particular, it’d just be nice to see people). I’m strongly considering getting back to the open-mic stand-up I was doing last summer.
Now, here is a racy picture of me hanging at one of our National Tournaments.
Every night when I’m coming home from work, I try to call someone. Usually my parents, to check in on things I need to do, or just to talk. Tonight I wanted to ask my Dad a question about my taxes, so I gave him a ring. He sounded like he was in a tunnel full of people, which is usually a pretty good indicator that he’s at an event or something. He said he was at dinner with U.S. Senator Tom Harkin, and from the tone of his voice and the background noise, it was pretty obvious it was a group of people who were having dinner.
Then I recalled my favorite fantasy league game, Fantasy Congress. It’s basically a fantasy football league only you get points for senators passing legislation, co-sponsoring bills, as well as other legislative tasks. I’d put Senators Harkin and Boswell on my roster because I’ve met them both, and I felt this niggling sense of disloyalty at ditching them for other more active and trendy Congresspeople.
The thing is, Tom has never been one of my power players. He’s not a total point suck like Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who I’m going to have to drop like a sack full of rocks. But he’s certainly no Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein alone accounts for 450 of my total 3676 points.
Anyway, I jokingly told my Dad to tell Harkin that he was gonna have to get on the ball with legislating, or I was going to have to drop him for Ken Salazar. This, of course, was a joke, because I picked up Salazar about two months ago when I had to ditch total legislative dead weight John Edwards.
My Dad laughed and said goodbye, and about a minute later I got a call from him. When he said hello, the tinny reverb told me I had been put on speaker phone. He told me Tom said he had just passed a big Stem Cell research bill today. I told him that was nice for Tom, and he can have his little dinner, but that is one bill, and Ken Salazar is, like inventing sub-committees just to pass shit to them and pick up points. That’s when Tom started talking to me.
“Salazar doesn’t do anything!” He exclaimed.
“That’s not what Fantasy Congress says. Salazar’s got, like, a million points. You were my sentimental pick, Tom, but I’ve got to tell you, you’re really screwing with my bracket here.”
Long story short, Senator Tom Harkin has promised me he will do better.
I am participating in something dangerous and potentially terrible.
I am attempting to toilet-train my cat.
I’m two and a half weeks into the process, and I have to say I’m not liking the way things are looking. I started the whole ordeal because my cat seems incredibly smart to me. Like, just insanely brilliant. My evidence to date for this assertion has been that he is capable of playing fetch, used to escape from my apartment and is always getting into cupboards. He also pees in the sink sometimes.
I thought maybe he peed in the sink because he is smart and he knows he wants the pee to go away.
But maybe he’s just a bastard.
The way you toilet train your cat is as follows. First, you buy this toilet seat for your cat. It’s basically a thin plastic tray that sits in your toilet. It has concentric circle grooves cut into, and every two weeks you cut out a bigger hole in the center of the device. In the remaining area, you place flushable kitty litter. 8 weeks from the start, your cat is toilet trained.
But what if your cat is a bastard?
First, I let him get used to the idea. I left the door to his private pooping closet open, and left the toilet as an option. He seemed okay with that, and used the toilet exclusively. So, I closed the door to the pooping closet. So far, so good. He survived the two weeks with the small hole in the center of the seat, and would even push his little poops down into the hole so I could conveniently flush them away. Everything was good.
Except I would still wander into the bathroom on occasion and have the sneaking suspicion that someone had urinated in my sink.
I ran the hot water, squirted hand soap in the sink, and hoped for the best.
Then, on Saturday, he graduated. I cut out a bigger hole, and now the hole is just big enough for him to stick his down into it. I know this, because he has stuck his head down into it, sniffed the water, and seemed largely curious and disturbed.
Nowhere near as disturbed as I was, however, when I entered my bathroom this afternoon and realized someone had dropped a deuce in my sink.
You are Scheherezade.
Night after night you tell him stories.
They all end the same way.
“How do you keep a murderous king in suspense?”
You’ll tell him tomorrow.
You are Beauty.
You asked for a flower because you couldn’t think of anything better.
If you really thought beauty was only skin deep,
You wouldn’t have asked for a rose.
You would have asked for an ugly goat with a heart of gold.
I guess I’m kinda in a funk- I’m in one of those weird places in my life where I don’t really know what to do next. I mean- should I be super upset I just ended a relationship that was almost 3 years? Or should I just be happy that the totally miserable drain on my energy isn’t my problem anymore? I guess you’re supposed to be sad, but it feels like that whole business has been ending for over a year already, and I’m tired of being sad and upset about it.
On another note, I totally need to make kisses with a dude, and not just to avoid watching anime or being asked how I am feeling.
I’m home at my parent’s for a week, and it’s that whole weird deal where I’m in my childhood bedroom but it isn’t really mine anymore. I mean, all my shit still there, they didn’t turn it into a sewing room or a home gym. It’s just not really where I live anymore.
I’m totally jazzed for Christmas, but I am also kinda not able to sleep- it’s like I’m on meth but without the commercial “oooh oooh“‘s. I’m at a point where I’m considering just burning through my sleeping time by curling ribbon on presents and shit.
This working 50-70 hours a week business is absolute horseshit on any sort of a reliable biorhythm.
So, I broke up with the dude. He’s moving out. I’m once again free to make dying alone with cats jokes.
Anticipate lots of those.
I’ve been working between 50 and 70 hours a week between school, teaching, coaching and working retail slinging blinds. I really like my retail job, but this new dude just started in our department, and everyone loves him. I totally anticipated totally loving him as well.
Until I actually met him.
He has a girlfriend, but watches every reasonably attractive girl who comes into our department like a hawk, then walks behind them checking out their asses. When they are close to out of hearing distance, he intones “man, that is so fucking hot”. Not “She is so fucking hot”. “That”.
He has taken one of my customers, who ordered around 500 dollars worth of blinds. I don’t know if he didn’t bother to check their name in the whole store quote list or if he’s just a dick. My money is on “just a dick”. He also doesn’t look out for any of our customers, or tell them about upcoming sales. He doesn’t sell things in the Home department at all, which is part of his job. He doesn’t restock anything, let alone put back anything that has been returned in the correct spot. He just puts it wherever.
His masculinity is insanely threatened by writing with the flower pens we have, so he hoards all non-flower pens, putting them in his pockets, attaching them to his nametag, and the like.
All of this shit is minor to the fact that when I talked about the kids on my speech team, he called all the dudes “fags”. I hate that word. I hate that it exists, I hate that if I say “the f-word” people don’t understand I mean “fuck”, I hate that fucking word. When he said it, I told him that he couldn’t say it, because it was hate speech. Then he repeated it around 6 times.
I would report him to my manager, or talk to him personally about how it is against company policy, but I don’t have a problem with him saying it because it is against company policy. I have a problem with him saying it because hate speech is morally wrong.
