An open letter to Skid Mark

Dear Skid Mark,

I know you and your esteemed colleagues have been coming in and out of my house for a few months now and probably can't recall finding it in any condition that suggests that I am particularly obsessed with cleanliness and orderliness. I imagine you infer from the tiny mountain of used tissues, static mess of the second bedroom of cast-offs, and general lack of order that you couldn't do much worse and would be surprised if I even noticed your dusty footprints, position of the leash you put away when you leave, or a faint smell sneaking past my stuffed nostrils that is suggestive of perfume used as an air freshener.

But I do notice, S.M., I do notice. I notice the lid down on the toilet once again. I think back to the faint perfume I smelled when I walked in this evening and I think, 'oh God, do I even want to look?' But I have to look, because I have only one toilet and I need to use it. And then I see you have upped the ante. Before I could only imagine what you were doing in my bathroom. Now I know. A second flush would have left me blissfully ignorant to the extent of your defilement but for reasons I can't possibly relate to, you chose not only to forgo the second flush but also noticeably fondled the Obama issue Rolling Stone. And S.M., wtf? Did you wrap your fist in toilet paper? I just put that roll on yesterday. You may think because I don't pick up the tiny Santa hat that my dog ripped off her Christmas toy 2 weeks ago that I'm so filthy and messy I would be oblivious to your activity but S.M., I've got plans for you. I'm going to turn off the water to the toilet, you're going to desecrate my bathroom, not be able to flush it, and be shamed from ever using it again. Sure, it will cost me one throat-closing day of stench (probably mixed in with my perfume) when I come home to whatever you couldn't flush down, but I think you'll see the danger you court when choosing private spaces to defile.

It is on.

Nice Nasty

photo by ctjac @ photobucket.com

Nice Nasty is a term that essentially means that you think your poop doesn't stink. Or there is some incongruity between the things you turn your nose up at and the things you do. For example, most girls don't sit on public toilet seats, and perhaps not any seats that aren't their own. I don't have that problem (anymore). For one, I'm not as fit and my knees don't tolerate squatting like they used to but really the turning point for me was my deployment in Kuwait. For a place I didn't spend all that much time relative to other places I've lived and worked, it changed me. On base, the bathrooms were trailers and the toilets so delicate that no feminine products of any type could be flushed. The trailers had both toilets and showers and were not air conditioned so you can probably try but trust me, your imagination could not conjure the smell. One of my favorite memories is of one of the girls remarking, "You can't get that smell in (insert wherever she was from)!"

Off base, it was like a toilet-themed video game where you had to first find one, and then decide if you were going to use it, and then try to figure out the mechanics on not peeing on your clothing while squatting and trying not to touch anything. Then, if there was a flush, you had to figure out what direction the water was going to come from so you didn't get sprayed across your feet or pant hem with questionable water with notes of whatever was contained in the extra water all over the rest of the floor. Going to a western establishment wasn't a sure thing either. In the big mall there, I went stall to stall, finding all the seats wet and decided finally to just go in one and clean it up. A woman who turned out to be an attendant, burst in on me and handed me a fist full of toilet paper. I used all the paper to clean the seat, sat down and then discovered that there was no toilet paper, not even a holder because native women used the hose behind the toilet to cleanse, hence the line of stalls with wet seats. Lovely.

There are a lot more bathroom related horrors from my time in Kuwait and other locales but Kuwait is when I finally conceded that I wash my ass every day and so long as the toilet seat appears clean and is dry, I should be able to use it without the quad workout. I don't like warm seats or walking in on the remnants of a big job but I'm otherwise pretty easy going. I don't need the tissue seat unless I'm testing to ensure the seat is dry if I can't quite discern if it's dry (it so sucks to be wrong about that). There are still squat worthy places but they are now the exception instead of the rule and I'm generally less spastic about the asses I don't know than the ones I do.

Which brings me to the inspiration for this post. My dog walker has been using my toilet and it flat out freaks me out. I have to bleach the seat before I'll use it and I feel kind of violated and a little pissed. I don't want to touch anything in my bathroom and I imagine her reading my Obama issue Rolling Stone and petting my dog while she drops a deuce. It freaks me out. It is not cool to know exactly who the other asses belong to that you share seats with. I can stroll into a public toilet, choose an empty stall and for the next 2 minutes, pretend that I'm the only one who uses it. Not so when you come home, notice the bathroom door slightly off, the seat down, and the toilet paper moved. WHAT DID SHE DO IN THERE? WHY IS THE SEAT DOWN? DID IT NEED TO BE CONTAINED? HOW MUCH PAPER DID SHE USE? HOLY CRAP, THAT'S A LOT! AHHHHH! JESUS CHRIST, WHY?! DID SHE WASH HER HANDS? DID SHE USE MY HAND TOWEL?

Now mind you, my house is near intervention cluttered bordering on filthy, but I just want to light a match and walk away. I don't even want to walk on the bathroom floor.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Nice Nasty.

You're Invited

image by crae013 at photobucket.com


Every girl imagines her wedding day and I’m no different. I don’t imagine my hair or dress, I don’t even imagine the groom in any substantive way. I just imagine how I feel and I imagine all of you. I imagine dancing with my brother and sister to something goofy and uniquely jamming in our family, like Super Bon Bon by Soul Coughing. I imagine my mother dancing with my relatives and me to Work That by Mary J. Blige. I imagine my father sitting out all the dances and watching us with a smile, the smile I know from all the dances I sat out before this dance. I imagine him saying something he means well but is actually pretty horrible during our dance like, “He seems like a good guy. Remember that marriage can be even lonelier than being single.” I imagine feeling free; I don’t see my wedding as a subdued sophisticated and lovely affair. I see it as a tremendous celebration. A great party and great event to celebrate. After all the Jimmy’s, Mr. Coffee’s, Maybe’s, IBC’s and God knows who else, it would finally be right. It would be good and he would be good and if that isn’t a reason to have a big party, I don’t know what is. The man I can imagine having this party with is someone who thinks it would be funny to interupt our wedding march and break into dance to DMX’s Up in Here and then return to a stately walk down the aisle like nothing ever happened. I’ve floated the aisle march idea by my mom who never objects to anything, but strongly objects to this so it would never happen but he’d have to think it would be funny if we could do it.

I guess I have this feeling that the man I marry would love me in a way that I could finally relax into being me, all of me, silly me, in public. My wedding day would be my coming out ceremony. Like What-Not-To-Wear in that revelatory moment when the person realizes it was the clothes all along and not them that needed to change. Ironically, learning that something could complement them as they are, something could bring out the very best of them and even soften their harsher features and lumpy bits, does end up changing the only thing that needed changing, the way they saw and treated themselves. But they needed first for someone else to help them see reality and then introduce them to the possibilities. If some ensemble of clothing, hair, and makeup could change the way I see my body and my face, is it wrong to hope that there is a person out there for me (and I for him) that could have an even more positive and profound impact? If he exists for me, you all are not going to want to miss this party. It is going to be off. the. hook. Fo shizzle.*

*Brosef, you had better stop gagging right this minute. I’m serious. You beat-box in the shower. Don't judge me.

In over my head

I finally called my own bluff and bought David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Wow. I feel like I'm at one of those places where your meal is free if you can successfully finish an Oprah wagon portion size of meat. His essays are heavily referential of other authors that I've either never heard of or never read, and full of words that I've never seen in print before. It is reading something like his book that makes me feel like that the university I graduated from should not have been accredited. How could I have never read Balzac? Do most people just pick that up after college as a bathroom read? Or have I just picked up a book that was not written for me-it is not supposed to be accessible to me, it was written for a class of intellectuals who have the reading list of books I've never heard of and use words like bisensuous and mythopia (which my spell checker insists are not words) in everyday discourse. It is dense and chewy and requires much more attention than I anticipated. I'm a little bummed that my foundation in philosophy and the works of great thinkers and writers of old puts a sentence like "And lets not even talk about Balzac" out of reach for my full appreciation for the hearty in-the-know ironic belly laugh that DFW's true contemporaries can have. But I'm working through his essays with the intention of going back over them again with a highlighter and dictionary to see if I can incorporate "synecdochic" into my everyday lexicon because everyone loves a girl that uses big words. Joking aside, I love learning new words because a well chosen word absolutely nails it, paints the picture I'm trying to create with both nuance and economy.

As dense and meaty as his essays are, my farm raised brain is able to appreciate the gist of his argument on television (the current essay I'm reading) and how it provides both community and isolation from other human beings and experience. His sense of humor shows throughout and though jokes about Balzac sail well over my head, not all the humor escapes me. Ha, Ha, that Balzac. What a kidder...

4 degrees

I swear I've spent enough time in the cold these last 7 years of dog companionship that I could feel the difference between 18 degrees earlier in the evening and the 22 degrees it is now when I took the dog out for one last potty break for the evening. Nothing anyone needed to know. I just felt like sharing.

Odds and Ends

Absolutely love this post from Emily. Emily's post is about drugs or it's about how people employ them to turn themselves out and see if there's something inside they would rather be. She writes so beautifully about the rosy lens of retrospect and how we concentrate on the parts that make us feel still like a part of something, like belonging, and not on the thing we tried to numb, quiet, or cover with all that crazy fun.

It makes me think of many things. It reminded me of high school and to a lesser extent college when group hanging out was still the norm, no one went to bars alone, and people were still figuring out what they were going to be in front of everyone else. It makes me think of how old I sound when I tell a freshly quarter century old IBC that his thirties will come like a thief in the night and he will finally start to look and feel a little different than he did in his twenties. Just a little bit, just enough to remind him that time is not static. He'll be reminded like I am when I see Debbie Gibson or the dude from ColorMeBad (3 words, Celebrity Fit Club--seriously), that youth is truly fleeting.

OMG, I need this

Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss

Science is awesome. It's like prozac, birth control, and man emotions in one handy potion, but better. I want this as soon as it comes out.