joeyfullystated

I’m a cold weather person. I’m compact, fleshy, red-faced, HEARTY as you would expect a Midwestern Mutt to be. Were I a bird, I’d be a fat feathered black-capped chickadee smiling into my suet. I delight at the end of summer, as I know, especially after my seven years in southeast Georgia, My Body Is Northern.

So when I saw yesterday (Halloween) would be in the 40s and snowy, I wore a long-sleeve button-up shirt AND a v-neck sweater, because I’m me. And while I thought my ensemble was the most masculine thing I’ve worn since ever, I was certain it was warm enough. My mistake. How cold was it? It was your-dumbass-needed-a-coat cold. Cause y’all, it was 40ish at lunch, but by quittin time, it was 33 feels like 24 and the wind was blowin so hard my eyes watered!

I’ve long contended there’s always a freakishly cold day in October — one that makes you panic about whether your kids’ winter coats still fit. Halloween was that day, right at the very end. Fortunately, everyone’s coat still fits. And more fortunately, today’s forecast is 47 and sunny.

Sounds like a good way to start the weekend!

Happy Friday Everyone! 

WordPress email be like, “Don’t just look at your stats” or whatever, but also, “Check out your competitors.” My what now? Competitors? Who the fuck is competing with this blog? What would that entail? She’s more neurotic? She finished her back hallway the year she started it? She doesn’t have to slide her knee skin up to shave? Does she post every day? Well la-ti-fucking-dah, good for her.

I really shouldn’t blog when I’m in a mood, but here we are.

Yes, I have actual problems like everyone else. However, I shall blog to you about all my petty annoyances and worries.

It was Monday and I had to go to work and therefore I had to take my pajamas off and put on a bra and shoes and make sense of my hair. My poor mother had a procedure today and I had trouble not checking my phone every 15-20 minutes, waiting for an update. Only half our swimmers made it to practice and my whole family napped off their sick all day. Reception had a plumbing crisis that kept her home. It was raining, which, let’s face it, is fine enough when you’re all workee workee indoors, but then, when I thought I’d work late, and was about to wrap up, the rain decided to intensify and so I worked more late, because work is preferred to anxious driving in rush hour, with poor visibility and the floody right lanes. The Mister thought he would help out, and tried to order quesoeverything takeout. Well the phone at the restaurant wasn’t working so he went to the place and it appears to be closed. Twenty-five years of nom, all gone? We are fairly devastated. So he went to the … more…  the … less… our place was kind of an authentic dive and the other place is sorta … it’s not a dive, it’s… standard, common, pedestrian, predictable, cliche, even. It’s not dark, there’s no tacky bad art. The tables aren’t old as me and they don’t serve drinks in red pebbled plastic tumblers. The food doesn’t arrive remarkably fast, even for takeout. It’s not our place. We ate some of it, but it’s just not our place. Bleh, there was no comfort in that food. My mother is reportedly in a great deal of pain but she’s OK and we’ll know more after her appointment tomorrow.

I have got to go put on some jammies, eat a Dreamsicle, and sleep my face.
I’m reluctantly pinning a lot, ALAWT, of hope on Tuesday.

“And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do.”

I heard this song in a show last weekend and since then, I’ve been playing it and humming it and singing it all the damn time, which is starting to drive my husband a little bit insane.

I was trying to figure out why I’m obsessing. Obsessives are good at obsessing about why we’re obsessing.

Music is usually a good way to identify relevant moods and emotions and meaningful memories that go with it. I got nothin. I got a lot, but not a pinpoint on why this song, why now.

It’s Crosby, Stills, & Nash, which would have been played at my mother’s house, but not at my father’s house, so I wondered what on earth I was doing in 1982, on those weekends at my mother’s and I thought really, really hard and came up with a lot of nice memories, but it was real life, so like this:

I was into Strawberry Shortcake dolls who lived in a gazebo in Barbie’s back yard. I also had a Strawberry Shortcake birthday cake, but it was artificially colored like whoa, bringing about the first time I threw up alone. And strangely, after that, I threw up by myself until I was 29, until I had morning sickness and my mother-in-law came in to rub my back, and I realized it was weird when people stopped accompanying me to vomit and strange when people began to accompany me while I vomited. Life is like that. It doesn’t matter, cause vomit.

I was into the books of Beverly Cleary. My mother bought them all. I read them all.

I had the Crayola Color Caddy, a lazy susan contraption for containing all of one’s crayons, markers, and colored pencils, intended to facilitate a neat and careful transfer of one color for another, which, as it turns out, stifled my creativity, as I preferred to pull as I went into art chaos, and then to put it all away after. I am still like this. My creativity is in the mess. Can’t be messy before or after, but in the middle, I am painted, covered in flour, wearing string, sitting in the paper, whathaveyou.

I had these adorable corduroy overalls with a pink penguin turtleneck and when things don’t fit you anymore when you’re nine, it’s because after the turtleneck became a midriff, your mother said that was okay because the overalls covered your tummy, but you grew up even more and one day, the overalls sliced your whohah in half and you got the sad. The first of many bodily betrayals, amirite, ladies?

As for the song’s meaning, well, I don’t sail, fraid of sea monsters for one, get the vertigo, too pale to enjoy the sun…trade routes would be a big NOPE for me.
And it’s a ballad! I don’t really DO ballads. Romance is so ooey gooey and sticky and sappy. Crescendo into how romance is human fly paper and can trap a bitch for 20 years. I’m not complaining, just amazed.

Do you know The Mister and I used to sing the NightLight Love Songs of WENS 97.3 in the backseat of his parents’ car when we were teens? Ballads, y’all. Sad bastard music. Which contradicts his aversion to my obsession. You’d think he’d like it.

So I dunno. Let’s listen again though, cause it’s so damn good.

Has this happened to you? Did you figure out why? Any insights here? I have failed, which was the easiest thing to do.

Happy Friday Everyone! (My apologies for the earworm.)

I’m not sayin I’ve been busy, I’m just sayin — Last night I had a dream that my dog was bleedin to death and there was nothin I could do. I was helpless. Only a matter of time. Her death was imminent. And yet — In my dream, as I lay beside her, I was impatiently thinkin I don’t have time to hold my dog while she bleeds out — I got too much shit to do.

Lemme just take a moment to count my blessings.
I am home, bathed, fed, comfortably adorned in pajama pants and a sweatshirt, sittin on my sofa. And there’s this:

She’s fine.

Y’all been busy? Countin yer blessings?

You know how people say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead?” Yeah, I’ll retire when I’m dead. And then, after I’ve been given the answers to all my questions and have been shown where the ice cream parlor is, I’m sure I’ll take an afterlife job. I dunno, maybe teaching young eager souls, growing supernatural flowers in a weedless garden, or mediating land disputes between lap giraffes and miniature sheep. It’s really anyone’s best guess, but I guarantee you, I’ll be busy not makin monies.

Anyway, my point is I generally don’t think about retirement. I generally think about how to do all, all, all the things.

Except, recently I thought about retirement. Lemme tell you why.

I met Benson for lunch.

When I arrived at Texas Margaritas, Benson, hep cat that he is, was already seated.

righteous red converse on his feet

He had not been at work, on the phone with the big corporation and their infernal muzak, running the gamut of the five incompetent people one must explain to before reaching that sixth magical person who is smart enough to understand the discrepancy.

While I was doing that, Benson was ordering some chips and salsa and a margarita.

blurry and hungry

deliciously blurry

By the time I was peeking into my shrimp quesadilla, he was ordering his second margarita. I ordered a Mr Pibb. And I loved it. I did. But it was not a margarita, because I am not retired. And given how blurry my pictures are, I really didn’t need the caffeine and I prolly could have benefited from a margarita because I’m spazzy and frenetic enough. When my Pibb was all gone, I drank my water like a good workhorse should.

Cause it was not a weekend. It was not vacation. For me. For Benson, it’s all weekend vacation margarita time, and so I envied him just a teeny tiny bit because margaritas are delicious.

Y’all, I dunno what I’m doin this weekend, but Imma try to wear my Converse and drink margaritas. If you’re able, I highly recommend you do the same.

Happy Friday Everyone!