29 April, 2009

Porn? well....

...sneaky looks/ gazing down on you/ are no substitute/ for a rendezvous....


"He'll find your porn," warns YoungEv, "if you have some. He always does."

His face is mildly concerned and a little startled as I consider- rather than snap "of course not!"- whether I have any porn on my fritzed computer.

"Um, mime porn? Pictures of Out of the Box, lots of them...ahhh..." My brow furrows as I think about it. No. I haven't even bookmarked any porn sites. I try to remember the name of the porn-y blog I used to read, and can't.

"Uh, sure, but like, if you've got, you know, uh, naked, uh, naked pictures? Of...anybody?" Clearly, he's uncomfortable imagining that Hawk and I have naked pictures of ourselves on my G4. "Because whenever a cute girl walks in with a repair- I've seen them do this- they search until they find naked pictures of her on her computer. They always find some."

Yeah, but CompuDan hasn't seen Primarily Decorative. If he did, I'm guessing he wouldn't search.

"No," I tell him. "The closest I've got is me in that set I knit for the Valentine's Day contest, you remember?" He blushes a little. He remembers. "And that's right on my desktop, probably. So CompuDan won't have to look very hard, but it's simulated naked only."

And on the topic of naked, I'm thinking it ought to be Naked Season pretty soon, yeah? But no. March drags on through April, broken up by three or four days of July, and now it's right back to March again. Blah.

Hurry UP, heat. I wanna take off my clothes.


(Strip; Adam Ant)

21 April, 2009

Ass-shaped Hole

...I don't have to miss no TV shows/ I can start my whole life over/ change the numbers on my telephone/but the nights will sure be colder....

Once again, Real Life interferes with my Virtual Life, and Actual Offspring preclude Productive Writing, which pisses me off, you know it.

And yet.

While at CityLit this weekend (mostly to see Leslie Miller and her book Let Me Eat Cake), I attended what I thought was a poetry workshop (it was billed as a poetry workshop: bring 2 copies of a poem you wrote) and naturally couldn't select just one poem, because the others would feel snubbed- took with me thirteen pages (yes) times two of poems because deciding is just too much work. GWB can go ahead and be the Decider; I can't be bothered. At any rate. Was that a run-on?? Fragment? Did I have a point?

Oh, yes. It wasn't a workshop at all, but a vetting process for an eeeeteetiny literary magazine, more like a literary pamphlet, literary flyer, literary tri-fold, if you will. Cute and adorable and limited for space, so let's us just look at the short ones, then, shall we? And I've been asked to submit five (I think five; at least four) of my poems to the editor. Which is nice, even though of course no one will ever read it. However, to be perceived as having literary chops, one must publish. To publish, one must submit. And submission is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PROCESS from writing. I can write like nobody's business. I can write up one side and down another. I can write your cliche and eat it, too. I can write what you meant better than you meant it. But researching places to send stuff? And actually sending it? And keeping track of who said Yes, who said No, and who never responded one way or another? Haven't been able to manage it.

My darling friend FurPoet (distinguished from my other darling friend BaldPoet) says, "Cybele, nobody is going to come ask for the poems sitting in your drawer." Which is sad and unfortunate and accurate, and sounds suspiciously as though he's quoting me back to me, because if memory serves (poorly, as usual) I have said this very thing at poetry workshops, un-blocking seminars, and I guess anytime anyone asked me. Usually I say this in response to people who are afraid to submit, because they fear rejection. Afraid to submit due to inexperience. Afraid to submit, suffering from intellectual intimidation. My problem is much simpler: I have a dreadful case of Cantgetoffmyassosis. I've said, and it's true, that I am the most inconvenient combination of Lazy and Vain that I've ever met.

So I will send the ones that were vetted, and perhaps get published, perhaps get motivated, perhaps produce a chapbook called The Ones You Never Hear, since Primarily Decorative reads only the ones practically guaranteed a good audience response, rarely the touching, poignant, perhaps edgy ones, at least not more than once, but the fellow who vetted my work liked two or three that no one has seen but me.

Which shouldn't surprise me. Except, I got through February okay, and then March hit. Hard and ugly and full of the fucking rain. March continues into April, and only twice this month have we seen April-ish weather. I'd say I hate to bitch about the weather, and hate to blame my moods and lack of productivity on the weather, but obviously, that isn't even remotely true. What I hate is hearing myself bitch about the weather and the havoc it wreaks on my internal chemistry, that's what I hate.

So it shouldn't surprise me, except I've been exceptionally unlike my normal cynically merry self, and there've been exceptionally few Topless days. I thought I'd escaped my usual pattern of wearing an ass-shaped hole in the sofa, eating cookies and drinking eggnog and getting fat and watching the house turn to a bear-pit around me, because each winter it gets a bit worse, the depression, but what I've done, I think, is postpone it. And I'm blue like royalty, like suede shoes, like Picasso, like I shot a man in Memphis.

More storms a-brewin', and not just on the horizon, I think.

(Bluer Than Blue; Michael Johnson)

03 April, 2009

Squeezing Jackson

...it's a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in bacon...mmmmmmm....

We had an extremely nice winter holiday, wherein we scrimped not at all, and then we came home and sat around with no work for a couple of weeks, biting our nails. Hawk did eventually roll and is currently stalled in Tex-Ass, waiting (behind 12 other drivers) for a load to come his way. So our finances went, practically overnight, from not too scary to suckity-poo.

However, the kids are up for Blackout Days every so often, though I wonder if the cost of candles offsets any BGE savings we might see. We're postponing purchases. We're saving up our errands. But then! Then ! Our local news station picked up this story about $1/day eating, and I challenged Fluff and Fuzz to try to eat for $1 a day. Just for a week. Just to see if we could do it.

Rebecca Currie was trying to disprove the claims of a California couple's experiment and premise, that it was impossible to eat healthfully on a budget of $1 per day. I figured, hey, she did it; let's us try it. If we run out of things to eat, the grocery is just around the corner.

Run out of things to eat. HAH!

First off, $21 buys more groceries than I thought it would. Also, we 'cheated' by using spices, canned goods, supplies and leftovers that we had hanging around already. (Rebecca started from scratch, pretending she had nothing- no spices, no flour, no sugar, no leftovers in the fridge.) Aside from the obvious savings (where did the other $80/week GO?) it's teaching the kids (who don't hear 'no' or 'we can't afford it' often enough) what is possible with $1. $3 for 6 donuts no longer looks like a bargain- hooray! Making pudding at home isn't a big hairy deal; booyah! The boxed pasta&sauces are 'too expensive'~ wowza! Coffee at Starbucks isn't even an option- not that it was very good anyhow...!

At the end of Week #1, before we shopped for Week #2, at the kids' request, we went for lunch at Wendy's. We set a limit of $3 each, and planned to order from the Value Menu, which doesn't really seem different from the Regular Menu except for corralling all the cheap stuff together on the signboard.

That $9 meal left them unsatisfied in many ways. I pulled open my chicken sandwich and showed them the size of the pattie. "Whoa," said Fluff. "That's a big piece of meat." Yeah. At home, I'd've cut it into slivers and mixed it with some noodles and sauce and peas, and the casserole would've fed all three of us. After the burgers, fries and Frosty were consumed, the kids were still kind of hungry. They were impressed when I showed them the amount of ground chuck $9 would buy. They put back the organic milk and eggs and replaced them with grocery brand milk and eggs in order to have room in the budget for a box of mint tea. And even though a dinner of cornbread and beans is far from their favorite, they volunteered that it was a more satisfying meal than lunch had been.

Pushing cookies and soda to the bottom of the 'wish' list (below bananas, popcorn and a pizza kit) was their idea. We're just starting Week #2, and survived Week #1 better than we thought we would. We will see how long we can manage. The kids are learning budgeting, meal planning, comparison shopping, that all things bear scrutiny and precisely what is important to them, and I'm clearing out my overstock of pantry goods. When I eventually double our budget to $42, we'll all feel positively wealthy.

Tonight, with the aid of a seasoning packet I had in the cabinet, broccoli I'd purchased two weeks ago, and the tail end (sorry) of last week's rotisserie chicken, I was nominated for an award of Kitchen Heroism because I made Chicken and Broccoli with rice.

So if you miss me, it's because I'm busy polishing my Kitchen Heroism award. It's made of copper and a bitch to keep clean.