Life – Page 180 – Feministe

Don’t Send Me No Flowers, I Ain’t Dead Yet

When I picked Ethan up from his dad’s this weekend, he yelled, “Yes! It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow!”

Valentine’s Day, she ain’t what she used to be.

Ethan and his dad prepared a lovely set of valentines for E’s classmates and I taped peppermint patties to the envelopes. I couldn’t help but think of the Peppermint Patty of “Peanuts” fame, her unknowing lesbian icon status, and just how heteronormative this particular holiday is.

For the holiday I got Ethan a new book for his LeapPad and his own set of headphones since he loves mine so much. My valentine is getting a slew of vagina-shaped chocolates sold on campus for the Vagina Monologues charity and a set of coupons I modeled after the Onion’s suggestions. I got myself a quiet night at home with meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

V-day on twenty dollars or less. Cheapskate ahoy!

I’m not a big fan of these pedestrian holidays, or most holidays, and Valentine’s Day has always been shadowed by my nearby birthday. Luckily I have birthday plans this year, a night of bowling and dinner with E and E’s dad, another dinner out with my parents, and perhaps another dinner this upcoming weekend with friends and the pseudo-boyfriend. It’s about time. After my 21st birthday disappointment wherein I was living with and fighting with the parents badly enough that the two week long silence was only ended with a half-assed rendition of “Happy Birthday To You,” I figured the birthday excitement of my youth was over.

I’d rather think of Valentine’s Day itself as a massacre of another sort: hearts, relationships, and unrequited love slayed as easily as gangsters with guns hanging in a garage on February afternoon. Disappointment, really, and not because I feel left out of the holiday or anything, but that people so invest their relationships and self-worth into this holiday that most are disappointed. And thus, I am disappointed in them for being so ridiculous.

In the meantime, Amanda better illustrates my point and offers a bit of advice on how to avoid that V-Day malaise.

Thrifty Food Plan, Thermostats, and Lunchboxes

For anyone who has been following this series, Elizabeth’s family has finished one month of the government’s Thrifty Food Plan. (Post one, the one that started it all.)

This conversation inspired me to get a few books on how to save money and shop savvy. There are some things on my budget that won’t budge, but others are completely flexible. Other than yesterday’s trip to the grocery store because I absolutely had to have fresh fruit, I have saved buckets on grocery bills for the two of us by modifying how we cook and eat. My primary problem (as of right now) is time. I don’t have that much time to stand around the kitchen and play Mother of the Year, and so far I’m spending most of my Sunday cooking for the week.

All I need to do now is figure out how to avoid the convenience of E’s lunchbox food and begin to make our own incarnations, and get used to the low-set thermostat and the house being cold. Because goddamn, it’s cold.

Bedroom Art

After the Great Cleaning of 2005, I realized that my bedroom was unforgivably bare. The only things in there were my bed, a dresser, a hamper, a lamp, and an alarm clock. While I’m all for living simply, I felt like I was sleeping in a jail cell.

The vintage clothing store I wrote about earlier this year, is going out of business, partially because of a lack of customers and partially for a lack of time. I went in this week to find their going-out-of-business sale. I wanted to chat with the owner for a bit, but my shopping buddy was limping around on a bad knee. Long, rambling story short, I bought three framed pictures of children on park benches doing kid things.

Does this picture not rock? A little girl knitting in the great outdoors, a ball of yarn spilling out of her bag? Awesome!

If you don’t like it, keep your mouth shut.

Something about the other two are a bit disturbing. They look like big-eyed, big-headed emo kids who are, shall we say, “on the nod.” Peaceful and at the same time disturbing. I’ll try to get non-glaring pictures if anyone is interested.

At least my room feels less like a jail cell.

Derrick Jensen, Here I Come

I’m off to see Derrick Jensen in Ohio at Antioch College tomorrow night, so blogging will be light over the next two days. Because Jensen is one of my ideological heroes, I’m trying hard not to pee my pants. Thrilling.

What I’ve Been Doing Since I Haven’t Been Blogging

Wednesday
Substitute as a para for a gaggle of kindergarteners. Reconsider teaching. Reconsider taking Ethan out of Montessori next year and contemplate applying for a scholarship so he may attend kindergarten there. Feel proud that child is so damn smart without a minor push from any of us. Remember birthday is in two weeks and dread the annual birthday malaise. And, oh yeah, Valentine’s Day. Stupid holidays. Sleep on the couch all afternoon and never quite recover from unplanned nap. Bitch about the grit on the floors that is now embedded in my feet. Try to list my goals from this month through the rest of the year.

Thursday
Resolve issues with ASL teacher, who turns out to be a fantastic instructor. Fall asleep on parents’ couch after dinner. Get lecture about incurable insomnia. Grumble. Go home. Begin thinking about the garden, how it will be planted and where in the yard the sunflowers will go, and how obscenely gaudy the ancient neighbors will find them. Feel pleased. Order egregious amount of vegetable and sunflower seeds from Burpee. Wonder where the hell I’m going to get the money for gardening tools. Finish math homework with little sweat or tears. Be glad I am not blogging as the dial-up connection has been painfully slow. Have horrible nightmare that disrupts the first opportunity for uninterrupted sleep in weeks.

Lego my Pablo Friday
Attend first school observation. Make awesome tortellini concoction that if distributed among the nations would inspire world peace. Buy straight needles to knit both sleeves of Klaralund at the same time. Mend two sweaters, darn a pair of socks, start a wearable everyday knitted hat in green. Lament blogging break because Pablo has been awfully cute and it is the day for cat blogging. Finish everyday green hat. Decide it’s too short, cast on at the bottom and begin knitting a fold-up brim. That night, watch an actual film, one that transcends “movie” status by having good actors, writing, and cinematography, but fall asleep halfway through. Dream about beautiful Cuban actor.

Saturday
Clean the hell out of my house. Cleanest it’s been since I moved. Boxes from moving six months ago are finally all unpacked and it appears a yard sale is needed. Remove a Pablo-sized hairball from under the sofa. Gag. Also recover a transparent red Lego from a dark corner that inspires Ethan to make a wide array of emergency vehicles from Legos all afternoon. Pablo gets in on the Lego action. Thank whomever that both are busy enough for me to rest. Make grocery list for next week. Plan to cook all day Sunday. Pray for the good health of the inventor of my second-hand generic Crockpot.

Sunday
Crap. It’s Superbowl Sunday, isn’t it? Roll out of bed to answer the phone, to hear that an old, fond acquaintance of mine (the scariest-looking teddy bear/I’ll-kill-you-in-a-minute gay man I’ve ever met) is in the hospital in a drug-induced coma because a friend of his thought it was really funny that he was drinking antifreeze during a night of excessive drunkenness and didn’t stop him. Fucking idiot. Go to the hospital and buy him a small token to let him know I’m thinking of him. Wonder about something Dru once said about getting through a time period of friends’ self-destructiveness. Wonder when this time will end. Wish people had some sense and that drug and alcohol addicitions were biologically impossible.

Monday
Lay around. Have sweatpants day. Go to local pet store where I am asked by the badly tattooed clerk if I have a long-haired cat. When I inquire why he asks, he points to the shoulder of my jacket covered in a carpet of cat hair. Curse. Eat homemade stew. Finish watching “City of God.” Love it despite movie malevolence.

Tuesday
Attend full day of classes. Collapse on couch. Take this quiz:

You Are the Very Gay Tinky Winky!

Purple with a gay pride symbol… how could he not be gay?
And that red purse is divalicious!

What Gay Childhood Icon Are You?

Read “Speak” (and part II) during lunch at my daily hangout. Briefly excuse myself to bathroom to cry. Go home after final class. Cut my own hair. Collapse on couch. Wander to the basement to gaze at pile of laundry. Go back upstairs to lay on couch. Sigh as E drives Lego emergency vehicles over my reclined body.

Wednesday
Another sweatpants day – the local school corps appear to be okay on subs. Knit a few rows on Klaralund. Pet Pablo. Count nine days until another disappointing birthday rolls around. Relent and begin blogging again.

Fin: Skully Bag

I finally finished the Skully bag tonight after fighting with it for at least two months, a project undertaken to use up the masses of super-thick wool I had from a previous failed project. This is a picture of the final blocking process – very precise, as you can see.

I basically made a massive Booga bag with an attached strap that can be lengthened or shortened as needed, knitted a large pocket in red for the front, and then made an intarsia pocket using a skull pattern I found on the internet. I felted them all seperately, sewed them together, then very, very lightly felted them as a whole piece.

It’s kind of raggedy-looking, but big enough to carry around books or knitting projects. And it’s done. Done. One more thing to check off on the to-do list.

In other news, I cleaned the hell out of my kitchen tonight after making more chili and a large spinach and mushroom lasagna. Ethan topped it off by making blueberry and banana nut muffins. I don’t want to cook a stitch this week. In my quest for cheap, healthy living I’ve decided to try and cook ahead, using good but inexpensive foods that are easy to reheat throughout the week. I’m freezing the chilis and soups that I make for later. In addition, I found that at the grocery store I can have large, single-serve custom salads made for about three dollars a pop. It sounds expensive, but I never eat the salad stuff I buy separately and it beats paying five to ten dollars for a salad in a campus restaurant.

The most important thing is that this method saves me a whole lot of time. Time is something that is repeatedly brought up with Half Changed World’s government Thrifty Food Plan experiment (Week 3 of the experiment has been posted). If I had more time, things around here would look and feel much different. If anything, I’d occasionally catch a few winks that have nothing to do with the flu.

Splash!

I finally completed the splash page for Krista, thereby ending a long web project I undertook for her but was too tired to finish. Luckily Krista has awesome taste in graphics – funnily enough, she hadn’t noticed her penchant for bird pictures until I pointed it out to her.

A few more tweaks at her request and that makes one more thing I can cross off the to-do list.

The Human Body is a Strange Thing

I went to my friend Lori’s house yesterday to sit around and watch crap TV. We watched a bunch of reality shows and shows about reality shows, drank a couple of glasses of wine and ate some homemade chili. Some other people stopped by and we all watched “Bullworth” together, lamenting the lack of honesty in contemporary politics. None of us felt very well, but it being a free night for me with the little one at his dad’s, I had big plans for the evening – go home, clean up the house, take a proper shower, and call some friends for a nice, chill night of board games.

And then I woke up. It was dark and I thought for a moment that I was in my own bed. Then I realized I was laying flat on Lori’s futon. What time is it? I checked my phone and it was 4am. What the hell had happened? When I called Lori to try and figure things out, she answered her phone upstairs in bed. She too had passed out before midnight.

I got my stuff together and drove the two blocks home, feeling progressively more ill the whole way home, pissed off that I had wasted a perfectly good Friday night sleeping on someone’s crappy futon. My head pounded and my stomach churned. Once I got inside I ran for the bathroom and threw up for the next two hours.

I finally crawled into bed at seven, fell asleep at eight, and woke up at eleven feeling ab-so-lutely fantastic!

My eyes don’t hurt, my knee feels better, the headaches are gone, and I’ve accomplished more today than I have all week. If all I have to do to feel like a healthy human being is sleep on that stupid futon and have a two-hour vomit session, bring it on.

I haven’t felt this well in weeks.

The Dingo Ate My Baby

Nope, not thinking up a title.

The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004: Unfortunately the “no-repeat rule forbids otherwise-deserving companies – like Bayer, Boeing, Clear Channel and Halliburton” keep them off this year’s list, where they belong.

Arianna Huffington offers the Political Oscars of 2005. I have only seen one single, solitary movie nominated for the Oscars, so I’m not much in a caring mood. However,

Creative Writing:
Best: Charlie Kaufman for his mind-bending screenplay, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Worst: Alberto Gonzales for his morality-bending memo calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint” (a.k.a., “Eternal Torment of the Enemy Mind”).

was good enough for me.

There is one more explanation for why I might be feeling ill. After last night I’m fairly sure I have bronchitis, and Ethan woke up with morning with a vomiting flu. Yet it doesn’t explain the fall I took last night that left a massive bruise on my left knee. I’m tired of everyone telling me I look and sound like shit, should get more sleep, or take it easy. There are things that have to be done around here that either no one else can do or should do, or things that simply have to be done on my own, like school work, going to classes, and the new job.

Someone actually suggested to me that I get a hobby. Holy shit, Batman! I have hobbies! What do you call knitting, blogging, and running? These keep me sane!

If anyone wants to spring for a live-in maid (with whom I can live in peace without that pesky power-based relationship), perhaps a cook that also grocery shops, eyeglasses, or a long vacation (that preferably isn’t in a mental health institution), then we can talk about all the rest I should be getting.

More on all this later if anything comes from the doctor’s visit I’m supposed to be making this afternoon.

Letter to the Editor, And Other Things

I fired off a letter to the editor this evening after stewing over this information.

I read with disappointment that the amendment to the Indiana Constitution against gay marriage was again coming to the forefront of state politics. I was even more disappointed to find that the state legislature was considering two related bills, one that bans gays and lesbians from adopting or fostering children and one that revokes partner benefits from the state’s universities.

Of all the time, money, and energy that could be spent at the state level, why is homosexuality, of all things, the trendy political target?

Indiana is taking great strides to move backwards, and in the meantime wonders why the Brain Drain of our young, successful college graduates is so high and our national reputation is so dismal. Hoosiers will do well to remember that gays and lesbians are among our finest assets and that a queer dollar is still green.

A legitimate government is one that represents all it’s people, not a select few.

It was hastily written but it pithy enough to make a point, I think. And yes, I used some of your words. Y’all are good.

I haven’t been feeling well lately. My poor sleeping abilities are catching up with me, especially with this new evil schedule, and my eyes feel constantly strained. It’s time for glasses but I can’t afford the initial cost all at once. If I spend too much time in front of a computer screen, read a book, or knit with finer gauged yarn, the dizziness, nausea, and headaches set in. To top it off, I have yet to fully shed the cold that killed me last week. Thus, keeping up the blog has become a chore — quick cut and paste jobs done in short spurts to avoid feeling sick. I’m trying to finish knitting a sock, but had to put it down tonight and lay around in the dark. And further, reading for my classes is getting close to unbearable.

My sub-para job was easy but draining. I was reminded today that I am mother to the best five-year-old I have ever known. Not like that’s biased or anything.