Defining

self·ish·ness 'sel-fish-ness (noun):
When my mother calls to tell me she's headed out of town because my step-grandparents are in rapidly declining health and I respond with "But did you hear what I said? I am an hour late meeting my friends because my step-mom didn't call me to tell me she no longer needed me to drop the camera off!"

in·sen·si·tiv·i·ty (")in-"sen(t)-s&-'ti-v&-tE (noun):
This has been omitted in case my employers ever find my blog, because they could very much take it the wrong way. Just trust me, it was hilarious. And offensive.

dou·ble en·ten·dre 'd&-b&l-än-'tänd(-r&) (noun):
(Playing Guitar Hero)
Jamie: I'm just not using the blue button anymore. My pinky doesn't reach.
Jef: Instead of using your pinky, just slide your hand up and down.
All: Gross.

in·ebri·a·tion "nE-brE-'A-sh&n (noun):
(Watching Casablanca)
Rick Blaine: (on screen) Here's looking at you, kid.
Bonnie: (simultaneously, toasting) Here's mud in your eye.
Jamie: (falling over giggling) Did you just say,"Here's to nutting in your eye"!?

Chasing Painted Horses

But there ain't no back
To a merry-go-round!
--Langston Hughes, "Merry-Go-Round"

The Boy and I rode the merry-go-round today. It was one of those cheap mock carnivals in a mall parking lot where all the rides are unfolded semi-trailers. Well, all the rides but the merry-go-round; it's the one ride that can't be cheapened by folding it up into a 53-foot trailer.

He exchanged a few bills into tickets and we stepped on the rickety red platform. The Boy didn't care much which horse he rode--he was on the ride primarily because it would make me happy--but I take my horse selection seriously. I have a whole methodology in choosing my steed: I prefer ones that are lowered at the beginning because I find they usually end raised and I like to climb down instead of pick myself up at the end.

I also prefer the ones that are dented or scratched. Maybe it goes back to reading the Velveteen Rabbit when I was little, but I like to think everything has a soul, especially children's toys. The damaged horses aren't ruined; they've just been pre-loved. Leave the shiny ones for the kids who don't know any better.

I chose a black horse with a green saddle and a missing ear on the outside and The Boy grabbed the adjacent one on the inside. I like the outside because the horses run faster and, if I remember my physics correctly, I think I'm right. I grinned while The Boy shrugged and made an off-hand remark that he liked the inside because less people would be able to notice him on the children's ride. I didn't care. I've always loved the merry-go-round.

The ride began. The tinny music filled the speakers and I was surprised with how quickly the little merry-go-round sped up. I even caught The Boy smiling. We laughed and even the music wasn't so bad; it's been updated to "real" music as opposed to the music box tinkles. The center of the merry-go-round was decorated in mirrors which made me dizzy as I looked in, towards The Boy.

The small merry-go-round was equally as short in the ride length. The galloping horses slowed and mine sunk into the floor as it stopped.

"That's not supposed to happen," I huffed.

"Are you going to get on another horse?" he asked.

"Yeah, why don't we?"

"Okay."

He handed over more tickets and this time I picked a purple horse with a blue saddle and a hole in the horse's neck that I plugged with my thumb. Again we raced off. I looked into the mirrors in the center until I got disoriented, but The Boy never did. While I looked inward, he looked outward, but it was never at each other. He was always looking for something else.

My purple horse halted against the floor with it's raised hoof scraping the color-coated steel. Again I had to pick myself off the floor.

"I can't believe it's happened again."

"Are you going to get on another horse?" he asked flatly.

"Um, okay."

And he handed off the last of the tickets.

I took the next horse in the circle--I don't even remember what color it was. Just don't leave me on the ground, I pleaded into the painted mane. Let me end higher than before we started.

The platform jerked forward unevenly and I stared ahead while we chased the painted horses. I hated the mirrors.

The ride stopped and, as usual, The Boy was high and I was low.

"Are you going to get on another horse?"

"No. I'm getting off the ride altogether." It surprised The Boy and it surprised the hell out of me.

And I picked myself up off the floor and I walked away.

This will go down on your permanent record

For my dear friend and resident poet, Ryan.

I once got a phone call from Ryan--it was after I had written this post.

"Are you really still mad over the CD thing?"

"No." And honestly I was over it. Over two years had past between the writing of that blog post and my shin-kicking vow to raise as much hell in his truck when he puts on Eminem when he knows fully well that I refuse to have anything to do with that artist.

So I was a little surprised to see that Ryan tagged me to list 5 songs that knock my socks off. I am going ahead and assuming his tag is a concession that I really do have better musical tastes, especially since he didn't list The Artist That Shall Never Be Named Again once in his vastly improved list.

I win!

1. "Wonderwall" by Ryan Adams. Yes, it's a cover of Oasis's hit, but it is the sexiest song I have ever heard in my entire life. Where Oasis raises the pitch in the chours, Adams instead lowers it, accomplishing such a sad yearning. Adams voice cracks and falters creating a defeatism that could only be obtained by having a heart stomped on. But with the vocal imperfections, one also knows that he was not entirely innocent of blame.
   


2. "Sweet Thing" by Van Morrison. I discovered this song after the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad breakup of '05. There was one part of the song that stuck with me:

   And I'll be satisfied
   Not to read in between the lines
   And I will walk and talk
   In gardens all wet with rain
   And I will never, ever, ever, ever
   Grow so old again.
   I will not remember
   That I even felt the pain.

   "I will never grow so old again." That's how I felt: old. The line reminded me who I once was and I sang the song as my mantra over and over again for months on repeat until I finally got back to that place. The $9.99 CD from Best Buy probably saved me thousands of dollars in therapy.


3. "Dixieland Delight" by Alabama. This song takes me back to Athens, GA. I'm in some seedy bar with sticky beer floating on old wooden floors. This song comes on and everyone in the bar cheers. Half the crowd puts their drinks down, but everyone gets up and grabs a partner to dance. It doesn't matter if they know each other or not, it just matters that there is a gentleman to spin you around. Not surprisingly, I was a member of the other half that didn't put their drinks down; I can twirl with beer in hand.
   


4. "Show Me" by Mint Royale. Favorite song of all time. Mint Royale recently held a contest to see if any one of the listeners could figure out the lyrics--not even the band knows them because Pos from De La Soul raps the song. Funny thing is both the winners (See the Competition Results page in the blog) have different results than what I once worked out. In any case, this song will always leave me in a better mood than I was in before listening to it.
   


5. I'm combining five because I can't make up my mind. And it's my blog.
   
   "Kiss Off" by Violent Femmes. If this song is playing, be assured I'm in my underwear dancing in my apartment. And when he counts to ten, I sing extra loud because each number correlates fantastically with a boy:
   

   One cause you left me and
   Two for my family and
   Three for my heartache and
   Four for my headaches and
   Five for my lonely and
   Six for my sorrow and
   Seven for no tomorrow and
   Eight--I forget what eight was for and
   Nine for a lost God and
   Ten for everything

   
   "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns 'n Roses. I was twenty and I had a new boyfriend, the hockey player. Every Thursday he would take me to the Masquerade to dance to 80's music. When this song came on, he would do a perfect Axl Rose and pick me up in his Brawny-man arms and spin me. I just remember being so happy and carefree that summer.
   

It seems like I'm always at my happiest when I'm twirling.

Will and AprilBapryll also did this meme.

Unrequited

I
want
a
rubber band
ball.

The saga continues

MIKE: What happened to you? I thought you were going back to blonde. Did you lose a bet or something?
JAMIE: Well, apparently if they accidentally dye your hair green--and you begin to cry really hard in the middle of the salon--they'll fix it by making it this color and they'll knock a lot of money off your bill. A lot of money.
MIKE: (laughs so hard he cries) What color is that anyways?
JAMIE: I'm not even sure.

Room with a View

This morning my boss found me standing in the bottom level of a parking garage, holding a glass of iced tea and not doing anything else in particular.

"To the right," she said.

To the right was the direction of our new office. Only I didn't know which way to go and I had sort of given up on the going-to-work thing this morning. At least I had my tea.

I followed my boss into the elevator and let her press the new floor number, and then I followed her off the elevator and into our new glass doors.

"Your new space is labeled by employee number instead name," she said as she broke away from me into her own office.

13. Lucky number 13. Oh god, I really don't have any fortune, do I? I thought as I trekked through the maze of what only can be described as a triangular-shaped, open workspace.

A Post-It note with 13 scrawled on it in red ink was taped to a partition wall towards the back. I grinned as I saw not one, but two windows under my control overlooking the interior plaza. Then I counted the number of employees with window views: 7.

I must be doing something right around here.

Secrets

I've become increasingly disappointed with the PostSecret site over the past year. With it's growing fame, I feel that it's lost the subversive touch that made PostSecret so popular to begin with. It seems like every 14-year-old emo kid with a pair of scissors and a printer is submitting material. I'm sorry, but I don't think middle-school wishes formed the foundation of the project.

It was the older Secrets like these that inspired me to take stock:



These Secrets go into further depths than I'm prepared to handle, much less confront. I think they are Secrets that I would prefer to not realize. Sometimes I'll read one, like the wall Secret, and it feels like someone is standing behind me and whispering in my ear. How did they know that?

Of course there are funny ones on the site as well that I enjoy just as much:


These at least provide a laugh and lighten the somber tone of the site, unlike the the emo kiddie ones which don't seem to accomplish anything.

I've never submitted anything to the site largely because I haven't bought a stamp since 2003. But it doesn't mean I haven't been making them when the inspiration does reach me:


Sometimes it reaches me through walls.

Fervor Over Fortune

There's only one reason I get in funks. I spend so much energy being a good person and doing what's right, and often I feel like Karma isn't rewarding enough. Matter of fact, Karma frequently enjoys pushing me face-first in the mud and then taunting me in song format afterwards. Additionally, the sanguineness in me believes that this time will always be different, when usually it's not.

I've always had more fervor than fortune.

I had a good wallow for a couple of hours this evening. Appropriately, Last Holiday arrived in the mail and I watched Queen Latifa do everything right with what seemed like no return in life.

Afterwards, I drove to Blockbuster to return the movie and pick up another one. It was late for weekday hours--a little after 10 PM. Ahead of me in line was a nice looking black family: parents and a little girl no older than four. She had her hair in two little puffs on either side of her head. I was always jealous of little black girls' hair. I love the braids and the barrettes and the puffs and ribbons. The little girl was fussy and beginning to cry. Normally I get really irritated when children cry in public, but this was a cute cry. It was tired with not much threat behind it.

In her hand was one of my favorite movies, An American Tail. The mother gave the case to the Blockbuster clerk who noticed that there was no disc inside. The little girl figured it out and began to cry harder. The mother called to the father, "Go get Fievel Goes West! Quickly!" and he disappeared behind the shelves.

The man in front of me was called to the checkout and I moved to the front of the line. The little girl began to fuss harder until the mother took her back to the children's section. A minute later the little girl returns with tear-stained cheeks, but the unmistakable cover of Fievel Goes West is in her grip.

I bend down and look at her, "Did you find your movie?" I never talk to children, but her weak cries made me believe she could be easily consoled.

She begins to wail. The mother looked at me and whispered, "She knows it's not the original Fievel."

"What? Are you serious?"

The mother nodded. I looked to the crying girl, "But it's Fievel! Everyone loves Fievel Mousekewitz!"

The mother said a little less patiently, "Fievel is Fievel."

The girl, with puffs on either side of her head, cried harder.

I loved An American Tail growing up. When the movie came out I had a little red radio Walkman and I would drain the battery by leaving it on at night so I could hear "Somewhere Out There" one more time. As I began to quietly sing along to Linda Ronstadt, my brother would inevitably charge into my room and rip my red Walkman away. I still haven't completely forgiven him yet.

In the video store I knelt down and looked at the girl and began very quietly, "And even though I know how very far apart we are/ It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star." She had to stop crying to hear what I was singing. I hit the next verse a little louder, "And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby/ It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky."

It was somewhere around here that the rest of the people stopped to pay attention to me singing in a video store at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night.

"Somewhere out there if love can see us through/ Then we'll be together somewhere out there/ Out where dreams come true."

Unfortunately, this did not have the desired effect. Somehow I think I envisioned her singing along and smiling and laughing, but it just made her miss her movie even more and cry harder. I'd like to think she wasn't wailing over the quality of my song. The mother, however, laughed and thanked me.

"Well it was my fault for making her cry the second time by bringing it up."

"She would have cried anyway."

And no, I didn't make that little girl laugh, but I made myself smile. In hindsight, I think I sang the song more for myself than I did for her. I've always had more fervor than fortune and instead of cursing it, I honored it.

And that little girl had a point, Fievel Goes West doesn't hold a candle to An American Tail.

Mommy and Daddy are fighting

I've been at odds with the city recently. It seems to have lost its springtime appeal: the Bradford Pear blooms had long since fallen and the city seems nestled under a blanket of yellow pollen.

And the homeless have reemerged.

During the IDOL GIVES BACK fundraising--when each member had to find a local charity to support-- it seemed fitting that Atlanta's Ryan Seacrest chose acknowledge the homeless situation. Maybe it's the fact I live in Midtown, but it is a situation.

I was driving home from a friend's house late one night last week and I got stopped at the light on Freedom Parkway and Boulevard. Usually there is a panhandler at the light, so I didn't notice the man on the corner.

When he approached my truck and tried to get inside, however, I took notice.

He leaned against the passenger-side door and began to yell at me through the window. I refused to acknowledge him by focusing my attention on the CD player. He pulled the door handle and got angry when he realized the locks were employed. This would have encouraged me to run the red light, but I was sandwiched in the lane on all sides by other stopped vehicles. As he hollered, I flipped my visor open and began to reapply lip gloss in the mirror; I've already learned the hard way to not make eye contact when this sort of thing happens.

The homeless man got even angrier when I busied myself in the mirror, so obviously the only logical thing for him to do was to take his cane and beat against my passenger-side window with it.

And this is when I got scared.

I screwed the cap back on my lip gloss, tucked it in the center compartment, and I pulled my phone out and debated dialing 911, but knew the situation would rectify itself as soon as the light turned. I wasn't keen on hanging around the area and filing a police report, so I put the phone down and continued to primp while Crazy continued to beat against my truck with his cane.

***

Three days later and I'm on the phone with The Boy when something outside stirred me from the comforts of my bed. It was a loud and terrible noise that continued for minutes. With The Boy on the phone, I walked out on the balcony and saw a black helicopter hovering above the street feet from me, shining its intense spotlight towards the ground. It hovered, made a quick circle to turn around, and hovered again.

I recognized the black helicopter as Atlanta PD from when I dated Christopher. In the mornings while he spent hours in front of the mirror, I would stand at the 12 x 12 foot window in his Midtown apartment and watch two or three circle the area. He presumed they were looking for someone and I stood on the 14th floor and wondered what was below. The helicopter outside my apartment door was doing the same: the same short, tight circles, maneuvering hastily and with abandon. It was more dramatic than TV: it was feet from me.

I described the scene to The Boy, who was not as enthralled as I was. I'm pretty sure his exact response was, "What is wrong with you!? Get inside now!"

Oh. "Even though I live on the second floor?"

"Yes. Double bolt your back door. Make sure your windows are locked and get away from them."

"Do you hear the helicopter?"

"Yes! Now get inside!"

I did as he said and retreated back inside, making sure the back door was double-bolted. I discovered my windows were in fact unlocked and went back into the bedroom and into the spot before the commotion stirred me. As we moved on to other subjects, the helicopter continued to harass me with its menacing presence.

***

Monday I came across this article:

I'm going to answer his question with "Yes, it's like New York, only we drive." That sounds fairly reminiscent to something I once saw, only mine involved a shot gun and both of them running into an abandoned house that's actually being renovated into condos right now. Same street, about 2 miles from where he was.

The city had me down, so I did the only thing I knew that would lift my spirits. I took my dog to Piedmont Park. Under a beach umbrella outside Park Tavern stood the man I see every weekend. With him, he brings about 20 plastic bowls filled with water so the dogs don't go thirsty in the heat. As I sat down at Park Tavern's table with my book, he approached me and gave Nikita her own ketchup-colored plastic bowl that she drink from furiously.

I smiled and thanked him, forgiving the shot guns, the helicopters, and the homeless men with canes.

Shear Willpower

My inner blonde is slowly becoming my outer blonde.


I'm getting ideas.