Sole Train

So I'm having a bit of an obsession right now with Golden Grahams.  The cereal, not some funky new street drug.  I can't seem to eat enough of them, and I put away about three bowls a day over the weekend.  I do this pretty often with food, just get on a kick and consume something constantly until that undefinable moment when my tastes swing from "Hell, yes!" to "Never again."

The worst time was when I got a quesadilla maker for Christmas. For about four months, that was all I ate every night after work.  Of course I haven't even been able to look at the thing since, but it was fun while it lasted.  Oh, quesadilla maker, don't feel sad.  It's not you, it's me.

I wonder if I'm able to get in these habits simply because I live alone. If I'd felt I needed to justify my dietary patterns to anyone, I might have made an effort to include some variety, or at least felt a twinge of shame at the monotony.  As it is, there's no one to judge me for anything I happen to do.  Eat cookies for supper?  So what.  Fry an egg at 2 a.m.?  Try to stop me. Make brownies and cut out the very middle piece?  Suck it, I'll do what I want.

I once had this conversation with my sister, who also lives alone:

Sister: "Would you judge me if I told you I made a cake yesterday and it's almost gone already?"

Me: "No."

Sister: "How about if I never even put the slices on plates and instead just ate it right out of the pan?"

Me:  "Of course not."

Sister: "What if told you I just left the pan by the side of my bed with a fork in it?"

I say, your house, your rules.  And it doesn't just apply to food.  Does anyone ever close their bathroom door when they live alone?  Or get dressed immediately after a shower?  Or not have the TV, radio, and computer on while talking on the phone? .... they do?  Well, as Bobby Brown so eloquently put it, that's my prerogative.  If I want to keep the thermostat at 75 or stay up till 4 a.m. watching old movies, who's going to complain?  That's the beauty of independence.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my friends with kids secretly hate me for this.  Since I have yet to find that special someone to start a brood with, I have the luxuries of sleeping till noon on Saturdays, discretionary income, and the freedom that comes with virtually no major responsibilities.  Does that make me spoiled or selfish?  Perhaps if I'd turned down several serious marriage offers in favor of carefree living. In reality, my lifestyle isn't decadent or somehow less valuable because I'm single ... it's just different.  I'm working with what I have at the moment, and I'm good with that.

On the downside, you have to learn to keep yourself pretty entertained.  This might have been a problem for me before I lived in Japan for a year -- not so anymore. With almost no one to talk to or anything in English to read, I was forced to be creative.  When I wasn't killing cockroaches or avoiding my topless old lady neighbor, I spent my evenings trying to decipher crazy gameshows on TV and attempting to bake banana bread in my rice cooker. When that failed to amuse, I once resorted to choreographing a routine to the theme song from "Shaft." 

I soon decided that the equation for a tolerable single existence is this:  happiness = the amount of time spent dancing in your living room ... in your underwear.

I honestly don't remember the last time I was bored.  I can't stand hearing someone whining about not having anything to do, because there's always something to do.  What they're really saying is, "There's nothing I want to do."  Did I want to learn the katakana alphabet, or how to whistle the Himi High School song, or every single line in "The Naked Gun," or all the lyrics after "He's a bad mother --shut your mouth?"  No.  But I did it, and now I own it.  Forever.

Sometimes, you gotta make do with what you have.  You gotta find that happy place to escape to in your own head.  You gotta shake what your momma gave you. And you gotta do it to music, alone, wearing as little as possible. Preferably eating a bowl of Golden Grahams.

You Had Me at Space Vampires

It's been awhile since I've posted, so let's start this one out with some real honesty. I have a confession to make. I'm not sure when it started or how it evolved, but I've developed a real addiction ... to really bad movies. No, not XXX movies. I'm not even talking Sci-Fi Channel "original" bad, because they're in a class of their own. I'm referring to action-packed, formulaic, laughable one-liner, villian-with-an-iffy-foreign-accent flicks. More than that, I seem to be fascinated with what I call "afternoon wasters," the ones on TNT or TBS that catch your eye on Sunday at 1:00 ... and suddenly your day is gone along with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

I don't consider myself to have bad taste in movies, but my DVD collection does resemble that of a teenage boy. I'm not against chick flicks, per se. I think most women watch them for the same kind of escapism guys get from seeing things blow up. They both know it probably isn't going to happen, but isn't it damn fun to imagine?

As I've examined my preferences lately, I've come to identify a sort of rating system for the awesomeness of terrible action movies. And by "terrible" I mean not even close to high art, but a hell of a ride. Here are a few just to get you started:

If the movie is set in some sort of future dystopia, perhaps after a cataclysmic event, 1 point.
If it involves assembling a team of people, each with special skills, to fix something/rescue someone, 1 point.
If someone on the team is a computer whiz who can hack the Pentagon while eating various forms of junk food and saving everyone's ass, 1 point. 
If one person on that team is secretly working for the government/enemy/is a robot, 2 points. 

If the team has to go someplace dangerous to accomplish the task (space/deep sea/a cave), 1 point. 
If they have to go someplace ridiculous (an ancient pyramid, into the earth's core), 2 points. 
If they go to the Arctic/Alaska, that's a whole new category.

If the team encounters monsters or aliens, 2 points.
If, at any time, the audience gets to view things through the eyes of a creature, as in "snake vision" or "Predator vision," 3 points. 
If the team must fight nature itself, 1 point. 
If what they encounter is supernatural or paranormal, 2 points. 
If they find out it's the result of genetic experiments, 3 points.
If whatever it is USED to be human and/or the team starts turning into them, 4 points.

If the movie stars Coolio, 5 points, because that's a guarantee you're going to witness something truly awful.

This is just a rough framework, but I think it generally holds true. However, I'm open to suggestions from other bad movie lovers out there.

Hilarity Ensues

So it's 12:30 am, and I can't get to sleep. Why? The woman who lives in the apartment above me has been laughing loudly and hysterically for the past 15 minutes. I can't tell if she's on the phone or if someone is tickling her funny bone in person (or tickling anything else, frankly) but something has gotten her going.

Not that I'm complaining. It's preferable to the evening when, off and on for the better part of an hour, I heard what resembled the sweet sounds of romance, accompanied by the frenzied repetition of "John! John! John!" Usually I'm a supporter, albeit reluctantly, of those who are fortunate enough to be bumpin' uglies, since at least someone in my building is getting some. But that night I found myself very close to pounding on the ceiling and yelling, "John, whatever you're doing to her, STOP IT!"

Tonight, however, I've been trying to remember when exactly I laughed that hard. I generally find many things amusing, but rarely do I engage in the kind of hearty, uncontrollable guffaws now drifting down from above. The last time I remember really losing it was a couple months ago, when I was driving home from a friend's house at about 11:00 on a Friday night. I stopped at a light and happened to glance to my right, where someone in an eagle costume was waiting on the curb.

I did a triple-take, because although I hadn't been drinking, I suspected that perhaps I was hallucinating in some fashion. No, it was a person in a full-out, mascot-like bald eagle getup, complete with a huge head, which apparently was difficult to see out of, since he had to keep stopping and looking down to check where his large, taloned feet were landing in the crosswalk.

I looked beyond him, expected a group of kids to be following in his wake, maybe a team of sorts or a theater group, out for some fun after a game or a show. Nope. All alone.

He passed in front of my car and reached the other side of the street, where he simply stood, flapping his gigantic wings and swiveling his head frantically, as if he had migrated this far and now wasn't sure which way to go. Then, from the opposite direction came a tiny, beat-up car that screeched up next to him. He leaned in toward the window and there was a slight commotion ... then he disappeared into the back seat and the car sped away, complete with its endangered cargo.

All this happened in the span of a red light. I blinked several times, still unsure of what I had witnessed. By the time I got my turn arrow, I was laughing. I laughed so hard all the way to my apartment building that I nearly threw up in the parking lot. Because not only were those 30 seconds one of the most bizarre, delightful gifts I've ever received from the universe, but I knew how completely crazy I would sound when I re-told the story. Who would believe me?

I still don't know what happened on the corner of Silver Lake and 37th that night. Was it a prank? Was it a drunken dare? Did some kid piss off his friends, who then left him at Walgreens to fend for his feathery self? Or was it simply a very patriotic prostitute? Take your pick. I'll take the memory -- if all goes well, it might just replace my recollection of "John! John! John!"

If an Idiot Slips in the Parking Lot . . .

and no one is there to see her fall, is it still hilarious? Answer: Yes. Yes, it is. I've managed to make a fool of myself a couple times recently, and here's what's surprising. I'm actually super disappointed that nobody was there to witness it.

The first time was just before Christmas, when I cut through the parking lot of the nursing home across the street on my way to the bus. I usually step over a large snowbank and into the lot, then stomp the snow off my boots and continue on. Now, I don't know if I was in too much of a hurry, or if I failed to anticipate the steadily increasing size of the snowbank, or if the bag of coats I was donating threw me off. But somewhere between the stepping and the stomping I lost my balance. And I fell. But it wasn't a clean fall.

I took several stumbling jumps, staggering around as if I could somehow conquer gravity and regain control, fully realizing that it was already too late to recover. I finally resigned myself to the fact that I was 175 lbs. of disaster in an inevitable downward spiral, wheeled around and crashed to the pavement, skidding a fair distance before grinding to a cold, hard halt. And the worst thing was that afterward, all I really wanted to do was lie there and groan, but I had to get up and catch my bus.

I bruised my hip and cut my finger, but in the end nothing was really injured but my pride. Oddly, one of my first thoughts upon landing wasn't "I hope nobody saw that." Instead, it was "Did anybody SEE that?!" Because it was spectacular. I immediately got the giggles as I limped away, thinking of how awesome it would be to have video of it. I take comfort in the fact that several elderly people in wheelchairs may have been peering out their windows, witnessing evidence that they are not the only ones who periodically take a spill.

The second foolish thing happened just last week, when I was shopping. I was on a quest to find some new lotion and, as we all do, popped open the cap on one of the bottles to smell it. Because let's face it, if it smells like medicine or decaying roses, you're never going to slather it on. I couldn't quite get a whiff, so I decided to give the bottle a little squeeze.

SPLAT! It exploded right in my face. I had lotion everywhere. I mean on my coat, in my hair, dripping off my nose. Of course I looked around to see who had the privilege of viewing this grand spectacle, since I was standing near the pharmacy and was sure I would draw some stares . . . no one. So I was left to fish a kleenex out of my pocket and swab myself down, goofy and all alone.

What I'm lamenting is this: If I'm going to do something super embarrassing, it seems a shame to waste it on myself. There should be at least one other person there who can relate the tale to their family over dinner or tuck that memory away for a rainy, unamusing day. Otherwise, it's just me, taking a quick, silent bow in celebration of my own stupidity. Which is okay, too, I guess.

No Shame

Well, here it is a new year, and I reapply myself with more determination to actually keeping this blog updated regularly. First topic of 2009? The fact that there are very few situations in this world in which a person should have no shame. By that I mean they shouldn't care what other people think about them. I will name two.

First: How you look when it's 25 below outside. I was online earlier this weekend ordering some new (warmer) boots and gloves, and I found myself trying to mentally coordinate them with my other articles of winter clothing. After several unsuccessful minutes, I finally realized that nothing I have matches. It was all purchased out of necessity, at different times in different years, and together amounts to a mishmash of down, knit, fleece, and Goretex that can be combined in an infinite number of ways for maximum comfort but minimum fashion.

Why is it that the warmest coats are never quite the most stylish? Do I need to look like a walrus just to keep my core temp above 90? And why do the best scarves and earmuffs and facemasks make us all look like frosty criminals? I will guarantee you that I run across at least one person each day who's bundled up like the unibomber . . . but who cares!! When you're standing outside stamping your feet, bouncing up and down, occasionally dancing and swearing up a storm just to avoid losing any toes, you don't care about others judging you. You just want to survive. You should have no shame.

[As a sidenote, in the interest of full disclosure, I also have no shame in moving very quickly from building to building if I must venture outside in cold weather. I go nowhere slowly when it drops below freezing. I'm not kidding, I would leave my grandmother in the dust if it meant getting inside a few seconds faster.]

Second: Last week, I was about 30 feet from my bus stop when the bus, earlier than usual, blew right by me. Without thinking, I took off sprinting after it for another full block (to no avail) and yelling "Hey! Hey! Hey!" I do this inadvertently, the yelling. I know the driver can't hear me, but I want the universe to know that I filed a protest. Here's the thing, though -- when I run for the bus, I RUN FOR THE BUS. I mean full-out, crazy-person, arm-flailing, track and field running. And from experience, I know that watching someone do this from inside the bus is one of the funniest things in the world.

But what's even funnier is watching someone who needs to run but doesn't want anyone to know they're in a hurry. They sort of hop-shuffle along, like, "What? Late? Not me! No, this is my normal, everyday, extremely frenzied walk, and I'll thank you to look away now while I dive toward a moving vehicle." When they do finally step on, sweating and wheezing slightly, they try to pretend it was all part of the plan. Wake up, shower, dress, jog in dress shoes, go to work.

I once watched a woman sprint four blocks to catch our bus at the next stop, and when she got on I noticed she was wearing heels. I almost started clapping. Seriously, I think we should, as a society, start applauding people who accomplish stuff like this. And not a sarcastic Brubaker effort, but sincere, appreciative applause. Because not only did they work their ass off to get their day back on track, but they didn't care that you shook with silent laughter as they did it. And that's nothing to be ashamed of.

Inappropriate

Wow, work has really gotten the best of me these last couple weeks! However, just because I haven't posted doesn't mean I haven't witnessed several highly entertaining incidents in the meantime. What I'd really like to talk about is one word:

in·ap·pro·pri·ate

Pronunciation: \ˌi-nə-ˈprō-prē-ət\
Function: adjective
: not appropriate for a particular occasion or situation
graceless, improper, inapt, incongruous, incorrect, indecorous, inept, infelicitous, unbecoming, unfit, unhappy, unseemly, unsuitable, wrong

Example #1. Last Friday I did what any red-blooded American woman would do with a free afternoon ... I caught the new James Bond movie downtown. Despite the fact that it was 2:30, there were still about 50 people in the theater, including a large group of rather loud teenagers. About half an hour into the film, one of the girls stood up and started yelling "Fuck you!" at the top of her lungs. Obviously she was unhappy with someone in her crowd and didn't care if we all knew it. She yelled it several times, arms outstretched (and rather drunk I believe, judging from the slurring and total indifference to the rest of us) She then settled down, but after about 20 minutes was at it again. I was just ready to go ask someone to remove her when she not-so-politely removed herself ... and as a parting shot, she left us with her favorite two words. Needless to say, her outbursts were distracting, and consequently, I have no idea what Daniel Craig did with the unconscious woman he saved from the boat accident and missed a too brief shirtless scene. I paid $6.00 to see some high-octane British ass-kicking, not some adolescent drama playing out five rows ahead. 

Example #2. On my way home from work earlier this week, a car cut off my bus in traffic. Granted, it was annoying, but not completely unheard of. In response, the bus driver sped up and drove angrily next to the car, then stopped right on its bumper and proceed to flash his headlights off and on for the entire length of the red light we were waiting at. In other words, he pretty much had a complete mental break because we lost a Saturn's-length of time on the road. While I usually appreciate an aggressive driver, I was not only scared but embarrassed for him.

Example #3. The other morning I sat right behind a chubby, middle-aged couple on the bus who periodically gave each other cute little kisses. At least, they were cute at first. But they had to kiss each other every time the bus stopped. The kissed when she pulled the cord. They kissed when they stood up to exit. It was as if they needed constant affirmation that they were in love, or constant convincing that it was real. In the span of 30 minutes, I went from "Awwwww..." to "Get a room!" And that's not just the perpetually single woman in me. It was a gut reaction to unnecessary PDA. I don't care if they were 18 or 80, there should be a three-kiss maximum in public places. One kiss says "Yeah, we're together." Two say "We want everyone to know how much we're together." Three say "We've only been together a month and this is still super awesome!" Any more than that and you're trying too hard. Or you know your ex is watching.

I'm not saying that any of these people are terrible human beings, or even that they should be punished in some way (although that girl from the theater should probably be detoxed.) They weren't hurting anybody (although the bus driver was about a blinker flash away from extreme road rage), and they weren't breaking any laws (except the laws of decency, makeout-couple!) The things they were doing weren't horrible ... just inappropriate.

Love at First Bite

Last weekend, I celebrated Halloween. No, I didn’t wander out into the night to create mischief and mayhem (although I did find myself standing in line at the grocery store buying both eggs and toilet paper, oddly enough). I didn’t wait by my front door with a bucket of candy -- the good stuff, not Tootsie Rolls and toothbrushes. I didn’t even dress up as a sexy fill-in-the-blank, since almost any revealing outfit can be justified with devil horns and a little extra eye makeup … case in point, I have a friend who attended a party as a sexy zombie. She said she wanted people’s first reactions to be “Ew, that’s hot.”

I rang in All Hallow’s Eve the old-fashioned way. I watched horror movies. On Friday night I viewed the original “Psycho” with someone my age who had never seen it before. Here’s the kicker: not only had he never seen it, but he also had no idea, not even the faintest whispered rumor, of what was going to happen. It was priceless. Of course, the rest of us watching baited him terribly (no pun intended). Whenever we heard the “mother” voice, we made comments like, “His mom’s a real bitch,” or “Isn’t she terrible to him?”

Halfway through the show, my friend turned to me and said, in all earnestness, “Do you ever get to see the old woman’s face?” And I was like, “Um …. yes …. as a matter of fact, you do!” When the final reveal in the fruit cellar occurred, he simply said, “Whoah!” I asked him if he truly didn’t see any of that coming, and he replied, “Not in a movie this old.” And it’s true. Back then we didn’t have a nightly celebration, courtesy of 15 versions of Law and Order and CSI, of seriously damaged people who commit gruesome crimes and end up being fascinating as well as freakish.

Ah, that Alfred Hitchcock. He knew how to thrill. The two movies I watched on Saturday, however, weren’t as good. Well, they were good in their own special way, much like a car wreck. They were terrible, but you couldn’t look away. One was an unbelievably bizarre 1970 flick starring Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell that had something to do with a warlock, some weird chants, a Rosemary’s Baby-ish theme, and a crazy monster with tentacles that you were never actually allowed to see.

The other was a 1958 movie called “The Horror of Dracula” starring Christopher Lee. It basically featured Dracula lurking around the neighborhood preying on hapless women who left their windows open at night, while good ol’ Van Helsing tried to catch him sleeping in his coffin during the day. Part of the story line involved a woman who was bitten and converted to vampirism but was later cured and returned to the husband who’d never given up hope that she would recover. He’d even given her a blood transfusion after Drac just about sucked the life out of her neck.

What struck me most about the story wasn’t the idea of true love overcoming all odds. It was the idea that, because of his devotion, that guy had earned himself the ultimate argument-ender. For the rest of their married lives, he had something to hold over her head that was just awesomely unbeatable.

It wasn’t “Remember the time you gained 20 pounds and I stuck around?” or “Remember when your grandmother died and I took three days off work to drive you to the funeral?” or “Hey, remember when I agreed to quit school and move across the country just to be with you?” It wasn’t even “Don’t forget, I gave you a kidney.”

It was “Remember the time you were undead? Yeah. That was me by your side.” I imagine the conversations would go something like this:

“Honey, did you take the trash out?”

“No, but you were a vampire.”

“Well, do you think you could turn off the football game?”

“Do you think you could not have been a vampire?”

“Are you listening to me?”

“VAMPIRE!”

Not even Hitchcock could come up with a scheme that diabolical.

Would You Like Prejudice With That?

Last weekend, I went out to Benihana to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I was having a great time watching Kenny, our samurai-esque chef for the evening, create a smoking volcano out of onion rings, when another friend leaned over and whispered, “I think the table over there has a problem with us.”

Sure enough, I glanced across the griddle to find five or six middle-aged people glaring not very subtly in our direction. This came as a surprise, since we were neither drunk nor loud nor shouting obscenities. We were eight women with chopsticks sharing some stories and laughs. Oh, and seven of the eight were gay.

I say that as an aside, because it wasn’t the most defining characteristic of the group. Nobody was French kissing, there was no heavily-tattooed, spikey-haired uber lesbian grabbing our waitress’ ass and tearing up an 8x10 of the American family. We were nicely-dressed women in all shapes and sizes. We didn’t even all have short hair. We were all wearing lip gloss for Christ’s sake!

But someone at the other table must have seen the couples sitting a little too close. A look here, a touch there, and suddenly it didn’t matter that we weren’t shouting obscenities. We were the obscenity. And I say “we” because, even though I was the only straight girl at the table, in their eyes I was just as offensive. So they stared, hating me for something I couldn’t control, something they misunderstood. They hated me, essentially, for daring to eat chicken and sing “Happy Birthday” in public.

I’ve often told people that until you have gay friends or family members, you don’t truly understand how crazy it seems that some people can look at them and say, “Because of who they love, they are not as good as you.” As if, in some inexplicable way, who they share their life with negates the fact that they are great people.

But homosexuality didn’t prevent the birthday girl from showing up on my doorstep with her partner three years ago, hours after I was violently mugged, with $150 in cash to tide me over and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to get the blood out of my clothes. It didn’t stop another friend from vowing to keep a change of clothes next to his bed after he felt he responded too slowly to a 3 am assault outside his window. And it doesn’t stop another friend in his 20's from being the sole caretaker for his ailing grandmother and her sister.

Knowing that strangers were viewing me with disgust when I hadn’t done anything to them was a terrible feeling. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to know that, whenever you go out, there looms the distinct possibility that someone will give you the evil eye just for being yourself. I have to admire the quiet, everyday courage it takes to be different, to live your life without apologizing for your happiness regardless of what the "moral" majority says.

Despite the lack of love from our restaurant neighbors, I did have a great time. My food was great, Kenny made a beating heart out of the fried rice, and our waitress took an awesome Polaroid of our whole group. As I watched it slowly materialize, I thought about how lucky I've been to meet so many intelligent, interesting, resourceful, funny friends since I moved to the Twin Cities.

Afterward, the rest of the girls decided to go out dancing at a gay bar. I declined, mostly because that's not really my scene, but partly because it would have been an ego blow not to get hit on at least once. Being friends with lesbians is a double-edged sword, man. Or, in this case, a double-edged samurai sword.