My grandmother told me that my grandfather had wanted to pay for my new car. I had financed it with the dealer, and my payments were $247 per month for forty-eight months. The catch was that I had to visit my grandparents, pull into their driveway with my teenage teal Cavalier, ring their doorbell, and step inside for lunch and a soda. I would think to do this on one of my many free and lazy afternoons, and after a pleasant visit in which my grandfather would make me laugh with his goofy, heavily accented rendition of the jingle from the Glade Plug In commercial, he would surprise me with the check. He would smile with his whole face and pull me in for a hug and announce that he loved me and was proud of me, and this was his gift to me.

Once, when I was eight, I was watching television in their living room when, abruptly, he asked me if I could write out all of the English nouns I knew. I was given lined paper and a pencil, and I spent two hours at the kitchen table making my list for him. Eggs. Sweater. Tree. Arm. Car. When I presented it to him moments before my mother came to pick me up, he put on his glasses, looked it over carefully, and asked me for a few choice definitions. What does unicorn mean, what is a boom box? I tried to explain best as I could, and he nodded and then carefully folded the papers and put them on his reading table. For many visits afterwards, when I was nine and then ten, I would see my papers. Sometimes they would be on the reading table, and sometimes they would be in the kitchen. They had been folded and unfolded, handled and smudged. Surely he couldn’t use an abstract list of undefined random words as a dictionary, but he was clearly using the list for something, viewing and reviewing my nouns on what seemed to be a regular basis.

When he died, and when they asked me to write the eulogy, this is what I kept circling back to, the long ago day of the listed words. I fought the urge to stand up by the casket, look upon our family, and deliver commonly used English nouns. Man. House. Paper. Eyes. Eulogies, however, are no place for private memories, so I instead used a mix of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, arranged in sentence form, and spoke of how he was good and how we would miss him. Simple, straightforward, run of the mill eulogy pieces.

It was after the luncheon, where my sister and I fought over the last croissant, when my grandmother told me about how he had wanted to give me the check for the car, but how I had never brought the car over to show him. I wouldn’t normally admit this, but my instinct was to run the numbers in my head, figure out what my savings would have been, what I could have done with an extra $247 per month. Then I ran a different set of numbers, realizing that, by the time of his death, I had owned the car for two years. For two years, he had waited.

I have regretted my eulogy for over six years now, even though my family issued compliments for such a well-constructed, thoughtful speech. I have regretted making him as bland and ordinary as a stranger and for subtracting myself from the equation completely, well before he was even gone. I should have said: Sorrow. Selfishness. Distance. Time. I should have said: On so many days, throughout so many years in the future, I will climb into the front seat of my rusted, weather-beaten teenage teal Cavalier and be struck with how I failed you.

Chris and Carole. Carole's wrapped in a blanket, not a toga.



Chris and Jackie. That Chris, he's so damn cute.



Jackie with the macaroni and cheese merchandise pyramid. Proud moment!

I had a nightmare about the Gosselin family the other night, and now I will never watch Jon and Kate Plus Eight again. All that occurred in the nightmare was that I had to baby-sit the eight kids. I don't think anything went particularly wrong, but when I woke up after spending an evening with the sextuplets and twins, I felt shaken to my very core. I don't know what I would do with that many kids. I can't even imagine having the energy to name eight kids, let alone feed and clothe them.

We had a good weekend; Carole came over on Saturday and spent a fun-filled evening with me and the Cheese. I can't say that I was especially pumped for the wine tasting that the Cheese and I had to attend the next afternoon (my liver was absolutely burning), but all was swell that ended swell. I don't think I like wine tastings, though. I mean, in theory, they sound great. Wine, good, tasting wine, better. But the thing about a wine tasting is that you have to pretend that you may actually purchase some of the wines instead of furtively drinking as much as you can and then later in the week stocking up on eight dollar bargain bottles from your favorite corner liquor store. And I just don't have it in me to feign that kind of interest. And then there's the wine phraseology. Light, crisp, fruity, clean, nutty. The same twelve words, over and over again. Followed by me issuing the same nod, over and over again. I'm a big fan of wine, don't get me wrong. But I guess I'm not a big fan of people who talk about wine, about the nose, body, balance. Yet another example of me thinking people are pretentious for virtually no reason at all.

1. This fish is going to haunt my dreams and also my desktop, as I have now applied this image to not only the inner folds of my cerebrum but also my PC's wallpaper at work. I have never seen anything quite like this animal, at least not anything not in a comic book or cartoon. And I love it. I would try to adopt one if I didn't think I'd be violating some kind of customs law.


I think I would name it "Smiley."

2. Chris and I have been making our way through "Arrested Development," and I only have one thing to say. Where the hell was I when this show was actually on the air?

Final Countdown- Europe


Gob is by far my favorite character, and I think it may be because I'm strangely attracted to him. Not Will Arnett, but Gob. His crazy chicken dance, the mad hopping he does to "The Final Countdown" before his flawed magic tricks, his transparent sensitivity to never having been respected by his father, his ineffective use of the segway for transportation- oh, it's everything. Chris, too, has admitted, without really admitting, that there is a certain animal magnetism to Gob Bluth. Although Chris would never use the phrase "animal magnetism." Come to think of it, neither would I. Except when it comes to Gob.

Animal magnetism aside, "Arrested Development" is brilliant. When it was on the air, I somehow got the impression that it was a legal drama. Not sure how that happened, except that I will say I thought that "Lost" was a reality show and that Suze Orman wasn't an annoying bitch.

3. MV gave me a pearl necklace today. Not the semen kind, the other kind. She didn't want it, so she gave it to me. And now I feel like a million bucks, and I think I may throw the pearls into the daily mix. It's amazing what a nice piece of jewelery can do for a case of low to moderate self esteem. I felt a little like Jackie O today in my elegant string of pearls and blouse from Wal-Mart, MSRP $9.98. Or if not like Jackie O, then at least like the mother from VC Andrew's "Flowers In The Attic." You know the bitch, she constantly played with her string of pearls while lying to her children about why they were stuck up in an attic eating doughnuts dusted in poison. Sorry if I ruined the novel for you; if you haven't read it by now, you probably never will. But one day, your thirteen year old daughter will. And while she'll have lots of questions, she'll probably be much too embarrassed to ask any of them. Phew, bullet dodged!

Lunar eclipse tonight! I'm pretty sure that only a solar eclipse requires special precautions for viewing (paper with a pinhole in it?), but, nonetheless, I will avoid looking up at all tonight.

Kidding. I'm very excited, especially since there is next to nothing out here in V-town to interfere with the view. Perhaps I should take up star-gazing as a hobby, maybe join an astronomy club. Yeah, that sounds like something I would follow through with.

This is the last eclipse until December 2010. Which really isn't that long of a time to wait, if you should miss it tonight. Two and two-thirds of a year can go by in a blink of an eye if you're not careful. Point in case:

Things That Feel Like Yesterday:

Moving in with Chris. Actual time elapsed, just under five years.
Graduating high school. Actual time elapsed, just under ten (!) years.
Seeing "Back To The Future" for the first time. Actual time elapsed, twenty years.
Eating a chicken caesar salad. Actual time elapsed.... well, it was yesterday.

See what I mean?

Anyway, if it's not too late, get thee to a window. But don't go outside, it's cold as a penguin's nut sack.

I think the newest CD in Chris' collection is from 1998; he hasn't really enjoyed the last ten years of what the music industry has had to offer. We were on our way to dinner last night, and I flipped through his CD book (meticulously organized in alphabetical order with all liner notes and cover art) in search of some decent traveling music. Right near the beginning was Ben Folds Five, Whatever and Ever Amen. It's been a long time since I've listened to that CD (favorite song, "Evaporated.") Although I have listened to it at some point with Chris, so the last time I heard the CD prior to last night was sometime in the last five years, two months. In fact, listening to Whatever and Ever Amen with Chris may have been the first time I've ever ruined anything for him. See, before I told him that "Brick" was about abortion, Chris thought it was a simple, innocent tune about returning Christmas presents with some chick. How he got that idea, I can kind of understand. Six AM, day after Christmas... then I walk down to buy her flowers and sell some gifts that I got. I mean, it's a stretch, but sure, returning gifts, okay. I remember very clearly, though, the look on his face when I explained that the song was most definitely not about the disappointment one feels when his Old Navy sweater doesn't fit just right and one must make that trip, with some chick, back to the mall. Chris was upset, visibly so, when I explained that the gifts were sold, and not returned, for the funds needed to pay for, that's right, the abortion. And maybe I should never have told him, but I did, and it was the first of many times that I would turn some seemingly sweet and harmless thing into something too horrible for contemplation for the poor bastard. But he says he still loves me, even when I ask over and over again like a machine gun on rapid fire, so I suppose it's all okay. But, dude. How could you not know the song was about abortion?

Evaporated.

That's right.

Just found out that the tax rebate checks are not free money. Guess I conveniently ignored the word "rebate." Accepting the $1200 this year will reduce our tax refund by $1200 next year. For those of you who can do math, the answer to that equation is a negative. Me, owing money, me who takes advantage of no social programs, will never see a nickel of social security, do not agree in the least with any of the choices *my* government has made over the last eight years, me who pays and pays and pays and never seems to receive. Me.

Fuck your rebate. I'm stimulating NOTHING.

White Trash Moment Number 548

Deluxe Mac and Cheese on sale at the grocery store: Ten for ten dollars, get the eleventh box free. Eleven Mac and Cheese boxes dumped into my cart and loaded onto the conveyor belt. Seemingly, am the only person in the store taking advantage of the deal of this century. Decide at one point that I am going to own this choice of mine. I announce to the cashier that I came THIS CLOSE to buying twenty-two boxes. At home, I arrange all the Mac and Cheese boxes on my counter in merchandising-style pyramid. Then, the in-laws stop by, and you can see in their eyes what they are thinking. Their poor son, he makes all the wrong choices. And my eyes say, at least it's Deluxe Mac and Cheese, and not the powder.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/thelifebeforehereyes/trailer1/

Check out that trailer- one of my favorite writers, Laura Kasischke, is having her novel "The Life Before Her Eyes" made into a movie. I'm excited. It's been a long time since I've read that book, though, and while part of me thinks I've forgotten the A-ha! moment, another part of me is pretty certain that they give it completely away in the trailer. See, this is why I avoid watching trailers. Either way, I'm looking forward to this movie, although "White Bird in a Blizzard" was quite a bit better.

Two of my favorite poems by Laura Kasischke:

"Palm"

I see you will live an ordinary life, perhaps
have children, perhaps marry
a kind but un-
remarkable man. There
is a simple journey that waits for you
(Niagara Falls? Yellowstone Park?) Go
on it. Make
the decisions you have to make: paint
the upstairs bathroom blue, move
to Wisconsin. It doesn't matter.
But here, here in this crease, this crease
like a scar at your thumb -- here
I see something more.
The drapes in this room will be red
and torn. Close them. Let him
show you slowly to the bed. No
you'll say, it's daylight
and my simple husband trusts me.
Trust me -- this
is your moment -- the one
you'll remember (the hot breath
of the August breeze, the sun
white in the sky, the trickle of sweat
on his neck: it will turn to salt on your tongue).
This one you've held
and will hold all your life
though it cuts a bit at your thumb
like a single sliver of glass that glints
from a quarry of slate. You
will die someday, of course, slowly
not young not old. And before you're forgotten
the neighbors will speak of you fondly.
Now close your hand tight
on this secret. Die
with this secret but no regrets. Remember
this is how the small survive, the way
the small have always survived.

"Hostess"

One of the guests arrives with irises, all

funnel & hood, papery tongues whispering little
rumors in their mouths, and leaves

his white shoes in the doorway
where the others stumble
on the emptiness when they come. He

smiles. He says, 'I'm
here to ruin your party, Laura, ' and he does. The stems

of the irises are too
long and stiff for a vase, and when

I cannot find the scissors, I slice
them off with a knife

while the party waits. Of course, the jokes

are pornographic, and the flowers

tongued and stunted
and seductive, while
in the distance weeds & lightning

make wired anxiety of the night. But I'm

a hostess, a woman who must give
the blessing of forced content, carry
a cage of nervous birds

like conversation through my living room, turning

up the music, dimming
the lights, offering more, or less, or something else

as it seems fit, using
only the intuition
of a lover's tongue, a confessional poet, or
a blind woman fluffing up her hair. It is

an effort, making pleasure, passing
it around on a silver platter, and I'm

distracted all night
by his pale eye

like a symbol of a symbol of something
out of logic's reach forever, until

the soggy cocktail napkin
of my party ends
with this guest carrying
an iris around the kitchen in his teeth, daring me

to take it out with mine. Perhaps

a hostess should not laugh
too hard, or dance
at her own affair. Frolic

is for the guests, who've now
found their coats and shrugged them on. I hear

someone call 'Good-night'
sullenly to the night, disappointment
like a gray fur lining
in her voice. Someone

mentions to this guest
that his shoes have filled with rain, suggests
suggestively he wear
a pair of my
husband's shoes home when he goes. Of course, of course, one

of the godmothers has always
come to the christening for revenge. She
leans over the squirming bassinet and smiles
and sprinkles the baby with just
a bit of badness. In his

white smock, he
is prettier than we imagined
he could be, but also
sneaky, easily
bored, annoyed
with the happy
lives of his dull friends. When

he grows up he'll go to parties just
to drink too much, to touch
the women in ways that offer

favors he can't grant. The women

will roll their eyes behind
one another's necks. The men

will bicker about the wine. And
after the party, and the storm, in the after-

quiet, the hostess will find
herself standing
a long time on the patio
alone, as I

stand tonight, after
the party, in the still, small song of embarrassment
and regret, aeolian

in my white dress, the wind

feeling up
those places again while I
smoke a cigarette, which fills

my whole body with the calm that comes
just after the barn
has burned to the ground, and the farmers' wives in nightgowns
stand

around in moonlit air, their
breasts nearly exposed, their
swan-necks warm. Perhaps

it was the wine. When I
passed him in the hallway by the bathroom, I

thought I heard him say, 'Laura, I want

to ruin your life, ' and, trying to be polite, I said, 'That's

fine.' I said, 'Make yourself at home'.

For no apparent reason, my sister sent me an email today detailing the signs of a stroke, including diagrams and a what-to-do checklist. I wrote her back, "What the heck? Why did you send this?"

She replied, "Because I care about you! And I thought it was funny."

Boy With A Coin- Iron & Wine

Snow.

Aching body due to frantic shoveling. I can raise my right arm, but I can't raise my left. My whole body is leaning, furthering the already asymmetric slant that makes me drive, walk, sleep lopsided. I am always crooked, but now it is not manageable. One cheek on a paper lined public toilet does not usually present a problem; today I almost toppled over, mid-stream.

White-out, they call it, but while office White-out corrects, this incorrects. Can't walk, drive, see. Didn't get mail yesterday. Through rain, sleet, or snow, my ass. Schools, malls, banks, closed. The salt trucks ran out of salt. Not that you ever see a salt truck when you really need one, but at least the illusion was dimly alive before the news updates came out. Northwest suburbs, no salt. Go fuck yourselves, drivers. The salt is in Cairo, Illinois, the news anchor said. Cairo, right there at the southern tip of Illinois doing absolutely no good at all. The Cairo-ness of the salt painfully evident this morning while we slipped and slided to work.

Wet socks inside boots. Nothing is worse than a wet sock inside a boot except possibly being at work with a wet sock inside a boot. Sitting there, feeling the cold sock squish around your toes. Knowing that it will be hours before you can free your foot, and when you do get to free your foot, it won't be an especially attractive moment. Peeling a wet sock from a pale, damp foot, dangling the wet sock like a cooked spaghetti noodle, wriggling your wrinkled toes, placing a wet footprint squarely on the tile of your kitchen floor.

Dirty mounds of black-speckled snow, the filthy polluted snow mounds they don't show in holiday themed movies. Shit-colored slush tracks, yellow dotted from dogs. The plows push trash and snow together; the exhaust from the cars is a poisonous powdered sugar. You wonder if this is what your lungs might look like, flicking a cigarette butt into an already marred mountain of what started out as clean, pure, untouched and is now in worse shape than the city budget, the pothole damaged cars, the delayed salt truck in fricking Cairo, Illinois, a fucking tropic compared to our ugly little corner.

Fourteen inches, the official total. Fourteen inches doesn't sound too bad until you try to push open your door, until you slam down on the accelerator and go nowhere, until you sink up to your knees when you flip open your mailbox in vain. After the snow, the snow still blows. From atop your roof, from the covered streetlights (I think I see green), from the beds of trucks. Into your face, a slap after a punch, a good measure spit in the eye.

Which would almost be okay. I'd let it have the last laugh if it really was the last laugh. But the forecast promises more. Another inch or two or five. Yeah, sure, what the fuck. I can still raise my right arm; my car is still operable. You haven't completely beaten me yet. So, alright, take another shot. Do your worst, give me all you got.

A customer- a rather cute, young male customer- sent me flowers today. It was a pink and red "Valentine's Day" kind of mix, in a pink and red vase, and, after I got done squealing, I said to MV:

"This is how it's going to go down. I'm going to tell Chris that a cute Italian boy sent me flowers today and he's going to reply, 'What? I didn't send you flowers!'"

MV laughed, whatever, not too amused.

I get home. I tell Chris, "Hey, guess what. A cute Italian guy sent me flowers today!"

Chris replied, right on cue, "What? I didn't send you flowers!"

And there you have it. I don't even need him, I already know what his response is going to be.

What a weekend. First things first, I have to talk about this Lane Bryant shooting in Tinley, and not just because it's hometown news. It really has me rattled. It's a Saturday morning, you wake up with all of these plans, you go shopping or to work, and that's the last thing you ever do. You die in a clothing store- not your average site for these kinds of killings. It's not a bank, a liquor store, or even a mall or school, where crazed killers generally like to shoot things up. A fricking plus sized clothing store. With probably less than a thousand bucks in the register. I'm sure we'll come to learn that this was not just a robbery gone "poorly" as the TP police have stated.

Anyway, the whole thing is bizarre and terrifying and a reminder of how fucked some people really are.

On the other side of the Chicago area (the wayyyy other side), Chris and I had a really nice weekend together. Usually, the Cheese works nights on Friday, days on Saturday, and sometimes Sunday, which can really put a crimp in our weekends together. This weekend, though, we had all of that time together. We had Mexican and Sushi, although not on the same nights, went to the Winter Festival in Lake Geneva (don't worry, Dan and Meg, now we're more pumped than ever for our April trip- in fact, I found a great place for us to stay. Will have my secretary call yours with details.), went thrift-storing, watched a couple of movies, shared a couple laughs, beers, bottles of wines. Overall, a nine out of ten. I would only grant a ten if I had won some money. This weekend made me realize how rare it has become for Chris and I to really do something special together, and I mean special in the sense of "leaving the house for more than shopping." It's sad, really, but it's mostly the fault of our conflicting work hours, other obligations, having to save money, etc. Hopefully we can move back towards how we used to be instead of how we've started to become.