I don’t know how to get back.

This.

Do you remember the books you used in elementary school to learn to read? Here are mine:

I started kindergarten in 1976 and in MY day, the school told parents not to teach their kids to read before starting school, because they had to follow the curriculum of teaching us the alphabet and if we could already read, we would be bored. Ahh, the 70s. So. My first day of school I informed my mother I was NOT going back because they didn’t teach me to read. (end mildly amusing anecdote and my mother’s favorite school story about me) Anyway, for some reason, one day A Duck is a Duck popped into my head and then Helicopters and Gingerbread and I thought (no idea why) that I would really like to see these books again. So I went to Amazon and lo and behold, someone was actually selling them there. So I bought them. This is back when I was gainfully employed, btw, and spent money like it was going out of style. (Lesson #1 of being unemployed, you learn how to wisely spend money and vow you will never blow it on stupid crap again, knowing damn good and well that you will.)

I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection lately. I mean, A LOT. People, I could do a friggin’ PBS fundraiser with Dr. Wayne Dyer about meditiation and being positive and Your Best Life. Wayne would, of course, be pacing around on stage doing all the work in his pajamas and I would be sitting in the rock garden stage left providing the snark. But BY GOD would would raise PBS some serious cash. My point, and I do have one, is that part of this unemployment-slash-interpersonal-relationship-hell inspired EatPrayLove fest has been looking back at this, what is undoubtedly the halfway point in my life, as I am clearly having a mid-life crisis, and getting all nostalgic. So I went back and looked at these books again. WHOO BOY they are 70s-riffic, y’all. The illustrations and pictures made me LAWL. These books were originally published around 1969 and then recopywrighted in ‘73 and ‘76. So YOU know what’s up in here.

Oh my god I am SO OLD. I found a section in One to Grow On about the Wave of the Future. Something called, “computers.” Behold 1976:

My brothers both had shirts like this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. It looks like he could expect a coffee cup to drop down in the opening and start filling up with cappuccino. It’s like the computers in the Hepburn/Tracy movie Desk Set. Which is terrific, by the way. You should watch it.

The Tele. Typewriter. LOL. At least it’s a fashionable olive green. Well, you know. For the 70s. Incidentally, this photo encapsulates what my whole house looked like when I bought it, before the renovations started. Welcome. Come on in. Have a pina colada.

Dear Future, I hope komputerz in the future do not develop to such a point that there are lots of video games that will paralyze my common sense with the mind-blowing juxtaposition of fun and utter dysfunction. Also, please don’t let mommy and daddy get a divorce. (too dark? I can never tell.)

Oi! You kids! Don’t sit on the shelves in the library! *mumbling* Stupid kids… god I can’t wait…. 5 more years and I’ve got enough to retire… (I used to teach school. Can you tell?)

I used to have a purple dress just like this. My mom made it for me. Including the rickrack around the bottom. Also, homerow keys, kid! Good lord, public schools teach NOTHING.

 
These books are geared toward kids in the first through second or third grades, tops. Interestingly, I found this in the back of one of them:

Don’t do it, Robin McNamara. You’re only in third grade. This kid has been held back so many times he drives himself to school and smokes during recess. He’ll tell you he loves you, talk you into drinking the half empty bottle of Tanqueray he found and then end up threatening you when he gets out of juvie if you don’t visit him there every weekend. Stick with the cello lessons, Robin. You have so much to live for.

I just went back and reread my last post.  And I LOL’ed.  And then had myself a good cry.  Then I bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked one.  Yeah!  That’s right!  Then I knocked off a liquor store.  And then I drove around town looking at gang graffiti because I want to join the one with a “signature” I can do.  And then I came home and binge ate chocolate and sloppy joes and drank a bottle of wine and took my medication (health first!) and then I went to bed for about 36 hours and now here I am.  Now I feel able to make another post.

Let me first just clarify that it is not 3 million people out of work.  It’s 11 million.  And as of two days after that last post down there?  I am one of them.  *sigh*  Yeah.  I know.  Everyone wants to know what happened.  And I tell them.  And I take responsibility for my part in it.  And I’m working on letting go of the company’s part in it.  Had a really promising interview for what I thought would be the perfect job but haven’t heard anything from them so I’m pretty sure that’s off the table.  I’m surprised at the depression, I didn’t think that would happen to me.  But I guess you learn a lot of things about yourself when hard times hit.  I am so grateful for my friends and family right now and part of me is really looking forward to what’s coming next.  I believe things happen for a reason.  But I am so very bad at free falling and trusting.  So.  I cry some.  I eat a lot.  I look for jobs.  I don’t get out unless I have to.  Sorry.  Just can’t do it.  I meditate and sit in gratitude for what I do have right now in this moment and ask for grace and patience and speed in getting over myself and back on track.  It’s gonna be okay.  It’s gonna be okay.  It’s gonna be okay.

So. So, so so.

I have this friend who may not actually be a friend after all who is being very unkind to me.  I should drop this friend like a bad habit but instead I sit around butt hurt and confused.  Who breaks up with a friend??  Jerk.

Then yesterday the president of the company came into the weekly Monday meeting, lost his everloving mind at everyone and informed us that anyone who misses a deadline this year is getting fired.  No questions asked.  No investigation.  No probation.  Just, fired.  I have the two biggest moneymakers in the company on my plate.  They are on time for the deadlines I was given, but now he has moved up the first one from April to March.  So there is an awfully good chance it will not be on time.  I am seriously going to start taking my personal stuff home from the office so there’s less to clean out later.  I am so stressed out I can’t even meditate.  Y’all.  What am I gonna do if I lose my job?  Well, I guess I’ll do what three million other people are doing right now.  Look for another one.  Surely with this French degree I can find….. *cry*

I have a play opening in like a week and a half.  The Book of Liz by Amy and David Sedaris.  I’m sure it will be fun, it’s a comedy, but I’m supposed to be off book tonight and I’m not.  Too busy trying to keep my job.

My friend Rachel told me this was going to be a hard year for me.  Next year is supposed to be better.  Which helps a little, I guess, feeling like there’s light at the end of the tunnel.  But this crap has been going on for a while now, which is the reason I so rarely update here.  Who wants to tune in to listen to someone meh it up?  But I guess people can turn the channel if they want, right?

Photo by Hatcher & Fell Photography

Here’s a publicity photo for my play.  I don’t wear the wig in the show, sorry.  I love wigs but there is an, um, unusual costume piece I have to wear that won’t work with a wig.  I look like a Who from Whoville here.  All I can say is that Hatcher and Fell not only takes great photos, they are freaking GENIUSES with Photoshop.  Look at my skin!  And my teeth!  People, let me Kate Winslet you here and assure you that I am *not* looking that good these days.  I am breaking out like a 14 year old boy and I haven’t showered in three weeks.  Just kidding.  But not about the zit part.  I look awful.  And could I please stop gaining weight?  For like, five minutes?  That would be helpful.  Look how nice I look in this picture.  Gaze upon it and know that last night, that woman had a dream about terrorizing people in a haunted houses.

Can it please be April now?

I have trapped the chupacabra in the hall closet!  Fat bastard ran under the door from my office as I was walking into the bathroom this morning.  HI!  GOOD MORNING!  YOU HAVE VERMIN!!   Please shoot me.

I went by my parents’ house this morning as my dad is taking my car to have new tires put on it.  I updated my cold, heartless mother (who as you will recall laughed cruelly about the situation previously) and she told me to just put some DCON and water in the closet, it’ll die, and then just remove it.  A dead chupacabra (or mouse the size of a large gerbil, take your pick).  Dead and decomposing in my coat closet.  I was hoping there was a way we could work together to liberate it without having to resort to violence, but my mother assures me that one cannot catch a live mouse, for they are crafty and wee.  But my dad has a lot of experience with rodents so I’m hoping he has a better idea.  My father is the neighborhood mole catcher/killer.  My mother calls him The Mole-inator.  He has some kind of trap that you put in the ground, it snaps down on the moles, killing them, and then you just pull it out and dispose of the evidence.  Occasionally it doesn’t kill them so my dad has to finish them off, which I find incredibly disturbing.  Anyway, he is so good at it that the neighbors started calling asking him to come help in their yards with their mole problems.  So it’s like a new hobby I guess.  Doesn’t bother him.  This is the same man who sits on the back patio with a bb gun shooting the squirrels who try to steal “his peaches” from the next door neighbor’s peach trees.  He really likes peaches.  What were we talking about?   Oh yes, point being that hopefully my dad won’t mind removing the dead, probably vicious and rabies carrying mouse from my home.  I just wish he could figure out a way to do it without killing it.

And by the way, I am going to Home Depot this weekend and buying caulk, cement and whatever other sealing devices I can find and sealing up every opening to my home that isn’t required in order to breathe.  Or enter and exit.  For PEOPLE.

So, I was taking a picture these, that my friend Stu, who is a Nebraska state trooper, sent me for Christmas.  As you can see they feature my second and third favorite members of KISS, The Spaceman and The Starchild:

when I noticed something large-ish and black out of the corner of my eye skittering down the hall toward the kitchen.  I didn’t get a good look at it but judging from the size and color, it was either a mouse, a giant African cockroach, or a tarantula.  So I got up and stood with my arms clutched to my chest and whinging to myself for about five minutes in my office before talking myself down and realizing that no one else was gonna take care of this.  I’m single and I live alone.  I had to pursue the perp myself.  So I skulked about That End of the house with my camera (for evidence),  a flashlight (to look under furniture), a broom (with which to subdue the suspect) and my iPhone for moral support.  I did what any reasonable, independent, college educated woman would do.  I called my parents.

Who proceeded to support their only daughter in the only way they knew how.  By laughing.  And telling me it’s more scared of me blah blah blah if it crawls on me and murders me in the night YOU’LL BE SORRY.  And not FIVE MINUTES EARLIER I had just called to wish my father a happy birthday!  If I get bitten my a mouse, tarantula or…. whatever the hell African cockroaches do to people which I’m sure is unpleasant and ultimately death-inducing, it’s on THEIR HEADS.

I sat on the dining room table with my feet on a chair for a while hoping the quiet would lure whateveritwas out of its hiding place.  To no avail.  Getting leftovers out of the fridge and heating them up was what I can only imagine looked like bad, overly dramatic pantomime.  Unlike subtle, realistic Stanislavski method mime I guess.  I apologize that I have no video footage available for your amusement as I am sure you, like my cold, heartless parents who will be going to the creepiest nursing home I can find, are laughing at my plight.  My father suggested if I kept a cleaner house, this wouldn’t be a problem.  His room will not have a window.  Or a door.

So now I’m sitting here all freaked out with candles burning praying to Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed that whatever it was was actually running down my hallway toward what it KNEW to be the way out as fast as possible because it couldn’t wait to leave as it was terribly late for something and its overbearing significant other varmint who never understands anything would be waiting and would never believe its story about being trapped in an INCREDIBLY CLEAN HOUSE inhabited by an utterly neurotic female who had had a very, very bad day.

Hey did I ever show you a picture of my coin purse designed to look like a vagina?

Here it is attacking Domo kun:

I’m in a movie.  Remember that post I did last year?  About the vampire movie?  Yeah it’s finished and the trailer is ri’cheer:

I’d like to say that I’m the hot, thin, badass Latina gettin’ all up in David Alford’s grill there.  But that would be a filthy lie.  I am, rather, the uh, zaftig redhead who says, “the penis people” and later unfurls a naughty but delightful banner which I now have at my home.  It’s not displayed or anything.  At least not until I find a nice prominent place for it.

Lord, y’all.  I don’t know when the premier is but I know now that seeing myself is going to send me into a shame spiral of low self-esteem the likes of which I have not seen since the last set of show photos I saw, more than a year ago.  At least my hair looks better now.  And the lesbisan dream sequence, OH GOD THE DREAM SEQUENCE.  If Jesus really exists they will have edited me out of that as much as possible.  Y’all?  I can’t wait to see this and yet I may have to get drunk to do it.

I’m sorry this is just funny.