shoesonwrong

Please Let Me Know If I Am Allowed To Sue For Backwages

My parents, who have expressed love for neither heat nor humidity, bought a summer home in North Carolina. A summer home. As in, a house to go to in the summer in the South. I love my parents, but they're like confused birds -- don't old people usually fly south in the winter? I actually looked up the proper Latin phrase just for this post, and I believe it translates to, "You're going to boil alive, and I get all your stuff. Well, as long as you don't read this blog post first, and write me out of the will completely for suggesting you're old people, leaving all your stuff to Ryan. I knew you liked him better than me."

So, saying they bought a summer home is a bit of a stretch. They bought some land that they intend to go to in the summer, and it has a home on it at the present.

When I say "home" I of course mean "deathtrap that has to be torn down." Apparently the land was a really good idea, though, and it is in a pretty location. Still, their vacation home isn't really a home and isn't really a vacation yet, since they have to tear it down. My mother, who has been working on it for three weeks now, said to me, "I'd ask you to come help, but I know you're having all those mental health issues and stuff, so you can't come right now." For the first time since my personal struggle with mental health has began I though, "Oh thank God I'm crazy because I don't want to do more manual labor."

I'm not entirely sure why they would want me to help, since my track record with these projects has usually involved a lot of whining and pretending to go to the bathroom while really just sitting on the john and reading to avoid work. I guess over the years, though, I've picked up some skills. Before I moved out of home, I helped re-shingle two roofs, install a metal roof, install a drain field (where the sewage goes!), refinish hardwood floors, plane and sand endless pieces of board that was used as baseboards, and paint my own bedroom. (I specify MY bedroom because my mother wouldn't let me near the primer or paint for other rooms of the house, believing that I was going to do it wrong and leave drips or weird brushstrokes -- both of which she is famous for herself.) And all those are just home projects. My parents also heat their home with a wood burning boiler, so every year we had to haul firewood. When we were done hauling firewood, we hauled more firewood, took a break, and then hauled even more. We hauled so much firewood that we used a skid steer loader to do some of it, which I learned to drive. My parents laughingly recall how I, in a fit of rage that I wasn't being allowed to sit indoors with a book where it was clean and not outside, screamed at them that I was a CHILD and shouldn't know how to drive a skid steer loader and it was CHILD ABUSE or at least  CHILD LABOR and why can't I just go inside now? They actually have lots of stories that involve me screaming outrageous things in a fit of rage. Ask them about it sometime.

Sure, I've aged some and matured a very little bit, but my commitment to not getting dirt on me and whining when I do get dirt on me has not lessened. Now, my mom calls me regularly to check up on me (remember, I'm crazy) and tells me how it's going. She's the picture of cheerful optimism. It makes me kind of ill. She's all, "The house is coming along great and we just love it down here!" No matter how much I try to point out that she is getting actual dirt on her -- dirt that makes her hands feel chalky and gets under her fingernails and makes her feel a little anxious (that last part might be me) -- she cheerfully continues to recount stories of the house and hiking (outdoors!) and the cute things Cassie is doing. 

I think I'm adopted. I also think I hope that they build a really cool house there and I can visit it.

We're leaving for my parent's house today, and of course there is a snowstorm. There's always a snowstorm. My only consolation is that the rest of the nation has crappy weather, too. (I don't require happiness, I just require everyone else to have a similar level of misery. MERRY CHRISTMAS.) Normally, it's just us, driving hours and hours through a blizzard while the rest of the country complains about not having a white Christmas.

I'll be back on Saturday, a minimum of twelve pounds fatter. Have a great Christmas, and if you don't, keep in mind that Momo sympathizes.

Day Thirty: I Will Be Frank. I Put Very Little Effort Into This Month.

Wow, this has just been my best attempt at National Blog Posting Month ever, hasn't it. I have a series of excellent excuses, however, regarding my lack of posting: I was sick, it was too cloudy out, it was too sunny out, I didn't feel like it, I didn't have any good ideas, my pinky finger hurt, I was busy doing other things, I was busy not doing other things, the cats were giving me the stink eye, making that instant pudding really ate up a lot of my time, I was reading, I was watching a movie and claiming to be reading, I was playing a video game and claiming to watch a movie, my belly button's caving in, the economy, the environment, the plight of the inner city youth, and purple.

Last Saturday may have been the longest month of my life. Ryan's aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, and sister came to visit, and I love my in-laws, but they exhaust me. I cleaned my house, re-cleaned my house, had to figure out how to entertain them (which involved taking them all over downtown Detroit), and then actually make conversation with them while they were here. I am, in essence, a comedian. I have about an hour of good material that I trot on out for an audience, then it's time for me to go because I'm sweating, my throat is raw, and I'm socially awkward and plagued with emotional problems. At that point, I want nothing more than to drink about a gallon of water and curl up with my sock puppet companion.

We had a really good time while they were here, but by time they left, I was spent. Ryan tried to talk to me and then I said something my mother said to me many times while I was growing up, "Shh! Do you hear that? That's right, silence."

Day Six: I Will Not Be Going To Dollywood

On Saturday, I am embarking on a road trip with my mother to Tennessee to go real estate hunting. Well, technically, she's real estate hunting and I'm just going along for the ride because I haven't seen a blade of grass or leaf of tree in months. Also because going anywhere with my mother is hilarious. While extolling the virtues of the upcoming road trip, she excitedly told me how much she loves driving through Cinncinnati at nighttime because it looks just like New York City.

I don't ever have to make up things that my mother says because they're gems of absurdity all on their own.

Adventures In Housesitting

It's been six days since I posted because I spent six days at my parent's house, pet-sitting for them while they went capering off on another whirlwind vacation. Apparently taking care of dogs is nothing whatsoever like riding a bike because we've been without Cassie for around five months and I've lost the ability to remember to let the dogs outside at regular intervals.

My parent's older dog, Shelly, is seventeen (eighteen? We've lost count.) and completely deaf, mostly blind, and more than a little bit cranky. I felt like I was visiting a relative I barely like in the nursing home most of the time I was there; I mostly just left her alone except for when I had to scream at her to communicate. I felt bad just hollering into her face like she was the clown at a fast food joint, but anything less than a good bellow went completely unheard.

I used the time up there to get a lot of reading in and visit some old friends. Also, I went to see Burn After Reading. It was okay, but I had been prepared for something else. It would have been like seeing Fargo and expecting it to be a lighthearted comedy.

By the time I went home, I had used all the clean towels, Cassie got muddy and then slept on my parent's bed without me realizing it until I was heading out the door, and I had subsisted on mostly reheated pizza and candy corn for nearly a week. So, if you're looking for someone to mess up your home and forget to take care of your pets, I am available for hire.

Helen

Ryan and I were talking about cassette tapes earlier, specifically how they completely confused me. Records, I get. CDs, mp3s, or other digital forms of sound, I get. But cassette tapes are this unholy union between the two that utterly baffle me. Plus, they have to be rewound unless the recording was on both sides of the tape. Sure, most fancy people could use the tape deck they used for playing to also rewind (or, I hear, even fast-forward!), but there were other, more archaic and physically taxing methods of moving the tape from spool to spool that only the unlucky few got to undertake. Some of us got the privlege of doing it by hand, using a little crank that fit into the holes on the cassette. My old babysitter, Helen, used to have a device like that.

Helen looked after me off and on for a few years whenever my parents both happened to be indisposed at the same time. Helen was a kind, amusing woman who was (as near as I could ever figure) eight million years old. She sucked her dentures unnervingly between every sentence and her entire house was permeated with that special old lady scent that can only created after years of never allowing fresh air into a house filled with afghans and at-home permenant kits.

When I would go to Helen's, she would try to think of ways to entertain me, so she'd sit me down in front of a three-hour Benny Hinn special and make me rewind her cassettes by hand. Her reward for doing this was letting me eat as may M&Ms as I wanted from her candy dish. The M&Ms were older than I was and were left uncovered most of the time. Once, I saw her dusting them with a damp cloth. She never seemed to understand why I didn't ever choke down more than two or three during my visits with her.

Neither her (nine million year old) husband or her ankle biter dog seemed to care for children, so they napped on the other side of the house whenever I came around. I suspect they actually napped about 23 hours out of the day no matter who was visiting, but couldn't prove it. I saw Ernie (her husband) so little, that I completely forgot about him, and when he passed away, I remember saying (too loudly, as I was prone to doing as a child, and, uh, now) "He's still alive?!"

A few years later, Helen suffered a stroke and lost the ability to talk. It nearly killed her, not being able to regale the world with stories of her children or her childhood. Her favorite story to tell me was how her father was a manager at Faygo when Helen was a little girl, and she would pilfer bottles of pop right off the line. When I knew her -- nearly seven million years later -- she still didn't like to drink cold soda because she got used to drinking it lukewarm in the factory. She would pour herself a cup of warm soda and bring me one too. At first, I would tell her that I didn't like mine warm and she would tell me she was sorry and would remember next time, but after awhile I figured out that she remembered how I liked my soda and she was just going to bring it to me warm anyway.

Geez Mom & Dad, why not just go out and get a bouncy castle while you're buying things I always wanted

Today, my parents bought a new car. Well, it's not brand new, but it was definitely manufactured during the second term of Bush's presidency.

My parents do not buy new cars. At least the people who raised me and taught me to call them my parents do not buy new cars. My parents are, and I am trying to not understate this here, the cheapest people in the world. It's not that they're stingy or anything -- they like to have fun and I know they would always help me out if it needed it. But my mother can pinch a penny until it is screaming and begging for mercy. They heat their (not small) house using wood. My mother once bought a turkey that turned out to be weird on the inside and she was so incensed that she dragged it into the supermarket, still in her serving dish, because they refused to give her back her ten dollars otherwise. She dragged that bird in there, half-crazed at the notion that not only was she not eating turkey like she wanted to, she was also not holding ten dollars in her petite hand and she flopped that inedible turkey up onto the customer service counter while I cringed and tried to pretend like her? Oh, I don't know her. I just caught a ride with her when I was hitchhiking. I don't know why she keeps talking to me.

When I moved away from home to go to college, my parents bought a hot tub. When I got married and had no chance of moving back into their house, they got a pool. The house I grew up in was ramshackle and in a decade-long process of "being restored." Then I moved out, they finished renovating, and now it looks like a woodland paradise.

And now they have bought a new car. A new car. A car that doesn't backfire or sound like a gimpy asthmatic rhino charging you. A car that is not held together primarily with rust and hope and the force of my teenage embarrassment.

Oh dear God. I bet they're going to buy a pony next, now that I'm not around to ride it around the house.

Who lives in a pineapple and drives me crazy?

It turns out that I am, uh, not good with children or teenagers. Well, that's not exactly true. Toddlers love me, but that's because I swing them around by their feet. Infants don't seem to care for that, and anything bigger than a toddler I cannot manhandle due to my upper body strength being equivalent to that of a kitten's.

My brother and sister in law are visiting Ryan and I for the weekend, and I have to entertain them alone until Ryan gets out of work at five. They are fourteen and thirteen years old and, apparently, highly trained in the art of soul-crushing apathy. Everything I suggested we do has been met with blank stares that quickly shift back to watching Sponge Bob.

(If I have a facial tick by the end of this weekend, it will be because of that spongy abomination.)

I think we're either going to go shopping, to the zoo, or to a museum this afternoon. My backup plan if things get awkward is to leave them at a gas station, just like my parents used to do to me.

Maybe tomorrow, we can pick out what to bury her in

In the past year, my mother had at least four conversations with me about how and where her body will be disposed when she dies. It's this long, drawn out process where she lists all the options to me and then presses me to tell her what I want to do with her corpse. Is it important to me to have her ashes? Do I want her buried in the ground? Should she donate her body to science? And I'm all, "Geez mom, I don't know." I'm secretly hoping she just falls into the ocean or burns to death so I don't have to decide this. She started it again today when she was here visiting, and it went like this:

Her: So, I've been thinking about dying.

Me: Why do we always have to have this conversation?

Her: Now, what do YOU want to do with my body when I'm gone? Because I don't want to cause any trouble or stress on you once I'm gone.

Me: Do we seriously have to talk about what to do with your lifeless body, years down the road, right now?

Her: Yes.

Matriarch

Me: Look! My grandma fixed my boo-boo quilt for me. It was all ripped and about to fall apart, but she patched it. It feels thicker. I think she did something else to it, too -- she did whatever grandmas do to quilts.

Him: She fell asleep and burned it with her cigarette?

Me: I'm so sad for you.

Thanksgiving and a Beautiful Analogy

I realized something today: listening to Gwen Stefani or the Black Eyed Peas makes me feel like I'm trying to poop out a Volkswagen Beetle. My whole body tenses up, my neck tries to draw into my chest cavity, and I can feel my heartbeat in every one of my extremities. Pretty soon I'm hearing my heartbeat in my head, and I get dazed and confused. Then it's over, and this immense wave of relief floods over me.

By the way, yeah, Happy Thanksgiving. It's been quite a lovely day here, despite that whole realization I mentioned above, and we've done a whole lot of nothing. Slept in, watched TV, ate junkfood, and attempted to exercise Dog inside the house because it's too cold out for her and she whines when her dainty feet become chilled. (I know, I know. WHAT HAST THOU CREATED??) Tomorrow, we're going up to my parents house for Real Thanksgiving. (Because today was just Fake Thanksgiving.)

Also, wordpress.com is up and running -- which I think is pretty cool.

Pool Draining, TV Watching, Body Ripping Good.

I am alive, believe it or not. Last weekend we went to my parents house. I slept in, yelled at the dog about bullying my parents dog, helped my parents drain their pool, watched a LOT of brain rotting television, and ate about 8 thousand chocolate chip cookies. Then on Sunday afternoon we came home, it rained, my ears and throat started throbbing, and I ripped off part of my big toenail.

Overall, the weekend was better before we came home and I started ripping off parts of my body.

I love that I can turn anything into a big deal. I imagine that my friends and family do not feel likewise...

I also imagine Ryan's getting sick of hearing, "This place sucks. WHERE ARE MY FRESHLY BAKED COOKIES? WHERE ARE THEY?"

All Roads Lead to Dog Poop

First of all, I wanted to say thanks to everybody who left me comments (both on the typepad and the livejournal) and sent emails. I appreciate it more than I can say.

Beth was here Saturday through Monday. We watched episode after episode of Freaks & Geeks and, well, I have no idea what else. The weekend was a blur of laziness. And it was good. (I tried to tie her up and keep her in the closet, but Ryan said I had to let her go home.) Wait, I DO recall going to a movie and making fun of the dog. The latter happened a lot. Mainly because Dog is, let me think about how to put this nicely, an idiot.

Speaking of The Wrinklebag, she is not so happy with the being home thing. My parents house was fun, then we took a road trip, then Beth was here, and yesterday... she ate a leaf. That was pretty much the highlight. She's been expressing her distaste for us, the apartment, and life in general by holding in her poop. She just WILL NOT GO. Essentially, she holds it in until she simply cannot anymore, which is usually about 10 minutes after both Ryan and I have passed out from the smell of the poop-being-held-in-too-long farts that she charmingly emits every few minutes.

Why do so many of my posts degenerate into dog poop?

Annie Who?

We unloaded the dog a few days ago at my parent's house. There's a big exam period coming up, and we just didn't have enough free time for the dog. We're going to be so busy studying that we just won't have time to lock her in a box and beat her with sticks like we usually do. So we decided to just drive by my parents house and chuck her out the window. She bounced off a small-ish boulder, but I think she'll be fine.

I've talked to my mom everyday since we dropped the wrinklebag off. Cassie doesn't miss us. At all. She apparently spends her time taking walks and trying to make sure that my parent's dog doesn't get more attention than her. Basically she's all, "Annie who?"

You know, Annie. The one who wipes your spit slime off your fat face? The one who clips your toenails and plays tug of war 70 percent of the day? I PICK UP YOUR POOP, DOG.

"Annie who?"

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I have to admit, I am getting a lot more studying done than I would if I had to yell "NO" every five seconds while my toe was being gnawed on. PLUS, I've formulated a plan for passing linear algebra. It involves a giant vat of cole slaw, a quilt, and a ping pong ball. I can't divulge anymore information than that. Mainly because I have no idea what my plan is yet.

Not Every Post Will be Dog-Oriented. I promise.

I had the weirdest series of a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream during my "holy crap the dog's asleep" nap. Yes, 4 dreams; one of them real. In the first dream, I was in a nice farmhouse. In the next dream, I was living under the overhang of a Dairy Queen. In the last dream, I was living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER. And Ryan offered me government cheese. I kid you not. I was a little afraid to wake up again because, well, what if it got worse?

We just got back from my parent's house. We were there for two days to show off the new dog and try and collect my sanity. While I'm pretty sure that's been gone for good for about a decade, I at least got some sleep and we have Cassie understanding that she has to just buck up and deal with her crate or I will eventually become a raving lunatic with big knotted hair who talks into her shoe like it's a phone.

I'm not entirely sure she understand the complexity of the issue, but she seems to get that she needs to go in that crate. Because my mother is like a short little female version of Dr. Doolittle. I don't question it, I just roll with it. I am getting more sleep, able to shower without the dog going nuts, and the dog is entertaining herself. My mom could be using voodoo and a blood sacrifice to make the dog behave, and I'm so relieved, I might still be okay with that.

Now that we're home, Cassie seems decidedly disappointed that we're not at my parent's house. No short little woman chasing her around and making funny noises, no big man calling her, "Mini DinkerDoo" and petting her all the time. No big yard to play in, no big dog to play with. She looks at me like, "I hate you. You are so mean. I will never forgive you. Oh. What's that over there?" Yeah, dog, well, deal with it. If I can't live at my parents house, with a heated pool and freshly baked dessert every night, then you certainly cannot.

That Toad Was Very Rodent-Like. I Swear.

The weekend was fun. We went camping at Brevoort Lake campground, and in less than 48 hours, we managed to take multiple hikes, swim twice, photograph the Cut River bridge from every conceivable angle, climb Castle Rock, bike around Mackinac City, and get freaked out by a toad that looked a lot like a giant killer mouse. I think that last one was mainly just something I did.

I was also the only person who came THIS CLOSE to passing out on the top of Castle Rock. The whole way up, I kept getting dizzy and shaky; turns out I'm not an out of shape lump (although I certainly am a little bit of that), I was just so scared of the height that I almost lost my lunch AND passed out. Kind of reminds me of the time that we were trekking through the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. I'm not sure what was worse: the steep drops right next to the walking path, the stairs that were made of metal grating (I. Could. See. ALL. The. Way. Down.), or the fact that it took my parents several minutes to notice that I wasn't walking beside them anymore because I was clinging to a guardrail and feebly bleating, "Mom? Dad? Someone?" while shivering like a chihuahua.

Besides freaking myself out several times, I really enjoyed the camping trip. I didn't brush my hair once the entire trip, so the fact that it looked like it had been combed with a twig was quite lucky, if you ask me. Also, Ben & Jerry's did it again. They are just too dang clever for me, because they make these teeny tiny little cups of ice cream with spoons like thimbles included in the package. It cost 1.25 for the ice cream. Normally, I'd feel pretty gypped, you know, if I were being RATIONAL. Instead, I found myself going, "It's so little and cute! And only a 1.25!" Those Ben & Jerry people, they ought to be selling something more expensive than ice cream, because I would probably buy that too. "Oh, look honey! It's an teeny tiny car, and it only costs 70 thousand dollars! And it runs on SNAKE OIL, isn't that wild?! TEENY TINY!"

I'm sitting here, warming up my camera batteries in my armpits while typing this post. I can't find the battery charger or any extra batteries or the dang camera cord... thingy. You know. Don't pretend like you don't know. Because I'm too brain dead to figure out what I'm trying to say tonight. So, like I was saying, warming batteries up in my feverish armpits so that I can upload pictures from the camera so you can see my teeny tiny Ben & Jerry ice cream cup. Oh forget it. I keep moving my arms and the batteries keep falling and you people don't give a crap about my teeny tiny ice cream cup. I imagine you're more than ready for me to stop using the words "teeny tiny," though. TEENYTINY TEENYTINY!

When we weren't on the go, we were sleeping. I slept 10 hours a night and still needed daytime naps. It's getting worrisome how much I sleep. Or where I can sleep (anywhere). Or how I can sleep (any conceivable position). I swear, I went in to the tent to just make the bed and maybe flop down for a second. 2 hours later, I emerged bleary eyed. My mom used to always talk about how she could go on 4 hours of sleep when I was younger. "Oh yeah," she'd say, "I would get home from work around 3 a.m., and sleep till 7 or so. Now I need SEVEN hours of sleep. Guess that's what happens when you get older."

Geez. Um, I need like 10 hours right now. When I hit my forties, I'm going to be comatose 13 hours a day. And that's not counting naps. Between the napping and the passing out when I stand on my tip toes (I'm 5'9" ish... That makes it better, right? RIGHT?), wow. I'm just a ball of fun.

Wrapped Up Like a Goose

My mother has many many talents -- she can be short, she can COOK very well, she's sweet, she's relatively patient, and she is a very good listener. Correctly hearing song lyrics is not one of her talents, though, as evidenced by a conversation in the car that went something like this:

Mom: "Why is that guy singing about a goose?"
Me: "What, Mom?"
Mom: "That guy. On the radio. It was just on. '... Wrapped up like a goose and a roller in the night. Blinded by the light!'"
Me: "That's Bruce Springsteen, and he didn't say 'Wrapped up like a goose,' He said 'Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night' At least, I think that's what he said. At the very least, I know it was 'deuce' and not 'goose.'"
Mom: "Are you sure? (she tries singing it) Blinded by the light! Wrapped up like a goose and a roller in the night! It sounds like it fits."
Me: "He did not say goose. Or roller."
Mom: "If you say so."
Dad: "I'll bet even Bruce doesn't know what he was singing."

Now imagine me singing loudly, every five minutes, "BLINDED BY THE LIGHT! WRAPPED UP LIKE A GOOSE AND A ROLLER IN THE NIGHT! BLINDED BY THE LIGHT!" And you have a pretty good idea of what a car trip with my family is like. And when it gets too quiet, I sing a rousing rendition of "Marijuanaville," during which my mother looks irked and my dad tries not to look amused, lest her evil eye fall on him too.

It's during trips like that, Ryan just sits back and laughs because he doesn't share any DNA with them. But I've got news for him: OUR KIDS ARE GOING TO BE CRAZY JUST LIKE ME. Ha ha ha.

I have a guardian angel, and her name is Susie. It is because of her that my neighbors no longer need to see me stripping in my living room while panting and and sweating. Most of the neighbors will be thankful, except maybe the pervy frat guys who live a little ways down the street. SHE SOLD US HER OLD AIR CONDITIONER FOR REALLY REALLY CHEAP. And now I don't feel like I'm dying all day long. When she mentioned selling her old air conditioner, and she asked me if I had money to buy it, I was willing to give her my first born if I didn't have cash on me. I don't think she'd want my firstborn (see above paragraphs), but that's just how desperate I was. So in case I didn't seem thankful enough in person, I just want to let her know: Thank you so much, and I'm sorry I tease you about your knitting. I will never tease you about your knitting again... well, um, okay, we both know that's not going to happen. But I'll try!