Thursday, January 15, 2004

It has occurred to me

that horoscope was absolutely correct. I've never been to that particular Goodyear before. I'm travelling, baby! To the visit the exotic wildlife growing on the toilet in the customer bathroom! God bless you, TV Guide Online Birthday Horoscope. Year Twenty-Seven is GREAT!

Birthday Karma Update

"As of 10:28 AM, today hasn't gone too badly. So far the day is going down in history as The Day Carol Moseley Braun Dropped Out Of the Presidential Race, so I am cautiously optimistic that the day actually might not suck donkey balls."
-younger, stupider me, 10:28 AM

This just in from the Typed Too Soon Department: I walked out of the office today actually thinking, "You know, that wasn't too bad. Sure, I've got cramps and I'm hacking up phlegm like... like a... mestruating, coughing really hard... person, but I've had worse. Really! It's been a nice birthday!"

Then, of course, I got to my car. And saw the flat tire.

AAA came. And told me I needed a very serious alignment.

I found a Goodyear. Where they told me that I needed TWO new tires.

And new breakpads.

And a re-alignment.

Immediately.

So I turned out of the shopping center, fretting over where the money for all this was coming from and how I was going to get off work and by the way my blood sugar was so low I was seriously contemplating gnawing off the rearview mirror.

Then the cop pulled me over.

Apparently you can't make a right on red back there.

"Not a good way to celebrate your birthday," he said. "Are you upset?" NO, I'm THRILLED. This was EXACTLY what I needed less than a year after a wreck and two speeding tickets. I totally tried not to do that terrible woman-thing of crying my way out of ticket, but I cried my way out of a ticket. Which was good.

But not as good as the phone call I got while waiting in the tire place, where my sister and brother in law asked me to be Taufling's godmother.

Best. Birthday. Ever.

Would the TV Guide Horoscope Lie To Me?

If today is your birthday...
There will be surprises galore this year. No matter how conservative a Capricorn you happen to be, your world will be turned upside down -- and you will enjoy every minute of it. New people will come into your life and a new romantic relationship is possible. Travel is also in the cards. Don't go where you've been before -- go somewhere exotic.

1/15/77

There's a lot to be said for karma, and a lot more to be said for birthday karma.

I have bad birthday karma.

This is through no fault of my own. My mother's water broke twenty-seven years ago today, two weeks before my due date. Cincinnati was experiencing such a wicked cold snap that the Ohio River froze. There are pictures in my baby book of people walking from Ohio to Kentucky without the help of a bridge, and somebody with an adorable sense of humor at The Cincinnati Enquirer added icicles to the masthead. So the entire neighborhood was turning out every morning to break up the ice on my parents' driveway, just in case. My sister was three. It kept snowing.

It was so cold in the delivery room my mother wore two pairs of socks, and when her labor stopped the OB/GYN folded his arms and said, "I have a cocktail party to get to tonight. You're having this baby." They slipped a pill beneath her lower lip and ten minutes later another Catholic had entered the fold. It was eighty below zero, the coldest day in the history of Cincinnati.

My sister was dropped off at my grandparents and got so upset she was constipated for days. Her memories of my arrival consist of never leaving her fuzzy footie pajamas and watching our grandfather pray the Rosary, begging the Blessed Mother to help his granddaughter poop.

My father missed the birth. He was in the parking garage, heating up the car so the engine block wouldn't crack in two. One of the nurses was running up and down the halls with me tucked under her arm, yelling "Who's the father of this baby? Anybody?"

I just sent my mom an email thanking her for all the pushing. It can't have been fun, especially when the result was an unemployable empath who is always too hot.

I was born with the first and only tan I have ever had. My kidneys weren't quite ready for the wide world yet and I was jaundiced. They shoved me under bili lights--see, in the spotlight already--until I was a proper pale German again.

I am confused in my first photograph. My eyes are slitty and my hands are waving about in a disorganized matter. "What the hell is going on here, and who took my umbilical cord?"

The birthday pictures in the years to follow aren't much better. I am wearing a nightgown in ninety percent of them because I am sick again. The best of this category is from 1990, when I am leaning over a birthday cake with a space shuttle orbiter featured in frosting. I'm dressed but wan: I have just gotten over the flu that has ravaged my family. When that picture was taken my sister was unconscious on the couch, having succumbed to a fever of a hundred and one that morning. My mother, just back on her feet, camera in hand, sang "Happy Birthday" solo against the backdrop of my father throwing up in the bathroom.

If I wasn't sick on my birthday, I was being dumped (he actually sat me down on the couch and opened with, "I hate to do this to you on your birthday, but...."); if I wasn't being dumped, wars were starting; if wars weren't starting, I was taking final exams. In geometry.

My longest relationship was with a guy who was born five hours before I was. I couldn't even whine to him about it because he was in the same boat. On our twenty-first birthday I wore an ugly dress to the campus bar, where I tried and did not like Guinness. (Not a very good first-beer beer, Guinness.)

I was thrilled when I heard I am going to be an aunt, even more thrilled when I found out I am going to be an aunt in April. If you love your future children, you're not going to so much as shake hands with your spouse in the spring to as to avoid this ungodly space between Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King Day.

What's it like, spring birthdays? What's it like to have a birthday unmarred by post-Christmas hangovers, sugar shock, and debt? What's it like to not have to write a whole spate of thank-you notes a week after just having finished a spate of thank-you notes for combination presents? If I ever get married, it's going to be in June or July or some lovely non-January month just so that I can open things that weren't purchased on clearance.

When I came to work this morning, my desk chair was covered with cards and gifts. I was stunned. Really, an email will suffice. Cash is better.

One of my co-workers will turn twenty-seven tomorrow. "You still look good," she said, tossing her hair. "You have young skin." Thanks, I'll cling to that as I sit here listening to my bones ossify.

I honestly don't remember what I did for my birthday last year. I know I was at the Cape. Maybe I took a walk on the beach and kicked small children. Where will I be a year from today? Disgustingly famous, I hope, but in a good way, not the I-saw-you-on-the-eleven o' clock-news way.

As of 10:28 AM, today hasn't gone too badly. So far it's going down in history as The Day Carol Moseley Braun Dropped Out Of the Presidential Race, so I am cautiously optimistic that the afternoon and evening actually might not suck donkey balls. This morning I blasted Jimmy Buffett ("She came down from Cincinnati! Took her three days in a Corolla!") and did my hair and put on pantyhose. If people are going to be dropping by your office to give you a card with a picture of a dog on it, you want to look good.

Direct birthday cash to: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

We are in a new era now, you and I.

It is 3:38 PM Eastern Standard Time. It is a Wednesday. I am wearing a blue denim dress with black sandals, silver boot-and-hat earrings, and a silvertone watch. I had turkey and bacon on wheat toast for lunch. My only sister is in the sixth month of pregnancy with her first child. I live in a snug little studio apartment and make $12.75 an hour doing technical and marketing writing for an engineering firm. The temperature is 68 degrees. Tomorrow is my twenty-seventh birthday.

And America is going back to the Moon, and on to Mars.

I was present for history today as I undertook the highly important activity of organizing contracts, straining to hear the President's voice through tinny computer speakers. We will finish the International Space Station, dedicating what remains of our tough little shuttle fleet to completing its construction and bending the science we perform there to withstanding the rigors of long-duration space flight. And in 2010, those lovely ladies, these three oribiters, having performed their tasks so long and so well, will be retired. The "in between", this pause on interplanetary travel that has occupied my entire lifespan, has ended. Only a few months ago I wouldn't have even entertained the idea.

The Moon will serve as a launching pad for Mars. Its weak graviational pull and helium-rich environment will make for an excellent pit stop. We're not just going because it is there. We're going because it is time, and because we owe it to ourselves, our babies, and those who blazed the trail some forty years ago.

The tragedy of the cutoff Apollo program will at last be righted. If the Moon program's funding had not been cut, the mighty Saturn V rockets not silenced, I very firmly believe we would be on Mars right now. We're going to rectify that. Nearly every single Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo astronaut, when writing of the current condition of the space program, expresses nothing but frustration over the "beached whale" state of our Moon hardware. But all those years, and all that work, will not have resulted in merely a "ta-dah!" moment.

The President recognized the presence of Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon (or, as he prefers to put it, "the most recent man on the Moon") in his speech. He talked about Columbia, of lives lost and progress gained. He understands.

We are going back.

Also, do not mock my earrings. They too are awesome.

The history of mankind could change today at 3PM

Not, you will note, the history of "humankind," hear that, Stupid Priest Who At a Recent Mass Quoted Jesus As Calling the Apostles "Fishers of People"?

We are just a few days from what those of us in the NASA family refer to as "dark week," that span from January 27 through February 1 that marks the anniversaries of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. And this afternoon, the President will outline his vision for the future of NASA. He will most likely suggest a trip to Mars and the construction of a manned Moon base. If done well--and I think it will be--this could be the new-millennium equivalent of JFK's 1962 Rice University speech, at which he challenged the United States to break Earth's orbit: "We choose to go to the moon," he said. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept...."

I quoted that speech all the time when I worked in education at Kennedy Space Center. Twenty years from now, you might visit the Cape and hear what the President will say today echoed back to you.

Listen, and dream. Then do.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."
-JFK, May 25, 1962

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

That's Some Daily Double

An update, mes amies, on that most unfortunately named filly, Miss Thirtyfour D. She and Gary Lynn "That's Right, My Middle Name Is LYNN" Stevens finished fourth in a field of seven last week. Thus sayeth the Equibase footnotes on her performance:

MISS THIRTYFOUR D broke slowly, saved ground stalking the pace, came out into the stretch, split foes past midstretch then surged late inside.

I.... I don't even know where to begin here. The slow breakage? The "stretch" comment? The splitting of foes? The surging? The late surging, which is of course on the inside? It's kind of like that moment when Alexander the Great, having conquered all there was to conquer, sat down and cried.

Someday, when I die, I shall experience an unbroken, eternal string of setups so glorious.

"A Super, Super, Super-Mega, Super-Mega Bummer."

Thus spoke a person with hair much, much longer than mine, a male person, an engineer with JPL, the company that produced the Mars rover for NASA. He was discussing a flaw in a parachute design that threatened the success of the entire mission. And he totally looked like Bonnie Raitt.

You learn these things on PBS, the fact that our brightest scientific minds, the people paving the way for interplanetary travel, apparently just fell out of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. And, you know, God bless them. If they think personal grooming is a super mega bummer but if they're dropping manmade objects on the surface of MARS, who am I to argue? I can't charge my cell phone without bringing in Stephen Hawkin for an assist. You go, Feminine-Haired Inarticulate Freaky Rocket Science Man. You go.

Monday, January 12, 2004

Pete Rose: A Stupid, Stupid Man

Pete Rose’s birthday is April 14. He wore number fourteen for his entire career, and then for fourteen years he lied and lied and lied about breaking Rule 21. You know, that rule they post big as life next to the door of every single Major League clubhouse in North America. The no-gambling one.

“Players don’t read the fine print,” he said in a recent interview when Charles "Don't Call Me Charlie No More, For Some Reason" Gibson asked him about that annoying little rule. Rose wore a tiny 14 stitched on his collar, because this serves as a bodily reminder of who he once was, and who he wants to be again, and also because he is a pathetic asshat.

We Cincinnatians love our baseball and we love our own, and Pete Rose was both. He poured himself out to us, there along the thin white lines, and we poured ourselves out to him, our Pete. He then proceeded to humiliate us, first when the accusations surfaced, then when the denials continued, and now—now that he has a book to sell—with a tacit admission, minus an apology.

You really have to know what you're doing, to humiliate Cincinnati. We gave the world both Jerry Springer AND the Bengals. And yet here we sit alongside Kentucky, humiliated.

Understand, I grew up with this. The gambling allegations broke when I was twelve years old, that official crux between makeup and make believe. Just as the issue seemed to tuck itself away, here came Pete again, sniffling. The latest: Pete would like to manage again. While owning racehorses. With his players. Horses named Dumbass, by Doesn'tGetIt, out of WhyWhenHeChargesFourHundredBucksAnAutographCan'tThisGuyAffordADecentHaircut.

Does Pete deserve admission to the Hall of Fame on the basis of his performance as a player? Absolutely. He's there already, big as the Big Red Machine in a lifesize cutout. There sits the bat he used to break Ty Cobb's record. He embraced the bases, embraced the game to his very self. “See that?” dads would say to sons, pointing from the upper echelons of Riverfront Stadium. “That is how you play baseball.”

And should he be punished for breaking the rules of the game? Yeah. What I want is a plaque of Pete in the Hall, stupid hair and all, enshrining his flying leaps and his power-mad swing and his West Side lumbering run. And on that plaque I want engraved the fact that he was banned from baseball for betting on it as a manager of the very team from the very city that loved and nurtured him, so that what he did for baseball as a young man will never be remembered without what he did to baseball as an older one.

I used to work in downtown Cincinnati, and every single day I'd drive past Bold Face Park, where young Pete learned to hit and field and fly. It's overgrown now, seedy and crumbling in a bad part of town and not much use to anyone anymore.

Perpetually angry as I am with Pete, the Prodigal Idiot, often as I shake my head and say, “He did this to himself,” the intensity, the pain in his eyes gave me pause has he described to The Talking Head Formerly Known As Charlie his utter agony at seeing a brand-new, state of the art, half-empty stadium on the banks of the Ohio. “Seats are for asses,” he said fervently.

Well, no shit. That’s why your involvement with baseball has been confined to one for half my life.

Email your spring training picks out of the Reds' clubhouse to: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Previous Tastings