Saturday, January 14, 2006

It's Almost Time!

Ah, we once again gather to anticipate the anniversary of crappy things happening on my birthday. Oh boy! I can't wait to find out how it's going to suck this year!

Birthday primers for new friends here

Thursday, January 12, 2006

"Hey, come here! Smell this!"

It’s fair to say that my life has now become a battle against various odors. The lease is up on the Blonde Bachelorette Pad, Northern Edition, and I have been seriously considering moving, as the neighborhood is… I don’t want to use terms like “sketchy” or “life-threatening” or “rapist colony”, so let us just emphasize the final syllable in “neighborhood” and leave it at that.

Outside of the fact that I need a military escort to get the mail, I have been frustrated with a parting gift the former tenant left me in the form of a permanent cloud of Marlboro Stank. S/he had a habit, judging from the tenacity and intensity of the smell, of perhaps ninety thousand packs a day.

“You can tell there’s a war going on,” Josh the Pilot offered hopefully in the early days when I draped sheets of Bounce on the ceiling fan and emptied entire cans of Renuzit into the hall closet. I had three ozone treatments for the carpet and employed the Order of the Glade and thought I had it beat until this Thanksgiving, when I opened my suitcase in Julie the NephewMama’s blessedly thirdhand smoke-free home, aaaaaaaaaand…. I hadn’t come very far at all, baby.

But moving costs money, a lot of it, and last week I looked with exhaustion at all of the things in my apartment , and though each individual thing was at that very moment soaking up the wavy little smell rays, it would also have to be balled up in tissue paper and hurled in the back of a van, and then removed from the van and then unpacked, and I went “Just…no.” My entire esophagal system might be disintegrating with every inhale, but at least I won’t have to order new address labels. So it’s official: I will not take on excess work to save my life.

Then we have the Millennium Bellemobile, which, while tobacco-free, began emitting suspicious smell waves of her own before I left for a two-week visit home over Christmas. It was an odd, musty type of odor, which did not seem overly strange in a car that has held up to two inches of water on the interior and spends most of its time in a state somewhat known for its moisture content. Yankee Candle Car Jars are a woman’s version of duct tape, so I slapped a couple in the windows and got on a plane to Cincinnati.

And when I touched back down again, the 78 year old woman who lives downstairs, after replacing the safety on her Glock once I identified myself, greeted me with a cheerful, “Guess what I saw in your car last week while you were gone.”

“Utter despair?”

“Nope! A squirrel! Ran clean across the dashboard. Disappeared before I could get a good shot off.”

A… squirrel? A squirrel was in my car? Like… in… my… car?

It’s one thing to merely suck as a driver. It’s quite another to suck as a driver while small rabid rodents burst out at you from small crevices in the floorboards.

I opened the door for a tentative sniff. The Car Jars had been utterly defeated. Smell status: Critical.

Such times call for a penis. If there’s anybody who would know anything about diagnosing foul odors, it’s a carrier of the Y chromosome. Scott The Taller was around, so I called his.

I sent Scott out with a small flashlight and locked the door behind him, as in this neighborhood, the squirrel was probably packing. I unloaded the dishwasher, because when you’re waiting to hear which type of infestation your motor vehicle is carrying, what you need to do is pretend it isn't happening.

Scott was gone a while.

He carried a strange expression when he returned. I approached him, slotted spoon in hand. “What? What?”

“Well,” he said, removing his jacket, “it wasn’t a dead squirrel.”

“Ew… oh, ew. A mouse?”

“No. It was a dead animal, though.” He returned the flashlight. “Are you missing a pound of ground beef?”

ewwwwwwwwww at: mb@blondechampagne.com

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Semesters

The whole dance starts all over again tomorrow, which means the anxiety dreams commenced a week and a half ago. First my teeth fell out, and then came one in which the popular girls from my grade school showed up as students and flipped angrily through the syllabus: "I'm looking for evidence here that you're qualified to teach technical writing and... I'm just not seeing it." Then they went to the skating party to which I was not invited.

At least my parents are in town, and have been cramming me full of fries and ice cream in these final days. "Ohhhh-- you're fine," they keep telling me, to which I say: People who will be fine tend know WHEN CLASSES BEGIN. Because last night I prepped my grade book, laid out my clothes, spewed one final time, and checked my email on the university system. Where I learned that classes, in fact, begin tomorrow. I would have arisen at dawn, climbed into my pantyhose, conducted myself to the college, and then patiently awaited students who wouldn't show for twenty-four hours. Because I am just that dedicated, and blonde.

syllabii on the copier at: mb@blondechampagne.com

Previous Tastings