Archive for April, 2010

My damned back went out during the course of packing up books and moving the boxes, because I am a dumbass who sincerely believes that she can carry ANYTHING, slipped discs notwithstanding.

Did I mention that I am a dumbass?

I am waiting for my muscle relaxers (sweet, sweet goodness) to kick in, and then I’m heading back down into the cave to further frustrate myself. So far I’ve got about seven or eight large boxes packed, so not bad for a morning’s work.

I used to be able to move in a heartbeat. Everything I owned was portable. I hadn’t amassed a lot of furniture in my early twenties, and I hadn’t yet started a large book collection, and moving was as simple as finding a buddy with a pickup truck who was willing to make a couple trips for a case of beer.

I miss those carefree days.

Why am I updating again? I don’t really know. I suppose I’m bored.

I’ve been sort of sifting through my past relationships in my mind, trying to ascertain what went wrong and why I was partially at fault, in order to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself with Norton, and it’s been a strange trip down memory lane indeed.

I don’t like to talk about exes, really, particularly on this blog where airing others’ dirty laundry really ain’t my business, but I think I’ve made some interesting breakthroughs.

I know I tend to run away, particularly when scared off by something intense. I know that this is something I’ve worked on and talked about with friends and my shrink and sort of gotten past.

I know I have bad or self-destructive habits that tend to manifest during times of intense stress. Again, something I’ve been working on.

I don’t know, I suppose I feel healthier these days. Healthy enough to be coupled with someone and not drop a classic TranceJen FreakOut.

(I did, of course, have a mini-freakout this week, but that was a baby little wee freakout, nothing for the books.)

I feel good. Hopeful. Happy.

It’s refreshing.

It’s nice to be able to lie against someone and not have your heart racing, thinking, “WTF Is He Thinking??”, but rather, just, “This is great.”

It’s great to be able to just fucking relax with someone and Be.

It’s uncharacteristic of me, but I love it.

Something about Norton just makes me comfortable. I would compare him to an old shoe, but I guess that would be less than complimentary.

Something that just… fits.

Anyway, this is getting too sappy for me.

I think the pills are starting to kick in.

And if I got time to lean, I got time to clean.

Later.

I’m gonna be Productive today!

I’m gonna go through my entire TranceCave and clean out ALL the tchotchkes and carefully pack them away in newspaper!

Then I’m gonna start packing up everything from the big metal desk!

Then I’m gonna start carrying all the shit from the basement out to the garage!

Then I’m gonna start going through the garage in earnest, really digging through all that shit!

Then I’m going to box up all these damned VCR tapes that no one is ever going to watch!

Then I’m going to start boxing up books!

Then I’m going to run them over to the new house on my back, like a sherpa!

YEAH!

Yeah.

I have had entirely too much coffee and am probably going to drop dead by ten AM.

Send help.

Thank you.

Happy Thursday.

So yesterday I spent the day with Norton and it was all wonderful and shit, and I came home and immediately after he left had a seizure, and then, in the post-seizure fog, I sort of freaked out.

My friend Sue called me, thankfully, and talked me down off a ledge, but I had scary thoughts swirling terrifyingly through my twisted little brain all night.

I mean, what is wrong with this guy?

At first glance, nothing. We get along great, and it’s perfect and easy and fun, and I’m supremely attracted to him, and he’s respectful and funny and we have loads in common, but so far he has no annoying habits and no rotten little idiosyncrasies and no deep dark secrets save his divorce, and it’s starting to GET to me.

I like this guy so much, kids. I don’t remember ever having liked someone so much, so quickly off of the bat, ever, and it’s fucking with my head.

I know I’m just being paranoid and stupid, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but damn, WHERE IS THAT OTHER SHOE??

I feel like I’m having more than my allotted amount of fun allowed by the law, and that the fickle finger of fate is going to come down and poke me directly in the eye. The good eye, too.

I’m trying to chill.

I’m really trying to chill.

I’m just not used to all this… emotion.

It’s so very strange and hard to explain.

Generally I am quite a cool motherfucker when it comes to dating, but I have to confess that Norton makes me melt and stammer and stutter just a little, and I don’t like it! I like to keep my cards close to my chest, say what I have to and hold back the rest, to quote Miss Ani DiFranco.

This is not that.

This is long strange phone conversations about the future, and meaningful glances, and lots and lots of making out.

This is totally different than my past dating experiences, and I am sort of adrift.

I’m trying to ride the wave, be in the moment, and totally enjoy it – because God, it is enjoyable – but there is that small paranoid part of me that wants to scream a little.

Is that insane?

I don’t know.

Anyway.

He met my mother and the J-Man briefly, and both gave him the thumbs-up. (Which is a lot for the J-Man, because the J-Man? Generally he could care less. I think he sees that I am happy.)

In other news, I see the stomach doctor today, and just let him try to take me off of or change my stomach medication. I will cut a bitch.

Happy Wednesday.

I tire of packing, cleaning, clearing, de-cluttering.

I’m sure our garbage men agree. Lately there have been huge stacks of bags in the alley behind the Trance house. They probably dread rolling up here.

I also tire of writing about packing, de-cluttering, and the like. Truly I have become a boring person in the wake of this move.

Today the J-Man and I went out to brunch with the Notorious J.E.W. My father and J. were in rare form in the truck, singing along to current rap hits at top volume to and from the restaurant, which was enough to drive this indie rock chick insane.

Not that I don’t have a deep and abiding appreciation for Ludacris, guys, but come ON.

Really.

I had a pretty mellow weekend. Lots of reading, lots of cleaning, and very little else. This means my cabin fever was at an all-time high and by the time I go out with Norton (who had his kids all weekend) on Tuesday I am going to be crawling the walls.

In other news, tomorrow I am having a pedicure.

You may be shocked by this information, given the fact that I am very anti-foot-touching.

I still am, but that does not negate the fact that the old dogs are looking a little crunchy, and that will not do. The pedicurist in question is a trusted friend who does a damned good job and most importantly does not tickle. She also knows that if she did, she would be at risk for a well-placed and completely involuntary kick in the chin, so we’re all informed and careful and shit.

I’m such a princess.

In still other news, my seizures have been slowing down somewhat with the addition of the new medication. I’m not holding my breath, but it’s promising.

With that good news, the summer seems to be shaping up just fine. So far the following plans are underway: the Chicago roller derby championship, the Stars concert, and the much-anticipated trip to Vegas. Also in the works is a nice little vacation for the J-Man and I. I haven’t yet decided where we will go, but I’m excited about it. We haven’t really taken a trip together alone in a long time, and I think it’ll be fun.

Good times ahoy.

In still other news, I stupidly ate a sloppy joe, and now I feel like I ate sweatsocks. I am never, never going to learn that this gastroparesis shit means business.

Happy Sunday Night.

Yesterday I went through the rest of the beads, the yarn, the knitting needles, the mosaic tiles, the paints, and the other assorted craft crap in the house.

I could seriously make a fortune on Etsy, kids. I could whip up some knitted penis cozies or mosaic baby Jesuses or beaded swastika pendants and become the next goddamn Martha Stewart.

Instead I create questionable furniture and scarves (I can only knit square things) and jewelry that will probably have to be sold at the garage sale, things that will have to go even though they have indeed been crafted with looooove.

I packed everything away for the move. What I am going to do with my hands now, I have no idea. Probably more packing.

It never ends, seriously. I finish one little sad corner and look at the mountainous piles of crap to come, and I am overwhelmed.

What I would really like to do is post this ad on Craigslist:

Come one, come all! HUGE blowout sale! All the crap you can carry! Bring your truck and your shopping bags! Five bucks a bag will net you endless treasures! We have everything from pianos to ping-pong balls, and it all Must Go! Come to Trance House on Trance Avenue this weekend from 9AM to 5PM this Saturday and Sunday for the sale of a lifetime! Don’t miss it!!

That would be pretty fucking sweet. Alas, my mother will not go for it. So, we are listing things on Craigslist one at a time, getting very few responses, and feeling quite frustrated.

The piano is going soon, and I have mixed feelings about that.

We purchased the piano when I was about three or four and began to take lessons. I played classical piano until I was well into my twenties, and actually had quite a knack for it. It landed me quite a few jobs, playing at parties and weddings; and, as some of you may remember, playing the organ at a Christian Scientist church for many years.

THAT was certainly never dull.

Anyway, it will be sad to see my beloved piano go, but the fact remains that I really haven’t touched it in a good few years, partially because it is horribly out of tune, and partially because I am a sight-reader and find it terribly hard to read sheet music these days, what with my vision being what it is.

I would dearly love to find it a good home, maybe with someone with kids.

I suppose I’m talking about it like it’s a pet, but it is like a pet, a little. I loved it, played with it, and got to know it well.

My grandfather, God rest his soul, would probably be outraged to know that I no longer play, and more outraged to know I’m getting rid of the piano, but we really are going to have nowhere good to put it.

Sigh.

If there’s one thing I have a serious emotional attachment to, I suppose that would be it.

In other news, there is no other news. There is only packing.

Happy Thursday.

“Psst.”
…
“Psst.”
…
“HEY STUPID!”
“Wha-huh-what?”
“I’m talking to you.”
“Where are you?”
“In your belly.”
“WHAT?”
“It’s me, the leftover Chinese.”
“Oh, fuck. I knew you were going to come back to haunt me.”
“Yes.”
“WHY?”
“Well, let’s see. You’re not supposed to eat beef. You’re not supposed to eat crunchy pea pods. You’re not supposed to eat water chestnuts. Anything else I am missing?”
“Shit.”
“I foresee much gastrointestinal distress in your future, Jennifer.”
“What are you, the Ghost of Stomach Future?”
“You could say that.”
“I hate you.”
“And I hate you.”

In other news, I can’t stop thinking about sex. It is the 400-pound gorilla in the room. Apparently I need religion, or exorcism, or a good slap in the face, or the opposite of Viagra, or something. Anything. Help.

Here’s a laugh: The seizure medication I am on is often known to suppress a person’s sex drive. I cannot even imagine what I would be like without it. I would be humping kitchen chairs and masturbating seventeen times per day and howling at the moon.

This is terrible. Just terrible.

Happy Wednesday from the hormonal one.

Norton and I went thrift-store shopping yesterday, and rather than bore you with an exhaustive play-by-play, I will just throw out a few highlights.

We had an excellent time looking for frames and records and making fun of scary baby dolls, “art”, and bad album covers.

One in particular is worth mentioning. It depicted the (hairy) arms and (hairy) hands of God coming down from the sky (with hairy fingers, too) and reaching toward a crowd of people with the large caption “YOU BETTER MIND.”

LOVE.

We have decided to become the next Captain and Tennille, complete with a really bad haircut for me, a stupid captain’s hat for him, and some dorky poses, which we practiced until a man who I strongly believe was there shopping for Jesus records (there were a LOT of Jesus records) interrupted us.

I bought a really kick-ass dress which was new with tags and everything for ten dollars.

After making fun of other people’s stuff, we went to lunch. While about to sit down, I heard someone frantically calling my name. There are five thousand restaurants in the greater Chicagoland area, and who did I happen to run into?

The Notorious J.E.W. That’s right, my father.

Norton had a brief look of total panic cross his face, but then he came up and shook his hand and was very polite. Must be that military background.

My dad regaled us with tales of karaoke stardom and staying out until four o’clock in the morning every single night. Way to make an impression, Dad.

Afterward, we came to my house and talked a lot, and made out even more, and Good Lord, my hormones cannot be handling this, I am going to have to lock myself in a closet/peel off my skin/start going to church/recite BeeGees lyrics whilst fiddling with a rosary/stand on my head/all of the above.

This making out, it is Hot. And I am Weak.

I think I really, really like this boy. He’s very cool, and sort of mellow and quietly funny.

Who knew?

Not me.

In other news, there is some sort of Catarchy (cat anarchy) going on in this joint. If I’m not being awakened by the melodious sound of cats horking up hairballs, I’m being awakened by the sound of them fighting furiously.

I’m seriously about to attach the hose to the laundry sink and start spraying these little suckers with everything I’ve got.

In still other news, I still have a basement full of shit. So today’s mission: De-shit-ify.

Happy Tuesday.

Alice the hamster has nine lives. Seriously.

The hamster cage has two openings, one in the front of the cage, and one on top. The other night, I took her out on the top of the cage, because that’s where she was roaming around. (The cage has levels and tubes and such, for the adventurous hamster in your life.)

I let her roll around in her ball for a couple of hours, even though the constant banging invariably drives me batshit motherfucking crazy, and then I fed her and placed her back in her cage.

Hours later, I was lying across my mom’s bed, reading. I was in that comatose condition I tend to fall into when ensconced in a particularly good book, so when my mother walked in the room and screamed, “ALICE!” I didn’t even look up.

She hit me on the leg and screamed, “I thought you put Alice back in her cage!”

“Wha-huh-I did!”

Yet there was Alice, toddling calmly through my mother’s room with her rotund self, as Skittles the cat looked on from a mere two feet away.

Shit.

I flew a good three feet off of the bed, book flying, and grabbed at the hamster, who eluded my grasp about seventeen times. She may be a butterball, but she is wily. Finally I caught her and stuffed her back into the cage, noticing that I had left the top door of the cage wide open.

Let me explain the logistics of this. In order to escape, this Mission Impossible-assed hamster had to climb out of the cage, scale down the cage, jump off of a foot-and-a-half-high chair, and flee a room that usually contains at LEAST two cats.

Then she had to make it through the kitchen and the hallway to gain access to my mother’s room.

I was pondering all of this when she began to spit things out into her food bowl.

Hamsters are food hoarders. They store massive amounts of food in their faces, ostensibly for “later”, and then either eat the gross stuff or spit it back out. I call this Hamster Bulimia.

Alice started to spit, and what she started to spit was cat food.

This ballsy little creature was actually sitting in the kitchen getting her grub on out of the cats’ bowls, probably for quite some time from the looks of it, and the cats didn’t maul her to pieces? Unreal.

She also spit out a medium-sized craft pompon, which probably came from under my mother’s bed.

I can only imagine the havoc that would have been wreaked had the hamster hidden out until midnight and crawled under the covers with my mom, but I sort of wish it would have happened, and that I’d have been there to see and hear it.

The screams would have been heard in Nigeria,

Apparently our cats are either really, really shitty mousers or they have come to accept Alice as one of their own, because this is the third time she’s gotten out and they haven’t laid a paw on her.

As much as the noisy little bugger drives me up a wall, I’ve sort of come to admire her tenacity, I can say that much.

In other news, I sold my weight bench. Goodbye, ghosts of workouts never completed! Goodbye! Now the damn thing can stop STARING at me every time I go down into the TranceCave, and I am a hundred and fifty dollars richer. Score!

In still other news, the fam is at church, and I am sitting here internetting and drinking coffee like a freak.

Do I feel guilty?

Not in the slightest.

Happy Sunday.

So, the date.

I was nervous, y’all. I changed my clothes no less than fifteen times, and decided on a pair of black pants and a somewhat cleavagey red top that needed to be pinned*, lest I show the girls in all their glory and look like a fi’-dolla’ hooker.

*He wound up totally noticing the pin. But only because he was staring at my cleavage like a dirty boy.

He was late, due his daughter being bitten in daycare. I could empathize with this, because some little miscreant once bit the J-Man in his face, leaving a perfect circle of teeth marks and a large welt. I won’t tell you what I said to the kid’s parents, but it involved using a muzzle.

He showed up about a half-hour late, looking remarkably like Ed Norton. (Score!) (He shall henceforth be referred to as “Norton”.) Norton was not wearing tennis shoes on the date, which you all know is a pet peeve of mine, but Doc Martens. Score two for Norton.

We went to a local lunch place I had never been to that seemed OK, sort of expensive for a sandwich joint, which made me balk a little, but not bad. The waitresses were wearing tiny booty shorts, and we joked about that. I didn’t notice him ogling the plethora of ass on display, and that was nice. Another point for Norton, for not being a blatant ass-looker.

He was cool. He seemed pretty laid-back and funny, and when he talked about his ex-wife it wasn’t all OMG BITCH FROM FUCKING HELL, so that was a good thing, too. There’s nothing worse than being on a date in which someone continuously rails on their ex. We talked about our kids, music, movies, etc.

Then we finished eating, and came back to my house, which made me nervous, because A – my house was not in the most pristine state, and B – what the fuck were we going to do at my house, anyway?

We ended up talking and looking at photo albums and stuff, and after a while he looked at me and said, “Can I kiss you?”

I thought about it for a second, and then decided to go for it.

We ended up making out on the couch for a good twenty minutes, because I am a dirty whore.

Seriously.

I don’t DO that on first dates, kids. I really don’t. I am not THAT dirty of a girl. I can generally keep my bad bad little hormones in check, at least for a while.

But he was such a good kisser, and he was so cool, and… and… well, I just said fuck it.

Because I am a dirty whore.

He had to leave at three, because that was the deal – there was no way in hell I was introducing him to my mother and son on a first date, dirty whore-ness notwithstanding – and we made plans to go thrift shopping on Monday, because we both like to do so.

All in all, it was very cool, and I’m excited about seeing him again.

I gave him a copy of the little book I published a few years ago – some of you might have this – because he seemed interested, and I guess he read quite a bit of it yesterday afternoon, and he called me last night to discuss it.

He said that he really enjoyed it and that he could see himself in a relationship with me (!).

Shock and awe.

I didn’t quite know what to say to that beyond “I like you, too.”

So that was my day. Intriguing, to be sure.

I’m interested to see what happens with Norton. Obviously this was only a first date and he could still wind up being a serial killer/social tool/stalker, but things are looking good so far.

And did I mention he was a good kisser? Score another point for Norton.

Happy Weekend.

There are three houses for sale on the block, currently, and none of them are moving. They are barely even being looked at, and I would know, because my mother is the type that repeatedly stares out the window and gawks at everything that the neighbors do.

I am not optimistic about this house selling.

For one thing, this neighborhood is a little ghetto.

How ghetto? I will tell you.

The other night, as I was sitting down to watch Glee, I distinctly heard out of my window, as clear as the proverbial bell, “STFU AND PASS THE SPLIF, YO!”

Yeah. It’s THAT ghetto.

Then I had to deal with my child asking me what a splif was.

I claimed ignorance on that one.

My front yard is regularly littered with cigarette butts and beer cans or 40s from the neighbors on the right side of me, who like to par-tay as often as humanly possible. The neighbors on the left side are an older couple that I love dearly who are just now putting their house up for sale and jumping ship to a retirement community deep in the wilds of Indiana.

I will miss the hell out of them.

The boys across the street like to party on their porch listening to cock rock until the wee small hours of the evening bellowing loudly to each other while their girlfriends giggle and drink 40s while probably praying that my mother, ever vigilant, is not going to call the police.

And then there is the mariachi music, which is charming and eclectic at first, but terribly annoying at four AM.

Would I move here? Hell to the no.

In other news, my date is actually a lunch date.

Ohhhhhhh.

I had no idea, but I talked to Dude last night, and apparently he has a missing headlight and doesn’t want to drive after dark, so lunch it is.

Maybe he just wants to see me in the harsh light of day.

I have no idea.

I will give a full report tomorrow.

Aren’t you glad you’re not dating me?

Heh.

Happy Friday.