Archive for July, 2010

So. You may or may not know that we have three cats, and my stepfather has two.

Last night I was informed by my mother that my stepdad had laid down an ultimatum. He is getting rid of one of his cats, and we are expected to get rid of a cat, namely, Skittles.

He doesn’t like Skittles, because he has seen her attack the other cats on many occasions and feels that she would not be a welcome addition to his home. Never mind the fact that she is JUST FUCKING PLAYING.

Ahem.

Anyway.

I received this news the way one would expect. I promptly burst into tears.

I didn’t call my stepfather and whine or beg or cajole, because I know that at this point, it wouldn’t do any good. We are moving in two weeks. He’s made up his mind, and it is his house.

I have to abide by his motherfucking, shitty-assed, ridiculous, cock-sucking rules.

I spent the evening in tears, and when I say “in tears” I mean “an utterly incomprehensible, sobbing mess”, and Skittles followed me to the basement, where she licked my feet and periodically brought me toys to throw.

This just made me cry even more.

I agonized about this all night. Shelters were not an option, obviously. I didn’t want to post an ad on Craigslist for strangers, because I wasn’t about to trust some yahoo with my pet. God knows what people do to animals, especially when they are not teeny and adorable. The cat weighs sixteen pounds – for all I know someone might try to eat her.

I thought briefly about posting a note on Facebook for friends to read in hopes that one of them might want to adopt her, but I was even worried about doing that.

You never know how someone is going to treat an animal. They might have a bad day and kick the cat, or they might let her outside, or they might not give her any attention, or they might GOD KNOWS WHAT.

I was tweeting about this early this morning, and a friend of mine inquired about the cat. I asked whether she would be interested, because I know she is a cat person.

She was.

She is coming by today to look at Skittles.

Obviously I have very mixed emotions about this. While I would be glad to have a trusted friend take her, especially a friend with children who will love her, I am going to be fucking horrified to see her go.

She is currently winding herself around my ankles, purring, with no clue as to what is to come.

This is the cat that sleeps on my bed every night, the cat that fetches toys so nicely with her tail pointed skyward. This is the cat who is not standoffish in the slightest, who wants attention and licks one’s hands and feet for a scratch or a rub.

I am probably a little silly for putting so much stock into the love of an animal. I’ve had other cats, some for twenty years. I can honestly tell you, though, that I’ve never had one tug at my heartstrings as much as this one. There’s just something about her that makes me so very happy.

If that makes me silly, then I don’t know what to tell you.

I am now feeling resentful and angry and completely shitty about the move. This is probably very childish, but damn, I’m pissed off.

I’m just so pissed off.

Here’s hoping you have a happier Monday than mine.

I got up during the wee small hours of the morning on Garage Sale Day, sucked down a few quick cups of coffee and a cruller; and after applying the most scant amount of vanity makeup, my mother and I immediately went outside to begin hauling boxes and bags and clothing out of the garage and into the yard to place on tables and clotheslines.

I have to add that our clothesline setup was among the most ghetto-riffic device that has ever been jerry-rigged. Initially I tried to ram a hook into the side of our old, huge tree (because I am a tree-killer, not a tree-hugger), but I soon discovered that THAT would require super-human or at least very manly strength, which I certainly do not possess. Thankfully we already had a large hook rammed into the side of our back garage by the previous owner, who did possess the sort of strength I so needed. Still, I needed another hook, and since one apparently wasn’t going to drop out of the sky, what was I to do? Simple. I simply tied the clothesline around a very tall, very thick branch, and let it sort of hang down so that it would reach the garage hook at a 45-degree angle. Not ideal for hanging clothes.

Then we got the idea of running the clothesline through a pool cleaner pole so as to stabilize it and make it run parallel to the ground. (I wish to God I had taken a photo of all this.) We couldn’t get the clothesline to run through the hollow pole without bunching up, though, so we tied a washer to it, held it upright, and sort of rammed it into the sidewalk, praying that the weight of the washer would pull the clothesline downward.

This amazingly, eventually worked.

You’re probably not interested in any of this, but I think it was funny, so Neh.

Anyway, just imagine a heavily-knotted clothesline running from the garage to a giant tree with a big pole on it, careening at an odd angle, tied all to hell with knots they certainly never taught you in the Boy Scouts.

For the record, it worked fine.

We had about four hundred hangers worth of clothing, a lot of which was hung on the large iron swing-set that my dad welded so many years ago, some of which was hung on the clothesline. We also had about six large tables full of folded clothes (WHY do people fold clothes when hosting a garage sale when the heathenous masses are just going to rip through them anyway? I don’t know.) and mountains of shoes.

Then there were the toys. Piles of stuffed toys, staring with glass eyes from wagons and boxes and bins. Princess castles and Barbie houses (from my cousin, not J.). Radio-controlled cars and a Spiderman that really punched and kicked that every single grown man who came to the sale would pick up and play with but not buy.

My mother had glass doodads and vases and trinkets and salt and pepper shakers from every state displayed on racks. I had candles, candles, candles, melting in the hot sun.

We got done setting up at about eight-thirty, and people had already begun to filter in.

You just can’t get rid of early birds. People believe that they are getting the jump on the crap and are therefore superior to the rest of the human race. You could even sense a bit of smugness on their faces. I don’t get it, and I never will.

My elderly aunt and uncle arrived, she with her Sobe water and glittering ankle bracelets, he with his oxygen tank, and prepared to take the money.

For the first two hours, we got pretty slammed. I even had a woman spend a good fifty dollars on a huge pile of the J-Man’s clothes and shoes. Things looked promising. People were looking at furniture and saying they’d be back. As an eternal optimist, this made me happy. They’d be back! They would surely buy!

I am so deluded, and they were so full of shit.

Things slowed to a screeching halt at about eleven o’clock, and we began the useless acts of re-arranging tables, telling each other that people would re-appear after the lunch hour, and eating junk food to soothe our wounded egos.

Inwardly I was seething, because no one was buying my clothes. I had about a hundred and fifty well-taken-care-of items for sale at ridiculously low prices, including several dresses I found a sin to even let go, and no bites? NO BITES?

I was filled with chagrin, but I was polite and welcoming; so welcoming, in fact, that I was relentlessly teased every time we had a customer.

I’m a friendly person. It’s the Midewesterner in me. I’m a hugger, I’m a talker, I’m'a make sure I learn your name and make you feel welcome in my home. As far as I’m concerned, this even goes for garage sale customers.

So maybe I’m a little weird to my strangely reticent family, who doesn’t believe in talking to strangers, but I don’t care. I said “hello” and “how are ya” and “can I help you find anything” to every person who came into the backyard, and they started to mock me mercilessly.

Jerks.

A slow trickle continued on throughout the blazing hot afternoon, and I had to come in and cool off. I immediately had a fucking seizure, but thankfully it was relatively minor. When I say minor, I mean that there was no head-bashing involved. Still, I was banished from the yard for a one-hour penalty, so I chilled for a while before returning.

I’m not really supposed to be in the sun given the fact that I’m on more pills than everyone booked into the Betty Ford Clinic put together, but sometimes I am stupid and go for it anyway.

By about four-thirty we started packing it up. We had a few stragglers, but no one was buying much.

We dropped prices to ridiculous lows. Do you have a penny? TAKE THE SHIT.

We packed for about two hours, and wound up with about fifteen large garbage bags of clothes and shoes for Amvets and about ten boxes of crap that we just chunked out into the alley for the garbage pickers to rifle through.

Sout’ Side garbage pickers are intense. You can put something, anything, out in the alley, and it’s gone in an hour. Anything.

Perhaps we should have done that to begin with.

Anyway, we made about three hundred bucks, which is neither awful nor great.

I’m going to post the rest of the big furniture on Craigslist and put the small stuff in the alley. Simple dimple.

And how was YOUR weekend?

So, I’ve been perusing a couple of dating sites for quite some time now, and I have discovered something rather ugly about myself, something rather dark and dim about my nature that actually pains me:

I am an ageist.

I don’t like older men.

I don’t like *most* older men, I should say. I don’t like older men unless they’re, well, hot.

Lately I have had a barrage of mail from men who are, shall we say, well past their prime; and while I do reply to said men, my heart isn’t in it at all.

For starters, many of them send old photos, as if they’re trying to hide their age, and that just pisses me off.

I had a man send me a photo yesterday that must have been a good forty years old. To quote my good friend Sue, “it was taken at his high school reunion, and he graduated with Moses”.

While he wasn’t THAT old, the photo did have a twenties sort of vibe, including a tiny little mustache.

I then proceeded to make her pee in her pants by talking about what we would do on our date, including the Charleston, buying hooch, talking about FDR’s policies, frequenting the local speakeasy, and seeing a silent film.

All jokes aside, I don’t understand why men don’t date women their own age. (DAD, I’m looking at YOU.)

I don’t really feel I’d have very much in common with a man in his fifties unless he was really a hip sort of man. I don’t know. Perhaps I just have yet to be proven wrong, and perhaps the bad haircuts and jowly faces in the photos I am sent are not helping matters much.

I’m not saying that I’m hot shit on a silver platter, mind you, but Lord, I don’t want a cold turd on a paper plate!

These men often seem to be highly sexualized, as well, which is all fine and great and good, since I am as well, but I am truly not looking for an IM conversation that goes like this:

(I think you can guess which person is me. Hint: I punctuate.)

Hi
Hello.
hows it going
Good, and you?
good
Tell me a little about yourself.
do you like to fuck
?
i have a big cockk
OK, well…
u wanna suck my cock
Sorry, I have to go.

This is an accurate representation of several IM conversations I have had over the last few days, and sadly, they’re about as intelligent as it gets.

I don’t know what about my photo says “I’m your little go-to girl for sexting”, but apparently something does.

I guess I need to drape myself in Victorian garb and look all prim and proper.

The younger men can be just as bad, don’t get me wrong, but they’re rarely as bold.

I would date a nice older man if I found him attractive and he seemed to be intelligent and we had some shared interests. However, the men I’ve met don’t fit the bill.

I do find myself frequently attracted to younger men, which makes me feel slightly pervy. Men in their twenties. Rowr.

Does this make me an ageist?

I’m disheartened today. If I wanted a father figure, I would call up my dad and have a nice cup of coffee. I certainly wouldn’t be trolling for sex on Yahoo.

I’m trancejen on Yahoo, by the way, should any of you like to chat. And I do mean CHAT, not have virtual sex. I’m full up to my ears in virtual sex.

Happy Thursday. Go out and have sex the old-fashioned way.

This weekend marks our last garage/moving sale; and I, for one, cannot wait, because watching people Christian me down to a dollar for a fifty dollar dress is something that I dearly look forward to, especially when I am sitting in the hot, blazing sun.

Yesterday I purged my closet and dresser drawers and came up with over a hundred items that I don’t wear or haven’t worn in years. I had no idea I was such a clothing packrat. My first instinct would be to sell this stuff on eBay and actually get fair prices, but I decided to just say “fuck it” and chuck everything into the garage sale.

EBay is, for the moment, too much damned work.

I also gleaned a pretty hefty amount of stuff for Amvets, and that is also where we’ll be donating the stuff that doesn’t sell during the sale.

As always, this is a family affair, and my aunts will be over in the wee hours of the morning with their reading glasses and cash boxes in hand, and we will eat donuts while hanging clotheslines and talk family gossip while shouting out various prices to neighbors.

It would be sort of fun if I didn’t feel I was being screwed so badly.

In other news, we are also trying to find out everything we can about becoming landlords.

I am moving into this with much fear and trepidation, because this particular hood seems notorious for trashing property that isn’t theirs, based on what I have seen.

I think that strong credit checks are in order, and also current home inspections, lie detector tests, and regular visits from the Orkin man.

You never know about people and bugs.

In still other news, the guy I went out with seems to have flaked in that there has been no mention of another date.

We were supposed to go out again, and then allegedly got stuck at work and allegedly forgot his phone with my number in it and allegedly could not call me to report that he couldn’t make it. He apologized, but now things seem to have cooled off, leading me to believe that the entire story he concocted was indeed Boolsheet.

So, there you have it.

I believe that the problem with online dating is that there is such a huge pool of willing women out there that men begin to believe we are expendable and start to treat us as such.

It’s incredibly sucky.

In still other news, nothing has been said outright, but it looks as if I have won the Cat Wars and will be taking Skittles with me during the move. Score one for Jen.

Happy Wednesday.

I can’t begin to tell you how this small piece of metal in my nose has had the e-mail rolling in on the dating site. People mention it more often than not. I think it’s a Bad Girl factor. Nose ring = girl who will do very, very dirty things (I can neither confirm nor deny).

Yesterday I got an e-mail from some dude from the hood who said, and this is verbatim, mind you: “Your nose ring is hawt. Message me back.”

I haven’t yet replied, but I think I am going to send the following:

Dear Lover of Stainless Steel Body Modifications,

Thank you for both your interest and your whimsical creative spelling.

I find that several gentlemen are interested in the steel ring that pierces my nose, therefore I thought I’d take a moment and tell you all about it. It’s a 12-gauge ring crafted of fine surgical steel, and it was inserted by a lovely tattooed gentleman at a local tattoo shop near my home.

It did not cause me any pain, however, when the cork was inserted prior to the piercing I was rather uncomfortable due to the small size of my nostrils, which is evident in my profile photo.

People often ask me whether I ever get hardened mucus, or “boogers”, on my nasal piercing, which is a relevant and interesting question. It’s actually only happened once, and rather recently. I was sitting on the sofa watching television, and I felt a strange sensation, as if my nose ring was maladjusted. I went to turn it, and lo and behold! A large formation of hardened mucus was attached, much to my chagrin. I dealt with it in the usual way. Perhaps I should clarify that and say that I procured a Kleenex and removed said booger thusly and did not flick it away or pick it or eat it or anything in that vein, as one might imagine if one were a less sanitary type of person. As I have no idea what type of person you might be, I have no idea what direction your mind might take.

What else can I tell you about my nose ring? I can tell you that my mother vehemently disapproves of it. However, her opinion of my body art does not hold much weight with me, much to her great displeasure. My twelve-year-old son also believes that I would look much better without it. Obviously you disagree, which tells me that we would perhaps be suited for a long and fruitful relationship.

Obviously my nasal piercing signifies that I am of a highly sexual nature and am well-versed in the most carnal and depraved acts. This is exactly why I got it, and I am pleased that you have picked up on that. My level of sexual attractiveness has been raised exponentially with that small piece of metal, thank the gods, and for that I remain ever thankful. One of my greatest desires is to perform oral sex upon a man I don’t know very well in the front seat of a car on a first date, and I do hope that you will help me fulfill that desire in the very near future.

Hopefully I have both further piqued your interest and answered any questions you might have had about my piercing. I very much look forward to another message from you, as you seem to be the kind of man with whom I could have a serious future.

Respectfully,

Jen Trance

I think that’s totally appropriate.

Happy Thursday.