Caterwauling

I swear, some of the people who contribute to my newspaper should all form an Ice Capades team … and the ice should crack under the sheer weight of their stupidity alone.

One chick wrote in at great length on how devastated the country became after Sept. 11, 2002. Um, did I miss something on that day? Or is she that discombobulated that she forgets what year our world fell apart? (She’s running for agency president, BTW.) The same chick sent in four photos of herself and told us to pick which one we wanted to use, but then to send it to her for approval of our choice. Um, why the hell, then, would she send four photos if she wasn’t OK with all of them?!?!

That’s not even going to touch today’s e-mail battle about our Problem Child division president who keeps sending in photos of herself every month and writing 1,000-word cutlines that are libelous on a good day and just plain false on other days. A group of 11 former presidents have launched a flame campaign, directed partly toward the newspaper, about how we need to discredit the Problem Child. I loathe the woman just as much as the next person, but when a leader sends me information, all I do is cut it to fit (and to have the photo run as small as possible) — I don’t exactly call and verify that someone with power over me is blowing smoke out of her ass (and up everyone else’s, apparently). That would cost me my job, duh.

My final complaint is the fact that these yo-yos need to go back and watch them some “Sesame Street” so they can learn how to count. I do not understand how, when given a word limit of 200, 300, 500 or 1,000 words, how these moonbats can write 2,000 words and wonder why we get mad at them. One dildo in particular — I gave her a limit of 500 words — she turned in 1,500. I sent it back to her and told her that she should be the one to cut it (it was a courtesy on my part). So she sends it back at 1,200 words and asked if she cut enough. *scream* So I sliced out the next 700 words myself, and she had the audacity to tell me to e-mail what I did to her boss so she could approve it. (Um, don’t think so.)

I think I have a bruise on my forehead in the shape of my space bar key. 🙂

This one’s for Jane.

I’m safely at work (not being paid, as it’s a furlough day, so I essentially cleaned/decorated my office and uploaded photos. Heh), away from the beasts, but if you want to know what a typical day in our life is like, then visit that link to Maddie’s page.

Here are my two favorite shots of Maddie (taking her bag of catnip prisoner!) and Short Bus Kadi (at my feet, begging for food, as always!):

Funny gal Margaret Cho shows there’s a hell of a lot more to her than jokes about being a famous fag hag. I was prepared to be amused, but instead, I am full of insights and rage and sadness and everything else I never expected.

Read it. All. Now.

Rejected headline: In which the infidel reminisces about publishing a magazine under the bold cover headline, ‘What if God were one of us?’

Talk about overdosing on nostalgia (again), but I just found an old issue of my college magazine … when yours truly was the editor.

My editorship (then) and my editorship (now) are two different eras. My stories and cutlines were so ballsy and defiant then. Shit, my issue went to bed one week after a proposed merger between Point Park College (a nonsectarian theater/journalism school with a high gay/lesbian/bi population) and Duquesne University (a really good — and really Catholic — school) was announced — so I marched my staff — all of us clad in PPC T-Shirts and sweatshirts, BTW — up to the big marble sign outside of Duquesne and had our staff photo taken outside of it. The cutline reads: “Point St. Duquesne: The infidels of The Pioneer staff wish to pay homage to the Holy Roman Empire.”

I went on to write up an interview with the president of Duquesne for the pompous asshole that he was. I blasted our school trustees for lying to us, claiming to be searching for a president but all the while planning to become an affiliate campus of Duquesne. I got everyone on my staff to submit thoughts/fears/concerns on the proposed alliance and I printed every last one of them in a collage. I profiled the woman in charge of recruiting for my college, and I printed even her off-color remarks and asides, just to show the people who were really in charge of our lives at that time.

And I got away with all of it.

Damn, I had fire.

These days, I tiptoe and whisper and shake my head and run to my office and lick my wounds. The only thing I can do around my office (other than fight the good fight) is to write stories about topics that normally don’t appear in magazines like mine. I take deep breaths and plot strategies to present ideas and information to people who can either make me really happy or make me really mad.

Back then, I could tell people to shove it. I also had people to whom I reported who would back nearly everything I said or did because they truly wanted us to have real-world experience and for us to make a product of which we’d be damn proud — then and in the future. God love Joe Knupsky for letting me alternate between being the fiesty readhead and the fearless fuck-up routine that I’ve perfected over the years.

The sad thing is, Joe is teaching at Duquene these days. 🙂 PPC lost a great spirit in him, and in Mark Vehec as well, who’s doing techie stuff at Duquesne right along with him.

For those interested, PPC and Duquesne parted ways (i.e., no alliance). PPC brought in a new president, and for as long as I had a leading voice in the student media, no one championed her more than I did. She has since turned the school around, doubled enrollment and added majors and departments. I hear PPC might apply for university status in the next year or two, and that’s great. But I will always remember it as the little college that, on one hand, prepared me for the bullshit of non-profit management … but it also nurtured that snarky little rebel in me who just doesn’t have enough opportunities to shine.

I’m going to keep this magazine handy for awhile — to remind me how far I’ve come and how many screaming fits I’ve had with non-editorial people in my day. 🙂 Will I ever be understood again?!?!

I just realized that I have an immense fear of going to the laundromat — not, surprisingly, because of the questionable quality of its other patrons, but because the last thing I did, the day that my appendicitis struck, was go to the laundromat.

Amazing how phobias develop.

I’ve been meaning to do laundry for weeks, but the thought of dragging 10 bags of clothes to the car and going to some ghetto laundromat just makes me ill.

Besides, “Message in a Bottle” is still on. *swoon* I’ll leave after that. Maybe. 🙂

I love this movie. Never lived it though — I usually find men who are attached to their mothers, their exes or to OPPs.

The noise around here quieted down around 11 last night, at which time I made myself a few cocktails and tried to forget about my frayed nerves. Of course, at 9 a.m., another car alarm went off. The thing is, I could tell it was an accident — the poor guy parked next to me set it off and jumped 10 feet. He scurred for a few minutes to make it stop, and when it did, several people around here started honking and yelling. Funny how nobody said a word when it was the greaseball who was doing it incessantly last night.

I put up some Halloween decorations last night. Had to lock the cats in my bedroom to do so. I hung 25 feet of shimmery spiders from the ceiling. In theory, it would’ve been easy, but this is me we’re talking about. They’re hanging by pushpins and Scotch tape. I wait for one cat to breathe on them, and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down, with their nasty breath. 😉

Some moron has been setting off his car alarm (purposely!) for 45 minutes. Add that to the throng of brats who convene beneath my balcony (oh, god, I pity the guy who lives below me) and then the brat in the next building who has been blowing a party horn nonstop for two hours, I am ready to fucking MURDER someone!

Oh, and I’m out of cigarettes. Joy.

One of the little monsters threw a basketball at the sign above my car. The ball bounced and rolled into my tire. I saw the whole thing and gave him the poison darts. I gave the darts to the asshole with the car alarm too — who, just my luck, is parked directly under my bedroom window.

I am giving everyone nasty looks and snarky comments, but I am not complaining to management because when I throw my housewarming party, I want my guests to make all the noise they want. If someone complains, I will kill them on sight, after what they and their kids make me put up with every fucking night of my life.

You know the rest.

I got up early to clean the kitchen and to start the process of putting my 5,000 word magnets up on the fridge (it’ll never be finished, BTW). I played referee while the cats ate (i.e., I kept yelling at Kadi every time she tried to attack Maddie to get to her bowl, while her own bowl sat half-full), made some coffee, and overdosed on nostalgia.

Today is my beloved Samantha Jones’ second birthday — I bought her on this day in 2001 and didn’t even know how to drive her. 🙂

Today is also the birthday of someone I used to care about (Brat, for anyone interested). But for the life of me, I can’t really remember what he looked like, other than the visage in some drunken photos of us that I have around here somewhere.

But I thought back to about this time four or five years ago, when I was (surprise) planning for a Halloween happy hour at my place. I was putting the word magnets all over the fridge door (and I had far fewer magnets back then!). I remembered the scent of my then-favorite Glade Plug-ins — tropical mist. On a whim (this year), I bought a pack of them. And I guess the familiar scent, coupled with the familiar activity, took me back in time for a minute.

Last night I dreamed about one of my old and dear friends from Pittsburgh. While life took us down such separate paths, I am glad to exchange the occasional e-mail with him. But he was so clear in my dream — I dreamed that I was staying in some far-away hotel with my colleages (because we travel once a year to host a conference), and I bumped into him. We had breakfast in this huge, wall-to-wall glass lobby and laughed while we pondered the aesthetic and the esoteric, as we’d done so many times before.

I miss those conversations — we had so many right in my tropical-mist scented kitchens and living rooms. And I guess, when I awoke, I was kind of sad that those days really are over. I felt alive when I was with him — that my dreams and thoughts and plans really mattered. I always felt beautiful around him (even though, when I see the photos from those parties, I was a drunken, slovenly mess in every last shot!) — he was a person who looked at your heart before he saw the rest of you, and he found immense light and beauty in everything that came within close proximity of him.

And the feeling was mutual.

I wanted to drop him an e-mail today, to say all of this. Maybe he’ll wander by the website and see it. Or not. I just have to laugh that I feel more comfortable telling 50,000 people how much I miss him today, yet I can’t even write a private e-mail to that effect.

I’m so glad my old friends Dawn and Rob will be here, because I adore them and and also because they were such a part of my life — such a part of me — during those years. But they will serve as a small reminder that I can’t bring everybody from my old life into my new world. But I can bring the magnets, the air fresheners and the memories, and at least it’s something.

There are new beginnings and new memories to be made, though, in my rooms that now smell like Glade’s butterfly garden and Renuzit’s mandarin-and-green tea and my Nag Champa incense. But for all the changes, it never hurts for a moment to stop and remember who I was and the people who loved me because — and maybe in spite — of it. 🙂

Alternate headline: This is what we’ve waited two weeks for. Why god why?

1. Do you watch sports? If so, which ones?

Sheet wrestling (i.e., porn). Used to watch tennis. Also used to just go to the gym and watch all the buff people lifting stuff. Now I could give a shit less.

2. What/who are your favorite sports teams and/or favorite athletes?

I am a fan of the Pittsburgh teams, mostly because it’s the only city that outfits all of its major sports teams in the same colors (I am a sucker for men who can color-coordinate) — da Pens (Penguins), da Stillers (Steelers) and even those overpaid losers da Bucs (Pirates).

3. Are there any sports you hate?

It’s more that I hate the commentators. I can have sports on in the background without being too weirded out, but I’m not going to willingly sit down and watch.

Another thing I hate ABOUT sports is when you’re dating a guy and his team loses the Super Bowl. Every fucking time I’ve been with somebody around that magical time of year, it has been a given that I will NOT get laid because he’s too depressed to do anything but lift beer after beer to his mouth and then pass out on the couch. Not even a blow job can mend their broken little hearts. 🙂

4. Have you ever been to a sports event?

Back when Three Rivers Stadium still stood, I saw the Pirates. Actually, I was there selling raffle tickets for my then-employers, so I didn’t really watch the game. I went to PNC Park, the new baseball stadium, after it was built — but that was mostly for the great restaurants and certainly not to watch the Pirates lose play.

And then when Heinz Field was built for the football team right next door to PNC Park, I went there for social events with other young professionals. I even stood on the field for a minute. The drinks were overpriced but the food was good. And the view of the city from both of the new stadiums was just freakin’ breathtaking.

5. Do/did you play any sports (in school or other)? How long did you play?

This will surprise everyone who knows me, but I actually did work with our women’s volleyball team in high school (no, silly, I couldn’t play — I ducked every time the ball came near me!), but I ran the scoreboard. My (then) friends Judd and Stephanie were the team’s statisticians, and I basically had to have them tell me when to give a team a point.

I do have a great memory from that time, though. Our team was full of the most incredibly sweet and academically gifted people, but volleyball champs, well, they were not. They only won one game during the whole season, and that was thanks to me sneaking points into the scoreboard when nobody was looking.

Oh, that was a riot. Judd came over to me and said I needed to remove some points because his and Stephanie’s sheets only showed that they had made X number of points. I just kind of looked at him blankly and said, “Well, I was keeping up on my own, and I’m pretty sure I called it right.”

I don’t know if he ever knew what I was up to, but he realized — as I had — that the other team hadn’t brought any statisticians. And the reason I even did it was because it was Senior Recognition Night, and those girls had worked so hard and felt like they had nothing to show for it.

At any rate, for the rest of the night, whenever I would see fit to add a point (and don’t get me wrong — the girls were doing great — I probably only padded the score by about five or six points), Judd and Stephanie would hurry up and credit the point to someone on their sheets.

What’s funny as all hell is that the other team had a HUGE parent turnout, but not a fucking one of them raised a question.

I retired from the team after that game — there were more to be played, but I was carrying four advanced placement courses and was editor of the school paper and the (worthless) president of the school’s national honor society (not to mention that Judd’s and my friendship was starting on its path to hell in a handbasket). But I, like the ladies, had the joy of tasting a sweet dose of success. They went on to play their little hearts out with renewed confidence in themselves, and I have secretly known for 11 years that I might have had a little something to do with that. 🙂

Rejected headline: Yes, kids, even YOU can buy a crack house

*updated twice*

I went to Urban Outfitters’ website to purchase the newest game sweeping the nation, Ghettopoly, but “Due to customer concerns, we no longer sell the game.”

That’s OK — I visited our fine friends at Ghettopoly.com and found, in addition to the item I wanted: Hoodopoly, Hiphopopoly, Thugopoly and Redneckopoly, which are currently in development and on my holiday shopping list (particularly Redneckopoly — as a former Pittsburgher, I shall easily win any game!).

Sure, the masses are crying about how horrible this game is supposed to be, but I worked in the buttcrack of the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh, where my brand-new car was attacked by gang members when she was two months old. Not to mention the, um, array of people adorning the streets and either whistling at, throwing up on, or slurring toward you as you scurried from your building to your car down the street.

All this hype is SO making me want to buy a game pronto. Seriously, no media hype = nobody really wants it. But all these groups had to make waves, so now, demand is up. Oh, these are gonna be worth some serious money someday — if you do buy it, don’t even open it. Sell it in a decade for cash mon-ay!!!

Update

It’s on backorder till Nov. 10. And shipping was $9, but what the hell, right? 😉 I want it just for the little smokey-tree shaped “playa” piece!!!

This just in

They even have a Cafe Shop! Get yer ghetto thong!!!