When we’re not listening to P.G. Wodehouse (mebbe 10% of any given day) I have been playing Schoolhouse Rock like a demented pusher.
RIP, Blossom Dearie.
However, since I have the box set, this means the lists include the tribute songs.
Most of them are okay, but whenever the Lemonheads cover of My Hero, Zero comes on my kid shudders and quietly clicks to the next song.
He really does have exquisitely good taste.
It is some variety of school vacation hereabouts but I failed to book tickets for, um, anything, so we’re listening to P.G. Wodehouse and catching up on the news…. or rather the “allegedly more upscale stories reported by papers other than the fabulous Daily Mail.”
This is the best so far have been about exciting new crisp flavors.
Don’t believe anyone could possibly market “Cajun Squirrel” as a food item? Well, Walkers did.
For an extra special treat, try the ‘flavour facts’ option on the website and watch one of the most famous chefs in the UK act like he actually cares.
WTF is up with Heston Blumenthal anyway? Snail porridge? I don’t get it. Ick.
Anyway, the only person I’ve met who has actually tried any of these crisps was very enthusiastic. Five minutes later we were comparing brain injuries – my skull has been fractured three times, but he has a very impressive scar after undergoing a form of trepanation to fix a massive bleed following, uh, moshing.
Clearly, nobody won that particular credibility contest.
Though I would never eat squirrel flavored anything.
The pain in my neck was so intense I was nauseous, dizzy, and my jaw kept locking up with the stress.
One afternoon I also received some bad news from my hometown, and although I was not much interested in talking Byron cornered me and wanted to chat. After making my dismal mood clear I tried to quietly excuse myself, but my charming companion embarked on a rant about….. his fear of male pattern hair loss.
For this particular person the concern is purely imaginary – he has as much hair as he ever did in youth, and all sets of grandparents and parents demonstrably kept their hair until death.
Beyond that, this is one of those “normal” problems I have little patience with, given my history. I defy anyone to wake up following cancer treatment at age thirteen with chunks of hair coming out in big handfuls to grow up at all let alone arrive in middle age with all their empathy and tolerance intact.
I did my best to reassure and then joke my way out of the conversation but he just kept getting more and more wound up, even after I pointed out that I was a wee bit too distraught to be a happy little helper.
When he continued I put up a finger and said So, are you persisting because you are trying to distract me, or because you are self-centerered and vain?
He paused then replied Uh, the latter, I guess.
Yesterday morning I bravely ventured forth to have a massage, hugely disturbed by the thought of strangers touching my neck.
I had forgotten to worry about the fact that I live in a small town, so the odds that it would be a stranger hovered somewhere around zero. In fact, the first thing the therapist said was You’re Karen’s friend, right?
Uh, yeah.
Then we sat down for the obligatory intake questions, including Do you have any health problems?
I opened my eyes very wide and said No.
Why did I do that?
Who knows. Clearly pathological behavior, but hey! I’m allowed the occasional twitch!
Especially since she would figure it out shortly, as she then proceeded to do deep tissue massage of my torso, home to three hundred plus biopsy scars, and neck, sliced halfway round to hack out massive malignant tumors.
This very nice and professional woman hesitated when she caught her first glimpse of the scars, and nearly stopped when her fingers encountered the large supposedly “benign” thing growing in the right side of my neck.
She did not at any point ask me what the heck she was looking at.
British people are so polite! Or…. something.
Other than the strange suspension of narrative integrity, the experience was good. My neck feels much better now.
Though I miss Ana Helena’s wit and brutality, blasting Scopotones or punk music or the Velvet Underground and saying feel the pain or you will never get better as she pounded away, somehow in the madness restoring the function of my right arm, and my sense of smell, lost more than a decade earlier.
Or to state it a different way: I want to go home.
Somewhere on the train journey from London to Cambridge I managed to throw out my neck.
It has been suggested that the pain is psychosomatic and derived from my hatred of this city, but I’m not buying that nonsense.
Unfortunately for me, pain is a purely physiological experience. If it hurts, something is broken.
Hot baths, ice packs, stretching, and tentative prodding have not helped at all so I will almost certainly need to visit some kind of professional to get it fixed.
I loathe, detest, and abhor strangers touching me. Especially my face or neck.
Though the prospect of a medical procedure is certainly better than sitting around contemplating the memories the pain brings up.
Like spending the majority of the fifth and sixth grades in a neck brace and arm sling.
Yes, like Joan Cusack aka Geek Girl # 1 in Sixteen Candles….. my early adolescence was no fun at all.
The river flooded and I forgot to put my gangplank out!
Like I’ve mentioned before (though I suspect nobody believes it) my life functions largely at the mercy of a rickety barter system. This week, that has meant that I’m reading research statements in exchange for some tech work.
To call the task tedious would be the understatement of the decade. Though I do get to issue dire warnings against excessive use of e.g. and similar poor grammar choices!
I’ve continued to ponder where to spend my precious few weeks in the states, while evaluating salacious stories that have been trickling in.
What a conundrum; I really can’t decide who to visit. Several people I would have once thought fun have turned their attention to sabotaging marriages (their own or others). Why, I do not know, though I suppose it might be a developmental plateau of some sort. Like turning five, or thirteen.
These antics baffle me on a fundamental level, though I’ve been rifling through my mental files and cross-referencing with old stories in an effort to understand.
For instance: once, years ago, I was casually chatting with one of my rock star friends at some bar and his girlfriend turned up and was so visibly enraged I thought she was going to leap across the table and attack me.
What was I talking to her partner about? Grotesque abdominal surgeries. Even a backwards person like yours truly can assert that does not count as flirting. No matter how much cleavage I had on display.
Though I just shrugged and wandered off – thinking weird, but whatever. I wouldn’t have even remembered the incident except, within the next twenty-four hours, she tried to seduce my husband.
I was puzzled, and that has remained my dominant reaction to similar situations. Why are some people so possessive, if they also engage in poaching? If you are capable of having one thought (this person is my possession) then how is the other (I will now steal the possession of another person) tenable?
I don’t understand either belief, let alone how people maintain both at once. I have many faults, but I am not a hypocrite.
It would take several more years before I went on the Hunt for Bad Boys and Lumberjacks with Ana Erotica, who announced the explicit operating principle Straight Girls Have No Solidarity.
Oh. Really? I never knew.
While it would be foolish to make generalizations about such a large slice of humanity, this was an illuminating instruction – it had seriously never occurred to me that anyone would think like that.
When I was seventeen I was quite shocked to find my best friend (since kindergarten) making out with my boyfriend in the laundry room. Not because I felt betrayed by him, oh no. What I failed to grasp then or ever was why she made that choice.
I still don’t really understand why she would have picked a few seconds of reckless affection in a dank basement over the entire lifetime of experience we had enjoyed. Even if he was one of maybe two heterosexual males in our scene.
Wandering along behind Ana Erotica as she rampaged across the Hill that week I watched with amazement as she racked up conquests and made enemies. Along the way I took lots of notes and made several enduring friendships with people she rejected as Not Dirty Enough. Heck, I even seem to be stuck forever dealing with the truly heinous boys who caused all the trouble that inspired the campaign – and I dislike them both.
You have to remember that the majority of my early social life was conducted amongst activists and children, two social groups notorious for highly calibrated ethics. Like them, I am a purist, completely loyal to first principles even at my most wicked.
It was clear to me at a very young age that antics like fucking your way through the housemates and/or their loved ones made it very difficult to split up the monthly phone bill. This lesson can be extrapolated to fit almost any other scenario where you might need to choose between having a family, community, job, or …. a quickie.
I know lots of people who competently practice non-monogamy. That is not what I am talking about – there is a big gap between consensual ‘open’ relationships and the active, deliberate destruction of emotional and practical resources some of my friends are engaging in at the moment.
I may be hedonistic, but I understand and respect boundaries. This is, I think, a reasonable way to view the world.
Happy, happy, happy birthday wishes Iain Aitch!
The last time he showed up to visit he handed me a present and I pushed him at a room full of about one hundred strangers brandishing it and shouting Hey everyone! Look! Iain just published a new book! You should definitely buy it!
We’re always laughing too much to actually take a good picture, but I’m absolutely delighted he is my friend:
Yesterday started with a stroppy teenager screaming that I had ruined his life by moving here. I mildly replied It wasn’t my idea but of course, that response was not appreciated.
Then I urgently needed to print a draft but found that I could not do so from Word.
Q: When has Word ever worked for me?
A: Never.
Too bad my career is in, oh, publishing, huh? It is just so frivolous that I need to be able to handle and produce, well, documents…..
I did not repudiate January this year but I am extremely thankful the cursed month is almost over.
Oh, and, btw, guess what I miss most today in the Something I Never Appreciated category?
Free weekly alternative newspapers.
Of whatever varying quality.
I bruise easily – the slightest jolt leaves weltering marks – and I am also quite clumsy. This means that I generally look like I have been mixin’ it up even when I have mostly been sitting around reading books.
One of my local charming companions finds this hilarious and likes to grab whatever piece of flesh that can be reached and take a big bite chomp chomp chomp because it is apparently amusing to watch me trudge through annoying social situations with visible bite marks.
Um, thanks.
However, after a recent encounter, I realized that one of my scars had fallen prey to the attack. Not too surprising, since I have approximately three hundred between my waist and chin. However, the ‘normal’ behavior of scars more than twenty years old is just to, well, hang out. They sit there, flat and flaccid, without reproach or any other message to deliver.
This one turned red, then swelled up, and remained inflamed. For about ten days. Given that it is an area that has been hacked away three times because a malignant tumor persists in returning…. well.
I’m kind of passive aggressive about the whole skin cancer thing, but this reminded me that if it has been four and a half years since the last positive biopsy, it has been exactly that amount of time since my last check-up.
Shhh! Don’t tell! I’m supposed to go in every six months….
I just really, really hate visiting hospitals. And while I heart the NHS most sincerely, they provide an institutional aesthetic that I have trouble enduring since I was a sick kid in the 1970’s.
Wanna see visual evidence? Hallway, cancer ward, leading teaching hospital in the UK, 2008:
