In which I’ve seen in the past week both of my parents and all of their siblings and nearly all of their siblings’ spouses and children.
For no particular reason, both of my parents came to town to visit this week. They’ve been divorced for twenty-seven years, so it’s strange that they should both have shown up at the same time. Made my week pretty busy, actually.
My dad rolled into town in his RV with his brother on board, and we all went to see my aunt, their sister, for dinner. There was a large feast at my house with my mom and all of her siblings. My dad took me out to lunch on Tuesday and out to dinner last night. There was ice cream cake at the house for G’ma’s birthday. Suffice it to say, the diet suffered this week.
Hanging out with family is informative. I know from having looked at a bunch of my female relatives exactly where my tits are going to be in twenty years. I have learned that my dad and I are extroverts and my mother and brother are introverts. I listened to the Hall women tell me most emphatically that I’m not pudgy. I rediscovered that Morgans will drink until the bar closes.
Pretty cool, really, to be back around family. In the 15 years I spent in the Midwest, I saw my mom twice and my dad maybe five times, and the rest of my family only once: the weekend I got married. I didn’t really have anyone around to bug me about birthdays, holidays, family events, grave sites, and the like.
I was an island. I liked it.
But I also like being back in the middle of my family again. Walla Walla is where my parents are from; this is where my relatives come to come home.
Of course, this relative-fest in the middle of September probably means that no one will be around for the holidays, but that’s okay. G’ma and I will eat cookies and drink mugs of tea without them.
In which your intrepid narrator will be Out Of The Office.
I’ve been telling everyone I’m going to New York for about four years. This year, I SWORE I’d get there NO MATTER WHAT… but then I changed jobs and thought, well, the job change was all for the good, but I bet I won’t be getting any vacation time this fall, damn it.
But! Since there’s no hurt in asking, I asked the new job if I could take a week off already even though I’m brand new, and they, awesomely, said yes!
I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see Deboka, and Jake, and Derby, and Barbara, and hopefully VUBOQ too, and maybe meet some online friends IRL for the first time! YAY!
In which this is a very special OMG SO MUCH FAMILY edition.
Friday after work I jogged home and took a 3-minute shower. The boys picked me up in the band van at 6:30 and we drove to an RV park in Wallula to play the opening night of a biker rally.
When we arrived, there was no one there but the band, the sound guy, and the dozen employees of the rally.
We set up. Darkness fell. The only lights on the whole property were the two on the bandstand. A biker chick took her top off on stage, and a biker dude ran around with a giant latex cock hanging out of his fly. By the end of our last set, there were probably 80 people there.
I heard there were about 800 people the next night. Sigh.
Saturday, MY WHOLE ENTIRE FREAKING FAMILY SHOWED UP IN TOWN OMGWTFBBQ. Moms, dads, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, oh my! After dinner with the maternal side, my brother and I went out with our uncle Dangerous Dan (our dad’s brother) and painted the town about fifty shades of red. There are no pictures yet because my cell phone was dead and the other pictures are on digital cameras at home.
Sunday I was pretty useless and laid around nursing a hangover when I wasn’t chatting with my mom or my aunt at the house.
Today I’m sitting at work talking on the phone and doing my job, but am mostly waiting for PAY DAY. Gonna buy a plane ticket to NEW YORK CITY tomorrow, oh yes I am.
New York! I’m comin’ to visit you!
In which I’m a little worried about my instrument.
I’m playing the Rally In The Valley – a biker rally, natch – tomorrow night. Outside. At night. It will most likely be both damp and chilly: not good conditions for a weak voice.
Then I’m supposed to play a chichi benefit gig on Saturday afternoon in the Tri-cities.
Both of which are awesome, of course, except for the fact that my instrument did not respond well to being used during band practice last night. I sang for less than an hour, and not even in full voice, and today woke up sounding like a bullfrog.
I have enough voice to talk on the phone at work, but I (a) don’t think I’m going to make it all the way through the gig tomorrow night and (b) will probably be utterly voiceless on Saturday.
This is bad because I want to do a good job at these gigs and I want the money.
I haven’t had a voice-related problem not concurrent with an upper respitory infection in twenty years, but I have been through it. The only cure is time and liquids and rest; and if I don’t do those things the instrument will just drop out completely and there’s nothing I can do about it. With gigs to do, the whole thing is just bummin’ me out.
In other news, my dad is arriving in town on Friday, and my mom is arriving on Saturday and they’re both going to expect to be able to hang out with me. (They divorced when I was 13 so it’s pretty amusing that they’re both showing up the same week; I haven’t seen either of them in a few years.)
Query: is it possible for your parents to give you laryngitis remotely?
In which this is what I did with myself on my three-day weekend.
Thursday I went out and, inexplicably, got drunk after band practice. I think the sober dude who was driving me around – to three different bars – might have been hoping I’d get drunk enough to lay him, but I’m old and crafty so his plan (if it fact there even was one) failed! Hah hah!
Friday SUCKED. Talk about a monster headache. Whoo boy. Ouch.
Friday night, I played the Pepsi stage at the Walla Walla county fair with the boys. The gig was meh (we had to compete with the sounds coming from the rodeo, which was about TWELVE FEET AWAY), but there was a consolation and it was falafel (cue angelic choir):
That’s the first falafel and hummus I’ve eaten that I didn’t have to make myself in two years! It was freakin’ delicious!
Saturday, I went and saw my stylist Jolene and she colored my hair. It is now this awesome color… er, these awesome colors:
Since I had a gig at one that afternoon and my coloring went long, I didn’t get a trim. I’m going after work tonight for that.
The gig was playing by the pool at Basel Cellars for stomp (basically, drunk people walking on grapes for no good reason). This was the view from my mic:
We played stomp there last year too. Although the hors d’oeuvres are yummy, playing on the opposite side of the pool from the party is bit like being aural wallpaper.
Saturday night, I went with my drummer to Wildhorse casino and saw an R&B act, and then we hung out with the band – a really smokin’ rhythm section – until the wee hours of the morning. There was a lot of really cool discussion about music, family, poverty, the music business, and personal anecdotes. I had a blast.
I woke up the next day with laryngitis.
Sunday and Monday I read The Magicians. It fucking rocked. So much that I even went to the author’s website and sent him a message telling him so. I’ve been having such crap luck with novels lately that I felt he needed to know that I hadn’t devoured a novel with such one-pointed devotion in a long time, and that I thanked him from the bottom of my reader’s heart to have had a taste of that again. The main character is hard to like (because he’s wholly and unsalvageably emotionally stunted) but it was still a really great story and a wonderful read.
I spent most of Sunday and Monday in silence, so the voice is nearly healed. I’d never really considered before that I make all of my money with my voice; if I were suddenly struck permanently mute I’d have to change jobs and hobbies altogether… how freaky is THAT?
In which I post about my life on Facebook, because the Internet is self-reflective like that.
I don’t know if it’s The CurseTM coming or I’ve just used up the day’s compassion for sloppy thinking, but when I logged into Facebook and saw the utterly meaningless meme traveling through it, I got a little worked up.
Many people are posting this as their status: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”
So, being me, I posted this: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care (unless they spent all their money on stupid shit and actually deserve to die), and no one should go broke because they get sick (unless it’s their own fault because they ate at McDonald’s three times a day for 27 years).”
Heh. Pretty clever, huh?
Apparently not. My friend Jake asked, “So… You don’t think we need health care reform? How disappointing, Mush! Who are you?”
Well, when your friend asks you who you are, you gotta answer! And this is what I said:
“Of course I want health care reform. But it ain’t just gonna suddenly be free awesome health care for everybody, now is it? I know from reading my Vonnegut that people are NOT all equal, and pretending that we are is idiotic because it leads to handicapping and I will be damned before I’ll accept handicapping to make me as dumb as the chick I just got off the phone with!
“In some schools, they don’t let sports teams win because they don’t want the losers to feel bad. This is what happens when we try to homogenize and make everyone equal. We’re not equal. Some are much better at living, much better at liberty, and much better at pursuing happiness. Others are stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or entitled, or just plain nasty.
“We are not all equal. We are entitled to equal opportunity under our country’s constitution, but we are not inherently equal in value or talent.
“Some people are deliberately more expensive, health care-wise, than others: smokers like myself, addicts, and the grossly obese, just to name a few. Do you want to pay for that?
“Right now we have a country full of obese, addicted, and old people. Do you want to pay for that? Do I? Hell, I’m poor enough I can’t pay for my own healthcare; how can I afford to pay for that family down the street, who, because of their choice to eat nothing but fast food, will all have diabetes and heart disease by the time they’re 35? Those conditions are both expensive to treat and avoidable.
“And although I respect the idea that everyone deserves to live, we don’t all deserve it equally. Pretending that every life is equally valuable is absurd: I myself don’t have as much value to my society as a gifted heart surgeon, but I do have more value than a 90-year-old with terminal cancer.
“So while I think that every effort should be made to save every life, I know that the world doesn’t work that way. If it did, we wouldn’t have the word ‘triage.’ In the UK, they say that deaths go up significantly during the last two months of the year because surgeons have quotas to fill and tend to quit doing operations after they’ve achieved them. People who need surgery in March are not inherently more valuable than people who need surgery in November, but they’re a lot less likely to die. Studies show that only one in five people who need surgery to reduce the risk of stroke actually get the surgery in time due to the way the healthcare system works there.
“Over here, if you’ve got the money, you get the surgery in time. So at least a portion of society gets adequate care… it just doesn’t happen to be the portion I’m in.
“There is in my estimation no way to make a perfectly fair system of health care in this world as it is, so today’s “post this as your status” Facebook meme is essentially empty. It doesn’t mean anything other than that we care in a half-assed way – only enough to repeat something toothless when it only takes us 5 seconds to do so.”
Let’s all remember that not too long ago I needed surgery myself, and I had no health insurance. Because of my extreme poverty the hospital gave me their services for free (somewhere around five grand worth) and it took me slightly over two years to pay off the surgeon, the lab, and the anesthesiologist. The only reason I’m not still paying it off is that my rent was only $50 a month during that period. That was LUCK, not worth. I didn’t “deserve” the excellent care just because I draw breath, and as a grown person I certainly hadn’t taken the responsible steps to grow an emergency nest egg or obtain health care insurance on my own. My results were, as I said, simply good luck.
So I’m not being a heartless bitch; I’m just saying, THINK ABOUT THIS, PEOPLE. Our system sucks, yes, but it may be that it sucks less than it could.
Thoughts?
In which I realize something about my generation. We distrust success.
Dear Starbucks,
Back when you were the new guy, we were super into you. We drank your coffee by the gallon. We drove out of our way to stop at your new stores on our way to work.
Then time passed, and you became this giant behemoth with stores on every single goddamned corner in the nation, and we dropped you like you were hot.
You had gone and done the unacceptable: you’d made it. You’d quit being our little local NW business-that-could, and become everybody’s damned coffee shop. You slut!
Now we avoid you because you’re no longer exclusive and hip and we go to local coffee shops instead. We talk shit about you whenever we see your green logo on a quaint downtown Main Street USA because your coffee ain’t like it used to be, back in the day when our love was new.
Well, being that all these truths are self-evident, I just wanted to let you know that I have a friend who recently started working for you and she’s changed my attitude. She overflows with enthusiasm when she talks about your corporate culture and your desire to give back with your ethical sourcing, environmental stewardship, and community involvement.
It occurs to me that you’re actually big enough to make a difference, if you really want to. The fact that you’ve over-saturated your market is our fault as much as yours: we threw money at you for twenty years. What were you supposed to do? Ignore it?
Keep up the good work. Be a good behemoth. I’m proud of you.
Warm regards,
Mush
I shopped at Walmarts because I was young and poor and they were cheap. Then they took over the world and now I loathe and hate Walmart. Same for Starbucks, Body Shop, and even Amazon.
Some of these businesses still get my money because they’re either really good at what they do or they’re the most convenient, but I no longer feel any kind of real emotional loyalty to them, like I did when they were little and new.
As soon as a business reaches a certain level of success, I quit trusting it.
Remember when Amazon deleted books off of people’s Kindles without warning, how outraged we were? Remember when they re-indexed their database and removed GBLT material from easy view, how offended we were? If a small company had made such a blunder, we would have accepted an apology with a grin. “Shit happens,” we’d have said, and kept supporting them. But when a big company does something like that we suddenly all put our conspiracy hats on.
Well, sometimes. Other times we just ignore it and keep shopping there. We know, for instance, that Walmart is a community-killer, but we keep shopping there because we’re brainwashed to think that it’s both cheaper and more convenient (which it isn’t if a store has been open for more than four years). We know, for instance, that Blockbuster censors the films they carry1, but we keep going there too.
We just don’t like it.
What size does a company have to be to earn our disdain? Why is huge success a target of such dislike? Where did I even get this attitude? If I inventory my opinons, I really do loathe big businesses, even if they’re big because I selected them and gave them money for years. Why do I like underdogs? Where did this attitude actually come from?
—
1 Googling this assertion these days comes up with a bunch of carefully-worded spin most likely seeded by Blockbuster itself saying that Blockbuster doesn’t censor films. Well of course they don’t literally censor films, they’re a rental place and not editors. But they do refuse to carry titles until the studios or distributors censor them to the organization’s Christian preferences (for this reason, I have never been a Blockbuster patron) and they got away with it because they were the largest rental channel in the nation for so long and had the clout to make such demands. Now they’re seedy little brick-and-mortars where they still exist at all, so I really don’t care if they demand censored films.
In which I’m planning my weekends.
I agreed to work 5 hours tomorrow from 8 to 1, so I’ll not be going out tonight. (Not that I would have been anyway; I just wanted to sound like I have choices!) I’m thinking of watching Mad Men (season 1, episode 7) and doing some knitting for a swap that I should have completed, like, a month ago.
There might also be some Mexican food, or pizza, or something decadent along those lines because I have basically been eating really, really well and want to splurge.
This weekend, I need to get my nails done and clean the bathroom and do laundry. Next weekend I’m busy: I’m playing the Fair on Friday night, have a hair appointment Saturday morning, and a winery gig Saturday afternoon.
The weekend after, there’s the Rally in the Valley (blues for bikers! w00t!) on Friday night, then my mom arrives (I haven’t seen her in, like, a couple of years) on Saturday afternoon, and right after I have a benefit gig in the Tri-Cities. Sunday I’ll probably be inundated with aunts, which will totally rock.
So THIS weekend? I’m gonna be mellow. And knit!
In which I’m not looking, oh HELL no I’m not, but if I were looking there’d be a pretty stringent list.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s what my standard looks like these days (this applies only to mates, and not any other type of relationship):
1. You must not be a goddamned stoner.
2. You must not be an alcoholic.
3. You must not be currently or recently addicted to speed, pills, coke, heroin, or any other street, pharma, or pseudo-pharma drugs.
4. You must be a devotee, preferably of Amma’s.
5. You must not be a slob at home, at work, or in your car.
6. You must not watch more than five hours of television per week on average.
7. You must have a few hobbies or directions of study that interest you so deeply that you occasionally wander off and immerse yourself in them.
8. You must have a broad command of grammar and be able to spell.
9. It would really help if you were a ‘roo.
10. If you smoke cigarettes, it’s less than half a pack a day and you’re thinking about quitting.
11. Your glass is half-full.
12. You must respect the place you live in enough to clean and repair it as needed without being told by an outside source that it needs to be done.
13. You must not be co-dependent or passive-aggressive.
14. You must not be fundamentally angry.
15. You must know or be willing to learn enough about music and computers and my other interests to nod at the right places when I talk about them.
16. You must support yourself financially.
17. You must love to travel and be well-traveled.
18. You must be essentially good-natured.
19. You must not be obsessed with material possessions – actually, you shouldn’t be obsessed with anything.
20. You must be tolerant.
21. You must be contemplative by nature.
22. You must be reasonably healthy and take a certain amount of care of your person.
23. You must consider compassion to be one of your basic personality traits.
24. You must be vegetarian, or very close to it.
25. You must be very, very intelligent.
26. You must read. A lot.
27. You must never have been routinely cruel to persons or animals and you must not be so now.
28. It would really help if you’re not a morning person, but if you are be mellow about it.
29. You must not blame the shape or condition of your life on anyone but yourself.
30. You must be funny, and laugh a lot.
I’m made in such a way that I would genuinely rather be single than put up with things I’ve come to know that I hate: like stoners, for instance. Dear God, if I never find myself attracted to another goddamned pothead I’ll consider it a miracle. (Fat chance, though. Why are so many interesting men hell-bent on retarding themselves with endless bong hits? And DON’T let me hear again that “at least pot’s natural.” Whatever, you dumb stoner. Crude oil’s natural, too, but I don’t see you smoking that. And no, I don’t agree that everybody would be better off if they’d just get stoned, and how utterly unique of you to say so.)
And slobs: Christ! I cannot figure out what makes an adult person want to live like a pig! Pick it up, wash it, and put it away already. Messy rooms smell bad. Your mother doesn’t live here. Whoever let you think that masculinity was synonymous with slovenliness totally did you a disservice.
And unhealth: if there’s something wrong with your body, adjust your lifestyle. Continuing to party like it’s 1999 and eating crap food because you “don’t like vegetables” is suicide, so why not just save us all some time and fucking shoot yourself and quit with the trying to get laid already? What makes you think you have anything to offer if you can’t put your own house in order? And what sort of grown man is too much of a pussy to lay off the fast food? Hello! Are you twelve or what?
I particularly dislike listening to someone say mean shit about people because it’s exhausting to be around. We all have bad days, sure, and I’m all for a good venting session, but if you’re negative and mean all the time I just plain old don’t want to hear it. Your attitude is your problem, not mine.
I’m no longer interested in non-devotees, either, let alone atheists. Clearly I’m too intelligent to believe in the Sistine Chapel ceiling version of god so quit assuming that I do. My philosophy is fundamental to me and I really don’t want to have to hide it, nor do I want to explain it in endless detail. It’d be so much easier if it was understood implicitly.
As much as I wish I could let it go, bad spelling and grammar drive me batshit. I’ve always thought people who sucked at English would at least be good at math, but while probably sixty percent of my lovers couldn’t spell ‘thorough’ if they tried, I have yet to bed a mathematician. Go figure.
I don’t like TV. There are shows on TV that I enjoy, yes, but overall TV is crass and evil and fills your head with shit. It is a waste of time. While I’ve been known to veg in front of the glass teat myself, it’s a diversion for me and not a lifestyle. TV makes you complacent, stupid, and greedy, and while it does so it systematically makes you think you’re cleverer than you really are while simultaneously undermining your self-confidence. Fuck TV. People who watch too much TV are voluntarily crippling themselves.
I’ve tried to be tolerant of FODA, too, but I’m going to just come on out and admit for the first time anywhere that it grosses me out to taste meat in someone’s mouth or smell it in their sweat. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten meat myself that I can no longer perceive it as food: to me, it’s the dead body of a living creature that you just chewed up and swallowed because you’re, well, most likely thoughtless or greedy. Meat-eating is as disturbing to me as eating human flesh would be to you, actually. I just don’t say much about it because I know how statistically insignificant I am in this culture of rampant meat-eating.
Of course, I stink like cigarette smoke, so, yes, I’ll just shut the fuck up now, but the majority of my lovers have been smokers so the comparison isn’t equal.
Oh, and you should have already figured out that you need to have a job. If you’re still working on that one, fine, take your time, but I don’t wanna watch. I’m not a freeloader and no man has ever supported me; the reverse should be true for you. I’ll pay my way, you pay yours, okay?
And please, know what you need to be happy. Don’t expect me to know, because I’m not you. Have your own interests and pursuits and hobbies, and get your various needs met through them on your own. People without interests are both creepy and impossible to satisfy. And please note that buying things then abandoning them untouched in the shed does not qualify as a bona fide hobby.
I don’t care if you’re competitive and aggressive, just don’t take it to the point that you really believe that compassion is for weaklings. That’s just stupid. Compassion is fundamental – I am That, Thou art That, and all of This is That – so man up and volunteer already…
Uh, yeah. I could go on for hours, but I’ll just quit now. Don’t I just sound like a card-carrying bitch? I really do, don’t I.
The good news is that I’m quite prepared to die single, because the bad news is that I obviously will.
Oh, well. Someone has to be the childless old maid in the family, I guess.
In which there are two lists. And pictures. And a lot of colons. I love using colons.
These are the things I DID NOT do over the weekend:
Get laid, get wasted, have an epiphany, knit, buy a bike, eat Mexican food, do yoga.
These are the things I DID do over the weekend:
Friday, I went to a thing out near the airport, and heard some music:
Saturday, I made this purple wrap:
It was based on a thing I saw on Etsy, and I made it without a pattern ’cause I’m clever like that. It took a looooong time because I would pin it together, put it on, look at it, take it off, cut it, pin it together, put it back on, and look at it over and over.
I made and ate this delicious Indian food:
Sambar, for the record? Is freakin’ nommability squared.
Sunday: I napped, watched three episodes of Mad Men on DVD, and packed a bento. (Seriously. That’s all I did in a whole entire day. You may confer upon me now the Laziest Girl Evar! award, because I totally done did earned it!)
VSCO
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4 random books from my Library!
