I hope you die,and I hope i die,too

Media Whoreishness

( or, “What I’ve been listening to,reading,watching)

1. Tutorial on “How To Make Whipped Cream Soap” from ZAJA
2. Charlie & Lola both reading and watching on dvd
3. Bones, Season 1 Temperance Brennan is easily the most annoying TV protagonist ever.
4. The Cat Empire, So Many Nights
5. Run Fatboy Run
6. Installing a Radiant Floor Heat System
7. Making papercrete
8. Video about cob houses
9. “Right is Wrong”,by  Graveyard Swedish guys who obviously like Black Sabbath and the result is awesome
10. So,Your Tiny Black Heart is Broken -songs for those of us not so into Valentine’s Day
11. Polo:The Runaway Book – a wordless book we’ve been “reading”.
12. The Weekly Feminist Reader
13. Inkspell – having a harder time getting into the sequel to Inkheart
14. Study: Brain Substance may halt Alzheimers
15. Justin Timberlake @ the Grammys just following up on all the comments on Twitter that were all like, “ZOMG, Justin Timberlake is so hot”

[blog title from "No Children", The Mountain Goats]

Jupiter tries not to cough up a lung

“When you reach the end of your rope,tie a knot and hang on”

-Thomas Jefferson

Things That Make Me Want To Curl Up In Bed And Stay There

• I’ve been sick for 14 days. Just when it seems I’m coming out from under it, I slide back into it.Yesterday it was 90+ degrees and I was running a fever.I was sweating like a whore in church. I sound like I smoke a pack a day and drink whiskey like it’s water. I’m coughing up some of the nastiest chunks of lung butter I’ve ever seen
• The kids are all starting to come down with colds and have the accompanying whine that seems to go along with it
• We don’t have health insurance
• I haven’t had sex in 15 days
• My Grandmother has a black eye. No…not just a black eye.The entire side of her face is swollen. She doesn’t remember what happened
• Alzheimers sucks big fat hairy donkey balls covered with pus-filled zits.
• The nursing home says they will have a bed for her as early as Thursday,which means we need to clean out her apartment,which also means most of her “stuff” will end up at my house.
• Summer is pretty much over
• My step-son was “missing”,which just turns out to mean he was not easily located
• The 7 year old stepped on a metal …thing…. and ended up with a huge puncture wound on the bottom of her foot and I stressed all night long that she was going to wake up with lockjaw because I’m a horrible mother who didn’t take her to the ER to get a tetanus shot.
• Tetanus can cause seizures so intense they break bones and dislocate joints (!!!) .Thankfully, this is just a random fact thrown in here and no one I know has tetanus.
• I finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha and did not fall head over heels in love with it as promised
• Two weeks of being sick…my house looks like I could apply for FEMA.

The Silver Lining

• I’m not quite dead yet
• There have been no hurricanes in NY
• Soon I will not have to worry so much about my Grandma on a daily basis
• I ate a brownie for breakfast
• I have coffee
• Tina Fey rocks

Participating this week in Weekly Geeks #17:A Quote A Day

Jupiter loves tomatoes,fresh off the vine

Italy has the most exciting men. Survey says so.

I haven’t watched Family Feud since the other guy was the host.Not Richard Dawson.The other one,the one who killed himself. The volume is so loud I have to shout to hear myself but  Grandma can’t hear it otherwise.As it is, she has to keep asking,”What was the question?” “What’d he say.”.

TV rots your brain,studies show. Studies say, Watching game shows might actually improve your brain power,lessen the chances of memory loss. It opens pathways in the brain that otherwise get blocked and muddled because they aren’t used, like a Seasonal Use Only road.

Studies,surveys,blah blah blah. The problem is,studies are soulless and the problem with surveys is that sometimes they ask stupid people that don’t know the right answers. Any idiot knows, the most exciting men on earth live inside my head.

The kids raid the fridge as I spill the pills into my hand. A pink,a red,a blue, a white. Cylinder,sphere,circle,oval. God,if I ever need to take this many fucking pills, just shoot me,I think.My daughter peers into my hand and asks,”What are all those for.”

“I have no idea anymore,” weighing the question along with the pills in my palm. What good are they doing? Keeping her body going while her mind fades until she remembers nothing and no one. Useless,useless.

It’s stifling hot in the tiny apartment.The air smells acrid and bitter. She left the coffee pot on again and it congealed into a tarry sludge at the bottom of the pot. Every day,I turn the coffee pot off because she forgot. Every day,I open the windows. Grandma,leave the windows open.Let some fresh air in here.

“I’m cold.It’s cold in here”, Huddled under a blanket in the blue recliner that used to be Grandpa’s…that still is Grandpa’s,even though he’s dead…..in weather 88 degrees. Take these, I hand her  the pills,then water in a glass that’s been around since my childhood.

“My Keys? Well, I don’t know where my keys are.”

No no no….TAKE THESE. Take these pills.

“I don’t want to take them”, but she takes them anyway,like an obedient child.

“Do you like tomatoes? Look out the window! My tomato plant has tomatoes almost ready!”She speaks like a little one seeing the wonder of ripening tomatoes for the very first time. I lean out the window,satisfying her. One blushed tomato dangles expectantly on the vine.

“Nice”, I say.She says she can’t wait until it’s ripe.She loves fresh tomatoes,right off the vine.

I searched my memory,sure there was something there about tomatoes and my Grandma.I remember my Grandfather bringing tomatoes in from the garden,using his shirttail as a sling for transporting them inside.In the kitchen, he’d let them gently roll across the speckled Formica and my Grandma would rinse them in the big milk white ceramic sink. At dinnertime,there would  be slices of fresh tomato in a fancy dish,with cucumber spears alongside them. My Grandfather would spear them with his fork,laying them on his plate and marveling out loud with a “mmm.mmm…look at them.They turned out nice this year.”

5 minutes later,she asks me,”Do you like tomatoes?I have one almost ripe on the tomato plant someone gave me”. Then she wrinkles her nose as if she smelled something vile and says,”I don’t like tomatoes.Blech!I never have.”

When the tomatoes are ripe, I’ll take them home with me.