Finishng out my lunch hour at my desk.

I tried sitting in the lunch room, and I did as long as I was eating, but there is a tool show coming to town this weekend and the men I work with are all back threre salivating over air compressors and compound wrenches at ridiculously low low prices. If they would salivate quietly, I wouldn't mind, but hell no, they have to one up each other with tales of the torque wrench or the miter saw they got at this travelling carnival of tools the last time it came this way and whatever one has, well by golly damn, the other one has the same thing but he's had it longer and it works better.

Shit, will you shut the hell up? Or can we at least change the subject to shoes, something we all need and use. Or, since the sound of your voice has now started to make me as sick as this Healty Choice frozen entree I'm eating how about you just shut the hell up?

Ok, so I've made up my ind that this is the year I finally get my act together and get this gut off of me. I'm sick and tired of it. So I'm eating Healthy Choice and drinking Atkins and trying to keep my carbohydrate consumption at a minimum. It ain't easy, but I've also decided that this is the year I want to learn how to belly dance, and with as much as I've got to throw around, it could turn into a massively choreographed and well rehearsed belly flop.

You can take the girl out of the east side....

You can take the girl out of the east side, but you can't necessarily take the east side out of the girl.

For now it is a fact that I was born, raised and reared east of I-45 and continue to live in the cache challenged east side of the "Greater" Houston area. There really isn't much going on in this side of town, it's not experiencing a tech boom of any kind, we haven't had a new mall go up in over twenty years and we have only had Starbucks for about three years now. We've got thousands of nail salons offering twenty dollar acrylic nails and free fungus with purchase of a fifteen dollar pedicure. Superbowl parties on this side of town will occur at places with names like "Skeeters" and "Choppers."

So last week while I was on vacation I decided to venture to the west side of town and see what was going on over there. And yes, I refer to anytime I leave the geographical boundaries of the poltical subdivision I live in as "going to town". Anyway, I'm going somewhere to expand my horizons and the Hong Kong City Mall seems like a good place to start.

First off, it felt like I was driving to Hong Kong proper. Ok, so it only took me 45 minutes to get there cause I have a lead foot, but it was still a long drive. I got there early and got an excellent parking place, it was kinda cool and windy but not altogether unpleasant. I get inside and am greeted by the aroma of fish market and urine. No kidding, there was a puddle of urine in the mall outside the grocery store. Needless to say I skip the grocery store and head for the fabric shop.

This fabric shop has some absolutely gorgeous stuff, silks, jaquards, all kinds of stuff that I have no idea what they are and the little old lady behind the counter can't tell me because she doesn't speak much of my language and I don't speak much of hers. Between sign language and pointing we work out that her son will be back in an hour and he can help me. Ok, I've seen something I want and I'll be back in an hour. Next stop, the shoe store.

Lucite, buckles, platforms, grommets! I am in love and ready to whip out the plastic and be a shoe buying fool.

Except.

When I ask for a size 10 (yep, I' a big footed jerky eating girl) the fella at the counter says "that man's size". He said it with a smile and in a helpful tone. But I guess from the look on my face he figured out pretty quick that I want to beautify and showcase my feet, not buy shoes for somebody else. "Nine biggest size made for women." Really, ok, thanks.

Is there a Moscow City Mall in town? Maybe it I check the Sunday paper I an find a Prague Pavilion. They've got to have shoes in my size because that's where my ancestors came from.

I've got fourty-five minutes to kill until the fabric guy gets back.

I walk passed several store fronts that have nothing in them but tables and chairs and people are filling out forms. There is no window with a clerk to process the paper work or computers that I see, looks like eveything is done with paper and pencil. Whatever, by now the smell of urine and fish has been over come with the smell of institutional disenfectant and fish. Slightly better.

I go into one store that has all kinds of bags hanging in the window. Hello knock-off world. Phooey Vuitton's in all shapes and sizes, fake Gucci and Coach, the place smells like a jar of liquid vinyl. Hot liquid vinyl. "and we have shoes," the lady behind the counter indicates their selection with a sweep of her hand. Shoes? Ok, I'll take the bait and check out the selection.

They have lots of shoes all right. Rows and rows of them.

Used shoes.

Some of these shoes are so damn used that I am pretty sure I sold them in a yard sale about ten years ago. Thanks, but no thanks.

As much as I like shoes and the way my feet look in shoes, I don't covet anybody else's shoes enough to wear used shoes.

It's a thing. It's my thing and I acknowledge that.

Jeez, isn't the fabric guy back yet?

Walking the mall again, there is a restaurant that people are literally lining up outside for. I don't expect there to be a menu in English by now, but I figure I'll look inside and see what's going on.

I walk up to the window just as a guy is hanging a whole pig on a hook that is suspended over a carving table.

A whole, intact, skin is singed all over it pig.

I'm not naive by any means. I know where meat comes from and I eat it anyway. But this guy is standing there with a knife taking orders and is about to start carving hunks off this and I just don't think I can handle that. It's not butchered, honestly I don't even think it's been gutted so not only has it been cooked in some fashion with it's hooves still on and the intensines (and whatever was in them) still inside.

I've got plenty of fabric at home still folded on shelves that I haven't done anything with.

And the toll road comes out just a couple of blocks from here, that'll shave a good ten minutes off my drive.

I haul ass at seventy plus the whole way home.

By the time I get to the interstate, pass downtown and get on another section of the toll road, I'm starving hungry. The smells that assaulted my brain previoulsy have loosened their grip on my brain, and I pull into a place that serves up plenty of deep fried seafood and french fries. As I plunge a stick of fried cheese into marinara sauce I wonder if somebody would look inside the window and be completely grossed out by the sight of my eating this.

And as I savor the golden deep-fat fried goodness that is fried food I'm thinking, yeah, probably so.

Here's to home and the familiar.

I'm a little more pedestrian than I would like to admit.

How bad can it be?

I like beef jerky.

I come from a long line of jerky eaters.

Honestly, the prospect of a food that requires zero preparation on my part that most quickly satisfys my hunger and lets me get on with the business of living my life appeals to me. I can get to the bathroom, refill my Diet Coke and snag a chunk of jerky in a two minute commercial break and be back to watching television without missing a single whine, dramatic eyebrow or, "we need to ask Grissom", but I digress.

Yep, jerky appeals to my lazy side.

I have a friend that makes jerky, and it's pretty damn good, he puts a lot of work into it. Which is why the sorry bastard doesn't get his ass around to doing it but once in a blue moon, so I have to make due with the commercially available jerky at the juggernaut of the retail world, Wal-Mart.

So, I'm going down the aisle last weekend, doing my best to avoid the snivelling toddlers with dirty faces and sticky substances in their hands and the little old ladies with their blue hair and shopping carts filled to overflowing with Christmas crap and I spot a bag of what purports to be "buffalo jerky".

Ok, I'll bite, I'm curious, after all, how bad can it be?

So I get home and settle down to watch a videotaped episode of Jerry Springer, (yes, I'm borderline white trash, no I don't live in a trailer, well, actually, I don't live in a trailer anymore, but that's besides the point, anyway) I've got my glass of Diet Coke and my bag of newly found dried meat goodness at my side and as yet another toothless wonder starts tossing her overly processed, black roots at least a foot long hair around calling her mother (sister, cousin, doesn't really matter) a fucking whore I absentmindedly tear open my jerky snack and pop a piece in my mouth.

Hey, it's jerky. I've been eating jerky since I had teeth, I love the stuff.

But, something seems altogether wrong about buffalo jerky.

It's got a taste that Diet Coke won't kill.

It's got a taste that peanut butter filled pretzels won't kill. (Yes I eat all kinds of white trash food when I'm watching Springer.)

I'm starting to think that running outside and eating grass like a dog to get the taste out of my mouth as a viable option, but I made it to the bathroom and a bottle of generic Listerine type mouthwash first.

I'm reading the pack of the package thinking that surely something as truly majestic as a buffalo, an animal that supported an entire culture of indiginous people on our continent before white settlement, couldn't taste that FON-KEE.

Ingredients: Buffalo meat soaked in a beef puree solution.

My neighbor has a dalmation named Sparky that he lets run loose.

Sparky really enjoyed that package of buffalo jerky.

Good doggy.

Well, the good news is that I found three pair of amazing party shoes on Saturday.

The bad news is that I found them at this completely shit ass department store that used to be the only thing going in this part of the country and a lot of the sales staff still likes to think that they are the only store around.

This store is so asshat that the show department is basically self service. Twelve days before Christmas and there are two people working in the department. This means that one person is running back and forth retrieving shoes from stock and the other person is ringing up sales on both registers so they'll both get commissions for the day. Anyway, I'm getting all the shit I've been lugging around all morning in one of the chairs and getting my tennis shoes off while my mom takes the prospect out of the boxes and I pull on a footlet, which is realy just a cheap assed peice of ugly suntan pantyhose that has been stitched closed on one end. They must make those out of leftover panythose stuff.

I was just about to start complaining about this fucking department store and their stuffy staff and their fucking practically self service shoe department when I looked down at my feet.

I've got nail polish slopped all over my cuticles, and on my skin. My nails are too long, I can't remember the last time I clipped them. (Shit, I didn't clip them the last time they got clipped, the wonderful Athena did that for me.) My heels are rough and I've got some massive callouses on the sides of my big toes and I haven't shaved my legs in about eight weeks.

I actually refrained from complaining about self service shoes at that point.

My mom and I got a good laugh about it later over lunch.

Ok, ok, yesterday afternoon I was in a really foul mood. Not that this is essentially different from any other afternoon, usually I'm in the mood to rip somebody a new one by 9 am, so technically I'm behind already for the day.

I want to get my degree. Lack of a degree is keeping me in the cycle of earning bullshit money and not being able to see the world. So I squirrel away as much out of my paycheck as I possibly can, I don't buy new clothes, I drive my cars until the hubs fall off and buy my pantyhose and cosmetics at Wal-Mart, except for hairspray which I bought at the dollar store last night. I am terrified of an old age where I have to live in a rental unit and exist on Ramen.

Ok, ok, technically it's the thought of living in a rental unit that scares me, I happen to like Ramen.

Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm in my thirties, I still live at home with my mom and I don't have a boyfriend right now.

Holy shit, can I digress or what?


Anyway, I need my degree . If for no other reason than in my old age, I could have some Chuck Wagon to mix into my Ramen.

Man, I am so fucking bored out of my skull that I actually volunteered to go to a benefits meeting. How fucking lame is that?

Fourty-five minutes of sitting on a hard assed courtroom seat and my bottom was just about ready to go on strike. By the time I hit the vending machine and the ladies room the meeting was over so nobody really noticed that I bailed early. If they did, fuck them. My directed supervisor (who can't see passed the end of her own fucking nose, she's so self centered) started telling me about the life insurance coverage that our employer was now offering and what a bargain it is and it wouldn't cost me very much and I should consider signing up for it.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

Anyway, lunch was craptacular. Half a (bullshit sandwich shop name) original ham & turkey, minus the turkey because they just didn't put it on there and I was too tired, bored, agitated to argue the point, and a cup of same bullshit sandwich shop's brocolli cheese soup, with florettes. As if florettes made it more appealling than the bogus-assed chicken with wild rice that looked like it was made with Elmer's school glue and smelled faintly of death.

Or, at least what I imagine death would smell like, anyway.

Blech.

On a more positive note, I used up a can of hairspay this morning.

Yep, one can of hairspray, it's all gone. That was the last can I had under the bathroom counter. I don't even have a reserve one on top of the bathroom counter. I do however have countless canisters of gel, mousse, spray gel, and foaming mousse that I haven't even bothered to use since Jesus was a child. One would think that they would eventually get so old as to burst and explode like the forgotten cans of corn and spinach that are long abandoned in the back of the kitchen closet sometimes do. But no, they are currently collecting dust in the confines of the cabinet under the sink. Dust and spider webs. Quite a combination.


Anyway, I've taken two days off this week to work on cleaning up that nasty house. There is so much residual shit in that place that it is not even funny. There is enough dust in my closet alone to plant a garden, and that shit just ain't right. So hopefully with a little time off and the house to myself I can make some headway. At least I can get some crap in the trash without somebody wanting to know why I'm shit-canning something and coudn't it be used for something else.

"Don't throw that out, it'll do for a rag."

"It's threadbare and the butt is torn out of it. Besides, it's cotton-poly blend and it won't soak up water very well."

"It'll do to wipe the floor with."

"When was the last time either one of us wiped the floor?"

Hands fly up in the air, "ok, you're right, you're right, throw it in the trash."

The last statement is intentionally designed to make me fee guilty, and it does, for just a moment, until I realize that somewhere, within the dark confines of the laundry room is a discarded tote bag full of shit that would "do for a rag". Or is that in the living room, maybe it's in the hall closet. But then, her bedroom closet is a possibility as well.

Where is that fucker?

Something that tastes that funky ought to be covered by my insurance!

If you've ever wondered how they make a crown, I really can't tell you.

What I can tell you is that I was roused from my nitrous-oxide stupor by the assistant shoving what looked like a garden trowel full of blue hair gel into my mouth and telling me to bite down. As soon as I did this stuff started setting up like Jello on steroids. Then you find out why it's applied with something that looks like a graden trowel. The assistant parked the heel of her hand on my forehead, took the handle in her other hand and pulled that hardened mess free.

Then she gets out a chunk of plastic and a drill like the one they use at the nail salon, she checks the gaping place in my mouth where a tooth used to be and then she starts fashioning me a temporary plastic tooth. As I'm still coming out of the nitrous she is giving me instructions. I can barely understand them because Billy Idol is screaming someting about a Rebel Yell at me through the headphones. (Seriously, I've been going to this dentist for eighteen years, I've been listening to the same tape of music for eighteen years.) Anyway, no chips, ice, carrots or anything else hard for at least twenty-four hours until the funking tasting cement (that she managed to slop into evey corner of my mouth) has had time to cure. Cure? Like in a ham? Anyway, be careful with this "replacement tooth" (read: fake-assed peice of plastic) because sometimes they break and we'll have to fit you with a new one. We'll call you when your crown comes back from the lab.

So, two weeks later, more drilling, more Billy Idol, lots more nitrous oxide and more of the God-awful funky tasting cement I have been crowned.

But, what exactly am I queen of?

If they can make mint flavored condoms....

Why can't they make mint flavored surgical gloves for dentists and their assistants to use.

I have to say the taste of latex kinda kills the thrill of having a dark nice looking man with big hands and the smell of Laugerfeld hanging around his scrubs manipulate my jaw into the position he wants it in.

I think I need to be alone now.

I only own a dozen or so tote bags.

So why am I still hauling around my school back-pack a week after I dropped the class and shlepping everything I need around in the portable mess? Hell, it only took me three days after dropping to pull the textbook out and leave it in the back of my car, and that sucker was heavy!

Do I really need three month old grocery store receipts?

If I examine and inventory the contents of the bags, will that inspire me to clean them out? Or will it just send me into the throes of a depression that I can only climb out of with a hot fudge sundae and three different kinds of Zingers? Maybe that's why I make things hard on myself.

Was I a self-flagellator in a previous life and this is the most effective way of punishing myself in this one?

ORDER SOME PEACH COBBLER!

So, it's like this. I work with a "warlock". A self-ordained warlock. He also photographs ghosts, at least that's what he tells people he's doing. I'm not so sure he isn't casing the place to come back and rob them later. Maybe that's why he never complains about being on night shift.

He's in the office now, getting bawled out by his supervisor's supervisor. He's may be getting some unscheduled days off. And we're worried because nobody brought any chicken bone necklaces to ward off the evil curse he might throw on everybody in the building, so we're thinking that we better call the chicken joint and have some delivered. But they won't deliver for under $ 6.00, so we'll have to order some sides. I vote for peach cobbler, that'll push it up over $ 6.00.


Are self-ordained warlocks as powerful as the one's who get the degree? I need to read more Harry Potter.

Ok, went to lunch in the rain. Really, in the sprinkles, the sky was gray and the wind was cool and for a minute I just stood there and breathed in the ionized air and enjoyed the change in the weather. It never really started raining but it was a good ten degrees cooler than it was when I went on my coffee break earlier.

Ok, well, it's been a while again. Summer school can sap your energy just lke Rheumatoid arthritis, but I blew that class off last night, hell with it. It's summertime and the living ain't easy, why make it any harder on myself when the heat index is up to 105 degrees at eight o'clock at night. I'll just go home and hide in the air conditioned comfort of my bedroom.

Ok, treatment update. As of a month ago I have started taking the cancer drug Methotrexate for the treatement of aforementioned Rheumatoid arthritis, with mixed results, but overall I have had more pain free days lately and have missed fewer days at work. Ok, the being able to come to work on a regular basis may not be such a good thing, but being able to work the clutch in my car is fantastic!

Wow, it's been a while. Not that I haven't been doing anything worthy of writing about, I just haven't been in the mood to write about anything. Rheumatoid arthritis can take the joy out of life faster than any bitter old harpie relative at a holiday dinner ever could.

Just got back to the office from the doctor's office. That place is some kind of trip. I hate making an appointment becuase each time I need a doctor, I have to make a descent into HMO hell. I'm sitting in the waiting room, there is a woman to my left reading "Miracles in Motion" ok, but could she please read quitely to herself, no, she's one of those mumbling readers, cheese, read out loud or be silent, maybe she hopes to spread the word of God that way. Who knows?

In the next waiting room but certainly not out of hearing "Savannah" and "Sawyer" are with their mother waiting to see the pediatrician. It only takes thrity minutes of "Ring Around the Rosey" and "London Bridges" before their mother gets tired of all the noise they are making and starts yelling about "all the sick people who would like for it to be quiet". Yeah, and I'd rather hear "London Bridges" again than you trying to reason with a sick four year old. But then, I got the distinct impression that the four year old was the most mature person in that conversation.

I don't need to be saved. I don't have a ton of credit card bills or student loans. What I need is a country house in the Sussex region of England. Can you send me a dollar? Maybe I do need to be saved, from myself.

I had a lot of ideas of things I would like to post last night. Then I slept, and this morning I can't remember a one of them.

Ok, so it's Monday afternoon. I've consumed four Diet Cokes, half a box of thin mint Girl Scout cookies and a couple of tacos from Taco Bell. Trust me, it was way worse coming back up than it was going down.

What would life be like if I could just say to hell with personal hygenie, clean clothes and the microwave. I could live under a bridge, I wouldn;t have to have a job. I'd never have to clean my room, the city would eventually come along and do it for me, and well, shit, really can't depend on that because I live in Houston Texas and the government doesn't get around to doing shit before they want to make some lame assed bid for the Olympics.