ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Okay, so the economy is blowing up and soon we’ll be on a barter system again and the new depression is coming, and I really couldn’t give a shit less about any of that stuff because instead I am busy obsessing over how Sarah Palin is basically like the most regressive major candidate I have ever seen when it comes to women’s issues.  By obsessing I mean I hear about it on the radio sometimes and I skim Newsweek articles occasionally, and when this happens this I shake my head disapprovingly.  By women’s issues I mean our important right to kill our unborn children whom we are unfit to parent.  And other stuff.  By Sarah Palin I mean this person that the NPR people suddenly began shitting themselves over a few weeks ago.  Not without good reason.

“Not that I’ve taken the time or effort to adequately inform myself,” I complained to my husband, “but Sarah Palin is basically like the most regressive major candidate I have ever seen when it comes to women’s issues.”

“I know,” he said, grinning.  “Just think, this time next year you won’t be allowed to vote anymore!”

This is the man who read that first really big Newsweek spread about her, saw that she had some big dead dumb animal in her place, and announced that “if I were a voter” he would vote for her on that basis.  Ugggh.

If he were a voter.  I am actually kind of starting to feel the same way, although I think he only says stuff like that to make me freak out at him.  I feel like the responsible thing is to vote, but really, I cannot relate to either party enough to want to vote for them.  I have issues with both sides.  Basically, it feels like I’m choosing between voting for a nanny-state and voting for a morally-legislated theocracy.  So as it always does, this thing has pretty much diminished to a mere spectator sport for me.  I think voting for either side would be feel irresponsible when I don’t really think either has my best interests at heart as I see them.

Why isn’t there some kind of middle ground?  Why do both parties seem like exactly half a retard to me?

Last week we got these two things in the mail from Pat Roberts, who by the way when I went to vote in the Republican primary last time was the only conservative candidate running for his seat and I still abstained from voting for that motherfucker.  And the front of this flyer thing basically said something on the front like “Republicans ONLY, LOL!”  And then you open it up (I always open even obvious junk mail because I once ruined a shredder when I didn’t realize there was a magnet or something inside an envelope) and you see that it is two applications for absentee voting.

So, what, are these idiots sitting around coming up with ideas for their flyer and going, “How can we encourage some otherwise abstaining Republican voters to vote absentee, yet at the same time discourage Democrats by implying heavily that they aren’t allowed to?”

I mean, this is the guy whose Senate site says, “I believe it is wrong for a select minority to impose their definition of marriage on the nation.”  Uh, the fuck are you talking about, dude?  Letting somebody else have the same rights you straights have enjoyed since the dawn of time somehow imposes on your own rights?

Anyway, even though I despise my party, I thought the idea of voting absentee sounded pretty terrific.  And because I’m so super mature, after I filled out the applications for my husband and me, I took a pen and marked an “x” across the big smiling picture of that fascist right-wing stooge Pat Roberts. Then I put a “Vintage Black Cinema” stamp on each application, which I felt was highly appropriate because based on his above comment I suspect that in his heart Pat Roberts secretly discriminates against everyone who is not just like him.  And Duke Ellington is basically as far from Pat Roberts as you can get.  My husband got Black and Tan and I got Prinsesse Tam-Tam.

Fuck you, politicians!

So the dog has this fixation with us preparing dinner every night.  She can be fast asleep in a padded chamber three miles away, yet the instant she hears one of us place knife to cutting board, a magical animal instinct tells her that we have food.  And a magical crazy instinct that is usually totally wrong tells her that she may get some of it if she goes into the kitchen and jumps up and down enough.  While it’s annoying and she’s constantly underfoot when she does this, we still tolerate this behavior because it is also hilarious.

What makes this just about the funniest is the fact that no matter what we are doing up on the counter, if a cutting board is involved she won’t believe us that it is not meat.  Specifically, she believes the only valid use of a cutting board or a knife is to cut up ham into small pieces for her to eat.  So it’s hard for her to understand when we cut up something else, like onions or celery or carrots.  In her mind, the cutting board is a magical tool that dispenses salty cured meats.  She cannot be dissuaded from this no matter how many times we actually show her the thing that we are really cutting up.

And she does this thing where she stands on her hind legs and bounces up and down with her front legs pointing up.  And when that doesn’t work she assumes the traditional “begging” position.  I don’t know where she learned that, but it was probably taught to her long ago by someone who was really sloppy with a cutting board.  And this is a picture of my husband after I asked him to let me take a picture of him imitating what the dog does when she wants ham.

But rest assured, her stupidity is really funny.  Tonight she was worse than usual for some reason.  Usually after a while she gives up and goes away, but she waited patiently as we cut up a slough of vegetables for the soup and then watched my husband with an eagle eye as he sliced up sage leaves and pulled thyme leaves off their twigs.  Finally he got fed up with all the bouncing and begging and offered her a piece of carrot.

“HERE,” he said.  The dog excitedly raced for the carrot, and as soon as she realized it wasn’t meat, abandoned it on the floor and resumed bouncing.  Because, you know, if we caved on this, there is DEFINITELY meat up there.  I was making soup dumplings up on the counter, but I stopped to address her behavior.  And what I did was standard in all canine behavioral manuals.

I gave the dog the finger.  “Do you understand that you are an idiot and I can’t respect you?” I demanded.

“That’s mean,” my husband said. “You flipped her off.”

The dog bounced up and down again, landed on the carrot, lost her balance, and fell.

“Okay,” he said.  “She is an idiot.”

“Dog,” he said.  “If you eat that carrot, you can have some of our food.”

The dog sat there and looked confused.  Then the bouncing again.

“Dog,” I said.  “If you eat that carrot, you can have all the dumplings and we’ll eat our soup without.”

Bounce.  Bounce.

“If you eat the carrot, you can have our whole dinner, meat included, and we’ll go hungry.  I just want to see you eat it.”

Despite the fact that this was basically the best offer she could ever get, short of us leaving a Honeybaked Ham on a sheet of plastic in the living room, she failed to take us up on our wager.  So, whatever, dog.  That one’s not coming back on the table.

This is what we had for supper.

Over the course of this past weekend I have become obsessed with a stranger on the internet.  Mildly.  Mildly obsessed.  More like just being very, very interested, really.  Obsessed only in the sense that I have read over half of this person’s entire blog archive and spent that whole time constantly thrilling over how unbelievably alike we are in terms of personality, attitude and outlook.  She’s in love with music.  I’m in love with music!  She loves the words “fuck”, “cocksucker” and “motherfucker”.  I love the words “fuck”, “cocksucker” and “motherfucker”!  She’s a nonreligious person living in a red state.  I’m a nonreligious person living in a red state!  She sews and plays with legos and loves math things and is raising her kids to be smart nerds.  I am obsessed with spreadsheets and I have a book called the Excel Bible on my Amazon wish list.  She referred to her family’s pet turtle as acting like a shithead. She’s a habitual over-sharer.  Oh, oh, me too!

Best of all.  She probably lives within 25 minutes of me, which I determined based on careful consideration of the stores she mentions frequenting.  I don’t know why this is so exciting to me.  Obviously I’m not expecting to become best buds or to necessarily ever even meet her, for that matter.  But it just feels cool to know that someone whose wavelength is so similar to mine is RIGHT HERE IN MY OWN TOWN.  I felt the same way when my crafty friend and I became buddies.  But back to the object of my new obsession, we go to the SAME BORDERS!  The same WHOLE FOODS!  But not the same Target.  I go to the Mission one and she goes to the Oak Park one.  I feel like such a stalker knowing this and just lurking around on her site.  But my need for completeness requires that I finish reading her archives before I can e-mail her and gush about shit.

Anyway.  So this is how the whole thing went down.  A couple months ago I started subscribing to this blog called A Year of Crockpotting.  I love it and I like to let the posts stack up for a few days and then I read a few all at once.  And on Saturday my crafty friend and I went on one last yard-saling hurrah in her neighborhood and I found a one quart “Fiesta Crockette” mini crock pot for only three dollars and as soon as I got home I went straight to the Crockpotting blog so I could figure out what to do with it.

And I decided to take some inspiration from her peach compote recipe, only mine was going to be a crisp.  But more importantly, while I was looking at that page I saw a link to someone other lady’s blog and I opened it up in another tab and then I went off and forgot all about it.  I do that all the time.  And then later I came back and was like, “What the fuck is this?”  And I read:

Tuckie continues to be a shithead. I got so desperate today, I dunked him in water and tried to force feed him. He can keep his mouth shut for a super-long time.

Tuckie, it turns out, is a pet turtle.  Anyway, her description of the shithead turtle was so appealing to me that I also read:

So the Other Mom was all “oh, I get to listen to music I like now.” And I was, of course, all “What the fuck you talkin’ about?” But only without the fuck because we live in Kansas.

That was, like, all it took.  I mean, can’t you just picture that coming out of my mouth?  If I had a kid, I mean?  And so I was practically in love and also hysterically excited to find out that this person who said shithead and fuck lives in MY STATE.  And I thought, as progressive as she obviously is, she MUST live in Kansas City or Lawrence.  And I practically had the vapors when I read that she lives in Overland Park, which is almost where I live except that I’m in the Dotte.

Not to mention she has a son named Darwin.  As in, Charles.

And because I felt terribly guilty for procrastinating on this all last week and their wedding is in like two fucking weeks now - how did that happen? - I immediately got up and baked the second layer for the bottom tier of the wedding cake.  But yes, later, I went back and began reading from the very beginning.  I don’t do this often, but when I feel that I am truly going to like a blog, I have to go back to the start and take it all in.  Just like I need to read books in order and watch TV shows in order.

What makes me feel like the biggest freaking internet stalker about this whole thing is that I have to keep reminding myself that this person is a complete and total stranger who has never heard of me and therefore can’t be expected to give two shits about me.  But I want to e-mail her and tell her about “Allergic to Beans” by Leticia Viloria.  I want to e-mail her and ask eager questions about the zippered pouch she made last year.  I want to e-mail her and be like, “Isn’t it exciting!  Another non-Christian right here!”  I make it sound like I’ve never met another nonreligious person.  Not so.  But it still excites me when I run into another person who thinks religion sucks.  To me they’re the brilliant, sparkling gems of the prairie.

Anyway, so I’m pretty sure that even if I don’t e-mail her she will eventually get a hit from my site when one of you people clicks over, because I’m just assuming she is every bit as in love with her site stats as I am with mine.  So I’ve decided that I’ll play coy, finish reading and plan to e-mail her in a friendly way that won’t make me sound like a crazy person, and if she gets a hit and comes here and sees all this explanation and says hi to me, well, then that’s OK too.

By the way.  The peach crisp was fantastic.

We just sold our Nintendo Wii to our friend’s sister, who needed it for her husband’s birthday.  The system is actually terrific and fun, but our living room is set up incredibly awkwardly with really no room to move around, so we aren’t able to play with it the way we thought anyhow.  So we basically said, okay, sounds good and if we ever get this living room rearranged decently we can get another sometime.

Which meant my husband had to erase our personal data off it tonight.  And on the Nintendo Wii there are these little people avatar things you create called “Miis” (ha, ha!  get it?  my god Nintendo, you just kill me!) and we went through to get rid of those guys, too.  And the whole thing felt rather heartless, all things considered.  When you pick them up they struggle fiercely until you throw them in a trash can to erase them.  “We’re killing them!” I did not say.  But I felt so mournful about the first one that instead of erasing the others my husband simple put them into the “Mii Parade” and set them on an eternal sprint around and around the screen.  Still.  Better than sending them off to a murky electronic oblivion.

So last weekend I decided to quit Weight Watchers and I canceled my subscription this Tuesday and I had my mind all made up that I was going to do this thing on my own and hey, screw their chart that says I need to lose 5 more pounds before I can stop paying.  And today I am writing yet another blog post that begins with the word “so”.  It’s what I do.

And so anyway, I had already paid up through October by the time I canceled my membership, so I figured, I like the meeting and I’ve paid for them, so I’ll keep going.  But I hadn’t really talked with my crafty friend about this, so I was afraid she’d be sad and disappointed, and I also wasn’t sure how I wanted to say goodbye to the people at the meeting.  I didn’t want our meeting leader, who is terrific, to feel like she had done something wrong, or that I’m rejecting everything I learned over the past couple years, or anything like that.  So when she weighed me this morning and asked how I was, I said I was “OK” and when she asked how my week had been I said “OK” because I didn’t even know how to bring things up.  I figured I would ask my crafty friend’s opinion before I went announcing anything in my group.

So the meeting leader says to me, “Just wondering, exactly how tall are you, anyway?  Are you like an in-between?”

I was surprised, but I told her I was five foot three and a half.  Then she said, “Well, I didn’t know if I should bring it up, but I heard you talking with [nice older lady] last week and saying that you felt like quitting because you weren’t at goal yet but you felt comfortable with your weight and didn’t want to keep paying to stay in the meetings without reaching Lifetime.  I just couldn’t catch you before you left, because I was helping some new people.”

She showed me a height and weight chart and explained that apparently the first time my goal had been calculated, it was with the assumption that I was five-three, but that if you’re halfway, it’s okay to round up.  I was shocked.  I could have been at goal this whole time instead of hovering just a couple pounds above where I thought I had to be.  The upper “healthy” weight for five-four is 146, which I’ve been safely inside for months now (lower, really, if you think about how they weigh you with your clothes on).  “Talk to me after the meeting and we’ll sort this all out,” she said.

It wasn’t a bad meeting, but I couldn’t wait for it to be over.  I sat with my high-school friend because my crafty friend wasn’t there yet, and we talked about healthy breakfast things to eat and other stuff, but I just kept thinking, thinking about what she had said.  After the meeting we looked at the chart together again and she said that she was really sorry that she couldn’t declare me retroactively to be at goal, but that if I could just maintain here for another six weeks, I would be at my Lifetime goal and I could stop paying as long as I didn’t go more than two pounds over my 146 that she now has put down for me. And I realized this made a lot of sense, particularly since I’ve already paid for October anyway.

Well, check this out, bitches.  I weighed myself at 140.6 this morning, and at the meeting I weighed in at 144.2.  Assuming my scale isn’t being a little shit, I’m in good shape so far.  Both those numbers are way, way, safely within the 146 she set for me.  So basically now I need to work on staying exactly where I am right now.  This may be difficult.  I don’t anticipate having problems after that, but I think I can rise to the challenge of hovering here for six weeks.  It’s weird, a week ago the thought of trying any harder just exhausted me.  But now it feels different, like you’ve been wandering in a dark tunnel for a long time and then you suddenly turn a corner and realize that you were really close to the proverbial light for a while, except that you weren’t staring it down the whole time.  And so feeling this close makes kind of a difference.  It kind of sucks that could’ve been at goal for months now and I had no clue, but I’m sort of glad now it worked out the way it did.  It was probably a good confidence booster for me to maintain roughly the same weight through a really undisciplined summer that included two weeks of eating Midwestern funeral food, catering all my own food for our wedding, Pronto Pups at the state fair, and now, a wedding cake for our friends.

“What if after the six weeks I lose more weight?” I asked her.  “I don’t want to focus as much on my food anymore, but I’d like to work on my fitness.  If I lose more weight will I get in trouble or something?”

“Not after the initial six weeks,” she said.  “And not unless you start getting underweight according to the chart.  We’ll ask you to start taking in some more calories if that happens.”  Yeah, I don’t really think I’m going to have that problem.  I told her thank you so, so much for talking to me instead of just letting me leave.

I felt like crying and laughing at the same time.  I know how weird that sounds.  And after I left, I had this weird feeling for a while, like I wasn’t sure if I was completely happy about it.  By later in the day, I had chatted with my crafty friend a little and decided that this was probably just because I’d made up my mind on sort of a difficult matter and then had it suddenly unmade for me.  And when I made it home later after wandering around City Market with my crafty friend and her husband, I felt better.

This is a nice thing, even though it caught me off guard at the time.  My meeting leader actually liked me enough to help me be able to stay, even though you’d think it would be in their best interests to keep me paying.  Although, maybe they figured since I’ve paid them almost $900 over the past couple of years, I’d done my time.  Either way, it was nice.  She told me she considered me such an inspiration to the group that she’d love me to become a meeting leader sometime after my goal.  This kind of surprised me.  After I heard more, I learned that the reason for this is that I am that person who never shuts the fuck up and is always raising my hand and talking about how when I was a fatty I used to do shit like stand at the fridge and eat ice cream and cake without even sitting down for it.  Apparently oversharers like this are popular with meeting leaders because lots of Weight Watchers members prefer to sit there like mopes and it helps the meeting feel less like a healthy funeral when there are a few blabbery people there.

So.  Fucking A.