inauguration day live blog!

OK so I got up a little late, I’m a little late to the party.

But all is well. Hey, if every day for the next eight years I get to wake up to Rahm Emmanuel high-five-ing various other men in suits, I can slash my porn budget in HALF.

Man is Sex-ay.

While I was making my morning sake I sort of vaguely saw the supreme court justices come out. Whatever.  They look happy.  Well, John Stevens looks happy.  He likes Harvard grads, I guess.

The Obama girls look lovely, nice and polished, but not overly so, just like well-dressed little girls. Oh, Bill Clinton, nice to see you again.

Lara Bush is wearing all beige. Looks like she’s entering a monastery. Collecting alms.

The crowd on the Mall looks incredibly orderly. Are they all standing in rows?

Oh wow. Michelle Obama. Can’t say I’m crazy about the outfit. A weird color of greenish-yellow, and lots of chunkiness.  Looking at it more closely, it’s nicely cut.  I’m just not crazy about the color. (More about the dress and the designer.)

George Bush looks like he’s been crying.  And like he thinks he’s about to be shot. Is he heavily medicated? Did he switch to pills when he gave up drinking? I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis.

HOLY CHENEY IN A WHEELCHAIR

Here comes Joe Biden, who looks exactly like he always does. Bright, happy, avuncular. Really a perfect image of a vice president.

Phenomenal crowd, patiently waiting. How does this compare to the crowd at other inaugurations?  Is this a record?

I appreciate how they’re announcing people in batches, with one or two well-known names in each bundles.  This group had Nancy Pelosi, who got a big, short burst of a cheer.

And here comes the man himself.

Has there ever been CHANTING of the president-elect’s NAME at an inauguration? Nice sentiment, but I think it’s a little too like a soccer game for me.  Let’s be dignified, shall we?

OK, now we’re talking. Diane Feinstien takes the microphone.

Tepid applause for Rev. Rick Warren.  Will they show people turning their backs on him?  On CNN? I’m guessing no. Course, maybe that isn’t still happening.

Nice prayer, as such things go.  Bit of a weak goatee. But I think Obama is doing something very interesting by inviting him to say the invocation.

Looking at the faces, I don’t think he was supposed to end with the Lord’s Prayer, a VERY Christian prayer. Well, he has to do what he has to do.

Aretha, wearing a crazy-ass hat, sings My Country, Tis of Thee. Obama looks like this means more to him, stirs his soul, more than Rick Warren’s prayer.  Aaaand it certainly fired up the crowd.

Crowd voices saying yes we can, and yes we will…

Time for the Biden Oath of Office.

I like his signature blue tie. It makes me happy.

And there you have it, Joe Biden, second-in-command.

People on the podium are crying. Which is a nice thing to see. Real emotion.

More music? Oh, hey, Yo Yo Ma! and Izhak Perlman! Playing a John Williams composition.  Holy cats. That guy really did write the soundtrack to my life.

Oh dear, Obama just got caught on camera saying Who is that? and then giving the person a conspiratorial wink.

I love Yo Yo Ma. He has a really engaging personality as a performer, and he’s doing some interesting things with co-creation of content on the web.

CNN just announced that Obama’s term began at noon, even without the oath. So he is now president. While Tis a Gift plays in the background.

The Obama girls are fidgeting, it looks like, and Michelle is dealing with them, while Obama sits in front, looking like he’s posing for a statue.  Which he is, of course.

Here it comes. I’m going to stand.

Well Stevens did a pisspoor job of administering the oath.  But Obama figured it out. His was shorter than Biden’s.

OK Obama! Now it’s time for him to deliver his speech.  His first inaugural address.

I’ll leave you to experience that for yourself. Enjoy, and congratulations, America. Well done.

always something there to remind me

When I was in college, I had that boyfriend.  The one who says, as if he memorized it and says it to all the girls, because he does, “I’m not promiscuous but I’m not monogamous. I’m going to see other women,” and this on the first date, pretty much as a how-do-you-do.

But because you are 19 and you are already insanely turned on, you don’t care and you go ahead and sleep with him anyway.  Lots of times.  Wheeeee!  Sexy fun times galore!

And then the day comes when you are at a friend’s dorm one Sunday morning, and you see him emerge bleary-eyed but perky-tailed from some (other) tramp’s room, and you suddenly remember than you were warned, and further that you said that this was going to be completely and totally OK with you.

And yet it is not OK, as it turns out.

It is not OK with you, you discover that morning, to see your boyfriend (for lack of a better word), all adorably rumpled and wearing your favorite plaid flannel shirt (it is 1990, let’s remember) with sex-smell waves visibly wafting off of his body just before Sunday brunch, not when the sex-smell is not mingled with your own, goddammit.

And so you break up with him.  After one last romp, of course, during which you stuff that favorite flannel shirt of his into your backpack as a memento, or perhaps a trophy.

Yeah, definitely as a trophy.

And then it rains for three weeks, and it sucks, and you cry.

And then you start vigorously sleeping around again, because hey, you are 19!  And crying and self-pity are only a satisfying substitute for sex for so long.

Time passes, the semester ends, and you return home to Cape Cod for one last summer at home before your mother finally and for good drives you crazy and you can’t DO THAT anymore.  But that hasn’t happened yet, or you haven’t noticed it yet, and you are on Cape Cod for the summer and you are reasonably attractive and 19. Worse things have happened.

Your birthday is in the summer, and you decide you want to celebrate it by taking the ferry over to Nantucket and then steaming back into Hyannis harbor under a shower of fireworks, and the 4th of July (and the Town of Barnstable’s annual fireworks display over Hyannis harbor) offers a relatively convenient and inexpensive way of doing this.

So you call up Mr. Flannel and invite him down for the weekend.

You think, he’ll be good for a little birthday romp in the dunes! He’s a total tramp! And so am I!  Yahoo!  Let’s screw!

And he obligingly comes over and is obligingly funny and smart and cute and adorable just like you remember him

but not

obligingly

randy.

And when you propose a little bouncybouncy with the lad, he purses his lips and says don’t you remember you broke up with me?

Crap. Why did he have to be like that?

And yes, you had kind of forgotten. Or at least, you had completely forgotten that it might matter.

***

the shirt in question

***

For some reason, in all the moves since that summer, from college to California to grad school to debauched club girl to reformed upstanding professional and back again to grad school (sigh), I have been entirely unable to rid myself of that shirt.  I have long since stopped fitting into it, sized as it was to fit a scrawny (but surprisingly strong!) little English lit MFA student from UMass. But I cannot, it seems, throw it out.

It has long since stopped smelling like him.

That has long since stopped being the point.

I used to look at it and think about being 19 and hot and ready to rumble and really alarmingly trusting and naive. But with a great ass that sort of made it all OK.

These days it reminds me more to remember that other people are likely to have different memories of shared events than I am, and that their versions of events don’t always flatter me to the same extent as my own do.

If at all.

But the shirt, when I look at it, represents my version of events. It is my glass slipper, my souvenir from the fairy tale of having been young and sexy and cool enough to run with guys like that for a while.

No, guys like that are not at all what they are cracked up to be.  I know that by now.

But I still retell myself my favorite stories sometimes, late at night, and they get better with each retelling.

ha! we’re back.

One of the things I ALWAYS tell beginning bloggers that they should NEVER do is write the dreaded “sorry I haven’t posted for so long” post.

So I won’t.

I happened to notice tonight that there were a few comments that I had shamefully left unmoderated for, like, a really long time.  And I hate to do that. So SPROING consider yourself moderated! And that little editorial action made me want to say hello!

Member that time? That I said I was going to go back to school? Part-time?

HA

PSYCHE

I quit my job and went full-time instead. Because I’m a psychopath who can’t do anything halfway. Ever. I commute each day, five days a week, by bus.  Takes about oh say two-and-a-half to three hours each way. WHAT

So um, yes, busy is what I have been. It’s true.  Busy and happy and fulfilled and excited and kind of interested in accounting. Not like in a life-changing, career-path-forming sort of way! Just that way you feel when you totally expected to hate a subject and instead it ends up being moderately more interesting than you thought it would be, enough to keep you interested and engaged and determined to get a really good grade because you really like the professor.

Kidding. I always want a good grade.

So now it’s the winter break, and I have all this delicious time on my hands.  I’m thinking about starting a videoblog. I’m thinking about trying to get an internship doing web 2.0 marketing for a startup that’s all rockstar sustainable and fairly-traded and crap like that.  I’m thinking that I miss the old Dune Shack, where I could always let it all hang out.

So in honor of our renewed acquaintance, here is my Christmas present to you:

You’re welcome.

father figure

I freaking love my dad.

Sure, sure, there were tough times back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when he was variously employed as a less-than-enthusiastic-father-of-three, and then an embarassingly-enthusiastic-divorcé-about-town, and my two brothers and I were forced to spend every second and fourth weekend with him in some tiny little house across town that didn’t have a proper lawn, never mind any neighbor kids our age, and NO NOT EVEN A TV SET GOOD GOD CALL DSS THIS IS CHILD ABUSE.

I mean, really — it was the late ’70s!  There were vitally important Evel Knievel specials to be watched!  And… and… very special episodes of Good Times!!!

But then I had a minor epiphany when I was about 17 years old, and realized that he did the right thing by divorcing my mom and living his life the way he really wanted to — or at least, one of the Right Things that were possible in that situation.  The other ones involving grinding away and suppressing his own personality in a life of increasing misery “for the sake of the children” or submitting my mother to electro-shock therapy so that her personality changed to the kind of person my father enjoyed spending time with.  At all.

Add to their basic incompatibility the fact that Dad doesn’t really like children, and he was basically in a tight spot.

I told my Dad, that day that I had my epiphany, that I thought he did the right thing after all, and we’ve been pretty tight ever since.

Now I live in that very tiny house across town, and can enjoy the sound of a house unsullied by the sounds of sitcoms and siblings, and occasionally I spend Saturday mornings on the phone with Dad, catching him up on my life.

Dad is the parent with whom I can occasionally use swear words, or refer casually to my days of casual co-habitation with various romantic partners.

Dad tries really hard to keep up with my changing interests, and pays attention when I talk about stuff I like, so he has some idea of what to buy me for my birthday.

This is in contrast to members of my family who can only seem to recall that I was once obsessed with Snoopy, and restrict their purchases to Snoopy-themed cards and novelty items.

Because, you know, I’m still 12.

So today I’m on the phone with Dad, relating all my tales of Derring Do, and he is ooohing and aaaahing most gratifyingly, and the conversation veers into the difficulty of finding furniture that is suitably dollhouse-sized to fit into this tiny little house on Cape Cod.

I mention a catalog company that my dear friend Saucy has recently brought to my attention, one that produces clean, modern organizationally-enhanced home and office furniture to gladden my little OCD heart.

Dad waits an appropriate period of time — a few minutes, maybe — and sort of coughs and says What was the name of that catalog?  …because, uh, because I might want something like that…

Elfa, Dad.  E-L-F-A.  And God bless your awesome heart, I know as sure as I know my name that you are writing that down on piece of scrap paper that you will keep in your wallet until my birthday in July, at which time you will present me with a $50 gift certificate to Elfa over lunch at the Squire, with a shy little smile and a modesty that continues to charm the socks off of me.

Thanks, Dad, in advance.  I love my hypothetical new shelving system from Elfa, because it reminds me of how you listen, and remember, and care.

love

me

let the learning begin

So I’ve been jetting up to Boston a lot lately, trying to get accepted to my school of choice for that elusive graduate degree.  (This effort would be greatly assisted if those who have been asked for recommendations would send them in.  Just sayin’.)

Most recently, I was back in the Back Bay for my admission interview, which was really low-key and more about me asking them questions than anything else.  Since I have, of course, already researched the hell out of the school, the program, and all of the faculty, I didn’t really have any questions to ask.

(Honestly, wouldn’t you be embarrassed to go into an interview and ask a question, the answer to which could be found just by reading the damn website? I know I would.  So of course I committed their website to memory months ago. It’s a sickness.)

So, lacking any truly cogent questions (I opted out of asking the silly ones, i.e., What’s your favorite color? Thai or Chinese?  Brontë or Austen?), I just told funny stories and made my interviewer wipe the tears from her eyes at least five times.  Which I think is a record for me in an interview.

I interview well.

But before any of this happened, I had to wait in the charming foyer of the renovated brownstone that houses the admissions office of the School of Management (wood paneling, chandeliers, recessed statuary alcoves, sweeping curved stairway with stunning wrought-iron railing, etc. etc.), idly checking my email and thinking I could so totally get used to this when it occurred to me that I could probably stand a little freshening up after the arduous drive up from the Cape of Cod to the urbane streets of Boston.

So I flounced over to the ladies’ room (also charming, in a little nook under the dramatic staircase,with adorable little ivory pull-knobs on everything, which made me mutter can I live here?) and splashed my face with water, scrubbed behind my ears a bit, and did all those little tweaks and prods that we don’t even know we do when we’re in the bathroom.

Whenever I wash my hands I always want to immediately put moisturizer on them.   So I looked around the bathroom for the cabinet or hideyhole that women always find to stash such things in.

I knew I would find something, because

1. This is a women’s college, so if there’s one thing I know it’s that you will always be able to find little stashes of moisturizer, tampons, and advil if you are willing to look hard enough; and
2. This building houses several faculty offices; I have seen these women, and they look good. No way is there not random toiletries around here someplace.

So I found a teeny tiny cabinet, opened the door and found:

1. Moisturizer (my favorite brand, no less); and
2. Some rather expensive hair spray.

I don’t usually use hairspray, but I figure these ladies clearly know more about looking good than I do, so I spray myself but good with the pricey aerosol, fluff myself up a few times, apply more moisturizer, and head back on out to the foyer.

Shortly thereafter, I was called in for my interview.  Which went well (c.f. above discussion re: wiped eyes).

All told, I was only there for about an hour. Then it was time to drive way too fast listening to music way too loud and on towards home.

When I got home, I realized that I had been molesting my hair the whole ride home, because it felt all silky and awesome.  I went into the bathroom to check myself out, and Lo! I looked GOOD!

This is totally bizarre because I am in the process of growing my hair out, and so it is all in-betweeny and weird-looking these days.   BUT with the help of the hair-styling savvy of the Management faculty at 409 Commonwealth Avenue, I was able to achieve temporary hair awesomeness.

This morning, the magic was gone.

This afternoon, I went to the store and spent way too much money on a bottle of the very same brand of hairspray.  Not sure it’ll work without the little ivory pull-knobs, though.

not dead yet

I took today off from work, as I was weak and frail like a kitten from the flu. Also, my head was pounding its way out of the tops and sides of my skull, which made it difficult to think.

Fortunately, it turns out that a rigorous schedule of sleeping, moaning, drinking licorice tea, and moaning myself back to sleep is pretty effective in getting me back into fighting trim. So I feel almost mostly better now that it is almost mostly time to fall back into bed, and I can hope to feel pretty tolerable by morning.

Or I’ll have a complete reversal and lose my voice by morning. Which also sometimes happens.

During my sojourn at home, I was reminded of what life was like when I did this every day, when I was a poor, wretched freelance editor, eking a wage out of inserting the serial commas and deleting the rampant, unnecessary apostrophes that sadly litter today’s romance novel manuscripts.

I didn’t do much but drive to the post office and grocery store every day, drive back home, and turn the blinding white pages of the latest missive from Pern with my trusty red pencil by my side.

Some days, I would take a walk around the neighborhood, taking very bad photographs of leaves and things, muttering insensibly to myself about all the great things I was gonna do someday, and how much I loved this “lifestyle.”

This crippling isolation, my friends, is what led me to blog in the first place. Please don’t make me go back there again. It is a dark, dark place.

So yes, I puttered about the house for most of today, when I wasn’t sleeping, or moaning — no wait, I think I did manage some simultaneous moan-walking — watched a little PBS, realized that my tearing up at the intro music and montage for American Experience was probably a sign of mental decay, or at least a high fever, but something about it is all so reminiscent of my early teenage years, which were all mixed up with swelling, surging John Williams soundtracks, Indiana Jones fantasies, the music from Epcot Center (I owned the album) and more re-readings of Jane Eyre and Little Women that I could possibly make you understand…

So I love PBS, right? We all know this. And they’re in the midst of a mostly awful but highly watchable series of Jane Austen-based flicks this month (Northanger Abbey, Good; Persuasion, Not Bad; Mansfield Park, Perfectly Atrocious; Miss Austen Regrets, Don’t Even Get Me Started…) And I’m in a bit of a feeble mental state just now, right? Maybe just a little emotionally vulnerable, perhaps a tad excessively open to sentiment.

But tell me you don’t clap your hands with joy at the last part of this final scene from Northanger Abbey.

Should I go back to moaning? I think I’ll just go back to moaning.

words to live by

So I’m at some lousy store, spending the $50 gift card that somebody who does NOT know me very well gave me for Christmas.  I actually loathe this store, as it gives me awful, vivid flashbacks to my childhood of penury, but hey, $50 is $50, and I have needs.

Today my needs are focussed on my breasts, as they so often are.

I have been in desperate need of a new bra or three for about 6 months.  I’m not crazy about the bra selection here, in this lousy crap-ass store, but I am desperate and the idea of free undergarments charms my black soul.

I am also in need — OK, “want” — of a cheap-ass webcam, because, well, because I’vebeen getting started on Seesmic and although I LOVE my new Flip camcorder, the translation from Flip to Seesmic is still a little buggy.  Seesmic is really built for people with built-in webcams on their laptops (i.e., mac people), so until I get my savings back up to the right levels after the holidays and can buy me a MacBook, I am still stuck using this crappy old desktop PC that has sucked air ever since we bought it over a year ago.

So I figured I would use some of my free money at the lousy store to buy a lousy webcam, and Hey! Whaddya know?  It is lousy.

So far it does the trick, it’s getting around all those buggy bits I was encountering because I wasn’t recording directly into Seesmic, but the video quality is FAR below that of the Flip, which is depressing.

So I don’t know.  I know I don’t want to spend any of my MacBook savings on another, better webcam, since once I have a MacBook I will no longer have this problem.

I’m afraid this is another case where the best move is Suck It Up and Save Money Faster.

legal mumbo-jumbo

What do you think? Do you think that of the two parties in an argument about money, in which one party disputed the wisdom of saving versus spending, and the other party — the pro-saving party — was HERSELF accused of being a poor saver, and was thereby provoked and incited to apply the term “jackass” to her chosen life partner…

In a case such as this, who do you think owes whom an apology?

Party the First, who asserts that putting money in an interest-bearing account in an established financial institution, such as a bank, is an unproven scheme of debatable, if not scurrilous returns?

or Party the Second, whose assertion of the basic jackassery of Party the First remains visibly supported by all present evidence?

now with inexorable consequences!

Today I amused myself by spending all my holiday gift cards and gift certificates. It almost ended in astonishing tragedy! because I couldn’t find one of the best ones: a gift certificate to my favorite yarn shop, Adventures in Knitting!

C’mon. Yarn shops have to have totally queer names. It’s the law. Just like haircutting shops (Sheer Magic!). You know this is true.

Of course it was one of those totally quaint gift certificates, all written out in beautiful cursive by the charming Irish grandmother of dozens who runs the place. I seriously think her name is, like, Maeve, or something.

God bless her, she has little patience for me ever since I dissed her favorite method for knitting socks, the infamous “Magic Loop” method. She thinks I’m nuts because I prefer the old fashioned, five-needle method. It may someday come to blows.

So of course when I go to grab the gift certificate (for fifty bucks!) and run over to the yarn shop to spend my lucre, I cannot find it. I turn the house upside-down. No dice.

So I call, and somebody who is NOT Maeve answers, and is distinctly less than helpful. (She asks me if I have the receipt. For a GIFT. Awesome.)

So I go hightailing it over there (see that? how I am now talking like my mother? hightailing it, indeed…) and just pray that Maeve is there. She is.

She gives me many disapproving glances over the tops of her reading glasses, but finally digs up the evidence of my mother’s purchase of the gift certificate lo these many weeks ago. In beautiful, looping cursive, she writes me out a new certificate.

I spend it. On this:

The Knitter’s Purse. It is wonderful beyond imagining. Also, it is black, not red. In it, I can fit all the complicated socks I am currently knitting. PLUS all my needles. PLUS all my little folded up patterns. *sigh*

NEXT I had a little gift card from Barnes and Noble to spend.

I went online for this, because Barnes and Noble is in Hyannis and we don’t go to Hyannis on Saturdays. Our people.  It simply isn’t done.

I knew I wanted the new biography of Edith Wharton. I was then inspired by this post to buy a little paperback of Middlemarch, because it’s been too long. That got me thinking about all the classic literature I gave away at Christmas (everybody got classic literature this year – all expertly matched to your personality! well-traveled grandfather? Kipling’s Kim! Social climbing aunt? House of Mirth! Slutty sister-in-law? Moll Flanders!).

I had given my mystery-novel-loving mother-in-law Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and it had been painful to part with it, since I had given away my copy years ago. So that went in my BarnesandNoble.com shopping cart as well.

Then I thought how about how much I love Wilkie Collins, all that fabulously concocted gothic wonderfulness: fainting women, shrieking men, innocent heiresses, mysterious foreigners, nefarious baronets…

So I went looking for some more Collins fun. When I found this review of Blind Love, I knew:

Unjustly neglected tale of Victorian master storyteller’s later period. Blind love of Iris Henley for notorious Lord Harry Norland has inexorable consequences leading to fiendish crime. Based on a real-life case, enlivened by Collins’ intricate plotting and colorful characters. 16 full-page illustrations by A. Forestier. Preface by Walter Besant.

Inexorable consequences? I love inexorable consequences!

prithee, more badinage

In honor of the upcoming Jane Austen-fest promised to me by PBS this fortnight…

You just have to watch this parody of all I hold dear.

I… I weep. With joy.