A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

...Got up at 6:30 AM. AUGH. (I am doing emergency teenager-sitting for my downstairs neighbor.) Second night in a row of only six hours of sleep, too.

I have to do various work-related things today, including teaching a class. I will have to think of something nice to do to celebrate later. Perhaps a visit to Chantilly lies in my future...

I cannot believe that I am thirty-seven! I keep counting up from 1973 to see if perhaps I am mistaken. I feel about sixteen (all the better to write YA with, my dear,) or maybe thirty at the most. Maybe because sixteen was the point at which I was most certain that I was completely responsible and mature and a real grown-up, and I have never felt that certain since.

For my birthday, please comment with a book recommendation (with reasons why I would like it), description of the most awesomely bad thing you've encountered lately, link to music, photo of a baaaaby animal or cakewreck or exquisite vista, amusing anecdote, or some such pleasant item.

Have Captain Trips, a deadline, ants in the kitchen, no food in the house, and cold medicine that merely adds an overlay of "vaguely and unpleasantly stoned" to my wretched state of being. Yecch. When I feel better I will disinfect the house.

Here, have a sizzling-hot preview of the Project Blue Rose chapbook, going on sale in June.

And a photo of my not-hypothetical spherical cat.

And the cat-owl.

Feel free to comment with anything you think might cheer me up.

I really appreciate the birthday wishes, birthday gifts, and my adorable Her Majesty's Dog birthday fic from untrue_accounts and "manga fowl of DOOM" icon from oyceter. Thank you all very much!

I had a lovely birthday yesterday, culminating in my parents taking me out for lobster. Yes, at that same restaurant, with our $75 gift certificate. I informed the waiter that it was my birthday, so he brought me a free mud pie (mocha ice cream in an oreo crust heaped with whipped cream.)

My step-Mom reminisced that when I was a teenager, I was always pestering them to take me out for lobster, and they could never afford to. Dad added that when I was a child, I always pestered him for lobster, which wasn't available in Ahmednagar and which they couldn't afford when we lived in LA. (I know they did manage to scrape together the money occasionally, though, because I vividly recall the few occasions when I got it.)

It's great to be an adult and be able to indulge those childhood fantasies which you can still appreciate. (I would not get such a thrill over Jello now, though I loved it as a child.) For me, lobster, and college, and publishing a book, and living by myself with two cats and a whole lot of books are the fantasies which most lived up to my childhood imaginings.

What childhood fantasies and treats did you grow out of? Which ones were just as good when you finally obtained them as an adult?

The lobster, a live two-pounder flown in from Maine, boiled plain and served with melted butter, was delicious.

If you're like me, you won't get it till you read the comments.

It reminds me of how, when I was a child, I asked an adult what Khizr was. He's a mysterious man dressed in green who appears in a lot of Muslim stories and rescues lost travelers and so forth. The man I asked intended to explain that Khizr is a sort of job title, like "guardian angel," rather than a personal name. But what he kept saying was, "Khizr is an office, not a person."

For years afterward, I believed that Khizr was a talking, flying, green office building.

I am in Santa Barbara for the weekend and staying at my parents' place, where I have been joined by one relative and two family friends, one of whom is having a birthday. My parents were going to take us all out to some nice restaurant, and the birthday girl voted for lobster. (OK, so I encouraged her.) So we went to the only restuarant in Santa Barbara that offers live Maine lobster.

I called to make the reservation for 7:15, which I changed to 7:30 at the restaurant's suggestion. The six of us arrived at 7:30. Our table wasn't ready. The bar was full. So we stood in the aisle, getting bumped into, for twenty-five minutes. Just as we were about to be seated, an irate man pushed forward, exclaiming that he had been waiting an hour for a table.

We were seated next to the open grill station/wait station-- the part of the kitchen adorned with festoons of paper noting everyone's orders, which the waiters would go to, check, then pick up the matching plates. As the evening wore on, this turned into an impromptu crisis management center, or perhaps lack-of-crisis-management center, with semi-hysterical waiters clustered around, patting each other soothingly on the back and giving thousand-yard stares to the plates.

After a long wait, our waitress, who seemed to have been attacked and mugged by her uniform, came over to take our drink orders. She was a pretty, slim blonde woman, but her too-tight black pants were riding low and her too-tight black blouse was riding high, so that a bulging roll of fat (which was just about the only fat on the poor woman's body) was squished out and exposed between them. It was strangely hypnotic.

After another long wait, the drinks arrived. Sensing more long waits in the future, we quickly placed our orders. It was then that the waitress informed us that they were out of broccoli, jambalaya, and lobster. Annoyed, the birthday girl switched her order to the mixed seafood grill, I switched mine to the steamed Dungeness crab, and my visitig relative ordered the salmon.

About half an hour later, the waitress returned. "I'm really sorry about this, but there's a party in the back and they ate a lot... Um..." We all glared at her, guessing what was coming. "Um... we're out of the crab and the mixed seafood grill. I'll let you think about what you want to switch to!"

"I want to talk to the manager," said Dad ominously.

"I'll let her know," said the waitress, and fled.

Fifteen minutes later, neither waitress nor manager had arrived at our table. The crisis station at the grill was in full force, with waitress comforting each other and consulting in great confusion over the order slips. Dad got up and stomped over to demand to see the manager. At that moment, our waitress directed him to the manager, and he and the manager vanished into a back room together, and our waitress returned to the table.

"We're out of salmon," said the waitress, looking ready to duck. "But you don't have to switch!" she assured my visiting relative. "We do have one plate of salmon left. Just not enough for the seafood grill."

"Can you make the seafood grill without the salmon?" asked the birthday girl. "You do have shrimp and scallops, right?"

"Um... yes," said the waitress, rather doubtfully.

"Are you out of the cioppino?" I asked.

"Oh no, we've got some of that left."

"OK, I'll have that."

The waitress split, and Dad returned with a report. As he had been entering the office, another customer barged in, swearing and bellowing, "I'm not paying for this meal! You can call the police to chase me out of the restaurant!"

"We're not calling the police," said the manager.

"Everyone at my table is finishing dessert, and I never got my entree," continued the irate customer.

"I'm so sorry," said the manager. "I'm afraid we've had a total breakdown in the kitchen."

She comped both angry men the meals for their entire table, apologized profusely, gave them a seventy-five dollar gift certificate, then came over to our table to apologize and explain. Apparently the restaurant runs on half-staff on Sunday nights, but they had forgotten that the holiday on Monday made this particular Sunday the equivalent of Saturday, which is their busiest night. "I've been here for five years, and I've never seen anything like this," she said.

The waitress appeared with our meals. The visiting relative looked down at his plate. "Why do I have rice and mashed potatoes? I ordered steamed vegetables."

"We're out of everything," explained the waitress. "Vegetables, baked potatoes, cole slaw... I just grabbed whatever we had left, and threw it on your plates."

And then came the most unexpected twist of all: the food was really good.

the_red_shoes attempts to make chicken stock:

"Putting it v, v charitably. I tried to make REAL chicken stock once in our first apt here from the leftover carcass of a (boughten) roast chicken, bones fat scraps and all. It looked like Hannibal Lecter's apprentice had been carefully preparing for a life of extremely unappetizing crime in our kitchen, practicing on pullets while Working His Way Up. I wound up with this horrible watery-yet-gluey mess with a visible inch-thick scum of frothing fat on top with horrible bobbing mangled things occasionally poking through it only to be drowned again in the percolating ooze. The cats hid from the smell. (The landlady upstairs said "What is that?" I said maybe her cat had left a dead bird in the hedge, or something.) T wanted to decontaminate the pot by leaving it in the back yard to get rained in. You remember when Meg's jelly won't jel in Little Women? It was like that, only extremely gross."

This reminds me of the biology class assignment I got in tenth grade, which was to boil a whole chicken, until the flesh fell off the bones, then dry the bones and reconstruct the skeleton. We were given a month and a diagram of a chicken skeleton to do this. I put it off till the night before because I was so terrified of the assignment, then made shamefacedly confessed and made my Dad drive me to the grocery store to buy a whole chicken.

Several hours of boiling (the chicken), yelling (Dad's), and weeping (mine) later, the meat was not off some bones, while others had turned to jelly or even dissolved. Dad, having refused to go to bed and leave me alone with the chicken, suggested that I put the bones in the oven to try to dry them out. Several hours later, we had a pile of bones that were more-or-less dry enough to glue together. That was when we discovered that the bones did not match the anatomy diagram. It was like a jigsaw puzzle... FROM HELL.

By 3:00 am, we were pretty much randomly gluing bones that looked sort of right to other bones that were sort of in the right place. Eventually we achieved a chicken-like object, although there was still a pile of bones that we didn't know what the hell they were or where they should have gone, and went to bed.

The next morning we awoke to see the Frankenchicken lurking there atop the tabletop, lopsided, mutant, malevolent. I burst into tears and said I wouldn't turn it in at all, because I'd done such a bad job and I was embarassed to be seen with it. Dad, who is a very wise man in some ways, said that on the contrary, he had no doubt that everyone else also left it to the night before and probably gave up well before we did. Not only did he drag me and the Frankenchicken to school, he accompanied me into the classroom because he was so curious to see what the rest of the kids had come up with.

Some kids had their very own Frankenchickens, which much like ours were lopsided, wet, smelly, only vaguely chicken-like, and sometimes with extra vestigial limbs. Some kids had partial chickens. A few despondent folk carried plastic bags of bones, with maybe a leg or a wing glued together. One boy had taken all the bones and glued them into a solid ball, like Darth Vader's prototype Chicken Star.

And then there was Elizabeth Sugar. Elizabeth Sugar was clearly the only person in the class who had actually bought a chicken and boiled it the day the project was announced. I suspect that she went through several chickens before getting the hang of the project. Her bones were polished and gleaming and wired together. Her anatomically perfect chicken skeleton was mounted handsomely on a polished wood base, and was posed as if poised for flight.

Elizabeth Sugar was chosen as valedictorian, to no one's surprise, and went to Harvard to study genetics. I believe that even as we speak, she is mapping the chicken human genome.

Me? I became a writer.

"Young, who was hired by Los Angeles officials at a cost of $800 a day, said he is confident he'll get the job done. "At most, I can lose a couple of fingers," he said."

"It is because of this cat-and-mouse game that Young said he doesn't wear shoes when pursuing alligators. "Shoes just slow you down," he said."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-alligator17aug17,1,5988050.story?coll=la-home-headlines

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-081805notebook_lat,0,742789.htmlstory?coll=la-home-headlines

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-081805gator_lat,0,1096847.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Best News Stories Ever, as far as I'm concerned, must involve escaped wildlife. My previous two favorite news stories ever took place in my hometown of Santa Barbara. In one, a capybara, which is a South American rodent that looks just like a guinea pig but is the size of a large hog, escaped from the zoo and spent several months on the loose, eating vegetables out of people's gardens and running away before the zoo people could recapture it. In the other, someone released a piranha into a pond in the Alice Keck Park Park (it was established by a lady named Alice Keck Park) and teams of experts were unable to capture it. Then a twelve-year-old boy took his father's fishing rod, snuck into the park after dark, hooked it, and brought it home in a bucket.

I went to Brentano's to look for Saiyuki # 8, which they didn't have, and then became transfixed by Toni Bentley's butt-fuck memoir, The Surrender, about how she found God up her ass. I'm serious.

"I came to know God experientially, from being fucked in the ass—over and over and over again."

"I want to die with him in my ass"

It's... well... a pretty good read, I have to say, although I wish I knew exactly how much of the humor was intentional. A lot of it reads like Mad Libs entries where all the inserted words and phrases involve ass: "True happiness can be found... in the ass." "Love is... taking it up the ass." "The last taboo is... ass." "I never got over my childhood until I explored the joy of... ass" "My training as a ballerina prepared me for... ass."

Then I heard the sound of clapping. I went to see what was going on, and saw an author standing by a table of books, with a small audience. I went closer to see who it was, thinking that if it wasn't anyone I'd heard of, I'd check her out anyway because hey, she's on tour and some day that'll be me and maybe her book would be really cool and something I'd want to read and then I'd buy it and make her happy and justify this leg of her tour.

When I got close enough to read the sign, which advertised "Barbara DeAngelis: author of How Did I Get Here? : Finding Your Way to Renewed Hope and Happiness When Life and Love Take Unexpected Turns and
Are You the One for Me?: Knowing Who's Right and Avoiding Who's Wrong," three things happened:

1. I realized that I knew who the author was, and that I'd flipped through some of her books before, and that I'd found them insipid, cliched, and unquestioning of defunct gender roles.

2. A woman in the audience said, quite loudly, "There's a seat here in the front!"

3. Barbara DeAngelis said, "Come on in, there's a seat right here."

Since, after all, some day it would be me up there... I pretended that I had intended to attend the thing, and obediently sat down.

Barbara DeAngelis proceeded to talk for forty minutes without break. She used words like "authenticity," "healing," "wholeness," and "transformative." She referred to Native American vision quests. She asked all of us who had had an experience we didn't expect to have happen to us occur in the last year to raise our hands. She said that we thought we'd had a good day when things like our job, our family, and our friends were all doing well, and a bad day when bad things happened to those things that we cared about, but we should have a good day because of what's inside of us, not because of outside events-- that if we were dying, we'd say it was a good day just because we were alive, so we should always say it's a good day because we're alive. She said that we don't have mid-life crises, we have mid-life opportunities for change.

I didn't want to be horribly rude and walk out, especially from my first row seat, so I amused myself by imagining how Toni Bentley would have written DeAngelis' books: How Did I Get Up Your Ass? : Finding Your Way to Renewed Hope and Happiness in the Ass When Life and Love Take Unexpected Turns into Ass and Are You the One for My Ass?: Knowing Who's Right for Your Ass and Avoiding Who's Wrong for Your Ass.

Barbara DeAngelis informed us that she had built a career out of total honesty and straightforwardness, and yet she realized that there were parts of herself that she had been hiding from the world, and so she decided that in order to be a truly authentic person, she would have to come out of the closet and reveal those significant aspects of herself that she'd been holding back out of fear.

Ass, I thought. Ass, ass, ass! Please tell us that authenticity lies in ass!.

"My psychic talents," she said. "My great work as a spiritual healer and counselor. I have helped so many people, I have so much compassion, and I wish to share that... Now... With all of you."

She looked into all our eyes, dramatically, one by one. I sat there until it went to question and answers, then I ostentatiously checked my watch, mimed "Eeek, it's late!" and fled. Even so, I'm sure she thought I was an ass.

Branna, who is about to defend her dissertation on particle physics, and I went to a Rosh Hashana party tonight at Raven's place tonight. Her six-year-old son, Robin, whom I often babysit, answered the door.

"Hi, Robin," I said.

He took one look at me, shrieked "AIEEEEEEEE!" and fled.

While the two of us were fixing appetizers in the kitchen, this oldish guy, Daniel, walked in with his girlfriend, who I hadn't met. He blinked puzzledly at me and started to introduce himself.

"We actually do know each other," I said. "Rachel Brown. We met at the Jim Henson Company. I used to have long hair."

"Oh, yes," he said. "I remember now." Pause. "I asked you out once."

"....." I said. Is there any possible reply to that, other than a silent stare of dumbstruck horror followed by a silent stare in the opposite direction?

Then another, even older guy came in when I was telling Branna how I'd visited Palo Alto during the El Nino floods when I was doing disaster relief for the Red Cross, and our hotel had been flooded on the first day.

"Incompetent government bureaucrats," remarked the old guy.

"The Red Cross isn't a government organization," I said. "Though it is pretty incompetent."

"It's like a government organization," he said.

"That may be, but it's completely private. So you ought to like it."

He then opined that in cases of widespread disaster, neighbors just ought to help each other and that would be better than any organizations doing anything.

I pointed out that your neighbors might all be flooded too.

Branna pointed out that some neighbors are better than others.

"That's true," I said. "I'm pretty sure one of my neighbors stole my laptop."

The old guy started talking to someone else.

At the end of the party, some of the women asked Branna what exactly her dissertation was about.

"Well, you know that atoms have neutrons," she said. "And you know that neutrons decay..."

Robin stuck a long stick with a blue parakeet on the end of it into my face.

"Uh, thanks," I said, accepting the parakeet.

"...And then it becomes a proton..."

A green parakeet flew into the room and began circling Branna's head.

"...So then a particle called a neutrino is created..."

"Catch it, catch it!" squealed a troupe of stampeding children.

"Cheep!" cheeped the parakeet, fluttering in the opposite direction.

"...And then it becomes a different element..."

"Can I hold it?" asked a small girl, regarding the blue parakeet. "Will it tickle?"

"No, I wanna hold it," said another small child.

The green parakeet made a break for the other side of the room.

"Catch it, catch it!" said the children who weren't begging for the bird in my hand.

"We're putting them away now," said a parent.

"...So then the neutrino..."

"Perhaps you should explain this with reference to parakeets," I suggested. "If the blue one is a neutron and the green one is an electron..."

"Not a bad idea," said Branna. "OK, imagine that the blue parakeet is matter, and the green one is antimatter..."

"IT'S GETTING AWAY!" shrieked a child.

"Does any of this have any practical application?" inquired the old anti-government guy.

Branna said, "As (someone I forget) said to Queen Victoria, "Madam, I cannot say what we will discover, but perhaps some day you will find a way to tax it."

On that note, we took off.