Addendum

I know Mrs. Piggle Wiggle isn't true.

Book 'Em, Sick-o

I stopped at the Goodwill on my way home this afternoon to look at books. I couldn't help it, it just happened. One minute I was driving down the road, the next minute I was in the parking lot - and I figured while I was there I might as well go in and have a look around...

My name is Erin, and I am a bookaholic.

When we moved into this house three years ago, I had more boxes of books than we had boxes of everything else all put together. When it finally (about six months ago) came time to unpack, I managed to weed them down by a total of five boxes - an accomplishment of which I was very proud. I don't really need two Madonna biographies, I figured; my seventh-grade history text isn't necessary anymore; and Portnoy's Complaint can burn for all I care.

I packed 'em all up and brought 'em to the Goodwill. I felt bad about unloading some of them. The spanish-language novels from an abandoned college minor that I'd only clung to this long out of a pretentious desire to see them on the shelf - was the Goodwill really going to be able to do anything with those? But I couldn't throw them out, and I had to thin the ranks, so to Goodwill they went.

And then I wandered around to the front of the store and brought another boxful home.

Well, how can you not? A hardcover book costs a dollar, for crying out loud! And they're all mixed up, so you get Art Buchwald next to the Frugal Gourmet next to Alistair Cooke's America. Regular-old bookstores - even regular-old used bookstores - where everything's all organized and alphabetical, are nowhere near such fun.

I made a rule about six months ago that I was only allowed to read things that would help me with this project that I'm working on. That meant no classics, no serious fiction, no serious biography - nothing serious at all, as a matter of fact. Just silly stuff, preferably true silly stuff making light of bad things that happen to good people. You'd be surprised how much of it is out there. So I'm allowed to go to Goodwill, because I have a rule.

Otherwise I'm prone to everything. The hardest thing for me to put back on the shelf this afternoon, as a matter of fact, was a guest book from somebody's funeral. I used to buy these sorts of things all the time when I saw them in these sorts of places, because it's just so wrong that they should be left lying around. I couldn't stand the thought that no one would ever buy them and that they'd be left on the shelf for years until they just got thrown away, so I would take them home. Guess where they all wound up in my big clean-out last summer?

I buy books that are the same edition of books I already own, because I panic and think maybe it is mine and how did it get here? I buy odd titles that make no sense (today I passed up a slim volume titled Sonnets from the Portuguese - just such a lovely idea, I thought). For some reason I have an obsession with King Lear - I must have thirteen copies, I just can't leave it on the shelf, I don't know why. Even now that I've finally read it, I don't know why.

But today the shelves seemed to be trying to tell some kind of story, a story that I couldn't quite suss out. There was a lot of Judy Blume, adult and young adult (think Forever and Wifey, not Margaret or Fudge). About twelve copies of The Bridges of Madison County (what is that about? are we at the point where the folks who actually liked that book are having their estate sales?). No less than three pristine hardcovers of the aforementioned Cooke's America, complete with dustjackets and everything (I have one, but the jacket's in rough shape; those were hard to say no to as well). Lots and lots of Reader's Digest Condensed. But nothing classic, nothing good. Oh, except for one bright pink copy of The G Spot - which I forgot had ever even been a book.

Who is this perverted old broad who's been cleaning out her bookshelves, anyway? I don't think I want to know...

Meanwhile, what did I come home with? Tim Allen, Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry, Andy Rooney and (thank god) The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Treasury by (my favorite) Betty MacDonald.

Ugh.

Hey, an addict's gotta do what an addict's gotta do. At least I'm not out there peddling Piggle-Wiggle on the playground.

Somebody's Gotta Do It...

Well, we had to cancel the St. Patrick's Day party. I loaded in 16 pounds of corned beef, ten pounds of potatoes, six pounds of onions, five pounds of carrots, four pounds of parsnips, two turnips, one giant cabbage and four cases of beer. I spent the week cleaning up the house from the construction mess and the porch from storing wood there in the winter. I pulled the decorations down from the attic two days ahead of time and filled the house with fresh-cut daffodils and little pots of faux-shamrocks the day before. I was so efficient, so organized, so ready - and then I woke up St. Patrick's Day morning and I had the euphemism. I'm mostly better now, but you'll forgive me for taking down the green background this morning because it was making me a litle queasy.

I spent the weekend in bed watching television - normally something I would love an excuse to do - but for the first ten hours there was absolutely nothing on. I watched The Real Housewives of Orange County (and later heard David Rakoff describe it on This American Life as "like watching paint dry - shallow, fake-breasted, Republican paint"). I watched a mini-marathon of Three's Company on TV Land and felt sorry for all the blonde girls because they weren't Suzanne Somers - until they showed a Chrissy episode and I felt bad for her because she was. I actually watched the last half of a Surreal Life Games but mustered up the energy to lunge for the remote when I Love New York came on. I was sick enough already, thank you.

That's when I discovered my new favorite show. It's called Dirty Jobs, and it's on the Discovery Channel. They were showing what turned out to be an all-weekend - meaning all through even Saturday night and until I fell asleep on Sunday - marathon. It can't be a new show if there are that many episodes kicking around, but I'd never heard of it before.

There's a host named Mike something, and he's cute and smart and fit and funny in a sexy-math-teacher kind of way (i.e., smart enough to know when to turn on the cute/fit/funny act and when to tone it down). If I'm being honest here, I'd have to say that he's the reason I left the TV on that channel, because the premise of the show - people write in with the myriad truly disgusting ways there are out there to earn a living, and he goes to work with them for a day and films it - certainly wasn't conducive to my getting well anytime soon.

I watched him make flowerpots out of cow poo, clean the inside of a 104-year-old boiler, sweep up Giraffe droppings at the San Francisco zoo, dismantle rotten floats after the Rose Bowl Parade, try to tell the difference between this odd insect's eggs and poo, mine salt using ammonium nitrate explosives, and dig through dried-up owl poo for teeny animal bones (actually, I think the owl stuff came out the other way, but there was a recurring excretory theme).

It's fascinating. Especially because all the people who do all these awful jobs seem so cheerful about them. It's possible, of course, that having a TV crew on hand and a cute, smart, sexy math teacher to do your job for you can have a mood-elevating effect (the few women he encounters are, without exception, positively giddy). But for the most part - even including the airport incinerator operator, who was really disturbingly creepy in a Sling-Blade-starring-Larry-"Bud"-Melman kind of way - I believed that all these people really loved their dirty jobs.

Until he got to New Orleans.

The poor bastards working residential demolition in New Orleans had all had jobs they loved before the storm and this wasn't anything like any of them. They'd been bouncers, financial something-or-others, butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers - and now they were slinging sledgehammers in rotten houses because, as one of them put it, "we have a love for the city and want to see it survive - and also because we need the paycheck." Another guy, when Mike couldn't get the sledgehammer through the wall and asked what they normally do in this situation, said "hit it harder" and put the hammer through on his first try. A third fellow, asked by Mr. Cute/Smart what kind of cockroaches were swarming over all the food that had been abandoned in the cupboard, answered flatly "I don't know. I try not to think about them very much."

Now, I don't know anything about the misery that New Orleans has been these past few years, but I do know a little bit about dismantling a rotten house. We didn't have cockroaches, thank god, but we did have slime and mold and black-stink mildew and bronchial infections. Johnny did most of the actual work because he's chivalrous like that, but I lived in the house all through it and I helped load the dumpster. And let me tell you - I don't know what they're paying those butchers and bakers down in the Crescent City, but there isn't enough money in the world...

Thank god he went from there to expressing a poodle's anal glands. Otherwise I might have gotten sick.

Updates From The Homefront

I've got some folks coming over for corned beef and cabbage tomorrow (dig the green background) so I don't have time to write a whole big rant on this week's New Yorker or the latest Times snobbishness - or even my own stupidity. So here are some random updates on some random things I've mentioned before, starting with my own stupidity...

The radio broke again yesterday - the radio that broke before but wasn't really broken? The same exact thing happened: it wouldn't turn up. Turns out I had it on mute. Turns out when it's on mute you can still hear it a little bit. Is it just me? Is nothing I'm complaining about really broken? Am I just a big fat idiotic moron? No, the toilet in the new bathroom won't stop running, and I'm pretty sure I don't have it on mute - and yes, I did jiggle the handle...

The radio announced the other day that the reason people let banks foreclose on their houses is not so much that they can't afford to pay their mortgages, though that's part of it, but also that when property values drop down so far that if they sold they'd still end up owing money, they figure it makes just as much sense to walk away. Hmmm... Well, we'll see what the market's doing in seven years when my fixed rate runs out.

Still no word from Keyspan, though a very nice stranger did write in to suggest that I consider some electrical something or other. I don't know. That would probably entail more electrical work (i.e., rewiring the entire house) than I'm prepared to do right now. Plus there's the whole mysterious-socket-in-the-living-room thing, which I'll have to explain some other time...

I took the plastic off the windows this week when it was 70 degrees outside - a stupid decision, as it turned out, because it's snowing now - but behind the plastic in the picture window in the living room I discovered a dried-up little spider that had apparently been trapped last fall when I put it on. Ha ha, fucker!

Oh, and a new way your house can kill you: you spend an hour and a half making the new stove level and even with the counter top, and then the new stove breaks and you call the Maytag guy and he comes and pulls it out to fix it, but when he shoves it back he doesn't bother levelling it off, and you don't notice, and when you slide the big pot of spaghetti off the range it hits the counter and splashes all over you and you get burns over whatever percentage of your body it is that you can't possibly survive.

I think that's it for now. Happy commencing on St. Patrick's Day!

TOWNVILLE UPDATE #2:

That ordinance I was all fired up about last week? The one that would give bigoted old men with too much time on their hands the right to spy on folks who don't speak perfect english? Failed, resoundingly. By a vote of 8-2. And one of those two guys says he only voted yes because - well, I don't quite understand his reasoning but he swears he doesn't actually support it. They told the gentleman who proposed it - apparently this is the second time he's done so - to go home and stop bothering them.

Yay, Townville!

Euphemistically Speaking

I think it's time to admit the bathroom's not going to be ready by the time company comes. I mean, it works - hot & cold running and all that - but it ain't pretty.

See, we're having the family over for St. Patrick's Day, as we have done every year since 2001 or so -- even last year, when the stove exploded and we had to cook the corned beef in a succession of crock pots. That was fun. Like playing musical chairs with a saucepan full of boiling water. Fun!

We got the kitchen fixed - well, mostly. Hot & cold running and stove and everything, but we never quite got around to putting plaster on the walls - or even tearing out the other half of the old cabinets. It works, but it ain't pretty either.

But then Johnny up and got a wild hair and decided to get the bathroom cleaned up once and for all. Washing the walls and sanding and priming and sanding and skimming and sanding and priming and sanding and painting and painting again (see? you live with a painter long enough you start to learn all the proper steps involved - you still don't do them, but you know them...)

Except for, first the conjunctivitis hit and then, this week, the euphemism. You know? The virus that's been going around? The one we won't discuss in pleasant company? Johnny got it from the lady whose house he was working in last week. She had it and insisted on following him around and telling him all about it. She euphemismed, as a matter of fact, all over the kitchen floor.

It just so happens Wednesday is Johnny's birthday. I'd bought him (by which I mean us) tickets to see Ardal O'Hanlon at the Burren on Friday night. He (by which I mean I) was really looking forward to the evening. We don't get out like that very much, and we were going to get there early and have dinner first and everything.

Needless to say, Johnny spent the evening euphemizing.

And Saturday. And Sunday. And the best part of last night. With me shoving crackers and ginger ale to him on the butt end of a ten-foot pole, because I have to go to work this week no matter what, and I don't want to end up getting all euphemistic on the subway...

So anyway, right, I started out saying about the bathroom. Poor Johnny got the job about half-done before he was stricken ill. He's feeling better now, he'll be back to work tomorrow, and he says he'll get it finished in the evenings after, but I doubt it. He's been on the couch for four days: he's not going to want to be home in the evenings, let alone back in the bathroom.

Of course, I could do it. I know the steps, and I don't work on Tuesdays. I could go up a ladder with the web tape and the joint compound, then later with a brush and a roller. I could do it. I did the porch all by myself and I stripped the woodwork in the living room and that was--

Uh oh. I think I feel a euphemism coming on...

Squirrels and Rats and Renegade Broads

I’m going to say this right now, and I hope you all will call me on it should I ever renege:

I will never rent a storage space.

There’s a thing in the Times today about how people are using these rent-by-the-square-foot stash-cubbies to convince themselves they don’t have as much stuff as they used to, or to give themselves more space to get more stuff. I will never do that.

Here’s how I know:

I live with a person (let’s call him “Johnny”) who has a hard time throwing anything away. Or letting anybody else throw anything away. That card table you put out for the trash last January when you realized it wasn’t good enough for company anymore and you were never going to be taking it with you on a camping trip again? It’s in my basement.

We have broken lawn mowers that somebody has sworn are going to work again someday. We have wine bottles enough to take over for poor, dead Mr. Gallo. We have a second freezer full of the heads and carcasses of fish that folks have caught, filleted and passed along. We have a scythe – a scythe! – the only possible use for which might be to give me tetanus.

We’re set. I don’t need any more space for this stuff.

Here’s a true story: Last year, I managed to convince this “Johnny” that we had too many old t-shirts between us, that we ought to thin the ranks and toss some out. Don’t ask me how I managed to convince him, but I did. He wanted to give them to Goodwill, but the only ones he was willing to let go were too far gone for Goodwill, in my opinion, so he said we ought to keep them to be rags.

Fine. So I put the old and ratty t-shirts in a trash bag in the basement. I even, over the intervening year, went into the bag once or twice to rag a shirt out when I was stripping woodwork. But I didn’t rag them up ahead of time, and I forgot to put a label on the bag.

Last month, when I wasn’t home, “Johnny” was looking in the basement for something else I don’t remember, and he found this unlabelled bag of shirts. Perfectly good shirts! What were they doing in the basement?

He brought them up, ran the whole bag’s worth through the laundry, folded them all up and put them all away. I came home to find a shirt I’d forgotten that I used to own – one that says “William Kennedy Smith… meet Thelma and Louise” – in a place of honor in my t-shirt drawer.

Now, let’s forget about the fact that this is the first time he’s washed and dried and folded and put away laundry in recent memory. I’d loved this shirt. I’d bought it at a gay pride rally in New York – oh, it must be fifteen years ago, at least. My dad said it made no sense because William Kennedy Smith was found not guilty, but I was young enough to know that guilt or innocence was not the point.

I still love the shirt. It reminds me of the friend I was visiting in New York at the rally where I bought it, who has been living strong with HIV a dozen years now. It reminds me of being 22 and beautiful. And idealistic. And just a little dumb. It reminds me of my Dad – who’s also still with us, by the way (hi, Dad!). And I still love Thelma, and Louise. But I’ve moved on.

It wasn’t easy, moving on. The shirt was threadbare and yellowed by the time I finally managed to give it up. I’d tried a bunch of times before and failed, but at long last I’d succeeded. And I realized, when I saw it, that I hadn’t even noticed it was missing – but now that it was back I wanted it again.

So I took the shears and chopped it into rags. Because I refuse to become the Collyer Brothers, no matter what this “Johnny” has to say!

Except for no I didn’t. The rest of the ratty t-shirts got the shears, but I tossed the girls under my bed for safekeeping. I’m sure I’ll never wear the shirt again – well, almost sure – but I couldn’t stand to throw it out a second time.

Hm. I never noticed how much room there is under that bed there. It’s like its own little secret storage space. I wonder what else I could squirrel away without having to admit anything to the pack rat that I live with…*

But I’m not renting it. I own it. See? There’s a difference. I swear.


* (two rodent metaphors in one sentence – not bad, eh? at least there aren’t any spiders in it this time – and there could have been, what with that bag of t-shirts in the basement…)