Tag Archives: hypomania

Unpleasantville

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wood chipper

Gather round, my dumplings! It is time for a near-quarterly blog post. I would like to share a brief statement on Haus of Vomitola’s Q2 earnings. NONE! Not since we were banned from Google AdSense have we made a red cent on this thing. This is all about unconditional love and finally remembering a password.

A lot has happened since early March. I escaped the world of advertising for the world of I’m not quite sure yet. Last week, it happened to be a dog track in Iowa. You think I’m kidding.

Around May, my beloved ancient cat nearly perished from something indeterminate yet expensive. By virtue of filling out all the fields on many forms, I bamboozled a financial institution into giving me a country house. Perhaps you recall the existential void created by the last time we bought  farm.  But it’s all different now, because I understand the real value of alpacas as a tax shelter.

Flash forward: I am now the proud owner of a wood chipper and default commander of a small bulldozer.

I am also involved in various tedious shenanigans that mostly involve paying double for things. I have a few months of rent to pay on my old apartment by the methadone clinic due to my inability to read contracts. I also owe the child’s school a year of tuition, despite signing up for a refund option. Apparently I was 3 weeks late to exercise that option. See previous reading problem. Despite measured attempts at negotiation with the headmistress,  I left it at “Fine, fuck you, I’m paying never to see you and your stupid “bring an entree if your last name starts with A-M potluck organizing school play having field trip chaperone requiring” tinhorn bullshit Montessori concern again!”

Oh, and somewhere in there, Mr. H got a case of what I diagnosed as flesh-eating bacteria, and a doctor diagnosed as “Oh, God, I’ve never seen that before.” He’s fine. But it was touch and go for a while, as I had to navigate making my own dinner, and I get hives when my blood sugar gets low. It’s a damn good thing I watch enough Discovery Channel to be a doctor, or he might have lost a leg. In the olden days, I would have had to amputate it myself, with only my chainsaw.

I haven’t seen Lambchop since early March either. When last I consulted her, she was shrieking something about “mannschaft,” and I thought it better not to inquire further after her personal needs. I’m sure she’ll get over it eventually.

But my pal and I are probably overdue for a rage-free vacation. We once spent at least 48 hours “in the moment,” not troubled by anything more than the occasional chicken traipsing across our path as we dashed into the surf.  That weekend is my gold standard for vacations, if not life.  Try as I might, I can’t maintain this sort of unstudied bliss. Normally I busy myself with math, imagined slights, muttering, and editing the “shitlist” stored in my iPad.

But this week, Mercury is out of retrograde, and the super moon has passed (though I forgot to take a photo of it and caption it “fate/ up against your will”).  Things are looking up indeed. Those who typically vex me now positively enchant me. I have “Raspberry Beret” on an endless loop in my brain. Thanks to that, I don’t need to sleep anymore! Did I mention I have a chainsaw? It’s time I met some of my new neighbors. I’ll make a pie.

Try a little tenderness

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I honestly can’t remember why I ever saved this picture to my “MUST USE” folder, but then again, why wouldn’t I have saved it? Perhaps it’s a commentary on impostor syndrome or the vulnerability of the creative state, or perhaps it’s an accurate description of my preferred workplace dress code. We’ll never know, will we?

OK, we do know. I would totally work naked given the option. And I am, thank god.

Where did we last leave your intrepid narrators? I chose to turn to page 33, and I was eaten by a bear. Stupid move. Lambchop opted for page 18, and she was rewarded with the discovery of pirate treasure! This is just not fair. OK, I’m in a room. I see a door. There is a table with a key on it.

What actually happened? I left the country, but they wouldn’t keep me. Prescription drugs rain like lemon drops. My personal life continues to gracefully degrade, and my professional life, well, see above. Each day is an ongoing horror fest, punctuated by the sublime. I haven’t been to a grocery store since early 2011, so there’s that.

Quittin’ Time!

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Right now, I’m taking a break from rolling around on the floor, giggling.

My work here is literally done.

Not at Vomitola HQ, mind you. Lambchop and I sued for sexiness discrimination the last time they tried to oust us. It’s true: in America, you cannot be dismissed for being too attractive. Thank God we finally have some protection as Attractive-Americans.

I think I’ll miss commuting at 5 mph the most. But perhaps this longing can be assuaged by swimming in my money bin.

See, I applied to join the 1%, and after a series of tests (mostly matching shoes to bags and ordering off the menu in French), I reached the final hurdle: orphan clubbing. But I saw through this ruse. I hired someone to club the orphans FOR me. And what do you know, I was in!

I take my new responsibilities seriously. No, I will not sponsor your charity walk. Why are you obsessed with redistributing my wealth?

Everything.sucks

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tiny and very reasonable painted sparkle heads

I need someone to take dictation. Ideally someone with some really flumpy sweater kittens. Anyone? Eh, I guess I will continue to shout out loud to myself while I drive. A significant portion of my day is still spent driving, and while I try to delight in the anthropological value of watching a Prius ruthlessly cut off the Coexist-plastered Tercel that ruthlessly cut off me, sometimes the good life wears thin, as Stephin Merritt said. I need an evil twin to handle my commute!

And once I’m on the job, I need to exert a certain amount of mental energy in vanquishing my enemies. Luckily, they pretty much take care of themselves, owing to their stunning incapacity. I am going to suggest the patented Vomitola program of vanquishing when I am next at the Pentagon. I could do it in less than 5 slides, including stick figures and case studies. And with that, we’d save billions of dollars a month, as we leave our enemies to inevitably ruin themselves. We could build a giant dome and keep to ourselves with the extra cash. A swimming pool full of money for every man, woman, and child! Now there’s a stimulus.

But this experiment called life is not all eye rolling on conference calls and sniffing white board markers as others flap their gums. Sometimes we find time to do things! Lambchop has been very busy luring passersby into a van, and she is working on a series of Tiny and Very Reasonable paintings (as seen above!), which can be coveted and purchased at Sparkleheads.com.

I am thinking of raising money on Kickstarter to snap up the .sucks domain when internet anarchy begins to reign next year. I only need $185,000 more, and I think I’ll be good. My company would be called Everything.Sucks. We’re all you need for things that suck! I am assuming I will face stiff competition for the acquisition from Verizon.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out why my Entourage calendar keeps flipping to 2013. Does Microsoft outrank Mayan prophecy?

Math: fad or here to stay?

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Dear the internet, I wasted my whole weekend trying to buy a TV. Apparently no one wants me to buy a TV, as there are eleventeen thousand choices, with hundreds of dollars in price variance between sellers of TV sets. Plus the poor slobs at Sears will haggle, I hear! Is it even called TV anymore? Apparently it is called HDTV, and I am getting a “screen,” not a set. Also, my old DVD player is a few letters too short to just plug into the holes on a “display.” As Mr. H said, we have put more research into this TV than we did into buying our Indian Burial Ground, but then, look where that got us.

I backed into needing a TV by getting a TV stand, er, media wall, (from here!) and it is fantastic, but so completely attractive that maybe putting a TV on it would spoil it. It may well just sit there, languishing glamorously, until someone comes up with the notion to sell TVs in three flavors, like Apple products. You know: nice, nicer, really nice, and no, you can’t afford it. I cannot abide more than three choices, and I become so paralyzed that I would rather stare at all this reclaimed Brazilian barn wood than watch TV. I hear there is nothing good on TV anyway. Oh, barn wood, you have a lovely and fascinating pattern of holes. By the way, its beauty is superlative when placed against our new wall color.

Other than that, cruising altitude is nice. Is it the Oprah book or my stop smoking medication (I don’t smoke anyway, so really, this is approximately the same as taking speed, with less scratching holes in myself)? Now I’d go watch some Olympic Facebook updating, if I had a TV. My money is on the team from my old highschool, where people I don’t even remember meeting will still add me. You who what? Is that your married name? No? I really just don’t remember?

Oh, Jesus, remind me to tell you about the going jogging some day. My shoes are shiny like a robot.

Pre, post, and currently traumatic

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Internet, you jerk. I am trying to decide if I should go back to the therapist I saw last year or the year before or maybe the year before that for Wanting to Throw the Ybab in the River Syndrome. I want to throw the ybab in the river again. I am starting to think this is a personality flaw on her part, not mine. Can you have a two-year-old treated for Total Asshole Syndrome? Is there some kind of off-label use for animal tranquilizer everyone else is in on but me? I am so sorry that jerkism is hereditary. It is really biting me in the patootie.

But anyway, the therapist I saw back whenever that was happens to drink lots of soda with real calories, and that used to disturb me to no end. And I couldn’t just tell her that (because I’d sound crazy, wokka wokka), but jeez, I can’t watch someone drink two Mountain Dews or Pepsis in a row at 10AM. Am I really that boring with my petty neuroses that the woman has to prop her eyelids up with toothpicks? Don’t answer that.

I idly considered finding a new therapist, maybe one of those fancy CBT ones who will snap me with a rubberband every time I consider peeing on the floor. I wonder how therapists of that ilk feel about how cock and ball torture comes up ahead of their professional organization in the Google? Does this give them a complex? Do they just move their no-complainy bracelet to the other wrist and blithely move on? I’d like to know what that’s like. I require a full day of rumination if someone is a little hasty at a 4-way stop! And do not even talk to me about the grocery store. I couldn’t find the wheat germ. It was awful.

Oh well, if I can’t have low calorie mental health, at least I finally convinced someone at Saab to put a new liger on the back of the car. Someone stole the original one! Can you imagine? What must they be doing with it?

March madness

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It’s a good thing I am in good with the powers of the universe because the last few weeks have been bumpy. Emotionally, March is like landing a duct-taped regional jet with a wicked crosswind on the twelve feet of runway Logan Airport can afford. At the end of the twelve feet is the harbor and an LNG tanker, so you see how the stakes are high. November of course stabs me, but March sees me hanging by my feet twitching as the last drops of blood drain away from my head. And then something wondrous occurs from all that oxygen deprivation, and god starts talking to me.

Now, don’t get too ruffled. My god is a pretty lowercase kind of ultimate love, a safety net of interconnected interests rather than a personification. I call it god because I simply do not have a better word. This year, god is telling me we’re in for a flood, but it will be OK. I kind of preferred three years ago when god told me to take up learning Chinese and buy tickets to Spain, but apparently god is not a fan of the exchange rate now.

Last night, Mr. H took it up on himself to show me many links about horrible things happening to dogs. An artist in Honduras, or possibly Guatemala (all those countries look alike), tied up a manky stray dog in a gallery and instructed gallery patrons not to feed the dog. The dog starved to death over several days. The internet responded to the news with all-caps comments about castration, and the pictures were quite sad. Horrible point about how human are sheep and horrible point about how we walk by starving animals and people in the street on a daily basis and also do nothing. I like to think I would have fed the dog and called the damn police, but I am not sure if the Honduran P.D. would have been all that moved.

Then ol’ Mr. H showed me a video of a Marine holding a puppy, and whaddya know, he throws that little fuzzball off a cliff! I live under a rock, and I had not heard of that one. Apparently some people are making the point that the average YouTube looky loo cares not for actual people dying in Iraq (brown or otherwise), but puppies? Do NOT fuck with puppies! I was going to a candle-lit vigil for ending the Iraq war yesterday, but it was sleeting, and I decided not to take a ybab out in that. Oh. ALL-CAPS COMMENT ABOUT PUBLIC FLOGGING.

I was so pissed that now I have to pray for all of these assholes, including Mr. H, who could have kept these things to himself. In fact, I have to pray for the whole damn internet. This is going to take a while. If you need me, I’ll be in my grotto.

Unprofessional painting

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If me of now went back in time to warn me of five years ago that future/current me would be covered in flecking blue paint (Martha Stewart Surf 286) and honey-mustard sauce, me would not believe me! But it is all true. Me has no idea how me’s life turned out this way.

A few days ago, I had a few glasses of wine (with dinner, not at 10AM, although heaven knows…) and decided to start painting the bathroom a different shade of blue. I have good ideas all the time! I can’t even tell you how frequently. I have a whole folder on my desktop called “GOOD IDEAS!!!!!” My bathroom is 50% old blue and 50% new blue now, and I may work on it one hour per night for the rest of my life. Because either I get some paint in my hair, or someone wakes up and starts screaming, or a cat wants to come in because the door is closed, or maybe the fumes just become too much and I wake up on the floor the next morning even dumber.

After the bathroom is painted, I will have to tear the “shelving system” out of the linen closet. That means I will have to put better shelves in. I can’t just leave things in a heap in the bottom of the closet, much as I wouldn’t mind. It’s hard to find shelves. At IKEA, they expect you to cut them to the length you desire, like, with a saw or the power of your mind or something, so all their shelves are eighteen feet long. No. The Container Store has a sale on shelving, and that’s great, but everything is sold in systems, and I, a professional internet user, can’t figure out how to find JUST SHELVES. Single shelves of the correct length. In desperation, I typed in “http://ijustwanttobuysomefuckingshelves.com/” and crossed my fingers, but no luck there. Where do you get shelves, good people of the internet? I am hoping my own Google ads will tell me.

***
Local color report:
Lowell High School is back in session. Before we set out on our nightly trek for takeout, the phone rang: a “PRIVATE CALL” according to the display.

“Bee dee booop,” said the caller, voice breaking with hysterical giggling.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, your penis did not go through!” The caller then died from laughter and somehow managed to slam the phone down in a dying act of valor.

Once downtown, a roving pack of teenagers conspiratorially made the aside “PENIS!” to us as we passed. Then we passed Marty Meehan over by the Masonic Temple. He was going to hassle us about voting when a young voice shrieked “I like penis!” out a screened window from the housing project across the street. We continued on, not stopping to vote in the primary because we had already seen Niki Tsongas having a victory dinner two streets over at the one nice restaurant in town, oblivious to the penis crisis in the streets. If she isn’t in touch with the penis issue, she does not need my support.

“If we were actually insane,” I remarked to Mr. H, “we’d assume people were only saying penis to us!” One never knows.

How I got covered in honey-mustard is another boring story for another time.