I am so glad to be back from Iowa I could pee on the floor!

(Sorry, that was inspired by Prathna Lor, and also by Kathy's excitement about pee in literature.)

I just spent way too many days in Iowa, and discovered that it wasn't ME all those years--Iowa makes me suck. My symptoms include: short temperedness, dark circles, feelings of aortal explosion, intense awareness of arm flab, saying "that's GREAT!" in a high-pitched voice about everything that is really not great, the desire to flee any and all things remotely related to marriage, and general self-hatred alternating with extreme narcissism. While there, I also experienced NPR withdrawal and overblown cravings for Jolly Ranchers--a lethal combination. Now that I am home, I feel smarter, but all my symptoms still linger, making my usual existence impossible, and especially difficult for my boyfriend, who has offered to murder Iowa for me. Our meeting on Friday will restore me to normal. I am praying for it, just as the Iowans do.

See that picture? My home town under weird, looming clouds? That is how I feel in Iowa.

Have You Noticed I Love Lists?

This is all I got. List of ten unrelated items from my life:

1. My semester is over. My students won't be able to eat my life for another 6 weeks or so. Also I will finally be free on weeknights to watch bad television.

2. Speaking of which, I watched I love New York 2 last night. I was sad that the entertainer got the boot. Yes, he lives in his mama's basement, but clearly he was the best possible candidate. Plus I hate that Buddha guy.

3. My car got towed yesterday so I ate popcorn and brownies for dinner. In bed. It did not make me feel better.

4. Why don't people who go on mass shooting/suicide sprees try killing sucky political figures instead of random Nebraskans at malls? a) they would be more famous, and b) sucky political figures, even if they don't die, will have to live in fear.

5. I don't like writing things these days.

6. Christmas is stupid this year. I have gotten nothing in my stocking as of yet. Also I am obligated to go to a stupid going away party for someone I don't like on Saturday, which I am upset about.

7. What is this newish book by Kurt Vonnegut? Did I make that up? I should have married Kurt Vonnegut.

8. Who can Venom Literati jointly marry? I still like the idea of going on a reality show as one unit. I wish we were hotter (ie: had bigger tits) because we could all just become Hef's bunnies. I guess we could get each other fake boobs for Christmas.

9. I bought Love in the Time of Cholera last night. It will be lovely. My ex-boyfriend hated Marquez. No one who hates Marquez should be trusted, loved, or fucked. Yalls better love you some Marquez. I bet New York loves her some Marquez. As for Buddha, I don't think he can read.

10. Some of the Metra ticket-takers are hot. My standards have plummeted into the toilet. Remember when you used to think you could do Everything and then some? Do some of you still think this? Because I want to think this again.

Things I Learned From My Students Yesterday

I have been so absent lately because my students are eating my life. This is a good thing. Everyone should have something that eats their life. Sometimes I'd like at least a little nibble of it, but then I'd just get depressed, so it's better that they go ahead and devour it so I don't have time to think. Beachwood is probably eating Missy's life right now. Whenever we are sad, we should all feed our lives to Beachwood and she can digest them and expel them in the form of sunshiney Beachwood farts.

These are things I have learned from my students yesterday:

In Latin America and probably elsewhere, soccer teams choose the colors of their jerseys according to what their countries produce. Wine=purple jerseys. Corn=yellow. Coke=white, as in Columbia. (I am making that up. Can we have a week where everything we post is made up?) The Chicago Fire soccer team chose red as a reminder of that gigantic fire caused by the cow way back when.

Children should not be given candy at movie theaters because it causes them to spaz out and disrupt everyone during the movie. Candy at movie theaters should be banned.

People who ride the bus, especially members of specific ethnic groups, smell bad. Children at homeless shelters are dirty and they smell bad, too, but they still have fun on Halloween.

When many of my students were young, there were these lollipops from Mexico that had your fortune printed on the stick. An example of a Mexican lollipop-fortune: "You will have six children." I think that is an inappropriate fortune for a young girl. But I'm jealous that I didn't grow up on fortune-lollipops.

At AA meetings, people may look tough and scary, but really they are good people who believe in God. Gangbangers may also look tough and scary, but really they have nicknames like chicle (bubble gum).

That's all I learned yesterday. I love my students. They can eat my life whenever they want.

There's no such word as "businesswoman"

This missed connection afforded me jillions of replies, including one from someone who is fairly prominent and used his real name (unless that dude has an enemy who's subtly trying to bring him down with missed connections):

You remind me of my Daddy, with your pin stripes and your sleek seal's head.

When I look at you, I think of that future morning when we take the Ferrari downtown together instead of rubbing up against less ambitious strangers on the crowded train.

I saw you on the red line at the Grand station today. Let's take over the world together. I would love to be the woman behind the man. And under the man. And on top of the man.

But these two, Alleyway and Stomped Foot, got me nothing (more or less). Except I like them better. They do not make me feel gross, like the one above.

Part of the pleasure of writing these is the responses--but even (or maybe especially) in missed connections, there is the lowest common denominator.

And so we writers of missed connections must make the ultimate choice: the slobber (and other bodily fluids) of the masses or the appreciation of a few. (Please read that last sentence/paragraph in a somber, snooty voice. And then sigh for a long, long time.)

Drugs that I am on plus breast cancer month equals confusion

My back stopped working on Tuesday morning because I bent over. I became the monkey-man before homo erectus on the evolutionary chart. I became someone who could not round her back, nor twist.

Needless to say, it interferes.

Now I am on muscle relaxers and pain killers. Partly, this is wonderful. I have never slept so much in my life. I have never had such vivid dreams. I am incapable of stress.

Except that lots of times I'm not sure if I'm really seeing things or not. Like, I just saw this commercial I'll call "Be My Bra." I think it was about breast cancer. I think being a bra means being supportive. There were lots of people saying, "I am your bra." People of all ages, races, creeds, sizes and shapes. They were all being bras. Was this real?

The downside of believing in logical solutions

I have spent this week “learning” Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista. I just got a new computer at work, which would normally be exciting, except for the fact that it operates on Vista and Vista has proven to be my arch-enemy. I spent one entire day this week at work unable to do anything on my computer. My screen likes to go completely blank, except for my wallpaper, at random moments. The shared drive (which contains pretty much every file that I ever need to use for my job), only works on occasion. And this makes me want to bang my head on the wall and then cry in the corner for the rest of the day. But I don’t.

Instead, I restart. Or I call the IT guys and they fix it temporarily. Or I copy and paste what I’m working on into a brand new file. And then everything works fine. But I am not satisfied. I apparently believe that Microsoft would not release a system with so many inherent problems and that this system should do most everything it does for a logical reason. Or, if not, then there should be some sort of logical fix for major problems. Why on earth would I have such blind faith? I don’t know. I shouldn’t. And this also makes me want to bang my head on the wall and then cry in the corner for the rest of the day. But I don’t.

Instead, I go home and try not to spend another minute thinking about my computer until I get to work the next day. My brain no longer works when I am at home. I can hardly talk. I can't read more than five pages and expect to comprehend anything I've read. I can’t even understand TV. Not even a show as stupid as Bionic Woman. That is sad.

I heard recently that something like 60% of people spend more time with their computers than with their significant others. That is also sad.

I hate technology today. Evil computers, scary dancing robots that we will all one day marry…it’s awful.

I’m tired. A computer is eating my brain.

Water, Shoes, Shoehorns, Iowa: Meaningless Tangentials

So I am trying to drink more water lately. I feel like my insides are full of gunk and that they need to be rinsed or watered down or whatever. It is so difficult for me to drink water, except in the form of coffee. I can drink coffee-water all day, but I have had the same glass of water sitting on my desk all morning and I've barely made a dent in it. The only time I can force myself to drink water is in the middle of the night. I don't know why this is, but it's a super bad idea because then I have to get up and pee a hundred times.

Usually I just go to the closet and pee on my boyfriend's shoes. He has way nicer shoes than I do, and gets upset when he is out in public and people accidently step on or scuff them. He also puts the tissue paper stuffing that comes in the toes back in the toes of the shoes when he is not wearing them. And he has a shoe rack in our closet, which I think is super weird. It seems like something my dad would do.

My dad, I remember, had shoe horns, and also this weird shoe-stretcher apparatus...I don't understand what either of them did for the shoes. Maybe he bought too-small shoes and had to stretch them out? The shoehorn I am clueless about. He also had a ridiculous amount of shoe polish, even a white canister for white sneakers, which is so weird. He was always making me buy suede-protectant for my shoes, which never worked and when my shoes got splotchy he would get angry because I hadn't keep up on the applications. The shoe polish was in this ugly wardrobe that later became the illicit substances drawer when Lala and I lived together in Iowa City. My Dad's shoe polish was next to his underwear (tightie whities), next to which was the top half of a Trivial Pursuit box with a bunch of pennies and cruddy rolls of BreathSavers and--I know you want to know this--a lone condom that was there for years and is probably still there.

Will water help me? Will water save my gunky insides? How can I drink more of it? What are shoehorns and shoe-stretchers for? Please oh please let me know.

And Then I Was Sad

Last week I had a city-meltdown. The city was eating me. I escaped with my boyfriend to...Lake Geneva? My boyfriend and I have not traveled that much together, and I was pleased to discover that he is a good traveler, because boyfriends are never good travelers. I only screamed at him once, when we had to go to Wal Mart twice in one day to buy a fishing pole, which we never bought anyway, because both times we got there and he decided he didn't want to fish anymore. I couldn't get that mad because it was like something I'd do.

I used to go to Lake Geneva as a kid with my best friend Lindsey's family. We stayed in a big house on the lake and promised to make out with boys whose parents owned boats so we could go for boat rides, then we'd scam our boat ride and flee. Lindsey's mom was always dieting so we'd eat ham and mustard sandwiches all week and lay on the dock in the sun. I loved it.

Lake Geneva is weird now. Rich people name their properties things like "Exquisite Oaks." I still love it, though, because it is still a place where nobody does anything. People don't even utilize their own boats there: they dock them and sit on them and drink beer all day. Everyone in Lake Geneva is always hanging out. Even the people working in the crappy touristy shops have an aire of hanging out.

I started to hate the city. After the first day I said, "Boyfriend, can we move here?" I was serious. "We can buy a boat and live in it." I wanted to disappear in a teeny touristy town with no permanent residents. I could become the kayak-rental-girl, or the fat girl selling 'spensive and not-that-good truffles at the candy store. I could do nothing and not care that I was doing nothing. Because those are the people I'm most jealous of: who are doing nothing and are perfectly happy.

Really, though, I could not live there and do nothing. I would start to think everyone there was a loser. And I would get fat and beerbellied like in college. And I would think I was a loser. And then I would kill everyone.

And then I was sad.