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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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12:06 p.m. - 2014-12-28
Inspired by Hil with her lovely entry prompt questions I finally renewed my D-land membership and am diving headlong back into blogging. Thank you, Hil. You are a good friend. 1. I feel you can tell a lot about a person by what they eat for breakfast. What is your FAVORITE breakfast? My ultimate favorite breakfast is at a diner. This meal doesn't have to be eaten in the morning, I'm perfectly happy with diner breakfast any time of the day or night. And my order never changes. Eggs over medium, french fries, white toast with jelly, and sausage but only if it's patties or skinny link. A lot of local diners have started serving chorizo and it is NOT a breakfast sausage. If chorizo is my only option I go meatless. To drink I have coffee with real milk (I detest half-n-half and the fuss and bother of wrestling those little creamer cups open.) Plus a Pepsi. It used to be apple juice but like so many other foods these days, apple juice gives me the squits. In fact this condition is known as 'diner butt' in our family because immediate (loud, messy, smelly) bowel distress haunts me and sets in most often after eating out. Since we mostly eat at diners...you get the picture. I've yet to figure out whether this is true IBS or just more fuckery by my aging bod. However, even the threat of the instant onset of the poops is not enough to stop me from eating at diners. For the pleasure and luxury of being served a meal I didn't cook I am willing to risk the discomfort and embarrassment of making ass gravy in a public restroom. 2. Who are the top three celebrities that want to sleep with you, but don’t know it yet? Stephen King, of course. Except that his fidelity and fierce love for Tabitha is one the most attractive things about him. I've never once heard even a whisper of gossip that Steve has stepped out on his wife and I think this is amazing and wonderful. So instead of sex if he and I could get in the car and take a long, long, long road trip and spend that time talking about books and writing and music and more writing and only stop to sleep and eat and take pictures of ourselves wearing funny hats at tacky roadside attractions I would die a happy, happy woman. This admiration for fidelity and loyalty would not, however, stop me for a second from spending a wicked wild weekend screwing the brains out of Pierce Brosnan. Other than those two I'm good. 3. Tell me about your favorite hiding spot as a kid, and your favorite hiding spot as an adult? For a while when I was a kid one of the places we lived had a big deep linen closet. It was shelved on three sides and had a ceiling light fixture with a pull chain. I used to hole up in there comfy and happy on a pile of sleeping bags and comforters, mostly I read but sometimes I just went there to be alone and safe. These days I don't need to hide much but do enjoy jaunting off in my car and going to dollar stores. While I'm driving I play the stereo loud and sing along in my awful, awful singing voice and pretend I'm not making my own ears hurt with my tuneless squawk. At the dollar store I wander around and look at the mad variety of things that someone, probably a bunch of someones, thought it was a good idea to make. Because at the dollar store there's a lot more than funnels and disposable bakeware. A really good dollar store will have some seriously weird shit. So much grist for the imagination. 4. Do you feel that society is going to hell, or do you feel that we are improving, or staying the same? This is something Mick and I talk about A LOT. On one hand I know what an ugly brutal species we are so the violence and superstition and oppression and sexual predation and tribal mentality that has inspired genocide pretty much since we figured out you could kill somebody by hitting them with a rock doesn't surprise me at all. Do I think America has blown its chance? Absolutely. And I cannot lay this all at the politicians' feet. Americans themselves have happily forfeited many of their rights and freedoms for bullshit 'security'. They've willingly and happily gutted education, the environment, labor unions, pretty much every advance of the last century has been neatly kicked apart during this one. We are and always will be our own worst enemy. This country has squandered every bit of the strength and hope it gained from its diversity and has become so bitterly partisan and xenophobic and so goddamn mean it's infuriating and as the child of immigrants it grieves me personally. I truly love the idea of America. My family was tired and poor and worked like hell to come to the land of the free. And when they got here they worked even harder. Finding joy and gratitude in having access to clean nutritious food, modern medicine, and free education for their children. When he made a place for himself my Da insisted on hiring other greenhorns to work his crews. Poles, and Slavs, and Italians. In my mind's eye I can see Lars the Norse roofer up on the ridgepole of a half-finished house. Almost 7 feet tall, tanned muscles, blonde hair gleaming calling down in his broken English for Lazlo the Hungarian to bring up another bundle of shingles and Lazlo in his even worse English telling Lars to keep his pants on. Yet when was this country ever truly good? The horrors done to the native people alone would be enough to mark us out as assholes and rotten jerks, but noooo. We used to think it was okay to actually OWN other human beings. We're the only country to have used the atomic bomb for Christ's sake. So the tiny bits of decency we've managed during the last few decades are good like the Civil Rights movement and securing voting rights for everyone, the legalization of birth control, and the steady march toward marriage equality, those are nothing to sneeze at. To say nothing of the Native Americans having the last laugh with their casinos and tax-free cigarettes- getting rich by selling our vices back to us is fricken awesome. But no, I don't think this country will ever live up to its potential and the promises chiseled into the base of the Statue of Liberty. We're too busy watching 'Duck Dynasty' and being all upset by some dumb thing Gwyneth Paltrow said. 5. Do you remember your dreams? Tell me the last nightmare you remember. I dream intensely. I never have lucid dreams, those where you know you're dreaming and exert some control over the action. My night world is just as real as this one. And while it's less gruesome and violent than it used to be, it's still rarely pleasant. My poor gimpy psyche is still trying to work things out, I guess. Even when the action doesn't seem all that bad (I'm walking down a corridor or sitting at a table) the emotions I feel during dreams are awful. Dread and shame and fear and anger. Frustration is a common one. As is humiliation and confusion. Those two come as a set because quite often I'm in a situation where I'm expected to know the rules and produce something (paperwork, answers to an exam, knowing where people are and what they're doing, etc) and I don't have a clue where I am or how I got there. So I am confused, just dropped into some unfamiliar scenario and then humiliated because I fail. I don't have the answers or the right forms or worse I've let the baby run into the street or starve to death. What baby? I don't know, it's not mine and I never even saw it, but it's dead now and I am responsible. It's all my fault and I am sad and scared and guilty and yet upset because it was so unfair! How could I be blamed? I just got here. My night world is a pretty blunt instrument and it doesn't take a degree to see what my biggest fears are. 6. What’s in your pockets? Tissues and the wrapper from a mini Tootsie Roll in the left one and a foil wrapped packet with a lens wiping cloth inside in my right pocket. I'm of the age now where I am required by law to have tissues in my purse and upon my person at all times. Hey, at least I'm not in the sparkly kitten sweatshirt/powder blue elastic-waisted pants time yet. I'm really dreading getting to that era of my life. 7. What are you interested in that no one else seems to care about? I won't say nobody cares about this, but gender bias in medicine isn't a hot button issue. And it bugs the ever living crap out of me. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the US yet a woman exhibiting all the signs of cardiac distress going to the ER has odds stacked way against her that anyone will even give her an EKG. Instead she'll be patted on the head, given a Xanax and sent home. Whereupon she promptly drops dead from cardiac arrest. Why does this happen? Because women's health just isn't a priority. For all the pink washing every October women as individual patients are not taken seriously when they have a complaint. They receive less care, are given less lab work and testing, and way more frequently told "It's all in her head". And I don't want to get into medical devices, and drug trials, and how even surgical scrub sinks are set at heights most often comfortable for men. Let's just say I have big issues with an issue very few people even think about. 8. Who is your childhood hero? Barbie. Yes, I had flirtations with the original Suffragettes, Harriet Tubman, the second wave feminists, Bella Abzug, Nancy Drew, and Jane Goodall, I liked them and took inspiration from their lives. But Barbie? She was my main girl and through all the comings and goings of my messy hurtful childhood Barbie was there. Barbie was tough. At least mine were. My gang of Barbies had serious chops. They swam in the pool and the bathtub. They got rigged out in homemade parachutes and thrown out the window and came up smiling. One of my Barbies had her feet chewed off by little sister and she still didn't quit. And cool? That townhouse with the elevator? The Porsche? And clothes to die for. No matter what the occasion- jungle safari, tea with the Queen, Barbie had the clothes for it. Barbie allowed me to make my first attempts at this he-she business too. My favorite Barbie dated GI Joe. The badass one with the fuzzy head, the facial scar, and the kung-fu grip, thankyouverymuch. I seem to recall that even though GI Joe was such a hard ass Barbie still drove the Porsche. It was her fricken car. When they were done messing around- dancing, smooching, whatever- Barbie dropped GI Joe off at the toy box in the closet and went home to her townhouse alone. It was her fricken townhouse. 9. Do you have a lucky talisman, a rabbit’s foot or a pair of lucky socks? Or something you always do for good luck? Aside from the pentacle around my neck, which I wear more for constancy and comfort than belief in any supernatural powers (plus it's good at forestalling conversion attempts by proselytizing Christians, not often a problem anyhow here in the land of the lapsed Catholic and secular Jew but it has come in handy that way a few times) I do not have any physical lucky charms. I am, however, wicked superstitious about tempting fate. Even in the heat of anger I never tell someone to drop dead. I will never jinx things by speaking of them as done deals before they actually are. Don't count your chickens before they're hatched? Shit, I don't even believe in my chickens until they've hatched, fledged, graduated from poultry school, worked their little chicken jobs for 20 years and are now retired to the old chicken home. Hubris makes me anxious. Not planning for disasters and failures makes me even more anxious. Ponyboy might have stayed gold, but not me. Tires will go flat, appliances will break down, people will lie, cheat, and fuck you over because it's fun for them, the store will be out of it, the sale will be over, the tickets sold out, and of course it will rain on your wedding day. To believe otherwise is just foolish. It leaves you unprepared and looking like a jackass for your dimwitted gullibility. Plus when things actually DO go right it's so pleasing and such a relief it feels fabulous. I don't sabotage myself or court disaster, I simply account for it. And when things go wrong it doesn't wreck everything for me. I've already made room in my emotional budget for the flubs and the stupid stuff. Like last week when I got out of the hospital and my incision was pouring out fountains of urine and I leaked all over every pillow and blanket in the house it didn't surprise me in the least that the dryer died. I was pleased the washer hadn't died too. Hilary left one more question but I'm not going to answer it. At least not here in public. I need to put my wise crone hat on and she and I will talk. In private. Though let it be understood I don't have a single bad or harsh thing to say. It's just friend stuff.
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