All Things Profane and Sacred

Yesterday I was gearing myself up to face the bill pile and decide what I can pay this month, when an odd little envelope came in from Multnomah County Courthouse. I thought fast-did I apply for a job and then forget about it? It is a bit bulkier than a rejection letter (and the bouquet wasn't right either). Opening it up, I saw that I had hit the local lottery-I've been summoned to jury duty.

This is not the first time-I got nailed right out of the gate, shortly after my 18th birthday. This was small town Wisconsin and the procedure was much simpler than I'm sure the metro area's will be. We all filed into a little room. A judge explained what it was all about, spun a hopper, and pulled out 12 slips of paper. I was number 7. For some reason I'll never get, neither attorney objected to me, and so I heard an interesting sexual assault case-a woman who was working at a group home was charged with assaulting a man with downs syndrome.

The best part of the case was when this woman's boyfriend was called to the stand. The defense attorney wanted to bring out that the two of them had never had oral sex together, since that was the main assault that occurred. When the boyfriend said that she had never fellatiated him, I snickered (I was 18, remember). The boyfriend turned fully to the jury box and loudly said, "But a lot of other women have!" I can only imagine what was going through the defense attorney's mind.

Anyhow, the state actually paid me more for jury duty than I was making working, so I was happy. I noted that in Oregon, you only get $10/day, and I think you only get that if you're on a jury. You have to eat the rest of your time.

So, cross your fingers that they excuse me. I can't afford to be dicking around, making 1/4 of what I'm making right now-the finances are eating me alive. They had the last 9 months to stick me on a jury. They missed their chance.

So J came home to me yesterday in one of those moods. Money has been really tight-if it weren't for the job coming through when it did, we would be toast. Burnt, peanutbutterless toast. So things are a bit sticky here at the end of the month, and we're probably going to spend a few days eating beans, but things will be marginally better by this time next month.

Anyway. So J told me he spent the day at work praying for help (I'm not religious and he's not religiously affiliated). When he went out to his car at the end of the day, there was a twenty and a one dollar bill sitting folded on the floormat of his car. Even funnier, when he got his pipe cleaning kit out for a scrap session last night, he found a baggie with a good size bud in it; neither of us remember it being there the last time we used the kit. J's god sent him both money and pot-I guess man does not live on bread alone, huh?

The boys have been doing sychronized elimination these days. When they poop, both their butts drop at the same time. They have been standing one on each side of a bush, pole or fireplug (god that sounds horribly dirty) and peeing away, oblivious of the backsplash the other creates. I hope this isn't part of some elaborate dog con where I have to explain to them that there is no sychonized peeing at the Olympics while the other neighborhood dogs howl with laughter because they've put one over on doofus and dirtbag.

We have a $30 shovel. This shovel caused hours of debate. My position was that since I am mere steps away from debtor's prison, and because our little household is mired in poverty (we're already fashioning good deprivation stories for the grandkids about the depression of ought-six), we did not need no $30 shovel, the $3.99 model would do us fine for a few seasons. J's position was that this was the finest of shovels, built from the steel of champions, perfectly crafted and built to last. "We'll be showing the grandkids the fine shovel grandpa bought in the depression of ought-six! We'll never have to buy a shovel again!" he said. He had a gift card to Fred Meyer with a hundred dollars on it (His work gives out these bonuses several times a year-I can't wait to see what he gets for Arbor Day), so I told him that if he wanted to get the damn shovel, he could go ahead.

He's been driving around with the shovel all weekend, demonstrating the hot shovel action to all his friends and pedestrians who made the mistake of taking their Sunday walk down our street. I'm a shovel widow. Damn thing.

In celebration of 420 yesterday, I did as little as possible. I went from work to home, picked up the boys, went out to J's work and picked him up, and went wandering around Mount Hood with my little family group. We had managed to scare up a bowl for the proper moment and stopped in the middle of an overgrown logging trail to enjoy. We weren't able to make our real destination because of snow on the mountain and bad road conditions-or I guess I should say, because we took my old, low to the ground Toyota, instead of J's old, powerhouse turbo diesel-but we had a good time anyway wandering the trails off Melmamoose Road. It is a truly beautiful area, but has obviously become overtaken by shooters. The trails were carpeted with shotgun shells quite a ways in, every sign was pumped full of holes, and many of the gravel areas off the main road were filled with trash and other shattered debris from yahoos who like to shoot, but don't like to pick up after themselves. God help the asshole I find pulling that shit-I don't need a gun to kick someone's ass for them.

The dutch oven smackdown was an ugly incident in our household's history. It was all our roomate's fault-I can tell you that much. You see, he was having a bbq at his girlfriend's house, and needed to borrow it for marinading the meat. I should have known better, but I was feeling mildly guilty for skipping out on the q-it was one of those, "Hey, meet this chick I've been seeing" things (well, I had kinda met her when she was picking up roomate, but that was half asleep on the couch in your jammies not making eye contact because you're all groster and lazy kind of meeting, which totally doesn't count) that I should have been at, but I was PMSing in a bad way and sent my boyfriend instead (who was derelict in his duties and escaped to play video games with a friend shortly after eating, but that's another story).

ANYWAY. The dutch oven. Right. Weeks go by, and I still don't have my dutch oven back. This is bad, because I use it almost every day. Dinner time rolls around and I'm making all a manner of things in this huge 20,000 gallon stock pot I have, getting steam burns on my arms and weird kinks in my back from stirring things around the depths.

And daily I'm bugging roomate about my dutch oven. Hey, E, where's my dutch oven? Oh, I'll get it for you, no problem. And we're joking around about it, because that's what you do in this house, but I'm getting more and more burned because I just want my beloved dutch oven back. Nuclear is the next setting on my dial.

Finally, as I'm despairing of even getting my dutch oven back, J intervenes. Apparently all this time, our roomate thought a dutch oven was some sort of ceremic doodad, and was playing along with what he thought was me joking around. But I didn't know that, because while I was asking in all seriousness for my oven back, he was saying, ha ha, yes, of course I'll get that back to you, snicker. Let me just clean the poop out of it first. And I'm like, ok, just get it back to me, you kidder, you.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

It's nice to have a schedule again. Well, let me revise that. It's nice to have something to do again, a reason to get up in the morning, tasks to accomplish, places to go. I think waking early up always sucks at least a little (Sleep! That's where I'm a Viking!), but there's no getting around that ever in life. We spent most of yesterday rearranging the office furniture to fit the freebee desk boss K found (so we could both have a place to sit). This task was more difficult than you may think-our office only has one outlet for our modern convienences.

It's weird going to a church to go to the office. The church gives us very low rent, which is why we're there, but we're the only secular program operating there. The whole upstairs is set up as a school, but has no students. That is where the ladies room is. I have to turn on the electric at the breaker box before my bathroom break. It's an odd situation altogether, but it feels kinda right.

It was a long weekend. My roomate who had the snip snip on Thursday had some errands to run on Friday. His girlfriend biffed it pretty badly on Wednesday-she did a header off her bike into the sidewalk-and he needed to visit her in the ICU because she had just regained consciousness. Then he needed to go out to Buttfuck, Milwaukie to catch a ride to Eugene to go to a job interview (I shit you not). Since he offered me some hot sweet cash and since I didn't have a whole lot else on my plate, I was driving his ice pack on the crotch'ed ass all around town. He had the map and was giving directions. It didn't work out so well. Life lesson learned: Never let someone all fucked up on Vicodin be your co-pilot.

On my way home, I got a call from J. He thought he only misplaced his ATM card, but when he went to the bank, he discovered that it had been stolen and all our money had been blown at Fred Meyer and Jack in the Box. Now we have to wait while the bank "investigates" to get our goddamn money back in the bank where it belongs. Luckily our bank is WaMu, so they were actually very on the ball and helpful, which is lucky for them. I've taken consumer law and I have a lot of time on my hands.

Today is a great morning, not because it's sunny and 75 (it's not) and not because I won the lottery (I didn't) but because I have a job, of sorts (Yea!).

Every morning, I browse the lawyer jobs, picking out the ones that I could apply to with a straight face and that don't make me puke with anguish. I type up a cover letter, tweak my resume when necessary, and send them out. Most won't even send me a rejection letter. After the legal jobs, I start browsing the non legal jobs on Craigslist in the areas I've worked in: property management, small office, adult retail, and anything else that I think I can con my way into. I bookmark the likely ones and then send out resumes.

I saw an ad for a part-time receptionist at a non-profit, sent out my standard spiel, and forgot about it. That afternoon, I got a voicemail from an old law school chum inviting me over for an interview. Ah, the agony of embarassment-how I hate to lose face. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

The office is a tiny fishbowl in what used to be the office in a church elementary school. My friend, St. K, invited me in, talked about the whole deal and gave me cookies and tea. It was nice catching up, it was nice not needing to do the formal interview bullshit, it was nice getting a job. It was nice to hear that I wasn't the only up shit creek unemployed lawyer who applied. It sounds like he could use help with more substantial issues than answering the phone, too, so it will be a good opportunity to get some experience working a non-profit.

Moreover, our financial ship here is sinking fast and I don't think we could have kept our head above water for much longer. Our roomate is leaving if he gets the job he's supposed to interview for today (he had the big time snip snip yesterday and I'm not so sure he will be able to make it to Eugene in the condition he's in) and my bank account is empty and we've been playing the money shuffle game to keep on keeping on.

Dan Savage posted part of an email from his brother over on Slog (the blog for Seattle's alt newspaper, The Stranger) that pretty well sums up my feelings as we start off the century:

"This story, about a Marine reservist named Daniel Brown returning from fighting in Iraq who was kept off a plane because his name appears on the Feds’ top-secret terrorist watch list, finally made me realize what really pisses me off about the current political environment. It’s not just that the President of the United States is a lying fundamentalist loon, or that Congress is run by a bunch of Christianist theocrats: it’s that their fear, their madness, and their incompetence has filtered down to every level of American society.

Before Bush and Company created the Age of Fear we live in, any American security guard with half a brain and one working eye and a fucking backbone would have the common sense to say, “Hey, this guy’s name might be on this magic list, but he’s with his unit returning from combat, and there’s no way he’s a terrorist. His name is also very common. Probably thousands of Daniel Browns out there. Not only will I let him go through security to his plane, I’m buying him a drink in the departure lounge.” But no. Now everyone is so fucking afraid that they cannot make a simple commonsense decision to do the right thing.

And so the American myth of the self-made man, the man who can boldly do the right thing, dies, suffocated by fear and incompetence."

We nearly lost Pogo yesterday. We were taking a family trip to the park, and were all geared up with enough poop bags and tennis balls to handle any emergency situation (any emergency situation involving poop or balls, that is. Wait, that's not quite what I meant). Anyway, we were trying to cross busy old Freemont to get to Irving park at prime mow you down frogger hour. After waiting several minutes, with the dogs getting more and more impatient, we spied a break in traffic and rushed accross the street. Unknown to J, Pogo had set down his tennis ball when we stopped. Also unknown to J, Pogo's collar was too loose. When we dashed accross the street, Pogo realized he had lost his ball and pulled in the opposite direction. His collar popped off and he started running accross the road, right in front of a big red SUV.

Luckily he wasn't hit and we went on to the park and ball catching and running around and wagging. He and Jude are quite a pair-my little snausages.

Is it any wonder I love J? The other day we were putting up a ceiling hook to hang up one of those three tiered baskets. Our ceilings are about 9 or 10 feet tall, so, of course, once we hung up the basket, the bottom basket dangled an inch above where my fingers could reach. I suggested we use some wire to extend the basket's reach. J came up with a clothes hanger, and we stepped back to admire his work. He was frowning, and said, "I guess that doesn't look so great." I said, "No one will ever notice." He took down the basket, put a few twists in the hanger, hung everything back up and said, "There. Now it's folk art."

I came pretty close to poking out my eardrum with a Q-tip today. I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice the Q had a defective tip. It doesn't help that I never follow proper Qtip procedure-I ram that baby in and root it around, grunting with pleasure all the while. There is nothing as feisty as a woman with a clean ear canal.

Last night I volunteered up at the clinic. It was a real off night for me-I knew I wasn't communicating well, and I was having problems getting people to get to the goddamn point already and more problems telling people what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. It was nice to be able to walk home through the spring night and sit a while on the porch and let all the work roll off me.

The lovers lay on a grassy hill, looking up into the sky. One pointed up to a cloud that was floating by and said, "Look!" The other responded, "It's a ghost penis in the sky!"

I'm so glad to be shut of March. April's gonna be better, if only because April needs to be better. Sent out a couple of application packets yesterday, and have one more that will go out when I buy some more envelopes. I've also been playing the guitar again and have started writing a short story. I was able to get a swim card this month, so hopefully I'll be swimming some more, and am trying to get back in the yoga groove. I'd like to start running again, but my joints are so sore I'm afraid they'll snap. We've got some freebie shrooms that are waiting for the right day, and a single can of Guiness left in the fridge from some long ago party. Who could ask for anything more?

I must have a bone for nostalgia or something. Every once and a while the desire to reach out and see what old friends are up to invades my crusty hermitage and I do a day of sleuthing (all my addys and #s are usually outdated), calling parents, googling, emailing and expending too much energy to get in touch with people whose life has moved on. I don't know why. These people who are frozen in my mind at whatever age and stage they were at are not the same people that I knew umpteen years agone. Alas, Discordia.