Anyone remember that movie Ferngully?

Of course we have neighbors we hate.

No, that's too far. We don't hate them. They just seem like dicks.

My house sits on an acre, just far enough back from a busy road. We have a big yard, and we like to spend time outside, usually tossing a ball for the dogs, and often with a beer (or large glass of wine) in hand. On one side of us, close to our house, is a house that's empty save occasional visits from the grown kids of the dead lady who used to live there.

On the other side, past the vast expanse of our lovely yard, live The Jerkoffs. It's a couple and a kid, and someone who looks like a grandma seems to appear from time to time. Roomie has seen the kid shooting at birds. That's just a really good way to piss off this particular hippie. And, charmingly, while the kid was shooting at birds, Grandma was just chilling on a riding mower, watching.

It's not like we have seagulls or some other kind of asshole birds around (like steller's jays, which are big, fat jerks), but sweet songbirds, cardinals, something called a titmouse,  and amazing, huge pileated woodpeckers -- rare, protected Woody the Woodpecker birds. Roomie also saw the kid chasing the chickens around their chicken coop throwing rocks at them. Cool, right?

(Don't get me wrong, I'm OK with eating chickens. I'm just not really into being an asshole to them while they're still alive. I get the irony, but as I see, it, 90% of the point of raising chickens is eating eggs -- or meat -- without feeling guilty about the horrible treatment the animals experienced while they were still alive.)

While all that makes me think the kid is a turdface, I wasn't really pleased when I heard his dad yelling at him while they burned whatever they were burning (they do it so often I suspect it may be their garbage) in their yard one morning. I'm not sure, but I think I heard him smack the kid, too. Excellent. (Mom's an unknown. Guilt by association, I say.)

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the dogs. They have dogs, but they don't appear to be pets. They live in a pen outside next to the chicken coop, and they bark incessantly. I don't hold it against the dogs. They look out and see our off-leash pooches running around, frolicking happily with owners who love and snug them and throw balls for them. I mean, I'd bark, too. It's like the dogs are yelling, "Hey!  We want to play! This is bullcrap! Did you guys see this? We live in a cage! Look, see how huge this yard is? Why can't we run in the yard?! That looks like fun! We want to come play! Come get us! Can we hump your dogs?!"

So that's the background on how I felt when, one day, I heard the sound of large machinery coming from the neighbor's yard. It sounded angry, and hungry, and as I looked at the stand of trees and brush that separates our property from theirs, I saw limbs and leaves heaving and shaking as they clawed and cut them out of the ground. Tiny birds fled the destruction.

My vision's not great, but it was totally a scene from FernGully (p.s. Avatar was basically an expensive version of FernGully, but without Tim Curry. Incidentally, I have loved Tim Curry since he was trying to figure out who killed Mr. Boddy. Anyone with me? My early exposure to Rocky Horror only confirmed my adoration).

So now I think of my neighbors as the new embodiment of Hexxus.



Except my neighbor is in no way sexy.

In summary: Tim Curry is rad, my neighbors are dicks, and Hexxus destroyed enough bird habitat that we can now see the dickface yard better and hear said dicks yelling at their kids more clearly. Yay.

On the other hand, I now have a much better view of the daily activities of their chickens.

But that's another post.

Bear with me, there's BOOZE at the end.

Oh, wow. Has it really been that long since I posted? What a jerk! And it’s not like I have nothing to write about. Hooboy and howdy do I.

Like the story about my first friend in Myrtle Beach.

Yeah, that’s right. I haven’t even been to the state and I have a friend.

How, you ask?

Well, it started a few years back. Four? Three? Not sure, but it was long enough ago that people I knew were blogging on LiveJournal. One day, I was bored, poking around on LJ when I ran across a woman whose userpic was a still from one of the best films of all time, Grey Gardens. And I’m not talking about the Drew Barrymore version (which, incidentally, I heartily endorse), I’m talking O.G. Grey Gardens.

“Here’s a blogger I could read,” I thought.

So I did. For years. Her name is Katie, and she now has several active blogs, none of which is on LiveJournal. She’s my first internet friend.

So when Katie joined Twitter, I was all over it. The thing is, Twitter sounds lame, but I actually think it’s fun. Really. It’s much less high-school-reunion-ey than Facebook, and if you avoid all the d-bags, you actually end up finding funny people and ridiculous links like this one that I'm pretty sure I'm a horrible person for enjoying.

One of the followers I gained through Katie was JEKinard. Now, when I get a follower, I don’t always follow back. But JEK had some good Tweets, and she seemed more human than Spam-bot (always a big consideration on Twitter). So I followed her back. Over the last few months, she’s someone I’ve seen floating around on the internet. All I knew is that she was a budding attorney who lived in the south.

So when I announced that I was moving to Myrtle Beach, S.C., imagine my delight when JEK replied, “I work in Myrtle Beach and live just south of it. We can be pals. You won't get a twang and I'll help you find the culture.”

Naturally, I found her on Facebook and added her.

When she accepted my friend request (I realize that this story with all it’s Twitter and Facebook references is sort of boring up to this point, but if you're still reading, here’s where it gets crazy), and when she added me back, I decided to look at her info. She read good books, listened to good music, and liked good movies. Check, check and check.

Then I saw her employer.

Roomie and Roomie PC

What? No. Way. I sent her a note.

Subject: WAIT

Body: “Where do you work? Roomie and Roomie? For Bob Roomie??”

Her reply:

“Yes... I do. Should I be weirded out?”

Sputter.

“I just can't believe what a small world it is! My boyfriend is Hottie Roomie, Bob is his uncle. We've actually been trying to get a hold of Bob …”

“Dude!! I've met Hottie's dad a couple times! …”

And on and on it goes. She knows of Roomie, knows his family. Knows his cousins, for shit's sake. And now JEK and I are friends and we will soon hang out because whaddya know, WE BOTH LIKE COCKTAILS (even though I’m totally the needy new friend who is constantly like, “What’s it like there? Are the bugs terrible? Will my hair be frizzy? Are you smart? Can we hang out?” She’s either patient or she’s faking it because she knows I’ll blog about it. Either way, I’ll take it because, according to Facebook, she wears cute outfits and quotes Margaret Atwood).

But seriously, y’all. The universe is tiny. Some random girl on Twitter who was cool enough to not get unfollowed (which I do with extreme prejudice ((I actually don’t know what ‘with extreme prejudice’ means, I just thought it sounded tough))) not only lives where I’m moving and is into a lot of the same stuff I like — including sharing a blogger friend whom neither of us has met — but she knows Roomie’s family. I haven’t met his family.

All’s I’m saying is, the internet is RAD, people.

Marian the librarian

I went to Portland this weekend, and before the baby shower I attended Saturday afternoon (it was, perhaps, the girliest weekend ever: baby shower, wedding planning, and ice skating), I decided to take a yoga class to kill some time. I poked around on line until I found a class at the time I was looking for.

When I unrolled my mat, I had no idea I'd just stepped into the worst yoga class ever. No, really. The worst. I'm not exaggerating even a little tiny wee bit. No hyperbole here. It was the worst. You know how I know it was the worst yoga class ever? We spent about 10 minutes on mountain pose.

Let me repeat. We spent about 10 minutes talking about and practicing for mountain pose. If you've never done yoga, let me explain what mountain pose is: You stand there. Both feet on the ground. Both arms at your sides. That's it. It looks like this:








(I made that drawing myself, in Word. Because apparently my macbook pro didn't come with a drawing program. wtf, apple?)

See, I've taken beginner yoga classes before. At the Bikram studio (which I do not recommend, though that's a separate rant) and at the local park and rec yoga studio. You tell them you're new, and they tell you to watch what everyone else is doing, then they get going. But this? This was a real beginner's class. A beginner's class for 'tards. (Does it make it OK to use that word if I take of the "re"? No? Eh. Sorry.)

But it wasn't just the slow pace (I counted 6 poses in 90 minutes) that made the class so maddening. It was the instructor. Marian. "Marian the librarian," as I heard her say to two of the people in class.

"Oh, are you a librarian?" One woman (the larger lady whose legs started to shake about 15 seconds into warrior 2) asked.

"No," Marian answered, giving her throaty, Erkelish "he he" laugh, "No, I'm a fiction writer."

I think it's appropriate that Marian writes fiction, actually, because I swear the woman stepped out of a Woody Allen movie. She had thick black glasses, shoulder-length, wiry hair, and she pulled her red workout tights up nearly to her bra strap. The tights gave us all a good view of the outlines of her underwear, and those were really fascinating. Not just granny panties, but almost like some sort of support panties, with a belly control panel. Not that Marian had a belly, it just sort of looked like it, the way her T-shirt was stuffed into the top of the tights. The odd thing about the control panties was that they cut across the outside of her hips, creating a definitive crease across the tiny pouches of fat she carried there.

In the first five minutes of class, while Marian was explaining the intricacies of toe-heel placement, a woman squatted down.

"Are you OK? He he. Does your back hurt?" Marian asked.

"Oh, no, it's just, menstrual cramps," the woman said in a stage whisper.

Well, shit. You can't have a woman in yoga class with menstrual cramps. So every five minutes, Marian would leave us all standing around waiting while she demonstrated a new menstrual-positive pose for the bleeder in the corner.

But the laugh. The laugh will haunt my dreams. Every "he" sounded like she was about to choke, and her shoulders would hitch up as she bared her tiny teeth.

"Okay, so, take a strap, and pull it like this. He he. And, oh, oh my. That's not long enough. I guess, he he, I guess, yeah, maybe get an extra strap, he he. And, yeah, connect the two straps, he he."

Because I was a drop-in, I paid $16 for the class. $16! Do you know what I could buy for $16? Five bottles of Three Buck Chuck. Five! That's a lot of bottom-shelf red wine. Plus I'd have a dollar left over to give to the homeless lady down the street.

Can you rue a person, or only rue the day you met them? Because I'm pretty sure I rue Marian.

The Karma Chameleon

A regular old Monday’s bad enough, but a Monday when you feel so out of shape your legs are like lead as you climb the stairs to the office, a Monday when you find yourself chugging Pepsi Max in an effort to stay conscious at your computer? Well those are the Mondays where you feel like maybe the Karma Chameleon is out to get you. (The Karma Chameleon is, I have always imagined, like a mean little leprechaun who comes to get you and make bad things happen to you as payback for former evils. I picture it shaking its red, gold and green little fist at me and glaring with yellow eyes. Oddly, it also wears sparkly bandanas and a lot of eyeliner.)

Today, I think the Karma Chameleon was coming to get me and pay me back for that one time in Junior High when my friend Shizzy and I pushed a kid into his locker and he hit his head and ended up going to the nurse’s station. Seriously. We were those bullies, and man oh man do I ever regret it, but what can you do about it now? Anyway, all day today the little jerk Chameleon was shaking his wee fist at me, and while I stared at my computer in a grump fog and out-of-shape-stupor, I tried to envision a future in which I’m in shape, running five days a week, able to wear my Sevens again (that’s Seven jeans—they’re not size seven. We’re far, far from that), and it actually kept me from stabbing myself in the eyeball with a letter opener.