Category / Vintage Imports

by ravelingoutko

Me, Me, Me Again

Pants Party has tagged me to tell you five (more) little known things about myself.  I can tell you that I do not mind at all the request to chat more about myself.  I rather like writing about myself; in fact, you are probably sick of it all, but guess what suckas?  Here is some more:

1. Although I grew up in Tennessee, California has always been something of a second home to me.  My dad’s family is from the Bay Area, and my mother, who grew up in New York, moved out there in the 60s when it was trendy, all flowers in her hair and reading about Buddhism and shit. (Later, her mother and brother moved to California, too, so eventually everyone was out there.) My parents met and got married in Berkeley before moving to Louisiana and then Tennessee.  As a kid, I spent a lot of summers in San Jose with my grandparents and always thought about moving to the West Coast when I grew up.  Apparently I miscalculated somehow and ended up in Zembla, where the natives feel superior not only to southerners (as does the whole country, pretty much, damn Yankees) but also to Californians.  Oops.

2.  I have written a lot about this elsewhere, but not as much here on vox, so allow me to tell you that I have some unhealthy obsessions with food.  I do not like to touch it, especially if it is sticky, crumbly, or oily, and I hate the idea of food being stuck on or in my teeth or on my face.  The sight of food on someone else’s face makes me want to die a little bit inside, especially if it is ranch dressing and it is on a person’s lips, or if it is pudding and it is stuck all over their tongue and they insist on speaking and revealing the bepuddinged tongue to the world.  *Shudder*  I call this phenomenon “Puddin’ Mouth,” and I consider it to be a serious crime against humanity.  The only thing worse than Puddin’ Mouth is Jam Hands.  Ew.  Jam Hands.  I’m certain that my current obsession with bento (pretty, neatly-arranged foods I don’t have to touch) is a function of this issue at large.

3.  I was once arrested, but it’s not on my record any more.  I won’t tell you what for, because it was totally lame and embarrassing, so don’t even ask, dude.

4. I had the Worst Trip To Paris Ever.  Well, OK, maybe the Nazi invasion was the Real Worst Trip To Paris Ever, but mine comes in a close second.  My Then-Boyfriend (plot point: we met in Germany and he didn’t speak English) took me as some kind of romantic gesture, but all we did was fight the entire time, which was of course entirely his fault because I am perfect and easy to get along with and completely non-offensive in every way.  Ha.  Name a Parisian landmark and I can detail the fight we had there.  The best was one probably in the gardens at Versailles (fine, not technically in Paris but close enough) where, in a fit of fury, I lost all ability to speak German and resorted to screaming the word ASSHOLE at him loudly enough to probably ruin all the other visitors’ idyllic little afternoon strolls.  Sorry, Other Visitors to Versailles.  Really.

5.  One of my mother’s many nicknames for me growing up was “The Ice Princess,” because she thought/thinks I was/am cold and heartless and unemotional.  Personally, I think this speaks more to her inability to make use of logic or reason and her resulting characterization of logical people as “heartless” than it does to any particular flaw in my character (see above re me and how I am practically perfect in every way just like Mary Poppins).  The thing is, I kind of like the whole “Ice Princess” thing.  One day, when I am a rich and fabulous (but please, not famous!) literary critic, I will buy a little house in some rocky, icy coastal region where there are fishing boats and lots of sweaters, and I and my small, besweatered hound dog will hide out up there being cold and logical and anti-social.  Sometimes I will have all my friends to visit –hey, maybe that includes you there— but mostly I will revel in my generally icy nature.  Take THAT, Mother.

And this has been Five Little Known and Perhaps Disturbing Facts About Me, courtesy of The Meme That Will Live Forever. Would you like to be tagged?  Then consider yourself tagged.

by ravelingoutko

Improving My Life Through Consumerism

When I moved to Zembla I came with a table-and-chairs set my parents had let me take from their kitchen (or, more accurately, pawned off on me). It was an octagonal table made of swirly brown formica and the chairs were padded and covered in a mustard-colored vinyl that was starting to crack. Straight out of the seventies, I assume, and I don’t mean the cool seventies; I mean the ugly seventies. After a few months in my house, the chairs were basically destroyed: my cat had decided to use them as scratching posts and the already gross vinyl was shredded to the point where the polyfill padding was falling out in dusty, white clumps. That shit was awful. I happily ditched the set when I later moved into a smaller apartment where I didn’t have room for it anyway.

That was in 2002, and since then I have been eating my meals hunched over the coffee table like some kind of caveman. Food just tastes so much better when you are bent double in an effort to get closer to the plate, don’t you agree? I suppose I could have gone on with this elegant style of dining without a change if I hadn’t gotten a dog, or maybe if my dog just hadn’t figured out that by standing on his hind legs he could reach my plate. Not only was I now bent double trying to reach the plate, but I had to use my elbows to shield the food from the dog’s hungry, drooling maw, kind of like one might in a prison mess hall (hardened criminals and their drooling maws — a tale as old as time). Add to that the indignity of having to carry my plate with me back to the kitchen if I needed a napkin or a drink refill, or, worse yet, coming back from the kitchen only to find the food I had just prepared being licked by a dog. A dog who also spends a lot of time licking his own butt. What I’m saying is this: the whole coffee-table dining thing wasn’t working for me.

But please, Internet, don’t cry for me, because I have a new table-type-thing where I can eat my food safely, far from the dog and his drooling maw. I bought this “utility cart” thingamajig at Wal-Mart (hey, I am normally not a Wal-Mart lady, OK, but Target’s tables are out of my budget, while this thing was so cheap I felt like I was being paid to take it) and ever since, I have been happily dining, with good posture, on food that has not been licked by a dog. VICTORY.

In other corners of my living room, I was also suffering a distinct lack of new stuff. The television I have been using for the past ten years (I got it in a trade with my brother: he gave me his 13″ TV; I gave him my 1987 Chevy Cavalier) was on its last legs. It wasn’t new enough to hook up to the DVD, so I was using a dead VCR as a conduit between the two. The color had gone off and the sound was usually either screamingly, eardrum-bustingly loud or nearly silent. The best part was when I tried to watch DVDs on the thing, and I feel I could go on for thousands of words on the subject of My DVD Player’s Many Faults, so I will be brief. Ever since I bought it, it has made a horrible rattling sound when the disc spins. If I paused it, it would come back when I restarted it in a different language, or with a new set of subtitles. To open the tray, I had to hit “OPEN,” stick my finger inside the machine and wiggle the tray loose. If it opened too fast, my finger got stuck and my knuckle was scraped raw. If that wasn’t bad enough, the sound was staticky — sometimes only for the first 3 minutes of the movie, but often throughout the whole feature. The picture was weird, with huge red blotches wiggling across the screen at rapid intervals. The situation, in its entirety, was not pretty. I had Netflix discs sitting on top of the TV for weeks and didn’t bother watching them because it was more painful (literally and metaphorically) than it was worth.

Once again, though, I have improved my life by buying things. Do you guys know how freaking cheap electronics are these days? A modest (20″) TV and a new DVD player, both on sale at Target, added up to roughly half the price I had expected to pay. The new, awesome, Actually Functional DVD player cost roughly 2/3 the price of the old shitty one, which had been, at the time, the cheapest one available. The best part, of course, is that the new things actually work — I can both see and hear the films I’m watching! Both audio and video! Wonders never fucking cease, do they? VICTORY AGAIN.

by ravelingoutko

Blame It On the Smokes

Ugh.  Hello.  It has been an incredibly lame week, mainly because I have caught some kind of cold or other general respiratory plague and have felt like poo on toast for days.  I fully blame this on the approximately forty-seven thousand cigarettes I smoked on Friday.  See, I had sort-of “accidentally” quit smoking, which is something I occasionally do, and hadn’t smoked since my birthday (over a month ago).  I am one of those people who never, ever smokes unless she is drunk, but when I am drunk, I must have cigarettes and must have them NOW and damn anyone who will step in my way because I will crush them, CRUSH THEM I TELL YOU, and then I will grind their crushed remains into a dry powder and I will SMOKE IT.

As you can see, I have some strong feelings on the matter.  I really love to smoke, but if I am not drinking I tend to forget that smoking exists.  Friday, though, I managed to get a wee bit tipsy, a wee bit chatty, let’s say, and promptly smoked all of the cigarettes within a five-mile radius of my mouth.  Oops.  As soon as Saturday night I realized I was getting a cold, and, logical or not, I connect the two.

And now I have this cold, and there is this chowder in my lungs that won’t come out no matter how much I cough, and believe me I am coughing a lot and soon I will have the six-pack abs to prove it.  People at work keep sneaking up on me (or maybe I just can’t hear them what with all the coughing and hacking and gurgling and death sounds I am making over here) and dropping cough drops on my desk.  I wish they would tell me to go home.  I don’t really feel sick enough to go of my own accord; anyway they need me here at the moment because someone in our department got fired.

Even outside of the issue of my lungs, the week has straight up sucked, due to an irritating mixture of minor annoyances that somehow add up to be more than the sum of their parts.  Don’t you hate that?  My garbage disposal is stuck; I didn’t write as much as I wanted; in my otherwise excellent class I have this one pain-in-the-butt student; and on and on it goes.

But!  There are, of course, things to celebrate, like that my advisor loved the chapter I recently finished, and that now that school is back we are watching Battlestar Galactica again, and that I found a really good leave-in conditioner that makes curly-but-not-frizzy hair a real possibility.  Who couldn’t use a good leave-in conditioner?

by ravelingoutko

A List of Five Things That Peters Out Somewhere Around Number Three

I have been tagged by Rogue to tell you five things about myself, and behold, here are those five things!  (I hope I haven’t told these stories already.)

1. I absolutely can not ski.  I suppose it’s not just skiing; I mean, I am hilariously uncoordinated and without athletic talent.  Skiing, however, is the worst of the worst.  As much as I love snow, I thought I would really like skiing, but it turns out that no, in fact, I do not like skiing.  What with the clumsiness and the fear of heights, I should have known, but the fact that skiing is not for me did not really become clear until after my second (and last) ski trip.  In seventh grade I had gone skiing with my best friend, who had just moved to Tennessee from Colorado a couple of years before and promised to teach me.  After getting stranded when she got onto the chair lift and I somehow…didn’t, and then after riding the chair lift up by myself, frozen with fear, and after falling while trying to get off the lift, and after falling multiple times (once directly in front of the snow machine, how fun) while trying on my own to “ski” down the hill, and after finally walking the rest of the way down, dragging my skis dejectedly behind me and sniffling, EVEN AFTER ALL THAT, I somehow thought that a second ski trip would be appropriate.  I suppose by tenth grade the painful memories had faded enough that I believed my boyfriend when he told me he would teach me everything I needed to know and skiing would be oh-so-easy and safe and fun and oh, how I would JUST LOVE IT.  The only major improvement on this second trip was that, when I was again unable to climb onto the chair lift, my boyfriend didn’t ride up without me, leaving me to fend for myself.  Even so, when we rode up together, I still fell on my ass trying to get off the lift —  right in the path, of course, of the people on the next chair who were also trying to exit. There I was, flailing around in the snow in my puffy pink snow outfit, horribly embarrassed and starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I had made a terrible mistake. It took us probably an hour to get down the hill, as I kept falling every thirty seconds.  At one point, I was sitting on my butt in the snow, a lost ski sticking up about ten feet away, where it had conveniently landed like an emergency flare, and my boyfriend was doing his best to get me up so we could “ski” the rest of the way down, except whatever action he proposed (Did I want to get up and ski down? Did I want to walk down? Did I want to keep sitting there?) I could only wail back “Nooooo!”  Finally he asked what, after all, I DID want to do, to which I sobbed “I don’t KNOOOOooooow.” As much as I would like to forget this horror, I never could, because the boyfriend in question loved repeatedly telling that story to everyone who would listen, even twelve years after the fact.  Never.  Skiing.  Again.

2. When I was about sixteen, I decided I wanted a belly-button piercing, but I knew that my parents would never, ever allow it, so I did it myself in my bedroom one night with an ice cube and a safety pin.  It looked pretty rad for about a week (I was using the safety pin as jewelry because I was apparently, like, so punk rock) but it soon “rejected” because I hadn’t gone deep enough.  Alas.

3. My first kiss was in kindergarten — there was this boy, Jared, and I had long known I was completely in love with him.  One day, our teacher announced that Jared was moving away to Florida, and the class had to say goodbye to him.  We sat in a circle on the floor, Jared at the center, and went around, each taking turns saying our goodbyes.  When it was finally my turn, I decided that this was my chance and I had to seize it:  I got up from my spot, walked up to Jared, told him I loved him, and kissed him smack on the lips, right there in front of God*, Mrs. Dombroski, and everyone.  I later learned that one of my friends was incredibly mad at me for doing it, because she had been in love with Jared, too, but her turn had already come and gone and she hadn’t thought of kissing him herself.  Oh, kindergarten drama.  I continued my path of forward behavior  with boys in sixth grade, when I asked the object of my crush to the Sadie Hawkins Dance:  the morning announcements that day explained about the dance, and how it was the girls’ chance to ask the boys out (oh, antiquated tradition; as if we couldn’t ask boys out without the safe cover of Sadie Hawkins), and I think it was less than ten minutes before I had happily arranged my first-ever date to my first-ever dance**.  At the dance, I asked him to “go with” me (what we called it at our school, though we never exactly went anywhere),  to which he said yes.  Regrettably I am not at all that bold anymore.
[*It was Catholic school.]
[**Public school, finally.  Oh, how I loved public school!]

4.  I hate games — I don’t just mean, like, you know, mind games, but recreational games.  Monopoly, poker, badminton, drinking games, bets, dares, charades, hearts, ping pong.  I hate games.  Do not even come to me asking me to play a damn game, what with all the winners and losers and competition.  Not happening. Even when you win, games are awful; case in point: the time I finally won a round of Presidents and Assholes* that I had gotten sucked into playing at a bar  (everyone else wanted to play and lord knows I hate to stir the pot) and one girl was so mad that I had beaten her that she threw a handful of popcorn at me and then dumped some more of it in my beer.  [This leads to 4b; I hate popcorn.  Seriously, the kernels and the skins and the butter and the horrible squeaking sound when you bite it!  Shudder.]
[*This is a horrible, horrible game.]

5.  I never watch those YouTube videos everyone posts.  Sorry!  They look and sound bad, but more than that, they are a more annoying species of “link posts,” where you will not understand the post without clicking on and reading eighty-seven links.  (This is why I’ll never be able to read political blogs; they are about 90% links, 10% recycled ideas, and no original content, but that’s a kvetch for another day.)  YouTube videos are similar in that, to understand the post, I have to go look at other content, but it’s worse because there’s the waiting and the skipping and the adjusting your sound.  It’s just never worth the trouble.

I am now meant to tag five people, but let’s just say that you can do this meme if you want.  Yes, I mean you.  You there with the face.

by ravelingoutko

A Story About Some Rice I Made

A while back, I knew someone who had the strangest habits in the kitchen, one of which was that she never rinsed the soap from her dishes before putting them on the rack to dry.  There they would sit, lined up neat and clean, with great bubbles of dish soap sliding down the edges of glasses and bowls and drip, drip, dripping onto the counter-top.  She contended that this was completely normal for Europeans and that it was we “crazy Americans” who were “obsessed with hygiene” and “environmentally unfriendly.” (European readers, please feel free to chime in on this topic: do you rinse the soap from your dishes after washing? This inquiring mind wants to know.)

At any rate, whether you out there in the internet rinse your dishes or not, it is no matter.  I am merely here to tell you about some rice I made tonight.  It had great beginnings, I tell you what.  That rice was destined to be perfect sushi rice, sticky but not mushy, deliciously seasoned, the whole deal.  I have made sushi plenty of times before, and I have a rice cooker, so the whole venture is very nearly fool-proof.  In fact, I had made quite the tasty pot of brown rice a couple of days ago (which is nice indeed with some diced chipotle peppers in the pot as it cooks) and was feeling tip-top as far as my rice-making skills.  What could go wrong?  Nothing.

When the rice cooker was finished steaming, I looked in and saw a most lovely mountain of sushi rice staring up at me from its depths, still bubbling.  Bubbling with huge, iridescent, rainbow-hued bubbles.  I lifted the glass lid and watched as the bubbles seemed to pop in slow motion, and up to my nose wafted the delicate scent of cucumbers.  Mmmm, I thought to myself.  Cucumbers.  Just like my cucumber-scented dish soap.

Oh, no she didn’t, you might say, but people, oh yes I did.  I hadn’t rinsed the pot thoroughly after washing out the remains of my chipotle brown rice, and along with tonight’s meal I had steamed up a delicious batch of soap.  As I dumped the sad, sad soapy sushi rice down the disposal, I faced the last remnants of my mistake: a thin, slippery, plasticky film of cooked soap sliding down the walls of my rice pot and plop, plop, plopping into the sink.

I suppose we crazy Americans are a bit obsessed with hygiene, and we can be awfully unfriendly to the environment, but on this point I will never concede:  RINSE THE GODDAMNED SOAP FROM YOUR DISHES.  Learn from my mistakes!  I have no idea what kind of wine you would serve with soap rice, anyway, do you?

by ravelingoutko

It's Snooooow-ing!

While I did grow up in the South, it was in an area that gets a decent snowfall about, oh, once a year. Quite memorably, the Winter I got my driver’s license we had the biggest snow I remember ever having, and I learned how to slide right off the road and not get killed.  In fact, in the past few years, snow has fallen every time I have been home for winter break.  Here in Zembla, however, it’s another story.  At the beginning of every school year, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, and May stretch out before you like an interminable expanse of greyness and rain and dismal, drippy, puddly despair.

But not today, my friends, oh no, because TODAY IT IS SNOWING.  It was snowing last night when I took the dog out, and when I took him out again at 6:30 this morning, it was so snowy that the poor little guy didn’t know where to do his business.  It was so snowy I had to scoop up arms-full of snow from my windshield before I could even scrape it.  It is still snowing right now, in fact, big fat fluffley flakes that are drifting past my fifth-story office window and down, down, down.

I took pictures, but I will wait to post them until I get home where my camera cable and plenty of hot tea await me.

P.S.  IT IS SNOWING.

by ravelingoutko

School Makes Me Want to Puke

So, yeah, I almost lost my (ahem) composure on the way to school this morning, and do you know what?  I blame it on the health industry.  Since I am being all healthy and everything (hey, it’s January!), I decided I should be taking a multi-vitamin, and I dug around in the medicine cabinet and found a nearly full bottle of One-A-Days.  Like most things in my medicine cabinet, however, they were expired, so I bought a new bottle.  Shortly after taking today’s vitamin, on my way to school, I suddenly, vividly remembered why I had stopped taking them before:  they make me intensely nauseous.

I was in heavy morning traffic, stuck in the middle of a bridge, and I was having that horrible pre-vomitous feeling where your mouth just won’t stop watering, so you have to keep swallowing, but the swallowing just makes you feel worse, you know what I mean? Anybody?  I started panicking a bit when I thought about the fact that I had no trash bags or any other such receptacle in my car, and I might wind up ralphing all over myself (“not my favorite grey trousers,” screamed an irrationally fashion-conscious voice in my head) or having to hang my head out the window and hope for the best.

Let me tell you; I did not relish the idea of puking out the window.  I have done it once before, so I know from puking in a moving car: it was Minneapolis in December, the middle of the night, and a friend was dropping me and my roommate off after a night out.  Right smack in the middle of the Washington Avenue Bridge, I had to hang my head out into the icy winter air and let go.  From there, I can only assume that my dinner and several beers flowed southward, down the Mississippi River,  through this huge continent, and out to the Gulf of Mexico.  Poetic as it may sound now, it was awful at the time.  The wind, people, the wind!

This morning, weighing my options, I decided to hang on as best I could.  “Breathe, breathe,” I told myself, and slowly but surely, I made it off the bridge and over to a 7-11 where I could pull over.  I eyed the dumpster to see if it had a lock on it (it didn’t), but I am relieved to say that it didn’t come to that.  After a few moments, the nausea went away and I proceeded to school, where I managed to get through the first day of class with a still-upset stomach.

Fucking vitamins, man.  I am quite certain it’s the vitamins, I feel I should tell you, because as soon as I started feeling bad, the memories of pain wreaked by these vitamins in the past all flooded back to me.  (Heh.  Flooded.)  In case you would like to avoid such a fate, may I humbly suggest you not buy the One-A-Days, at least not the “Weight Smart” variety, which this was.  On the other hand, maybe the ralphing is how they “help” you “manage” your weight, the cheeky health-conscious vitamin industry bastards.

by ravelingoutko

Open Letter to the Orange I Just Ate

Dear “Orange,” if that is, in fact, your real name,

Remember when I found you and your brethren in the produce section?  You were so delightfully cheap, only thirty-eight cents per pound!  How wonderful, I thought, as I bagged you and a few others.  The first one I ate was just delightful, all orangey with a very orange-like nature.  Mmm.  Orange.

How I was looking forward to eating you after my lunch!  But as I began to try to peel you, “Orange,” I noticed how pithy you were, and how tightly that pith did cleave to your flesh.  Several minutes later, and with the help of a paring knife, I had freed you from most of your bitter, white bindings and was ready to dig in, but then, “Orange,” I encountered another aspect of your peculiar physiognomy.  Your sections, they were inseparable from each other!  Each time I tried to remove one of your sections for the purposes of eating and enjoying, I wound up ripping off a random chunk of flesh, one bound by no membranes, one leaking juice from its innumerable tiny juice sacs.

This is a sad, sad representation of an orange you have concocted, my friend, and your cruel illusion will not stand.  As I write this, hands smelling of citrus, pith buried below my fingernails, I am concocting a plan.  I will investigate the last remaining specimen from that shopping trip, and if he, like you, is but a hollow, haunted shadow of Orange, I will go back to the grocer, guns blazing, and demand that they stop passing off out-of-season hunks of vaguely orange-like fruit as Actual Oranges, even at thirty-eight cents a pound.

Stickily yours,

Your Sworn Enemy

by ravelingoutko

Case of the Broken Noodle

I woke up in a haze, my noodle feeling like it got pounded all the way to Reno and back. I yelled weakly for my assistant Jameson, but the lousy Paddy was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t seen him in days, anyway, and figured he was off on his own and up to no good, probably down at the pool hall, chasing the eight-ball.

I hauled my aching corpus into the kitchen and knocked back a few painkillers with a slug of Diet Coke, but it was to no avail. The pounding around my eye-socket, cheekbone, and temple just kept pounding; pound, pound, pound, like that ridiculous pink rabbit. What could it be? With Jameson absent from my offices and my cupboard, the usual cause of my pain was unlikely.

Had I been konked on the cranium? Knocked on the block? The hound, with his persistent noise, was little help. It was suggested in certain circles that I had become vulnerable to the poison of this burg and was being hit with its infamous allergies, but I knew that to be a load of malarkey. Allergies! What a pantywaist affliction. No, it couldn’t be.

I stared deep into my medicine cabinet, row after row of useless multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, and laughers staring right back at me. From the deep, shadowy recesses I thought I heard a low voice uttering “antihistamine.”

Case Status: Pending

by ravelingoutko

Lofty Self-Improvement Goals

I have started doing a few regular things, on a schedule, to help with the final dissertation-writing push: planning days to work in the office, setting page goals, and so on.  It’s easy to forget about all the other little aspects of daily life, though, when you — by its very nature — have to get obsessed about one specific goal.   With that in mind, I have also slowly been adding in a few small things to do every day to help with my general health and well-being, in order to stave off the scholarly malaise.  Just to have them down in writing, here they are:

– Make the bed every morning when I get up.  Usually I don’t do this, but in my case “making the bed” involves just throwing the duvet across it, so, well, why not?  It’s nicer to get into bed at night when you don’t have to straighten everything out and re-align the duvet within its cover. Keeping my bedroom nice (and free of stressful distractions such as schoolwork) helps me make it a place where I can actually rest and relax.

– Attempt to look presentable even if I am not doing anything special.  No reason to lie around in sweatpants even if the only people I’m seeing that day are dead writers.

– Pay attention to what I eat, i.e. fruits, vegetables, and water.  I probably can’t live on wine, coffee, and carbohydrates alone.  Not that I haven’t tried.

– Regular exercise, i.e. at least a good long walk if not a run, at least 4-5 times a week.

– Keeping track of the above two items via sparkpeople, which is totally free and it will add up your protein/fiber/calories, etc., for you.  How nifty, and how nice to see evidence of your good work.

These are the sorts of things that make me feel better about life, even if only in small ways.  I call it the “depressertation” for a reason, and it’s probably best to give myself more chances to succeed in both halves of that little neologism.