formerly a fearless temp

I am about to wrap up terrifying cleaning task two of three (my half of the computer room), and seriously, people, NEVER AGAIN will I go through this. I've already invested six or seven hours in this GD computer room, I'm not done, and it's been sheer torture. I am going to turn over a new leaf. No more living in disarray and filth! I've kept my bedroom clean for a full week! I think I may be on to something.

Next up is my car, which, though smallest, has potential to be the grossest of the three terrifying cleaning tasks. Since I'm always running late, I tend to eat meals in there, and since I'm clumsy, food falls. I try to clean as I go, but stuff can get under the seat and out of sight and forgotten about. Every time I clean out my car, I fear reaching down and finding that a nest of squirrels have taken up residence under the driver's seat, subsisting on old PB&J crusts.

More news as it develops.

In other news: Did anyone else watch Broken Trail tonight? I keep wanting to call it Broken Arrow, and then I remember no, that's that terrible Christian Slater movie about a nuclear weapon, and then I think, Whatever happened to Christian Slater? And then I remember how much I loved Pump Up the Volume when I was in high school, and wonder whether I should watch the movie again, or will it have lost something? Probably.

But! The movie I meant to talk about is called Broken Trail, and it is a two-part western on American Movie Classics starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church, a.k.a. Lowell the dull-witted mechanic from Wings. Also, he was nominated for an Oscar last year for Sideways. But I liked Wings better, so that's what I choose to remember him from. The movie is about two cowboys trying trying to bring a bunch of horses across the frontier who run across five Chinese girls about to be sold into prostitution, and then take the girls under their protection. Drama ensues. Is anyone else out there watching it?

Okay, would say more, but it's late and I have to move some furniture before I toddle off to bed. And so off I go, to move furniture! Then sleep! Here's hoping I don't drop anything on my toe, like my father did last week in the office.

I have somehow managed to lose my cell phone and my house keys, complicating my life and leading to sure disaster. The cell phone loss is particularly tragic because I lost it just after finding it; I had misplaced it earlier this week, couldn't find it for a day, then remembered where it was (in my father's car!) and called my number to find it wedged under a seat. I happily hoisted it in triumph in our smelly garage, and then shut it off so I could charge it in the kitchen - but somehow the phone never made it to the charger just ten feet from the garage. Where did the phone go? Where? Did it vaporize? I have already made my brother lift a lot of heavy furniture for me to look under, but no luck. I now fear having to enter the scariest place of all - my bedroom - to find it. I've been attempting to clean my room all week, but keep giving up after forty minutes or so, when I realize what a lost cause it is. I am destined to be messy and unorganized, I think.

How much do people really change? Will I ever regularly put things where I can find them? Will I ever know where all of my important life possessions are? The other day, I drove my brother to a car dealership to pick up my mother's car, and in the course of our journey, I made a lot of characteristic errors, like losing one of my brand new leather gloves at the gas station, accidentally running up on the curb (which caused me to lay on the horn, also by accident) outside a restaurant, and dropping my car keys into such a spot under the seat that I had to get out of the car and practically lie down in order to reach them. All of this done amidst the wreckage of the last few months of my life, handily symbolized by the interior of my car, which is littered with Diet Pepsi cans, candy wrappers, books, papers, and receipts.

My brother laughed, watched me fishing for my keys, and made a few choice comments on how gross my car was. To have a male college student who will readily admit to going days without showering call something of yours gross - now that is a moment that can stop a girl in her tracks. In my case, in my fishing.

"Shut up," I said.

He just laughed and watched me go back to picking through the disgusting mess under my seat to find my keys. After offering him a Chewy bar I found under there, which he turned down, I found the keys and got back in the car, put the keys in the ignition and looked at my brother in triumph.

"It must be exhausting being you," he said.

And you know, it kind of is. I really believe that my life would be so much easier, so much less taxing, if I threw things away and remembered where things were (like my cell phone and keys). I've spent much mental and physical energy (more mental than physical, because I am lazy) on this lost-keys-and-phone crisis, mental and physical energy that could have been better spent thinking through a solution to our problems in the middle east, or exercising off the eighty-three pounds of potatoes I ate over the holidays. But no, I had to spend them walking myself back through the past few days - could my keys be in my bathrobe? I have been spending a lot of time in my bathrobe this week. There's no earthly reason for my keys to be in my bathrobe, but it's never good to look for an earthly reason when one is trying to piece through my past actions.

Speaking of keys: Earlier this week, I was involved in another key-related crisis that led to my mother's car finding its way to the dealership. I was going out, again with my brother (we are the dream team; putting us together on a task is the best way to ensure disaster – example, The LeBra Incident), this time to the bookstore, and was well onto the highway when I realized my mother's car was running on fumes. Why were we in my mother's car? There's a good reason for that. The reason is: My brother and I were lazy. My mother's car lives in the garage, while my brother's car and my car live at the end of the driveway, which is steep and snow-covered. Also, neither of our cars has a CD player (though my brother's does have a CB radio, which is entertaining, but not the same). So we borrowed my mother’s car.

We ended up at a busy Sunoco, where I turned the car off and filled up the tank (almost fell while walking backwards from the pump to the car’s tank, but stayed upright). My brother washed the car’s windows with the squeegee. All good things. And then I got back into the car, put the key in the ignition and – nothing. It would not turn. It would not budge. I jiggled, I messed with the steering wheel, I messed with the gearshift, I swore, I hit things, I used brute force, I made my brother do all of these things, I begged the gas station attendant for help, and in the end, yes, we were towed. After an hour of sitting parked at Pump 4, after making phone calls to friends and family for advice, after a good old-fashioned shrieking fit from the mom unit, after all of that – the car was towed to the garage, where it would have $600 of work done on its steering column. Not that I’m happy about my car costing my mother that kind of money, but it was kind of gratifying to hear that it was a common problem on the part of Fords of that year, and not the result, as she initially accused, of my brute force when turning the car off.

Because really, if a car’s ignition is that sensitive – we’re not talking about Lou Ferigno here, we’re talking me, Jess Who Last Exercised In June 2005 – it’s faulty.

I could edit this rambling heap of junk into something worthy of human consumption, but that would require time, and right now my parents are offering me a free dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s. My 25-year-old social life is so exciting that this is probably my best offer for the evening, and so I am off. Will try to post before the new year, but if I don’t – happy new year to all, and to all, a good night.

In list form because I've had eight hours of sleep total since Sunday morning, and my mental resources are lacking.

1. My car just had seven hundred dollars of repairs done. I think I felt a physical pain typing that sentence. I need a massive financial windfall. STAT.

2. Yesterday I had my first conference with my teaching lab instructor about the five-minute Anticipatory Sets my partner and I were supposed to come up with over the weekend. The lab instructor offered the kind of honest, direct critique one would associate with your run-of-the-mill evil overlord. She made my partner cry and I kind of want to throw up right now thinking of the revisions I have to do.

3. Said revisions are nausea-inducing in part because I showed my work to my methods teacher and he gave me contradictory advice.

4. SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS.

5. Is anyone else out there watching Into the West? Anyone? I missed the first two hours so I'm still kind of confused about how everyone is related, but dudes, I LOVE IT. The writing is kind of, well, bad, especially the dialog, and there are lots of cases where you feel like they're trying to cram a history unit into a storyline, but the show more than makes up for it by having dreamy guys in lead roles and devoting a good portion of the second episode to a wagon trail expedition that was, basically, a live-action version of Oregon Trail. I devoted many hours of my elementary years to Oregon Trail. Awesome game. I could have offered such advice to the characters in the story. Don't try to cross the river! Take a ferry!

6. On the up side, I have high speed internet at home now. Sweetness! I just watched the Goblet of Fire trailer three times. OMG HARRY!

7. OMG really don't want to revise Anticipatory Set!

8. All I do lately is go to school (it's either four or eight hours a day, every day, except for the weekends, and we have a 5-10 page writing assignment due every Monday and other homework - like the Anticipatory Set lesson planning - to do then too, so those days fill up) and obsess over Into the West. I've already talked about Into the West, so I guess I'll talk about school. It's been an interesting experience so far for a lot of reasons. There's an overwhelming amount of information, and they ask a lot of us, but most of what we're learning is interesting and seems like it will be useful down the road.

9. That said, I'm really struggling with my perfectionist tendencies - I hate making mistakes, and this whole program is about making them and learning from them. No one can be perfect the first time. BUT I WANT TO BE.

10. As a result of (9) (yes, I am aware that these numberings are pretty arbitrary - too tired to structure more carefully), I find myself assaulting myself with a variety of self-help affirmations and encouraging statements. Right now the record playing in my brain has three tracks: It's Okay to Make Mistakes, This is a Learning Experience, and You'll Do Fine.

That is all for now.

Question of the day:

How cold is it lately? So cold that:

(a) car locks freeze
(b) Diet Coke cans explode
(c) temps in knee-length skirts seriously consider immolation
(d) pleather car accessories cease to function
(e) all of the above

If you answered (e), give yourself a gold star! I'm guessing that you, too, have spent time in a cruel wintry climate, where the day sometimes greets you with a car whose lock won't turn and whose interior is coated - yes, coated - with frozen patches of Diet Coke. Perhaps you, too, are equally forgetful about checking the weather and doing your laundry so that you always end up wearing the worst possible clothes combination for the day (a knee length skirt and tights isn't really the best ensemble for crawling across one's Diet Coke encrusted front seat, trying desperately to jar open the driver's side door from within - but is there a best ensemble for that?).

As for the pleather car accessories: I will get to that later.

So, did you know that when someone says a soda can exploded they really, seriously meant that it exploded? Because I didn't! I know I once left a soda in the freezer and forgot about it, which annoyed my mother to no end because she ended up cleaning it up, but I didn't really grasp what it meant. I thought exploding meant bursting at the seams in the gentlest way, foaming up and over like a glass of soda poured too generously. I did not picture the carnage I found in my car this morning. My gearshift, the emergency brake, the dashboard - all coated with icy Diet Coke. I had to use my ice scraper to turn on the radio because the entire display was covered by one particularly stubborn patch.

Cans seriously explode! Like grenades! With aspartame! It's crazy!

I was, of course, already running heinously late for work, which meant I could undertake no real cleanup. I grabbed some napkins from the house before leaving and while driving to work, the heat on full-blast, I dabbed at frozen patches and threw napkins over places where I thought the stuff would melt or, as the case may be, drip from above.

The strange thing was that I got in my car at the end of the day expecting to see/smell the effects, huge stains and stale sweet stench, but nothing! Or just about nothing - only one or two places where puddles had formed. Other than that, the car looked the same, which begs the question: Is the car already so saturated by Diet Coke that one exploding can is but a drop in the bucket? This is possible. I've been drinking a can a day on my way to work for the past two and a half years. To think of the amount that's already evaporated and made its way into the upholstery - but does Diet Coke even evaporate? Is it part of the circle of life?

Either way, I certainly spill enough that the evaporation could be a non-issue.

And now we get to the pleather car accessories: My big gift from my Dad this year, if it can be called a gift since it was really owed to me anyway, was a car bra (or, to use the manufacturer's term, a "LeBra") to cover up the damage to my front end. I was crazy mega excited about this until about 7:45PM tonight, when my brother and I decided to try to put it on.

"Should we put the car in the garage?" Said I, Wise Elder Sister.

"Nah," said Jimmy, Somewhat-Less-Wise Younger Brother.

I chose not to fight him on this because while I am Wise Elder Sister, I am also Lazy Elder Sister and I didn't feel like playing musical chairs with the cars.

"Should we use the directions?" said I, Wise Elder Sister.

"Nah," said Jimmy. "There are pictures on the box. Just prop it open and we'll use that."

I again agreed. My Wise Elder Sister status grows shakier by each turn of this tale.

Ten minutes later I was kneeling in the snow, pulling as hard as I could to get the bra to stretch over the front end while my brother pulled and pulled on the end to secure the last set of clips. He pulled and pulled and pulled so hard, in fact, that the end of the Le Bra RIPPED OFF IN HIS HAND, propelling him backwards in a manner that would have been comical had he fallen over, but was in fact horrifying because he stayed on his feet and WE BROKE THE LEBRA.

"Oh," he said when he found his footing.

"Huh," I said when I saw the frayed edges.

"Maybe it'll still work," he said.

This prompted another ten desperate minutes of us trying to figure out a way to get the rest of the LeBra attached in a manner that would not lead to it flying off of the front end and blocking the windshield a la that really funny scene in Tommy Boy - and I know I'm not the only one out here who knows exactly to what I am referring.

(Or maybe I am.)

We would have been at it for longer, but a parental (Mom) came to inspect what was taking so long.

"Why is it all frayed like that?" she said.

"Uh," the brother said.

"Hmm," I said.

"Oh my God, YOU BROKE IT," she said.

After that, my mother kept poking her head outside, saying things like, "It says right here not to put it on unless it's 70 degrees or you're in an enclosed space!"

Which was very helpful at that point.

And then she poked her head out and said, "Your father says to grab the receipt - he left it in the box. You can see if you can bring it back tomorrow."

In the box. Which we propped open in the subfreezing wind to better see the pictures. My brother and I almost toppled each other racing for the box which was, of course, empty.

Oh, the awesomeness! It was SO AWESOME.

For the next five minutes we searched the snowy front lawn. For the five minutes after that we performed experiments, dropping receipts from our wallets at the spot where the receipt was last spotted, in the hopes of detecting some route it might have taken. This sounds clever but was not very helpful because my brother and I are - now this may come as a shock to you guys after hearing the preceding adventures - not the most attentive of individuals, and we would naturally take a moment while tracking the new receipt's irregular progress to talk to each other, only to look up and see oh my goodness! A receipt! Blowing in the distance! So exciting!

And then we'd run it down and realize it was the Sunoco receipt we'd dropped a minute before.

The best part was how this was all followed up with dinner, which was spent with both parents looking from one of us to the other, trying to figure out how they produced such wonders.

"The best part is, this was a team effort," I said. "It took two of us to do this."

Tomorrow: The exchange adventure. Will my brother be able to come up with a convincing enough lie? Or tell the truth sympathetically enough that we earn an exchange?

Stay tuned!

You know what I did today? I fought The Man (better known as the Treasurer's Office, which handles all parking ticket-related disputes in my hometown – but isn't The Man catchier?) I went down to City Hall this morning totally lacking mercy! Prepared to be brutal! Supported by plentiful documentation!

A brief retelling of this morning's ruthless, brutal, take-no-prisoners takedown:

Self: Hi, I'm here about a ticket?

Parking Ticket Guy: [Super-friendly] Hi! What's the problem?

Self: [Whips out Green Folder of Obsessive Documentation] I received this notice in the mail saying I was late on a fine, but I never received a ticket, blah blah blah, Tale of Woe --

PTG: [Looks at receipt] Yeah, that's something different. Well, it looks like you've had to pay enough already, so let's just dismiss the ticket altogether, all right?

Self: Uh, okay.

PTG: [Filling out form] How do you spell your last name again?

And that was it! I had two reactions: (1) The urge to do a silly dance right there in the office, and (2) Frustration that I didn't get to launch into my already-prepared rant on how completely messed up the city's procedures are. Only handling protests in person on Tuesdays between 9 and 11AM? That is so messed up! What a messed up system!

But that messed up system had dismissed my ticket, and so I just walked away. I feel like there's a deeper lesson about complicity in unjust systems in there, and I should probably feel worse about this, but – I got my ticket dismissed! Yay! Yay for warped, messed up systems that mean I don't owe the city $70.00!

And now it's time to go! I had other things I meant to ramble on about, including the fact that I spent last night having dinner with Kristen the Republican Bride, who came to the outing accessorized by the one of the cutest babies I've ever seen and a Bush/Cheney 2004 diaper bag. I am not joking. There was a bib too. It was so very hard not to react by, say, flinging the offending items across the room.

I kid, I kid, I would never do such a thing. First of all: How rude! And second of all: I've never had a good arm.

Item the First: ( my car smells )
Item the Second: ( inspect my car, please )
Item the Third: ( remember when my car got towed? the adventure continues! )
Item the Fourth:( in which i discuss a new traffic light )

Today I brought my car in for an oil change and ended up paying $330.00 for alignment work. I would be sad and pathetic and whine about it, but the thing is...I kinda sorta ran over an orange traffic cone last week. So it's my fault.

But! I still argue that the orange traffic cones were in a stupid place! I had to merge! I couldn't avoid hitting them! Okay, maybe if I was, you know, "obeying the speed limit" but come on! The speed limit is for LOSERS!

Kidding. Kind of.

Anyway, now car has oil change, alignment fixed, and two new tires. Happy little car.

In other news: It has been quite a week. My cousin Meg had her little baby Abigail, who after a day of being around my scarily huge extended family decided to get away from it all by having a seizure, refusing to breathe, and being placed in the ICU. I've got to tell you, that was a day. I do not look back fondly on Wednesday, July 14th.

It turns out she has meningitis and will have to be on IV antibiotics for 20 days, which means she won't be able to come home with Meg and her husband for another three weeks. They think Abigail should be fine, but still it's a difficult ordeal for Meg and her husband and for little Abigail, so any good thoughts that can be spared for them would be appreciated. Right now we've got the greater tri-city area's Catholic phone lines with God opened via conversations with my aunt Lynn's coworker (formerly a nun with the order of the Holy Names), Meg's boss (Sister Maureen -- Meg teaches at a Catholic school), and Father IForgotHisName (the priest at Meg's school). We've also lit up the Presbyterian hot line through a friend of mine, who asked her church to pray for Abigail at a service tonight. We take any and all good thoughts and prayers to the intangible force or deity of your choice.

I kid, I kid, but I also honestly appreciate it.

When I wasn't stressing about Abigail, I've spent a good chunk of my stress time obsessing over my grandfather's checkbook. Which brings me to: Have I mentioned that my grandfather's aides are driving me crazy? Because they are. It's like doing one of those complicated logic word problems: How do you keep the peace in a situation with five aides, Debbie, Carolyn, Lorene, Marilyn, and Diana, where:

-Debbie doesn't like Carolyn
-Carolyn doesn't like Marilyn
-Marilyn acts like she's the boss of everyone
-Jim doesn't like Carolyn or Marilyn all that much, but doesn't want them fired. Yet.
-Carolyn is a personal friend of Lorene.
-Lorene is Jim's favorite.
-Lorene doesn't like Diana because of the way she folds her sheets when she spends the night.
-Diana is pretty chill at this point. But give her time.

They keep calling me up and gossiping about each other to me. I feel like The Man, keeping them down, and I am so close to not caring about that.

And, okay, reality check (this is an honest request) – am I being an Evil Hardass Bitch from Hell by requiring these people to have worked all of the hours they're scheduled for before I pay them? Is that such a crazy idea? My aunts had, for some reason I have yet to discern, been paying them in advance, but that inevitably led to inaccurate amounts on the check, causing discrepancies that would have to carry over week after week. This has made the checkbook insane, and so I created this new system where everyone gets paid on Saturday for the week, and it's driving some of them crazy! They're all upset and keep calling me for their checks even though I sent them a letter telling them that the next check wasn't coming until July 17th!

I'm not crazy, am I? I mean, I cleared it with my grandfather, and he saw the logic. You work, then you get paid! Right?

Anyway. I'm so wiped out. Must go sleep. Am behind on everything in life. Owe e-mails, phone calls, other stuff. Apologies, will get back on things soon, honest.

Just when you thought it couldn't suffer any further indignities: SOMEONE EGGED MY CAR!

!!!

In the middle of Saturday night, some person(s) took out their pent up frustration at the world in general (not me in particular, right? please not me in particular!) by throwing eggs at my car! And getting it all gross and eggy! The BASTARDS!

My father and brother are convinced that it was some of the neighborhood teenage boys, which would make sense, but part of me kind of wonders if the true culprit(s) aren't quite so obvious...I mean, who would take action on such a defenseless creature? My car is by far the crappiest vehicle on the block. There may be cars that are at the same crappy level or slightly below in the development, but they aren't near me, and my parents' and other neighbors' nicer cars both made it through the evening without incident. This looks like a blatant attack on crappy cars.

Who would do such a thing? See, here's the deal: I have visions of all the uptight obsessive precision-lawnmowing middle-aged dads and husbands in the development meeting under cover of darkness the first Satuday of every month to dole out their punishment to those not up to snuff. Some kind of Take Back The Stuffy Neighborhood thing -- this month I was singled out for my crappy car. Maybe next time they'll turn their fury on the house around the corner that seems to mow their lawn once every eight weeks whether it needs it or not, so that it's overgrown 90% of the time.

Uptight bastards! I have no proof but already I'm sending mental dirty looks in the general direction of our neighbors across the street, whose house is so perfect that you kind of hate it while, at the same time, admiring its elegance and tasteful beauty.

Anyway, if shaming me into getting another car is their game, well tough! They lose! If owning a crappy car is wrong, I don't want to be right! I refuse to be intimidated into ditching my car! Also, I can't afford a new one. So ha!

On Sunday afternoon I was late (of course) and had to race over to Jo's for our little mini pool party and thusly didn't get a chance to stop by the car wash on my way. On the highway about ten minutes into my trip I realized that my car smelled like fried eggs. Niiiiice.

In other news: Today was my first day of freedom, aka unemployment. It was a very nice day during which I got a lot of stuff done. Okay, I got some stuff done. A few things. Must do more tomorrow!! None of this sitting around for forty minutes preparing to do something worthwhile! We are going to jump straight into the worthwhile activity, or at least cut our prep time down to twenty minutes (thirty at most).

My cat is quite adorable. I submit to you this icon as proof. It's Scout, the kinder, gentler, slightly smellier cat of our household. Isn't she cute?

Today I managed to lose my car key while standing with half of my body within the confines of the car. An accomplishment, I know! I was merrily unloading stuff out of the trunk and had to shift my purse to my other hand to grab the Tide and, while doing so, heard this tell-tale *clink* of my key bouncing off of something metal and vanishing! Never to be heard from again! I can't figure out where it went! I pried up the floor of the trunk, thinking it had fallen into the spare tire well there, but no luck, and it wasn't on the ground anywhere, so it must have fallen in this tiny crevice between the body of the car and the back fender and wow, it takes some skill to drop one's key in the one precise space it would be impossible to remove it from!

Anyway! The whole reason the key fell and got lost was because it was not on my key ring, and the reason it was not on my key ring was because I had just gotten an oil change and, for some reason, I find myself blaming the car for this, as if it sucked the key out of my hands and into its innards, instead of blaming myself for not, you know, PUTTING THE KEY IN MY POCKET like any normal human being. I find myself thinking, "Car, I try to do something nice for you, and THIS is what you do?? Eat my KEY?! Have you no dignity? No gratitude? Did you not notice how smoothly you shift gears now? Don't I DESERVE better treatment than this?!"

I probably don't, since the car was actually like a thousand miles over for the oil change, but whatev! Not the point! I want my key back!

In further car news: The Electric Lady continues to ghettofy at a remarkable rate. Yesterday I was walking to my car and noticed that the little metal plate that proudly displays the dealership name was a little crooked, and so I went to straighten it, and, oh yeah, it came off in my hand. Of course. So now there's this ugly gray/black metallic square in the middle of the electric blue expanse of the back of my car. So, as of this moment, my car now has:

*A gaping hole in the left front bumper where my father hit it while backing out of the garage (It's called a rearview mirror, Dad. Learn to love it);

*Missing/peeling black trim by the windows on the right side of my car, but not the left, for some unknown reason that must have to do with the differential of the drag or the lift or whatever on the different sides of the car;

*A rear passenger door that refuses to open from the inside;

*Windshield wipers that refuse to return to their starting positions 95% of the time so that while at rest they often end up sticking straight up;

*An ugly black/gray rectangle where the dealership plate used to be,

and

*Two rear license plates because when time came to put on the new plates, we discovered that one of the screws had rusted so badly that the old plate couldn't be removed, and so we just decided to screw in the new one over it. Which means I have two half-attached plates. Nice.

Oh, little ghetto car! I still heart you.