Prunella Vulgaris's compendium, or: A companion for the ingenious of either sex. The newest experiments in japanning, to imitate the Indian way, plain and in speckles, rockwork, figures, &c. The art of persuming and beautifying. Divers receipts in physick and surgery, with many other useful things. To make enamel of divers colours for gold, silver, or other metals. To which are added, many curiosities, and rare secrets, known to few, but very profitable and pleasant.
That time of the day when the blood sugar plummets, the clownery escalates, and yours truly fails to suffer fools gladly, the effervescent smile fading and I fail to camouflage emotions well without it, especially when dealing with all manner of absurdity in the form of general creeps or dudes whose game is being needy as hell which is not cute or endearing and gives me the airplane ears like few other things.
When it's nothing too awful I should really suck it up, and I always feel so guilty after being bitchy even if it's warranted, there's no excuse to dish it back and no one looks good. I don't consider myself a perfectionist but I guess I am, in the sense that I really don't want to be a jerk and also I really don't want to get blowback from further ups who make mountains out of every available molehill either because that does happen, and the insecure's ego gets bruised most easily. So I'm sorry dudes. I should be more patient and gracious and hope that someday you grow up. And on my side, I need to not beat myself up so much and just try to minimize the jerkitude on my end. It was nothing bad, it just could be better.
Melancholia cured by tea and time, of sitting on the porch in the old almost-hood and wandering the streets of the city, routine can cure so many ills, as do the joys of conversation with those whose company I like, the purring of the cat next to me on the pillow, good books and some incomprehensible divine grace.
There are straunge folk afoot with the changing of seasons and such, scowling at the creep doing the eye-rape because there's no other way to combat lecherous gaze and pass-making without getting written up especially since the race card will inevitably get played, wondering how the hell all these people who are supposed to be helping the down and out seem to be in need of mental help themselves, if not for being crazy, then for having no heart whatsoever. Such eternal questions of existence may remain unanswered until the end of time like the ones that I constantly scream to God on the days when nothing makes sense and only the logic of some updated queen-free great chain of being seems to hold my view of the universe together.
And Layne Staley would have been 45 today, so of course an Alice posting is mandatory. All of you except Randal are probably rolling your collective eyes but dayum those harmonies were swank, and they've yet to be co-opted into any voice-of-a-generation hipster thing. Mad Season's one-off and Dirt are desert island discs, Jar of Flies too. I love it all.
One of my britpop loving friends referred to them as 'Camaro Rock' and she's not entirely wrong. But yeah, no apologies, no guilty pleasures here, sheer enjoyment maybe.
I was too young to remember when grunge was cool, never did
the flowered dresses or the floppy hats, being too young and
hand-me-down dweeby as it was, and the unfortunately gigantic baggy
jeans and t-shirts gave way to skinnier jeans and longer skirts still
mostly black, but more bibliotheque gothique than displaced Portlandia.
I get leery at burgeoning cultural zeitgeist nostalgia for things I love without apology, like grunge and rusty smokestacks and overgrown teenage angst and slackitude that befits this region I call home. I can't wait til everyone moves on from rust belt chic, because I love this stuff out of familiarity and comfort with my low station in life and its attendant trappings rather than a kitschy aesthetic of ironic quaintness.
I can't get condescending about the taste of other folks anymore, because of what I like, and because I know that most of my fellow rust belt denizens are wearing Affliction instead of vintage bowling shirts, and that they like Bon Jovi unironically and watch a lot of sports and drink non-artisan beer and while none of these are my thing, there's nothing really wrong with that. It's stupid to be a snob when you're the butt of everyone else's jokes and you just look more insecure. What we're all respectively into might not do it for others, but that was never the point as it was.
An accidental christening of the new perky and lightly colored office carpet with the elixir of St. Drogo meant some dismay on the parts of the powers that be and now I have a brand spanking new desk mug with a lid so I don't spill again, because this new corporate floor covering is evidently really damn special and the greatest thing that happened in years. It's not some priceless rug from Tabriz, for heaven's sake, just some generically patterned thing with a corporatey buzzword name like "Synergy" or "Media-Fest" or "Follow That Dream" that evidently make some people who have nothing better to think about really happy.
It's not the first time I've gotten treated like the baby of the workplace family and this in particular, makes me feel like a little kid that's gotten used to drinking out of the glass, spilled some Hawaiian punch on the Persian rug and has now been demoted back to sippy-cup status. Evidently everyone else has one now too,which I guess is supposed to not single me out, but everyone also seems to know that I was the first to spill coffee on the brand new carpet. Because no one's ever spilled coffee on a carpet ever before in all of recorded history. Seriously. Addendum: as if this wasn't enough, I received an electronic transmission that was sent at midnight last night, as if this horse wasn't beaten enough to a bloody pulp already... At this point, it's just hilarious.
OfficeSpaced snark aside, it's not that I want to be down here on a lovely Saturday in May when there's a lot of swank stuff going on, homies occasionally getting a weekend off instead of stuck dealing with angry women and space cadets takes precedence and with the weather warm, the day is still young at 5:15 as it is. Whether or not this is used against me because I've outed myself as a sometimes sucker will be evidenced later on. And maybe it'll rain. Despite what the overlords would have one believe, this is not because I'm a good little worker or want to score any brownie points with them. It's all about peonage solidarity.
But time spent there equals to less time later so inshallah I'll be roadtripping down to the Rubber City recently vacated by certain now-famous folk to see the works of the wonderful Howard Finster, who in a fair world would get more recognition than, say, Thomas Kinkade. His fans include Michael Stipe and David Byrne, but I stumbled across not by that trajectory but a random library search for outside art.
By all accounts, he seems to be a nice guy, and as far as what I've read, doesn't seem to be super crazy unless one counts spirituality as such.
Last night I drank an Irish coffee and met new people, and talked about things that are somewhat meaningful, and loved the passion that everyone had even if the things that really move my soul are other things.
And it's amazing how people will see what they want to see in your words, whether they assume you're in agreement and therefore do not listen or when they take your dissent from their point of view somehow personally, because history may be miscronstrued and twisted but the facts themselves don't lie.
Oh are you just being fatalistic? You say it doesn't matter because God will come back someday and everything will be ok? Everything's the same so why bother to change things, because this is the way it's always been and you live in the most powerful country in the world and they're imperialist and you don't do anything to change that because you don't have a problem with it, unlike me, from somewhere else that's not so important. You'd rather sit passive on the sidelines because you don't care.
Because nothing says mature and classy like twisting my words, seeing what you want to see, and resorting to ad hominem attacks without any knowledge of how I live my life or how I feel. My belief in the cycle of history, of the unchangingness of human nature, the way that lust for money and power drive the ambitious of the world, that the technology advances and the cast changes, but fundamentally, the cycle remains unchanged, doesn't mean that I think this is good or okay or something to stand by and watch idly. It's just an observation. The strong prey on the weak, those imbued with a sense of their own rightness often force that on others at the threat of sword or gun or nuke. If you listened to my words you'd know that this kind of thing makes me mad as hell.
Also, maybe it's that you're resenting my punching holes in your straw men and bringing up truth that shreds your theories? That the egalitarian French revolutionaires screwed over Haiti, that while Washington bullets destroyed a lot of lives, so did the ones made by Soviets, especially in the Ogaden, where weaponry was sold to both the Siad Barre and the Mengistu dictatorships so socialists could kill each other and anyone who was in the way.
and what if an Israeli rocket fell on your house and killed your
family, what would you do? You'd probably just stand there and do
nothing wouldn't you? Because you think that's just the way it is.
Look, when 9/11 happened, I wasn't crying out for blood vengeance. I'm still not. I grieved the loss of life here and hoped for soul-searching on the part of my countrymen in hopes that maybe we'd wake up and see what a wreck we make of the world. It's just not how I roll. I try to do that whole love enemies and pray for them because I'm a crazy fundie and try to live out this crazy stuff that makes no sense and goes against my most primal impulses. I try to practice this forgiveness thing and I feel ashamed of what my country has been and what it has become, and the perpetuation of these violent cycles.
But that means nothing to you. This is the inverse of the Jack Bauer Scenario that justified torture for suburbanites everywhere. Whatever. So much for discussion in higher education. This is why I can't bring myself to actually go back to school. Dumbassery like this on the part of both teacher and student. I am caught between polemics and platitudes, and neither reflects the reality of what I read, what I've learned, and what I see played out in my own small microcosm and on the world stage.
Acknowledgement is not the same as acquiescence, and if you took the time to listen to what I was actually saying, maybe that'd make sense, but since I don't believe in a socialist utopia where all the oppressed people come together to take down The Man without there being a followup of purges and reigns of terror, I'm somehow responsible for all the the stoogery of my own country. You accuse me of generalizing an entire religion, an entire group of people without knowing a damn thing about my circle of friends or my life outside of the hallowed halls, and you generalize me for happening to be born in this country. How fair is that? Not very.
You'll be successful in life because you have such a wonderful smile. Did you know that they didn't hire people to work at the casino because they didn't smile. Let me tell you what I learn in sales training school. Smiling happy people have greater productivity! Corporate America is waiting for you. Rich people help people. Poor people can't help people because they have nothing. Rich people help other people.
Oh really. Not that there aren't generous rich folk out there somewhere, but what I see usually is that such gifts come strings attached or a giant spotlight rather than sheer altruism. There are some in my world with some means who I see helping out everyone around them, but they don't make a show of it, but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
There's a lot of stiff-lipped humorless individuals who have "succeeded" in life if that's your definition of success and a lot of us who do wear the perpetual grin usually work in the lower echelons of the customer service industry where other people are always right no matter how wrong they are. It takes less muscles, and sometimes if the teeth are showing and the mouth goes up far enough, you can't always see the curve of the cynical eyebrow, the frustration of being unable to respond in kind and knowing that this is our life destiny, for opting out of networking and ladder-climbing but still having to deal with those who do.
