The Battle of Utrecht

I’ve been writing on this blog intermittently for over two years now, so – senile old coot that I am – I sometimes forget exactly which of my pet insanities delightful eccentricities I’ve told you about. For example, did you know I’m an obsessive list-maker? Everything must be on a list, or it doesn’t count, it’s not real, and I can’t be held responsible for forgetting or not caring about it. I’ve had a running to-do list for years now (obviously regularly transferred onto a new sheet of paper when a lot gets done and scratched out) and it governs my life. I left it at ex-co-blogger Eddie’s house once, and… I did not handle it well. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Now, having the list does not necessarily mean I get the shit on it done, but at least it’s all neatly arranged so I can worry about it. Case in point: my cousin had a baby in late December. I don’t know if she reads the blog, but in the interest of privacy I’ll just tell you she named it after a major river of France – you can decide among yourselves what you’d like to imagine among Rhine, Rhone, Garonne, Seine, Marne, Oise, or Loire. (Too bad France lost most of its empire or we could throw in Volta, Mekong, and Saint Lawrence.) I don’t much care for the name, but I can’t really say anything because a) it’s too late b) it’s none of my business c) I’m a childless spinster and d)  little Mekong’s cousin, born a year earlier, is named Jimmy. She is female, and named after a beloved late dog of my grandmother’s. The dog was named after a black army nurse who was one of my grandmother’s best friends when they were in Europe during World War Two. (Jimmy was a nickname for Jemima or something similar.) Things about this I don’t understand: how my grandmother made a close black friend in the still-segregated army, why she named a dog after her thirty-five years after the war, how Jimmy-the-woman felt about Jimmy-the-dog or if she ever knew, and how Jimmy-the-baby will feel when she hears this story.

Here’s how a discussion of my list-making turned into a rambling discourse about Little Mekong: my cousin asked everyone in the family to paint a small canvas or panel to decorate the nursery, as a sort of welcome. I thought this was a wonderful idea, and immediately bought a small canvas, brushes, paint, and a stencil of a parent and baby giraffe. I painted the grass and the sky, set the canvas aside, and didn’t touch it again until last week. With national supplies of ADHD medicine dwindling (it’s true, there’s like a HORRIBLE shortage), I knew I had to paint it now, while I still had legal amphetamines, or keep putting it off until Mekong graduated high school and “paint baby canvas” had spent eighteen glorious years on my to-do list. So last week, I got out my supplies and prepared to Make An Art. I couldn’t find the clip to hold the stencil to the canvas, so I had to run to the art supply store.

The art store is almost right across the street, next to an out-of-business salon mysteriously named “HAIRZ GOD’S GIFT,” so this errand should have taken five minutes TOPS. Giant Camel came with me to get some supplies for his obscene collages, which was nice because it counted as a date and got me out of springing for Qdoba that weekend.

So we go in, I find my clip, and I go to the cash register. The Art Fag manning the register (yes, I’m sure you’re offended, but you also know exactly what I mean) said, “Oh, I guess you’re just here for the free stuff?”

“Uh… so I can just have this clip?”

“No. We’re giving away gift bags with purchases. Also everything in the store is thirty per cent off.”

“Okay, uh… I guess I’ll pretend to need more stuff to take advantage of the savings…”

So I wandered around a while before just buying five blank greeting cards for when I forget people’s birthdays. I took my clip and five cards to the register, where I got a different, slightly larger art fag, and everything went to hell.

You know how you’ll go to the store, and the one day you’re buying condoms and laxatives, or trying to use the six dollars of food stamps you have left over, or have some awkwardness, you get the chatty, incompetent cashier? You can sail right through with a toothbrush even if you’re paying with an out-of-state check, but God forbid you need Pepto-Bismol even if you have exact change. We had the art-store equivalent of that cashier. I just wanted to go home and paint my damn giraffes. Oh, no. I had to enter the raffle, get my bag of freebies, talk about the raffle, talk about the freebies, swipe my membership card, swipe my debit card, do it all again, hear the cashier yell “Tood, I need your numbers! I need your numbers! Todd, I need your numbers for the register! Todd! Numbers!” do it all a third time, wait for him to bag my purchases despite the fact that I’d just been given a bag of freebies, be invited to some kind of art demonstration later in the day, be offered refreshments, and watch him count my change, look confusedly at the cash register, and count my change again before I could get out of there. I would have gladly abandoned my change, my honor, my ethics and my boyfriend just to NOT BE AT THE CASH REGISTER anymore. It was a shackle and a bishop away from being an inquisitorial torture, although I did snag a free nutter butter on the way out.

Finally home, I took an inventory of the goodie bag:

-       The bag itself, which is one of those reusable shopping bags that everyone thought was environmentally friendly but it turns out they aren’t

-       A small tube of yellow ochre acrylic paint, with one of those “CALIFORNIA SAYS YOU’LL GET CANCER” labels

-       A little box with two more acrylic tube “green gold” and quinacridone magenta.” Now… two things. Gold doesn’t tarnish, so “green gold?” Does it just sound better than “remember that tacky brass lamp your parents had in 1989? That color.”? And “quinacridone magenta.” Magenta is already a fairly specific color – do we need it to be sub-specified by whatever peculiar chemical is in it? Has anyone ever demanded of an art store clerk, “Does this magenta have quinacridone in it? THERE MUST BE QUINACRIDONE OR ALL WILL BE RUINED.”

-       A stick of Elmer’s glue. Does anyone know what that animal on Elmer’s glue is? It looks like a fat chupacabra.

-       Some post-its

-       A sketch pad

-       A small paintbrush

-       A yellow highlighter

-       Another brand of acrylic in titanium white

-       A maroon gel pen, in case you wanted to be a female teenage Aggie fan in 2001

-       A plain blue ballpoint

-       A New Year’s Sale coupon that’s good from February 28 to March 13. I don’t think that’s even Chinese new year.

-       Something called an “angling tool”

-       A six-inch ruler, which of course is useless for me (did you get that? Did you get the dick joke?)

-       A single sheet of watercolor paper

-       Some tape

-       A brown map color taped to a card (tangent below)*

-       Another tiny tube of acrylic in “azo yellow.” You are artists. Here’s a list of things that are yellow: the sun, lemons, buttercups, jaundice, white wine, gold, topaz, any number of lemon-flavored candies, most urine, bees, honey, Winnie the Pooh, squash, blond hair, cheetahs. Nothing? Nothing better than "azo?”

-       A tiny gesso board

-       A package of “paper samples”

What on earth does a person do with such a bag? Paint a six-inch-high painting of a titanium white woman in a yellow ochre dress and with azo yellow hair running across green-gold grass toward a quinacridone sunset on a variety of papers?

I did, however, produce a wonderful painting:

The shape of the giraffes is a little shaky, I grant, but I’m pleased with the spots, and the shrub is a triumph.

*Brown map color tangent: in second grade, I had a teacher who liked to give out coloring packets. Graded coloring packets. There were like, thirty pages stapled together, and we were to work on them in our free time when we were done with our work. No one ever finished them, so on the last day of the term we all had to take them home and finish coloring them. Our teacher, oddly strict about accuracy, wanted everything to be brown, since “people didn’t have fancy dyes back then.” So we had to color brown Christopher Columbus, on a brown ship, with a crew of brown Spaniards and Italians, in brown clothes, eating brown bread, leaving the brown dock in brown Spain, and finally arriving on the brown shore of Hispaniola, which featured brown natives in brown clothing standing in front of brown tree trunks.
I no longer care for brown.

It's not because you're black...

[****NOTE: Correction to yesterday's blog post: Chris and I will be on Keith and the Girl today at 4pm, not 5pm. I, Meghan C. Rowland, am a whore and a horrible human being. I apologize.****]

Well, last night sucked: the Saints lost, I tripped over a Christmas tree on the sidewalk, and Wacky Wanda pounded on the door and tried to get in at 1:30 in the morning. That’s probably the thing that pisses me off most that people ever do: they knock, and then if you don’t answer they try the knob. And so… what? Are you just going to walk in? If I’m not here, are you just going to pop in a DVD of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, help yourself to a beer, and wait? Wacky Wanda was angry because, as she put it, we “stole her pocketbook that she left in the foyer.” So, naturally, after leaving her possessions in a public place, she assumes they were stolen by the only two people who bother to be polite to her crazy ass. I did get a little reassurance, though: I’ve always hated my speaking voice, but I noticed as I shouted at Wacky Wanda that, when I’m angry, my voice does in fact sound like an angry adult man, and not the Paul-Lynde-with-hayfever production I hear on answering machines, so that’s good.

As for the Saints… I don’t know where to begin. I’m completely irrational about football, to the point where watching The Walking Dead is less stressful for me than others because, since it takes place in Georgia, I figure everyone involved is a Falcons fan and already spiritually dead. I did manage to avoid actually crying in the bar, which was a very small victory.

So, since 2012 has started with a whimper, I’m going to go for it and tell you my best “I was accidentally racist” story ever. It’s called, “It’s not because you’re black; my mom thinks I have a disease.”

So, this past summer, I was running an SAT prep seminar for a group of kids. The organization I was working for would generally leave someone in the room with me for crowd control and, presumably, So There Would Be An Adult In the Room, Not That We Think You’re A Sex Pervert But Well What With the Church Better Safe Than Sorry And We’re Sure You Understand, It’s Really For Your Protection. The Designated Adult was generally one of two African American ladies of about the same age.

You see where this is going, right? I called the one by the other’s name. In my defense, I badly need new glasses and I genuinely expected Jane, not Tessa, to be there that day. What makes this so acutely embarrassing and Accidentally Racist is that, instead of saying, “oh, excuse me, got a case of the Mondays!” I PANICKED and started babbling about new glasses because the part of my brain that ensures compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 burst into the control room and yelled at the rest of my brain, “SHE’S GOING TO THINK YOU DID THAT BECAUSE SHE’S BLACK AND JANE IS BLACK AND THEY’RE BOTH BLACK AND YOU CAN’T TELL BLACK PEOPLE APART BECAUSE YOU THINK THEY SHOULD BE MAKING YOU GRITS, THAT’S WHAT SHE’LL THINK!” That’s what’s racist – just assuming my black sort-of coworker with whom I’ve had several pleasant conversations is going to be racially offended because I called her by the wrong name one morning, and further assuming that the only way I can head off being reported to the Southern Poverty Law Center is to apologize way too much, offer a convoluted excuse, and make it a bigger deal than it ever would have been if I hadn’t panicked. Essentially, I was filibustering her being offended.

Thank God for small favors, and the fact that I genuinely do need new glasses, because the first thing I thought of to say, that I might actually have said if I hadn’t remembered I was half blind, was this: “It’s not because you’re black; my mom thinks I have a disease!”

Backstory: My mother thinks I have that disease where you can’t recognize faces. When I was a child and young teenager, we’d be watching TV, and I’d say, “oh, isn’t that Jessica Walter?” Instead of saying, “no, shut up about Jessica Walter for five minutes” my mother would turn to me with a baffled look and say, “No. No. That actress doesn’t look a thing like Jessica Walter. That’s Susan Anton. I think you have that problem where you can’t recognize faces.” Granted, untreated ADHD and constantly needing a new glasses prescription mimics that disorder very closely, but it wasn’t like I screamed in terror when Dad came home because there was a strange man in the house, every single day. I have a friend who thinks everyone on TV is “that guy from Monk.”  (She can’t remember his name or face, but the core concept sticks with her.) Plus, Mom thinks everyone has every disease. (This from a woman who genuinely believes she had the menopause three times.)

So, of course, that was the excuse I thought of. What’s less racist that not being able to tell any people apart? I don’t see black and white, I see ever-shifting, interchangeable, practically Cubist agglomerations of features. And, of course – to make sure my point got across – the first sentence I thought of was “It’s not because you’re black; my mom thinks I have a disease!”

“It’s not because you’re black; my mom thinks I have a disease!” just summarizes my life. My awkwardness, my constant borderline hysteria, my peculiar childhood, all neatly explained in one barely coherent sentence. It’s up there with all the other great lines in the history of the English language:

“We have not yet begun to fight!”

“Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute!”

“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a king of England, too!”

 “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a minute believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

“Sorr about the bag.”

“It’s not because you’re black; my mom thinks I have a disease!”

7 Things You Didn't Know About Me: 6-7

6.) I had a pet chameleon when I was in eight. His name was Abu and he was so noble and adorable that I want to vomit everywhere just thinking about him. 

My family had mixed emotions about old Abu. Becca was a straight-up hater (speaking of our shitty relationship growing up) because I had adopted him from Olney Elementary's third grade this-is-how-you-take-care-of-a-lizard unit...that apparently happened. Five years prior to this adoption, Becca asked if she could adopt her class' lizard and our parents wouldn't even entertain the thought. Five years later I asked and our family gained a new beloved pet. Similarly, Becca wasn't allowed to have an American Girl doll because our parents thought that they were laughably expensive and frankly, you've got some stones for even asking, missy. But me? Proud owner of both Samantha and Kirsten. Is this evidence that our parents love me more? One could certainly make that argument.

My father, on the other hand, was a big Abu fan. I might even go as far as to say that he was Abu's best friend...? In the whole world...? When I first got Abu, it was very much a FINE, BUT HE'S YOUR RESPONSIBILITY, YOUNG LADY situation, but somewhere down the line he stole Richard's heart and my dad spoiled that damn lizard rotten. Every Friday he'd go into the pet store he passed on his way home from work and buy Abu some new top of the line lizard accessory or gourmet bag of crickets the store clerk promised you couldn't find anywhere else. To give you an idea, Abu came to us in a small plastic fish aquarium and left in a giant glass habitat with mahogany detail, deluxe electric heat rock, and his choice of five high-res images of the Grand Canyon to serve as a backdrop, depending on his mood. (Although he didn't have an American Girl doll, so: Abu: 1, Meg: 1, Becca:...it's questionable.)

As far as pet's deaths go, Abu's was pretty traumatic. (Not as bad as the time Rachel killed my cat when we were in Hawaii and I missed the luau because I couldn't stop crying, but hey—we all make mistakes.) Like any other morning, I woke up, spritzed some water onto the side of his habitat and waited for him to scamper over and PFFFT! PFFT! PFFFT! it up with his little missile tongue. Instead, Abu, who was noticeably struggling to breathe, could only manage to turn his little lizard head towards the water and stick out a tiny portion of his pink little tongue before he collapsed completely. This image is scorched into my memory. This happened 18 years ago and I can still remember what pajamas I was wearing and what was on that bookshelf. It was almost as bad as the Christmas morning my family sat down at the kitchen table for breakfast and our neighborhood fox walked up to the deck and dropped dead. Almost. 

Back in 1993, I freeeeeeaked the fuck out, burst into tears, ran to get my mom and made her call pretty much every veterinarian in the state of Maryland until she found one who'd be like, "A one-year-old shitty little class chameleon? THAT'S AN EASY FIX! Bring 'em on in!!!" But she never found one. SHE NEVER. FOUND ONE. Instead, my mom sat me down on the living room couch and very sweetly explained to me that all the vets she talked to agreed that one year is an impressive amount of time for a chameleon like Abu to live and maybe this was just his time to go. Holy shit. It was horrible.

I blamed myself for Abu's death for months afterward because I was also babysitting Teresa's chameleon at the time, and instead of putting hers in a separate room, I put him on the table across from Abu so they could see each other. I thought he died of jealousy. How tragic is that??

Oh my God. Why did I choose to tell this to you this story? I feel like I'm about to cry and all I want to do is call my mom, but it's 5 o'clock in the morning and I feel like she'd disinvite me to Hanukkah dinner and Lord knows she only makes those sweet, sweet latkes once a year. I am completely miserable, San Diego.

7.) This last one isn't so much a piece of trivia as an anecdote Dan's been trying to get me to tell on the blog for a year now but I've been resisting because it makes me seem...well, racist.

Growing up, I lived a few streets over from an African American girl named Amber who's father was a police officer. A few years ago I somehow found myself having a conversation with a co-worker about how cops are assholes. My co-worker made the point that although yes, most police officers are assholes, it's also a really mentally and emotionally draining job that in the long run can have damaging effects. 

"So many of these cops," she said, "are put in a position where they have to shoot someone on the scene because it's a matter of public safety, but afterwards, it really fucks with their head and they're never the same. Nobody really thinks about that."

"Oh my God, I know exactly what you're talking about," I told her, "My friend Amber's dad was a cop and he had to pull a gun on someone one day and it totally fucked with him. He came home and got his hand stuck in a pickle jar and I remember he lashed out at Amber's mom and she was like, 'It's not about the pickles, is it? You had to pull a gun on the job again today, didn't you?' It really does affects family's lives."

After I said that my co-worker continued on with our conversation, but in my head I stopped and was like, "Huh...I wasn't really that good of friends with Amber. How do I know all of that? Specifically the pickle jar thing. Why can I see that happening so vividly...?" And that's when I realized that that in no way happened to my friend Amber's dad—I was thinking of a plot line from Family Matters. I had just confused the black family in our neighborhood with a cop for a dad with THE WINSLOWS.

I immediately turned beet red and all I wanted to do was acknowledge what had just happened, but I didn't really know this girl well enough to be like LOL RACE LOL!, so I had to just stand there like an asshole and finish having this conversation about my "friend" who's "dad" got his "hand stuck in a pickle jar" and then he and his neighbor got in the "Sexy Urkel Machine" and "Laura" was suddenly "interested" and it was an important "life lesson" about how it's what's on the "inside" that counts.

A year has passed since I told this story to Dan, who has since moved halfway around the world, but I still regularly get text messages from him being like, "I just thought about how you told someone your friend Carl Winslow got his hand stuck in a pickle jar and laughed-out-loud in a meeting," and all I want to do is melt into a puddle and slither out of the room Alex Mack style because it's so fucking mortifying.

So, 7.) I am a racist asshole.

Thoughts I Couldn't Flesh Out Into Full Entries

- I ran across this while perusing fuckyeahtattoos the other day:

...Look, I'm not trying to seem insensitive here, but there's just something so hilarious? ironic about paying someone to permanently scar you by dragging an ink-filled needle across your skin to further self injury awareness. It's like going on a hunger strike to battle anorexia. Or organizing a fight club against domestic violence. Or renting out a That's Amore! for a night and turning it into a full-blown Roman vomitorium to end bulimia. It just makes me laugh is an interesting choice.

- Remember the 90210 episode where Steve decides to try out his stand-up chops at comedy night at the After Dark, bombs, panics, and ends up stealing a routine from Richard Belzer and it's this big morality lesson about how you should always tell your girlfriend the truth and never steal from Richard Belzer? .........................................................Hmm? Oh, I'm sorry. There's no punchline here. I just think it's completely absurd that that was actually a plotline on 90210.

- "I still really want to see a Christian foam party"- Andrew, October 14, 2011. It just seemed too funny to waste on Twitter. Sorry.

- Alia Shawkat's overacting in Drew Barrymore's Best Coast music video extravaganza "Crazy For You" is one of the most magical things I've ever seen in my entire life. (4:45)

Best Coast - Our Deal from sssnake on Vimeo.

Sometimes when I come back from the gym out of breath, I throw on my doorknocker earrings and a denim jacket and walk around my bathroom delivering that monologue to myself in the mirror. Kind of like how when I get bored emptying the dishwasher, I make all of my movements really big and dramatically slam dishes down in frustration and pretend I'm the piano player in The Style Council's video for "Shout It to the Top".

It passes the time. Either way, Night Creepers 4 lyfe.

- I listened to the unedited version of "Guilty Conscious" the other day for the first time in a while and it was startling.

- Somebody from Hurricane, West Virginia hacked into my Facebook account last Wednesday at 2:38 in the afternoon. The story here is obviously that there's a Hurricane, West Virginia. And that it was recognized for Outstanding Drinking Water Performance in 2010 and has one of the oldest barbershops in America. Swear to fuckin' God.

- I wrote a tweet last Friday about an incredibly mediocre sandwich I was eating at the time and got this in response:

You know what? I resent that. Because I'm fairly confident that they have sandwiches in the third world and the law of averages tells us that some of them have to be mediocre. So suck it, Angie.

- It's T.G.I. Hagman!

And it really is T.G.I. Hagman. I'm not jumping the gun and dooming a man to months of radiation therapy this time. PROOF:

(That was a very meta experience for me. Check it out:

Let's go one more level.

It's like being trapped in a really mediocre Escher drawing.) As of 1:22am on October 21, 2011 (FOR REALZ, FOR REALZ), Larry Hagman is...alive! And I would sell my soul to the Devil to keep it that way.

Alright, that's going to do it for us this week. Have a great weekend and if you're going to the Maryland Renaissance Festival this Saturday—SEE YOU THERE. (!!!1) Buh bye.