"Have you ever been on a motorcycle?"

A commenter notes: "Not enough applause GIFs in the world for this post!"

Try. See if you can find enough applause GIFs. If you only know one thing about me, know that I love a GIF.

Sometimes, when the night air seems cold and the world is a mean, friendless place, Meg and I will ask each other random questions via text. I don't really need to know her cup size or when she thinks the race war will begin; I just need to know she's there. However, because we're both what is politely called "colorful" and coarsely called "batshit," sometimes these late-night questions lead to stories, like the other night when Meg asked me if I'd ever been on a motorcycle.

The answer is yes. Longtime fans will remember my post about a date that ended in a shed in the woods watching Entourage under a Confederate flag with the central star replaced with a whiskey ad. Well, this is... not nearly as bad. Several years ago, I made a date with an-older-enough-to-be-exciting-but-not-like-OLD-old man on some internet.com website. Looking back, it's hilarious that 31 used to be "fascinating and older" and not I'LL STILL BE COOL IN THREE YEARS, RIGHT?!?!?!, but time makes fools of us all. I drove over to his house, and before we left he wanted to introduce me to his roommates.

All thirteen of them.

The house was huge with several bedrooms, but then eight dudes just... lived in bunk beds in the finished basement.Most of them were gay, so I guess it functioned as a generic sleepaway camp/armed services/hostel/prison fantasy. Introvert that I am, the idea practically gave me hives. There was also a generalized scrotum-and-Cheeto odor that under normal circumstances I might have found comforting, even arousing, but the thought of the endlessly recirculated air down there alarmed me. Then I met Asher, who lived in a cage.

Can I tell you what's not sexy? People who are big into being obviously kinky. Be your own butterfly, go right ahead, but there's something about people who need casual acquaintances to know that seems desperate. Thus it was with Asher. He slept in a little cage - he was a small guy, and the cage was of a size that he could wiggle around more or less freely in it but not really stretch out. He had a blanket over the top against drafts (DRAUGHTS, in the UK) and to make a surface he could drop his glasses, billfold, and keys on. I was not going to bend down and look in on him like he was a terrier - I refused to play - so I carried on small talk with the area of his legs I could see and successfully contained my questions until my date and I got out to the driveway.

Me: Was he locked in?

Him: Oh, yeah. When he's ready for bed he finds someone to lock him in for the night.

Me: What if there's a fire?

Him: Oh, Tim's job is to make sure someone lets Asher out in an emergency. You know how you're supposed to have a plan for fires...

Me: What if he has to pee?

Him: He holds it, I guess.

Me: If he has an accident, is one of you supposed to rub his nose in it?

Him: I guess. I don't know. He's a nice guy.

A nice guy. The hell? He wants to be locked in a cage at night, which, ignoring the BDSM subtext, is wildly dangerous, but it's okay because he doesn't steal or carve "FOR THE REICH" into people's foreheads with a broken beer bottle?

By this point, we were on his motorcycle, so I had to shut up. I didn't get to ask any more questions about Cage Boy because my date spent the evening telling me about his coati (!) and his nine-year-old daughter (!!!!!!!!!!). Three days later he texted me to tell me he had a nice time but was moving to Denver - you know, 'cause. So, fair warning, if things go south with Giant Camel I'm just going to prostitutes. Fingers crossed, I can avoid ever going on another date.

@OMGLOLCTN

"Mom said you hit a cow with a chair?"

That's what they think of me. They think I'm some mad cow-chair-hitter. I would never do that. What I did was hit the fence with the chair to scare the cow, which I think we can all agree is rational behavior, provided you're holding a lawn chair and need to scare a cow.

What Happened Was:

So, Landlady, on account of her being a hell of a swell gal, is giving us a good deal on rent. She also has a persistent neck injury from a surgery that went haywire in the dark pre-Obamacare year of 2009. So between that and needing to do something, anything, to keep from staring at the wall until I write an all-"aLL wORk and NO play makeS JACk a DuLL Boy" blog post, I've started trying to do little tasks around the property. I patched a gravel road, which is hilarious. One of the chores I decided I should do was to establish a compost pile. I love compost. It comforts me - I feel like I'm being less wasteful, and it reassures me about death. Maybe when I die, I can quietly rot in a corner of the garden until I'm ready to be spread on marigolds.

So, I had in mind a nice neat little pile of rotting kitchen trash. Landlady apparently envisioned some kind of JUMBO NUTRIENT RECLAMATION SYSTEM, which is why she woke me up at seven the other morning to go dig up her uncle's dead vegetable garden. Apparently he'd just gotten bored with tending it and let it gently wilt, and Landlady saw all that unused mitrogen sitting around and licked her lips like  a dieter at Wawa. [HONK HONK BEEP BEEP REGIONAL HUMOR] So we ripped out all these poor little watermelon and squash vines and piled them on top of my respectable little heap of eggshells and apple cores.

Then this textversation:

Landlady (9:52 PM) i just thought of something
remember how those cows got in
i hope they dont go after what we just put down

CTN (9:54 PM) Will they, if there's fresh grass around?

Landlady: (9:55 PM) yes
cows eat grass
did you not know that

CTN: (9:57 PM) Right, but if they have grass would they eat dried up old squash vines?

Landlady: (9:58 PM) COME OUTSIDE THE COW IS EATING THE COMPOST

That was it. I had been in a bad mood all day: no matter how much Cool Whip I eat, I'm still overweight; I got turned down for a job writing gay romance novels because I "lacked the necessary experience"; I just... no. I was not having it.  I calmly put on my shoes, walked outside, and picked up the lawn chair. I brandished it at the cow, and it shied back a little, but that wasn't enough. From somewhere deep inside me, I felt a primal cry:

"I SAID HAUL ASS, PIGFUCKER!" And I slammed the plastic chair into the fencepost. The cow, seeing that I meant business, turned and "ran" off (cows can only go so fast), and I went in to have a conversation with Landlady about how cows remember things and I had better be careful.

Later that night, the cow returned, knocked over the fence, and ate all the compost, but I take my victories when I can get them. 

@OMGLOLCTN

On Country Living

So, due to "circumstances," (read: "our roommate spent his rent money on pot and we got evicted") I now live in a historically black farming community in east central Texas with:

- Two menopausal women of color, one of whom is my boyfriend's mother

- the boyfriend in question

- a seldom-seen teenager

- three dogs, one of whom has Crazy Eyes and killed one of the goats

- the surviving goat, which was crippled when its hooves were burned in a wildfire but that no one has the heart to euthanize

- assorted wildlife (rabbits, cattle, scorpions, methheads)

I told an old friend about this, and she said essentially, "Well, of course. These things happen to you!" They do, and I'm tired of it. I'd give up all this "colorfulness" to live in an APARTMENT in a TOWN like EVERYONE ELSE, but the fates have decided against that, so instead I'm going to tell you about my encounters with cows and how I got sprayed with urine without realizing it.

Twice in the past month, my landlady (the non-mother-in-law menopausal woman of color) has woken me up to help her deal with a cow. Technically, a cow once and a bull once - I'm showing my non-country origins, but I don't know if there's an inclusive word that means "one of those animals of irrelevant sex." Head of cattle, I guess. The first time was fairly simple - there was a cow in the yard, and we needed to throw rocks at it so it would go away and not eat up the plants. Everything out there is trying to eat or kill something else and usually succeeds; an ornamental cactus was eaten by rabbits to my horror (imagine the fierce little rabbits that could casually eat a cactus), and then one of the rabbits was killed by a triumphant Yorkiepoo named Romeo. Landlady killed a mouse with a length of PVC pipe, Giant Camel killed a scorpion with a drain stopper. "It's the ciiiiiiiircle of liiiiiife...." but we were to determined to interrupt the circle at the point of "Cow Eats Magnolia Tree."

It worked. I always assumed that if you threw rocks at a cow, it would charge, rhino-like, and cripple you with a well-placed blow from its mighty hoof, but instead it climbed back through the barbed wire fence and wandered off. My part in this success was apparently so impressive that a couple of weeks later I was called to help with a bull.

Let me set the scene:

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

Chris, a homosexual struggling humor writer

Landlady, a menopausal woman of color

Cathy, also a menopausal woman of color and aunt to Landlady

Alfred, some kind of weird relative by marriage to Landlady, for whom he apparently has a thing

Dee (non-speaking), a well-behaved little girl and daughter to Alfred

Bull (non-speaking), a bull

Two more key details. Cathy has a) a tendency to speak incredibly quickly, b) the thickest Southern accent I've heard outside community theater productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and c) a mild stutter. On a good day, if she's pointed directly at me and there is no background noise, I can understand her every third sentence. Alfred thinks Landlady and I are romantically involved, and is weird about it. I resent being put in the position of telling a stranger that it's not that, I'm actually gay, just borderline homeless, LOL.

So Landlady and I walk along the edge of the pasture, past a dog's grave and a trailer with "welcome" spraypainted near the door in yellow, to Alfred's. We did not have A Plan, which I hated. They were used to it - apparently chasing this bull back wherever it belongs is easier than making whoever repair the fence - but I Wanted A Plan. I'll do anything if there's a checklist, but no one would Tell Me The Plan. As I eventually deduced, the plan was to gently and slowly annoy the bull into going in the right direction so that no one had to move rapidly or make a quick decision in the heat. I like this idea, but I still didn't know where the friggin' bull was supposed to go. So the upshot was that I walked around three yards to the left and slightly behind Alfred so the bull couldn't get around him as easily, while Cathy and Landlady drove around in a minivan and a Lincoln arguing about whether the bull would walk toward a car horn or away from it. While this debate raged, the bull jumped a barbed wire fence and got its hind legs tangled in it. I was the only worried person; everyone else just watched him kick until he freed himself. Eventually and more or less by accident, we got the bull back into the correct pasture, and I went home and ate fistfuls of stale Captain Crunch until my calm was restored.

So, you know, that's what I'm up to. I guess the urine-spraying story will have to wait till next time. That's what we in the business call a teaser.

AND MY HAGMAN GIFS AREN'T WORKING AND I HATE EVERYTHING

And it seems to me you lived your life like a bourbon in the rain...

It's 11:07pm on November 23, 2012 and Sir Lawrence Hagman...is not alive. He's dead. Larry Hagman died. And I wasn't there. I WASN'T. THERE. Patrick Duffy was! Linda Gray was! Why wasn't I?! Why didn't anyone call me??!! I would have quit school, shoved a handful of FAFSA money down my bra, booked the first available plane ticket to Dallas and sat my ass down next to that man for as long as it took for him to NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT.

Sigh. I guess now is where I say I'd like to thank everyone from their Twitter/email condolences during this extremely difficult time. Man. I don't know how I'm going to tell Ex Co-Blogger Eddie. I feel like the news should come from me, but I just don't know how to break it to her. That and it's midnight on a Friday and she has a life, whereas I was just "night napping" in and out of an episode of Tanisha Gets Married when my phone started blowing up. I thought I had perhaps won a prize of some sort (I was still semi-asleep at the time), but NO. JR is in heaven with Jock, wearin' gold medallions and pattin' the rumps of God's secretaries. "Jay-Are!" they say with a coy smile, feigning indignation. Hagman just laughs that little Hagman laugh of his and gets some dap from John Forsythe. 

Remember how happy JR was when the Asia deal went through?

That's how I like imagining him in heaven. Just drunk and jovial and successful in Asian markets for all eternity.

So, where do we go from here? I think we both know the answer to that question: LARRY HAGMAN JPEG/GIF GRIEF PARTY!!!!!

Goodnight, you prince of Dallas, you king of Southfork.

Then Again, They May Have a Point

Well, okay. I just finished writing that post being snippy about people not hiring me, and then… well, here’s what happened.

Giant Camel, who has “marketable skills” and “a pleasant demeanor,” is at “work.” Supposedly “work” is a place where you perform tasks for money. Frankly it sounds too exotic for me, but he seems to enjoy it.

I decided that I would be a good little wife and make dinner, so I got a chicken out of the freezer to thaw this morning. I thought it was probably ready, so I decided to start cooking. And that’s where we went off the rails.

The chicken is sealed in plastic, like everything else in the world. I don’t want to use the household scissors to cut it for two reasons: one, salmonella, and two, Giant Camel. He is “artistic” and I can only guess what bloody craft scissors will inspire in a person who keeps bleached oxtail bones on the toaster oven “just in case” and who once said to me: “Oh, I was saving my hair from my comb in a Ziploc bag to make a little decorative bird’s nest for you, but I think I left the bag in the car when you gave it to charity. Oh, well.”

So I get a steak knife out of the dishwasher. This steak knife is special to me because one Easter, my grandmother sent me a box of household goods and two sweaters. On top was the steak knife, attached to a note: “I thought you could use this for something.” You know, something. Maybe steak, maybe not, you know how people are up there. Something. Now, I put silverware in the washer business-end-up, so the eating surface is more exposed and more likely to get clean. This means that occasionally you stick yourself with a knife, as I did this evening. I proceeded to yell, drop the knife so that it skittered into the back floor of the dishwasher, and then realize I wasn’t really hurt. No, I actually hurt myself leaning into the dishwasher to get the knife out.

So the knife and I are finally ready to free the chicken. So off we go. Do I pierce the plastic so that a little jet of chicken blood shoots out at me? Of course. Do I startle and drop the chicken into the colander? Of course. I eventually get the chicken out and go to extract the giblets. When they’re at work, they’re organs; when they’re shoved back in and left in a pile, they’re giblets. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could avoid getting to eighth base with the chicken and kind of gloosh the giblets out by shaking the bird, like with canned goods. Well, watery chicken blood sprayed further but only something I assume was a pancreas flopped out. I showed to my own pancreas as a cautionary tale – “if you stop working, you end up like this!” Of course, the remaining giblets were still frozen into the bird, so I had to reach in and peel them out with that two-fingered come-hither/g-spot motion.

Then, I do the Salmonella Dance, a feisty little Latin number involving turning the faucet on with my elbow, rinsing my hands, getting the bottle of detergent without really TOUCHING it, washing hands, washing bottle, washing everything. It carries through the entire chicken preparation process – get the cooking sherry, pour it on the bird, pour shake the pepper on, smooth the pepper across the bird, reach for the cooking sherry, remember you have salmonella literally all over your body, wash everything, forget if your hands are wet with water or bird juice, rinse, repeat.

So I get the damn thing herbed. I yell at Giant Camel – who is not here – for using all of the special seasoned salt I got for my birthday. This more than anything may be a sign of my coming crack-up. I got upset because we were almost out of the special seasoned salt. This is even worse than being the kind of person who gets seasoned salt for his birthday and is pleased. I add a little chug-a-lug of cooking sherry, then seal the bird into the pan with foil. I have to wedge it in because it’s a little round cake pan and tuck the foil around the bird like it’s bedtime. Then, of course, I have to do the Salmonella Dance.

I did preheat the oven. I did not check the racks before I preheated the oven. The bird won’t fit so I decide – 1540 on my GREs, ladies and gentlemen – I decide the best thing to do is fold up a tea towel, take the top rack, extract it, run into the bathroom while chanting “no whammies no whammies no whammies,” and run the shower on it cold. Then I can, you know, just set it aside. Did I note where the shower head was pointed? No. Did I turn it directly on my head? Yes.

I leave the now-cool oven rack in the bathroom and drip my way back into the kitchen to put the bird into the oven. I do a final round of the Salmonella Dance. I forget to move the giblet-heavy colander out of the way and get suds all over the pile of organs, nixing the potential for gravy. Having forgotten the tea towel in the bathroom, I dry my hands on my pants and then wonder if that’s “sanitary.” My boyfriend and I share underwear because medium Hanes boxer-briefs all look alike, but God forbid I get germs on my jeans.

I then proceed to tell thousands of strangers how goofy and Lucille Ball-like a cook I am – and I haven’t even started on the carrots! Join me next week, when I plan to somehow drown while trying to make baked fish and green beans.

Fuck Work, Unless You’re Hiring

Weeeeeeeell, I’ve got some good news and some not-so-good news. And then some more not-so-good news. Let’s go in reverse order:

I did not get the job I thought I was going to get. During my interview, it was strongly implied that I would get a second interview. Instead, they’ve elected not to acknowledge my emails. So, there’s that.

So now, having run through all my friends who have friends who might be hiring, I’m ready for the next rite of passage for this generation: I’m moving back in with Dad after Giant Camel’s and my lease in Philadelphia is up at the end of July. So, there’s that. I’d talk about how I feel about all of this, but since most of our readers are within five years of my age, I’m going to assume you know how I feel.

Now, the silver linings:

-       I’m going to keep looking for jobs, mostly so I can say I’ve been looking, BUT having already mentally processed the defeat of having to move in with family I’m going to concentrate on writing during my last while in Philadelphia. I have my eye on a couple of moneymakers (greeting cards and the much-discussed romance novel), but I also plan to do more blogging, and I have a few more projects in mind. This will be good for me, in that a) I won’t go crazy, b) one of these might make money, and c) then I can hold my tattered little manuscripts out to my father, stepmother, readers, and potential employers and declare, “See? I wasn’t just playing Playstation and crash-dieting and crying! I created.”

-       I get to go to the Texas State Fair in the fall, and to the Chickasaw Indian Casino for my birthday. I’m pretty sure that for my eighth birthday my father took me to an arcade and gave me some money to feed into loud machines covered in blinking lights for a minimal shot at reward. Twenty years are as an evening gone…

-       I get to dish about the crappy temp job I had last winter. I withheld it because I didn’t want prospective employers to find the blog, read me aggressively sassing a job, and decide I was unfit. Now I am exponentially less sanguine about prospective employers even looking at my resume, let alone my cover letter, let alone checking to see if I even HAVE a blog and wrote three books, so what the hell. For months I’ve had little bits of paper floating around with notes about that job, and now I can throw them away.

So, as you might remember from my post about Dawn Davenport being my spirit animal, I worked at a large, poorly run tech company. To cover my ass I won’t name it, but the name is as stupid as “CompuCom,” so should you draw any conclusions from that… My job was to load mobile phone apps onto mobile phones, see if they crashed and were in the correct language, rinse, repeat. Theoretically, this might have been a fun job, but. Most of the apps weren’t in English, resulting in a lot of “fun” with Google translate trying to find the keyboard shortcut for those letters only one language uses, a la “Ѭ.” Even before I began, random layoffs raged – the guy who trained me went a week before I did, which is incomprehensible. So there was a strong slasher-movie aspect – every day you’d show up and someone else would be gone. And most of the remaining people were either assholes, lunatics, or some new and exotic combination. So imagine me getting up at 4:30, taking a two-hour bus ride, then sitting quietly in a freezing office writing up, in extreme detail, why an application (we did not test APPS on PHONES but rather APPLICATIONS on DEVICES) to find a nearby bus station in Stockholm didn’t seem to work, but I couldn’t be sure because it was all in Swedish, all the while having no job security and the worst English-speaking coworkers I’ve ever had. Also, we had to flag things that might offend Islamic sensibilities or annoy the Chinese government. I can honestly say I find both of those things extremely difficult to predict. So you can see why I needed to try to mine it for humor.

Some of the best apps:

-       A body mass calculator that, if you typed in the information wrong, gave the reading “INFINITE BMI LOL YOU ARE OBESE”

-       An ovulation tracker that you could set to text your husband when your eggs were ready: “Honey, get home quick!” I got in trouble for not flagging this as potentially offensive to Islamic sensibilities.

-       A numerology “thing” that told me that, according to my name’s numerical value (verbatim), “looks like you should be peep-year-old aunt bath bar next door.” No clue about Islamic sensibilities, as usual, but this offended the hell out of me.

-       I plugged something in wrong and got an error message reading “OPERATION ATTEMPTED ON SOMETHING THAT IS NOT A SOCKET.” Of all the metaphors for my sex life…

-       A soundboard of clips and sound effects from “Young Frankenstein.” I thought I had my headphones in while I was testing it – turns out they weren’t pushed in all the way and Madeleine Kahn was just screaming away for fifteen minutes. The fact that no one mentioned this to me tells me all you need to know about that office.

And my co-workers: One guy wore a purple-and-leopard-print Santa hat around all day, indoors, in January; on guy ostentatiously backed into a parking space in a VOLKSWAGEN JETTA (if you’re parking in a LOT, your car isn’t good enough to do that); and my supervisor typed interoffice messages in this font. Everyone was queer for sanitary wipes and used them many, many times daily – on their hands, on their workstations, on each other for all I knew – as though they knew I was deliberately not washing my hands after I peed. A poster in the breakroom (it had no chairs in it, but hooray for posters!) advised us that we could donate blood at the nearby Fluid Processing Center.

Fluid. Processing. Center. That’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? Crazy John’s Discount Fluids. Flow-n-Go EZ Fluids. Fluids r’ Us. And then when it gentrifies: the Fluidry.

So in short: fuck work, unless you’re hiring in the North Texas area. I’m available August 1^st.