57 posts tagged “qotd”

If you could re-live one day of your life, which day would you choose?

Questions like this drive me crazy, because I think about them. Why?  Moot point.  Not going to happen, but I still contemplate.  Was there a day that was so fabulously amazing that I'd want to live through it all again?  And would I do just that--simply re-enact the day as it happened?  Would I be able to change my actions?

If so, that opens up a whole other can of worms.  Then why not pick a day when you made a big mistake and go back and fix it?  Or pick a day where you made a decision, no matter how small, that ultimately affected you negatively?  Or a day on which some action of yours would have altered your life completely?

In short, thanks, Vox, for making me think about shit I can't change.

How could you better “green” your life? What’s holding you back?
Sponsored by One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Crisco, delicious greasy Crisco...

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Among the things that I enjoy doing that I imagine to be pretty good for the planet is buying locally.  I figure if an item doesn't have to be shipped a thousand miles to get to me, that's a good thing.  So, given the choice between locally grown tomatoes and tomatoes grown in Mexico and trucked to Kansas, I'll take the ones that started in Kansas.  Given the choice between shoes made in China and shoes made in the US, I'll take the American shoes.  Except...there is no choice.  I've spent the last 4 months trying to find my next pair of shoes.  I knew I needed to get some new ones, because the old ones were falling apart. (Thanks, Keen. Your shoes are shite.) 

At the end of all that research, I came up with bupkis.  There are very few companies that make shoes in the US anymore and even with my spending limits set at $200, I couldn't find one pair that I would be caught dead in. I just couldn't find any.  My Danner boots are great and America-made, but alas, they don't make walking shoes.

So I settled.  On a bad day, when I needed something to cheer me up, I settled for a pair of Chacos.  They at least make their sandals in America. These shoes, however, were made in China. *sigh*

The color is called "Shamrock."  Doesn't that count as "green"?

If you were sent to prison for an undefined amount of time, what would you miss most?
Sponsored by “Inside Guantanamo” on National Geographic Channel. Premieres Sunday at 9P et/pt. \

It's hard to even know where to start, probably because we have so little conception of what "freedom" means on a practical level.  Until you don't have it, freedom seems like an abstraction.  Lose it and you realize how much of your life revolves around little trivial freedoms.  The freedom to get up in the middle of the night and get a snack.  The freedom to call someone on the phone.  The freedom to take a walk.  Nor do we fully grasp what it would mean to be incarcerated for an undefined amount of time.

I've spent some time thinking about this recently, because the narrator of the book I finished writing in January is on death row in Oklahoma.  Under the current system of capital punishment, though, that's what death row inmates face.  It's a double punishment: an unknown length of incarceration, but in most cases at least 10 years, and as much as twenty-five, followed by execution.  Oklahoma's H-Unit has the distinction of being the only underground death row in America.  The narrator in my novel has spent six years in administrative segregation in a windowless cell.  This is home:

Yes, Oklahoma also has the distinction of being the only double occupancy death row in America.  The only way to get rid of a cellmate is to beat him up or kill him.  According to inmates, that's the unofficial policy on H-Unit.

Here's what "yard time" looks like:

That's the only daylight inmates see.  They never see the outside, trees, or animals.  They can walk up and down in the 20 x 20 foot yard, and they're allowed a rubber ball to play with during their hour of yard.

The thing I discovered my narrator missed most was the horizon.  Simply the ability to look outside and see the earth meet the sky.  You probably wouldn't list that as a freedom until you're deprived of it.  

Vox, are you trying to imply that I'm not an expert?  

If you could be an expert in any one field, which one would you choose?

As many of you know, I was raised by a woman who believes that she can do anything.  Not just that she can do anything, but that she can do anything better than everybody else.  It scares me, because I sometimes fear that I'm becoming my mother.  I'm always proud of myself when I do something I didn't know how to do before, but still...I don't want to become that person. 

I think this is why I hate Jack on Lost so much.  I'm afraid I'll become him.  Dr. Douche acts like he's the only one who can do anything right.  He's the only one who can make decisions.  He has to do everything.  This is pretty much what it would be like being stranded on a deserted island with my mother.

So as much as I value that "yes I can" attitude I got from my mother, I don't want to be an expert at everything.  Next time, I think I'll hire a professional.  For something.

What's your favorite scent?

July 3, 1977, 3 am

Dried on the clothesline and stored in an old cedar chest, the bedsheets smell like bleach and sunshine and the inside of a squirrel's nest after spring cleaning. 

It's going to rain.  Maybe not today.  Or tomorrow.  Maybe not until September, but the promise of it hangs in the air.

The wind kicks up, blows over the open fields to the north of the house, across the back yard and patio, then into my bedroom window.  It carries the smell of ripening wheat, diesel from the train that went by the grain elevator an hour ago, fresh cut grass, lilacs, and the raw and pungent mixture of tomato plants and my sleepless grandfather's pipe.

I had to stop drinking halfway through the vice presidential debate, because Palin was killing me.  We started with our usual list of "drink" words or moments: change, experience, Main Street, golly, darn, heck or any other folksy utterance, any instance in which Palin substituted a folksy story for actual policy substance, the moments when Biden fought laughter.  We also had a special "English majors drink" rule: any time Palin racked up more than five dependent clauses without actually finishing the sentence.  We hit two of those.

In the end, it was "maverick" that almost did me in, and that turned out to be Biden's fault.  When he went on his rant about McCain not being a maverick, I finished off my last bottle of cider and declared my participation in the drinking game over.

The best line of the night, though, was Palin's use of the phrase "team of mavericks."  Really, she and McCain are a "team of mavericks"?  A TEAM of MAVERICKS?  I checked the OED this morning to make sure I was being fair, but the OED confirms my understanding of the word maverick: an individualist.  So, how exactly would one set about getting together a team of individualists?  Exactly what would this team of mavericks rally around?  (Or maybe Palin meant maverick in its Old West sense of "an unbranded yearling or calf."  Well, it might describe Palin, but McCain?  Hardly a calf.)

There were also two rather scary moments in the debate, the first when Palin established that she's not just Bush in a dress, but that she wants to be Bush in a dress.  She actually used the word "nucular."  Not once or twice, but perhaps a dozen times.  I would not automatically ascribe that to any particular political feeling, as I grew up among people who said "nucular," including my dad.  What happened as the debate wore on, however, is a different matter.  Namely, Palin slipped a handful of times and said, "nuclear."  Because the Alaskan dialect does not in fact feature the word "nucular."  So, Palin had actually practiced using "nucular," perhaps drilled herself on it during the week of "debate camp" she attended to get ready for the debate.  The thought of McCain being president doesn't absolutely terrify me, in part because I suspect he despises Bush.  How could he not?  Palin, though, seems to want to emulate the Worst President Ever.  Yikes.

The other scary moment is one that is seared into my brain.  A thing that made me want to run from the room and pour bleach in my eyes.  Sarah Palin winked at me.  She looked right into the camera and she winked at me.  Our country has put up with a lot these last eight years: invasions of other countries, plunging home values, rising unemployment rates, the nepotic and necrotic demolition of revered American institutions.  I've handled all of that, but I swear to you, if that woman ever winks at me again, I am going to go batfuck insane and take this country apart into a big pile of red, white and blue Legos. 

I don't care if she wants to wink at the people who show up for Republican rallies and stump speeches, because they're her people.  She can wink at them.  But when I watch a vice presidential debate, I've invite the candidates into my home as guests.  I expect them to act with appropriate decorum.

So here's the deal, Sarah Palin: you and me, we're not in on a joke together.  We're not friends or compatriots or fellow travelers on this journey of life.  You are Satan's favorite succubus, and I hate your stupid Amy Winehouse hair, and your five kids with their ridiculous "frontier" (maverick?) names, and the way you've stolen the word "Awesomest" from indolent teens everywhere, and the fact that you fired the town librarian over issues of "loyalty."  Like you were the fricking Communist Party Boss of Wasilla, Alaska.

Do you hear me, Sarah Palin?  DO NOT FUCKING WINK AT ME EVER AGAIN.   

What is something that can always make you feel better?
Submitted by meehshell

This has been one of those weeks when I've had to really hit all of the things that usually improve my mood.

Walking
I don't know if it's just the movement.  The same reason babies are comforted by being walked. Or maybe it's a reminder that we're all still evolving.  Humans are bipedal now, and maybe someday they'll shed that stupid asshole gene.  Either way, a nice long walk always makes me feel better about the world.  I have not been able to do as much of it as I'd like, since I banged up my knee in a bike wreck.  (Traitorous bike.  I knew I should have walked!)

Chocolate
Of course.  Need I say more?  I keep this stuff stockpiled.  As of this moment, I have two bars in my desk and another one at home.  I had more when the week started.  Quite a bit more.  This is the real reason I don't kill people.  Not only does the chocolate diminish my homicidal urges.  I also suspect that I wouldn't be able to get this chocolate in prison.

Music
Two things guaranteed to cheer me up: Leslie and Lys doing How We Go Out and Rammstein doing just about anything.  You can't go wrong with a chubby midwestern girl in gold lamé, rapping.
For that matter, you can't go wrong with a naked German heavy metal band frolicking with naked, oiled body builders.  Both are good for a laugh.
Which brings us to Friday and the thing that always makes me happy: Friday Lunch.  It's become something of an institution for me and my friends.  Going out to lunch on Fridays is like running away from the rest of the world.  There is nothing so bad in a week that Friday Lunch won't fix. 

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

A lot.  A lot lot lot.  Which is why I am now going to write a novel about it.

1. I came home from the hospital to a little house in Bethany, Oklahoma, where the streets were and still are dirt.
2. When I was a year old, we moved to another tiny house on Polk Street in my "hometown" of Hugoton.
3. A year later we moved to a big old house on 10th Street, which had been cut into two apartments at some point.  Because I wasn't in school yet, I stayed home with my mother and my grandad, while they remodeled it back into a single house.  I remember quite vividly the day after they built an interior staircase, and I stood at the open doorway to what had been the exterior staircase, watching them rip the stairs off the side of the house.  Can you guess where I got my home remodeling urge?  At age three, my main toys were various sized nails and screws, a hammer and pliers, and some scraps of wood.
4. I'm going to count my grandparents' house, too, over on Harrison, just two blocks from the train tracks and the grain elevators.  It was my real childhood home, where I was always a child, spoiled and doted on.
   
5. After my parents got married, they decided to build a new house, but in the interim, we moved to a house on Trindle, which was much smaller than the 10th Street house.
6. Then the landlord on Trindle sold the house and we had to move again, because the new house wasn't finished yet.  We moved to the horrid little Blue House, where everything was blue.  The carpet, the paint, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything.  Also, it was only two bedrooms, and with seven of us, it was like hell on earth.  On top of each other all the time.  Also, the air conditioner didn't work for shit.  Also, the hot water heater didn't work at all.  Also, you couldn't run the drier and anything else at once.  Also, did I mention that everything was blue?  I hate blue.  That house was so bad I would have been ashamed to invite my friends over, if I'd had any friends.
7. At last, the new house was done.  Mom's new house.  It would never be our new house, because Mom had designed it and picked out everything in it.  All the carpet was the same, all the furniture the same, so that all the bedrooms looked the same.  It was like living in a motel.  Salmon carpet, ivory walls, and freaky faux-Danish furniture.  Oh, except in the kitchen where the floor was tiled in brown and the counter tops were orange.  Fucking 80's.
8. Then I left for college and lived in a dorm room for a while, which I don't really count.  My junior year, I moved in with Allen, my football buddy, and two architecture types: Ken and Jen from Colorado.  It was the first time in my entire life that I had my own room.  At 19, my first room.  It was about 9 x 10, with a sloping ceiling in the attic.  I had enough room for a twin bed, a small dresser and a milk crate for a night stand.  It was lovely.
9. After two years of that, I moved into my very own apartment: part of a huge Victorian, where my bedroom was the formal dining room, complete with chandelier, and my bathroom was the butler's pantry.  That's where I also had the cat ghost.
10. I made the mistake many college co-eds make.  I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.  He picked the house and it was a dump.  I'd moved out in about six months, and so I only count it as representative of why you should never trust someone else to pick out your living space.  It was located in the flood plain of the '51 flood and it flooded.  We didn't get water in the house, but we got it right up to the underside of the floor boards.  Mosquito central, nasty filthy place, and then we got a dog--which boyfriend also picked out without any consideration for my opinion.  Spastic little dog.  Nice enough, but never destined to be my dog.  Then, my cat got shot by some hillbilly neighbor.  I was done.
11. After that, I moved into one of my favorite homes: an apartment in the old Wareham Hotel.  Elevator.  Restaurant and bar downstairs.  Swank.  Soundproof.  Beautifully tiled old bathroom, walk in closet.  My own.  Pigeons walking by on the window sills outside.
12. Then I got a job in Japan and moved into a traditional Japanese apartment in Nakazawa, upstairs from the Quickie Mart and just down the hill from a massive Shinto shrine.  Tiny bathroom.  Tiny kitchen.  Two lovely 6-tatami rooms that opened out on a balcony that overlooked a few thousand acres of rice and the Honshu mountains.  I had tree frogs and mud swallows and a stray cat. 
    
13. I made another mistake.  I moved in with my sister and remodeled an apartment in a house I didn't own.  A story better not dramatized.  Another lovely living space, but one I had to leave when my sister got remarried and sold the house.  Au revoir.
14. I followed that with a dinky little subsidized apartment in a brick WW2 era complex.  Subsidized because I was making about $18K a year working for Planned Parenthood.
15. After two years there, I got married and moved to Florida, where Hubbicula and I resided in a craptastic apartment in a craptastic complex for about a year. 
    
16. During which year, I did mountains of research to figure out where to buy a house.  I drove endlessly through neighborhoods and researched property values and sales trends, and we looked at five houses.  House #5 was perfect, except that it didn't have a garage.  It was a lovely little Arts and Crafts Bungalow in a suspect neighborhood a block from the interstate.  Still, it was perfect, with oak floors, original tiled kitchen counter tops and ten-foot ceilings.  And thousands of little lizards living in my yard, sneaking up my walls, sleeping in my potted plants.  Loved that house.  Almost nothing to remodel in it, except for the urgent need to paint over every room in the house.  Pepto-bismal pink in the living and dining rooms.  Dining room had exquisite paneled walls with a plate rail and a lovely chandelier.  Hideous other colors throughout.  No remodeling until the end, when we got ready to sell it, then we redid the front porch and I redid the kitchen ceiling.
17. That brought us back to Kansas, where we spent two months living with my parents.  It was...okay.  Hubbicula might have other things to say about it, but living in the suburbs was never our plan.
18. So we bought the house we have now.  The tiny, adorable little limestone gnome cottage.  The house of the charming screened porch and the leaking basement.  I have mixed feelings about this house.  I'd probably love it if it weren't the size of a postage stamp.  Oh, and if I didn't wake up on rainy nights and panic. 
    

I believe that's an adequate survey of my various homes, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that I've lived in 18 different houses.  No wonder I'm tired of moving.

What's different about my home now and my childhood home?  Well, not a lot.  It's in Kansas, surrounded by Kansans.  It's a lot bigger town than my hometown.  90,000 people vs. 3,000 people.  It's humid here, but not brutally windy.  We've got eight movie screens instead of one.  We've got squirrels and cottontail rabbits instead of coyotes and jackrabbits.  I don't know everyone yet and I'm related to almost no one.  Still, it's Kansas.  I've got that going for me, which is nice.

What is your deepest, darkest fear?
Submitted by [Susan].

Being friendless, brainless, helpless, hopeless, and unemployed in Greenland!

Are you celebrating Cinco de Mayo?

This is something that always amuses and confounds me about America.  We're the descendants of a bunch of Quakers and Puritans and the like, but we will take any excuse for a drink.  We have this convenient excuse that we call "Melting Pot."  Oh, we say, there are so many cultures in America that we have to expect that we'll adopt a bunch of different holidays.

Yeah, only all we seem to adopt are holidays that allow us to drink copiously.  St. Patrick's Day?  We're on board.  Oktoberfest?  Bring on the pilsner.  Cinco de Mayo?  Mix up some margaritas.  Mardi Gras?  Laissez les bons temps rouler and show us your tits.

This is why I think various religious and ethnic groups need to think really carefully before they start promoting their own holidays in America.  Next thing you know, everybody's celebrating the Prophet's birthday with liquor.  Hell, I'm surprised we haven't co-opted Chanukah and turned it into an eight-day drinking game. 

So, I don't think I will celebrate Cinco de Mayo, but that's only because I don't like Mexican beer or tequila.  Now, give me a nice Belgian holiday and I'm on it.