Nephew UPDATE

In the form of an entirely new one:

Matthew Daniel, son of Daniel The Brother-In-Law, reporting for duty to pee on his father.  Hi, Matthew.  You’ll find me terrifying.  I won’t mean it, but I’ll still be terrifying.

In other child warping news, Fohlen continues to make his or her presence known.  His parents, on their way to the OB/GYN, overheard his eldest brother say:  “Will, they have to leave.  They need to  see if that baby’s still there.”

But this was a minor happening compared to the Great Zoo Event of last week.  I picked up the phone to hear my godchild on the other end announce:  “Aunt Beth, I got something to tell you.  There was a turtle on the back of an alligator, and the alligator didn’t like it, so he threw him off!  And the turtle fell in the water!”

Well, there’s a simple resolution to such interspecies angst:  You send in Will The Destroyer.  The Smaller Child Nephew will pull a few tails, everybody will know who’s boss, and there will be cookies for all.

not sure what to do with a niece at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

The Rockiness Of It All

The Rocky Mountain News folded a few weeks ago. I sent a blind application letter to these same offices about a decade ago and am still waiting on the reply.  I’m thinking I’m not going to hear back for a while.

As the collapse of the newspaper industry began, I started to question where I’d be if I’d actually entered the field, as was the plan for my misguided youth (7 AM August 24, 1991- 1 PM May 15, 1999).  Eight years bent on a job as a newspaper columnist.  And then, when I got to the final stages of a two-day trial internship with a New Hampshire paper, I freaked out, because, as it happened, I utterly hated newspaper writing, which was what I was told I must do in order to reach the vaunted columnist status.  Fortunately, Al Gore had invented the Internet by then, so by the time I fled, panic-stricken, to graduate school, I was able to go about the important business of Being Me directly, unhampered by the annoying middlemen of paper, ink, editors, owner conglomerates, or readers.

But as it happens, I now know where I’d be had I become a pen-and-ink columnist:  Right freakin’ here.  I was hired into the Department of Government Governmenting with another new employee in his forties.  Guess which industry he refugeed from.  Guess.  Just guess.

Somehow, the lives we almost wound up with aren’t melancholy and mysterious when the road not taken is a cul-de-sac.

same desk at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Sparing

I don’t like what DC is doing to me.One of the main aspects I dislike about working within the Beltway, in addition to the fact that I actually have to breathe the same oxygen as Congress, is the high Mean Person quotient.  They’re everywhere, and I fear I’m becoming One of Them.

Now, we all know how I feel about people (hate them) but as a downtown rat I’m now in constant contact with panhandlers (am well aware I’m not supposed to hate them).  This city is rife with beggars, even in the low-tourist-traffic district where I work.  There are several regulars, all of whom I am terrified of and avoid, especially after I saw one of them propping up his tip cup with a fresh pack of cigarettes– which is precisely why I much prefer to make direct product donations to food banks, drop an extra tithe percentage or five into the coffers of homeless shelters, or offer a person panhandling for a meal food out of my bag.   It’s mere quality assurance.  Also, solving world hunger one 100-calorie pack of Chips Ahoy at a time.

Some of the local panhandlers, however, don’t even try; one, who looked to weigh in at least the Walter Perry range, set his cup near his propped-up head and stretched out full-length on a concrete wall.  Dude. If you haven’t the good grace to maintain at least the appearance that you’re starving, at least remain upright.  I’m more inclined to donate to those who at least entertain me, like the guy who stood in front of the subway stop last month holding an enormous sign crammed with very small lettering.  At the top: OBAMA KILLED PRINCESS DIANA.

Most difficult to face are those who are mentally ill; clearly, a donation to them isn’t enabling a lifelong career of cup-holding; clearly, they need help; clearly, I have absolutely no idea how to help them; and clearly, as a person with a mental health history of my own about as thick as a Wookee thigh, I’m about five steps away from pulling up a piece of street corner next to them.  One more admonition about moving sheep and goats about state lines crosses my desk, and I’m joining the lady who last month  stood at the busy crosswalk of a Metro station, shouting “F–K YOU!!  ALL OF YOU, FAKERS!” into the traffic.

There’s one regular who sits in front of a local museum when the weather’s nice, occasionally shouting about proper dinner table settings; the last time I saw a man drop a couple quarters into his cup, he was rewarded with a top-volume diatribe about socks.

But that wasn’t even the worst part about it.  The worst part about it was that no one walking past this poor guy made eye contact, or even pretended to.  Including me.

Maybe it’s a safety issue.  Maybe it’s because we’re in a hurry.

Or maybe we just don’t want to look suffering in the eye anymore.

anyway, happy Tuesday at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

The Current State of the SAT

This weekend I was doing some research on the current state of the SAT–  you don’t want to know why; really, you don’t– and turns out they’ve changed the whole mofo around.  I am furious.  They GOT RID OF THE STUPID FREAKING ANALOGY SECTION and replaced it with some kind of pussified “sentence completion” ditto sheet.  And?  There’s an essay.  You have to write crap down.

FURIOUS.  All those hours of weeping over a practice booklet, and then, when I’m already finished with it, they turn around and change the rules of this thing so that I’d actually look like a somewhat competent person on the other side of it.

…Oh wait, there’s still a math section.  Never mind.

although it’s probably the kind with pictures of a bunch of pennies and dimes, asking how much money is there at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Love and Honor to Miami

With my brother school looking decidedly… controversial these days, I wish to extend my honest congratulations to Miami University, my college-in-law, for sending its men’s hockey team to the NCAA National Championship.

Julie The NephewsMama went to Miami, as did Country The Brother-In-Law and a whole raft of cousins.  No, it’s not in Florida.  It is just north of Cincinnati, that most worthy of hometowns.  ESPN always gives Miami one of these:  (OH), so as not to confuse it with, you know, the actual Miami, where everybody goes to wear neon jams and get shot at.  This Miami is set amongst many cornfields and is a perfectly lovely red-bricked place– fun, biggish, and academically sound.

Well.  Until it offered me a teaching position few years ago, which I couldn’t take because The University Of Airplanes also offered an employment package which did not include the necessity of moving eight hundred miles. I would have totally accepted Miami’s classes, if only because it presented the opportunity to rapidly and in person inform Country that his beloved alma mater had deemed worthy, as a  professional disburser of academic instruction, his sister-in-law, a woman he no doubt is amazed to see inhale and exhale without detailed directions at every step of the process.

A business school powerhouse, Miami was perfect for Julie The NephewsMama and would have been an over-structured nightmare for me.  It is not necessarily the type of place you go to sit about in berets and lounge on beanbag chairs in Victorian Lit symposiums numbering as many as five students in a single class.  You go to Miami for the khaki and the Greek houses and the football cheers, and that was just fine with our parents, who rather favored the state school way of doing things when the letters from the bursar’s office came.

Miami introduced me to College, to shower shoes and campus newspapers and the singular, pervasive smell of a dormitory; indeed, one of my few discernible preteen memories out of the great haze of peer rejection and mental panic is of my cousins and me discovering the campus shuttlebus as a wondrous innovation during a Little Sibs weekend.  It’s located in Oxford, a quintessential Midwestern college town with bricked streets and an “uptown” within walking distance, a charming row of bars, Burger King, and this one incense shop that smells kinda funny.

True to the fold, Julie and Country’s wedding– they call an inter-alum marriage a “Miami Merger”– was an ivy and red brick tribute to their alma mater.  The fight song was played as the wedding party was introduced, which resulted in a great deal of footage of the maid of honor clapping along, pretending to mouth the words, and failing utterly.

Of course, their two sons have been trundled several times up and down the state route tying Cincinnati to Oxford; Jim The Small Child Nephew found his last visit largely boring, and Will The Smaller Child Nephew honestly doesn’t care where he is as long as food and the possibility of watching Cars is on the horizon.

At five and two, however, they’re now at an age at which they understand that when adults shriek a great deal at sporting events on the television set, bath times get moved, yelling is encouraged, and tussles over tank engines are settled less quickly.  Miami’s advancement into the Frozen Four, then, resulted in a great deal of running in circles and screaming indiscriminately, with Will adding an occasional, and until the final sixty seconds of tonight’s game, thoroughly incomprehensible “Miami crash!”

It came down to overtime, which would have meant more had I any idea how NCAA national championship games are decided in overtime (sudden death?  penalty shots?  goalie who has squirted the most amount of water into his mask over a twenty-minute period? team with the greatest number of teeth per capita?) So I  defaulted to my regulation playing time behavior, which was crunching up and shrieking every time the Miami goaltender moved one millimeter out of the net, and snickering at the vastly Canadian announcer (eh?) who said such things as “Look at that stick handling!  He’s got some soft hands, right there.”  (Also:  “He’s really jammed it home!”)

Oh well.  Miami’s bricks are better than their bricks.

first goal wins at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Permission

The last time I spoke for a high school audience, one of the students approached me and requested a moment of my time. “I need your advice on something,” she said. “I need the opinion of a person who doesn’t know me.”

An opinion based on a total lack of knowledge about something is directly down my alley, so…  “Okay!”

“Well, there’s this guy I’ve been kind of seeing, and I need to know if I should break it off.”

“What’s confusing you?”

“I kind of think my parents don’t like him.”

“Oh. Well, a lot of people run into that.  Do you know if there’s anything specific your parents don’t like about him?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because ever since he went to jail—“

It was at this point I stopped the conversation cold, and asked the young lady to repeat her last sentence out loud to herself.   “Okay, well, it’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said.

“WHEN THE WORLD ‘JAIL,’ IS INVOLVED, IT IS AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS, because unless you’re dating Gandhi, this probably isn’t a person you should be involved with right now.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“At the very least, it sounds like he needs to figure some stuff out.”

“I think he does!”

She thanked me and walked off. And in her footsteps I heard, in my own voice, echoes of the same justifications she’d probably been feeding herself for weeks and weeks: “Why should I join JROTC if it’s really an authoritarian expression of the military-industrial complex like he says it is?” “Oh, who cares if he borrows my car and then abandons it four states away. Our love is stronger than mere steel!” “I trust him, so like he says, I really shouldn’t care if his study partner from his bio class is suddenly on his speed dial and also sending him naked pictures of herself.”

She wasn’t really looking for advice from me.  She was looking for permission to listen to herself. Because, for serious… looking for confirmation of boyfriend choices from the scary stranger with the microphone?  What kind of high-grade crack were they brewing up in this place’s chem lab?

Probably the same stuff I was breathing the first time I called a phone psychic.  It’s called Being Insecure And Under Thirty.

wisdom of the ages at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

MRI Stands for Marvelous Reclining Incident!

I did not post yesterday because my immune system, in sympathy with the knee, just said “Oh, f it all” and plunged me into fever, phlegm, and a permanent state of coughing.  This was particularly awesome since I’m painfully short on sick leave as it is; the federal government, apparently, would like to increase the ability of its new employees to hurl new and foreign germs upon the rest of the workforce.  Well played, federal government!

So I’ve now gone from no sick leave to negative sick leave even before my loose body and I part ways.  This means that the government now, quite literally, owns not only my soul, but my body and all its once and future viruses as well.

Some of the minuscule sick leave was hurled down an MRI-shaped hole before the phlegm even presented itself.  Like most total non-athletes whose medical concerns are limited to the psyche and the colon, I’ve never had an MRI before.  I knew a great deal of noise was involved; I was vaguely aware that someone would probably ask me to remove my underwear.  In this respect, it was much like every single college date ever.

There was also, I’d heard, some sort of tube in the mix.  This was indeed the case, but before the tube and I were permitted to reach a first-name basis, the technician had some questions for me.

“Do you have any artificial limbs?” she asked as I stashed my panties beneath the forlorn pile of khakis and dryclean-only polyester which marks my Big Girl work clothes. And then as a follow on, it became clear that, to have an MRI, the techs need to know exactly how big a redneck they are dealing with here.

“Any non-visible piercings?”

“Currently experiencing breakout symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease?”

“Tattoos on the back or private parts?”

“Breast implants?”

“Artificial but permanently attached hair products?”

“Decorative metal teeth caps?”

I was then asked which type of music I wished to listen to during the procedure.  I turned excitedly to the list on the wall, for surely, here was my big, big chance to try out this “XM Radio” all the kids are talking about.  But no:  The list was of local radio FM stations, two of which offered country.

Now came the conundrum.  I could listen to a general pop feed, but this virtually assured exposure to Britney Spears, with no way to change the station.  Or, I could choose one of the country offerings, and run the risk of encountering Tim McGraw, Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, or Faith Hill, also with no way to change the station.  But since one Britney equals four Nashville unbearables, I took my chances with the country station.

As it happens, holding a rogue knee really, really still becomes as painful as mounting a StairMaster and setting it to “Patellar Dislocation.” But nothing was so uncomfortable as the realization that, with eight minutes of imaging still to come, “Nothing to Die For” cued up over the headphones.  There’s holding very still while an enormous freaking magnet sweeps over your body, and then there’s holding very still while an enormous freaking magnet sweeps over your body as Tim McGraw tells you how to live your life.

I should’ve copped to the non-visible piercings.

soft tissue at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Loosely Bodied

Longtime The Readers may remember The 2005 Adventures of the Torn Left Meniscus, a delightful injury which results in occasional and sudden locking of the knee.  Fellow Catholics were especially large fans, as this sometimes resulted in a cry of post-kneeling pain audible from as far as four pews off.

But since the advent of my very very important work at the Department of Government Governmenting,  which involves a six-block angry hurtle to and from the train station, the locking incidents have become more frequent and expletive-producing, a phenomenon compounded by the fact that I quite often go from fully sports braed and Workout Primed to writhing on the ground within seconds.  Finally it began hurting even when I was performing the rigorous governmental activity of just sitting there, and though I had formerly consigned the source of the injury to being, you know, old, I decided it was time to call in a specialist.  You can’t be too careful with your joints.  Also, unlike the last time this sort of thing presented itself, I wave before me a health insurance policy which covers medical events other than lancing my left kidney on a Wednesday in a month containing the birthday of one of the cast members of the original Hee Haw.

This, as you can well imagine, goes over wonderfully at work, where I have accumulated precisely enough sick leave to execute a particularly rapid sneeze:

ME: Here’s my paperwork for sick leave.  I have an appointment with an ophthalmologist.

MY SUPERVISOR: … Really?  I didn’t know you wore contacts.

ME: I… don’t.  It’s for my knee?

MY SUPERVISOR: So you want sick leave for an appointment for an eye doctor about a knee injury even though you aren’t limping.

ME: ….He’s a specialist.

On a Monday morning, I was prepped, propped, and X-rayed, presenting my knee for photographing at Theismann-quality angles.  By the time the doctor showed up, I was cradling the entire left leg,  unsure where the age of thirty began and the torn meniscus ended.

The doctor was my parents’ age and began with what every single person wants to hear from a well-seasoned medical professional:  “I’ve never seen this before.”

He pointed to an X-ray on a computer screen– it was my knee, and it was not smiling at all.  “What you have here is a loose body.”

Well.  I’ve been called a slut before, but never in such a manner.  Certainly not by a member of the medical community. “I’m a what?”

“There’s a loose body floating around in your kneecap.”   He circled the aforementioned looseness.

I then rendered my own expert medical opinion, which was:  “Ew.”

“But I usually only see these with a bone injury, and your surrounding bones are smooth.  I don’t know where it could have come from.”

There’s another one you want to hear from your attending physician:  “I don’t know.”  I bent forward to examine the reason I have been falling off treadmills and high heeled shoes for the past four years.  “Is it cartilage?”

“Cartilage won’t show up on an X-ray.  You probably haven’t injured the meniscus at all.  Otherwise, I’m not sure about the composition of the loose body.”

My bet was on a small but galacticly dense ball of solidified angst.  “Well, now what?”

Now what was an MRI.  But I was given, as a parting gift, a take-home image of my knee to put in my very special Chondromalacia Emergency Moments scrapbook.

Most American women have extremely poor body image, so I am proud to say that my femur is fierce.  I have a totally hot patella.

It’s my new party conversation starter.  “See,” I said to Josh The Pilot, tapping the screen.  “It’s a loose body, just floating around in my kneecap.”

“Ew,” he said.

I emailed it to all known family members, as this is the closest I will likely ever come to a sonogram.  “See how I need to eat for two!” I wrote.

It was then time to find a second opinion.  I went online and Googled my new ailment.  One hit turned up a story on a Redskin who was sidelined for a game; another discussed a patient who underwent surgery with exactly the same symptoms as mine, but the surgery didn’t work, so they doctor tried it again, and then his entire leg went numb, and the doctor cut it off.  He cut it off.  He cut the dude’s leg entirely off.

It was then time to close the browser window.

hearing the heartbeat at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Actual Email From Your Friendly Federal Government

This showed up in my inbox yesterday, and my, but the lads at the club and I had a chuckle over it while swirling the port in our Waterford crystal goblets:

From: NOTICE
Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 3:24 PM
Subject: Tax Compliance

This is a notice to all Department of Government Governmenting employees.
April 2, 2009

This is a reminder to all (Department of Government Governmenting) employees of the importance in meeting your tax obligations.  Our system of taxation relies on voluntary compliance.  If the public perceives that Federal employees do not
maintain the highest level of tax compliance, public confidence in the
government may suffer.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has informed (the Department of Government Governmenting) that as of October 2007, 3.00 percent of (Department of Government Governmenting) personnel had some type of Federal income tax delinquency in the form of a balance owed and/or an unfilled tax return.  Non-compliance of Federal employees generates congressional and media interest during the tax filing season.  (Department of Government Governmenting) employees not in tax compliance are encouraged to contact the IRS to resolve these tax problems.

You may visit your local IRS office or call toll free at 1-800-829-1040
for assistance in filing returns or resolving any balance owed.  Forms,
publications, and additional information are also available on the IRS
website at www.irs.gov.

You pay your taxes, goshdarnit!  Or it’s straight to the Cabinet for you!

encouraged to contact the IRS at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Cherry Blossom Doomin’ Time

Since we have some new The Readers thanks to the general decline in American education and expectations, Blonde Champagne is celebrating this year’s Cherry Blossom Festival by not bothering to write a new post about it and linking to last year’s instead.