The pointless ramblings and obscure humor of an over-worked, off-beat, performer-writer-teacher.
By messing with my profile, I've now unknowing become a citizen of Albania and been put on some watch-list somewhere.
HEY!! How the hell did I get to be 103 years old?
In my life
****11****
...uncreative...
ChesterGlasses
Don't Panic. . .
the pelican
things that make me happy
What Ever Happened To My Lunchbox
Writing it down
today
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visited *loading* times
I channeled my father for dinner tonight and made clean-out-the-refrigerator soup. Although I cheated a little. I didn’t put everything in. I resisted the urge to put in shredded carrots and the moldy ham. I also didn’t have any day-old oatmeal to add. Now my father would have just cut the mold off. I’m sure he would say, “After all, if it had hung in a smokehouse for winter, that’s what they would have done.” And it would be true. After all, everyone knows that cheese doesn’t reach it’s perfection until the mold crust has been cut off a couple of times.
I caught my mother-in-law cutting the mold crust off the cheese a couple of days ago. Yet I’m sure when we got married, my wife’s whole family thought I was strange for doing such things. I’m a lot like my mother-in-law, so I assume she’s probably done it for years, just never told my wife or any of her siblings.
Neither my wife or any of her siblings really understand clean-out-the-refrigerator soup. Oh, they think they know. Everybody thinks they know. For many people it’s the only time their father “cooked.” But nobody really knows clean-out-the-refrigerator soup like my brothers and I know clean-out-the-refrigerator soup. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but I think we ate more clean-out-the-refrigerator soup than anything else. Now, that doesn’t seem possible, so, I’m sure we sometimes had clean-out-the-refrigerator clean-out-the-refrigerator soup soup.
I think the closest to full clean-out-the-refrigerator understanding my father-in-law came was one Sunday when my wife was a kid. Her mother sent him and the kids home from church while she stayed for choir practice with the “suggestion” that he feed the kids some lunch. They ate left-over chocolate frosting on white bread. He never had to make lunch again. Bill Cosby would have been proud. My wife also recalls a time he made Frito and Barbeque casserole, but since no one else remembers it, the incident was either a vivid dream from her childhood or something everyone else has suppressed – both real possibilities. Being from Texas and New Mexico, however, my father-in-law doesn’t really understand clean-out-the-refrigerator soup because he makes clean-out-the-refrigerator burritos.
But my father was an true clean-out-the-refrigerator soup artist. And no matter how disgusting it may have looked, we ate it. We had to. “This isn’t Burger King. You eat what gets made and you don’t get it your way.” I only remember twice that we didn’t eat it. Once was a night my parents went out on a date and left us clean-out-the-refrigerator soup. That time it had lima beans. Now my mother denies this ever happened, but there were plenty of witnesses. There were the three of us (my brothers and me), our foster-brother at the time, the neighbor’s grandson (who was like our brother anyway), and possibly his younger brother. We put it back in the pot as soon as we were sure Mom and Dad were gone and ate peanut butter. The other time was the afore-alluded-to oatmeal incident. Although, I’m sure we were probably told, “Just eat around it.”
Clean-out-the-refrigerator soup was part of our father’s holy trinity. Pure Nirvana to him would have been eating clean-out-the-refrigerator soup while bumping down the back roads in our beat-up Winnebago telling us about “the last time” he was there.
I had a strange experience the other day. I wasn’t going to write about it, but then after some discussion going on gongli’s blog, I decided I would.
I mentioned the seminar I was attending this week. We were playing around (i.e. analyzing) short stories earlier in the week. My group ended up having to present “Mountains Like White Elephants” by Hemmingway. Now, I’ll start by saying, I’m not a big Hemmingway fan, but a lot of that “not a fan” is in relation to the man, not his work. His work has a quality that Gongli (and others in the comment section) defined very well. We all “hated” the story to begin with. It’s extremely short and (even in comparison to other Hemmingway) seemingly very uneventful. It’s the second reading, the after thought, the discussion that shows it to be just the opposite.
One of the things I like about Hemmingway is that his writing has a structure that is more like drama than prose. After all, I am a drama teacher. One of the things I hate about Hemmingway is that his writing often has more of a drama-like structure and is not so much like prose. His style is certainly not “pure.” “Mountains Like White Elephants” seems at first to not only be drama-like in structure, but even more poetic than short-story like. It was after another reading and discussion of poetic elements contained in the piece that the actual short-story structure started to emerge as well.
Another thing I love about Hemmingway is how he lays his soul bare in his writing. And one of the things that I dislike is how his own macho posturing, lasciviousness, and drunkedness seeps into his characters. OK, I know it’s incongruous, but I think the incongruity is part of Hemmingway as well. For all the macho posturing, a feminist reading of “Mountains Like White Elephants” has definite pro feminist (and arguably even “pro-choice”) undertones.
Then there is the humor in Hemmingway. Yes, I said “humor.” (“The ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd. A person's characteristic disposition or temperament.) I found myself smirking as I began reading the story. It begins with a semi-anonymous old(er) man (he is never named within the story) in a bar with a young girl, a trophy girlfriend. She is also semi-anonymous, given only a nickname in the story. They are waiting to leave their foreign location, getting drunk in the local dive. It is so evocative of Hemmingway the man and his life-style/attitude that I find it amusing. I do tend to have a dark sense of humor. I also find humor in the operation/procedure that the girl is contemplating and the two are discussing. The procedure could be interpreted as a number of different things from breast augmentation (probably less likely because of the time period) to lobotomization to abortion – the absurd to the strange to the severe.
So, after this afternoon discussion I was surprised to go to one of my favorite blogs and find someone else in the middle of a Hemmingway contemplation. It was just too weird.
Sidebar to Gongli: So, don’t feel you were off the mark by finding humor in your “lifted” Hemmingway imitation.
Hemmingway is too complex to be liked or disliked. It must be both.
Say "Goodnight Gracie."
Chester's sidebar told me to piddle away my time. And now that I've seen this, I've laughed my self into a puddle of piddle.
I'm attending a week-long seminar on teaching pre-AP English. My wife asks, "What for, if you're never going to teach pre-AP English." I tell her, every English class should be preparing students for AP English and/or college. That's the rhetoric. It's also just an excuse to hang out with some friends.
Sitting in one session today, I wrote a sentence (two actually, but it tried to be one.) Have you ever just written a sentence (or two) that was just really good but you had nothing to do with it - no story, no essay, no poem. Well, I just decided to post it.
The smock she wore dangled from her shoulders like old skin that no longer fit tight to her frame. Once bright lemon that tickled the back of the throat with its pungency, it was now flat and sallow -- tasteless to the senses.
Yesterday I wrote a thirty-nine-word non-run-on non-compound sentence describing how students entered a classroom. I got accused of being a wannabe Faulkner. I didn't take it as an insult.
I thought that title might catch someone’s attention. I spent Saturday (nearly the whole day by the time I was finished – an hour here, two there, three there) putting a new faucet on our kitchen sink. It seems a relatively simple task if you haven’t seen under out kitchen sink. The plumbing must have been originally installed by a double-jointed sadistic suicidal gnome. There’s no way a normal person could have reached all those connections.
My adventure starts with a trip to “Lowes.” Remember my last entry. I assume “Lowes” is a person’s name and not a reference to prices. Anyway, after (almost) finding the faucet I want at a reasonable price, I’m overcharged by thirteen dollars. I tell the clerk, “That wasn’t the price on the shelf.” He calls the plumbing department in a feigned attempt at assistance, which doesn’t answer his call. Then he finally says, “I’ll go check myself.” After fifteen minutes of waiting, he still hasn’t returned and no one from plumbing has shown up. I leave. Go to “Home Depot” and “Wal-Mart,” but have no luck. Have to take care of some other weekend business, so the faucet hunt is put on hold.
Fast forward to that night (9:00 by now) and I return to my quest. Go back to “Lowe’s” by now some minimum-wage slave has put things on the shelves where they belong and I find my faucet. Monty Python had an easier time with the Holy Grail. I go home and begin looking at what I really have to do, really noticing the maze of pipes under my kitchen sink.
The garbage disposal is in the way and I was going to have to take it out to get to the connection. The problem is I didn’t know how to detach the disposal from the sink. I’d already tried about a week ago when a loose bolt jammed the blades. Then, I could feel where the bolt was by sticking my hand in the drain, but couldn’t pull it free. I decided I’d have to detach the garbage disposal. After unscrewing every screw and bolt (or is that unbolting) I could find, the garbage disposal remained firmly in place. I finally declared the (expletive deleted) garbage disposal out of order.
Now I’m faced once again with trying to remove it or not replace the worn-out faucet that has probably been in place since the house was built twenty-five years ago. I finally find the key screw(s) and get the garbage disposal disconnected – sort of – at least the bottom half. So I spend the next hour with this vile smelling disposal, trying to get the jammed bolt out. It takes trying two different vice grips (one of which I had to run to Wal-Mart to buy), a hammer, a screwdriver, a file, and a few of those expletives to remove the bolt.
OK, I admit, I’m highly distractible when it comes to fixing things. Starting one thing always leads to another. It’s like doing math inside of parenthesizes – I have to finish the inner job (the garbage disposal) before I can finish the out job.
The connection for the faucet is in such a tight space that I have to return to Wal-Mart to buy a different wrench. Mine are too big. By now, I’m on a first-name basis with the door greeter.
TANGENT WARNING: We have a new Super Wal-Mart a few blocks away. It was built behind our old Wal-Mart. The old store has been demolished and is being leveled and dug for a new parking lot. In the meantime, you have to hike around the construction site to get to the new store. You’ll can tell how addictive Wal-Mart is – business hasn’t dropped off.
I return home. It’s close to 11:00pm by now. I have to lie on my side to get inside the cabinet door and then twist around to reach the connection that is really out of reach. I keep thinking that if I get stuck, the paramedics will have to come and cut me out, and since “Rescue 911” was canceled years ago, I won’t even have the chance to meet William Shatner. Soon all the connections are disconnected, but the faucet is welded in place by years of rust and hard-water deposits. Time for those expletives again. I finally break it free. The new one gets attached.
New problem – the connection pipes on the faucet are much longer that the old ones. It makes attaching the faucet easier, but the old copper connection pipes from the incoming valves are too long and so old I don’t dare try bending them. So it’s back to Wal-Mart for modern flexible connection lines. Finally, by midnight it’s finished.The new faucet works and the garbage disposal is operational; although, with one bent bolt.
The point, next time I’m going to find that double-jointed sadistic suicidal gnome and fix his plumbing.
We ignore the phone a lot in our house. We have caller ID, so unless it’s someone we know or recognize the number, we don’t answer – too many people who want to trap us in another “real deal.” I answered one day because the number had a Washington area code – thought maybe my brother was calling from a different number. It was some bimbo (or could have been a mimbo) trying to sell something I desperately didn’t need. Anyway, we got one of those calls from “Sears Home Improvement” today. Ignored it. On the second or third ring the three-year old picks it up. He probably thinks it’s grandma. To him, every phone call is from Grandma and every plane is flying to see Grandma. He says “Hello,” and at first we are shocked that A) he really knows how to answer the phone and B) he answers it politely. “Yes, yes, yes, goodbye” and with that he hangs up the phone. We were rolling on the floor and only wondered later if he bought something.
I’ve been playing around with the new “pager” and “category” functions in Books of Elven. I hope it means greater functionality for navigating it. It means that those of you who only read “TrolLore” can use the “buttons” to read only those entries. It seems to work, but I can’t quite get my mind around it. Using the links, if I click on “last page,” it takes me to the page with my first entries. Now shouldn’t that be “first page”? And if I click on “first page,” or the number one, I go to the latest page of my blog. Does this seem backward to anyone else, or is it just me. Some times it is just me, so I’m not too sure.
I mean for example: seven people on a desert island, the skinny guy shares a hut with the fat guy, the gorgeous movie star shares with the Kansas farm girl. Does that seem strange to anyone else. I’ve often thought that maybe Ginger was a lesbian. I don’t know why, but it would seem to be the explanation for a lot of things. And just maybe Greg and Marsha never happened because she was too concerned with her nose and he was too concerned with Sam the butcher. Makes you think about Sherwood Shultz in a whole different light doesn’t it. Who’s cousin was Oliver exactly? What was his last name? What happened to Tiger? What happened to Fluffy? I’ve always assumed that since we never saw Fluffy after the first episode, Tiger happened to Fluffy (lunch for one). Is it just me, or does it bother anyone else that the outside of the Brady abode was generic 60’s split-level, but the inside was a wannabe-Wright two-story. And was it just me, or were the back doors from the dinning room, family room, and kitchen on the same side of the house of the front door? And what about the door to everywhere? You know the one – in the kitchen – on the back wall. Sometimes it was Alice’s room; sometimes it was the laundry room; once it was the stairs to the basement. Although, that basement only seemed to exist in that one episode. And exactly how much coffee did Mrs. Brady drink?
Speaking of coffee, do you wonder why they named it “Starbucks”? was it named for a character in Moby Dick, or were the original owners fans of Battle Star Galactica. I personally think it was a warning about how much they were going to charge you for a cup of coffee. And personally, “CostCo” does not sound like a place where you get things cheaper by buying in bulk.
