Please put down your cheese sandwiches before reading this.
I’ve said it before – sometimes the best way to get rid of a disturbing image is to foist it upon others. Yesterday I was in the bathroom at the train station (can any story that begins this way end well?) when a woman and her from-the-sounds-of-it 3-year old daughter entered the stall next to me.
The woman started calling someone on her cell phone, which is disgusting enough from a toilet stall, while her daughter gleefully played with the receptacle intended for lady trash. I could tell from the way the wall was shaking that the girl was shoving her entire arm into the bin.
“What’s this, momma?”
“And then I told him that… hold on a sec… huh?”
“What’s this for?”
“That’s where the mice live.”
Because it’s good to teach children that furry little creatures live in the toxic garbage bins in public bathrooms. If I were that woman, I would probably have my daughter’s hands replaced with sterile robotic ones as a safety measure.
Please resume cheese sandwich consumption. And with that lovely holiday story, I leave you for the sunny coast of Oregon. Be good!

Filed under: General on December 12th, 2007 | 15 Comments »

Natasha and I were at our favorite neighborhood bar, crammed up against a wall, cautiously sipping our drinks while trying to avoid all the people shoving their way to the bathroom. Nat saw a couple guys paying their tab, so we hovered behind their stools until they left.
“Now that’s more like it,” Nat said, as she hung up her coat on the hook under the bar.
We saw one of the regular bartenders, and he stopped over to say hello. “So where’s Peter tonight?”
After a pause that bordered on uncomfortable, Nat said, “Oh, he’s out with co-workers.”
“Ah, so it’s girls’ night out, huh? Well, welcome!”
He refilled our waters and then moved down to the end of the bar to mix up some chocolate martinis for a group of four men.
I turned to Nat and asked, “Who the hell is Peter?”
“He means Farnsworth.”
“But he calls him Peter?”
“Yeah. And I’m Melissa.”
“And you don’t tell him your real names? How did that happen?”
“I don’t know… they got it wrong one time and it just kind of stuck. I tried to gently correct him a couple times, but I guess he didn’t hear me.”
I shook my head and laughed, because the reality was that I knew exactly how it happened. It happened the same way that I came to be known as Faith by a well-intentioned co-worker.
Unlike Peter and Melissa, Faith actually exists. She’s a co-worker of mine who vaguely resembles me with her brown curly-esque hair. The first time he called me Faith, I thought I just heard him wrong. Faith was in the conference room with me, so I assumed he must have just been talking to her. While looking directly at me.
But then I would pass him in the halls and say hello, and he’d respond in a mumbly voice, “Hello… Faith.” I would already be on my way to the next meeting, so it never seemed the right time to correct him.
A few months ago, I was on the street corner outside our building waiting for the light to change when I heard someone say, “Hi Faith!” I recognized his voice, but forced myself to remain motionless. “My name is not Faith, and I will not respond to it,” I thought. “That will only encourage him.” Through my keen peripheral vision, I could feel his smile fade as he waited for a reciprocal hello that would never materialize.
So now he thinks I’m an impolite boor. Or rather, he thinks Faith is an impolite boor, which I suppose is a little better. Unfortunately, this has gone on for two years now, so I think the statute of limitations for correcting him has long since expired. If it continues for another two years, I may begin answering to the name Faith and instead pretend that I am partially deaf.
As I think about it, I worry a bit that I may have a forgettable face, because I also had a friend who continually got my name wrong. She thought I was Natasha and Natasha was me.
“How’s Jenny doing? I haven’t seen her in a while,” she would ask me. At first I thought she was being ironic, but then I realized that she thought I was Natasha.
“Do you mean Nat? She’s doing fine,” I would respond. But maybe she thought I was being ironic.
It wasn’t until Nat starting dating Farnsworth that the situation righted itself. It all came down to a simple logic puzzle: if a) Natasha dates Farnsworth and b) Jenny is terminally single and c) Natasha and Farnsworth do not have an open relationship, then d) that woman kissing Farnsworth must be Natasha.
Maybe the only solution is for me to start openly dating someone at work so that I become a work-couple. I’ll make sure everyone refers to us as a unit:
“Jenny and Alex are going to the holiday party, so I’m definitely going.”
“Did you see Jenny and Alex volunteering at the blood drive? They’re really a caring couple.”
“Hey, I heard Jenny and Alex came up with a great new product idea last week while they were making dinner together. Because they’re dating each other.”
Once everyone in the company thinks of us as a single life force, I’ll make a point of making out with Alex in front of my co-worker who calls me Faith. Then he’ll have to put two and two together and figure out that I am Jenny, and not, in fact, that insensitive lout Faith.
I suppose to some, it would seem that a plan that spans multiple years and requires the support of hundreds of co-workers may not represent the most direct approach, but I’m confident that this will spare my colleague the humiliation of having me call to his attention this faux-pas. Plus with my plan, there’s kissing. Now I just need to wait until we hire someone named Alex.

Filed under: General on December 10th, 2007 | 14 Comments »

“You hef wire heng-er, Jenny?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Heng-er. Wire heng-er, from closet so I can take apart?”
And thus began my 48-hour adventure in plumbing.
It was New Year’s Day 2006 and I had been waiting two weeks for my landlord to send over a plumber to fix my clogged bathtub and leaky toilet. I was less than thrilled when he finally sent someone over on the day I was planning to get to work on my New Year’s resolutions, which involved spending more quality time focused on lounging around my apartment in pajamas while eating clementines and drinking scotch.
It didn’t instill me with a great sense of confidence that the building handyman, Anton, and his helper Stash began their repairs by jamming a straightened wire hanger down my bathtub drain, but I was relieved that someone was tending to it, as I had grown weary of standing in four inches of water after each shower.
Anton – Tony – is the handsome fifty-something Polish man who takes care of my building. From the moment he walked through the door, my house smelled of a heady mix of aftershave, tobacco and onion.
His assistant speaks very little English and has a walrusy mustache that covers most of his mouth. The aptly named Stash has two fingers missing on his left hand, which doesn’t surprise me since last summer I saw him on a ladder outside my window, wielding a running chainsaw in one hand and steadying himself on the branch of a mulberry tree with the other. With each crack of a fallen branch, I readied the phone, wishing I knew how to say tourniquet in Polish.
Tony seemed to be there primarily to oversee Stash’s work, so while Stash was pulling hair from my drain, Tony and I chatted a bit. He said my name often as we spoke.
“How long you lived here, Jenny?”
“About three years.”
“Three years? And who was here before?”
“Uh… it was a young couple. The husband was-“
“The architect, yeah right. I remember. With wife who was teacher.”
“I think so – I never met them.”
He looked around my apartment, at the ceiling and the walls, and then noticed the photographs in the dining room.
“These your parents, Jenny?”
“Grandparents. They’re my mother’s parents.”
“Where are they coming from?”
I oversimplify: “He’s Italian, she’s German.”
“I think she look like Ingrid Bergman, with the hair like that and that face.”
My mother’s parents look like movie stars, both of them. Her mother was in a milk ad, I remember my mom once telling me.
“So Jenny, what do you say you are?”
“I say I’m Italian and German, although I mostly like to tell people I’m Italian. Sounds more exotic.”
I smiled, and he laughed.
“I know this girl who father Polish and mother Italian, and she say she hef and hef. I say, ‘Which hef Polish?’”
Tony moved his square, open hand around his face and said, “She say, ‘This part.’ I say, ‘Which hef Italian?’ and she say, ‘The rest.’ Is funny, what she said.”
He smiled, and I laughed.
Stash yelled something in Polish, and Tony excused himself and went into the bathroom. As I listened to them speak, I was reminded of a friend of mine whose grandparents were from Poland. She said that whenever she would hear her grandparents talk, it sounded like, “Shleeba shlaaba” to her. This stuck with me, apparently, because while I sat patiently in the living room watching Ellen, I could overhear their conversations from the bathroom, and it sounded like:
“Shleeba shlaaba shleeba shlaaba gasket?”
“Shleeba shlaaba shleeba shlaaba Home Depot.”
“Shleeba shlaaba shleeba shlaaba New Years?”
“SHLEEBA SHLAABA SHLEEBA SHLAABA BUCKET!!”
It was at this point that I saw a blur of denim overalls rush into my kitchen and back to the bathroom. I got up to see what was going on and found Stash on his knees holding a bucket under the pipe coming out of the toilet to catch all the water that was gushing out. Tony was pushing a tiny rag around the floor with his foot to mop up the lagoon that had collected on the tiles. I gave him an old towel to use instead and asked if everything was all right.
“I am calling other friend – Marius – to come help. He will bring new part for toilet. This first time I tried to fix problem like this.”
I found that to be an unnecessary clarification.
About half an hour later, Marius arrived. He was a youngish, somewhat shy Polish man carrying a large red toolbox.
“You were expecting me, right?”
“Yes – they’re in the bathroom.”
After another hour of clinking and clanking, flushing and snaking, and what sounded possibly like swearing, I thought about offering them a drink. At this point, I couldn’t imagine I could impair their abilities, and I was craving a beer. It was also the only word I knew in Polish – piwa – although I don’t remember why I knew that. I decided against it and opened up a Diet Coke instead.
Another hour passed and I heard the trio packing up. Finally, my house would be returned to me.
Tony got a serious look on his face and told me that they still needed one more part for the toilet, so Marius would need to return tomorrow morning.
Marius asked for my phone number and said, “Until tomorrow, you should use bucket.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bucket. Toilet still leaking when flushed, so you should use buck-“
Tony cut him off at this point, “Don’t listen to him, Jenny. You can use toilet. It still leaks, but for two, three times you gonna flush it by tomorrow, should be fine.”
I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that Tony was calculating my bathroom needs on an hourly basis, but appreciated that he wasn’t suggesting I relieve myself in a bucket for the next 24 hours.
After they all left, I had to know – what would happen when I flushed the toilet? I grabbed a towel just in case, then carefully pushed down the handle on my Victorian era toilet. At the base where pipe meets porcelain, a virtual typhoon of water came rushing out, most of which fortunately shot back down into the bowl. A less than ideal setup, to be sure, but many steps above the makeshift outhouse that Marius had suggested.
By the time I got home from work the next day, Marius had come and gone, leaving black fingerprints all over my sink and a ring of dark amber caulk around the pipe on my toilet. A crude solution, but a solution all the same.
So today, after standing in two inches of still water during my morning shower, I thought about Tony and Stash and Marius. I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled down to Tony’s number. My thumb hovered over the “talk” button for a few seconds before I came to my senses, snapped the phone shut and went to look for a wire hanger.

Filed under: General on December 6th, 2007 | 11 Comments »

I’m off to Sonoma for the weekend with Dee-Dee and a couple of her friends from high school. I had considered getting them all really drunk so they would tell me crazy stories about Dee when she was 16, but then I remembered that I’ve already seen the pictures of her with a giant perm and prayer hands leaning against a tree for her senior photo. What more could there be to tell?
We have decided to rent a limo for our tour of the wineries so that we get to feel like the Kennedys, or maybe the Baldwins. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be like MTV’s The Real World: Napa, but without all the crying and T&A. But I’m not leaving until someone makes out with someone. And by someone, I mean me, in both cases.
Wish me luck!

Filed under: General on November 30th, 2007 | 11 Comments »

Over Thanksgiving, my family and I watched March of the Penguins on cable while we digested our 4,000 calorie dinner. At one point, after the emotional rollercoaster that is the life of a penguin – 70-mile walks, temperatures dropping to 80 degrees below zero, frozen eggs cracked and abandoned, four months without food, sad wails of father penguins who lost their chicks, and happy reunions – my 96-year old grandmother turned to us and asked, “Do you think penguins are good to eat?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, I bet you’d get in trouble for eating them.”
“Yes, probably.”
“But I wonder what they taste like.”
So in honor of all the fallen penguins, devoured by hungry grandmothers everywhere, my nephews and I made dioramas.

Filed under: General on November 28th, 2007 | 22 Comments »

All my life, I’ve wanted only one thing, and that’s a pickpocketing monkey to call my own. How come India gets everything? Sometimes the injustice of it all just makes me so mad.

Filed under: General on November 19th, 2007 | 8 Comments »

Last weekend, Natasha, Farnsworth and I drove up to Wisconsin to have dinner at Dee-Dee’s restaurant in Elkhart Lake. Her parents’ house is only a few miles away from the restaurant so she said we could all stay there since her parents are in Florida for the winter.
I was thrilled at this prospect since the last time we went to her restaurant, we all slept on her sister’s living room floor, which wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that our friend Seamus had some rare combination of asthma, allergies, sleep apnea, tonsillitis, and post nasal drip that evening that caused him to snore so loudly that my ears bled. Mainly because I stabbed pens in them to make it stop.
“Nat, you and Farnsworth can take this room. It used to be my brother’s. And Jenny, your room is at the end of the hall on the left. It’s a little… well, you’ll see.”
I pushed open the door and just stood there for a minute, taking it all in.
There were two white wicker beds.

There was a white wicker baby chair with Raggedy Ann and Andy sitting in it.

There was white wicker dresser with a shrunken apple head old lady on it.

There was a white wicker nightstand with a telephone that was either from 1973 or from the future.

And there was a child’s desk hosting what appeared to be a shrine to a tiny stuffed dog, complete with a bag of real tiny dog snacks.

“Yeah… so it’s a little intense, I know.”
“Okay, Dee… what’s the story here? This is like something you see when people lose a child and they preserve their bedrooms for posterity. Do you have dead twin sisters that you never mentioned to me?”
“No. My mom just likes country stuff.”
“Why did you put me in the dead baby’s room? Make Nat and Farnsworth sleep here!”
“I can’t. The beds are too tiny. They’ll fall off. You should be careful of that, too. My sister and I fall off of these all the time.”
“Thanks for the heads up.”
We all tossed our bags in our rooms and headed downstairs to watch TV.
“My dad has bootleg Canadian cable. He gets like, 2000 channels.”
And yet, we still ended up watching Meatballs.
I realized that even though I’m pushing 40, I still felt a sense of rebellion at running around Dee’s parents’ house unsupervised. The big difference this time, though, was that instead of sneaking crème de menthe and Peach Schnapps from parents’ liquor cabinets, we were drinking Bushmills and Bombay Sapphire.
After flipping through all 2000 channels about ten times, we decided it was time to water down the gin so no one would notice we drank it, and head up to bed. Before we all retired to our respective rooms, we followed Dee into the master bedroom where I saw some giant glasses sitting on the nightstand.
“Look at me! My name is Jim and I’m your father! Dee-Dee! You get down here for dinner right now! I don’t care who you’re talking to on your gigantic 1970’s telephone… your mother slaved over this gravy bread and you’ll eat it right now!”

“Take his glasses off now! Seriously!”
“You’re no fun, Dee.”
I gently placed his glasses back in the exact position I found them, and headed off to my room. As soon as I crawled into my dead twin bed, I immediately realized that the reason Dee always falls out is not because the beds are so small, but because they are arched in the middle. I had to lie on my stomach and straddle the bed spread eagle like a drunken cowboy in order to not roll off. I imagined Dee-Dee walking into my room the next morning only to find my lifeless body, head wedged tightly between a vice of white wicker.
I somehow made it through the night unscathed and immediately went downstairs to watch 2000 more channels of cable TV before we headed out to the restaurant again for brunch. I got sucked into this retched movie where Nicolas Cage was being hunted by Ellen Burstyn and her horde of crazed hippie beekeepers.
“God, this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life!”
“Oh, it’s a remake of a British movie. The original was much better.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Wicker Man.”

Filed under: General on November 14th, 2007 | 19 Comments »

After my last entry, I received an email that said simply: “Not all dummies are creepy… please meet my friend Jerry Mahoney.”
And then I scrolled down and saw this photo:

My initial horror was replaced by morbid curiosity, followed by a surprising flood of fond recollections. Maybe I didn’t hate ventriloquist dummies after all. Maybe that Mahoney character was all right, snappy little bow-tie and politely crossed legs. And look at his little worn feet. I wonder where he’s walking?
I mean, I had a ventriloquist dummy as a kid and we had some good times, my dummy and me. I’d sit in my room and practice throwing my voice. During my Randy Newman period, I tried to learn how to make him sing Short People, which came across as, “Short teetle got nodutty. Short teetle got nodutty to lud…” I had the same dreams as any other 8-year old girl: Vaudevillian fame and glory.
But then one Halloween when we were too old to go door-to-door for candy, my brother and I fashioned a noose out of a clothesline, fed the other end over a tree branch and into the upstairs sewing room window, and waited patiently to drop my ventriloquist dummy onto the heads of unsuspecting trick-or-treaters.
At one point, the snap of the rope was too much for my dummy and his head separated from the body, leaving me with a decapitated ventriloquist doll, and quite possibly necessitating years of therapy to rid that girl dressed like a Smurf of her recurring nightmares of a smiling, unblinking head rolling down the sidewalk at her.
That memory aside, this whole movie theater experience got me thinking about how maybe it was time to get back to my roots. I just imagined all the fun I could have with ventriloquist dummy photo shoots. Ventriloquist dummy reading the paper. Ventriloquist dummy playing Twister. Ventriloquist dummy sipping a scotch next to Pickles. And really, who would shove next to my seat on the train if I had a ventriloquist dummy on my lap?
I started to get a little obsessed with the idea of having a ventriloquist dummy in my house. I’ve been listening to Dan Savage and his Savage Love advice podcasts lately, and he says that as long as they don’t hurt anyone, we should indulge our obsessions. If I denied this strange attraction to ventriloquist dummies I had resurrected, maybe it would begin to consume my life.
So today, I took Dan’s advice and searched for “ventriloquist dummies” on eBay. Having spent a horrific 20 minutes on eBay, I fully intend to call Dan Savage and let him know that this was the worst advice anyone has ever indirectly given me in a podcast. I now understand that we must bury all fetishes deep down into our psyche and never speak of them because if I had, I could have spared myself the image of a grinning Bozo the Clown ventriloquist dummy, which quite possibly will necessitate several years of therapy to once again repress.

Karma, she is a bitch.
So my apologies, Rhonda. I’m sure your friend Jerry is a really pleasant fellow who would never try to steal my soul and trap it inside his heartless wooden cavity, but that’s just not a risk I can afford to take. I guess I just don’t want no short teetle, don’t want no short teetle, don’t want no short teetle round here.

Filed under: General on November 8th, 2007 | 17 Comments »

This weekend, Natasha, Farnsworth and I went to see one of my all-time favorite movies – Blade Runner – since it was the limited release 25th anniversary director’s cut. It was playing at a theater in Chicago that typically shows the more alternative, less mainstream films so you tend to find an interesting crowd there. We made sure to get there early because we knew that it would be packed, and as we were waiting for the earlier show to let out, I was a bit disappointed that the most unusual thing I saw was a man coming out of the bathroom wearing what appeared to be an Einstein-esque fright wig, but it was actually his real hair.
The three of us settled into our seats and started talking about where we should go for dinner afterwards, when suddenly something caught my attention.
“Natasha. Nat. Nat! Okay, okay, look. Look at that woman walking down the aisle. Is she carrying what I think she’s carrying?”
“No… it can’t be… there’s no way.”
“Ohmigod it is! It’s a ventriloquist dummy!”
“Maybe it’s her son’s doll. Let’s see if she hands it to him.”
[The woman walked into the row of seats and sat down. To her left was a young boy and to her right was an empty seat. She folded up her coat carefully, placed it on the empty seat, and then set the ventriloquist dummy gently on top of her coat, making sure to turn its head so he could see the screen.]
“All right, so we’ve established that the dummy does not belong to the kid.”
“So maybe she’s in a birthing class and she has to carry around the doll to see what it’s like to have a real child.”
“Nat. She’s like forty-five and has a real child sitting right next to her. Plus, I’m pretty sure most birthing classes don’t hand out creepy ventriloquist dummies wearing cardigans and wingtips.”
“Good point.”
“She’s crazy! She’s gonna kill us all!”
“Just keep an eye on her.”
“No doubt.”
Even though it was amazing to see the film on the big screen once again, I just couldn’t keep my eyes off the dummy’s shiny head. He was directly in my line of vision, and I could swear that on at least two occasions, the woman leaned over and whispered something into his ear.
At the end of the movie, as the credits were rolling by, I glanced over again and saw that the dummy was gone. The woman was still there, but sitting next to an empty chair.
“Nat! The dummy’s gone! It’s gone!”
“Where’d he go?”
“No idea. I didn’t see her move him. Does the kid have him?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Hey, what if you turned around and instead of Farnsworth sitting next to you, there was the ventriloquist dummy wearing his glasses? “
“Ohmigod I’d freak! And what if he was wearing Farnsworth’s leather jacket?
“Yeah, yeah. And holding a bloody bucket of popcorn…”
[long pause]
“Okay, this is no longer a storyline I want to continue.”
“Agreed. Let’s get the hell out of here before he grabs onto your ankles and starts stabbing.”
“Jenny! I’m serious, cut it out. I mean, what kind of freak has a ventriloquist dummy?”

[long pause]
“I had one as a kid.”
“Why does that not surprise me in the least?”

Filed under: General on November 6th, 2007 | 13 Comments »

One rye, two scotches on an empty stomach. Then home to a handful of Cheez-its, a dill pickle spear, and two tablespoons of peanut butter.
I never dreamed my life could be this glamorous, did you?

Filed under: General on November 3rd, 2007 | 10 Comments »