Mothball Stroganoff

I swear this must be what our new neighbor makes for dinner every night. What the hell can he be cooking that generates this odor? It's disgusting. Despite all our best efforts to tape his duct work that runs throughout our basement and now serves as a Mothball Stroganoff conduit, the stench of fresh hot mothball stroganoff comes piping into our apartment practically every goddamn night. We should invest in duct tape; we've used so much of it.

I've begun to eschew the entire downstairs (basement) altogether just to avoid his offensive odors. Odors, plural. You see, while we each have our own basement areas including our own washer/dryer units, these are only separated by hastily tacked up plywood, this being the only unfinished area of an otherwise solidly built, nicely maintained rental. Anyway, when our lovely new neighbor does his laundry, we can smell it. Now, before you get all in a bunch about this, please note that I wouldn't mind at all if he used laundry detergent and dryer sheets like the rest of us. I could even handle it if he used that nasty strong-smelling store-brand cheap stuff. But no, our guy cleans his clothes with battery acid and Drano. If I'm downstairs when he does laundry, my eyes, nose and throat start burning and I have to run upstairs Before. I. Die.

And I'm not the canary in the mineshaft in our marriage. That's Mr. Karin's job. I can be going along thinking everything's fine and he just passes out dead from some noxious fume I hadn't yet detected. Or I'll come home from work and within a minute he'll say, "You've had garlic today. woo! And you were around somebody who has a dog. And a cat, too." He's some kind of olfactory detective. Hard to believe we haven't made a game of this. He'll get into my car, which I think I've kept quite tidy, thank you, because I've removed the rotten apple cores from summer and the Spicy Blackbean Gardenburger wrappers from Burgerville that I don't want him to know I've eaten, and he'll declare it a toxic waste site, that we should get out of the car immediately and that no one should ever drive this car again because the air quality inside is so horrendous.

So you understand now how significantly powerful the odors emanating from our dear neighbor must be if they are causing me to run screaming like one running from Godzilla.

Not even one?

I'm not having any kids. No, not even one.

I decided in college, to the shock and awe of my Elementary Ed. friends, that I didn't want to have any kids. I love kids. I love to teach them. I love to play with them. I love to lead them. I love to hop them up on sugar and give them back to their parents with noisy toys on Christmas.

I am an aunt ten times over. I am truly madly deeply in love with my brother's four children. The day his first kid was born turned my world inside out. Here's the photographic evidence to prove it.

Not that there's anything wrong with having children. It's that something in me just knew that I wanted to spend my life's energy on other things. Travel, Education, Service of Others. I didn't want to (and still don't want to) be torn between the duties and joys of motherhood and My Life's Calling, whatever that means. (This may explain my current early mid-life crisis as, upon reflection, there has been woefully little travel and education, though I'm not doing too badly in the Service to Others department and that feels good.)

Here are some of the responses I've gotten from those who know and love me and complete strangers alike:

• You must be a lesbian. (nope.)
• You are a very angry person. (sometimes, but what's that to you?)
• You have a terrible mother. (emphatic nope. see my Sugar Sugar blog http://karinleak.blogspot.com/.)
• You must have children. God says so. (I've clarified with people. The Bible indicates that God told all the creepy crawly things to be fruitful and multiply just after creation. Okay, I get that. Then again to Adam and Eve. Be fruitful and multiply. Okay, sure. Then once more to Noah and his family after the Great Flood. Really, people. I don't think under population is an issue anymore.)
• You'd make a great mother. (Thanks, but I'd like to sleep sometime in the next 20 years.)
• You're selfish. (You are so right. You know me so well.)
• Not even one? (WTF? No. Not even one.)
• You should at least have a boy. (The feminist in me rages. A Chinese friend of mine said that her name means, "Well, the next one will be a boy." Aaaaarrrrrrgh!!! Nevermind that you can't force the baby to be a boy or a girl, or that I'd prefer a girl if I had to have one at all.)

The only thing that sometimes, but sadly does not always, flick people's noses out of my business is when I tell them, "I'm happy with my life the way it is."

"O-kaaaay," they skeptically say. Then they add, "You're sure? Not even one?"

What about you? Kids? No kids? Greatest Aunt/Uncle ever?

And, as always, my follow up question, the one that makes life worth living: Why?

Mental Constipation

So, I have lots of things I could write about, but I'm too afraid to talk about them.

Do you ever feel like that?

Dork Like Me

Inspired by Michael 5000's Dorkfest '07 http://michael5000.blogspot.com/, I shall now present to you, my three maybe four gentle readers, clear and present examples of my dorkiness.


Scrabble Stories


I have been known, on occasion, to play Speed Scrabble, which involves ditching that useless board altogether, drawing seven tiles from a mess of them in the middle of the table, then, at an agreed upon moment, assembling them as quickly as possible into words on your own private grid. Once someone has used all their letters they yell "draw two" or "draw one" if several dorks are playing. Play continues in this fashion until all the tiles are taken and played. If you're stuck you can destroy your words and start over if you think you have the time. The first person to use all their tiles wins. Uh...wins the thrill of victory as points aren't really kept, although they can be for those math dorks out there.


The best part, though, comes next. Scrabble Stories. Everyone gets ten minutes to free-write something creative and fun, creepy, silly, scary, whathaveyou as long as it contains all of the words created during Speed Scrabble. Then you go around and read your stories aloud and laugh and laugh. It's a good time. If you're a dork.


Here are two of my Scrabble Stories: (My Scrabble words appear in purple.)


1.
The writers gathered at the inn, this time during the hottest summer on record. If only the fan worked. Nevertheless, they wrote funny pieces and slapped their knees at their jokes. At lunch, the women on diets weighed their roe to the gram, not wanting to exceed their caloric limit. Ultimately, they deemed it too expensive and axed it from their menu.


2.
The guy didn’t care that he had HIV. He feared the smell of the hospital ward wafting from the patients who were sicker than he was. As sick as he would become. Last week, as he walked past the nurses’ station, he heard an Indian family chanting over their son. Meditation was an art form he’d never learned to appreciate. Now he wouldn’t have time to learn it. The elevator dinged, the doors opened and he stepped onto the AIDS ward for his second treatment.



Word Jumble


My mother and I used to do the Word Jumble in the Living Section of the newspaper every single day. When I got a place of my own, we did them over the phone and on weekends when I went over to do laundry. For Mother's Day one year I hand-made a Word Jumble Mother's Day card complete with drawing and riddle. And no, I wasn't 10. I was 25 when I made this. So great is dorkiness and my love for my Ma. She loved it. Oh, yeah. She was a dork, too.

Coke for Breakfast

'Tis the season to be coughing, aching, sneezing with a stuffy head so you can't rest and need to take NyQuil, I guess, gauging from the coughing and hacking I've been hearing at work lately.

This happens every year when kids go back to school. You don't even need to have kids or work with kids to suddenly be exposed to extra germs this time of year. Everyone else who has kids will take care of that for you.


So I'm noticing that several over-worked, over-tired coworkers have been fabulously sick lately. So sick that I don't recognize their voices when they answer their phones and I become convinced that all new people have been hired without my knowledge or I'm in some useless work dream. So sick that it makes me want to constantly use Purell hand sanitizer even though I think it's a ruse and even though the smell of it makes me think that pantyhosed and mightily coiffed women from my mother's church group from the 1970s have just descended upon me with a can of AquaNet hairspray.

I effortlessly overhear my coworkers rambling on and on to each other, between coughs and hacks, from the other side of the cube wall about how much it sucks to be sick and how everyone they know is sick and everyone they love is sick and everyone they live with is sick and how they should really just be home and in bed. And I'm thinking, "Uh, duh." I went to college for such advanced analyses of psycho-social situations.

And then I hear it. I hear the unmistakable metallic crack-whoosh of someone opening a Can of Coke. I think, "Oh, My God. What the Hell Time Is It? It's 10am and You're SICK. WTF!?" But just in case I'm wrong I invent a reason to swing by their cubicles to sneak a peek. Indeed, they, The Sick Ones, The Coughing Up a Lung Ones were drinking Cokes for Breakfast.

I don't get this. I really don't.

Listening Out 3: A Paradelle

Here are a few things I've heard recently out my window:

-$1,200 bucks a month? Damn Californians!
-It really isn't my fault.
-Do we really wanna live here?
-I used to do that shit.

And now I shall attempt to incorporate these seemingly random overheard snipits into a very short-short story/paradelle variation. Why? First of all, why not? Second of all, because it keeps the brain young and fresh. And c) because I'm a hopeless word geek and I like it that way. Oh, and Michael5000 suggested it, although that was before I was o'er taken by the paradelle.


Listening Out: A Paradelle

He didn’t want to stop, but she insisted.
He didn’t want to stop, but she insisted.
She gasped, “$1,200 bucks a month?” “Damn Californians,” he complained.
She gasped, “$1,200 bucks a month?” “Damn Californians,” he complained.
Californians insisted she didn’t want to stop, but he gasped.
“Damn,” she complained, “He bucks $1,200 a month?”

Considering their options, they discussed. “Do we really wanna live here?”
Considering their options, they discussed. “Do we really wanna live here?”
Looking around, he declared, “I used to do that shit.” She said, “It really isn’t my fault.”
Looking around, he declared, “I used to do that shit.” She said, “It really isn’t my fault.”
“He really used my shit,” she declared, looking around. “Really, considering it…do I, we wanna do that here?”
They discussed their options. Said fault isn’t to live.

They declared Californians want $1,200, gasped!
But he really isn’t looking to do it.
Really, considering that he bucks around,
We discussed, insisted she live here a month.
She didn’t wanna fault their options.
She said, “Do I complained? He used to stop my damn shit.”

The Paradelle: A Fantastic Hoax!

Turns out that poet Billy Collins fabricated the history and origins of the paradelle in order to give credence to this new form he created as a parody of other fixed forms. Nevertheless, it has taken on a life of its own and an anthology of paradelles has even been compiled, for which I am truly grateful. I completely enjoyed writing my first paradelle and expect that I shall make many more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradelle
http://www.redhen.org/bookDetail.asp?bookID=199