Ten Resolutions For The Rest Of Us

Friends.

How many years in a row have you made the same three or four resolutions and failed to keep them? You said you'd exercise more, but did you? You said you'd eat better, but did you? You said you'd be nicer to everyone, but let's face it, honey, you're the same hateful bitch you were a year ago, and you love it.

So a few years ago, I vowed to stop making impossible resolutions. Instead, every year, I make a list of resolutions of the sort that I think we can all get behind.

In 2006 I resolve to:

1. Eat all the fat, carbs, and sugar I damn well please. For breakfast on New Year’s Day I’m having twelve cupcakes and a stick of butter. Fuck you, Dr Atkins! I spit gnocchi on your grave!

2. Screw the gym! I’ve worked out religiously for years, and have I developed smooth, sleek, muscley Arms Of Love? No sir, I have not. So screw it. Me and my metabolism ain’t gonna play no more. I’m spending that hour every day watching TV and eating bon bons on my couch.

3. Binge drink all the damn time, and consequently

4. Have more drunken one-night stands. Because everybody loves an easy lay.

5. Stop pretending I like you, you and stupid ironic tee shirt and your so-called “indy cred” and your stupid ugly face! I hate you! Go to hell, Stinky McWhoreface, and take all your stupid dirty hippie friends from Burning Man with you!

6. Self-medicate. Who needs self-esteem when you have Paxil?

7. Have more drunken one-night stands. Who needs self-esteem when you’re an easy lay?

8. Overspend. The good lord gave us credit cards for a reason. So really, isn’t it a sin not to go into debt? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?

9. Keep a self-indulgent narcissistic online journal where I talk about friends, family, and coworkers without impunity. So what if I lose my job, become ostracized from my relatives, and turn into a social recluse? At least I’ll have a legion of adoring fans who will support me and hang upon my every word whenever I write about pooping in the bathtub or that really cute thing my fucking cat did the other day.

10. Peace on earth, goodwill to man, blah blah blah. All that good stuff.

Sushi of the Tundra

During my two hour (two hour!) layover in Detroit, I discovered that there's a sushi restaurant in the Northwest terminal. It didn't seem like it was doing so well. Maybe people are just a little skeptical of sushi made by downsized autoworkers, for some reason.

Me, I thought they ought to have made that into a marketing gimmick. Motor oil maguro maki! Brake fluid bento! Gearshift gyoza! Oilpan omikaze!

Or maybe I was just crazed with hunger. That could have been it.

Have Yourself a Blah blah blah

Most show tune queens will be quick to point out that the lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that everybody knows aren't the ones that Judy Garland sings in Meet Me in St. Louis. The bullshit about hanging a shining star upon the highest bough is treacly nonsense that got added to increase the song's commercial appeal, and it's completely discorant with the achingly melancholy tune. The filmed version suggests that Christmas is a time to put the best face on a crappy situation, because god only knows how much worse it might get:

In a year we all will be together
If the Fates allow.
Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow
and have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

What most people don't know is that the version of the song in Meet Me in St. Louis was cleaned up at Judy Garland's request. The original draft is considerably darker:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas;
It may be your last.
Next year we may all be living in the past.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas;
Make the yuletide gay.
Next year we may all be many miles away.

No good times like the olden days
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together
If the Lord allows.
From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Which, frankly, is how my family has always celebrated the holidays.

Merry guilt tripping Christmas, everybody, from my family to yours. Eat all the damn turkey and pie you can stuff in your face, you stupid lazy hussy, because god knows, it's not like you're going to get a man this year, either. Why aren't you married like your sister? Is that a zit? God, I don't know why I bother with you.

Ho ho HO!

Christmas, as explained by my nephew, age 20 mo, to his little brother, age 2 mo.

Loosely translated from the Korean.

Grampa and Jesus fly through the air riding Thomas the Tank Engine, ho ho HO.
Grampa, or maybe Jesus, lives in the attic, ho ho HO, where he has all the candy and chocolate.
On Christmas day, Grampa, or maybe Jesus, comes down the chimney, ho ho HO, and puts candy and chocolate under the tree.
There's choco for mommy.
And choco for daddy.
And choco for nanny.
And choco for me.
And then grampa takes you away to live in the attic, ho ho HO!

Quack quack quack quack

Whenever I visit my sister's family I always feel like I've fallen into a bizzaro world of heteronormativity. I mean, I know people are like this, I've seen it on TV. I just never thought I would be related to suburbanites. It's so weird! I feel so off-center. Quick, send some party drugs, a glow stick, and some anonymous sex, stat!

We are all up to our armpits in babies. And like any baby-centric house of this modern era, it has been a 24-hour-a-day Wiggles marathon for the last two days.

Y'all. These people are not right.

Okay. First of all? Jeff and Murray are rolling on some serious drugs, man. Nobody gets eyes that big without first amoking a whole bag full of happy.

Second. These people are some sick fucks, let me tell you. Here's one of my nephew's favorite Wiggles songs:

"Five little ducks went out one day
Over the hill and far away.
Father duck said, 'quack quack quack quack!'
But only four little ducks came back."

Dude! That shit is terrifying! What's the message here? "Daddy's going to send you out wandering all by yourself. By the way, there's a one-in-five chance that you're not coming home. You might get eaten or killed by some unnamed predator. Tough shit, kiddo. Them's breaks. Quack quack quack quack."

Third. And this might be the most frightening of all. I'm starting to think that Greg is kind of cute.

Seriously. Send help.

On the road

The woman sitting next to me on the plane smells like chocolate and ham. I can't imagine why. Could she have had chocolate and ham for breakfast? Maybe this is what they do in North Carolina, and she is fleeing the brutal eggs-and-toast oppression of the tundra to go back to her chocolate-and-ham eating people.

Or maybe she is made of ham. I could believe this. She has forearms like ham hocks, and thighs like ham hocks, and a face like a great big ham hock. I suppose this doesn't account for the chocolate smell, which is making me vaguely nauseated.

Directly behind me is a couple who has brought their tiny little purse dog on board with them, riding in a designer dog tote. It is running in tiny little circles inside of its tiny little Dolce and Gabanna prison and yipping once every 7.28 seconds precisely. Maybe it is excited by the smell of the ham lady.

In front of me, a mother is bribing her daughter with candy. "Sit still or no Starburst. Sit still or no Starburst!"

Traveling for the holidays is so charming.

Bah humbug

I am going to admit something to you, and it's not very pretty.

Ready?

Here we go.

I really kind of like Christmas.

Okay, so there are parts of it that aren't exactly to my tastes. I think the overall red and green color palette is kind of hideous. I despise shuffling through crowded malls just to buy my brother-in-law some awful generic gewgaw like a combination screwdriver-hammer-flashlight. And I hate -- oh how I hate -- Christmas carols. The merry gentlemen can go rum-pum-pum themselves with a wassailing bowl for all I care.

But in general? I love it. I love anything that involves a parade, really, but Christmas in particular makes me happy. For one thing, you get to take everything in your sphere of influence -- houses, trees, small children -- and bitch them up in tinsel and lights and bling like they're doing drag in Vegas. And there's these wonderful things you do with food. You put cinnamon and brandy in fucking everything. Apple juice! Wine! Grampa! The world is mad with brandy!

And then under it all, underneath all the gaudy spectacle and the crass materialism and the drunken eggnog-fueled bad-idea hookups with coworkers, there's actually a sincere message at the core that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion. Even in the middle of winter, even in the bitter cold out here on the tundra, there's something to celebrate, because there's always a spring, and no darkness never ends.

Oh, that's such bullshit. It's all about the bad-idea hookups, really.

Rainbow Letters

I've been asked to write letters of recommendation for four of the people who work with me, and I'm happy to do it. These guys are all really great, and it's a fantastic fellowship I think they're all qualified for, but man do I need a break from this. I'm not usually one for effusive praise. I feel like I've been shitting rainbows for a week. I've been writing things like, "Jim is a wonderful coworker! He is smart and hardworking and wonderful, and his wonderful wonderfulness is a wondering wonder wonder, puppies flowers gumdrops and kittens!"

What I would really like to do is write a letter like this.

"Dear Committee. Mary is a very productive coworker, but she could get a lot more work done if she wasn't always stuffing bon bons in her fat mouth. Jim perms his hair because, apparently, it's stil lthe 80s in his universe. And Tim... well, Tim is so far in the closet he can see Narnia."

Alas, such a letter would be both inapproriate and untrue, as these coworkers of mine are worthy of all the fucking rainbows I can squeeze out. So I'm keeping the letters just as they are, all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, except I'm adding these words to the beginning of each one:

"Despite his drug problem...."

Stick Man of the Tundra

I am kind of skinny. It's a little better than it used to be, what with the going to the gym and the protein shakes and the incipient alcoholism, but in general, I am still kind of a skinny bitch. I clatter around on wee little chicken legs, waving my wee little stick arms about and rolling my big melon head around my wee little stick neck.

This has always been bad for my self-esteem, but it's never been a real significant problem before. Except, you know, it turns out that body fat is, like, insulation, and we stick people... well, we don't really do so well out here on the tundra.

It takes approximately twenty seconds to cross the street from my building's front door to the bus stop where I catch my ride in to work in the mornings. On good winter days, I have a coffee to keep me warm. On bad winter days, there's an evil biting wind that sucks heat directly out of my eyeballs. On very bad winter days, poor road conditions make the buses run half an hour late, and I am forced to lick at the bottom of my ice-cold coffee for warmth as I slowly, slowly, freeze to death.

I had to run an errand today that took me to a building three blocks away, through what I would call a blizzard, and what the tundrans apparently like to call a flurry. (I say that if you can't see the sky? It's not a flurry.)

Block one, I lost all feeling in my head.

Block two, my fingers froze off.

Block three, polar bears killed me and ate my face.

I have come to the awful realization that I am never going to survive life on the tundra without investing in (1) snow tires and (2) body fat. Unfortunately, I am (1) poor and (2) have the metabolism of a hummingbird. So if you happen to be walking across the tundra one of these days and you see a pair of chicken legs sticking up out of a snowbank, think on me fondly. And then leave me alone -- the polar bears already got all the good bits.

A man and his hair

You have no idea how hard it is to get a haircut out here on the tundra.

The first person who cut my hair after I moved to town was a short, squat, burly man, all hair and tattoos and piercings, whose belt of chains rattled as he moved. The whole time he cut my hair, he chomped on the butt of the same cigar and dribbled ashes around the chair like incense. I only asked him for a little trim around the sides, because even if it turned out he was a decent barber, I felt like he wasn't the type to really bellyfeel my twinky prissy queen aesthetic.

The next person.... O, my friends, learn from my mistakes. Never trust your hair to a midwestern woman with split ends and a bad perm. First of all, she had clearly never cut Asian hair before. After she ran her comb through my hair, she let out a surprised little "Oh!" and then spent the next uncomfortable minute prodding and poking my head. Then she stood back, cocked her head to one side, then picked up her scissors and said, "Okay, well, let's see what happens."

Should this ever happen to you, stand up and walk to the door. Do not look back. Do not ever look back.

The third person was a rail-thin bobble-headed woman who was 18, 19 tops, who told me in that strange teenage uptalk accent that "I'm not? Really? A stylist? I think? Of myself? As an Artist? Of Hair?" And frankly, this was a pretty decent cut, especially given the horror that was the one before. But there was the unmistakable miasma of marijuana smoke dripping from her pores, I figured this was more chance than talent that guided her scissors, so I never went back.

Months, I tell you, months I spent looking for a decent haircut in town. Eventually I decided I needed to start paying more than $30 for a cut if I was ever to be happy with my hair again, and I started calling around to salons to find people who actually had experience with my type of hair and style.

My salvation was a salon on the north side of the Square. The person who answered the phone was so gay there was a lisp in "Hello", and I thought to myself, "Oh! It's my people! My people can cut hair! I am saved!"

Mary. You have no idea.

I knew from my first meeting with him that this was the one.

"How do you want your hair?"
"Well, it's hard to explain. I want the sides really tight, but the top should be kind of spikey. Except not spikey, more like really piecey, and not pointy, you know?"
"Sure. You want anime hair."
"Yes! Yes, that's it, exactly! You get it!"
"Of course. Let me get my razor."
"You'll razor cut me? Nobody else in town would use a razor."
"I'm a professional. Do you want me to wax your eyebrows while you're here?"
"I... I think I love you."

ASL

I know exactly two sentences in American sign language. My friend J. once taught them to me, years and years ago over one dinner or the other, and I have trotted them out at cocktail parties for years and years since.

They are:

"Grow, little lesbian, grow!"

and

"Why the fuck not?"

So the other day I met a woman who is a translator for the deaf, and -- being both the friendly type and the drunk type -- I decided to show off my entire repertoire of two sentences.

The first sentence, she blushed a little but laughed.

The second sentence, she looked confused and asked me to sign it again. And then again. And then one more time.

"So, what were you trying to say?"
"Um. I was told that it was 'why the fuck not.'"
"Ohhhh. No no. Someone taught you wrong. This is the sign for 'fuck' as an expletive." She raised her middle finger.
"Oh."
"What you were doing," bringing the index and middle fingers of both hands together twice, "means 'to have sex'."
"Oops.
"Easy mistake to make. So what you were signing was, 'Why fornicate differently?'"

Snotty

"What do you mean you never cook Italian?"
"I just don't. I never really learned how."
"But you cook all kinds of crazy shit like stir-frys and little French stews and whatever. How can you not know how to make spaghetti and meatballs?"
"Well, the stir-frys and the Asian food I learned to cook from my mom. We just never had Italian food all that often. A lasagna was, like, a really big deal in our house. My mom trotted that out for special occasions and really important guests."
"Huh. That's just so weird. I have a hard time imagining Italian as anything other than everyday, family-style, ordinary food."
"That might be because your last name is Lombardi."
"So where did you learn to cook all the other stuff?"
"What other stuff?"
"You know, the crepes, the bourguignon, the little things stuffed inside of other little things and baked with little bits of herbs and mushrooms on top. Did your mom teach you to make that stuff, too?"
"The French food? No, that's my own doing. I tought myself out of the Gastronomique."
"That is so fucking snotty."
"I know. I think it comes with the territory when you're gay."
"Hm. Coq au vin and cocksucking, huh?"
"Something like that, yeah."

Space Alien

I am not one of these people.

And here, I'm not even talking about the people with the cheese-shaped foam hats who strip naked and paint their bodies green on game day. No, I'm talking about the real Wisconsinites, people who have been here for gerations. They're the good, hearty, salt-of-the-earth men and women who make up the stoic, reliable backbone of the state. These are descendents of sturdy frontier folk, people with good respectable monosyllabic names like Bob or Pat or Barb, the kind of people Garrison Keillor talks about. These are the people you want on your side after the Apocalypse, because they'll know how to fix your roof and hotwire your car, and in a pinch they'd probably teach you how to churn your own butter.

I'm not really kidding about this. I was supposed to have a late afternoon meeting with a coworker a few months back that he had to cancel because he and his wife -- pardon me, his little woman, Barb -- had to go help can vegetables at church.

There's a rhythm to life in this place that other people can sense, and it's so much a part of their identity that it doesn't occur to them that someone else might not feel it intuitively.

Snow tires, for instance. Apparently, you need snow tires to drive in the snow. I did not know this. I learned to drive in the weatherless paradise that is California. Who knew there are special tires for the snow? They are so clever nowadays.

So when this second snowfall of the season blanketed the streets with a layer of fluffy white death and caused my car to do a tiny, slow-motion pirouette into a minor intersection during my drive home, I decided that snow tires might be a good thing.

The mechanic on the phone said there isn't a snow tire to be had, because all the normal people bought their tires a month ago. (Who knew? So clever.) Luckily, being the friendly, giving, midwestern type, he said he could order me some. What size would I need?

Tires come in sizes?

Sure. [You moron.] What's the make and model of your car?

96 Honda Accord.

Oh, you probably have 195-60-15s, or maybe 205-60-15s.

What?

Do you have steel or alloy wheels? [Are you from Mars?]

They're.... shiny? [I am from Mars! Help me! I am going to die out here on the tundra!]

Why don't you just come in? [You are so fucked. You're going to die, out here on the tundra.]

Hello again

Hi. This is your 157th "Welcome to Holidailies" post of the day. I'm your host, Peter. If you are familiar with such fine internet establishments as "The Usual Suspects", you may know me as Oh, That Peter. If you are familiar with such fine internet establishments as 3WA, I'm not that Peter, and I promise you that I won't talk about, you know, hanging myself from the ceiling with nipple clamps, or whatever that's all about.

If you have no idea who I am, here's what you need to catch up.

1. I used to keep an online journal that ended when I finished grad school and started looking for a job and got all paranoid about future employers finding me and reading about my trashy, trashy life.
2. The job brought me to Wisconsin, which is really not so bad as all that, if you don't mind a little frostbite once in a while. Who needs toes anyway?
3. I am a bit of a space alien in Wisconsin, but I'm trying to adapt. A "hot dish" is like a casserole, only with tater tots on top; a "cheese curd" is only good when it talks to you; and "football" seems to be some kind of cult.
4. I rock. I totally rock. You are going to love me.

Forward

The state legislature meets just up the street from here in the only thing that might reasonably be called a landmark in our pokey little town. Somehow, this building manages to perfectly capture the spirit of Madison. It's an elegant white granite building fronted by an array of majestic Doric columns and topped by a grand 200-foot dome that seems particularly out of place surrounded by squat square-box storefronts that surround it on all sides. The highest point on the dome is crowned by "Wisconsin", a statue of an Olympian woman cast in bronze and plated in gold. She gazes out across the lake, holding aloft the great eagle of freedom in her left hand, thrusting her right arm out towards the expanse of the uncharted west, and standing completely oblivious to the fact that she's got a fucking badger perched on her noggin like a giant jewel-encrusted rat.

Sometimes I love this town. Sometimes it drives me nuts. But then, this is true of everything I've ever loved.