Things that are awsome at Bunkey's car wash

1. Always a soap opera on tv
2. Bird houses for sale
3. Patio furniture in the waiting area
4. Christmas drawing for a 19" television
5. Weird cards for sale
6. Rich ladies with pantyhose under their jeans

Better than Word-a-Day Toilet Paper

Thanks to Bunny for the linky.

False Alarm

It's not a big secret that I have a rather extensive collection of nightgowns, mostly purchased at Wal-Mart. I often come home from work and spend the evening in one of them. Some are cuteish, most are pretty ugly. That will be important in a minute.

Tonight it's cold, right - we've gotten this pretty sudden swath of cold air from the north and it's not only colder than the average, but the temperature varies by like 30 degrees from when you go to work in the morning to the afternoon when the sun is at its brightest. So I'm not acclimatized to sudden winter yet and I get home tonight feeling tired and sick of everything, so I put on a super comfy outfit: longish pink striped nightgown with POCKETS that zips up and hits just below the knee (Germil has a matching blue one that I purchased for her after surgery - it's that kind of thing) ; really old cream flannel pajama bottoms that are a hair too short and kind of tapered in an unflattering way, and also have red flowers on them; blue fuzzy socks. My hair is out of its ponytail and has a million weird dents and I'm looking settled in for the night.

So I've just sprayed the tub with, like, Easy-Off Bam! and it's all very cat lady, and my cell phone rings - it's the alarm monitoring company, which is never good. Fortunately, it's always been a false alarm, but your reaction is never different despite that - instant panic, drop everything, grab the keys and hop in the car to see if D&A's house is on fire like I've just been told. And the thing I always forget about the fire alarm is that they will always send the Fire Department, because you don't want to risk it with fire, right? So I go wandering around, seeing and smelling no fires, call Robbie & Brian to come over and go behind me, and when I hear sirens in the distance? Yeah, it was for us. I don't need to tell you I wasn't wearing a bra.

Not one but two fire trucks show up, which, if the house had really been on fire, I don't think that the 20 minutes it took them to get here would have really done a whole lot of good. The one from about 6 miles away is volunteer, and the now 24-hour fully staffed one about 3 miles away was off in Carrboro, 15 miles away, fighting an actual fire. How embarrassing.

So 7 guys are standing around in the driveway while the chiefs from both departments check stuff out and realize, of course, it's a false alarm. We stand around the driveway a bit waiting for one dude to fill out the paperwork and the Chief starts chasing Cookie the cat, trying to pet her, since she's crying like crazy, hanging on my super ugly pant leg, looking for food. The cutest of the volunteer fireman says, "I was watching Grey's Anatomy" in that voice where you're meant to feel really bad - which, sorry, cute rednecky fireman - and I hope he has TiVo until I remember that GA is terrible this season and he should quit watching it anyway. And then Chief man starts talking about the garage in Carrboro that's burning down with cars inside and meanwhile I'm standing in the driveway at 9:30 at night in some seriously fugly loungewear, surrounded by country firemen and one whiny kitty.

In high school I would sometimes wear slippers and sweats to school, and I would pretend out loud that it was just for comfort but it was clearly for attention, because it's actually NOT comfortable to wear slippers all day - there's no arch support. The point is sometimes I pretend to be embarrassed for being "caught" in something tragic, because I have this secret little craving to be seen as kooky or crazy or like I just couldn't care less about how I look . . . this is not one of those times. I think I might still be blushing.

I don't really like talking about my flair

I meant to give credit to the person who created that gorgeous girl up there, which I found by searching for "illustration" at Flickr. I don't mean to be coy by reminding you of A Hundred Dresses, a book Mom got me a hundred years ago and which is about imaginary dresses but not really, but because I like to think about Eleanor Estes and how many dresses were in your closet meant then something like how many MySpace friends you have. My confession is that I am one of those adults who started using the internet in my twenties and thinks MySpace is full of pedophiles, and I honestly don't even know what happens on Facebook, even though I laugh knowingly along with the whole room when someone who's only, like 5 years younger makes a joke about it. I am also one of those adults who thinks that living in a universe where so many things that you own, drive, and carry matter in actual life and in a life that is completely text-, email-, and Second Life-based is terrifying in a way that is hard to explain, and which is probably only going to become bigger. Something about that book calms me a bit, so I raise my sad little blog to Eleanor Estes.

Things I Wonder About Instead of Going to Bed at a Decent Hour Even Though I Have a Migraine

1. Does Julianne still go to church? If so, why is she at Hyde and why on earth is she talking on the phone EVER to a gross actor?
2. How do all the starlets get their curls to stay intact? Mine wilt in no less than 2 hours. How much hairspray? What is the magic product? Do I have the wrong curling iron? Are all my hairs going to get cooked off trying to make it work?
3. Are all the LA girls wearing Lincoln Park After Dark on their nails or have they moved on from that and are now wearing something equally mysterious? Is it black? Is it purple? Is it blue?
4. How annoying is it that everyone famous has extensions?
5. Is Britney Spears really conscious or is she taking 13 anti-depressants whose side effects are simply wearing terrible clothing and driving around LA randomly buying weird stuff? And if she doesn't want the paps to be so in her face maybe she could just not drive around LA for a minute?
6. Why won't this migraine go away?
7. How gray is my hair going to be in 5 years and how can I stop it from happening?
8. Do all the normal, nice people I know who live alone do gross things like leave an empty pizza box from literally 3 weeks ago, possibly, on the kitchen table surrounded by myriad other pieces of whatever and say, out loud, "you are so gross" every time they look at it?
9. Seriously, what gives with this headache?
10. How much water does a person actually need during the day and is it true, like Diet Coke says it is, that Diet Coke counts for some of the water?
11. Is my new awesome bag a knockoff?
12. Why am I such an email pack rat? (Current inbox count: 6,029)
13. Am I going to pass out soon? Answer: Yes.

Night night.

Who knew?

Suddenly my family has become bloggers. This is good news. Heff asked for my answers to questions - I kind of love these surveys so we give it a try:

1. Best thing you cooked this last week
This question is weird, but mmmmm, annoying Giada's Shells with Crispy Pancetta and Spinach. You know you just heard her say pancetta with her stupid accent. But they were seriously good.

2. If money, time, and babysitting were no object where would you go?
Definitely France, probably start in Paris but then I'd go South for awhile. I'd spend at least 3 months there. Until I went to Montrèal, I would have been intimidated by the prospect, but now that I realize I can understand what's happening on my college French, I would want to re-learn how to speak. Dreamy.

3. When was the last time you cried?
How embarrassing, but during last week's Friday Night Lights during that gorgeous song playing when Street, Tim Riggins (love!) & Lyla were on the boat.

4. 5 things you were doing this month 10 years ago
Well, this is super depressing. I would like to change number 3 to right now.
(1) I would have been on my mission, in Bluffdale, (2) teaching children of polygamists, (3) living in a basement apartment with weird lion statues on either side of the walkway, (4) getting our Ford Escort stuck down a hill in the snow and tromping in our dresses to a neighbor's house to use the phone and call said polygamist to tow us out with his giant truck, (5) eating pot roast for dinner 7 out of 10 dinner appointments because Peterson's had it on a 2 for 1 special

5. 5 things on my to do list
Is that the existential or the random to do list? We choose random.
(1) Use my real passport and not just the printout fake passport that works for Canada
(2) Learn calligraphy
(3) File the billion papers on my desk
(4) Find a better way to save some money that makes some money
(5) Be more careful, e.g. stop stubbing my toes all the time and breaking things

6. 5 favorite snacks
(1) Diet Coke
(2) Cheetos
(3) Slightly dry Fresno oranges
(4) Peanut M&Ms
(5) Armadillo Grill queso

7. 5 bad habits
(1) Too much TV!
(2) Not filing the billion papers on my desk
(3) Speeding
(4) Sniffing my hair
(5) Clutter, everywhere

8. 5 favorite foods [right this minute]
(1) Armadillo Grill queso
(2) Bruegger's Bagels
(3) Rare steak
(4) Red Vines
(5) Popcorn

9. 5 places I've been [which have awesome bridges]
(1) Montrèal, Quèbec
(2) Trois-Rivières, Quèbec
(3) Portland, Oregon
(4) Linn Cove Viaduct, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina
(5) Lake Ponchartrain, Louisiana

10. 5 favorite memories
(1) That time we went to the canyons somewhere with the Egans and us kids wandered around playing some kind of game where we hid from each other and were sneaky
(2) That time on a really muggy, cicada-filled summer night near Nauvoo, Illinois, driving out to North Carolina with Dad, as I waited for him in the car to check in to the Days' Inn, listening to "Jealous" by Sinead O'Connor on repeat, feeling terrified and excited that I was moving across the country and hoping (correctly, it turns out) that it might end up being really awesome
(3) That time when Louise Plummer said, "You're going to be a writer, right?" going up the stairs to her office in the JKHB
(4) That Christmas Eve where our family sang Stille Nacht, poorly, through lumpy throats, to Martha Lewalder in a sad hospital room
(5) That time when I found a cheap ticket to fly to Vegas the next day, (and had a super awesome boss who let me go) to be picked up by Em & Trav on their way to Fresno, to surprise everyone that I was coming home to see Neck, and Bean went into labor early with James so Em, Trav, Mom & I left Fresno toute de suite to drive to Utah and see that baby and we drove to LA on accident and stopped in St. George at a sicko Days' Inn and slept for very few hours, and Mom worried that Em & Trav were sharing a bed after only dating for a few weeks. Even though it was 2 am. And I think we slept in our clothes.

And PS, somewhere on that list would be your wedding, Bean & Heff, on the Groundhog Day that was the opposite of ugly, because it was the most peaceful and silent the Salt Lake Temple has ever been in my experience as a guest, and even though it was cold and leafless, it was happy and figuratively warm and hopeful in a way that feels different than Spring and Summer at Temple Square, because the grounds weren't perfect in that picturesque way, but they had a spare minimalism that was sort of like just the right amount of white space, if you see what I mean, like you could hear the wind and not the embarrassing wooing of the billion bridesmaids milling around, waiting for the doorways to open up for their sunny photos.

Archives all moved

And it is really humiliating.

It was you, breathless and torn

Thanks to SoapNet airing O.C. reruns I became reacquainted with an old song and WHAMMO! I was back in The Regency apartment 52 with 5 other girls listening to it on repeat and I almost couldn't breathe. Musically, there's not a lot going on: the guitar is just broken chords, sometimes minor, and the vocal stays within one octave and mostly repeats the same note, but the echo and white space make it hypnotic, and when you leave it on repeat, it's easy to miss where it ends and begins, like a circular daydream.

Not unlike then, my 19th and 20th years, today has been a repeat day and I can taste and smell and see everything in that place - the weird low-pile industrial carpeting, multi-colored Christmas lights in T's and my bedroom, the vaguely musty left bathroom with no shower, just a tub, the overly bright flourescent bulbs in the kitchen, making that boy frozen (frozen!) stir-fry with Yoshida sauce late one night and chatting with him about serious things like fiction and the gospel at the kitchen table, almost fainting because he called me Lis . . . I read a book recently where the main character, a woman in her 90s, was sent in and out of reveries throughout the narrative, and it occured to me that I have become not unlike an old woman, reliving parts of my twenties with no small amount of being overwhelmed and full of . . . regret? Maybe. Sometimes just fondness, wistfulness . . . sometimes plain joy. I'm not sure I'm old enough for that to be appropriate, but nonetheless, Mazzy Star starts her singing and I don't have any defense against it.

I have joined them

That is, the many people who gossip and talk self-deprecation on this, the far superior Blogger. I want Andrew & Diaryland to succeed, but they're kind of living in some early age of the internet over there, and there are excessive exclamation points, so here I land instead.

I'll migrate my archive over here eventually, but in the meantime, maybe the new, nicer interface will lead to more writing. We're hoping.

Thoughts of Home

In some ways, I was much cooler in high school than I am now, which hasn't occurred to me until this year. (That may be another terrible thing about turning 30 - the inability to keep perspective about adulthood.) Anyway, I used to be a much better reader, for one thing, and I subscribed for years to House Beautiful partly because I was learning to love modern design but mostly because of the essay piece at the beginning of the magazine, "Thoughts of Home." Lots of really terrific writers mused on places they had lived and I loved to think about houses and how people felt about them.

I didn't really know then that this day would feel so awful, that I would spontaneously burst into tears in the chips aisle of the grocery store (and many more times since) on this, the final day that the Muellecks call 1441 West Alluvial home. I thought I had said all my goodbyes at Christmas, but it feels more sad today than it ever has, and I literally can't imagine my life without that house.

Not unlike when someone passes away and you mull over your regrets, I am regretting the times in high school when I really wasn’t cool and brought tension into that house. I wish I had gone swimming more, that I had spent time with Mom in the flower beds growing petunias and begonias and sprinkling Corry’s with her every day. I wish I had brought in love and compassion for my siblings instead of sucking it out with my anger. I wish I hadn’t slammed my bedroom door or mocked the HVAC or made fun of the cheesebox and the cat litter-y garage.

But there is always sweet with the bitter, and for great family barbeques in the backyard with the Turners, for the huge flowering pear who fell that one freak day (may she rest in peace), for the flourishing honeysuckle I planted on the pool fence, for that familiar squeak signaling the garage door opening, and for the many pink azaleas that bloom each spring, I am blessed. To the living room where no one sat, to the one wall of shiny wallpaper in the dining room that made Dad almost swear, to the drafty paned window in my bedroom, and to the old black wetbar, please don’t forget us. We loved you.

Hey, y'all. It's me, Margaret.

Now's as good a time as any to just randomly start writing again, right? I have thought of approximately one thousand things to write about since, oh, March or whatever it's been since I've updated this thing (with the exception of the new design, which is . . . I don't know. I kind of want a total overhaul but I'm not that committed to the whole thing to make it worth it, maybe.)

But I'm waiting for an email to be sent and recieved and it seems to be operating in 1991-era speeds of internet connectivity, which is driving me mad. So I come to write something unimportant, when what I wanted to write about these months were Super Important, like hurricanes and deaths and politics.

Instead I am writing about nothing, just to make that other one go away.

In other news, Veronica Mars rules.

A defense of Southern fiction

In response to a dear one who said, "I can imagine appreciating something about it, but overall I thought it was really difficult reading, hard to understand, and even at the end, when I did feel like I had a pretty good idea of who the characters were, how they related to each other, and what had happened to them, I found it really depressing. I say Faulkner Shmaulkner, and think that he's just one of those authors elitist literary people rave about in order to isolate themselves from the rest of the normal world."

To her, I say this (though it might be true that only an actual Southerner is allowed to say anything, in which case, I hope somebody will just bless my heart and forgive my indiscretion):

I made up my mind to read As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury partly because I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about; classic literature is categorized that way for reasons that sometimes elude me (Tess of the d’Urbervilles comes painfully to mind). I suspect some are canonized because they were innovative or came out of oppression or some sort of break from a tradition, but that by itself doesn't entirely clear it up for me. Much in academia is about separation and elusiveness for the sake of its own elusiveness, and while I can see why reading Faulkner can feel that way (it also has to me in the past, let's be honest), this last reading I've understood it differently; more importantly, I was moved. I don't love to read Dickens or Hardy, for example, because the novels I've read just don't move me in any way, and I, perhaps at my peril, fail to see their greatness. Faulkner, on the other hand – and please, let’s not forget Flannery O'Connor – stir me up. It’s not what my mom would call uplifting, necessarily, but that’s not my main motivation for exploring fiction. Sometimes I like to be mystified, challenged, horrified, perplexed, overwhelmed, or thrilled. I think there are layers upon layers of humanity to experience in Faulkner and other Southern fiction, and my crush on the genre has the most to do with learning to see the Southernness, if you will, without the cloudy lens of stereotype and generalization. I didn't used to have any idea why people classified Southern writers differently, why people even spoke of it as a subset of the greater canon. I think I'm starting to understand it, with much help from Flannery O'Connor.

I don’t mean this to be a surrogate college paper with the quoting and the MLA, but I can’t possibly say it better than Ms. O’Connor herself. Both she and Faulkner write characters inhabiting a world that she terms "the grotesque," in which "we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected."

The cultural South, unlike any other place I've lived, is haunted a certain amount by the identity of place, specifically as it relates to the Civil War. People wear and display and buy a lot of things decorated with the rebel flag, for example, which seems outrageous to people outside, because, in part, it represents things which are frankly heinous and probably best left in history. But it also seems to represent to them the fight and the pride of this region, and I don’t blame people for wanting to hold onto that history. General Robert E. Lee, I was told the other day, (and here I would take off my hat, were I wearing one) was by far the best general in the war. He just didn’t have the troops or the money to win. While I’ll admit to being perplexed by the ignorance and suspicion that often accompany that rebel flag flying high over the trailer, I get that people are hanging onto an ideal that they’ve been preaching since somebody’s great-great-granddaddy, and it’s no sin to maintain your family’s wariness and pride (with a little bit of insolence, because you did lose that war) and your good manners like you hang on to your land, Yankees be damned.

So it's not that I identify with the characters or think they're redeeming, and I definitely don’t think that Faulkner or O’Connor mean for you to impose yourself on the work’s mystery that way. It's that the spirit – the pervasive haunting – is embodied so perfectly in the characters who cling to an old ideology that they probably couldn't even define, but that is so ingrained in their blood as to paralyze them.

Maybe it's universally true that folks like to be part of something bigger; for Southerners, it's often Christianity, and that, too, seems tied to the land and to the history of those who defended it once. For Flannery, it was the most important thing; her Catholicism in the largely Protestant South – and, by extension, her faith – dictates the fall and redemption of her seemingly unredeemable characters. “The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it,” Flannery said, “is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” Being haunted makes this culture tentatively committed to keeping things just so, unless it isn't meant to be, in which case your angels will most likely step in. In Southern fiction, Redemption - or its notable absence - is, not unlike a Protestant deity, personified in a closely hovering presence, everywhere and nowhere, its judgment seen and felt in the fields, the horizon, the noon sun, the river. The land is living, and holding you to a time when you almost lost it; unlike in the big-sky West, the trees form a tight little plot to make you feel at home and encourage you to stay put. It would never stop you from being neighborly, but you can sit on the porch and feel surrounded by something living rather than open space, which can start you wandering if you let it.

Butterfly

Today, on the 2nd anniversary of this mercurial space, I am compelled to write about something that seems bright and cheery mid-winter. Bean and Germil and Buddy came unexpectedly in December for a week, and it was among the greatest memories of family time I now have. Most of my time spent with my family is around an event - a holiday, a wedding - so it comes with a little bit of added stress. Other trips are decided months in advance, overplanned, and tend to never quite meet my expectations, which would be impossibly met considering we are people with such complicated history. This trip, courtesy of free tickets, was planned and booked in short order, and arrived just weeks after a hectic but relatively uneventful, drama-wise, weekend in Newport Beach. I loved it.

Anyway, while they were here we spent a happy half hour in a secret treasure in Durham - a butterfly conservatory. It was freezing outside, but a balmy 80 degrees inside, and butterflies flitting around your head in a lovely, small, tropical oasis. In the kind of fortune and happiness that marked the whole visit, admission was free because of Bean's universal card, and Buddy's glee spoke for all of us.

I know that butterflies are beautiful and graceful and have a short life for the work they have entering it, and maybe this is why they are a ubiquitous artistic icon. I do think they deserve their fame.

It's pretty late

THAT had to go away because I'm kind of basically over it. Are most people? The talk is, I guess.

The truth about today is that I took two doses of Excedrin, which is not only hell on my stomach but has the tragic side effect of keeping one up at night when one really ought to be sleeping and keeping one's head cold from heading south to the nightmare country known as chest cold. When it's a tension headache Excedrin only takes the edge off, so maybe the doses were ultimately a mistake and what I should really be doing is exercise or at least cleaning the baseboards. Because my mom is coming and she will see the dirt like the crazy ladies on Oprah and honestly, how do I live like this? Today my house smelled from a pot in the sink.

But none of that is close to interesting, so let's try sleeping again.

Oh, please

Isn't there anyone who is neither Liberal nor Conservative, strictly speaking, with something of perspective, optimism, hope, understanding of government, gratitude for the country in spite of vitriol, and isn't either enraged in sackcloth or triumphant with a gunrack?

Call me.