CozyJamble

For a Political Princess, lately I’ve been mum on the state of Political affairs. The reason is simple: current politics depresses me.

I’m not disillusioned because I’ve jumped on the Obama Failure Train; I’m disillusioned because that train exists. For a President who has done more in his first year of office since FDR, he’s mainly managed to unite the Right and Left  in a never-ending tirade against his Presidency. I’m tired of hearing Republicans talk about how he’s done nothing when it’s their own party who is holding up the line. I also have no tolerance for those on the Left who bought into the Conservative talking-point: “Obama Is A Socialist/Communist/Anarchist/Liberal Overmind,” and are now disappointed he’s not living up to that hype (was no one paying attention to his campaign?).

In fact, I have never seen a sitting Head of State get so much flak since the days of…FDR.

Indeed, the same arguments against the New Deal and Franklin seem to be popping out against Obama–everything from criticisms that he’s a warmonger, to the idea that he’s secretly plotting on taking over America and running it like a dictatorship. The more I read about FDR’s detractors, the more I see how those dissenters haven’t changed their tune in 70 years. Top that off with the fact that the Obama administration is drawing conscious comparisons between the two men (whether it be by TV and web broadcasts to the nation, or emphasis on New-Deal-Esque programs and reforms) and it feels as if the last seven decades never happened. In an era of financial instability, we revert back to our previous era of financial instability, like an adult reverting to her brooding acne-teen self when visiting her mother. Underneath all this angst, all this fear and hate and rage, there is one simple cause: we know jack-squat about how the economy works!

Oh, we fooled ourselves for a while. The prosperous ’90’s harkened back to the roaring ’20’s–a comparison that, in hindsight, should have been a red flag for the coming millennium. Regulation and safety nets were done away with under the idea that unfettered capitalism would bring in unimaginable wealth. And damn them, it did. Greenspan and the economists broke the rules and then declared there were no rules, and the wealth went up and up. It was living life financially day-to-day…which worked until the very reasons for the saftey nets came crashing down. Those in charge took life day-to-day because they had absolutely no ability to think further than one acquisition ahead. The markets collapsed, the bubbles burst, and we came face to face with the knowledge that no one really understood what they were doing. No one. From Goldman Sachs to Greenspan, all admitted they were pretty much making it up as they went along. As talking heads throw around terms and lingo and theories, the only thing that’s clear is that we’re all still in the dark.

For an example, I turn to horses.

You see, the economy is like a Mustang. It is it’s own creature, with hungers and wants and drives and moods that we can understand…up to a point. Then the Mustang, like any wild creature, begins behaving wildly.

And at this point we freeze. Those who would restrain the beast, who would bridle and saddle it and tame it, are told they are wrong, for they will just break its spirit, sap its vitality, and in the end it will wither and die. Those who want to leave it alone and ride freely over the prairie are told they are wrong, as the Mustang will buck  it’s rider, kick  that rider’s stomach through their spine and run off joyfully as the rider slowly bleeds to death. So we compromise, with reins made of twine, and hold on for dear life. The problem is, there is no blanket rule for dealing with the economy. Just because something worked in the past does not mean it’ll work in the present–just ask Jimmy Carter. Or the Lehman Brothers. Taking care of the economy is like trying to ride a horse, a process any equestrian will tell you takes equal parts skill, luck, and screaming at the stupid thing at the top of your lungs while banging your feet into it’s sides as hard as you can.

It is foolish to think that our prosperity in the past was because we mastered the Mustang…and it is fatal to believe future wealth will be the result of anything other than the horse forgetting we’re on it’s back.

Wow, what a somber post. To  make up for it I give you: An Adorable Kitten!

You can now go back to your regularly scheduled lives.

A new question is sweeping the nation, a new development in the normal list of inquiries asked while making small talk. Being asked by family, co-workers, employers, and people at parties, I find myself having troubles coming up with an answer. The dasterdly query?

“What do you do for fun?”

With that, I’m immediately sucked back to Elementary school, feeling like I did when my teachers would ask a no-brainer and I’d go blank trying to answer. What color is the little red school house? Uh…

“Fun stuff?” I weakly answer. The quentioner is still looking at me. That must not have been the right response. “Nothing!” I try again. The questioner looks at me once more, though in an entierely new way. That is not what they are looking for either.

The problem is, what I consider fun others consider boring. I usually give that standard  answer, “I watch movies and TV,” and we talk about the latest episode of Glee. But the truth is: my favorite pastime in the world is reading books.

And not just any books…encyclopedias.

Encyclopedias! I can’t tell you when this passion began, but it was early on. I blame my mother for giving me an illustrated dictionary when I was four. If it had just been pictures of cows and dishes and aardvarks I’d be fine, but the makers of THIS dictionary opened every alphabetical section with a brief illustrated history of the letter. Looking at the scrawl on the page I’d watch it transform from culture to culture, from runes to Greek, to Latin, to Arabic, to Old English, and finally into recognizable modern English, ending as the letter A. I was fascinated.

“What is she reading?” visitors would ask. “She’s really into it!”

My mother would look over. “B.”

That dictionary opened the floodgates. If the letter A was once a squiggle, what about the people who wrote it that way? What were they like? Tugging the giant blue encyclopedia from the shelf, my father helped me look up the Greeks, and then from there the Trojan War, and then from there the entry on Aesthetics. Soon I was reading it all by myself, jumping from entry to entry as if following links on a web-page (I invented the internet!). As I got older, my need to know didn’t go away but increased; after a hard day, there was nothing more relaxing than sitting down with a glass of milk and the estimated death toll from the first French Revolution.

For some reason my ability to recite every major battle of the Thirty Years War did not make me the most popular girl in school. While my classmates also read the dictionary, it was to look up dirty words.

“Oh my god, it says dam!” they’d shriek, and collapse into giggles.

“You know that’s the one associated with holding water?” I’d say, looking at the entry.

“Look!” someone else would cry. “Butt!”

Soon enough I learned that, though I longed for the complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, most girls longed for the complete set of Cabbage Patch Kids. Or those dolls that you filled with water until they peed themselves. I never understood why you’d want a peeing doll. I feel pretty confidant in saying I think whoever came up with the idea was on a much weirder level than my Webster’s-loving 8-year-old self.

Yeah, I will take the OED over Patty Wets Herself any day, thank you.

But I slowly became accustomed to giving the normal response–”What do I like? I like to watch TV and movies.” I kept my love of random information alive, but unmentioned to those who wouldn’t understand. Which, when you’re a weird kid, is generally everybody.

However, the internet and Wikipedia have opened new doors in my obsessive fact-checking fixations. We live in a joyous age where it’s acceptable to spend hours online, pouring over insignificant material and committing it to memory! No longer will anyone have to endure the stares of incomprehension in this new age of iPhone checking and Googling!

“What do you do for fun?” they ask!

“I look up random entries on Wikipedia and then cross-check them in a encyclopedia!” I proclaim!

They stare at me blankly. “You…that’s what you do for fun? You look up stuff in a hardcover encyclopedia?”

“Uh…sorta.”

They roll their eyes. “Why don’t you just Google the answer?” they ask. “That’s what we do.”

And then they are off, talking to others about current events, checking and double-checking dates and facts and definitions on their iPhones while I watch from my corner by the bookshelf, containing one very dusty copy of the Britannica, entries A to CH.s

As my father’s family resides in Arizona, I’ve come to know our Western State pretty well. From Phoenix to Mesa we’ve been everywhere (in the Phoenix-Mesa area). But there is one place we continually come back to. That place is my father’s hometown: Bisbee Arizona.

Bisbee!

Bisbee is the Town That Time Forgot, mainly because Time decided long ago to pull up stakes with the copper mining corporations and go elsewhere. The source of America’s copper in the early part of our century, Bisbee was the quintessential Western city, until the mine owners decided they could make profit by going overseas. The legacy of the copper mines is still around–a literal legacy left in copper slag heaps, cloudy drinking water, and a giant open-pit mine known affectionately to the locals as “the Pit” or “that giant fucking hole in the ground.”

Bisbee!

Built into the mountains and hills, Bisbee is a town cobbled together from dirt and vertigo. Windy roads lead to houses on precipices overlooking abandoned mine-shafts next to town hall buildings, all adjacent to the Copper Queen Hotel whose cowboy/prospector clientele has given way to no clientele. Driving around, my father outlines the history of the area, mainly by taking us to all the places he was beaten up as a kid.

“See that alleyway?” he’d say. “That’s where the Unionized miners, the Wobblies they were called, were rounded up by the government, and also where a kid named Bobby kicked the ever-living tar out of me. Up ahead is the High School, one of the oldest buildings in town and where I got a swirly every day at 2 PM for four years.”

“Why are you taking pictures of these places?” my mother demanded to know as my father climbed out at a fence post where the first copper ores were found and where he was beaten up by a bunch of cowboys for running a pro-Marxist, anti-cowboy newspaper. “This is like an ex-prisoner going back to visit the State Penitentiary.”

“It’s my history,” he shrugged.

Bisbee!

It certainly is history, layers of it, each one covered in copper dust and desert clay (and, apparently, my father’s young anti-cowboy, pro-Marxist blood) . It’s a place where bolo ties and big belt buckles are worn as your Sunday best, where backyards go for acres until they hit the wall separating Mexico from the U.S. At night we’d watch the Mexican city lights flicker on and listen to the uncles talk about how they used to walk over the border to buy cigarettes. Generally these stories ended with them being escorted back to the American side by machine-gun wielding teenagers hired by the drug cartels. Bisbee is a desert, eschewing attempts to grow grassy lawns and suburbs. Bluffs and badlands surround it, cacti and coyotes run through it, Black Windows live inside it.

“For god’s sake!” my mother cries as my brother and I shriek at a dead spider on the bed at my grandfather’s house. “That’s a garden spider! Black Widow spiders do NOT like to go inside houses!”

“Scorpions do, though!” my father helpfully supplies. Mom glares at him as Luke and I both volunteer to sleep in the car.

Bisbee!

Despite the conservative, copper-covered, arachnid-filled parts that make the liberal city-girl inside me scream, I like Bisbee. Walk down the streets and you walk down paths used by outlaws and Sheriffs, Pancho Villa and the U.S. Calvary, Indian Chiefs and Copper Magnates. Unlike Tombstone, nothing has been sanitized for tourists. The good and the bad are stretched out in the sun for all to see. Bisbee is a place where you can run for hours without ever seeing your neighbors. It is a place where on quiet nights you can hear the guns from the drug cartel wars fire in Mexico. It is a land of unsurpassed beauty, of sunrises over snowy mountains, where you can toss apples to wild boars from your front porch.

It is a land ruined by people, a story of greed and abandonment told by a miles-deep hole in the ground.

Most of all, I like Bisbee because of its violent goofiness, as personified by my father’s High School Gym Teacher.

“He called it Combat Basketball,” my father told us over our last breakfast in Bisbee. “You’d get a boxing glove on one hand, and ball in the other, and then he’d blow the whistle and all the smaller guys would run for cover because the bigger guys would toss away the balls and just beat us up.”

“We also had Combat Baseball!” my Uncle remembered. We demanded to know why the two of them didn’t switch out of P.E. and into one of the other curriculars, like Glee club.

“We’d get beaten up in Glee club,” my father frowned. But you were already being beaten up IN CLASS, we argued.

My Uncle snickers. ”Yeah,” he says, “But there’s a little bit of dignity in getting beaten up by the Jocks. There’s no dignity in getting beaten up by the Glee club.”

BISBEE!

It’s about this time of year that I re-discover I hate cooking.

You would think this is a fact about myself I wouldn’t forget, but the holiday season always lures me into a false sense of culinary confidence.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fires? Simple!” I shout and rush to the store, only to come to my senses hours later as I nuke macadamia nuts in a microwave. You would think a girl who subsides on Swiss Miss and Red Vines would have come to understand she couldn’t cook a long time ago, but my powers of delusion are great. I love the idea of entertaining and I love the idea of bringing friends and family ’round a table laden with seasonal goodies…just heaven help the neighbors as I attempt to make my ideas reality.

“Your smoke alarm is going off again!” the building manager shouts from his apartment, which I can hear as I have all the windows open to get rid of the smoke. “Thanks!” I shout back, wondering if it’s now a bad thing that when they hear an alarm go off in my apartment their first thought is “She’s baking again.”

I have always been extraordinarily bad at cooking and perversely good at setting off fire alarms. I gained notoriety in college as the girl who set off all the alarms in her building by boiling water. I can now disable most household fire alarms in 30 seconds or less. If I was to ever die in a real fire, when my life flashed before my eyes it would be a tableau of all my various roommates and I trying to fan smoke out a window.

I don’t even have to be the one cooking in order to get something to burn. Just being in a room and contributing even the slightest amount will do. On a recent trip to Boston I added a crumble of brown sugar to an apple crisp. Five minutes later the fire department showed up.

“I barely even turned on the oven!” my friend exclaimed.

I think my problem with cooking is that it doesn’t fall into the two extremes of my attention span. You need someone to intensely focus on a project for hours on end, cutting out all distractions and entering a near trance, you call me. If you need someone to hit a button and then completely ignore something for hours, call me too. But cooking falls in this stressful middle ground, where you can’t put something in the oven and walk away, but you’ll bore yourself to tears trying to intensely focus on a process that largely happens in an oven. Boring and stressful, cooking is a magical activity that makes me feel as adept as a two-year-old chewing on soap because it looks like candy.

And don’t’ get me STARTED on measuring.

“How much flour did you add to this cookie dough?” my boyfriend asks.

“Uh…” I respond, trying to remember if I used a measuring cup or a Subway Monopoly Cup. “Why?”

“Because it’s both too much and not enough.”

Thus if you see me in a grocery store, loading a cart with turkey and babbling about being home for the holidays, stop me. Soothe my raging brow, stop my feverish foodie dreams, and rip the ingredients out of my hands before steering me to the microwaveable dinner aisle. For, at the end of the day, the greatest gift I can give to you is not cooking and accidentally giving you salmonella poisoning.

And the greatest gift you can give me is hot coco and a bucket of Red Vines.

Please enjoy the pilot episode of: General Dentistry

Will Dr. Danny’s General Dentistry practice survive dental love triangles, financial ruin, and sabotage?

Now also found in the Fun Stuff section of this website!

I woke up to see this triumphant headline on the New York times:

Democrats Clinch Vote for Health Debate!

Yes! I thought! Finally! Moving forward! Debating on the Senate floor! There are no obstacles now! Then I looked down at the next headline:

But 2 Holdouts Say Proposed Legislation Needs Improvement.

Hey American governing body: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Health care has been a roller-coaster ride of emotions for me, like an abusive relationship that slaps you, apologizes, then makes you pay out of pocket insurance costs. Up and down, back and forth, I’ve watched the debating as only someone who’s been chronically hospitalized can. I cheered for the House bill, I railed against the arguments that Public health care would be so effective it would run privatized care out of business, so we shouldn’t do it. I’m on the verge of exhaustion, which I can’t afford to have under our current system.

Health care is a lot like a Slip-N-Slide.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since I got a free Slip-N-Slide from a production at work. I know, I hear you thinking: that’s awesome. Josie, you are the epitome of every kid in the 90’s dreams.

I acknowledge your envy. Who of our generation didn’t want a Slip-N-Slide? Hose it down, slide across, have hours of fun, reach speeds of up to 10 MPH while on your tummy. Some would even whisper rumors of friends or cousins who went so fast down a Slip-N-Slide that they were able to fly across an entire backyard.

So you tell everyone that a Slip-N-slide is great, you dream about a Slip-N-Slide, and then one day…you’re invited to a Slip-N-Slide birthday party. You’ve died and gone to Slip-N-Slide heaven.

And when you get there, you discover that the Slip-N-Slide is a great way…to rip off your skin as you try to slide down a plastic tarp that is never wet enough or slippery enough to let you go more than a foot. There’s long lines, you barely get wet, the slide part crumples up and bunches and twists away from your body. You’re basically flinging yourself on cold, hard ground over and over; essentially a land belly-flop.

And ROCKS. No matter where you put your Slip-N-Slide there are always rocks.

You go home, bruised and sore and bored. Your friends who were not invited eagerly gather around you.

“What was it like?” they ask in hushed tones. “What was the Slip-N-Slide like?”

You try to think back on it, but now, away from the rocks, all you can feel is your friend’s eyes watching you. Waiting for you. Judging you, for any kid who doesn’t like a Slip-N-Slide cannot be trusted.

“It was great,” you say.

And that is the American Health System of today. We love it, we’re excited for it, we can’t wait to brag about our advances to all the other Countries. But when we need it most, it gives us rocks. So we hide our cuts and bruises and red tummies.

For if the Slip-N-Slide isn’t that great…what else have we been wrong about?

The spam is getting smarter.

Used to be, I’d log into my websites admin panel and discover I had a couple hundred comments waiting.

Fame! I’d think, quickly opening a browser.

Unfortunately, the comments were never from adoring fans. Mainly they were Viagra ads, worded as if written by a stroke-prone Bob Dole. Randomly generated sentences using a computer that spoke english as its second language would also appear, little treats from the inter web that I steadily deleted.

We played this delightful game of post-and-delete, the spammers and I, with little variation for years. They’d surprise me now and then: sometimes spam written entirely in Russian would appear! I once had someone try to comment the whole Cryllic alphabet to a post. They’d ramble, cajole, implore, trying to woo me into complacency by telling me that my post was “of very valuable information to, a good fins of informative like a journaliss!” I ignored it all, always deleting, always marking as spam, never for a second believing that there might be danger lurking under the praise of my “fins righting.”

That is until today…when I logged in and found a joke waiting.

“Did you hear about the reseraunt opening in India?” It asked. “It’s a new Dehlicatessan. Buy Viagra!”

And with that, I sprayed milk out my nose and realized the bastards had got me. Scrolling down the screen, joke after joke appeared:

“What did the sailors say when they saw the boat full of livestock? Sheep ahoy! Prozac cheap for you.”

“What happened to the tap dancer? He fell into the sink! Get Ambien!”

“Allegra. What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.”

And on and on. It was like my grandfather spamming me, or a group of 8-year-olds who moonlighted as Cialias dealers. I can only conclude that the spam has evolved, sending me jokes as they have come to understand that I write comedy, and this blog is primarily a funny one (I’m taking your silence as agreement).

Of course, this can only mean that spam is one step away from developing sentience. Becoming aware of its surroundings, it’s changing it’s tactics–adapting to new situations, learning from past mistakes, asking me what goes black and white and black and white and boom (a nun falling downstairs. Free credit check now!). I see a future where Skynet is real, except for instead of wiping out humanity the robots will steal your social security number and buy large amounts of gas with your credit card.

A.I. is here my friends–and it’s discovering puns. Or, as the evolving intelligence known as “Florintanecagh@Adderol.Net” says: “Why do birds fly south? Because it sure beats driving.”

From the producers who brought you MOUNTAINS!!! now comes the most epic weather phenomema of all…RAIN.

Remember when I posted about our friends, the spiders? Though I did the humane thing and immediately filled my car with so much raid I could have knocked out a dog (by humane I mean good for me, the human) it appears our ooky brethren are not finished with me.

Only this time, it’s not our friend the spider. It’s our  frenemy the cockroach.

Ah, the cockraoch! Eating our food, living in our bathrooms and fridges, leaving their filthy trails over everything we own like a relative who won’t go home and is impervious to most poisons! Unfortinately, for some reason people now think its ok to like our indestructible foe.

“It’s like you’re Wall-E!” my boyfriend declared, upon watching a roach scurry into a drain.

Remember that adorable scene in Wall-E where we think Wall-E squished his pet roach but then it pops up again unscathed? Imagine that scene now in your kitchen. With an army of the roaches. While you try to make a bagel.

“Hey!” my friend exclaimed as I futilely stomped on the ground. “It’s like that thing from Wall-E!”

While the Wall-E pro-roach propaganda machine may have suckered others in, it didn’t get me. Raid, roach bait, visits from the exterminator–all were utilized. I became the Jigsaw of the Periplaneta americana world, laying trap after trap after trap for them (you know its good writing when you reference “Saw”). And I did research on my own into how you can kill them.

You can’t! The best you can do is spray and hope that the Cockroach Gods are merciful and leave to pester your neighbors. They leave trails like ants, they swarm like bees, and are more impervious to death than a blockbuster action hero.

Oh, and they also used to be GIANT.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though. I know there’s life without roaches because I’ve lived that life, known that dream. I’m talking fumigation with the exterminator now, and I hope those assholes of the Order Blattaria understand that I’m coming for them. And when the day comes that I can put food back in my fridge, when I can eat off countertops, when I can open a drawer without fearing the sight of a scurrying shadow, on that day I will look down upon my foe and they will know:

This is not Wall-E.

Current Mood:  weird

Yes I, your intrepid literary heroine, have recently made the move to Burbank, butt of so many of my jokes.

Attracted by the low crime rate and tired of multiple break-in attempts at my North Hollywood home, I sojourned to the Mother of All Suburbs. I now live a quiet life of CozyJambling, interrupted by the occasional truck backfiring, which still racks my “is-that-gunfire?!” sense (you can take the girl out of Highland Park, but you can never erase the gang-activity in Highland Park from her subconscious, as they say).

And on that note, let me know present you with two thrilling Burbankian shorts: The BHPS Origin story, and a word from our sponsor, the Donut Place.

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