In the last 24 hours I’ve taken almost 200 photos of blooming flowers and trees and newly-arrived birds and the signs of spring are all around. This morning it was cold as all damn getout but I was feeling great, and the sun was out, and I walked to work. It was wonderful. There will be great photos for weeks just from my walk this morning.
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This is the time of year when lawns get sprayed, turning many of them weird colors. My own front yard is currently an awful shade of chartreuse, but it’ll be weed-free, dammit. I caught this fakey green lawn and hydrant walking from my car to my office and thought it looked neat. I need to get more angles on it, but I was running a little late so I’ll go back at lunch.
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I realized recently that I was, in fact, not in good hands with Allstate. Okay, fine, I’m not here to impugn the quality of the Hands, but the fact is those Hands were costing me about a half a bill more a month than almost everyone I know. This after the fact that for the last three or four years – basically since I realized at one point that if anything happened to my car I’d be oh so fucked zOMG because there’s no replacing my car, there’s having the car I have and not having a car – I drive like an old lady. I go the speed limit, I always buckle up, and while I do have stored within my body roughly the amount of road rage that’s present on, say, the Triborough Bridge at any given moment, I haven’t had a ticket in over three years. And that ticket was a seat belt citation. I honestly could not tell you the last time I got pulled over for speeding.
And yet – here I am paying half again for car insurance what everyone else I know is. File under, Chump.
Brian has a friend who’s an insurance agent, and today he called him for me. The guy quoted me a more reasonable price for car insurance but also mentioned to Brian that, should, say our house burn down (not entirely unthinkable since our house was built in 1941, we live next to this, and this occasionally happens in our neighborhood, and oh yeah, all those tornadoes Oklahoma’s famous for), nothing of mine would be covered. So our wonderful insurance agent suggested I get a renters’ policy to cover me in the event of a disaster.
So fine, I did it. I’m still saving about $50 a month AND I have an insurance agent I actually trust for once. So that’s a plus. But it went all over me – a renter in my own home.
Do you know who doesn’t have to be a renter in their own home? Straight married couples, that’s who. If Brian and I were legally married, crap like this wouldn’t matter. We could visit each other in the hospital without having to spend thousands on legal fees drawing up paperwork saying we can visit each other in the hospital. If one of us died the whole insurance and inheritance thing would be much, much easier than it is now – we have to pay the aforementioned legal fees and do mountains of paperwork just to loosely codify something that married people get the instant their marriage license is filed. Legally, we’re strangers.
I wish that the people who oppose gay marriage could understand the way I’m feeling right now. It’s a rancid stew of so many negative emotions, of unwantedness and exclusion and passive aggression and not being a fully included or valued member of my society. I’m a renter in my own freaking house. I wonder what Jesus would say about that. I wonder if that’s a metaphor for the larger situation. I wonder if people who have such strong opposing views to mine would take a moment and try to see this from my point of view, for just a second. At the very least I hope you’ll hold back and understand I’m hurting enough. Maybe now’s not the time to pile on with your little opinions about something you don’t know anything about.
Whatever, man. I really hate playing the aggrieved minority. But I have to say that if you’re straight – especially if you’re married – you have it so easy and you don’t even know it. It’s like being rich that way – it’s hard to understand how much easier your life is unless you’re on the outside. And here we are living next door to you or down the street or hiding within your families and churches and feeling invisible and left out and unwanted. So you should think real hard about that and wonder if that’s the witness you want.
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Last night we went to see the Thunder play the Lakers. When we left the house I caught a look at myself in the mirror, and I thought, "I love my hair!" So I had Brian take a photo of it. I’m thinking of growing it out longer – thoughts?
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Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.
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This is the house I park in front of every day. It’s in pretty good shape, except some of the attic windows are broken out and there are about a dozen cats living on the property. I’m pretty sure it’s abandoned, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was walking to my car one day and saw a huge SWAT van, about a hundred police cars, and Jodie Foster being led out with a blanket around her, having just killed the cannablistic serial killer that lives inside. Just sayin’ is all. In the meantime I really hope I don’t run over one of the cats.
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I’ve been in an awful mood off and on for weeks. There have been moments of grace and warmth, like when my mom and I got to share a box at the Thunder game with my brother and his girlfriend, and we ran into my cousin Stephen and his new-ish baby. That was nice. There was Friday night, when Brian and I finally, finally got off our asses and tried the Iguana Mexican Grill around the corner from our old apartment in downtown Oklahoma City. We’ll be going back.
But good Lord there have been a lot of moments of total panic, discordant anger, impatient hand-wringing and worn-out, exhausted sadness. I tend to blame these moments on Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I do think that it being February has a lot to do with why I’m feeling so wonky. I haven’t written anything decent in weeks and I’ve been too worn out and whiny to subject my wonderful readers to too much complaining, WHICH I HOPE TO GOD YOU APPRECIATE. This time of year I find myself sapped of energy and a weird combination of lazy and restless: I don’t feel like doing anything at all, but that makes me angry with myself and so I force myself to get up and get something done, the whole time feeling resentful and angry. It’s not a fun place to live.
I spent most of Saturday miserably hungover from our outing at the Iguana Lounge and attempted to recover while Brian went with his family to an Oklahoma girls’ basketball game. It was not a productive or exciting day and I felt like shit for most of it.
The thing I forced myself to do this weekend was to plant the spinach sprouts that I’ve had up for a few weeks in the plot in the backyard, and to pot some of the more ably-performing zucchini plants I had, which I did yesterday. The spinach looked fine but I think I killed about half the zucchini that I transplanted. It’s fine; I’ve got something like 40-50 more plants still in their flat currently sunning on the front porch. It was hard, thankless work, I gouged the fuck out of my hands while I was doing it and managed to piss off my sinuses in the meantime. Still, it’s good to have done.
| Everyday, Growing | Comments (2) | |
I Was A Regency Zombie
"Minor pandemonium ensued in the blogosphere this month after Quirk Books announced the publication of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)"
This Is Why You’re Fat
One of the funnier blogs I’ve come across in awhile. America can produce food like this but not a car that gets 30 miles per gallon or most of our electricity on our own or a way to keep Sarah Palin busy for, oh, the next 60 years?
Cussin’ Obama
I’ve listened to all of President Obama’s audiobooks during the last year, so these potty-mouthed excerpts from "Dreams From My Father" didn’t shock me, necessarily. Still, I have to admit that having the President say "This shit’s getting way too complicated for me" might make a perfect ringtone…
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Last week I posted this photo:
along with a short little missive about how I fell madly in love with these biscuits about nine years ago while living for a summer in Ireland. You guys responded with a flood of kindness, including offers to send me what would amount to about 70,000 calories’ worth of cookies. Which you are free to do. But it should be noted that my buddy Jaye beat you all to the punch by going into the British imports store AROUND THE CORNER FROM MY HOUSE and buying me some. So it turns out I could’ve been eating them this whole time, because the cookies were within freaking walking distance of me. Needless to say, I’ll be glad to have Jaye around when I’m traipsing around Ireland once more this summer, as without his keen eye it’s entirely possible I’d walk right over the edge of the Cliffs of Moher. Thanks, Jaye. And thanks, all of you. I really, really like all the people who read this website.
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This time of year is empty branches and gray skies. I freaking hate both of those things.
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