But Call Me Betsy

We were innocently watching some bad TV last night, when, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something moving in the dining room. A little shadow, as it were. "Could that be a mouse?" I inquired. Please don't let it be a mouse, I thought. It was almost 11 p.m., way past my bedtime and I knew that if it was a rodent, I'd have to deal with an adrenaline rush for the next half an hour. We peered under the desk, and a little creature darted to the blinds. It was our mouse friend, the one I'd heard rattling around the week before and the one Dan and I spotted after his yoga class the same night. The worst thing is that it probably wasn't the same mouse, but one of the 500 hundred we have nesting and reproducing in our crawl space. Without giving you a boring blow by blow, Dan somehow managed to trap it underneath the lid of a bin, and then we weren't sure what to do with it. For a short time, I thought that we would just have to kill it. Like, drop a ...

Like, they're not going to tell the interesting stuff--they're not going to say that he's a terrible kisser or has BO or a flatulence problem  or (as I suspect) all three. They're going to say how they don't understand him and how they don't like each other.  They're will be five tears shed, none of them authentic.  Hold on--why is Juan Pablo talking to Kermit the Frog and what is Tina Fey doing in a Muppet movie? That one girl brought her ugly dog on the show. I mean, I still like it because it's a dog; but it's not that cute. This is just the recap show where they show all of these dumb flashbacks. They're all fighting to talk and get air time. They are all saying that he wasn't a good listener and didn't ask them any questions beyond where they see themselves in five to three years. It's funny how they change their stories now; it's like Andi and Sharleen choosing to leave instead of not getting picked has allowed them to...

Or rather, I have no reason to blog on Sunday nights. And I will not be watching the Oscars, as I haven't seen hardly any of the movies, and hate the whole thing; from the awkward conversations on the red carpet to the falderal with the entertainment full of high kicks to the badly read cue cards by people I admire to the gushing acceptance speeches and the swelling of the music to get them the hell off the stage. I am sure Ellen DeGeneres will be good, but I do not care. Okay, so I did see Captain Phillips, Her, and Blue Jasmine, but that's it. I missed out on all the kids movies (Crood, Frozen, Despicable Me). I just looked all that up, lest you think I'm more tuned in to this nonsense than I pretend to be. Last week after Downton, we watched part of another show on PBS--but now I can't find it. It was a British show about detectives trying to figure out who slit the throat of a quadriplegic and then also killed rapist. I can't recall what it was called. Somethi...

Still thinking a lot lately about the years when I worked as a waitress. Or the year and a half I worked as a waitress. I'm not sure how long I did it, exactly. I started at the bottom--as a hostess in TGIFriday's. I'd just graduated college and was working in a children's theater group part time, and maybe I started the hostessing gig on my summers off. I can't recall. But when you're a hostess, you have to dress up for every shift and you end up envying the waiters and waitresses, because they seem to be so much more sophisticated and involved with the business, whereas we, the hostesses, just stood at the front door and said hello and tried not to seat too many people in the same section, lest the wait staff hate us forever. Being double or triple sat, as they say, is a terrible thing to do to a waiter; unless he happens to be exceptional at the job. And many of them were, or at least, that was my impression. There were people who left work with giant wads ...

I've been working on a story recently that centers around a waitress in Chicago and so have been thinking nostalgically of those days, though I have not gone so far as to revisit my journals from that time, because I'm certain they would be full of depressing anecdotes; probably me obsessing over some guy whose name I no longer remember. What I do recall about Chicago is that the winters were dastardly cold, Lake Michigan was beautiful, they had great thrift stores, I was incredibly lonely most of the time, and I had a lot of really funny and talented friends. Here's Hancock Tower (thanks, Emily!). I don't think I ever went up in it and there were also entire neighborhoods in Chicago that I never visited.   My first apartment was a garden apartment in the Belmont area--pretty close to Wrigley Field and Gingerman Tavern. The apartment itself was okay, though it had a mushroom-y smell and clanking radiators. Below is my cat on the left (Gretel) and my roomm...

It dawned on me the other day that I live in New Jersey. You think this would be obvious, but for the last few months, I've been  thinking of it like an extended stay--like how, in high school, I went to Einbeck, Germany for two months. In fact, it's a lot like moving to Germany--everyone talks with an accent, seems somewhat indifferent to hardships (like driving) and takes it for granted that there will be breweries/strip malls to your left at all times. But I've done this before--started over from scratch in another city--a bunch of other times as a kid, and three other times as an adult. When I was twenty-three-ish, I moved to Chicago, where I knew exactly one person who was moving away at the end of the summer. I transferred from a TGIFridays in Dunedin to a  TGIFridays on Erie Street, and instead of leaving when I was supposed to at the end of August, I found a roommate in The Reader and stayed for five years. After that, I applied to grad school and moved to a ...

I learned this lesson about soccer players in high school when I had a crush on a guy named Charlie D. who was a year older than me and had a gravelly voice and green eyes and worked as a janitor in McDonalds. That's a great job for a high school  kid living in Florida. I'm not saying I slept with him, because I am pure as a Sunday snow storm, but I did learn that you can't trust a guy who kisses you in the women's rest room and presses you up against the hand dryer while wearing coveralls and carrying a mop. More on that another time. Tonight is the non-shocking reveal of Andi leaving the show because JP sleeps with her in the fantasy suite and then tells her she' so-so as a contestant . We know about it all because of the endless previews and because of this cover of US Weekly . Dan asks, "Is this the fellatio suite episode?" He's been working on that line for a while. We start with Clare and what else? A yacht, of course! She's not sure if...