Dirty deeds, done deep-fried.
Burger King would like for you to engage in a pact with the Evil One.

Dear Alice,
“I’m on the pill and now no one in his right mind would sleep with me!”—and more!

The following incident might-could have some adverse effect on the supreme powers of a teacher as unquestionable authority figure previously closer in bearing and appearance, from student point-of-view, to some Creative Writing Deity than to an ordinary mortal:

Not that the above is me. But if it were.

Say said-teacher were teaching a poem. An ordinary Monday. Mid-morning. None of the students are responding except the same faithful, eager one or two. But then even they begin to flag and look down at their coursepacks and doodle fake notes in their notebooks.
“Okay, so the speaker compares her current place in life to being in a rowboat without oars(“September,” Jennifer Hecht), here. What could that indicate?”

Dead silence. Teacher reminds class of their participation grades. Asks what’s up. Sighs loudly. Looks around the room and feels a beady-eyed desire to slap all her students in turn, even the nice ones. Makes an effort not to show that through her voice.

“Okay, well, if your life feels like—”

She stops then, because she tastes something—salty—on her lip. More. Puts her hand to her face and realizes that the zit she covered in 1. Zit Begone Stuff, 2. SPF 15 Moisturizer, then 3. Makeup, earlier this morning, is bleeding down her face onto her upper lip, there in front of her class seated around this small table. Bleeding great, big weeping drops.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess I have to go to the Ladies’ Room, now.”

When she leaves she considers never returning, but she does.

I hate birth control pills.
Every time I’m on the pill I have Breakouts Like it’s 1999. Which was, actually, another time my skin was so crappy because I was on the pill then, too. I was never so pimply in real adolescence, only during the weird fake-variety instilled by birth control pills.

Even the brand purported to *control* acne actually has the opposite effect. My facial skin freaks out completely, shouts “Hormones? What hormones are these? Why are there so many? I must make you ugly! And give you pain, too!” These are never ordinary blackheads. They’re big, aching, red pimples with lovely white caps. Giant zits that last for days. All over my face.

My friend Ginger’s going through the same thing, only with uncontrollable, frightening-to-her mood swings. She’s not like this normally. Only on the pill. So what does she do, now—go to a psychiatrist to get some antidepressants and then pick me up and swing by the damn dermatologist’s?

That’s three medications, three different doctors, a heeuge pile of change and drugs all so we can, what, have sex? (If. We even. Feel like it.)

You have to take it the exact same time every day. If I forget a pill and have to take two the next day, I spend the morning puking. If I forget too many pills, I get pregnant. Because I have no health insurance, the pill costs me $40 every freaking month.
I am very, very typical.

In college, I could get the pill for ten dollars a month, and many college students were still paying about that, but then last year Congress passed a bill that sapped Medicaid’s budget and that cost skyrocketed to $40 or $50 even for college students and Planned Parenthood customers like me. (Even if you could still get them for ten dollars a pack, our school’s student health center was all booked up for the year for pelvic exams by the start of this month. Dear Exorbitant Student Fees--thanks! Love, Over Half Your Population.)

The whole deal just blows: the pill sucks, but it’s the best we have. And now it’s getting tougher to get our hands on? Did I hear someone over there saying something about “the best country in the world”? You, over there? Great. Hoist that flag a little higher on the left. It’s a tad crooked.

It sucks enough that women have to even deal with pelvic exams every six months or year because we’re the ones who deal biologically with the horrible effects of HPV. (Most people have HPV, but it more or less only shows symptoms in women, “symptoms” meaning cervical cancer.) The fact that HPV affects women inordinately is no one’s fault. But I’m running out of fingers to count my women-friends who’ve had to go through excruciatingly painful, expensive procedures because of catching the shit too late due to crappy or nonexistent healthcare.

Birth control’s pretty much the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rather unpleas- the ridiculous oceans of shit women go through, having to do with our reproductive parts. But every time I look in the mirror lately, it’s the one that really gets to me.

WWJD?
From the q&a section of the website of Krista Blondin, a Canadian Janis Joplin impersonator (my favorite words here are "a minor detail"):

"Q: Will Krista be swigging a bottle of Southern Comfort on stage and using coarse language at my event-like Janis did on stage?
Generally No, especially when we do concerts that are all age family events or corporate functions. Some of our concert goers and biggest fans have been as young as 8 years old, so we have a cleaner version of the show that includes no swearing or glorification/encouragement of the use of drugs or alcohol. Krista is completely able to capture the essence of Janis Joplin without this minor detail. Of course we have an authentic bottle handy, easily filled with ice tea if this is something you would really like to see in the show! At night clubs where people are over the age of 19 there may be the occasional swear word in the show for example: Rap during Ball & Chain."

Sable-kitty has been doing this...



...all day. Same corner. My bedroom. Where Middle-of-the-Night Rats #1 and #2 were wrangled.











Good night and sleep tight, you of vermin-free households.

Cats & Rats & Elephants.
I should feel honored somehow, because it’s my room they bring them to, my room, central somehow, the Buddha Belly where you drop off your soft meat hearts.

Instead I stood there last night, four a.m., after grabbing for the thickest-soled shoes and sweatpants, layers between me and It. I thought, Keep the door shut from now on? No, because then the pampered cat, my darling who hasn’t been to the vet in years and who usually sleeps in my bed; he might get bitten by a rabid one and I’d never know; I’d have shut him out like he’s some barn cat. And what if fresh vermin should appear in here with no cats to attack it? Only me, and my futon not so far from the floor. Besides, there was something happening in the corner under the bureau, something I had to take care of right now.

For the second night in a month, the cats have presented me with a rat. I’ve always rented out old houses, places whose walls and floorboards never quite meet, whose windows may or may not open, houses possessing novel heating and cooling situations, high ceilings with pretty molding, secret old balconies, noisy radiators and hardwood. There’s always a price for the beautiful antique wallpaper and the claw-foot tub, however. Character, it means many things: the faucet you have to jostle, the window held open with a stick of wood, extra sweaters.
This place is the most stunning of all; this is the place that leaves our friends truly slack-jawed. “How’d you find it?” they ask and we shrug as if the stained-glass pocket doors and domed two-story dining room ceiling is not remarkable, as if it is our right.
Wonder means hardship in equal proportion. I’ve felt lucky to have porches and commodious kitchens; now I have a veranda and a dining room you must mount stairs to reach. I’ve dealt with kitchen ants, with swooping cockroaches. Now we have rats.

Feeble squeals. The light was dim when I turned it on, so you couldn’t tell that its eyes had been gouged out, that half its pointed head was a bloody mess. It sat upright, its long tail splayed out, its head tucked down, cats surrounding it in a loose hunting circle. A cat would paw it and it would squeal, uncle, uncle, uncle. I just stood there beside the dresser feeling inept. Move the dresser? What if it then ran under my bed? The cats sat and snaked around it. “Kill it! Just kill it!” I told them. Wide awake now. Useless adrenaline.
I went to the kitchen and found an empty tomato can in the recycling bin. I already held another heavy shoe, not consciously sure of what I meant to do with it. When I returned, the smallest, sweetest cat, the dainty spirited cheerleader who is of course the chief hunter, grabbed the rat up in her mouth and ran from the room. The black cat followed, as did my pampered cat and I said, “No! Don’t!” to him, but the more I said no, the swifter he ran, so I followed, envisioning rotten rats beneath sofas, envisioning sick, foaming jaws.
In the living room, I tossed the can atop the rat atop our gorgeous oriental carpet. This cut across its tail and it squealed in pain. Then I edged the insides of a local weekly paper beneath, and a thick book beneath that. I lifted it all up, and the rat brushed weakly against the inside of the steel, a soft, uneven percussion I could feel more than hear. I unlocked the front door with my foot and carried the whole thing over to the edge of the veranda, where I dropped the floor out and the rat pitched to the unused garden below.

This morning I talked with our maintenance man. He tells me getting rid of the rats will be “a process.” Rats will flatten their skeletons to fit through the smallest holes. Rats are smart; they learn to avoid poisoned traps. Which we can’t put inside because of the cats. We’ll start with the basement, he says, and our cabinets. Our house has many gaps and secret spaces. We’ll just see how it goes.
This week I will update my cat on his shots. Tonight I will leave my door ajar again. I don’t know how well I’ll sleep.

Didn’t want that monkey anyway.
So in this crazy-fascinating article, the NY Times says it turns out that monkeys rationalize things, too. Like many of us, I think that I just assumed that that thing you do? When you’re choosing between two cars and kind of like the pretty/fancy one but then it turns out you can’t afford it? So you go with the practical, ugly one. And by the next day, the practical, ugly one is so much better, in your estimation. Someone even so much as mentions the words, “Rust-red Cooper Mini,” and you think: Oh, they’re just so expensive to fix. And so small.

Same thing with exes. Our brain points out all the ways they’re so unattractive. That thing with his jaw when he’s thinking. There was always something so showy about it. So it turns out that we are—and by “we are,” I mean, of course, “I am”—not crazy. Either that or all primates are equally crazy.

Never one to hyperbolize, I thought I’d title this entry

Music. Gods.
I truly believe the world would be a better place if everyone in it owned this record.

The Dirtbombs, hey! And the record’s Ultraglide in Black, and it’s freaking me out. Every album of theirs has a totally different sound, something I’d distrust if this one hadn’t already stolen my soul and sucked the marrow out. At any rate, in Ultraglide, the Detroit outfit takes old R&B songs and does waay more than simply cover them. They take the ideas of these songs and make them into things of their own and, in this charmingly succinct album, do the same to you.

I tell you: Making dinner the other night, I found myself going over to the old boombox and hitting “play” once, twice, three times, the volume rising, my roommates drawn to the kitchen for an impromptu groove-off. Every song totally rules, and this group is obviously having such a silly amount of bad-ass fun, you will get jealous. Jealous, even as your own hips shake. Stand-outs are “Underdog,” “Kung Fu” and “Ode to a Black Man.”
Dancedance revoluuution, indeed.


Oh, and their website’s q&a page is also totally funny. Two sample questions:
“Q: Blah blah blah Detroit scene?
A: If there was a 'Detroit Scene', we'd tell you all about it. However, there's not. It's a nice media delusion, but that's about all it is.”

“Q: Blah blah blah the White Stripes?
A: If you want to know about the White Stripes, ask the White Stripes.”
(This last one, with a link to that little band’s website which, once it opens, remains within the frames of the Dirtbombs’ site. Har.)