Am I Demon

I’m rotten to the core.

I don’t know why I always identify with the villain, but since I was a kid I have always felt a certain camaraderie with the “bad guy”. I have always been drawn to people who are clever and ingenious. I like someone who is quick witted and a little cynical and if he can con Kanye West into shutting his egomaniac piehole for 30 seconds, even better. That kind of magic is like watching the Sistine Chapel being painted. Unfortunately, this kind of artistry is rarely used for good. It’s always the villains who possess these qualities in books and movies.

When I was a small child I was never a big fan of fairy tales. I did like Sesame Street and my favorite character was Oscar the Grouch. I also liked Animal from the Muppets and of course the Grinch. I liked the bad boys and the cynical jerks even as a kid. I progressed to Travis Bickle  and Lestat as a teenager. It wasn’t until I was in college that I understood that being called cunning wasn’t a compliment. I guess my moral compass has not always pointed due north.

I would argue that sometimes there is justified revenge and there is almost always appropriate retribution for being wronged. Neither begin with turning the other cheek. My favorite characters in books and movies had usually been wronged in some way, big or small, and they reacted accordingly. If that made them villains, so be it.

When I was 21, I started a business – a record label. It was named Medea after one of the most interesting characters in Greek mythology. She murdered her own children to make her ex-husband pay for his infidelity. Talk about blind rage. She has always been one of the ultimate villains because she didn’t care about her own suffering as long as she exacted revenge on those who had hurt her. The ironic thing about this is that a large part of my time in this business was spent babysitting a bunch of guitar playing man-boys. If Medea’s children behaved anything remotely like these guys, I could see where she was coming from.

My husband has always found my love of villains to be a little unsettling. When I read “Gone Girl” I was rooting for Amy. I wanted her to make her husband pay for having had an affair. It didn’t matter that she was bat-shit crazy, he had to pay and the punishment had to be exponentially worse than the crime. We read the book at the same time and had totally different reactions. I was cheering for “my hero” while he was horrified that she was getting away with it. I felt the same way about Alex in Fatal Attraction. Again, I am all for justified revenge. Karma is a bitch, but not always swift.

I have been binge watching Breaking Bad over the last month. Walter White is one of my favorite villains, mostly because we get to see him transform from a doormat to a badass over time. Also, he is clever and smart. He is a meth-making MacGyver who took on every possible enemy from the Mexican cartel to ex-con neo-nazis and won, all while kicking cancer’s ass. So what if he poisoned a kid and set up his brother-in-law to take the fall for him as the biggest meth producer in the southwest. I mean, everybody has their flaws right?

I think one of the reasons I can relate to the more villainous characters is because they are who they are. They are real, flaws and all. I like people who don’t take crap from anyone. They don’t care about being liked, they just do their thing. I think most of us have a little villain in us which is why these characters are so relatable. We just don’t let our inner villain out of its cage often, if at all. I probably let mine out a little more than I should, but hey when you have a gift, you really should share it!

Bleach

The view and the aroma was good in my corner bedroom!

As I lie in bed last night reading my book I could smell bleach as if there was a bowl of it sitting next to me. I thought maybe it was coming from the bathroom where I had cleaned earlier in the night so I walked in to take a sniff, however, there was no bleach smell at all. Apparently I didn’t clean that well if the smell had already dissipated. I went back to bed and picked up my book again only to find the bleach smell invade my nostrils once more. I quickly took a whiff of my hand and found that the smell was indeed emanating from me. This is typical. I probably got more bleach on myself than I did on the surfaces I was cleaning. I’m sure I will also find splotches on my pajama pants in the morning.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the smell of bleach. I am one of those weirdos who likes the smell of bleach, gasoline and paint. In fact, the smell of bleach reminds me of moving into the loft that I lived in before moving in with my husband. This isn’t because the place was so clean it smelled of bleach, truth be told, the place was probably not technically fit to house human beings. It was above a bakery, so most days it smelled of freshly baked bread and cinnamon rolls. It was also a party house, so it smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke too. But, for one night, it smelled so much like bleach that I got lightheaded from the fumes.

It was the night that I moved in, on my 30th birthday. My parents were coming over the following day and after a bottle of wine and cupcakes with a few friends I had determined that the place was not presentable. I was already nervous about my parents seeing the place where I had chosen to live. I was not known for making good choices about my living arrangements. After living in a co-op with a worse reputation than the Faber College Delta House my sophomore year in college, I had tried not to let my parents visit often. As a matter of fact, I don’t think my mom ever came to that house after my dad warned her about the fact that $150 of the $250 per semester rent went to cover the cost of the kegs that were regularly replenished in the walk-in refrigerator.

Maybe the bleach peeled the paint…

So needless to say, the fact that I was moving into another space that would host parties on the regular was not information I wanted to share with my parents. Unfortunately it was hard to hide with a mountain of empty beer bottles piled on a corner counter in the kitchen and a freezer full of Jagermeister. Also, I couldn’t guarantee that a gaggle of musicians wouldn’t show up in the middle of my parents’ visit. The front door didn’t even have a lock – which was why my dad was coming over to install a deadbolt on my bedroom door. Literally, there was no lock on the front door, but that’s not to say we didn’t have a security system. Our alarm was a floor that was caving in right inside the front door where our old ping pong table stood at an angle. Any would-be robber would take one look and assume nobody actually lived in the loft.

Looking around the loft I wasn’t quite sure where to start but the floors seemed to be something I could handle. The kitchen floor hadn’t been scrubbed in possibly forever, so I started there. It was of the 1950s linoleum variety, so it was pretty easy to scrub. Within a few minutes the floor went from brown to yellow and I almost regretted cleaning when I saw the actual color of the floor. It completely clashed with the once cream colored carpet. Plus, the stains on the carpet really stood out next to the sparkly linoleum. I evaluated the carpet and determined that the camouflage pattern was not intended, it was beer stains and dirt. I vacuumed until my hands were vibrating and the stains were still as black as ever. I finally decided that the best option would be to treat it with bleach, so that is exactly what I did. I spent the remainder of the night scrubbing at the stains on the carpet with diluted bleach. By 3 am I had scrubbed out the majority of the stains and I was delirious from the bleach fumes. I dumped my dirty bleach water and headed to bed.

Ted Nugent could have passed out on our floor and never been discovered!

I awoke the next morning and walked out to find all of the stains back in their camouflage pattern throughout the living room and down the hallway. Apparently the dirt from the base of the carpet crawled right back to the surface once the bleach dried. I debated pouring more bleach on the stains but I opted to let them do their thing. I would rather have my parents see the filthy carpet than have them wonder if I was trying to cover a murder scene with the overwhelming smell of bleach wafting through the loft. Interestingly enough, my parents never mentioned the stained carpet or bleachy smell.

I never tried to clean that carpet again. As a matter of fact I think I only vacuumed a few times after that day. I once handed a guy a bucket full of bleach water and a sponge when he made a mess all over the floor one night. He laughed until he saw the look on my face and he quickly got to work. Those stains were still there on the day I moved out.

I only lived there for about six months, but the smell of bleach still makes me think of that long first night. Other things come to mind when I think of my time living at the loft like watching drunken idiots jump down into the bakery with no way to get back upstairs, 6′ tall guys sleeping in my giant clawfoot tub, people cleaning cake off the walls while being carried on another person’s shoulders with a mop, and sledding down the stairs on bread racks. But those are all different stories for different days.

 

 

Negative Creep

Whoa is me

Have you ever been around someone who is so negative that they literally suffocate any room they are in with their heavy attitude? You can just feel the bad vibes radiating from them and all of a sudden you can’t breathe. They tiptoe up with their giant pillow to smother any little rays of sunshine around them. Usually they are totally unaware that they are smothering you or anyone else with their negativity. Half the time they don’t even realize that they are, in fact, Eeyore. They think that worrying that their glass is not half full means they are a “glass half full kind of person.” They are the person who points out a hurricane just hit the island you are vacationing on next week. They bring up divorce rates when you talk about your newlywed friends and the probability of you pooping on the bed during childbirth when you tell them you are pregnant. These are my least favorite people to be around, yet they are drawn to me like moths to a flame. I think it’s my resting bitch face.

A normal person would run the other way when they see Eeyore trotting up with his pillow ready to smother. Not me! I try to convert them into an optimist. I am like a Jehovah’s Witness shoving my little glass half-full in their face saying “yes, but what if you looked at things THIS way!?!” That probably comes from my need to be right all the time more than my wanting to make that person a better version of themself. Plus, I am a pot stirrer. I can’t help myself, especially with Debbie Downer. I tell her that’s great news about the hurricane because it probably cleared out all of the tourists, and that our newlywed friends have a better chance of staying married than they do dying in a plane crash, so good news for them. As for pooping on the table – where do I begin? It will make a funny and disgusting story for the child later in life and will be fodder for jokes for many years to come. Bring it on Eeyore, game, set match!

The problem is I leave these conversations as if it were an actual tennis match, and I was up against Anna Kournikova. I am exhausted and Debbie Downer just sulks away unaffected. I guess that’s because the little energy vampire drained me. One would think that after a few of these Jehovah worthy interventions I would learn my lesson, but I am a bit of a slow learner and I am stubborn, the ultimate double whammy! I get sucked in time and time again by the negative creep dragging me into the basement with them to show me how stark and lonely it is. I follow them right down and try to convince them that a set of nice curtains and a coat of paint will make all the difference while trying to pour a little water in their glass. And as I pour they suck down that water just like they are sucking the life out of me.

Alas, I am the eternal optimist. I will keep compiling my list of rebuttals for little miss downer and her half empty glass. Well, that or I am always ready to stir the pot and beat that dead horse for all I’m worth. I guess it’s all how you look at it.

 

While writing I listened to:

The Dude Abides

Coffee and punk rock is all I need to get things done today!

Since I left my nine to five job in January I have become pretty carefree. So much in fact that my husband has been calling me “The Dude“. I can’t really blame him. I have taken up wearing a uniform of sorts which consists of pajama pants and a CBGB tank top with a sweater that looks like a homeless man was wearing for years before handing it over to me. When I leave the house I throw on a pair of workout pants to “dress it up a little”. It usually stops people from trying to hand me dollar bills at the grocery store. I’m not going to lie though, on occasion I just throw on yesterday’s pajama pants. Don’t judge me! (more…)

Shameless

Tap dancing in the driveway singing punk rock.

My daughter and I were walking into the gym (my new hang-out) when an SUV pulled up along side of us. The windows were down, the music was up and the thirty-ish scruffy football player looking driver started singing along “Staring at the blank page before you, open up the dirty window, let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find…” loud enough for a few rows of cars to hear. I’m not a big fan of pop music, but I have channel surfed enough to recognize the theme song from the Hills (AKA Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield) that he was belting out. (more…)

css.php