ornamental

ILLNESS

Saturday, July 1, 2006

DREAMs: Squatters and Powerlines

#1 For some odd reason, Stan and I decided to go to one of those multi-level malls like in Denver in the old days. Our plan was to then go to a basement level, hide out in a bathroom, and then when the place is closed, spend the night. So what we actually did was find an office room and hide out in there instead. We had brought sleeping bags with us, and there was some strange padded thing on the floor that we put the sleeping bags on. There was also TV in the room, so we were set for the night. I had fallen asleep fairly early, but then awoke around 1:30 AM (not unlike real life). There was a window in the rooom, not facing the outside, but facing the interior hallway. I was worried that a night watchman would find us, and he eventually did. We explained to him that we were just spending the night and not there to cause problems, so he let us go without incident. I remember leaving the place and walking around the outside; it was like a large zoo, literally, surrounding this mall. And for yet another odd reason, we decided to do the same exact thing the following night, spend the night downstairs. This time the room we stayed in had a rollaway bed with an ugly lime green blanket. And this time the dogs were with us. I was lactating (ew) and nursing Lucifer Sam as if he was a baby (ew...love my dog, but...ew). I went to another part of the room where they had a restroom, but I saw a couple people on the other side of a door, and they saw me. I was afraid what they would do if they found us here again. I turned myself in, and this time it looked like they were going to arrest us. There were a bunch of other people there too, including a woman who looked maybe Native American in ethnicity who was working for security. She was asking me a question in a language that I did not understand. Before they went through fully with the arrest I woke up.

#2 Stan and I were driving somewhere and there was a bad driver annoying another driver. The second driver (the one who was beying annoyed) was driving a 2-door purple-mauve SUV, like a Ford Bronco. They started chasing the first driver. I think we then followed them to see what happened. We ended up on a cul-de-sac with a bunch of downed power lines. There were a bunch of kids running around the neighborhood, and I was trying to get them into the house. The power lines looked organic, like drowned earthworms, only larger, like actual powerline size. I had a cellphone with me (I think it was Stan's new cellphone) and I was going to call 911 to get someone over there to take care of the situation. I forgot what happened after that.

Posted by Ann on 07/01/06@09:40 AM CST ..::Link::..Whisper or Scream?

Friday, June 30, 2006

Oh Grow Up

I was reading something at the Huffington Post today regarding Anntithesis Coulter and some frumpwad left a comment to the article and she (I can only assume it's a she) starts in on the personal physical attacks. Look, when it comes to personality, attitude and beliefs, I find Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity (you know, the standard rightwingnut crowd) as ugly as they come. But when people start in on the nitpicky personal criticism, it detracts from the legitimate critiques of their truly hideous minds. Instead of criticizing Anntithesis' politics, attitude, morals, et. al., the commentor starts in on how she wears her dresses too short and hair too long. Oh bite me. You know, if there was a saving grace of Annthrax, which there isn't, but if there was, it would be those qualities. I mean the short black dresses and long hair give a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, this is someone who at one time had a love of life and a free spirit that wasn't chained to fascism or at least rigid ultra neocon thinking. Just think how truly frightening kukluxklAnn would look if she wore brown shirts and cropped her hair nun-like. And from personal experience, the people who knock someone's personal appearance are actually jealous because they can't wear short skirts--not that I can anymore either, but I'm not knocking Anntichrist for doing it. And long hair...who says that once someone is past a certain age they have to get "mother's hair?" If you can grow it, flaunt it.

I find this trend of knocking someone based on their looks very disturbing. Not only is it very Junior High, but when there are so many legitimate criticisms of these rightist zealots and someone from the left resorts to the easiest of put-downs, it just makes the the left's case look weak and leaves them open for more of the same in return.

Posted by Ann on 06/30/06@10:12 AM CST ..::Link::..7 Screamers.

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Just feeling a bit grumbly today.

As I was trying to wake this AM I was listening to WPR while they had on the president from NOW, discussing the organization's 40th anniversary and how feminism has changed in the past few decades, etc. etc. Now (sorry) I'm probably in 99% agreement with what NOW stands for, however something was said that just rubbed me the wrong way. They were discussing how young girls (pre-pre-teens) are dieting so they can look thin or "good." Of course this is horrible, as said NOW's president. But she said something to the effect that the point isn't to look good, but to have healthy bodies. Upon first listen, that sounds all fine and dandy, and maybe it's just me because they had brought up Rush Limpball's term "feminazi" earlier in the show which caused bizarre imagery to slideshow in my slumbering head, but this ideal of having a healthy body just rubbed me the wrong way. I remember seeing images of Hitler Youth exercising. Health was very important to that movement. Would the president of NOW tell a girl with a debilitating or wasting disease that it's important to have a healthy body, when that is and never will be a possibility in her life? While all sensible people can agree that unnecessary dieting at any age just to attain some ideal thinness is a bad goal, and that it is *more* (note emphasis on MORE) important to be healthy than to look "good", is it necessarily IMPORTANT to be healthy, if physical health defined by national standards isn't in your cards? I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I just caught wind of a butchey PE instructor from a past life, not encouraging girls to do *their personal* best, but to be *the* best, which is obviously unobtainable for everyone except the best. Whatever happened to a healthy mind and being a decent person? There's a lot of mean-spirited healthy bodies running around out there. And I don't think they're important. Supposedly a certain Mr. Shrub is reportedly in fine health.

Like I said, maybe I'm reading more into her comment than what was intended. But who knows?

Posted by Ann on 06/29/06@01:58 PM CST ..::Link::..A Whisper Inside.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The Whistle

I subscribe to a mailing list that serves my neighborhood and one adjoining it. It includes information that is of interest to people living in said 'hoods and the east side in general. One issue of contention lately has been the implementation of the train whistle. There had been a whistle ban for the past few years or so, but they have now reinstated it because they couldn't get the funding to get those guard things (I don't know the technical name of them) that block off an intersection when a train passes through. It seems like everyone who responds on that list (I don't...I just lurk) is anti-whistle. You'd think the local railroad commissioner (who was in charge of reinstating the whistle) was the devil himself by the way these people talk.

Then I read that the main proponent of the whistle ban lives on the same block as we did when we first moved to Madison. That street is unusual as there are no houses across the street, just train tracks and gardens growing there started by the local homeowners and "renters with seniority"--because Stan and I only lived there a year, we weren't able to put a garden across the street. We had no seniority. We were treated like inferior life forms. But I liked the train. Traintracks instead of houses meant fewer people, fewer people meant fewer families with children, fewer children meant fewer annoyances during the day, fewer little unmonitored sprogs peering in my front window because my upstairs "neighbor with seniority" said it was okay to hang out on our house's front porch (even though they weren't bothered by it because they were on the top floor that didn't have a front porch). Why would a train whistle bother me when there were screaming sprogs on my porch? Naturally, I was the mean neighbor because I told them to leave, and Upstairs She was the good neighbor because she said it was ok. Upstairs She and Upstairs He kept us awake all night, sometimes with music, sometimes with tv, sometimes having political arguments with their parents. (WTF?) Then early on Saturday morning when Stan and I could sleep in, Upstairs He would become Downstairs He, because that's where they stored all their sporting equipment that they dumpster dived for at a local sporting goods store. Not only did they have the gardens across the street, not only did they claim the driveway so Stan and I had to park on the street, but they also claimed the basement with all their crap that they were too good to pay for (more money for pot!) They were like a nasty old tomcat pissing all over the entire place marking their senior renter ownership, not unlike their nasty old cat who tried unsuccessfully to jump into our windows. Stan taped the windows shut with duct tape to prevent that, but he removed it before we moved out, unfortunately because that cat was successful in entering with the next tenants, and killed one of their kittens. Had he known they had cats, he would've left the duct tape there (the landlord wasn't going to replace the defective screen anytime soon).

So a train whistle was going to bother me? Not bloody likely! A train whistle is soothing, even if it is right across the street, even if it is loud sometimes. A train whistle goes away. Partying neighbors go on and on into the night. Politically arguing neighbors never seem to end. They were nothing like train whistles. They were train wrecks.

So we moved. I knew that when we moved to Madison we wouldn't be able to afford to rent a single house like we did in Fort Collins before we moved out here. I knew we would have neighbors. But I never realized we'd have to deal with 40-year-olds acting like 20-year-olds. We were both in our late 20s at the time, and we really wanted a place of our own. Plus, fixer-upper houses were relatively cheap to buy in Madison, especially in the general neighborhood that we were already renting in. We pretty much looked for houses all over the east side, but settled on one that I had my eye on for months, one that had finally come down into our price range. And that house, was it far away from the train? No, it was a block away from our rental! In fact, the train is virtually just as close as it was before. The whistle does not bother me one bit, but thinking about living in that rental with all the sprogs and the killer cat and Upstairs He and She does piss me off to this day. She never worked, BTW, she just hung out...claimed she had some disease, although she was more physically active than I was because I spent all my time in school and working, which meant I had to go to bed early and she could stay up all night having political arguments.

Posted by Ann on 06/27/06@09:20 AM CST ..::Link::..13 Screamers.
By Ann @ 09:40 AM CST:07:01:06 ..::Link::..Whisper or Scream?

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