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Saturday, August 30, 2003

Incredilobotomous! 

Wrapping up some stuff before leaving for Maine, the Director of PCL Production stopped by to say "hi" and asked if I was attending the 3Q Rewards & Recognitions ceremony next week. She reacted sheepishly when I said I was on vacation next week: "Uh, well I better tell you then, you've won an award." And... for -- get this! Demonstrating Core Corporate Values.

Management and Staff nominate candidates every quarter, and usually I set those chipper e-mails to "auto-delete". I am the first to have received nominations from both locations. I win "Company Bux" to purchase cool items like a Bose Radio -- which I just might!

Days like this make me feel I'm living in a novel by Sartre. Any minute now, I'll panic as I watch myself turn into a giant cockroach or millipede. Although I can't see that I do much to add value to the company, I get glowing reviews and raises and... now awards. (Cynical laughter.) Well... Job Security I guess.

I will add to this entry later: I'm putting off going to the Mall to purchase gifts for my family. I have no idea what to get any of them -- what do you get for folks who have everything? What do I get for a 1 year old child that's not a pukey stuffed animal or an educational toy...?

# posted by B. Arthurholt : 4:50 PM : Luscious

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Love is Strange 

I'm fascinated with Blogs. I check other people's blogs out, and read their entries. Breaking hearts, sleepless nights, anger and jealousy, newfound loves, growing intimacy -- it's all recorded. I haven't yet grown tired of it yet. I have bookmarked a few blogs, just for their outlook: I have a teenaged girl blog -- she talks about cute boyz and new clothes; the blog for a British Curate who is my age and has his sermons posted; one for a teenaged boy who I think must have Attention Deficit Disorder or something; a late 20something addict in recovery; a 50ish year old dead-head musician; and most recently, the blog for some poet singer songwriter who lives in LA and must be at least peripherally in The Biz. I like the voyeuristic aspect, but I'm reassured that we are all the same folk with the same base needs and issues on this here sphere.

A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from the guy who used to organize "group events" when I lived here in Dayton. The group had a cheesy name (Boys Organized For Fun - BOFF) and you had to interview and sign a waiver in order to join. He wanted to know if I was interested in participating in an event like one from a year ago involving the same "victim". I wrote back "maybe" and I said So you still see that guy, huh? Between you and me and the blog-post: I got some pleasure that the "victim" enjoyed himself, but bondage by itself does nothing for me. If you want details, there's not much to tell: Some guy was tied (I believe the politically-correct term is "restrained") to a specially-made bench with a spandex hood with a nose-hole only and a headset to "sensorally-deprive" him. And then we "tortured" him (under any other circumstance it really would be called tickling) with a variety of found objects -- the polartek gloves seem to be the big hit of the evening, along with the feather duster and the riding crop.

S wrote back to say that yes, he's still seeing that guy, in fact on a regular basis, and that he's very happy and they're considering moving in together. Well, well, cynical ones, who says Love Doesn't Exist?

Today's Dream
It's a sunny morning and I sit in my car at the valley intersection of Reading and Dorchester. The windows are slightly down and the sunroof is open. Joan Sutherland and Pavoratti are singing a selection from "La Traviata". When the light turns green, I move through the intersection, turn right onto the ramp entering 71S and start to pick up speed. I pass the yellow Merging Traffic Ahead sign, and the overpasses above and ramp next to me begin to converge. As I'm coming up level with the highway, a moderate number of cars move along, but everything looks safe in the mirrors as I sail in to join the regular lanes. A slight lavendar haze surrounds the downtown skyline coming into view, and I turn to check the blindspot.

It's only a moment -- a split-second -- but I turn back to see traffic suddenly stopping. The semi directly in front of me has its rear door open, and I can see the sides of its narrow interior shake as it thunders hard to slow. The rear lights contain a design of magnified red spots; and I watch powerless as the black enamel hitch in its rear bumper cruises thickly towards me. It disappears dead-on into the front end of the Civic, and with a crack of plastic and glass, my car flies apart like a bag of chips that's just been opened: the grill and lights pop and shatter; the hood folds and bounces up; the car starts to swing sideways like a tilt-a-whirl. I'm being propelled into the steering wheel and corner post. In all directions, brakes send up a distress squeal.

August reports are filed and discussed. It's been a full day and it's time to go.

# posted by B. Arthurholt : 5:01 PM : Luscious

Monday, August 25, 2003

Little Miss Tobacco 

Does anyone remember the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa becomes Little Miss Springfield, but renounces it when asked to promote tobacco products? I felt like I was living that episode this past weekend...

My friend C invited me to the Ripley Tobacco Festival, which is an Ohio river town an hour-and-a-half away from Cincinnati. We went to see the bed races, but instead wound up spending most time at the festival itself. It was a hoot. Ripley has a nifty Sullivan-esque public Library, high-style prairie with terra-cotta florettes beneath a panel of stylized leaded-glass windows.

It also has a brick farmhouse that is the Ohio Tobacco Museum. C and I went. "Real, live, honest-to-goodness" (but retired) tobacco farmers were on hand in the museum as docents. The man at the desk, right after I gave my suggested $1 donation, began railing about ... something, I'm not sure really what. The price of a carton of cigarettes used to be $ 8 - 10 in 1979, and now costs $ 35 -- but the price a tobacco farmer receives for a bushel is the same: $ 1.79. (I don't know if he chose that number because that is also the current price of a gallon of gasoline.) There's also a lot of taxes to pay. I think his argument was that the government was making it very difficult to be a tobacco farmer these days. I didn't particularly like being preached to, although mind you I definitely believe that the small farmer is the backbone of this country. (I believe the small farm is preferable to plowing the land under for another McMansion suburban development or a Super Wal-Mart, or having the small farmer himself plowed under by an agribusiness like Archer Daniels Midland.) Still, I wanted to argue that if tobacco is so unprofitable, then why don't you grow something else? (Apparently, it's mostly Asians that come in and buy the tobacco these days. For Marlboro and other American cigarette companies? No, for Asian cigarettes. They sit for another two years over there before even getting into a ciggie, which I thought was curious, because I hear my smoker friends complaining about how their cigs go stale a day after opening a pack.)

A crusty farm woman gave us a talk on the process of growing tobacco, complete with a whacking stick or whatever it's called. You would leave the sticks in the field until it's time to harvest the tobacco, then, placing a metal spear on the top, you whack the tobacco off at its base and impale them 3 - 5 at a time on the top of the stick. After the tobacco is harvested, they're put into bound pallets and stored in a curing barn for six to eight months until it's sold to those Asians. They had packets of seeds, tiny, with the comment that a tobacco bush grew to be 6 million times its seed size. (Or something like that, maybe it's only 2 million.) I asked her if they rotated their crops to replenish the soil, and her eyes, magnified behind glasses, looked at me, and she said there was no need: "You just put Nitrogen on everything, oh, and grow winter wheat which you could also use in the Spring to shield the young tobacco." She talked about the quality of the local crop: "We've smoked this stuff for years, and there's never been a problem." I felt bad about taking a free packet of tobacco seeds, so I left it behind discreetly in the other room.

My friend C made me laugh. Exhibits weren't exactly kept under lock and key, and C was picking up and sniffing a wide roll of tobacco, packed in a plastic baggie with a government packaging label on it from 1917. It looked like a giant doobie! When I mentioned that this was some historic tobacco, she was mortified she had just instinctively reached out and handled it...

At the fair itself, it was the happening teenage spot: Girls wearing the tightest shirts, one had on a black and white mini mini with black platform shoes and a plastic handbag with a circa 1989 Madonna on it. There really was a Miss Ohio Tobacco and her second runner-up, and throughout the afternoon and evening we saw them in various evening/prom gown type outfits, complete with tiara and blue eye-shadow! Some of the things people had for sale were totally hilarious to look at. There were t-shirts with a buxom babe on it holding deer antlers "Find a nice rack and mount it". I think it would be so funny for me to own and wear one of those t-shirts, but I don't think very many people would see the humor. I actually saw two people wearing this t at the fair. There were also flags featuring the confederate cross-bars, in the middle of which there was one of those trucker-splashplate-Babe silhouettes in a Charlie's Angels flame. Verrrry tasteful.

There were booths where the tobacco companies were handing out free samples -- C's sister said: "C'mon, I'll get you some chew." The sign said they were handing out only 2 packets, but they weren't being too circumspect and were jamming handfuls of samples into plastic bags. They acted like they were desparate to hook potential tobacco consumers. It smells smoke-apple-y, and we were laughing that they would make good potpourri sachets. I haven't yet tried it, I told my parents about it, and they freaked that I could get tongue cancer. Just for that, maybe I'll take it to Maine with me and try it out in front of them. (There's a difference, I learned, between chew and the SKOAL-type stuff. One you actually chew it -- and that's what I guess is what I got free -- the other, you just wad it into your cheek and hold it there.) Such an education, so much to learn!

C and I talked about getting tattoos because they were so cheap in that town ($35 minimum, $50 average), so I spent a lot of time checking out the tattoos on everyone. Some cool tattoos: one guy had an anklet with black triangles and black dots between, it reminded me somehow of a clown or jester motif.

Now I'm back at work. More later.

# posted by B. Arthurholt : 4:14 PM : Luscious

Sunday, August 24, 2003

I'll edit this later 

Since I've discovered blogging, I've been spending 2 - 3 hours daily reading, writing and editing. And it's led to a few other projects. Probably anyone reading this site is savvy enough to know about the templates you view here, that include all the HTML coding. Well, the coding intrigued me, and especially after copying the code in for the nifty webcounter and guestbook, I picked up an old HTML book and started reading it. Earlier tonight, I signed up for a free webpage -- www.hugshyhermit.012webpages.com. I think it's empty right now, or who knows what happens when you click on it. But hopefully, as the days go by, you will see it develop. Right now, the base of it looks like a (horrors!) webpage from 1993. Maybe six months from now, you'll see spinning heads, fire-breathing dogs, set to the soundtrack of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang". Hey who knows, maybe this Blog will feature that, too. (Or MORE!)

One can hope...

So for all one of you that might be reading this -- do you know how a week ago I was trying to reach out and talk to old friends? Well, tonight, an old friend called me! I've known Richard since 1986 -- July 6th, 1986 to be exact. He, and my other friend Betsy, are on my list of folks to call, but I guess he beat me to the punch! I thank my mom for this, because she sent him a birthday card -- his birthday is on the 23rd or maybe the 26th.

Richard is one of my first boyfriends, and I will always have a tender spot for him. I met him right after I came back from England and a few months after I moved out on my own and into an apartment with some college friends in Fall River, Massachusetts. He was "older", meaning he was 28 when I was 23! ha ha ha! I think we both had mullets! I got a job the first day or so after arriving in Fall River, on the management training program for Apex Department Stores, "the largest discount luxery retail store in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts" (so said the assistant store manager at the interview). ha ha! I was hired on the spot, and that should have been a warning sign! I worked in Swansea Mall, in the men's department. It was horrible.

But I met Richard that summer. I was clubbing all the time, a lot with my little Apex Department Store friends -- and we would hit bands, I remember seeing NRBQ in Providence, and catching a lot of local punk bands at this giant warehouse just north of town. I had a "girlfriend", a woman who suprise! also had a mullet (and later one narrow "Til-Tuesday" braid) and wore black-and-white business suits with padded shoulders and matching black-and-white men's shoes. I met Richard at "The Looking Glass", an unpopular dance club in Newport. He always used to say that I talked non-stop when we met. I guess that's true, it's nerves. I'm really sort of shy, and talk less and less as I get to know you.

I dated Richard for just over two years, until I moved to Philadelphia. You will probably not believe this, Blogalongs, I can barely believe it myself but I didn't have my priorities on right back then. I remember having to work two and sometimes three jobs to support my expensive wardrobe habits -- this was the 80s. Even so, Richard and I have stayed in touch since then. The last time I saw him was two years ago, just before I took the transfer to Dayton. Richard has been with his current boyfriend Bobbie, for gosh, I think like 5 years now. They just bought a condo in New Bedford "Freeport". They're planning a commitment ceremony. I'm very happy for them and I hope I can make the event. Richard has always made me laugh.

And, changing the subject abruptly: Right now, I can hear the Television upstairs blaring a James Bond soundtrack. Jamie, my upstairs neighbor and landlord, is also a friend. Jamie likes to eat at trendy restaurants that are bland and unmemorable. We went out for brunch today at Cafe Brio, and we had a good chuckle. We bought, for $15, a Bellini -- some sort of frozen fruit wine concoction. It was tasty, but... $15. Did I mention I'm having financial probs? This doesn't help.

Also, I had a hissy with my tenant yesterday. I got a new Dayton Power & Light bill, and I left her a voicemail: "You agreed after the last bill to switch the utility to your name. I am not happy." When I spoke briefly with my Colorado friend Chris, we were snorting about the "I'm not happy" line. Along the lines of "...and when I'm not happy, ain't nobody happy." ho ho chuckle chuckle. I think he's horrified and tickled that I have stories like the one about evicting the tenants on New Years' Eve. (Yup, that's true. I'll save that story for another time, Bloggies.)

Stay tuned. You may start seeing some changes occur to this site over the next few weeks.... (Or not.)

# posted by B. Arthurholt : 10:32 PM : Luscious