Stars

At some point in my life a scientist told me that not all of the stars in the sky are stars. Some of them are entire galaxies, with suns, moons, and planets like ours. Sometimes I look up at night and wonder if maybe, far away, I am a dot in someone else's night sky. Maybe someone else is looking up, and their scientists have told them that not all of those stars are stars. Maybe someone else is wondering if there is other life out there. Maybe they are staring up at those tiny dots, and thinking of me.

A Clichéd Explanation For Why People Are Fireworks

Earlier this year I got my first tattoo. It is a quote that reads: “We are like fireworks, rising, shining, and finally scattering and falling. So until that moment comes when we vanish like fireworks, let us sparkle brightly, always..."

Fireworks mean a lot to me. Not only are they involved in some of my greatest childhood memories, like driving down every year to Grandma’s on the Fourth of July to watch the show in Charles City, but they are also my own personal metaphor for all the people I meet.

I have found that certain people have a tendency to EXPLODE into your life, and they are so bright and so beautiful that you can’t help but stare in wonder. Others you see coming for some time, and even if you lose sight of them momentarily, you know they will show themselves again soon. Some of them stay and float gently down, making themselves familiar and comfortable, and some of them vanish just as quickly as they came, leaving nothing but an afterimage burned into your eyes and heart by their brilliance.

In people and fireworks, it all matters about what’s on the inside. Some fireworks come in bright and eye-catching packages, but they are usually only the little ones that pop and fizzle and take up space in the sky. It’s the ones with the plain package that really shine, that soar above all the others and burst, unexpectedly dazzling against the darkness. They light up the whole world and you can’t help but be mesmerized by them for as long as they are there in your sight.

I like to think that we are all fireworks, rising higher and higher until we reach the top and show our brilliance to the waiting crowd, then sparkle gently on our way to the ground, hopefully leaving behind some impression of our beauty on the people who were lucky enough to see us.

I’m not sure when I started to think of people in this way, and I do realize that it’s a little odd to compare humans to dangerous things that streak into the sky and explode. But I do believe that it’s all about making sure that you let your powder burn hot, and that you explode and let all the world see your colors, for as long as you can. And don’t forget to stop and look at the other fireworks exploding around you. They may not be as bright as you, or as beautiful, but their colors are just as important as they sparkle in the dark night sky.

I've got quite a few fireworks in my life right now who are exceptionally good at showing their colors, and I'm trying very hard to remember to sparkle right on back to them. Sometimes I forget, when the dark sky is hidden behind the fog and clouds of work and everyday life, but every once in a while I get a reminder to let myself shine through, and those are the moments when I really feel happiest.

So, running the risk of sounding like a bad "Twilight" reference, sparkle, my friends. Sparkle with all your might.

A Dream & A Movie

I had a dream today. In my dream I was being chased by Mark Zuckerberg because my best friend had done something illegal. I don’t know what my friend did, or why Mark was chasing me instead of him, but I do know that Mr. Zuckerberg was very persistent on his Schwinn bicycle. For some reason he kept forcing me away from the school that my daughter was at, even though it was time for me to pick her up. Apparently my daughter’s school was at the top of a very large, steep hill, because every direction I went in to flee Mark Zuckerberg made me have to climb my way back up. The fourth time I climbed this ridiculously steep hill I was so exhausted that I had to be dragged the last few feet, where I immediately decided that I wasn’t ever going to climb that hill again. I promptly woke up early from my nap and, despite being so tired all I wanted to do was roll over and die, I got out of bed and went out to the kitchen to find something to eat, because I was sure if I went back to sleep I would have to climb that damn hill again, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.

A lot of other stuff happened in my dream, but it was very strange and involved a Mexican complaining about the Light Rail and then taking a dump on the tracks of the L-Train, and something about rocket launchers being inefficient against single-zombie targets. I'm not sure I understand most of what happened in my dream-land, and I don't expect you to either, so I will spare you the disturbing details.

PS: I went to see “My Soul To Take” today. It wasn’t anything like I was expecting, and was surprisingly clever. Max Thieriot was actually pretty amazing. I think I will be following his work from now on.

Fuck you, Toy Story 3

That’s right. Go to hell stupid Woody, Jesse, Slinky, Rex, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Hamm, and Buzz. (But not Mexican Buzz, cuz I dig it.) I went and saw your stupid movie in the theaters, and contributed to your ridiculous amount of monetary success. I came home relieved that for once a long-awaited sequel hadn’t completely ruined a perfectly good thing by being totally obnoxious and unrelated. (see: Star Wars: 1-3, The Matrix 2, 3, Fast and the Furious 2-???) I was pleasantly pleased with your accomplishments.

Until I decided that it was about damn time I cleaned out our spider halfway-house garage.

See, my garage is filled with all of my things left over from high school and all the stockpiles of useless things I had in my room at my parent’s house, and the funny little toys I brought home from when I worked at the arcade. I was doing great, so proud of myself for resisting my packrat nature and actually throwing things away, until I came across a corner of big black garbage bags.

Inside the garbage bags were toys. Lovable, dirty old toys with dirty love-stains on their faces from the nights they spent keeping me safe on/next to/under my bed, or getting dragged through the dirt because I wanted to play “school field trip” in the woods behind our house.

I thought to myself, “These toys are dirty and old. I will never let my daughter play with them. I will never play with them. No one will buy them. I should throw them away.” But then my mind, unbidden and most certainly against my permission, called up Andy’s toys, terrified in the black garbage bag, waiting to get thrown away. Fleeing for their desperate little toy lives, and suffering humiliation, torture, and nearly horrible, fiery inferno-death, all because they just wanted to be loved and played with.

So now I, who was doing so well at getting rid of the unnecessary things taking up space in my garage, had to go to Target, buy some nice, clean Rubbermaids with no holes in them, and give my old, ratty toys a warmer and more comfortable place to live, so they wouldn’t think that they were in a garbage bag because I didn’t love them.

Now I have even less room in my garage.

Fuck you, Toy Story 3.

Hippy-Cat vs Satan-Cat vs Hybrid-Dog

I currently live with 3 animals, which I’m beginning to think my husband thinks is 3 too many.

There’s Jasper, or, as my friends like to call him, Satan. He’s one of those cats that looks all cute and comes up and bumps his head against you, purring like nothing in the world will ever love you as much as this adorable black fluff-ball, then, after you pet him for a bit, goes all crazy and bites you and runs away. Somehow I always watch his fluffy tail disappearing around the corner into the hall and hear imaginary cackling in my head followed by a very creepy voice sneering “Got you, Bitch.”

Jasper is the black Maine Coon in the back. Woodstock is a domestic shorthair.

We have Woodstock, the old hippy who just lays around all day being chill with his old-guy claws that he can’t retract because he’s old and probably just doesn’t care any more. The coolest thing he’s done in the 8 years since I adopted him is slowly turn his own right eye from green to brown, so now I have a cat with two different colored eyes, which is super awesome.


Then there’s Lula. The hybrid-dog. I call her a hybrid-dog mainly because she’s a mix between a dachshund and a black lab, and even the most chaste, polite people in the world hear that and are all “WTF I wonder who was on top?” I also call her a hybrid-dog because I’m not sure she’s entirely dog. She plays with her toys like a cat or retarded wombat, and I’m relatively certain that she’s at least part garbage disposal, because that chubby little black lab/wiener dog can book it when she hears food wrappers, and don’t you dare drop something or it will be in her stomach before you even realized you weren’t holding it anymore. Also she is part demon. If you’ve ever heard her play tug-of-war, you know what I mean. Those kinds of sounds have no business coming from a dog.

Yes, her legs are very stubby and do actually end in raptor claws.

Anyway, Hippy-cat is usually so super chill that you don’t even know he’s there, until he decides to delve into his hidden cocaine stash to relive the glory days and then starts tearing around the apartment at 2 am meowing crazily and trying to destroy the rug, probably in an attempt to explain to us the horror that was Kitty Nam.

Satan-Cat is the one to watch out for. He’ll lie on his back like a big, black, unconscious blob, making you think he’s friendly and harmless because he’s baring his belly and Animal Planet tells you that that’s an act of submission. But then you try to walk past him and no matter how quiet or careful you are, that sonofabitch reaches out and shanks you.

Jasper ambushing a passing Mexican.

Sometimes Satan-Cat likes to chase Hippy-Cat and jump on his back and make him run laps around the apartment most likely having flashbacks to Kitty Desert Storm until finally Hippy-Cat snaps and punches Satan-Cat in the face like “Bitch, fuck off before I have a heart attack because I was exposed to Agent Orange before your mother was even born.”

While all of this is going on, Hybrid-Dog is usually standing there alert, watching hopefully for an opening so that she can play too, but every time she tries she just gets double-kitty-punched in the face, and has to retreat to wait for another opportunity to join the fun. Sometimes she just chases Satan-Cat while he chases Hippy-Cat, whining in a really annoying high-pitched frequency because she doesn’t like to bark except at people who wear big hats.

Usually I find this to be amusing or at least tolerable. Sometimes I get annoyed and hiss at them like a giant, angry snake, and the two cats scatter in different directions and Hybrid-Dog cowers in submission and pees a little and then I feel bad because they were just trying to have fun because I, their owner, don’t play with them enough and don’t let them outside because I don’t want them to die from cars or eagles or velociraptors.

So I apologize to Hippy-Cat and Satan-Cat, clean up after Hybrid-Dog and pat her little head so she knows I still love her, and let them play some more.

Until I get annoyed again and lock them in separate rooms for time out.

My apartment is crap

The apartments I live in are absolute crap. They look  nice from the outside, and seem so very pretty the first time you tour them. My building is right on the edge of a lake surrounded  by beautiful trees and is not at all crowded by stores or streets or hobos, which is kind of hard to find in the city. However, having been here for 3 years now, I can tell you with no small amount of certainty, that these apartments are crap. Actually, it’s more the management of these apartments are crap. Let me explain.

It all started in October of 2007. I was newly married, very pregnant, and was quite sick of being homeless and forced to live with my grandmother who lived 3 hours south of where my husband was forced to live because he had a job and couldn’t leave the cities. At first this setup had seemed pretty awesome. I got to spend a lot of time with my grandmother, whom I adore and don’t see often because, as previously stated, she lives 3 hours south of the cities. But as the weeks which were supposed to be days passed, and I grew progressively more pregnant, I became extremely distressed at being separated from my shiny new husband and forced to sleep with my hybrid dog on a futon in the porch.

So we decided to rent these lovely new apartments that seemed so amazingly more fancy than our first apartment, which had been decidedly ghetto and tiny. We moved in shortly after, and that’s when I began to notice that things were not quite right. First, I ventured out onto our 18 foot-long deck, marveling at how much more rich I felt because I had a mother-fucking DECK, and not just a tiny little balcony, or, even worse, no outdoor space at all, as had been the case with our first apartment. I quickly realized that my deck was not as amazing as it had first seemed. It was not, in fact, shiny and beautiful, but made entirely of unsealed wooden planks which I’m sure were salvaged from an 1820s shipwreck somewhere off the coast of Bermuda, and were not protected from the rain or snow in any way whatsoever, and had, therefore, begun to rot. The nails holding my salvaged planks together were rusty and sticking a few inches further in the air than I’m assuming is safe, and didn’t at all help to stop the rotting wood from sagging a good three inches downward when stepped upon.

Still, I enjoyed my new two-bedroom apartment, especially as I began frantically buying things to decorate the baby’s room. After a while, I began to notice that the brand new paint on the frame of my sliding door which led to the rotting death-deck was peeling to reveal the black metal underneath. I didn’t really mind, and ignored it. Soon, however, I realized that the paint was peeling at an alarming rate, despite the fact that I never found any paint shavings on the carpet or anywhere else, so I decided to investigate. Turns out it wasn’t paint peeling to reveal black metal at all. It was mold. Growing around my door. In the wintertime. Mildly disgusted, I scrubbed at the mold for a whole two hours before abandoning the obviously impossible task, until I got the brilliant idea that perhaps using bleach on it would make it go away. It did. I also learned that I am allergic to bleach.

That winter was pretty mild, considering I live in Minnesota, and we are known mostly for lakes and snow, but that did not stop the death-deck’s sliding door from developing condensation inside the glass, as well as gradually forming a buildup of ice inside the apartment which froze the door shut and was there all season because our heat does not work. This little ice-formation was nothing, however, compared to the death-cicles outside, which every winter hang directly over the door and come crashing down in a death-inducing avalanche of sharp water the second the weatherman wakes up and thinks "It might be warmer today than yesterday."

Spring arrives, and I am glad because now I can open my windows again. Unfortunately that also means that the snow is melting, and apparently our bedroom window likes to leak directly over an electrical outlet. The mold is back, only worse than before, and since it is spring, the silverfish that live in my bathroom and bedroom closet and apparently UNDER MY FUCKING BED decided to come out in full force and cause me to have a nervous breakdown because I have an anxiety disorder and bugs freak the shit out of me.

When I finally get around to approaching the office about my issues with the apartment, which takes a while because I hate any kind of confrontation and also I am lazy, they tell me that they can’t really help with the deck because they don’t have the money to do repairs on everyone’s decks and I don’t believe them because I pay $935 a month for this crap-hole, as do the billion other people who live in this massive complex, but whatever. They say they’ll send someone out to look at the mold, but if they did I never saw them and apparently they felt that the amount of mold on my walls was perfectly acceptable and didn’t need to be addressed presently.

I learn after the first thunderstorm that the slab of concrete in front of our door transforms into the Atlantic Ocean when it rains, and also that the lights over the door attract an ungodly amount of moths/mosquitoes/flying-buzzy-insects-of-doom as soon as the sun sets, and if you wish to leave the building after dark you have to hold your breath and duck through this cloud of nastiness, waving your arms like a madperson and hoping none of the bite-y ones get stuck in your hair.

Also there are no parking spaces after dark. You leave, you run the risk of having to park on the street and walking 57 miles back to the building. Actually it’s probably about a block, but it seems much further when it’s cold and dark and you’re afraid of the dark and every rustling leaf is obviously a zombie or the Jeepers-Creepers guy swooping down to carry you away into the night sky and kill you for your eyeballs.

There’s also the fact that our garage seems to be a halfway house for crack-addicted spiders, and the fact that there is a butt-shaped hole in the wall of the hallway caused by my husband’s butt going through the sheet rock while were wrestling. Long story. (Actually, it’s not, I just don’t feel like explaining it right now.) Also our kitchen isn’t big enough for one person to cook/breathe in, let alone two, but our bathroom is big, despite the silverfish infestation.

So, like I said, the apartments I live in are absolute crap. But hey, at least we have a pool! Filled with liquid ice. And possibly sharks. With lasers.

My first blog post, ever.

So this is a blog.  It makes me feel funny.  Like I already feel obligated to post a bazillion hilarious/thought provoking/insightful things and have a bazooka-jillion readers, even though I know that I am nowhere near talented or interesting enough to have even half of that.  Which, since I’m notoriously bad at math, I’m assuming is around 10.

I’m sure this will end up just like every other thing I spontaneously decide to do, and I’ll post faithfully for a few weeks or even a few months, but then slowly I’ll begin to forget or get bored and the majority of my blog posts will become explanations about why I don’t write more blog posts that only I read anyway.  Oh well, sounds like it might be entertaining while it lasts, and since you can never have too much entertainment, I guess I’ll just go ahead with this doomed venture.

So, you are probably wondering about the title of this doomed blog, and if you weren’t, I’m sorry for assuming that you were.  Anyway, since I’m not really satisfied with it at the moment, I may change it. But for the moment it is titled “Lamplighter Alley”.  The story behind me wanting to be a lamplighter isn’t very interesting or action-filled, but I’ll share it with you anyway.

When I was in middle school, my friends and I were easily bored, but found amusement in posing theoretical questions of varying difficulty to each other.  One day one of these easily-bored friends asked this of us:

“If you could grow up and have any unusual job you wanted, what would you be?”

Many of my fellow bored-friends thought long and hard before coming up with awesome answers like “emu farmer”, and “moon-rock harvester”, and even “cat shaver”, (which to my now somewhat more immature mind sounds really funny and is obviously an innuendo for something, but at the time it just seemed like a funny but awesome job).  When inevitably the group’s attention turned to me, I was a little nervous to admit that I, in fact, hadn’t needed to ponder the question at all, because all my life I’d wanted to be a lamplighter.  Now, to be clear, I’m not entirely sure that “lamplighter” is the proper term for the job that I envisioned, and I am relatively sure that it’s not even supposed to be one word, but whatevs. “Lamp lighter” just doesn’t look as cool and can’t be used as a screen name.

Anyway, when my friends stared blankly at me, because obviously a lamplighter wasn’t a real thing, unlike moon-rock harvesters and emu farmers, I had to explain, which went something like this:

“You know those movies that take place in, like, old England, or something, before they had electricity?  You know how sometimes between scenes they show that weird old dude walking around with a candle on a stick, lighting the candles in the lamps along the street so that people who are out walking at night can be comforted by the soft glow of candlelight showing them the way and protecting them from rapists?  Yeah, I want to be that guy.”

This half-hearted explanation of my future career plans was always followed by a somewhat long pause, then someone offers an obligatory “That’s cool…” while someone else points out that we have electricity now, so what need would the world have for a lamplighter?

And that’s how, slowly but surely, I gave up my dream of growing up to be a lamplighter. But I still want to be one.  As for the Alley part, I guess I always thought alleys were dangerous and mysterious spaces where I was sure all the cool kids went to hang out or get killed, and I especially like streets that are named "Alley". Like Diagon Alley. Fuck yeah, Harry Potter.

EDIT: I decided to take out the part where I basically tell you that this whole blog is shit, and add something about "Lamplighter Alley" that I thought of at 2:47 am while at work last night. I was wondering why exactly I put two unrelated words that I like together to create a blog called "Lamplighter Alley", when I began picturing a place called "Lamplighter Alley". It would be a street out of the way and shunned by society because in the movies the lamplighters always seem really creepy even though they are trying to be helpful, kind of like friendly lepers. There would be lots of lamps on Lamplighter Alley, but none of them would ever be lit because the lamplighters would be all like "Fuck that we light lamps all night, we're not going to do it on our street too. Besides, there are no rapists here, only creepy but helpful lamplighters." All the houses would be dark and decrepit-looking, and there would be no flowers or sprinklers or white picket fences, and it would always be cloudy and dark because in my head this street is somewhere in a seedy part of London and I heard somewhere that London is always cloudy.

Welcome to Lamplighter Alley, bitches. I hope you brought a flashlight because we're too cool for electricity.