Psst...Part 3

You guessed it...still no DSL at home. This means no Daily Muffy, no site updates, no blogging, and no joy in Mudville. They say the problem should be resolved by Thursday. Do I believe them? Well, no.

Psst...Part 2

My home internet is still AWOL. I keep getting technical support people who say "sure, we'll fix it," but sound like they don't really mean it. So I may not be online in time for Christmas.

But oh, the stories about the new (as yet unnamed) apartment. Wait for pictures of Satan's Lazy Susan, which I unfortunately discovered in a kitchen cupboard...

Pssst...

Just a quick note. Yes, I'm still alive. My phone is hooked up but my internet hasn't been activated yet. I am 90% moved into the new place. Here are the most immediate pros and cons:

Pro: Huge!

Con: Paper-thin partition between the two units, meaning I can hear every word on the other side, including the woman next door pampering her cat at 5:30am ("Who's a pretty girl? You! Brrrrrrruh!")

More news soon...

Another Chef's Tip From President's Choice

When eating a high-class meal like the President's Choice "Pappardelle in Sausage Ragu" (ready in 6 minutes!), the master chefs provide this tip for making your dinner complete:

Serve with a dry red wine, such as a Valpolicella.

I'm serving MY frozen dinner with a can of Black Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke. A philistine, I am!

Living Space and Me: The Second Look

So I went next door to my new apartment with a few goals: clean the tub, replace the burned out bulbs, and move all the boxes of packed stuff out of my kitchen so I can start moving some bigger things.

It turns out I've never smelled the apartment on a warm day. The previous long-term tenant -- who I'll refer to as "Bad Guitar" -- allowed a scruffy stray cat to infiltrate the building, and the cat obviously spent a leisurely six years spraying its scent around the place. The basement is the worst, but it's also a bit whiffy in the kitchen and the livingroom.

So I started opening windows to air the place out, and lo and behold some of the windows are broken. Most of the screens have enormous holes in them...probably due to the cat again. Determined to fix at least one thing, I scrubbed the tub until my hand was numb. It was a valiant battle but the tub won. It appears permanently stained.

Standing outside -- directly between my old and new apartments -- I felt that feeling come over me. It's like an upside-down waterfall in my throat and a metal clamp around my head, a feeling of deep sorrow and panic that just comes over me in a huge, unstoppable wave. I stood there trying to figure out when I'd last felt like that, and then it came to me: I feel like this EVERY TIME I MOVE. It's a mix of emotions all bundled up: how will I manage this transition? What nasty surprise is lurking around the next corner? How's my cat going to feel about living in another cat's stink? Will the landlords fix the things that need fixing?

And under that, a feeling even more childish and irrational than all the rest: is my old apartment sad because I'm leaving? Am I being ungrateful? Will it be lonely?

I recognize that attributing human emotions to a building is a little neurotic. Stupid things strike me as sad and poignant when I'm feeling trapped, panicky, or vulnerable. I was literally standing there looking at the light through my kitchen doorway, wanting to burst into tears and comfort the old building all at the same time. I was in a deep funk, and not a Bootsy Collins kind of funk. A deep blue funk.

Fortunately my mother called and said that she always felt the same way when she moved, except for that last part about imagining that my apartment is crying, of course. Her advice and comments were wonderful, uplifting, and realistic:

1. Hire a MollyMaid for three hours to go over the bathroom and the kitchen. I'll try to do this tomorrow.
2. Ask the landlord to fix the windows, screens, and bathtub. The fact that his son backed into my mother's car yesterday may give me some leverage.
3. Go to a pet store and ask about cat-spray neutralizer.
4. Paint. This is hard because I've never painted, I don't know how to begin, and I don't want to delay moving all my stuff over (since we have no heat here).
5. Get some rugs and curtains.
6. Recognize that feeling displaced is probably a normal thing to feel when moving.

So I'm back on track. Maybe this advice is just plain common knowledge, but I tend to get so wrapped up in panicky predictions that I overlook the obvious.

Besides, I've always wanted a maid, even for just a few hours!

SOMEBODY Has Been In the Back Room

Annie Drogyny send me this video, stating that she's the blonde one and I'm the brunette. As incorrect as I think that is in so many ways, it's still an interesting -- though sort of surface-only -- look at the "ugly" side of drag queen dynamics. It's "Sing Me Spanish Techno" by The New Pornographers.




I WAS hoping for a raunchy sex scene -- that would certainly wake them up at MuchMusic (or whatever it's called nowadays -- but instead we got a pretty accurate time compression of:

1. Drag mother adopts drag daughter in a sort of possessive way.
   
2. Drag daughter does her best to upstage drag mother (that isn't really played out in the video, maybe the daughter is just supposed to be doing her best).
3. Drag mother silently resents drag daughter.
4. Drag daughter moves on.
   

In my defense, I don't think I've ever actually HAD a drag daughter. Drag PEERS yes, but I've never taken anybody home and -- for example -- pulled my feathery top off my shoulders and plucked their eyebrows. It's too much trouble and it's sort of like having a child...one who borrows your clothes.

And I don't think I've ever resented anybody because I thought they were BETTER than me...there are lots of people out there who are better than me and I honestly wish them luck (if they're good people!)

What the video DOESN'T show -- after this petty drama -- is the endless back-and-forth wrangling as the two of them vie for control over a tiny piece of drag-land. The piece of drag-land is usually pretty crappy, but in the tunnel vision world of drag performance all that matters is that you've got it.

As an aside, I enjoyed the display of two very typical styles of drag performance: the "I'm so jaded and sly" style and the "wacky wide-eyed, wide-mouthed" style. Though this may also have something to do with the way certain men look in makeup...since drag is about exaggeration, usually the most prominent facial features get blown up in a sort of monstrous way. If you've got a big mouth, it looks even bigger in lipstick, and even BIGGER if you're doing an over-the-top lip-sync of The New Pornographers.

PS: If this post is odd it's because I was listening to "Shorty Blackwell" by The Monkees. It's Mickey Dolenz's attempt at topping Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. You can imagine what THAT sounds like.

Living Space and Me

When it comes to living requirements I need two basic things: peace and space. I don't really care if my apartment is dusty or not, or if it has a nice colour scheme, or if the decor is...well, even a decor.

Today I got my first good look at the apartment I'm moving into and it certainly has space. More space than I remembered, in fact. When it came to choosing either unit A or unit B in the duplex, I chose "space" over "nicely renovated."

So now I take a closer look and, yes, there are some things that make me go "yich!" Despite the lack of cleaning by the previous tenants -- there's a crust of grunge in the bottom of the bathtub, most noticably, which my mother recoiled from in terror -- there are other things that I find myself being a little sad about. The bedroom painted in garish, childish blue and green, for instance. The loose bannisters. The ghost of cat urine still haunting the basement. The fact that both doors have wobbly fixtures and are difficult to open.

Still, though, it's MY new space. Will it be peaceful? I guess I'll know when the new tenant moves into unit A. And I'll really be able to judge when I have some furniture in there, and when I've wiped up the dust and cleaned the toothpaste off the mirrors.

Question #2: Will I be "house proud" in my new apartment? I'm feeling twinges of "house-proudness" at the moment -- as evidenced by my wondering what people will think of my shabby door and my garishly-painted bedroom -- but in the past this instinct for dusting, vacuuming, and cleaning has occupied a far-distant "last place" in my mind, behind all the other things I do in my life. And when I HAVE gotten house-proud in the past it's only lasted a week or so, before some percieved calamity has inspired me to retreat back into a purely functional (and avoidant) routine.

The difference here might be that I have SPACE to put the huge mountains of "stuff" that I've acquired over the years (and that I regrettably have to move during the next few days). If I can partition my life and still have a few square feet of visible floor, maybe I can form a routine of prettifying.

All in all, though, I think I'm in a pensive state of mind because our furnace broke again last night. My days are running out in this building -- and I still have a lot of packing to do -- but it looks like they'll be cold ones. And the fact that somebody backed into my mom's car in the parking lot sort of put a damper on the "first look."

But I'm hopeful! We'll see...

Holy Cow! Lysol!

I remember running across this in an old movie magazine a few years ago, but here it is again in The New Yorker, February 19, 1927:

...it explains things so much better than I can.

There is much misinformation about feminine hygiene -- a subject so vital to health and happiness that it behooves every woman to beware of unprofessional advice and to learn the facts.

As a contribution to the proper understanding and practice of scientific bodily care the makers of "Lysol" Disinfectant offer a booklet which gives the facts -- frankly, explicitly and reliably. Its name is "The Scientific Side of Health and Youth" and its author is a woman physician who has combined sympathetic appreciation of woman's intimate problems with professional knowledge and experience...

Lysol didn't make a special "douche formula," they just wrote a booklet telling women how to spray a household cleaner into their vaginas. And what's IN that household cleaner? This book from 1936 gives you the details, and also provides some horror stories about its use:

It consists essentially of cresol, a distillate of wood and coal, which has been made soluble in water by treating it with soap. Cresol was discovered through the attempts of scientists to find a substance which would not be so poisonous as carbolic acid and yet as effective in killing germs. It is now recognized to be almost, if not equally, as dangerous as carbolic acid itself; swallowing Lysol has come to be a common -- but extremely painful -- means of committing suicide.

No wonder the kid in the picture looks so scared.

For another great Lysol douche ad -- a "love-quiz" that looks like it's from the late '30s -- click here.

X-Ray Hair Removal

Right now I'm reading "Inventing Modern" by John H. Lienhard. It's a sort of personal, semi-autobiographical overview of the way technological advancements -- steam power, balloon-frame houses, elevators, X-rays, relativity, quantum physics -- brought "modern" into social consciousness in the 20th century.

While tracing the American fixation with everything "modern" during the first half of the century, Lienhard lets drop tidbits about inventions and concepts that flourished but failed, either because they were supplanted by new technologies -- cattle drives, the Pony Express -- or because they turned out to be very, very dangerous.

These stories make me sit up and say "holy cow!" Maybe he didn't intend to write a book of nifty factoids, but I sure am saying "holy cow!" a lot.

Holy Cow...The Tricho!

Apparently everybody was ga-ga about X-rays at the turn of the century, in the same way they would be ga-ga about atomic energy before VJ-Day. These X-rays could SEE THROUGH stuff! A doctor could look at the inside of your body...without opening it up first!

This was a miracle, but people just had no idea how dangerous X-rays were. We sometimes hear about the X-ray machines that children utilized to make sure their shoes fit in shoe stores, but I've never before heard of...THE TRICHO.

We all know that large doses of radiation will make your hair fall out. So why not use it as a method of hair removal? From the '20s to the mid-'40s, women went for multiple sessions at the Tricho machine. They'd sit with their chins up against X-ray emitters and get bombarded with radiation for four minutes at a time.

Their facial hair fell out, of course...but, as one website puts it:

...[it] also eventually resulted in wrinkling, atrophy, white or brown fibrous splotches, keratoses, ulcerations, carcinoma, and death for many clients.

Even after the dangers became known and the government shut down the machines, women continued to go to secret Tricho clinics...it was so effective they didn't seem to care that they'd be disfigured in 3 or 4 years. And what's more, people just loved X-rays because they were so scientific and modern.

That didn't stop them from dying, however. Apprently:

By 1970, one study estimated that over one-third of all radiation-induced cancer in women over a 46-year period could be traced to x-ray hair removal.

What eventually stopped the fad? According to doctors who coined the term "American Hiroshima Maiden Syndrome," women were turned off the Tricho by grotesque images of atom bomb survivors. Suddenly radiation wasn't so harmless anymore. So another science fad bit the dust.

The most comprehensive Tricho page I've found online is at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices...just in case you want to learn more.

A Fourth for Bridge (Not to Mention a Second and Third)

Ever since I saw images of well-dressed suburban '50s couples getting tipsy and playing Bridge I've wanted to join in the fun. The problem is that very few people play bridge anymore, and those that do are deadly serious about it.

Imagine my surprise and delight to learn that three people I work with have been dying to play bridge again...but they didn't have a fourth! I said I'd be happy to play, with the caveat that I've never played before and never got past chapter two of the "how to play bridge" book. They said that's okay. I said maybe we should hold off until I've read the REST of the book, and they said no, they'll teach me. I said I've never played any "trick" card games in my life. They said that's okay.

I sort of feel like I'm entering a Scrabble championship without knowing how to spell, but it's all about bettering myself. Right? RIGHT?

As an aside I notice that I've lost some basic English knowledge while writing these blog entries. I'm occasionally confusing my homonyms and not realizing it until later. Maybe it's because I'm trying to write quickly, or because my job involves writing all day and I'm fatigued when I get home. Or maybe I have a degenerative brain disease.

As a further aside my work has already directly affected my writing. 8 months of writing manuals has broken me of most of the habits I spent decades reinforcing. It's a struggle now to type "colour" instead of "color." I automatically use the Oxford comma and use only one space after a period. I'm becoming a drone.