The Chronicles Of Jessica

HOLY SHIT. I am so happy right now that I want to french kiss every registered Democrat in America. But I won't stop there! I want to embrace the spirit of bipartisanship, I want to get the love rolling. I want to go get a mani/pedi with Ann Coulter. I want to give Bill O'Reilly a hot oil treatment. I want to freebase morpheine with Rush Limbaugh, or whatever is his drug of choice these days.

All I can say is, thank god people woke up and actually turned off "Dancing with the Stars" long enough to get out to the polls and express their dissatisfaction with the hole that this administration has dug us into. I finally feel like I belong in the country I live in. I'm not going to visit any more websites about south american real estate, or hoard any more Canadian quarters. Other people realize that Bush is a hugely incompetent dipshit! Or at least enough of that 12% of swing voters realized it to make a difference in the election, and that's good enough for me.

Paul's blog can articulate so much of this stuff so much better than I can, but even though this is just a midterm, we have to know this is a searing condemnation of the current administration. People are fed up with what's been going on, and they should be. Seriously, yo. It came about six years too late but I think people are finally starting to wake up to the facts, and the facts are fucking bleak. Things have not been good. We are not safer, our international standing is in the toilet and there have been many childs left behind. And even though the Democrats aren't perfect, I know that this will mean the start of better things for our country. I am over the moon, readers!

I only hope we can start to reclaim some of our international goodwill before Paul and I go on our honeymoon. We had almost resigned ourselves to Niagra Falls.

Hola! That's spanish for hello! Guess who's enrolled in a spanish class at the local community college? And I am TOTALLY the best one. My teacher even thought I had taken spanish before, which I haven't. She just thinks I am a natural with this foreign language thing. Also I kissed up to her by bringing her free tickets to the American Shakespeare center.

There was an incredibly creepy disturbance in the force this week, my friends, and I know not what to make of it. I had to go to the laundromat by myself because we'd put it off for so long, and the amount of dirty clothes was just completely overwhelming. Most household tasks are a little beyond my reach, anyway. Chores just don't hold my interest. I'm more interested in 'clean' than 'neat'. The toilet will have been scrubbed several times in any given month before the archaelogical dig on my coffee table gets cleared off. I just always seem to find something better to do than straighten up. And you may understand my mania a little better when I reveal that this alienates me completely from the rest of the women in my family. They are all incredible housekeepers, especially Auntie Jan. She's the Michael Jordan of housekeeping. The woman could be bleeding out her eyes and she'd still make sure the vanity was free of water spots before going to the hospital.

A couple of years ago my mom was giving me a hard time about how cluttered my apartment was and how she would have thought I'd have grown out of those tendencies by now, so I said to her, "You know, maybe this is just the way I am, Ma."

She slapped me and washed my mouth out with soap. Which was weird, you know, because I was thirty.

Anyway, Paul's no Martha Stewart either, so we usually end up in this psychological wrestling match over who does this most odious of all household tasks - the laundry.

Now it's one thing to be able to wash the clothes in the privacy of your own home, mix up a cocktail, crack open some Downy, watch a little Lifetime while you wait out the spin cycle. That is a freakin' paradise compared to the average experience at the Staunton laundromat. This is the circle of hell that Dante forgot. I've actually had to ask people to extinguish their cigarettes - inside. And they've pretty much got the market cornered, so they keep raising and raising and raising the prices - it costs $3.50 just to dry a pair of jeans. I'm not exaggerating, it totally sucks. And this week we had like eight loads of dirty clothes to do. And I forgot to eat lunch before I went, so by the time I was done with everything I was practically fainting from hunger, so I wasn't in my right mind anyway, and then I saw the creepy attendant guy who windexes the front loaders and always wants to show you his etchings, so I booked it out of there kind of fast - and left all our towels sitting on the counter. When I realized what had happened (the next morning when I got out of the shower) I had to call creepy attendant guy only to be told that the towels were NOT there. That's right, someone stole all our towels.

These weren't name-brand Wamsutta egyptian cotton towels or anything like that, though they were clean and folded. I just can't get over the idea that someone would be so desperate for linens that they would walk into a raunchy laundromat and take the first mismatched stack they saw. Those towels have been...well they're towels! They've dried the intimate nooks and crannies of my (and presumably Paul's) body! Not to mention our guests, and we've certainly had one or two of questionable hygeine. (Sorry, Julie.) I just can't imagine anything so gross, it's like buying thongs from the Salvation Army thrift shop.

Still, I figure if they needed them that badly, who am I to judge? I haven't really had time to go buy new ones, between work and my spanish class and all, but paper towels are surprisingly adept for this purpose. I should write to the ad execs at Brawny, huh? This could be a whole new direction for them.

Vaya con dios, towel thieves. Yo tengo triente y uno anos. (True, that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, but my class hasn't gotten to the unit on expressing extreme irriation with the breakdown of the social order. So far we mainly tell time and figure out where the bathrooms are.)

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. What is it about big events that makes it seem like you spend 10 hours preparing and all of 10 minutes actually eventing? There is no doubt in my mind that the wedding will be the same exact phenomenon on a much larger scale, but at least that will be well-documented by a professional photographer.

So we had a sort of orphan-actor-potluck thing and I was in charge of stuffing. I did the rather labor-intensive traditional bread stuffing that is the mainstay of our family holiday dinners, I think it's a New England thing. I'd seen my grandmother and other Boutet women making it before but never actually done it myself. It's a lot harder than it looks. You actually cut the bread into little pieces with scissors and after two full loaves, some serious hand crampage can set in. BUT! It turned out rather tasty if I do say so myself. I managed to not eat myself nauseous this year. I wore jeans on purpose, instead of stretchy pants like I usually do, and I definitely quit while I was ahead. Fallon's green bean casserole almost put me over the top, though. Why is it you can throw Durkee fried onions on anything and make it yum? I bet you could top poop with them and easily choke down a few bites at least, you know, if you were on a game show or something.

I'm so glad I'm not going to be working in customer service for very much longer. I mean I'm friendly and patient with people but I can really only take so much. Here's something obnoxious that happens all day long: People will call us because they see the number on their caller id, and even though they don't have a message from anyone, they call the number back and say, "Somone called me. Who was it?"

How do people have nothing better to do than mess around with stupid stuff like this? Caller id is supposed to save you time by keeping you from having to talk to people whose calls you don't want to take. Now, inevitably, if I accidentally dial a wrong number and hang up once I realize that I did, whoever I accidentally dialed will ring me back an hour later - "Somebody called me." Newsflash, dipshits! Everyone has voicemail, everyone knows to wait for the beep, if whoever was calling you meant to call you and it was important, they would have left a message!

Sigh.

Also, I don't have time to balance your checkbook with you over the phone. It's not my fault you spent the money you'd earmarked for your electric bill on a membership upgrade at www.hotpussyparty.com.

I'm cranky! Think it's time for a turkey sandwich. And a nap.