The Chronicles Of Jessica

I got this comment on my last blog from someone who was obviously searching for a hippie presence on the internet so that he could dampen their enthusiasm with some right-wing invective. I don't think his acknowledgement was meant to be flattery, but flatteries are few and far between these days (unless you count construction sites and hot dog vendors) and so, this is how I'm choosing to interpret it. I'm famous and have a large readership and Roger from Oregon wants to jump on my coattails. The Chronicles policy is not to discriminate in the comments, unless you are hocking Viagra, Cialis or Hydracodone. So, Roger from Oregon, your comment - misguided though it may be - shall stand. Whilst I smoke marijuana joints with members of Al Qaeda and watch my Pollyanna 30th Anniversary Edition DVD, I'll think of you.

This week has sucked with a capital suck, my friends, and I am in no way sorry to see the ass end of it. First Paul overslept by about three hours on Monday and was late for work, sending the homestead into an absolute panic (this sounds weird if you don't know that Paul has to get up at 4:30 in the morning. Yeah. He gets a medal.) Then I got lost on the way to this audition, arrived totally late and panicked and sweaty and I had to borrow fifty cents from this actor in the lobby so I could get a bottle of water since I was dying of thirst and I'd totally forgotten my wallet.

All right, that's a lie. I had my wallet. But I'll let you in on a little foible of mine - I never have cash on me. N.E.V.E.R. And it's not because I'm afraid of getting robbed, it's because everybody takes a debit card, even for a $3 latte, and it's faster and simpler to just use that for everything. You can use the debit card for train fare, you can use it at the post office, you can use it at McDonalds even. So why do you need cash? You need it for maybe three things, parking meters, vending machines, and the homeless. There is this one enterprising guy in Chinatown who accepts debit and credit for panhandling but there's a five dollar minimum.

So, Kindly Bearded Character Actor Guy, if by some chance you recognize yourself in this, thank you for the change. I didn't get the part but maybe you did, and if so, congrats. Tell them they screwed up big time by not hiring me, because I bring atmosphere. I make things fun, and I guess they just couldn't see that, could they? No, they were too busy judging me and deciding that I was a sweaty, splotchy mess. Pffft.

Then last night we were going to see a show with our friend Christine and our car died in the middle of New York Avenue in rush hour traffic. Just died. I tried to get it to turn over a few times and it just wouldn't stay on - so finally Paul and Christine had to push it off to the side of the road and we had to get someone to come and tow us. It was $75 to get them to tow us about a block and a half, and now they want $90 to run a diagnostic on the car to try and figure out why it's losing power. We offered a kind of a barter scenario, they fix the car, I hang around their dingy office and brighten the place up with some atmosphere but they said no. Some people's priorities are just completely skewed. I mean screwed. No, skewed.

Skewed.

(Hey, check out my new design theme! Marcus is making some updates for me. We love Marcus! He understands...things...on the computer. And is winning and handsome.)

Some things I don't get.

For instance, it's 9 degrees out right now and everywhere I go I see these young girls with no coat on. Did it recently become uncool to properly protect yourself in 9 degree weather, because I didn't get the memo. Or is Generation Z just impervious to extreme weather conditions? I don't think that can be it, because once summer rolls around you know I'll be seeing these exact same girls trotting around town with their fun-bags barely covered by a skimpy tank top that says "Beg Me For It" in sequins across the front.

I had that tank top for a while myself but then a bunch of the spangles fell off at the dry cleaner. Stupid Bedazzler. I should never have been sucked in without a solid warrantee.

Something else I've noticed that is an odd trend: Didn't rehab used to be for people who had problems with drugs and alcohol? Now it seems like they have a rehab for just about anything, especially if all you really need is a convenient respite from the press. There's Isaiah Washington, who made some rather unflattering remarks about a homosexual coworker and now has entered a residential treatment facility. Apparently, you can go to rehab to learn not to hate gays?! That's incredible! There's really nothing those 12 steps can't help with!

I had no idea. If rehab is this comprehensive, I can think of several things we should start sending people in for. To wit:

• Chronic subscribing to Weekly World News
• Unnatural reliance on the Home & Garden Network (yes, mother, I'm looking straight at you.)
• B.O.
• Bad customer service.
• Repeated insistence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (could probably get a decent group rate on that one)
• Spitting, anywhere other than a sink or dentist's office
• Falling asleep/reading "People"/knitting during plays (bit of an earmark for me there, I admit.)

And speaking of gay, Ted Haggard has emerged from his rehab experience and assures the press that he is now 100% hetero. Ta da! It's like magic, this rehab! What a relief it must be to Ted's wife; three weeks of counseling was all it took to undo the damage caused to their marriage by years of his closeted methamphetamine-fueled same-sex frolicking. Life in the Haggard household is normal again. Ahhhhh.

It's too bad about the Bears losing the Super bowl. I should probably check on my friends Kelly and Steve and make sure they haven't committed suicide. Paul and I didn't watch the game, we didn't even know it was Super bowl Sunday until we saw a special on Festingos Tortilla chips at the Giant (buy one, get one free.) Paul was hiding out in the office while I watched the Monk marathon on USA. I haven't really had cable tv over the last few years, so I haven't seen this show many times before but it's GOLD! Two thumbs up. Anyway, it's not that I'm anti-football, I just get confused. I kind of need someone around to explain what's happening, like, the entire time. There are so many penalties and plays and fouls and filibusters - I can't keep up, I just can't. Jimmy tried to make some headway in this department a few years back, and he was really making progress, too, but you'd be surprised how many people are not willing to do this for you when they're trying to have fun watching football. I've lost all headway since then. Maybe there's a sports rehab that could help me.

You know how California is like getting ready to separate from North America and float out to sea? Can't we do the same thing to Texas, just like perforate them somehow and set them adrift?

I don't mean any disrespect to any Texans who are readers, but as far as I know, I only have Fallon and I don't know that she really counts, anyway. I've never seen her in a cowboy hat and she doesn't have any kind of extensive knowledge about the Alamo that I can see. She does make good guacamole, but that could just be a coincidence. Anyway - first they unleash George Bush on us and now this - what is with people out there? Has the heat fried their brains?

For those of you too lazy or disinterested to follow the link, I will sum up. This lady from Texas left a couple of huge boxes of honkin' diamond rings (apparently she's a jeweler) in the trunk of this guy's taxi in New York city, along with a thirty cent tip (ouch!). Then he ran all over town making calls and everything, finally found her, and she compensated him with a $100 reward.

Is it just me, or is this woman the biggest cheapskate E.V.E.R? First of all, I would probably have at least given him one of the diamond rings for his girlfriend or something. $100 bucks seems a little paltry for what he saved her from going through, don't you think? And second, thirty cents is a pretty damn lousy tip unless the cabbie is driving you, like, across the street. And it's not like she didn't have the change, because he was breaking a twenty for her. Most places in New York would probably charge you a thirty cent fee just to break the twenty. They are not fond of making change in that city, let me tell you. And yet no one has ever adjusted the ATM's so that you can get less than twenty dollars out, or specify what denominations you want.

I always found that annoying, so what I would do when I first moved to New York is go to the Duane Reade (that's the drugstore, for you non-Applers) and buy something small that I needed, you know, like deodarant or Playgirl, and then choose the cashback option with the debit card. Then you can tell the cashier, oh, could you give me some singles with that or whatever. This plan was genius, because there is a drugstore pretty much everywhere you go, and there's no surcharge to do this, unlike at a bank.

Until! One day, and I swear this is true - I went into the Duane Reade and the cashback option had been disabled on the little machine. So I asked the cashier and she says, "We don't have cashback." And I say, "Oh, did you stop offering that?" and SHE says, "We've never had that." Well, whatever. I figured she was new. But upon subsequent trips to the Duane Reade, I would inquire with different cashiers at various locations and kept getting the same answer - "We've never had cashback."

Well, maybe the Duane Reade corporation had succeeded in brainwashing an entire fleet of employees but they were NOT going to pull one over on me. I wrote to the company, asking for an explanation as to why they no longer offered the cashback feature with debit card purchase and do you know what they said? "We've never had that." Okay - STOP LYING! You did have it, because I used to use it all the time and it was my special secret system for avoiding ATM surcharges and you hated that, didn't you? You just couldn't let that stand! No one can win except for you, you just had to be the big man, the big drugstore corporate man, forcing me to use your store ATM and laughing all the way to your overflowing vaults full of MY hard-earned money!!! Screw you, Duane Reade! Who is Duane Reade anyway - HE'S NOT EVEN A REAL PERSON!!!!

Um...

Yeah, so anyway, that bitch from Texas is pretty tight with a buck!

That's all I'm saying.

For those in Chicago or willing to be, check out www.JohnnyKnightphoto.com

Well, yesterday was Valentine's Day, and owing to the fact that D.C. is like a dirty, windy ice cube right now, Paul and I didn't get to have dinner at this restaurant where I had made reservations almost a month ago. We could still have gone, but it was so nasty out, and I literally could not figure out how I was going to get to this place in high heels and a dress. I would have had to wear snowboots and legwarmers and bring my shoes in a separate bag and that's just not classy. We could have taken a taxi but dinner was going to be pretty expensive on its own - see aforementioned posts re: "poverty". And as you know, our car is on the fritz. We ended up going to this Italian place around the corner from us, which I had read about online. The food was just okay. Still, we had a really sweet evening; Paul got me this new Annie Leibowitz book I've been dying for, and we were home in time to watch LOST.

(Spoiler alert! Also - people-who-don't-watch-LOST-and-don't-care-about-it-alert!) And speaking of lost, LOST has lost me. It was pointed out to me recently that LOST did not start out with some sort of story arc in mind, the writers just keep churning it out and what's going to happen next is as much of a mystery to them as it is to us. Well, it shows! If JJ wants me to remain a loyal fan of this show (and I have no reason to believe that he's indifferent to me) then I need some answers and I need them right now. I don't want any more flashbacks into the lives of these tertiary characters. I don't care about creepy Scottish guy and his ex-girlfriend, I don't care about mincy Juliette and her ex-husband, and I could give two shits about any of the stupid stuff they keep showing that happened before the damn plane crashed. Just tell me what is up with this group of psychic nutjobs hanging out there and kidnapping everyone and let me go live the rest of my life in peace.

Also, there isn't nearly enough footage of Sawyer without his shirt on. Althought at least they did finally have him do it with Kate, so I guess I can't complain that I'm not getting thrown any bones. But you're on thin ice, LOST. The shark is poised and ready, and you are about to jump it.

On an unrelated note, this is possibly the creepiest thing I've ever seen.

Apparently, a cross-section of Evangelicals have started hosting these "purity balls" which is a kind of cotillion for virgins, who've promised their fathers to remain virgins until they get married. I read that some of the fathers and daughters exchange "purity rings" with one another when the girl gets her first period.

There are so many things about this that give me the shimmies. Obviously this whole movement is intended to get girls to abstain from having sex until they get married. In theory, I don't have a problem with that at all. There was a time in my youth when I thought I would wait until I got married to have sex, too. (Stop that - why are you laughing?) I think that abstinence-education is fine; there's certainly nothing wrong with letting kids know that the only sure way to protect against STD's and unintended pregnancy is not to have sex at all. But to just stop at abstinence education is ridiculous and it's irresponsible. Teenagers are going to have sex no matter how much we try to talk them out of it and when they do, they deserve access to information about how to protect themselves. The Bush administration funded over 170 million dollars to abstinence education last year - not sex education, abstinence education. That means that by definition, the course material can't include information about how to use condoms or any other forms of birth control. And I read that more than half these programs were purposely disseminating misinformation to scare the kids, like telling them that condoms are only 50% effective and that you can get pregnant by touching another person's genitals. (Although in high school we did hear about this one girl who got pregnant that way, it was a friend of Misty's boyfriend Randy's cousin. At this time, The Chronicles know of no other relevant statistics.)

I just don't understand how people can talk out of both sides of their mouths about this stuff - we don't want you having abortions but we don't want you knowing about how not to get pregnant either. ???? AAAAARGGHHHH! Why can't those people get kidnapped by the group of psychic nutjobs on LOST?

Plus, the whole thing is totally sexist. Why aren't they trying to get the boys to promise to remain pure until marriage? Hey - I freely admit the futility of that exercise but it's their dogma and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I like the idea of father's becoming closer to their daughters and trying to help build their self-esteem, but this is icky. But you know, the one thing that is kind of fun is to imagine the expression on my father's face if I ever tried to initiate a conversation about my periods. I have a feeling that a desert island would not be far enough away for him.

I found this thing online where you can upload your photo and it tells you what celebrity you look like, and now I'm obsessed with it. I made Paul let me do a photo of him. It said he looked like Matthew Fox and Mary Kate Olsen. Weird, because I always thought his looks favored Ashley.

I feel we've spent so much of our life force energy dealing with Comcast over the last week, we may never be the same. It's probably the equivalent of smoking a carton of cigarettes, or having pounds of red meat loitering in your bowels.

The cable went out last Wednesday, but not just the cable: the cable, the internet and the telephone, which are all tied together in what they charmingly call the "Triple Play Package". At first we thought it was my fault, because we have one of those switches that turns off all the power to the room and I accidentally flipped that and left it off all day and then when we got home that night everything was dead. They were supposed to come Thursday between 4 and 7 and Paul got off work to meet them, and they didn't show. They were supposed to come Sunday between 4 and 7 (and we nearly killed ourselves driving home from New Jersey in a frickin' blizzard to get there in time) and they didn't show. So Paul got on the phone last night, and wept and pleaded, and offered some cash and our first-born child, and they promised they would be there by ten a.m. this morning, and the guy finally showed up at 9:57. Stupidly, I didn't get up in time to take a shower because I realized that the minute I got in the shower, he would show up and ring the bell and then leave because he'd assume we weren't home. That's how it works, right? It's the same principle of the universe that makes your food come to the table when you go to the bathroom at a restaurant. In fact I tried to get this principle working for me by waiting for the guy without pants on, you know, because of course the repairman shows up when you have no pants on. Yeah, it didn't work.

It turned out they had disconnected the cable themselves last week when our downstairs neighbors moved out. Brilliant. Now I have to spend the day as an oily-haired crone because they don't know the diff between the basement and the first floor. There's not a balance credit big enough to appease me for that, Crapcast!

In other genius customer-service news, Paul and I rented a car to go see his family in New Jersey, which was so much fun, and when I returned the car, the guy at Thrifty charged my credit card for the rental car reservation of one Jake Dunton, of Indiannapolis, Indiana. He apparently rented a car there in 2004. How they could make this mistake, I do not know, for I don't look like a Jake, and it is 2007. Of course now they have taken their substantial car rental fee TWICE and I'm sure this will be no problem at all to clear up. And even if it is, what care I for that?! I mean, I have more disposable income than Oprah! In fact, I should start my own school in Africa, right next door to hers, and we can coordinate mosaic tiles and landscaping choices.

We didn't really watch the Academy Awards last night, although Paul was able to get the channel with an antenna we found in a box under the dining room table (why, where do you keep your antennaes?) Paul wanted to see Al Gore get his Oscar, and I kind of did too, but I have this love/hate thing with award shows. I love seeing everyone all dressed up and everything, but it's just such a huge collective self-congratulatory pat on the back, it kind of puts me off sometimes. And I don't like having to stare at Halle Berry every year, who makes me feel fat, and all the famous actors, who make me feel unsuccessful. I always have this vague feeling that if I could get one of those gigs as a seat-filler, and score a chair next to Martin Scorcese, then maybe I could get something going. But with my luck I'd probably get stuck in the balcony between Carrot Top and the guy who did the sound editing for Saw III.