The Chronicles Of Jessica

I've stopped buying bottled water for our house because I feel guilty about the environmental aspect of it. A heckton of petroleum goes into making all the plastic that we use in such a mindless fashion, and it gets on my nerves. The water bottles aren't even made out of recycled plastic, as far as I can tell. They have that little logo on them to encourage you to recycle the bottle instead of throwing it out, but come to think of it, I don't know that I've ever seen anything that indicates a product has been made out of recycled plastic. I worry that recycling is probably a total hoax. I've never actually seen them pick up our garbage but I have little faith that the bottles and cans we so painstakingly rinse and separate are actually making it to the recycling stage. The guys who collect it can barely manage to get the empty bins back onto the sidewalk, which is not exactly rocket science.

What a tired analogy, rocket science. I'm exhausted today. I literally sat here with my fingers over the keyboard for like two minutes trying to think of something else to make the point. But I once heard this NASA guy on the radio talking about how, among rocket scientists, they use that joke all the time and then laugh heartily at the irony of it. Which is cute/nerdy in a way that appeals to me. Though it has nothing to do with what I was saying.

Anyway, I'm probably exhausted because I'm dehydrated, because I'm not drinking as much water as I used to when I was getting the bottles. I am very weird about water. When I was a kid I never ever liked it, unless it was absolutely ice cold and even then it was a struggle for my mother to get me to drink anything that wasn't fizzy. Of course she could have been plying me with San Pellegrino, but I don't know how readily available imported Italian sparkling water was in Alabama in the early eighties.

I used to think San Pellegrino was the stupidest thing in the universe, and so bourgeois I could not even handle it, and then I worked at Orso in New York City (they're bastards, never eat there) and I actually tried it. We were allowed to take the leftovers if people didn't finish their whole bottle and it was delicious! Don't get grossed out, the customers were pouring it out of the bottle into glasses on their table so it's not like we were sucking up the backwash of random NYC tourists or something. But I loved it! It was totally refreshing and tasty. I would buy that all the time, except I'd be having the same carbon-footprint angst that I have over the plastic bottles, slightly lessened by the fact that the San Pellegrino bottles are glass. I don't really know if producing glass is bad for the environment. And if it is, don't tell me. The guilt buffet table is over laden right now, mkay?

So for whatever reason, I don't like drinking water from the tap. Maybe I saw Erin Brockovich too many times, I don't know, it just kind of weirds me out. Though I will drink water out of a water fountain at the gym with no problem, and I have no problem drinking tap water at restaurants. I'm a mass of contradictions. My new system now is to try and buy one bottle of water and keep refilling it at the water cooler at TempLand or at the gym or wherever. This was working more or less okay, except I wasn't really getting as much water as I needed because I kept finding myself out and about and getting thirsty and needing to buy another bottle. Then Paul would see this half empty bottle hanging around and he'd pour it out and recycle it. I think he's under the impression that water goes bad, like juice or Lactaid. These deeply held beliefs take time to correct, but I'm working on it.

So I tried having one on my desk and one at home. This didn't seem to be working and I couldn't figure out why until I realized that the cleaning crew at the office building was throwing my water bottle away every night. Why they would take it upon themselves to do this, I have no idea. Maybe they think water goes bad, too. There's no recycling here, either, which means they've just been getting tossed in the garbage. So all this effort I'm making to try and improve my personal petroleum consumption is just being thwarted at every turn, and I'm THIRSTY.

The fact that we have to pay for water at all kind of galls me. It should just be given to us as citizens. That's what the Romans did, right? That's what that aqueduct business was all about? A civilized society should provide water to its people.

And postage. How can it cost forty cents to mail a damn letter? Water and postage. I don't ask for much.

Today at TempLand I had to call all of these foreign companies to try and schedule this stuff (I could go into detail but why should you be just as bored as I am?) and it left me feeling like such a dipshit American. The companies were in Italy, Germany, Poland, France, Finland and Sweden, and a lot of places the person who answered did speak English and was able to help me out pretty well. But at some places, even though they didn't speak English, they would try speaking to me in like three other languages, and I was completely useless every time. I could determine the language but I couldn't understand anything, of course, and I kept having to say, "I'm sorry, I only speak English." It made me feel so dumb. I mean in my defense I do speak excellent English. English and I go way back. But I took French for 3 years and I just took a Spanish class at the end of last year - yet I am completely useless at any actual communication.

I could get into a whole thing about how the American educational system completely leaves us hanging in this regard, by not making foreign languages a requirement until high school, which is really way too late. If you start teaching kids languages as soon as they start learning to talk, there is no end to the information they can absorb. But I'm not going to get into that whole thing, because I have known for a long time about that particular inadequacy of our learning institutions, and so I really have only myself to blame for my failure to progress in this capacity. I just wish there was a thing like in The Matrix, where I could lie in that dentist chair and Ike Turner could just hook my brain up to the computer and upload knowledge and then I would just instantly know jujitsu and Portuguese and stuff.

I would go on, but I think that analogy sufficiently illustrates my culture's inherent lack of industriousness far better than I could put further into words.

We've been car-less since about March because Paul's trusty Cheverolet bit the dust and we weren't sure if we really needed a car living here in DC, so we didn't look into getting another one right away. It turns out we kind of do need at least one car, there are just a lot of places where Metro doesn't run and a lot of errands that can't be accomplished without some mode of mechanized transport. To wit: we've been ordering our groceries from an online delivery service which mostly works out okay, but then the other night they were supposed to bring the groceries between 7 and 9 pm and they didn't show up until almost midnight and Paul's Haagen Daz Caramel Cone was totally melted and that just isn't cool. Okay, it was OUR Haagen Daz Caramel Cone. When I got on the phone to complain, the woman told me that she would refund our delivery charge "this once" but that they don't guarantee delivery so they wouldn't give us that refund if it happened again. So basically, all those other times that they showed up when they supposed to were just happy coincidences; they don't guarantee their delivery times so I should consider myself lucky that I happened to get the groceries delivered when I was home to receive them. If you can't guarantee the times, what is point of having the times? The delivery is the service that I'm paying for! That's what you do! I could go to Giant and battle the lines and the substandard produce and the screaming kids in the candy aisle but that's what I'm paying you for.

So we need a car. And of course, whole new set of hassles. Yesterday I got this notice from the DMV saying that we owed this $150 fine because our insurance had been cancelled on our vehicle. When I called them, I politely explained that we had sold that vehicle and that's why the insurance had been cancelled. But THEY (not-so-nicely) explained that because the insurance had been cancelled before they had the physical license plates back, that our insurance was considered lapsed and therefore we would have to pay. Now, I am in the habit of complying with the law. I had even called my stepfather, who was a Virginia state cop, to ask him what we should do with these license plates (because in other states I've lived in, you just throw them away or, if you're in Alabama, you can use them to make a decorative statement.) He told me that I should surrender them in person in case someone got ahold of them and wanted to use them for nefarious purposes. Of course, the DMV has no hours that they're open on the weekends, so you have to take pretty much the entire day off to go wait in their lines, and so they didn't get these license plates back until a few weeks after the car was sold. Thus - $150 fine. Not that I'm not blaming Charlie, because Virginia is a normal state with normal laws. How can they try and charge us $150 fine for a lapse in insurance on a car we DON'T EVEN OWN anymore?

This is what politicians don't understand. See, it's not stuff like gay marriage and abortion and the war in Iraq that really impact people's day-to-day lives. I know it sounds shallow, but it's true. It's stuff like this. It's having to wait in line for hours at the DMV and being charged arbitrary fines for ridiculous shit, so you can't afford to replace your Carton of Caramel Cone. It's being condescended to and spoken to rudely by municipal employees. It's being jerked around! I once contested a parking ticket I got in New York on a rental car because it said I was within 36 inches of a fire hydrant. I painstakingly measured the distance with a tape measure and took photos and documented the fact that I was well over 36 inches away from the fire hydrant. They took about three months to write me back and tell me that yes, I was more than 36 inches away from the hydrant, but the rule said you had to be 50 inches away. YOU SAID 36!!!! How can you say 36 and then go back and say 50? That doesn't make any sense! You are just trying to screw me! And there is nothing I can do about it and I hate you and your ass face!!!!!!

GAH!

I really want to get my daddy down here in his state trooper uniform and make him take me to the DMV so I can say, "This man says that this is bullshit, and he has a gun, which I think lends an authoratative air to his opinion."

I think because that girl does not look dissimilar to me at that age. Either way - GOLD!

I spent a couple of days last week workshopping the new show at Woolly with the director and the writer and a few members of the cast who were available; I still haven't met them all yet. The director is awesome and he's a Scone - I've decided this is my new nickname for British guys. Charles thinks it's ridiculous but I think we've established by now that Charles thinks most things I do are ridiculous. He's supportive of me nonetheless, which I appreciate. Besides, he's British, too, of course he's not going to like the gestalt of the whole nickname thing. I wouldn't like it if he started calling American girls some arbitrary nickname based on one of our native foods, like Pop Tarts or something. Although I have definitely met some women for whom that description would fit quite aptly. Anyway, given that I was born in England I feel entitled to some freedom of expression in this regard.

Anyway, the workshopping was really cool. Melissa James Gibson, the playwright, is so neat - she just sits and she's all cute and quiet outwardly but you know her mind is just churning with all this stuff because you come in the next day and she's written, like, 30 new pages of the play overnight. Why can't I tap into talent on command like that? I mean I can haul out my Marisa Tomei "My Cousin Vinny" impression pretty easily but it's not the same thing.

It's been so long since I worked on a new play. In fact I've never ever worked on a play with the actual writer in residence before; Shakespeare has never made himself available for rewrites, as it were. I wish it was starting tomorrow. Then just as the play was wrapping up I could leave town, go get married, and take a week long vacation as the capper. The timing is probably good though - this way I have something else to really look forward to. Besides Season 4 of LOST, which isn't until JANUARY. Bastards.

I was thinking of going to the movies this weekend and there is nothing, but nothing, that I want to see. I heard Shrek 3 stinks; well, my cousins Allie and Alana said it was awesome but the grownups that I've polled have been lukewarm. Rise of the Silver Surfer is some comic book movie, forget it. You can make a comic book movie but you need good actors like Patrick Stewart to get me there. We already saw Pirates of the Caribbean and I was not impressed. The plots are so bizarre and so vague in those movies, you can't remember who's dead, who's plotting against who, who's part fish. And there's not nearly enough of Johnny Depp mincing around doing his Keith Richards impression. Hear me now, Sony: Johnny Depp mincing around doing his Keith Richards impression is the ONLY reason the first movie did so well! More Johnny Depp mincing around doing his Keith Richards impression = Better movie!

Something tells me Sony could give a damn because according to the internet (from whence all facts are born), P.O.T.C. has already earned $274,145,510. Holy shit, that's a lot of money. And I think that's just straight ticket sales, not even counting merchandising and Happy Meal toys and stuff like that. Bastards.

I want to see Ocean's 13 but Paul doesn't, because he didn't see Ocean's 11 or 12. He is such a hard ass about stuff like this. He has to watch everything exactly in order. He won't even come in to the middle of a Seinfeld rerun, it has to be exactly at the beginning. But that's okay, I'm going to go alone because Ocean's 13, to me, has the drool-worthiest cast of any movie franchise. You've got your Pitt, your Clooney, your Cheadle, and (my personal favorite) your Damon. J'adore Matt Damon. Actually, I think Paul has a little man-crush on him too, because when we rented The Departed he kept chuckling to himself every time the Damon was on screen. He caught me lifting an eyebrow and he said, "I know, but he's just so charming!" I agree wholeheartedly. He's charming, he can act, and he's got an ass you could bounce change off of.

Matt? Call us.

I hate Ann Coulter. She is just so mean. Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, doesn't matter - mean is mean. Elizabeth Edwards called in when she was on Hardball the other night to call her out, on some of the stuff she says, such as this little gem:

"If you want points for not using your son’s death politically, don’t you have to take down all those “Ask me about my son’s death in a horrific car accident” bumper stickers?"

That's mean. How does it help anything to say stuff like this? It's just trying to incite people and get them talking so you can try to sell more mean books. Also she looks like a skeleton.

See? Now I'm mean! She has a bad effect on the populus. I want to hire someone to sit on her until she dies. Whoa! That was really mean! I need to go look at some puppies.

The goal is supposed to be for us to keep progressing, getting smarter - moving forward and not trying to drag one another down with pointless invective. So I take back what I said about having someone sitting on her. But seeing as she hasn't backed down even an inch about being urged to raise the level of discourse, I don't want to completely give in either. What say we just get someone to slap her around a little? And make her have a sandwich.

Well, what else....Paris Hilton has been out of jail for two whole days and has she called? No. And I kept my lunch hour free all week long just in case. She swears that the world is going to see a different Paris Hilton from now on. Which I suppose could mean a fully-clothed version of herself.

I really need to get a bathing suit to wear on the cruise but I'm out of recreational drugs so I've been putting it off.

I've also decided that I look weird in glasses and that I can't handle contacts. I got new ones last week and I'm getting a headache every time I wear them for more than two hours. I really want to get my eyes lasered but every time I tell someone that they have a story about someone they know who had it horribly botched, or else the person's eye exploded when they went up in an airplane or something. Oh, also I don't have five thousand dollars. Which apparently is a surgical prerequisite.

Our downstairs neighbors apartment got broken into the other day and even though this affects us not at all, I am still going to write about it in terms of memememememe.

Apparently some theiving dudes were able to somehow pop the lock off of the iron bar security door that is in front of the entrance to their apartment and then either kick in or perhaps use some sort of log to ram open the other door, then stole their laptop and digital camera and some other stuff. I guess I don't know for sure that they were dudes and I don't want to discriminate unfairly, but let's face it, most women aren't so much for the breaking and entering. I feel fairly certain that the reason they chose that place was because the door is kind of obscured by the stairs leading to our apartment, so they were hidden a little bit from the street. Still, the upstairs neighbors have a lady in to clean their apartment once a week and she observed a dude ringing the bell for that apartment and acting in a suspicious joint-casey kind of way. When he saw her looking at him out the window he took off. Hopefully he's under the impression that a shut in lives there and he won't be back. I would assume it's the same dude, but who knows? He wasn't wearing a t shirt that said, "I robbed this place Tuesday and all I got was a lousy Inspiron Notebook."

Everyone has their little crime stories. Fortunately among my friends and family they are for the most part very non-violent, more inconvenience-slash-personal outrage type stories, so I'm very grateful for that. I don't want to go into the ones that were violent because it gives me the major heebie jeebies.

Minor detour, courtesy of Word detective dot com: "As to your worries about "heebie-jeebies" possibly being an anti-Semitic slur, the answer is a somewhat qualified "no." The phrase "heebie-jeebies" was invented by Billy De Beck, a famous American comic strip artist of the 1920's, in his popular "Barney Google" strip in 1923. De Beck, by the way, also invented "hotsy-totsy" (a term of approval) and the wonderful "horsefeathers" (meaning "utter nonsense") in his strip. "Heebie-jeebies" must have caught the popular imagination immediately, since the dance of that name appeared a scant three years later, in 1926."

See? I give a little learning along with....whatever else you're getting from this.

As I was saying, it tends to bring up a flood of personal crime anecdotes from people in your circle, along with your own recollections. For example when I lived in Chicago and my cousin Tonya was visiting me and our purses got stolen out of the trunk of my car along with my friend Gotch's coat, his journal, and a 24 pack of toilet paper that I had bought for my apartment. (Three guesses as to my advantageous location when I realized that was missing.) Then the car was actually stolen two days before I was supposed to drive to Ashley Bishop's wedding in Birmingham, so I didn't get to go to the wedding, and when the car was finally found, the police never called to tell me so it sat in an impound lot for a week racking up fees for Mayor Daley's brother in law, who owns all the impound lots in Chicago. "Vote early and often!" ARGH.

I remember that like it was yesterday because it was such a disaster. Marcus had to drive me to the impound lot at the crack of dawn, and they couldn't tell me anything about the car, not even whether I would even be able to drive it away because, according to the woman behind the counter in the gold glitter "Jesus was a Black Man" tee shirt and stirrup pants, the car may or may not have "been burned".

Excellent.

Turned out it had not been burned or even singed, just a little cracked up and thank goodness for Geico because they handled it all amazingly and I could not have been more pleased with their customer service. Not only do their commercials make me lol out loud, they actually back it up. I love the cavemen, I love the gekko, I love their whole kooky ad team (which is based in Richmond, by the way. Little bit of trivia.)

Julie's car has been broken into twice here in the District; actually the downstairs neighbors had their car broken into last month, too. (God, they have bad luck!) Tonya and Claude had their house broken into and the crooks stole their Sega Genesis, if I'm not mistaken - of course it was probably obsolete about five minutes later, so oh well. Johnny and Anne had their apartment broken into which was reallllllly bad, because he has his photography studio in the apartment and they got some expensive equipment and her wedding necklace. My friend David Parkes apartment was robbed when he lived in New York while he was in it; they tied his roomate to a chair and he pretended to sleep through the whole thing. Which is pretty smart if you think about it and also kind of hilarious, especially 20 years later.

Of course I once had a roomate who stole the keys to my car and made copies and then drove it all over town for months without me knowing. I just kept finding taco bell wrappers under the drivers seat and thinking, "When the hell did I eat a Gordita?" You could be living alongside a criminal mind, you just never know. Well, I do, actually. Paul is so moral he won't even let me take a ball point pen. I maintain that ballpoint pens are like community property, you need one you take one, you leave one - so? Like the penny tray at 7-11.

Feel free to chime in with comments about your own personal crime related experiences. I'm not happy with the level of comments lately. Ante up! Also I'm making a "sorry you got robbed but I'm glad we didn't" card for the neighbors and I need ideas.