Caustic Cupcake's Creepy Cupboard

I was thinking today, as I carried some more of my stuff out of the apartment to take to my parents' house, about the order in which I've been collecting my things.

• First round: a few sets of clothes, some toiletries, Wheelock's Latin, George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Wellbutrin, a bedside table, and a cell phone charger.
• Round Two: More clothes, hair accessories, and a few articles of makeup.
• Round Three: laptop and power cord; vitamins; quilting supplies; guitar; stuffed walrus.
• Round Four: Clothes; bills, checkbook, stamps, and financial records; iPod cord; two more hoodies.

Oh, the horror: the internet at my parents' house is down. "There was life before internet, you know," my mother said, but the time is now and the internet is here! And by "here" I mean the local Burger King, where I am internetting on my laptop.

I took my laptop, vitamins, quilting supplies, guitar, and stuffed walrus over to my sister's room at my parents' house yesterday before work. I have two walruses, both of them presents from Logic Professor. The big one is named Gettysburg, and the smaller, cuter one is named Getlet. He had texted me to say that Getlet missed me. I told him to leave the walruses out of this. Then I came and rescued my walrus.

In addition to missing LoPro and our kittens and, to a lesser extent, the most boring rabbit ever, I am also feeling guilty. It is the complement of missing someone when you are at fault for the separation: I feel guilty because of how he feels. Seeing LoPro upset makes me upset, and it's all the worse because I'm the cause of it. While I appreciate the kind words of everyone who comments here, I have to say that I am not the one you should be consoling, and I probably do not deserve it.

By the way, speaking of Burger King, I am gaining weight. I keep shoveling cookies and ice cream into my face. Maybe today I'll run around the back yard a couple times.

Well, I'd better get out of here; my computer is about to die, and I have to bring my parents some burgers. Also, there's a homeless woman here who keeps staring at me, and a man who sounds like he has tuberculosis. Remind me to blog about all the new bartenders I've been training. I leave you with a couple pictures of my current HQ:

Labels: Logic Professor, Lovelife

Labels: Kittens

JQ the Neph-ew and I were sitting on the kitchen floor at the ancestral manse of his grandparents - my temporary headquarters - playing with Tupperware. He decided to dump an entire package of strawberry Oreos into a Tupperware container.

"Tell Dyeda what we did with the cookie earlier," I said. Dyeda was sitting in the kitchen while Gramma fried bacon.
"We did with the cookie throwed it into the street and Aunt Cupcaked runned it over and said 'What did you do to my tire?!'" he reported dutifully. Dyeda smiled.

The entire package fell into the container and once, sending a couple Oreos flying.
"Whoa! Tons!" he exclaimed.

JQ loves bacon. He has been waiting for me to blow on strips of it until they cool down, and then yelling at his grandmother, "WHY DID YOU LET ME EAT THAT FLAMING HOT STRIP OF BACON?!" and laughing as she feigns astonishment. This is because he heard me say the same thing to her, after she had cautioned me against eating hot bacon and I ignored her.

JQ is still playing in the kitchen with his grandparents. I just heard him looking for the potato he had been using with his potato gun. "Where is my potato? My potato ran away!" he cried.

In other news, Logic Professor and I went on a date yesterday. We saw a thunderstorm and went out to a nice Indian restaurant. Then we got ice cream and came home and watched Religulous with our kittens. But before the movie, I fell on my face. I had been trying to climb over the bunny gate while making a phone call to let my mother know I would be staying at the apartment that night. The first foot made it over without issue. The second foot somehow got caught in a hoodie that was hanging on our hat-rack. I realized in an instant that my foot was not going to come free, and that I was going to go down and so was the coat rack, and so, having accepted my fate, I just went limp and fell over the gate with little fanfare. Logic Professor heard the THUMP-CRASH of me and the coat rack landing, and he came running in to help.
"Are you okay?" he cried. I was fine. My mother still hadn't answered, so I hung up and Logic Professor collected me off the floor.

Labels: Dr. Thumbscre.ws

I'll start this off with honesty: my lease says that I can't have pets.

The landlord sent me a text message, with no explanation or introduction, telling me that we can't have kittens in the apartment. (This coming from the man who gave me a rabbit. Dude, if you're worried about pet damage, ask Parsley to stop eating plaster.) He has no idea what he's up against. Although I am representing Team Kitten from our field headquarters, I am prepared to unleash an unholy storm of FUCK YOU in his direction. The best case scenario, for him, is that we keep the kittens, he accepts a pet deposit, and we all call a truce. The worst case scenario? We keep the kittens and make him evict us. Either way, we're keeping the kittens and I'm sending him a Christmas card in December that shows the kittens sharpening their claws on the walls and the carpet. Or sharpening their claws on a picture of his face. If he decides to do this the hard way, I hope he has six months of time to kill trying to put out people who are still paying rent. It's pretty impossible.

I remember when they tried to evict the crackhead a few doors down. He had set his apartment on fire more than once, been arrested for assaulting another tenant, crashed his car into the telephone pole on our corner, and threatened the landlord, and the lawyers told the landlord that because the crackhead was still paying his rent, they had an uphill battle to fight. Imagine trying to put us out - the most well-behaved, boring tenants in the building - over a couple of adorable kittens. It took them a year to get the crackhead out. Please.

To bolster my case even further, I should note here that when I moved in, the woman down the end of the building had a one-eyed cat named Bandit, the woman downstairs from where I live now had a cat that lived in her basement, the people who lived in what is now our apartment had a cat, and the woman who lived in what later became the crackhead's apartment had a tiny dog. They were allowed to keep their pets, though two of them got evicted for failure to pay rent. That shows that there is a precedent of pet ownership in our building, and that they're not going to evict us. I am confident the kittens will be destroying the carpet for a long time.

In fact, I'm not sure I want to pay a pet deposit. When we spoke on the phone, the landlord mentioned it as a distant possibility. But I am currently bitter not that our rent when up recently, but that it went up more than the identical apartment next door. How do I know that? The same way the landlord knows we have adorable, defenseless, harmless, apartment-dwelling kittens: the painter. I don't want to give the landlord another nickel right now. If I saw him reaching for a nickel on the sidewalk, I would throw myself on top of it like a soldier saving his platoon from a grenade.

This kitten war will not be affected by the state of my relationship. Logic Professor is holding down the apartment, and he has custody of the kittens. So regardless of what happens between us, we will still have to make sure that the kittens get to stay in the apartment.

And so help me Graf, they will.

Labels: Kittens

Yesterday I had a long, hard day of moping, with the exception of the time my parents forced me to go to the ice cream stand. There was a pond in front of the shoppe and it was jammed with turtles. They barely had room to swim around each other! And there was a little vending machine of turtle food! Let me tell you how much money I spent on turtle food. No, I'd better not. I tried to feed only the little ones. Perhaps this counts as animal cruelty, but my mother and I took turns chucking the tiny pellets of food at the shell of the largest turtle to see if we could get them to bounce off. He did not appear to notice.

After my long day of moping and turtles, I went home to see the kittens and Parsley. And Logic Professor. I'd missed him, and them, very much. I took a much-needed shower (when one is moping, things like personal hygiene take second fiddle). Cupcat took a shower with me, too, and then Sugar fell into the still-draining tub after I was done. Logic Professor tried to towel her off as best he could, consoling her and telling her "It's okay! We'll fix it!" Then I fell asleep at our apartment.
"Is it okay if I stay here tonight?" I asked. I didn't want to make a habit of blowing in and out of his life at whim, keeping him on his toes.
"CUPCAKE," he exclaimed. "You can stay here forever!"

So I texted my mother to let her know. THAT was weird. "Staying here tonight! Can you leave dad a note so he doesn't worry? Also I left the office window open," I wrote. The office, again, is what used to be MY room, and is now the rat n' paper depository. How strange it is to be letting my parents know where I am.

Now I'm sitting on my bed internetting - oh how I missed you, laptop - while Logic Professor does the same and Sugar sleeps near us. I have a load of laundry on in the kitchen. Today I'm going to go find some breakfast, help my parents' neighbor watch her one-year-old grandson, maybe fold some laundry, and then I'll be back at Pseudonym Castle.

Labels: Family, Flat Life, Lovelife

MAY 24th vs. JULY 8th: six weeks

For six years following the day I left home, I didn't spend a single night over my parents' house. Mostly, it was because there was nowhere to stay. For someone or something to move in, something else has to die or get evicted. I'd taken my bed with me, and what had been my bedroom became the office/the answer to our family's lack of storage space. It now contains a computer, a couple filing cabinets, canned goods, recycleables, a pet rat, an antique school desk, several fans and power tools, a piece of lumber, and, you know, other stuff. Stuff that I can't sleep on.

For the record, because I've always wanted this on the record, they chipped my pennies off the door. I had glued a strip of pennies around the edge of my bedroom door, all face down except for one face up to indicate the year I defaced the door with currency. Now there is a strip of glue that bears the likenesses of hundreds of tiny Abe Lincolns all the way around the door where pennies were stuck into the glue. The reason I want this on the record is so that I can finally say THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR STEALING MY THREE DOLLARS' WORTH OF PENNIES.

I digress.

The first time I spent the night here was in May, the night my younger sister left home. Now, I didn't leave on very good terms when I moved out. I didn't come back to visit for a couple months, truth be told. But I had time to pack my shit and move it, and my parents and I were getting along enough that my mom packed me up some pots and pans and dishtowels and whatnot. Also, I left during normal working hours, more or less. When my sister left (this most recent time), it was abruptly, late at night, and with not much more than the clothes on her back. I came over to sit up with our parents, drinking coffee and deciding what, if anything, to do. I slept on the couch.

My older sister and I cleaned out her room, for the most part. Our parents put in time cleaning as well, but we didn't want them to deal with it alone. And it was, at times, dangerous. I mean, not dangerous in that there was an unexpected chasm behind a dresser or a colony of scorpions under the bed (though it wouldn't have been unexpected), but there was good reason not to put our hands into anything we hadn't visually inspected first. Or to sit down anywhere but a pre-cleared, bare patch of hardwood floor.

We painted the room over the next couple of days because we didn't want our parents to have to look at the walls. To my continuing guilt, the person doing the painting dropcloth was ineffective and our parents had to scrape paint splatters off of the floor later. I took a break from the blog for a few weeks, mostly because of all that.

* * * * * * * *

When I told Logic Professor that I could no longer ignore my issues with our relationship, the logistics of actually taking a breather were not clear to me. I had decided, though, that the difficulty of separation was not a good excuse to stay together despite my doubts. I didn't have a plan beyond "Maybe you could go stay with your parents for a while?" It seemed the most likely possibility; LoPro's parents have a large house with spare bedrooms right down the road. I hadn't considered staying with my parents.

Our choices got narrowed down considerably when LoPro said "Why should I be the one who leaves?"
"Because it would be easier," I said.
"I don't want to be thirty and living with my parents," he said.

Then I thought about staying here with my parents. Due to the death of a semi-distant inlaw with plenty of furniture, they'd procured a twin bed for the my sister's empty room. And our relationship has greatly improved in six years; once I had vowed to sleep in a cardboard box before ever moving back home, but with time things have changed.

So that night I packed up some of my clothes and toiletries and a couple books, and I came back to stay for a little while.

Labels: Better Living Through Uprooting, Family

Because of unexpected turnover at the CPRB, I went in to work early today. Though, because it's 4:40 AM on what is technically Sunday, I guess I could say I went in to work early yesterday.

It was a hell of a night. Let me say first that I had a good time, I made a killing, and nothing happened to me. That said, when I got home, the first thing I did was check the news. Nothing was up yet, so I searched for the name of our street on Twitter, and found a streak of twirts (is that what those are called?) containing words such as:

• riot
• madness
• mayhem
• insanity
• crazy
• war zone

I agree. Early in the evening the Cool Manager and I discussed the eerie fact that shit hadn't happened outside yet. That many young people partying, combined with that many edgy cops, all crammed into that narrow a street, would surely lead to shit going down, and so far it hadn't. Eventually it did.

Sometime around 11:30 or midnight I thought I heard a shot fired and looked up from my bar to see a mob of people screaming and running up our side street. "...the fuck?" I thought. It might not have been a shot; if it was, it didn't hit anybody, to the best of my knowledge. The frightened mob was being chased by a phalanx of cops on horseback. I have never seen so many cops on our street. It was truly impressive.

Someone told me that a wave of people had been heading up the street and the cops stopped it, and stopped it hard. (That would have been when everyone ran up the side street as well as all the other side streets in the area.) I wonder if a wave was possible. By that point, people on the street were standing shoulder to shoulder. There was nowhere for them to really wave to.

The coppers shut down the entire street. It's a good thing we're on a corner; we got to stay open because of the side street. But it seriously dented what our sales should have been. That's the second night this week that the cops have fucked with my income.

After they'd cleared the street, the monsoon set in. It thundered so loud. I hope that first sharp thunderclap made every jumpy, overreacting cop on the street reach for his or her gun, and I hope every one of them felt like an idiot for it.

I drove home in the rain. I was almost there when I saw some emergency vehicles ahead, and slowed down. Were they headed my way? I couldn't tell. In the middle of the road, I slowed down and stopped. Like an idiot. Then I proceeded with caution. Then I read the flashing sign: DUI CHECKPOINT. NO TURNS PERMITTED. PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO CHECKPOINT. Shit, I thought, My inspection sticker! I must say that I am now frighted by how very near I came to turning off and gunning it because I panicked over my expired inspection sticker. But that would have been utterly stupid. What are they doing now, executing people on sight for expired inspection stickers? At a checkpoint for something other than inspection stickers?

I approached the checkpoint. The problem - and there was a problem - was that it was raining, and there were lights in my eyes, and the signage and street cones didn't make it overly clear (to me) what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go or what part of the roadblock was the actual checkpoint, and also two lanes had to merge there and I was in the wrong one, and the cop who was waving his flashlight at me or the car next to me or the car behind me wasn't helping me figure out if I was the one who was supposed to keep driving, let alone helping me figure out WHERE to drive.

I got yelled at. No, really: the cop yelled at me. And I couldn't even figure out what the yelling was directing me to do. At first, I kind of just blinked to try to get the flashlight out of my face. (In case you ever want to try it, it doesn't work.) But I guess I did what I was supposed to because the next thing I knew the flashing lights were behind me and the cones had petered out and I was on my merry way. The didn't even notice my inspection sticker. This leads me to wonder what, exactly, are the criteria for being stopped for a DUI at that checkpoint. Because if I didn't meet those criteria by doing all the things I did, I don't know who would. My hypothesis is that it's a trick checkpoint. The real checkpoint is at the flashing sign that said NO TURNS PERMITTED. If you make a turn at that intersection and gun it, as I had originally planned to do, you are drunk, and then you get arrested. If you go straight, you're fine. I sure am glad I went straight. I bet that if I had chucked a beer can out the window on my way through, they still wouldn't have stopped me.

Or maybe figuring out how to get through the checkpoint is the test.

Then I made it home. It's a temporary home. I'm typing this from my parents' house. Logic Professor and I are kind of separated; it was my stupid idea. I am so stupid. Really. I have been having doubts, and I thought it would be a good idea to take a step back from the relationship, to slow things down, to think about some things. I am so stupid. Furthermore, the kittens are with LoPro at our apartment. I don't even have kittens to cheer me up. My parents' cats don't count; they're everything I never want our kittens to become. I almost got off at my regular exit and dove into bed with my LoPro and my kittens. It was so hard not to. But I think it's for the best. I guess.

I am so stupid.

More to come at a reasonable hour. I'm going to bed now.

Labels: Better Living Through Uprooting, Cool Punk Rock B4r, Insanity, Logic Professor, Lovelife

Last night, three of our off-duty bartenders showed up at work to get very drunk for very little money; hooray for employee pricing! One of the bartenders was having her 21st birthday party. A bunch of their friends were there, too.

I only realized a brawl was happening when it spilled down the stairs to my bar. The Cool Manager was trying to wrestle three women at once to the front door, an off duty bouncer was trying to help, and the bartenders - all of them beautiful young women - were fighting. But at our bar, the beautiful young women don't pull hair. They will fucking kill you. These bitches are no joke. The barback jumped over the bar to help get them out. That's how six of our employees came to be in a brawl on the floor. They knocked over chairs and drinks and everything.

At one point the off-duty bouncer came to be holding one of the women by her neck, bent over backwards on the bar, trying to restrain her.

We didn't call the cops, even though the off-duty bouncer at one point was yelling for me to do so. I take my cues from the manager. There are cops everywhere on our street, though, and they showed up to our party uninvited and told us to shut it down. I was thrilled; I'd already made my money, and now I was going home early. "Watch us get out of here at the same time as usual," said the barback. And we did, partly because I was helping a new bartender count out, and partly because the Cool Manager, the barback and I were talking about what happened.

The new bartender told me that as the brawl was moving downstairs, one of the fightin' old bartenders was throwing ice at her, yelling about being replaced by someone less pretty. Her suspicions are correct; she got fired last week while she was on vacation, but doesn't know it yet. Technically, though, the new bartender is a replacement for someone else who quit, and while she might be less pretty, she doesn't break her nails off in anyone else's face. Yet.

We've experienced drastic turnover lately after a long period of calm.

Throughout the whole melee, which lasted longer than the typical bar fight (because instead of helping to end it, the employees were all IN it), I watched and bartended. I cleared all the empty glasses off the bar, which is my policy when bad fights are going on. The customers reacted in different ways. I told a couple of the more horrified ones to get out from between the fight and the door, lest one of them get a high heel in the ribs. Some of them got a kick out of watching, and I understand. It was a hell of a spectacle. I didn't tell the customers that they all work here.

Or, they all used to work here.

Labels: Cool Punk Rock B4r

You didn't show up for work yesterday, and they're about to report the car stolen. We're not sure where you're staying, but your boss is going to go look. We tried calling, but I guess you haven't replaced your phone yet. I'm not sure I have the right email address; it's unlikely you have internet access anyway. You might be in jail. Then you really won't have internet access. I wouldn't know; they're not picking up the phone.

Call someone.

This post is less for you and more for me. I don't know who to talk to anymore.

* UPDATED *
A missing person report did not have to be filed after all. Thank you. That said, I believe very few things are going to go right for you - for the rest of your life - unless you have a change of heart and say yes.

My sister Jul, reassuring her four-year-old son, JQ: "Ghosts aren't real, honey... they're just something people made up to tell spooky stories."
JQ: "Like snakes?"

*UPDATE*

Soon after this conversation, on an unrelated note, JQ said: "I'm not kicking you, I'm banging my leg against you!"

Labels: Dr. Thumbscre.ws