topotales

Storm is rolling in;
the leaves know fall is coming.
I cling to summer.

I got this SMS yesterday evening from Paolo after he had just arrived home:

I am gonna kill your dog.  Spread her in pieces, cut her little filthy paws and make nice little medallions, pull her teeth out and make fishing baits…grrrr!

And despite the shitty day I was having the sun suddenly came out, little birdies began to chirp and the world wasn’t such a bad place after all.  Because I was at work.  Not at home, cleaning up the  garbage Scapi scattered over every square inch of the dining room.

I mean, can you appreciate the genius?  It’s like she’s a master painter, making sure each little horizontal area of her canvas has its decoration.  Even the chairs have been pulled out and left slightly akimbo to the table.

The best part is that the pictures above are from the LAST time Scapi did this on a major scale, in January, when Paolo also made it home before me.  Paolo didn’t take pictures this time because we don’t yet own a wide-angle lens.  I love my dog!

Painting in garbage wears me out!

This evening on the way to the climbing gym, again the same conversation when we pass the outdoor tennis courts:

me: I keep telling you, we should play tennis sometime!  I’ll be all Whoosh! [I make flailing arm motions with the right arm], Swish! [flailing arm motions with the left arm]

Paolo: Topo, you don’t change hands in tennis.

me: What?  Why?

Paolo: …

….    ….

[AN AIRPLANE FLIES LOW OVERHEAD]

me:  … oooOhhhh.  Well, whatever, we should play tennis!  I’ll kick your ass!  [flailing arm motions with both arms]

Paolo: [following the flailing arm potential ball trajectories with his eyes] Jesus, I just hope there’s an airline strike that day.

Today my job mostly involved a lot of clickity-clicking up and down the office halls in high heels, full of Righteous Indignation. Also it required a lot of being brave, tracking down important people and saying important things that make sense, and trying to change stuff to make it better.  All this I did and more, using technical manager vocabulary like “improvement opportunity” and ”client satisfaction” in the same sentence.  I find the necessity for this kind of semantic pedantry so annoying that it breaks my English major heart in ways that only Grisham or Crichton could match.  “Business-lingo for Dummies” might do the trick, too.  I mean why can’t we just say “you suck” and “they’re pissed”?

But really, with or without the kind of vocabulary that comes out of a twenty dollar yellow preschool primer, some of the guys I work with would have a hard time making a decision even with a hot poker held to their iris.

So as of four pm I have been seriously contemplating one of the following options for tomorrow:

1. Going out on my lunch hour and coming back with dreadlocks and a full face tattoo.
2. Bringing in a special treat in the form of hash-laced brownies (No, I haven’t gone completely mad- I don’t intend to actually bake.  I live 2 hrs from Amsterdam where I can get store-bought.  God bless Amsterdam.)
3. Pulling down my pants and pooing directly onto my keyboard.
4. All of the above.

I asked for pictures,
thought: life would have been so sweet.
If only we knew.

Ok, I wasn’t going to post anymore today because fistulated cows and Catholic lesbians seemed like a pretty definitive subject mix for the day.

But then Amy (thanks, Amy!) totally cheered me up by sending me this photo of a supermarket in (Italians, hold your breaths… nah, just kidding) Spain:

And who could sit on something like this for more than 15 minutes?  Not I, … no, not I.

Super-maxi-bitch super market now has some serious competition.

I mean - good lord, what ARE those things?  “Shop here, we have - PSYCHO PHAT GERMS!”  These little guys look like something you’d find stuck to Spongebob’s bootie after a day cruising male nurses in the oncology ward.

Also, why is the hairy green penis-cucumber grimacing?  Oh… wait, probably because the worm is begging at his feet to save him from the ADHD purple four-eyed rectangle dude.  And in the upper right-hand corner we have a green sock-puppet whose nose looks like my parent’s dog’s… eh, nevermind.  I’m just feeling bad for the blue thingy- he looks as alarmed to see the rest of those toothy insectoids as the human in the picture!  His eyes are saying “Save me!  Save me!”.

There’s also this Croatian supermarket, whose name suits the above picture.  I can’t wait to shop there- it’s not just SUPER GROSS!

I used to have this girlfriend.  She was one of the most strangely OCD people I ever lived with.  For example.  It always took her an extra ten minutes to put on her socks because she had to make sure they were going on the correct feet.  She’d hold one up and turn it and poke at it until she could figure out from the big-toe poof (yes, that is a technical term) which foot it belonged upon.  I’m not really sure what the toe-poof criteria were for brand new socks, but I’m sure they were complicated.  Once she was satisfied she had the correct sock-foot match she’d scrunch the sock up completely into a little ball with just the big-toe poof sticking out, then slowly, … veeery slooowly … roll it up her foot and around and over her ankle.  It had to fit perfectly or the whole process was restarted.  Now, …I’m not saying I don’t have my neuroses. I’m just saying that this was one of about six milliongoddamned neuroses of hers, alone.  Add that number of neuroses to my six trillion or so  neuroses and it’s not any kind of mystery why the relationship didn’t take.  That, and the cows.

The cows?  You ask.  Indeed.  The cow fight I am about to describe ranks in my top ten of longest and most vicious relationship-benders I’ve ever had.  Okay, it’s probably also in the top ten for overall weirdness.

I have no idea how this originally came up in conversation, but it did.  At some point Jen remembered that when she was young she went on a field trip with her class.  All girls, Catholic school class.  Second or third grade.  On that field trip, she was terrorized and warped for life by the sight of a “cow with a hole in it, and the hole had a plastic window so you could look inside of its stomach”.  Now you find the real tipping point at which our neuroses met head to head.  This was something so beyond my concept of “field trip for small children” that I had to laugh.  As a matter of fact, it was also beyond my concept of - concepts, period.  “Sorry, Jen, but if a teacher - a CATHOLIC teacher - took small children - A BUNCH OF LITTLE GIRLS - on a field trip, WHY would it be one so obviously tailored to send them home crying and terrified, for the rest of their lives, from having looked inside of a LIVE COW with a PLASTIC WINDOW?  NOT TO MENTION… who the FUCK would put a WINDOW on a LIVE COW?”

[In retrospect, this is obviously the perfect Catholic field trip.  Jen just probably forgot the bit that involved God's wrath and Smiting and all the other stuff that leads up to one having a plastic window implanted into their belly by more powerful beings.]

Anyway, so here we have: 1. Jen: I am scarred for life so I can be as neurotic a bitch as I like and 2. Taz: yeah, you’re totally fucked up, bitch go put on your socks.  Needless to say, neither of us bothered to investigate this.  We just talked and fought and cried - yes, cried! about the fucking plastic window cow for - no, not days… no, not weeks… MONTHS!  It’s not like this was the 80’s.  It was 2001.  We had Google (just type “cow with a hole in it”, you’ll see).  We were just too right to need it.

During one blast-it, all-out crying and screaming fight, I did finally break down call the outdoor zoo where the (still alleged) fieldtrip went.  To my surprise, not only is it the case that cows with plastic windows to their stomaches exist, but -INDEED- this is considered a fine and educational thing to show small children on a field trip.

1.  You may want to encourage your children’s teachers to not take them to see terrifying displays of animal abuse on field trips.  That is, in case you’re not Catholic and didn’t know that was happening.

2.  Google won’t save your relationship, anyway, if a fistulated cow is in the mix.

3.  I was looking at the above picture of Scapi and the (happy, unfistulated) cows in Pfalz (Germany, where the scientists don’t have to poke holes in you to figure shit out) and thinking about it…

I’m sure I’ll think of more reasons I had to tell this story on the interweb, and edit later.

p.s. I was going to post a picture of a fistulated cow up here.  But I won’t.  Because there are a disturbing amount of fistulated cow pictures already smeared across the web - I mean,  loads and loads of pictures of kids with their hands stuck inside plastic windows in the sides of cows.  There are also loads of sites talking about how educational this is and how it doesn’t harm the cow in any way (sure buddy, let’s put a holey pvc window in your belly button, stick our fingers in a few times per day to see how digested your food is, and see how great you feel about it!), etc etc.  If these guys were as smart as they say, they’d find a better way to examine half-digested grass.

I can’t stand to see animals subjected to bullshit like this - especially since most of the subjecting is not being done by good-guy vets, it’s being done by cow-food and cow-hormone researcher vets working for big companies to see if they can make more money by changing cow diets.  /end rant, and apologies.  At least I didn’t hotlink you to the PETA website.

So, last night Paolo told me that this is a “perfect visual representation” of what goes on in my brain.

(Note: The video runs about 5 minutes, which is coincidentally about 5 minutes longer than it takes for my thoughts to go from brain to mouth.  But this is hilarious even if you don’t care about the strange happenings in my brain.)

So yeah, apparently I’m powered by little blue claymen (why isn’t that a word if we can use snowmen?) who make me laugh so hard I just peed a little in my pants (yeah, I know, an alarmingly frequent occurrence).

What I love about these videos (oh yes, there are PLURAL!) is that they are all so obviously made in this dude’s basement or garage where the “spare” “stuff” lives.  And after you wonder where his wife is and realize that’s a real fucking stupid question if he’s talking to himself and making claymation videos all day, then, … THEN, you have to start wondering … many things … many, many things.  Especially about sanity, and drugs, and wormholes, and portals to other dimensions, and sanity.  At least I do.  But then again, I’m powered by blue men and pee my pants frequently.

So some friends of myself and Paolo were married earlier this month, and plan to celebrate the tying of the Gordian knot in their (and my!) favorite valley.

I highly recommend Val di Mello for many reasons if you get the chance.  As a matter of fact, it was in my long-term blog-o-plan that I was at some point going to list all the reasons I love it, but then we got this email inviting us to the wedding celebrations and really, I couldn’t possibly put it any better than this…

Some excerpts from the bride’s (American) translation of the invitation:

“Dear friends from near and far…Here’s my translation of Fxxxxxx’s original
message, which serves as an invitation …We will eat, we will drink, and if the rain gods
agree, we will climb… it’s important that everyone comes equipped for eating and
drinking. Moving on… Val di Mello offers stunning landscapes, enchanting
walks, excellent rock, terrifying…sgambate?? (damn useless
dictionary!), pizzocheri, bitto, and gnocchi with DONKEY sauce (yes, that
is the correct translation)… ps. Axxxxx was gracious enough to tell me the
meaning of the word sgambate.  Here is what she told me: “big
movement with legs and it can also mean that the swimming suit is cut
very high on the legs so all your body hairs will be visible.”

Don’t you wish you were going there RIGHT NOW!?  I mean, I was already in favor, since my superior Italian dictionary informed me there would be DONKEY sauce, but the sgambate translation clinched it.

Hippie skirt to knees,
silk hem and ribbons clinging.
Hands restrain themselves.