Yesterday we spent the day meeting with our new realtor and with the mortgage broker guy. Apparently David’s credit score is so squeaky that fiscally responsible angels fly out of his butt on a regular basis. This is one of the host of ways in which we are polar opposites and yet he still sticks around.
We talked about what we’re looking for in a home, how much space we need, what areas we like, fiduciary responsibilities and previous horror stories about buying or selling a house. The realtor (Mark) set up this special ‘home page’ on the Edina Realty site that allows David and I to add houses we like and the Mark can look at that list, set up viewings and make recommendations. The only thing that sucks is that you cannot write notes about the properties. Sometimes I am saving a house and want to say “yeah, it’s a good house, but the kitchen looks like someone else’s butt”. You can rate the properties but there is no way to say why something got a 3 and something got a 5 when they seem so very similar.
I think that what I am saying is that I know that most people don’t understand my thought process very well. I may lowball one property for it’s lack of central air but then rate another highly even if it has no central air because it’s got features more important to me. I just don’t want to encourage the line of thought that I am batshit insane.
Even if I am.
The mortgage approval process was less painful than I remembered it to be, but I was less nervous about it. I’m being very “if it is to happen then it will happen” about the home buying thing. I’m being chill.
Every new step makes this a little more real to me. Every new step is exciting but also scary. New house, that’s awesome, great big commitment to a house? scary.
I just keep thinking of where I was 3 years ago. How ready I was to move to Baltimore. I had reserved a townhouse, I was on the waiting lists for 2 other ones, financing was a total breeze, I was going to move to the east coast, live in my new home, go back to school and essentially become someone new. I had my plans all set. Then I meet David and I feel all new without leaving the state. We are so opposite, he’s responsible and healthy and ethical and more left leaning than me, and not reactionary; I’m not really any of those things. And yet he wants to buy a home with me.
And he told me that Chester wants to start a band called Um-Tunk and the Funk Famu. Apparently they hang out at the zoo. How could you not like that? Also he renamed the dogs JabberJowls and Grease Fire. Maddie is JabberJowls and a Grease Fire is something that sounds slick and fast, but is really just a problem in your kitchen.

At the end of every school year one of David’s coworkers gives out Red Lobster gift cards. This year he got two because he also helped her clean out her classroom since she got ‘excessed’. Needing to get some ‘real food’ on our way to see a movie, we decided to stop at Red Lobster. There’s a Red Lobster by every shopping mall!
Red Lobster tries to be a fancy restaurant, they have a ‘wine list’, their servers are robotic in the recitation of their lines, the prices on the menu would indicate that this place was supposed to be nice. Red Lobster is not a nice restaurant. I’m sorry, April, I know of your love. Red Lobster is a restaurant for people who want to go to a nice restaurant and don’t know the difference. They know they want to go someplace fancier than TGIFridays or Applebees but aren’t quite comfortable with a place that isn’t a chain. Chains are comfortable, everything is rote, the chef isn’t going to surprise you with a reduction or a roulade. You can get a meal that fits your expectations and pay a lot for it. Your needs will be fulfilled and your lady friend might even put out (if she isn’t put off by the garlic salt on your breath).
You would think that a restaurant that specialized in seafood would actually know how to prepare the stuff. You would think that the shrimp would not be rubbery and overcooked, you would think things would be seasoned to accentuate the flavors. Of course, you would think that the meals would not be pre-cooked at some central processing facility, vacuum sealed in plastic bags and sent off to individually owned and operated franchises. How do you think they get the food to taste EXACTLY THE SAME every time you go? It doesn’t matter if you go to a Red Lobster 5 miles or 500 miles from your house, the scampi will taste not similar but exactly the same. Consistency equals comfort.
Anyway, flush with $50 in gift certificates we debated whether we would have enough time to eat and still get to the 9pm movie and we decided we would. The food was overpriced, the wine was overpriced, our waitron was terrified that we took more than the pre-plotted 3.25 minutes to peruse the menu and make a choice. We wanted to wait on a drink order until we chose our meal!!! Danger Kelly-Waitrobot!!!! How will you compensate for a situation outside the manual?
They served ranch dressing with the calamari. Need I say more?
We got out of there with bare minutes to spare and hustled over to the theater. We parked under the giant AMC sign and then had to walk all over to actually find the entrance. Perhaps they should have been clearer. perhaps I hate malls.
Point of contention: AMC theaters now serve popcorn that was popped in a central processing facility. I wish I was lying about this but I am not. The concession monkeys come out of the back room with giant bean bag sized bags of popcorn which they empty into the bin under a warming light. Also, you have to add your own butter flavored grease substance to the popcorn. It’s actually cheaper to let the customer decide how much they want (inevitably a lot) than it is to actually train the counter jockeys to apply the appropriate amount. This says that turnover is high and they don’t want to pay more than they have to for training. Having a butter flavored grease pump is a terrible idea. People look at it and think “I love butter on my popcorn! This is free! I’m gonna take all i can to satisfy my urges and stick it to the AMC man”. I can only assume that AMC has some sort of investment in cardiac medicine and research.
We got our tickets and the ticket taker asked us if we wanted to donate a dollar to get a chocolate bar. We passed up this golden opportunity but his dissatisfaction was apparent in how he mumbled a vague direction to the door we were to enter. We went to the door marked “Ratatouille” and went in. The place was packed and the movie had already started. We found a seat in the middle of a row, got some strange looks and commenced watching. It was so strange to me how they packed so much into the 5 minutes we missed. I was getting lost on the story.
Then it was over…how curious. It seems it was playing on two screens and we walked into the wrong one. Well fuck a duck. We’d now already missed 30 minutes of the show we were supposed to see. Feh, we went to go see Transformers since we missed it last week.
The Transformers movie is essentially a 2 hour paid advertisement for eBay, Yahoo, Apple Computers, GM automobiles, whatever company makes those little flash memory cards, The Strokes and the US Military. We paid $9 each to watch advertisements. huh. Other than the constant gratuitous shots of the GMC, Apple and eBay logos there were lots of things blowing up and I do like me some explosions in movies. The story line was thin…super thin….but hey, there’s a brand new Camaro! And explosions!
Having not watched the cartoon as a kid, I was a little surprised at what a retard Optimus Prime was. What was that fucking speech at the end? Do space robots join some sort of space robot Toastmasters organization to learn how to give speeches? He needed to take a writing class. Actually, all of them were sort of retarded in how they spoke (except for ‘BumbleBee’ he was more Nell-like), maybe it’s a space robot thing?
But things exploded…oh! eBay! I know eBay! and Apple! I own an Apple! I can relate to this movie.
The last scene was dork boy making out with slut girl (you know, the one that was all shallow and dating the football guy but ended up not being shallow and liking the dork guy because, you know, they are both deep and stuff) on top of his car. His car is a space robot with a face and a name and it considers itself a sentient being. So, essentially, they laid on top of someone and made out. They did this while all the other space robots were hanging out and watching.
Space robots are total pervs.
We made it home and I resisted the urge to vomit 3 kinds of shrimp all over my lap and we declared the evening a success!

and she says i like long walks and sci-fi movies
if you’re six foot tall and east coast bred
some lonely night we can get together
and i’m gonna tie your wrists with leather
and drill a tiny hole into your head
more than a little addicted to Fake Palindromes by Andrew Bird.

A billion years ago, in the primordial ooze I first came to life. It was my first life, the first of many i would apparently have over the next billion or so years, and it would seem i am on track for many more lives. In that initial life, when my form could only be described as “gelatinous slime” and my thought process as “poor, but shows potential”, I ate something. I don’t know what it was, I think it may have been orange and most likely slimy or oozy.
Immediately after this curious meal of mine, the sticky currents changed and I was killed.
Many more incarnations occurred and many more curious meals devoured until the advent of the ‘baby carrot’ and the ‘chee-toh’, and yet it would seem that through time and across these many lives I’ve managed to carry that first meal with me. It has been an intestinal traveling companion of which I was unaware.
Unaware until Monday afternoon when it suddenly resuscitated itself in my lower colon. The colon of a modern day human may seem similar to the sulphuric burpings of the primordia, but this little orange fella knew things were not as they should be. He awoke, took stock of his surroundings and made the only logical decision, he attacked.
His attack was swift and unexpected, he demanded escape and what could I do but comply? I underestimated him. Perhaps he learned much during that billion year journey with me, all i know is that he is a brilliant tactician and a fearless warrior. He managed to unite the various intestinal factions that reside at or against their will in my abdomen. They came together against a common enemy and they have been fighting non-stop this entire time.
I plead with them, I beg them to listen to reason. I am not keeping them here against their will, they are free to leave any time they like, i just ask that they do so in an orderly fashion. There is no need for them to paint their faces blue and charge like a valiant but retarded Mel Gibson led army! I offer safe and free passage! Just get on the train!
Entropy. Rhinoceritus. Mob rule. Call it what you will, they will not listen. They have been battling a non enemy since Monday and i am tired. I missed my movie this morning, I can’t even walk the dogs because I fear being more than 10 feet away from the toilet, I will miss my fireworks tonight. I drank an entire liter of Pedialyte this morning hoping the eternal purple grapeness of it all would calm them, lead them to negotiate. Failure. They turned the Pedialyte against me just as they turned the oatmeal against me.
I give! Don’t you see the white flags I keep waving?? I am sure the Geneva Conventions mention this specifically. This has to be illegal! Three days this has gone on. The original orange meal is long gone, possibly spreading discontent among the sewers, i don’t know.
I will take my case to Bush! He adores these types of situations! I’ll just whisper something about mass destruction…he won’t even have to hear the rest of the sentence! awesome.
Happy 4th people! May every explosion you see in the sky tonight remind you of the battle being fought in my insides.