Sundown in the Paris of the prairies

I had an AMAZING dream last night! Let me tell you. Let me tell you my AMAZING dream. Ok.

First off I was in a dorm room with Johnny Depp and we were drinking Guinness. Just, you know, chillin' with the Guinness. Specifically. And for some reason it was perfectly normal for this guinness to be yellow. And I spilled some on the floor and was all, oh no, it looks like I peed on the floor! I can't have Johnny Depp thinking I peed on the floor! So the logical course of action was, of course, to run away. I ended up in some kind of swanky bar where I and some cute guy in a trenchcoat were international superspies and this chick tried to assassinate us but we beat the crap out of her and took her guns away. Then while I was monologing gleefully, he decided he felt sorry for her and gave the guns back to her, and she proceeded to rise from a near coma to fire four rounds into my gut. Not cool, dude! I wasn't actually wounded somehow, but I chewed him out pretty good for it and he felt bad so he took me to some house where they apparently had a centipede infestation. I was having none of that, thanks, so I ran to the house across the street and (this is the highlight of my dream) ended up playing Dungeons & Dragons with the main characters of Bleach. The mysterious guy in the green and white striped hat was DMing. IT WAS WAY COOL. I woke up and was like, yes!! and then I thought about it and was like, oh no. And then I was like, ha ha, it's too late for that now. YES!! Welcome to awesometown!

Johnny Depp, beer, violence, D&D, and anime. What more could I ask for? Besides, I dunno, a life?

Ok, three two one let's jam.

As heard on the bus ride home today:

"You know, I've been thinking, wouldn't it be great if, you know, you like broke into a convenience store in the middle of the night, just like broke the window and went in, and then, like, stole cereal. But not like all the cereal, just all of one kind of cereal, just cleaned 'em out of that one kind of cereal, and then like left money for the cereal and the window on the counter. And then they'd come in in the morning and be all, damn, they REALLy wanted that cereal, like this guy totally couldn't wait until morning, you know? Just totally could not wait for the store to open, he wanted that cereal so bad. That'd be great."

Get everybody and their stuff together

AHHH! Ok Go is coming to Mankato on April 29th! But that's the day Mary and Alex get married! If this was a sitcom there would be more zany deliberation as to which event I would prefer to attend. If this was a sitcom there might even be a wacky plan to attend both festivities. Heck, if this was a sitcom I'd probably wind up getting stranded after the concert through a series of unfortunate misadventures, lamenting my inept sense of responsibility and reflecting on the virtues of friendship, when a passing bus would see me along the side of the road and offer me a lift, and it would be the band making a guest appearance on the sitcom, and the band and I would both make it back to Rochester just in time for the vows and then the reception would ROCK!! And the moral of the story would be,

this isn't a sitcom and I don't want to die, so no wacky hijinks for me, thanks. But geez, did the 29th HAVE to be the tourdate? Maybe this is some kind of butt-grabbing grudge or something. Come ON, Ok Go, that was so four months ago. Get get get get get over it.

I think it's time we blow this scene

Some sketchy food math:

Diced carrots and onion sauted with oregano in vegetable oil and beer plus chicken broth and more beer plus black beans plus kidney beans plus button mushrooms plus beer (it's THAT beer, I gotta get rid of it) plus diced tomatoes and what the heck here's some of the stale rice I made last week to fry but never did plus some curry powder and cayenne pepper and more curry powder and garam masala and more curry powder and let it bubble a while, it's kinda soupy, and then a little more curry powder and garam masala plus ground beef browned in (you guessed it) beer plus what's even going on anymore equals Oh thank god it tastes good because there's a ton of it.

Actually I think mango would taste really good in it. If I had mango. I don't have mango. But I'm pretty sure it would be good.

THEN WE TAKE BERLIN

Busy day!

Aunt Bonnie and Frank dropped by Savers and we went to Subway for lunch. Shortly after I got back to the store, somebody peed all over one of the fitting rooms! Hooray for pee. My favorite. But then I retreated into the jewelry room and spent the last four hours of my shift getting stuff ready in advance for next week's silent auction, since I won't actually be there next week to set it up. A whole pile of good stuff was waiting for me, which is definitely an improvement over the last crapshoot. There's a big "Barbie and Stacey sleep'n keep" travel box from the late '60s packed with vintage clothes and a horde of grubby vintage barbies, as well as a slightly less abused (empty) Skipper travel case. I spent a while making sure the Sony Minidisc walkman worked (quality control, gotta check...for at least fifteen minutes...), which was entertaining to figure out. I've never encountered minidiscs before. They sort look like something a government agent would clandestinely hand off to a mustachioed man with a thick accent in a nondescript coffee shop just outside the pentagon or something. You know, like how they did with CDs and microfilm in '80s spy flicks. You know what I mean. Except I don't think foreign insurgents and rogue CIA agents are very interested in discs with "Weezer" and "Fountains of Wayne" written on them. OR MAYBE THAT'S THE TRICK? And there's an old typewriter and a rambo-style knife with a pommel compass that unscrews to reveal the little survival kit in the hilt and everything. There's actually nothing in this auction that I think is stupid this time, which is amazing. I forgot to take my last break and ended up leaving a half hour late, but I don't mind, on the grounds that perusing old crap in the jewelery room is stuff I would probably do in my free time if given the opportunity.

As I was walking to the light rail after work, I saw a man and a woman come storming out the doors, screaming an throwing punches at one another. DRUNK FIGHT! I'm not really good at reacting to things like that. All the right elements have to be present for me to quickly figure out an appropriate course of action. For example, if it was night, I would probably run like hell back to the liquor store and suggest they call the cops while I hide out until it blows over. That sounds reasonable to me. Or if there were a handful of bystanders I could stand with them and look very concerned, I can do that pretty well. But this was broad, sunny daylight and there was not another soul in sight, and they were directly in my path to the light rail. Um.

Basically my default reaction is to not react at all, so pretty much I'll just nonchalantly walk past with my headphones on and my hands in my pockets like it's nothing. I can nonchalantly stroll past pretty much anything. If I ever came across Abraham Lincoln swinging a baseball bat at a pack of chainsaw-wielding penguins, I wouldn't even quicken my step. Doo-dee-doo. Walkin' on by.

This time I suprised myself. I think it must have been because he was hitting her more than she was hitting back.

"Hey!"

He pointed at me. "YOU STAY OUT OF THIS!"

"ok!"

Right then an angry black woman came charging across the street, and then thirty seconds later the cops came, so to my relief I found myself walking through the doors and up the stairs to the rail platform. Nonchalantly.

Doo dee doo.

First, we take Manhattan

I got all of next week off from work! Talk about burning through vacation time. Kerry tells me I have like ninety hours of unused paid sick time, so maybe I'll just call in sick for, you know, a month, too. THEY'LL NEVER SUSPECT.

Well, maybe.

I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them

I'm on a pretty big cooking kick right now, and I think it has something to do with the fact that I have about $15 to last me two weeks and if I forget to bring a lunch to work I'm gonna be pretty much screwed. But I do have all these groceries, so. Last night I made the "spinach braid" thing out of my off-the-shelf cookbook, which involved spinach and tuna and ricotta cheese and parmesan and provolone wrapped up in prepackaged crescent roll dough. Today I made "Sopa de aguacate poblano y elote" for dinner and I'm thinking about maybe making some goulash to stick in the freezer and possibly even the beer and black bean soup that came out of the same book as the spinach braid. I bought some pretty awful beer I gotta get rid of somehow. It's Blue Moon, so I thought I'd like it, but it's the special Spring brew so instead of the usual orange-and-orange-peel they used lime-and-lime-leaf. It really just tastes like they strained beer through a pile of wet leaves and farted lime at the bottle a little. Pretty bad. But I don't know, maybe if I can sneak it away in soup and fish and whatnot it won't be so awful. I hope.

Laura came over a couple hours ago and recounted the events of her day while I made my soup, and then talked me into walking to Target with her on the grounds that it was a beautiful day out. She was right. Unfortunately I wore the wrong shoes and am now sporting blisters the size of golf balls. Brilliant. But it was so pleasant outside I really couldn't mind too much.

So, what's it gonna be now, taking a bath or making more food? Or both?

Ah, days off.

For trying to change the system from within

I'm gonna apply at the Aldi opening near Savers on thursday! Funny thing is, Ashley and one of the supervisors, Christina, will also be applying. I think it would be pretty great if they hired all three of us and we all just packed up and moved over at the same time. Actually I don't even know what my chances of getting hired are, considering Aldi cashiers start at $11.50/hour and I'd imagine the competition would be pretty crazy stiff, but it's worth a shot. Either way I'm going to be using up my paid vacation at work pretty quick so I'll be free to put in my two weeks as soon as I find another job. That's my plan. Ayup.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom

Yesterday I was taking my fifteen at work when my phone rang. I answered.

"Hello! New Zealand calling!"

"...uh, beg your pardon?"

"...New Zealand calling!"--

"Huh?--"

Oh!

Sarah Taylor is doing a semester in New Zealand, and she called me! We could only talk for about ten minutes before my phone died, but it was still nice to hear from her. She was riding a bus and the bus driver, a cranky old cuss, said something that reminded her of an old inside joke from 6th grade (track and field! yikes, I used to run places on purpose!), and decided to call me just to say hello. From New Zealand.

There's something to be said for friends.

I guess I'll know when I get there

Last night I got home from work and decided, mostly on impulse, to go see Reverend Horton Heat at First Avenue. It was pretty much a self-dare. Well, I thought to myself, I'll show me! And headed back out the door and caught the next bus downtown. I couldn't even quite remember which stop I wanted, so I just got off at the Mary Tyler Moore statue (didn't hit my head on it this time) and struck off down a vaguely-remembered street.

Whenever I do something like this, it's like some kind of intentionally induced mania, where I suspect I subconsciously avoid thinking too much about anything because then I might start thinking things like "man it's cold" and "what am I doing going to a show by myself?" and "holy crap where am I?!" and then, dang, who knows what I'd do. So I just grin and pick a direction and hope for the best.

I almost gave up and turned down a side street when I caught sight of the wall of painted stars: it was First Avenue. I'd lucked out. I ambled on in, bought a ticket, and wandered into the main room. And panicked just slightly.

There I was, all alone in a club packed with people I didn't know, to see a band I didn't really know, and I wasn't even sure how long it would be until the opening act started. And as for blending in, let's just say I was the only "bright red peacoat and faded purple hair" ensemble in a sea of "black leather with varying degrees of metal studding and bleach-white spiked hair." I guess showing up to a psychobilly show in a jaunty red wool coat is sort of like attending the opera in a bikini and boots.

For somebody who likes to be inconspicuous, I sure am pretty damn bad at it.

I couldn't find an open out-of-the-way spot to lean against a wall and wait it out, but I didn't want to spend the whole time wandering in circles. I actually felt so silly and out of place that I started to think about leaving. Then, as I'm standing by the stairs, I tune in on the conversation of two guys passing by: "mumble mumble yeah, man, they've even got some crazy Japanese movie playing!"

And I look up to find Sanjuro staring back at me from one of the myriad TV screens circling the room. They're not just playing any old crazy Japanese movie, they're playing my favorite crazy Japanese movie. For some bizarre reason, they were playing Yojimbo.

Sometimes the dumbest things cropping up in the weirdest places can make all the difference. It's like how I remember one night in Greece I was feeling a little homesick, and I glanced out the hotel room window to see the big dipper, poised to spill the same milky stars over Athens as brightly as it would over Aitkin county. And now here I was standing in a swarm of punked out leather jackets, watching Toshiro Mifune raise cain in a black and white Kurosawa town. It may seem a little silly, but it was the tiny bit of familiarity I needed.

I found a spot along a rail and settled in for the long haul.

And as turns out, Reverend Horton Heat was totally worth the trouble.

So I started out for God knows where

Oooh, he got the badge done. You see, in the Resident Evil games, the Umbrella Corporation is responsible for the T-Virus, which, I am told, creates the game's signature zombies by reanimating the t-cells of the dead. They are also responsible for any number of other excitingly horrific genetic mutation experiments. Sometimes these experiments just don't work out, though, which is where the waste facilities come into play. Which, according to my ID badge, is where I work. Presumably "disposing" of biohazardious genetic sludge which may or may not be sentient and a little resentful.

There you go, more explanation than you ever dreamed of (or wanted)!

Some day we (Kori, Liz, Martha, and I) will don our professional clothes and ID badges and hit the Apache Mall food court for a quick power lunch over our evil corporate lunch breaks. Or, even better, go into the subway at noon and eat with the Mayo Clinic employees like it ain't no thang.

I declared a personal snow day today and called in. I haven't been feeling too great since last weekend, and it's all snowballed (ha ha) a bit and when I looked out the window this morning it was like, nuh uh. There's been some stomach flu bug floating around at work lately, so I hitched a ride on that wagon and got the day. After Mara left for school I looked out the window and was all, holy crap! Whiteout. I couldn't see past the building next door, it was so thick. It's thinned out to the point where I can see the crackstacks again, though, which is about as far as I can ever see anyway.

Ok, time to crawl back into bed and sleep until some time tomorrow.