"After all," I explain, "that is not the same thing as a dog."

"Puppies have a marked tendancy to turn into dogs," he tells me.

I sigh. "Don't you remember what Juie Bernstein told us?&mdaash;'Once a puppy, always a puppy. Though sometimes the dimensions get slightly larger.'"

"The dimensions always get larger, unless you manage to off it," he responds.

You see how badly he wants one, right? Else why protest so much?

"You know," I tell him, "I think you're getting way into some left-brain-dominant thinking. Do you need to go back to T'ai Chi class? Because it seems to me like you aren't living in the now. Be here now. Don't worry about the future. If your heart calls out for a puppy, you need to respect that call."

See, he thinks I want a pit bull, or a golden Lab, or German Shepherd, or a retreiver. But to me a tiny little terrier would be just fine, once I got Mandy acclimated to him or her. Mandy is very tender with little doggies, once she understands that they are family members.

So I think we have everything all settled, now. Except for the part wherein A the H sees the puppy and realizes the error of his ways, and submits to what he really wants, deep down. And how long could that take?

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1 Oh, gee, Greg--thanks for the help!

Posted by: Attila Girl at July 02, 2008 03:59 AM (1q/ac)

2 You have no idea how long it took to come up with that flamebait, okay? That is possibly the only recipe featuring dog meat online that I could dig up in anything resembling Net-time. And then no response whatsoever... sigh. In all seriousness, the way some people treat dog cultivation in China is offputting. I'm not against eating dogs, but the idea that a St Bernard gave his life so's I could eat some stew is kinda nauseating. Bambi, not so much. You haven't lived until you've had venison cooked with ginger and soya sauce in a hot pot. And a dash of wine...

Posted by: Gregory at July 02, 2008 04:55 AM (4VYLZ)

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Philips SHL9500 Lightweight Premium Headband Headphones.

They're cool--not quite noise-cancelling, but more comfy than earbuds. And they'll work with the computer or the iPod.

And they fold up.

Also, they didn't cost a jillion dollars. Earphones shouldn't cost a jilion dollars.

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"Anyway, you'll note that I made it good to her, which she certainly didn't do with me."

"You did say something about feeding her your gun."

"I made the point that that was metaphorical, and represented the fact that I had no intention of getting all suicidal anymore because of other people's tactlessness. That's growth."

"Also, you called her a 'cunt.'"

"Ah--but I meant that in the Canadian sense. What do you want?--A fucking affidavit? 'I hereby do concede that I overreacted to KT's overreaction.' I'll even sign it and get it notarized. You guys will have it on the East Coast in a matter of days, and you can all fucking frame it."

I don't sound defensive, do I? I'd hate to think that I was acting defensive. My imaginary friend Binker gets defensive all the time, but that's Binker--just a volatile guy.

More James Thurber/New Yorker cartoons: "The hounds of springs are on winter's traces--but let it pass, let it pass."

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He had to pull strings.

All my mom had to do was get on the waiting list, wait for a bit of a break on same, and exercise that white-haired little-old-lady charm that she's been resorting to in the last couple of decades. (It's her best chance for manipulating people since she chopped her breasts off a while back to ease up on her back problems. As a matter of fact, I think the white hair might work better than the breasts did. After all, my mother always gets her way, and I don't always get mine. Perhaps I ought to dye my hair white.)

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You've been wondering what to get me for my birthday, which is coming up on July 9th. Me too! (Though I'm thinking of chocolate croissants.)

Here are some suggestions:

• Hit my tip jar! (left sidebar)

• Send me a lead on some copyediting, proofreading, or line-editing work.

• Send me something from my Amazon wish list.

• Ship me out some pinot grigio (I'm in a white wine phase right now).

• A Pier One gift certificate is always great for a chick who just moved.

• Buy an ad from me!

• Tell me what a genius I am, and how reading my material has changed your life for the better.

(And let me know if you need my business address for the gift certificate or the wine.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:25 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Usually, when I write about my friends I use the "blog a clef" technique, and don't name them, but every once in a while I'll use real names if the story seems particularly interesting and the facts are all a matter of public record anyhow.

I did so the other day, and I sent a copy of such a story to my "friend" to make sure she was okay with the piece.

Well, she wasn't. She hit the roof and wrote me a scathing note accusing me of sabotaging her career, and making her look "self-promotional" at the same time. (A bit oxymoronic, but what the hell.)

Of course, I took the article down as quickly as I could, but I lost a day to a depression that that had to do partly with her cruelty, and partly with my own ambivalence about using my journalistic skills strictly for things that are perfectly unlikely to bring any renumeration in whatsoever.

You see the oddity, right: an old high-school chum behaves like a cunt, and I'm the one who wants to give up writing, and/or eat my gun; was anyone over the age of 17 ever this sensitive? Christ.

I know the solution, and I'll bet you do, too: start selling articles for Actual Money; get my books published, rather than let them molder away on my hard drive, and never again turn my back on people whom I can't really trust.

I'm indebted to this person in a moral sense, just as I'm morally indebted to the family practitioner in Tehachapi I see every year or so who likewise rags on me for what probably (also) amounts to being bright and good-looking—even in middle age. But at this stage in my life I'm not prepared to take unlimited amounts of shit from anyone.

Ack: why eat my gun when I can feed it (metaphorically speaking) to other people?

UPDATE, 6/24: Prof. P. assures me that KT is quite likely to read this someday, and take exception to the word "cunt." After all, she did conclude her note by saying that she recognized that I didn't mean to hurt her. What she did not specify, of course, was whether she'd intended to hurt me. And it appeared to me that she had intended to hurt me, and in no uncertain terms.

"Besides," I told him. "She won't ever read it. She doesn't believe in blogs."

"Bullshit," he responded. "You know she's going to be monitoring your site after you removed the offending article."

If she cared that much, I think she would have thanked me for taking the article down. Or perhaps even apologized for telling me that something I had meant in a nice way had been a "shock," and an "embarrassment" to her.

As for the "feeding other people my gun" line, that's simply my way of saying that whenever possible, I don't want to turn my anger inward, and contemplate "eating my gun" (that is to say, committing suicide). I've admitted my part in this: I need to get people's permission before I write about them without veiling their identities (or at least make an honest effort to do so).

The other party in this hasn't owned up to her part in the kerfuffle.

This is someone I see every four years or so. We can remain friends, or not. It makes no particular difference to me. I did something wrong. I made it right. I'm getting on with my life.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:40 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Well, I'm glad you put "friend" in quotes; that was hardly a friend-like reaction! I'm also glad you're feeling better about it. I certainly can empathize with your reaction, since it's quite similar to how I often deal with things *sigh* Now, like you said, it's time to kick a** and take names! LOL

Posted by: Kat at June 22, 2008 07:23 AM (Cnodf)

2 Nothing is quite as cathartic as getting it out of your system. I think you did. ;-)

Posted by: Rightwingsparkle at June 22, 2008 08:03 AM (bJxMT)

3 Anyone who behaves that way doesn't deserve you as a friend. Fuck her. ;P

Posted by: Nicki at June 22, 2008 09:32 AM (JLOx7)

4 Give em hell. It always make you feel better - and empowered!

Posted by: beth at June 22, 2008 11:21 AM (awyCJ)

5 Well, I'm thinking that f*ing someone you don't actually like all that much is perhaps counterproductive, so I won't give you the same advice Nicki did. Of course, I'm a guy, which defines me as a person who would f* anything with two legs and at least one orifice, according to your US court systems (and the UK's headed in that direction as well, seemingly - the Malaysians mostly reserve their nuttiness to the political sphere - you decide if this is better or not). But perhaps sitting on your 'friend' would help. Did wonders for me back in the day...

Posted by: Gregory at June 26, 2008 03:07 AM (cjwF0)

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Very few of us in this country have anything to complain about.

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A the H just got a bitchin' set that cost a million jillion dollars, in celebration of his new paying assignments. I, of course, am still hanging with my fun-but-ill-paying gigs, so I'm wondering if I could get some noise-cancelling headphones for something in the area of $50. (Earbuds don't work for me, unless I can get some designed for children. Anyway, even if I can find some that don't hurt my ears, so I can use 'em with the iPod, they might not serve for watching videos and TV shows on the laptop.)

Needless to say, I'm also on the market for 1-2 used, dirt-cheap Mac-compatible monitors (one to save my spinal cord in the official office, and the other to function as a tiny television in the kitchen).

As always, Darrell is forbidden to take part in this scavenger hunt (or, for that matter, in my upcoming Birthday Whoring, the first week in July). Because I should have a couple of things around the house that Darrell didn't send me. It's a married thing, you know.

Also: K in Florida is forbidden to send me money or gifts. Ever. So is K2 in Arkansas, for that matter—she already gave me the best gift a girl could ever get. (She told me that my mother-in-law, were she still around, really would like me. That was the best thing I've ever heard! Well, one of five super-bitchin' things I've heard over the past almost-46 years.)

So: bottom line. Send me money, and tell me what non-earbud earphones that are cheap are the best for noise-cancelling functions.

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who once again has selfishly taken a Staff Gig. Whenever he does this, he is less available to help me with my computer angst. People never (as G.B. Trudeau once had Zonker complain), "consider the human cost."

So he walked me through the immediate crisis, and indicated that since my other computer-chick is no longer available, he'd help me if I "absolutely" needed him.

So of course I spent five minutes telling him how wonderful he was, and how incredible, and how I was about to built a small alter to him here in the new condo. You know: perfectly normal things to say to the guy who can make your computer work no matter what is wrong with it.

"All right, all right," he finally growled. "Stop kissing my ass."

"I can't stop kissing your ass," I told him. "That is an impractical idea. I just need you too much."

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I just happened to come across this as I was researching something else; it has a number of pithy quotes for aspiring writers. (And al writers, no matter how successful, aspire to something. Remember that.)

Jeff Sanford once accused me in a backhand fashion of being wordy, and asked me, in a rather cross, harried moment, what I would do if I didn't turn out to be "the next Virginia Woolf."

Fortunately, that never came about, for I am. I didn't have much of an answer for him yet, though: blogging had not yet been invented. I was thinking, "literary genius, or maybe beach bum." I hadn't yet decided for sure. I still haven't.

And yet Jeff and his wife Midge, their daughter Kate Sanford, and the Matthews family (Kerry, Scott, Joan, and Don) did something for me that I will never be willing to fully acknowledge, much less able to repay, in this lifetime: they took me in for months at a time when I was in high school/college and my mother "went violent."

Had it not been for the Sanfords and the Matthews (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Perrys, Turleys, and Goldfarbs) I would have ended up on the street.

So when one discusses "the tender side of agenting," one hasn't even scratched the surface of the Sanford "mizvahs." Having a crazy teenager under your roof—coming and going at all hours—is much, much harder than holding any writer's hand through the dark tunnel of creative troughs.

I've done both. Writers are awful, but teenagers are worse. Teenaged writers? The mind reels.

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We've got a lot going on at the house (plumbers, floor-tile people), along with some computer concerns. We're both also doing work-work (me: mostly editing, with some writing; A the H: mostly writing, with some editing). And at this moment we've got one computer down, and one that isn't getting along with the internet. And then this one—which does connect to the internet—doesn't have A the H's writing program, Final Draft, installed.

Of course, I shall be blogging tomorrow at Right Wing News, so you've got that goin' for you.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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But it makes for controversy in one's writing, and great headlines.

This summer Colorado is holding an uncompetitive women's bike ride (I shan't be so gauche as to say "race"). There are others, such as the Bay Area's "Cinderella Classic," which my sister-in-law and my mother once rode in. ("No," they told me. "It is not quite a century. It's less than a hundred miles."

"Aw," I thought. "Why bother? By the way: where are we eating tonight? Did you want Mexican, or should we do Thai?")

One is bound to have a certain ambivalence about female-only athletic events, but I figure anything that gets us out there is probably a constructive notion. This isn't "male-bashing"' it's just changing the framework.

Of course, if there is no competition, I'm not sure why you'd want to exclude men—though I shan't try to untangle that tonight. This is the one I want to do someday: not so much for the Tiffany necklace as for the views.

Naturally, of course, I'm afraid that the olive will fall out of my martini.

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"So. Why do you have so many pairs of nail clippers?"

"Because my wife keeps borrowing them and losing them. I have to have extras, or I wouldn't have any at all."

"Perhaps your wife is simply doing her bit for the ecosystem: it's bad for nail clippers when there are too many of them in the bathroom drawers. Someone has to cull the herd."

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I mean, I sort of get the notion when it applies to high school and middle school (and secondary school) and college students.

Also, to the teachers thereof.

But what about everyone else? Where are they getting extra time to read? Is it the effects of the "longer" days, with more sunshine? Is there an illusion that one has more time?

As the daughter of a schoolteacher, I definitely associate longer days and more sunshine with housework and household organization (though of course I've learned to resist the temptation to create cleanliness and order over the years). But I don't associate long days with reading.

Winter is for reading, curled up on the couch or in a window seat. Drinking hot chocolate or Earl Grey tea with a bit of whole milk in it. And for just grabbing something off the bookshelf: Wuthering Heights, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or anything by James Thurber.

Summer is for walking, or driving. Or for soaking up the sun somehow. Certainly not for placing a white sheet of paper in front of one's eyes and letting it reflect the sunlight into one's eyeballs.

The only thing I really want to read in the summer are cookbooks (with a focus on grilling and creating bitchin' salsa, natch) and Shakespeare.

Because I'll burn my retinas out for Billy the Shake any day of the week. But for no one else.

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But it didn't hurt.

Good. Lord. The word hawt is inadequate.

(And, thank you, David Linden. DJQ has been making me music compilations since he was in graduate school. No, wait—undergrad. I still have most of 'em, and the cassette tapes are holding up well, in every sense of the term.

"No good deed goes unpunished." Last winter after a visit with him and his fam [during which I think I might have been particularly selfish and boorish, but perhaps my lack of manners was within the normal margin], I more or less demanded that instead of waiting for my birthday, he make my next music CD right then and there, before I caught my flight back to L.A. It was ready by the time I got back from blogging in the room outside his office.

The Shivaree track was on it.

Every music collection he makes for me is my favorite, with the possible exception of all the other ones he's made for me.)

Now that I've pulled my head out of my ass long enough to see that an incompetent contractor has basically tossed his beautiful, beautiful office, let's all buy more copies of The Accidental Mind in a show of solidarity.

It turns out mine is in Arcadia. When I called my favorite San Gabriel Valley furniture/decor place to get the new condo measured for blinds, I was informed that both the women who work there had been "enjoying" my book.

"Um. I went back and got that after I left it behind, right?" I started to feel a bit queasy, then.

"No. You said you would, but then you didn't. So we've been reading it, and we really like it."

"Cool. A friend of mine wrote it. But you're sure I left my copy at your store? 'Cause I thought I'd gotten it, but my husband had just put it into storage, with all the rest of my valuable . . . um . . . stuff."

"It's here. I'm looking at it right now; we put your name on it. But we'll give you the book back when you come in to pick out the blinds for the new place."

"Okay. That'd be . . . that'd be great."

To my credit, I didn't ask them to flip through Accidental Mind and figure out whether short-term memory problems in one's 40s are predictive of future senility. I wouldn't have remembered the answer, in any event.

UPDATE 2: To me, the photos suggest that David's tiny antique tea table probably survived the disaster, along with his fetching little cranium.

Is it possible that the Johns Hopkins contractors need to spend more time watching Modern Marvels? Just a thought: I must go, before I get upset again. I'm actually pretty mad, and this thing happened, like, a week ago or something.

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It should be a large-ish one: at least as big as the old one, which was enormous by my standards but quite modest among entertainment-industry people. As I recall, these things are measured on the diagonal, which would have made ours 4-5 feet. I think.

Any advice you have would be appreciated.

Naturally, we'd like a flat-ish screen, and HD capability. But we won't be hanging the thing on a wall: rather, we'll probably just place it on the entertainment center I got to hold my LP collection. It's shallow, but I like it. If we keep it, I'll probably have to get holes drilled in the back, and get one of those thingies installed: those doohickeys that allow a flat-screen to be angled in one direction or another. (If we have to get a new entertainment center, that's okay. Though I'd rather not. A the H likes glass, but A the H hasn't thought about how difficult it is to keep glass clean.)

We're retaining the old television so we can keep our VHS tapes, and so I can get back in the habit of watching television in one of the other rooms. Not the kitchen, though: we have to get the Charter Charmers [these guys are really, really nice--A the H is ready to write a letter to The Powers That Be about how great their techs are] back in order for me to watch TV in the kitchen. So it's the office, or the bedroom.

As you can imagine, with no media room and only one den/guest bedroom, we're going to have to coordinate much more closely about hours from now on. The touchy time is late at night before A the H has gone to bed--but while I'm starting to groove in "vampire" mode. If A the H is watching the big TV, I'll be in the den. If he's watching the small TV, I'll be in the living room. It's a matter of me not having to relocate when he goes to bed, because I'll be trying to unwind, too: it's just that I take 3-10 hours to do it.

But, yeah: when we're rich again, I might get a small telly for the kitchen so I can watch movies while I make soup or bread or whatever.

I'm starting to really like this place. Except for the piercing screams of children and the occasional yelling down on the street—or engine-gunning—by the local youts, it's not a lot more noisy. And there aren't all those fucking birds around here: just pigeons, and (yes!) hummingbirds.

I figure if I want to see birds, I can go hiking in Brand Park. Or I can go walk my old loop in Flintridge—it was 3.3 miles, and it took me an hour in my prime. It was more like an hour twenty, an hour fifteen, in the last year, but that route contains ungodly changes in elevation. If I don't stop off to check out any of the views, I can do it in an hour and ten. Not bad, considering.

Now I can start the loop any place I like, so I do the hike up front, rather than ending on the steepest climb, after I'm exhausted. Like hiking to the Rio Grande: expend all your energy up-front, going downhill. That way you can just fucking die on your way back to the trailhead, and as you pass the rangers, your face beet-red, your spouse can come up and give them a hearty "hi," so they don't attempt to try their first-aid skills on you.

Where the hell was I? Oh, yeah: advice on TVs, and on either repelling or attracting birds, depending on my mood. Please send. Thank you.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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I'm so glad we went with Charter for our entertainment/internet/phone service package, rather than AT&T. For ten to twenty dollars more a month, we:

• don't have to put up with an awful dish taking up space on our balcony;

• deal with the nicest installation/customer support people out there (quite a transformation from eleven years ago!);

• could pull out all the ugly extra cables around here, and cover up the ugly extra outlets in the wall;

• are getting a much faster internet connection.

Of course, I haven't attempted to actually watch TV here, yet. I must get around to that soon.

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