mr. toad's wild ride

Wednesday, Jul. 31, 2002 @ 5:24 p.m.

Eleven monks were treated in hospital after a fight broke out for control of the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the traditional site of Jesus's crucifixion, burial and resurrection.

The fracas involved monks from the Ethiopian Orthodox church and the Coptic church of Egypt, who have been vying for control of the rooftop for centuries. After several days of rising tension, the fists began to fly on Sunday. The Egyptians said their monk was teased and poked and, in a final insult, pinched by a woman.

Yesterday there was a silent stand-off on the roof, with the Ethiopians defending their property with a row of chairs.

Well, I guess monks are people too and allowed to be petty sometimes. *snigger*

I got a 90 at diaryreviews. Decent. I have been waffling back and forth for weeks as to whether I should submit for review or not. On one hand, this is something I do for myself; and much as I value and enjoy my readers it kind of seemed like allowing a stranger to critique my diary was an exercise in narcissism at best, masochism at worst. But then I thought that they might provide constructive criticism and feedback, so I figured what the hell. Though to be perfectly honest I admit to being a tad peeved that I was reviewed by a 15-year-old. I would rather have been reviewed by someone who is more of a peer. Oh well.

I slept very poorly last night. I think the only thing keeping me from nodding off at my desk is the V-8 I had that was loaded with Tabasco sauce. Mmm, spicy vitamins. When I get home I am going to take a shower with Trader Joe’s salt scrub. It’s lavender-scented. That makes 4 different kinds of salt scrub that I have now. Look, I don’t belong to the OCD ring for nothing.

Yesterday L. kept talking about those poor whales that beached themselves on Cape Cod. I wondered aloud what causes whales to do that. Is it a physical illness or something mental? Perhaps a glitch in their DNA from when they used to be land creatures? Much to my amazement L. began ranting about the bible. She said “It’s all there in revelation, people! Read your bible!!” I must admit I was curious as to what totally insane connection she would make between beached whales and the end times, but since religious conspiracy theories make me want to tear my hair out by the roots I silenced her with a dubious-sounding “Okaaaaay…”.

Remember Earring-Magic Ken? I wonder how that one got to market. Was the design committee really that stupid, or did someone (either someone gay or just mad at Mattel) do it on purpose? Figuring the executives were so damn clueless the thing would be on the shelf before the 700 Club raised a stink, forcing Mattel to lose millions in the ensuing recall. I like to think it was some creative dissident. I hear they are collector’s items now.

Last night I read the chapter about bohemia’s youthful veneer (especially as it relates to Generation X) in Weird Like Us, called “Bastards of Young”. Some excerpts:

My peers were labeled immature before we even reached full adulthood. The “slacker” badge stamped upon our foreheads in our early twenties cemented the belief that growing up was a concept that held no interest for us. In 1986, journalist Susan Littwin coined the phrase “Postponed Generation” to describe “the crisis of this generation of young adults, hovering reluctantly in the passageway to maturity in a world for which they are unprepared”. The 48-year-old Littwin characterized the “children of the children of the ‘60s” as simultaneously spoiled and abandoned, unwilling to accept the responsibilities that a sluggish economy and changing attitudes about family were denying them anyway.

And:

Some contrarians have serious problems with an image of adulthood based on conformity and status-driven materialism. Adopting youthful costumes and customs gives their rebellion a light-hearted veneer, beneath which a real conflict rages. The explorations that lead bohemians to nurture new value systems usually begin in youth, and the search for alternatives doesn’t magically stop after college. In fact, it intensifies as responsibilities grow. The perception of adulthood as the phase when questioning gives way to cool contentment doesn’t make sense in an era when no basics, not your dress code nor your family structure nor the shape of your career, are solidly in place. Slackers refuse to act like grown-ups because they believe that to do so would be to lie.

And:

What few people have grasped is that the endless adolescence of Generation X was never meant to be taken literally; it is a kind of ritual, the public interrogation of a myth. On one level this has meant scrambling and unscrambling the images, scrutinizing vintage and contemporary visions of growing up to get at their changing meanings. We are trying to distill some truth from these stories and signs, to see what it might be like to reach adulthood free of habit, without our suits already picked out.

This chapter interested me especially because people have always told me there was a strange eternal teen-age quality to me. I still wear the Doc Martens and Mary Janes I wore then, I still wear my hair in a bob, and I still wear the same kinds of clothes, listen to the same kinds of music, and shop religiously at the Sanrio store in the mall. People with children always said it was due to my not having any.

I’ve made a list of all the housemates I’ve ever had and their various problems. I guess lately I have been feeling smug about living alone (even though technically I live in Ana’s house):

- Suzette: The first place I lived after I moved out my parents’ house was with a guy who was divorced and who rented the 2 bedrooms he didn’t use to me and another girl. She was a fairly nice person, but she had the most atrocious diet. All I ever saw her eat was pork chops and boiled greens; real slave food. Consequently, when she moved her bowels it smelled bad enough to peel the paint from the walls. I provided air freshener but she never used it. If something that smelled that awful came out of my body, I would see a doctor immediately.

- Kenny: A friend of my older brother’s, they invited me to move into the third room of the house they had rented. The first week I was there he threw a wad of towels into the hall closet without folding them, and they fell over, taking several bottles of cologne with them. I told him when he did laundry he could leave it on the couch and I would fold it for him. I thought that was more than fair (it’s not like folding towels is rocket science) but for some reason it upset him, and for the entire 10 months I lived there he avoided me, even going so far as to leave the room when I came in.

- Doug: The master bedroom in the 4-bedroom house he leased was available and he was a friend, so I took it. He was a nice guy (we used to date), but he had one serious problem: He was a binge-drinker. He wouldn’t stop until he was passed out or puking his guts up. He threw up on the bathmat or in the bathtub (I had my own bathroom, thank gawd) more times than I could count. I would hear him vomiting down the hall, even when my door was closed and the stereo or television on. There was no mistaking those strangled groans and choked whispers of “Ah gaaad--blooooorch!” for anything else.

- Scott: Another inhabitant of the house, he was always broke as a joke. He blew his paycheck on pizza, beer, and porn the day he got it and spent the rest of the period sponging off anyone who would let him. The utilities were in my name, and more than once he couldn’t pay, so I got the money by stealing videos from his extensive collection and selling them at Rasputin’s.

- When Scott moved out another guy whose name I forget moved in and carried on the fine tradition of brokeness and drunken vomiting. The only things he had in his room was a bare mattress on the floor and a lamp.

- The other housemate (I also forget his name) was a nice, responsible young man, but he had 2 girlfriends that I always knew would one day find about each other. One was a dental hygienist who cooked him dinner, the other was drunken jailbait who came over at all hours to engage in very noisy sex. Eventually they found each other out and the bad girlfriend went after the good one with a vengeance. I put my foot down and she wasn’t allowed back at the house after that.

Luckily soon after we all got evicted and I found the shack.

If I see that damn commercial for that Dana Carvey movie one more time and have to listen to him say “Turtle, turtle”, I am going to go insane.

The word of the week is “Beelzebub”. I don’t believe in the devil, I just think it’s a fun word to say. Bee-ell-zuh-bub. The stress should definitely be on the “bub”.

~S.

frozen + fresh