Holiday Irritations

“Find a nice fat girl and you will never go hungry.”

I believe such advice has been quietly handed down, from one old bum to another.  Yes, I am fat. And yes, I have and will and do feed hungry people.  But, there is nice and then there is nice. I am a nice person as in generally being a pleasant person, but if you define nice as a spineless gullible wimp who will do anything to please you, I am not nice at all.

Asking me to make you a plate or a sandwich “to get me through the day” now and then is one thing.  Asking me to go all out baking holiday pies and cookies and other goodies for you is another.

I am not sure what irritates me most – an old goat asking me to bring him an assortment of homemade Christmas goodies when I do my ASSUMED baking OR the fact that he hears what I am saying but he doesn’t listen to me, as if he can veto my opinion or talk me into doing what I don’t want to do.

I said, “No, I don’t do that.”

“Not even for your grandchildren?”

“No, they have a mother.”

Asking me if the woman who brings my grandchildren over to see me is my sister or telling me that I am so sweet he doesn’t need sugar for his coffee does not flatter me.  I don’t roll like that. Giving me a list of favorite cookies will not put them into my oven.  Asking me to take his Food Stamp card to the store to buy the ingredients to bake his goodies ticks me off.  (I do not get food stamps, I do not know how to use those cards, and I don’t think I am authorized to use his card.)  That’s like asking me to commit a crime.

So here is my message to every old man out there who is trying to get a woman to bake him holiday pies and cookies:

BAKE THEM YOURSELF!

It is NOT hard. Recipes are everywhere. Stores also sell box mixes and ready to bake dough, no measuring required. All you have to do is read and follow directions.

He can’t do that… or at least that is what he said when I gave him a package of “just add water” biscuit mix to go with the tub of yummy homemade cooked in a crook pot beans  (thanks to a recipe by a blog friend) adding, “I’ll just stir it in, it will taste the same anyway.” And yes, he did RUIN good beans stirring in that biscuit mix. When he returned the container unwashed, I could see little globs of white raw flour goo stuck to the sides.  And THAT is why I am NOT baking him cookies!

This art looks how I feel.

Am I a Christmas Cookie Grinch?

No, this old goat lives like a homeless dude in an apartment.  His wife died last year and I don’t know what happened, but he did not keep anything from her kitchen.  The man doesn’t even own a pan.  He makes his rounds, playing on the sympathy of single older women, bumming things and trying to find someone to take care of him.  That is NOT going to be me… I have no use for a man who has his priorities so messed up that he cannot meet his own basic needs.  I don’t think he has even purchased a roll of toilet paper since he moved into this building.

He gets away with it because he is nice, recently widowed, and looks like Sam Elliott in an old cowboy biker kind of way.  But that helpless homeless thing he has going on gets on people’s nerves after awhile.  He is like a stray dog with big puppy eyes, but who needs a pet man?

Okay, that’s my vent… my holiday irritation.  What’s yours?

 

 

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LEEK: art therapy

Have you seen her? She looks like your onion ass all over.

WHAT?

She’s big, not like you, she don’t have a neck or nothing man, like that girl on Willy Wonka, a blueberry, like your onion ass ALL over.

MY WHAT?

You know you got that onion ass, nothing you can do about it. I know you’re losing weight but it don’t matter how skinny you get, you can’t get rid of that… you’ll always have an onion ass…

I let him dig himself into a deeper hole trying to explain why he calls my ass an “onion” when I should just consider the source and move on, like this middle aged man pronounces “vagina” as “va-jay-jay” and probably pees out of a “winky” but my mind was stuck on that onion thing. How the hell does my ass look like an onion? Onions are round and firm – he’s never touched it, never will, so I don’t understand the comparison.

I happen to like onions, buy spicy red onions to slice in thin slivers on leafy green salads (spinach is the “new lettuce” in my world) and sweet whites are good sliced. I also occassionally buy yellow spanish onions for cooking although I do prefer shallots minced for some dishes and sliced green onions for others. And, of course, we cannot forget chives with their mild onion flavor as snipped chives is a favorite garnish.

Never once, in my 52 years on this planet, has it ever crossed my mind to describe my big ol’ butt as an onion. And yes, suppose he is right in that my body type will never change, I always was and always will be “pear shape” but geez… if asses are in the onion family, I am a shallot and he is a freaking leek.

Still, it bothered me. It laid on my mind like an irritation, especially that “you will always have an onion ass” and the best way to purge my mind of irritations is with a little art therapy.

The following colored pencil drawing started out as onions until I worked over it in my typical abstract fashion. Faber-Castell Polychromos on hot pressed 100% cotton watercolour paper, 4×6 inches.

Thanks for reading today!

Sleepless Night

I should be sleeping. Instead, I am doing things like hanging alarms and setting little booby traps so the next person who attempts to crawl in through a window will leave DNA.

I spend my nights moving things around and finding new places to put things. In the process, I am down-sizing by pulling things out to eliminate.

Logically, it would make more sense to be on high alert in broad daylight, as the intruder who entered my home was snooping around in here while I was out shopping last Wednesday. I know this person was in my bedroom, had gone thru my things, and found hidden things. The only thing possibly missing is a few pills with little to no street value. (Possibly, as the script was filled in July and I have been using an alternative herbal medication so I had not looked at the bottle since July.) Nothing was stolen, not even small cash & carry items (easy to hide and easy to pawn) so the list of suspects was short.

I would not have known that anyone was in here if they didn’t leave clues – two easy to dismiss, could have alternative explainations, but one clue was totally undeniable: hammers do NOT cock their selves.

So what were they doing in here? As far as I can tell, they were just hanging out, perhaps avoiding the person they live with, taking a reprieve from the cold, and/or being nibby and weird.

Hopefully, the person is now aware that their activities did not go unnoticed so best not to do it again.

Anyway, this is the story behind the “Violation” poem. I am 98% sure of who this person was so logically, I have nothing to fear. It is that 2% that is keeping me awake, the off-hand chance that maybe I am wrong. Or maybe it is the sense that it is time to clean house and move things around. I need to regain the privacy and purity of my home. It feels like they left invisible muddly paw prints everywhere, tainted all my stuff and I can’t see it but I have to clean it all up.

Sorry for writing all this… the poem could stand alone, needed no explaination. I am writing this because I am very tempted tonight to do what I usually, or rather USED to do when I am calm and collected on the outside and a little messed up about something inside. I keep telling myself “not an option” as I have to deal with this without that. Thank you for reading. Maybe I can go to sleep now.