the spam won’t stop.

you can’t see it anymore, is one problem.

the two people in the world who i thought would be able to fix the problem haven’t been able to do it yet.

it got 123 e-mails tonight, in the past couple of hours. one will pop up any second now, i’m sure.

last week, spam started appearing in the “comment” section, on every single entry i’ve made. christine has made the comments section go away, as you might have noticed. you’ll have to e-mail me if you want to comment. sorry.

but the thing is, it’s not really gone, it just appears to be gone. if i look at the special website-editing place, there are all the millions of evil spams, more every few seconds, the vast majority from online casinos. MB has informed me these might not be online casinos at all, they might be secret evil evildoers who are going to steal ALL my credit card information, who will DRAIN ALL MY RESOURCES.

and the resources have been a little bit slim lately anyway, so i really can’t afford any draining at this juncture.

my computer is now loaded up with all kinds of anti-evildoer programs, including SPYBOT and ADAWARE and KILL THE EVIL FUCKER BASTARDS.

but i don’t think any of these mighty forces are going to help me with my current spam problem.

the thing is, every time one of the spams appears, it shows up in my mailbox. hence the one million e-mails tonight alone.

i haven’t gotten ANY e-mails at all from friends today, but maybe all my super-strength anti-evil programs have filtered them out.

one really bad thing is that i’ve been going to bed early for quite a while now. but at the moment is 11:28 p.m., WAY WAY LATER than i’ve gone to bed for quite some time, plus i got up pretty darn early this morning and worked out an extra long time, so i’m very tired and SHOULD DEFINITELY BE SLEEPING, but instead i sit here at the computer, waiting for the evil spam to appear in my mailbox so i can DELETE it, while at the same time laboriously going through each of my entries and deleting all the spams, sometimes there are more than a dozen per entry.

so see, i’ve clearly gone over the edge. TURN OFF THE COMPUTER AND GO TO SLEEP, MISS SMITH.

before there were computers, before i did a lot of typing, i just wrote really, really long handwritten letters to people. at least there, my hand would eventually get cramped, plus my handwriting would become illegible so i’d be forced to quit...

THERE’S ANOTHER SPAM! MUST....DELETE IT.....BEFORE IT.....DELETES.....Meeeeeeeee.......ARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH....................

Last Thursday, November 18th, I was rushing around cooking Indian food. I love Indian food, and sometimes I make it, although I always end up making too many dishes, it takes literally forever, and by the time I’m done cooking (sometimes it’s taken as many as three days), I don’t even want to look at any Indian food, much less eat it.

But I’d just begun; I was chopping onions, and although somebody claimed that if you held them under the water while peeling them they wouldn’t make you cry, I was crying. It was painful.

The phone rang as I stirred a big pot of onions. The tears had somewhat subsided. It was my mom, calling from Hawaii, where she’d been vacationing with my dad, my sister Amy and Jim, her boyfriend. “Grace, you’re just going to SHIT when I tell you this,” were the first words out of Mom’s mouth. Mom generally doesn’t start conversations like that. I figured she surely must be exaggerating. Incidentally, Amy claims Mom’s exact words to me were “You’re going to SHIT YOUR PANTS,” but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she said.

“Amy and Jim got married!” said Mom. And although I certainly didn’t do any defecating, I was, indeed, completely shocked. Amy and Jim had been dating for three years, and have been living together a good long while, and sometimes they talked in vague terms about getting married. My friend Randy and I were hoping for a big wedding; he wanted to be an usher, or sing a song, and I wanted to make the wedding cake. Plus I though it’d be nice if I got to be Maid of Honor. The only time I was almost a Maid of Honor was for Randy’s brother’s wedding, but I was demoted to plain Bridesmaid during the wedding rehearsal. And plus, that bride turned out to be the actual devil, so it wouldn’t have been much fun to be her Maid of Honor anyway.

But I figured that since I’m Amy’s only sister, I had a pretty good shot at finally being the Maid of Honor. My hopes are dashed in that regard, but it’s all right. I’m never going to be Miss America, either, but I’ve learned to cope.

After I got over my initial shock, I was just so happy. I started crying again, and I couldn’t figure out why. Tears of joy! It’s refreshing to cry tears of joy, let me just say that. This was the very first time I’ve experienced tears of J., whereas I’ve shed more than enough tears of sorrow/anguish/grief/anger, etc.

Amy and Jim had planned the trip to Hawaii, then decided that since they were going to be in Hawaii, they might as well get married. They didn’t tell anybody, and on the morning of the wedding they told my parents they had a surprise for them; they had to put on nice clothes and they were leaving in a half hour. Mom thought they were going to go someplace fancy for lunch, but she balked at putting on a nice dress. Dad figured they were going to make them go on a helicopter ride, and he absolutely refused.

Luckily, Amy can convince anybody of anything, so they all managed to pile in the car. They drove to the minister’s house, which was right in back of the church. Mom and Dad didn’t notice that they were pulling up at a church. At this point they decided they were going to go on a boat ride and the guy they were picking up had the boat and was going to fix their lunch.

They drove to the Hyatt, to the end of the parking lot, got out of the car and I guess the minister figured my parents didn’t know about the upcoming nuptials, so he said he was going to do a baptism in the ocean. I’m not sure if my parents thought Amy and Jim were about to join a cult. Finally, Amy said “We’re getting MARRIED.” I wish I could have been there, just to have seen the expressions on Mom and Dad’s faces. I supposed I would have been just as surprised, but I feel that if I’d been there, I would have figured it out. But it’s hard to say.

So they walked to a grassy place overlooking the ocean and got married. They then piled back in the car and did, indeed, have a very fancy lunch there at the Hyatt. If they’d have had the wedding inside the hotel, it would have cost something like $1,200 or $4,000, and I bet that didn’t even include any kind of wedding. Lesson learned: Get married outside, it’s much cheaper.

amy-n-jim-n-mom-n-dad

They got back on Sunday, and MB, my friend Randy and I waited at my parents’ house to greet them. When they emerged from they car, we broke into a highly choreographed rendition of “Going to the Chapel,” which they seemed to appreciate. We may decide to hire ourselves out for other wedding galas of this time, because we’re darn good, and who knows how good we’d have been if we’d practiced, or thought about it for longer than 24 seconds before they pulled up.

It’s funny to think of Amy as a married woman. She’s still my little sister, the baby of the family, and Mom kept saying she didn’t know they let 10-year-olds get married. Amy and Jim act like they’re 10 quite a bit, which is very endearing.

They’re sketchy about having some kind of reception; they say maybe they’ll have one in the spring. Randy and I have been encouraging them to register, so they can get presents, and Randy has graciously offered to help Amy pick out stuff to register for.

me & dad, A. & J. at their FIRST reception

In the meantime, we had an intimate, family-only reception at Randy’s. MB and Mom serenaded them with The Wedding March as they came in, and I made a spectacular wedding cake out of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Nutter Butters, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, with a big white snowball on top. I described the cake to my friend Christine, who said it sounded like a white trash wedding cake, and I tried not to be mad at her for that. I explained that it was tasteful and lovely, but she didn’t seem to believe me. Clearly, she had no idea of how beautifully it turned out. I took several photos of it, and here’s one:

That’s about all the excitement around here. Nobody else has gotten married. I was going to write about the wedding sooner, but I got caught up in all the Thanksgiving hoopla. Turkey, stuffing, etc. This year it was my job to chop the celery and stuff it with blue cheese, as well as making a Waldorf salad. It was exhausting, but somehow I managed it. Whew.

I also spent a great deal of Thanksgiving day studying the ads in the paper. Did you know there are more ads on Thanksgiving than any other day? I was fascinated with the number of stores that opened at 5:30 a.m. on Friday. Some were open till 11. I’ve never actually known anybody who would get up and shop at 5:30 in the morning, but Mom said there was a huge line of shoppers at 4:30 on Friday. She read about this in the paper, mind you; Mom’s idea of shopping is to drive to the store, walk inside, look around for approximately three minutes, declare that she didn’t need to buy anything after all, and then promptly exit.

The only other big news is that we had a whole bunch of snow on Wednesday, and I drove around in it quite a bit, while it was actually coming down. It was a fairly horrible experience, I almost got hit once, I couldn’t see because it was a white-out for a while, and I consider myself fortunate to be alive. It warmed up over the weekend, and the snow is all gone, thank God, and maybe now spring will be right around the corner.

Ok then,

Grace

ok then. many, many things coming to you very very soon.

gs

It was a 5K, which is only 3.2 miles, not so bad.

You may recall that in my first race, which took place in Davenport, Iowa last summer, MB and I started together and after about 10 minutes he took off and I didn’t see him till I finished, and by that time I was near death and extremely crabby. This time was much better because I was better prepared. For one thing, I didn’t start running at a full sprint, like I did in that first race. MB and I didn’t talk about it beforehand, but I expected him to take off with no warning. I told him this as we got in line at the starting line, and he said, “I don’t know if I’ll run fast today. I might just take it easy.”

Approximately four seconds after this declaration, he was gone. Zoom zoom.

But like I said, this time I expected it, so I didn’t get outraged. I watched him till I couldn’t see him anymore, then I concentrated on not falling down. I fell down the other day while running, got a pretty big bruise on my thigh and scraped up my knee, so I’m trying to be more careful.

My big problem with a race is that I’m out of breath the whole time. I guess I don’t run that fast when I’m not in a race, and so the breathing isn’t usually a big deal. I kept saying to myself, “If you slow down a little, or if you stop and rest for two seconds, maybe you’ll be able to catch your breath.” But even though I claim to not be a competitive person, clearly I’m kidding myself. I felt like I couldn’t slack off when all these other people were running alongside me.

Towards the end of the race, there were two boys of about 11 in front of me. One was wearing those gigantic 20-pound basketball shoes, and I thought I could pass him, because surely he should be getting tired because of the shoes alone. I did pass his friend, but the basketball-shoe kid kept up the pace and there was no way I could overtake him.

And like I said, the best part was after the race. In that first race, the Bix race in Iowa, with approximately 19,000 participants, the treats at the end of the race were twinkies. I like twinkies as much as the next person, but that’s about all they had, except for some lame cans of soda and random chips.

But for this much more intimate race (maybe there were about 200 or so people?), the Springfield Roadrunner’s Club had piles of sandwiches, plates of different kinds of bagels, fruit galore, doughnut holes, and the aforementioned chocolate chip cookies.

They gave away a bunch of raffle prizes, but we didn’t win anything. MB wanted to hang around to hear the finishing times, even though he knew he wouldn’t win. For some reason, all the men in his age category, 45-49, are very fast. If he’d been older or younger, he’d have at least won third place. But there appears to be something about those 45-49 year old men that makes them crazy with competing and nutty about being super duper fast.

In my age group, the women are kind of slow. If I was fast in anyway, I might have won something, but of course I’m not, so I don’t have to worry about it. I will say that the overall winner of the whole race only ran 12 minutes faster than me, so hopefully next time I’ll be able to pick up my pace and win.

Just kidding. I do admit to a modicum of competitiveness, but nothing kooky like that.

We saw some people we knew after the race, including Steve O’Connor, who I went to kindergarten with. His wife, Carol, was also there; instead of running, she called out the time as we ran past the one-mile mark. Carol was very festive, in big elf shoes and lots of jingle bells draped over her. In the brochure for the race, it said that we could dress up for Xmas and there would be a costume contest, but I didn’t see anybody more festive than Carol. I wonder if she got a prize?

After the race, I went to a rehearsal for Gus Gordon’s radio play of It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s going to be like a 40’s radio broadcast of the play. We’re performing it December 3rd, 4th & 5th at the Hoogland Center for the Arts, and they’ll tape the show and it’ll be broadcast on WUIS on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Pretty neat, huh? If I was still Grace About Town, I could have talked it up quite a bit, but since they fired me because they said nobody wanted to read about me anymore, I regretfully can’t do that.

Incidentally, even though I’ve been doing a pretty excellent job of not mentioning getting fired, I do have to say that every day, somebody e-mails me and/or stops me on the street to say they love the column, or they want to know where I’ve been? And I have to say, “I got fired.” Apparently none of the people who’ve stopped me or written to me were aware that they were actually sick of reading about me. Oh well. Bygones, as that guy on Ally McBeal used to say.

I’m playing the part of Violet Bick in the play. She’s a floozy, I believe, but not a prostitute. I don’t know why, but I’ve never actually watched It’s a Wonderful Life in its entirety, so I was a little confused about who Violet is. I somehow got it into my head that she became a prostitute when George Bailey isn’t born after all, but that’s all wrong. Just so you know. Which you probably do, because it seems that most people living on the planet earth have seen the movie at least 12 plus times. I’m going to watch it, really soon, I promise.

I was happy to go to the rehearsal and just sit. Because it’s a radio play, we only have to sit around, and then stand up and read our lines. Not too taxing, and fun at the same time. I was more tired from the run than I thought I was, I guess because of all that over-exertion.

After the rehearsal, there was time for a 6-minute nap, and then MB and I got all gussied up and went to the Illinois Symphony. He wore his tux, and looked quite dashing. He’d worn it in his last wedding, but this didn’t bother me at all. Kind of like knowing he’d run away during the race, I was prepared with the knowledge that he’d worn it before. And he did look damn good. I wore a long black dress, and we were quite stylish.

The symphony was excellent, and once again, I was happy to just sit. Even though the musicians were so good, I did find myself getting sleepy a couple of times. I tried to keep myself awake by focusing on an old guy a few rows in front of me, who couldn’t keep his head up. Maybe they should make the auditorium a little bit chilly so people will stay awake. If it’s warm and there’s lovely music washing over you, it’s kind of hard to not feel sleepy. Especially if you close your eyes to really feel the music. I tried that, but when I opened them, my contacts were stuck to my eyes and I felt that I was going to have to curl up in my chair, like the little kid in the next row. That’s a benefit of being a kid; his dad patted his sleeping head a couple of time, and nobody thought anything of a kid sleeping at the symphony.

During intermission we ran into our friend Becky, who was sitting up in the balcony. She had to return to her seat right when they flicked the lights, because it was a long walk back up all the stairs. Maybe this would be a good way of keeping people awake, a couple of vigorous calisthenics at intermission, like jumping jacks or some leg kicks in our chairs. Not that these things would have been so easy to execute in my long tight black dress, but it would have been entertaining.

And that was my very busy Saturday. Sunday was much, much more mellow, except for the brief excitement in the middle of the day when Mom, Dad, my sister Amy and her boyfriend Jim returned from their weeklong trip to Hawaii. Except he’s not her boyfriend anymore, he’s her HUSBAND, because they got married in Hawaii! Quite the biggest and happiest surprise I’ve had all week, all month, even.

Whew. The only event to come in November is Thanksgiving, which is just about the turkey, really. I’ve been annoyed to hear people asking each other “What are you going to do for Thanksgiving?” EAT TURKEY, of course, why do you even need to ask? I do have some things to say about Thanksgiving, but that’s for another day.

Ok then,

grace

when i think about things too much, as i’m apt to do too much, things can get bad. if i spend my time thinking about steven wright’s process and stuff, then i’m not going to enjoy it as much as say, MB, who sat next to me and laughed and laughed.

the other issue with the performance was the person sitting to my left. she was humongous, and she oozed into my personal space. that wasn’t so bad; the seats are wide, and i didn’t mind scotting closer to mb.

but she also had gum. which wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d chewed quietly, there in her chair plus mine. but no, she was a popper, a cracker, a gum smacker. CRACK, it would go, then another SMACK followed by, over and over again, CRACK, POP, CRACK, SMACK.

let’s just say it was annoying.

and then, to compound things, she started jiggling her leg. again, wouldn’t have been a problem if we hadn’t had a collective chair. but her endless jiggling caused the chair (rightfully MY chair) to jiggle, and me, too.

so there we were, jiggling and CRACKing. even more difficult to concentrate on steven wright’s slightly skewed view on life.

at one point she decided she needed to go to the bathroom, and told her boyfriend/husband/handler that she had to get up. we were all in the second row, and he told her he couldn’t. they discussed it, and i was rooting for her all the way, figuring that if she left, surely they wouldn’t let her back in.

but he won the argument. the CRACKing and jiggling continued, Steven Wright continued his monotone and i sat there, amused yet annoyed.

it’s always something.

ok then,

gs

But MB doesn’t have the luxury of endless days off, plus he has many, many more ethics than me when it comes to earning a living and stuff like that. Ethics, is that the right word? Morals? Desire not to be destitute? Anyway, we left on Friday and came back Sunday afternoon. Whew, fast, man, fast.

We went to Arizona, where it was 82 degrees upon de-planing. I knew it was going to be hot in Phoenix because it was about 38 degrees in the airport. Sure enough, we stepped out onto the exhaust-clotted airport drivethru, and boy, was it hot. And dry – my throat started closing up right away, and I was gasping for breath. But the heat felt good.

No time to stop for a sip of water, because we had things to do, people to see! MB has friends in Arizona who he wanted to visit, although briefly. I thought it would be fun, even if I couldn’t stay a week. Besides, they weren’t my friends we were visiting; I’d never met these people - what if I hated them? I assumed I wouldn’t hate them, because MB is a very nice person, and I figured he wouldn’t have a bunch of thugs/bullies/methamphetamine addicted/mean/ loud/smelly/stingy friends.

But first, Arizona.

I went to college in Arizona for one semester, my Sophomore year. The University of Arizona, in Tucson. I call it my lost semester. I think I was a Creative Writing major at the time – I do recall taking a poetry class, and I wrote some OK poetry. I also took a fiction writing class, and I wrote one (very bad) short story, and it was ripped apart in class, which made me decide I didn’t want to write fiction after all. I’ve come to realize that one of my chief bad qualities in life is giving up on things almost immediately, sometimes even before I actually start something. Other times, of course, it’s a good thing that I quit, like when I attempted snow skiing. And yet other times, I doggedly hang on, trying and trying, even though it’s pointless to keep trying. I’ve had more than one relationship like that.

I took a hiking class that year, too, which was fun, although extremely hot. One time our class was slogging down a dry stream bed (they were all dry, of course; it’s the desert!), and we came across a couple of naked hikers. They were just standing there nonchalantly, leaning against a boulder, quietly chatting, dressed in hiking boots and that’s all. As we passed, I, too, tried to appear nonchalant, but of course I wanted to ask them lots of questions (and I wanted to get a good look, too). The most important question was, what about all the cacti everywhere? I was afraid of getting stuck by the cactus, and I was fully clothed. Ouch, that’s all I have to say.

But back to our trip. The plane was completely full. “Nascar,” we kept hearing. Ah, Nascar. Car racing, right? I figured the yearly Nascar race must take place in Phoenix.

No, MB informed me (one great thing about him is that even though he doesn’t actually do stuff like Nascar-watching, he still knows about it. I don’t know how – maybe it’s a guy requirement?) that Nascar is EVERY WEEKEND, at different places around the country. The races last about an hour or so, and the cars go around and around in a circle for about a hundred miles (if any of these facts are wrong, it’s due to my lack of listening clearly, not MB’s relating of the information). Hmm. My first question for Nascar is, what about the huge huge waste of gasoline?

There were many middle-aged men in fancy Nascar jackets on the plane, and lots of them were in the hotel dining room at breakfast. They seemed orderly and polite. They didn’t hog all the breakfast sausages, which were kind of cold.

We sat by the pool on Saturday morning. The sky was an intense blue, and I wondered, as I do every once in a while, why any people are left living in colder climates like ours.

As I lolled by the pool, I heard part of an interesting conversation. A wedding was going to take place shortly, but the son of the bride’s sister had been murdered the night before, which was really messing up the wedding plans. The chief problem seemed to be that they suddenly didn’t have anybody to stand by the guest book to make people write their names down.

It’s always something.

Friday night we’d gone out to dinner with MB’s friend Nancy, a lovely and sweet woman. She drove a sporty white convertible, but she’d never driven it in Nascar. We ate at an Italian restaurant, where our waiter was maybe 18, very eager and enthusiastic and overly earnest. We told him we were just visiting Phoenix for the day, and hoped we’d like our food. This made him even more eager and earnest, and he kept coming back to make sure everything was to our liking. He was sweet, but also one of those people you want to put a muzzle on after a couple of minutes. But then he told us he’s in the Army Reserves, and will probably be going to Iraq soon, which made me feel bad for any bad thought I might have had.

Saturday afternoon we drove to Prescott, where a gaggle of MB’s friends was gathered. We got there later than expected, so they ate pizza and drank Captain Morgan’s rum & coke without us (at lunch).

Prescott is a fairly small town up in the mountains. It has a town square, like in any small town around here, except Prescott is very upscale, with lots of art galleries, gift shops galore, and plenty of bars and restaurants. MB’s friends include Mike-n-Pete, a married couple, I don’t know why the wife is named Pete, and Bill-n-Nancy. We met them at the hotel and drove in Mike-n-Pete’s great big silver car into the center of town.

We walked around, and I realized it would be impossible to keep up. Mike-n-Pete flew in and out of shops, as MB and I trailed far behind. I saw a pair of walking sticks in one place, and stopped to examine them. Mom wants a pair of walking sticks, but I didn’t know how I could get them on the plane. Plus, she found some sticks and put rubber things on the bottoms of them, so I figured she could live without the ones I saw. There were more in other stores; the first pair sold for about $15 per stick, but the other sticks were about $80-$100. It’d make me nervous to hike with a pricey stick like that; what if I tripped and broke it? I assume they’re pretty sturdy, but I have been known to break things deemed totally unbreakable.

After about a half hour of dashing from store to store, we settled in a bar, which might have been the real point of the scurrying around. We ordered Bloody Marys. And then the interrogation began.

Pete started. “How old are you?” she asked. I was startled. Unfortunately, my reaction to being startled is to blurt out whatever anybody wants to know. I’d make a lousy captured spy, which is why I’m glad nobody ever trusts me with too much top-secret information.

They seemed satisfied with my response, and Mike said I don’t look that old, and then assured me a few times he was telling the truth. Pete launched into a story about how once Mike had gotten her to believe they’d won the lottery, and the first thing she’d said was “We’re getting a maid.” She claimed she hadn’t gotten mad at him, but I’d have been quite pissed off if I thought I’d won the Lottery and then didn’t. Pete wanted to illustrate the fact that you usually couldn’t believe anything Mike said, but he’s a good man despite his tendency to lie.

Whew. Then they wanted to know everything about me. I figured they only thought they wanted this information, and if I launched into a diatribe of the various things I’ve attempted in my life, the random moving around the country, they’d quickly get bored. I diverted the conversation, avoiding mention of topics like the feature film I made, “Teenage Catgirls in Heat.” Although, maybe they’d have been fascinated with the tale of making that film, complete with great big paper mâché and fake fur cats that we launched off the side of the roof.

Sometimes it makes me nervous, telling any of my life’s story to people like that. People who clearly have legitimate jobs, careers, even. They obviously have much more adult, responsibility-type things than me, and it just makes me nervous. I avoided any mention of anything, except they found out I’m a massage therapist and I promised everybody a massage, in hopes of further diverting things. It worked.

After a few bloody Marys we piled back in the car, and somehow the talk turned to crazy things they’d done in the past, when they all lived in Springfield. A lot of discussion was devoted to MB, and they kept saying “bad turtle” and then whooping with laughter. “What does that mean?” I asked. “Nope, not gonna tell you,” said MB, his face getting red. MB isn’t the type to blush, so I figured this was something I needed to know about. “I love him,” said Pete, “So I can’t tell you about the bad turtle.” Her words sent them all off into hysterical laughter again.

MB had left some tea he’d bought at the bar, and went back to get it. I was alone with the friends, and begged them to share the bad turtle story with me. They refused. They said I should pretend to know, which might make MB come clean. When he got back in the car, I looked at him archly. “Bad turtle, huh?” I asked. He laughed and squirmed uncomfortably, but wouldn’t give it up.

I didn’t press it, but only because I didn’t want the friends to think I was some kind of harping lunatic. I knew MB wouldn’t be able to keep it from me for long.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much like that, drinking, eating, laughing. A good time was had by all, especially MB. It made me happy to see him having fun with his friends, and I was glad they weren’t mean/bitter/obnoxious/stupid/ smelly cretins (I didn’t think they would be, but you never know).

I didn’t mention the bad turtle till we were driving back from the airport, and MB broke down and confessed all. I won’t break his trust by sharing it with all of you, but let me just say it didn’t involve strippers, unnecessary violence, or illegal activity of any kind. If you see him, you can ask him yourself.

Ok then,

Grace