Aunty Christ had some time on her hands

For some unknown reason, the auntychrist at gmail dot com spam box fills up with the most interesting shit, while the less celebrated yahoo spam box mostly contains emails like, “Get a better home loan”—from—“Your personal banker.” Yawn. Why do deposed Nigerian royals prefer the gmail? You got me. But good lord, look at these names:

Philmon Hillesheim
Morvey Egerton
Mrs. Kate Hood
Omland Camps
Squines Cuccaro
Rattray Sheline
Magaddino Winkenwerden
Chisolm Rainwater
Ladell Hilz
Shock Buehler
Gronosky Gonzaga
Schwartzbach
Rau Ranni

It’s like things that had only recently heard of the concept of human language decided to take names to fit in with the rest of us. Shock Buehler is a morning drivetime deejay, of course. Morvey Egerton insists on appearing in his own television ads for his family’s jewelry store, while Rattray Sheline spends her Sunday mornings cutting out coupons that she never uses. Chisolm Rainwater has never been more than 30 miles from the Oklahoma farmhouse where he was born. Omland Camps is a fixture at Valois cafeteria. Rau Ranni likes to tell people she makes her own clothes, but she just sews rickrack on the hems of the skirts she buys at Goodwill.

Like a lot of people, I spent most of the '70s and ‘80s watching television. Like so:

I only sorta remember this commercial, actually, but I like it so damn much.



Whereas this one actually has haunted me my entire adult life. Thanks, television.



I remember this commercial, and I remember these damn dolls. My best friend had one. They were all right, I guess, but I don’t know, ad guys. What the fuck?



Oh, and a classic. I was trying to explain this one to Rich while we were in Chicago last year. These used to be on all the time.



Here we have the Battle of the Carpet Companies. I guess Empire won out, since their ads are on TV even now, even in Saskatoon. You used to get a free tee-shirt with your carpeting, I guess, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.



But Lincoln was always my favorite. Try to get that jingle out of your damn head, if you dare.



Trip down memory lane completed. Oh, television, thanks for everything.

Edited to add:

I don't know how I forgot about this one. It's truly the most awful commercial ever. But oh my god. Totally awesome.

Aunty Christ missed some of you (but not you)

Rich Bachelor and I are back from our long, long journey, upon which I learned a lot about water, and Rich learned something too. I mean, he certainly might have. I don’t want to imply that he didn’t learn anything, and yet who knows. It seems likely that he did, anyway. He probably did. Let’s just say he did. Or perhaps didn’t, depending.

Out of a six-hour class on water rights my small brain and I have retained the following information:

Ranchers are very concerned about water rights. (And rightly so, I add, before anyone gets offended.)

Ranchers don’t like environmentalists.

Ranchers don’t like fish.

A few other things, such as how, if you don’t know a lot about water law, you should probably shut the fuck up about it. The “you” in this case being me. Hello! After the class, Rich and I found ourselves in a bar where I was forced to argue about water rights with a man who also forced me to drink what he was drinking, a Peggy Sue float. (Baileys, French Kiss vanilla liqueur, cola and cream.) To paraphrase Mr. Samuel Clemens, Peggy Sue floats are for drinking, water’s for fighting. To paraphrase the man I was talking with at the bar, Peggy Sue floats are for drinking, beer’s for making girls’ titties fat. Whatever, dude. This was not an argument I could win, obviously. I was totally outclassed.

Another thing I learned from the seminar can be summed up in this story, told by the seminar-giver, after a few of the attendants said they were ranchers from the nearby community of Ranchington:

Oh, Ranchington. I have a funny story about Ranchington. I grew up in Townsburg, which is about 40 miles north of Ranchington for those of you who don’t know, the oldest of six kids. My younger brother put himself through college by working for the BLM during summer vacation, so he came back to Townsburg every year and lived at home and worked. One year, he went to a dance at Ranchington [meaningful pause] wearing sandals. [The room erupts in laughter.]

Yeah, he came home that night looking pretty beat up. [More laughter.]

Ha ha ha. Ranchers hate mandals!

Being out of Saskatoon and in the mountains/desert made me a bit homesick for Remote Mountain Village. For comparison’s sake, here is a photo of the land around where I lived for six years, before moving to Saskatoon:




And here is a photo of the land nearbouts to where we were driving last week:




“Nearbouts to where we were” sounds odd to me. I think it should be “nearbouts to where we was driving.” But I’m no grammarian. Anyway, to me they seem damned similar, and it kind of made me happy to see something in the same vein as what I used to see every day, as recently as three years ago. It also made me homesick and sad and a bit emotional. Oh, the beauty! Why did I leave? I spent most of our third day on the road trying to convince Rich that we should move to the eastern part of the state and open a bar, where he would deejay and perhaps play with his band (which he would also have to form), while I stay home and work on the thug dog ranch.

I must mention also, in public-service-announcement fashion, that the Geiser Grand Hotel in Baker City is ridiculously nice, with good food and friendly service, in a lovely setting, all for not a lot of money. I always love it when some far-seeing person decides to restore a landmark building (set to be demolished) to its glorious past, and that’s what the owners of the Geiser Grand have apparently done. It’s an amazing piece of history, and it’s a beautiful hotel. No complaints at all. It was a lovely end to a gorgeous trip.

More soon. I promise.

Aunty Christ and the shit of humanity

Roland Barthes wrote that photographs signify death—a creepy way to look at things, for sure, but also possibly true. I think he was talking only about portraiture, but, as we all know, corporations are people too.

My former office wife is one of maybe (he says) ten people left there, and, in the manner of momento mori, he’s taken these lovely pics of our dead processing center. May we all remember it as the awful, creepy, evil place it was. Fuckers.







(I know I should credit the photographer for use of his work here, but for reasons of anonymity, I will not. Suck it.)

Aunty Christ's gotta wear shades

So. It finally happened. Aunty Christ was let go.

And then immediately was rehired by the same company, but as a temp, without benefits, and at a lower rate of pay.

Oh, how I wish I had something insightful and witty to say on the subject, but I kind of feel drained by the experience. My new master makes 5000 times my former salary. I typed that, thinking it would lead me to a witty, insightful conclusion, but I instead find myself slackjawed in amazement. Well, obviously they couldn’t afford to keep me on at that wage [insert joke about needing to buy many more gold-plated bathroom items/black-market organs].

I keep repeating that this is hardly the worst possible outcome, and might be one of the best. And I would like to emphasize that just because I may seem to be protesting too much, does not specifically make it un-so.*


*Or, if it does, please don’t tell me. Thank you.

Sometimes Aunty Christ likes to pretend people are French

In a few weeks, I’ve gone from incredibly insecure and feeling like I can’t do anything right to feeling like I’m on top of the world. Am I awesome now suddenly? Well, maybe. Aunty Christ is not counting out that possibility. Was I worthless and horrible two weeks ago just because I felt that way? Unfortunately, this question leads to all sorts of mental acrobatics, in which I try to figure out a rational way for me to accept that I am currently awesome while maintaining that I was something better than rotten a few weeks ago. I think I can do it. I’m pretty good at self-delusion.

I’ve been remiss in my blogging duties, and now I find myself with all sorts of things to talk about. For one thing, school. I feel as though I should be embarrassed for saying so, but I love being a community college paralegal course student. And I’m really good at it. I know, I know, it’s like bragging about medaling in the Special Olympics, but I brag. I received the highest grade on the midterm in all three of my classes. I’ve started giving the correct answers, occasionally, in class, and (it is very hard to admit that I am proud of this) my classmates—some of them, at least—seem to assume that I’m smart. It could be the glasses, of course. I wear glasses because I’m smart, not because I’m myopic.

It’s tempting, given my newfound amore with the law, to turn this into a law blog, but since this is only my first semester, I feel it might be premature. I could only cover topics such as: “How to interview: Rectangular table or round?” And: “So you want to file an appeal? Be ready to answer a lot of questions about tangentially related topics, apparently.”

More on that later. My other favorite topic lately is the economy, and more importantly, why the national economy is sucking for me. To sum up briefly, my former company (which sucked) got bought out by a larger company, which also sucks, and which apparently bought us simply to (1) drive itself into debt, and (2) fuck with us. This week, I was asked to leave my comfy basement, where I have been working for the past seven months, and come to the office. The stated reason was so that I could help on a filing project, although I think we all can guess that the actual reason was so that my bosses can tell me in person that I’m canned, rather than doing it by phone or email. So impersonal.

So, I spent a day this week doing light clerical work in anticipation of our office’s move to the cheaper suburbs of Saskatoon. This light clerical work involved constructing 300 cardboard boxes and lids while someone else filled them with folders, and then running upstairs with them and putting them in neat rows. As one of my coworkers said, “They are making us dig our own graves before they shoot us.” The shooting began yesterday. About 15-20 of my coworkers were laid off, with more hot laying-off action to come next week, we are promised. As Rich noted earlier, working for the Dread Pirate Roberts sucks big ass.

“Good night, Aunty. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

In today’s economy, I am pretty much guaranteed six months of looking for a job, followed by another several years of underemployment, temping (if I’m lucky), and part-time work. If I were a younger, more flexible woman, I’d strip or sell my eggs. Perhaps both. As an old, I’ll be stuck offering carts to Wal-Mart shoppers. And I promise you I’ll be muttering under my breath to each patron who passes by, “For this I went to a top-ten school?” Because if I am nothing else, I am a bitter, petty woman who unreasonably thinks she deserves society’s esteem despite doing very little to earn it.

So, I was depressed about the whole impending unemployment/destitution/ignominy thing, but as if to balance that out, fate (in the guise of MySpace) has decided to unearth for me three of the best friends I’ve ever had, none of whom I’ve spoken to for over a decade. One is L, my good friend from high school, and the woman who introduced me to The Smiths and Dylan Thomas and Monty Python. We saw the Moody Blues every summer, because that’s where she was conceived, according to family legend, and we more or less lived at the Cabaret Metro and the Vic every weekend, catching Inspiral Carpets, Mojo Nixon, Joy Division, Texas, Peter Murphy, the Meat Puppets, and, oh god, everyone. We dissected a fetal pig together (we named her Fifi Trixibelle), we tried to dred our hair together, we pierced each other’s ears for the 11th or 13th times. Oh god. I mean, we were girls. We were really stupid. And then, for some reason, while I was at college and she was working in a custard stand in our hometown, she decided not to be friends with me anymore, and so we weren’t.

Now—in a twist that I never would have seen coming, she’s living in a house two blocks away from the high school we hated, and raising a kid, and she’s still hilarious and bitingly cruel. She told me about her Christer neighbor who puts a cross in the middle of his lawn every Christmas, and her idea to put a W in hers, and get her friend on the other side to put an F on her lawn. That’s L. That’s the way she’s always been.

And we were both friends with B, my first gay male love. Now, thanks to L, I have his email address. I hear he’s designing at Ikea stores, and rescuing pitbulls.

The internet is a deeply stupid thing, I'll admit. But every once in a while it comes in handy.

Oh no Aunty Christ didn't

For some reason, my brain has latched onto the term/TV show title “Tool Academy” as its new favorite thing to talk to itself about. You know, maybe I’m at the store, or driving down the street, or sitting in my interview class listening to some diapersack spouting forth about how awesome he is, and all I can think is: “What is this? Tool Academy?”

Anyway, Rich is gone, leaving me once again to stare helplessly at the stove. It makes food, when Rich is here. But now it sits cold and empty and unproductive. Where’s my dinner, stove? Oh, it’s at Arby’s? Okay, then.

North Saskatoon is filled with fast food drive-thrus, but the closest is Arby’s. Oh, what’s wrong with Arby’s?, I asked myself. I mean, of course it’s disgusting, but a chicken sammy is a chicken sammy, right? I was ready to flip on the turn signal when I looked up at Arby’s giant red penis and said: Oh god. I cannot do this.





Any kitchen that prepares shaved penis on bun is not for Aunty Christ.

Good thing, anyway. Two weeks ago I went to the office for the first time in seven months and ended up talking with a little flibbertigibbet of my acquaintance, who turned the conversation, eventually, toward her dislike of people who don’t take care of themselves. And then she kind of very meaningfully stopped herself and looked at me. “Oh, not you,” she said. “I mean someone like _____,” and proceeded to name two or three really obese people in our office. Finally! Someone who doesn’t consider me morbidly obese—that’s awesome. I guess I can stop wearing my “THIS IS WHAT 400 POUNDS LOOKS LIKE” t-shirt (size medium, but it’s a little snug).

That awesome guy from my interview class? Turns out that when he’s not talking, Pregnant Black Teen is. Pregnant Black Teen kind of stole my instructor’s heart the first couple classes, her being preggers and my instructor being a mother. To introduce one of the film clips we watched (it’s a community college course: we watch a lot of movies), my instructor informed us that in this scene Denzel Washington’s film wife had just had a baby, and the mother next to me looked at the mother behind me and they both said: Aw! A baby! But Pregnant Black Teen killed off any good will her fertility had bought with the unfortunate habit of yelling at the movies we’re watching, and then yelling at our instructor as if she were a movie. The instructor, for example, put on Erin Brockovich and instructed us that although Erin’s interview skills were good, we perhaps should think twice about wearing a short leather vest to talk to clients. “She look good!” shouted Pregnant Black Teen at Julia Roberts’ sassy little figure. “I’d wear that! What’s wrong with the way she look?” Later, when the instructor said that she didn’t really like Julia Roberts but she—“Oh yes you do!” Pregnant Black Teen yelled. Instructor: “Well, no, I just don’t really like—” Pregnant: “Yes you like Julia Roberts!” It went on for perhaps a minute, and the instructor (a seasoned litigator) won, but only barely.

It was a wonderful moment for law, and for community college, and for humanity in general, probably. But there are moments in everyone’s life when you just want to take someone by the shoulders and tell them to stop being a stereotype and, oh, I suppose I just feel like that’s happening more and more frequently lately. That and the Tool Academy thing.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. Now, stove, make me dinner.

Aunty Christ is the Weepy Grand Canyon of Emptyness

Today is Super Bowl Sunday and, not coincidentally, my favorite day of the year. That’s right: Puppy Bowl V. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m retarded for dogs, right? I’m a pedophile for dogs. I’m Temple Grandin for dogs. I am not, however, coprophagiac for dogs or necrophiliac for dogs. I for one draw the line there. Some people are disgusting.




So, Rich and I looked at cats the other day, and we found one that’s as close to a thug dog as any cat is going to be. I introduce Rico.

Like my name say, I am Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. Bitch, I will cut you.

He looks almost exactly like a thug dog, and he is large enough to stand up to the thugs’ mindless antagonism, I think. And provide them an ample meal in his litter box, but that’s another—completely disgusting—issue. (Didn’t I just say I was against that?) Of course, we have not gotten him yet. Will we? Will we soon—or ever?—bring him home in a little cardboard suitcase and introduce him to the Brothers Thug? I don’t know. It seems kind of unlikely at this point. I would like to get a cat, if only because Rich loves cats so much, and to be a cat person in a house of thugs must be hard.

But oh my: another thing that needs to be cared for. For the past six months or so, a blog post that another blogger wrote (in fact, the last blog post she wrote) has been clattering around in my head. Wide Eyed Kid wrote:

“Somewhere in 2008 I ran out of whatever it is that you pull out when you need to 'dig deep' … I've been told by a whole bunch of people that I am 'strong'. My shrink has said it. My counsellor has said it. My father has said it. My partners have said it. And my friends have said it. I think people say 'you're strong' to reassure themselves. Someone else's strength is a comforting alibi. People say 'you're strong' like it's a personality trait... like it can't be used up or beaten out of you.

“I pretty much used up all my strength not committing suicide after the home invasion. And after the first 2 years of that, every tiny amount of regenerated strength was put toward the maintenance of my sanity. I haven't had enough spare to get on top of things since 2003. And now I've been comprehensively drained once more. Strength is a resource that needs to be replenished. What I once had in abundance now needs complete and total regeneration. But I don't know how.”

When I first read that, I thought, “I know exactly what you mean, sister.” Not that anyone’s ever accused me of being overly strong, I don’t think. And not that I am strong. But there are other things, other traits, that after a year of neglect have been worn away by worry. Stress has hollowed my damn self out. I write about myself in cover letters: I am organized, detail-oriented, and meticulous, a good speller, a good writer. But I am none of these things. I may have been at one point, but they have been chiseled away, at first with a tooth scaler, but lately, a jackhammer. Worse yet, I think of myself as a nice person—a nice-ish person, anyway. “You have so much love to give,” an ex once accused me of, stating his case that I should rethink the whole having kids thing. I thought, no, children are not for me, but this love I have—he’s right. I have love, but I will give it to those I meet who deserve it. And I’m living with someone who deserves all my love and more, and I am empty inside, and I have nothing to offer him.

What I do have, in abundance, is anger and criticism and a need to be left alone—or, even more sadly, mindlessly encouraged, like the final Special Olympics sprinter lumbering toward the finish line. I feel specifically wounded by the economic crisis, and by my unstable job, and by the people who don’t realize that everything’s turned to shit, and by the people who know that it’s just going to get worse and insist that you be terrified by their vision of the future. Ah, but there’s nothing more annoying than bloggers endlessly whining about shit, right? So, I don’t blog anymore. Just to open my mouth is to whine unattractively, and no one wants that. Even me. Whoever that is these days.

So this is more just apology, really, for being a bad blogger. I think maybe that going back to school is going to somehow provide the fertilizer I need to regrow some good part of myself. Not in the “school is bullshit” kind of way, either. After every class I feel a little bit more myself, but only a little bit. Then, eight hours of work and I am empty again. But it’s a start. It’s a glimpse of who I would rather be, which is better than this. This shell. This thing.

So there’s my plan of attack, I guess. Feel a little better tomorrow. And build on it. And build on it. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. I need to say also that I hope Wide Eyed Kid re-found her strength.