The Ponies

In which our heroine discovers the wild world of online betting. . .

So my older brother gave me $50 for my birthday, with the caveat that this money must be used to bet on a horse for the Derby - either that or returned to him. Since gambling seems to be about the only vice on the planet that I can't get addicted to, I tried to wiggle out of this stipulation, but he called me from Louisiana or Texas or wherever he is at the moment to give me shit until I hunkered down in front of the computer and figured out how to bet on a horse online. Also, my mother called and told me that Barbaro was going to win and I had, by god, better bet that money on him. So I did. It took ages. For some reason I have absolutely no problem blithely entering my credit card and all personal information into websites that are promising to send me books or T-shirts or computer things or whatever, but entering that same information into gambling websites wakes up the latent paranoid Puritan in my soul and I'm sure they're going to drain my bank account, highjack my identity and leave me penniless in the gutter. Even more penniless in a deeper gutter than usual, I mean. Also, it's just not that simple.

You would think - I did - in this day and age, that it would be perfectly easy to bet any amount of money on anything using a credit card and a couple clicks of the mouse. You would be wrong, as I was. Betting on a horse for the Kentucky Derby is a complex, multi step process involving a lot of cross cultural diplomacy. It turns out that you have to register with the betting site first and by register I mean give them every bit of personal information that you possess. I did this over the phone, with someone named Diego. Diego's English, while undoubtedly better than my Spanish, was still not really up to the whole spelling things out task that phone information processing requires. Part of that was my fault; I can never remember what you're supposed to use as examples. I mean, normal people, when forced to spell things out over the phone, say A as in apple, S as in Sam, etc. I can't remember those nice normal things and instead my brain presents me with L as in lizard, V as in vampire, P as in psychoanalysis and so on, and I don't think Diego had a clue what the hell I was talking about. Eventually, though, with many mutual apologies, we figured it out and then I asked if I could bet now. No, no, I couldn't bet: I had to deposit money in my account first. Great, could I use a credit card for that? No, no I couldn't; that would be much too simple.

There are many different ways you can deposit money into your online betting account. None of them are simple. Some of them, as I discovered after a confusing 15 minute chat session with someone named "Billy" won't work for people who don't have a landline phone. Time was running short. I called the betting place again and, desperate, handed over all my financial information: bank account number, routing number and so on. Then I went back to the computer to actually bet my money. No go - and it was 20 minutes to post time. I called back and got Juanita. I said excitedly, "I want to put $20 on Barbaro to win, place or show, $20 on Sinister Minister and $10 on Steppenwolfer because I like his name!"
"You can't do that," said Juanita impatiently, "You only have $50."
"But that is $50."
"No, no. Those bets total $120 just for the first two."
I became completely confused. Have I mentioned that math is not my strong suit? "Help." I said plaintively, "I've never done this before and I don't know what you're talking about."
Juanita was very patient and she walked me through it. You can't just bet money to win, place or show - that's three separate bets, and they have to be filed, or whatever it is they do with them, individually.

So I ended up betting $8 to win, $8 to place and $8 to show on both Barbaro and Sinister Minister and forgot about Steppenwolfer altogether. I thought I was being smart, hedging my bets and being canny. I am clever, I thought. I can't lose. All my money won't just evaporate now. And it didn't, but shit. The one time in my life I'm prudent and yet again it is proved that I should listen to my mother, because if I'd just bet the whole damn $50 on Barbaro I'd be rich as hell right now and in the process of buying a digital SLR like I want. Alas, though, because I was cautious, and because I went with Sinister Minister, who came in 18th or 75th or something, I only won $65 - but that's way better than nothing and I am all enthused. Perhaps I can find an addictive pathways center in my brain for gambling after all. Meanwhile, I have to call Juanita & Diego back - I want my money and I can't figure out how to get it out of the computer.

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Yeah Birthday

Well, the lexapro is finally kicking in and I'm starting to feel better. This is awesome; praise lexapro! Yeah antidepressants! Antidepressants are a Good Thing! Or, then, it's possible that it was just having such a nice birthday that has made me more cheerful. It was a really lovely day & night & thank you to all my various friends who made it that way. I'm sorry I've been such an unholy pain lately, but I swear I'm getting better now.

Yesterday I went to the arboretum with my mother. I hadn't been there in ages and so I had never seen the huge bonsai exhibition they have. I'm ambivalent on bonsai; the process is so paintstaking and then it looks so sculpturally cool that it invokes my inner 10 year old (never far from the surface) who thinks wow! I would like to play with troll dolls around that bonsai tree! But then something in me recoils from, what is, let's face it, basically torturing trees. I barely have the heart to prune the roses; there is no way I could cut tree roots and wire limbs to force them here and there. They did have a bonsai made out of wisteria though and I could wrap my mind around that - I wonder if I could do it with honeysuckle. Torturing honeysuckle bothers me not at all; I actually find it quite a soothing and meditative practice.

Then, in the evening, the kids and I went and had a festive dinner at Sunny Point, which I always thought was about the best restaurant in Asheville. I still think that - for breakfast/lunch/brunch. Dinner was not as all fired incredible as I had hoped it would be. It was good, but it wasn't great. I had the stuffed trout special, which came with mashed potatos. The whole thing was sitting in a stone cold sauce (so cold, in fact, that I am assuming it was meant to be cold) and honestly it was kind of gluey and all of it was white. Some lemon, something lighter, something with some zing would have been a good addition. M had a chicken breast with kalamata olives over risotto and while that was delicious, it was way too rich and not really as good as the chicken/olive/artichoke thing that I make from time to time. The risotto itself was really really good though, and you can't fake a risotto. A had a Cobb salad which was huge and, bonus, cheap. Go for the salad.

So after dinner, stuffed and logey, I went on over to Drinking Liberally and had a fantastic awesome time, even though, or possibly because, Screwy Hoolie stood up in the middle of it and announced that it was my birthday in a loud voice which carried across all of Jack of the Wood and then the entire bar sang Happy Birthday to me while I stood there and turned extremely bright red. Then people bought me drinks; my awesome astrologer friend J brought me a copy of my birth chart and we talked for a long time; my other friend J showed up, which she hardly ever does; I ran into yet another one of my friends J who I hardly ever see, along with a bunch of the old bluegrass jam people I also hardly ever see anymore; my friend C recited poetry at me and while I was sitting talking to my friend M I met a guy with the same birthday as me. So it was really fun, big fun and when I got home M and I watched The Lost World (he was incredulous at first at the simple beautiful badness of it, but he's hooked now too) and then I went to sleep. Ah birthdays.

And now, what is almost the best part, I am looking for a digital camera, because I also got some birthday money, hooray, hooray, and instead of being sensible and saving it to spend on bills and food and boring shit like that, I am going to blow it on myself and buy a nice camera. I've just been researching and while what I really want is an SLR, I don't think I can afford even a used one, damn damn, but oh well. So please, help me out here. I want the closest thing to an SLR I can get for under $400; I want to take awesome incredible photos that are much better than my usual photos. I would really like the ability to do macros, as well as a good zoom and I think I need at least 5 megapixels, since I really want to start doing a lot more high res, print quality stuff instead of all the mostly web things I usually do. Recommendations? Thoughts? Comments? Speak to me! Help me get the camera that I will have forever and love!

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This is It

The day I've been dreading. In 24 hours it will all be over, except for the party, that's what I keep telling myself, it doesn't mean anything, it's just a day, and yet it's only 9:15 am and I already had to apologize to my mother, my daughter and my dog for not being a satisfactory birthday girl. But I did get a card from my cigarettes, which was thoughtful of them. A few weeks ago they gave me a tote bag too, made of recycled soda bottles and alarmingly ugly. My cigarettes are my true friends, apparently, either that or they can't believe I'm still alive, despite their best efforts to kill me off.

I got an email from the one old friend who always, always remembers my birthday. He said, "Where have the years gone? In my mind's eye I can still see the wafty bo-ho
artist fumbling around downtown charleston" and you know, so can I, and I really wonder where the hell she's gone too. Thanks, R.

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theo the magnificent

theo the magnificent
Originally uploaded by zen♫.

Courtesy of Zen the magnificent, photographer extraordinaire, here's Theo looking oh so incredibly good that you just know there's a half chewed shoe carefully stashed under a bush somewhere.

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Ah Asheville

I went to see my new therapist again today and I really like him, although my brain has this tendency to swerve wildly between believing in things "new age" and not believing in them at ALL, and he definitely tends towards things of a newish age nature. Only in Asheville, I believe, does your therapist think you should a) get your chart done, b) go to a sweat lodge and c) do some kind of ritual to invoke the spirits of your ancestors for guidance. That's actually not a bad idea, because it turns out I'm afraid of my ancestors, which is something I didn't know until I considered having them all over for dinner and drinks as it were. I think he wants me to face my fears, which is going to take a while, but I suppose it must be done, and I guess we might as well start with the family. I know it seems weird to fear your ancestors, but I do have a lot of them, and the ones for which photographic evidence exists tend towards long beards and stern expressions. Even the women don't really look, you know, jolly, and the children are all completely serious, even when they're shoved into pony carts or standing there with dogs. And then something about 100 year old photographs of dogs really gets to me, somehow, and I have been known to sniffle.

In other depression news, I put myself back on Lexapro, since I have about 5 weeks worth stashed away, even discounting the one pill Theo ate a while back (didn't affect him at all. Dogs don't need anti depressants - I wish I could get that enthused about a milkbone myself.) The only problem is that my stash expired in October 2005. Of course I took one first and then started to worry that I'd poisoned myself and that terrible hallucinations, shock and death would soon follow. Fortunately, though, I have all these friends who work in mental health (yeah, I know, I know) and one of them found out for me that Lexapro doesn't really turn into LSD or arsenic or anything when it's out of date, it just gets, possibly, less potent. So we shall see whether my brain chemicals get sufficiently altered to turn me into less of whatever it is I am right now and more of a sort of cheerful (not too cheerful, never that) human type being.

My mother says that depression is a completely rational reaction to the state of the world today and all smart people should be depressed. Of course she also says that there's never been any kind of mental illness or depression in our family at all, ever, and when I point out that both my grandmothers were hospitalized for depression or madness or, actually, since I have no idea what they were put away for, who knows, maybe that convenient female complaint of nerves, she says that people were always locking women up in those days for no reason at all. This has always evoked a picture in my head of a guy with a big butterfly net lurking around a city street, just waiting to nab a passing woman and haul her off for electro shock therapy - and then that's that, for as my aunt, famously, once said "Mother was never the same after the shock treatment."

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Depression & Parties

Ah, being kind of down and yet having parties - two great tastes that taste great together. Anyway, I'm not having this party. My friend J is, on Saturday, and I am co-hosting it, because it is kind of for my, uh, birthday, about which the less said the better, because I am just not in the birthday mood, unless the birthday mood is fairly blue. Why am I so down? I think it is the birthday thing, combined, you know, with the broke thing and the fat thing and the dateless thing. Not to worry though, because no matter how awful & gloomy I get, I am totally capable of cheering up for a good party, therefore, if you want me to cheer up, you will come to this party.

I just went to send out some email invites & realized I don't have everyone's email and I'm too lazy to try to dig all over the place and find them, so if you didn't get an invitation and you would like to come, drop me a line (you can get to my email by clicking on my avatar up there in the upper right hand corner, or, as I discovered today, for you poor IE users, way down in the lower right hand corner) and I'll send you directions and stuff. Saturday night. This Saturday. May 6. It's in West Asheville. She is threatening, or promising, depending on your outlook, croquet. And it's also a Kentucky Derby party. Did I mention that? Yes, the Derby, traditionally run on or near my birthday and on which I have never, yet, won one thin dime. Such is life and horseracing.

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Unsolved Mysteries

There are portents and omens abounding, oh yes. There are peculiarities and metasynchronicities; there are rips in the space time continuum and general weirdness is at an all time high.

The remote control for my TV/DVD player has reappeared after being, apparently, on vacation for almost 10 months. Not only that, but it heralded it's reappearance in this plane by causing not one but two substitute "universal" remotes that had been procured to replace it to break down. To backtrack a bit, the original remote that came with the TV vanished completely and utterly sometime early last fall. We searched and searched and turned the house upside down; there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, and one sibling was driven to accuse the other sibling of absconding with it and taking it to school for nefarious purposes or maybe just because sibling #2 is notoriously absentminded about what exactly is in said siblings backpack at any given time. Finally it was assumed that the demon hound had eaten it whole, although it was unlike him not to leave shredded remnants around. So we bought a universal remote, which more or less worked.

Then, in the last week or two, this universal remote suddenly died and couldn't be resurrected and I bought another one. It absolutely refused to work at all, so, using my vast resources of arcane technical knowledge, I decided that the electric eye type answering gremlin thingy in the TV that responds to the invisible ultra ionic magic zapper beam from the remote was, clearly, broken and the TV would, thus, either have to be replaced or taken into the TV repair shop. I suspected that the cost of both options would be roughly equivalent, so, naturally, I didn't do anything except stop watching The Lost World, which has left my evenings empty and bereft. I hate not being able to watch people fight dinosaurs and giant bees; it's just so. . so. . lonely. Then the other day when I was cleaning up for the party, I found the original magical remote. Sitting in plain view on the end table in the living room. Just sitting there innocently as if it had never been lost. Now, I am not Martha Stewart or my mother, we all know this, and yes, a fairly thick level of dust has been known to establish itself on my household surfaces, but even I dust more than once every 10 months, and I swear to you on the proverbial stack of bibles that that damn thing was not sitting there last week, or, indeed, at any time since it vanished. It's a big clunky hideous brown remote, for one thing, not a sleek black fashionable remote like all the others in the house, and it has toothmarks at one end from an encounter with the demon hound. But there it was; here it is again, and, more to the point, it works like a charm, so it must have disabled the other remotes when it snapped back into existence from the 9th dimension. There's no other explanation.

In more unsettling omen news, on Saturday, as I was cleaning up party detritus (it was a fabulous party, by the way, and the cleanup wasn't even all that bad, yay) I kept walking past a stick in my path. Every time I saw it I kind of jumped, because this was one of those snake appearing sticks that at first glance looks distinctly serpentine. Finally I got fed up with jumping and then saying, oh, that's just that stick, so I picked it up (after, okay, poking it several times with another stick to make sure it was, in fact, a stick and not a snake, not that I have any major problems with snakes, but I do like to be forewarned before I actually handle them) and threw it towards the weeds/trees/bushes/jungle that make up the back end of my yard. Where it caught on a branch and somehow became supple and draped itself over the branch, just as a snake would have done. I just added a picture, so you can see I am not kidding. It's still there. I think it kind of broke itself in two but not quite, and managed to hang itself up on that branch that way, but I am here to tell you that there are few things in this world more deeply creepiness inducing than picking up a stick that looks like a snake but feels like a stick and throwing it - only to have it behave like a snake. Cold shivers ran up and down my back and I heard the distant clanging footsteps of the gods as they moved, impenetrable and obscure, through their fabled halls. Well, no, actually, that didn't happen. What happened was I said, Holy Shit, and stood there staring at the stick/snake for a while and then shook myself and came inside and did my level best to forget the whole thing while simultaneously wondering what, if anything, this Meant.

So you see, weird shit is going down and magic is afoot, or whatever that annoying pagan bumpersticker says. Be on guard. Carry a rowan twig, or an amulet, or perhaps a .22. And if you know what my remote has been doing on another planet for the last ten months, I'd love to hear about it.

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Sad Things

Yesterday I went over to the Cathedral of All Souls who are hosting, this weekend, the North Carolina incarnation of Eyes Wide Open, the exhibition put together by the AFSC on the terrible costs of the Iraq war. I volunteered for two hours: I sat there and talked to a few people, sold a couple of T-shirts and shivered a bit, since the weather has gone from unseasonably hot to unseasonably cold. The exhibition is heartwrenchingly sad and people's reactions to it were interesting, from the man who told us that the next war would be about oil (like, what exactly is this one about?) and that oil was worth fighting for, since without it the American way of life would end. I have about 10 million problems with this attitude, starting with 1) it's not our oil to fight over and going on to 2) war is never worth it and if we don't come up with a better way to resolve our differences than war than we are all doomed, which leads me to 3) the problem with the end of the American way of life would be what, exactly? We create something infinitely more sustainable, more community oriented, more peaceful, less gluttonous, less competitive, less driven?

But that conversation, which I've after all had before, and will have again, wasn't what really hit me. During the two hours I sat there two bus tours full of mostly older tourists pulled up to go through the cathedral. I find bus tours totally baffling as a phenomenon; I can't imagine any circumstances in the world that would end up with me willingly getting onto a bus full of polyester wearing camera toting strangers to sit for hours and then get out with these same strangers to look dutifully at a "sight" for 15 minutes and then get back on the bus. But I am in the minority, clearly: I am from Mars and these people are from Earth and Asheville is clogged with them all spring and summer and fall, so whatever. They got out and went into and around the Cathedral, keeping, for the most part, a wide berth around the attached chapter house with its Eyes Wide Open banner and people in War is Costly t-shirts. Two ladies did come over; they stopped below the two steps up onto the porch and asked us what was going on. S, one of the local AFSC people, told them what it was and they recoiled. "Oh," said one of them, "It sounds sad." "Well," said S, "War is sad." "Oh, I don't want to see anything sad." said the lady, and they beat a hasty retreat.

No, she didn't want to see anything sad, and you know, that's perfectly natural. I don't want to see anything sad either; nobody does. Sad things are awful; they're sad, they hurt, they lead you down into sad places in your own soul. But I sat there and thought about it and it occurs to me that the next rational step, after recognizing that nobody wants to see sad things, is to do what one can to make sure that there aren't any sad things for people to see. In other words, if we don't want to see sad, then we must work to ensure that there isn't any sad to see. War is sad; you don't want to see it. So working to get rid of war is what we must do, for ourselves and for the ladies who don't want to see war.

Granted my own work along these lines is pretty lame; consisting as it does mostly of drinking too much every Thursday and then sitting, mildly hungover, at a table on a cold day in front of an exhibition of heart breakingly sad things. It's small, but it's something, maybe, even if it's only something in my own soul and my own small life. It's acknowledgement, perhaps, recognizing the existence of this sadness, standing witness to it and trying, in the very act of not looking away, to make the source of sorrow end.

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Par-Tay!

I am having a party tonight, which I kind of refused to grasp until this morning, but now I am in a whirlwind of activity and my house is immaculately clean. I think I'll forbid people from entering. I have to go out now and mow the lawn & set up the yard for party proceedings, woo woo. I hope it's a fun party and not a complete drag; it's a blogger get together. If you are reading this, can tolerate the company of geeks & are within driving range, stop on by. 6:30.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with the only wisdom I have so far garnered from my advanced age: when you get old enough, drinking a Coke feels equally, if not more, as sinful and guilt inducing as a couple of shots of whiskey. Such are the joys of age and avoirdupois.

Oh, and yeah, I'm still freaking out, but I'm subsuming all my depressed anxiety by being too busy preparing for this party to get all anxious and depressed. Remember the fight or flight reflex? I'm doing both right now and so my primitive stem brain is pleased with me. Also, my stomach finally stopped hurting, and that does tend to improve one's mood.

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Things Are Kind of Sucking Again

I'm starting to think that the Asheville vortex has dedicated it's otherworldly intelligence to kicking me the hell out of this town. Since Monday I have:
1. Lost primarly money making job #1.
2. Realized that I am hovering on the verge of losing job #2.
3. Found out from my landlord that he's raising my rent by $50, effective July 1 AND he wants to clean out the basement and the shed, which makes me suspect he's actually planning to sell the place, since he's never considered doing this before. The place needs some major work now; he told me he's in a cash bind; I bet he puts it on the market and then, then oh my readers, I am so fucking screwed it is not funny, not funny at all. You try finding a rental with a dog, a cat, an adolescent boy, no job and an utterly abysmal credit rating.

I've been having weird unearthly intuitive intimations for a couple of months that I may not be living here by next fall and they would appear to have been based in reality. I'm terrified and freaking out although I know it's too early to freak out, but if he does sell this place I am in so much trouble. And, I have to decide, even if he doesn't sell, if I can afford an extra $50 a month (no, of course not, but can I find anything else for less?) and not only that, can I afford another winter like last winter, where I nearly froze to death and it still cost me around $500 to keep the house just warm enough to stop the pipes from freezing? Or should I try to find somewhere smaller, cheaper, better insulated? Now? After I've been putting in hours and hours on the garden and it's just starting to look good? Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.

Also, I have to find another job, pronto, something I'm obviously not very good at. Meanwhile, my mother has diverticulitis, which is better than what we thought and she has forgiven me for going over her head and forcing her to go to the doctor. I went out drinking with my brother and he was really mean to me, which, combined with job loss, sent me into a depression tailspin that I'm still in. And I started therapy. I like my therapist and he wants me to take fish oil, which I'm doing, because I have anxiety (which I knew) and am depressed (which I suspected) and have to completely redefine myself and my space (which is the kind of thing Asheville therapists say and I hope to god he has more of a clue on what exactly that means and how to do it than I do.)

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