Living in Filth

I just don't get this whole adult thing where people live in clean palaces.

Here's what I see when I visit other people:

Here's what I see when I come home:

(Except we don't have the excuse of kids to cause this sort of thing)

Wife and I have a bedroom, office, living room, kitchen and two bathrooms to clean. That's really not a lot of space. And this March, we planned out 1-2 rooms per weekend for deep cleaning, like taking out everything, rearraginging, dusting, washing it and putting it back. We got the living room done, and most of the kitchen. 

Even when things are relatively tidy, things go to shit quick. Since we try to eat healthy and make food at home, the dishes pile up quickly. Empty table space is like an invitation for the mail you don't think you can throw away yet, but don't know what to do with either as well as the cereal boxes that just don't fit in anywhere. Wife has a desperate fear of becoming a hoarder, so at least we are able to throw away legitimate trash. At least we aren't living with the remains of takeout food surrounding us along with dead cats for atmosphere. right?

The way I see things, there's about 5 useable hours a day where you aren't sleeping or working (including prep and travel time). Take out 2 hours for applying to jobs. 1 hour for cooking a healthy dinner. and there's two hours left in your day. Oh, wait, we have to budget the bills and see if we have enough to buy gas this week. 1.5 hours left. 

Oh wait, I'd like to spend some time connecting (not a euphemism, not entirely) with the person I want to spend my life with. Hard to connect when you're elbow deep in toilet gunk. 

So we end up doing what absolutely has to be done, like dishes and laundry, and leave the rest for another day. 

It's all just another thing Disney lied to me about. Where are the singing birds and mice that are supposed to help do this shit?

At least we got the Christmas tree down this month. 

I Hate Toddlers/Review of More Real at MIA

If there is one thing you should do before going to an art show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, it is this: Check their schedule for kid events.

If there is an event for kids, such as Sunday’s Rock the Cradle with 89.3 The Current, DO NOT GO. You can be sure that every 2 year old in the metro area will be there.

You will find this out when you get to the museum after backroading through south Minneapolis because the GPS decides you need to visit every pothole in Minnesota on your way there. You will begin a spiral shaped pattern of driving around the museum in ever widening circles and narrow streets as you search hopelessly for a parking space. “Surely this street will have openings,” you think. “Parents wouldn’t want to walk their 2 year old in this cold for half a mile.” But you would be wrong.

Finally, you find a spot seven blocks away in a neighborhood that has several run-down apartment buildings daring the laws of gravity and good taste.

You walk the seven blocks in dampness, each step screaming “this better be worth it.”

Kids are everywhere as you get closer. Without wife along, as she was feeling sick, you start to stick out as the only tall guy, wearing a black coat and hat, without a kid hanging off a limb. You begin to feel as pedophiley and suspicious as a guy with a van and candy at a playground. But dammit, you’d punt a kid if you weren’t surrounded and actually rather terrified they might turn on you. And you have the lingering knowledge that if you have a sudden poop attack, there will be kids in each fucking stall in the place to make your life more miserable.

You begin to have conversations with these parents in your head. One-sided conversations where you pretty much yell at them.

“What the hell do you think your kid is getting out of this? Every kid here is about 2. Two! They don’t even understand the concept of fucking TIME yet, but you think you can force culture on them and they’ll get something useful out of it. Like the four cardboard tubes they tied together with string that they are carrying around like a fucking badge of genius rather than the worst craft project known to man? I can understand if your kids were 8 or so. At least then they can discern the concept that other people in the world think different thoughts than them, and they might actually remember what they saw today a month from now. You fucking liberal douchebag parents want to cram your 2 year olds into the genius class and want to grab on to the fact that your kid spent two seconds looking at a piece of art that they might just be the next Picasso or some shit. I hate you. This much.”

That’s the conversation I had while walking behind a mother who was letting her 2 year old walk up the stairs in front of me all by herself. I had a lot of time to think. 2 year olds are shit at climbing stairs.

I got up the stairs and dodged and weaved my way to the More Real show. I knew that there would be solace there, because tickets to get into this exhibit are 14 bucks, unlike the free rest of the museum. 14 bucks is a small price to pay to get away from munchkin land.

The full name of the exhibit is MO/RE/AL: Art in the Age of Truthiness. They already have a 300 or so page souvenir book about it you can buy for 40 bucks at the gift shop. Ugh. Also the site just linked to has more annoying gifs than a geocities refugee center.

If you don’t know what truthiness is by now, here you go.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The idea of art as a lie that gets to the truth is an old one. I’m a fan of unreliable narrators and metafiction, but the pieces here did not impress like the collection at the Real Life show, which used a lot of the same thematic organizing devices, yet managed to group the pieces in more useful and digestible clusters.

Unlike the other shows I’ve been to at the MIA and the Walker, I had a lot of trouble getting into this one. The first three rooms, in fact, were a bit of a bummer and I was wondering if I could get my money back if I left early enough. Compared to the Sports Show and the Until Now shows at MIA and the Real Life show at the Walker, this exhibit was sparse. Most rooms had one or two artists, sometimes just one or two works to examine. It makes you jealous of MoMA visitors who have a chance to see Tilda Swinton in a box. 

I turned around a bit on the experience when I got to the “Phantom Truck” by Inigo Manglano-Oralle. This piece takes up the largest room in the wing, so much so you wonder how they got it in there. The whole room is dark, like photo-room dark, with little more than the exit sign illuminating anything. Out of the darkness you can make out the vague massive shape of an open top semi trailer with big, boxy and air-compressor shaped equipment loaded and strapped down. It’s rather menacing, and for good reason, since it is based on the idea of the chemical weapons trucks that were supposedly our reason to invade Iraq.

You wanna feel bad about your fellow social internet surfers? Like, shit we are doomed bad? You can check out this piece called “NoFun” Two artists decided to use Chat Roulette (You can go there anyway if you need to feel like we’re doomed) and put up a hanged body. People laugh about it, even though nothing about the scene looks fake. Out of the many people who saw the scene, one called the cops.

Another point of interest was Vik Muniz’ “Verso” pieces. A Rembrandt hangs on the wall, but around the room are other paintings, leaning up against the wall so you can only see the backs. On the backs, there are mailing labels to say what they are “Starry Night” or “American Gothic” and where they have been. The idea here is to give the museum goer a look at the story of the life of the painting, where it has been, which is typically only seen by the museum staff. I think this is where I get a bit perturbed by this.

The act of recreation here is impressive, don't get me wrong. Obsession like that usually is. However, pointing out to me that there are other stories behind great works, that they go to different museums, is about the least insightful thing you could say about artwork. I know that they keep making commentary tracks for movies, but I quit listening to them years ago after the point where they all pretty much say the same damn things and you aren’t really going to learn anything new about the movie business that you really cared to know. Exception: Anchorman commentary – it’s like another hilarious movie. Back to the Verso pieces, this insight isn’t even as good as a commentary track about how people got along in the making of the movie or which scene was shot first. It’s the intellectual equivalent of telling me that the book I’m reading was shipped to a Barnes and Noble once.

Much more interesting, and in the same meta-fictional realm of the backward paintings, was the nearby room showing a 10 minute film by Eve Sussman called “89 Seconds at Alcazar.” The film is a recreation and behind the scenes look at the minutes before and after the scene depicted in “Las Meninas” by Diego Velazquez. Here’s that painting, which I’m sure you’ve seen:

What’s so interesting in this one shot scene is the constant fluid motion of the people involved, the intricate costumes recreated from the painting, the way everyone eventually lines up, and the fact that Peter fuckin Dinklage is in a dress! And it’s way more interesting and says more about the piece it’s commenting upon then the back of a painting. There’s also a bit with a dog.

At the risk of apples to oranges comparisoning: here’s a list of novels concerning nature of mixing fiction/art/life that you will get more out of than spending time on the same subjects at this gallery:

Atonement

Lolita

The Neverending Story

The White Hotel

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

I ain't got time to re-run, death's a-comin'

Yesterday I took my VHS collection to a donation center along with my VHS player. I know that even 2 years ago, pawn shops stopped paying for tapes. Even DVDs were only a buck a piece. I took that price then because I needed to get food that month and sold 50 DVDs for 50 bucks. I’d probably spent about $750 amassing that collection. There was regret at the time, but not a lot. I had gone through my collection, and they were DVDs that I wasn’t planning to watch again.

Yesterday, though, I got rid of my VHS collection, with tapes that I’ve had for 20 years, without batting an eye. This included the last copies of the original Star Wars movies before Lucas THXed the shit out of em. The Godfather movies, and a whole bunch more. Wife told me to make sure to write down the ones we should get DVDs of. My response, what’s the point, we’ll have to move to BluRay eventually and DVDs will be useless.

But beyond that is a huge difference in life.

As I’m approaching 35, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the main differences between my 20s and my 30s.

Back in my 20s, I thought nothing of watching Reservoir Dogs 30 times. Likewise for Star Wars, Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the list goes on. I spent a lot of time with the movies I loved. I would fall asleep to movies as a regular part of my sleeping habits.

Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s just the proliferation of Internet services like Netflix and Hulu. I’ve had cable for about 1 year of my adult life, so videos were a pretty big staple of entertainment until technology caught up. But I think it’s more than that. I loved watching movies again and again. I read books a few times even though I wasn’t teaching them.

These days, I can’t stomach the thought of watching something again unless I’m also watching with Wife who has not seen it (like Doctor Who). There is simply too much good, awesome stuff out there now to be spending time re-running things. And the phrase “holds up to second viewings” is just insane to me. Why does that matter when there is so much more to read, view, see? I did break this twice. I watched Battlestar Galactica twice. It was not as good second time around even though I consider it one of the best Iraq commentaries via sci-fi ever devised. I also watched the last season of Lost again – It got better once I knew why I should care about the secondary lives of the characters.

Is this an age thing or is it that so much more is available than there is time to watch it. It seems that there wasn’t much TV worth watching in my 20s except for 24 (first five seasons anyway). Now I’m trying to keep up with a ton of shows that are all really really good.

The other big thing that changed between my 20s and 30s? Naps. Oh my God, I have fallen deep in love with good naps. 

Social media experience is NOT A THING/My new dentist sucks

Been applying like a mug to get wife a permanent gig. This contract work at my place of biz wasn't going to last forever. In the past week, we've sent out 30 or so apps, contacted two placement firms that are talking to wife, and I did some LinkedIn networking like a mug and got another person in a local business communication group I belong to to take a look at wife for a social media position at their company.

Now, social media is like the baby of a species you have never seen before. No parents. You don't know how to deal with it. And it's only a couple years old. Some people get lucky and have successes, but when other people try to repeat that success, it's just white noise.

What works in social media is new, interesting things. No matter how many experts you wrangle, or examples you bring in, that's the bottom line. You just have to keep throwing out new things and hoping something will stick.

But, this potential employer wanted someone with a few years of professional social media experience. THAT IS NOT A THING. The damn concept was unknown a few years ago. Companies did social media, but not many, and not to the extent they do very recently, and certainly not as a full time gig. So I want to ask this person what the fuck, but can't cause there still might be a position at that company down the road that will work. We're meeting her for coffee maybe in the future, so perhaps I'll get to ask this question.

Secondly, I had three fucking cavities filled this week. We used to go to this dude in Fargo for our dental needs, and he was AWESOME. Only dentist wife has ever liked. I agree. He made dental work seem easy.

So I was somewhat relieved to find out the dentist we chose here had gone to school with him.

Wife got a cavity filled on Tuesday. She moaned and complained that it was a lot worse than before. I scoffed. "Dentistry gets better every year."

Then I went in last night, and had three fucking cavities filled. And oh my GOD it was like being waterboarded. the stupid drill was shooting water down my throat so I couldn't breathe. The dentist was like, try to breathe through your nose (with my mouth open,which I have NEVER understood as advice. Am I just weird or is it impossible to breathe through your nose with your mouth open?) Then she left after filling one and drilling the other two so she could check on another patient.

I welcomed the chance to breathe. but my tongue started to explore the drilled teeth and holy shit do they just strip mine mouths now? I felt like the entirety of my tooth was gone except a couple peaks around the edges.

Then she mentioned possible root canals in the future and I'm OLD I"M SO OLD JESUS FUCK.

Anyway, here's a better blog about dentists. Enjoy.

Walgreen's Gave Me the Wrong Drugs: Updated

Difference between last week and this one? Immense. The severe, wicked, horrible depression is gone thanks to a change in medicine and some perspective. I have an anecdote to share and we'll call this post good.

Went to Walgreen's two days ago to pick up a prescription for wife. When I got there, they had two. This happens often, and I don't keep good track of what she takes, so I just paid and left.

Got home, and the second medication was a refill for the new prescription the Dr. put wife on after the new year that made wife violently ill every time she tried to take it. Vomit sessions all night. So she stopped taking it and told her doctor (along with the info about the depression going south in a bad way).

So we got a mostly full bottle and entirely unopened bottle of medication that I paid for that we don't need. I had to pick up another prescription today. Here's the conversation I had with the Walgreen's person.

Me: Picking up for my wife, Mrs. Fargo Jones.

Her: OK.

Me: Can we double check what you are giving me? Two days ago you refilled the wrong prescription.

Her: (reads prescription)

Me: Yup. that's right. So, that incorrect prescription. She violently threw up all night when she took it, twice. And you refilled it and sold it to me. I was unaware of what it was. Is there any way to do a refund?

Her: Nope. We can't do returns for medication.

Me: OK. Guess I get to go do some experiments then.

Her: ...


Really, I joked about using her prescription drugs illegally, and this teller had no warnings or concerns whatsoever.

So Walgreen's, if you're listening, it was at the Eden Prairie Walgreens, at 12:42 p.m. Thanks!

UPDATE: So, it turns out if you write a blog about your wife, along with fill out the feedback form that the receipt asks you to fill, and in there leave a link to your blog, you should tell your wife about said blog. When the pharmacist calls to figure out what went wrong, things will go much more smoothly. Anyway, pharmacist called wife and made things right. She figured out that one of wife's three medical allergies was not on the list at Walgreens, and that the prescribed medicine included that allergen, hence why wife puked her guts out both times she tried taking it. The pharmacist said the doctor should have known that (cover your ass classes, always helpful for medical professionals, eh?). In any case, they credited wife the 15 bucks toward the next prescription. So, yeah, I guess we're cool now.

Wife said the pharmacist seemed to be really treating her with kid gloves. I said, yeah, well, I was very dickish in my letter and blog.

Love Letter/Horribly Severe Depression

I think the worst thing about severe depression is the way others react even though I don’t know how I want them to react. If the idea of reading about depression makes you wanna puke, I don't blame you and please stop and go do something else instead. this one isn't for you. Like the spoken word part of a 90s R&B song, I'm about to get serious up in here.

For two weeks, wife and I did the depression dance, which is a lot like a Coldplay song where it starts off quiet and sort of meekly sad, and builds and builds until it becomes a loud riot of darkness that you can’t get away from.

Wife had her medication changed after the new year, including a depression med. Shortly after, she got violently ill, which was attributed to flu season, but she was never quite the same. I commented, she noted my concern, but we were ok.

But then the song began to build. She had to fight people to get paid on time, and was told she had a tone, which is a huge trigger word from her past, then we found out she was not being considered for a job in a rather harsh way, and we decided it would be a good time to start drinking heavily every night.

So for a solid week, we spent all our waking hours at home after work her telling me what’s the point and me trying to give her reasons to keep going. She would fall asleep at 8 and I would stay up until Midnight applying to more jobs for her.

She called her Doctor on Monday, and was told the doctor wouldn’t be in until Thursday, and asked what was this concerning. Fuck if wife is going to discuss her issues with the phone jockey at the clinic. She had told her doctor previously about the concerns, but the doctor didn’t seem concerned. She sets an appointment for Thursday and I beg her to just go back on the pills she was on before which we still have a bunch of, but I’m no doctor. And we get through three more days of suicidal feelings, with me on duty to stay with her through it all when were not at work. Finally after a wretched Wednesday night, she calls in to the doctor on Thursday morning and leaves a message “I’ve been feeling suicidal since Monday, the new pills are not working, I would like your help.”

Two hours pass.

She leaves another message along those lines.

Fifteen minutes pass.

The doctor calls her and changes her medication “But not until noon because I’m very busy today and you should have gone to the emergency room if you were feeling that way.” So this doctor of medicine expects a suicidally depressed person to possess the rationality of a non-suicidally depressed person. And me? I still am not sure what an ER would do for us other than charge us several hundred dollars we don’t have to change her medication to something that takes days to kick in, and berate us because that’s what doctors do in our lives particularly when it comes to mental illnesses, berate us.

Then the crescendo. Wife decides to kick it up a notch and start blasting away at every self-esteem issue I’ve revealed to her over five years. I try to encoruage her, speak loving words, guilt her, berate her, make her laugh, and nothing was working. She kung-fu’ed every statement of mine into another way I hated her somehow. She was a jedi master in flipping my words. She choruses “you’d be better off without me,” and “What’s the point?” and “You don’t love me” and “You betrayed me and sided with the people who won’t hire me.” I promise that I am going to sit there and take the abuse and love her, and she takes that as a challenge and raises it to 11 until pretty soon she’s talking about leaving me “It will be better, you wont’ have to pay back Sallie Mae, you wont’ have to wash the clothes or do dishes for me. Really, you will be so much better off.” And I’m wondering if I stabbed my thigh would I hit the artery the first time and Shit I am in there too and death seems like a perfectly rational reaction to this progression of shit we call life and why aren’t more people doing this because this all feels so fucking bad.

I get up out of bed and scream that I can’t take this any more and if I’m the only thing keeping her alive then she’s doing a great job of hacking away at that final tie to earth. I’ve been running an emotional marathon for two weeks and I am exhausted and can't take any more and she yells at me that I am abandoning her just like she always said I would someday. And I put on my coat that’s on the floor and can’t make myself move any more because if I reach the kitchen and those knives I don’t know what will happen.

There is no rationality in severe depression. People say all sorts of shit to people who are in a bad way mentally, and if you haven’t listened to Maria Bamford discuss it, then do so.

And I write about this, both my and wife’s depression, because I hate hate hate that we have to go through so much of life hiding it from people. If we had cancer or something, it’d be fine and dandy to bring up, and people would shower us with ribbons and fun runs. But if the wiring in your brain chemistry is having a hiccup, man, you better just buck up and get over it because all our lives suck and who the fuck do you think you are to bitch about it? Maria Bamford says this better than I can in another interview from Slate:

Bamford: People get really irritated by mental illness. “Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!” I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, “You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.”

It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody's fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, “Oh, you’re just an attention getter.” Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice.

Slate: Or a weakness.

Bamford: Yeah. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. “Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.” Or: “I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?”

More of that interview here

So I spent 15 minutes on the floor, wife in the bed. Trying to clam the fuck down. We eventually fell asleep. Today started off horribly, with every attempt at discussing the issues while driving to work leading again to how much better off I would be without her.

By 10, we were doing better, We were joking again. Sharing things we saw. The old wife I hadn’t seen in two weeks was peeking through. She had already had therapy scheduled, so I joined her for the first time at her request. We talked it out at therapy to a degree. The therapist recommended I start seeing someone, which I agree with.

And this sickness affects so many people out there, and it isn’t something you can talk down, or rationally deal with or throw love at, like SO MANY people do. It’s a storm that you have to withstand and weather somehow, holding on to whatever you have. For wife, it’s me. And I am very glad to be that person.

Sallie Mae Can Suck My Balls Clean

Life lately:

Enjoying the hell out of working with wife. She is contracting with my company, and making such a good impression that the president the other day was like "Get ____ to help you with that project" to one of the sales head dudes. We eat lunch together every day. We're kindof sickeningly in love :)

Working on weekly goals, some we reach. Others not. This week, to only eat out twice, both times because of work reasons.

Met with a lawyer and found out we are in too much debt for chapter 13, and make too much money for chapter 7. (last year, I would have qualified for a chapter 7, but couldn't find the $1600 that it would have taken to file it since I had no job, so go figure). We literally can't declare bankruptcy even though we have multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans between us and will NEVER be able to work it all off. Our loan debts take all my paychecks per month leaving not quite enough for rent. So we rely on wife to make money for us to live on. There's something rather freeing about the fact we cannot discharge student loans (because Sallie Mae in 2005 lobbied congress to pass a law making that impossible), yet they are so large due to predatory lending that we cannot possibly keep up the payments. Something freeing about looking at indentured servitude for the rest of our natural lives. In fact, it's weird because even indentured servants got off after 7 years. Fannie Mae has us for life without parole, and it's all perfectly legal for them to do so.

It's easy to denigrate us for taking on so much debt. But we aren't alone. Student loan debt surpassed $1 trillion this year. There's no question it's the next bubble, higher ed. As more and more of us, fed the lie that higher education is the key to a better life, take on debt, then find no jobs for us on the other side, we are not going to be able to pay back the promise/lie you fed us, America. But hey, don't take my word for it. Other bloggers have said it far better than me.

We keep on truckin on. Sallie Mae suicide is certainly something we discuss on an intellectual level, since being in this position sucks so much balls, and no one gives a shit because you took out the loans willingly to chase the dream that we are fed about education being worth the cost. But in the end, I keep saying, we don't have a house, we don't have cars worth more than 300 bucks. we really have nothing to our names, so what the hell would they take? They can garnish wages, sure, but would any sane judge garnish so much that I can't afford rent let alone food or gas to get to work to pay the wages they garnish? It's hard to say, since this insane system has been upheld by judges so far.

Maybe once enough people are out of work and in life-debt to Sallie Mae - and given the exponential costs of higher ed, that won't take long - things might start to change. Until then, will keep going to work, keep paying the interest only payments that are more than i made in a month at my first professional job 10 years ago.

Sigh.