It’s Confession Time.

I’m living in total chaos.

It’s true: We moved over a week ago and this apartment is in as much disarray as it was when we set down the last piece of furniture. I have unpacked a total of two boxes. We have no stove, since the old one was kaput and the new one hasn’t arrived. The linoleum in the kitchen was torn out and tiles were laid, so for most of last week we had no kitchen floor. It wouldn’t have mattered much, as the fridge’s contents included (and still include):

1. an empty box of Diet Squirt
2. the prosciutto
3. a styrofoam container

The cupboard in the bathroom is bare. The box containing the items that should be in the cupboard are in a box on the floor below it. There is a bathmat, but there is no towel bar.

The living room is stacked with all the books that were on the shelves that D.W. built into the wall at the old place. He has yet to put the shelving in here, so the books rise like stalagmites from the floor, Dorothy Parker on top of the biography of Royko on top of that big book of pie recipes on top of Valerie Solanis’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto, which I can’t believe I still own. These books need to be on shelves anyway, but where they are now is also blocking me from getting to boxes of my clothes, which are scattered in the living room as well.

I can’t find anything. I can’t step anywhere. I can’t live like this.

The state of affairs is wholly unlike me. I am an organizer. I need my home to be in order. My younger sister might laugh at that; she’s seen my house covered in papers and purses and dishes before, but she would also agree that there is a system in place. I am not an absentminded professor. I need my saucer and my spoon, my wooden hangers and my flower vase, my coat rack. None of these things are in place because this past three weeks were three of the busiest, most productive weeks I’ve ever had. As a result, the saucer and spoon were pushed to the bottom of the list. They had to be pushed.

The cleaning, organizing, decorating, and shopping can’t happen this weekend. But Monday and Tuesday, they can. They’d better, because I can’t keep warming up cans of soup in my office and sorting laundry in the dining room.

I’m slightly more comfortable, now, having shared this. I was starting to feel like a real sham, though it should be said that while the truth will set you free, it won’t hang your curtain rod.

Which is too bad.
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Snickerdoodles of Yore.

I had a Snickerdoodle tonight.

I was at a meeting where coffee and refreshments are often served. I had my own beverage (green tea, since I have officially gone back to the tea fold after a year-long love affair with coffee that ultimately left me cold), but I didn’t have my own cookie. I looked into the box and saw that tonight’s offering was the mighty Snickerdoodle.

I don’t know if “Snickerdoodle” is a proper noun, but I’m choosing not to look it up. I’d like to believe it is capitalized.

And when I bit into the Snickerdoodle, I was instantly taken back to the good old Winterset Public School System. I spent twelve years in that school system and I ate many a Snickerdoodle there. Tonight’s cookie was identical to the ones we got back in the day. It was mostly shortening. Shortening and sand, from what I could tell. Shortening, sand, and a dusting of cinnamon. And it tasted pretty good because it tasted like progress.

Allow me to explain.

While enjoying my cookie, I thought of twelve years of school lunch. There was the “Beef n’ Noodles,” which was served over an ice-cream scoop of whipped potatoes. There was the “Chicken Patty,” which was a flat, round, breaded disc of chicken between in a white bun. Standard school lunch fare. I went and downloaded the current lunch menu and found that Winterset has improved upon the lunch program. There are now vegetarian options, a fresh fruit bar, and there’s even a “Harvest of The Month” note on the menu that tells about local ingredients used in the food. A little chef’s hat denotes “Scratch Cooked Items.”

This is all fantastic, of course. I’m a big fan of nutrition. “You are what you eat” is one of the only adages I would consider etching on my gravestone.

And as I chewed the pebbles of Snickerdoodle tonight, I thought that those kids are probably going to be getting cookie upgrades, too. But in truth, a large part of who I am comes from the changes I have sought to make in my life since leaving Iowa and the Snickerdoodle plays a big part. When I desire a cookie, I seek out the exotic, the gourmet, the fancy. This is because the Snickerdoodles of my past never satisfied me. But of course, without the dry, starchy Snickerdoodle of yore, I could never enjoy the warm, cardamom-pecan Gingerbread of today.

I leave you to snack on this famous phrase from Kurt Vonnegut: “You are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you pretend to be.”

p.s. Please forgive my somewhat spotty blogging lately. Thankfully, my career is robust. It doesn’t pay to neglect PaperGirl, however, even though this is some of the only writing I now do for free.
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Turkey Projection In Springfield.

Ah, Springfield.

Tonight, PaperGirl comes to you from the lovely Springfield Garden Hilton. Five of us Neofuturists are spending the night here after a gig at a nearby college. It was good, clean fun, though it really wasn’t clean at all: The stage was littered with bread, tomatoes, tortillas, bubblegum, and all manner of our messy props by the end of the show and everybody loved it.

I did a little research on Springfield and discovered that Lincoln lived here for awhile when he was a young man. The people of Springfield are proud of this. I also learned that Lincoln was the one who proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday back in 1864.

That got me thinking about Thanksgiving, which is quite possibly my favorite day of the year, and how my family totally forgot to tell me they had all made plans for the holiday this year. It’s really very funny. My mother called the other day and launched into details about her flight and her schedule the week of Thanksgiving and I had no idea what she was talking about. Everyone’s coming to Chicago.

I’m thrilled, of course, but I felt a little like Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles. There are worse ways to feel; I mean, she does eventually kiss Jake Ryan.

One other fact about Springfield:

A famouly eccentric Springfeldian hired Frank Lloyd Wright to build her home for about $60,000 in 1904. After her death, appraisers inventoried her estate and found safety deposit boxes all over the country containing feathers from her favorite parrot.

Perhaps my family will serve parrot this year, having forgotten about the turkey…
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Let This Be a Lesson To You.

I just watched about half of that documentary called Sherman’s March.

The film was made in 1986 by a guy who wanted to re-trace William Tecumseh Sherman’s path of destruction through the South. Before the re-tracing gets started, the filmmaker gets dumped by his New York girlfriend. He tells the camera about it. Getting dumped sends him into a nostalgic, romantic reverie. The film becomes about women: Sherman is all but forgotten. He films women he meets on the road, women he used to date, and women who simply pass by his camera. Since the movie takes place in the southern part of the country, you get mostly southern women in the film and they’re pretty interesting creatures.

Still, Sherman’s March isn’t great. There are great sequences, great moments. But the filmmaker is limp noodle. He’s just one more super sensitive guy who thinks that being really really really nice is going to get him laid. Sorry, gents: If you want it to happen for you, you can’t be every woman’s best friend. Once you are every woman’s best friend, you cease to be attractive to most of them. “Gentle” is rarely synonymous with “hot.” This is something that many women I know, including me, intrinsically feel. Even if a girl is into “artistic” types or “sensitive” guys, a lot of it is mockingbird-ed, politically correct rhetoric. No, of course I don’t mean girls desire to be slapped around or abused. They just don’t want a guy to have a softer voice than they do. It’s a Darwin thing.

And McElwee (the filmmaker) has a pretty soft voice and he’s really trying hard to be a nice guy, so it’s not much fun listening to him talk about trying to embark on a relationship. The full title, which is Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, sort of says it all.

Check it out if you:

1. like documentaries from the 1980s (like me).
2. are a guy who can’t figure out why all sorts of women tell you they love you but never kiss you.
3. happen to find a copy of it on your bookshelf.

And now, we march to bed.

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