By and large, I love my job. I work for a small organization, so everyone there has a lot to do, and we all pretty much focus our own thing and get together once a week to update the others of our progress. It’s the exact opposite of micromanagement–a very efficient way of doing business, if you ask me. And even if you don’t.

There are, however, two women in the office who…well, they don’t annoy…they amuse me, let’s put it that way. They amuse me because they’re so…predictable? No. Chatty? Kinda. Easily excitable? Bingo….

Take last Friday. I’m sitting at my desk, doing what might be called coding or possibly piddling, depending on your point of view, when in walks one of these two gals to tell me about the whole duct tape/Visqueen/FEMA business. And then naturally the other one overhears (like I said, it’s a small office) and joins in the conversation. Next thing I know, they’re dashing out to the hardware store, convinced that terrorists are going to dose their bedrooms with lethal amounts of strep or flu or incephalitis. I chuckled to myself (as I often do), downed some coffee, finished my “work,” and went home to enjoy the last relatively low-key weekend I’ll have for a while, intent on reading, napping, and lollygagging on the couch.

On said couch, however, in the midst of a series of the aforementioned naps, I was awakened by odd gurgling noises coming from the stomach of our oldest and dearest hound. He didn’t look particularly nauseous or anything–well, no more than he usually does–but when I let him out, he went straight for a grassy patch of yard, and chowed down on clover until I very nearly dragged him inside again. This happened again and again until yesterday afternoon, when it finally just stopped.

None of which gave me pause in the least–until I read that others were having the same problem. Which makes me wonder if the boogeymen/terrorists haven’t been even more devious than any of us had feared and begun their next assault on the Great Satan by giving our pets upset stomachs…. Monstrous!

You know, in my salad days, something like the Lysistrata Project would have really pumped my ‘nads (to use an expression popular in my salad days), but today my woodie for political activism has gone as flaccid as Bob Dole’s pre-Viagra wang. And on top of that, I’ve got my own show to worry about, and well, they’re doing the whole damn thing on freakin’ Lundi Gras!

The cards are stacked against me. And, uh, I guess I’m getting old.

Like I said, I have these tics, these things I do in broad daylight that drive me nuts. They may seem like nothing to you, but I know what I’m doing and I don’t like it one bit.

The least innocuous but most irritating tic I’ve got is wincing. Yeah, wincing. I know it doesn’t sound that bad. It doesn’t look that bad, either. I just kinda squint my eyes, maybe shift in my seat a little. To the person I’m talking to, it probably looks as though I’ve got a very minor pain in my leg or something. No one would ever get the impression that I’ve totally tuned them out and that my mind is now entirely focused on events that happened in the long-distant past–that I’ve dredged up some goddess-awful memory and am fixated on it, thinking, “Jeez, what on earth made me do that?” It’s like I’m watching a movie of myself that no one else can see, and I cringe at the awkward parts.

There are five very specific incidents in my life that make me wince when I remember them. In chronological order:

1. I’m in junior high–probably 8th grade–and I’m sitting in Sunday school, and someone spills his drink on the table. For reasons unknown to me, I toss my bible in the middle of the puddle. I guess I’m thinking it’ll soak up some of the soda. Who knows? Everyone just turns and looks at me as if to say, “Man, you’re a total freak.”

2. I’m in college–probably a junior–and I’m with a bunch of friends in my hometown, and we’ve been out all night drinkin’ and hangin’ at the Cha Cha Palace (yes, honey, even Tinytown, Mississippi has a queer bar). It’s still reasonably early–probably midnight or so–and we stop at a late-night diner for something to eat. I wander off to the bathroom to piss, but when I get there, I realize how totally drunk I am and wanna sit down, so I drop my pants and sit on the toilet–not like I have to shit or anything, I just figure, “I’m sitting on a toilet, I gotta drop my pants.” An hour later, one of my friends has to crawl under the locked door, zip me up, and carry me to the car. I can barely remember the entire waitstaff giving me the evil eye on my way out.

3. I’m in grad school, and I’m teaching a literature course, and we’re studying a play that I particularly despise. (Unfortunately, I have no control over the syllabus.) Anyway, I’ve read this play before–several years before–but I can’t bring myself to read it again, so I do something students do all the time: I watch the movie. Of course, the movie is quite different from the play, so when the students start asking me questions about things that happen only in the play, I look like an idiot.

4. New Year’s Eve 1996: I’m working at Lucky Cheng’s, and we’re packed to the gills, and the staff is comprised of nothing but drag queens and hipsters, and we’re all trying to be cool and get schnockered in plain sight of our customers by swilling champagne straight from the bottle. I’m sitting with a table, taking a lengthy drink order, when a co-worker comes up and holds the bottle to my mouth and urges me to drink and it goes down the wrong way and I nearly choke to death. There’s nothing like showin’ out (as my father calls it) and bungling it.

5. Spring 1997: Precious Moments and I are driving back from the Audubon Hotel and we’re sloshed–I’m sloshed–and we’re singing along with some crappy Dash Rip Rock/Better Than Ezra bullshit on the radio and I’m belting out the tune and she just stops singing and looks at me like I’m some kind of freak. Which brings us back to where we started…

Since three of the five incidents detailed above involve hard liquor, maybe cutting down on my booze consumption would prevent me from having too many more embarrassing moments to relive in the future. But of course, if were a good listener and my mind didn’t wander so much, I wouldn’t be dredging up these thoughts and wincing, now would I? See, that’s the problem: I’m a Leo with ADD.

So, like, yeah, I got rid of the frames. They’re functional and all, but messy. I’m not completely happy with the way it is now, but it’s better.

In other news:

• DramaRama kicked ass–thanks in no small part to the design savoire-faire of you know who and the stage managerial skills of our favorite newbie.
• We’ve begun rehearsals on our newest oeuvre. Anyone gonna be in town for the Williams Festival?
• I managed to work a reference to the Singing Nun into that script. Now if I could only get the man who wrote the play about her to return my calls, I’d have a show lined up for summer.

Mary Ann Esposito can do as she pleases.

Mary Ann Esposito can mix peas and jello and, say, lobster tail, and it will come out fine. She doesn’t have to worry–she’s Mary Ann Esposito!

Mary Ann Esposito can make a mess in the kitchen and not look back. She can take eggshells, for example, and throw them on the ground, and dance the hoochie-coo until she’s overheated and passes out, and it’s no big deal. Her interns will pick her up and take her to the emergency room. And when they’re done, they will come back and clean up the eggshells, too. Mary Ann Esposito doesn’t have to worry about such things. But she should.

Mary Ann Esposito probably wears a wig. I mean, come on: who has hair like that outside of a Williamsburg synagogue? I hope she washes it regularly–dirty wigs smell very bad! If she goes too long between washings, she will find herself without interns. No one will want to help her produce the show, and she will have to do all the cooking and cleaning and camerawork, which would take a really long time. It would take her a whole month to make one tray of lasagne! Trust me on this one, folks.

Mary Ann Esposito probably gets recognized in restaurants, but not for being Mary Ann Esposito. She looks a lot like my third grade teacher, Mrs. Rogers. If I saw her, I might be tempted to go up to her and say, “Hi, Mrs. Rogers. I thought you were dead!” I’m sure other people would do the same thing

Mary Ann Esposito, Mary Ann Esposito, Mary Ann Esposito. So many vowels. Consonants, too, but lots of nice vowels. And they’re nicely placed. Mine are in the middle of my name, which doesn’t help much.

Mary Ann Esposito won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight? Mary Ann Esposito won’t you come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moon?

Mary Ann Esposito has left the building.

. . . it’s here . . .

As a general rule, I hate posts that start off, “Oh, man, I had this crazy dream” (though I’m willing to put that aside when it’s my own post and my own dream). Like, ultimately, who cares? Unless it has a really funny narrative–and on the off chance it does, then it’s probably not the dream you actually had, you’ve probably done some heavy embellishing, ’cause, like, when was the last time you dreamt a goddamn romantic comedy, start-to-finish?–no one’s going to give a shit but you.

See, the problem is, dreams don’t translate. I can’t explain to you the weirdness of trying to sneak away from a speech being given by a deranged, shotgun-toting George Bush, Sr. on the White House lawn and–even weirder–Bush pere subsequently calling me out by name, trying to shame me into staying. Nor can I convey how fucking terrifying it was to step out into the Barataria Swamp to protect my dogs from a rabid jackal. (A jackal? Do they even exist anymore? WTF?) The stories, the images, can’t be shared with others–not even the colors, since I myself tend to dream in shades not seen since Missle Command was a hit at your friendly neighborhood arcade.

I can, however, tell you how great it is to be able to remember subconscious scenes, tableaux. I can imagine how my boyfriend would have growled at me last night (if he were here) when I stumbled from the bed at 4:00am, lurching to the study in search of a pen and paper to write the shit down. And I can laugh at myself like I did this morning, trying to decipher the gibberish I scrawled in my half-sleep: “fishing rodeo w/cats.” I mean, did I really think I’d be able to remember that crap?

In other news, it’s time for a redesign. Maybe.

three four haiku for jack frost

In the living room
My breath is little white clouds
My nuts are walnuts

Three hounds and one cat
must share a room for the day
Whatever. They’ll deal

Our house is on stilts
Bathroom tiles like chunks of ice
IT’S FUCKING COLD, BITCH!

Water sprays outside
But where is it coming from?
Broken pipes, of course!

Last night I had the strangest dream. No, I did not sail away to China in a little rowboat to find ya’. You spoke naught of laundry, nor of anyone holding you. In fact, you weren’t there at all…

It started out kinda weird. See, I thought I had a vagina. I was sitting at home–or what looked like home, except I was in a recliner, a type of chair I covertly adore but which I’d never have the nerve to display in my own house–and I looked down, and I wasn’t wearing any pants, which is kinda strange, ’cause, like, personally I think wearing a t-shirt with no pants is just wrong. Anyway, I looked down, and there it was, plain as day: a big hairy muff. None of the equipment I’ve grown accustomed to seeing between my thighs over the past thirtysomeodd years. It was, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting… After the initial shock wore off, though, I took it in stride. I knew I was in a dream, and I was ready to have some fun. And I was all like, “Hot damn! I’m gonna go out and fuck me some straight boys tonight!” (Not like I can’t do that already with a quick trip to Bourbon Street, but whatever.)

So just as I was getting all revved up about the possibility of seeing the average American heterosexual male up close and personal, things changed. For some reason or another, I suddenly realized I wasn’t a woman after all, I just needed to whip out the clippers. It was like my subconscious said, “Hold up there, boss. We ain’t ready to go down that road just yet. Hey, Lenny! Change the reel!”

The next thing I knew, I was in one of the butchest dreams I’ve had in my whole life–which may not be saying much, but, you know, anyway… So there I was, same place I was before, sitting at home, when all of a sudden the manager of the Atlanta Braves was standing between me and the TV. He was hustling me out there door and into the car, and by the time I realized what was happening, I was in a bullpen–you know, like at a baseball stadium–and I was warming up my arm. The Atlanta Braves were playing in the World Series, and I was called in as the relief pitcher.

I played a lot of baseball growing up: left field, second base, third base. I was an all-star shortstop. But one thing I never felt comfortable doing was pitching. So all the time I’m in the dream, I keep thinking to myself, “Man, I throw like a girl.” Which, a few scans back in the R.E.M., I was.

And then I woke up.

My dreams never achieve closure, as the therapists and 12-steppers say today. It’s rare for them to have a plot. In fact, I’m surprised when I can even remember them. What does that say about me, Mr. Freud?

In other news, happy birthday to the inimitable Jeanne Moreau (not to be confused with the similarly inimitable, though lately deceased, Jean Marais.) Bonne fete!

I’m back from New York. I saw some good stuff, lots of bad stuff, and many handsome, hilarious, hirsute, huggable, heckling, hotsy-totsy, higfalutin’, hyperbolic, hunky, hair-hoppin’ homo sapiens–including some reformed bloggers, a couple of blogfolk I didn’t know, and a very sassy luddite/author/teacher/friend who recently penned one of the best novels I’ve read in years, (and I’m not just sayin’ that ’cause I’m biased). And I have no pictures to show for any of it, despite the fact that I brought a digicam with me for exactly that purpose.

Anyway, like I said, I’m back. And what did I learn from the whole experience?

1. New York is full of sexy men.

2. New York is full of aloof, sexy men.

3. None of New York’s aloof, sexy men give thirtysomething Southern whiteboys so much as a second glance–even when said whiteboys flaunt their newly discovered Lebanese heritage by eating messy baklava in public.

4. Numbers 1 – 3 are not technically new revelations, since I’ve experienced each of them before and, in one very important instance, triumphed.

5. Green monkeys are cute, but they can’t prepare a decent bowl of mussels to save their lives.

6. Life without email is a mixed blessing, but when it’s cold, it’s just fucking cold.

7. One man’s non sequitur is another man’s watertight argument.

8. If I stop blogging, the terrorists have won.

In other news, youknowwho is fine, the hounds are alive, the cat is still a spiteful, loveable wretch. And my bio-mom and sister are total foxes!