Dammit. Just. Dammit. (Or the Very Confused Grub)

I know, I know...it's Fourth-of-July in the States - our big show -- all hot dogs, s'mores, sparklers and mosquito bites. The best Fourth I ever spent was on a chilly summer night in Colorado, blanket, fireworks, and well never mind.

Very different vignette this morning: it's a full container of left-over expensive beef lo-mein I forgot to put in the fridge, whiney little dog, huge stack of bills and whatnot, and dammit all to hell---I clicked on something in Curse and then when I logged into the game, all of my hard work in setting up elvui was gone. Well, more annoying than that: there were bits and pieces of it, but it made no sense. When I looked in the add-on folder, all seemed to be well.

Look - I'm not asking for any diagnosis or sharp-shooting here. I am just kind of laughing to myself because if this was twenty, hell, even ten years ago, I'd have no compunction about waking up a young leet druid to get his ass to go mow the lawn or something. But these days, I hesitate, because waking him up for his expertise to come and fix whatever his addled mother broke seems....bizarre. 

So my choices, self-imposed of course

My phone is ringing...what the f*ck? Why is this person calling me at 8:34 AM? 

Anyway....so my self-imposed choices are to be a grown-up. A grown-up wouldn't have a big stack of bills that need paying sitting in front of her, or a laundry room full of unmentionables, or even a full container of now spoiled beef lo-mein. A grown-up would fix her own damn UI, and answer that call. (I didn't.)

I was thinking about Cyrme's post Cha-ching with very helpful ways to make gold. In my world, the achievement would be "most gold wasted." Most checks written to people doing a job I should do myself. Most containers of Chinese food or spaghetti left out. Most times I undercut myself on the Auction House. Most repair bills for complete stupid mistakes. It's the thank-you notes I need to write, the vacation photos I need to look at and comment on, the stories that are half-finished begging to be completed. A half-overturned rock sheds no light at all, but just confuses the grubs underneath. I am a confused grub.

This UI debacle is just one example of, if I choose to be all mojo-and-superstition, sprinkled with superstitiion and a hefty serving of mumbo-jumbo gumbo*, the universe telling me NOT TO PLAY. STOP. Stop it now! But I do believe that a detox from Azeroth may be in order, even though I think I would be just like this reporter. 

So onto my half-assed morning, which will include an amazing piece of writing by John Updike. We read this again on Tuesday in my little writer thingy, which comprised mostly of either middle-aged women complaining of their divorces or other middle-aged room judging them. Good times. Everyone needs to just step off.

Apologies: back to Updike: 

For Guarf -- 

A&P
by john updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty. 

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out o fthose white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

I just wanna walk in an A&P in a dirty pink bikini and be queen of the world for a few moments, you know? Oh well---taking out the trash.

*Just like Momma Troll used to make

Postscript: Oh Look! Matticus found something that might help!