If a cow ever got the chance...

Going to Wisconsin again this weekend. The occasion is The Engineer's birthday party. Every year, his birthday in May and the Pinoid's in June are the big social family events of the season. Both sides of the family and various well-wishers and neighbors show up to drink beer and/or Diet Pepsi and sit in lawn chairs. My cousins play softball, with the dog as outfielder. My dad grills these weird ovoid burgers (they really are approximately football-shaped; I think it's unintentional). My mom makes dubiously vegetarian beans by removing the pork chunk from a can of Van Camp's Pork 'N'Beans (okay, she only did that once). There are usually good fruit salads and sketchy gelatin-based salad (Mr. Burns: "It's made from HOOVES, y'know..."). I try to claim my share of meat to feed to Hootie the cat, but they are on to my little scheme.

It's all weirdly idyllic, and of course my saying so only goes to show how remote I am from that community, that life. If I was really a part of it I would notice for myself the little meannesses my mom has to point out to me later: how my uncle will still barely acknowledge my mother (his sister-in-law) after thirty years of marriage to my dad; how my great-Aunt Dorothy asked my grandma not to bring my grandfather over for supper anymore after he'd had his first stroke; how my other grandma was distressed when I first started dating a "Mexican"... And yet, there are mitigating circumstances for all these things. I mean, my grandma works in a canning factory, side-by-side every day with seasonal immigrants from Mexico and Texas, and there is real friendship between them. Displayed on her refrigerator door are invitations to quinceaneras in Chiapas, along with my cousin's drawings and a Post-It with my address in Chicago. So I don't know what I'm trying to say. Just that I go back and forth on the whole thing. In college I loathed my hometown and (by extension) my family, and spent as little time there as possible. Lately I have been idealizing it/them, making oversimplified generalizations about "country bliss" that only a complete outsider could assume.

I'll stop now because I'm confusing myself. I have never been able to write about where I'm from, as you can probably tell from the psychotic shifts in tone. It's always condescending or romanticized, and I change my mind about it halfway through. More on this subject later, possibly.

I was supposed to call Outgrabe before Survivor comes on at 8. Don't think I'll make it. One of the consequences of my three-year hiatus from writing (basically, from when I graduated college until starting this diary in February) is that I now write REALLY FUCKING SLOWLY. Sorry for the caps, but it annoys me. That's why I don't update as often as I'd like, because sometimes I don't have AN HOUR AND A HALF to be poking around on here. I type about 80 wpm, so that's what? Like one word a minute? (Okay, it doesn't always take that long.) I feel like an accident victim who's relearning speech. Really fucking slowly. People keep sending me IMs to say "I tried to call but your line has been busy for three hours". Then I say "if you would leave me alone I could write my entry, which I'm almost done with", and twenty minutes later they start asking why isn't it up yet (I have impatient friends), and I say "well now I'm almost ALMOST done."

Speaking of Mr. Outgrabe, he has been totally kind and supportive lately. So much so that I have even been lulled into thinking he has no ulterior motives. (I mean, what would they be? He can't be trying to borrow money, considering that I've owed him twenty bucks [the same twenty bucks] for the past five years. And I know [for agreed-upon reasons that I won't get into here] that he's not trying to get into my pants.) It's like a mutual-validation society around here.

That sounds wrong. So very wrong.

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