bad metaphor

Visited Wichita this weekend with Indie Dan, a good friend of mine, and were reminded of why we left. Sure, it’s no Detroit (“Paris of the Midwest”), but I’m not exactly clamoring to get back there either.

Exhibit A: A typical feature article in our city’s illustrious paper:

Runaway Trailers Repeatedly Kill:

Runaway-trailer crashes are notable for the cruel coincidences of place and time that put the victim in the path of a rolling projectile. Most of the victims are helpless motorists, but pedestrians also have been injured or killed. Runaway trailers even have crashed into houses.

Bolt your doors and duct tape the vents! And remind your kids never to speak to stranger runaway trailers.

Also in that edition was a quote from a caller who suggested that kids at the mall should sit in Jesus’ lap instead of Santa’s, and someone who blamed the downfall of our society on the ACLU (damn those liberals campaigning for people’s rights!). As Dan and I were attempting to leave town on Sunday morning, we were stuck in a mile long line of cars that were headed to church. Not a basketball game or concert or anything. Church! This is what I miss out on in godless heathen Lawrence.

Speaking of religion, in a town in which you cannot throw a rock without hitting a church, another group is gaining momentum:

Former Inn at the Park, now a Scientology stronghold owned by Kirstie Alley.

I found out last weekend that Kirstie Alley, from such illustrious roles as “bar wench from Cheers” and the “Look Who’s Talking” series, purchased a property next to her Wichita home and put up a Santa village. I’ve always been kind of intrigued by fringe religious groups, the nuttier the better (fast forward to the last minute of that video in the link for a good laugh). Scientologists believe in Santa? I guess whatever makes the bucks.

Just a plain old cheap looking Santa village backdrop. Mildly disappointing. I’m sure attending the opening gala would have yielded something hilarious but I wasn’t exactly willing to contribute money to this organization just for laughs (nor do I want to receive pamphlets from them for the next billion years).

Most of the time we spent hanging out with Dan’s friends from high school – I didn’t have friends in high school and the few that I did, hauled ass out of town as soon as they could. Good thing for them and for me, because most of the people who stayed behind ended up married, pregnant, in rehab, or a combination of all three. Subsequently the conversations mostly revolved around high school; what else was there to talk about? Every trip back to Wichita ends up being the same for me: boring and slightly depressing, kind of like being in high school again.

Headed to Houston tomorrow, a town I previously complained about, but oddly enough I am looking forward to spending a week there. Maybe because anything looks good after Wichita, or because I get to hang out with my family, eat good food, and play video games. Okay, maybe that is reminiscent of high school also…but the good part, right?

Fat, lazy, general no-goodnik.

Problem: The feline in question, pictured above, is on the brink of morbid obesity, which increases risk of health problems including diabetes and floor-shattering.

Proposed solutions: reduce his food intake, increase exercise.

Problems with the proposed solutions:

Increasing his exercise proves to be difficult as the feline displays aggressive inertia, to the point that only the possibility of food entices him to move. That enticement, unfortunately, negates any positive effects of the exercise.

Reducing his food intake also proves to be difficult, as the cat has taken to retaliation at 3:00 in the morning. Behaviors include walking on owners head and vocalizing until the owner relents and dispenses more food.

Withholding food during daylight hours has also proven to be difficult, in that the cat will vocalize in the absence of the owner. The owner’s neighbors, alarmed by the increasingly distressed vocalizations, have taken it upon themselves to push food through the gap under the door, to feed the hungry feline (gap is not wide enough for neighbors to see the “starving kitty.”) Subsequently, the feline has learned that loud vocalization will result in food suddenly appearing underneath the door.

Current dilemma: how to make the cat lose weight, and stop the neighbors from calling the animal equivalent of CPS?

Since my return, I have been engaged in many things besides updating this blog: sleeping, catching up on back logs of Cute Overload, knitting an increasingly unmanageable number of projects (due to the holiday season creeping up even faster than ever this year), and cooking. Since Elijah and I had Thanksgiving on the road, my friends decided to have a post-Thanksgiving dinner, preparing a free turkey that my friend Andy received from one of his jobs in lieu of a living wage. Luckily, our preparation of this turkey did not burn the house, and in fact turned out to be delicious. Inspired by this post on Michael Ruhlman’s blog, I begged Andy to let me keep the turkey bones to prepare some delicious stock.

Thus last night, instead of joining Eli on funny drunk escapades at a friend’s house, I opted to stay inside instead and tend to the stock (and maybe get a few stars in Mario Galaxy on the side, too. So I didn’t socialize but at least I was a warm dork). Several hours and seven stars later, the stock was finished – a beautifully colored rich broth of turkey goodness! Excited by my new creation, I let it cool while I deposited the bones and herb matter into a garbage bag, a peace offering to the aggressive raccoons of East Lawrence. Still in my pajamas, I put on some shoes and my puffy down coat and went outside to take out the trash, and then I saw a girl lying collapsed on the sidewalk.

She was on the street corner directly outside my house. My first panicked thought was that she was a homeless woman in the process of freezing to death at my doorstep, but no – she was slightly younger than me, college age, one dirty, crumpled ballet slipper on her foot and the other lying next to her. She was sobbing impressively.

“Hey…can I help you?” I ventured, repeating myself a little louder so she could hear me over her sobs. She lifted her head to look at me – kind of chubby, but pretty nonetheless – and looked kind of embarrassed amidst her anguish. “No, no, I’m fine.” I offered to call somebody for her, but she shook her head and said she lived just over there, pointing vaguely ahead of her. She thanked me and smiled, the embarrassment quickly replaced by resentment of my presence. My bag of bones was dripping, so I went to go toss it in one of the bins behind my house, and when I came back, she had gotten up and walked away.

As I saw the retreating figure, it occurred to me that I could have offered her a ride home – she was more or less standing in front of my car, and it was a terribly cold night for someone in crumpled, booze-stained ballet flats. I always think of these things too late.

It’s the morning now and I hope she was able to make it home without incident. I did hear sirens not too long after I came back to the apartment and wondered if it was for her. What in the world happened to her, to cause her to collapse on my street corner? Had she been raped? Or did she just get rejected, by a boy she liked, in a particularly odious manner?
Whatever the case, I hope she made it somewhere safe and warm.