The following is a song sung by a little man in a bowtie, who had run out of announcements and was trying to kill time between bands at the 1998 Winnipeg Folk Festival. For years, I've wondered if he just made it up on the spot. Turns out it exists in a rare volume of folk songs about Ohio.

Oh, the nurse pinched the baby just to tease it,
There's something wrong, and everybody sees it;
And along with all the women in Ohio,
Mother's gone down to the beer saloon to pray.

Oh, she caught the rage from that old Doctor Dye-o,
Who neither drinks whiskey, tea, nor rye-o,
And along with all the ladies from Ohio,
Mother's gone down to the beer saloon to pray.

First, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who commented on my Facebook status. I was expecting a couple of hang-in-there's or chin-up's, but you guys went above and beyond cheering me up.

In return, I'd like to share with you all my new-found understanding of the wiley and elusive semi-colon. I'm taking an editing class this semester, with my first meeting yesterday evening. We took a grammar test, the likes of which the instructor assures us would certainly be given during any job interview for an editing position. Am I good at that sort of thing? Well, I used to think so. I mean, I know the difference between there, their, and they're. I know that 'I' may sound high-falluting, but has no place in a prepositional phrase. But despite that Paula Poundstone special on Bravo, I've never understood the semi-colon. Now, at last, my eyes have been opened:

One uses a semi-colon in a couple of different scenarios, the easiest being a list in which there are already commas: Amy Klobuchar, D. of MN; Joe Lieberman, I. of His Former Scruples; Scott Brown, R. of A Truck.

The other use lies in connecting two sentences that share an idea, thereby including a full stop without a period. For example: She can tell you why somebody would go to the trouble of including a semi-colon when he could have just used a period; I can't.

Ta-da!

Me: Hello there, children!
My fellow midwesterner, usually a guy: Hey, Annie.
(I notice (s)he seems rather gloomy.)
Me: I notice you seem rather gloomy.
Guy: The Vikings lost in the playoffs AGAIN. How do you think I feel?
Me: Betrayed? Bewildered?
Guy: They eiowurdfg and had five turn-overs! They couldn't neucvyhseruqi to save their lives!
Me: I like turnovers.
Guy: Favre qeou;sth 300 yards! How could they have oieyvjlcr???
Me: That's a lot of real estate. What's a farv?
Guy: Now the Colts are going to mrnbuyibtjk and mother-zitobp[*! That should've been us!
Me: Colts are baby man-horses.
Guy: Annie, quit pretending you know what I'm talking about.
Me: Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.
Guy: Beat it before I v(&m> you in the back of your mother-po6krl# neck.
Me: Po6krl# you too.

Dear Ad Geniuses -

Far be it for me to delve into the dangerous waters of observational comedy, but you do realize that the world is full of beautiful women who are ACTUALLY French? Or French Canadian? Or French African? Or Swiss? The point is that you don't have to hire an American wannabe to drop her towel.

I realize you were probably going for camp, but it's not funny. It's just irritating, and makes me less likely to buy your client's product.

Yrs,
The Opera Ghost

Now that I've calmed down enough not to see the world through an angry red haze, I'm doing a little theraputic cat-sitting. Gwerold's house is a nice little number with a brick exterior and a teriffic kitchen. It's also near my parents' neighborhood, so instead of driving to the gym, running on a machine, and then driving back to shower, I decided to run outdoors.

I only fell once.

It puts things in perspective, it makes you appreciate the things we have here in the U.S., everything happens for a reason, blah blah blah...

Seriously. Life on earth isn't easy, but what Haitians have put up with since the slave rebellion is enough to make anyone qualify for sainthood just for not giving up. And just when you though it couldn't get any worse, the land itself goes and turns inside-out.

I know that lots of people, myself included, have half a mind to swim to Haiti and start digging people out of the ruins by hand. I also know that what they really need is money. I have decided that if I ever have more money than I know what to do with, I'll buy every factory in Haiti and ensure that each employee has a safe job with living wages and benifits. Until then, I really hope that my heart going out to them means something to somebody somewhere.

A few days ago, I got punched in the teeth by The Dog. That's right: She got really excited when I got home, jumped up, and clobbered my lower lip with her snoot. This is not her fault, because she's a dog.

I however am not a dog. I am a sentient human who should know how to plan. Nevertheless, I went to donate blood today while wearing a very thick fleece top whose sleeves are a bit of a chore to roll up, and are also a bit slippery. As I was trying to expose the crook of my elbow, my had slipped off of the fleece and flew directly to my mouth, such that the knuckle of my thumb hit me right in the spot where The Dog had clobbered me bare days before. I must have yelped a bit, because the phlebotomist (heh-heh-heh... 'flea-bottom-ist')jumped and I had to explain that I had just punched myself in the face.

And that is why I am in charge.

Whenever I work a crack-o'-dawn shift like today, there's always an hour or so before the country rolls out of bed, realizes that their dogs or children ate something they shouldn't have during the night, and flood the lines with calls. Until then, there's little to do but surf the internet or BS with the overnight staff. Today I opted for the latter, and eventually the conversation turned to STRIPPERS. It occurred to me during the conversation that this seems to happen suspiciously often around this office. But how?
1. Talking about my friend's wedding = Talking about his bachelor party = Talking about STRIPPERS
2. Talking about exercise = Talking about that new aerobic stripper-cise video in the infomercials = Talking about STRIPPERS
3. Talking about Christmas = Talking about my family's annual Christmas talant show = Talking about that time my friend brought her college buddy who was working through her PhD program as a STRIPPER (she declined doing anything in the talant show, since my parents' living room does not have a pole.)
4. Talking about how the conversation keeps turning to STRIPPERS = Talking about STRIPPERS
5. Talking about money = Talking about how we don't have any = Talking about how we wouldn't have to get up at the ass-crack-o'-dawn and spend all day busting it out if we were to spend our evenings making thousands of dollars as STRIPPERS

Oh.

Last night was FEMA's misogi, the annual Japanese purification ritual wherein we clean the dojo from fore to aft, do 1008 punches/sword cuts/push-ups/sit-ups, and meditate between each 100 repetions on what we'd like to let go of and what we'd like to bring in. This is also one of the few times that I will voluntarily sing in front of people, since part of the tradition is that anyone willing is invited to read a poem, lead a chant, or sing a song. Since nobody else does, I've been bringing a song for the past few years, which I think surprised everybody the first time they heard it. I remember it well - Kermit the Frog's 'It's Not Easy Being Green,' which sounds good no matter who is behind it. Nevertheless, I've always had a bit of a problem with my voice shaking, and it never sounded as passable in public as it did in the car. Last night though, I felt okay. The song was 'Only Remembered,' one of the rare traditional hymns that Unitarians have picked up(we consider Bette Midler's 'The Rose' to be a hymn). When it was over, everyone said it was the best I'd ever sounded. Gosh, that was nice.

The funny (or maybe not so funny) thing is that during the ritual, I was trying to let go of being afraid of things that really have no reason to scare me, like checking my work e-mail, talking to Shifu, or singing in front of people. I go to the misogi every year and ask the universe for help in making me a better person and the world a better place, even though I don't really believe that any such thing is going to magically cure me of my vices. Maybe I'm just getting better with practice, or maybe I'm just getting tired of my own anxiety. Or maybe, at the risk of sounding sentimental, having this great thing in my life and everyone there together last night was special enough that I just couldn't keep from singing. It's at least enough to give a person hope.

Since I first became interested in geneology in jr. high, I've been a little confused about my family's country of origin. Grandma's family is Irish, which was pretty easy to figure out since her daddy was from Sligo. Grandpa on the other hand would say that we were Polish half the time, and then ask us what the hell we were talking about when we mentioned it. Since we are quite probably coming to the end of his life, Mom and her siblings asked him to write his autobiography, which I was reading yesterday. By God, I've got it in writing now.

Galicia. The Evanics were from an Eastern European principality about the size of Minnesota. You don't hear too much from them since the iron curtain fell. And since it no longer exists -Its territory is now divided between Poland and Ukraine. Every now and again, one or two Galicians manage to escape, but never to Cleveland.

"Winter" as it likes to be called, officially starts at about 1130am on this, the shortest, darkest day of the year. Like other Unitarians (yes, both of them), I'm supposed to spend the day reflecting on the past year and my hopes and dreams for the rebirth of the sun. I'm having a little difficulty however, considering that I got off work at 11pm last night, went home for a nice nap, and am now back at work shortly after 6am because my co-worker called in sick and my boss asked if I could come in early. I'm feeling as punchy as... something that punches a lot. A kangaroo? So to save time, I find myself inclined to sort the year's experiences into a handy system of red and black columns:
Gains: One honorary niece, one literal nephew (still in utero), one vicarious dog,new terrific living quarters with my very own loo, one new rank at FEMA, two killer pastry recipes, one kitchenaide mixer, one renewed interest in English
Losses: One lower back, one knee, one neck, one aspiration toward med school, three jade monkeys
Overall, not a bad little year.

It's looking more and more like the degree that I pursue after graduating from Catholic School will be an MFA. For the past semester, I've taken physics and biology as I toyed with the idea of professional medical programs. Without going into details, I'll just say that the things that I've had to put up with in those classes have led me to believe that maybe revenge is not a good enough reason to be a doctor after all. Meanwhile, I felt very clever in Brit-Lit for figuring out that Aemelia Lanyer's 'Eve's Apology in Defense of Women' was written in the voice of Pontius Pilate's wife. In fact, I enjoyed the class all around (except for Paradise Lost, which made me think that Adam really got kicked out of paradise for talking too much). I don't know if it was all the smut in medieval writing, or the sly ways that female writers broke onto the literary scene that I found so inspiring. Mostly, I think it just felt good to be good at something again. With that in mind, I realized that I could spend two years getting better at something I adore, or eight years trying to get good at something that will have me terrified to go to work for the rest of my life.
I wish that I could say that this epiphany came to me in a dream, like Mrs. Pilate's vision of the crucifixion - not that I would compare my relatively meager professional life crisis with it, it just would have been nifty to say. Instead, it came to me while I was butting heads with one of my lab partners about how to word the research proposal that wouldn't die, and I realized that all I wanted in all the world was to (punch her in the back of her anti-grammatical neck and then) go home and write a story about anthropomorphous bats.

Being I'm a second degree black belt now, I had some vague notion that I'd be harder to beat up now.
ROWNG!
So I was at the gym at St. Kate's, the one allegedly designed for women's bodies, and I was doing a clean-and-jerk. No sooner had I done the first rep than my lower back went TWANG, and worsened with each subsequent move. Like a twit, I went on with my other exercises until I got to the leg press, when I realized that moving the thing less than an inch put me in enough agony to punch someone.
Then I went to class that evening which, I'll admit, is also not the smartest thing I've ever done. Shifu tried to teach us the details of nanquan, which involves repeatedly jumping into the air as high as you can and then landing really hard in a horse stance. I went on as long as I could (read 'until Shifu said "Turtle! Lie down!"'), and then spent the rest of the class lying on the floor.
The next day, it got bad enough that I went to urgent care, where the doctor prescribed super ibprofen and told me not to exercise for two weeks.
'At all?' I said, horrified.
'Well, you can swim. But only if it doesn't hurt,' said the doctor.
For those of you to whom I haven't mentioned it, I don't usually swim. This is not because I don't know how, but because I'm afraid of sharks. Yes, even in swimming pools. Yes, even though they'd certainly find me tough and stringy. Yes, I know it's irrational, bordering on insane, but it's a phobia. It's not supposed to make sense.
And the moral of the story is... Does anybody have an harpoon?

So yes, the demo:

I spent a great deal of the pre-show time trying to keep the children from running amok. I did this by sitting them down in a circle and playing silly little campfire games with them, like Concentration and Twenty Questions and Find the Cocktail in This Picture of Shimei Turtle. It went pretty well up until ten minutes to showtime, when we all had to be backstage and it got to the point that I said "OKAY! FOR THE NEXT TWO MINUTES, EVERYONE JUST STAND UP AND STAND STILL!!!"
Thankfully, they're good enough kids that they were quiet and polite during the Iiado performance until it was their turn to go on, at which point they totally brought it. They even displayed something of a sense of rhythm while I was counting for them, and I knew that I would be allowed to live after all.
So that was one down. Then, after a few other acts including scath, bluedraconis, and mcsassypants's blow-me-down spectacle of kicking and throwing prowess, Naomi and I got up and did Nanquan with Professor Wong right there in the front row. For the one or two of you out there who hadn't heard, Professor Wong is the guy who taught a special class on Nanquan just 2 days before, and I couldn't go because I had to be at my swag-bellied measil of a job. The man is also considered one of the top ten instructors in China (yes, the one with over a billion people). Naomi had to fill me in on the few highlights that we could realistically incorporate by show-time, and some time into the performance, I look up and there's Professor Wong just smiling and nodding.
So that was two down. Then I was hopping around back stage, trying to evict the remaining butterflies before I had to go on with Sensei Tom, when Shifu called all the black belts on stage. And then, in front of Shigong, Professor Wong, my parents, God, and everybody, three of us got promoted to second degree black belt.
Then I had to go on with Sensei Tom without fainting.
Shifu always says that getting a black belt is like climbing a mountain: You spend all this time and energy on the goal, only to get to the top and see all these other mounts that need climbing. That's certainly true. From here though, you can also see that the world is round.

I know there may be one or two of you in the audience who may be unaware that Feminist Eclectic Martial Arts is having its 20th anniversary demo on Sunday. And to both of you I say, FEMINIST ECLECTIC MARTIAL ARTS IS HAVING ITS 20TH ANNIVERSARY DEMO ON SUNDAY, and you should totally check out fema-martialarts.com for details. We've all been working really hard for months to get ready. Originally, these were my tasks for the hootenanny:

1. Put together a killer performance with Shimei Naomi, the school's highest ranked student.
2. Herd the kids (read 'cats') into a performance of their own, which will hopefully not end in anybody falling off the stage or getting poked in the eye.
Note to self: The next time I write a play, NO ACTORS.
3. Wrangle everybody into getting the venue cleaned up afterwards so that it is as nice/nicer than when we found it.
4. Not embarrass Shifu in front of her friends.

Easy, no? Then I got a call from Shifu a few days ago, telling me the exciting news that Sensei Tom, a sixth dan in judo and one of my favorite guest instructors of all time, needs a stand-in throw-ee for his part of the demo, since his original partner backed out. This brings me to...

5. Learn a traditional judo kata in a couple of days, and be able to perform it eight days later.

But this is why I am in charge sort of. Then I came down with a bit of a sniffle last Thursday, which didn't seem so bad at first. Since then however, I have felt the germs slowly trickle down from my sinuses to my throat, and though I seem to be past the point of greatest discomfort now, I seem to have some kind of gremlin colony with its claws in my larynx. In short, I now sound like a frog, and not some adorable felt frog with a banjo if you know what I mean. This then brings us to...

6. Perform items 1-5 with laryngitis.

I want a brownie.

I have to say, turning 30 wasn't nearly as traumatic as I'd been led to believe. I still haven't finished my novel, but I am taking the time to get it the way I'd like. I still haven't found true love, by I have found true friends. I don't have what I'd call a career, but I've done a lot of decent things, and I do have all of the prof's at St. Kates fooled into thinking I'm the smartest late-teen since King Tut. A couple of months ago, I found my first white hair. Last Saturday, I ran my second half-marathon.

I'm alive. I'm alive.
I'm alive.

Last night, I was out to dinner for a dear friend's birthday. I'd had a drink and a half and was feeling mighty fine, when the subject of who should officiate at the wedding of Rachel and The Boy came up. Ever the helpful (read 'sauced') English major, I said I'd do it. This was mostly in jest, but also in a here-if-you-need-me sort of way. Rachel then looked rather thoughtful and said that I would probably have to include something religious for her Baptist family and The Boy's Catholic one. That is a bit of a noodle-scratcher, but I figure that if anyone can bring together the Catholics and the Baptists, it'll be the Unitarians. Why? Because one is just as confused by us as the other. All I have to do is open with that joke about the UU family who were the targets of hate-crime and had a question mark burned on their front lawn. I can see it now...
"To whom it may concern, we pray that you bless this union of..."

Here is part of a sonnet by Edmund Spenser that I'm supposed to read for class tomorrow:

Most happy letters fram'd by skilfull trade
With which that happy name was first desynd:
The which three times thrise happy hath me made,
With guifts of body, fortune and of mine.

I'm trying to think of something intelligent to say about it during the class discussion, but all I can think is that it has roughly the same meaning as the lyrics to 'I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts.' Here's another one:

The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre love, is vaine,
That fondly feare to loose your liberty,
When loosing one, two liberties ye gayne,
And make him bond that bondage earst dyd fly.

Eew.

By the way, does anyone know a good restaurant that could accomodate a party of 20 for brunch on a Saturday? I've been searching all day for a place to go after the monster dash, and the most promising thing I've found is an Irish pub. That might not be the best thing for the vegetarians in the group.

You know that English paper that I busted my imaginary balls to write last week? Well, I got an A on it. I also got the hand-written remark "This is a feeble conclusion to a strong summary." That, in fact, is the nicest thing this particular professor has ever written on one of my papers.

I prucured a used dishwasher from one of my bosses. This involved carrying the thing up his basement stairs, standing around and making awkward small talk while it ran through a cycle to see if it worked, getting it outside and into his car, driving from West Minneapolis to East Saint Paul, getting it out of his car, up the steps, and into the kitchen (good thing I'm strong like Polish bull). This happened two days ago, and we still haven't been able to run the thing. Why? Because for all my talents and education, it didn't occur to me that we would need a part to couple the hose to our kitchen faucet.

That is why, in between work, class, labs, Master Su classes, driving to Canon Falls to feed 4 very lonely cats, and writing an English paper that will hopefully not leave me emotionally wounded by my professor, I've been searching far and wide for said part. By far and wide, I mean two different hardware stores (one of which has a cat living in it, so you could also say that I've looked in a zoo). Of course, it seems like a lot more when you've got no time for it. This morning I had the rather overdue idea to bring the dishwasher's manual with me to the next place I look. I forgot the damn thing when I left the house today, because my hands were full of coffee, car keys, English papers, and cat hair.