Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

Menu

Extremities

by

I was in awe of all the lady-funniness going on around me at the Hideout last week, so thanks to everyone who came to see us! In addition to girl comedy, the night’s fun included being held hostage by the Ting-Tings, who apparently decided to shoot five seconds of their music video right outside the Hideout, which meant that for nearly an hour or so nobody could really leave or even go sit out on the breezy little brokedown patio and instead we were all forced to stay inside and sweat and drink our compensatory drinks, and oh, it was a nightmare. Well, except not really.

One of the things I read was based on my Bad Times entry a few years ago, but of course I had to revise and update it in order to cite new developments in the world of chain-store shopping discomfort, such as the Extreme Value Item Transaction at Jewel supermarkets. The Extreme Value Item Transaction doesn’t quite count as Bad Times, but it always confounds me just the same, because I inevitably fail to come up with a satisfactory response to the Extreme Value Item. The Extreme Value Item, for those of you who do not shop at Jewel, is a daily designated grocery item that has been deployed to a special location right there at the cash register, where the cashier can point out the fabulous savings opportunity it presents.

Is the value of the Extreme Value Item truly extreme? I have no idea because it’s never an item I’d buy. It’s always a can of nuts, or fruit roll-ups, or one of the more dubious flavors of Doritos. And the cashier has to point to it and say something like, “Have you seen our Extreme Value of the day?” Even when there isn’t a distinct subtext of I’d rather I didn’t have to ask you this the whole thing is extremely awkward. One time I tried just going, hmm! while pretending to deliberate about buying the Extreme Value, but that felt really pathetic and on some level unfair to the cashier. I’ve tried to say just, “no thanks,” but even that seems too much somehow, because when it comes down to it, I suppose I deeply resent having to take a position regarding the Extreme Value appeal of Blue Gatorade. Unsubscribe please! Now I find that most of the time I just avert my eyes and mumble uhnuhnuhnuhthanks, which is also my standard response for panhandlers and people handing out flyers and Hair Question Men. It’s still not the best response to the Extreme Value Item Transaction, but it’s all I’ve got, other than using the self-checkout or shopping somewhere where the bargains do not actually accost me.

I meant to tell you about the 5K but there isn’t much to say, other than: I ran it! Very slowly! I did the Couch to 5K program, in which you drive yourself apeshit for 7 weeks trying to measure and keep track of the myriad running/walking intervals until suddenly you really do find yourself sprinting along gazelle-like for miles, plural miles! Of course then at the 5K you see that you are are not at all a gazelle and that other slow runners are faster than you, as are some powerwalkers, people on crutches, and glaciers. But never mind! I’m probably going to do at least one more later this summer or in the fall.

There’s more to catch up on, but I really want to just be in bed now, continuing my Little House series reading kick. I’m on These Happy Golden Years now and can’t get enough of all the euphemistic horse-lust, cute little schoolhouses, and endless confounding descriptions of dress-sewing. Oh, behold the cambric basque with the darted polonaise and the lace jabot! Whatever the hell that is! Good night!

08:17 AM, from txt

by

This morning on the drive to work we were stopped at the light at Kedzie and Peterson. Just as the light was turning green there was this kid, like this high school kid, in front of the car—he was still crossing, moving slowly through the crosswalk. He wasn’t scared of being hit. He had his hood up, and he looked morosely pleased with himself as he shuffled by and made the cars wait.

I told Chris, “That kid is so like, ‘Dude, I just cheated death.'”

“You know that’s going to be his Twitter today,” Chris said.

Hold that thought

by

Ten words I did not know were real words until I played Scrabulous: qat, ghi, hup, taw, pah, gey, ors, yoni, mana, and cowbird. I’d actually come across “yoni” before, but it was in this book, which has a distressing amount of kooky blithering mixed in with the important stuff, and I guess I thought it was just a word she made up while drinking pennyroyal birth-control tea, but what do you know, it’s for real.  And now that I write them out here, those first six or so sound like I’m counting in Quechua or something.

Ten words I’d hoped would be real words in Scrabulous but are not (along with their surmised meanings): aith (melancholy); feo (Spanish for ugly; maybe it’s caught on?); nomen (the names of many); hitee (the person who is hit); feveree (the person with a fever); sia (some kind of martial-arts thingy); kithen (plural of kith); avise (to hold fast), and nas (a benign skin growth). Oh, the scores I could’ve scored had these words been for real.

But truth be told, I haven’t even been playing Scrabulous all that much over the past week or so, since I had to write my column. Now I have another article due next week, and on Friday we’re headed to Wisconsin for the weekend, so I can’t update the way I’d like to until next month. But in the meantime please dig how these folks got in the New York Times yesterday, and especially read Mo’s recent posts (and gawk at some of the hater comments) about the awesomely complicated subject of body image and fat acceptance and the whole crazy chalupa of controversy that comes with it. I wish I could write an entry about it right now, if I wasn’t so fat and lazy. I mean, busy. Whatever! See you in February.

Recent impediments

by

to updating this site: 1.) NaNoWriMo. 2.) Thanksgiving travel. 3.) Sickness, in the form of a lame little cold which nonetheless turned me into a gloomy snuffling rheumy-eye’d Dickens character for days and days. But now the dense cloud of ennui and Kleenex is dispersing and letting some of the twinkly holiday stuff sparkle through, and I think I might even be myself again one day soon.

I did not win NaNoWriMo. I did not get to 50,000 words, as I pretty much expected I wouldn’t. I guess I could have done it if I’d followed the some of the proverbial NaNoWriMo advice, i.e., cancel all your social obligations; order nothing but carryout; shut yourself up in your room with your hands taped to the keyboard and a beer hat filled with Red Bull, and so on. But for me, the point was more that I wanted to see how many words I could write every night while still being sort of a normal person who cooks dinner and watches those old Twin Peaks* episodes with her boyfriend (who had never seen the good episodes). And I wrote more words under those circumstances than I thought possible. All the counting counting counting made me twitchy, though, since I was working with several different files at once, instead of a long rambling Word document that starts with It-was-a-dark-and-stormy-bibbety-blah, and at some point I needed a calculator, and then I felt like I was auditing my own soul, but in the end it was nice to have some measure of progress. And then I ate some turkey.

*Comments we made over the course of viewing both seasons throughout November include, “That’s not the last you’ll see of creamed corn.” “It’s not very hard to kill a Renault brother, is it?” and “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Leland!”

Anyway, it’s close to midnight, and I seem to be needing a lot more sleep than usual, what with the cold and snow and shopping and minor ailment and my newfound taste for hot toddies, so I hope you’ll understand my cutting this short. I’ll be back in a few days to blather about Christmas music or something.

Connect with me

Visit Us On TwitterVisit Us On FacebookVisit Us On Instagram