The Crazy Cat Lady Speaks

“You’re just going to be an old lady with cats?” he says.

“Well, unless I meet a guy who doesn’t suck, yes,” she says, with emphasis on the word “suck” to indicate she is talking about him. She doesn't know if he gets it.

The cat thing really gets under her skin, though. It’s the thing all guys seem to say when she indicates disinterest in marriage, which is to say, she's been hearing the cat line since she got her first boyfriend at sixteen. She has two of them-- cats, not boyfriends-- which is the acceptable ratio of cat to single woman without making said single woman appear crazy.

She says she'd like to get a dog, but they’re a lot of work. And you can’t leave them for days in the care of a friendly neighbor while you take off for California, or London, or Peru. Cats are easy; they’re portable, and they aren’t bothered if you stay out late drinking whiskey with a guy who is still sucky after all these years.

Actually, that’s not fair. She doesn't know if he sucks in the present tense, she just knows he sucked years ago when she was dating him. Right now, in this bar, he’s good company, but this is probably because she's not sleeping with him; she has no plans to sleep with him, and that relieves her of the worry about who else he’s probably sleeping with. This leaves her free to just enjoy her whiskey.

“Your standards are too high,” he says and takes a drink. “Good luck finding a guy who doesn’t suck,” he adds, so maybe he got what she was saying after all.

Of course, she's lying.

It’s got nothing to do with meeting a guy who doesn’t suck. She's probably met a few of them, though no names spring to mind. The truth is, she likes being able to take off to California, or London, or Peru if she wants to. She likes being able to eat cereal for dinner and not worry about feeding another human being. She likes being able to stay out late and not having to share the remote control when she's at home. She likes not having to shave her legs if she doesn't feel like it. And she really likes the fact that the only underpants she ever has to wash are her own.

But she'd also like to have someone to talk to sometimes, and maybe have some adventures with.

She gives him this. He’s damn charming. She can see how her younger self would have fallen for the self effacing and warped humor, the knowledge of baseball, and history, and current events, the freedom of spirit. It’s becoming apparent to her how this guy was able to talk her into some very careless behavior the night they met.

She can’t figure out if that’s what he’s after right now or not, but she also can’t imagine what other reason he might have for getting in touch with her.

She's pretty sure he’s not here to save her from a life of spinsterhood, loneliness, and cats, but he also never makes a pass. When they part ways at the end of the evening, there’s some talk about meeting for dinner the next night, but she assumes they will not speak again for another three years, if at all.

But that’s not what happens. There will be a ball game and one of the best nights of her life, followed by one of the worst mornings. There will be other drinks in other towns. There will be long conversations about more than just banter. Bit by bit, she will lose her armor. She will start meaning it when she tells herself everything will be okay. She starts thinking maybe she doesn't have to have all her adventures on her own. She starts wondering if cats are enough.

He will never make a pass, but for the first time ever, he will see her naked.

And then he will be gone, and he won’t say goodbye. She will learn about it in a facebook status.

Her family-- the one she's chosen, not the one she was born to—- will have the inauspicious task of holding her up. After six months, she will not be able to recognize herself.

But she's in there somewhere; I know it.

So she finds the hustle first. She paints her deck. She gets some writing work. She snags an editing job. She resurrects her wreck of a blog and she gets a readership. She starts cleaning out her house and looking westward. She tries to remember that fundamental decency and a belief in the basic goodness of other people are not naïve, even in the face of bullshit. She focuses on all the people who love her instead of the one who doesn’t.

She hugs her cats.

She rolls up her sleeves and begins the long process of getting herself back.

And she wonders if a van can be tricked out with a bed, a generator and maybe WiFi and a litterbox.

The Manda Wonders Why She Doesn't Work for The A.V. Club

Somebody actually made the following movie: "Zombie Strippers" starring Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson. Tagline reads, "Bloody mayhem in the champagne room."

Englund, you may remember, gained fame in the 1980's with his portrayal of Freddy Krueger in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" film series. Jameson is well known as an actor and producer of adult entertainment.

But it's free on On Demand, and K Rock and I have a pretty morbid sense of curiosity, so we decided to give it 20 minutes while we were waiting for the take out to arrive, even though we were wondering how it ended up among the regular On Demand free movie offerings.

A quick check of the IMDB revealed that this film was produced in 2008, in 18 days-- which incidentally is the same number of days it took to produce Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation"-- and came in under budget at $1 million.

I don't really know where that million went, because it wasn't for production values, acting, or special effects. A lot of barbecue sauce went into making this film.

But it IS clearly revealed from the outset that this is to be a horror movie: the opening voiceover tells us that it's W.'s fourth term in office with Arnold Schwarzenegger as veep.
K Rock: "So far, it's like something from The Onion."
Manda: "So it's a political satire."
K Rock: "Silly us for underestimating Jenna and Robert."

The plot of the film is fairly simple. A zombie gets loose from a government lab that is conducting experiments to create a super-soldier. The zombie makes his way to the town of Sartre-- yes, like THAT Sartre-- Nebraska. The town name, naturally, adds some intellectual credibility to the proceedings.

Upon arrival in Sartre, the zombie ends up at a strip club called The Rhinoceros, because the film is loosely based on a French allegorical play of the same name. This parallel further underscores the deeply existential implications of the film's themes and content.

K Rock: "Never before has a Jenna Jameson film inspired me to read French literature."
Manda: "Have you ever seen a Jenna Jameson film?"
K Rock: "Well... no...."

The first zombie-- Private Birdphlew (or some other spelling that is pronounced Bird Flu) bites a stripper (Jameson) at the Rhinoceros club, she then does her dance as a zombie, which makes the crowd of frat boys from Central Casting go wild and start throwing money. The unscrupulous club owner (Englund) then pressures the other strippers to become zombies so he can take their earnings while feeding them selected members of the audience. Of course, these audience members become zombies as well, but they're kept caged up in the basement of the club, because obviously you want to keep increasing numbers of live zombies incarcerated in the basement of a bar.

And there are a lot of boobies.

So there you have the existential themes and content.

Eventually the army-- wearing belly shirts-- shows up to save the day, which prompts K Rock to comment: "Are those regulation haircuts?"

One of the army guys gives us pause, actually.
K Rock: "This guy thinks he's in a Blaxploitation film from 1977."
Manda: "I thought he was going for the Ice-T on 'Law and Order' vibe."
K Rock: "But the beret and the hint of an Afro and the clearly posturing dialect."
Manda: "That's where I was getting the Ice-T effect."

The film contains other stereotypes that are so over the top that I can only hope and pray that they were meant to be ironic. There's the Sleazy Manager's business partner, a woman with a generic Eastern European accent that she either learned from watching Bela Lugosi or "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons. There's the maintenance guy, Paco, whose cart features a Mexican flag and a bottle of tequila and whose lines mostly seem to hinge on rehashing variations and puns on "We don't need no stinking badges." Paco goes out in a blaze of glory, wearing a sombrero and an ammo belt and smoking a cigarillo. It was like watching a living, breathing South of the Border billboard.

Yet the film has its moments of genuinely funny dialogue, like when The New Stripper, a wholesome Midwestern stereotype working to afford a colostomy for her grandmother, says to her religious right boyfriend: "Maybe there's more truth to me taking off my clothes for emotionally stunted men so my grandmother can shit in a bag than in my staying pure and virginal for you."

Between that and the stripper zombie reading Nietzsche, there was some real potential for some female empowerment and breaking of stereotypes. Alas, the gratuitous nudity kind of killed that potential.

Later, K Rock and I would deconstruct the film and agree that this was a movie that could have been cult classic campy, but the influence of production execs who were looking for more nudity was bleeding obvious (pardon the pun). We ended up watching the film in about half the time allotted because we fast forwarded through most of the dance sequences.

Still, the film included this exchange just after Jameson becomes a zombie:
Jameson: "I've never felt more alive."
Other Stripper: "Sweet irony."

Which means this movie is still smarter than Alanis Morrissette.

The Manda Goes to a Wedding Shower


On Friday afternoon the Work People had a wedding shower for NayNay. We ate things with cheese and toasted her with champagne. She opened boxes of place settings and kitchen utensils. It was lovely, and I couldn't be happier for her and the soon-to-be Mr. NayNay.

But I don't get wedding showers.

This is not standard singleton sour grapes about how people get to marry the love of their lives AND they get a lot of free merchandise to boot and if I don't marry the love of my life I get bupkus. It's not like that.

I was introduced to the man who in ten days will be Mr. NayNay almost four years ago. I remember this very clearly, because I pulled NayNay aside-- I think I may have even grabbed her by the collar-- and said, "If you fuck this up, I'll kill you." I'm always happy when it turns out I'm right about other people's relationships. It happens so rarely in my own.

Who am I kidding? I'm happy when I'm right about pretty much anything.

And it's not about the stuff, because people-- including NayNay-- offered to throw me a housewarming when I bought Little Blue. I refused because I don't really get housewarming parties either.

It's all the planning. It's knowing what kind of china you're going to be eating from for the next few decades. It's getting all gooshy about modern appliances. I can't muster that much excitement about salad tongs. I watch people open these boxes at these things-- and I've been to many of them-- and I can't wrap my head around going all misty-eyed over flatware.

Right now, as I write this, my mom is thinking about window treatments for my house. I'm content to let her do it, mainly because I don't care what's on my windows as long as my neighbors can't see when I'm in the living room playing Rock Band. I think all of this means I'm missing something essential about being female.

Females are supposed to nest, or so we're taught. My current war against my belongings makes me think I'm really engaged in a long process of tearing my nest apart so I can fly again.

Or maybe I'm just abnormally averse to having to write thank-you notes.

Mercifully, we didn't have to do that thing where they make a hat out of the bows from the presents and make the bride wear it. That custom originated with the sour grapes crowd; I'm sure of it.

At Crazy Manda's Everything Must Go

Picture it: Summer, 2002, Top of the Hill in Chapel Hill, NC
Two guys and a girl sitting around a table drinking I don't remember what. A game of "I Never" has devolved into a series of increasingly personal questions and answers, which will eventually lead the trio to agree that "What goes on in Chapel Hill stays in Chapel Hill."

The evening ends with the Queen Mother of all personal questions: "What's the most embarrassing CD you ever bought?"

I'm pretty sure my answer to this question at the time was Poison's "Look What the Cat Dragged In." The only other answer I remember was from the guy who did the asking: Madonna's "Like a Virgin." We weren't even talking CDs anymore. We were talking about tapes.

Still, it's easily the most personal question anyone has ever asked me. I can't even think of another question that's more personal.

And this evening, I think my answer could safely be ALL OF THEM. Or at least pretty much everything I bought during the 90's.

If you've been following along at home, you know I'm engaged in an all out war against my belongings. I've already put my DVDs and my books on the chopping block over at Amazon. And last night, I started listing CDs, which seems kind of futile because nobody buys CDs anymore. This part of the experience is humiliating, even though it's just between me and those anonymous buyers picking up Pearl Jam's "Ten" for a quarter. You can deny a lot of things about your past, but those boxes of jewel cases stand as an eternal testament to how lame you once were.

At least until you woman up and start listing them for sale.

How many places have I lived since I moved out of my parents' house in 1992? A lot. There was a two year period in there when I changed residences no fewer than six times. That might have been the happiest two years of my life, come to think of it. And yet, somehow, in all of this moving around, I somehow still have a copy of Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill?" Are you KIDDING ME? If I go the rest of my life without ever hearing that woman screech out "You Oughta Know," then I can safely say that the rest of my life will be superior to the years up to now in a substantial way.

I didn't like that song when it came out. And that was in the midst of my first big breakup. I was the target audience. Hell, I'm still the target audience. I'm the angriest woman I know personally. But it's got stupid lyrics and the music is boring.

Come to that, I have a nasty habit of judging harshly people who don't know the correct context and usage of the term "irony."

Why do I even own this CD in the first place?

And that's not even the most embarrassing CD I've got here. It's just the most embarrassing one I'm willing to admit in front of people-- all five of you.

My mom never kept any cool records. Or maybe she just never owned any cool records, so maybe I've erred on the side of caution in case some kind of imaginary progeny I might have would want them. Even though I'm pretty sure at this point any progeny I ever have will be strictly imaginary, even if they weren't, I couldn't face them after they'd seen what's in these boxes. I'm having a hard time facing the boxes myself.

Ahhh, but at least we have Blonde on Blonde. It's gonna be okay.

The Manda Watches the Dexter Season Premiere

My TV crush is a serial killer. This kind of puts my reality into sharp perspective.

Okay, so sure, Dexter kills people. But he's got a code. He only kills the bad ones. The ones who slipped past the system and are an ongoing danger to society. The symbolism of the trash bag in his disposal method is not lost on me. Probably wouldn't be lost on anyone with more than a sixth grade education, because the symbolism and the irony on this show are not all that subtle.

But you know, he's not really a bad guy. He's nice to his girlfriend/ wife-- except for the part where he's indirectly responsible for her death. He tried to get her out of town for her own safety. And he's really really really sorry about it. He's appropriately catatonic and self-loathing for the situation. But before that, he killed the ex-husband who was threatening her and punched a neighbor to defend her honor. And aside from that, he basically stays out of her business. She's kind of a needy, nagging shrew, too, but he never says a bad word about her. Maybe he's emotionally distant, but he at least knows he's supposed to fake it.

He's got a steady job. Well educated. Owns his own home. Has a boat. Good looking in a disheveled kind of way. So really, what's not to like here? I've done worse. We all have.