The Tory Party

Last Trivia Night

I had a hell of a good time last night, and I appreciate how many people came out to give me a send off. We vanquished all but the mightiest foe for a resounding #2 position, which may net more beef satays down the road.

I will say more, but right now I just want to show off the new trivia bulletin board. Long live City Beverage!

Katrina

[This is an update from Jenny (formerly Jenny Turpish — yes, THAT Jenny Turpish, but now married and I shouldn’t broadcast her new name). She moved to New Orleans after she got married. I don’t know what else to say. - Tory]

Hello all,

As much as I loathe and detest generic broadcast emails, I thought that I would make one exception to the rule and give everyone an update as to what is going on down here in the bayou. Thanks to all who have expressed such concern about us–if you’ve tried to call, please keep trying. Our phones are working, but intermittently at best. Still, I am grateful for that, as the problems around here are just beginning.

[My husband, TJ,] and I rode out the storm along with most in Baton Rouge. TJ’s mother had several “refugees” from New Orleans and Mandeville–including some of his family.

Currently this is what we know:

TJ’s sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, and “baby-on-the-way” were lucky in that they only had a “few” trees on their home in Mandeville. TJ went with his family there today to aid in the clean-up, and thankfully there wasn’t any flooding in her home-just some rainwater damage and window loss to add to the whole trees-on-the-roof problem. The thing is this–St. Tammany Parish (Slidell, which is pretty much a total loss, Covington, and Mandeville) will be without power for at least 3-4 weeks, so TJ’s sister is going to look into enrolling her 5 and 3-year olds in school here in Baton Rouge. Meanwhile, they will just live with his parents. Her baby is due in December, and I know she is really upset about the whole situation.

Other friends staying with his mom and dad just watch the news trying to ascertain whether or not their homes made it. I think the not knowing is the toughest, and no one will be allowed anywhere near New Orleans for probably at least 12 weeks.

TJ and I lost power for only ten hours. We were probably some of the first houses in Baton Rouge that had power restored, as his sister and brother (who live here) are still without power even now. Schools around here are closed until Tuesday.

It’s been really hard watching the news coverage, especially the local news. Even the anchors and broadcasters are searching the aerial photos for their own homes–most have commented they lost everything along with the rest of Southern Louisiana and Mississippi.

A friend of mine still doesn’t know where his sister is–she lived in New Orleans East–the area that only has the roofs showing for all the flood water.

The bigger problem right now for Baton Rouge is simply the numbers of people who have no place to go. Our population has doubled due to the evacuees. They are housing people in the River Center–thousands of people–and now they are concerned about the crime rate here…due simply to people who no longer have nothing to lose, and have nothing to do with their time. The local news guy, this morning, commented about going to a convenience store downtown and seeing two guys with guns in their waistbands walking around. He basically said he wanted to call 9-1-1, but how could he since at this point that was hardly and emergency. Talk about perspective. Unfortunately, locals are concerned with the coverage of the looting going on in the city, worried that the rest of the world will judge NO on the idiocy, desperation, and complete lack of morality of a few. There are going to be stories of looting, just because times of desperation bring about the worst in some. I hope the include how thousands of people around here are opening their homes and resources to strangers. It is truly amazing how the people around here are rallying and coming together to aid their neighbors. I hope that story gets some billing…

Anyhow, some have asked if they can do anything for us–which is wonderful, but we have it good here. If you really want to help (sorry to sound like a commercial) please donate to the Red Cross. They have mobilized the largest disaster relief effort in history and simply need money. (1-800-HELP NOW)

Also, please remember that whatever images you are seeing on the news–it is just the tip of the iceberg. I watched video from a helicopter that flew around for hours showing the devastation, and people from the area, people who lived there all their lives, were unable to recognize anything. New Orleans and many other cities and completely submerged. The water will be there for a long time…

Please stay in touch, and keep these poor people in your prayers.

[Jenny]

Magic Cookie Bars

These are stoopid easy to make, and that’s why I like making them. You’ve probably seen them or had them before or maybe had a boyfriend whose roommate used to get them from his mom and then you`d compulsively eat half of them when no one was around. Not that I know anything about that or make them as penance.

Sorry the instructions are all English measurements, but being American I am way too lazy to go metric.

You will need:

• 13 x 9 glass baking dish
• 1 stick butter
• 1 package graham crackers (1/3 box)
• Bag o` chopped walnuts
• Bag o` semi-sweet chocolate chips
• * Bag o` butterscotch chips - optional
• Bag o` sweetened coconut flakes
• 1 can of sweetened, condensed milk

Preheat your oven to 325 F for a glass dish (350 F for metal). When it’s good and hot, melt the butter in the dish. Meanwhile, crumble the graham crackers into a big-ass resealable bag and crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin.

Once the butter is melted, swish it around the dish a bit to grease the sides, and then put the dish on the most level (heatproof) surface you’ve got. Sprinkle the graham crackers evenly over the butter.

Sprinkle a layer of chopped walnuts (you`ll probably use only 1/2 to 2/3 of the bag, depending on how much you like walnuts.)

Sprinkle a layer of chocolate chips (you`ll probably use almost the whole bag.) Then a layer of butterscotch chips, if you are so inclined.

Sprinkle a layer of coconut. Then pour the condensed milk in stripes over the whole thing.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until mostly golden brown on top.

Don’t be like me — wait for it to cool completely before you try to cut it. I usually cut it with a Big Nife and then scoop them out with a thin metal spatula (pancake-turner spatula, not icing spatula.)

Spatula.

Now you have magic cookie bars as addictive as meth but way more fattening. Awesome.

Moving II: Electric Boogaloo

It’s over. I had been dreading this move like poison, thinking it would be a huge ordeal. It was. But now it’s done, and I have to tell you the story.

Aran Keeng came up the night before to help me get ready, and I baked an enormous amount of cookies in an obvious effort to sublimate my anxiety into food product. The very presence of Aran Keeng mellowed me out, though, due to I knew he would stay calm no matter how many times I bashed his knuckles or knocked him off balance or shouted the eff word or made him sweat up his Wallace shirt. If ever you are doing anything that would make a normal person scream with frustration and pain, you should find someone like Aran. But not Aran himself, because I imagine after calmly handling too much frustration he might explode with hideous anger and go Godzilla on us all.

I should also note he got a half hour of sleep that night due to insomnia. Good times!

Anyway, in the morning, we picked up the truck, dad came to help and fix some stuff, and then Supremegoddess came to help, too.

Now, those who have been paying attention know that Supremegoddess was my roommate at our residential high school, and for no reason I acted toward her like a foaming hellbitch. Yet she insists on not only forgiving me, but also being sincere and non-passive-aggressive and helpful. I don’t know what to do about this. It’s actually rather alarming.

So Supremegoddess volunteered to help me move. I really had no expectation that she would drive two hours to come to my house at 10:00 AM on a Saturday to get sweaty and dusty and gross. But she did, and on top of that she saved my sweet ivory ass.

You see, I’ve never moved a houseful of crap before. And due to extreme shirking of friend duties, I haven’t helped anybody else move a houseful of crap either. So imagine my surprise when my plan of “move the big stuff in first” rapidly filled the truck and left three skillion feet of empty space at the top of the truck.

Then Supremegoddess arrived. She has moved a houseful of crap before. She explained that the way to do it is load the boxes first, due to if stacked neatly they take up the least space, and then load the big, odd-shaped stuff. Then she explained how to spiderweb it all with bungee cord to keep it secure.

I’m not sure why she came to my rescue. She may have sensed a disturbance in the force, and known that somewhere a really sucky truck-packing plan was going down. Or maybe she wanted to assert her essential dominance in a polite and kind but incontrovertible way.

In any event, there are two things particularly funny about her help:

• One is how genteel Supremegoddess was about giving advice, using phrases like “for future reference” and “what you may want to do.” In the given context, it was sort of like a professional painter walking into a room full of people painting with toothbrushes clenched between their teeth and saying, ”Say, I was thinking, and you don’t have to listen to me on this, but maybe what you want to do is use paintbrushes. And hold them in your hand.” Ohhhh.

• Two is how much Supremegoddess impressed my dad. At one point I could see him standing at a diagonal the end of the hall, watching Supremegoddess direct me. He had his head tilted with a vague smile on his face as if watching Johnny Sack or Larry Scott. He kept making references to the scene in Goodbye, Columbus where Jack Klugman yells at his son-in-law for not knowing how to pack a truck: “I can’t believe someone’s been to college and knows how to pack a truck.” She would move her hands to help her visualize where something was going to fit, and dad later compared this to Russell Crowe as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. He also said that he hoped she had learned this from experience, and not just because she could tell by looking at it, because she made him feel “totally incompetent.” Damn.

• Okay, three things. At one point, I’m standing at the front of the truck with a box, and she’s at the back, and I ask her, “Hey, should I put it up here?” And she says, “No, it won’t fit.” But it looks like it’ll fit to me, so I try it anyway. Doesn’t fit. I’m two feet away from what I’m doing, and I’m wrong. She’s fifteen feet away, and she’s right. Weird. Eerie.

Y’see, I am a drafthorse when it comes to labor. I lift heavy things. I force and whisk and try to do things as quickly as possible, leaving no time for things like “planning” and “getting stuff out of my path before I walk backwards over it with a 200 lb couch.” Left to my own devices, there is a lot of frustration and injury and sweat — but with proper guidance, I am a very happy Tory. This is why I closed the door on the truck energized and positive, with vim and vigor and pep and moxie and the rest.

This story is now 1/3 of the way done.

Aran and I drive the hour and a half to Winston-Salem without incident, but for some reason once we get there I’ve graduated from peaceful easy feeling into gung-ho aggression. The furniture is the enemy, and I must destroy it by relocating it 50 feet more.

This takes a while, as I decide the weight bench and 240 lbs of weights belongs on the second floor, as well as the queen-sized bed, coffee table, two desks and more crap than you can shake a crap at. Through this, Aran Keeng is mellow despite dark under-eye circles, the occasional knuckle crunch, and the fact that I am getting more and more irritable and shout “FA-A-AHK!” whenever anything even marginally painful happens to me. I start talking to the furniture. I’m soaking through my second shirt of the day. I discover that the reason they tell you to measure your furniture is because you may want to put it through doorways. By the way, my couches are 33” wide, and the living room doorframe only 30”. The couches get put back on the truck and called a number of insulting names.

Truck unloaded (but for the couches), we proceed to my storage unit to pick up some crap and drop off other crap. Here I find that in three months my ceiling-free, open air unit is coated in tacky dust (there’s a roof over it all, but a cargo net instead of a real ceiling). Ew. In the future, I may spring for one of those sheds with climate control and, you know, a ceiling. Ceilings rule.

Three funny things happen here:

• One is how I’ve gone from irritable to goofy and punchy. I’m still working in a hurry, though, so while moving a mattress I sort of miss the doorway and back right into the wall next to it. This makes a nice “WHOCK” sound. I say “FA-A-AHK!” I told Aran later to admit that this was funny. He said he wouldn’t admit it.

• Two is how we try to move out the red couch stored here. We ascertain it’s the right width (hmm… don’t think I gave my roommate back his tape measure. Gotta remedy that). I lift my end, and think, “This isn’t bad, we can do this, I can do this.” Then Aran lifts his and OMG FA-A-A-HK! The left side is much heavier than I thought it would be, and my left arm has decided to rebel. The couch goes crashing. Aran is afraid that he’s killed me. I am amused by the abject failure of my arm muscles. I say, “Forget it, not today,” and the couch stays. Aran doesn’t know yet that I’m going to try to move it again next weekend. Got to let him recover first.

• Three, an hour after this, I get in the car and see a rough red rash on my cheek, between my nose and my cheekbone. Today it was the same plus sorta swole up under my eye. Ew. I’m not sure what this is about, but I suspect it was the rat poison in the storage shed. Poison gets on the boxes. Boxes touch my shirtsleeve. I use my shirtsleeve to wipe my face – presto! Delicious red rat rash. But considering I don’t know how I did it, I should be pretty damn grateful that it was my cheek and not my eye. Ewww.

We head back to the house and unload for the last time just before the sun goes down (around 8:00 PM, I reckon.) I’ve sweat through my third shirt. Aran looks like he aged ten years. Even Jake is tired, and he didn’t do nothin’.

I let thirty-year-old-looking Aran sit on the back porch while I make one last trip for a shower curtain (must… shower…) and the antidote to all extreme exertion: Yuengling and Subway sandwiches. I should note how NOBODY wants to mess with you when your shirt is dirty, your face has a rash, and your hair is soaked from your third sweat of the day. I never got so little eye contact in my life. However I leveraged my hideousness into getting the woman in front of me at Plej’s to let me go ahead of her, and she was very kind and obliging despite being terrified.

After liberal application of food, beer and shower, we adjourn to the living room where I plug in “The Maxx” (yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Purple. Outback. Julie Winters. Aww yeahh.) I unpack some things and Aran zonks out in an armchair. This is probably because it’s 11:00 PM. Also probably he feels if he keeps his eyes closed I won’t shout “FA-A-AHK!” again.

As I take Jake out for the pippy of the night (“Help me make… the pippy of the ni-i-i-ight…”), I marvel at how I’m so close to campus that anyone from school can see me take Jake out in duckie PJs and no bra. Ew.

In the morning, I sit on the porch eating a bowl of Fiber One (with a little Special K Fruit and Yogurt for body, ‘cause that stuff be tasty) waiting for the landlord to come by and take the living room door off the hinges so we can move the couches in. My body is talking to me, and Aran is still sleeping, so on one level I’m hoping the landlord has forgotten to come because I HATE these couches and I don’t want to touch them ever ever again. I’m not a religious person, but I know when I’m beat, so I sez to my HP, I sez, “I know whatever you decide for me, you’ll give me the strength to do.”

My landlord shows up on time. Damn reliable landlord. But the pin is stuck in the hinge like you wouldn’t believe. Good pin. I ask if Goodwill takes donations on Sunday, and the landlord says I could ask at Vee’s Treasures across the street when they open, because they would know. I’ve met the couple who runs Vee’s Treasures and they’re hella nice and I need new siderails from them anyway, so awesome.

An hour later, Vee’s Treasures has the couches, the truck is empty, a great weight is lifted from my shoulders, and Aran gets to sleep in. Everyone wins.

When we return the truck, I turn too sharply and scrape the side of the truck on a tow dolly. But it hardly leaves a mark at all.

There’s no moral to this story. Except sometimes you get more than you deserve. And though I dreaded moving my crap like a face-full of rat poison, I really lucked out over and over. I am a lucky biatch. Even if dad likes Supremegoddess more than me.

On Vacation, Bush Talks Texas in Idaho

Bush talks in circles to avoid making a good decision or meeting with a middle-aged mother

President Bush is a foaming idiot. A gibbering, unintelligible, flightsuit-monkey, war-mongering, lying stealing oily ignorant bloodthirsty socially-dysfunctional idiot. I don’t even know where to begin. I have to keep my scope very narrow when I talk about Bush, because he emits so much stupid per second that pointing it all out in even a single press conference would take me all week.

It’s true. I am a smug, soulless bastard.

“The Sunnis have got to make a choice,” Bush said. “Do they want to live in a society that’s free? Or do they want to live in violence?”

Ah, yes. Because desert-dwelling Muslims represent a culture that prizes freedom above all other virtues — more than faith, unity and sense of righteousness — and you can totally appeal to them on that level. “Ooh, freedom! Because the mortal realm isn’t transitory and irrelevant! And freedom totally means something under dominion of thugs, thieves and warlords! Especially when they were put there by white people!”

Did you say `freedom`? Oh, then nevermind.

Also, what longstanding religious and territorial disagreement can prevail when you dangle the English word “freedom” in people’s faces? This is why Israel and Palestine are Best Friends Forever.

But I guess if you spend all your time talking about dragging the backward heathen Middle East into the perfect light of the Western world, and by “Western” you mean “with your very own fixed elections, two-car families and credit card debt,” eventually you start swallowing your own line of poo.

I haven’t smiled since this asshole took office

[Bush] said he thought that most mothers, regardless of their religion, would prefer to live in peace rather than violence.

Oh my crapping crap. The thing about this little press conference is that it hopelessly confuses what Bush has to say about 1) how, according to his statistically significant survey sample, Americans want to stay the course in Iraq, and 2) how we really are going to achieve goals of peace and reconstruction in Iraq.

The quote above seems to refer to the great sway and influence of all those moms in Iraq. So an Iraqi mom is supposed to be able to dissuade her desperate, hungry, angry, empowered-by-God child not to become a suicide bomber, yet an American mom can’t even get a meeting with a comfy, full-bellied, complacent, empowered-by-God jackass who’s ostensibly her public servant. Asshole.

Nothing scares Bush more than an informed opinion

So, to rephrase, Bush thinks Americans really want war, but Iraqis really want peace.

This is despite the fact that support for Bush is lower than it’s ever been, support for the war has taken a nosedive, and the insurgency is NOT in its last throes. Osama Bin Laden attracted support for the 9/11 attacks by claiming our troops occupy holy Saudi soil, and yet Bush thinks the whole Middle East is going to be role-modeled into tripartite capitalist Republics by putting 130,000 more Americans — trying their goddamndest to unscrew Bush’s mess though they might be — IN BABYLON?

We love white people telling us what to do!

Remember that time Bush had us invade Baghdad, but he didn’t have any plan for, you know, looters? So priceless Mesopotamian artifacts have been lost, perhaps forever? This is because Bush is an ASSHOLE. When you think of Bush, and whether he has good plans for healthcare, Social Security, and energy policy, remember he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t expect an invasion to result in looting. And we wonder why our troops don’t have the equipment they need. “Tanks need armor? Aw, dang! Why didn’t I make a list?”

Sidebar: Be assured I love my troops. I can’t even talk about it. And I`m not generally anti-war — like my dad says, “What do you want `em to do? Stay home and shine their boots?” There are a lot of places in the world where 130,000 troops can liberate the living crap out of people who really need it (Darfur? North Korea? Not that we want to piss off China.) And there are a lot of places where hundreds of billions of dollars could change EVERYTHING (tsunami damage in Indonesia, famine in Nigeria, AIDS all over.) Hell, if we had all 130,000 of these tougher-and-braver-than-me em-effers in just Afghanistan, we`d be in a hell of a lot better position. But Bush has picked one of the worst and most bizarre places to invade, in terms of both pursuing an achievable goal and making us safer as a country.

Marines are not peacekeepers! Trying to make the military into police is like trying to make a bull into a seeing-eye dog: if you try it, you are STUPID.

Note to self

As for the families Bush says he’s talking to that have lost children and spouses to this war and want it to continue, what’s the alternative? That they accept their loved ones have died for a bad cause — or a lost one? They’re entitled to feel any way they want — I can’t imagine what they’ve been through, and it would be the most ignorant kind of cruelty to tell them what to believe.

But 1) I don’t trust Bush to be an accurate reporter of their sentiments, 2) I don’t believe he’s seeing a representative sample of military families (this is the same asshole that can’t be bothered to attend a funeral), and 3) I don’t believe that their beliefs, however deeply felt, are alone sufficient reason to stay in Iraq.

As Senator Chuck Hagel said, “`Stay the course` is not a policy.” You can’t ask more people to die just because many have died already. You don’t throw good money after bad; you don’t gamble away $10,000 in pursuit of $1,000 you already lost. And that’s MONEY. What we have in Iraq are HUMAN BEINGS.

I should also point out that also in Iraq are IRAQI HUMAN BEINGS, which, you may note, insurgents are killing even more frequently than they’re killing Americans. Obviously Iraqis are not using the word “freedom” enough.

It’s like if your neighbor was attacked by his Rottweiler, and your solution was to send in five more Rottweilers. Maybe they take out the first Rottweiler, but they breed new ones. It’s bad for the dogs and even worse for your neighbor. And probably after a while your neighbor dreams of the days when all he had was one Rottweiler.

That was a terrible metaphor. Maybe I should stay away from the political rants a while and play with my dog instead.