Happy birthday to me

In honor of the big three-two, my top childhood birthday memories:

1980, Age 4 - I'm on a huge Smurfs kick, so mom tells me she's going to order a Smurfette cake for my birthday party. Only she must not have spent a year of Saturday mornings with her butt planted two feet from the TV screen like I did. At the party, she gathers all the kids around the cake box and proudly lifts the lid. I gasp in horror. "Mom, what IS that?!" She looks puzzled. "What do you mean? THAT'S Smurfette!" Um, no, mom. ALL smurfs are blue. Not pink. Not even girl smurfs.

1982, Age 6 - While sitting in my desk doing schoolwork on a warm, sunny afternoon, I hear a faint thumping sound of music in the hallway. The music got louder as it grew closer, and then all of a sudden, Miss Piggy appears in the doorway of our classroom. THE Miss Piggy, with bouncing blonde curls, a boombox on her shoulder, and a clump of brightly colored balloons. She walks up to me, and I nearly wet my pants. First she leads the class in singing "Happy Birthday" to me, and then she produces a box of chocolates, which I get to hand out to all my classmates. As I walk home from school proudly holding my balloons, I see my mom, who surprised me by meeting me halfway down the block. I am so overcome with happiness that as I run toward her, I burst into tears.

1986, Age 10 - In the middle of the night I am awakened by rustling noises in my bedroom, along with some "shits" and "goddamns." I lift my head up and see two figures huddled at the foot of my bed. It's mom and dad, trying to set up my a new stereo so that I'll be surprised when I wake up the next morning. I pretend to go back to sleep, but I'm too excited and my heart is pounding. I listened to the whole thing. The next day I unwrap my first two cassette tapes: Janet Jackson's "Control" and Johnny Cash's "Man in Black," both of which I had specifically requested. Within a week, I had memorized every single word of "Nasty" and "A Boy Named Sue." That's right, folks - even back THEN I was this cool.

School days

In honor of the work-work-work mentality that appears to have stolen away all my blogging time, I offer you three random tidbits about my new career in a high school:

1. Overheard at an assembly this week:

Teacher, to students: "Grass monkey? I mean, what the heck IS that? Whoever heard of a grass monkey?!"
Student: "No, it's BRASS monkey."
Teacher: "Really? Aw, geez. Well, uh ... guess I'm old."
Student, drawing heavy sigh: "Uh, yeah, it's from the EIGHTIES."

2. Hanging in the cafeteria above the microwave is a sign that reads "Do not use a napkin when heating cookie. We can catch a fire!" Every time I see it, I envision this little cartoon flame with arms and legs and a worried look on his face racing down a street, with an angry mob of high school girls chasing after him.

3. My school is Catholic, but I'm not, so I don't partake in communion during Mass. But I'm starting to feel somewhat obsessed about those little white wafers. Are they crisp, like saltines? Or more crumbly, like a Ritz? Maybe they're gummy and bland, or maybe they're seasoned and tasty? The aspiring foodie in me is dying to know.

Uncredited appearance

That right there on the TV, my friends, is your good buddy Chickenbone Jones. Nestled in the arms of some hot babe, because where else would you find a television star who was completely naked except for his fake-diamond-studded collar?

This was filmed back when Kathy Griffin and a camera crew from her reality show "My Life on the D-List" appeared at the Humane Society Silicon Valley's Fur Ball fundraiser. I tried to dodge the mob because I was sweaty, rumpled and covered in dog hair, but evidently the cameras couldn't resist getting a shot of our beastly little cur. Don't be fooled by that wide-eyed-angel gaze up there – last year at this party he growled at a three-legged dog, and this year he lunged at a dog with one eye. Yep, we got ourselves a real little philanthropist here.

Let's catch up

There is so, so much going on lately. I mean, if you could read all the blog posts I've composed in my head the past couple of weeks, you'd wet your pants from laughing. They were HILARIOUS. Oh, and the photographs! OK, well, those actually do exist. Only they're inside my new BlackBerry, and evidently I'm not smart enough to figure out how to get them out of the BlackBerry and into my computer. And the "instruction manual" that came with it? Please. I got a more informative booklet with the four-button walkman-on-a-neckstrap I got when I was 10. For the first week I despised this thing. But I worked at it, tried to stay patient, and now I have settled into more of a mild disgust. Hoping that when I get it linked up to actual useful things, like Outlook e-mail and schedule at work, we'll live happily ever after.

But the pictures. So first off, I have some shots of Princess Leia hugging my husband. THE Princess Leia, who was at the San Jose Rep doing a one-woman show written by some broad named Carrie Fisher. She showed up at a pre-show reception and went around to all the tables saying hi to everyone. I thought she looked beautiful, though I was a little WTF? on her eye makeup. Royal blue eyeliner, bright and thick, sprinkled with glitter the size of diamonds. Later I realized that she isn't quite as freaky as all that, it was just stage makeup. I also realized this woman has created for herself a job where she sits around on stage in pajamas, telling stories and smoking cigarettes. So if she wanted diamonds in her eyes, she could probably make it happen.

I also have pictures from the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which I attended for the first time despite the fact that I have lived in the Bay Area for six years. To all of you who told me this is a stupid hillbilly event that isn't worth the drive or the effort, well, I would like to introduce you to my new best friend, crab fries. CRAB FRIES, YOU GUYS. Crunchy, golden, beer-battered garlic fries, topped with creamy aioli and a heap of shredded dungeness crab. I began to slobber just typing that sentence.

OK, I must interrupt myself and say that just now I went to Yelp to see if other people liked these greasy little babies, and yikes! People hated this festival?! I really can't understand that. The biggest complaints seem to be the heat (because Gilroy in July is normally so pleasant, right?); the traffic (one einstein whines about "bad traffic planning by the organizers;" mm-hmm, because there's so much with Highway 101 you can get creative with!); and the food (CRABFRIES-CRABFRIES-CRABFRIES.) Someone even complained about a lack of beer! I just don't know what is wrong in people's heads sometimes. The beer was icy cold and plentiful. The food was outstanding. In addition to the crab fries, we really enjoyed the buttery shrimp scampi with garlic bread, and the garlic sausage sandwich. We also tried the garlic ice cream, and Yelpers, I'll give you that one. Eww.

I wasn't the only one who didn't care for garlic ice cream. Emily West, an up-and-coming country music artist and also my very good pal, didn't like them, either. Emily was at the festival primarily to the hell out of a song called "Rocks in Your Shoes," which is her first Top 40 hit and a song I'm crazy about. It was so awesome to hear it live. And I'm telling you, this woman is adorable (if you can manage to be adorable while also being a 6-foot-tall blonde bombshell.)

At the end of her set (after she tried garlic ice cream onstage and declared it to be "awful") she came out to sign autographs. Now, normally I stay far away from celebrities of any kind. I love to gawk at them, but I don't want to talk to them because I know I'd say something stupid. Like "You are cool" or "I love you." But for some reason I had a little burst of courage with Emily, maybe because she toughed it out for our small crowd, in dust and wind and cruel heat. I liked her sense of humor. At one point she casually dropped some remark about her tour bus, and then she chuckled and whispered into the microphone, "Yeah, I don't have a tour bus." She also used her cell phone to take pictures of the crowd and some some self-portraits of her and her guitarist, the only other person on stage. Then she asked us to please become her MySpace friend. Awww-WUH!

So I got in line and when it was my turn to meet her, I told her that I really appreciated her coming all the way out to Gilroy. Then I said her song kicks so much ass. She laughed at that, and as I walked away I looked down at what she wrote on my program. "To Amy: You kick ass. Emily West." Emily, you are cool.

Finally, since we seem to have a bit of a celebrity theme going on in this post, I may as well tell you that someone you all know (hint: IT'S CHICKENBONE JONES!) attended a photo shoot with his dad this week. San Jose Magazine is doing a feature for their October edition about local celebrities and their pets. The photographer said Chickens was the most "energetic" dog they saw that day, which was probably putting it kindly, since Sal said he was sprinting around and around the hotel suite and wouldn't sit still because he was too busy trying to kiss everyone. On the plus side, he did not pee on any people or furnishings. Really, that should be their headline.

NOOO! STOP IT WITH THE TOE STORIES!

So there are two stone steps leading up from my back yard to the patio, and yesterday afternoon I was walking up them while wearing flip-flops. And I tripped.

On my way down, in addition to banging knees and elbows and face on the cement, I sliced open the tippy-tip of my right big toe. The same toe that has, on its wrinkly exposed nail bed, half a new toenail. Which replaced the old purple toenail, which still had a black drill-hole from where the blood had to be drained after I dropped a 25-pound weight on it. The fall practically scraped the tip clean off in an almost perfect circle, though at the moment it is hanging on by a thread.

God, this thing is mutilated. Is it possible that my toe is cursed?! I am pretty sure that's exactly what is going on, and that it had nothing to do with the margaritas I was enjoying at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

There ain't no bugs in me!

Dear county health clinic,

You owe me tears. Lots and lots of tears.

Love,
Amy


Let's begin with the news: I don't have tuberculosis. Despite what I was told a few months ago, my body is perfectly free of deadly and infectious bacteria, and I have a stamped, signed immunization record to prove it.

See, I spent a lot of time thinking this through during my month between jobs, and I realized there's no way I could take that scary medication unless I honestly believed it would help me. I learned this lesson the hard way, with the whole lumbar-puncture extravaganza. Every fiber of my being knew that procedure was totally unnecessary. I knew I had food poisoning, not spinal meningitis. But I let that cranky ER doctor talk me into it, much to my great suffering and remorse. So with this TB problem, I was feeling really stubborn about just doing what I was told. Packing my body with crazy drugs. Risking damage to my organs, rearranging my life plans. NINE MONTHS WITHOUT VODKA.

Not helping matters was how the results of my test were determined with a ball-point pen. A ball-point freaking pen! OK, so in a TB test, they inject a little bit of something under your skin. Two days later, if your skin is all angry and red about it, that's bad. Well, my injection site ended up looking like a mosquito bite. So this doctor yanks a pen out of the desk drawer, draws four sloppy little marks on my skin and measures the distance between them. She explained that 10 or below is normal, 11-15 is questionable, and 16 or higher means you're toast. Well, I was an 11, and so I failed. According to the OFFICE SUPPLY.

Now, this won't be a very smooth segue, but try to go with it. Every now and then for as long as I can remember, I wake up in the middle of the night and see giant spiders dropping down from the ceiling onto my face. Spiders the size of your hands. I shriek and scramble off the bed (in a careful, horizontal fashion, so my face doesn't bang into the spiders) and cower in the corner of the room until the lights come on and I begin to wake up. It's sort of an interesting sleepwalk/nightmare combo. Well, I had one of these episodes Monday night, and I leaped out of bed in such an awkward manner that I aggravated the tendinitis in my right wrist. I've been dealing with this nagging pain for more than a year but never got it checked out because (a) despite what you might believe by reading this blog, I don't ACTIVELY seek out reasons to need medical care, and (b) it was usually just a mild annoyance. But when I was escaping the spider attack Monday night, something got really inflamed and the next day I could barely move my wrist. So I made an appointment with my doctor, and after we dealt with the wrist thing, I say, "Oh, and by the way. This TB thing. I kind of want another test, because I don't really trust that broad at the county clinic. That OK with you?" Sure thing. Five minutes later a nurse injects my arm, and then I leave.

And for the next 48 hours, my eyeballs are glued to the injection site, where there is no bump.

NO BUMP.

NOBUMP!NOBUMP!NOBUMP!

I practically bounded into his office today to get the test site checked. My doctor was as shocked as I was. Took one look at my arm and said, "Um, you don't have tuberculosis." I KNOW! I SO TOTALLY DO NOT HAVE TUBERCULOSIS! But I ask him, if the first one was positive, and this one was negative, how do we know which one was wrong? Do we need to do some sort of tuberculosis tiebreaker test? But he said that if I had the bacteria, there's no way it can "hide" from this test, so the first one has to be wrong. He thinks maybe the first doctor gave me too much of the chemical, or administered it improperly or in a bad site. I suspect recycled drug needles, but whatever, it doesn't matter now. What matters is this: Don't be cheap. I went to the county health clinic instead of my own doctor because I thought it would save me some money. Instead, for the bargain price of $20, I got myself bills for a chest X-ray and two or three additional office visits, plus some serious panic and anguish. The crazy part is that it feels SO good to be free of a disease I never had to begin with, I couldn't care about that stuff if I tried.

So then we got arrested at this cockfight and...

No, just kidding. Cancun talk is over, at least until the next auction.

Started the new job last week, and so far it's going great, although there is a learning curve. For one thing, I learned that at a Catholic high school? If you see a "Sr." in front of someone's name, it does not mean "Señor." This notation perplexed me for two full days. I was like, "Man, how weird that a private girls school owes it all to a bunch of important Hispanic males?!?"

My new responsibilities have a whole lot in common with my old ones, in that I'll be doing a lot of writing, editing and organizing. Beyond that, well, it's a very happy place, and that's nothing like the newspaper, where layoffs have taken such a toll on the staff and readers. The proud and optimistic atmosphere of a school now feels almost unbelievable. When I arrived on my first day, the maintenance guys were still installing stuff in my office so I strolled around the campus and tried to get my bearings. I wandered past a beautiful blue swimming pool filled with splashing, laughing kids. Walked through the gym and admired the championship banners hanging on the walls as sunbeams streamed down onto the court. Then I stumble into a theater by following the voices of about 30 teenagers belting out, "The sun'll come ouuuuuut ... tomorrowwwww!" I practically suffocated myself on all that joy. (Man, I hate sounding like so wide-eyed and corny right now. But I spent 10 years in journalism, and even back in the good times, newsrooms were rough around the edges. Plus, I was usually in a sports department, which ain't exactly all cupcakes and balloons, you know? So you'll forgive a little wonderment at this strange foreign object that seems very much like a happy workplace.)

Now I have to go before I'm late for my nine-toenail pedicure. (Oh, I forgot to mention that. The seawater in Mexico was exactly what my big toe needed to finally let go of that disgusting purple nail. I made my husband take pictures for the blog -- and, boy, was he ever grateful for that opportunity -- but I'm so grossed out I don't think I can stare at that photo long enough to post it. But the good news is, there's a wee little toenail growing in its place. Come on, little guy! Come on outta there!)

Up next: How imaginary spiders helped me in my war against tuberculosis!