In Which I Am a Genius. One Might Even Say...An UNFORGETTABLE BUSINESS GENIUS.

I.

Totally.

Called it.

THAT'S RIGHT, TRUMP! I AM ONTO YOUR WILY WAYS! I AM TOO CRAFTY FOR YOU!

Unfortunately, I am not crafty enough to have placed money on your firing of an entire team on tonight's episode of The Apprentice. But! You didn't get that one past ME, Donny boy...ho ho hoooooo no. HAH!

Perhaps I should explain.

The previews for tonight's episode of The Apprentice were VERY exciting...Donald was gonna be PISSED, he was gonna have to come back from a business trip to lay the smack down, my beloved Carolyn Kepcher was going to be subbing in for Trump (with"Boyfriend Bill" Rancic as George's subsitute...come back soon George! But keep Bill!), something that had NEVER HAPPENED IN THE BOARDROOM BEFORE was going to happen....all very exciting. So here's the synopsis...

*SPOILER ALERT! NOT MY FAULT IF YOU READ IT!*

As mentioned above, Carolyn - whose hair, by the way, looked TERRIBLE tonight, like a damn dog chewed on it, which sucks, because she has looked gorgeous all season - was in charge, and dealt the task of going to Dick's Sporting Goods stores, picking a sport, and holding a mini sports expo to sell - remember this for later - equipment. She also shook up the teams a bit...each PM selected the three people they thought had contributed the least and sent them to the other team. Alla sent away Rebecca, Marshawn (!) and Jennifer M, while...I think Josh sent away Markus, Clay, and someone else who I can't remember at this PRECISE moment in time. Capital Edge picked golf, which none of them played, and Alla was the PM. I suspected that I liked her this whole season, and I THINK I still do, but she's a very bossy and not very listen-y PM, which I don't love. Anyway, Excel (way to name yourselves creatively, douchebags) picked baseball, which was a nice concept, complete with a full size batting cage and tutorials for the kids....which turned out to be all that people cared about. The bottom line is that while Capital Edge managed to boost regular sales for the golf department by 74%, while Excel actually made the baseball sales DROP by 30% or so. OUCH. They LITERALLY lost by 100%. Hah!

So Trump comes back and he's pissy because it's the YOOGEST defeat EVER, and they call the whole team minus Rebecca and I believe Brian, who was exempt from last week's success as PM, back to the Boardroom,
and is very cantankerous.

And then he fired every one of their asses. Four people gone, in one fell swoop. WHOMP.

AND I KNEW IT!

I said just the other day - "well, what the hell are they going to do then? Fire the whole team? That's really all you can do that hasn't BEEN done in the Boardroom thus far." HAH.

I would also like to say that the Zathura floats from last week's episode were AWESOME, even the one that lost, so good job on that, people I don't and probably won't ever know. Also, big props to Jacob from Television Without Pity, not only for his awesome recapping in general, especially Apprentice-capping, but ESPECIALLY-ESPECIALLY for this passage, which had me straight up losing my shit at work: "For some reason, I've noticed, the marketing's kind of ignoring the whole Jumanji aspect, especially of late, and I think that's weird, because even if you can't say Zathura, I bet you can say Jumanji. It's characterized by the execs as a "sci-fi family adventure," which means they can't just focus on marketing to kids, because it's a big movie the whole family can enjoy blah blah lies lies lies it's a dumb kids' movie and Jumanji sucked. Take an awesome kids' book, stir in a little Robin Williams, and then feel sorry for yourself about what you've just done."

Hah!

I am going to respond to all of Fake Cancer Girl's crap with that from now on.

"But I'm telling the truuuuuuth!"

"Blah blah blah lies lies lies, it's a dumb kids' movie and Jumanji sucked."

Hah! I am responding to EVERYTHING with that from now on!

Anyway, the Frightening Moment of the Day award goes to the usually better-behaved of the Terror Twins, Cady, fro getting stuck in the recliner and having to be rescued. We couldn't find her, and it was really bothering me that I couldn't, so we all tore the house apart for 15 to 20 minutes looking for her. We finally found her stuck up under the chair, somehow having gotten in but unable to get back out, so I had to reach in and pull the poor thing out, and she was TOTALLY scared and probably hungry as hell from being stuck in there all day. Of course once I found her, I was pissed, because I'd been on the verge of tears, and she SHOULDN'T BE IN THERE ANYWAY, but the upside is that it's improved her relationship with all of us DRASTICALLY. She's been hanging out and Being Cute and letting us pat her and me hold her, and all that, which is new and exciting.

In fact, she's saying hi to me now, so I am going to go and give her some love.

Twisted

How twisted do you think a person can be before their bones actually crumple under the weight of being THAT fucked up?

This past week, fabulously hot on the heels of my Grandpa's cancer-related death, a friend of mine told me SHE was diagnosed with cancer and was having surgery to remove a kidney, where the cancer was lurking and buying cigarettes, liquor and porn for minors. Naturally, I wished her good luck, and felt awful for her.

That was about the end of where it was clean and dry.

There's an enormous saga behind it, but the bottom line is that she told us her sister was going to email us with updates on her condition. When the sister DID, a whole bunch of stuff didn't add up...the hospital had no record of her, the sister was variously nutty and involved, nutty and uninvolved, and then, finally, completely clueless and told one of us that our friend was in fact at home with bronchitis. Whatever. We compiled an expose email of sorts and sent it out and then waited for the debris to rain down, which of course it has.

That's all beside the point, as I see it. I am trying to figure out whether anyone - especially someone who I genuinely liked and enjoyed spending time with - could actually be twisted enough to lie about having cancer. She loves attention, this I and all of her friends know, but this seems so psychotically beyond the scope of even the most dedicated attention whore that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it. This isn't to say I'm changing my mind...all the evidence, I mean ALL the evidence, points towards her being completely full of shit. I don't regret sending the email or looking beneath the surface to find out what was going on. The hospitals we called, the ones her "sister" told us she was at and the one she later said she'd been at, had NO record of her, under THREE variants of her name she claimed she was there under. What is going ON?

I just can't come to terms with the fact that someone I know and associate with would actually do such a thing. I have long since accepted that there is a lot of evil in the world, with murders and rapes happening right now as I type this, and whole other castes of darkness below even that with drug underworlds and human trafficking and organized crime and genital mutilation and genocide...but my life HAPPENS to be occuring on the same planet as all that. In my little house in Massachusetts, I vote in US elections and have a great guy and two cute cats to come home to, and can choose freely to do as I like, unmolested by the ickier sides of other lives whose running times happen to be simultaneous to mine. To have someone even get herself into a situation where I would have to debate whether her sickness is real or not makes it seem like maybe there's a crack in my world through which all the evils of the world, great or small, could creep through, dank and sticky and unclean.

And of course it's like a chemical burn. It's eating me up.

I really do hope she proves herself innocent.

My Begonia Is Secreting Pheremones.

This is the only explanation I can find, because I have DOUSED the thing in hot-sauce-and-water-cat-deterrent which is working fine for the Calamondin orange and rubber plant (in the case of the latter, it's working half way...apparently dirt is a powerful-cat-attractant. POWERFUL.), but all Flyboy wants out of life is to be in the yellow room and lovingly chew on the begonia's trembling leaves. Right now he's stationed outside the door, yowling to be let in, but I really don't feel like I need him mating with my begonia, so he's staying out there, goddamn it, and he'd better learn to like it.

In all fairness, he and Cady BOTH have show slight improvement in their behvior, and since they are still relatively young, slight is pretty damn good. You forget that at their core, cats are wild animals, and they are just living inside because we happen to have caught on to the fact that they are cute and cuddly and decided to bring them in. It's in their nature to want to check stuff out and rocket around and bite each other, and right now since we're still nowhere near being unpacked there's still lots of crap around that's all new and shiny to them. Plus, I'm a knitter, so you know THAT'S trouble. Oh, and does everyone know that cats are actually nocturnal? Because I tend to forget that, and have "WHY are there crashing noises out in the rest of the house, WHY GOD WHY GODDAMN CATS" moments in the middle of the night, and it's hard to remember that it's the nocturnal biological clock doing it, not devious plotting.

Well, maybe SOME devious plotting.

So there have been three major life events in the past week. Here we go.

1. Last Sunday, my grandfather on my mom's side passed away. That is sad, but not entirely unexpected. He was 81 and had cancer, and in truth, he's probably in a much better place. The really sad thing is the endless bitchery of his wife, who we shall call Meathead because I would beat her to a bloody pulp if I could.

My grandparents got divorced about 25 years ago. Both are remarried now, and we see our grandmother a lot more than we see our grandfather...he's always been a very solitary, hermitlike man, and he lives up on this kee-razy hill that's barely paved. He also married someone who is my mom's age, then had two kids with her, which is needless to say, an interesting circumstance. In any case, Meathead is also pretty solitary and insular, and throughout Grandpa's illness - cancer - she has gained a certain degree of notoriety in the family for being IMPOSSIBLE to deal with. She doesn't seem to think it's necessary to inform blood relatives that their patiarch is sick or in the hospital, a., and b., once they find out, she doesn't keep them updated. The first time he went in, no one could get any information out of her, and it was horrendous. During that first stint, Ma recieved an email from Meathead basically announcing that the Barn, the house where Grandpa had lived pretty much forever, was going to be foreclosed on and sold at auction. My parents of course started right away to see what the options were so she and Grandpa wouldn't lose the property. They emailed and called and pleaded for her to contact them so they could help, and only to find out when Ma called the lawyer to SEE IF THE HOUSE HAD SOLD that Meathead had come up with some deal that fell off the back of some truck (driven by her daughter's boyfriend, to continue the metaphor). No email, no call, to say oh by the way, don't worry, I got it handled." Inconsiderate? Yeah. Truly offensive? Eh. The really awful part's comin'.

On the way home from the most recent long-term hospital stay, she pulled over to the side of the road and told him that not only had she had to sell the Barn, but that she wanted to get a divorce. Oh, and by the way? She bought a trailer for him to live in, an hour away from his children. Alone. At 81 years old, with cancer. Nice. She promised that she would make sure he got to all his appointments and such. THAT was a crock, as you'll see.

Wednesday the 12th, Grandpa went into the hospital. On Saturday, Ma, her brother, and her aunt had all tried calling Grandpa and hadn't gotten ahold of him. They started calling around to track him down, and when Ma finally got ahold of Meathead, she blithely told Ma "oh yeah, he went into the hospital on Wednesday." Un-fucking-believable. Oh, and by the way? Ma also talked to Grandpa's oncologist, and was told that his last cancer-fighting shot of Lupron was a month and a half late, and the one before that was THREE MONTHS LATE. And by the way, he hadn't seen Meathead in person in about six months or more. WAY TO TAKE CARE OF HIM, YOU HEARTLESS BITCH! Did I mention she's a nurse? SHE'S A NURSE FOR GOD'S SAKE!

So, Ma and Paintbrush went down to the hospital and took care of business...saw Meathead a few times, and thankfully, the kids DID make it to the hospital to see him (Kid number one is at college in PA, and kid number two needed transportation), which was nice, because Kid number one is really a wonderful girl. Kid number two is too, of course, but he is a lot more shy, so there isn't as much of a bond.

So anyway, Meathead is a hateful, hateful bitch. I really want the piano that Grandpa built, but Ma doesn't want to contact her to get it or anything else. We'll see.

2. I quit my hateful, hateful job. Thank god. There isn't much to that...it wasn't a good fit, and there you have it. They called me into a meeting basically to tell me I wasn't doing enough side projects for my Boss, and the longer the meeting went on, the more I realized that I was fighting a lost cause. I have busted my ass, and am really proud of the work I did for them, and if the fact that I didn't do enough of the work that Boss should be doing himself, if he could deign to come into the office once in a while, or learn to operate a computer (Do people still not know how to use computers? Oh yes, my friend, they do.) eclipsed the great work I'd been doing in the CAPACITY IN WHICH I WAS HIRED, then fuck it...there's no way I was ever going to get to a point where I would feel even respected, much less appreciated. I'm not asking for a pedestal, just for people to not think that I'm doing a shitty job. Thank god that's over. I just feel bad for Elvette, who will be stuck there for a bit because she has no other financial option, and Buggie, who can't fight genetics. Sucks.

3. A friend got herself into a huge ass lie and it all unravelled. I'm so exhausted from typing up the Grandpa saga that I will have to cover the bullshit of THIS drama next post. It's a doozy.