But before I launch into "Things for Which Kelly is Distinctly Not Thankful," a word from Oh Mere of Mine:

Mere: "There is no way in hell I am watching that video, so you're going to have to tell me: Just what, exactly, is Air Sex?"

Me: "You know air guitar?"

Mere: "Yeah."

Me: "That, but with sex."

Mere: "Oh. Ew."

Now back to our regularly-scheduled bitching.

I work with a lot of "Get 'Er Dones," as Swell Nathan calls them. Not just my coworkers, but our clients as well.

(My "Get 'Er Done" coworkers have learned their lessons. I am rather like a chinchilla; I may look all cute and cuddly, but fuck with me and I will maul your face off.)

So today, I got a call from this guy who went on and on about how he is just such good friends with our General Manager, D.J., and one of our technicians (D.J. and the tech have never heard of him). He asked for a same-day service call. Since we've never done business with his company before, I made sure to inform him that, as is standard practice in our industry, we would require payment when services were rendered for this first service call. After that, I told him, we would be happy to invoice him for payment.

I don't care if the Pope called us up. We've never done business with our Holy Father before, and he'd have to pay COD just like everybody else.

This guy? Was INCENSED.

He threatened to call our competitor. I said, "Well, you do what you have to do, but Trey's gonna make you pay COD too unless he's worked with you before."

He asked to speak to the owner. He said he needed to speak to my supervisor.

OH REALLY.

I like to think I remained very calm and collected at this point in the conversation, but Dad informed me later that I got a little...uh, shrill.

"GLADLY! I WILL BE HAPPY TO LET YOU SPEAK TO THE OWNER AND MY SUPERVISOR. JUST GIVE ME A MOMENT TO GET DAD ON THE PHONE!"

I know. That probably wasn't the smoothest move, but ladies and gentlemen,

NOTHING. NOTHING. NOTHINGNOTHINGNOTHING

Pisses me off more than some dumbass redneck who barely has command of the English language talking to me like I'm some kind of G-------- moron just because I happen to be a woman.

Dad spoke to the man, who was just as sweet as sugar when Dad got on the phone. No sir, he doesn't mind paying COD one little bit! He'll even get us a P.O. number for our records.

Meanwhile, I was standing in Dad's office vomiting pea soup all over the place and growling, "KELLY'S NOT HERE RIGHT NOW."

(OK, not really.)

Before Dad got off the phone, he said, somewhat jokingly, "Well, Kelly's the boss around here and what she says goes! She handles all that sort of stuff, and if she says you gotta pay COD, you gotta pay COD!"

Dad chastised me, "Kelly, he's just a Bubba who doesn't like talking to a woman unless he's buyin' her a beer. Don't take it personally."

Just HOW should I take it, then?

I have worked very, very hard for a very long time to make sure that I am always taken seriously in my professional life. I'm college-educated, I do my work, I do it extremely well, I'm hyper-responsible, I dress modestly (though not conservatively), I keep my word, I look people straight in the eye and I have a firmer handshake than most men I know. Given everything I've told you about Big Daddy, do you think he'd have some miniskirted, brainless ninny of a daughter working for him? I think not.

I even purposely lower my voice when I talk to men at work.

And this inbred shithead is gonna talk condescendingly to me like I don't know what the hell I'm talking about? And I'm not supposed to take it personally?

Dad: "Well, your college education sure as hell didn't teach you how to talk like a lady."

Kelly (sweetly): "No, Daddy, you taught me that."

(And then I ran.)

(Like my hair was on fire.)

(As my grandfather used to say, I frequently allow my mockingbird mouth to overload my hummingbird behind.)

While my dad believes in traditional male and female roles in a family setting (which is why at every family party I end up waiting hand and foot on my dad and brothers while they drink beer), he has ALWAYS taught me that women are every bit as capable as men. Not every man, especially in small-town Louisiana, shares that belief, and it's hard for me to accept that sometimes.

But you know what? I have something that he doesn't have.

The "Get 'Er Done" crew we work with.

When I called up the tech that would be taking Mr. Just-Shut-Up-and-Invoice-Me-Little-Missy's service call, I told him what an ass that guy was to me on the phone.

"You want me to go over there and beat the hell out of him?" the tech asked eagerly.

While he would never do such a thing and I would never want him to, it's nice to know I've got friends like that.

And I bet you not a one of Mr. Get-Back-in-the-Kitchen's crew would offer to come over and beat the hell out of me for him.

Chinchilla: 1
Redneck: 0

Back to the kitchen to bake pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

What?! There's a time and place for everything, right?



Your feminist
Kel

Today, I indulged in one of my most favoritest activities:

I lounged in a nice, comfy chair, sipped ginger ale and read Vogue like it was some sort of Gnostic text while I sat under a hood dryer, wearing a smock.

In short, I went to the salon.

Surprisingly, my mom wasn't much of a spa girl when I was growing up. I mean, we went to the salon every six weeks, religiously, and she occasionally got a manicure. But she never got, say, a pedicure or a massage. I didn't even know what waxing was until I was in high school, because my mom never did it.

(And if Judy did it, it was glamorous. If she didn't, well...then it didn't exist.)

Once, after we moved to Birmingham, she and I went to a little spa up the street from our house to get manicures for some special occasion or another. The manicurist, a born saleswoman if ever there was one, gave my mom and wink and said, "You know, we also do facials, massages and seaweed wraps!"

My ears perked up, and the manicurist was quick to notice. "How about you, Kelly? Would you like a massage or a facial today?"

"Momma, can I?" I asked.

"Of course. It's your money." My mother went back to flipping through Women's Wear Daily.

In that moment, I. Was. Hooked.

From that day to this, spas are like my mothership. And the more bizarre and probably useless the treatment, the better. Wrap me in seaweed, paint me with mud, beat me with hot rocks and call me Edna.

In the course of the last 14 years or so, I have allowed complete and total strangers to see me as naked as the day I was born and then:
1. Pour hot wax on my body and then rip it off while I scream
2. Wrap me from head to foot in muslin and slather me with goo
3. Examine my pores with high-powered microscopes (and cluck over the sad state of affairs)
4. Scrub me with sand, salt, sugar and pulverized rocks
5. Try to drown me slowly with oxygenated mist

And I pay them for the privilege.

Before you start thinking I'm deluded, I fully acknowledge that, by and large, spa workers are simply dominatrices with eastern-European-sounding names dressed up in starched white uniforms in order to make S&M more acceptable to the middle class.

My only defense is that, in the words of Truvy from Steel Magnolias, "It makes you pretty."

Well, that and "there's no such thing as natural beauty."

I freely admit that I am a total spa snob. If there was a Bliss in Shreveport, I'd probably be there every damn day. When I first moved back to Shreveport, I couldn't find a decent salon (or spa) to save my life. I was outraged; when I lived in Charleston, I had gone to the salon that Reese Witherspoon used when she got married to Ryan Phillipe! There was NO WAY I was going to set foot in Mabel's Curl Up & Dye.

I tried a few so-so places with limited success, until one fateful New Year's Eve I met Bryan Sullivan at a party. In addition to being THE stylist in Shreveport, Bryan is also quite - how shall we say? - BEAUTIFUL and fashionable, in addition to being one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet. He introduced me to Allison Dickson, whom I would follow to the ends of the earth if only she would continue to trim my hair.

I never have to bring pictures to Allison, or explain to her in excruciating detail what I want done or, more to the point, what I don't want done. I simply say, "Oh, you know, whatever," and "whatever" is always, ALWAYS fabulous.

Sometimes I think I missed my calling as a beauty editor for a fashion magazine. With my great love of spas, salons and, apparently, spending all my money on strange and likely toxic beauty products, I could at least be getting paid for it, right? As my friends frequently remind me, it is not my sole responsibility to make sure that the aestheticians of the world earn a living.

At any rate, I think my devotion to beauty says something for me, don't you?

Truvy does.

"I don't trust anyone who does their own hair. I don't think it's natural."



Your highlighted
Kel

P.S. If there were a spa that could turn me into Amanda Palmer, I would pay them any amount of money.

Received this in an e-mail the other day:

"Everyone is always telling Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes, implying that coonasses are dumb, but anybody who would build a city 10 feet below sea level in a hurricane zone and fill it with Democrats is a genius!"

Mere: "Democrat soup!"

Happy Sunday, y'all!



Your coonass
Kel

Today, in cleaning out their dining room, which has been the receptacle for basically everything since they've been remodeling their house, my parents uncovered a treasure trove of memories.

I spent most of my afternoon in the dark in my parents' living room looking at slides.

Remember slides?

You young whippersnappers (Jesus, I really need a yard so I can yell at kids to stay off of it) who don't remember slides: You make me feel really old.

ANYWAY.

There were tons of pictures that I'd never seen before and some that I haven't seen in over 20 years: pictures from my dad's time in Vietnam (technically illegal); countless photos of me with my grandparents; several dozen inexplicable pictures of cattle; me naked, riding a tricycle; me in my very-first-ever dance-recital costume (BLUE BIRD COSTUME, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH); and pictures of Carol when she was young and spry.

My mom is having all the slides transferred to CDs, so hopefully there will be, in the near future, plenty of fodder for you all to make fun of me, which is, of course, everyone's favorite activity.

They also found and gave to me my children's Bible (got it for my 2nd Christmas, and over the course of a year, my father read it to me, cover to cover), my Girl Scout handbook (WHO'S READY FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? THIS GIRL!), a needlepoint of the Virgin Mary that my grandmother did many years ago, and, perhaps most importantly, a picture of my great-grandparents, Cicero Campbell and Molly Smith Campbell.

Technically, I suppose, she was Molly Smith Campbell Campbell, since her two husbands were brothers.

Molly's first husband was a banker who died of yellow fever at age 26, when they'd been married only five years. She then married her first husband's brother, Cicero, a farmer whose first wife, Daisy, had also died in the same yellow-fever epidemic.

With the money Molly's first husband left to her upon his death, Molly was able to lend/give the money to Cicero to build a house and expand his farm, which was our family's first Big Break, I guess you could say.

The farm (which I guess was technically a cotton plantation) grew successful and supported and educated several generations of my family. Unlike many, less fortunate families in central Louisiana, the Campbells hung on to their farm during the Great Depression, with only the help of a black family, the Grants, who lived on the farm. They suffered greatly during WWII, when all the men had to leave and go to war (Molly and my uncle Buddy kept the farm running by themselves, since Uncle Buddy was the only man too young at the time to go to war).

I never knew Molly; she died the year I was born. But I like to think I have a little bit of her scrappiness. Though she had to cook for scores of people every day, raise children and do the other endless and back-breaking work of a farm wife, she and my grandmother still managed to look like they'd stepped out of a fashion plate in every picture ever taken of them.

I come from a long line of hardworking clothes sluts :)





Your very proud
Kel

Questions from arthursimone!

Here are the rules:
1. If you want, leave a comment saying, "interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions of a very personal nature.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1. What's the meanest thing you've ever said to someone?

Allow me to preface this by saying I don't think I'm mean; I don't say untrue things to people for the purpose of hurting them. I am, however, blunt and rather impatient. And as I think everyone knows by now, I don't suffer fools easily. Plus, I am as fierce and stubborn as a bulldog where my family's concerned.

A few months ago, my mom caught bronchitis. One Saturday, she was having a lot of difficulty breathing. I was concerned enough to call her doctor's answering service and have him paged. He called me back right away.

"Hi, this is Kelly," I said, "My mom saw you a couple days ago for bronchitis, and now she's having a very hard time breathing. She's taken her decongestants and a hot shower. What else should we do?"

"Well," he answered, "She has bronchitis."

"Yes, I know," I said. "But she's having a really, REALLY hard time breathing."

"That's the bronchitis," he informed me.

We went on this way for several more minutes, until I couldn't take it anymore. "LOOK," I exploded, "did you GO to medical school in Granada? I KNOW she has bronchitis but am telling you that she CAN'T BREATHE. NOT BREATHING leads to DEATH, and in case you missed that day in med school, DEATH, unlike BRONCHITIS, is INCURABLE."

He met us at the emergency room.

2. You live in shreveport. Why in the hell do you live in shreveport??

Like so many things in my life, living in Shreveport was not The Plan. I was born here but, as my parents have the worst case of wanderlust known to man, have lived all over the place. Mom and Dad eventually retired here. I moved back to Shreveport after a Very Bad Event (i.e., husband unceremoniously dumping self and marrying chief reason for divorce), intending for my stay in Shreveport to be temporary. And it was! In May of 2005, I moved to New Orleans, one of my favorite cities in the world.

Class, what happened in August of 2005?

Back to Shreveport goes Kel.

One year later, my parents came out of retirement to buy a business. And they needed me. Then my brother moved to Shreveport. He needs me too.

Shreveport's definitely not high on my list of Places I'm Dying to Live, but the best way I can explain it is that now is the time to do this. And while Shreveport leaves a lot to be desired, in many ways I like it just fine. I've made lots of incredible friends and found my mentor - the sparkly, wonderful, talented, generous, admirable Lucienne!

3. If your hen purse came alive for a minute and could answer one question, what would you ask her?

"How do I make the perfect Pimm's Cup?"

4. Of all reality tv shows, which do you think you could actually win?

Amazing Race, definitely. I've actually wanted to try out for it several times but have never found anyone who would try out with me.

5. What'd you do in a past life to warrant reincarnation into *shreveport*??

I'm just lucky I didn't come back as a dung beetle.

I got the baby in my first slice of king cake of the season, AND I didn't bite into it (like I did two years ago, ripping a big hole in my gums that took weeks to heal).

I did not get the baby at all last year, and correspondingly, 2007 was NOT the best year ever. So I have high hopes for 2008.



Your lucky
Kel

The best parade, though, is yet to come. Tuesday, the kindergarteners at St. Joseph School are going to parade around the parking lot.

Mardi Gras 2008 - 2nd Set

Your
Kel
Of the Sore Feet

Mardi Gras 2008

Also:

The 365

365-Day Photo Project

Right Now It Looks Like I Will Have to Leave Birmingham

Commentary later, my dears. Meanwhile, it's nice to be back.



Your happily tired
Kel

P.S.

365-Day Photo Project

P.P.S. Mere's pictures

Today, I went downstairs in a bit of a foul mood. I was not relishing the thought of getting out and Christmas shopping today (my dad neglected to buy ANYTHING AT ALL for my mom). I looked to see what the post brought. Bills, bills, more bills...RATS.

Then I spied a large envelope. Probably not for me, I thought bitterly.

Wonder of wonders, it was for me!

From...

THE PENGUIN!!!

Inside was a Christmas CD: "From Our Flock to Yours". With THE BEST Christmas tunes: Louis Armstrong, Benny Grunch & the Bunch, Zooey Deschanel, the Squirrel Nut Zippers...awesome. And the sweetest note, which was just what I needed today to lift me out of the dumps.

To my lovely, lovely Penguin: Were you not already the husband of a great lady, I would snatch you up so fast it would make your head spin, and I would be your Clown Princess of Crime forever! As it is, I really wish you and Tracey would adopt me.

Merci beaucoup, mon gentil garcon -



Your luckylucky
Kel

So tonight, I was sitting on my bed in the midst of a giant pile of cards, envelopes, stamps, pens, envelope glue, return-address labels, and envelope seals, trying to address 84,000 Christmas cards in time to mail them tomorrow. Because I'm organized like that. Yeah.

The animals were driving me CRAZY. WHY OH WHY, every single time I have some sort of important paper products on the bed which really just DO NOT NEED paw prints all over them do Chihuahua and Wednesday decide that RIGHT THEN would be a DANDY time to walk all over whatever the hell Mom's doing? WHY?

And they get all up in my face and swish their tails at me and Chihuahua's whining all, "CHIHUAHUA IS DIE OF STARVE," and it drives me batshit insane.

So I was talking to Mere in the middle of my own little Christmas clusterfuck, and she's trying to tell me a highly entertaining story about something that happened at work and she hears:

"Hold on a sec..."

*Screaming at top of lungs* "ANIMALS GET THE HELL OFF MY MOTHERFUCKING CHRISTMAS CARDS BEFORE I GET UP FROM HERE AND FUCKING KILL YOU BOTH!!!!!!!"

"I'm sorry, you were saying?"

Mere: "Wow. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, huh?"

That's me, Little Miss Ray of Christmas Sunshine.

Off to wrap presents.



Your irritated
Kel

P.S. My current mood may have a little something to do with the fact that my GPS decided to lose its tiny mind while I was trying to deliver 8 million cookie baskets to clients, thus causing me to text Hef, "AM LISTENING TO KILL BILL FIGHT THEME AND WISHING THE GARMIN WAS HUMAN SO COULD RIP ITS FACE OFF," and then I pulled up in front of one client's house, where I was welcomed by the following sign:

WARNING
AFRICANIZED BEES MAY BE PRESENT
ROLL UP WINDOWS AND TURN OFF AIR CONDITIONER

Seriously? Seriously. Africanized bees. You have GOT to be kidding me.

I am the Court Jester for the universe, folks.

And then I pulled up in The Rich Folks' Neighborhood and the rent-a-pig in the guard tower acted like I was a known felon just escaped from Angola. So I had A Good Day.

Heard this on the news today:

"Half of Louisiana is under water, and the other half is under indictment."
--Billy Tauzin, R-Louisiana

Yep, thass abou' rat.



Your Proud-To-Hail-From-The-Third-World
Kel