Craigslist Transactions are Shady by Nature (Not Cause I Hate Ya)

I have tons of sh** to sell.  Coming off of many years of being a spendthrift (I'm newly inititated into the "Do I REALLY need that?" mentality), I have amassed a certain, well, prodigious collection of purses and other girlish accoutrements that really needs to be whittled down. 

I do not particularly enjoy the usage of ebay if I can sell things more locally.  Ebay requires packing items for shipment, convincing the post office that sending perfume via ground is legal according to their website, and giving Ebay a cut of the profit which itself requires money and time and drives to the post office.  To that I say, NOPE.  Instead, I enjoy when I meet someone around the corner at the bagel shop and sell them $300 worth of old jewelry.  Thus began my relationship with Craigslist.

Craigslist has been fine for me over the years while apartment hunting and giving things away for free, so I figured, let's give it a shot with all this stuff I need to sell.  Most of the people that contact me have been thus far average and not scary, so I would say that Craigslist is still being good to me.  That said, here are some of the gems I have come across (none of these are spam) in attempting to sell via Craigslist:


In seeing a purse in person:

DH:  "Here you go, it's the Calvin Klein."
Customer:  "You said this was silver in the ad.  It's really more of a grey with a shimmer and some metallic inflection."
DH:  "So, in other words, silver."
Customer:  (15 minutes later)  "Yeah, I really am looking for something darker silver than this."


In negotiating price:

DH:  "Great!  So that'll be $200 as we discussed.  That is 50% off retail value."
Customer:  "Will you take $75 for it?"
DH:  [Inhaling deeply with eyes closed] "No.  We already discussed price via email, didn't we?  We came to an agreement?"
Customer:  "Yeah, I'm really only looking to pay $75."
DH:  [Shoving back chair and standing up] "Thanks for letting me know now instead of before.  Buh-bye!"


In picking a meeting spot:

DH:  "Let's meet at the bagel shop in the town center."
Customer:  "Let's meet in the rear of the Whole Foods parking lot in the center."
DH:  "There's no Whole Foods in my town."


In providing too much information as to why a particular item is desired for purchase:

DH:  "The shoes are size 11."  (What?  I have big feet.)
Customer:  "Great!  Would you be willing to sell to a man with a shoe fetish?"
DH:  "TMI, bro!  If you'd just said, 'I want to buy them,' we wouldn't have had a problem!"


Upon discovering via Google that the customer has a criminal record:

DH:  "Holy ****** ****!  WHAT IS WITH PEOPLE????"
Fatty:  "MRROOOW!"

Craigslist, I do love you most of the time, but I needed to get this off my chest.  Please help me find some more real customers and less freaky deaks.  Oh, and darling readers, if you're in need of any new purses, perfumes, or jewelry, please do get in touch!  I have many for sale.

Mon Jardin des Plantes

Friends, don't be jealous!  I have a container garden (raising the roof - you can't see me, but I'm doing it).  That's right, this is the kind of crap Desperate Housedaughters get excited about when they don't have things like jobs and boyfriends. 

Please voila my gorgeous lettuce container:

Also, please enjoy one of the members of my herb garden:

Mr. Mint has been repotted to a much larger container since this picture was taken, and let me tell you, it is satisfying to have a little jardin des plantes on my deck.  Iranians eat herbs by the handful (as opposed to delicately sprinkling them over meats and veggies like white people), so it'll be great to grow piles and piles of mint and basil for us to eat. 

Container gardening is kind of cool, even posh!  I like the idea that it's not in my yard where I'd have to do things like weed the garden and fend off bunnies (one of my friends has a gorgeous outdoor garden and tells me all kinds of tales about squirrel/tomato robberies), and I also like that sweet Fatty can go luxuriate her fat self underneath the shade of the Heliotrope. 

I will say, though, that the number of strange and somewhat unattractive insects I've encountered on the deck throughout the potting of said garden is ICKY.  I will spare you photographs, but suffice it to say that adult jumping spiders are approximately tarantulas that are the size of a quarter.  And about an inch tall.  YEAH.

Do you all keep container gardens?  If so, what do you grow?  I need an excuse to go to Home Depot and buy more potting soil so the cutie dude there can carry it out to my car for me.

Dinner Expectations

Dinner.  It's what's for dinner.  Wait, what?

Cooking dinner is part of the housedaughter equation of expectation which looks something like this:  Desperate Housedaughter + free time + no job + vague household skills = dinner.  Each and every night, I receive two phone calls, usually in this order:

4:30 PM - Dad calls.  "Housedaughter, what's for dinner tonight?  I'm on my way home on the train."

Me:  "Dad, WTF?  I'm so sick of getting these calls about dinner!  I can't make dinner every single night!  I already do all the laundry, 75% of the dishes, [blah blah prattling and whining about all the housework], so I don't feel compelled to make dinner, AGAIN!"

Dad:  "Fine I'll eat bread for dinner."

Me:  "FINE!"


5:30 PM - Mom calls:  "Housedaughter, what's for dinner?"

Me:  [Turning red with rage] "PFFFTTTTTT WHAT?"

Mom:  "What.  Is.  For.  Dinner?"  (She's adorable and thinks I didn't hear her.  I love optimists!)

Me:  "Thanks, I heard you.  Tacos.  From last night."

Mom:  "Ok, I'll just eat a muffin from the grocery store."


Oh dear.  I try hard to avoid the carb-loaded dinner fate for my parents, but let's be clear - I hate cooking.  Baking is fun and enjoyable, but cooking, NOOOOO!  I don't find anything about it fun.  So when dinner is laid squarely on my shoulders all the time, I get exhausted.

In the last 7 days, I've made dinner a shocking 3 times!  BBQ burger/veggie extravaganza, tacos, and spaghetti and meatballs (well, I only made the meatballs).  When my Dad makes dinner just once every 3 months, he gets mad if we ask him to make dinner again during that time.  And I laugh at him copiously.  What gives, people? 

It's good to be a housedaughter in a way, because now I know (unless I married some super rich dude who regularly bought me Prada and we had a prenup) that I could never be a housewife.  The expectation of dinner is just too much for me.  It tosses me over the edge.  Alas, I must now take my leave of you to go make my breakfast oatmeal.  Let me confess that cooking breakfast is an exception to my cooking hatred.  I make a delicious breakfast, so come on by anytime before 10 AM!  But please don't ask me to make you dinner.  Ever.

Repairmen

My parents freely make appointments with repairmen and expect me to be home during the long windows of time in which they'll potentially arrive.  Apparently, as a housedaughter, it's part of my job description.  [Sidebar: I'm still waiting on the official job description...hmmm maybe Fatty is HR.  I should ask her.]  Today, for example, the AC repairman will be arriving somewhere between 12-6.  Let's talk about this. 

12-6????  Can you imagine if my mom made an appointment with her patients and said, be here from 12-3, and I'll see you somewhere in there.  YEAH NO.  I get it, I get it, she's in an office, blah blah no travel time, blah blah crap.  But a 6 hour window?  The repairmen of the world are getting a little too comfortable with us being comfortable with their time window system.

I think a 2 hour window is fine.  3 hours, pushing it.  Above that?  You should bring me lunch, a soda, and guarantee an attractive and age-appropriate repairman with every repair.  I know Hillary Clinton told us that it takes a village to raise a child, and I often find that she is right, except that it takes a village to maintain a damn house.  If I weren't home for these appointments, my parents would have to wait months to have the AC repairman come, and by then mice could eat through the wires again (that's what happened last time).

I think next time I make an appointment somewhere, I'll try to make it in a window of time and see how well that goes.  Hi, friend I'm meeting for lunch?  I think I'll arrive somewhere between 8 AM and 9:30 PM.  Let me know if that works for you.  Toodles!

She got GAME!

UPDATE:  Mom has called me twice from the restaurant to confirm that yes, in fact, Todd is taking care of them and is awesome, nice, and hot.  Oh, and that the food is fabulous.  She was on dessert number 4 the second time she called me.  Seriously, if I didn't think I was a Desperate Housedaughter before, I think having a mom that has cooler weekend plans than you with random celebrities she befriends at lunch makes you pretty D.H.-y.  Fo' realz.



EARLIER TODAY:
Ohhhhh NO you will not believe the phone call I just got from my mom who is currently partying it up (under the guise of a dental conference) in NYC with her fellow Iranian lady dentist friends!!!!  WHOOAOAOA!!!!

Apparently my mom and her lady friends decided to head to the Park Plaza (pronounced PAhhhk Plahhhzahhh) hotel for lunch, cause, they fancy.  So I guess at the Park Plaza they seat you at long tables, so you end up sitting with other random people.  So this handsome man sits next to my mom and greets her.  She greets him back, and they have a short conversation.  When she turns back to her friends, they're all FREAKING OUT.  Why???  Because that dude is TODD ENGLISH.  YES.  And so my mom turns back and starts talking to Todd again, and they become insta-besties.  That's right, my mom got game.

So Todd and my mom and her friends chit chat and finally Todd says, "do you ladies have plans for tonight?"  To which my mom says, "no, not yet!"  So Todd says, "I'm opening my new restaurant Crossbar tonight.  Would you please join me at the opening?  I'll take care of you."  My mom was all, "let me check with my friends, Todd, and we'll get back to you."  Ok, that was in my imagination.  What they really said was, "YES YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES," and then squealed with delight.

My mom calls me, and casually mentions that Todd English invited her to dinner.  WHAT A PLAYA!!!! 

Mom, you outdo me all the time, and I'm so proud!  Go shake it, sister!  And mention to any celebrity you meet that I have an awesome blog and that my sister is a stand-up comedienne.  Oh, and take lots of pictures - me and my readers need the dish (pun intended)!

Online Dating...is fun?

Desperate Housedaughter is single and ready to mingle!  Ok, that's kind of a lie.  I'm single and hesitant to mingle.  I'm generally afraid of people and prefer to watch Ugly Betty reruns rather than, well, a lot of stuff.  Because of this proclivity, you can imagine that although I go out quite often and try new things, I tend to do so with my Mom or other person with whom I have solid rapport already.  Mom, you're in NYC this weekend partying with your friends!  I miss you!

Yeah that's right I just gave a shout-out to my Mom.  Due to being a 28 year old who gives mom shout-outs on her blog, I've had many friends suggest to me that I buck up, join the current population of Earth instead of continuing to behave like I'm in Ye Olde Days, and sign up for online dating.  I reminded them that I came to blogging about 15 years too late, but they said that's no excuse and I need to get on board more quickly.  So, finally, after much struggle and waves of nausea, I signed up for one of them websites last weekend.

My friends have been SO SUPER EXCITED!!!!  They've helped me with my profile, decided on pictures, and were, and are, generally all perky and encouraging.  Despite their efforts, however, instead of feeling like this about online dating:

I feel more like this:

My friend Anna told me not to have a bad attitude.  Oh, Anna, while you speak words of wisdom, you know I'm incapable of following them!  I'm a Virgo and I know that if I don't like something right away that I will probably never like it.  There have been exceptions to this, of course, but yeah.  Does not bode well.  And let me admit that I have a VERY bad attitude about online dating.

I got the standard creeps right away sending me messages like, "you r hot.  nice pics" and "let's get together and speak Persian" but written in Persian/English.  LAAAME.  The danged thing even matched me with a high school friend's older brother.  That was particularly enlightening, especially because I had a minor week-long crush on that kid when I was 14.  But I digress.

Then I got messages from two seemingly nice, normal guys.  They both have jobs, are into music, are freakishly tall (not a requirement, but entertaining nonetheless), and are age appropriate.  Despite their on-the-surface normalcy and my attempt at open-mindedness, I gotta tell you, I have pretty much no interest in meeting either one of them in a romantic type of setup. 

This is my question, and here, beautiful readers, you can advise me since you all are brilliant and go on many dates and aren't holed up like this Desperate Housedaughter:  How does one figure out dating?  I realize this is the age-old question, and many tv shows, movies, and books have been dedicated to it, but it's like I'm feeling it for the first time!  I am CLUELESS. 

Do I go on dates like I go on job interviews - to even the ones I'm pretty sure I don't want just to get more practice and give it a shot, or do I not think of it like that because it's a real dude and his real $25 buying me dinner?  I don't freaking know.  Help me, readers!  I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm not sure I'm that into it, so I beseech you to help me figure out what to do and improve my attitude!  Comment me some advice, you lovelies, cause I NEED IT.

Pants

I'm generally an advocate of pants.  They're fun and cover up people's usually gross/too hairy legs, mine included.  Just to be clear, I mean real, honest, well-fitted, full-length pants, such as these:

Not these:

or anything else attempting to be pants, i.e. leggings, jeggings, or tights of varied opacity.  Please, people, they ain't pants.

Being a Desperate Housedaughter, though, I don't always need to be worried about the appropriateness of my pants.  Who the heck is looking at me while I'm sitting home all day?  The cat?  She doesn't wear pants! 

There are times, though, when I have to put on the pants.  Like for example, 5 minutes ago.  I ordered a salad for lunch, and since gas is $587.32 per gallon, I feel less bad these days about paying $1 per item for delivery.  It saves me trouble, and money.  The only problem with ordering delivery, though, is that I have to put on some pants.

My typical uniform of housedaughteriness is a college t-shirt (GO HOP!), some inappropriate mid-length harem shorts thing I bought from Old Navy, and my at-home glasses (not to be confused with my in public glasses - my at home glasses are more German Architect while my in public glasses are more Sexy Librarian).  But when the delivery man is coming, the jeans must be put on.  I want him to keep delivering me my salad, so I figure it's a fair trade.

What kind of pants do you wear at home, if any (you saucy readers)?