Up to No Good

Let that be a lesson to the rest of you.

2011-07-03T17:18:00.007-07:00

Is there a point in updating a blog that hasn't seen action in a year? (Exactly a year, too - lazy coincidence FTW!) Blogger says I have thirteen followers, so maybe, but maybe not. In any case, I don't care, because this blog has always been about how funny I think I am, more for my own amusement than anyone else's. Which is why I am willing to share the following story that, if I had to give it a name, I would call "Once upon a time Jill found a cockroach."

Once upon a time, I found a cockroach. Or rather, it found me. It might not be the first cockroach I've found in my apartment. There was this ... thing ... a few months ago that was vaguely roach-like. It looked mostly like this (although I'm not sure about how many legs it had but to be fair, it's not like I took a good look and counted them or anything):

This particular beastie was dispatched with the aide of EcoSense Indoor Insect Killer. I think EcoSense needs to revisit their definition of "on contact" because the bug didn't even flinch when I sprayed him. I think he enjoyed it, actually. I had to chase him around the living room, alternately spraying and jumping back a few feet, all the while praying that the EcoSense spray wouldn't damage the finish of the laminate on my living room floor, because how would I explain that to my landlords?

Anyway, after cornering the beastie I was able to drown him in EcoSense before scooping up his soggy carcass with a wad of paper towels, throwing the mess away and taking the trash out, holding the bag as far away from me as humanly possible. Then I went inside and had a fit of the heebie-jeebies.

But that's not the story I wanted to tell. Because the other day, I met a legitimate cockroach in my bathroom.

I knew it was bound to happen eventually, so I'd made plans. I didn't think I could stand to actually come near enough to a cockroach to employ the chemical-death-and-paper-towels routine, plus I figured a roach would be too big to scoop up without being able to feel it through the paper towels. So, I planned, if I ever found one I'd use the broom and dustpan, because I have one of these bad boys:

I figured I'd stun the offender with the broom, sweep him up, and run for the front door which is conveniently located from anywhere in the apartment. I felt this would work equally well with any other sort of pest I encountered (cricket, spider, boy attaching a takeout menu to my screen door).

I should have factored nudity in. Because when Once Upon A Time Jill Found A Cockroach, Jill was stepping into the shower.

If I'm counting my blessings, I have to say it wasn't a very big critter, as far as roaches go, probably only two inches long and a little on the thin side. But I was, as I mentioned, sans wardrobe, and the exterior of my building is well lit. Unfortunately, the bug was between me and my bathrobe, and he was headed for me.

Well, I thought, this was no time to be squeamish. So I took a step toward my bedroom. I made it. I turned to assess the location of the intruder and saw him change course - apparently, he liked me. Stupidly, I kicked at the air in its general direction and then, to my horror, it unfolded its wings. I think it was kind of new at the whole cockroach thing, because it only made it two feet in the air before falling. It hit my arm on the way down, and I heard a screech. Oh, hell, I thought. It can fly, and it shrieks.

A moment later I realized the shriek had come from me, not the bug. I was frantic now, and the wings had put a damper on my plans for broom and dustpan. I thought of the EcoSense, but recalling its efficacy on the beastie, I decided to go for the hard stuff - Scrubbing Bubbles. I grabbed the can from under my sink, gave it a little shake, and took aim like Jack Bauer going at a suspected terrorist.

The Scrubbing Bubbles didn't kill it, but they stunned it, buying me enough time to grab the paper towels. Muttering a quick apology to the tree from whence they came, I sopped up the foamy mess and tossed it into the toilet. I flushed twice. When the bowl had re-filled the water, I glanced around the bathroom, all twelve square feet of it, and said, "Let that be a lesson to the rest of you!"

I have no idea who I was talking to. Theoretical other insects, I suppose. I just hope they were listening. Because I'm running out of cleaning products, and I think if I shriek like that again my neighbors are going to call the cops.

Blog Readers and Irishmen: Urine-portant to Me

2010-07-03T13:20:00.005-07:00

I've come to the conclusion that the only thing more irritating than a blog that is never updated is a blog where the only updates are apologies for not updating. I've always found those to be a little too much ego to handle. Like, "I know you've all been waiting with baited breath to hear the excruciating minutiae of my unexceptional life, and I'm sorry I haven't kept up with the running tally of my back pimples, but I promise I'll update soon and let you all know how my colonoscopy went!"

Apologizing for not updating seems to say to me that, "My blog and I are so important to you that it was rude of me to live the life of a normal person and not write down every single thought I have for you to read, dissect, and debate."

But I digress. I'm deviating from the most important thing I wanted to talk about today, and that is: toilets. Or, more specifically, toilets in Ireland.

I recently got back from spending about 5 weeks in the Republic of Ireland. When I first arrived, I became immediately convinced that the reason Ireland has never become a major world power is because of the proliferation of alcohol. Everyone drinks in Ireland. I think that, if the indigenous ungulates had thumbs (and pocket money), they, too, would drink. Ireland is part of the European Union, and as in many European countries, everything closes at 6pm. And I don't mean "close" in the American sense, where the lights dim and shopkeepers make announcements that they'd really appreciate it if you headed toward the cash register. I mean, it's 6pm, the door is locked, and they're pulling the gate down in front, if they didn't already do just that at a quarter to.

The only exception to this closing time is the ubiquitous pub. Pubs in Ireland are like Starbucks in the USA - you can't spit without hitting one. No one is bothered by shops closing early, because everyone drinks once the working day is over. At any given moment, about three-quarters of the Irish population is getting foxed.

This, I thought to myself, is why you just don't hear much about Ireland. But the longer I was there, the more places I visited, the more restaurants I ate at, I discovered a much more sinister problem lurking in Ireland's back rooms: there are almost no public toilets in Ireland.

Oh, if you're in a pub or a Supermac's, there's bound to be a toilet. But rarely more than two toilets per room (men's or ladies'), and they're usually enough to, if you'll pardon the expression, frighten the piss out of you. I went into a pub toilet once and I turned around and walked right back out.

But during the day, or if you're not a drinker, you are out of luck. There are no public toilets anywhere. Shops will not only tell you they haven't a toilet, but the employees will stare at you as though the very notion of a toilet is too ridiculous to even imagine. One woman repeated the word to me: "Toilet. Toilet?" as though it was foreign to her. Finally, she said something akin to, "Why on earth would we have a toilet?"

Why on earth, indeed. This attitude would explain something else I noticed with alarming regularity in the good old R of I: public urination. In five weeks in Ireland I saw, and I am not making this up, at least 10 men having a pee in some random corner. Or behind a tree. Or into the river or the ocean. Or wherever he might have been standing. I was rather revolted, to say the least, but at the same time I'm not sure what else a person is supposed to do if there's not a pub in the immediate vicinity (rare, but it happens).

And as I mentioned, pub toilets don't seem to have any sort of hygienic standard, the kind that might be enforced by a government entity. Actually, none of the precious few public toilets I did find seemed to have been designed, or cleaned, by anyone with any human DNA. In one stall, the toilet paper dispenser had been mounted on the wall behind the toilet, forcing the user to either try to assess her toilet paper needs before having a pee, or contort herself into a position usually only seen in the Cirque du Soleil to reach said toilet paper after relieving herself.

Then there are the toilets themselves. Irish toilets have remarkably deep bowls, causing what I will delicately refer to as a sort of splashback when any sort of ... ahem ... matter enters the bowl. Just in case public toilets weren't hygienic enough, let's construct them so they function as accidental bidets as well! Why not? And when you come to the end of your time on the can, there's the flush. I didn't once see a public toilet where the handle to flush was actually attached to said toilet. It tended to be on the wall. And sometimes it wasn't a handle so much as a sort of metal cylinder that had to be pushed in. Lever or cylinder, it's a rare Irish toilet that will actually flush the first - or second, or third, or fourth - time you try. And it's nothing to do with whether the toilet has actually been used or not. Some of them simply have to be persuaded repeatedly and with great force. A few jets of water will make a bit of noise, and the toilet will gurgle in a somewhat convincing manner, but nothing much will happen.

The more public toilets I used, the more convinced I became, as I am now convinced, that if Ireland ever wants to have any kind of global impact, they need to re-think their plumbing. In my opinion, a nation rises and falls on the strength of its public toilets. I think that's what has made America the great nation that it is. We may have economic crises to face, we may be divided on important issues, we may face international ridicule for some of our policies or laws. But, by gosh, we know how to do public toilets.

And that's what I'll be celebrating this July 4th, dear blog readers. This great nation called America, and its remarkable system of public bathrooms. I can go into almost any store in America, ask to use the toilet, and be pointed in its direction. And that, to me, is what freedom is all about.

It's not the years, it's the mileage. No, seriously, what's up with the mileage?

2010-04-28T14:33:00.004-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I have lost my mind.

I think.

A week ago, I noticed that the odometer in my car was at 123417. Sort of random, but in my odd little mind I realized that I would soon be rolling over 123456. Which would, of course, be awesome. I made a mental note to keep an eye on my mileage so I could properly document this momentous event.

And then, promptly, I forgot all about it.

I have a receipt from the gas station that proves that I put twenty dollars worth of gasoline in the car a week ago Monday. $20 buys a little more than half a tank. Two nights ago, I got in my car to go to the mall. The gas gauge told me I had less than a quarter of a tank left.

I was puzzled. By my calculations, I should have had between 1/4 and 1/2 a tank left. I decided I must not be getting the MPGs I once enjoyed - the car is, after all, thirteen years old. I briefly glanced at the rest of the dash, just out of habit. What I saw shocked me.

I had missed 123456. I had missed it by a lot. The odometer read 123722. That would, I knew, account for the missing gasoline. But I was deeply puzzled. Because I did not put those miles on my car.

I've gone back over the past week or two seven or eight times. I can account for 80, maybe 100 of those miles. Which still leaves me with 200 miles I can't account for. 200 miles.

My first thought was that perhaps one or two of the neighborhood miscreants had taken my Camry out for a little joyride. That would explain the miles and the gasoline. But that can't have happened - I Club my car every night. Unless said miscreants had spent hours driving back and forth in a straight line, that wasn't my explanation.

I know of at least one instance in which I have sleepwalked. I wasn't very adventurous at the time. I organized my sock drawer. Driving seemed unlikely.

I asked my mother if she'd been dosing me with Ambien. She plausibly denied it. So I'm stumped. All I can conclude is that I must have gone somewhere in that car and been traumatized horribly enough that I've blocked it out of my mind. That can mean only one thing: the mafia is after me, and I am in serious danger.

So if someday soon I call you up to report that my kneecaps have been broken, don't panic, I knew this was coming. But do be kind enough to drive me to the hospital. In your car, not mine. Because mine is out of gas.

God Is Good, But Never Dance In a Small Boat

2010-03-17T22:11:00.002-07:00

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, a few of my favorite Irish verses (including the blog title)

May those that love us, love us,
And those that don't love us, may God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn't turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so we'll know them by their limping.

There are only two things to worry about. Either you are sick, or you are well.
If you are well, there is nothing to worry about. If you are sick, there are only two things to worry about.
Either you will get well, or you will die. If you get well, there is nothing to worry about. If you die, there are only two things to worry about.
Either you will go to Heaven, or you will go to Hell. If you go to Heaven, there is nothing to worry about. If you go to Hell, you'll be so busy shaking hands with friends that you won't have time to worry!

Shiny Suds

2010-03-13T01:57:00.001-07:00

I hate it when my cleaning products turn into perverts.

Snuggies FTW!

2010-03-05T19:48:00.003-07:00

I really suck at this blogging thing. You'd think I would have figured that out, oh, twelve years ago or so, but such is life.

In my defense, I have, as before, been working on my adoption blog, which keeps me too busy to have anything of use to say here. I digress.

I came across this earlier, and I had to share.

It's about time the Snuggie used its mighty power for good and not evil. Go, Snuggie, Go!

Click and help, peeps. Click and help.

Mr. Whiskers's Revenge

2010-02-17T15:39:00.004-07:00

My therapist owns a cat.

You may have read about this before, here or here. I've tried to let the subject die, but it refuses. Every so often, during therapy, I will look at John and remember that he owns a cat. And I will fight the urge to ask about it. I don't need to know the cat's name, really I don't. I'm happy to think of it as Mr. Whiskers. Or at least I am, as much as I can be happy to think of it at all.

But I can't stop now. Mr. Whiskers is so much bigger than any 50-minute therapy session or blog bit. I've been thinking about him and speculating about him and laughing about him for so long that I knew something had to happen, and it was up to me to make sure it did.

And so I've added something new to my resumé. It took me until about 5am, but I did it. I am now a singer-songwriter, for I have penned "The Ballad of Mr. Whiskers."

I may record a performance and put it on YouTube. I'm not sure yet. In any case, here it is, in all its early-morning cowboy-ballad glory.

The Ballad of Mr. Whiskers

Legend has it there once was a mighty, fluffy feline,
They say he lived with a man named John in a pad East of the Beeline.
His eyes were wise, his fur was soft, his claws as sharp as Fiskars,
And legend says he lived up to his name of Mr. Whiskers.

Mr. Whiskers! Yippee-ki-yi-yo!
Mr. Whiskers! In a sweater and a bow!

Well Whiskers was the toughest indoor cat you've ever seen.
He could take on any Tom in that Cat Fancy Magazine.
He lived on milk and Fancy Feast and though he'd sometimes roam,
He was loyal still enough to come when John called, "Daddy's home!"

Mr. Whiskers! Yippee-ki-yi-yo!
Mr. Whiskers! Strolling through PetCo!

Now Whiskers, he looked good in both a sweater and a hat,
And even Santa Claus confessed, "Now here's an awesome cat!"
Mr. Whiskers walked with pride in a collar and a lead,
And though he'd rather now, that cat could swim across Lake Mead.

Mr. Whiskers! Yippee-ki-yi-yip!
Mr. Whiskers! Playing with catnip!

No woman was ever good enough for this noble cat's friend John,
Whiskers frightened would-bes off with a show of cattish brawn.
And so the bachelors lived alone, a counselor and his pet,
But Mr. Whiskers is, of cats, the best of all as yet.

Mr. Whiskers! Yippee-ki-yi-eer!
Mr. Whiskers! Loyal through the years.

John died alone and Whiskers mourned the loss of his dear friend,
Then Mr. Whiskers disappeared and so our story ends.
But be alert, for Whiskers might just pass on by,
You'll know him by his whiskers and the twinkle in his eye.

Mr. Whiskers! Yippee-ki-yi-yi!
Mr. Whiskers! The legend never dies!

Blah blah blah

2010-02-16T18:12:00.003-07:00

I haven't updated this in nearly two months. Bad Jill! Bad blogger! Shame!

It's not that I haven't been writing (the frequent updates on my adoption blog are proof of that). Or that nothing has happened for me to write about.

I've mostly gotten very lazy lately, and also depressed. And my fibromyalgia is doing bad, bad things to me. I wake up most mornings feeling like someone beat me soundly with a potato sack full of unripe fruit. Which is not, as you can imagine, a very pleasant thing.

I used to take meds for my fibro, and they worked well enough. But I stopped taking them when I got pregnant, and never started them again. They were expensive, for one. Also, I think one of them might have been doing some sort of damage to my kidneys. And Barbers have kidney problems to begin with.

So no more fibro meds for me. I'm not taking the antidepressant I was on before my pregnancy, either. I'm back on Zoloft. The SSRI I was taking before has a high incidence of liver damage. And I'm very attached to my liver. I've had it as long as I can remember. Also, for some reason, I have always been skeeved out at the thought of anything liver-related. I like to pretend I don't even have a liver.

So apparently I can either have good brain chemistry and lots of energy, or I can have a liver and kidneys. I've rather unsportingly chosen the latter.

I think that's it for now.

Big Ghouls Don't Cry

2009-12-29T14:35:00.003-07:00

I have recently re-discovered eyeliner.

I'm probably a little slow on the get-go, here, since I'm 26, and the last time I was at the mall I saw these 10-year-olds who were more heavily made up than a Miss America contestant. But I'm a little on the uncoordinated side, and I've found that I do best with makeup that can't render me blind if I mess up.

I tried eyeliner a number of years ago. It was a bad thing, very bad. I was even pastier in my teens and early twenties than I am now, if you'll believe it, and I was clueless when it came to cosmetics. But I'd started reading Glamour magazine, and their makeup tips were pretty and colorful and they encouraged me. If this 14-year-old Brazilian model in the photographs can do it, I told myself, than so can I! It didn't occur to me at the time that the model probably couldn't do it either, and the makeup she was holding was probably a prop for the photos, and the photos were likely taken in between bits of work by a highly trained makeup artist.

But I was a little slow - I grew up in a pathetically small and isolated town, and I thought I could do it. I bought eyeliner. Charcoal black eyeliner. Did I mention how pale I was? And that I have blue eyes, and that my hair was at the time fairly light? And I bought black eyeliner. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Especially since Glamour was, at the time, spreading the rumor that any woman can wear red lipstick.

Suffice it to say that even my best, most practiced efforts left me looking like a Kabuki hooker.

A few years later, when I was about twenty or so, I decided to try again. I thought maybe it would be okay if I dropped the red lipstick. But I was still terribly pale, and horribly unskilled with an eyeliner pencil. If my hair had been darker I'd have looked goth. As it was, with the beret I'd decided to start wearing, I looked a bit like a mime. I am terrified of mimes and clowns. So once again I gave up on the idea of ever wearing eyeliner.

But recently (I'm a little slow as I said) I discovered Sephora, and I decided I needed to give eyeliner one more shot. I found a Sephora brand pencil in a pretty dark copper color. I practiced. I discovered I actually looked okay if I applied to my heart's content and then used a Q-Tip to remove 75-80% of what I'd put on. I actually looked pretty good, if I say so myself. I started wearing it almost every day, and I thought I looked terribly sophisticated and alluring.

Then one day, in a fit of hormone-fueled frustration, I ended up crying about something. I expected sympathy, at the very least, from my mother. What I didn't expect was the look of abject horror on her face.

"Jill! Are you okay?"

"Do I look like I'm okay?" was my mature, controlled response. Come on, Mom, I'm crying here!

"Your eyes are bleeding!" she said, shoving a fistful of Kleenex in my direction.

As it turns out, a big part of the pretty copper color was red pigment, and my tears mixed with the eyeliner to form a rather convincing-looking sort of fake blood. I had to take my contacts out and clean them and spend a good ten minutes removing the red streaks from my eyes and face.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll try again in a few years.

2009-12-20T01:13:00.001-07:00

I have nothing new to say, but I found this when I was going through my "My Pictures" folder and it made me laugh. Bono is so smug. Smugness is a very irritating quality.

Whine, whine, whine

2009-12-08T16:52:00.003-07:00

It's been a while since I complained. Something must be wrong with me. I ALWAYS complain. I need to rectify the situation. So here goes - the latest list of things that are cheesing me off today.

-It's called the fast lane for a reason. If you want to go 60, get out of the fast lane. 60 is not fast. Especially when the speed limit is 65. Speed up, change lanes, or be prepared for a vicious tailgating.
-I hate it when I want to read a book that has been made into a film or TV show and I can't find a copy at the store that doesn't have Jennifer Aniston's dumb face on the front. Famous actors and actresses rarely look the way I imagine characters to be, and I'm buying the dang book, people, not the movie. They are rarely the same. Did you know they changed the whole bloody end of "My Sister's Keeper"? And Cameron Diaz is SO not the mother I pictured.
-While I'm on the subject, I bought "Flash Forward" at Barnes & Noble the other day and the description on the back of the book is a description of THE TV SHOW. Not the book, the TV show. And they are not the same thing. The book is very different.
-It's not irritating, but when I was at the zoo last, I walked past the primate exhibits, and a zoo employee nearby asked me, "Do you want to go in the monkey house?" which wouldn't have been funny except his tone of voice made it sound like the worst chat-up line in history. I don't think he said it that way intentionally, because he looked confused when I laughed and declined his offer.
-I got a new debit card a few months ago because the old one finally expired. I didn't just get a new card, though, I got a new PIN. I didn't want a new PIN. I'd had the old PIN for 10 years. I wrote the new one down somewhere but I lost it and it's really irritating. I tell cashiers to run the card through as credit but they always forget, and they have to cancel what they did, and sometimes my card won't work again so quickly, and I have to use another card.
-I seem to be missing $600 from my savings account. Last time I checked, I had $700 in savings. Now I have $123. I'd check out my transaction record, but the credit union website no longer likes my password and I'm too lazy to call their corporate office and fix it. I shouldn't have to! I KNOW I have the right password.
-I'm not very funny anymore. I used to be funny. Then people started telling me I was funny. The more people told me, the less funny I got. Now I'm about as humorous as cancer.
-TV Guide magazine keeps cheating and putting together these double issues. It's a double issue because they put two weeks in one. Which means two weeks of listings but only half the other content I'm paying for. And they got rid of the "Is It Just Me?" column, which was my favorite.
-I've had a migraine for three weeks.
-Did you know that the Salvation Army bell ringers make like $7.25 an hour? They can't even be bringing that much in with those little buckets. Which makes me suspect that the money I donate goes to pay bell ringer salaries and not to help the homeless. The bells were irritating enough when I thought they were helping society. Now that I know it's not a volunteer operation, it's extra irritating.
-I hope I never meet Stephenie Meyer, because if I do, I'm likely to hurt her. If I have to hear the words "Twilight," "New Moon," "Jacob," "Edward," or "Sparkly Vampire" one more time I will bloody lose it. It is a bloody stupid book, people! And yet there are women - grown women in their forties and fifties, puff-painting t-shirts and screaming about Robert Pattinson. Can you imagine if the genders were reversed? It wouldn't be cute if a bunch of middle aged men lined up to see Miley Cyrus walk the red carpet.
-Speaking of, WTH happened to Miley? She used to be this cute, age-appropriate, normal little thing. Now she's a cheap skank. I cringe when I hear my 7-year-old niece talking about Hannah Montana.
-I am only going to say this once (once today, anyway): Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, looks good in skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are gross. I'm looking at you, Jonas Brothers.
-Fibromyalgia sucks. I sleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like it was closer to 10 minutes. And I feel like someone was beating me with a sack of unripe fruit while I slept. And you know how sometimes you don't feel like exercising but you know that if you do, you'll get this nice energy rush? Fibro ruins that. I exercise and feel like crap. Worse than crap. Crap squared.
-People keep feeling the need to chastise me for complaining. Because it could be worse and I could be homeless and disabled and have no family and no food, or because I don't live in the coldest place in the world, or because I'm not fat enough to require surgery. Well you know what folks? If I want to complain, I can complain. I don't care if there are people who are worse off than me, I don't care if I'm not the fattest person in the world, and I don't care if you don't consider 50* to be sufficiently cold. I'm crabby and tired and thoroughly miserable and a size 18, and if I want to whine, I'm by gosh going to whine. I'm allowed to, and you can't stop me.
-Someone asked me the other day about "giving away" my baby. Excuse me? I did not give her away. I placed her for adoption with a wonderful couple. I did not put an ad on Craigslist.
-I used to be able to wear my contacts for days, even sleep in them, and these days I get five, maybe six hours of comfortable wear out of them and then they hurt my eyes. Well, that was a fun fourteen years.

Enough about me. I've found a new way to annoy others - or to trick them, in any case. When I'm at the zoo, I'll pick an empty patch of land to stare at and photograph, and I'll see how many people stop to stare, too. My record is five.

Missed connections

2009-11-21T01:35:00.004-07:00

I have done a craptastic job of blogging lately. I can think of a number of reasons for it but none of them are very good.

In the time I have spent online not blogging, I have been indulging a guilty pleasure. I am slightly addicted to the "Missed Connections" section on Craigslist. Have you ever looked at Missed Connections?

The concept is a simple one. You're out somewhere - a club, a grocery store, a gas station. You see someone, you make eye contact, maybe you say hi. And then the moment is gone, and so is the person you connected with. So you go to Missed Connections, write up what happened, and see if that person responds.

If I'm honest, I don't read Missed Connections because I have missed any connections. My purposes are much more nefarious than that. I do it for entertainment. Because there are an awful lot of idiots in the world, and these days most of them have internet access.

I stick to m4w, Men for Women, because I've found that men tend to be a bit more ridiculous and maudlin in their posting. I've only gotten a laugh out of Women for Men once or twice. M4w? The world is a scary place, ladies and gentlemen.

I am slightly worried that so many men seem to find "hot" women shopping at Wal-Mart. Especially West Valley Wal-Marts. The West Valley is where 99.9% of violent crimes in Phoenix seem to occur. And Wal-Mart is ... well, have you been to the People of Wal-Mart website? It's a leper colony.

But overweight hoochies aside, there is a sort of poetic stupidity in the subject lines I've encountered. I've been collecting them for a while, and I'd like to share my favorites with you, faithful reader.

I think my favorite so far is "You returned a Derek Jeter Halloween Costume." Brilliant, isn't it? There'll be no mistaking that one. How many people returned Derek Jeter costumes? Actually, I'm not sure, but I think this one is still brilliant, and I never even read the posting, just the headline. The headline is all I ever read, if I'm honest.

Equally brilliant (in its stupidity, anyway) is "You startled me in the alley while I was peeing." Kind sir, while I don't doubt you may have been stumbled upon by a beautiful woman in the alley, do you really think that said woman is going to be interested in a man who urinates in public? Is she going to be sitting home, thinking to herself, "You know, that guy who was peeing in the alley was pretty hot. I wonder if he noticed me?"

There has to be a story behind "I can't believe you bossed your grandma around" and I, for one want to know what it is. I read the listing for this one and I'm still not sure what was going on. Or why a man would be interested in a woman who bosses her grandma around.

"No Tip was big enough, Emily." Was it because Emily was beautiful or because Emily was an unusually competent waitress? The world will never know, because I never read the posting and the listing's expired. Alas. Rest assured, Emily, your efforts didn't go unnoticed.

I have a few questions for the man who posted "T-BIRD ER WAITING ROOM." Sir, who sits in an ER waiting room and checks out the women there? Especially T-Bird. Their patients are either criminals or the elderly. I realize you're stuck there for four or five hours, but maybe you ought to let the doctors reattach the woman's severed hand before you attempt to hit on her. Just a thought.

When I read "I bought eggs from you =)" I sincerely hoped it wasn't from the same people who post every day offering 8 grand to a Jewish egg donor. Perhaps it was a trade, as the same day, posted in w4m, was "to the kind stranger who bought my pumpkin."

Ah, Craigslist. You give so much and ask so little. Idiots of the world, post on. And please be specific.

You Can't Say I Didn't Get Something Out of It

2009-11-16T23:31:00.005-07:00

In mid-October, my mother and I attended Kendall Summerhawk's Money, Marketing and Soul Intensive, or MMSI for short. My mother was excited to learn about how to grow her business and market herself. I was excited to get a facial at the hotel spa. But my ticket was dirt cheap owing to a great deal my mother got, so I went along to the workshop as her personal assistant.

I don't know if it was the stress of travel or the fact that I sleep poorly in hotel beds, but I had the attention span of a fruit bat during the event. I could not pay attention had my life depended on it. I tried very hard to pay attention but failed miserably. I thought that perhaps if I took notes, I'd do better. I was wrong.

The notebook wasn't lined. I can't write in an unlined notebook. Not only that, I can't stop myself from drawing in an unlined notebook. Never mind that I have little to no artistic ability to speak of. So while my mother and the rest of the crowd were excitedly learning about money archetypes and branding and seeding and all sorts of strange verbs, this is the sum of what I accomplished in four days.

I showed my mother my work. I'm not sure if she was horrified or amused. I like to think she was amused. And my facial was awesome.

Baseball Will Kill You

2009-11-04T15:23:00.006-07:00

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that when the Yankees won the world series 11 years ago, my father killed a man.

This is a true story.

But lest my father's memory be tarnished with a half-truth, I feel I should clarify what exactly happened in 1998. Although my father hated the Yankees, he certainly didn't mean to kill anyone. Especially not Leo Larson.

Leo was my parents' insurance agent for around 25 years and a friend of my father's. Despite a near lifetime in Arizona, Leo was a big, big fan of the New York Yankees. In the mid-90s, Leo took on a position of leadership in our church. My father was the executive secretary, so he attended every Tuesday meeting the church leaders had. Leo and my dad used to talk baseball, because my father couldn't stand the Yankees and because Leo loved them.

I should mention here that Leo was diabetic, and there were complications. His health was poor, but his spirits were good. Leo, busy with work and church all day, missed game 4. My dad saw the game before he left for the church - a bit later than he'd have normally left, but he was hoping the Padres could pull it off and force a fifth game. No such luck, however, as the final score was 3-0.

The meetings proceeded as usual that night and, my father later said, if Leo was a bit quieter than usual, no one noticed. He looked a little pale, but that was typical given his health. When the meetings were over, everyone left but my father and Leo, waiting to rehash the game.

"Well, Leo," my father said, eying the man's Yankees necktie, "The Yankees won it. You can die a happy man."

And he did, late that night or early the next morning. I never heard for sure when it happened. But my father said later that he was pretty sure he was the last one to see Leo alive, and that other than a goodbye, "die a happy man" were the last words anyone ever spoke to him.

Last year, a month after my father died, I was watching the Dodgers lose the NLCS, and I remembered that world series ten years ago, and I smiled to myself for a minute, thinking that when my dad ran into Leo in the next life, perhaps Leo would reassure my dad that he had indeed died a happy man.

The Return of Mr. Whiskers

2009-10-30T13:49:00.004-07:00

I held out as long as I could, I really did.

For weeks, I found excuses for giggling during therapy - knock-knock jokes, lines from sitcoms, bumper stickers. I tried as hard as I could to keep from mentioning how much mental energy I have expended of late thinking about my therapist's cat.

Yesterday, I failed.

I blame my mother.

John's birthday was the 24th, and my mother mentioned something about having a birthday party with the cat, and I mentioned something about giving the cat a party hat, and it went downhill from there. Yesterday, about two-thirds of the way through my hour, I pictured Mr. Whiskers in a party hat, and I lost it. It started with a choked-out laugh, scarcely suppressed.

John raised an eyebrow, clearly wondering what I found so amusing about having boundary issues. I tried to cover my laugh with a cough, but that only made things worse. I found myself wondering if John would say "Bless you" to his cat if the animal sneezed (do cats sneeze?), and I laughed again. Unbidden, the image of John and his cat in matching Christmas sweaters came to mind, and I found myself shaking like a hotel bed with Magic Fingers.

I laughed out loud, more of a bark than anything else, and the dreaded giggle loop came crashing down around me.

I bloody lost it.

John stared for a moment, clearly worried about my sanity. Then, perhaps realizing that as my therapist, he should have a better grasp on my sanity than to simply wonder, he asked me what I found so amusing.

Excuses flooded my mind, each less plausible than the last - I just got a joke I heard yesterday. I figured out the best way to exact revenge on my ex-boyfriend. I'm having a seizure.

Perhaps if I hadn't been trying so hard to come up with an excuse, I could have actually come up with one. But in this sudden surge of brain activity, I lost control over my tongue, and out came the words, "You have a cat!"

Understandably, John didn't see what was so funny about the fact that he owns a cat. I can't blame him. I laughed the laugh of the damned for another minute, and then the tale of Mr. Whiskers came tumbling out of my mouth. The cat's name. The leash. The screensaver. The matching Christmas sweaters.

John seemed particularly offended at that last bit. "Oh, gosh, no!" he exclaimed, and I could see him racking his brain, trying to figure out what he may have ever said to me to make me think that he was the sort of man to put a sweater on a cat.

I gave him the first excuse I could think of. I blamed my mother.

"She's a sick woman," I blurted out. "She needs medication!"

He raised an eyebrow, which gave him a rather unintelligent look owing to the fact that his mouth was still open, as it had been since I brought up the topic of cat sweaters.

"I don't know what's wrong with her," I continued. "It's got to be her ADD!"

John managed to compose himself at last. "Does she do that sort of thing often?" he asked. "Just take a topic and go off on it?"

I thought about that for a moment. "Yes," I lied.

I'm not sure if he believed me or not. He didn't seem to, but I could tell that he wanted to, that he would rather believe me than accept the fact that after working with me for four years, I am still mentally disturbed enough to spend the better part of two months imagining his life with his cat.

After the tale (no pun intended) came out, there was a moment or two of awkward silence, during which, I believe, John and I made a tacit agreement never to speak of Mr. Whiskers again. Then he asked me how long I'd been seeing him, and I cheerfully told him it's been four years.

I think a little bit of him died when I said that. I could see a bit of light leave his eyes. I smiled more widely. It is slightly perverse, I'll admit, but the truth is that, as much progress as I have made since 2005, I didn't feel I'd accomplished very much until just then, when I realized that, whether he liked it or not, John would never be able to forget me for the rest of his life.

And if I'm not mistaken, he's learned an important lesson about sharing bits of his personal life during an hour that someone else is paying for. And that, my friends, is progress.

Birthday Blog

2009-10-23T12:55:00.005-07:00

So. It's my birthday. I'm 26.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I am now firmly out of my early twenties and smack dab in that comfortable mid-twenties age bracket where you are neither too young for things nor too old for them.

On the other hand, I don't think that anyone aspires to be mid-twenties, single, unemployed, and living with mom.

In my defense, I've had a rather busy year. I got dumped, fired, and pregnant, my dad died, my car broke down four times, and I placed my baby for adoption. I think I can be forgiven for taking a little time for myself to figure things out.

Part of me feels that, at my age, I should know what I want to do with my life. I thought I did, actually. But the more I look into certain degree programs, the less excited I get about going back to school. I'm not even going to get in to the cost of ASU.

At the moment, I have an AGS, a cosmetology license, and a notary commission for the state of Arizona. I sort of like that none of those things are the least bit related. It makes for an interesting resume. I've considered spending the next few years getting more interesting little certifications and qualifications, just so I could print up the world's strangest business cards. For instance, I'm considering learning to drive a forklift. How cool would that be if my business card said "Jill Elizabeth. Hairstylist, notary, forklift operator"?

(Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. It bothers me that I can't ever remember whether in cases like the preceding I should put the question mark inside or outside the quotation marks. I think I'm doing it wrong, but it doesn't look right when I do it the other way. Grr. Okay, end interlude.)

I've also recently got it into my head to become a CNA. And a pharmacy technician. And I'd love to learn stunt driving. And get a masters in social work - which of course means I'd have to first get a bachelor's in social work.

None of this has anything to do with my birthday, does it? I've slept seven hours in two days (I've been doing school presentations for LDSFS, and high school classes are early) so I have the attention span of a fruit bat at the moment.

But it's my birthday, and if I want to ramble, I'll ramble.

I have a personal history of bad birthdays. I had good ones as a child, but the older I got, the worse my birthdays became. I think it was my eighth birthday party when one of my friends convinced another two of my friends that none of them liked me anymore.

There was one year when I was late getting home to a family party, and I arrived to find that my relatives had eaten most of my cake without me. No candles, no singing. There was the year I was in a car accident. The year I started taking antidepressants. The year everyone but my parents seemed to have forgotten my birthday. The year I failed my driving test. The year my college roommate's bad hygiene made the dorm room smell like excrement. The year my mom was in the hospital for gallstones. The year I was in beauty school learning exactly how little talent I had for doing highlights. The year I had to work at the salon for ten hours all by myself. The year my dad had cancer. And last year, when I found out I was pregnant.

Happy birthday? Not possible.

This year's been pretty good, actually. I think partly because I had such low expectations, but there you are. I had to wake up early to do two more school presentations, but then I had brunch with a friend and then relaxed and played a video game and read a bit and went shopping and went out to dinner with my mother and came home to watch TV and chill.

Not the most exciting birthday in the world by anyone's standards. But nothing horrible happened and except for my birthday migraine, I feel alright. So far my 27th year is off to a dull start. But on the upside, dull is better than bad, and I did get a free Grand Slam.

On the Upside, There Were No Mountain Lions

2009-10-19T13:39:00.006-07:00

I don't usually use this blog to talk about specifics of my life or what I've been up to lately. I have another blog for that, and it is appropriately pathetic. But I just got back from a trip to Tucson and suffice it to say that an acid trip would have been less upsetting.

I got directions to the hotel from the hotel's website. It was fairly specific, down to the fact that one road would change names after I'd been on it a few miles. However, it then specified that I needed to stay on said road with changed name, so when I was on Skyline and saw that I needed to turn left to stay on Skyline (the road was, just for the hell of it, changing names again, which the website didn't mention), I turned left. There are a number of places in Tucson where, for reasons unknown, the same street intersects itself. Skyline intersects Skyline, Sabino Canyon intersects Sabino Canyon, and Kolb runs parallel to Kolb in one place. Sort of a nexus-of-the-universe thing.

I should not have turned left. As it turns out, I needed to stay on Sunrise, which was once Skyline, which was once Ina. It would have been nice if the website had mentioned that.

But Jill, you might say, how hard could it have been to find a giant resort built into the side of a mountain? And perhaps I could have found it by myself had it been daylight. But this was Tucson, and for reasons I can't explain, they aren't big on things like streetlights or signs or roads that go in straight lines or roads that actually lead somewhere. But they especially hate lights - I have never been in a darker city. I think there may be some sort of city ordinance where no one is allowed to use anything brighter than a ten-watt light bulb, even outside. The hotel wasn't lit up and the street wasn't lit up.

After an hour or so of trying to find my way around Tucson, I found the hotel. My mother checked into the hotel. It's supposed to be this luxury resort. Well, I don't know where all the money goes, but it isn't into their electric bill. We drove around the hotel for ten minutes trying to find the parking lot by our room, but again, it was too dark to see where I was going. We returned to the lobby area and one of the valets drove a golf cart in front of us to show us where to go.

The hotel is quite literally built into the side of a mountain. Our room, which had an outdoor entrance, faced this:

My mother was afraid that a mountain lion was going to come down and eat us. I was more concerned about the unusually large cockroaches, several of which seemed to be enjoying the lack of light around the hotel. We got into our room. My mother claimed one bed, so I went to the other one. It had hair on it. I don't mean two or three long hairs. It looked like this all over the bed:

Apparently, the Wolfman is on the housekeeping staff. I am highly allergic to dogs and their fur, but Loews prides itself on being a pet-friendly chain of hotels, which apparently means dogs are allowed to frolic in freshly-cleaned rooms. I found hairs in the bathroom as well. The front desk was called, and hell was raised. I got fresh bedding. I inspected it closely for more mystery hairs. It seemed to be okay so I went to bed. I was looking forward to seeing Tucson during the day. Unfortunately, the money and marketing conference my mother and I were attending went from 8:30am to 5:30pm, so by the time we got out, it was too dark to do anything. I gave up on having any sort of good time and commenced drawing cartoons in my notebook.

We checked in on Wednesday night, and while I was waiting for housekeeping to de-fur my bed, I looked out on the balcony. There was a grassy sort of area outside the patio and a woman was walking one of those nasty little furry crap machines - pomegranates or whatever they're called. So on Saturday night, when I heard a strange grunting bark outside, I figured someone else was walking a dog out there. But the dog sounded sick. Really sick. And angry. I opened the curtains to see what sort of dog it was.

It wasn't a dog. It was a pack of javelinas. Javelinas, or collared peccaries, are a sort of wild desert hog. They are alarmingly large and noisy, and they were hungry. I'm an idiot, so I went out on the patio with my camera. Of course, it was too dark to get a good shot. Not because it was night time, but because there are about two light bulbs lighting up the whole of the outer hotel.

I saw the javis again in the parking lot on the way to find a Denny's. I almost ran one over with my mother's Highlander. But the car's headlights illuminated them a bit better, and I got this picture:

Apparently, my mother should have been more concerned about javelinas than about mountain lions. There was also a frog by the ice machine, and a coati by the swimming pool, and of course the world's largest cockroach hanging out on the stairs, and a few grasshoppers that were determined to gain entry into our room. The mountains are indeed beautiful, but it was all just a bit too much nature for me.

I've decided I hate Tucson. I don't ever want to go back. Maybe someday, if they decide to invest in lighting. But I'm getting a room inside, and I'm taking a gun in case the javelinas get aggressive.

Happy Anniversary! You're Crazy.

2009-10-05T23:04:00.002-07:00

Tomorrow is kind of a big day for me. Kind of.

It's also sort of depressing. Tomorrow is the four-year anniversary of my being in therapy (with this particular therapist, anyway). This is depressing for several reasons, two of which are that 1) my relationship with John is the longest I've ever had with anyone to whom I am not related, and 2) it's been 4 years, and I am still in therapy.

I mentioned the anniversary to John last Thursday at our session. He wasn't sure of the date. He unearthed my file, which is dangerously thick.

He rifled through a heavy stack of session notes to the last page. "Four years," he said. I wondered if he was thinking what I was, which is that I'm not sure what it says about his skills as a therapist that I am still seeing him four years later, and I'm not quite 26 so how screwed up can I really be yet that I need four years of therapy?

He then asked me what sorts of things I felt I still needed to work on. I'm sure he was thinking along the lines of grieving my father's death and my baby's adoption and the anger I have at my ex.

But what I was thinking to myself, that I almost blurted out, was, "I have a problem, John, and it is a big one. I have spent more time wondering about you and your cat than I have spent on anything else this week."

I didn't say that, of course. I thought about it - several times I thought about it, throughout my session. And at one point I actually laughed out loud about it. John asked what was so funny and I had to make something up to keep from telling him that every time I drive past a pet supply store I picture him inside pushing his cat up and down the aisles in a shopping cart.

I told him what I felt I still needed to work on, and he said something about how those were valid issues, blah blah blah, and as he spoke I pictured him discussing boundary issues with his cat.

I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this up. Eventually I am going to have to tell him about the cat problem, and I'm not sure how he'll react. I'm hoping he will find it funny and we can have a good laugh about it and move on.

I am terrified that he will feel the need to give me details to set me straight on the subject. I know too much already. What if I discover something even more distracting? What am I going to do then?

I think it's probably a good thing that, four years later, I am still in therapy. I seem to need it.

My money's on "Mr Whiskers"

2009-09-28T13:38:00.002-07:00

My therapist has a cat.

I wish I didn't know this, but I do. He mentioned it in my last session. My therapist is in his forties, and single, and he has a cat.

I wish I didn't know this. Oh, certainly I'm glad to know that he prefers cats to dogs, because I've found that cat lovers are more empathetic than dog owners. But I still wish I didn't know this. I wish I knew that he liked cats, but not that he owns one. Because my mind can't just let it go. I can't just accept that he has a cat, and move on with my life. One could argue that, were he a better therapist, I would be able to let it go. But I've been seeing him for four years, and he has a cat, and I can't let it go. Questions arise, unbidden, in my neurotic brain.

I start to wonder about the cat. Is it a shelter cat? What sort of markings does it have? What color are its eyes? How big is it? How old is it? How long has John owned it?

What is its name? What sort of name would John choose for a cat? Paws? Frankie? Boots? Mr. Whiskers? Or does it have some sort of embarrassing lovey-dovey name like Angel or Sweet Pea or Baby? Does he talk to the cat?

Is he the male equivalent of a crazy cat lady? Does he have a picture of his cat as a desktop or a screen saver on his computer? Does he subscribe to Cat Fancy magazine? Would he, in casual conversation, refer to his cat as his furbaby? When he gets home from work, does he announce to the cat that daddy's home? Does he kiss the cat on the mouth? Does his cat screen his dates? Is that why he's still single?

Does he take the cat for walks? I think he's the sort of man that might put a cat on a leash. Do they go shopping together at Petco for kitty toys? Is he the kind of person who puts outfits on his pet for different holidays? Is there a picture of the cat with Santa? Are there pictures of John with his cat? Would he send them out in his Christmas cards? If the cat went missing, how much would he offer for a reward?

I am taking advice - life advice - from a man whose house contains a box that holds cat poo. How can I do that? How can I take my psychotherapist seriously when I know that he spends some of his time scooping cat poo out of a litter box? Is anyone who would voluntarily handle cat poo really qualified to give advice?

I don't know how I'm supposed to take him seriously now. Tomorrow I'm going to see him, and I have to try and sit there and discuss my problems and pretend that he doesn't have a cat and that I haven't spent the better part of an hour wondering about the cat. What if, mid-session, I crack up? What if I can't stop laughing? He's going to ask what's so funny, and I'm going to have to tell him that I have a mental picture of him and his cat in matching Christmas sweaters.

I'm not sure this is going to work anymore. I think I may have to find a new therapist.

And now, for something completely different

2009-09-25T15:52:00.001-07:00

I don't have anything to say today, but I'm sick of this blog being stuck in the middle of my list on my Blogger Dashboard. Which is my own fault for having more than a dozen blogs, but I digress.

Here's a pig in a bath.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

2009-09-19T13:33:00.003-07:00

Today is, apparently, Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I don't know how I missed this earlier. I can't believe it's not printed on my Audobon Backyard Birds calendar. And it wasn't in the newspaper.

Maybe if I'd turned on the TV. I think this sort of thing is right up Channel 3's alley. They've probably got Beverly Kidd on location somewhere in a tricorn hat and an eyepatch.

You may say, Jill, isn't this the sort of ludicrous hilarity in which you typically revel? Well, if you do, you'll have to speak up, because I can't hear you. Maybe consider sending it by e-mail next time so my ears don't strain.

But I digress. I do indeed enjoy a bit of juvenile frivolity every now and then. But I do not participate in Talk Like a Pirate Day.

There are two main reasons for this, which I shall elaborate for your reading pleasure. The first is that, despite the recent pop-culture success that it has enjoyed, I do not think piracy is funny or cool. Perhaps if actual piracy was a thing of the past I could bring myself to laugh about it. But there are plenty of places in the world where actual human beings are attacked, brutalized, and killed by actual pirates, and I don't find it the least bit funny or cute. These pirates do not have a skull-and-crossbones flag on their ships, and they do not dress like Johnny Depp in one of the wildly popular Disney films based on an amusement park ride. Real pirates are much more dangerous and ruthless than that. They are cruel, they are terribly violent, and some of them are downright evil.

So forgive me if I don't think that pirates are cute or funny or simply pop-culture. I haven't been able to forget an article I read about a British civilian who was savagely and brutally slain in front of his terrified wife. Maybe when I can, I will find pirates cute and amusing.

The second reason I will be speaking in my normal hybrid of American and British English today is because of the TV show "Wife Swap." Yes, "Wife Swap." I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I have actually seen that show, but the fact remains that I have actually seen probably a dozen episodes. There was a time when I needed something to fill my TV-watching gap of 4 to 6pm, and Lifetime had the answer in the form of shrill, nasty women torturing the families of other shrill, nasty women.

In one episode, one of the families involved in the swap is headed by a man whose real name eludes me because he insisted on being called Chumbucket. Yes, *the* Chumbucket. The one responsible for this august occasion known as Talk Like a Pirate Day.

How can I describe Chumbucket? Out of touch with reality is the first phrase that comes to mind. Chumbucket, and his wench - I mean, wife - are a good argument for fewer personal freedoms in America. They dress like pirates (or rather, like the Disney version of pirates), talk like pirates (or rather, like Disney pirates), annoy their neighbors, and raise their psychologically damaged children by ignoring their problems, allowing them to curse wildly, and teaching them that there is no reason to aspire to do anything to contribute meaningfully to society (or "pirattitude," as they call it). They stage pirate plays in the backyard of the hovel they call a house, they have pirate friends (Say hello to Cap'n Slappy), they wave swords. Here's a family begging for matching prescriptions for lithium if ever I've seen one.

I won't go into detail on the episode featuring this family. Suffice it to say that Chumbucket and Mrs. Chumbucket are two of the most reprehensible human beings I have ever encountered (and I went to a community college). The fact that one of them created this holiday and stands to profit from it, even in a non-monetary fashion, repulses me like a pus-oozing face wound.

So no, I will not be talking like a pirate today. And be advised, those of you who know me, that if I hear that you have spoken like a pirate today, you will land on my spreadsheet of respect somewhere in between Dr. Phil and the man who invented Esperanto. And I think we all know how I feel about Dr. Phil

Clarification

2009-09-16T01:09:00.001-07:00

I recently announced that, if I ever owned a boat, I would name it Three Hour Tour. I want to clarify something.

I have no plans to buy a boat.

I would also like to add that, were I ever to purchase a racehorse, male or female, I would name it Good Morning Dan.

Again, thank you.

Alert the media!

2009-09-14T14:58:00.001-07:00

I have made an important decision.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and the answer simply wouldn't come to me. But after a lot of thought and consideration, I think I've got it. I think I have the answer.

If I ever got a boat, I would name it "Three Hour Tour."

Thank you.

Accentuate the ... negative?

2009-09-11T17:30:00.009-07:00

I have been trying for over an hour now to update this blog.

I feel like I have plenty of things to say, but two problems keep coming up.

The first is that I don't feel like I'm particularly funny anymore. I used to be able to crank out three or four rants in a sitting, and find them rather clever and well-written, with at least one turn of phrase of which I was particularly proud. But lately I can't even make a joke about infomercials, which is saying something.

The second problem has to do with a promise I made to myself, one I made, if I'm honest, in part to get my therapist off my back. I promised myself I wasn't going to be such a negative person. That I was going to try to lighten up a bit, try to be humorous without being sarcastic.

It's a lot harder than I thought. I'm not sure what it says about me that I can't be funny without being mean. I don't like the thought. I have always thought that I was just generally a rather clever person. I didn't concern myself with the fact that I was overly sarcastic.

I'm starting to wonder if I've ever been funny at all, or if it was just rudeness. If it's the latter, that's sort of an earth-shattering revelation. My sense of humor is an integral part of who I am. I don't like to think that rudeness or nastiness are such a big part of my personality.

Am I a negative person? I've never really thought so, but lately I've started to wonder. I don't want to be a negative person. I want to be clever and funny without risking offense. I wonder if I can.

But I think I've mostly decided that, if I can't be funny sans sarcasm, I simply won't be funny anymore. I want to be a happy person. I want to be the sort of person that my family can be proud of, that others will be drawn to.

One thing I've learned about myself over the years is that I am capable of doing very hard things, of living through hard things and becoming stronger for it. Lately I feel I've had more than my share of hard times, and I do wish God would back off a bit. But if this is the lesson that I need to learn, I'll learn it.

Maybe I won't be funny anymore. But I am going to try to be happy. I am going to try to be positive.

I should probably start by getting up before noon.

Confessions

2009-09-01T16:52:00.008-07:00

I'm working on a few new rants, but in the meantime, here are a few random items from my list of deep, dark secrets (so deep they squeak).

-I have no idea what “3G” means.
-I didn’t know how to pronounce the word “mojito” until about three months ago.
-I have two Hannah Montana songs on my iPod (but I won’t say which two).
-I have had the game of football explained to me more than seven times, but I still couldn’t tell you which guy does what and for which reason.
-When people in public places ask me to sign a petition, I tell them I am Canadian so that I don’t have to sign without hurting their feelings.
-I cried at the end of “Nanny McPhee.” I cry every single time at the end of “Nanny McPhee.” I have seen "Nanny McPhee" about ten times.
-I joke about my fear of fish, but I am seriously terrified of the things. If I ever had to touch one I think I’d have a seizure.
-I think that pigeons are adorable. Also, chickens. Farm animals in general get me very excited. I think they are fantastic.
-I do not understand the cultural appeal of the zombie. Or the pirate, or the ninja.
-I once kicked a dog. The dog had it coming, and if I had the chance, I would kick it again. It was a horrible beast.
-It's not really a secret anymore, but I watch "SpongeBob SquarePants" with alarming regularity.
-I enjoy watching TV infomercials.
-I screen my phone calls.
-I am addicted to celebrity gossip. I waste my money on at least two scandal rags every week.
-I faint at the sight of my own blood.
-I'm not sure what it says about me that the preceding are some of my deepest, darkest secrets.

Yesterday

2009-08-30T16:38:00.003-07:00

Yesterday was an anniversary of sorts for me.

It marked one year since my father had a massive stroke.

One year ago yesterday morning, he was driving me to the bank. One year ago yesterday afternoon, he would never drive me to the bank again.

He didn't die right away - he lived for another 11 days, first in the neuro ICU at St. Joseph's, then at a hospice in Mesa. But in my mind, he died on the 29th. That was the last day that he was himself. The last day that he was awake.

Yesterday I looked at the clock at 3:45, at 4:30, at 6:15, at 7:20. I could remember clearly what I had been doing a year ago at each time: balancing my checkbook, talking to my mother in hushed tones about what we should do for my dad's headache, calling an ambulance, sitting in the ER at Gilbert Mercy waiting for news.

My mother was waiting for news. I think part of me already knew what the news was. I knew when the paramedics called out his blood pressure - 60 over 40 - that he was gone.

Knowing didn't make it any easier on Monday morning when a doctor, one of my dad's neuro-oncologist's lackeys, told us my dad wasn't going to wake up or recover. Nothing in the world could have made it easier, because they were talking about my father, and telling me he was gone.

I miss him every day.

Fat Pants

2009-08-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

I went shopping recently for a pair of pants.

I had a baby on July 7th, so I’m not even sure why I thought I ought to go shopping for regular pants. It probably would have been more prudent to stick to maternity pants for a few more weeks at least. But I had it in my head that, dang it, I was going to wear pants that button and zip. So I went to the mall.

I went to a department store at first because for one reason or another, probably denial, I thought I had lost a lot of my baby weight. But after forty seconds in the dressing room at Dillard’s, it became abundantly clear that my beluga-sized hips needed a specialty store.

I went to Torrid, which is a store that caters to the not-slim young woman. I haven’t shopped there in years, because I didn’t need to, and because I wore neon the first time it was cool and I don’t see a need to repeat the trend. Neon aside, they do carry jeans in my size so I thought I’d give it a go.

The saleswoman that greeted me looked terribly out of place, because she was … oh, what’s the word … ah, yes. Skinny. I can’t imagine why a skinny woman would want to work in a fat girl’s store. I can only assume she feels some sense of moral superiority to all the pathetic fatties who can’t shop at Abercrombie like she can. Maybe it was my imagination, because of her size, but she seemed kind of condescending, which irked me. I was tempted to asked why she worked there. Torrid starts at a size 12, but if this woman was a size 12 I’ll eat my Spanx.

Anyway.

Skinny Suzy asked if I was looking for anything in particular, which struck me as an odd question because I was standing in front of a wall of jeans. I don’t like having salespeople shadow me while I shop, so I told her I was just looking. She said okay, and left me alone.

I found a few pairs of pants to try on and Skinny Suzy started a dressing room for me … and promptly disappeared. I tried on the pants, and I have to say it’s been a long time since I’ve been quite so offended by the sight of my own body. I dumped the pants on the appropriate rack and went in search of more. Lather, rinse, repeat – try on, make face, dump trousers. On my third trip to the dressing room, Skinny Suzy reappeared.

“How’s it going?” she asked, in the way that one might ask a small child his name.

I smiled tightly. “Not well at all!” I said. Suzy looked stunned.

“Oh. Sorry,” she said, but made no offers of assistance. She seemed surprised I hadn’t given a perfunctory “Great!” Well, if she didn’t want to be verbally abused by fat people, she chose the wrong line of work.

I finally found a single pair of jeans that fit and weren’t a foot too long. But, you know me. I can’t be happy with pants that fit. Because, apparently, at some point in the past few years, clothing manufacturers decided that it is no longer fashionable for a pair of jeans to be uniform in color. The butt looked worn out already and there were some strange light horizontal lines on the upper legs. My mother told me to ignore the irregular wash and buy the jeans, because they fit, and because they buttoned and zipped.

I bought them. Skinny Suzy seemed happy. Probably she was relieved that I wasn’t going to say anything else unexpected. I paid cash, which confused her a little. I don’t mean to malign her cash-handling skills. I don’t imagine she has to deal with paper money very often. When I worked at Horribly Managed Children’s Salon, I got cash so rarely I always had to stop for a moment to remember what to do with it.

Suzy spent a bit more time than one would think necessary to check the fifties I gave her for watermarks. She looked from me to the cash once or twice, as though she had some sort of x-ray vision that allowed her to spot counterfeiters. I’m used to that, because I have what I like to refer to as Dorian Gray syndrome, which is to say that I haven’t aged since 1997. Salespeople are naturally distrustful of teenagers. I can’t blame them. I don’t like teenagers either. I didn’t like teenagers when I was a teenager.

So, I have normal pants now, pants that zip and snap. They fit well, and although they are 4 inches too long (as are most pants labeled Size X Short), I do like them. I put them on out of the dryer this afternoon. And you know what?

I miss my maternity pants.

It’s that time again, boys and girls!

2009-08-13T14:43:00.003-07:00

It’s been well over a month since the last list, so here we are: things that are bothering me right now!

-What is the point of a heat advisory in the Phoenix area? It’s Phoenix. It’s hot. Don’t we all know that? But Jill, you might say (which would be stupid because I can’t hear you), sometimes it gets a bit hotter than normal, and people need to know to stay indoors. To which I say (or I would, if I’d heard you object), is 114* really that much more dangerous than 110? Do the risks of heat rise exponentially with every degree of heat over 109? And do people really need to be told to stay inside when it’s really, really hot? I think that if you don’t know that, that if you’re the sort of person who would cheerfully go for a run when it’s hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk, this is what’s known as natural selection. Survival of the smart-enough-to-avoid-heat-stroke.
-When someone admits to being an unapologetic (fill-in-the-blank), it tends to be the sort of thing for which they should probably consider apologizing.
-I’m never sure whether, when writing, I should use the passive voice or end a sentence with a preposition.
-Ninety-five percent of the American population wouldn’t know a preposition if it bit them in the collective arse.
-The difference between a perfectly browned grilled cheese sandwich and a blackened mess seems to be about ten seconds. Maybe it’s my stove. Maybe I’m too bloody stupid to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Either way, I’m irked.
-I want to smack the next person to speak or write the phrase “natural childbirth.” Ten times out of ten these people think that childbirth is only natural if it’s drug-free, and that the only admirable, good, acceptable birth is a natural one - otherwise, you have failed as a woman. I had an IV painkiller and an epidural and finally a C-section because my body didn’t want to birth a baby. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that and I’m sick of certain people judging me for not wanting to be in excruciating pain. They’ll say that drugs aren’t good for the baby. Well how the hell is my suffering and being exhausted any good for the baby? I got drugged and I got sliced and my baby was pink and healthy and aced her APGAR. I’ll probably blog about all this later because it really bothers me.
-I watched a few episodes of “Toddlers & Tiaras” last Saturday. The fact that this show exists at all just kills me. (In my defense, there wasn’t anything else on TV.)
-The media seem incapable of using the right words when discussing Twitter. The verb is “tweet,” not “twitter.”
-The fact that the preceding bothers me, bothers me.
-My neighbors’ dogs are at it again, which mystifies me. Doesn’t the barking at 3am bother them, too? Because it sure as heck bothers me. I need to replace the battery in my Dog Silencer Pro, and all will be right with the world again.
-A few days ago “Access Hollywood” named Madonna as one of the sexiest women over 40 in show business. They said she had the body of a woman half her age, or something like that. This makes me wonder if they have seen Madonna lately, because as near as I can tell she has the body of a med school skeleton.
-I had a funnier comparison than “med school skeleton” yesterday but I’ve forgotten what it was.
-I have the Stanley Steemer jingle stuck in my head.
-I’m not very funny anymore.

Happy? Birthday.

2009-08-09T21:18:00.004-07:00

Today is my dad's 53rd birthday.

I remember his 51st birthday. It is, in fact, seared into my memory more clearly than almost any other day of my life. That was the day we found out he had a brain tumor.

I remember his 52nd birthday as well, although not quite so clearly because it was a good day. My mom had made a banana-flavored cake and my dad had finally found a good pair of non-bulky cargo pants at Mervyn's. We talked about the year before and how this birthday - and every birthday after it - were, by default, better than the year before, because what's worse than a cancer diagnosis?

We found out the next day: a terminal cancer diagnosis. They gave him three months. He got three weeks. And suddenly my dad's 51st birthday seemed like a great day, because he had been alive. Now every birthday after his 52nd is, by default, worse, because it means that nearly a year has gone by without him, and there are days when that thought alone is almost too much to bear.

I hate that all these thoughts come up on his birthday. I hate that I can't just take this day to be happy that he was born, happy that I had him as long as I did. I know there are people worse off than I am, people whose fathers died younger and more tragically than did mine.

But he was my daddy, and he is gone, and I miss him, and today is his birthday. It's hard to think of anyone, and anything, else.

Ripped pants and other occupational hazards

2009-08-03T02:15:00.008-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I have been doing something lately that I am in no way proud of, and I'm not even sure I should admit to it.

I have been watching "SpongeBob SquarePants." A lot.

I used to hate SpongeBob. I first watched the show when I worked for the Horribly Managed Children's Salon. I had heard of SpongeBob but hadn't been subjected to the questionable humor and inane story lines. Then came HMCS and their DVD collection, which included one disc of SpongeBob. You'd think that only one DVD would be a godsend, but the fact is I'd have been happier with about twenty SpongeBob DVDs. The fact that there was only one meant I had to watch the same ten episodes over and over, and mostly I only saw the first one on the disc ("Ripped Pants," in case you were wondering) because every kid wanted to watch it from the beginning.

I began to loathe SpongeBob. I found myself suggesting other shows to children, hoping against hope that even one of them that I talked to would choose something that would offend my ears less, like, say, fingernails on a chalkboard. But I was never able to talk more than one child out of watching it in the nearly two years I spent at HMCS.

I was terribly relieved, therefore, when HMCS got another SpongeBob DVD. At last, I thought, new episodes to get sick of. I eagerly slid the disc into the DVD player, wondering what childish adventures awaited me. I'm sure you can guess what came on, though.

That's right. "Ripped Pants." It was the first episode on this DVD as well. I think a little part of me died that day. Incidentally, during the time I worked for HMCS, I did tune in to SpongeBob at home once. The episode that aired was "Ripped Pants."

So, how did I end up watching SpongeBob SquarePants voluntarily; purposely? Well, the problem is that if you don't watch Oprah or soap operas, daytime and afternoon TV is a scary, boring place. SpongeBob is one of the more sane, normal, entertaining programs on the air between 2 and 7 or so. When I channel-surfed last week, my best TV prospects were a fishing show, a Bruce Willis movie dubbed (poorly) into Spanish, a show about people who had things left in them after surgery, and (I wish I was making this up) a cartoon of the crucifixion. Yes, that crucifixion.

Can you blame me for taking refuge in Bikini Bottom? No, it's not the smartest show on TV. It isn't even *a* smart show. But things could be worse. I could still work at HMCS. Frankly, ripped pants were the least of my worries there. I was about as happy there as Squidward at the Krusty Krab.

Did I really just compare myself to Squidward? I think I've been thinking too much. I need a TV break. I think there's an episode of SpongeBob on ...

I still have all of "Ripped Pants" memorized, for the record.

Dear Madonna,

2009-07-27T15:18:00.002-07:00

Please eat something.

Love,
Up To No Good

The operative word here is "emergency"

2009-07-14T18:03:00.004-07:00

I went to the ER on Saturday night.

Strictly speaking, it was Sunday morning. It was a little after midnight when my mother pulled the car into the ER parking lot at Banner Desert.

I had my choice of ERs. There's a hospital every few miles around here, I swear. But I couldn't go to Gilbert Mercy, because that's where the ambulance took my dad after his stroke, and I don't know much about Banner Gateway, and Baywood was too far. When I had gallstones three or four years ago, I went to the Banner Desert ER. They treated me pretty well. So I thought I'd go there this time.

I had a fever of 100.5, chills, and a sharp pain in my back. I told this to the woman at the front desk. She seemed uninterested and shoved a paper at me to fill out - their computer system had gone down or something like that. I filled in the blanks and gave it back. I was sent a few feet away to have a nurse (I think) put a little clip on my finger and ask me the same questions the first lady asked me. Then I had to sit in the waiting room. My mother had found two chairs apart from the rest, which was a good thing because the waiting room had sort of a leper colony feel. My skin was crawling just being in there, and if I hadn't been in so much pain I'd have just walked back out the door. The place was packed.

I sat and waited. And waited. I observed an interesting cultural phenomenon during this time, and if I have any Hispanic readers, perhaps they could enlighten me. But it seems like every Hispanic person that came into the ER had the entire family with them - no less than five people.

I waited. Finally, a nurse named Alvin called me back to a little curtained-in area. He asked me the same questions I'd already answered twice and took my vitals. I waited a few minutes more and an actual doctor came back. He asked me the same set of questions. I started to think that maybe someone should write my answers down, save a little time for the next person. The doctor said something about my appendix and my kidneys and wandered off. Alvin led me back to the waiting area.

About 45 minutes passed. The waiting room was filling up. Several people seemed possibly to have highly communicable diseases. It was getting harder to avoid sharing their air. Finally another nurse called me back into a corridor marked "Procedures." She said she was going to start an IV. She asked me the same questions I'd already answered.

I should mention that, in addition to being exceptionally pale, my skin is on the thick side. No one has ever been able to find a vein on the first try, and most of the time it takes a good 5 to 10 minutes. It took two nurses and an ultrasound machine to locate a vein for my IV. They got it going, put me on a saline drip and gave me drugs for pain, stomach acidity, and something else I'm not clear on. And then ... they sent me back out into the waiting room with my IV pole.

About a half-dozen or so people in the waiting room also had IVs in. My mother and I found a place to sit that seemed slightly less disgusting and were settling in when two orderlies wheeled two women into the area in hospital wheelchairs. One of them had a plastic bag she was vomiting into. And vomiting, and vomiting. I'm not sure what the volume of the average adult stomach is, but this woman had to be pushing it. I thought surely she'd run out of contents to vomit, but no such luck. And these were gut-wracking, 50-decibel heaves. I nearly threw up myself. I found myself wondering, shouldn't someone do something for this woman? Pump some fluids into her? Find a bed for her? And what about the rest of us with our IV poles? Why the wait? If I felt well enough to wait, I wouldn't have gone to the ER. But I did. I went to the emergency room because it was an emergency.

A nurse called me back into a little room. He checked my IV and asked me the same questions I'd answered already. He said something about a CT scan and a room but implied it might be a few hours. I was sent back into the vomitorium. This part of the waiting room was emptying, and my mother and I, too, went to the other side. Right next to an elderly gentleman who was hacking up a lung.

We'd been there three and a half hours, and I was in a great deal of pain. I whined to my mother for a moment, then went back to the nurse in the little room and asked him to remove my IV.

My mother drove me to Gilbert Hospital on Power Road, where they say it's door to doc in 31 minutes. Only six or so people sat in the waiting room and none of them were losing bodily fluids. A kind, well-dressed young woman asked me a few questions and printed out a bracelet for me. No sooner was it on my wrist than I was taken back. One nurse took my vitals while another asked me a series of questions - and put my answers into the computer. Then I was taken back to a room. An actual room with a heavy wooden door. I changed into the gown they gave me and a nurse started an IV and took some blood. A doctor came in. Both he and the nurses knew my answers to their questions from looking at the computer. Fifteen minutes later I was getting a CT scan and an hour after I'd arrived, I had a diagnosis (a kidney stone and infection) and I'd been given an antibiotic shot. Then they sent me on my merry way with a prescription.

I don't have any funny points to make and there is no moral to this story (although it's obvious which hospital I'd recommend) but, seriously, vomiting in the waiting room? That was pretty bad. I'm just saying.

Pam's problems blow.

2009-07-01T15:01:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article about how this summer has been bad for retailers, and how they’re not doing as well as usual, and how markdowns that usually take place in August took place in June. The article is here if you’re interested.

I’m sure it’s a fascinating article that makes a number of good points about … oh, I don’t know, the economy or the weather or something like that. I’m not sure, really. I got distracted when the article introduced me to Pam MacWilliams.

Pity poor pam. The economy has been tough on her family. Says the article, “She's spent only $200 this month on clothes for her family, compared with about $600 a year ago.”

Um, excuse me? $600 a month? Multiply that out and the woman spends $7200 a year on clothing. $7200. A year. On clothing.
Oh, Pammy. May I ask why? Why do you need to spend $600 a month on clothing? Does a new month necessitate a new wardrobe? Are January’s sweaters not good enough for February? Are your children taking growth hormones so that none of their clothes fit them from month to month? Does your weight fluctuate enough week to week that you need new clothing that often? Are you unable to pass by an item of clothing you like without buying it in every color? And where in the name of arse do you store $7200 a year worth of clothing? Is an extra bedroom serving as a closet?

Ah, but Pam doesn’t need to worry about storage space. Do you know why? She has a lake house. The article goes on: “She also hasn't loaded up her lake house with the usual summer accessories like blowup toys.”

I hate to repeat myself, but excuse me? A bloody lake house? You want to cut expenses, start with the lake house. And what happened to last summer’s blowup toys? The ones she loaded up the lake house with in 2008? Do blowup toys have an expiration date? Are last summer’s toys no longer fun or useful? Are her children (hopped up, perhaps, on those growth hormones) such terrors that they destroy a lake house full of blowup toys each summer?

The article quotes Pam. "I thought that the economy would turn faster," said MacWilliams. "I had high expectations. Now, I want to save more."

You want to save more? Sell the bloody lake house. Make your children wear something more than twice before buying them new ones. Something tells me that a woman who buys new blowup toys for the lake house every year and blows seven grand a year on clothing isn’t going to make her precious children wear the same swimsuit every time they swim. Her daughters probably have a swimsuit for every day of the week each, with a matching blowup toy.

You want to save more, Pam? You’re worried about the economy? Cry me a river. I’ve been unemployed since August. I spend less than $200 a YEAR on clothing. I’ve had the same swimsuit since I was twenty, and I haven’t bought any blowup toys since 2003. I don’t have a lake house. I live with my mother. And I can’t afford a vacation to Manhattan. Oh, did I not mention it? Pam is a tourist from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She was interviewed during a trip to New York.

You know what irritates me the most, I think? Not Pam, although she irritates me plenty. What irritates me the most is that the AP reporter who wrote this story thought Pam was a good person to talk to about the economy. Pam, a woman who is not only gainfully employed but who is married to a man who is also gainfully employed. A woman with a bloody lake house. The reporter thought that this woman represented concerned Americans and their economic woes.

Well, you know what, Pam? You know what, Associated Press? My aging blowup toys and I spit in your general direction, and we don’t consider any of what you had to say as news.

Silence

2009-06-30T13:46:00.002-07:00

I bought one of these and it saved my life. Also, the lives of several dogs that would have been shot. Or poisoned. Or a combination of the two, because I'm not confident enough in my math skills or my aim to leave it to one of those to shut the dogs up.

But I don't have to. Which means no jail time for me!

Have It Your Way

2009-06-22T00:59:00.001-07:00

I went to Burger King a few days ago.

My mother was driving, because I am morally opposed to speaking into a box and too lazy to get out of the car and go inside to order.

Where was I?

Right. Burger King.

The Kia in front of us seemed to be taking a long time. Like, three full minutes, which doesn’t sound like much, but if you were to stop and count to 180, you’d realize that’s an inordinate amount of time to spend ordering food.

“What’s taking them so long?” I asked. “This is Burger King. They sell hamburgers and French fries. How hard is it to order a hamburger and French fries?”

I mean, there are only so many variations on a burger and fries. Even if the car’s occupants wanted crispy chicken and onion rings, that would only account for an extra five or six seconds as the order-taker looks for a less-familiar button on the register.

Still, the Kia sat. I stared at the picture of the Angry Whopper on the menu board. I began to empathize with the Whopper. I was getting pretty angry, myself. And hungry.

“Maybe each burger is special-order,” my mother suggested.

I couldn’t argue there. You are supposed to be able to have it “Your Way” after all. Of course, my way involves a lot less time burning ever-more-expensive gasoline in the drive-thru, but I digress.

Finally, the Kia pulled forward, and we pulled up to the box. The previous order was still on the screen. I expected to see a long list of food, each item special-ordered, but was surprised to find that they’d ordered only about five things – burgers and fries all.

“Well what the heck took them so long?” I asked.

My mother knew better than to answer me.

After a moment, a man’s voice came out of the box.

“Welcome to Burger King, would you like to try a value meal today?”

“Yes, I’d like a number 4, no cheese, ketchup only,” my mother said slowly and carefully. I always get a number 4, no cheese, ketchup only, but sometimes this falls beyond the comprehension of the average fast-food employee. “Large size, with a root beer.”

There was silence.

“Okay, that’s a number 1. Would you like cheese on that?”

Huh?

“No, a number four, no cheese,” my mother corrected.

Silence. Then, a woman’s voice. “Okay, what size and what to drink?”

Sigh.

I always find it a bit disconcerting when a man takes my order and a woman repeats it back, or vice versa. I always hope that they’ve been communicating with each other. They didn’t seem to have been.

The car behind us inched closer to our bumper, apparently in the hope that if he hit us, we’d get a move on.

My mother repeated the order. It had become abundantly clear why the Kia had taken so long to order.

We pulled up behind the Kia at the window. The fact that the Kia was still at the window sort of worried me, considering how long as it had taken us to order. I wondered if, inside, they were still peeling potatoes for the fries.

The driver of the Kia was handed a large sack. I could see the driver digging through the bag. I can’t say I blamed him. Finally, he pulled away and we moved up to the window.

They had our total right, that was reassuring. Then the woman who opened the window spoke.

“You wanted a Coke, right?”

“How exciting to be present at the birth of a new phobia.” – Niles Crane

2009-06-16T00:07:00.001-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I just got even more lovably neurotic. I have developed a delightful new phobia.

You wouldn’t think such a thing was even possible, considering I have about thirty-seven phobias already. What more could I possibly have to worry about?

Barking dogs.

I don’t know if it’s because the weather’s been in the double digits lately, or if there’s been a rip in the space-time continuum or if there’s a disturbance in the force. I don’t know why, really. But I do know that in the past week I have heard more barking than I have heard in the past … oh, year or so. All of a sudden, the dogs in my neighborhood can’t keep their yaps shut.

My neighbor, Zippy the Pinhead, has two or three of those nasty little fuzzy crap machines – pomegranates or whatever they’re called. I’m not sure why. I’ve never seen him or the vampire chick that used to live there or Bobby Hill or the ugly beer-drinking chick go anywhere near the dogs. No one walks them. No one pets them. No interaction. And every so often, perhaps in protest, one or more of them will start yapping.

The yapping I can handle. My father had them trained, Pavlov-like, to run into their house when our back door opened (he spent months using a powerful spray bottle full of water shooting each dog when the noise got bad). They don’t do that anymore, but I’ve found that they respond rather well to me shouting “Shut up!” at them. Also, I know the exact address of next door so if the dogs don’t shut up I can always call the police.

The booming bark is new.

A few weeks ago at 11:15 it started and didn’t stop until my mother called the police. The next morning it started again. The police were summoned again. The barking stopped. I didn’t hear any barking for about a week. I thought perhaps the police had put the fear of God into the dog’s owner. But a few days ago it started again. At 3am. And again at 4am. Then this morning at 6:30. This dog barks whenever it wants, for as long as it wants to, and the owners seem to neither know nor care.

I can no longer relax.

I spend an unprecedented amount of time worrying that barking is going to start at any point. I dread coming home from stores and events because I think, I’m going to sit down to relax and then the barking will start. I dread going to sleep because I think, as soon as I’m mostly asleep, the barking will start. I’ve been wearing earplugs but I don’t know how much I trust them to keep things quiet in my head. I realized a few days ago how fixated I have become on the possibility of barking and I decided to keep track of it. I made a note of the time each time the paranoid fear hit me. Here’s a sample day:

11:36am
11:41am
11:51am
11:57am
12:12pm
12:17pm
12:46pm
1:15pm
1:24pm
1:37pm
1:45pm
1:53pm
1:58pm
2:13pm
2:17pm
2:32pm
2:45pm
2:57pm
3:01pm
3:07pm
3:14pm
3:27pm
3:31pm
3:46pm
3:49pm
3:53pm
3:58pm
4:19pm
4:37pm
(out of house for a while)
6:12pm
6:16pm
(out of house)
7:34pm
7:41pm
7:48pm
7:53pm
7:56pm
8:05pm
8:09pm
8:20pm
8:24pm
8:30pm
8:36pm
8:46pm
8:49pm
8:55pm
8:58pm
9:12pm
9:26pm
9:30pm
9:36pm
9:42pm
9:58pm
10:00pm
10:06pm
10:11pm
10:15pm
10:21pm
10:25pm
10:47pm
10:57pm
11:01pm
11:52pm
11:59pm
12:01am
12:04am
12:10am
12:15am
12:21am
12:26am
12:31am
12:35am
12:42am
12:47am
12:52am
12:56am
1:06am
1:12am
1:21am
1:29am
1:35am
1:38am

That is, I believe, at least 70 times. And that was just when I had a pen and paper handy.

I’m not sure what to call this new phobia – the fear that sometime soon a dog will start barking – but I think I’ve got enough empirical evidence here that it does in fact exist. If you can think of a good name for it, let me know. But speak loudly – I’m wearing earplugs.

Nine months

2009-06-10T15:03:00.004-07:00

Yesterday (the ninth) marked the nine-month anniversary of my father's death.

I can't believe it's been nine months. Some days it feels like it's been years since he's been gone. Other days it feels like hours. I can still remember everything very clearly - the day he died, and the eleven days before it. The day he lost consciousness (August 29th) is especially clear in my mind. In some ways it feels like he died that day. His brain did, I suppose. He had the stroke on Friday. When my mom and I saw the MRI on Monday, we knew he was gone. The doctor said the white areas were dead spots. The image was blanketed in white spots.

I knew earlier, though. On the 29th, when we couldn't wake him up. We called 911 and the ambulance came, sirens blaring. I met the EMTs in the driveway. They came in. They took his blood pressure. It was 60/40. When I heard those numbers, I knew then and there he wasn't going to wake up.

The EMTs had my dad strapped to a stretcher. They asked if we had a hospital preference. They took him away. That was a Friday. One week later, in the hospital, the nurses took out his breathing tube. Again, an ambulance came. They took him to the hospice we'd visited earlier that week.

On Tuesday, September 9th, another ambulance took him away. They didn't use sirens that time.

How has it been nine months already? Where did the time go? I've done so little with it. I've had so little energy.

I bought my dad a Homer Simpson card for Father's Day last year. I feel the strange compulsion to buy a card this year. Why? What on earth would I do with it? I don't know, but the urge is there just the same. Habit, I suppose. I've bought one every year that I can remember. It seems strange I don't need to buy one this year. That I'll never need to buy one again. I think my dad's birthday will be hard, too, especially since it'll mark two years since the initial diagnosis.

Brain cancer, I'd thought. Who the hell gets brain cancer? It seemed unfair. Why did it have to be my daddy? He thought differently.

"Why not me?" he'd say. "Am I so special that I can't get a brain tumor? I'm no better than anyone else."

But he was, in so many ways and for so many reasons.

I miss him so much.

Insert bear-related pun here

2009-06-04T23:54:00.003-07:00

I went to the zoo a few days ago. I got a Sno-Cone. Sno-Cones are the sort of thing that seem exciting at first but then you sit down with one and you think, I spent three bucks on this? Mine kept melting and dripping onto the picnic table I was sitting at.

But I like the zoo. I don’t know if it’s on purpose or not, but at the Phoenix Zoo you have to do a lot of walking to see not a lot of animals (so it makes for good exercise if nothing else). I don’t mind too much because the animals have large habitats instead of little cages or fenced-off yards or anything like that. They’ve all got plenty of room to … do whatever it is that animals in zoos do. And there are unusually large squirrels all over the place, as there’s ample room to frolic. The meerkat exhibit was full of squirrels. I didn’t see any meerkats. Maybe the squirrels, hopped up on Sno-Cone juice, ate them all.

When you first get in to the zoo, if you keep going straight ahead, past the carousel, you get to a little African savanna area with four or five giraffes, a number of alarmingly large birds (not emus – I’m talking vultures), and a few odd ungulates. The giraffes are terribly curious, especially the younger one (little guy, probably only 11 feet tall). It kept looking around at all the people on the other side of the fence as if he was thinking, “Oh, look, they’ve got humans on display today. I love those things.” I got some really good pictures. I like to spend a bit of time at the Savanna because from there, it’s a good five-to-seven minute walk to see another living creature if you head to the left. And that’s assuming you can spot one of the bighorn sheep on the mountains. I saw one once, when I was on the road on the way home.

Anyway.

I have been to the zoo probably eight times in my life. I have wandered from one end to the other and I have seen almost every animal on exhibit, with one notable exception: I have never seen a bear.

If their website can be believed, the Phoenix Zoo is home to at least one spectacled bear. I learned all about spectacled bears from watching “Go, Diego, Go!” at my last job. Something tells me they don’t actually talk in real life and would be more apt to rip Diego to shreds (this is the only thought that kept me going during my 100th viewing of the DVD). Anyway, according to the zoo’s map, the spectacled bear exhibit is in between those for the anteater and the capybara (world’s largest rodent!). I have been by the exhibit several times. It’s a nice little patch of land with lots of trees and rocks and vegetation, but something seems to be missing, or at least it’s been missing the times I’ve checked.

I have never seen a bear.

I have spent the better part of 20 minutes scouring every inch of the enclosure. I have walked by at different times of day. I have checked for signs that the exhibit was closed. And I have never, not once, seen any signs that there is indeed a bear living there.

I have a theory about it, actually. It’s a very nice enclosure, as I’ve mentioned. I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. So I think that the zoo poured a lot of money into putting it together, and then when it came down to it, they didn’t have the money left over to get an actual bear to put there. So it’s been empty all this time, and they think that no one is going to notice, that people will just figure the bear is in the back or napping somewhere and no one will be the wiser.

Well, Phoenix Zoo, you’re not fooling me. I’ve never seen a bear, and I’m not going to be satisfied until it’s been proven conclusively that there is indeed a bear in all that foliage. I want proof, Zoo people, and when you’re ready to give it to me, come find me. I’ll be the one by the Sno-Cone stand taking pictures of squirrels.

Separated at birth?

2009-06-04T19:49:00.002-07:00

New "Burn Notice" tonight at 9.

Writer's block and tiny cats

2009-05-28T13:50:00.004-07:00

It occurred to me a few days ago that I hadn't posted anything new in a while. I buried that information in the back of my brain for later review and it only just came up again.

I haven't been able to put together anything coherent lately. I don't know why. I certainly haven't run out of things to complain about. Plenty of things irritate me, particularly when I'm hungry.

I'm working on a few good rants, but in the mean time, here are a few things that popped into my head this week. They may or may not be funny. Or interesting.

-When did John Cougar Mellencamp dump the "Cougar" from his name? I think that, considering the pop-culture phenomenon that is the "cougar" he ought to put it back in there. Capitalize on the trend while he can.
-It rained last week. I was looking forward to a good rain because my car is a mess. It rained enough to clean most of the dirt off my car, but not the bird poop. I don't know what those birds around here are eating, but something in their excrement, when mixed with the finish of my Cavalier, formed a powerful epoxy and that stuff isn't coming off without a fight.
I put a feeder in my backyard, and *this* is the thanks I get. Stupid birds.
-My “Check Engine” light has been on since I took my car home from the shop a few months ago. You’d think they would have checked the engine while they were fixing everything else. The light didn’t actually turn on until I’d driven about two miles from the shop.
I’ve decided to “fix” it by putting a piece of electrical tape over it.
-Why does the media always make a big deal about how popular and athletic and smart a missing/killed teenager is/was? Would it be less of a tragedy if some fat, stupid loser was killed by a drunk driver? Is it a matter of not wanting to speak ill of the dead, or do people just not care what happens to unpopular people? Nancy Grace talked yesterday (I changed the channel as fast as I could) about a "beautiful young wife and mother" who was killed by her husband. So would it be okay if she was a single, childless hag? I think to Nancy it would because Nancy doesn't talk about the ugly victims of crime on her program. Ever. If Natalee Holloway had been hook-nosed and greasy-haired and overweight, Nancy wouldn't have given the story air time. Neither would anyone else have.
-Last night I saw a commercial for a nasal spray for allergies. To illustrate how pet dander irritates the sinuses, the ad featured a tiny kitten dancing around under a large, disembodied nose.
I know I hate it when tiny cats frolic under my nose. Of course I'm not sure how I feel about the solution offered in another ad: an army of tiny CG men marching a nasal allergy spray towards my nostril. That worries me a little as well. Maybe the tiny army men could take on the tiny cats, and that way I wouldn't have to take any medication.
-Speaking of which, side effects are getting scarier and scarier. One new nasal spray carries with it the risk of a hole in the nasal septum. I'm not 100% certain of the purpose of the nasal septum, but something tells me it's important and that I'd rather just have nasal allergy symptoms than a hole burnt through the sucker.
-Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation for the current pop culture obsession with zombies? I don't know, maybe it's because my father died of brain cancer last year, but I don't understand the appeal of the dead rising in various stages of decomposition with the purpose of emptying our living skulls. Why would I want that on a t-shirt or a mug or a bumper sticker?
Of course, I didn't get the whole pirate trend either and I don't have a compelling reason for that. Although my ex's pirate fixation doesn't exactly endear the pirate movement to me. My ex is ... let's call him a rotten sack of crap and leave it at that, since my mother reads this.
And pirates? Yeah, guess what folks, they still exist, and they commit horrible atrocities. A British man was brutally beaten to death, in front of his wife, by pirates. Maybe we shouldn't glorify that, okay, Disney? Johnny Depp? Y'all got it?
-There was a big to-do on the news about how swine flu deaths now number 100 or something like that. Yeah, okay, that's sad, but do you know how many people die every year of the regular flu? 20,000. Why aren't we keeping tabs on that?
-I'm sick of hearing about how Mancow Muller has decided, after experiencing it, that waterboarding is torture, for the sole reason that when I hear the name "Mancow" I get this nasty mental picture of a grotesque man-cow hybrid. Can we just call him by his real name of Eric and leave it at that?
-Why do they spend ten minutes discussing the heat on the news? We live in Phoenix. It gets hot. That's not news. If the heat is news to you, maybe you ought to finish moving your belongings out from under that rock before you worry yourself with the news. Phoenix is hot. It's always been hot, it will always be hot.
And you know what? It hasn't been as hot as it usually is! That's news. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it, Royal Norman.
And, finally ...
-Words I do not ever want to hear again: bromance, sexting, waterboarding, BFF, swine flu, twilight, Jonas Brothers.
Thank you.

In Your Face … book.

2009-05-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

I will admit to being vain enough that I have “friended” people on Facebook just to see my number of friends go up. I won’t send out requests, myself, but I have accepted friend requests from people I don’t really care about.

For the most part, it hasn’t been a problem. Most people don’t spend an inordinate amount of time or effort on their Facebook profiles, and it’s easy enough to hide updates on Mafia Wars or other applications that I find inane.

But there are a few friends I have – one in particular, who shall remain nameless – who don’t fit into that “most people” category, and whose updates I am seriously considering hiding on my friend feed. This one friend is someone I haven’t seen in the better part of nine years, someone who I was only acquainted with in high school. And yet I know more about her personal life than I do about clipper cuts, and I’m a licensed hairstylist.

This person – let’s call her “Jane” – is under the mistaken impression that everyone she has friended on Facebook is on tenterhooks for more intimate details of her stunningly unremarkable life. You know that video, “The Trouble with Twitters,” where people Tweet things like “Watching TV with my cat” and “I forgot how much I like pickles?” Well, Jane is like that on Facebook. Nothing is too unimportant for a status update, including household chores and her husband’s bowel movements.

For instance, Jane recently baked a fruit-filled cake. How do I know this? Because she had no less than three status updates about said cake, and a photo album of the cake and the people who ate it. We see Jane in the kitchen. Jane mixing the cake batter. Jane pouring the batter into a cake pan. Jane adding the fruit filling. Jane putting the cake into the oven. The cake coming out of the oven. The cake on a cooling rack on the counter. The cake being iced. The cake being decorated. The decorated cake. Several women standing around the cake, smiling. Jane next to the cake she baked. Someone slicing the cake. Someone holding a slice of cake. Someone putting a forkful of cake into her mouth. And several more random shots of … you guessed it. The cake. I exaggerate a bit, but there were nearly twenty pictures in the album and I got a little teary-eyed at the thought that some poor bandwidth somewhere died to put those pictures on the internet.

And the status updates? “Just baked a yummy cake!” “Everyone loved the cake!” “Fruit filling is so yummy!” I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. To hear Jane tell the story, it all started in a Betty Crocker mix factory in Des Moines.
You know what, Jane? It’s a bloody cake. And no one cares.

The cake is only the most recent of her over sharing. Every single picture she has ever taken is on an album on her profile. Yes, your baby may be cute (in an awkward, let’s-hope-he-grows-into-his-looks sort of way), but do I really need to see ten nearly identical photographs of him making funny faces? Here he is in a diaper, smiling. Here he is in a diaper, smiling again. And here he is, this time smiling, in a diaper. I don’t mean to sound cruel, here. But I don’t even know the kid. If I had more than three similar-looking photos of my own nephew, I’d get a little bored. And this woman has more than thirty photo albums on her profile, each more superfluous than the last.

And I have noticed that the people who clog up my friend feed the most (Jane and those like her) seem to have the worst grammar and spelling. I’m reasonably certain these people have graduated from high school, but I’d never guess that if I were to judge on their ability to put more than three words together. These are the people who randomly ad Os to the word “so” in an effort to convey emotion. “I am sooooooooo excited!!!!!!!!!!!” They might say. Because they also enjoy overusing punctuation marks. After all, they think, if one exclamation mark means I’m excited, then twenty of them must mean I’m super (or sometimes suuuperrrrrr) excited. Exclamation mark! My recent rant about grammar and spelling was a direct result of too many illegible status updates by two specific people.

I don’t mean to pick on oversharers like Jane, though. There are plenty of other annoying friend habits that make me want to log off for good (although I’ll concede that some of it has to do with how Facebook is set up). There’s the obsessive quiz-taking that several friends practice. I have hidden many of them from my feed, but, like a particularly virulent strain of the Hantavirus, for every one quiz I stamp out three more seem to emerge in its place. No offense, Facebook friends, but I don’t give a crap what color your aura is, what supernatural creature you are, who your Twilight soulmate is, or what your Native American/Redneck/French/Scottish name is. You’re a fan of not being shot in the face? Of not catching on fire? Congratulations. You’ve acquired common sense. Now, how about becoming a fan of shutting the heck up?

I’m not saying I’m perfect and none of my updates are ever annoying. I’ll admit to being guilty of some of this, myself. I had to find out what Golden Girl I am (Dorothy). But I do those for me. Half the time I don’t post my results on my wall, and I figure when I do it annoys people so I limit myself to one, maybe two a week. And I post other things. I’ve found that I’m most annoyed by repeated quiz-taking when it’s done by people who never do anything else on Facebook. I have friends I know nothing useful about, but I could tell you what their Barbie name is, and that annoys me.

So take heed, potential Facebook friends. I will accept your friend request, yes. But I can only hold back my snarky commentary for so long, and if it’s only a matter of time before you post one too many cake pictures, beware. I will comment. And I will not hold back the snark.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog with this special announcement:

2009-05-16T00:25:00.001-07:00

I will return on Monday. And I will be funny. Promise.

And the winner is ...

2009-05-09T23:54:00.006-07:00

I'm sure that my loyal readers (all two of you) have been waiting with baited breath to find out what happened vis-a-vis my mobile phone. Did I go with Verizon or Alltel? Did I pick out a phone? Was Steve helpful?

My mother had ideas in her head about asking my brother Scooter for help picking out a phone and a plan. Bad idea, I told her. I knew, from a twenty-minute conversation I had with him during a spring training game, that my brother thinks we should switch to T-Mobile and buy used iPhones for him to hack. Never mind the fact that I don't want an iPhone, and my mother's ADD brain would explode from app overload.

And in any case, I said, nice men like Steve and Traffic Director guy are paid to explain these things to us. Why not let them do their jobs? So my mother and I went in to the Alltel store on Tuesday. Much to my chagrin, the aforementioned Steve was busy with a telephone call. Instead, we were helped by a young man named Michael, whose hair strongly resembled Alltel Chad's, only darker. I found myself wondering if there was a company policy about Chad Hair, and if maybe Steve's neat haircut meant he was a Verizon guy.

Anyway. Michael turned out to be very helpful, although if I'm honest I'd have preferred Steve if only because his desk was one of the lower ones. Michael had one of the side desks that sits about four feet high so we had to climb up onto these bar stools that were not meant for short people. But I digress. First things first: a plan. Michael showed us what we had, and what he recommended since my mother is starting her own business. She looked at me a fair few times for an opinion, which was a darn shame, because I had none. I don't actually use my phone for phone calls most of the time, so it made no difference to me how many minutes we ended up with.
As my mother compared plans, I asked Michael about the Verizon-Alltel merger. September, apparently, is when our Alltel bill becomes a Verizon bill.
"Will that Chad guy be out of a job?" I asked, staring at a promotional poster.
"Everyone asks me that," Michael said. "I've never even seen an Alltel commercial. I have TiVo."
"They're annoying," I told him. I didn't add that even if he'd never seen the commercial, he'd clearly seen the print adds and taken one in to SuperCuts with him. Finally we picked a plan, mostly because I said, "This looks good. Let's go with this one."

But what phones to buy? I know that, had things been different and I'd been in there with my father, I would have walked out with a Hue II (interchangeable faceplates make it pink). Maybe a Banter, although I don't like the idea of a sliding half. Won't it collect pocket lint and crumbs? What if it snags and breaks off?

My mother knew what she wanted, for the most part, and walked away with a cherry red BlackBerry Curve. Her main qualifications for a phone were a qwerty keypad and e-mail-checking ability. My main qualifications were an SD slot and the option to get one in pink.

I circled the phone display for an hour all together. I knew what I needed. And I knew what I wanted. And I got it - a pink BlackBerry Pearl. We went back to Michael's desk to get the phones set up. Steve came over to help. He is, apparently, a Data Transfer Specialist. It said so on his nametag.

"Do you get a special parking space?" I asked.

He said no, but I could tell he was thinking he probably should. Especially once he said so. I found myself liking Steve a little less. Up close, his hair didn't look as neat.

But the important thing is, after two and a half hours (during which time Scott told my mother on the phone that she should switch to T-Mobile), we walked out of there with new phones and a slightly better monthly plan. Which just goes to show, you can't judge a phone salesman by his hairstyle, or a mobile phone company by their incredibly inane commercials.

Oh, you humans ...

2009-05-05T02:51:00.003-07:00

You just kill me sometimes, you know that?

I try to be good on Facebook and Twitter. Only twice have I left comments correcting grammar or spelling. Twice! And I could have done so at least sixty-three times this past week alone.

On the off chance that the offenders are reading, here's a refresher. And yes, I do see the irony in my being a stickler for grammar and spelling and being so poor at style. What can I say? Strunk and White bore me.

-"Your" indicates possession. If you mean to say "you are," the word you want is "you're" which is a contraction of the words "you" and "are." As in, "I'm sure you're aware that your pants are on backwards."
-Contractions are tricky little things, aren't they? Here's another one: it's. A contraction of the words "it" and "is." "Its" is, like "your," a word that indicates possession. As in, "It's annoying when people don't know the difference between two similar words. English isn't that difficult. Its rules are fairly simple."
-"Their" indicates possession. "There" indicates location. "They're" is one of those tricky little contractions, this one of "they" and "are." As in, "They're parking their car over there."
-So much of English is about possession, isn't it? Here's another one: the apostrophe. This one's important, so I'm going to go all caps-lock on your arse: YOU DO NOT NEED AN APOSTROPHE TO PLURALIZE A WORD. Never have, never will. An apostrophe and an "s" can be another contraction, usually a given word and the word "is," as in "Jill's intolerant of poor spelling." However, if I had just returned from a Jill Convention, I would not need an apostrophe to say, "There were a lot of Jills there." The "s" alone is sufficient for pluralization. To say that "There were a lot of Jill's" there would beg the question, Jill's whats? Apostrophe = possession. I will shout it from the rooftops.
-The following are not words: lite, nite, rite, thru, tho, and any mishmashed abbreviation that one might use in a text message or a chat room.
-It is customary to begin the first word of a sentence with a capital letter, unless you are e.e. cummings. And his work just irritates me. Also, proper nouns should begin with capital letters. Is it really that hard to push the shift key?
-If a word you've typed is underlined in green or red, the computer doesn't like it. Usually, the computer doesn't like it for a reason, and that reason is that you can't spell.

Please keep these things in mind, dear humans. Read them. Learn them. Use them. Because I can keep my opinions to myself for only so long, and once I begin my merciless red-pen rampage, no one will be spared.

It's that time again ...

2009-04-29T00:15:00.003-07:00

Time for a few things that have been bothering me lately. Yay!

-This whole swine flu thing. Let’s stop blaming our porcine friends, okay? I’ve heard about human cases and fatalities but I haven’t heard of a single sick pig. And I think I would. News stations seem to enjoy using stock footage of farm animals.
-Every time I hear “Love Train” by the O’Jays, a song I used to like, I think of Coors Light, thanks to that stupid commercial where people are playing in the snow. It seems to me that inebriation and extreme temperatures are a poor mix on account of the risk of accident and injury.
-Something hasn’t really been said that really needs to be said some time, by someone, and soon, so I’m going to say it: “The Office” just isn’t funny anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Period.
-Fringe is rated TV-14 for language, violence, etc. But they need to add another letter to the TV rating system so I’ll know if I shouldn’t be eating while watching. Like a G for gore, so I don’t spit out half my ice-cream sandwich upon seeing a dead animal’s exposed spinal cord.
-Fox needs to stop advertising their new show “Glee.” Quickly. It hasn’t aired yet and I’m already sick of it, mostly because I’ve had “Don’t Stop Believin’” stuck in my head for two weeks now.
-I don't know who is responsible for the proliferation of so-called "skinny jeans" on men these days - Pete Wentz? The Jonas Brothers? - but this person needs a sound beating. Men do not look good in skinny jeans. Women do not look good in skinny jeans. No one looks good in skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are evil. Pass it on.
-I watched a lot of dumb shows when I was a kid - hey most kids' shows are dumb. But it's always disheartening to see exactly how stupid they were when you're an adult and time has clouded your memory. Case in point: I caught "The Snorks" on Boomerang a few months ago and I had to turn it off after five minutes. That show made "The Smurfs" look like "CSI: Miami."
-You know those Sonic commercials, the ones with two idiots sitting in a car and talking? I hate those commercials. I hate them!
-Also, pretty much every Wendy's commercial ever made is stupid. I've never seen a commercial for Wendy's that ever made me want to eat there.
-I can sort of understand people's outrage at the Fox network's refusal to air the president's speech and show "Lie to Me" instead. But at the same time, his speech is going to be on every other channel at that time, so it's not like if you want to watch it you can't. Just don't watch Fox. I don't think that every single channel that airs needs to have the president's speech. It's sort of annoying when they do, because I'm the sort of person who would rather read his speech the next day, where I can digest it at my own pace, and I'd rather watch regular TV in prime time. I'm going to be one of those people watching "Lie to Me." Sorry, America.
-Bea Arthur died. She was my favorite Golden Girl. I've always thought that I'd like to be like Dorothy Zbornak when I get older. Only, you know, happy.
-I still can't seem to write worth crap lately.
-I'm never tired at 1am.

Can you hear me now, Chad?

2009-04-24T01:27:00.002-07:00

I've been with Alltel for almost six years. Yes, the company with that annoying guy with Ryan Seacrest's hair. In my defense, he wasn't part of their ad campaign in 2003.

Verizon, the company with that annoying guy who used to ask if we could hear him now, recently bought Alltel. I spent about fifteen minutes on-line trying to figure out if that meant I was going to be a Verizon customer or if I'd still be one of Chad's people. It became obvious that neither company wanted me to know. I don’t know why. Maybe they weren’t sure, themselves.

So the other day, when I went into an Alltel store (still said Alltel all over the place, but it had Verizon posters on the walls) for help with a problem with my 2-year-old LG (they were no help at all), I picked up a Verizon brochure and looked at Alltel phones. Once the first guy I talked to (whose job was to direct store traffic, according to another, more helpful employee named Steve) proved useless, a second man (the aforementioned Steve) asked if I'd thought about upgrading my phone. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could yet, because I got my last phone at the end of May – the 25th, to be exact, and here’s the picture to prove it:

Although I guess it would help you to know that the file is named “052507_1357” wouldn’t it?

I digress. Steve looked it up in the computer and apparently I’ve been eligible for a new phone since January. And the store had a deal going where if I bought a Blackberry, I could get a second phone (of equal or lesser value) for free. Oh, and would I be sticking with Alltel or did I want to switch to Verizon?

Apparently it’s my choice. The phones are cooler on Verizon but Alltel is cheaper (and though the commercials do feature Chad, they are blessedly tuba-free). Part of my problem in deciding is I have no idea what the bleep I’m signed up for with Alltel. For all I know, my Alltel contract has a clause where the CEO gets one of my kidneys if his fail, and I’m paying three bucks a month for it. I know I have unlimited text-messaging, but beyond that, it’s a mystery to me. Mobile phone bills were one of those things, like motor oil changes and mowing the lawn, that my dad took care of. Any emotions aside, his being dead is a major inconvenience in that I now have to figure these things out on my own, and I find myself unable to make head or tail of a single mobile phone plan offered by either Verizon or Alltel.

Normally in this situation I’d ask my brother Scott (my own personal Geek Squad) for his opinion. But I know what his opinion is – he thinks I should switch to T-Mobile or AT&T and buy a used iPhone on Craigslist so he can hack it and play with it for a while. That’s what he did and he likes it so much that at one point his wife referred to his iPhone as his girlfriend. But I don’t want to switch to T-Mobile or AT&T. I’m happy with Alltel, kidney clause or no.

Of course, I could be just as happy with Verizon, too. And I might be no matter what. Steve made it sound like my Alltel bill would eventually be a Verizon bill. He was a bit hazy on the details. I’m not sure he understood it himself. He sure as heck wasn’t going to get any help from the company websites. But he did seem knowledgeable on the pricing for the Verizon plans. I’m thinking I’ll just go back and see Steve and let him figure it out for me. He might end up talking me into giving my bone marrow as well, but he was able to solve the problem I came into the store with, and that’s more than I can say for anyone else. And he had nice hair.

Idle Hands

2009-04-19T01:19:00.002-07:00

I’m a day early here, but I’m trying to keep to a schedule of an update every 5 days or so despite having nothing useful to say, and no ideas beyond how best to build certain animals out of Legos (which doesn't help my blog much).

A day early for what? you might ask. Which would be too bad, because I can’t hear you. But let’s pretend I can. A day early for my mother’s birthday, certainly. Monday the 20th is her 52nd birthday. Happy birthday, Mum!

Isn’t my mommy pretty?

But that wasn’t what I was referring to. In addition to April 20th being the birthday of my mother, Adolf Hitler and Luther Vandross, and the ten-year anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, and the 107th anniversary of the isolation of Radium by the Curies, it marks eight months since I was fired.

It was a Wednesday night, that August 20th. My manager – let’s call her “Bonia” – accused me of about fifty things I never did and then told me I was fired. The paperwork I had to sign was dated more than two weeks earlier, which says to me that one of the reasons she had for firing me – an incident about five days earlier – was just a smokescreen.

It’s just as well they fired me. They were real arses about me missing work while my father was having brain surgery. After he died they’d probably have told me, hey, it’s not like you can see him anymore, so get your duff into work. They weren’t very understanding about his having brain cancer. They seemed to feel that my concern over his illness should take a backseat to things such as sanitizing combs and sweeping floors. I guess my priorities were messed up. Clean floors are important, after all.

I’d never been fired before. I was rather proud of that fact. When I get a job, I keep it. I work hard, I do my job, and when it’s time to move on, I write a neat little letter of resignation and two weeks later I’m gone. But my employer – let’s call the salon “Bool Cuts 4 Kids” – decided, to hell with hard-working, honest people. Let’s fire the most reliable employee we have because she refuses to turn into a bootlicking kiss-arse.

Do I sound bitter? Oh, I’m bitter. I’m beyond bitter. The very thought of Sonia – er, Bonia – makes my blood pressure rise and my fists clench. She said (after accusing me of a lot of bad things, mind you) that I shouldn’t hesitate to list her as a reference, that she’d put in a good word for me. Well, I don’t know if she’s a liar or simply won’t talk on the phone, but I haven’t been able to get a job since then. Anywhere.

So, I’ve been unemployed for eight months. I’ve been a busy girl since I was thirteen years old, when I started washing dishes and clearing tables at my aunt’s restaurant. This is the longest I’ve gone aimless in twelve years. If I wasn’t working, I was going to school full-time, and there were many semesters that I did both. I’ve never enjoyed work. I like slacking off, watching TV, reading. I always thought that unemployment would suit me.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me state now emphatically just how wrong I was. Unemployment does NOT suit me. Unemployment is a rotten thing.

It worked well for me at first. Nine days after I was fired, my dad fell asleep on the couch and he never woke up. Eleven days later he died – a combination of a blood clot, an infection, and massive brain damage from a stroke (caused by the clot). Having a job would have been a complication I didn’t need at that time. I never thought that, at the age of 25, I’d have to plan my father’s funeral and write his obituary. I relished the time I had to grieve and … well, grieve, mostly.

But long about January, I started to get restless again. Bored. The quiet time I used to enjoy had become a burden. I’d wake up in the morning (afternoon, if I’m honest), have sugared cereal for breakfast, spend three hours playing video games, eat dinner, and watch TV and mess around on-line until I couldn’t stay awake any more. If the TV shows didn’t change, I’d never know what day it was. It was excruciating.

Desperate for a change and tired of 24-hour celebrity gossip, I started working on little projects to occupy my time. I started sewing again. I made five dresses and a hat, as well as curtains for my mother’s office. Sewing was fun because it meant I could go shopping (never mind the fact that I had to dip into my pathetic savings to do so). It was something to do, and it was easy to find progress. At the end of the day, I could hold up a dress and say, hey, I made this.

But I somehow lost the manual for my HuskyStar and the buttonholer wasn’t working, so, crabby and bored, I turned to cross-stitching. Again, I could easily see my progress. I went through one, two, three projects. I did more shopping. And again I tired of it. My embroidery floss kept getting tangled up. I lost count of stitches. I couldn’t find patterns I liked.

So I switched to scrapbooking. More shopping. But now the scrapbook I started is, essentially, finished, and I’m bored again. I’m even getting tired of my video games. I find myself longing for the repetitive days of up-at-eight, work-at-nine, off-at-six. While I don’t miss being covered in other people’s hair, I do miss being gainfully employed and feeling like I was contributing something to society. And the boredom is taking its toll on me.

I can’t focus on books – I haven’t read anything in months. I can’t write any more – it feels forced, and the snark that used to come so easily to me is an effort. I can’t focus on TV – only “Lost” and “24” hold my attention. I have no attention span and nothing to do – a deadly combination. I’d go back to school, but who the heck can afford ASU these days? Especially with no job and no income in the foreseeable future.

On the upside, I’ve got plenty of time to learn fascinating things about history. For instance, Tuesday is the 1,256th anniversary of the founding of Rome. People always say that Rome wasn’t built in a day. I think I could do it. It would give me something to do. Maybe I’ll start with Legos.

And now, your feature presentation

2009-04-14T02:16:00.003-07:00

I love going to the movies. I really do. There is nothing quite like the experience of seeing a movie in the theater, no matter how crappy or stupid the movie. But there are a few things about the whole movie-going experience that I cannot stand, and as is my SOP, I’m going to share them with you, my loyal blog readers (all two of you).

Part of it is my fault, I know that. I have a sort of large personal bubble. I don’t want anyone sitting next to me at the theater. I’d be happy if I could keep people from sitting directly behind and in front of me, too. And I am particular about where I sit. I like to be four or so rows from the middle aisle, dead center.

In order to facilitate this quirk of mine, I have to get to the theater and buy my ticket about an hour before the movie is scheduled to begin. The upside is that I can get exactly the seat I want and, through a little clever maneuvering, keep the seat next to me vacant.

There are a number of downsides. The first is that an hour before a movie starts, there’s nothing on the screen and you have to listen to the theater’s sound system play the same bad arrangement of a Mozart song six times in a row. There’s nothing really to do. I like to get to my seat and stay there, so I’ve usually got my popcorn and soda already. After an hour, before the movie’s begun, my soda’s gone and I’m out of popcorn … and because I’ve chugged 20 oz of Sprite, I have to pee badly. And look, it’s movie time!

Once something does appear on the screen, it’s painful to watch. At Harkins theaters (I go for the $1 soda loyalty cup) they begin with about ten bits of trivia, shown over and over again. The world’s largest snowflake. The oldest ice skates in the world. The Mills Brothers. The Beatles outselling the Rolling Stones. How tall the bodies of the Mount Rushmore heads would be.

Over and over. For a good twenty minutes. Then the advertising starts. It used to just be static ads but lately they’ve been showing TV commercials as well, for mobile phones and car insurance. A few of the static ads are inevitably for weight-loss clinics and heart doctors. Because after eating all that buttered popcorn, you are going to be fat and have heart problems. Then there’s the propaganda – I mean, the music video - for the National Guard featuring 3 Doors Down, a bunch of guys who are under the mistaken impression that they are much more hip and relevant than they really are.

Then we get to see some Seacrest-wannabe introducing “hot new” bands that no one has ever heard of and we’ll hear 90-second clips of their songs. Finally, after an hour of folderol, the coming attractions start. They’ll roll at the time the movie is scheduled to start, and this is usually when groups of seven or eight people will come into the theater, looking for adjoining seats. Look, you jerks, if you want to get good seats together, try getting to the theater more than two minutes before the freaking movie starts. These are the idiots that’ll make you move to the end of the freaking row so they can sit together, even though you got to the theater on time specifically so you could sit where you did. Personally, I won’t move for these people. Y’all want seats together? Front row’s open. Check it out. Don’t like it? Try being punctual for a change.

Teenagers, here's a hint for you. When the theater is dark and the movie is showing, keep your bloody BlackBerry in your pocket. That screen is mighty bright, your texting is loud, and what the bleep does a 15-year-old need a BlackBerry for, anyway? What important business are they conducting? I've had the same crappy little LG for two years now and I'm a bloody adult. I should be the one with a BlackBerry. Bitterness aside, seriously. I don't want to see or hear text-messaging when the earth is being burnt to a crisp. Sort of ruins the mood, kids.

And here’s a pointer for you older folks. Parking your walker and/or oxygen tank somewhere for the duration? Make sure it’s set down carefully, not leaning precariously against a handrail. Otherwise during a movie, the stupid thing will fall and make an absolutely unholy racket so loud that Brendan Fraser’s lines are unintelligible over the sounds of metal hitting concrete.

Also, folks, the back of my chair is not a footrest. It is the back of my chair, and I will defend it, violently if necessary. If you have a wet, hacking cough, please stay home. I came to hear the sounds of the movie, not the sounds of you yakking up a lung. And if you are clever enough to predict the movie's ending halfway through, kindly keep it to yourself, you jerk.

After all, I paid ten bucks to get into the stinking theater, and that's money I could be saving to buy a BlackBerry, or a trip to Mount Rushmore.

Fail Whale

2009-04-09T01:40:00.003-07:00

I have nothing interesting or useful to say, but I have watched this about ten times already and it's still funny.

Go here: http://current.com/items/89891774/supernews_twouble_with_twitters.htm

It's funny because it's true. Also, it makes me feel guilty about the crap I've tweeted before. Oh well.

A Few Things That Have Been Bothering Me Lately

2009-04-04T00:51:00.003-07:00

-Quote-unquote tagless t-shirts. The bane of my existence.
-People who are incapable of checking their spelling and/or grammar before posting something on Twitter or Facebook. If a word or phrase is underlined in red, folks, you've screwed something up. Fix it.
-Prescription drug side effects that are worse than the condition for which you're taking them. If taking a medication puts me at risk for liver failure, asthma-related death, and certain kinds of cancers, I'm going to have to pass. Drug commercials remind me of something Dave Barry said years ago about the two main ideas in a prescription drug ad: you need this drug, and this drug will kill you.
-People who do other things when they are driving - eating, putting on eye makeup, folding laundry, text-messaging, talking on a phone ... When I learned to drive, I was given the impression that you don't do anything else at the wheel, because you are driving. That's what you're doing. You're already doing something, so you don't do anything else until you're done with it.
-Those Geico commercials with the googly eyes on top of the money stack. Also, the accompanying re-make of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me."
-The widespread use of the phrase "pluck your eyebrows." You pluck a chicken. You *tweeze* eyebrows. I will shout it from the rooftops.
-Movies in 3D.
-That, no matter how much medical research says otherwise, people will continue to look for a quick fix for weight loss.
-How crappy the ShamWow is in real life. The commercials make it look like the coolest product ever. I say "Wow" every time ... because I can't believe how poorly it absorbs liquids.
-April Fool's Day jokes.
-The way that no one seems to say "excuse me" anymore.
-How hard it is to get a decent apple at the grocery store.
-That I can't seem to write a decent blog any more.

The Teenage Goldfish Theory

2009-03-29T00:21:00.002-07:00

I went to the mall a few days ago.

It couldn’t be helped, really. I had a hankering for a specific kind of candy and I can only find it at a candy store at the mall. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. I’m not a big fan of malls. They’re noisy and crowded and the people who work the first-floor kiosks are dangerously disrespectful of my personal boundaries, especially the girls at the sea salt scrub kiosk, who won’t take no for an answer. I’ve taken to faking mobile phone conversations when I walk past to try to avoid their assault.

I digress.

The aggressive kiosk workers were nothing (on this particular evening) to the loitering teenagers. The little punks were everywhere – outside the dollar theater, by the fountain, in the bookstore, on the escalators, in the parking lot. I couldn’t avoid them, and believe you me, I tried. It was simply impossible – the buggers had taken over. And they were OBNOXIOUS. Laughing, shrieking, pushing, shoving, kissing, running, loitering, fighting. Absolutely unbearable.

I was a teenager once, and I was a lousy little punk. The other kids my age were worse. The lot of us should have been routinely beaten – would have done us all a world of good. But I tell you this now: we were nothing, nothing, to these little jackasses at the Superstition Springs mall.

It’s entirely possible that age has changed my perspective and today’s teenagers seem more obnoxious. But I don’t think that’s it, and as I tried to get through the parking lot without committing involuntary vehicular manslaughter (what ever happened to looking both ways, kids?), I started working on a theory.

If a goldfish is kept in a small bowl, it will be a small fish. It’s not going to overextend itself if the room just isn’t there. If you put that same goldfish in a large tank, that bugger’s going to grow to an alarming size. I believe that teenage obnoxiousness is much the same.

I grew up in a small town, rather isolated with about 6,000 people on a good day. Because the town was so small, its teenagers could only get so obnoxious. The multifariousness of our misbehavior was limited. We were in a small fishbowl and didn’t have room to grow to our full obnoxious potential.

Kids down here, on the other hand, have the whole of Maricopa County at their disposal. They are free to grow to levels of obnoxiousness heretofore unknown. Big pond, big fish. Big city, unbelievably obnoxious teenagers.

So parents, I’m begging you. Take your teenagers out of the city. Put them on farms. Lock them up in their rooms. Send them to detention facilities. But mamas, don’t let your kids grow up to be creepy gigantic goldfish. Or they will be good for nothing and contribute nothing to society. Then they’ll have to sell sea salt in a mall kiosk. Is that what you really want?

Oh and in case anyone's interested, I'm also working on a Prophylactic Juvenile Incarceration theory but don't have much evidence so far on account of I can't find any twelve-year-olds to lock up for nine years.

And now, the fake news

2009-03-24T02:02:00.001-07:00

Anyone who has seen firsthand the exquisite pastiness of my face would not be surprised to learn that I’ve got a bit of Swedish blood in me. I might be off a generation or so here, but I’m pretty sure that it was my grandmother’s grandfather who left Sweden back in the late 1800s. (He married an Englishwoman, which explains my teeth.) The story that I’ve heard from family members is that he and his brother fled Sweden to avoid the draft. However, after discovering The Local, Sweden’s news in English, I think I know the real reason: Sweden is a very, very boring country.

I don’t mean to sound rude. I’m sure it’s lovely there – this is, after all, the country that gave us ABBA and IKEA. But judging by the headlines – the things that The Local considers to be important and pertinent – Sweden just isn’t very exciting.

Consider a few recent headlines:
-Hunter charged over toilet seat shooting
-Regular tobacco use falling in Sweden: study
-McDonald’s wins right to serve beer at Stockholm airport
-Group rules against Swedish swimmer on ‘sexist’ swimsuit ban
-Liberal Party looking to reduce Migration Board’s influence

So, to recap: a man shot a toilet seat, Swedes aren’t smoking as much as they used to, the airport Micky D’s has booze, a woman can’t wear something under her swimsuit, and the Migration Board has more influence than the liberal party likes.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is news.

Granted, I’ve left out a few interesting headlines for effect. For instance, a man died at a nuclear plant, and there was something about a psychotic art student. But the first day I ever read The Local, one of the biggest headlines was something about one of the guys from ABBA – I think it was Bjorn, and he had something to say about illegal music downloads. And that was a leading story.

Maybe I’m desensitized to hard news stories, living near as I do to Phoenix, a city where people are more apt to shoot you than they are to stop at a red light. I guess I’m just accustomed to reading news stories that are … well, newsworthy. Rapists on the loose. Bodies found in the desert. Car accidents in the West Valley. Stories such as those in The Local strike me as novel … and dull.

I think I know why.

I grew up in a town that had, on a good day, a population of about 5500 people. The news stories in the local paper – a weekly that cost a quarter until I was a teenager – made the headlines in The Local look like hard-hitting super-journalism. Usually it was something about the DARE program or tourism or the mayor being a crook (they were all crooks, by the way). The lack of news was just another stark reminder that I lived in the middle of nowhere, where nothing ever happened and no one cared. One of the nice things about moving to the Valley was that things happened. Sure, plenty of them were bad, but these things, good and bad, were proof that people live here. Lots of people. And they do other things, and people care. It’s exciting in a way. So many people live around where I do that there isn’t just one psychopathic felon, there are dozens of psychopathic felons. You can’t beat that. Page didn’t even have any psychopathic misdemeanor-committers.

So, sorry, Sweden, but you can keep your Bjorns and your falling tobacco use and your Saab factories and your booze-filled fast-food restaurants. I like things busy and messed up. And I think my great-great-great-grandfather did, too. Why else would he have left the only country in the world where people were as pasty as he was?

Dear Old Navy,

2009-03-19T01:27:00.004-07:00

You guys used to be cool. Your ads were stupid, but they were INTENTIONALLY stupid. No one expected a Grammy-winning song about Performance Fleece. People expected kitsch, and kitsch they got.

I looked forward to getting an ad in the mail featuring a chimpanzee in a t-shirt and khakis. Because, by gosh, you guys SOLD that t-shirt and those khakis and I could buy it if I wanted to. Or two for $15, because that was the kind of nice sale y'all usually had going.

I didn't mind the ads with the puppy, either, because who doesn't like a puppy? Also, you sell dog toys and shirts - which caused a little eye-rolling on my part, because if the good Lord intended for dogs to wear t-shirts, He wouldn't have given them fur. But I digress.

The point, Old Navy, is that your ads used to be okay. They were lame but overall unoffensive. Now? You have crossed the line. Because I draw the line at talking mannequins.

Calling them "SuperModelquins" doesn't make it okay. Giving them names and personalities doesn't make it okay. It makes it worse. It creeps the hell out of me. I don't like to see normally inanimate objects talking. I don't want to see a plastic finger break off when one plastic demon proposes marriage to another. I don't want to see disembodied legs in the back room. I don't want to see a metal pole disappearing into a female mannequin's nether regions under one of your stupid sundresses. I don't want to see a torso twisted at an unnatural angle, or worse, improperly attached. It's just yucky.

Those painted-on smiles, Old Navy? They give me nightmares. They scare me. They creep me out. I don't know what jackass in the idea room decided to use talking dolls as a selling point, but he or she needs to be fired, and then beaten soundly with a hard plastic limb. You know why? NOBODY LIKES TALKING MANNEQUINS. THEY ARE FREAKY.

I mean it. Show me one person who thinks the SuperModelquins are cute and I'll show you a person with deep-seated psychological issues and about half the normal amount of brain cells. There is nothing cute or clever about a talking mannequin. It is disturbing and scary and until you bin the lot of the SuperModelquins, you're not getting me to buy any more $10.50 t-shirts, even if I can get two for fifteen. No, sirs and madams, you've got to offer me THREE for fifteen before I can overlook that level of creepiness. I don't need a three-button-placket polo shirt that badly. I'll buy one at Wal-Mart. Wal-Marts may inevitably smell like pee, but I don't have to worry about anything coming to life and suffocating me while I shop - except maybe a greeter or two.

So you know what, Old Navy? Ditch the dolls and bring back the chimp. Well, not THE chimp since he ripped a lady's face off. Maybe another chimp. Or a pony. Nothing says kitschy like a pony in a polo shirt.

Well, shoot

2009-03-12T22:07:00.005-07:00

Warning: this one isn't particularly funny. But it was on my mind.

A few days ago I read about a problem some people are encountering on Facebook. Here's the article: http://www.slate.com/id/2212301/

Basically, on Facebook, people can tag you in a picture, and many people are uploading embarrassing old pictures of their friends thus removing any dignity a person may have attained in the years since high school.

I think I would have enjoyed the article more if it hadn't been so relevant. Last week a guy I knew in high school uploaded a picture from a marching band trip. It's not the most flattering picture of me. For one, when I was a teenager I had what doctors refer to as a bit of a weight problem. I also had bad acne and an attitude problem and I had a habit of dyeing my hair strange colors - blue for instance. It's mostly red in this particular picture but I appear to be holding my hand up to a tuba player's head, gun-like.

In my defense, I never really shot anyone, and if memory serves, he probably deserved it. But the point is that I'm not that obnoxious little punk anymore and it's a little awkward seeing pictures like these resurface at random. I don't feel a huge connection to the Jill in the picture and it seems weird that people might see the photo and think, oh, that's Jill.

But I have no control over who uploads what pictures and whether they tag me in them or not. So I've formulated a sort of revenge: I'm going to upload my own pictures from band trips, and the more they incriminate others the better. I figure it's my only recourse.

So be warned, people. If you photo tag me ... I'll tag back. And it won't be pretty. I've done a lot of dumb things in my life with a lot of dumb people, and I have pictures.

Tag, I'm (sick of) it.

2009-03-09T01:54:00.002-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a new pet peeve.

I realize this is probably something of a shock since I so rarely get worked up over stupid things. But, hey, sometimes these things happen, and this is one of those times.

Anyway. The thing that has been bothering me lately is something both sneaky and nefarious. It crept up slowly and has over time become a major issue in American today. I wholeheartedly believe it is responsible for, oh, sixty percent of textile-related violence today. I am, of course, referring to the quote-unquote tagless t-shirt.

On the surface, it’s a fantastic idea. Nobody likes those lousy, itchy tags stitched into the back neck seam of a t-shirt. Why not eliminate them and print the information instead directly onto the fabric? And if that was all that happened, I would be a happy girl.

But apparently, that’s not enough for the good folks at Hanes and Fruit of the Loom and every other t-shirt manufacturer out there. You see, there is so much important, vital information on a t-shirt tag that they couldn’t possibly fit it all inside the back of a shirt. No siree, they need a tag, and a tag they’ll have. So they stitch it into a side seam instead, usually the left, a few inches up from the hem.

And for some reason, this is twenty times worse than a neck tag. For starters, it still itches, and now in a much more obnoxious place. The logical thing to do as a consumer would be to cut the tag out. This, too, is more complicated. A tag at the neck can be cut next to the ribbed neckline quickly and easily, and you can usually cut it close to the edge without a problem. Not so with a side tag. The side tag is always serged in so that any attempt at removal risks hacking a hole in the side seam of your shirt. There’s no removing all of it without also removing the serging, which means your shirt could unravel and, potentially, come unstitched. So you’re forced to leave a small itchy strip there in the seam – always assuming, again, that you’ve managed to cut that closely without mutilating your shirt (and believe you me, I'm not that coordinated).

Can someone explain this to me? Usually when something ends in the suffix –less, I assume the item is without the thing it is less. A strapless gown, for instance, lacks straps. A horseless carriage requires no horses. A cordless phone doesn’t have a cord. A witless person can’t effectively string together more than three words. So why, I ask you, does a tagless t-shirt have a tag sewn into it?

I don’t care where the tag’s sewn in, Old Navy. If there is a tag sewn in at all, it is not a tagless shirt. So until you take all of that useless information from the tag and print it under the brand name and size at the back of the neck, you have not produced a tagless t-shirt. How’s about we call a spade a spade here, okay? There is, so far, no such thing as a tagless t-shirt.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to put something on this tag rash.

Have you seen this picture?

2009-03-05T01:43:00.002-07:00

Because it is hilarious.

I've been laughing my arse off about this for a solid week now. It's still funny.

Oh, Katie ...

2009-03-02T00:55:00.006-07:00

Top to bottom: Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy

Dear Katie,
Please eat something.
Love,
Up to No Good

Headed nowhere

2009-03-01T00:47:00.004-07:00

So. Apparently I haven't ranted in a week now. Blogger says I last updated on the 22nd and today is March 1st.

This is a shame, really, because I'm too dang tired to be clever. I'm too dang tired for much of anything, really, and I have been for about a week. I haven't even finished my Valentine's candy yet and I'm usually a holiday ahead as far as candy goes.

I blame my migraine. Here you might think that I've made an error and that I should have pluralized the word migraine. You would be wrong. If I calculated it properly, I reckon I'd find I've actually had relatively few migraines in my life considering I've been getting them since I was ten. The problem is that each headache lasts at least a week.

A week.

Sometimes - frequently, in fact - longer. So my problem (one of about fifty) is that I've had this headache for a week now and it's made me crabby and unproductive. All I've had the energy for is looking at the same thirty or so websites over and over again and wondering why they don't update every twenty minutes, because I'm bored. Most of them update once daily or so, so I've had to play a lot of video games as well (hey, you try mowing the bloody lawn when your brain's trying to push its way out of your skull).

One of my daily obsessions is a blog called Your Next Gift dot com. Each day there is a new, fairly cool item that would make a good gift. The other day they featured this. It’s a voice-activated alarm clock.

I was excited by the idea at first but upon reading the description I was disappointed. It recognizes 10 commands and none of them are what I need in an alarm clock. I need something that will stop blaring when I shout “Shut up!”

Who designs these things, anyway? What's the point in having something voice-activated if I can only say certain things? Although I reckon this keeps the clock's feelings from getting hurt if I turn verbally abusive after a poor night's sleep.

But anyway. Back to my headache.

I've seen commercials for a prescription migraine drug (that doesn't work for me, if you were wondering) where migraine sufferers have been photoshopped so they're holding their own heads, Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore-style. The caption is something to the effect that sometimes their migraines are so bad, they wish they could take their heads off.

I could see that, I suppose. There would certainly be some advantages to being headless. I know I'd like to see exactly how my arse looks in a pair of jeans before I leave the house. And if you were to meet up with other headless people, you could engage in all sorts of headless hijinks, as do the members of the Headless Hunt in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." But honestly, I've never had a headache so bad I wanted to remove my head. Probably just my central nervous system. You don't need one of those, right? I mean, the peripheral nervous system is such a slacker. Why not make it take some of the workload for a change?

Although I would miss conscious thought, I think. I've had electrical impulses firing in my brain for so long that I think I'd miss that as well. Which is why instead of removing anything vital I usually just take a Frova or two.

Frova is a wonderful little pill that my neurologist prescribed a year or two ago. It is the only thing that knocks my headaches down a few notches. And last October my doctor told me not to take it any more. So I've been forced to tough it out when a migraine hits.

I should mention that my version of toughing it out involves a lot of whining and sobbing and a fair amount of Twizzlers. And hours at a stretch on the computer. Which could prove useful. For all I know, tomorrow's Your Next Gift might be some sort of anti-migraine device.

Or at least something I can shout at if it makes a loud noise.

Friend is a four-letter word

2009-02-22T00:30:00.003-07:00

I have a confession to make - I feel like a pathetic loser making friendship requests on Facebook. “Golly gee, will you please be my friend? If it’s okay with you,” is what it feels like. I’ve never made friends easily and I guess clicking on “add as friend” just feels too desperate – instead of trying to get to know someone personally, I’m asking outright, will you be my friend? So I have sort of an unwritten personal policy about making friendship requests. If it’s someone I used to know, I won’t send them a request. They know my name. If they want to be my friend, they can find me. Let them be the pathetic, groveling idiot for a change. I’ve played that part to death.

Rule aside, I must admit I find it curious that I get friend requests from people who had no interest in being my friend before. If they didn’t want my friendship eight years ago, why want it now? Have the rules changed and being short and chubby and neurotic is “cool” now? And how do they expect me to respond? I admit, I was rather wretched in high school, but I’m not such a sad sack now that I’ll be friends with anyone who clicks on my name. I haven’t forgotten the nasty things that were said and done and I don’t reckon I ever will.

I expect that many of them are simply curious as to what I’ve been up to all this time. I’ll admit to a bit of that myself. On more than one occasion I’ve looked up people I used to know to see how their lives have turned out, although my motives are less than pure. Usually I just want to see if their lives have turned out horribly as I’d hoped they would because they were such horrible people and I don’t think they deserve success or happiness. They deserve to be miserable, just like I was – just like they made me. They’ve been Dorian Grays too long and it’s time their outward lives reflected what nasty little people they are inside.

But Jill, you might say – in which case I’d tell you not to interrupt while I’m ranting – But Jill, you might say, don’t you think that maybe some of them feel badly about how they treated you and they really would like to be your friend (even though as it’s Facebook, “friendship” is a subjective term on account of I can be “friends” with one of thirty Josh Grobans out there, or with something abstract like a TV show for example)?

Well, you rude little cutter-inner, if that were the case, they could at least send me a message to that effect. Otherwise I’m forced to assume that the only reason they sent me a friend request is because they want to make sure I know they’re getting married (to a man more than a decade older who has the same name as her absentee father; I don’t need Freud to help me with that one) or they’ve graduated college (pity I differentiate and discriminate between education and intelligence, and know for a fact that they cheated in high school and therefore likely did so in college as well) or are doing exciting and wonderful things with their lives (in the words of George Costanza, “well good for the tuna”). Or as is the case with many people, they just want as many friends as they can get as a pathetic measure of their personal popularity. I'm sorry, but I don't think anyone is really good friends with seven hundred people, spoilsport that I am.

Another disturbing Facebook friend trend came to my attention a few weeks ago. I was helping my mother with her Facebook account (she only updates her status when I harass her about it). I had a look at her list of friends and saw that more than half of them are people within the same age range as her four adult children (between 25 and 31, if it matters). This naturally reminded me of one of my biggest problems as an adolescent: People in my peer group invariably liked my mother more than they liked me. In church, they would stop to talk to her and ignore me. They LOVED my mom. If I had a dollar for every time I was told, “I just love your mom,” I could have paid for my second semester of college myself instead of borrowing from my parents (I paid for my first, rather expensive semester with my own savings, thankyouverymuch).

I had the same problem with the younger of my two brothers. He attended my high school graduation, and immediately afterward, the two of us were surrounded by my fellow graduates – all of whom wanted to talk to Chris. I decided then and there that I would never attend a reunion – I’ll send Chris instead. I’m sure my classmates would rather see him than me, anyway. He was a senior when I was a freshman so everyone my age idolized him – he was sort of the Head Jerk in school at that time and I think it would have done him a world of good if someone would have just slapped him hard at about age fifteen (hi, Chris!).

Do I sound bitter? Well, I’m bitter. And you know what else? I’m clicking on “ignore” on most of my friend requests until people actually grow up a little and observe the social niceties. A little note goes a long way.

And incidentally, former classmates, so too will I go a long way. Just as soon as I get a job and move out of my mother’s house and get my BA and become a minor celebrity. Then maybe I’ll have my people respond to your requests. After all, that’s what “friends” are for.

Blah blah blah

2009-02-17T01:02:00.002-07:00

I don't really have anything important to say (do I ever?) but I haven't updated in a few days - 5, actually - and I start to feel guilty for some reason.

You'd think I'd feel more guilty for posting a useless update, but you'd be wrong.

It's not that I don't have anything to say, really. It's that I'm too lazy to say it. It's exhausting being clever all the time. Sometimes I just don't have it in me. I've also got a problem where a topic I really want to write about is still an option on my poll and I feel like I should wait for the poll to end before posting something on that topic. My inner obsessive-compulsive won't let me jump the gun.

I have another problem as well - a topic will seem interesting, and I'll think I have a lot to say about it, so I put it in my poll ... and promptly lose interest. That's happened with about eighty percent of the topics I've come up with. Some I make myself write out anyway. Some I just pretend I never thought of. I'm a big fan of denial.

If you have any ideas for me, any at all (because as you know, dear reader, I live to make you happy) pretty please send them to me at jilleb163 AT gmail DOT com. I'll send you a platypus in return.

True Ugly

2009-02-12T01:39:00.004-07:00

Disclaimer: this isn't the most eloquent rant I've ever pieced together. And there's no point to it. But it was on my mind and - all together now, children - if it's bothering me, it's going to bother you as well.

I’ll admit it – I watch ABC’s “True Beauty.”

I don’t know exactly why. It's not as rewarding an experience as I'd hoped. The fact that it’s executive-produced by both Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher – both of whom are known for looking good and acting dumb – should have tipped me off. Somehow I thought it would be fun to watch good-looking people act like jerks. And don’t get me wrong, it really is. But I’m not sure what the real point of the show is in the end.

I’m getting ahead of myself. In case you’ve not heard of it, I should explain that “True Beauty” is a reality show in which beautiful people compete for the chance to win a boatload of cash and a spot in People magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful People issue. But the twist is that the contestants are really being judged on their inner beauty, not their outer beauty, or something like that. The winner of each challenge is determined not by who looked the best but by who was the least unbearably obnoxious.

Here’s the problem: someone’s going to win, and yet they’re all awful people. This is the first time I’ve watched a reality show and not wanted any of the contestants to win. I don’t think any of them deserve to. They’re all phony narcissists. Oh, I suppose Julia (the beauty queen) isn’t all bad. But it’s hard to tell with her what behavior is a result of her pageant training and what’s just her being insincere.

If this show is a search for people with inner beauty, why did they cast good-looking people with no redeeming qualities? I suppose the show is meant to teach viewers about inner beauty, but it should teach by example - good example, not bad. But while the contestants to possess some quantity of outer beauty most of the program seems to showcase their inner ugly. And to what point? Not one ousted contestant has shown the slightest bit of remorse when faced with incriminating footage of their appalling behavior. Some, like Monique, actually seem amused by it, as though they think their petty nastiness Is cute.

What’s more, in the interviews and commentary mixed in with challenge footage, contestants have prattled on about inner beauty, seemingly unaware that their catty behavior on film is a blinding example of the exact opposite. Perhaps they mistakenly believe that inner beauty is achieved through good dental hygiene and regular colonics. They have no real concept of what quote-unquote inner beauty is.

I think that responsibility and accountability are part of inner beauty. Yet there are always excuses for their actions, too – someone was asking for it, or needed to be dressed down. So why is it that the ones who are most convinced of their inner beauty are the ones who, when confronted with anything short of perfection, blame everyone but themselves for whatever doesn’t meet their excruciating standards of personal worthiness?

The show is educational in the sense that it tells the viewer, please don't act like this. But studies have shown that people respond better to good examples rather than bad. Instead of showing me how inconsiderate these people are, how about showing me how a decent, truly beautiful person would act?

I'm asking way too much. I know that. So why do I watch? Because it's on TV. And because I've known outwardly beautiful people who are ugly on the inside, and I like to think that they're stabbed in the back by other beautiful people the way contestants are on the show. It does my heart good. I think that most socially inept people enjoy watching socially adroit people treating each other like crap. It makes for good TV. And personally I like seeing conceited people getting kicked off and told basically, it doesn't matter that you're good looking, because you're a horrible person. And we're throwing your picture in the trash.

Oh, and Billy? Two things. 1) You’re obviously trying to compensate for your latent homosexuality. Give it up already. America won't like you any less - and how could they? They don't like you much now. 2) Calling it a “murse” does not make it better. It just makes you sound like a jackass. Bad enough you carry a murse. But to call it a murse? Sigh. Give it up, little buddy. Have you considered a Jack Bauer-style messenger bag instead?

Survey says ...

2009-02-08T03:11:00.005-07:00

I was in the middle of typing up a beautiful rant about magazines - I just got the March issue of Glamour, despite it being the beginning of February - when my eyes fell on a list I'd written on an envelope.

I like writing on envelopes, particularly the back where the flap is. I always have for some reason. I tend to write important things on the back of envelopes - shopping lists, driving directions, insurance information, deep thoughts about toilet paper, that sort of thing. I frequently forget to remove the envelope's original contents which is why a few days ago I left the house with a bill from Victoria's Secret in my hand - my directions were written on the back of the envelope.

Where was I?

Right. Ranting.

So, the list on the envelope that I'd spotted happened to be the options on Pathetic Blog Poll #3 and the votes for each. Seven people wanted my thoughts on child beauty pageants, by the way, which puts a bit of pressure on me not to disappoint. Or rather, it would if I put any thought into my writing. I in fact put very little thought into what I write, which is why I worry any time someone tells me, "Oh, Jill, I read your blog the other day ..." I'm always afraid they're going to follow that with, "Would you like to go with these nice men in white coats now?" Or "You do realize that the usual way is think, then speak, right? Not speak, then think?"

But if I cared what people thought of my taste and opinions I wouldn't answer the door in my moose pajamas or quote Homer Simpson in the middle of an otherwise intelligent conversation.

Where was I this time?

Right. Pathetic Blog Poll #3. So, it occurred to me that, hey, maybe I ought to consider pontificating on one of the topics I used in my poll. I've used a few already and as I've asked for people's opinions I probably ought to take them into consideration. So my magazine rant is on hold for a while - maybe it'll be on my next Pathetic Blog Poll.

But that's the beauty of this whole thing, isn't it? I can write about whatever I want. I can ignore every topic I've used in a poll and write paeans to the potato if I am so inclined. I can write six or seven rants about the one topic nobody votes for. Because it's my blog! Hahahaha!

I mean, um ... well ... that is ... Oh, come on. I posted a squirrel picture earlier. That's nice, right? If you're not too concerned about the hantavirus or that sort of thing.

I'm sure what I meant to say is, thank you, kind reader, for investing your precious time in my humble little blog. Please take a moment to vote in my poll.

There are a few other things I was going to mention but I can't find the list I made. I think it's on its way to Old Navy with my credit card payment.

Squeeeee!!!

2009-02-08T02:59:00.005-07:00

I don't have anything useful or humorous to say, but I do have a picture to share.

I found this little guy on Cute Overload and was rendered incoherent.

This happens to me frequently when I see an animal, even a marginally ugly one (I squealed the first time I saw an actual pigeon, despite being seventeen at the time), especially a baby animal. I blame my parents, of course, as I was never allowed any pets as a child. And when something as cute as this chubby little squirrel comes along? I shriek like a howler monkey.

That's also my reaction to a video of the smallest pigs in the world, despite repeated views. And my reaction to sheep and goats and cows and ducks and rodents and especially pigeons and chickens.

I think I was going to make a point about everything but I've been distracted by the cuteness of my little chipmunk buddy.

Just be glad he wasn't a baby chipmunk. I'd be unable to type.

The sound of music

2009-02-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but if not, I’ll say it now: I’m in therapy.

But that’s not the point. Anyway, I’ve been going to the same therapist for over three years, and in that time, I’ve noticed something: the music in the waiting room sucks.

On my very first visit, I took a seat in the waiting area and filled out a few papers. It took me longer than it should have, because I was distracted by the music playing: “Rainy Days and Mondays” by Karen Carpenter. I mentioned in a previous rant that I find any song recorded by a Carpenter to be sort of a downer. Well, “Rainy Days and Mondays” makes “Merry Christmas Darling” sound like a lively march.

I went to my therapist because I’m depressed. Let me tell you, “Rainy Days and Mondays” didn’t cheer me up any. After a time, I was called back and I met John, and we got down to business. He asked me the usual questions, among them a query about any suicidal tendencies.

“I’m not suicidal,” I told John, “but if I was, that music in the waiting room would have pushed me over the edge.”

He agreed that Karen Carpenter wasn’t the best, cheeriest choice for a therapy waiting room. It changed the next week to a classical music CD – some of the most lachrymose symphonies I’ve ever heard. It was almost as bad as the previous week but at least this time I could appreciate the musicianship of the composers and performers.

That was in October, so it wasn’t long before the classical dreariness gave way to Christmas songs. Those I could tolerate. From there it went to some fairly benign piano music, although more than enough of that was depressing.

Then John and his colleagues moved to their temporary offices farther west on Baseline. An old radio was tucked under a silk plant on a beat-up side table. I was hopeful at first because it seemed to be set to an oldies station. But after hearing “Dust in the Wind” and “In the Year 2525” I found myself thinking longingly of the days of Karen Carpenter.

Then one day someone changed it to 95.5, the Coyote – a local jazz station. Aside from a vague sense of being in an elevator, it was okay. They stuck with it in their new offices, too, and I didn’t think much about it until I realized how many jazz songs are in fact about sex. I should mention that many of the therapists in John’s office specialize in sexual and pornographic addiction. So I found it particularly ironic when I was waiting for my appointment one day, along with three or four men from the LifeStar group, and 95.5 played “Sexual Healing.” I said as much to John, and the next week it was Christian pop music.

I didn’t mind too much since as a general rule, Christian pop is inoffensive and upbeat. But it only lasted a week or two. Then it was some rather frantic-sounding orchestral arrangements (Wagner, I think), and then … silence.

I suppose they’ve given up. I don’t reckon there’s any kind of music that works well in a therapy office, but still, you’d think they’d keep at it until they find the least intrusive variety. Personally, I’d be happy with KSLX. Nothing to motivate a person to get up and do something like a little Led Zeppelin.

I think I’ll suggest it next time. They seem to take my music recommendations seriously. I can use that to my advantage.

See, I’ve learned something in my years of therapy after all.

Are we done yet? Never!

2009-02-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

October 6th (I think it was the sixth) was my three-year anniversary with my therapist.

Three years.

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve made an enormous amount of progress in that time. If you think I’m bitter now, you should have met me three years ago. I was more bitter than Dorothy Zbornak. And I didn’t just have issues. I had … a subscription.

Contrary to what I tell people, therapy is not fun. It’s not easy and most of the time it sucks. It’s hard work. The things I repressed, I repressed for a reason – they’re painful to think about, and even more painful to rehash.

But that’s not my point. My point is that it’s been three years and I still see John every week. There’s no end in sight. Sure, on occasion John will ask me what goals I have, what I want to accomplish from my hour every week. Because I am making progress, and logic dictates that eventually, I’ll work through my problems and not need weekly therapy.

Here’s the problem: in the past three years, I’ve not been living in a bubble. Things continue to happen. And that means that more problems arise.

I was making progress this year. I was doing rather well mid-summer. Then I got dumped. Then I lost my job. Then my dad’s cancer came back, and then he died. Issues galore. For every problem I work through, three more pop up in its place.

I suppose that over the years I’ve learned to deal with my problems better, which means I deal with them more quickly and in a more mentally healthy manner. But the fact remains that problems keep coming, and as long as they do, John’s got job security.

I suppose that a recession is a good time to be a therapist. People realize what utter crap their lives are and seek help. And the longer you’re in therapy, the more problems from your past emerge. No one goes to a therapist for *one* problem. Even if it starts off as one problem, the next thing you know, you’re realizing you had a dysfunctional childhood and that you’re disappointed in your college experience and that you’re been self-medicating with candy … three years pass and you’re still nuts.

But you know that you’re nuts, and so it’s a little easier – which is good, because you’re going to be nuts forever.

Cheers.

I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper ...

2009-01-28T01:57:00.001-07:00

I think my mother's the only one who wanted to read about this, but too bad. I needed an excuse to use this title. So here goes.

A few weeks ago I was listening to Michael Medved’s radio program.

In my defense, my mother had turned the radio on and chosen the station. Had it been up to me, I would have been listening to KSLX – or better yet, nothing at all on account of I’d just woken up and was sort of crabby.

Anyway.

Not being a regular listener, I can’t say for sure whether Michael Medved is an obsessive lunatic . However, based on the hour or so of programming I heard, the man needs psychotropic meds, and quickly. Because he thinks that one of the worst problems in America today is soda consumption. To listen to Medved tell the story, one would think that sugared beverages killed Kennedy, knocked over the World Trade Center, ruined the economy, and ended more lives than cancer, heart disease and AIDS combined. I’ve never heard anyone discuss soda with such vitriol.

Soda, apparently, is the single biggest reason that Americans, and more specifically children, are obese. He thinks that it’s worse than drugs and that it should be outlawed.

I wish I was making this up, I really do.

Seriously, Michael Medved? With all the problems society is facing, you’re going to zero in on soda? Forget violent crime, unemployment, abject poverty, a lack of health insurance, drunk driving, and about fifty other things. Oh, no. It’s soda that’s the real evil. The road to hell is paved with Coke bottles.

I’ll admit, soda isn’t the healthiest thing in the world. If you drink a lot of it, you’re not going to be in great shape. But a few cans a week never killed anyone. A Dr Pepper with lunch isn’t going to inflate your arse. Mountain Dew doesn’t cause diabetes. And if children are overweight, soda is likely merely a factor, not the sole cause. If you’re eating rubbish, it doesn’t make a difference what you’re washing it all down with.

If Michael Medved wants to vent his spleen on the beverage industry, why not turn his rage to the makers of these so-called energy drinks? Teenagers and young adults are using them as meal substitutes and downing them in alarming quantities. Or what about the perpetuators of lattes and frappucinos and iced coffees? The calories in those suckers is nothing short of alarming. And again, young peple are sucking them down instead of eating.

And, Michael Medved, what about the alcohol manufacturers? Why not get angry at them for their sly marketing to teenagers? Why not rage about DUIs and alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis of the liver and how more and more starlets are going to rehab because they’re alcoholics before they can even legally buy alcohol? Where’s your vitriol there, Michael Medved?

I’m not advocating soda instead of milk instead of school cafeterias. I don’t think people should have Coke with every meal, or spend more on Diet Pepsi than they do on groceries. And I’m certainly not going to say that soda is good for you. But plenty of things aren’t good for you, but are fine in moderation. It’s not the Coca-Cola company’s responsibility to teach moderation. That’s the job of parents, and if they’re not doing it properly, they’re to blame. Not the hardworking people who make and bottle and ship and deliver soda across the country. Should they lose their jobs just because people are stupid? No, Michael Medved, they should not. And you should shut your bloody piehole about soda and focus on the real problems we’ve got going on.

Like loudmouthed, obnoxious radio show hosts.

Just a thought.

Tag – I’m It!

2009-01-25T03:29:00.004-07:00

Most people prefer to make a long story short, but I’m much better at making a short story long …

I don’t remember exactly how – I think a celebrity gossip website was involved – but a few months ago I came across a blog called That’s Hideous. As you might guess from the name, That’s Hideous is a blog about ugly things – frequently designer clothing or shoes or on occasion some kind of artwork made with what looked like the skull of a rodent-like dog.

I’ve always felt that quite a bit of, if not most, designer items were absolute crap. I’ve seen celebrities wearing what looked like Jerry Seinfeld’s puffy shirt, and they were considered fashion-forward, just because some greasy, leathery-skinned Italian’s name is stitched on the label of the offending garment. (And I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that fashion designers never appear in public wearing anything as ridiculous as the things they stuff models into for runway shows.)

Where was I? Hideous things, right. Anyway, I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I was to see someone else pointing these things out. A Coach handbag isn’t pretty just because it’s a Coach handbag. In any case, That’s Hideous became one of those websites I checked every day for updates (hence its inclusion in my Daily Grind blogroll). And when I checked it yesterday, under an item about Pete Wentz’s atrocious boots, I found what is, in the vernacular, a “tag”.

Considering the thirteen-odd years I’ve been on the internet, you’d think I’d be more familiar with this sort of thing, but you would be wrong. Tags are rather new to me, probably because I’ve mostly used the internet for baby animal pictures and socially inept rambling. But near as I can tell, when you’ve been tagged, you have to answer a number of questions or make a number of statements, depending on your tagger. You then tag others to make them do the same, and so on, creating a sort of chain-letter of how-well-do-you-know-a-person. There now, I think I’ve explained this all to death.

In any case, after reading Deka’s (who knew she could squeal like a pig? Not I.) I found that my little blog had been tagged (and also blogrolled – thanks, Deka!). I’ve never been tagged before, so I was excited in a pathetic sort of way. And so, to finish my unnecessarily long story, here’s what I came up with.

Ten things I love
1. Disneyland. I’d live there were it allowed.
2. Swedish Fish, despite my irrational fish phobia. Maybe it’s the Swede in me – although they’re manufactured in Canada.
3. My family. Most of them, anyway.
4. Animal Crossing: City Folk. I’m unemployed; It’s all I’ve got.
5. “The Soup” on E!. No one does snarky quite like Joel McHale.
6. Dr. Greg House. Although I’m not sure what that says about me.
7. Celebrity gossip.
8. Cold cereal. Works for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and is healthy as part of a complete breakfast (not that I ever eat a “complete breakfast”).
9. Domo-Kun, that fuzzy brown harbinger of Japanese television
10. Bookstores. I’m a nerd like that.

Ten things I loathe
1. Made up mishmashed words like “webinar” and “guesstimate” and “edutainment.”
2. “The Sound of Music.”
3. Brain cancer.
4. People who run red lights.
5. Katy Perry. She tries so hard to be edgy and hip and it just ain’t working.
6. The rapidly diminishing resale value of my Chevy Cavalier (down to $1300 already).
7. Migraine headaches.
8. Anything with more than four legs.
9. Fish.
10. Bad grammar.

Ten random facts
1. I faint at the sight of my own blood.
2. All of my electronics are pink (phone, camera, computer, Nintendo DS, etc)
3. My picture was in a (now-defunct) teen magazine when I was in high school.
4. What started off as a joke has now led me to the point where I automatically say “Canadia” instead of “Canada” (my sincerest apologies to the residents of America’s hat).
5. I have a good internal clock – I can tell within 5 minutes how much time has passed since I checked a clock and I can wake myself up at a certain time without an alarm clock.
6. I can type 95 words per minute.
7. I’ve had my gallbladder and my tonsils removed (on separate occasions, of course).
8. I used to work in a library.
9. I can’t swim.
10. People in general make me very nervous.

I reckon I'm supposed to tag a few people now as well. I doubt the webmasters and -mistresses of the celebrity gossip sites that I frequent would consider it. So I'm going to pick on family, if they're willing (America being a republic, I can't force them). So I'm going to pick on Holly, Becky, Patsy, Dana and ... hmm ... I know embarrassingly few real people. I'll leave it at four, particularly as I'm not expecting any response.

So there's random fact number eleven: I believe that having low expectations keeps a person from being disappointed.

The ugly office, or: My therapist is messing with my head

2009-01-24T01:55:00.005-07:00

My therapist – I’ll call him John, since that’s his name – my therapist has a beautiful office. It’s been feng shui-ed and color coordinated, the plants are lovely and green, and the sofa is a miracle of modern engineering – terribly comfortable, but easy to get up and off of.

It wasn’t always so, although it’s rarely been uncomfortable. When I first started going three years ago, John and his colleagues were in a small-ish office on Baseline. Then they planned to move. But their new building wasn’t complete yet. So once the lease on the old place ran out, they relocated to temporary offices down the street – the furnishings of which were spartan to say the least, particularly the folding chair collection that made up the waiting room.

Finally the new offices were completed –again, on Baseline, but this time a good seven or so miles to the west. But it was worth the drive, because the new waiting room has overstuffed leather couches and lots of dark wood and all sorts of English-Lord’s-study sort of touches. And John’s office was a good size, with a little niche for his desk and a big window for the plants. I spent many a happy (sort of) hour staring at the ugly tasseled rug and gazing out the window into a lovely green area, hoping for a glimpse of the fluffy black cat that likes to nap there.

A number of other therapists are in the same set of offices, and some of them do group sessions. They need more room for more people, obviously, so some months ago instead of meeting in John’s chi-friendly workspace, we went down the hall to what I can only describe as an architectural afterthought. One last room tacked on the end, a perfect small square with two windows.

I call it the ugly office. Nothing matches. The furniture looks like remnants from other decorating styles, the throw pillows clash with the throw blanket (and by extension the sofa), a large black floor fan/heater takes up a good deal of room, and the filing cabinet looks like it was on special at Costco. The walls are painted ecru but the switch plate and the outlet covers are bright white. The decorating touches are random and sporadic – a little iron scrollwork here, a wood-framed clock there, dark mini blinds killing the natural light from the windows. Everything is in a different color palette, which means that nothing matches – further adding to the feel that the room was a last-minute addition.

The first time we met in the room, I didn’t think much of it beyond, “hey, I didn’t know there was a room here.” But it’s been nearly four months and we’re still in the ugly room. I don’t know who’s using John’s office that couldn’t find ANY other place to meet. But the ugly room has taken its toll on me. I can’t focus in there. The schizophrenic decorating is too much of a distraction. I actually spent 20 minutes of therapy time a few weeks back detailing all the ways the room irritates me.

I felt much better when I’d gotten it all out. And John agreed that it was an ugly room.

But we still meet there, week after week, leaving me to wonder: now that he knows I hate the room, is he having us meet there to annoy me? He practically admitted once to pushing my buttons if he’s had a boring day. Part of me suspects that his office is free and we’re meeting in the ugly room because I hate it in there.

Last Thursday we went into the ugly room as usual, and much to my surprise, there were a few additions. A large rug covered the snag in the carpet by the couch, and a number of silk plants had been stuffed haphazardly into corners. One particularly large fake palm tree was stuck behind the chair John sits in, giving him the impression of being the ruler of a small tropical nation. And there were new throw pillows - ones that matched absolutely nothing, including the rug. Which, by the way, is hideous. It's squares - six squares long and eight squares wide - with smaller squares in the middle. There is no pattern to the colors of the squares. I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find one.

After I'd discussed my week and grief and a few other things, John asked me about the rug. I think he could tell it bothered me. So I told him I hated the randomness of the square colors. You know what the man did? He asked me about it for the remainder of the session, seeming fascinated that the disorder bothered me. I told him that my brain feeds on logic and order and reason, and the ill logic of pink square, brown square, blue square, green square just irritated the enamel off my teeth. And it wasn't enough just to say that. He said that maybe the point was that there was no point. So I had to argue semantics and how no point can't be a point - no avocado can't be an avocado, after all, and points in this instance were just as good as avocados.

And that wasn't enough. I had to try to explain the inner workings of my brain to him. At 5:30 we quit, me with my migraine and John looking like he'd just watched a favorite TV show.

"I think this helped me understand a little better how your mind works," he said. I was sorely tempted to ask how, after more than three years, he didn't have a comprehensive understanding of the Jill Brain, but I kept my trap shut because I suspected that would only lead to more questions.

And because I was still mad about the rug.

These boots were made for walking - if they fit

2009-01-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

For reasons I can’t properly explain, I have always liked boots. I’m not talking about stiletto-heeled pointy-toed ankle booties. Those make me throw up a little in my mouth. But I like regular boots – cowboy boots, riding boots, Frye boots, combat boots, Wellington boots.

Boots make an outfit. A shirt and jeans is just a shirt and jeans. But a shirt and jeans and boots? That’s a look. Boots are sturdy. Boots are warm. I even like the word “boots.” But I never wear them.

I can’t.

I don’t mean that I can’t in a fashion-phobic sense. I don’t mean that they make me look short or anything like that. What I mean is that I literally can’t. Apparently in the world of shoes, calf size does not grow with foot size, with the result that I can’t fit my (what must be) freakishly large calves into any pair of boots I’ve tried on.

I got a pair of boots (my father called them Nazi boots) when I was about fourteen years old. They zipped up the sides. They looked perfectly normal in the catalog but when they came in the mail, I found that they didn’t zip higher than four inches above my ankle.

I tried to wear them anyway, unzipped. I looked like a bloody fool. But I wanted to wear boots so badly! I was even skinny then. And still they wouldn’t zip.

I’ve tried since then to find boots that fit over my calves. I’ve never thought I had abnormally large calves; on the contrary I think they’re fairly proportionate to the rest of my body, including my feet. So why is this so hard? I can’t even get Wellies to fit. I got a pair from Old Navy that I thought must certainly fit me, as the opening at the top was oversized. No such luck. I could get them on, but the top of the boots was scrunched under my calf.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover these boots. They wrap! Meaning they will fit my legs. The problem of course is that they’ll run me a hundred bucks give or take, and I’m unemployed.

I’m going to save up. I have to. They may not be comfortable, I haven’t a clue. But I don’t care. This is my one chance in life to wear boots and I’m not going to miss it.

“O,” it’s a Mexican food restaurant!

2009-01-15T01:32:00.000-07:00

I was headed north on Val Vista one weekend in December, headed for the freeway on-ramp. At Baseline I passed Nando’s, a Mexican restaurant my mother is fond of. Just down the street is a Filiberto’s. And about 200 yards from that? Julio’s.

I’m not a big fan of Mexican food so I’d never thought about it before, but passing those three caused a little “click” in my brain. All three restaurants’ names end in an O sound. Well, more particularly an “o’s” sound.

Merely a coincidence, I thought. Until later that evening I saw a TV commercial for Macayo’s, and my mom mentioned eating at Serrano’s. And the more I thought about it the more names came to me. Some Burros. Popo’s. Abuelo’s. Los Dos Molinos. Rito’s. Los Olivos. Mi Amigo’s. Federico’s. Armando’s. Rubio’s. Bertos. Dos Gringos. Raliberto’s.

I can understand some of them. I have a rudimentary understanding of the Spanish language. They’re men’s names – Federico, Filiberto, Julio, and the restaurants “belong” to the men, hence the possessive form. But does every restaurant have to be Some Guy’s restaurant? Can’t we get a little more original than that?

I know that there are non “-o’s” Mexican restaurants in the Phoenix area. Hey, there are plenty of “-a’s” out there too. I know, I know, there are others. Arriba, Z Tejas, Baja Fresh and Chipotle come to mind. But so many Mexican restaurants go with the “-o’s” suffix. It’s so *boring*. Why not go with “Raul’s House of Tacos” or something like that? And even that has a man’s name in it … Let the women play too, guys, okay? How about Rosa’s? Maria’s? Juanita’s? Or we could keep names out of it all together. I’m still waiting for a “Comida Bonita” or a “Burrito Bueno” or a “Casa de Arroz y Frijoles.”

I think I’m going to be waiting a while. Just as well, really, because I may have spotted a trend in the names of Italian restaurants and I have to investigate.

I can still play a mean “Clair de Lune”

2009-01-11T02:46:00.002-07:00

A few weeks ago I read an absolutely amazing book. “Outliers” is the latest from the incomparable Malcolm Gladwell – the man responsible for “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” In “Outliers,” Gladwell looks at what makes people successful in their respective fields.

What makes a man (or woman) successful, Gladwell says, is not so much where he was born, if he got good grades, what school he went to, or even his God-given talent in his area of expertise. Gladwell relates story after story to prove that what matters is as arbitrary as the month a person was born – or quite frequently the year – and how much time he or she puts into his work.

Gladwell cites what he calls the 10,000-hour rule. The idea here is that regardless of natural ability, what is really necessary for mastery in a given area is 10,000 hours of practice. Here’s an example: Music students were divided into two groups – one group of children with a natural musical ability, and another group of children who simply enjoyed playing. Over time, it became clear that the students with the natural ability had *nothing* on the other children if they didn’t put in the practice. Less-talented children who practiced did just as well if not better than the children with natural ability who practiced sporadically.

The Beatles, in their early years, had a gig in Germany that required them to play for 8-hour stretches. Bill Gates had access to computers at a time when such a thing was unheard of, especially for a 13-year-old boy. “Outliers” gives example after example of successful people who had the right opportunities in front of them to make them great. I know I’m not doing this book justice; I couldn’t possibly do it justice. This is one of those instances where I’m afraid I must insist that you read it for yourself. It will blow your mind to bits. But there is a point to my story lurking on the horizon, and I’m getting there.

I took my first piano lesson at the age of three. I loved playing and I had a knack for it and in particular for sight reading. I took lessons every week from age three to age … fourteen, probably. And even after I quit I continued to play at home for my own enjoyment – and still do. I had good instructors – great instructors, themselves gifted musicians. And I practiced at home, I really did. But I find that, at the age of twenty-five, I’m simply not that good. There are a number of twelve-year-olds out there playing as well as I do. I don’t mean to put myself down; I can tackle Rachmaninoff and Debussy with the best of them. But twenty-two years after my first lesson, I am not a concert pianist. It used to bother me, and I used to get depressed when I heard a piano played well. But no longer, for I now know why.

I’ve calculated that over the years, I’ve practiced 6,000, maybe 6,500 hours. Quite a lot, but not enough. It isn’t that I lack the talent or the skill set. I simply never spent enough time at the piano. My gift for sight-reading meant that more often than not, if I didn’t like a song I was assigned, I’d glance at it on my way to my lesson, and play it for the first time for my teacher (and I got away with it about 75% of the time). Had I really applied myself, practiced the piano instead of reading or turning cartwheels, I could easily have gotten to 10,000 hours, and I’d be at a concert hall somewhere, dazzling a well-dressed crowd.

I knew I didn’t practice enough. But I didn’t just want to play the piano. I wanted to be a kid. I wanted to play softball and read and dress up my Barbie dolls and color and swim and laugh and play. So many times I’d set a timer for the hour of piano practice I’d been prescribed, only to succumb to soul-sucking tedium after thirty-five minutes.

So I’m not a concert pianist. You know what? I’m okay with that. My vanity is such that what matters is not what I have achieved but what I could achieve if only I’d apply myself. I’m okay with that.

Particularly since I was born in the wrong month for ice hockey.

I need your money!

2009-01-06T15:38:00.004-07:00

Two posts in one day, aren't y'all lucky! But I have a good reason. I need your money.

Well, not me specifically, although I'd not say no to a cash gift.

The BC (British Columbia) Cancer Foundation needs your money. I'm not a resident of America's Hat, myself, but any organization that's working against cancer is good in my book.

My brother - no, not that brother, the other one - is participating in the Ride to Conquer Cancer. Apparently he's taken up cycling, don't ask me why. But he's decided to do something with it, so more power to him, I say.

Anyway, here's the link to his donation page. If you've got an extra fiver, give a fiver. Ten, twenty, even better. Every penny helps, seriously. If you don't have any to give, pass the link along to someone who does.

Cancer killed my paternal grandfather at 62, my favorite aunt at 58, and my daddy one month after his 52nd birthday. Cancer sucks. Let's do something about it, okay?

Crikey!

2009-01-06T02:07:00.001-07:00

I miss Steve Irwin.

I was channel-surfing a few days ago in the late afternoon and the only show on television that didn’t involve murder, police brutality, or illegal activities was “The Crocodile Hunter.” Not just any episode, either, but a special on baby animals.

I hadn’t watched the show in ages – probably not since the death of its star. I’d forgotten how insane Steve was. And how insightful, and knowledgeable - about every creature on God’s green earth.

He had no natural fear. He reached into a den of baby rattlesnakes and pointed to the mother snake’s monstrous teeth. “Never, ever try this. I’m a professional … no one should ever touch a rattlesnake.” He wrestled with crocodiles. He stuck fingers into mouths full of sharp teeth. He rubbed the bellies of big cats. “Lion cubs have got a great bite!” He picked up and carried hungry young black bears.

Steve found beauty in even the most hideous of animals. He pointed out the delicate nose of an orangutan, the tiny venomous teeth of a baby diamondback, the clumsy elegance of an elephant’s stride. He could find the hiding place of the stealthiest of animals, lure the shiest of marsupials from their home, identify specifically the most hideous and generic looking insect. He let iguanas sit on his arm and head or bats hang from his shirt while he explained to the camera the creature’s preferred diet (which seemed at time to include Steve’s hair and khaki shirt).

He used words like gorgeous, glorious, magnificent, beautiful, lovely.

Steve loved animals and he respected them. He didn’t fault an animal for behaving like an animal as so many idiots seem to do these days. If an animal bit him, he knew it was his fault for not being more careful. And he didn’t let bodily harm stop whatever he was doing.

“The Crocodile Hunter” was one of those shows that always seemed to be on. Anytime I needed something to watch, I could turn to animal planet and there it was. I watched a lot of television many years ago – much of it educational, believe it or not. I watched the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, the History Channel. I didn’t learn much. But somehow when I watched “The Crocodile Hunter” I remembered. I learned about the wombat, the iguana, the sloth, the possum, the sun bear, the armadillo and about twenty other animals. What Steve said stuck with me – perhaps because he said it with such enthusiasm.

It seemed particularly ironic that he died from the sting of a normally docile creature. I always thought he’d be eaten by a crocodile or torn apart by Tasmanian devils. But a stingray? It didn’t seem right.

I still watch Animal Planet sometimes, but it’s not the same without Steve. I miss his child-like delight and wonder and unwavering enthusiasm. No one on TV has been able to match it, and I don’t think anyone ever will.

Take a Page from my book … and you can keep it

2009-01-04T02:09:00.001-07:00

In my first ever Pathetic Blog Survey, one person cast a vote to have me write about why I never discuss life in the town in which I was born. I’ve put off doing so because … well, obviously I don’t like to discuss it, or that wouldn’t have been an option on the survey. But I’ve run out of things to blog about (television’s been dull lately) so here goes.

Imagine that you had an embarrassing, invasive, slightly painful medical procedure performed – a colonoscopy for instance. Maybe a lot of people know you went in for a colonoscopy. Maybe they’ve had colonoscopies as well. Maybe they’re wondering how yours went – after all, theirs weren’t bad at all, and some of these people liked them so much they decided to get one every day.

Would you actually consider discussing your colonoscopy with any of these people? Would you want to get into the details of it – removing your trousers, putting on a paper gown, having something inserted into an orifice that is for all intents and purposes a one-way street? Would you discuss individual polyps? How about the lingering arse pain that resulted?

I sure as hell wouldn’t. If I’ve experienced something humiliating and painful, I shut my gob about it and repress it until my therapist makes me talk about it. I don’t voluntarily bring it up and I sure as sod don’t bring it up every chance I get.

Living in Page was like an 18-year-long colonoscopy. It sucked. It was miserable. I hated it. It left its own kind of scarring. I’m happiest pretending that I didn’t completely exist until I moved to the Valley of the Sun six years ago. As far as I’m concerned, I never lived in Page.

And neither did anyone else. Being in Page can hardly be considered living. The place didn’t even get a Wal-Mart until I was seven or 8 (1990 or 91) and it wasn’t even Super. Just a regular Wal-Mart, and not a particularly good one. It had three aisles of pet beds and shelf after shelf of Black hair care products and relaxers despite there being at last count maybe ten black people (mostly men) in a town of 6,000.

There is one middle school and one high school. Two elementary schools, but for more than half of my schooling I was with the same group of jerks and idiots, almost none of whom cared if I lived or died. So the girls that were b****es to me in sixth grade got to be b****es to me in seventh and eighth grade, too, and throughout all four years of high school. I’m just saying, a change in bullies would have done me good.

I’m the youngest of four, which meant that every teacher I had thought of me instantly and prejudicially in terms of my sister or one of my brothers – unfortunate for me since the younger of my brothers (who is closest to my age) was a real arrogant jackass in high school and he failed to make a favorable impression on 90% of the teaching staff at the high school (Hi, Chris). Many a teacher looked at me on the first day of class and said, “Oh, you’re Chris’s sister,” in the same tone that one would use to say, “Oh, you’re a convicted felon.”

The one teacher who remembered Holly best was, sadly, my sewing teacher. My sister is a much better seamstress than I am on account of I have very little patience and I get lazy and cut corners. So with Mrs. Buck it was always, “Well when your sister was in my class she made the most beautiful (insert garment name here) …” and then she’d hold up whatever atrocity I’d serged together in a rush and suggest I not work with silks or satins for a while as she marked a “C” in her grade book. Well, I haven’t worked with satins since then, Mrs. Buck. I hope you’re happy.

I was the Rodney Dangerfield of Page, AZ. I got no respect. I had maybe three or four teachers in my entire academic career who actually endeavored to work with me as an individual (albeit one with exacting standards of morality and grammar for a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old). And even one of them often said, “When your brother was in my class …” although I have to admit I never asked which brother and silently hoped it had been Scott.

I’ve glossed over the bullying and verbal abuse I was subject to because those were like a combination colonoscopy and gynecological exam – best left unvisited except by trained professionals like my intrepid therapist, John. Suffice it to say that there was many a morning I woke up angry that I hadn’t managed to die in my sleep the night before, and that I faked sick dozens of times to get out of going to school and facing such nastiness.

I concede, as a small child I was happy in Page. I didn’t know what a pathetic little hellhole I was in. I had my friends Carrie and Rachel and my blankie and my toys and my family and that was all I needed. But that was such a small fraction of my life that it hardly bears mentioning in this little rant.

I hope this satisfies the question as to why I never mention Page. And even if it doesn’t, tough. I’m not going to bring it up ever again if I can help it. And if I can’t help it … well, there are a number of psychotropic drugs out there that will help quell the urge.

It is human nature to avoid discussing unpleasant things. Living in Page (in my experience) is the most unpleasant thing I can imagine. So I avoid discussing it. And I may never discuss it again.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and, in the words of the starfish on “Finding Nemo,” find my happy place - which I can guarantee you isn’t in Coconino County.

New Year’s resolution: edit my vocabulary

2009-01-01T00:30:00.001-07:00

I should have expected it, really. 2008 was both an Olympic year and a presidential election year. It was bound to happen. It does every year. But this year was worse.

I am of course talking about overused words and phrases. Each year has its list – things that everyone is tired of hearing about but will talk about anyway. I’d imagine that my list is a little different than others’. I’m much more easily annoyed. But short fuse or not, there are a lot of things I’m sick of hearing, and I’m hoping that by listing them here, I can help raise awareness and expunge them from our social consciousness. And so here they are, in no particular order.

1. The Economy
2. Michael Phelps
3. Obama (I’m sick of hearing his name and he’s not even sworn in yet)
4. Joe the Plumber
5. Bailout
6. Miley Cyrus and/or Hannah Montana
7. Brangelina
8. Uncool (I’m looking at you, Aniston)
9. Britney Spears (she’s crazy, she’s not crazy, she’s crazy, she’s not crazy … how about we leave her alone and let her decide which it is?)
10. Jonas Brothers (that number on the tag of your jeans? That’s supposed to be waist size, not age)
11. Baby bump (if an actress has a decent meal, she's pregnant. If an actress had a baby two months ago and hasn't lost every pregnancy pound, she's pregnant. If an actress has a steady boyfriend, she's pregnant. How about we shut up and let them decide if they are or not?)
12. Lohan (any of them)
13. Pregnant man
14. Gas prices
15. Heath Ledger (can’t we let the man rest in peace already?)
16. SNL and/or Tina Fey
17. The Hills
18. Madonna (why is she still news?)
19. Paris Hilton (why is she EVER news?)
20. Twilight/Breaking Dawn/Robert Pattinson/etc etc etc

I’m sure I’ve missed one or two but those are the first ones that came to mind. Here’s hoping 2009 will be a Phelps-free, Miley-free, economic-crisis-free year.

Year in review

2008-12-28T02:47:00.001-07:00

Warning: this is a long one.

It’s the end of the year, and we all know what that means: the media – or “the media” if you prefer to be snarky about it – will be counting down lists of the best, dumbest, and most amazing people, animals, natural disasters, and celebrity meltdowns of the past year.

Animal planet, for instance, has a special airing soon about the ten most amazing animal moments of 2008. E!’s “The Soup” will do some sort of soupy countdown as well – a clipdown, I believe they call it, since it’s all TV show clips commentated on by the delightfully snarky Joel McHale. In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King listed his favorite movies from this year. The list goes on and on.

I actually considered counting down my ten favorite countdowns, and I still may do so. But with all the emphasis on the best of things, I always get confused. I think, hey, wasn’t this in fact a spectacularly crappy year?

So without further ado, I give you my personal top ten suckiest moments/events/whatever of 2008.

10. My car. Period. This was not a good year for my car. Of course, it’s a Chevy, so no year is a good one and every mile I drive causes more and more cash to fly out of the tailpipe like it does in those commercials. I think the bloody thing’s worth maybe a grand now. But even for my bottom-of-the-line, stripped down Cavalier, this was a bad year. The EGR valve croaked. Two of my three A/C control knobs broke. It really started to get that Old Car Smell. The little ashtray-drawer-thingy snapped off. The latch on the boot broke. A tire went flat in the 3rd Avenue parking garage. The paint started peeling off aggressively. My gas mileage tanked. The belt driver (whatever the H that is) had to be replaced. The foam in the steering column hardened, causing my horn to blare randomly, frequently, and without warning – often at 2 or 3 in the morning, for five minutes at a stretch. And more recently, the battery died. A fairly new battery, I might add.

All this is just in the past year. Since I’ve owned it, I’ve also had to have the brakes fixed, a new A/C installed, the starter repaired, and the antenna reattached. And the windshield wipers replaced five times. And like four new batteries. And the stereo replaced.

My next car will be German or Japanese, I promise you that.

9. 2008 was the year that an old friend from my past made a reappearance.

Acne.

I had horrible acne as a teenager, and I was terribly relieved to find that as I entered my twenties, my skin cleared up. I had, oh, three or four good years. My skin looked great. A trifle pale, certainly. But that’s my normal hue. I could use WiteOut as a concealer, I swear it. But every so often I’d get a nice rosy glow in my cheeks, and darned if my face didn’t look fantastic.

But then it happened. Long about … oh, March or maybe April I think, I started noticing blemishes where there once were none. It started out small – a red bump here, a red bump there - one, maybe two at a time. But then a new one would pop up while the others were still out. Three zits, and then four marred my face.

By November, I was back to using a medicated facial cleanser, toner and moisturizer, the kind that peel off a layer or two of the epidermis as they “clean.” And you know what? I’ve still got acne. Five zits on my face, two on the front of my neck, three on the back of my neck, and one or two little guys behind the ears.

I’ve tried concealers and foundation. The blemishes suddenly match my skin … and I end up looking warty instead of zitty.

Sigh. Goodbye, lovely skin of my twenty-second and twenty-third years. I’ll miss you.

8. My favorite antidepressant stopped working. Oh, Zoloft. What happened? We used to work so well together, you and I. Sure, we had our ups and downs – dosages upped and downed, that is – but once we hit the right number of milligrams, it was magic, wasn’t it? I felt normal. You didn’t have many side effects – mostly headaches, and I was used to those. Together we got through beauty school and fibromyalgia, and you kept me from hauling off and hitting people (although in all fairness, most of them deserved to be hit). We were a team, Zoloft! But I flew too close to the sun on wings of serotonin. I took you for too long. And you couldn’t help me anymore.

And I was a miserable harpy again. Dr. Zenner – you remember him, right Zoloft? He said that if I leave you alone for long enough, when I go back to you, you’ll work again. And we’ll be so happy together.

In the meantime? Bupkis.

7. I met another old friend this year, one more crabby and vindictive than acne. I had my tonsils out in 2007, and I enjoyed a good nine months of good otolaryngological health. Not a rhinovirus or a streptococcal amoeba or a sinus infection in sight – and I’d been a walking strep virus for ages.

In March of 2008, I got strep throat. Well, I told myself, removing the tonsils wasn’t a foolproof solution. I did work closely with children (until #3 happened) and germs were germs. I doubled my use of hand sanitizer and turned away when someone coughed. Strep returned again in March, then May. And June. And again in November.

On the upside, that’s only four cases of strep compared to the ten a year I was used to when I had tonsils. On the downside, that’s four more cases of strep than I had in 2007.

I’m not sure what else can be removed to help remedy the problem. As soon as I find out, I’ll schedule a surgery.

6. I bought myself a shiny new Dell laptop computer back in … oh, February, I think. It came with Windows Vista installed, and I was (pathetic as it is) used to Windows 2K. But, I told myself, new is good. And I got used to the little “quirks” (bugs) that came with Vista, and I came to like it well enough.

Until October, that is. I’d installed Service Pack 1 (which was supposed to fix said quirks but brought with it two bugs for every one bug it fixed) and on the advice of Scott, my computer-genius big brother, I had Windows set to check for updates nightly.

Mid-October Windows strongly recommended some sort of antivirus update. And fool that I was, I clicked “Ok.”
That, my friends, was the beginning of the end.

This all-important, Strongly Recommended update caused my computer to commit hara-kiri. It would not start up. Start Up wizard couldn’t fix it. It would not boot manually. I could not access my files. My computer, an integral part of my life, was a $750 paper-weight. And I completely. Freaked. Out.

Fortunately, I had Scotty, my own personal Geek Squad. He employed every tool in his mental arsenal to fix my problem. He tried removing part of the hard drive. He tried hack after hack. Finally, using a CD that booted Ubuntu, he retrieved my files from Windows. And when I had them all backed up, he cleared my hard drive off, cleaned up my computer, and downgraded me to Windows XP. He also did a little research, and apparently hundreds if not thousands of people had also lost hard drives to this Strongly Recommended update.

Scotty, you saved my tuchis. You rock. Thank you for losing hours of sleep to keep number six on my list from ruining the whole dang year.

5. Did you know that people in their twenties can get gum disease? I didn’t until the über-helpful dental hygienist told me that I had it. So do you know what I did for my summer vacation? I got my gums lasered four times (and my insurance only covered three). My poor gums. They ached. They stung. They bled. They … healed. But unless I brush and floss vigilantly at least twice a day for the rest of my mortal life, it will come back. And you know what? After a treatment I couldn’t eat anything crunchy for a week. No potato chips! No movie theater popcorn! No regular popcorn!

It was brutal. Especially considering how many movies I saw this summer.

4. Numbers four and three on my list sort of tie for general suckiness, but after considering my sizeable debt, I ordered them as I did.

At the end of July, my boyfriend of four months dumped me. And he gave me the “it’s not you it’s me” routine, just like they do on television. He encouraged me to get angry with him for it and then got offended when I called him a rude name.

Things only got worse between us but I’d rather not get into that.

3. I was fired from my job of nearly two years. I hated management, but I was starting to build up a clientele and I loved working with little kids. I was good at what I did. I had seniority. I was responsible. I filled in at other salons as they needed me. I kept my trap shut when they transferred me to a salon I didn’t want to work at.

But my manager, Sonia, was (pardon my French) an absolute horse’s ass, and she played favorites like one would play a piano. And I was not one of her favorites. So she made up stories about me stealing and messing with the computers, refused to believe me when I told her the stories weren’t true, and canned me. Five days after my dad had brain surgery. Then, after she fired me – in front of a co-worker she insisted sit in on the firing – she said to me offhandedly, “Oh, sorry about your dad.”

I have no qualms about saying that if God is just, this woman will roast in hell for eternity. She treated me like manure and fired me because she could. I hate her like poison.

2. My father’s brain surgery – his third in a year – was because – I believe it was a year to the day from his initial diagnosis – we discovered that his cancer had come back with a vengeance. One month, his MRI was clear. But after he went to the ER because he was having trouble speaking and writing, they did a scan and discovered a huge tumor had popped up out of nowhere. It was aggressive, and it was going to kill him. We were told he had a few months to live, they weren’t sure exactly. They did surgery to remove what they could, and to insert chemotherapy wafers in his brain.

The surgery was on Friday. He came home on Monday night. Eleven days later he lost consciousness and never woke up.

1. Eleven days after he passed out, he died. My father. My daddy. My friend. The best, smartest, kindest, most insightful man I’ve ever known. I miss him so much that it hurts – it’s a physical ache that won’t go away. His death devastated me and I’m not sure I’ll ever completely recover. I’d give the world for five more minutes with him. One more minute. Anything.

I miss him. I don’t know what to do without him. But I have no choice. It sucks. It hurts. And it’s why 2008 will live in my memory as one of the worst years of my life.

Book me

2008-12-23T14:04:00.001-07:00

If he had occasion to embarrass me, my father had one story in his arsenal that he turned to first, and I’ll paraphrase it here for you.

“With every kid,” he’d say, “things are different. They’re all born with their own personalities already in place. And you wonder what they’re going to be like, who they’ll be. You wonder what their little voices will sound like when they learn to talk, and what sort of things they’re going to say.”

Here I typically buried my face in my hands.

“It was the same with Jilly Bee,” he’d continue – he always called me Jilly Bee – “we wondered what words she’d learn when and what her voice would sound like, if she’d sound like her sister at all.

“Then she learned to talk. And she talked and talked and darned if the kid didn’t talk all day long. We couldn’t shut her up. We’d be watching TV and she’d be chattering away during the show and we’d have to try to shut her up until the commercial break.”

It seems I was a bit of a chatterbox. But looking back all I can figure is that for the first 18 months or so of my life, I couldn’t talk, and once I learned I felt I had to make up for lost time. So I talked and talked and talked. Even in my sleep, as my sister complained.

Teaching me to read was a matter of self-preservation for my parents. I could read to myself out loud, in a room other than the one the TV was in, and they’d get a little peace. I imagine that my siblings helped me out a bit, and my parents read to me. In any case I could read fairly well at three, and at 3 ½, I got a library card.

I’ve always been a fan of libraries. I go in, and I get to take their books. Any books I want! I can just take them! I got such a kick out of that as a kid. I was used to going to stores with my mother and hearing that no, I couldn’t have this or that, because it was too much money. But in the library, it was all free! I was hooked. Fines in those days were about a nickel a day for an overdue book. Nothing I couldn’t handle.

Many years later the library moved to a new home, one much bigger than the closet-sized city building it had been in before. I hated it at first. It didn’t feel like my library. It smelled funny. It was on the edge of a cliff. I had my reasons. But I lived in a town without a bookstore, so I went to the new library.

At the start of my senior year of high school, the library had an opening for a shelver. On a whim, I applied, and much to my surprise I got the job. They’d never hired a teenager before, so I was rather flattered, although I suspected my literacy and familiarity with the library had more to do with the decision than anything else. That, and the fact that three of the librarians had known me since I was three and started coming to the library. In any case, I started working there most days after school.

I loved it. It was heaven. Every book in town was at my disposal. I got my grubby hands on new books the instant they were processed (and many times I got to type out the labels, apply the barcodes, and cover them). Not only that, every day before I started work, I could access my account and check on the due dates of the books I’d checked out. I could renew them myself if I needed to.

When I moved to Gilbert, one of the first things I looked for was the public library. And I found it – less than two miles from my house, it was a monster of a building, with easily twice the number of books I was used to. I didn’t know any of the employees, I didn’t know where anything was … and I couldn’t renew my own books.

None of this stopped me of course. I checked out book after book after book, often filling up my card. But the thing you have to remember about me is that I’m sort of an idiot. I had the darndest time remembering to renew my books before they were due back, or remembering to turn them in on time. I had so many books out that I didn’t read most of them. And fines were no longer the nickel I was used to. I think it was a quarter per item per day.

A few years ago, I had a period of six months where three times, I owed more than sixty dollars in overdue fees. Once I owed more than 100. I was gainfully employed and not in much debt so I managed, but I felt sick about it. I am at heart a very cheap person, and I realized that for the money, I might as well be buying my own books to keep forever instead of borrowing. So I started going to bookstores and I never looked back. I’ve been to the library building twice in the past three years, and both times I just went in to vote – I didn’t even go in to the main library where the books are. No books checked out meant no fines. And bookstore books had the advantage of not smelling like the last person who checked them out, as is so often the case with library books. And I can read them at my leisure with no pressure and no time limit. They are mine, to do with as I please.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I own a good 5,000 or so books (that I know of). It’s self-defense and a very twisted sort of cheapness. And it works.

A little something to think about

2008-12-21T02:57:00.001-07:00

There is a show on television called The Big Bang Theory. I’ve never seen it myself on account of it’s on at the same time as another show I watch and I didn’t used to have DVR.

But I did (and do) subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, which means that if something exceptionally hilarious is said on any TV show at all, it might be printed in a little TV quotes section in the next issue of EW.

Such is the case with Big Bang Theory. I wish I’d had DVR a month or so ago just so I could hear this line spoken aloud.

Sheldon (played by Jim Parsons) is explaining a new game he’s come up with called Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock. The rules are as follows:

“It’s very simple. Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitates lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and, as it always has, rock crushes scissors.”

I think that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. And if I could figure out how to shape my hand for lizard (I figure Spock is the “live long and prosper” hand sign), I would totally make someone play this with me.

And people say there’s nothing good on TV anymore.

Church Lady was right

2008-12-18T02:34:00.003-07:00

DISCLAIMER: this is going to make me unpopular. I don't care. You're going to think I'm a horrible, heartless shrew for writing it and you're not going to like me. Tough potatoes.

Picture this: Sicily, 1920.

Sorry. I’m channeling Sophia Petrillo. Where was I?

Right. Picture this: there is an old man – no one knows how old for sure, but we know he’s old. He hasn’t shaved in years. He’s overweight. He’s a pipe smoker, so his beard is likely a nasty shade of tobacco yellow. He’s dirty – he seems to have been rolling around in an ashtray. Everyone knows who he is but no one knows much about him. They do know one thing: he’s interested in the kids.

No matter where they go, he’s there, watching them. Watching them play and learn and wander through Wal-Mart with Mom. But it’s not just in public. He’s known to watch them in their homes as well. Are they eating their vegetables? Are they fighting with a brother or sister? He sees it. He’s always watching. He might write some of it down so he’ll remember. They go to bed at night. He’s there. He watches them sleep. And watches them, and watches them.

Maybe parents aren’t completely cognizant of this at all times. Maybe that’s why when Mom and Dad see the old, fat man at, say, a shopping mall, they take their kids over to say hello. Some kids fight. Some scream. Some cry. Mom and Dad get out the camera.

“Sit on his lap,” they say. “Say hello,” they say. “Be nice,” they say, “he’s not going to hurt you.” But kids know that’s not completely true. Everyone knows the fat man punishes kids he thinks are bad.

And it doesn’t matter how scared a little kid is. Mom and Dad are going to snap their picture, capture that look of abject terror.

They’re not leaving the mall without that all-important picture with Santa.

Pretty creepy, isn’t it? I’ve always thought so.

What kind of story is this to tell your children? An old man is watching you all the time, day and night, so you’d better be good. Or else. Smacks of enabling a pedophile, if you ask me.

I realize that I’m being a bit extreme here. Not every kid is afraid of Satan. I mean, Santa. Some kids get excited. They’ll write him letters. They’ve been good all year long, and they’re going to get their reward.

The idea that good children are rewarded and bad children are punished is nothing new. You can look back through history at fables and folktales and fairy tales, and the theme prevails. Good = rewards. Bad = punishment. But the problem is that Santa is not real. Kids don’t get presents because they’re good. They get presents because Mom and Dad went shopping. But for some reason parents feel the need to lie to their children.

Here many people interrupt me. “It’s not a lie!” is their battle cry. Is Santa real? Well, no. But you’re telling your children he is. That’s a lie. And what’s a child to think when they learn the truth? If Mom and Dad lied about something like Santa – an omnipresent, omniscient being with magical powers – maybe they were lying about other important things – maybe about this Jesus person, too. He’s got some of the same characteristics.

Jesus, by the way, is the reason we celebrate Christmas. Santa takes away from that in a very real, very disturbing way. People will claim that Santa teaches us to be generous and kind … but I’ve never once encountered a child who asked Santa to bring toys to the orphans or the poor kids next door. I’ve never once seen a Santa-obsessed family teach or encourage their children to be generous with the less fortunate. They only say, “Be good or Santa will give your toys away to someone else.” Giving is a punishment, not something important or good or to be enjoyed. Santa for them is not about giving. He's about blackmail. Something to hold over the kids' heads to make them behave.

The poor kids won’t be getting any toys this year. They must have been bad. Good kids get what they ask for. Poor kids don’t get what they asked for … poverty must make you a bad person, right? And Jewish and Muslim children must be bad, too, because Santa doesn’t visit them. Santa only visits good children.

No chimney? No problem. Santa has a magical key that lets him into every house in the world. Am I the only one a little uncomfortable with this idea? We’re in a recession. Santa comes into the house and eats my cookies! Sure, he allegedly leaves presents, but who’s to say he’s not sneaking into the china cabinet while he’s in the house? Pilfering some of the nicer silver, picking the lock on the gun cabinet - or worse, the liquor cabinet.

My mother is fifty-one (hi, Mom) and she still remembers the devastation she felt when she learned that she’d been lied to about Santa. She felt stupid and gullible and hurt. So when my oldest brother was old enough to ask about it, my parents told him the truth – Santa was just a story. And so he, and my sister, and my other brother, and I, never believed in Santa. We were never disappointed at Christmas because we knew that if we only got a few things each, it was all our parents could afford – and that even though money was tight, they still wanted us to have something to open on Christmas morning.

We had other Christmas traditions. For instance, we did what we called drive-by fooding. We’d collect canned and other nonperishable foods, put them in big paper bags, and drive by the homes of struggling families at night. A kid or two would sneak from the car or truck, set the food on the family’s doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run like hell for the car. I loved it. It was a thrill doing it anonymously, and knowing that I’d helped someone have a better Christmas than they might have anticipated. My mom made pancakes or waffles every Christmas morning. It made me sad to think that a kid I went to school with wouldn’t have breakfast on Christmas, and if I could do something about that, even at the age of five, I was going to do it. I didn’t have Santa at Christmas, but I had something better. I had love and compassion.

I never believed in Santa, no. But I never once felt that I missed out. I never once felt like something was missing from the magic of the season. I knew what it was not just to receive, but to give, and to make a difference. I got to play at Santa. And I’m convinced that letting a child play at Santa is worlds better than encouraging him or her to believe in Santa.

And yes, I was one of those rude kids in elementary school who told other children that Santa wasn’t real. But I’m not going to apologize for that. Parents might have lied to their kids (and still do and will), but I wasn’t about to. I believed in honesty, and I still do. Honesty is a good Christian value. I believe in Jesus, not Santa. I celebrate Christmas, not Santamas. And I always will.

Timing is everything

2008-12-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t sleep a few nights ago. This is nothing new, really, but usually when I can’t sleep I’m in bed reading or playing a video game, and a few nights ago I was downstairs on the couch, eating cookies and wondering how often Barack Obama gets a haircut.

I’d been watching “House” on the USA Network. I own all 4 seasons on DVD but I only ever watch it when it airs on TV (which I suppose means I’ve wasted a great deal of money, but I digress). In any case, house ended at 12, and was followed by an episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

I’ve watched many episodes of the show before, and it happens that this particular episode was one I’d seen before – but only the first half. I never knew how it ended. So I watched, and it turns out it was the mom, not the grandmother, who killed all those parents.

“L&O:CI” was followed by two episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” I can’t watch this one most of the time because it’s about, as the announcer guy says, sexually-based offenses, and I don’t have the stomach or mind for that. But the second one was particularly interesting. It was about a doctor (played by Martin Mull) who was prescribing fake and ineffective treatments for HIV. People died, he was convicted, etc, etc. Very captivating. Also very depressing.

But I was watching the second episode because of the first, and it is in fact the first episode that caught my attention. The gist of it is that a woman in the Marines had been raped and was pregnant and missing, and they found her dead, and in the search for her killer we learn all about the corruption and cover-ups in the military vis-à-vis female soldiers and sexual abuse. And apparently if you’re a female soldier, the men see you as either a b***h or a slut, and you’ll be subject to sexual harassment and any number of unpleasantries.

What caught my attention was actually a commercial that aired I think three times during the show. It was a commercial for the Army, and it showed a young woman and her parents, who had been unsure about her decision to join the armed forces. The point of the commercial was how mature and responsible the young woman was for having enlisted, and how proud her parents were of their soldier daughter.

And then the commercial break ended, and we went back to how female soldiers rarely report their rapes by superior officers.

I found that ironic and hilarious. Three times! I think that during prime time these things are probably screened a bit more carefully – what commercials air during what program about what, and that sort of thing. But when you’re watching USA at 2am, all bets are off. And I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping that woman who joined the Army knows what she’s got herself into. If she doesn’t, Mariska Hargitay could tell her for sure – right after these messages.

On the upside, there are always Charlie Brown songs

2008-12-12T01:56:00.011-07:00

It's mid-December, which means that stores and radio stations have been playing Christmas music for about two months now. They start earlier each year. And it's impossible to get away from them. So I've been listening to a lot of crap lately. Over and over and over. Lousy 99.9 KEZ is everywhere. And they play the Delilah show at night. Delilah! *shudder*

Before you write me off as some sort of holiday-hating shrew, let me explain. I'm not against ALL Christmas music. There are some really smashing songs this time of year - "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," for one. And BNL's album "Barenaked for the Holidays" is a favorite of mine. And I've always liked traditional Christmas carols like we sing in church.

But there are a number of Christmas songs that frankly I could do without. They bother me, which means (all together now, children) that it's going to bother you as well.

I'll warn you: these are bad songs. Bad Christmas songs! To quote Norm MacDonald, "Happy birthday Jesus. Here's some crap!"

The first offender makes me want to bash my head against something hard. I believe the name is "The Little Drummer Boy." It's about some little street urchin with a drum and a dream, on his way to visit the baby Jesus. But even though he could clearly afford a drum, he's got bupkis as a gift, so when he gets to Bethlehem, he asks Mary if he can make a loud noise in front of her newborn baby. And Mary agrees. So he drums for a bit, and the baby Jesus smiles. Pah-rum-pa-pum-pum. Pah-rum-pa-pum-pum. Ad nauseam. The most popular version of this song is performed by a choir of wobbly-voiced women who sound like, as they're singing, they're either very cold or very frightened.

I hate this song. I hate it like poison. I know mothers of babies, and they're rather protective of their newborns. And Mary gave birth to the Son of God. So I reckon she was more than a little protective. Would she really have let some little brat come into the stable and bang on a drum? I doubt it. Aside from which the song has no historical basis, and the constant pah-rum-pa-pum-pumming makes my blood pressure spike and my fists tighten.

Moving on, then.

Second on my list is a more modern, touching, heartfelt piece of tripe called "Mary, Did You Know?" It asks Mary if she knew her baby would walk on water, heal the sick, calm the seas, etc etc. Nothing too offensive, right?

WRONG! Let's consider this for a moment. Mary was a virgin. She was visited by bloody angels. You know something? I think the had a pretty good idea of all of that. But thanks for asking.

Number three isn't even a Christmas song. "My Favorite Things" from that movie with the Nazis and the nun has nothing to do with Christmas. I suppose the imagery about silver white winters and brown paper packages and warm woolen mittens conjures up a wintery feel. But really, what in the name of arse has it to do with Christmas?

And honestly, who the hell has favorite things like these? Whiskers on kittens? Schnitzel with noodles? Doorbells? Wild geese? What kind of demented freak would sing such a song? What's wrong with ... I don't know ... ice cream or movies or spending time with family? I don't suppose they hold a candle to bright copper kettles, do they?

Moving on again. The fourth is "The Christmas Song." Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost, blah blah blah. This is called "The Christmas Song." So why is there no mention of Jesus? Why is it just yuletide carols and tiny tots and Santa? The nerve of some people ... Velvet Fog, my arse.

Number five is "The Man With the Bag," a swinging little jazzy number about how everybody's waiting for the man with the bag (Santa, I assume). This song didn't bother me the first few times I heard it. But then I listened to the lyrics: "He'll be here, with the answers to the prayers that you've made through the year."

I beg your pardon, but since when does sodding Santa answer prayers? I thought that was God's area. I guess maybe if you pray to Santa, he does the answering.

Six is "Do They Know It's Christmas" by the slapably-smug Bob Geldof and a bunch of arrogant celebrities. There won't be snow in Africa this Christmas, no. But that's because most of it's in the bloody southern hemisphere, so it's actually Summer in December. And no, I don't reckon "they" know it's Christmas, because "they" aren't Christians and I'm guessing they don't celebrate. Hey, "philanthropic" celebrities - how's about helping out the millions of diseased and impoverished American children before spreading the wealth to Africa? Probably because American children don't make good news stories. And they're harder to adopt, aren't they? Psht. I spit in your general direction, Hollywood.

Number seven: "Baby, It's Cold Outside." A lovely little Christmas date-rape song. "Hey, what's in this drink?" Oh, just a little rohypnol. It'll wear off in the morning when I'm done with you.

The woman wants to LEAVE, you jackass. No means no.

Number eight: "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Radio stations play the Andy Williams version eight times a day. Riddle me this: if it's really the most wonderful time of the year, why do suicide rates spike in December? Also, since when do we tell scary ghost stories at Christmas? Ditto toasting marshmallows.

Ninth on my list is "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." What message does this song send to children? Nobody liked Rudolph until he did something for them. Like saving their white-tailed arses. And do we need the constant repitition? "And if you ever saw it, SAW IT..."

Number ten is "Santa Claus is Coming To Town." (And I wholeheartedly believe that Bruce Springsteen's version is guaranteed to void even the strongest of stomachs.) Why? "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake ..." Another instance where we're confusing Santa and Jesus. And I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of some old man constantly watching the little kids in my life. That's pedophilia, isn't it?

And speaking of odd sexual compulsions, what gives with "Santa Baby"? Is Eartha Kitt trying to hit on the old man? Gross. He's old! He's married! Shame on you, Eartha. Bad kitty.

I should probably stop at ten, but number eleven kills brain cells: "Merry Christmas Darling" by Karen Carpenter. I'm convinced that, with a little research, Modern Science could prove conclusively a connection between Carpenter songs and fatal gunshot wounds. "Rainy Days and Mondays" makes me want to commit voluntary euthanasia, and/or maim the radio DJ responsible for playing it.

Twelve on the list peels the enamel from my teeth. "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" is disturbing on so many levels, only one of which I'll mention. What a rotten bastard that Santa is. He doesn't care how many homes he wrecks, does he? He just slides down the chimney and makes out with people's mothers. I always wished there was a follow-up: "I Saw Daddy Killing Santa Claus" would have been awesome.

Lucky thirteen is last on my list for now. "Wonderful Christmastime" should be banned on account of it violates the eighth amendment. This song is atrocious. Paul McCartney was a BEATLE, for goshsakes. What happened? I think this song and "Say, Say, Say" ought to be enough evidence that Paul lost his mind years ago. This song is an embarrassment for a former Beatle. This song is an embarrassment to Wings, and that's saying something.

I think I'll conclude now. I've probably stuck all sorts of rotten songs in your head, and I'm sorry. But don't worry. I'm sure if I pray extra hard to Santa he'll put me back on his nice list. Maybe bring me some warm woolen mittens and raindrops on roses. All of my favorite things.

I think it's been up for more than 30 days

2008-12-06T03:24:00.003-07:00

My father died on September 9th and we buried him a week later. September 16th, for the slow among you. That's very nearly three months, which amazes the hell out of me (although I'm not sure how long I feel like it's been. Days and years, I suppose, depending on my mood).

I digress.

My mother is a world-champion procrastinator, particularly if the task at hand is unpleasant. Unpleasant tasks, for her, include washing dishes, clearing off the kitchen table, finishing her school work, and ordering a marker for my father's grave.

I can't say that I blame her for putting off the latter. I don't think that's anyone's idea of fun. Also, when we made arrangements for my dad, we set it up so that when Mum kicks it, she'll be buried in the same plot. So the stone is going to have her name on it too. Which I can't imagine. It's hard enough coming to terms with your own mortality in the face of a loved one's death. It must be even harder to order a grave stone with your name on it.

But yesterday - or rather, Thursday, as it's after midnight as I write this - I nagged just long and hard enough that my mother drove us down to Mountain View Memorial Gardens and we picked something out. It'll be very ... well, not pretty, but nice. Granite base and everything. I had to sort of hold her hand through the whole thing (figuratively, although once she started crying I did put an arm around her).

After we got it ordered, we went for a little walk to the grave site. We could have driven but a Mr. Frankenstein (seriously) was being buried a little ways off and I didn't want to disturb the solemnity of the occasion. Beside which it was a lovely day for a walk.

I remembered exactly where to go. Mum didn't, which I thought was kind of funny. If my grave was picked out already, I think I'd know EXACTLY where to find it. But I digress again. When we got there, we found a temporary marker (which I sort of expected, and appreciate - it's important to keep track of the dead in a place like that).

They remembered the "D" in Rodger; that pleased me immensely. I'd held up remarkably well, I must say, until I got a good look at the marker. Nothing about the marker specifically set me off so much as the cold realization that my father's body was about eight feet below my shoes. I lost it then. Mum did too, and we cried for a bit.

Then we went on our way.

The good news is that in six to eight weeks we'll be the proud owners of a gravestone. I think Mum's lucky in that respect. How many people get to see their gravestones before they die? Now she knows she won't (many many many years from now mind you) be buried beneath the inscription, "I'm sorry, what did you say?" or perhaps something more creative like, "Here lies Peggy, 'cause she's dead/never was right in the head."

Instead, it says BARBER in capital letters in the middle, with my dad's name on the left, hers on the right, dates below names, Mesa temple in the left corner, and "Together Forever/10-9-1976" in the right. Although I think that might be a little confusing because my parents were sealed in the St. George temple, not the one in Mesa. But Mum wanted the Mesa temple and in any case St. George wasn't in the book.

Did you know you can get a Salvation Army logo on your grave stone? Also a Boy Scout Beaver. Or a Bingo card. Or any number of tasteless emblems that reminded me more of tattoos than anything else. I suggested the hunting rifle to Mum but she refused.

Maybe I'll pre-arrange my own funeral and grave. Order a stone with a hunting rifle and the phrase, "I told you I was sick." Add a sportscar and call myself "Jill the Great."

On the walk back to the car I saw a stone that had a picture of a Ferrari and "Mr. D" and that was it. I'm not sure if Mr. D was a Ferrari. Heaven only knows what's buried there, or who.

And now, if you'll excuse me, it's my bedtime and I'm looking forward to a number of unsettling dreams.

Hang me out to dry

2008-12-03T02:09:00.001-07:00

I hate laundry.

Why do I hate laundry? It’s my own clothes. If I want to wear them again, I need to wash them. And I’m sure not going to go without clean socks and underpants.

I’ve tried simply buying new. This is why I have more than 20 pairs of socks, and enough underpants for every day of the month. I’m trying to avoid the inevitable. But the inevitable is of course inevitable. So I drag my laundry basket downstairs, do a quick sort, and start the washer.

I think that part of the reason I hate laundry so much is that I really hate my clothes. I open my closet and there’s just … nothing. Nothing to wear (this is something of an accomplishment, considering how full my closet is). When I sort and wash and fold laundry, I am reminded of how much I hate my entire wardrobe. I have maybe three t-shirts I like, and one pair of pants my arse doesn’t continually expand in, and that’s about it. Something can look amazing on me in the store, but I get it home, and I look like I’m in a fat suit for a movie role. It’s hard to muster up the necessary enthusiasm to launder something I don’t like wearing. It’s hard enough to want to wash the clothes I actually DO like. And when I wash those, all I can think is that each rinse cycle fades that favorite item a little more, and a little more, until my black t-shirt has turned to a nasty sort of puce, and my white polo matches my teeth more than my eyeballs (and for the record, I haven’t bothered with whitening strips in the past five years).

Plus, laundry time is when I notice bad things. A hole in a t-shirt that wasn’t there. The Ragu stain that didn’t come out in the last washing. A line of ink on my pajama pants because I’m always writing in bed. The increasing number of lint balls on my sweater. For some reason, I don’t notice things like that when I get dressed. I only see them when I’m doing laundry.

Some day, I will have enough money to pay someone to do my laundry for me. Failing that, I’ll try to have enough money to buy two or three of my favorites. I’ve already started a little. I have two extra pairs of blue and red crabby socks, and a second navy-and-green striped t-shirt. As long as my favorites are from the clearance rack, I’m all set. And if you’ve ever seen the way I dress, you know that … well, pretty much I’m all set.

Eventually, if I’m rich and famous, I won’t ever do laundry. I’ll buy thirty or forty of things that I like, wear them once, and give them away. It’ll be nice to know that I’m doing my part to kill the earth. I think I’m already on to a good killing start, judging by the amount of polyester I found in my wardrobe the last time I did laundry. In any case, I’m off to a good start with things, I think.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m out of socks.

Snarky enough for a man, grammatically enhanced for a woman

2008-11-26T03:31:00.004-07:00

I was browsing Cute Overload earlier as I am wont to do. There was a post about adopting a turkey for Thanksgiving - which I did; her name is Serendipity and she is so ugly she's cute. See?

ANYwho.
I had to comment in response to a nuffer who objected to people donating to animal causes when there are people causes out there in need of monetary help. Whilst browsing the comments, I came across one that mentioned something called the Gender Analyzer, a site wherein you can enter a URL and, using some sort of complicated algorithm or something, GA will tell you whether the page was written by a man or a woman.
I tested out a few websites and GA got it right. Then out of morbid curiosity, I tried the URL of my blog.
GA decided my blog was written by a man. Ditto my Domo blog (although in my defense, the site is mostly graphics). This interested me. What about my writing would lead GA's text classifiers to think I'm a dude? (Obviously the text classifier hasn't taken a good look at my rack.) I've decided it's either my complex sentence structure, my excruciatingly correct grammar (if I'm in the mood for it) or my snarky humor.
I think the humor might be more of a typically masculine thing than the grammar, and I'll tell you why: I don't know of any men since Strunk and White (except perhaps my late father) who could diagram a sentence or differentiate between a verb and a gerund. I don't mean to imply that men are stupid, I just mean that men tend to communicate more directly than women, and with fewer nuances and details.
But whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes - no, wait, that's the Grinch.
But whatever the reason, GA decided I write like a man. To the side of the results is a poll: did GA give the correct result? I clicked "no" and was taken to the survey results page. 53% said yes, and 47% said no. So much for their fancy text classifier. I'm inclined to believe that the folks behind GA are bigger turkeys than my new sort-of pet. Which is a shame, I think it's a cool idea. Almost as cool an idea as Cute Overload.

Do me a favor and fill out my poll, won't you? Otherwise I'll be forced to rant about undergarments again, and that wasn't fun for ANYONE.

Houston, we have a problem ...

2008-11-22T03:08:00.005-07:00

Or I should say that I do, anyway.

I think I have a blogging addiction.

I started off with just one blog - this one. Then I started taking pictures and began my Domo blog. Then I started a third blog, a private one, as a journal of sorts.

And I've done it again.

I blame my mother.

I have an unhealthy obsession with English usage, and she has always encouraged it. She's as likely as I to point out inappropriate quotation marks and words pluralized with apostrophes. It was only a matter of time before I began photographing examples of abuse and looking for a place to display them. And the time has come.

I am pleased and slightly embarrassed to introduce you to my newest blogging effort, The Language Police. I have no way of predicting the update frequency, as I'm unsure how many examples of language misuse I can regularly capture in my camera phone. But rest assured that if I see it, I will photograph it, and I will share it.

It is, perhaps, worth mentioning that as I was setting up my new blog, I got an idea for another blog. I wonder if Blogger has a limit to the amount of bandwidth they'll allow me to waste at their expense. I should check on that.

And while I do that, I humbly suggest you check on my newest blog and let me know what you think. I am also accepting submissions, so keep your eyes peeled, and I may appoint you Language Police Officer status. I am the police chief, but I could always use a deputy.

New baby!

2008-11-18T00:43:00.003-07:00

Ok, I totally stole these pictures from my brother's Facebook page. But my camera phone vanished the pictures I took at the hospital, so here we go. This is Landon James Barber, 8 lb 2 oz, 20.5 inches long, born at 11:30am on November 17. I got to hold him for the longest time. He looked at my face for a few minutes and then, nonplussed and exhausted, fell asleep.

Neigh-mate of the month

2008-11-16T03:20:00.004-07:00

I blame my parents.

No matter how much I ranted or raved or cried or stuck my lower lip out, I never had a pet growing up. And I wanted one BADLY.

I can't fault my parents for their refusal; in retrospect it's just as well, really. I wasn't responsible enough, and animals stink and shed and do a number of other unpleasant things.

But because there were no real animals in the Barber house, I made do with plush versions. I have hundreds of stuffed little buddies in boxes in the garage, and I still buy them, even at twenty-five.

There is a Wells Fargo inside the Safeway down the street from my house. My mother has started banking there because ... well, I don't remember why, exactly. But I was there with here a few days ago, and I noticed a sign: Today, sign up for a free checking account and get a FREE plush pony.

There was a pony on the counter.

I held out for a whole three days before I signed up. And I got my pony. And, ladies and gentlemen, here it is. My free Wells Fargo pony.

PS: If you read my Domo blog (and you'd better) you'll notice that Domo hitched a ride. He couldn't help himself.

Run for it

2008-11-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

What I’m going to share with you today is somewhat personal in nature, but it’s bothering me, which means – all together now – it’s going to bother you, too.

I went shopping for a sports bra. I didn’t think it would be that difficult. I should preface this with the fact that I am not exactly on the flat-chested side of things. More accurately, if I went for a run without a sports bra, I could knock myself unconscious.

And now, with that charming mental picture in mind, I shall continue.

I went to Wal-Mart, because I am first and foremost a cheap person. (Jerry Seinfeld once said that cheapness is not a sense. Ladies and gentlemen, he was wrong. Cheapness is indeed a sense.) I figured that if I didn’t find what I wanted there, I’d move on the more expensive Target.

It took me a good five minutes to actually locate the sports bras; Wal-Mart would clearly rather that customers purchase their undergarments of more questionable taste (I don’t know that Disney really *wanted* that done to Tinkerbell, personally). Finally, I found a wall of the things. Some of them looked as though they couldn’t hold in place anything more substantial than a Kleenex tissue. The tag claimed they fit up to a “C” cup. Maybe they’re measuring differently than I do, I don’t know. But the undergarment in question was literally a tube top with spaghetti straps. A training bra, really. That was a big ‘no.’

So I moved on to some sturdier-looking cotton models, things that might actually serve a purpose. And they were sold in a pack of three for ten bucks. Good deal. But I checked the tag, and these, too, only fit up to a “C” cup. Sensing a trend, I moved on to styles I wasn’t even considering. “B/C” cup. “B/C” cup. And finally, “B/C” cup. One style, one that resembled a real bra more than anything, was sold in regular band and cup sizes. These came in “D” cup sizes. But they were padded. I beg your pardon, but “D” cups really don’t need any extra padding. Padding is sort of the problem. And this wasn’t even a full-coverage style; it looked like a demi more than anything.

I checked every other brand and style, and nothing was designed for a cup larger than a “C.”

Am I the only one who sees a problem here?

Let’s examine this from a scientific perspective: if you’re a “B” cup, you don’t even NEED a sports bra. A “C,” I’ll give you. But in my (very personal) experience, it’s the “D” and “DD” cups that really need a sports bra. Not the “B” cups. So why is it that only one sports bra in the entire danged store came in a “D” cup? What are large-bosomed women supposed to do for sports bras? Perhaps we’re not supposed to work out, just to be on the safe side. But seriously, what gives? Because I’d really like to start working out again. And I prefer to do it while conscious.

In small packages

2008-11-11T02:18:00.000-07:00

A zoo in Australia recently celebrated the birth of a baby pygmy hippopotamus.

In case you were wondering, a baby pygmy hippo is about one-fifth the size of a regular baby hippo. Full-sized pygmies (is that an oxymoron? Full-sized pygmy?) are only half as long and one-tenth the weight of your standard river hippopotamus. By my calculations, that makes the babies five times as adorable, and the adults at least twice as cute.

And this pygmy hippo baby, with his Shrek ears and wide nostrils, is very cute indeed. From the videos, he (or was it she?) looked to be the size of a large cat. It was very playful, frolicking in the water and chomping on its keeper’s khaki shorts. A regular hippo could never get away with that.

I’ve always been a fan of ungulates, so I know for a fact that there are also pygmy goats, pygmy horses, and pygmy elephants. And if you go outside the ungulate family, there’s the pygmy loris, pygmy marmoset, and the pygmy owl, just to name a few. These species all have two things in common: they are very small, and therefore, they are very cute.

What is it about tiny things that make them so adorable, so hard to resist? I’m not sure, exactly, but I do know that there’s something scientific to it. Take babies, for example. They are scientifically designed to make us want to take care of them. I believe that was proven in a study somewhere, but at the moment I’m too lazy to look it up. But it doesn’t end with babies. Toddlers and small children can get away with doing things that adults never could, simply because they’re little.

My two-year-old nephew is a good example. He can have snot on his face, and be running after his mother to hit her (for trying to wipe away said snot), and he’s still adorable. If I tried that, I’d be labeled many things, none of them cute or flattering. This is nature’s way, I think, of continuing the human race. Kids can get away with a lot more things that, when an adult does them, you’d normally want to kill them for.

Part of the reason I have so much fun with my Domo blog is that I get to play with miniatures. Domo has a small piano, an angel costume, and a skateboard, and because they’re all tiny, they’re all cute. If I could get away with it, I’d play with a dollhouse. Because it’s little, with little furniture and decorations. And little = cute. We are, I swear it, scientifically programmed to equate something tiny with something good. Things on a small scale are almost always good things. Small = cute, and cute = good, therefore small = good (and I only got a “B” in my logic class. Ha!).

There is, as always, an exception to small being cute. And I speak, of course, of the insect. They crawl. They fly. They bite. They spread malaria. They are creepy and nasty, and yet they are small. But there is a wisdom in this. They need to be small, even though they are not by extension cute, and they are certainly not good. Think about it: would you like for insects to be any bigger than they already are? I’ve seen crickets and roaches the size of field mice. That’s big enough, thankyouverymuch. So I’m happy with bugs being the exception to small = cute = good. Bugs = bad, and we all know that.

And with that inborn knowledge, we have free brainpower to appreciate the good things in life.

Like tiny hippopotamuses.

It's beginning to look a lot like ... August

2008-11-08T18:19:00.006-07:00

I haven't been updating my blog as often as I used to. I've decided that, like Maris Crane, I exhaust easily under the pressure to be interesting. Also, I've been spending more time looking at baby pygmy hippo videos and less time writing.
I digress.

Today is the 8th of November, which means that tomorrow might as well be Christmas. I say this because I've been hearing Christmas music in almost every store I've been in this past week. Some stores didn't even wait for Halloween to be over - Wal-Mart was playing "Little Saint Nick" while I was shopping for Halloween candy a few days before my birthday. Christmas merchandise was fighting Halloween costumes for shelf space, which puzzled me a bit since it was more than two months until Christmas.

I think it starts earlier and earlier every year. Christmas didn't used to start until after Thanksgiving. Then it was after Halloween. Now it's before Halloween. I expect that in a few years, Wal-Mart will stock prelit trees next to their back-to-school supplies. Which is frightening, since school starts earlier and earlier every year. I'm pretty sure that Chandler schools went back at the end of July.

But just because we're pushing holidays up a little, doesn't mean we want to miss any. So I'm sure that by December first, Wal-Mart will have an aisle or two of hearts and flowers for Valentine's Day. And once the Christmas clearance is out of the way in a month (because it gets marked down BEFORE Christmas these days) it'll be time for Easter baskets and chocolate rabbits. Once Valentine's day is gone, they'll display folding chairs and barbecues. And from there, it's time for back-to-school and Santa Claus.

I'm sure that, if I ran a urine-scented retail giant like Wal-Mart, it might make sense to me. But I'm a fairly logical human being, and so I like a day or two to breathe in between holidays. I don't want Halloween to turn into Christmas. I don't want Christmas to twitch its nose and turn into Valentine's Day. I like a week or two where I can buy bags of candy in regular-colored wrappers and not worry about whose house I'm going to or if I've bought a gift for someone.

But back to Christmas ... it's my fault, partly, for living in the greater Phoenix area. But I'm going into clothing stores, and it's all wool and parkas and corduroy. Which is, I'm sure, nice if one happens to live in New York or Illinois or one of those places where the seasons actually change. But here in Maricopa County, we have two seasons: Hellfire, and the rest of the year. And the rest of the year just isn't that cold.

Aside from which, it's hard to feel Christmassy when I'm still mowing the lawn and watching oranges ripen on my tree. It feels more back-to-schooly. So every time I hear "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," I sing along with my own words, about how it's beginning to look a lot like August does in the rest of the country.

But what can I do? Wal-Mart's blaring their Christmas soundtrack and Old Navy's got one table of t-shirts. So I bring my iPod with me, crank the A/C, and laugh at the poor suckers elsewhere who are already getting snow.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go water my roses. In short sleeves and flip flops.

Bang, bang, you're dead ...

2008-11-03T20:48:00.004-07:00

I don't usually wax political, because for the most part politics make my head feel like it's going to explode, and I can't abide by arguing and nastiness. But something has been bothering me lately, so it's going to bother you all as well.

Much has been said in recent weeks about Sarah Palin's suitability as president of the USA. Apparently it's not important that she'd merely be the vice-president. Since John McCain is old, it's apparently a given that he's going to get sworn in and immediately kick it on account of being older than sixty. Ridiculous.
On one level I can understand the concern. But what I want to know is, why hasn't anyone discussed Joe Biden's suitability as president of the USA? He's Obama's running mate, so he's next in line.
Most people would probably hasten to point out that Obama is not an old man. Well, does this make the man invincible? He is an incredibly polarizing figure. There are a lot of wackos out there. It's only a matter of time before someone takes a shot at the man. Whether they succeed and kill him or not is anyone's guess. But he could very well be assassinated, leaving Joe the Bummer as our nation's leader.

What's that you say? Obama isn't likely to be assassinated in office? Well, I'd say that the odds of him being shot at are just as good as, if not better than, the odds of John McCain's health taking a turn for the worst. We are every bit as likely to end up with President Biden as President Palin. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't know if I can stomach Joe's weaselly little face for four years.

Let's have a little equality, shall we? If we're going to condemn McCain to death for being an old president, let's at least concede the possibility that Obama will be murdered as the nation's first black president. Well, technically, he's only half, but that's another rant for another day.

But as long as we're condemning one candidate for his VP pick, let's condemn the other as well. That's the American way, right?

P.S. Of Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin, guess who is the only candidate with any executive experience? That's right - Sarah Palin.

Under my thumbnail

2008-10-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

I've just decided that one of the absolute worst sensations in the world is the feeling you get when you've been pulling at a cuticle for a while and you realize you've pulled it one millimeter too far.
Right up there with it is the sharp stab of a hair splinter under that same cuticle. But blood aside, I managed at least to get the blasted things out most of the time.
Hair splinters are among the six hundred or so things about which no one will warn you when you contemplate a career in cosmetology. I suppose if I really wanted I could have avoided them by working at a full-service salon where 95% of the haircuts I did would be done with scissors only. But instead I decided to work at a place where 95% of the haircuts I did involved clippers and therefore hair splinters. (Scissors cut the hair straight across at the ends whereas clippers cut the ends at an angle, giving them the perfect shape to wedge underneath unsuspecting skin cells. Just in case you were wondering.) On the upside, I never had to do any chemical services and when I was alone in the salon I could play video games.
But they fired me, and now I have to get another job, one that I probably won't like as much - although almost anything looks better than CC4K when I recall the fun of picking someone else's hair out of my hyponichium.

Ron, Rick and ... Barbie

2008-10-25T02:43:00.002-07:00

I’m watching "Seinfeld" on channel 10 and during the commercial break there are ads for the station’s news team. The morning idiots are Ron and Rick, and a series of blonde dodos. The blondes are all interchangeable and if they didn’t have names I don’t think I’d have noticed them changing.
There used to be Ron, Rick and Ilona. Then out of nowhere, they canned Ilona and it was Ron, Rick and Jen. And it was the three of them as far as I knew until just now when I saw an ad for Ron, Rick and Alexis.

Is there some rule that TV anchorwomen have to be blonde? Oh, there are a few brunettes out there, to be sure - minorities, mostly. But not a single fecking redhead and heaven forbid any of them should have curly hair.
And I can guarantee you that once the Fox 10 morons tire of Alexis they’ll shove her aside for a newer model blonde idiot - Tiffany, perhaps, or Jessica. She’ll have no personality, perky breasts and heavily peroxided hair. I don’t know where they’ll find her - Stepford, perhaps. I think there’s some kind of lab where Fox 10 grows these little idiots.
And they lease the lab space from Mattel.

Birthday Brat

2008-10-23T15:23:00.005-07:00

So.
Today's my birthday.
I'm 25. There's nothing really exciting about 25, except that my car insurance is a lot cheaper because my prefrontal cortex is finished growing so I'm less apt to make poor decisions, if I recall my psychology classes correctly. But I think that's it. Birthdays get less exciting as you get older. I remember years ago I'd make lists of things I wanted for my birthday and/or Christmas, and my birthday would be an Event ... not so much anymore. Now ... now I pretty much figure I have an excuse to be obnoxious for twenty-four hours and that's about it. There will be cake, and maybe takeout from a restaurant I like, and family will come over. Nothing exciting.
I was hoping to watch the Dodgers play in the world series on my birthday this year, but as usual they messed that up. I swear, it's like they beat the Cubs and then just gave up. Honestly. "Okay, we won the NLDS, that's as far as we can go." Didn't they kind of want to go to the world series? Did they forget they haven't won the NLCS in twenty years? Didn't they realize they had to beat the Phillies more than ONCE to do it? I digress.
I'm sure I'm getting a few presents. My mother took me to the mall last week and bought me a few skirts and a dress from White House Black Market, since most of my closet looked like it belonged to a teenager (which I suppose makes sense considering last time I was a size 12, I was nineteen). And Mum likes to make sure I've got a few things to unwrap as well. But it's not really important to me anymore. In fact, I've been watching so many episodes of "What Not To Wear" and "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" lately that far from getting greedy for more, I actually got rid of 2/3 of the contents of my closet a few days ago.
But the other reason that my birthday isn't a big deal this year is that my dad is gone. He never made a huge deal out of my birthday or anything, but the fact is that I don't feel much like celebrating without him. I can only imagine how bad Christmas is going to be. Everything's going to suck for a while. I'll probably end up crying.
But that's okay. Today is my day to be the birthday brat. And as that annoying song goes, it's my party and I'll cry if I want to. Once it's midnight I have to behave myself again. I might as well milk this for all it's worth.

Money Can't Buy Me Love ... Or Maybe It Can

2008-10-19T20:19:00.004-07:00

Allow me to apologize for my extended absence from the world of blogging. It was unintentional and due to Bill Gates and his wonderful Windows Vista. Allow me to take a moment to suggest using Ubuntu, if I may.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

I like to think of myself as a fairly frugal person. Frugal being a nice way of saying that I am basically very cheap. I got it from my father. He was, in the words of Elaine Benes, extremely careful with money. And Jerry Seinfeld had it wrong; cheapness is indeed a sense. My father and I both possess(ed) the ability to smell a sale.
I don’t often spend a lot of money on things. I own a few expensive things, but my piano doesn’t count, or either or my guitars because they’re musical instruments and that’s different.
I did spend over 100 bucks on a vintage dress once, but I had to have it, and every time I wear it I get compliments. I think it was well worth the money. I’d spend it again on such a dress if I could find one. Alas, most of the dresses manufactured in the early sixties were made for women with much smaller hips than mine.
But the most expensive thing I’ve bought cost me $187, plus shipping. Before I admit to what it is, I should explain myself. In many important ways, I had an unhappy childhood. And this purchase was an attempt to fill a void I’ve had in my life since I was three - to snatch up a missing piece of my girlhood. An attempt to ease some of the residual pain of the last 22 years. I knew I shouldn’t spend so much on it, but I couldn’t stop myself when it came down to it.
Yes, that’s right. I spent 200 bucks on a Fisher-Price security bunny.

I had a pink bunny-bunny when I was little and I took it everywhere with me. One day my sister took me to the playground by our trailer and I took my bunny-bunny with me. I got distracted by the swings and the slides and when it came time to head home, I lost track of my security bunny. My mom went back to the playground to look for it later but it was gone - some SOB stole my bunny-bunny.
And it sounds ridiculous, but that missing bunny blankie has pissed me off for years. When I saw one on eBay, I bid on it. I kept getting outbid, and I kept bidding higher. The bidding ended at $187.
It was probably a stupid waste of money and there may be some point in the future where I regret spending so much money on something so inconsequential. But I’ll say this much: when I got my bunny in the mail, I smiled for a week. I keep it in a fireproof box, and that bunny will never leave the house.
I can’t afford to replace it a second time.

The Secret Is: You May Already Be a Winner!

2008-10-14T02:38:00.000-07:00

(Edited from a much earlier MySpace blog post)
Don't you just love those little get something free banner ads? The one I'm looking at right now says I can get a free* iPod Nano. And I'm sure I am. If I re-define the word "free."
It starts with little things, like a free trial of Netflix. Then you have to sign up for Columbia House. Then you're spending $300 on foreign-language CDs. Next thing you know, you've spent $2500 on tickets for a Swedish cruise line, and still no free iPod.
I suppose that after you've signed on to go into space for twenty grand, you get your "free" iPod. But wouldn't it be easier just to go to Target and buy one for $150? Or try eBay, I saw Nanos going for $75 the other day, and the seller doesn't require you to travel the Grand Canyon by train first.
What's sad is that there are people dumb enough to think they're getting a "free" iPod, or Coach handbag. And they go through every single so-called "sponsor offer," including the charter flight to Euro Disney, all in the pursuit of free MAC eyeliner and lipstick. If the masses weren't so stupid, companies would have abandoned the whole get-a-free*-iPod/handbag/Mini Cooper strategy years ago.
Honestly, rub a few brain cells together and think about it: it sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?
Well, it's the darnedest thing about stuff that seems to good to be true: it always is. If there were companies willing to give away expensive things for free, they wouldn't have to advertise. People would be beating down their proverbial doors to get their iPods, and it’s the same thing with those generous eBay sellers who are offering the secret to making a million dollars at home. If these people were really making that kind of money, would they be selling their secrets on eBay for $400? They wouldn't need that money. They'd have so much money they'd suffocate under its weight. The only ones who benefit from get-rich-quick schemes are the ones who propagate them.
Take recent bestseller Rhonda Byrne and her book "The Secret." Byrne asserts that if you purchase her book, or the companion DVD, or anything else with her name on it, you will understand what history's greatest thinkers knew and how you can apply this elusive knowledge to your own life, enabling you to make buttloads of money, lose weight, get laid, become famous, and say no to drugs.
It's certainly worked for Rhonda, hasn't it? The woman's loaded these days. She's everywhere. Her book is the bible in the Church of Oprah. She's been on every TV show and magazine worth its salt.
Personally I only watch "House" and repeats of "Seinfeld" and the only magazines I read contain celebrity gossip. So I'd not heard of Rhonda Byrne until my therapist asked me if I'd read her book. I said I hadn't, and he lent me the DVD that one of the other therapists in the office has been sharing.
Well, I watched most of it. It was longer than I thought, and I fell asleep about forty minutes in. But I think I got the gist of it. And I have to say, it's no secret. There isn't a thing in that book that hasn't been written before by Dr. Phil, Anthony Robbins or Deepak Chopra. And I do not wish to sound rude, but most of it's bull.
If having the life I wanted was as simple as "The Secret" makes it seem, I would be six inches taller, independently wealthy, 50 pounds lighter, antidepressant-free, a successful, well-respected writer, and an undercover CIA operative, with 20/20 vision and smaller pores.
Just for laughs, I decided to focus on getting good news in the mail. I suppose it worked, as it turns out I may already be a winner. But that was all I got, nothing else good in the mail.
Or any of the crap I've bought on Etsy. Crimeny, people. I paid ten bucks for shipping; the least you can do is send me my stinkin’ merchandise sometime this year.
I don't mean to imply that a person can focus on how bad their life sucks and still be happy and successful. But neither do I believe that victims of domestic violence or rape brought it on themselves with their negative energy, or that parents whose babies die of SIDS weren't thinking healthy thoughts.
I don't think that focusing on something brings it to you. You just notice it more. For instance: my parents bought a Toyota Highlander three years ago. Since that time, I have noticed a LOT of Highlanders on the road. I don't think that my parents' purchase has compelled the masses to flock to Power Toyota. I simply never had reason to notice the Highlander before. It wasn't relevant to me; I never considered buying one or driving one. Now that I see one every day, I notice them everywhere I go. I don't think that the car is selling better on my account. I just notice them more.
I think it's important to focus on the good things in life and to put good out into the world, but for moral, ethical reasons (read "Happiness is a Serious Problem" by Dennis Prager for more on that). If you tell yourself, "I'm going to have a wonderful day" over and over, your day will become wonderful because your mindset predisposes you to notice the good in things.
Bad things happen, no matter whom you are or what you do. Jesus was crucified, and I don't think it was a matter of negative thinking that did it. There doesn't exist a way to keep bad things out of your life. And this is how it should be. It's important to have opposition in things. It gives life meaning. It's not always fair, but crap is going to happen. It's a given. It is perhaps one of life's only certainties. Positive energy is a good thing, but it's not going to make your life perfect.
And it certainly isn't going to get you a free iPod.

Dave Barry 2008

2008-10-12T02:26:00.001-07:00

I have long suspected that Dave Barry is one of the smartest people alive - this is a man who managed to sell a book whose cover featured a picture of him sitting on a toilet - and now my good buddy StumbleUpon has provided me with a little evidence. The list is "Twenty-Five Things It Took Me over Fifty Years to Learn" but for the sake of brevity and because I don't like a few of them I'm going to pick my favorites to share.
From my old buddy Dave:
-The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.
-You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.
-You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
-They can hold all the peace talks they want, but there will never be peace in the Middle East. Billions of years from now, when Earth is hurtling toward the sun and there is nothing left alive on the planet except a few microorganisms, the microorganisms living in the Middle East will be bitter enemies.
-There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
-At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that:
The universe is even bigger than they thought!
There are even more subatomic particles than they thought!
Whatever they announced last year about global warming is wrong.
-The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.
-A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.

I remember a while back - was it 2000? There was a sort of fake campaign for Dave Barry for president of the United States. I think we need to bring that back. America needs a strong fake leader now more than ever, and I think that fake leader is Dave Barry.

Of course, I am really, really tired, and I've just eaten a Hershey bar, a Swiss cake roll, and about sixty SweeTarts. So I could be completely wrong.

Something's Fishy

2008-10-11T01:04:00.000-07:00

My name is Jill, and I am afraid of fish. (“Hi, Jill!”)

I read somewhere that most animal phobias have their root in childhood trauma, and mine is probably no different, although I can’t be sure what did it for me. I think it goes back to my first vacation. My family took a trip to Sea World when I was 2½. I was wandering down a hallway, the walls of which were actually large aquariums. I stopped to look at a small, plain-looking fish. My sister was with me. She tapped on the glass or something, I don’t remember. Maybe she just pissed the thing off. All I know is that one minute the fish was this big, the next, it was THISBIG. It was a puffer fish. And it scared the tar out of me. I don’t remember looking at any more fish there, but I do remember the penguins, and thinking that they were magic for some reason. I don’t know. I was two.

I still sort of think that about penguins, though. I love penguins.

In any case, I’ve always hated/feared the slimy little Satan-spawn. They creep me out and make me nauseas. Most of the time it’s not a problem, since people don’t exactly walk their pet fish, or put fish pictures up on their living room walls or wear fish t-shirts. But every now and then my phobia would become a problem.

My parents wouldn’t let us have a cat or dog, and thanks to me a pet fish wasn’t going to happen either. When our neighbors asked us to watch their pet goldfish while they went out of town, my parents had to prop open books and magazines up around the bowl so I couldn’t see it. Aquariums were off-limits. Nature shows were a no-no. Forget about serving tuna. And when I went shopping with my mother, we had to carefully detour around the seafood in the meat department.

But still, we all adjusted, and it was just one of those cute little quirky things about me, the same as my compulsion to correct the grammar of others, or my habit of memorizing the disturbing facts I learned in “Reader’s Digest” or my penchant for dramatics or my night terrors. And as I grew up, I learned to adjust. I simply avoided the fishing report in the local newspaper; I stayed away from the hunting and fishing area of Wal-Mart. I didn’t think much about it anymore.

However, in recent years, the health-conscious have begun promoting fish as a good way to increase one’s omega-3 fatty acid intake. I’m cool with that. But it’s not enough, apparently, for magazines and newspapers to suggest eating fish. Oh, no. They have to accompany this recommendation with photographs. Of fish – more specifically, dead fish, in threes and fours, piled on plates, their cold, soulless eyes staring up at the reader, wispy little tails and fins in place and everything.

Ugh. I’m getting sick just writing this. Pardon me while I vomit.

Okay. But honestly, there has to be a better way to convince me to eat something. If pork was suddenly found to be highly nutritious, would photo editors suddenly start accompanying their pictures of broccoli and asparagus with shots of lifeless porcine carcasses? I think not. Showing a dead animal, as is, is not very appetizing. What’s wrong with showing a fillet of some sort, all cooked and pretty with a little garnish? Why show me slimy black fish bodies? It didn’t used to be this way. But lately I have noticed more and more and more of it. Every article about health and diet has a picture of the little dead devil-things on a platter. And I’m here to say enough. I’m tired of having to ask my mother to pre-screen my periodicals for me with a sharpie and scissors so she can make things safe for me. I had to stop subscribing to “Martha Stewart Living” for just this reason (well, also, it sort of sucked).

I’d rant more, but I feel another good sick coming on. Let me just conclude by saying that when I read an article about how the ocean’s fish were in danger of dying out by 2040, my first thought was hallelujah, followed by the thought that it’s a good thing I don’t live anywhere near the ocean. All those dead SOBs have to go somewhere, and it’s best if where ever it is, is far, far away from me.

And by the way, the irony of the fact that penguins EAT fish is not lost on me. I try not to think about it. It’s easier to like them that way.

Good Grief

2008-10-10T17:08:00.001-07:00

I’m not exactly a stranger to death. In my relatively short life, I’ve had to deal with the deaths of three grandparents, two aunts and a father. But it wasn’t until my father’s death a month ago that certain nuances of the grieving process became a bit clearer to me. There are things about the way Americans “do” death that bother me, and as is my SOP, I’m going to share them under the principle that misery loves company, and if it’s bothering me it’s for darned sure going to bother you as well.

Someone said to me last week, “I was so sorry to hear that you lost your father.” And I thought what a funny thing to say. I didn’t lose him; I know exactly where he is. But that’s how it’s always put, isn’t it? A loss. I lost my father. He lost both his sisters. It sounds so careless. And while I appreciate the sentiment, it sort of bothers me. It’s another way that we distance ourselves from the reality of death. We don’t call it death; we call it loss. I’ve read that the more uncomfortable a society is with something, the more euphemisms there are for it. I believe it. Think of how many different ways we have of referring to the two big ones: sex and death. But no one will say the words, “your father died.” He did! He died. He is dead. We got a death certificate, not a “loss” certificate or a “passing” certificate. Let’s not mince words, ok? He’s dead, and saying it pretty won’t make it any less painful.

Of course, the person who accused me of misplacing a family member then moved as if attracted by magnet and hugged me much tighter than I’d allow even my mother to do. I am like my father in many ways, one of which being that I can’t abide by strangers touching me. I barely know this woman. I can’t even remember her name, and that didn’t stop her from mauling me. Yes, I’m grieving. That doesn’t mean I want random strangers turning into affectionate barnacles. Especially not during flu season (and as far as I’m concerned, it’s always flu season). Don’t pat my shoulder, my arm, or my knee, and please don’t hug me tight enough that you can glean both my cup and band size from your own body fat displacement. Some things just need to stay private, capisce? And FYI, I carry pepper spray for the specific reason that I’d rather not be molested. Thank you.

My sister said something funny when we were bringing seven vases of flowers in the house after the funeral. She said that it’s funny how people give live flowers when someone has died. “It’s like saying, here, these are pretty, but soon they’re going to die, just like your husband did!” We had a good laugh about it, but when you think about it, giving flowers is an odd thing to do. I’m sure it’s a tradition rooted in the middle ages when a dead body would stink up the house or something equally unpalatable like that. But really, what good are flowers to a grieving widow or child? The best thing that we got after my dad died was a big basket full of paper plates, bowls and cups, plastic spoons and forks, napkins, paper towels, Kleenex, toilet paper, trail mix, cookies, and bottled water. We didn’t have to wash dishes or run out to the store, and we had pick-me-up snacks and drinks at hand. I went on-line and, in a fit of morbid curiosity, looked up some of the bouquets we were sent. People spent a LOT of money on flowers. I wish they’d have given it to the hospice or to Barrow instead, where it could do good instead of wilting and shedding on the carpet.

I’ve noticed something else. Before the funeral, people are all phone calls and dinners and visits and flowers and sympathy. After the funeral? Nothing. It’s like, okay, he’s in the ground, that’s it. Back to your life. And the thing is, after the funeral is when we need the attention the most. Before the funeral, we had the funeral to get ready for. After the funeral, there’s nothing, just a lot of emptiness. Phone calls and flowers and visits would be nice around now, but everyone else has moved on. We got so many flowers the week of. I sort of wish they’d been spaced out a bit more. I could do with a pretty bouquet about now.

Death is a sticky situation; I think we’ve established that. So people tend not to know what to say. And so they say the wrong thing. Many wrong things. I would like to suggest here and now that we adopt some sort of official words of condolence and mourning. Something along the lines of, “I heard what happened. I’m so sorry.” Nothing else needs to be said. I don’t need clichés or platitudes or half-witted advice or, worst of all, “I know what you’re going through.” Because no one, not even my siblings, knows what I personally am going through. I’m the only me out there and I’m the only one who had the relationship with my father that I did. So no one can rightly claim to know anything. Other people have said to me, when I have expressed the slightest bit of unhappiness or remorse, “Well, do you think your dad would want you to feel/act this way?” Sorry, I don’t know how he would want me to feel or act just now, and since he’s dead and I can’t very well ask him, can I. Thanks though.

There are other things that no one should, under any circumstances, say to someone who has just experienced the death of a family member, and I’ve decided to pepper-spray the next person who says any one of them to me:
-“It was for the best.” (Best for whom, exactly?)
-“God needed him more.” (I’m sorry, but God doesn’t need any of us.)
-“It was his time to go.” (Even if this is true in a fatalistic or religious sense, he was only fifty-two so frankly “his time” sucks for all involved.)
-Anything beginning with, “You probably don’t want to hear this now …” (Well then do me a favor and can it.)
-“He’s not in any pain any more.” (He wasn’t in any pain before he died, either. His tumor wasn’t painful, and in the hospital after the stroke he was unconscious and sedated. But thanks for playing.)
-“Everything will get back to normal before too long.” (Really? Will my father be less dead in a few months?)
-“This Christmas will probably be hard for you.” (Gee, ya think?)
-“Put your trust in God.” (I did that already, and God took my father away.)
-“The best way to get over your grief is to step outside yourself and do something for someone else.” (K, first off, you never “get over” grief. You learn to live with it. Second of all, I can barely get out of bed in the afternoon and choke down 700 Calories a day, on top of which my father just died. What good am I to anyone else when I can’t even take care of myself at the moment? I think I should probably start brushing my hair regularly before I start any big service projects, just so I don’t scare the less fortunate.)

I know that people mean well, and I appreciate that. But we mustn’t forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. A simple, “I’m sorry,” means so much more to me than a lot of flowery words or proverbs. And if you step away after you say it you’ll be out of my pepper-spray range a lot faster.

Shut Your Mouth

2008-10-09T04:51:00.000-07:00

So. I read in the newspaper on Sunday about a new, less-invasive way of doing surgery; doctors are learning it as we speak and are apparently rather excited about it as it means less mess when removing gallbladders, appendices, and that sort of thing. Well, naturally, the first paragraph caught my attention. I had my gallbladder out a few years back and I’ve got four delightful little scars on my abdomen as a result. I’m lucky, actually, because my surgery was done laproscopically so the incisions were all very small, the largest about 1.25 inches across. If I didn’t know they were there I wouldn’t notice them. I digress. I thought to myself, less invasive? Do tell.

And then I read on.

And it turns out that these nutcases want to pull things out through existing bodily orifices. Gallstones? That gallbladder’s coming out your mouth. And in the case of appendicitis, get ready to give birth to an organ, because isn’t it handy that there’s an orifice nearby there as well.

May I be the first to say, ew? Perhaps I’m overreacting, I do have a delicate stomach. And the patient is unconscious during surgery, so it’s not like you’d choke on a part of your upper GI system. But personally, I’d rather be sliced open like a trout than have any part of my body come out of another part of my body.

The article did go on to mention that there are concerns about infection and the impossibility of properly sanitizing an orifice to minimize risk. But they’re working on it. Working on it, which means that before long they’ll have something figured out, and you gentlemen might be passing more than a bowel movement.

This is, I think a good example of the adage that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Granted, a lot of the … technology, I guess you’d call it, isn’t quite there yet. But it will be, so between you and me, if I have to go to the ER for a ruptured appendix, I’m bringing an X-Acto knife with me and making the first incision myself. It may be the only way to make sure they remove my appendix the way God intended: by slicing me straight open and ripping that sucker out. And if a GI doc asks me to open wide, I’m headed for the exits. There are some things you just shouldn’t throw up.