After a nearly five month hiatus, today I resume my chronicling of life's small hilarities. A lot has happened in my time away from this forum. The main change has been my move to the golden shores of California. Technically, in my case my environs are not so much miles of beautiful Pacific coastline littered with bronzed bikini bodies but rather the fog-swamped hills of downtown San Francisco. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying the smugness I feel saying that I'm now a California girl and not a Least Coast chump. This one-woman Manifest Destiny is doing me good -- I'm so caught up in stress over whether my damn garbage goes in a recycling or compost bin that I almost have no time to dwell on any other problems.
Last night, I got some good news and so went out with my friend Human Cat (a girl named Cat who also has a cat, hence the need to specify her species) for a Tuesday dinner special in Cole Valley to celebrate over 13-dollar three-course Italian dinners and 13-dollar bottles of wine. It was fantastic. Winbibing is my favorite form of imbibing: it's toasting the small victories that makes that wine taste so sweet. Cf. other kinds of drinking, like:
Slimbibing: grudgingly ordering vodka with just soda water because slowing metabolism can no longer process sour mix efficiently;
Grimbibing: commiserating over a drink with pals going through breakups, layoffs, depression, etc.;
Whimbibing: when a random mundane weekday happy hour most happily devolves into a surprise epic raging all-night funfest;
Pimpbibing: ordering bottle service or any other overpriced beverage in an effort to feel like the big man in the club;
Dimbibing: mindlessly downing beers while engaged in similarly mindless task like watching TV; and
Kimbibing: downing soju or sake bombs with your Asian friends and watching in amusement as they turn bright red and forget how to do math.
Woke up this morning feeling like 13 million dollars. Today's a brand new day, and California's the place to be!
Body warfare
Haven't posted anything in a while, because I haven't been feeling particularly inspired. And because the past week has been marked by toil and discomfort of the type that is more painful than interesting.
One week ago, I embarked on a quest of physical restoration after a long winter and early spring of ill-health and poor fitness. It's an ambitious tripartite plan, involving:
1) reduction of alcohol intake;
2) general food consumption regulation; and
3) resumption of workouts.
The first theater of war, though met with unanimous derision and skepticism by those whom I told of the scheme, has been surprisingly successful. This past weekend I even made a cameo at a party on a rooftop with a pool, and managed not to stagger into said pool. Improvement!
On the second front, I have faced signficantly greater challenges. In fact, the only thing I like about my eating plan is its project name:
THE EMACIATION PROCLAMATION
...in which I shall set fat cells free.
I rarely go on diets, but when I do, I like to give them really grandiose names. For example, in addition to the Proclamation of 2010 I've also participated in:
* Operation Famine;
* Taliban Hostage Meal Delivery Service; and
* Mission: Masai (in which I endeavored to run like a Kenyan marathoner, yet eat like an ordinary Kenyan)
As it turns out, it's really hard to eat less, and, more importantly, to eat right. I'm currently locked in an epic battle of wills versus a grapefruit that is sitting in my kitchen fruit bowl. I have obstinately refused to eat it, with an eye toward letting it go bad and therefore be unfit for consumption. After which I can scrape it into the garbage can -- and eat something more tasty -- with my conscience clear.
It is sort of like a game of low-stakes grapefruit "chicken." Unfortunately, I am losing. This grapefruit has been sitting healthfully in the kitchen, taunting me daily, and not just for the week since The Emaciation Proclamation was enacted.
Hand on heart, I swear that this fruit has been in my possession for five months. It was a Christmas-time acquisition. And for whatever reason, it has not aged. It is like the Demi Moore of citrus.
Day after day, I peek into the kitchen and hope that it has started to get dimply and old, its skin starting to pucker and petrify, or becoming soft so that the slightest touch would pierce the protective shell to expose the soggy, rancid fruit inside. No such luck. My friend even suggested I start chronicling the journey of the magic grapefruit, capturing via time-lapse photography its descent into inedibility. . . but I suspect that goading it on in this way would only anger it and provoke even more age-defying antics.
To my credit, I have somewhat countered my dietary setbacks by amping up Part Three of the plan: workouts. I even went to the gym on a Saturday night. The Saturday night college gym crowd is a fascinating cross-section, comprising, as far as I could tell, three demographics of students:
1) Ana girls. Seriously sinewy anorexics with ratty thin hair and ashy skin. The girl on the neighboring treadmill was power-walking at a near-90 degree incline, staring intently at the TV monitor in front of her. She was watching an episode of Bobby Flay throwing down on the Food Network, which I realized was the closest she had come to eating anything in weeks.
2) Roid kings. Guys strutting around in wifebeaters from which protrude bulging trapezius muscles blending seamlessly into the ears, precluding the existence of a neck. The gym was constantly pinging with the sound of them dropping heavy weights gracelessly, madly overcompensating for their acne and shriveled testicles.
3) Asian invasion. Chinese and/or Indian graduate engineering students wandering around the gym looking like they had never before emerged from the lab or attempted any physical activity aside from unicycling. I saw a pair of Chinese guys negotiating adjoining treadmills with some trepidation, their awkward gaits probably attributable to the fact that each was wearing flimsy canvas shoes suitable for only low impact sports like table tennis or tai chi.
All in all, it's been a slim win on the warfronts. We'll see how long my decrees can hold.
One week ago, I embarked on a quest of physical restoration after a long winter and early spring of ill-health and poor fitness. It's an ambitious tripartite plan, involving:
1) reduction of alcohol intake;
2) general food consumption regulation; and
3) resumption of workouts.
The first theater of war, though met with unanimous derision and skepticism by those whom I told of the scheme, has been surprisingly successful. This past weekend I even made a cameo at a party on a rooftop with a pool, and managed not to stagger into said pool. Improvement!
On the second front, I have faced signficantly greater challenges. In fact, the only thing I like about my eating plan is its project name:
THE EMACIATION PROCLAMATION
...in which I shall set fat cells free.
I rarely go on diets, but when I do, I like to give them really grandiose names. For example, in addition to the Proclamation of 2010 I've also participated in:
* Operation Famine;
* Taliban Hostage Meal Delivery Service; and
* Mission: Masai (in which I endeavored to run like a Kenyan marathoner, yet eat like an ordinary Kenyan)
As it turns out, it's really hard to eat less, and, more importantly, to eat right. I'm currently locked in an epic battle of wills versus a grapefruit that is sitting in my kitchen fruit bowl. I have obstinately refused to eat it, with an eye toward letting it go bad and therefore be unfit for consumption. After which I can scrape it into the garbage can -- and eat something more tasty -- with my conscience clear.
It is sort of like a game of low-stakes grapefruit "chicken." Unfortunately, I am losing. This grapefruit has been sitting healthfully in the kitchen, taunting me daily, and not just for the week since The Emaciation Proclamation was enacted.
Hand on heart, I swear that this fruit has been in my possession for five months. It was a Christmas-time acquisition. And for whatever reason, it has not aged. It is like the Demi Moore of citrus.
Day after day, I peek into the kitchen and hope that it has started to get dimply and old, its skin starting to pucker and petrify, or becoming soft so that the slightest touch would pierce the protective shell to expose the soggy, rancid fruit inside. No such luck. My friend even suggested I start chronicling the journey of the magic grapefruit, capturing via time-lapse photography its descent into inedibility. . . but I suspect that goading it on in this way would only anger it and provoke even more age-defying antics.
To my credit, I have somewhat countered my dietary setbacks by amping up Part Three of the plan: workouts. I even went to the gym on a Saturday night. The Saturday night college gym crowd is a fascinating cross-section, comprising, as far as I could tell, three demographics of students:
1) Ana girls. Seriously sinewy anorexics with ratty thin hair and ashy skin. The girl on the neighboring treadmill was power-walking at a near-90 degree incline, staring intently at the TV monitor in front of her. She was watching an episode of Bobby Flay throwing down on the Food Network, which I realized was the closest she had come to eating anything in weeks.
2) Roid kings. Guys strutting around in wifebeaters from which protrude bulging trapezius muscles blending seamlessly into the ears, precluding the existence of a neck. The gym was constantly pinging with the sound of them dropping heavy weights gracelessly, madly overcompensating for their acne and shriveled testicles.
3) Asian invasion. Chinese and/or Indian graduate engineering students wandering around the gym looking like they had never before emerged from the lab or attempted any physical activity aside from unicycling. I saw a pair of Chinese guys negotiating adjoining treadmills with some trepidation, their awkward gaits probably attributable to the fact that each was wearing flimsy canvas shoes suitable for only low impact sports like table tennis or tai chi.
All in all, it's been a slim win on the warfronts. We'll see how long my decrees can hold.
Lo, Fat!
Oh goody! Just checked my leftover spare ribs in the fridge, and it looks like they are cold. You know what that means.... hardened saturated fat layer!!!
I don't often come by isolated saturated fats. An obvious but nevertheless unfortunate byproduct of my aversions to both texture and cooking smells is that I don't often cook meat at home. But the other day I decided to make some braised spare ribs and headed to the grocery store to buy a good cut.
Spare ribs, as luck would have it, turned out to be on sale. My disproportionate satisfaction with the luck-of-the-draw savings, however, quickly turned into vastly more disproportionate horror at the following sign advertising the sale:
What jerk came up with the idea of adding to the sign a friendly cartoon rendering of an animal, smiling and totally oblivious to its grim future of slaughter, purchase and consumption? The cute little cow had a little friend too, a piggy playing near the packaged pork ribs. Waaaaah!!!!
I know it's grossly hypocritical of me, but I don't like being reminded of the animal from whence my delicious meal came. Of course, if I were more committed to the cause I would become a vegan, which I fully intend to do as soon as I meet a vegan who is not kind of annoying and proselytizing.
The little white lie is enough to keep me relatively clean of conscience on the rare occasions when I eat meat. And cooking with meat, though even more rare, is an occasion to celebrate, because of the glorious saturated fat that it generates.
Playing with fat is, without a doubt, the single greatest Joy of cooking. In the past, I've likened the act of chipping away the white, solidified centimeters-thick layer of fat that forms at the top of certain dishes to peeling off a Biore pore strip from a blackhead-laden nose. There's something very viscerally satisfying about seeing an accumulation of an unwanted byproduct. I think that's also why I really like that Ped-Egg scraper thingamajig for filing down the rough skin on my heels.
This time, while the spare ribs were slow-cooking, I had already jumped the gun on the fat-removal process by siphoning away some fat that had risen to the top with a spoon. I found the process of slowly skimming liquid fat, however, infinitely less satisfying than gouging off pieces of its solidified alter-ego.
It's far more delicate work -- surf too deeply and short rib flavor shrapnel gets caught on the spoon along with the waste -- and I've never been too skilled at any tasks requiring the finer motor skills. Or patience, for that matter. The process of collecting liquid fat resembles the meticulous and repeated dedication of plucking an unruly eyebrow, whereas solid fat offers the instant gratification of waxing multiple hairs into orderly submission in one fell swoop.
On the other hand, capturing fat in liquid form has its own set of merits. As surely as Lindsay Lohan will wake up tomorrow afternoon hungover with cigarette butts and cocaine in her hair extensions, so will all saturated fat harden at room temperature. For my short ribs, I collected the fat in a soup can and it solidified before my eyes.
I think next time I'll pool it into a clear receptacle. Maybe a beer bottle or a shot glass so I can play a nice trick on someone when they get drunk. Heh heh heh.
I don't often come by isolated saturated fats. An obvious but nevertheless unfortunate byproduct of my aversions to both texture and cooking smells is that I don't often cook meat at home. But the other day I decided to make some braised spare ribs and headed to the grocery store to buy a good cut.
Spare ribs, as luck would have it, turned out to be on sale. My disproportionate satisfaction with the luck-of-the-draw savings, however, quickly turned into vastly more disproportionate horror at the following sign advertising the sale:
What jerk came up with the idea of adding to the sign a friendly cartoon rendering of an animal, smiling and totally oblivious to its grim future of slaughter, purchase and consumption? The cute little cow had a little friend too, a piggy playing near the packaged pork ribs. Waaaaah!!!!
I know it's grossly hypocritical of me, but I don't like being reminded of the animal from whence my delicious meal came. Of course, if I were more committed to the cause I would become a vegan, which I fully intend to do as soon as I meet a vegan who is not kind of annoying and proselytizing.
As it stands, I like to pretend that meat grows in plant form. I like to imagine that some fatherly farmer wearing stylish coveralls and a floppy sun hat with a fetching grosgrain ribbon tied 'round it goes out into his fields each day with a brightly colored watering can and lovingly irrigates his steak crop. Then takes some pruning shears to his burger bushes. And sings lullabies to his baby bacon saplings.
The little white lie is enough to keep me relatively clean of conscience on the rare occasions when I eat meat. And cooking with meat, though even more rare, is an occasion to celebrate, because of the glorious saturated fat that it generates.
Playing with fat is, without a doubt, the single greatest Joy of cooking. In the past, I've likened the act of chipping away the white, solidified centimeters-thick layer of fat that forms at the top of certain dishes to peeling off a Biore pore strip from a blackhead-laden nose. There's something very viscerally satisfying about seeing an accumulation of an unwanted byproduct. I think that's also why I really like that Ped-Egg scraper thingamajig for filing down the rough skin on my heels.
This time, while the spare ribs were slow-cooking, I had already jumped the gun on the fat-removal process by siphoning away some fat that had risen to the top with a spoon. I found the process of slowly skimming liquid fat, however, infinitely less satisfying than gouging off pieces of its solidified alter-ego.
It's far more delicate work -- surf too deeply and short rib flavor shrapnel gets caught on the spoon along with the waste -- and I've never been too skilled at any tasks requiring the finer motor skills. Or patience, for that matter. The process of collecting liquid fat resembles the meticulous and repeated dedication of plucking an unruly eyebrow, whereas solid fat offers the instant gratification of waxing multiple hairs into orderly submission in one fell swoop.
On the other hand, capturing fat in liquid form has its own set of merits. As surely as Lindsay Lohan will wake up tomorrow afternoon hungover with cigarette butts and cocaine in her hair extensions, so will all saturated fat harden at room temperature. For my short ribs, I collected the fat in a soup can and it solidified before my eyes.
I think next time I'll pool it into a clear receptacle. Maybe a beer bottle or a shot glass so I can play a nice trick on someone when they get drunk. Heh heh heh.
revengeful
It's amazing that, a mere decade removed from the consistent and interdisciplinary rigors of secondary education, somehow my "knowledge" of everything I learned in middle school through college has been totally reduced to simple summary captions that a monkey could have memorized.
Geometry: Perpendicular = my mom can park. Parallel = my mom can't park.
Anatomy/Biology: Liver = Processes alcohol and resultant munchies. Fallopian tubes = Chicago Bulls.
Literature: Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo = Good at revenge. Dostoevsky's Invisible Man = Sucks at revenge.
Sigh. I randomly thought of this last allusion yesterday as I found myself at the distributing end of some poorly executed revenge. I was trying to park my car during the heart of rush hour; legit spots were few and far between, so I spent a solid half hour circling within the six block radius in each direction of my apartment, searching in vain.
I was in the middle of making a U-turn substitute (completing an otherwise illegal U-turn by utilizing an open-ended driveway) at my typical (i.e., "cautious breakneck") speed, when a short fat bald man ran up to the passenger side, slammed his chubby hand on the car's hood, and shouted:
"Hey, slow down! Bitch ..."
How totally bizarre and uncalled for! I hadn't come remotely close to hitting him or anything else. After all, had I actually done so, his mangled body splattered across my tires would certainly not have been in any condition to shout at me.
Nevertheless, anyone who's ever met me knows I'm not one to stand idly by when someone, however stupid, picks a fight, however stupid. So I did what any reasonable medium-to ill-tempered person would do in that situation.
I screeched to a halt and shouted back: "Say that to my face, you ... [edited]." The remainder was a filthy, classless and otherwise awesome outburst of epic, Tarantinian proportions, comprising:
Geometry: Perpendicular = my mom can park. Parallel = my mom can't park.
Anatomy/Biology: Liver = Processes alcohol and resultant munchies. Fallopian tubes = Chicago Bulls.
Literature: Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo = Good at revenge. Dostoevsky's Invisible Man = Sucks at revenge.
Sigh. I randomly thought of this last allusion yesterday as I found myself at the distributing end of some poorly executed revenge. I was trying to park my car during the heart of rush hour; legit spots were few and far between, so I spent a solid half hour circling within the six block radius in each direction of my apartment, searching in vain.
I was in the middle of making a U-turn substitute (completing an otherwise illegal U-turn by utilizing an open-ended driveway) at my typical (i.e., "cautious breakneck") speed, when a short fat bald man ran up to the passenger side, slammed his chubby hand on the car's hood, and shouted:
"Hey, slow down! Bitch ..."
How totally bizarre and uncalled for! I hadn't come remotely close to hitting him or anything else. After all, had I actually done so, his mangled body splattered across my tires would certainly not have been in any condition to shout at me.
Nevertheless, anyone who's ever met me knows I'm not one to stand idly by when someone, however stupid, picks a fight, however stupid. So I did what any reasonable medium-to ill-tempered person would do in that situation.
I screeched to a halt and shouted back: "Say that to my face, you ... [edited]." The remainder was a filthy, classless and otherwise awesome outburst of epic, Tarantinian proportions, comprising:
- the f-word;
- the f-word as adjective;
- both c-words;
- all three p-words;
- the f-word several more times; and
- various conjugations of both "suck" and "lick."
Had there been any bad words that started with Greek letters or numbers, I would have used them too.
Had there been a massive flock of birds standing nearby, they would have flown into sky cinematically as I shouted.
Had there been a massive flock of birds standing nearby, they would have flown into sky cinematically as I shouted. Had a full orchestral ensemble been sitting in my back seat, they would have spontaneously burst into the cataclysmically combative strains of "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana to accompany perfectly my dramatic insults.
Most unfortunately for me, the impact of my tirade was somewhat dampened because I hit a wrong button and rolled down my left rear, rather than right front, window.
In other words, I don't think the guy was actually able to hear anything that I actually said. I probably just looked like a cat lady who has misplaced her cats and resorted to talking to herself.
Once you've made an ass of yourself, what else is there to do?
Had I not been in a car, and had he actually heard me, either he would have cowered in shock and backed down.... or else we would have come to blows. But since I was in a vehicle, I couldn't very well elevate the fight further -- I would've had to actually nudge him with the car, which most would consider a crime, or else get out of the car and chase him on foot, which all would consider totally f-word-ing stupid.
So anyway, I ended up just giving a weak stinkeye out of the still-closed passenger side window and driving off like the Invisible Man that I am. Why even bother to learn bad words if my deployment of same is going to be so ineffectual?
bloody hell
Yesterday I found my mind wandering to the last tattoo parlor I visited. Of course, by "visited" I mean stared at from afar, half-wishing that I were still in the age range where an impulsive tattoo would not be unanimously mocked by my peers. And of course by "parlor" I mean the folding table and chairs set up at the top of the stairwell of Senor Frog's in Cancun, perfect for tempting drunken teens into capping off their evening's streak of poor judgment with permanent body art.
I remember thinking then how great it was that even the rare fastidious holidaymaker who had ridden neither a skanky one-night-stand nor a mechanical bull could still have one last chance to bring a bodily-fluid-borne disease home as a souvenir.
So yesterday I wondered: where do the artists who are insufficiently skilled with needles to work at makeshift nightclub tattoo setups go to seek employment? Apparently, they work for my doctor.
Yesterday I suffered through what should have been a non-sensational annual physical. Unfortunately, the nurse drawing my blood couldn't find a good vein. For ten minutes she poked and prodded my arms, tied and retied a tourniquet, and still nothing. If I were ever to consider smuggling some heavy duty contraband goods into the country on my person, I would want this chick heading up the body-search division at Customs.
She ended up pricking my right arm three times, including once into a vein that yielded nary half a vial of blood despite her fiddling in vain with the needle for another ten minutes while it was in my arm. It was like watching a really stupid child play "pin the tail on the donkey," and even after they take off the blindfold he's still trying to stick the damn thing to the animal's eye.
I was beginning to freak out that they'd have to draw the blood from my hand or foot like when I was a kid, when she finally switched to my left arm, and, on the second try, managed to collect her vials.
So this morning I woke up to see that both crooks of my arms are covered with erratically spaced puncture spots and track marks. It looks like the work of a vampire with a bad overbite. Or a heroin addict with Parkinson's Disease.
I wonder if today will be a better day...
I remember thinking then how great it was that even the rare fastidious holidaymaker who had ridden neither a skanky one-night-stand nor a mechanical bull could still have one last chance to bring a bodily-fluid-borne disease home as a souvenir.
So yesterday I wondered: where do the artists who are insufficiently skilled with needles to work at makeshift nightclub tattoo setups go to seek employment? Apparently, they work for my doctor.
Yesterday I suffered through what should have been a non-sensational annual physical. Unfortunately, the nurse drawing my blood couldn't find a good vein. For ten minutes she poked and prodded my arms, tied and retied a tourniquet, and still nothing. If I were ever to consider smuggling some heavy duty contraband goods into the country on my person, I would want this chick heading up the body-search division at Customs.
She ended up pricking my right arm three times, including once into a vein that yielded nary half a vial of blood despite her fiddling in vain with the needle for another ten minutes while it was in my arm. It was like watching a really stupid child play "pin the tail on the donkey," and even after they take off the blindfold he's still trying to stick the damn thing to the animal's eye.
I was beginning to freak out that they'd have to draw the blood from my hand or foot like when I was a kid, when she finally switched to my left arm, and, on the second try, managed to collect her vials.
So this morning I woke up to see that both crooks of my arms are covered with erratically spaced puncture spots and track marks. It looks like the work of a vampire with a bad overbite. Or a heroin addict with Parkinson's Disease.
I wonder if today will be a better day...
foul mood and odor
Drat. Friday night and I'm home alone. Looks like next door neighbor is an even bigger curmudgeon than I am, though; I can tell he or she is home because of some cooking odors wafting down the hallway.
That's right, I have never met my neighbor. He or she is generally an unintrusive, neutral presence. No loud music or subwoofed bass shaking my walls, no raucous parties and constant stream of sloppy guests, no illegal prostitution enterprise operating under cover of some deliberately vague "import/export business." As far as I can tell.
But tonight, I'm already in a bad mood, and now I've noticed there is a bad smell to go along with it. I have no idea what my neighbor is cooking, but judging by the terrible odor I wouldn't be surprised it if turned out to be fecal matter.
I hate cooking smells with a passion, even when it is vegetables and not apparent human waste that are being cooked. The kitchen in my house growing up was always swimming with curious odors -- odd combinations of animal parts, heavy oils and strange spices -- and I hated it. Now I go through Febreze or other "odor-eliminating" sprays in my own kitchen the way Ryan Seacrest probably goes through lube.
I hate emerging from a restaurant with my clothes saturated with food smells so that people I run into hours later can still guess my entree. Curry? Mongolian or, worse, Korean BBQ? Bless. And since I have really long hair that is damaged by aggressive coloring over the years, I'm convinced that my strands are more porous than the average person's, and therefore absorb and hold smells longer.
Curiously, even though I am very put off by odors, I have never been particularly sensitive to or discerning about pleasant scents. I've worn the same perfume for the last nine years because I can't find a new one. Whenever I test drive a brand that smells yummy on someone else, I somehow end up redolent with olives, latex, or other equally unappealing scents.
The last time I ventured into Sephora I enthusiastically coated all the available surface area on my wrists and forearms with different perfumes, then wandered aimlessly around the store for fifteen minutes waiting for the "top notes" to settle. Unfortunately afterward I couldn't tell the differences among any of the scents. Nor could I remember which perfume I had sprayed where on my appendages, rendering the whole experiment worthless on multiple levels.
So in an effort to look like less of a no-talent assclown I spent a further half hour fumbling with about two dozen tester paper strips coated in new scents, periodically heaving Kate Moss-grade sniffs at a pot of coffee beans to "reset my sense of smell." Finally I left in shame with my hands totally covered in paper cuts and totally devoid of purchases.
I so wish my olfactory dullness would kick in right about now. Think whatever my neighbor is cooking is starting to burn. Serves him or her right.
That's right, I have never met my neighbor. He or she is generally an unintrusive, neutral presence. No loud music or subwoofed bass shaking my walls, no raucous parties and constant stream of sloppy guests, no illegal prostitution enterprise operating under cover of some deliberately vague "import/export business." As far as I can tell.
But tonight, I'm already in a bad mood, and now I've noticed there is a bad smell to go along with it. I have no idea what my neighbor is cooking, but judging by the terrible odor I wouldn't be surprised it if turned out to be fecal matter.
I hate cooking smells with a passion, even when it is vegetables and not apparent human waste that are being cooked. The kitchen in my house growing up was always swimming with curious odors -- odd combinations of animal parts, heavy oils and strange spices -- and I hated it. Now I go through Febreze or other "odor-eliminating" sprays in my own kitchen the way Ryan Seacrest probably goes through lube.
I hate emerging from a restaurant with my clothes saturated with food smells so that people I run into hours later can still guess my entree. Curry? Mongolian or, worse, Korean BBQ? Bless. And since I have really long hair that is damaged by aggressive coloring over the years, I'm convinced that my strands are more porous than the average person's, and therefore absorb and hold smells longer.
Curiously, even though I am very put off by odors, I have never been particularly sensitive to or discerning about pleasant scents. I've worn the same perfume for the last nine years because I can't find a new one. Whenever I test drive a brand that smells yummy on someone else, I somehow end up redolent with olives, latex, or other equally unappealing scents.
The last time I ventured into Sephora I enthusiastically coated all the available surface area on my wrists and forearms with different perfumes, then wandered aimlessly around the store for fifteen minutes waiting for the "top notes" to settle. Unfortunately afterward I couldn't tell the differences among any of the scents. Nor could I remember which perfume I had sprayed where on my appendages, rendering the whole experiment worthless on multiple levels.
So in an effort to look like less of a no-talent assclown I spent a further half hour fumbling with about two dozen tester paper strips coated in new scents, periodically heaving Kate Moss-grade sniffs at a pot of coffee beans to "reset my sense of smell." Finally I left in shame with my hands totally covered in paper cuts and totally devoid of purchases.
I so wish my olfactory dullness would kick in right about now. Think whatever my neighbor is cooking is starting to burn. Serves him or her right.
Sweaty Beards
English idiomatic question: what is an antonym for oxymoron?
What I mean is, rather than a subject and modifier that contradict each other (e.g., "compassionate Conservative"), instead a turn of phrase where the subject's obvious traits render the modifier redundant and unnecessary (e.g., "greedy banker," "ankle-biting midget" or "virginal sci-fi fan").
Not-ymoron? I don't think such a word exists – although maybe "redundancy."
Anyway, my "attractive Swedish" friends (see where I was going with the not-ymoron query?) Isabella and Christian have recently informed me that their hotly-anticipated collaborative film Sweaty Beards may soon be opening in the US!
Sweaty Beards is a movie about Vikings, by real Scandinavians, in English. Moreover, it features an island death match. Just when I thought one film could not have it all. Check out the movie website: http://www.sweatybeards.com/
I'm incredibly excited at the prospect of this flick. First of all, Vikings are obviously awesome. In 2007 I spent 40 hours in Stockholm – about 38 of which were daylight, mind – and was disappointed to find that there were no actual Vikings roaming the streets, attempting to lure me aboard their ship to pillage my passport and what few krona I had not spent on aquavit.
Second, I despise subtitles because they're so distracting and oftentimes less than accurate – try watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Buenos Aires, where the whole theater starts laughing when Angelina taunts Brad with "Chickenshit!" and the subtitles helpfully flash "!COBARDE!"
So I know I have a notoriously short attention span and difficulty sitting through movies without ejecting to go wander around the lobby, or making up plots in my own head, or asking lots of questions and irritating fellow spectators. I may or may not also have been roundly booed at the conclusion of Avatar when I shouted "finally!" and broke my 3-D glasses in frustration.
But this looks like the first film ever that I might be able to endure in its entirety. Let's all go to the movies [x3]. . . and get ourselves a treat!
What I mean is, rather than a subject and modifier that contradict each other (e.g., "compassionate Conservative"), instead a turn of phrase where the subject's obvious traits render the modifier redundant and unnecessary (e.g., "greedy banker," "ankle-biting midget" or "virginal sci-fi fan").
Not-ymoron? I don't think such a word exists – although maybe "redundancy."
Anyway, my "attractive Swedish" friends (see where I was going with the not-ymoron query?) Isabella and Christian have recently informed me that their hotly-anticipated collaborative film Sweaty Beards may soon be opening in the US!
Sweaty Beards is a movie about Vikings, by real Scandinavians, in English. Moreover, it features an island death match. Just when I thought one film could not have it all. Check out the movie website: http://www.sweatybeards.com/
I'm incredibly excited at the prospect of this flick. First of all, Vikings are obviously awesome. In 2007 I spent 40 hours in Stockholm – about 38 of which were daylight, mind – and was disappointed to find that there were no actual Vikings roaming the streets, attempting to lure me aboard their ship to pillage my passport and what few krona I had not spent on aquavit.
Second, I despise subtitles because they're so distracting and oftentimes less than accurate – try watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Buenos Aires, where the whole theater starts laughing when Angelina taunts Brad with "Chickenshit!" and the subtitles helpfully flash "!COBARDE!"
So I know I have a notoriously short attention span and difficulty sitting through movies without ejecting to go wander around the lobby, or making up plots in my own head, or asking lots of questions and irritating fellow spectators. I may or may not also have been roundly booed at the conclusion of Avatar when I shouted "finally!" and broke my 3-D glasses in frustration.
But this looks like the first film ever that I might be able to endure in its entirety. Let's all go to the movies [x3]. . . and get ourselves a treat!
threes
If deaths, humor and sneezes come in threes, so does the TOTALLY BATSHIT CRAZY.
I've always known that there were some crazy people in my apartment complex, but the majority of my days pass incident-free. Sometimes I think God likes to store things up and then spring them on me collectively at opportune times to make unrelated events seem correlated and therefore more significant.
Like seventeen years and four days ago, when I was on a middle school field trip to Boston and in order to bypass the huge line to get into the famous "Cheers" bar I sidled up to the doorman and asked in a faux-Texas accent whether he could let me and my friends cut the queue, seeing as how we had escaped from those horrible Waco Branch Davidians they been showin' on the news. And he let us. And the next day the compound burned to the ground. And I realized that even at age twelve I was a total dick and God already hated me.
Anyway, so today, I was thwarted in my simple attempt to do a small load of laundry by the collective crazy of my fellow apartment dwellers. Three of them, in fact.
1) The Gnome
The gnome is back. I may have mentioned before that there is a gnome who lives in, or under a bridge near, my building. I've only seen her once, and only in the building's basement laundry room, where I presume she can tunnel out from her underground lair in order to launder her soiled and frayed robes, harem pants, and pointy-toed cloth shoes.
The last time I spotted her she was lurking around the ground level dryer gathering the last of her tattered rags into a glorified bandana-adorned hobo stick before scurrying out of the side door.
Accordingly, I don't even remember so much what she looks like. But I'm guessing a standard file photo of Hayden Panettiere can serve as sufficient visual demonstration of her gnome-ish qualities.
So if the last several months have been totally devoid of gnome sightings, how do I know she is back?
Because when I walked into the laundry room today, there was a small, rusty-looking stepstool leaning against the machine. Who else but a gnome would be using a stepstool to assist in dropping clothes into a washing machine?
I was too terrified to stay in the room, even though there was still a free machine available. Besides, I hate the recently installed "upgraded" machines anyway, because they don't have a cold/normal option, forcing me to choose between inferior cycles.
Better to save up all my laundry and quarters and hit that coin-op laundry near my parents' house that is really just a front for a Salvadoran smuggling ring of some kind, where at least I get to listen to the fellow patrons talk melodiously about me behind my back because they think I don't understand.
2) The Teen Music Fan
On the elevator ride up from the laundry room, a pale skinny hand clutched at the doors as they were closing. I would have thought it was the gnome chasing after me were it not regular-sized.
It turned out to belong to a college-age kid, maybe 18 or 19 years old. He had an iPod strapped around his neck, the earbuds buried in some floppy, appropriately unwashed looking hair. He wore scuffed gray New Balances, a cool looking retro shirt, and shredded jeans.
So why was this relatively normal kid blaring from his iPod a song I recognized as by Miley Cyrus? I could hear a wasted hooker-with-emphysema voice screeching about the next STD she is planning to contract even with the headphones on!
Am I really getting that old, or are "the kids these days" totally beyond insane? Who is this Justin Bieber character, and who is the record executive responsible for slipping him prolific doses of Human Growth-stunting Hormone? Why is he singing a song about "Eenie meenie miney mo" on broadcast radio? Why is Justin Timberlake, never a scholar of lyrical sense to begin with, now singing about “Carryout”? Is Rihanna an epileptic?
Why has the FCC not stepped in to ban this garbage from the nation's airwaves? I'd rather hear the continuous, logical beeping of the Emergency Broadcast System than try to decipher these lyrics.
3) The Wicked Witch of Northwest DC
So because I couldn't stop staring in disbelief at the kid in the elevator, or perhaps because I was beginning to move ever so slightly along to the audible beat (that Miley be a dirty festering skank but her Swedish pop impresario producers sure write a catchy tune), I decided to get off the elevator a floor early with my laundry bag.
Big mistake.
There is an widely-known crazy lady in my apartment, and she was there. For the sake of maintaining her privacy and dignity I'll just call her "Batshit Brenda the Septuagenarian Cackling Cat Lady who still wears miniskirts in A Concerted Effort to Kill Us All with her Rand McNally Atlas-worthy collection of spider veins." Brenda for short.
Doesn't every urban apartment complex have a Brenda? You know, a holdover from the 'Nam years who still dwells in her rent-controlled little hovel and emerges every once in a while to terrorize the other tenants with awkwardness?
I made the rookie mistake of talking to her once, and now she knows me. She never remembers my name, but she knows me. In fact, Brenda's probably given me an equally insightful nickname like "the Crazy Oriental Tall Girl who dresses like her welfare check got lost in the mail.”
Anyway, every time I see her in the halls or elevators, Brenda likes to complain about how expensive things are these days and what my rent is. She’s very consistent and persistent, like a one-woman Gallup Poll. Every time she asks, I give the same pat answer, that “I’m not in charge of finances in my household.” That seems to satisfy her.
But today, I was already in a little shock from my run-in with the music fan and the evidence of gnome activity. So today she started whining again about money. Went on and on and on. When she finally got to her customary question, I decided on a whim to break the cycle. I decided to answer her in Chinese. Just plain pretend I no longer speak the Engrish.
So I told her my rent in Chinese, then asked what hers was, and then looked at her politely as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
What happened next was straight out of a Coen Brothers movie. Brenda didn’t skip a beat or change her expression at all. She started speaking German! Or at least what was definitely a Germanic sounding language. Too bad I don’t understand German, because I never did get the answer to what her rent is.
She hacked and hawed for about two more minutes, and then.
Literally.
Said, “Auf Wiedersehen.”
Like she was Heidi Klum and I was a Project Runway hopeful. Or she was Arnold Schwarzenegger and well, just had never learned to speak English in the first place.
WHAT?
So there are two potential explanations for this social interaction. First, that she really is that crazy and didn’t notice that we had gone all “It’s a Small World” and had a multi-lingual conversation. Which would mean that I’m just as big a dick now as I was seventeen years ago.
Second, and more troubling? That I was just one-upped, and rather admirably so, by the apartment crazy lady.
Either way, I ran back up the stairwell, locked and bolted my door, and turned up my TV really really loud. Help! I'm afraid!
I've always known that there were some crazy people in my apartment complex, but the majority of my days pass incident-free. Sometimes I think God likes to store things up and then spring them on me collectively at opportune times to make unrelated events seem correlated and therefore more significant.
Like seventeen years and four days ago, when I was on a middle school field trip to Boston and in order to bypass the huge line to get into the famous "Cheers" bar I sidled up to the doorman and asked in a faux-Texas accent whether he could let me and my friends cut the queue, seeing as how we had escaped from those horrible Waco Branch Davidians they been showin' on the news. And he let us. And the next day the compound burned to the ground. And I realized that even at age twelve I was a total dick and God already hated me.
Anyway, so today, I was thwarted in my simple attempt to do a small load of laundry by the collective crazy of my fellow apartment dwellers. Three of them, in fact.
1) The Gnome
The gnome is back. I may have mentioned before that there is a gnome who lives in, or under a bridge near, my building. I've only seen her once, and only in the building's basement laundry room, where I presume she can tunnel out from her underground lair in order to launder her soiled and frayed robes, harem pants, and pointy-toed cloth shoes.
Accordingly, I don't even remember so much what she looks like. But I'm guessing a standard file photo of Hayden Panettiere can serve as sufficient visual demonstration of her gnome-ish qualities.
So if the last several months have been totally devoid of gnome sightings, how do I know she is back?
Because when I walked into the laundry room today, there was a small, rusty-looking stepstool leaning against the machine. Who else but a gnome would be using a stepstool to assist in dropping clothes into a washing machine?
I was too terrified to stay in the room, even though there was still a free machine available. Besides, I hate the recently installed "upgraded" machines anyway, because they don't have a cold/normal option, forcing me to choose between inferior cycles.
Better to save up all my laundry and quarters and hit that coin-op laundry near my parents' house that is really just a front for a Salvadoran smuggling ring of some kind, where at least I get to listen to the fellow patrons talk melodiously about me behind my back because they think I don't understand.
2) The Teen Music Fan
On the elevator ride up from the laundry room, a pale skinny hand clutched at the doors as they were closing. I would have thought it was the gnome chasing after me were it not regular-sized.
It turned out to belong to a college-age kid, maybe 18 or 19 years old. He had an iPod strapped around his neck, the earbuds buried in some floppy, appropriately unwashed looking hair. He wore scuffed gray New Balances, a cool looking retro shirt, and shredded jeans.
So why was this relatively normal kid blaring from his iPod a song I recognized as by Miley Cyrus? I could hear a wasted hooker-with-emphysema voice screeching about the next STD she is planning to contract even with the headphones on!
Am I really getting that old, or are "the kids these days" totally beyond insane? Who is this Justin Bieber character, and who is the record executive responsible for slipping him prolific doses of Human Growth-stunting Hormone? Why is he singing a song about "Eenie meenie miney mo" on broadcast radio? Why is Justin Timberlake, never a scholar of lyrical sense to begin with, now singing about “Carryout”? Is Rihanna an epileptic?
Why has the FCC not stepped in to ban this garbage from the nation's airwaves? I'd rather hear the continuous, logical beeping of the Emergency Broadcast System than try to decipher these lyrics.
3) The Wicked Witch of Northwest DC
So because I couldn't stop staring in disbelief at the kid in the elevator, or perhaps because I was beginning to move ever so slightly along to the audible beat (that Miley be a dirty festering skank but her Swedish pop impresario producers sure write a catchy tune), I decided to get off the elevator a floor early with my laundry bag.
Big mistake.
There is an widely-known crazy lady in my apartment, and she was there. For the sake of maintaining her privacy and dignity I'll just call her "Batshit Brenda the Septuagenarian Cackling Cat Lady who still wears miniskirts in A Concerted Effort to Kill Us All with her Rand McNally Atlas-worthy collection of spider veins." Brenda for short.
Doesn't every urban apartment complex have a Brenda? You know, a holdover from the 'Nam years who still dwells in her rent-controlled little hovel and emerges every once in a while to terrorize the other tenants with awkwardness?
I made the rookie mistake of talking to her once, and now she knows me. She never remembers my name, but she knows me. In fact, Brenda's probably given me an equally insightful nickname like "the Crazy Oriental Tall Girl who dresses like her welfare check got lost in the mail.”
Anyway, every time I see her in the halls or elevators, Brenda likes to complain about how expensive things are these days and what my rent is. She’s very consistent and persistent, like a one-woman Gallup Poll. Every time she asks, I give the same pat answer, that “I’m not in charge of finances in my household.” That seems to satisfy her.
But today, I was already in a little shock from my run-in with the music fan and the evidence of gnome activity. So today she started whining again about money. Went on and on and on. When she finally got to her customary question, I decided on a whim to break the cycle. I decided to answer her in Chinese. Just plain pretend I no longer speak the Engrish.
So I told her my rent in Chinese, then asked what hers was, and then looked at her politely as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
What happened next was straight out of a Coen Brothers movie. Brenda didn’t skip a beat or change her expression at all. She started speaking German! Or at least what was definitely a Germanic sounding language. Too bad I don’t understand German, because I never did get the answer to what her rent is.
She hacked and hawed for about two more minutes, and then.
Literally.
Said, “Auf Wiedersehen.”
Like she was Heidi Klum and I was a Project Runway hopeful. Or she was Arnold Schwarzenegger and well, just had never learned to speak English in the first place.
WHAT?
So there are two potential explanations for this social interaction. First, that she really is that crazy and didn’t notice that we had gone all “It’s a Small World” and had a multi-lingual conversation. Which would mean that I’m just as big a dick now as I was seventeen years ago.
Second, and more troubling? That I was just one-upped, and rather admirably so, by the apartment crazy lady.
Either way, I ran back up the stairwell, locked and bolted my door, and turned up my TV really really loud. Help! I'm afraid!
obviousness obviated
A friend of mine who just got married is on an unintentionally prolonged honeymoon in Paris right now. Last I heard he was still stranded by ash-related flight groundings, and he was emailing me to seek suggestions for, and I quote, "non-obvious" things to do in France.
More to the point, I'm not quite sure what to make of the request for a "non-obvious" tip. At least for a tip from me. To me, French things are often very obviously French. I've noted before that whenever I see an image of uber-French-looking David Guetta deejaying I fully expect to glance down at his turntables and find that he is spinning a wheel of brie.
I am grateful, therefore, when friends give me tips for their hometowns. I was in Verona last summer for opera, and a pal sent me a great email that I received my first day there, high-lighting several things of mixed-obviousness that I shouldn't miss. Seven scoops of gelato per day? Obvious. Gelato cheaper than water? Non-obvious. Pasta? Obvious. Pasta with donkey and horse meat? Non-obvious.
I sent a reply email full of increasingly useless suggestions that all involved taking a train out of Paris. My suggestions are useless for two reasons: first, because I'm not a huge fan of Paris and haven't been there for nine years; and second, because trains on the Continent right now look like prop vehicles from a Bollywood film because everyone is trying to secure a seat, or at least standing room, or at least hanging room from the outside of the carriage.
More to the point, I'm not quite sure what to make of the request for a "non-obvious" tip. At least for a tip from me. To me, French things are often very obviously French. I've noted before that whenever I see an image of uber-French-looking David Guetta deejaying I fully expect to glance down at his turntables and find that he is spinning a wheel of brie.I'm guessing that he was hoping for suggestions of activities that wouldn't be written about in guidebooks or other materials made available to hordes of tourists. For that, I am pretty useless. For the past few years my travel has been completely impulsive and comparatively unresearched.
Usually I can be found a few hours before a flight's scheduled departure scrambling to pick up a guide book or some themed historical fiction so that I cram some knowledge about a region and orient myself.
I like to land feetfirst in a city and figure it out as I go. I'm transfixed by drugstores and convenience stores, and like to wander through them in different countries and draw semi-specious conclusions about the local citizens's preferences for toothpastes, hair care products, simple groceries and sugar-free drinks. I like being courted and wooed by local beer ads before eventually sampling them all. I like strolling around and looking at clothing stores, at other people walking on the streets, and searching for vendors selling authentic jerseys of the local soccer team that I can admire or, alternatively, obvious counterfeits for actual purchase.
I am grateful, therefore, when friends give me tips for their hometowns. I was in Verona last summer for opera, and a pal sent me a great email that I received my first day there, high-lighting several things of mixed-obviousness that I shouldn't miss. Seven scoops of gelato per day? Obvious. Gelato cheaper than water? Non-obvious. Pasta? Obvious. Pasta with donkey and horse meat? Non-obvious.
So I liked Verona. Unfortunately I've been bombarded recently by commercials for a new movie set there called Letters to Juliet, starring the terrifyingly bug-eyed albino-with-thyroid-condition Amanda Seyfried. Ugh. I'm guessing it's going to be pretty heavy on the obvious.
tox tox tox
My bruxism has reached worrying levels. Technically, I don't grind my teeth, but I do clench my jaws with the ferocity of a field soldier enduring a nonanesthetized foot amputation. Anyway, the problem has escalated so that my molars are now dissolving into the jawbone from pressure. My jaw hurts 24/7.
Because I am afraid of mouthguards and will not wear one with beneficial regularity, I'm told my only option is Botox injections in the jaw to loosen the muscles.
Yikes! I'm not sure what my views on Botox at this point in my life should be -- I'm both depressed and intrigued at the prospect. On one hand, it's obviously depressing that I now need toxins injected into my face to prevent it from crumpling. But on the other, I have heard that Botox used as a preventative measure is more effective than waiting until after the collapse of one’s face and then attempting to put it back together using pulleys, wind-tunnels and staples or whatever they do.
After all, I don’t want to turn into “the Joker.” Shudder. That’s the nickname I gave once to a super old cougar wannabe with whom I got into a scuffle at Miami airport last New Year’s... We were all trying to fly standby to get home, and obviously seats on flights out of a cruise-ship port city after the holiday break are few and far between.
Anyway, this lady was the most hideous person I’ve ever laid eyes on (and I've seen Donald Trump in passing). She was dressed in all black, and all spandex. As a former volleyball player, my experience with spandex teaches that it was designed as a compression material – yet this woman’s garments somehow hung loosely from her deliberately emaciated frame.
She had dry peroxide blonde hair with visible brown roots styled into a bizarre feathered mullet. Her face looked like it had been segmented off and handed to an army of ants or other small industrious creatures who then scattered in different directions, pulling her skin taut like a tent-covering for an outdoor wedding.
Her face was stretched so tightly that the corners of her mouth were forced into a wry half-smile, like the one painted on the face of Heath Ledger's Joker character. I remember muttering under my breath, "Why so serious?" then laughing nastily to myself.
Most annoyingly, even though she was obviously not working a flight and was just trying to get home from a personal vacation like everyone else, she was wearing an “AA Crew" badge hanging from a jeweled lanyard around her bony, wrinkly, decrepit neck.
That neck! The telltale sign of aging that no amount of plastic surgery can hide. She looked like Nicole Richie from shoulders down, Madonna in the face, and the Lorax at the neck.
She was obviously trying to get the inside track on seats available for different flights by flirting with the gate agents, eating some Twizzler’s candy in what I’m sure she must have thought was a seductive manner. Watching her feed was like tuning in to a nature show on NatGeo. I remember watching her fumble with a twist of licorice in her clawed, leathery hands, then force it through her barely open, Restylane-filled lips in one swift motion.
So anyway, this brings me back to my original point of worrying that I will turn into the Joker whether or not I allow my Botox intervention to commence. It was pretty plain that the original Joker was only able to consume food sufficiently narrow and cylindrical such that she could slither it down her esophagus while moving nary a facial muscle.
If I don’t take care of my jaw problems soon, I’m no longer going to be able to chew, which might leave me potentially even worse off. Eeek! What should I do?
Because I am afraid of mouthguards and will not wear one with beneficial regularity, I'm told my only option is Botox injections in the jaw to loosen the muscles.
Yikes! I'm not sure what my views on Botox at this point in my life should be -- I'm both depressed and intrigued at the prospect. On one hand, it's obviously depressing that I now need toxins injected into my face to prevent it from crumpling. But on the other, I have heard that Botox used as a preventative measure is more effective than waiting until after the collapse of one’s face and then attempting to put it back together using pulleys, wind-tunnels and staples or whatever they do.
After all, I don’t want to turn into “the Joker.” Shudder. That’s the nickname I gave once to a super old cougar wannabe with whom I got into a scuffle at Miami airport last New Year’s... We were all trying to fly standby to get home, and obviously seats on flights out of a cruise-ship port city after the holiday break are few and far between.
Anyway, this lady was the most hideous person I’ve ever laid eyes on (and I've seen Donald Trump in passing). She was dressed in all black, and all spandex. As a former volleyball player, my experience with spandex teaches that it was designed as a compression material – yet this woman’s garments somehow hung loosely from her deliberately emaciated frame.
She had dry peroxide blonde hair with visible brown roots styled into a bizarre feathered mullet. Her face looked like it had been segmented off and handed to an army of ants or other small industrious creatures who then scattered in different directions, pulling her skin taut like a tent-covering for an outdoor wedding.
Her face was stretched so tightly that the corners of her mouth were forced into a wry half-smile, like the one painted on the face of Heath Ledger's Joker character. I remember muttering under my breath, "Why so serious?" then laughing nastily to myself.
Most annoyingly, even though she was obviously not working a flight and was just trying to get home from a personal vacation like everyone else, she was wearing an “AA Crew" badge hanging from a jeweled lanyard around her bony, wrinkly, decrepit neck.
That neck! The telltale sign of aging that no amount of plastic surgery can hide. She looked like Nicole Richie from shoulders down, Madonna in the face, and the Lorax at the neck.
She was obviously trying to get the inside track on seats available for different flights by flirting with the gate agents, eating some Twizzler’s candy in what I’m sure she must have thought was a seductive manner. Watching her feed was like tuning in to a nature show on NatGeo. I remember watching her fumble with a twist of licorice in her clawed, leathery hands, then force it through her barely open, Restylane-filled lips in one swift motion.
So anyway, this brings me back to my original point of worrying that I will turn into the Joker whether or not I allow my Botox intervention to commence. It was pretty plain that the original Joker was only able to consume food sufficiently narrow and cylindrical such that she could slither it down her esophagus while moving nary a facial muscle.
If I don’t take care of my jaw problems soon, I’m no longer going to be able to chew, which might leave me potentially even worse off. Eeek! What should I do?
delayed reaction
Because I am not a nice person, and because people like to say stupid things around me, I usually never hesitate to draw a face or call someone out on their stupidity immediately upon discovering it.
Every once in a while, however, stupidity has an incubation period. Like the time I met a blonde, blue-eyed could-be-gracing-Aryan-propaganda English girl in Greece and she said to me sincerely:
"Oh, you're Chinese? I'm part Chinese too. My grandfather lived in Hong Kong."
So, two days ago I went to lunch at Founding Farmers with an old college friend in town for the day.
I asked our waiter whether the "FF Blood Orange Soda" on the menu was premade. As in, the type of pre-fab fruity soda of the type Boylan's or Dr. Brown's sells...
So garcon answered with a description of how the soda was made (pulp of blood orange mixed with a fruit syrup and seltzer water, in case anyone is interested), and concluded with:
"A blood orange is just a type of orange."
Maybe because all these drugs are making me a little slow, but, seriously, why did it take me two full days to realize just how riddled with stupidity that reassurance was?
Now I think on it, there's only one reasonable inference I can make about the motivation for his statement:
Did he really think I was worried that the Blood Orange Soda contained blood?
Is that really a plausible concern in this day and age? A common question posed by restraunt patrons?
If so, I blame the irritating infiltration of vampire fascination into pop culture norms.
I was over Twilight before it began, what with Stephenie "My books suck not so much because I'm Mormom but because I lack any semblance of gift for prose" Meyers at the helm of story-telling.
Or its underwhelming movie franchise making undeserving stars out of: Kristen "No need to call an OB/GYN, my face always looks like I was just kicked in the twat by a cleated passerby" Stewart; Robert "Blimey, my hair is dirty from having it up my own arse all day" Pattinson; and Taylor "I'm hot, but when I open my mouth please resist the urge to batter me with Thermoses full of milk" Lautner.
Even True Blood, with its hot hot undead, strains my nerves with its casting of Anna "I'm blonde and now openly bisexual but somehow still not remotely hot" Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse.
Done with vampires. Done with blood. And somehow I never want to go back to Founding Farmers again.
Every once in a while, however, stupidity has an incubation period. Like the time I met a blonde, blue-eyed could-be-gracing-Aryan-propaganda English girl in Greece and she said to me sincerely:
"Oh, you're Chinese? I'm part Chinese too. My grandfather lived in Hong Kong."
Perhaps because I was none-too-sober myself, I didn't realize the absurdity of her statement until the next day, at which time it was far too late to shoot her one of my trademark withering "wtf, white chick" stares.
I asked our waiter whether the "FF Blood Orange Soda" on the menu was premade. As in, the type of pre-fab fruity soda of the type Boylan's or Dr. Brown's sells...
So garcon answered with a description of how the soda was made (pulp of blood orange mixed with a fruit syrup and seltzer water, in case anyone is interested), and concluded with:
"A blood orange is just a type of orange."
Maybe because all these drugs are making me a little slow, but, seriously, why did it take me two full days to realize just how riddled with stupidity that reassurance was?
Now I think on it, there's only one reasonable inference I can make about the motivation for his statement:
Did he really think I was worried that the Blood Orange Soda contained blood?
Is that really a plausible concern in this day and age? A common question posed by restraunt patrons?
If so, I blame the irritating infiltration of vampire fascination into pop culture norms.
I was over Twilight before it began, what with Stephenie "My books suck not so much because I'm Mormom but because I lack any semblance of gift for prose" Meyers at the helm of story-telling.
Or its underwhelming movie franchise making undeserving stars out of: Kristen "No need to call an OB/GYN, my face always looks like I was just kicked in the twat by a cleated passerby" Stewart; Robert "Blimey, my hair is dirty from having it up my own arse all day" Pattinson; and Taylor "I'm hot, but when I open my mouth please resist the urge to batter me with Thermoses full of milk" Lautner.
Even True Blood, with its hot hot undead, strains my nerves with its casting of Anna "I'm blonde and now openly bisexual but somehow still not remotely hot" Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse.
Done with vampires. Done with blood. And somehow I never want to go back to Founding Farmers again.
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