Yes, you may mock me now.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Confessions of a former goofball
This is my old license plate from when I lived in Missouri.
Yes, you may mock me now.
Yes, you may mock me now.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Dear Jackass, Volume 3
Dear realtors everywhere:
You narcissistic attention-whore. Must you plaster your homely mug on every single flyer, every single ad, every single business card, and even the aluminum signs in front of the homes you sell? Do you really think to yourself, "I've got to get an edge on all the other realtors out there...but how? Wait, I know! If people could only see how hot I am, they would be hypnotized into doing business with me!"
Who cares what you look like? If I don't need to know what my banker or my chef or my auto mechanic looks like, why do I need to know what my realtor looks like? I'm buying a house, not shopping for a mail order bride. Here's the new rule: If you happen to be one of the .001% of the population who is freakishly gorgeous, you are allowed to arbitrarily paper the city with your photo. But you, Realtor, are no supermodel--and no, a tacky Glamour Shot feather boa doesn't help. Adding your frumpy photo to an advertisement is not an extra incentive to a prospective buyer, but more of a puzzle. Now, instead of marveling at the spectacular amenities of this 3 bedroom town home, I'm sidetracked with trying to fathom what your thought process could possibly have been when posting your sad mugshot above the photo of this lovely abode. Please, in the future, save yourself the time and expense of the photo shoot, and save us from the burden of staring at your bad teeth.
Dear parents of seemingly feral children:
How new-age of you to have developed a parenting style in which your children are allowed to express themselves at any moment in any way they choose, even if it includes leaping off a chair and into a potted plant in a hotel lobby, shouting, "I'm Superman!" Everywhere you go, people hate your kids, which is unfortunate since their bad behavior is your fault, not theirs. Back when I waited tables, I remember serving a lovely, well-dressed couple with beautiful twin girls about 6 years old. As the parents calmly questioned me about the wine list and the Caesar salad, they gave no hint if they were aware that the little blue-eyed wildebeests were repeatedly pouring sugar all over the table and licking it up. To those parents, and to all the rest of you who choose to increase your Prozac prescription rather than taking a couple of minutes to teach your kids how to behave in public, I hope your kids grow up and never, ever move out of your house, because you deserve to have to put up with them until your last breath.
Dear nude frolicker in my gym locker room:
I'm minding my own business, changing my clothes, when suddenly, there you are like my flabbiest nightmare. Your belly is charging off to the left while your boobs are scuttling to the right--then suddenly, without warning, both parts change their minds and switch directions. It's like a flesh stampede, with some body parts threatening to trample others to death. I take no issue with your size; the problem is that I shouldn't be so familiar with it. This kind of nudity is something that should be reserved for the privacy of your own home, or perhaps that handy dressing room provided by our gym, not two feet from where you're now practically aerobicising while brushing your hair. I'm no prude--I change clothes out in the open here in the locker room myself--that's what a locker room is for. But I have the decency to do it quickly and without fanfare. You are actually wandering around nude, now strolling into the bathroom stalls, now brushing your teeth. And could you be a little less chatty? You are actually striking up conversations with random locker room occupants, complete with arm-waving and belly laughing, all free from the confines of clothes. Oh God, now you're eating a protein bar. Please, just a pair of panties, that's all I ask. I shouldn't have to see pubic hair and food in the same setting.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
You people have got to be good for something.
Look at you: Back again, ready to be entertained. It's all about you, you, you, isn't it? You take, and you take, and you take, and you never think of giving. Well, today is your chance to give back. I need some ideas for a good Halloween costume.
Let me just say it's never hard to top our previous year's look. Every year Brian and I wait til the last second and then sorrowfully pick through what's left of the crappy costumes in the stores, ending up with whatever cheap, predictable, hokey junk is left that no one else wanted. Last year we went to a party as a cop and a convict--pretty uncreative, but then again I was 4 months pregnant, and was happy just to find something my potbelly fit into. (There are lots of cute ideas out there for pregnant chicks, but they're much funnier if you're really pregnant--say, 8 months or so--not just a mere four months.) Brian, for his part, was happy with his convict costume because it didn't involve anything too degrading or goofy--all he had to do was step into the orange jumpsuit.
But every year I vow to myself that next year I'll put more thought and effort into Halloween costumes. That's where you come in. Surely you've got some ideas for us--preferably something that works for a couple, so that my costume makes sense in light of his, and vice versa. I would love to be Little Bo Peep, for example, but since that would involve dressing Brian up as a sheep, I'm pretty sure I'd have to heavily medicate him first. He would rather not to have to wear lots of makeup or a wig or a huge cardboard thingamajig. I, on the other hand, am willing to degrade myself in any number of ways in order to achieve a funny or cute costume, but naturally I'd prefer if it could be something I looked cute in. Little Bo Peep would great because there lots of ways for a girl to look adorable in that kind of costume. Heck, I could even figure out how to make myself into a reasonably cute sheep, if only I could talk Brian into being the Little Bo Peep. Again, that would involve some kind of sedative, possibly something designed for farm animals and administered with a gun.
I've asked my friends for ideas, but they're no help. I turned to Common Wombat for advice, but was met with his confession that he let his wife Sally dress the two of them up as M&Ms one year. This tells me two things: 1) He loves that woman very, very much, and 2) She does not love him at all. It does sound pretty cute, though, and I toyed with the idea of asking Brian if we could do that this year, but then I remembered that I have a small child to raise, and it's easier to do that in a two-parent home. So I kept my mouth shut.
Now, don't think you won't be rewarded for your help. If I use your idea, here's what you'll get in return:
1) I will put a pox on the enemy of your choice.
2) I will name my 15th child after you.
3) I will vow to never, ever throw a drink in your face in a crowded bar and call you a gutless swine.
4) I will post a picture of us in our costumes, lavishing you with credit and praise. My guess is it will be only a matter of time after that before your name becomes synonymous with Halloween fashion, and soon all the top designers will be knocking down your door, begging to make you rich and famous with your own clothing line. Eventually you will be sleeping with half the stars and/or starlets in Hollywood, and after a few stints in rehab and an illegitimate child or two, you will reemerge as a Hollywood darling again when you star in your own reality show based on your struggles to get your life back on track.
All in all, I think this is a pretty good deal for you, and it will save me a lot of tedious thinking. So get to work, folks, and make me look like a genius this Halloween.
Let me just say it's never hard to top our previous year's look. Every year Brian and I wait til the last second and then sorrowfully pick through what's left of the crappy costumes in the stores, ending up with whatever cheap, predictable, hokey junk is left that no one else wanted. Last year we went to a party as a cop and a convict--pretty uncreative, but then again I was 4 months pregnant, and was happy just to find something my potbelly fit into. (There are lots of cute ideas out there for pregnant chicks, but they're much funnier if you're really pregnant--say, 8 months or so--not just a mere four months.) Brian, for his part, was happy with his convict costume because it didn't involve anything too degrading or goofy--all he had to do was step into the orange jumpsuit.
But every year I vow to myself that next year I'll put more thought and effort into Halloween costumes. That's where you come in. Surely you've got some ideas for us--preferably something that works for a couple, so that my costume makes sense in light of his, and vice versa. I would love to be Little Bo Peep, for example, but since that would involve dressing Brian up as a sheep, I'm pretty sure I'd have to heavily medicate him first. He would rather not to have to wear lots of makeup or a wig or a huge cardboard thingamajig. I, on the other hand, am willing to degrade myself in any number of ways in order to achieve a funny or cute costume, but naturally I'd prefer if it could be something I looked cute in. Little Bo Peep would great because there lots of ways for a girl to look adorable in that kind of costume. Heck, I could even figure out how to make myself into a reasonably cute sheep, if only I could talk Brian into being the Little Bo Peep. Again, that would involve some kind of sedative, possibly something designed for farm animals and administered with a gun.I've asked my friends for ideas, but they're no help. I turned to Common Wombat for advice, but was met with his confession that he let his wife Sally dress the two of them up as M&Ms one year. This tells me two things: 1) He loves that woman very, very much, and 2) She does not love him at all. It does sound pretty cute, though, and I toyed with the idea of asking Brian if we could do that this year, but then I remembered that I have a small child to raise, and it's easier to do that in a two-parent home. So I kept my mouth shut.
Now, don't think you won't be rewarded for your help. If I use your idea, here's what you'll get in return:
1) I will put a pox on the enemy of your choice.
2) I will name my 15th child after you.
3) I will vow to never, ever throw a drink in your face in a crowded bar and call you a gutless swine.
4) I will post a picture of us in our costumes, lavishing you with credit and praise. My guess is it will be only a matter of time after that before your name becomes synonymous with Halloween fashion, and soon all the top designers will be knocking down your door, begging to make you rich and famous with your own clothing line. Eventually you will be sleeping with half the stars and/or starlets in Hollywood, and after a few stints in rehab and an illegitimate child or two, you will reemerge as a Hollywood darling again when you star in your own reality show based on your struggles to get your life back on track.
All in all, I think this is a pretty good deal for you, and it will save me a lot of tedious thinking. So get to work, folks, and make me look like a genius this Halloween.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Mockery 101: Your first assignment
Isn't it fun to mock people? There's something so satisfying in imagining that you are so incredibly intelligent, with your ponderously large brain, that the vast majority of the population is simply beneath you. And what better way to make yourself feel smarter than to mock others?
Often, the practice of mocking others involves pretending people are way dumber than they actually are. Let's say someone asks you a question that's a bit silly and uninformed--but in your head (because you'd never have the balls to say it out loud), you get all worked up over it as if it were the world's dumbest question; you make a disproportionately big deal about it, later retelling the story to your friends in such a way as to magnify the supposed stupidity of the person. For example, I once heard a guy say he needed some double-sided transparencies--a silly idea, considering transparencies are TRANSPARENT, and therefore can't be double-sided, because, well, side 1 would show through onto side 2. The silly part was how long it took to convince this guy that it wasn't possible to accomplish this. The guy just didn't get it. Now, I often cite that as an example of a dumb question, but the truth is, that guy probably wasn't really dumb, but just a little confused about the subject. That's a lot of what goes on in the world of mockery--you seize upon the tiniest infraction and exaggerate it to make a person seem way stupider than he probably really is, all in the name of feeling better about yourself for a few heady moments.
But what you really look for are those truly golden opportunities, those super satisfying moments when you find someone to mock who really deserves it, someone who does something really, incredibly dumb, no question about it. Sadly, those opportunities come along fairly rarely, so you're forced to mine the thousands of average, fairly intelligent interactions in your typical week and make do with what you have. Wouldn't you enjoy a good, solid mocking victim right about now? Someone who redefines the word "idiot?" You would? Great, then sit back, because I have a good one for you. This is going to make you feel so smart.
When I was 15, we took a test in one of my school classes in which were called upon to summon all of our knowledge of our own private parts and those of our neighbors. Our teacher provided each of us with a very artful rendering of a pee-pee and a woo-woo, and tasked us with labeling the various bits appropriately. Naturally, there was much snickering among us as the tests were handed out, and a good time was had by all. Well, all except one, for whom the jokes must have gone sailing right over her addled head.
Below you will find my test and hers. Mine is not so incredibly impressive--I scored a mere 87% on the female portion of the test, and a 93% on the male. (Baffling, since one would think I was a shoe-in to do better in identifying the parts I actually possessed in my very own undies--kind of like a cheat sheet in my bloomers.) But to be fair, I hadn't had much interaction with genitals up to that point--hardly any with my own, and certainly none with anyone else's. Still, I didn't do too badly, and was at least very thorough, as you can see from the detailed descriptions of the various and sundry parts, which I fastidiously scribbled on the back side of my test.
But here's where your mocking opportunity comes in. There was a girl in my class who I'll call Brenda. I don't remember how I came into possession of her test, but the moment I laid eyes on it, I knew it was comedy gold. I've kept it lo these many years, perfectly preserved and treasured as though it were the original first draft of our Constitution. I think if my house had caught fire at any point over the years, I would have risked life and limb to run back in and save this important document.
Here are Brenda's slightly misguided answers.
Notice she scored a paltry 12% on the female parts, and a shameful 0% on the male. In case your eyesight isn't so great, let me just point out that the top image, which is clearly the female part, has been labeled with a vas deferens, a penis (which she misspelled), and even a testicle. And the bottom image, which should be quickly noticed to be the male part because of the tell-tale PENIS hanging solemnly off of it, is labeled with two ovaries, a seminal vesicle (which she has renamed the feminine vesticle), a Fallopian tube which she appears to have tried to rename a Phillipino tube, and yes, a vagina. And the very object which should identify this drawing so obviously as a male part--the aforementioned penis--is, in fact, the very part that she labeled a vagina. Also chuckle-worthy is the presence of the urethra, which she renamed the urena, and the epididymis, which she renamed the epicenter.
And here's the back side of her sheet, left blank, as if she felt she had pretty much said it all on the front side of the test.
Now, let me clear up some questions you must surely have. No, this girl was not mentally challenged. She did not attend Special Ed classes and didn't appear to need them. She was strictly a C and D student throughout high school, but she wasn't in need of a spot on the short bus. She looked normal enough and spoke normally enough, although no one would have called her quick witted or loquacious. She was just your average kid--or so I thought until I was confounded with this mystifying test of hers.
Which begs the question: What the hell was in this girl's pants? I have to assume she had one of those hangy-downy things that she labeled a vagina.
I suppose I could ask my ex-boyfriend about it--who, a few years later, actually cheated on me with this sexually confused dimwit possessing ambiguous private parts. Which only goes to show, you don't necessarily have to know one single thing about the male or the female sex organs in order to make use of them in the back seat of a car.
Often, the practice of mocking others involves pretending people are way dumber than they actually are. Let's say someone asks you a question that's a bit silly and uninformed--but in your head (because you'd never have the balls to say it out loud), you get all worked up over it as if it were the world's dumbest question; you make a disproportionately big deal about it, later retelling the story to your friends in such a way as to magnify the supposed stupidity of the person. For example, I once heard a guy say he needed some double-sided transparencies--a silly idea, considering transparencies are TRANSPARENT, and therefore can't be double-sided, because, well, side 1 would show through onto side 2. The silly part was how long it took to convince this guy that it wasn't possible to accomplish this. The guy just didn't get it. Now, I often cite that as an example of a dumb question, but the truth is, that guy probably wasn't really dumb, but just a little confused about the subject. That's a lot of what goes on in the world of mockery--you seize upon the tiniest infraction and exaggerate it to make a person seem way stupider than he probably really is, all in the name of feeling better about yourself for a few heady moments.
But what you really look for are those truly golden opportunities, those super satisfying moments when you find someone to mock who really deserves it, someone who does something really, incredibly dumb, no question about it. Sadly, those opportunities come along fairly rarely, so you're forced to mine the thousands of average, fairly intelligent interactions in your typical week and make do with what you have. Wouldn't you enjoy a good, solid mocking victim right about now? Someone who redefines the word "idiot?" You would? Great, then sit back, because I have a good one for you. This is going to make you feel so smart.
When I was 15, we took a test in one of my school classes in which were called upon to summon all of our knowledge of our own private parts and those of our neighbors. Our teacher provided each of us with a very artful rendering of a pee-pee and a woo-woo, and tasked us with labeling the various bits appropriately. Naturally, there was much snickering among us as the tests were handed out, and a good time was had by all. Well, all except one, for whom the jokes must have gone sailing right over her addled head.
Below you will find my test and hers. Mine is not so incredibly impressive--I scored a mere 87% on the female portion of the test, and a 93% on the male. (Baffling, since one would think I was a shoe-in to do better in identifying the parts I actually possessed in my very own undies--kind of like a cheat sheet in my bloomers.) But to be fair, I hadn't had much interaction with genitals up to that point--hardly any with my own, and certainly none with anyone else's. Still, I didn't do too badly, and was at least very thorough, as you can see from the detailed descriptions of the various and sundry parts, which I fastidiously scribbled on the back side of my test.
But here's where your mocking opportunity comes in. There was a girl in my class who I'll call Brenda. I don't remember how I came into possession of her test, but the moment I laid eyes on it, I knew it was comedy gold. I've kept it lo these many years, perfectly preserved and treasured as though it were the original first draft of our Constitution. I think if my house had caught fire at any point over the years, I would have risked life and limb to run back in and save this important document.
Here are Brenda's slightly misguided answers.
Notice she scored a paltry 12% on the female parts, and a shameful 0% on the male. In case your eyesight isn't so great, let me just point out that the top image, which is clearly the female part, has been labeled with a vas deferens, a penis (which she misspelled), and even a testicle. And the bottom image, which should be quickly noticed to be the male part because of the tell-tale PENIS hanging solemnly off of it, is labeled with two ovaries, a seminal vesicle (which she has renamed the feminine vesticle), a Fallopian tube which she appears to have tried to rename a Phillipino tube, and yes, a vagina. And the very object which should identify this drawing so obviously as a male part--the aforementioned penis--is, in fact, the very part that she labeled a vagina. Also chuckle-worthy is the presence of the urethra, which she renamed the urena, and the epididymis, which she renamed the epicenter.
And here's the back side of her sheet, left blank, as if she felt she had pretty much said it all on the front side of the test.
Now, let me clear up some questions you must surely have. No, this girl was not mentally challenged. She did not attend Special Ed classes and didn't appear to need them. She was strictly a C and D student throughout high school, but she wasn't in need of a spot on the short bus. She looked normal enough and spoke normally enough, although no one would have called her quick witted or loquacious. She was just your average kid--or so I thought until I was confounded with this mystifying test of hers.
Which begs the question: What the hell was in this girl's pants? I have to assume she had one of those hangy-downy things that she labeled a vagina.
I suppose I could ask my ex-boyfriend about it--who, a few years later, actually cheated on me with this sexually confused dimwit possessing ambiguous private parts. Which only goes to show, you don't necessarily have to know one single thing about the male or the female sex organs in order to make use of them in the back seat of a car.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Can't an alcoholic get a goddamn nap anymore?
I always thought I had a good "woke up drunk" story--you know, an entertaining story about a funny place I woke up after a night of drinking. And I do have one--but as usual, my friend Josh makes me look like a lightweight.
First, my sordid story. Many years ago, my friend Becky and I went to Warrensburg (about an hour from home) for a street dance. I don't remember much of the dance, except that it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. Okay, perhaps that can be attributed to the fact that I got too drunk to enjoy it. At any rate, what I do remember is waking up in the middle of the night to the feeling of cold rain pelting me in the back. Hmmm--how odd. Was there a leak in my bedroom ceiling? A groggy, cursory inventory of the situation revealed that I had passed out face-down on the sidewalk. In an alley. About a foot from the open door of my car, where my keys were in the ignition and my purse was on the seat. It was 4 AM, there was no sign of Becky in sight, and I had those little bitty sidewalk pebbles permanently lodged into the flesh of my right cheek.
Incredible--could it really be that I was stupider and more careless than I had previously realized? I made a mental note to add this to the tediously long list of things I had done that I would crap myself if my future kids ever thought of doing. (And in case you're wondering, no, I don't drink like that anymore. In fact, that's the only time I ever did anything that stupid.)
But then there's Josh's story, which makes my drunken evening sound like an afternoon spent volunteering at an old folk's home.
One night he was sleeping peacefully when, from the depths of his very sound sleep, he thought he heard some kind of knocking sound. Hoping it was a dream, he tried to ignore it and settle back into his deep slumber. But the knocking sound continued, and as his fuzzy brain floated nearer and nearer to consciousness, the noise got louder, eventually revealing itself to be a very obnoxious banging indeed. Irritated to be yanked out of his lovely sleep, Josh angrily sat up and prepared to locate and punish the maker of the sound. Looking to his left, he quickly spotted the source of the commotion: Someone was rapping on his window. But why? What could be so important that he'd need to be awakened in the middle of the goddamn night? Squinting, he realized it was a cop. What the hell was going on here? And what was that infernal honking sound?
That's when he noticed he was in the back seat of a car.
At a stoplight in Kansas City.
And his brother was passed out in the front seat, with his head on the steering wheel, laying on the horn.
Uh oh.
But while that part of the story is strange indeed, perhaps the strangest part of is that the cop let them go. Somehow Josh convinced him that he was refreshed from his nap and able to handle the driving that his brother had so clearly been unable to. But don't go thinking Josh gets away with everything--he did, after all, get a DUI on a moped once. If I remember correctly, he was only driving the moped because he knew he was too drunk to drive a car, and was hoping to avoid a DUI by driving the moped instead. But as he eventually discovered, the law is no kinder to drunks on mopeds than drunks in cars.
His thinking wasn't totally flawed--in my teeny tiny hometown (about 30 minutes from where he got his two-wheeled DUI) there is an old man with a bit of a drinking problem. He has been in trouble with the local cops so many times for driving drunk that he finally either agreed not to drive his car anymore, or perhaps his family intervened and took it away from him. More likely, he lost his license long ago. At any rate, he no longer careens drunkenly around town in his car. Now he does it on his riding lawn mower. There are seven miles of highway between my hometown and his favorite bar in the nearest teeny neighboring town, and he can often be seen traversing them, at the rate of a crippled turtle, on his riding lawn mower, on his way to happy hour. As far as I know, the cops don't object to this.
What have we learned from this story?
1) An alley is a perfectly safe place to sleep, where your car, your purse, and your virtue will remain safe from pillagers and plunderers.
2) Cops in Kansas City are sympathetic to the plight of the public napper.
3) Drunk on a moped = jail time. Drunk on a lawn mower = quaint slice of small-town life.
First, my sordid story. Many years ago, my friend Becky and I went to Warrensburg (about an hour from home) for a street dance. I don't remember much of the dance, except that it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. Okay, perhaps that can be attributed to the fact that I got too drunk to enjoy it. At any rate, what I do remember is waking up in the middle of the night to the feeling of cold rain pelting me in the back. Hmmm--how odd. Was there a leak in my bedroom ceiling? A groggy, cursory inventory of the situation revealed that I had passed out face-down on the sidewalk. In an alley. About a foot from the open door of my car, where my keys were in the ignition and my purse was on the seat. It was 4 AM, there was no sign of Becky in sight, and I had those little bitty sidewalk pebbles permanently lodged into the flesh of my right cheek.
Incredible--could it really be that I was stupider and more careless than I had previously realized? I made a mental note to add this to the tediously long list of things I had done that I would crap myself if my future kids ever thought of doing. (And in case you're wondering, no, I don't drink like that anymore. In fact, that's the only time I ever did anything that stupid.)
But then there's Josh's story, which makes my drunken evening sound like an afternoon spent volunteering at an old folk's home.
One night he was sleeping peacefully when, from the depths of his very sound sleep, he thought he heard some kind of knocking sound. Hoping it was a dream, he tried to ignore it and settle back into his deep slumber. But the knocking sound continued, and as his fuzzy brain floated nearer and nearer to consciousness, the noise got louder, eventually revealing itself to be a very obnoxious banging indeed. Irritated to be yanked out of his lovely sleep, Josh angrily sat up and prepared to locate and punish the maker of the sound. Looking to his left, he quickly spotted the source of the commotion: Someone was rapping on his window. But why? What could be so important that he'd need to be awakened in the middle of the goddamn night? Squinting, he realized it was a cop. What the hell was going on here? And what was that infernal honking sound?
That's when he noticed he was in the back seat of a car.
At a stoplight in Kansas City.
And his brother was passed out in the front seat, with his head on the steering wheel, laying on the horn.
Uh oh.
But while that part of the story is strange indeed, perhaps the strangest part of is that the cop let them go. Somehow Josh convinced him that he was refreshed from his nap and able to handle the driving that his brother had so clearly been unable to. But don't go thinking Josh gets away with everything--he did, after all, get a DUI on a moped once. If I remember correctly, he was only driving the moped because he knew he was too drunk to drive a car, and was hoping to avoid a DUI by driving the moped instead. But as he eventually discovered, the law is no kinder to drunks on mopeds than drunks in cars.
His thinking wasn't totally flawed--in my teeny tiny hometown (about 30 minutes from where he got his two-wheeled DUI) there is an old man with a bit of a drinking problem. He has been in trouble with the local cops so many times for driving drunk that he finally either agreed not to drive his car anymore, or perhaps his family intervened and took it away from him. More likely, he lost his license long ago. At any rate, he no longer careens drunkenly around town in his car. Now he does it on his riding lawn mower. There are seven miles of highway between my hometown and his favorite bar in the nearest teeny neighboring town, and he can often be seen traversing them, at the rate of a crippled turtle, on his riding lawn mower, on his way to happy hour. As far as I know, the cops don't object to this.
What have we learned from this story?
1) An alley is a perfectly safe place to sleep, where your car, your purse, and your virtue will remain safe from pillagers and plunderers.
2) Cops in Kansas City are sympathetic to the plight of the public napper.
3) Drunk on a moped = jail time. Drunk on a lawn mower = quaint slice of small-town life.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
When flies suddenly gather in uncommon numbers, it's rarely just a coincidence
When I was 16, I drove a Chevy Citation for awhile. Not exactly a hot car, what with the hatchback and all, not to mention the bland grey interior to match the bland grey exterior. But hey, when you're 16 you're just glad to be driving. Know what's less hot than a grey Chevy Citation? A grey Chevy Citation full of flies.
I hate bugs. I know, hardly anyone outside of the entomologist population is big fan of them, but you've got to remember, I lived in Alaska til I was 8 years old. In Alaska, there are maybe 5 types of relatively non-scary insects, and other than that, there's just a whole lotta moose and caribou. I had seen mosquitos, ants, a couple flies and some bees--but none of those in any kind of number. I didn't like bugs, but I also just didn't think much about them, since they weren't much of an issue.
Then, owing to the general lack of adult supervision in my life at that time, I saw two horror movies when I was 7 years old which dealt with insects as predator. One was called The Bees, and the other was called The Swarm. Both of these movies, according to IMDB.com, are laughably bad, neither earning even as high as a scant 4 stars out of 10. But in both movies, incredible numbers of insects get together and basically blanket people, feasting on their flesh. There's a scene in one of the movies, I recall, where a frightened couple races to their car to escape the insect horde, and just as they're breathing a sigh of relief, the insects simply blanket the car and enter through the A/C vents and kill them anyway. I think I remember a scene in which insects are hiding inside a toilet--I'm not sure how well that worked since most insects don't do well in the water, but what I know for sure is that I spent the rest of that year lifting toilet seats and checking underneath to be sure there were no surprises before I used them. So there I was, just turning 8 years old, beginning to be a little skeeved out by bugs.
Then I moved to Missouri. In comparison to Alaska, Missouri is one massive insect nest. As an 8-year-old I was shocked upon discovering the vast array and sheer numbers of all the many insects I was apparently surrounded by in that new state. As far as I could tell, the movies I had seen had it right--insects did indeed exist in the kind of voluminous hordes that could consume the human flesh of most of North America. For a couple of months, before we were able to get a house, we stayed in a double-wide trailer belonging to a friend of mom's. I don't know how many of you have spent time in a trailer, but in addition to that one occasion, I also stayed in one many years later for about a month, and I can tell you one thing: Insects LOVE them. That first trailer experience was a fright show. For one thing, crickets were coming up through the drain in the bathtub. We'd kill the crickets, and the next day there'd be a cricket party in the tub again. We took to leaving the bathroom door closed at night to contain them, then drenching the tub with Raid in the morning to get rid of them again. I was aghast--they were coming up through the pipes! Exactly the kind of thing that happened in those movies!
Worse, there was some kind of incredibly stupid, hard-bodied beetle-ish insects that kept sneaking into the trailer and then bumping along the ceiling at night while I was trying to sleep. I'd be laying there in bed and hear them bump bump bumping against the ceiling as they flew around, seemingly trying to get past the ceiling to fly a little higher. It's one thing to know there are insects in the house, but it's just too much to ask that a person tolerate the kind of bugs that create a racket and constantly remind you of their presence. We had noisy crickets chirping merrily in both bathrooms, and the stupid beetle-y things banging themselves methodically against our ceilings. It was enough to drive a person nuts. And trailers are so cheaply made that there is often a ridiculous gap of an inch or more at the bottom of the doors that separate one room from another. Once my bedroom had been cleared of all invaders, I'd stuff a towel in that cavernous gap to help keep them out, then I would lay there in bed with the covers pulled up over my head, hoping that would afford some protection against them.
But enough about my psychosis.
Fast forward to me at age 16, in my bland Chevy Citation. It was summer in Missouri and I got into my car on a particularly hot day and noticed a big, fat fly buzzing around. Ack! Gross. And there's nothing more irritating than trying to driving while a fly is circling your head, so I opened the doors and shooed him out with much arm-waving. Then I went on my way, to a friend's house for a visit. Later, as I got back in my car to return home--another fly. I did that same comical dance, waving my arms and flinging myself over the seat to reach into the back seat, finally ousting the filthy little interloper. Weird--I hadn't left the windows down, but whatever. Flies are sneaky. He must have flown in during that split second that I had the door open to get in. But this went on. The next morning as I got into the car, there were two flies! Again, the windows had been up all night. What a bizarre coincidence! I shooed them out, and went about my business, but the next time I got in the car again, a few hours later...three flies! They were taunting me! I didn't have time to think about it right then, so after a now-routine shooing, off I went, and as you probably predicted, more flies appeared again later that day.
By now I'd had enough. Clearly, as you've gathered by now from the various escapades from my past that I've recounted on this blog, I'm no genius. But even I could see there had to be some explanation for this beyond mere coincidence. In the parking lot of the grocery store, where I happened to be at this most recent fly invasion, I began inspecting my car for clues. Front seat: Clear. Back seat: Nothing particularly suspicious. Hatchback: Seemingly normal. Just a few random things thrown back there and forgotten--a sweater, a pair of tennis shoes, a paper bag...hmmm. What's this in the bag? Mother of God, it's a sack of potatoes...TEEMING WITH MAGGOTS! What the fuck?! Who did this?! I leapt about a foot in the air, braying like a donkey on fire.
Then I remembered--I had gone grocery shopping for mom a couple weeks back. Clearly, I had carelessly left one bag in the car. And now that bag was a carnival of maggots. Why couldn't I have left the bag containing the canned goods? Or the one containing the toilet paper? More importantly, what do you do when your car turns into a breeding ground for flies? I had to somehow drive home in this fuel-efficient mobile nest. Howling dramatically and hopping from side to side, I snatched the bag out of the car and flung it across the parking lot like I was afraid it would bite me. After a quick inspection for leftover maggots (they very politely stayed corraled inside the bag instead of scattering througout my hatchback), I raced off to the carwash to give that car a vigorious, punishing scrubbing akin to what a rape victim probably does to herself immediately after the attack.
So there you have it: Proof that what you see in the movies is often not so far-fetched. The insects are coming for us. Just don't make things worse by storing potatoes in an environment of 100-plus degrees.
I hate bugs. I know, hardly anyone outside of the entomologist population is big fan of them, but you've got to remember, I lived in Alaska til I was 8 years old. In Alaska, there are maybe 5 types of relatively non-scary insects, and other than that, there's just a whole lotta moose and caribou. I had seen mosquitos, ants, a couple flies and some bees--but none of those in any kind of number. I didn't like bugs, but I also just didn't think much about them, since they weren't much of an issue.
Then, owing to the general lack of adult supervision in my life at that time, I saw two horror movies when I was 7 years old which dealt with insects as predator. One was called The Bees, and the other was called The Swarm. Both of these movies, according to IMDB.com, are laughably bad, neither earning even as high as a scant 4 stars out of 10. But in both movies, incredible numbers of insects get together and basically blanket people, feasting on their flesh. There's a scene in one of the movies, I recall, where a frightened couple races to their car to escape the insect horde, and just as they're breathing a sigh of relief, the insects simply blanket the car and enter through the A/C vents and kill them anyway. I think I remember a scene in which insects are hiding inside a toilet--I'm not sure how well that worked since most insects don't do well in the water, but what I know for sure is that I spent the rest of that year lifting toilet seats and checking underneath to be sure there were no surprises before I used them. So there I was, just turning 8 years old, beginning to be a little skeeved out by bugs.
Then I moved to Missouri. In comparison to Alaska, Missouri is one massive insect nest. As an 8-year-old I was shocked upon discovering the vast array and sheer numbers of all the many insects I was apparently surrounded by in that new state. As far as I could tell, the movies I had seen had it right--insects did indeed exist in the kind of voluminous hordes that could consume the human flesh of most of North America. For a couple of months, before we were able to get a house, we stayed in a double-wide trailer belonging to a friend of mom's. I don't know how many of you have spent time in a trailer, but in addition to that one occasion, I also stayed in one many years later for about a month, and I can tell you one thing: Insects LOVE them. That first trailer experience was a fright show. For one thing, crickets were coming up through the drain in the bathtub. We'd kill the crickets, and the next day there'd be a cricket party in the tub again. We took to leaving the bathroom door closed at night to contain them, then drenching the tub with Raid in the morning to get rid of them again. I was aghast--they were coming up through the pipes! Exactly the kind of thing that happened in those movies!
Worse, there was some kind of incredibly stupid, hard-bodied beetle-ish insects that kept sneaking into the trailer and then bumping along the ceiling at night while I was trying to sleep. I'd be laying there in bed and hear them bump bump bumping against the ceiling as they flew around, seemingly trying to get past the ceiling to fly a little higher. It's one thing to know there are insects in the house, but it's just too much to ask that a person tolerate the kind of bugs that create a racket and constantly remind you of their presence. We had noisy crickets chirping merrily in both bathrooms, and the stupid beetle-y things banging themselves methodically against our ceilings. It was enough to drive a person nuts. And trailers are so cheaply made that there is often a ridiculous gap of an inch or more at the bottom of the doors that separate one room from another. Once my bedroom had been cleared of all invaders, I'd stuff a towel in that cavernous gap to help keep them out, then I would lay there in bed with the covers pulled up over my head, hoping that would afford some protection against them.
But enough about my psychosis.
Fast forward to me at age 16, in my bland Chevy Citation. It was summer in Missouri and I got into my car on a particularly hot day and noticed a big, fat fly buzzing around. Ack! Gross. And there's nothing more irritating than trying to driving while a fly is circling your head, so I opened the doors and shooed him out with much arm-waving. Then I went on my way, to a friend's house for a visit. Later, as I got back in my car to return home--another fly. I did that same comical dance, waving my arms and flinging myself over the seat to reach into the back seat, finally ousting the filthy little interloper. Weird--I hadn't left the windows down, but whatever. Flies are sneaky. He must have flown in during that split second that I had the door open to get in. But this went on. The next morning as I got into the car, there were two flies! Again, the windows had been up all night. What a bizarre coincidence! I shooed them out, and went about my business, but the next time I got in the car again, a few hours later...three flies! They were taunting me! I didn't have time to think about it right then, so after a now-routine shooing, off I went, and as you probably predicted, more flies appeared again later that day.
By now I'd had enough. Clearly, as you've gathered by now from the various escapades from my past that I've recounted on this blog, I'm no genius. But even I could see there had to be some explanation for this beyond mere coincidence. In the parking lot of the grocery store, where I happened to be at this most recent fly invasion, I began inspecting my car for clues. Front seat: Clear. Back seat: Nothing particularly suspicious. Hatchback: Seemingly normal. Just a few random things thrown back there and forgotten--a sweater, a pair of tennis shoes, a paper bag...hmmm. What's this in the bag? Mother of God, it's a sack of potatoes...TEEMING WITH MAGGOTS! What the fuck?! Who did this?! I leapt about a foot in the air, braying like a donkey on fire.
Then I remembered--I had gone grocery shopping for mom a couple weeks back. Clearly, I had carelessly left one bag in the car. And now that bag was a carnival of maggots. Why couldn't I have left the bag containing the canned goods? Or the one containing the toilet paper? More importantly, what do you do when your car turns into a breeding ground for flies? I had to somehow drive home in this fuel-efficient mobile nest. Howling dramatically and hopping from side to side, I snatched the bag out of the car and flung it across the parking lot like I was afraid it would bite me. After a quick inspection for leftover maggots (they very politely stayed corraled inside the bag instead of scattering througout my hatchback), I raced off to the carwash to give that car a vigorious, punishing scrubbing akin to what a rape victim probably does to herself immediately after the attack.
So there you have it: Proof that what you see in the movies is often not so far-fetched. The insects are coming for us. Just don't make things worse by storing potatoes in an environment of 100-plus degrees.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Lessons I've learned, Part 8
I should never, ever be allowed to speak.
It would be difficult to convey to you how many times I have opened my big, dumb mouth and said something so retarded, so mortifying, that I lay awake the next several nights wishing for my own death. I'd blog about them so you could get your jollies laughing at my stupidity, but the internet isn't big enough to hold them all. However, one particularly unfortunate boo-boo was so traumatizing to me that it's never far from my mind, in spite of the years that have passed since it occurred. Every once in a while I notice it feels like there's something in my throat, and eventually I realize it's my foot, where it's still permanently lodged after this one particularly heinous faux pas.
I live in Texas, but still have some family and friends in my hometown in Missouri, so I go back from time to time. On one particular visit, I was in the lone drugstore of that incredibly tiny town when a man who looked to be in his seventies spotted me and was very excited to see me. He was so sweet, so kind and so enthusiastic, it was as if seeing me had made his day.
You'd have to understand my hometown; it is very, very small. I can hear some of you now--"I come from a small town, too!" No, you don't. Not like this. There were 38 kids in my senior class in high school. There is one street light in town, and it's on the main street, a flashing yellow. Everyone knows everyone. This is the kind of town where, when a car shows up in town with out-of-state plates, it's news. "Who is that? The car has Idaho plates." " I think it's Kitty's cousin." No, you're wrong--I think Bob has a sister from Idaho, though, it could be her." Etcetera. There's a little old lady in town who has a police scanner in her home, which she sits by all day long, enraptured, as if she's watching TV. The moment anyone gets stopped or arrested, she's on the phone to anyone and everyone she knows to report the news. She actually gossips about what she sees in other peoples' shopping carts at the grocery store, as in, "I guess Jackie's husband is making some good money now, I saw her buying steaks." Growing up, I used to hate the total lack of privacy that comes from small town life. I probably only went to the doctor once a year or less, but still, if I called the only clinic in town to make a doctor's appointment, the office worker who answered the phone would say, "Can I help you?" and I'd say, "I'd like to make an appointment," and she'd say, "Oh, hi, Karla." And this was before our town got caller ID.
There were only a handful of businesses in town--one grocery store, two gas stations, one hardware store, one florist, etc. My mom happened to own one of the two restaurants in town, which made her high profile, as in, everyone knew her. And by extension, it seemed like everyone knew me, even though I didn't necessarily know all of them. I was probably introduced to them all at some point, but forgot lots of names, partly because I was a kid, and partly because I was (and still am) fairly self-absorbed. This is why it came as no surprise to me that this very kind elderly man knew me and knew all about me, while I could not, for the life of me, guess who in hell he might be.
This happens to me a lot when I'm back for a visit, and usually I can play it off because the exchanges are fairly short. Someone will call out, "Hi Karla!" and I will answer as if I know them. We will exchange the briefest of pleasantries, and both be on our way, with the other person naturally assuming I knew exactly who they were. I hoped to be able to pull off the same scam with this man, because the alternative--letting him know I didn't remember him--was out of the question. He was just so glad to see me--how could I tell him that I didn't even remember him? So I played along, hoping his identity would come to me at some point. The thing that haunts me even now is that he gave me an out--he actually said to me at the start of the conversation, "You probably don't remember me, do you?" And God help me, he was just so sweet and cheerful that I didn't have the heart to say no, so I said, "Yeah, of course I do!"
I'm actually a pretty skillful bullshitter, so I thought I could pull this off. Plus, I know that the key to getting away with any kind of lie is to keep the exchange brief, try to make your escape before being caught. With this man, however, it was not so easy to extricate myself from the situation. He wanted details about my life, and asked me very specific questions. "How's your mom? I know her health hasn't been so great lately." "I hear you moved to Texas--what part? Do you like it there?" "What brings you to town? How long are you here for?" This went on and on. This guy was clearly retired, and seemed to be someone who perhaps didn't have a lot to do in his day-to-day life--why else would he be so thrilled to see me, someone who he probably hadn't seen in 10 years? I wanted to turn the conversation back toward him before I blew my cover--plus, it would have been incredibly rude to answer all his questions about me and never ask one about him. So I took the first opportunity to ask, "So what have you been up to?" As he opened his mouth to answer, I was wracking my brain--who IS this guy? I was desperately hoping to mine his responses for clues. Here's the sad saga of how it went down:
Me: So what have you been up to?
Him: Oh, well, not too much...you heard about my wife.
Me: (Nodding solemnly) Yeah, I did.
Him: Yeah, so I'm living by myself now, which is hard.
At this point I was thinking, Ah-ha! His wife left him! This gives me a clue. But he kind of had that hangdog attitude about it, like he'd been dumped by her, so in an effort to put a more positive spin on it, I brightened and said:
Me: Hey, you're back on the market!
Him: Well...I don't know if I'd put it that way...(trails off)
Suddenly, total recall hit me like a bucket of cold water. I knew exactly who this guy was: It was Mr. J, the father of a kid I went to school with, and longtime patron of my mom's restaurant. His wife died about a year before; I remembered my mom mentioning it to me.
Holy.
Shit.
Did I just tell a man whose wife died that he's back on the fucking market??!
Can't...breathe....Foot jammed in mouth just past the knee....
I don't remember what happened after that. I have no idea how the conversation ended, or if I was in any way able to recover from that. (Is that possible!?) It's like I blacked out from the mortifying horror I felt. The next thing I remember is practically racing across the street to meet up with Brian, who had been in the grocery store picking up some food. I breathlessly recapped the scene, gushing miserably about what a goddamn idiot I was.
Now, any responsible person would have agreed with me that I was, indeed, a goddamn idiot, or at the very least, that I had stuck my foot in my mouth. (If only I had stuck in in there sooner, before I got a chance to speak.) But my husband loves me a little too much for total honesty, and can't stand to see me in such a fervor. He actually tried to convince me that it wasn't that big a deal, that Mr. J. probably hadn't noticed, etc. In spite of my protests and retelling of the story to be SURE he understood exactly how thoughtless and stupid I had actually been, he stuck to his reassurances that I had behaved in a perfectly acceptable manner. You've got to love a man who will flat-out lie to try make you feel better.
I have to tell you, this story still horrifies me to this day. I managed to surpass even my own expectations of exactly how stupid I'm capable of being. I learned a very important lesson that day: I should never, ever speak unless I'm reading from a script that someone else wrote.
It would be difficult to convey to you how many times I have opened my big, dumb mouth and said something so retarded, so mortifying, that I lay awake the next several nights wishing for my own death. I'd blog about them so you could get your jollies laughing at my stupidity, but the internet isn't big enough to hold them all. However, one particularly unfortunate boo-boo was so traumatizing to me that it's never far from my mind, in spite of the years that have passed since it occurred. Every once in a while I notice it feels like there's something in my throat, and eventually I realize it's my foot, where it's still permanently lodged after this one particularly heinous faux pas.
I live in Texas, but still have some family and friends in my hometown in Missouri, so I go back from time to time. On one particular visit, I was in the lone drugstore of that incredibly tiny town when a man who looked to be in his seventies spotted me and was very excited to see me. He was so sweet, so kind and so enthusiastic, it was as if seeing me had made his day.
You'd have to understand my hometown; it is very, very small. I can hear some of you now--"I come from a small town, too!" No, you don't. Not like this. There were 38 kids in my senior class in high school. There is one street light in town, and it's on the main street, a flashing yellow. Everyone knows everyone. This is the kind of town where, when a car shows up in town with out-of-state plates, it's news. "Who is that? The car has Idaho plates." " I think it's Kitty's cousin." No, you're wrong--I think Bob has a sister from Idaho, though, it could be her." Etcetera. There's a little old lady in town who has a police scanner in her home, which she sits by all day long, enraptured, as if she's watching TV. The moment anyone gets stopped or arrested, she's on the phone to anyone and everyone she knows to report the news. She actually gossips about what she sees in other peoples' shopping carts at the grocery store, as in, "I guess Jackie's husband is making some good money now, I saw her buying steaks." Growing up, I used to hate the total lack of privacy that comes from small town life. I probably only went to the doctor once a year or less, but still, if I called the only clinic in town to make a doctor's appointment, the office worker who answered the phone would say, "Can I help you?" and I'd say, "I'd like to make an appointment," and she'd say, "Oh, hi, Karla." And this was before our town got caller ID.
There were only a handful of businesses in town--one grocery store, two gas stations, one hardware store, one florist, etc. My mom happened to own one of the two restaurants in town, which made her high profile, as in, everyone knew her. And by extension, it seemed like everyone knew me, even though I didn't necessarily know all of them. I was probably introduced to them all at some point, but forgot lots of names, partly because I was a kid, and partly because I was (and still am) fairly self-absorbed. This is why it came as no surprise to me that this very kind elderly man knew me and knew all about me, while I could not, for the life of me, guess who in hell he might be.
This happens to me a lot when I'm back for a visit, and usually I can play it off because the exchanges are fairly short. Someone will call out, "Hi Karla!" and I will answer as if I know them. We will exchange the briefest of pleasantries, and both be on our way, with the other person naturally assuming I knew exactly who they were. I hoped to be able to pull off the same scam with this man, because the alternative--letting him know I didn't remember him--was out of the question. He was just so glad to see me--how could I tell him that I didn't even remember him? So I played along, hoping his identity would come to me at some point. The thing that haunts me even now is that he gave me an out--he actually said to me at the start of the conversation, "You probably don't remember me, do you?" And God help me, he was just so sweet and cheerful that I didn't have the heart to say no, so I said, "Yeah, of course I do!"
I'm actually a pretty skillful bullshitter, so I thought I could pull this off. Plus, I know that the key to getting away with any kind of lie is to keep the exchange brief, try to make your escape before being caught. With this man, however, it was not so easy to extricate myself from the situation. He wanted details about my life, and asked me very specific questions. "How's your mom? I know her health hasn't been so great lately." "I hear you moved to Texas--what part? Do you like it there?" "What brings you to town? How long are you here for?" This went on and on. This guy was clearly retired, and seemed to be someone who perhaps didn't have a lot to do in his day-to-day life--why else would he be so thrilled to see me, someone who he probably hadn't seen in 10 years? I wanted to turn the conversation back toward him before I blew my cover--plus, it would have been incredibly rude to answer all his questions about me and never ask one about him. So I took the first opportunity to ask, "So what have you been up to?" As he opened his mouth to answer, I was wracking my brain--who IS this guy? I was desperately hoping to mine his responses for clues. Here's the sad saga of how it went down:
Me: So what have you been up to?
Him: Oh, well, not too much...you heard about my wife.
Me: (Nodding solemnly) Yeah, I did.
Him: Yeah, so I'm living by myself now, which is hard.
At this point I was thinking, Ah-ha! His wife left him! This gives me a clue. But he kind of had that hangdog attitude about it, like he'd been dumped by her, so in an effort to put a more positive spin on it, I brightened and said:
Me: Hey, you're back on the market!
Him: Well...I don't know if I'd put it that way...(trails off)
Suddenly, total recall hit me like a bucket of cold water. I knew exactly who this guy was: It was Mr. J, the father of a kid I went to school with, and longtime patron of my mom's restaurant. His wife died about a year before; I remembered my mom mentioning it to me.
Holy.
Shit.
Did I just tell a man whose wife died that he's back on the fucking market??!
Can't...breathe....Foot jammed in mouth just past the knee....
I don't remember what happened after that. I have no idea how the conversation ended, or if I was in any way able to recover from that. (Is that possible!?) It's like I blacked out from the mortifying horror I felt. The next thing I remember is practically racing across the street to meet up with Brian, who had been in the grocery store picking up some food. I breathlessly recapped the scene, gushing miserably about what a goddamn idiot I was.
Now, any responsible person would have agreed with me that I was, indeed, a goddamn idiot, or at the very least, that I had stuck my foot in my mouth. (If only I had stuck in in there sooner, before I got a chance to speak.) But my husband loves me a little too much for total honesty, and can't stand to see me in such a fervor. He actually tried to convince me that it wasn't that big a deal, that Mr. J. probably hadn't noticed, etc. In spite of my protests and retelling of the story to be SURE he understood exactly how thoughtless and stupid I had actually been, he stuck to his reassurances that I had behaved in a perfectly acceptable manner. You've got to love a man who will flat-out lie to try make you feel better.
I have to tell you, this story still horrifies me to this day. I managed to surpass even my own expectations of exactly how stupid I'm capable of being. I learned a very important lesson that day: I should never, ever speak unless I'm reading from a script that someone else wrote.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
The Bad Mommy Chronicles, Part I
When I was pregnant with Jake, my husband and I still got invited out to bars on the weekends like we did before the pregnancy--but I rarely went. Sometimes I'd tell Brian to go on without me, other times the two of us would just stay home or go to a restaurant together, but rarely did I fraternize with drunk people. I tried it a few times, early on, and I discovered something very important that many of you may already know: Drunk people are only tolerable when you are also drunk--and the drunker the better. In my pregnant sobriety, I would sit at a table in a bar with my friends for a couple of hours thinking, "Good God, why am I friends with these people?" I learned how very important it is that either all of us be drunk, or none of us be drunk. Pregnancy is tiring and irritating enough without the added tedium of 7 drunk idiots haw-hawing at every unfunny remark made and continuously repeated in a two-hour span.
However, it so happens that I did buy a lot of booze while I was pregnant. I know, I know, this doesn't surprise you, but I promise, it wasn't for me, it was for Christmas gifts. Brian and I spent that Christmas in Corpus Christi visiting his extended family, and there were many people there we rarely see. What kind of gift do you give people whose tastes you don't know well? Booze; always a safe bet. Plus, Brian's mom and dad have been getting more into wine recently, and have been experimenting with different types and reporting their findings to us (because we're big wine whores), so I thought it would be cool to get them 10 bottles of different types of wine. (Plus, while I love to buy gifts and normally spend the months prior to Christmas traipsing through store after store looking for just the right gift for each person on our list, that Christmas I was the size of and relative shape of a Shetland pony, and wished to minimize the traipsing. The liquor store was my answer to a one-stop shop for all the good little boys and girls on my Christmas list.) So with the 10 bottles of wine for the in-laws and the various single bottles I bought for this person or that, I ended up buying probably 20 bottles of wine that Christmas, all while I was 6 months pregnant.
Nothing makes you feel quite so seedy and shameful as shopping for booze while pregnant. Not to mention I wasn't just buying one or two things, but a whole, bulging shopping cart-load--really, it was like that scene in Leaving Las Vegas, where Nicolas Cage, having decided to check into a hotel and drink himself literally to death, is cha-chaing through the liquor store, piling bottle after bottle into his shopping cart, while drunk off his ass. Well--except for the fact that he wasn't pregnant. And I wasn't drunk. As far as you know. But just as I was trying to console myself with the thought that surely bystanders who saw me lumbering along behind my cartload of spirits would know I was buying this for other people and not for myself--the meddling old man who rang me up looked disapprovingly at me over his glasses and actually wagged his finger at me as he said gravely, "None of this for mommy." Yeah jackass, I got the memo that booze isn't recommended by the Surgeon General for fetuses. Man, it's like a pregnant girl can't even be an alcoholic these days without catching some flack. Things sure were a whole lot different when I was in utero. My mom drank, smoked and did God-knows what else while I was incubating. Now, just because a few babies have been born with a third leg or no skin, everyone's all uptight. (Just kidding, of course. I behaved myself very nicely while pregnant--and really haven't drank much since Jake's been born, either. Damnit.)
I didn't set foot into a liquor store again until my son was 6 months old--an unheard of stretch of time, considering most of my adult life I have faithfully frequented those magical places on a regular basis. The liquor store is my Toys R Us. Or was, anyway. Drinking is not as much fun now that I have an infant in the house. Even when he goes to grandma's now and then and we have a night out with friends, I'm always acutely aware that we'll be picking him up soon and he'll be chirping merrily at 7:30 AM, ready for breakfast, so drinking is no longer as fun as God intended it to be. At any rate, recently I had to buy Brian's dad a birthday gift, and he is not easy to buy for. I asked Brian's mom for hints, and she recommended getting him some different imported beers.
Brian's parents are not the alcoholics I'm probably inadvertently making them out to be, and it's not like we buy them booze for gifts on a regular basis. In fact, it's the opposite--they don't drink that much, which is why it made sense to buy them a variety of wines that Christmas, since they haven't drank enough wine in their lives to know just what they like--they're still experimenting to find what appeals to them. Plus, they have a built-in wine rack in their den which has been completely empty all the years I've known them, so I thought it would be cool to fill it. As for the imported beer for the birthday gift, same story--Brian's dad likes imported beer but doesn't drink it often enough to be a connoisseur, so it was a nice idea to get him a few different kinds to experiment with.
(Certain members of my family, on the other hand, know exactly what they like to drink, thanks to many years of dedicated attention to their livers. No experimentation needed there.)
So there I was, one Friday morning, faced with the chore of buying Brian's dad's birthday beer. I also needed to pick up a six-pack for Brian, since that was the night of my friend Vanessa's surprise birthday party, and Brian would not have time to stop at the store before heading to the shindig. I had Jake with me, though, and while I hated to take a baby to the liquor store, from what I understand, it's frowned upon to leave a 6-month-old home alone, even if you lock him in a small room with a bowl of water and a jar of baby food, and no access to lighters or other dangerous items. Bizarre, but whatever. I'm a rule-follower, so I did what's expected of me and took him along with me. To the liquor store.
He was asleep by the time we got there, so instead of just carrying his car seat by the handle and possibly waking him up, I put the car seat in the stroller so he'd have a smoother ride and hopefully get to finish his nap. I felt like a colossal ass pushing my stroller into the liquor store, but I kept my eyes front and didn't check to see if anyone was staring, or possibly grabbing a phone to call Child Protective Services. As I perused the imported beers, Jake woke up and began to fidget and complain, so I picked him up and carried him on my hip as I shopped for the beer. Then I began to calculate how many six-packs I needed to make a decent-sized birthday gift--I decided on four. Plus one for Brian--that's a lot of beer to carry. I needed a shopping cart. But there's no way to push a shopping cart and a stroller both at once...plus the baby wasn't even in his stroller at the moment, but chattering happily away in my arms...why not put the beer in the stroller? I'm a common-sense girl. So into the stroller, exactly where Jake would normally sit, I piled 5 six-packs of bottled beer. That made the stroller pretty heavy, so I had to lean my shoulder into it as I struggled to negotiate the various wine displays and aisles of liquor, pushing my combination stroller/booze wagon toward the cash register while balancing my 20-pound baby on my hip.
When I was almost to the register I encountered a tight corner between the bargain schnapps bin and the wine gift bag display, and one of the cashiers cheerfully hustled over to help, pulling my overloaded stroller the rest of the way to the register for me. In all, there were three cashiers gathered around as I hefted 6-pack after 6-pack of beer out of the stroller, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, mumbling lamely about a birthday gift for my father-in-law. Why did I feel like I was lying, when I wasn't? Funny how when you think you look like a criminal, it makes you actually feel guilty, as if you really are doing something wrong. Anyway, no one said what they must have been thinking--that Jake should be removed from my custody as soon as possible--and I paid my tab and left. Along with one of the cashiers, who generously transported my tower of beer to the car for me and loaded it in. Yes, I bought so much beer at the liquor store with my infant that I needed a carry-out.
That's where this episode of The Bad Mommy Chronicles should end, but just yesterday I reached a new low. My friend Brooks recently had a birthday, and would be coming over to my house that evening. I needed to get him a birthday gift...but what do you get for the guy who has...some things? Brooks is a dear friend of mine and I love him. I think you know what that means--I had to get him a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Not because I thought he'd actually drink it, but just because the thought of it made me giggle. That would mean yet another mother-son outing to the liquor store.
As we entered the store (a different one this time), a cheerful girl behind a table parked right by the door said, "Hi! Would you like to try a sample of our Vodka Mudshake?" I had seen her through the glass door as I approached the building. This was a liquor store that almost always had someone handing out samples at the door, but I assumed because I had a baby on my hip, she'd let me pass unmolested. I was a little surprised she even asked me, but I laughed and responded, "Right--that wouldn't look wrong or anything, drinking booze with a baby in my arms," and she replied, "Oh, it's just a sip." Damn pushers, they know just how to get you. But she had a point. The little sample cups stacked beside her were the size of thimbles. "Okay, I'll try it." So I took my sip of creamy, chocolatey vodka-stuff, thanked her politely, and then pivoted toward the cashier to ask, "Where's the Mad Dog?"
I've got to hand it to these liquor store employees, they are masters at not acting judgmental when someone does something that the rest of the world would consider wrong. I get the feeling I could smoke a crack pipe while carrying a basket of severed arms around the store, as long as I was on my way to the register to make a purchase. Instead of being shocked that someone would bring an innocent baby into this den of iniquity and then commit the even graver sin of buying the cheapest swill in the store, normally reserved only for people who sleep on sidewalks, the cheerful cashier insisted on holding Jake for me while I selected from the colorful array of Mad Dog flavors. Lime green, bright red, orange, purple...wait, isn't this supposed to be wine? It says so right on the bottle, but to my knowledge, there are no orange or lime-colored grapes. Never mind. I'm an old fashioned girl, so I went for the tried-and-true purple stuff, none of those new-fangled fancy flavors. Brooks would be puking up purple, like decades of Mad Dog drinkers before him. I hadn't seen a bottle of Mad Dog since high school, and I had forgotten how unbelievably cheap it is--$2.99 a bottle! See, it's true--you don't have to spend a lot of money to get a fine bottle of wine. I took my baby back from the helpful cashier and, with my bottle of cheap rot-gut in the other hand, I carried Jake to the cash register. He sat on the counter, grinning and swinging his arms like a madman while I paid, and the sweet, smiling cashier asked me not once but four times if I was sure I didn't need help out to the car. Thanks lady, but like any good mother, I think I can carry an infant and a bottle of booze from the liquor store to my car. My mother did it, my mother's mother did it, my great-great-grandmother's mother did it...you get the picture.
So anyway, it's day 203 of Jake's life, and he has yet to be taken away from me. So far so good!
However, it so happens that I did buy a lot of booze while I was pregnant. I know, I know, this doesn't surprise you, but I promise, it wasn't for me, it was for Christmas gifts. Brian and I spent that Christmas in Corpus Christi visiting his extended family, and there were many people there we rarely see. What kind of gift do you give people whose tastes you don't know well? Booze; always a safe bet. Plus, Brian's mom and dad have been getting more into wine recently, and have been experimenting with different types and reporting their findings to us (because we're big wine whores), so I thought it would be cool to get them 10 bottles of different types of wine. (Plus, while I love to buy gifts and normally spend the months prior to Christmas traipsing through store after store looking for just the right gift for each person on our list, that Christmas I was the size of and relative shape of a Shetland pony, and wished to minimize the traipsing. The liquor store was my answer to a one-stop shop for all the good little boys and girls on my Christmas list.) So with the 10 bottles of wine for the in-laws and the various single bottles I bought for this person or that, I ended up buying probably 20 bottles of wine that Christmas, all while I was 6 months pregnant.
Nothing makes you feel quite so seedy and shameful as shopping for booze while pregnant. Not to mention I wasn't just buying one or two things, but a whole, bulging shopping cart-load--really, it was like that scene in Leaving Las Vegas, where Nicolas Cage, having decided to check into a hotel and drink himself literally to death, is cha-chaing through the liquor store, piling bottle after bottle into his shopping cart, while drunk off his ass. Well--except for the fact that he wasn't pregnant. And I wasn't drunk. As far as you know. But just as I was trying to console myself with the thought that surely bystanders who saw me lumbering along behind my cartload of spirits would know I was buying this for other people and not for myself--the meddling old man who rang me up looked disapprovingly at me over his glasses and actually wagged his finger at me as he said gravely, "None of this for mommy." Yeah jackass, I got the memo that booze isn't recommended by the Surgeon General for fetuses. Man, it's like a pregnant girl can't even be an alcoholic these days without catching some flack. Things sure were a whole lot different when I was in utero. My mom drank, smoked and did God-knows what else while I was incubating. Now, just because a few babies have been born with a third leg or no skin, everyone's all uptight. (Just kidding, of course. I behaved myself very nicely while pregnant--and really haven't drank much since Jake's been born, either. Damnit.)
I didn't set foot into a liquor store again until my son was 6 months old--an unheard of stretch of time, considering most of my adult life I have faithfully frequented those magical places on a regular basis. The liquor store is my Toys R Us. Or was, anyway. Drinking is not as much fun now that I have an infant in the house. Even when he goes to grandma's now and then and we have a night out with friends, I'm always acutely aware that we'll be picking him up soon and he'll be chirping merrily at 7:30 AM, ready for breakfast, so drinking is no longer as fun as God intended it to be. At any rate, recently I had to buy Brian's dad a birthday gift, and he is not easy to buy for. I asked Brian's mom for hints, and she recommended getting him some different imported beers.
Brian's parents are not the alcoholics I'm probably inadvertently making them out to be, and it's not like we buy them booze for gifts on a regular basis. In fact, it's the opposite--they don't drink that much, which is why it made sense to buy them a variety of wines that Christmas, since they haven't drank enough wine in their lives to know just what they like--they're still experimenting to find what appeals to them. Plus, they have a built-in wine rack in their den which has been completely empty all the years I've known them, so I thought it would be cool to fill it. As for the imported beer for the birthday gift, same story--Brian's dad likes imported beer but doesn't drink it often enough to be a connoisseur, so it was a nice idea to get him a few different kinds to experiment with.
(Certain members of my family, on the other hand, know exactly what they like to drink, thanks to many years of dedicated attention to their livers. No experimentation needed there.)
So there I was, one Friday morning, faced with the chore of buying Brian's dad's birthday beer. I also needed to pick up a six-pack for Brian, since that was the night of my friend Vanessa's surprise birthday party, and Brian would not have time to stop at the store before heading to the shindig. I had Jake with me, though, and while I hated to take a baby to the liquor store, from what I understand, it's frowned upon to leave a 6-month-old home alone, even if you lock him in a small room with a bowl of water and a jar of baby food, and no access to lighters or other dangerous items. Bizarre, but whatever. I'm a rule-follower, so I did what's expected of me and took him along with me. To the liquor store.
He was asleep by the time we got there, so instead of just carrying his car seat by the handle and possibly waking him up, I put the car seat in the stroller so he'd have a smoother ride and hopefully get to finish his nap. I felt like a colossal ass pushing my stroller into the liquor store, but I kept my eyes front and didn't check to see if anyone was staring, or possibly grabbing a phone to call Child Protective Services. As I perused the imported beers, Jake woke up and began to fidget and complain, so I picked him up and carried him on my hip as I shopped for the beer. Then I began to calculate how many six-packs I needed to make a decent-sized birthday gift--I decided on four. Plus one for Brian--that's a lot of beer to carry. I needed a shopping cart. But there's no way to push a shopping cart and a stroller both at once...plus the baby wasn't even in his stroller at the moment, but chattering happily away in my arms...why not put the beer in the stroller? I'm a common-sense girl. So into the stroller, exactly where Jake would normally sit, I piled 5 six-packs of bottled beer. That made the stroller pretty heavy, so I had to lean my shoulder into it as I struggled to negotiate the various wine displays and aisles of liquor, pushing my combination stroller/booze wagon toward the cash register while balancing my 20-pound baby on my hip.
When I was almost to the register I encountered a tight corner between the bargain schnapps bin and the wine gift bag display, and one of the cashiers cheerfully hustled over to help, pulling my overloaded stroller the rest of the way to the register for me. In all, there were three cashiers gathered around as I hefted 6-pack after 6-pack of beer out of the stroller, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, mumbling lamely about a birthday gift for my father-in-law. Why did I feel like I was lying, when I wasn't? Funny how when you think you look like a criminal, it makes you actually feel guilty, as if you really are doing something wrong. Anyway, no one said what they must have been thinking--that Jake should be removed from my custody as soon as possible--and I paid my tab and left. Along with one of the cashiers, who generously transported my tower of beer to the car for me and loaded it in. Yes, I bought so much beer at the liquor store with my infant that I needed a carry-out.
That's where this episode of The Bad Mommy Chronicles should end, but just yesterday I reached a new low. My friend Brooks recently had a birthday, and would be coming over to my house that evening. I needed to get him a birthday gift...but what do you get for the guy who has...some things? Brooks is a dear friend of mine and I love him. I think you know what that means--I had to get him a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Not because I thought he'd actually drink it, but just because the thought of it made me giggle. That would mean yet another mother-son outing to the liquor store.
As we entered the store (a different one this time), a cheerful girl behind a table parked right by the door said, "Hi! Would you like to try a sample of our Vodka Mudshake?" I had seen her through the glass door as I approached the building. This was a liquor store that almost always had someone handing out samples at the door, but I assumed because I had a baby on my hip, she'd let me pass unmolested. I was a little surprised she even asked me, but I laughed and responded, "Right--that wouldn't look wrong or anything, drinking booze with a baby in my arms," and she replied, "Oh, it's just a sip." Damn pushers, they know just how to get you. But she had a point. The little sample cups stacked beside her were the size of thimbles. "Okay, I'll try it." So I took my sip of creamy, chocolatey vodka-stuff, thanked her politely, and then pivoted toward the cashier to ask, "Where's the Mad Dog?"
I've got to hand it to these liquor store employees, they are masters at not acting judgmental when someone does something that the rest of the world would consider wrong. I get the feeling I could smoke a crack pipe while carrying a basket of severed arms around the store, as long as I was on my way to the register to make a purchase. Instead of being shocked that someone would bring an innocent baby into this den of iniquity and then commit the even graver sin of buying the cheapest swill in the store, normally reserved only for people who sleep on sidewalks, the cheerful cashier insisted on holding Jake for me while I selected from the colorful array of Mad Dog flavors. Lime green, bright red, orange, purple...wait, isn't this supposed to be wine? It says so right on the bottle, but to my knowledge, there are no orange or lime-colored grapes. Never mind. I'm an old fashioned girl, so I went for the tried-and-true purple stuff, none of those new-fangled fancy flavors. Brooks would be puking up purple, like decades of Mad Dog drinkers before him. I hadn't seen a bottle of Mad Dog since high school, and I had forgotten how unbelievably cheap it is--$2.99 a bottle! See, it's true--you don't have to spend a lot of money to get a fine bottle of wine. I took my baby back from the helpful cashier and, with my bottle of cheap rot-gut in the other hand, I carried Jake to the cash register. He sat on the counter, grinning and swinging his arms like a madman while I paid, and the sweet, smiling cashier asked me not once but four times if I was sure I didn't need help out to the car. Thanks lady, but like any good mother, I think I can carry an infant and a bottle of booze from the liquor store to my car. My mother did it, my mother's mother did it, my great-great-grandmother's mother did it...you get the picture.
So anyway, it's day 203 of Jake's life, and he has yet to be taken away from me. So far so good!
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
It's the Wednesday Two-for-One Crab Special!
Hope you're in the mood for some crab! Have a seat and put your bib on.
Years ago I knew this guy, let's call him Rick. He was a cute, popular guy in the town where I lived, and while I always thought he was a little full of himself, lots of girls probably would have liked to be his girlfriend. The lucky lady, at least at the time of this incident, was a girl I'll call Jessica. I never cared for her, because, well, I like nice people.
At some point during a boys' night out in a neighboring town, Rick ended up sleeping with a girl who, even by his own admission, was pretty skanky. You could hardly blame the guy, though--he had a penis, and she was a girl...and you know how men who have penises can be when they have access to girls. He had to do it, right? I'm just kidding, I know not all men cheat. And really, if you knew his girlfriend Jessica, you'd hardly fault the guy. She was not the most dynamic individual. If you put her side by side with one of those swan ice sculptures you sometimes see at weddings, you'd be hard pressed to tell which was which, and you might end up liking the ice chunk better. At any rate, Rick committed the crime of infidelity, and karma zapped him right in the crotch--he got crabs.
It took him a day or two to realize what the hotbed of activity in his undies was. By the time he understood that insects had, indeed, colonized around his family jewels, he had already slept with his girlfriend Jessica. (Clearly, the guy didn't spend much time on his feet.) So now he had a dilemma: There was always a possibility that he had not managed to transmit the critters to Jessica during their liaison, and if he knew that for sure, he could simply treat his own infestation and she'd never have to know about his penis's wandering eye. However, there was no subtle way for him to inspect her nether regions without arousing suspicion (short of chloroforming her), so that idea was impractical. Naturally, when she discovered the growing swarm in her formerly pristine cotton panties, she would know Rick had accidentally tripped and fallen into someone else's vagina. What to do?
I bet a lot of you out there are thinking there is no solution to a problem so delicate as this. You're probably thinking to yourself that the only answer is to admit defeat--go to Jessica, head hanging in shame, and confess. Beg for her continuing love, and then head to the drugstore, hand in hand, to buy a family-sized bottle of Crabicide, or Crab-Out, or whatever it's called.
Suckers. There's always a way out, if you're incredibly slimy and devious, as was Rick. Of course, it also helps if your girlfriend is dumb as a bag of hammers. Here's what Rick came up with:
He packed a bottle of wine and a blanket, and whisked Jessica off to a local farm, where he took her into the barn and had sex with her in the hay. Then, disheveled and picking hay out of their hair, they went back into town and retired to their separate homes. Lo and behold, the next day Rick showed up on her doorstep, aghast. Apparently he had gotten crabs from the hay! Had she seen any of the little buggers on herself? Wide-eyed, she shuttled off to the bathroom for a peek and wouldn't you know it, she had gotten them too! Poor Jessica--if only she had known how easily crabs can be gotten from a roll in the hay. Well, it's a lesson learned.
And yes, she fell for it, and never suspected anything untoward of her doting boyfriend. And Rick, so proud of himself for pulling off the world's most incredible scam on possibly the world's dumbest girl, couldn't contain himself; he bragged about it to my boyfriend, and probably half the town as well--although, as far as I know, Jessica never heard the story.
-------------------------------------------
What's that? You're still hungry for more crab? Here comes dish number two.
My friend Josh (as he will herein be called), was never what you'd call the choosy sort when it came to women. If you wanted to sleep with him, there was no screening process you had to go through. Are you female? Then the answer is yes. It was that simple. Are you 200 lbs? Fine. 600 lbs? Also fine. Covered in feces? Okay. Handcuffed to a corpse? No problem. Eating the corpse? Perfectly acceptable. Not only was he he a dumpster diver when it came to women, but he was very proud of it. The more objectionable the person he slept with last night, the more people he would brag to about it today, cackling maniacally throughout the narration. I have many funny/disturbing stories about his escapades, but let's not deviate from the crab theme.
One night he slept with a girl named Dana, and as cruel fate would have it, he came away from the encounter with a batch of souvenir crabs. Thereafter he loudly referred to Dana as Fire Woman, since he likened the feeling of a herd of crabs munching on his manhood to what it must feel like to have a fire in his pants. Here's how silly and naive I am: When I heard him disgustedly refer to Dana as Fire Woman several hundred times, I assumed he regretted sleeping with her and therefore getting crabs--I actually thought branding her Fire Woman was his way of saying, "You wouldn't want to sleep with that girl, believe me."
Clearly, I underestimated Josh's willingness to overlook any and every flaw when it came to potential bed partners. Either that, or I overestimated his hygiene standards.
During a sexual dry spell, Josh went to the drugstore, picked up a bottle of DeCrabifyer, or Don't Be Crabby! or whatever it's called, and headed to Dana's house at 4 AM on a weeknight. When she stumbled out of bed and answered the door, Josh was standing there with the crab shampoo in one hand and a six pack in the other, and a big grin on his face, saying, "Let's go!"
And they did. She slept with him. (But no parasites were exchanged this time. Don't you just love a happy ending?)
Stay tuned next time for Gonorrhea Monday!
Years ago I knew this guy, let's call him Rick. He was a cute, popular guy in the town where I lived, and while I always thought he was a little full of himself, lots of girls probably would have liked to be his girlfriend. The lucky lady, at least at the time of this incident, was a girl I'll call Jessica. I never cared for her, because, well, I like nice people.
At some point during a boys' night out in a neighboring town, Rick ended up sleeping with a girl who, even by his own admission, was pretty skanky. You could hardly blame the guy, though--he had a penis, and she was a girl...and you know how men who have penises can be when they have access to girls. He had to do it, right? I'm just kidding, I know not all men cheat. And really, if you knew his girlfriend Jessica, you'd hardly fault the guy. She was not the most dynamic individual. If you put her side by side with one of those swan ice sculptures you sometimes see at weddings, you'd be hard pressed to tell which was which, and you might end up liking the ice chunk better. At any rate, Rick committed the crime of infidelity, and karma zapped him right in the crotch--he got crabs.
It took him a day or two to realize what the hotbed of activity in his undies was. By the time he understood that insects had, indeed, colonized around his family jewels, he had already slept with his girlfriend Jessica. (Clearly, the guy didn't spend much time on his feet.) So now he had a dilemma: There was always a possibility that he had not managed to transmit the critters to Jessica during their liaison, and if he knew that for sure, he could simply treat his own infestation and she'd never have to know about his penis's wandering eye. However, there was no subtle way for him to inspect her nether regions without arousing suspicion (short of chloroforming her), so that idea was impractical. Naturally, when she discovered the growing swarm in her formerly pristine cotton panties, she would know Rick had accidentally tripped and fallen into someone else's vagina. What to do?
I bet a lot of you out there are thinking there is no solution to a problem so delicate as this. You're probably thinking to yourself that the only answer is to admit defeat--go to Jessica, head hanging in shame, and confess. Beg for her continuing love, and then head to the drugstore, hand in hand, to buy a family-sized bottle of Crabicide, or Crab-Out, or whatever it's called.
Suckers. There's always a way out, if you're incredibly slimy and devious, as was Rick. Of course, it also helps if your girlfriend is dumb as a bag of hammers. Here's what Rick came up with:
He packed a bottle of wine and a blanket, and whisked Jessica off to a local farm, where he took her into the barn and had sex with her in the hay. Then, disheveled and picking hay out of their hair, they went back into town and retired to their separate homes. Lo and behold, the next day Rick showed up on her doorstep, aghast. Apparently he had gotten crabs from the hay! Had she seen any of the little buggers on herself? Wide-eyed, she shuttled off to the bathroom for a peek and wouldn't you know it, she had gotten them too! Poor Jessica--if only she had known how easily crabs can be gotten from a roll in the hay. Well, it's a lesson learned.
And yes, she fell for it, and never suspected anything untoward of her doting boyfriend. And Rick, so proud of himself for pulling off the world's most incredible scam on possibly the world's dumbest girl, couldn't contain himself; he bragged about it to my boyfriend, and probably half the town as well--although, as far as I know, Jessica never heard the story.
-------------------------------------------
What's that? You're still hungry for more crab? Here comes dish number two.
My friend Josh (as he will herein be called), was never what you'd call the choosy sort when it came to women. If you wanted to sleep with him, there was no screening process you had to go through. Are you female? Then the answer is yes. It was that simple. Are you 200 lbs? Fine. 600 lbs? Also fine. Covered in feces? Okay. Handcuffed to a corpse? No problem. Eating the corpse? Perfectly acceptable. Not only was he he a dumpster diver when it came to women, but he was very proud of it. The more objectionable the person he slept with last night, the more people he would brag to about it today, cackling maniacally throughout the narration. I have many funny/disturbing stories about his escapades, but let's not deviate from the crab theme.
One night he slept with a girl named Dana, and as cruel fate would have it, he came away from the encounter with a batch of souvenir crabs. Thereafter he loudly referred to Dana as Fire Woman, since he likened the feeling of a herd of crabs munching on his manhood to what it must feel like to have a fire in his pants. Here's how silly and naive I am: When I heard him disgustedly refer to Dana as Fire Woman several hundred times, I assumed he regretted sleeping with her and therefore getting crabs--I actually thought branding her Fire Woman was his way of saying, "You wouldn't want to sleep with that girl, believe me."
Clearly, I underestimated Josh's willingness to overlook any and every flaw when it came to potential bed partners. Either that, or I overestimated his hygiene standards.
During a sexual dry spell, Josh went to the drugstore, picked up a bottle of DeCrabifyer, or Don't Be Crabby! or whatever it's called, and headed to Dana's house at 4 AM on a weeknight. When she stumbled out of bed and answered the door, Josh was standing there with the crab shampoo in one hand and a six pack in the other, and a big grin on his face, saying, "Let's go!"
And they did. She slept with him. (But no parasites were exchanged this time. Don't you just love a happy ending?)
Stay tuned next time for Gonorrhea Monday!
Monday, August 29, 2005
Here's hoping you never find what you're looking for
I have always believed that I am the kind of person who wishes others the best. I used to think that, in general, I hope everyone finds what they're looking for in life. Recently I've changed my mind. Judging by the things you people are searching for on the internet, it is not in your best interest, nor in anyone else's best interest, for you to find what you're looking for.
For example, there's the person who found my site by searching for rhino pooping pic. No, there's nothing on my site about rhinos pooping, and there sure as hell are no pics of it, but a reference was made to it by Phil, one of my commenters, in one of my previous posts, which is, I assume, the phrase that led this poop seeker to my site. Phil was telling me that someone mysteriously found his site by searching for rhino pooping, even though his site is most certainly not about that subject. Now, since he made that comment, someone found MY site a few weeks ago by searching for rhino pooping (once from a US search engine and once from a U.K. search engine) and, more recently, someone found my site by searching for rhino pooping pic. Please, for the love of God, tell me this is the SAME one or two people doing all this hunting for rhino dookie. I'm not okay with the idea that there is even one person out there so obsessed with this bizarre quest, but the possibility that there is a group of such like-minded psychos is just too much to bear. Here's a business opportunity for you: If anyone out there lives near a zoo, go take a picture of a rhino doing his business. From what I can tell, there's quite a market for such photos, and I bet the whackos in question would be willing to part with some cash in exchange for those highly sought-after pics.
To the person who found my site by searching for celebrity diapers: I know what you were looking for. You wanted to know which of your favorite stars wears adult diapers--I happen to know the answer to this. I know a lot of people in the adult diaper community because...well, never mind why. Let's just say I've got friends who have friends who have friends who pee themselves. The following celebrities wear adult diapers:
Tom Cruise (That's why he has that crazed look on his face all the time--he's probably thinking "I'm peeing myself and no one knows!")
Both the Olsen twins (Although to be precise, they're actually still in toddler diapers, not adult diapers.)
Bea Arthur (This one should come as no surprise.)
Gwen Stefani (It's true! Although hers is a diaper thong.)
Clay Aiken (Although he barely qualifies as a celebrity, and doesn't even need the diaper--he just wears it because he likes the feel of it.)
And while we're on the topic of pee, would the person who found me by searching for pee in my face please raise your hand? I didn't think so. I wouldn't raise my hand either if I were you, you urine-loving deviant. I don't even know what to say to you, besides maybe you'd like to rent some Tom Cruise movies, now that you know he's a walking pee sponge. You can at least fantasize about him while you're having trouble finding someone willing to degrade you in the manner you prefer. Please, God, tell me you're having trouble finding someone to do that.
Mr. Pee In My Face may be a sicko, dear readers, but he's a Boy Scout compared to this next guy, the one who found me by searching for stuff wheelchair goo in mouth charade. Don't believe me? Here's the screenshot:
All I can hope is that this guy doesn't work in or live within 100 miles of a nursing home. Or Larry Flynt.
For example, there's the person who found my site by searching for rhino pooping pic. No, there's nothing on my site about rhinos pooping, and there sure as hell are no pics of it, but a reference was made to it by Phil, one of my commenters, in one of my previous posts, which is, I assume, the phrase that led this poop seeker to my site. Phil was telling me that someone mysteriously found his site by searching for rhino pooping, even though his site is most certainly not about that subject. Now, since he made that comment, someone found MY site a few weeks ago by searching for rhino pooping (once from a US search engine and once from a U.K. search engine) and, more recently, someone found my site by searching for rhino pooping pic. Please, for the love of God, tell me this is the SAME one or two people doing all this hunting for rhino dookie. I'm not okay with the idea that there is even one person out there so obsessed with this bizarre quest, but the possibility that there is a group of such like-minded psychos is just too much to bear. Here's a business opportunity for you: If anyone out there lives near a zoo, go take a picture of a rhino doing his business. From what I can tell, there's quite a market for such photos, and I bet the whackos in question would be willing to part with some cash in exchange for those highly sought-after pics.
To the person who found my site by searching for celebrity diapers: I know what you were looking for. You wanted to know which of your favorite stars wears adult diapers--I happen to know the answer to this. I know a lot of people in the adult diaper community because...well, never mind why. Let's just say I've got friends who have friends who have friends who pee themselves. The following celebrities wear adult diapers:
Tom Cruise (That's why he has that crazed look on his face all the time--he's probably thinking "I'm peeing myself and no one knows!")
Both the Olsen twins (Although to be precise, they're actually still in toddler diapers, not adult diapers.)
Bea Arthur (This one should come as no surprise.)
Gwen Stefani (It's true! Although hers is a diaper thong.)
Clay Aiken (Although he barely qualifies as a celebrity, and doesn't even need the diaper--he just wears it because he likes the feel of it.)
And while we're on the topic of pee, would the person who found me by searching for pee in my face please raise your hand? I didn't think so. I wouldn't raise my hand either if I were you, you urine-loving deviant. I don't even know what to say to you, besides maybe you'd like to rent some Tom Cruise movies, now that you know he's a walking pee sponge. You can at least fantasize about him while you're having trouble finding someone willing to degrade you in the manner you prefer. Please, God, tell me you're having trouble finding someone to do that.
Mr. Pee In My Face may be a sicko, dear readers, but he's a Boy Scout compared to this next guy, the one who found me by searching for stuff wheelchair goo in mouth charade. Don't believe me? Here's the screenshot:
All I can hope is that this guy doesn't work in or live within 100 miles of a nursing home. Or Larry Flynt.
To the person who found my site by searching for sweet karla, I guess you quickly discovered you found the wrong site. If you've read more than one post here, you already know I'm not sweet. If you were looking for mean karla, vicious karla, sarcastic karla, hateful karla or karla who is even now mocking you behind your back, then you've found the right Karla.
I might have to do a search on this one myself. Someone found me by searching the phrase prostitution victims of secret lemon grinder accident. Yeah, I know, you're a skeptical bunch, so here's the screenshot:
This must be a news story of some kind, so I'll want to poke around on CNN.com and Foxnews.com. It breaks my heart to think of those poor prostitutes, who, from the looks of that search string, fell into a lemon grinder by accident and met their grim death. I'm curious about the details on this story, because I didn't know grinders specific to lemons existed, particularly in a size that would hold several prostitute-sized people at once, nor was I aware that prostitutes had liberal access to these lemon grinders. What were those foolish, foolish prostitutes doing near that industrial-grade lemon grinder? Didn't they know they weren't licensed or properly trained in operating that machine? And what in God's name were they going to do with all that ground lemon peel? Let this story be a lesson to lemon-loving prostitutes everywhere. You may know a lot about fulfilling the fantasies of lonely, fat men using fake names, but you do not necessarily know a lot about lemon grinders.
Lastly, as you can see from the above screenshot, someone also managed to find me by searching for embarrassed by dark filthy warehouse-district sophomore sprawled on bartop scandal. This one might actually be legitimate. After all, I've been a sophomore twice before (once in college and once in high school), and I've been sprawled on a bartop or two in my time. I remember one time I got kicked out of the Lone Star in Kansas City because I was asleep with my head down on the table. (Okay, I guess you'd call that "passed out," rather than "asleep." Let's not quibble.) Anyway, all I can say in my defense is sometimes naptime rolls around quicker than you expect. Sure, I'd have preferred to sleep in my own bed, but I improvised, and I don't think I should be sneered at for that. I'd hardly call it a scandal, and I doubt I had the good sense to be embarrassed. The part I'm confused about is the part about the dark filthy warehouse district...although wait. At that same time, not far from the Lone Star, my friend John and his brother Steve were living in a dark, filthy "apartment" in a dark, filthy warehouse district of Kansas City. This place was never intended to be an apartment, but was supposed to be a place of business, with big glass windows all along the front of it facing the sidewalk. But there was a bathroom in there, so the incredibly thrifty owner rented it out as an apartment to my friends in spite of the fact that there was no kitchen. I guess he knew it would cost too much to get it into the kind of shape it would need to be in to rent it out as a business location. This place should have been condemned, and I mean it when I say it was never intended to be lived in--no carpet, no washer/dryer hookups, all big open street-facing windows and concrete floors; bare light bulbs hanging from the ceilings. Also, no hot water--and this was in the dead of winter in Missouri. John said he had to drink half a bottle of Jack Daniels just to be able to take a shower in the ice-cold water issuing forth from the filthy pipes. By the looks of his brother Steve, he was either not willing to take that step or still too cold-sensitive even when loaded, because the dude was just dirty-looking most of that winter. Anyway, those two meatheads may well have been with me that night at the Lone Star when I was nodding off over my tequila shot. They were probably stinking up the place with their unwashed clothing and their unwashed hair, and maybe it was the other patrons who were embarrassed about the scene--hence the word "embarrassed" in the search string. Ah-ha! Mystery solved.
So okay, that last search was legitimate, but the others are just unforgivable. You should all be ashamed of your creepy selves. I hope you never find what you're looking for.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Lessons I've learned Part 7
Sex toys go in the trunk, not the back seat.
Man, I'm going to get some frightening Google searches after this.
This story is about my gay friend Tommy. That's not his real name, although I'm not sure why I'm protecting his privacy. I think he'd be flattered to have his story showcased here, and will probably pout when he finds out I used a fake name. But since I'm too lazy to call him and ask how he'd feel about having the story told, he's getting a fake name.
Tommy got an unusual gift from one of his ambiguously gay friends--a big, black rubbery dildo. I say "ambiguously gay" because this friend of his was one of those gorgeous, studly athlete types who plays on a semi-pro sports team, and gives the appearance of being straight, but Tommy knows better. This particular item was (hopefully) the kind of thing purchased more commonly for comedic effect than for actual use--it was incredibly big, ridiculously long, and very rubbery. Novelty-like, really. Tommy named it Clifford--because the only thing funnier than being the owner of one of these doohickeys is being the owner of one that you've named, which you then can presumably refer to as if it's an actual person. As in, "Clifford hates rainy days," or "Don't talk like that in front of Clifford."
Tommy was on his way to Austin (a few hours' drive) one weekend to see some friends, and was speeding along in the little grey chick car he drives. I'm not a car person, but I think it's like a grey 1990 Cutlass or something--I always associate that kind of car with something a mom would drive, which is why I think of it as a chick car. Don't ask me what he was in such a godawful hurry for, but when the cop pulled him over, he was clocked at 100. I've known Tommy for years, and he's always driven this same old Cutlass, and the most shocking part of this story, to me, is that the car was able to achieve that kind of speed. I have to believe this story because I have no reason not to trust my friend, but really...100 mph? Anyway.
The cop marched up to Tommy's driver's side window and issued the standard, "Do you realize you're endangering the lives of everyone on this road" speech, with the standard daddy-yelling-at-his-little-boy attitude, while Tommy acted appropriately remorseful, hoping he could somehow get out of this ticket. No dice--because of the excessive speed, the cop said he'd have to arrest him. Arrangements were quickly made for a tow truck to come fetch the little grey chick car, and the cop continued to admonish Tommy. He handcuffed him and made him stand aside as he proceeded to inspect the car for potential evil. He began rifling through the overnight bag in the back seat, pulling out clothes, shaving kit, shoes...and Clifford.
In all the commotion of first being pulled over for speeding, then learning he'd be arrested and his car towed, Tommy had forgotten all about Clifford. The cop froze in place, uncomprehending at first, holding Clifford by the base as the upper 10 inches of Clifford lazily swayed back and forth in a rubbery fashion. Tommy, handcuffed, stood there horrified and mortally embarrassed, mouth agape, staring at the motionless police officer and Clifford, still swaying like a metronome. I imagine this moment happening in slow-motion, with the cop's first thought, "What is this? What IS this? What the...no. No. NO!" And his second thought, "God knows where this thing has been! I've got to wash my hands right now." The cop dropped Clifford like a lit match, clearly disgusted, and continued to sift through the bag, while Tommy thought to himself, "Well, the worst has happened, there's nothing more in there for him to find." Then the cop pulled out two gay porno tapes.
Tommy had no idea those were in there. He had only brought Clifford along as a joke to show to his friends in Austin. He had no idea how the tapes got in there--although he discovered later that his gay friend Chris (or Gay Chris, as he was cleverly referred to) threw them in there when Tommy wasn't looking, just to be funny. So by now the cop must have thought Tommy was some kind of deranged pervert on his way to a big gay orgy of some kind. If you knew my sweet, innocent little Tommy, you'd know this is far from the truth. Tommy hung on to his virginity a ridiculously long time, way longer than anyone else I know, and even now just seems too sweet and pure to be up to any shenanigans, much less on his way to a big gay orgy. I think of him as pure as the driven snow, if the driven snow were gay.
Then the cop got a call about an even more sinister law-breaker than the dildo-wielding Tommy--a female driving erratically, in excess of 100 mph, out-running several pursuing cop cars. She was believed to be armed and on amphetamines. All units were called to respond--including, apparently, Tommy's captor. To his shock, Tommy was hastily un-cuffed and told he was free to go! The cop tossed Tommy's filthy bag of orgy paraphernalia unceremoniously onto the roadside pavement and sped away. Tommy and Clifford were left to continue on with their weekend plans.
The lesson? It's along the same lines as "Always wear clean underwear, just in case you're ever in a car wreck." Always put your sex toys in the trunk of your car, not the back seat, just in case you're ever pulled over and searched by a homophobic cop.
Man, I'm going to get some frightening Google searches after this.
This story is about my gay friend Tommy. That's not his real name, although I'm not sure why I'm protecting his privacy. I think he'd be flattered to have his story showcased here, and will probably pout when he finds out I used a fake name. But since I'm too lazy to call him and ask how he'd feel about having the story told, he's getting a fake name.
Tommy got an unusual gift from one of his ambiguously gay friends--a big, black rubbery dildo. I say "ambiguously gay" because this friend of his was one of those gorgeous, studly athlete types who plays on a semi-pro sports team, and gives the appearance of being straight, but Tommy knows better. This particular item was (hopefully) the kind of thing purchased more commonly for comedic effect than for actual use--it was incredibly big, ridiculously long, and very rubbery. Novelty-like, really. Tommy named it Clifford--because the only thing funnier than being the owner of one of these doohickeys is being the owner of one that you've named, which you then can presumably refer to as if it's an actual person. As in, "Clifford hates rainy days," or "Don't talk like that in front of Clifford."
Tommy was on his way to Austin (a few hours' drive) one weekend to see some friends, and was speeding along in the little grey chick car he drives. I'm not a car person, but I think it's like a grey 1990 Cutlass or something--I always associate that kind of car with something a mom would drive, which is why I think of it as a chick car. Don't ask me what he was in such a godawful hurry for, but when the cop pulled him over, he was clocked at 100. I've known Tommy for years, and he's always driven this same old Cutlass, and the most shocking part of this story, to me, is that the car was able to achieve that kind of speed. I have to believe this story because I have no reason not to trust my friend, but really...100 mph? Anyway.
The cop marched up to Tommy's driver's side window and issued the standard, "Do you realize you're endangering the lives of everyone on this road" speech, with the standard daddy-yelling-at-his-little-boy attitude, while Tommy acted appropriately remorseful, hoping he could somehow get out of this ticket. No dice--because of the excessive speed, the cop said he'd have to arrest him. Arrangements were quickly made for a tow truck to come fetch the little grey chick car, and the cop continued to admonish Tommy. He handcuffed him and made him stand aside as he proceeded to inspect the car for potential evil. He began rifling through the overnight bag in the back seat, pulling out clothes, shaving kit, shoes...and Clifford.
In all the commotion of first being pulled over for speeding, then learning he'd be arrested and his car towed, Tommy had forgotten all about Clifford. The cop froze in place, uncomprehending at first, holding Clifford by the base as the upper 10 inches of Clifford lazily swayed back and forth in a rubbery fashion. Tommy, handcuffed, stood there horrified and mortally embarrassed, mouth agape, staring at the motionless police officer and Clifford, still swaying like a metronome. I imagine this moment happening in slow-motion, with the cop's first thought, "What is this? What IS this? What the...no. No. NO!" And his second thought, "God knows where this thing has been! I've got to wash my hands right now." The cop dropped Clifford like a lit match, clearly disgusted, and continued to sift through the bag, while Tommy thought to himself, "Well, the worst has happened, there's nothing more in there for him to find." Then the cop pulled out two gay porno tapes.
Tommy had no idea those were in there. He had only brought Clifford along as a joke to show to his friends in Austin. He had no idea how the tapes got in there--although he discovered later that his gay friend Chris (or Gay Chris, as he was cleverly referred to) threw them in there when Tommy wasn't looking, just to be funny. So by now the cop must have thought Tommy was some kind of deranged pervert on his way to a big gay orgy of some kind. If you knew my sweet, innocent little Tommy, you'd know this is far from the truth. Tommy hung on to his virginity a ridiculously long time, way longer than anyone else I know, and even now just seems too sweet and pure to be up to any shenanigans, much less on his way to a big gay orgy. I think of him as pure as the driven snow, if the driven snow were gay.
Then the cop got a call about an even more sinister law-breaker than the dildo-wielding Tommy--a female driving erratically, in excess of 100 mph, out-running several pursuing cop cars. She was believed to be armed and on amphetamines. All units were called to respond--including, apparently, Tommy's captor. To his shock, Tommy was hastily un-cuffed and told he was free to go! The cop tossed Tommy's filthy bag of orgy paraphernalia unceremoniously onto the roadside pavement and sped away. Tommy and Clifford were left to continue on with their weekend plans.
The lesson? It's along the same lines as "Always wear clean underwear, just in case you're ever in a car wreck." Always put your sex toys in the trunk of your car, not the back seat, just in case you're ever pulled over and searched by a homophobic cop.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Lessons I've Learned, Part 6
It's not enough to simply lock your bedroom door.
The story I told you about my 4 ridiculously messy roommates got me reminiscing about that (incredibly filthy, roach-infested) year we lived together. There was yet another lesson I learned from that time.
My roommates and I were all in ROTC...which might lead you to believe I'm a military chick, but that would only be true in the sketchiest sense. I was only in the Reserves, never the active Army, and I did it because it was either that or drop out of school after my sophomore year, since my mom could no longer afford my tuition, and the Army would pay it for those remaining two years. So I was in the Reserves and ROTC for my last two years of college, and after college I fulfilled my Reserve obligation and then got out. It was a great experience, and I had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot, but if you knew me you'd know that I am just not the military type. So I got out when my obligation was up, and went back to being the person of questionable morals and behavior that you've grown to love.
The ROTC department at my university was small--maybe 40 students in all, with only 4 or 5 instructors. The instructors were active Army people, not college professors. While the 7 or 8 seniors in my ROTC class did attend classes taught by the other ROTC instructors, we were primarily assigned to Cpt. Mitchell, while the juniors in ROTC had their own instructor, as did the sophomores and the freshmen. So the 7 or 8 of us seniors (including my roommates) spent the majority of our ROTC class time with Cpt. Mitchell, and we became very familiar with him. Maybe too familiar, as my story will illustrate.
One weekend there was a party at our house. I was not in attendance, since I had driven home for the weekend to see some friends, but apparently this was a hell of a party. Cpt. Mitchell was there, and had appointed himself bartender. He stationed himself by an open window and used a table as his bartop, where he poured tequila shots and basically badgered people into taking them. Every so often he would stick his head out the window and puke into our hapless bushes, then pour himself another shot and carry on, like a true soldier. By everyone's account, this was apparently a great party, probably largely due to the tequila shot pouring prowess of Cpt. Mitchell. When I returned on Sunday, my roommates looked like something that had crawled out of the sewer--each of them was sprawled on various pieces of furniture, moaning and squinting and retching and cursing God. I went into my room to drop my bags, and noticed my bed had been made--which was odd, since I hadn't made it before I left. In fact, I had locked my bedroom door before I'd left. I peered out my bedroom door into the adjacent room, addressed the crew of living dead and asked, "Who slept in my room?" Suddenly, life crept into the eyes of the roommates, who instantly looked guilty. They fumbled. "Um. Well.... Uh," looking from one to the other and back at the floor. I went back into my room and took the sheets and blankets off the bed, thinking the guilty looks of my roommates surely meant that someone had not just slept in there, but possibly banged a hooker or a farm animal, so I might as well wash sheets now and ask questions later.
That's when I saw the tighty whities.
The only thing worse than discovering that some unidentified couple had sex in your bed is discovering that they left their vile little undergarments there. And am I crazy, or would it have been better if it had been the girl that had left her underoos there? Somehow it was worse that it was men's underwear than women's. I wanted to burn my bed to the ground.
Now they had no choice but to tell me the story. Here are the incredibly seedy details:
Party ends at our place, guests crawl home. Cpt. Mitchell remains, and in spite of being so drunk that he has puked several times and looks like Charles Manson instead of the clean-cut Top Gun he had resembled at the start of the evening, he wants to go barhopping. Drunk roommates actually try to resist, but Mitchell insists--and he was, after all, our superior officer, and we were accustomed to taking orders from him. They go to a place so seedy that it actually has big, dark blue sheets thumbtacked up to cover the windows so that you can't see into it from the street. It looks like something you'd find in a warehouse district. Once inside, Cpt. Mitchell picks up some skank. He defiles the skank in my bed after picking the lock to get in, while my roommates stare wide-eyed at each other in the living room, unable to believe this turn of events.
But here's where the story gets even more madcap, more zany.
Our fearless leader and his skank fall asleep in my formerly bacteria-free bed. Just as daylight begins to break, there's a knock at the door. A hungover roommate peers out the window and realizes it's Cpt. Mitchell's wife! Everyone tries to ignore the knocking. She persists, then leaves--but returns again a few minutes later, banging even harder, crying, and calling "I know he's there! His car is parked right here!" Cpt. Mitchell scrambles into his clothes--most of them, anyway--instructs the girl to stay put and not make a sound, then sheepishly answers the door. His crying wife has the baby in her car; the family retreats to the Mitchell household, for what must surely have been a daylong crying and fighting session. (Let me also note that Mitchell had brought his wife to the states from Germany where he'd met her a few years before. She still had a thick accent and had no family here in the states.)
My roommates are then left with Cpt. Mitchell's...friend. Eventually someone takes her home, and soon I arrive to find the filthy evidence at the crime scene.
Naturally it would have made sense to throw his filthy little panties away. But I found his behavior nauseating, particularly since a big portion of his time spent training us to be leaders involved instructing us to behave with strong moral character. So I didn't want to let him off the hook so easily. I picked up his putrid little bloomers by hooking them onto the end of a pen (which I promptly disposed of) and put them into a paper bag, and delivered them to him as he sat at his desk Monday morning. He was embarrassed, horrified, ashamed, etc. I can't imagine a bigger scandal that could have rocked our small ROTC department. He had crossed a boundary by even attending the party--and then, of course, he bludgeoned several other boundaries plum to death. (And no, Cpt. Mitchell isn't his real name.)
The lesson: Locking your bedroom door is never enough when you live with a house full of guys. Someone will get resourceful and find a way to degrade themselves and someone else in your bed. Consider sprinkling glass shards in your bed before you leave for the weekend, or perhaps leaving a wolverine with newborn cubs under the comforter.
The story I told you about my 4 ridiculously messy roommates got me reminiscing about that (incredibly filthy, roach-infested) year we lived together. There was yet another lesson I learned from that time.
My roommates and I were all in ROTC...which might lead you to believe I'm a military chick, but that would only be true in the sketchiest sense. I was only in the Reserves, never the active Army, and I did it because it was either that or drop out of school after my sophomore year, since my mom could no longer afford my tuition, and the Army would pay it for those remaining two years. So I was in the Reserves and ROTC for my last two years of college, and after college I fulfilled my Reserve obligation and then got out. It was a great experience, and I had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot, but if you knew me you'd know that I am just not the military type. So I got out when my obligation was up, and went back to being the person of questionable morals and behavior that you've grown to love.
The ROTC department at my university was small--maybe 40 students in all, with only 4 or 5 instructors. The instructors were active Army people, not college professors. While the 7 or 8 seniors in my ROTC class did attend classes taught by the other ROTC instructors, we were primarily assigned to Cpt. Mitchell, while the juniors in ROTC had their own instructor, as did the sophomores and the freshmen. So the 7 or 8 of us seniors (including my roommates) spent the majority of our ROTC class time with Cpt. Mitchell, and we became very familiar with him. Maybe too familiar, as my story will illustrate.
One weekend there was a party at our house. I was not in attendance, since I had driven home for the weekend to see some friends, but apparently this was a hell of a party. Cpt. Mitchell was there, and had appointed himself bartender. He stationed himself by an open window and used a table as his bartop, where he poured tequila shots and basically badgered people into taking them. Every so often he would stick his head out the window and puke into our hapless bushes, then pour himself another shot and carry on, like a true soldier. By everyone's account, this was apparently a great party, probably largely due to the tequila shot pouring prowess of Cpt. Mitchell. When I returned on Sunday, my roommates looked like something that had crawled out of the sewer--each of them was sprawled on various pieces of furniture, moaning and squinting and retching and cursing God. I went into my room to drop my bags, and noticed my bed had been made--which was odd, since I hadn't made it before I left. In fact, I had locked my bedroom door before I'd left. I peered out my bedroom door into the adjacent room, addressed the crew of living dead and asked, "Who slept in my room?" Suddenly, life crept into the eyes of the roommates, who instantly looked guilty. They fumbled. "Um. Well.... Uh," looking from one to the other and back at the floor. I went back into my room and took the sheets and blankets off the bed, thinking the guilty looks of my roommates surely meant that someone had not just slept in there, but possibly banged a hooker or a farm animal, so I might as well wash sheets now and ask questions later.
That's when I saw the tighty whities.
The only thing worse than discovering that some unidentified couple had sex in your bed is discovering that they left their vile little undergarments there. And am I crazy, or would it have been better if it had been the girl that had left her underoos there? Somehow it was worse that it was men's underwear than women's. I wanted to burn my bed to the ground.
Now they had no choice but to tell me the story. Here are the incredibly seedy details:
Party ends at our place, guests crawl home. Cpt. Mitchell remains, and in spite of being so drunk that he has puked several times and looks like Charles Manson instead of the clean-cut Top Gun he had resembled at the start of the evening, he wants to go barhopping. Drunk roommates actually try to resist, but Mitchell insists--and he was, after all, our superior officer, and we were accustomed to taking orders from him. They go to a place so seedy that it actually has big, dark blue sheets thumbtacked up to cover the windows so that you can't see into it from the street. It looks like something you'd find in a warehouse district. Once inside, Cpt. Mitchell picks up some skank. He defiles the skank in my bed after picking the lock to get in, while my roommates stare wide-eyed at each other in the living room, unable to believe this turn of events.
But here's where the story gets even more madcap, more zany.
Our fearless leader and his skank fall asleep in my formerly bacteria-free bed. Just as daylight begins to break, there's a knock at the door. A hungover roommate peers out the window and realizes it's Cpt. Mitchell's wife! Everyone tries to ignore the knocking. She persists, then leaves--but returns again a few minutes later, banging even harder, crying, and calling "I know he's there! His car is parked right here!" Cpt. Mitchell scrambles into his clothes--most of them, anyway--instructs the girl to stay put and not make a sound, then sheepishly answers the door. His crying wife has the baby in her car; the family retreats to the Mitchell household, for what must surely have been a daylong crying and fighting session. (Let me also note that Mitchell had brought his wife to the states from Germany where he'd met her a few years before. She still had a thick accent and had no family here in the states.)
My roommates are then left with Cpt. Mitchell's...friend. Eventually someone takes her home, and soon I arrive to find the filthy evidence at the crime scene.
Naturally it would have made sense to throw his filthy little panties away. But I found his behavior nauseating, particularly since a big portion of his time spent training us to be leaders involved instructing us to behave with strong moral character. So I didn't want to let him off the hook so easily. I picked up his putrid little bloomers by hooking them onto the end of a pen (which I promptly disposed of) and put them into a paper bag, and delivered them to him as he sat at his desk Monday morning. He was embarrassed, horrified, ashamed, etc. I can't imagine a bigger scandal that could have rocked our small ROTC department. He had crossed a boundary by even attending the party--and then, of course, he bludgeoned several other boundaries plum to death. (And no, Cpt. Mitchell isn't his real name.)
The lesson: Locking your bedroom door is never enough when you live with a house full of guys. Someone will get resourceful and find a way to degrade themselves and someone else in your bed. Consider sprinkling glass shards in your bed before you leave for the weekend, or perhaps leaving a wolverine with newborn cubs under the comforter.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Happy Birthday Vanessa!
Today is my friend Vanessa's birthday. All together now, let's sing:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Karla's friend Vanessa
Happy birthday to you!
Holy crap. I would never have requested that if I'd known what awful singers some of you are. Please refrain from singing on my blog ever again. (Especially you, Common Wombat. You sounded like a cow caught in a threshing machine.)
In the following pictures, Vanessa's the one on your left.
It's no accident that she's on my my right side (your left) in both pictures. I insist that she remain on my right side at all times, just in case I suddenly go blind or without warning we find ourselves victims of an air bombing attack; I'll know where to find her.
My friend Jeremy had his birthday yesterday. So happy late birthday to Jeremy, who has supplied me with the technology to be able to listen to Howard Stern at any moment of the day, and to watch a billion hours of TV in the span of a few months. (Don't sing the birthday song to him, though; you guys stink at that. Especially Wombat, who sounds like three goats in a stump grinder.) And then there's my friend Chris, the guy with us in the top picture, whose birthday is also today. So happy birthday to Chris--who we only hang out with because his birthday is the same day as Vanessa's.
Now that I think of it, the middle picture was taken a couple weeks ago on my birthday (August 1) . It must look to you like all my friends were born in August, but that's not true--well, yet, anyway. But now that I think about it, I think I'll go ahead and weed out all the non-August people in my life, starting today. So, attention friends of mine: Unless your birthday is in August, don't call me anymore. (But keep my address, so that you can still mail me birthday gifts. Start planning now for the gift you'll get me in 2006.)
Anyway, back to Vanessa.
Here are just a few of the benefits of having her as a friend:
She laughs at my unfunny jokes.
She sometimes gets me drunk.
So far, she hasn't stolen any of my valuables.
She almost never hits on any of my family members.
She keeps my darkest secret, about the time I got busted for prostitution. (Oops. Pretend I didn't mention that.)
By some incredible luck I found her as a friend, and in the years since then, she has been a crucial element in my life. My life would be very sad and dull without her, and I suspect there would be lots of pills and dramatic weeping involved. In fact, when my husband daydreams about us moving out of Texas someday, my first reaction is always, "But I can't be without Vanessa!" It simply is not possible to convey what a great person and what a great friend she is, and I have to tell you, all you readers who don't know her are really missing out.
However! If you'd like to get to know her, here's her home address. She's a really nice person, so I'm sure she'd love it if you just drop by and visit any time. She lives at:
1515 South Lemon Street
Springbell, Texas 77322
Oh come on, I'm just kidding--that's not really her address. What kind of idiot do you take me for? To clarify: I am an idiot, but just not that kind of idiot. I don't want the guy who Googled "homeless dental sex" showing up at Vanessa's house, or Common Wombat trying to shatter her eardrums with a serenade outside her window. (Did I mention he sounds like 6 weasels in a paper shredder?)
Anyway, happy birthday Vanessa. I hope to be celebrating your 100th birthday with you someday.
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Karla's friend Vanessa
Happy birthday to you!
Holy crap. I would never have requested that if I'd known what awful singers some of you are. Please refrain from singing on my blog ever again. (Especially you, Common Wombat. You sounded like a cow caught in a threshing machine.)
In the following pictures, Vanessa's the one on your left.
It's no accident that she's on my my right side (your left) in both pictures. I insist that she remain on my right side at all times, just in case I suddenly go blind or without warning we find ourselves victims of an air bombing attack; I'll know where to find her.My friend Jeremy had his birthday yesterday. So happy late birthday to Jeremy, who has supplied me with the technology to be able to listen to Howard Stern at any moment of the day, and to watch a billion hours of TV in the span of a few months. (Don't sing the birthday song to him, though; you guys stink at that. Especially Wombat, who sounds like three goats in a stump grinder.) And then there's my friend Chris, the guy with us in the top picture, whose birthday is also today. So happy birthday to Chris--who we only hang out with because his birthday is the same day as Vanessa's.
Now that I think of it, the middle picture was taken a couple weeks ago on my birthday (August 1) . It must look to you like all my friends were born in August, but that's not true--well, yet, anyway. But now that I think about it, I think I'll go ahead and weed out all the non-August people in my life, starting today. So, attention friends of mine: Unless your birthday is in August, don't call me anymore. (But keep my address, so that you can still mail me birthday gifts. Start planning now for the gift you'll get me in 2006.)
Anyway, back to Vanessa.
Here are just a few of the benefits of having her as a friend:
She laughs at my unfunny jokes.
She sometimes gets me drunk.
So far, she hasn't stolen any of my valuables.
She almost never hits on any of my family members.
She keeps my darkest secret, about the time I got busted for prostitution. (Oops. Pretend I didn't mention that.)
By some incredible luck I found her as a friend, and in the years since then, she has been a crucial element in my life. My life would be very sad and dull without her, and I suspect there would be lots of pills and dramatic weeping involved. In fact, when my husband daydreams about us moving out of Texas someday, my first reaction is always, "But I can't be without Vanessa!" It simply is not possible to convey what a great person and what a great friend she is, and I have to tell you, all you readers who don't know her are really missing out.
However! If you'd like to get to know her, here's her home address. She's a really nice person, so I'm sure she'd love it if you just drop by and visit any time. She lives at:
1515 South Lemon Street
Springbell, Texas 77322
Oh come on, I'm just kidding--that's not really her address. What kind of idiot do you take me for? To clarify: I am an idiot, but just not that kind of idiot. I don't want the guy who Googled "homeless dental sex" showing up at Vanessa's house, or Common Wombat trying to shatter her eardrums with a serenade outside her window. (Did I mention he sounds like 6 weasels in a paper shredder?)
Anyway, happy birthday Vanessa. I hope to be celebrating your 100th birthday with you someday.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
I'm bangable.
I'd like to thank the Academy for this prestigious award. If anyone needs me, I'll be home waiting for my trophy to arrive.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Three and a half more interviews
Go here to read my interview with Jane D'oh.
And go here to read my interview with Chris, at the curiously-named Satans Farts.
And then there's my interview Miss Burgoo (the sister of the above-mentioned flatulent Satan), found here. After that interview, she asked for an additional question, which I faithfully provided not one but two of, and she then answered them here. But it turns out I'm a total blogging moron--I've been waiting for her to reply to the extra questions forever, and it just occurred to me today that I've been only clicking on the link to the original post, which I had bookmarked (you know, the post for the first interview I gave her) instead of looking at the current day's posts. So while I've been waiting for her to reply to the extra questions, she's probably been waiting for me to link to her interviews on my site.
So now you know what a dope I am. (Or did you already know that?) My computer genius husband will roll his eyes at me. Go ahead, you can, too.
And go here to read my interview with Chris, at the curiously-named Satans Farts.
And then there's my interview Miss Burgoo (the sister of the above-mentioned flatulent Satan), found here. After that interview, she asked for an additional question, which I faithfully provided not one but two of, and she then answered them here. But it turns out I'm a total blogging moron--I've been waiting for her to reply to the extra questions forever, and it just occurred to me today that I've been only clicking on the link to the original post, which I had bookmarked (you know, the post for the first interview I gave her) instead of looking at the current day's posts. So while I've been waiting for her to reply to the extra questions, she's probably been waiting for me to link to her interviews on my site.
So now you know what a dope I am. (Or did you already know that?) My computer genius husband will roll his eyes at me. Go ahead, you can, too.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Lessons I've Learned, Part 5
Beware the horror lurking in your microwave
This edition of Lessons I've Learned will shock you, if only for the fact that, unlike my previous Lessons, it does not involve copious alcohol consumption.
For a period of time in college, I lived with 4 guys. Yeah, I know--that's a recipe for disaster. Of course, I knew they'd be slobs, since, well, they were guys--but naivete prevented me from understanding or predicting the unbelievable extent to which their slobdom would spiral. How can men live like that? These normal-looking, well-behaved, reasonably attractive guys blithely strolled from room to room in our cute little off-campus dwelling, kicking litter hither and yon as they went, sidestepping piles of clothing, stacks of dishes, and food items that had fossilized weeks before. I had two choices: To become Snow White to their 4 Dwarfs, thanklessly cleaning up after them day in and day out, or to stubbornly ignore it, hoping beyond common sense that they'd eventually muster up enough pride to tidy up after themselves. I knew it was the longest shot conceivable, but I'm an optimist, so I chose the latter. Who knew--perhaps eventually they'd grow ashamed of the filth, and each would start to pick up after himself just enough that the house would begin to exist in a general state of, if not cleanliness, then at least acceptable clutter.
This shows how dumb I was.
Time went by and the filth reached epic proportions. I can tolerate constant disarray, if I must, but what I can't tolerate are cockroaches. I can't stand insects of any kind, but roaches are an unspeakable horror. I cannot sleep if I've seen one in my home. I will perch in a crouching position on the center of my bed, holding a shoe in one hand and a can of Raid in the other, head swiveling from side to side, on the alert for anything that might resemble scurrying. I had signed a lease with these zoo animals, and had no place to move to in the middle of the semester, and yet I could not sleep at night if there was even the remotest chance that a roach might amble across the bridge of my nose as I slumbered. And our tiny kitchen was home to, seemingly, about 40% of the US population of roaches. I couldn't move a coffee cup for fear of igniting a storm of activity that would cause me leap 3 feet in the air and shriek like chimpanzee on fire. In fact, once when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I screeched like banshee when I saw a huge roach sitting comfortably on the bristles of Sid's toothbrush. On the bristles! His big, disgusting body covered the whole head of the toothbrush. This was not an acceptable living situation. I needed a solution.
Here's the best I was able to come up with: I moved into the basement room. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs in the basement. I traded with one of my filthy cohorts, who was glad to get an upstairs room. My hope was that my room was far enough removed from the kitchen that the roaches would be too lazy to make the trek, especially considering my room was also scrupulously absent of any food items or even a sweet-smelling, potentially roach-attracting candle or tube of lip gloss. For good measure, I also kept a towel stuffed under my bedroom door to ensure that the crack that an insect might potentially enter through no longer existed. And, for my final display of genius, I kept a can of Raid handy, which I used every single night to spray the entire perimeter of my room before I went to sleep. The nightly inhalation of insecticide fumes lo those many nights may explain some of the questionable things you've read on this site, and which, if you know me, you've heard me say on a regular basis. But far more important than the health of my brain is the fact that I never once saw a roach in my pristine basement hideaway, so my plan worked. But that's not where the lesson comes in. Are you ready for the lesson? I don't think you are, but you wanted something to read today, so basically you're asking for this. You're going to be sorry, though.
Eventually I moved out of that litter box and into a house with my nice, clean boyfriend. I was careful to clean the hell out of everything I owned before bringing it into my new pad, and my boyfriend helped out in this task. As it happened, he was the one who cleaned out the microwave, and he was incredibly thorough, even taking apart the housing so he could get to the fan part. That's where he found the roach graveyard.
A nice little pile of dust had accumulated back there, and it wasn't hard to determine what that dust was made of, when you took note of the fact that there were also the dried husks of roaches in various stages of pre-dustification. Roaches would get in that little fan compartment and die, the heat would dry them out and over time, turn them to dust, and then the little dust particles would presumably FLY AROUND INSIDE MY MICROWAVE while my food heated up! I had often contemplated the security of my microwave from roaches, and considered the inside of that appliance to be a safe zone. After all, bugs can't get in there unless you leave the door open, right? Who the hell would think about them turning to dust and getting sucked up through the f!&*@ing fan? Oh, the cruel, Godless irony--I had been tediously soaking the carpet around the periphery of my room with Raid every night to ward off the roaches who might or might not wish to crawl, relatively harmlessly, about in my room, when in fact, I was even then digesting the roach dust that had coated the pizza I had reaheated and eaten earlier that day! I have been reeling from this revelation for years, my friends.
The lesson? GOD IS CRUEL! No, that's too simple. The lesson is this: Cover every single thing you heat in a microwave. If it's a bowl of soup, put a lid on it. If it's a burrito, put it inside a Tupperware container and put a lid on it. Even if you don't live with 4 of the filthiest jackasses to ever walk the earth, and even if you don't have a roach in your house--there's just no way of knowing what dead things might be, even now, decomposing in the depths of your appliances.
I have to go kill myself now.
This edition of Lessons I've Learned will shock you, if only for the fact that, unlike my previous Lessons, it does not involve copious alcohol consumption.
For a period of time in college, I lived with 4 guys. Yeah, I know--that's a recipe for disaster. Of course, I knew they'd be slobs, since, well, they were guys--but naivete prevented me from understanding or predicting the unbelievable extent to which their slobdom would spiral. How can men live like that? These normal-looking, well-behaved, reasonably attractive guys blithely strolled from room to room in our cute little off-campus dwelling, kicking litter hither and yon as they went, sidestepping piles of clothing, stacks of dishes, and food items that had fossilized weeks before. I had two choices: To become Snow White to their 4 Dwarfs, thanklessly cleaning up after them day in and day out, or to stubbornly ignore it, hoping beyond common sense that they'd eventually muster up enough pride to tidy up after themselves. I knew it was the longest shot conceivable, but I'm an optimist, so I chose the latter. Who knew--perhaps eventually they'd grow ashamed of the filth, and each would start to pick up after himself just enough that the house would begin to exist in a general state of, if not cleanliness, then at least acceptable clutter.
This shows how dumb I was.
Time went by and the filth reached epic proportions. I can tolerate constant disarray, if I must, but what I can't tolerate are cockroaches. I can't stand insects of any kind, but roaches are an unspeakable horror. I cannot sleep if I've seen one in my home. I will perch in a crouching position on the center of my bed, holding a shoe in one hand and a can of Raid in the other, head swiveling from side to side, on the alert for anything that might resemble scurrying. I had signed a lease with these zoo animals, and had no place to move to in the middle of the semester, and yet I could not sleep at night if there was even the remotest chance that a roach might amble across the bridge of my nose as I slumbered. And our tiny kitchen was home to, seemingly, about 40% of the US population of roaches. I couldn't move a coffee cup for fear of igniting a storm of activity that would cause me leap 3 feet in the air and shriek like chimpanzee on fire. In fact, once when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I screeched like banshee when I saw a huge roach sitting comfortably on the bristles of Sid's toothbrush. On the bristles! His big, disgusting body covered the whole head of the toothbrush. This was not an acceptable living situation. I needed a solution.
Here's the best I was able to come up with: I moved into the basement room. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs in the basement. I traded with one of my filthy cohorts, who was glad to get an upstairs room. My hope was that my room was far enough removed from the kitchen that the roaches would be too lazy to make the trek, especially considering my room was also scrupulously absent of any food items or even a sweet-smelling, potentially roach-attracting candle or tube of lip gloss. For good measure, I also kept a towel stuffed under my bedroom door to ensure that the crack that an insect might potentially enter through no longer existed. And, for my final display of genius, I kept a can of Raid handy, which I used every single night to spray the entire perimeter of my room before I went to sleep. The nightly inhalation of insecticide fumes lo those many nights may explain some of the questionable things you've read on this site, and which, if you know me, you've heard me say on a regular basis. But far more important than the health of my brain is the fact that I never once saw a roach in my pristine basement hideaway, so my plan worked. But that's not where the lesson comes in. Are you ready for the lesson? I don't think you are, but you wanted something to read today, so basically you're asking for this. You're going to be sorry, though.
Eventually I moved out of that litter box and into a house with my nice, clean boyfriend. I was careful to clean the hell out of everything I owned before bringing it into my new pad, and my boyfriend helped out in this task. As it happened, he was the one who cleaned out the microwave, and he was incredibly thorough, even taking apart the housing so he could get to the fan part. That's where he found the roach graveyard.
A nice little pile of dust had accumulated back there, and it wasn't hard to determine what that dust was made of, when you took note of the fact that there were also the dried husks of roaches in various stages of pre-dustification. Roaches would get in that little fan compartment and die, the heat would dry them out and over time, turn them to dust, and then the little dust particles would presumably FLY AROUND INSIDE MY MICROWAVE while my food heated up! I had often contemplated the security of my microwave from roaches, and considered the inside of that appliance to be a safe zone. After all, bugs can't get in there unless you leave the door open, right? Who the hell would think about them turning to dust and getting sucked up through the f!&*@ing fan? Oh, the cruel, Godless irony--I had been tediously soaking the carpet around the periphery of my room with Raid every night to ward off the roaches who might or might not wish to crawl, relatively harmlessly, about in my room, when in fact, I was even then digesting the roach dust that had coated the pizza I had reaheated and eaten earlier that day! I have been reeling from this revelation for years, my friends.
The lesson? GOD IS CRUEL! No, that's too simple. The lesson is this: Cover every single thing you heat in a microwave. If it's a bowl of soup, put a lid on it. If it's a burrito, put it inside a Tupperware container and put a lid on it. Even if you don't live with 4 of the filthiest jackasses to ever walk the earth, and even if you don't have a roach in your house--there's just no way of knowing what dead things might be, even now, decomposing in the depths of your appliances.
I have to go kill myself now.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Calling All Loons (or “An Open Letter To My Dear Readers”)
I've been getting some visitors to my site lately via some really, um...interesting search queries. This is maybe the most fun part of having a blog, in my opinion, so I save all this bizarre info in a .txt file deep in the bowels of my computer til one day when I feel like blogging about it. Today I was rooting around in those very bowels, and thought I'd share with you the fruits of my bowel-rooting. (Yeah. I can already see the Google searches that line is going to bring.)
First, we have the poor sod who did a search for Zantac chiggers. Was this person trying to treat his chigger infestation by pouring liquid Zantac on the affected areas? Was he so uninformed as to wonder if Zantac somehow caused his chigger bites? Or did this person perhaps have a chigger as a pet, and was seeking to cure the poor little thing's upset tummy? (Which makes me wonder how he knew his chigger had an upset tummy. Or why he'd have a chigger as a pet.) I guess the most likely explanation is that he had several chigger bites on his body--which as I've explained to you before aren't really chigger bites, but actual chiggers burrowed into your skin--and he, being a parasite lover, was worried that the Zantac he had been prescribed for his acid reflux might somehow negatively impact his precious chigger colony. In other words, this guy is a loon.
Then there's the fellow who found me by searching for chigger jokes. Are chigger jokes really in demand? Who is out there trying to stock his arsenal of jokes with some chigger humor? I'm not even sure most people know what chiggers are, so such a joke would probably go over like a lead balloon, unless you were in just the right, chigger-knowledgeable crowd. I must assume, then, that this search was done by the guest speaker at this year's annual Exterminator's Convention, as part of his plan to warm up the crowd with some insect humor. But this guy is no genius, clearly, because exterminators don't make their bread and butter from chigger control as much as from controlling other types of insects. So as you can see, this guy is a loon.
Sigh. And then there's the chap who found me by searching for Mexican butts booty. Never mind that I am no expert on Mexican butts, or really, booty of any kind, so there's actually no useful information on that topic on my site. But I worry about this guy. He clearly has a fixation, and one that could surely be better satisfied by loitering around the parking lot of an El Chico restaurant than by sitting at home reading my largely booty-less blog. I can imagine the disappointment on his face when he reached my site and found not the abundance of Tejano backside he had hoped for, but just a lot of barely-funny chigger references. I feel sorry for this dude--even though he's surely a loon.
And today's feature search? Well, you wouldn't believe me if I just wrote it here--you'd tell me I was making it up. I had to take a screen shot of this one.
Now, it's bad enough someone is searching for roughing it with the prissy little princess. I can only hope that "roughing it" in this goofball's mind refers to camping or living in a log cabin with no running water, and not some crazy porn-style aggressive interlude. Either way, that guy is an obvious loon. But as I'm sure you'll agree, the really fascinating element of this particular screenshot is the search for I adore creepy homeless dental sex. I'm trying to think of a joke to make here, but nothing I can think of is funnier than the search itself. I will say that, while I didn't realize until now that homeless dental sex was even a category of sex, I have to wonder if the word "creepy" is really warranted here—I think it’s implied. It would seem that this King of all Loons would find more info on the subject if he refined his search and left the "I adore creepy" part out, instead just searching for (shudder) "homeless dental sex." By the way, I’d like to issue a warning to all homeless folk right here and now: Keep your mouth closed. There’s a weirdo on the loose. It’s in your best interest to refrain from falling asleep under an overpass with your mouth open, at least until this bizarre Google searcher gets put behind bars for one of the many offenses he no doubt commits on a regular basis. God wiling, a nosy neighbor will soon notice the human bones half-buried in the back yard of his hovel, or the stench of decay emanating from one of his tinfoil-covered windows, and call the cops. Until then, hide those rotting teeth, my unbathed, transient friends.
So what have we learned from these various search queries? My readers are, by and large, goddamn loons.
First, we have the poor sod who did a search for Zantac chiggers. Was this person trying to treat his chigger infestation by pouring liquid Zantac on the affected areas? Was he so uninformed as to wonder if Zantac somehow caused his chigger bites? Or did this person perhaps have a chigger as a pet, and was seeking to cure the poor little thing's upset tummy? (Which makes me wonder how he knew his chigger had an upset tummy. Or why he'd have a chigger as a pet.) I guess the most likely explanation is that he had several chigger bites on his body--which as I've explained to you before aren't really chigger bites, but actual chiggers burrowed into your skin--and he, being a parasite lover, was worried that the Zantac he had been prescribed for his acid reflux might somehow negatively impact his precious chigger colony. In other words, this guy is a loon.
Then there's the fellow who found me by searching for chigger jokes. Are chigger jokes really in demand? Who is out there trying to stock his arsenal of jokes with some chigger humor? I'm not even sure most people know what chiggers are, so such a joke would probably go over like a lead balloon, unless you were in just the right, chigger-knowledgeable crowd. I must assume, then, that this search was done by the guest speaker at this year's annual Exterminator's Convention, as part of his plan to warm up the crowd with some insect humor. But this guy is no genius, clearly, because exterminators don't make their bread and butter from chigger control as much as from controlling other types of insects. So as you can see, this guy is a loon.
Sigh. And then there's the chap who found me by searching for Mexican butts booty. Never mind that I am no expert on Mexican butts, or really, booty of any kind, so there's actually no useful information on that topic on my site. But I worry about this guy. He clearly has a fixation, and one that could surely be better satisfied by loitering around the parking lot of an El Chico restaurant than by sitting at home reading my largely booty-less blog. I can imagine the disappointment on his face when he reached my site and found not the abundance of Tejano backside he had hoped for, but just a lot of barely-funny chigger references. I feel sorry for this dude--even though he's surely a loon.
And today's feature search? Well, you wouldn't believe me if I just wrote it here--you'd tell me I was making it up. I had to take a screen shot of this one.
Now, it's bad enough someone is searching for roughing it with the prissy little princess. I can only hope that "roughing it" in this goofball's mind refers to camping or living in a log cabin with no running water, and not some crazy porn-style aggressive interlude. Either way, that guy is an obvious loon. But as I'm sure you'll agree, the really fascinating element of this particular screenshot is the search for I adore creepy homeless dental sex. I'm trying to think of a joke to make here, but nothing I can think of is funnier than the search itself. I will say that, while I didn't realize until now that homeless dental sex was even a category of sex, I have to wonder if the word "creepy" is really warranted here—I think it’s implied. It would seem that this King of all Loons would find more info on the subject if he refined his search and left the "I adore creepy" part out, instead just searching for (shudder) "homeless dental sex." By the way, I’d like to issue a warning to all homeless folk right here and now: Keep your mouth closed. There’s a weirdo on the loose. It’s in your best interest to refrain from falling asleep under an overpass with your mouth open, at least until this bizarre Google searcher gets put behind bars for one of the many offenses he no doubt commits on a regular basis. God wiling, a nosy neighbor will soon notice the human bones half-buried in the back yard of his hovel, or the stench of decay emanating from one of his tinfoil-covered windows, and call the cops. Until then, hide those rotting teeth, my unbathed, transient friends.So what have we learned from these various search queries? My readers are, by and large, goddamn loons.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
The world wants to know, damnit!
Fish on a Bicycle has interviewed me. It was just the two of us, at a trendy outdoor cafe in Hollywood. I was smoking a clove cigarette and wearing a studded Gucci t-shirt, and he was leaning across the table in earnest, holding his tape recorder close to me so as not to miss a word. People kept bothering me for autographs, but I screamed at them and threw my latte on one particularly pathetic hanger-on.
Okay, so he just emailed me the questions, as you might expect. I don't even smoke. Just read the answers, goofballs.
1) You are abducted by aliens. They are benign and albeit a characterless and cold lot, they are at least polite and concerned with your comfort. It turns out that they have a benevolent nature and they share with you, in lay terms, a secret that could end the suffering of millions. They describe to you, beyond dispute, in a way that you could easily relate to others a direct link between cancer and laughter. You are returned to earth safely and now have the opportunity to end the "big C's" reign of terror at the cost of abandoning one of humanities greatest gifts, humour. What will you do?
Lose the humor. That's an easy one. I would say yes to absolutely anything that would put an end to cancer, whether it would be for one person or many. Unfortunately, I didn't think of that when I was in school, because it would have been cool to go into a field where cancer research was being done. But I don't dwell on that with much regret--chances are, I wouldn't have been smart enough for it anyway. So my new slogan would be "Lose the humor, lose the tumor." Ho ho, sometimes I crack myself up. Oh wait, I can't do that anymore. Drat.
2) It's Christmas eve and you are six years old, it's almost time for bed. Can you describe what you see, and how you feel?
Believe it or not, this is an impossible question for me to answer. I remember almost nothing of my life before, say, age 9. Which is weird, because I didn't start on the booze and pills til age 11. (I'm kidding. I started booze and pills at age 10. Okay, I'm still kidding.) Seriously, though, I did not have a fabulous early childhood, and always wondered if there was some reason I don't remember it...like did something terrible happen to me that I blocked out? It's a mystery. At any rate, it's not such a sad story--there was a point in time when things dramatically improved (at the aforementioned age 9), and then continued to get better and better over time, til eventually I would say it became downright awesome. So the earliest Christmas I remember would be age 9 or 10, and I remember awaiting such holidays with some major excitement, although I do not recall the details of the night before. I know that the anticipation was always eased a bit because my mom was a big softie who loved gift-giving above all other things, and she would always break down and give me a gift or two before the actual day. I didn't even have to ask--in fact, as I got older, I used to say, "No, I want to wait til tomorrow (or whenever the gift exchange was to take place) and do it right," and she would say, "No, I can't wait! Open just this one." That one gift wouldn't be missed, either, because she grew up poor and her gift-giving policy when she became a mother was always "the more, the better." Our Christmas tree would be packed with so many gifts it would look like it was for 10 people, when it was really all for me. We didn't have a lot of money some years, either, so those gifts might all be little, dollar-store gifts that didn't cost much, but she insisted on having tons of them so I felt like I was having a windfall Christmas. Christmas was her favorite time of year, and she made a huge deal out of it, in terms not only of gifts, but also decorations, food, and cheer. Since she passed away two years ago, Christmas, by contrast, is really not much fun at all.
3) What is the biggest, most shameful lie you have ever told (and has it come back to bite you)?
Well, this isn't so much a lie as just bad behavior. I cheated on one of my first boyfriends, many years ago. He was certainly not someone I could have married, not only because we were too young, but also because he was just not right for me. But he was a genuinely great person, and he loved me and trusted me. It never really came back to bite me, but about a year after I broke up with him, I began thinking about it, and I started to see myself in a different light. Before that, I had always defended my actions, regardless of what they were, and felt that I was in the right 100% of the time. Suddenly I started taking stock of the little things (and bigger things) I did that were thoughtless or hurtful. That was kind of an epiphany for me, and from then on, I worked much harder at behaving in ways that show good character, but I am still bothered by the things I did back in the day that I now see were dishonest.
4) Project yourself into the future, your little boy has grown up. He's become a handsome, intelligent, articulate and (despite your influence) well balanced 18 year old. He calls to say that he'd like to bring his new girlfriend over, for dinner, and could they stay over? (The obvious implication is that they would like to share a room.) Let's say you are broad minded enough to agree. They arrive, giggling and holding hands, she is pretty, bright and in every way adorable, but 35 years old....discuss.
Funny you should ask such a question. I'm 8 years older than my husband--which, as you may have guessed, makes him 12 and me 20. (Okay, so those aren't our actual ages, but the part about the 8 year gap is true.) I am sure my in-laws didn't exactly break out the champagne when my husband told them about me (he was 21 at the time, and I was 29.) Even so, an 8-year gap is a bit easier for a parent to digest than a 17-year gap. I have some friends who have an even bigger age gap than that, and they are very happy, so I can't say I'm against big age gaps--but we are talking about an 18 year old here, which makes a difference.
I can't imagine agreeing to let my 18 year old sleep in the same room with his girlfriend. But more importantly, I would certainly expect the little beast to give me a courtesy heads-up on the advanced age of his wittle punkin before he showed up at the door with Miss Crow's Feet. (Brian told his mom on the phone, by the way, how old I was before introducing me. I believe she sat there for a second and then quietly said, "Brian." But then recovered and was very nice about it--and his whole family has always been wonderful to me.) At any rate, what I'd hope is that she didn't have kids--that would concern me more than the age gap. Naturally, I'd wish he was dating someone his own age, or at least closer to it, but I know better than to make a big deal about disapproving of his choice in a girlfriend for whatever reason--that would only strengthen his dedication to her, I'm sure. I assume that most relationships begun at 18 don't end in marriage anyway, so he might as well live and learn on his own. Now, if she had kids, I'd be incredibly nice while she was there, but eventually get around to having a one-on-one with him discussing the challenges of such a relationship--but then ultimately still let him make his own decision (like I'd have a choice anyway). But in your scenario, I am somehow broad-minded enough to agree to let them share a room, and the short answer is that I would not change my mind on that when I discovered her age. I would avoid anything that would so horrify him as causing a scene in front of his girlfriend. (I prefer to cause my scenes behind-the-scenes.)
5) And just to prove it's hypothetical, you have some extremely dead people to choose to marry, hurl off a cliff or shag stupid: Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence and Jim Morrison.
Well, there's no point in sparing Cobain's life, is there? He was very clear about not wanting to be here, and very proactive about making that happen. Plus, leaving him here to be tormented by that jackal Courtney Love is just plain cruel. So I'd push him off a cliff, and he'd probably thank me on the way down. Then I guess I'd be in the unfortunate position of having to shag Jim Morrison, just because I'd rather be married to cutie-pie Michael Hutchence than to Jim. I'd just have to watch him like a hawk and not leave him alone in hotel rooms. (I answered all these questions assuming these dead people would be alive again in your scenario. If they're still dead, then my answers would change based on the varying levels of decomposition. Whoever is less decomposed is the one I would shag, and whoever is most decomposed is the one I would marry.)
Okay, so he just emailed me the questions, as you might expect. I don't even smoke. Just read the answers, goofballs.
1) You are abducted by aliens. They are benign and albeit a characterless and cold lot, they are at least polite and concerned with your comfort. It turns out that they have a benevolent nature and they share with you, in lay terms, a secret that could end the suffering of millions. They describe to you, beyond dispute, in a way that you could easily relate to others a direct link between cancer and laughter. You are returned to earth safely and now have the opportunity to end the "big C's" reign of terror at the cost of abandoning one of humanities greatest gifts, humour. What will you do?
Lose the humor. That's an easy one. I would say yes to absolutely anything that would put an end to cancer, whether it would be for one person or many. Unfortunately, I didn't think of that when I was in school, because it would have been cool to go into a field where cancer research was being done. But I don't dwell on that with much regret--chances are, I wouldn't have been smart enough for it anyway. So my new slogan would be "Lose the humor, lose the tumor." Ho ho, sometimes I crack myself up. Oh wait, I can't do that anymore. Drat.
2) It's Christmas eve and you are six years old, it's almost time for bed. Can you describe what you see, and how you feel?
Believe it or not, this is an impossible question for me to answer. I remember almost nothing of my life before, say, age 9. Which is weird, because I didn't start on the booze and pills til age 11. (I'm kidding. I started booze and pills at age 10. Okay, I'm still kidding.) Seriously, though, I did not have a fabulous early childhood, and always wondered if there was some reason I don't remember it...like did something terrible happen to me that I blocked out? It's a mystery. At any rate, it's not such a sad story--there was a point in time when things dramatically improved (at the aforementioned age 9), and then continued to get better and better over time, til eventually I would say it became downright awesome. So the earliest Christmas I remember would be age 9 or 10, and I remember awaiting such holidays with some major excitement, although I do not recall the details of the night before. I know that the anticipation was always eased a bit because my mom was a big softie who loved gift-giving above all other things, and she would always break down and give me a gift or two before the actual day. I didn't even have to ask--in fact, as I got older, I used to say, "No, I want to wait til tomorrow (or whenever the gift exchange was to take place) and do it right," and she would say, "No, I can't wait! Open just this one." That one gift wouldn't be missed, either, because she grew up poor and her gift-giving policy when she became a mother was always "the more, the better." Our Christmas tree would be packed with so many gifts it would look like it was for 10 people, when it was really all for me. We didn't have a lot of money some years, either, so those gifts might all be little, dollar-store gifts that didn't cost much, but she insisted on having tons of them so I felt like I was having a windfall Christmas. Christmas was her favorite time of year, and she made a huge deal out of it, in terms not only of gifts, but also decorations, food, and cheer. Since she passed away two years ago, Christmas, by contrast, is really not much fun at all.
3) What is the biggest, most shameful lie you have ever told (and has it come back to bite you)?
Well, this isn't so much a lie as just bad behavior. I cheated on one of my first boyfriends, many years ago. He was certainly not someone I could have married, not only because we were too young, but also because he was just not right for me. But he was a genuinely great person, and he loved me and trusted me. It never really came back to bite me, but about a year after I broke up with him, I began thinking about it, and I started to see myself in a different light. Before that, I had always defended my actions, regardless of what they were, and felt that I was in the right 100% of the time. Suddenly I started taking stock of the little things (and bigger things) I did that were thoughtless or hurtful. That was kind of an epiphany for me, and from then on, I worked much harder at behaving in ways that show good character, but I am still bothered by the things I did back in the day that I now see were dishonest.
4) Project yourself into the future, your little boy has grown up. He's become a handsome, intelligent, articulate and (despite your influence) well balanced 18 year old. He calls to say that he'd like to bring his new girlfriend over, for dinner, and could they stay over? (The obvious implication is that they would like to share a room.) Let's say you are broad minded enough to agree. They arrive, giggling and holding hands, she is pretty, bright and in every way adorable, but 35 years old....discuss.
Funny you should ask such a question. I'm 8 years older than my husband--which, as you may have guessed, makes him 12 and me 20. (Okay, so those aren't our actual ages, but the part about the 8 year gap is true.) I am sure my in-laws didn't exactly break out the champagne when my husband told them about me (he was 21 at the time, and I was 29.) Even so, an 8-year gap is a bit easier for a parent to digest than a 17-year gap. I have some friends who have an even bigger age gap than that, and they are very happy, so I can't say I'm against big age gaps--but we are talking about an 18 year old here, which makes a difference.
I can't imagine agreeing to let my 18 year old sleep in the same room with his girlfriend. But more importantly, I would certainly expect the little beast to give me a courtesy heads-up on the advanced age of his wittle punkin before he showed up at the door with Miss Crow's Feet. (Brian told his mom on the phone, by the way, how old I was before introducing me. I believe she sat there for a second and then quietly said, "Brian." But then recovered and was very nice about it--and his whole family has always been wonderful to me.) At any rate, what I'd hope is that she didn't have kids--that would concern me more than the age gap. Naturally, I'd wish he was dating someone his own age, or at least closer to it, but I know better than to make a big deal about disapproving of his choice in a girlfriend for whatever reason--that would only strengthen his dedication to her, I'm sure. I assume that most relationships begun at 18 don't end in marriage anyway, so he might as well live and learn on his own. Now, if she had kids, I'd be incredibly nice while she was there, but eventually get around to having a one-on-one with him discussing the challenges of such a relationship--but then ultimately still let him make his own decision (like I'd have a choice anyway). But in your scenario, I am somehow broad-minded enough to agree to let them share a room, and the short answer is that I would not change my mind on that when I discovered her age. I would avoid anything that would so horrify him as causing a scene in front of his girlfriend. (I prefer to cause my scenes behind-the-scenes.)
5) And just to prove it's hypothetical, you have some extremely dead people to choose to marry, hurl off a cliff or shag stupid: Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence and Jim Morrison.
Well, there's no point in sparing Cobain's life, is there? He was very clear about not wanting to be here, and very proactive about making that happen. Plus, leaving him here to be tormented by that jackal Courtney Love is just plain cruel. So I'd push him off a cliff, and he'd probably thank me on the way down. Then I guess I'd be in the unfortunate position of having to shag Jim Morrison, just because I'd rather be married to cutie-pie Michael Hutchence than to Jim. I'd just have to watch him like a hawk and not leave him alone in hotel rooms. (I answered all these questions assuming these dead people would be alive again in your scenario. If they're still dead, then my answers would change based on the varying levels of decomposition. Whoever is less decomposed is the one I would shag, and whoever is most decomposed is the one I would marry.)
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