When life imitates a bad SNL skit

The other day I was describing a person's physicality to my lesbian sister and referred to him as "prematurely gay."

All the world's a Tom and Jerry episode

It's a tad alarming how much my and my sister's world views have been shaped by cartoons. When she first came to visit me in Los Angeles and we drove to Vegas, Zoe was very disappointed that the cactuses along the way were not shaped like huge pitchforks. When I order a steak in a restaurant, I still expect a huge white T-shaped bone to dominate the cut. Then there was the Woody Woodpecker reminiscing in Zimbambwe.

So when Zoe called the house the other night and said, "The dog's head is stuck in the fence! Quick, bring canola oil!" I didn't blink. I knew we'd grease the dog's head up real nice and that she'd pop out like a cork and ricochet off of a tree, causing a bird's nest to fall on her head, which would in turn cause the irate occupant of said bird's nest to peck the dog's head in anger while the dog whined and ran around in circles (on her hind legs only, natch) and covered her head with her human-like paws.

No oil was needed in the end, just a good, hard, push-pull effort, but the dog's cheerily vacant expression during and after the ordeal, as well as her redoubled efforts to get her head back in the fence immediately after dislodgement, held their own cartoonish appeals.

And I don't listen to NPR Morning Edition because my commute is too late in the morning to allow it, so don't even start

I don't own an iPod. When they first came out, Dan bought one and transferred our shared CD collection onto it, which we listened to at home and in his car; but I had a CD player in my car and so felt less of a need to buy one for myself. (Also, I'm a wee bit of a music file luddite. Still. Sad. But true.) Then we moved and got a new desktop and kept adding music to that, which at the time seemed a fullproof tactic.

Right now, however, post-robbery and pre-new computer, I'm gravely regretting my No iPod decision, and not just for its postfeminism implications. I do own a Shuffle, but when we got robbed it contained my gym mix, which is full of the mindless, horrific crap I need to get through 45 minutes of rotating my legs in place; and since I still have no means to update my playlist at the moment, I'm stuck.

So I've been listening to Boston radio. And have nearly passed out every morning from its sheer crapissitude. Just this morning I spent a solid 30 minutes flipping endlessly around the dial in the hopes of landing on something halfway decent, and yet all I came away with was the cacophonous memory of some new Jessica Simpson ditty, which I landed on after flipping away from that horrific Nick Lachey single.

All of this is a big ramp-up to the admission that I don't hate the new Paris Hilton song nearly as much as I should.

Found art

My sister at the end of Game 6 of the NBA Finals on Tuesday (after earlier wondering aloud what "Pat Sajak" was still doing coaching):

Her: "Who's that guy clapping?"

Me: "That's Mark Cuban, the owner of the Mavericks, the guy I was telling you about."

Her: "He looks like a special-needs friend who's wandered onto the court by mistake and who no one has the courage to lead away."

Bingo.

Quitting school and going to work and never going blogging

Apologies for the dearth of posts (someone at Blogger should just create boilerplate text for lack-of-posting apologies already...). Mostly the day-to-day has caught up with me this week. More intriguingly, lately I find myself wanting to blog about people who read this site -- in tangential ways, mostly, as entryways to get into weightier subjects -- but I'm not especially comfortable doing that. So I'm thinking about starting a second surreptitious blog where I will, as they say, stop getting polite. Mneh heh heh.

Meantime, I do have an BIMT entry brewing about long hallways that should soon paralyze my readership with its trenchant wit. TRENCHANT, I tell you! MNEH HEH HEH! Mneh heh. Mneh ... eh.

City folk rule!

Just came back from a wedding in upstate New York (where I was the officiant, actually, which is its own story, except I actually did pretty well, especially considering my I'd-rather-drink-Drano terror of public speaking in general, so I guess there's no story there after all) and was incredibly charmed by the small town we stayed in and the people who lived there. The single drawback was the lack of modern infrastructure, which made it impossible to get cell phone reception or to get online to keep up with the news.

So when I came home, I went to the NYTimes.com site and was greeted by this headline:

"North Koreans Reported Closer to a Missle Test."

Nce to be back.

The five worst things ever said to me

5. “When’s your baby due?”
4. “You seem well-suited to a career in equestrian performing.”
3. “So I think of you as one of those hidden jewels, the kind of woman who, when she takes off her glasses, you go, ‘Hey, she’s pretty good-looking after all!’” (I don’t wear glasses.)
2.“You're a big New Kids on the Block fan, aren't you?”
1.“There’s something a little sexual about the way you pet dogs.”

A mistake that almost cost me my future husband

A mere two months into our relationship, I described Dan as a cross between Erik Estrada and Mr. Bean. To his face.

We must protect our children AND our dogs!

My sister Zoe recently started dating a woman who has three dogs, one of whom is handicapped and has no control over his lower faculties. When walk-time comes, the dog has to be manually relieved through a complex squeeze and release method. (Hey, I'd do it for my dog too, although right now he's having noooo problem relieving himself anywhere and anytime he pleases.)

The woman recently went away for a night and left the dogs in my sister's care, but before she did, she carefully showed Zoe her way around the handicapped dog's bladder. No problem! figured Zoe. Anything to win points.

Zoe called me later in the day in abject panic: she'd spent the last hour trying to get the dog to pee with no success whatsoever; in the process, however, she'd given him a raging woody.

Now see, if Zoe had had more regular access to the male equipment over the years -- if, say, the federal government had done more to discourage her from pursuing that homosexual lifestyle thing -- this never would have happened. Sure, sure, the little guy probably had the best night of his life, but if we've learned anything on the Senate floor this week, it's that one should always bypass sexual pleasure for the sake of biological duty, be it pissing on a fire hydrant or procreating in a loveless heterosexual marriage.

On the other hand, if the time ever comes, sounds like Zoe would be perfectly at ease living on my side of the tracks.

Don't stop airing Shark Week though!

Discovery Channel, you have lost my love.

Sunday night, after a very entertaining moon-landing special featuring several toothless, trailer-park-residing conspiracists and a slightly more erudite skeptic identified only as a "magazine editor,” you aired an hour-long piece about a 5-year-old Indonesian boy named Novemthree who suffered from the biggest face tumor ever recorded in modern medical history, and the Herculean efforts of a squad of doctors to remove it. I was riveted.

The hour proceeded powerfully. The first three tumor chunks were taken out over several day-long surgeries, and except for a bout of pneumonia, the little boy was pulling through like a champ. Then the mouth tumor was removed and his mouth was reconstructed during a final marathon procedure, and all the doctors admitted that even they were surprised with the success of their efforts. And while Novemthree hardly looked normal, he looked a lot better, and could finally see out of both eyes and cry out of both eyes, and so he cried tears of happiness. And a few months later he was checked out of the hospital and all the doctors and nurses and staff and reporters who had covered his story threw him a big party and cheered and cried and gave him a cake shaped like his new face (okay, that last part was actually slightly uncomfortable, but the cake designers took appropriate liberties, so all was well). And then the little boy went back to his tiny fishing village, and all of his brothers and sisters hugged and kissed him, and all the other village kids were finally unafraid of him and wanted to play soccer with him, and Novemthree was a happy little being for the first time in his life. My heart swelled with joy.

Then you tacked on a charming little P.S. informing us that Novemthree died less than a year later.

I’m sorry. I guess you got confused. Did you somehow forget the rules? It’s one rule, actually, and it’s very, very simple, but I'll remind you of it again since you apparently have taken leave of your senses. Okay? Here it is:

EVERY SINGLE PERSON FEATURED ON A CRAZY MEDICAL SPECIAL MUST SURVIVE.

Listen here. The only reason we ride your hour-long waves of medical voyeurism is because we know everything will always turn out okay in the end. The conjoined twins will successfully be unattached. The two-foot-long javelin sticking out of some poor track-and-field spectator’s noggin will be removed with just a drain-sized scar left behind. The guy with the decades-long stomachache who turned out to have swallowed his twin’s embryo in utero will finally be relieved of his discomfort after a single groundbreaking robotic surgical procedure.

So I KNEW that Novemthree would be okay. Hell, 30 minutes in I felt so secure in the kid’s survival that I flipped over to the Discovery Health Channel to watch another special called “The Half-Ton Man.” (“You have to understand… I couldn’t just eat one pork chop. I had to eat 24.”). But I tuned back in just in time to catch the triumphant end of Novemthree’s story, and then you went and popped my balloon of elation with an elephant gun of a postscript.

So what am I left with? Why, that would be a water tank’s worth of guilt over the off-color jokes I made at the show's three-quarter-hour mark, beginning with the “eh” I uttered when the amazing before-and-after photos were placed side by side and ending with an imagined reprimand from Novemthree’s father in a few years when the little boy would have been an insolent teenager: “Don’t make me put those tumors back in you!”

For shame, Discovery Channel. For shame.

There's one place like home

Yesterday my commute home was delayed due to a Ben Affleck movie being filmed in our neighborhood. This morning the hubby served coffee to John Malkovich. Did we dream the whole move from L.A. to Boston?

Like owner, like hound

There are two types of older siblings in this world: the nurturers and the torturers. I earned the latter designation in mid-1975 when I took the time to stuff most of a head of lettuce down my sister's throat, leaf by leaf; only Zoe's last-gasp hacking drew in my mother's rescue effort.

Thwarted but not defeated, I spent the rest of my toddler and pre-tween years perfecting my persecution of the hapless little sprout. I pulled the tail off of her beloved stuffed pig; I climbed into her crib to offer "hugs" that were actually death-squeezes; I threatened to flush her down the toilet; I repeatedly beat her over the head with a child-sized wicker chair; I offered to clean her room and then threw away all of her material possessions; I punched her in the face and knocked out a loose tooth double-quick; I threw a Monopoly board in her face when she refused to sell me Park Place.

It seemed about right, then, that when my dog met my sister's dog for the first time this weekend, he peed on her.

How meta-awesome is this?

My new favorite hobby is to inadvertedly hit wrong buttons on my keyboard, which has lead to me forwarding four or five email correspondences to unsuspecting entrants in my hotmail address book. (Nothing too incriminating yet, but a few have bore witness to my excessive use of exclamation points, which I'm a bit embarrassed about.)

Just a little while ago, I inadvertedly whacked a button that took me back to some old entries on my blog (yeah, yeah, I was reading my own blog. I'm really, really, really bored today). Then I whacked another button my mistake and Lo! I hit upon a nazel-gazing goldmine. I guess old comments don't actually go away even when the comments counter has gone back to zero! So actually, my new favorite hobby is reading the writings of my first four or five loyal readers! There's some high drama in them-thar 2004-2005 comment sections!

I guess there's also hope yet for Gilbert Gottfried?

Who knew K-Fed was a scour shower away from becoming a Peter Saarsgard/Ralph Reed hybrid?

Random crank musing

It doesn't take much to depress me. Yesterday it was a "Moms ROCK!" bumper sticker; today it was a woman doing a "Coffee Talk" impression. Why must some people be so lacking in subversion?