Happiness is a warm puppy

I know a little while back I made a passing swipe at Joe Biden for that Princeton cap idiocy during the Alito hearings. But you know what? In times of desperation, such as blog writer's block or the ineludible confirmation of a conservative ideologue, there's nothing wrong with resorting to a little prop humor. So to that end....

Look! Puppies!




Pictured, clockwise from top left upside-down puppy: Durkheim, Foucault, Mead, Benedict, Milgram, Descartes, Plath, Buddy.

So begins my all-photo week. I can't promise Abramoff and Bush, but I can promise Skeletor anad Figment the Purple Dragon. Stay tuned....

Stopping by blog on a snowy evening

(It's not actually snowing here; I'm taking Frey liberties for the sake of a catchy title.)

I've learned so much on this particular Saturday afternoon:

- Chasing a bowl of buttered pasta with a ream of dark chocolate can lead to some debilitating digestive moments, and no amount of Dandelion Detoxifying Yogi Tea can remedy the situation.

- While it may seem a quirkily stylish idea to hang a large gravestone rubbing above your home computer, staring at the words "in memoriam" day after day lends a certain fatality to an already frustrating job-search effort.

- It costs a fuckload of money to heat a place in winter. This month's gas bill drove me straight to the classifieds to explore my compensated medical experiment options.

- The provincial snootery of Boston extends to its animal shelters. Today I took a friend to a Boston to pick out a cat; after considering a pair of kittens named Socrates and Aristotle, she went with a chubby orange kitty named Bukowski. Just to give a little perspective, when I'd window-shop at animal adoption fairs in Los Angeles, I'd pet puppies with names like Nick and Jessica.

The five most gut-churning words in the English language

"Little Women: The Broadway Musical"

Runner-up:

"Looking for work while unemployed"

Long story. Long last few weeks. I swear I'll be posting more soon. Just give me a little while longer.

Further evidence of a low-brow mind

Exhibit A: After a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday, I came away with one indelible image: the anonymous note left in the museum's guestbook that read, "The fat woman was cool! I love your stuff. Keep on making it!! I liked the pancakes and the nude people."

Exhibit B: Despite the fact that, just two days ago, my father gave me a copy of Mao to read, I was several sentences into the Atlantic Monthly's review of the book before I realized that the "most complete and assiduously researched biography" being described was not, in fact, a "detailed portrait" of cows entitled Moo.

Friday tidbits, Freudian style

A few of my nocturnal ditties over the past two weeks:

Dream: Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff begins selling his own handmade sweaters on Bluefly.com in a desperate bid to raise legal funds.
Analysis: I've been watching a hell of a lot of C-SPAN lately.

Dream: I'm in Logan Airport taking batting practice from Alan Embree, getting increasingly frustrated that I can't seem to hit anything. Then my husband comes along and points out that I don't actually have a bat in my hands.
Analysis: Alan Embree is gay.

Dream: Sean Penn goes off to South Korea to film a movie about refugees. While filming in a hut, the director inadvertedly causes a piece of film equipment to catch fire and the hut blows up, killing Sean Penn and the entire film crew. Sean Penn's corpse is laid out in a treehouse somewhere in Los Angeles so that everyone can visit it; over the next two weeks, his body slowly morphs into that of a pig man, and Jewish scholars use the transformation as evidence that none of us should eat pork because we're all actually pigs.
Analysis: Bacon doesn't count, right?

Dream: Johnny Knoxville is missing somewhere in the waters off of Florida, and everyone is looking for him. I rent a motor boat and search for him in the Gulf, but eventually he's found in a boat on the Atlantic by a poet named Pico Pyle. Later Johnny Knoxville and I meet up and we begin to make out, but then he turns into a file cabinet and I can't find his lips. Meantime, Pico Pyle is arrested under suspicion of having eaten his golden retriever after a long blonde hair is found in his mouth.
Analysis: Never, ever eat popcorn right before bedtime.

Poor closets, always discriminated against

Things I learned during today's confirmation hearings:

-Turkeys feel fear just like you and me

-If you're asked if you are a "closet bigot," the correct answer is actually "no"

-Questions do not always have to be phrased as questions -- they can also be phrased as ceaseless, factional monologues

-If you send someone a piece of correspondence, it is a grave insult to assume that they have actually received and read it

-Prop humor will never go out of style

-Girls are big fat crybabies

Today's brief DeLorean jaunt back in time

After rejecting a door-to-door salesperson's offer to shampoo my rugs, I returned to the Alito confirmation hearings just in time to hear Sen. Jeff Sessions use the term "super-duper."

The long, slow descent into private-school pretension

My mom, goddamn her and bless her heart, saved many of my writings from grade school and beyond, and over the holidays we took the occasion to go through them.

Amidst a choice science report on pandas and a few hard-hitting editorials for my high school paper ("Recycle Your Cans") were two inimitable stabs at fiction, one from first grade, the other from 11th. A side-by-side comparison:

Title
11th grade: "A Driving Force"
1st grade: "The Marvelous Magical Miracle Machine"

Synopsis
11th: Lani, a beautiful, rebellious private school girl, struggles with her parents' divorce
1st: Our first-grade protagonist, Meaghan, fights back against an evil machine wreaking havoc in her neighborhood

Influence
11th: J.D. Salinger
1st: Dr. Who

Excerpt
11th: "For the first three and a half minutes of class she took dutiful notes; once they launched into a discussion concerning the appeal of Marxism to industrialist reformers in the 19th century, however, she knew that it wasn't worth it. She was too far behind in the reading."
1st: "I met the machine again and it grabbed me and made me into four of me. One of the mes went home and told mom what had happened. She laughed and said, 'It's your imagination.' So I went for a walk. I saw the machine. It tried to grab me but I ran. I had had enough. I got mad!! I went home and took a bath."

Climax
11th: During a driving lesson, Lani mistakenly runs over her brother Claude's tweed cap, "a prized possession," and is subsequently grounded
1st:Meaghan finds the machine sleeping, steals his motor and kills him

Last line
11th: Actually an author's note that begins, "The Joycean theme explored in this piece..."
1st: "Then I woke up!! I said 'Phooey!!'"

Self-imposed blog vacation ends... now

Right now I am waiting for the delivery of a mattress, a disassembled bed frame and an armoire. All three are scheduled to arrive around the same time. The last one is arriving to our third floor apartment via crane. The bed comes in three pieces; each weighs more than 70 pounds; the company will only drop the three packages on the curb; I am a wee girl whose muscles have atrophied over these last two all-play-and-no-workout weeks; we are in the midst of a driving rainstorm that will soon turn into a driving snowstorm.

Today should be, what's the word? Fun. No wait, vomitous.