There's a Blog in My Throat

Live-blogging the Oscars

2009-02-22T20:28:00.026-05:00

11:55: Best Best picture group hug ever.

11:45: Seriously? I waited 3 hours to watch Mickey Rourke not win? Sean Penn's was the second best performance of the year. But still.

11:34: Mr. Winslet! Score one for the crazy dads.

11:24: I get annoyed every time I'm forced to rewatch Julia Roberts' endless acceptance speech.

3 am? This thing is lasting for-f'ing-ever.

11:05: Yes, yes, Hugh. We get it. You like music.

10:44: Humanitarian or no, you introduce Jerry Lewis, you show a "King of Comedy" clip.

10:37: Finally, the words I've longed to hear: "Coming up, a tribute to Jerry Lewis."

10:16: Zose wacky Frenchmen!!

10:09: I'm deeply appreciative of the fact that they did not schedule a musical montage right after the Best Supporting Actor presentation.

9:57: Zach Efron's top hat fell off! Funny!

9:54: This musical montage better get funny.

9:39: Do they ever NOT send a young hot actress to host the technical nerd awards?

9:39: Jessica Biel forgot to untuck her dinner napkin. And to brush her hair.

9:37: Wait, that Visa/MasterCard dog is still lost?

9:23: The boobs are struggling mightily

9:17: Sarah Jessica Parker's boobs try to offset her Unsexiest Woman in the World honor from a few years back

9:15: Ah, there he is. But not as sing-y.

9:11: Um, where's Hugh Jackman?

8:59: Angelina's death-ray eyes aren't quite doing the job on Jennifer Aniston.

8:58: Gay Mormons are always so pretty. (Hi Margaret!)

8:50: My husband just dropped a head of cabbage on the floor.

8:47: "Thank you Woooooody."

8:45: Back in the Habit!!

8:44: Eva Marie Saint seems to be experiencing a second, Peter Brady-style puberty.

8:42: Tilda, you so crazy!

8:39: Angelina = the new ungrateful Russell Crowe

8:30: The parenthetical "...for some reason" should come after every introduction of "Your host, Hugh Jackman!"

8:28: Uh-oh. We're out of wine already.

Live-blogging the pre-show

2009-02-22T19:34:00.009-05:00

7:35: And to think I used to find Peter Gabriel hot.

7:36: Fingers crossed Angelina and Aniston are wearing the same dress and have a Brenda-and-Kelly-like smackdown as a result.

7:41: Switched over to Barbara Walters. Mickey Rourke on winning an Oscar: "You can't eat it, you can't fuck it, it won't get you into heaven." Love.

7:43: Switched back to red carpet just in time to catch Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a skully. Double love.

7:45: Angelina looking extra-boring, extra-haggard and extra-bitchy. Brad looking a mite bitchy as well.

7:49: Swinton bringing the beautiful/crazy.

7:58: I ain't no Seacrest fan, but appearing in movies like "Wanted," "Kung Fu Panda," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," "Alexander," "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," "Tomb Raider," "Tomb Raider II," "Beyond Borders," "Original Sin," "Gone in 60 Seconds," "The Bone Collector," "Playing God," "Firefox" and "Hackers" doesn't exactly put you above the fray, Angelina m'dear. Suck it up.

8:13: Robert Downey Jr. = Tuck Everlasting.

8:15: There is a funny French bee in the commercial I'm watching. (Yes, Oscar ennui has already set in.)

8:27: I can't wait to learn about the MAGIC of the MOVIES!!!!!!

I'm back

2009-02-22T19:28:00.002-05:00

Why does bad crap always seem to happen to me before the Oscars? So far, 2009 is best summed up by the fact that my dog is now on Prozac.

No matter... I'm back and ready to live-blog this shit. Without further ado....

First Blog, Part Two

2009-01-25T19:35:00.003-05:00

Freshly finished with the SAG Awards (huzzah to "Benjamin Button" being shut out), I'm now watching "First Blood" on AMC. That fact in and of itself deserves dissection, but I'll leave it be, because there's so much else to talk about.

So first of all, is Rambo supposed to be a post-Vietnam Era HIPPIE in this movie? There's an awful lot of reference to his hair being too long, but it's not really long at all. Nor does he put out an especially strong hippie vibe. Je suis confused.

Second, are people ever really arrested for vagrancy?

If so, do small town cops really spend so much time torturing vagrants with razors and such?

Is Brian Dennehy ever thin and not in peril?

Am I very very wrong to find Sly hot in this movie?

Otherwise, this movie is all about confused memories for me. Due to its adult content, I mostly watched this movie from behind the couch at my dad's house and didn't understand what the heck was going on. All I took away from it was that Vietnam vets were a mountainous people. And even then I think the movie I'm really remembering is "First Blood Part Two," since I have very vivid memories of Rambo yelling at Murdoch and far fewer of Rambo making a man-tunic out of an abandoned tarp, which is what's happening on screen at the moment.

Actually, really, what is this tunic all about? He was wearing a perfectly reasonable tank top a few minutes ago. Personally, when I'm being chased, tunic conception and execution is usually low on my list of priorities.

I'm starting to doubt the validity of "First Blood"'s American Movie Classic status.

Hi ho.

2009-01-25T17:33:00.001-05:00

Gonna start this sucker up again.

Everything I say is everything you've ever wanted to hear

2008-08-24T13:34:00.003-05:00

I know a fair number of talking heads. Between ex-classmates, old co-workers, and LA associates, I usually catch at least one televised acquaintance a week, pontificating on the election or fall fashion trends or Britney's latest breakdown. And if my mood is bad or my confidence low, I invariably mope and wonder, Why aren't I doing that?

And then I remember: Because I'm a liar.

I don't mean to be. I don't want to be. It's just that on occasion, I open my mouth and let loose with a whopper. The whoppers themselves are usually inconsequential, but it's a tic I can't seem to conquer.

Latest example: Last week I was walking the dog at the beach. It was a beautiful afternoon with lots of families out and about, which meant a lot of wee ones squealing at the site of a hound with long, yankable ears.

One such squirt spotted us and came careening over. Watson stopped and obliged with his sad-eyed "just pull them and get it over with!" expression. Meantime, I chatted with the child's parents.

"What a cute dog!"

"Oh, thank you!"

"Is it a boy or a girl?"

It's a boy. My dog is a boy. Watson J. Dog is a boy.

"It's a girl!"

Why? WHY? I have no idea. It just came out. I even felt the idiocy rising in my throat and almost stopped myself, but then realized it would be better to live with the lie than explain why I floundered over a simple question regarding my dog's sex.

And so began the second leg of the walk: Hide the Dog Salami. First, I blocked any view of the dog's pee-pee by jumping next to him and leading him away like a ring handler. Then, once we were past the family, I planned a walking route that took me about a half-mile out of my way, thus circumventing the beach on our way back to the beach parking lot.

It wasn't all bad though -- Watson got some much-needed exercise after a summer of eating many unguarded foodstuffs. And a girl's gotta keep her figure, after all!

James Woods is NO carcarian carcarius

2008-07-27T19:48:00.006-05:00

"Shark Week." One of my most favorite weeks ever, it's "The Hills" for armchair ichthyologists. (N.B.: I have never seen a single episode of "The Hills," a matter I truly mean to address in a future blog entry.)

Except.... except. The very honest truth is that while I genuinely enjoy sharks, what I'm really fascinated by is shark attacks. And herein lies the problem. As any shark or "Shark Week" aficionado knows, death by shark attack is about as likely a demise as death by chocolate. It just doesn't happen very often. The International Shark Attack File records something like 65 attacks a year, and most of them are of the "a sand shark just bit my toe! oh no! oh well!" variety.

So there are only so many truly sensationalist attacks that "Shark Week" can focus on, and the other sad truth is that I'm already intimately acquainted with all of them. The 1916 Jersey Shore attacks? I could tell you which limbs were lost by which victims. The USS Indianapolis tragedy? Let's just say that when I saw Jaws for the first time, at the age of 8, and listened to Quint recount his own USS Indianapolis experience, I instantly knew that the screenwriters had plagiarized an actual survivor's account -- which I'd read at the age of 7.

So I fear I'm at the end of my "Shark Week" addiction -- the highs are few and far between and are punctuated by unbearable cravings ("Can we PLEASE hear the details about that recent Laguna Beach attack already? Please please please?"). South African air shark footage is okay and all, but I can only take so many close-ups of doomed limpid-eyed seals.

Guess I need a new animal-attack fetish. Meantime, I'll be writing a long-overdue complaint letter to the producers of "Shark" for blatant misrepresentation.

Weeks of afternoon downpours

2008-07-02T14:14:00.001-05:00

And it still has yet to occur to me to close the windows before I leave for work in the morning.

You know....

2008-06-24T20:41:00.003-05:00

I should be enamored with the little gray kitty currently perched on my forearm -- especially since I give her almost no attention when our squeaky-wheel dog is in the room -- but, uh, I kind want to toss her off. Except I'm sitting next to the hubby, whom I've frequently berated for throwing the cats across the room, so I'm sort of stuck.

The question is, is it getting old?

2008-06-17T23:58:00.002-05:00

The answer is, never.

I have so much more to say, but tonight let me just send out props to all the fair- and foul-weather Celtics fans (Justin and Ada get special props) who really truly get what this means. Johnny and Red are celebrating somewhere together tonight.

The news you can't use but can definitely enjoy

2008-06-06T11:56:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite aspects of being down in the Florida Keys is reading the daily paper, The Key West Citizen. The paper consists of two main sections, News and Sports, and is crystalline in its mission: You want real news? Go read The Miami Herald. Witness the front page headline the day after Obama secured the Democratic nomination:

"Man Hacked in Machete Attack"

I'm also pretty partial to the Crime Report, not so much for the writing (though this morning's headline, "The Bicycle Thief Knows Who He Is and Accepts It," should win a Pulitzer) as for the crimes themselves. A recent ditty:

"A woman awoke Sunday to find her car's windshield and rear window shattered and a note under the windshield wipers admonishing her boyfriend, reports say. 'Your boyfriend touched my girl's ass [and] now you have to replace your glass,' the note said.

Even some of the straightest news stories end up being pretty amusing, like this one from today's front page: "Fire destroyed the rental home of a well-known Marathon musician late Wednesday after a tiki torch exploded... Robert Hudson, known locally as "Rocketman," was playing a gig at Porky's Bayside restaurant...."

But far and away the best feature is the "Citizen's Voice" column. All locals are invited to call the paper's hotline to leave a voicemail proclaiming what's on their minds, and every day the paper prints the choicest 15 or 20 messages. Never mind the quaintness of the concept, or the fact that enough people call every day to keep the section humming: The column succeeds on its cryptic insanity alone. Some recent entries:

"Car dealerships, pay attention: No more balloons! Besides, do you really believe balloons help sell cars?"

"Democrats remind us of sheep who voted not to deal with the wolves. It's lazy to be 'against' the war, so don't cry when they come for you."

"I found it fascinating that the trooper stated that the pedestrian killed on Tuesday night was holding a beer can. After being thrown 75 feet?? Come on, now."

"By not using your own mind, that is to say, by not thinking for yourself, you have already paid the ultimate price. Use it or lose it."

"Fire must be contained and controlled at all times or it works against you. Contain and control -- from a book of matches to a nuclear reactor."

To hell with Iraq. The United States needs new cranes."

There's also some sort of ongoing fight raging between several callers squabbling over whether or not Fox News should be made available on Comcast. A caller yesterday placed himself firmly in the "No" camp, prompting today's reply:

"To the person who wants Fox news taken off Comcast, I'm calling Comcast to have you taken off your Comcast service, because I don't want to think like you."

Never underestimate the power of the "Oh yeah? So's your face!" retort.

Incidentally, if you were curious about the machete hacking victim, he's alive and talking, although he did lose his nose in the attack. Police have arrested and charged Jimmy "The Kidd" Dumas in the attack and have already dismissed his claim that he macheted the victim in self-defense. The Kidd is also now under suspicion for soliciting money to fund a liver transplant he never actually needed. Though he may have. No one really knows!

The Florida vote

2008-06-03T18:12:00.002-05:00

Back in November, a two-week jaunt to Key West gave rise to a very important, very pressing question:

"Of course I like you -- my dick is hard, isn't it?" or "My other ride has tits" -- which is the more offensive T-shirt?

First, some context. Key West is the land of a 1,000 trashy T-shirt stores. Slogans like "It's not the size of the fishing rod, it's how you wiggle the worm" and "I'm not balding -- this is a solar panel for my sex machine" regularly populate local retail display windows and the guts of middle-aged male tourists. In other words, it takes a lot more than a maybe-racist Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt to offend down there.

But I've spent a lot of time in Key West over the last eight years, and there has been an undeniable rise in the offensiveness quotient of T-shirt slogans. "I'm not 50 -- I'm 18 with 32 years of experience" has been supplanted by such lovelies as "I'm a doctor -- lie down with your legs spread and do what I tell you."

I think what really got the hubby and I, though, is that both of the first two aforementioned slogans were spotted on actual men on the streets of Key West, both of whom, unbelievably, had actual, real-life, non-inflatable ladies on their arms. (Granted, one of the ladies was blatantly trashed and staggering about with a margarita mug sporting flashing Christmas lights, but so it goes.)

Once both shirts were spotted, the gauntlet was thrown, and the hubby and I got down to it. I argued that the latter slogan was far more offensive, as it equated a woman with a piece of two-wheel machinery; at least with the hard-dick assurance, the lady in question was maybe being flattered? The hubby, meantime, pushed for the former, pointing out that the man in question could be assuring the woman of her likability right before sex, which would more likely make the statement itself a manipulative lie. (This debate, incidentally, raged on during much of our three-year wedding anniversary dinner. Classy couple, classy dinner conversation.)

Then, the hubby threw in one more wrench by inserting a third contender he'd spotted in a few T-shirt shops: "Hump and Dump," with an image of a man throwing out a woman in the garbage. We both agreed that this one trumped all and then ordered some dessert.

But now we're back in Key West, being regaled with the usual offensive oddities, and coming back fron a yoga class the other day I spotted what I now consider to be the end-all:

"Ass: The New Vagina."

So I throw it to you, dear readers. Which is the most offensive T-shirt slogan?

a) "My other ride has tits."
b) "Of course I like you -- my dick is hard, isn't it?"
c) "Hump and Dump" (with illustration)
d) "Ass: The New Vagina."

Results will be posted later this week. And incidentally, in the interest of complete fairness, I am amenable to the idea of assigning a half-vote to each and calling it a day.

I'm back

2008-06-02T16:07:00.002-05:00

Allo.

The last few months have been overscheduled and at times more than a little trying, for reasons I can't divulge. But nothing reinvigorates the soul like a Corona at 5 pm after a day at the beach, the situation I find myself in now. Also, I have a lot more free time over the next month. So yep, I'm back. More postings to come shortly.

Happy Birthday

2008-02-26T12:08:00.001-05:00

to my favorite.

Live-blogging the Oscars: a lude

2008-02-24T20:28:00.054-05:00

8:31 - This may be a good time to mention that I'm not really a Jon Stewart fan.

8:31:30 - Mostly because he receives a disproportionately raucous reaction to every tepid joke he utters at full volume.

8:34 - A Hillary joke followed by a Jew joke in the first two minutes. WHO SAW THAT COMING?

8:35 - FOLLOWED BY A LAWYER JOKE. UNPRECEDENTED.

8:37 - Javier Bardem doesn't seem to enjoy veiled John McCain jabs.

8:42 - I've already switched from wine to beer.

8:43 - First Best Song performance. This is a good time to talk about the Friday night date night I had with my hubby this weekend. After failing to figure out the broken DVD player, we switched over to the On Demand free movie list, which seemed pretty lacking in promise.... to me. An excerpt of the evening's conversation:

Dan: "Hmmm, this doesn't look very go-- OH MY GOD HOWARD THE DUCK! I've been wanting to see that forever! Do you KNOW that you can't even get it on Netflix? And OH WAIT! OH MAN! LAST TANGO IN PARIS! Okay, we're fast-forwarding to the sex scenes, and then we're watching Howard the Duck. 'Bring me the butter...'"

Me: -----

A half-hour later

Dan: "I am in HOG heaven."

Me: ----

***

8:47 - "And now.... Oscar's most hateful moments."

8:38 - Does Spike Lee show up to this thing solely to be the requisite "Race joke! Quick! Cut to a recognizable black person! Where's Whoopi? Okay, where's the other one?" cut?

8:49 - My mother in law had a viscerally negative reaction to Ratatouille, owing entirely to the fact that it featured rats.

8:51 - NorBIT! NorBIT! NorBIT!

8:51:30 - Dammit.

8:52 - I absolutely adore Frenchmen who speak in fake French accents.

9:06 - Dan and I have been squabbling over who's rocking the Woolly Willy look better, The Rock or John Travolta.

9:10 - Not awarding a major award early on is such a mistake -- that's how you lose the husband vote.

9:10:30 - Dan has just suggested an antidote: have the Oscars co-hosted by Steve Carrell and Scarlett Johansson.

9:15 - Jennifer Hudson just had her Oscar revoked.

9:17 - First non-surprise of the evening (Best Supporting Actor Javier Bardem) just caused the dog to dramatically readjust his place on the couch.

9:23 - Second Best Song performance. This is a good time to try and explain why I hate Angelina Jolie so much. Okay, so first of all, she is not a friend of women. She doesn't seem to have any female friends, only male husbands and boyfriends she steals from women. One day I think Zahara will call her on this. Second of all, I think she's a wildly overrated actress and stunk in that dumb movie she won the Oscar for, and I say that not even caring that she tongued her brother. Mostly though, I hate her because I think she wildly overrates her own value as a humanitarian. When she travels to Iraq to raise awareness of the refugee situation over there, exactly who is she seeking to educate? The US Weekly readership? It just doesn't fly.

9:27 - I DARE Jon Stewart to make an Owen Wilson suicide joke.

9:33 - Jerry Seinfeld as an annoying animated bee totally works for me.

9:39 - One of the reasons I adore my husband is that he loves the oddly beautiful non-Americans: Rachel Griffths, Toni Collette and now, apparently, Tilda Swinton (who just gave an oddly beautifully awesome acceptance speech)

9:45 - Do you think the Technical Award nerds were pissed a hot PREGNANT actress hosted their awards this year?

9:49 - Dan likes the odd hotties, I like the Coen brothers.

9:51 - Peter "thirtysomething" Horton will play the lead in The Michael Bay Story.

9:53 - Third nominated song. Okay, I'll be honest, the superdelegate thing is making me nervous. I just don't trust the Clintons to seek any sort of truthful end result to this primary. Dignity just does not seem to be a coveted quality of their campaign (unless polled working-class Ohio voters suddenly put "dignity" atop their list of coveted qualities in their presidential candidate). And the whole bizarre Karl Rove-playbook accusation this weekend made my meta-blood boil.

10:01 - I have to pee.

10:02 - Peed.

10:10 - Okay, I'm just gonna say it: I don't like these foreigners comin' in and stealin' our Oscars. Where's Lou Dobbs when we need 'em?

10:15 - Forth nominated song. So inspired by Howard the Duck, Dan and I have been engaged in some pretty punny humor all weekend. For the one or two of you who never saw the greatest duck comedy of all time, here's a primer: a midget in a duck suit from another planet suddenly gets sucked into our universe, lands in Cleveland, meets Lea Thompson and spends the next two hours saying things like "that really ruffles my tail feathers!" and "That does it -- no more Mister Nice Duck." So Dan and I started reimagining the five nominated films as dog movies -- Atonemutt, There Will Be Bloodhounds etc. -- and OH WAIT! It's JACK! JACK'S BACK! Whoo hoo!

10:28 - Dan and I just counted, and shockingly I've seen more Best Picture movies than him -- those 50s musicals come in handy.

10:29 - Renee Zellweger, I know you're not supposed to insult someone by saying they have a lesbian haircut. However....

10:34 - Lifetime Achievement Award. Okay, so Nicole Kidman isn't quite as creepy-looking now that she is with bun, but there's still something so freakingly waxen about her. And it bums me out because I thought she was hyper-cute when she had normal hair and skin and lips, and she was still totally my fashion icon until maybe three years ago, when she married that country Australian guy who flat-irons his hair (which clearly inspired Tom Petty ahead of his Super Bowl performance, and do you KNOW that I can't even still talk about the Super Bowl and oh my god it's clearly cursed other New England sports teams because the Celtics have lost three in a row since the All-Star break and the Bruins, well, who cares, and but now I'm afraid that David Ortiz is going to break his groin during spring training?) and isn't it kind of weird how she became all Stepfordian only AFTER she divorced Tom Cruise given what Kat(i)e Holmes has become and...

10:39 - oh, commercial.

10:45 - Fifth Best Song performance. So anyway, Patrick Dempsey. So here's a dirty little secret. When I lived in Santa Barbara 15 years ago, there was this video store called "The #*&@* Video Store." You actually called it "The Fucking Video Store," but it was spelled the way I first spelled it. Anyway, it was about a block and a half away from my apartment, which meant that we never returned our videos because it was just too easy a process. So the two movies we had out forever were Dances with Wolves and Can't Buy Me Love. And, well, I loved Can't Buy Me Love. LOVED. But I HATED Patrick Dempsey, mostly because he was just a little too damn skinny and a lot too whiny. And so I still hate him today even though he's genuinely hot.

10:57 - Okay, forget what I said about Jon Stewart. I think it's genuinely awesome that he brought back the woman from Once to give her acceptance speech.

10:58 - And as if on cue, my dog just let rip with one of the smelliest farts that ever was.

11:00 - Okay, I'm lame, but the dead people montage always makes me teary. And it was a total dud of a dead lineup this year ('cepting for Heath, of course).

11:11 - So has anyone actually seen Enchanted? It's getting a lot of disproportionate play this evening, and BOY is that making my hubby angry.

11:15 - "I've served three tours in Iraq and all I got was this lousy Short Documentary subject?"

11-something - I've been totally distracted by reorganizing this blog.

11-something-plus-one - I so extra-love my husband for loving Helen Mirren as much as he does.

11:37 - So if anyone wants to really understand the emptiness of knee-jerk heretical film criticism, go read Stephanie Zackarek's criticism of Daniel-Day Lewis's performance in There Will Be Blood. It made me honestly a little embarrassed for her.

11:45 - Might I just mention that I love the Coen brothers?

11:46 - Okay, Denzel Washington has to be the least-offensive, least-drunk presenter of Best Picture in a long time.

11:47 - Good final win. Otherwise? BOR-ing.

Live-blogging the Oscars: a prelude

2008-02-24T20:01:00.004-05:00

I'm cranky. I'm cranky because we spent two hours today shopping for local produce, dairy and bread in a sincere but semi-cynical effort to begin the 100-mile diet. I'm cranky because after the shop we headed straight to our favorite pizza place, but it was closed. I'm cranky because this afternoon I listed a pair of expensive leather boots on eBay that the dog threw up on a half-hour later. I'm cranky because the dog then ate the loaf of our new locally sourced, locally baked multigrain bread. And I'm cranky because I'm now being forced to watch Regis Philbin.

Let's play.

February is National Pet Dental Health Month

2008-02-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

Plan accordingly.

Facebook

2008-02-19T14:30:00.002-05:00

Okay, I think I'm done. I gathered 83 friends in about a week's time, using the following standard: people with whom I've had at least one memorable conversation (i.e. a conversation I can remember). So that seemed a decent standard and a decent number (although I'm sort of maxed out until I start having more meaningful conversations with near-strangers).

Then I started scrolling through all my other friends and got really annoyed. Journalists, publicists and LA denizens -- who make up a good chunk of my roster -- ruin the curve, since they know, or at least "know," about a bazillion* people at any one point. The more I clicked over to friends' profiles boasting three-digit friend tallies, the less popular I felt. And if there's one friend I'm not looking to reacquaint myself with anytime soon, it's good ol' Miss Unpopularity.

Then I got defriended. By who I couldn't even tell, but my number went down to 82 for a while, and I was crushed.

Also, because I hate having my photo taken, the only digital shot I had available is a four-year-old picture of me with my sister's dogs. And it's finally starting to dawn on me that pretty much all of my public-domain photos feature at least one dog. Which is just lame.

Meantime, I can't figure out how the hell NOT to send all these TV and movie quizzes to all of my other friends. Which is probably most annoying of all to my "friends," who were probably only looking to up their own tallies to begin with. So sorry, "friends" -- you shouldn't have accepted my "friendship" to begin with.

*the term "bazillion" got reintroduced into my lexicon this weekend by my adorable hubby. I like it. Somehow it seems greater and yet less-threatening an amount than "gazillion."

Steno notebooks

2008-02-12T11:12:00.000-05:00

There are seven, half-used, on my desk right now.

2008's beauty resolution, unraveled

2008-02-08T17:01:00.000-05:00

Eat better, take vitamins, do more yoga, blah blah blah.... my big beauty resolution this year was hair-related. I do get my hair cut and, uh, color-enhanced on a fairly regular basis, but it still looks like crapola half the time, because all the magazines tell you not to wash it every day, but if I don't my hair gets all gross and oily, but I believe the magazines, so I put my hair back in a ponytail, but I don't have any nice barrettes anymore (dog-chewing bait, those are), so I put it back with an elastic, but that makes me look like some sad-sack "Extreme Makeover" Before, but mostly I don't care. (Exhale.)

Except my resolution is to start caring. So. So this year I bought into a new trend: dry shampoo. My understanding is that this was a 1970s dud of a idea that has since made a successful comeback. At least, that's what the magazines say, and in case it's not already clear, I fearfully believe them. So a few weeks back I bought a bottle of spray-on dry powder shampoo and started playing with it. At first the can sprayed nothing but air on my head (the nozzle was clogged), and so I figured the powder was invisible and, suffering from the placebo effect, spent a few days admiring the volume and fluffiness that the "powder" had bestowed.

Eventually though, the can started dispensing a thin white mist all over my head, and suddenly I got it. My hair was huge, sexy and dry. I fluffed it out and I trotted off to work with Farrah Fawcett-like exuberance, convinced I'd finally solved the gross hair dilemma.

Except two hours later I looked in the mirror and saw that the white powder hadn't dissolved but instead was glaringly scattered throughout my hair and scalp. I looked like some eighth-grade thespian basking in the post-performance glow of her winning turn as the grandmother in "Into the Woods."

Except my actual secondary school acting roles were limited to parts like "Strawberry Vendor" and "Rabbit #8." But still.

My To Do list

2008-02-07T10:44:00.000-05:00

... is cracking me up today:

Police
Hockey item
Yamada
1 pm bag
Gym
Platelets
Story ideas
Blog

Last night's indecipherable dream

2008-02-06T13:02:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination and Eli Manning died, possibly of a flesh-eating disease.

What does it all mean? I'm stumped.

A tale of two duties

2008-02-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

The best part of my day: going to vote with the hubby and bumping into my sister at our polling place. I love that my sister and I vote in the same district -- even if we did split our vote.

The worst part of my day: spending seven-eighths of it ghostwriting a plea for money from a much-higher-up. Actually, it's not even a plea, it's a pre-plea: I'm supposed to get them all greased up for the money demand coming their way in the next month. All I know is that it's an arduous task asking for money when you know you'll never see a dime of it.

What can you say?

2008-02-03T22:59:00.000-05:00

The Giants played better. And, I feel like it's unfair to be granted a World Series Red Sox win, a Patriots Super Bowl win, AND a Democratic presidential win in the same 13-month period. I'll take the first and third wins and humbly carry on into that great goodnight.

Overheard from a bride-to-be (or, Why I Eloped)

2008-02-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

"and basically, the whole room will be a shrine ... to us!"

Facebook

2008-01-31T15:29:00.000-05:00

I don't get it. But I've let too many social-networking opportunities pass me by, so as of today, I'm making a genuine effort to be Facebook-accessible. So far I feel very popular and very professionally unproductive. If any blog readers want to join in the festivities, leave a comment!

Green with annoyance

2008-01-30T16:51:00.000-05:00

A few weeks back, a friend and I decided to start mailing one another some of our favorite recent books so as to save money and trees. Of course, we're shipping these books cross-country, so the effort is self-negating, but it sounded good on (unbleached, post-consumer recycled) paper, so off we went.

Last week I brought Claire Messud's The Emperer's Children and T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle into work to ship off. Except, I couldn't bring myself to buy a new box to ship them in, since that would probably negate the zero-sum-ness of our efforts. So I started scrounging around the office for a used box, but none was to be had. So I gave up that day, and the next and the next, because the whole task seemed too arduous.

Today I put "mail books" back on my to-do list and made it my first priority of the day (well, second, after emailing off a writing assignment that was already a day late). First I asked around the office for a used box -- nothing. Then I went to the post office to ask same. Nada. Then I went to the local bookstore. Success! The perfectly sized box. So I brought it back, packed up the books with used newspaper, and took the package down to the post office.

Except only then did I realize there were old mailing stickers on the box that had to be removed if it was to be successfully reused. So I harrumphed back to my office and spent the next 10 minutes magic-markering the label ito oblivion. Except it didn't really take because I had also taped over them, plus I got dizzy from the marker's fumes, which assured my personal destruction if not that of the planet. So then I grabbed a pair of scissors and spent the next half-hour scraping off the tape and then the labels, getting magic marker all over myself in the process.

Total time elapsed on non-work-related morning project: 90 minutes.

Also, my bra has suddenly broken (but not in a titillating way) and I seem to have developed a low-grade allergy to pistachios, a fatal blow to my afternoon snacking habits. Not a good day.

9021-uh-oh

2008-01-24T19:00:00.000-05:00

As I'm admitted on this blog before, one of my longest-term guilty pleasures is "Beverly Hills 90210" reruns. Except, I've finally owned up to the fact that this may not be the healthiest preoccupation. Case in point: last night I dreamt I made out with Dylan McKay in a movie theater.

So to cleanse my soul, I'm watching a PBS documentary on Auschwitz right now.

Cuh-rap

2008-01-16T20:18:00.001-05:00

In a fit of procrastination last week, I got on eBay and bid impulsively on a used designer handbag that I had no real interest in owning.

Cut to now: I'm 33 minutes away from owning it for a price I don't remember authorizing. Praying for a last-minute outbid here....

Update: 33 seconds....

31 seconds...

10 seconds....

Cra -- wait! Someone outbid me with 3 seconds to spare!

Goddammit. I really wanted that bag.

What Michigan primary?

2008-01-15T20:07:00.000-05:00

Just watched the last half-hour of Die Hard. Some thoughts:

-I cannot not watch this movie when it is on. Other movies that share that distinction: Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, Titanic.

-John McClane kills more people in that movie than the terrorists do

-I wish Hans Gruber had his own radio show

-Did the late great Paul Gleason ever play someone professionally competent?

-The more I watch this movie, the more I become enamored with the throwaway lines of those about to die. My current favorite is the terrorist who is trying to shoot John around that boardroom table, then gets to the end and says, "No more TEEEEHBLE." Runner up: "You ahre a poleeceman. There ahre rooooles."

-When Argyle the limo driver punches Theo the computer nerd terrorist? Least disturbing cinematic black-on-black violence ever

Weekend wrap-up

2008-01-14T13:22:00.000-05:00

Just got back from four days in Key West for its annual literary seminar. It was inspiring, intimidating, and imminently worthwhile.

The single drawback to my trip was having to contend, yet again, with my least favorite airport in the U.S., Miami International. I've now been to this airport eight times in the last nine months, and each visit has made me earn for the caustic small-town airs of Logan Airport workers. A brief rundown of its flaws:

-The high quotient of retirees in the airport means a large number of transport cars populate the terminals. Except these cars only run in third gear and careen around the terminals seemingly without brakes, announcing their presence with a thin beeping sound that totally undersells the danger hurtling towards you.

-Check-in lines are not well marked. Baggage screening lines are not well-marked. Terminals are not well-marked. Departure gates are sometimes not marked at all, causing certain travelers to, say, take a transport train back and forth a few times because she is confused as to where, exactly, her plane is departing from.

-Beer is sold in the terminals. This is good. However, 90 percent of those who partake in said offering are those who should not be drinking in airport terminals: prenaturally beer-bellied middle-aged male adolescents who probably can't wait to get to their final tropical destination so they can rush to the nearest retail tourist trap and purchase a "Will Your Boobs Please Stop Staring at My Eyes" T-shirt.

-When your airline loses your bags, which it will, all Miami airport workers will profess ignorance, then feign interest, then display annoyance, then send you to wait in a line where the counterperson will eventually profess ignorance, then feign interest, then display annoyance, before finally placing a call back to the person who sent you to that line in the first place.

Mostly though, the airport pisses me off because all of the lunch counters completely overcharge you for cafe con leches. Also, there are way too many neon lights.

P.S. I know this is a little wah-wah coming from someone who, less than 48 hours ago, was sitting at an outdoor bar situated on the Gulf of Mexico, eating a dozen oysters and washing them down with a favorite local beer while catching the end of the Cowboys-Chargers game (i.e. the final nail in Jessica Simpson's celebrity coffin). But 24 hours ago I was sitting indoors on the shores of the Boston Harbor, eying the fresh foot of snow outside my window demanding shoveling attention, and today I'm catching up on three days of backlogged work, so permit me a wee bit of wah-wah-ing.

Wah wah wah

2008-01-03T13:07:00.000-05:00

So, yup, one of my New Year's resolutions was to blog more -- 5x a week to be exact. And, yup, I immediately reneged on that promise all last week. In the middle of the week I began writing a post about why the dog was to blame for my procrastination, but I never finished it, and sadly, it wasn't even the dog's fault. And now it's a new week and I'm still tired and a little overworked and stressed out over a number of non-work items and all in all just in an icky frame of mind. And tomorrow I'm off to Key West for four days, which sounds lovely except for the fact that I'll be hauling my laptop down to do some backlogged work.

So I'm still going to try and blog every day that I can from now on, but beware that I'm going to be a collosal grump. So there. It's either that or shut this sucker down.

BREAKING: Jessica Alba is pregnant!

2007-12-12T12:12:00.000-05:00

And that makes me really happy, because now Jessica Alba will get fat (typed the intrepid blogger as she munched on a proscuitto, mozzarella and basil sandwich).

A retroactive plea for sympathy

2007-12-06T17:02:00.001-05:00

Over the course of my young life, I have lost my entire music collection not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR times. First time, freshman dorm robbery. Second time, entire CD shipment failed to arrive. Third time, computer with all music digital files stolen. Fourth time, year-old hard drive of replacement computer crashed.

Okay, first time it was only like 25 CDs, since CDs were a relatively new-fangled thing and I had just started buying them (yup, I'm old). So it wasn't that traumatizing. And third and fourth times, it was/is more about doing to work of re-stealing and reuploading the files than anything else. And that's what husbands are for.

Second time though.... oh, that second time. I had just taken off a semester to run an environmental campaign office in Santa Barbara. I had no idea what I was doing; for a few different reasons, I just knew that I needed a severe change of pace. So off I went, with an impulsive friend in tow.

A few weeks into my time there, I was sure I'd made a collossal mistake. My weekly work hours hovered around the triple digits, it rained all the time, and there was a giant tree growing in the middle of my office. Also, everyone used the term "stoked" way too often for my liking.

So I desperately awaited the comforts of my music collection, which my dad had promised to send to me ASAP. And one day, UPS finally dropped off a big media package -- a big, ripped, empty media package that one of my idiot employees still signed for.

I can't even begin to explain the feelings of rage and loss that surged through me when I saw that box, mostly because I knew, I just KNEW my dad hadn't thought to insure the package. And so it was. UPS gave me a hundred bucks for my troubles, my dad guiltily promised to take me on a used-CD shopping spree when I returned home (six months later), and I was stuck listening to the Philadelphia soundtrack -- the only CD the previous director had left behind in the office -- on endless, Sisyphian loop. Sometimes, in my dreams at night, I can still hear the grating sounds of the Spin Doctors covering "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" Thank god for Neil Young's "Philadelphia."

Nostalgia makes me blue

2007-12-04T13:53:00.001-05:00

Everyone always makes fun of me for hanging onto my Hotmail account. For most, it seems to be the email equivalent of toting around a Filofax organizer instead of a Blackberry. (Which I certainly don't do, nosireebob. I've lost my Filofax in the house somewhere.)

To which I always say, screw all y'all. First of all, I'm a notorious Luddite. I'm an iPod iDiot, I only recently started texting, and I routinely lie and pretend to understand things like Skype and Drupal. Second of all, I like having all of my ancient emails in one place. Many encyclopedic email exchanges with friends and family have been lost when I've changed jobs, cities and computers, and so I cling to this particular slice of personal written history like it's the day before the day after tomorrow.

And third of all, it took 10 years, but Hotmail recently redesigned its whole site, making my account comparable to a Yahoo email account circa 2002. Antiquated, yes, but hardly unusable.

Except today my account has developed a bizarre quirk: when I delete emails from page 3 of my inbox, I'm taken to the last page of my account. So of course I've taken the opportunity to reread old emails about such pressing topics as the perils of turning 30 and the Patriots' chances against the heavily favored Rams in the Super Bowl. (Me: "Ah, the Pats. Wasn't it a great game last week? I'm sure Kordell is seeking solace in the arms of many male prostitutes right now. I have this great feeling that we're going to win on Sunday.")

But it's all made me a little sad somehow. Sure, it's heartening that of the 13 friends listed on that last page, I'm still in close contact with 11 and have only purposefully lost touch with one. Still, life seemed simpler back then. We gossiped about boyfriends and girlfriends, not spouses and kids. Chelsea Clinton's greatest offense was her stuffy post-makeover bob. New England sports teams were beloved, not villified. R. Kelly had yet to pee on anyone. Good times, now long gone.

Although I'm not getting shit done at work today because I drank a little too much during MNF and am now exhausted. So I guess some things never change.

PFDD (Post-Florida Depressed Disorder)

2007-11-30T16:39:00.001-05:00

Back from two weeks in Key West. Right now I'm thinking that a negative-60-degree shift in one's environmental temperature should automatically qualify one for disability payouts. Right now I'm also thinking about moving down to Key West.

More this weekend.

Friday's affairs

2007-11-16T16:26:00.000-05:00

I am utterly incapable of doing work past 4 pm on Friday if I have nothing specific due. So instead, I've decided to make a list of all the stupid things I did this past week:

Shoved my credit card into the wrong slot in my wallet, then couldn't get it out all day. Had to charge everything on my debit card, then rush home, get online and transfer money from savings to checking to cover it.

Lost my car in a parking lot for 25 minutes.

Spent all morning intoning to Dan that it was going to rain, going to rain, going to rain, then failed to bring an umbrella to work and wore my wool sponge of a winter coat - on the one day I had to walk home from the T.

Carried one of my sister's beagles down the stairs because she was showing a limp, then realized when I got to the bottom that I'd forgotten the other beagle.

Walked a half-mile to my car to move it, then realized I'd forgotten my car keys once I got there.

Hmm, pretty low tally, actually. Good show!

Why can't Wii be friends, why can't Wii be friends...

2007-11-15T14:18:00.000-05:00

Sunday was a glorious day. It's been more than two months since I've had a weekend day that wasn't bogged down by either wedding activities or freelance work, and as such, I've been a frenzied, stress-out, somewhat unpleasant blob lo these past eight weeks.

But Sunday I woke up and had exactly zero commitments on my schedule, my last assignment wrapped up the night before. So I luxuriated in bed for a while, then slothfully read the Sunday paper on the couch for an hour or two. I may or may not have squeezed in a SoapNet "Beverly Hills 90210" rerun before taking the dog to the new neighborhood dog park, where the lazybutt even trotted around a bit.

And then, in the penultimate event of my day, I beat the living crap out of my husband.

Transcript of a phone call between my sister and I Sunday morning:

Her: Okay, you guys HAVE to come over today. Guess what we bought?

Me (distracted while watching Val almost lose the Peach Pit after Dark to a bondsman because Colin fled jail): What?

Her: Wii!!! It's a-MAZ-ing. You have to come over tonight!!

And so we did. And as I expected, I sucked at almost everything: table tennis, Dance Dance Revolution, Zelda (though I only served as an unhelpful advisor with that one), Pop the Balloons, baseball etc.

But boxing? Goddamn. I kicked ass. Specifically my husband's ass, which had no chance against my endless left-handed jabs. Two months' worth of pent-up stress was released in one three-round bout, during which I knocked him out three times. I loved it! And no spousal abuse charges to boot. If they reconfigure Dance Dance Revolution as a contact sport, I may be in business....

"Prepare our standard rich and famous contract for Mr. Frog!"

2007-11-08T16:33:00.000-05:00

Third time's the charm with Netflix and me.

First time, the hubby and I joined and queued up two movies: Hitch and Hotel Rwanda. But they fell too far on the respective ends of the comedy-to-tragedy spectrum, and so we never much felt like watching either one. (Well, I never much felt like watching either one. I was in the middle of a nine-month fallow period during which, come Friday night, I wanted nothing more than a couple of glasses of wine and a long doze on the couch.) Then we lost both DVDs in the house somewhere and never found them, but were too embarrassed to own up to Netflix. So we kept paying our monthly fees for three more months before finally copping to our idiocy and paying for the lost DVDs. (Which, incidentally, were never found. I hope they're partying it up in the lost-sock netherworld somewhere with our digital camera and the belt to my favorite wrap sweater.)

After waiting a few months to ride out our shame, we rejoined again, this time under my name only, and ordered a single movie: Walk the Line. Which was already airing on HBO on a bihourly basis, but no matter. When we got the red envelope in the mail, I tore it open in elation, overjoyed that we had finally mastered Netflix. Of course, you're not supposed to rip the envelopes, as the hubby pointed out about a nanosecond after my trumphant tear. Ashamed, I refused to mail back the DVD for many weeks, then finally double wrapped it in scotch tape and cancelled our membership again. (Also, we never watched the movie.)

After many more months and much soul-searching, we finally joined up again a few weeks ago, under a new email and a new password. And I think we have finally hit upon the magic formula: Netflix like the marginalized high school losers we both once were. To wit, portions of our latest Netflix queue:

Bananas
Zelig
Love and Death
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Broadway Danny Rose
Take the Money and Run
Monty Python's Life of Brian*
Superbad(to reflect on our former nerdom)

Although I just took a look at the queue and noticed the hubby is attempting to get all hoity-toity** again with picks like The Piano, The Corporation, and Winged Migration. Bah. He seems to understand our limits though: The Muppet Movie still sits firmly atop the queue.

*Meaning of Life was already Tivoed.

**I wrote too soon. Dan has managed to queue up an animated movie called Flushed Away, about a "high-society mouse" named Roddy who get flushed down the toilet by "Syd, a common sewer rat." Animation, toilets, and high-society comeuppance? It's the Dan Tobin hat trick!

The contest is over

2007-11-08T14:52:00.001-05:00

...and Dan has won: he got first mention on Defamer:

Former Writer's Assistant Calls Bullshit on Ellen Degeneres's Crocodile Tears

Bastard. AWESOME bastard, that is!

Do you even understand your own cinematic reference?

2007-11-05T16:20:00.000-05:00

The hubby loves to mock my private school education. Despite the fact that I was on financial aid for the 12-year entirety of my schooling; despite the fact that I bear few superficial vestiges of a prep schooler (boat shoes will never, ever grace these paws of mine); despite the fact that many of Dan's closest college friends also hail from private schools; despite all this, he takes profound glee in trilling the r in my admittedly goofily named alma mater and taking me to task when I make the occasional pompous slip, like pronouncing "frontage" to rhyme with "fromage" every time we pass the Frontage Road exit near our home.

To be fair, I probably dug my own grave the second I made mention of "Quiche Day" in our high school cafeteria. Still, I get a little tired of defending a privilege that my parents worked very hard to give me.

And then I run across the website of entities like Dog Day Afternoons Country Day Prep and vow to send every future child, niece and cousin of mine to trade school. Boston's "first and largest prep school exclusively for dogs," run by a prep school graduate, Country Day Prep explains that "while you are a good mummy or daddy" who "of course bring[s] your dog with you to the Vineyard when you're summering," "most dogs are preppies in the making, social animals who actively seek to party" and therefore need access to round-the-clock daytime care complete with spa treatments, birthday parties and aqua therapy (to and from limo service optional).

Although I actually look forward to the day when dog schooling becomes an issue in presidential elections. I wonder how much money Mitt Romney would have to pay to get Seamus admitted?

Question of the day

2007-11-02T13:49:00.000-05:00

Those salad bar eggs -- are they real? The ones at my neighborhood salad bar are looking increasingly battered. The one I ate today was a trapezoid. Can you fake a whole egg?

Not just another manic Monday

2007-10-29T12:18:00.000-05:00

The greatest manic Monday of all.

Put on hold again.... just can't wait to be put on hold again...

2007-09-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, I gotta suspend this baby for a little bit (yes yes, hold back your shock and awe). Too harried (that's bad!) and too busy actually getting paid to write (that's good!) to be updating on a regular basis. I should be back in November.

Cheers.

The essence of dismay

2007-09-20T11:37:00.000-05:00

Editing the text of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg presentation, transcribed by a law student, and running across several references to "Roby Wade."

Q: Why could I never be a lawyer?

2007-08-21T15:16:00.000-05:00

This morning on the train, I sat next to a man working on his laptop. I couldn't not look over, so I did, and saw he was writing and storing emails. Some of his emails had titles like "Feedback on recent case," so I knew he was a lawyer. I peered in a little closer, hoping to catch a peek at some illicit piece of communication.

This was the email he worked on for the entirety of our time together. Titled "Re: Request for a shredder," It began, "Hidden in my request for a shredding system was a larger question about record keeping...."

But he didn't like that beginning. So I watched him delete "Hidden" and replace it with "Implicit." But he still wasn't satisfied, apparently, and so added "Extremely" in front of the "implicit." I guess he found that phrasing to be too extreme, however, for he pounded the Backspace button and went back to "Implicit." Around this time, I noticed that he was prematurely balding.

Then, in a flurry, he deleted "Implicit," went back to "Hidden" and added "extremely implicit" as parenthetical later in the email. As the train slowed down to his stop, he slammed his computer shut and then hopped off, carrying his computer case in one hand and a 12-pack of A&W root beer (no doubt his rocket fuel for the next 15 hours) in the other.

A: Because I don't like root beer.

Sing a song of sixpence, a library full of pie

2007-08-20T11:20:00.000-05:00

I was missing my bag, my binder and my pie. After looking all over for the first two, I decided they were gone forever and instead focused my efforts on the missing pie. I went to the library and asked if they had any pies in Lost & Found. "Oh yes," the librarian said, "We have hundreds. Come look." She took me to a back room and lifted the lid off of a large wooden chest. Inside there were stacks and stacks of coconut pies, some square, some round. I asked how I'd know which one was mine. "Your name should be written on it," the librarian replied. But I'd forgotten to write my name on my pie, and so I slunk away, furious with myself for having left my pie unsigned.

I hate Sunday night anxiety dreams.

Mattel toy recall

2007-08-15T18:50:00.000-05:00

Is it wrong that I don't care? Moreover, is it wrong that when I read about the toy recall's first victim, my only response was, "My dear young idiot, you ATE the Polly Pocket magnets. Don't you think you deserved to 'puke green,' just a little?"

I mean, when I swallowed my dad's 1776-1976 commemorative coin circa '77, I knew I had no one to blame but myself for the terrors that followed.

Just another random Sunday

2007-08-15T18:29:00.000-05:00

Sunday afternoon, I was all set to buckle under (buckle down? buckle in?) and plough through some work. Important work, time-sensitive work, overdue work. And then I tried to buckle under/down/in and I just. couldn't. do it. It was too damn beautiful out. It seemed the whole world was on vacation. And dammit, we had just celebrated Lazy Day!

So the hubby and I went berry-picking instead. No foolin'. We picked a couple of boxes of blackberries and about 15,000 pecks of blueberries, with all the free snacking we wanted. The only bump in the berry-picking road came when a loud farting noise emanated from the blueberry patch and both Dan and I panicked that the other had rudely soiled the mood. But nope, it was just a nearby berry-picking tween. So all was well.

And then, after berry picking, we went wine tasting. No foolin'. The farm also made fruit and grape wines, and some of them weren't half-bad, and since we were the only ones there we got more than our fair share of pours. The only bump in the wine-tasting road came when a loud "moo" emanated from somewhere nearby and our wine-making host panicked that one of his cows had escaped. But nope, the cow was still safely esconced and was just being loud. So all was well.

And then, after wine tasting, we went to McDonald's. No foolin'. I'd forgotten to eat lunch and was absolutely starving and hadn't had McDonald's in a few years and so we figured what the hell. The only bump in the McDonald's-eating road was, well, the McDonald's. I mean, it was delicious and all, in a 100-percent sodium sort of way, but I quickly learned an important lesson: a two-hour yoga class + no lunch + berries + fruit wine + a Quarter Pounder and fries = death. So all was distinctly not well. Ah well. I slept like a salt-logged log that night, at least.

Having my steak and eating it too

2007-08-10T08:18:00.000-05:00

As a woman who wolfed down a big steak dinner on her wedding night (while the hubby had the fish, thanks), I was almost down with this article in the New York Times Styles section yesterday. Ladies, no more salads! was the writer's imperative. Be yourself and order the steak!

Except that wasn't it at all. The real imperative was "order a steak as a strategic first-date maneuver as a way to project a 'guys' girl' aura, regardless of what it is you feel like eating or not eating." God forbid it be "order the steak because there are few things better in this world than a high-quality piece of red meat served medium rare with a large pile of frites nestled beside it."

I will never ever understand where the NYT finds these people. I'm mentally running down my list of female friends at this very moment, tossing out the vegetarians for sampling purposes, and I cannot think of a single one who would order anything other than what she wanted on a first date (save, you know, chili). And actually, let's bring the vegetarians back in: they may not order a steak on a first date, but they'll damn well eat you out of your bread basket. And not once will they consider the strategic disadvantages of doing so.

Life is short. Eating, within certain non-gluttonous boundaries, should be one of life's great pleasures. Any time you revise your own gastronomical interests to please the company of others, that's one night of pleasure lost to you. Period. Me, I prefer to hang with those who feel comfortable enough to order without provocation and allow the (hopefully delicious) chips to fall where they may.

And for the record: my choice to eat nachos for dinner last night was purely my own. And they were damn delicious.

Musings

2007-08-07T10:49:00.000-05:00

-This morning I drove behind a black Porsche with the license plate "Torts 1." Do you think there's any chance the driver of that car is a nice person? (Caveat: I say this knowing crap about torts law. For all I know it involves prosecuting puppy-haters.)

-Last time I cried: last night, watching the HBO documentary "White Lights Black Rain." Last time I cried before that: earlier last night, when I managed to get some pepper up my nose.

-No, I've never read a single word of the Harry Potter series, so please please please stop asking. I feel marginal enough as is.

-My 63-year-old mother wrote a short film that was just accepted to a film festival. Seniors: the new hipsters.

-The hubby and I are embarking upon a two-week detox diet starting this weekend. My feeling is, you gotta tox before you can detox, so I plan to eat mightily horribly this week. Any and all crappy-eats recipes are much appreciated. (Also look for my summer lobster tally to go up again.)

-I just noticed that I wrote "brevity" instead of "levity" in a recent post. My brain is officially a useless oblong of Spam.

"We're on seventeenth heaven!"

2007-08-03T13:27:00.001-05:00

How the Christian Right maintains its strangehold on the Republican Party: relentless repopulation.

Arkansas Couple Welcomes 17th Child

"We are just so grateful to God for another gift from him," said [scarily potent dad] Jim Bob Duggar, 42, a former state representative. "We are just so thankful to him that everything went just very well."

Jennifer joins siblings Joshua, 19; John David, 17; Janna, 17; Jill, 16; Jessa, 14; Jinger, 13; Joseph, 12; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 9; Jedidiah, 8; Jeremiah, 8; Jason 7; James 6; Justin, 4; Jackson, 3; Johannah, almost 2.

***

My biological clock has never wound down so quickly.

Happy Friday

2007-07-27T13:15:00.000-05:00

Drunk astronauts, death-sensing cats, Mikhail Gorbachev hawking handbags.... The world's gone mad! Time for a bit more brevity. I'm sure many (two) of you have wondered what I look like, so I've finally decided to reveal myself to the blogosphere:

Watson J. Dog is still a little gun-shy, which is why he's hanging back a bit in this photo. Otherwise, perfect likenesses all around.

The most useless fact you will ever learn about me

2007-07-16T14:54:00.001-05:00

I have lived in 5 of the 19 Real World cities.

My heart is bursting

2007-07-12T16:13:00.000-05:00

During the summer, the hubby and I get a weekly farm box share from this group. It's a pretty great thing all around, save for the excessive amounts of Swiss chard we're forced to consume each week (me no like Swiss chard).

Today it got even better. We're starting to receive weekly emails profiling different teenage volunteers. This week's volunteer is named Kangni, he is 16 years old, he is from Niger, his favorite vegetable is the carrot, and his favorite hero is Spiderman. We also got this little tidbit:

"Besides making us laugh, Kangni leads us in breakdancing moves during water
breaks and is fascinated by the juiciness of our turnips."

So now I want to adopt Kangni.

I'm angry at God

2007-07-10T18:13:00.000-05:00

He front-loaded the summer's celebrity scandals and now there's nothing good going on! Someone better OD soon or else He can forget about my annual end-of-fiscal-year tithe.

Lobster count update

2007-07-09T20:22:00.000-05:00

Three and a half lobsters consumed this past week, plus one lobster roll, plus one crab roll. Three of those lobsters were inhaled in one sitting at a July Fourth clambake; other people's eyes were bigger than their lobster stomachs, and shellfish vulture that I am, I swooped in and ate what others left behind. The half was consumed a day later with a West Coast friend in town with whom I always eat lobster; the half came about only because the restaurant had one lobster left, which I'll admit, left me shaken.

As for the crab roll, the food stand next to our ferry landing was out of lobster rolls.

Summer '07 crustaceous tally as of 7/9: Seven and a half lobsters, three lobster rolls, and one crab roll consumed. Decent, decent. Certainly not a Blog in Throat record, but not bad.

P.S. My sister recently told me that when she regales her friends with stories of my early childhood idiocies, all the tales seem to revolve around food. Finally a friend of hers spoke up and asked, tentatively, "Um, is your sister... a ... big girl?"

Reading list

2007-06-29T11:43:00.001-05:00

I'm off to the wilds of Maine for the next six days, which means I need a pile of reading material. So this morning I gathered a bunch of books off the bookshelf that I've been wanting to read for a while. Here's a list of what I came up with:

Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Clemente, David Maraniss
Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich
A Million Little Pieces, James Frey (yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah YEAH, I know. But I'm curious, and it was given to me, so I'm not actually supporting him financially, so whatever.)

I gazed at this pile with satisfaction, and then was stopped cold by a thought: Could I BE any more of a boy? Baseball, volcanoes, MIT nerds, male druggie "memoir," perverse male sexual longing? Jesus. And let's not even mention the fact that I'm in the middle of a P.G. Wodehouse book.

So I just sent my husband out to buy I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron. Sue me -- it's clear I need some serious help. And it's better than Divine Secrets of the Traveling Ya-Ya Pants or whatever.

Update: I'm back, and managed to crack not one of the above titles. Instead, I read 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers. An outstanding, heartbreaking piece of reporting, and in classic Blog in Throat style, a wholly inappropriate vacation read. Still, highly recommended.

SIGH

2007-06-28T12:58:00.000-05:00

How many times will we be reading some variation of these words over the coming years?

Joining Kennedy in the majority were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. With Breyer in dissent were Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Actually, if I shaved my head I'd look like Bunsen Honeydew

2007-06-27T13:51:00.000-05:00

This morning I made a well-worn mistake: I asked the hubby his opinion on my new dress.

"Not my favorite style," he said. "I wasn't going to say anything," he said. "If you shaved your head, you'd look like a prisoner," he said. Grrr!

His central complaint was that it's shapeless. Okay, so yes, it's a babydoll shift of sorts, and yes, it may not show off my best attribute (butt), and yes, it may give everyone around me a decent sense of what I'd look like pregnant (fat).

But so what? Butts aren't for work, and pregnancy's supposed to be beautiful. I don't actually subscribe to the second half of that sentence, but honestly, this dress has put a more positive spin on pregnancy for me than any pregnant friend has. This thing is COMFORTABLE. It conducts BREEZES up my skirt. I can eat a huge dim sum lunch and not think TWICE about it. I haven't had a single wedgie ALL DAY.

So bring on the baby batter, I say. Shapeless fashion rules.

Older siblings unite!

2007-06-22T17:54:00.000-05:00

In light of the recent, awesome finding that eldest siblings are indeed the smartest ones in the family (and cuter to boot!), I have just this to say to my younger sister:

Remember that time when you were putting on your new Ralph Lauren socks, which said "RL" on the side, and I came into the room and asked, "What does 'RL' stand for?" and then, before you could answer, I said, "Oh, duh, right leg," and you just stared at me really hard as you finished putting the sock on your left foot?

Total anomaly.

Quickest way in the world to drive your husband from the room

2007-06-20T21:35:00.000-05:00

"You know what, babe? I'm totally like Angelina Jolie with all of our adopted pets. Trout is Maddox, and Spoon is Shiloh, and Watson is obviously Zahara..."

Epilogue
Hubby, several hours later: "Wait, so if you're Angelina, I'm Brad Pitt?"

Me: "That's right!"

[brief pause]

Hubby: "I so wish I could have farted just now."

Afternoon conundrum

2007-06-20T14:43:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, I ate lunch way too early today and am starved.

Very unfortunately, there are four cannolis sitting underneath my desk at this very moment.

Very, very unfortunately, four different flavors of cannoli are represented, which means they'll all be missed.

Very, very, very unfortunately, there are now three and a half cannolis sitting underneath my desk.

Why I'm feeling discombobulated this morning

2007-06-15T08:47:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamt that Dan and I were considering a move to Catalina. We went there to investigate job opportunities, and I ended up at a local medical clinic run by Andrea Zuckerman. The position I applied for was office manager, which appealed to me because in my office was a bed, where I was expected to work all day. The office also had a huge green leopard as a mascot who came and hung out with me on the bed while I was talking to Andrea, who confessed to me that she wished she'd become a lawyer instead of a doctor (guess Jessie cornered that market on that career path, huh, AHHndrea?).

So I was feeling all happy and optimistic on the ferry ride home when Dan and I ran into our downstairs neighbors, who started buying us drinks and got us drunk and then rushed home ahead of us and switched our apartments so that they got the one with the roof deck, and nothing we did or said could convince them to switch back.

Then the dog woke me up.

Then I fell back asleep and dreamt that I was in a fiction class with a famous instructor who looked like Kevin Spacey. I hadn't written anything for class, and so, in a panic, I submitted a plagarized poem written by my best friend Ada in fifth grade. The poem goes like this:

A pride of lions, so superior
All together a mass of strength
All together, never bothered*
Sipping slowly by the pool.

As they sit they have no worries
All is silent, all is still
On the open plain
In which their awesome power rules.

Mr. Spacey made me read it aloud, and after I did there was a silence. Sarah, my onetime grade-school academic nemesis, pulled out an IKEA catalog and pointed out that the poem bore a striking resemblance to the assembly instructions for something she had recently bought. Then Mr. Spacey made an announcement reminding everyone that we were supposed to be writing fiction for adults, not children. Then I left the room and cried. Then I tried to write a story about two major league outfielders playing catch who both struggle with an overwhelming desire to nail the other in the face with a fastball, but it wasn't working, so I cried some more.

Then the shower woke me up.

*this line isn't accurate, but for some freaky reason I remember the rest of her 5th grade poem word for word. This is probably because my own poem for the assignment went something like "A horse stands behind a stone wall/He is very tall/He is having a ball/That is all" and I was blown away by her effort. Also, she drew a very nice picture of lions sitting at a lake, and my horse and wall drawing bit.

For those in "Sopranos" withdrawal

2007-06-13T13:08:00.000-05:00

I heartily suggest renting the single season of "Freaks and Geeks." I'm still aglow from watching the first three episodes last night, and not even a coerced viewing of "Judging Amy" during a noontime pedicure today could dampen my spirits. (Dear GOD who watched that show? Whoever you are, you kept it on the air for lo too many years, pushing it into syndication and forcing it upon unsuspecting, pedicure-seeking bloggers, and for that alone I rue your existence.)

Two quick F & G points:

1. I think, were I still in the dating pool, I would have problems dating anyone who did not identify with one of the central characters on the show. (This theoretical litmus test would replace my old theoretical litmus test, namely that I would have problems dating anyone who favored the American version of "The Office" over the British one.)

2. The show contains a more than likely fascimile of my hypothetical* future son, and let's just say he doesn't hail from the freak ranks. This worries me just a bit.

*Inserted just before publication so as to ward off the inevitable unwanted inquiries.

We'll always have... eh, you know

2007-06-08T15:35:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry, this whole Paris Hilton thing is just too awesome. She's spent her whole life thinking she owns the world, finds out she doesn't own the justice system, goes fake-psycho in jail and temporarily gets away with it, has just enough time at home to nap and eat a few cupcakes, and then gets called on her bullshit, gets the full 45-day sentence reinstated and goes truly psycho as a result. (I bet they don't let her keep her hair extensions this time either.)

And to top it off, today's court sketcher gave her the full-on Sunday funnies treatment.

Seriously, she looks like the mom from "For Better or for Worse." NOT that I ever read that cartoon anymore. The death of Farley was just too much. Plus, Liz just got rejected by Anthony AGAIN and it's looking like those two will NEVER get together and I seriously can't take it anymore!

For those keeping score at home

2007-06-04T14:21:00.001-05:00

Two more lobsters consumed this weekend, bringing my summer lobster consumption totals to four lobsters and two lobster rolls. Perhaps I'll aim for double double digits before the first official day of summer.

A la Ruffles potato chips!

2007-05-31T15:29:00.000-05:00

You know how you sometimes get an overwhelming desire to eat Rold Golds or Lays or Cheetos or Fritos or Doritos or Tostitos or Funyuns or Pringles or Goldfish or Smartfood or something equally, deliciously retrograde and start going through the cabinets of your kitchen hoping the perfect salty snack will just magically appear, even though you know it won't because you never actually buy that stuff for the house?

Well, behold my magic potato chips! I just conducted the requisite snack search and totally forgot that we had some Ruffles left over from our weekend hot dogs-with-all-the-fixin's binge. I once declared (on my wedding day) that I never cry when I'm happy, but I may have to change my tune on that front.

Know how else I know the chips are magic? They just disappeared.

Summer's sneeze, makes me feel so not fine

2007-05-29T10:22:00.000-05:00

This weekend was shaping up to be a real corker. I ignored my computer. I went to the park with the dog. I spent copious amounts of time hanging out on our new roofdeck, doing what I imagine all roofdeckers do (read an A.M. Homes book while the hubby plants an herb garden). I watched the Red Sox extend their lead over the Yankees to about 2700 games. I consumed: 1 hamburger, 2 lobsters, 3 ice cream servings, 4 hot dogs, 5 chicken wings, and (1)6 beers.

And then I had an allergy attack. And I don't have allergies.

I've always been a bit of a Republican asshole when it comes to allergies. Deep down, I've always felt that allergy-prone people bring it upon themselves, and that if they would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and finally stop blaming mites and pollen and dander for their problems and admit that the problem lies with them, their allergies would go away.

But now I know their pain. I've been walking around for three days looking like I broke up with my boyfriend and cried my eyes out and then ate a raw onion and cried some more. I've also sneezed sneeze-juice over every available surface in our apartment. I didn't do ANYTHING to deserve this, and it totally sucks, and I want the government to pay me for my pain!

Or at least reimburse me for my Claritin, which as over-the-counter recreational drugs go is only fun for the first hour or so. After that, it turns you into a rude crank who visciously rejects a hubby's attempt to get a little Memorial Day lovin' (sorry, babe).

Is it a coincidence that he's now a psychiatrist?

2007-05-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

A little more than eight years ago, I went to a party hosted by my ex-boyfriend. My mission was two-fold: work up the nerve to talk to the chap I'd been crushed out on forever, and make the ex-chap jealous in the process. So I threw on my leather pants and headed out.

Alas, me being me -- shy and insecure even in leather pants -- I was very slow to tackle my evening's assignments, and so I spent the first chunk of the night chatting with safer foils.

At one point I began talking to a guy we'll call J. Somehow the conversation rolled around to insults, and I boasted that I was a master insulter. The guy asked me to prove it.

"How?"

"Give me your best shot."

"No no...."

"No, come on, just do it. I can take it."

"Okay." And so I did. J.'s face immediately fell, he muttered something about getting a drink, and then he quickly got away from me. I felt like an ass, but soon thereafter I found myself actually talking to the chap I liked, and so I quickly forgot about the insulting exchange.

Flash forward to this past Saturday night. I am now married to one of the aforementioned chaps, and it was his 10-year college reunion. We walked into the reunion venue, and lo and behold, J. was one of the first people we ran into.

My hubbby reintroduced us. J. gave me a rather wan smile and said, "Oh, sure, I remember her."

Crap, I thought. He remembers. But then I told myself I was being silly. Silly! Twas eight years ago, after all. Stop it with the self-centered paranoia.

We followed J. and his wife to the bar. J. placed his order and then turned back around to me.

"So I've never gotten over what you said to me. It crushed me to my core."

"Oh, SHE'S the one?" his wife asked, as my hubby laughed hysterically.

So let this be a lesson to all of you: never, ever tell someone you don't know very well that he is a "nonentity," because it may hit a nerve, leave a deep psychological scar, and cause you untold social embarrassment almost a decade later. Although the way J. remembers it, I actually called him a "nonfactor," which is just absurd. I'd never be that mean.

If for no other reason....

2007-05-15T22:03:00.000-05:00

-- and there probably is none -- you have to appreciate the late Jerry Falwell for giving us headlines such as the one currently on CNN.com:

"Falwell's legacy -- faith, hate or Teletubbies?"

Shifts 'n' wiggles

2007-05-15T16:20:00.000-05:00

Like so many other liberal, East Coast, middle-class, childless, self-satisfied, vaguely self-aggrandizing, "Gore in '08" couples gone by, the hubby and I have recently purchased a Prius. She's a lovely vessel, strong and true, fit for humans and hounds alike.

And she needs a name. My mother bought a white VW when I was in high school, and she put me on naming duties. I came back with Whitey Bulger and Honky as the two most viable monikers, and she promptly decided the car should go nameless. But my mom had planted a seed, and so I've since always driven in named cars. The crusty old Acura sedan my sister and I shared after college was named Fletcher, after my grandfather; the black Miata I drove in California was named Clyde, after my favorite Pac-Man ghost and as a shout-out to my sister, who named her car Blinky; and the Toyota I've shared with the hubby over the last year is named Mr. Hammond, after the plumber who unclogged the toilet that Dan's friend Scott clogged in exactly the way you would imagine, at the house of some cute girls they were bunking with and trying to impress in New Orleans during a cross-country trip. (Needless to say, top to bottom, I was not a part of this.)

There are some obvious naming options for a hybrid: Kermit, Dennis Hastert, or if you go with my no-fail stuffed animal-naming formula, Hybridy. But yesterday I was inspired by my 6-year-old neighbor. She and I were digging around the dirt outside her home, looking for crystals and diamonds, when she found a small green caterpillar. We decided to name it.

Me: "He's wiggly. How about Wiggles?"

Her: "Wiggles is a good name. But he's tiny!"

Me: "Okay, how about Mr. Tiny Wiggles?"

Suddenly appearing hubby: "Mr. Tiny Wiggles is an excellent name for that caterpillar."

Her (silenty): "You guys are weird. I'm glad you're not my parents."

So I plan to make the push for Mr. Tiny Wiggles, because I think that's just an all-around great name. Well, maybe not for a penis. But otherwise, a great name.

No hippie chick

2007-05-10T14:50:00.000-05:00

The hubby and I have recently stepped up our greenie efforts. We replaced all 32 lightbulbs in our house with fluorescents (do NOT ask the cost), we've taken to unplugging all electronics not in use, and we're going to start air-drying our clothes. Well, we're going to start thinking about air-drying our clothes.

So when I was shopping recently, I decided that I should be a bit better about what sort of body products I buy. I headed over to the eco-aisle in our neighborhood grocery store and found an all-natural, biodegradable, herbal body wash. The packaging was boring, but not in a scary-culty Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap sort of way, and one of the herbs listed was lavender, which is one of my favorites. So into the basket it went.

The next morning I showered with the body wash without incident. A few hours later, I was sitting at my desk when I found myself becoming unusually nostalgic for my days as a poor but noble environmental organizer. What's going on? I wondered. I'm never nostalgic for that time. I was broke and exploited and worked 100-hour weeks and had no life! What the he--

Patchouli. Fucking patchouli. Fucking goddamned patchouli was one of the four herbs contained in the body wash, which I would have known if I had read past the word "lavender." But I hadn't, and so I reeked of patchouli, and no amount of scrubbing with my lovely but distinctly unbiodegradable grapefruit body scrub that night made it come off. So I spent the next few days skulking around, too embarrassed to even leave the house, smelling like hippie.

But let us be patently clear. Yes, I used to work as an environmental organizer in Santa Barbara. Yes, I employed a number of hippies in my office, including a hippie from Kentucky who had ended up in Santa Barbara because his VW van had broken down there. Yes, that hippie ended up sleeping on my couch for $100 a month after his other hippie friends repaired the bus and drove off without him in the middle of the night. Yes, the hippie ended up choosing a closet over the couch and slept in the closet each night and would emerge Jesus-like from the closet each morning, evoking obvious Real Genius comparisons that no one seemed to make but me. Yes, the hippie started inviting other hippies over, until one day one of the other hippies started stashing stolen electronic gear in the apartment and my other roommates and I told our hippie roommate that the other hippies were no longer welcome. Yes, our hippie then ditched his job and ditched the apartment without warning and stuck us with a huge phone bill. Yes, that hippie was eventually replaced by two other hippies who came to Santa Barbara from Boston by hopping a train. Yes, those two new hippies showed up with fleas. Yes, the two new hippies then clogged our showers and sinks with hippie goo when they bathed for the first time in however many days, costing me my security deposit.

BUT. I. am. not. a. hippie. Or as I put it to the hubby a few weeks' back when we were watching a documentary on the Altamont Free Concert:

"Man, I would have made the worst hippie."

"Why?"

"Because I hate crowds and I hate hippies."

And people wonder why I never went to Burning Man.

Does Chuck E. Cheese do limo valet?

2007-05-09T13:55:00.000-05:00

Don't ask me how or why I came across this today (okay, fine, my birthday's coming up and I can't decide what I feel like doing), but this is from a few-months-old Time article about kids' birthday parties:

"Ask a parent about birthday parties and you'll probably get a sigh and a description of the last party their kid went to — limousine service, a petting zoo or Ferris wheel, and definitely elaborate goody bags — followed by their despair at having to organize their own equally expensive party for their child's birthday."

First Time names all 5 billion of us the Person of the Year, then they craft a lede and story that all 5 billion of us can relate to. Truly the magazine of the people.

A something of your imagination

2007-04-30T22:22:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Zoe. Zoe was a sweet, quiet girl who one day grew up to be a smart, funny, beautiful, confident, progressive young woman who attracted admiration wherever she went.

Long before all that though, Zoe loved dragons. She loved elves and hobbits and dwarves too, but most of all she loved dragons. Her favorite movie was Dragon Slayer, and her favorite video game was Dragon's Lair, and her favorite song was "Puff the Magic Dragon." Zoe loved "Puff the Magic Dragon" so much, in fact, that sometimes she would put on her pajamas and lip synch the song into a microphone with her eyes closed. This became a problem one day when her older sister Meaghan rode up behind her on her Big Wheel and launched an unanticipated kamikaze attack, but the attack was quickly thwarted by their mother, and Zoe was once again free to mouth "frolicked in the autumn mist" to her heart's content.

Zoe liked stuffed dragons too, and kept several of them around the house. Her favorite stuffed dragon was Figment, the very special purple dragon mascot of Epcot Center. Zoe had never been to Epcot Center, but she dreamt of going there and meeting Figment, and talked about it all the time with her mother and father.

One day, her father took Zoe aside and, with a big smile, told her they were finally going to Epcot! Zoe was the happiest little girl in the world. She rushed to her room and packed all of her favorite clothes, including her camouflage shorts, and began thinking about what she would say to Figment when she met him.

When Zoe and her family got to Epcot Center, however, she soon discovered that Figment was a difficult creature to find. His image would pop up in gift shops and on the occasional breakfast menu, but the real Figment was nowhere to be found. Zoe wasn't worried though. She knew it was just because Figment was shy, like she was, and that they would find each other eventually, as they were meant to.

Finally, towards the end of their trip, it happened. Zoe saw Figment from afar, held tightly by a large bearded man with a top hat. Zoe had no idea why Figment was letting himself be restrained like that, but it didn't matter; Zoe rushed right up to Figment.

"Hi, Figment!" she said. Figment did not reply, but Zoe thought that he was probably shy around the big bearded man. So instead of pressing Figment further, she asked kindly that their photo be taken together. And so it was, and once again, Zoe was the happiest little girl in the world. When she got home, she put the photo in a frame and made sure her father hung it on a prominent place on their wall, and there it stayed for many years for all to admire.

The years passed, and Zoe grew up, as all little girls do. Her love of dragons waned, soon replaced by a fascination with ventriliquism and, later, feminist and gender studies. The photo of she and Figment became a forgotten relic of a long-ago time, unnoticed by those who entered her home.

Then, one day, her older sister Meaghan, at that point in time a brilliant, enticing college coed but no less of a malevolent creature, took a quick glance at the photo and made the following observation:

"Zo, it totally looks like you're giving it to Figment!"

And so it was that from that moment forward, anyone who entered the Agnew home was invited to view, and subsequently speak reverently of, the Fisting Figment Photo.

Zoe never really forgave Meaghan for her observation, but she also understood that some things are bigger than strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff, and should be immortalized as such. Still, she spent her years plotting her revenge, hoping that one day, technology would allow her the chance to reveal to all the world the photo of an eight-year-old Meaghan posing as the sixth Celtic starter alongside cardboard cutouts of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale et al. If only their mother hadn't packed it away into storage. If only.

"From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-ZEE..."

2007-04-29T18:40:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the New York Times Book Review makes me feel like the most uncouth, unread, uncultured nincompoop who couldn't make it past the first round of the "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" tryouts if her Perez Hilton-addled mind depended on it.

And then sometimes, the NYTBR just makes me mad. Witness the first line of this brief review of the book Mr. Thundermug from a few weeks back:

"Although a book in which an intelligent baboon is set down amid human kind inevitably brings Kafka to mind, the protagonist of Medvei's slight, whimsical first novella is luckily more Stuart Little than Gregor Samsa."

Really? A novel introduces an intelligent ape to the human race and the very first thing you think of is a man's literal-following-metaphoric transformation into a big ol' bug? Because, just off the top of my head, when I think "intelligent monkeys among humans," here's what comes to mind for me:

-Clyde, King Kong, Dr. Zaius, King Louie, Dunston, Project X monkeys, Ben Stiller etc., but also more complex movie monkeys like the Nazi monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark, who broke my heart just a little when he revealed Marion's hiding place in the basket and, together with my nursery school's guinea pig Perseus, first taught me that not all animals are kind and good. (I was still sad when he ate the poisoned date though.)

-The TV show after "Banana Splits" that featured "talking," driving, cigar-smoking, crime-solving chimpanzees who tripped around in human gangster clothing and made me deeply depressed for reasons I couldn't pinpoint at the time.

-That chimp owned by the couple in California that brought him a birthday cake on his birthday, and then all those other chimps who got jealous and attacked the couple and ate the man's face and fingers and eyes and nether regions. (Intelligent monkeys know: you always share cake!)

-George Michael's "Monkey," because when the song first came out I imagined Mr. Michael to be lyrically grappling with a complicated human-monkey relationship.

***

Someone recently suggested I write the comprehensive guide to monkey pop culture, and it's misguided idiocy like that of the New York Times that just may drive me to do so. First though, I'll need to check in with my trusted advisor, occasional sleeping partner and all-around (stuffed) best friend, Big Monkey Head. He always knows what to do.

Then why can't they transfer knowledge about how to replace the toilet paper roll properly?

2007-04-26T08:05:00.000-05:00

Granted, I'm a humorless, domestic dominatrix of a wife who, on the few occasions I let him outside, leads my husband around on a short halter leash while making verbal whip noises behind his back, so I may not be the best source on this, but when you're quoted in an article about how you'd like to attract more women to small-plane aviation, you may want to avoid comments such as this:

“Women learn differently from men,” [Matt Kauffman, the chief flight instructor at Aero-Tech Services] said. “If two men go up, they will scream and shout, and a transfer of knowledge occurs, and we’d get back on the ground and go have a beer, and life is good,” he said. “If you yell at a woman, she’d start crying, and she’d never come back.” He would like to hire a female flight instructor but can’t find one, he said.

It's really for the best, Matt. A female instructor would menstruate all over the plane anyway.*

(Tip of the hat to a long-ago Onion joke on this one.)

Learn something new every blog entry

2007-04-24T16:15:00.000-05:00

Apparently, in hound mixes, Artic Monkeys cause paroxysms of bark-y glee that can only be halted with the offering of a peanut butter-smeared dried cow ear.

But I'm sure they get that all the time.

My mom's American life

2007-04-19T10:23:00.000-05:00

Three and a half years ago, my mom had a very bad accident. She was in the hospital for three months, and we didn't know if she'd walk again. But she persevered through her physical rehab and made a remarkable recovery, surprising even her doctors.

A year later, she was looking for a new place to live that could accommodate her still-lingering physical issues. She read about a new living facility for those 55 and over that would focus on cultivating its residents' artistic backgrounds and skills. She wrote a funny and ingratiating letter to the creator of the center and charmed her way into to the facility off a waiting list of hundreds.

My mom had been taking writing classes for years and wanted to continue in that vein. So she signed up for a screenwriting class. One week my mom wrote a short film script about an older woman who has recently had an accident and decides to rob a convenience store to pay her medical bills. My mom read it aloud in her class that week; the teacher, a longtime TV and movie producer, thought it was outstanding. He sent the script to a director friend of his, who also adored it and decided he wanted to film it. It was no idle promise; a few months later the parts were cast, the rewrites were finished, and a filming crew was assembled.

Meantime, the living facility, and my mom's story in particular, started getting some major press, including a front page story in the Sunday New York Times. Ira Glass of "This American Life" caught wind of all of it and decided to film a segment on my mom for the TV version of his radio show. Before my mom knew it, "This American Life" was filming the filming of her first film, and interviewing her on-camera to boot. And six months later, my mom finds herself the subject of Episode 5 of Showtime's "This American Life," titled "Growth Spurt," airing tonight at 10:30 p.m. Here's a preview:

If ever you feel like there are no more surprises in store for you in this lifetime or that the achievement of personal or professional success has a cut-off date, take a grateful pause and remember that it's never too late to start living your life forward instead of backward. My mom has taught me to make that choice more and more over this past year, and for that, she's my forever hero.

Secret squirrels

2007-04-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

For Christmas, I bought my dumb dog an intelligence-building toy: three stuffed squirrels stuffed inside a stuffed tree stump. Your dog is supposed to be so titillated by these squirrely squirrels that he starts devising ways of removing them from the stump, which will make him smarter over time.

After I opened the toy for Watson on Christmas Day, and then assembled it for him, and then took out one of the squirrels for him, and then crawled around the house squeaking one of the squirrels at him while he gave me that sorrowful "give it UP, already!" look, the stump has settled into its rightful place as an aesthetic blight on our living room.

Last week I was at a friend's* house and saw the same toy in the corner. I asked my friend if his dog plays with it.

"Oh no, he hasn't touched it in months."

Ah ha! I thought. A plush stump filled with plush squirrels engages NO dog.

"...he got so good at removing the squirrels that he finally got bored with it."

It still crushes me to know that my dog is considerably slower than his canine brethren. But as a helpful reminder to this fact, Watson ate an entire frozen burrito yesterday when my back was turned and still has not recovered. I suppose I should be thankful that he works overtime to squelch my overly great expectations.

*If I reveal my "friend" was actually my therapist and the "dog" was actually my therapist's dog, I imagine the story becomes a wee bit funnier.

No unicorns, either

2007-03-28T09:27:00.001-05:00

When visiting a country like Cuba, the conversations among traveling companions tend towards the profound. Witness one such exchange between my father and me:

Me: God, this place is just so amazing.

Dad: Isn't it? We haven't seen any dwarfs though.

Me (after sideway glancing over at my hysterical husband): Uh, no, no we haven't.

(A week later)

Me: So, dad, we never saw your dwarf.

Dad: Did see an albino though!

Twenty-four hours into my capitalist reentry....

2007-03-21T18:09:00.001-05:00

and socialism is looking pretty darn good to me. I need a mojito.

To my 1.5 remaining readers

2007-03-21T07:42:00.000-05:00

I'm back. Where have I been, you-and-a-half ask? Well, Cuba for starters. Just got back from a 11-day education tour of the island, with an unanticipated jaunt to South Beach tacked on at the end thanks to some airplane madness. It was truly a once in a lifetime trip that I'll attempt to deciminate here and there over the next week or two.

Leading up to the trip, I spent a month working 80-90-hour work weeks, with six weekly hours of class tacked on for good measure. When I slept, it was often in 30-minute spurts, curled up against my dog. But rest assured that I never forgot you, reader-and-a-half. I merely resented your guilty-inducing presence. Which may induce me to start blogging again.

Okay, back to email catchup. Man, Barack sent me like 50 messages. Obsessed much?

No doy headline of the day

2007-03-05T10:44:00.000-05:00

From Boston.com:

"Winters a Trial for Maine Nudists"

Live-blogging the Academy Award miscues

2007-02-25T20:40:00.000-05:00

8:31 -- Ellen calls Penelope Cruz Mexican

8:33 -- Ellen can't recall the name of the black guy from Blood Diamond

8:35 --Cameraman fails to locate Jew in the audience in response to Ellen's "blacks, gays and Jews" "joke"

8:37 -- Ellen dances

8:39 -- Nicole Kidman forgets to defrost her face prior to stage appearance

8:41 -- Academy decides the viewing audience can handle waiting an hour for first acting award

8:43 -- Dancing mimes??

8:47 -- Will Ferrell takes stage with dead poodle atop head

8:48 -- Dead poodle reawakens and springs atop John C. Reilly's head

8:59 -- Adorable little kid presenters inadvertedly underscore the falsity of all adults in Hollywood

9:05 -- Cameraman negates charming sentiment of short film director's "here's one for the little guy" speech by cutting to nepotism poster child Gwyneth Paltrow

9:08 -- Animal Planet fails to offer Puppy Awards counterprogramming

9:12 -- Academy fails to invite Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame to lead sound effect chorus

9:16 -- Sound effect guys don't make sound effects during acceptance speech

9:22 -- Meaghan loses $5 Supporting Actor bet due to Norbit factor

9:25 -- Ellen interviews Martin "Scuzzezzy"

9:26 -- Interpretive dance??

9:27 -- INTERPRETIVE PENGUINS??

9:30 -- Pizza and wing dings fail to arrive during James Taylor travesty

9:34 -- Al Gore forgoes pre-Oscar detox diet for pre-Oscar wing ding diet

9:48 -- Ben Affleck

9:50 -- Voters forgo one shot at hipster cred by failing to give Adapted Screenplay Oscar to Borat

10:12 -- Academy exceeds fat bearded guy Oscar winner quota with second Pan's Labyrinth win

10:15 -- Naomi Watts shows up in reasonable fascsimile of yellow Bebe dress I wore to 11th grade Thanksgiving assembly

10:30 -- Academy only sends interpretive snakes to eat Ellen

10:31 -- Writers pander to one-one billionth of home viewing audience still unaware of Ellen's lesbianism

10:59 -- Italian composer guy fails to shriek and climb all over the seats and declare his lusty Italian love for entire world upon Academy Award win

11:03 --Ditto Italian Babel guy

11:06 -- Ellen's new pantsuit fails to achieve desired "wowza!" effect

11:27 -- Three-hour Dreamgirls song and dance montage causes paroxysms of rage in Blog in Throat hubby

11:41 -- Eighteen-hour broadcast causes normally even-tempered Blog in Throat mother to send three-word email: "this show sucks."

11:49 -- Philip Seymour Hoffman pays follicle homage to Peter Jackson

12:13 -- Jack Nicholson pays follicle homage to Britney Spears

12:14 --Diane Keaton pays fruitcake homage to Britney Spears

12:17 -- Academy officially kicks off "Seinfeld in 2008" Oscars host campaign

My anxiety dream last night

2007-02-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

Tom Cruise won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the Battlefield Earth sequel -- and the world was okay with it.

I wonder if God's great chicken is of the food-court teriyaki variety?

2007-02-19T16:04:00.000-05:00

Next to the Yuletide log, Puppy Bowl has to go down as the greatest piece of counterprogramming in television history. Although I always watch the big game, even when it's of the boring-as-an-egg-white-omelette variety such as last month's Christian Clash, I still find my way over to Puppy Bowl during second-half commercial breaks. Were it 1989, and were I not friends with the sort of folks who rip apart a totally innocuous catch phrase about two seconds after it finds its way into the popular vernacular (I usually wait about four seconds myself), I would happily give two snaps up to Animal Planet for its programming creativity.

But I'm equally appreciative of the stations that throw up their pukiest programs during big TV events, knowing they shouldn't waste quality programming on a 0.1 Nielsen rating kind of day. And so it was a few weeks ago that I found my way over to a movie called Amazing Grace during the halftime of the AFC Championship Game.

The movie starred Moms Mabley, the "octogenarian first lady of black comedy," according to a quick Google search. The word "inadvertant" should figure into that description, because what made the woman so hilarious was that she was mostly incomprehensible. Whole Moms monologues would go by without a single understandable utterance. I think she was trying to clean up a corrupt mayoral race or something, but the movie was clogged with too many soul cinema cliches to make much sense, and Moms' dialogue rendered impenetrable an already muddled plot.

Anyhow, all I know is that at one point, the inimitable Ms. Mabley stood up in front of a group of college activists, and, with tears in her eyes, managed to (sort of) say the following:

"Children, you are the breast, the thighs, and the dark meat of God's great chicken."

I've been holding onto this quote for quite a while now, because I frankly don't know what to do with it. It may be the most sublime sentence I've ever heard spoken aloud. Were it 1989, and were I not once a student at the kind of high school where students mocked you for carrying drugstore-bought school supplies, I would doodle that phrase all over my Trapper Keeper. As it is, I think I'll have to make it the new mantra of this blog. So from now on, there's a breast, a thigh, and a piece of dark meat in My great throat, and don't you forget it. Or in the words on Moms, dooonchoofuggetit.

Dear Cultural Anthropologists of the Next Century:

2007-02-18T16:45:00.002-05:00

Greetings! How're those hydrogen fuel cell vehicles treating you? What? Those never came about? But we were totally led to believe they'd be all over our roadways by 2020! Bizarre.

Anyhow... I know you guys are really busy, what with trying to figure out the meanings of strange 21st-century terms like "civil liberties" and "Greenland," so to save you a lot of time and expense that would otherwise go towards researching the cultural values, mores, and trends of American culture circa 2007, I offer you the February 18 lineup of CNN.com news stories:

And just like that, you understand everything that we were once about. Wasn't that easy? Now go take your grant monies and blow them on a nice meal -- I hear Rumer Moore-Kutcher-Federline III's new restaurant is excellent. But before you do, be sure to watch the news video about the blind windower found mummified in front of his still-blaring television more than a year after he died. It's really funny.

Love,
Meaghan

Yeah, but he only did it for a role

2007-02-17T19:50:00.000-05:00

From the Access Hollywood website this afternoon (emphasis added):

"As for her new do, Spears isn't the only star to go follicle free. Among the many celebs who have sported the lock-free look? Natalie Portman, Demi Moore, Sigourney Weaver, Sinead O'Conner, Samuel L. Jackson, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, British actor Patrick Stewart, Winston Churchill, Moby and REM's Michael Stipe."

Cue the sound of a "fucking football field of women" puking

2007-02-09T19:10:00.001-05:00

I'm never one to trumpet the superiority of married life over singledom. I was happy and unhappy while single, and I've been happy and unhappy while married. Which is to say, sometimes I'm happy and sometimes I'm not, and I've tried to hold myself pretty much wholly responsible either way. Except when my husband gets a little too slap-happy discussing his latest poo-blog entry; at that point, all bets are off.

Then I read about this guy, and every day since I've thanked my lucky dumplings I'm no longer single. Although really I'm just thankful that every woman I know, single or no, has dodged this fucktard.

If there's a silver lining to the death of Anna Nicole Smith -- and no, I'm not in actual mourning, all of you "I was more upset when Chris Farley died than when Princess Di did!" (male) readers out there -- it's that she quartered this guy's 15 minutes of blog fame.

Reasons I haven't been blogging much

2007-02-08T14:10:00.000-05:00

In no particular order:

-Football playoffs. Killed my social life, killed my post-holidays "no drinking" pledge, and eventually, killed my spirit. Almost killed my remote control, too, after I smashed it into the couch post-Patriots' loss to the Colts.

-My biannual realization that this is a pretty useless endeavor driven in large part by useless worries about what past acquaintances would think of me if they met me today ("Uh, no, sorry, dropped the Russian, the French, the math, the sociology, the flute, and the basketball. But hey, check out my blog!")

-Six-day workweeks plus two three-hour classes per week plus three mammouth freelance dealies plus looming 10-day international travel creating hardline deadline for all of it.

-My "life is too short to worry about weight" mantra has finally caused me to gain a lot of weight, necessitating some sort of attempt to get back in shape.

-Sick as a dog this last week, I've been.

-Sick dog this last week, I've been dealing with.

-Late in December, I tried something. I decided that I would go cold turkey on my downtime online activities for a little while. No more reading of blogs of past coworkers or past exes or past rivals. No more reading of Hollywood gossip sites. No more reading of anything but the most essential news sources. No more Friendstering or MySpacing. No more idle Googling of girlfriends of 10-year-ago romantic interests. Etc.

And surprise surprise, 'twas a raging success. Not just in terms of time gained, but in terms of mindframe adjustment. No longer was I fretting about other people's successes or wealth or wit or beauty or travel or blog-comment tallies and how it all compared to my lack of same. I just got online, did my business for a bit, got off and went back to living my all-around good life. Online ignorance truly is bliss. The only downside was that less time online meant less time for blogging.

But I'm drifting back towards my neurotic tendencies, so look for semi-regular blogging to resume shortly. If nothing else, it's high time I wrote a long-promised blog about my sister, a dragon, and an unconscious sex act. Look for it.

Overheard in Boston

2007-02-08T10:01:00.000-05:00

Most teeth-gnashing exchange I overheard this weekend:

Polite counterwoman to oafish male customer: "Here you are. Have a nice day."
Oafish male customer: "Do you have North African blood in you?"

Most redemptive exchange I overheard this weekend:

One college-aged girl to another: "He had ALL the railroads, which meant I would have owed like TWO HUNDRED dollars every time I landed on one..."

Not an entry, just a plea

2007-01-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

Anyone else stuck at home working this fine Saturday evening? If so, DISTRACT ME. Comments, emails, whatever have you.

What you callin' chicken?

2007-01-18T13:36:00.000-05:00

You know why I love food courts? It's those teriyaki chicken people. The ones from the Japanese food counters who walk around with chunks of chicken speared on toothpicks, offering up free samples to anyone who so much as exhales their way.

I love that chicken. I can't usually bring myself to buy a whole plate of that chicken, because in my heart of hearts I know it's made out of Grade D frozen chicken thighs harvested from the bodies of beakless, toeless imprisoned fowl subjected to wartime-like tortures; and that it's smeared in a sauce whose dual base surely must be sugar and ketchup; and that a whole serving of that stuff is a gateway drug that pushes me to consume more volatile concoctions like pu pu platters and bright-pink-pork fried rice plates; and that, though my many vegetarian friends are a fairly nonjudgmental lot who even consume things like street-vendor sausages and turkey cartilege on drunken occasion, I don't trust them all enough not to cluck-cluck over my sorrowful -- nay, downright Republican -- teriyaki chicken-consumptive ways, were I to be more unrepentant about them.

And yet. I love that chicken. And so, I've found that through a combination of circuitous food-court laps and a few quick hairstyle changes, one can make enough passes by the free sample people to assemble a whole meal of the ambrosiac stuff, guilt-free. I just wish one could still purchase an Orange Julius with which to wash it all down.

Two nice things about Tivo

2007-01-11T15:50:00.000-05:00

1. When you set it up to record the president's 20-minute address on Iraq, you can determine exactly how much time elapses before Bush first mentions 9/11 (3 minutes).

2. When your friend emails you reveling in the '90210' rerun he's watching in which a bunch of heretofore unseen black students "crash" the group's high school dance, causing David to worry that his rap debut will be spoiled, you needn't panic: Tivo's been recording every last SoapNet '90210' rerun for the past three months.

The moment at which you stop denying your dog's stupidity

2007-01-02T21:36:00.000-05:00

The moment at which he climbs into the shower and starts eating a bar of soap.

Refocused effort coming in 5, 4, 3....

2006-12-28T15:08:00.000-05:00

Still not out of my post-Christmas, post-second-Christmas-thanks-to-divorced-parents-throwing-two-separate-
holiday-celebrations haze. I may or may not get my blogging crap together before the weekend, but if not, I would just like to take a moment to extend thanks to the creator of Stovetop Stuffing, whose timeless product gave me and mine many moments of unironic joy this holiday season.

Thanks also to my family for being cool enough to eat the stuff in the first place.

It's official

2006-12-18T14:57:00.000-05:00

I've now fallen asleep during all three Lord of the Rings movies. Conked out in front of the DVD of the first one years ago, sawed some wood in a movie theater while watching the second, and passed out this past Friday night in front of a TBS viewing of the third. I did wake up once, to ask my enthralled hubby a question that had been bugging me: "Is it the hobbits who live to be 500 years old, or is that the Smurfs?" Then I went back to sleep again.

Nerd cachet, it was nice knowing you....

Friday snausages

2006-12-15T16:09:00.000-05:00

-Sometimes I just make stuff up to be insecure about. Today I decided that my head is much too large for my body. This despite the fact that whenever I wear a hat, I most resemble Fievel.

-I overheard an engineer talking about how he took a date to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Museum of Science and that the date didn't go well. He then explained that there was this new girl he really liked and he thought he might also take her to the Body Worlds exhibit. New definition of nerd: an individual who repeatedly fails to grasp that wandering many rooms filled with flayed and pickled human bodies does not a romantic evening make.

-The crazy cat lady in my office now has a mug that says "Crazy Cat Lady."

-This is why I will be leaving this office very shortly.

Tis the season to be bawling

2006-12-14T16:06:00.000-05:00

It's funny. You'd think that attending a friends 'n' family holiday party at which you mistakenly mix champagne with a potent schnapps-vodka-juice blend thinking it's just juice, downing three of those babies without thinking anything of it, then finding yourself so blindingly drunk at the end of the evening that you repeatedly throw up on the ride home while your father, yes YOUR FATHER, cheerily says, "Hey, if you can't puke your guts out in front of your dad, who can you puke your guts out around?" -- you'd think that that would be the most embarrassing part of your week, right?

Too bad I left an interview yesterday convinced I'd nailed it only to realize my fly had been gaping open the whole time.