I had a peep around the Homestar Ruiner boards to see when they are releasing episode three (answer: not now, so not goddam soon enough), when I came across this exchange:
Originally Posted by Gluttony:
Do any of you know that They Might Be Giants is a real band that the Brothers Chap did not make, if you don’t believe me check out some of their songs like Particle Man, and Istanbul
Originally Posted by Darkblade07:
I know there real.One of there songs is on DDR.
DUH, Gluttony.
I finally got one glorious day of temp work. Well, a half day. I was downtown at a car company’s convention that was some kind of reward for the top sellers/managers of the year. I had kind of a feeling of dread that you get when you’re dealing with the public, and if you know that public is going to be mostly middle-aged white men. Mostly they were nice, but a couple felt the need to make jokes at me, which was kind of frustrating because I was basically taking transcription of the focus group/Q&A portion of the day, and I was trying to concentrate on typing like a furious demon and catching all their unfamiliar company jargon. Type for fifteen minutes, and then switch to a new table and start all over again.
It’s that thing I’ve been dealing with for years, that hyuk hyuk, you won’t mind if I ask you loud personal questions in front of everyone or make a joke about your name. I understand I am going through a phase right now where I am Overly Sensitive to male entitlement, which helps me smile in the face of all this to make my moneys and GTFO.
At one table this hambeast of a guy insisted on knowing what my name “stands” for. I always want to say something bizarre like “ending inhumane chicken farming practices” but that wouldn’t go over well.
“C’MOOON, it’s gotta stand for something,” he pressed. I shook my head nonchalantly.
“It doesn’t stand for anything!” snapped the only other woman at the table with me, who looked like she was in her early thirties and had her arms all stacked up with bracelets and a jaunty cap. Right on. I’m sure she deals with that shit more than she would like as well.
In conclusion, please kill me, I can’t get Smell Yo Dick out of my head.
In Other News: Reader’s Advisory from Awesome Jerks!
Thanks! Here is the aggregation of the awesomeness that you left in my comments the other day.
Nailing Your Wife. Nathan Fillion in PG porn from Lorena.
Violet sent me something from Walmart that was no doubt lewd, but they apparently got huffy and moved it?
Beloved grad school homie JT sends me Darth Montague. ANOTHER channel from the Cheezburger people. They are poised to take over the world, methinks.
Rothbeastie gave us Diesel’s SFW Porn party invite.
Tuckova sent me new Grace Jones! Holeee shit. News flash: she still scares me, almost as much as she did in A View to a Kill. Awesome video.
Krumpy my Krumpy sends me Gay Porn Twins Go On Robbing Spree (Srs)
La Pequeña Sarah Palin comes from Styro. YEAAAAH. [NSFW, NMS.] “When John McCain dies I will be president. MWAHAHAHA!”
Julia sends Gay Mount Everest. Doh. I love live news redonkulousness.
Lady GaGa! How did I not know her? Man, I love pure pop music like this around the house. And yet I am running to Andrew Bird right now. I dunno! Thanks, Meredith. I need to listen to our local dance station more and less NPR. Oh, the economy’s bad today? How about now? Still, yes. And tomorrow too, right? Yeah.
Also, today I wrote about Tim Burton’s film homagery at Blogher. I love writing over there. I know I’m not curing cancer or anything with my pop culture blurbery, but it’s so much fun to focus and nerd out on a topic besides…well, me.
Hey this is like a real weblog or something today! Thank you, my homies, you are cheering.
“I had a bad dream last night about bad people,” Franny said, which is not an unusual statement around here.
“Oh yeah?” I said. I was dying to get into the shower, but you have to stop for these things. I could tell it was bursting out of her.
“I had a dream a bad person put Patty in the blender and turned it on!”
“Oh dear.”
“And you know who it was? SARAH PALIN!”
We were staring at this cover at the doctor’s office intently the other day. I had no idea until last night that there was flap over this cover and the fact that Palin has evident wrinkles. I had noticed that photos of Clinton had more or less ‘chopping while she was campaigning.
In Other News: Lewd Tomato
Don’t laugh. It could happen to you.
YEY, Veronica Peep did it! She did it on Saturday, actually. And then she took Sunday off and went again on Monday. It’s okay with me if she takes a day off now and then. So now the question is answered about if any of the chickens will lay before the days get too short: yes.
They’re a little small right now, as they always are when you have new layers. It’s all so exciting. I’m glad our first eggs are an interesting color.
My friends who took Mr. Klassy have OMG eggs now too, and sent a hilarious email about the doings of Mr. Klassy, which read in part:
Also, you were not kidding about the sleeping. Dude just falls asleep! Whenever! He used to fit through the holes in our electric, but not plugged in, fence, and he got out and came up the stairs to the back door a couple of times. Then one day I looked out the window to see him face down on the ground, with his head and upper chest through the fence, and the rest of him inside the fence. I thought he was dead so I went running out and no, he had just gone partway through the fence and then fallen asleep.
Oh yea, I loled. He was narcoleptic from the beginning, so I guess this is just his way. I am imagining my friends wanting fertile eggs and him falling asleep mid-hump.
In Other News
This morning when I was uploading my egg video, I saw that they had Britney’s new video up at groogle vid. I thought it was pretty meh but kind of loved it anyway, because I am an unapologetic Britney lover. I kind of wanted to physically stop her from flipping her hair around. What I really loved was her red wig, ooh la la. It made me a little sad that I dyed my hairs dark brown this weekend, but three years of red/pink/orange was pretty high maintenance. I need to take a break from spending moneys on my hair in This Economy.
Also, due to the link that Lorena left me in yesterday’s comments to Nathan Fillion prons, I found this blog. She’s one of those writers…the kind where you would read the back of a cereal box if she wrote it. My internets died on me just as I was reading her, so I couldn’t get beyond her front page, which almost killed me. But now I can read them! If it turns out she is a white supremacist (or any kind, really) or a puppy kicker, disregard this link. I love that feeling where I am reading someone and feeling all light headed. Jeffery Eugenides has the same effect on me.
Hey. Heeey. How’s it going? Nice chin zit. Whatever, I hate small talk. Strudel’s dad and I broke up. All I have to say about it is that it was amicable, and that if you know me at all by now, you know that a) it was a while ago and b) I’m okay, STFU. The reason I am telling you is that my writing is/has been changing on this joint. We’re not going to have long walks by the railyard where I cry, we’re going to keep making butt jokes, UNDERSTAND?
US Weekly should have a section of people with more ordinary occupations for that “Stars, they’re just like us” bullshit. I want to see a week of writers who have made agonizing messes of their lives and are now passed out in their own sick. I’ll buy that issue.
Against my better judgment, I am leaving comments open for this entry. Whenever I see emo posts on the internets I like to give a bingo to the person who goes most off-topic. So, bring it on. Tell me about your weekend! Did you have a dream involving cream soda? Was there a bathtub full of it, and we were taking a bath in it, except this shouldn’t freak me out because you don’t like me that way, that cream soda way? Did you see a movie once about cream soda and there was a wolf in it wearing underpants?
OH YEAH, that’s some good off-topic. I cut my finger on a can of pork brains and it is sort of turning green in one place. What should I do? Also, please send links, the more raunchdiculous the better.
One girl miraculously got over her flu and came to the party. Thank god! She was brilliant and is welcome back anytime. The girls were discussing Christmas and Franny was name-dropping Xmas because she knows she is a cool pimp.
“We don’t celebrate Christmas,” announced Brilliant Girl.
“What do you DO, then?” asked Franny.
“We have Solstice.”
“Hmm, you’re lucky,” I said.
“Why do you have Christmas then, if you don’t want it?” Brilliant Girl said.
“Well, my family likes it,” I said.
“MOM! You’re always happy at Christmas,” Franny chastised me.
“Maybe she seems happy,” Brilliant Girl snapped back.
Much roffling all around.
Taking chances with Frannie’s cake layers:
I was SOOO tired last night I sound like a total crabby bitch. Oh well…if the shoe fits. I cheered up after this and STFU’d and watched the last episode of Battlestar Galactica, which made me crabby again. lool
ETA: It’s a good day. I got submitted for a job which I WAY underbid myself for, so they called me right back, and I just got asked to write the introduction to a friend’s book. I asked her if she wanted someone with more clout, but no. They want me. It’s going to be a good weekend or I am going to start taking hostages.
I guess that’s right. What’s the female equivalent of risky bidness? I dunno.
My point is I am HOME ALONE this weekend! Woo! I do have a friend coming over on Saturday night to drink the wines with me, and I will make copious plans to do cool girly things or cool alone things, but I will probably just fall asleep and wake up with the imprint of the corner of whatever book I’m reading on my cheek. Drooling on library books, that’s what I call living.
Although it can be fun to sleep with library books sometimes, because they often smell so weird. It’s your own personal bed adventure that will probably not result in an STD. Who knows what kind of dreams you will have if you sleep with the one that smells like patchouli, or the one that smells like chili powder, or both of them at once.
I especially enjoy reading cookbooks from the library in bed. You’re flipping through and all of the sudden a flat piece of spaghetti jumps out. Foreign pasta snake! in your bed. I have to say the library cookbook that made me the most furious was a Chinese cookbook, I think from Wallingford branch. It had all these notations in it about nutrition, most of them verifiably wrong. They were all written in this precise, minuscule block writing. I could hear it hissing at me off the page. There was a particularly long screed about the dangers of incorporating the amount of salt that the “Orientals” like to consume could have disastrous results when combined with the typical American diet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost every recipe was marked with a scold of some sort: “CUT SALT IN HALF!” or “THESE MUSHROOMS HAVE NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE!!” Calm down, dude. Live a little.
So, yeah. Home alone! Canoodling with library books. If it got more exciting, my head might explode.
Today I picked the girls up early because Franny had to go to the dentist. A mom in the entryway pounced on me instantly once she figured out I was Franny’s mom.
“Oooh, this is the famous Franny! Madison loooooves Franny!” New kids always loooove Franny because she’s all nice and welcoming and diplomatic and crap. SIGH. Where did I go wrong?
Madison’s mother immediately tried to set up a playdate. Franny had told me a couple of weeks ago that Madison was “kind of weird” so I wasn’t ready to immediately commit her to an afternoon of hell. I had a feeling like an invisible hand was creeping up and gaining a tight grip around my throat. This year I try to avoid other parents whom I am not already friends with at all costs.
“ALSO,” the mother went on, loudly, as the other afternoon kids attempted to nap nearby, “I work up north, and I am trying to find someone to take my kids if there’s some kind of an emergency. What if there’s an earthquake or something? I don’t even know what the school would do.”
This was all starting to sound like a personal problem, and I tried to back away. Strudel was moving so slowly that I was sure that small lizards in equatorial regions were losing vestigial toes in the time it was taking her to get her backpack and shoes.
“STRUDEL!” I stage whispered. “Focus, child.” She smiled at my eye daggers.
I assured Madison’s mom that I was desperately looking for nine-to-five work at the moment and could be employed at ANY MINUTE, and that we would consider a weekend playdate on the odd weekend that Franny wasn’t with her grandparents or her father, and we didn’t have anything important to do like shampoo our wombat.
“Ohhh, that’s too bad,” she said. “We like to have playdates after school.”
This is it. I have hit the wall. I never want to hear the word “playdate” ever again. I want my children to play, but if one more stranger comes up to me wishing to engage in negotiations about my child’s busy and important social life, I am going to start flinging my own poo. I can’t take it any more.
A friend of mine who has been trapped in this school longer than me absolutely assured me that this change would come over me, as it has come over the older parents. I see the new parents, excited and enthusiastic, thinking that the school will be part of their social circle. I see the old parents, tired, grumpy, and burned out. Not speaking to each other. The word “playdate” is never uttered.
I have become the Wisteria Lane outcast here, which I’m okay with. I don’t see anyone and they don’t see me. I drop off and pick up my children at odd times. I put on my headphones after drop off and literally run away from the school. There’s no standing around chit-chatting with the working parents; they have someplace to be, and things to do.
I think about Strudel’s old class, with the three-hour day, and about how the mommies in that class would hiss that Strudel’s new class, for working parents, was glorified day care. Day care or not, it’s saner, rather than some kind of toxic bog. I wanted to cry last year when I was in the office working on the auction and Strudel’s teacher heaved a devistating sigh before returning to Strudel’s class with the words “Well, back to the pit.” I see Strudel’s new, young teachers enthusiastically greet her every morning and say how nice it is to see her smiling face and I feel better. Sometimes cutting yourself off from that mess is just the thing.
My big kid’s first slumber party is happening this Friday night, for her eighth birthday. When did that happen? I guess when Franny was a baby I just imagined a small version of me walking around at this point, but she’s really not. You can project all kinds of wants and desires onto your kids, and you can’t always tell what you’ll end up with. I guess what I wanted for my first kid was less fear in her life than I had and a better schooling experience. I think we’re doing okay so far.
The de rigueur food for the modern girl’s slumber party is spaghetti. Spaghetti has been served at the last two she attended, and so she is afraid to serve anything else. I talked her into a bolognese sauce, at least. There’s no reason to suffer just because my house is being invaded by squeaky short people. Since her school has a mixed age group model, she has invited a couple of older girls. I wonder if she will sleep with her stuffed bunny with all these maTOOR girls around.
I promised her that once she turns eight she can get her ears pierced, but I told her we would not be going the gun route. I think the timing’s great since she’s over here most of the time now, and we can take good care of them so they heal well. She is excited, and scared. I think this will probably be the most voluntary pain she’ll experience in her life. Ah, womanhood rituals. Next week we’re doing mother/daughter lip collagen followed by tottering around in high heels for three hours.