Yard Sale Porn

Assault With Intent to Watch a Movie

2012-01-25T20:56:00.000-05:00

I posted a status on Facebook the other day that went as follows:

I think that _if_ I ever end up in a physical altercation with another person (by no means a guarantee because that's not how I roll) but _IF_...it will take place in a movie theatre. This is my prediction.

Now, I think I am generally a person who is fairly easy-going. Sure, there are things that I find annoying.
Here are a few:

I get irked when I order pasta in a restaurant and it's over-cooked. I mean really - a box of pasta costs 89 cents - the profit margin on a plate of it is huge. Bearing that in mind, I think it's not unreasonable of me to expect it to be cooked properly.

We have a self-checkout aisle at the grocery store. We also have hand scanners that allow a shopper to be able to scan and bag their items as they shop. Then, at the self-checkout aisle, one simply scans a bar code and a customer card and the entire order scrolls across the screen. It's very convenient as there is no time at the register needed to scan items or bag them. What drives me batty is when someone uses that lane to process an enormous order that has not been scanned and bagged. Do they not understand that by doing that they're spending twice as long checking out? In the "manned" lanes a person is bagging while the food is being rung up but these fools are scanning, then paying, then bagging. All while I'm standing behind them with the ability to process $200 worth of groceries in 45 seconds.

Buying women's clothes. Honestly, I think that's a whooooole other blog post.

OK, so some things get under my skin but I usually just roll my eyes or fume a bit and that's it. No confrontation, no taking it out on some poor schmo in customer service, and no snide comments. Life is too short to get really worked up about this stuff.

Except.

You know when people talk during a movie? Yeah, that goes up my ass sideways. I mean, really. All of my non-confrontational habits go right out the window. I exhibit both passive-agressive and active-aggressive traits. I sigh, I stare, I glare, I say things like "Really?!?!", "For frick's sake!", and "This is NOT your living room!". Sometimes these people are drunk, sometimes stupid, and sometimes a horrible combination of both. If you're too dumb to watch a movie without needing to make comments to prove that you understand what's happening, stay at home. The only reason I have not yet gotten into a full-on tussle is that often Huppy is at the movies with me and confrontation is her Kryptonite. Each time I make any of my little protests she sucks in her breath, bugs her eyes out at me, and dies a little bit inside. The problem is that this happens almost every time I see a movie. Do people suck more lately or am I becoming the curmudgeon that I've always wanted to be?

So yeah, this is clearly a hot button issue for me. Be forewarned rude movie-goers: when I finally lose it I'll lose it big time, I have a second degree blackbelt, and I outweigh 90% of my potential opponents. Let's just all play it safe and shut. the. hell. up.

Just Call Me Ms. Goodwrench

2011-11-06T16:09:00.002-05:00

I was at Wal-Mart yesterday. I feel that in the past I have been fairly critical of Wal-Mart for being such a miserable place to shop. The lines were always 15 people deep, two-thrirds of the checkout lanes were inactive, the aisles were messy with nothing residing exactly where it was supposed to be, and it often smelled of humanity (liquid, solid, or gas depending on the day and aisle). In the interest of fairness, I should say that my local Wal-Mart seems to have gone through an overhaul and the last few times I've been there it's been a much more efficient and less sketchy experience. So, good job to you, North Attleboro Wal-mart.

As I left Wal-Mart and crossed the parking lot to my car I heard someone say "Excuse me! Can you please help me?" I looked around and saw a woman standing in front of a large pickup truck with its hood raised. It seemed as though she was talking to me so I put my stuff in my car and walked over to her. As I approached, I asked if her truck battery was dead. She gave me an odd look and then told me that, no, her issue was that when she tried to remove the oil fill cap she came away with the entire oil fill tube instead. After some discussion I concluded that when her son had last changed her oil, when he screwed the oil fill cap back onto the tube he misthreaded it and tightened it to the point where it was essentially frozen in place. So, when she went to unscrew it to add some more oil the cap was so stuck that the twisting motion released the entire tube from the engine instead. Fortunately, I had a flashlight app on my phone (yay technology!) and about 6 additional inches in height (yay genetics!) which allowed me to examine the area closely enough to figure out how the tube needed to be held in order to get it back onto the truck. It didn't go on perfectly but it did go back on and it was tight enough to form a seal. I told her I thought she'd be OK to get home but she should get someone to put everything to rights as soon as she could. She thanked me several times and gave me a couple of handwipes as my hands were black with engine oil. I told her it was no problem, wished her luck getting home, and left.

It wasn't until I was well away that it occurred to be that there is a good chance that the reason she asked me for help in the first place is that she thought I was a man. I think that's why she gave me a funny look the first time I spoke to her to ask if her battery was dead. I don't care one way or another about the mistaken gender identity there - it was getting dark and I have very short hair. Actually, I guess I should be pleased that from a distance my middle aged lady hips weren't as obvious as I think they are. What really pleased me, aside from the fact that I think I was actually able to help her, was that it never dawned on me that I wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable person to ask for help. It was nice to know that I didn't automatically assume that some kind of testosterone-give knowledge was required.

This is a good thing since my efforts at playing the helpless female usually end in disappointment anyway. A few years ago, a stray cat decided that my garage would be an excellent place to shuffle off its mortal coil. Unfortunately, thanks to warm weather and a several day stretch in which I didn't need anything from the garage the cat's mortal coil had become quite a haven for disco rice. Rather than deal with this, I went next door and told my neighbor Jeb about it. I was hoping that if I seemed traumatized enough he would manfully go into my garage and take care of it. Instead he got all queasy looking and suggested calling the city animal control office. This turned out to be excellent advice because about a half an hour later a woman from Animal Control showed up and womanfully took care of it. My heroine!

They Work Out

2011-11-06T15:01:00.001-05:00

I have to admit that I have bought both singles by LMFAO that have been released thus far. I watched the video for the first, "Party Rock Anthem" and then spent quite a bit of time researching YouTube for instructional videos on "how to shuffle". My brain now completely understands what needs to be done in order to shuffle (and to dougie, thanks to my last dance-related research) but where the spirit is willing, the flesh remains awkward.

I had seen a few people on Facebook mention the video for the next single, "Sexy And I Know It" but it took a while to get around to watching it. I'd like to discuss the video a bit, so please check it out if you have a moment. Don't look at it if you're at work or church, though.

OK, so now you've seen that.

My first reaction was along the lines of "Yikes!" and "I wonder how much therapy costs." upon reflection, though, I realized that they aren't doing anything in this video that women have been doing in music videos since the dawn of MTV. In addition, lots of people make a point to spend their Super Bowl half-time watching women (sort of) play football in their underwear. How different is that from rival underwear gangs posturing at each other at the beach? Aside from gender, it's pretty much the same thing.

So, I'd like to know what you think: Do you think LMFAO is just trying to be silly and a little disturbing or are they spandex-clad geniuses making a prescient statement on how numb we've become when it comes to female almost-nudity in pop culture?

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peck-um, Peppers

2011-10-26T21:13:00.002-04:00

One of the great things about teaching is that learning takes place on both sides of the (metaphorical) podium.

So. Last week I was teaching my statistics class some probability, specifically binomial probability experiments. Don't worry, I'm not going to explain that now. What's important, though, is that talking about binomial probability experiments requires one to say the word "success" approximately a million times. Make that two million because I have two sections of stats.

Here's what I learned: It is impossible to say the word success a million times (or even twenty) without at some point butchering one's pronunciation. Unfortunately, for me that means changing "suck-sess" into "suck-sex". Yeah, so that happened. A bunch of times.

Sadly, this is not my first foray into being accidentally lewd in the classroom. When I taught math at a high school in Virginia there was a time when we were covering trigonometric problems. The abbreviation for the secant function is "sec". I was using the variable x to represent the angle which meant writing "sec x" on the board several times. You can see where this is heading. Yup, in front of a whole room of 17-year olds, I wrote the word sex on the blackboard. I sent them further into hysterics by saying "Well, ya know, it is Friday." What I meant was that it had been a long week and I was tired. What they thought I meant was that Friday = Sexday. Frickin' fricklebats.

Could Happen to Anyone

2011-10-11T10:07:00.000-04:00

I'd like to present this conversation with as little explanation as possible and leave you to determine how it came about.

Me: Erk! (accompanied by a wide-eyed look of pain and surprise)

Huppy: Did you just pinch the skin on your stomach in the hinge of your glasses.

Me: I did. It left a mark.

Come conclusions you may draw: I am very, very flexible. I have a specific unique facial expression for absolutely every situation. One of these things is true and one is probably not true.

Situational Awareness Is For Suckers

2011-10-11T09:58:00.000-04:00

So we're just coming off a nice three day weekend. The weather was quite temperate and so a ton of house projects got done. That's the good part. The bad part is that in those three days I found three different ways to hit my head on something. I'm pretty sure the first and the third time were on exactly the same spot. How did I manage this? Well, I started out with the locking mechanism from an open trunk lid on Saturday. The next day I climbed the ladder into the attic and stood up right into a roof beam. I wrapped up the holiday weekend by hitting my head on a shelf after plugging in some speakers below the shelf. The lesson I'm taking from this is that it would be best if I just walked around all hunched over because floating just above me is a whole host of crap of stuff waiting to bash me in the noggin. So, if I start acting weirder than usual I may be concussed.

A-Maia-can Horror Story

2011-10-11T09:38:00.002-04:00

I know, it's been a while. I have a few things saved up to share with you, though, so buckle up!

A few weeks ago we had about a week of dreary, rainy weather. On one of these days we'd had a respite from the rain and I drove downtown to stop in at my taekwondo school to find out why Master Oh had called me on my cell phone. I parked in the municipal parking garage behind the school. When I pulled in I noticed that someone seemed to have parked their wheelchair next to the low wall that separates the garage area from the alley. The wheel chair was completely draped in a thin red blanket. If this was to hide it, I'm not sure that red was an ideal color choice, by the way. As I was straddling the low wall (what, like I'm going to walk all the way around?) near the shrouded chair I glanced over it and saw that there was something in it. In all the times I have parked there and gone across this wall to get to the school I have never, ever made it over that quickly. Seriously, if it was a pommel horse I would be sporting a medal right now. Whatever or whoever (whomever?) was under there was not visible aside from tenting up the blanket in a few odd spot. It seem to me that there was a smallish person under there taking a nap with their arm up over their head. On my way back to the car I gave it a wider birth and kept me eyes locked on it the whole time. No movement. I sped home. A hour or so later when Huppy called to say she was on her way home I a) told her about the freaky deaky wheelchair red (blood red!!!) blanket ghoul in the parking garage behind the school and b) made her promise to drive by and see if it was still there. It was and she was equally creeped out.

I spent the next day thinking about what was obviously either a troll who lost his bridge and hides under this red (blood red!!!) blanket now waiting for unsuspecting people who get to close so he can snatch them and suck the marrow from their long bones OR a pile of dismembered body parts stacked on a wheelchair with a note for the police from a brilliant serial killer who wants to engage in a battle of wits. That evening, I told Huppy that we were going to drive back there and see if it's still there. AND IT WAS. This time I took pictures:

At the time that I took these it had been raining again all day. As a result, a few things became clear:

1. It's not a troll in a wheelchair.
2. It's not a pile of body parts in a wheelchair.
3. It's not, in fact, a wheel chair.
4. It is probably someone's bicycle and cart.

Or is it?

Yay! These Pictures Are Gre-...Oh.

2011-07-18T13:34:00.000-04:00

At the beginning of May I participated in my first half marathon. I think I blogged about it already so I won't rehash.

For some reason the company that was contracted to do race photography is based in Germany. Normally this would be no big deal because I never, ever feel the need to order race pictures. I have yet to take one where I don't look like I'm having some kind of episode. In none of my pictures do I look like I'm having fun or even running, for that matter. I swear I'm doing both. One time I started running in an exaggerated fashion when I saw the photographer in the hopes that overemphasizing the movements they would show up on camera. That experiment yielded a series pictures that make me look less like I'm running and more like I'm doing an impromptu roadside audition for Westside story.

So, no spending my money on race pictures for me. Until now. I decided that for my first half marathon I really needed to get a picture because it felt like kind of an accomplishment. Luckily for me, there was a photographer at the finish line getting pictures of people holding their medals. Perfect! A race picture where I don't have to be running! I ordered it and one other one that was only bad but nor outright horrible.

The race photographer's website was very, very slow. After a million years of trying to look at pictures that would or would not expand from thumbnail I picked the two that I mentioned earlier. Since the company is in Europe I got hit with an additional fee by my bank. Thanks bank! Then the waiting began. It took about a month but they finally arrived this week.

Here's the one that I was so pleased to order:

I was pretty happy with this one until I looked at it closely. See it? Allow me to zoom for you:

I can't decide whether this makes this picture more awesome or less awesome. On the one hand, look how tough I am! On the other hand, that is a Buzz Lightyear band-aid.

Leaving My Mark

2011-07-04T16:17:00.001-04:00

This morning Huppy and I ran a 10K that started and ended at Gillette Stadium. For my non-local friends, this is the place where the professional football team the New England Patriots plays. Actually, I guess I should say this is the place where the major league soccer team the New England Revolution plays because that's who uses the place in July. Anyway, it was very warm. VERY warm. I did not finish in a time faster than my first 10K in February which was disappointing. But that's OK because it was really, really warm. Did I mention the heat yet? It was hot out.

Anyway, after finishing up we decided we needed food and drink. Gillette has a big shopping complex attached to it and we decided to stay there since we were disgustingly sweaty but there we were among thousands of disgustingly sweaty people milling around.

So, we squelched into the Olive Garden. (Side note: I actually ate some salad). While we were eating, I joked about how I hoped we didn't leave sweaty butt prints on the booth when we left because that would be a super gross thing to do. The booth seats were vinyl, though, so when we left after our meal no visible butt sweat was seen.

Unfortunately, the seat backs at this Olive Garden are cloth. Yup, when we got up there were big wet marks from our backs. For the record, the mark I left was bigger which I think makes me the grosser of the two of us.

So, I'd like to apologize to the Olive Garden at Patriot Place and whoever was seated at that booth after us. I am usually much, much better at keeping my bodily fluid expulsion restricted to the appropriate times and places.

A Day That Will Live In Infamy

2011-06-15T15:08:00.004-04:00

I'll just prep you right now: this one might not be all that funny.

Today is June 15th. On June 15th, 1985 I was talking on the phone with my bestie (we didn't have that word then, though) Amy when the operator interrupted the phone call. I know, that only happens in movies! Well, it happened to me in real life, I swear. The operator interrupted my call with Amy to patch in my mother who had left the house with Pop (my dad) a while ago. Pop had mowed the lawn earlier and wasn't feeling too well so she insisted that he go see a doctor this time instead of chalking it up to indigestion/gas/pickled pigs feet. They were about halfway to Peoria (where the ER's are) when Pop died of a massive heart attack at 43 years old. I was 13 and my sister was 8.

Clearly this was what in my Intro to Psych class at ICC "a significant emotional event". The effects of it on me then and the adult that I have become are big enough even I can see them. I'm not sure what kind of teenager I would have been but the timing of this event (the summer before I started high school) probably helped me stay on the straight and narrow. It was a sad summer, obviously, and it became very important to me to not do anything that would make my mom cry ever again. I had seen that enough and it was awful. So, I came home when I said I would, called when I'd be late, didn't drink, and didn't cut classes. I'd like to say that I also got excellent grades but, hey, a leopard can't change its spots. I'm sure I got in trouble for things but for the most part I tried to not be a problem.

I remember seeing Mr. G , my grade school principal right after it happened. He gave me his condolences and was asking after my mom and sister. I distinctly remember telling him that I wasn't sure of I was going to be able to stay in high school because I might have to drop out and get a job to help support the family. Yes, I know that is crazy melodramatic and probably something that would only have been necessary had we been living in the Little House on the Prairie but I honestly though that it was a possibility. Mr G said that it probably wouldn't be necessary and that mom was was a resourceful woman.

In addition to not wanting to make anyone sad, Pop's death also made me less likely to indulge in those risky, stupid behaviors of which young people are so fond (drugs, drinking, reckless driving) for the simple reason that I, unlike many of my peers, suddenly believed in my own mortality. Death happened and it could happen to me sooner than I'd like if I temped fate.

Pop's death also meant that mowing the yard was now my responsibility. Unlike many kids, I was not handed a lawnmower by a relieved dad the instant I was strong enough to push it. Noooo. Caretaking of the lawn was serious business and was not for the less-than-committed. Pop mowed the yard in different patterns each time in order to...I'm not sure why but I know there was a reason. As a result of this lawnmowing as rite of passage experience I think cutting the grass is great. I love it to this day. It's a great time to be alone with your thoughts (although, aren't we always?) and still accomplish something tangible. I wonder if Pop felt the same way and that's why he wouldn't let me cut the grass and not because I wouldn't remember to mow on a diagonal that week. (Side note: We custom ordered his grave marker to have a lawnmower on it.)

While Pop's death made a lasting impression on me (and my mom and sister obviously but it's not my place to talk about their experiences) his life did as well. Since I can't make new memories of him I have to hang on to the ones I have. Pop was my mom's second husband and not my biological father. The way I see it, that's even better because Pop chose to be my father. This is also why I called him Pop and not Dad - Dad was already taken. It is my impression that my biological father washed his hands of me when I was 4 or 5 and my mother was granted sole custody of me so Pop is pretty much the only father-type that I remember.

When Pop was born his right arm stopped just past the elbow. Obviously, this made him left-handed (there's a joke there, I just know it). Since he was the one to teach me how to play softball, I am a righty that bats and golfs as a lefty. He taught me how to pitch in our backyard. Most of the time he pitched it to me at a reasonable speed but every once in a while he's tell me to move and he'd wind of and whip it at the wooden wall of the garage. It would hit with a huge BOOM and I would get a thrill of terror imagining trying to catch it. When you only have one full arm, that arm is pretty strong!

The shorter arm had its uses as well. Because it ended in a rounded stump maybe 4 inches below the elbow it had the shape of a potato on a swivel. That doesn't sound very flattering but it's the best I can do. That short arm was MURDER when it came to tickling. You know how when you were a kid and someone would tickle you and you would laugh and laugh but eventually it wouldn't tickle as much because the tickler would be digging in to hard with their fingers because of your squirming? Not this arm. It had no fingers so it never stopped tickling and because it was all swivelly you couldn't block it. It was brutal. It's possible that instead of a birth defect this was a new step in evolution. Just sayin'.

Don't get me wrong, Pop had his less than stellar moments as well. The man could not stand in a line. He would get incredibly crabby and start swearing. We all went to FL to visit my uncle when I was a kid and we actually drove past Disney but didn't go in because there was no way in hell Pop would have made it more than 10 minutes in one of those lines without losing it completely. Imagine being, say, 11 and driving from IL to FL and being taken within sight of Disney and not going in. I know, right? I still haven't been there and I think I might be the only one (well, other than my sister).

As an adult, I think he probably reacted to feelings of anxiety with profanity. Most of the times when he cussed me out it was because I had scared him somehow. I remember playing on my swingset shortly after a growth spurt and not realizing that I was about a half inch away from breaking my neck on the ground as I did summersaults on the part of the swingset shaped like an A. He saw me from the house and ran outside to tell me to use my head for something other than a hat rack. I was a literal child and this was waaaay to non-specific for me to get his meaning so I confusedly told him that I wasn't even wearing a hat. He interpreted this as sass and I probably ended up grounded and still confused about what hats had to do with anything.

Another time I had some stitches on my upper leg (butt cheek, whatever) from a mole removal and the stitches popped open when I sat down to pee. Obviously I started screaming, my little sister came to see what was what, saw me bleeding and she started crying, Pop rushed in freaked out his own damned self and started cussing me out for...not sure...having blood? having to pee? Finally my mom arrived on the scene and quickly realized that while I did need medical attention I was in no way, shape, or form bleeding to death, told this to my sister (who thought I might be bleeding to death), and told Pop to calm down because he wasn't helping.

While I grew up in a small town, it wasn't always idyllic: especially for a girl who looked like a boy. Once day I was riding my bike when a car pulled up and some older kids (old enough to have a car) started calling me names. This was nothing new to me so I did what was sensible, I flipped them off. They did not take kindly to this and circled the block so they could approach me from behind again and this time the passenger leaned out of the car and pushed me. My bike hit the curb and I went flying. I'm not sure if I landed on the curb, the street, or the sidewalk but my bike was pretty mangled and my forearm was suddenly devoid of skin. I was only a block from home at this point and so dragging my bike I started walking (and crying, I'm sure). The two idiots in the car came back and said they were sorry and asked if I needed a ride somewhere. (Seriously, you just almost killed me and you think I'm going get in a car with you?) I told them no. I probably did not say no thank you but manners be damned. They drove off and I made it home. Pop was home and he flipped right the hell out. He bandaged me up, put me, my bike, and a baseball bat in the van, and then we drove around town so I could tell him if I saw the "sonsofbitches" that did this to me. I was young but smart enough to a) know not to tell him if I saw the car and b) know not to tell him that I knew who they were and did not need to look for their car. That would not have ended well for anyone.

I'm not bringing all if this up in an effort to garner sympathy. It was 26 years ago and the 13 year old with the interrupted phone call is a distant memory. The reason I bring it up is this: it might have been prevented. In the immediate, it might have been better if he didn't insist on taking a shower before heading to the hospital. But maybe not. At the very least it might have meant that he died in a hospital and not in the van that I was convinced at 13 would be mine when I turned 16 (It had shag carpeting!). Instead that van was sold to Mr. Crank of Crank's Roto Rooter and that probably means it lost it's shag carpeting. More long range, though, Pop's father died of a heart attack at approximately the same age. Pop got indigestion a lot but then he also ate strange things (pickled pig's feet). He smoked. He probably had high blood pressure. I doubt he went to the doctor all that often (if ever). Maybe his heart was bad and he wouldn't have gotten old but I am sure that with some care he would have made it out of his 40's (a decade that I am entering). He probably knew on some level that he wasn't well but going to a doctor would take that from feeling into certainty and that's scary as hell. It might have meant being told to change his habits. Pop (and many of his siblings and my sister) was not a fan of being told what to do. Some might say that he lived on his own terms and I suppose you can look at it that way. However, I think if he'd really thought about what it would meant to his family and friends for him to cut out early he might have made a few changes. Maybe not. So I guess my real point is this: rather than make up once new excuse after another to explain away why you feel like crap, be proactive. You'll either be told that you're fine and having nothing to worry about or you might be given an opportunity to fix something before it becomes a real issue. Wouldn't it be nice to know 26 years from now that your kids are plotting what kind of goofy thing to get you for Father's Day instead of writing a blog post about how it shouldn't have been 26 years since you last cussed them out?

Is This Weird?

2011-04-06T21:32:00.000-04:00

Sometimes when I'm driving by myself in my car I, like most people, sing along to the radio. What I also like to do is say the lyrics in a speaking voice and try to make it sounds like lines in a movie. This doesn't work on all songs, of course. Some lyrics are just too stupid to say. One of my favorites is "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits. Try it:

That ain't workin', that's the way you do it.
Play your gee-tar on the MTV.

That ain't workin' - that's the way you do it.
Money for nothin' and your chicks for free.

I like to create different characters and moods and make the words fit. So...that's not weird, right? If it is, I'm going to blame all those drama classes in high school.

Running Update

2011-04-06T21:13:00.000-04:00

So I posted on February 28th that I was planning on running a half marathon. I resisted saying anything prior to that because I didn't to jinx myself. The universe has quiiiite a sense of humor, it seems. The very next time I ran after going public with my plans I noticed a little tightness in one ankle. I didn't think much of it but I did cut the run short at 3 miles. After a few days of increasing discomfort, I decided to see a medical professional. I was really rooting for a nice prescription, maybe some therapeutic massage. I could totally get better if I had some therapeutic massage and pills that make me feel like I'm floating, I;m sure of it. What I got instead was a diagnosis of a fibular stress fracture, a clumpy aircast boot, and no massage.

So. This is my new announcement: I do not want to be saddled with an iPad2. They look hella stupid and not fun at all. Also, m&m's are yucky and I hope I don't have any soon.

Maia Don't Be A Hero

2011-02-28T20:36:00.002-05:00

Last November I decided to sign up for a half marathon. I have two motivations for doing so:

1. I wanted a fitness goal that I had a decent chance of not achieving without putting in a lot of work. This is because in the last few years I've discovered that I can pretty much do very little training and still improve my times for the sprint triathlons I have been doing. Make no mistake - I am not bragging here. My triathlon times are extremely slow, they're just slightly less slow than they were before. I have honestly been passed by people who are walking when I am running. So, I figured I'd work on running because I suck at it the most.

2. I exercise: I take taekwondo, I work out once a week with a trainer, and I go to the gym. I also try to watch what I eat. I log what I eat and my trainer and a dietician at the local hospital have both come to the conclusion that my biggest problem is that I don't eat enough most of the time. Nevertheless, I have gained weight steadily for the last several years. Thus, I decided to try to literally run my ass off.

So far, running is working. I am able to run a lot farther than when I started and I've lost almost 25 pounds since November. There's plenty left to go but Huppy (she's trying to run her ass off too) and I decided that when we both had lost 20 pounds we'd book massages at a local spa. Sadly, we both hit that benchmark in early February which meant every masseuse with a job was booked solid for a week on either side of Valentine's Day.

Today was the day! Recall one of my previous trips to the spa involved a masseuse that accidentally cut the fromage while she was working on me. Nothing like that happened this time, thankfully. What did happen, though, was this:

My advice to you, Gentle Reader, is that when they tell you to let them know if the stones under your back are too warm and they are you should really just say something. I can confirm that they do not have a special medal that they give out to those of us who are so very tough that we would rather get first degree burns than speak up. But if there was a medal, I'd totally have gotten it.

On the upside, it looks kind of like a bunny. Easter is just around the corner.

The Sins of the Mothers

2011-01-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

I won't even begin to explain why it's been so long since I posted. Not because there is a long, convoluted explanation, but because I am a lazy sack.

Anywho...

My mom is visiting for a couple of weeks. Let me tell you about my mom. She was born in Norway and moved here when she was 11, got sent back to Norway to live with her sister as a teen (I suspect discipline problems), and moved back here again a few years later. Much of what she's accomplished, she's done on her own so I know she's functional. She's had a career, bought and sold a few houses, raised two kids, and after she retired she became and EMT and a lab tech. But. She also has a tendency to end up in the restaurant kitchen when she means to go into the restroom (it's happened more than once), she once drove us through two or three darker than the darkest dark thing mountain tunnels with no lights because (we found out later) she thought the defroster button was the headlight switch, and she hit herself in the head with a hammer so hard that she had to call an ambulance for herself. Another thing she does is mixes her idioms. Some examples: "I know you like a glove." and "She's a real piece of cake." She claims that it's because English is not her first language but I'm somewhat skeptical since English has been her daily language for, oh, 50 years or so.

Anyone who has met my mom makes a comment about how similar we are. That's fine since so far I've never gotten lost on my way to the bathroom I figure I must have inherited some of her other qualities instead. Yeah.

Today I had to make some phone calls to track down a pond warmer because, as I told the person on the other end in all seriousness, my old pond warmer "kicked the dust". Noooooooooooo!

Me, My Big Mouth, and I

2010-11-29T21:54:00.001-05:00

Last week I only had class on Monday since I don't have Tuesday classes and the rest of the week was Thanksgiving Break. Yes, it was pretty sweet. Some of the the students in my last class of the day were debating whether they would attend their Tuesday classes or just head home for the break instead. I pointed out that the vacation portion of the week didn't actually start until Wednesday and they run the risk of missing something relevant or at least graded. Just call me Professor Buzzkill. The students said that they wished their professors would just cancel classes which would let them off the hook. I told them that doing this was kind of unprofessional. As a bonus bit of wisdom, I gave them the advice that calling in sick after a long weekend looks pretty sketchy and should be avoided.

Not to sound arrogant or anything but I'm pretty sure the universe listens to me and thinks it's funny to mess with me.

Having said that, it should come as no surprise that at about 7 p.m. on the Sunday of Thanksgiving break I started to become sick. So, eating my own words (and little else) I called in sick for Monday.

So, I'm going to try something: I want you all to know that winning the lottery is really sketchy and should be avoided.

Reason #47 To Get LASIK

2010-11-12T21:36:00.000-05:00

I wear glasses. I wear them for every waking minute of my life. I own contact lenses but only wear them when I am swimming or something similarly fraught with danger. Glasses are a big part of what I look like when I imagine myself. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a fan. Sure, there are downsides: they slide down my nose at the first hint of perspiration (this translates as anywhere from 20 to 100 times a day depending on the season), they fog up when I come in from the cold, they get smudged even though I'm sure I'm not touching them, and then there's the haircut problem.

The first thing that happens when I sit down in the spinny chair to get a haircut is that they put a superhero cape on me but backwards. That part is cool. Then they make me take off my glasses. This means that I never, ever get to see anything other than the Before and the After. So, I must trust the person wielding the scissors completely - I have no chance of knowing after I've told them what I want if they've gone rogue.

Today I discovered a new reason why I wish I wasn't a Spectacled-American on haircut day. I've been going to the same two people for haircuts for the last several years. One of them is a hairdresser with an in-house chair massage person who is 2 hours away from my house and the other is a no-frills barber a mere 2 minutes away from my house. I went to the barber today for probably the 10th time. Thanks to this no-glasses-during-haircuts thing, it took until the 10th visit to realize that my barber is missing an entire finger. Damn you, nearsightedness! All this time I had a mental image of what was transpiring around my head and it was only 90% correct.

I might have to add haircuts to the list of contact-lens-necessary activities. For all I know my other hairdresser might have an eye patch. Or only one ear. Or a mime performing in the background. ANYTHING could be happening during my haircuts.

It's Elementary, Right? Right?

2010-11-06T21:57:00.000-04:00

They are showing a new series on PBS called "Sherlock". It's a re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes stories that takes place in modern day London. Sherlock is a self-admitted high-functioning sociopath and Dr. Watson is a veteran of Afghanistan with a psychosomatic limp.

Based on hearing good things about the show, I set up a series recording on the DVR. The HD channel, of course. When we started to watch the first episode, we noticed that the show had a weird feature in the form of a narrator. Narration is not itself strange but this woman was thorough. She told us everything that was going on to an exhaustive level of detail. I thought it was a little annoying but, hey, I figured it was their schtick. Huppy, on the other hand, couldn't stand it and stopped watching. I started looking on message boards to see if anyone else found the narration to be a little overwhelming. Apparently not because there was no mention of it anywhere. I found this to be puzzling since anyone who has spent any time on the interwebs knows that everything is mentioned at least once. Everything. Since we definitely weren't hallucinating her, I realized that she must be a service provided for the visually impaired. OK, cool. I'm sure it was just a mixup but I recorded the next episode on both channels (HD and SD) just in case. The narrator was present again when we started the show but when we switched to the SD version she was gone. The episode was much easier to watch without all the extra nattering.

Now, I'm glad they have these services for the visually impaired, I really am. But am I a total jerk to think maybe it's not necessary to for them to do so on the high definition version?

This Isn't What It Looks Like

2010-10-25T14:25:00.000-04:00

So when I got out of class at 10:50 today I moseyed over to the caf to wait for lunch (they start serving at 11:15. At about 11:08 I go over to the sandwich making line and casually lean against the counter reading a book while the sandwich guy did all of his prep work. By the time he was ready there was a line of about 15 people but I was first. I triumphantly headed to my table with my sandwich and was happily eating when one of my students came up to me and we had the following interchange:

Her - "Um...I just wanted to let you know there's something brown all over the back of your pants"

Me - "Really."

Her - "Yeah, it's brown."

Me - "Was it there during class?" (Visions of three hours of teaching with brown stuff smeared on my butt flashing through my head)

Her - "No! No, I saw it when I was in the sandwich line but I didn't want to tell you in front of all those people but, yeah, um it's on the right hand side."

Me - "OK, thanks for letting me know"

I sidled to the bathroom and sure enough there is about a 1/4 cup of peanut butter smeared across my right ass cheek. As I'm sure you're aware, peanut butter looks an awful lot like SHIT so I was obviously really happy and not at all embarrassed. I cleaned it off as best I could, went back, and gave that student a thumbs up. I mouthed the words "peanut butter" at her lest she think I'm incontinent.

My current fear is that peanut butter is like toothpaste in that you can clean it up and it seems to be totally gone until the fabric dries and it gets miraculously resurrected in all its glory. Toothpaste is like the Easter Jesus of stains. I still have another class to teach so I'm going to go now and see if there's peanut butter leavin's on my bum.

Also, I stapled my sleeve to a test the other day. If I get any more suave I'm going to need a permit.

I've Got The Moves, Baby

2010-09-16T12:16:00.001-04:00

For the past few months Huppy and I have been working out once a week with a personal trainer. Often when we meet in the basement of the Y, Shane (the trainer) has us do some ladder drills. This week the Y was pretty crowded due to some renovations at the downtown Y so we went outside to play. Shane put two ladders down side by side in the grass and we got started. We soon learned that the ladder on grass is slightly elevated and it's very easy to catch it on your feet and yank it out of place. This doesn't really happen inside on the floor so this new wrinkle took some adjustment. In between ladder drills we would do some kettle bell activities and planks. Somehow on one of my ladder drill segments I managed to get my foot caught in the ladder, spin around a few times hog-tying myself with the ladder, whirl even further out of orbit, then crash down to the gorund, roll over, and hit my head on a kettle bell that I swear had been 15 feet away from where all this started.

After asking me if I was OK (which was nice of him considering how hard it must have been to actually talk with all the laughing he was doing), Shane said he really wished he had a camera. I'm glad he enjoys our sessions as much as I do.

More Like PURRicane Earl

2010-09-04T21:49:00.001-04:00

So we here in New England were recently under threat of a hurricane. The news reports were full of hurricane tracking and helpful hints as to how to prepare for it. School hasn't started yet so I took it on myself yesterday to do the hurricane preparations. I moved a bunch of yard stuff into the garage and what I couldn't move I strapped down. High on a sense of accomplishment, I next went to Target to get supplies in the event we lost power, water, or both.

When Huppy got home she looked through the Target bags to see what I'd gotten. This is what she found:

2 two-gallon containers of water
1 package of toilet paper
1 box of chocolate chip Fiber One bars
1 Wii pistol
1 package Double Stuff Oreos
1 bag kitty litter

Based on her reaction, I don't think I'm in charge of emergency preparations anymore.

I. Can. Tell.

2010-07-30T17:42:00.001-04:00

A while ago I posted an open letter to my students and in it I mentioned that I can tell when they are texting during class. Texting secretly from a classroom desk requires the phone to be held in the lap which means the neck and upper back are held at a particular angle in order to see the screen and operate the keyboard. This angle is unique to texting, it seems. I'm pointing this out again because people seem to honestly think they are being subtle about it. I'm here to say that this is not possible. Not. Possible. So stop because I and every other instructor who has their very own cellular telephone knows what you're doing and we're making a mental note and it may bite you in the ass at a later date.

This got me thinking about other things that people do that are impossible to misinterpret.

For example, I was at a sandwich shop the other day sitting at a table waiting for my oder to be ready. A guy came in and was standing at the counter ordering his food. He had his hand in his pocket and from behind his shorts started kind of jiggling a little. No, he wasn't doing that. What he was doing was either scratching himself or, I dunno, fluffing his "pillows"? Disclaimer: Now I do not now have nor have I ever had male genetalia so I am not an expert as to what sort of care and maintainence is involved. However, based on how often I see men jamming their hands into their pockets and making adjustments it must be an area that requires a lot of fine tuning. Is it super itchy? If so, is it naturally that way or are the super itchy guys less than fresh? If it's not itchy, are they in pain? If so, is it so excruciating that it requires immediate and public redress? I only ask because women experience discomfort in personal areas as well but it seems to me that our way of dealing with it is to, well, deal with it. We endure until we have a chance to fix it without putting on a show. Most women would risk a punctured lung from a rogue underwire bra than start meddling with their girls in the middle of, say, ordering sandwiches. (See how I did that? Full circle, baby.) Perhaps they aren't itchy or in pain and are merely touching base, if you will. Like Monk needing to touch all the parking meters, perhaps it has a calming effect. My point, because I have one and I should probably get to it, is that a hand in the pocket to jiggle coins or something else strictly genital-free looks nothing like a hand in the pocket intended to scratch and itch or lift and separate or whateverthehell is happening. So, guys, people can tell you're doing it. Maybe other guys can't see it happening because if they could then they would have to admit that their own forays into personal shipping and handling are visible as well. Women notice it, though. The next time you hear a women mutter, "Ugh, seriously?!?!", under her breath look in the opposite direction of her gaze and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Nose picking. This one is particularly relevant to me because I had to ride the train with a guy yesterday that literally picked his nose, rolled it on his fingers, maybe dropped it onto the floor, maybe touched it to his mouth for the entire 45 minute ride. I don't know exactly what he was doing with it because I was too busy craning my head around far enough to keep him out of my peripheral vision. I must have looked like the girl from The Exorcist I was trying so hard to spin my head around and away from him. Honestly, if I had been on that train much longer I would probably have spewed pea soup all over as well. And I didn't eat any pea soup. So, anyway, this guy clearly thought he was being stealthy about it. He seemed to be trying to do his digging quickly and with purpose so that he could remove his hand for phase II, The Rolling. What he didn't realize was that any amount of time with finger in nose is A) really, really obvious and B) an eternity for those nearby. It doesn't look anything like nose scratching. I don't know why but it just doesn't. Thus, I would like to add nose picking to the list of things that can not be mistaken for something more innocent. Also, the reason I had to endure the Booger Show was that I was in the window seat and The Nose Goblin was in the aisle seat. In order to get away I would have had to look at him, ask him to let me out, and then pass through is boogerified air space. As it was, I had to do this anyway because he was riding the train aaalll the way to the end of the line in Providence.

So Far So Good

2010-07-30T11:37:00.002-04:00

In my previous post I told you about my spooky encounter with a 4.5 year old who may or may not have seen catastrophic events in my future. It's been a week and this is what I've got:

1. The day he skeptically wished me good luck (Friday?) I waited in vain for a bus to take me to the train station before the train actually came and went. This caused me to have to hang around for an extra hour and a half for the next train.

2. That Saturday, I realized at about 9 pm the night before participating in a triathlon that I was getting a cold and not suffering from allergies as I'd previously thought (hoped).

3. The triathlon was rough. See # 2.

4. For my last week of teaching this summer I was blessed with not just a cold but also a...blemish...on the side of the bridge of my nose slightly above where my glasses rest. Not only was it unsightly but every time I pushed my glasses back up the nose pieces hit it and basically sent an electrical jolt of pain throughout my entire body. I don't know how the bridge of my nose is connected to the rest of my body but it is. Perhaps it went into my brain and each time I hit it whith my glasses I actually gave myself a mini lobotomy. I'm not ruling it out.

5. Huppy came home from work early yesterday. It seems she's coming down with a cold. So, yeah.

Hopefully you're reading this list and thinking that this isn't so bad because it isn't. I could have made a list twice as long of stuff that went my way this week. So I think it's safe to say Dr. Doom Lite was just trying to freak me out. I hope he put that on his list of things that went his way this week.

The Sword of Davocles

2010-07-23T10:19:00.000-04:00

We had houseguests last night. Huppy's brother and his two kids (4.5 and 6 years of age) stayed over last night on their way to a fabulous vacation destination. Since I'm teaching a summer class right now I had to get up at 5:30 to catch the train. Since the kids are 4.5 and 6 they were already awake when I left at 6:10. I went into the living room to say goodbye and to tell them to have fun and they were kind enough to tear themselves away from some kids show that involves a buch of obviously stoned guys in blue jumpsuts to give me a hug. The younger one gave me a hug and said goodbye. As he's heading back to the couch he adds, "Good luck." You may think this sounds sweet but he said it in that exact tone that people use when they think you're going to need it and it;s not going to help. You know, they way people say "Good luck with that."

So now I'm left wondering what he knows. His name isn't that far off from Damien the creepy kid from The Omen movies and he does sometimes talk in a demonic-sounding voice (which sounded more pro wrestler to me before but now I;m not so sure). So what started out as a normal carefree Friday has now turned into a danger-fraught gauntlet of doom.

Just in case Junior Spooky is correct, I want you all to know that it's been nice knowing you.

Woman Vs Wild

2010-07-20T16:39:00.003-04:00

The house in which I live is bordered on two side by wetlands. As such, despite being in the city we get a lot of nature passing through. Deer have been spotted a few times. Our last batch of koi (not the current batch) were likely carried off by a heron. Each spring ducks disturb the sanctity of the back yard in their efforts to perpetuate their species. They make up for it by bringing the baby ducks by later in the year, baby animals being almost always painfully cute. In the winter the yard is criss-crossed with tracks leading in and out of the wetlands and often to and from under the wraparound porch. It's definitely something I very much enjoy about living here.

Well. Recently things have taken a more antagonistic flavor. I suppose you could say the heron eating the koi was not nice but, really, it wasn't so bad. The fish just went from being there to not being there with no drama in between. This is different. This is a raccoon.

The first time the raccoon knocked over the garbage can and pulled all the grosser (is that a word?) elements of the garbage out I was fairly sanguine. I mean, really, the raccoon is a scavenger and the lid wasn't on very tight and I didn't actually know there was a raccoon living nearby so...my bad.

After that I was careful to put the lid on and pop the handles up in order to secure it. See, I'm human and we humans are smart enough to have invented locking garbage can lids. Ha! Go dig in someone else's garbage with your cute masked face and your creepily childlike hands! It seems that my evolutionary superiority complex was ill-advised. The raccoon knocked the whole thing over and since the lid didn't go flying off like last time he or she used those dexterous little mitts to painstakingly pull all the gross stuff out through a thin opening that formed between the can and lid when the can settled onto its side.

This is when Huppy the engineer stepped in. I got a picture message on my phone later that day showing the garbage can augmented with not one, not two, but three bungee cords. This was war. To my untrained eye, I would estimate that our garbage can could probably be dropped from a plane without releasing its contents. I'm happy to say that, despite making it somewhat laborious to actually use the garbage can, it seems to have worked.

While this was a battle won, the war continues. Thwarted by the web of bungees the raccoon faded back to regroup. The next sortie happened while I was out of town. Huppy was asleep dreaming Huppy dreams when she heard what was obviously a zombie with a gammy leg slide-thumping across the porch outside. OK, was probably not the first thing that popped into her head but based on her description-after-the-fact that's totally what it sounded like. At any rate, she eventually determined that it was the raccoon dragging the bag of birdseed across the porch. Apparently the bag was too heavy to be dragged off to Chez Raton Laveur so after dragging the bag some distance Plan B seemed to be to just eat as much birdseed as possible while remaining on the porch. Huppy was unwilling to actually go outside and shoo the creature away so, satisfied that the house was not being invaded (by zombies or otherwise), she went back to sleep. The next morning, of course, there was birdseed to be cleaned up and, as an added F-U for the bungee cord thing, a pile of actual raccoon vomit. Apparently there is such a thing as too much birdseed.

After that things got quiet again. The closest thing to a skirmish occurred one night when Huppy was out of town. I went outside after dark because the next day was garbage day and since I was home alone it fell entirely to me to remember to put the cans out at the curb. If you know me, you know that I had to write a note on my hand. Anyway, I go outside to kick some remembering garbage day ass and there's a bunch of noise and scrambling just out of sight on the stairs leading to the back yard. I did not pee myself. However, I did get a powerful jolt of adrenaline and some practice seeing how fast I can dive back onto my house. Once my less primitive brain took over again I realized that it was probably just the raccoon snooping around to see if I left the koi food out. (In addition to bird seed raccoons will also eat koi food- they seem to prefer the $20 bag over the $8 canister).

As of this morning the siege continues. At 6:00 this morning I discovered that there appears to be raccoon poop near the back door. While this is disturbing enough I'm additionally disturbed by the fact that a part of me wants to use it to figure out what the raccoon is eating now that my garbage is so effectively on lockdown. I won't do that but the CSI-watching part of me kind of wants to.

All I know is that this raccoon does not want to bring poop into this. I have three freakishly large cats in my house. At any given time I am in possession of about 300 lbs of poop and I am not afraid to use it.

To Infinity and Beyond

2010-07-14T22:16:00.001-04:00

I swear to you all that I don't mean to go so long between posts. I think of things all the time but am not very good at keeping them in mind until the next time I'm in front of a computer. This is fairly pathetic when you consider just how often I am in front of a computer (almost all the time).

Anyway, I'm here to tell you about last night. Calm down, it's not that kind of story. When at home I drink Caffiene Free Diet Pepsi. I know, what's the point if there's no caffeine or sugar? I agree but I drink both sugar and caffeine out in the real world so while at home I try to curtail it a bit.

Anyway, the grocery store ran out of my usual soda the other day so I was looking at the other Diet Pepsi options. There's Diet Pepsi (obviously), Pepsi Max, and Pepsi One in addition to the Coke famliy of diet colas. From what I can tell Pepsi One is the same as Diet Pepsi except they use Splenda as the sweetener instead of whatver they use in DP (aspartame?). I figured Pepsi Max was the same thing with yet a third type of sweetener so I chose that one.

After drinking two of them and then going to bed I realize just how off the mark I was. As I'm lying in bed I realize that I am wired for sound. I think I might even have levitated. I definitely saw sparks.

Holy crap, people, did you know that Pepsi Max is basically Diet Jolt? Shit fire and save matches, how did I not realize this? It's called Pepsi MAX, for crap's sake. It's extreme! (Remember when everything was extreme? Now everything is green.) There is twice as much caffeine as other colas. Recall I drank two of them after 8 pm.

I do not know when I finally fell asleep but I can tell you that when the alarm went off at 5:13 a.m. it was rough.

I'll leave you with a video of Wanda Sykes doing a bit about falling asleep that would be funnier if it wasn't so terrifyingly true.

Jokes.com

Wanda Sykes - Additional Thoughts

comedians.comedycentral.com

Futurama New Episodes

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Russell Simmons Stand-Up Comedy

The Couch That Bites

2010-06-17T11:21:00.000-04:00

The last post was boring and preachy, I know. Here's a quick story.

My laptop cord is typically plugged into the wall behind the couch in the room with the big TV. God forbid I have to watch TV without the ability to look people up on imdb.com. Anyway, I just returned from ten days in sunny (rainy, actually) Iowa so obviously I'd brought the laptop and cord with me. When I went to plug the cord back into its usual outlet yesterday the following occurred:

1. Plug in hand I kneel on the couch and stick my arm between the wall and couch to insert plug into outlet.
2. It's too frickin' dark back there so I randomly try to stick the prongs in to various places in the wall.
3. I wise up and use my fingers to palpate where the outlet is.
4. It still takes a bunch of tries but the cord is finally plugged in. The lights in the room flicker a little but that, my friends, is a problem for another day.
5. I rise up to remove my arm and start charging my laptop.
6. Everything but the arm moves.
7. I pivot my body a bit and try again to remove my arm from behind the couch while pulling the back of the couch away from the wall.
8. - 15. See #7
16. I start thinking about those Chinese Finger Cuffs and how the more I struggle the worse it's getting.
17. I look at the clock and think seriously about whether I can stay there for another 2 hours before Huppy comes home. The answer is no because I realize I have got to pee like it's my job.
18. I decide to just pull as hard as I can until my arm pops out.
19. Success, finally!
20. I spend the rest of the day whimpering about how bruised my arm feels from its ordeal.

Before you think I'm a total moron (I will admit to being a partial one), I would like to point out that the arm in question had NO trouble going down behind the couch. I swear there was plenty of room. I;m tempted to try again as an experiment but I'm home alone and I kind of have to pee.

You Like Me, You Really Like Me

2010-06-17T11:05:00.000-04:00

Most if not all of you are friends with me on Facebook so this may be boring for you. My friend list recently exceeded 300 people and I decided that it was time to trim it a little bit. There was an explosion of people added in the year leading up to my 20th high school reunion and since then things have calmed down a bit. Out of those 300+ people there were maybe one or two that I couldn't really place despite my best yearbook scanning efforts. I suspect this is because their name has been changed but they didn't think to include their original handle anywhere in their profile. Not fair. Deleted. Next I moved on to the folks that only seem to have anything to say when they wanted to promote their pyramid scheme/sell crap from the comfort of your own home business. Don't get me wrong, I think social media is an excellent resource for the promotion of small business and if I sold crap from the comfort of my own home I'm sure I'd use it. The people I deleted didn't seem interested in using it for any other purpose, however. Gone. The rest of the folks that I got rid of were people that just didn't seem to be on Facebook ever or if they are they just look. I figure if they're never logged in then they don't care if I drop them and if they're creepy voyeurs then it's good riddance there too.

Before I did all this (actually the process is ongoing) I posted a status explaining what I was going to do. This way if I delete someone with whom I have had little interaction they might have seen my status and will know it wasn't personal and can re-request me if they'd like. I figured I'd get some comments from people saying that they were thinking of doing the same thing. What I did not expect was the flood of comments from people asking me not to delete them. I apologize if I caused anyone to panic. Seriously, the people I deleted probably have no idea they've been deleted because they don't seem to be on FB at all anyway. One thing this outpouring has cause is that I will now be extra-paranoid about my statuses and whether they are boring or not. No pressure.

Having said all that, I would encourage people to take a good hard look at what information they have out there and to whom it is visible. Those of you with kids, especially.

Kuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

2010-05-17T19:24:00.000-04:00

So you know the voices in your head? I'm not talking crazy voices that tell you to to shave one eyebrow or that the government is trying to steal your thoughts. I just mean the ones where you have imagined conversations in your head with people. Maybe you don't have them but I think you do.

Anyway.

Most of the time I don't think about these voices because they're just expressions of my own thoughts ("Holy crap, it's hot out here." or "Please don't be a telemarketer." or "Where the hell did I park my car?").

Every once in a while, though, they surprise me. A couple of weeks ago I was driving in my car listening to the radio when a new song started. I think it was Van Halen's "Jump". If it wasn't it was certainly in an equivalence class with "Jump". As it started I head the following very clearly in my head:

"Oh, hell yeah!"

What the heck? I mean, I appreciate this song as much as the next person but I am pretty sure that reaction was not mine.

Should I be worried?

Oh Fud.

2010-05-16T21:02:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was a very nice day. I got to drive my car with the top down, go to a barbecue, have a yummy burger at Fudruckers, and go see my former football team (sort of - they've been bought and renamed) give a solid beat down to their biggest rival.

Let me tell you about my trip to Fudruckers. I love Fudruckers but I don't live near one so my love is generally unrequited. Obviously I was pretty excited when I pulled into their parking lot yesterday. I get a little scared, though, when I saw that all the blinds were pulled down. It looked pretty dead. Crap, what if the damned place went tets up in the years since I was last there? I parked the car and walked toward the building hoping fervently that I wasn't going to be disappointed. As I approached I saw that the windows were indeed covered completely with white opaque window shades. Ugh. I also realized that my fly was down so as I was checking out the windows I zipped myself back up. The entrance was around the corner and when we got there I was elated to see that the door opened into a fully functioning Fudruckers. I was puzzled as to why they were depriving their customers of a view of the bee-yoo-tee-full day outside so I skipped the order counter and went to check out the dark tomb of a seating area. Those blinds? Turns out they were some sort of magical one-way blinds that are opaque from one side and totally see through from the other. Awesome. Just awesome.

So to recap, I had an awesome day with a brief interlude of zipping up my pants while standing in the middle of a big window of a surprisingly busy restaurant. Not that this stopped me from going inside and eating at said restaurant. I mean, hey, it's Fudruckers.

Odds and Ends

2010-05-01T13:26:00.001-04:00

These things don't really go together so I'm just throwing them all into one post.

I was waiting for the bus the other day (to take me to the subway which takes me to the train which gets me to the car which swallows the bird that swallowed the spider that ate the fly...) when I heard this repetitive clinking sound. I couldn't figure out why this sound bugged me so much but it did. It wasn't loud or anything but it was really sort of creeping me out. There was only one other person at the bus stop and his back was to me but it seemed like it was coming from his general vicinity. So there I am standing on the curb squinting around trying to solve this mystery when I finally identified the sound. Usually I feel better when I figure something out but this was not the case here. My epiphany was this: the dude was clipping his fingernails. On the street. Wating for a bus. I'm not talking about a little I-just-snagged-the-nail-on-a-zipper type maintainance, I'm talking a full-on Just-look-at-these-claws-I-really-need-a-mani sort of nail clipping session. Am I the only one who is creeped out by this? Like, really creeped out. Intellectually I know that I shouldn't be, but still.

Obviously, I took a picture.

And another thing: what is up with people who fill up their soda at the self-serve soda thingy and then take a couple of sips before walking away. Or worse, take a couple of sips, replace those sips with more soda, and then walk away. I'm generally a patient person, I think. Maybe not, I don't know. Whenever this happens and I'm waiting for my turn to fill my cup I have thise urge to just smack them in the back of their head. Not so that it hurts, just so that they get a noseful of soda.

Next I have a couple of pictures to share with you. The first one I took a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans. This is on a door in an elementary school lunchroom. I thought it was cool that the President was being used as an example of good table manners (vs Elmo or a sports figure, etc).

The second picture is old but it cracks me up. Last summer I was at home and I heard a thud from the living room. I didn't feel inclined to investigate because I have three cats who range in size from 15 to 19 pounds. Cats of that size make frequent thuds. Anyway, the next time I went into the living room I learned two things:

1. Someone had knocked over the fan.

2. Dennis does impressions.

This, obviously, is his knocked over fan impression.

The Mile High Club

2010-04-27T17:28:00.001-04:00

Ha! I bet that title got your attention. Calm down, it's not what you think. I just wanted to peak your interest.

I recently took a couple of trips involving air travel and decided to spend some time on one of the flights to write a blog entry. The catch here is that when I fly I take anxiety meds (hey, I used to get drunk like everyone else but having ulcers put the kabosh to that). The following is what I wrote. The only changes that have been made are fixing some pretty egregious typos.

*********************************

So I thought I’d try something a little different for my next blog. I’m currently on a flight from Boston to Chicago toward the goal of reaching New Orleans this evening. The something a little different is not just the air-blogging. It’s more the blogging while medicated. I usually pop a couple of chill pills before boarding and from what I understand I seem fully functional if a little bit groggy. Which is good. I have to take people’s word for it, though, because I remember very little of my chill pill times. So while it’s possible that nothing exciting will happen, I’m going to write this blog for myself as a little time capsule.

I was late to the airport because someone stole my cab at school. I’m not talking about the big city idea of cab stealing where you hail the cab and then some jack hole jumps in and they take off. I called for it at noon to pick me up at 3. At 2:55 I was where I said I would be waiting. Still there at 3 and now it’s kind of raining. The reason I called a cab a priori (editor's note: I managed to misspell the word plane twice but has no problem with a priori) rather than flag one down was that I didn’t have time to go hunting for an available cab. So anyway, at 3:15 I talked to their dispatcher who was frankly puzzled since his driver had picked someone up at the assigned time and place. I heard him berating the driver over the radio for not asking a name and then picking up a guy when the name was a woman’s name. He tells me another cab will be sent. The story fizzles from here because I was mad at the idiot cab driver but couldn’t take it out on my actual cab driver. So I fumed my way through a ton of traffic and at least 2 near misses on my way to the airport.

Now I’m on the plane and aside from it being pretty bumpy there at the start it’s all good. I can say that because of the chill pills. Huppy and I are across the aisle from one another and must communicate by our own sign language. This probably isn’t necessary except that I’ve decided it is and she’s really, really not good at reading lips. I think it might be her disability. Everyone has one. I just told her I loved one of the flight attendants. He's a round elderly Asian guy who moves with ruthless efficiency. I conveyed this to her with a series of eye rolls and head tosses and then I drew a heart on my arm rest. I think she got the message. She didn’t stand up and ask if there was a doctor on board so that’s good.

Let’s talk about Huppy for a moment. She’s still wearing her coat, has her headphones in and is thoughtfully staring in front of her. No book, no laptop. Just staring. What’s going on in there? Her hands are folded on the tray table in front of her. Do people really do that? Also, it’s always the tray table in front of you, never your tray table. I wonder why. Are the airlines trying to teach us about spatial relationships or do they think we’re dumb enough to try to monkey with the tray table in front of someone else. I, for one, am not interested in the sort of personal space violation that this would entail.

The last flight I took from either MLI to ORD to ORD to BOS (memory problems, remember) had a serial farter on it. It was a nightmare. I overheard some people saying that the culprit was actually spraying deodorant after each episide in order to cover it. While nice in theory I can say that in practice the poop particle dispersion rate was far superior to the deodorant’s. For me, the deodorant part of that story will forever stay the stuff of rumor.

But that was not this flight. This flight everything smells like peanuts. It must be the snack of choice for high flying travelers.

The flight attendants keep bringing things back to the back of the plane. Once it was a handheld grey box. Now it was a tray held high with what looked like silverware wrapped up in a napkin. I’m guessing we have a person back there who actually ordered an honest to goodness meal on the flight OR they’re setting up for an emergency tracheotomy.

The woman in front of me just opened her flavored seltzer (the drink for people who hate taste) and it fizzed all over. She held it in the aisle until it calmed down and then started whipping her arm around to fling off the seltzer that she got on herself. So now I have selzer on my foot. The thing that really ties it all together is that she’s wearing a raincoat. Sitting in her seat. On and airplane. Apparently she knew she was sitting in a seltzer splash zone. If I had known I would have worn galoshes.

Already I can see the benefit of this blog. I can guarantee that without it I woudn’t have remembered why my right foot is sticky. (editor's note: it's true - I didn't remember why my damned foot was sticky)

Other random thoughts: sometimes compromising is the same as losing. When I get up in the morning and stand at the train station it is in the mid to high 30’s. I know that by the time I head home from work it willl be in the 60’s at least. So I try to dress warmly enough so I’m not freezing in the morning but light enough that I don’t feel like bursting into flames in the afternoon. This, it turns out, is not possible. I know, you think the secret is layers. That may be true for normal people but when I put clothes on in the morning I cannot later be held responsible for their location or how they get from one place to another unless it is on my body being worn as clothes. So, my compromise is the same as losing because based on what I’m wearing there is a 15 minute window in the afternoon when I am dressed weather-appropriate. Unfortunately I never get to savor that moment because I am in class at that time. I think my new strategy is to dress whole heartedly for either the morning or afternoon temperatures and just suffer during the other one. It adds up to about the same amount of misery and the compromise way but this time I have the added benefit of experiencing the part of the day where I get it right. I’ll let you know how that goes.

I Wish I Had Thought Of That!

2010-03-21T11:45:00.001-04:00

Here's a story. Of a lovely lady. (Me)

OK, stop laughing.

ANYWAY, this happened to me last week. As you may or may not know, I've been studying martial arts for the last 5 or so years. Recently I came to the very difficult decision to take a sabbatical from tae kwon do in order to spend more time at the gym. My knees have been really hurting lately and it would take a few days to recover from TKD class which would happen just in time for another TKD class. In between I would be too sore to do any other exercise. This did not amount to enough activity so I was getting steadily less...visibly fit...which only exacerbated the knee issues even more. So, I decided to take a break and go to the gym at least 4 times a week (one day with a personal trainer, even). I saw someone I knew from TKD last week and was asked why I'm not in class anymore. I gave the quick knees-recovery-sabbatical explanation and was given the following advice:

"You should lose weight, then."

I'll give you a moment to process that.
...
...
...

I know, right? Who says that? Several responses flitted across my brain before I answered. They were:

"Huh. That never occurred to me! Wow! Thanks for the advice! Before I go, will you help me tie my shoe? I forgot how. Also, please explain to me how to open this door. Do I push the knob thingy? Turn it? Do speak a password into it? Dang, things are so confusing!"

or

"You know you said that out loud, right?"

or

"Considering I almost certainly outweigh you and I have a black belt in tae kwon do, would you like to amend this conversation in any way?"

But I went with:

"Uh, yeah, that's the plan."

I'm Baaaaack!

2010-03-02T22:22:00.000-05:00

So, yeah. I'm sorry that it's been quite a while since I've posted. I've been teaching an over-overload this semester and it's been insane in the membrane. In the grand scheme of things, I can't really complain since no matter how crazy my schedule is it only ever lasts for three months before I get a minimum of a month off. Here's a hodge podge of stuff for you:

1. I am now down to one pair of pants that fit me. Stress and the fact that I like to do most of my grading in restaurants have really taken a toll on the old waistline (and buttline, and pretty much all my lines). Why am I sharing this with you? I had originally vowed to not purchase more pants seeing as how I have many, many pairs of pants that are only 10 pounds away but after a marathon session of grading at Panera (see?) I decided to go see what I could find at Target. I headed over to the women's clothes and wandered around trying to find something that seemed to be made of natural fibers and didn't have some dipshitty sparkly butterfly pattern glued to the pockets. Right before I decided to abandon hope and go throw myself at a pizza, I found a pair of khaki pants that looked workable. Not low-rise? Check. Made from cotton? Check. Waistband that won't dig in when I sit down? Check. Inexpensive? Check. Thank goodness! I grabbed them off the rack and started to head to the checkout lanes. Right before I got there something on the tag caught my eye. I looked closer, turned around and put them back where I found them, and speed walked out of the store.

They were maternity pants. As the kids say, FML.

2. Remember when I told you I got my feet tangled up in my pants, fell down, and messed up my toe? It's still messed up! A toe is not a complicated body part. What the hell could still be wrong with it? Frankly, if this keeps up I might have to let it go. Times are tough and if it's not going to hold up its end of the bargain I'll find another toe.

3. Thank goodness for iPods at the gym. I've been doing a lot of interval stuff on the elliptical lately and I suspect that I probably sound like an obscene phone caller at times.

4. Last Tuesday I had the house to myself for the evening. This is what I did:
   3:00 I arrived home from work
   3:15 I headed to the grocery store
   5:00 I made tacos for dinner (the totally inauthetic orange powder in the beef kind)
   5:30 - 7:00 I watched some TV
   7:15 I went to bed

   I'm so wild and crazy that I go beyond wild and crazy and end up wrapping around into completely boring.

Thanks for reading, all. Have a good night.

Can't You Smell That Smell?

2010-02-05T20:04:00.000-05:00

Since I've blogged in the past about how I find some people stinky and wish they would not be so ick-worthy it's only fair that I share this story. I don't want to but...well, you'll see.

So my morning routine is to get up, shower, brush teeth, get dressed, pack breakfast and lunch and then let the cats out of the basement. Before you think I'm cruel, the basement is a nice place for them: they have beds, cat towers, 4 litter pans (for 3 cats), and sometimes a toasty wood stove. The cats have to go downstairs at night or one of them (Ibsen) will spend the night walking around my room pushing things off my dressers onto the floor and molesting the blinds. It's not restful for me. If I decide to take a nap during tthe day this same cat will join the others sleeping peacefully next to me but there's something about the hours from 11p.m. to 3 a.m. that are ripe for noisemaking to my friend Ibsen.

OK, so they come running upstairs each morning and I head downstairs to make sure they have food. This morning I was greeted by a terrible smell that needed immediate investigation. One of the other cats (Dennis) was a stray for a few years in our neighborhood in Lowell before we took him in and so he's a little odd. One of his peculiarities is that he doesn't really understand about using litter to cover up his poop. He knows he supposed to do something but he's just not sure what so he dutifully scrapes at the wall and the floor outside the pan. For a really long time. This, of course, does absolutely nothing to cover the poop in question but eventually he figures he's put in enough time and he walks away. If I'm home and I hear him tirelessly scraping at the walls I go downstairs and shoo him away and cover it myself (with a scooper, don't get any weird ideas) before the stinkiness can spread.

So back to this morning. I open the door, it's smelly, I go downstairs and cover up Dennis' latest triumph. All fairly routine. I had a moment before I left the house where I wondered if I'd stepped in something but after a frantic moment of shoe checking I saw that I hadn't. I chalked it up to my nose having flashbacks and left for work.

I drive about a mile and a half to the train station and then ride the train for 45 minutes before hopping a bus or walking the rest of the way to campus. It's a pretty stress-free way to commute as I can nap or read for the whole train portion of the trip. The downside is that I am beholden to the train schedules. There is no turning around and heading home because I forgot something.

Today, as I settled myself onto the train I smelled something icky again. I checked my shoes again thinking I'd find something in the more-well-lit-than-my-living-room train car. Already I was steeling myself for the phone call I'd have to make to Huppy to tell her that I may or may not have stepped in the poop or stinky barf and tracked it who knows where before leaving. This would be a bad phone call at any time but I thought it would be particularly unwelcome at 6:30 a.m. I had a moment of relief when I saw that my shoes were as poop-free as I'd originally suspected. That vanished when I realized that somehow, someway in my brief interaction with my cats I had gotten a dime-sized amount of poop on my shirt. MY SHIRT! And I'm on a train that will be traveling in only one freaking direction for the 45 minutes getting steadily more crowded. Oh, and I have poop on me. Fortunately I was wearing a button-up shirt with a t-shirt on underneath so I unbuttoned it and rolled the offending portion of the shirt up like a coke-head's dollar, jammed the roll under my armpit, and zipped up my coat. This put many layers between the crap and the rest of the world.

I'm happy to say that for as paranoid as I was I didn't smell it again until I made it to my office and took off the button-up shirt and unrolled it to get a better look. Cleaning it off was not an option because I had rolled the shirt up and I couldn't be 100% sure I knew where all of it was anymore. Now I know I mentioned that I was wearing a t-shirt so you may think that it shouldn't have been a problem. Not true. I bought this t-shirt too small for the express purpose of being able to wear it under other things. I thought I was going to have to cancel my 8:00 class and wait for the bookstore to open at 9:00 so I could buy another shirt but I remembered that I had a full zip sweatshirt stashed in a desk drawer. I haven't even looked at this thing in a about a year and a half so I was relieved to find it still there.

My new problem: my t-shirt was a kelly green ringer and the sweatshirt was olive green. Also, it appeared to have food on the sleeve. Trust me - the kelly green/olive green thing was a real problem (the food ont he sleeve wasn't optimal either). Not a poop level problem but a problem nevertheless. I freely admit that my main consideration in buying clothes is comfort, not fashion. However, no matter how ill-fitting or unattractive my clothes may be they never, ever, ever clash. Ever. To me, seeing such a thing is as grating as hearing a note sung off-key. So for three uncomfortable hours I felt like fire ants were crawling on my body because I had on this terrible color scheme. Finally, when I got a break between classes I went to the bookstore and bought a grey sweatshirt. Ahhhh. I was able to focus much better after that.

My last class of the day ran late so I never made it back to my office for leaving to catch the train home. This means the poop shirt is still rolled up in a tight ball on my desk so I have that to look forward to on Monday.

As for how the poop got there, I only have theories. It definitely came out of a cat and I haven't found any outside of the approved litter boxes so I am guessing it occured when I was covering up Dennis' tribute to digestion.

So, aside from that, it was a pretty good day!

It burns! It burns!

2010-02-01T11:55:00.000-05:00

SERIOUSLY?!?!? Suddenly my TV is riddled with commercials for this place. Schools don't just start overnight. It's not like a hot dog cart, it requires a lot of planning, hiring, leasing of space, you name it. So how it is that all that happened and no one said, "You know, maybe we would have more credibility if we had different initials."

I wonder if they sell t-shirts. I might need one.

All You Need Is Love (And an Emesis Basin)

2010-01-30T17:45:00.001-05:00

This blog post is will begin with a shoutout to Joe who said I needed to hurry up and post something before he leaves on his trip tomorrow. Holla!

I love books. LOVE books. I read while watching TV, sitting at stop lights (shhh), riding the train, before movies start - have book will read. You get the point. I read for pleasure almost exclusively. The types of books I read tend to be mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, or fantasy. I do not read romance and I do not read books that are about horrible lingering deaths. I’ve mentioned before my aversion to sad movies. This rule holds for books too. When I was much younger I read Sophie’s Choice and thought I’d never recover. Also, I don’t read teenage angst vampire porn. I might have to, though, just so I can say definitively that I don’t like it. I grew my hair out once for that very same reason. (shudder)

OK, back on topic. Here’s what drives me around the bend. When I’m choosing my next book and I read the cover and there’s an appropriate amount of people missing/bodies found/zombies reanimating I am happy. I feel utterly betrayed when I get into the story only to realize that I am being tricked TRICKED into reading a g**damned romance. Suddenly all the spooky events and plot twists are just a device to pressure two people together so that they can take comfort in each other’s arms. Barforama.

Now you’re probably wondering, Maia why do you hate love so much? I don’t. I swear. I have what I believe are perfectly valid reasons to hate this sub-genre (the romance in disguise). I will enumerate them here and you can decide for yourself if I am just an old grump.

Did I mention how they’re tricky? The fact that they don’t openly fly the romance flag on the dust jacket summary tells me that they know this is some bullshit too.
They follow the same couple of scripts every time:

Script 1: Woman is imperiled, man protects her, they fall in love. This kind typically has a lot of description of her trim, athletic body and his kind eyes. What it boils down to is that she is weak and can’t handle shit and he is turned on by her obvious need for a big strong daddy. Ugh. I hate them both.
Script 2: Woman and man are both strong (usually law enforcement ) types, they meet, she gets kidnapped and almost killed, he finds her and saves her life. The way the bad guy captures her is by some lame-ass ploy like sending a text message claiming to be from the good guy setting up a meet at an abandoned warehouse. Never mind the fact that our protagonists have never communicated by text prior to this point in the book. These books spend so much time describing the burgeoning love between the two of them that they can only support the most moronic of characters
Script 3: My favorite. The bad guy is doing bad guy things. Stalking, killing, whatever. He’s soooo bad. This version has a woman and at least two men involved. They’re all trying to solve the crimes. Teamwork! Sexual tension! One guy is really nice and pines from afar and the other one is dynamic and charming. Naturally, this is the guy our lady fair picks. (Moment of silence for that pioneer John Hughes, everyone). The book is nearing its end and terror still reigns but our romance is hot and heavy. Suddenly it all goes wrong. In a surprise twist we find out the Mr. Right is actually Mr. PsychoKillerQu'est-ceQueC'est . And by surprise twist I mean something that has been painfully obvious for at least 100 pages. And from this, ladies and gentlemen, we learn that you should always choose the quiet creepy dude who loves you from afar over the fun exciting dude who secretly wants to make you into a sofa cover. Rookie mistake.

I guess most of my beefs can be distilled down to the fact that having a romantic plot line seems to give the author permission to completely phone in the rest of the story. They say that love makes people stupid and apparently so does writing about love. Which makes me stupid right now. Whoa.

After rereading this, I can admit that I definitely sound like a crab. In the interest of full disclosure, I am also a terrible person to sit next to in movies because whenever a character busts out some hackneyed sappy line like, “I’ve loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you.” I roll my eyes pantomime gagging. After rereading that, it occurs to me that I might be kind of an ass. Huh.

The One About Bowling

2010-01-24T00:32:00.002-05:00

I just got home from bowling. It's been several years since I've gone bowling and several years again since the time before that. I had a lot of fun and hopefully won't wait another several years before I go again. Here are a few observations:

1. I have clearly not seen a single music video in a very, very long time because although I recognized most of the songs that they played the only familiar video was for....wait for it....Born in the USA by The Boss Himself. Vintage!

2. This bowling alley color coded the balls by weight so you could see from a distance if another lane had a ball with potential or not. This is absolute genius and also such a painfully obvious thing to do that I can't believe this is the first place I've seen that does it (I'm looking at you, Plaza Lanes in Washington, IL). Not having to slink around the drunks in the other lanes furtively spinning around each ball until you could see the weight and stick you fingers into the holes to check the fit was such a boon.

3. Speaking of hands and fingers....I really do not think I'm a germaphobe. I know I'm not. Something is definitely happening to me as I get older, though. Perhaps it's just an enhanced awareness of my own mortality. Regardless, about an hour and a half into the three hours of bowling one part of my brain seceded from the union in order to dedicate itself to fixating on the horror show of pestilence that I must have on my hands.

4. On a related note, on the drive home there was a lull in conversation that I chose to fill with, "So, how bad do you want to touch your face right now?" and got the response "Oh my God, it's killing me." I know we could have washed our hands before we left but, honestly, hands washed in a public restroom are only half-washed. I kept myself distracted with fantasies of owning a home autoclave.

5. I did better than I expected at bowling and I credit it this to the fact that I wore a bowling shirt. You gotta dress the part. Plus, in true Big Lebowski fashion, I consumed White Russians. Also, I find that the more of an ass I make of myself the better I do. Most of my strikes came when I ended up in a weird sort of airplane/crane hybrid stance.

6. I must be so much more out of shape then I think I am because an hour into it I was sweating like it was my job and already starting to feel a blister form on my right big toe. Pathetic!

7. There was absolutely no security with the bowling shoes. Granted, they were half neon yellow and half neon orange. But seriously, in my more morally ambiguous and less germaphobic youth I totally would have ended up with a pair of bowling shoes at the end of the night. Do people not do that anymore or do they have tracker chips in them? Can you imagine the embarrassment of being tracked down the my Bowling Shoes Retrieval Task Force?

8. That rug really tied the room together.

A Case of Cerebral Flatulence

2010-01-18T18:01:00.000-05:00

There is a water filter in my basement that filters the water for the whole house. Once in a blue moon it needs to be changed. It's not a very difficult thing to do. This is the story about how two reasonably intelligent people managed to turn it into a circus.

To begin, it was Huppy who decided it was time to change the filter. I was in another room and I could hear her steadily growing frustration level. It seems there's a knob at the top of the filter that allows you to bypass it. This is helpful when taking the filter out so that the only water that comes out is that just sitting inside the filter itself. This knob was not submitting to her efforts to turn it to bypass so she turned the water off at the knobs on the water pipes above it instead. This is where I wandered in to see if a fresh set of hands (or, to be honest, a bit of cheerful optimism) could make some headway. As she unscrewed the filter, water started spraying out a little. This wasn't necessarily worrisome as we knew that there would be some water already in the pipes. Well, I decided (this was my decision and my decision alone, world) that the thing to do would be to just go ahead and unscrew the filter all the way. My theory was that, like a bottle of soda, once the pressure was relieved the water in there would fall into the bucket underneath the filter and we could proceed. This is not even close to what happened. Instead, the water started spraying out in all directions more agressively and then when I made that final turn it blew the filter housing off and a gush of arctic water came pouring out with absolutely no intention of stopping. Obviously I tried to put the filter back on immediately. This proved to be a challenge due to the sheer force of the water I was pushing against and the fact that it was so cold my hands were already numb and there were shooting pains going up my arms. Did I mention this frigid water was going everywhere? At this point in my story there was a lot of shouting happening. I distinctly remember actually saying the words, "Oh my God, what have I done?". Prior to this event I would have classified that statement as something that is only said in books or movies and not by actual people. I won't keep you in suspense, I did finally manage to get the damned thing back on but not until the water had soaked everything within 5 feet of the filter (including me) and a little o-ring type seal had been carried off in the deluge. The absence of the seal meant that once the filter housing was tightened again there was still a fine mist spraying out. It was a vast improvement, though, so we took a moment to regroup. Oh, hey! There's the shutoff valve! I turned it, the fine mist turned into a fine trickle, and all was right with the world. Except, of course, the shitload of water dripping off of everything.

Lest you think we are completely inept let me add a few notes.

1. The utility closet has no light in it so all activities are done by the light of a flashlight.
2. The big, monster flashlight is not where it is supposed to be so we had to resort to the small crappy one that only allows you to see about 6 square inches at a time.
3. The shutoff valves that were originally turned off were at eye level are bringht red.
4. The shutoff valve that actually worked was gross, dusty, rusty, and located at ankle level.
5. I should not try to help.

On the upside, Huppy's mood improved dramatically when the situation went from "Big strong Huppy is too weak to turn the damned knob" to "Maia made a huge mess (again)". All is as it should be.

It Wasn't Me! (For A Change)

2010-01-07T00:39:00.001-05:00

I want to tell you all about my experience at the spa the other day. It was awesome! Don't stop reading - I do have a story to tell, I'm not just gloating.

My mother is visiting from Iowa so we've been doing fun things this week like seeing Sherlock Holmes at the premium cinema (has booze and food), seeing Wicked, eating lots of good food, and a 90 minute massage at a day spa nearby. I decided that since I'm still kind of banged up from the pajama pant incident I would try a hot stone massage since that involves less squeezing and pressing.

Let me just say that my mind is my own worst enemy most of the time. I have to read a book or do a crossword puzzle before sleeping in order to tire it out and distract it with something to chew one while I drift off. So while I love love love going to the spa and getting a massage, I never manage to relax into it all the way because my damn brain won't shut off.

Here are some of the things the voices in my head say to me:

In the locker room -

"OK, time to put on the robe. I love these robes. So big and roomy! Wait, are you naked? What are you doing? Holy crap, you are not wearing any clothes under this tiny tiny robe! You're supposed to keep your underwear on, you raging perv!"

I press on because you are, in fact, expected to be naked under the robe and I know this.

On the table -

"Did you remember to moisturize? You know your tattoos look ashy when you don't. Nice job, this poor person has to rub your ashy tattoos. Wait, did you eat? You're not supposed to eat! Oh my God, you ate today. How could you eat! What if you have gas? Don't think about! If you think about it, it will come. You're still thinking about it! Was that a gurgle? I think you gurgled! STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS! Don't clench your butt, they'll see you. Relax but not to much because you know. The thing you don't want to think about will happen. What is this music? Are those seagulls? Who thinks seagulls are relaxing? This is so weird. Ooh, rainforest, that's better. A trip to the rainforest would be cool. No it wouldn't, you hate heat. Feet! Do not flinch. This. Does. Not. Tickle. Is this towel covering me? I don't feel super covered. What if I'm not. What's hanging out? Something's hanging out I know it. Is that a breeze? Did her boobs just hit my head? I think they did. Yup, there it was again. Should I apologize? That's stupid, she hit me with her boobs, I didn't head butt them. I wonder what they think about this whole time. I would count or recite poetry my head, I think. Not you wouldn't, dumbass. If that was true that's what you'd be doing right now instead of worrying about whether or not you're about to fa -STOP. Do not speak its name. OK, time to flip over. Face down now. I wish I had one of these tables at home. I would totally sleep on my stomach of I had this face holder thingy. I love this thing. Soooo relaxing. Hey! You're drooling! Could you be grosser? What if that fell on her shoe? Are those Crocs? I don't care what people think, those things are comfy. Those holes look different. They must be fake Crocs. Mock Crocs! Good one, me. Focus! You almost drooled again. Man, I really need one of these tables. I wonder how much they cost. Remember that movie Love At First Bite? Was that George Hamilton? I think so. Wait, what? We're done? Oh man, I was just getting sleepy!"

So I can't fully relax because I'm too busy worrying that I'm embarrassing myself or about to embarrass myself. Well, friends I have good news. I now have an embarrassment credit! While I was laying there doing my whole routine in my head the most wonderful thing happened. Truly, truly wonderful.

My massage therapist farted.

This, of course, derailed my internal monologue to a desperate struggle not to react in any way, shape, or form. It was not easy because, while I am an adult, there is something about being buck naked that automatically puts hysteria a few steps closer to happening and if you add a fart into the mix...I'm lucky I didn't have a stroke for as hard as I was trying not to react. But I did it. Which means I totally have a freebie coming.

WIN!

Minivans Are Tangible Evidence of Evil

2009-12-30T12:56:00.002-05:00

Well, I've got some time to kill so let's make a blog entry, shall we? I am having my CPAP machine adjusted (a task that I am not trusted to do on my own) and the respiratory therapist is slated to arrive here between 11 and 1 to do this 30 second task. I really wish I could remember if I chose 11 to 1 over some other time slot because if I did I need to go give myself a swirly or something because this is crap (vs cpap - ha!). I'm hungry and I want to leave my house. So, back to blogging:

The title to this entry is a bumper sticker that I saw many years ago and may or may not have purchased. The car that I covered in stickers is now living out its golden years in New Orleans with Andy so I can't go outside and confirm if that one is on there or not. Regardless, at the time I thought it was perfect and I kind of still do. I have no doubt that there are people reading this who drive a minivan so let's just say I'm not talking about you. (I might be but let's just say I'm not) Here are some things that I don't understand about my fellow drivers:

1. I have driven many minivans over the years. I will admit that they are not the easiest to back up and be fully confident that you are seeing everything behind you. Still, other than that, they are no harder or easier to drive than any other vehicle commonly found on the roads. So why is it that so many people drive them as if they have no freaking idea how to do it. They change lanes too soon after passing because the minivan is longer than they expect, they park like ass clowns because the minivan is wider than they expect, and they drive like frickin' Dale Jr. because apparently the engine is more powerful then they expect. Is there too much shit happening inside the van to be paying full attention to what's going on outside? I'm aware that some people in SUV's have this same difficulty but what makes it so galling in minivans is what happens after they just ran a stop sign and pulled out in front of you. You know what happens. They give you the look like you are some kind of assassin sent from the future to single-mindedly try to kill their precious children. SUV people will also pull out in front of you or cut you off but the difference is that at no point will they even acknowledge that something bad almost just happened.

2. What is up with people's obsession with backing into parking spaces? I feel like this is getting more prevalent lately. I can't figure out the benefit of doing this. They're trading the process of backing out of a parking space for backing into one so there's no less driving in reverse. In fact, it's easier to back out into a whole parking lot lane than it is to back into a single parking space so overall it's more work. For the same reason it's not saving time because it's quicker to back out then to back in. So...I don't get it. There's only one reasonable explanation in my mind: they're planning on robbing the place because that's how getaway drivers park.

3. Truck nuts. Not OK. Ever. They actually make me sad for the driver who is clearly so profoundly insecure and worried that someone somewhere might think that his lifted diesel Dodge Ram is a female truck that he had to attach male genitalia to it. I'm not even going to get into the insanity of assigning a gender to your vehicle (mostly because I do it). I wonder if there is some sort of analogous feminizing car accessory out there...like boobs that go on the grill. I'd look it up but I'm resolving to try to learn at least a few new wholesome things before I add to my already considerable repertoire of inappropriate knowledge.

4. Am I the only one who pays attention when moving from an offramp to a new highway to whether or not there is a merge lane? There's one like this near the mall here and almost every time I take the exit when I get to the bottom of the ramp there is a car stopped at the bottom watching the other cars go by. The problem here is that there is a merge lane so the idea is to keep going, use that blinker and merge into the traffic. Easy peasey. I'm pretty sure it's a standard thing in road design. I've seen it before lots of times, I swear. If you're one of those people be sure to look in your rear view mirror. If you see a person in an orange Jeep waving their arms and yelling, that's me. If you don't read lips, I'm saying "You get your own lane, you funky idiom!"

I want to share one thing with you all before I go. I've come up with an expression to describe when people are operating their vehicles in an unsafe or obnoxious manner. Feel free to use it but if it gains worldwide popularity be sure to remember you heard it here first. Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you....

Drivin' Douche

How The Mai-ty Have Fallen

2009-12-28T21:37:00.005-05:00

I hope everyone had a nice holiday (or just a nice last week of December if that's what it was to you). Mine has been, until about 30 minutes ago, full of personal triumph. Let me start with the ways in which I have been kicking ass lately:

1. I went to Maine for Christmas with Jenn Hupp (hereafter to be referred to as Huppy because, really, how can you not?) to hang out with her brother's family. In an unusual plot twist, I did not get a cold while I was there nor have a I gotten sick since I returned. My joy is tempered by the fact that Huppy got sick instead. Still, woot!

2. I actually spent all day today working on lesson plans and syllabi for my Spring 2010 classes. I know, right? This sudden ability to focus prior to the last minute comes from the fact that I have agreed to teach six classes in the spring (full time is 3 or 4 classes).

3. For years I have made something called peanut butter popcorn (an awesome treat I learned from my Grandma Kelley). It tastes so good but I tend to make a mess when I make it. Today, however, the fog parted and I had the epiphany that I could do everything I needed to do in the microwave eliminating a lot of the mess. Yes, I am 38 and it is late 2009 and I just frickin' figured out how useful my microwave can be.

These things have made me feel like I'm doing all right, navigating through the world, kicking ass, taking names.

Then a little while ago I stood up from the couch to go check out a cat-related noise and I somehow managed to get my right foot tangled up inside my left pajama pant leg while in mid-stride. This had the effect of hogtying my feet together and I pitched forward sprawling on the floor missing a doorway by inches. I mean seriously, I've been doing so well and suddenly I can't trust myself to walk and wear pants at the same time? For frick's sake!

Huppy witnessed this incident in its entirety and once I was vertical again we had this conversation:

Huppy: "You weren't actually that close to hitting the doorframe. You did some traveling while you were writhing around."
Me: "Oh, that's good. I mean, it would have been fine either way. I would have used my catlike reflexes to keep from getting brained."
Huppy: "Really. And where were those catlike reflexes when you were trying to walk across the room?"
Me: "Uh..."

Tomorrow my goals are to do more lesson plans, wear my clothes right-side out, and to not fall down. And no fires!

Update: It's now been 24 hours and one of my toes is purple. Again, how is it that I can't successfully walk and wear pants at the same time. I've had a TON of practice!

Menace II Society

2009-12-18T21:01:00.003-05:00

I hope that someday I can make this blog into a place where I weigh in on deep issues, make astute observations, perhaps give my readers a new perspective on something...

Today is not that day. Instead I'm going to tell you (for not the first and certainly not the last time) a story about how I made an ass of myself today. Ready?

This is finals week where I work. This means I have a ton of grading to do. Unfortunately I am almost incapable of grading at home. Home has too many things to do other than grading so I typically go to a restaurant, park myself there, and tip heavily. Tonight I decided to try a local Thai restaurant. It's a pretty small place and a little family was at the only four-top so I sat at a little two-top, placed my order and started to get organized. While I was separating the finals into a stack for each of the three versions, I got a whiff of someone toasting marshmallows. Despite the fact that I hadn't gotten my dinner I immediately started fantasizing about ordering whatever it was that smelled like roasted marshmallows. Here's a neat tidbit: If you put your napkin on top of a candle it ignites and smells like smores. Yup, in the midst of all of my organizing I had set stuff on top of the burning candle at my table. By the time I realized what was going on the napkin was pretty well engulfed so I picked it up and walked toward the bar to ask for a glass of water. One of the other customers was nice enough to let me extinguish it in her ice water.

Take a moment and imagine how mortifying it was to set my napkin on fire and have to douse it in someone else's water.

I'll wait.

OK, now try to imagine how extra mortifying it is, after the napkin fire/dousing experience, to return to the table and discover that the final exams were now on fire. Seriously. I'm not sure it's possible for me to be a bigger horse's ass. Fortunately, copier type paper doesn't burn nearly as fast as a paper napkin so I was able to bat this one out with my hand. At this point I blew out the candle, put all my grading stuff away, ate my food, and left.

I don't think I'm going to do any more grading tonight.

So You Think You Can Function

2009-12-16T23:01:00.001-05:00

I was watching the season finale of So You Can Think You Can Dance this evening and needed to go to another room to grab some paper. As I stood up the showed a clip from a Bollywood performance and since those are my favorites I stopped for a moment to do a little dance. Naturally, I was asked what on earth I was doing so I said I was dancing and that if I wanted to I could do what they were doing on the TV. Considering the amount of flipping and leaping that was going on I had to say this with a hefty amount of confidence and bravado. Sure, I can do that I just don't feel like it. After making this pronouncement I turned and walked right into door.

If anyone asks how I got the bruise I'm going to tell them I was dancing.

Mmmm...that's some good foot!

2009-12-12T18:45:00.000-05:00

So I called my friend Maureen Friday afternoon to make plans to get together that evening. Before we could get very far, though, the person she was meeting showed up and she told me she'd call me back in a few minutes. No problemo. I'll pause here and let people know that when I'm home alone for a while I tend to get a little squirrelly. About ten minutes later my phone rang and it said "Private Caller" on the caller ID. Based on Maureen's profession, having a blocked number is very reasonable. So I answered the phone singing a variation of Tina Turner's "Private Dancer" (You're my private caller, a caller who's money, you'll call who wa-ant to...) and I got this: "Um, is Maia Kelley there?" Craaaaaaaaap! It was my doctor's office calling to confirm an appointment for next Tuesday. When I get there I fully expect to be handed a referral for mental health services.

I might take it.

A Open Letter to Students Everywhere

2009-12-07T19:38:00.002-05:00

Dear Students,

I have a very simple message for all of you from your teachers. We can see you. Based on my years of teaching experience, I can only conclude that you don’t realize we can see you. Is it TV? Do you think there’s a piece of one-way glass between us like on the detective shows. In that case, you must think us deranged as we roam the front of the room happily nattering away at what we think is a big ass mirror. No, that’s not it? OK, then perhaps you think we’re just not that swift. We’re too dim to notice the things you do while we teach. I don’t know if I’d hang my hat on that theory either, students, because if that’s how slow you think your teachers are, what does it say about you? I know, I know, get to the point, you gas bag. Fine. Here’s what students need to know:

When you sit in the back of the classroom and stealthily mine for nose gold, I can see you. Yes, you’re very clever sitting in the back row so the other students have their backs to you and can’t see this activity. But I can. Every time. You don’t realize I can see you because you’re too busy sliding your eyes sideways to make sure no one near you can catch you in their peripheral vision. Please stop. Please.
Those desks at which you sit? They don’t have any fronts or sides, just tops. So while YOU might not be able to see your own hand digging around to get at that persistent itch you so very clearly have, I can see it just fine. Hey, everybody has had to do the shimmy a few times in their life when struck by a wedgie or some other personal discomfort while in public. But seriously, some of you folks have this happen waaaay too often. I’d like to refer you to my blog on odors and its related suggestions on hygiene. And by “folks” I mean boys and men. Despite the fact that we are subjected to commercials on the topic of feminine itch I have never seen a female student do this.
Guess what! I have a phone too. I even know how to send text messages! I know! And I'm so OLD! This means I know what it looks like when you do it while I’m teaching. When a person is bent over using both hands to fiddle in their laps with something just out of sight they are either texting or about to get arrested for public indecency. It's cool , though, I can respect your decision to place text messaging above paying attention in my class. I’ll assume that you will in turn respect my decision to rank sleeping in tomorrow morning above meeting with you in my office to help you learn the material that I was teaching while you were texting.
Finally, here’s one of the ways I know you’re trying to cheat on a test. No one takes a test and only looks at their own paper and nowhere else. Sometimes people stare ahead vacantly and sometimes they look up at the ceiling or down at the floor. Want to know where they don’t look? They don’t look at me. The only reason a student will repeatedly look at me during a test is to see if I’m looking at them. And I am. Sure, eventually I might not be looking somewhere else when they check but by that point I’m already aware of their intentions. So, be my guest and copy that answer from your neighbor. This is not my first rodeo, boys and girls, and I never give people who sit next to each other the same version of the test.

I know this seems like a lot of information but it really does all boil down to this simple message: I. Can. See. You. Thank you for your attention in this matter, students. It feels good to get this information out there.

Sincerely,
Your Math Prof

P.S. Yes, this will be on the test. Duh.

Por Favor

2009-11-28T20:32:00.001-05:00

I spent some time on the treadmill today trying to counteract some of the bad choices I've made over this very delicious Thanksgiving weekend. While doing so I noticed a sharp pain in my right big toe. It seems that I might be developing a bunion. Yes, a bunion. What. The. Hell.

I need a favor from anyone reading this. If at any time I start to refer to my pants as slacks or my couch as a davenport I freely give any and all of you permission to stage an intervention. Please.

In Your Facebook

2009-11-25T12:43:00.001-05:00

I'm on Facebook a lot, I admit it. I'm on my computer a lot in the evenings and therefore it is pretty easy to keep a Facebook tab open and periodically go there and click Home to see what's what. I love watching TV with my laptop on so that I can look people up on IMDB and figure out where I've seen them before.

Back to Facebook, though. Here are some comments based on my Facebook journey thus far:

1. I don't friend request people lightly. Because of this, I tend to deliberate before pushing that button. Sometimes I deliberate for a while. I've realized, though, that the downside to this is that there are two situations where that Add As A Friend button appears. The first (and most obvious) is when you have never requested the person as a friend. The second (and more insidious) is when you have requested them to be your friend and they ignored your request. So now I find myself wondering if I request so-and-so as a friend will they be logging in next time and thinking that I'm some kind of psycho who can't take a hint. I would love to respect their decision if I could be sure that a decision has been made. I'm tempted to start keeping a log of which requests are pending but that in itself sounds like a totally psycho thing to do. I seriously do not want to think this much about this.

2. Does anyone else have a FB friend who uses their account solely to recruit others to their pyramid scheme? (Call it what you want but if you recruit me to recruit others and the more we recruit the more money we make without lifting a finger, as a professional mathematician I can say definitively that that ain't a rectangle.) Now I don't mind if people put little blurbs up about their home business or request help for a charity drive (I've done the latter) because to do so is a smart use of social networking. However, if you friend people under the guise of being long lost pals and then inundate their new feed with exhortations of the the wonderful business opportunity you have for them, you are sleezy.

3. I play Scrabble and Wordscraper (a Scrabble knockoff) on FB. I understand how these games work. I don't understand the Mafia Wars/Farmville/Fish Tank style games. I tried Mafia Wars and from what I could tell you don't actually need skills you just need to be logged in all the time. Perhaps there were subtleties that I missed but it seemed like all I had to do to advance was to log in and click a button a bunch of times and convince others that this is fun so they'll do it too. Come to think of it, this sounds a whole lot like a pyramid scheme too. One where you don't actually make any real world money which makes it all the more unfathomable. Like patchouli there has got to be an appeal that I am fundamentally incapable of appreciating. If you enjoy it, though, I wish you the best of luck with your wise guys/crops/fish.

4. I also don't understand the snowball fight style game. Is it even a game? I'm not sure what it is. There are several for every holiday and season. Are they cute? They must be. I don't really get cute. OK, that's not entirely true. Baby animals are cute and make me make noises like "Awwww" and "Ooooh". (Oddly, I don't find baby people anywhere near as cute as baby animals but that's a WHOLE other blog). Anyway, if you send me a request for any of these things, I thank you. First I thank you because you thought of me (or clicked the boxes that chooses your whole friend list) and second I thank you because it gives me the chance to block the application which saves me some time later.

5. I'd like to pause here and say I have very smart, funny, insightful FB friends and I'm glad you guys are out there because you're way more interesting than the TV shows that I have on when I'm lurking on FB. Except for Glee. You guys are going to have to really up your game to top Glee.

6. I don't have any students as friends. It's not that I am worried about what they would learn about me because I'm pretty careful about what I put out there. It's more that I've learned the absolutely most horrifying things about my students through FB. Mark my words, some of these kids or going to have problems if they ever have an employer who bothers to do an internet search (and a lot of them do). What they seem to not understand is that it's not just what they post that's seen it's what their friends post also. Considering how prevalent this is, though, I almost wonder if there will come a time when it no longer matters because it will be so hard to find someone who doesn't have compromising information out there.

OK, that's it for now. I have to go see what's up on Facebook.

Knowing Is Half The Battle

2009-11-24T21:38:00.001-05:00

Well, here's a partial answer to my question in my original post.

What's That Mean?

2009-11-23T18:37:00.002-05:00

In my last post I mentioned the Always Clean Wipes and quoted a little bit of marketing text for them. This got me thinking about some of the euphemisms that have been created by marketing departments for (usually) horrifying things so they can been talked about without without actually talking about them. Some cases in point:

Massengil came up with the concept of feeling "not so fresh down there". Of course, those old enough to remember the commercial also know that this was used as part of a mother-daughter conversation about swamp crotch. Has anyone out there actually had a conversation with their mother or daughter about this topic? No, they have not. Do you know how I know? Because if they did both parties would have died of acute embarrassment and they would not be reading this blog.

How about "erectile dysfuntion" or "natural male enhancement" instead of "no boner" and "boner pills". Erectile dysfunction sounds dignified and natural male enhancement sounds like something that should make you run faster. (In reality, I imagine it probably impedes running).

Charmin has put cartoon bears to excellent use in order to sell us their toilet paper. Somehow they've managed to tell us on how it will prevent you from actually touching your own waste and how it doesn't leave pieces of TP stuck to your bum.

There are others but my all time favorite is from the Alli literature. Alli is a pill that allegedly promotes weight loss by blocking the absorption of fat in foods. Since the fat isn't being absorbed it stays in the pipeline, if you will, until it reaches the other end of its journey. As such, the makers of Alli want to make sure people are aware of what they call "treatment effects". Know what this is a euphemism for? You'll never guess. It sounds so innocuous, doesn't it? Well, if you're taking Alli and you're happily getting thorough your day and you suddenly realize that you just crapped your pants you, my friend, have just experienced a treatment effect. Don't worry, though, if you've read your literature before popping these pills then you know the makers of Alli have got your back. They suggest that new Alli users wear dark pants. See? No problem.

On that note, I leave you with a classic SNL moment.

Bus Bus Magic Bus

2009-11-23T17:22:00.003-05:00

I know it's been a while. I won't flatter myself into thinking that anyone is paying attention but if you are, I'm sorry.

Where to start? I'll start with the bus. Part of my commute to and from work involves a ride on a Boston city bus. Since Boston is a fairly heavily populated place the busses are usually crowded enough that all the seats are taken and I have to ride standing. Well, I was waiting at my usual bus stop at my usual time and flagged down a bus in my usual way. When I got on the bus realized that I was absolutely positively the only passenger. Since I have an active interior life (I play pretend in my head a lot) I immediately started mentally shuffling through scenarios as to how this could have happened. The idea that the bus driver had just come on duty was discarded as being too boring. I imagined reading in the paper about how a Boston city bus driver had been killed and was being lauded postmortem as one of the most dedicated drivers they'd ever had and then seeing the picture and realizing that it was my driver and he'd been killed YESTERDAY. Then I moved on to how I'm being secretly filmed and the driver was about to start going off his route and how politely and respectfully I handle the situation would later be dissected on some evening news program. I finally settled on pretending that I was being chauffeured in my own personal big ass bus and relaxed ready to enjoy the ride. Then I saw this:

For those of you in the know this is a wrapper from something called Always Clean. It's a wipe that comes with a certain brand of feminine product (and I'm quoting the website here) "restore that shower clean feeling with every change". Now I don't want to get into a discussion on this wipe's raison d'etre. I do want to point out, though, that the intersection of the set of uses for this wipe and the set of things one does on a city bus in EMPTY. There is no overlap. None.

So, it turns out, the real reason I was alone on what should have been a crowded city bus was that somebody violated an unspoken rule of decorum and everyone fled the bus in horror. That, or it was a ghost-driven bus. I haven't given up on that one either.

She (Didn't) Bop

2009-11-12T21:33:00.001-05:00

I had to drive in to work today (normally I take the train) so I was able to have some much needed sing-a-long time in the car. The first 40 minutes of the trip are all highway and then last 10 are on Boston streets. What this means is that by the time I was close to work I was one with the music. So much so that I realized at a red light that the state trooper next to me was actually laughing at me. This was embarrassing enough until I realized that I'd been singing along to Prince's "Kiss". Take a moment and imagine yourself singing along to that song.

Go on, picture it. I'll wait.

OK. What kind of faces were you making? Exactly. I think I might be very lucky that this guy didn't pull me over for having Bluetooth sex or something.

Also, I learned on the drive home that the answer to the question WWJD is apparently "cut people off and then give them the finger". I would not have guessed that.

Pour Some Shook Up Ramen

2009-11-11T17:11:00.001-05:00

I bought some candy the other day for the purpose of smuggling it into the movies. (I'm not a millionaire, people! I can't afford those high flyin' movie candy prices.) I didn't eat all my candy that night (I'm obviously not well) and as a result discovered a full box of Sugar Babies in my backpack today while I was running errands.

Sugar Babies.

Holy crap, how the hell did I forget about how AWESOME Sugar Babies are? Needless to say I ate the whole box while driving from place to place today. I think it's possible that I might have dropped two of them in the car. I can't find them because it's a cosmic rule that they will remain invisible until at least one summer has passed and they have become one with the carpet in my car. Still. TOTALLY WORTH IT. I wish I had more. Right now. I want to be chewing on their teeth-pulling gritty caramelly goodness while I type. I want to put them on my cereal. I want to shove my hands into a vat of them and then throw them into the air while laughing giddily. I want to marry them but we won't reproduce because then it would be Babies having babies and this has gotten weird enough already.

Ahem. So yeah, lots of sugar today.

Insane In The Membrane

2009-11-10T16:27:00.001-05:00

Since I have already used this forum to complain about my fellow humans and their peccadillos and will definitely do so again in the future, I thought it only fair that I focus on my own shortcomings at least once.

I'm pretty sure that I might end up being crazy someday. Possibly soon. If I'm lucky I might be able to get away with being merely eccentric. Here's why:

1. I listen to my iPod a lot when I'm going to and from work. If the weather is nice I'll walk to the train station rather than taking the bus. Provided, of course, that I don't have a full bladder, haven't left my office too late, and am not wearing unfriendly pants. (The topic of unfriendly pants is a whole other blog post, I assure you.) Anyway, I have a really hard time not dancing to the music when I'm walking down the street or standing around waiting for a train. I'm not talking head bobbing, toe tapping, or even that weird thing where people put their hand to the side of their head and wince like the music is making them simultaneously deaf and incontinent. No, I mean dance. Things like that hop to the side thing that Vanilla Ice does in the "Ice Ice Baby" video or dancing down the street waving my arms like they do in Hairspray. You may be thinking I'm silly because music makes lots of people want to dance. Duh, it's music. My problem is that I'm not sure I'm always going to refrain from busting out some moves. I've caught myself several times now aaaalmost letting loose and it worries me. The hardest song to walk normally to is "Stayin' Alive" (ah ah ah ah stayin' aliiiiiiiiiiive). That song puts me on auto-strut. So someday I might give in to my compulsions and reenact the "If I Were A Rich Man" scene from Fiddler and I guess we'll see what happens.

2. I have three cats. No one who voluntarily shares space with these aloof yet needy barf machines is completely sane. That said, I'm still very fond of them. Dogs are fine, but I don't trust unconditional love. The love of a cat makes more sense to me as it is based more on the barter system. You feed me, I let you pet me. You give me water, I purr for you. You scratch me under the chin, I barf on the carpet (never the hard floors). I never said it was a perfect system.

3. Twice this summer I came back from running errands and discovered that my shirt was on inside out. This wouldn't be so disconcerting if the shirts in both cases weren't button-up collared shirts. Accidentally wearing your t-shirt inside out is for rookies. The closest I came to realizing what I'd done was when I tried to stow a pen and thought, "Huh, I thought this shirt had a pocket." And then, like the mercury from a busted thermometer, that thought went slithering out of my fingers and I continued to roam the word looking like a crazy person.

4. I am 38 years old and if someone plays peek-a-boo with me I still laugh like I'm a a toddler. Belly laughs. That can't be OK.

5. One of my celebrity crushes is Gene Wilder. Case closed.

The Nose Knows

2009-11-04T18:46:00.000-05:00

Two posts in one day! Aren't you lucky?

This is a topic that has already been touched on by Librarian Lyssa in her excellent blog but it's one near and dear to my heart (nose) so I'll say my piece too.

I never really thought about it before but after almost 40 years on the planet I just have to wonder if not everyone smells things to the degree that I do. As a consequence, I have a couple of things to say:

1. For the love of all that is holy, please, please, please do not use patchouli. Anywhere. Ever. It smells like dead things in an attic. Dead things filled with hate. Patchouli is like a Stephen King book for my nose. I have a 45 minute train ride to work in the morning and I like to listen to my iPod, close my eyes, and doze. Thanks to the patchouli wearer on this morning's ride every time I closed my eyes I imagined a mummy was shambling down the aisle to get me. If someone who likes patchouli can explain to me what it smells like to them, I would love to know.

2. I work at a college. In addition to buildings and grass we have some trees. Thanks to all the construction that has happened on campus some trees have been moved or removed altogether. One tree in particular, however, has survived all the changes. What is notable about this tree is that every fall it grows balls and suddenly starts emitting this...odor. Imagine feet made out of cheese left in a hot car on a summer day. Then someone gets in the car, is so grossed out by the smell that they vomit in the car, and then they leave the car in the sun for a while longer. Thanks to Google, I'm pretty sure that the tree is a ginko. Here's my beef: who on earth chose to plant this tree in the middle of an urban college campus? This one isn't just me - watching the transformation take place on students' faces as the enter the Stink Zone is priceless. Anyway, next time I'm interviewing for a job and they ask me if I have any questions I think I'll ask them if there are any ginko trees nearby.

3. I think by the time people are old enough to go to college they should also understand the importance of washing their hair. College boys, I am talking to you. Unwashed hair is unsightly (YES, the rest of the world can tell even if you can't) and smelly. These folks have access to showers, I know it. It makes no sense to me that someone would sabotage their prime hooking-up years like this.

OK, I'm done. At ease.

From Me To You

2009-11-04T18:29:00.000-05:00

I like learning new things. Sometimes I learn things that are awesome. Sometimes I learn things that are horrifying. I want to share with you the one thing that I have learned that is simultaneously fantastic and horrible to an equal and high degree.

Ready?

In 2004 the NY Times had an article about NYC sanitation workers and their surprisingly large pool of sanitation-related slang. The article can be found here. From this article I learned what they call "disco rice". Think about what that might be and then go here to find out.

See what I mean? Awesome and horrifying. At the same time.

P.S. If you read the article, my other favorite expression from it is "urban whitefish".

And now you know it too. This is my gift to you. You. Are. Welcome.

Happy Monday!

2009-11-02T07:46:00.001-05:00

On my train ride in to work today I saw a kid (probably between 16 - 20) who had the neck of his shirt (possibly a turtleneck) pulled up over his nose and mouth. He was holding it there by pinching the shirt to his nose. I figured at first that the guy next to him was smelly but the nose and mouth stayed covered after Possibly Smelly Guy got up. So then I figured he was fearful of germs. You know, swine flu and all that. When I got up to leave the train I saw that the part of his black shirt that he's been using as a germ filter was covered in shiny snot trails presumably from spending an hour pinching his nose with it.

As unpleasant a way that was to start my day, I have a feeling that kid's day got a lot worse when he showed up to school covered in nostril juice.

Halloween Memories

2009-11-01T14:52:00.000-05:00

I remember one Halloween where I dressed up as a murder victim. A swarthy stocking cap wearing murder victim. I'm not sure why I wanted a beard and a stocking cap but I apparently did. Anyway, my mom helped me make it so that the handle of a plastic knife was sticking out of my chest and the rest of the knife came out of my back. There was blood everywhere. It was awesome. I was so proud of that costume and couldn't wait to get out on the streets to wow the neighbors with my gory goodness. What a charming childhood memory, right? Well...

Does any one out there have a younger sibling that is preternaturally cute? Yeah, me too and I had to take her with me trick or treating. So here's how it went:

Neighbor Lady: "Well, hello! What have we got here?"

Maia & Liv: "Trick or treat!"

Neighbor Lady: "

What an adorable mouse! Oh, and a hobo."

Liv: " Thank you."

Maia: "I'm not a hobo. I've been stabbed."

Neighbor Lady: "Honey, come to the door! You have to see this mouse!"

Neighbor Lady's Husband: "Well, ha ha! Isn't that something! I bet you'd rather have cheese instead of candy!"

Liv: (laughs. cutely

, of course)

Neighbor Lady: "Don't let the hobo steal your candy!"

Maia: "I'm not a...thank you for the candy."

Sigh.

Also, I'd like to make a few comments about adult costumes. First, pimp and ho costumes are played out

. Next, why is it that as far as I can tell the only pre-made adult costume for women that is not a whore costume with devil/angel/maid/doctor accessories is the cow costume. You know the one I'm talking about it. How do those design meetings go?

Designer 1: "How about a firefighter costume for women?"

Designer 2:

"Great idea, Designer 1! How should it look?"

Designer 1: "I'm thinking a form-fitting, low cut fire coat, a short skirt, some fishnets - red - and um, ... some high heel rubber boots."

Designer 2: "Dude, I think you nailed it. That totally sounds like a firefighter"

Designer 1: "Yeah, chicks are gonna love it."

Designer 2: "What about the fat chicks?"

Designer 1: "I dunno, I guess we could make a cow costume."

That's all for now. At ease.

Northwest Nap

2009-10-30T16:52:00.000-04:00

Over the course of this day I have thought about several things upon which I could pontificate in this blog. Now that I'm home and have a few minutes to write, I can't remember a damned thing. So, for inspiration, I went to www.urbandictionary.com and picked one of the newest words added. A Northwest Nap is a sleep deep enough where you aren't disturbed by irritations like the phone, your kids, the doorbell, air traffic control, the Air Force, stuff like that.

OK, I've been flying on planes since I was a wee slip of a thing. I had no fear of flying

until I was studying overseas in college and flew several times on domestic Chinese airlines. Why would this instill a fear of flying? Imagine a church bus. You know, the kind that has wheels that kind of wobble and trails a sickly cloud of greasy smoke? The kind that has been used to the point of exhaustion by the school systems before being sold at auction to Our Lady of Perpetual Incontinence? Well, slap some wings on it and pipe some jangly Chinese music through the speakers and you have yourself an example of Air China's planes. I actually saw smoke coming off the wing on one of our flights. I swear. No one else cared! I felt like William Shatner (and later John Lithgow) in the Twilight Zone. When I got home from Asia I joined the ranks of those who need to get completely blistered in order to fly. Eventually I got smart and asked by doctor for some chill pills instead of getting bombed every time I walk into an airport.

My point? Of all the horrible images that my brain will throw up

onto my interior movie screen AT NO POINT did I imagine that BOTH pilots are asleep or drunk or having sex or wha

tever the hell was going on with that Northwest flight. What the hell? That shit would not ha

ve happened before 9/11 and the advent of those bank vault style cockpit doors. Remember when you could see the pilots? You know what? The terrorists have won. Assholes.

Check Baby Check Baby 1 2 3...

2009-10-29T11:09:00.000-04:00

I'm starting this blog because I would rather create a blog that only ever had one entry, thus clogging up the internets with more useless crap, then get off the couch and grade papers. I've always said I'd do anything (once) for a t-shirt and I guess I'll also do anything to avoid grading Applied Math projects. They have to write things. I don't mind grading math. It hurts me deep inside to have to grade something written. I don't know if they phone in their writing skills because the project is for a math class or if they really do have that much trouble stringing a few paragraphs together. Either way, I do not look forward to grading these projects.

Also, the name of the blog comes from a session of brainstorming cool band names. I think it came from a real life experience from when I lived in SC or VA.

So, how do people get rid of their old porn? Like the internet, are our landfills 95% porn? There are only so many younger brothers around to inherit so it has to go somewhere. This is going to bother me now.