It's Not A Fat Roll, It's Side Cleavage.

I've gotten fat. Well, my friends still tell me I'm not fat, but they say that because they're my friends, and possibly because they're afraid I'll eat them. But either way, I now weigh two pounds more than I did when Ryan was born and have decided to do something about it. So I made Tom buy me excercise equipment. The conversation went something like this:

ME: Remember when I asked what you'd do if I ever got fat?

TOM: Yeah. . .

ME: And you said you'd buy me a treadmill and refuse me affection?

TOM: Well that's not exactly what I said but, yeah. . .

ME: WHERE THE HELL IS MY DAMNED TREADMILL?? YOU OWE ME!!!


So, I got my machine. Not a treadmill, since I have bad knees, but close. I got a Tony Little Gazelle. So now I can swing my legs back and forth with no semblance of coordination until I am a thin and desirable woman. Well, a worn out and sore woman, anyway. But I am doing the Gazelle thing for an hour a day (for the most part) and am waiting for the pounds to melt away. They are not melting. I fear they are unable to melt. I also fear they are reproducing. The next step is diet, which I dread. I don't eat much, but I drink a lot of Mountain Dew. I read the can; Mountain Dew is 170 calories per can. I did the Gazelle for an hour and a half today and only burned 100 calories. Mountain Dew is evil. I know I should switch to diet, but diet Dew tastes like 7Up and I hate 7Up. When I was little my dad would make me drink 7Up if I puked and that association is hard to work past. Why can't Tom like fat chicks like I do? My life would be so much easier if Tom could just see my belly fat as a gigantic third boob, with a naval nipple.

Women, we should totally push that philosophy. Maybe a girdle with an underwire or something, like a cummerbund by Wonderbra. That might help. I mean, belly fat takes inches off the penis, but it does nothing to our naughty bits. We should embrace our fat, if for no other reason than that it would be easier than a lifetime on the Gazelle.

Jorge, You Gots Some 'Splainin To Do!

Okay so explain something to me. Why is it that it's perfectly fine to hassle a guy about his sex life, which breaks no laws, but it's just purely political to inquire about ILLEGAL FIRINGS? I mean, what is worse here, getting a blowjob from the easy intern, or firing qualified government employees for their political alliances? Getting an extramarital blowjob is, while immoral, not illegal. Firing people for failing to religiously support your boss's megalomania is illegal however. And even if it weren't, doesn't eight years of Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Whitewater, and the impeachment proceedings for the infamous Lewinski chubby-gobble, doesn't all of that sort of kill the Republican party's right to claim political witch hunt?

You can't chase a guy down for eight years desperately searching for dirt on him even though he's a great president, only to go ruining the country when you get your turn and then go all Howard Hughs paranoid when people notice your federal offenses.

A Desperate Call For Help, So HELP!!

My mother mentioned to me a story or book she had to read in college. It was mandatory required reading for her and so this must have been some undergraduate English class, since my mother only attended actual college classes for two years and was going for an English degree. Later she took night and weekend classes and got her degree and we are all very proud of her, but since she had to read this particular story or book for a class she attended some time in the pre-menopause years, it must have been an undergraduate class requirement. So, back on subject: this story, or book, is about a lawyer/barrister/solicitor who hires an assistant/copy-maker to work in some Victorian or Edwardian or whatever legal office. The guy does good work, steady and legible, and the boss has no problem with him, until he comes in early or late or on a weekend or something and finds the assistant in his pajamas. The guy lives at the office, which seemed to tick off the lawyer. So the boss tells the guy that he needs to find a different place to live, except that he doesn't leave. He never leaves. He continues to do excellent work, but he still lives there as well. So finally the lawyer decides that the nerve this guy has to blatantly NOT move out is somehow more important than the good work he does and has him arrested. After all, why shouldn't the guy have to pay his way like everyone else, right? So the guy gets arrested and sent to jail, which in this time period or maybe just in this part of the world, is a pay your own way kind of place. Except, no one is paying the guy's way so he has no food or clothes or blanket. And the lawyer realizes that maybe he overreacted when he had the guy sent away, especially now that he has no assistant or copy-maker or whatever, so he gives the poor guy some money, so he can have food and clothes. So, after all is said and done, he STILL pays the guy and the guy STILL doesn't have to pay his own way, and now no one is making legal copies!

Now, my mom swears the assistant was named Barnabas, but no amount of googling will bring up anything even remotely resembling fictional lawyers in Olde England. However, there are plenty of stories about Saint Barnabas and what seems to be a very incompetent medical system in the New York Department of Corrections run by St Barnabas Hospital. Now, I never went to college, although I always check "some college" on questionnaires since I took that one Saturday writing class out at the junior college. But I know that some of you (Dawn, Chandos) went to actual accredited higher-learning places and got credit for learning highly. So maybe you read this story or book and can tell me what it was? I want to know the name of it so I can buy my mom a copy. There's a lady who works with her who lives at work and so Mom calls her Barnabas behind her back, and I hate when there's a literary reference I don't get. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray just to understand a James Blunt lyric last winter.

So please please please save me from redundancy. (No wait, that's a habit if I say please too many times in a row I have to follow it with "save me from redundancy".) Please please please help me find out what this story and/or book about the barrister and/or solicitor's assistant and/or copy-maker is. Google has finally failed me.

Stupid People and Cannibal Fish

You ever have a friend who seems intelligent, easy to talk to, relatively normal, a person who seems to display only one personality for years and then all of a sudden one day goes batshit crazy and decides to let Unstable Bad Decision Making Personality out to play? Like they woke up one day and said "I am tired of living life by the minimum of rules generally agreed upon by society such as Don't tattoo your face and Don't paint-bomb hobos" (invented examples, but still) "I am hereby making the decision to start doing really stupid things. Not stupid in a 'Oh you know better than that' sort of way but rather, stupid in a way usually experienced only by those women who for some reason try to marry serial killers". Why do people do that? Why have a midlife crisis meltdown and decide to wreck your life before the age of 30? And why talk to me in public after you've done that?

BTW, my fish tank is all cloudy and I fear it may be divine-fishy retribution for my fish turning cannibal on the new guy. Do they sell drops for that, do you think?

Update Post! Yaaayyyy!

Hmmm, where to start? Let's go backwards, from most recent post to wherever I get tired of going back.

Blue Lagoon SUCKED. Yes it had a penis, but as Edith Anne says, if you want to see a penis all you have to do is ask. Yes it had a Brooke Shields body double wandering naked around a hut. But it had HORRIBLE writing, which actually boosts my confidence as a writer cuz hey, if that guy got published . . . But when the guy got all pissed and exploded with "And I don't know why all these strange hairs keep growing out of me!" as a subtle sign that he's hit puberty, it lost a little something. And where did they get baby clothes? And who the fuck were the people on the other side of the island? I feel a little less bad for the blond guy and a little more in awe of Brook Shields and Kristy MacNichol. I mean, how did their careers ever take off?

Tom has admitted to his dirty secret. He watches Big Brother, I mean. Not the other one. (Although, it's either that or he's in love with his Hanes beefy-T Pocket T's. Tee hee hee, boys are so messy.)* He watches Big Brother and for some reason, not that he has unburdened this shame to me, he gives me random updates on the Tommy Lee guy and his porn-star-looking daughter. I don't like this on many levels. 1) It makes me aware that Big Brother is still on the air, which I am sure is a sign of the apocalypse. And to think, some people think Gay Marriage is the sign of declining morals! 2) It makes me aware that I married a man who watches Big Brother. 3) It fills valuable brain-space with facts such as there is a bar owner somewhere who looks like Tommy Lee and that he has a daughter who looks like post-anorexia Jenna Jameson. 4) It is the only reason I have spent the past two minutes of my life, two minutes I will never get back, googling pictures of Dick, Danielle, Tommy Lee, and Jenna Jameson, not to mention the time I had to spend on the CBS website slash Big Brother, which I'm sure has made me dirty. To pay Tom back for this, I may delete Eureka after I watch it this week.

I am still not smoking, nor do I want to. According to The Prophet Allen Carr, I only have five days of withdrawal left. I certainly hope he was right.

I am very close to the part of my novel-writing process where I start writing. I have a plot, an outline, character profiles, and assorted clever lines and descriptions thought up. Now, I have to write it. This will be the hard part. Wish me luck.

Add to my reading list Fluke, Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard Of Melancholy Cove, and Island Of The Sequined Love Nun. Keep in mind, these were all research for my novel and as such, I plan to deduct their cover price from my taxes.

Okay, that's about it for updates for now. Tune in for new stuff and if the stuff I wrote today sucked, you can blame Dawn.


*I really hope Tom doesn't read this.

From Carpet-Muncher to Carpet-Killer, The Downward Spiral of Chuck

Let me begin by saying that I have anger issues. I get to feeling overwhelmed by something and then some sort of adrenaline-fueled defense mechanism kicks in and basically says Don't get mad, get even. And then I almost inevitably do something stupid. About two weeks ago, this stupid mental italics voice told me to murder my carpet. Never, and I mean NEVER listen to a disembodied voice in italics.

I killed my carpet. It smelled like years of dog pee and potty-training toddler pee and spilt instant cappuccino and I was shampooing it weekly but I could still smell it all in a nauseating bouquet of uck. Not ick; it was clearly uck. So, I killed it. I ripped it up in pieces and drug it's stinking corpse to the curb. I pulled up the tack-strip along the walls and the rusted staples some idiot had randomly shot into the floor (Coulda been me - I got mad at the staple gun a few months ago) and after all was said and done I had bare wood floors and one impending medical bill for a tetanus shot. But, adrenaline's a funny thing. It can make it possible for a woman to lift a Volkswagen off her baby, but it cannot seem to make me strong enough to move a corner curio cabinet. So I actually had bare floor except for where the furniture I couldn't move was. Those parts had to wait for Tom, sitting alone on tiny islands of frayed reeking carpet.

So Tom came home to take Ryan to the fair and demonstrate his penis size by wasting money on "easy", though obviously rigged, carnival games. Think, "I'll win you that there stuffed dog" followed by two hours of skee-ball. Anyway, he came home and I made him move the furniture so I could get rid of what was left of my gruesomely dismembered living room carpet. Yes, it does make me feel better to constantly refer to it as a horrific murder victim, thank you very much.

But . . . as long as Tom's moving the furniture away from the walls, and we've both quit smoking, we should really wash down the smoke-stained walls. So we go to Home Depot and buy gallons of TSP heavy-duty wall cleaner. But not sponges. We buy those at a Dollar Store after it finally occurs to us that we will need some way to actually get the cleaner onto the walls. No, we're not bright.

But . . . as long as we're washing down the walls, and since apparently no amount of scrubbing can get all of the yucky color off and the streaky running rivers of brown tar and nicotine are making the place look like a crack-house in a Law & Order rerun, we might as well paint.

But . . . Tom's only got a couple of days home so we have to get two coats on the walls AND the ceiling in, oh say, one day. And we can't let the dogs in the living room because they might brush the walls (if I knew how to keep them out of the living room none of this would have started). And, all the furniture has to be shoved into the middle of the room because the house is only 800 square feet and there's no place else to put it, which makes it oh so much fun to paint the ceiling.

So, finally, after the chain reaction from Hell, I have no pissy stinky carpet, clean freshly painted walls, and seven years of immunity to tetanus, and what do I find this morning when I wake up?

The dogs have pissed, and shit, on the one small area rug I allowed myself. I can only imagine they did it because they hate me and find my tears to be an endless source of amusement. Either that or they didn't want to get their feet wet outside since it had rained. Yeah, because feet stay so much drier when you live with a floor COVERED IN DOG URINE! I don't think even PETA would get mad if I killed these dogs. Fur is bad. Meat is bad. But heinously and joyously strangling incontinent beagles, not so much.

The Pointless Pizza Boys of Bettendorf, IA (and other weekend ramblings)

(For years, too many years to count, I have known of a movie. It had the plot of Pirates of Penzance, but with better set design. And in the end, the girl romantic lead stopped time and set the pirates up with her sisters so she could marry the boy romantic lead. I finally, through the wonder of the Interweb, found that movie. And it is TACKY. Never ever watch a movie you vaguely recall from childhood which might have in fact been part of a dream if not for the fact that it mirrored a piece of musical theater you were never exposed to. Because it will invariably SUCK and ruin your memories. Which is also why I will not buy The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, even though it is on my amazon.com wish list.)

I have a night to myself. Ryan is at my mother's. I have library books I haven't even cracked which are due back in two days. I have twelve hours of suspenseful prime-time crime dramas inside my DVR. I have last night's Monk and Psych to watch yet. I have a movie trapped inside of my computer which refuses to be burned to disc or even discs and which I will have to watch at my desk which is awkward because the chair rolls around on the newly carpetless floor (Long story but basically I got mad at the carpet for smelling like dog pee and took a box-knife to it at 9:00 Monday night and ripped it all out. Eighteen hours and one tetanus shot later I had ugly, but odorless, pee-stained hardwood floors.) making it difficult not to miss the action. I have a notebook full of character ideas and the wispy memories of a vaguely homo-erotic third person dream I had and want to write into a story. I have all of these things to do and what am I doing? I'm reading and copy/pasting (with props, mad props) Savage Love chunks (that just sounded horribly wrong) and blogging while NOT talking to Tom on the phone. I mean, he's on the phone, and I'm on the phone, but we're not talking. We're not fighting or even arguing, we simply have nothing really interesting to say anymore. I think after three years (almost) of a telephone-based marriage, that we may have run out of topics.

Why am I not hanging up to watch TV, read books, write books, or finally see this movie I've had for over a month already? Because it's late! Because it's late and if I

OMG!I.broke.my.keyboard!...I.took.the.button.off.to.clean.under.it.
and.there's.a.piece.of.wire.thing.in.it.and.I.don't.know.how.to.
replace.it.the.right.way!Oh.crap...Let.the.IRC.guys.be.able.to.help! Thank the gods for alphablu. I can always count on him for funny links and computer help. He was the guy who made me realize how horribly wrong it is to buy generic lubricant. I mean, if it's KY that's pushing your budget over then you have some serious issues, and probably some loss of muscle control to look forward, or backward, to.

Okay, now that that little trauma/drama is over with, and Tom finally had to hang up to watch reality television or whack off or whatever other dirty things he thinks I don't suspect, I am going to go too. I have to watch Blue Lagoon.

I always feel sorry for that poor blond guy from Blue Lagoon. He was the male lead in the movie that made Brooke Shields (I think. I don't really know since I was only born in 1976) and the movie that made Kristy MacNichol (again an assumption) and he's never really had his big break. (See? I was going somewhere with that parentheses pirate lead-in.) I mean, he can't act, but neither can Keanu, or Ashton, or Brad, and he had the same pecs, I mean credentials, they have. It makes me worry about the future of The Actor I Almost Could've Shagged.

TAIACS is my age, from very near here. If I'd only bumped into him during my high school years I could be selling my story to the tabloids. Or at least I'd have a cutey to point out to my friends instead of random long-haired pizza boys.

My Gods why am I still blogging? I have incestuous skinny dipping to watch!

Props To Dan Savage

So I was reading my favorite advice columnist, and I came across a letter from last week (I can't believe I missed last week's column but that's off-point) which was a thinly veiled attempt for some 18 year old kid to brag about all the awesome kinky sex he has. So Dan pretty much outed him for that and then went on to point out the irony of the awesome-sex-having teen demographic after so many years of Republican-sanctioned abstinence only programs. The following is a DIRECT EXCERPT from the column dated August 2, 2007. I am right now giving mad props to Dan Savage and am in no way attempting to circumvent copyright laws.

"Politically speaking, RSCI, this may not be the best time for teenagers to gloat about the totally awesome, amazingly kinky, and sinfully premarital sex they're having. A study released last week showed that the rate of teen sexual activity, which had long been in decline, stopped falling in 2001—despite the hundreds of millions of dollars the Bush administration has poured into abstinence education.

"The percentage of teenagers having intercourse began to plateau in 2001 and has failed to budge since," wrote the Washington Post. "Experts are unsure of the reasons for the change, but [point to] the possibility that some irreducible portion of the teenage population can never be dissuaded from having sex."

Hello, George W. Bush? You've spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to dissuade teenagers from having sex and what are teenagers like RSCI doing? Bragging about all the awesome sex they're having. Are you going to stand for that? Or are you finally going to get serious about winning the war on teenage sex?

If you believe that premarital sex is always wrong, Mr. President, then act like it. (Let the liberals laugh about Senator David Vitter, the conservative GOP senator from Louisiana caught up in the "D.C. Madam" scandal. At least Vitter had the decency to wait until after marriage before hiring hookers to diaper him.) The current status quo is unacceptable! We can't continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to talk teenagers into remaining abstinent while their gonads and hormones implore them to do the opposite.

The time has come to take the fight to the hormones, Mr. President. The time has come to chemically castrate American teenagers.

Instead of wasting money on failed abstinence-education programs, Mr. President, put Depo-Provera and Tamoxifen, the two most effective chemical-castration drugs, into products consumed by teenagers—Doritos, Mountain Dew, lip gloss, and Axe body spray. (Some adults also consume these products, of course, but not any we want reproducing.) A chemical-castration program would not only be cheaper and more effective than your failed abstinence-education programs, Mr. President, it would also lower rates of sexually transmitted infections, decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies, save souls, prevent hurricanes, and spare elected officials who can't have kinky sex themselves anymore (thanks to fallout from the D.C. Madam scandal) from having to listen to teenagers like RSCI brag about all the kinky sex they're having."


Amen, Dan Savage. Amen.

But . . . since when do I say "mad props"?

On Old Friends, Good and Bad

Marv update: I went to talk to Marv and alas, he isn't my past. He is a pretty cool guy and a dear old friend but he's not my past. I fear I have been nostalgic for my pre-motherhood days and when a friend from those days popped up I went overboard on the nostalgia. So seeing Marv isn't the big deal I made it into because it isn't really a big deal at all, mainly because we live in different towns and lead perpendicular, rather than parallel, lives. But I will continue to email him and talk to him on the phone, basically because I have nothing better to do late at night, at least not on nights when Tom has to go to sleep early, and also because he is a cool person and a dear old friend.

Smoking update: I know it's been months since I announced my intention to quit smoking, but it's been a weird process. I went on the Chantix pill and quit smoking after two weeks with no problems. After two more months I called my doctor for a refill and also to ask him some questions about side effects. Like, how long would I continue to feel nauseaus all day? Well, by all day I mean not counting the 18 hours I seem to be sleeping lately. So he cut my dosage back to half a pill twice a day rather than one pill twice a day. So for the last two months I have been on half-dose, which is the same as saying I have been in a continual nicotine fit. But I have been diligently waiting for the desire to smoke to disappear. The problem was, I slipped up every now and then. So I never, after the first two weeks last spring, went more than a week without a cigarette.
Then Tom got his vasectomy reversed, and Chantix is not approved for pregnant women, which I may soon become, so I quit taking the pills at all. I felt stuck. Either I start smoking again and hate myself with a near-suicidal passion, or I quit and feel deprived for the rest of my life, an endeavor I wasn't sure I could pull off anyway. So I researched ways to quit smoking and found Allen Carr and liked the success rate stats. So I read the book and swore to follow the instructions and so far, four days after my last half pill and two days after my last cigarette, I feel great. I feel better today than I did when I was on the pills regularly. I don't want a cigarette. I don't feel like I need a cigarette. I don't see any appeal in the concept of having a cigarette. I am a non-smoker. I love Allen Carr. I highly recommend him, especially for people who are having trouble on Chantix. I don't know if this book would have worked without the pills, but I do know that the pills weren't working for me without the book.
And I always wondered, if the pills imitate nicotine to the the nicotine receptors in my brain then what's to stop me becoming addicted to the pills? The problem was that I feared the withdrawal. Now I enjoy nicotine withdrawal, because I see it as A) the desperate death throws of addiction, and B) not even bad enough to wake me up or send me to the doctor. It is mild and laughable and pathetic. Like the tiny arrows the tribesmen shot at Larry in Night At The Museum.

An old friend

An old friend found me and we've been talking. Marv manages a pizza place now and sometimes he calls me between Super-Pepperonis.

Perhaps I should preface this with, "My husband thinks I'm a slut."

See, back in the days before motherhood and marriage, actually in the days directly leading up to motherhood, from a biology point of view, I was friendly. I won't say I was easy, because I did have my standards. But that whole joke about how girls know in the first five minutes whether they're going to do it or not? It's true, and I never wasted much time after that. So Tom, bless his heart, thinks I was easy. And he doesn't judge me for it; he was easy too. But whenever I mention an old friend, he thinks I've slept with him. Especially if it's a long-haired pizza boy. Come on, how many professions let a guy grow his hair out? And I did love the long hair...

Anyway, an old friend found me. Old as in pre-motherhood. Pre stretch marks, pre- telletubbies, pre "to Gardasil or not to Gardasil" (I Gardasiled). He was my friend when I was young and fancy-free, and he was a good friend too. I have missed him over the years. And now I have heard back from him and it's nice.

For one thing, it's nice to hear from someone who has no choice but to picture you skinny. For another thing, it's nice to hear from someone who remembers you before you could name the Telletubbies. By color. With their favorite toys. (ball, hat, skirt, purse) But Tom, well Tom may not understand. Because I was friendly with Marv. He had long hair. He made pizza. What was a girl to do? But Marv was a friend, despite that. And I like talking to him now that he's resurfaced.

So, my faithful reader(s), is it so wrong that I talk to Marv? Would it be wrong to introduce Marv and Tom? Am I too sleepy to blog right now? Any comment would be good. Just.....let 'er rip.