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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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EDITED FOR CLARITY, BUT NOT FOR HILARITY! arielmeadow: DrJays Street Style was a big hit over at Metafilter. smartypantsmimi: Yay! SCRAPS OF SCRAPPLE I think I have reached the nadir of the lip balm cycle. The point at which lip balm is actually doing you more harm than good, and you are no longer reaping its balmy benefits, but you keep reapplying and reapplying despite the diminishing returns. I wish I could go cold turkey on the balm and just gut it out, maybe with the assistance of some medication that would make me forget that I had lips, until the worst of the dryness/unbearable awareness of dryness/urge to apply/application/temporary relief but rebound effect that leads to even more heightened awareness of dryness cycle had passed. But I just don't think I'm that strong! Look at me, I'm sobbing and kicking your locked door like Leonardo DiCaprio in that Basketball Diaries movie! MOM! OPEN THE DOOR! CARMEX, CHAPSTICK, ANYTHING! Nora visited my work the other day and had her usual fantastic time. She is very impressed with the cafeteria grilled cheese sandwich and pronounced it "yummy" about a thousand times. The cafeteria sells a brand of organic hippie woo-woo juice called "Naked Juice" and we shared one of those with two straws---since she has previously just been a store-brand-apple-juice kind of girl, she found the taste of that to be rather exciting as well. However, when I told her, "This kind of juice is called Naked Juice," she stopped sipping, looked me in the eye, and gently said, "Nooooo, Mommy" complete with a little head-shake as if to say My Poor Mother Is Insane. I try to keep her visits on the down low since I know many people are not 100% thrilled with rugrats in the office, but I have one coworker who is just gaga for Nora and often showers her with cool trinkets. This particular time Nora ended up wearing many strands of Mardi Gras beads, making her look like a refugee from a Toddlers Gone Wild! video. THE RAMPAGING COWS WIN! One weird thing I did this weekend, besides invent a fictional merchant of indeterminate ethnicity named Ibrahim Elbowskin (anybody want him for their next novel? I can provide you with a rather detailed character sketch), was attend a Bulls game. Although there was something kind of odd to me about attending an NBA game on an NFL playoff weekend, the tickets were very cheap, I had never before been to United Center for any reason, and we had been meaning to do this with our friends for some time. THE GAME Basketball suffers from that thing where it only really gets exciting in the last ten minutes or so, unless you really care about strategy and stuff. I don't know enough about it to care, so I will admit to being kind of bored in the second and third quarters. Then shit got absolutely thrilling, and the Bulls ended up beating the Knicks* by one basket as the freaking buzzer sounded, so that was cool. *I keep wanting to type that the Bulls beat The Kinks. Kirk Hinrich and Ray Davies, one-on-one! Beer! Nachos! LT and I got into a little tiff on the way home, because we were talking about how stadium food is usually kind of objectively gross but you have to eat something there just to get the full experience, and then I said, "I was surprised that United Center had decent beer, though." "If you like Miller Genuine Draft," he shrugged. THE CIRCUSES When I was not ingesting lowbrow substances or enjoying the display of freakish athleticism, I was laughing my ass off. A basketball game is such a crazy thing, yo. First of all, someone way back in the annals of live-basketball history decided that the audience must be CONSTANTLY, and I stress CONSTANTLY, entertained. At every lull, at every twenty-second timeout, at every little interruption in play, the scantily clad cheerleaders will do some choreographed thing, some strange music and inexplicable animation will play on the big screen, or some jackass will run onto the court and start using an air gun to shoot t-shirts into the crowd. They kept having these bizarre contests and raffles, with hilariously lame prizes like a gallon of water! A case of paper towels! A Dunkin' Donuts medium coffee! It's so not even worth pulling out your ticket stub to see if you "won"! At halftime, bafflingly, there was a pie-eating contest. Even more baffling, the scoreboard touted the contest with the slogan, "Pie Makes Halftime Into Fulltime," which I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO PARSE even though, believe me, I spent ALL NIGHT TRYING. The scoreboard also kept showing a little animated basketball with feet and googly eyes, and he would beat time on an animated drum and tell the crowd to chant "Go Bulls" or whatever. He was always depicted alone, and in a sort of animated void, and to me he seemed kind of sad despite all his rah-rah crowd-noise-encouraging ways, and I developed a rather intense mental relationship with his existential plight that I don't expect you to understand. TRYING TO ARTICULATE THIS AND FAILING. I have become slightly mixed up in a brouhaha regarding some comments I made on a messageboard, replying to posts written by a woman who has dealt with infertility and now is in the process of adopting. I just want this out in the open: I am officially sick of being told that I cannot comment on people's feelings about adoption, because I did not come to adoption after trying to have a baby the regular way first. These two sets of feelings---the ones about infertility, which OKAY FINE, I HAVEN'T EXPERIENCED, and the ones about adoption---absolutely need to be separated. I realize that sounds impossible for many people, but you need to try. It gives me a really icky feeling when I read that this person's adopted child will heal her heart, make her whole, and "make the pain go away." Oh hey Adopted Child! No pressure or anything! You just have to, you know, fix my entire life! In addition to being a baby, learning about the world, and dealing with being yanked away from your birth parents, birth culture, and previous living situation! Put the usual disclaimers here about honoring other people's feelings and experiences and so on. I don't want to start shit, I really don't. But I needed to vent because it is not just this one messageboard, it is dozens of weblogs and diaries and adoption sites with horrible poetry. I look at Nora and I think about how important she is, and how much I respect her little tiny flame of personhood, and it kills me to think about another parent-to-be framing the adoption of another tiny flame of personhood as just another chapter in their own personal Journey To Healing yadda yadda. RANT OVER And now I will get down off of my probably-very-irritating high horse and post a picture of Ms. Nora, whose tiny flame of personhood expressed itself recently in a total meltdown over the prospect of having to leave Purple Dog behind while she ate a post-nap snack. The rule is supposed to be that the Stuffed Animal Extraordinaire, His Highness, Mister Bedtime, Purplizzle Doggizzle stays in Nora's bedroom, because I do not want to be running all over the house looking for his gangsta ass, but sometimes you wake up all fragile-like and you just need to be with your dog for a little while longer. ---mimi smartypants from way downtown. |
