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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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A General History of the Pyrates. So fun. Print it out and take it with you.
A drugstore run is desperately needed. LT goes through soap like Burning Man kids go through body paint, like Robert Pollard goes through Miller Lite, like mariachi bands go through giant sombreros, like Elizabeth Wurtzel goes through prescription drugs and the last few remaining people on earth who will put up with her bullshit. (I take every opportunity to slam the Wurtzel, and I do not care if it's sporting or not. It's a personal problem.) To reiterate: LT uses a lot of soap. He washes everything three or four times and gets all soapy like a soap commercial, and I refuse to take showers with him, whether they are the sexy kind or the prosaic getting-clean kind, because he is trying to make me look bad with his prolific Soap Usage. However, I am plenty clean goddammit, just because some people need their entire bodies to meet strict laboratory safety standards does not mean I am not fresh and spiffy after showering as well. The point is that I just yesterday unwrapped the last bar of soap from our stash, and since that will last approximately one LT shower, one of us needs to get to the drugstore posthaste. Also, my mascara, the only cosmetic I use with any regularity, is mostly one solid Black Hole Of Crustiness and I have been tempting fate and contact dermatitis on each eye-makeup occasion. We are out of vitamin E, and although I cannot right now remember why we take vitamin E, that is no reason not to put it back on the drugstore list. There are no jellybeans in the house. And I have no more shaving cream and have been shaving my legs without it for some time now. 1. Soap, the most obvious alternative to shaving cream, vaguely works but gets your razor all scummy and weird. 2. Plain water = no traction, and is just about as pointless as shaving dry. (That sounds naughty, doesn't it? Let's shave each other dry!) 3. Speaking of shaving dry: no freaking way. My delicate little girl ankles are squealing at the very thought. Squealing like the drunk girl with the hideous flouncy shirt who shrieks "oh I love this song!" at just about every jukebox selection, and for christ's sake how can you "love" this song, this song is by Air Supply for crying out loud, and please tell me someone put it on as a joke. 4. Sorry about that. This is why I shouldn't be allowed to type things while drinking wine. Back to our regularly scheduled Shaving Cream Alternatives. 5. Peanut butter is right out. 6. Moisturizing lotion works kind of okay, as long as you use a very light layer and rinse the blade often. SO WHAT ELSE, BESIDES A DEARTH OF TOILETRIES, IS WORKING MY LAST NERVE TODAY? Noise. I am not sure when my nerves became so shredded and so close to the surface, when exactly I became such a pathetically high-strung, jittery, straight-out-of-Poe creature, without even the beating of a hideous heart or a laconic raven for explanation, but today there is entirely too much noise in the city. I would like to rip out the guts of the person who invented the car alarm, and then dance on said guts. I would like to suggest that if my neighbors do indeed require the sound of deafening craptastic R&B booty-shaking music for hours at a time, they go curl up inside a subwoofer at Excalibur rather than spend their evenings at home. I would like it if my next-door office neighbor would turn down the ringer on her phone: you are sitting right next to the thing, is there some reason it has to be set to "Wake The Dead" volume? Because I am having several daily heart attacks over here because of it.
It is funny, because every so often I get like this: like "My God I Cannot Live In This Urban Din One More Second, Oh For A Cabin By The Lake," etc etc ad nauseum, but you know that if you ever actually removed me to a cabin by the lake I would instantly be lonely for a bedraggled man ranting about Jesus on the loud rumbling subway train, for ambulance sirens shrieking mayhem at all hours of the night, for the big boots upstairs when all the bars close. I even go batshit in hotel rooms after a while because it is too quiet, and hotel rooms transmit a fair amount of human noise like televisions and drunken attempts to use the key card. If it were just me and the crickets I would be crazy within hours. Still, though. Everybody hush for just one second, I need to think. I HAVE RANTED ABOUT THIS BEFORE BUT NOT IN THIS LEVEL OF DETAIL: THE NEW YORKER 1. This magazine has one particular copy-editing tic that drives me batty: the insistence on creating a dieresis where none is necessary. The New Yorker copy editors have this thing about putting the umlaut on top of perfectly normal English words, such as cooperate or preemptive. I doubt that any of their readers are puzzled by the word "cooperate," and would be pronouncing it KOOP-ER-ATE unless that silly umlaut were there. And this is a case of The New Yorker being a rogue state here, going it alone without the support of the Grammar UN as it were, because I know of no style guide that recommends this reckless diacritical practice. 2. The cartoons. Here are two examples: (a) A cat is in a bar, saying to the bartender, "Catnip for everyone." (b) Two people in parkas and gloves are playing tennis in the snow. One says, "Forty-love." Is it funny that there is a cat in a bar? Ordering catnip, which cats like but which bars do not normally serve? Is it funny that people are playing tennis in the snow? Is it somehow funny that one of the players is whipping the ass of the other? If it is, I don't see it. It is not that I don't "get" the cartoons, but don't these "jokes" seem like...not enough? A cat in a bar! Playing tennis in the snow! These are incongruous situations, but they do not come anywhere near the level of funny. 3. Sometimes even though The New Yorker is being so quaintly, ridiculously New Yorker, you kind of have to appreciate it for being what it is, the way you would forgive an elderly gay uncle for over-the-top affectations like an ascot or a monocle. I was reading some essay on the German musical avant-garde (see, right off the bat you knew there would be trouble), and came across a sentence that started off, "Although most Americans regard Theodor Adorno as..." I do not remember how The New Yorker thought most Americans regarded Theodor Adorno, but the real howler here is that "most Americans" do not regard Theodor Adorno as anything whatsofuckingever, because most Americans do not have a clue as to who Theodor Adorno is (which is perfectly fine, I think you could probably have a rich full intellectual life without needing even a shred of Adorno-knowledge), and it is kind of cute of The New Yorker to so arrogantly assume otherwise. MISSIVES FROM THE ETHER I really love the newly-discovered (by me) text-messaging capability of my cell phone. It is pleasant to be on the bus and get a little "hello" from someone. It solves the twin problems of the fact that I often have trouble hearing my phone ring what with all the city noise around me, and also that when it does ring in a quiet place it startles me nearly into catalepsy. It solves the social-anxiety problem of wanting to communicate with someone but not wanting to do something as boorish and intrusive as making their phone ring. And it is good for those non-emergency drinking sessions, not so much HELP I AM STRANDED HERE SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS BUT DRINKS ARE HALF-PRICE GET HERE NOW but rather I SEEM TO HAVE FOUND MYSELF AT A BAR NEAR YOUR HOUSE COME BY IF YOU ARE NOT BUSY. LT has discovered that he can text-message me from the cell phone company's website, and has found that he enjoys doing this whenever he needs a little break from programming or dissertating, with the result being that I often get strange messages like URGENT CALL BACK IMMEDIATELY MY SCROTUM IS WRINKLED!!!! ---mimi smartypants has been formatted to fit your screen. back/forward |
