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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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Yesterday, I was editing a scientific paper, which is something I rarely do anymore ever since I became THE MAN and made it to the not-very-exalted ranks of the lowest tier of management (the air up here is not fresh and clean and rarefied, but rather warm like a recently vacated bus seat and smelling faintly of croutons). It was a paper about man-to-man transmission of HIV, and I am happily editing along when I get to this phrase: "insertive anal sex." As an editor, you are always looking for the plain way to say it, and that goes double for science editors. We don't let patients "expire," if I had a nickel for every time I changed "in close proximity" to "near" I would be very rich indeed, and once I spent a very happy day changing "evacuated the contents of the rectum" to "defecated" about a million times in a manuscript about chronic constipation. (Side note: why do I always get the butt articles?) So when I saw "insertive anal sex," I sat back in my task chair and thought: Huh. Insertive anal sex. What other kind is there? Does front-to-back dry-humping count as "anal sex"? Are we talking ATM (the other kind) here? Normally when something in a manuscript doesn't make sense, you ask the author, but somehow I just could not bring myself to type a query like ****AUTHOR: DO YOU MEAN RIMJOBS?**** I soldiered on, and it turns out that later in the manuscript "insertive anal sex" was contrasted with "receptive anal sex." Ah. It all makes sense. Why did I not think of that? (Don't answer that. Not like you could answer that, what with all the tape on your mouth and everything. Or even answer it charade-style, with those handcuffs.) Lollipops for barfy people. Incredibly detailed commentary on Fraggle Rock. I loved the Fraggles. It was fun to see Henson get all politically/environmentally preachy, and the songs were good. This is the number-one result on Google for freestyle rap battles, and it made me crack up laughing. I Googled freestyle rap battles looking for some definitions, because it seems to me that freestyle rap battles are probably not completely improvised. I mean, if you know that all you have to do is cast aspersions on your opponent's skills, you could easily prepare stuff in advance. It would be better if freestyle rap battles operated more like extemporaneous speech contests in high-school forensics, where you get the topic at the last minute and then have to speak (or, in this case, rap) about it. The only allusion I could find to such a thing is in this article, where a rapper named Supernatural flows lyrical on the subject of fingernail clippers. Is the Obama scone story true? I cannot find the original source, but I dearly hope so! Orgasm-face campaign literature notwithstanding, I am really starting to love this man! I need to record some of the the "conversations" between me and Nora, because there is undoubtedly some MFA graduate student struggling to revive the Theater of the Absurd who could use the dialogues. This morning I went to work late so I had the rare opportunity of breakfast with Nora. Me (ridiculously cheerful voice): Here's your oatmeal. Use the spoon! Scoop it up, put it in your mouth! Mmmm! Is that good? Oatmeal! You are a very big girl to use the spoon! THE NEWEST OBSESSION Lying in bed, LT and I got back on our surrealist cooking show idea, and actually got most of a script ready, including a bit where the host said something like, "Now let's all take a moment to stir pork fried rice into a glass of milk." I think this sentence is really funny, and really wise, and even in the midst of our busy lives let us never forget to take a moment to stir pork fried rice into a glass of milk. Whew! That's not kosher! But it is important. KEEPING MY MOUTH SHUT FROM NOW ON So I am in a group of women who don't know me that well, and they all have kids, and there is some general chitchat about baby milestones going on. One of the women is fretting over the fact that her son is nine months old and does not crawl yet, and a flurry of group reassurance and hairpats ensues, with different women chiming in to say how there is a wide range of normal, etc. Someone says, "My niece walked at seven months," not in a bragging way but just in a "see, there really is a wide range of normal" sort of way, and after not contributing to this conversation in any way up until now I suddenly blurt out, "that's just freakish" and then I am on the receiving end of several Looks. Whoops. I have a feeling this is precisely why I do not belong to any playgroups, or indeed have any "normal" friends whatsoever---I suffer from a weird combination of too-shy-to-speak-up and inappropriate Tourettic outbursts wherein I declare that perfectly nice babies are freaks of nature. So I am afraid I cannot make it to the scrapbooking coffee hour or Tupperware party, but if you want six beers and a deconstruction of the phrase "insertive anal sex" after the kids have gone to bed, just let me know when and where. ---mimi smartypants is a small fish in a small pond in a small backyard. back/forward |
