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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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MY FOOLISH NUMBERING HABIT IS THE HOBGOBLIN OF MY LITTLE MIND Or maybe I just want something to be orderly, since I'm not. I am out of order. I am disorderly. Excuse me, this is not what I ordered. 1. This entry may be long. Longer than normal, even. I feel bad about making you sit there for so long---maybe you can read this in shifts? Maybe you can print me out or sync me up and take me with you? It would be nice to travel together. Aw jeez man, I love you. And unlike some of those other vortex-swirly, dark-circles-under-the-eyes, video-camera-in-a-mirror-filming-itself online journallers, who just say that they "love" "you" in order to provide themselves with some hip postmodern talking-to-the-audience cachet, I actually mean it. (There are about five private* jokes in that last sentence, for which I apologize.) *(By which I mean, funny only to me.)** **(Stop it.) 2. Diamond industry uses fake feminism to get you to buy more diamonds. These ads are everywhere right now, making claims like, "Your left hand rocks the cradle, your right hand rules the world. Raise your right hand." An unusually hard, polished chunk of stone now equals empowerment, sisters, in case you were not aware. And this whole "left hand/right hand" thing is disturbing---women don't have enough trouble reconciling their various social roles and conflicting media messages? Now the diamond industry proposes that we make a mental divide within our body itself. Yeah, that sounds healthy. (Maybe brassiere manufacturers will be the next to embrace this. "Your left breast nurses your twins. Your right breast falls out of your halter top at the Phish concert.") 3. Before I forget, go read The Easy Hour by Leslie Stella. It's fun and it's easy and I liked it very much, and so much good and funny stuff happens that I did not even mind the rather conventional, saw-it-coming ending. Also, the book contains tons of secret and not-so-secret Chicago references. I will be happy to decode them for the fee of a few two-dollar Old Styles. I'll be your indexer, I'll be your glossarist, and if that isn't sexy you don't know what sexy is. (Cripes! All roads lead back to me me me today! Anyway, read Leslie's book. She wrote me a nice e-mail once.) 4. Someone recently asked me why I don't kill myself. Not as in "mimi smartypants you suck why do you live" but as in "how do you keep from doing it, because the world is awful and pointless and god knows you express that sentiment often enough on your web page so I thought you might have some thoughts on the subject." I do not have a terribly good or succinct answer to that question except for: a. there is some really fun stuff that you can only get or do on this planet, as far as I know; b. I would hate for everyone else to have the last word, and go on talking about me behind my back, when I was dead and could not defend myself or (if the things they said were nice) say OH GIVE ME A BREAK I WAS NOT ALL THAT; c. A Mystery Third Reason, which will come at the very end of this entry. No peeking.
5. My sister-in-law, who is no stranger to fashion or to "spa days" and who has been known to book three or four pedicure chairs at once for her and her gay-boy friends, occasionally gets after me in a friendly, family-teasing way, to try a little harder. So when I once (probably tipsily) expressed tentative interest in the pedicure experience, she was all over it and before I knew what was happening I had an appointment. Which is how I recently found myself sitting in a kind of throne with a whirlpool footbath attached, while a male "nail technician" clipped and poked and scrubbed and filed. You know that either your diary is too voluminous OR that you are too darn lazy when you cannot successfully Google yourself, but I think that I may have mentioned sometime that I do not enjoy having my feet touched. This obviously makes the pedicure a dicey proposition. LT was very intrigued and presented various scenarios in the days leading up to the appointment: "What if you throw up? What if you pass out? You do realize that they are going to put something between your toes, while the polish dries, don't you?" "Stop it, you're making me nervous," I said. I only had one or two bad moments relating to the pedicure, and that was mostly because David, the pedicure guy, had weird long fingernails and the occasional feeling of his nails on and around my toes made my forehead sweat a little. The other bad moment was when my sadistic sister-in-law, whose appointment was slightly behind mine, offered to get me a magazine (once I was trapped in the chair) and she brought me YM.* Which, since I am not fifteen years old, was totally baffling to me. I read it cover to cover and now I know a disturbing amount of trivia about Good Charlotte and someone named Ashton Kutcher. What kind of sick parent names a kid "Ashton"? Talk about asking for a beatdown. And combined with "Kutcher" it sounds like a German sneeze or some breed of yappy dog. *(Did you like that "Create Your Own Digital Scrapebook [sic]"? Great spelling! You too can read YM, go to a good college, learn nothing because you are too obsessed with teen celebrities, get a publishing internship, and splash your typos all over the place! Hang your heads in shame, YM staffers.) Anyway, now I have soft smooth feet, I guess (not sure if that should be a high-priority goal for any human) and, since I don't plan on doing this very often if indeed ever again, I went for the bright red sexpot nail polish. I thought about posting a digital photo but foot fetishism is very common, and I am not sure I could sleep at night if there was even a remote possibility my feet were being wanked over. (Or would they? My theory is that foot fetishists would be attracted to large feet, rather than the size-five-AA-width things that help me gallivant around, but LT insists the opposite is true. Pervs, speak up and settle this!) 6. You should also read the latest issue of Vanity Fair. I snickered when I saw George Clooney's smug bloated visage on the cover, but inside there is a punchy Hitchens thing about Iraq, a well-written piece about Las Vegas, and a very funny screed about the right-wing cesspool that is MSNBC, where it seems any ranting nutbag can get a talk show. Representative paraphrase: "They have gone from scraping the bottom of the talent barrel to draining the swamps and scouting the bus stations." 7. Today: full moon, wine and chatting with Iris after work, and the birthday of HD. She is a lot more fun as a biography than as a poet, which I think is a fair trade to make if you get to have lovers with names like Ezra and Winifred. 8. I acted out in a meeting yesterday. It was an informational meeting about our new 401(k) investment company. I found the presenter rather smarmy and irritating, and he was trying to demo the new "life planning" website feature. (Virtual life planning! For your virtual life!) Then he said, "What kinds of life experiences could impact* your financial future?" *(Don't get me started.) No one was saying anything, so I piped up from the back: "A debilitating cocaine habit?" Lots of nervous laughter from the room and the presenter, who said, "Ha ha ha, there's not a module for that...how about college?" Same freaking difference, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut for once. I think fatigue makes me class-clownish.
9. Why is there fatigue? Because I recently became a mother. No, I am not now nor have I ever been pregnant. I did not bud like a sponge, have sex with myself like a worm, or push forth a miniature Athena from my forehead. LT and I long ago decided that adoption was the manner in which we wanted to become parents and, after six months of paperwork, several sets of fingerprints, three interviews, one home inspection, and nine months (eerie, that) of waiting while our paperwork was processed, we have received word that there is a little seven-month-old girl waiting for us in China. She's at an orphanage in Chongqing, she is absolutely adorable and healthy, she is soon to be named Nora [Chinese Name] Smartypants, we can travel to meet her and bring her home in about six weeks, and ever since I found this out on Monday I keep sneaking out of bed to gaze at her little face some more. I feel like some freaky gooey hippie New-Age fetal-wonderment lady, going gaga over her picture. I will soon need a Crabbiness Transfusion to get back to my old self if this keeps up. Obviously there is oodles more to say, but you will just have to stay tuned. I refuse to break my strict two-thousand-word upper limit. You poor people signed up for Smartypants, not Tolstoy. ---mimi smartypants is somebody's mommy. back/forward |
