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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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RAP LYRICS OF THE WEEK: A little introduction to how nice I am GROUP PROJECT: I could use some help with my "what's-my-name?" rap. I know all of you have been laying down rhymes since you were out of the womb, but as a classical music nerd I am new to all of this, and I have been unable to find any sort of night classes to help teach me MC skills. First this week I had a business dinner, and today I had a business lunch. Mimi Smartypants: The Business of Our Business Is Digestion. Oy. Free food, though. I wonder if I'll ever get over that "free food" mentality that comes from being desperately strapped for cash in college. It's like a dog from the pound that eats garbage in the street even though it has a perfectly nice home. I remember crashing faculty functions in order to surreptiously fill my pockets and secret ziploc bags full of hors d'oeuvres. I may not have had enough money to do laundry but I had plenty of little quiches and purloined spinach pies. I have been skateboarding down Memory Half-Pipe lately, and the mention of being poor plus Thanksgiving coming up reminds me of the Worst Job I ever had, which you all know about already---the photo processing plant. But for some reason all sorts of little details about my factory stint have been running through my head, such as the fact that the lifers who worked there called me "the college girl"; the concrete break room with the yellow walls, and the ceiling therein that was supposed to be white but instead was also yellow, from cigarette smoke instead of paint; the fact that I smoked more during that period of working midnight shift than I ever have before or since; the guy who always wore the same Slayer t-shirt, who once got me abysmally high (ed. note: this is one of my favorite adverb/adjective combinations ever, because it is fun to think of a "high" resembling an "abyss") in the parking lot before I drove the two miles home v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-ly. Was that anecdote fun or interesting? No it was not. But did I need to write it down? Yes I did. However, did I need to post it on the Web for many people to see? Hmmm, you may have a point there. This page has everything: Roz Chast cartoons (I love her books, and most are out of print, so keep your eyes peeled at used bookstores), dictionary tidbits, and mouseover words. The mouseover words open windows that stay open, though. I find it annoying but maybe that is supposed to happen. What do I know. I have this factoid in my head: that when Henry Adams wrote his autobiography, he left out not only his first wife's suicide but his entire first wife. Of course memoir is selective (which is why Elizabeth Wurtzel always manages to leave out the fact that she's a totally spoiled whiny vacuous ho), but jeez. If your wife committed suicide and you were writing an autobiography, you could try to spin it a certain way, or play the sympathy angle, or use up some pages working out your anger, but ignoring it entirely is weird. Here's what else is kind of weird: that NaNoWriMo thing. Write a crappy novel! And for god's sakes make sure you put an unrealistic time limit on it! It's not the time limit so much as the unnecessariness of it all. I could snort some methamphetamine and write tens of thousands of words in a few days, but what would I have? A bunch of words. And what will these people have at the end of November? Let's be totally honest here. A large majority of them will have a crappy novel. That was way harsher than I meant it to be. I am all for anything that gets you typing if you need to get typing, and I know that not everyone is self-directed to the point of being practically autistic, like I am. If deadlines and some virtual cheerleading help you write, then that's cool. Honestly, I would be dead or at least seriously transparent, insubstantial, and unbalanced if I didn't vomit up all kinds of words onto my hard drive or into my notebook every day, so forget I said anything. I'm an idiot. (Plus, there's nothing wrong with crappy novels as long as I don't have to read them.) An essential fact of modern life is being extremely aware of geography in terms of where you are not. Earlier people just knew that they lived where they lived. They were probably aware of the next village, and maybe they knew that there were other places, but that just didn't filter into consciousness very much. They focused on where they were. With commuting, world news, etc, now it's all Geography Of The Elsewhere. I am sick of people saying they are going to move to Canada because of election results, health care system problems, or blockheaded foreign-policy moves by the current administration. No, you're not. You really aren't. So either buy a plane ticket and make plans or just shut up about it. It reminds me of people who say they are "engaged," but they have made no wedding plans and speak vaguely about how they will get married three years from now. I will believe it when I see the invitation and the caterer has her deposit. Would moving to Canada really make you feel better, anyway? Wouldn't you still be just be angry from a more northerly location? I am also sick of Palestinians blowing themselves up and taking busloads of schoolkids with them, and losing whatever scrap of sympathy may have remained for their very worthwhile complaints, but that's a rant best carried out on some other website. It makes me mad because besides the (horrendous) loss of life, it's just plain bad PR. Who the hell is running this show? Grrrr. Hiss. Mimi Smartypants can be full of bile [This one is good if you rap it in a kind of fake-Rastafarian voice] [I will stop now] I just bought some new hair goop. Some women have this false notion that the right lipstick or face lotion will change their life, and that is what they spend too much money on at the drugstore. With me it's the hair goop. Talk about smoothing power and I'm all yours. This particular hair goop says something about gooping a little on and then "style as you dare." Huh? And then this morning I was reading a beer bottle label (note: I WAS NOT drinking beer in the morning, this was an empty bottle left out on the counter). This is some uppity microbrew that LT bought, and it said something about "spraining your taste buds." Why are consumer products threatening me? We will end with the best poem I have read all day. Once there is the chicken. ---mimi smartypants has a calming maternal presence. back/forward |
