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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


2003-06-04 ... 10:47 a.m.

This is pretty amazing. Dokaka is a Japanese guy who does weird acapella version of weird 1970s songs. Pretty much every thing about it is weird. (If I say the word "weird" too much it takes on a sort of Moe Szyslak accent in my mind. "Weird for the sake of weird.")

You know what else is amazing? The guy who sat next to me on the bus yesterday who kept snapping his fingers, playing the air drums, cracking his knuckles, and just generally being very restless with his crazy hand jive. This was sort of annoying me on a distant, general level, because I was trying to read (Fragrant Harbor, by John Lanchester, which is a major departure from his other books and which I cannot really recommend. I have been on a brief Hong Kong history kick, especially the wartime stuff, but this crappy, cardboardy-flat, historical romance is not what I was looking for. A Borrowed Place was much better).

Oh yes. Mr. Spazzy Hands. He was annoying me, but the annoyance was very abstract and one should be thankful for small favors on the bus, such as no group-home resident actually drooling on you. Then I started to wonder why I couldn't stop looking at his hands. It was not just that he was moving them around a lot, it seemed that there was something...off about them. Taking a closer covert sidelong glance, I realized that this man (who, by the way, was of a rather swarthy, hairy ethnicity) had shaved the hair on his hands. Consequently they were stubbly. There was gray, scratchy-looking, five o'clock shadow all over the backs of his hands. Somehow having shaved sandpapery hands is one thousand times grosser than just having hairy hands.

Unorthodox hair removal unsettles me. Up and down Devon Avenue are many Indian salons that advertise threading, sugaring, and "full-arm waxing." Arm waxing? Once, during a wine-drinking marathon, a friend of mine confided that she tweezes her nipples, which really startled me. I mean, number one, ow. And number two, exactly how hairy are your coconuts, anyway? Are we talking the occasional stray (which should not cause anyone distress, in my opinion) or something a baby orangutan could cling to?

Despite my tendency toward Mediterranean fuzziness, there are limits to this hair-removal thing, I think. I shave my legs and underarms, although I am not obsessive about it, and it mostly gets done as I sit in the bathtub with a big glass of wine (alcohol and razorblades, a fine combination!) I visit the Eyebrow Lady once a month, and occasionally I pop in to see another lady who gets out some hot wax and neatens up my Royal Area. That last salon service is sporadic, but I perversely enjoy it for its bad-ass torture-chamber aspects (see! I may be dominating but I can sometimes be flipped!). Although it is very odd to make small talk with a stranger when pantsless. Especially with one who is doing hot-wax-related things to your private stuff. And one who then expects a tip.

Why am I telling you this? And what sort of drugs did I take before I decided to tell you this? The morning is all a blur.

WHAT RULES AND WHAT SUCKS (IN THE WORKPLACE)

My new work chair: Rules! You may remember that while other editors received brand-new kick-ass office chairs last year, your friend Mimi was left to perch her posterior on the same old seat. Not anymore! My new chair is so very adjustable that one could easily spend a good two hours of one's morning fucking with it, which is precisely what I did the other day. The arms go in and out and up and down, there is some sort of lumbar (gosh that word sounds dirty to me) support knob that sends a bulge of comfort up or down your spinal column (rrrrowwrr!), and the seat can tilt all sorts of crazy ways like you are playing one of those flight-simulator arcade games. Plus the seat is EXTRA SUPER WIDE! There is so much room, you could come sit in the chair with me! Really! Or I could gain fifty pounds in the ass location and still keep my job! Okay, I have to stop, I am getting too excited.

The rest of work: Sucks! I am losing yet another employee! I thought there was supposed to be a recession or something! Goddamn it, be recessed! I suppose it is my fault for hiring these young talented go-getters, and honestly I am not one of those bosses who takes it all personally when someone leaves. Everyone has to forge his or her own path, fly little birdie be free, etc. But it sucks for me because it means lots of cruddy HR paperwork, lots of extra tasks while we are down a person, and lots of self-consciousness and cold sweats while I play the interviewing game again. And it sucks for you, because I will probably talk about the process here, and you will be all like WE HAVE HEARD THIS BEFORE and I will be all like DON'T YELL AT ME OKAY NOW WHERE DID YOU PUT THE BOTTLE OPENER.

UH-OH THE BIG RANT

Also, I had kind of a big Mope Session about office politics in general the other day. Just about all the people I know who are of a certain age, who come from an "alternative" background, who have lefty politics and unorthodox cultural tastes and whatnot, and who are as surprised as anyone to find themselves in a "real" job, express disdain and amused contempt at all the corporate absurdity and ladder-climbing ruthless achievement. We are all standing outside the cage, laughing up our sleeves at the spectacle. Then you find these same people participating in said politics, and defending their sad little position on the food chain with the ferocity of wounded wolves. The pose of ironic detachment is what they really value. It's the same in any group or scene or clique, I suppose. Blah.

WARNING THE FOLLOWING IS KIND OF GROSS

I did go to yoga last night, and during this funky sort-of-a-headstand-sort-of-downward-facing-dog thing, which I suspect the instructor was making up as she went along, the weirdest thing happened to me. I am all happily inverted and suddenly it was like my face exploded and snot and phlegm and sinus juice backed up into all kinds of passages it was not meant to be in, passages I did not even know I had, and my right eye started streaming with water and I nearly choked to death. The best way that I can describe the incident is that it felt exactly like inhaling pool water, complete with taste-of-chlorine and everything (and where did that come from?). So it was not only an alarming snotular emergency, but also an eerie traumatic flashback, since I have not been in a pool in years, and most of my pool-memories involve swimming lessons that were more like drowning lessons.

LEAVE YOUR HYPERTEXT AFTER THE BEEP

Supposedly Mattel is investing in the Beatbug. Holy cow this sounds cool. I would stand in line to buy one, seriously.

This restaurant review in today's New York Times is fairly unremarkable until we get to the end: Eric Asimov mentions a dessert called "Thai Sticks" and then quips, "Dare I say they are intoxicating?" I think that every time a mainstream cultural product makes a favorable, joking, or otherwise benign reference to marijuana, those of us who are not heart surgeons or airline pilots should be given license to take a "smoke break" in celebration.

Very good article on parallel universes, from Scientific American.

---mimi smartypants is frayed at the edges and busted at the seams.

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