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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


2003-08-27 ... 2:00 p.m.

SOME HORRIFIC SIGHTS I HAVE SEEN THIS WEEK THAT NEARLY SET MY EYES AFLAME, AND CAUSED ME TO MAKE PLANS FOR TWO-DOLLAR BEERS WITH MY SISTER TOMORROW (YOU SAY "SUBSTANCE ABUSE," I SAY "COPING MECHANISM," TOMATO TOMAHTO LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF)

A man using a spoon to feed cheez sauce, the kind that comes out of a pump with ballpark nachos, to his very small baby.

This older woman who works in my building who periodically wears these green overalls, with a belt (overalls with a belt?) and many strands of fake pearls around her neck. And ankle boots. And dangly earrings. I have a feeling she thinks this looks kooky and kicky and refreshingly insouciant, but it just looks amazingly stupid.

A guy vomiting into a paper cup. A small paper cup, like an eight-ounce coffee cup. I practically RAN past him because vomit is the last thing I need to see in the morning, but from the brief glance I could tell he was soon going to wish he had bought the Big Gulp (no pun or disgusting association intended).

A pair of goths on the train, with suitcases (vacationing goths?), and the male one had a lot of tattoos of big-breasted vampire girls in suggestive poses and such, and it made me mad because doesn't your "alternative" culture include any non-mainstream depictions of femininity? You are wearing a gothy boy-skirt, for crying out loud, one would think your ideas about gender would be a bit more advanced but I GUESS NOT. Besides, they were terrible tattoos.

(Incidentally, most of you know that I too used to dress funny, and I still like the dark music and the eyeliner, and I still sometimes have urges to put on the velvet and boots and go dancing, and thus I have a little soft spot for the gothy boys and girls. However, that taking-yourself-too-seriously thing has got to go. Want to know how to spot this kind? Ask to see pictures of their non-goth selves. Most of the hardcore and humorless spooky kids refuse to admit that they did not come out of the womb looking that way.)

This is ridiculous. A whole day of computer viral infection, a half-day of our database crashing, and now another half-day of waiting around while the IT guys, who all have the unfortunate habit of wearing their cell phones on their belts,* upgrade my machine. My work life is a shambles. Without a computer, we become pitiful office creatures, calling each other about the smallest items, keeping an ever-growing list of things to do "later." Plus, the boredom. No new e-mail, no spontaneous Google searches. Yawn.

*(Do you do this? Please stop now.)

I took a super-early lunch, to run some errands and go to the bank. In front of the Hilton I saw an Indian family crowded around a guy who had apparently slipped on the curb somehow, and they were clucking and sympathizing, hauling him up and brushing him off. Then on Michigan Avenue I saw an old lady take a more typical old-lady fall. Many helpful people were also taking care of her so I just kept on trucking, as it were. How odd, though, to see two people fall down within five minutes and six blocks. Maybe some kind of science-fiction falling-down plague is sweeping the planet. Heaps of people in the street, hordes of commuters crawling to work.

Americans! Share the meat. Heh.

Vacation at home! What's with those socks?

Go penguins go!

A BRAND-NEW THING TO BE STUPID ABOUT!

Things I have been stupid about in the past include not knowing the male platypus is poisonous; how to deal with the flip-top toothpaste cap; how to pull into my parents' garage without knocking it down with the car; not knowing that getting a key copied does not take days and cost dozens of dollars; and Star Wars.

The new thing I am stupid about is soda. As I may have said before, I do not drink tons of soda, but there are times when I hanker for the diet Pepsi. With certain foods, with certain hangovers, it is what I need. However, I don't want lots of it, and I want ice. And a straw. Drinking out of cans is not my thing unless those cans are filled with Schlitz.

This preference has meant a lot of complicated maneuvers for me if I decide I want soda while at work. I have to go to the machine and buy a can, or go to the White Hen and buy some kind of plastic twenty-ounce (twenty-ounce! what do they think I am, a Soda Camel?) bottle, then I have to go up to our cafeteria and get a styrofoam cup filled with ice, and a straw, and by that time oh just forget it.

But everyone say it with me now: DUH. THE PHENOMENON OF THE FOUNTAIN DRINK. All convenience stores have the fountain-drink option! Soda, ice, and straw all in one package! And if you get the smallest one, like I do, it is EIGHTY-SIX CENTS instead of a dollar twenty or whatever for some dumb plastic bottle. So, my brown fizzy artificially-sweetened beverage is now (a) convenient; (b) cheap; and (c) served just the way I like it. I think this bears repeating: DUH.

SPAM I RECEIVED FROM YOGA JOURNAL

"What Will It Take To Get You To Meditate?"

Are they threatening me?

A LIST OF THE ADJECTIVES ON MY PACKAGE OF DRIED APRICOTS, SOME COPYWRITER NEEDS A SEDATIVE

flavorful
luscious
golden
velvety-smooth
distinctive
tender
sweet
subtle
tart
delicious
tasty
succulent
active
healthy

TWO OTHER THINGS, THEN I WILL LEAVE YOU ALONE

1. This web page, and indeed my life, is rather drama-free. Except for those times I get all Despairy, I tend to live in my head and not in the heart or the spleen or wherever we are keeping our emotions these days. But today I realized that if you added up all my daily emotions and divided by, I don't know, the number of emotion opportunities in twenty-four hours, you would get a smallish number and the breakdown would be something like this: Pleasant, Amused, Slightly Irritated, Horny, Slightly Irritated Again, Wistful, Cranky, and so on. Not a Panic or a Grief or a Wrath among them.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off�then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. (Moby Dick, Herman Melville)

So either I need to join the Merchant Marines, or if emotions are just chemicals in the brain, I need better drugs.

2. In my recent list of things I want to be other than human, some readers questioned the predominance of inanimate objects. I was surprised at their surprise---doesn't it seem preferable? Doesn't the animal/vegetable kingdom seem a bit ridiculous, all these cells dividing, all this matter flailing about under its own power? Sometimes I would rather be something dignified, something solid, something like a stapler or fried egg. A still life. With stapler and fried egg. If you paint that for me I will love you forever.

---mimi smartypants brought the noise.

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