|
|
||
|
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
|
STRANGE-FLAVOR SAUCE COATS MY MENTAL SPOON What is making me feel so weird? The weather, which here in Chicago is dark and chilly and weirdly humid, like a hiding in a coat closet? The fact that I have spent six hours reading articles on rectal cancer (for business, not pleasure)? The bottles of Miller High Life* that I enjoyed last night? *Speaking about Miller High Life in the plural causes me anxiety about what that plural should be. Millers High Life? Miller High Lives? Miller High Lifes? The cause is a matter for debate, but the effects are not. I am very drifty and odd today, with frequent yawns, inappropriate giggling, and a strange obsession with certain turns of phrase that have gotten stuck in my head and will not leave. NUMBER ONE. Today for lunch I decided I wanted a baked potato (with broccoli, cheddar cheese, and lots of salt), so I took my floaty head over to the potato place and ordered it to go. Then I left and thought: "potato obtained." Over and over again. If you Google "potato obtained" you can find statistics on potato production in Uruguay. Whenever potato production in Uruguay comes up in conversation, as it so often does, you will now be totally prepared to THROW DOWN. When it comes to potato production in Uruguay, you will be dropping knowledge like the A-bomb, dilly as napalm! Which I believe is a Tupac Shakur lyric (uh, the second half of the sentence, anyway), and if there were an award for mentioning Tupac Shakur and potato production in Uruguay in the same paragraph I would be clutching my statuette and beaming right now. Is there such an award? Oh. Dang. "Potato obtained" also recalls "potato I have," which is not something Yoda said while holding a spud but rather is a line from Ulysses. (Also: a fun Joyce conference program. They had me at "A Semiosis of Swine.") NUMBER TWO. Hotmail's home page tried to entice me to click with their strange phrase, "Guidelines for safe teen piercing." Echos of "teen piercing" bothered me all day (although not to the extent of "potato obtained.") Let's pierce some teens! NUMBER THREE. Today I was reminded of the existence of this beef-pushing girly messageboard place (my favorite quotation: "It's totally cool to feel good about yourself." Huh. I did not know that. And here I thought self-loathing got all the good press.) When I went to this site, to confirm that it still existed and was still just as bizarre as I remembered, I became transfixed at the sight of the random clip art tacos in the bottom right corner. Then I became even more transfixed by the phrase "clip art tacos." Here are some more! And here is a woman being a taco! Go ahead lady! Be the taco! Whew. I feel slightly better now. Time to take a giant, lung-rattling hit off the Reality Bong and try to type about things tangible and narrative, instead of just noodling on words I like. WHILE YOU'RE IN THERE, CHECK THE OIL This has been Mimi Tune-Up Week. I hate going to doctors, but with international travel and mommyhood coming up it is probably not a bad idea to get my insides investigated. First, there was a girl-parts appointment. Have you ever heard that statistic about how airlines fudge the "on time" percentage? They make sure to push back out of the gate on time, so that they get to call the flight "on time" even if the pilot ends up driving around the runway for an hour. I think my gynecologist's office operates on the same principle, as I was weighed and blood-pressured and told to get naked precisely at the hour of my 9:15 appointment, but then they left me to sit in a cold lonely room for what felt like an eternity. I eventually hopped off the table, trying to keep robe and ludicrous paper "lap sheet" around me, and shuffled over to my bag and my library book, because I cannot stand doing nothing. When the doctor showed up she looked different to me. I remembered her having long blonde hair, and this woman had short red hair. She also seemed taller, and heavier. Of course healthy non-breeders like me only see the gynecologist once a year, and she had given birth in the interval, which could explain the new body shape, and even doctors are certainly allowed to change their hairstyles from year to year. Still, though, the first few minutes of small talk were hard, as I kept thinking, "Is this really my doctor? Or is some random woman about to feel around in my hoo-ha? Ah well, worse things have happened." (Postscript: Barring some X-Files soul-stealing body-replacement scenario, I think she really was my doctor, just a bit physically altered from last year.) Not two days later I was at the internist, for a physical and blood work. There was nothing noteworthy about this except that I was not allowed to eat for twelve hours before the blood draw (and this turned out to be more like twenty hours, because getting up in the middle of the night to eat sounded like more trouble than it was worth). Few things make me as cranky as hunger. The phlebotomist was all cheerful and funny and marveling over the Apparent Nonexistence of my arm-veins (I would make a lousy junkie), but I was so hungry that there was no way I could make any sort of small talk or humor-appreciative noises back. I was too busy contemplating popping the foam hand-squeezy thing into my mouth, because it looked a bit like a giant Skittle. The minute it was over I was out of the chair like a shot, down the elevator, out of the hospital, not passing Go but walking (or rather slouching, stumbling blearily like a no-blood-sugar zombie) directly to the nearest Thai restaurant, where I proceeded to eat my weight in peanut sauce and tofu. Then yesterday I got my hair cut at the fancy-schmancy place. I have gone from having semi-long hair to having rather shortish hair, in just a few months, but change is good and I had a sudden longing for the shape of my head, and the nape of my neck. Oh neck there you are! I missed you! The fancy-schmancy salon makes me a bit nervous---the leather pants, the artful bedhead, the piped-in club music. The shampoo girl was the kind of hipster who is so thin she looks bowlegged, and I am still not clear what her deal was because she gave me a TWENTY-MINUTE SHAMPOO. I am not kidding. She kept lathering and lathering and massaging my head and then lathering some more, and then more massage, and after a while I thought "this is the longest shampoo in the universe" but I cannot exactly look at my watch in that position so I thought "maybe I am just a poor judge of time." After ANOTHER eternity of lather and massage I started to count songs on the salon's CD mix, and even assuming your standard three-minute pop song (and these were not, they were more like seven-minute ambient/jungle/shoegazing/worldbeat things), TWELVE SONGS went by from the time I decided to count. The shampoo girl was also touching me a lot in other ways---when she was leaning over she would press her pubic bone into my shoulder, and when she finally let me sit up to towel off she scratched my neck some. Normally I am not going to complain about cute girl-touching but MUST I BE VIOLATED AT THE HAIR SALON? I chose not to tip her, because she made me feel so dirty. Yeesh. Fuck, I have to get out of here. Because I have nowhere else to put it, here is a photo of a very young David Foster Wallace. Here is a picture of a whole lot of radiators. This radiator depot was somewhere on Milwaukee Avenue.
And here is how to bathe properly. Date-rape shampoo girl, please take note.
---mimi smartypants is curious yellow. back/forward |
