August 2012
Exclusive!
Reasons to avoid celebrity weeklies include: things that are wrong; and things that are true but also wrong.
At least we have a fighting chance now. Vintage Enquirer, for instance, couldn’t be refuted (splendidly and succinctly) in a tweet.
And in things that are true but also wrong, forget the fighting chance — if you don’t read celebrity weeklies, you don’t know that Busy Phillips little girl has this cardigan which is the most adorable cardigan ever, but is also $54. Celebrities! Pay adult-sized prices for kiddo-sized duds.
They’re totally just like us.
Knotty...
I’m makin’ tings!
A…mistake “snake” for the step cats to play with first, and presently what is turning out to be an inadvertently-triangular scarf on its way to (hopefully) being passably this pretty blanket.
I shouldn’t have gone back to look. My stitches look…not the same as hers.
In any event, you want to see something lulling and hypnotic? Watch crochet how-to videos. These are the ones I’m using. And so I have 12 weeks to make something that will either be A) A baby blanket; B) A dolly blanket; or C) A pot holder.
It’s not unlike making friendship bracelets. It’s kind of fun, especially when you have help.
I have to learn how to change colors now. Somebody put Carol Duvall on speed dial. We might need some Mod Podge.
Bad Sports...
You guys realize we’re the dopes here, right? That buried inside all of the head-shaking ados about performance enhancement, it only happens because we demand it. We demand that the exceptional human beings we watch accomplishing athletic feats, progressively and continually become even more exceptional.
If one baseball player hits a zillion homeruns, we need the next one to come along and hit 700* more. If it’s not stronger, more, bigger, faster, more defiant of gravity, we’ve feel like we’ve already seen it. Snooze. We don’t want ordinary fast. We want a 10.75/100m fast.
But even though these athletes are exceptional human beings, they are still ultimately constrained by the very fact that they have a human body. Physiologically there’s only so much more, more, more they can actual give us. Short of bringing back the arenas of lions and vomitoriums, the show we pound our fists for can’t go on without performance enhancement.
“Yeah, but if they do it, they’re still cheaters! They still did bad!” Maybe. But without attention there are no sponsors, and without sponsors there is no way to support athletics as a career. You have to not only be beyond superlative, you have to LOOK like a product to survive.
We have created this business of sport. We demand an ever-more-impressive show and pay our price of admission in branded cereal accordingly.
Win-at-all-COST being the point. If we’ve maxed out what the body can do cleanly, will we still keep watching? If not, we better be ready to pay no attention to the dope[ing] behind the curtain.
(He sells sunscreen, but eesh — he’s only 40? Maybe he didn’t get any free samples.)
Orange You Glad...
Not orange like Prince Harry (HRH the Terrace Kitty, not the HRH Oops Naughty Bits) though he could be included too. My Prince Harry takes his meals al fresco twice a day and has treats separate from the step cats. Nice things from this week, in hues of punchy warm.
Orange like “Just Because [you’re so tired you think you might implode like a Supernova]” flowers that brought some cheerful at exactly the right time.
Orange like novelty-spelling cloth diapers that showed up in the mail. You can “Oh, just you wait,” and you might be right, but we’re going to give it a go. It’s the least we can do really, attempting not to turn the whole planet into that patch of garbage in the ocean.
Orange like the fruit bowl. If yours doesn’t have disco balls in it, your fruit might not be having enough fun. I don’t really have any cravings other than I can tolerate fruit now, when I really had no time for it before — and ice in my drinks. All beverages must now be the temperature of an Arctic ice floe before Al Gore invented global warming, see above.
Okay, fine. Orange like Harry.
“I ended up making a living in a business where I had to have people I didn’t know, cheer for me performing fantasy warfare.”
—
Mick Foley, Plus One #35.
His definition of professional wrestling — he didn’t turn a phrase, he gave it a suplex.
And Miles to Go...
The math is very simple: for every sports bra you have to wear to accomplish said sport, you get to add a mile. By these calculations, this morning’s actual two miles, counts as five.
Where did I put THREE sports bras? Two in the usual locale, and one to keep the kid similarly snug. It worked. I’m glad I didn’t have to explain it to anyone, but it worked.
That’s been the biggest hurdle in this whole “Baby on Board” running thing. It’s not that I don’t feel like it, and it’s not that I’m eager to have an excuse to ease off — it’s that it hurts. An L-O-T lot.
I don’t understand it, I wasn’t expecting it, and it seems like not everyone gets it. There are girls out there who can do eight and 10 miles up until the end. There’s no way. I can grit out two. Wearing my entire underdrawer collection at once helps, but two is the limit.
But it’s okay. Even though the graph shows a downhill trend, I’ve still done 1,012 miles with her. No, they weren’t all on foot, but still. More than 1,000. And hopefully it will be closer to 1,500 by November.
And in 94 days plus…training time, she’s going to get to do some more in this joker. I mean, it has a steering wheel. What’s more fun than that?
And in the meantime, I’ll do as much as I can until I can rock like Mel again.
Book Marked...
Maybe it’s because they were there first, or maybe because the pictures stamp the stories onto your brain like Silly Putty and the Sunday Comics, but I was washing blueberries this morning and finished the phrase, [for Sal.]
Because who else are blueberries for? I don’t even remember liking this book, with its stingy color palette and its constant appearance thanks to its cover medallion, but it’s there.
A hippo will always be a George, Frances is a badger with a wagon, and whenever gorgonzola is mentioned, I see it falling out of the sky and the lady with the stinky face from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
And always, when my socks don’t match, which they never do because they come in multi-striped packs of 70 just begging to be scattered to the four corners, I am Dorrie.
I am a good witch. My hat is always crooked and my socks never match.
It probably makes sense then, that I’m not always bringing home tiny pink ruffles, or another stuffed monkey-or-other, I’m bringing home books. Books with fire trucks (“Where does Uncle Bro work?) and tractors (“Show me where Grandma and Grandpa live.”) and no Disney-Dora-Barbies-or-Bratz.
Because you remember this stuff. Even if you can’t read the words.
“All by way of saying, that if there ever came a time when the government of my new homeland was actually calling up the forty-something asking-and-telling homosexuals with hypo-active thyroids to take up arms, something very calamitous indeed will have to have happened.”
—David Rakoff, “Love It Or Leave It” from Don’t Get Too Comfortable.
It’s his essay on becoming a US citizen, and explains “Grass soup.” If it comes to eating grass soup, you’ve probably already got worse problems. I read this in ‘08 or ‘09, and with a few adjustments to details, thought it exactly described how useful I would be to a fighting force.
And then I joined the Army and David Rakoff died. Damn.
“So that’s why I answered “yes.” But, like I said, it is grass soup. (I hope.)
It’s his essay on becoming a US citizen, and explains “Grass soup.” If it comes to eating grass soup, you’ve probably already got worse problems. I read this in ‘08 or ‘09, and with a few adjustments to details, thought it exactly described how useful I would be to a fighting force.
And then I joined the Army and David Rakoff died. Damn.
“So that’s why I answered “yes.” But, like I said, it is grass soup. (I hope.)
