real close up
OW OW OW OW OW
I have burned myself three times in the last week—one was a roasted-marshmallow accident, the other two were just me being oven-dumb. It sounds obvious to type it, but I am always astonished at how much a minor burn, the kind that does not even need treatment, hurts. I need to make a donation to a burn-survivors’ foundation now because I cannot imagine having burns all over.
One of my burns is a perfect pink triangle on my forearm, and looks like maybe I tried to give myself a queer-pride brand. I’m here! I’m clumsy in the kitchen! Get used to it!
DARE TO BE STUPID
Sometimes I wish that Weird Al was still actively parodying pop music, because Nora is at a prime age to enjoy song parodies and yet she has no emotional connection with his classic targets like Michael Jackson or Madonna. We will have to continue making up our own. I bet you did not know that the dreadful Nicki Minaj song about “starships” is actually about pie. And Miley Cyrus should really hear our multiple-verse ode to defecation, “Potty in the U.S.A.”
I GO PLACES AND MEET PEOPLE
• I will cop to sometimes reading smug food/health blogs. Sometimes it’s for vaguely aspirational reasons, like how I read Real Simple* or home-decor websites, a borderline-pornographic oh look at that lovely whatever maybe I could have that too. Sometimes it’s more to snicker and roll my eyes at these people who run around putting chia seeds on everything and taking boring photographs of bowls of oatmeal. (Seriously, it’s like a clichéd joke of boringness. Instagram of a bowl of oatmeal! If Bert from Sesame Street had a blog!)
However, as with just about any blog, a rule for reading food blogs should be Never Read The Comments. Mostly because they will be simple-minded things like “oh wow your bowl of oatmeal is so pretty!” and who has time for that. I am glad I recently read one food blog’s comments, though, because it was an amusing mess of religion and crazy.
Marie August 20, 2012 at 11:55 am: This describes us to a T! We have such happy mealtimes because our kids have never had any choices, now age 4 and 2. When they are given choices at church, they never choose soda, they choose water. They eat what they are given and they give God thanks that we have food to eat. We don’t eat fast food. They don’t eat candy or sweets (almost ever), that is for special occasions/holidays. We must be french! When other kids get candy around them and they can’t have any, they don’t whine or complain because we have trained them about it at home. We homeschool so that they are not indoctrinated by the ridiculous food pyramid (oh thank you government for misleading the public and causing disease for years in an issue you have no business in). They also have never been told they come from monkeys, which really does something for their self-esteem.
To quote Hank Schrader: “Goddammit Marie! They’re minerals!” What an amazing explosion of creationist food-smug. If smug were jism, that would be bukkake right there. Marie, I hope your children grow up to be Twinkie-eating Wiccans.
*Real Simple footnote: I also got mad at this smug-yet-somehow-compelling magazine recently, for suggesting that if you need to change a light bulb and it is too hot to touch, you cut a tennis ball in half and use that as a sort of handle. So a tennis ball has to die because you can’t wait a minute? Calm down, tweaker.
• Went to the Michigan dunes with my family, and while it was too cold and perilous to actually swim (red flags, loudspeakered warnings of death), we did have fun splashing and walking around. We wanted to spend the night somewhere with an indoor pool, so Nora could continue burning off the thousands of calories she did not eat that day, and actually ended up at an Indiana casino/hotel (a few miles in the other direction). There is nothing to make one feel fit, healthy, and stylish like walking around an Indiana casino. That may not be nice, but it is true. (I had a no-Chicago-taxes beer, won $12 on the slots, and called it a night.)
• Also attended my father-in-law’s enormous pig-roast birthday party, out in the country. It was not too terrible, although it was a long way to travel to not eat pork with people I don’t know (ie, all my stepmother-in-law’s relatives). There was a serious amount of confusion about Nora’s gender from said relatives, which irritated me more than it usually does. I don’t think she presents in a strictly male fashion, but more in a “somewhat ambiguous” fashion. Then again I don’t think these particular rural relatives get out much, so they probably don’t know what the hell to do with ambiguity. I mostly stuck with LT and his sisters and only overheard one derogatory joke about an ethnic group, so maybe we will count the evening as a win. Plus Nora found a flattened toad on the road to the barn. It was completely flat and practically mummified, but when she turned it over with a stick she exclaimed (and I quote), “There’s something pulsating under the skin!” Aw who doesn’t love maggots? Little squirmy friends of ours.
—mimi smartypants respects the decomposition process.