could use some herring
THE MISHMASH CATCH-UP
I think I suffer from the exact opposite of body dysmorphic disorder, since if I give my appearance any conscious thought at all I tend to think I look all right. In fact, there are days when I have a vague feeling that I may even look hot-to-dare-I-say-it-smokin'-hot, and maybe my walk is extra-sassy and I feel alllll right, to quote Lou Reed although I usually don't. Quote Lou Reed, that is. Where did I just read a Q&A with him? I can't remember the magazine but he was a total ass, and even called the (female) interviewer “sugar.” I guess it is no surprise that Lou Reed is a jerkface but it is still disappointing, and my dismissive hatred is cemented. Dear Lou Reed: you have a mid-range talent at BEST, John Cale was the best thing that ever happened to you, so please stick a pin in that giant inflated ego of yours, thanks. Wait, I think I lost the thread somewhere.
Anyway, without fail it is on the days when I am bopping along feeling mighty attractive that I will catch an actual glimpse of myself in a mirror or store window and witness the reality of WHO LET ME LEAVE THE HOUSE LIKE THIS? It is sometimes shocking, it truly is. Just about the only two things that let me regain my equilibrium w/r/t my appearance are (a) remembering that 99.9% of people I encounter are not even thinking about how I look, much less judging it, and that the remaining percentage who are judging can go fuck themselves; or (b) having sex. Woo hoo sex, the great bulldozer of the beauty myth! The blindfold over the measuring public patriarchal gaze!
Speaking of sex, LT and I recently enjoyed a childfree weekend for our twelfth anniversary: Nora spent a few days having her every wish granted at my parents' place, while we went out to dinner and walked around naked and blasted all the inappropriate-lyrics music we could find in our collection. We do not usually do anniversary gifts, which is why I was surprised to receive a teeny-tiny refurbished Mac laptop, the very machine I had been lusting after for months (to LT's deeply-ingrained codemonkey dismay). It will allow me to indulge the fantasy that I still have a life involving long wasted afternoons drinking tea and typing nonsense in a public place (in reality it will just allow me to type and post from a comfy chair in my living room). I can pretend that I will now get serious about taking pictures and organizing them all to heck (in reality I will probably still have a few vast undated folders named things like “CATS,” “NORA,” and “OTHER STUFF.”) At the very least it does play nice with my iPod, unlike my dumpster-dived PC which was somehow allergic to its own Firewire card.
And speaking of the stupid body that I drag around, like a homeless person pushing a cart full of foil and string, yesterday I bought a new swimsuit for the upcoming beach vacation with not much trauma at all. I surprised myself by purchasing something with separate containers for each boob, as before that had seemed the height of scariness, and I preferred to squish all the breast-bits into a high-neck wetsuit-like thing to minimize exposure. But the lift-and-separate option actually looks decent, and I found a suit with a tiny little skirt (really more of a crotch apron), which provides just enough of a psychological crutch to get me over the OMG PRACTICALLY NAKED swimsuit issue that I tend to have. Woods Hole, I can't wait to get in your hole. Maybe I will go dip Nora into the screaming hell of park-district “Family Swim” someday soon, just to test out the new suit.
ENUMERATED CRAP, TWO THIRDS CHILDISH
1. Nora is the queen of Head Sweat. In this weather her gorgeous bangs are often plastered down with perspiration, which she finds irksome, so she has taken to wearing those stretchy cloth headbands to keep it all out of her way. Except that no matter how many times I adjust the headband back up to its proper, hairline position, inevitably she will end up pulling it down to forehead level, like a small version of Ivan Lendl or Rambo. What most people call hell, she calls home!
2. Recently I took a day off work and spent the entire thing with my kid (up to and including bedtime, as it was LT’s turn to go out drinking), and you’ll get no standard OH THE HUMANITY mommyblog moaning from me in this entry because Nora is truly excellent company these days. Four-year-olds are really very nice people. Okay, at around 5 pm I did think the words “please shut the fuck up” but it was only once, and only inside my head.
3. After a dinner of buttered, Parmesaned noodles and a pint of blueberries, Nora said, “That was the best dinner ever. If I were an anaconda a wild pig would be the best dinner ever. Also I would not chew my food.” Okay then.
4. I really wish that one of my older, tasteful, very genteel professional colleagues would stop using the phrase “shot [fill in possessive pronoun here] wad” in emails about budgets, the timing of certain press releases or published features, etc. I am fairly certain that this person would never talk about wads being shot if she knew the standard meaning of those terms, and it upsets me every time but there is no way to get her to stop without making the situation much, much worse.
5. However, if you want to gab about wad-shooting at length, or set up an appointment to do more of the same, the climbing structure at Mather Park informs me that 508 7114 is the number to call. From the same “community message board” (ie, Sharpie on the side of the monkey bars), I have learned that EMILY [HEARTS] DONKEY COCK.
—mimi smartypants protests the objectification of donkeys everywhere.