Fussy

Breakfast Cereal Hell!

2010-02-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

Do you eat cereal for breakfast? I eat cereal for breakfast. Two years of oatmeal did wonderful things for my cholesterol, I'm sure, but OATMEAL BURNOUT. So: cereal. During college I discovered the joys of mixing two or three different cereals together, but I no longer live in my lovely old co-op dorm where we had 24-hour access to coffee, tofu, and fourteen different kinds of cereal. Ah, those heady days when I could roll out of bed, shuffle through a haze of cigarette smoke, and come to while shoveling a bowl of Life/Cap'n Crunch/Grape Nuts into my mouth.

I have to buy my own cereal now. Cereal is expensive, so I usually only have two boxes max on hand at any one time. Right now it's 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday and my post-yoga, who-needs-food? high is fading, and I'm poised to saunter into the kitchen and construct a bowl of what I have at the moment, which is Post Raisin Bran (I like Post because the raisins aren't all sugared up like they are in Kellogg's Raisin Bran) and Peanut Butter Panda Puffs. I love these cereals separately, my God I do, but together they're somewhat of a disaster. The Raisin Bran sinks to the bottom and gets ungodly soggy while you're dealing with the Panda Puffs, which have all floated to the top to demand you pay attention to them first.

My breakfast life is hell. Surely you can help. Tell me some good cereal combinations? I feel so lost right now.

Reading Revival

2010-02-01T08:40:00.000-08:00

In a wonderful coincidence, I decided to try to revive Fussy's long-neglected Reading page and Sony offered to help out by letting me give away one of their Pocket Readers. Go see!

Don't give it what it wants

2010-01-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

Occasionally my yoga teacher, Steve, does this thing in class where he asks us to stand slightly bent over, with our hands on our knees, and breathe. Breathe all the way in until we feel like we're going to burst, then all the way out until our lungs feel flat. We do this in-and-out thing a couple of times and then we breathe in our fullest breath and hold it. He tells us it's not a contest, to let out our breath when we need to, but when we feel that instinctive, almost panicky feeling that we can't hold it another second, hold it one more second. Then breathe. But don't let the panic decide.

That moment -- when the panic's standing there looking at you in shock for your insubordination -- must be like when a pendulum gets to the top of its swing and just floats there for a moment, thumbing its nose at gravity.

Then we do a few more rounds of deep in and out breaths, and then we blow everything out and hold it. That's the one that gets you, having no air in your lungs at all. No one can hold out nearly as long, the instinct to get air into your lungs becomes unendurable pretty quickly. But wait, says Steve, for one second beyond what you think you can endure. Don't give it what it wants.

He says this strengthens our neural pathways. I believe him. Steve can do things, things you'd think were impossible.

Suddenly, last week, after years of doing this exercise, the broader lessons began to apply as well. I realized that when I feel a tiny jolt of anxiety about whatever, a dirty dish, or I had ten things to do in the time it would take to do one of them well, I could think: Don't buckle. That's what it wants. Pause first. It'll back right off and then you can put away the dish with a quiet heart instead of the other. Pet the dog instead of pushing him aside to get at the laundry; pet the dog and then get the laundry. Don't give it what it wants, because what it wants is to be in control, it'll snap you around like a flag on a windy day. Your nerves will literally fray.

This is the type of emotional control that helps you get up and stay in your handstands, too, of course. Handstands and laundry. I should pay Steve double for his classes.

But today I forgot. You can ask Jack about that. He quietly took Jackson off and away to hit tennis balls because I spent the morning with no more breath in me at all, trying to push It back, because It wanted what It wanted and what it wanted was to shut me down. It put the fire in my heart right out, like a bucket of water hitting a birthday candle. It got what it wanted.

(But when that happens, sometimes there's a solution:)

He was a nice guy with some funny habits

2010-01-25T12:42:00.000-08:00

At one point while Alice and I were working, The Simpsons came up in conversation. (I have a wee ~~app~~ widget that feeds random Homer quotes to my MacBook dashboard, like "We're going bowling. If we don't come back, avenge our deaths," and "Well, it's 1 a.m. Better go home and spend some quality time with the kids.") Alice admitted that during a certain point in her life it was really important for her to watch that show, and I confessed how I always wanted to watch the Simpsons but my Simpsons-watching always depended on which relationship I was in at the moment. (Dividing my old boyfriends into Simpsons watchers and non-Simpsons watchers is as valid way as any of reducing them to stereotypes, right?) The point being, if my boyfriend liked The Simpsons, I got to watch The Simpsons. If he didn't, I had to ask the bartender to turn up the volume.

Why yes, I did have some trouble getting my other needs met, now that you ask.

This makes me realize that I haven't not been in a relationship since the show began, in 1989. I know most of you were twelve then, but surely you'll appreciate the fact that one of my '90s boyfriends liked to watch The Simpsons with no pants on. Naturally, he encouraged me to do the same. He was a nice guy with some funny habits, and he'd get out a blanket for our laps -- you know, for modesty's sake, in case his roommate came home and saw us sitting on the couch in our undies. Even though his roommate was a nice guy, and they were very close. I think they might even still be roommates. I remember wanting to be real quiet if we were having sex when his roommate was home, but my boyfriend kind of had the attitude that he hoped his roommate would enjoy knowing we were having a good time and sort of get turned on by it. And part of me was all, Okay, wow, that's tribal of you.* Plus, I had my own roommate to deal with, so it wasn't like I could've suggested we leave and go over to my place, where my sexually awkward roommate would be staring into the gloom above his bed and everso politely listening to us as well. Of course, my roommate insisted we not have a TV at all. Otherwise, instead of listening to me and my boyfriend have sex WE COULD ALL HAVE BEEN WATCHING THE SIMPSONS.

*I'm great at rationalizing all sorts of questionable boyfriend behavior; having grown up with a lot of intimacy/insecurity/boundary problems, I spent years pretending that I was just fine with a lot of behavior that a self-respecting person shouldn't be fine with AT ALL. I should say that the no-pants thing was an incredibly mild example of this, and fell more on the "fun thing to try" end of the spectrum than on the "will put you in the hospital" side.

Oklahoma, you're OK

2010-01-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

I had kind of an adventure getting from California to New York!

Despite the fact that I couldn't wait to actually BE in New York and writing with Alice, I'd been somewhat dreading the skyward application of movement that would result in the transferrence of my corporeal being from one coast to the next. I mean, AIRPORTS = SO MUCH WAITING and sitting and looking at people eat and also being afraid of their sneezes. And the spending of money on a ticket and an airport-priced bottle of water, MY GOD. But I rummaged around in my purse until found a bullet and then I bit down on it, and Thursday morning I boarded a commuter flight (you know, the little crashy ones!) to LAX, from which point I would launch myself Eastward.

In telling this tale I will spare you all but the most fascinating details, many of which involve a peculiar romance that's blossoming between me and my Kindle.

ALSO, I APOLOGIZE FOR THE GROSS MISUSE OF CAPITAL LETTERS. BUT I WARN YOU THAT IT MAY CONTINUE.

I got to LAX, bought a $27 bottle of water, checked the departures screen to see what gate my next flight was leaving from (not posted yet), and sat down. I read. For two hours I read and sat and sat and read and periodically got up to check the departures board, which always said my flight was ON TIME but never assigned it a gate. About 30 minutes before flight time I finally looked at my boarding pass. THAT had a gate number on it! Hey! And that gate was a 20 minute walk from where I was.

Run, O.J., Run!

I have a trustworthy little voice in my head that I need to pay more attention to, but frankly that little voice naps an awful lot, and then it WAKES UP IN A PANIC and YELLS AT ME.

So I boarded and all was well. The flight wasn't full so I had a whole row to myself! I was thinking about stretching out and taking a nap but then the flight attendant handed me a CHEESEBURGER. This had NEVER HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE and it was AWESOME. What a wonderful trip this is! I said to myself. I did not get all smug and go on to say, and I bet we'll land in Newark early! Because I'm not, despite the opinion of some, a complete idiot. I may be a partial idiot, AS WE ALL ARE, but there are some areas in which I excel and one of them is not pretending that just because I feel lucky and comfortable at the moment is this state guaranteed to continue indefinitely.

And what happened next was that about an hour out of Los Angeles, a young woman several rows behind me fainted. Upright in her seat, which is second only to fainting in bed, for safety purposes.

We learned about the event after a flight attendant got on the P.A. and asked "Is there a health professional on board?" That was a thrill, believe me. Beverage service halted! Passengers stood! Necks were craned! Oxygen tanks passed briskly overhead!

I couldn't see what was happening and frankly I felt like it was really none of my business. I went back to reading Autobiography of a Yogi. And eventually everything got quiet, they moved the beverage carts away, and I all but forgot about the Fainter until about an hour later when the captain announced that we were, as a group, going to drop her off in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We began our descent to a flyover state! I actually got kind of excited about that for a couple of reasons, one of which was that I'm from a flyover state, so I have Flyover State Pride, and another of which was Tulsa is where Sarah Brown's parents live.

Tulsa from above looks like a suburb of suburban L.A., a manageable sprawl, big enough to get on the map but not so big that you can't get your arms around it and give it a friendly squeeze.

Tweeting about Tulsa was extra fun because it got the few people from Oklahoma who follow me on Twitter all up in arms.

There wasn't a lot of complaining in the cabin about our unexpected stop in the Central Time Zone, fortunately. Certainly I felt that if the Fainter were me, I'd want to get off the damn plane, already, and I'd feel terrible about inconveniencing a bunch of understanding, to a point, strangers. I think we all felt bad for the girl -- who, now that I think of it, was being abandoned by the airlines in Tulsa, Oklahoma? -- and mentally rearranged our schedules for arriving in Newark an hour later than planned.

Meanwhile, Sarah B. went so far as to Tweet that if I needed it she could find a place for me to stay in Tulsa. I offered to fake a heart attack if it meant I could stay in her old room, and she replied that the pink decor would probably give me a heart attack. I treasure the life-sustaining properties of almost all of my internal organs, so I put her well-meaning but deadly suggestion on hold because:

Pro tip for all future flight-disrupters: if you become ill in one of the back rows, you will be wheeled all the way up the aisle in a special airplane-aisle-sized wheelchair for your ROLL OF SHAME and everyone will want to get a good look at you, so a contrite/sick to your stomach facial expression helps the rest of us feel like our time isn't being completely wasted.

After the Fainter and her family deplaned, the rest of us sat there wondering when we were going to take off again. Nearly thirty minutes elapsed until the captain came on the line and announced:

Some guy a dozen rows up from me bellowed "UNACCEPTABLE!" and I hope it made him feel better, it certainly didn't shrink the distance between Houston, where the oxygen tanks were, and Tulsa, where we needed them to be. I thought about standing up and yelling, "MERCURY IS RETROGRADE! TRAVEL DELAYS ARE FORESEEABLE FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS!" But I didn't because if you say stuff like that around certain people it doesn't have the calming, reassuring effect you think it will.

So we all filed off the plane to spend the next four hours in the airport bar, which had been shut up tight until someone called the manager and told him to come back in to reopen it or 100+ completely sober New Yorkers and Angelenos would open it up for themselves.

I kind of wanted a beer, but I also wanted to find an outlet and recharge my phone, and so I happened to be in the waiting area when one of the ground crew made a quiet announcement over the politely-not-too-loud, it's-Tulsa-and-we-have-good-manners P.A. system offering a voucher for a hotel and a flight out in the morning for those who didn't want to stew in their own juices for the rest of the night, fly through the air with a frustrated, exhausted crew, and then try to get a taxi out of Newark at 3:00 a.m.

So me, some French guy, and a young couple who were on their way back from New Zealand and were so sleep-deprived and slap-happy that they'd grab their knees in mirth at the slightest provocation, we got our vouchers and slunk off to the dingiest little Radisson I've ever been so grateful to see.

A sudden and unexpected trip to a hotel bar in America's Heartland had me reevaluating my wardrobe choices. When packing for this trip, and indeed for life itself, looking like a girly-girl isn't always at the top of the list. So I showed up in the Radisson bar looking as I often do, like an extra in The Seventh Seal: cropped hair, monk's cowl, carrying the devil's own electronic book-reading machine:

Oklahoma, I'm used to inattentive strangers calling me "sir," but I'm not used to waiters 15 years younger than me calling me "dear."

Come here, Tulsa. Give me kiss.

Unfortunately, I had to stop making out with Tulsa and force myself to sleep so I could make it back to the airport at 4:45 a.m. for the next direct flight to Newark.

Flight: UNEVENTFUL
Taxi into the city: WAITING
Wallet: EMPTIED
Apartment: WARM
Writing partner: PUNCTUAL AND INSPIRED

And now we work.

Just in case Santa comes back

2009-12-28T10:04:00.000-08:00

I assume everyone has already consumed their yearly allotment of butter, but in case you need something to push you into the 99th percentile, here's a good way to pop open your fat pants. My mom typed up some of my favorite recipes and mailed them to me when I became a grownup, in those crazy years before computers, global warming, and teeth bleach. It was a time of nutritional wonderment, when mothers fed their babies jars of Gerber egg yolks GAH.

Seriously, though, these are really good, and they freeze pretty well, too.

Happy new year!

I know one thing

2009-12-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

"Comedy is the most important thing in the world except for justice." Sigourney Weaver

"The greatest sin is judgment without knowledge." Kelsey Grammar

"Money is not going to make you happy. A new idea is what makes you happy." Fifty Cent

"Sports teach you how to be quick. Injuries teach you how to slow down." Yao Ming

"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke." Ornette Coleman

"Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect, they'll go our of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way, they will go out of their way to make your life difficult." Mohamed ElBaradei (director general, International Atomic Energy Agency)

"What makes for a good character is weakness and strength--that combination that we all have. It's often missing from characters in badly crafted stories." James Spader

"The key to milking a cow is you don't actually pull your hand down; you move your fingers. You've got to press the milk out." Katie Stam (Miss America)

"We have a very good law in Maine: When you catch a female, you carve a notch into the tail and throw it back. The industry has grown under that law. It proves if you take care of the female, she'll do you good business." George Johnson (lobsterman)

(The January Esquire has a bunch of those "What I've Learned" lists in it.)

The Other Woman

2009-12-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

The biggest perk I've earned for writing a few blog posts for PBS is that it's given me the chance to pester the staff for favors. I am so grateful to Jeannine Harvey in particular for making this happen:

It's an autographed photo of Margaret Warner, as you can see, that arrived just in time to be an early Christmas present for Jack. Jack loves Margaret. Whenever the NewsHour comes on, Jack heaves a small, lovesick sigh and says, "Oh, Margaret, what a cunning stick pin you have in your lapel tonight," or he asks me, "Do you like Margaret better in navy or taupe?" I realize I can't compete with a woman reporting from Kandahar in a flak jacket, and I've come to terms with that.

1282: Clarification

2009-12-02T12:44:00.000-08:00

I'm happy for Meredith Baxter. She's in gay love with a contractor! I bet her rain gutters look fantastic. I wonder if she's reading the comments about her over at the Daily News? I love how the illiterate asses always throw in first, and then the vultures swoop in and rip them apart, and then the maggots swarm around for awhile, and then you get a couple of tortoises on the side of the road making smart remarks about the mess:

sgt_majorette
12:18:44 PM Dec 2, 2009

Oh my goodness. I am so shocked. What is this world coming to. Think of the children. Family values. America. What about the troops. Can I go back to watching SpongeBob now?

Yankeeman6969
1:05:02 PM Dec 2, 2009

Majorette, SpongeBob and Patrick are gay together. Squidward is gay also. And Sandy the Squirrel is a big-time rug- (or is it seaweed)-muncher. Mrs. Puff and Pearl are getting it on. The only one on that show who's not gay is Mr. Krabs, who is in love only with money...LOL! In all serious, David Birney must love that his time was wasted with someone who wasn't even interested in his gender. At least they got 2 kids out of it.

Yankeeman6969
1:06:13 PM Dec 2, 2009
To clarify, I was addressing Majorette, not saying that she was gay with SpongeBob and Patrick. There should've been a colon after her name, not a comma.

1281: I've Built Up All This Momentum...

2009-12-01T09:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I took Jackson to get an ice cream cone after school. We pulled into Fosters Freeze and were unbuckling ourselves and whatnot when I glanced into the rear view mirror and saw a swarm of middle schoolers pouring out the door. Then two girls started beating the crap out of each other. I told Jackson to stay in the car, and we turned around and watched these fourteen-year-old girls yanking the shit out of each other's hair and trying to connect with some fists, but mostly just spinning around in a wobbly circle and tearing off each other's jackets. A dozen other kids stood by shouting and seeming sort of equally giddy and horrified.

So I was sitting there in my car, and I was of two minds. One mind said: Stay out of it. You don't know these kids, it's none of your business. The other mind said: You're a GROWNUP, get out there and break it up.

The moment I decided to get out of the car and see what I could do to abate the damage, a Fosters Freeze counter guy came out the door, the tall one. He had just the verge of a smirk on his face as he circled the girls, who were in a sort of shrieky scrum now, and he chose the smaller of the two and he wrapped his arms around her torso and lifted her up, then he turned 180� and placed her back down on the blacktop, whereupon her best friend handed her her backpack and they both climbed into a Ford Explorer that'd been sitting there with her mom (I'm assuming) waiting for her with the engine running. (The other fighter vanished.) There was another SUV sitting in the space next to the Explorer so the mom couldn't see what was going on on the other side of it, her daughter losing chunks of hair and dignity. I couldn't see the mom's face, I just saw her posture go all rigid and WTF?

On the way home in the car, Jackson and I talked about what we'd seen, and I told him about being unsure of what I should have done. "I could have stopped it," he said in that ridiculously confident way third graders who've played a lot of video games have. Then we got home and he took a two-hour nap for some reason? The end.

30: Bernie Mac explains it all for you.

2009-11-30T12:08:00.000-08:00

Another November come and gone! It's always weirdly satisfying, posting 30 days in a row. This has been the most enjoyable year for me so far, which is a surprise, what with all the dread I felt leading up to it. Huh. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Bernie Mac, by request:

29: I watched a movie last night

2009-11-29T12:52:00.000-08:00

I'd almost been persuaded not to watch Away We Go based on a fair amount of dismissive scuttlebutt I'd absorbed through the horror that is the Internet. The Netflix envelope had been sitting around for a week. I certainly didn't want to subject Jack to it -- he's a fairly open-minded guy, but the movie had a pregnant woman in it, and as I'd just been watching The Business of Being Born and seen how he avoided the room for ninety minutes on the off chance he'd be faced with anything birth-y, I figured I'd spare him Away We Go because it had a pregnant lady in it and YOU JUST NEVER KNOW, THEY CAN BLOW AT ANY MOMENT. Plus, Jack had watched Jackson emerge from me in Sensurround IMAX with 3-D Smell-O-Vision, and he's made it pretty clear that that was enough precious emergence for one lifetime. Fine.

Wow, what a preamble, huh! So I cracked open a leftover bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse and I found Away We Go absolutely delightful. And the moment it was over I started to wonder what was wrong with me. For liking it. Am I not jaded enough? Am I too easily swept up in the charm of things and incapable of bringing the hammer of discernment down on a film that a whole bunch of people said blows? Does having a decade on the main characters airlift me out of the second-hand Eames chair where you sit being huffy at a director for not "getting" what it's truly like to be thirtysomething with thrift-y taste, a positive outlook, and some questions about the possibility of creating a happy family?

I had no one to talk to (as usual) about this, so I went to imdb.com. There I found a few bland discussions about the film, including one started by a guy (?) who was cranky for some interesting reasons that seemed to center around the fact that Jim from The Office was in the film but he wasn't as funny in this movie as he is on The Office! Apparently thread-starter walked into the theater expecting a movie version of his favorite TV show and then became greatly affronted when John Krasinski's character didn't smirk enough. THAT, my friends, is . . . I don't even know what it is. Is that level of attachment to your own expectations even possible?

I found a friend in Roger Ebert, which was somewhat reassuring. (I like Roger Ebert. If you don't like him, that doesn't mean we can't still be friends, I'm sure we can find other common ground. How do you feel about fruit-flavored V-8 juice?)

Ebert led me to A.O. Scott, and then I got it, I got where all the disgust was coming from. I really like A.O. Scott, but I think he was riding on the other side of the boat from where I was so we saw some different things. He felt Bert and Verona traveled around thinking they were better than every couple they visited on their trek around the country, whereas I took it more as they were just innocent of what happens on the other side of adulthood, and were shocked at how people they'd known years earlier had evolved into life circumscribed by marriage and children. People crack. Or they turn into who they need to be to make shit work. Who was it who said (probably a million people) that they were a perfect parent before they had kids? That's all it is. I thought Bert and Verona were on the mild side of the pre-kid smugness continuum, actually; but we all project our own stuff on other people, so maybe where I see two people who love each other but don't have a clue how hard it's going to get, A.O. Scott sees two people who love each other and think they're better than everyone else.

(I wonder how he feels about fruited V-8?)

28: I was inspired

2009-11-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

Jackson had the day before Thanksgiving off from school and I left him to his own devices most of the day, but round about 4:00 p.m. he realized that I had things entirely too easy, so he asked me if we could join some of the most heinous rush-hour traffic of the entire year and go up to K-mart.

The result of which, three days and four half-price action figures later, is this: a new yogabeans!

27: hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah

2009-11-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

26: Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T08:04:00.000-08:00

Jackson: They made us all go around at lunch and say what we were thankful for.

Me: What did you say?

Jackson: EVERYBODY said "family and friends." It was so annoying!

Me: Maybe they meant it, Ebeneezer.

Jackson: I mean, it was cute when the little kids said it.

Me: So what did you say you were thankful for?

Jackson: Italian food.

25: I made a pie

2009-11-25T18:50:00.000-08:00

I sort of felt bad using the frozen Marie Callendar's pie crust for the canned Libby's punkin pie I made today, because my mom taught me how to make pie crust and she just had it nailed, she was so deft the way she pinched around the edge...you know. And when the fuck do I make a pie anymore? Never. Once a year, maybe. I just don't have the muscle memory, or the desire to eat all that sugar every day for a week.

The other thing, I gave Jackson a choice: devil's food cake or angel's food cake? One is dark, one is light. One is round and solid, one is fluffy and has a hole in the middle: "So if you were made of food," he reasoned, "you could use it as a halo."

Exactly.

(Devil's food it is.)

24: What are you doing for Thanksgiving?

2009-11-24T19:10:00.000-08:00

I picked Jackson up from an after-school playdate today, and while we were waiting for the kids to come in from the back yard I asked his friend's mom what they were doing for Thanksgiving. It's an innocent question, coming from me, but maybe not so much from some other folks, because she gave me this real long, slow, suspicious look before answering, "Uh, we're staying here." Now granted, she's got a real dry sense of humor and I'm about 47% sure I was being played -- or rather, she was 47% playing me and a full 53% afraid I was going to ask if I could come over* and bring my flute***.

* Which, come on! Who wouldn't want me at their house for Thanksgiving dinner**?

**I can think of at least one person: two weekends ago Jack, Jackson, Peewee, and I went to have a long, inebriated dinner with friends and ended up sleeping in their kids' playroom where, in the middle of the night, an electronic robot spelling toy suddenly started saying D I L D O spells DILDO! and then I went into their bathroom and barfed up my filet mignon. But they were real nice about it in the morning. To my face.

***I've been practicing!

23: The Point Is

2009-11-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

I understand that the point of NaBlo is to make you sit down and write something every day to kick start the habit of creativity but for fuck's sake, I don't need any help, I write every day as it is, I SPENT THE WHOLE DAY WRITING, MOTHERFUCKER, AAAARRRRGH.

Naturally, I can't post what I've written since it's for the book. Which sucks, because I'd really like some feedback. I spent a good fifteen minutes this afternoon wondering what billionaires do to prepare for the coming of their fifth child. I know. It's agony, being me. Want to know what I came up with?

"Engrave the pony."

That's right, there you go. Sneak preview.

22: OK, not everybody

2009-11-22T18:29:00.000-08:00

21: Fuck everybody

2009-11-21T19:05:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of Nicolas Cage, so bear that in mind when I say this: who turned him into Steve Buscemi?

Don't get me wrong, I think it could be an improvement. Put him in another Coen Bros. movie and I might consider taking him off my personal black list. I'm not sure who else is on that personal black list, let me think for a minute.

Personal Black List
Keanu Reeves
Hugh Hefner

Buh?

I'd go onto imdb.com and troll around for actors who make me squint with displeasure, but I think I'd rather drink this glass of wine and think good thoughts about a pussycat. As the saying goes.

20: Friday

2009-11-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Another attempt at making a toy photo:

Coney Island 2007

19: Death, Apparently

2009-11-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

NPR's compiled an argument for "The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings" and they've set it up so you can listen to one song from each of their album choices, and then embed your choice of their choices in your website. So here's one:

This song always sort of chokes me up.

So that's fun! For you.

Other thoughts: The dying hydrangea I posted on the first of the month has gotten so much more brownly-yet-pinkishly elderly, it's like the Lillian Gish of the neighborhood, fading so graciously that every time you look at it your heart still sees the bee-stung lips of its youth. I'm regretting not having set up a tripod and putting little chalk circles around its tripod feet so that I could set it up in the same place at the same time every day to capture the hydrangea's elegant demise. Instead, all I have is before and somewhat less before:

Lastly, if anyone is waiting along with Peevish for my thoughts on the Mamie Minch album, I haven't listened to the full thing just yet but my impression thus far is that she is going to get somewhere! She just hasn't quite figured out how to get everything in gear and floor it. There are some wonderful duets with her and a woman named Dayna Kurtz over on a certain MySpace page that have been a lot of fun to listen to, and so then I downloaded Dayna's "Postcards from Downtown" album (so far so good!!), but I can't find any joint releases from them so far, despite some talk about a 10-inch, which does me no good whatsoever, my turntable's been packed away for a decade. And no, I can't think of a better word than "album" for any songs released as one whole stack of pancakes by an artist, I think it's still a good word -- I like the way "album" lets you think of a book with page after page of photographs somebody else took of the inside of your head* -- so I'm keeping it.

*Too labored?

18: Elsewhere!

2009-11-18T09:32:00.000-08:00

Here's a song I just love. Listen to it! Learn it! Love it! Mamie has one album on iTunes, I'll let you know how it is after I drive to Oxnard and back. That should take about 45 minutes, right?

THEN your mission is to go over to Jennsylvania and see how she one-upped anything I've ever yogabeansed by reimagining an entire teen vampire film using dolls. OH, YOU ARE WELCOME.

17: Better Ideas

2009-11-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

What sort of monster would I be if I didn't pause to make fun of my own tragedies?

NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month

NoBloPoMo = No, I won't be participating

NaBlowPoMo = In fact, I'll be devoting the month to oral sex

AmmoPoMo = And stockpiling weapons

BlammoPoMo = While watching Warner Bros. cartoons

BimboPoMo = And pornography

LimboPoMo = After which: margaritas!

NamblaPoMo = I didn't say child pornography

SamboPoMo = In fact, let's deconstruct some racist imagery instead

ShamBloPoMo = 30 shampoos in 30 days!

ShaNaNaBloPoMo = Blogging about allegedly simpler times

16: More Bad Ideas

2009-11-16T15:22:00.000-08:00

You know the Momversation videos, where bloggers talk about different parenting issues? How much trouble do you think I'd get in if I started a parody site?

Fawnversation = interviews with woodland creatures

Johnversation = let's meet some people named John

Juanversation = Spanish edition

Nomversation = just an endless loop of video clips from Cute Overload

Pomversation = cheerleaders, naturally

Domversation = drunk rich people

Lawnversation = sprinkler talk!

Wanversation = people who need some sun and/or a sandwich