tales of a fourth grade romantic ...

i was 10 years old when the wolfgramm family of minneapolis was jackson fived into a spectacle of laffy-taffy wardrobes and synths. they dressed like human geranimals. their music was the perfect soundtrack to my fourth grade notions of what romance would be:

* standing in the same row during the christmas program
* my slumber party calling your slumber party, passing a phone slick with little caesars sweat
* an arrangement to couple skate during a slow song at an event at least a month away at skate country, the local roller skating rink
* the two of us, separated from the rest of the class, hiding in the hollow of that tree at cooke park during the class picnic
* having you flick a me note you'd folded into a football
* being partners for the situps portion of the presidential fitness test
* making eye contact at least seven times during sunday mass

i spun the jets' self-titled debut through my walkman enough times that cotton candy should have spewed from my headphones. here are the tracks that stuck out to me:

THE JETS
1. curiosity: "curiosity, i want to know. is she just a play thing? curiosity, i want to know: baby can i pull your string?" oddly, this song made me think of tampons.

*NOTE* i'm not sure why, but i always imagined lyrics to be dirtier than they were. to my way of thinking, debbie gibson's "shake your love" was about boobs; when janet jackson sings "you hold me in your arms, and squeeze me, you could leave me making me blue" in the song "when i think of you" from her album "control," i thought the squeezing part involved boobs.

[yet, the ll cool j song "i need love" didn't raise any dirty flags. cool james' sophisticated imagery was lost on me.]

2. crush on you: "can you hear what song i'm playing in the background?" i coo into the phone to adam s., stoked that i've kept him on the phone long enough to hear it. VICTORY! [what a terrible flirtation technique].

3. you've got it all: i'm at valley fair with fannie and princess linda and this is the song we choose to perform in their mini recording booth. not only do i sing the loudest, i am also the most off-key.

4. love umbrella: i think one of the male wolfgramm's sang this song and all i remember is "my. love. umbrella." highly skippable.

5. private number: this video included a magic telephone booth well-before bill and ted.

8. la-la (means i love you): this remake of a delfonics song may have been my first experience with an ear worm.

like the tumblrs do ...

one of these days i'm going to do a social experiment and blog like i'm tumblr-ette, but instead of 15 posts filled with links and photos and what i'm wearing and snippits of IMs, i'm going to put them ALL INTO ONE POST! (that will lead to a book deal, or acknowledgement in a scientific journal).

it is going to be a very cerebral experience.

here's a quick glimpse of how it will look:


"i've found that nothing makes me feel better than knowing the seat of the bicycle is eroding the structure of my pelvis!"


"all i do is clown around! in that hat! and vest!"

dear AT&T, you let the iphone into the wrong hands this time.

no frey zone ...

here's hoping the people at the ymca think i'm one of those classy bitches who wears fur running pants.

THE SCENE: you wander into the spinning room during off-hours. it is dark, except for blue christmas lights, which makes it seem like you are about to ride a bike at a pink floyd lasar light show in a high school planetarium.

on a bike to my left is a dude who looks like a cross between a guitar-player dad and teen wolf. like not necessarily in a band, but maybe he plays at like a sandwich shop on tuesday nights and is packed up by 9 p.m., and done with his payment -- a single newcastle -- by 9:35 p.m. he seems nice.

he is wearing an ipod.

on my left is a woman who is not just cycling, but has a cycling routine. the book "interview with a vampire" is parked near her front tire.

Q: now. which one of these two pranksters cranked the eagles greatest hits on the universal stereo system?

aside from "the heat is on," glenn frey is hardly the richard simmons of easy listening. i honestly can't think of worse workout music. i spent 10 miles trying.

lyin' eyes?
already gone?

during desperado, i try to go faster when he says " ... out riding fences ..."

"interview with a vampire" hops off her bike during "tequila sunrise." sprays down the equipment, grabs her book and leaves. so guitar-dad picked the eagles. that was my first guess. except that he hops off, cleans his bike, and walks out during "peaceful easy feeling."

"wait!" i said to him. "is this your music?"
"no," he says. "it was the girl's."

and now i'm stuck with it. he asks if i want him to turn it off, but i only have like 30 seconds left to go, so i wave him off.

by then i'd already thought back to the playlist i'd just been running to earlier. it went a little like this:

"holding out for a hero" by bonnie tyler
"holding out for a hero" by bonnie tyler
"holding out for a hero" by bonnie tyler
"bizarre love triangle" by new order
"holding out for a hero" by bonnie tyler

lather. rinse. repeat.

***
as an added bonus, here is footage from my lunch date with jcrew. as we left the india palace lunch buffet. if not for scat humor, i'm not sure we would ever have anything to say to each other.

me: hmm ... i got rice pudding on my jeans.
jcrew: of course you did. ... oh! i got sauce on my shirt!
me: of course you did.

jcrew: oof. i'm so sick
me: man. indian food just goes right through me. it doesn't even pause.
jcrew: you have tiki masala sauce on your face.
me: is it gone?
jcrew: no.
me: is it gone?
jcrew: no.
me: is it gone.
jcrew: no.
me: god. it's like i just stuck my head in the tiki masala vat.
[jcrew mimes motorboating a pan of tiki masala.]

feeling 33 ...

i come to you on day two of what has been an epic hangover with no sign of abating. after sleeping until 9 p.m. last night, chuck came into the bedroom and asked me if i wanted "the man to bring the medicine."

this was code of "should i order pizza from papa john's?"

ASIDE: papa john's is not the best pizza in the world. it's passable. but what papa john's does is really appeal to my throbbing misanthrope. you can complete an entire transaction online and never have to speak to another human being. and if you really have your shit together, you can send them a text message saying "no. 1" and they will know that you want a medium pepperoni pizza with onions, an order of garlic breadsticks and two cokes.

i propped myself to just the slightest angle. a degree where i wouldn't necessarily choke on a breadstick, at an altitude where the contents of my stomach wouldn't spontaneously pollack the floor.

i went to bed a few hours later and woke when it seemed that a gremlin was trying to gnaw its way out of my stomach. i woke up again when toonses decided to perform a few scenes from les miserables outside the bedroom door.

the rest of the day, walking coma. at one point i spit on the sidewalk, and immediately regretted the loss of fluid.

me: i have the attention span of a [redacted]
[redacted]: [paraphrase] i have a two-day hangover, too.
me: i could [redacted] on demand.
[redacted]: at least you can [redacted]. i'd settle for a [redacted]
me: i made something last night that looked like [redacted]

trust me. this was hilarious.

pop rocked ...

if my memory serves me correctly, saturday night ended with some sort of froo-froo drink that had pop rocks along the rim of the glass. although cell phone photos indicate that i later spent time hugging my friends and squealing. and there is apparently a message to chuck in his cell phone archives where i gush on and on in, i'm told, the voice of a 4-year-old. he also said that my text messages started to read like an eye chart as the night went on.

trust me when i say that i am never drinking ever again. well, at least until we go on vacation.

also, i finally met maurey.


here is my cleavage and bubbles


here is jcrew being a pretty princess


here jcrew tattoos drock's leg

FOODS THAT WERE MADE IN OUR KITCHEN

wasabi vessels: we made these little nuggets for a belated valentine's day party, filled them with salmon and avacado and then i dumped wasabi on top. i had no idea they were so easy. i've been giving the japanese far too much credit.

bonus footage:







nori my ass. i can just administer this shit straight. if you look closely, mr. sproactually, you can see the massive bruising on my middle finger from the demon door smashing incident what-say 3 months ago.


pad thai: the recipe is still a secret, but i stand behind my estimate that chuck makes the most awesome pad thai. this is a pretty solid woo-ing technique.


READING OTHER PEOPLE'S WORDS
"t-bag's list of grievances" here chuck taps into toonses' inner psyche to get to the bare essence of his being.
"my return" my cousin posts infrequently, but when she does, it is good for at least 12 solid laughs. here she writes an over view of her life since returning home from capetown and moving into our grandma's house. there is an especially great moment where she writes about a former roommate from duluth.

BOOK
Kill Your Friends: A Novel (P.S.) by john niven: John Niven is what would happen if Nick Hornby got into a terrible car crash and punctured the lobe where politeness lives. I had a heck of a time getting into his novel "Kill Your Friends," since I'm not exactly fluent in vitriol. It is pages and pages of a man angrily screaming British slang for cocaine in your face, spit foaming at the corners of his mouth.

Steven Stelfox is an A&R dude negotiating the Brit pop scene in the 1990s. It's a cruel, cruel place where everyone is trying to find the next big thing. The young sexy girl singer, the song that resonates with clubbers, the reimagining of the Spice Girls, or those croony Emo "artists." When things don't go his way, Steven may do something like hammer away at a colleague's brain with a baseball bat, but only after his first murderous attempt fails: the one where he tries to overdose the guy, then plugs his orifices with all sorts of embarrassing things.

full review will be here.

WARNING: chuck and i are both reading anna karenina right now, so i probably will be sidelined from my book-a-week pace. i like to think of this as our own little mini oprah's book club. chuck, of course, playing the role of oprah. me, of course, playing the role of a chunky housewife who uses O magazine as a life manual.

INDOOR TRIATHLON
i finished swimming! i finished swimming! is it possible to swim, get water in your ears, go outside, have the water freeze, and die? just wondering.

i have like 50-some miles on the bike to finish by the end of this month. apologies to my crotch.


PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT

these are my new favorite thing, and how i spend my friday nights. every time i buy them, one of the cute little hippies working at whole foods says "HAVE YOU EVER HAD THESE BEFORE! THEY'RE AWESOME!" this may also be the reason i've been working out for eight weeks and still have lost zero pounds.

in the hood ...

[i'm in an elevator. i'm wearing a gold vest with a fur hood. behind me is a short stocky man. he is either looking at me, or i have been getting pure hubris injections right into my mother-vein again. when the other woman in the elevator gets out on the fourth floor, he speaks:]

man: i'm sorry. i'm not staring at you.
man: it's just, your coat. ...
man: in 1987 i really wanted a coat with a fur hood like that. where the fur is full and goes all around your face ... i've been sitting here trying to decide if i should tell you that.
me: thank you?

it's not about the bike ...

so today i finally took the plunge [tee hee] and started the swimming part of that lifesucking event, the couch potato triathlon. yes, i have a swim suit. probably about five more than the average non-swimmer. they seem to crop up every time jcrew gives me a load of clothes that were denied by plato's closet because they didn't have the words HOLISTER stitched across the ass.

these are the sort of suits that look better on people without freakishly blue skin. but each covers enough of my body so that i don't end up with my likeness on a poster anywhere near the words "level three sex offender."

the idea of swimming made me a little queasy. my friend the greeter, who is also doing the triathlon, caught kathleen turner's vocal polyps swimming last week. then he slipped into a coma. so i had started thinking of the pool as a soup for the infectious diseases found in toddler nostrils.

things got off to a bad start when i decided for the first time that i'd use an actual bathroom instead of the pool. the ladies stall closest had a toilet seat that was 180 degrees of wet. like it had been riden down the apple river on a summer day. swimmer's butt wet. a wet that one assumes is water, but could be the accidentally spray of a tike who miscalculated the time it takes to peel out of a care bear swim suit. i decided to chance it, as i've heard chlorine kills fecal matter, etc.

the toilet paper was the consistency of glue. similar to what you found hanging in your trees when it rained the night before homecoming.

the smell hit me long before i hit pool level. that universal pool smell is a tricky one. it nauseates me, and it brings back all sorts of phobias, but i kind of like it. sort of like the conflicting emotions i get when i smell drakar.

i'd only done a few laps when some familiar faces paraded in: our neighbor, last seen tanning au natural while al fresco [i almost didn't recognize him with clothes on], his wife and their granddaughter. the only one missing was their young aggressive and obnoxious grandson, who seems to be grooming himself for a career in rapistiology.

the trio hung out in the open swim part of the pool wearing snorkling gear and floating around. before i figured out how i knew these people, everytime i clung to the side of the pool sputtering and coughing chlorine out of my cillia, i watched al fresco, and tried to place him.

WARNING: if you have a middle aged neighbor who hangs out in his back yard wearing a tiger stripped loin cloth, you do not want to spend too much time looking in his direction while sharing a community pool. he WILL misread your intentions. he will think you are hunting silver foxes with mickey mouse tattoos. i am as sure of this as i am that he has liver spots in places he cannot see with the naked eye.

eventually i noticed that for every lap i completed, he dipped under water, his goggled gaze following my slow, flailing progression through this muck.

the swimming wasn't terrible -- aside from the water part. "it really is such a complete, full body exhaustion," i thought to myself afterward. [seriously. i thought that sentence.] i tried to think of something else i could do that would give me the same feeling, without getting water in my eyes.

i think i'm going to start performing as a marionette.

stern words ...

i'm not mad, i'm just disappointed.

now listen here, book i'm reading. i'm giving you until the end of this chapter before i make like a prom mama and ditch you in a dumpster behind the old gym ...

"the most exciting british novel since trainspotting," my ass, word magazine.
"blah blah blah american psycho," my ass, too.

if i wanted to listen to someone scream british slang at me in all caps, i'd just get a college sophomore fresh from a study abroad semester shifaced on jag and say the word "soccer" to him.

[or i'd leave my mom alone in a dark room with a princess diana bio pic. she tends to catch accents.]


tastes like mushrooms slathered in mushrooms.

for carrying hummus to your mouth ...

MAKING FOODS

chai rice pudding: this smelled like it would be so good, but it was pretty medium. although easy enough to make: chai tea bags in soy milk, cook rice, add apples ... blah blah blah.


sesame won tons: THESE ARE SO DARN GOOD! won tons as a hummus vessel. won ton wrappers sprinkeld in seasame seeds, paprika, garlic powder and salt. super addictive.


tofu custard: this was my go to dessert last year, i ripped it out again this year: firm silken tofu, powdered sugar, food processed, chilled, slathered in fruit.

MOVIES
Trans-Siberian [Blu-ray] 2008: two precious bible-thumping iowans travel on the transiberian railroad and become amazingly adept at killing people and drug muling.

The Princess Diaries : i'm going to start a tumblr blog and fill it with deep thoughts about the crap i watch on saturday nights. this movie gave me hope that someday i'll find out that my real dad was a prince and that my hair and eyebrows will form a union and work together for the greater good. annnnd ... i got teary at the end.
Bridget Jones's Diary : this is a stunningly accurate representation of what my mid-20s were like. instead of the age old "i'm totally carrie. ... no you're samantha" debate, i'm going to silence people by saying i was bridget.

BOOK READING
Let the Right One In: A Novel by john ajvide lindqvist: I read an interview with Stephenie Meyer, writer of the Twilight series, where she said something about how she had taken liberties with the classic vampire story because she was writing fiction and there are no hard-fast rules about what vampires can or cannot do. So she did things like make their skin glimmer in the sunlight.
This is a laughable about of liberty — not to mention creativity — considering what John Ajvide Lindqvist has done with the vampire of this novel.

full review here-ish.

How It Ended: New and Collected Stories jay mcinerney: In Jay McInerney's world, men are writers with varying degrees of success. They are married to women who are pregnant, which may or may not stall their philandering. The wife typically knows what's up and either ignores it, aborts the child or asks the man to have his fairly healthy cat put to sleep as contrition. There is typically a back story salted with cocaine residue and lapsed catholicism. His newer stories always reference 9/11 in some capacity.

In Jay McInerney's world, no one leaves New York City. Maybe a character spent time in China modeling or teaching English, or maybe there was a stint in Los Angeles. But home is Manhattan, and now that McInerney has gotten older, he'll concede to characters with suburban address. But never the main characters.

"How It Ended: New And Collected Stories" reads a bit like a posthumous compilation. It is a mix of snippets of his old stuff -- including pieces from "Bright Lights, Big City," "Brightness Falls," and "Model Behavior." This is fun and feels like reading an old yearbook. It has been years since I've read any of his novels, and it was a nice reminder of whats-so-big-about-McInerney. [Namely, that he writes about a time and place that I'd love to vacation in: New York City. 1980s. Writer cliques.]

full review will be here-ish. [unless jodi fires me]

READING THE INTERNET
god, futbol kills me. this time, he travels the streets of argentina with a friend who has bought salami from a street vendor.

The salami stank to high heaven. It was a peculiar smell; sweaty feet combined with damp cardboard, with a touch of cheese that must have latched on inside the peddler’s basket. It was gross, but tolerable. Almost intriguing, I would say.

pulling, twisting, what is the diff? ...

jcrew: do you want to go outside?
me: [without pause] yes.
jcrew: whoa, i didn't even have to pull your arm.
me: [??]
jcrew: pull your leg?
me: [??]
jcrew: what's that phrase?
me: twist your arm?
jcrew: oh. yeah.

taking a crack at it ...

chuck was surprised when i told him i'd signed up for the "couch potato triathlon" again this year. this now yearly ymca event gives me 28 days to run 26.2 miles, swim 87 laps and bike 112 miles. in return, i get a t'shirt decorated with a cartoonish potato dripping potato goo on a treadmill, and if i'm lucky, a slice of carrot cake at the post-triathlon party.

"you hated it," he reminded me.
"i did?" i said.
i hated something that ended with a free mesh t'shirt that, even when clean, manages to maintain a stink that is so satisfying, yet would ordinarily require far more sweat?
"yes," he said. "next year i'll just buy you a shirt, okay?"

i'm told that i began to resent the way the triathlon cut into my running. that sounds about right, since it is exactly what i'm bitching about this year. i'm not sure why i signed up again. why bother with something that is 66.6 percent suck?

i think i like to give an identity to my crankiness. i also think that doing things you hate is good practice for life.

i know i can run 26.2 miles in four weeks, and i also know that pedaling makes my legs tired and that swimming is absolute torture. i go through great lengths to assure that my face never gets wet. you should see me in the shower.

swimming brings me back to when i was 3-foot-8 inches of freckles and exposed gums with a perminant swim suit wedgie that surely made other mothers wonder why mine had bought a child a thong. something about getting into the water has always made me feel like i sprinkled ex-lax and coffee beans on my activia yogurt.

i took lessons, but they didn't take.

what i call swimming is a strange flailing of parts that is:

1. a spandex swimsuit tutu;
2. flesh tone water-wing shaped muscle atrophe;
3. and a landline

away from resembling bea arthur's community ed water aerobics class. it takes a long time and does too little. not to mention that day last year my lane was hijacked by a handful of italians, whose combined yardage of speedo matched that of the rubber band holding my wet hair out of my face.

the only difference between this year and last is that now i actually own a bike, a blue giant cypress funded on the romantic notion that this would make my transformation to hippiedom complete: i'd make one tank of gas last the entire summer and in the process, my thigh muscles would swing from my pelvis like the sturdy sides of beef in a PETA documentary. in theory, i'd see the results of that summer biking in this here triathlon.

in truth, my blue giant cypress has become a place to hang my bike helmet. the bike helmet i bought for biking, but have more often worn while fumbling my way through "hit me with your best shot" on the easy level of guitar hero.

so it turns out i still hate biking. the standard bike seat reaches a level of intimacy that i prefer share with antimate objects. i'm told that i'll callous over time and become accustomed to the stationery sodomy, but i'm struggling to get through the chaffing phase. i cannot politely explain to you the sort of torture i endured last night when i got home, but i considered purchasing preparation h -- which would mean a trip to k-mart in west duluth, where i make all of my embarrassing purchases.

biking is the least efficient form of exercise in the entire workout bible. i biked for 50 minutes yesterday and in turn burned about 300 calories. what an effing waste. it would take me half as long to burn 300 calories on a treadmill doing something i like and that won't get my butt pregnant with an infant digital heart rate monitor. or, i could have skipped lunch.

the man panting, grunting and clomping on the treadmill behind me provided the percussion for the spoken word angst poetry i was writing in my head. "least. [grunt] efficient [clomp] form [gasp] of [grunt grunt] exercise [clomp] ever."

i've already knocked out more than the 26.2 miles of running. i'm at 30 miles on the bike. 0 laps in the pool. i might just throw in the towel before i commit to any pool time. we'll see. first i have to find something else to hate for the rest of the month.

i gotch 'yer valentine right here ...

photo stolen from chuck.

how to eat sauteed worms ...

as i was making dinner tonight, i found this on the stove and absentmindedly picked it up. then my brain went wonky and what i saw in my fingers was a slithering jamaican worm. i screamed for holy hell.

obviously i was so excited about fajita sunday last night that i started treating the sliced peppers like confetti. so today, on quesadilla monday, i almost had an aneurysm.

olive oil really gave that pepper scrap an earthy mucus effect. i'd never noticed before. thankfully that didn't break dinner.

FAQ rhymes with weakly review ...

FAQ ABOUT WEAKLY REVIEW
Q: you didn't make any food all week? or read a book?
A: no.
Q: and the only movie you watched was "anchorman"?
A: yes.

FOODS MADE BY CHUCK
baba ganoush: chuckles mixed up Mediterranean night by making baba ganoush instead of hummus, like we usually have. the subtle change in taste is interesting. the subtle change in color is alarming.

MOVIE WATCHING
"anchorman" : this is a tale as old as adam and eve: anchorman tells deepest desires to dog. dog gets chucked into a lake by a biker who's face was blasted by a burrito. dog saves anchorman from vicious bear.

TV WATCHING
"the hills" here's what must be happening behind the scenes:
whit: [sigh] do i have to confide in olivia every. single. day?
producers: [emphatically] YES! olivia was hired to be your pretty-haired confidante!
whit: but ... but ... does she even have pupils? she rolls her eyes so much it's hard to tell ...

"the bachelor" i can't wait until the first time ty tells one of these ooey-gooey wanna-be wives who's uteruses throb everytime jason mentions his son:
"you aren't my real mom!"

in other news, [this topic actually deserves an entire post, but ...] fannie has this theory of dating called "the ick." that is the moment where she's seeing someone and they do something that grosses her out in such a way that she can no longer think of them as a viable contender for her love. previous icks have included:

* a man who was shorter than her, who, when they kissed horizontally, she felt like he was climbing on her "like a monkey."
* a man with tiny feminine fingers who did this weird scratching on her leg
* something i can't quite recall involving a vikings jersey

when jason kisses these women, he makes a face that gives me the ick. i cannot look at the tv. i make a scrunchy face and look away. he's like a weird ferret nuzzling into their mouth hole. ick.

sunglasses for the brain ...

the parents pista are in town. we hiked the heck out of hartley nature center and took three meals in public. now i am holed up, recharging. while a nice day, socialization is like a vampire hanging like an stalagtite from my caratoid artery.

i'm zapped and my hair smells like an advertisement for pizza luce.

so 'appy ...

so as i tried to convey last night through one eyeball and some hunting and pecking, chuck and i went to a watering hole. it was a good scene. plenty of michael jackson on the juke box and jug after jug of satan's drool. i willed myself to be hung over just because this was going to be 24 hours of 2006-2008 revisted.



i love rt quinlan's: i love how the bathroom is 10 degrees warmer than the bar, the perminant fixtures sitting at the end of the bar, the video cameras trained on the back alley and the front hallway, and the jokes on the chalkboard. when i took high school friends there recently, i think they thought it was a fantastic dive. i think that's half right: fantastic. but less of a dive and more of a den of hippiedom.



we took a photo in my favorite "let there be lowenbrau" spot. with a character named oddio who recently burned his own eyebrows off. by accident.







today, instead of a headache, i woke with a wild hair to finally get an iphone. here that happens:



i'm so 'appy. tee hee.

we later ate pizza for dinner. one of those unprecedented "dine in" situations that felt really cheesy. i shoved 20 pounds of processed glop down my throat. so. good. overheard from the two twelve year oldish boys sitting alone at a table:

boy one: i wish ET was here.
chuck: me, too!

taking fashion cues from a toy poodle ...

a lesser person would refer to this as "date night". me ... i'm going with "first time that chuck and i have gone out since new year's eve so we got drunk."

we have a weird life now where we tag team at the foot of the bed: when i sleep, he's awake and vice versa. i feel like there is a joke there ... Q: how did the couple both sleep on the same side of the bed? A: they slept at opposite times![i'll hone this before i take it more public.]

lately i sweat a lot in my slept. i feel like when chuck climbs into bed, i slimily slither from his hands like a toy at a carnival.

tonight our stars aligned. that meant that chuck had to wake up, eat a strange combination of vegetables ground up and shaped like a chicken patty, and then go to the bar [rt quinlan's]. chuck was the king of sacrifice [breakfast beers] and arfitificial chick'n!

our night:






henceforth, i take fashion cues from a toy poodle:

the lo-down ...

a year and a day ago, my not unattractive male doctor gave me the world: a three-year prescription for my drug of choice. orthotrycyclen-lo. the perfect cocktail for keeping my womb an uninhabitable place. my own personal fanny pack-shaped mars.

my not unattractive male doctor shook me off his leg, breaking free of my slobbery embrace, and sent me into a world of slacker contentment. the less ticky-tacky farkle narkle i have to deal with, the better. i have the capacity to go catatonic if my schedule becomes more complicated than: remove sweatpants. put sweatpants in a place where i'll be able to find them. see world. return to sweatpants.

yesterday, standing at the walgreen's counter, i was denied my refill.
my jaw dropped in a way i'd previously thought only happened in cartoons.
i looked like the girl in the back row of a christmas concert, singing soprano on "oh come all ye faithful."
the white-coat shrugged, his shoulders licking the corners of his bow tie. he consulted with his manager. he came back.
my mouth was still hanging open. broken hinge or something.
"state law says prescriptions expire after a year," he said.
this seemed like the sort of timely information that could have been given to me last month so that by this month this interaction would just be the silent exchange involving my prescription and the monthly lip gloss i buy myself as a special congratulations for good behavior.

by now i was picturing mars quickly budding and greening, like time-lapse photography. i looked at this cheeky pharmacy major, law enforcement minor and decided that if need be, he would be awarded the grand prize of one dumpster baby.

anyway, a phone call and fax later, my not unattractive male doctor pulled through again. when chuck called me a "trapper," we were able to laugh.

world's grossest straw ...

how i spent the past week:

MAKING FOODS

kale skillet pizza: after burning this two weeks ago, i tried it again, tweaking things here and there -- including doubling the kale. this had an interesting effect on my digestive system. i'd call this recipe "deep dish colon cleanse in a skillet." i swear you could use my lower intestine as a straw.


pad thai: chuck makes the best pad thai in the world. i'm not sure how he does it, and i don't want to know because then i might try it and break it. i think it involves ketchup.


READING
In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami: "In The Miso Soup" by Ryu Murakami is not the kind of book that you bring home to meet your parents. It is lurid. It is frightening. It is unpredictable. Murakami plucked ordinary words out of nowhere and arranged them into a simple, matter-of-fact horror. Like a smiling child with a box of crayons, humming the Dora the Explorer theme song, then showing you a crudely drawn crime scene with headless chickens and bloody axes and dead parents.

full review will be here.

The Fuck-Up by arthur nersesian : Let’s call this epidemic “runaway book.” This is where I begin reading something funny. I’m dog-earring pages like crazy. A writer’s voice is so clever and sassy that I start to imagine that my own word document privileges should be revoked.

And then, runaway book. This time, I actually felt my heart sink. I meant to mark the exact spot where it happened, in the latter fourth of The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian, but now I can’t find it. I suspect it was around the part where the main character was getting annihilated at a literati party, or when he was eluding captors by climbing down fire escapes, over barbed wire fences and then cramming fistfuls of garbage down his throat for dinner.

You lost me, Nersesian. You really lost me.

full review here.

TV
"the hills": the entire cast of gossip girl and marissa cooper wearing the olsen twins as hats could not match the bitchiness of olivia shaming whit by telling her that she's too old to get involved with who kissed whom drama.

"nip/tuck": thoughts during the show. "is she going to bomb their office? no! wait! what? she's going to chop off her breasts in their lobby? with what? ah. of course. an electric carving knife."

this show never disappoints.

"the bachelor": i see that jason is falling for molly, and i'm assuming she will win. this is a bad idea. molly is on the equivilent of "the price is right." do you know how many women kiss the host of "the price is right"? do you think any of them would kiss the host if there were no cameras? if bob barker or drew carey approached molly at a bar, she would throw a flirtini in his face.

these two would never date if this wasn't a contest. god this show is embarrassing.

NEW TV ADDICTION
"damages, season 1": gah. i just tried to watch one episode, but these bastards have a season-long plot. WHY!? [i'm on number six ... oh, wait, that sentence took too long to write. now i'm on seven.]

READING THE INTERNET
"who is on twitter" [via] god. this is embarrassing. before reading this i had twittered twice in one day about running. but at least i'm not a DJ.

WATCHING MOVIE(S)
The Apartment 1960: despite being a total mess, fran kubelik has some great lines: "they just don't make shrimp like they used to" and "i can type like crazy, i just can't spell."

PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT

bosso nova: i have been spending my saturday nights lately making hippie vanilla sugar cookies and taste-testing bevvies. this week i hit on a winner with these, which taste like fruit and rose petals. when i'm alone in my car, i practice saying "acai" in case i ever have to say it out loud in front of anyone else.

PURE EVIL

when home row hurts ...

today i learned that when the cheese grater is falling out of the cupboard, grabbing it in midair -- while a sign of stunning dexterity -- is one way to shred the shit out of your middle finger.