Everybody talking to their pockets, everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stem rose

I have developed a pretty serious Internets crush on this gal, and y’all, no one but her (she?) could inspire me to go on ahead and make a list inspired by something on FB. And of course I have no choice but to do it her way. So:

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
Part I of IV

Disintegration (The Cure, 1989)
Maybe I was late to the Cure party, but when I got there, this was playing. Over and over and over and over and over. I was fifteen. The time was right. Desperation, longing, loveliness, twelve songs that made me feel briefly like someone who did not, in fact, own any acid-wash jeans OR listen to this in the car on the way to see Cocktail at the Golden Triangle Mall. Which I did. Shut up. So did you.

Girlfriend (Matthew Sweet, 1991)
I was pretty sure I was going to meet and immediately marry Matthew Sweet. I almost named my kid Evangeline (seriously, it was on the short list, in 2007. Thus is the Power of the Sweet).

Appetite for Destruction (Guns n’ Roses, 1987)
Didn’t get into Axl n’ Pals till a couple of years after this came out, but converts are always the worst zealots. {Berwie, HHL, Lab Partner, Kingfish – good times, y’all, good times. The Incident till makes a fun lil’ story, 18 years later, don’t it?}

Thriller (Michael Jackson, 1983)
My first musical obsession that wasn’t Muppet-related. People, I made a fan club. I convinced myself he’d be stopping by to see me at school one day, to thank me for starting a fan club.

Pump Up the Volume [soundtrack] (various artists, 1990)
You know, back when we lived in a little town without a music store and didn’t have the Internets or a driver’s license and/or husbands who kept us hooked into the new-music synapse chain, we learned about “alternative” music from 94.9 THE EDGE, or else soundtracks from movies that starred a pre-be-hairplugged Xtian Slater. Concrete Blonde (and L. Cohen, in a roundabout way), Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Cowboy Junkies, the fucking PIXIES!!!! Ho shit. I wore this tape the fuck OUT.

PS: Don't worry, bitches, I'll get to the Beatles at some point. People who name their kids after one of them are clearly influenced by the Fabs, OK? Chill your shit.

Ride the tiger

Something very very strange about experiencing a 4.4 earthquake in the 14th floor of a building built to withstand much bigger ones ... oddly cushiony swaying, people looking around with their WTF faces on, nervous giggles, stray "holy shit" comments popping up over cube walls ...

You guys! My ass! Seriously!

The most disgusting thing on last night’s South Park wasn’t Cartman-related as usual, and it didn’t involve an inside-out nutsack or people eating poo or anything – it was a small pot of Carmex.

Stan was in the office of some douchebaggy corporate spokesperson (long story), and the CS kept saying, Lumbergh-like, “Yeaahh, no, see, yeaaah, no,” etc., while applying Carmex with a finger in this hideous circling motion on his pursed lips – if I have to tell you what that made me think of, then you are reading the wrong blog today, friend.

And but the Carmex itself – gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Could anything be more gross and depressing? It reminded me of elementary school, when some kid would have a pot of it, and you’d look and it’d be all smooshed around and have finger divots and lint and little-kid mouth germs you could almost see with the naked eye, and it makes you think of dry lips and cold sores and the funk of the classroom on a dark January afternoon with the heat on full blast and everybody’s clothes drying out from the rain that started during recess and you can’t remember whether it’s your mom’s turn to drive the carpool home or that dork Danny’s dad or what and you just want to go home.

Bleah! Jesus, people. Get a stick of Burt’s Bees for your lip hydration issues and quit driving me nuts.

This blog is proof that Shatner loves us and wants us to be happy.

Enjoy it, all ye who labor and desire comfort upon ye.

Best alarm clock ever

No, I'm not talking about Clocky. I'm talking about the Nev-R-Fayl Atomic Baby Clock, the one that wakens the sleeping Gleemonexes prior to seven in the a.m. even on holidays. And even when they done DRANK too much the night before. Oi.

Today, though, it was a new level of awesome (and I mean awesome, not "awesome"): I heard over the baby monitor, in a sweet little 18-month-old baby voice, "Ayyy-fah AAAAYYYgh!"

Translation: "Fla-vah FLAAAAYV!"

I'm seriously gonna have to start watching my f-bombs and GD-missiles now, y'all. Heh.

Going out on top

Is anyone else as sickly giddy as I am about tomorrow night? I'm talking about BSG, people, as if there's any other point to the universe right now. Tomorrow night is finis, the end, all done, bye bye. Holy frak. I cannot take the waiting, but I also can't take the knowing it's over, over, really over. I mean, they could make like X-Files or any of a million dozen shows who overstayed their welcome -- lose the best writers, replace a producer or three, chug along painfully and half-assedly without the marquee stars, wringing the last drop of cash out of their preciousss for another two or three or five limp-dicked seasons while viewership falls away and the memory of the good years becomes more and more tarnished -- but they're doing the heroic thing and quitting while they're ahead. Gods bless them. Gods damn them. GALACTICA!

In which I’m sure I deeply grieve and offend some, but hey, they’re not likely readers of this blog, so.

Internets, I have done told y’all before about my powerful obsession with Big Love, which is another one of those HBO amazingly-well-written-and-acted joints (oh, for my lost Deadwood! And The Wire! But fuck Sopranos right in the ear. It is dead to me).

We’ve just had the second-to-last ep of this cheaply shortened season (they’re still crying writers’ strike, which was like THREE FUCKING YEARS AGO, lazy bastards), and it showed Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn, or as I like to call her, Three-horn, yay Norm MacDonald! ) going into the LDS temple for this seeekrit ritual thingy. She’s not supposed to be there, having left the LDS church to join the Church of Bill, a polygamist offshoot she was sort of pressganged into on what she thought was her cancerous deathbed some years ago, and as the first wife of three, she’s lost her “temple recommend” and her good standing amongst the mainstream faithful. But with her life in crisis, she cons her mom and cunty sister into sneaking her in with a borrowed recommend, and y’all.

Y’ALL.

This ritual she goes through? Is HYSTERICAL. They were taking it very seriously, very solemnly, and cursory research has indicated it’s accurate. Which is just … RIDONCULOUS. There’s all these veils, and they’re wearing, like, weird white drapey dresses … I don’t know, it was just hilarious to this little lapsed Methodist. And then they went into this sex-segregated lounge area in their crazy duds, and … y’all. A guy, or several guys, made this up about a hundred and fifty years ago. I mean, come ON. With Catholicism or Islam, at least it’s been around so long that I can’t prove to you whether it’s real or not (I suspect not, thus my apostate status, but to each his or her own), but with this, like Scientology, you know exactly when it all got rolling and who exactly came up with it. No mystery, except the one of why people believe it, you know? And don’t even get me started on those two jackasses from the local LDS ward who just BARGED IN on Barb in her bathrobe in her own home and got all up in her GRILL with questions and threats and shit like they had a right to be there (I would’ve told them to go fuck a dead donkey, then slammed the door into their flinty little priss-ass faces, and right quick). And then (SPOILER ALERT) at this hearing they forced her to go to – and I mean, this is not a law enforcement action; the only power these fucknuts have is what Barb, et. al. give them – they excommunicated her, meaning (I think) that not only is she barred from Heaven on Captain and Deputy Fucknuts’ say-so, but also not even her own mom can ever speak to her again.

Two questions:

1) How is this bullcorn religion different from my establishment of His Righteousness The Shatner as the Deity as far as this blog is concerned? (Besides the fact that, though crusty, I am less of a smoking prick than those LDS ball-sores on the show, I mean.)

2) These are the people who were behind the big push on Prop 8? Wow.

Can't do it. Got a bad case of the fuckits.

Things I Wrote in Meetings Between 2005 and 2006, In Which I Remember Neither the Meetings, Nor Writing These Things During Them
(part four of a series)

[small drawing of several dorsal fins approaching a wee house complete with smoking chimney]
You betcha, I'll get right on that.
************************

WE. SPEAK. YOUR. NAME.
[small drawing of Oprah]
************************

Please don't make me watch tapes.
************************

you know they're nouns,
you know they're nouns
************************

WWKDD: What Would Kim Deal Do?
************************

Festival of Equine Fecal Matter
************************

[large star w/circles around it]I need the final callout lists for the IT/[vendor] pages to check against this wreck
************************

[someone else's handwriting] What are they talking about?
[my handwriting] some nat'l holiday in Israel screws our development
pushes back the testing date
[someone else's handwriting] great
************************

I am a scientist
I try to live on science alone
************************

"indivigibles"
"hear-back" (verb)
"cashmere with a K"
************************

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Golden Moments in Parenting, v. 2

Some unknowable time prior to six a.m. on a Saturday morning. Kid Gleemonex fights like the very devil as Gleemonex attempts to change the diaper she was summoned from sound sleep to attend to, and wonders what is with the kid jumping the gun on her usual blissfully-late-by-comparison 6:30 a.m. wakeup call.

Gleemonex: "So, kid. You're totally cool with being an only child, eh?"

You know you live in Northern California when ...

Your spouse sends you the following email:

Subject: We are under 400k
Just looked at [realty website] and there were 3 new listings in [X] area for 399k or less with 3/2 on half acre or more. All short sales and foreclosures. We are finally hitting some sweet spots now...

And your reply is:

Holy smokes. If we could break SIX, I'd be happy ... we haven't seen the fours in YEARS.

Spoiler-free bitchout

To the 19-year-old Model What’s-Yer-Face on Survivor, the One Wearing the Guys’ Boxer Shorts and Giving Neck Rubs and What Have You:

Listen, honey. You’ve never had to work for anything in your life, primarily because men just give things to you. You think this is because you are simply awesome, and you also think that you deserve this easy life because you are very pretty. Flirting and playing coy, well, that’s how you pay for stuff, when you have to pay at all. I can forgive you thinking this, because you’ve never known any other way, and we all gotta use what we’ve got, am I right?

But I have to draw the line at your instant loathing of, and constant plotting against, the older woman on your tribe. You disliked her on sight, because she is Old and therefore totally useless and gross, and you’ve pulled out all the weapons in your arsenal to get her eliminated as soon as possible – you’ve played your youth against her age, your pliability against her solidity, your (totally generic) beauty against her averageness, your giggly conspiratoriality against her directness. You’re working only on the men – you know not to waste this shit on other women. And it works, for the most part.

I have news for you, though: You’re not going to be nineteen forever. Time is a fucking bitch. And no matter how hard you chase the dragon – Shatner knows what horrors of Botox and cutting and yet-to-be-imagined anti-aging shit you’ll eventually submit yourself to – unless you die young, you’re going to be her age someday. For your sake, I hope you develop some other life/coping skills, because your only currency’s going to start dropping somewhere just past your next birthday; only a little at first, but a lot more and a lot faster later. And the real bitch of it is, this game you’re running is UNWINNABLE: There will always be another fresh young nineteen-year-old coming up after you.

Just thought you should know.

Also, a panel from a Lynda Barry comix which apparently really spoke to me.

Things That Are Mod-Podged Onto the Cover of an Address Book I Made for Myself in 1992, the Summer Before I Started College, In Which I Am Reasonably Certain That Only the Twin Peaks Screenshot Didn’t Come From Sassy Magazine

ANOTHER REASON TO BE WINONA RYDER

GIVEITAWAY

He would never date your best friend … would he?

“mike edwards is my future husband”

Screenshot of the dwarf from Twin Peaks, with the words She’s filled with secrets. at the bottom of the screen.

“i’m too pale”

Quotation from “Summertime Rolls,” by Jane’s Addiction: “ … MY GIRLFRIEND DON’T WEAR NO SHOES. HER NOSE IS PAINTED PEPPER SUNLIGHT. SHE LOVES ME. I MEAN IT SERIOUS AS SERIOUS CAN BE.”

Photo of Ann Richards

A profile of the Capricorn personality, which includes the sentence “Has beautiful eyes tinged with sadness and wisdom.”

The words Depeche Mode.

Small photo of Matt Dillon.

Emo teen brokenhearted poetry:
SPEAKING TO YOU
I FEEL GAPS THAT BEFORE WERE BRIDGES
AND SILENCES THAT BEFORE WERE WORDS
AFRAID TO BRING UP DRIED EMOTIONS.
I THINK BY TALKING ABOUT THINGS
YOU REVIVE THEM
LIKE RUNNING WATER OVER A SPONGE
IT’S NOT ENOUGH FOR US TO SAY SO MUCH
BUT STILL CIRCLE AROUND WHAT SHOULD BE SAID.

Well, I know LUMBERGH fucked 'er.

Oh Shatner, you guys, get your vomit buckets out, cause I’m about to defend Jennifer Aniston.

Hardly a day passes that I don’t see a cheap-looking magazine cover or a Yahoo homepage feature with her cute, brave, tragic, sassy face on it, and no matter what else is going on in her life – fucking that douche John Mayer, or that even bigger douche Vince Vaughan, or starring in yet another stupid-ass unfunny feminism-negating “romantic” “comedy” or whatever – the story is ALWAYS about how, this one time? She used to be married to Brad Pitt (see, he’s really famous), and everybody wanted them to have a baby but for whatever reason (who knows, maybe she didn’t fucking want to?? Anybody ever think of that?) they never did, and then Brad Pitt (famous, handsome dude) starred in a movie with Angelina “Homewrecking Incestuous Mad-Crazy-Hottie” Jolie and yada yada yada Miss Aniston found herself divorced (and alone, OH THE HUMANITY) while the two happy adulterers adopt half the favela children of Brasil or whatever and then start replicating their own ridonculously pulchritudinous DNA like they’re the godless heathen bizarro-world Duggars.

Internets, that shit happened like TEN GODDAMN YEARS AGO. If people were still asking YOU about the hot guy you used to date back in the day, YEARS LATER, would you not find it justifiable to just go fucking apeshit on them? Cause I sure would. It’s like, the whole story of this woman and her entire life is how she got cheated on and then divorced, and her ex took up with some other famous woman and now you all gotta elbow each other off the cover of US Weekly and none of the three of you can ever talk about anything else, especially not YOU, and every interviewer’s first and last and only question of you is something about that whole fucked-up situation. Aniston could cure cancer and end all war, and they’d still be all, “So. Have you ever met Brad’s children? Do you ever think you’ll speak with Angie? How painful was it, exactly, when you found out they were fucking?”