Do you prefer "fashion victim" or "ensembly challenged"?

Internets: Once upon a tyme, as I believe I have done told you more than once, I was quite the ... well, not snappy, but more like interesting dresser. I put thought into it -- a LOT. And time and money. And then I went to college and between the sudden disappearance of curfew, getting palsy with my good buddy Andy Alcohol, and my discovery of the East Coast College Aesthetic (early 1990s version, grunge years), there was no more of that for the next, oh, decade and a half.

But now I am a Mid-Career Professional, and I find myself in the annoying position of having to dress better to be taken seriously at the Day Job.

Which is where these wonderful humans come in -- the geniuses who operate Looks Good From The Back, a bubbling spring of fashion inspiration for real people who want to dress more gooder. Adrien and Marianne are both cute as hell, and have a great sense of fun to go along with the whole dressing-like-a-grownup thing -- and I am seriously dorking out about the fact that they chose me as their project for September! They're fixing me!!!

You guys -- go check it out. And then, start reading them every day!

Love,
Gleemonex

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Thanks once again to BlabberMouse (aka She From Whom All Good Things Must Flow), who introduced me to She's Still Got It, who in turn put me on to my new pals Marianne & Adrien. And of course: THANKS, MARIANNE & ADRIEN! You guys are awesome.

If you have a problem / yo I'll solve it

A few things that make me feel stabby:

--This list from a blog off of sfgate, allegedly the 15 "magic words" that help get you hired in today's wintry job climate:

1 Leadership

2 Interpersonal

3 Problem solving

4 Motivated

5 Efficient

6 Detail oriented

7 Prioritize

8 Teamwork

9 Reliable

10 Multi-task

11 Time management

12 Passionate

13 Listening

14 Outgoing

15 Honesty

--The news item that that little pinhead twit Zuckerberg is allegedly "worth more" than Steve Jobs. That is so ridiculous, it actually OFFENDS me. "Worth?" What the fuck does that guy make? He tripped and fell ass-backward into something and it blew up and rained thousand-dollar bills all over him, and for what? So I can know that my husband's high school girlfriend is ovulating, and that some guy I worked with three jobs ago is Heavy Into The Jesus now? Fuck you.

--The "younger" tribe on Survivor. Goddammit, you pack of pretty morons, do you realize how fucking stupid it is to be PROUD of the simple biological fact that you are YOUNGER than someone else?

And one that makes me laaaaaaaaaugh and laugh to myself like a lunatic, probably tap-dancing on everyone else's last fucking nerve:

--If the walls of that one empty office could talk, they'd tell an extremely baroque tale of HR catastrophies-in-situ, desperate backstabbings, rug-pullings and under-bus-throwings, and clandestine use of company space to seek new employment elsewhere ...

Oh boy. They have sequins.

So I'm watching actual, live/real-time network TV on Friday night in the Emergency Room,* and something terrible called "Wife Swap" comes on.

And I can't decide which is worse:

--The self-described "all-American Texas football family," with the laughably self-described "trophy wife" (I think you bought it at the wrong trophy store, dude), the members of which prided themselves on being "hard-working" Republican Christians (with that ugly & disgusting assumption such people have, that anyone who isn't at least upper middle-class just doesn't like to work and is a lazy commie welfare cheat) who love football above all else, and having a mom/wife who literally does nothing but cook meat-based meals, clean the tract house, and attend various football-related activities for the two hulking porcine teenage date-rape suspects they called sons.

--The "hippie" family from Georgia, the members of which (especially the dad) do drum circles and "clowning" (not "clowning around," as in, goofing off -- I mean "dressing up like fucking MIMES and putting on little mime shows and shit, unironically, for spectators' presumed wonderment and delight"), have no actual jobs, and have a mom/wife who hasn't shaved her armpits in 20 years (because she doesn't believe in gender roles).

--The very concept of the show, designed to exploit everyone's worst preconceptions and prejudices for trainwreck-style entertainment under the guise of busting those very notions down. BULLLLLLLLLLLSHIT.

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*The kid had what turned out to be croup, fixable with a few 'roids, some ibuprofen, and boatloads of Yo Gabba Gabba. But it was after-hours, so off to the ER we went, on the alarmed say-so of the advice nurse after we held the phone up so she could hear the kid breathing her horrible terrifying rattly wheezy breaths. Good times!

Our glasses / were empty / but now they're full / with Dazzleberry Lemonade the glass is full

News & notes from what passes for my brain these days

--At this point, there is not a contiguous half hour of my waking life that isn't internally soundtracked by one or more songs from Yo Gabba Gabba. A girl could do worse.

--Consecutive number of Sunday New York Timeses that are on my desk, waiting to be read, including today's: Three

--Amount, on a scale of one to ten (with one being "not at all, fuck 'em anyway" and ten being "GODMOTHERFUCKINGDAMMIT"), that I resent that fact: 10

--Have y'all seen The Hurt Locker? It's real good stuff. Srsly.

--Are you aware of the existence of this bugfuck insane cunt Christine O'Donnell? I wish I weren't, but she keeps intruding on my life, sort of like the infernal she-beast Meg Whitman, only even fucking stupider. And possibly even more dangerous.

--Proving that the Internets are worth something after all: What the Fuck Should I Make For Dinner?

I like my coffee black. Like my men.

Monday Awesomeness Roundup

--Beyond the Lighted Stage: Rush documentary. Y'all, it would be hard to find a band whose music connects less with me ... but I loved this! That's the measure of a good documentary, y'all. Thanks to Our Lebowski for bringing it to the party.

--Black coffee. I took yet another cue from BlabberMouse (from whom I take most of my cues, to the point of if she lived any closer than on the opposite side of the entire country like she does, it might cross the line into some sort of stalkerazzi-impersonation type of thing so maybe this is for the best) and have been trying to lessen the grip of the Demon Sugar on my life. First up: the creamy delicious sugarbomb beverage I have known all my days as "coffee." I have slowly crept up, over the years, to about three tablespoons of raw sugar in a regular cup of joe (plus a generous dash of half-and-half). Not teaspoons, TABLESPOONS. It had to stop, and stop it did. Cold. I'm not saying never again, but: Not now.

--Mad Men. Again, yes. Always.

The clocks turned from green to red

So, OK, you know how I like to write about shit that doesn't mean anything, like teevee and whatnot.

But there was this horrific fire a couple of miles from our house tonight, which my husband and our kid drove by AS IT HAPPENED -- they saw the initial fireball (she said tonight as we were settling in to read a few more pages of Little House on the Prairie, "I saw de little bit of fire, and den de BIG fire!!") and Mr. Gleemonex, like many others, thought it was a plane crash (we're more or less directly in the path of trans-pacific flights taking off from SFO, and he and I are kind of permanently weirded out by the fact that we came back from our trip to Maui, our first legitimate non-family non-work [as in, 100% our choice to use commercial aviation] Vacation together, on Sept. 9, 2001). As I'm writing this, nearly 60 homes are burned completely to the ground, at least one person is dead and dozens of others are critically injured, the fire is still burning … it's fucking HORRIBLE.

And the thing is, we can't know, about this stuff, which is what makes it so fucking terrifying to think about. After 9/11, I developed a crushing, twisting fear of airplanes, airports, and flying (yay Xanax, eh? cures what ails ya) -- but eventually I realized, fuck it -- every fucking DAY is fraught with danger. Why get so torqued about THIS kind of one in a million danger? I've always been a fear-riddled person -- there is a thing I will tell you about someday, a near-death experience which I remember in sickeningly lucid detail that sends me into fantods today, thirty years after the fact, which undoubtedly marked my psyche -- but my fears are always worse in the realm of "normal person, going about his/her normal day, when DEATH COMES SCREAMING OUT OF THE BLUE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH" type of thing.

Say you got home earlier than usual from work Thursday. Six-fifteen to your usual 6:45. You thought you'd start dinner cause damn, you all are eating late these days, or maybe since nobody's home yet, you might play hooky for ten minutes from your feeding-and-provisioning duties and read ONE GODDAMN SECTION of your still-unread Sunday NYT. You sit down in the chair by the window, catching the last of the September light, and

Dr. Lyle Evans

Internets, I have to tell you this: Mad Men is the reason there's no reason to go to the movies anymore.

This season is ON FIRE. I have become as vehement and unstoppable an evangelist for it as I am for The Wire, which is to say, people who consider themselves filled with the LORD (and who always all-caps the word LORD) will recognize a similar unhingement in me as that which they find in themselves.

Which is to say: Holy Drunken Out-Of-Control SHATNER, is Mad Men awesome.

It's not about the clothes (which are wonderful) or the envious nostalgia for drinkin' & smokin' like it weren't bad for ya (although, well ...) or the thing where when guys you know drink to excess and skirt-chase, it sucks, but when Don Draper does it while being handsome in a suit it's awesome. None of those things. It's about some of the best-written, nuanced, complex, real, honest human life ever captured on film. You forget you're watching fiction, you forget you're watching period drama -- you just live in that world, fully immersed, until it's over, and then it stays with you and you find yourself thinking about it days, weeks, months, years later.

It really is that good. I wouldn't steer y'all wrong.

Champale

You guys, can I ask you, what is the deal with me not being able to produce any kind of non-work writing during daylight hours? I don't kick it into gear till after midnight, even when I am this tired, just ass-broken, walking-into-walls tired, and I have to get up in like five fucking hours and WHY AM I STILL UP? I'm not Hunter Goddamned Thompson, goddammit. Fuuuuuuuck.

Aloha, Mr. Hand

Sorry for going AWOL on you good folks, but it was for an excellent reason -- the Gleemonex fam up and went to Hawaii for a week! Total last-minute thing (seriously, booked five days before departure) -- we haven't been on a vacation since the Molokai trip while I was pregnant, in 2007, so between the kid's school's annual closure week, a tendency on my part to case airfares in idle moments, some luxe condo-owners' willingness to rilly DEAL at the last minute, and a very large amount of job-related FUCK THIS SHIT on my part, we were off to the Big Island for a week of sun, sand, extremely calm surf, crazy-fresh fish, tropical drinkz, and largely internetless, TV-free early-to-bed/early-to-rise days of heaven.

Despite all the shit going on in the world, I can't muster a lot of ire right now -- none, actually, cause I'm still vacation-hiiiiiiiiiigh from the awesomeness -- but here are a couple of things for ya:

--I CANNOT GET THE CEE-LO GREEN SONG OUT OF MY HEAD. You know, the unbelievably catchy, curse-riddled one you can't sing in front of your toddler? You get as far as "I see you ridin round town with the girl I love" and that's as far as you can go without risking an awkward phone call from the school director concerning your child's "inappropriate use of language"? Yeah. That song. It fucking rules.

--It is seriously about three decades past Upgrade Time for the Honolulu airport. Holy 1974 Time Capsule!

--I think the writers of Psych have narrowed down their demographic focus to an incredibly granular level (as we say at my Day Job): Their target audience is, specifically, me and Mr. Gleemonex. The rest of y'all are just incidental -- but I, and they, do hope you enjoy the show!