And from then on, wherever I went, I was run-ning.

Oh, Internets. What is WRONG with me? From my most inauspicious beginnings in the sport of running, through a sort of midlife resurgence in interest, technique and capability, derailed by a pregnancy, then back with a major vengeance -- it is from things like this that things like this come into being.

Can we agree to call it a growth thing? Me facing my fears, doing something that scares me, that sort of thing? Because although it's definitely the early goin' and there's lots of inconvenience and life disruption ahead, I am ... I am seized with the notion of the half-mary and all I have left is the choosing of the form of the Destructor.

Come on, people -- stay with me now, don't leave a sister hangin ...

Lucy, while we argued, was lying on the patio, doing a charcoal sketch of Barbra Streisand. From memory this time. It was a full-faced rendering, with teeth like baseballs and eyes like jellied fire.

Wow. Wowie wowie wow, was that Oscars awful. I am STUNNED by how awful it was, and that's even with the bar of expectation low enough for a seven-month-old infant to crawl over it. I fucking hate the alleged entertainment product of Seth MacFarlane, have hated it for my entire awareness of its existence, but I had no idea how truly terrible he could really be. The whole goddamned thing was painful, and stupid, and brutal (and of course SUPER misogynist and racist, just for extra kicks).

So here's some things I wrote down as I drank champagne and lost, utterly and in slow motion, to Mr. Gleemonex, on our Oscar-winner ballots:

1) When did we decide that the Oscars are supposed to be funny? I mean, this here is obviously a colossal fail, but I mean the concept that this the show is supposed to be hilare-town? As Linda Holmes wrote on NPR,

It seems like it's very difficult for awards show organizers to learn the lesson that an awards show is not a roast. It's not there to pull the rug out from under Hollywood and zing the heck out of everybody and show 'em a thing or two. 

2) If I ever meet Barbra Streisand, I'm gonna ask her if she's read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3) WTF was with Nicholson? He reminded me of Hader's ancient field reporter on SNL.

4) I declare an immediate, total, permanent moratorium on calling out people who are in the audience.

5) I wish Salma Hayek had stabbed MacFarlane in his stupid fucking punchable face. She might've if she'd been any closer to him.

6) Clooney is a good sport, because he has to be, but I think he wanted to burn the building down with everybody in it. Including himself.

7) And then this thing, from the Onion. I can't even. This is what rape culture looks like, Internets. Somebody thinks it's satire, and "funny," to call a nine-year-old girl a cunt. This beautiful, sweet, talented, self-possessed young lady, nominated by her (adult) peers for her excellent work, and it's all turned to ashes by one word from a fucking warthog-shitstain of a person who thinks he's funny and is going to get away with it because his fellow warthog-shitstains will think it's funny and defend him on grounds of if you didn't think it's funny then you're uptight and don't get humor and are probably a castrating lesbo cunt yourself.

So yeah. Puke City.

Bite the wax tadpole

Dear Sirius Satellite Radio,

I am a big fan of your enormous array of channels and programming options, and I enjoy partaking of the popular, alternative and fringe music of the 1950s - today. What amazing depth and breadth you all are capable of covering, with every single recording ever made, available right at your fingertips! What fun you guys must be having, essentially making mixtapes for all of humanity all day and all night on your hundreds of outlets!

But I do have one question, about an obscure band called "U2" from the 80s: I love that song "With or Without You," but I have to ask -- why did they never make any other songs? I mean, they seem so talented, so passionate, so amazing -- it's just inexplicable how they turned out to be one-hit wonders, much like this other obscure 80s band, "The Police," which had that mega-hit "Every Breath You Take" and then just disappeared. I don't get it -- I know we all rock out hardcore to the immense back catalog of the Pretenders, and it goes without saying that we need to hear every B-side jerk-off Madonna ever made in the entire 1990s and 2000s, but it just seems like such a damn shame for U2 and the Police to have fallen into obscurity so quickly and completely.

Time for a "Where Are They Now?" reunion special or something? Here's hopin'!

Love,

Gleemonex

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PS: Genuine Gleemonex Endorsement: Phantom Planet's The Guest (2002). My ancient iPod played "Always On My Mind" for me this morning at the gym and it was a lovely moment and then I remembered how much I loved this band back when Schwartzman was in it. 

The five spots of paint - the man, the woman, the children, the ball - remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

So that Russian meteor thing -- holy crap that was awesome. Friday morning's family snuggle (aka the time right at the asscrack of dawn when our daughter bursts through the door of our room, assaults one of us -- the irregular variation of her choice is what keeps it lively! -- with a book to the face, and piles in on us) was given over to watching videos of the event on my iPhone. Fucking gnarly.

And of course part of my interest in it was that it hucked me back in the ol' wayback machine to my yute, when I was convinced -- I mean utterly, thoroughly convinced, more convinced than I was of the divinity of Jesus and THAT is saying something -- that the world was going to end any day now in nuclear war. Global thermonuclear war.

Fucking Reagan*. Fucking Weekly Reader. Fucking The Day After.

I was trying to explain this absolute dread fascination with Russia generally and nuclear holocaust in particular to my sister-in-law recently. She's almost 9 years younger than me, which is enough years that she didn't grow up in that insane soup of dread & doom centered on the Russians and "emptying the holes" and "a millisecond of brilliant light and we're vaporized" and unironic cries of "Wolverines!" My husband (39) and my brother (42) both chimed in, backing me up, and she began to understand it in sort of an intellectual way, but I think you had to be there to really get what it was like to know in your heart that it was gonna happen tonight -- or maybe tomorrow during the times-tables test in math, or Thursday just as you get out of ballet class -- and no duck-and-cover drill could save you.

I don't know whether this was the cause of, or merely a large component of, my dread fascination with all sudden disaster -- Francine covered it way better than I can right now -- but I've always been "into"** everything from Chicxulub to Tunguska to the goddamned Titanic (I transcribed about 3/4 of Walter Lord's A Night To Remember in lavender Le Pen in a spiral notebook I stole from my sister that had My Little Pony on the front, and that's the stone truth), so this (particularly since it was over Russia) hit me right in the brain-nads.

PS: People with kids may not want to read this story, which has haunted me since I read it in the New Yorker in 2004. Or maybe you do, if your style is to look your worst fears directly in the face.

PPS: also: lol.

-------------------------------------
*Seriously: Fuck that fucking guy. 

**I say "into," but it's not in a good way -- just an unstoppable thirst to know about the worst, the baddest, the horror and the chaos and the ashes of what's left. Maybe this is how irreligious me copes with the unknowable mysteries of this dangerous fucking universe -- or maybe I should get me a hobby that doesn't involve catastrophe? Probably that second thing. 

When I tried to sit down at the baccarat table, the bouncers put the arm on me.

I would actually rather cut up and eat, with knife and fork, and no gravy, a king-sized memory foam pillow fresh from the factory, than participate in this event.

She said, surprising exactly no one who has ever read this blog before.

Also, I feel I can't just not show you guys this thing -- which despite my longstanding and dire hatred of Fred Armisen and the comedy stylings thereof, and my lifelong reluctance to even acknowledge the existence of fart humor, I cannot stop laughing about in my head all the time. Have a great weekend, y'all!

I was just another fucked-up cleric with a bad heart.

OK, so in my current line of work I don't wear "pants" and no one goes to Starbucks with me and I forget how to talk to adults and occasionally the hem on my brain falls out and oftentimes the most nutritious lunch I have in a week is TJ's garlic hummus with the lite pita chips, but christ do I love my day job (which is fortunate cause it's also my night job, my weekend job, and my holiday job). Here's one of the million reasons why: No one in this house has suggested I attend a webinar as part of my development plan. Suck it, Ragan Communications! Go explain "When you're allowed (gasp!) to break the rules!" to somebody who gives a fuck!

As I skulked around the airport, I realized that I was still wearing my police identification badge.

My sister-in-law posted on the facebooks that she can't bring a balloon kittycat home on the plane from a convention she is attending. I love her, but I think she is just not giving the required level of effort here. And so: 

Things Which I Have Transported With Me In the Coach Cabin of Commercial Aircraft

--My wedding dress, DFW - SFO via Las Vegas (fog-related emergency landing), Burbank (carried by another airline entirely) and a seven-hour drive up California in a rental car with 2 strangers also stranded in Burbank 

--Twelve vegetable samosas from Indian Cafe, EWR - DFW

--Two children under the age of five, solo, SJC - DFW / DFW - SJC

--Forty oz., total, in 5-oz packets, frozen expressed breastmilk, SFO - DFW

--Six packages of Morrison's Corn-Kits (cornbread mix), DFW - SFO

--Eight onion bagels with scallion cream cheese from Columbia Bagels, LGA - DFW

--A set of hot rollers, still hot from the morning's hairdo, which disturbed and alarmed the security peoples but was in the end allowed to travel with me, DFW - LGW

--A tennis racket and the entirety of my CD collection (~125 units), MIA - DFW

She's a looker, yeah, she's got it made

AMAZING BODIES IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY: PART I

Not my body, I mean -- I just randomly thought of this person the other day (maybe inspired by the tights on one of Me At 13's dance outfits? who knows what pulls these thoughts out of the murk in the tarn of my brain ...). And I thought I'd share. 

When I was in high school, I went to aerobics class three or four times a week at a gym just off the courthouse square (so like 6 blocks from my house -- I drove there, of course, because what kind of a no-car-having LOSER walks anywhere, GOD!!!). There were a couple of different teachers, but the one with the most amaaaazing body was Frieda H., my cool cousin's friend, who at that time was in her ... mid-to-late twenties, maybe 26 or 27?, and the mother of two young children.

Frieda had awesome Warrant-video-girlfriend blonde hair, big and teased and best suited for lolling about on the hoods of cars in front of cameras. And trust me, in the late 80s, that hair was HOTTT. It was what we were all trying to do, and failing to various degrees. She was no taller than me -- so 5'5" or thereabouts -- but she seemed downright Venusian, six-two at least. She showed up to class in full makeup, always, and it never ran or streaked. She wore immaculate hi-top Ryka sneakers, the shoe of choice for aerobic instructors, with socks of a perfect scrunchiness and hue peeking out the tops. But as bawss as the upper and lower extremities of Frieda were, it was the middle part that was the most amazing.

Slim, powerful, compact, not an ounce of fat on her, unless you count her perfect, perfect boobs (adorable round 100% factory original B-cups with no post-market adjustments). There wasn't even any line across her shimmery shiny paint-splash-printed thong leotard where her shimmery shiny fuchsia tights ended. O wait did I just mention the thong leotards? Because holy shit yeah, THONG LEOTARDS. Astonishingly high v-cuts in the front, well past the hipbones and up to about the third rib, that made her legs look like metal alloy Space Age sculptures, reaching for the sky. In the back, the thong revealed the most eye-popping pair of buns in all of humanity -- smooth, curved, free of any pock, ripple or mushiness, powerful (christ she did an hour's worth of 180bpm maniac shit on a TWELVE-INCH STEP BENCH, three times a week) but not showing any obvious muscle. It was ... a thing of beauty.

You'd watch those buns, pistoning away up at the front of the room, as you shuffled along trying to keep up on your lame 6-inch step (or an 8 if you were showing off or old ladies grabbed all the sixes cause they got there first), and think to yourself "ehhhhgaaaaaaah I'm dying." I mean, you don't have a lot of deep thoughts during step aerobics. But then twenty-five years later you're like -- goddamn, Frieda, that was a world-class set of buns. I salute you, and your whole thing you had going there, and I do hope you enjoyed living in that body as much as we all enjoyed a-lookin' at it. Mahalo!

Sometimes known as the leader of the homeless

Awesomeness Potpourri: Some Things That Are Great Today

The dance routines, the excelling, the periods, the junior sexual harassment, the rompers

I almost can't stand how much I love DOSBS's new joint, Me At 13 -- it's one of the tumblrs I now look at about 15 times a day on my phone, hoping there's a new post. Also I like its tumblr address, which I read as "meat 13." Wondering whether you'd like it? Here is a context-free sample of things on it that have made me schnorg-laugh in a most unladylike fashion in public lately: 

     --Cacique, the favored store of NBA Spurs wives

     --while doing a bunch of secret exercises you made up to do in your room at night after everyone goes to bed

     --I never get to make my own decisions. It’s just like tennis camp.

     --Mrs. Mortimer told us in theater arts today that nobody is allowed to do any more Toonces the Driving Cat improv scenes. She has hit her limit.

The greatest interview in the history of interviews: A "Home-Free" Hitchhiker Tells How He Rescued a Guy From Being Killed By a Racist Maniac Who Said He Was Jesus Christ

I'm not even trying to be funny here, y'all -- this is for real. This guy, Kai, is my new jam. I love him. Yes, this video is funny in parts, but I'm completely serious about my genuine human affection for Kai, and if you want me to shut up before I start talking about the beauty of the human spirit and how this is the kind of thing that gives me faith in humanity, you'll just go watch it yourself.

And finally, just for shits: Recent Searches on my iPhone
does melamine contain bpa
[name, alleged hometown & alleged occupation of my sister's new gentleman friend]
the americans fx
what the fuck should I make for dinner
vrbo molokai
lyrics johnny ryall
vegan icing
obama administration cabinet
TMJ

Imagine if the landlord from Lebowski was a 13-year-old girl

Oh goddammit Internets. I can barely type this through the tears of wheezy, cackling laughter, but you -- especially you and you -- will thank me for it. It's like the video in Infinite Jest -- "the Entertainment" -- which is so perfect that, when viewed, causes the viewer to do nothing else basically until they die. I think I'll let Alec Baldwin tell you about it:

Alec Baldwin: My guilty pleasure like that was when I was in my 20’s and I’d go to my friend’s house. And we just had this weird habit, where like at 4:00 in the afternoon we would like make a drink and we’d roll the biggest joint and we’d smoke pot and watch a show called "Stairway to Stardom" that was on public access TV. And "Stairway to Stardom" was this older man. He kind of looked like Rod Steiger – he was a burly-looking, tough-looking older man – and his wife. And she kind of looked like Tammy Faye Baker. She was like a big, big honeycombed, shellacked hairdo. She was like this big, bosomy older woman.

And the guy would come out, and he had the funniest voice. He’d be like, ‘Welcome, everyone, to "Stairway to Stardom."’ And they’d sing a song, an opening song, and then they would bring out acts that would perform, that were all like local Queens, Brooklyn talent; people singing and parakeets. It was like – it was bizarre.

Lena Dunham: That sounds like the best thing in the world.

Alec Baldwin: It was the best show in the world, especially if you’d smoked an enormous –

Lena Dunham: Amount of marijuana.

Alec Baldwin: An enormous joint. 

I don't even partake of herbal jazz cigarettes anymore, and this is the greatest thing in the WORLD. 

Hat tip: Mr. Gleemonex, who got it from Alec Baldwin's podcast. Reader, I married him!