Sorry, we only carry sizes 1, 3, and 5. You could try Sears.

Cunty Things Said to Me By This Person, Emma, Whom I Used to Work With at the Hi-Tone Nanny Agency In San Francisco in the Late 90s: A Partial List

--"You like Elizabeth Hurley? Isn't she a little too glam for you?" (In some insipid lunchtime conversation about celebs, amongst all us gals.)

--"Hunh. Provolone. Kind of bland, isn't it?" (Judging my cheese/fruit/baguette lunch, which was A, none of her business, and B, all I could afford at the fancy grocery store nearby.)

--"Well, when you've grown up a little more, you'll see it's not really that much." (Upon my wide-eyed reaction to hearing how much her house in the then-gentrifying area of the Lower Haight cost.)

--"I think you've worn those exact shoes to work every day this week." (Probably I had; I owned about three pairs, total, of work-appropriate shoes. Nice of her to notice.)

--"Heyyyy! You're getting skinny!" (Approving of my figure about a month after my dad died -- a fact of which she was well aware; she'd complained about how "long" I was out of the office, which btw was three days -- when I was at my lowest-ever adult weight on account of I had basically stopped eating for awhile there.)

--------------------------------
Randomly thought of this woman the other day, sparked by Shatner-knows-what; Emma is not her real name. She was/is about 5 years older than me, and was from Money, and worked at the agency as a counselor (who met with clients and placed nannies/housekeepers/etc.), whereas I was a mere admin. In fairness, she was generally pretty nice, and helped me out a lot with wedding planning and, like, restaurant suggestions, but she could occasionally just drop some fresh steaming cuntiness on my desk for no reason as she passed by. 

Irony? It's when ... something's like, ironic.

11/40

And then you find yourself in the somewhat humiliating position of trying (virtually) to cut the (online) throats of all the other bitches who are trying to win this goddamned pair of vintage 90s Docs on the goddamned eBay ... HANDS OFF, YOU WHORES, THESE'RE MINE!

I need them for a reason, and it's a hilarious one, and but also there's the fact that I never had Doc Martens money back in the day and always wore knockoffs so it's basically like I'm buying my kollege self the shoes she really wanted and was not badass enough to get. 

On a similar note:

That Marissa Mayer chick can shut RIGHT the fuck up about nobody gets to telecommute and blah blah blah lookit me I only took two weeks of maternity leave. Good for you, bitch, with your custom-built nursery right next to your office. Where's my custom-built nursery? Right. Exactly.

Foursquare Tuesday

Random bits of this, that, and the other thing:

--On last night’s Cuddy-centric House episode (no spoilers): I didn’t mind them straying from the formula, and it was interesting to get her side of the story. But a few things:
1) Those blouses, my god. Her funbags are RIGHT OUT THERE. You can practically see the nipular region. People, this is not workwear, not even in California, not even for a girl fresh out of college who doesn’t know any better yet and doesn’t have much to lose – for a professional woman at the height of her career, among people whom she wants to take her seriously, it is RIDICULOUS. I’m not saying it’s not hot – and I know this is a teevee show, all right? I’m just saying, the Dean of Medicine should not dress like she works at Wet Seal.
2) I am troubled by how many opportunities this gave the show to call her a bitch. I get that a woman in her position probably is not unused to being called bitch, but it … felt a little like “Hey, here’s your big episode, bitch. What? Powerful women get called ‘bitch’ all the time, right?” An excuse to do, in context, what they sort of wanted to do all along. Yuck.
3) With regard to that “professional woman at the height of her career” stuff: This is what she busted her ass her entire life for? To take flak from all sides, to be constantly harangued and bullied and importuned, to have no time for her kid or her boyfriend or her yoga or her fucking lunch? Nothing is worth that kind of life, to me. No amount of money, no amount of power or prestige. Fuck that noise.

--Indeed yes, good sir: the stone cold truth about apostrophes.

--A short story which is not for everybody. Woof. I warn you, this one will stay with you. You’ll think about it at four a.m., you’ll think about it on the bus, you’ll get a shiver of dread down the spine out of nowhere on a clear blue day.


--A little bit of how I’m feeling in my professional life these days, courtesy of the true-Jesus geniuses at Married to the Sea:

marriedtothesea.com

In the sleepy west / of the woody east

Two things, Internets, and for once only one of them is television-based:

--Sesame Street. My kid is obsessed with it (we got her these two DVDs for Xmas, 40 Years of Sunny Days, which is a sort of best-of from all the seasons), so since we’re about to be driven nutbag by the repetition, we thought we’d TiVo a few current eps. First of all, it’s only on for an unforgivable ONCE a day. Remember when it used to be on like four or five times and you just had to sort of find something else to do while you waited out the horrible, horrible Electric Company and the meh Mr. Rogers in between eps? Secondly, it’s so … earnest now. The skits go on too long, they’re very draggy, there’s none of that punchy quirky jump-in, jump-out stuff they used to just throw in there, there are Serious Lessons all the damn time, Cookie Monster is basically shelved (listen, MY generation wasn’t the one with the childhood obesity problem – I don’t think it’s fucking Cookie Monster’s fault, so why does he get the blame? Why is HE sent off to the Old Age Home for Disgraced and Discredited Puppets? Fuck that noise), and to top it off, all the new characters are these uninteresting babbly little toddler-aged puppets who, like, mispronounce stuff – what kind of thing is that to teach a kid? GOD! Kid Gleemonex lasted about twenty seconds into the ep before she started in with the “I don’t like this one. Mommy, skip it! Want to watch monstos.” (Which is what she calls Grover, et. al. – clearly these fools weren’t monsters, and this crap wasn’t Sesame Street, eh?)

--My gal uncouth heathen linked to this totally awesome sorority rush dress code from some silly bitches at Cornell – srsly, you should read it, it is hysterical, and it totally validates (for the billionth time) my lifelong aversion to this particular subset of female relationship crapola, and besides, for real, girls, you’re at Cornell -- if you really had the mettle for some serious motherfuckin sorority life, you shoulda gone to Vanderbilt or something so give it up. But more importantly to me personally, the tone of this dress code – the intensely personal voice of the writer – put me immediately in mind of this person, the unnamed person from an unnamed part of the Gleemonex past. It could absolutely have been written by this person, with his/her egomania, prescriptive view of everyone else’s life, and unshakeable faith in his/her eternal and thoroughgoing righteousness. It is uncanny. For all I know, that’s actually what he/she is up to right now – yet another completely invented life, this one in Ithaca, New York, raining capricious and terrible misery into the lives of innocent, impressionable teens once again …

Read this out loud: I am wee Todd did.

PSA from the crusty black heart of Gleemonex Industries:

• A regimen is a systematic plan (as of diet, therapy, or medication) or a regular course of action.
• A regime is a mode of rule or management, a form of government (e.g. a socialist regime), a government in power, or a period of rule.

They look a lot alike, but they are not, in fact, interchangeable. And the next time SHAPE magazine uses them as such, I will go to there and burn them down.

I know. We're all upset that Jenny's marrying a bohunk.

So Mr. Gleemonex was skimming the Rolling Stone cover story on the Jonas Bros., who, in case you have the good fortune not to have heard, are a boy band made up of a trio of Bible-thumping godbaggers, who are currently setting preteen hearts aflame all over the world. Sorta like Hanson, only dark-haired instead of blonde and minus MmmBop (one of my all time favorite songs, and I'm not kidding). (Shut up, it's a really good song.)

So among these douchetards' offenses against music, taste and decency, reported Mr. Gleemonex, are that they wear purity rings, and apparently a lot of their wee fans are following suit. Purity rings, in case you have the good fortune not to have heard, are these Special Christian Rings the kids wear on the third finger of the left hand, signifying their pledge to stay virgins until they're married. Some kids buy their own -- icky and weird enough -- and some kids' parents buy them FOR the kids and make a big creepy deal over it.

And that's where I draw the line. You hear the most about these things in terms of way-wrong shit like Purity Balls (a father-daughter dance type deal where there's all this talk about, and emphasis on, the preteen or young teen girl's virginity) ... ugh. There's something so skeevy and embarrassing about that -- reminds me of Joe Simpson and his obsession with his daughters' boobs, you know? Like, dude -- why are you thinking so much about that? It's none of your goddamn business. And it riles every feminist cell in my body, the repugnant notion that a father has some sort of ownership of, or material interest in, his daughter's vagina and the disposition thereof.

The nutjobs who are into this stuff like to cast it as a partnership, or the father protecting and aiding the daughter against all the dirty dirty menfolk in the world, but it's the biggest load of overbearing sexualized patriarchal horseshit ever voided by the bowels of the patriarchy.

Here is what a father needs to do to protect and aid his daughter:

1) Have her back. I don't mean act like she's always right, even when she's wrong -- I mean make sure she knows she can trust you. Trust you to believe in her, to help her navigate the world, to give her a hand when she scrambles over various obstacles. You've got to be her corner man, her rock -- and don't act like you're the ONLY man she can trust, either. Just show her what that looks like so she can recognize it in others. Be her biggest fan. Fucking BE AROUND.

2) Be kind to women in general and her mother in particular. You can't think that if you're a bigot or a misogynist or just have a bunch of unexamined "women are lesser/worse at X thing" opinions, that you can make her the exception and she'll never notice. She will. If you mutter about "women drivers" or talk shit about your exes or team up with her against her mom, if you reflexively tag combative or less-pliant women as "bitches," if you tell her how slutty her friends look, or repeatedly disrespect your mom, your daughter's teachers, the waitress, the barista, the VP of your division -- she's going to internalize that, and it goes double if the object of your low opinion and bad treatment is her mother. She'll realize she is of a species that you think is less than your own, and if her own father thinks she's not as good as boys and men, well, why should other males respect her? And why should she respect herself, either? She'll settle, she'll take what she can get. It's your job to make sure she knows her worth.

That's it. Everything else will flow from those two things. Nobody gets through life without some angst and pain and drama, and your girl will make bad choices sometimes -- but if you give her those two things, she'll always be able to pick herself up, dust herself off, and go forward, made stronger by experience.

Just so long as he remembers YOU wear the pants in the family.

Can we please, PLEASE stop referring to inanimate objects as “she”? Holy trussed-up Thanksgiving Shatner with a side of sautéed pigeons’ nuts, does that make me sick.

There’s this commercial that plays all the time during Yankees games, in regular rotation with the various dick/colon/hair-issues commercials – I don’t even know what it’s for and I don’t care, because it’s about this kid out riding his bike, finding a junker car parked by the side of the road with a note taped to it that says “If you can fix her, you can have her,” where “her” is the fucking junker car.

Ugh. You love “her” so much, you just left “her” by the side of the road for the taking, by whoever wants to slap a new coat of paint on “her,” tinker with the engine a little, and show “her” off to his similarly socially retarded friends? So creepy and lame.

Ships, cars, guitars, various machines and other toys that your basic boy-in-a-man-body type persists in calling “she” – it’s such affected, annoying bullshit. And on a related note, if I hear someone saying that X Object is “like a woman,” I instantly assume I’m dealing with at best a silly delusional wannabe ladies’ man, and at worst a misogynist a-hole who sees women as so Other that there can be no common ground – I’m just a pair of tits and a vagina to him, so why are we even talking?

“She.” Gimme a fucking break.

or maybe it was Hamm's, I don't know

Am I the only one who missed this insanity? Jimmy Fallon taking over Conan’s slot, while the goofy (yet surprisingly and hottly cut) redhead gives Leno the boot? I didn’t even know my boy Conan was moving up an hour (shows how Up on Current Events I am, right?).

Why would anyone want to leave the late-late show? So much more freedom, a smidge more cred – it’s like if you’re a really good writer, they eventually make you editor, and then managing editor, where all you do is manage. Which blows. But it’s the only way to make more money, so you take it, and sit around getting bitter and miserable from all the goddamned managing you have to do and you don’t get to write anymore and why couldn’t they just have kept paying you more to do the same job? Damn.

So, two more points on this, and then I’ll let you go on your merry way:

1) Fallon? Really?

2) Why are there no women talk show hosts? I mean, aren’t we a bunch of talky bitches, as a species? I don’t mean casserole/tampon/you-go-girl shit like Oprah or The View (which I’ve heard Howard Stern dismiss contemptuously as “a bunch of fucking yentas sitting around running their mouths like always,” a statement with which I cannot disagree). I mean: Conan’s show, but with some funny broad behind the desk. (And please, please do not write the words “Sarah Silverman” in the comments – THAT is not what I mean at all.)

I’m saying, someone like my friend Rich Hilary (who used to lie in wait for me on the way to class on sunny spring days, brandishing a sixer of Black Label in my face and DEMANDING that I accompany her to the lawn instead and drink this fucking cheap beer and get a goddamn tan already, you SAID the professor doesn’t even know how many people are in your class, let alone your name or whether you’re there or not, bitch!). Somebody sorta loud and brash, with wide-ranging interests, an amazing ability for recall, devastatingly sharp wit, a keen sense of the absurd, the ability to draw secrets and truth out of absolutely anyone, and a blazing fearlessness in re: stepping over the line. Come to think of it, why not Rich Hilary? Or, I don’t know, Sars (of Tomato Nation & TWOP fame)? I’d totally watch that.

In which I take up a cause, and rally the Internets to its defense.

OK, Internets. Goddammit. I've had this post brewing for a week or two about how when celebrities have babies, there's all this intense scrutiny about their bodies and how fast they can get back into pre-baby shape and how that SUCKS because yes, their jobs do entail more public ogling than most of us are subject to but A)that shit trickles down to the rest of us and nobody needs that and B)"celebs" are still PEOPLE and biology is a bitch so LAY OFF.

[Pause to marvel at me actually defending celebrities ... ]

But then yesterday afternoon, I'm in the grocery store and I see that we've stopped pretending it's the usual celebrity baggery and have turned it into a blood sport. One of those awful rags, I think this one was In Touch, dispensed with the relative politeness of the other celeb gossip sheets (e.g. US Weekly, which is practically Atlantic Monthly by comparison), and went straight for the throat. The entire cover is pregnancy-one-upsmanship: Side by side photos of J.Lo and Christina Aguilera, with a banner headline blaring POST-BABY BODY WINNERS & LOSERS, and several little side headlines, including one that says "BEST NEW BUMPS" (i.e. if you carry big-all-over instead of soccer-ball-out-front, you're a fucking failure and a worthless person and should probably just kill yourself now, to spare the rest of us the sight of your adult female body). Jesus H. Shatner playing bocce ball w/yr grampa, y'all.

It's this kind of insanity that's responsible for the horrors of "Mend it like Beckham," not to mention a general cultural attitude that says there's something wrong with you -- the civilian woman -- if you don't look like your old self (or better!) within a week of giving birth. FYI, that shit is NOT REAL. Pregnancy and childbirth are whole-body experiences that are goddamn close to entirely out of your control. Your body will do what it wants to do, what it needs to do to make and birth a baby -- you're just along for the ride. Anything beyond the basics requires luck, genetics, and an ass-army of surgeons, nutritionists, nannies, stylists, doctors and assistants to pull together, and I guarantee that in their private moments, these celebrity moms want nothing more than to curl up into a ball with their newborns and sleep like the dead -- just like the rest of us. So can we please, please lay off, on just this one subject? Permanent moratorium? KTHXBAI.

-----------------

PS: Lest any haters infer defensiveness based on my personal situation, full disclosure: I happen to have been one of the lucky few whose body returned more or less to normal fairly quickly. This is due to a combination of the following factors, any one of which, had they been different, would have screwed the whole deal: Starting physically fit and at a normal weight, working out throughout the pregnancy, not having any complications that would sideline me (hyperemesis, preeclampsia, migraines, excessively loosened joints or balance issues, etc.), having cravings that ran more to fresh fruit than to ice cream (a MAJOR surprise to this sugar-baby, I tell you whut), getting diagnosed with GD and put on a no-sugar (and no-white-bread, no-starch, no-juice, no-anything-good) diet that actually caused me to lose weight in my third trimester, breastfeeding like it was going out of style, feeling ready and able to exercise (a little) again at about three weeks postpartum, and sheer genetic luck of the draw.

My backpack's got jets

I figure today's the last workday before xmas for most of you who read this blog at work (on your BREAKS, of course!) -- here's hoping you're released early. My company, or at least my team/department/whatever tends to do that, which is very kewl of them, but I've worked at plenty of joints that hold you till the last everlovin minute -- the nanny agency, for example (my boss once left early the day before xmas vacay and CALLED US at 5:01 p.m., allegedly to tell us something she forgot, but really to make sure we were still there, the hose beast), and the online spinoff of the print-media company (where my fourth boss, T., a very neurotic little man who was a great guy but a TERRIBLE boss, would rush around in the last hour before a holiday acting like we were about to break the goddamned Watergate story to a stunned and outraged nation). And poor Ma Gleemonex this very day is supposed to be released from minding the little high-school hobgoblins at 1:00, but all the teechurs have to stay after for their mandatory-fun holiday luncheon. Gaaaaaaaaaaaah!



Aaaanyway, get outta here! Scoot, all y'all! Go have a nice cocktail somewhere, preferably in the company of someone you love. The Internets'll still be here next week.

Feeeelings, nothing more than feeeelings

Another peril of the all-female office is that meetings are almost never about work. Ostensibly they are, of course, but really they're about getting up in each others' grills.

Take our Wednesday morning meetings, for example. A normal workday started at 8:30, but on Wednesdays, we had to report at 7:30 for our weekly team meeting. We were all hourly employees, but this (mandatory) meeting was off the clock and thus unpaid -- I regret to say, only a bunch of women (especially young ones just out of school) would put up with that horseshit in the first place.

Each week, the duty of "hosting" the meeting rotated; if it was your week, you had to:

1) Type up a list of agenda items for discussion, including space for each person to present her "goals and challenges" (both professional AND personal) for the week, make 6 copies, and have them ready to hand out.

2) Come up with an activity (this was an agenda item) for everyone to do. Actual examples included: writing down something you like about each person on a separate little piece of paper, which then are sorted and handed around so that each person ended up with five of these little affirmations about herself; going around the table, every person makes two statements, one true and one false, that everyone then gets to guess which is which; stating a work-related or (preferably) personal challenge and having everyone else weigh in on how to fix it.

3) Bring food, almost always Starbucks pastries (at about $2 each), which you paid for out of your own pocket (see above re: only women putting up with this horseshit), and about which all the girls would ritually bemoan how high in calories and fat they were and would eat only half of.

All attendees were required to show up on time, slop over with praise of the "You go, girl!" variety for each other, and every once in awhile really open up an artery about her personal life from which everyone could suck deeply (e.g. one counselor who kept us all updated on her fertility struggles, another who provided progress reports on her new boyfriend, whom she hoped would ask her to marry him).

Can you IMAGINE a scenario like this if there were even ONE dude in the group? What happened was, not being a very girly person in general and reacting badly to this bizarre sorority thing, I sort of became the office "guy" out of self-preservation, and was repeatedly accused of being cold or gruff, of not being a Team Player, and of really just Not Getting It.

Well, that last was at least true ... I surely did not Get It, and the day I handed in my resignation (after fourteen looooong months trying to bail water), without even a prospect of another job lined up, was among the highlights of my working life.

You'll shoot your eye out

You know that section in the men's department at Macy's that has, like, tie racks, "executive" poker sets, and inflatable sports-themed furniture -- basically all that crap that says "I have no idea who you are or what you like, but I drew your name in the office Secret Santa pool, so here ya go, you can at least tell I spent the required 20 bucks"? Well, that got me thinking about the whole Secret Santa thing, my main experience of which was at the nanny agency where I worked when I first moved to Galivornia. 

One of the perils of working in an all-female office -- which I will never do again, so help me Shatner -- is that "Secret Santa" in that type of environment is code for "Festival of Olympic-Level Passive-Agressive Bullshit." This particular gynocracy had a very highly codified Secret Santa tradition. There were six of us in the San Francheesy branch, so there was no sliding, no halfassery -- you had to do it right, goddammit, or somebody was gonna be pissing in your lattes for MONTHS. I mean, seriously, if office policy* is that you have to sign emails to each other "LYLAS," you know you're in for some finely-tuned insanity. 

But so anyway, it went on for a week, and there were specific things you had to do over that week. It went something like this -- and keep in mind, the three of us at my level were pulling down a sweet 27 G's a year: 

--Monday: A homemade food gift (e.g. cookies).  Unspoken Rule: Home. Made, bitch, and don't be frontin with something from Whole Foods.

--Tuesday: A small item for the home (e.g. candle, little mirror, set of port glasses). Unspoken Rule: Minimum level = Pottery Barn.

--Wednesday: Reading material. Unspoken Rule: If Oprah likes it, we fucking LOVE it. And it better be so new it still has the no-go inside it.

--Thursday: Kristmas Keepsake. Unspoken Rule: Any ornaments must match receiver's xmas decor; no Hallmark items; minimum gift value = $25.

--Friday: A Real gift, which proves how you know the receiver like a sister (she's a pal and a confidante, after all, and if she threw a party, and invited everyone she knew, she would see the biggest gift would be from you, and the card attached would say, "You are an amaaazing woman!!!"). Unspoken Rule: A gift card, even one to Sephora or a day spa, will mean that at least until July, every one of your sushi orders will be "accidentally" fucked up, every conversation will stop when you walk into the room, and every tittery little gigglefest in the galley kitchen will be aimed your way. Yay sisterhood! 

*I am only joking about the LYLAS business. We were a micron away from that. But JUST a micron.

A frozen elk heart left on yr doorstep wouldn't be enough

Can we please declare a permanent total moratorium on Jack Nicholson impressions, with the death penalty (via staking to a fire ant hill on a hot noonday in July at the Reunion grounds, with, of course, beer concessions, fireworks and carny games concurrent) imposed for first offenses? Please? I hate them so very

very

very

very fucking much. They've been stale and insufferably asinine for two decades now, and they're starting to make me hate Jacky-boy himself -- even Batman Jack, even Mars Attacks! Jack, even friend-of-Hunter-S.-Thompson Jack -- just for existing to be impressioned [new coinage, go with it]. Impressions suck the big wet scaly one anyway, just as a rule, but Jack Fucking Nicholson impressions have GOT TO FUCKING GO.

[This post brought to you by that stupid motherfuckin "frank TV" thing, whose commercials run every 43 seconds on TBS. Kill me now. But let me kill the person responsible with a ballpeen hammer first.]

Don't let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out!

On second thought -- DO let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out.

La la la la laaaaaaaa! Commence double-barreled bird-flippin insane happy dance! A-Rod is gooooooooone! Some other unlucky car-chasing bastards are gonna pay all their lunch money for this useless choking motherscratcher and we are RID OF HIM!

Good luck peddling this second-rate piece of ass around the league, Scott Boras, you fucking douchebag. You two deserve each other. And may he never win a World Series ring as long as you both shall live.

CELEBRAMOS!

Douchebaggery, Ivy-League Style

Mr. Gleemonex and I got our alumni magazine the other day, as we do every two months, and it was the usual collection of self-congratulatory silliness, historical interest, and legit college news. The best part, as always, was the "Class Notes" section, in which one looks up one's own class and the classes within three years of it in both directions, and busts on whatever these intellectual luminaries are up to. The section is, of course, self-reported -- you're supposed to send news to your class's representative, who writes it all up like the chatty motherfucker he or she undoubtedly is, bolds the names, and turns it in to the editors.

The funniest thing is how predictable it all is.

The most recent two or three classes are always chock-full of reports, almost entirely from this or that happy asshole who's one of the 70 percent of the class that's going to med school, B-school, L-school, or some sort of too-too international graduate program, plus global travelogues and the many immediately post-grad weddings of the Orthodox Jewish set.

At five or six years out, you get a few more weddings, coupla babies (usually the people who have those, like, made-up jobs you see in the NYT Sunday Styles wedding pages, whose own families are FILTHY rich so that's how they can afford to have babies at this age), and some silly-ass fantasy careers like "documentary filmmaking" and "private art gallery curator."

And by 11 or 12 years out -- i.e. my and Mr. G's classes -- you get lots more weddings and babies, plus things like tenured professors, persons of some seniority in various US Embassies around the world, the guy who is "an attending oculoplastic surgeon" and the Tooly Mc O'Tooligan fucktard of enormous familial wealth from your floor freshman year who's now living in London and has somehow managed to convince some woman to bear his child, despite his total lack of sexual or personal allure. These are the same people who've been reporting to the mag for all these years, so you're kind of familiar with their stories, and they are the main reasons why you skipped your 5- and 10-year reunions -- you already keep up with your actual friends, aka the other (relative) slackers and the networking-averse, so why go to hang out with a bunch of gladhanding numbnuts you barely even remember?

Ahh, the hate ... feel it, know it, live it, and fuckin blog about it.

Misanthropy and an unwillingness to kiss Probst's ass

OK, still on the Survivor topic, but not on the current season per se – just on the concept in general. Having watched every episode since Episode One, Season One, I’ve always wondered how I would do if someone forced me (and it would have to be at gunpoint) to be on the show.

I think I would probably suck at it, in a possibly epic way. Here’s why;

1) I. Don’t. Camp. I mean, I do not indulge in the camping arts, at all. So much aggro and hassle and dirt, and for what payoff? I’m not so in love with sleeping on the ground and dragging a bunch of equipment across Nature’s hostile bosom (while actually feeling my armpit hairs grow) that I’ll risk getting mauled by bears, bugs, Satan’s eight-legged buddies, shotgun-toting murderers or, of course, Sasquatch (who’s probably only looking for a fwend, but I’m not up for that in the middle of a lightless night, chief). And this is with people I like, presumably – forget trying it with 15 strangers, some of whom I’d undoubtedly like to whack to death with a ballpeen hammer by Minute Four.

2.) I hate people. Well, not you guys, of course – but people in general. And I can only hold it together for so long without that becoming apparent, you know? I’d spend a good 75% of my time ranting to the cameras about what princesses/divas/assholes/blowhards/jackoffs my teammates were, and how I’d like to whack them to death with ballpeen hammers … while back at camp, the rest of them plotted against the Rilly Mean Bitch (aka me).

3.) I am kind of a wimp. I just flat ain’t doing the Gross Eating Challenge, I’d rather not stand on a post the size of a pub coaster for four hours to win immunity, I can’t do puzzles of any kind under pressure – about the only kind of challenge I’d be any good at would involve shooting or maybe balance. Or, hey – spelling! I can spell like a motherfucker. Let me know when THAT wins the million bucks, eh?

4.) I’m bossy. Now, I’d try to go with the flow, especially if I sussed out that that was necessary for social reasons, but laziness and incompetence light fires of fiery flame back behind my eyesockets and to avoid total brain incineration I’d eventually have to, as they say, “take the leadership role,” which is almost always fatal in the game, no matter how gently done (sole exception: Yul Kwon).

5.) I’ve already been to junior high once. It sucked great big hairy donkey balls, and I’m not going to do it again.

The semester without REM cycles

OK, for some reason, this link to an evil and Wrong item called Clocky -- courtesy of dooce -- hucked me almost bodily into the fall of 1992. The walls of my cube were suddenly replaced with the cinderblock of the dorm room I shared with one K.L., a freak and total spasmoid of the first order (and I mean that in a bad way), and I recalled -- nay, lived! for a moment! -- the early mornings of that watershed first semester of freshman year.

Among her many other bizarre fantasies and confabulations, K.L. fancied herself a rower of crew, having been (allegedly) a Junior Olympic competitor in kayaking. This meant that she (allegedly) got up at 5:00 a.m. three mornings a week -- OF COLLEGE -- to go to some godforsaken part of Manhattan with the team to practice. She may -- MAY -- have actually gone thrice.

But all goddamned semester, the bitch most definitely set four -- FOUR -- alarm clocks for times ranging from 4:30 to 5:10. That's a.m., ante meridien, as in, IN THE MORNING. They'd ring -- sometimes right next to young Gleemonex's sleepy and/or hungover head in the top bunk, because K.L. moved them EVERY NIGHT to make it harder for her to snooze them and/or sleep straight through -- and they'd ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and rinnnnnnnnng.

And she wouldn't even get up. She'd torture my ass for over an hour, most mornings, with the ringing and the snoozing, and the lurching all over the room knocking stuff over in the dark trying to find the clocks and hit snooze, and the throwing herself back onto her bunk with the greatest possible force and maximum shakeage of Gleemonex, and then finally decide, fuck it, she's missed the van to the river, and she'll go work out later.

Homicidal rage, people. Homi-fucking-cidal.

Oh, and there was also her high school friend and fellow alleged rower of crew, a Russian guy (not her boyfriend, another person entirely, whom she'd get bizzy wit on the lower bunk while I "slept" on the top bunk) with no social skills named Orgo or Olga or Oly or some shit, whom she invited, sans discussion with me, to bunk on our floor on crew nights because he lived off campus -- that motherfucker was there 2-3 times a week, smelling up the place, taking up the entire floor of our tiny double, and participating in the alarm clock derby.

I was getting the shakes from this, the DTs -- my hair was falling out, my sentences became gibberish, I tried earplugs and discussions with K.L. and all manner of remedies, and nothing worked. I don't even remember why this all finally came to an end, but mercifully, it did, and a couple of weeks into the spring semester, I moved down the hall into my best friend's room (her roommate having dropped out to get married, if I recall), K.L. moved to another floor to be closer to some crew jock she was infatuated with, and life resumed a little normalcy.

But I came so close to killing her in the wee hours, Internets -- thisclose, I swear to you. If she had had Clocky, I'd be blogging this FROM JAIL.

Bitch, please

I can't get outraged over this shit -- it just annoys me and wears me out. Two items of note today:

--Some NY legislator with a nanny complex and no dumbass filter wants to ban people using iPods and cell phones in crosswalks. What are we supposed to do, take them off and fold them up every time we get to a fuckin street corner? How are you planning to police this? Doesn't NYC have a couple or three slightly more pressing problems than idiots who think the laws of physics (i.e. human vs. automobile) don't apply to them when they're in their invisible happy place with a phone or music?

--Ooooh, naughty, naughty Prince! That silhouetted part of his performance (which by the way, was fucking cool -- in fact, the whole thing RAWKED) -- the one where his guitar sorta looked like it was coming out of his junkular region as if it were long, curved, pointy, barbed, erect junk? LET'S ALL FREAK RIGHT THE FUCK OUT! THINK OF THE CHILLLLDRRENNNNNNN! MY EEEEEYYYEES! NOW I AM IMPURE AND WON'T GET IN TO HEAVEN! OH, THE HUMANITY!