Also the movie Broadcast News, which I thought of, randomly, today for the first time in like eight years. It's good stuff.

Some Things I Am Grateful for, Right This Minute: A Partial List

Lizards. I love lizards, and they're all over my back deck. Sprawling posture, FTW!

Tank tops. It's 91 degrees. I can't wear t-shirts when it's more than 72 degrees out; my armpits make like volcanoes and start pouring superheated toxic steam.

Sunless tanner. It's not like that orange shit we used to use in the 80s; it dries fast, shows color quickly, and is natural-looking if you apply it carefully.

TV. Orphan Black is back, The Americans is back and in TOP FUCKING FORM y'all, VEEP is coming back, I'm going to mainline Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt when Mr. Gleemonex is in Vegas (have so far experienced it only in gif form) -- and so much more. Yay TV!

It's almost medical, what goes on under here ...

Jesus Hopscotching Christ do I love Tina Fey and also David Letterman.

This is beautiful -- and you should also check out the first part of her appearance, because that was the fucking awesomest.

The 25th Hour, starring Ned and Maude Flanders

MY BOOKS ARE OUT OF BOOK JAIL!!!

I had a happy day a couple of months ago, organizing them. I don't alphabetize, I don't have a real system, but I know the kind of things I want next to each other. Here are a couple of pics of some of the subsections: 

THE APOCALYPSE/DYSTOPIAN/GENERALLY FUCKED-UP SECTION

I mean, Jesus -- global thermonuclear war, 9/11, serial killers, religious fanatics, fucking Tiger Eyes ...

THE NEW YORK SECTION

There's other NY stuff in the Biography and Food/Cooking sections. This ain't all, y'all. 

THE SOMEBODY WENT TO SCHOOLY-SCHOOL, DIDN'T THEY? SECTION

These are on a wayback shelf, I promise. Only an insufferable twat would put this stuff where it would be easily accessible. 

A SHELF OF SOME OF THE GLEEMONEX HOUSEHOLD FAVORITES

Just realized it's missing both To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice;  those are on my bedside table. Must get extras for public shelf, here. 

The houses that handed out booze were my favorites.

Halloweenies: Notes on the Most Wonderful Night of the Year

• There was a dad at Kid Gleemonex’s school Halloween parade dressed in the orange tux and top hat of Lloyd Christmas (he even had a cane), and it was ALL I COULD DO not to go up behind him and thwap the back of his knees with my umbrella. The only thing that stopped me — and y’all, it was close — was: What if he didn't get it? Like, a friend talked him into a two-person costume he really didn't understand all that well? And here's this crazy lady at an elementary-school Halloween parade, assaulting him for no reason …
• The girls’ costumes at the same event ran about 20 percent Elsa and Anna. The costumes were clearly stratified by price, from the $8.99 grocery-store version (the modern take on the cheapo-mask-and-plastic-bib store-bought costumes of my childhood classrooms) to the fitted, heavy $140 one with a long train, real beading, and a full, flowing satin skirt with lace overlay and real-looking long braided wig. 
• I wasn’t able to stop myself shouting “Oi! Potter!” in my big fake British accent at the dozen or so Harry Potters I saw that day and evening. I am what I am. 
• Rainbow Brite is apparently back. 
• My own couples’ costume idea came too late to be usable (Friday morning): Werewolf Bar Mitzvah. One person is in a werewolf mask and glove/claws, but wearing a suit and a yarmulke and carrying the Torah. The other person is dressed as a rabbi (also wolfed up). I love a costume that like four people on Earth, one of whom is Tina Fey, would get. 
• The kids got a great haul in the spiffy neighborhood we trick-or-treated in, but who were the cheap motherfuckers who were offloading all their Celebrity Cruises pillow chocolates? I’d like to go TP the fuck out of their house, man. Shaving-cream their windows too. 

I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker's remark about how he'd "never rode in a convertible before."

I am pretty sure that the sight of me in my shiny tricked-out new seven-seater hybrid vehicle, butt-dancing and shouting along to Kriss Kross on the unreasonably good stereo (turned up so high that it annoyed the kid and really confused the baby) was fairly pathetic/hilarious from the outside -- but oh my Shatner was it awesome on the inside! I've been riding that high for three days now.

'Cause I'm the miggida miggida miggida Mac Daddy
the Miggida miggida miggida Mac
'Cause I'm the miggida miggida miggida Mac Daddy
the Miggida miggida miggida Mac

I make you wanna

[4x]
Jump Jump
The Mac Daddy make you jump, jump
A Daddy Mac will make you jump, jump
Kris Kross will make you jump, jump
uh huh uh huh

Unrelated Question: Are the Golden Globes always like that? We recorded it because of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and kept watching because it was a total, utter mess of hilarity, drunkenness and space-casery. If it's always like that, well, friends, I been wasting my got-damn time on the Oscars all these years.

EHRMAGERD! WERMERN!

All previous declarations of things having won the Internet are now rendered null and void.

Winner and Champion Forevermore:

Binders Full of Women

And a new silver medalist, strangely apropos:

Jenna Maroney's summer dance jam, "Balls"

That's why her hair is so big. It's full of secrets.

So in the quest for authentic details for the thing I'm writing, I asked a few friends (Berwie, Lab Partner, and Lita Fajita) to xerox and send me whatever I wrote in their HS yearbooks. I don't have any of it in hand just yet, but from their responses, a picture is emerging of me that is ... not exactly how I remember it. What I'm saying is -- I thought I was a put-upon insecure outsider who covered her secret total awkwardness with loudmouthed "can't make fun a me if I do it myself first!" kind of transparent foolery. But I'm beginning to get the idea that I might have been -- how to say. I might have been a bully -- a junior asshole -- a Mean Girl. 

It's like when Liz Lemon went to her high school reunion, terrified of all the girls she used to think of as Mean Girls, and they were like, "Fuck you! You were so mean to me!" 

Ahh, well. My mouth, it seems, has a very long history of writing checks my butt can't cash. 

And that's today's roundabout Top Gun quote. 

I don't want to be A queen. I want to be THE queen.

In Descending Order of Greatness, Four Books By People I Find Hilarious, Which I Bought In Hardback Even Though I Fucking Hate Hardback Books, Because I Wanted To Support These People By Buying Their Books In the First Run

Bossypants, by Tina Fey
OMS, I loved this so much. Obviously it is from last year, but I'm including it because of my theme. I wouldn't even take it on the train with me because I'd've finished it too quickly. I had to restrict myself to little sips before bedtime so as to draw it out. And I've read it through four or five times since then -- I want to marry it and have like ten thousand of its babies.


Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, by Mindy Kaling
Love! So much to like here, but my favorite was a chapter on one-night stands, which Mindy has never had one of and explains why not (and it's the exact same reason I wouldn't do it, even if I were single). Close second: Her rant on a "fucking mean Senegalese kid" who bullied her back in the day.

You're Not Doing It Right, by Michael Ian Black
Owie owie ow. Some of the stuff in here is brutal -- like, I read it with the kind of face on my head that I wear while watching about 80% of Game of Thrones. But funny as all hell, and oddly uplifting, and MIB just kills me daid sometimes (in a good way).

Girl Walks Into a Bar ..., by Rachel Dratch
I love Dratch (whom I always call just Dratch, dunno why), and I really liked parts of this, but it's a little thin content-wise, and the first chapter (which is about how she only ever gets calls anymore to play the parts she thinks of as "The Unfuckables") was almost depressing enough to make me quit on it. Glad I stuck with it, though -- it got better!

Anybody got anything else (especially anything else funny) I should read? I'm only four weeks behind on my New York Timeses, I'm up to March on my pile of New Yorkers, and I might get to page four of Birdsong sometime next week, so I got some readin' time comin' up!

I'm entirely sure, you're entirely sure, what I'm suggesting.

Interception!
Yet another of the million reasons I cannot wait to vote again for my President, Barack Obama -- I'll let Mr. Gleemonex take this one:

Which teen would you rather have grow up to be president? A guy who peacefully hangs with his friends hotboxing pakalolo or a dick who pins a guy down and forcefully cuts his hair off cuz he looks different and is probably gay?

On a slightly different but related note: We watched Obama on Fallon (finally), and it was awesome. But I wanna take a moment to discuss the futon that was in the cool-ass photo they discussed on air -- a young Barry, looking cool as shit with a small fro and a nice smile, sitting on a futon covered in (probably) a sheet, with a plant in the background (Fallon was like, "Lookit you, tryna be all grown up, class up the place with a plant!" Heh.). And I'm thinking: I will bet you one hundred dollars, cash American, that Mitt "Entitled Motherfuckin Gay-bashing Asstard" Romney has no fucking idea what a futon is. I mean that if you asked him to define the word, he could not get anywhere close; he would not even know that it belongs in the category "furniture." It works in reverse, too: If you showed him a photo, he absolutely could not come up with the word "futon." Why would he? He's never seen one in his entire life. Futons are for Poors, and he's never even met one of those. 


The craw -- in which this is stuck -- is getting crowded
So also (you'll notice a theme here) we're always like two or three weeks behind on SNL episodes (the fact that we are awakened at the very tippy-top of the asscrack of dawn every morning -- even weekends and holidays! --  by the four-year-old bursting through our door with a book has much to do with this), and we only just watched the one with Kristen Wiig's big send-off a few days ago, and I have not been able to get over it. 


I don't like her much -- at least, not unalloyed. When she's allowed to hog up all the airtime with her awful maybe-funny-the-first-time-but-certainly-not-the-forty-third-time recurring sketches as she's done the last couple of years, it's goddamn near unbearable (not as bad as the dull, stupid horrorshow that is Armisen, but still, not good). (Quick note about Bridesmaids, if I may -- I laughed a LOT more than I thought I would, which is entirely attributable to the Feig/Apatow influence, but both Wiig and Rudolph were about five to seven years too old for their characters; it took me out of the story a little.) 


And but so whatever, I'm only one person. Other people dig her flavor. BUT: Why the big sendoff? Did I miss how she's so deeply, universally beloved and revered as both person and sketch comic that her FINALLY leaving is such a notable event -- the Passing of an Era, the Exit of a True Icon, the worth and weight of her presence so enormous that her departure demands tribute from All Who Came Before Her, to be noted by All Present and All Who Shall Ever Follow? 


Fucking Cocksnacking Shatner, what a load that was. There've been a few sendoffs of note, but nobody who's ever been on that show has ever had anything like this one. Ugh. Well, silver lining: No more Wiig on SNL! Yay! Now -- can we get rid of Armisen? Please? PLEASE. I beg. 

I've never met a literate stonemason.

Yoicks, I really disappeared on you guys for awhile, huh? I had to go back to the Day Job for awhile, but that's all done with now -- thanks to the twin factors of Mr. Gleemonex is awesome and daycare for two = almost as much as our jumbo Cali mortgage, I have parted ways with that joint forevermore. I am now officially a full-time mom and part-time writer -- which is actually my dream job, no kidding around.

And as happy as I am with this new arrangement, it's weird -- I've never not worked for dollars, not since childhood. I was hustlin my parents and grandparents for cash when I was like four years old (extra chores, what have you), started full-charge babysitting when I was nine, kept the church nursery all through high school, had lemonade stands, pulled a wagon full of soft drinks, ice and candy bars through the Reunion grounds while people were getting their camps ready, yada yada yada. A paycheck makes me feel safe -- I grew up in a freelance household, and y'all -- that life holds no romance to me, at all, and I'm only doing it now because I've run from it all my life and it's time to stop fucking around at stuff I'm NOT good at and get working on what I AM good at. Plus there's the ol' personal history factor, e.g. the fact that my dad was A)a massive sexist who didn't want his wife to work (because apparently it would have made his penis fall off) and B)not actually all that good at the "income generation" part of his self-designated Head of Household role, leading to all sorts of fun games such as "Did they shut the electricity off again today?" and watching my mom have to ask him for money to go to the grocery store -- not good memories, and exactly the baggage that led to me keeping my toxic pointless fuckaround of a day job longer than was good for any of us.

And but so, I am not my mom, Mr. Gleemonex is not my dad, and this is our life -- our kids will never be this age again, everything in my heart wants to be home with them, and now I finally have the time to write -- y'all best dig up your Z.Cavaricci long shorts, put some Violent Femmes in the CD player, and look the fuck out for this book I'm working on. It's gonna be awesome.

It's after six p.m., Lemon. What am I, a farmer?

Are you guys aware that, unlike my toxic insane pointless fuckaround of a Day Gig, there are people with actual jobs? Like, real jobs, where they work on real things? The gal next to me on Caltrain the other day obviously has one of those. She spent the entire hourlong ride working on a very powerful, tricked-out looking Mac with that personal wireless thingy sticking out of it, manipulating data and charts and huge dense long paragraphs (with footnotes) in a massive document entitled: Tuberculosis epidemiology and novel transmission routes in rural Tanzania. I wrote it down in my iPhone's notes app, I was that impressed. Even though I look at that and all I can think is: "I ... can't. I am all out of can. I am unable to muster any can."

I begin to think that perhaps I am just a fundamentally unserious person ... oh well. So: Are we all agreed that 30 Rock has been on fucking FIRE these last half-dozen eps?

Woke up quick at about noon / just thought that I had ta be in Compton soon

Tuesday Goulash

Things that have been said to me by my boss via email in recent days:
--You are passive.
--You need to really own [this stupid fucking assignment that means nothing to no one but him]
--This is not CC’ing anyone else or BC’ing anyone else, FYI
--Anyhow, all this falls into the “bold conversations” reference, as we need to have these.
--This is a critical tool for us, and I know we can all do better around it.

TV right now:
--The Middle makes me laugh so hard that I have to mash the heel of my hand on my belly button to keep it from sproinging off across the room. A couple of times I've thought I might be on the verge of a stroke, unable to catch my breath -- Christ, it's funny! Except when I'm dying of sympathetic cringery for Sue. Oh, Sue. [virtual hug]
--Boardwalk Empire: Shit is gettin REAL up in here. It took all of last season to really find its footing, but now it's one of my favorite things on the teevee.
--The Walking Dead: Hoofaaah, this is some intense olde-tyme horror show stuff. Love it.

Late-Pregnancy UltraVivid Nonstop All-Nite Technicolor SurroundSound Dream Theatre feature from last night: Me and Tina Fey were getting shitty on some cocktail she kept mixing up (which had a vodka base, plus NyQuil and Coco Loco and some other stuff) at her house. My sister came by with some super-buzzkill fundamentalist evangelical xtian friend of hers, who kept trying to evangelize us but thought he was being real subtle. He even asked for a Scotch, to prove how Down he was. Me and Tina just slumped behind the wet bar, giggling, and drank some more FeyBombs while he droned on and on. (NB: This was a much funner dream than the one the other night which ran five times, back to back, in which I went into labor four weeks early and had to keep waking myself up to check whether this was, in fact, happening. It wasn't.)

Or so the Germans would have us believe.

Me and Acting, or: There Are So So SO Many Reasons I Am Not A Star of Stage and/or Screen, You Don't Even KNOW.

So because I cannot stop myself (decade-long girlcrush), I am re-reading Bossypants in bits and pieces before I turn in for the night. And I'm thinking about Acting, and how for me, that's such burned, scorched territory, never to be traversed.

I did some THEATRE back in the day -- compulsory, in the case of church xmas plays and elementary-school pageanty thingies, but everybody did that stuff.

What astounds me in thinking on it is the times I did it voluntarily in high school, never mind the fact that I am A)spectacularly terrible at it, and B)hate it like I hate group projects, quarterly check-ins with the grandboss, and the thought of actual jail.

Unlike Ms. Fey and others who do this for a living, I did THEATRE not because I actually wanted to, but because in my mind, it was what Alternative kids did. In my defense, there weren't a lot of options in Cowburg High School that had even a whiff of Alternative about them -- Mr. Gleemonex loves to just die laughing at the clubs in my HS yearbook, what with Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Future Farmers of America, Auto Shop, etc.

But I'm still kind of at a loss to explain why I was so sure that Drama Club and One-Act Play and taking Theatre as an elective were so important to me (at least 9th & part of 10th grade, after which I outgrew that particular flavor of horseshit and sampled a few others). I never understood what was fun about it -- it was a lot of extra-hours work, you didn't really control anything (least of all your fellow actors), the word "thespian" is stupid, I certainly didn't "become" Becky Thatcher in my disastrous stint in the role, and hot calzone-fucking SHATNER did I hate the actual performances. I still remember the dread, the angst, the pure distilled loathing of the event ... I didn't even want my family to come to the shows, because I knew I was terrible and I hated everything and its ASS FACE.

And there weren't even any cameras or stagehands and such. If I had to do any acting -- like, say, it was a demand made by people who had kidnapped a family member -- I'd probably end up getting murdered by the crew or my co-stars for gumming up the works. Y'all, I can't even take a normal snapshot -- I stand there all frozen-smiling, trying not to blink, wondering if my chin looks weird, dying to brush that single strand of hair out of my eye, adjusting my stance so I don't look like I have lunch-lady arms, waiting for somebody to TAKE THE FUCKING GODDAMN PICTURE ALREADY, CHRIST IT'S DIGITAL, TAKE FOUR HUNDRED OF THEM TO GET ONE THAT WORKS OR ELSE JUST KILL ME NOW.

So anyway. Actors: My hat is off to you, sirs and madames. I reserve the right to bag on you freely in this here blog, but I'll never not give you credit for doing the impossible.

Giving up, and giving in / put on your Mom Jeans!

Welllll ... yeah, but no.

Here’s the thing -- I get what you’re saying, but I think you picked the wrong target. Yes, my biggest girlcrush of the past decade, Tina Fey, is quite pretty, and boy, can she glam up real nice.

But I don’t think she’s playing when she runs down her own looks, or breaks out exactly what happens on photo shoots (one of my favorite and most cringey parts of Bossypants, incidentally) to make normal people look like Stars, or puts her characters into purposely unattractive positions. I really don’t think it’s “false modesty and humblebraggin’” in this case, at all.

I think that for most of us, our idea of what we look like gets fixed in resin when we’re about thirteen. We make that into a brooch, and we pin it inside our jackets, and it’s always there against our hearts, no matter what else happens in our lives, how we grow, who we become, what we actually see in the mirror in the present day. Famous doesn’t fix that. Sometimes it takes horrible turns -- have y’all seen that pathetic ghoul Heidi something-or-other, who got 23 plastic surgeries in one day, and turned from a very very pretty young woman into something just desperately hard to look at? Shatner only knows what she’s carrying around inside her own head.

But mostly it takes the more common form -- your old pal Gleemonex’s brooch, for instance, shows a soft-bellied, freckle-faced, weird-toothed loud girl who never, ever knows what to wear and will never ever have a boyfriend EVER. No matter that I grew up, that I’m 37 and more confident of my body and my looks than I’ve ever been, that I eventually got plenty of male attention, etc. etc. etc. That girl is still in there somewhere. My great good luck is that I’m not in an industry in which my ability to make a living is dependent upon my looks, and I don’t compete for my living against genuinely incredibly attractive people, the 20s on a scale of 1 to 10. Tina Fey does.

It’s a defense, this first-strike “I’m such an awkward-o” thing, but I would be willing to bet cash money that she earned it cleanly, and I don’t think she owes it to anybody to let it go. I don’t think it’s a “bit” for her. I think the snapshot immortalized on her own brooch (belabor! belabor! it’s what I do) is a lot like those kinda mortifying pictures she included in her book -- even I don’t have photos as awkward as those, poor kid. I imagine they’d make a pretty powerful mental impression on a person, particularly when that person spends her entire professional life in front of a camera, and even the compliments that she normally gets are of the “kinda cute, for a writer/comedian” backhanded bullshit variety.

So anyway. That just stuck in my craw all weekend long, and now it’s out. Tina, if you stumble across this, Shatner forbid -- sorry for the rando-internets analysis. Whatever you’re doing, it rules, and I love you. Super-hard. But not in a weird way.

Internet Fun Happy Question Time With Your Host, Gleemonex

In which I ask the unaskable, and answer the unanswerable.

Q.: How many times can you say “Rufus Wainwright” before it becomes “Wufus Wehnwiiigh,” like it’s Baba Booey instroducin de myftery gueft on Stern?

A.: Sober, twice. When vodka is involved, none.

Q.: Will there ever come a day when you are able to see or even think of this without springing instant tears of strangled, semi-hysterical laughter, and feeling like you might hyperventilate from the hilarity?

A.: I certainly hope not, and I’m kind of offended that you asked. For when a person is tired of Men Who Look Like Zach Braff, a person is tired of life.

Q.: How many times per day do you find yourself saying “Really?” in the “Really?!? With Seth & Amy” manner, either in your head or out loud?

A.: A minimum of once, and up to eight times. Some days I am more incredulous than others, but incredulity and bogglement do tend to find me at least every 24 hours.

Q.: Does it ever, ever stop being funny to say stuff about how this guy wants to watch the opposing pitcher weave and breathe his story lines, or how he plays like he’d never surrender?

A.: No. No it does not. At least, not if it’s me or Mr. Gleemonex making the jokes. If it’s the FOX commentators, it’s worth a spontaneous stabbing at least.

Q.: Of the six women on the elevator up this morning, including yourself, how many were wearing an outfit of which the top half was composed of a tank or cap-sleeve shirt with a cardigan over it?

A.: Six.

Q.: No, I said, including yourself.

A.: Six.

Q.: Really?!?

A.: Oh, shut up.

Seth, the world has always been full of whores.

I have two and only two words for you this morning, Internets:

BROWNIE HUSBAND.

I am seriously about to renounce my worldly life and take upon myself the habit and the vows of the Church of Tina Fey, for she is all that is wondrous in this universe.

-----------------------------
*Note: This does not conflict with Shatner as the Deity. He is the All-Knowing, All-Seeing, and it is His light that reveals to us the beauty that is everywhere. Hence, Fey.