funny enough to post

and twitter, because seriously? check it out!



Not nearly as hilarious if you don't recognize that man, but I know him well, and I barely do. Go, alter loved ones, hilarity will ensue.

The kind of thing that bugs me

Chicks dig shiny things. Jewelry is fun and sparkly. It's also an art form, so it's very difficult for me to judge whether a certain type or piece of jewelry is worthy of being bought or worn (except for those name necklaces...really, Carrie on Sex and the City having one still did not make it any less tacky).

Oh, and this:




That is a live beetle, people. A bug, with a jewel-encrusted outfit on, that people actually wear. I really think that if you wear this, you should both be squished...you and the icky bug.

last minute thing..or 2..or several

My sister's birthday is in a couple of days, so today I went shopping to get her the one thing she really wanted (and that her poor starving artist sister could get), really comfy pajamas. Nothing like the last minute...it's how I do everything, you know. So, I go into the jammy section of local department store, and somewhere between the bridal white silky lacy negligees, and the frumpity frump triple-layered flannel jumpsuits, I came across something perfect and snatched it up. I was all ready to make my way back out of the store when I found myself amongst a sea of denim. Jean sale. Can you have too many pairs of jeans? The answer is no.

I was non-commitally browsing, when something caught my eye. Surely, there must be a mistake, because Paper Denim & Cloth jeans cannot be on sale for $33. Shut UP. I tried to remain calm as I searched through the small rack of them. I would have bought a bunch of them, but they only had one pair in my size. So happy, though. Total score. Here's where it gets ugly.

One might think that I had a great shopping experience...found exactly what i needed for sister, great pair of jeans for silly cheap, time to get out of there, right? Well, as I was looking around at all the sales racks, the compulsion overcame thought occurred to me that since I got the jeans for so cheap, I could totally splurge on one or two more things. And so I came home with 3 shopping bags. Terrible. I could refrain from eating a couple times a week for the next ummm couple of months, maybe.

Ladies, we need to talk

Oh, but first I need to thank the brilliant Placebo for fixing this page in Explorer. If you've been looking at this blog in IE, welcome to what it would look like if you used a good browser. I can't promise it will stay fixed, because I often change stuff around and don't even bother to look at it in that crappy browser. You could just download a good one just to see my blog correctly all the time. Is that selfish of me?

Anyway...

Girls, I love you. Really, I do. I don't want to be forced to become one of those catty women snickering behind your back whenever I'm out in public. The only way our relationship is going to remain healthy, though, is if you listen to reason.


The low cut jean: This is a clothing item that should be banned from online sale because they really need to be tried on. In fact, it should be necessary to try them on in front of a 360∘mirror, and while sitting on various chairs of different heights. I love these jeans, too. I also have enough self-awareness to know what's going on with them when I sit down, and enough common sense to know what panties do and do not work with them. This whole whale tail thing? It's not sexy. It's ghetto. Cut it out.



VPL: Yeah speaking of the panties...girls girls girls..I know it's been said before, but some of you have not gotten the memo. If your underwear dissects your bum, do not leave the house like this. Rethink it..there must be some other choice in that closet of yours.



muffin top: why, oh why is this still happening? Do people actually leave the house without looking in a mirror?



This is not about being big or small, a size 2 or 12. Some of the sexiest women I know are boodylicious. They just know how to dress their curves, and don't leave them all exposed for the world to see.

I'm just tired of going out at night and seeing these same things over and over and over again. Let's get it together, ladies. I'd like to still respect you in the morning.

PS...now that the page is fixed, I'm going to be updating that stalking list over there on the left just to see if I can break it again, for kicks. Kel, if you're out there..send me your email address so i can find your new web home.

Because you asked nicely...

...and not because it was the subject of the Based on Experience podcast while I was away...in the form of the weird foot fetish people on ebay. If you are such a person, my feet are apparently too cute anyway, and no, I don't want to hear from you. And I'm also not linking the podcast just because I'm mentioned as their one known female listener (awww thanks), but because they're funny, and I appreciate a podcast with no real theme or point, but that's immensely entertaining anyway. I highly recommend you take a listen.

Anyway, the new flops:



Totally cute, right?

And because I know that this blog is not so much fraught with overly-personal stuff, I think the occasional insight into my life could be a bit entertaining, or at least informative, so I will share the most recent crazy mom story. I would have loved to insert random pictures of my niece to try to distract from what is obviously the bad gene scariness of my family, but I discovered when I unpacked my camera, that for the entire duration of the vacation, my camera was on the take-only-really-blurry-and-shitty-pictures setting. I never claimed to be a photographer. I promise to post pictures, taken from a less camera-idiot person, when I get some emailed to me. Ok, on to family story time.

First, some background, so you don't think this is just a weird fluke of crazy. My mom has a long history of depression, which manifests itself in various behaviors, including past issues with alcoholism, manic mood swings, panic attacks, etc. Her family is all sorts of nuts, so in context, the depression is probably best case scenario. She is on medication, a cocktail which now seems to keep her on an even keel most of the time. When she is in a particularly stressful state, though, I don't think any concoction of pharmaceuticals could be enough to counteract it. She has been living in a house for the past 5 years that is the property of her employer, and though she doesn't make much money, it's the reason she's kept that job. The living situation is pretty much the paycheck. Over the past couple of years, there have been various disagreements with her employers (one of the two, in particluar; we will call him "A", for asshole), and she has known that it's probably best that she leave, but has been slow in taking steps to do so. She has, for the past couple of months, though, been actively searching to buy a condo.

The vacation I just returned from is something my sister and I do every year, and it is always a group trip with some of her husband's family, sometimes extending to our friends, their kids, etc. It doesn't include my mother, and though it's never been said outright, I'm sure she knows that on some level it's because the vacation is, in effect, a vacation for my sister and her husband away from my mother, who lives only a couple of miles from them. They are the ones who have to deal with her when she's having an off day or week, or just a bad episode of anxiety. Anyone who has dealt with, or is himself, a person with depression, knows that it can be extremely difficult to deal with when the medicine isn't quite working. That's not to say that we don't all love her, and do what we can for her, because we do, and my sister and her hubby have gone above and beyond. Because I'm so far away, the burden is very much on them. This one week a year, they get to get away and try not worry, but almost every year, my mom has some sort of issue just before or during our vacation week. In some ways, it's surely a cry for attention, however subconscious on her part. This year was no exception.

Just before we left, she and A had an argument. It would be unfair for me to say either party was clearly in the right or wrong, but because this guy is an asshole to begin with, despite my mother's faults, I'm still leaning toward him overreacting and making it uglier than it had to be. In any case, after a brief, angry phone call, he hung up on her, after he said that she was fired and needed to vacate the premises. This is not the first time those words have been said, and they usually are able to patch things up, but it is always my mother who has to placate him and make things right, because she, of course, is the employee in the situation. She went the 2 blocks over to A's house to discuss it, and he, in his rage, decided to call the police, claiming trespassing. To be clear, my mother may be the least threatening person on the planet. She may be nuts, but more in an if-you-hurt-my-feelings-I'll-show-you-by-crying-for-a-week sort of way, rather than being angry. It was his way of just being spiteful. The cops basically told him that he was abusing the 911 service, but told my mother to leave, and that was that. Until...my mother stewed over this for a couple of days (insert us all leaving for vacation here), and made a very poor decision. She took all of her business cards and letterhead from the company, put it into a metal bucket, set it on fire, and proceeded to leave the ashy remains at the end of her boss's driveway. In a rare case of actually getting mad instead of curling into a ball and crying, she did something truly silly. It escalated the situation, and her boss had her arrested for trespassing. When we called her from the beach a couple of days into the vacation just to say hi and see how she was doing, we got this great bit of news. So now there's a court date, and she's definitely moving sooner than she planned on it, and my sister came home having this mini crisis to deal with. Good times. Family is so much fun.

***Disclaimer: For anyone thinking of posting hateful comments about making light of mental illness, bite me. I realize this is a somewhat difficult subject for some people and that you could take offense if you are someone who deals with depression or a similar disease. If it offends you, just don't read this. We all cope with it in our own way. This is my way. Deal with it.

Did ya Miss Me?

For those of you who didn't even realize I wasn't around, I have been in Charleston for the past week, bookended by a couple of days in Charlotte. I had no internet and only basic cable during my holiday, so I'm a bit behind in blog world, emails, stupid box watching, and other lazy-ass pursuits. What I did have was a lot of baby time with my now 7 month-old niece, who is the cutest human being on the planet. I shall prove this later with photographic evidence. That would require my unpacking, because my camera is shoved into my suitcase, which is spring-loaded with even more stuff than when I left, when I had to sit on it in order to close it. Don't ask how I got it closed for the trip back. It involved the bending of laws of physics, and I fear the government tracking me down for these little secrets...but I digress.

Lillian, as I mentioned, is now 7 months old and does much cooler things than when I last saw her at 3 months old. She sits on her own, which I shall take the credit for because she did it for the longest during this past week. She is just starting to attempt crawling, also something she first accomplished due to my superior childcare skills. Yeah, I'm taking credit for that, as well, even though I wasn't in the room when she first did it. She did feel compelled to impress me with an encore when I called her mother a liar, which proves that she did it just to impress me. Have I mentioned the cuteness? Oh, and for you parents out there who are score-keepers in the my-baby-did-that-way-younger sort of way? She was very premature, so really, these feats are even more impressive. She also laughs almost constantly, is an expert at doing "raspberries" with her mouth, and holds her breath as she is dunked under water, which illicits body-shaking laughter from her. My point? She is the cutest and the most clever human being on the planet.

Other vacation highlights:

lots of beach and ocean. I love the ocean, especially when it's not in the northeast where it barely gets above a temperature that makes your heart stop for a second. It was just cool enough to be refreshing, but warm enough to not dread the initial plunge.

girl day. We do this every year..girls get a day, then the boys. I think the unofficial goal is most stereotypical gender-based activity. We had spa and shopping day, followed by the watching of The Family Stone, which of course, we forced the boys to watch with us. Boys went out for lunch, ate about 9,000 chicken wings in all varieties, saw Talladega Nights, and I think drove go-carts or some other boy-related activity. We totally win, due to the manipulation of roping them into a girly activity by renting our movie instead of going to a theatre.

poker. I was the household poker tournament champion, which was held the last night. Not surprisingly, I was the only girl who played. The girls were unimpressed with my victory, because they don't even know the rules and didn't sit and watch for long enough to even see a river card play. But the boys? They fear me.

Shopping related note: I don't wear flip flops, as a rule. That thing that sits between the big and second toe always hurts my tender little feet. I did find a pair that I love, though, and wore nothing else the last few days there (on my feet, people. My family isn't some weird nudist cult). Even more, they're from the most unlikely source: Crocs. Yes, those hideous plastic clog makers.*** I now understand the comfort factor for those fashion victims who insist on wearing those things..something I never would have found out because I refuse to put anything that ugly on my feet. Here are the very not-ugly and über-comfy flops:



***Note: I am not purposely chiming in on the now infamous blurbdoocery clog debate here...it's just a weird coincidence that the ugly clog people make super cool flops. Though I think it's obvious on which side of the fence I reside.

Unfortunately, I need to go to the grocery store, because I'm not so keen on eating a mayonaise sandwich on moldy bread for dinner, and that's pretty much the only food in the apartment. I'll be back later to share with you the fun of having a mother who is certifiably insane. That's not hyperbole. She's nuts. I think I will sprinkle that story with random pictures of the baby as an artistic study in the vast spectrum that is my gene pool.

Other subjects to come: update on CYB, Roy, and at some point, Man Notes.