Saturday, March 19

Say Again?

It is a perfect sunny day. I am on the bus, resplendent in my new short pixieish haircut and my bright-red anime jacket. I am excited to be outside needing only a jacket. It is a great day. Everyone seems glad to be alive.

A woman gets on the bus with her two tiny, tiny children. They are all three precious beyond imagination. Sunlight glows on their blond hair. The tiny, tiny boy and the tiny, tiny girl look around with wonder and point things out to their mother, jabbering in tiny-tiny-child language. They are all three very excited to be there. I am very excited to have them there. The sun seems to shine brighter around them.

The bus pulls up to the children's museum, and the three of them get ready to leave. The tiny, tiny girl turns to me and smiles shyly, then waves goodbye. I melt into a tiny, tiny puddle and wave back. She keeps waving. I keep waving. The happy, happy sun shines down on the two of us.

Then she turns to her mother and shouts, "Look, mommy! I waved to that man over there!"

....

Then she says it over, and over, and over again, as they get off the bus.

Goddamn kids.

     

Friday, March 18

Elton John Fans from The Other Side

This morning at work, for the first time in probably almost a year, I thought, "Huh, I wonder how my old boss's husband is doing."

Then I got an email saying that he died this morning.

...Poor guy.

On the "strange coincidences" tip, lookit the little black box that can predict the future. (Who first showed me this link? Damn, I've forgotten. Bueller? Bueller?)

The first otherworldly coincidence-vibrations it picked up were on the day a billion people tuned in to watch Princess Di's funeral. Apparently the Great Mysteries of the Universe are celebrity-gossip whores just like the rest of us. Watch for Joan and Melissa Rivers holding a seance in the lab before next year's Oscars.

     

Thursday, March 17

Signs of the Coming Apocalypse

7-11's coffee machines now dispense French Toast flavored cappuccino. If you're feeling especially saucy, I bet you could mix it with the strawberry-banana flavored coffee and the Nutmeg Sugar Sprinkles and the whipped cream and get a Belgian Waffle in a Cup. Then you can drink it while eating one of their Orange Juice Flavored Donuts. People, this is why the French hate us.

Also: Friendster for Cats and Dogs. Guess what they're called.

     

Wednesday, March 16

The Shiny Green Plastic Really Brings Out Your Eyes

The second clarinet job in the Naples (Florida) Philharmonic is open. ASK me how much I want to play Beethoven for cute little retirees in polo shirts and sun visors. Seriously. SO MUCH. Be a lamb and pass Grandma the lemonade.

If it improves my chances I will even invest in a sun visor and a polo shirt and wear them to the audition, though I suspect the audition will be behind a screen and then I will be the only person there who gets to find out how terribly, terribly clever I am.

     

Monday, March 14

Think of the Google Referrals This One Will Get

The Naked Blog kindly provides a heads-up on this article in the Scottish Sunday Times, which proclaims the vast majority of blogs self-absorbed, pointless, terribly written, and skull-suckingly boring. (Is too a word. Yuh huh. Whatever, I'm rubber and you're glue, loser.)

Naked Blogger and his respondents are able to slough this kind of thing off with various well-crafted riffs on "So's your mom," but me, I am fragile, like bunnies and kittens and snowdrop-fairies. So now I'm all overwrought trying to make sure that "unconstrained by the need to be interesting in any way whatsoever" doesn't apply to me.

Unfortunately, last Thursday's link to the Splitcock! guy gave me a case of the Screaming Weirds which only got worse into the weekend, and I ended up spending possibly far more time than I ought to admit reading about the world of extreme body modifications. Maybe you know people who have lizard-bumps implanted into their faces and arms, or forked tongues, or 00-gauge Prince Albert piercings, or voluntarily amputate their own toes and fingers, but my "insatiable curiosity to know everything except that which is worth knowing" is just getting warmed up, yo.

The trouble (w/r/t me being interesting) lies in all of the (potentially interesting and blog-worthy) conversations I'm avoiding with real, actual people for fear of them asking some innocent question like "Do anything fun yesterday?" because, you know, they don't know about the Screaming Weirds. Then I'll end up saying something incriminating like "Did you know that if you perform a partial meatotomy on your penis but leave the glans intact you can turn the whole thing inside out?" and then there will be this awkward silence after which they will suddenly remember somewhere they have to be just then. Run, don't walk!*

And there I am, left without a topic. Alas.

I guess I could always tell you about the vegan peanut butter cookies I baked last night. They're quite good. I didn't even measure the ingredients. That's interesting, right? Thank God, I'm safe for now. Take that, Scottish Sunday Times! Rawr!

(*Edit: I should probably clarify that I'm not weirded by the prospect of having this procedure done as, say, part of an m-to-f transsexual surgery type thing. What I AM weirded out by is PERFORMING THIS SURGERY ON YOURSELF. thank you.)