Why those with overactive imaginations probably shouldn't read

So I'm reading some dooce.com on this lovely, rainy, glorious day off.  I started reading this site a couple weeks ago and I did what any terrible reader does with books:  I read the most recent entry and then jumped all the way back to the beginning to begin reading it in full, which has been taking up most of my online life because dooce has been blogging for 11 years.  It's been a pretty fantastic journey with Heather B. Armstrong so far and I've just completed reading the birth story for her second child.

Now here's where I have some problems.  When I read and become extremely involved with the characters/people involved; I am right there with them and not just in the sense that I can relate, oh no, it all sticks with me even when I'm not reading.  I read "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and then suddenly had people out to get me and the secrets of the sugar bowl.  Seriously, I wandered around my day-to-day life thinking suspicious thoughts about every stranger I saw and that I would find the missing Quagmire triplet while on my lunch break.

So I just got through a birthing story and I find myself thinking, "Maybe I should put on a bra or a robe before my fiance and his friend get back from the gym?  Hell no!  I'm pregnant and I can do whatever I want because I'm growing a real live person in my uterus!"  It wasn't until I started reading dooce that I even entertained the thought of having babies.  Yet here I am, justifying my lazy indecency because I'm incubating an imaginary human.  That, my friends, is what my brain is capable of...and why I do not read scary stories.

Left? Wrong?

The newest exclamation trend that's permeating my news feed sends me into a bit of a tizzy.  Here, let me demonstrate it in context:

Status update:  Oh, how I love tangerines!

Comment:  I know right?!?!?!?!

Or the variant:

Status update:  What the shit is up with this weather?

Comment: right?!?!

The missing comma in the first example makes it at least a little funny.  "Yeah, I know right [AND left!  Even without making an 'L' with my fingers]!"

These exclamations had to come from the television.  Kids these days and their television and hooloos netflickers.  And although I'm sure its use will fade in time, I still have a bit of a twitch when I hear it.  Of course it doesn't help that someone I knew a while back used to say it in place of an umm, uhh or natural silence in a statement in the most awful valley-girl-like accent I've ever heard.  Seriously, she sounded like a 90's pre-teen:

"So I was walking down the street, riiiiiight?! and saw this guy just standing there riiiiiight?! and this other girl saw him too and we both looked at each other like, 'I know riiiiight?!'"

Ugh.

Giggles

Just listen to the introduction...(or the intro and the whole song if you're into that sort of thing)



Maybe I'm the only one, but I was definitely envisioning a naked Thom Yorke to be on stage after that introduction.

Other song titles that would achieve the same standard on the giggle meter:

And now performing "With Diseased Chickens Down Their Pants"...

And here's Radiohead, playing their new single "White Female"...

Let's give a big welcome to Radiohead, and their debut performance of "Naked Twister in a Tub Full of Jell-o"...

Antique Adventure

One of my favorite ways to unwind is to wander around antique shops/malls and explore. See, you thought that I was kidding when I said I'm the most uncool person I know. I spend my free time *looking* at stuff I won't buy.

10 uncool points for me!

Most of the time I just find a lot of junk: boring salt shakers, irons, floral printed crap; but recently I found something else.

Tessie Talk...coming to eat your soul and haunt your dreams!

"Come play with meeeeeeeeeeeee"

Very true

"...but that's what love is, being able to confide in someone that everything isn't okay, and trusting that they will listen."


Well said, Dooce, well said.

Spring Sprang Sprung Springing Springer?

In Maryland, we get to experience all four seasons.  And although I have never lived anywhere that wasn't this basic climate, I am truly thankful that I get to wear gloves sometimes and skirts other times.  But right now?  Right now I want some springtime.  Don't get me wrong, winter can be cool (mainly that I look incredibly dashing in scarves and pea-coats) but if it's cold, then I want snow.  Apocalyptic, shutting-down-highways snow.  My mother instilled in me this love of snow.  For as long as I can remember, every time it ever snows, we have to contact one another and be excited about it.  It didn't matter that while I was in college, we wouldn't have snow at the same time.  I still would call my mom and squeal, "It's snowing!"  I love-love-love snow.

But because it's still not cold enough to snow, then I want Spring.  I want to open the windows to the apartment and spend hours on the porch smoking cigarettes.  I want freshly grilled asparagus and steak.  I want to smile at the forsythia in our yard and sip wine while reading a fluffy novel.  I want to wear shoes without socks.  And the breezes...oh the breezes.

So Old Man Winter, if you're listening, then you need to either put up or shut up.

Ruining everything: Beauty and the Beast

I have this boy that I'm going to marry someday and one of his favorite things to tell me is how I ruin everything.  This should not, in any way, be held against him.  I do ruin things:  childhood memories, bad associations, words, songs, etc.

For example, let's discuss Beauty and the Beast.  Now for the sake of me (and the fact that I know no other version), we're talking about the 90's Disney cartoon with all of its Angela Lansbury glory.  For now, I'm going to ignore the fact that the story is based completely around a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome.  I just want to focus on the secondary characters:  Mrs. Potts, Lumiere, Cogsworth, cute little Chip.  Why does no one feel especially bad for these people/household objects?!

I have no problem with the Beast learning some humility, but due to their profession, these people had banishment thrust upon them for no fault of their own!  And where is Mr. Potts throughout all this?  I like to think that when the enchantress with the rose showed up, he was out to market and then he came back to the house and there was no one there and he ran off to live a life that didn't involve sleeping next to a teapot and cleaning up Beast poop.  And where did the Beast poop, because I'm pretty sure that during this time, indoor plumbing did not exist, and if a Beast poops anything like a Great Dane, it was monumental?  And what did he eat?  Did they edit out the part where Belle finds the creepy basement room that's full of the bones from the previous trespassers?  Cogsworth giving the grand tour, "Here's the West Wing, you should never go there, and here's the dark hole where Beast has his morning damsel-in-distress carcass and cup of tea."

I realize that by the time Belle comes around, Chip and company have all been living as inanimate objects for ten years, but do they really still harbor no ill will for the ass who put them into this situation in the first place?  If I was one of those servants, when that last rose petal fell, you better believe I'd be the animated axe that chopped off his damn head.

Gene Kelly on the big screen and

Beer. Could life be any finer?

Controlling life's impulses

Some time ago, I saw this video of Jim Carrey talking about little impulses that we all feel and I never felt less alone than I did in that instant.

I will just be sitting, sipping my coffee when out of nowhere, my brain says, "You should just pour that sweet caffeinated goodness over the precious keyboard of your laptop."  As we all know, liquid and electronics are not friends and I s-l-o-w-l-y place the cup down.  My problem is that then some irrational recess of my brain lights up and now it's gone from a simple impulse to an all-out fear that somehow my psyche will short circuit and some ridiculous crazy person will leap forth from my head, take control of my body and reenact Singin' in the Rain with my morning cup o'joe.  Then I sit wary of the mug on the table, scared shitless that I don't have the mental control to take a sip and put it back down like a normal person.

I experience thoughts like this daily:  irrational impulse, play out scenario in my head with full cinematic audio and visuals, fear I might actually follow through, avoid initial trigger like the plague.

Driving down the highway like a normal law-abiding citizen
"I wonder how it would play out if I just took up two lanes instead of one."
"Holy shit!  I would get in a crash and then lose the ability to move my right hand, and I haven't learned how to write with my left hand yet and I can't operate my phone with my left hand yet either, and then I won't be able to call for an ambulance and then I'll just die on I-95 and end up being that crazy woman that went and got herself killed during rush hour and every person sitting in the traffic afterwards would curse me and say how glad they were that I died because I made them sit through 20 minutes of extra traffic!"
Now, staying in far right lane, driving white-knuckled, refusing to even switch lanes despite the grandma in front of me going at a steady 30 MPH on the busiest interstate on the East coast

My days pretty much switch between this and thoughts of psycho killers (kiss-kiss-say) plotting my demise.  I still like to believe that at least Jim Carrey understands me.

Thank the lord for the grammar police

FIRST!!!111!!ONE!

I've started many blogs in my day, but they've all fallen by the wayside.  I've had a vacation blog (about the only vacation I've taken in the last 4 years), a blog full of links (that was mostly a regurgitation of what I found on Neatorama.com that day), a fashion blog (what possessed me, one of the least fashionable people I know, to start that?), and a stuff I want blog (somehow it helped me to not get depressed by all the things I couldn't afford by linking to them).

Reasons I shouldn't have an autobiographical blog:
     I am one of the most uncool people I have ever met in my life.
     I over-use parentheses (if you couldn't tell by the above paragraph/sentence).
     I typically go to bed by 10PM every night, including weekends.
     I like to start projects and never finish them.

Why I'm starting another blog:
     Dooce.com
     I go through my day narrating it in my head.
     I can update my blog through my phone.