Category: Random

I don’t know where to file these posts.

Sharp as a Marble

Let’s be honest, I’m not the brightest knife in the drawer. I mean, the sharpest bulb in the marquis marquee. I’m not the sharpest bulb in the Marquis de Sade.

I’m not the brightest bulb in the marquee. There it is. Or the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I got an herb-growing kit from one of my students for Christmas. I took it home, opened it up, and planted those seeds that moment. It was only after the little hockey pucks of soil had soaked up the water and the seeds were pressed carefully therein that I realized it was kinda cold for growing things, even inside.

But THEN I had a brilliant idea.

I made a greenhouse out of saran wrap. It worked! Those herbies were growing! Eventually, they were poking up against the saran wrap, so I took it off.

And they all died.

Ever hopeful, I bought my first basil plant of the season at the Farmers’ Market this morning. Call your bookie to place bets on how long it takes me to kill it.

That’ll Work

Excellent evening at C & K‘s house:

  • Shooting hoops with their nearly-four-year-old, who was wearing a button on his shirt that said “Lesbian Mom”.
  • Sitting on the screened porch as the thunderstorm blew in.
  • Eating a hunk of cow, expertly marinated and grilled to bloody perfection by C.
  • Listening to dramatic readings of articles on “The Bachelor” from In Touch Weekly.

Favorite part: I was making up a little Mad Lib using an article about how Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock bonded over their cheating husbands.

Me: Past participle.

K: Flossinged?

No Such Thing as TMI, Part 2

I’m kind of a sweaty monster.

I always have been. When I get hot…which is often, because of the…you know, the extry insulation…because I’m a little bit of a chubster…

Anyhow, when I exercise or get nervous or even just experience a day in Durham between March 1 and December 1, beads of sweat pop out on my upper lip and my forehead develops a sheen and pretty soon I’ve got pit-stains the size of pancakes. Shortly thereafter I’m on the train to Stankonia.

I should say, I used to get pit-stains. And I used to visit Stankonia.

You see, I tried all the different underarm products:

The natural deodorants. What a crock. That shit deodorizes about as well as crossing your fingers and hoping you don't stink.
The ones so effective you could supposedly skip a day. Lies.
The ones that are strong enough for a man but made for a woman. Not for this woman, apparently.
The ones that are actually made for a man. But the cologne smell was so strong, I would find myself hearing Daddy Yankee songs and looking around for the guy following me*.

So about two years ago, I did some research. On the interwebz. Which is magical in its offerings. And I found

Klima. Works like a goddamn dream.

How does it work? Remember how that lady died in Goldfinger?

She asphyxiated from being painted gold.

That was baloney—you can’t die from asphyxiation if you can still get air in through your mouth and/or nose…where air usually goes—but you can block pores by painting the skin, or in my case, spraying a little ethyl alcohol cocktail on it.

The negative: (1) It’s one million dollars a bottle. (2) If you spray it on before your underarms are completely dry, it’ll itch like crazy. And (3) it, like many antiperspirants, is chock-full of aluminum, and I hear that when they autopsy Alzheimer’s patients’ brains, they’re just lousy with the stuff.

So basically I’m spraying Alzheimer’s directly into my armpits.

But, hey, no pit-stains! No stank!

*Just so we’re clear, I’m pro-Latino dudes. I nearly married one. But many of them really like their Old Spice**.

**Just so we’re clear, I’m also pro-Old Spice. I like a man who smells good. Just not bathed in it so that the inside of my nostrils feel all burny.

New Theme! New Theme!

What do you think? It’s shmancy, no? The only thing is I don’t know how to change that box that says “About Me: Go to WordPress admin page -> Technical Speech Settings to change this text.”

I went to the admin page, and I found Technical Speech Settings, but my computer hacking skillz are limited to clicking buttons that say “Change This Text”. Alas, no button.

Bobby! Baaaaaahhhhhhhbby! Heeeeeelllllllllp me!

Varna Chameleon

We create these caste systems in our heads, I think. At least I do.

I went to elementary school in a district with K-8s only, no middle schools or junior highs. At ninth grade, hundreds of kids from the eight schools spread throughout the county would funnel into Watauga High School in Boone.

The hierarchy of elementary schools was thus (based entirely on my perceptions and opinions):

  1. Hardin Park. It was right there in the middle of Boone. Full of Appalachian State faculty’s kids, townies. They didn’t have to drive ten miles to the mall.
  2. Valle Crucis. They must’ve put something in the water because they raised some OH MY GOD TOTALLY CUTE boys, particularly Antoine (swoon) who played on my brother’s soccer team, the Strikers (fanning self).
  3. Blowing Rock. Rich-people town. The kids who went to Blowing Rock would be getting cars for their sixteenth birthdays, and not an ’83 Subaru GL station wagon that was concave on both sides and cultivating a serious case of rust, and you’ll share that with your siblings, you’re welcome.
  4. Parkway.
  5. Green Valley. Parkway and Green Valley were interchangeable. They were on the other side of the county, and I didn’t know anything about them. But they had to be better than…
  6. Cove Creek. That’s where I went. Ten miles west of Boone in tobacco country. The only reason Cove Creek was above numbers 7 and 8 was because we had a dope-ass gym, left over from the days when our elementary was a high school.
  7. Mabel.
  8. Bethel. Again, Mabel and Bethel were interchangeable. Both considered Total Bumfuck.

So imagine my confusion when my brother went off to WHS and promptly asked Melany Johnson, who had gone to Hardin Park, to the Homecoming dance.

I was like, whoa. Can you—I mean, can you do that?

It didn’t matter that my siblings and I were faculty brats and my mom was a—gasp!—Unitarian Universalist, so we probably had way more in common with Hardin Parkers than with the kids at Cove Creek. It still blew my little mind.

Which was then rendered FUBAR when Melany Johnson said yes.

Let me insert that, looking back, the Cove Creek kids were awesome—except the ones who told us we were going to hell because we weren’t members of Brushy Fork Baptist, they sucked—and I’m still friends with some of them today. I’m just trying to illustrate the way I created this everybody-OK–nearly-everybody-is-better-than-me paradigm.

Well, I still do that. The one I had unconsciously developed about my gym is “I can’t talk to people who are fitter than me”. Which means…everybody. Because everybody’s fitter than me.

But my caste system keeps getting wrecked because people at my gym keep commenting, and emailing, and coming up to me and saying, “I read your blog, and oh my gosh, we have so much in common!”

I love it.

“Guns Don’t Kill People”

In response to Saturday’s shooting in Arizona, I posted the following on Facebook:

The fact of the matter is, it would be damn near impossible to walk into a Safeway and kill six people and wound eleven others *with a knife*. Guns do kill people.

My friend Joe responded with a link to a story from last May about a Chinese man who murdered eight people, including his family and neighbors, with a knife. The circumstances are different, and the story doesn’t indicate how long it took him to commit the eight murders (my guess is much longer than the hail of bullets that took out so many in AZ), but I pushed farther.

Me: All right, Joe. How about 33 like at Virginia Tech?

Friend Suzanne responded: how about box cutting knives that brought down 4 planes and two buildings. killed way more than 33. fact is, people kill people and it doesnt matter what the tool is that they use.

I get her point (and yes, people will commit violent acts regardless of what’s in their arsenals), but I feel like it lacks nuance. First off, does anyone really think it was the box cutters that allowed 19 Islamist extremists to commit the 9/11 atrocities? I said: Box cutters didn’t bring down those planes. A lifetime of indoctrination, years of planning, and the element of surprise did.

Moreover, let’s add up all the victims of gun violence and compare it to all the victims of knife violence and 9/11 put together. I’m guessing the former will tip the balance.

Mostly, I wanted to make this point: I don’t think *nobody* should have guns, but why did this mentally unstable man have access to semi-automatics?

Jessie helped me make my argument—that it does matter what the tool is that they use: guns make it ridiculously easy for insane people to take out a lot of people at once. Eliminating them won’t eliminate people on people violence but it will drastically cut down.

Joe replied: If someone were exercising their right to carry a handgun, that dude would have been stopped sooner. God knows I NEVER leave the house without mine.

And here’s the thing about Joe. He’s a work of human bad-assery. (Seriously, insert “Shaft” soundtrack here.) He has spent his adult life learning to use weapons effectively, for work and for pleasure. He goes spearfishing, for god’s sake. That’s fishing but with a spear.

So I told him: I know, Joe. And believe me, of all the people that carry guns, you’re the guy I want to have one. But you’re, like, special-trained, secret service dude. Most people who pack are about as skillful with a gun as I am with a stove, but at least the only person I’m endangering with my cooking is me.

I really don’t believe in the elimination of guns. I don’t. But I mean, do people in Arizona have to take a driving test before they can get behind the wheel of a car? Why don’t they have to pass some sort of assessment of skills and, more importantly, mental health before they stick a Glock in their pants and go to Safeway?

What do I know though? Seriously, I don’t know. Are gun tests the answer? If not, what is?