Pole Dance

On the topic of skank skirts...

Dear Prudence,

My wedding is 59 days away, and I am concerned about my future mother-in-law's dress. She is a wonderful woman who makes me feel accepted as her son's choice for a wife. But with only two months left before the wedding, she had finally begun her search for a dress. Last Sunday, my mother-in-law held my bridal shower at her house. My mother told me that while she was there, she saw a photo of the dress my mother-in-law picked out. She described it as "young, low-cut, and flowing." I wanted to get to the bottom of this, as my mother-in-law had not even informed me that she had purchased anything. So, after the party, I sent her an e-mail, and she sent me a picture of the dress. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My 51-year-old mother-in-law has picked out a dress with a wispy skirt, a V-neck, and spaghetti straps. It's fit and styled for someone my age—25! And it's robin's egg blue—which doesn't even go with my champagne-colored dress, the bridesmaids' sage green, the chocolate brown tuxes, and my mother's pale pink dress. I can't swallow the fact that she would attempt such a daring wardrobe choice on a day so important to me and her son. This dress has been ordered and is not set to arrive until two weeks before our wedding! I really need advice on how to tell her that I do not feel it is appropriate to wear.

—Frustrated Bride

Dear Frustrated,
The nerve of this 51-year-old woman to decide she's just going to march off and buy a dress that she finds flattering without asking permission of a 25-year-old. Sure, she has welcomed you into her family and thrown a shower for you. But now she has really shown her true colors—robin's egg blue, to be exact—by pulling this spaghetti-strap stunt. This V-neck desecration has to be stopped! You simply must tell her the hard truth. Something along the lines of, "Hey, you old hag, no one wants to see your saggy flesh. Your choice of color is an outrage. And, in case you've forgotten, in 59 days it's going to be my day, my day, my day, my day."

—Prudie

LOL! My 21-year old daughter and I bought the same style dress this week, I at her urging. It is not wispy, it is not robin's egg blue. It is black, short and tight.

I love my kids.

To Ride the Tide

Waves crashing
stir an ocean
of emotion

Silent, But Deadly

When Amy was a baby, we discovered that, if we squeezed her midriff, she would fart. She retains that ability to this day, which likely explains why she won't let anyone touch her midriff.

On a similar note, I love to poke fun at Little Adam, I think because he emotionally toots when I do. He's a decent enough guy, and I am generally nice to everyone. I am, in fact, fairly incapable of playing practical jokes because I feel so bad afterwards.

The last practical joke I played was on Gerry - I poured pixie stix into his wine. I still feel badly, especially since Linda scolded me for doing it.

Before that...well, that would have been in 1999, when I turned the lights out on someone who was trying to find something in a storage closet strewn with boxes and debris. When I flipped the lights on 15 seconds later, it was to discover she had someone in there with her, a woman stricken with polio who was then also stricken with terror at being in a dark, enclosed space with clutter at her feet. I still feel incredible remorse for that one.

And yet I pick on Adam. Go figure.

The winter of my pale ail's ninth year, she was in a sledding accident that left her with a ruptured spleen and internal bleeding. She spent a week in ICU being released into our care with strict instructions that no pressure be applied against her abdomen for six weeks. That meant for six weeks we weren't allowed to squeeze toots out of her.

And, because the seatbelt strapped right across the injured organ, it meant we had to drive like old fogies for six weeks. No fast accelerations, no sudden stops. For six freakin' weeks.

I could tell people were irritated with my slow driving. And while I knew it was necessary, they didn't. And that's when it dawned on me that perhaps their annoying driving habits were equally warranted and I should give them the benefit of the doubt instead of feeling unkindly towards them.

I wonder, then, if I always assume the other person has a reason for their bizarre or irritating behavior, would I be less likely to respond negatively towards them? If I assume they have internal injuries, would I be less likely to poke at them thinking it will do nothing more than cause a small emotional "toot?"

I struggle with this because, quite honestly, it is so much fun to poke at Adam. While I don't really know what makes him tick, I cannot resist messing with his clockworks. I am actually quite ashamed of myself as you can tell by the fact that I am blogging about it when I should be painting my nails.

So what's my point? That I'm going to quit poking at Adam? Not a freakin' chance. I actually have no point - I just wanted everyone to know that Amy farts when you squeeze her midriff :-)

Dead Heat

These snails are mating. Their genitals are in their heads. So, they aren't actually kissing here. They are flat-out fucking. From The Fool, "...courting may take up to six hours, and involves circling, tentacle touching, and lip and genital biting." Sounds strangely familiar...

I think we are voting for a new president this year, yes? Neither Zap nor Gerry can answer that question as I will never, ever trust them on a year-type question again...

The rest of you though, I need you to focus on who I'm going to vote for in November. I don't feel you are taking your responsibilities to proselytize me seriously. Are you an Obama mama or do you like women that cry when they lose? Speak! This is a safe environment in which to do so; I make only one request - that you have an alcoholic beverage in your hand when you do. That's only fair as I'm going to be drinking when I read your responses.

(This reminds me of the best disclaimer I've seen on a blog
Typewriter Machine. I'm with you, Mich.)

Ok, back to l'élection d'un fonctionnaire. I am going online right now to see who is running. It appears my choices are:

For the Elephants, John McCain (he is good-looking in a rugged sort of way, I must admit). For the Asses, Obama and Hillary. I would call her Clinton, make it sound less sexist or perhaps more, turning it back into a good ole' boys club, but then I might confuse her with her ass of a husband.

Now, here's the thing - I don't watch TV, I don't read the newspaper, and I don't surf the net. So I don't have a clue as to what any of these three stand for. I don't know their stance on the war, on abortion, on whether or not teachers/my daughter should get paid more or less. I am virgin soil just waiting for your brains to fuck some sense into me.

I am leaning at the moment, sans intelligent reasoning, towards Obama. I am republican, sure, and this will be the first ever I've crossed the political line. However, I feel my vote would be wasted on McCain if the other 99.9999% of republicans are not voting for a republican candidate.
I have, however, listened to a number of comments and watched a number of Youtube videos. And I've heard from God who says Obama is a MacDaddy.

No offense, God, but I'm leaning towards the MacDaddy and it's solely based on Etherhuffers Synaptic Chasm. His Lincoln's Hat trumps your Holy Word of God, especially since I'm not quite sure what version you are reading from.

The sands in the hourglass are swiftly running out. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Once the HUMINT is in (I read that in a book), I will carefully digest and determine if I should vote my then-enlightened conscience or do what I planned to do all along, which is give my vote to the irish since they have no say but loads of common sense.

Now BOTTOMS UP and pass me a pint of your wisdom forsooth.

The Devil's Eye

Oh, Lord. I'm in such trouble.

I've discovered I can watch TV on my computer.

When I accepted this position, I was asked to say a few words about my work experience before and at Microsoft. I was also asked to share an interesting fact about myself. The most interesting thing I could think of was that I hadn't watched TV in two years with rare exception.

They thought I was special. They thought I had willpower. They didn't know I'm just easily confused by remotes...

The hiatus is over. Last night, I watched House until I couldn't have held my eyes open with his crutch. And it was marvelous. I plan to watch another two hours tonight. And tomorrow and every day this week. I plan to do nothing worthwhile with my evenings for the entire week except watch House kill his patients so he can cure them.

And when I am caught up on two years of watching House, I will move on to CSI, a show about crime and...well, pupa. Life is good.

I wanna girl with a mind like a diamond...

Now those are awesome nails.

My kids don't look at all like me. Oh, sure, they have bits and pieces of me. Becky and Karen have my eyes (green, with an orange circle around them), Karen has my boobs (only a handful), Becky has my hair color, and...hm...Jody and Amy really don't have anything whatsoever that in any way, shape or form resembles me! Double-hm...

None of them, however, have my nails, more's the pity because I have fairly decent nails. Even my hairdresser says so. And how I manage to have them is a mystery.

Nails are the product of good nutrition. One of the worst things you can do for your nails and bones is drink carbonated beverages. I drink diet coke morning, noon and night. I drank 16 cans of diet coke one day last week and that was just what I drank at work.

I've been told that one of the ingredients in carbonated beverages is the same ingredient that eats holes in limestone. First, pish-tosh. Second, it takes thousands of years for phosphorus to eat through limestone to any significant degree. If I live to be one thousand years old, I don't think anyone will be making a fuss over the holes in my bones.

Still, doing a quick check on the Brinell hardness of my fingernails, I suspect that at one thousand years old, I will still have uncommonly hard nails.

I do my own nails every single weekend. It takes two days to paint them - I believe in allowing each coat significant drying time. I paint, I settle down on my favorite bathroom counter and I read. I repeat this process until the color is consistent and the gloss mirror-like. Vanity is time-consuming, what can I say?

The color above is, of course, my favorite. It is not currently what I am wearing. I occassionally think I should vary the color. At the moment, they are sort of coppery to celebrate the seasonal change that is supposed to be occurring but hasn't actually done so. Well, ok, Spring did finally arrive, then Winter took control again, then Spring wrestled control out of Winter's frigid hands, and now they say Summer is supposed to hit on Saturday and last for 7 hours. God, my nails are gonna be soooooo confused if I try to keep up with that.

My nail ritual can be a little boring, so I try to spice it up every once in a while. This week, I thought I would add a little excitement to the whole process by squirting a good steady stream of acetone-based nail polish remover directly into my eye. Since there was no polish in my eye, the acetone went straight to work removing a layer of the cornea.

I always wonder if, in the case of an emergency, one is really capable of recalling specific instructions on how to deal with said emergency in the heat of the moment, and guess what? One does! My head was under the faucet in a fraction of a second. Once the acetone was sufficiently flushed from the outer lid, I managed to pry my eye open enough for water to flush the inner lid. Once the burning had stopped, I decided I should likely read the bottle to see if there was something other than water I should be using.

I'm not entirely certain what the smallest font available in blogger is, but the font size of the writing on that bottle was, I swear, not even .01. It was the smallest frikkin' print I've ever seen. Now, how much sense does it make to put a warning label on a bottle if the print is so tiny that no one can read it, especially not someone whose eye is in the process of melting? Hm????

I would call the person who designed that warning label a moron but, since I'm the one that shot acetone into my eye, I'm pretty sure he would just say, "Right back atcha."

Speaking of moron vs. moron, later in the ER, the doc told me she'd seen three cases of eyes being glued shut the previous week. One woman, who'd glued both eyes shut, claimed she kept prescription eye drops by the side of her bed. On the night preceding her trip to the ER, she'd rolled over in the middle of the night, reached out to grab her eye drops, and grabbed the super glue by mistake. Sure. Whatevs. Who keeps a bottle of super glue on their nightstand???

That's so dumb! Yeah, yeah, I know, right back atcha.

"And now my beauties, something with poison in it."

I love to sleep. I could sleep 12 hours every single night and never get tired of it. :-)

In all my life, there has only been one year where I did not sleep well consistently. And that year is over. I am back to loving bedtime and all the things that go along with it.

It isn't just the night-time ritual I love, though. I truly see sleep as a time of healing. Whether our brains are overworked from too much work, not enough work, hard work, or working hard at something not even related to work, the truth is you cannot run an engine 24x7 without a little maintenance, and sleep allows an overworked engine to cool down slowly and completely. If we are not getting enough sleep (granted, 12 hours may seem excessive to some), our brain will overheat and the pistons will seize.

In fact, I recommend sleep to anyone who is confused or upset. This may seem counterproductive - you have a problem to solve, just how is sleep gonna help you do that? Trust me. When you wake up, your brain will re-engage without all the heat and friction that was blocking you from solving the problem in the first place.

I'll say this, though, to those of you who are thinking I'm bonkers: There is a time for doing a Rip Van Winkle, and there is a time where sleeping for 100 years is masking a deeper issue. If you truly go to sleep thinking that, if you sleep long enough or just refuse to get out of bed, your problem will go away, then you need to get some professional help. Sleep is a chance for our bodies and minds to relax, unwind, rejuvenate. Sleep is not some magical spell that will transport us from a world of problems to a world with none.

That's what pot is for.

I see how you are. Or do I?

Main Entry: cam·ou·flage
Pronunciation: \ˈka-mə-ˌfläzh, -ˌfläj\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from camoufler to disguise
Date: 1917
1: the disguising especially of military equipment or installations with paint, nets, or foliage; also : the disguise so applied2 a: concealment by means of disguise b: behavior or artifice designed to deceive or hide
— cam·ou·flag·ic \ˌka-mə-ˈflä-zhik, -jik\ adjective

Amy showed up at my work yesterday and I nearly failed to spot her in a lobby occupied by her and only her. She is viking - blond hair, blue eyes, skin so white it is nearly translucent. You'd think she would be easy to spot in a color-filled room, especially by her own mother.

She was dressed head-to-toe gangsta, I do not lie. Only the glasses gave her away and they were hard to spot under the stocking cap she wore pulled down to cover every strand of viking blond hair.



On another day, Jody called me from a phone number I didn't recognize and, speaking with an accent, began a most remarkable sales pitch that actually had me nearly buying something until some small inflection, perhaps a chuckle under her breath, gave her away.


You might conclude from these two examples that Vicky is not very smart or perhaps suffers from early onset of dementia. Both might be true, but there is a larger truth here - that humans are adept at camouflaging themselves.

Soldiers, gang members and flat-chested women use camouflage to hide or appear different and thus survive. Mottled fabric, puffy jackets, even pushup bras are all camouflage. Face paint makes tribal warriors look fierce, and Cover Girl makes beautiful eyes. But it isn't just our external shells we try to hide. Humans use far more complex tools to emotionally camouflage themselves. And they devote a lifetime to doing it.

Norton Juster alludes to how easy it is to misperceive in his description of the many characters Milo encounters as he journeys through the Land of Wisdom in The Phantom Tollbooth. Along the way, Milo encounters Faintly Macabre (the Which), Dodecahedron (who has twelve faces, each with a different emotion), and the Whether Man (who could not tell a cirrus cloud from a cumulus cloud). All are something different than what they I.N.I.T.I.A.L.L.Y. appear to be.

Eventually, Milo comes upon a house with four doors. He knocks on the first and the door is answered by a very ordinary-looking man who claims to be the world's shortest giant. A knock on the second door reveals this same ordinary-looking man who claims to be the world's tallest midget. Door three and the same man, purporting to be the world's thinnest fat man, and the final door where Milo is greeted by the fattest thin man, all four people being the very same individual. The implication is that how others perceive us is affected by how we present ourselves to them.

And humans will go to extraordinary lengths to blend. Intelligent people will play dumb so they won't be bothered. Not-so-intelligent people will answer any question with any answer just to look smart. (And drop-dead gorgeous actors hide their bald spots even though we could care less if they have any hair at all on top of their head.)

Hurt people often hide behind sarcasm. Lonely people act like clowns. Shy people hide behind their hand, their hair and often their friends. Seldom is an individual not camouflaged in some tiny way. And the truth is, we don't even know we are doing it. By adulthood, certain techniques have become ingrained - like the chameleon changing colors when light reflects in its cells ...hey! Where'd it go? It was here a minute ago...

So, here in this world where we all share a finite amount of space, you have individuals who are constantly camouflaged and constantly camouflaging to fit in with current surroundings. And you have individuals who think they know who they are looking at and think they need to speak to those hidden agendas.

Abraham Lincoln once said, "I don't like that man. I must get to know him." What wisdom! How are we, scarred and scared individuals, able to correctly identify the so-called

speck

in someone else's eye with a

freakin' huge beam

in our own? And if we don't take the time to get to know that person - learn what they've been through, learn what shaped their thinking, then any wisdom we might offer them is based on incomplete knowledge and is likely just us acting smart, cammo to cover our own stupidity.

I suspect that when we truly know someone well enough to know why they clown around, know where the sarcasm flows from, then we will no longer notice the speck.

Milo and his watchdog companion, Tock, travel through Wisdom mostly by land. There are a couple of exceptions - one when, since time often flies, Tock is able to transport Milo and others aerodynamically. The other, and to my point, is when Milo, Tock and The Humbug utter unsubstantiated statements and thus jump to the Island of Conclusions. The only way back, of course, is to swim through the Sea of Knowledge.

People aren't what they seem, and people don't see clearly. Wouldn't it be amazing if we took the time to gain inside knowledge about the workings of another individual and then used that knowledge to clear up our sight rather than beat them to a bloody pulp? If we don't take the time to clear our vision before gazing intently at another, we will seriously misread a camouflaged individual and take action that will only make them want to apply a second coat of war paint, perpetuating the cycle of animosity. Getting to know them, on the other hand, allows us an opportunity to accept them just the way they are and enables them to see past our flak jacket and olive garb, too. To the parts of us that are wonderfully alike.