Steal This Meme

1. Manly Things: I curse like the ill-mannered love child of a sailor and a dockworker (Ed. note: the first time I met an actual dockworker, I convulsed with glee and shrieked, "Dude! Dude! Do you guys ACTUALLY CURSE THAT WAY?!" "Oh, YEAH!", he replied, clearly a man satisfied with his chosen profession). I am a rabid devotee of the stick-shift (and sometimes must restrain myself from making "vroom-vroom" noises when putting DecrepiCar through its paces). I've operated a firearm and a pressure-washer (the latter was more fun, mainly because people flinched a lot less when I was using it). I've got two tattoos, and nary a rose, butterfly or ex-boyfriend's name among them. I was once suspended for shrieking, "YOU MOTHERFUCKER!" at a fellow student in front of my entire fourth-grade gym class (to my credit, he'd hit me in the face with a wooden lacrosse ball, certainly one of the more motherfuckerly activities in which one can engage).

2. Womanly Things: I've cried in front of friends, family, boyfriends, teachers, bosses, stewardesses ("I guess this means you DON'T want your packet of Chex Mix?"), waitresses, babies (J.Q. thinks it's absolutely hilarious when I cry. He also likes football and power tools... there go my hopes of getting a gay son). I bake a kick-ass snickerdoodle. I have a favorite brand of tampon (O.B.) and will expound at length on why this is so (making me no better than those freakishly perky Tampax spokes-orifices on TV ["Let my period stand in the way of my career as a kickboxing, crime-fighting hovercraft pilot? NO WAY!"]).

3. Favorite Books, Circa Sophomore Year of High School: Georges Bataille's "The Story of the Eye", Jim and Debbie Goad's "Answer Me!: The First Three", my own personal copy of the DSM-IV. If only I'd discovered D&D and Ayn Rand, I would've been the most awful, insufferable, greasy-haired little tsunami of hormonal rage the world had ever seen. As is, I still feel like inventing a time machine solely to return to 1997 and kick my own ass.

4. Favorite Weird Sensation of the Moment: itchy/burny/good. Getting tattooed, eating overly-spicy food (Ed. note: has anyone ever tried their local wing joint's "novelty" level of spice? Most places near us have Mild, Medium, Hot and then something intriguing, like "Searing Maelstrom of Agony"), mild sunburn, that moment right after you spit out a big swig of mouthwash. You know... itchy/burny/good. Latest entrant into the I/B/G hall of fame? Too Faced's "Lip Injection" gloss, which I find I'm powerless to stop applying, despite the fact that it makes my lips look oddly raw and pink, like I'm turning into prosciutto.

5. Looking Forward To, In Random Order: ice-skating for the first time in nearly a decade (hope the rink still plays old Beastie Boys albums), going home and nursing my kid (even though he's begun crawling up, grabbing a boob like it's an overstuffed sandwich and forcibly jamming into his sharp little maw), having my eyebrows professionally tortured into shape by the nice Korean ladies at Nail-stravaganza, my husband getting back from his business trip (even though I sometimes feel like reconfiguring his facial features with an impact wrench, my heart grows two sizes when I see him lugging his suitcase down the concourse), lurkers everywhere helping inflate my burgeoning ego by telling me how very amusing and witty and stylistically awesome and possessed of an adorable infant I am... hint, hint.

A Keg, A Well, A Maple Tree, Me

Did you guess "things which are tapped"? Good, because if you had guessed "things which are cold and unyielding", I'd have to insert my size-10 riding boot in your nether aperture, smartass. "Things which are brimming with luscious nectar" will garner you a coquettish giggle and feigned slap... untrue though it may currently be.

I'm tapped... literally and figuratively. My previously Holstein-caliber milk production has suffered greatly under the stress of Marital Mayhem 2006 (I can still shoot a stream across an 8' room, however, a feat which gives me a perverse, John Holmesian satisfaction). J.Q. has had his first taste of supplementary formula (and liked it, the little traitor). While I'm aware there are a hundred things I could do to make my cups once again runneth over... I'm not going to. I'm frankly too tired to scour local health food stores for Sri Lankan Mu-Mu Tea or to spend eight hours a day listening to my pump drone away like a slightly more benign version of one of those "Terminator II" robots (see, I'm not just feeding my kid Satan's brew... I'm doing my part to help prevent SkyNet from annihilating the human race!).

The quality of my milk has gone drastically down as well. I'm now producing the boob equivalent of a decaf skim americano (if I worked at Starbucks, I'd be fired within an hour for being unable to resist calling that one the "Why Fucking Bother?"). I believe this can be explained by the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It's one of the very first things taught to any new computer industry recruit (in addition to the apocryphal Tale of the Stupid User Who Thought Their CD Tray Was a Cupholder).

For the first (but alas, probably not the last) time, a term is equally useful in discussing software or my boobs. My current diet consists primarily of:

- Store-brand "granola" bars which are actually quivering wads of pure glucose syrup; you can almost hear the few pathetic oats entombed in their sticky depths screaming, "HEEEEEEELP MEEEEEE!"

- Diet energy drinks. Back in my day, you used to be able to buy capsules of pure ephedra at your local convenience store. These things were pure jitter in a neon-gelatin shell; they were marketed under names like "Heart Palpitatorzzz" and favored by college kids and long-haul truckers. Nowadays, thanks to newfangled notions like "massive FDA public safety recalls", the closest thing we've got is the energy drink. I've sucked down an alarming number of these cute lil' cans in the past month; alas, none of the "supplements" contained therein (taurine, ginseng, gotu kola, rhinocerous testicle extract) seem to do the trick. This is primarily due to the THIRD staple of my diet...

- Paxil. Aka "paroxetine", aka "Vitamin P". The word "paroxetine" makes me think of parrots for some reason... I like to imagine a busy, Merrie Melodies-type factory line transforming squawking, flapping birds into cheery pink tablets (attention bird-lovers: I am sorry if the previous imagery offended you. I'm sure you harbor real love in your hearts for your incessantly-chirping-and-pooping, scary razor-sharp-beak-having friends). Dubious origin story or not, this fine feathered pharmaceutical has absolutely KNOCKED ME ON MY ASS. Although my anxiety does seem to have abated somewhat, if only because I've been busy lying on the couch, muttering things like, "J.Q.! Are you eating a Cheerio or a rock? It's a rock, isn't it? Uggghh..." *crawls across room, removes rock from infant's mouth* "Pumice? Are you kidding me? You are ON YOUR OWN after this, mister! I am ONLY getting up again for FELDSPAR OR HARDER!"

So, yes. Exhausted. Kinda queasy (I'm not pregnant again. And if I am, the embryo is just going to have to nurture its OWN DAMNED SELF, because I'm too tired). Oh, and (to use a clunky computer metaphor so as not to offend the squeamish, although if you're squeamish, you're probably still busy cleaning vomit out of your keyboard from the earlier milk-squirting reference): when I attempt to "launch" a certain special "program" (C:\JUL\Down_There.exe), even after "twenty minutes" of trying to launch the damned thing, it just DOESN'T OPEN. If you know what I mean.

And yet. Either I am especially foolish or especially resilient... with a can of RhinoCRUSH in hand ("Now with 27% more testicle!") and my fuzzy-headed baby on my hip, I know I'll get through this somehow.

Verse Chorus Verse

I had to run through a heavy fog to catch my train this morning. Like everything else in my life, from pop songs to Cheerios, it made me think about us. I feel like I've been chasing you through the fog. I keep tripping over rocks and crashing into trees, but every so often you come achingly close. Even when I'm bruised, bleeding and covered in dirt, a glimpse of your shirt or a breath of your scent is enough to make me pick myself up and keep running after you. There are a million wrong reasons to keep going, but I believe that if I were driven by them, I would have fallen and stayed down a long time ago. I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I'm starting to see where people would go to war for this, perform acts grand and insane for this, pine away to a splinter in some picturesquely seedy European flophouse for this. I love you.

I come not to bury grief, but to praise it. Well, maybe just a little bit of burying. After all, I come from a proud line of Burying People. I still recall being awakened early one Sunday morning (cruelly roused from my girlish dreams of Trainspotting-era Ewan McGregor dipped in Magic Shell) to assist in digging a tiny grave for my younger sister's recently-expired pet cicada, Sting-Ass.

So let's try this praise shit for a little while. They let's whip out the Hefty bag, shovel and retrofitted cereal box tombstone and get crackin'.

Grief Benefit #1: I Wish I Could Eat Your Sugar-Coated Bacon When You Turn Black

I've always been to one degree or another overweight. While I've never carried enough excess ass-mass to qualify for my own Discovery Channel special, I've also never been particularly happy with my body. As it turns out, grief, like a tapeworm or a smack habit, is a fucked-up yet surprisingly effective panacea for pudginess. I haven't seen fat burn this quickly since that Underwriters Labs video "Why Your Turkey Fryer Will Kill You and Everything You Love". A harrowing anecdote: while at a bloggers' brunch recently, I invented a new dish: bacon topped with brown sugar-glazed walnuts. It looked greasily, intoxicatingly delicious. And yet I DID NOT FINISH IT. To quote Homer Simpson, "I've become everything that I hate!" I'll just have to console myself with my greatly de-maximized gluteus.

Grief Benefit #2: I Feel the Pain of Everyone... Then I Feel Nothing

You don't really realize how many day-to-day things annoy you... until they don't. When your life is consumed by one giant, fucked-up problem, ordinary troubles are instantly deflected, like Astroglide off the back of a particularly kinky duck. Diapers and onesies scattered all over my house, making it look like the set of a really awful sitcom called "Fraternity Baby"? So what? WaWa truck flipped over on the highway, disgorging 30,000 gallons of two-percent? Just more time to rest my head on the steering wheel and let Led Zeppelin soothe my troubles for seven and a half minutes at a stretch. Insane guy on the street ranting about how the Illuminati and community college adjunct professors are conspiring to destroy his liver? Fuck you... me and my liver have bigger problems than that. Which brings us to...

Grief Benefit #3: I Love You More Than I Did the Month Before

And I can see where it would be easy to love you a little bit too much. While actually filling my Ativan prescription would be cheaper ("I'm-so-sorry-you-have-to-go-through-this," mumbled my doctor, "This-might-help-take-the-edge-off"), red 16-ounce party cups have a certain cachet which my local dispensary has yet to match.

I've never been one to self-medicate, believing on some level that if I endured enough pain with enough stoicism, I would someday receive... oh, I don't know... a blue satin ribbon emblazoned with "#1 Bad-Ass"? The people's ovation and fame forever? I've shredded more Tylenol 3 prescriptions than I can count. I gave birth without employing anything stronger than hospital apple juice, my vocalizations of pain limited to a single, "This.. can't... continue." Yes, I always talk that way (and as it turned out, I was, like, a billion centimeters dilated and thus entirely correct).

But this? I need the edge taken off from time to time. And I'm amazed and delighted that something I can buy at the PLCB store actually works. I'd have thought for sure that I'd need to visit a terrifying back alley or a Kokopelli-infested shamanic healing center, but no... right there, next to the local chicken wing emporium, lies temporary solace. And tonic.

I can't keep going. Then you show up... and I can. The pessimist in me would say you weaken me, break my will, drain me of resolve. I don't buy that. If I'm going to continue, I need to believe it's because you replenish me, refill me, refuel me just as I'm sputtering to a halt. When I'm bone-weary, ground down to dust, I need to have faith in the the Cheese Principle: your face still makes me melt rather than crumble. And like anything involving cheese... hey, it can't be all bad.

Milestones: Ten Months

It's been ten months since we brought our little Badtz Maru-lookin' baby home.

While he has not yet netted us a distribution deal with Sanrio, he has greatly reduced his efforts to kill mommy, so I think we'll hang onto him.

1. He got his first haircut this week. As much as it pained me, it was either that or start referring to him by some pseudo-Native American sobriquet like "Drooling Eagle" and dressing him in tie-dyed onesies from the local head shop. He took it like a champ... which was of absolutely NO help, because even at his most sedentary, J.Q. exhibits a level of motion akin to a methamphetamine addict covered in fire ants. The hairdresser, apparently the only woman in the world immune to his shaggy-headed charms, spent the majority of her time yelping, "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! DANGEROUS!", as he frantically attempted to grab her scissors. Eventually, realizing that a $5 tip wasn't worth incurring My First Lawsuit, she traded the scissors for a moustache trimmer and buzzed him. I managed to stop her before he was transformed into world's tiniest Marine ("Ah-ten... HUT! Fall in! I said, FALL IN, MAGGOT! STOP CHEWING ON THAT PEEK-A-BLOCK AND FALL THE FUCK IN NOWWWWW!"), but not before my fuzzy-headed little baby had morphed into a Big Kid. Sob! Although I believe the majority of my grief was due to the loss of his uber-cool punk rock spikes, rather than my ability to correlate his first haircut with the fact that he will eventually grow up, leave home, begin dating a heavily-pierced Womyn's Studies major and only visit to borrow money and remind his parents that we're petit-bourgeois sacks of shit.

2. New foods tried this week: graham crackers (with an emphasis on the "crack"; they were VERY popular), a cinnamon-sugar soft pretzel (inhaled, then attempted to eat my finger because it was coated in cinnamon-sugar), and, last night, a burrito. The latter went over particularly well, with J.Q. crawling onto my lap every two minutes or so to beg for another bite of Mexi-rice. While I know it would be Wrong and Unhealthy and Sure As Shit Not Approved By The AAP to feed him eviscerated Taco Bell innards ALL the time, his behavior when eating actual baby food makes it sorely tempting. Lately, if he gets bored while eating, he'll reach in and grab the mashed carrots directly out of his mouth, or splatter them all over a three-foot radius via raspberry-blowing. By the time I've managed to get a few jars of liquefied deliciousness down him, his high chair looks like what would happen if someone did a remake of "Reservoir Dogs" starring the cast of "Veggie Tales". Which would actually be pretty damned cool, now that I think about it... who WOULDN'T want to see Eddie the Evangelical Eggplant or Percy the Proselytizing Parsnip get mowed down in a hail of gunfire and snappy dialogue? "Do NOT fuck with me, you fuckin' pesticide-coated piece of shit zucchini motherfucker! 'Giving praise to the lord', huh? Where's your lord now? He ain't exactly present and fucking accounted for when you've fucked with me to such a degree that I'm about to bust a cap in your fucking ratatouille-hole, NOW IS HE?"

Oh, boy. I'm going to hell. Straight to hell, do not pass purgatory, do not collect jaunty little halo. I'm going to spend all eternity with chortling demons spitting Gerber products in my face. Except I think that, down there, they've got flavors like "Napalm 'n Rice" and "Sandblasting Compound Delight".

Special Section For Philadelphia-Area Bloggers: I've been thinking about putting together a Philadelphia-centric scavenger hunt. A friend of mine orchestrated one last year and it was ridiculously fun. This one would be geared more towards introverted, geeky types (my team during the last hunt was comprised entirely of, well, dorks, which put us at a slight disadvantage). I was also thinking of charging a nominal entrance fee, to be used as prize money for the winning team. Here are some sample items I came up with:

• Photo: a team member holding a live animal intended for human consumption. [50 points, +10 extra points if animal is NOT a lobster]
• Competition: Strangest Foreign Snack Treat (Prawn-Flavored Pudding, Etc.) [25 points]
• Craft Project: a polygon made entirely of beer coasters [20 points, +25 points for dodecahedron]
• Competition: Most Phallic Piece of Locally-Grown Produce [15 points]
• Item: A t-shirt from any now-defunct Philadelphia radio staion [10 points, +15 points for WDRE because I miss them so]
• Photo: graffiti containing at least one word of three syllables or more ("motherfucker" and "cosksucker", while amusing, do not count) [30 points]
• Photo: a team member eating a cheesesteak while standing on Frank Rizzo's grave [100 points]

If you or anyone you know would be interested, drop me a line at me@thumbscre.ws.