You swine!

What's old is new again:

And then there's Maude...

I'm a little late getting to this, but Bea Arthur died this past week. I always liked the way she delivered a sharp line with her withering glare. The line always came after a long pause that had you laughing before she even got to the jab. I looked for a clip of her doing one of those trademark cuts, but I couldn't find one.

I also looked for the Maude theme song, which I like. There's a band here in Austin called The Greatest American Heroes, and their schtick is that they perform all TV theme songs. It's way fun to see them and sing along, and they always start their show with the Maude theme song. It's got groove, baby! But I couldn't find that either (except a version where Rosie O'Donnell is singing it to Bea, and I just can't abide by Rosie O'Donnell).

So, instead, I'll include this tribute to Bea that someone put together. God'll getcha for that.

Spin - like Web MD but different

I happened to see the cover of Spin magazine this morning - I guess it's the most recent issue. It has No Doubt on it. Anyway, I glanced at the blurbs enticing you to read the stories inside. Gwen Stefani is going to perform again with No Doubt. "I felt like I was cheating on them!" she exclaimed, according to the cover.

Then I looked at the other blurbs. It promised health tips from rock stars. Hmmm - seems like an odd resource for health advice, but I'll bite. So, I look at the quote from some guy from some band I've never heard of: "I've stopped smoking crack!"

Um.

Isn't that kind of like saying, "I've stopped pointing a loaded pistol at my head and pulling the trigger!" and claiming that's a health tip?

This is why you come here.

So, I've been working a cold, or possibly allergy, since Saturday. Sore throat for a couple of days, followed by several days of congestion headache and constant nose-blowing. Good times.

Last night, I decided to use some nose spray to help open up the old sinus passages before I went to bed - try to keep down the possibility of any snoring since J is a light sleeper and the slightest noise in the night is met with, "It's like Armageddon in here!" (Okay, he's never actually said that, but he IS a light sleeper and everything wakes him up.)

I grab the bottle, shove it up one of my breathing holes, as instructed, squeeze the bottle and FWUP!! The entire nozzle decapitated from the bottle and propelled itself up my nostril with such force that it actually stuck! I'm not even joking. Because we're past the first two months of dating, I stepped into the doorway without removing it and said to J, "Look at this! Can you believe this??" He laughed, thank God, instead of turning away and saying, "Gross!" I followed up by asking, "Who does this happen to besides me?" He had no answer.

Since I didn't think to grab a camera, there is no still photography or video of the event, so instead, I'll share this with you today. It'll be stuck in your head all day. You're welcome.

I'll just have a Diet Coke.

So, I'm clawing back to normalcy after an extremely rough work week last week. My company had its annual conference last week, and it involves many, many extra hours, mostly on my feet, with very little sleep. I've decided I'm getting too old for all that.

I'm also much too old to do things like getting shit-faced drunk in front of my co-workers and professional peers, to the point that I'm drunk-crying in a service area beause I can't find my purse, and other professional people who are actually *working* the event I'm at must be assigned to me as a "keeper" because no one is sure I won't end up falling face-first down an escalator in the foyer. I have discovered that other people in my industry are NOT too old for this, despite the fact that they are a good 10-15 years older than I am. There's a word for that: pathetic.

Now, I'll admit that I pretty much don't drink anymore. J doesn't drink and doesn't like it if I do, and it wasn't an important enough activity for me to keep doing it if it bothered him. So, I'm admittedly out of that lifestyle to a great degree. But even before I started dating J, I had come to the conclusion that heavy drinking was probably something I'd do best to avoid, based on how I felt the next day. Yes, there's the obvious: a hangover. I despise feeling sick and losing the entire next day to feeling like shit and knowing I'd done it all to myself. It rarely seemed worth it in the light of day.

But there was also the anxiety. I'd often find myself replaying the night before and wondering how big of an ass I'd made of myself. Had I been annoying? Had I said something embarrasing? Did I just plain look like a stupid drunk? I never, ever came away feeling like, "Wow, I really did myself a favor last night!" So, J notwithstanding, I'd come to the conclusion that large amounts of alcohol really didn't serve me well on the whole.

So, it surprises me that other people go year after year, getting older, growing wiser, but they don't seem to learn that lesson. I'm not talking about a glass of wine with dinner or the occasional extra cocktail or two that leaves a gregarious buzz - I'm talking about can-barely-walk, might-throw-up, slurring, gonna-wanna-die-in-the-morning sauced.

And if you didn't want to give up that lovely experience for life, wouldn't you at least decide at some point that your best bet is to reserve that condition for family and friends, who love you, not people you have to work with, either in-house or customers - people who need to believe in your competence and judgement in order to do business with you? If nothing else, it just doesn't seem like a good professional choice.

But maybe I'm missing something important in the corporate culture. Maybe that's why I haven't climbed "the ladder" any further than I have. Luckily, I'm not really interested in climbing much higher. I'm pretty sure I'd just end up falling off after a few drinks.

Everyone has their limit.

I think my attic has had enough.

I've been filling it up pretty good since we moved in. The new house is smaller than the old one, but the attic has more usable space, so I've been methodically filling it with things that were once stored in spare closets.

It's been a chore. We've had to put down plywood to create a floor, and it's been hot up there. Some of the boxes are quite heavy, and while you can stand up in some places, mostly you're crouching as you move around up there - sometimes with a heavy box in your hands, which is awesome for your back. The a.c. unit and water heater are up there, so there are lines of various kinds running around that you have to be careful not to knock around, and there's insulation that you don't want to get all over yourself. Oh, and we don't have a pull-down staircase, so we've had to get the ladder out every time we want to get up there, which has been frequent.

So, all in all, it's been a pain, but it's been effective. Last night, I was putting the last of the stuff up there, and I guess I should've told that to the attic. "Attic, this is the last of it. We won't be bothering you too often from here on out." I say this because it attacked me.

I got up the ladder and was crouched over the door opening so that as J handed boxes up to me, I could grab them and then put them where I wanted them. I was in the same spot I'd been in many times over the last few weeks with no problems. But then it happened. I raised up, and the roof attacked me. I know what you're thinking - "She banged her head." If only. No, one of the roofing tacks (the terribly sharp and unclean nails used to attach the shingles to your roof) reached out and stabbed itself into my lower back. And when I say it stabbed me, I don't mean that it scratched me - I mean that it punctured a hole into my back. I guess the attic had reached the end of its patience with my intrusion.

I said many bad words...or more accurately, just one bad word over and over with great force. And J looked at my with wide eyes, trying to figure out what exactly had happened. I don't remember if I told him or not, but I do remember saying, "Let's just finish this!" Yes, I went ahead and moved up all the boxes before descending to inspect the damage. Had I been injured and not finished the job, it would've seemed like it was for naught. So, we finished, and then I went down and J did triage.

There was a nice, round puncture - very tender, but not bleeding. J cleaned it with peroxide and put on the old standard: neosporin and a bandaid. I had a tetanus shot a few years ago for something else, so I was good on that score. And by this morning, it was actually looking really good. You can hardly see it among all my freckles, moles, etc. But the attic should know - this ain't over.

One for the ladies.

Okay, ladies. I gotta have a little female reality check here. Or maybe it's just "remind me that all women - or most - are like this so I don't feel like such an idiot."

The general question is this: is anyone else out there plagued with occasional bouts of...let's call it "heightened emotional response" that may even at the time seem a bit out of proportion, but it's just how you feel at the moment and you can't really NOT feel that way, but soon after you begin "emoting" you're thinking, "Oh boy - this reaction/conversation was a mistake, and I wish I could go back and erase it, but I'm in it now, and how do I wrap it up and end up in a completely different place from where I am right now?" Only you can't. And then the next day, you wake up, and you think about how the whole thing started, and you think, "Why did that set me off so much?" And then you take a Midol for your cramps...and it hits you.

Shit.

And does anyone else feel stupid and embarrassed when you realize that your overreaction to something that may have normally caused you a legitimate pang, but wouldn't have led to some giant reaction, is *hormonal* - turning you into a stereotype? And for the millionth time, you have to admit to someone (probably the male you live with) that not only are you sheepish about being a drama queen the day before, but now you have to admit that it's that damn thing that all men like to blame all women's complaints on anyway? Aaaaargh!

I'm not alone in this, right?

I hate that I'm always so slow to realize what is wrong with me. And I hate feeling like a stereotype. And I hate that there's usually a grain of legitimacy to what set me off, but it gets blown out of proportion by my hormonalized reaction, so that it's hard to return to the subject "in the light of day" and address with it the true perspective it would've gotten on any other day of the month, especially if it's something important. And that means that either the subject is dismissed completely - like there wasn't anything legitimate in it at all, it was all just hormonal irrationality - or the subject itself now has the cast of my overreaction, so it's a little tainted. Even though J might be willing to listen with understanding, the subject is now touchy and deep down he wonders if I really did mean/feel all the stuff I said, despite what I'm saying later.

Here's a fictional example: J is watching TV and someone eats an olive on-screen and he says in passing, "I love olives. But you hate them, don't you?" There's a slight disappointment that I don't make anything with olives, and instead of saying, "You can keep some in the fridge if you want," I say, "If you wanted me to buy olives last time we were at the store, why didn't you just say so? You don't have to act like I'm keeping you from something you love! You always act like I'm holding you back from what you really want!!" And things go from there, with lots of "always" and "never" being tossed around, and half-way in, I'm realizing, "I really don't feel that way, and no, I'm not making anything with olives, because then I couldn't eat it, but this is SO not the big deal I've just made it into, and how the frig do I get out of this?"

And from then on, he's afraid to mention olives, and I don't know how to reassure that I really don't care about it that much - it was just the hormones making it huge. No, I don't like olives. That's true. And I don't want to have to put them in stuff I'm going to eat, too, because it would ruin the taste for me. But olives are now, suddenly, a sore point, when they so shouldn't be.

Now, that's not exactly a fair representation, because the subject is probably something more legitimate than olives, but the scenario is the same.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Reassure me, ladies, that others of you suffer this same affliction and you know what I'm talking about. It's not that I think there's some solution, but I can feel a little less sheepish if I know I'm part of a community on this!!

American Idol, not America's Next Top Broadway Performer

I don't know how many of my readers watch American Idol, but J got me back into it a couple of seasons ago, and we've been pretty religious about watching the last two seasons. It's fun to have contestants to root for and those you hope will be eliminated each week (you know it's true), but the downside is when the person you think should win - hands down - is not the person the media campaigns for.

This season, that's my situation. I love Danny Gokey. J is right there with me, too - we both think he should be the winner, and it shouldn't even be in question. Of all the singers on there this season, we feel like he's the one who is most marketable as radio-play singer. If a record company gave him a contract today, I really believe he could have a career. He might not be as huge as Carrie Underwood or Kelly Clarkson, because he's not country or straight pop - he's got more of an R&B kinda thing goin on. But he's solid, and he's really personable, and he really behaves like a pro, and he's got a great story and a good look. That guy should be doing this for a living.



But the media wants Adam. Adam Lambert. Blech. Adam is a talented singer and he's got stage presence and he'd also be a pro. But what Adam should be doing is STAGE work. Adam should be on Broadway - he should be in Rent or Mama Mia or something - not on a concert tour. He's not a rocker. He's not even a pop star. His over-processed look does nothing for me - he's like Johnny Rzeznik if Muzak Goth were doing him. And the high notes he hits are like a vocal trick he's learned rather than a full tenor-type sound. And every performance is like Andrew Lloyd Weber put it together. I can't stand him. And it's not because he's bad - if this were a competition for a lead in a Broadway musical, I'd vote for him all the way and cheer. But it's not. It's for a contract as a solo recording artist in a mainstream genre.

And much as the media and the AI judges want us to crown Adam the untouchable king of this year's competition, it just doesn't work for me. I wouldn't buy an album by the guy. I wouldn't go to a concert of his. But I might go to a show if he were in a leading role - after all, in THAT scenario he's actually SUPPOSED to be in costume!



Danny, on the other hand - that guy I can get behind. I just hope that the media isn't able to influence the real vote. They've backed the wrong horse before. If it had been up to the media, it would've been David Archuleta instead of David Cook we saw on a guest appearance the other day. Hopefully, we'll dodge the bullet again this season. Go Danny!!

Honking for hostility

Ya know what gives me a heart attack when I'm driving - even more than the siren I can hear "somewhere" but can't find, and therefore, am unsure if I'm in the path of some speeding emergency vehicle and should move, or if I should stay where I am, because moving would actually put me in the way? Random honking.

I swear, car horns should be rigged where if you're using the horn and it's not actually an emergency, it shocks you.

On at least two occasions recently, I've either been driving or sitting at a light, when someone started jamming on their horn. Not one long, continuous beep, or the quick little beep people do when you've looked away and the light has changed and they're telling you to go. No, these have been repeated honks that indicated some kind of urgency. Only when I look around, I can't determine what's so urgent.

Is there an out-of-control bus bearing down on us, and the driver can't slow down or a bomb will explode the bus and we'd all better hurry up and pull to the side of the road? Has an old lady fallen in the road in front of my car, and I can't see her, and I'm about to drive right over her unless I heed your alert to stop? Is my car on fire?

I'm honestly not sure what it was about. Possibly someone was just saying hello to someone else, in which case, I should be within my legal rights to punch you in the face for scaring me and anyone else who had to listen to your alarming honking and get distracted from what they should've been doing - aka, driving.

If it was someone mad at some other driver for not moving quickly enough after a light turned or trying to change lanes (the nerve!), then the honker needs to switch to decaf.

But for the greater good, I'll just simply request to everyone out there to please be judicious about how you use your car horn. It's not a toy, people.