Month: November 2005 (Page 3 of 4)

OK, even I, who pushes the boundaries of good taste & public decorum on a regular basis can figure out that placing bets in a dead pool as it relates to the Kansas City homicide rate is a bad idea. For god’s sake, if you’re going to do it? You have to LIVE IN KCMO, people. Maybe even be employed by the city. Maybe the po-lice dept! That would make it almost understandable. These numnuts lived in the sumptuous suburb of Leawood – Kansas – and just like making fun of Iowans, it ain’t quite as funny if you’re not one of us. Does that make it fair? No, but then, there’s that big Life Lesson on How Life Isn’t Fair. It wasn’t until tonight that I realized people were actually paying money ($5) to participate in the pool. Wince, wince. Listen up. I can tell you firsthand when you work in the blood and guts and horror of daily life and see what human beings are capable of doing to one another? You do make jokes. I’ve witnessed rape victims, battered and bruised. Stabbed, left for dead and in intensive care, and yes, back at the victim services center? We crossed lines “in jest” that would horrify an observer. (Note: never did we joke around an observer! Smart monkeys!) You cross those lines of good taste and political correctedness, because there’s nothing left some days, and it’s a way of coping. Because you know you’re all IN the same boat, fighting & trying to make it better, and some days? You just have to get it out in a crass, stupid way. Can’t say I quite see how that template fits over these government employees in Kansas. Ooo! Somebody broke a building code! Curses! The stress! Margaret, let’s start a betting pool on KCMO’s homicide rate!

All of that sniping aside, I think it would have been a smarter punishment to borrow a page from one of my husband’s 5th grade teaching techniques. Require each death-pool participant write a letter, to each of the 112 families, apologizing for what they did. Take their salaries that were suspended, and put them in a crime victims fund. Having their boss apologize for them takes their personal responsibility away, and shoots it up into the blue-sky-yonder realm of government. And you know nothin’ comes out of government except a lot of spin & tape.

So, we know that’s not going to happen. How ’bout instead of dedicating all this time & energy to lambasting the employees, and Mayor of Leawood, and Demanding Apologies and suspending people right & left, we get some more time, money & energy poured into the poor parts of our city, break into the silence that locks the murderers safe behind sealed lips, get some of the thugs out of the streets and into county. Figure out why people are shooting each other so much. Drugs? Money? Turf lines? What the hell? Make as many jokes as you need to, if it helps you find something to fix it. There’s blood on the streets, and that’s the real pool we’ve got to stop.

Tammy had a post about her betrothed, and how he went to the hospital & had to drink barium. BARIUM! Apparently it tasted like unfancy chalk milkshake, but in my romanticized, Curious-George-influenced mind, barium would be found on the shelf right between “Ambrosia” and “Elixir”. (Which is filed next to “Ether”, apparently Curious George got into that at one point, too, as I have a mousepad which proves it.) My parents got me the Curious George Goes to the Hospital book waaaay back in the day when it was looking like my tonsils & I would need to be parted, and quick. For the less-read set, Mr. George swallowed a piece of a puzzle, and he was a HIT on the children’s ward. I, on the other hand, didn’t see a single other patient when my tonsils came out, and let me tell you, despite the promises of Ice Cream All Day Long, having one’s tonsils taken out is not exactly Fun Times and Party Pants. The surgical staff learned a little lesson that day, though – they didn’t clean me up before they wheeled me out, and I apparently had blood on my face, and all down the sheet. My parents thought I was dead & reacted, you know, how a worried parent might. MUCH OF THE FREAKING OUT. My money says they started mopping up the blood & changing the sheet before wheeling you out after that. Me? I slept through the whole thing. Sort of sums up college, too.

Miss Kristin was the brains & dexterity behind the success in standing Curious George upright, with both puppets on his hands & as you can see, he is King of the Jelly Bellys. Kristin is Queen of the Sweaters, as you can see, she is wearing her finished Te Rosada in a loverly hand-dyed blend of greens & yellows.

I took these pictures while I was on the phone. My title is Queen of the Multi-Tasking!

Karen tagged me for a li’l meme, which are perfect for Sundays! Here we go. I’m going to lay it out there that if you’d like to do this, too, consider yourself tagged, and if not, just kick back & watch some football. I might have even done this one before? But I don’t remember, and I’m up for seeing if I have new answers!

7 Celebrity Crushes

1. Michael Chiklis
2. Viggo Mortenson
3. Vin Diesel
4. Henry Rollins
5. Dave Grohl
6 & 7. Those two brothers on Prison Break, Hottie & HottieMcHottier

7 Things I’m Good At

1. Talking
2. Entertaining
3. Knitting
4. Cooking
5. Puzzles
6. Sleeping
7. Backrubs

7 things I plan to do before I die:

1. Own a station wagon
2. Travel overseas
3. Knit a really complicated sweater
4. Stay married to the awesome JWo
5. Write a book
6. Never settle
7. Keep learning

7 things I say often:

1. What the fuck?
2. Dammit!
3. You gotta admit…
4. Let me ask you this….
5. Fucker (I swear a LOT.)
6. This is Jennifer. (how I answer the phone at work)
7. POLLY, PILLOW!

7 things I cannot do:

1. Move furniture with my husband
2. Make items crafted from small pieces of felt and maintain my sanity
3. Stay organized
4. Keep my mouth shut
5. Enjoy mustard
6. Play an instrument
7. Eat “Thai Hot”

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex:

1. Humor
2. Eyes
3. Forearms
4. Kisses
5. Stability
6. Honesty
7. Flexible

Yeah, JWo, that last one? It’s alll for yoouuuuuuuu…… see number 1!

…if you consider the Mississippi River one of the coasts. (name that movie!)

Standing outside tonight, I was reminded of a time a therapist asked me what I believed in. What :could: I believe in. The answer I gave her was, “The wind.” For me, the wind is symbolic of a force you can’t see, you can’t take a picture of it, you can’t follow it, per se, and it changes the landscape wherever it goes.

I know what it’s like to stand on the edge of a beach, the roar of the water, the horizon and sky disappearing and merging together, and certainly those places make one feel small in relationship to the world around you.

That same feeling is right in my driveway on evenings like this, all the trees around me bare, waving their branches and gyrating against the deepening blue of the night sky. The rushing noise of the wind surrounding me, dry crunchy leaves swirling and leaping while the next gust built force and then poured in around me, as big as a wave. I turned my face to the wind, coming from the south and the west, and saw the first star of the night. I thought about how we humans consider ourselves at the top of the heap, but in that moment I was as inconsequential and small to the wind as one of the oak leaves at my feet.

There’s something beautiful about living near the plains; we know it’s not fancy or glamorous, and the only ships we have are oversized SUVs and semis hauling ass on the interstate. I’ve even seen a tumbleweed or two zip across the road out on the highway. But we got wind, baby, we got biiiig wind. And there are three things that get me wistful, philosophical & filled with the world around me: a landscape blanketed in snow at twilight, the smell of an Iowa corn field in the heat of summer, and big wind through the night sky.

-Shoes
-Black Shoes
-Makeup
-Watches
-Earrings
-Skeins of Yarn
-Knitting Patterns
-Purses
-Gadgets
-Good Friends
-Naps
-Orgasms

Did I shock ya? I was paging through the latest Sephora catalog, and almost fell over myself. (You know how reactionary I get with the physical comedy.) There is a makeup set called “Multiple Orgasm”. Don’t believe me? See it here. Now, I’m all for makeup sets & making oneself attractive & all the fun of being a girl (or drag queen) and playing with makeup. But even me, Miss Jaded & Seen It All, never thought she’d see makeup named as such, and described as giving one The Look of Multiple Orgasms. (They did so in the catalog, not so much on the web page.) Mind you, I’m not rallying the Parents Against Everything On Television, and it made me raise an eyebrow and chuckle at the same time. I think it’s such a funny dichotomy in which we live, where we are bombarded with sexual messages & imagery at every turn, YET, one lonely nipple on the Super Bowl gets everyone’s wardrobe in a bunch and censorship gets another surge. Maybe it’s not you or me in particular getting wound up – it’s more those political chumps. But tell me those same chumps don’t have a stack of porn in their nightstand, or get their kink out by wearing women’s shoes & hosiery. It’s going to take a long time, I guess, to get over our Puritanical roots and fears. That said, it’s my opinion that some of the people in the media’s eye should just walk around naked and be done with it (Paris Hilton, Li’l Kim, Christina Aguilara) – they’d probably look less trashy than they do in their outfits designed (I use that word loosely) to titillate and tease.

I guess it’s my own sensibilities, shaped more by my father’s influence than society – perhaps because I was raised without television, or even Cosmo magazine for that matter. He cautioned me against excessive makeup and perfume (“no one should know unless they are VERY close to you”) and that maintaining a little mystery was more attractive than putting it all out there, so to speak. Maybe that’s a little Puritan, maybe it’s just tasteful by our societal standards. All I know is that there’s a line – in all of us, and in society, the fine balance between repression and expression. (Just as there is between good taste & bad – yet it is all subjective.) We can take some of our discomfort and see it as a reason to examine our own issues, why something would make us uncomfortable, or sometimes, it’s just reason to roll our eyes at how ‘out there’ or blatant something is. My reaction to the Nars makeup was more along the lines of leaving a little mystery. To me, things like “pouting, bee-stung lips” or “warming blush” are sexier descriptors than the clinical, albeit straightforward, “multiple orgasms”. But hey, it sure worked to catch my eye on the page – and then spend time writing a blog about it!

And really, it all boils down to one question: is that the makeup look I want to wear to the office? (and THAT makes me laugh.)

(yeah, and what the hell is up with getting up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday? I absent-mindedly & completely skipped my daily coffee/Diet Coke fix yesterday & had a junkie’s withdrawal-headache wake me up this morning. So you know who’s nappin’ today!)

OK, I have today off. BLESS IT. It was that or I was going to rip a couple people’s heads off and take them bowling. Not necessarily in that order, but have no doubt, heads were gonna roll. My boss actually called me an “ass clown”* yesterday to finally break through my angry swearing banter, and it CHEERED ME UP. How many jobs do you get to say THAT in, I ask you????

(*I kid you not, he said, “ass clown”: that’s a sign of a motherfuckin’ good boss, too. He even said it was a good idea, when I stated I was gonna kick a certain individual’s ass. Said, “It needs to happen.” I know I can’t actually go and do it, but the shared sentiment goes a looooong way.)

So today, I give you a smattering of things that made me laugh this week.

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From one of my favoritest shows on TV right now, “My Name Is Earl”:
“Some people were born to be super pretty, some people were born to be knife throwers.”

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JWo threw out the smartass question, “What rhymes with purple?”
My snappy comeback? “Orange.”

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Did you know I’m the Gadget Queen? I love me the gadgets. LOVE them. I always want something new. So I see a T-Mobile commercial (and we’re T-Mobile customers), and I state, “I NEED a Sidekick.”

JWo, doesn’t even look up: “POLLY’S your sidekick!”

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JWo: “Don’t you have book club tonight?”
Me (exasperated): “NO James, it’s not every week! It’s every 5-6 weeks.”
JWo: “Well. The Evelyn Woods Book Club meets every two days.”

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So, on the calendar for today: this morning, meet with a woman who cleans houses, and determine if she has the fortitude, strength & dedication to take our house on. It is not dissimilar to becoming a Green Beret, in my opinion. I will be shouting at her like a drill sergeant to see if she flinches. Then I get my hair cut, and I’m currently plotting lunch plans right now. I may take a page from Miss Bekah, and have me some adult beverages tonight! It’s that or run around the neighborhood, shrieking like a howler monkey to burn off some steam. Maybe I’ll do both…. Happy Friday, everyone!

You know, those big stick thingies that they swing around a lot in the Kung Fu type movies, Jackie Chan’s used one, makes that excellent WHUH WHUH WHUH whipping sound through the air?

That is what this week has been. I feel like I’m wearing soft slipper shoes & I’m bouncing all around in the trees, whUH WHUH WHUH whacking shit and grabby hands while I travel across the entire landscape. And while I’m doing it without falling down, I’m getting a leeeetle tired of it. For whatever reason, I’m not allowed to smack people in the FACE with my stick thingy, and that’s where I’d get some joy.

Someone toss me the numchuks! Unfortunately, with my hand-eye coordination (or lack thereof), I would end up spiking myself right in the face. Seriously. I can’t even shoot a rubber band without hurting myself. It’s a wonder I don’t just trip & fall down, every single day.

Instead of the blog I was GOING to write today, on Sex and Marketing, you have to put up with some ranting & my desire to swat the entire Kansas Board of Education, along with CBS’ Early Show, for putting Jerry Falwell on the television, at least they had Bill Nye the Science Guy to counter him, but then? then? THEN? They put a third person, a comedienne, to just crack jokes. How about we get the Irish Spring dude in the third window when we interview some folks who survived Auschwitz? That would be funny, too! Hey, you know me, anytime we can throw political correctedness out the window, I’m the first one at the sill.

THWACKETY-THWACK THWACK THWACK! The swatting has commenced.

OK, so they put these new automatic flushers on the toilets at work. I’m not sure what the point is, except I guess to eliminate the chance that someone is behaving like they’re 8, and not flushing after they use the facilities.

But here’s the deal: right before the automatic flush occurs? The thingy makes a sound. It makes a sound not unlike a baby raptor, from Jurassic Park. Which is arguably a little disconcerting, given that one is seated an in a semi-vulnerable state of undress; if for some reason you are using the bathroom as a personal 5-minute escape from stress, it is actually alarming. I seriously expected to turn around and see a green head with a mouth full of fangs coming out of the wall. FABulous, dahling! Good thing my pants are off already, otherwise I might have shat them.

Now, yesterday, I don’t know what the deal was, but the flusher just started Cah-RAWH! flushing. And Cah-RAWH! flushing. And Cah-RAWH! flushing. Any notion I had that this was a way to conserve water was gone. It was not unlike when the waiter tries to take your plate away, but you’re not quite done eating? Hey? hey? hey? Not so fast, Mister! Usually I just stab the waiter with my fork, but this was different. I had no fork, and the baby raptors were squawking, repeatedly. The last bastion of peace & quiet has been eliminated, and I hustled out of there.