I like to make up my own lyrics sometimes, especially if it’s a song with a catchy tune but I’m not terribly interested in learning the words for my car (or shower) singing. There are songs I work hard to learn, to memorize – some songs are just really easy to hear what they’re saying, and then other songs, the words are harder to hear, or the music is louder than the singer, blah blah blah, basically, I’m getting older and I find myself picking and choosing what I’m going to sacrifice as far as hard drive space in my brain.

So yesterday morning I was hopping around trying to get my husband to recognize a specific song, and I was angry-singing “Standing in the AIRport, with a pocket full of CHEESE.” He looked at me like I had announced we were selling everything and moving to Tibet to wear orange robes and sit on prayer rugs. Obviously I was not even close on those lyrics, so I would need to do it again, WITH FEELING and a little more of the music. I am not easily daunted, so I continued to sing, with more angry metal gods in my voice: STANDin’ in the AIRport! a pocket full of CHEESE!

Oh. Mah. God. Yes, he got it. It’s Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade”. And the lines I was screeching are actually, “Rally round the family, with a pocket full of shells.” Of course my thrashin’ metal hubby knows this. He corrected my version softly.

I stopped my metal-dancing, which is me hopping from foot to foot and holding an imaginary microphone for my angry song: “Hm. So, it’s a violent song, hm?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. Well, I like saying ‘Pocket Full of Cheese’ better. ”

“Pocket full of SHELLS, Jennifer.”

“Yes, well, that’s the way THEY sing it. I’d rather have a pocket full of cheese, myself.”

I would. I like cheese. I like when hip-hop artists talk about getting lots of cheese. I know they don’t mean Gruyere, or Gouda or – gasp – Havarti, the blessed of the blessed cheeses. But it makes me laugh more to think about getting bits of Vermont Aged Sharp Cheddar instead of Benjamins, or Kasseri cheese instead of rifle shells. Velveeta shells & cheese, now THAT would be something in your pocket. A dreadful mess, yes, but what a nice non-violent message it would send the youth of today. Rally ’round the calcium!!

With a pocket full of cheese.

In determining my dwarf name was “Fussy”, we also agreed Hubby could give “Grumpy” a run for his money. Never one to shy away from a thesaurus, I would offer up alternatives, including “Testy”, “Surly”, “Crotchety”, and my favorite by a gnome nose, “Peevish”.

I love my shower radio. I was even talking about it at Knit Night a month or so ago, and Abbey said, “Oh my gosh! I always looked at those and wondered, ‘Who buys those?’!”

Well, that would be me. I’m not ashamed. I like it. The first time I took a shower with it, Green Day was playing (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”) and I started singing along, and immediately, the dog started burfing. BURF! Hey, she’s gotten used to it now. She just wants to make sure we are always ready to move to a higher alert level.

In any event, I enjoy my $20 gadget, it has a clock (so I can see how late I am), and even a mirror (so I can NOT look at myself, mmmmmk, I’m confident but not that narcissistic). It has a three-suction-cup thingy that slides into a slot on the back, if you want it to stick to the wall – AND/OR it has a shoelace-sort of hanger to sling over the shower head. I excel at overkill in some areas of my life, and Shower Radio Safety is one of those areas. The tile on the walls are small tiles, and the positioning of the suction cups allows for only TWO suction cups to work. Plus, I don’t have a lot of faith in those things. So I use the two suction cups, AND the rope thingy over the shower head. And the rope thingy is secured by one of those gizmos nobody even bother to name, the thing you push in so the holes are open, and then you thread the laces through, and let go, and then it springs back and through tension, holds the laces in place. Commonly seen on parka hoods and sleeping bags. Mmmmkay? Got the visual?

So I’m getting in to shower one morning, and turn my radio on. In adjusting the volume, I accidentally bump the tuner. ARGH. I can’t deal when a radio station is not coming in perfectly. The scratchy and the feedback – sends me to the moon. So as I try to mess with the tuner, WHUPS, the suction cups come off. I told you! You can’t trust them! So I’m grabbing behind the shower radio (keep in mind the water is on, adding Slippery and Vision Reduction to the drama!) and I accidentally press that damned gizmo that holds the rope laces in place. Now the radio is falling, because Gravity takes over. (GRAVITY: IT’S THE LAW.) And I (not realizing how loud I’m being) unintentionally start sing-song-shouting, “OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH!” And my husband is cracking up on the other side of the wall because I sound EXACTLY LIKE M.C. HAMMER.

Stop!

Shower Time!

You just try and tell me you can’t hear that catchy music in your head now. :)

Then James started banging on the wall because I was singing, and it was just like the Good Old Days at Widow Creek with the Neighbor From Hell, and all I could do was laugh and laugh and laugh at the thought of JUST how horrible her life would have been if I’d discovered the shower radio a few years sooner. Oh, yes. I would have had my own drum section covered by her banging, eeeeevery morning. (According to her, I did my laundry at 5 in the morning. Helllo, have you met me? I don’t get up that early unless (altogether now!) it’s the DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING OR THE DAY AFER CHRISTMAS. I will try to put together a few blog recaps about those joyous days, because now, free of apartment living and a next-door-neighbor who drove every resident crazy, they are funny stories. Not while I lived them, and believe you me, I didn’t just take her allegations and banging and roll over and turn the other cheek. It’s as I said last night to my husband about the cable company trying to overbill us, and it applied to Harriet the Horrible as well, “You just don’t fuck with me.” Can’t Touch This!

STOP! Shower time.

Hubby & I decided that my dwarf name would be “Fussy”.

I’m OK with that.

…..or a Double Agent, or a Triple-Secret Black Ops Agent.

Two out of five nights a week, I exit the little concrete structure that connects all the parking garage levels – and I have NO IDEA where my car is. I stop. I mutter. Never mind that in most instances, a mere 4 hours earlier, I had returned from Lunch, parked the vehicle in question, and no, I do not have a Do-It-Yourself-Lobotomy Kit at my desk. So I veer in one direction, ambling along, until I round the corner and see, no, my car is not there, therefore, logic dictates it is in the OTHER direction. Oh ho, yes, there it is. Shuffle, shuffle.

And by that point, the Bad Guys would have caught up with me, riddled my body with bullets, and stolen all of the Crucial Documents and Computer Files.

Agent Sidney Bristow ALWAYS knows where her ride is.

HAH! you thought this would be about work! But it’s not! Hah! It’s just a shout of joy and praise for the “Final Straw” album by Snow Patrol. I LOVE THEM. They are like an Irish Coldplay mixed with a smidge of Cranberries and a dash of bitters. Sounds like a mighty tasty beverage for your ears, doesn’t it?

Sometimes I think advertising copywriting has to be the funniest job in the universe. I thought about doing it, but I’m too sensitive to criticism on things that I make/do/create, I’d get fired for crying on the job, probably. So, hey, why not have a blog on the internet where trolls could ridicule me? (paroxysms of laughter. hoping the trolls have to look that word up & then forget where they were and go live under somebody else’s bridge.) Anyhoo, that was the first thing I heard on the radio when I got back to my desk after lunch and I thought, “Hm. Beef really doesn’t remind ME of the Good Old Days, but I’ll file that under “Curious” and meanwhile it kinda makes me laugh.”

The Lovely Miss K and I went to Westport CoffeeHouse at lunch today, to eat paninis and drink beverages & work on our sock knitting. It was only 211 degrees in there, so my blood did not actually boil, but my cafe latte stayed hot a lot longer than say, a place with the heat set at 85 degrees. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not like the heat so much. My office is often referred to as the “meat locker”. I justify the cooler temperatures by saying I would fall asleep if it were warmer. That said, I would have been in a coma if we’d stayed at WCH any longer. What cracked me up, prior to going there, is that I did some research online to ascertain that they did, in fact, serve lunch-type food. Not that I’m opposed to eating cheesecake and drinking coffee for lunch, but that makes for a bad scene around 3:00 in the afternoon, and if you’ve read any of my Shopping-at-Costco-Hungry posts, you have an inkling of what sort of behomoth fat crazy wonker lady I turn into with the blood sugar crash. So yay! They serve cold sammiches AND paninis. They even state on their website, the cold sammiches are served on “Baggett”.

I messaged Kristin: “I am still deciding if we can go there, they don’t know how to spell ‘baguette’. And they have pronunciation guides for ‘panini’ and ‘focacia’, which they did spell correctly.”

Oh yes, I did. I am that much of a snob. And I justify my snobbiness because I LOOK EVERYTHING UP. See, I’m not saying I’m one of those people who automatically knows how to spell everything? I do know how to spell a LOT of things, mainly because I went to the state competition in 8th grade and it turned into something that was a little more important to my father than to me, so I went out on “leucite”, but still, I made it really far, and my dad was so disappointed he didn’t speak to me the whole 7 hour ride home, but I don’t think that scarred me, do you? (I’ve forgiven him. Don’t you hold a grudge now. They’ll eat you UP!)

Anyway, if I’m not sure about a word, spelling or definition, I ALWAYS double-check. Dictionary.com and M-W.com are my friends. And I know I have typos here and there, but I proofread like a freakazoid and try my darndest to catch ’em. And I think, much like my earlier post this week, if you’re going to spend money and time promoting yourself, your business, have information on a website, or have it ENGRAVED INTO PLASTIC, then you damn well better be sure you’re spelling everything correctly, not to mention you haven’t thrown some extra apostrophes in for good measure. ACK! Don’t get me started on apostrophes. People are afraid of the apostrophe. They think if an “s” is on a word, then let’s be safe and put an apostrophe in there. Oooooooooh, drives me nuts. I used to correct my high school teachers’ spelling and punctuation all the time. ALL THE TIME. It did not endear me to them. (shocking!)

So while we were there, a man came in and was trying to figure out what to order. Apparently a coffeehouse virgin, he was. He had no clue! So the barista CORRECTED HIS PRONUNCIATION of something and Kristin and I exchanged looks. As in, WHOA, they ARE crazy about this here! Then the man eventually sat near us and this must have been his first day in the Big City, as evidenced by his inability to drink his beverage without copious amounts of SLURPING. It was borderline insane. Like he’s got to be belching by now from all the air intake. Which is probably Russian for “Good Coffee”, where he’s from, but still. I freak out if I slurp the bottom of a glass with my straw, I can almost see my parents’ glares in my memory-eye. (note proper apostrophe usage!) (My dad would burp after dinner and say, “That’s Russian for ‘Good meal’!”)

Anyway, all this bally-hoo about pronunciation reminded me of a coffee house I used to frequent in Minneapolis – they served ice cream and pastries, and had the the snottiest staff EVER. For, if you ever pronounced anything incorrectly, they would arch their eyebrows at you and correct you. You, the customer. My ex-boyfriend took great delight in this, and was always ordering (sounds like) “One Croyzunt, to go”. And they would nearly fall down in SnobPain, eyebrow twitching, as they haughtily replied, “It’s pronounced KrwaSAN“.

It strikes me, as far as the written word, I’m just as bad as them and probably twice as haughty. The difference is I’m more entertained by it all.

I actually was chatting online with a friend of mine yesterday – I’m becoming Old School anymore – I’d rather write an email than IM! Anyway, she used to work with me & has since moved to another city – and we were discussing some of the details of the ‘State of the Union’, and I was indulging in some self-pity, lamenting my lot in life, in my Old Age, as I continue searching for my Purpose, and as I work towards my dreams and such, and if you know me for more than five minutes, you’ll know I LOVE ME THE METAPHORS. Love ’em. Imagery, hyperbole, all that stuff. I love to DESCRIBE.

So I was describing me: “It’s like I’m caught over in some dead tree by the bank and everyone else is canoeing right on through the rapids. ”

To which my friend replied, “Yes, but you are the shelter for a lot of homeless little squirrels…they are grateful for you.”

Me, laughing OUT LOUD: “This must be the “penance” phase of my life then. Squirrel Shelter.”

The funny thing is, it’s sorta true. And, actually, it’s not so bad. I like being there for people and helping them feel better. Keep your eyes peeled, Squirrel Shelter Life Coaching could be coming to a strip mall near you…..

OK, I like to dabble in trifling fantasies sometimes, mostly under the header “If Jen Ruled The World” and one of those governing rule mandates would have to cover driving.

Here’s a few rules that would get implemented under my tyranny, I mean, Benevolent Rule:

1. Turn Signals.

A. If you throw it on WHILE you’re in the middle of changing lanes, it does NOT COUNT. In fact, it is more insulting that you did it as an “afterthought”, rather than putting it on and THEN moving over. Like you’re throwing a bone to the rest of us “riff-raff” and blessing us with a half-baked courtesy. Ticket.

B. If you LEAVE your signal on, extensively, blinkety-blink-blink-blink long after you’ve changed lanes? Ticket.

C. You completely ignore using a signal and instead rely on the element of “surprise” when changing lanes, often indicated by a grabbing of the steering wheel and violently throwing it to the left or right, while punching the gas? Ticket.

2. If your wipers are on, your lights are on. Minnesota made this a rule/law. It’s a good one. Don’t do it? Ticket.

3. Constant tapping of the brakes. Look. Either you need to slow down or you don’t. I remember a crazy illustration when I was young, of Goofy, illustrating how you used the brake: you pretended that you had an egg between your foot and the pedal. I was, apparently, the only person to see this. I will not fine you for this, but I may run you off the road. If you’re so afraid behind the wheel, take the f’ing bus. You’ve been warned.

4. See a “Lane Closed Ahead” sign? This does not translate, in ANY LANGUAGE, to “Speed Like The Devil Until Lane Ends And Then, Merge Like A Bastard In Front Of Everyone Else Who Payed Attention.” Do it again? Ticket.

5. Someone lets you in, because you put your blinker on and you were doing it at the right time? Give ’em a wave. It’s fifty cents in the karma bank, and thirty dollar debits if you don’t.

This is, of course, only a start. I’m sure we’ll have a future blog post covering more driving transgressions (and yes, that’s the ROYAL WE). However, lest you fear for your personal independence and freedoms under my rule, think again. In Land of Jen? There are NO MOTORCYCLE COPS.

oh. But. One last thing. I’m always in front. Always.

As spotted at a Mexican restaurant in Overland Park…..

I think if you’re going to spend good money on a custom sign, then you should a) know how to spell or b) employ a company that knows how to spell. I don’t really see a lot of alternatives to this, and while we all make typos? This should not be an arena in which typos are made. I’m stubbornly digging in my heels on this one, folks.