Halloween recap

cutest trick-or-treater: the toddler ballerina who walked right into my house when I opened the door, pointed at the bowl of candy saying "uh! uh!", and tried her best to refuse to leave even after I put some in the bag her mom was holding. I think she was holding out for the whole bowl. Or maybe she just liked my hallway.

best costume seen in downtown Salem: two dudes dressed up as trees in outfits made of...actual trees. Impressive.

best use of cleavage to confuse door-to-door salesmen: I'm claiming this one for myself. When someone was at the door yesterday at 6 pm, I was convinced it was my first trick-or-treater of the night. Alas, it was the Verizon FIOS guy trying to convince me to buy his product. (I guess the weekly fucking junk mail they send me wasn't invasive enough. Bastards!) Unfortunately for him, I was already in my costume, lowcut as it was, with my fake tattoos accentuating the boobage, and while he was trying his best to explain to me how much money I'd be saving, he couldn't quite keep his eyes on my face. He tried, but he just couldn't. I think it threw him off his sales pitch.

That's all I've got.

xoxo

...is fundamental

I just watched Alvin Poissant being interviewed on the local news about the new book he wrote with Bill Cosby, entitled Come On People. Apparently the book deals with problems in the black community such as absentee fathers, low self-esteem, and the devaluation of education.

I have no opinion on the merits of said book, but I do have one suggestion. If you want to talk about the importance of education, you might just want to put a comma somewhere in that title. Because otherwise? Dude. You're just advocating bukkake.

Happy Halloween!

xoxo

book review time!

I just finished Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman (not to be confused with Chuck Palahniuk, not one of whose books I have ever been able to finish, and oh yeah, I hate Fight Club the movie too, so there). But back to Mr Klosterman. While some of the lines in the book made me laugh out loud, chortle even, I was somewhat disappointed in the book. Part of it may well be that the back cover lead me to believe the book was about one thing when it was actually about something else. And part of it may be that, for a music critic, Mr Klosterman appears to have, well, suspect taste. But people who know the complete lyrics to "Hotel California" shouldn't throw stones, eh?, and it's really not fair to judge someone's writing negatively because you're kind of thunderstruck that they like KISS and admit it in public.

So I'll say this: even though this book is more about Mr Klosterman's complex relationships with various women than it is his road trip to visit the sites of various famous rock star deaths, anyone who keeps a never-unwrapped CD of The Best of Peter, Paul, and Mary next to used copy of Husker Du's Zen Arcade in the hopes that they'll "slowly fuse into a Pixies' B-side collection" probably deserves your book-buying dollar. Especially since you could whip through this book in three hours if you're stuck in an airport or something.

xoxo

rosewater mango martinis & world championships

Yesterday was a lovely day with a little unpleasantness between the bookends of very good stuff.

You know the right side bookend: baseball lurrrrve rewarded. The left side bookend was a party thrown by one of my massage school classmates, a reunion of sorts. A good half of my class showed up. And, as always when I see or speak to a friend from school, I am struck with how very much I miss them all, goddammit. It's kind of funny how much we bonded with each other, unless you realize what our massage school experience was--the same people together in all the same classes for a year and a half, during which we were constantly touching each other.

Now, you don't go to massage school unless you like touching other people. Or, if you do, you don't stay long. A certain tactile predilection is necessary. But there's also somewhat of a necessary predilection for empathy, an awareness of other people's energies, a basic kindness. The vast majority of my classmates have, I guess I'd say, good hearts and they know how to use them. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm malevolent, not Mother Theresa. But there's a bad penny in every change jar.) So, for a group of people who were together a lot for a year and a half, there was very little draaaama and much love. I miss 'em, and that's not just the rosewater mango martinis talking, 'cause I'm all sobered up now.

(In a related tangent, a friend who will remain nameless told me the other day that he was thinking of writing to this woman on JDate but hesitated because she was the manager of a massage clinic, until he remembered, oh, yeah, I know Andrea and she's not a New Age fruit loop who lives on wheat grass juice and asks to balance your chakras. Heh.)

The unpleasantness is that, upon arriving home from the party and preparing to watch the end of the game, my dad said something craptastic to me, solely because he was upset I went out two nights in a row. (You can't fucking make this shit up. Oy.) Usually I'm really good with ignoring shitty remarks that people make because of their own issues--if there's one good thing with living through one's offspring's puberty, it's that it'll teach you that skill--but maybe because I'd come home in such a happy mood or maybe because I had the slight buzz going, I let it bother me. It made watching the Sox win slightly less fun than it should have been.

It was still fun, though.

I only wish I'd bought a sofa, eh?

xoxo

more baseball luv

Maybe even lurrrrvvvve.

Did you see Dice-K get that hit last night? "Way to help yourself out, Dice-K!" I yelled at the TV. I also told Manny Del Carmen that that stuff on his chin looks like nothing so much as pubic hair, asked Mr Ramirez how his oblique's doing for the first time in a couple weeks, told Tim McCarver to shut up about 6,747 times, and when he wouldn't, mocked 2/3 of what he said, and on commercial break, kept seeing some chick running into a car. All in all, it was a satisfying night of baseball.

The hard pear/apple cider we were drinking didn't hurt, either. Mmmm, cider.

When this is all over and done with, it's going to be such a let-down.

xoxo

cake!

I made a Double Chocolate Gooey Butter cake last night--Paula Deen recipe--and can I just say? Best. Cake. Evah.

Of course, nothing made with two sticks of butter, a package of cream cheese, and 2/3 of a box of powdered sugar can be, by definition, bad. Add in chocolate and, you know. (I'll note that the actual recipe calls for a whole box of sugar, but that's too too even for me.) It's chocolate cheesecake on crack. It's diabetes on a plate. It's an extra three miles.

It's good.

xoxo

here's the thing...

Did you ever notice how you start to pick the speech patterns of people you're around all the time? One of the doctors I've worked with a long time always says "here's the thing..." as he's walking up to tell you something job-related, and I find myself frequently wanting to start out blog entries that way. He also often says, in a completely sardonic way, "People are no damn good!" when somebody screws something up or a patient is late or whatever. I find myself saying that a lot too, often to people who have no idea that it's a joke.

When my son (and his friends) were in high school, they had this way of saying "Are you SERious?" to express perfect and complete scorn and disgust. (It was all in how you pronounced the "serious".) I like to say that one too. But unfortunately, I can't do it as well as they did, 16 year-old boys being all about the scorn and disgust as they are.

And, to prove it doesn't go in all one direction, one of my friends, not so long ago, used the phrase "'n shit" in either a blog reply or an e-mail. I laughed really really hard. Because, y'know, that's a sign you've been hanging around me way too much ('n shit).

xoxo