just another ink-stained wretch

Summer movies

2008-07-03T17:31:00.001-07:00

Behind me:

Iron Man
Although Gwen Paltrow still, after years of nasal-avoidance training, speaks directly out of her left nostril (her right one is for the emoting), I saw it twice, because I want to have of the sexy time with Robert Downey, Jr.

Indiana Jones and the Full of Bullshit
I. cannot. speak. of. it. I ground my molars to nubs by the start of "Act two." That's right, in quotes.

WALL-E
Lovely to look at,
delightful to hold,
but when I think back on it,
it felt less than bold.

The Love Guru
I caught the trailer for The Love Guru while attending a different film - just the trailer caused me to garrote myself with the straw from my twelve-dollar Big Gulpee.

Sill ahead:

Wanted
An ancient order of assassin weavers. How? How do I get past that? With what combination of over-the-counter meds?

The Dark Knight
Sweet! Summer is just ripe for a light-hearted romp starring a recently-deceased, extremely talented young actor playing a violent sociopath.

The Incredible Hulk
Hahahahaha. Not really.

You know what I'd like to see? Angelina Jolie as The Incredible Hulk, and the subplot involves an ancient, secret order of assassin weavers, led by Paltrow, who kicks Mike Myers' self-indulgent, bewigged ass to the curb, while never saying a word.

It only looks like simple math

2008-07-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

161 [My son has found the Game Show channel]
+
July 1 [Only. Only July 1]
+
me [I work from home]
+
them [The kids go back to school in late August. Late August]
=
Ten [The amount of minutes I sat through the credits of Wall-E so I could be in the dark, where no one was talking at me and yelling out Madagascar! as his final answer.]

Also, I may have been a little weepy.

2008-06-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

Chocolate pedicures

2008-06-27T13:27:00.001-07:00

When did it all become so complicated? One hundred years ago, people of my low class maintained their personal hygiene by having one of their kids pull out their rotten molars for them. Not so long ago, it was all about avoiding being bitten by the fleas that were carrying the plague. Today, it's all shoving toxins into our brows and ripping off the small hairs. Sometimes, the general eyebrow grooming/nail polishing/feet buffing/neck moisturizing/cuticle pushing/hair fashioning/leg shaving, on top the shampooing and conditioning and showering and running in place activities . . . Is this the price we pay for penicillin and TiVo? Gah. It feels like trying to push a large amount of fat free vanilla yogurt back into a tipped container - messy, and tiresome, and futile.

(As you may have guessed, I just readied myself for the annual donning the Bathing Suit of Utter Humiliation. Simply in order to ready my body for the Wedging into the Clinging Garment of Truth, I first had to standing ass over teakettle in the shower, deforesting my wimbles with sharp objects.)

Right now, I am looking forward to losing my sheet as I get older, and sticking a loud hat, one with ostrich feathers, atop a body hairy, wide and unpainted, with gnarled, toenail claws. I am perfecting my mad cackle as we speak.

.

And also? Bacon vodka!

Man Stabs Mom, Assaults Another Woman With Chicken

2008-06-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

Dude.

Dude?

Dude!

more words

2008-06-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

The summer plan to increase the children's vocabulary is going gangbusters!

In the mornings, while I first check work email and let the coffee wake me up, the kids watch back-to-back episodes of Match Game '77. Apparently there is some television-based wrench in the time/space continuum, where Fannie Flagg has become President and Swanson TV dinners are the national food.

What, you ask, are the vocabulary words of week two?

They include the following terms:

groovy,

EST,

bogart,

and

swinging,

as well as the following phrases:

making whoopie,

Smokey on my tail,

and

key party.

I'm going to screen for them "Studio 54," "The Ice Storm" and "Boogie Nights" tomorrow, for extra credit.

Blue Oyster Cult

2008-06-19T13:19:00.001-07:00

The boy who took me to the junior prom loved Blue Oyster Cult.

He took me to the only prom I ever attended wearing a corsage. Or a dress. My general style was the Morp - "prom" spelled backwards, which kids threw for themselves. At the Morp, there was a great ska band, and the theme was "Come as you aren't." I wore leather pants and heels, because I was a men's golf shoes and sweater vest kind of girl, so a) leather pants was funny: Hahah! Me, sexy!? and b) We both know that actually, leather pants was my teenage version of the grown woman in a twee, sexy kitty Halloween costume.

At the prom, I wore a white eyelet gown and a wrist corsage. I kept pushing up the sleeves of my matching jacket while we danced, because I was so used to fighting those long sleeves on my old dude sweaters.

The first few times I heard his favorite song, "Don't Fear the Reaper," after we broke up, I cried, hard. The first few times I heard "Don't Fear the Reaper" after he killed himself, years later, I cried again.

I can't say I've thought about him terribly often in the twenty-some years since, but when I do think of him, I am always sad he didn't get to grow up, to be a father, to develop gray hair and rue it. He missed a lot. He missed everything.

Blue Oyster Cult doesn't play on the radio much these days and it's not on my iPod, so I don't often think of him.

Then yesterday, I came across this:

On July 25, Blue Oyster Cult is playing a free concert on the beach. And if I go, I'll sit on the warm sand, and drink iced coffee and sneak some hot, sweet, buttery fried dough from the plates held by my hard-won children, both of whom will be leaning their backs against me for support and warmth and companionship. And the sea spray will smell like life and my kids' heads will be fragrant against my chin.

And it might be bittersweet, but maybe I'm too old for that now. It's still sad, but it's faded, and maybe, maybe it won't be bittersweet at all.

dim

2008-06-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

To mark the first full day of working from home with children 24/7, I gave myself a black eye in my sleep.

Thirteen hours later, we find the wee scamps home bowling on the wooden floor, with a baseball and four quadrillion plastic cups - the SuperExtraBrittleCrashyLoud kind.

I am about to garrote myself with little more than the laptop cord.

*

Do you ever find yourself working on someone's eulogy? I sometimes, while doing the dishes, work myself up to a fine lather of chest-aching tears, honing those pithy one-liners that will assuredly reduce the assembled to a mix of tears and laughter. Only, the people for whom we are mourning? They are, you know, not actually yet dead.

I like to be prepared.

words

2008-06-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

Not much going on. You know, life stuff. It may be summer, but we know learning never stops! To that end, I've been exposing the kids to new vocabulary. We like to work in real-world multi-sensory learning. To whit:

We live in a town on the cusp of the ocean; it's part of a natural marine preserve. And in this town, sea lions are protected by federal law. They like to dock their bodies to rest under and around the wharf. We sometimes go down to look at them, and listen to them bark, but we don't, ever, approach them. (Note: this detail is like foreshadowing, but not as subtle).

While we were walking on the wharf, my children and I, sniffing the salty air and eating ice cream and generally loving the day, we came across a gaggle of out-of-towners, including a fanny-packing, video-camera wielding cretin as she videotaped her flat-ironed, Zac Efrony teen, encouraging him to scale the protective barrier fencing. She wanted to catch on camera her son as he petted baby seal lions, with Mom sea lion barking madly in distress beside him.

I told the woman that the sea lions, because (obviously she didn't know, right?) they were not to be touched. And I said it nicely, but firmly, because there are different levels of breaking rules: going four miles over the speed limit on the empty highway, and holding the two-day DVD rental for four days are not the same as actively screwing with animals. And she said, as HostileTeen placed his hand on them and stared me full in the face, Oh, he's just standing next to them. He won't touch them.

He is touching them, I said, as he touched them. We can't approach them, I said. And I used my Nice Lady voice and my Nice Lady face. They're wild animals. They're protected, I said.

He won't touch them, she insisted, her voice high like I was just some tight nut, randomly bugging her, her face like a fist. And he looked at me and poked at them.

It wasn't that she was a badstupidhead liar or that he was so goddamn hostile, or even that they were treating wild animals like a piece of public art they could climb all over, or that he could get badly bitten, then sue the town, eventually helping to force even more places to become off-limits and covered with warning signs - none of those things were the worst part.

The worst part was that the mother sea lion was swaying back and forth, barking, lifting up one flipper and then another, obvious distressed that someone was approaching her sleeping, vulnerable babies, touching her babies, and another sea lion was diving into the water and back up on the dock, and down again, circling the scene. The sea lion's mom was so, so terribly upset. The mother sea lion's panic was palpable. And the people? They were laughing at her "antics." They were totally not getting it in the most hideous, nasty, manner.

That's when I introduced my dear, beloved, unsullied children to the term, "Total fucking assholes." Twice.

2008-06-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Paul Newman

2008-06-10T20:21:00.000-07:00

You kick ass.

You have stayed classy, even though you were born more beautiful than most,

and have donated, to date, some $200 million to charities,

and you really, really can act,

and you were #19 on Richard Nixon's enemy list,

and you said this:

“I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”

I wish you well.

More simple wisdom from the evil machines

2008-06-08T20:08:00.001-07:00

The Internet has taught me tonight that when one reaches a grand sixty years of age

a) Some women do indeed look terrific,

and

b) The drugs are are still really, really good.

Lauren Hutton talking crazy guacamole talk.

Can't touch that, either

2008-06-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday and you know what that means: I'm off to K-Mart to buy my daughter Abstinence Capris. Yep, they have the reminder spelled out right there across the ass: "True Love Waits."

Because, you know, nothing reminds a young man (trailing behind and catcalling) that the lady in question is waiting for marriage quite like cheerful neener-neener bubble letters drawing his eye to her backside.

No, they don't have them for boys. Why do you ask?

Birds I Have Known - Two

2008-06-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

One extremely high-strung mockingbird is currently residing mostly on the telephone pole outside my window. He enjoys making car alarm noises, mimicking the barking of dogs and the occasional foghorn (beach town), and flaps wildly in the apparently vain hopes of attracting a mate. He is singing right now as I type this. He is singing at three a.m, when I get up to pee. He is singing at 5 a.m. when the cat steps on my head. He sings at 11 p.m. I do not know how much Red Bull he consumes, but it must be a fierce amount, because I have yet to not hear him for more than two hours in every twenty-four.

Apparently, as a "bachelor bird," he's going to keep trying until mating season is over. It's not making me angry; it is making me anxious. He's not joyous - he's desperate. He is crazed, he is frenetic, and his energy is infecting the air around him. His energy is infecting me.

I really, really need to get that bird laid.

Birds I have known (or, in this case, been) - One

2008-06-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

1984.

I dressed, for one excruciatingly long, warm, foot-smelling, all-enclosing, fifty-pounds of heavy mock bird head wear day, as the character Sam the Eagle - part of a concentrated PR effort to herald the Olympic torch as it came through Boston.

After a mere six hours, I staggered home with a crisp $20 and a mild neck rash.

(What? And leave show business?)

Birds I Have Known - Two

2008-06-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

Apparently, as a "bachelor bird," he's going to keep trying until mating season is over. It's not making me angry; it is making me anxious. He's not joyous - he's desperate. He is crazed, frenetic, and he's infecting the air around him.

I really, really need to get that bird laid.

Gossip pages

2008-05-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

Oh, China. It's Sharon Stone. Please. She had a few good movie roles, and a lot of lousy ones. We don't take her seriously. She is famous for flashing her wibbles, having a husband who had his foot gnawed on by a Komodo dragon, wearing fur, and, uhh. . . No, that's it.

*

Quote of Note: Jossip. I enjoy their weekly sound bite round up. "Enjoy" is the wrong word, since I wince at every one. What's the combination of "painful" and "enjoyment," laugh/wince = Lince? Waaff?

Today's choicey bit?

“A good soufflé and a good blow job is all you need to get a man, I think.”
— Bethenny, Real Housewives of New York City: The Lost Footage

And I think if you equate blow jobs to overblown (see what I did there?) baked custards, you are so not invited to my key party.

See, I think we have the whole man v. woman thing in miniature. Or, okay, maybe Uptight Wealthy Botoxed Republican v. absolutely everyone else. Stereotypical as it totally, utterly may be, I do believe that only someone who willingly allows herself to be deemed a "Real Housewife of New York City" would think that any man, gay, straight or Aiken, has a baked custard dessert and that special WaySuperHappyGrownUpPrivateThing as equally weighted deal clinchers. Get one right and for the other, dear hostess, your guest will be more than happy with generic, individually wrapped, 7-11 fruit pies.

*
Okay, here I am gossiping about people I don't know. That's honestly rude. It's only fair that I tell you something trashy about me, then, right? Hmmm.

How about this? I have a jug of dead dog ashes in my closet.

You?

Not green, but puce

2008-05-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

I gots me The Covets something bad. Writers who are NotMe have nice, fat book deals and everyone Who is NotMe is skinnier and happier than I am, and they all, also, sport one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry and are about to buy any one of the many lovely houses, for sale, where I want to live, and for which I do not have teh monehs.

It's not only that I have slugs coming under the kitchen door at night.

Oh, yes, I really, really do.

But it is partially that.

Google any variation on slugs in my kitchen and you get a slew of hits, most in the UK. This does not make me feel better. Cosmopolitan, yes. Less squigged out, no.

So, tonight, I carefully laid out a thick line of salt to stop them, not to burn them - my own Wiccan clearing by the cat fud.

I don't know the ritual or mineral with which to repel covetousness.

Oh, wait.

Playing Ball

2008-05-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Fifty-something-year-old Fan Man,

You'll think I don't understand, but I do. Oh, I really, really do. I lived in Massachusetts for more than twenty years. Celtics. Patriots. Red Sox. Bruins. You know them and you love them, or people will throw your ass out of the car somewhere between Sharon and Worcester, at 3 a.m., in late February. During an ice storm.

So, when we stopped, my young children and I, at the In-And-Out burger in San Mateo, I understand that our (opposing team) Red Sox hats jarred you. You had, like us, sat in the sun for some four hours. Perhaps you partook of a hearty $9 draft beverage, or two. And maybe the movement of my eight-year-old son, galloping cheerfully to our car, enraged you, not unlike the way movement upsets a bull. Even though your team won.

When you slammed your team's baseball cap against the picture window as if you were thrusting out your middle finger, I started to laugh. Though the way you exposed it at me, angry and full-frontal, was pure primate behavior (as if showing me that you had huge balls), what really caught my eye was your expensive, silk-screened tee shirt. "Jesus," it read, "Is the Way and the Light!"

It may not have occurred to you, but as spectators and not actually active members of our opposing teams, what each team does only needs affect our lives oh, so tangentially. It's called "playing" and it's called a "game" for a reason. And while we witnessed the game, we were not, you and I, actually involved. At all. We ate ice creams and checked email and stood in bathroom lines and maybe slapped a back or two - and that was the extent of it. Really. Feel free to downgrade that adrenaline level at any time.

And afterwards? We're not required, even if we are the most passionate fans ever, to scare small children with our post-game vehemence. It's still okay to say things like "Good game!" and "What a crowd!" and "Wow. Those twelve dollar garlic fries sure sucked, didn't they?"

Besides, everyone knows Baby Jesus totally hates your team.

Barbara

Ode to Adam Sandler

2008-05-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

No.

A Quick Look at Ground-breaking Emo Males as Pop Cultural Icons

2008-05-21T10:52:00.001-07:00

James Dean
I fully believe Jimmy would have flat ironed his hair, and you know he already had the eyeliner and black nail polish in a drawer.

Patrick Swayze.

What?

Swayze is a hybrid - he's a Square-jaw/Wounded. I was too old to think he was hot in "Dirty Dancing," where he played a pre-Emo - an emotionally damaged, Jordan Catalano, if Jordan Catalano was all jazz hands and 15 years of hard drinking made him look at least 39 in full sunlight.

But I got it. In both "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost," he was cast right. He wasn't a great (or very good) actor, but he had a vulnerability that read clearly on screen.

And then he showed that he did have a thing, and that thing was more complicated than a flipped up collar and peg jeans; that thing kicked ass in "Donnie Darko."

Jared Leto
I was way too old to be attracted to Jared Leto when he showed up in "My So-Called Life." And yet, omgsqeee! I was all 14 again. He was so good-looking, and so, so emotionally unavailable. That combination, we know, crosses all cultural divides.

Too bad he's actually an ass.

Johnny Depp
If only he wasn't only two-thirds size.

Who rides in the Emo Float for 2008? Your votes, please.

Oh, come on!

2008-05-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

The best part of going to film school? The professors. My Film 401 guy was an LA-expat - an older, grizzled, experienced producer/director with lots of stories and a full-blown daytime drinking problem. He'd screen classic movies for us and we'd break down the whatevers and eventually the class would devolve into his sipping from his coffee mug and telling stories.

He talked candidly about beauty in Hollywood; his kid was an actor, okay, but not hugely talented. Quite good looking by "regular people" standards, he was planning to have a minor nose job and some other work done because on film, he needed to have a more generic, chiseled look to get to the level he wanted. And his dad talked about it as a necessary step if he wanted to work film rather than stage.

I was older than anyone else I my class; I was in my late twenties, married, working full-time. I had a more refined bullshit detector than they did, simply by virtue of being old. Prof and I had long talks about plot points and God knows what else; he declined to do more than drunkenly skim my term papers. "I'm sure it's fine. You know this," he'd say and put his feet up and start another story about who was closeted in Hollywood and who was doing what drugs, my paper tossed to the side.

I suddenly realized how hard he was working to appear hip the day he screened for us the John Ford movie, "The Searchers." It's considered a classic Western, but when John Wayne discusses how his now-teenaged niece, surely wedded to one of her captors and therefore so sullied she should be killed, the class was outraged. They went nuts. Prof was stunned; it never occurred to him that part was now un-PC and could (and did) violently alientate them from Wayne's character. The world had changed.

He stopped the movie and said as much. "You guys are young," he said. "You missed what an icon John Wayne was." He paused and sipped from his coffee mug.

The class grumbled and shifted, not appeased.

"Although, there is this one thing," he said, smiling slightly, "You know John Wayne's characteristic swagger, that butt-clenched walk?"

"You know where that came from?"

Everyone waited. I waited. I watched his face. He was, by God, going to win them back.

"Just before a scene, he'd stick a tiny pine cone up his ass."

Hair and business

2008-05-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

I have super thin, curly hair. It looks like crap pretty much all the time. In high school, before it changed from thick 'n' wavy to thin, sad 'n' curly, I used to wear a smooshing down hat on my walk to school. I'd remove the hat just as I finished my mile trudge and hit school grounds. Because when you are 15, you care far too much. Flat, post-hippy hair was the goal. Now I just want to not scare myself when I walk past reflective surfaces.

I once had a boss who had Tourette's and refused to acknowledge it. I'm not sure he knew. His one strong, repetitive tic was a shoulder shrug while talking and it took Herculean (Wonder Womanly?) effort on my part to decipher, depending on the conversation, whether he was wound up or he wanted me to know he was genuinely blasé about how I developed the PowerPoint presentation.

He asked me in the job interview, as one of those questions, what weakness I had, and I said something about my hair being out of control. I was 22. He laughed and offered me the job. What the hell, twenty-two-year-old me? That was so flippant and gross. What the hell?

Hair and work just go together. There was the job where the human resources person called me nappy-headed and then explained how her people would one day destroy Israel. She was best drinking buddies with the head of HR, so there was no one, really, to go tell. Also, she had several assault convictions, so I think maybe they already knew that she had Issues.

She also would lock herself in the lunch room and chant "I hate those mother f)ckers" at her salad.

No, please, do not mediate my grievance.

It's hot here. The West Coastians are limp and whining, Oh, it's so hot. We’re so hot. Ye gods, but it is hot! And I try to refrain from going all old man/high-waisted pants on them, You don't know from hot! In Boston, we had humidity! Here you have a nice, dry heat! Oy, you don't know from the dampness! Instead I just slam a hand on my frizzy, frizzy hair and look sympathetic.

I'm in loooooooooove with a girl

2008-05-13T14:07:00.001-07:00

Fluid Pudding

And she writes a little, too.

Putting the "cra(p)" in Crafty

2008-05-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

"Oh," says my son, Friday night, around 9 p.m., "I need slippers for [the school play on] Monday. Old-fashioned ones."

Saturday:
Target's slipper cupboard was bare
Sears, alas, also had none
Mervyn's shoe department simply sneered.
Amazon.com? Why, yes! Huzzah! Please, to enjoy our $35 sheepskin slippers, plus our $20 shipping. I could not do it. I could not.

Aha! I shall (the one who glues together Halloween costumes due to an utter inability to sew with needle and thread) sew slippers! On Sunday! While also on deadline and being feted as the stretch marked, strung out, saggy mother I am.

So, I did.

They are like wee plaid potato bags, the slippers he trotted off with this morning. The whole hook-and-loop thing did not work, nor did holding out a handful of safety pins and wishing him much luck. At midnight, I was stabbing at some bits of raffia left over from my holiday wrapping spree (4% of which may or may not go to school fundraising!) so he could tie them closed to fit 'round his wee ankles.

They won't last twenty earnest multi-purpose media room minutes. You know it. I know it. The parents watching the play know it; they'll set their Blackberrys by the unraveling of the clashing thread.

"One must let one's children starve, metaphorically speaking," says my friend, a writer. She's not a mother. "You must give them less to give your art more."

I call bullshit. It's not that easy.

I don't want to be a "Sunday Writer," someone who dabbles, the rueful mom who always wanted to write That Book. Who signs up for that? Would I have rather been working on my novel?

Yes.

And yet . . .

My kid needed goddamn slippers - ones without a Disney icon on the toe. I tried to go the easy route and buy them. I could have said, "Nope. Sorry, Kid. My need to work on my book trumps your need to feel like your edges are square this week."

I can't do that. Who can?

And yet, while I don't let them starve - sometimes, crappy drive-thru food on the way home from Little League means I can hit the computer as soon as we get home. That thirty minutes of writing time, of "me" time, while they watch "iCarly" and eat transfats, is what saves me from therapy and vodka.

Well, therapy, anyway.

Now it's Monday morning and I'm all Craft Hungover. I can't even think about a glue gun without triggering my gag reflex.

*

Have you seen "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" yet? No? We need to talk.