It’s been a busy couple o’ months ladies and gentlemen.

Um. Ok, 4 o’ months. Sheesh.

The long story short version:

I was *this close* to being a contestant on the pop culture edition of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Passed the written test, aced the little one-on-one interview with a production assistant, and got a postcard in the mail that said I was in the pool. (From what I understand this is a lot further than most people who try out get.) I started cramming for the potential. I had everyone I know quiz me at every given opportunity (which I’m sure was getting on my friends’ nerves, but bless ‘em, they just played right along) and I spent hours reading Wikipedia entries and random lists of pop culture minutiae. After more than a month of this insanity, I saw a listing for the show that said the pop culture edition was airing the next week. Uh, how could they be airing it if they hadn’t even called me yet?

I was crushed.

Watching the actual airing was even more painful. (For the record - I’d have solved every financial issue I’ve got - and a few future ones - with what I’d have won.)

Here’s what I do have to show for it:

Maybe I’ll see if I can pay a bill or two with one of those pencils. Though, honestly, I’m not even sure where those pencils are right now.

Anyway.

Then the holidays snuck up and slapped me around a bit. And then just work.

When I overextend myself - which I tend to do often becuase I’m a people pleaser - sometimes I just get so overwhelmed that I kind of shut down and then I get behind, because I slack. Which just causes more work to pile up. Which starts to turn into the proverbial vicious circle.

And I know you simply don’t care.

Get back to the stories! The controversy! The fun!

Yeah. That’s just what I aim to do, if anyone’s still out there. (Plus, I finally upgraded my WordPress installation tonight… and it makes me happy to have new toys to play with.)

Just for fun, if you haven’t (and I know you haven’t) you should revisit the fag hag vs. fruit fly (or Amy, poor Amy) discussion for the random comments that have floated in over time. I especially love that someone who came upon the entry a full four months after Amy crawled back into whatever troll dwelling she came from felt the need to admonish us with “Both of you GET A LIFE.”

Thank you Hannah for such amazingly profound advice, but I need to ditch a bit of my life actually. I’ve got too much. I notice you seem to be lacking some of your own… want a bit of mine?

If you like, and want more, go listen to Nicholas Megalis. If you live in the Cleveland area, go see a show.

More about what I’ve been up to coming. No, really. In less than 3 months. I swear it.

If you use (or need to use) Microsoft Office for anything you do, try OpenOffice instead. If you’re used to Microsoft Office, there’s very little learning curve (at least in Word vs. Writer), and it’s FREE.

Sorry for the weird non-sequitur-ish plug post. I can’t help it, I’m just terribly impressed with OpenOffice and I feel the need to spread the word. To the whole 4 people who might care, but still.

Taken with one of my birthday presents (that arrived today!), a new digital camera that totally KILLS my old camera in quality and features at a third of the price. My old Kodak EasyShare DX4330 now goes for about $30 on eBay. Mine isn’t even worth that much though, as I think I’ve nearly killed it.

Of course, this new one almost too good. You can see all the little bits of cat food that Lish somehow manages to get everywhere and I’m a little slack about cleaning up.

Enjoy the cat picture now - there aren’t likely to be many more. I’ve had it for about 3 hours and Lish has already learned to hate this camera as much as my old one.

So has David:

Sadly, I am still waiting for the thing that I mentioned in the last post, so I am still dying to tell you about it but won’t. It will either be a really cool story or a sad lament. But you’ll just have to wait and see…

In the meantime, I’m starting to feel human again, finally. My humanity was in question last night. This weekend I ended up going 34 hours without sleep - the longest stretch I’ve ever pulled - and even after getting 10 hours of sleep Sunday morning / afternoon, the effects of sleep deprivation (combined with some junk food binging) had me feeling really funky. It was not a pretty sight. I’m still off kilter a bit - which is probably why I’m still awake at 4 AM - but I’m feeling better.

Long, boring story as short as I can make it: David and I had to go to his sister’s wedding at a location damn close to the coast of Virginia this weekend. We drove down for the wedding over Friday night and drove home Saturday evening. Staying overnight with his family wasn’t really an option, due to work commitments and financial considerations, but it had been made clear to us that our attendance was not optional. So despite the scant 2 weeks notice and encroachment on my birthday weekend (I turned 32 on Thursday!), we did what we could.

The drive was long and tedious - nearly 10 hours there and 11-plus to get home. Since most of our driving was done at night, there wasn’t much to look at, and David tried to nap for a notable portion of the trip (since he’d had to work Friday, he was operating on even less sleep than I was), so it was mainly just me and the 10 mixtape CDs I’d made for the trip. (Though I did giggle a little every time I saw the sign “Speed limit enforced by aircraft.” The phrasing just causes me to imagine low flying military craft circling overhead waiting to “enforce” the speed limit by launching a missile at the next red Mustang that goes racing by.)

There were a few things that really made the whole trip worthy. On the drive from the hotel where his family was staying to the wedding, I spotted a Food Lion (which is a prominent grocery chain in the Southeast), at which point I had an epiphany: I could stock up on Duke’s Mayonnaise at a normal price! (Ok, so as epiphanies go, not the most profound one ever, but you have to try and understand how important my Duke’s stock really is to me - when I order it online I pay $5 a jar.) We stopped on the way back to the reception and grabbed as much Duke’s as we could carry (along with some other assorted items, like a 6 pack of Sun-Drop for Marshall). Happiness temporarily replaced the dread of the drive still to come.

Of course, I had already planned another part of the trip that would make it a real success. The day before we were to leave, it dawned on me that there are Bojangles’¹ locations in Virginia. Though my initial excitement over this realization faded some when I noted that none of those locations was even close to our route, careful study of the list of their locations when compared to my Google maps travel plan led me to conclude that by going around the other side of Washington D.C. as we headed home, we could leave the freeways briefly, destined for a Maryland Bojangles’ location and grab a bunch of sausage biscuits, seasoned fries, and a half dozen Bo-berries. Though it proved to lengthen our trip by nearly an hour (partly because of traffic near D.C., partly because of the sloooooooow service at the Bojangles’), I’m still glad we did it. Our detour enabled me to at least glance at some D.C. landmarks as we drove past, where our original path would have been too far away from the actual city to see anything. And David - who has listened to me extol the virtues of the Bojangles’ sausage biscuit for 5 years now - after finally getting to taste one Saturday evening proclaimed that it was indeed well worth the extension to our drive. I fully agreed, seeing as it had been 4 years since the last time those buttery biscuits had graced my tastebuds. Plus they gave us a sweet potato pie for free since we had been gracious about the long wait for our order, and that was a most delectable freebie. (I don’t remember that being a menu item last time I was there either, but that could just be a faulty memory.)

Oh yeah, the wedding and the reception were nice too. And I do truly like David’s family, so it was nice to spend some time with them. But the mayonnaise and sausage biscuits were the stars for me.

Is that wrong?

 

 

¹ I shall endeavor to explain a little, as I know not all of you reading this will know what I’m yammering on about here. (Those of you who do know though I’ll bet can understand…) Bojangles’ is a fast food Cajun style chicken n’ biscuits restaurant that started in Charlotte, NC and now can be found throughout much of the Southeast U.S., but not in most of the rest of the country. (Stop before you say it! No, Popeye’s is NOT the same thing. Not by a long stretch.) Though there are other menu items worth mentioning, Bojangles’ has perfected the Southern specialty of the sausage biscuit, and delivers it fast food style. No other fast food outlet can even come close (though way back in the day - before Carl’s Jr. took over the chain - Hardee’s was a contender). The things that McDonald’s and Burger King market as such should not ever be referred to as sausage biscuits, as neither component is actually sausage or biscuit. (Though I’m guessing “grayish, gristle filled, formed meat patty sandwiched between layers of frozen-then-reheated flour paste” wouldn’t sell very well, it is a much more accurate description.) And then there’s the Bo-berry… a blueberry biscuit drizzled with icing… yum!

Whenever I’ve been back to North Carolina to visit, my first stop after leaving the rental car place has always been the Bojangles’ just outside the Charlotte Douglas airport, and I’ve always tried to make it the last place I visit before going back into the airport. When my dad returned to the States after living in Germany for 8 years, the first thing he wanted to do was go to Bojangles’. Yes, really. It is *that* good.

Yeah, um, whatever. I’ve been busy. Shut up.

I actually have something I’m dying to write about, but I’m waiting for something before I do. Cryptic? Yes. But you’ll just have to wait and see. I know you’re on the edge of your seat…

So I’ll leave you with some randomness for the time being. This is but a snippet of things that have gone through my mind today. Don’t try to understand, just read.

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Earlier today I heard a song that evoked a memory. I’m quite sure I’m not the only person who relates moments in life with songs. I have lots of musical memories, most of which would seem terribly banal to the rest of the world, I’m sure. (Though the fact that I equate Rage Against the Machine and N.W.A to sex could possibly make for an interesting story. But, another time perhaps.)

Anyway, the song that took me back today was Blurry by Puddle of Mudd. Let’s get this out there first - I loathe that song. It was overplayed, and it’s just plain annoying in my opinion. But whenever I hear it now, it makes me laugh.

One afternoon at some point in 2002, while the song was in the midst of every hour on the hour replay on KROQ, David and I were sitting outside the Glendale Galleria having a smoke. There was a man sitting about 4 tables away from us who was muttering to himself a little when we sat down. (If you’ve never lived in Los Angeles or a large city like it, that might seem strange in itself. Sadly, it’s commonplace there, and you learn to just live with it.) Everything was okay for a minute or two, but suddenly he was overcome with maniacal laughter and then this:

“Fuck the Armenian mafia! I don’t care if they kill me now! Are you listening to me? Come get me you fuckers! Can you take it all away… the pain you gave to me… can you take it all away… can you take it all away…. can you take it all away… the pain you gave to me…”

And so on, ad nauseam. Sometimes I wonder if he survived that little outburst. We didn’t stick around to find out.

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OOOOH! City Dweller’s web site is now open for business! Go shop! (Please, shop. It took a LOT of my time to build this damn site, and I’ve still got gads of work to do. It needs to start bringing in some moolah.)

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I was browsing through free ecard selections online, in order to better bombard a friend’s email with birthday wishes later this week. There are scores of these websites out there, but I try to avoid the ones with pop-up ads and really stupid cards, which means there’s like 5 left. So I was trying to find some new ones, and in my search I came across this title - “Free e-Cards for pornography addicts and the people who love them.”

Who could resist? I mean really. Come on.

The selections are priceless…

“All the things that you’ve been hiding… …have really hurt me. Please get help for your pornography addiction.”

“Your pornography addiction is leaving me lonely… Why am I not enough?”

“Just do it [accompanied by a picture of a sneaker]. Winning your personal battle against pornography is a tough fight. … I’m praying for you, Honey!”

Aside from the fact that it’s clear this site is of the opinion that anyone who’s ever looked at a pornographic picture is a heathen condemned to a special level of hell and in need of an intervention - PRONTO! - these cards are just plain ridiculous. I mean, if you’re dealing with a problem that is actually to the level of an addiction, and you think sending an ecard is the best course of action to nudge the addict into healing…

Oh. So that’s why your significant other needs porn. Gotcha.

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I saw a commercial for Jet Li’s new film, Fearless, during Adult Swim tonight. Rather than just stick with an edited 30 second trailer, they took a different approach.

(shots of text being carved from stone as movie-trailer-voice guy narrates)

THE MATRIX

CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON

KILL BILL

(cut to a short scene of the new movie)

ALL HAVE ONE THING IN COMMON

(cut back to stone background)

FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER YUEN WO-PING

(cut to fight scenes from movie)

NOW THE MAN BEHIND THE DECADE’S BEST ACTION MOVIES HAS SAVED HIS BEST FOR JET LI’S LAST…

I dunno. That just strikes me as an odd choice for marketing. Except for the fanboy market (which, granted, is mostly what you’re aiming at if you’re advertising on Adult Swim), who’s that gonna woo?

Don’t get me wrong - the fight scene choreography in all of the mentioned films is outstanding, and I’m sure some of the success of those had at least something to do with his wizardry. But he also choreographed The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions… and no amount of magical choreography could have saved those trainwrecks. I doubt even the fanboys would argue with me on that one.

Note to movie marketing type people: If you’re pinning all your hopes for box office turnout on the fight scene choreographer, it might be time to find a new job.
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And finally… this evening I stopped to pick up some terribly bad for me, but fabulously easy and cheap, fast food for dinner on my way home. I decided to stop at a KFC for the first time in - literally - years, just because all of a sudden fried chicken sounded good to me. (Hey, I am a Southern gal you know). They were still supposed to be open for a couple more hours (this will be important in a second) and there were no other cars waiting at the drive-thru as I pulled up to order. I was told that they’d be right with me, so I waited. And waited. And waited some more. After some time had passed (Ok, it was probably only like 5 minutes, but I think there’s some sort of temporal shift that happens in a drive-thru - it felt far closer to 4 hours. I had time to read the entire menu about 10 times while I was waiting, and wow, is it boring.) a voice boomed:

“Ok people, that’s it, we are all out of chicken for the night. We ain’t got no more chicken.”

That is just WRONG.

And I am still craving fried chicken, dammit.

Three young girls, around 16 or 17 at the oldest, walked into Diverse Universe tonight. I stopped them at the door, saying “You have to be 18 to come in here because we have adult material.” Before they turned to leave, one of them asked, “How old do you have to be to work here?”

What I wanted to say was, “Regardless of your age, you’re too stupid to work here.”

But I just sighed loudly and said, “18.”

On another note, we’ve moved. I am writing this from my new domicile, the top half of a cute duplex that is quite a bit larger and more comfortable (and on top of that, cheaper!) than our previous hellhole of an apartment on the 6th floor of what felt like a hotel. We have a large balcony/porch in the front, not to mention a small back porch off the kitchen. And it’s a real kitchen! (Our previous place had a little cubbyhole that was meant to be a kitchen of sorts.) It’s closer to both of our places of employment, and we are finally making our cats learn to deal with each other. (We’ve previously kept them separated by a series of tall baby gates and a demilitarized zone, but that isn’t physically possible in the new place, so they will just have to get over it. As I write this, I’m having to pause every few seconds or so to make sure they aren’t killing each other and David and I are both armed with squirt bottles. Thankfully we haven’t had to use them yet, though the temptation to just squirt them for fun almost overcame him last night.) The list of things that are better about this place is long… and though I’m completely exhausted from the move and the aftermath - we still have some final cleaning to go at the old place, plus you know, unpacking - I couldn’t be happier at the moment.

It’s so nice to actually like where you live. Even if our downstairs neighbors have tackied up the front steps with ceramic ducks and wheelbarrows with flowers planted in them. They’re nice folk and all, but yeah… and it was a bit of a letdown to meet a married couple with kids after pulling up to the drive to find a spinning rainbow garden stake in the yard. And after meeting them, I’m 99.999999% sure it’s not a symbol of solidarity with the gay community… But it’s fitting I guess, considering I live upstairs, you know?

Now… to plan a housewarming party. Who wants an invite?

Ahh, the powers of You Tube. Now you, yes you, like Chelle, can truly appreciate the analogy that I first presented in one of my tales of youth.

Beau Nasty : Loverboy :: Cheez Whiz : Parmesan.

I mean, it was a BRILLIANT analogy, even if I do say so myself. But it was hard to fully appreciate it if you weren’t familiar with Beau Nasty. You Tube makes this a reality.

Plus you can point and laugh. I loved this band for a brief period. I still like to hear their songs from time to time.

The ooey gooey cheesiness of Cheez Whiz:

 
As compared to a finer, aged Parmesan (but of course, still pure cheese):

 
Now, worship me for the brilliant wordsmith I really am!

Or, you know, continue pointing and laughing, whatever works for you. Yes, yes, I know. I think you just blew snot on me. Stop laughing already. Dammit.

No less than three people have emailed me the story about John Cusack’s stalker this morning.

I’m starting to get the idea that my dear friends think there is some sort of correlation between me and this psycho stalker lady. Let’s just get this out there: I have neither the time nor energy to stalk Mr. Cusack.

You know, aside from all the other reasons I wouldn’t do that. Yeah.

If you’re just joining our broadcast, you’ll want to read the previous post and its comments before slagging through this long winded response.

So, let me begin by saying two things:

1. I’m writing my response to you as a post, mainly because it is easier to read large blocks of text in this space rather than in the comment area, and I do this in the hopes that this time you might actually take the time to read AND comprehend. (Well that, and this is MY site, so I can do what I want.)

2. This will be the last thing I have to say to you. You will never see my point of view - this is quite clear as you don’t even know what the point is - and since you apparently have no sense of humor, most of my comedic gems are wasted on you completely. I don’t feel the need to defend myself against your attempts at insults - it’s so painfully clear from your choice of attacks that you know NOTHING about me, there’s really no point. It’s also pretty apparent that you are the type of person who simply must have the last word on something, so I’ll let you. Feel free to comment here as many times as you feel necessary; I’ve got lots of bandwidth to spare. (And anyone else who feels like expending the energy to reply may feel free to do so. So far I’ve been amused with my friends’ grasp of wit.) I did not use your comment as a “springboard to start this discussion” - you misread (something you’re really good at). I used your comment as a spring board to post on my blog again, something I have been remiss in doing because I am a busy, busy girl. I do not have the time or the energy to continue debating you after I’m done with this post, as it has become tiresome and I have a life to live.

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