All posts by Licketysplit

With optional trunk liner, but since you are a pig, you will need it

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Yesterday saw the Vomitola-Mr. H family inexplicably oafing into a decision, as is our custom. We went out to look at cars since our lease was up in a few weeks, and we came home with something without spiders living in the side mirrors. Our salesperson basically threw himself on the ground and grabbed our ankles and refused to let us leave, and we were swayed by not having to take our filthy old car to get detailed and a lease end inspection. A. Ybab picked all the raisins out of a cookie and pasted them all over the backseat just the day before.

We easily picked out a car, which went something like “This one has wheels. Ooh, grey? Hey, I like grey. The colorblind can enjoy it too.” Then the tedious negotiations started. My father fancies himself a car negotiator, and he will walk in and say “I will pay you no more than $10,000 for a car!” and they will say “OK, you can have this one with windows that don’t even open,” and he will say “Sold.” Or he will walk out in a huff and sulk for days. Living with the insane is delightfully unpredictable. I prefer the Socratic approach.

“Here’s our best offer,” says The Hair.

“Do you feel that I appear mentally challenged, or as some of the less couth among us might say, retarded?”

“Well, it’s a great car, you really like it. I want to put you in the car you love.”

“Actually, I like far cheaper cars too! Do you like Hyundais?”

“OK, what if I could do….THIS [underlines number with flourish]?”

“What if you could fly?”

“Well, how about….THIS?”

“Do you like your life?”

In the meantime, Mr. H sits off to the side and looks disapproving and says things like “I’d really like to sleep on this. We should go.” Then we finally arrived at a number ten squillion dollars lower than the original price and lower than what I was prepared to pay anyway. Of course “the other guy” had to come out and “remember” the special incentive I asked for twenty minutes earlier. We are starving and dehydrated at this point, and A. Ybab has befouled her unmentionables. “Fine, make it all go away,” we wailed.

Then we came home and obsessively used the internet to determine that we could have spent $4 less at a dealership in Tulsa. Blast! Do you like your life?

You can light a candle, or you can keep pissing in the dark

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Historically, I am really good at pissing in the dark. When I was infested with child, I would stumble into the bathroom at 3AM each night with my eyes closed and still manage to find the toilet. I wasn’t even awake, I don’t think. But in a bold break with tradition, I just ripped up my right shift key and took the waffle bit out from under it, rather than learn to shift with my left pinky finger. I mean, that was going OK, but I am older and just not adaptable anymore. Take me out back and shoot me.

My dad said that bit about the candle when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, and that sentiment is of course fraught with hilarity given my genetic background of half-assed solutions. My first phrase was probably “jury rig.” If you ever say “jerry-rig” to me, I will cut you. It’s just not right. There was some great meaning to what mine papa was saying, but I chose to ignore it and have a “Family Guy”-style mental diversion picturing Peter Griffin decked out in a periwig like Elton John, singing about pissing up a rope on a candle in the wind.

Recently, Mr. H overheard the following exchange at work and was trying to impart how “Family Guy” it was.

“So this lady who’s on maternity leave brings her baby in to show it off, and all the women are all ‘Ahhhhhhh, baby, ahhhhhh!’ and then they leave, and these two biddies on the other side of wall from me are quiet for a minute. And then one says ‘He’s all boy.’ And the other one says ‘Oh, yeah.'”

And I said “And then the second one took a sip of coffee? And it there was a really awkward long silence as they both looked at each other?”

“Yes!” he said. “Exactly.”

I am so glad we have the medium of television so as to better understand each other.

O, I has a blog

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Just the other night, I was thinking I might write a blog post, and maybe even see if I could goad anyone into a content challenge, but then I encountered a group medical situation in my home. This situation has been reviewed by bystanders with phrases including “God hates you” and “OMG plague of Jaffa.” Sneak preview: herpangina!!!1111!!!!

So, I kind of forgot what I was going to write about. I think it had something to do with Dr. Who and might have been timely last week. Timely. Oh, I kill. I didn’t even mean to do that nerd pun. It just springs from my virus-ladden digits. It’s my 25th birthday again today. Each one keeps getting worse. Last year, the highlight of the day was not throwing the baby in the river and eating a burrito. This year, I can’t swallow food, so the burrito is out. Next year, I expect to accidentally teleport somewhere with a lot of lava. And Sarah Silverman. Man, I am just skipping next year.

Unprofessional painting

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If me of now went back in time to warn me of five years ago that future/current me would be covered in flecking blue paint (Martha Stewart Surf 286) and honey-mustard sauce, me would not believe me! But it is all true. Me has no idea how me’s life turned out this way.

A few days ago, I had a few glasses of wine (with dinner, not at 10AM, although heaven knows…) and decided to start painting the bathroom a different shade of blue. I have good ideas all the time! I can’t even tell you how frequently. I have a whole folder on my desktop called “GOOD IDEAS!!!!!” My bathroom is 50% old blue and 50% new blue now, and I may work on it one hour per night for the rest of my life. Because either I get some paint in my hair, or someone wakes up and starts screaming, or a cat wants to come in because the door is closed, or maybe the fumes just become too much and I wake up on the floor the next morning even dumber.

After the bathroom is painted, I will have to tear the “shelving system” out of the linen closet. That means I will have to put better shelves in. I can’t just leave things in a heap in the bottom of the closet, much as I wouldn’t mind. It’s hard to find shelves. At IKEA, they expect you to cut them to the length you desire, like, with a saw or the power of your mind or something, so all their shelves are eighteen feet long. No. The Container Store has a sale on shelving, and that’s great, but everything is sold in systems, and I, a professional internet user, can’t figure out how to find JUST SHELVES. Single shelves of the correct length. In desperation, I typed in “http://ijustwanttobuysomefuckingshelves.com/” and crossed my fingers, but no luck there. Where do you get shelves, good people of the internet? I am hoping my own Google ads will tell me.

***
Local color report:
Lowell High School is back in session. Before we set out on our nightly trek for takeout, the phone rang: a “PRIVATE CALL” according to the display.

“Bee dee booop,” said the caller, voice breaking with hysterical giggling.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, your penis did not go through!” The caller then died from laughter and somehow managed to slam the phone down in a dying act of valor.

Once downtown, a roving pack of teenagers conspiratorially made the aside “PENIS!” to us as we passed. Then we passed Marty Meehan over by the Masonic Temple. He was going to hassle us about voting when a young voice shrieked “I like penis!” out a screened window from the housing project across the street. We continued on, not stopping to vote in the primary because we had already seen Niki Tsongas having a victory dinner two streets over at the one nice restaurant in town, oblivious to the penis crisis in the streets. If she isn’t in touch with the penis issue, she does not need my support.

“If we were actually insane,” I remarked to Mr. H, “we’d assume people were only saying penis to us!” One never knows.

How I got covered in honey-mustard is another boring story for another time.

What to eat: a sandwich (I wish!!!)

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This just in: I am so completely and utterly bored with the internet that I opted to do actual work over reading one more stinking line in Google Reader. Although work still involves the internet, so I guess we have a little problem there. Somehow celebrities will have to wear ugly shoes without me. Life goes on. Somehow.

These days, it’s nigh on to impossible to be a renaissance man. There is simply too much content in the world. I realized this in one gleaming moment of disappointment when I was a teenager and consequently had my first panic attack in an aisle at Barnes & Noble. All those books! All that information! Summer reading lists are the least of our worries. Wrangle the brain chaff, wrangle it, before it buries you like a tsunami.

We have to be adroit enough to build our own highly curated channels of entertainment and educational content in order to avoid suffering total information burn out, but most of us are pretty lousy program directors. If we were given a million dollars and the severed head of Katie Couric so we could create primetime programming, we’d still run nothing but funny cats and grandmas falling down. Or perhaps a baby showing us what birds do. Being well-rounded is overrated.

Hello, goodbye

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Will I ever finish the September Vogue? I have sprained my page turning hand. I couldn’t finish it during an entire double process color appointment. Will the feed from this blog stop BREAKING and dumping crap everywhere? Sry Kthx. I would upgrade everything, to Word Press and something reasonable like Feed Burner, but I got as far as making a Feed Burner account, and then it tells me to do an installation step that is NOT THERE in the Blogger console. Hmm. I guess I should migrate to WP first. But this is something like work, and I have enough damn work. And I don’t care anymore, or rather I have not cared for many anymores. [N.B.: In 37 more months, this post will migrate to WordPress or south for the winter.]

This past weekend, I ate an excellent sandwich. I am about to launch a new site about what to eat in Lowell. It will be called What To Eat in Lowell. This is funny to me because I have Asperger’s. OMG so I ate a sandwich. It was so good! It was so good the cops came. Well, a cop came to the establishment where I had the sandwich, and he got his own sandwich. Or maybe it was a bagel. I can’t keep up with law enforcement and their ample square bottoms. But the real deal is that before the sandwich, we saw a red tailed hawk hold a pigeon down on a street corner and step on its neck until it was dead. Or I guess it died when the hawk ripped its head half off. Then the hawk carried the pigeon down the main street and perched on a traffic light. So that’s one thing to eat in Lowell right there.

What does one do when confronted with the majesty of nature like that? Camera phone! That’s behind the paywall only. Ybab has learned to flap her arms and say “Flap flap RAWRRRR.” Of course that’s what the bird says. Birds here in Rand McNally are giant metal robots that decapitate smaller birds.

They’re American planes; made in America

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There are numerous perks to living next to a minor league baseball park. I can hug the Canalligator any time I want. Sometimes I’ll be relaxing in the afternoon haze when, lo, the melodious Windows start up chime thunders as the sound system boots. Every game night, I can open my windows at 7:22 PM and hear “Sweet Caroline” if I am so inclined. I like to go out and take a deep breath, savoring the scent of pure sugar and roasting sausage. One day, the sound person played an entire David Bowie album while testing and setting up the system. Sometimes he plays Queen. Life should come with surround sound, even if it sometimes plays the “Hamster Dance.” Some people would not want to live next to a baseball park, but crazy crap is kind of my thing.

I also enjoy have people trying to park in our parking lot towed. Simple pleasures, all around. As American as apple pie. I am still not totally sure if I should stand up during the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Last night ybab and Mr. H and I were out walking in the park. We noticed some fighter planes making lazy loops in the general vicinity of our house, and that always makes one nervous. We figured it must be a routine patrol, but we entertained ourselves for a while thinking that maybe a plane was off the radar and about to get shot down in our front yard. Wouldn’t surprise us, given our real estate track record. Underwater or smoking hole? Which holds resale value best?

We were in the courtyard right across the street from the ballpark kind of not paying attention while a ybab ate rocks when we heard something something about Air Force appreciation over the ballpark loudspeaker, and then we realized “OH FUCK.” There was nowhere to quickly run for cover, and next thing we knew, we were looking up at a guy in a cockpit. I should have covered ybab’s ears; sorry kid. However, when one is a few hundred feet directly below two jets, one’s instinct is to drop to the ground and flatten out one’s skull, like a cat trying to squeeze under a bathroom door. To hell with the children. They regrow ear drums anyway, right?

It took ten minutes to calm her down as she pointed up and jabbered “BIRD? BIRD?” No sweetie, that was ten seconds of what it’s like to live in Iraq! Consider yourself a world traveller now. Remind me to add “runway” as a feature to our sales listing.

Now where’s that Klingon woman I’m supposed to fight?

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On Caturday, I taked a baybee outside. In the hall, we ran into our neighbor. She was wearing a Klingon outfit and letting in a guest. A baybee stared up at her. “Oh, she’s getting so big,” my neighbor said. I assume she felt fleeting shame at this moment. “Yes, sure is! Oh well, another dull Saturday,” I opined, and ran for my life. Her guest was not wearing a Klingon outfit, but maybe his was in the car.

Mr. H missed the outfit, but I told him about it with great joy in my heart.

“The forehead thingy?” he asked eagerly.

“Like she worked at Kings Dominion.”

“The hair?”

“Yes.”

“The boots?” he asked in disbelief.

“And a cape.”

Now, we waited around outside an awfully long time with camera phones ready, but no luck. Still, knowing there was a Klingon across the hall left me on pins and needles. Might as well dangle a squirming toddler in front of a pit bull. “I’ll be right there,” I’d say, “I just have to hang up my cape.” Some things are just too good to drop.

I can only hope that next weekend brings more of the same. I wonder what her husband was wearing? Bless the people who think to dress up as Klingons, bless them every one. Perhaps it sounds as if I am making fun, but I enjoyed this deep in my soul.

If I drink that, I’ll just have to pee again

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Casa Vomitola survived a visit from ybab’s grandparents. We sat around. We fell asleep mid-conversation. We stared into space and refused entertainment and liquids. We made arrangements very, very complicated. We mean well. We always mean well.

In other news, my accountant died. This is very sad, and this is not allowed! I require eternal dedication from my professional services providers. I have no idea where to send my receipts now. Maybe this is a sign that the lord doesn’t want me to file taxes anyway.

Also, my hairstylist has the nerve to be on vacation! I am thisclose to cutting my own bangs. I am quite good at it thanks to Allure Magazine, but she will still be mad if I do. Well, don’t go on vacation then! Await my whim, universe.