Three Exciting Pieces of News:

- Piggybacking off of Chris' bucket list post from yesterday, I'm happy to report that I got to cross something off of my own bucket list the other day. I didn't stand in a cranberry bog or have sex in a hot tub (which I've seriously reconsidered since you guys pointed out the "Vagina on Fire" factor that I in no way took into account. I was going to amend it to sex in a bath tub, but then I saw the bath tub rape scene in The Moderns and decided that it looks too uncomfortable. And not just because of the whole forced entry thing, but also because it's like, ACK, small spaces. Nermal! So I guess my goal now is to discuss fiscal responsibility in a warm body of water with a member of the opposite sex while respecting each other's opinions, emotional boundaries, and personal space. Which, frankly, feels excitingly attainable!), but I did see Hall and Oates on Monday night. LIVE. In concert. I KNOW.

How was it? Oh, I don't know. How's breathing? How's walking into the Sistine Chapel and looking up? How's knowing the power of true love? Trying to put it into words won't do it any justice—you just have to experience it. That being said, I will say the following:

1.) I know my parents were the ones who actually purchased the tickets, but I'm going to take full credit for the majesty of this Rowland family excursion. When I saw Hall and Oates on Wolftrap's summer schedule, I immediately changed the homepage on both of my parents' laptops to the ticket order site and tiled their desktop with the following to remind them of old priority one:

This was especially funny to me because my mom had no idea how how to change any of it back to her defaults, so we were playing for keeps for a while there. Was it obnoxious? Yes. Was it effective? Yes. So, you're welcome, rest of the family.

2.) Becca and I got drunk and took a sloppy picture with "Wolfy" the Wolftrap mascot, which is now on their Facebook page. I've done a lot of things in my life, but I think that's what I'm most proud of. 

3.) H&O sound just as tight, if not tighter now than they did then. And normally I'd be horrified by seeing "tight" that many times in a sentence, but in this case I'm just aroused.

4.) Daryl Hall looks a whole hell of a lot like Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star these days, and again—aroused.

5.) Being part of a 4,000 person amphitheater clapping along to "Private Eyes" kind of makes me understand the draw of megachurches.

6.) I bought a H&O t-shirt and I would just like to say that American Apparel's ladies tee sizing is wildly inaccurate. I got a large, walked all the way back to my seat, held it up, saw that it covered approximately one-tenth of my left shoulder and was then faced with the conundrum of do I waste 30 of my precious dollars or do I physically get up again? And oh, what a Sophie's Choice it was. I asked my dad to go back and do it for me because that feels like something a dad should do and he said no, which was as surprising as it was upsetting. (He also said no when I offered to wash his car for $10 the other day because apparently he doesn't trust me with it. I can't decide what's more depressing: the fact that my dad doesn't trust me to properly wash his car despite the fact that I'm a 26-year-old woman and not a 12-year-old neighborhood hooligan, or the fact that I genuinely needed that $10.) In the end I walked all the way back to the merch table and was like, "UM, EXCUSE ME MA'AM—MY TITTIES DON'T FIT INTO THIS SHIRT" and got a more reasonably sized unisex one. In retrospect, I think I made the right choice.

5.) H&O's sax player. I mean, my God. We were in the balcony and I just had my iphone so I couldn't zoom in and get a good picture, but I wish you could have seen him. He was a "sturdy" gentleman in a blueberry blue three-piece suit with long, luxurious blond locks that ended just above his asshole. If I ever have to get really, really bad news, I want him to deliver it to me and then dive directly into a sax rendition of Jefferson Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now". I feel like I could handle literally anything after that, including but not limited to the world running out of lovers. And corporation games.

6.) I'm 99% sure I met my soulmate. I didn't so much "meet" him as gawk at him from afar, but either way, I'm glad he's in my life now. I don't really know how to say this gracefully, so I'm just going to say it: he was an incredibly large black gentleman with a gangbangery blue bandanna tied around his head who really aggressively wanted to hear "Sara Smile". He was standing in the back of the balcony one section over from mine and let me tell you something: that man likes him some Hall and Oates. And I get it. Oh how do I get it. He was rocking the fuck out the entire time. Just gettin' down with it. At one point I looked back and he was doing the like, lean back, I'm-pretending-to-turn-my-steering-wheel-back-and-forth dance move normally reserved for The Rap Videos and the like. But you know what? Paired with "I Can't Go For That", it just made sense. I liked his innovation. I also liked that he wasn't afraid to let Daryl Hall and John Oates know exactly what he wanted to hear at any given moment from half a football field away. Overall I've just never been so close to walking up to a total stranger in public and offering to have intercourse with them in a courtesy tent. And I've been to Preakness.

7.) There is no human being I am more jealous of than H&O's tambourine player. He wore a jaunty little vest and stood directly behind Hall with a tambourine in each hand and his only task of the night was to jam. And jam he did! I had this moment of clarity somewhere in the middle of the concert when I realized that the happiest I think I could ever humanly be is the following: on stage at a Hall and Oates concert wearing a big 'ole pair of espadrilles, cut-off daisy duke shorts, Confederate flag bikini top, aviator sunglasses, lighted incense sticking out of my high pony tail, a tambourine in each hand, just fucking feeling it for an hour and a half every night 'til death do us part. That is my heaven. I'm not saying it for LOLZ, I'm not saying it to be ironic; it's just truly the happiest I can imagine myself. Do I find it upsetting that the happiest I can imagine myself involves semi-racist swimwear, Hall and Oates, and a thick cloud of sandalwood? No. No, I do not. Frankly, I think it's pretty par for the course. My name is Meghan Rowland and I approve this fantasy.

- The next exciting piece of news is that we're having our first out-of-state District reader meetup this Thursday night in Omaha, Nebraska! Because I'm going to Omaha, Nebraska! In a few hours! My sister is going for business and she emailed me a few weeks ago being like, "Wanna go to Nebraska with me? We can go to the American Legion and get tacos and drink $5 pitchers of margaritas with grizzled Midwestern veterans and you can make it a solo 2b1b Investigates." And I said madam, you had me at American Legion and tacos. So, if you're in the greater Omaha, Nebraska area this Thursday night, my sister and I will be at Mr. Toad's in the Old Market at 10pm. And I know 10 is kind of late for a "school night", but we're going to see a College World Series game beforehand and I'm psyched. Not just because I like baseball, mind you, but also because I'm excited to see a collegiate sporting event when school isn't in session. My dad's company has a box at the Naval Academy stadium, so our family goes to a lot of Navy lacrosse and football games and I can't enjoy a single one because I'm too stressed out by the concept of handling a full course load and playing a sport. I drive my sister crazy because I spend the entire game leaning over and being like, "...So do you think they do their work before the game or after?" I'm sure it's just the result of having an incredibly time consuming major, but it seriously stresses me the fuck out. I thought I was going to shit my pants at my first home Navy football game because the entire school has to march out onto the field and stay to watch the game. I was like, "WHAT—THEY HAVE TO?! LIKE HAVE HAVE TO? IT'S SUNDAY! WHAT IF THEY HAVE TO WRITE A PAPER? WHAT IF THEY HAVE TOO MUCH SCHOOL WORK AND JUST CAN'T DO IT? THIS IS TWO SOLID HOURS THEY COULD BE WORKING!!!1" (Speaking of Navy lacrosse games, we were at a game a few months ago and my dad's colleague brought his daughter and her teammates who play lacrosse for American. I was like, "Oh, cool, I went to American." And they were like, "Oh, what year?" "2007. What about you guys?" "2014." WHAT??? 2014?!!?!?!? That is a class of flying cars and robot butlers and beach houses on the moon and it took everything in my power not to be like, "PSHH 2014? What's the use of getting a college degree at that point—we'll all be dead by then anyway.") 

(Also, they asked me if I played a sport at American and I swear to God I responded, "Um, no, I was more involved in the literary magazine and that kind of...scene". They slowly nodded their heads at me and immediately went back to talking to Becca about Bucknell. ALRIGHT LISTEN YOU PRISSY LITTLE SHITS: a.) AmLit was the tits and I make no apologies for it, b.) YES, WE, AS A STUDENT ORGANIZATION, HAD EMOTIONS. And we chose to channel those emotions through poetry, prose, art, photography, and design and yeah, maybe I also listened to a fair bit of The Smiths at the time, but I played sports in high school so back off, butter; and c.) you can't legally drink until like 2045, and I could make a fort in my apartment out of boxes of wine right now if I wanted to and there's nothing Johnny Law could do about it, so what's up?)

Now I don't remember what I was originally talking about. OH! Yes. Reader meetup. You should come. Because obviously from the above story, I'm super fun. Again, Mr. Toad's, 10pm. We'll be the east coasters with the metric ton of free 2b1b stickers. Email me if you have any questions!

- My third and final exciting piece of news is that I recently found out that there's a difference between base jumping and freebasing. And guess what? It's a biggie.

On that note, I will be in Nebraska until Friday night if you need me. GO HUSKERS!

Chris' Bucket List

I decided to write a bucket list. I was kind of superstitious about doing it, because it somehow just seems like bad luck or tempting fate:

Man: I need to do these things before I die.

Zeus, king of the gods: The Gods will not be ordered.

Eris, goddess of discord: I don’t see how you’re going to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with the colitis you’re about to start having.

Atropos, who determines the length of men’s lives: You should… hurry.

Aphrodite, goddess of love: You’re not going to bed a supermodel, I’ll tell you that now. I might get you someone from the Lane Bryant catalog if you leave a good offering, but that’s the best I can do.

Poseidon, god of the seas: You can’t cross the Atlantic in your own sailboat. I say this not as God of the Seas, but as someone who can see that you sunburn easily, have terrible astigmatism, and regularly gets lost on the way to the mailbox.

See what I mean? But then, two things happened: I did some cool things that it would have been fun to cross off my bucket list had I made one, and I got desperate for blog topics. So here we are. I’ll leave off the items that have to do with “personal growth and fulfillment,” since presumably, you don’t want to read about how I want to, just once, be in good shape and good health and “really feel at home in my body.” It would undoubtedly be funny, but not on purpose. Onward:

To Do:

Hit someone in the face with a pie, and be hit in the face with a pie: This is a symptom of my having watched too much TV as a child, especially I Love Lucy. Whenever the writers didn’t know how to wrap everything up in the two minutes remaining, everyone had a good old-fashioned pie fight and laughed and made up. It just seems so reasonable and so fun, and you get to eat the debris!

Reveal the identity of the real killer: Another TV neurosis. The two TV shows I have the clearest childhood memories of, excluding the reruns I lived on, are The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote. They had predictable results: Blanche Devereaux taught me how to act around men, and Jessica Fletcher made me yearn to unmask the murderer. I knew Murder, She Wrote was fiction but I didn’t know the premise was fictional, too. I just assumed that at some point in most people’s lives, they would be stranded in a castle during a terrible storm, a duke would be stabbed to death with an antique halberd, and before the police arrived one of the guests would call everyone into the library and explain how, through careful observation and deduction, they had learned who the murderer was. I don’t know why I thought I would be the one to figure it out, since I’m not observant at all and have the attention span of a fruit fly with a drinking problem, but there it was. I especially liked when Jessica said, “The butler couldn’t possibly have known where the keys were kept. But you could.” When other kids were playing cowboys and Indians, I played “assemble the suspects and reveal the terrible secrets the blackmailer had learned.” My poor, patient parents.

Publish a book: Check! Buy The Misanthrope’s Guide to Life September 18^th!!!!!1!

Watch the Eurovision Song Contest: It’s everything I love. Bad music, nations competing, and broad stereotypes. For those of you who haven’t uncovered this joy, what happens is this: every European country who wants to, plus occasionally some countries on the fringes like Morocco, Israel, Lebanon, and the Caucasian countries, each choose an artist and song to compete at the big televised contest in spring. The songs are insanely kitschy: recently Latvia entered a pirate anthem called “Wolves of the Sea.” Each country “votes,” and since you can’t vote for your own country there’s a lot of weird political bickering: Greece and Cyprus always vote for each other and never for Turkey, Germany regularly throws Israel some “Did we mention we’re sorry?” points, and Eastern Europe either votes for Russia or not depending on how tense things are at the time. Greece almost boycotted Finland in 2006 over the Finns’ allegedly Satanic entry – which won. Remember the Celtic music craze of the 90s? Ireland kept sending one red-haired woman to sing about faeries and the morning mists, and regularly won. Italy stopped playing because it never won. Do you see how cool this is!? It’s like a macroscopic high school theatre department, if all the theatre kids had spent most of the last century fighting wars of extermination against each other. For some completely inexplicable reason, this delight is not broadcast in the United States, so sometimes I’m going to go to Europe in April, get a hotel room, and go nuts.

Visit every continent: It just seems like something you should do, doesn’t it? Also every state.

Learn to drive a standard transmission: I actually learned to drive in a standard, but then sort of… drove the truck into a ditch. I’ve never driven a stick since. I don’t really think I need to know, but it’s one of those “well, but what if… a man should know….” things.

Be able to pass the French Foreign Legion fitness test: I don’t want to join the French Foreign Legion – can you really imagine me in an equatorial outpost in one of France’s allegedly independent colonies, shouldering my rifle as I gaze up at the Tricolor and whisper “Pour la France…” Also, according to rumor they check your underwear for cleanliness and if there are “blemishes” they make you lick them clean. All that said… what if? What if I just totally, totally fuck up and need a new life, likerightnow? Also, I want it to be my decision not to be in the French Foreign Legion, not “Monsieur has too much of le paunch.” It’s pretty intense – I don’t have the exact requirements to hand, but it’s a lot of running and lifting and… motion. I figure I can build up to that level over three or four years, do it once, then rest on those laurels forever.

Swim with seals: Dolphins are too humanlike and whales are too large. I imagine swimming with seals is like being around a pack of aquatic puppies. Plus, I wanted to have something on this list that someone might conceivably take me to do for my birthday.

Learn to play the musical saw: I don’t need to explain why this would be cool, do I? The musical saw.

So, there it is: my plan for a happy life, given to you all free of charge. I may expand it into a book called Ah, Hell, You Might As Well. Think of it as Eat, Pray, Love for people who think Eat, Pray, Love sucks.

FOR CHRIS! (And you other Creative Types)

From my beloved Jay Smooth and his vlog, Ill Doctrine. "Beating The Little Hater".

Whining Time Station

Getting back into the swing of blogging is hard. It’s very different from the books we’ve been working on, and also from my allegedly “academic” writing for school. After a significant time off, your “blogging muscles” atrophy and it takes a lot of effort to get back up to speed. You can find almost any reason not to work, if you try; once, when we were working on a book, Meg turned to me and asked me if I thought there was an afterlife. I don’t know if she thought she wasn’t long for this world or if it was just the first thing that came into her mind, but the ultimate point is that it’s more fun to confront eternal, nagging, disquieting questions that have haunted mankind since its inception than to dive into a writing project that intimidates you.

Another reason it’s been hard to get up and go on the blog again is that nothing really happens to me anymore. All I do is work on the books, work on schoolwork, watch Maude, and occasionally get falling-down drunk with my Marine friend. It’s not a bad life, but it’s not terribly eventful. I went on a trip to Texas to visit my grandmother, which I enjoyed enormously but isn’t really comedy fodder. Even when we went to a roadhouse called the Hog Pit and saw a transvestite who looked exactly, exactly like Divine, it was still too matter-of-fact to make a blog post out of. I tried very hard to make a post out of my pseudo-graduation trip to Baltimore, but the only good observation was about the Holocaust memorial*, so that was out.

The upshot of all this is, I keep getting one-liners and one-paragraph ideas, but post topics are hard to come by. For example, the other day I was going to the bank, and passed a kid about eighteen – shirtless but wearing black slacks, with a wedge cut, carrying a skateboard. It was like a wet dream I might have had in 1999. I think that’s hilarious because it says a little about me and a lot about how the late nineties warped us all, but I didn’t see a way to expand that into a post without getting into an extreme discussion of Jncos, and I’m saving that for the patriotic slideshow I’m planning for the Fourth of July.

Other issues are hard to expand into full posts because they’re difficult to expand on without becoming offensive, even by our standards. One is my new game, following “From a Block Away, Can You Tell If That Person is a Lesbian or a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy?” and “Are You White Trash or Is Something Wrong with You?” It’s called “Are You Crazy, or Is That Just Your Culture?” I’m sure I’ve already offended someone, but let me explain. My old apartment looked out over the rear area of a Chinese restaurant. One day, two of the women who worked there had lit a bonfire in a metal bin, and were idly conversing while crumpling up stack after stack after stack of shiny gold and silver paper and throwing the papers into the fire. This fascinated me. Both Giant Camel and Ex-Co-Blogger Eddie said, “Oh, it must be some Asian holiday.” Well, probably, yes, but it was still interesting. Likewise, later that week, I saw three people curled up in an unusual posture on the sidewalk. When I got closer, I could see that they were probably Muslims at prayer. I guess more than anything, this is an endorsement of the American melting pot: while we may not be particularly interested in the details, most of us are perfectly willing to accept other cultures, at least passively, and not interfere with their rites, provided they’re not uncomfortably loud or leave a mess on the sidewalk. That said, don’t you think occasionally a batshit immigrant comes over, and their batshittitude gets overlooked because everyone assumes it’s their culture? I think it has to happen from time to time. It also must happen in reverse: imagine a poor immigrant coming to these shores, and the first person they meet owns a traveling reptile show or is an amateur UFC fighter with rickets or a juggalo. Imagine the resulting letters back to Asmara about “what Americans are really like.”

And then, of course, there are the posts I can’t write because they just make me sound like a blithering lunatic, like how talking about watermelon makes me uncomfortable because I think people will think I’m making a racist joke. I don’t at all understand how liking watermelon got to be a racist joke, because a) doesn’t everyone like watermelon? And b) aren’t there significantly more offensive stereotypes about black people?, and the fact that I don’t understand it is what makes me nervous. Several people in my family farmed watermelon and I have a lot of happy memories of getting the melons as a child, but I’m afraid to tell people that because I think they’ll think it’s an elaborate metaphor for segregation. Also in this file is the fallout from the Larry Craig scandal, when a Republican senator from Idaho was arrested for accosting men for sex in a public restroom with hand signals. No news outlet that I saw ever described the signals, so for a time I live in fear that I would turn the water knob in a certain coy way and receive some surprising attention.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is that blogging is hard and I may not be as sane as we’re all polite enough to pretend. In the coming days, look for a terrible recipe, my bucket list, and a leisurely discussion of why it’s fun to go to gay bars with straight people. Also, Meg and I might go to a brewery!

*The Holocaust memorial in Baltimore is a bronze cast of emaciated bodies being consumed by flames. It is, by an enormous margin, the most upsetting public art I have ever seen.

Gone Editin'

WORD. We're in Philly wrapping up editing for book #2, but both Chris and I will be back in full force FOR GOODZIES and FOR REALZIES on Monday. In the mean time, do we have readers in Nebraska? Becca and I will be in Omaha next Wednesday-Friday and we wouldn't hate sharing an ear of corn with you. Let me know!

A Few Quick Thoughts I Couldn't Flesh Out Into Full Entries Because They Don't Have Conclusions And Just Kind of Abruptly End, Or "Why I'm Not A Terribly Good Writer"

- I'm sorry, but is the world aware of how busy the gym is at 6 o'clock in the morning? Let me back up a bit. So I've been a fair-weather member of the Fitness First gym on L and 19th for the past couple of years and I'm a huge fan. I like it because it's not trendy or complicated. It's a generic gym—you go in, you get your shit done, and you get out. It's like the Shasta cola of workout establishments. I've been calculating for the past few years what I call my gym's "Aspie Hours", or times throughout the day when the least number of people are likely to be there. These hours are roughly the following: 8:30-9:30am, after the nine-to-fivers go to work, before the housewives come in; 1:00-3:30ish, after the lunch rush, before the evening rush, during group classes; and 8:45-10:00pm, after the evening rush, before closing. I particularly like going during the 8:30-9:30am time slot because it's primarily filled with the elderly and I feel like Super Man on my Arc Trainer by comparison. And yet I went in this morning at 6am. I went in as a joke. As a SICK, understated joke—as performance art, really—and it was packed. Packed with fit, perky, fast-moving people who made eye contact. It was disgusting. So. I learned a lesson. Good. Good for me.

- Hi. If I'm going to spend $52 to make my apartment smell like cannabis for 60 hours, I expect to wake up at the end of those 60 hours thigh-deep in chicken bones and half-eaten Hot Pockets with a 50-page opus on my desktop about how time is cyclical titled "SERIOUSLY_DO NOT FUCKING FORGET THIS.doc", not holding an empty 9oz glass jar with the clearest head I've had since I was 14.

- Teresa got a part-time job reporting traffic for the local NBC news station and recently said the following on air: "Reports are coming in of an overturned blueberry truck on I-95 just outside of Baltimore. So if you're headed up that way tonight, it looks like you're headed for a real jam." I bring this up only because I need you to know how incredibly sexually attracted I am to that joke. Not only is it a traffic joke, it's a preservatives joke. I'm wetter than a Slip 'n Slide at a Fourth of July party.

- I came back from the gym this past Monday morning and was about to collapse on my bed and make love to a bagel and an episode of "Fraiser"—as is par for the course—when I overheard my neighbor get into a huge fight with her boyfriend. Or I guess he got into a fight with her because he was doing all of the yelling. And I do mean yelling. I've overheard plenty of neighbors yell at their significant others in my time, but this was some next level shit. This was a sensible blouse and an overcooked meatloaf away from being a Lifetime movie. I couldn't figure out what they were fighting about though because it was one of those situations where all you can hear is a lot of forceful mumbling with the occasional clear word or phrase when someone really wants to drive a point home. Like, "mumblemumblemumble I WAS THE ONE mumblemumblemumble WHILE YOUR ASS mumblemumblemumble FOR FIVE HOURS mumblemumblemumble BECAUSE YOU NEED THE DRAMA." Trying to fill in those blanks is like playing The Burning Bed edition of Mad Libs. It's haunting. Anyway, I didn't know what to do about the situation, or even if I should do anything at all. I just kind of sat there awkwardly shifting my eyes around the room all "ha ha...Roz", hoping things wouldn't escalate to the point where I had to put pants on. I felt badly for her. But mostly I couldn't stop thinking about that "Family Guy" cutaway "Horton Hears Domestic Violence in the Next Apartment and Doesn't Call 911":

So then I obviously watched that clip like sixteen times in a row and just cackled and cackled like an asshole with my bagel dangling out of my mouth while God only knows what was going on next door. I justified this in my head by thinking, "Well, I'm not laughing at her; I'm laughing at what her horrible situation reminds me of." But that still felt...off. 

I find my whole reaction to this situation deeply disturbing because I'd like to think I'm a feminist, yet here my neighbor's boyfriend is yelling at her in a sort of scary way and I just could not give two shits. I mean, I sort of did. I guess I gave AN shit. The concept was horrifying, but you know, we're all adults here. Let's tend to our own flocks. And then the fact that that went through my head horrified me even more because again, feminist. So then I tried justifying that by reminding myself that I hate her. Because I do. I've asked her repeatedly to stop slamming the door behind her when she goes in and out of her apartment because besides it being rude and startling, it rattles our shared wall where I have two plates hanging and if they fall and break I'm going to blast the most offensive German shiza porno that euros can buy every single night between the hours of 3-6am until death do us part. And yet she continues to do it! Day in and day out! So her boyfriend's yelling at her? Good. I have a strongly worded letter I wrote to our condo board that he can read aloud to her as well. So basically, this means that in my own mind, the following is my stance on verbal abuse: VERBAL ABUSE IS STILL ABUSE! ABUSERS ARE COWARDS! REAL MEN DON'T HURT WOMEN! THAT IS UNLESS THAT WOMAN WON'T STOP LETTING THE DOOR SLAM BEHIND HER BECAUSE COME ON LADY!

So in conclusion: I am a horrible human being, I bring down my gender and this great nation, and Libya is a land of contrast. THE END.

Hello Darlin'

Hello, kids. Daddy’s missed you.

Sorry about my prolonged absence. With school, work, and the books, things got a little intense for a while. I’m back now. Let’s never fight again. I’m going to ease my way back into blogging with a little post following your favorite format and mine: Thoughts I Couldn’t Flesh Out into Full Entries! (Don’t worry about me falling back onto this as a crutch again: I just went to Baltimore, joined a gym, and Netflixed a documentary about a Christian music duo who are PARTNERS IN LIFE AND PARTNERS IN SONG, so some genuine essays about life’s little foibles will follow soon. Think of this post as how, if you haven’t had sex in a while, it’s quick and has bad form but it’s still awesome because it’s been so long.)

Enemies List: I’ve decided to go ahead and start a paranoid, Nixon-style “enemies list” solely for the purpose of adding “doofus at the Apple store” to it. He’ll fit nicely between “Jimmy Carter” and “the Jews.” Here’s what happened: I finally caved and bought an iThing. I didn’t really want to because they have a weird, cultish aspect. That whole gung-ho breadline snaking out of the store for six days before the “new” model of anything, which is as often as not the same thing only a new color, disturbs me and reminds me of lemmings. I finally caved and got an iPod for two reasons: Angry Birds, and the fact that I downloaded a free audio version of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I figured if I bought an iObject, I could listen to it while I worked out and then actually work out and actually “read” the book and then learn to multitask and then come home and blog while I ate a balanced meal and finally be an adult. I’ll let you know if it works. So I ordered the iWhatever from Wal-Mart.com because I had a $50 Valentine’s Day gift card there from Mom, and it arrived with a screen protector already on it, but very badly applied. It’s crooked and has little fibers trapped between the screen protector and the glass. Now, I’m extraordinarily clumsy. I was so bad at “Operation” as a child that my parents let me hit the board with a hammer in a new game called “Vivisection.” I once was so eager to get my suitcase that I fell onto a baggage carousel and was dragged along for several feet. (Next time you’re at an airport in Israel, do something that makes you stand out. It does not reassure people.) The odds of me successfully applying a screen protector are about the same as the odds of my being the next keynote speaker at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, so I went to the Apple store to try and have them do it for me, since it’s such a fucking clean, well-lighted place where nothing goes wrong and you live forever.

So of course I get there and it’s packed to the gills, and the one person who’s not busy flatly refuses to help me. He thinks I want him to give me a free screen protector – I don’t know why, but that’s where he went – and then after the third or fourth time I told him I had one he started asking me how the screen protector that’s there got on the iMotherfucker.  I told him it came that way and he got very haughty and insisted that “we never have shipped them like that, never.” Things went downhill from there, and ended with my storming out but oh-so-slyly dropping a candy bar wrapper on their floor. A small and childish act, but I comfort myself that maybe one of those iTools slipped on it.

Oh, Mom: She has been on her game while I was away:

Mom: Oh, I’ve had such a day. I spent all day on the phone with the drugstore. They’re simply not realistic about those controlled substance laws. Accidents happen.

Me: Like what, for example.

Mom: Oh, I poured a bottle of Xanax into a can of peaches.

Me: Were you making a “special” cobbler to eat while you watched the Kentucky Derby?

Mom: No, I just… well. So, I was going to have peaches for lunch. And I opened the can and I just didn’t feel like getting a bowl dirty I’d just have to wash. So I had the peaches in my lap, and I had Grendel* in my lap, and I was fussing with the remote, and I remembered I hadn’t taken my medicine, and you know I have on that wrist brace ever since I hurt my wrist moving the fish tank, and one thing led to another and they just all fell in there. I scooped some out with an envelope but it was mostly a loss. And the pharmacy thought that was just so suspicious.

AND

Me:…so, if I can afford it, I want to try to visit the gals** this fall.

Mom: Chris!

Me: What?

Mom: How terrible!

Me: I thought you liked them.

Mom: No! That word!

Me: Afford? Fall? Prolapsed?

Mom: Chris! Gals. It’s so offensive.

Me: Oh, I’m sorry, I meant womyn.

Mom: That’s not what I mean. It’s so racist. So very racist.

Me: GAL?

Mom: Yes! You know…(whispering) as in “li’l nigra gal.”

Me: You have never once heard that phrase outside the film Mississippi Burning.

Mom: You don’t know everything.

I love her very, very much, but she’s weird.

*Mom’s poodle. He has an eating disorder.

**Two female college friends of mine.

From the Department of Varied Meats: Shit, who knew about ox tails and didn’t tell me? They are so incredibly, amazingly delicious. One wouldn’t think so – you know, ox and tail – but by the same magic as two negative numbers multiplied making a positive number they are delicious. I also feel they qualify as “healthy” because it’s so much work to knaw (<- when you don’t write for a while you come up with all kinds of fresh, vibrant spellings) the meat off the wonky little bones. I even had a nice conversation with a stranger while buying them.

Woman: “Four? Ha. I gotta buy ten pounds. My kids fuss if they don’t get ox tails when they visit.”

She then shared a recipe with me: “Cuban style” ox tails: brown ‘em, then boil them up with chorizo and raisins. “I know raisins sound awful, but trust me.” The only blemish on my new ox tail love is, of course, a passing vegetarian. Now, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this ever, but I have moderately severe ADHD, one symptom of which is that it’s very hard to separate background noise from what you actually want to hear. You can’t pick up the right strand. The exception, of course, is when something is annoying enough to punch its way into your consciousness. So I’m standing at the meat counter waiting to order my beloved ox tails and some hipsterette passes by and says, clear as day, “It’s so disconcerting to just see slices of animal piled up.” Two things: One, vegetarianism is not terribly common and wasn’t super-widespread until recently. This girl almost definitely grew up in a meat-eating household, and definitely had some relatives or friends growing up who ate meat. She might not like it, it might disgust her, she might think it’s unethical, but Goddammit she’s used to the idea of meat. It does not disconcert her. It’s not wildly foreign. I wasn’t in a loincloth, squatting over the corpse of a slain enemy, chewing his still-beating heart to gain his courage. Second, I am always polite to vegetarians. I’m not going to join them but it’s none of my business what they eat and I know it’s hard to get good vegetarian or vegan food so I don’t bait them like some people do. If I’m polite about it, she has to be! I’m not eating human flesh! I’m not eating currently alive things! I’m not eating a rare steak naked in front of her as the bloody juices drip down my chest (although if you provide the steak and think you would enjoy this I’ll come to your house and do it.) If this happens again, I’m writing a pamphlet called “The Carrot Wept” and see if I can starve her into submission.

Why I Am Not a Political Writer: I came up with the most tortured metaphor in the world today during my “awake but not up” period. So, Barack Obama is in the eleventh grade, and “running the country” is a Calculus test. On the first page, there’s an incredibly intimidating problem with a huge elaborate diagram labeled “unemployment: 25 pts.” He doesn’t know if he knows how to do that, so he does all the other problems first: “Health Care: 15 pts. Palestinian statehood: 10pts.” to try to get enough done that even if he leaves unemployment blank or only gets partial credit he can still pass (get reelected.) The other kids in the class are Republicans and they might wreck the curve by… I thought this was so fucking clever until I got up and let some blood get to my brain. I think this whole thing says very little about me and still less about the government, but a lot about how much I disliked my eleventh-grade calculus teacher, a man named “Jan” (not Jan as in “Yan,” Jan as in Jan Brady, thus named because his father died in January while little Jan-to-be was in the womb) who wore short-sleeved shirts with ties, believed he had been a Roman centurion in a previous life, and told one startled class about the overwhelming joy he felt while conducting a faster-than-sound jet flight as his wife was artificially inseminated. The resulting son was a midget.

You know what they say in show business: Always leave ‘em laughing, but failing that, end on a midget. All my love, and see you soon.