Who knew?

That the mitzvah challenge would be so much fun? Today's happened in seconds, but provided me with a lot of amusement.

I was baking cookies ('tis the season, after all) and I ran out of powdered sugar. Also known as icing sugar. Trying to substitute granulated sugar for powdered sugar in icing recipes results in crunchy icing - never a desirable result. So I needed powdered sugar, but I didn't want to do a grocery store expedition; usually, trips to the grocery store are to a store across town from me, and I'm doing major grocery shopping. It takes a few hours - worse when I'm messing about with coupons.

One grocery chain holds a pretty tight monopoly in this region. Stores that aren't SuperAnnyoing MegaMart tend to be small, and lacking a lot of the hoity-toity fussy ingredients I'm usually looking for. As much as I dislike patronizing the super annoying mega mart, trips to the smaller stores usually result in frustration. But there is one of those smaller stores really close to my house, and I know that they're going to have powdered sugar, so off I went.

Another reason I don't usually go to the smaller stores is that I end up spending too much time hiking up and down the aisles searching for something. I know the layout of the mega mart. Happily, though, I found a bunch of things that mega-mart doesn't carry and ended up spending about $50 rather than the $2.69 I'd expected.

While searching for a soup flavor I know the mega-mart never has, I heard a man and a little girl in the next aisle over having a conversation about why they were in the grocery store. The child sounded like she was perhaps 2. She was having a great time. Daddy, on the other hand, was frustrated. He had been sent to fetch egg noodles. He couldn't find egg noodles. He wasn't sure where to even look for egg noodles. Did he say all that? Not exactly, but you could tell.

I happened to be standing in front of a display of all kinds of pasta. I found egg noodles - by this time they were in the same aisle as me - and I handed them over to him with a smile. He thanked me, laughing, and asked if he just looked that lost. No, I told him, I'd heard him, but he did look like a deer in headlights! We had a shared chuckle over his daughter's comment --"Daddy, that's it? That's all we needed?" -- he thanked me again for saving him the hassle of hunting through the entire store, and we went our separate ways.

Fun, funny, and helpful to someone. Mitzvah? Check!

Proof, if anyone needed it, that I have a twisted sense of humor.

Saw this on a forum I frequent; the context in which it was posted is irrelevant here.

Suffice to say, it made me absolutely howl with laughter.

Twisted? Moi? Surely, you jest.

Overheard:

"Dude, how do you spell 'legit'?"

"L-I-G-I-T"

No, I did not stop, correct them, nor did I explain that 'legit' is short for 'legitimate'; but I wanted to.

Replay

A comment left on the delightful Mrs. G's blog the other day made me giggle, and then sigh, because while clever, it made me realize that yes, I've got that little voice inside my head.  

Mrs. G had solicited comments from her readers for advice for her college-bound daughter.  One of the respondents suggested that Miss G listen to that little voice inside her head, y'know, the one that sounds like your mother?

I have a conglomeration up there, of my Dad, my Mother, my Swedish Mama, and my grandmothers, both of them.

My father despises fast food.  Actually 'despise' isn't strong enough of a word.  Abhors, that might come close.  When we were kids and traveling in the car (which we did often, from Oh-hia-ia to Florida and from Oh-hia-ia to northern Michigan, and back again.) Dad would never want to stop at Mickey D's, BK, Taco Bell, or any of the other zillions of fast food outlets.  On the very seldom occasions when we DID do a fast food joint, there was ABSOLUTELY no eating in the car.  We went inside.  Without fail, when we were done, Dad would wash his hands.  Every time.

My sisters and I thought that was hilarious.  As we moved to our teen-aged years, it was a reason to roll our eyes.  Vociferously.

And then.  Of course.  I have started to feel the same way.  I had a quick taco at Taco Bell the other day, and when I was finished eating it, I wanted to not only wash my hands, but I also contemplated a second shower.  Ugh.  Gross.  

I avoid fast food as much as I am able, but modern hectic life means that sometimes, that's what you do.  I try to make the best choices I can among the very bad options, minimizing my fat intake, and trying to keep my daily caloric count down, too.  But recently, I've started to feel that ugh-I-need-to-cleanse-myself-of-this-grease feeling after even just an Iced Coffee from Mc D's.  

Bleagh.  

oooops!

Seen on the back of a black SUV, similar to the ones President Idiot rides around in all the time:

01/20/09: the end of an ERROR!

oh, how I love chance encounters with other random liberals.

Goddess of Laughter

Laughter is the sunshine of sounds. That elusive (sometimes) goal: to make us laugh. An addiction for some ---who become comedians, humor essayists, comedy writers.

I wasn't a class clown growing up. No, I was a wallflower, painfully, p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y shy. The first and maybe only time I ever managed to crack up a roomful of my school mates, I wasn't even sure why they thought what I'd said was funny. So that wasn't a life-changing event.

I think that among my group of friends as we grew older, I managed to make people laugh from time to time, but I really don't remember all that well who was the "funny" one, or even if there was ONE. We all laughed a lot, all the time.

There's a lot to be said for having a cadre of friends who get you. Friends that don't require a long-winded explanation about why something is funny.

The web has expanded those circles for some of us, allowed small groups of people scattered across the globe to get the inside joke, to have their own lexicons of in-jokes.

I read a very, very silly number of blogs on a daily or near-daily basis. Some of them I discovered before I began blogging myself, others discovered through fandom or friends of friends. Overwhelmingly, the ones I continue to read are the ones that make me laugh or are are particularly thought-provoking. Over time, blogs that have dropped from my list are those who either update too infrequently, or are never funny at all.

No, I don't use bloglines. I'm a complete luddite when it comes to RSS feeds. Not a priority to learn how to do it, set it up....nah, I'd rather wait eternities while the 30-odd pages load.

Usually, checking the blogs is a part of my morning ritual. On days when it doesn't happen that way, then I read them after I have finished my work for the day, after I have sent out the required work-related e-mails. If that's the time of day that I'm catching up, DH is usually fast asleep. Thank goodness I have a laptop and can move to another room so that the clicky-click of the keyboard isn't disturbing him when I'm leaving my own clever commentary on blogs, but more than that, I need to be in another room because I often burst out laughing over something I'm reading.

Since personally, I hate, despise, and detest when someone wakes me up, I do my best to not disturb his sleep. I have a large, loud laugh, the kind of laugh that you hear in a grocery store and recognize, you know it is your great Aunty Clarice, or your mother's strange friend Bea because of the distinctive cackle. A head thrown back, full-on ab-muscle action recognizable ha-ha-ha-ha.

DH makes fun of me for my witchy cackle. I, on the other hand, like it.

We should all be so lucky to have such a belly-roll laugh each day.

Sun-Run

I will be offline for a while, as DH and I are heading to Flo-ree-da to see my parents. I can't wait to see them, and I'm looking forward to much better weather for a few days.

While I'm gone, I leave two little games for you to play. With! Prizes! My own version of the pay it forward game. The two winners will get a knitted something, shipped to them within the next 365 days. Knitting still takes me a while, and I have a project or two ahead of this. The knitted 'thing' will be of my choice of color, style, et cetera. Could be a scarf. Or a hat. Or a dishcloth. Or a lap blankie. (full size adult blankets take too freaking long) Winning means that you must be willing to give me your real name and address so that I may send you this knitted thing. The catch? If you win, you must also pass on two handmade somethings within the next year. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, heck, could even be a batch of cookies that you give to your neighbor.

The first is a caption competition. Finish the sentence below for the perfect caption for the following lovely picture.


Dick Cheney always looks constipated because_____________________.


The next one is a spot the difference. Tell me what the difference is between the following two pictures:








The two entries that most entertain me will win. I'm the judge, and my decisions will be final. It *is* MY blog, after all. You may enter either contest or just one or the other, whichever you prefer.

Best of luck! I'll be back towards the end of April.

Overheard, regarding the Superbowl...

A mother and daughter, walking in to a grocery store; the little girl was perhaps 4.

Child: "Why are we going?"

Mother: "Because they invited us to watch with them."

Child: "To watch a football game? Why?"


Don't worry, sweetie...I don't get it either.

;-)

A Dying Breed

While shopping with my mother recently, I was trying on shoes when I heard, from the next aisle over, "Ohh, I like them shoes."

I met my mother's eyes and ground my teeth, seeing my own expression mirrored on her face. Bad grammar! Ugh. We both laughed. "Y'know..." I said, "When you and Dad used to correct us, it drove me crazy. Now I want to smack people who don't speak properly."

"Nuh-uh," she drawled, too amused.

Among the many things we weren't allowed to say....'nuh-uh' was tops on the list, followed by 'yeah,' 'shut up,' 'dude,' 'ain't,' and 'like,' when used in the following manner..."so, I was, like, so tired and stuff, and she was like, no way!" Valley Girl-isms, 'gross' and 'totally' were verboten. (Yes, I grew up during the 1980s.) Swearing was out of the question, too. I never heard either parent swear until I was well over 21, and I never swore in front of either of them until long after I was married.

This insistence on correct speech was yet another square thing my parents did that made them so much stricter than my friend's parents, and lame, if you'd asked me when I was about 11. Now, however, I wish fervently that more people paid attention to good grammar and basic fundamentals.

I have to attend a business writing workshop, and I'm beyond annoyed by it; does it look to you like I needs help with my writin' skillz? A friend who is an educator pointed out to me that everyone could use a refresher course from time to time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if more people paid attention to the basics, this wouldn't be an issue.

I know that the 'rents laugh these days when my sisters and I are annoyed with bad grammar, poor diction, and the like. They chuckle to themselves, having proved to the sibs and I yet again that they knew what they were talking about.

Like, dude, that's totally annoying, fer sure.

Wisdom for the ages. Or not.

Seen on t-shirts at a local festival:

I'm out of my mind. Please leave a message.


and



Did you have an extra bowl of stupid this morning?




both of which entertained the hell out of me.

Wonder where that comes from.

My sister is visiting from New York City this weekend. She brought a friend, former roommate, and incidentally the woman who inspired me to be a blogger with her. On Saturday, as my sister and her friend prepared to take out the watercraft on the lake where the parents live, my dad was giving them a quick lesson on watercraft operation and safety. The friend had never been on one before. They're a pretty short learning curve, and the girls were off a quick few minutes later.

After they left, my father cleaned up the paraphenailia they'd left behind; long sleeve t-shirts, shoes, a bag with sunscreen in it, and stacked it neatly in a box that is bolted to the dock for that purpose alone.

The rest of us piled into the boat, and as we left the docks, I fussily re-arranged towels, drinks, sunscreen and other things brought on board. Dad teased me about being OCD. Gee, wonder where I get that from?

And I pay attention to this stuff.

Without a sense of humor, I doubt that I'd be able to survive. Even when the joke's on me, as long as there's some laughter, that's a good thing. I was doing some surfing, and I'm amused at myself yet again.

When I'm stumped for a blog post, or if I haven't seen/heard any news on a particular day, I'll head to my personalized version of Google, which pulls various wire stories that I've told it I want to see. Among the links to NPR and the New York Times, the BBC and CNN, are two gadgets with celebrity news. As if I don't get enough from the nearly-daily gander I take at sites like Perez and the Superficial.

Looking at Google yesterday, I was surprised to see a quote from Ashton Kutcher, who asserts that men are 'merely accessories.' This reversal of the roles from the stereotypical ornamental female is rare, so of course I clicked the link. I discovered, thanks to People.com, that Kutcher has written an essay which appears in this month's Harpar's Bazaar.

He rates the importance of men as somewhere less than shoes and somewhat more than handbags. Now this is the guy who brought us MTV's Punk'd, so I can't help but wonder if he's having a laugh with this piece. Without having read it in its entirety, I couldn't be sure.

As I sat and wondered about this, I realized how absurd it is that we all pay attention to this kind of stuff. I've often defended myself from critics of my celebrity news-watching with this; MY life seems a lot less fucked up, frankly, when I read about the antics of Brit-Brit, La Lohan, and Paris. After all, *I* haven't shaved my head or flashed anyone lately. Not to mention the fact that I've never been arrested, ever, for anything.

This celebrity news-watching is a completely separate thing from my fangirl silliness, because you don't see J & J in the tabloids, now, do ya? Nope. I wish that more pictures of them were published (of course) and that the mainstream media paid more attention to the show, but mostly I think that if they want their private lives to stay private, then they're pretty smart to stay out of the gossip rags. Besides, I freely admit how completely ridiculous my fangirly-ness is.

Anyway, I read Kutcher's essay and it is howlingly funny. Intentional or not, it doesn't much matter. Who'da thunk it, he's a good writer. Anytime I laugh out loud at the screen more than once whilst reading something, the writer is managing to hold my attention and is doing a good job, in my ever-so-humble.

Going to the chapel

...and we're gonna get married, going to the chapel of love!

A friend got married this weekend. Watching several of my high school friends with their spouses, or significant others, or just standing around the bar talking at the reception made me feel both sad and content. Sad, because we are all getting older. Someone reading this who is in their 50s or so would be annoyed with me, because we're all 30-something these days, and that isn't OLD unless you're a teenager. Content, because it is nice to see folks who I thought would never, ever, ever grow up doing just that. Sort of like, "well, I don't have to worry about *you* anymore, because that's settled."

Weddings usually make me cry. I missed the church ceremony of this weekend's wedding, which I am sorry about, but not too sorry because I don't know if I could have handled it in my current mental state.

I asked so many people so many times, "How ARE you?" wanting, of course, not the social pat answer that we usually give, "I'm fine" but getting not much more than that most of the time. I haven't seen many of these people since the last big wedding, which was I think in 2002. When we, people in general, not just my group of friends, gather at social events like this, so often we strive to be positive and upbeat when talking with old friends about what's going on in our lives, even if things aren't fantastic.

I wrote a post over on MySpace that should have probably been posted here about the walk that we took down memory lane a few days before the wedding, the shared language we have of "do-you-remembers" and the common experiences of our school days. These are old friends, some of them from middle school days, almost all of them from the same high school I attended. Scattered, now, from Arizona to Oh-hia-ia, with jobs diverse as can be imagined. But yet, with the commonality that we have of our youthful days, I honestly don't need to ask how they're doing, I can tell from a look in their eyes, a certain tilt to their smiles, decoding with ease the unspoken message.

I was honest and truthful when people asked how I'm doing; actually, each time someone asked me, "How ARE you?" I responded by saying, "I'm unemployed! *laugh* But all right. How are you?"

We talked about plans and dreams, goals and aspirations, kids, (who has them, who doesn't) cars, mortgages, houses, careers. What astonishes me, over and over again is that we're ADULTS, really, we're the grown-ups. I don't think of myself as an adult. I don't think of most of them as adults either. In my mind's eye, everyone remains perpetually about 17. Seeing them in person, then, is always a shock, because hey! No on really IS 17 anymore. When did that happen? How do the years slip away from us? Why isn't there a "pause" button for life?

I bought a dress to wear just about an hour before I left for the event, a silly set of circumstances that would only happen to me. I didn't need a new dress, but tagged along with a couple of friends just for the heck of it. I tried on sundresses, things that reminded me of 50's style party dresses, (it is true, nothing ever really goes out of style) and things that didn't fit, or fit me badly. Coming out of a dressing room, I saw a stunning light blue gown made of floaty sort of material hanging at a cash register, and I asked the salesgirl if they were holding it for someone. "No," she said, "We were looking for another size at another store." So I picked it up and checked the size, and wonder of wonders, it might fit me. When I tried it on, it was perfect. Everything else I'd tried on had been about $40, but of course this one was over $90. And a color that I have nothing else that will match it, no shoes, no purse, no wrap in case it gets cold.

So I wandered to the shoe department, and found the perfect strappy sandals to go along with it. More than $100 later, I was ready to party! It looked fantastic, though. I'm vastly entertained that the shoes bear the label "Jessica Simpson."

It was a late night, and I've had a slow start to the day. But the house is clean, the sun is shining, and the day calls out to me. Tomorrow is the first official day of my unemployment, and I have it planned so that I'm not sitting at home moping. I'm toying with the idea of going to a spiritual retreat up in New York state for a few days, as I try to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life. Seems like a good idea to go and meditate and reflect and plan. For now, however, I'm off to enjoy the sun while it lasts.

Listening to: Mix of Swedish pop including Per Gessel, Lisa Nilsson, Marie Fredrickson.

We Can Work It Out

In the 1980s, my mother was a huge Michael Bolton fan. She tortured my sisters and I for unspeakable hours by forcing us to listen to his music. I wasn't a fan then, and am still not a fan now.

Hearing his music on the radio, though, brings back memories of being about 13 and Mum blasting the music on a stereo that only played cassette tapes, and my mother and babysis singing at the top of their lungs. Me, I can sing. Decently well. Middlesis too. Mum and babysis? Not so much. I remember trying to suggest gently that maybe they ought to let Michael sing it himself, or better yet, that I had Def Leppard's "Hysteria" right here, really, I could pop it in the second cassette deck and play it right now, wouldn't everyone like that better? I knew I sure would.

As both sisters and I cruised around in an old Jeep that my dad has purchased as a summertime toy, babysis plugged her iPod in to the radio and announced that she was going to play her favorite song on the iPod, her mostest favoritest song on the whole 30-gig hard drive. Wait for it, she said, wait! Beginning a few seconds later were the first few cords of "How Can We Be Lovers If We Can't Be Friends." I am not at all surprised to find that I still remember every word. Nor am I surprised that babysis's singing skills haven't improved in California.


Babysis's poor friend B. He was with us, and subjected to all three of us singing along to the delightful Mr. Bolton at top volume. In case you've forgotten (and I am SO SORRY if you truly had for giving the dreadful song back to your memory) there's a quick 4-5 seconds in the song where the music stops and Bolton sings a cappella for just a second in that horrible voice that sounds like he's straining for every single note (seriously, dude, it is called breath control. Look in to it.) where he screeches, "We can work it out!"

That line, indeed the song's entire lyric, provide endless hours of fun for us, where we'll say the words to one another in very serious tones of voice, before we end up breaking down and rolling on the floor.

Again I say poor B. He watched this circus of his own free will for about 4 hours on Sunday. When he left, I asked if they thought we'd tortured him unfairly.

"Whatever, dude, we're more entertaining than any other three people I could name. Fuck, no," middlesis declared.

I love it that she's even more foul-mouthed than I am, and that both parents roll their eyes at her for such vulgarity rather than attempt to get her to clean up her act. And she's right. We are pretty darn funny. We entertain ourselves, anyway.

HOOKY DAY!!!

Because I am a very firm believer in caring for my own mental health, today I am taking a hooky day today to go skiing. See ya on the slopes!

Bought into the hype

I got an iPod nano for Christmas. I told DH for about 2 years that yes, I'd like to have one, but only if it didn't cost $300. I don't like to admit to my own materialism, so it pains me a bit to admit this, but I have hundreds of CDs. I spent several hours on New Year's Day loading music into iTunes (which I have yet to figure out...damn confusing, that program is) and there are over 500 songs stored on the nano, with another approx 1.5 gigs of space left for still more music, and perhaps another 50 or so CDs that I already own that I want to add, plus about 70 albums that I don't own that I'd like to add. Old stuff, new stuff, things I know I can borrow/steal from friends and other stuff I will have to break down and actually buy in the iTunes store, which I have not even begun to explore yet. I'm having enough trouble with iTunes and loading actual CDs that I purchased, without getting into things to download. I won't get into my confusion with iTunes here, but I do have one question for the interweb....what happens when you have no more space on your iPod but you continue to load music into iTunes? How does iTunes decide what does and does not get sync-d to the iPod?

The iPod makes me insanely happy. I put most of the Swedish music I own on it, plus a few embarrassing things from the late 80s/early 90s that I'm cringing over, but each song that plays when I set it to random shuffle makes me smile.

Worst cringe-worthy disc I loaded into iTunes? Gotta be Nelson, "After The Rain", which I freely admit is terrible, awful, horrible music, but makes me laugh every time I hear it and so can not be all bad. When I was 16, my friend Val met them, and we played their cassette over and over until it wore out. DH actually bought the music on CD, so I guess that means we've both got bad taste in music from time to time. Every time I hear the opening strains of "(Can't Live Without Your) Love and Affection", I'm taken back to those days of blasting music on purpose to irritate our parents, uncontrollable giggling, obsessing over dumb boys, and the excessive amounts of heavy metal I listened to until I damaged my hearing. Thankfully, I no longer own the more deafness-inducing things like Metallica, Ratt, Megadeath, Anthrax, and shudder, shudder, Poison. Strangely, iTunes classifies Nelson as "Metal" along with Def Leppard and Nickelback. WTF is up with that?

Perhaps the next most embarrassing thing I loaded on the iPod is Limp Bizkit's "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot-Dog Flavored Water" which is also abysmal, but I like to run to "Rollin" and "Livin It Up".

I am worried about doing further damage to my hearing with this wonderful new toy. I have caught myself turning it up while at the gym to block out super-annoying conversations taking place around me, and when I check the volume, I'm surprised at how high it is. I set the max volume setting yesterday but found myself disabling it in the gym this morning because I couldn't hear what was playing.


I have to admit to indulging my OCD as well...it seemed to me that loading music on to iTunes was a great opportunity to go through all of the CDs we own and find the cases that don't have discs, the discs that don't have cases, to put away the discs that had been stacked up when we removed them from the player and never returned to proper cases, and alphabetize the whole collection.

I discovered last night as I was alphabetizing that DH owns more than 35 Jimmy Buffett CDs. Did you know that Jimmy had released more than 30 CDs? I think to be precise that DH owns 39 or 40 Buffett discs, including imports and some awful stuff he did in Nashville in the 70s. I've chosen to only load very selected amounts of Buffet, things that I find very soothing.

I've written before about the strangeness of our shared music collection....Ani DiFranco next to Journey next to Rascal Flats next to Tori Amos and Dave Matthews band. During our dating years when we didn't live together, we would each buy a copy of a disc we liked and as a result we have two copies of several things....a Pittsburgh guitarist named Tony Janflone, a pop star who never really took off, Amanda Marshall, Harry Connick Jr.'s 25, and Buffett's Banana Wind. I'm sure there are a few that I've forgotten, but I'm not sure what to do with the duplicates. Leave them in the collection and when I want a CD in the car's CD changer then I still have one? Get rid of them for store credit at a local used music store or sell on eBay?

Another facet of my OCD is that I will get a song stuck in my head that I want stuck in my head (meaning I like the song) and I will listen to it over and over and over until some mysterious thing makes me move on to something else. Currently it is the Barenaked Ladies "Wind it Up" off the the Are Me CD, which was a birthday present. The song is much better than another pop song that's all over the radio (I'm sure you've heard it) with the same name. I've known about the Ladies for a while, but obsessively listening to "Wind it Up" on the iPod reminds me that they're really, really clever songwriters. Hearts on fire you'll learn/end up with heartburn...Yes I'm out of line/but you're out of your mind. Those are just two lines that I think are funny, but the whole album is full of little one liners that you might not hear the first or second time through but might make you burst out laughing at inappropriate times. Not that that has happened to me, no. "Wind it Up" is about a messy breakup, but besides being pretty darn clever is really a fantastic rock song.

I've never thought about what makes me listen to something obsessively and then stop listening or move on to something else, but it happens all the time. I'll even hear snippets of whatever my current obsession is when I wake up in the middle of the night. Most of the time that doesn't bug me much, when I'm able to go back to sleep. Seems, however, that the older I get, the crazier I get, and that is perhaps not such a good thing. :-) I think the fact that I am able to worry about being nuts is a good sign....if I was truly a nut, I wouldn't be worried about it, right? Right?!?

The Wisdom of Bumper Stickers (Yes, Again)

From time to time, I see a bumper sticker that makes me laugh out loud. I've shared these once or twice before, mostly because there just isn't enough funny in the world. Ready?

I'm not anti-Bush; I'm pro-intelligence.

HA!

Something IS out there

I heard a very quick blurb on NPR as part of the hourly news update yesterday about gamma radiation coming from space, which scientists first discovered during cold war times. Short gamma bursts are credited with being colliding stars, but these longer bursts seem to indicate that they are maybe from intelligent life far away in the galaxy. I couldn't find a link to the story, on NPR or on space.com, but conspiracy theorists will no doubt delight in this news.

On Heartbreak

Someone close to me is going through a terrible break-up. I'm thinking about the times when my own heart has been broken, and how I dealt. Never well, I can tell you that. Since I'm in the mood to share a story of woe, (a la Scaryduck) I thought I'd tell a story of a break-up of mine, but not a single one is funny or even particularly memorable.

There's the Swede named Johan who really broke my heart, but here's what I remember about how and why we broke up: nothing. This happened in 1991, so that has a lot to do with why I don't remember, it has been 15 years ago. I think he stopped calling and I asked why and he totally just blew me off and I was crushed. I kept a pretty extensive journal at the time, but re-reading it kinda confirms that yeah, it just fell apart. There are a bunch of references in the journal over about a 2 month period about what an asshole I thought he was, but nothing about why it ended. Re-reading the journal was fun, though.

Then the Canadian named.....yeah, I'm not giving his name, I don't harbor any vague feelings of dislike to him in the same way that I still do, for heaven only knows what reason, towards Johan. Anyway. The Canadian boy; we broke up because we were both going home to our respective countries after spending a year in Sweden as exchange students. His hometown in Ontario and mine in Ohio aren't really that far apart, but for once, practicality and reason won out over hormones. Of all of the ex-s in my past (and there aren't really all that many) The Canadian Boy is the ONLY one who I wonder what he's up to and what he became when he grew up. Not because I want him back (hellllllooooo, happily married for 6 years now) but because I'm genuinely curious as to what he decided on as a career and what he is doing with his life. Most of my other ex-s, I know what they're doing or where they are. You'd think I'd Google The Canadian Boy to find out, and I have Googled him, but I've never found him and I've taken that as a sign that I really am not meant to know.


Finally, there was a fella with a very odd name, that according to him had some deep meaning to do with faerie, and he was a deep and dark mysterious writer. This is actually funny, now that I'm thinking back on it. He had written an unpublished vampire novel, it was about 1992 or 1993 and Anne Rice's "The Vampire Lestat" and goth culture were huge, huge, huge. So dark and mysterious writer guy made a big deal of "letting" you read his novel. He let me read it, and at the time, I thought it was awesome. Now, I think it is better than some of the dreck that I've read lately and if he'd made any effort whatsoever, he probably could have published it. But I digress. Dark and Mysterious writer man really swept me off my feet. He was older, gorgeous, and soooo intellectual. We spent hours sitting in Perkins, smoking, drinking coffee, and discussing everything under the sun. We were soooooooooo cool. Then, after about 3 months, he broke it off, telling me that I was destined to be alone for my whole life, and that when I was 45 and alone and bitter, he would laugh at my sad life. Isn't that evil and mean and now more than ten years later very funny? I was a mess for about a month, lost about 10 pounds and was a recluse from my friends that whole time. I managed to win him back for a brief week or two several months later, and then I broke it off because I began to realize what a fucking idiot he was. Last I heard....he was arrested for shoplifting a pack of batteries and was working construction in southern Ohio. Who is the bitter one? Who? Imagine my surprise, then, when I googled him just now to see if I could confirm or deny the fact that he spent some time in jail and I discovered that he's a grad student in Nebraska and has won a teaching award. Wonder if he's hitting on cute young co-eds, that was so his style once upon a time. His bio on the university's website does not mention his marital status, but I can't imagine anyone on this planet putting up with his insanity for long enough to live with him, let alone marry him. His bio is full of the pseudo-intellectual doublespeak he once accused me of writing in a college term paper. It doesn't translate well to the written word here, but I find this really funny. If I wasn't sure that he'd vindictively try to out my secret identity, I'd link his bio here to share a laugh with y'all.


To me, the only way to deal with heartbreak is to take time. And to laugh when you can. I'm hoping to be able to help the person in my life who is hurting. What's your best advice for dealing with heartbreak?

Make me laugh

I was doing some catch-up reading last night, reading some blogs that I have not been able to check for a while (hello, Marianne, Scary, Misty, Julia) and laughing out loud at some of their entries. Which had me spinning off in another direction of thought.

Once upon a time, between the ages of 13 and maybe 20, whilst hanging with friends, I would laugh so hard my stomach would hurt. When my sister and I would spend time with friends who were brother and sister in a town maybe 45 minutes away from home, we’d often get the giggles so severely that we couldn’t stop. That rolling, belly laugh, gasping for breath seems so distant now. I had a bit of a taste of it when I was visiting my sister in New York two weeks ago, which made parting from her all that much more difficult. I’d forgotten, somehow, in the months that she’s lived in NYC how much fun she is, and how much I miss her on a daily basis. You push that sort of thing to the back of your mind so that you don’t dwell on it, you know.

Anyway, back to making me laugh. Everyone’s entries that I was reading had a cute turn of phrase, something too funny that made me laugh out loud and made my DH make faces at me as he was doing some serious reading of insurance policies. Scary used the phrase “chunder monkey”, which I’m not even sure what that means and it makes me laugh. (uh, yeah. Urban Dictionary says “someone who vomits a lot.” Shoulda known, with Scary.) And then there was Julia, suggesting that everyone who disagreed with her to, “eat my fuck.” Ha! And hahahahahaha! God, I thought that was funny.

Dooce has a tag “how to charm me” but this is more along the lines of “how to make me chuckle”. I think for simplicity’s sake, however, I’ll just tag it “funny”.

What makes you laugh?