Category Archives: true life 2012

Spooktacular

Sandy, the impending Frankenstorm, is bad for all kinds of reasons. It’s also annoying, in that I couldn’t’t hang the ghosts I made last year out on the porch. I’ve realized I can hang them in my office window and light them up so they look super-creepy from outside. Bonus: the only window I could hang them up in is the window where Ghost Cat makes his appearances.

It’s only a matter of time before I forget that they’re in there and scare myself witless.

If it’s the worst thing that happens during the storm, I’ll be fine with that.
We’ve stashed the stuff in the yard, filled the water containers, tested the emergency radio, checked on the strategic bourbon reserve, charged the kindles, and all that other stuff that Native Floridians are born knowing how to do.

I suspect at the very least we’re in for a lengthy power outage. The most fun part of any power outage is this:

We have two bathrooms. The one downstairs is below the level of the city sewer connection so it has an electric pump. When the power goes out, the 1st thing I do is grab a flashlight and go downstairs and pull that door shut so that I don’t forget and use that toilet.

Later, I forget I did this and go downstairs for candles or one thing or another, see the shut door and scare myself witless wondering what sort of ghost or serial killer snuck in and pulled the door shut. It’s a pocket door, it can’t just blow shut.

I’ve usually just scared myself witless happening upon the lifesize sarcophagus at the bottom of the basement stairs. The one that’s always there.

Then I remember why the door is shut.

Then I laugh at myself.

Then I do it again 2 or 3 more times over the course of the evening.

I do this every time. Every. Time.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

photo.JPG

As I was walking back from my local farmer’s market this morning, drivers kept honking and waving. Pedestrians and cyclists were also happy to see me, it seemed.

I was thinking, “Wow, the neighborhood is super-extra-friendly today!”

It was only when I was close to home and a woman waiting to cross at the light accused me of being a muslim-loving Holocaust denier that I realized my neighborhood probably wasn’t effusively excited about my fab cherry tomato haul. They’re pretty great tomatoes, but I suspect it’s the large Obama yard sign I was carting home that was catching their attention. I’m not the sharpest cheddar in the cheesebox before I’ve had all of my morning coffee.

Like a Lovecraftian heroine, I find myself coated in slime


[embedded video: coughs & sneezes]

I can’t recall ever being sneezed on. Not by another human being, anyway. Horses, dogs and cats? Yes. Another person? No.

Not until Friday night. I was minding my own business, sitting in the front row of a packed concert hall, listening to Neil Gaiman speak at George Mason University’s Fall for the Book Festival, when the gentleman seated behind me suddenly blasted the back of my head with a great honking snootful of mucous.

These things happen. Sure. Yes. Absolutely. No malicious intent. Just a sneeze.

His wife made a half-hearted attempt to discretely wipe some of the snot from my hair. Or maybe she was just trying to rub it in, thinking I wouldn’t notice. I’m not entirely certain, as I was trying to ignore them and pay attention to the person speaking at the podium a few feet in front of me.

Here is a dramatic re-enactment of the aftermath of this event, as I now remember it.


[embedded video: ghostbusters]

Then it happened again on Sunday night while Michael Chabon was talking.

Then it happened again while I was listening to David Byrne and Dave Lowery speak at a Smithsonian event Monday night.

Oddly, this doesn’t outrages because of the yuck factor or the amount of time I’ve spent washing my hair this weekend. Accidents happen. This annoys me because I’m once again on a very high dose of a very unpleasant drug designed to cut my immune system off at the knees and at each of the 3 public events I chose as calculated risks there was a single solitary sneezing guy – and each time, that guy was seated right behind me? How is that possible? What are the odds?

I guess it would be weirder if it had been the same guy each time.

I’ve upended my life to minimize the amount of interaction I have with germyness for the next few weeks. I’ve stocked up on hand sanitizer. I’ve rearranged my life to avoid Metro and small children and teeming crowds as much as humanly possible. And yet? Old dudes with weaponized nasal passages seem to be homing in on me like Jack Ryan after the Red October.

To be fair, avoiding Metro and small children and teeming crowds is pretty much my avocation, but I’m too tired to work up a funny line of persecution and inconvenience and indignation, so let’s just pretend that in the day-to-day, my favorite activity is taking small children to big events via Metro, where we lick the handrails and seatbacks to pass the time along the way.

I’m lacking a punchline today. Here, have a sneezy baby panda, instead:


[embedded video: sneezing panda]

update: comments are being harshly moderated to eliminate any links to sneeze fetish sites because, although my moderation criteria is pretty liberal, some of the stuff that’s been left in the comments crosses some serious lines. Also: yuck.

Only 43 days until Halloween

There’s so much annoying stuff like life and school that’s always threatening to interfere with the highlight of the year: Halloween. I mean, really.

I will not be deterred. I’ve been contemplating a theme for months, although I haven’t had an easy time making a definitive choice.

I don’t know if I can be as ambitious as I was with 2010’s 31 Ghosts, but still, October 2012 needs a theme and Halloween is too generic.

I was thinking witches or werewolves, probably because my Tivo, Overlord II, keeps recording The Craft and Ginger Snaps every single time they’re on. A witch-themed October runs the risk of aggravating me because most movies about witches are filled with misogynistic bullshit or superfuckingannoying new agers, and that will distract from the fun. Drunken ranting mixed with critical theory? Never ends well.

I thought I’d covered Werewolves, but I was mistaken. I considered it in 2009, but clearly didn’t get very far.

Then I thought, what the hell? why not Witchcraft and Werewolves?

Just for the record, I don’t think this is a binary topic, Witchcraft OR Werewolves. I think there’s an interesting intersection of the werewolf and witchcraft genres in movies (or TV shows or books or graphic novels) where people transform into non-lupine creatures. Come on, you know there are going to be tangents and random selections made by Overlord II and things like that, anyway, so let’s just build in a little flexibility into the system and be done with it. There are loads of great examples, if you don’t believe me:

Wolverine? Maybe.

Maybe not. Probably not, because that was a terrible movie.

Cat People? Yes!

Plus other movie examples I’ve forgotten in the time it took me to type the last sentence and look up the links to both the 1942 and 1982 versions of Cat People and then spend a few minutes contemplating that Ronin Tunney is the girl in The Craft, which I looked up on IMDB a few minutes ago when I linked my earlier reference to it, and Robin Tunney looks familiar because she’s the boss on The Mentalist, which is a deeply stupid show I can’t stop watching even though I find Patrick Jane incredibly unsympathetic and the entire premise of the show a farce and the repetitive incidental music annoys the hell out of me and why the fuck has that show been on for FIVE seasons? This is the SIXTH season? Does the devil own Bruno Heller’s soul? Apparently not, since he was one of the producers of the failed Bionic Woman reboot. Not even, he was only the producer of the unaired pilot of the doomed series. But still, what the hell?