ila: my across-state move sucked balls, so i can't even imagine how much mo
Kimberly: Woo, almost a month late! My first car was a '98 Dodge Neon. I got
Lauren: I don't know why but I'm always good at shutting this kind of thing do
Lauren: Yay house! twitter tells me you're still working on it, but even so! (
You know, I may love, love, love to watch sports on television, but that love is tempered by my hate, hate, hate for the commercials that air during sporting events. Particularly the ones that air during National Football League games.
You know what I'm talking about. Even if you've never seen an NFL game in your life, you already know what these ads are all about. Between slow-motion montages of trucks bouncing over rocky fields and gritty men pulling off dusty work gloves, we get the phallic icy blue bullet train of "frost-brewed" Coors Lite and an endless parade of chumps desperately urging us to "man up" with a bottle of Miller Lite. Occasionally, all these elements get jammed into one explicitly masculine tableau depicting a dude with salt-and-pepper hair sipping beer and tinkering with a vintage truck as a bluesy guitar playfully wails in the background and a confident voiceover reminds us that we've always stood by what we wanted, so why would we let a little thing like Erectile Dysfunction stand in our way?
I read this article by Julie Klausner last week, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. That's, like, time, man. A lot of it. A lot of time to spend thinking about one article.
Have you read it yet? No? Go ahead and give it a whirl. When you come back, I'll have a confession and some thoughts waiting for you.
...
Hand to God, my father — my rational, mathematically-minded, hard science-loving, fiscally conservative Republican father — swears he saw a UFO.
He was 17, and on the tractor. He'd just made a turn when he looked up and saw something in the sky straight ahead of him. It was large, silver, oval-shaped, and perfectly smooth. It descended silently just behind the woods on the north line of the property. When my dad went back there later to check the area out, he found nothing.
My grandfather didn't believe him. He likely accused him, in his particular parlance, of having been "smokin' dat pots" before seeing the mysterious craft. But my dad is certain it was there.
There are other strange tales from the farm. My aunt tells of seeing unexplained lights in the woods and around the property. And my hardened, work-worn great-grandmother used to take a perverse delight in telling my dad and his sister stories about the ghosts of Native Americans who were killed as they huddled in a hole in a nearby field when the Great Fire of 1881 swept over the land.
Something tells me she embellished a bit.
Hi. You look nice today. Is that a new shirt? It's really working for you. Is, is uh... are you doing something different with your hair? Parting it on the other side, maybe? Yeah? I like your face. Good job with that. Good job having that face.
[Clears throat, drags toe across floor]
Some rain we're having, huh?
[Avoids eye contact]
Uh.
So, I've been gone a little while? Partially because I unofficially participated in the Bloggers' Day of Silence last Friday in support of For Japan with Love (and by "unofficially" I mean I didn't tell anyone I was), and partially because I've been working on the same damn post for over a week now. I just keep pouring words into the post draft window, and whenever I try to stop and edit them down, I end up adding more. I've read it over so many times that it doesn't even make sense to me anymore. I try to scan through and all I see is DERP DERP DERP DERPA DERPA DERP. They say the hardest part is admitting you have a problem and, well: I think I might need help, you guys. Someone please come over here and hit "publish" for me.
Confession: I don't watch movies. In fact, I hate movies. Whenever anyone asks me if I want to watch a movie, my immediate response is to punch that person in the face. Maybe you think I'm exaggerating. The beau has had his nose broken five times.
All this is to say I don't know much about movies, or the celebrities who are cast in them. Or celebrities in general, really. Which naturally leads us, as it does, to the one celebrity I seem to be marginally conscious of: Brooklyn Decker. It's appalling to think that there was once a time in the not-so-distant past when I did not know a person named Brooklyn Decker even existed! Fortunately, the intense kinship I felt with her during the brief half hour I thought her name was Lyn Decker has forever seared her name indelibly into my squishy grey matter. This has helped, too:
I know what you're thinking: that cover? Again? Seriously? This is the third time you've slapped that thing up on your blog. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were fishing for new male readers. What gives, man?
What gives? I finally read that article, man. In Esquire. The one about Brooklyn Decker.
And guys, it's bad.
Whenever I see a a "SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR" street sign — which is often — I assume they're talking about Radar from the old T.V. series M*A*S*H.
"Did she just say she wants a juicehead gorilla?" the beau asked, in reference to Snooki.1
"Yes. Yes, she did," I replied.
"Fucking Jersey. At least they have a place where they can congregate," he muttered.
Two years after everyone else first furrowed their brows and uttered WTF? at their television screens, we finally watched Jersey Shore for the first time. I told you I'm slow to adapt to pop culture. I will say this: that show boasts a very high number of people I would be horrified to actually meet in real life. Like, as in all of them. Clearly, I'm going to have to start recording it.
In much more timely news, I AM ON THE COVER OF THE FEBRUARY ISSUE OF ESQUIRE MAGAZINE!
When I was six, my parents and I moved back to the U.S. after being stationed in Germany for three years. What followed was a sincere attempt on the part of our extended family to reassimilate us into American pop culture, where we rightfully belonged. My aunt actually used her brand-new camcorder to film my parents watching television in the living room of her suburban New Jersey home, as if they were the subjects of an anthropological study of people raised in cultural isolation. I saw the footage years later: "Here's a car commercial," my aunt narrates off-camera as a classically 1980s car commercial featuring a loud, obnoxious voice personality appears on the screen. "Huh," my mother mutters, arms crossed on the couch. My dad looks on in bemusement. And six-year-old me is writhing around spastically on the carpet in front of them, pulling every amateur acrobatic trick in the book, because OMG, I have an audience and look at me look at me watch.
This is inspired by Angie, whose recent post about an Urban Outfitters email had me going "Yessssssss." It also made me recall this one time, back in 2009, when an Urban Outfitters email caused me to write a long, ranty letter. That letter was originally posted on my old private LiveJournal blog, but I dug it up and reposted it over here to share. I hope you enjoy!
******************
Hello, Urban Outfitters.
Now, before I begin, let me just get it out into the open: I like you just fine, especially if you’re on sale. I have bought many a fine discounted top and/or sweater from you. I have even gone so far as to consider purchasing your underwear (but ultimately decided they are more suited for a model addicted to heroin). What I am saying is that, you and me, we are cool. We don’t have to talk all the time. I come back after a few months, maybe a year, and there you are. We just get back into it like old times. We're cool. dig?
But then you sent me an email, and I opened it. And, UO: we have got to talk.
Like many other 30-year-olds, my concept of a great night out increasingly involves making a pot of white cheddar shells and cheese and staying in to watch House Hunters. I've always been slow to take to new trends -- it took me five years to agree to having a cell phone and I finally opened a MySpace account only after all of my friends had already moved to Facebook -- but now I am positively backsliding into utter cultural oblivion, especially as it pertains to current popular music.
This naturally has a lot to do with the fact that on those few occasions when I venture outside of the house at night, it's to dark wood-panelled pubs with names like "The Pig and Gribble" or "The Hanged Goat" instead of fog-machine-clouded hookup bars with names like "Sharkeeze Lounge and Vomitorium" or "Ronnie's House of Leering and $1 Well Shots." The kind of places I go to these days seem to be populated by sad intellectuals with Elvis Costello glasses who are perpetually sighing into their artisan beers, places whose jukeboxes seem to be stocked solely with Joy Division albums -- places in which there is nary a bare midriff nor a hot new club track to be found. So I guess I can understand why it took me a full year to realize that the Black Eyed Peas had released an album in 2009 with such widely-known and widely-played songs on it as "Imma Be" and "Boom Boom Pow."
Full disclosure: I downloaded these particular tracks and commenced trying to reconnect with the Youth of Today. Full disclosure, round two: my brain has taken a liking to these songs, particularly "Boom Boom Pow." Furthermore, my brain has decided without consulting me first that "Boom Boom Pow" is quite obviously the Best Song of All Time. So much so that it must play it repeatedly, with no advance warning, and often in undesirable settings such as at my department's team meeting and during my appointment with the gynecologist.
