name games, part two

so here's my secret (which isn't really a secret because i'll tell anyone who'll listen): i want to have another baby, like right now. little miss is seven months old, and i always knew i wanted to pop out the kiddies really closely together for several reasons. not the least of which being that i can finally get the boob job i've always wanted when my body is done incubating my offspring, and by boob job i mean reduction. i want those bad boys downsized, lifted, and tightened so that no matter what i'm doing they always stay in the same place, and also so that i can wear a regular shirt/bathing suit/dress without looking like a porn star/hooker on her way to work.

right, so b's all for this plan (and what husband wouldn't be) except for one thing, we still live in a one bedroom apartment. yes, me, b, little miss, and monster all in one little tiny apartment. adding a new fetus to the mix might make b's head explode. and since i'm not ready to be a single mother i have to just give it some time. although i make it a point to talk to b about babies at least once a day so he doesn't think it was all a phase and i got over it.

moving along, since i can't really talk about baby name stories with b unless i'm currently knocked up, i talk with my cousin who happens to be equally as babybrained as i am. since i'm so intrigued by the fine line between an unusual name and a ridiculous name, i thought i'd share some of the more, um, unique ones we've heard. not to be a hypocrite, because i know i've said before that it's really hard to judge parents for what they name their kids, but sometimes i think that pointing out some of these examples is really just a motivator to help keep myself in check. but i want to say, in all fairness, that i sincerely do feel bad for these kids, and some of the parents.

1. this one came to me courtesy of my mother, a first grade teacher. it's the story of a young, immigrant couple who had a baby girl. the hospital promptly labeled the plastic crib with a pink card that said 'female.' the naive parents thought that in america, the hospitals name your baby for you. so female (pronounced fe-Mal-ay) became the child's legal name.

2. then there's the poor kid who's mom has an awful sense of humor. his real name is something like benjamin mark but she's only taught him that his name is 'beema.' yes, beema, as in short for beemer, as in BMW. so apparently the kid is five years old and doesn't know his real name, and mom insists on using beema. in my opinion, she should have just named him that from the jump and it might not be so bad if there weren't an ordinary name to fall back on.

3. oh yes, my list would not be complete without little 'trezir', as in 'mom doesn't know how/doesn't care how to spell treasure correctly.' trezir seems to be the only one in his (yes, HIS) family who lost the name game, he has two older sisters, nicole and annette.

with all that fresh in my mind, i asked my cousin what she thought about the name barnaby, not barny, just barnaby, for a boy. sure it's not the most common, but it's not like a total joke either, right? i guess i have plenty of time before i really have to go there. my point is that i hope my attraction to different sounding names isn't going to be scarring my kids forever and ever. or at least that they end up in a school where only the adults talk about their weird names and that the other kids don't beat them up because they all have weird names too.

a message to the creepy maintenance man wearing a blue wool sweater in 85 degree weather who has treats in his pants

dear lone english speaking tor view village maintenance man, please stop using your whisper voice to try to lure my dog over to you for treats.

sir, not only does my dog has severe sensitive stomach issues that you cannot possibly be aware of, producing mass amounts of doggie vomit and diarrhea from one single milkbone, but your approach is unsettlingly similar to a child molester hunting for prey.

if you were normal and not in any way scary, i might be nice and bring one of monster's special dietary treats outside and give it to you to give to him. but you'd have to really, really convince me that you're not having sick and unnatural fantasies about my dog, which you are clearly not capable of.

oh sir, i see the gleam in you eye, and the corner of your mouth turn in a sly smile when you see my furry friend walking by. even when we're over a hundred yards away, across the street, you follow him with your eyes, one hand shading them from the sun to get a better view, and slowly start walking in our direction. your false attempts to be disarming 'can i give the doggie a trrreeeeaaaaattt?' send chills up my spine. what's worse is that monster knows you as the 'treat guy' and so gets excited, irregardless of his imminent bowel discomfort. poor little guy has no notion of what you'd really do to him if you could get your hands on him, bribing him with dry, crumbly cookies.

no, my monster is way too innocent to be corrupted by your unbridled desire for doggie rape, and i'd like to keep it that way. so from now on, sir, please keep your treats in your pants for another victim and allow us to enjoy our morning walk without your sinister motives clouding the air.

help, i could use somebody...(a real person, that is)

this afternoon, i realized that there a few questions i have that, if answered, i would be able to rest much easier. so i call to you, blogland, to hopefully supply me with some piece of mind:

1. if a bathroom/tub cleaner makes my eyes water and the back of my throat burn, is it unsafe to give my baby a bath in a tub that was just cleaned with said cleaner, or does it just mean that it works really, really well?

2. is it possible that the non-english-speaking maintenance workers at my apartment complex have some kind of special caller id that flashes 'angry psycho' in their native tongue when i call (six times) to get my air conditioner fixed and that's the real reason why they never pick up?

3. is it possible for a computer tard like me to find help on blogger about that stupid word verification that's fucking with comments being posted on my blog? i've gotten several (exactly four) reports of it preventing comments from being accepted, so naturally i spent a solid eight minutes browsing the blogger help links only to become convinced that blogger is totally self-aware and has no real live people involved in any of it's decision making processes. which prompts me to ask, what can i bribe an electronic entity with to allow me to collect comments like the comment whore that i am?

if anyone out there can help with any of the above and at the same time share how you made it past the demon blogger regulator on the comments link, please, please spread your knowledge.

disclaimer: i can only offer payment of one randomly selected, slightly chewed baby/dog toy for any useful information.

any given sunday

for lack of anything legitimately interesting to write about today, i'd like to share the conversation b and i had last night, mostly because i think that anything he says is hilarious so it's nice to let him make the funny for me. the following discussion takes part sunday evening, as we were watching the third game in the yankees/red sox series:

b: OH SHIT! did you just see that?

me: what?

b: what'shisname just fucking STOLE home!

me: (looking up from making grocery list) all i see is pettitte's mouth hanging open like he's trying to catch a fly or something.

b: pettitte's so old he needs a cane to get out to the mound. his slow ass was asking for someone to show him up like that.

me: when is youkilis going to give that poor rat he drapes over his chin a break? i mean, i know he shaved it for his kids charity a few years ago, but unless he plans to do that every few months, why is it back? if he's good enough to bat over .600 (even if it is still april) he should know that not one woman alive actually wants to snuggle up to that thing.

b: i know, i need a goatee like i need a second butthole, which is not at all.

____

b: so do you think it's wrong that i hate on twitter even though i might be the only one?

me: no, you should feel free to hate on anything you want. i mean, i tried twitter and within 24 hours realized that it was way too depressing to sit and type about things that i'm doing for no one to read.

b: yeah, sometimes i feel like 'fuck it, there always has to be at least one voice of dissent, right?'

me: i think twitter is like that restaurant where the servers are all mean to you on purpose because you're supposed to think it's witty and original, when that concept is really only entertaining to a specific crowd.

b: what the...? there's a place where the waiters talk shit to you?

me: yeah, not around here, i think it's in like chicago or something. whatever, i just heard about it somewhere.

b: if a waiter ever pulled that shit with me i'd be all 'who the fuck are you calling me fat for eating greasy burgers and cheese fries and twenty gallons of coke? oh, and do you have cheesecake here too?'

____

me: can the guy from the optimum commercials get with the chick from the progressive commercials and go somewhere to annoy each other to death already?

b: i hope they go to the same place that the douchebags who make car and cell phone commercials will end up. those bastards promise you buckets of happiness and bags of gold and then have 300 teeny tiny words and the bottom of the screen explaining how they can legally lie to you.

____

me: monster, barking at nothing will not distract me from the fact that you just dropped a horrendous stink bomb on me.

b: but what about him compulsively licking his junk and then coming up to give you lots of kisses?

finis.

to pop or not to pop

b and i were recently musing about how annoying the pop performers of today are. and we know all about them of course because we are thirty and still occasionally will tune in for an ep of mtv's real world/road rules challenge. i mean, come on, these people are so trashtastic and narcissistic that it makes for great trainwreck tv. needless to say, the commercials for the new hannah montana movie/soundtrack/concert and other such acts that air during these programs have been subjected to our cries of 'does anyone listen to good music anymore?'

then we realized that they were perfect for their target audience, which no longer includes us. and i'm fine with that. i'd rather clean my house while blasting some mgmt or muse. but i'd sweat the shit out of hannah montana for little miss when she's 12 because that's still better than her smoking up with the rebellious 17 year old boy down the street.

another notable mention here is this kid asher roth. every time i hear his retarded voice claiming 'i'm the champ-I-ON of beer PONG' it makes me want to kill myself. but after i quickly change the channel and my anger subsides, i see that he's just talking about those silly college days that we've all had. except that he's still allowed to talk about them because he's living them. if he actually were my age and singing this crap, then he'd deserve the severe beating i so badly want him to get (just not from me, i'm kind of weak).

this in turn brings me to a conversation i had with b's sister bridget, who was born way after the new kids on the block phenomenon (the original movement, not this lame reunion bullshit). i was explaining to her how when i was in fifth grade, you had to have those over sized buttons of your favorite new kid, the ones that had the little eisel on the back so you could stand it up like a picture frame. and you would bring these buttons into school each day and arrange them on your desk to show your undying devotion to joey or jordan or whoever it was.

my point with this is that if i can evolve from a time where i practiced the oh-oh-AHH-o-oh dance to a song called 'the right stuff' in my backyard to my more refined musical taste of today, then maybe the pop was a necessary right of passage. although, i did also smoke weed out of a dented foster's keg can (my mom actually drank that shit) out my bedroom window when i was 15, with my 13 year old brother, so who am i to judge.

blog, we have to talk...

i'm sure you've gotten a little suspicious the past few days, blog. and as it turns out, you have good reason to suspect something afoot. i wanted you to hear it from me first, i've been cheating on you blog.

i have a new blog that i've been spending a lot of time with lately. it's younger, has a fresh new color scheme, and we have different things to talk about together. i mean, i don't want to lose what you and i have, because i really do enjoy your company. but there are some needs that you can't fill for me.

don't even play like you're jealous, because that will just force me to run off with new blog and leave you behind. we might even have a threesome with my possessed computer. hopefully we'll all get taken over by skynet and christian bale will have to come and save us (me) from the machines.

but in all seriousness, blog, i think this can be the beginning of a very diplomatic open relationship. who knows, with some of the pressure taken off of you, you could really blossom into a funnier, wittier version of yourself.

all i ask is that you give it a try.

thanks, blog, for understanding. you'll always have a special place in my heart.

safety first

the moon has moved about half-way through it's cycle, so that must mean it's time for me to prepare myself for the task before me. yes, i'm talking about going into to work today, that strange place where i move in slow motion (slower than usual) and it takes every ounce of my being concentrating on not getting hurt every second that i'm there.

professional kitchens are set up for disasters. add one hapless klutz like me to the big, scary equipment, knives a-plenty, and the fire balls that the older-than-dirt gas stove makes whenever you try to turn a burner on, and you've got a psa for what not to do while attempting to cook.

so today i thought i'd remind myself of some of my past mistakes in hopes of not repeating them. since i barely ever work any more, i have to be extra vigilant about keeping my clumsiness in check.

let's see, i definitely fell head first into one of those mega-sized garbage cans and did the whole cartoon-esque legs wiggling above the rim for help move. of course this happened in the summer so that the bruise on my arm that looked like a hand print was visible and forced me to say 'no, my boyfriend is not the violent type, i just fell in a garbage can' eliciting that sideways head-tilt from people who aren't sure if i need a domestic abuse hotline number. but since i figure that can only happen to a person once in their life, i'm probably in the clear with that.

i should also try to avoid burning myself. a friend once wrote my name out in bacardi 151 and then lit it on fire and i leaned in with my long ass hair to blow it out like a candle. well, that didn't really happen at work, but it happened, so whatever, i own the story and can use it anywhere. same goes for the time i was driving and a lit cigarette butt (um, i don't smoke) managed to get tangled in my hair and smolder away for a good ten minutes because i thought i had a bad tire that was making that gross rubbery smell. so maybe i don't have to worry about people throwing their discarded butts at my hair while i'm at work, or do i? i know they passed that law and all, but it still surprises me how many chefs smoke in professional kitchens. and no, i don't want to tell you where because some of the places i know this to occur in happen to make delicious food and no one's perfect right?

further in the vein of 'not burning myself' falls grabbing the handle of a pot that just came out an oven, or stirring hot rice so aggressively that a few angry clumps weld to my hand skin.

there have also been many, many knife slips in my culinary career so far, but i have since learned that the sharper i keep my knife the less likely it is to slip, or the more likely it is to cut really deeply when i do slip. which means my awesome knife sharpening skills i learned from the knife master at korin in tribeca are most often put to use when caring for my knife after cutting off a chunk of fingernail.

so if i avoid fire and knives, and garbage cans that look extra dangerous (just to be safe), what does that leave for me to actually do at work? sitting by the espresso machine mainlining lattes sounds about right, until i find a way to make that menacing too.

fun times

i haven't been skiing in over five years.

i love(d) skiing.

b never got into it, and that's probably why i stopped. i feel bad for my twice-used, practically still gleaming, kickass skiis that i bought the winter before i met b. i've been thinking about selling them, but i can't bring myself to do it. although i can't imagine when i'll be able to get away and really enjoy skiing again either.

i wonder if i'll still be any good. not that i was any good before. i did break a woman's nose once when i caught a nasty patch of ice. but whatever, i yelled 'oh shit watch out!' like fifty times before i hit her, she could have moved instead of standing there staring at me.

maybe i miss the independence of it all. or not because i never went skiing alone and didn't even like riding the chair lift alone.

what is it that i miss about it?

i think it's the whole being outside part and seeing snow covered mountains and all the fresh air. i was always the type to just eat a granola bar on the slope rather than go into the lodge and have lunch by the fireplace. but that's also because i'm lazy and hated removing and then replacing all the layers.

maybe i miss all the fun times i had with my friends when we went skiing. sure, kristine had a slow start, as we all did at some point, but it was a great way for us to bond. our friend teresa used to have the best songs for us to sing to distract us from the cold. there was also all the drinking involved in proper skiing, i.e. the 40 of old english (i can't believe i just typed that) in the car on the way to the mountain.

and now i just realized that we were those annoying jackasses on the slopes that everyone hates. so if anyone's in the market for some sweet atomics, 165's i think, let me know.

photo credit--kristine took this one on our last ski trip, forever ago

yo mama did what?!

throughout my interesting and fun-filled day of blog surfing i've seen this image popping up repeatedly. even more surprising was seeing my name mentioned at the end of miss yvonne's post about her tag.

i will now confess my lameness and share that i googled the word 'meme' to see what all the fuss was about. i stopped reading the definition somewhere after i saw the word 'memeticists'.

but now that i realize that it's just a way to talk about myself, i'm totally into it. i thought for a second about trying to pull off that whole 'this is so wack but i guess i'll do it anyway, to be a sport' thing but really, that's not me.

so thanks miss yvonne, for making me feel liked for a hot minute. i don't even care if i incur a horrific backlash when i reveal some of my innermost truths.

1. a few years ago, a very dear friend and i tried to get a new catch phrase started. whenever we really liked something we would say 'that's so my balls!' because it was fun to say balls. then we figured out that we never had balls and were never going to be able to grow balls, so it began to feel more like a cruel joke on us.

2. i would love to be a vegetarian, except that i still get confused about all the different kinds of vegetarians/vegans/whatever there are and i'm afraid of aligning myself with the 'less cool' group of restrictive eaters.

3. i'm obsessed with my tiny head. it's my favorite physical feature.

4. i spent bags and bags of money to go to a fancy culinary school and now the only cooking i do is for my six month old baby. oh wait, yeah, i work about once every fortnight at a catering company too.

5. the picture of the kiddies on my header is actually an original oil painting of me and my brother, done by my nana, that is currently hanging in my living room. it's always been an enigma to me because it's dated 1979, which was the year i was born. my brother wasn't born until 1981. the scary part is that that is EXACTLY how we looked as children, round about five and seven years old. i've tried to get nana to clarify the date question but to no avail.

6. b and i talk about our dog's ass way too much. we're convinced that he can make us millions of dollars because he has the most fascinating pattern of butt swirls that look just like an owl's face (butt swirls being the technical term for the hairs around his little pooter), and no the actual hole is not in the owl's face, the swirls fall beneath that. i tried to take a picture to illustrate this point, but i was so grossed out and crampy from hysterically laughing that there was no way i was going to succeed.

7. i can't lie. my physical reaction to telling a lie has not evolved since i was about four years old. sweat palms, big cheese grin, nervous laughter, shakes, all occurring at the same time.

8. i love really loud concerts. i love really loud concerts in really small and really smelly dirthole bars. the louder the better. no one wants to hear me singing along.

9. weird money is the most obscene thing anyone could make me touch. i define weird money as any coin of monetary value that is one other than the standard penny, nickel, dime, or quarter. i don't understand why they circulate, can we please just smelt them all away to weird money hell already?

10. i'm actually a really happy person. (cue barf sounds) sorry, but it's true.

and i guess that's as good as anything to end with right? right. so whom do i tag? seeing as i'm a relatively new blogger, i think i'll keep this one in the family, because if anyone's going to get annoyed with me sending this i can handle burn ups from them. so there's my dear friend kristine, my husband brian, b's sister bridget, and preacherman (even though you're technically not family, i love hearing stories about things you do when drunk, i mean, things you do everyday :) ).

note: for those of you (b) who haven't heard of this fun little game of tag i'll explain--
the objective here is when you are tagged to post ten things about yourself that we don't already know and then tag ten (or four) other people to do the same.

name games

when i was pregnant i was constantly berated with 'what's the baby's name?' all day, every day. sometimes i would answer with a few of the possible choices b and i were currently favoring, but as soon as i saw the forced smiles and heard 'oh. that's different' i stopped. worse yet was the droning on and on of every possible association a person has to that particular name.

i became so sensitive to the whole name issue that i just stopped talking about it altogether and simply said 'we don't know, we'll name her when we see her' even though we had her name picked out by the time i was five months along. i know people have varying ways of expressing their curiosity and are often just trying to connect with you. this tempered my frustration but also led me to vow that i would never ask a pregnant woman about the name of her baby as long as i lived.

this vow, however, does not preclude my asking of grown adults 'why did your parents name you THAT?!' as anyone who's ever spent a few hours watching major league baseball can tell you, there are some strange names out there.

i've compiled a list of mlb's choicest examples:

1. razor shines. yes, you're reading that correctly. this one is hands down the leader of the pack, mostly because every time i hear it i have all-too-vivid images of that creepy movie 'monkey shines.' i could go on all day, but i'll spare you.

2. coco crisp. can i get a synchronized 'what the fuck' here please? this one has been irking me for some time now, and i know his real given name is covelli loyce crisp, but that doesn't make me stop thinking about chocolate rice crispy treats.

3. milton bradley. two names, ordinary enough in their own right, but put them together and you have and infinite selection of circus and toy-related images haunting your brain for at least five-ten minutes.

4. kosuke fukudome. ok, ok. japanese is a completely different language, with sound combinations nothing like what we americans are used to, but the little kid in me can't help but hear 'go-suck-it fuck-you-do-me' in my head whenever i see this guy's name.

5. boof bonser. for serious. i don't even feel bad ragging on this clown for that awful name because he sucks and was dead weight on b's fantasy baseball team last year.

i only hope my little girl won't grow up hating her name. now that i think about it, i grew up hating my name. i was probably in college by the time i realised that i actually liked having my name. it was hard though, being a child of the 80's and hating my mom for not naming me 'tiffany' or 'jem'.

aaaannnnd, now i'm over it. that's why they made it legal to change your name. so little miss, if you're 25 and hate your name, come talk to me first and i'll pick out a new name for you.

deep thoughts, way too deep

i love to try new things, and generally, the more spontaneous the notion, the better. i find the excitement and anticipation of experiencing something for the first time is addicting. this however, will usually dissipate entirely after i try whatever it is that i have lined up for myself.

i was probably about ten years old when i was really into horseback riding. and by 'really into' i mean that i begged my mom to take me because it looked like a lot of fun. so we went, once. not only did the mean old nag refuse to walk faster than the rate of the grass growing, but it bit me on my little pencil-sized arm after the ride. i had horse tooth imprints for two weeks. i quickly realized that the horse smell and perpetual fog of flies was not something i'd be willing to put up with if i pursued horseback riding.

next was water skiing. i guess my first mistake here was that it was in the hudson river. big foul. not only have mutant three-eyed fish been caught here, but it has long been used as a through-way to haul excess new york city garbage upstate for dumping. regardless of starting out with such a handicap, i gave it my all, for about an hour. after managing to get vertical maybe twice, and swallowing way more of the hudson than i was comfortable with, i gave up. only i chose the worst place in america to give up, the swampy side of the river with algae so thick that i was instantly enveloped in slime. as i sat there in the menacing goo, waiting for the boat to bring the rope around, my mind filled with images of all the little bugs and critters that called the algae home swarming all over my body. i was near hysterics by the time i was pulled from the water.

move along to sky diving. now this was one that i was really super excited about. it just sounded so brazen and yet whimsical at the same time. i was maybe 25 and for a very dear friend's birthday, myself and our third dear friend decided to jump out of a plane together. oh yeah, and we actually paid an additional $85 to have an extra person jump with each of us to record us on dvd. i don't even need to talk about what it felt like watching my friend disappear into the clouds, becoming infinitely smaller. but i will say that those instructors need to tell beginners that if you open your mouth really wide going 120 miles per hour, it makes it really hard to breath. so hard, in fact, that you can feel as if you're suffocating and convince yourself that you will arrive on the ground in a tragic heap of dead flesh and bones. that information would have been much more helpful than the jokes about my straps being loose. having made it to the ground safely, i vowed to never watch the dvd of my horrifying experience, although i can't bring myself to throw it away.

now i'm at a crossroads.

i am thoroughly intrigued by my cousin's practice of fire walking. it seems to be a challenge to purify your thoughts in such a focused way as to be able to walk across fire and emerge stronger rather than weakened by the flames.

as much as i want to conquer the fire, i don't want it to conquer me.

am i better off leaving this one alone, to let the idea live on only as a fantasy in my head? my track record speaks for itself, but have i come far enough in my life that i can overcome my own self?

this is the point at which my head explodes and i become the universe, as theodor learns in 'the mysterious stranger,' "nothing exists save empty space--and you."

a message to the man riding his motorcycle over the mountain by west point

dear sir, you are obese.

i hope that this is not news to you, but if it is, i truly am sorry to be the one who had to clue you in.

i address you today, sir, because yesterday when i was driving behind you, just past bear mountain, your massive body weight tilting dangerously close to the surface of the road was enough to give me severe anxiety for the next 12 hours.

every time you negotiated one of the many curves in the road, i had to brace for the inevitable event of your massive self no longer defying gravity and wiping out right in front of my eyes, at 60 miles per hour. you must have developed the balance of a ballerina, because according to the laws of physics, as i understand them, you should no longer have any legs left to wrap around your hog. in which case, i must praise you for such an accomplishment.

that feat, however astounding, does not negate the sensation that overcomes me when i see you whipping around curves on the side of a mountain that i'm about to witness a real live death. aren't there laws and weight limits about this very situation? didn't they invent that harley trike just for this kind of thing?

just some food for thought sir, the next time you put on your tiny helmet and climb aboard your toy-sized motorcycle. maybe it's not such a great idea to push your luck so far.

i don't expect you to remember

'hey b, guess what today is?'

'uhhh, can you just tell me?'

'sure! today is the five year anniversary of the night we met.'

'awwww, really, five years already? i feel like i was in high school last week.'

'oh honey, those days are LONG gone. but i just realized myself what the date was and since my mind is full of useless details, i thought i'd share that one.'

'well i know our wedding anniversary, and all our birthdays because they're all in the same week, but are there any other dates that i need to keep track of?'

'may 19th was the day we brought monster home, if you want to count that because we never knew when his real birthday was. or don't because we could just as easily say he was born here on his gross chair.'

so here's to you b, and your amazing pick up line that has since led to the happiest five years of my life.

it's not me, it's what you do to me

today i'm going to share what i would say to a 'friend' if i could say anything to her and have her actually listen instead of waiting politely (or not) for me to stop talking just so she could resume talking about herself.

and i say 'friend' because she's one of those relationships that you're almost forced into, to be nice. like say, your sister's neighbor, who always happens to be around enough to know random details about your life and therefore feels it's appropriate to require you to do friend-like things with her.

so i'm going to call this 'friend' marvin, for annonymity's sake.

yes, that marvin, because i'm pretty sure this chick is from mars.

since i imagine myself talking to her in person, and so having to deal with her wacky interruptions, i will be inserting those into this conversation, which in no way is meant to be a dialogue.

"marvin, we've known each other for a few years now, and we've both had some amazing changes happen in our lives, (i know! yeah it's so great that you can come over with the baby just in time for me to break out the new enormous bbq grill we just paid a million dollars for!!)...which would normally connect two people and help to build a stronger foundation for a friendship. however, this is not the case with us.

as we find ourselves in situations that pose similar questions to us, we are increasingly following diverging paths. what i mean by that is that the life choices you make for your family are the exact opposite of the choices i make. the values you esteem, i find meaningless. the traditions you neglect, i treasure and wouldn't give up no matter what opposition i faced. (so i really want to open an etsy shop, should i call it 'made by marvin' or 'shop here sista!'??)

i've always said, and still firmly believe, that each person/family has the innate right to do as they please without interferrence from others. marvin, with you, i find myself wanting to grab you by your ears and shake you into reason. it's increasingly harder for me to partake in your irreverent ways, all the while keeping my mouth shut about how you're totally fucking your life up.

i can't keep up with the charade. (do you like my new drapes? i wasn't so sure about the color, but now i think it's totally the right shade of mocha.)"

this relationship has never been on the level where i would genuinely feel that any helpful advice would be worth the air required to suck in and brace myself for the worthless discussion, nor would it ever be solicited from marvin. and that's the reason why this is all hypothetical. because the message would never get through. i just have to let this one die off into that land of 'oh yeah, whatever happened to her?' we're all going to be better off in the end.

when blogger's block attacks

i've been in a slump lately. somewhere between returning to work for exactly nine hours and then finding out i'm not working again for another two weeks, and making mass quantities of baby food for little miss, i began to think that i've actually run out of interesting things to say.

in the past three days i've had several rejected posts. some have made it almost to the publish button, only to be deleted at the very last second. rather than over think the shit of out every little detail, as is my normal custom, this time i decided to just throw out some of my ideas in list form and see if there are any bites:

1. discuss why people who want to live 'off the grid' really annoy me

2. explain my extreme aversion to 'weird money'

3. share my experience of sheer terror when i thought that i had an old pair of contacts actually fused to my eyeballs

4. talk about how addicted i am to specialty beer and how i've always wanted to brew my own yet most likely never will

5. tell someone (anonymously, of course) about how i can't be friends with her anymore because she makes me into a hypocrite

i completely understand if the consensus is to wait for me to be struck with some other miraculous inspiration. hopefully i'll be back to my true form soon. in the meantime, i won't beg, but i'll ask nicely, don't give up on me yet.

i want to call this post anything other than 'lazy sunday' even though it really is

after my first shift back at work, in the bronx no less, i find myself sitting here suffering from a severe lack of intelligent things to say.

so i thought i'd be lazy and just throw out a link for your viewing pleasure. i still can't stop laughing at this one. b just proclaimed the tone of the day to be 'man, if you do couchie right, it'll sure do you right.'

on that note, just look.

simple math

this:



will always equal this:

can i really do this?

tomorrow is the big day, my return to work. i'm excited, anxious, and nonchalant all at the same time.

while i pretty much know what i'll be getting myself into, things will be a little different. last summer i was the raging preggo who was on a very long leash. in the food business, it's typically a big no-no to consume more of your product than you actually send out to your customers. try telling that to an eight months pregnant lady who's been on her swollen clownshoe feet for upwards of ten hours.

so i think that this time around i'm going to have a small list of goals i want to achieve as i re-enter the world of the working:

1. be the one who gets along with everyone (i.e. no shit-talking)
2. do at least one thing per shift to help that i wasn't asked to do
3. try not to go to the pastry department's dry storage and eat all their jellybeans
4. get better at ass-kissing for my boss's sake (he's one of those 'napoleon complex' types and could always use a few words of encouragement)
5. let someone else have a turn at cleaning out the short-term cooler (i called it 'the matching game' because there was always two of the same thing opened and you had to combine them, i loved it)
6. try not to use my broken spanglish with the dishwashers hoping they'll see how smart and considerate i am by attempting to speak in their own language while i'm really just making it harder for them to understand me
7. don't get annoyed when i ask for more responsibility and actually get it

i'm not sure how well i'll be able to stick to these guidelines, but i really am going to try. i may end up giving myself some form of dissociative disorder, polite and charming at work, bitchy loudmouth everywhere else.

that thought almost just made it more interesting.


update: i just remembered another item for my list:

8. do NOT nag the tool who borrowed my signed copy of the murray's cheese book, with all my favorite gourmet cheeses labeled and noted, and then ignored my fervent pleas to return it

you sure you don't want to change first?

as a nod to the many incongruities we experience every day, i offer you the following discussion about family portraits.

it all began this morning when my husband, who happens to be the funniest human being alive, showed me his corporate weekly rag with a huge photo of the newest new york regional director front and center. now i must say that this was interesting to me because the old big boss left in somewhat of a flurry of drama and mystique, as much as can be expected in the financial world anyway, and they found a new guy really, really quickly.

back to the photo. it's clearly professionally done. husband on the left, big toothy smile, one arm wrapped around wifey, the other lovingly resting on boy child's lap. oh yeah, and let's not leave out the most important detail, they all matched. mom and pop in pale blue button-downs, mom's collar open wide enough for you to see her glorious string of pearls. little boy, maybe only 18 months old, in his blue pinstriped polo shirt, complete with the little polo player logo shouting from his chest 'hey! hey you! we have more money than you!'

they look like the typical lexus-driving, golf club membership-holding, run-of-the-mill yuppies. when i pointed out the matching garb to my husband, hoping for a 'let's burn them up for being so lame' session, he surprised me with 'oh yeah, they all do that. you know, it's what you're supposed to DO for family portraits.'

to which i replied 'um, not OUR family portrait. ever. period. never ever. ok? you clear on that one? NEVER.'

b comes back at me with 'but they do that so you don't look like a douchebag in the picture.'

natural response, 'funny, because the end result is actually that you look like a douchebag in the picture.'

now this is the absolute last thing i would have expected from b. he continually spends his days dressing the part at his office, keeping his real personality under wraps. he then comes home in an explosion of hilarity, finally letting his true self emerge from the confinements of his job.

i won't mention the name of his company, for fear that the evil compliance officer (who won't even let b have a facebook account) will come running in here screaming about how many rules b's breaking for being human and not a drone. but suffice it to say that the b i know loves to come home and tell me about how bad he wants to tell big huge corporate land to suck it.

so maybe now that the shock of the portrait controversy is starting to hit you, i ask who's right here? as i ponder my own gut instinct to not falsify my family with an image that could cost a pretty penny and then lurk in our house for years and years to come, i wonder, am i being too quick to judge?

then just as i was sinking into a foggy gloom of doubt, b bends over to kiss the baby goodbye and says to me, 'fuck it, let's just all match her pink and brown flowery pajamas in our family portrait, 'cause that's a picture i'd hang in our living room.'

i almost teared up a little. that's the b i know and love.

don't let the pineapple talk you into anything

today i'm going to be sharing my deep philosophical thoughts about the vast abyss that exists in my kitchen. it's a wasteland filled with forgotten food items, so depressing that when you gaze into its lonely world you are almost compelled to shed a tear. yes friends, i'm talking about my pantry.

in restaurant lingo, it's known as dry storage, or more commonly, that place to go when you want to raid the pastry department's stash of jellybeans and imported chocolates. in kitchens near and far, large and small, this is the dead zone of food. this is where you will actually find dust bunnies gathering on top of canned goods and bags of rice that seem to sigh if you touch them, exhausted by the effort of attempting to look appealing.

i have ventured forth into this dismal realm in hopes of either a) using some of the miscellaneous crap i have accumulated or b) throwing out (i mean, donating) those innocuous food items i must have purchased while delirious in my immediately post-partum phase.

this mission has brought to mind a certain anecdote about canned pineapple. my husband's sister, bridget, was telling us about the time she was at their parents' house and heard a loud sudden, banging noise. after careful inspection, she discovered that a can of pineapple chunks had mysteriously exploded in the pantry, spraying everything within a five foot radius with it's sticky syrupy bits. at which point in the telling of this anecdote my husband's brother, conor, jumps in with 'it was so tired of living there it killed itself!'

while i laughed so hard i cried a little at this story, i found myself wondering if i too, was driving any of my neglected consumables to suicide. when my eyes landed on the bag of barley, long passed it's expiration date (um, wtf is there an expiration on barley for anyway? it's just a grain, and if you keep it in an airtight container, or in the original bag with a paper clip holding it shut, it should be good for a long, long time, right?), i cooked it up for dinner, mostly to ease my guilt. it helped a little, but i needed to go further.

so far it hasn't been as bad as i thought it would be. i actually made black bean soup * the other night using canned beans. not only did it look exactly like the picture, but it tasted pretty good too. score one for the wasteland.

this small step in the right direction is what i needed to revitalize my pantry. i will make the commitment to keep things current if you, pantry, will promise to take your prozac and not let any 'accidents' happen on your watch. working together i know we can build a solid relationship based on mutual respect. no more will i stuff you with soups i never intend to eat, or 9 out of the 10 ingredients needed to make a recipe, doomed to perpetually being 'almost' used.

pantry, i'm here for you. we'll get through this rough time. and then, just when you're starting to show vibrant signs of life, i'll revert back to my old ways until the next passing moment of introspection strikes.

*note: i did modify the recipe slightly. i added an extra can of beans to the pureed part to make the soup a little thinker, and i think it was for the better. the soup needed it, and i got to use one more can from the pantry, everybody wins.