Cool-Ass Shizz

Or, what I am in love with for the next five minutes.

1) Sweet potato fries. Which, more literally, are baked, but sweet potato bakes sounds odd. Anyway, I had forgotten about the existence of such things, and then remembered and have consumed 3 whole sweet potatoes this week. This could be construed as gluttony…. or as a valiant attempt to improve my health and well-being! You decide. Anyway, if you feel like gorging on sweet potatoes until you turn orange (this actually happens, though my google searches for results were in vain – I wonder if maybe Paris Hilton is a sweet potato fan?), it’s super-easy and good for you and yummy. Get a sweet potato or a yam, they’re the same thing more or less. Preheat your oven to 350. Scrub the sweet potato to get off the yucky germs people leave behind when they caress the produce. Cut the potato up, either into circles (by slicing like you would a cucumber) or into sort of ghetto-style fries (matchstickish chunks). Either works just fine, though circles are easier to cut up but ghetto fries remind you more of French fries. Scatter the slices on a baking sheet and drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle with salt (and pepper, if you want, maybe even cayenne if you’re feeling frisky). Toss the potatoes around to coat them in the oil and salt. Put the baking sheet in the oven and get yourself a beer. The beer is integral, because god made beer to make us happy, right? And who are we to question that? Also, beer and fries go together really, really well. A cheeseburger works here for the same reasons: a)it makes us happy and b)beer, cheeseburger, fries? Could there be a better meal? Anyway, drink your beer and go read some gossip blogs for about 10 minutes. Then go toss the potatoes around some more (use a spatula this time, for chrissakes, they’ll be hot!), finish your beer, and take the potatoes out after about another 10 minutes or so. They’ll be mostly mushy with crispy parts where you sliced them really thin. Eat. Feel both virtuous and naughty, because these are fries! but they are healthy! You will probably need another beer or two to be able to reconcile these two things, but that’s okay. Beer is healthy, too. I recommend Newcastle.

2)Shit, I forgot in the orgy of potatoes and beer what was meant to go here. There was definitely something. Instead, enjoy this picture of a drunk man and a horse in a bank that my sister emailed to me:

Later I will come back with whatever I meant to post before.

Today is the second day of the rest of my life

No, seriously.  The time has come to get off my ass and get moving and stop eating entire pans of brownies (see my fat girl confession).  So E and I have embarked upon a walking routine as of yesterday, 3 miles around Bluff Point every morning while Boyo is at school, and we’ve started working on our eating.  That, for me, means desserts are basically a no-no right now, since other than that I eat pretty healthy.  I’m trying to tweak even that usually healthy eating without sacrificing anything, too (since if I start sacrificing too much I’ll fall off this precarious wagon of good behavior).  So this morning I had 2 scrambled eggs instead of 3, and saved the yolk from one to use in my hair.  It’s dieting!  It’s hair care!  I’m multitasking!!!  Even after only two days I feel really good about myself and the direction I’m going.

The other really great thing is a little thing known as SPRING!!!!  Oh my HOLY, I missed the warm weather and the sun after all the rain we had last week.  All I want is to be outside lounging around in the sun like a cat.  We actually went to the beach this weekend, and while it was too cold to swim it wasn’t too cold for kites and sand toys.  Having the beach so close by is the coolest thing, and almost makes up for the fact that my apartment is a nasty little shit hole.

Lastly, I don’t know if I mentioned yet reading Candy Girl, a memoir by a former stripper (Diablo Cody), but I did and it was really good.  I finished it in one evening when I should have been working.  Now I totally want to do a phone sex hotline, imagine the cash you could rake in just for faking hot & sexy!  Supposedly I have a great phone voice (customers have even said things about how my voice made it hard to focus on the task at hand, ooh la la).  She was also featured in this month’s Jane, one of my favorite magazines (the others being Cookie, Playboy, and Marie Claire).  I love when I feel like I’m up on something hip like that.  Anyway, I definitely recommend the book – it was a fast, entertaining read, very funny and well-written, and some of her experiences (well, pretty much all of them) were just wild.  I love the idea of some regular ol’ midwestern goody-two-shoes girl turning into this crazy hot stripper chick.

That is all for now, internets, sorry I have been such a crappy lazy blogger lately, but did I mention it’s spring??

In which I get up on my high horse and then fall down for lack of anything good to say.

I want to write a million things and can’t think of any of them right this second. The incident in Virginia yesterday, the various books I’m reading, the weather – all combining into a sort of useless head-muck today. I feel like not writing about or really reading about what happened at VA Tech is blasphemous in some way, and yet at the same time I always get the feeling that, really, it’s none of my business and I need to butt out of other people’s tragedies. Nobody wants to suffer with a microphone or a TV camera shoved in their face. So, while my heart goes out to them, I don’t want to keep going on and on and beating the whole thing to death when it’s not my thing. I’ll leave it at that, hoping it makes sense.

I just spent a really, really long time enjoying the links from Anne’s latest post. Even when she’s not really writing, the woman can do funny. The meat is disgusting yet oddly fascinating, and if you get through it all there is the wonder of meat haiku at the end! Which reminds me of a website my brother used to love: Hats of Meat. We spent a lot of time looking at this and laughing hysterically. The internet is just a strange place, isn’t it?

Melissa also has a really great post up today, about her baby sister. It’s hard watching your little siblings grow up, no matter how old they are. I’m the oldest of four, and my baby sister is now 18 and I can’t get over it. She has a boyfriend and goes to college AND I USED TO CHANGE HER DIAPERS. How can this even be possible? I hate to think what I’m going to feel like as my son gets older. Heck, he’ll be 5 in June and kindergarten-bound in fall and it makes my knees get a little wobbly thinking about it.

Lastly, I have a whole stack of books from the wonderful folks at Harper Collins that I need to read and review, thanks to BlogHer. I feel guilty that I haven’t written about any of them yet, but I’ve had a ton of books going lately and haven’t finished any of the freebies quite yet.

Holy!

I just went and checked my blog stats because, you know, I’m lame like that and obsessed about how people get here and how many people get here.  (Hello, googlers looking for Meredith Viera’s feet and tiger lilies – so many of you! – and domineering boyfriends!!)  And, my god, there are people who have me ON THEIR BLOGROLLS.  As if I were a real blog-type person and not just me.  Mind-blowing, I tell you.

Tomorrow we get to (have to?  I haven’t decided yet) go to Monster Golf for one of Boyo’s best school friends’ birthday party.  We went to Target today trying to pick her out a present, and I realized that apparently I know nothing about little girls anymore, despite the fact that I used to be one and I was damn good at it.  Barbie?  My Little Pony?  PINK?  Check, check, check.  To the point where my mother used to tape – remember VHS tapes?- My Little Pony for me when I started kindergarten, because otherwise I would miss it.  And I used to always order pink ice cream because, hello, it was pink, okay?  And then I would taste it and make my mom trade because pink is pretty but I guess not so tasty.  And yes, I was indulged as a child.

Anyway…  so we’re there in the aisle of 8000 different Bratz dolls and I asked E if toys were this bad when we were little.  Because, awful as Barbie may be, Bratz seem to be so much worse.  Plus the big-ass eyes and lips thing freak me out and they just seem so… porny.  I picked up all these girlie pink things and then put them down again because I wanted to not be all “oh, well, being a girl, you’ll want pretty pink things!”  We ended up getting a few pink things, but also I Spy Snap, which is gender-neutral and actually lots of fun, but I wondered as I browsed, why the hell was I making such a big deal about the pink and the girly and trying to avoid them?  When we get boy presents, they tend to be car-related and I’m fine with that, but somehow for girls I feel like I need to try extra-hard to make the present un-sexist.  So maybe going to an all-girls’ school (ahem.  Women’s College, excuse me.  Though they aren’t anymore.) and taking gender equity courses has ruined me forever.  It’s weird because I myself am girlie in some ways – pink is one of my favorite colors and I love shoes and Sanrio, and you see my love affair with pink started earlier.  So why am I so worried about perpetuating this?  To the point where I try to make sure not to say how cute little girls look, I say something about smart or whatever like my one comment is going to make or break some girl’s self-esteem when it comes to math.  (Speaking of which, remember that Barbie?  The math is hard Barbie?  Classic.)

And now, I really should be working.  Since I’m at, well, work.  And they’re paying me.  But I don’t think it’s for blogging.  Now my supervisor will find this and realize the Terrible Truth about my slackerhood and I’ll get dooced.  I hope I get unemployment.

Goodbye poetry month

So, yeah, that was a boring idea. Also I suck at posting every day, even if I don’t have to write the posts. Oh, well.

Back to your regularly scheduled bloggy goodness. Which, today, includes me telling you what I think of the Regina Spektor album (so behind the times with the music!), imagining being rich and thin, and rain boots. So.

#1 Regina Spektor’s Begin To Hope. First off, she’s Russian, which has that certain Slavic cachet, I think. Russian, and as you can see here and here, hot and the wearer of some very cute clothes. Can we just talk about the cut-out elbows in the second video’s suit? Because I think they’re just awesome, somehow. They remind me of something Linda Loudermilk would design, and I’m strangely obsessed with her clothes. But, um, I suppose her music isn’t about her clothes or her cute hair or any of that. So, the album. This is not really my usual type of music, but I like her voice and some of the songs are totally catchy. Boyo and I sang “It breaks my hear-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-arrrt“ for hours after listening to it in the car. But some songs are just too Tori Amos punk rock grrrl with fairy wings and a piano for me, because I hate Tori Amos. Also Dave Matthews, not that that has anything to do with anything except to show that I am kind of a musical weirdo, apparently. Ahem. So, there are four or five songs on the album that just rock my world and get in my head and I sing all day, and there is The Suit Without Elbows, and the hot Russian-ness, so I think all that combined gives a thumbs up to Begin To Hope. Because, really, isn’t that what you were waiting for before running out to the store (or clickety-clickety Amazoning) to purchase the album?

#2 – E has an idea. A really, really good idea, and the plan is for riches and fame to follow the implementation of said plan, which I am required to be all hush-hush about, so ssshhhh, internets, sssshhhh. Anyway, after that we will be rich! And we will have a lake house, and a city apartment, and I will have a big-ass Coach bag and a cute-ass Prada something because I am in love with Prada, and I will have rainboots because the cuteness, it slays me.

Of course, at school today I realized that I can lose 100 pounds and have rainboots of cuteness, but, really, will that make my life better? Then I thought harder and gazed upon many pairs of rainboots on many college-girl legs of varying thinnesses and realized that the answer is, unequivocally, resoundingly, YES! Because joy is rainboots and thin legs to stick in them.

And what, you may ask, will I wear with these rainboots (which I will stop linking like a madwoman right now)?  Why, I thought you’d never ask!  And I will be glad to show you!  I will magically stop being annoyed by dresses, and I will outfit myself from Stop Staring!  because all those pinup-cute dresses are just calling out to me.

Oh, and the cat, I need to update you on the cat.  Because we took him to the vet, and $76 I couldn’t really afford later, he has new food.  The throwing up is caused from being a stray cat, apparently, and as a stray cat he learned to eat fast so he wouldn’t starve, and now he’s eating too fast and the food irritates his stomach, and back out it goes.  So the vet’s advice was… bigger food.   And it cost $76, and they couldn’t have told me that over the phone, and the internets never told me that despite hours of google searches for cat puke.  So he’s only thrown up once that I know of since then, a few weeks ago, so it must work.  The other recommendation she gave was to put rocks in his food.  I’m sure Boyo and I must have looked at her then like she was crazy, because rocks?   In the cat’s food?  Weird.  But to eat, he must pick around the rocks, slowing himself down, irritating his stomach less, etc.  So it’s sage advice, even if it’s weird.  And, besides, I relish putting rocks in the $76 bastard’s food.  Damn expensive cat.

April 6th poem

in just-

in Just-

spring       when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles       far       and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far       and       wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

 from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

     the

             goat-footed

balloonMan       whistles

far

and

wee

 

- e.e. cummings

April 5th Poem

Doing Laundry on Sunday

So this is the Sabbath, the stillness

in the garden, magnolia

bells drying damp petticoats

over the porch rail, while bicycle

wheels thrum and the full-breasted tulips

open their pink blouses

for the hands that pressed them first

as bulbs into the earth.

Bread, too, cools on the sill,

and finches scatter bees

by the Shell Station where a boy

in blue denim watches oil

spread in phosphorescent scarves

over the cement. He dips

his brush into a bucket and begins

to scrub, making slow circles

and stopping to splash water on the children

who, hours before it opens,

juggle bean bags outside Gantsy’s

Ice Cream Parlor,

while they wait for color to drench their tongues,

as I wait for water to bloom

behind me—white foam, as of magnolias,

as of green and yellow

birds bathing in leaves—wait,

as always, for the day, like bread, to rise

and, with movement

imperceptible, accomplish everything.

 

-Brigit Pegeen Kelly

April 4th Poem

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

take them up like the male and female

paper dolls and bang them together

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

 

-Sharon Olds

April 3rd Poem

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance —
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

-Billy Collins

April 2nd Poem

I Remember

By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color–no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.

-Anne Sexton