Special Wednesday Wisdom

"Ideas are like coffee. If you let them percolate, then drip down, you'll get a nice hot cup of caffeinated material. Drink up." - me

(I know it's hard to believe that I came up with this gem, but I did! Yeah, my thesis is gonna rock hard with this type of wisdom. Go me!)

Four Bad Ideas in No Particular Order

1. My scary bear hat flew off my personage when a big gust of wind overtook me in London on Saturday. It landed in a muddy puddle at the edge of the curb. As I reached out to pluck it up, I realized that a bus was barreling down the road. I wondered if I could grab it before the bus got there. I snatched back my hand with a second to spare. Unfortunately, the bus ran over my poor hat. When the light changed, I picked it up again, sopping and dirty. All's well that ends well on this, as I did not lose my hand and the hat came out of the washing machine and drier as good as new.

2. For my lit class tomorrow, we are reading What Is the What by Dave Eggers. It is an excellent "autobiography" of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. (It also could maybe be about 100 pages shorter, but I still recommend it.) People stared at me while I read it on the subway and bawled.

3 & 4. Last night I defrosted a large plastic container of Daisy Mae's baked beans that I found in the back of my freezer. I plan on eating them tomorrow for lunch. It's double whammy of potentially bad ideas, as I probably should not eat a lot of beans before going to class, and the container has been in the freezer since my book party. My book party rocked the house in August 2008.

Doody by the Pound

Whenever I am distressed, I give in to my cravings for sweet and fatty food. Throw in the recent holiday weekend, and the recipe is for overeating disaster. My problem is that eating so poorly tends to make my digestive tract explode. This is uncomfortable and smelly.

After a particularly fetid incident late Monday night, I crawled into bed and told Husband that I just evacuated pounds and pounds of poo.

"Doody by the pound?" he giggled. "That's gross. Especially because when you get it by the pound, the store wraps it up in wax paper and writes what it is on the outside, and everyone in the store knows what you have. It's so embarrassing!"

Damn, I love this man.

Out with the Old, In with the New

There's nothing like starting a new year than by breaking things. By things, I specifically mean bathrooms. And by bathrooms, I mean home and hotel facilities, one on each coast.

Yesterday morning, Husband and I awoke to urgent voicemail messages from my cousin, who is staying at our apartment while we gallivant about California. It seems that the pipes in our bathroom are leaking. The super and a maintenance dude came over to poke about, and after ripping up the linen closet (and patching it back up), concluded that the walls and floors of the bathroom need to be torn open to fix the problem. Work is to commence on Friday, Jan. 2 and hopefully will conclude on Monday, Jan. 5, which is my first day of work and I was already a nervous wreck about it before I learned that I won't have a functional bathroom that day.

I rang in the new year today by nearly breaking the toilet in the hotel. The result of my spontaneous self-cleansing strongly resembled an eel. Steph warned me yesterday morning that the toilet was not as powerful as it should be. ("It took me three flushes and a lot of hoping. I almost started looking around for a wire hanger, but then figured that this place was too fancy. A wooden hanger would work," she explained, "but wire hangers can be bent so that you can get as far away from the shit as possible, whereas a wooden hanger, it is what it is.") I thought about my honeymoon trip to London in August 2001 and how I had broken the toilet with a shit brick, and then feared that my eel turd would be even worse. Fortunately, it went down in two flushes and nothing resurfaced. Whew!

Happy new year and shit...

Getting the Work Done

At a (hopefully promising) job interview yesterday, I was unexpectedly presented with a case study. While I initially wanted to shit my pants* because I recently have not reviewed various underwriting procedures, I think I ultimately did fine.

As I told Steph about the interview today, she whistled. "That's brilliant!"

"What is?" I asked.

"Giving you a case to review so that they don't have to do the work themselves."

"Oh, it was an old application that was decided years ago already. I didn't do any of their current work, although that would be genius."

Hence I decided that if I am ever in a position to hire someone, Steph is right: this is a perfect way to unload work on someone else. I'll just bring different "case studies" to interviews, and if the work is done well, not only will I know that I found a good worker, but I'll be freed of whatever burdensome task I set before the applicant. Now, if only that would work at home, too...

*If the interview had been in the morning rather than afternoon, I suspect that I would have unloaded. I woke up after only 4 hours of sleep with horrific gas and crapped repeatedly over the course of the AM hours. Incidentally, I also burned my finger on a frying pan handle (why it was hot, I do not know), slammed my shin to a piece of furniture that resulted in a lovely purple bruise, and discovered that my only pair of pantyhose had a small hole in them. Given the early situation, I'm amazed that I was coherent at all.

Appropriately Uncouth

When I called the unsurance company's intermediary a few days ago to supply them with the information they needed to reconsider approving a bilateral breast MRI, I was sitting on the porcelain throne taking an enormous dump. I figured it perfectly expressed my feelings on the matter, even if the woman on the other end (who actually wound up being very nice) had no idea what I was up to. It turns out that only my doctor can tell them what age I was at my first period, how I was at my first birth, what my ethnicity is, and what my prior pathology reports have concluded. Seems a lay person is not knowledgeable about these things about herself.

Since my doctor is an asshole who won't take five minutes to call it in, I am shit out of luck. See? The whole situation stinks.

Misnomer

Little Lad's Basket? Very misleading name. The place should really be called Uncle Montezuma's Big Gift Box. Even though vegan stuffing and yogurt wage war in my intestines (I almost suffocated Husband and myself with my hideous gas last night), I still plan to eat there again. That's the kind o' fool I am.

I Ain't Shittin' Ya - Why I Love Husband

Loving Husband is easy. Although he did not find anything about the picture of the disgusting toilet in India amusing, he indulges (and even encourages) my love for doody jokes. I came home a few weeks ago and found a random bag from Borders on the little bench we have next to our front door. Inside was What's Your Poo Telling You? by Josh Rochman and Anish Sheth, MD.

This slim brown volume is right up my alley, so to speak. There's a description of dung, then analysis from Dr. Stool. Not only is it informative, but heeelarious. Par ejemple, "Rotten Poo" (something of which I am a frequent victim):

This poo can vary in shape and size, but its distinguishing feature is its atrocious and unbearable odor. As this poo is under way, the stench will overwhelm you. Even with a quick courtesy flush, survival instincts force you to speed up the defecating process in order to exit the bathroom as quickly as humanly possible. Lord help the innocent bystanders if you are in a public restroom, because this odor will linger and may promptly cause others to experience gagging and nausea… this poo smells as if a dead animal has been decomposing in your intestines and is making its exit at its most noxious moment [I generally describe my worst gas this way, thinking of it as a hamster or perhaps gerbil]… when it happens, a quick termination of the stooling session is a must.

How could I not cackle multiple times as I typed this up?

"What's so funny?" Husband asked.

"I'm writing about the doody book you gave me," I giggled.

"Ah, you and your book reports!" He puffed his chest with pride.

Yep, I love Husband a lot.

All Hail!

I'm tired, but I did stop emitting toxic fumes from my ass. This is good because I went to a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood New York and the Haven Coalition, in which I had to get on stage in the middle of an excellent variety show featuring comedians and burlesque performers and depress everyone with the sad facts about women who were forced to travel to New York for abortions and had nowhere to stay. (With the help of Haven volunteers, they sleep in a safe home as opposed to on the street or in the bus station.) It would have not been cool to fart while I was holding a mic and trying to pull heartstrings.

Despite my depressing info session (which I did manage to leaven with a joke about hanging out in the back alley), the show was awesome. I am particularly smitten Desiree Burch, a comedian who launched into a 10 minute hilarious rant about why women should leave their snatch unshaven and proud. Oh, this woman is brilliant. Des and I nearly bust our guts laughing.

Also, I won a very exciting and sort of scary prize in the raffle. I shall take a picture of it and post it later/tomorrow.

A Smelly Fart Saga (Now with Dialogue!)

Q: What's more socially awkward than me at a big launch party for The Panelist where I don't know many people?
A: Me at a big launch party for The Panelist where I don't many people and I have the most toxic gas known to man.

I spent the day mostly holding my gas in because I don't want to get fired from my internship because I killed the associate editor after she asphyxiated because she could not breathe in the foul air I created. When I arrived home in the evening, I hoped that non-stop farting would empty the gas pocket before I left for the party. Husband came home 45 minutes later.

"What smells so awful?" he asked as he walked into the apartment.

"Sorry, I was farting in the kitchen," I replied meekly.

"Damn, woman!" he exclaimed. I think he was partly impressed.

Unfortunately, the gas I released merely stank up my domicile. It did not go away by the time we left for the event. You know things are bad when you fart outside in a strong wind and you can still smell it. In the wind competition, I beat Mother Nature.

I did a nice job holding back for 90 minutes while on the subway and at the party, but I thought I should leave before I poisoned my friend's apartment. I was horribly uncomfortable. Plus, I couldn't risk losing my other writing gig by gassing the publisher, editor, and all of their friends and supporters.

I hope I'll be better in the morning, but if you are supposed to have plans with me later today, bring a gas mask. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Happy Presidents Day

Last night Husband and I journeyed out to Queens to have dinner with some friends who just bought a new house. The 7 train was not running, so we took trusty old Fred the Red, our PT Cruiser that we bought in August when Husband took a job in Connecticut. It turned out to be very fortuitous that we had Fred with us because our friends were getting rid of some furniture they didn't want to bring to the new place. You know how much I love free furniture, and I have wanted a buffet with a hutch for our dining room for a long time, so it was perfect!

Husband put the back seat down and the buffet slid in perfectly. The hutch, however, was a bit too big for the trunk to close. Given that it was freezing out, I was a bit hesitant to drive into Manhattan with the trunk open, but it actually worked out fine. (My digestive system cranked out some extra gas to heat up the car, which was thoughtful of it but also extremely smelly.) It was tying the trunk down that almost caused Husband and I to lose our hands to frostbite.

Long story short, it arrived safely as did our appendages. The hutch is white and looks fantastic in the dining room. For once we are also actually throwing away the old furniture that the new furniture is meant to replace, so we have a net gain of space. All very cool.

I Made It

Smooth sailing all the way back. The nice thing about buying gas in Connecticut is that you can just stick the nozzle in the tank and it will fill automatically. You can do that in Illinois, too, but not New York or Massachusetts, so I was quite shocked the first time I tried to fill a gas tank in either of those states. Anyway, I irresponsibily ran inside and emptied my tank while Fred's was being filled. The sad part is that I could have saved a lot of money if cars could run on natural gas. I ate a lot of food that triggers my natural gas production cycle over the last few days and could have powered my ride back to NYC if someone had figured out a way to harness this type of sort of environmentally friendlier, albeit toxic in its own way, fuel alternative.

I had a wonderful time visiting Alex, but it's also nice to be home. Tycho seems pleased to see me. I'm excited for my new assignments at Bugaboo Magazine tomorrow. Yay.