| You Are Lemon Meringue Pie |
 You're the perfect combo of sassy and sweet Those who like you have well refined tastes |
This is an open letter to all babies, present and future:
Yes, very cute. Now stop posing for a photo op every 10 seconds and crawl over here. I want to talk to you. No, we can play Peek-A-Boo later. You adults can stay too, if you like.
*Sigh* You babies these days have sooooo easy. I just finished shopping for a gift for a friend's new baby off her registry, (which BTW was 18 pages! What, is this baby taking a voyage overseas, she needs 100 sets of jumpers?) and picked an item off this list that met my "appropriate gift size", in the $30-50 range, and looks huge wrapped. A blanket.
One blanket cost $35 bucks? For a baby? Come on! And no, I didn't bring my better half, I want to get out of Babies R Us for under $200, thank you.
Then I found this blanket.
Have you seen this thing? This blanket almost defies proper description. So soft, so fuzzy, so cuddly. The nerve endings in my fingers began to short-circuit from sensation overload. If pure joy could be rendered into tangible form, it would be this blanket!
I held it to my face for several minutes. A man. Alone in a baby store. I'm sure the nearby shoppers thought me a deranged Pedo, but I didn't really care, I was communing with the softest element in the known universe, even softer than a puppy's belly. . .
Which brings me back to you, babies. Stop chewing that! Here, chew on the froggy rattle.
Awww. . .
Where was I? Oh, right.Look, this blanket is far too soft for you to appreciate. My baby blanket wasn't nearly this soft! My mother unearthed it out a couple of years ago, and in comparison, it feels like rough spun burlap drug thru a gravel pit. And, it's not like I was born in a cave, it was the '70s! Back then, adults knew better than to coddle us. Or cover electric sockets.
I can tell you right now, if my blanket had been this soft, I never would have matured past the larval stage. I would have just lain my chubby pink body on this blanket, weak from atrophy, until I expired from pure ecstasy. Much like a shmoo. You babies are too young to know what a shmoo is, but I am dead sure that Disney will buy the rights sooner or later, and resurrect the mighty schmoo! In digital format, starring Brad and Angelina, no doubt. But I digress. . .
In conclusion babies, this blanket is no good for you! The world, in fact, life in general is not like this blanket. It's harsh and itchy and covered in bacteria! Just like my old blanket! Best get used to it now, so the shock won't overwhelm your proto-brain when it finally shows up to break your favorite toy. Please, give your blanket to an adult, who really needs this amazing softness as an escape from the harsh reality.
I'm telling you this for your own good. No. . .please don't cry. . .*sigh* Alright, fine, keep it then, pouty face! You are such a baby. . .
SA
"Laddie, do you know what a true Scotsman wears under his kilt?" -Random jolly man
Ok when I first started this blog, I put about ten seconds of thought into the title, picking words that I thought would be interesting and unique, just like me. I like the word musing as I feel it adequately describes my thoughtful yet humorous ponderings transcribed to this blog.
It took about a week of sifting through other's blogs before I found how sadly wrong I was. I am not a zen wordsmith, I am just another schmuck who used a neato word to show how verbose I am.
The word "Musing" may be the most overused non-lingo word out there in the Blogosphere.
Reading other sites with the word musing in it, I came to realize that "musing" apparently has a wide variety of definitions as well. One man's musing is another man's irritating rant, or more likely a thinly veiled (like prosciutto thin, at best) marketing pitch.
The Current Stats from my www.bloglog.com
Caustic Musings: http://maggiewang.com/ a promising name, but without the really acidic writing I was hoping for. Plenty of delicious meals and hardcore exercise regimens, however.
Fireplace musings: http://fireplacemusings.blogspot.com/ an actual muser of of New Zealand that I enjoy.
Amy's Musings http://www.amysmusings.com/ - A mommy blog, one of many I enjoy, for no reason I can adequately explain.
A Musing D'Bergeracs http://bakeryofthepoets.blogspot.com/ - a diary blog of sorts with a font I hate.
Merri Musings: http://www.merrimusings.mu.nu/ Current news stories mixed with yummy sarcasm for flavor.
Black musing sheep. http://shinmiao.blogspot.com/ Don't know what to make of this one, but I do enjoy the name. Do black sheep muse?
Here are some ones that I have trouble understanding how "Musing" became affixed in their title:
Bittersweet Musings: http://sugar.splitsys.com/ Technical and Xenophobic
Business Musings: http://www.businessmusings.com/ WSJ with musing, if musing is to be regarded as any opinion whatsoever.
Collegiate Musings: http://collegiatemusings.com/ Not even trying to pretend it's a blog, just a passthru to a linkfarm. (or mabye linkghetto)
Divakar's Musings: http://divakar.blog.com/ A daily affirmation blog best describes it, I think.
Any other musings out there I just have to add to the list?
So, do I take musing off the title of this blog so I won't be lumped in with others that I find less than amusing? (yuk yuk) Or do I keep it as a shining beacon to the standard of what true musing should be? Thoughts from my loyal reader...er..readers?
SA
OK, with the state of the Internet, I know there has to be some checkpoint measure taken to make sure that a human is filling out a comment on a blog, rather than a sophisticated program, but fuck!
I was trying to ad my pithy wisdom to one of my favorite blogs, and after pouring out my soul in the comment section, thus adding to the Human Experience, I was confronted with the "Visual Verification"(addressed hereafter as VV, as I hate it so much), which was so completely impossible to read that I got it wrong three times before I finally pulled it off. (This may be my favorite run-on sentence ever, so I'm leaving it! I talk like a run-on sentence.) I don't have time for that! I gots things to do.
They make it much harder to read, I'm going to need a freaking program just to read it for me! I love the justification for VV, that it makes it impossible for a machine to read. Oh really, wise Internet security experts? Ever heard of OCR software? My crappy digital pen can translate my left-handed scribbles,(far worse, most likely than the VV can produce) into plain text with a 95% accuracy. I'm thinking that a diabolical spammer can come up with a remedy to your infallible VV measure pretty darn quick, if he felt it was worth his time.
If spammers are ever going to be stopped, it will be as a formal declaration of war against them, and destroy their means of spewing their porn, virus and get-rich-quick schemes at the root, namely their ISP access. A case can be made that they are elusive and unstoppable, but money is always traceable to and from a source if your work as a collective to uncover it.
Of course, when that day inevitably comes, and the World Police finish them once and for all, our world will become that more homogenized and uninteresting. Be careful what you wish for.
Oh, and make sure you copy my visual verifier before attempting to post. :)
P.S. Or is it just me?
Fozzie the Bear?
| You Are Fozzie Bear |
 |
While I was sitting in traffic this morning, I looked over and saw this Bumper sticker on the back of a Chrysler Pacifica:
You girls are such scamps! That made me laugh. At least until I pulled up next to the driver, and found that it wasn't a woman, but a man in his mid '50's! With very little hair. And a sour expression.
As we were sitting in traffic together, I began to wonder how he came to be driving this car. It didn't seem to fit him. He looked more like the old beige Volvo or new red Convertible type to me. As we were incarcerated in traffic hell, I had time to speculate.
Was he the Walter Mitty husband, nagged into driving his wife's car to the dealership for servicing? Maybe she finally remembered to tell him the oil light was on for the last two weeks. . . again. She was driving him to an early grave, and at this point, he was welcoming it.
Or perhaps he bought this car for his daughter, away at college, and he was driving her car to her out-of-state campus, because he couldn't let his little girl drive all the way by herself. The sticker on her car makes him very uncomfortable, but he'd be too embarrassed to mention it to her. He was already mortified that his neighbor Frank swore that his saw her on a "Girls Gone Wild" video his son had hidden in his closet.
Or, after sizing him up for a bit, I decided he could be a vicious carjacker. He probably waited around a stop sign near her home, and when the fem hipster came tootling up, he pulled out his gat, New Jack City style, and forced her from her car. Now he was on the way to the Chop Shop to meet his evil cronies, drinking her Chai Latte half-caf and listening to NPR's "Talk of the Nation". No, wait. . .that's not on until 2, must be "Morning edition". That's probably road grime on the car door, but it could be dried blood.
Or maybe he was an old hippy with a sense of irony, and this sticker reminded him of the good old days of free love, psychedelics and occupying various administration buildings, his long hair in his eyes whilst strumming the only cord he knew on his battered guitar.
Or it could have been that he was a cross dresser who goes by the name of Margie Manhands on the weekends. After cruising a bit and finding a suitor, he likes his um, she likes, her wig pulled. That's how Margie gets down.
*Shudder*
Then the traffic began to move again, and he cut in front of me without a blinker or even a courtesy wave, and I was sure of it: Henpecked husband. No killer carjacker or Transvestite would have been foolish enough to draw attention to himself like that. I would have flipped him off, but er. . . just in case I was wrong, I decided not to. I don't want to go out like that, yo.
SA
There seems to be a wide lattitude on what is an acceptable avatar these days, everything from faces, pets, random image photos, and I even saw one today of an up-close shot of a thong peeking out of someone's jeans (No doubt a MLM blog trying to lure me in)
I am in search of an avatar that defines me, and until I find one suitable, I made this one. A shadowy figure, but one of the good guys, perhaps. What do you think?
SA.gif)
P.S. Hmmm he's not animated anymore here...I'll have to work on that.
Not one myself, I can only observe, and hope that if that sad day ever comes, I can handle myself with a little more dignity. For some of you, it can be a tell-tale checklist.
Being a thirtysomething, I have been immersed in the subculture of middle-class suburban couples, and after a decade knowing the same married couples, some of those marriages are inevitably breaking up. Let's just skip over the general divorce stuff, who did what to whom, and talk specifically about the poor bastards back on the scene.
Really, if you have been married for a good length of time, you are not cool. Not even close. You might be fat, bald, and while probably a snappier dresser after a woman got ahold of you, you are not prepared for dressing like the single hip folks. If you have kids, the factor of uncoolness is multiplied for every two kids. Now, though these guys are back on the scene, and after an appropriate length of time, (Read: 30 seconds into separation to years after the divorce is final...) they are trying to attract a new mate. All have different methods, but there are some general steps in this process I have observed.
First, they go for the total makeover, trying recover the body they once had. Fitness results are mixed, but then comes the next step: do all the cool stuff they were dying to to, but never got around to. Buy a motorcycle, go hang gliding, get some tattoos, leather fringe pants, shark cage diving, etc. This seems to help butch them up from years of being housebroken, and restores their confidence enough that they are ready to hit the dating scene again.
Here is where it branches out the most. Some of these guys start with modern technology, (the very thing that helped destroy many of their relationships in the first place) and will create their profiles to let the lucky women out there know that they are available again. One friend of mine is under the impression that this is a numbers game, and more is better, (probably correct, if not hollow and deeply cynical ) and has eight separate profiles up. As I am perceived to be an Internet expert, he asked me to look a couple of them over to improve, and I foolishly agreed. *shudder* At least he didn't have any nude photos up, that would have been too much to take.
Others reach for the stars, and drop by their local strip club to let the lasses there know that a 'Man of means' is in the house, and shopping for a hot young thing to accompany him around town. Most sadly, will spend long months and immeasurable resources before they come to the conclusion that these ladies are not looking for men like them, and will move on to one of their other options.
The only thing sadder is one of them who actually does land a dancer. Now to be fair, many of these girls are very nice, I dated two dancers in my life, (one even became an ER doctor, just like she said she would :) , but the limited collective experiences of those I know who have dated them has been pretty ugly. Not all of these girls are all there, both intellectually or emotionally, and many more are relentlessly hooked on an assortment of drugs and tanning beds.
To a single twentysomething, these isuues are not a big deal, they can overlook some or all of these for a time, but for a divorced man, these will present too many challenges to overcome. You can show this beautiful girl off to your envious pals, yes, but you can't introduce them to your parents, your children, or your remaining couple friends. Many men don't realize all the other things they have grown to need from a woman besides a hot bod.
There are a fair few that will attempt to cannibalize your herd. They couldn't make it work with their spouse, but the main women they have been exposed to for years and years are other wives of their couples friends. You can generally spot these dudes easily enough, as they are the ones who will come over from their dingy bachelor apartment to watch the big game with you, but will end up in the kitchen talking your wife for long periods of time, trying their flirt out. This can lead to some hard feelings and the occasional gunshot wound for the least subtle among them.
And now we come to the saddest bastards of the lot: those that try to pick up where they left off at the 'clubs. You've seen 'em. The older guy with grey in his hair, usually wearing something inappropriate like a Hawaiian shirt and khakis, or jeans with a button down and dress shoes. Always at the edge of the dance floor or at the bar with the gold card out, trying to buy a drink for a 22 year old. The one most likely to try to out-drink shots with newly found young friends, and end up with a DUI. I despise these lads the most, probably because I know that would be me if I was ever in that situation. I loved the nightclub scene, and live music in particular. But I digress...
The common theme for most of these divorced men is spending amazing amounts of cash trying to attract a new mate (except the cannibals, unless they suddenly have huge medical bills ;), which is the one thing they usually don't have loads of! People only sometimes get divorced because they fall out of love. Many more split because of the financial mess they have created for themselves, regardless of whose fault. Now they are out there again, probably paying hefty child support (if they aren't a-holes), possible alimony, their new living space with all new furnishings (you know their wives made them toss all their bachelor furnishings long ago) , new expensive man toys, and new a hefty bar bill whenever they go trolling. Plus all the things they have become accustomed to that they have to buy, like cable, Internet, blackberries, prescriptions, food, etc.
Then, when they finally find a new mate, and it may be months or years before she finds out her free-spending Mr. Right is financially screwed, and she finds that she is his new Sugarmamma, whether she can afford to or not.
I bring this all up as another recently divorced man, more of an acquaintance than a friend, was hanging out a friend's BBQ, discussing his new freedom, and how I should hook up with him to head downtown for some "Man time" with the boys, and all the hot spots they were going to, in his brand new hummer h2, the chicks he had on the hook, and all the wonders of ice climbing, blah blah blah.
Then he proceeded to bemoan his fate with his 2 kids, on how he only got them Wednesday afternoons and one weekend a month, and how the system and his Ex were out to get him, and how unfair it was. I surprisingly felt very little sympathy for him.
When I showed little interest in joining him, he called me and some of the other men there out for being whipped pussies, and reminded us how much we were missing. And it had an effect, like being dared on the playground as children.
I came to realize that while many women are very suspicious of other women near their man, the most dangerous thing to married men was no-longer-married men.
As I began, I don't have the perfect answer. I only hope that given the same circumstances, I would be able to cope better. I am also not holding divorcee women to a different standard, I just have less exposure to their shortcomings.
SA
P.S. Wow. I can apparently can be long-winded. I'll be surprised if anyone takes the time to read all that.
ounter with a rather short dress on. She had long red hair, alabaster skin, bright green eyes, and the cutest nose with a four tiny freckles on it. I tell you all that to try to convey that she was smoking hot and was well aware of it. I had my eye on her for some time before she had gone back to school, and left town..
ke-out session in the car, and I was eyeing the ubiquitous La Quinta that shared the parking lot with the Denny’s. (I know, very classy of me, but really, I was just planning ahead to the inevitable conclusion of this evening. . .) Seriously, what is it with La Quinta and Denny’s? Do they get a special tax break if they are within a stone’s throw of each other?
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