The Bloggess

Throw WAY WAY Back Thursday

May 8, 2014in Random Crap

Sometimes I do #ThrowbackThursday where you’re just supposed to put an old picture up on the internet but today I’m going a step further. I’ve been doing some research into my family history but it’s filled with dead ends and few pictures because my father’s family are all Bohemian immigrants who didn’t believe in selfies, apparently. But I went looking for pictures of people living in the Czech same town at the same time as my relatives and this guy popped up and I’m pretty sure we must be related.

Also, I just want to point out that this guy may or may not be my great-great-something-or-another, but he is almost certainly the first hipster God ever made. Stylish facial hair, glasses, hat, jaunty pose, some sort of unicycle with training wheels. Also, lots of hipsters wear their granddad’s clothes and this guy is more likely to be wearing my great-great-great-granddad’s clothes. He’s like a hipster to the third power. (I was going to say “a cubed hipster” but that sounds less mathematical and more like something unsanitary you’d put in a casserole.)

Anyway, this is very nice because I always feel inferior to super-cool hipsters and so now instead of feeling defensive and shy I can just be like “Yeah, my ancestors were hipsters before it was cool. Like, before toilet paper was even invented. It was fun but we’ve moved on since then. Nice unicycle, though.”

People with ADD are too easily distracted to be expected to remember to reorder their ADD meds. And that’s why this post exists.

May 7, 2014in Random Crap, rants

I have lots of things to write about but my head is too full to get them all out. Every day this month has been filled with joy and terror and confusion and self-doubt and gratitude and horror, and then my mind is filled up with stories that I need to get onto paper, but they all get jammed together.

It’s like when you were six and you were trying to get money out of your piggy bank, but it didn’t have a stopper so you just turn the glass pig upside down and shake it violently and loudly as each penny drops out of the opening, but then it would get jammed with pennies and you’d have to sneak a knife out of the kitchen to shove it up the thin opening, and it totally worked, but then you wiggle the knife a little too hard and suddenly the glass opening of your piggy bank shatters and you panic and try to put the pieces back together because you instantly realize that the bank was worth way more than all the pennies inside of it, but you slice open your hand on the broken glass, and that’s when your mom realizes it’s gone terribly quiet and she walks in to find you cross-legged, wide-eyed, holding a knife and covered in blood, and she screams “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” as if you might have murdered your little sister, but you explain that your sister is fine and that you just got stabbed by the piggy bank, and that you’re really sorry and will take any punishment she metes out but that “it sort of seems like being stabbed is punishment enough,” and then your mom is like, “JUST PUT THE KNIFE DOWN, JENNY” as if you’re some small, terrible mugger who murdered a pig for a bunch of blood-soaked pennies.

And that’s what my head is like right now. It’s awful and wonderful. And it’s full of blood and stories and (metaphoric) broken glass and far too many run-on sentences. So tonight I’m going to turn my head upside down and shake until things come loose, because sometimes the only thing harder than writing is not writing.

This post has no real point except to say that I’m still here and that one day very soon I will have shaken free the final page of the book inside my head so you can read it. But for now I’m leaving you with a song I listen to when my head gets too overwhelmed and when I need to be reminded that writing is very much like life, in that it is sometimes incredibly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also incredibly worthwhile.

This is why I’m almost never asked to write for the news.

May 5, 2014in I am totally overrated, Posts that will get me hate mail, Random Crap

So HLN asked me if I’d write a piece for them about having sex after babies, but I pointed out that I think sex after having a baby isn’t all that different from sex after any other desperately demanding job that causes complete exhaustion and irritability. An overworked, kid-free friend of mine told me that her husband recently tried to seduce her by saying, “We’re not stopping until the sheets are soaked.” And then she was like, “Well then I guess we’re both gonna have to pee in the bed because I’m stopping in about 10 minutes. Some of us have shit to do, Kevin. And also, no one wants their sheets ‘soaked’ in body fluids because first of all, ew, and secondly, that just sounds dangerous. Dehydration is a silent killer. Also, we don’t even have the waterproof mattress cover on because it’s in the wash and someone didn’t put it in the dryer. Did you mean to say that we wouldn’t stop until the sheets are “vaguely damp”? Because that would be preferable. No one wants to sleep on a soggy mattress, Kevin. That’s how people get cholera.”

And that’s why sex after having a baby is very similar to sex after starting an exhausting but wonderful full-time job that never ends, which is sort of what motherhood really is if we’re being honest. But then I said that I really didn’t want to write about sex anyway because I’m a fucking lady and HLN read my theory about how cholera is spread and then agreed that I should just avoid that topic. Then they suggested I write about “Pintrest Moms” instead and so I did.

And shockingly, they just published it.

It’s possible it might offend people more than the sex thing. Hard to tell with people.

This is why furniture stores almost never have thrones.

May 2, 2014in Random Crap

Victor and I discussing Game of Thrones (or as I call it, “Wait, who is that again? Who’s that guy? WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE? WHAT IS HAPPENING?“):

me: I don’t even understand why everyone is fighting for that knifey throne. It looks bad-ass but it bet it’s incredibly uncomfortable. If I were a King I’d sit in a hammock.

Victor: That doesn’t quite establish fear like a throne made of hundreds of swords.

me: I wouldn’t be afraid of a King who was sitting in a chair made of swords. I’d think that he used up most of his swords making furniture. But if I was a King sitting in a hammock then invading armies would be like, “Is that King in a hammock? Where are all the swords that most Kings melt down to make into ottomans and shit? This is weird. Let’s run away quickly.”

Victor: “Game of Hammocks.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

me: It’d be one of those hammocks that have fringe on the bottom, but the fringe would be made out of the fingers of my enemies.

Victor: Not imposing enough. me: Hmm. The fingers and penises of my enemies. Victor: Closer. But still not enough.

me: Fine. Then I guess I’d make a knifey chair like the Game of Thrones one. But I’d also want it to be a recliner. And to have a massage feature. Although I suspect that would probably just massage the blades into your body, now that I think about it.

Victor: Like a Lazy-Boy made of electric carving knives. me: Fuck it. I don’t want to be King anymore. I really just want a hammock.

Victor: Well, I’m glad we settled that.

me: I have simple tastes. Penis fringe optional.

i suspect Ned Stark was carrying this sword less for protection and more to use as a cane to lean on rather than sit on the Throne of a Thousand Paper Cuts. Even the crow looks concerned. Or hungry. — i suspect Ned Stark was carrying this sword less for protection and more to use as a cane to lean on rather than rest his weight on the Throne of Tetanus. Even the crow looks concerned. Or maybe he’s hungry. Aren’t crows carnivorous? That throne is like a pointy bird feeder for crows.

PS. Go back up and click on that Game of Thrones link on the top. You’ll thank me. Probably.

Success is not for the laz

April 30, 2014in Random Crap

My husband said “success is not for the lazy” but what if the thing that I’m really successful at is being lazy? I bet super-successful people never focus on succeeding in the field of laziness and so they don’t realize how hard it is. I assure you, it takes just as much commitment and time to be slothful as it does to be an astronaut.

We lazy people don’t do it for accolades or rewards. We do it because it’s what we do. We never get recognition for excelling in the field of laziness, probably because all the other people who are focused on laziness are too lazy to come up with a way to measure laziness. Which is fine because the truly lazy couldn’t be bothered to submit our laziness for judgement. We are industrious in our unindustriousness. (Spellcheck just informed me that “unindustriuous” isn’t a real word, but it refused to give me any suggestions or help, and I suspect that means that even Spellcheck has been inspired by my languorous example.)

I’m so good at being lazy I could do it in my sleep. Literally. In fact, sleep is when I do some of my best work. The only way I could get better at being lazy is if I were in a coma. Victor pointed out that I’d probably regret all this laziness when I’m old and on my deathbed but I don’t think he’s thought that through. Death is really just the highest level of laziness and it sort of means that my dying act will be my final masterpiece AND I DON’T EVEN HAVE TO WORK AT IT.

Then Victor said that he didn’t have any way to respond to this sort of “illogical ridiculousness” and flatly refused to debate it with me anymore.

And I think that’s just laziness.

I think the man has great potential.

The King is Coming. But maybe not the one you think.

April 27, 2014in Posts that will get me hate mail, Random Crap, weekly reruns

I got an email from someone who wanted me to come to “a very important social media conference” and at the end he wrote “THE KING IS COMING!” Then I wrote back, “Elvis is coming?” and he was like “I’m sorry. Who?” And I explained that he’d said that the king was coming to the event and that I happened to have it on good authority that Elvis had been dead for quite some time, and then he explained that “THE KING IS COMING!” obviously referred to the true king, Jesus Christ. So then I was like “Jesus is coming to your social media conference? How did you swing that?” and then he explained that “THE KING IS COMING!” is just his auto-signature and didn’t refer to the conference at all, and I told him that it was very nice auto-signature but that some people might suspect that he was advertising Jesus and/or Elvis as being attendees and that he might want to reword it so he didn’t get sued. I also asked him why some people referred to Jesus as The King, because it seems like his Dad would be The King since he’s the main dude in charge, so technically wouldn’t Jesus be a Prince? Except that “Prince Jesus” doesn’t really have a nice ring to it, and it sounds like something Disney would try to make into a musical. But then he never responded.

And this is probably why I so seldom get invited to events.

****************

And in other news, it’s time for the weekly wrap-up:

What you missed in my shop (Named “Eight pounds of uncut cocaine” so that your credit card bill will be more interesting.):

“Magnificent misfit.” You really are, you know. And that’s a wonderful thing.

What you missed on the internets:

Kick-ass stuff I pinned.
Bunches of people asking if I’ve seen the new Walter Potter taxidermy book. I have and I’ve reviewed it.
I was on the news. Sort of.

This week on shit-I-didn’t-come-up-with-but-wish-I-did-because-it’s-kind-of-awesome:

Unfinished Scripts. It takes incredible talent to be this awful.
Now I want one.
Girls Who Read

This week’s wrap-up is brought to you by Melany, a tell-it-like-it-is, hold-nothing-back blogger, and Beverly Hills queen of snark. She believes that snarky is witty, but younger and better looking, and her blog, Melanysguydlines.com is full of hilarious TRUE STORIES about being young, single, and navigating this crazy world with a huge dose of humor. She says what most are thinking but do not say themselves. Think Chelsea Handler with a splash of Perez Hilton. You can check her out here.