christmas in october, yo

By this time tomorrow, I will have met Gee Dubya President, slapped him in the face, and been killed by the Secret Service.

Then you can all sigh and say, "I knew her when..."

This will be right up there with the time that George Michael knocked me down at Heathrow airport after his "coming out" interview when he tried to suck off a cop in a public bathroom.

Man, my life is sweet.

Am I a star-fucker? Perhaps.

But Gee Dubya President, coming into my work...just too much temptation. Like I told Andy tonight, I have to not be totally enthralled because all it does is remind me of whom it is that's actually going to be there - to avoid getting hyper psycho on his ass.

For all of those Secret Service fellas who may be reading me for "background" at the moment (or as I like to call them, the "SS") please know this:

I so super duper love, love, love the president and all of the choices he's made thus far. Sending those kids to die on faulty ingelligence in Baghdad? A stroke of brilliance, my fellow 'Merkins. Totally ignoring Osama because he proved too tricky to capture? Excellent!

My gawd, how do I love thee?!? Let me count the "dead in a foreign country with no one to mourn them because it's unpatriotic to 'go against' our soldiers during this time of war, war, war" ways.

At most, I'll have three to five seconds with the man. How can I condence nearly four years of vitriol into that short of a conversation?

Wish me luck, folks.

Thank sweet jeebus I live in a swing state, or else the fucker would totally be ignoring us right now. ()

i'm not even sure that i'm awake, actually

I am currently stuck at home unexpectedly due to my brakes totally going out on me yesterday. I almost died but didn't. Go, me!

My four-year-old daughter is providing a rather surreal atmosphere. Things she's said to me include:

• Do you like Spartacus, or do you not like Spartacus? Or do you totally hate Spartacus? I really, really, really hate Spartacus.



• Who's that guy who makes all the cotton candy? What's his name again? Oh yeah - it's God.



• I woke up with Murry slapping me in the face saying, "Wakey, wakey - make me oatmeal!" He slaps me all the time but he's still my friend and I miss him when he's on the moon.



• Then Greg sucked out my brain and I was a dead zombie. No, wait - I was an elm tree. With a zombie brain!



• When it rains I get scared and say, "Ahhh! Water is falling down - we better catch it!" but I'm still pretty good at keeping water in a cup. Water in the cup doesn't fall down unless Nicky knocks it over. But that's not rain. It's just spilled water. Not scary!



• (The scene is our kitchen and there are paper plates scattered everywhere. Zoe's lying on her tummy carefully examining one. I asked her what she was doing and she replied in a totally dead-pan, serious way.) I'm tracking an elephant. These are his footprints. There's an elephant somewhere in this house...and I believe he's hopping on one foot.

She's a bizarre little creature. Oh, and she's racist, too. Our neighbor is black and Zoe met another black girl one day at my office and she asked, "Do you know Cassandra? She's brown, too!" As Mike always says, "Nobody likes a racist baby. Except maybe for other racists."

We suspected Zoe was going to have, shall we say, issues years ago. Perhaps you recall this exchange from December 2002:

Me: Do you ever wonder if Nic has anything wrong with him? Inside his brain, I mean?
Andy: No, he's fine. You worry too much.
Me: Well, I can't help it. I mean, Hippy's daughter has autism, her son has ADD and Boob Job's son has ADHD. I just wonder about it.
Andy: No, I think he'll be all right. Now this one on the other hand...(he points at Zoe who just walked in the room with no pants on, her shirt backwards, a sieve on her head like a helmet and carrying part of a broomstick she's using as a guitar)...this is the one I wonder about.
Zoe: Wock and woll, Missy Mommy!
Me: Yes, rock and roll, indeed.

She's either a genius or a mental case. Or perhaps a little bit of both. Time will tell.

I wonder where she gets it from? ()

commence navel gazing...now

Because I love my little man so very much, here are is a glimpse into the saga known as Nico and the Donut.

He goes nuts for Krispy Kreme. Not just a normal kind of nuts - I mean serious whacko nuts.



A change starts to gradually come over him...



...and he breaks out his Jack Nicholson "Here's Johnny!" impression.



He's so out-of-it that he doesn't even realize the threat that Stella is posing to his beloved donut.



Then he switches into his "Barbarino" from "Welcome Back, Kotter" stage. Which is a weird ability he has, seeing as how he's never once watched the show. The kid's a natural!



Guess how many teeth I have?



THIS many!



Then he gets into his, "Man, I love you, man" stage. It's obvious he's itching for more donut.



But his sister already ate the last one.



She's a wicked, wicked woman.



The end.

I know - this was just a poor, thinly-veiled attempt at making a post filled with my beautiful son a legitimate thing, but so what? He's a cutie patooty and you know it. ()

state of the world

I was reading Veronica today (because I'm hot, hot, hot for her brother but let's not mention that, seeing as how he's an Argentine and Andy has some rather strong feelings about that particular nation just because they're a bunch of big, fat cheaters an' stuff...crap, I've forgotten where I am in this mess of a run-on sentence...is it time yet to close my parentheses? Is it ever!)

Anyway, I was reading Veronica and she linked to Miss Universe pictures (yeah, it was a post back in June but nothing else is being updated today so I could indulge myself without appearing to be too stalkerish - much) and since I can't resist the sexy slithers of international lady snakes I was checking out them foxy fly bizzles.

Let's move on.

I've never seen a Miss Universe pageant before, so I was wholly unprepared for what I was in store for. There are contestants from some of the most war-torn, poverty-stricken countries in the world. Sure, Sudan, Haiti and Liberia were absent but Bosnia and Ghana were present. Hell, there was a delegate from Botswana, fer crying out loud! Botswana, where the median age is 19 years and the life expectancy is a touch over 30. Nearly 40% of their adult population has HIV/AIDS! And yet, in the face of that, they managed to send a delegate to the Miss Universe pageant.

There's something seriously fucked up with that picture. Not the picture of the delegate - she's absolutely lovely - but rather their representation in the pageant. How do they even know about Miss Universe? More to the point, why on earth would they care? Hell, I'm far more privileged than the great majority of the people of Botswana, I suspect, and I couldn't give a crap about the pageant. I don't even know when it was held - I followed an old link because I was bored. How do they afford the dresses, the grooming, the finishing school? I doubt poise and grace are very high on their list of skills they teach their children in Botswana - who cares about that when you're having a mid-life crisis at the age of fifteen? Utterly baffling.

Further than that, how do so many Africans afford air fare to America? I understand that a great majority of them qualify for amnesty when they arrive so they don't have to worry about immigration costs, but how do they afford the $1500+ plane ticket in the first place? In Liberia you can buy and sell entire families for that amount. And none of the Liberians I know have come across to America alone - one woman brought her nineteen children with her. Here's a fun little task for you - go to Travelocity and search for a flight from your airport to Monrovia. (Monrovia has the only airport in the whole of Liberia, and even that is little more than a packed earth runway that's serviced from Ghana and only Ghana.) It's confusing and difficult, isn't it? So how in the world do they get here? It's not likely that there are many travel agents on every block like we have here. I don't have the guts to ask the people I know how they got here, and in my line of work I'm more likely to get, "I got here by the grace of God" as an answer than anything else - which I can respect but it doesn't eliminate the shround of mystery regarding their travel.

African immigrants, frankly, astonish me. I wouldn't even move to a state I'd never visited, let alone a nation half-way across the world. Sure, they speak the language, but still - how on earth do they do it? I suppose I have a reverse-racism going on whereby I view African immigrants as more exceptional to most Americans because of what they've overcome and what they deal with every single day, so perhaps my vision is skewed. Then again, the closest thing to a tyrant I've had to deal with has been Gee Dubya President and he makes being a Canadian citizen look appealing, so I guess I'm talking out of school here with regards to what I would do to escape a fanatical government.

But anyway - dude, seriously? That chick from Botswana? She's pretty hot.

I couldn't just say "I love Alfie" (which is what I'd intended to do), now could I? I had to dress it up in this construct of how I don't understand the world or its values and oh aren't I the inferior one? Yeah, that's the stuff. ()