Heh... Ball Drop

Yesterday, before commencing the 15-hour (if I'm lucky) drive back from North Carolina, I had lunch with My Mandy and her two boys. This was a pleasant experience and my last chance to get a decent taco before returning to New England, where the opportunities for a good taco are surprisingly thin on the ground.

We ordered flan at the end of the meal, because opportunities for good flan in New England just don't exist at all. Mandy insisted the boys share her flan, but I got one of my own, which prompted the older son to remark, "I wish I could order my own flan."

"Well, kiddo," I said, "someday you will be older and you'll have a job and then you can order all the flan you want. That's the tradeoff. Your memory will turn to slush, and your face will sag down to your knees, but you'll be able to order whatever you want whenever you want."

Another advantage is that you don't have to worry about New Year's Eve. I mean, you CAN go out and play if you want to, but you no longer feel like you have to do anything. You can sit on the couch, and the hardest decision you'll have to make is whether to watch the marathon of The Walking Dead, or True Blood, or The Big Bang Theory.

You won't feel that you need to explain how you drove seven hours yesterday and eight more today, and now you are, as they say, knackered. You won't feel the need to try to remember any fun you ever had on previous New Year's Eves in order to prove that it is as overrated as the haters say it is.

You might have hazy memories of a party that didn't suck that might have happened in high school-- but that also could have been after graduation. You're just not sure, on account of your memory has turned to slush. You might also remember a frat party in college at which some douchebag launched a Roman candle indoors and how said Roman candle barely missed your head. You might remember a random array of bartenders over the years with whom you may or may not have made out. (Hey, you try writing that sentence and not ending it with a preposition.) But you can't be sure of the details.

So, yes, it's been amply stated that New Year's Eve is an overrated night that is almost certain to end in disappointment. The crowds. The sloppy drunks. The desperation. The Greek calls it Amateur Night for a reason.

But more than that, today I did battle with the Northeast Corridor. Usually, the Northeast Corridor, and specifically the New Jersey Turnpike, wins in a manner designed to humiliate me into crying like a little girl. However today, on New Year's Eve, just a few miles from where The Ball Will Drop, it looked like this:

Either I have some really excellent karma stored up from all the other times the New Jersey Turnpike beat me up and stole my toll money, or the Magic of the Hair Band is a real thing. I know I didn't turn the channel from Hair Nation (sattelite radio and I have made up and are trying to make it work this time) from the time I crossed the New Jersey state line until I arrived in my driveway. The Van Halen and Bon Jovi seemed to created a protective coating that allowed me to breeze through like it was 2 in the morning on a Wednesday, not the middle of the afternoon on New Year's Eve.

But five hours is a LOT of rocking out. I can only be expected to sing "Don't Stop Believin'" so many times in one day. Six times. Six is my limit.

So I'm staying at home. I've got some eggnog that my mom packed in my travel cooler. But I don't have any rum... maybe I can add tequila and call it huevo nog.

But no. That sounds gross. And when you're all grown up and have a job, you can buy the top-shelf drinks and learn that shooting it or mixing it with inappropriate liquids is a waste that nears the scale of a crime against humanity.

Crazy Bat Lady

I still don't especially want bats in my home, but would you get a load of this little guy?



I think bats have gotten a bad rap in our culture. We have this idea that they're scary and they bite people and drink blood and spread disease.

Generally speaking, they don't. What they DO do is eat things that are scary and bite people and drink blood and spread disease, as I discovered last summer. So I'm not just being swayed by a cute little animal video that The Canadian posted on my Facebook feed.

But the cute little animal video helps, and it's a good thing because bats are in a lot of trouble. They're losing habitat-- hence they end up in my living room. But they don't want to be in my living room any more than I want them there. They're losing zoo space. They're getting exposed to pollution.

And there are still a lot of people out there who want to bash them with shovels because they are kind of scary looking. But in our defense, neither The Suz nor I ever killed one on purpose, because we're not the kind of people who go around killing any animals on purpose. Except mosquitoes.

But it looks like the little guy above is changing a lot of minds today. And if he can move someone like me from tolerance to enthusiasm, then perhaps this species has hope after all. The video has gone viral, and the batworld site has gotten so many hits today that the main page has crashed. But you can still make a donation, so I think I'm going to give them the money I had earmarked for this really hot pair of shoes.

They wouldn't have fit my giant ass feet anyway.

Bork! Bork! Bork!

I think I've established that I am a simple creature. And with the release of The Muppets, we've firmly established that the things that brought me joy when I was five years old still make me happy.

And that's pretty much the basis of the new film. It appeals to the inner five-year-olds in the audience who remember watching The Muppet Show every Saturday night without fail. Who still proudly display their lunchboxes from kindergarten on a bookshelf in their home offices. Who can't remember to buy more milk but still know every song from the soundtracks from The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper.

K-Rock and I are of one mind on the Muppet obsession, but we're also grown up and intellectual now:

Because we are grown up and intellectual, we don't let our inner five-year-olds call all the shots. We grapple with the Big Questions about the Muppets.

Is the Swedish Chef a racist stereotype?

We conducted some intensive research on this topic and concluded, yes, possibly, but there is evidence on the interwebs that the Swedes actually find the Swedish Chef funny. So it probably doesn't matter.  Wikipedia tells us that at least one real live Swedish Chef, a guy named Lars Backman (there's an umlaut over the a in that name, but I'm not sure how to add an umlaut on this platform... plus I like to say umlaut) claimed that his appearance on Good Morning America inspired the Swedish Chef, but Muppet writer Jerry Juhl has denied this claim. The same Wikipedia entry cites Brian Henson's story that his father, Jim, had a tape called "How to Speak Mock Swedish" that he listened to in the car, and that became the basis for the character.

While we have been unable to locate where one might obtain a copy of said tape, there are a number of sites on the interwebs that enable users to translate text into Chef Swedish, including an add-on for Firefox which can translate web pages.

What does The Count feed on?

He's a vampire, so the obvious answer would be blood, right? Except, a) he's a character on a children's show, and having a character who lives by draining living humans of blood would be pretty dark and b) he's made out of felt. Does this mean he sucks the stuffing out of rag dolls and teddy bears? Also pretty damn dark.

But for the trivially minded, his full name is Count von Count.

Is Beaker a representation of the silenced cultures victimized by post-colonial European Imperialism?
Since K-Rock threw me this question, I've been able to think of little else. I haven't run my answer past her yet, but I'm going to have to go with a big yes on this one. Beaker doesn't speak English, but rather a series of squeaking "meep" sounds, which clearly represents the Eurocentric misunderstanding of native languages the world over. Furthermore, Beaker is subjected to humiliating and dangerous experiments at the hands of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. That's a very English-sounding name, and he does speak with a slight accent. Or the reference to honeydew melons could be symbolic of the Dutch propensity for agriculture. Also, he looks kind of Belgian.*


In the clip below, we can see the Swedish Chef teaming up with Honeydew to try to evade/ suppress a Beaker rebellion, which reflects the cooperation between European powers to subjugate native peoples.


Finally, Beaker is pale and has red hair, which physically identifies him with the Irish, who lived for hundreds of years under the violent oppression of British rule. He's obviously so skinny because his English landlord hasn't been allowing him adequate food supplies.

Is Animal an indictment of the faulty American educational system?

Some accounts indicate that Animal was inspired by Keith Moon of The Who, except without the dying in a pool of sick part. Under this interpretation, Animal would be, if anything, an indictment of a faulty British educational system.

Except he isn't. Because Animal is fucking awesome.

*I do not hate Belgians.

Like Mini Golf, But Aggressive

Last week I took part in the school's Faculty/ Student Field Hockey Game, which is an annual event that doesn't benefit anything of which I am aware. It's just an excuse to try to see if any of the male teachers can be convinced to wear the traditional field hockey kilt.

Nobody wore a kilt this year, because the afternoon turned cold and dark. And then it started to rain. Then it started to rain harder. But we powered through and the ref called the game with only two minutes of play left-- after the faculty managed to tie up the score at 1-1. 

But I'm sure the ref was totally objective.

The fact that I was playing in this game shocks me for several reasons. First, I barely know what field hockey is. I don't know if it's just not popular in the South or if my school just didn't have a team because they thought it was a bad idea to have more sports for girls than mandated by law. Or maybe they just didn't want to encourage Good Southern Ladies to learn to run around with sticks and whack the crap out of stuff.

Second, I was never good at any sports. I ran track because I thought I needed to have a sport on my resume for college applications, and track required me to remember minimal rules: run that way, very fast; if something gets in your way, turn. Even the field activities, shotput and discus, demanded a minimal amount of coordination: throw this heavy object as hard as you can, that way; if something gets in your way, wait until it's out of the way because, for the love of God, you could kill someone.

I was mediocre at best.

Because that was my attitude toward sports when I was still young and energetic, I was surprised to find myself running around on a field in the cold and rain, wielding a wooden stick, chasing a little yellow ball. Not just hanging around and taking up space, either. I was running back and forth. I fought for possession of the little yellow ball. I didn't even think to whine about how cold I was or stop to collapse to the ground in a panting heap.

Which is what I used to do after finishing last in the 800 meter.

This is what happens when you teach a grown-ass woman to fight. I figure if I can spend three hours a week kicking and punching the crap out of a heavy bag, in between sit-ups and inverted push ups (with gloves, and no, it's not a superpower) and thirty jumping jacks in thirty seconds and whatever other sadism sensei comes up with, then an hour running around in the rain with a stick should be no sweat.

I never would have thought I could do this-- and like it. Need it, even. I'm still not great at it (especially the inverted push ups with gloves... but that doesn't mean I don't have superpowers) but I'm also not a spaz anymore. And I can hit a ball with a stick in the rain. Toward the goal net. Just like miniature golf. But aggressive.

So here I am staring down the short dark tunnel to 40, looking at my Inner Athlete. This is probably not a big deal to anyone besides me, but at least I'm excited about it. A year ago I started taking steps to radically change the course of my life. Some of those changes-- the boat, learning to operate the boat, freelancing regularly-- are still works in progress. Being able to do multiple push-ups wasn't on the to-do list, but it's a change. It's progress. Instead of getting twisted up about reaching some imaginary destination, I'm enjoying the detours.

It also can't hurt to know how to kill a man with my elbow. Never know when that might come in handy.

"Candlesticks Always Make A Nice Gift..."

My Mandy is coming to visit tomorrow. My Mandy and I became friends on a seventh grade field trip to Discovery Place, when we discovered that the mutual dislike we had been harboring for the previous year was the product of a rumor fabricated by some Mean Girl whose motives have been lost to the history of middle school.

And that was it. She's my Person. We were band geeks together in high school. Drinking buddies in college. I wore a purple bridesmaid's dress at her wedding-- also the last documented instance of my wearing heels. I was at the hospital the night her first son was born. Neither of her children seem to know I'm not actually a blood relative.

My will (Yes, I have one. That was a fun Saturday night activity.) stipulates that she will be the one to obtain and dispose of my journals. So, yes, that means this is the person I trust, in the event of my death, to take care of all the stuff too profane for me to write about here.

This woman knows where twenty-five years worth of bodies are buried.*

This visit is kind of a big deal because it will be My Mandy's first visit to Little Blue. So this means cleaning. Not just day-to-day get-the-dishes-out-of-the-sink, vacuum-up-the-cat hair cleaning. This is full-scale dust-the-ceiling-fans, scrub-the-bathtub cleaning.

You know it's serious when I get down on hands and knees and scrub the bathtub.

And it has to be done because I am possibly the world's worst housekeeper. I shouldn't be. My mother is the second most fastidious person I've ever known, and she was raised by the first. I own the entire collection of Swiffer products. I have a range of sprays and powders which, although green, are pretty powerful. I have a Shark, and a Dyson DC-14 "Animal". I am equipped to keep this place in a condition rivaled only by the best operating rooms in the country.

Furthermore, Southern women are supposed to keep a clean house,but I am an affront to all they hold sacred because I have balls of dust under my bed that can no longer reasonably be called "dust bunnies". They're more on the scale of mid-sized farm animals.

Or they were until I vacuumed them up this weekend.

Despite what I've said about The Great Purge and my fear of reality television, though, I'm not a hoarder. I just don't get all in a twist if the laundry doesn't get done today. I don't really worry about vacuuming until the cat starts sneezing because she is allergic to herself. I don't think about the dishes until I run out of forks.

I figure it doesn't bother anyone but me, and there are just other more interesting things to do. There are books to read, yarn to weave, friends to meet, passport stamps to collect, heavy bags to kick, money to lose at craps tables, inane blogs to be written. In the words of Crash Davis, "We're dealing with a lot of shit."


* The bodies are metaphorical. I may know how to kill a man; doesn't mean I've actually done it.

Crazy Cat Lady= Lady With Crazy Cats

I know I'm not supposed to, but I always liked Ernest Hemingway. Sure, on the one hand, there's a lot of evidence to support that he was a raving misogynist, but I figure if he was able to get a woman like Martha Gellhorn to buy into his nonsense and marry him, there's nothing wrong with me enjoying his clean, sparse prose and structurally sound short fiction.

And he liked drinking and boxing and cats.

He liked cats a lot. If you go to his old house in Key West you can see the descendants of his cats still roaming around the place, cared for and protected by a loyal museum staff.

You might also visit the marina and get to scratch a manatee's tummy and feed it lettuce, but that's another story for another time.

The direct descendants of Hemingway's cats are all easy to spot, because they're polydactyl. That means they all have extra toes, so they look like they're wearing catchers' mitts... or boxing gloves. The legend goes that Hemingway got his first cat from a sea captain, and it was polydactyl, etc. There was a time when sea captains prized the cats with extra toes because they're allegedly superior at mousing, which comes in handy on a ship.

This is also why They say polydactyl cats are more common in New England and maritime Canada.

It was the Hemingway thing that created the tipping point when I was at the shelter looking for a companion for Laurel (code name: Mayhem) when we moved to the now not-so-new house. Separated from The Suz's cats after we left The Old Apartment, she was getting isolated and weird, so I adopted Minerva (code name: Chaos).*

Minerva has seven toes on either of her front feet. We don't have any mice here, so I have no idea if they provide her with a strategic advantage over rodents. But two of the toes are essentially non-functional, so the claws never wear down. This means Minerva gets more frequent pedicures than I do.

While a pedicure is a bit of a treat for me, it takes on the tenor of a minor military operation for Minerva. I have to do a bit of reconnaissance to determine the best location to trap her, then I have to use treats and guile to lure her into that location. From there it's a matter of brute force-- balanced with some delicacy so I get to keep all my fingers-- to get her into the crate for transport.

She hurls herself around the crate during the short drive to the vet, yelling the whole time

Once in the waiting room, she continues to make a fuss, alarming dogs, other cats, and small children while we wait for a technician.

"Is this Minerva? Did I pronounce it right?" asks the technician.

"Yes and yes. Um, I don't know if it says so in her chart, but she's... difficult."

"Yes, I see that here. We'll be fine." The technician picks up the crate and carries her off to the back.

The animal hospital is a reasonably large facility, but Minerva's yowls and screams are clearly audible in the waiting room. I suspect they're clearly audible in Fresno.

I don't have pictures, because I'm not allowed in the back, but the techs tell me they have to wrap Minerva in a towel, put on the Cone of Shame, and call in backup to pin her down and clip her toenails.

The tech returns with an even angrier cat in the crate. "She tried to kill three of us."

"Yeah. She does that. She'll try to kill me later tonight." And now that the toenails have been cut, she'll have stealth capacity. She's a baby ninja.

When I get her home she will go upstairs to sulk for the next four days. She's entered her adolescent years now, so that's what she does anyway. Sits up in her room alone. Wears only black. Complains that nobody understands her. She'd listen to Coldplay, I'm sure, if she could figure out how to use the Ipod.

I'm not sure where I went wrong in raising Minerva. The Kiwi was her primary influence in her first year, and the Kiwi is a calm, Zen sort of person. Not all senseless violence like me. But The Kiwi, like me, has a very low tolerance for bullshit, so I guess that was what Minerva absorbed.

As we're waiting to check out, a little girl in the waiting area peeks into Minerva's crate and tells her she's pretty. "Look, Daddy," the kid says to her father, "she looks like a Halloween kitty."

I hear a low growl from the cage.

Insult to injury. And now I know I'll be sleeping with one eye open tonight.


*Laurel and Minerva both got their names from the staff at the shelters where I adopted them. I was too lazy to think of anything better. They got their code names from Special K during a particularly harrowing weekend of pet-sitting.

The Crazy Cat Lady Gives Away Free Candy

I don't especially like Halloween. It lost most of the appeal when I stopped being a trick-or-treater and became a trick-or-treatee. I haven't been home for the festivities or the last few years, but since it's a Monday this year, there's no escaping it. I got a big bag of candy and put a few decorations on my lawn, because I also don't want to find myself trying to figure out how to get egg off vinyl siding come Tuesday morning.




I don't really do costumes, either, though I did wear my kickboxing gear to school today as what has to be the laziest costume ever. The students dug getting to see my gloves, though, and they speculated once again about who would win if I got into a cage match with NayNay. We're planning a major YouTube event if we ever get good enough to actually fight real people.

And now there's a family with toddlers working their way up my street. I'll have to tell them how cute they are, even though I don't understand toddlers in any meaningful sense. The Idiots (TM) are scared of little kids, so I expect to be fishing Laurel out from under the bed later.

Please don't let them take me....

I resist your cultural stereotypes. 

Minerva resents people calling her a "Halloween Cat" just because she's black. This will somehow become my fault, and she will add it to her growing list of grievances against me, leveraging it all for an extra helping of gooshyfood.

So right now I'm hiding in my office and wishing the dojo were open for classes tonight. A good round on the heavy bag would do wonders to stave off the nightmares. But tomorrow a good round on the heavy bag might do wonders to stave off the effects of leftover candy.

Don't Mess With a Woman Who Has A Wayback Machine

Today is The Suz's birthday. I'm not supposed to say how old she is. To celebrate the momentous occasion, Saturday night she, K-Rock, and I stepped into the wayback machine and journeyed to 1994.

Actually, we just went to see the Indigo Girls play in Nashua. It amounts to the same thing, except now we have smartphones. And everyone in the audience had a smartphone. And everyone in the audience with a smartphone seemed to be sharing the experience on facebook or texting with their friends or checking their email repeatedly or otherwise avoiding having an authentic experience.

You'd think the people at an Indigo Girls concert would be all about the authentic experience. These were very earnest, crunchy, New Hampshire liberals. Lots of handmade dangly earrings and flowy tops on the womenfolk. Lots of Drew Carey glasses, and t-shirts promoting obscure microbrews on the menfolk. And a lot of guys in fedoras.

I don't understand guys wearing fedoras.

Still these guys were part of a predominantly female audience. So I'm pretty sure that the Fedora Guys who came to the show with their girlfriends are getting a free pass on all kinds of dirty stuff for at least six months. Well played, Fedora Guys.

When I saw the Girls in 1994, there was much more gender equity in the audience. I knew a lot of guys who genuinely liked the band, and not just as an easy way to ingratiate themselves. But that was 1994, and it was the South, so the Girls had a pretty good local following. Listening to Rites of Passage puts me right back in my freshman dorm. I don't think I'm the only one who was around in that time and place who could trace the trajectory of her early 20s through their lyrics.

And my late 20s.
Early 30s.
...late 30s.

Anyway, I'll skip the rundown of favorite lines. And despite the rampant smartphone usage, it was a successful evening out and allowed us all to hearken back to our college days. I am happy to report that Amy and Emily can still deliver the goods.

And with that, I'm going to go plug my headphones into my own smartphone and hop back into the wayback machine for the rest of the evening.

Ahhh, 1994, it's kind of nice to be back for a little while.

The Manda Reconsiders Tube Dresses

On CNN this evening I saw a piece about Slut Walk in New York City. And I knew this was a phenomenon taking place in other cities around the U.S. and Canada, but it got me thinking about a post I wrote from Las Vegas this summer in which I was harshly critical of the fashion choices of female patrons of casinos on The Strip on a given Saturday night.

How do I reconcile my support of the Slut Walkers out there with my use of the term "grievous skankage" to describe the yellow tube dresses of the world?

Perhaps what follows from here will be a thin rationalization meant to justify some inherent hypocrisy in my own thinking. But I stand by my observations in Vegas. I take great umbrage at living in a culture that tells women their primary currency lies in wearing stiletto heels and a tube dress (and/or their ability to bake brownies, for that matter).

I take even greater umbrage at living in a culture that tells women that their primary currency lies in putting their sexuality on display and then punishes those women for doing so by telling them they were "asking for it" when some violent pervert assaults them.

From the standpoint of logic, that's a slippery slope. It starts with a tube dress and ends with the cut of a black t-shirt. It implies that sexual assault is about sex when it's actually about violence and domination. And it's the kind of thinking that assaults victims all over again.

I may dislike the tube dress on aesthetic grounds. I may dislike the tube dress as a result of my cultural concerns. I may make catty comments about the tube dress because the wearer of one of them nearly accidentally set me on fire in a bar. But I defend the right of the wearer to don the tube dress and drink until she can't see her own face AND STILL make it safely home at the end of the evening.

And if by some chance she doesn't make it safely home at the end of the evening, I expect law enforcement officers to treat her with respect and courtesy regardless of her fashion choices. I don't think it's too much to ask for in a free society that we can wear whatever we like without endangering our bodies or our access to justice. The worst thing a woman in a tube dress should have to fear is smartass remarks from people like me.

In Which the Manda Speculates if Boiling Water and Leaves Can Cure the Common Cold

After many, many months of existential meltdown, it feels pretty good for me to be able to say that, in general, I like my job. I get paid to be funny and talk about books and movies and good writing, and when the students are into it, that doesn't suck. Doesn't mean this is where I want to be forever, but with soaring unemployment and dipping real estate prices, where I am is just fine for now.

But here's what does suck about teaching high school: every year, about two weeks in, I get a nasty little cold that doesn't go away until February.

I'm not going to be the asshat who blames the kids for this. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if you spend a lot of your time in a relatively confined space with a lot of people, you're going to have some germs passing around. I'd likely have the same complaint if I worked for an airline. The thing is, if I worked for an airline, I wouldn't have three months for my immune system to get used to something else before going back to the confined space.

So it's nobody's fault. It's just the job, and if that's my worst complaint right now, I'm okay with it.

Still, here I am with a throat that feels like I've been eating sandpaper for three days. And I'm pretty sure at any moment I'm going to cough up an internal organ. It's not a bad enough sick for me to feel justified in calling in sick and spending a day or two in bed, it's just bad enough to make me whiny and generally irritating to any poor schmuck who happens to cross my path and say "How are you doing?" in passing.

It's just bad enough to make people say, "Wow, Manda, you don't look so good," after I spent a lot of time applying makeup to try to look like I'm perfectly fine to be out in public.

It's just bad enough to keep me from kickboxing tonight. That's the worst part.

So instead of kicking a heavy bag so hard it tips over and hits NayNay in the face-- true story-- I sit at home and watch reruns of "How I Met Your Mother" on TiVo and make a pot of tea.

Last week I said there are few things a good pot of tea won't fix, and one of my friends said I sounded like her (ex) mother-in-law. I've heard a lot of stories about this mother-in-law and have concluded that this comparison might have been more flattering if my friend had compared me to Satan hisownself. But maybe things are better between them now.

So I'm revising my statement. No, a pot of tea won't cure cancer. It probably won't even cure my cold. Tea won't make an insufferable mother-in-law more sufferable. It won't mend a broken heart. It won't solve a crisis. It won't magically enable me to kickbox tonight.

I understand the appeal, though. Making a pot of tea is a routine, and routine helps you feel a small measure of control when facing a crisis. It's something to DO at any rate. There's a social element to hot beverages which can also be therapeutic. There's a reason tea-making is a full on ceremony in some cultures.

And a hot beverage is soothing to a throat that has been scrubbed with sandpaper. These are all desirable outcomes.

I understand that this attitude toward tea is a stereotypically English affectation, but we have our own version of it down South. Except we fry stuff instead.

And I like tea. Right now I have a nice oolong going, and oolong is fun to say. Go ahead. Try it. Because I have a friend who owns a tea shop, I also know the difference between an oolong, a green tea, a black tea, and a white tea. I've also reached a point of snobbery about it that means I don't like to use bags or tap water in the preparation. It could mean I'm a dork. It could also mean I haven't embraced the chaos as much as I like to think I have.

So now I'm going to retire for the evening with my mug and a trashy novel. These are the things that will improve my state of mind and, I hope, body.

But if anyone were to want to bring me a plate of fried chicken, I probably wouldn't say no to that either.

This is Where We Used to Live

The morning is glorious. A blue New England morning when summer is just giving way to fall. Bright sharp sunshine, just warm enough but with the hint of the crispness to come. Clouds floating fluffy above.

The Saturday that came Before, and I wake up on the floor by the door of a room in a Motel 6 in New Haven. The Suz is dozing in the bed. E-Money is stirring on the same floor, over by the window.

In those days, Suz worked north of the city, and I worked west. Neither of us had bonded with our co-workers, so when we felt social we would meet for drinks on Friday afternoons in Faneuil Hall, where the tourists go. We were only a year into Boston, so we were still somewhat tourists ourselves.

Labor Day weekend found us enjoying the musical stylings of a cover duo calling themselves Me and Julio, even though they didn't play anything by Simon and Garfunkel at all. When they paused for a break, The Suz watched them stand in the street smoking cigarettes. "I just want to go out there and ask, 'Okay, which one of you is me, and which one is Julio?'" she said.

Later in the evening we met up with E-Money and lamented our lack of plans for the Labor Day weekend. The Suz was well into the bag when she announced that all she really wanted in life was a good bagel.

"I know a place," E-Money offered.

The Suz was well near the bottom of the bag, but he and I weren't. We formulated a plan, then the three of us crammed into his Corvette, and he took us to our apartment so we could throw together a few things and exchange his mid-life crisis on wheels for my more practical vehicle, a VW Beetle we called Stewie.

So the next morning we woke up in this motel room in Connecticut.

The Suz was not making a speedy recovery. "I'll take the train home," she said, before she closed the bathroom door. "You guys can go on without me."

"No way. Either we all go or none of us go," said E-Money.

"Agreed," I said. I tossed him my car keys. "There's a CVS across the road. Go get some Advil and some Pepto-Bismol and some Gatorade. Then we wait and see."

Two hours later we were cruising down the FDR trying to decide where to park the car for the day. We picked a spot not far from the UN on a row dotted with embassies in a garage offering the full day for about $12.00. The Suz took another pull from the bottle of Pepto-- she had stashed it in her purse-- as we emerged onto the street.

That was a perfect day.

That was the day we got a bagel in a diner on Lexington Avenue and the waiter thought the three of us were siblings. That was when his remark felt kind of true.

That was the day we met a promotional crew from the Fox network in Central Park who gave us tubes of lip balm bearing the logo for the network's new reality series "Love Cruise." The Suz took the cap off and applied some.

"Let me understand this. Some strangers in Central Park give you lip balm, and you decide it's a good idea to put it on your face?" I said to her.

"Yep. It's not bad," she said and took another swig from the bottle of Pepto. That was the day The Suz was a trooper.

That was the day we made fun of E-Money for ordering a pink girly drink in a bar in Greenwich Village. We also made fun of him for insisting we go to Greenwich Village because he wanted to be on Bleeker Street, because it was the home of some comic book villain whose name I don't remember.

That was the day I accepted a bottle of water someone handed me out the window of and SUV in Times Square.

"Let me understand this. Some strangers hand you a bottle of water from a vehicle in Times Square-- after dark-- and you decide it's a good idea to drink it?" The Suz asked me.

"What? They're legit. It's sealed. The car had the NBC logo on the side," I said.

"Sure, okay," she said.

It was after 11:00 at night when we got back to the car. We had walked all over and seen nearly everything.

"But we didn't make it to the World Trade Center," E-Money lamented.

"That's okay. It'll give us something to do next time," I said.

Of course, there wasn't a next time. When I think about what today is, and what it means, I think about the collapse in my stomach as I watched it happen on a TV screen in my classroom. I think about the colleague crying on the sidewalk outside the school. I think about the tragedy of broken families and the hope of unfathomable heroism. I also think about the war and the debt and how I have to take off my shoes at the airport. I think about all the things I'm supposed to think about today.

But I also think about that perfect day, my first trip to New York with my two best friends in the world. I think about Me and Julio, Pepto Bismol and other pink drinks, and artwork on the sidewalks, and comic book villains. I think about how it seemed safe to accept a bottle of water from a moving car. How it was still safe say things like "Next time." And "It's going to be okay."

There Is Nothing New Under The Nevada Sun

When we were in Vegas, The Suz and I participated in a test audience for the new fall CBS lineup. The Suz and I, respectively, log a lot of hours in front of the television, and we thought it was time for us to Give Something Back to the networks.

Also, it was free, and we were dangerously close to losing the kids' college funds at that point in the week.

Well, except for the part where neither of us has kids.

The show we screened was called "Two Broke Girls." And no, it was not a reality show about The Suz and me actually going to Vegas. It wasn't even based on our lives back in the old days at the old apartment.

If it had been about either of those things, this show might have had a chance at being funny. It could have featured "The One Where Suz Kills a Bat," and "The One Where Suz Sets the Kitchen on Fire," and "The One Where Manda Has a Stalker" and "The One Where Manda Keeps Pet Swedish Fish."

This show was The One Where Two Stereotypes Meet and Wait Tables Together and One of Them Discovers Her Boyfriend is a Cheat and a Lie.

Being part of a test audience sounds like more fun than it is. We were hustled into a little windowless room with a few dozen other pasty Americans, some of whom were wearing fanny packs. In 2011. I kid you not.

We sat through about half the episode, then they showed us a series of previews of other series coming up in the fall lineup. One of them looked like a rip-off of "The Mentalist:. One of them looked like a rip-off of "House", but with ghosts. One of them looked like the bastard offspring of "Entourage" and "Two and a Half Men", somewhat sanitized but with an extra helping of stereotype and misogyny.

Then they showed us the rest of the episode, which ended with the two shrill and generally irritating "broke girls" sitting on the back of a horse in the backyard of and apartment in Brooklyn. Or maybe it was the Bronx.

I don't remember, and it doesn't matter because I'll buy a lot of things in my TV programming. I'll accept vampires, witches, werewolves, a good-hearted serial killer, a yogurt-eating ex-spy, a physicist who isn't all that good at math, a cranky doctor who wastes thousands of dollars in hospital resources and nearly kills every patient before he cures them, a friendly doctor who can cure a patient with a ball point pen and some gardening gloves. I'll buy a LOT of things. But I won't buy that a waitress in a diner can afford an apartment with a backyard in ANY borough of New York City and that said waitress might have any sort of ability to get and keep a thoroughbred in said backyard. That is just TOO FAR.

After viewing the episode, we got to answer questions on a computer.

CBS: Would you watch this sitcom?
US: I'm pretty sure I've already seen this sitcom. Many, many times.

Then the computer asked us questions about our interest in the preview shows. We were pretty sure we were already watching those as well.

Then there was a series of demographic questions, and then we and the doughy tourists filed out of the room and back into the land of slot machines. It was kind of like that time I took the GRE on computer, but less entertaining.

I'm not of the mind that the sitcom is a dead form. There are quite a few that I like very much. And they're actually mostly on CBS. I'm kind of obsessed with "How I Met Your Mother," even though it's kind of a rip-off of "Friends." It's got fun, likeable characters and sharp dialogue, and even though the writers tend to withhold plot points to the point of being infuriating at times, I think they have a good sense of where everything is going and they tie the pieces together well.

I also enjoy "The Big Bang Theory," although most of the geeks I know are better at math and science than the scripts show those guys to be. Not sure what I'm going to think of "The Office" without Steve Carell, but I'm willing to stick around to find out. And, to borrow a phrase from one of my work colleagues, "Modern Family" almost (but not quite) makes up for the loss of "Arrested Development" (which I still mourn).

So I'm not opposed to sitcoms. But I am opposed to generic rip-offs. I may not have great taste in pop culture. I like a lot of trash. But for the most part, it's at least sort of original trash.

Get Your Geek On

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm a fan of the series True Blood. It's a show that revels in its own cheesiness, and I dig that. The plotting-- whatever The A.V. Club reviewers might say-- tends to be more complex than that in the books that are the source material, and you've got a whole cast of ridiculously good-looking dudes who might take their shirts off at any moment. (There is some debate about the definitive rankings, but four out of five dentists agree the leading man is totally the weak link in this respect.) The crazy cat lady is not made of stone, people.

So what could possibly drag me away from such riches as these on a Sunday night?

Bar trivia. Obviously.

I don't mean to brag-- okay, I totally mean to brag-- but I am a beast at bar trivia. Not only do I know a lot of useless crap, but I am smart enough to surround myself with other people who know a lot of other kinds of useless crap.

When I worked summers at Nerd Camp in Durham, N.C., we used to assemble a dream team of graduate students and professors to take on the local rubes for Tuesday trivia night at the James Joyce. Guess what kind of bar that was.

And in Durham, the local rubes are mostly graduate students and professors, so the fact that we rarely paid for drinks at the Joyce attests to the group effort.

So I made my bones, trivially speaking, at an early age.

And so it happened that Sunday night I said a quick prayer to the TiVo gods-- I didn't have time to sacrifice a live chicken or anything, but you do NOT want to mess with the TiVo gods-- and hustled off to play with the three-dimensional people at a TGIFriday's in a strip mall in suburbia.

The drink special was something called a Hemingway Daiquiri. It tasted of citrus. It reminded us of the rain. We sipped our drinks and thought of Havana.

On the way over in the car, Mr. C. (who is the younger brother I never had), NayNay, and I started quoting from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Why? What's the significance? I DON'T KNOW!

No. Wait. I do know. We decided to name our team "The Alamo's Basement." Which you'll get if you know this movie. If you don't know this movie, then I'm just sad for you.

We thought this was a clever name-- and you get points for clever names-- until we heard the some of the names of the competition:
"No James, you can't have my daughter's number; she's 19."
"If my girlfriend gave it up as much as John Lackey did, I'd be a happy man."
"My girlfriend called me a pedophile. That's a big word for a five-year-old."

I'm not making this up, but I am worried about how that last team name is going to turn up in a Google search and if that means I'm going to end up in a file somewhere that I don't deserve to be in.

At any rate, we dominated the field of competitors with their stupid vaguely creepy team names. NayNay knew all the celebrities on Dancing With the Stars. Mr. C. breezed through the state flags competition. And I got us 8 points for knowing Zooey Deschanel played the main character's older sister in Almost Famous.

NayNay and I noticed that the musical selections playing between rounds were oddly familiar-- we think the trivia guy and our kickboxing sensei might be in league with one another. I had the oddest urge to try for 60 jumping jacks in 60 seconds when trivia guy played AC/DC, but NayNay talked me out of it. Doing jumping jacks in a bar attracts the wrong sort of attention.

Before the final round, though, trivia guy clearly parted ways with our sensei and played "Sweet Caroline." I hate this song. Always have, even before I broke up with the Red Sox (but we still talk from time to time).

NayNay agrees with me on this, and she has not broken up with the Red Sox. This validates all my beliefs.

"It was on the 'Do Not Play' list at my wedding... and my Bat Mitzvah," she said. "Along with 'Oh What a Night,' 'Old Time Rock n' Roll,' and 'Brown-Eyed Girl.'"

This is why NayNay and I are friends.

She can also do math and history at the same time, as she calculated that the Korean War began four score and seven years after the delivery of the Gettysburg Address.

We went into the final round with a commanding lead over the creepy, creepy competition.

And we blew it. We tossed around the correct answers (Manchester United and Tina Turner) but second guessed ourselves right into fourth place.

Fourth. Place.

Oh, the humanity.

And so, almighty TiVo, please safely record the season finale of True Blood next Sunday night, because clearly this insult cannot stand.

The Suz's Summer Reading Challenge Wrap Up: Don't Judge Me

For those of you just tuning in, just before Memorial Day, the Suz issued a challenge to her friends: read 50 pages a day (any book) every day between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Now that it's Labor Day, I feel compelled to provide a page count and some kind of rationalization.

I know I didn't read 50 pages every day, but I read a total of 13,101 pages. By my best count, that's 13,101 pages in 98 days, so my average was 133.7 pages per day. Not too shabby, even if The Suz did beat me by 3000 pages.

Now, The Suz has an edge on me and most of my fellow readers. She's a big fan of serial fiction. She's into at least four series that I'm aware of, and probably more than that, because she's always waiting for the next book by somebody.

I try to stay away from serial fiction for the same reason that I don't buy potato chips.

I will eat them. All. As quickly as I can. And then when there's no more left, I'll spend a week trying not to get my hands on more.

In the case of potato chips, of course, there are always more, so it takes a colossal effort not to run right out and buy another bag.

In the case of serial books, though, I'll plow through what's there and then spend a week in withdrawal, sometimes poring back over the editions I have to try to soothe the pull. And eventually I settle into a low-level craving as I wait out the months-- or years until the next installment.

Seriously, J.K. Rowling almost killed me. Which is ironic, because there was a short period there when my greatest fear in life was that I might die in a freak accident before I got to read book seven.

The thing is, I do this even when I don't even like the series in question. Nobody who has seen my living or working spaces would ever accuse me of being even a little bit Obsessive Compulsive. I have embraced the chaos, baby. But serial fiction activates whatever OCD or addictive impulses I have lingering in my reptilian brain, and I will finish what I start.

Case in point: The Twilight Series (I refuse to call it a saga). Two years ago I borrowed the first two books from my cousin because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and because I've had a thing for vampire books for as long as I can remember.

Not only did I not understand the fuss, but this series fundamentally changed my philosophy about reading in general. I used to think that any reading was worthwhile. After reading Twilight, I decided that my time would have been better spent watching re-runs of something more cerebral like Jersey Shore. Or Fox News.

But that didn't stop me from picking up the third issue of the series on a routine trip to Target the day after I finished the first two installments. This wasn't an impulse buy. And the trip wasn't entirely routine. Sure, I needed cat food and toilet paper, but I could have gone to the supermarket. It was just easier to lie to myself about my true intentions if I went to the bog box store.

And the day after that, having chewed my way through the third book, I ended up at Barnes and Noble, with all the shame and self-loathing of a junkie cruising Chinatown at two in the morning.

And all that was for a series that offended my sensibilities on so many levels I'd need charts and graphs to document them all. Imagine what happens when I get my hands on a series I actually like.

But, oh, we don't have to imagine.

The Suz first recommended Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series to me well before HBO bought the rights and gave the world True Blood. It sounded like something I'd dig because there were vampires (that don't fucking sparkle) and Elvis. For a girl like me, what's not to love there? But I got busy with other tasks, like naming my pet Swedish Fish, and never got around to it.

But somewhere between the cerebral readings of June and July, I read the last two installments of J.D. Robb/ Nora Robert's In Death series (Back in 1999 I set the record by devouring the first ten installments of the series-- also a Suz recommendation-- in a grand total of four days. Even now that they've become kind of predictable-- the culprit is always the third person Dallas interviews-- I love these characters enough to stick with them.), and I remembered the joys of serial fiction.

I went for the old standby first, making myself a sub-challenge to finish the seven Harry Potters in seven days. It took me nine. Then I decided that rather than continuing to ask The Suz how the books compared with the TV show, it was time for me to tackle Harris's take on vampires and Elvis. I got through the eleven available installments in about ten days. Even though I like the TV version better-- even if they don't include Elvis-- I certainly don't have the sensation that I was robbed of my time.

I think about how I started this summer reading books about the nature of good and evil, about domestic life, about Big Ideas. And I ended by rediscovering fiction, but not cerebral book-club fiction. Closer to pulp fiction, really. And now I can't quit. I just started the Las Vegas mystery series. And I picked up a few more new (to me) mystery series at the used bookstore today. And I know, as I have known about so many of my mistakes, that this doesn't end well. It can't.

Remember That Time When Manda Lost Her Damn Mind?

We aren't apex predators roaming the Serengeti searching for springbok and wildebeest to kill and eat. These days, we just go to Target.

Today, The Suz and I were able to isolate and bring home the elusive cherry Pop-Tart and the even rarer Parmesan Goldfish cracker.

It was good hunt.

Our checkout operator kept a running narrative on the contents of my cart. In addition to Pop-Tarts and Frosted Flakes, I also had the season 5 DVD of Dexter, which she deemed too scary.

I also had some items for my classroom, since it's that time of year again. Nothing big, just some construction paper and a few packs of markers. "You must be trying for mom of the year," she said to me.

"I don't have kids," I said. "I teach high school."

The Suz was duly impressed with me for not leaping over the counter and kicking this woman in the face. But given the overall contents of my cart, what with the school supplies and the fact that I eat like a five-year-old when left to my own devices, it was probably not an unreasonable conclusion on the checker's part.

I've got Pop-Tarts, Goldfish crackers, Crayola markers, Dexter DVDs, and a big bag of Swedish Fish. I'm lucky I didn't end up with my name in a file somewhere.

I don't usually buy Swedish Fish, because I have no self control around chewy candy, and Swedish Fish may lead me to a marginally psychotic episode.

For example, I used to advise the school yearbook. To provide some perspective on the magnitude of this project, let me just say that I followed my stint as yearbook advisor with two years of graduate school, during which time I carried a full course load and worked two jobs. The grad school years were still easier than the yearbook job.

Because advising the yearbook caused me to routinely work fourteen to sixteen hour days, my nutritional needs suffered. For a substantial chunk of the 2005-2006 school year, my body was held together by a sludge made of Coca Cola and Swedish Fish. This is not an exaggeration, and I am still surprised that I didn't develop scurvy.

Near the end of one particularly grueling deadline, I was working my way through yet another bag of Swedish Fish when I discovered one fish that was perfectly shaped and imprinted. This fish was too perfect to eat, so I taped him to a piece of copier paper and named him Bjorn, he was the quiet one.

Before the deadline was complete, Bjorn was joined by Ingmar (the funny one), Leif (the smart one), Leif's son, Erik with a K (the mischevious one), and Maurice (the charming one).

Nobody on the yearbook staff thought this was weird. If my students during the day thought it was weird, they didn't say so-- but now that I think about it, they did avoid any sudden movements or eye contact.

In my own defense, I didn't talk to the fish or anything. And I ate most of their friends.

But I think the part where I was keeping pet Swedish Fish played a large role in The Suz's threat to me at the end of the school year to quit advising the yearbook or get another roommate.

So I don't advise the yearbook anymore. But I still like to eat chewy candy during the rare moments of downtime at work, and I tend to have marginally better self control with a bag of Swedish Fish than I do with a bag of Starburst.

The Great Purge of 2011

I moved to Little Blue three years ago and joined the ranks of the American Homeowner. The Suz and I lived in the same apartment in Brighton for eight years, and during that time we accumulated a lot of stuff.

The Suz moved in with The G-Man by varying stages, so she was able to sort through her stuff and discard as she went through the process over a number of weeks. I was working full time and finishing graduate school and working an assisitantship to pay for said graduate school, so when it came time for me to vacate the premises at Corey Road, I threw everything into a series of boxes with the thought that I'd sort through and purge later.

Those boxes came to inhabit my basement... and, eventually, my nightmares.

This week I decided it was Time to do the Big Sort on the material evidence of the last decade of my life. I plugged in some dance music on the iPod and descended the stairs. It wasn't a terribly difficult job. If you've managed to leave things boxed up in a basement for three years, that's a pretty good sign that you can live without them, and they need to become yard sale or donation fodder.

I had a few moments of debate over a few items, and these generally ended with me telling myself, "That's not who I am anymore."

I don't kid myself. Deciding what stays and what goes is a deeply existential process. You journey through memories and determine what your aesthetic tastes are... and what they were and will be.

For example, I no longer understand why I own any shirts that are not black and tee. So pretty much anything that didn't fit this description went into a bag destined for Goodwill. I'm also not sure why my mother felt the need to send me a collection of seasonal door wreaths. She's a very generous person, and for that I am grateful, but sometimes I wonder if she's met me. Because someone who has met me would probably not associate me with a Christmas wreath sporting a little plastic snowman and sled.

Unless the little snowman had a noose around its neck and/ or was anatomically correct. Or if the sled had "Rosebud" written on it.

So the bulk of this stuff had to go, and while my basement isn't entirely clear of debris yet, it looks like a normal basement and not a Very Special Episode of Hoarders.

But I have some sympathy for the Hoarders that I didn't have before. Basically, unless a crew of workers comes to your house to clear out the crap, it is incredibly difficult to get rid of things that have accumulated.

Not in an emotional sense. I have an actual emotional attachment to a handful of the things in my house, and the rest of this stuff if purely functional.

But in a practical sense, it is just not easy to get rid of stuff you don't want or need anymore. I don't like to be wasteful, so I can't just throw these things out with the trash. Someone out there might be able to use this crap.

Hence, the yard sale.

I took two carloads of stuff up to the Ponderosa, the dwelling place of The Suz and The G-Man. We put it all out on tables, took out an ad in the paper, hung up signs, and worked our asses off for two days. I never worked so hard for so little. And at the end, we still had a truckload of stuff to take to the Salvation Army.

But I DID earn enough money in the yard sale to buy a heavy bag, and now I have a basement to put it in. I can't decide if this is a genius idea or if it will end with me facing charges at some point in the future.

I Don't Read It For The Articles

I might just be the least fashionable person ever.

Really.

I used to be more experimental in my sartorial choices. But then there was an unfortunate incident in which some mean kids hounded me into an untenable position under some monkey bars in the playground, at church, because I'd had the audacity to wear Bermuda shorts printed with frogs to a youth group meeting. That also pretty much ended any associations I ever wanted to have with organized religion by the age of ten.

And there was my misguided obsession with sequins and rhinestones in seventh grade.

Then there was the flirtation with grunge wear in college.

And the feather boa phase in my early twenties.

Somewhere along the line I developed the philosophy that if I couldn't wear jeans and a black t-shirt to a given location, it was probably not a location where I needed to be. I make some concessions for work and for the weather, but this is where I've settled. And I'm comfortable with that.

But I still love fashion magazines. Always have. In middle school-- despite the frog shorts incident, or maybe because of it-- I used to get positively giddy at the end of summer when the thick September issues of the teen-girl magazines arrived to showcase back-to-school wear. I'd pore over pages of plaid skirts and tweedy jackets accented with lace scarves and chunky vintage jewelry, because what I really wanted to be when I grew up was Molly Ringwald.

I don't want to be Molly Ringwald now, though maybe there's some kind of holdover in my hair dye. But I still love the magazines. I'm not talking about magazines like Cosmo, which seem to exist to sell women clear heels and lube. I'm talking about the magazines that exist to sell me an $800 handbag and matching shoes.

Not that I ever bought a $800 handbag.

Not retail, anyway. That would be nuts.

September is still the big issue of the year for these glorified catalogs. And I love to look at them and think about what life might be like if I were the kind of person who would or could get away with buying and wearing a $5000 seguined cocktail dress in my daily life.

But I don't get a lot of what I see anymore.

For instance, I saw an ad for Justin Bieber's new perfume. He's not marketing men's cologne. He's marketing perfume. And it comes in a bottle with a big carved plastic flower on top. And I've seen Georgia O'Keefe paintings that were less suggestive than this flower. And I'm wondering if this observation will result in this post appearing first in the results on the off chance someone anywhere in the world ever Googles "Justin Bieber and Georgia O'Keefe." And now I'm wondering what kind of person would enter that search string-- if you are that person, let me say welcome and feel free to drop me a note.

I'd link to the website here, because you know there is one, but I don't want to generate any more traffic for this travesty than absolutely necessary.

Then I'm looking at this spread of some art director's favorite things, and this spread includes a pair of lacy underpants priced at $90. I know it might seem incongruous for someone who looks at these magazines to fantasize about $5000 cocktail dresses and ridiculous boots to say this, but $90 for underpants? Let me say it again. $90? For underpants?

I guess if you actually did drop five grand on a dress you probably wouldn't put Hanes that come three to a pack at Target under said dress, but $90 for underpants seems excessive. For that kind of money, these underpants had better be able to serve other functions. They better be able to change my furnace filters and do my taxes.

And this is why I might be called many things, but high-maintenance probably won't be one of them.

The Enemy of My Enemy Eats Bugs

I know down South the mosquitoes are legendary. The mosquito is the state bird of both South Carolina and Georgia. True story.

But much like everything else in Massachusetts, our mosquitoes are meaner and more aggressive.

They do no fear the citronella candle. They scoff at your Off lanterns. They see most sprays as a marinade, not a repellent.

Short of dousing yourself in kerosene and setting yourself on fire, you can't deter them. Actually, self-immolation would probably just look like a barbecue to them.

I just spent a lovely evening on the patio with Special K and her gay husband. We were out there for hours. Just long enough to make me feel safe.

Just like in all horror movies, they strike when you're feeling most relaxed. And then they came for me.

I think other people get mosquito bites, and they have just a little itchy bump that goes away after about twelve hours. Not so with me. I get giant red welts that make my extremities look like I'm coming down with a a mild case of leprosy.
And they last for days. And days. And two weeks from now I'm still going to be itching that spot on my ankle.

I've got two bites on my ribcage, which means one of them got through my shirt-- which means that mosquito got further tonight than most of my recent dates.

One of them bit my face.

And I don't know what kind of environmental or evolutionary benefit mosquitoes provide. They suck blood. They spread disease. They buzz. They're just a nuisance.

As much as I am averse to bats in my residence, they seem to be our best hope for eradicating the mosquito menace. That is, aside from pelting my neighborhood with copious applications of napalm, which could create greater problems. So I'm thinking about using my savings to build a bat cave in my backyard. A haven for these misunderstood creatures.

Of course, if I establish a bat sanctuary in my yard, I will be so creeped out that I'll never want to go outside again. Either way, problem solved.

The 30-Day Hangover

I just finished watching The Hangover, which is something I had promised myself I would never do. But I was feeling a little nostalgic for Vegas, if one can feel nostalgia for a month ago.

I have determined two things.

1) Bradley Cooper is, in fact, ridiculously good looking.

2) The Suz and I did not take maximum advantage of Las Vegas. Nobody stole a police car. Nobody married a hooker. Nobody stole any wildlife of any kind. Nobody ended up in the trunk of any sort of vehicle.

Even in our younger heyday, I don't think we could have pulled off madness even close to the kind that Hollywood cranked out in this movie. I think the best The Suz and I could have hoped for would have been entering into some kind of altercation which would have began with me saying to a total stranger, "You don't have the stones!"

But we did see Elvis. We saw Elvis a lot. Elvis, in the words of that great philosopher, Mojo Nixon, is, in fact, everywhere.

He's on the sidewalk:

He's in the wax museum. And he's interactive:

He's in the gift shop. And he looks like Bill Compton:

He's in the casino bar, and he's mixing cocktails:

I guess there are some names that are embedded with a kind of destiny. For instance, if you name your daughter Destiny, there's a good chance she's going to end up working in clear heels. If you name your kid Elvis he's got a good chance of becoming a bartender in Las Vegas.

Or he becomes this guy:

Which is okay, as long as he doesn't become this guy:

Your Rock n' Roll Lifestyle



Naming my rock band is a central preoccupation of my life. It doesn't matter that my musical talents were pretty much limited to playing the bassoon in high school and college band.

I tried to do more. I took guitar for about three months when I was thirteen, but then my teacher stopped teaching for personal reasons, and I never really came back to it. I can strum out a few chords, but that's about it.

But that doesn't stop me from naming my band and, sometimes, its albums. For years, my imaginary band has been called Seven Goats Named Otis. This comes from a story The Suz used to tell about the goats her father raised. Only one of them was actually named Otis, but all of the goats answered to Otis. There were seven goats total, hence Seven Goats Named Otis.

Yeah. It's not a great story.

Then on the road trip last fall I decided to start a funk band called Electric Balls.

Then K-Rock and I decided that you can make a cool band name by using the word electric in conjunction with nearly any noun that does not name something that runs on electricity. Obviously, the classic example of this is Electric Mayhem, which was and is one of the rock n'roll greats. But the theory works with more mundane household items as well. For example, Electric Ottoman is a passable band name, but Electric Toothbrush is just an appliance.

Thus was spent an hour or so sipping lemoncello and musing on this subject. "It disturbs me how much I can engage in a theoretical universe," said K-Rock.

When science people engage in a theoretical universe, they prove the existence of antimatter and wormholes and stuff. When humanities people engage in a theoretical universe, we come up with this:

Electric Ottoman-- smooth jazz
Electric Predator-- metal
Electric Gargoyle-- emo pop, e.g. Coldplay, but slightly edgier
Electric Balls-- funk
Electric Blunderbuss-- alt. country, e.g. Uncle Tupelo
Electric Ovary-- angry girl music
Electric Lemon-- happy girl music, e.g. Katy Perry
Electric Grass-- reggae
Electric X-- techno/ world music fusion
Electric Bratwurst-- oompa band/ polka/ Octoberfest
Electric Wiffle-- kids music, e.g. the Wiggles
Electric Spatula-- unplugged folk

Waxy Residue

In 1997 I took a job as a guide at Madame Tussaud's, because I was living in London, and I was broke. I figured working there would be the best way for me to see what all the fuss was about without actually having to scratch together the admission price, which was 18 pounds (roughly 36 dollars) at the time.

I actually find wax figures beyond creepy; I was literally terrified of the figure of Hitler that stood in the stairwell leading down to the chamber of horrors. It was my job to check that stairwell at closing time, so every time I'd open the doorway, I'd see him looking right at me from behind the glass barrier designed to protect the figure from vandals. I'm actually getting THE SHIVERS just thinking about it now.

But that was about the only excitement in my day. I mostly pointed out the toilets to visitors, which has given me the unique ability to locate toilets in about six languages, and sold guidebooks to people waiting in the queue out front. And I made some very excellent friends who will doubtless mock me for the following.

See, since 1997, Madame Tussaud's has franchised all over the world, and they have one in Las Vegas. And The Suz talked me into buying a ticket, now that I'm employed and living in the suburbs.

To be fair, I don't know what the place in London looks like now. I've seen the people who work there, and they all wear black bootcut pants and t-shirts that proclaim them "backstage cast" or something like that. They're clearly trying to be hip-- we had to wear plaid blazers and blue skirts, which were NOT FUN in London in December. I may have singlehandedly propped up Marks and Spencer that winter with my purchases of opaque tights to guard against the chill and damp.

But when we reached the top of the first escalator, there was no Queen Victoria to greet us like there was in the old days. "Manda, people don't know who Queen Victoria is here. They'd all be saying, 'Who's the old guy in the dress?'"

But I guess The King of NASCAR probably wouldn't translate in England.

Probably not much call for Evel Kinevel, either.

But I did see some familiar faces, so to speak. The Suz maintains that Mel Gibson paid somebody to make him look like he did in 1990, but I told her that was the same figure they have in London, so they probably just made him from an older cast. I checked my vintage guidebook when I got home for confirmation.

She's probably right that Oprah paid someone, though.

We were also able to establish conclusively that Suz is not taller than Prince.

And she talked to the Founding Fathers and determined that Sarah Palin is, indeed, out of her freaking mind.

I also had to speculate about how they get the figures of sitting Presidents. It's a pretty involved process to make one of these figures. There are sculptures and sittings and calipers involved. Is this something a President has to do once elected? Do they have to go to Madame Tussaud's and do a sitting for a figure? Is that in the Constitution? Because their Obama is pretty good.

We had a moment of panic when we discovered that the Johnny Depp figure was missing, that possibly he was stolen and we weren't informed.

We found him later on, disguised as a gay pirate.

The eyeliner is weirdly hot.

Overall, it wasn't a bad way to spend an afternoon, though their scary exhibit doesn't come close to the old Chamber of Horrors, which featured, in addition to the Scary Hitler figure, recreations of scary killers from English history and the severed heads of nobles from the French Revolution. The severed heads were doubly frightening when you knew that they were made from casts Madame Tussaud (yep, she was a real person) took from actual heads during the days of the guillotine-- and as I understand it, that's how the revolutionaries allowed her to keep her own head. So now you know How It All Got Started.

The scary exhibit in Vegas was just a short maze of dark hallways that were supposed to be some kind of government lab at Area 51. They had some wax figures of zombies and stuff, and people would jump out of the shadows at us as we walked through. It seems with America's rich tradition of serial killers and other nutbars, Tussaud's could do better.

So that ended our visit. The front desk offered to sell me a guidebook, but I said, "Thanks, I'm all set."

And they haven't totally lost touch with their roots. I found Queen Victoria in a back stairwell.

The Weird Turn Pro

It looks like I missed my chance at winning a big big jackpot last night. It was supposed to happen between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m., at Paris. I was supposed to pick a machine facing east, and the payout would have been $2000.

But that's okay, because within the next six months I'm going to meet and marry a man who is loaded. He's older than me and has salt and pepper hair and lots and lots of money from working in some kind of international import/export business. We're going to have two kids and live in Florida.

So says the psychic Suz and I met on the corner of Las Vegas and Flamingo last night, which raises the following question: if you're actually psychic and live in Las Vegas, why is it that you're doing readings for tips with random strangers on the strip?

She also told us that the Massachusetts state government is about to collapse because Deval Patrick is currently under double secret investigation from the FBI, and that I shouldn't move to California because I have some kind of prejudice against Mexican culture of which I am unaware. This is clearly wrong, because everyone knows I really hate the Norwegians.*

I'm also going to make my own boatload of cash by editing some project that will make $40 million worldwide, even though there won't be a movie made of whatever this project is. Perhaps I underestimated that manuscript about the Nazi scientists attempting to clone Jesus Christ.

One prediction she offered that I found believable was her assertion that Suz and I will be friends for another four or five decades. It's comforting to know that after the abuses we've put ourselves through this week, we might still have the chance to live that long.

And this man I'm going to meet, obviously a reference to my imminent marriage to George Clooney... or, more likely, Sam Axe.

*I do not hate Norwegians.

Another Conversation About Why Pop Music Sucks

The Suz doesn't usually drink beer, but when she does, she drinks a Dos Equis the size of your face.

This is lunchtime in the strip version of a redneck bar. They've got a lot of neon, loud pop-country music, and a mechanical bull. I want to ride the mechanical bull because I think it would be funny, but that would be against medical advice. The doc is probably right that it wouldn't be funny to have my liver pop out onto the floor of a faux-redneck bar in Vegas.

So the Suz and I sit and have a nice civilized lunch before we board something called "The Deuce," a bus that will get us to downtown.

The music is really loud, and they're playing that song about the woman who goes postal on some dude's car. I don't remember who sings it or the exact title, but it got a lot of airplay a few years ago.

Me: I get the whole angry woman revenge thing. This song is about vandalizing a dude's car after he cheats on her, which is a reasonable instinct, I suppose. But "carved my name into his leather seats?" Oh, no, no, no.

The Suz: Why not just take the car and sell it to a chopshop for a profit? Then he doesn't have his car and you have cash.

Me: That you could use to play craps! Yes! Exactly! But leaving evidence like that at the scene?

The Suz: Amateur... rookie mistake.

In the Casino, the Mighty Casino

"I'm a freaking lion, okay? I'm supposed to be stalking the Serengeti, taking down wildebeests and springboks in a fearsome fashion. Instead I'm living in a glass enclosure in a casino in the middle of the fucking desert. Not a springbok to be seen for thousands of miles.

"I can't even take a nap. We've got these two jerks out here in our enclosure lying down with us just to demonstrate how fearsome we're not. Little kids are watching! It's humiliating.

"Listen, asshole, the day is coming when I will reclaim my dignity and eat your leg. Just not today, because it's really hot out here."

Grievous Skankage

"Matt Damon should have never married that waitress. It just gave people hope," says The Suz.

This is Saturday night in the heart of The Strip in Las Vegas, wandering between Planet Hollywood and The Cosmopolitan. A lot of the casinos here have themes, e.g. New York, New York, The Venetian, Treasure Island. The best The Suz can come up with for The Cosmopolitan tonight is, "I wear very little clothing and and professionally attempt to starfuck."

I like her turn of phrase, but borrow a better one from Christopher Moore: "Grievous skankage."

There's an abundance of tube dresses and hot pants and halter tops. This is clothing that requires waxing of pretty much everything.

But at least skankage is democratic. There do not appear to be any sort of age or weight restrictions on wearing this stuff.

"Manda, it's 2:00 a.m. on Sunday. These are people trying to salvage the weekend," Suz tells me.

Salvage the weekend? All I had to do was put on a tank top in a futile effort to beat the desert heat, stand outside the poker area at Planet Hollywood to watch highlights of the Giants game.

I'm engaged in sending The Kiwi a message about the game on facebook.

"You're texting about me, aren't you?"

I didn't even see him until he was really too close to my personal space. He's tall, reasonably good-looking, and younger than anyone trying to chat me up should be. But he's got one of those weird piercings in his face.

"Nope, not texting about you."

"Yes, you are. You're texting about me."

"Actually, I'm texting about Cody Ross, but thanks for your interest," I say in my very best I'm-bored-with-you-now voice.

You can get the same results by having boobs and walking up to a craps table in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. Of course, in either case you're also likely to pick up something that will require broad-spectrum antibiotics, but if all you want is to hook up with some dude, it's clearly not that difficult.

So with the abundance of desperate tube dresses out there on any given night, I'm beginning to wonder how the pros stay in business. My suspicions were confirmed by two guys I overheard on the sidewalk: "All you have to do is go to a club, hang out until about 2:00 a.m. and wait for the runoff."

So this is where the home delivery option clearly provides a competitive edge.

It also eliminates any possible need your average fan of The Hangover might have for using charm or wit to seduce "the runoff," so I'm guessing these jobs are reasonably secure.