Buggery

How do I maintain my alluring figure? By eating ants, of course.

The United Nations wants us to eat more bugs.  Of course, the United Nations wants us to do a lot of things, including celebrate June 1 as the Global Day of Parents (UN resolution 66/292) and recognize 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography (UN resolution 66/284), and some other stuff having to do with peace around the world, and we haven’t been doing a bang up job of that, so I don’t think they’re going to be successful with this bug eating campaign.  However, I may go along with that Global Day of Parents thing if it means I get a present.

But let’s get back to the bug-eating thing.  In order to facilitate more bug-eating, there is a fascinating (honest, I’m not joking, read it) report issued by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Edible Insects.  If you read the report, you’ll find out that not only does the UN want us to eat bugs, they want us to cultivate bugs.  And they want us to stop calling bugs “bugs” and in an interesting bit of doublethink along the lines of how “used” cars are now “preowned” cars and “war” is now “peace,” the UN wants us to call bugs “minilivestock.”

The report makes convincing arguments, including the fact that we already put all sorts of disgusting things* in our mouths like snails, and oysters, and tofu, and penis (albeit we don’t literally eat that last one), so why not locusts?  There’s a bumper crop of cicadas expected to swarm into the East Coast of the United States any day now.  A couple of years ago, we were worried about swarming stink bugs minilivestock.  And when I was growing up, I remember how everyone was afraid of “killer bees.”  Oh, wait, I think I mean Africanized bees  Africanized minilivestock.  My point is that we’re always being threatened by some swarm herd of minilivestock, so instead of being filled with dread, why not tie a napkin around our neck and just wait at the dinner table for them?

Eat me.

While I was considering serving my family a great big pile of writhing maggots for dinner, our cat, Noodles, spent the better part of a day (a whole day!) stalking a wayward housefly that had become trapped in our home.  She finally grew bored and gave up, and the fly died of natural causes, eventually dropping dead in the windowsill over the kitchen sink where I made my husband come and dispose of the corpse.  Now here we have a cat, a creature known for its hunting prowess, outwitted by a single Musca domestica, and yet this is how we’re going to feed the world.

If you’re interested in minilivestock recipes and can wait until its July release, check out The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook.  If you can’t wait, and want to get cooking right away, here are a couple of blogs for you to check out:

Insects Are Food

Girl Meets Bug

*Other things that I would rather not put in my mouth include lima beans, beef liver, and the Mother’s Day breakfast my daughters tried to serve me this year.

Royalty free stock photos including the image in this post can be found at Stock.XCHNG.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor and Sleep Over?

There’s a guy, Peter Lovenheim, who thinks he’s got the answer to solving any rape/torture/kidnappings that are occurring in your neighborhood.  He even wrote this stupid opinion piece, published over the weekend in the Washington Post, “How Well Do you Know Your Neighbors?”  The article was written to shill the author’s dumb book as a reaction to the Cleveland kidnappings story, and the author, Peter Lovenheim, suggests if only the neighbors of Ariel Castro were just a little bit more friendly with the rapist/torturer they could have solved the Michelle Knight/Amber Berry/Gina DeJesus disappearances.

The fault of this horrible crime, of course, is with whoever kidnapped and held these women. But I wonder what would have happened if the neighbors had spoken to one another more and shared their worries. I wonder if, collectively, they would have pushed law enforcement authorities to check things out, to get involved. I wonder if this tragedy could have been discovered much sooner if the neighbors on Seymour Avenue had been, well, a little more neighborly.

I grew up on a street not unlike Seymour Avenue.  Maybe my neighborhood was a bit whiter (I grew up in Connecticut, after all), and most of the folks who lived there had low paying jobs instead of subsisting on government aid, but there were a bunch of dilapidated houses (my family lived in one) and lots of screaming and crying behind closed doors that was heard out in the street (usually my dad screaming and my mother crying).  If the residents of Seymour Avenue are indifferent to what their neighbors are doing, I’m not surprised.  What passes for normal on Seymour Avenue, and the street I grew up on, would no doubt shock the sensibilities of the privileged writers for the Washington Post.

On the off chance your neighbor might be a rapist/torturer, do you really want them waking up in your house?

In his book, In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, Mr. Lovenheim offers a novel solution to the lack of neighborliness in American society today: sleepovers.  Yes, you read that right.  The premise for his book, which he got paid to write (I can’t emphasize that enough), is this: let’s get to know our neighbors better by sleeping over their houses.  

Because I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking, let me explain right now that he’s not looking for sex, which is the only way this idea even makes a little bit of sense to me.  I figured this was some sort of new fangled swinger party, where he got his sleeping bag and packed his toothbrush and headed over to have sex with his neighbor’s wife.  

I think that would have made a better book.

But that’s not what he means. He thinks the only way to truly get to know another person is to spend time with them in their house, like he did as a kid.

As the mother of two little girls, my home has hosted its share of sleep overs, and I understand the appeal: you get to stay up late, eat junk food, and giggle about boys in your class.  So I understand how this is fun for school age girls.  From my perspective as an adult, however, sleepovers are one long nightmare where our family cat, Noodles, is so frightened she pees on the carpet, at least one of the guests decides she wants to go home at 1am, another one pukes around 3am, and the entire next day is ruined by a miserable, cranky, sleep-deprived child.

To their credit, about half of the people in his neighborhood told Lovenheim, no, sorry, you can’t sleep over.  The other half probably thought there would be sex.

Royalty free stock photos including the image in this post can be found at Stock.XCHNG.

Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent

So you’re telling me you still need a reason why you shouldn’t send pictures of your tatas and hoo ha out over the internet?  Here it is:  A Victim Speaks: Standing Up to a Revenge Porn Tormentor.  It’s  a story about a woman named Holly Jacobs.  Well, her name used to be Holli Thometz, but she had to change it after she did something that most of us have done at least a few times: she broke up with a boyfriend.  Let’s go to the article to see what happened next.

Years later, when they’d finally broken it off for good, Ms. Jacobs, now 29, says that Mr. Seay did the unthinkable: He uploaded naked photos of her to the web. Photos that she’d sent to him in confidence. He allegedly posted them to scores of revenge porn sites, online hubs where scorned exes publish intimate photos without their former lovers’ consent. She says he attached her name, email address and a screenshot of her Facebook profile to the nude photos along with commentary about what a slut she was. Knowing that she was working as a teaching assistant at a local university, he allegedly uploaded a video of her masturbating with the title “Masturbation 201 by Professor Holli Thometz.”

The exhibitionist in me (and I am a bit of one.  After all, I write a personal blog) sympathizes with Ms. Jacobs/Thometz and I’m sure it’s fun and sexy to pretend to be a porn star for your own special someone.  It’s too bad she chose the World’s Absolute Worst Breaker-Upper to play with, and he turned around to do the internet age equivalent of writing her name and number on the men’s bathroom wall.

Next time, send flowers.

Fortunately for me, I was married before robot smart phones made taking naked selfies pictures of yourself common place.  It’s not that people didn’t do this before; they did.  I knew a guy in college who showed me some (naked) pictures of a (naked) former girlfriend.  Did I mention she didn’t have on any clothes in the pictures?  Later, when he asked me out, I prudishly prudently declined.  And then there was the room mate who told an uproarious story about a guy who took a picture of his erect penis with his parents’ Polaroid  camera to give to her as a psychotic romantic gesture.

While it was done way back in the dark ages when I was dating, it certainly was not convenient.  Either you had to have access to a Polaroid, or you had to know someone with the skills to develop your film for you, or you had to trust that the pimply teenager behind the photo counter at Walgreen’s wouldn’t pay too close attention to that roll of film you just dropped off.

There were other reasons why I never gave a naked picture of myself to any of my boyfriends, and I wrote about most of them in the post, #1617 in Our Ongoing Series “Why You Should Never Send Nakie Pics Over the Interwebs” (short answer: none of them ever asked). Also, because I’m by nature a pessimist, I wondered about what would happen to pictures after the relationship (inevitably) ended.  Did I think my ex was going to whip out the grainy Polaroids of my tatas/hooha and sigh wistfully, remembering the good times we’d had?  Or did I think he would immediately show them to all his frat brothers and point out that my right breast is ever-so-slightly larger than my left?

Forget the women and children! I’m going back in there to get those naked pictures of my girlfriend!

Once, in idle conversation with a group of friends the question was asked, if your apartment was on fire, what would you run back inside for? I said I would run back in for a Coach handbag I had just spent an entire week’s pay check on, another girl said she would grab a teddy bear her grandmother had given her, and then this guy said he would run back in to save a stack of pictures of his ex-girlfriend.  She was naked in them, of course, and he had broken up with her three years before.  Three years before!

So go ahead and take off all your clothes and pick up your camera phone if you want.  Just make sure you have a new name picked out when your boyfriend turns into a total psycho lunatic after you break up.

Royalty free stock photos including the images in this post can be found at Stock.XCHNG.

I’ll Never Be a Member of the Mile High Club

I haven’t flown for a number of years because having children ruins not only your sex life, but also your travel plans.  Anyway, I used to fly regularly for work, enough so that if I never step onto an airplane again it will be too soon.  Why the airlines continue to ratchet up the level of discomfort their customers must experience is beyond me, unless all airline executives are hired from an employment firm that specializes in providing sadistic bosses.  I imagine the folks who run these companies get together for weekly meetings to devise new torture.

How are we going to have sex in here now???

Evil Airline Executive #1:  Let’s take away their electronic devices!  They’re all addicted to their smart pads and their robot phones and if we prohibit them from using them during flights, they’ll suffer brutal withdrawal symptoms before their fight to Albuquerque even takes off! (Curbs on In Flight Use of Devices Under Pressure)

Evil Airline Executive #2:  Let’s make the seats smaller! (Airline Passengers’ Complaints Rising as Seats Get Smaller)

Evil Airline Executive #3:  Let’s make the bathrooms smaller! (Some Delta Onboard Loos Get Smaller)

Is it me, or does it seem like airline employees really are determined to make the experience even more miserable than it already is?  Witness two recent news stories, Mom says flight attendant ‘humiliated’ her for using breast pump in the air and Man Sues Airline Over Soda Spat.

Now I realize both “victims” in these stories are pussies overly sensitive, and they’re probably just filing nuisance lawsuits in an effort to squeeze a few thousand dollars out of the airlines, but why do the airlines leave themselves open to this sort of litigiousness?  What kind of training do airline attendants receive that tells them it’s ok to get into a confrontation with a mother over the use of a breast pump, and to argue with a passenger over a can of Coke?  I realize the guy with the soda was being a total dick, but someone needs to explain to me how the flight crew reconciles in their own brains that the electronic ordering console embedded in a seat back will not bring down the entire flight with its use, and yet a Medela breast pump will.  And when does being a dick customer (I’ve been a waitress, so I know from dick customers) mean a person should be detained by a small army (eight officers arrived to question Soda Guy when the flight landed) of government agents?

Weapons of Mass Destruction

I nursed both my daughters, so I really sympathize with the pain and discomfort the mom who was not allowed to pump went through on that fucking flight, which probably felt interminable.  I think that mom showed remarkable restraint by only filing a lawsuit.  Had I found myself in the same situation, I probably would have gotten into a fist fight with the flight attendant, and wound up being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay as an enemy combatant.

The images in this post are from Wikimedia Commons, a freely licensed media file repository.  

When the Help Isn’t All That Helpful

For the past two years, I’ve been cleaning my house only to keep up appearances for my cleaning lady, Luz.

Don’t just stand there! Grab a mop! The cleaning lady is coming, the cleaning lady is coming!

Luz comes once a week, usually on Thursdays, and the day before, there is an absolute cleaning frenzy that the house does not see any other day of the week, not even on Thursdays when Luz comes to do her thing (she’s a cleaning lady, but not a particularly good one).

“Why are you cleaning the toilet?” my husband will ask.  ”Oh, it’s Wednesday.”

Pushing loose strands of hair off my face, I  shake a toilet brush at him and shout,  ”Yes!  It’s Wednesday!  Why aren’t you helping?  Grab that deck brush and bucket and start scrubbing!”

We decided we needed professional mental housecleaning help when my husband absolutely refused to contribute in any meaningful way to maintaining the house, and hiring a cleaning woman was cheaper than a divorce.  I, of course, had been refusing for years to contribute in any meaningful way to maintaining the house.  My contributions are limited to preventing our two young daughters from wandering off with strangers, cooking a really nice chicken piccata, and providing an occasional BJ.

So once a week, Luz comes and performs “light cleaning.”  She dusts, wipes down the kitchen and bathroom counters, and vacuums.

And once a week, I perform “heavy cleaning.” I scrub the bathroom toilets and the shower, I Windex all the windows, I dismantle the sofa and love seat and vacuum underneath the cushions (“I said no eating in the living room, dammit!”), I wash the kitchen floor.

“You know,” my husband commented the other day, “I think you do more housework now that we have a cleaning lady than when we didn’t.”

Of course I do.  I can’t let the cleaning lady see how we really live.

I’m guessing Mr. and Mrs. Edwards didn’t take their housekeeper to see The Help?

I got to thinking about Luz and other cleaning ladies when I read this story out of Maryland, Upper Marlboro Couple to be Sentenced in Slavery Case.  From the article:

According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, the couple enticed the victim, a woman from the Philippines referred to in documents as “T.E.,” to come to the United States in 1999 to work as a domestic servant for the couple, promising to pay her so she could support her children back in her home country.

Federal prosecutors did not immediately return calls Thursday to determine how the couple enticed the victim or how they became aware of the case.

Prosecutors said upon arriving in the U.S. using a fraudulent visa provided by the couple, “T.E.’s” identifying papers were seized by the couple and they refused to pay her and forced her to sign a contract saying she would owe the couple $20,000 if she ever left, which she finally did in 2009.

The couple, Alfred and Gloria Edwards, pleaded guilty to harboring an alien and are now awaiting sentencing.  Their attorney is arguing for leniency based on the fact that the couple took the woman on vacation with them.  Of course they took her on vacation with them!  They probably made her rinse out their underwear every night in the hotel sink.  Or maybe they made her hold their places in those long lines at Disney World, so they could just jump in at the end there and hop right on the Magic Carpets of Aladin ride.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll ever want a full time, live in housekeeper, even if I’m not holding her against her will.  If we had a housekeeper living with us 24/7, I’d have to spend every waking moment cleaning, instead of just Wednesdays.

Royalty free stock photos including the images in this post can be found at Stock.XCHNG.

No Mo’ Camp NaNoWriMo

Writing is hard.

As I mentioned back in this blog post, Camp NaNoWriMo Procrastinato, I was participating in the April NaNoWriMo challenge.  To review, here’s an explanation from the website:

What is Camp NaNoWriMo?

Based on November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Camp NaNoWriMo provides the online support, tracking tools, and hard deadline to help you write the rough draft of your novel in a month… other than November!

Camp NaNoWriMo was established in 2011 as a project of the Office of Letters and Light, the parent 501(c)(3) nonprofit to National Novel Writing Month and the Young Writers Program. 2013 Camp sessions will take place in April and July.

What: Writing a novel from scratch in one month’s time.

Who: You! (And about 20,000 other novelists around the world.) Let’s write some perhaps-awful, but definitely lengthy, prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster. Writing begins at 12:00 AM on April 1, and again on July 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach your word-count goal by 11:59 PM on the last day of the month. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

Specifically, I had challenged myself to write 50,000 words (about 200 pages), and those of you who follow my Twitter feed know that I realized about mid month that I was going to fall well short of my goal.

In the end, I wound up with about 20,000 words and 80 pages, a little over a third of what I had hoped to accomplish. Looking back, it was absolute insanity for me to expect to churn out an average of 1,667 words a day (every day!  For thirty days!) when I had seen myself struggle to produce 500 word posts a couple of times a week over the two year life span of this blog.

And yes, it has not gone unnoticed that I only managed three posts on this blog for the month of April. This experience taught me that I only have so many words a day in me, and I was either going to work on CampNaNoWriMo or I was going to work on Do Not Get Sick in the Sink, Please.  There would not be both, and I am humbled by (and in awe of) the writers out there who maintain their blogs while simultaneously working on their version of the Great American Novel.

Here are a few other things I learned while failing miserably at Camp NaNoWriMo.

1. There is way too much good television on this time of year.  In addition to Game of Thrones, which premiered on March 31, right before CampNaNoWriMo kicked off, I’ve been caught up in The Americans, Bates Motel, Orphan Black, The Bletchley Circle and, of course, Survivor: Caramoan.  Had I known just how demanding my television viewing schedule was going to be this month, I would have realized all my free time would be spent on the sofa, shushing the children, eating crackers, and not writing a novel.
2. I like names that begin with the letter “M”.  One of my daughters has a name that begins with the letter “M” (Megan) and I found that several characters in the story I was writing also had names that begin with the letter “M”: Millicent, Mildred, Mabel.  As this will create no small amount of confusion in the minds of readers, I understand that I’ll have to go back and mix it up a bit, and add some names that being with the letter “P” or “L”, maybe.  But that doesn’t appear likely on account of this other thing I learned:
3. I have a great deal of difficulty thinking up names for characters.  I spent way too much time wracking my brain trying to think of a name for a new character I was introducing when I could have been actually, you know, writing.  I finally grew so desperate that I just started typing the word “SOMEONE” in the place where the character’s name belonged, just so I could move on.

In the end, though, I found it really worthwhile, and discovered that maybe I do have a novel in me.  I really encourage anyone out there who’s interested in writing to give the July camp a go.  Arrested Development returns on May 27, though, so just make sure you catch all the episodes before then . . .

If you’re not trying to write a novel, go ahead and watch these shows.

• Game of Thrones Sunday 9pm on HBO.
• The Bletchley Circle Sunday on PBS (check local listings).
• Bates Motel  Monday 10/9c on A&E.
• Survivor: Caramoan Wednesday 8/7c on CBS.
• The Americans Wednesday 10pm on FX.
• Orphan Black Saturday 9/8c on BBC America.

Is Chaz Bono a Big Fat Liar?

Diet tip: Record your weight in kilograms instead of pounds.

Am I the only one who thinks Chaz Bono is a liar?  Chaz is back in the news claiming to have lost 60 pounds.  As I’ve written before in this post, Three Ways to Revive Your Stalled Career, losing weight is one way for celebrities who find their star fading to resurrect their careers, or at least get a mention on TMZ.  And while Chaz can’t really be considered a star since he, like the Kardashians, is mostly famous for being a post operative transexual being famous, his weight loss has got him back in the news, with the story being reported by People Magazine, abcnews, and NBC’s Today.

I’m dubious about Chaz’s claim, because if you take a look at his before and after pictures here, I just don’t see the type of physical transformation I would expect in someone who has lost a quarter of his total body weight. Sure, his face looks a bit (just a bit!) slimmer, but that suit still looks pretty snug.

So maybe I should add another way to get your name back into the news: in addition to losing weight, confessing you were molested as a child, and coming out as gay/lesbian, it seems you can just say you’ve lost weight, which seems like the perfect plan, because you get to avoid all those hunger pangs and stalks of celery.

I imagine Chaz and his publicist and maybe his Mom, Cher, were sitting around trying to figure out ways he could get invited back onto Dancing with the Stars, or maybe even get his own reality show on one of the lesser known cable networks, say like the New England Fishing Network or RFD-TV: Rural American’s Most Important Network (I’m not making that one up, it’s an actual television channel).

Chaz: (crumpling up an empty bag of Cool Ranch Doritos® before opening another)  I could start a

Diet tip: Visualize this image while you’re eating celery.

charity or something, and we could issue a press release, and then hold a press conference with me surrounded by a bunch of sick, bald kids.

Cher: I tried that with Facelifts Should Be Free! the Corrective Cosmetic Surgery Fund and I had my picture taken with Joan Rivers and Bruce Jenner.  All it got me was that lousy movie with Christina Aguilera.*

Chaz: (thinking hard) Hmmm.  Maybe instead of just starting the charity, I could get the actual illness.  Then I could be bald and sick, and the paparazzi could come take my picture.

Publicist:  I don’t think they’re looking for any bald sickos on Dancing with the Stars.

Cher: If only you were born with some sort of talent, instead of just being a woman trapped in a man’s body . . .

Chaz: (wistfully) Yeah . . .

Publicist: (wistfully) Yeah . . .

Chaz: I could lose weight again.  That might get me a Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers gig.

Cher: (snorting derisely) Yeah, good luck with that, Mr. Cool Ranch Dorito®!

Chaz: (bursting into tears)  It’s your fault I’m fat!

Publicist:  Wait a minute!  What if you didn’t actually have to lose any weight?  What if we just say you’ve lost weight?  Who’s to know?

So I’m issuing a call to all the internet sleuths out there, who just finished embarrassing themselves in front of the entire world by revealing their dangerous and paranoid theories (which had hithertofore been limited to the Jon Benet Ramsey case) about the Boston Marathon Bombings.  Here’s your chance to redeem yourselves:  Can you unravel the mysterious case of Chaz Bono’s Weight Gain Loss?

*”That lousy movie” is otherwise known as Burlesque.

Royalty free stock photos including the images in this post can be found at Stock.XCHNG.  The image of the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos® comes from fritolay.com and is believed to be used according to the Fair Use Doctrine.