Treasons, stratagems and spoils

So coming home on Friday I was listening to the new New Pornographers album and I suddenly realized I was playing air violin. Fucking loser.

Of course my next conscious thought was, "I have to tell the internet about this!"

I am getting fucking old*

Exhibit A: Found first white hair this morning while putting on makeup. Motherfucker. Dave just laughed at me.
          It’s sort of pretty and silvery on its own, though, and I noticed the other day that Dad (who gave me his hair color and lumpy high forehead – thankfully, not the receeding hairline, though) – anyway, I noticed that Dad just looked like a silvery blond and it was actually quite attractive. (Well, judging by the hair he still has, which is kind of a fringe that starts below his ears and continues around the back of his head, like those headphones that wrap around the back of your head – LOVE YOU, DAD!)

Exhibit B: It seems like all the uses of the world = stale, flat and unprofitable. Although 1) I’ve been cynical and felt jaded for as long as I can remember so maybe it’s not age related and 2) Hamlet is pretty damn young himself. (Yay, English lit degree! Good for making literary references on blog; also helpful in search marketing.)


Exhibit C: Did not get carded by the place that cards EVERYONE.
          The other night I stopped at the liquor store on the way back from Marblehead (back from seeing my parents, hence the sudden urgent need for the booze – LOVE YOU, MOM AND DAD!). Anyway, I saw a rare gem, snatched it up and rushed to the checkout.

"You have cask-strength Laphroig!" I said excitedly.

"That'll be $69.99, please."

"Oh. I guess you probably don't need to card someone who gets excited about that, huh?"

"Not really." The clerk obviously was with me on the stale, flat and unprofitable thing.


Exhibit D: I’ve gained ten pounds and my jeans fit over my chubby thighs like sausage casings. Muffin top seeps ingloriously over the waist of my pants.
          You might think that having a big tattoo covering 50% of your lower back would make the muffin top situation better, but no. It just means your muffin top has variegated foliage. As with the Hamlet bullshit above, this complaint might not be age related, since I’ve only put it on since June, but my inability to get rid of the flabbage is pissing me off and might actually be age-related (but wait, aren’t you supposed to develop more self-control as you get older? And I had a fistful of candy corn this morning for breakfast, which does not sound very restrained to me. CURSE YOU, IRRESISTIBLE CONES OF DELICIOUSNESS!)

Linketty stuff:

Speaking of flabbage:

- Check out Rebecca Traitster’s this salon article on all the outcry over Britney being fat at the VMA:

As has been pointed out before, [Spears] embodies the disdain in which this culture holds its young women: the desire to sexualize and spoil them while young, and to degrade and punish them as they get older. Of course, she also represents a youthful feminine willingness -- stupid or manipulated as it may be -- to conform to the culture's every humiliating expectation of her.
What happened to Spears, and what she chose to do to herself, this weekend was actually pretty hard to watch -- a gross example of exactly how much malicious satisfaction we get out of the embarrassing weakness of an addictive, postpartum, out-of-control mess of a human being. But as sad as anything is that the young musician shows zero interest in making it stop.

- And here's a reality check on the whole fatness of Britney thing. Heh.

Speaking of being an English major:
- Amanda Marcotte unpacks the invisible knapsack of privilege (except she calls it ‘social capital”) you get along with your college degree.

What my parents called “the piece of paper”, social scientists call “social capital“. And it’s much more than a piece of paper. In college, you learn to act like a member of the college-educated middle class. You share cultural touchstones with them. It’s often a little unnerving for me because whenever I run with people that are clearly college-educated and come from a background of college-educated people, they accept me as one of them, because I am, after all, one of them. But I’m acutely aware of the fact that if I’d grown up like my mother did, when the idea of spending money educating your girls was seen as a rip-off (she’s a military brat), there is exactly no way I’d find easy acceptance in the middle class.

*apparently with increased age comes increased need to shout a lot, judging by the liberal use of all caps in this post. My hearing is probably going.

And one for dog people

(via the same friend, Kat)

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

By Pablo Neruda
Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer

Two weeks already, since my last post?

I need a life that goes slower and where I can fit in time to blog. Blogging is one of my favorite things, and I never seem to be able to make the time to do it.

I'll share a poem (my friend Kat brought it to my attention) - for everyone who has ever lost a kitteh. I don't know if it's relevant at all to a non-cat owner, I can't imagine not having cats in my life without also imagining that I would long impatiently for the day when I could become a cat owner again.

On a Favourite Cat
by Randolph Stow

Your house was a palace, full of arcane nooks
to discover and rediscover; all your life

a long imperialist adventure, where
kingdoms bowed down to your triumphal tail.

How can a little marble dish, abraded
by a rough tongue, so shake the heart? The fall

of sparrows is not man's concern: I took
no thought of what must leave me for your grave.

Under the mirabelle tree in my godson's garden,
be earth's pet now. What can I do?--but wish you

a matriarchy of blackbirds to teach you peaceable manners
and a Malplaquet of a mansion, to stalk and explore for ever.

Changing themes completely ...

This is just so groaty:



It's a ring shaped like a stack of pancakes and also SCENTED. Ew ew ew. But since it's sold out since I first looked at it this morning, I guess I'm alone in my revulsion. Via popgadget.

It reminds me of that gross Barbie Dream House which smelled like vanilla, of all things. Because barbie is clearly a baker, right? (Don't think about how her plastic would melt if she ever got near a real oven.) And baker rhymes with home-maker! Nothing wrong with home-making per se but girls who look like Barbie don't usually end up as stay at home moms, they seem to end up more along the lines of, say, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, depending on how much money and education they've got.