And then I boiled it, peeled it, cut it into chunks, and made him eat it.

It'd be even sweeter if Ilya weren't so terrifying-looking, wouldn't it be? The man needs a shave and a haircut, pronto. Luckily he's in Slovenia now, which I imagine is something like Siberia, which I imagine as being full of big, bearded lumberjacks. So Ilya should fit right in. If they let him check that chainsaw, that is.

1200 People in New York are Cooler Than You

Like, Way Cooler.

The better to see you with, my dear...

So I took my new contacts to my optometrist yesterday for a check-up. Everything was fine except for one minor annoyance-- at night any bright light was surrounded by a halo. Which made it look like there were cars all the fuck over the road. To cut down on the glare, I've been wearing shades at night, like a crack-whore. They're my asshole cop glasses-- polarized aviators. I keep asking my friends for their license and registration. Yeah, they still think it's funny.

ANYWAY, my optometrist nodded his head, concerned, looked deeply into my eyes, and told me it was because I had enormous pupils, so big in fact that they expanded around the edge of the corrective part of the contact lenses. He used the word enormous. He even made a gesture with his hands that implied a sort of weight, rather as if he were talking about breasts. I believe it turned him on a little.

I myself, I was a little freaked out. How can you go for twenty-five years without knowing that you have some truly exceptional physical characteristic? I felt a similarly taken aback when I found out that I had a tipped uterus-- it was like, how come no one ever told me? I've been seeing gynecologists and optometrists for many a yearn now, and they'd kept mum. I say that's medical malpractice by omission. 

At any rate, I found a sudden need to take a look at my pupils.

Here's the things about looking at your pupils: looking at them makes them disappear. They go into hiding. They shrink down like genitalia in cold water (that was my attempt at tact there, the lack of specification of genitalia, by the way). As you may already know, pupils dilate in the dark, when you're relaxed, and when you're sexually aroused. Through undisclosed means, I attempted to contrive a combination of these three factors in the bathroom, flipping on the light only after I was quite certain they were dilated. Of course they just contracted again. I had to try this two or three more times until I had convinced myself that I did indeed have enormous pupils, and also it was good that I was doing this at home instead of in Providence where I have a (male) roommate.

Well and so, I have to wear glasses at night if I'm driving in unfamiliar terrain, and I have learned two things about me: firstly, I have Pupils of Unusual Size (POUS's). Seriously. Those fuckers are huge. Also, I am willing to do almost anything in order to prove a point to myself.

I think I'm going to create a center for those, like me, who are the Particularly Ocularly Enabled. We're accepting applications now. Please include your name, phone number, and the maximum dilation measurement of your pupils. In metric units.

All this, with a British accent!

Creepy, hilarious, philanthropic... what more could you ask for in a video?

My apologies to avid followers of cuteoverload.

Yo dog's so ugly, her mama had to tie a steak around her neck to get your mama to play with her.

See what I did there, to that "your mama" joke? Heh.



One thing's for sure: Bobo's not making it to "cuteoverload" any time soon.

On the Subject of Art

Art, Craft, or Crapola? Sometimes the line is thin my friends. So very thin.

In the Pursuit of my Life-Long Desire to be a Crotchety Old Lady

Not only do I drink Cape Cods, not only do I have more cats than bathrooms, not only do I wear flat orthopedic sandals, not ONLY do I hate children and make inappropriate sexual comments at any turn, I partake in needlework, darlings. And not just any needlework: this is the queen of all crotchety old lady needlework-- it is in fact, CALLED "crochet." Crotchety, crochet. Get it?

At any rate, these are Granny Squares for the afghan I am currently completing in my head. I've made seven (Granny Squares, that is: not afghans) in the last four days, with speedy progress in the pattern-reading department, and here are them (why do I adore bad grammar so much? Seriously? It just makes me laugh to write like that. My mother will be horrified. Hi Mom!). There are the Loopy Flower Granny Squares (not so hard to pick out), the Basic Granny Squares, the Diamond Granny Square Variation C, and then the one and only "Splendor in the Grass" which reminds me of the CDB song "Uneasy Rider." You know, the part, where said uneasy rider is trying to convince the other rednecks that the greenteethed one is actually a "friend of those long-haired, hippie-type pinko fags." "He's a snake in the grass, I tell you guys/ He make look dumb, but that's just a disguise/ He's a mastermind in the ways of espionage."

Aside from crochet, I am enjoying summer vacation enormously, despite my twentieth cold of the year (!) catching up on my reading. Recommendations thus far include Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover if you like fairy tales, short fiction, or fantastic prose, and Kay Ryan's Flamingo Watching-- fantastic short, rhyming poems. I'm looking forward to the Blotner Faulkner biography and as much Carson McCullers as I can cram in before school starts again!

On the Subject of the Fitness of One's Physique

Some sort of spring fever seems to have hit the world at large, and instead of cleaning, my nearest and dearest are flocking to gyms, yoga studios, and the great outdoors for the purpose of greasing their knee joints, increasing the relative strength of their heartbeats, and presumably, nurturing that more abstract but socially hygienic goal of "physical fitness." So I, like the lemur [LEMMING] I am, got in line to jump off the cliff. I joined the gym.

Not only "the" gym, or "a" gym, but the Campus Gym. The San Diego State University gym, or the "Aztec Recreational Center" as they euphemistically term it-- a friendlier term than "The Gym Where 30 Thousand Hardbodied Undergraduates go to Lift Hundred Pound Weights on their Buttocks while Engaging in the World's Most Perfect Downward Dog." It's enormous, it's open 24 hours, it's color scheme is primarily grey. It's serious bidness.

For those of you who haven't known me since high school when my "physical fitness" consisted of hoisting a bottle of 20/20 to my lips (followed, perhaps, by ab-strengthening Toilet Bowl Worship), I have engaged in some basic physical fitness in the last ten years. I have yoga'd, I ran for several months, I mastered the Lusty Leapfrog (remember: there is no such thing as an overshare). 

And now, after a year-long hiatus, I'm attempting to reengage in the world's most obnoxiously beautiful city. And I mean beautiful people-wise. I should qualify, as this is a particularly blonde, tan, toned sort of beauty, not one to which I necessarily prescribe, although I enjoy T&A as much as the next fellow. This is Intimidating. I have Fitness Shame.

I think this is partly because, other than my pastiness and Lack of Tone, I seem to be in reasonable shape, because I am thin. This is a lie. Although I can touch my toes to my nose (a strange sort of claim to fame), I no longer have any sort of cardiovascular stamina. Even at my running peak, after six months of going 4 days a week, I could only go a mile and a half. In half an hour. People walk faster than I run. And I am PROUD of that accomplishment, my friends. 

I expect to die, but I really hope it won't be because of a treadmill Incident. I'll keep you posted.

3 Wishes

I've given a lot of thought to what my three wishes would be if a genie popped out of, say, the vase I picked up from my last trip to Goodwill. There are a lot of reasons for this, I'm sure, including a passionate love for fairy tales, fantasy novels, and men in parachute pants. So, after at least twenty years of mulling over this question, I'm ready to reveal my three choices:

1. I wish to be able to change shape into whatever animal, vegetable, or mineral I desire. (This requires amendments)

• I have to be able to change back!
  
• There have to be some  formal words to think or say aloud in order to do this, lest, you know, mid-coitus, the image of a porcupine should pop into my head and my husband would end up doing some SERIOUS explaining in the hospital.
  
• I need to be able to change from one shape into another without going back to my intermediate human shape.
  
• When I change back into a human, I need to be wearing the same clothes and retain whatever objects I had with  me before I changed.
  
• I need to be able to retain my human brain and consciousness in whatever shape I change to, even if it's a flea, or say, a diamond (a diamond shape would actually be really useful if say, a piano was about to fall on your head.)
  
• I also need to be able to retain the abilities and instincts of whatever animal I change into. It wouldn't be much help to change into wolf form and then not be able to run because I don't know what to do with my tail, or into fish form without knowing how to breathe through gills. 
  
• I also want to be able to change my human shape. So I could be a man, or a child, or an old woman, convincingly. Even better, I should be able to know the things a helicopter pilot, or doctor, or painter should know, if I change myself into one.
  
• I should also be able to wish to be myself, but in a different place. So this takes care of teleportation, basically.
  
• I have to be able to retain the memory of being whatever I change into, and what happened while I was in that form.
  

2. I wish to have the power to know the answer to any question. (This is another one that can bite you, so more amendments).

• Again, there have to be some sort of magic words uttered so I don't find out things I'd rather not know, which seems to be the fate of many people who receive this wish. I don't want to KNOW everything, I just want to be able to find things out.
  
• I want to be able to find out not only factual things, but also more subjective things. For instance, it would be very helpful to know what the best way to go about getting someone to give you something.
  
• I want to be able to forget anything I need to.

3. Free the genie. Duh.

I'm fairly confident these are the best wishes ever. Shape-shifting is awesome-- I can experience anything, from flying to deep-sea diving to watching my neighbor's HBO. Knowing anything I want to know could take care of me for the rest of my life-- in trouble with the law? Instant blackmail! Need money? Find some local buried treasure! Want to cure cancer? Bingo. And if you're tempted to ask a question you know you shouldn't (does he really love me, what do my friends find most annoying about me, what am I really like?) you can forget about it. And everybody knows you're supposed to free the genie. If you think you know different, you obviously haven't read  "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A.S. Byatt, and if you haven't already, you should. 

Anybody think they have better wishes? Or think I left something incredibly important out of my amendments?