Have a nice weekend.

Titter.

Groan.

Guffaw.

Today's Little Diversion

Have you been to Postcrossing? You get postcards from other countries... how fun is that!

Try not to think about it.

I know you think you're reading what you think you're reading, but you're not.

What you're reading is what I think.

What I think is that what you're reading is the stunningly brilliant thinking of a profound and complicated thinker.

And I think that what you think is that you're reading the clever writing of a charming writer who is a witty thinker thinking thoughts heretofore unthunk.

I think, therefore I am.

I know you think I'm not, but I think I got you to think about it.

Pay Dirt

Paying sucks, but...

Stop Holding Them Prisoner!

DOWN WITH BRIEFS!

English . . . ya gotta love it.



So. I figure this one, as they say, "removes all doubt."

A Pink Moment in Time

I'm Jess not sayin' anything at all...

Little Dope

There you have it, people, a little sewer cleaning dope and the complete Hundred Year Calendar, 1850-1950, a handy tool you'll surely use every day. Labeled for easy retrieval. Look up birthdays of parents, grandparents, "old" friends... consult analysis below:

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace;
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go;
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for its living;
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
--Mother Goose--

Yeah, you probably thought it was gonna take me a hundred years to finish posting it, huh?

Hung Loosely by the Top

... waiting for my muse ...

Meanwhile, today's rhetorical question: Why does the morning's first cup of coffee taste so much better than the second?

... no muse yet ...

Public Service Announcement: Click here to avoid poisoning your pet with toxic recalled food.

... well, that was inspired ...

[sigh]

... yeah ...

[yawn]

...muse? ... hello?

Two Turns Make It Rigid

I met a woman who was walking her new puppy the other day. She was about my age. We stopped to talk for a bit, first about the puppy, then about our recent breakage injuries and physical therapists. Then, almost out of the blue, she told me if she had it to do over again, she would never get married.

Normally I'm very hesitant to ask really personal questions of strangers, but since she'd brought it up, I asked her why not.

Her husband does not have interest in doing anything she'd like to do, she said. She told me about a tropical vacation they took. He refused to participate with her in any activities. When she wanted to do things like scuba diving, she had to go alone. He stayed in the hotel to watch TV, or he laid on the beach.

She has to do everything alone? Hmm, I said, that sounds a lot like my life, only with baggage. While I'm lonely for a partner, she's lonely with a partner.

They've been married fifteen years. Their social life, she explained, includes only his family. She can't really have any friends. He is not willing to allow anyone else into their social circle, and he expects her to spend her time with him.

He also has a huge debt load that he hadn't told her about before they got married. I'd discovered the same thing in my second marriage which, for that reason and others, was very brief, so I couldn't resist asking her what seemed to me the obvious question: why is she staying in the marriage?

She has her reasons. Finances, age, whatever--it's a lot harder to start over at 60 than at 40. She plans to tough it out.

You know, I'm not always satisfied with my life, but I don't envy hers.

Lack O'Daisy Gal

Extra Equipment: Large Capacity Pump and Extra Large Buckets

Not one of the fittest.
Surviving anyhow.
Poking a hole in the theory of evolution.

Two can stand up against a wall...

Time passes. In fact, five days have passed since my last post. And, as usually happens when time passes, things change. Since there's been a significant change in my #2 issue of five days ago, I feel it's incumbent upon me to note the new numbers as of this morning.

By today's count, I have found an addition three (3) Verizon telephone books on my doorstep, making an in-house total of nine (9) telephone books, or 1.5 telephone books delivered to me per month. The previously mentioned page count is therefore increased by approximately 3,000, for a total of over 13,000 pages of telephone numbers.

The nine, standing up against a wall in keeping with today's theme, measure 16" high. About 5.5" of the 13,000 pages, or 34.375%, are white. That would be 4,468.75 pages.

In general, these white pages have four columns. Each column hosts about 75 telephone numbers, resulting in an approximate count of 300 telephone numbers per page, and thus a grand total of about 1,340,625 telephone numbers in my personal collection of white pages.

Let me know if you need me to look someone up.

Who else can show a tool with spring tension?

Three Good Reasons to Sulk:

1. The Hundred Year Calendar was uploaded all at one time and saved as separate drafts to be used one by one. All was well until now. In Compose Mode/Blogger/IE/Vista/Dell, if I try to space down a line below the image, the entire image disappears. I don't know what the source of this aggravation is, but the workaround is to switch to Edit HTML Mode, space down there, then switch back to Compose Mode and get on with your life as much as possible. Other squirrely things have happened too, like lines of typed text suddenly vanishing for no apparent reason, or irrational line breaks being inserted into a blog post when it's published. Do-over is the only solution I've found for these quirks.
2. In the six months since I got telephone service started here at my "new" apartment, there have been six (6) phone books delivered to my doorstep: 1 Verizon, 2 Yellow Books, 2 Dex, and 1 "Convenient & Portable" Dex Plus. The Dex Plus, about 2/3 the size of the others, is all yellow pages. All the others are combinations of yellow and white pages which seem to cover varying but overlapping geographical areas. This foot-high stack of former rain forest, by my best calculator-aided count, falls short of 10,000 pages of fine print by only about 200 pages. Pshaw! That's hardly worth mentioning! I mention it only so as not to be accused of exaggerating. While I can't deny the possibility that I might need to use one or more of these books at some time in the future before they expire, I can say with absolute accuracy that I have only used one of them, once, thus far, and the information I got was somewhat misleading at best. I'm old enough to remember when there were two books, one white and one yellow. The white one started with A and went to Z, so if you knew the name of whom or what you were looking for, either a person or a business, you could go right to it. You did not have to figure out first whether the personal listings were separate from the business listings, or whether one suburb was alphabetized separately from the others. The alphabet was separation enough! If you wanted to find a particular type of business but didn't already have the name of one, you went to the book with the "yellow pages," which was also organized alphabetically, by type of business. Because there was only one provider of yellow page books, all the businesses were in there. There was no need for business people to pay for listings in competing yellow page books in order to cover all the bases. There was one base. Everyone looked there. My personal opinion is that, like the break-up of the phone company, the competition in phone books has not done anyone any favors, especially those of us who like trees.
3. While the new computer has arrived, the stuff to transfer my what-all from the old computer has not. Furthermore, a mere day after ordering the new computer, Corel sent me an email explaining that my old Paint Shop Pro X will not work right with Windows Vista.

Three Reasons to Stop Sulking:

1. Where I live, you would be able to see red in your thermometer if you had one. So good is this reason that it could, in all fairness, be repeated for items #2 and #3 in this list.
2. What the hell, I'm goin' with it. Where I live, you would be able to see red in your thermometer if you had one.
3. Where I live, you would be able to see red in your thermometer if you had one. But you don't really need one. Just put on a sweatshirt and go.

Through the sewer with one drag...

In 1988, I got a copy of a more-or-less blank book called Book Notes: A Book Lover's Journal (c. 1987, Book-of-the-Month Club). The book is divided into sections by the alphabet. Each letter is featured in a collage by Joan Hall based on the letter itself (in a typeface whose name begins with that particular letter) and an allusion to an author, character, book or place starting with that letter. Following each collage, the next page features the full name of the typeface and a bit of its history, along with the title of the collage. A literary nerd could play the book like a game, trying to guess the title of the collage from the hints it contains. A really nerdy typeface junkie could... oh, never mind, we don't know anybody that nerdy, do we? Besides, these days it's fonts we're into, not typefaces.

I've never liked my handwriting. I started out kindergarten with a death-grip on my pencil and I never lightened up. (As a result, I have a very prominent writing bump on the middle finger of my right hand, and the finger itself has a permanent bend at the second joint, in the direction of the little finger. I suspect this little distortion of complicating my current physical therapy issues.) Consequently my printing, and later my writing, have always been very labored and heavy and lacking the graceful flow of my grandfather's beautiful script or my mother's neat, pretty hand.

That fact and the school librarian's injunction against writing in books seriously inhibits my ability to make use of bound journals of any kind. Fear of making mistakes or saying something permanently stupid in ink further complicates my issues. (Consider that the weblog form has addressed both of these issues, thus freeing me to make a complete international fool of myself in cyberspace through time immemorial by merely ignoring the existence of Google cache and billions of potential readers.)

Nevertheless, in the interest of justifying whatever I'd spent on my copy of Book Notes, I sought out two books I had greatly enjoyed as a child and duly noted them thus:

• Josephine Scribner Gates, The Book of Live Dolls, c. 1901, The Bobbs Merrill Company, N.Y.

  "...I don't know of a lovelier thing that could happen to a little girl than to
  have her doll come to life. What a fine time there would be in the dollhouse!"
  (p. 11)

  And there was! This is my earliest book memory, checked out of the public library when I was very young and reread in March 1988.
• Julia Lina Sauer, Fog Magic, c. 1943, The Viking Press, N.Y.

  "Most of us live in two worlds--our real world and the one we build or spin for
  ourselves out of the books we read, the heroes we admire, the things we hope to do." (p. 58)

  On foggy days, a young Nova Scotian girl named Greta walks over the mountain and is welcomed to Blue Cove, a fishing village that existed there a hundred years before.

  "...women who stay ashore have to learn the same lesson that men learn who go to sea... they have to learn to be content and at peace shut in by their horizon." (p. 50)

  I first read this book when I was in sixth grade. I would have been just about the same age as Greta. Reread in March 1988.

Book Notes came with an envelope glued inside the back cover, a place for clippings of reviews, book lists, or whatever. I think I'll print out the voluminous notes I made when I read all those great books by Eric Kraft. He deserves a presence in there. And, off the top of my head, here are a few others who should probably be included:

• James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, The Pistol, Whistle, and World War II)
• Marilyn French (The Women's Room) [a review by Anne Tyler here]
• Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael, Providence)
• Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons, Deception Point, Digital Fortress)

Collapses on Entering

Rather than wallow in our usual puddle of pain and misery, lassitude and ennui... rather than indulge in our daily orgy of self-castigation (yes, mistakes were made!)... we here at Wrist World are going to sashay on over to a completely different emotional realm today, the Pit of Rage, where Dell awaits.

Yes, the new computer has arrived. The computer which supposedly is built specifically for the purchaser, the end-user who decides exactly what he or she wants in and on the computer which is being specifically configured according to his or her wishes, who orders accordingly and then sits with bated breath to wait for his or her wishes to come true, who waits for an amazingly short period of time considering that the computer is actually being constructed in Malaysia and not within the confines of the actual USA as he or she might have mistakenly thought.

Before even opening the box, our end-user pulls the packing slip. It is barely unfolded when our end-user espies the most heinous of all possible line-entries, the dreaded and extremely unordered Item No. 412-0933, AOL for Broadband.

So clearly does our end-user remember her online computer-configuration process. So clearly does she remember the very moment when she came upon this screen:

SELECT MY DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS

So you don’t have broadband. Big deal. You can get six months of AOL or EarthLink dialup access FREE with your new Dell PC.

• 6 Months America Online Internet Access Included add $0
• 6 Months EarthLink Internet Access Included [Included in Price]

So clearly does she remember thinking she was being forced to choose between two entirely unwanted, unneeded options. So clearly does she remember the two radio buttons: the AOL button selected by default, the EarthLink button the only way to unselect the AOL button. So very clearly does she remember the moment of selecting EarthLink to prevent the installation of anything AOL on her new unsullied computer.

You see, our end-user has been held hostage by the evil demon AOL before. She clearly remembers the utter impossibility of removing all its tentacles from her beloved Compaq laptop. She clearly remembers AOL's repeated refusal to cancel her service.

She clearly remembers the weeks after the service was finally stopped, months after the end of her contract. The AOL nag-bot phoned her own answer-bot daily, but did not leave messages. The nag-bot would not identify itself on her Caller ID box, but she Googled the number and found it identified as belonging to AOL in the documentation of a lawsuit. She was not surprised.

So, having discovered the installation of the evil demon AOL on our new (but thusly sullied) laptop despite our very deliberate attempt to ward off just such a fate, off we go to the Pit of Rage. Bring your action figures, throw them into the plastic jousting arena, and stand clear. No one gets out alive but the sewer-cleaning guy.

40 Working Days for $260: Put Some Men to Work

What? I got nothin'. . .

Wonder Bucket. Sewer Cleaning.

Go eat something.

Deposit Comes to Surface Without Man in Manhole

A few weeks ago I saw Norah Vincent on a local TV talk show. She was there to plug her new book, Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again, and she did a great job of it. I got online immediately and reserved the book at my library.

If you've been around here for awhile, you probably already know I'm not much of a reader. I am, however, about ten minutes away from finishing this book. It can easily be read in a day with time left over. This is the way I prefer to read a book. If I'm interrupted I lose the thread, which really spoils the fun of it for me. I rarely finish a book that I've had to put down for more than a day or two.

I did get interrupted about three-fourths of the way through this nonfiction account of Ms. Vincent's experiences during an eighteen-month period of time in which she dressed, acted, and passed as a man. Her experiences as "Ned" included forming friendships with teammates in a men's bowling league, getting lap dances at strip clubs, dating women who believed she was a man, a three-week retreat in a monastery, employment, and finally extended participation in an Iron John-inspired men's group.

Ms. Vincent shares the details of how she developed her physical disguise, which was interesting in itself. But the real stuff of the book is not only about how the world treated her differently as a man, but also about how she learned what was expected of her as a man in terms of even the most subtle behaviors, such as how men look at each other (or avoid looking at each other) so as not to end up having to kick each other's ass.

Despite a two-week interruption and my resulting loss of the thread of this book, I made a point of returning to it to finish reading. It's a really fascinating look at how deeply we are our gender, like it or not, and how the other gender differs. I think readers of either persuasion will probably find Ms. Vincent's observations interesting, fair, and worth a few hours of their time.

We Interrupt This Hundred Years...

...to prove that we here at Wrist World can still dredge up a fake smile for our digital camera, all the while stuffing our despised appendage under a dark wad of sweatshirt fleece on the floor, where it belongs.

Why have 6 or 8 men cranking?

icepick
chainsaw
nice sharp axe
hungry wolf, rabid dog
guillotine!

maybe just suck it out with a juice-box straw?

Anyone knows what can be done with a hose...

Remember when you were about 13 and you looked at the faces of models in Mademoiselle Magazine and said to yourself, "Self, I wish we had those high cheekbones with those chic hollows beneath them." And then you went to look at your cherubic-looking fat babyface in the mirror, tried to suck in your cheeks to achieve the level of chic you desired, and finally ended up cursing your ugly, hopeless existence?

And remember some years later when, still cursing your less-than-angular face, you discovered that the light swish of a make-up brush primed with brown eyeshadow, when carefully aligned with, but slightly below, your faulty cheekbones, could fool the entire animal kingdom into thinking you had the chic hollows you so desired? (You didn't really want to hang out in brightly lit places anyway, did you?)

And remember when your mother said, "Be careful what you wish for... it might come true!" Who could forget an ominous warning like that? But what, I wondered, could possibly be bad about hollow chics... er, cheeks?

You don't remember any of this? Well, I do. And sad to say, Mother knew whereof she spoke. This disheartening fact was brought home to me in the two days following my wrist surgery, days in which my post-surgical pain was being addressed with a combination of pharmaceutical drugs: naproxyn and the ever-popular oxycodone.

Dosed to the point of feeling pretty fine (much finer than someone who's just been cut up, really), I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. There was something odd about it. "Huh," I thought, and went back to bed.

Time went by and I had occasion to, you know, pass by the bathroom mirror again. "Hmmm," I mumbled, taking another look. "I must be pretty fucked up, because I think I look really good for someone who's just been cut up. I should probably stagger back to bed before I fall down and hurt myself." And so I did.

As you might expect, after I'd had a good long sleep I happened by the bathroom mirror again. "Wow," I thought, studying my reflection. "Look what a good long sleep does for ya! I look freaking awesome!"

And I am not kidding, people, I looked every bit of twenty years younger!

Time passed, specifically about a day and a half, when suddenly it became alarmingly clear to me that oxycodone and naproxyn were not my friends. In fact, such enemies were we that I feared I might die from our particular altercation. I stopped sharing special moments with them immediately.

As luck would have it, more time passed and I didn't die. And when I woke up still alive a day or two later, as you would expect, I passed by the bathroom mirror yet again.

This is the part of the story where we learn about hollow chics... er, cheeks. Because now they appeared in the bathroom mirror. I'd seen them there before, I realized, but they'd been missing since my wrist surgery. With their sudden reappearance, I could see that Mother's ominous warning was not groundless. At the age of 58, having achieved my desired level of chic through the assistance of nothing but time and gravity, I now know what's wrong with hollow cheeks. They make me look my age.

And my astounding good looks? Well, you might be thinking I just had a swelled head, and in a manner of speaking, you'd be right. Whatever. I was lovely while it lasted. (It's a pity one can't be selective about which pharmaceutical side effects to manifest, and an infuriating irony that I still have swelling, but now it's all wasted on my cherubic-looking fat babyhand!)

[Sigh...]