TAG! You're it!

I usually reply to comments left on here and on any other sites where I post stuff--just seems rude to leave someone hanging when they took the time to comment, you know?  I always wonder though if anyone ever reads what I've written in response.  Once someone has left a comment, they very rarely return to see if you've left any additional nuggets of thought.  Oh, the things about which I muse!  

Ric and I got into an "argument" last night (quotation marks being because most of our arguments are fake--you'll catch on when you hear what we were arguing about).  I made the executive decision that, in honor of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Ric's member should be named Queen Margaret.  He objected.  I decided he may warm up to the idea if I showed him how well Queen Margaret could be honored through music, so I began spontaneously composing songs for Queen Margaret ("Queeeeeeeen Margaret likes to sing because Queen Margaret's a dingaling. Queeeeeeen Margaret would like to dance if she weren't trapped in your pants!"  This is just one excerpt...).  Despite my best efforts to win him over, he wasn't buying it...men attach so much of their own masculinity to that one part.  Makes me wonder how men who somehow lose theirs are possibly able to cope.  Oh, funny thing--Ric asked me, "Well, if mine has to have a girl name, yours has to have a boy name, so what's yours?" My reply?  "King Humphrey."  I don't know why.  It just came to me immediately...the implications of naming my hoompty hoompty parts King Humphrey hit me after Ric pointed it out (he said I must spell it "Humpfree" but I refuzzle).  

I really need to give Bentley a bath...and I was reminded of this because he just jumped up in my lap, not because of any possible connotations that could be derived from my last paragraph, although the Freudians would have a field day!  Anyway, back to Bentley.  Bentley is a flea bag.  I don't know how--he NEVER goes outside, but nonetheless, he's a scratchy, itchy, furry ball o f little hopping parasites.  We gave him medicine, but now he has dead fleas all over him, and he's just too bushy to get them off of himself, so I'm about to boldly go where only stupid people have gone before.  I shall be doing so by following the brilliant instructions of Bud Herron in Cat Bathing as a Martial Art:

By Bud Herron

Some people say cats never have to be bathed. They say cats lick themselves clean. They say cats have a special enzyme of some sort in their saliva that works like new, improved Wisk dislodging the dirt where it hides and whisking it away.

I’ve spent most of my life believing this folklore. Like most blind believers, I’ve been able to discount all the facts to the contrary, the kitty odors that lurk in the corners of the garage and dirt smudges that cling to the throw rug by the fireplace.

The time comes, however, when a man must face reality: when he must look squarely in the face of massive public sentiment to the contrary and announce: “This cat smells like a port-a-potty on a hot day in Juarez.”

When that day arrives at your house, as it has in mine, I have some advise you might consider as you place your feline friend under your arm and head for the bathtub:

Know that although the cat has the advantage of quickness and lack of concern for human life, you have the advantage of strength. Capitalize on that advantage by selecting the battlefield. Don’t try to bathe him in an open area where he can force you to chase him. Pick a very small bathroom. If your bathroom is more than four feet square, I recommend that you get in the tub with the cat and close the sliding-glass doors as if you were about to take a shower. (A simple shower curtain will not do. A berserk cat can shred a three-ply rubber shower curtain quicker than a politician can shift positions.)

Know that a cat has claws and will not hesitate to remove all the skin from your body. Your advantage here is that you are smart and know how to dress to protect yourself. I recommend canvas overalls tucked into high-top construction boots, a pair of steel-mesh gloves, an army helmet, a hockey face mask, and a long-sleeved flak jacket.

Prepare everything in advance. There is no time to go out for a towel when you have a cat digging a hole in your flak jacket. Draw the water. Make sure the bottle of kitty shampoo is inside the glass enclosure. Make sure the towel can be reached, even if you are lying on your back in the water.

Use the element of surprise. Pick up your cat nonchalantly, as if to simply carry him to his supper dish. (Cats will not usually notice your strange attire. They have little or no interest in fashion as a rule. If he does notice your garb, calmly explain that you are taking part in a product testing experiment for J.C. Penney.)

Once you are inside the bathroom, speed is essential to survival. In a single liquid motion, shut the bathroom door, step into the tub enclosure, slide the glass door shut, dip the cat in the water and squirt him with shampoo. You have begun one of the wildest 45 seconds of your life.

Cats have no handles. Add the fact that he now has soapy fur, and the problem is radically compounded. Do not expect to hold on to him for more than two or three seconds at a time. When you have him, however, you must remember to give him another squirt of shampoo and rub like crazy. He’ll then spring free and fall back into the water, thereby rinsing himself off. (The national record for cats is three latherings, so don’t expect too much.)

Next, the cat must be dried. Novice cat bathers always assume this part will be the most difficult, for humans generally are worn out at this point and the cat is just getting really determined. In fact, the drying is simple compared to what you have just been through. That’s because by now the cat is semi-permanently affixed to your right leg. You simply pop the drain plug with your foot, reach for your towel and wait. (Occasionally, however, the cat will end up clinging to the top of your army helmet. If this happens, the best thing you can do is to shake him loose and to encourage him toward your leg.) After all the water is drained from the tub, it is a simple matter to just reach down and dry the cat.

In a few days the cat will relax enough to be removed from your leg. He will usually have nothing to say for about three weeks and will spend alot of time sitting with his back to you. He might even become psychoceramic and develop the fixed stare of a plaster figurine.

You will be tempted to assume he is angry. This isn’t usually the case. As a rule he is simply plotting ways to get through your defenses and injure you for life the next time you decide to give him a bath.

But at least now he smells a lot better.  

  

But You're My Lobster!

My best friend has a really wonderful fiance.  With that said, I'm pretty sure he smokes crack.  I mean, he doesn't do that whole cracked out not eating for days thing that seems to be the cracked out thing to do (oh no, we have hard-wood floors just out of fear that if Matty visited he'd gnaw on the carpet.  This boy is a cute little garbage disposal!), he's never jacked my stereo to pay for his addiction, and I haven't actually SEEN him partaking of this illegal substance, but I still believe he smokes crack.  Why?  Well, he's Melinda's lobster (I don't ask questions), and because he's Melinda's lobster, and she his, they want a lobster wedding cake topper, but according to Matty, these Bride and Groom lobsters, whilst perched so happily upon their wedding cake, should be battling with toothpicks.  Now, this raises a number of questions.  As I asked Melinda, "Do lobsters typically battle with toothpicks? Do you and Matt battle with toothpicks? Or do brides and grooms typically battle each other with toothpicks in Matt's family? Wouldn't toothpicks rot if lobsters carried around toothpicks under the sea? Do lobsters even have teeth?"  And there's the question I reserved for this blog because I know Melinda will read it, and I generally aim to amuse, "Is Matty smoking crack?"  

I was going to be a total smart ass and give some smarmy response to each of these questions, but I was so astounded by the answer to one that I have decided to focus my research.  Do lobsters have teeth? Yes.  IN THEIR STOMACHS.  The stomach is located a very short distance from the mouth, and the food is actually chewed in the stomach between three grinding surfaces that look like molar surfaces, called the "gastric mill."  Even freakier--lobsters can regenerate certain limbs, so if a lobster somehow loses a leg (or antennae, or a claw), they can just say, "Ah, fuck it.  It'll grow back" and keep right on cruisin'!  So Melinda, interested in having kids?  Let's say you really ARE a lobster.  The perks of this are that a female lobster can carry live sperm for up to two years, so if Matt ever REALLY pissed you off, you could withhold sex for up to two years with no pressure from the biological clock.  It'd even be a kind of "get out of jail free" card because, by law, a lobster carrying eggs has to be let go.  Kind of a sweet arrangement, if you ask me...hmm...maybe Matty's onto something.  I mean, other than the crack. =D

Oh My God, I LOVE Cheese Fries!

So Mandy was over here the other night, which is always amusing because there's no sense between the two of us.  Ric was on call, and since she's a wonderful friend, and I hate being home alone in the middle of the night when he gets called in, she was here until something like 4 am.  We watched Sex and the City, the Movie, pausing every fifteen minutes or so to either discuss something the movie brought up or to laugh our asses off at how incredibly funny we can be.  We also discovered while watching the movie that bagborroworsteal.com is a real website and could cause infinite financial woes for the both of us.  I also learned that Mandy cannot pronounce Badgley-Mischka, so she decided she'd just call them "Mishishka" from now on, which led to me pulling up an audio site of how to pronounce various designers' names.  For the next hour, every time she spoke, I replied by hitting play, and for some reason, this was hilarious...could've been the five rum and cokes and three cosmopolitans that we drank while watching the movie.  Who knows?  Ric returns home to find two drunk, hungry, and goofy women counting out a huge pile of change mined from the innards of my couch.  $8, yee-haw!  We were ready to go to Krystal!  We pile in the car, stop at the gas station for cigarettes, then head to Krystal.  Working the drive-thru window is the clone of Anjelica Huston circa Ever After--this girl's eyebrows are SOLID kohl pencil, visible from the moon (NASA told me this, so it's a fact), and Mandy cannot resist the urge to announce to everyone within a three planet radius that those are "some eyebrows, WOO!" at the top of her lungs.  Here comes the sidebar.  See, "the top of one's lungs" is often used idiomatically to mean "very loudly" but the phrase, in some cases, can be literal.  Take my group of girlfriends.  The misfortune of having met most of my closest friends in chorus is that all of us have remarkable lung capacity, we know how to support sound via the diaphragm, and when you say "the top of the lungs" in reference to one of us, it's louder than the top of anyone else's lungs.  People in Bangladesh are probably curious about the eyebrows of this Krystal employee; alas, this is one case where even Google can't help them.  Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.  Miss Eyebrows glares at us, walks out of view of the window (this is most likely so she can spit in every one of our Krystals and in our chili-cheese fries.  Our cheese-o-nator is now a spit-o-nator, but that was fine with us because we had enough alcohol in our systems to sterilize ebola), then Miss Eyebrows returns to give us our saliva-infested meal.  As she passes the chili-cheese fries through the window, Mandy lights up like the Griswold house at Christmas (or even moreso--check out http://www.socyberty.com/Holidays/The-Wildly-Wacky-World-of-Crazy-Christmas-Lights.335767  for some true comedy!). This is where Mandy exclaims, and she's totally serious as sad as that is, in this really high-pitched squeal, "Oh my GOD!! Cheese fries!!!! I LOVE Cheese FRIES!" and grabs the box from Ric.  Shocked silence.  A man inside the restaurant bursts out laughing.  Tidal wave laughter.  Mandy is oblivious.  She has cheese fries.  All is right with the world.  

The Sinking of the Good Ship Friendship

So Melinda tells me that Christy contacted her asking for advice on the whole Maggi-Christy melodrama (yes, there's singing.  I know people often use the term "melodrama" with the intent of the newer, accepted although technically incorrect definition, but I am using it in the traditional sense.  With me, there is always singing).  I had this big long post written about what it takes to maintain a friendship, what can cause one to sink into nothing, and my personal thoughts on the topic, but it suddenly hit me that it came down to one single thing.  Faith.  I believed in our friendship enough that when I walked into that bridal shower, I was still expecting to see her there.  I had every faith in her that she wouldn't possibly do something knowing how much it would hurt me, she wouldn't possibly betray my trust in her.  Caitlin was the only one who picked up on my reaction and emailed me later to see if I was okay.  I'm glad that Mandy didn't notice because I was trying so hard to not let on.  I didn't want her feelings to be hurt when I knew how hard she had worked to put together a lovely day, and I would never want her to know that my most prominent memory of that whole day is still walking in the door and feeling like there wasn't any air in my lungs.  How could she NOT be there?  Barring someone's death, I can't even imagine not going to something after she told me how important it was to her.  She doesn't understand that it's not about ruining a shower.  It's about ruining faith.  I just don't know how to get that back, how to restore something so intangible, so delicate.  In the words of Miranda Hobbes, "You broke us.  What we had is broken."  And the Brooklyn Bridge is such a long ways away...

After careful consideration, I have decided that there's a remote possibility I may need a replacement eyeball.