But Call Me Betsy

First real snowfall of the winter last night--so pretty when it falls sideways in front of the streetlamps. Inches on my car this morning, but didn't take long to dig through. Almost fell on my ass in the work parking lot because they hadn't yet put down salt. I was thumbing through Martha Stewart's Living yesterday in the doctor's waiting room. Even the ads in that magazine make me feel like a failure, not to mention the suggestions for holiday cheer. Hey, did you know you could melt your own wax candles and even shape them into reindeers with tiny silver beads strewn on them and little reins made out of leather? You can also bake a fourteen layer cake filled with chocolate mousse, fresh cranberries, and mint and topped with holly constructed out of tiny slivers of petrified grass. Or make your own Christmas cards--you only need cardstock, a laser printer, a family, a dog, calligraphy materials, and a studio in which to take the photos. Oh, yeah, and a digital camera....

So, my friend Tara threw a birthday bash for her boyfriend Jimmy on Saturday that involved inviting about 12 of his guy friends from all over the country to surprise him by ambushing him as the two of them walked up 5th Street. His glasses flew off and he was toppled to the road, not unlike a perpetrator in Cops . We then walked him to Ray's Happy Birthday Bar below Washington where two other of his guy friends were waiting to surprise him further. Here's Ray's: They have a jukebox next to one of their sticky bar tables and a statue of James Brown above the mirrored bar. The women's room is so small that your knees almost touch the door when you're sitting on the toilet. It's dark inside and smells like cigarette smoke and spilled beer. They had a Christmas tree in one corner decorated with white lights and beer can ornaments. I think we spoiled a typical Saturday at the bar for many of the older men in flannel shirts who frequent the joint. Everyone ordered PBR...

There's a cute blond trainer boy at the gym whose name is Luke (Sweat has a wall of trainer names and black and white photographs on the brick staircase as you ascend to find your machine). He's about 23 years old and teaches ab classes and will be your personal muscle building slave for the right price. I imagine that most girls (and some guys) at the gym think he's adorable. I imagine too that he doesn't notice me much because there are so many pretty young girls in cotton leggings, tight sports bras, and swinging ponytails who bounce around the place. So, to counteract his not noticing me, I pretend not to notice him. If he's at the front counter when I swipe in, I smile at the girl and ignore him and his fingerless weight-lifting gloves. If he comes into our class to retrieve a rubber ball to lay on, I don't turn my head. If he strolls in between the ellipses machines, I focus my attention on Dr. Phil. See, I'm trying to teach him a lesson that not EVER...

Shawn and I went to Body Worlds last night. The body shown here was at one time a real human person who decided to give his/her flesh and bones to Dr. Gunther van Hagens. Dr. Hagens developed and perfected the art of plastination which, according to the Web site "makes it possible to preserve individual tissues and organs that have been removed from the body of the deceased as well as the entire body itself." The process stops the body from decomposing and you can stand inches away from it looking at the red lines of the musculature or gaze at an entire family of bodies shaped only out of bundles of tiny red capillaries. This might be a friend of yours, who knows. They had glass cases and cases of preserved organs and bones too, both healthy and unhealthy--the message was, Don't smoke (blackened lungs) and don't get too fat (they had a sliced up body of a 540 pound person to illustrate the strain subcutaneous fat puts on the internal organs). The most amazing thing w...

I love lying backward in a chair with a dental dam and six sharp instruments stuck in my mouth along with a suction cup that's vacuuming off my cheek and two guys hovering above me holding bright lights. Let's do that for about an hour. The dentist had me wear those huge grandma cataract sunglasses but the gunk still splattered in my eyes. I kept thinking, What if something goes horribly awry and I die like this? I don't know what the cause could be--an allergic reaction to a chemical or maybe suffocation from the rubber sheet they stretched over my face (for real. One thing that did happen was the dentist almost cut my lip off with the scissors as he was trimmming the sheet so I could breath out of my nose). Anyway, I decided I would be a sad case if I died because I was trying to be so cheerful ahead of time, joking about how I had pureed turkey for Thanksgiving just to be sure I didn't damage my tooth any further, ha haha hahahahha. He showed me a video of what would...

We heard a case today that shook me up. I can't give details because of privacy issues, but it involved the loss of a child in an accident that one of the parent's feels responsible for causing. I don't know how a person survives grief that complicated; the death of a child on top of believing it was your fault. How many times would you replay that moment over and over again in your head, rewriting it so that you don't make the same mistake? I do that now with stupid stuff I should or shouldn't have said or done but the consequences are minor. These are not easy meetings to attend every week--there's always a detail or two that haunts; a brother wanting to lay in the hospital bed next to his dead sibling, a father brushing his daughter's hair before she goes to the OR, someone who walked in the Emergency Room talking to the attendants but who won't walk out again. So, yeah, I guess my root canal today at 5 isn't that big of a deal.

"That would be great ..." I could cut and paste about 20+ e-mails I've received with that phrase un-ironically used. I could list about 500 things from my job that would make you wonder if I was being satirical. I won't though. I can't. If you saw last night's episode of The Office you'll remember that the boss gets access to his employees e-mails. Guess what? I've experienced that actuality in my non-sitcom life. So, I'm a little skeptical about this whole "freedom of speech" thing. Not many people here today as it's Thanksgiving tomorrow. I wonder if, as will probably happen at Shawn's work, we'll all be told to go home a little early, enjoy ourselves, hey, maybe we should cut out early for a drink? Hmmm...I wonder... In other news, we're going to Bushkill, PA for Thanksgiving tomorrow. Bushkill is a lovely name for a town. It's about 2 or more hours away and so we'll leave here about noon, eat, then turn around...

That statement is for those of you who insist on riding their non-reflective bikes at night while wearing black hoodies and black pants. I'm very proud of you for conserving gasoline and remaining fit, but I CAN'T SEE YOU. Now that it's dark at like 3:30 each day, by the time I'm driving home from work, it's pitch black. There's been more than one time that I've jumped in surprise at bicyclers swerving out of nowhere and speeding off in the dark, visible only if you catch the whites of their eyes. I don't want to commit accidental vehicular manslaughter because some hipster insists on riding his midnight blue Schwinn home from an early happy hour at Sugar Mom's. While I'm on the subject, it will not be my fault if I hit you in my car because you're riding down the street against traffic. And if you insist on talking on your cell phone while doing this, you most certainly should be at least grazed by my bumper. Other possible circumstances for...

Yay! I went to the dentist yesterday and was told by Dr. Henry of the visible nostril hair that I need a root canal on the tooth whose filling I lost in Mexico. Dr. Henry was not pleased with the state of my gums either and gave me a serious dressing down for not seeing the dentist more regularly. I said, "But I didn't have insurance. I had to pay my rent first." He said, "You could've worked out a payment plan." I think he was forgetting that I hate dentists and would rather have my teeth rot out then go to one and pay for it out of pocket with money that could be better spent on student loans and red wine. I did like Dr. Henry on the whole. He gave me extra Novacaine on my request. It looks like my mouth will require about $10,000 worth of work before I'm able to smile freely again. Only you can stop gingivitis. So, I liked the doctor okay, but I hate everything about being at the dentist. It's so primitive. I feel like any second he's going to...

I got into an imaginary fight with a girl at the gym yesterday, this twit on the stair machine talking on her cell phone. Did you know that Megan doesn't know that her boyfriend cheated on her? I know! I know! I can't believe it either. There are levels of cell phone rudeness. I'd say that talking on your phone in a public space is slightly rude (though I am guilty of the walk-n-talk). The next level would be talking on your cell phone in an enclosed public space such as restaurant or a subway where people can't easily get away from your conversation. The next step is talking on your cell phone in an enclosed public space LOUDLY. Like, Sorry, I have to shout but I can't hear you over the sound of the choir singing in here! She was yelling to her friend because she was surrounded by work out machines that make noise. I don't know, maybe the noise should be a sign that you shouldn't be talking on your fucking phone? Since you're also supposedly exercising?...

It's a real phobia, people, don't laugh with your perfectly white and flossed teeth. Lots and lots of Web sites dedicate themselves to helping people overcome dental phobia, but the problem is that they are all implicitly trying to get you to VISIT the dentist. I used to work at Northwestern University Dental School as a slave to 2 of the Deans there before they closed the school to spend money on something like football. The dental students were, on the whole, very nice and smart. For practice, they worked on indigent patients who had no health insurance and could not afford dental care on their own. Here is a horror story about a patient. If you suffer from dentaphobiaousness, do not read on. Students did routine cleaning as well as more involved techniques like extractions and root canals. They were assigned certain stations to work in, sort of like cubicles with their own machines and equipment. One of the students forgot to clean the machine between appointments and when h...

C. Thomas Howell ("Ponyboy" in the film version of the SE Hinton classic, The Outsiders. I remember how profound I thought it was to write "Stay gold" in someone's middle school yearbook) made half of a cameo appearance in E.R. last night, playing a kidnapping pedophile whose three lines were, "Ergh!" "Where is she?" and "Let go!" What happened, C. Thomas Howell? Remember how much promise you had Soul Man, the overly racist (but totally typical of 80s) movie illustrating the backlash of affirmative action wherein your character wore blackface to be admitted into college? I always confuse him with Timothy Hutton, though I like TH much better and wanted to marry him after seeing Beautiful Girls. I just looked TH up on imdb and he's in pre and post production for about 5 movies, so that's a good sign. Anyway, E.R. has become this field of Where Are They Nows? Last night's episode alone featured John Stamos, John Leguizamo, ...

I swear to you that I do not watch the show Trading Spouses on any kind of regular basis, but I happened upon it last night at a quarter to ten and it was either that or Veronica Mars , which I actually do like a lot. However, the short bit I saw of the show was so horrific that I was hooked in immediately. Reality shows are the car crashes of pop culture. This really, really, super fat woman with a gigantic gap in her teeth was crying to another woman about how she was worried about her family and all. Turns out the big woman, Marguerite, a devout Christian/Psychotic had switched with a family who believed in astrology and the summer solstice and liked stars and didn't read the Bible. In other words, they were the spawns of hell sent to destroy Marguerite and her family (except she never said "family;" it always came out as "fambly"). On the drive back to her home, M. was crying and sobbing, working herself up, saying things like, "I never knew I'd se...

I swear to God the second that the clock struck midnight on Halloween, holiday commercials started appearing on TV, department stores threw up holly and blinking lights, and the grocery store stocked the shelves with egg nog. Never too early to spend, spend, spend. ( Pic 1 ): Tabby as a Hugh Hefner bunny. ( Pic 2 ): My good friends Liz and Luke after our Halloween party when everyone had gone home. Here are a two f-ed up things as of late: (1). Our local newscast on Monday spent 15 minutes of a 30 minute broadcast feeding on the Terrell Owens dismissal. For those on you who aren't from Philadelphia or obsessed with dumb shit like pro football, TO was a receiver for the Eagles who was recently suspended and then asked to leave, I think b/c he insulted someone else . It's all over the news here while 25 seconds were given to a kid in Philly who was accidentally shot and killed by his friend's dad's handgun. Less than that amount of time was given to the riots in Argentin...

Am home sick today (a double entendre. "Home sick" as in not feeling well and "home sick" as in missing Mexico). Should've known this would happen after the go-go-go vacation we had along with the long travel day on Sunday and waking up early and out of sorts yesterday. I hate coming back from vacation especially when I nkow that I won't have more time off for a long while. The cats and I are planning a fabulous day together of shedding, meowing at the ceiling for no apparent reason, and sitting in the houseplant. At some point, I need to eat something, but it will have to be something made out of sour cream & onion potato chips, wheat bread, pickles, and over-ripe tomatoes b/c we don't have anything else in the fridge. What else about our trip? Neither one of us own a watch and so we never exactly knew what time it was. Didn't use my cell phone except maybe twice to check the time. Spoke to most people in Spanish, including the whitey-whi...

We have returned from our ten day excursion to Mexico, not that much the worse for wear, a little tanner, a little more fluent in Spanish, a lot more respect for the country, its citizens, and the landscape itself is often breathtakingly beautiful. Two animal observations: (1). In the more rural areas, you will often stumble upon donkeys/burros standing alone on a long stretch of otherwise uncultivated land, munching grass and braying, seeming to belong to no one. Shawn wondered aloud if the donkeys are public property. Like, no one official owns them, but if you need one, you just hop on, kick, and go. I counter guessed that they do belong to individual family's, but that they're maybe not that easy to track. So, one title for our trip is, Where's my Donkey? (2). The competing title for our trip is "Dog Teats for Everyone," because every single female dog we saw in the wild had teats for their puppies (Don't worry about eating chickens or hogs or cattle from ...

Very soon, Shawn and I will be leaving the country to visit the largest cuidad in the world, Mexico City. We're staying there for 3 days and then traveling on to a smaller city that begins with the letter "T" (I think) and then Acapulco and one other place and back to el Cuidad de Mexico. I am afraid I will see too many starving dogs to enjoy it, not to mention the poor people. My friend Kali said to think of the dogs in Mexico differently since their culture doesn't view dogs in the same way we do. She said, Think of the dogs as squirrels. This idea helps for some reason, at least in an abstract way. I'm not sure how I'll feel when faced with their bony bodies. (By the way, in preparation for our trip, we rented Amores los Perros ["Love is a Bitch"] last week which is [in part] about dog-fighting. Last night, Shawn had rented Frida which should be called Diego because it's mostly about Diego Rivera and his work and success or about their relatio...

The party went fine, though no one hooked up or got into a fight or anything else. The most interesting thing that happened was that I gave a Columbian guy a peek at my right nipple. It was in front of a bunch of people within the context of the conversation about how my dress was lowcut and dangerous. I went and told Shawn right away. He was unfazed, probably because he ran around in a banana hammock last year asking girls to help him find his keys (which were stuffed in his crotch). I don't really like hosting parties unless everyone promises to have the best time of their lives, to go home before 2 AM, to not spill or break anyting or throw up on the floor or on anyone else, to bring and leave behind tons of good alcohol, and to love me, my apartment, and the tiny carrots I threw on a tray for snacks. Even Jimmy was fairly well behaved. He did talk to Shawn's boss about poop, but he always talks about poop. He also spun around on the dance floor with beer flying in all direc...

Every year around Halloween, I obsess about costumes. I have 3 C's for my Halloween costumes: (1). Cute. My friend Jodie once went as Gus the Rotarian. She had a bald wig, moustache, and a pillow stuffed underneath a business suit. She was very funny and unrecognizable. I am not this brave. I still want to be moderately attractive. I don't mind being covered in blood (I prefer it), but I want to be a pretty corpse at least. (2). Comfortable. I will never go as anything requiring me to wear a box or a ten pound headdress. I need to be able to sit down and walk with ease. (3). Clever. I don't want to go as a cat or a cheerleader or a fairy or a football player. (*Halloween costume tip #1: If you do find yourself having to go in one of these costumes, just add blood and/or the implication of violence and it's much more interesting. Like, be a cat that's been run over, or a serial killer cheerleader or a fairy with an arrow through its head or a football player in a bod...

I once had use of my legs. I once walked twenty minutes to and from work five days a week plus I would stand up for a few hours a day while teaching, plus I'd walk around town. Not in Philly. Here, I have two modes of being: driving in a car or sitting in a chair. These two modes are broken by periodic short walks to either get food or to pee. In State College, I actually had to walk outside and around the back of the apartment building to get to my car. Here, I park on the street so close to my building that I could reach out the apartment window to fish change out of the glove compartment of my car. I drive to work and park fourteen steps from the front door and walk another 20 steps to my swivel chair where I sit for 8 1/2 hours a day, expelling energy only from blinking and typing. Every once in awhile, I stand up and walk over to the candy dish near Karen's desk. At least once or twice a week, we must celebrate someone's something and are given sheet cake or chocolate ...

Karen and I have temporarily to permanently decided not to attend drawing class. Last week, we stayed in because she was helping me organize the closet and ended up knocking down the clothing pole (and then fixing it with my Black and Decker power drill; my mom was very excited about buying one for me), and she was also sneezing and we hadn't had our delicious frozen dinners yet and so fuck it, we decided to watch the second episode of My So-Called Life instead of learning how to draw another grid over another famous painting we could never hope to replicate. Tonight, we will be searching for cowboy boots and other assorted Halloween items, so you can see, we just can't really be bothered with art. My other exciting news is that Gretel caught a mouse Sunday. It was all fun and games until I heard the mouse squeak in terror. A little gray thing. Shawn kept saying, Oh, it's a baby! I was pleased with Gretel, but sad for the mouse. I went downstairs to open up the front of ou...

Is it okay to wear a pin on my sweater or does it automatically categorize me as one of those women who wear pins? Aren't pins coming back in along with the leg warmers and the gauchos (which I refuse to even consider)? It's not a wreath or a kitty cat or an angel. It's this head of a flapper girl in profile. I'm counteracting the pin with tiny-squared nude-colored mesh stockings and high brown boots plus an obnoxious sparkly ring so I'm hoping the pin looks somewhat ironic or whatever. And world hunger, massive devastation by our military, and the AIDS crisis in Africa continue, but does this pin look dumb? We had two fashion casualties at work this week. One was this woman who wears clothes that are two sizes too small; she has a massive chest and it's always barely restrained by an off-white shell. Last year, her skirt was so short that when she sat down, you could see the control top of her panty hose. It's not that she's trying to look provocative. ...

I confess that I watch Law and Order SVU and Law and Order SUV and Law and Order Criminal Intent and Law and Order Murder She Wrote and I never critiqued myself about it until Shawn came along and started groaning whenever the possibility of watching a L&O episode arose. Sunday night, I convinced him to watch Criminal Intent with me through sheer bribery that required me to rub his back for the whole hour and endure his comments about how dumb the show is and of course, it was an extremely bad example, i.e. Corbin Bernson was the guest star and you could see from a mile away that he was also the secret bad guy. L&O always has a secret bad guy; a character introduced early on as an aside who surfaces again later as the one who murdered all the co-eds because his mother forced him to wear cheerleading outfits as a boy. So by virtue of the fact that there's always a secret bad guy, you can pretty much guess who's responsible. But then the other thing that happens all the t...

With the exception of the PBS version of the local radio stations in Philadelphia (XPN), we really don't have an eclectic selection of music to choose from on dial. Since I'm generally in the car for an average of 11 minutes a day (to and from work), this doesn't matter too much, but one of the challenges I face every day is trying to skip over the Jesus stations as quickly as possible. This has always been a problem. Your scanner stops on a song that could be good...Could be some new Emo band or another that you're just not cool enough to recognize within the first three measures. So you keep it on the station and sort of don't pay attention until you start to hear one of the following key words/phrases that tip you off to the fact that you're awash in the love of Jesus: Hallelujah, My Savior, Lord God (and various permutations of this: God Our Lord, Lord of all Gods, God, You're Lord), He is King, Jesus has Risen, On the Cross, Crown of Thorns, Redemption,...

As part of my job, I hear stories on a weekly and sometimes daily basis about the many, many gruesome and mundane ways that you can die. Because of confidentiality rules, I can't be too specific but here are the top ten ways to become brain dead: 1. You are an electrician/roofer/window washer and frequently climb ladders as part of your job. One day, you slip/lose your balance/are stung by a bee and fall in slow motion to the concrete driveway in front of your five year old daughter (who probably later grows up and becomes a drug addict. See #4). 2. You wake up one day with the worst headache of your life. You complain about it. You take 3 Advil and lie down in the bedroom. Later, a loved one finds you unresponsive with foam on your lips. You are rushed to the emergency room where a CAT scan reveals that you have a blood clot/tumor/hemorrhage in your brain. You should've gone to the hospital right away. They might have been able to save you then. 3. You're a teenage boy and...

David Cross has this great part of his comedy routine where he points out how the Administration raises the terror alert every time Bush or his minions do something horrible (Cross also has a bit about Bush wondering what it will take to get the public outrage and how he decides to eat a Jewish baby just because he can). It's like Wizard of Oz; Look at the scary thing! Look! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Like, what should NYC do about the subway terrorists are coming alert? Not ride the train? Ride the train but pee a little whenever a dark-skinned man steps on your car? Answer "I support" to public opinon polls about Bush? And don't forget to be afraid of hurricanes. They can kill! Even though N. Orleans flooded not because of the hurricane itself but b/c of the levees. Still! Watch out for hurricanes. You too might find yourself on your rooftop with your dog and an empty Evian water bottle. Our government and our media work like terrorists too (in ...

If he were, in fact, a real person. It is a cliche, I'm sure, to have a crush on Mr. Darcy from the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice, not to mention the degree of nerdiness it reveals. Firth's Darcy is not handsome in a conventional way; no rippling muscles, eyes are plain brown, same with his curly hair (which has a tendency to frizz) , and his features are more fleshy than chiseled. HOWEVER! I would still fall to my knees in front of him and here are the top 10 reasons why: 1. When Mr. Darcy looks at Elizabeth, he wears an expression that's a combination of intense, heartsick love, bodice-ripping lust, and respectful worship. Also, he does that thing that I love where he steals glances at her when she her attention is elsewhere but holds her gaze for a second when she catches him staring before his pride (see title) causes him to break the glance (reminds me of a line from the first episode of My So-Called Life my friend Karen and I watched before draw-ling class la...

The day we moved into our new apartment, I met the old lady next door, Virginia. She came outside in her mumu/house dress with the knee high nylons rolled down over her ankles, bedroom slippers and the most unbelievable wig/dead animal planted on top of her head. She called me over and asked my name. I told her. She said, "What? What? I can't hear you!" This went on about five more times. "Annie? Janie? Susan?" I experienced a phenomenon I haven't encountered since about 7th grade--this great desire to burst out laughing at an inappropriate moment (like when you're being yelled at by your chemistry teacher whose fly is undone or when your friend farts during the Lord's Prayer at Church). She didn't seem to notice. She said, "I'm 84, can you believe it? I live with my son. He's 60. He's never been married. Don't tell him I told you that. I'm 86! Fooled you." Soon after, I noticed that the sidewalk in front of our apar...

It has come to my ever shrinking attention that I have the patience of a gnat. I blame everyone else for this inability to wait longer than four seconds for any single thing that I want. This quality has recently been highlighted by trying to log onto this site from my home computer which has recently become infected with pop-up boxes due in part to Shawn's downloading "hot live xxx teen Asian girl-on-girl lovefest cum action" videos and gaming tips for Grand Theft auto. And also because I should have some Adaware protection on here which I didn't. It used to be that I'd be happy to have any Internet connection at all and now if I find myself waiting for the screen to download I want to get up and wash my face or do something else rather than wait the 15 seconds it'll take to appear. Same goes for other areas in my life. The coffee person doesn't jump up to take my order and I'm irritated. The car ahead of me on 3rd street has decided to parallel...

My friend from writing class, Karin (not to be confused with my drawing class friend, Karen), volunteered to write a food review for Philly Style magazine or someone and so invited me along for a free meal last night. The overall dining experience at Meze's was good and I don't want to sound like I'm not recommending it because I am fully recommending it, with the following suggestions: 1. Hold on tight to your silverware and keep an elbow on your plate at all times. Since this is a newer restaurant, the waitstaff has over-service-itis; you know, filling up your water glass after every sip, whisking your plate away at the slightest provocation (if you happen to momentarily lean back in your chair, for instance), having three different people ask you how everything is at four minute intervals, etc. 2. Don't order fish. Actually, that's just a note to myself. If you like fresh fish, order it. If you enjoy choking on tiny little white bendy bones, have the sea bass. W...