How To

Good habits start early so I'm doing my best to help Thomas avoid being a "How Not To" Goth. He's getting the finer points already.

Thomas' How To Goth Like You Mean It:

Be mysterious:


Be pale:



Get into a band:



Hang out in cemeteries:



Be dramatic:



Embrace the eyeliner:


Wallow in the occasional blue funk:



No matter what you're wearing, this above all else: be fabulous!

How Not To Goth

I'm a public service kind of girl, I really am, and so today I'm going to present a public service announcement about my own favorite subculture: the goths. Today's topic: "What the fuck did you do to your face? Because seriously you look like a lobotomized mime on a bender." After mining the depths of the web, including the fertile grounds of myspace, I bring you the best of the worst (that I found today - I can pretty much guaran-goddamn-tee you that there is much worse out there just waiting for me to stumble across it, gasp in horror and yell, "what the FUCK is that? Who traded your psychotropic meds for a black eyeliner?").
Let's dive right on in, shall we?

What can we say about Captain Batbrows? He's clearly out of Pantene, but that's the least of his problems. His eyebrow flames, ridiculous as they are, aren't even the major issue I'm having. What's most troubling is the he appears to have been fellating an exhaust pipe. If you insist on wearing the black lipstick, which is a bad idea unless you're a member of KISS or the Insane Clown Posse (which you clearly are not, Captain), you need to acquaint yourself with one of my favorite words: reapplication. Constant vigilance, son, constant vigilance.


Okay, you have a corset, a bra, opera length gloves, a cadaverous English major in badly fitted leather pants and the ubiquitous and inexcusable International Male flouncy shirt, even what appears to be a pair of unenthusiastic bat wings strapped to your back, but it looks like you ran out of steam on the way up your head, and honestly I can kind of see how that patch of leprosy could be a bit discouraging, but if you're going to leave the house like that, Honey, you need to keep soldiering on; Goth, even bad Goth, doesn't stop at the cheekbones. A little mascara, eyeliner, and shadow would take this from "I'm A Polyamorous Ren-Fairy Who Will Eventually Marry The Dread Pirate Glen Here In A Lord Of The Rings Themed Ceremony, Refer To Myself As Raven Eyown Online, And Name My First Child Loki Taliesin" to "Moderately Attractive Goth Chick," well, if you'd do a little something with your hair, that is.


Where do I even start with this? There are so many things wrong with this that I'm fairly certain I'm going to have to call my opthamologist, because looking at this picture has actually made me even more blind than I was before. My contacts are melting to my corneas. Cheap splotchy black lipstick? Check. Badly fitted leather pants? Check. Bicycle gloves whose sole purpose seems to be to confuse me? Check. Lousy snake tattoo? Check. Orange sunglasses? Pink dangly earring? Kimono jacket? Check, check, check, and what the ever-lovin' fuck? I mean, what the hell is going on under that top hat? Is that where you keep the demented monkey who dresses you?


Actually, no, there's nothing wrong with this picture. Yep, this is just exactly how you should look. If you washed your face and took off the stretch velvet dress it would be harder to tell at a glance that you've suffered massive head trauma. This could lead to unrealistic expectations and awkward encounters. Dress like this always; it's more festive than than the cardboard "If I wet myself, please contact my doctor" sign you'd have to wear otherwise.


"My black lipstick is so clumpy and awful that my hair is actually attempting to make a run for it. Man, I'm hardcore!"


It's cruel to take your blonde cousin to a goth club with you for the sole purpose of making sure that, no matter how unwashed and indifferent you may look, you'll be able to stand next to someone who makes you look like a fucking fashion plate. Cruel. Just because her normal wardrobe is primarily composed of hemp, and she has no idea that the fishnet shirt creates a beer gut where none existed before, and the no-makeup hippy hair thing clashes painfully with the vinyl skirt, is no reason to take advantage. You're a heartless bitch, Streak, truly heartless.


This is a cropped version of the original three quarter length nude shot, so you're not getting the full effect. You can thank me later. You know who can wear white face? Mimes. And who likes mimes? Oh, that's right, nobody! Meditate on this, for it shall bring you enlightenment.


I like Skinny Puppy, I do. I wish that this boy and I could connect over other things I like, like, say, shampoo.


The glasses, the skirt, the Level One helpdesk hair style...I...fuckin' Hell, you've broken me, Sir. I can't go on. This picture makes me want to head straight to The Gap and buy some pink polo shirts, khaki gouchos, and for the love of all that is unholy, some goddamned brown shoes! You've brought me to new lows Mister. I hope you're proud of yourself.

See, I told you it wasn't going to happen!

My last post is a truncated version of what I wanted to post, and I didn't even know it actually published until today. For some reason there was something wonky somewhere between blogger and my ftp server. (I wonder if I could have fit any more "some" in that sentence.) Since then I've not had the itches in my britches to get back on this here bloggy thingy. I wanted to compose a long rant about schools canceling recess because tag could lead to collisions, and dodgeball is dangerous and exclusionary, and giving detention to kids who have the temerity to hug their friends, but I'm afraid my brain would esplode from the rage and my growing hatred of our overly sanitized, blunt-cornered, self-esteem building, life crushing society. Then I'd end up grabbing the Saphire, bellowing, "take care of the boy, this girl's got a date with the bottom of this gin bottle," and locking myself in the bathroom, emerging only for more lime juice and a pad of paper on which to draft the complicated plans for my insurrection that will rely heavily on small, pointy metal jacks, buckets of dirt, and finding enough grown ups with the intestinal fortitude to eat the occasional goldfish cracker long past it's thirty-second rule expiration, then returning to the bathroom mumbling incoherently about the siblings and baseball bats made of actual wood and fat lips and by God we liked it that way! So, in the interests of averting this frightful scene, I shall, instead, dedicate this post to things which are awesome and give me some small hope for the future of the world.

The man who brought us the infamous Hall of Douchebags has a blog!. This is cause for rejoicing people, so rejoice already!

You're The Man Now Dog presents Breakup Letter, A Dramatic Reading. (Thank you Dorothy!) Turn on your speakers.

Keep them on for this old classic: Rather Good kittens get down like that. Something that never fails to make me bop around my house like a jackass.

Go, check out VAST, it will make me happy, it'll make you happy.


Rock out with a cello!


And to bring it down a little, some Grant Lee Buffalo:


That's all I've got for today, I'm afraid.

Want to hear something shocking? Here goes: I meet women off the Internet. I'm meeting one today, as a matter of fact. Scandalous, I know! My husband is aware of my little hobby, and, open-minded guy that he is, is totally okay with it. Sometimes I just meet them for a stolen hour or two in the middle of the day, other times for a more formal dinner date, and occasionally I meet up with more a whole bunch of them at once for an elaborate group session. Talk about setting a bad example for my son! He's already taken up my tawdry little hobby.

Faces altered to protect the innocent.



Just got home, more tomorrow. She wore me out.

The Spanish Casual Chat

Confess! Confess! Give me your dirty little secrets, your clean little secrets, and even your mostly tidy but mildly disheveled little secrets!

This was inspired by a thread on a forum to which I belong, but I'm going to mix it up and confess to things I haven't even done yet. That's right, I'm going to be a madcap and toss in confessions of secrets I fully intend to be keeping at some point in the future. Am I going to tell you which those are? Hell no! Life is better with an edge of uncertainty! It builds character, keeps you regular, fights the germs that cause gingivitis!

So, if I were stretched out on the rack, water boarded (that sounds filthier than it should in the past tense), forced to listen to the soundtrack to High School Musical, denied access to shampoo for more than 24 hours, or in some other way heinously tortured, here's what I'd cop to:

*I tell people that I'm allergic to garlic, but I'm not sure I really am. What I do know though, is that it gives me horrible stomach cramps, and then, later that night the most appalling alchemy occurs somewhere in my bloated abdomen turning that pungent but mostly harmless little relative of the onion into a dank cloud of toxic EVIL that must fight its wicked way through my guts and escape out my ass. Miners used to keep canaries with them because the teeny birds would give warning, by way of dying, if they encountered a pocket of bad air. Those little birds had it easy! I could take out a turkey buzzard at a hundred yards after an accidental bite of hummus.

*I nearly broke up Christian Bale's marriage, but once I'd convinced him that I wasn't going to leave my husband and son, that he had a daughter to think of, and after a lot of counseling, he and his wife were able to move on from the unfortunate episode. It was heartbreaking to see a grown man, a respected actor, making such a fool of himself, though I was flattered, and I hope that we can all move forward with our respective happy marriages and maybe be just friends someday.

*I'm afraid of zombies, and the ocean (because it harbors zombies), and mimes (who might be a species of zombies). The only thing more frightening than a deep-sea zombie mime is possibly a cockroach...or a deep-sea zombie cockroach mime...

*I may have just pissed myself thinking about deep-sea zombie cockroach mimes.

*Sometimes I avoid my neighbors because I'm sure they can hear us watching porn and having sex.

*I was drunk when I accepted my Grammy, but I'd sobered up by the time I hip checked Avril Lavigne into the mini-quiche table and teamed up with JLo to beat the shit out of three of the Pussycat Dolls. I blamed it on the booze, but I have to tell you, in the interest of openness, that time I spent in "rehab" I was actually eating dim sum and watching old wutang movies with Jet Li and Yeun Woo-ping.

*It's been 61 hours since I last breastfed my son. This bit of information is significant for two reasons. The first is that I am no longer a nursing mother and I'm pretty happy about that. The second is that I might, possibly, be a tipsy right this very minute. I will probably have to confess to drunk blogging during our next Spanish Casual Chat, then head back to "rehab."

(Bonus points to anyone who knows where "Spanish Causal Chat" is from, and cookies in the mail to anyone who can find the relevant clip on YouTube....and more cookies to anyone who can correctly guess how many tries it took me to type the word relevant after all the wine I've just had. No cookies at all to anyone who guesses exactly how much wine I've put away tonight, because no one likes a tattle tale.)

We got the movie Monsters Inc. recently and I have decided that I hate it. When I first saw it in the theater, I loved it. I enjoyed the plot and the characters, and was suitably impressed by the animation. Now, however, all I can think about is that those two monsters have no idea what to with a child, and somewhere on the other side of that door are some very worried parents. Also, this kid can say about four words and yet she's already potty trained - is there something wrong with her speech development? How old is this kid, anyway? And, speaking of potty trained, she comes through the door around 6pm, and doesn't have to pee until late the next morning. I can't go more than two hours without peeing, so I somehow doubt a toddler is going to make it fifteen hours or so. She never once wonders where her parents are, either. I can't go down to the garage and rotate the laundry without Thomas checking on me to make sure I'm not doing something fun without him (he's convinced that there are clowns and ponies lurking around every corner, and I sneak away to frolic madly whenever he's distracted or asleep). And she gets Fruit Loops for dinner - and it's the only meal she has during the entire movie! The sugar rush! The tummy ache! The perservatives! Motherhood has clearly ruined movie watching for me. Who thinks about this during a cartoon? I mean, seriously, the kid doesn't exist, and I'm worried about her nutrition, hygiene, and development, and obsessed with how terrified her mom and dad must be that she's disappeared from her bed (because, honestly, is that not one of the most frightening things a parent can imagine?). What is wrong with me? Or is this really a horror movie cleverly disguised as children's entertainment? Think your little one is safe in bed? Nope! No matter what you do, if you aren't actively staring at your child, they can just vanish! Sure, the kid in the movie gets returned with nothing worse than an empty belly, some soggy underoos, and a weird habit of saying "Mike Wazowski," but her parents don't know that!!

Day Two

I don't have a penis (those of you who've not met me in person will just have to take my word for that [and so will most of you who have met me, actually]), so I really can't relate to penisy things, but apparently when penis and scrotum meet sand it is pure hilarity. This fascinating bit of news came my way this morning when Thomas decided that he simply couldn't be in the sandbox with his clothes on. First he wanted his toes in the sand, so we took off his socks. A little while later he let me know that the overshirt had to go, then the t-shirt, and then, as if a light went off in his head, he looked at me with this big grin and said, "pants! off!" So, there went the pants, and I thought he'd be content, but no, the diaper was creating a totally unacceptable barrier between his manly bits and the sand and so off it went. Immediately his plumbing was covered in sand and the cackling started. I would have thought that gritty sand cradling one's fragile nether parts would be unpleasant, and I certainly won't be offering my unprotected nooks and crannies to the not so tender embrace of beach grit anytime soon, but if one is a nearly two-year old boy, a sandy package is pure, organic awesome. It's amazing the educational opportunities motherhood presents, isn't it? I've also learned that if you set a boy on the potty but don't take away his markers he'll paint himself a pair of Ken doll bvds in a fetching shade of aqua. Also, poop covered scrotums are irresistable to little toddler hands. When he pees, he has no real interest in grabbing his junk, but if there's even a smear of poo, it's like trying to arm wrestle an octopus to get him wiped and diapered while keeping his hands crap free. And, lastly, I've learned that a mom just can't connect with her son on this issue. I used the word scrotum every day of his life during diaper changes and baths and not once did he acknowledge it or try to say it. Rob, while playing the Point Out That Bodypart game with Thomas one day said "balls" once, and our little man grabbed his diaper and gleefully shouted, "BALLS!" right back. Some things a boy and his mom just won't ever share, I guess.

One thing we can share, though, is a love of the zoo, and so I present to you a small (and sort of grainy because I only had my camera phone) photo safari of Thomas at the petting zoo and play area:

GOATS!


Farmer Thomas has some heavy chores to do!


The zoo seems to have a giant spider problem.



Caught like some unfortunate Edward Gorey child!




But no, our wee hero makes his escape!


Spider schmider...what else you got?

A post a day, huh? Oh that's gonna happen!

Something weird and exciting happened to me on Tuesday. I left the house - no, no that's not the really cool part, rare though it seems to be, the exciting bit was that I went out with my husband...and we didn't take the child! Yes, you read that right, the two of us left our house, sans Thomas! Shock shock horror horror!! It was the second time we've done so since Rear Admiral Poopsenhosen was born. Madness!!!

Thomas stayed home with my wonderful friend Tommy Salami, who I've known since I was 15 (because that's the level of trust that is required to babysit my kid, because I'm, like, totally not paranoid at all), so we could go see the Tiger Lillies! I huffed and I puffed and I pulled my gut in, then strapped a corset over the damn thing, wriggled my feet into impractical but gorgeous shoes, slapped enough makeup on to turn my sorry mug into something vampy and less than haggard, and off I tottered to the show.

You know what? I've had a bit of gin, and I think I might be a little too tipsy to make a good entry. I'll try again tomorrow, and leave you with this: